Grant—and the generalisation may be emphatic—that the shallow and the simple are _all_ the population of his richest and most crowded pictures, and that his “psychology,” in a psychologic age, remains thereby comparatively coarse, grant this and we but get another view of the miracle. We see enough of the superficial among novelists at large, assuredly, without deriving from it, as we derive from Zola at his best, the concomitant impression of the solid. It is in general—I mean among the novelists at large—the impression of the _cheap_, which the author of Les Rougon-Macquart, honest man, never faithless for a moment to his own stiff standard, manages to spare us even in the prolonged sandstorm of “Vérité.” The Common is another matter; it is one of the forms of the superficial—pervading and consecrating all things in such a book as “Germinal”—and it only adds to the number of our critical questions. How in the world is it made, this deplorable democratic malodorous Common, so strange and so interesting? How is it taught to receive into its loins the stuff of the epic and still, in spite of that association with poetry, never depart from its nature? It is in the great lusty game he plays with the shallow and the simple that Zola’s mastery resides, and we see of course that when values are small it takes innumerable items and combinations to make up the sum. In “L’Assommoir” and in “Germinal,” to some extent even in “La Débâcle,” the values are all, morally, personally, of the lowest—the highest is poor Gervaise herself, richly human in her generosities and follies—yet each is as distinct as a brass-headed nail.