That they include everything, that they do justice to all sides
and phases of the period, it would be fatuous to expect, and
ridiculous to demand. It is not their epical character alone
that forbids this; it is the condition of every work of art,
which must choose its point of view, and include only the things
that fall within a certain scope. One of Zola's polemical
delusions was to suppose that a fiction ought not to be
selective, and that his own fictions were not selective, but
portrayed the fact without choice and without limitation. The
fact was that he was always choosing, and always limiting. Even
a map chooses and limits, far more a picture. Yet this delusion
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.
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