The other day Zola died (by a casualty which one fancies he would have
liked to employ in a novel, if he had thought of it), and the man whom
he had befriended at the risk of all he had in the world, his property,
his liberty, his life itself, came to his funeral in disguise, risking
again all that Zola had risked, to pay the last honors to his
incomparable benefactor.
It was not the first time that a French literary man had devoted
himself to the cause of the oppressed, and made it his personal affair,
his charge, his inalienable trust. But Voltaire's championship of the
persecuted Protestant had not the measure of Zola's championship of the
persecuted Jew, though in both instances the courage and the
persistence of the vindicator forced the reopening of the case and
resulted in final justice. It takes nothing from the heroism of
Voltaire to recognize that it was not so great as the heroism of Zola,
and it takes nothing from the heroism of Zola to recognize that it was
effective in the only country of Europe where such a case as that of
Dreyfus would have been reopened; where there was a public imagination
generous enough to conceive of undoing an act of immense public
cruelty. At first this imagination was dormant, and the French people
conceived only of punishing the vindicator along with victim, for
daring to accuse their processes of injustice. Outrage, violence, and
the peril of death greeted Zola from his fellow-citizens, and from the
authorities ignominy, fine, and prison. But nothing silenced or
deterred him, and, in the swift course of moral adjustment
characteristic of our time, an innumerable multitude of those who were
ready a few years ago to rend him in pieces joined in paying tribute to
the greatness of his soul, at the grave which received his body already
buried under an avalanche of flowers. The government has not been so
prompt as the mob, but with the history of France in mind, remembering
how official action has always responded to the national impulses in
behalf of humanity and justice, one cannot believe that the
representatives of the French people will long remain behind the French
people in offering reparation to the memory of one of the greatest and
most heroic of French citizens.
It is a pity for the government that it did not take part in the
obsequies of Zola; it would have been well for the army, which he was
falsely supposed to have defamed, to have been present to testify of
the real service and honor he had done it. But, in good time enough,
the reparation will be official as well as popular, and when the
monument to Zola, which has already risen in the hearts of his
countrymen, shall embody itself in enduring marble or perennial bronze,
the army will be there to join in its consecration.
V
There is no reason why criticism should affect an equal hesitation.
Criticism no longer assumes to ascertain an author's place in
literature. It is very well satisfied if it can say something
suggestive concerning the nature and quality of his work, and it tries
to say this with as little of the old air of finality as it can manage
to hide its poverty in.
After the words of M. Chaumie at the funeral, "Zola's life work was
dominated by anxiety for sincerity and truth, an anxiety inspired by
his great feelings of pity and justice," there seems nothing left to do
but to apply them to the examination of his literary work. They unlock
the secret of his performance, if it is any longer a secret, and they
afford its justification in all those respects where without them it
could not be justified. The question of immorality has been set aside,
and the indecency has been admitted, but it remains for us to realize
that anxiety for sincerity and truth, springing from the sense of pity
and justice, makes indecency a condition of portraying human nature so
that it may look upon its image and be ashamed.
The moralist working imaginatively has always had to ask himself how
far he might go in illustration of his thesis, and he has not
hesitated, or if he has hesitated, he has not failed to go far very
far. Defoe went far, Richardson went far, Ibsen has gone far, Tolstoy
has gone far, and if Zola went farther than any of these, still he did
not go so far as the immoralists have gone in the portrayal of vicious
things to allure where he wished to repel. There is really such a
thing as high motive and such a thing as low motive, though the
processes are often so bewilderingly alike in both cases. The
processes may confound us, but there is no reason why we should be
mistaken as to motive, and as to Zola's motive I do not think M.
Chaumie was mistaken. As to his methods, they by no means always
reflected his intentions. He fancied himself working like a scientist
who has collected a vast number of specimens, and is deducing
principles from them. But the fact is, he was always working like an
artist, seizing every suggestion of experience and observation, turning
it to the utmost account, piecing it out by his invention, building it
up into a structure of fiction where its origin was lost to all but
himself, and often even to himself. He supposed that he was recording
and classifying, but he was creating and vivifying. Within the bounds
of his epical scheme, which was always factitious, every person was so
natural that his characters seemed like the characters of biography
rather than of fiction. One does not remember them as one remembers
the characters of most novelists. They had their being in a design
which was meant to represent a state of things, to enforce an opinion
of certain conditions; but they themselves were free agencies, bound by
no allegiance to the general frame, and not apparently acting in behalf
of the author, but only from their own individuality. At the moment of
reading, they make the impression of an intense reality, and they
remain real, but one recalls them as one recalls the people read of in
last weeks's or last year's newspaper. What Zola did was less to
import science and its methods into the region of fiction, than
journalism and its methods; but in this he had his will only so far as
his nature of artist would allow. He was no more a journalist than he
was a scientist by nature; and, in spite of his intentions and in spite
of his methods, he was essentially imaginative and involuntarily
creative.