Emile Zola once wrote in his sweeping dictatorial manner, "Le théâtre sera naturaliste ou il ne sera pas"; but as Henry Becque said in his mordant style, Zola always convinced one in his pronunciamentos; it was only when he attempted to put his theories into action that they completely broke down. Alas! realism in the theatre after all the gong-sounding of café æstheticians, after the desperate campaigns of the one clairvoyant manager in the movement, Antoine, is as dead as the romanticism of Hernani. After the flamboyant, the drab--and now they are both relegated to the limbo of the tried-and-found-wanting. When Zola sat down to pen his famous call to arms, Naturalism on the Stage, Antoine was still in the future, Dumas _fils_ and Sardou ruled the Parisian theatre, Uncle Sarcey manufactured his diverting _feuilletons_, and Augier was become a classic. The author of L'Assommoir had like Alexander sighed for new worlds to subjugate. He had won a victory, thanks to Flaubert and the De Goncourts, in fiction; it remained for the theatre to provoke his ire. It still clung obstinately to old-fashioned conventions and refused to be coerced either by Henrietta Maréchal or by the furious onslaught of Zola and his cohort of writing men. In the essay referred to, Zola said that a piece of work will always be a corner of nature seen through a temperament. He told the truth when he declared that the "romantic movement was but a skirmish; romanticism, which corresponds to nothing durable, was simply a restless regret of the old world." Stendhal and Balzac had created the modern novel. The stage did not move with the other arts, though Diderot and Mercier "laid down squarely the basis of the naturalistic theatre." Victor Hugo gave the romantic drama its death-blow. Scribe was an ingenious cabinet-maker. Sardou "has no life--only movement." Dumas the younger was spoiled by cleverness--"a man of genius is not clever, and a man of genius is necessary to establish the naturalistic formula in a masterly fashion." Besides, Dumas preaches, always preaches. "Emile Augier is the real master of the French stage, the most sincere"; but he did not know how to disengage himself from conventions, from stereotyped ideas, from made-up ideas.