Emile Zola | Page 7

realize that
anxiety for sincerity and truth, springing from the sense of pity and
justice, makes indecency a condition of portraying human nature so
that it may look upon its image and be ashamed.
The moralist working imaginatively has always had to ask himself how
far he might go in illustration of his thesis, and he has not hesitated, or
if he has hesitated, he has not failed to go far very far. Defoe went far,
Richardson went far, Ibsen has gone far, Tolstoy has gone far, and if

Zola went farther than any of these, still he did not go so far as the
immoralists have gone in the portrayal of vicious things to allure where
he wished to repel. There is really such a thing as high motive and such
a thing as low motive, though the processes are often so bewilderingly
alike in both cases. The processes may confound us, but there is no
reason why we should be mistaken as to motive, and as to Zola's
motive I do not think M. Chaumie was mistaken. As to his methods,
they by no means always reflected his intentions. He fancied himself
working like a scientist who has collected a vast number of specimens,
and is deducing principles from them. But the fact is, he was always
working like an artist, seizing every suggestion of experience and
observation, turning it to the utmost account, piecing it out by his
invention, building it up into a structure of fiction where its origin was
lost to all but himself, and often even to himself. He supposed that he
was recording and classifying, but he was creating and vivifying.
Within the bounds of his epical scheme, which was always factitious,
every person was so natural that his characters seemed like the
characters of biography rather than of fiction. One does not remember
them as one remembers the characters of most novelists. They had their
being in a design which was meant to represent a state of things, to
enforce an opinion of certain conditions; but they themselves were free
agencies, bound by no allegiance to the general frame, and not
apparently acting in behalf of the author, but only from their own
individuality. At the moment of reading, they make the impression of
an intense reality, and they remain real, but one recalls them as one
recalls the people read of in last weeks's or last year's newspaper. What
Zola did was less to import science and its methods into the region of
fiction, than journalism and its methods; but in this he had his will only
so far as his nature of artist would allow. He was no more a journalist
than he was a scientist by nature; and, in spite of his intentions and in
spite of his methods, he was essentially imaginative and involuntarily
creative.
VI
To me his literary history is very pathetic. He was bred if not born in
the worship of the romantic, but his native faith was not proof against

his reason, as again his reason was not proof against his native faith. He
preached a crusade against romanticism, and fought a long fight with it,
only to realize at last that he was himself too romanticistic to succeed
against it, and heroically to own his defeat. The hosts of romanticism
swarmed back over him and his followers, and prevailed, as we see
them still prevailing. It was the error of the realists whom Zola led, to
suppose that people like truth in fiction better than falsehood; they do
not; they like falsehood best; and if Zola had not been at heart a
romanticist, he never would have cherished his long delusion, he never
could have deceived with his vain hopes those whom he persuaded to
be realistic, as he himself did not succeed in being.
He wished to be a sort of historiographer writing the annals of a family,
and painting a period; but he was a poet, doing far more than this, and
contributing to creative literature as great works of fiction as have been
written in the epic form. He was a paradox on every side but one, and
that was the human side, which he would himself have held far
worthier than the literary side. On the human side, the civic side, he
was what he wished to be, and not what any perversity of his elements
made him. He heard one of those calls to supreme duty, which from
time to time select one man and not another for the response which
they require; and he rose to that duty with a grandeur which had all the
simplicity possible to a man of French civilization. We may think that
there was something a little too dramatic in the manner of his