Taine once wrote: "When we know how an artist invents we can foresee
his inventions." As to Zola, there is little need now for critical
judgments on his work. He is definitely "placed"; we know him for what
he is--a romancer of a violent idealistic type masquerading as an
implacable realist; a lyric pessimist at the beginning of his literary
career, a sonorous optimist at the close, with vague socialistic views
as to the perfectibility of the human race. But he traversed distances
before he finally found himself a field in which stirred and struggled
all human animality. And he was more Zola when he wrote Therese Raquin
than in his later trilogies and evangels. As an artist it is doubtful
if he grew after 1880; repetition was his method of methods, or, as he
once remarked to Edmond de Goncourt: "Firstly, I fix my nail, and then
with a blow of the hammer I send it a centimetre deep into the brain
of the public; then I knock it in as far again--and the hammer of
which I make use is journalism." And a tremendous journalist to the
end was Zola, despite his books and naturalistic theories.
Again, and from the diary of the same sublimated old gossip, Goncourt,
Zola speaks: "After the rarefied analysis of a certain kind of
sentiment, such as the work done by Flaubert in Madame Bovary; after
the analysis of things, plastic and artistic, such as you have given
us in your dainty, gemlike writing, there is no longer any room for
the younger generation of writers; there is nothing left for them to
do, ... there no longer remains a single type to portray. The only way
of appealing to the public is by strong writing, powerful creations,
and by the number of volumes given to the world." Theory-ridden Zola's
polemical writings, like those of Richard Wagner's, must be set down
to special pleading.
Certainly Zola gave the world a number of volumes, and, if the writing
was not always "strong"--his style is usually mediocre--the subjects
were often too strong for polite nostrils. As Henri Massis, the author
of an interesting book, How Zola Composed His Novels, says, "he
founded his work on a theory which is the most singular of mistakes."
The "experimental" novel is now a thing as extinct as the dodo, yet
what doughty battles were fought for its shapeless thesis. The truth
is that Zola invented more than he observed. He was myopic, not a
trained scrutiniser, and Huysmans, once a disciple, later an opponent
of the "naturalistic" documents, maliciously remarked that Zola went
out carriage riding in the country, and then wrote La Terre.
Turgenieff declared that Zola could describe sweat on a human back,
but never told us what the human thought. And in a memorable passage,
Huysmans couches his lance against the kind of realism Zola
represented, admitting the service performed by that romancer: "We
must, in short, follow the great highway so deeply dug out by Zola,
but it is also necessary to trace a parallel path in the air, another
road by which we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, to achieve
thus a spiritualistic naturalism."
Mr. Massis has had access to the manuscripts of Zola deposited by his
widow in the National Library, Paris. They number ninety volumes; the
dossier alone of Germinal forms four volumes of five hundred pages.
Such industry seems fabulous. But, if it did not pass Zola through the
long-envied portals of the Academy, it has won for his ashes such an
honourable resting-place as the Pantheon. There is irony in the pranks
of the Zeitgeist. Zola, snubbed at every attempt he made to become an
Immortal (unlike his friend Daudet, he openly admitted his
candidature, not sharing with the author of Sapho his sovereign
contempt for the fauteuils of the Forty); Zola, in an hour becoming
the most unpopular writer in France after his memorable J'accuse, a
fugitive from his home, the defender of a seemingly hopeless cause;
Zola dead, Dreyfus exonerated, and the powdered bones of Zola in the
Pantheon, with the great men of his land. Few of his contemporaries
who voted against his admission to the Academy will be his neighbours
in the eternal sleep. His admission to the dead Immortals must be
surely the occasion for much wagging of heads, for reams of
platitudinous writing on the subject of fate and its whirligig
caprice.
This stubborn, silent man of violent imagination, copious vocabulary,
and a tenacity unparalleled in literature, knew that a page a day--a
thousand words daily put on paper every day of the year--and for
twenty years, would rear a huge edifice. He stuck to his desk each
morning of his life from the time he sketched the Plan general; he
made such terms with his publishers that he was enabled to live
humbly, yet comfortably, in the beginning with his "dear ones," his
wife and his mother. In return he wrote two volumes a year, and, with
the exception of a few years, his production was as steady as water
flowing from a hydrant. This comparison was once applied to herself by
George Sand, Zola's only rival in the matter of quantity. But Madame
Sand was an improviser; with notes she never bothered herself; in her
letters to Flaubert she laughed over the human documents of Zola, the
elaborate note taking of Daudet, for she was blessed with an excellent
memory and a huge capacity for scribbling. Not so Zola. Each book was
a painful parturition, not the pain of a stylist like Flaubert, but
the Sisyphus-like labor of getting his notes, his facts, his
characters marshalled and moving to a conclusion. Like Anthony
Trollope, when the last page of a book was finished he began another.
He was a workman, not a dilettante of letters.
