Emile Zola | Page 5

deceived by effluvia from within themselves.

It is to the glory of the French realists that they broke, one and all, with
the tradition of the French romanticists that vice was or might be
something graceful, something poetic, something gay, brilliant,
something superior almost, and at once boldly presented it in its true
figure, its spiritual and social and physical squalor. Beginning with
Flaubert in his "Madame Bovary," and passing through the whole line
of their studies in morbid anatomy, as the "Germinie Lacerteux" of the
Goncourts, as the "Bel-Ami" of Maupassant, and as all the books of
Zola, you have portraits as veracious as those of the Russians, or those
of Defoe, whom, indeed, more than any other master, Zola has made
me think of in his frankness. Through his epicality he is Defoe's
inferior, though much more than his equal in the range and implication
of his work.
A whole world seems to stir in each of his books; and, though it is a
world altogether bent for the time being upon one thing, as the actual
world never is, every individual in it seems alive and true to the fact. M.
Brunetiere says Zola's characters are not true to the French fact; that his
peasants, working-men, citizens, soldiers are not French, whatever else
they may be; but this is merely M. Brunetiere's word against Zola's
word, and Zola had as good opportunities of knowing French life as Mr.
Brunetiere, whose aesthetics, as he betrays them in his instances, are of
a flabbiness which does not impart conviction. Word for word, I should
take Zola's word as to the fact, not because I have the means of
affirming him more reliable, but because I have rarely known the
observant instinct of poets to fail, and because I believe that every
reader will find in himself sufficient witness to the veracity of Zola's
characterizations. These, if they are not true to the French fact, are true
to the human fact; and I should say that in these the reality of Zola,
unreal or ideal in his larger form, his epicality, vitally resided. His
people live in the memory as entirely as any people who have ever
lived; and, however devastating one's experience of them may be, it
leaves no doubt of their having been.
III
It is not much to say of a work of literary art that it will survive as a

record of the times it treats of, and I would not claim high value for
Zola's fiction because it is such a true picture of the Second Empire in
its decline; yet, beyond any other books have the quality that alone
makes novels historical. That they include everything, that they do
justice to all sides and phases of the period, it would be fatuous to
expect, and ridiculous to demand. It is not their epical character alone
that forbids this; it is the condition of every work of art, which must
choose its point of view, and include only the things that fall within a
certain scope. One of Zola's polemical delusions was to suppose that a
fiction ought not to be selective, and that his own fictions were not
selective, but portrayed the fact without choice and without limitation.
The fact was that he was always choosing, and always limiting. Even a
map chooses and limits, far more a picture. Yet this delusion of Zola's
and its affirmation resulted in no end of misunderstanding. People said
the noises of the streets, which he supposed himself to have given with
graphophonic fulness and variety, were not music; and they were quite
right. Zola, as far as his effects were voluntary, was not giving them
music; he openly loathed the sort of music they meant just as he openly
loathed art, and asked to be regarded as a man of science rather than an
artist. Yet, at the end of the ends, he was an artist and not a man of
science. His hand was perpetually selecting his facts, and shaping them
to one epical result, with an orchestral accompaniment, which, though
reporting the rudest noises of the street, the vulgarest, the most
offensive, was, in spite of him, so reporting them that the result was
harmony.
Zola was an artist, and one of the very greatest, but even before and
beyond that he was intensely a moralist, as only the moralists of our
true and noble time have been. Not Tolstoy, not Ibsen himself, has
more profoundly and indignantly felt the injustice of civilization, or
more insistently shown the falsity of its fundamental pretensions. He
did not make his books a polemic for one cause or another; he was far
too wise and sane for that; but when he began to write them they
became alive with his