stories. He had published one, "Naïs Micoulin," in a paper called "La
Réforme," towards the close of the previous year; and he now gave "La
Fête à Coqueville," "L'Inondation," and "Nantas," to "Le Voltaire," to
which journal he also contributed some papers on Théophile Gautier,
Ste.-Beuve, and others. But a better known publication in which he
was interested appeared during the spring. This was the collection of
stories called "Les Soirées de Médan,"[25] to which Zola contributed
his well-known tale, "L'Attaque du Moulin," which he had previously
published in Russia, and which subsequently provided his friend M.
Alfred Bruneau with the subject for an opera. Nowadays in its form as
a story "L'Attaque du Moulin" has become a reading book in many French
and English schools.
As mentioned in a previous chapter, five younger writers, Alexis,
Huysmans, Maupassant, Céard, and Hennique, had gathered round Zola,
whose literary views they largely shared.[26] Each of them contributed
to the so-called "Soirées de Médan," the preface of which stated: "The
following stories have been published previously, some in France,
others abroad. It has seemed to us that they have sprung from one
and the same idea, that their philosophy is identical. We therefore
unite them. We are prepared for all the attacks, the bad faith, and
the ignorance of which current criticism has already given us so many
examples. Our only concern has been to affirm publicly what are really
our friendships and our literary tendencies."
At that time, of the six writers responsible for that preface, only
Zola had acquired a position; and such a solemn manifesto seemed
therefore somewhat presumptuous, the more particularly as, apart from
Zola's tale, the only other of real merit in the book was Guy de
Maupassant's. For him, so far as the book-reading public was concerned,
"Les Soirées de Médan" proved virtually a _début_, whose promise his
subsequent writings confirmed. "Boule de Suif," as he called his
contribution to the volume, was the tale of a woman, who is shown
sacrificing herself, during the Franco-German War, for the convenience
and safety of others. They entreat her in that sense, and yet as soon
as they are free they spurn her and abandon her to her shame. This
woman, like the other people figuring in the story, actually lived,[27]
and indeed it would be difficult to find half a dozen really imaginary
characters in all Guy de Maupassant's tales. He carried the passion
for personalities even farther than Alphonse Daudet did, and there
exists, it is said, a set of his writings, on the margins of which he
himself wrote the real names of almost every person and locality he
ever described. One may conclude that he was perhaps a more genuine
Naturalist than Zola, his work being invariably based on "human
documents," the fruit of personal observation and experience. This
occasionally tended to make his art unduly photographic; but, at the
same time, as is well known, his literary style was excellent, and
from that standpoint some of his tales are undoubtedly masterpieces of
their kind.
Unfortunately there was insanity in Guy de Maupassant's family, which
was old, of good nobility, but limited means. His father, who had
been a painter and had played a prominent part in founding a famous
Paris art club, had died in a lunatic asylum. The same fate befell his
brother; and, according to some accounts, there was insanity on his
mother's side also. In any case, from birth onward a dreadful threat
hung over Guy de Maupassant, and the life he led from the time he
became his own master was not calculated to ward off the danger. He
was a man of the strongest passions, a _beau male_, as the French say;
and women began the work which absinthe, opium, and morphia completed.
At last, still young in years, at the height of his celebrity, he
attempted his life, and was only saved from immediate death to languish
awhile in an asylum. One cannot think of him, as of some others,
without feeling the force of the contention that very little may at
times separate genius from insanity.
Immediately "Les Soirées de Médan" appeared, its contributors were
chaffed by the newspapers for attributing undue importance to
themselves; and Zola was said to be bringing up these young men in
leading-strings for the express advancement of his literary theories. A
rather acrimonious controversy ensued, Zola repeatedly declaring that
he was not, and did not wish to be, a _chef d'école_, and that those
with whom he was associated were his friends and not his disciples.
But the discussion suddenly ceased, for the literary world of Paris
was startled by the unexpected news of Gustave Flaubert's death at
Croisset, near Rouen.
During the previous Easter (March, 1880) the veteran author had
received Daudet, Zola, Charpentier, Maupassant, and Goncourt at his
country place, and Goncourt has related in his "Journal" how thoroughly
they enjoyed Flaubert's paternal hospitality, and how on Easter Monday
they lingered in Rouen, ferreting among old curiosity shops, playing
billiards, and planning a _diner fin_ at the principal hotel. When,
however, they wished to give their order, consternation fell on them:
it was a holiday, all the provision shops were closed, the hotel
larder was virtually empty, and the _diner fin_ resolved itself into
veal cutlets and cheese. That amusing experience was still in Zola's
mind when, on May 8, he received at Médan this laconic telegram from
Maupassant: "Flaubert dead." Dead--and they had left him so gay and so
full of life and health! Zola was profoundly attached to Flaubert, and
the tidings quite unmanned him. On May 11 he started for Le Croisset
and attended the funeral, of which he has left a deeply interesting
account, instinct with all the grief of one who has lost a near and
dear friend. In these later years various English versions of some
of Flaubert's books have been published, but, so far as the present
writer is aware, no editor or publisher has thought of utilising Zola's
account of Flaubert as an introduction to a translation. Yet that
account is perhaps Zola's best work as an essayist,--full of interest,
and much of it admirable in tone and style. One may say, too, that
anybody wishing to form an accurate opinion of Gustave Flaubert, both
as a writer and as a man, cannot do better than read the hundred pages
which Zola devoted to him in his "Romanciers Naturalistes."
But another blow fell on Zola in 1880. In October his mother,
long ailing and crippled, passed away at Médan. Various painful
circumstances attended the death and the funeral; and Goncourt, writing
at the end of the year, pictures Zola as having become a perfect
hypochondriac in consequence of this loss. He complained of all sorts
of ailments, kidney disease and palpitations of the heart, talked of
his own death as being near at hand, and feared that he would not have
time to finish anything. Briefly, "he was filling the world with his
name, his books were selling by the hundred thousand, no other author,
perhaps, had ever created such a stir, and yet he felt profoundly
miserable."[28]
About the time when his mother died his articles on "scientific
fiction," previously issued, some in "Le Voltaire" and others in the
"Viestnik Yevropi," were republished in a volume.[29] One of them had
greatly offended Laffitte, the editor of "Le Voltaire," who being
mixed up in sundry transactions with some of Gambetta's satellites,
resented Zola's caustic allusions to them. Nor was an article on some
scandal occasioned by the erotic publications of the "Gil Blas" to his
liking. He ended by accusing his contributor of defending obscenity
and of treating public men with disrespect. A rupture followed. Zola
castigated Laffitte in a foot-note to one of the incriminated articles
when he reissued them in a book, and turned to "Le Figaro," which
gave him all liberty to defend his ideas. He then began a series of
articles, republished in a volume the following year under the title
of "Une Campagne."[30] They dealt with a great variety of subjects,
political, literary, and social, and show how wide was the interest
which Zola took in the affairs of his time. One of them on Victor
Hugo and his poem "L'Ane" caused a sensation, for most people deemed
it positive sacrilege to attack the greatest literary glory of the
age. The uproar was even heard across the channel, and Mr. Swinburne,
who admired "L'Ane," and held Zola to be mere "stench," manifested
particular indignation. But a quarter of a century has elapsed since
then, and it is a question whether many people would be inclined
nowadays to regard "L'Ane" as a great poem. In a sense, Zola's attack
was unkind, but it was essentially one on fetish worship, on the
habit of lavishing indiscriminate praise on everything, good, bad, or
indifferent, that might come from the pen of a writer of eminence. Let
us remember that there has never yet been a poet of whom one might say
his every line is a masterpiece. Homer nodded, so did Hugo, and so has
even Mr. Swinburne himself.
