Zola seems to me to be the Vulcan among our later gods, afflicted with moral lameness from his birth, and coming to us sooty and brutal from the forge, yet as indisputably divine as any Mercury-Hawthorne or Apollo-Thackeray of the best of them. It is to Zola, and to Zola only, that the concentration of the scattered tendencies of naturalism is due. It is owing to him that the threads of Flaubert and Daudet, Dostoiefsky and Tolstoi, Howells and Henry James can be drawn into anything like a single system. It is Zola who discovered a common measure for all these talents, and a formula wide enough and yet close enough to distinguish them from the outside world and bind them to one another. It is his doing that for ten years the experimental novel has flowed in a definite channel, and has not spread itself abroad in a thousand whimsical directions. To a serious critic, then, who is not a partisan, but who sees how large a body of carefully composed fiction the naturalistic school has produced, it is of great importance to know what is the formula of M. Zola. He has defined it, one would think, clearly enough, but to see it intelligently repeated is rare indeed. It starts from the negation of fancy--not of imagination, as that word is used by the best Anglo-Saxon critics, but of fancy--the romantic and rhetorical elements that novelists have so largely used to embroider the home-spun fabric of experience with. It starts with the exclusion of all that is called "ideal," all that is not firmly based on the actual life of human beings, all, in short, that is grotesque, unreal, nebulous, or didactic. I do not understand Zola to condemn the romantic writers of the past; I do not think he has spoken of Dumas _pêre_ or of George Sand as Mr. Howells has allowed himself to speak of Dickens. He has a phrase of contempt--richly deserved, it appears to me--for the childish evolution of Victor Hugo's plots, and in particular of that of _Notre Dame de Paris_; but, on the whole, his aim is rather to determine the outlines of a new school than to attack the recognised masters of the past. If it be not so, it should be so; there is room in the Temple of Fame for all good writers, and it does not blast the laurels of Walter Scott that we are deeply moved by Dostoiefsky.