Complete Works of Emile Zola (1849 page)

It seemed to me, I remember, that I found out as never before when, in its turn, “Fecondite” began the work of crowning the edifice. “Fecondite” is physiological, whereas “Rome” is not, whereas “Verite” likewise is not; yet these three productions joined hands at a given moment to fit into the lock of the mystery the key of my meditation. They came to the same thing, to the extent of permitting me to read into them together the same precious lesson. This lesson may not, barely stated, sound remarkable; yet without being in possession of it I should have ventured on none of these remarks. “The matter with” Zola then, so far as it goes, was that, as the imagination of the artist is in the best cases not only clarified but intensified by his equal possession of Taste (deserving here if ever the old-fashioned honour of a capital) so when he has lucklessly never inherited that auxiliary blessing the imagination itself inevitably breaks down as a consequence. There is simply no limit, in fine, to the misfortune of being tasteless; it does not merely disfigure the surface and the fringe of your performance — it eats back into the very heart and enfeebles the sources of life. When you have no taste you have no discretion, which is the conscience of taste, and when you have no discretion you perpetrate books like “Rome,” which are without intellectual modesty, books like “Fecondite,” which are without a sense of the ridiculous, books like “Verite,” which are without the finer vision of human experience.

It is marked that in each of these examples the deficiency has been directly fatal. No stranger doom was ever appointed for a man so plainly desiring only to be just than the absurdity of not resting till he had buried the felicity of his past, such as it was, under a great flat leaden slab. “Verite” is a plea for science, as science, to Zola, is all truth, the mention of any other kind being mere imbecility; and the simplification of the human picture to which his negations and exasperations have here conducted him was not, even when all had been said, credible in advance. The result is amazing when we consider that the finer observation is the supposed basis of all such work. It is not that even here the author has not a queer idealism of his own; this idealism is on the contrary so present as to show positively for the falsest of his simplifications. In “Fecondite” it becomes grotesque, makes of the book the most muscular mistake of sense probably ever committed. Where was the judgment of which experience is supposed to be the guarantee when the perpetrator could persuade himself that the lesson he wished in these pages to convey could be made immediate and direct, chalked, with loud taps and a still louder commentary, the sexes and generations all convoked, on the blackboard of the “family sentiment?”

I have mentioned, however, all this time but one of his categories. The second consists of such things as “La Fortune des Rougon” and “La Curee,” as “Eugene Rougon” and even “Nana,” as “Pot-Bouille,” as “L’CEuvre” and “La Joie de Vivre.” These volumes may rank as social pictures in the narrowest sense, studies, comprehensively speaking, of the manners, the morals, the miseries — for it mainly comes to that — of a bourgeoisie grossly materialised. They deal with the life of individuals in the liberal professions and with that of political and social adventures, and offer the personal character and career, more or less detached, as the centre of interest. “La Curee” is an evocation, violent and “romantic,” of the extravagant appetites, the fever of the senses, supposedly fostered, for its ruin, by the hapless second Empire, upon which general ills and turpitudes at large were at one time so freely and conveniently fathered. “Eugene Rougon” carries out this view in the high colour of a political portrait, not other than scandalous, for which one of the ministerial ames damnees of Napoleon III., M. Rouher, is reputed, I know not how justly, to have sat. “Nana,” attaching itself by a hundred strings to a prearranged table of kinships, heredities, transmissions, is the vast crowded epos of the daughter of the people filled with poisoned blood and sacrificed as well as sacrificing on the altar of luxury and lust; the panorama of such a “progress” as Hogarth would more definitely have named — the progress across the high plateau of “pleasure” and down the facile descent on the other side. “Nana” is truly a monument to Zola’s patience; the subject being so ungrateful, so formidably special, that the multiplication of illustrative detail, the plunge into pestilent depths, represents a kind of technical intrepidity.

There are other plunges, into different sorts of darkness; of which the esthetic, even the scientific, even the ironic motive fairly escapes us — explorations of stagnant pools like that of “La Joie de Vivre,” as to which, granting the nature of the curiosity and the substance laboured in, the patience is again prodigious, but which make us wonder what pearl of philosophy, of suggestion or just of homely recognition, the general picture, as of rats dying in a hole, has to offer. Our various senses, sight, smell, sound, touch, are, as with Zola always, more or less convinced; but when the particular effect upon each of these is added to the effect upon the others the mind still remains bewil- deredly unconscious of any use for the total. I am not sure indeed that the case is in this respect better with the productions of the third order—”La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret,” “Une Page d’Amour,” “Le Reve,” “Le Docteur Pascal” — in which the appeal is more directly, is in fact quite earnestly, to the moral vision; so much, on such ground, was to depend precisely on those discriminations in which the writer is least at home. The volumes whose names I have just quoted are his express tribute to the “ideal,” to the select and the charming — fair fruits of invention intended to remove from the mouth so far as possible the bitterness of the ugly things in which so much of the rest of his work had been condemned to consist. The subjects in question then are “idyllic” and the treatment poetic, concerned essentially to please on the largest lines and involving at every turn that salutary need. They are matters of conscious delicacy, and nothing might interest us more than to see what, in the shock of the potent forces enlisted, becomes of this shy element. Nothing might interest us more, literally, and might positively affect us more, even very nearly to tears, though indeed sometimes also to smiles, than to see the constructor of Les Rougon-Macquart trying, “for all he is worth,” to be fine with fineness, finely tender, finely true — trying to be, as it is called, distinguished — in face of constitutional hindrance.