Some of Zola's articles in "Le Figaro" dealt with his own work; others
with that of his friends Goncourt, Huysmans, Maupassant, and Daudet;
but several were political--attacks on Gambetta and so forth, written
in the same spirit which had prompted the article on Hugo. Gambetta,
as will be remembered, had now (1880-1881) reached the crisis of his
life. The Tunisian debt scandal, the frauds of the Union Générale,--a
Catholic bank established with the papal blessing for the purpose of
wresting financial power from the Jews,--were associated by some folk
with his "great ministry." Besides, his proposals for changing the
electoral system, his patronage of reactionary generals, able men, it
must be admitted, divided the Republican party. He was accused, too,
of acting as a drag, of checking the progress of the democracy, of
sacrificing principles to personal interest. He had certainly become
somewhat sluggish so far as measures were concerned, and, as Zola put
it, he seemingly imagined that orations sufficed for everything. "It
was not his actions which gave him his position, but his phrases,"
Zola wrote. "He has always defeated his adversaries by phrases. He
has acquired authority by phrases. If there be any question of taking
a forward step he makes a speech. If there be a question of warding
off a danger he makes a speech. If there be a question of making his
authority felt he again makes a speech. He speechifies without a break,
and all over the country."[31]
Later, after Gambetta had come into conflict with his constituents,
and the elections of 1881 had shown that the so-called Opportunist
cause was seriously compromised, Zola returned to the attack, and one
may the more appropriately quote a passage from his article called
"Drunken Slaves," as it shows how deftly he profited by an opportunity
to defend his literary cause while dealing with a political subject.
Before giving that passage, however, it is as well to explain that
Gambetta, having encountered a hostile reception at an electoral
meeting at Charonne, had completely lost his head. Threatening his
adversaries (all working-men) with his walking stick he shouted to them
furiously: "Silence, you squallers! silence, you brawlers!... You pack
of drunken slaves, I will track you to your lairs!" And as if this were
not sufficient, his newspaper, "La République Française," added in its
next issue such choice epithets as: "Cowards, incapables, prostitutes'
bullies, jail-birds, and pot-house loafers." All who might not vote
for the great man having been thus stigmatised in advance, it might be
assumed when Gambetta, in lieu of his usual great majority, polled only
9,404 votes against 8,799, that about half the electorate was given
over to drink, crime, and depravity. Taking this as his text Zola wrote
as follows:
"The figures on either side are nearly equal, so it is
established that at Belleville and Charonne one of every two
citizens is never sober.... Yes, one half of the masses is
composed of brawlers, drunkards, and cowards. M. Gambetta
said to them: 'We will see which side is the most numerous';
and they have seen. Of 20,000 citizens 10,000 are drunken
slaves ... 10,000 drunken slaves! The figures make me
thoughtful. I remember a novelist who wrote a novel called
'L'Assommoir.' It was a conscientious study of the ravages
caused by drink among the working classes of Paris. It was
instinct with pity and affection, it solicited mercy for
womanhood and for childhood, it showed labour vanquished
by sloth and alcohol, it begged for air and light and
instruction for the unhappy poor, more social comfort, and
less political agitation. Now do you know in what fashion
M. Gambetta's friends and newspapers greeted that book?
They denounced it as an evil action, a crime. They dragged
its author through the mire.... Pamphlets did not suffice
them, they even delivered lectures, and declared publicly
that the author had insulted the people of Paris. They would
have hanged him had they been able, in the hope that by
so doing they might secure a hundred additional votes at
the next elections. Yes, it was so. M. Gambetta's friends
and newspapers were then all tenderness for the people.
M. Gambetta had invariably secured a large majority at
Belleville, and it was consequently impossible that there
could be a single tippler among those who dwelt on the sacred
mount of the democracy ... What! a paltry novelist dared
to insinuate that there were dram-shops in the _faubourgs!_
The man lied, he insulted M. Gambetta's electors, he could
only be a scoundrel. To the cess-pool with him, sweep him
away! And all the hounds who were waiting for their master
to toss them a bone, all the curs who lived on the crumbs
from his table, executed his orders, and sprang, snarling,
after the unlucky writer.... Ah! I laugh. There suddenly
comes a change.... The masses, whose evolution never ceases,
grow tired of M. Gambetta, accuse him of acting contrary
to his programme, of seeking personal enjoyment, of waxing
fat in the seat of power and keeping none of his most
express promises.... And on the day when they hoot him,
he is maddened by rage, he forgets that the Rancs and the
Floquets have vouched for the temperance of Belleville, and
he furiously calls the electors drunken slaves! All brawlers,
and all sots!
"Now the author of 'L'Assommoir' had not insulted them.
