THE SKETCHER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2646, 30 November 1904, Page 75

THE SKETCHER.

THE STORY OF ZOLA.*

(T.P's Weekly.) In this volume the story of Zola's life and chief works is told by one who knew lim intimately, and) over an extended period. It is a story of fascinating ''interest, and it is told admirably by Mr Vizetelly. I can promise anyone who takes" it up that he will find it very difficult to lay it down again. It is, indeed, like one of Zola's own best chronicles of life and chaiacter. I propose in a couple ©f articles to give the main facts which Mr Vizetelly has brought together. I liope the result "will be to give something like a clear and consistent picture of the man and of his ideas. I. The first thing -that strikes you as you open this book is the portrait of Zola, as he was in his latest days ; it confrqnts you as it lies opposite the frontispiece. It is a face which reveals with singular clearness the character of the inner nian. A' little coar&e, and, perhaps, even a little brutal, with full and somewhat sensual lips, with a high forehead, with a large, irregular, expressive now, •with a_ short and somewhat strong beard, it might bs ike face of any ' kind of Frenchman but for one thing, and that is ths expression. Rarely have I seen a lace in which there i& an expression of such inten&e melancholy. It is the face of oi:e who broods, and "niio suffers, and ■who weeps over the insoluble problems of this mixed world. It is true that Zola profcssed-^-especially in his later years — to be an optimist, ar.d that he had an ■ ambitious gospel by which ths future of humanity was to be improved ; but the conviction and the temperament of the man were in conflict ; and the temperament wr.s that cf a pessimist. An author's temperament may be seen in his choice of subjects ; and evei3"body knows the subjects which Zola chose. Vice, crime, poverty, insanity — these are the sides of human nature which are mainly described in his books ; and no man could have sought for his subjects in such things without having the temperament of the pessimist. How came it that Zola took this sombre view of life? The first answer, of course, inu^t be sought in the direction he himself taught the world more than any other man to teke — the hereditary instincts which he inherited from ancestors. But this alone would not account for Zola. It was his life and experiences — and especially his early life and iiis early experiences — which are accountable for the man's mood. And it will be soon <=een that these experiences of his early years were enough to have turned to sadness, and even to bittern-ess, a nature a good deal more joyous and healthy than the temperament oi Zola. 11. During the fury of the Dreyfus agitation Zola was accused of Hot being a Frenchman. This charge v, as based on thp fact that his father was undoubtedly an Italian. Zola, in fact, is the name of two Italian villages. The family can be traced through several generations ; it is perhaps a somewhat bizarre clement in j jts history that a Zola became a martyr \ for the -Christian faith in Japan, and was \ actually canonised in tho lifetime of the j gieat novelist, and during the pontificate of Pius IX. The father of Eniile Zola •was born in Venice. He was one of the ! many Italians who entered the service of Napoleon at a period when the great sol- ' dier represented not autocracy so much as the liberation of the new ideas of human ' lights which the French Revolution has ibr ought to the world. Ou the exiling of ifapoleon, Francois Zola settled in France. Tho father of Zola was not spared* during ■ifche Dreyfus afrair-e ; but the inreßtigations Ttrith regard to him did not result in discrediting him. He was in many respects .the kind of man who might be the father of a novelist, though he probably never had limself any taste for literature. He * Eniile Zola, hy Ernest Viaetelly. (John

