It is not that the series of the Rougon-Macquart has not several distinct men and women to show—though they occur, as a fact, almost in “L’Assommoir” alone; it is not either that Zola did not on occasion try for the cultivated consciousness, a thing of course, so far as ever achieved anywhere, necessarily separate and distinguished; it is that he tried, on such ground, with a futility only a shade less marked than Balzac’s, and perhaps would have tried with equal disaster had he happened to try oftener. If we find in his pages no such spreading waste as Balzac’s general picture of the classes “enjoying every advantage,” that is of the socially highest—to the elder writer’s success in depicting particularly the female members of which Sainte-Beuve, and Brunetière in his footsteps, have rendered such strange and stupefying homage—the reason may very well be that such groups could not in the nature of the case figure to him after the fashion in which he liked groups to figure, as merely herded and compressed. To Balzac they were groups in which individualisation might be raised to its very finest; and it is by this possibility in them that we watch him and his fertile vulgarity, his peccant taste, so fallible for delicacies, so unerring for simplicities, above all doubtless the homeliest, strongest and grimmest, wofully led astray. But it is fairly almost a pleasure to our admiration, before him, to see what we have permitted ourselves to call the “chunks” of excision carted off to the disengagement of the values that still live. The wondrous thing is that they live best where his grand vulgarity—since we are not afraid of the word—serves him rather than betrays; which it _has_ to do, we make out, over the greater part of the field of any observer for whom man is on the whole cruelly, crushingly, deformedly conditioned. We grant _that_ as to Balzac’s view, and yet feel the view to have been at the same time incomparably active and productively genial; which are by themselves somehow qualities and reactions that redress the tragedy and the doom. The vulgarity was at any rate a force that simply got nearer than any other could have done to the whole detail, the whole intimate and evidenced story, of submission and perversion, and as such it could but prove itself immensely human. It is on all this considered ground that he has for so many years stood firm and that we feel him by reason of it and in spite of them, in spite of all that has come and gone, not to have yielded, have “given,” an inch. ----- Footnote 5: Balzac. Par Émile Faguet, de l’Académie Française. Les Grands Écrivains Français. Paris, Hachette, 1913. GEORGE SAND 1897