ZOLA.

ZOLA’S name--a barbarous, explosive name, like an anarchist’s bomb--has

been tossed about amid hoots and yells for a quarter of a century.

In every civilised country we have heard of the man who has dragged

literature into the gutter, who has gone down to pick up the filth of

the streets, and has put it into books for the filthy to read. And

in every civilised country his books have been read, by the hundred

thousand.

To-day, his great life-work is completed. At the same time, the

uproar that it aroused has, to a large extent, fallen silent. Not

that there is any general agreement as to the rank of the author of

the Rougon-Macquart series; but the storms that greeted it have worn

themselves out, and it is recognised that there are at least two sides

to this as to any other question. Such a time is favourable to the calm

discussion of Zola’s precise position.

The fundamental assertion of those who, in their irreconcilable

opposition to Zola, have rightly felt that abuse is not argument, has

always been that Zola is no artist. The matter has usually presented

itself to them as a question of Idealism _versus_ Realism.

Idealism, as used by the literary critic, seems to mean a careful

selection of the facts of life for artistic treatment, certain facts

being suited for treatment in the novel, certain other facts being

not so suited; while the realist, from the literary critic’s point of

view, is one who flings all facts indiscriminately into his pages. I

think that is a fair statement of the matter, for the literary critic

does not define very clearly; still less does he ask himself how far

the idealism he advocates is merely traditional, nor, usually, to

what extent the manner of presentation should influence us. He does

not ask himself these questions, nor need we ask him, for in the case

of Zola (or, indeed, of any other so-called “realist”) there is no

such distinction. There is no absolute realism, merely a variety of

idealisms; the only absolute realism would be a phonographic record,

illustrated photographically, after the manner of the cinematograph.

Zola is just as much an idealist as George Sand. It is true that he

selects very largely from material things, and that he selects very

profusely. But the selection remains, and where there is deliberate

selection there is art. We need not trouble ourselves here--and I doubt

whether we are ever called upon to trouble ourselves--about “Realism”

and “Idealism.” The questions are: Has the artist selected the right

materials? Has he selected them with due restraint?

The first question is a large one, and, in Zola’s case at all events,

it cannot, I think, be answered on purely æsthetic grounds; the second

may be answered without difficulty. Zola has himself answered it; he

admits that he has been carried away by his enthusiasm, and perhaps,

also, by his extraordinary memory for recently-acquired facts (a memory

like a sponge, as he has put it, quickly swollen and quickly emptied);

he has sown details across his page with too profuse a hand. It is

the same kind of error as Whitman made, impelled by the same kind of

enthusiasm. Zola expends immense trouble to get his facts; he has told

how he ransacked the theologians to obtain body and colour for _La

Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_, perhaps the best of his earlier books. But

he certainly spent no more preliminary labour on it than Flaubert spent

on _Madame Bovary_, very far less than Flaubert spent on the study

of Carthage for _Salammbô_. But the results are different; the

one artist gets his effects by profusion and multiplicity of touches,

the other by the deliberate self-restraint with which he selects and

emphasises solely the salient and significant touches. The latter

method seems to strike more swiftly and deeply the ends of art. Three

strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth a thousand of Denner’s.

Rich and minute detail may impress us, but it irritates and wearies in

the end. If a man takes his two children on to his knees, it matters

little whether he places Lénore on his right knee and Henri on his

left, or the other way about; the man himself may fail to know or to

realise, and the more intense his feelings the less likely is he to

know. When we are living deeply, the facts of our external life do not

present themselves to us in elaborate detail; a very few points are--as

it has been termed--focal in consciousness, while the rest are marginal

in subconsciousness. A few things stand out vividly at each moment of

life; the rest are dim. The supreme artist is shown by the insight

and boldness with which he seizes and illuminates these bright points

at each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due subordination.

