The art of Zola is based on certain theories, on a view of humanity
which he has adopted as his formula. As a deduction from his formula,
he takes many things in human nature for granted, he is content to
observe at second-hand; and it is only when he comes to the filling-up
of his outlines, the _mise-en-scène,_ that his observation becomes
personal, minute, and persistent. He has thus succeeded in being at
once unreal where reality is most essential, and tediously real where a
point-by-point reality is sometimes unimportant. The contradiction is
an ingenious one, which it may be interesting to examine in a little
detail, and from several points of view.
And, first of all, take L'_Assommoir,_ no doubt the most characteristic
of Zola's novels, and probably the best; and, leaving out for the
present the broader question of his general conception of humanity,
let us look at Zola's manner of dealing with his material, noting by
the way certain differences between his manner and that of Goncourt,
of Flaubert, with both of whom he has so often been compared, and
with whom he wishes to challenge comparison. Contrast _L'Assommoir_
with _Germinie Lacerteux,_ which, it must be remembered, was written
thirteen years earlier. Goncourt, as he incessantly reminds us, was
the first novelist in France to deliberately study the life of the
people, after precise documents; and _Germinie Lacerteux_ has this
distinction, among others, that it was a new thing. And it is done
with admirable skill; I as a piece of writing, as a work of art, it is
far superior to Zola. But, certainly, Zola's work has a mass and bulk,
a _fougue,_ a _portée,_ which Goncourt's lacks; and it has a savour
of plebeian flesh which all the delicate art of Goncourt could not
evoke. Zola sickens you with it; but there it is. As in all his books,
but more than in most, there is something greasy, a smear of eating
and drinking; the pages, to use his own phrase, _grasses des lichades
du lundi._ In _Germinie Lacerteux_ you never forget that Goncourt
is an aristocrat; in _L'Assommoir_ you never forget that Zola is a
bourgeois. Whatever Goncourt touches becomes, by the mere magic of his
touch, charming, a picture; Zola is totally destitute of charm. But
how, in _L'Assommoir,_ he drives home to you the horrid realities of
these narrow, uncomfortable lives! Zola has made up his mind that he
will say everything, without omitting a single item, whatever he has
to say; thus, in _L'Assommoir,_ there is a great feast which lasts for
fifty pages, beginning with the picking of the goose, the day before,
and going on to the picking of the goose's bones, by a stray marauding
cat, the night after. And, in a sense, he does say everything; and
there, certainly, is his novelty, his invention. He observes with
immense persistence, but his observation, after all, is only that of
the man in the street; it is simply carried into detail, deliberately.
And, while Goncourt wanders away sometimes into arabesques, indulges in
flourishes, so finely artistic is his sense of words and of the things
they represent, so perfectly can he match a sensation or an impression
by its figure in speech, Zola, on the contrary, never finds just the
right word, and it is his persistent fumbling for it which produces
these miles of description; four pages describing how two people went
upstairs, from the ground floor to the sixth story, and then two pages
afterwards to describe how they came downstairs again. Sometimes, by
his prodigious diligence and minuteness, he succeeds in giving you the
impression; often, indeed; but at the cost of what _ennui_ to writer
and reader alike! And so much of it all is purely unnecessary, has
no interest in itself and no connection with the story: the precise
details of Lorilleux's chain-making, bristling with technical terms:
it was _la colonne_ that he made, and only that particular kind of
chain; Goujet's forge, and the machinery in the shed next door; and
just how you cut out zinc with a large pair of scissors. When Goncourt
gives you a long description of anything, even if you do not feel
that it helps on the story very much, it is such a beautiful thing in
itself, his mere way of writing it is so enchanting, that you find
yourself wishing it longer, at its longest. But with Zola, there is no
literary interest in the--writing, apart from its clear and coherent
expression of a given thing; and these interminable descriptions have
no extraneous, or, if you will, implicit interest, to save them from
the charge of irrelevancy; they sink by their own weight. Just as
Zola's vision is the vision of the average man, so his vocabulary,
with all its technicology, remains mediocre, incapable of expressing
subtleties, incapable of a really artistic effect. To find out in a
slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be expressed by an ingeniously
filthy phrase in _argot,_ and to use that phrase, is not a great feat,
or, on purely artistic grounds, altogether desirable. To go to a
chainmaker and learn the trade name of the various kinds of chain which
he manufactures, and of the instruments with which he manufactures
them, is not an elaborate process, or one which can be said to pay you
for the little trouble which it no doubt takes. And it is not well to
be too cerïain after all that Zola is always perfectly accurate in his
use of all this manifold knowledge. The slang, for example; he went to
books for it, in books he found it, and no one will ever find some of
it but in books. However, my main contention is that Zola's general
use of words is, to be quite frank, somewhat ineffectual. He tries
to do what Flaubert did, without Flaubert's tools, and without the
craftsman's hand at the back of the tools. His fingers are too thick;
they leave a blurred line. If you want merely weight, a certain kind of
force, you get it; but no more.
