If it be true that the critical spirit to-day, in presence of the rising
tide of prose fiction, a watery waste out of which old standards and
landmarks are seen barely to emerge, like chimneys and the tops of trees
in a country under flood—if it be true that the anxious observer, with
the water up to his chin, finds himself asking for the _reason_ of the
strange phenomenon, for its warrant and title, so we likewise make out
that these credentials rather fail to float on the surface. We live in a
world of wanton and importunate fable, we breathe its air and consume
its fruits; yet who shall say that we are able, when invited, to account
for our preferring it so largely to the world of fact? To do so would be
to make some adequate statement of the good the product in question does
us. What does it do for our life, our mind, our manners, our
morals—what does it do that history, poetry, philosophy may not do, as
well or better, to warn, to comfort and command the countless thousands
for whom and by whom it comes into being? We seem too often left with
our riddle on our hands. The lame conclusion on which we retreat is that
“stories” are multiplied, circulated, paid for, on the scale of the
present hour, simply because people “like” them. As to why people
_should_ like anything so loose and mean as the preponderant mass of the
“output,” so little indebted for the magic of its action to any mystery
in the making, is more than the actual state of our perceptions enables
us to say.
This bewilderment might be our last word if it were not for the
occasional occurrence of accidents especially appointed to straighten
out a little our tangle. We are reminded that if the unnatural
prosperity of the wanton fable cannot be adequately explained, it can at
least be illustrated with a sharpness that is practically an argument.
An abstract solution failing we encounter it in the concrete. We catch
in short a new impression or, to speak more truly, recover an old one.
It was always there to be had, but we ourselves throw off an oblivion,
an indifference for which there are plenty of excuses. We become
conscious, for our profit, of a _case_, and we see that our
mystification came from the way cases had appeared for so long to fail
us. None of the shapeless forms about us for the time had attained to
the dignity of one. The one I am now conceiving as suddenly
effective—for which I fear I must have been regarding it as somewhat in
eclipse—is that of Émile Zola, whom, as a manifestation of the sort we
are considering, three or four striking facts have lately combined to
render more objective and, so to speak, more massive. His close
connection with the most resounding of recent public quarrels; his
premature and disastrous death; above all, at the moment I write, the
appearance of his last-finished novel, bequeathed to his huge public
from beyond the grave—these rapid events have thrust him forward and
made him loom abruptly larger; much as if our pedestrian critic,
treading the dusty highway, had turned a sharp corner.
It is not assuredly that Zola has ever been veiled or unapparent; he
had, on the contrary been digging his field these thirty years, and for
all passers to see, with an industry that kept him, after the fashion of
one of the grand grim sowers or reapers of his brother of the brush, or
at least of the canvas, Jean-François Millet, duskily outlined against
the sky. He was there in the landscape of labour—he had always been;
but he was there as a big natural or pictorial feature, a spreading
tree, a battered tower, a lumpish round-shouldered useful hayrick,
confounded with the air and the weather, the rain and the shine, the day
and the dusk, merged more or less, as it were, in the play of the
elements themselves. We had got used to him, and, thanks in a measure
just to this stoutness of his presence, to the long regularity of his
performance, had come to notice him hardly more than the dwellers in the
marketplace notice the quarters struck by the town-clock. On top of all
accordingly, for our skeptical mood, the sense of his work—a sense
determined afresh by the strange climax of his personal history—rings
out almost with violence as a reply to our wonder. It is as if an
earthquake or some other rude interference had shaken from the
town-clock a note of such unusual depth as to compel attention. We
therefore once more give heed, and the result of this is that we feel
ourselves after a little probably as much enlightened as we can hope
ever to be. We have worked round to the so marked and impressive anomaly
of the adoption of the futile art by one of the stoutest minds and
stoutest characters of our time. This extraordinarily robust worker has
found it good enough for him, and if the fact is, as I say, anomalous,
we are doubtless helped to conclude that by its anomalies, in future,
the bankrupt business, as we are so often moved to pronounce it, will
most recover credit.
What is at all events striking for us, critically speaking, is that, in
the midst of the dishonour it has gradually harvested by triumphant
vulgarity of practice, its pliancy and applicability can still plead for
themselves. The curious contradiction stands forth for our relief—the
circumstance that thirty years ago a young man of extraordinary brain
and indomitable purpose, wishing to give the measure of these endowments
in a piece of work supremely solid, conceived and sat down to Les
Rougon-Macquart rather than to an equal task in physics, mathematics,
politics or economics. He saw his undertaking, thanks to his patience
and courage, practically to a close; so that it is exactly neither of
the so-called constructive sciences that happens to have had the
benefit, intellectually speaking, of one of the few most constructive
achievements of our time. There then, provisionally at least, we touch
bottom; we get a glimpse of the pliancy and variety, the ideal of
vividness, on behalf of which our equivocal form may appeal to a strong
head. In the name of what ideal on its own side, however, does the
strong head yield to the appeal? What is the logic of its so deeply
committing itself? Zola’s case seems to tell us, as it tells us other
things. The logic is in its huge freedom of adjustment to the
temperament of the worker, which it carries, so to say, as no other
vehicle can do. It expresses fully and directly the whole man, and big
as he may be it can still be big enough for him without becoming false
to its type. We see this truth made strong, from beginning to end, in
Zola’s work; we see the temperament, we see the whole man, with his size
and all his marks, stored and packed away in the huge hold of Les
Rougon-Macquart as a cargo is packed away on a ship. His personality is
the thing that finally pervades and prevails, just as so often on a
vessel the presence of the cargo makes itself felt for the assaulted
senses. What has most come home to me in reading him over is that a
scheme of fiction so conducted is in fact a capacious vessel. It can
carry anything—with art and force in the stowage; nothing in this case
will sink it. And it is the only form for which such a claim can be
made. All others have to confess to a smaller scope—to selection, to
exclusion, to the danger of distortion, explosion, combustion. The novel
has nothing to fear but sailing too light. It will take aboard all we
bring in good faith to the dock.
An intense vision of this truth must have been Zola’s comfort from the
earliest time—the years, immediately following the crash of the Empire,
during which he settled himself to the tremendous task he had mapped
out. No finer act of courage and confidence, I think, is recorded in the
history of letters. The critic in sympathy with him returns again and
again to the great wonder of it, in which something so strange is mixed
with something so august. Entertained and carried out almost from the
threshold of manhood, the high project, the work of a lifetime,
announces beforehand its inevitable weakness and yet speaks in the same
voice for its admirable, its almost unimaginable strength. The strength
was in the young man’s very person—in his character, his will, his
passion, his fighting temper, his aggressive lips, his squared shoulders
(when he “sat up”) and overweening confidence; his weakness was in that
inexperience of life from which he proposed not to suffer, from which he
in fact suffered on the surface remarkably little, and from which he was
never to suspect, I judge, that he had suffered at all. I may mention
for the interest of it that, meeting him during his first short visit to
London—made several years before his stay in England during the Dreyfus
trial—I received a direct impression of him that was more informing
than any previous study. I had seen him a little, in Paris, years before
that, when this impression was a perceptible promise, and I was now to
perceive how time had made it good. It consisted, simply stated, in his
fairly bristling with the betrayal that nothing whatever had happened to
him in life but to write Les Rougon-Macquart. It was even for that
matter almost more as if Les Rougon-Macquart had written _him_, written
him as he stood and sat, as he looked and spoke, as the long,
concentrated, merciless effort had made and stamped and left him.