Dramatists so unlike as Ford and Ibsen, novelists so unlike as Flaubert

and Tolstoi, yet alike impress us by the simple vividness of their

artistic effects. The methods adopted by Zola render such effects

extremely difficult of attainment. Perhaps the best proof of Zola’s

remarkable art is the skill with which he has neutralised the evil

results of his ponderous method. In his most characteristic novels, as

_L’Assommoir_, _Nana_, _Germinal_, his efforts to attain

salient perspective in the mass of trivial or technical things--to

build a single elaborate effect out of manifold details--are often

admirably conducted. Take, for instance, the Voreux, the coal-pit which

may almost be said to be the hero of _Germinal_ rather than any

of the persons in the book. The details are not interesting, but they

are carefully elaborated, and the Voreux is finally symbolised as a

stupendous idol, sated with human blood, crouching in its mysterious

sanctuary. Whenever Zola wishes to bring the Voreux before us, this

formula is repeated. And it is the same, in a slighter degree, with the

other material personalities of the book. Sometimes, in the case of a

crowd, this formula is simply a cry. It is so with the Parisian mob

who yell “A Berlin!” in the highly-wrought conclusion to _Nana_;

it is so with the crowd of strikers in _Germinal_ who shout for

bread. It is more than the tricky repetition of a word or a gesture,

overdone by Dickens and others; it is the artful manipulation of a

carefully-elaborated, significant phrase. Zola seems to have been the

first who has, deliberately and systematically, introduced this sort of

_leit-motiv_ into literature, as a method of summarising a complex

mass of details, and bringing the total impression of them before

the reader. In this way he contrives to minimise the defects of his

method, and to render his complex detail focal. He sometimes attains

poignantly simple effects by the mere repetition of a _leit-motiv_

at the right moment. And he is able at times, also, to throw aside his

detailed method altogether, and to reach effects of tragic intensity.

The mutilation of Maigrat’s corpse is a scene which can scarcely have

been described in a novel before. Given the subject, Zola’s treatment

of it has the strength, brevity, and certainty of touch which only

belong to great masters of art. That Zola is a great master of his art,

_L’Assommoir_ and _Germinal_--which, so far as I have read

Zola, seem his two finest works--are enough to prove. Such works are

related to the ordinary novel much as Wagner’s music-dramas are related

to the ordinary Italian opera. Wagner reaches a loftier height of art

than Zola; he had a more complete grasp of all the elements he took in

hand to unite. Zola has not seen with sufficient clearness the point of

view of science, and the limits of its capacity for harmonising with

fiction; nor has he with perfect sureness of vision always realised the

ends of art. He has left far too much of the scaffolding standing amid

his huge literary structures; there is too much mere brute fact which

has not been wrought into art. But, if Zola is not among the world’s

greatest artists, I do not think we can finally deny that he is a great

artist.

To look at Zola from the purely artistic standpoint, however, is

scarcely to see him at all. His significance for the world generally,

and even for literature, lies less in a certain method of using his

material--as it may be said to lie, for example, in the case of the

Goncourts--than in the material itself, and the impulses and ideas that

prompted his selection of that material. These growing piles of large

books are the volcanic ejecta of an original and exuberant temperament.

To understand them we must investigate this temperament.

A considerable and confused amount of racial energy was stored up

in Zola. At once French, Italian, and Greek--with a mother from

the central Beauce country of France, more fruitful in corn than

in intellect, and a father of mixed Italian and Greek race, a

mechanical genius in his way, with enthusiastic energies and large

schemes--he presents a curious combination of potential forces,

perhaps not altogether a very promising combination. One notes that

the mechanical engineer in the father seems to have persisted in the

son, not necessarily by heredity, but perhaps by early familiarity

and association. Young Zola was a delicate child and by no means a

brilliant schoolboy, though he once won a prize for memory; such

ability as he showed was in the direction of science; he had no

literary aptitudes. He seems to have adopted literature chiefly because

pen and ink come handiest to the eager energies of a poor clerk. It

is scarcely fanciful to detect the mechanical aptitudes still. Just

as all Huxley’s natural instincts were towards mechanics, and in

physiology he always sought for the “go” of the organism, so Zola,

however imperfect his scientific equipment may be, has always sought

for the “go” of the social organism. The history of the Rougon-Macquart

family is a study in social mathematics: given certain family strains,

what is the dynamic hereditary outcome of their contact?

