Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/244

218 Zola draws an illustration from a strong scene in Le Rouge et le Nolr, and shows how different the setting would have been in his own hands. Beyle is a logician, abstract; Zola thinks himself concrete, and concrete he is—often by main force. This is a sad failure to apply the doctrine of relativity to oneself. Beyle errs sometimes in the same way, and some of his attempts at local colour are very tiresome, but on the whole he remains frankly the analyser, the introspective psychologist, the man of distinct but disembodied ideas. He recognised the environment as he recognised other things in his fertile reflections, but he was as a rule too faithful to his own principles to spend much time in trying to reproduce it in details which did not directly interest him. It was therefore natural that his celebration by the extremists should be short-lived. Most of them do him what justice they can with effort, like Zola, or pass him over with some such word as the "dry" of Goncourt. His fads were his own. None of them have yet become the fads of a school, though some principles that were restrained with him have become battle-cries in later times. His real fads are hardly fitted to be banners, for they are too specific. In very general theories he generally kept rather sane. His real difference from the school that claimed him for a father half a century after his death, is well suggested in the awkward word that Zola is fond of throwing at him, "ideologist." The idea, the abstract truth and the intellectual form of it, its clearness, its stateableness, its cogency and consistency, is the final interest with him. The outer world is only the material for the expression of ideas, only the illustrations of them, and the ideas are therefore not pictorial or dramatic, but logical. The arts are ultimately the expression of thought and feeling, and colour and plastic form are means only. You never find him complaining, as his friend Merimée did, that the meaning of the plastic arts