Something very fundamental was to happen to him in due course, it is
true, shaking him to his base; fate was not wholly to cheat him of an
independent evolution. Recalling him from this London hour one strongly
felt during the famous “Affair” that his outbreak in connection with it
was the act of a man with arrears of personal history to make up, the
act of a spirit for which life, or for which at any rate freedom, had
been too much postponed, treating itself at last to a luxury of
experience.
I welcomed the general impression at all events—I intimately
entertained it; it represented so many things, it suggested, just as it
was, such a lesson. You could neither have everything nor be
everything—you had to choose; you could not at once sit firm at your
job and wander through space inviting initiations. The author of Les
Rougon-Macquart had had all those, certainly, that this wonderful
company could bring him; but I can scarce express how it was implied in
him that his time had been fruitfully passed with _them_ alone. His
artistic evolution struck one thus as, in spite of its magnitude,
singularly simple, and evidence of the simplicity seems further offered
by his last production, of which we have just come into possession.
“Vérité” truly does give the measure, makes the author’s high maturity
join hands with his youth, marks the rigid straightness of his course
from point to point. He had seen his horizon and his fixed goal from the
first, and no cross-scent, no new distance, no blue gap in the hills to
right or to left ever tempted him to stray. “Vérité,” of which I shall
have more to say, is in fact, as a moral finality and the crown of an
edifice, one of the strangest possible performances. Machine-minted and
made good by an immense expertness, it yet makes us ask how, for
disinterested observation and perception, the writer had used so much
time and so much acquisition, and how he can all along have handled so
much material without some larger subjective consequence. We really rub
our eyes in other words to see so great an intellectual adventure as Les
Rougon-Macquart come to its end in deep desert sand. Difficult truly to
read, because showing him at last almost completely a prey to the danger
that had for a long time more and more dogged his steps, the danger of
the mechanical all confident and triumphant, the book is nevertheless
full of interest for a reader desirous to penetrate. It speaks with more
distinctness of the author’s temperament, tone and manner than if, like
several of his volumes, it achieved or enjoyed a successful life of its
own. Its heavy completeness, with all this, as of some prodigiously
neat, strong and complicated scaffolding constructed by a firm of
builders for the erection of a house whose foundations refuse to bear it
and that is unable therefore to rise—its very betrayal of a method and
a habit more than adequate, on past occasions, to similar ends, carries
us back to the original rare exhibition, the grand assurance and grand
patience with which the system was launched.
If it topples over, the system, by its own weight in these last
applications of it, that only makes the history of its prolonged success
the more curious and, speaking for myself, the spectacle of its origin
more attaching. Readers of my generation will remember well the
publication of “La Conquête de Plassans” and the portent, indefinable
but irresistible, after perusal of the volume, conveyed in the general
rubric under which it was a first instalment, Natural and Social History
of a Family under the Second Empire. It squared itself there at its
ease, the announcement, from the first, and we were to learn promptly
enough what a fund of life it masked. It was like the mouth of a cave
with a signboard hung above, or better still perhaps like the big booth
at a fair with the name of the show across the flapping canvas. One
strange animal after another stepped forth into the light, each in its
way a monster bristling and spotted, each a curiosity of that “natural
history” in the name of which we were addressed, though it was doubtless
not till the issue of “L’Assommoir” that the true type of the monstrous
seemed to be reached. The enterprise, for those who had attention, was
even at a distance impressive, and the nearer the critic gets to it
retrospectively the more so it becomes. The pyramid had been planned and
the site staked out, but the young builder stood there, in his sturdy
strength, with no equipment save his two hands and, as we may say, his
wheelbarrow and his trowel. His pile of material—of stone, brick and
rubble or whatever—was of the smallest, but this he apparently felt as
the least of his difficulties. Poor, uninstructed, unacquainted,
unintroduced, he set up his subject wholly from the outside, proposing
to himself wonderfully to get into it, into its depths, as he went.
If we imagine him asking himself what he knew of the “social” life of
the second Empire to start with, we imagine him also answering in all
honesty: “I have my eyes and my ears—I have all my senses: I have what
I’ve seen and heard, what I’ve smelled and tasted and touched. And then
I’ve my curiosity and my pertinacity; I’ve libraries, books, newspapers,
witnesses, the material, from step to step, of an _enquête_. And then
I’ve my genius—that is, my imagination, my passion, my sensibility to
life. Lastly I’ve my method, and that will be half the battle. Best of
all perhaps even, I’ve plentiful lack of doubt.” Of the absence in him
of a doubt, indeed of his inability, once his direction taken, to
entertain so much as the shadow of one, “Vérité” is a positive
monument—which again represents in this way the unity of his tone and
the meeting of his extremes. If we remember that his design was nothing
if not architectural, that a “majestic whole,” a great balanced façade,
with all its orders and parts, that a singleness of mass and a unity of
effect, in fine, were before him from the first, his notion of picking
up his bricks as he proceeded becomes, in operation, heroic. It is not
in the least as a record of failure for him that I note this particular
fact of the growth of the long series as on the whole the liveliest
interest it has to offer. “I don’t know my subject, but I must live into
it; I don’t know life, but I must learn it as I work”—that attitude and
programme represent, to my sense, a drama more intense on the worker’s
own part than any of the dramas he was to invent and put before us.
It was the fortune, it was in a manner the doom, of Les Rougon-Macquart
to deal with things almost always in gregarious form, to be a picture of
_numbers_, of classes, crowds, confusions, movements, industries—and
this for a reason of which it will be interesting to attempt some
account. The individual life is, if not wholly absent, reflected in
coarse and common, in generalised terms; whereby we arrive precisely at
the oddity just named, the circumstance that, looking out somewhere, and
often woefully athirst, for the taste of fineness, we find it not in the
fruits of our author’s fancy, but in a different matter altogether. We
get it in the very history of his effort, the image itself of his
lifelong process, comparatively so personal, so spiritual even, and,
through all its patience and pain, of a quality so much more
distinguished than the qualities he succeeds in attributing to his
figures even when he most aims at distinction. There can be no question
in these narrow limits of my taking the successive volumes one by
one—all the more that our sense of the exhibition is as little as
possible an impression of parts and books, of particular “plots” and
persons. It produces the effect of a mass of imagery in which shades are
sacrificed, the effect of character and passion in the lump or by the
ton. The fullest, the most characteristic episodes affect us like a
sounding chorus or procession, as with a hubbub of voices and a
multitudinous tread of feet. The setter of the mass into motion, he
himself, in the crowd, figures best, with whatever queer idiosyncrasies,
excrescences and gaps, a being of a substance akin to our own. Taking
him as we must, I repeat, for quite heroic, the interest of detail in
him is the interest of his struggle at every point with his problem.
