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