a series of six separate
works united by the slightest of links, M. Zola attempted to trace the
career of a family during the period of the Second Empire, or rather he
tried, in imitation of Victor Hugo, to make an epoch, and not a human
being, the hero of the work. In this he has but partially succeeded. The
_Rougon Macquart Family_ is less a novel or series of novels than it is
a dissertation on the Second Empire from a hostile point of view. As a
gallery of historical pictures, painted by an able and contemporaneous
hand, it is a work of considerable value, but this value is in spite of,
not on account of, the story. Victor Hugo could indeed embody in his
_Quatre-Vingt Treize_ the mighty image of the first Revolution, but M.
Zola is not Victor Hugo, and such a task is beyond his powers.

One of the peculiarities of this tremendous and iconoclastic realist is
the care with which he writes and the indefatigable polish he bestows
upon his style. He writes and re-writes, corrects and copies, weighs
every phrase, and is never content till the written words exactly
reproduce the image of his thought. Another is his extreme reticence and
self-possession. There are no traces of a fine frenzy about the most
vigorous of his works. He paints vice from the standpoint of a
street-corner. To others he leaves the roses and the raptures: for him
are the mud and the stones. He has no illusions respecting the lower
orders, as had Dickens and Eugene Sue. He reminds one of a certain
picture by Courbet, who, disgusted with the elegant studies of the nude
in the annual exhibition, painted a group of real every-day bathers,
some half a dozen washerwomen at Asnieres. The picture was revolting,
but it was great, because there was truth in the subject and power in
the execution. And notwithstanding the tempest of adverse criticism
which his later works, and especially his _Assommoir_, have called
forth, he holds a high and recognized place amid the writers of the day.

To turn from Zola to Alphonse Daudet is to leave the back slums of a
city for a flower-decked forest-path: it is to exchange the hideous
facts of police records and city statistics for the fresh and tender
poesy of the woods and fields. M. Daudet is yet so young that he may
possibly surpass in the future even the great success of his earlier
career--namely, _Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine_. His _Nabob_, now in
course of publication as a feuilleton in one of the Parisian newspape