To the making of Zola there went, therefore, this curious racial blend,

as a soil ready to be fertilised by any new seed, and a certain almost

instinctive tendency to look at things from the mechanical and material

point of view. To these, in very early life, a third factor was added

of the first importance. During long years after his father’s death,

Zola, as a child and youth, suffered from poverty, poverty almost

amounting to actual starvation, the terrible poverty of respectability.

The whole temper of his work and his outlook on the world are clearly

conditioned by this prolonged starvation of adolescence. The timid and

reserved youth--for such, it is said, has been Zola’s character both

in youth and manhood--was shut up with his fresh energies in a garret

while the panorama of the Paris world was unfolded below him. Forced

both by circumstances and by temperament to practise the strictest

chastity and sobriety, there was but one indulgence left open to him,

an orgy of vision. Of this, as we read his books, we cannot doubt that

he fully availed himself, for each volume of the Rougon-Macquart series

is an orgy of material vision.[7]

Zola remained chaste, and, it is said, he is still sober--though we

are told that his melancholy morose face lights up like a gourmet’s at

the hour of his abstemious dinner--but this early eagerness to absorb

the sights as well as the sounds, and one may add the smells, of the

external world, has at length become moulded into a routine method.

To take some corner of life, and to catalogue every detail of it, to

place a living person there, and to describe every sight and smell

and sound around him, although he himself may be quite unconscious of

them--that, in the simplest form, is the recipe for making a _roman

expérimental_. The method, I wish to insist, was rooted in the

author’s experience of the world. Life only came to him as the sights,

sounds, smells, that reached his garret window. His soul seems to

have been starved at the centre, and to have encamped at the sensory

periphery. He never tasted deep of life, he stored up none of those

wells of purely personal emotion from which great artists have hoisted

up the precious fluid which makes the bright living blood of their

creations. How different he is in this respect from the other great

novelist of our day, who has also been a volcanic force of world-wide

significance! Tolstoi comes before us as a man who has himself lived

deeply, a man who has had an intense thirst for life, and who has

satisfied that thirst. He has craved to know life, to know women, the

joy of wine, the fury of battle, the taste of the ploughman’s sweat

in the field. He has known all these things, not as material to make

books, but as the slaking of instinctive personal passions. And in

knowing them he has stored up a wealth of experiences from which he

drew as he came to make books, and which bear about them that peculiar

haunting fragrance only yielded by the things which have been lived

through, personally, in the far past. Zola’s method has been quite

otherwise: when he wished to describe a great house he sat outside

the palatial residence of M. Menier, the chocolate manufacturer, and

imagined for himself the luxurious fittings inside, discovering in

after years that his description had come far short of the reality;

before writing _Nana_, he obtained an introduction to a courtesan,

with whom he was privileged to lunch; his laborious preparation for the

wonderful account of the war of 1870, in _La Débâcle_, was purely

one of books, documents, and second-hand experiences; when he wished

to write of labour he went to the mines and to the fields, but never

appears to have done a day’s manual work. Zola’s literary methods are

those of the _parvenu_ who has tried to thrust himself in from

outside, who has never been seated at the table of life, who has never

really lived. That is their weakness. It is also their virtue. There

is no sense of satiety in Zola’s work as there is in Tolstoi’s. One

can understand how it is that, although their methods are so unlike,

Tolstoi himself regards Zola as the one French novelist of the day

who is really alive. The starved lad, whose eyes were concentrated

with longing on the visible world, has reaped a certain reward from

his intellectual chastity; he has preserved his clearness of vision

for material things, an eager, insatiable, impartial vision. He is a

zealot in his devotion to life, to the smallest details of life. He has

fought like the doughtiest knight of old-world romance for his lady’s

honour, and has suffered more contumely than they all. “On barde de fer

nos urinoirs!” he shouts in a fury of indignation in one of his essays;

it is a curious instance of the fanatic’s austere determination that

no barrier shall be set up to shut out the sights and smells of the

external world. The virgin freshness of his thirst for life gives its

swelling, youthful vigour to his work, its irrepressible energy.

