To what different issues two men will work the same notion! Imagine
this world to be a flat board accurately parcelled out into squares,
and you have the basis at once of _Alice through the Looking-Glass_
and of _Les Rougon-Macquart_. But for the mere fluke that the
Englishman happened to be whimsical and the Frenchman entirely without
humor (and the chances were perhaps against this), we might have had
the Rougon-Macquart family through the looking-glass, and a natural
and social history of Alice in _parterres_ of existence labelled
_Drink, War, Money_, etc. As it is, in drawing up any comparison of
these two writers we should remember that Mr. Carroll sees the world
in sections because he chooses, M. Zola because he cannot help it.

If life were a museum, M. Zola would stand a reasonable chance of
being a Balzac. But I invite the reader who has just laid down _La
Débâcle_ to pick up _Eugénie Grandet_ again and say if that little
Dutch picture has not more sense of life, even of the storm and stir
and big furies of life, than the detonating _Débâcle_. The older
genius

"Saw life steadily and saw it whole"

--No matter how small the tale, he draws no curtain around it; it
stands in the midst of a real world, set in the white and composite
light of day. M. Zola sees life in sections and by one or another of
those colors into which daylight can be decomposed by the prism. He is
like a man standing at the wings with a limelight apparatus. The rays
fall now here, now there, upon the stage; are luridly red or vividly
green; but neither mix nor pervade.