THE TROUGHS OF ZOLAISM
Emile Zola was left an orphan in childhood, and experienced bitter
poverty. He began work as a bundle-clerk in a publishing house, and
trained himself to be a writer at night. He knew what it was to be
half-starved, and to write in bed with his fingers freezing in an
unheated room. His struggle for recognition was long; for more than a
score of years he wrote pot-boilers without success. But he had faith in
his own genius, he was a stubborn plodder, and in his grim, sober
fashion he worked his way to the top.
When I was a boy this Frenchman’s name was a synonym for everything
loathsome; Tennyson wrote about “wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism.”
This writer had used words never before used in literature, and
described actions never before described; the critics could find but one
explanation--that he was a vile-minded wretch. But in fact he was one of
the most conscientious writers and most determined reformers that ever
lived. He wrote that “‘l’Assommoir’ is morality in action ... the first
story of the people that has the true scent of the people.” And he
added: “I do not defend myself, my work will defend me. It is a true
book.”
He had set himself to tell the full truth about the world in which he
lived; to portray it as it actually was, both high and low, without
mercy, without fear or shame, without sparing the hideous facts. Having
such a picture before you, you might make what you pleased of it; you
might become a cynic or a sensualist, a saint or a revolutionist; but
until you had the facts, how could you judge what you ought to become?
He planned a tremendous work, to consist of more than a score of
volumes, the “Rougon-Macquart series,” to tell the history of a family
under the Second Empire. We are back in the time of Napoleon the Little,
when Victor Hugo was driven into exile, and the French bourgeoisie set
up their puppet emperor. Zola had imbibed the materialistic science of
his time; he believed that human life was determined by heredity, and he
wished to exhibit this force working in society. He chose two people
suffering from a nervous disease, and showed their descendants, the rich
ones plundering and squandering, the poor ones sunk in drunkenness and
degradation.
For years the critics spurned these books, and the public neglected
them; but at last came a masterpiece, “l’Assommoir,” which had an
enormous sale. The title means, literally, “The Slaughter-House”; it is
the name of a saloon in the working-class quarter of Paris, where the
poor are lured to their doom. It has been just twenty-five years since I
read this book, but I still see the procession of ghastly scenes: the
poor woman slave in a laundry, the husband a house-painter, and their
brood of wretched, neglected children. I gasp as I see the painter slip
and fall from the roof to his death; I shudder as I see the child Nana,
peeping through the key-hole at the obscenities her parents are
committing.
Zola has no graces of style, no charms of personality, no humor, hardly
even any sentiment. He is hag-ridden by the misery of the modern world,
and in plodding, matter-of-fact, relentless fashion he proceeds to
overwhelm you with a mass of facts. A few such facts you might evade,
but the sum of them is irresistible; you know that this is the truth.
Over the whole picture you feel the brooding pity of a master spirit, to
whom these suffering millions are an obsession, haunting his imagination
and driving him to his task.
There are no heroes and no heroines in Zola’s works; his hero is the
human swarms who breed like flies in our teeming cities, and struggle
and suffer and perish, without ever a gleam of understanding of their
fate. He takes us into the mining country, and in “Germinal” shows us
the slaves of the pits, coal-blackened hordes, starving, oppressed,
poisoned by alcohol, surging up in a blind fury of revolt. In “Nana” he
shows us prostitution; and to me this is the most frightful book of
all--the life-story of the little girl whom we saw getting her first
lessons in vice through the key-hole. This daughter of the working class
becomes their instrument of vengeance upon the exploiters; a seductress,
a wanton, luring men old and young to their doom, she is a kind of
symbol of wastefulness. Her life becomes a frenzy of destruction; silks,
jewels, food and wine are poured upon her in floods, and she throws them
about like a drunken giant wrecking a city. While she lies dying of
small-pox, we hear the mob outside shrieking: “To Berlin! To Berlin!”
The Franco-Prussian war is on, and Napoleon the Little is about to try
out his dream of glory, and provide Zola with the theme for yet another
masterpiece, “The Downfall,” showing war with all its horror of mass
suffering and national collapse.
Zola, raved at and prosecuted as a sensationalist and corrupter, had now
become a national figure; and he met this responsibility by evolving
from a materialist and fatalist into a scientific Socialist, a
rationalist and preacher of humanity. He wrote three long novels,
“Lourdes,” “Rome” and “Paris,” which exposed the church as a bulwark of
hereditary privilege, and became the text-books of anti-clericalism in
France. Then came the Dreyfus case, calling for a hero to carry the
anti-clerical banner into action; and the man with the sewer name came
forward to answer the call. France had become a republic, but the army
had remained monarchist and clerical. Some of these pious aristocrats,
needing money to lavish on their Nanas, had been selling army secrets to
Germany, and were caught. They decided to put the blame upon a certain
cavalry officer, who happened to be guilty of a quite different crime,
that of being a Jew. Captain Dreyfus was convicted, and sentenced to
life imprisonment in the convict settlement on Devil’s Island. Another
officer, who investigated the case and attempted to defend Dreyfus, was
shipped off to Africa.
It was nearly a hundred and fifty years since Voltaire had made his
fight in the Calas case; and here was “l’Infame” at the same old game of
the “frame-up.” Zola came forward with a terrific challenge entitled
“J’Accuse.” He was arrested, tried and convicted, and escaped from
France. For years this Dreyfus case remained an international scandal,
and finally it was proved that the documents used against Zola had been
forged, and later on one of the guilty men committed suicide, and
Dreyfus was released and reinstated. As I write this book the papers
record that Premier Herriot has abolished the penal settlement on
Devil’s Island, and so Zola’s task is completed.
He had now become the leader of the French masses in the war against
reaction; and his last novels were tracts written in this cause. In
“Labor” he portrays his ideal of the free men and women of the
revolutionary movement, living frugal and abstemious lives, and
consecrating themselves to the cause of human emancipation. Another,
called “Truth,” deals with the Dreyfus case. Another had been planned,
“Justice,” but this he did not live to write. In all these works you
notice that the old theories of materialistic science have been modified
enough to permit men to fight for truth and freedom; and so Emile Zola
shares with Walt Whitman the rôle of prophet of democracy. He served the
masses even better than Whitman, because he achieved complete insight
into the economic forces of modern times, and pointed out to the people
the exact road they had to travel. More than any other artist of the
nineteenth century he voiced and guided the movement of proletarian
revolt, the mass action of the workers of factory and farm to whom the
future belongs.