He had never called them squallers or cowards, nor, in
particular, had he threatened to track them to their
lairs.... He was less severe: he pitied them.... Leave
the literary men in peace then, you political gentlemen,
you majestic humbugs, who prate with your tongues in your
cheeks, and yet wish to be respected! You can see now how
shameful it was to heap insults upon a peaceable writer whose
one concern was truth, to hunt him down as if he had been
a common malefactor, and this solely by way of electoral
advertisement; for directly an obstacle is offered to your
own ambition, you rush upon the masses to suppress them,
whereas the novelist only spoke of curing them.... And you,
good people, go and vote for all those humbugs who, so long
as you work for their benefit, promise to give you jam! You
are great, you are noble, and if a passer-by ventures to
advise you to work, those humbugs declare it to be sacrilege,
and hasten to immolate him before you, to prove to you that
you are indeed perfect. But on the day when you refuse to be
duped any longer, when you claim the jam they have so often
promised, they turn round on you and insult you, call you
drunken slaves, and threaten to have you shot down in your
lairs! With a fine show of indignation they formerly denied
that My-Boots existed; but, all at once, if they are to be
credited, it is actually My-Boots who reigns as King over a
Belleville of brawlers and toss-pots."[32]
The foregoing extracts will give some idea of the passionate vigour
which Zola occasionally displayed in controversy. To some readers it
may seem beside the mark to dwell at length upon a series of newspaper
articles like "Une Campagne," but it is in such writings, more than
in the majority of his novels, that one finds the real Zola with his
superb confidence in himself, his disregard for conventionalities, and
his glowing passion for truth and rectitude. His pen was certainly
not always so virulent as in the passages one has quoted, but it was
almost invariably incisive, and when treating sociological subjects it
showed that, however impersonal his novels might be, his heart really
bled at the thought of the degradation he described in them. Looking
back, it seems extraordinary that for so many years his critics, and
particularly foreign ones, and among them notably those of England and
America, should have persisted in the ridiculous assertion that if he
pictured filth, it was solely in order to pander to readers of gross
instincts. His articles, his declarations, his explanations, were all
before the world, and easily accessible; but through carelessness, or
laziness, or ignorance, the great majority of English and American
critics never turned to them, and the legend of the filthy Zola, whose
favourite habitat was the muck heap or the cess-pool, spread upon all
sides.
The humanitarian purpose, the reforming instinct that is to be found
in Zola, appears clearly in some of the articles contained in "Une
Campagne." The meaning of "L'Assommoir" is indicated in the passages
that have been quoted here, and light is thrown on some of his
subsequent works, such as "Nana" and "Pot-Bouille," by the papers
entitled: "The Harlot on the Stage," "How the Girls grow up," "Adultery
in the Middle Classes," "Virtuous Women," and "Divorce and Literature."
Some of those articles were written apropos of the performance of
"Nana," which was dramatised by M. Busnach in conjunction with Zola
(whose name, however, did not appear on the bills) and produced at the
Ambigu on January 29, 1881. Zola tells us there had been no little
trouble with the theatrical censors, who, when the play was submitted
to them in manuscript, deleted the word "night" wherever it appeared,
and wished to strike out in its entirety the chief scene between
Nana and Count Muffat--a scene of temptation such as had been given
in a score of earlier plays. What particularly alarmed the censors,
according to Zola, was Nana's consent, the "yes" with which the scene
ended; they wished to substitute some such answer as, "Well, we will
see," which would have been ridiculous.
Edmond de Goncourt says that the audience at the first performance
was on the whole favourably inclined; but Zola points out that it
was composed of two distinct elements, on one hand the literary men,
friendly or inimical, who came to judge the play, and on the other the
faded harlots of Paris, the white-gloved bullies, the men of pleasure
and finance who had sunk to the streets, in fact all the characters
that figured in the play itself, multiplied fifty times over. And these
looked and listened with pale faces, sneering at the representation of
their own depravity. However, there was considerable applause when the
play ended; and Zola and Busnach received the congratulations of their
friends in the manager's private room, where Madame Zola, suddenly
turning towards her husband, scolded him for having failed to order
any supper to celebrate the happy event. "My dear," Zola answered,
remembering, no doubt, the supper intended to celebrate the success of
"Le Bouton de Rose," which had become a fiasco, "I'm superstitious, you
know, and I'm convinced that if I had ordered a supper the piece would
have failed."[33]
It was attacked by the critics on the morrow, some complaining that
they had been imposed upon, that they had been led to expect a
masterpiece of revolutionary audacity, and that only a repugnant play,
base and crapulous in its fidelity to life, had been offered them.
