am not disposed to change my
opinion.

[Sidenote: "Les Trois Villes."]

Before giving any general comment on this mass of fiction, it will
probably be best to continue the process of brief survey, with the two
remaining groups. It is, I believe, generally admitted that in "Les
Trois Villes" purpose, and the document, got altogether the better of
any true novel-intention. The anti-religiosity which has been already
remarked upon seems not only to have increased, but for the moment to
have simply flooded our author's ship of thought and art, and to have
stopped the working of that part of its engine-room which did the
novel-business. The miracles at, and the pilgrimages to, Lourdes filled
the newspapers at one time, and Zola could think of nothing else; the
transition to Rome was almost inevitable in any such case; and the
return upon Paris quite inevitable in a Frenchman.

[Sidenote: "Les Quatre Evangiles."]

With the final and incomplete series--coinciding in its latter part with
the novelist's passionate interference, at no small inconvenience to
himself, in that inconceivable modern replica of the Hermocopidae
business, the Dreyfus case, and cut short by his unfortunate
death--things are different. I have known people far less "prejudiced,"
as the word goes, against the ideas of these books than I am myself, who
plumply declare that they cannot read _Fecondite_, _Travail_, or (most
especially) _Verite_: while of course there are others who declare them
to be not "Gospels" at all, but what Mr. Carlyle used to call
"Ba'spels"--not Evangels but Cacodaemonics. I read every word of them
carefully some years since, and I should not mind reading _Fecondite_ or
_Travail_ again, though I have no special desire to do so.[476]

Both are "novels of purpose," with the purpose developing into mania.
_Fecondite_ is only in part--and in that part mainly as regards
France--revolutionary. It is a passionate gospel of "Cultivate _both_
gardens! Produce every ounce of food that can be raised to eat, and
every child that can be got to eat it:" an anti-Malthusian and
Cobbettist Apocalypse, smeared with Zolaesque grime and lighted up with
flashes, or rather flares, of more than Zolaesque brilliancy. The scene
where the hero (so far as there is one) looks back on Paris at night,
and his tottering virtue sees in it one enormous theatre of Lubricity,
has something of Flaubert and something of Hugo.

_Travail_ is revolutionary or nothin