IN his most suggestive study of the Greek World Under Roman Sway,
wherein we find the feelings, the thoughts, and the actions of those who
lived in the first century explained and elucidated by constant
references to similar states of feeling, thought, and action still
surviving among us who live in the nineteenth century, Professor Mahaffy
expresses his belief that the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius does not give a
true picture of the Greek life it purported to represent, but that it is
rather a reflection of the depravity of the Romans to whom it was
addressed; and then he adds these shrewd suggestions, to be borne in
mind by all who ever consider the fiction of a foreign country or of
another century: "We might as well charge all society in France with
being addicted to one form of vice, because recent French fiction
occupies itself almost exclusively with this as the material for its
plots. The society for which such books are written must have shown that
they are to its taste; the society which such books portray may be
wholly different and grossly libelled by being made to reflect the vices
of the author and his readers."
If French society were composed exclusively of the men and women who
people most of the Parisian romances of the past fifteen or twenty
years; if the inhabitants of the cities were like the miserable
creatures we see in M. Zola's _Pot-Bouille_, and if the dwellers in the
fields were like the horrible wretches we see in M. Zola's _La Terre_,
the outlook of France would be black indeed, for no country could exist
or should exist which was peopled by such a gang of monsters. But any
one who knows French life, any one especially who knows the life of the
larger provincial towns, knows that what M. Zola has represented as
typical and characteristic is, in reality, exceptional and abnormal.
Probably there is no house in the whole of Paris occupied by as corrupt
a set of tenants as those set before us in _Pot-Bouille_; and certainly
there is no village in the whole of France wherein all the horrors
depicted in _La Terre_ could possibly have taken place. The fact is, the
French like to boast about vice as the British like to boast about
virtue. I should doubt if there was any great difference in morals
between the upper society of Paris and of London, except the
overwhelming hypocrisy of the latter. Apparently M. Zola has at last
awakened to some consciousness of the false impression produced by his
work. _Le Reve_ was his attempt to produce a novel fit for the class to
which nearly all English novels are addressed.
In his recent study, _L'Argent_, there is a fairer balance than in his
other books; there are decent people, kindly folk, men and women of
honest hearts and willing hands. We have a cheerful glimpse of the home
life of Mazaud, the stock-broker who commits suicide when he fails. The
Jordans, husband and wife, are perhaps the pleasantest pair to be found
in all M. Zola's novels. With the novelist's increasing fame,
apparently, he is taking brighter views of humanity. And Madame
Caroline, despite her lapse, might almost be called an honest woman, if
this is not a paradox; she is a strong, wholesome, broad-minded
creature, admirably realized. The goddess Lubricity, whom Matthew Arnold
first named as the presiding deity of French fiction, is still
worshipped in other parts of the book; and her worship is out of place
in this book at least, for those who are seized with the lust for gain
have little time for any other. For example, the whole story of
Saccard's relations with the Baroness Sandorff is needlessly offensive
and revolting; and at bottom it is essentially false. But there is a
marked improvement of tone in _L'Argent_ over certain even of his later
books, while the atmosphere is nowhere as foul as it was in most of his
earlier novels.
There is no disputing that M. Zola is a man with a dirty mind--with a
liking for dirt for its own sake. There is no disputing also that he is
a novelist of most extraordinary fecundity and force. Of all the books I
have read in the past ten years, I received the strongest impression
from Zola's _Germinal_ and from Ibsen's _Ghosts_; and I can still hear
the cry for light, and the pitiful appeal of the son to the mother with
which the latter closes; and I can still feel the chill wind which
whistles across the dark plain in the opening pages of the former. There
is in _L'Argent_ the same power, the same splendid sweep, the same
mighty movement, the same symbolic treatment of the subject, the same
epic method. M. Zola thinks himself a naturalist; he has preached
naturalism from the house-top; he is generally taken at his word and
criticised as a naturalist, and as a fact he is not a naturalist at all.
M. Zola is not one who sees certain things in life, and who ties them
together with a loose thread of plot--although this is the naturalism
he approves of. He has preached it, but he has never practised it. On
the contrary, M. Zola picks out a subject and reads up and crams for it,
and conceives it as a whole, and devises typical characters and
characteristic incidents, and co-ordinates the materials he has thus
laboriously accumulated into a harmonious work of art, as closely
constructed as a Greek tragedy and moving forward towards the inevitable
catastrophe with something of the same irresistible impulse. No novelist
of our time is affected less by what he sees in nature than M. Zola; not
one is more consciously artful.
This symbolic method of M. Zola's is shown in _L'Argent_ almost as
clearly as in _Germinal_, which I cannot help considering his greatest
novel, despite its prolixity and the foulness of many of its episodes.
As _Germinal_ was the story of a coal-mine with a strike, so _L'Argent_
is a story of a gigantic speculation on the stock exchange, treated in
the same epic fashion, with typical characters and all the necessary
incidents. Obviously the Union Generale suggested certain particular
details of Saccard's Banque Universelle. Obviously also Baron
Rothschild sat for the portrait of Gundermann. There is the same use of
minor figures to personify the crowd, and themselves identifiable by
some broad characteristic--Moser, the bear; Pellerault, the bull;
Amadrin, the speculator who foolishly blundered into a successful
operation, and who has wisely held his tongue ever since; and all these
minor characters (and there is a host of them) serve as a chorus, help
along the main action of the tale, comment upon it, and typify the
throng of men and women who are at the periphery of any great movement.
These little people are all vigorously projected; they are all adroitly
contrasted one with another; they are all carried in the hand of the
novelist and manoeuvred with unfailing effect, with a power and a
certainty which no other living novelist possesses.
That many readers should be bored by all of Zola's writing I can readily
understand, for it is not always easy reading. That many more should be
shocked by him is even more comprehensible, for he has a thick thumb and
he makes dirty marks over all his work. That some even should be annoyed
by M. Zola's method or irritated by his mannerisms, I can explain
without difficulty. But what I cannot comprehend is that any one having
read _Une Page d'Amour_ or _Germinal_ or _L'Argent_ can deny that M.
Zola is a very great force in fiction. But there are critics in Great
Britain--and even in the United States, where we are less squeamish and
less hypocritical--who refuse to reckon with M. Zola, and who pass by on
the other side. A man must be strong of stomach to enjoy much of M.
Zola's fiction; he must be feeble in perception if he does not feel its
strength and its complex art. M. Zola's strength is often rank, no
doubt, and there is a foul flavor about even his most forcible novels,
which makes them unfit for the library of the clean-minded American
woman. But in any exact sense of the word M. Zola's novels are not
immoral, as the romances of M. Georges Ohnet are immoral, for example,
or those of the late Octave Feuillet. Yet they are not spoon-meat for
babes.
1891