Emile Zola.

Evening Post, Volume LXIV, Issue 119, 15 November 1902, Page 3 (Supplement)

Emile Zola.

The lamentable death of M. Zola removes from sight one who, though in no sense the foremost man of letters in the world, was perhaps the most widely known and most keenly discussed of literary men. Whatever our personal feelings may be with respect to his work and his workmanship, few persons competent to express an opinion will deny that his was a great literary personality. It is felt that a great man is dead, and that France, at any rate, could ill spare him. Had M. Zola died, Jet us say, ten years ago, the feeling would have been different ; indeed, it is no exaggeration to declare that the disappearance of the French novelist from the field of literature would then have been a source of unfeigned relief to many of the most thoughtful watchers of the age. Born on 2nd April, 1840, it was not until 1877 that he joined issue, by tbe publication of "L'Assommoir," with those conventions of society which endeavour to place certain limits upon the subject matter and structure of artistic work. Long before that date he had made his mark in literature. His father, a retired French officer and a civil engineer of some note, died when the future novelist was a child, leaving his young Italian widow and sod in narrow circumstances. The boy was educated in Paris at the Lycee St. Louis, and is said to have supplemented his school-work by voluminous reading at bookstalls. He eventually found a place in the firm of Hachette, the great printers and publishers, and at the some time contributed both articles and stories to various newspapers. Many of these stories were repubhshed under tho title "Contes a Ninon" in 1864. Other novels (such as "Therese Raquin" in 1867) followed, and , in 1871 the 'Kougon-Mao-quart" series began with "La Fortune dcs Rougons." This series, still unfinished after more than thirty years of scarcely interrupted labour, deals with the destiny of one family, which is made the vehicle by which the sociologist details the influence of the age upon the race. In order to do this effectively M. Zpla joined the modern French "Natural- 1 ist" school, .the methods of which, on the literaiyiside at any rate, were evolved, by M. Gustave Flaubert and the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt. M. Zola saw in "naturalism" a possibility that was not open to Flaubert with his pure literary genius. M. Zola determined to make "naturalism" the scourge of the age, the literary weapon that should compel men and .. women to see with their eyes and hear with their ears the facts of the life around them — not of life as it was assumed to exist, but of life as it was. Therefore M. Zola, with infinite pains, painted, in the most voluminous, graphic, and often enough ghastly and revolting detail, French life as he saw it and as he gathered it from evidence (often, perhaps, insufficient far generalisation and misleading) which satisfied his intellect. It was a deliberate challenge to conventional art, and it was a deliberate assault on the existing structure of social life. ' He told the world ; — "These are facts that I am laying before you.. I believe them to be absolutely true. They mean social and spiritual death." Whatever you think of me or of my- woiks matters nothing. What does matter is that it is no longer open to you to say that you know nothing of. theie things. If in doing what I am doing I break the canons of art and shock the sense of decency in men and women, so much the worse for art and tho sense of decency. Art can afford to negtect nothing, and decency that is built on deliberate ignorance is valueless.' That was, we believe, M. Zola's position, or perhaps we should say, what he always wanted the world to take as his position, and what in his better moments was his true position. It is impossible, however, to deny that the pride of popularity and the delicious &ense that ho was acquiring fame and fortune also influenced him to press on along the line he hr.d chosen, and to force the note of animalism and the abandonment of dceency and reticence. The '. ast popularity of his books should have i been a warning to him as to the way his fictional prophetic outpourings were being taken by the world. Instead that popularity led him to degrade the mission of which he boasted. In spite of our desire to do full justice to M. Zola, we cannot deny that too often, to use Souths phrase, one "smells the parasite through the prophet" — the social parasite who gives the populace what they want, not what they need. , In any ca&e, he was not accepted as a new prophet. He was widely read, often enough by, the wrong people, and he was uccused of being the worst example of the cliss ox novelists who obtain readers by appealing to the lowest passions. Thinking men were appalled at the subjects that he chose, and unnaturally, and could not wholly "accept his answer: 'These things are. facts, and can only be ibolishcd by men and women grappling with them. People will not read Blue-"books, "but they will read my novels." Tennyson, it will be remembered, turned on M. Zola with fierce anger in his "Locksley Hall — Sixty Years After." The passage must be quoted again : — "Authors — essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part, Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art. Rip your brothers' vices open, strip your own foul passions bare ; Down with Reticence, down with Reverence — forward — naked — let them stare. Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer ; Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure. Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the lioiighs of ZoLiism — Forwaid, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm." i Fine lines, even if only hdlf a truth. I The^ other half Tennyson himself gives a little later in the same great poem: — "Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children souk and blacken soul and senfce in city slime?" There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet." These, and the succeeding lines, were M. Zola's main point. It was not well ,that these things should be, but they would inevitably continue to be, he urged, and so far quite lightly, while men and women shut their eyes to them. There-* fore, unreadable as M. Zola often if, we do not wish to assert that he had no right to point out the "troughs" which Tennyson named after him. But even though it is admitted that he had the right to do so, and whatever his motive may have been, we hold that he was, in fact, turning the drain into the fountain,' and that this was not the right way to call attention to the perils of bad drainage. .We cannot doubt that M. Zola's books* did a very great deal of harm— and what is more, moie harm than good. The hideous details might have been justified had. they been infused with the essential Christian spirit or with the passion' of regeneration and human sympathy ; but they were not. They move to pity and. terror and disgust, but there is no true solution of the passions aroused. Theiefore, even though we admit M. Zola's intention to have been sound and not that of the pornographer, wo ennnot acquit him wholly on Tennyson's indictment. Lord Tennyson was by no means alone in his- view. Great French and English critics on artistic grounds, and vast