The sense for crowds and processions, for the gross and the general, was
largely the _result_ of this predicament, of the disproportion between
his scheme and his material—though it was certainly also in part an
effect of his particular turn of mind. What the reader easily discerns
in him is the sturdy resolution with which breadth and energy supply the
place of penetration. He rests to his utmost on his documents, devours
and assimilates them, makes them yield him extraordinary appearances of
life; but in his way he too improvises in the grand manner, the manner
of Walter Scott and of Dumas the elder. We feel that he _has_ to
improvise for his moral and social world, the world as to which vision
and opportunity must come, if they are to come at all, unhurried and
unhustled—must take their own time, helped undoubtedly more or less by
blue-books, reports and interviews, by inquiries “on the spot,” but
never wholly replaced by such substitutes without a general
disfigurement. Vision and opportunity reside in a personal sense and a
personal history, and no short cut to them in the interest of plausible
fiction has ever been discovered. The short cut, it is not too much to
say, was with Zola the subject of constant ingenious experiment, and it
is largely to this source, I surmise, that we owe the celebrated element
of his grossness. He was _obliged_ to be gross, on his system, or
neglect to his cost an invaluable aid to representation, as well as one
that apparently struck him as lying close at hand; and I cannot withhold
my frank admiration from the courage and consistency with which he faced
his need.
His general subject in the last analysis was the nature of man; in
dealing with which he took up, obviously, the harp of most numerous
strings. His business was to make these strings sound true, and there
were none that he did not, so far as his general economy permitted,
persistently try. What happened then was that many—say about half, and
these, as I have noted, the most silvered, the most golden—refused to
give out their music. They would only sound false, since (as with all
his earnestness he must have felt) he could command them, through want
of skill, of practice, of ear, to none of the right harmony. What
therefore was more natural than that, still splendidly bent on producing
his illusion, he should throw himself on the strings he might thump with
effect, and should work them, as our phrase is, for all they were worth?
The nature of man, he had plentiful warrant for holding, is an
extraordinary mixture, but the great thing was to represent a sufficient
part of it to show that it was solidly, palpably, commonly the nature.
With this preoccupation he doubtless fell into extravagance—there was
clearly so much to lead him on. The coarser side of his subject, based
on the community of all the instincts, was for instance the more
practicable side, a sphere the vision of which required but the general
human, scarcely more than the plain physical, initiation, and dispensed
thereby conveniently enough with special introductions or revelations. A
free entry into this sphere was undoubtedly compatible with a youthful
career as hampered right and left even as Zola’s own.
He was in prompt possession thus of the range of sympathy that he
_could_ cultivate, though it must be added that the complete exercise of
that sympathy might have encountered an obstacle that would somewhat
undermine his advantage. Our friend might have found himself able, in
other words, to pay to the instinctive, as I have called it, only such
tribute as protesting taste (his own dose of it) permitted. Yet there it
was again that fortune and his temperament served him. Taste as he knew
it, taste as his own constitution supplied it, proved to have nothing to
say to the matter. His own dose of the precious elixir had no
perceptible regulating power. Paradoxical as the remark may sound, this
accident was positively to operate as one of his greatest felicities.
There are parts of his work, those dealing with romantic or poetic
elements, in which the inactivity of the principle in question is
sufficiently hurtful; but it surely should not be described as hurtful
to such pictures as “Le Ventre de Paris,” as “L’Assommoir,” as
“Germinal.” The conception on which each of these productions rests is
that of a world with which taste has nothing to do, and though the act
of representation may be justly held, as an artistic act, to involve its
presence, the discrimination would probably have been in fact, given the
particular illusion sought, more detrimental than the deficiency. There
was a great outcry, as we all remember, over the rank materialism of
“L’Assommoir,” but who cannot see to-day how much a milder infusion of
it would have told against the close embrace of the subject aimed at?
“L’Assommoir” is the nature of man—but not his finer, nobler, cleaner
or more cultivated nature; it is the image of his free instincts, the
better and the worse, the better struggling as they can, gasping for
light and air, the worse making themselves at home in darkness,
ignorance and poverty. The whole handling makes for emphasis and scale,
and it is not to be measured how, as a picture of conditions, the thing
would have suffered from timidity. The qualification of the painter was
precisely his stoutness of stomach, and we scarce exceed in saying that
to have taken in and given out again less of the infected air would,
with such a resource, have meant the waste of a faculty.
I may add in this connection moreover that refinement of intention did
on occasion and after a fashion of its own unmistakably preside at these
experiments; making the remark in order to have done once for all with a
feature of Zola’s literary physiognomy that appears to have attached the
gaze of many persons to the exclusion of every other. There are judges
in these matters so perversely preoccupied that for them to see anywhere
the “improper” is for them straightway to cease to see anything else.
The said improper, looming supremely large and casting all the varieties
of the proper quite into the shade, suffers thus in their consciousness
a much greater extension than it ever claimed, and this consciousness
becomes, for the edification of many and the information of a few, a
colossal reflector and record of it. Much may be said, in relation to
some of the possibilities of the nature of man, of the nature in
especial of the “people,” on the defect of our author’s sense of
proportion. But the sense of proportion of many of those he has
scandalised would take us further yet. I recall at all events as
relevant—for it comes under a very attaching general head—two
occasions of long ago, two Sunday afternoons in Paris, on which I found
the question of intention very curiously lighted. Several men of letters
of a group in which almost every member either had arrived at renown or
was well on his way to it, were assembled under the roof of the most
distinguished of their number, where they exchanged free confidences on
current work, on plans and ambitions, in a manner full of interest for
one never previously privileged to see artistic conviction, artistic
passion (at least on the literary ground) so systematic and so
articulate. “Well, I on my side,” I remember Zola’s saying, “am engaged
on a book, a study of the _mœurs_ of the people, for which I am making a
collection of all the ‘bad words,’ the _gros mots_, of the language,
those with which the vocabulary of the people, those with which their
familiar talk, bristles.” I was struck with the tone in which he made
the announcement—without bravado and without apology, as an interesting
idea that had come to him and that he was working, really to arrive at
character and particular truth, with all his conscience; just as I was
struck with the unqualified interest that his plan excited. It was _on_
a plan that he was working—formidably, almost grimly, as his fatigued
face showed; and the whole consideration of this interesting element
partook of the general seriousness.
