HARDY AND MEREDITH
We have seen in chapter seventh, how the influence of Balzac introduced to modern fiction that extension of subject and that preference for the external fact widely productive of change in the novel-making of the continent and of English-speaking lands. As the year 1830 was given significance by him, so, a generation later, the year 1870 was given significance by Zola. England, like other lands cultivating the Novel, felt the influence. Balzac brought to fiction a greater franchise of theme: Zola taught it to regard a human being—individual or collectively social—as primarily animal: that is, he explains action on this hypothesis. And as an inevitable consequence, realism passed to the so-called naturalism. Zola believed in this view as a theory and his practice, not always consistent with it, was sufficiently so in the famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels begun the year of the Franco-Prussian war, to establish it as a method, and a school of fiction. Naturalism, linking hands with l'art pour art—"a fine phrase is a moral action—there is no other morality in literature," cried Zola—became a banner-cry, with "the flesh is all" its chief article of belief. No study of the growth of English fiction can ignore this typical modern movement, however unpleasant it may be to follow it. The baser and more brutal phases of the Novel continental and insular look to this derivation. Zola's remarkable pronunciamento "The Experimental Novel," proves how honestly he espoused the doctrine of the realist, how blind he is to its partial view. His attempt to subject the art of fiction to the exact laws of science, is an illustration of the influence of scientific thought upon a mind not broadly cultured, though of unusual native quality. Realism of the modern kind—the kind for which Zola stands—is the result in a form of literature of the necessary intellectual unrest following on the abandonment of older religious ideals. Science had forced men to give up certain theological conceptions; death, immorality, God, Man,—these were all differently understood, and a period of readjustment, doubt and negation, of misery and despair, was the natural issue. Man, being naturally religious, was sure sooner or later to secure a new and more hopeful faith: it was a matter of spiritual self-preservation. But realism in letters, for the moment, before a new theory had been formulated, was a kind of pis aller by which literature could be produced and attention given to the tangible things of this earth, many of them not before thoroughly exploited; the things of the mind, of the Spirit, were certain to be exploited later, when a broader creed should come. The new romanticism and idealism of our day marks this return. Zola's theory is now seen to be wrong, and there has followed a violent reaction from the realistic tenets, even in Paris, its citadel. But for some years, it held tyrannous sway and its leader was a man of genius, his work distinctive, remarkable; at its best, great,—in spite of, rather than because of, his principles. It was in the later Trilogy of the cities that, using a broader formula, he came into full expression of what was in him; during the last years of his life he was moving, both as man and artist, in the right direction. Yet naturally it was novels like "Nana" and "L'Assomoir" that gave him his vogue; and their obsession with the fleshly gave them for the moment a strange distinction: for years their author was regarded as the founder of a school and its most formidable exponent. He wielded an influence that rarely falls to a maker of stories. And although realism in its extreme manifestations no longer holds exclusive sway, Zola's impulse is still at work in the modern Novel. Historically, his name will always be of interest.