lone but as part of a stream of tendency which has
made the English Novel the distinct form it is to-day. Even a
resounding genius, in this view, may have less meaning than an
apparent plodder like Trollope, who, as time goes by, is seen
more clearly to be one of the shaping forces in the development
of a literary form.

CHAPTER XII

HARDY AND MEREDITH

We have seen in chapter seventh, how the influence of Balzac
introduced to modern fiction that extension of subject and that
preference for the external fact widely productive of change in
the novel-making of the continent and of English-speaking lands.
As the year 1830 was given significance by him, so, a generation
later, the year 1870 was given significance by Zola. England,
like other lands cultivating the Novel, felt the influence.
Balzac brought to fiction a greater franchise of theme: Zola
taught it to regard a human being--individual or collectively
social--as primarily animal: that is, he explains action on this
hypothesis. And as an inevitable consequence, realism passed to
the so-called naturalism. Zola believed in this view as a theory
and his practice, not always consistent with it, was
sufficiently so in the famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels
begun the year of the Franco-Prussian war, to establish it as a
method, and a school of fiction. Naturalism, linking hands with
l'art pour art--"a fine phrase is a moral action--there is no
other morality in literature," cried Zola--became a banner-cry,
with "the flesh is all" its chief article of belief. No study of
the growth of English fiction can ignore this typical modern
movement, however unpleasant it may be to follow it. The baser
and more brutal phases of the Novel continental and insular look
to this derivation. Zola's remarkable pronunciamento "The
Experimental Novel," proves how honestly he espoused the
doctrine of the realist, how blind he is to its partial view.
His attempt to subject the art of fiction to the exact laws of
science, is an illustration of the influence of scientific
thought upon a mind not broadly cultured, though of unusual
native quality. Realism of the modern kind--the kind for which
Zola stands--is the result in a form of literature of the
necessary intellectual unrest following on the abandonment of
older religious ideals. Science had forced men to give up
certain theological conceptions; death, immorality, God, Man,--these
were all differently understood, and a pe