heroism,
his martyry, and we may smile at certain turns of rhetoric in the
immortal letter accusing the French nation of intolerable wrong, just as,
in our smug Anglo-Saxon conceit, we laughed at the procedure of the
emotional courts which he compelled to take cognizance of the
immense misdeed other courts had as emotionally committed. But the
event, however indirectly and involuntarily, was justice which no other
people in Europe would have done, and perhaps not any people of this
more enlightened continent.
The success of Zola as a literary man has its imperfections, its phases
of defeat, but his success as a humanist is without flaw. He triumphed
as wholly and as finally as it has ever been given a man to triumph, and
he made France triumph with him. By his hand, she added to the laurels
she had won in the war of American Independence, in the wars of the
Revolution for liberty and equality, in the campaigns for Italian Unity,
the imperishable leaf of a national acknowledgement of national error.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Emile Zola
Emile Zola
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