It has, indeed, happened with this unsatisfied energy as it will

happen with such energies; it has retained its robustness at the

sacrifice of the sweetness it might otherwise have gained. There is a

certain bitterness in Zola’s fury of vision, as there is also in his

gospel of “Work! work! work!” One is conscious of a savage assault on

a citadel which, the assailant now well knows, can never be scaled.

Life cannot be reached by the senses alone; there is always something

that cannot be caught by the utmost tension of eyes and ears and nose;

a well-balanced soul is built up, not alone on sensory memories,

but also on the harmonious satisfaction of the motor and emotional

energies. That cardinal fact must be faced even when we are attempting

to define the fruitful and positive element in Zola’s activity.

The chief service which Zola has rendered to his fellow-artists and

successors, the reason of the immense stimulus he supplies, seems to

lie in the proofs he has brought of the latent artistic uses of the

rough, neglected details of life. The Rougon-Macquart series has been

to his weaker brethren like that great sheet knit at the four corners,

let down from Heaven full of four-footed beasts and creeping things

and fowls of the air, and bearing in it the demonstration that to the

artist as to the moralist nothing can be called common or unclean. It

has henceforth become possible for other novelists to find inspiration

where before they could never have turned, to touch life with a vigour

and audacity of phrase which, without Zola’s example, they would have

trembled to use, while they still remain free to bring to their work

the simplicity, precision, and inner experience which he has never

possessed. Zola has enlarged the field of the novel. He has brought

the modern material world into fiction in a more definite and thorough

manner than it has ever been brought before, just as Richardson

brought the modern emotional world into fiction; such an achievement

necessarily marks an epoch. In spite of all his blunders, Zola has

given the novel new power and directness, a vigour of fibre which was

hard indeed to attain, but which, once attained, we may chasten as we

will. And in doing this he has put out of court, perhaps for ever,

those unwholesome devotees of the novelist’s art who work out of their

vacuity, having neither inner nor outer world to tell of.

Zola’s delight in exuberant detail, it is true, is open to severe

criticism. When, however, we look at his work, not as great art but

as an important moment in the evolution of the novel, this exuberance

is amply justified. Such furious energy in hammering home this

demonstration of the artistic utility of the whole visible modern

world may detract from the demonstrator’s reputation for skill;

it has certainly added to the force of the demonstration. Zola’s

luxuriance of detail--the heritage of that romantic movement of which

he was the child--has extended impartially to every aspect of life

he has investigated, to the working of a mine, to the vegetation of

the Paradou, to the ritual of the Catholic Church. But it is not on

the details of inanimate life, or the elaborate description of the

industrial and religious functions of men, that the rage of Zola’s

adversaries has chiefly been spent. It is rather on his use of the

language of the common people and on his descriptions of the sexual and

digestive functions of humanity. Zola has used slang--the _argot_

of the populace--copiously, chiefly indeed in _L’Assommoir_, which

is professedly a study of low life, but to a less extent in his other

books. A considerable part of the power of _L’Assommoir_, in many

respects Zola’s most perfect work, lies in the skill with which he uses

the language of the people he is dealing with; the reader is bathed

throughout in an atmosphere of picturesque, vigorous, often coarse

_argot_. There is, no doubt, a lack of critical sobriety in the

profusion and reiteration of vulgarisms, of coarse oaths, of the varied

common synonyms for common things. But they achieve the end that Zola

sought, and so justify themselves.

They are of even greater interest as a protest against the exaggerated

purism which has ruled the French language for nearly three centuries,

and while rendering it a more delicate and precise instrument for

scientific purposes, has caused it to become rather bloodless and

colourless for the artist’s purposes, as compared with the speech used

by Rabelais, Montaigne, and even Molière, the great classics who have

chiefly influenced Zola. The romantic movement of the present century,

it is true, added colour to the language, but scarcely blood; it was

an exotic, feverish colour which has not permanently enriched French

speech. A language rendered anæmic by over-clarification cannot be

fed by exotic luxuries but by an increase in the vigorous staples of

speech, and Zola was on the right track when he went to the people’s

common speech, which is often classic in the true sense and always

robust. Doubtless he has been indiscriminate and even inaccurate in

his use of _argot_, sometimes giving undue place to what is of

merely temporary growth. But the main thing was to give literary place

and prestige to words and phrases which had fallen so low in general

esteem, in spite of their admirable expressiveness, that only a writer

of the first rank and of unequalled audacity could venture to lift them

from the mire. This Zola has done; and those who follow him may easily

exercise the judgment and discretion in which he has been lacking.

Zola’s treatment of the sexual and the digestive functions, as I

pointed out, has chiefly aroused his critics. If you think of it, these

two functions are precisely the central functions of life, the two

poles of hunger and love around which the world revolves. It is natural

that it should be precisely these fundamental aspects of life which in

the superficial contact of ordinary social intercourse we are for ever

trying more and more to refine away and ignore. They are subjected

to an ever-encroaching process of attenuation and circumlocution,

and as a social tendency this influence is possibly harmless or even

beneficial. But it is constantly extending to literature also, and

here it is disastrous. It is true that a few great authors--classics

of the first rank--have gone to extremes in their resistance to this

tendency. These extremes are of two kinds: the first issuing in a sort

of coprolalia, or inclination to dwell on excrement, which we find to a

slight extent in Rabelais and to a marked extent in the half-mad Swift;

in its fully-developed shape this coprolalia is an uncontrollable

instinct found in some forms of insanity. The other extreme is that

of pruriency, or the perpetual itch to circle round sexual matters,

accompanied by a timidity which makes it impossible to come right

up to them; this sort of impotent fumbling in women’s placket-holes

finds its supreme literary exponent in Sterne. Like coprolalia,

when uncontrolled, prurience is a well-recognised characteristic of

the insane, leading them to find a vague eroticism everywhere. But

both these extreme tendencies have not been found incompatible with

the highest literary art. Moreover, their most pronounced exponents

have been clerics, the conventional representatives of the Almighty.

However far Zola might go in these directions, he would still be in

what is universally recognised as very good company. He has in these

respects by no means come up with Father Rabelais and Dean Swift and

the Rev. Laurence Sterne; but there can be little doubt that, along

both lines, he has missed the restraint of well-balanced art. On the

one hand he over-emphasises what is repulsive in the nutritive side of

life, and on the other hand, with the timid obsession of chastity, he

over-emphasises the nakedness of flesh. In so doing, he has revealed a

certain flabbiness in his art, although he has by no means diminished

his service in widening the horizon of literary speech and subject.

Bearing in mind that many crowned kings of literature have approached

these subjects quite as closely as Zola, and far less seriously, it

does not seem necessary to enter any severer judgment here.

To enlarge the sphere of language is an unthankful task, but in

the long run literature owes an immense debt to the writers who

courageously add to the stock of strong and simple words. Our own

literature for two centuries has been hampered by the social tendency

of life to slur expression, and to paraphrase or suppress all forceful

and poignant words. If we go back to Chaucer, or even to Shakespeare,

we realise what power of expression we have lost. It is enough, indeed,

to turn to our English Bible. The literary power of the English Bible

is largely due to the unconscious instinct for style which happened

to be in the air when it was chiefly moulded, to the simple, direct,

unashamed vigour of its speech. Certainly, if the discovery of the

Bible had been left for us to make, any English translation would

have to be issued at a high price by some esoteric society, for fear

lest it should fall into the hands of the British matron. It is our

British love of compromise, we say, that makes it possible for a

spade to be called a spade on one day of the week, but on no other;

our neighbours, whose minds are more logically constituted, call it

_le cant Britannique_. But our mental compartments remain very

water-tight, and on the whole we are even worse off than the French

who have no Bible. For instance, we have almost lost the indispensable

words “belly” and “bowels,” both used so often and with such admirable

effect in the Psalms; we talk of the “stomach,” a word which is not

only an incorrect equivalent, but at best totally inapt for serious

or poetic uses. Any one who is acquainted with our old literature,

or with the familiar speech of the common folk, will recall similar

instances of simple, powerful expressions which are lost or vanishing

from literary language, leaving no available substitute behind. In

modern literary language, indeed, man scarcely exists save in his

extremities. For we take the pubes as a centre, and we thence describe

a circle with a radius of some eighteen inches--in America the radius

is rather longer--and we forbid any reference to any organ within the

circle, save that maid-of-all-work the “stomach”; in other words, we

make it impossible to say anything to the point concerning the central

functions of life.

