y of the attitude of Ezekiel or Hosea; the
business-like observer, in counting-house and workshop, in church and
stock-exchange, in tavern and brothel, in field and town generally,
became himself a _voyant_, beholding all things in nightmare. Yet, in
doing so, he effected a strange semi-reconciliation with some who had
been, if not exactly his enemies, the exceedingly frank critics and
unsparing denouncers of his system. Not much more than half sane, and
almost more than half disgusting, as are _Fecondite_ and _Travail_, they
connect themselves, as wholes, not with _L'Assommoir_ or _Nana_, not
with _La Terre_ or _Germinal_, but with _La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret_,
with _Une Page d'Amour_, and _La Joie de Vivre_, with the best things in
_L'Oeuvre_, _La Debacle_, and _Le Docteur Pascal_. Students of English
literature will remember how the doctrine of _Furor poeticus_ was once
applied to Ben Jonson by a commentator who, addressing him, pointed out
that he was very mad in his primer works, not so mad in his dotages.
There was always a good deal of _furor prosaicus_ smouldering in Zola,
and it broke out with an opposite result on these occasions, the flames,
alas! being rather devastating, but affording spectacles at least
grandiose. _He_ kept sane and sordid to his loss earlier, and went mad
later--partially at least to his advantage.

[Sidebar: General considerations.]

Passing to those more general considerations which have been
promised--and which seem to be to some readers a Promised Land
indeed, as compared with the wilderness of _compte-rendu_ and
book-appreciation--let us endeavour briefly to answer the question,
"What is the general lesson of Zola's work?" I think we may say,
borrowing that true and final judgment of Wordsworth which doth so
enrage Wordsworthians, that whenever Zola does well he either violates
or neglects his principles, and that the more carefully he carries
these out the worse, as a rule, his work is. The similarity, of course,
is the more quaint because of the dissimilarity of the personages and
their productions; but it has not been insisted on from any mere spirit
of mischief, or desire to make a paradoxical parallel. On the contrary,
this parallel has been made in order to support, at least _obiter_, a
more general dictum still, that principles are much more often fatal
than useful to the artist. The successful miniatures of the short
stories hardly prove more thoroughly than the smoky flaming