us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at
a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family, and we
can quite believe it. Indeed it is only in England that such a
book could be produced. England is the home of lost ideas. As for
that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the
sun always rises in the East-End, the only thing that can be said
about them is that they find life crude, and leave it raw.

'In France, though nothing so deliberately tedious as Robert
Elsmere has been produced, things are not much better. M. Guy de
Maupassant, with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style,
strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us
foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in
which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot
laugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he
lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de
genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has
not got genius, he can at least be dull. And how well he succeeds!
He is not without power. Indeed at times, as in Germinal, there is
something almost epic in his work. But his work is entirely wrong
from beginning to end, and wrong not on the ground of morals, but
on the ground of art. From any ethical standpoint it is just what
it should be. The author is perfectly truthful, and describes
things exactly as they happen. What more can any moralist desire?
We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time
against M. Zola. It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being
exposed. But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in
favour of the author of L'Assommoir, Nana and Pot-Bouille?
Nothing. Mr. Ruskin once described the characters in George
Eliot's novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonville