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EMILE ZOLA
by William Dean Howells

In these times of electrical movement, the sort of construction in the
moral world for which ages were once needed, takes place almost
simultaneously with the event to be adjusted in history, and as true a
perspective forms itself as any in the past. A few weeks after the death
of a poet of such great epical imagination, such great ethical force, as
Emile Zola, we may see him as clearly and judge him as fairly as
posterity alone was formerly supposed able to see and to judge the
heroes that antedated it. The present is always holding in solution the
elements of the future and the past, in fact; and whilst Zola still lived,
in the moments of his highest activity, the love and hate, the
intelligence and ignorance, of his motives and his work were as evident,
and were as accurately the measure of progressive and retrogressive
criticism, as they will be hereafter in any of the literary periods to come.
There will never be criticism to appreciate him more justly, to
depreciate him more unjustly, than that of his immediate
contemporaries. There will never be a day when criticism will be of one
mind about him, when he will no longer be a question, and will have
become a conclusion. A conclusion is an accomplished fact, something
finally ended, something dead; and the extraordinary vitality of Zola,

when he was doing the things most characteristic of him, forbids the
notion of this in his case. Like every man who embodies an ideal, his
individuality partook of what was imperishable in that ideal. Because
he believed with his whole soul that fiction should be the representation,
and in no measure the misrepresentation, of life, he will live as long as
any history of literature survives. He will live as a question, a dispute,
an affair of inextinguishable debate; for the two principles of the human
mind, the love of the natural and the love of the unnatural, the real and
the unreal, the truthful and the fanciful, are inalienable and
indestructible.
I
Zola embodied his ideal inadequately, as every man who embodies an
ideal must. His realism was his creed, which he tried to make his deed;
but, before his fight was ended, and almost before he began to forebode
it a losing fight, he began to feel and to say (for to feel, with that most
virtuous and voracious spirit, implied saying) that he was too much a
romanticist by birth and tradition, to exemplify realism in his work. He
could not be all to the cause he honored that other men were--men like
Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and Tolstoy, and Galdos
and Valdes--because his intellectual youth had been nurtured on the
milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time. He grew up in the
day when the great novelists and poets were romanticists, and what he
came to abhor he had first adored. He was that pathetic paradox, a
prophet who cannot practise what he preaches, who cannot build his
doctrine into the edifice of a living faith. Zola was none the less, but all
the more, a poet in this. He conceived of reality poetically and always
saw his human documents, as he began early to call them, ranged in the
form of an epic poem. He fell below the greatest of the Russians, to
whom alone he was inferior, in imagining that the affairs of men group
themselves strongly about a central interest to which they constantly
refer, and after whatever excursions definitely or definitively return. He
was not willingly an epic poet, perhaps, but he was an epic poet,
nevertheless; and the imperfection of his realism began with the
perfection of his form. Nature is sometimes dramatic, though never on
the hard and fast terms of the theatre, but she is almost never epic; and

Zola was always epic. One need only think over his books and his
subjects to be convinced of this: "L'Assommoir" and drunkenness;
"Nana" and harlotry; "Germinale" and strikes; "L'Argent" and money
getting and losing in all its branches; "Pot-Bouille" and the cruel
squalor of poverty; "La Terre" and the life of the peasant; "Le Debacle"
and the decay of imperialism.