Where a large part of Zola's merit lies, in his persistent attention
to detail, one finds also one of his chief defects. He cannot leave
well alone; he cannot omit; he will not take the most obvious fact
for granted. _Il marcha le premier, elle le suivit,_ well, of course,
she followed him, if he walked first: why mention the fact? That
beginning of a sentence is absolutely typical; it is impossible for
him to refer, for the twentieth time, to some unimportant character,
without giving name and profession, not one or the other, but both,
invariably both. He tells us particularly that a room is composed of
four walls, that a table stands on its four legs. And he does not
appear to see the difference between doing that and doing as Flaubert
does, namely, selecting precisely the detail out of all others which
renders or consorts with the scene in hand, and giving that detail
with an ingenious exactness. Here, for instance, in _Madame Bovary,_
is a characteristic detail in the manner of Flaubert: _Huit jours
après, comme elle étendait du linge dans sa cour, elle fut prise d'un
crachement de sang, et le lendemain, tandis que Charles avait le dos
tourné pour fermer le rideau de la fenêtre, elle dit: "Ah! mon Dieu!"
poussa un soupir et s'évanouit. Elle était morte._ Now that detail,
brought in without the slightest emphasis, of the husband turning his
back at the very instant that his wife dies, is a detail of immense
psychological value; it indicates to us, at the very opening of the
book, just the character of the man about whom we are to read so much.
Zola would have taken at least two pages to say that, and, after all,
he would not have said it. He would have told you the position of the
chest of drawers in the room, what wood the chest of drawers was made
of, and if it had a little varnish knocked off at the corner of the
lower cornice, just where it would naturally be in the way of people's
feet as they entered the door. He would have told you how Charles leant
against the other corner of the chest of drawers, and that the edge of
the upper cornice left a slight dent in his black frock-coat, which
remained visible half an hour afterwards. But that one little detail,
which Flaubert selects from among a thousand, that, no, he would never
have given us that!
And the language in which all this is written, apart from the
consideration of language as a medium, is really not literature at
all, in any strict sense. I am not, for the moment, complaining of
the colloquialism and the slang. Zola has told us that he has, in
_L'Assommoir,_ used the language of the people in order to render the
people with a closer truth. Whether he has done that or not is not
the question. The question is, that he does not give one the sense of
reading good literature, whether he speaks in Delvau's _langue verte,_
or according to the Academy's latest edition of classical French. His
sentences have no rhythm; they give no pleasure to the ear; they carry
no sensation to the eye. You hear a sentence of Flaubert, and you see a
sentence of Goncourt, like living things, with forms and voices. But a
page of Zola lies dull and silent before you; it draws you by no charm,
it has no meaning until you have read the page that goes before and the
page that comes after. It is like cabinet-makers' work, solid, well
fitted together, and essentially made to be used.
Yes, there is no doubt that Zola writes very badly, worse than any
other French writer of eminence. It is true that Balzac, certainly one
of the greatest, does, in a sense, write badly; but his way of writing
badly is very different from Zola's, and leaves you with the sense of
quite a different result. Balzac is too impatient with words; he cannot
stay to get them all into proper order, to pick and choose among them.
Night, the coffee, the wet towel, and the end of six hours' labour
are often too much for him; and his manner of writing his novels on
the proof-sheets, altering and expanding as fresh ideas came to him
on each re-reading, was not a way of doing things which can possibly
result in perfect writing. But Balzac sins from excess, from a feverish
haste, the very extravagance of power; and, at all events, he "sins
strongly." Zola sins meanly, he is penuriously careful, he does the
best he possibly can; and he is not aware that his best does not answer
all requirements. So long as writing is clear and not ungrammatical, it
seems to him sufficient. He has not realised that without charm there
can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without
fragrance.
