The method of the radical usually consists of two parts: one of criticism, designed to show the misery due to existing laws and institutions; another of construction, the disclosure of a new and better system. But here, too, the constructive part of the story is likely to be weak. For whether the writer sets forth his program by putting it into the mouth of one of his characters or appends it as a commentary to his story, the practicability of his scheme is always open to question. It is only through trial that any scheme can be shown to be workable. There is, however, a new method that deserves better the name of "experimental romance" than Zola's own works. It consists in portraying people living in accordance with new sentiments and ideals, or even under new institutions imaginatively constructed. Yet this method also has its weakness, for it is difficult to make people believe in the reality of a life that has not been actually lived. Still, this difficulty is not fatal; for experiments in living are constantly being made all around us, which the discerning novelist needs only to observe and report. He can show the success of these or how, if they fail, their failure is due, not to anything inherently vicious, but simply to adverse law and opinion. Life is full of such stories waiting for some novelist who is not too timid to tell them. We are thus brought round again to the thesis that the enduringly valuable elements of every story are its concrete creations of life. In the end, the story teller's fame will rest upon his power to create and reveal character and upon his sense for fate. There is just one thing that should be added to this--a rich emotional attitude toward life. It is the greater wealth of this that makes a novelist like Thackeray or Anatole France superior to one like Balzac. The personality that tells the story is as much a part of the total work as the characters and events portrayed, and must be taken into account in any final judgment of the whole. Without the author's vivid and rich participation, we who read can never be fully engaged, and we shall find more of life in the story, the more there is of him in it. CHAPTER XI THE DOMINION OF ART OVER NATURE: PAINTING In literature, as we observed in our last two chapters, nature does not find aesthetic expression on its own account. In the lyric, nature appears only as the reflection of personal moods and thoughts, in the drama and novel and epic only as the theater of human action or the determiner of human fate. In painting and sculpture, on the other hand, the expression of nature is the primary aim. Of course, in so far as this expression is aesthetic, it is an expression not of nature alone, but of our responses as well; but nature is the starting point, not emotion as in lyric poetry, nor the effect upon destiny as in the epic.