rotten can scent corruption in them, and these, I think, may be
deceived by effluvia from within themselves.

It is to the glory of the French realists that they broke, one
and all, with the tradition of the French romanticists that vice
was or might be something graceful, something poetic, something
gay, brilliant, something superior almost, and at once boldly
presented it in its true figure, its spiritual and social and
physical squalor. Beginning with Flaubert in his "Madame
Bovary," and passing through the whole line of their studies in
morbid anatomy, as the "Germinie Lacerteux" of the Goncourts, as
the "Bel-Ami" of Maupassant, and as all the books of Zola, you
have portraits as veracious as those of the Russians, or those of
Defoe, whom, indeed, more than any other master, Zola has made me
think of in his frankness. Through his epicality he is Defoe's
inferior, though much more than his equal in the range and
implication of his work.

A whole world seems to stir in each of his books; and, though it
is a world altogether bent for the time being upon one thing, as
the actual world never is, every individual in it seems alive and
true to the fact. M. Brunetiere says Zola's characters are not
true to the French fact; that his peasants, working-men,
citizens, soldiers are not French, whatever else they may be; but
this is merely M. Brunetiere's word against Zola's word, and Zola
had as good opportunities of knowing French life as Mr.
Brunetiere, whose aesthetics, as he betrays them in his
instances, are of a flabbiness which does not impart conviction.
Word for word, I should take Zola's word as to the fact, not
because I have the means of affirming him more reliable, but