masses of people on moral grounds, threw the books aside in honest disgust The man who could produce them, they honestly felt, was " both an artistic and a human monster. Then came the Dreyfus trial, and M. Zola, not a politician or statesman or soldier or man of affairs, calmly came forward and denounced with piercing energy the living lie in which the Fiench nation was enfolding itself. Li the cause of truth he deliberately sacrificed <hia sacial, his literary, and his national position. He was actually hounded out of the country, sentenced by the Courts in his absence, and deprived of his cherished decoration. In a moment men's eyes were opened. He was not a "gutter" novelist after all. Men saw that in the same way that he had sacrificed his person in the cause of truth, so he had been willing to sacrifice (and, we think, in a great measure had sacrificed) his artistic genius in the cause of truth and social salvation. Feeling from the first that he possessed the pen of a genius, he deliberately devoted it to what he deemed, however mistakenly, was the service of his country and the world in a way that he, as a great literary man, must have felt was not the way to secure enduring fame in literature, if by fame is meaut adoption among the household gods of men. M. Zola was far too great an artist not to know that the wearisome compilation of statistics and facts dealing with successive sections of society was in itself not so much an intolerable blot upon' his art as a necessary solvent of his work. ' For if the i results he aimed at were attained, the facts he compiled would cease to exist, and the structure of his work would fall away. Therefore he did not build in the bulk of his work for immortality, but strove rather to create bases from which his successors, late in time, should build. The passions of humanity, in all their height and depth, are and must be the theme of art io\ ever, but particular aspects of the^e passions (conditioned by the transitory troubles of a particular epoch), depicted for the purpose of ameliorating social life, are rather the field in which the social reformer labours than the theme of art. Yet even in the most desperate of the social novels the highest ark flashes out again and again with irresistible force. We have not space to deal here with the question that will for years be asked in connection with M. Zola's work — the question, "What is realism, and what is its placein art?" To the French novelist realism meant the aggregation of facts and the description of minute detail. To Shake.speaie it meant the slating of principles, and the application of these principles to life. To Rabelais it • teems to have been the aggregation of facto, for the purpose of throwing light oh human nature. . To Chaucer it was mere description, relevant to the development of a story. The truth seems to be that there is iio such thing as realism oj naturalism. Every artist sees Nature in his own way. It is in seeing Natuie that art comes into being, and when Rabelnis, Walt Whitman, or M. Zola were encaged in cataloguing facts they left, with manifest unsuccess, the region of literature for the realm of social science. — Spectator. •