His position was that the novelist is, like the scientist, an observer and an experimentalist combined.

Theobserver, he says, gives the facts as he has observed them, fixes the starting-point, lays the solid
ground onwhich his characters are to walk and his phenomena to develop. Then the experimentalist
appears and startsthe experiment, that is to say, he makes the personages in a particular story move, in
order to show that thesuccession of events will be just what the determinism of phenomena together
with study demand that theyshould be. The author must abstain from comment, never show his own
personality, and never turn to thereader for sympathy; he must, as Mr. Andrew Lang has observed, be
as cold as a vivisectionist at a lecture.Zola thought the application of this method would raise the
position of the novel to the level of a science, andthat it would become a medium for the expression of
established truths. The fallacy of the argument has beenexposed by more than one critic. It is self-
evident that the "experiments" by the novelist cannot be made onsubjects apart from himself, but are
made by him and in him; so that they prove more regarding his owntemperament than about what he
professes to regard as the inevitable actions of his characters. The conclusiondrawn by a writer from
such actions must always be open to the retort that he invented the whole himself andthat fiction is
only fiction. But to Zola in the late sixties the theory seemed unassailable and it was upon it thathe
founded the whole edifice of 

  Les Rougon-Macquart 

. The considerations then that influenced Zola inbeginning a series of novels connected by subject into
one gigantic whole were somewhat various. There wasthe example of Balzac's great

  Comedie Humaine

; there was the desire of working out the theories of heredityin which he had become interested; there
was the opportunity of putting into operation the system which hehad termed

  naturalisme

; and there was also the consideration that if he could get a publisher to agree to hisproposals he would
secure