The very idea that human beings should be thus subjected to all kinds of irresistible impulses produces the same gruesome impression as the old stories of demoniacal possession. Nordau might as well have described Zola as a man hating above all things the writing of novels, with a natural repugnance for anything savouring of the obscene, compelled by a demon in possession of his body and his soul to write the history of the Rougeon-Maquarts and other distasteful works. On the careful reader the impression would have been precisely the same. But no number of “vigorous affirmations” would have induced even the most weak-minded of readers to have accepted the demon, while Zola’s eroticism and his mischievous olfactory nerves may have imprinted themselves upon the minds of some by dint of scientific dissertation. While it would seem to most people rational to study Zola’s character and the state of his mind, in order to form a correct idea of the objects he has in view, Nordau, by his method of supposing that a writer is not a free agent, but is compelled to exhibit for the readers of his works the innermost recesses of his consciousness, proceeds in the opposite manner: he evolves the characters of writers from the characters of their books. From what he says about Zola, one feels inclined to conclude that this author devotes the large amounts he makes by his writings to the gratification of bestial lusts, living in a kind of harem of degraded women, rapidly destroying by debauch every spark of intelligence left in his tottering brain. We do not know M. Zola personally, but from what we hear, he seems to live a quiet and laborious life with his wife in a peaceful country house, and far from spending his earnings in riotous living, he banks them as a reserve for old age, which he seems likely to attain. When however a man’s private life and rational attention to his own business seem to clash conspicuously with Nordau’s diagnoses, his serenity and self-confidence are not in the slightest degree disturbed, because he has given his description to the man’s tendency in a “psychiatric sense,” and has referred to the man’s actual life. But the discrepancy between the author’s actual life and the life he, according to Nordau, ought to lead, is not an extenuating circumstance in the eyes of so harsh a judge as our alienist. On the contrary, it aggravates the sentence, for if the accused author is not in reality the monster he ought to be, it is simply because his attenuated physique does not allow of it, and drives him through all his debaucheries in his imagination.