But there comes back to me also as a companion-piece to this another
day, after some interval, on which the interest was excited by the fact
that the work for love of which the brave license had been taken was
actually under the ban of the daily newspaper that had engaged to
“serialise” it. Publication had definitively ceased. The thing had run a
part of its course, but it had outrun the courage of editors and the
curiosity of subscribers—that stout curiosity to which it had evidently
in such good faith been addressed. The chorus of contempt for the ways
of such people, their pusillanimity, their superficiality, vulgarity,
intellectual platitude, was the striking note on this occasion; for the
journal impugned had declined to proceed and the serial, broken off,
been obliged, if I am not mistaken, to seek the hospitality of other
columns, secured indeed with no great difficulty. The composition so
qualified for future fame was none other, as I was later to learn, than
“L’Assommoir”; and my reminiscence has perhaps no greater point than in
connecting itself with a matter always dear to the critical spirit,
especially when the latter has not too completely elbowed out the
romantic—the matter of the “origins,” the early consciousness, early
steps, early tribulations, early obscurity, as so often happens, of
productions finally crowned by time.
Their greatness is for the most part a thing that has originally begun
so small; and this impression is particularly strong when we have been
in any degree present, so to speak, at the birth. The course of the
matter is apt to tend preponderantly in that case to enrich our stores
of irony. In the eventual conquest of consideration by an abused book we
recognise, in other terms, a drama of romantic interest, a drama often
with large comic no less than with fine pathetic interweavings. It may
of course be said in this particular connection that “L’Assommoir” had
not been one of the literary things that creep humbly into the world.
Its “success” may be cited as almost insolently prompt, and the fact
remains true if the idea of success be restricted, after the inveterate
fashion, to the idea of circulation. What remains truer still, however,
is that for the critical spirit circulation mostly matters not the least
little bit, and it is of the success with which the history of Gervaise
and Coupeau nestles in _that_ capacious bosom, even as the just man
sleeps in Abraham’s, that I here speak. But it is a point I may better
refer to a moment hence.
Though a summary study of Zola need not too anxiously concern itself
with book after book—always with a partial exception from this remark
for “L’Assommoir”—groups and varieties none the less exist in the huge
series, aids to discrimination without which no measure of the presiding
genius is possible. These divisions range themselves to my sight,
roughly speaking, however, as scarce more than three in number—I mean
if the ten volumes of the Œuvres Critiques and the Théâtre be left out
of account. The critical volumes in especial abound in the
characteristic, as they were also a wondrous addition to his sum of
achievement during his most strenuous years. But I am forced not to
consider them. The two groups constituted after the close of Les
Rougon-Macquart—“Les Trois Villes” and the incomplete “Quatre
Évangiles”—distribute themselves easily among the three types, or, to
speak more exactly, stand together under one of the three. This one, so
comprehensive as to be the author’s main exhibition, includes to my
sense all his best volumes—to the point in fact of producing an effect
of distinct inferiority for those outside of it, which are, luckily for
his general credit, the less numerous. It is so inveterately pointed out
in any allusion to him that one shrinks, in repeating it, from sounding
flat; but as he was admirably equipped from the start for the evocation
of number and quantity, so those of his social pictures that most easily
surpass the others are those in which appearances, the appearances
familiar to him, are at once most magnified and most multiplied.
To make his characters swarm, and to make the great central thing they
swarm about “as large as life,” portentously, heroically big, that was
the task he set himself very nearly from the first, that was the secret
he triumphantly mastered. Add that the big central thing was always some
highly representative institution or industry of the France of his time,
some seated Moloch of custom, of commerce, of faith, lending itself to
portrayal through its abuses and excesses, its idol-face and great
devouring mouth, and we embrace main lines of his attack. In “Le Ventre
de Paris” he had dealt with the life of the huge Halles, the general
markets and their supply, the personal forces, personal situations,
passions, involved in (strangest of all subjects) the alimentation of
the monstrous city, the city whose victualling occupies so inordinately
much of its consciousness. Paris richly gorged, Paris sublime and
indifferent in her assurance (so all unlike poor Oliver’s) of “more,”
figures here the theme itself, lies across the scene like some vast
ruminant creature breathing in a cloud of parasites. The book was the
first of the long series to show the full freedom of the author’s hand,
though “La Curée” had already been symptomatic. This freedom, after an
interval, broke out on a much bigger scale in “L’Assommoir,” in “Au
Bonheur des Dames,” in “Germinal,” in “La Bête Humaine,” in “L’Argent,”
in “La Débâcle,” and then again, though more mechanically and with much
of the glory gone, in the more or less wasted energy of “Lourdes,”
“Rome,” “Paris,” of “Fécondité,” “Travail” and “Vérité.”
“Au Bonheur des Dames” handles the colossal modern shop, traces the
growth of such an organisation as the Bon Marché or the
Magasin-du-Louvre, sounds the abysses of its inner life, marshals its
population, its hierarchy of clerks, counters, departments, divisions
and sub-divisions, plunges into the labyrinth of the mutual relations of
its staff, and above all traces its ravage amid the smaller fry of the
trade, of all the trades, pictures these latter gasping for breath in an
air pumped clean by its mighty lungs. “Germinal” revolves about the
coal-mines of Flemish France, with the subterranean world of the pits
for its central presence, just as “La Bête Humaine” has for its
protagonist a great railway and “L’Argent” presents in terms of human
passion—mainly of human baseness—the fury of the Bourse and the
monster of Credit. “La Débâcle” takes up with extraordinary breadth the
first act of the Franco-Prussian war, the collapse at Sedan, and the
titles of the six volumes of The Three Cities and the Four Gospels
sufficiently explain them. I may mention, however, for the last
lucidity, that among these “Fécondité” manipulates, with an amazing
misapprehension of means to ends, of remedies to ills, no less thickly
peopled a theme than that of the decline in the French birth-rate, and
that “Vérité” presents a fictive equivalent of the Dreyfus case, with a
vast and elaborate picture of the battle in France between lay and
clerical instruction. I may even further mention, to clear the ground,
that with the close of Les Rougon-Macquart the diminution of freshness
in the author’s energy, the diminution of intensity and, in short, of
quality, becomes such as to render sadly difficult a happy life with
some of the later volumes. Happiness of the purest strain never indeed,
in old absorptions of Zola, quite sat at the feast; but there was mostly
a measure of coercion, a spell without a charm. From these last-named
productions of the climax everything strikes me as absent but quantity
(“Vérité,” for instance, is, with the possible exception of “Nana,” the
longest of the list); though indeed there is something impressive in the
way his quantity represents his patience.
