With Zola's theory of what the naturalistic novel should be, it seems impossible at first sight to quarrel. It is to be contemporary; it is to be founded on and limited by actual experience; it is to reject all empirical modes of awakening sympathy and interest; its aim is to place before its readers living beings, acting the comedy of life as naturally as possible. It is to trust to principles of action and to reject formulas of character; to cultivate the personal expression; to be analytical rather than lyrical; to paint men as they are, not as you think they should be. There is no harm in all this. There is not a word here that does not apply to the chiefs of one of the two great parallel schools of English fiction. It is hard to conceive of a novelist whose work is more experimental than Richardson. Fielding is personal and analytical above all things. If France counts George Sand among its romanticists, we can point to a realist who is greater than she, in Jane Austen. There is not a word to be found in M. Zola's definitions of the experimental novel that is not fulfilled in the pages of _Emma_; which is equivalent to saying that the most advanced realism may be practised by the most innocent as well as the most captivating of novelists. Miss Austen did not observe over a wide area, but within the circle of her experience she disguised nothing, neglected nothing, glossed over nothing. She is the perfection of the realistic ideal, and there ought to be a statue of her in the vestibule of the forthcoming Académie des Goncourts. Unfortunately, the lives of her later brethren have not been so sequestered as hers, and they, too, have thought it their duty to neglect nothing and to disguise nothing.