As it is with Zola's short stories so it is with his earlier novels: "La Confession de Claude" is a struggle between poetry and reality, the presentment of a soul longing for the empyrean but forced to surrender to all the horrors of degradation. The fragmentary "Vœu d'une Morte" contains indications of the same battle continuing. "Les Mystères de Marseilles" is a thing apart; but, at last, in "Thérèse Raquin" and "Madeleine Férat" realism triumphs brutally and in its first victorious hour blackens the canvas to excess. Average truth is disregarded--as Zola himself admits--and the agony is piled on to the point of nightmare. This is done, perchance, by the realist in Zola in order that no loophole may be left for the poet, also within him, to rise again. But take the Rougon-Macquart series, and there, amid all the realism of twenty volumes, a revival of the poetic sense will be found displaying itself repeatedly. Remember the idyll of Silvère and Miette, that of Marjolin and Cadine, that of Angélique and Félicien, that of Serge and Albine, the Paradou, Hélène and Henri, the vistas of Paris from the heights of Passy, the love of Goujet for Gervaise, even that of Georges Hugon for Nana, the epic march of the miners in "Germinal," the epic charge of the cavalry at Sedan, Clotilde's communion with herself while giving suck to her babe, and all the other instances. There may be no trace of poetry and romance in "Thérèse Raquin," but Zola when writing that book must have known full well that he had only scotched, not killed, his poetic tendencies. To understand him aright, let us remember that he made his _débuts_ at a time when science was enlarging her domain daily. For him she exercised a fascination equal to that of art. In his youth he had turned eagerly to certain scientific studies even while he was steeping himself in poetry, and later he devoured Flourens, Zimmermann, translations of the great scientists of England and Germany. He saw that there was often a deep poetry in science; he dreamt of making it manifest,--of going further,--of associating science and art, of establishing their co-relation, welding them together even in instances when to some folk they seemed to be antagonistic. His nature, as one has remarked previously, was a compound, a hybrid one, by no means unique, but such as is not often observed. "Lewis Carroll" supplies a somewhat approximate instance: in him one found the mathematician elbowing the romancer, only he did not dream of importing "Euclid" into "Alice." Zola, in doing so, or rather in doing something similar, was not entirely influenced by his own special nature, but was carried along by the spirit of his age, in which everything tended towards science. Those who remember Darwin and Faraday and Huxley and the others, and the thirst that came on so many young men in those days, will not gainsay it.