The scheme was further attractive in as much as it
lent itself readily to the system of treatment to which he had applied
the term _naturalisme_, to distinguish it from the crudities of the
realistic school. The scientific tendency of the period was to rely not
on previously accepted propositions, but on observation and experience,
or on facts and documents. To Zola the voice of science conveyed the
word of ultimate truth, and with desperate earnestness he set out to
apply its methods to literary production. His position was that the
novelist is, like the scientist, an observer and an experimentalist
combined. The observer, he says, gives the facts as he has observed
them, fixes the starting-point, lays the solid ground on which
his characters are to walk and his phenomena to develop. Then the
experimentalist appears and starts the experiment, that is to say, he
makes the personages in a particular story move, in order to show that
the succession of events will be just what the determinism of phenomena
together with study demand that they should be. The author must abstain
from comment, never show his own personality, and never turn to the
reader for sympathy; he must, as Mr.
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