Emile Zola | Page 4

The largest of these schemes does not
extend beyond the periphery described by the centrifugal whirl of its
central motive, and the least of the Rougon-Macquart series is of the
same epicality as the grandest. Each is bound to a thesis, but reality is
bound to no thesis. You cannot say where it begins or where it leaves
off; and it will not allow you to say precisely what its meaning or
argument is. For this reason, there are no such perfect pieces of realism
as the plays of Ibsen, which have all or each a thesis, but do not hold
themselves bound to prove it, or even fully to state it; after these, for
reality, come the novels of Tolstoy, which are of a direction so
profound because so patient of aberration and exception.
We think of beauty as implicated in symmetry, but there are distinctly
two kinds of beauty: the symmetrical and the unsymmetrical, the
beauty of the temple and the beauty of the tree. Life is not more
symmetrical than a tree, and the effort of art to give it balance and
proportion is to make it as false in effect as a tree clipped and trained to
a certain shape. The Russians and the Scandinavians alone seem to
have risen to a consciousness of this in their imaginative literature,
though the English have always unconsciously obeyed the law of our
being in their generally crude and involuntary formulations of it. In the
northern masters there is no appearance of what M. Ernest Dupuy calls
the joiner-work of the French fictionalists; and there is, in the process,
no joiner-work in Zola, but the final effect is joiner-work. It is a temple
he builds, and not a tree he plants and lets grow after he has planted the
seed, and here he betrays not only his French school but his Italian
instinct.
In his form, Zola is classic, that is regular, symmetrical, seeking the
beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the tree. If the fight in his
day had been the earlier fight between classicism and romanticism,
instead of romanticism and realism, his nature and tradition would have

ranged him on the side of classicism, though, as in the later event, his
feeling might have been romantic. I think it has been the error of
criticism not to take due account of his Italian origin, or to recognize
that he was only half French, and that this half was his superficial half.
At the bottom of his soul, though not perhaps at the bottom of his heart,
he was Italian, and of the great race which in every science and every
art seems to win the primacy when it will. The French, through the
rhetoric of Napoleon III., imposed themselves on the imagination of the
world as the representatives of the Latin race, but they are the least and
the last of the Latins, and the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin
Zola owed not only the moralistic scope of his literary ambition, but the
depth and strength of his personal conscience, capable of the austere
puritanism which underlies the so-called immoralities of his books, and
incapable of the peculiar lubricity which we call French, possibly to
distinguish it from the lubricity of other people rather than to declare it
a thing solely French. In the face of all public and private corruptions,
his soul is as Piagnone as Savonarola's, and the vices of Arrabbiati,
small and great, are always his text, upon which he preaches virtue.
II
Zola is to me so vast a theme that I can only hope here to touch his
work at a point or two, leaving the proof of my sayings mostly to the
honesty of the reader. It will not require so great an effort of his
honesty now, as it once would, to own that Zola's books, though often
indecent, are never immoral, but always most terribly, most pitilessly
moral. I am not saying now that they ought to be in every family library,
or that they could be edifyingly committed to the hands of boys and
girls; one of our first publishing houses is about to issue an edition even
of the Bible "with those passages omitted which are usually skipped in
reading aloud"; and it is always a question how much young people can
be profitably allowed to know; how much they do know, they alone can
tell. But as to the intention of Zola in his books, I have no doubt of its
righteousness. His books may be, and I suppose they often are, indecent,
but they are not immoral; they may disgust, but they will not deprave;
only those already rotten can scent corruption in them, and these, I
think, may be