of Zola's and its affirmation resulted in no end of
misunderstanding. People said the noises of the streets, which
he supposed himself to have given with graphophonic fulness and
variety, were not music; and they were quite right. Zola, as far
as his effects were voluntary, was not giving them music; he
openly loathed the sort of music they meant just as he openly
loathed art, and asked to be regarded as a man of science rather
than an artist. Yet, at the end of the ends, he was an artist
and not a man of science. His hand was perpetually selecting his
facts, and shaping them to one epical result, with an orchestral
accompaniment, which, though reporting the rudest noises of the
street, the vulgarest, the most offensive, was, in spite of him,
so reporting them that the result was harmony.

Zola was an artist, and one of the very greatest, but even before
and beyond that he was intensely a moralist, as only the
moralists of our true and noble time have been. Not Tolstoy, not
Ibsen himself, has more profoundly and indignantly felt the
injustice of civilization, or more insistently shown the falsity
of its fundamental pretensions. He did not make his books a
polemic for one cause or another; he was far too wise and sane
for that; but when he began to write them they became alive with
his sense of what was wrong and false and bad. His tolerance is
less than Tolstoy's, because his resignation is not so great; it
is for the weak sinners and not for the strong, while Tolstoy's,
with that transcendent vision of his race, pierces the bounds
where the shows of strength and weakness cease and become of a
solidarity of error in which they are one. But the ethics of his
work, like Tolstoy's, were always carrying over into his life.
He did not try to live poverty and privation and hard labor, as