was an engineer ; but more an engineer | lie was a drtain-er of ■dreama ; of gigantic"! and ambitious projects ; in some respects ' he was the progenitor of the great contractor and the promoter of our times. At one moment ho is in Paris proposing to the Governm-ent a new scheme of fortifications ; then ha is down in Austria, creating what is said to be the first tram- i way line laid in Europe; later on he is project ing a canal af Aix which will bring the water to the old Provencal capital from the mountain streams in the gorges^ around the town. i-'o he parses through his life^-restless, impetuous, projecting ; with those fluctuations of hope and) despair, of wealth and poveity which belong to men. of such temperaments ard such careers. In other words, he is a man of romance, though the romance takes the shape of brick and mortar, of dam and parapet, and not of books. He is a man of romance also in his marriage. He is 43 — ar.d, as chionicleis declare, a thorough Italian in appearance, with a very expressive face, a delicately-fashioned mouth and piercing eyes — when he sees a young girl of 20 leaving the church in Paris, falls in love with her on the spot, and in a few weeks is married to her. The girl was of somewhat. lowly condition. She came of a peasant" stock that had migrated'to the city. This was in 1839. The next year, 1340, on Wedii-esday, April 2, Kmik Zola was born in the narrow street known as the Rue St. Joseph in Paris. The father all this time was pursuing that chequered carter of men in his profession. He was at the door of every Minister in turn ; and one day there wr.s a Minister there who was favourable to hi? schemes, and the next a new iJinister of a different party, and opposite opinions were installed in tho fame place; and the project for fortifying Paris which one Minister accepted the other was ready to lejact. But haying finally done all he could in Paris, Francois Zola set out for Aix to begin there the work of his big canal. He had at last triumphed ; the first operations had commenced ; and) then suddenly catching a chill from the deadly mistral, he became ill. But he could not stop to think of illness; went off to Marseilles on a business visit, and there, in a strange hotel, surrounded by the whirling noise of travellers coming and going, of trunks and luggage, of noisy servants — there Fiancois Zola died in the arms of his young wife. The scene was the material for one of the most moving pages in one of the novels written by the son many years afterwards — the death of Charles Grande jean in "Une Page of Amour. " 111. Zola was but seven years of age when his father died. The heritage x left to the family was almost worse than none at all. It was a heritage of litigation ■with a municipality — in other words, of great hopes and big despair ; and the end was that the poor boy was brought up in the midst of grinding poverty". The story of the Zola household is typical of French life, and in reading it one feels that sense of satisfaction and of admiration which every such story is to give, for it brings out those fine characteristics in which the French people stand at th© head of all nations of the woildi — thrift, lalaour, and family affection ; and the supreme power of the Frenchwoman to tol, to guide, and to suffer for those she loves. It was mainly by two women, indeed, that Emile Zola was brought vp — two peasant women, too — his mother and his grandmother. They kept no seivant, and did all the housework themselves. IV. The years Zola spent in the Provencal land — the land of sunshine and of exuberance — must always be kept in memoiy v/hen judging his subsequent career. That early background with him — as with all of vs — was the factor that addod to the glory of success or tho gloom of failure, poverty, suffering, amid other and different scenes. Zola himself has given in his own eloquent fashion a picture of the kind of life he and his bchool fellows led in this beautiful sunny southern land ; his experiences are the material out of which he vxcte gome of his most beautiful gas-

