ideal. Because he believed with his whole soul that fiction
should be the representation, and in no measure the
misrepresentation, of life, he will live as long as any history
of literature survives. He will live as a question, a dispute,
an affair of inextinguishable debate; for the two principles of
the human mind, the love of the natural and the love of the
unnatural, the real and the unreal, the truthful and the
fanciful, are inalienable and indestructible.


I

Zola embodied his ideal inadequately, as every man who embodies
an ideal must. His realism was his creed, which he tried to make
his deed; but, before his fight was ended, and almost before he
began to forebode it a losing fight, he began to feel and to say
(for to feel, with that most virtuous and voracious spirit,
implied saying) that he was too much a romanticist by birth and
tradition, to exemplify realism in his work. He could not be all
to the cause he honored that other men were--men like Flaubert
and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and Tolstoy, and Galdos and
Valdes--because his intellectual youth had been nurtured on the
milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time. He grew up
in the day when the great novelists and poets were romanticists,
and what he came to abhor he had first adored. He was that
pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches,
who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith.
Zola was none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He
conceived of reality poetically and always saw his human
documents, as he began early to call them, ranged in the form of