A Zola Dictionary | Page 7

story of middle-class life, was followed by its sequel /Au Bonheur des Dames/, a study of life in one of the great emporiums which were beginning to crush out the small shopkeepers of Paris. /La Joie de Vivre/, that drab story of hypochondria and self-sacrifice, was succeeded by /Germinal/, the greatest, if not the only really great, novel of labour that has ever been written in any language. After /Germinal/ came /L'Oeuvre/, which deals with art life in Paris, and is in part an autobiography of the author. We now come to /La Terre/ around which the greatest controversy has raged. In parts the book is Shakespearian in its strength and insight, but it has to be admitted at once that the artistic quality of the work has been destroyed in large measure by the gratuitous coarseness which the author has thought necessary to put into it. Even allowing for the fact that the subject is the brutishness and animality of French peasant life, and admitting that the picture drawn may be a true one, the effect had been lessened by the fact that nothing has been left to the imagination. On the other hand there has, since Shakespeare, been nothing so fine as the treatment of Pere Fouan, that peasant King Lear, by his ungrateful family. It has been urged that Zola overdid the horrors of the situation and that no parent would have been so treated by his children. By a singular chance a complete answer to this objection may be found in a paragraph which appeared in the /Daily Mail/ of 18th April, 1911. A few days before, a peasant woman in France had entered her father's bedroom and struck him nine times on the head with an axe, afterwards going home to bed. The reason for the crime was that the old man two years previously had divided his property between his two daughters on condition that they paid him a monthly allowance. His elder daughter was always in arrear with her share of the pension, and, after constant altercations between father and daughter, the latter extinguished her liability in the manner indicated. Now this tragedy in real life is the actual plot of /La Terre/, which was written twenty-four years before it occurred.
In accordance with the author's usual plan, whereby a heavy book was followed by a light one, /La Terre/ was succeeded by /Le Reve/, a work at the other extreme of the literary gamut. As /La Terre/ is of the earth, earthy, so is /Le Reve/ spiritual and idyllic, the work of a man enamoured of the refined and the beautiful. It has indeed been described as the most beautiful work written in France during the whole of the nineteenth century.
/La Bete Humaine/, the next of the series, is a work of a different class, and is to the English reader the most fascinating of all Zola's novels. It deals with human passions in their elemental forms, with a background of constant interest in the railway life of Western France. The motives are always obvious and strong, a criticism which can by no means be invariably applied to French fiction.
Next appeared /L'Argent/, which is the sequel to /La Curee/ and deals with financial scandals. It was inspired by the failure of the Union Generale Bank a few years before, and is a powerful indictment of the law affecting joint-stock companies. To /L'Argent/ there succeeded /La Debacle/, that prose epic of modern war, more complete and coherent than even the best of Tolstoi. And to end all came /Le Docteur Pascal/, winding up the series on a note of pure romance.
Regarded as a literary tour de force the work is only comparable to the /Comedie Humaine/. It occupied nearly twenty-five years in writing, consists of twenty volumes containing over twelve hundred characters, and a number of words estimated by Mr. E. A. Vizetelly at two million five hundred thousand.
There can be little doubt that Zola's best work was expended on the Rougon-Macquart series. With its conclusion his zeal as a reformer began to outrun his judgment as an artist, and his later books partake more of the nature of active propaganda than of works of fiction. They comprise two series: /Les Trois Villes/ (Lourdes, Paris, Rome) and /Les Quatre Evangiles/, of which only three (Fecondite, Travail, and Verite) were written before the author's death. Politics had begun to occupy his attention, and from 1896 onwards he increasingly interested himself in the Jewish question which culminated in the Dreyfus case. His sense of justice, always keen, was outraged by the action of the authorities and on 13th January, 1898, he published his famous letter, beginning with the words /J'accuse/, a letter which altered the whole course of events in France. It is difficult now to