Others, of course, protested against the exhibition of the harlot on
the stage; and to them Zola responded that he was by no means the first
to set her there. He recalled Victor Hugo, with "Marion Delorme" and
"La Esmeralda"; Dumas _fils_, with "La Dame aux Camélias"; Barrière
and Thiboust with "Les Filles de Marbre," and Émile Augier with "Le
Mariage d'Olympe." They and their imitators had lied, however; they had
pictured harlots such as had never existed since the world was world,
and his sin was that he had done his best to portray such a creature
as she really was. "Besides," he added, "it seems to me cowardice to
shun certain problems under the pretext that they disturb one. That is
turning egotism and hypocrisy into a system. Let be, people say, let us
cover up vice and celebrate virtue even when it is not to be found....
I have a different idea of morality. It is not served by rhetorical
declamation but by an accurate knowledge of facts. And therein lies
that Naturalism which provokes so much laughter, and at which so much
mud is foolishly thrown."
The actress who played the _rôle_ of Nana was Léontine Massin. Fair,
with a coaxing glance, a sensual mouth and nose, and a superb figure,
she quite looked the part, in spite of her forty years; and, truth to
tell, she had in some measure lived it. She had also long been known to
the stage in minor _rôles_; and now, yielding to her natural instincts,
she sprang to the front, impersonating Nana with a power and a truth
which stirred one deeply. All Paris flocked to see her. But she was not
content with acting. She became Nana in reality, and her chosen victim
was the manager of the Ambigu, Henri Chabrillat, a bright, talented,
gallant man, who had shown his bravery in the Franco-German War, and
his literary skill in half a dozen novels. Unhappily he was carried
away by a mad infatuation for the temptress; as fast as money poured
into his coffers he squandered it upon her; embarrassment followed, and
when the end came he put a pistol to his head. Never, perhaps, has the
truth of a play, and the disregard of the passions for the most obvious
lessons, been exemplified more terribly. Amid the uproar which ensued
La Massin vanished, Paris for a week remained lost in amazement, and
then, as always happens, the tragedy was forgotten.
In that same year, 1881, Zola republished in book form most of the
biographical and literary papers which he had written of recent years.
"Le Roman Expérimental" had led the way in 1880, and now there came
four more volumes: first "Les Romanciers Naturalistes,"[34] a series
of papers on Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Daudet, and the Goncourts, to
which was added the much discussed review of contemporary novelists;
secondly, "Documents Littéraires: Études et Portraits,"[35] in which
will be found papers on Chateaubriand, Hugo, Musset, Gautier, George
Sand, Dumas _fils_, Ste.-Beuve, contemporary poets such as Leconte de
Lisle, Baudelaire, Banville, Catulle Mendès, Dierx, Anatole France,
Mallarmé, Hérédia, Coppée, Bouchor, Richepin, and Sully-Prudhomme;
and critics such as Taine, Pontmartin, Levallois, Babou, Barbey
d'Aurévilly, and Sarcey, with some curious notes on Buloz, the founder
of the famous "Revue des Deux-Mondes." Next there came "Le Naturalisme
au Théâtre," divided into two sections, theory and example; the former
including papers on the special gift alleged to be necessary in all
writers for the stage, on acting, costumes, scenery, government
subventions, etc.; and the latter running through the whole scale
of the playwright's art, tragedy, drama, comedy, vaudeville and
pantomime, with selections from the many articles which Zola had
written as a dramatic critic between 1876 and 1880. Finally there was
a fourth volume entitled, "Nos Auteurs Dramatiques," in which plays
by Hugo, Augier, Dumas _fils_, Sardou, Labiche, Halévy, Gondinet,
Pailleron, D'Ennery, Barrière, Feuillet, and others, were analysed and
discussed.[36]