Writing on Joseph Conrad, I referred to one of his tricks--which seem inextricable tricks of art--which he learned from Balzac: the method, which he uses in _Youth_, of doubling or trebling the interest by setting action within action, as certain pictures are set within certain frames. It is astonishing to find the influence Balzac had on Conrad, partly when suspense is scarcely concerned with action, partly in his involved manner of relating events. In Balzac I often find that some of his tales, like Conrad's, grow downwards out of an episode at the end; in some the end is told first, the beginning next--which was a method Poe often used--and last of all in the middle; for instance, in _Honorine._ Writing of Zola I said: Zola has defined art, very aptly, as nature seen through a temperament. The art of Zola is nature seen through a formula. He observes, indeed, with astonishing closeness, but he observes in support of preconceived ideas. And so powerful is his imagination that he has created a whole world which has no existence anywhere but in his own brain, and he has placed there imaginary beings, so much more logical than life, in the midst of surroundings which are themselves so real as to lend almost a semblance of reality to the embodied formulas who inhabit them. As I have said that George Moore might be supposed to be a lineal descendant of Zola, it seems to me that in many ways his method is almost the same as Zola's; only, they have different theories; both observe with immense persistence; but their manner of observation, after all, is only that of the man in the street; while, on the contrary, the Goncourts create with their nerves, with their sensations, with their noting of the sensations, with the complex curiosities of a delicately depraved instinct. The strange woman in _La Faustin_ is one of Goncourt's most fascinating creations: Germinie Lacerteux, his most sordidly depraved animal; and in the Preface to that novel, in 1864, they were right in saying: "_Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'Étude littéraire et de enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine._" They were the first, I believe, to invent an entirely new form, a breaking-up of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are generally disconnected, and sometimes no more than six sentences: as, for instance, in that perverse, decadent, delicately depraved study of the stages in the education of the young Parisian girl, _Chérie_ (for all its "immodesty") was an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies. Only, when I have to choose, after Balzac, the most wonderfully created woman in any novel, the vision of Emma Bovary starts before me--a woman, as I have said somewhere (with none of the passionate certainty of Charles Baudelaire) who is half vulgar and