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THE REVIVAL OF NATURALISM 225
and employment of the selected material for the expression of the idea, of the creative impulse that brings the film into being. Zola refers to the business of documenting as simply the amusement of a mechanic directing the play of a thousand cog-wheels with meticulous care. How Zola would have enjoyed himself in a film studio! But we must for ever be able to distinguish between the mere recorded fact of documentary interest and the creative impulse which builds such material into a work of art.
The popularity that Zola's books enjoyed, despite the antipathy in which the man was held, is of some significance. All his novels sold in great numbers, creating records at that time in the publishing trade. " Nana " reached many thousands; " L'Assommoir " reached the hundred thousand mark in a few months. Zola was an astute showman. It was an age of learning, particularly among the lower-classes, and he believed rightly that great numbers of people enjoyed receiving information at a low cost about factories, department stores, the stock exchange, the army, etc. It is only logical that the demand for information to-day is even larger, but it is for the cinema, with its greater breadth and scope as well as its far-reaching influence, to meet that demand. By such pictures as The General Line, Tur\sib, Drifters, Finis Terrce, Moana, The White Hell of Pitz Palu and Cimarron it is doing so.
Thus it will be appreciated that there is much in modern cinema that was foreshadowed in the Naturalistic novel of Zola. Scientific method, the theory of environment, even scenario-organization and selection of detail is common to both mediums.