It is a question how far real literature can be produced under such

conditions, not merely because literature is thus shut out from

close contact with the vital facts of life, but because the writer

who is willing to be so shut out, who finds himself most at home

within the social limits of speech, will probably not be made of

the heroic stuff that goes to the moulding of a great writer. The

social limits of speech are useful enough, for we are all members of

society, and it is well that we should have some protection against

the assaults of unbridled vulgarity. But in literature we may choose

to read what we will, or to read nothing, and the man who enters the

world of literature timidly equipped with the topics and language

of the drawing-room is not likely to go far. I once saw it stated

depreciatingly in a grave literary review that a certain novel by a

woman writer dealt with topics that are not even discussed by men

at their clubs. I had never read it, but it seemed to me then that

there might be hope for that novel. No doubt it is even possible in

literature to fall below the club standard, but unless you can rise

above the club standard, better stay at the club, tell stories there,

or sweep the crossing outside.

All our great poets and novelists from Chaucer to Fielding wrote

sincerely and heroically concerning the great facts of life. That is

why they are great, robustly sane, radiantly immortal. It is a mistake

to suppose that no heroism was involved in their case; for though

no doubt they had a freer general speech on their side they went

beyond their time in daring to mould that speech to the ends of art,

in bringing literature closer to life. It was so even with Chaucer;

compare him with his contemporaries and successors; observe how he

seeks to soothe the susceptibilities of his readers and to deprecate

the protests of the “precious folk.” There is no great art at any

epoch without heroism, though one epoch may be more favourable than

another to the exercise of such heroism in literature. In our own age

and country daring has passed out of the channels of art into those of

commerce, to find exercise, foolish enough sometimes, in the remotest

corners of the earth. It is because our literature is not heroic, but

has been confined within the stifling atmosphere of the drawing-room,

that English poets and novelists have ceased to be a power in the

world and are almost unknown outside the parlours and nurseries of

our own country. It is because in France there have never ceased to

be writers here and there who have dared to face life heroically and

weld it into art that the literature of France is a power in the

world wherever there are men intelligent enough to recognise its

achievements. When literature that is not only fine but also great

appears in England we shall know it as such by its heroism, if by no

other mark.

Language has its immense significance because it is the final

incarnation of a man’s most intimate ideals. Zola’s style and method

are monotonous--with a monotony which makes his books unreadable when

we have once mastered his secret--and the burden they express is ever

the same: the energy of natural life. Whatever is robust, whatever is

wholesomely exuberant, whatever, wholesomely or not, is possessed by

the devouring fury of life--of such things Zola can never have enough.

The admirable opening of _La Terre_, in which a young girl drives

the cow, wild for the male, to the farm where the stockbull is kept,

then leading the appeased animal home again, symbolises Zola’s whole

view of the world. All the forces of Nature, it seems to him, are

raging in the fury of generative desire or reposing in the fulness

of swelling maturity. The very earth itself, in the impressive pages

with which _Germinal_ closes, is impregnated with men, germinating

beneath the soil, one day to burst through the furrows and renew the

old world’s failing life. In this conception of the natural energies of

the world--as manifested in men and animals, in machines, in every form

of matter--perpetually conceiving and generating, Zola reaches his most

impressive effects, though these effects are woven together of elements

that are separately of no very exquisite beauty, or subtle insight, or

radical novelty.

In considering Zola, we are indeed constantly brought back to the fact

that most of the things that he has tried to do have been better done

by more accomplished artists. The Goncourts have extended the sphere of

language, even in the direction of slang, and have faced many of the

matters that Zola has faced, and with far more delicate, though usually

more shadowy, art; Balzac has created as large and vivid a world of

people, though drawing more of it from his own imagination; Huysmans

has greater skill in stamping the vision of strange or sordid things on

the brain; Tolstoi gives a deeper realisation of life; Flaubert is as

audaciously naturalistic, and has, as well, that perfect self-control

which should always accompany audacity. And in Flaubert, too, we find

something of the same irony as in Zola.

