ZOLA'S NEW BOOK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11346, 14 April 1900, Page 6 (Supplement)

ZOLA'S NEW BOOK.

Tire last issue of the Review of Reviews contains a notice of the remarkable book, entitled "Pecondite," just published by M. Zola. We quote some passages of the review:—

This is a book with a gospel in ft—a gospel of which M. Zola is the enthusiastic apostle. But it is a gospel of a pagan sort—the gospel of unlimited propagation. "Increase and multiply "is its Alpha and Omega. Never before has the huge English family been so gorgeously idealised as by this Frenchman, who has no children of his own, but who is the best known writer of a nation whose ideal menage: seldom contains more than two children. Whether it was M. Zola's stay in England which converted him to a belief in tho saving virtue of large families, we know not. But he has all the zeal of a neophyte, and lie rages against Maltlius and the neoMalthusians' witili the rampant fury of a fire-breathing dragon.

ANTI-MALTHUS IN EXOELSIS. It is a very strong book in more ways than one ; a quite untranslatable book for the most part, as might be imagined from its theme. For in order to laud and glorify the beatific Madonna he finds it necessary to scarify and roast in the furnace of his fury all those who shrink from the pains and responsibility of maternity, while grasping greedily at the roses and rapture of conjugal bliss. ' M. Zola's book is a " barbaric yawp " in favour of life infinitely multiplying itself with the divine improvidence of the aphis or the herring. It is an exultant psalm chanted at the topjjf liis lustv voice in praise of sex as the propagative, creative force of life.'. Hitherto novelists have dallied with sex, using it chiefly for the purpose of marrying the wayward heroine and the ill-starred hero." In "Fecondite," M. Zola uses sex not as the inspiration of the lover, but as the creative force of the parent. It is life rather than love that lie sings, and a purposely sterilized love is to him the supreme abomination. In this M. Zola is very much in accord with the Catholic Church, although never such a sermon against nro-Malthusiaii-ism and all its paraphernalia of checks could ever be delivered from a Christian pulpit. IN PRAISE OF PARENTAGE.

And' in "Fecondite," in 750 closely printed pages ho sings the canticle of a whole-hearted—nay, whole-souled—union of lovo between man and woman. But at the same time he pronounces the most terrible indictment, the most appalling curse, upon those who are untrue to their natures—upon the man who shrinks from fatherhood, and the woman who shrinks from motherhood, who does not- see the glory that may bo hers in bringing children into the world to swell the current of the world's force's.—not for evil, but for good. " Higher than the pleasure which passes like a tempest, there dwells an eternal human joy, the sovereign fact of creative love; one more human being, not more misery, but more force, more truth, more justice. And the creative love of that human being, of that living atom thrown in amongst the rest, is awful and sacred, of incalculable, it may be of supreme, importance." HIS IDEAL COUPLE.

To this end is drawn the idealist picture of Mathieu and Marianne, the husband who loves and respects his wife, and the wife who loves her husband— the wife with the soft eyes, "d'amanto eb do mere" (oh, Untranslatable words!), whose "whole countenance of love and tenderness spoke of health, beauty, cheerfulness, duties fulfilled and the calm certainty of loving well and loving life. . . . "Mcltherhood, instead of being with her destructive, had given her a fulness of form, a firmness and solidity of limb, all the brilliant beauty of the mother." ■ Mathieu and Marianne, although ."superbly, divinely improvident" in consenting to' have one moro child when they already hardly know how-to provide for the four which they have, yet continue to prosper, " thanks to their power of loving, of being good, of being healthy, of being strong." THE GLORIFICATION OF IMPROVIDENCE.