There are efforts here at stout perusal that, frankly, I have been
unable to carry through, and I should verily like, in connection with
the vanity of these, to dispose on the spot of the sufficiently strange
phenomenon constituted by what I have called the climax. It embodies in
fact an immense anomaly; it casts back over Zola’s prime and his middle
years the queerest grey light of eclipse. Nothing moreover—nothing
“literary”—was ever so odd as in this matter the whole turn of the
case, the consummation so logical yet so unexpected. Writers have grown
old and withered and failed; they have grown weak and sad; they have
lost heart, lost ability, yielded in one way or another—the possible
ways being so numerous—to the cruelty of time. But the singular doom of
this genius, and which began to multiply its symptoms ten years before
his death, was to find, with life, at fifty, still rich in him, strength
only to undermine all the “authority” he had gathered. He had not grown
old and he had not grown feeble; he had only grown all too wrongly
insistent, setting himself to wreck, poetically, his so massive
identity—to wreck it in the very waters in which he had formally
arrayed his victorious fleet, (I say “poetically” on purpose to give him
the just benefit of all the beauty of his power.) The process of the
disaster, so full of the effect, though so without the intention, of
perversity, is difficult to trace in a few words; it may best be
indicated by an example or two of its action.
The example that perhaps most comes home to me is again connected with a
personal reminiscence. In the course of some talk that I had with him
during his first visit to England I happened to ask him what opportunity
to travel (if any) his immense application had ever left him, and
whether in particular he had been able to see Italy, a country from
which I had either just returned or which I was luckily—not having the
Natural History of a Family on my hands—about to revisit. “All I’ve
done, alas,” he replied, “was, the other year, in the course of a little
journey to the south, to my own _pays_—all that has been possible was
then to make a little dash as far as Genoa, a matter of only a few
days.” “Le Docteur Pascal,” the conclusion of Les Rougon-Macquart, had
appeared shortly before, and it further befell that I asked him what
plans he had for the future, now that, still _dans la force de l’âge_,
he had so cleared the ground. I shall never forget the fine promptitude
of his answer—“Oh, I shall begin at once Les Trois Villes.” “And which
cities are they to be?” The reply was finer still—“Lourdes, Paris,
Rome.”
It was splendid for confidence and cheer, but it left me, I fear, more
or less gaping, and it was to give me afterwards the key, critically
speaking, to many a mystery. It struck me as breathing to an almost
tragic degree the fatuity of those in whom the gods stimulate that vice
to their ruin. He was an honest man—he had always bristled with it at
every pore; but no artistic reverse was inconceivable for an adventurer
who, stating in one breath that his knowledge of Italy consisted of a
few days spent at Genoa, was ready to declare in the next that he had
planned, on a scale, a picture of Rome. It flooded his career, to my
sense, with light; it showed how he had marched from subject to subject
and had “got up” each in turn—showing also how consummately he had
reduced such getting-up to an artifice. He had success and a rare
impunity behind him, but nothing would now be so interesting as to see
if he could again play the trick. One would leave him, and welcome,
Lourdes and Paris—he had already dealt, on a scale, with his own
country and people. But was the adored Rome also to be his on such
terms, the Rome he was already giving away before possessing an inch of
it? One thought of one’s own frequentations, saturations—a history of
long years, and of how the effect of them had somehow been but to make
the subject too august. Was _he_ to find it easy through a visit of a
month or two with “introductions” and a Bædeker?
It was not indeed that the Bædeker and the introductions didn’t show, to
my sense, at that hour, as extremely suggestive; they were positively a
part of the light struck out by his announcement. They defined the
system on which he had brought Les Rougon-Macquart safely into port. He
had had his Bædeker and his introductions for “Germinal,” for
“L’Assommoir,” for “L’Argent,” for “La Débâcle,” for “Au Bonheur des
Dames”; which advantages, which researches, had clearly been all the
more in character for being documentary, extractive, a matter of
_renseignements_, published or private, even when most mixed with
personal impressions snatched, with _enquêtes sur les lieux_, with facts
obtained from the best authorities, proud and happy to co-operate in so
famous a connection. That was, as we say, all right, all the more that
the process, to my imagination, became vivid and was wonderfully
reflected back from its fruits. There _were_ the fruits—so it hadn’t
been presumptuous. Presumption, however, was now to begin, and what omen
mightn’t there be in its beginning with such complacency? Well, time
would show—as time in due course effectually did. “Rome,” as the second
volume of The Three Cities, appeared with high punctuality a year or two
later; and the interesting question, an occasion really for the
moralist, was by that time not to recognise in it the mere triumph of a
mechanical art, a “receipt” applied with the skill of long practice, but
to do much more than this—that is really to give a name to the
particular shade of blindness that could constitute a trap for so great
an artistic intelligence. The presumptuous volume, without sweetness,
without antecedents, superficial and violent, has the minimum instead of
the maximum of _value_; so that it betrayed or “gave away” just in this
degree the state of mind on the author’s part responsible for its
inflated hollowness. To put one’s finger on the state of mind was to
find out accordingly what was, as we say, the matter with him.
It seemed to me, I remember, that I found out as never before when, in
its turn, “Fécondité” began the work of crowning the edifice.
“Fécondité” is physiological, whereas “Rome” is not, whereas “Vérité”
likewise is not; yet these three productions joined hands at a given
moment to fit into the lock of the mystery the key of my meditation.
They came to the same thing, to the extent of permitting me to read into
them together the same precious lesson. This lesson may not, barely
stated, sound remarkable; yet without being in possession of it I should
have ventured on none of these remarks. “The matter with” Zola then, so
far as it goes, was that, as the imagination of the artist is in the
best cases not only clarified but intensified by his equal possession of
Taste (deserving here if ever the old-fashioned honour of a capital) so
when he has lucklessly never inherited that auxiliary blessing the
imagination itself inevitably breaks down as a consequence. There is
simply no limit, in fine, to the misfortune of being tasteless; it does
not merely disfigure the surface and the fringe of your performance—it
eats back into the very heart and enfeebles the sources of life. When
you have no taste you have no discretion, which is the conscience of
taste, and when you have no discretion you perpetrate books like “Rome,”
which are without intellectual modesty, books like “Fécondité,” which
are without a sense of the ridiculous, books like “Vérité,” which are
without the finer vision of human experience.
It is marked that in each of these examples the deficiency has been
directly fatal. No stranger doom was ever appointed for a man so plainly
desiring only to be just than the absurdity of not resting till he had
buried the felicity of his past, such as it was, under a great flat
leaden slab. “Vérité” is a plea for science, as science, to Zola, is
_all_ truth, the mention of any other kind being mere imbecility; and
the simplification of the human picture to which his negations and
exasperations have here conducted him was not, even when all had been
said, credible in advance. The result is amazing when we consider that
the finer observation is the supposed basis of all such work. It is not
that even here the author has not a queer idealism of his own; this
idealism is on the contrary so present as to show positively for the
falsest of his simplifications. In “Fécondité” it becomes grotesque,
makes of the book the most muscular mistake of _sense_ probably ever
committed. Where was the judgment of which experience is supposed to be
the guarantee when the perpetrator could persuade himself that the
lesson he wished in these pages to convey could be made immediate and
direct, chalked, with loud taps and a still louder commentary, the sexes
and generations all convoked, on the blackboard of the “family
sentiment?”
