66 Transactions Texas Academy of Science. — 1908 - 1909 . 
The ideal, the ennobling qualities of man find no place in his works. 
For his vision is confined to the earth and the earthy. There is no 
vision of a higher life. The hero in ‘ ‘ L ’Assomoir, ” the unfortunate 
slater, is a hereditary drunkard, who in times of enforced idleness, 
falls a victim to the slumbering demon within, in spite of his utmost 
efforts at resistance. The family Rougon-Macquart is kept together 
by common fate, to which all their members are predestined by their 
forefathers. It is the iron law of a fate that makes one what he is. 
In Germinal it is the greed of ever making more money. Zola’s only 
poetic passion is his accusation of the actual conditions. He showed 
an especial affection for the ugly, the brutal, the common ; the dark 
side of life illumines all in the coarsest colors of murder, incendiarism 
and animal desires. Zola’s novels correspond so completely to the 
psychical condition of the literary revolutionists in Germany in the 
eighties and nineties that all the examples which were to ally the dis- 
cord of the young generation were taken from the series of Rougon- 
Macquart (heredity). 
Zola produced his effects by large, carefully executed pen-pictures 
of customs; Ibsen, the representative of the recently resurrected Nor- 
wegian literature, sought to inspire the people by special tactics in the 
struggle. He proclaimed in his “ Comedy of Love” the command- 
ment of living one’s life in one’s own way, regardless of others, and 
remained true to it all his life, for it appears in his last piece, “When 
We Dead Awake.” All his plays have a purpose. He is above all 
things a pioneer of the modern views of life. His later works have 
a pathological vein. He is the problem-poet, but he never solves his 
own problems. The individuality, the ego, goes forth like Nora from 
her '‘Doll’s House” to find the higher life, the right to educate her- 
self for life; it opposes, as in “ Public Enemy,” trusting to the vic- 
tory of its freedom and truth, a whole city full of lies and depend- 
ence; it struggles in Brand with the religious forces of the past and 
of his own heart; it is the great discord of the age which, in Ibsen, 
has found its most eloquent, most profound interpreter. This is Ib- 
sen’s greatness, but at the same time his limitation; viz, that he has 
looked deepest into modern life and discovered in it the problems 
which disclose the conflict between the individual and society, prob- 
lems that will probably never be solved. Thus modern literature 
leaves the conventional, the objective, and proceeds to the problemat- 
ical, subjective ; it leaves the sublime and proceeds to the seemingly 
ridiculous, the minute description of life’s details, to an estimate of 
the apparently trivial. 
In Tolstoi, as in Ibsen, are found conscience and love and truth, 