For there are to be no drones in Zola's regenerate world. The man must work to provide for his children, and the wife has no time to weep and will not want to, with her children to nurse and train up. What the Malthusians would call an act of improvidence, and Zola calls an " net of faith in life, a hymn of praise to Fecondite," | turns out to be a blessing to husband, wife, arid child. ' Let man do his part, let woman do hers, he says ; Nature will provide the rest. Mathicu, originally employed in Paris, and living in the country from economy, in a few years leaves the ardent city," and cultivates the land. Friends laugh at him, neighbours jeer, but in the end he is triumphantly vindicated. As each child is born, more land is added to his portion. Each child has its inheritance, as it were, when it comes into the world. Each child is welcomed and loved ; each birth is a rejoicing ; each child is a new delight, a new bond of union between father and mother, and grows up a useful member of society. And there are 13 of them in all, and all turn out well, though they are not moro ideally perfect than other people's children. They marry and have largo families of their own, and one even emigrates. to the French Senegal, to help to found a new France in a new land. Mathieu and Marianne live to see their descendants gathered round them to the third and fourth generation lovely old age, honoured and honourable. Tim closing scene of the hook, representing the reunion of the whole colossal family on the sixtieth anniversary of the marriage of its founders, is a truly magnificent and dramatic ending to a book which, with all its imperfections and all that may be urged against it, is such a book as hardly comes into the world more than once or twice in a century. For children it is not written ; it is a serious study of a serious question daily becoming more absorbingly important, both for the older civilisations of Europe and the younger populations of the colonies. THE DEPOPULATION QUESTION.

After all, the whole discussion may bo resolved into the homely old phrase, " She that rocks the cradle rules the world," For what shall we do when our women refuse to be mothers '! Our race is sapped, that is all. Hut as the lot of the lovingly-longed-for child is happy, so is that of tho many unloved, unwanted children terrible. A curse is on them from their births. Every cspect of the question— it Malthusianism, call it the population or the depopulation question, or, as Zola himself would call it, the question of life and death—is discussed in this most wonderful, most earnest, and most remarkable book. But when we turn from the picture of ideal wedded love to the other homes which are described, the idealist becomes the realist, and ifiero is a merciless rending of the veils of many married lives, a pitiless exposure of the methods resorted to for the artificial limitation of the family, for the defrauding of Nature, who will one day surely revenge herself. Zola, whose mouthpiece is the old family physician who goes everywhere, and knows everything, has ill abhorrence every sort of " fraud," which he condemns as the fount of all ill. It is not only Paris that he indicts in burning words—" that fast-living city, rushing to its night of sterility ;" it is the "murderous joy which kills the child "—an evil not confined to Paris. "Sordid calculations were perverted into fine sentiments ; selfishness into wise forethought; cowardly shrinking from life into honest citizenship." No words has he too strong to condemn the married couples wilfully childless.

THE NOTE OF A MORIBUND SOCIETY. This is tho cry littered by all moribund society, "the cry which announces the speedy end of the notion." What ails France now that she can hardly maintain her position among the nations '( Catholicism? No; it is not priestcraft which is eating the heart out of France. What ails France, what saps her vitals, is what ails Australia, and what will undermine her too in turn. It is the continual cheating of Nature, tho resort to artificial means to combine the endless gratification of passion with the avoidance of the holy duties of parenthood, tho endless repression of that life, that force, by which alone new force can be infused into the nation, by which alone a people can grow and expand. >, To defraud Nature, says Zola, undermines tho defrauders both morally and eventually physically. Tho wife, instead

of being an object of love and adoration, becomes a mere thing of pleasure ; the husband becomes corrupt, while the chance child that no precautions can possibly prevent from sometimes interrupting the debasing joys of it* parents has its life blighted by the unnatural conditions in which ft lias been forced on the world. But Nature is not to be cheated for long ; she prepares a revenge, and it is apt to be a terrible revenge. '"?-. WHAT CAN BE DONE?

• And is there no solution ? Will nothing still the cry of the unborn children, of the children strangled at' their birth, or born merely to die miserable deaths ? ' Truly there remains still an immense work of social salvation to bo done. . Before our Social Purity Leagues, our National Vigilance Associations, our Rescue Homes,, stands the prosaic need of arousing the .police to a sense of .their duty. That they are unaware of the existence of these sinks of vice is a supposition the absurdity of which is obvious, They know, but they prefer to shut their eyes and allow the mischief to continue. "Laws to save tho nation," cries Zola. " All such restricted remedies as are at present afforded' by philanthropy are illusory ; they are powerless to heal tho gaping wound in the nation's side." But can a nation bo saved by laws such as these, any more than it can be' made moral by Act of Parliament? It is to our women that we must look for deliveranco from the cur«e which has already overtaken France, and which is galloping to overtake us also. When women turn and deny their own natures, when they become perverted so that they refuse what every natural instinct almost from their cradles teaches them to welcome,, what can any one do, of what avail is any legislation 1 If there is a time for all thing's, then surely is the time to fold the hands in blank despair.. ■ •,, , ,