And it is here that I would complain, not as a matter of morals,
but as a matter of art, of Zola's obsession by what is grossly,
uninterestingly filthy. There is a certain simile in _L'Assommoir,_
used in the most innocent connection, in connection with a bonnet,
which seems to me the most abjectly dirty phrase which I have ever
read. It is one thing to use dirty words to describe dirty things:
that may be necessary, and thus unexceptionable. It is another thing
again, and this, too, may well be defended on artistic grounds, to be
ingeniously and wittily indecent. But I do not think a real man of
letters could possibly have used such an expression as the one I am
alluding to or could so meanly succumb to certain kinds of prurience
which we find in Zola's work. Such a scene as the one in which Gervaise
comes home with Lantier, and finds per husband lying drunk asleep in
his own vomit, might certainly be explained and even excused, though
few more disagreeable things were ever written, on the ground of the
psychological importance which it undoubtedly has, and the overwhelming
way in which it drives home the point which it is the writer's business
to make. But the worrying way in which _le derrière_ and _le ventre_
are constantly kept in view, without the slightest necessity, is quite
another thing. I should not like to say how often the phrase "sa nudité
de jolie fille" occurs in Zola. Zola's nudities always remind me of
those which you can see in the _Foire au pain d'épice_ at Vincennes, by
paying a penny and looking through a peep-hole. In the laundry scenes,
for instance in _L'Assommoir,_ he is always reminding you that the
laundresses have turned up their sleeves, or undone a button or two of
their bodices. His eyes seem eternally fixed on the inch or two of bare
flesh that can be seen; and he nudges your elbow at every moment, to
make sure that you are looking too. Nothing may be more charming than a
frankly sensuous description of things which appeal to the senses; but
can one imagine anything less charming, less like art, than this prying
eye glued to the peep-hole in the Gingerbread Fair?
Yet, whatever view may be taken of Zola's work in literature, there is
no doubt that the life of Zola is a model lesson, and might profitably
be told in one of Dr. Smiles's edifying biographies. It may even be
brought as a reproach against the writer of these novels, in which
there are so many offences against the respectable virtues, that he
is too good a bourgeois, too much the incarnation of the respectable
virtues, to be a man of genius. If the finest art comes of the
intensest living, then Zola has never had even a chance of doing the
greatest kind of work. It is his merit and his misfortune to have lived
entirely in and for his books, with a heroic devotion to his ideal of
literary duty which would merit every praise if we had to consider
simply the moral side of the question. So many pages of copy a day, so
many hours of study given to mysticism, or Les Halles; Zola has always
had his day's work marked out before him, and he has never swerved
from it. A recent life of--Zola tells us something about his way of
getting up a subject. "Immense preparation had been necessary for the
_Faute de l'Abbé Mouret._ Mountains of note-books were heaped up on
his table, and for months Zola was plunged in the study of religious
works. All the mystical part of the book, and notably the passages
having reference to the cultus of Mary, was taken from the works of
the Spanish Jesuits. The _Imitation of Jesus Christ_ was largely
drawn upon, many passages being copied almost word for word into
the novel--much as in _Clarissa Harlowe,_ that other great realist,
Richardson, copied whole passages from the Psalms. The description
of life in a grand seminary was given him by a priest who had been
dismissed from ecclesiastical service. The little church of Sainte
Marie des Batignolles was regularly visited."
How commendable all that is, but, surely, how futile! Can one conceive
of a more hopeless, a more ridiculous task, than that of setting to
work on a novel of ecclesiastical life as if one were cramming for
an examination in religious knowledge? Zola apparently imagines that
he can master mysticism in a fortnight, as he masters the police
regulations of Les Halles. It must be admitted that he does wonders
with his second-hand information, alike in regard to mysticism and Les
Halles. But he succeeds only to a certain point, and that point lies
on the nearer side of what is really meant by success. Is not Zola
himself, at his moments, aware of this? A letter written in 1881, and
printed in Mr. Sherard's life of Zola, from which I have just quoted,
seems to me very significant.