In 1868 he had blocked out his formidable campaign. Differing with
Balzac in not taking French society as a whole for a subject, he
nevertheless owes, as do all French fiction writers since
1830--Stendhal alone excepted--his literary existence to Balzac;
Balzac, from whom all blessings, all evils, flow in the domain of the
novel; Balzac, realist, idealist, symbolist, naturalist, humourist,
tragedian, comedian, aristocrat, bourgeois, poet, and cleric; Balzac,
truly the Shakespeare of France. The Human Comedy attracted the
synthetic brain of Zola as he often tells us (see L'Oeuvre, where
Sandoz, the novelist, Zola himself, explains to Claude his scheme of a
prose epic). But he was satisfied to take one family under the Second
Empire, the Rougon-Macquarts--these names were not at first in the
form we now know them. A friend and admirer of Flaubert, he followed,
broadly speaking, his method of proceeding and work; though an admirer
of the Goncourts, he did not favour their preference for the rare case
or the chiselled epithet.
Every-day humanity described in every-day speech was Zola's ideal.
That he more than once achieved this ideal is not to be denied.
L'Assommoir remains his masterpiece, while Germinal and L'Oeuvre
will not be soon forgotten. L'Oeuvre is mentioned because its
finished style is rather a novelty in Zola's vast vat of writing
wherein scraps and fragments of Victor Hugo, of Chateaubriand, of the
Goncourts, and of Flaubert boil in terrific confusion. Zola never had
the patience, nor the time, nor perhaps the desire to develop an
individual style. He built long rows of ugly houses, all looking the
same, composed of mud, of stone, brick, sand, straw, and shining
pebbles. Like a bird, he picked up his material for his nest where he
could find it. His faculty of selection was ill-developed. Everything
was tossed pell-mell into his cellar; nothing came amiss and order
seldom reigns. His sentences, unlike Tolstoy's, for example, are not
closely linked; to read Zola aloud is disconcerting. There is no music
in his periods, his rhythms are sluggish, and he entirely fails in
evoking with a few poignant phrases, as did the Goncourts, a scene, an
incident. Never the illuminating word, never the phrase that spells
the transfiguration of the spirit.
Among his contemporaries Tolstoy was the only one who matches him in
the accumulation of details, but for the Russian every detail
modulates into another, notwithstanding their enormous number. The
story marches, the little facts, insignificant at first, range
themselves into definite illuminations of the theme, just as a
traveller afoot on a hot, dusty road misses the saliency of the
landscape, but realises its perspective when he ascends a hill. There
is always perspective in Tolstoy; in Zola it is rare. Yet he masses
his forces as would some sullen giant, confident in the end of victory
through sheer bulk and weight. His power is gloomy, cruel, pitiless;
but indubitable power he has.
After the rather dainty writing of his Contes a Ninon, Zola never
reached such compression and clarity again until he wrote L'Attaque au
Moulin, in Les Soirees de Medan. To be quite frank, he rewrote
Flaubert and the Goncourts in many of his books. He was, using the
phrase in its real sense, the "grand vulgariser" of those finished,
though somewhat remote artists. To the Goncourts fame came slowly; it
was by a process of elimination rather than through the voluntary
offering of popular esteem. And it is not to be denied that Madame
Bovary owed much of its early success to the fact that its author was
prosecuted for an outrage against public morals--poor Emma Bovary
whose life, as Henry James once confessed, might furnish a moral for a
Sunday-school class. Thus fashions in books wax and wane. Zola copied
and "vulgarised" Charles de Mailly, Manette Salomon, Germinie
Lacerteux (Charles Monselet saluted the book with the amiable title
"sculptured slime"), Madame Gervasais--for his Roman story---Soeur
Philomene, all by Goncourt, and he literally founded his method on
Madame Bovary and L'Education Sentimentale, particularly upon the
latter, the greatest, and one is tempted to say the most genuine
realistic novel ever written. Its grey colouring, its daylight
atmosphere, its marvellous description of Fontainebleau, of
masquerades, of dinners and duels in high and low life, its lifelike
characters, were for Zola a treasure-trove. He took Rosanette, the
most lifelike cocotte in fiction, and transformed her into Nana, into
a symbol of destruction. Zola saw the world through melodramatic eyes.
Mr. Massis has noted Zola's method of literary travail, the formation
of his style, the labour of style, the art of writing, the pain of
writing, and his infinitely painstaking manner of accumulating heaps
of notes, and building his book from them. The Massis study, the most
complete of its kind, may interest the student, not alone of Zola, but
of literature in general. Not, however, as a model, for Zola, with all
his tiresome preparations, never constructed an ideal book--rather, to
put it the other way, no one of his books reveals ideal construction.
The multiplicity of details, of descriptions weary the reader. A
coarse spirit his, he revelled in scenes of lust, bloodshed, vileness,
and cruelty.
His people, with a few exceptions, are but agitated silhouettes. You
close your eyes after reading La Bete Humaine and think of Eugene Sue,
a Sue of 1880. Yet a master of broad, symphonic descriptions. There is
a certain resemblance to Richard Wagner; indeed, he patterned after
Wagner in his use of the musical symbol: there is a leading motive in
each of Zola's novels. And like Wagner he was a sentimental lover of
mankind and a hater of all forms of injustice.
From the conception of the work, with its general notes on its nature,
its movement, its physiology, its determination, its first sketches of
the personages, the milieu--he was an ardent adherent of Taine in this
particular--the occupations of the characters, the summary plan with
the accumulated details, thence to the writing, the entire method is
exposed in this ingenious and entertaining book of Massis. He has no
illusions about Zola's originality or the destiny of his works. Zola
has long ceased to count in literary evolution.
But Emile Zola is in the Pantheon.