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
he was creating and vivifying. Within the bounds of his epical
scheme, which was always factitious, every person was so natural
that his characters seemed like the characters of biography
rather than of fiction. One does not remember them as one
remembers the characters of most novelists. They had their being
in a design which was meant to represent a state of things, to
enforce an opinion of certain conditions; but they themselves
were free agencies, bound by no allegiance to the general frame,
and not apparently acting in behalf of the author, but only from
their own individuality. At the moment of reading, they make the
impression of an intense reality, and they remain real, but one
recalls them as one recalls the people read of in last weeks's or
last year's newspaper. What Zola did was less to import science
and its methods into the region of fiction, than journalism and
its methods; but in this he had his will only so far as his
nature of artist would allow. He was no more a journalist than
he was a scientist by nature; and, in spite of his intentions and
in spite of his methods, he was essentially imaginative and
involuntarily creative.