Zola

New Zealand Tablet, 16 July 1908, Page 9

Zola

Some time ago we recorded how the remains of Zola —the literary apostle of a very accentuated form of the vileness of the monkey-house and the sty —were transferred by a vote of the French Parliament to a place in the national valhalla, the crypt of the desecrated Church of St. Genevieve. This official crowning of pornography was, however, strenuously opposed by a sane and respectable minority of the Deputies. And the ' Pilot ' (Boston) takes occasion therefrom to opine that the ' honor ' thus bestowed upon Zola is not necessarily of a permanent character. ' The body of Rousseau,' says our able Boston contemporary, ' was conveyed there in triumph in the days of the Revolution, but his tomb was presently pillaged, as was also the tomb of Voltaire. The remains of Mirabeau were laid there in great pomp—but not to rest. The public changed their minds about him and flung his body out to make room for that of Marat. Then, a little - later, people changed their minds about Marat, and.his dust, in turn, was thrown into a sewer.' * Kings and peoples sometimes dance and sing to-day around their golden calves, and crunch them beneath their iron heels to-morrow. There is- a good deal of human nature in kings,

whether it be King John or King Demos. In his ' Arabian Society in the Middle Ages,' Lane quotes as follows from an entry in the register of Haroon Er-Rasheed : ' Four hundred thousand pieces of gold, the price of a dress of honor for Jaafar, the son of Yahya, the Wezeer.' A few days later the same register bore the following entry : ' Ten keerats, the price of naphtha and reeds, for burning the body of Jaafar, the son of Yahya. 1 A fate like unto that of Jaafar, the son of Yahya, may yet befall the corpse of Zola, as it befell the !>onedust of Marat and Mirabeau. ' Hudibras ' has it that . A turnstile is more certain - * Than, in events of war, Dame Fortune . . . For though Dame Fortune seem to smile, And^ leer uppn him for a while, She'll after shew him, in the nick Of all his glories, a dog-trick,'

The favor shown by the atheistic Radical-Socialism of the New Revolution in France to the unmentionable vileness of Zolaism may yet prove as fickle as the turnstile Dame Fortune, and may play him the dog-trick that the atheism of the Old Revolution paid to two of its demi-gods. History has a trick of repeating^ itself.