sages. But amid all the scenery and the glories and joys of open-air liie, the Zola family lived under the shadow of black and daily-deepening poverty. The lawsuits went on year after year after the fashion of such heritage of woe, the rent was hard to meet, and) the family ever moved on from one squalid dwelling to one more squalid still. At la&t the struggle to live in Aix had to be abandoned as hopeless. Zola's mother wont to Paris to J seek relief from somd of the friends her husband had left there ; and while he was at college, and scill dieaming of futuie literary glories, the boy was brought down to reality by this letter — one of the sad letters that no boys now and then receive from their parents : , ''It is no longer possible to continue living at Aix. Sell the little furniture that is left. Toil Mill in any case obtain sufficient money to enable you to take third- . class tickets to Paris for yourself ana your grandfather. Manage it as soon as ; possible. I shall be waiting for yon." ( It was thus that Emile Zola entered the '■ capital where be was afterwards to con- ' quier so great a position. j V - ! The desire of the mother to educate the boy persisted, and lie was sent to the ' Lycee St. Louis. He worktd apparently hard ; but his success was in different. He was anxious to gee jis soon as possible that degree which is the necessary pu&sport in (France to public employment, »o as to be ! able to help his mother. He parsed well 1 in science but. curiously enough, this great litterateur of the iuuue utterly broke down , in letter. He post-dated Charlemagne's ' death by 500 years, he w:;s ufteily igno- j rant of German ; he got a big nought in cor.sequence, and was plucked. Zola then went to Marseilles ; here again he was plucked, more disastrously even than in Paris ; and so lie returned, a double failure, to the sad home ; nobody had any faith in him, he seemed destined to be a burden rather than a help to his mother.^ He got, thiough the influence of a friend ot his mother's, a clerkship at £2 8s the month ; and thus it was that he started his career. Zola was then living in a i garret higher than the ordinary garret t even ; it was in a room superimposed, as ' it were, on the roof ; the leads of the i roof were a sort of terrace. It was from ,' these leads that Zola gazed on Paris un- J dterneatb. ; Soon after this his mother and he se- j parated for the first time ; she ' went to ! a cheap 'boardinghouse, eking out her j subsistence by her needle, at which she ' was clever, and Zola went to live in a j glass cage on the roor of a house — a spot | so modest and so remote that it was said t to have harboured Bernardin de St. Pierre J in the Reign of Terror. He was by this j time also out of the small situation on ; which he had started, and was, in fact, i without any means of subsistence whatever. He had to pile all his clothes on his bed at night; he shivered through the long hours, uncheered by a fire ; Jie wrote j ambitious epics with the stump of a pen- ' cil ; he sent everything of value to the 1 Mont ' d) 3 Piete ; he borrowed trifles ; he [ lived often through a day on a penn'orth ; of bread and a penn'orth of cheese. He : drank only water ; he gave up smoking ba- ! cause -he could not afford the price of even ' the cheapest bit of tobacco ; one of his i greatest anxieties every day was to get a ! few halfpence that wore necessary to buy •' a candle for his night's work at Ms poems, j It is hard to say if one sinks in the gutter | when he has reached the last possible ' depths of th-3 abyss ; and even the scenes jusc described did not end the story of , Zola's disaster and miseries. He lived in j the end in a house so disorderly, inhabited ; by people so vicious, that the police were ' constantly intervening. , VI. I And yet, as anybody who knows Pans ■ can realise, the inferno was not alto^ther ■without, its gleam of light There" is a. touching little passage "in one of Zola's j woiks {"La Confession de Claude") which. ; tells of one such gleam : j "I thought of ray last excursion to Fon- I tenoy-aux-Roses with the loved one, the good fairy, and my twentieth year. Sprint- i turn, was buckling into birth., the path was ' bordered by larg; fields of violets. ... I She leant, on my arm, languishing with love for the sweet odc-ur of the flowers. Deep silence fell from the heavens, and so faint was the sowid of our kisses' that not I a bird in all the hedges showed .■signs of | fear - • • . "We ascended to the woods ! of Verrieres, and there, in the grass under the soft, fresh foliage, we discovered some tiny violets. . . . Directly I found a I fresh one I carried it to her.- She bought J it of me, and the price. I exacted was a i kiss. . . . And now amid' the hubbub cf Uie Paris markets I thought of all these things, of all that happiness. ... I remembereel my good fairy, now dead and gone, and the little bouquet of dry violets' which I still preserve in a drawer. When I returned home I counted their withered stems ; there were twenty, and over my lips there passed the ge"ntle warcnth of ! my loved one's twenty kisses." i But Hunger knocks at the door, and Love flies out ; and Zola, in the winter of 1861, had to face depths of privation so great as to leave no possibility for any sensation but that of hunger, and terror, and pain. He had to live for days on bread alone, which he steeped in some kind of oil ; and once, when lie had been ?>6 hours even without that kind of food, I ho took off his coat, and gave it to his female companion to foa taken to the pawnshop. He Las given a terrible description cf that hour of his agony: j "It was freezing. I went home at the run, perspiring the while with fear and anguish. Two days later my trousers followed my coat, and I was bare. I wrapped myself in a blanket, covered myself as well as possible, and took such exercise as I could in my rooxn to prevent my limbs from stiffening. When anybody came to see me I jumped into bed, pretending that I, was indisjjosed."

Such, then, was the boyhood of Zola. It will be ,-ecn that it wa,s one v hick, brought him fac to face with life m its, most revolting and its most tragk realities:. It would have been impossible for liny man, e\en of the raosi sanguine temperament, to have through such experiences and i>o have been able <_ver afterwards to think of life as a joyous, as a romantic, thing. The impatience which Zola showed with the school of sentiment and poetr\ — the almost abnormal love he revealed lor the morbid, the vicious, the squalid — all these things w ere germinated in his mind in the garrets in which he lived in the long boais of semi-starvaion, amid the awful companions whom he had' made when he and hui-ger were companions. Zola, in short, was the poet hmreate of Hanger, of Revolt, of something like Anarchy, because in his own person he had been one of the submerged—of the lf/st souls that err out from the dark pit of want tn the unlistcning stars. — T. P.