I have mentioned, however, all this time but one of his categories. The
second consists of such things as “La Fortune des Rougon” and “La
Curée,” as “Eugène Rougon” and even “Nana,” as “Pot-Bouille,” as
“L’Œuvre” and “La Joie de Vivre.” These volumes may rank as social
pictures in the narrowest sense, studies, comprehensively speaking, of
the manners, the morals, the miseries—for it mainly comes to that—of a
bourgeoisie grossly materialised. They deal with the life of individuals
in the liberal professions and with that of political and social
adventures, and offer the personal character and career, more or less
detached, as the centre of interest. “La Curée” is an evocation, violent
and “romantic,” of the extravagant appetites, the fever of the senses,
supposedly fostered, for its ruin, by the hapless second Empire, upon
which general ills and turpitudes at large were at one time so freely
and conveniently fathered. “Eugène Rougon” carries out this view in the
high colour of a political portrait, not other than scandalous, for
which one of the ministerial _âmes damnées_ of Napoleon III., M. Rouher,
is reputed, I know not how justly, to have sat. “Nana,” attaching itself
by a hundred strings to a prearranged table of kinships, heredities,
transmissions, is the vast crowded _epos_ of the daughter of the people
filled with poisoned blood and sacrificed as well as sacrificing on the
altar of luxury and lust; the panorama of such a “progress” as Hogarth
would more definitely have named—the progress across the high plateau
of “pleasure” and down the facile descent on the other side. “Nana” is
truly a monument to Zola’s patience; the subject being so ungrateful, so
formidably special, that the multiplication of illustrative detail, the
plunge into pestilent depths, represents a kind of technical
intrepidity.
There are other plunges, into different sorts of darkness; of which the
esthetic, even the scientific, even the ironic motive fairly escapes
us—explorations of stagnant pools like that of “La Joie de Vivre,” as
to which, granting the nature of the curiosity and the substance
laboured in, the patience is again prodigious, but which make us wonder
what pearl of philosophy, of suggestion or just of homely recognition,
the general picture, as of rats dying in a hole, has to offer. Our
various senses, sight, smell, sound, touch, are, as with Zola always,
more or less convinced; but when the particular effect upon each of
these is added to the effect upon the others the mind still remains
bewilderedly unconscious of any use for the total. I am not sure indeed
that the case is in this respect better with the productions of the
third order—“La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret,” “Une Page d’Amour,” “Le Rêve,”
“Le Docteur Pascal”—in which the appeal is more directly, is in fact
quite earnestly, to the moral vision; so much, on such ground, was to
depend precisely on those discriminations in which the writer is least
at home. The volumes whose names I have just quoted are his express
tribute to the “ideal,” to the select and the charming—fair fruits of
invention intended to remove from the mouth so far as possible the
bitterness of the ugly things in which so much of the rest of his work
had been condemned to consist. The subjects in question then are
“idyllic” and the treatment poetic, concerned essentially to please on
the largest lines and involving at every turn that salutary need. They
are matters of conscious delicacy, and nothing might interest us more
than to see what, in the shock of the potent forces enlisted, becomes of
this shy element. Nothing might interest us more, literally, and might
positively affect us more, even very nearly to tears, though indeed
sometimes also to smiles, than to see the constructor of Les
Rougon-Macquart trying, “for all he is worth,” to be fine with fineness,
finely tender, finely true—trying to be, as it is called,
distinguished—in face of constitutional hindrance.
The effort is admirably honest, the tug at his subject splendidly
strong; but the consequences remain of the strangest, and we get the
impression that—as representing discriminations unattainable—they are
somehow the price he paid. “Le Docteur Pascal,” for instance, which
winds up the long chronicle on the romantic note, on the note of invoked
beauty, in order to sweeten, as it were, the total draught—“Le Docteur
Pascal,” treating of the erotic ardour entertained for each other by an
uncle and his niece, leaves us amazed at such a conception of beauty,
such an application of romance, such an estimate of sweetness, a
sacrifice to poetry and passion so little in order. Of course, we
definitely remind ourselves, the whole long chronicle is explicitly a
scheme, solidly set up and intricately worked out, lighted, according to
the author’s pretension, by “science,” high, dry and clear, and with
each part involved and necessitated in all the other parts, each block
of the edifice, each “morceau de vie,” _physiologically_ determined by
previous combinations. “How can I help it,” we hear the builder of the
pyramid ask, “if experience (by which alone I proceed) shows me certain
plain results—if, holding up the torch of my famous ‘experimental
method,’ I find it stare me in the face that the union of certain types,
the conflux of certain strains of blood, the intermarriage, in a word,
of certain families, produces nervous conditions, conditions
temperamental, psychical and pathological, in which nieces _have_ to
fall in love with uncles and uncles with nieces? Observation and
imagination, for any picture of life,” he as audibly adds, “know no
light but science, and are false to all intellectual decency, false to
their own honour, when they fear it, dodge it, darken it. To pretend to
any other guide or law is mere base humbug.”
That is very well, and the value, in a hundred ways, of a mass of
production conceived in such a spirit can never (when robust execution
has followed) be small. But the formula really sees us no further. It
offers a definition which is no definition. “Science” is soon said—the
whole thing depends on the ground so covered. Science accepts surely
_all_ our consciousness of life; even, rather, the latter closes
maternally round it—so that, becoming thus a force within us, not a
force outside, it exists, it illuminates only as we apply it. We do
emphatically apply it in art. But Zola would apparently hold that it
much more applies _us_. On the showing of many of his volumes then it
makes but a dim use of us, and this we should still consider the case
even were we sure that the article offered us in the majestic name is
absolutely at one with its own pretension. This confidence we can on too
many grounds never have. The matter is one of appreciation, and when an
artist answers for science who answers for the artist—who at the least
answers for art? Thus it is with the mistakes that affect us, I say, as
Zola’s penalties. We are reminded by them that the game of art has, as
the phrase is, to be played. It may not with any sure felicity for the
result be both taken and left. If you insist on the common you must
submit to the common; if you discriminate, on the contrary, you must,
however invidious your discriminations may be called, trust to them to
see you through.
To the common then Zola, often with splendid results, inordinately
sacrifices, and this fact of its overwhelming him is what I have called
his paying for it. In “L’Assommoir,” in “Germinal,” in “La Débâcle,”
productions in which he must most survive, the sacrifice is ordered and
fruitful, for the subject and the treatment harmonise and work together.
