-in _L'Etrangere_, for instance--exactly those that
would most strongly commend themselves to the Anglo-Saxon mind.

Among the most daring and successful of the novel-writers of the day we
must undoubtedly number M. Emile Zola, whose recent works have created a
deep and widespread sensation in literary circles in France. He is the
chief of the so-called Realistic school, and is already recognized as a
power in the land. To describe the characteristics of his works it is
necessary to speak in superlatives. They are immensely strong, immensely
realistic, and, it must also be added, immensely repulsive. Vice stands
before us stripped of all her plumes and tinsel--naked, hideous and
unclean. In _Therese Roquin_, for instance, he tells a tale of
adulterous passion, of murder and of remorse. It is precisely the theme
that used to arouse the genius of George Sand to its loftiest and most
impassioned flights. But instead of poets and high-born ladies, moonlit
nights and Italian landscapes, poetry, romance, art and music, Zola
descends to the lower classes of society: he takes his characters from
the shop and the factory, and shows us evil in all its abominations,
remorse in all its horrors. In _L'Assommoir_, his latest and, in some
respects, his most remarkable work, he has given us so atrocious and so
powerful a delineation of the vices of the French working-classes that
the mind recoils, sickened and terrified, from the contemplation of the
tremendous picture. To find its parallel even in another form of art we
must turn to some of the most repulsive of the pictures of Hogarth, the
representation of Gin Lane or the dissection-scene in the "Successive
Stages of Cruelty." Yet the foremost figures in this terrible
delineation, his hero and heroine, are not wicked: they are simply weak.
The _assommoir_--otherwise the drinking-shop--is the spider that poisons
and ensnares their humble natures. The first pages of the book, the
wedding and installation of Gervaise and Coupeau, the birth of their
child, her anxieties, her cares, her longing for a clock, her pride in
her modest home, are all told with a touch of tenderness, which,
however, speedily disappears amid an accumulation of unclean horrors.
The book is hideous, terrific, disgusting, but it is _not_ immoral. It
is scarcely fit for any decent woman to read, but it is no more
demoralizing than is the interior of a dissecting-room.

In the _History of the Rougon Macquart Family_,