o join in its consecration.

V

There is no reason why criticism should affect an equal hesitation.
Criticism no longer assumes to ascertain an author's place in
literature. It is very well satisfied if it can say something
suggestive concerning the nature and quality of his work, and it tries
to say this with as little of the old air of finality as it can manage
to hide its poverty in.

After the words of M. Chaumie at the funeral, "Zola's life work was
dominated by anxiety for sincerity and truth, an anxiety inspired by
his great feelings of pity and justice," there seems nothing left to do
but to apply them to the examination of his literary work. They unlock
the secret of his performance, if it is any longer a secret, and they
afford its justification in all those respects where without them it
could not be justified. The question of immorality has been set aside,
and the indecency has been admitted, but it remains for us to realize
that anxiety for sincerity and truth, springing from the sense of pity
and justice, makes indecency a condition of portraying human nature so
that it may look upon its image and be ashamed.

The moralist working imaginatively has always had to ask himself how
far he might go in illustration of his thesis, and he has not
hesitated, or if he has hesitated, he has not failed to go far very
far. Defoe went far, Richardson went far, Ibsen has gone far, Tolstoy
has gone far, and if Zola went farther than any of these, still he did
not go so far as the immoralists have gone in the portrayal of vicious
things to allure where he wished to repel. There is really such a
thing as high motive and such a thing as low motive, though the
processes are often so bewilderingly alike in both cases. The
processes may confound us, but there is no reason why we should be
mistaken as to motive, and as to Zola's motive I do not think M.
Chaumie was mistaken. As to his methods, they by no means always
reflected his intentions. He fancied himself working like a scientist
who has collected a vast number of specimens, and is deducing
principles from them. But the fact is, he was always working like an
artist, seizing every suggestion of experience and observation, turning
it to the utmost account, piecing it out by his invention, building it
up into a structure of fiction where its origin was lost to all but
himself, and often even to himself. He supposed that he was recording
and classifying, but