Ten years ago, then, the very few people who take an interest in literary questions were looking with hope or apprehension, as the case might be, to Paris, and chiefly to the study of M. Zola. It was from the little villa at Médan that revelation on the subject of the coming novel was to be awaited; and in the autumn of 1880 the long-expected message came, in the shape of the grotesque, violent, and narrow, but extremely able volume of destructive and constructive criticism called _Le Roman Expérimental_. People had complained that they did not know what M. Zola was driving at; that they could not recognise a "naturalistic" or "realistic" book when they saw it; that the "scientific method" in fiction, the "return to nature," "experimental observation" as the basis of a story, were mere phrases to them, vague and incomprehensible. The Sage of Médan determined to remove the objection and explain everything. He put his speaking-trumpet to his lips, and, disdaining to address the crassness of his countrymen, he shouted his system of rules and formulas to the Russian public, that all the world might hear. In 1880 he had himself proceeded far. He had published the Rougon-Macquart series of his novels, as far as _Une Page d'Amour_. He has added since then six or seven novels to the bulk of his works, and he has published many forcible and fascinating and many repulsive pages. But since 1880 he has not altered his method or pushed on to any further development. He had already displayed his main qualities--his extraordinary mixture of versatility and monotony, his enduring force, his plentiful lack of taste, his cynical disdain for the weaknesses of men, his admirable constructive power, his inability to select the salient points in a vast mass of observations. He had already shown himself what I must take the liberty of saying that he appears to me to be--one of the leading men of genius in the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the strongest novelists of the world; and that in spite of faults so serious and so eradicable that they would have hopelessly wrecked a writer a little less overwhelming in strength and resource.