All this clings and can be reduced to this general formula: that away from the observation of facts and experience of phenomena, the mind can obtain no quantity of truth.

In former times, a romantic novel, instead of studying man, would invent it. Now the novel studies him in his social reality. Formerly in drama, in romance, the play of passions was conceived a priori; now it is analysed a posteriori, by processes as exact as those of physiology itself. Since it was found that the law governing brute bodies is the same as that which rules living beings, that the intrinsic constitution of a stone has followed the same laws as the constitution of a maiden, that there is only one phenomenality in the world, that the law governing the movements of the worlds is not different from the law that rules human passions, the novel, instead of imagining, had simply to observe. The true author of naturalism is not Zola, then, but Claude Bernard. Art has become the study of living phenomena and not the idealization of innate imaginations. It is easy to deduce from here that Mr Zola was not the inventor of naturalism. He is, certainly, a strong and great personality who has given to the movement a great and strong impulse. None as he, in his writings, has defended it better and separated it better from the vagueness of theory — and whatever his faults, the man who wrote l'Assommoir shall stay as one of the most prodigious artists in this century of artists. But it would be as absurd to say that he invented naturalism as to say that Gambetta invented democracy!

In this century, however, in the scientific period of naturalism, Mr Zola has had illustrious forebears: before him came the Goncourts, and before the Goncourts, Flaubert, Taine and Sainte-Beuve (because the method of a penetrating critic who studies a novelist does not differ from that of the novelist who studies a character) — and before those, there was already Stendhal, and besides him, Balzac, and in an earlier century, Molière. Do not force me to go back to Homer! This is truly an illustrious genealogy. But, will the reader tell me — the true reader, the citizen who is not a scholar nor a theoretician, but simply an impressionable being, an atom of the great public, who is the ultimate art-maker — What, then, does this famous naturalism consist in? What is in it for me? What benefit can I expect from that discovery? What business is it of mine? How better does it educate me, entertain me, what superiority does it show me over the old idealistic novel? Why do you want to force me into buying Monsieur Zola, instead of taking my good money to Monsieur Jules Sandeau?

Well, here you are, my dear fellow-citizen: suppose that you want to have in your drawing room an image of Napoleon I crossing the Alps (such fancies are permitted to you: it is your own wall and you are free to cover it with spittle or imperial figures: such things rest with your conscience and the severe God who has to judge you some day). What do you do? You call two painters: one is the idealist, who comes with his unkempt mane, his velvet coat and his broad-brimmed hat, and the other one is a realist and comes, looking just like you, in his top hat, with his paint box under his arm. You give them your subject and go away to your own business.