"HOW TO COMBAT THE EVIL." "To combat tTie evil," is the writer's final conclusion, " the frightful decrease of births, death blowing in hurricanes upon young children, there exists only one drastic measure—to guard against it." Solely by preventive measures can we " arrest the fearful hecatomb of new-born children, that ever eppn wound in the nation's side, exhausting it. killing it, day by day." Help the woman, says Zola ; let her be confined in quietness and secret, if she so desire, without anything else being asked of her than that she shall be a mother ; nurse and care for both mother and child during convalescence, and the long months of nursing, " till the day when, the child being finally launched on the world, the woman may again be a healthy and vigorous wife." To this end lie would have founded a great number of institutions, refuges for women before their children are born, private maternity hospitals, convalescent homes ; to this end he would have protective legislation, and assistance for them during the nursing period. In this way alone shall we save the life of to-morrow. Est-ce qu'il y aura jamais trop de vie ? Shall there ever be too much life ? AN AUSTRALIAN STRIKE AGAINST MOTHERHOOD.

The Sydney Bulletin recently called attention to (his phase of the question in an article which certainly did not lack plainness of speech. According to our contemporary, the women of one of the most famous and prosperous of all British colonies have practically gone on strike against motherhood. . It says : —

"Mr. Coghlan, the New South Wales statesman, in his newly-published book, 'Study in Statistics,' shows that in New South Wales in 1885, 112,546 women, between the ages of 18 and 50, produced as many children as 165,767 women of the same ages in 1898. In other words, the average birth-rate has declined about one-third. And this is true of the entire Continent. From Maoriland,' he writes, 'comes the cry that the children are not sufficiently numerous to fill the schools ; while m Victoria there must be a like state of affairs, seeing that there aro now a less number of children under 10 years of ago than in 1891.'' The number of children born to .women of Australian birth is about 3.5 ; in France, it is 3.4. A generation ago the average was 5.31. Add to this Mr. Coghlan's startling statement that between 1893-8, in New South Wales, 28,145 first births out of 56.163, were due to ante-nuptial conception. Of these 28,145, 14,779, or 26 per cent., were illegitimate ; 27 per cent, of the marriages took place after the bride was enceinte."

This is very serious. New South Wales is a newly-settled country, where acres are many and human beings are few. Yet the child-crop is falling otf. The birth-rate is dwindling. The cause is not austerity of life. The standard of morality, to judge from other statistics quoted by the Bulletin, is not that which would be fixed in a community that was ascetic either from temperament or conviction. Yet the figures above quoted show that while the congress of the sexes increases and multiplies, the result in the shape of visible infants diminishes year by year. M. Zola lays his finger upon the symptoms of the malady which keeps stationary the population of France. It is rather startling to be told that the same causes are in full operation in New South Wales,

THE REAL DIFFICULTY. Tho difficulty is that the whole question of the multiplication of the species has been left to blind instinct. Reason has been shut, out from the region where, if there be such a thing as moral responsibility, it ought to have been supreme. It is quite impossible to accept M. Zola's doctrine of Divine improvidence. He has himself shown us *,he reverse of that medal, and it is sufficiently repulsive. It is a mistake to regard the excessive multiplication of the human being as a supreme good in itself. Bad though it may be to have selfish couples marrying to enjoy the pleasures of wedlock without facing the risks and burdens of parentage, it is not without its compensations. It is well that those in whom no mother instinct lurks should not perpetuate their race, What is wanted is not litters of children as numerous as aphides, but as many children as can be well-bred, decently clothed, properly fed and carefully educated. Every pair who have married and have reached a sufficiently lofty moral level to make this question a matter of careful thought, owe it to their species to multiply to the maximum at which they can provide physical and moral nutriment for their offspring. For parents are the recruiting sergeants of progress. If_ the educated and refined, the thoughtful and the cultured, rigidly limit their families, while the swine herds and the tramps increase and multiply without stint, the future will belong to their progeny. Their teeming cradles will swamp the output of tho others. The duty of not having too many children is being recognised. But the correlative duty as to the obligation of bavin? the maximum number you can properly provide for has never yet been insisted upon.