Emile Zola | Page 6

sense of what was wrong and false and bad. His
tolerance is less than Tolstoy's, because his resignation is not so great;
it is for the weak sinners and not for the strong, while Tolstoy's, with
that transcendent vision of his race, pierces the bounds where the shows

of strength and weakness cease and become of a solidarity of error in
which they are one. But the ethics of his work, like Tolstoy's, were
always carrying over into his life. He did not try to live poverty and
privation and hard labor, as Tolstoy does; he surrounded himself with
the graces and the luxuries which his honestly earned money enabled
him to buy; but when an act of public and official atrocity disturbed the
working of his mind and revolted his nature, he could not rest again till
he had done his best to right it.
IV The other day Zola died (by a casualty which one fancies he would
have liked to employ in a novel, if he had thought of it), and the man
whom he had befriended at the risk of all he had in the world, his
property, his liberty, his life itself, came to his funeral in disguise,
risking again all that Zola had risked, to pay the last honors to his
incomparable benefactor.
It was not the first time that a French literary man had devoted himself
to the cause of the oppressed, and made it his personal affair, his charge,
his inalienable trust. But Voltaire's championship of the persecuted
Protestant had not the measure of Zola's championship of the
persecuted Jew, though in both instances the courage and the
persistence of the vindicator forced the reopening of the case and
resulted in final justice. It takes nothing from the heroism of Voltaire to
recognize that it was not so great as the heroism of Zola, and it takes
nothing from the heroism of Zola to recognize that it was effective in
the only country of Europe where such a case as that of Dreyfus would
have been reopened; where there was a public imagination generous
enough to conceive of undoing an act of immense public cruelty. At
first this imagination was dormant, and the French people conceived
only of punishing the vindicator along with victim, for daring to accuse
their processes of injustice. Outrage, violence, and the peril of death
greeted Zola from his fellow-citizens, and from the authorities
ignominy, fine, and prison. But nothing silenced or deterred him, and,
in the swift course of moral adjustment characteristic of our time, an
innumerable multitude of those who were ready a few years ago to rend
him in pieces joined in paying tribute to the greatness of his soul, at the
grave which received his body already buried under an avalanche of

flowers. The government has not been so prompt as the mob, but with
the history of France in mind, remembering how official action has
always responded to the national impulses in behalf of humanity and
justice, one cannot believe that the representatives of the French people
will long remain behind the French people in offering reparation to the
memory of one of the greatest and most heroic of French citizens.
It is a pity for the government that it did not take part in the obsequies
of Zola; it would have been well for the army, which he was falsely
supposed to have defamed, to have been present to testify of the real
service and honor he had done it. But, in good time enough, the
reparation will be official as well as popular, and when the monument
to Zola, which has already risen in the hearts of his countrymen, shall
embody itself in enduring marble or perennial bronze, the army will be
there to join in its consecration.
V There is no reason why criticism should affect an equal hesitation.
Criticism no longer assumes to ascertain an author's place in literature.
It is very well satisfied if it can say something suggestive concerning
the nature and quality of his work, and it tries to say this with as little
of the old air of finality as it can manage to hide its poverty in.
After the words of M. Chaumie at the funeral, "Zola's life work was
dominated by anxiety for sincerity and truth, an anxiety inspired by his
great feelings of pity and justice," there seems nothing left to do but to
apply them to the examination of his literary work. They unlock the
secret of his performance, if it is any longer a secret, and they afford its
justification in all those respects where without them it could not be
justified. The question of immorality has been set aside, and the
indecency has been admitted, but it remains for us to