"I continue to work in a good state of mental equilibrium. My novel
_(Pot-Bouille)_ is certainly only a task requiring precision and
clearness. No _bravoura,_ not the least lyrical treat. It does not
give me any warm satisfaction, but it amuses me like a piece of
mechanism with a thousand wheels, of which it is my duty to regulate
the movements with the most minute care. I ask myself the question: Is
it good policy, when one feels that one has passion in one, to check
it, or even to bridle it? If one of my books is destined to become
immortal, it will, I am sure, be the most passionate one."
_Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo?_ said the Parnassians,
priding themselves on their muse with her _peplum bien sculpté._ Zola
will describe to you the exact shape and the exact smell of the rags
of his naturalistic muse; but has she, under the tatters, really a
human heart? In the whole of Zola's works, amid all his exact and
impressive descriptions of misery, all his endless annals of the poor,
I know only one episode which brings tears to the eyes, the episode
of the child-martyr Lalie in L'_Assommoir._ "A piece of mechanism
with a thousand wheels," that is indeed the image of this immense and
wonderful study of human life, evolved out of the brain of a solitary
student who knows life only by the report of his documents, his
friends, and, above all, his formula.
Zola has denned art, very aptly, as nature seen through a temperament.
The art of Zola is nature seen through a formula. This professed
realist is a man of theories who studies life with a conviction that
he will find there such and such things which he has read about in
scientific books. He observes, indeed, with astonishing minuteness, but
he observes in support of preconceived ideas. And so powerful is his
imagination that he has created a whole world which has no existence
anywhere but in his own brain, and he has placed there imaginary
beings, so much more logical than life, in the midst of surroundings
which are themselves so real as to lend almost a semblance of reality
to the embodied formulas who inhabit them.
It is the boast of Zola that he has taken up art at the point where
Flaubert left it, and that he has developed that art in its logical
sequence. But the art of Flaubert, itself a development from Balzac,
had carried realism, if not in _Madame Bovary,_ at all events in
_L'Education Sentimentale,_ as far as realism can well go without
ceasing to be art. In the grey and somewhat sordid history of Frédéric
Moreau there is not à touch of romanticism, not so much as a concession
to style, a momentary escape of the imprisoned lyrical tendency.
Everything is observed, everything is taken straight from life: realism
sincere, direct, implacable, reigns from end to end of the book. But
with what consummate art all this mass of observation is disintegrated,
arranged, composed! with what infinite delicacy it is manipulated in
the service of an unerring sense of construction! And Flaubert has no
theory, has no prejudices, has only a certain impatience with human
imbecility. Zola, too, gathers his documents, heaps up his mass of
observation, and then, in this unhappy "development" of the principles
of art which produced _L'Education Sentimentale,_ flings everything
pell-mell into one overflowing _pot-au-feu._ The probabilities of
nature and the delicacies of art are alike drowned beneath a flood of
turbid observation, and in the end one does not even feel convinced
that Zola really knows his subject. I remember once hearing M.
Huysmans, with his look and tone of subtle, ironical malice, describe
how Zola, when he was writing _La Terre,_ took a drive into the country
in a victoria, to see the peasants. The English papers once reported
an interview in which the author of _Nana,_ indiscreetly questioned
as to the amount of personal observation he had put into the book,
replied that he had lunched with an actress of the Variétés. The reply
was generally taken for a joke, but the lunch was a reality, and it
was assuredly a rare experience in the life of solitary diligence to
which we owe so many impersonal studies in life. Nor did Zola, as he
sat silent by the side of Mlle. X., seem to be making much use of
the opportunity. The language of the miners in _Germinal,_ how much
of local colour is there in that? The interminable additions and
divisions, the extracts from a financial gazette, in _L'Argent,_ how
much of the real temper and idiosyncrasy of the financier do they
give us? In his description of places, in his _mise-en-scène,_ Zola
puts down what he sees with his own eyes, and, though it is often
done at utterly disproportionate length, it is at all events done
with exactitude. But in the far more important observation of men and
women, he is content with second-hand knowledge, the knowledge of a man
who sees the world through a formula. Zola sees in humanity _la bête
humaine._ He sees the beast in all its transformations, but he sees
only the beast. He has never looked at life impartially, he has never
seen it as it is. His realism is a distorted idealism, and the man who
considers himself the first to paint humanity as it really is will be
remembered in the future as the most idealistic writer of his time.
1893.