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The one living novelist who has striven to give a large, competent, and profound view of the movement of life is M. Zola. When we have said the worst of the Rougon-Macquart series, when we have admitted the obvious faults of these books—their romantic fallacies on the one hand, their cold brutalities on the other—it must be admitted that they present the results of a most laudable attempt to cultivate the estate outside the kitchen-garden. Hardly one of the main interests of the modern man has been neglected by M. Zola, and there is no doubt at all that to the future student of nineteenth-century manners his books will have an interest outweighing that of all other contemporary novels. An astonishing series of panoramas he has unrolled before us. Here is Le Ventre de Paris, describing the whole system by which a vast modern city is daily supplied with food; here is Au Bonheur des Dames, the romance of a shop, which is pushed upwards and outwards by the energy of a single ambitious tradesman, until it swamps all its neighbours, and governs the trade of a district; here is L'Argent, in which, with infinite pains and on a colossal scale, the passions which move in la haute finance are analysed, and a great battle of the money-world chronicled; here, above all, is Germinal, that unapproachable picture of the agony and stress of life in a great mining community, with a description of the processes so minute and so technical that this novel is quoted by experts as the best existing record of conditions which are already obsolete.