To me his literary history is very pathetic. He was bred if not born
in the worship of the romantic, but his native faith was not proof
against his reason, as again his reason was not proof against his
native faith. He preached a crusade against romanticism, and fought a
long fight with it, only to realize at last that he was himself too
romanticistic to succeed against it, and heroically to own his defeat.
The hosts of romanticism swarmed back over him and his followers, and
prevailed, as we see them still prevailing. It was the error of the
realists whom Zola led, to suppose that people like truth in fiction
better than falsehood; they do not; they like falsehood best; and if
Zola had not been at heart a romanticist, he never would have cherished
his long delusion, he never could have deceived with his vain hopes
those whom he persuaded to be realistic, as he himself did not succeed
in being.
He wished to be a sort of historiographer writing the annals of a
family, and painting a period; but he was a poet, doing far more than
this, and contributing to creative literature as great works of fiction
as have been written in the epic form. He was a paradox on every side
but one, and that was the human side, which he would himself have held
far worthier than the literary side. On the human side, the civic
side, he was what he wished to be, and not what any perversity of his
elements made him. He heard one of those calls to supreme duty, which
from time to time select one man and not another for the response which
they require; and he rose to that duty with a grandeur which had all
the simplicity possible to a man of French civilization. We may think
that there was something a little too dramatic in the manner of his
heroism, his martyry, and we may smile at certain turns of rhetoric in
the immortal letter accusing the French nation of intolerable wrong,
just as, in our smug Anglo-Saxon conceit, we laughed at the procedure
of the emotional courts which he compelled to take cognizance of the
immense misdeed other courts had as emotionally committed. But the
event, however indirectly and involuntarily, was justice which no other
people in Europe would have done, and perhaps not any people of this
more enlightened continent.
The success of Zola as a literary man has its imperfections, its phases
of defeat, but his success as a humanist is without flaw. He triumphed
as wholly and as finally as it has ever been given a man to triumph,
and he made France triumph with him. By his hand, she added to the
laurels she had won in the war of American Independence, in the wars of
the Revolution for liberty and equality, in the campaigns for Italian
Unity, the imperishable leaf of a national acknowledgement of national
error.