He describes what he best feels, and feels it more and more as it
naturally comes to him—quite, if I may allow myself the image, as we
zoologically see some mighty animal, a beast of a corrugated hide and a
portentous snout, soaking with joy in the warm ooze of an African
riverside. In these cases everything matches, and “science,” we may be
permitted to believe, has had little hand in the business. The author’s
perceptions go straight, and the subject, grateful and responsive, gives
itself wholly up. It is no longer a case of an uncertain smoky torch,
but of a personal vision, the vision of genius, springing from an inward
source. Of this genius “L’Assommoir” is the most extraordinary record.
It contains, with the two companions I have given it, all the best of
Zola, and the three books together are solid ground—or would be could I
now so take them—for a study of the particulars of his power. His
strongest marks and features abound in them; “L’Assommoir” above all is
(not least in respect to its bold free linguistic reach, already glanced
at) completely genial, while his misadventures, his unequipped and
delusive pursuit of the life of the spirit and the tone of culture, are
almost completely absent.
It is a singular sight enough this of a producer of illusions whose
interest for us is so independent of our pleasure or at least of our
complacency—who touches us deeply even while he most “puts us off,” who
makes us care for his ugliness and yet himself at the same time
pitilessly (pitilessly, that is, for _us_) makes a mock of it, who fills
us with a sense of the rich which is none the less never the rare.
Gervaise, the most immediately “felt,” I cannot but think, of all his
characters, is a lame washerwoman, loose and gluttonous, without will,
without any principle of cohesion, the sport of every wind that assaults
her exposed life, and who, rolling from one gross mistake to another,
finds her end in misery, drink and despair. But her career, as
presented, has fairly the largeness that, throughout the chronicle, we
feel as epic, and the intensity of her creator’s vision of it and of the
dense sordid life hanging about it is one of the great things the modern
novel has been able to do. It has done nothing more completely
constitutive and of a tone so rich and full and sustained. The tone of
“L’Assommoir” is, for mere “keeping up,” unsurpassable, a vast deep
steady tide on which every object represented is triumphantly borne. It
never shrinks nor flows thin, and nothing for an instant drops, dips or
catches; the high-water mark of sincerity, of the genial, as I have
called it, is unfailingly kept.
For the artist in the same general “line” such a production has an
interest almost inexpressible, a mystery as to origin and growth over
which he fondly but rather vainly bends. How after all does it so get
itself _done_?—the “done” being admirably the sign and crown of it. The
light of the richer mind has been elsewhere, as I have sufficiently
hinted, frequent enough, but nothing truly in all fiction was ever built
so strong or made so dense as here. Needless to say there are a thousand
things with more charm in their truth, with more beguilement of every
sort, more prettiness of pathos, more innocence of drollery, for the
spectator’s sense of truth. But I doubt if there has ever been a more
totally _represented_ world, anything more founded and established, more
provided for all round, more organised and carried on. It is a world
practically workable, with every part as functional as every other, and
with the parts all chosen for direct mutual aid. Let it not be said
either that the equal constitution of parts makes for repletion or
excess; the air circulates and the subject blooms; deadness comes in
these matters only when the right parts are absent and there is vain
beating of the air in their place—the refuge of the fumbler incapable
of the thing “done” at all.
The mystery I speak of, for the reader who reflects as he goes, is the
wonder of the scale and energy of Zola’s assimilations. This wonder
besets us above all throughout the three books I have placed first. How,
all sedentary and “scientific,” did he get so _near_? By what art,
inscrutable, immeasurable, indefatigable, did he arrange to make of his
documents, in these connections, a use so vivified? Say he was “near”
the subject of “L’Assommoir” in imagination, in more or less familiar
impression, in temperament and humour, he could not after all have been
near it in personal experience, and the copious personalism of the
picture, not to say its frank animalism, yet remains its note and its
strength. When the note had been struck in a thousand forms we had, by
multiplication, as a kind of cumulative consequence, the finished and
rounded book; just as we had the same result by the same process in
“Germinal.” It is not of course that multiplication and accumulation,
the extraordinary pair of legs on which he walks, are easily or directly
consistent with his projecting himself morally; this immense diffusion,
with its appropriation of everything it meets, affects us on the
contrary as perpetually delaying access to what we may call the private
world, the world of the individual. Yet since the individual—for it so
happens—is simple and shallow our author’s dealings with him, as met
and measured, maintain their resemblance to those of the lusty bee who
succeeds in plumping for an instant, of a summer morning, into every
flower-cup of the garden.
Grant—and the generalisation may be emphatic—that the shallow and the
simple are _all_ the population of his richest and most crowded
pictures, and that his “psychology,” in a psychologic age, remains
thereby comparatively coarse, grant this and we but get another view of
the miracle. We see enough of the superficial among novelists at large,
assuredly, without deriving from it, as we derive from Zola at his best,
the concomitant impression of the solid. It is in general—I mean among
the novelists at large—the impression of the _cheap_, which the author
of Les Rougon-Macquart, honest man, never faithless for a moment to his
own stiff standard, manages to spare us even in the prolonged sandstorm
of “Vérité.” The Common is another matter; it is one of the forms of the
superficial—pervading and consecrating all things in such a book as
“Germinal”—and it only adds to the number of our critical questions.
How in the world is it made, this deplorable democratic malodorous
Common, so strange and so interesting? How is it taught to receive into
its loins the stuff of the epic and still, in spite of that association
with poetry, never depart from its nature? It is in the great lusty game
he plays with the shallow and the simple that Zola’s mastery resides,
and we see of course that when values are small it takes innumerable
items and combinations to make up the sum. In “L’Assommoir” and in
“Germinal,” to some extent even in “La Débâcle,” the values are all,
morally, personally, of the lowest—the highest is poor Gervaise
herself, richly human in her generosities and follies—yet each is as
distinct as a brass-headed nail.
What we come back to accordingly is the unprecedented case of such a
combination of parts. Painters, of great schools, often of great talent,
have responded liberally on canvas to the appeal of ugly things, of
Spanish beggars, squalid and dusty-footed, of martyred saints or other
convulsed sufferers, tortured and bleeding, of boors and louts soaking a
Dutch proboscis in perpetual beer; but we had never before had to reckon
with so literary a treatment of the mean and vulgar. When we others of
the Anglo-Saxon race are vulgar we are, handsomely and with the best
conscience in the world, vulgar all through, too vulgar to be in any
degree literary, and too much so therefore to be critically reckoned
with at all. The French are different—they separate their sympathies,
multiply their possibilities, observe their shades, remain more or less
outside of their worst disasters. They mostly contrive to get the
_idea_, in however dead a faint, down into the lifeboat. They may lose
sight of the stars, but they save in some such fashion as that their
intellectual souls. Zola’s own reply to all puzzlements would have been,
at any rate, I take it, a straight summary of his inveterate
professional habits. “It is all very simple—I produce, roughly
speaking, a volume a year, and of this time some five months go to
preparation, to special study. In the other months, with all my _cadres_
established, I write the book. And I can hardly say which part of the
job is stiffest.”
