A charge not unfrequently brought against Zola is that he was a somewhat ignorant person, who required to get up from textbooks every subject upon which he wrote.  Now there seems to be little doubt that it was in the first instance due to the indiscretion of his biographer, M. Paul Alexis, that this charge has arisen.  Impressed by the vast industry of his friend, M. Alexis said so much about “research” and “documents” that less friendly critics seized the opportunity of exaggerating the importance of these.  Every novelist of any consequence has found it necessary to “cram” his subjects, but says little about the fact.  James Payn, for instance, could not have written his admirable descriptions of China in By Proxy without much reading of many books, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling has not been blamed for studying the technicalities of engineering before he wrote The Ship that found Herself.  It is open to question even whether Mr. Robert Hichens acquired his intimate knowledge of the conditions of life in Southern Europe and Northern Africa entirely without the assistance of Herr Baedeker.  Zola undoubtedly studied his subjects, but far too much has been made of the necessity for his doing so.  His equipment for the task he undertook was not less complete than that of many another novelist, and, like Dickens, he studied life in that school of a “stony-hearted stepmother,” the streets of a great city.

Zola’s literary method may be described as a piling up of detail upon detail till there is attained an effect portentous, overwhelming.  He lacked, however, a sense of proportion; he became so carried away by his visions of human depravity, that his characters developed powers of wickedness beyond mortal strength; he lay under an obsession regarding the iniquities of mankind.  In dealing with this it was unfortunately his method to leave nothing to the imagination, and herein lies the most serious blemish on his work.  There is undoubtedly much coarseness in some of his books, and the regrettable feature is that it is not only unnecessary, but in some cases actually lessens the effect at which he aimed.  It is doubtful whether he was possessed of any sense of humour.  Mr. Andrew Lang says that his lack of it was absolute, a darkness that can be felt; Mr. R. H. Sherrard, on the other hand, indicates that his work “teems with quiet fun.”  On the whole, truth seems to lie with Mr. Lang.  M. and Madame Charles Badeuil, in La Terre may seem Dickensian to an English reader, but there is always the Gallic point of view to be reckoned with, and it is doubtful if Zola did not regard these persons merely as types of a virtuous bourgeoisie.

It was in the treatment of crowds in motion that Zola chiefly excelled; there is nothing finer in literature than the march of the strikers in Germinal or the charges of the troops in La Debacle.  Contrast him with such a master of prose as George Meredith, and we see how immensely strong the battle scenes in La Debacle are when compared with those in Vittoria; it is here that his method of piling detail on detail and horror on horror is most effectual.  “To make his characters swarm,” said Mr. Henry James in a critical article in the Atlantic Monthly (August, 1903), “was the task he set himself very nearly from the first, that was the secret he triumphantly mastered.”