In these times of electrical movement, the sort of construction in the
moral world for which ages were once needed, takes place almost
simultaneously with the event to be adjusted in history, and as true a
perspective forms itself as any in the past. A few weeks after the
death of a poet of such great epical imagination, such great ethical
force, as Emile Zola, we may see him as clearly and judge him as fairly
as posterity alone was formerly supposed able to see and to judge the
heroes that antedated it. The present is always holding in solution
the elements of the future and the past, in fact; and whilst Zola still
lived, in the moments of his highest activity, the love and hate, the
intelligence and ignorance, of his motives and his work were as
evident, and were as accurately the measure of progressive and
retrogressive criticism, as they will be hereafter in any of the
literary periods to come. There will never be criticism to appreciate
him more justly, to depreciate him more unjustly, than that of his
immediate contemporaries. There will never be a day when criticism
will be of one mind about him, when he will no longer be a question,
and will have become a conclusion. A conclusion is an accomplished
fact, something finally ended, something dead; and the extraordinary
vitality of Zola, when he was doing the things most characteristic of
him, forbids the notion of this in his case. Like every man who
embodies an ideal, his individuality partook of what was imperishable
in that ideal. Because he believed with his whole soul that fiction
should be the representation, and in no measure the misrepresentation,
of life, he will live as long as any history of literature survives.
He will live as a question, a dispute, an affair of inextinguishable
debate; for the two principles of the human mind, the love of the
natural and the love of the unnatural, the real and the unreal, the
truthful and the fanciful, are inalienable and indestructible.
I
Zola embodied his ideal inadequately, as every man who embodies an
ideal must. His realism was his creed, which he tried to make his
deed; but, before his fight was ended, and almost before he began to
forebode it a losing fight, he began to feel and to say (for to feel,
with that most virtuous and voracious spirit, implied saying) that he
was too much a romanticist by birth and tradition, to exemplify realism
in his work. He could not be all to the cause he honored that other
men were--men like Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and
Tolstoy, and Galdos and Valdes--because his intellectual youth had been
nurtured on the milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time.
He grew up in the day when the great novelists and poets were
romanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first adored. He was
that pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches,
who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith. Zola
was none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He conceived of
reality poetically and always saw his human documents, as he began
early to call them, ranged in the form of an epic poem. He fell below
the greatest of the Russians, to whom alone he was inferior, in
imagining that the affairs of men group themselves strongly about a
central interest to which they constantly refer, and after whatever
excursions definitely or definitively return. He was not willingly an
epic poet, perhaps, but he was an epic poet, nevertheless; and the
imperfection of his realism began with the perfection of his form.
Nature is sometimes dramatic, though never on the hard and fast terms
of the theatre, but she is almost never epic; and Zola was always epic.
One need only think over his books and his subjects to be convinced of
this: "L'Assommoir" and drunkenness; "Nana" and harlotry; "Germinale"
and strikes; "L'Argent" and money getting and losing in all its
branches; "Pot-Bouille" and the cruel squalor of poverty; "La Terre"
and the life of the peasant; "Le Debacle" and the decay of imperialism.
The largest of these schemes does not extend beyond the periphery
described by the centrifugal whirl of its central motive, and the least
of the Rougon-Macquart series is of the same epicality as the grandest.
Each is bound to a thesis, but reality is bound to no thesis. You
cannot say where it begins or where it leaves off; and it will not
allow you to say precisely what its meaning or argument is. For this
reason, there are no such perfect pieces of realism as the plays of
Ibsen, which have all or each a thesis, but do not hold themselves
bound to prove it, or even fully to state it; after these, for reality,
come the novels of Tolstoy, which are of a direction so profound
because so patient of aberration and exception.
We think of beauty as implicated in symmetry, but there are distinctly
two kinds of beauty: the symmetrical and the unsymmetrical, the beauty
of the temple and the beauty of the tree. Life is not more symmetrical
than a tree, and the effort of art to give it balance and proportion is
to make it as false in effect as a tree clipped and trained to a
certain shape. The Russians and the Scandinavians alone seem to have
risen to a consciousness of this in their imaginative literature,
though the English have always unconsciously obeyed the law of our
being in their generally crude and involuntary formulations of it. In
the northern masters there is no appearance of what M. Ernest Dupuy
calls the joiner-work of the French fictionalists; and there is, in the
process, no joiner-work in Zola, but the final effect is joiner-work.
It is a temple he builds, and not a tree he plants and lets grow after
he has planted the seed, and here he betrays not only his French school
but his Italian instinct.
In his form, Zola is classic, that is regular, symmetrical, seeking the
beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the tree. If the fight
in his day had been the earlier fight between classicism and
romanticism, instead of romanticism and realism, his nature and
tradition would have ranged him on the side of classicism, though, as
in the later event, his feeling might have been romantic. I think it
has been the error of criticism not to take due account of his Italian
origin, or to recognize that he was only half French, and that this
half was his superficial half. At the bottom of his soul, though not
perhaps at the bottom of his heart, he was Italian, and of the great
race which in every science and every art seems to win the primacy when
it will. The French, through the rhetoric of Napoleon III., imposed
themselves on the imagination of the world as the representatives of
the Latin race, but they are the least and the last of the Latins, and
the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin Zola owed not only
the moralistic scope of his literary ambition, but the depth and
strength of his personal conscience, capable of the austere puritanism
which underlies the so-called immoralities of his books, and incapable
of the peculiar lubricity which we call French, possibly to distinguish
it from the lubricity of other people rather than to declare it a thing
solely French. In the face of all public and private corruptions, his
soul is as Piagnone as Savonarola's, and the vices of Arrabbiati, small
and great, are always his text, upon which he preaches virtue.