The story was not more wonderful for him than that, nor the job more
complex; which is why we must say of his whole process and its results
that they constitute together perhaps the most extraordinary _imitation_
of observation that we possess. Balzac appealed to “science” and
proceeded by her aid; Balzac had _cadres_ enough and a tabulated world,
rubrics, relationships and genealogies; but Balzac affects us in spite
of everything as personally overtaken by life, as fairly hunted and run
to earth by it. He strikes us as struggling and all but submerged, as
beating over the scene such a pair of wings as were not soon again to be
wielded by any visitor of his general air and as had not at all events
attached themselves to Zola’s rounded shoulders. His bequest is in
consequence immeasurably more interesting, yet who shall declare that
his adventure was in its greatness more successful? Zola “pulled it
off,” as we say, supremely, in that he never but once found himself
obliged to quit, to our vision, his magnificent treadmill of the
pigeonholed and documented—the region we may qualify as that of
experience by imitation. His splendid economy saw him through, he
laboured to the end within sight of his notes and his charts.
The extraordinary thing, however, is that on the single occasion when,
publicly—as his whole manifestation was public—life did swoop down on
him, the effect of the visitation was quite perversely other than might
have been looked for. His courage in the Dreyfus connection testified
admirably to his ability to live for himself and out of the order of his
volumes—little indeed as living at all might have seemed a question for
one exposed, when his crisis was at its height and he was found guilty
of “insulting” the powers that were, to be literally torn to pieces in
the precincts of the Palace of Justice. Our point is that nothing was
ever so odd as that these great moments should appear to have been
wasted, when all was said, for his creative intelligence. “Vérité,” as I
have intimated, the production in which they might most have been
reflected, is a production unrenewed and unrefreshed by them, spreads
before us as somehow flatter and greyer, not richer and more relieved,
by reason of them. They really arrived, I surmise, too late in the day;
the imagination they might have vivified was already fatigued and spent.
I must not moreover appear to say that the power to evoke and present
has not even on the dead level of “Vérité” its occasional minor
revenges. There are passages, whole pages, of the old full-bodied sort,
pictures that elsewhere in the series would in all likelihood have
seemed abundantly convincing. Their misfortune is to have been
discounted by our intensified, our finally fatal sense of the _procédé_.
Quarrelling with all conventions, defiant of them in general, Zola was
yet inevitably to set up his own group of them—as, for that matter,
without a sufficient collection, without their aid in simplifying and
making possible, how could he ever have seen his big ship into port? Art
welcomes them, feeds upon them always; no sort of form is practicable
without them. It is only a question of what particular ones we use—to
wage war on certain others and to arrive at particular forms. The
convention of the blameless being, the thoroughly “scientific” creature
possessed impeccably of all truth and serving as the mouthpiece of it
and of the author’s highest complacencies, this character is for
instance a convention inveterate and indispensable, without whom the
“sympathetic” side of the work could never have been achieved. Marc in
“Vérité,” Pierre Froment in “Lourdes” and in “Rome,” the wondrous
representatives of the principle of reproduction in “Fécondité,” the
exemplary painter of “L’Œuvre,” sublime in his modernity and paternity,
the patient Jean Macquart of “La Débâcle,” whose patience is as
guaranteed as the exactitude of a well-made watch, the supremely
enlightened Docteur Pascal even, as I recall him, all amorous nepotism
but all virtue too and all beauty of life—such figures show us the
reasonable and the good not merely in the white light of the old George
Sand novel and its improved moralities, but almost in that of our
childhood’s nursery and school-room, that of the moral tale of Miss
Edgeworth and Mr. Thomas Day.
Yet let not these restrictions be my last word. I had intended, under
the effect of a reperusal of “La Débâcle,” “Germinal” and “L’Assommoir,”
to make no discriminations that should not be in our hero’s favour. The
long-drawn incident of the marriage of Gervaise and Cadet-Cassis and
that of the Homeric birthday feast later on in the laundress’s workshop,
each treated from beginning to end and in every item of their coarse
comedy and humanity, still show the unprecedented breadth by which they
originally made us stare, still abound in the particular kind and degree
of vividness that helped them, when they appeared, to mark a date in the
portrayal of manners. Nothing had then been so sustained and at every
moment of its grotesque and pitiful existence lived into as the nuptial
day of the Coupeau pair in especial, their fantastic processional
pilgrimage through the streets of Paris in the rain, their bedraggled
exploration of the halls of the Louvre museum, lost as in the labyrinth
of Crete, and their arrival at last, ravenous and exasperated, at the
_guinguette_ where they sup at so much a head, each paying, and where we
sit down with them in the grease and the perspiration and succumb, half
in sympathy, half in shame, to their monstrous pleasantries, acerbities
and miseries. I have said enough of the mechanical in Zola; here in
truth is, given the elements, almost insupportably the sense of life.
That effect is equally in the historic chapter of the strike of the
miners in “Germinal,” another of those illustrative episodes, viewed as
great passages to be “rendered,” for which our author established
altogether a new measure and standard of handling, a new energy and
veracity, something since which the old trivialities and poverties of
treatment of such aspects have become incompatible, for the novelist,
with either rudimentary intelligence or rudimentary self-respect.
As for “La Débâcle,” finally, it takes its place with Tolstoi’s very
much more universal but very much less composed and condensed epic as an
incomparably human picture of war. I have been re-reading it, I confess,
with a certain timidity, the dread of perhaps impairing the deep
impression received at the time of its appearance. I recall the effect
it then produced on me as a really luxurious act of submission. It was
early in the summer; I was in an old Italian town; the heat was
oppressive, and one could but recline, in the lightest garments, in a
great dim room and give one’s self up. I like to think of the conditions
and the emotion, which melt for me together into the memory I fear to
imperil. I remember that in the glow of my admiration there was not a
reserve I had ever made that I was not ready to take back. As an
application of the author’s system and his supreme faculty, as a triumph
of what these things could do for him, how could such a performance be
surpassed? The long, complex, horrific, pathetic battle, embraced,
mastered, with every crash of its squadrons, every pulse of its thunder
and blood resolved for us, by reflection, by communication from two of
the humblest and obscurest of the military units, into immediate vision
and contact, into deep human thrills of terror and pity—this bristling
centre of the book was such a piece of “doing” (to come back to our
word) as could only shut our mouths. That doubtless is why a generous
critic, nursing the sensation, may desire to drop for a farewell no term
into the other scale. That our author was clearly great at congruous
subjects—this may well be our conclusion. If the others, subjects of
the private and intimate order, gave him more or less inevitably “away,”
they yet left him the great distinction that the more he could be
promiscuous and collective, the more even he could (to repeat my
imputation) illustrate our large natural allowance of health, heartiness
and grossness, the more he could strike us as penetrating and true. It
was a distinction not easy to win and that his name is not likely soon
to lose.