unsymmetrical, the beauty of the temple and the beauty of the
tree. Life is not more symmetrical than a tree, and the effort
of art to give it balance and proportion is to make it as false
in effect as a tree clipped and trained to a certain shape. The
Russians and the Scandinavians alone seem to have risen to a
consciousness of this in their imaginative literature, though the
English have always unconsciously obeyed the law of our being in
their generally crude and involuntary formulations of it. In the
northern masters there is no appearance of what M. Ernest Dupuy
calls the joiner-work of the French fictionalists; and there is,
in the process, no joiner-work in Zola, but the final effect is
joiner-work. It is a temple he builds, and not a tree he plants
and lets grow after he has planted the seed, and here he betrays
not only his French school but his Italian instinct.

In his form, Zola is classic, that is regular, symmetrical,
seeking the beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the
tree. If the fight in his day had been the earlier fight between
classicism and romanticism, instead of romanticism and realism,
his nature and tradition would have ranged him on the side of
classicism, though, as in the later event, his feeling might have
been romantic. I think it has been the error of criticism not to
take due account of his Italian origin, or to recognize that he
was only half French, and that this half was his superficial
half. At the bottom of his soul, though not perhaps at the
bottom of his heart, he was Italian, and of the great race which
in every science and every art seems to win the primacy when it
will. The French, through the rhetoric of Napoleon III., imposed
themselves on the imagination of the world as the representatives
of the Latin race, but they are the least and the last of the