The vocabulary of Hugo and Zola is tremendous. No other French writers are comparable. Hugo of course is the greater. Coming from their fluent range to moderns, Duhamel for instance, is like coming to one-syllable words on a baby’s blocks. The range of the two older writers is prodigious. One can not help but be impressed by virtuousity. It is astonishing, the swinging around the head of the dictionary of a race. Only French and Russians have understood, then portrayed faithfully in fiction, the natures of women. Beside Zola and Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, the best of the English are cold, and a little dull. The bonfire of vision which illuminates is seldom at their command; the thin-edged penetration. Restraint of soul hinders. Some insufficiency hobbles, keeps the writer poised in a safe, less poignant place. In the seeing he is seldom able to forget, then create from the unmeasured which is beyond self. He stands in his shadow. There is a habit not to carry the novel to its logical end as was way with the great Frenchmen. In brittle, new-world atmosphere, the subject crumbles long before the supreme moment. Now our novelists are writing dull imitations of difficult, melancholy, sad-skied Russian novels, trying to make believe they suit our light, bright, lyrically dramatic atmosphere, and our young land, where promise is paramount, and experience and wisdom slight. In the person of _Nana_, the courtesan, proud Venus of the modern world, Zola symbolized the ultimate fall, then decay of France through unrestrained living. Powerful prose is here. It is style founded upon plasticity of logically marshalled fact. It is great in reach, conviction, resonance. The balanced exigencies of life Zola could feel, then express. His exposition resembles the regal unfolding of a rose. It is full, natural, complete. The result is fine, intellectual satisfaction. Zola, in _Nana_, speaks of the forties as the dangerous age for women. This may have suggested the novel by that name: _Das Gefährliche Alter_. (_The Dangerous Age._) Zola’s unfolding an idea, then pushing logical progression on, in sequence after sequence, is remarkable. With security he steps from the individual to the universal. His novel construction resembles an uncoiling spiral; tiny at first, scarcely larger than a dot; at last, huge enough to embrace the universe. _Nana_ is a little outcast of the Parisian gutter. When he finishes the novel she has been lifted to represent not only Paris, then France, but the devouring sin of Latin peoples; passion, debauchery, lust. And still he is not satisfied with sublime expanding of idea. On, on he goes, a god now, marching toward unseen worlds! Before our astonished eyes we see _Nana_ symbolizing the world-force the Greeks named Venus, which the pagan soul of Zola believes still to rule.