This irony, however, is a personal and characteristic feature of

Zola’s work. It is irony alone which gives it distinction and poignant

incisiveness. Irony may be called the soul of Zola’s work, the

embodiment of his moral attitude towards life. It has its source,

doubtless, like so much else that is characteristic, in his early

days of poverty and aloofness from the experiences of life. There is

a fierce impartiality--the impartiality of one who is outside and

shut off--in this manner of presenting the brutalities and egoisms

and pettinesses of men. The fury of his irony is here equalled by

his self-restraint. He concentrates it into a word, a smile, a

gesture. Zola believes, undoubtedly, in a reformed, even perhaps

a revolutionised, future of society, but he has no illusions. He

sets down things as he sees them. He has no tendernesses for the

working-classes, no pictures of rough diamonds. We may see this very

clearly in _Germinal_. Here every side of the problem of modern

capitalism is presented: the gentle-natured shareholding class unable

to realise a state of society in which people should not live on

dividends and give charity; the official class with their correct

authoritative views, very sure that they will always be needed to

control labour and maintain social order; and the workers, some

brutalised, some suffering like dumb beasts, some cringing to the

bosses, some rebelling madly, a few striving blindly for justice.

There is no loophole in Zola’s impartiality; the gradual development

of the seeming hero of _Germinal_, Etienne Lantier, the agitator,

honest in his revolt against oppression, but with an unconscious

bourgeois ideal at his heart, seems unerringly right. All are the

victims of an evil social system, as Zola sees the world, the enslaved

workers as much as the overfed masters; the only logical outcome is a

clean sweep--the burning up of the chaff and straw, the fresh furrowing

of the earth, the new spring of a sweet and vigorous race. That is the

logical outcome of Zola’s attitude, the attitude of one who regards

our present society as a thoroughly vicious circle. His pity for men

and women is boundless; his disdain is equally boundless. It is only

towards animals that his tenderness is untouched by contempt; some

of his most memorable passages are concerned with the sufferings of

animals. The New Jerusalem may be fitted up, but the Montsou miners

will never reach it; they will fight for the first small, stuffy,

middle-class villa they meet on the way. And Zola pours out the stream

of his pitiful, pitiless irony on the weak, helpless, erring children

of men. It is this moral energy, combined with his volcanic exuberance,

which lifts him to a position of influence above the greater artists

with whom we may compare him.

It is by no means probable that the world will continue to read Zola

much longer. His work is already done; but when the nineteenth century

is well past it may be that he will still have his interest. There will

be plenty of material, especially in the newspapers, for the future

historian to reconstruct the social life of the latter half of the

nineteenth century. But the material is so vast that these historians

will possibly be even more biassed and one-sided than our own. For a

vivid, impartial picture--on the whole a faithful picture--of certain

of the most characteristic aspects of this period, seen indeed from

the outside, but drawn by a contemporary in all its intimate and even

repulsive details, the reader of a future age can best go to Zola.

What would we not give for a thirteenth century Zola! We should read

with painful, absorbed interest a narrative of the Black Death as

exact as that of nineteenth century alcoholism in _L’Assommoir_.

The story of how the serf lived, as fully told as in _La Terre_,

would be of incomparable value. The early merchant and usurer would

be a less dim figure if _L’Argent_ had been written about him.

The abbeys and churches of those days have in part come down to us,

but no _Germinal_ remains to tell of the lives and thoughts of

the men who hewed those stones, and piled them, and carved them. How

precious such record would have been we may realise when we recall

the incomparable charm of Chaucer’s prologue to _The Canterbury

Tales_. But our children’s children, with the same passions alive at

their hearts under incalculably different circumstances, will in the

pages of the Rougon-Macquart series find themselves back again among

all the strange remote details of a vanished world. What a fantastic

and terrible page of old-world romance!