The effort is admirably honest, the tug at his subject splendidly strong; but the consequences remain of the strangest, and we get the impression that — as representing discriminations unattainable — they are somehow the price he paid. “Le Docteur Pascal,” for instance, which winds up the long chronicle on the romantic note, on the note of invoked beauty, in order to sweeten, as it were, the total draught—”Le Docteur Pascal,” treating of the erotic ardour entertained for each other by an uncle and his niece, leaves us amazed at such a conception of beauty, such an application of romance, such an estimate of sweetness, a sacrifice to poetry and passion so little in order. Of course, we definitely remind ourselves, the whole long chronicle is explicitly a scheme, solidly set up and intricately worked out, lighted, according to the author’s pretension, by “science,” high, dry and clear, and with each part involved and necessitated in all the other parts, each block of the edifice, each “morceau de vie,” physiologically determined by previous combinations. “How can I help it,” we hear the builder of the pyramid ask, “if experience (by which alone I proceed) shows me certain plain results — if, holding up the torch of my famous ‘experimental method,’ I find it stare me in the face that the union of certain types, the conflux of certain strains of blood, the intermarriage, in a word, of certain families, produces nervous conditions, conditions temperamental, psychical and pathological, in which nieces have to fall in love with uncles and uncles with nieces? Observation and imagination, for any picture of life,” he as audibly adds, “know no light but science, and are false to all intellectual decency, false to their own honour, when they fear it, dodge it, darken it. To pretend to any other guide or law is mere base humbug.”

That is very well, and the value, in a hundred ways, of a mass of production conceived in such a spirit can never (when robust execution has followed) be small.

But the formula really sees us no further. It offers a definition which is no definition. “Science” is soon said — the whole thing depends on the ground so covered. Science accepts surely all our consciousness of life; even, rather, the latter closes maternally round it — so that, becoming thus a force within us, not a force outside, it exists, it illuminates only as we apply it. We do emphatically apply it in art. But Zola would apparently hold that it much more applies us. On the showing of many of his volumes then it makes but a dim use of us, and this we should still consider the case even were we sure that the article offered us in the majestic name is absolutely at one with its own pretension. This confidence we can on too many grounds never have. The matter is one of appreciation, and when an artist answers for science who answers for the artist — who at the least answers for art? Thus it is with the mistakes that affect us, I say, as Zola’s penalties. We are reminded by them that the game of art has, as the phrase is, to be played. It may not with any sure felicity for the result be both taken and left. If you insist on the common you must submit to the common; if you discriminate, on the contrary, you must, however invidious your discriminations may be called, trust to them to see you through.

To the common then Zola, often with splendid results, inordinately sacrifices, and this fact of its overwhelming him is what I have called his paying for it. In “L’Assommoir,” in “Germinal,” in “La Debacle,” productions in which he must most survive, the sacrifice is ordered and fruitful, for the subject and the treatment harmonise and work together. He describes what he best feels, and feels it more and more as it naturally comes to him — quite, if I may allow myself the image, as we zoologically see some mighty animal, a beast of a corrugated hide and a portentous snout, soaking with joy in the warm ooze of an African riverside. In these cases everything matches, and “science,” we may be permitted to believe, has had little hand in the business. The author’s perceptions go straight, and the subject, grateful and responsive, gives itself wholly up. It is no longer a case of an uncertain smoky torch, but of a personal vision, the vision of genius, springing from an inward source. Of this genius “L’Assommoir” is the most extraordinary record. It contains, with the two companions I have given it, all the best of Zola, and the three books together are solid ground — or would be could I now so take them — for a study of the particulars of his power. His strongest marks and features abound in them; “L’Assommoir” above all is (not least in respect to its bold free linguistic reach, already glanced at) completely genial, while his misadventures, his unequipped and delusive pursuit of the life of the spirit and the tone of culture, are almost completely absent.

It is a singular sight enough this of a producer of illusions whose interest for us is so independent of our pleasure or at least of our complacency — who touches us deeply even while he most “puts us off,” who makes us care for his ugliness and yet himself at the same time pitilessly (pitilessly, that is, for us) makes a mock of it, who fills us with a sense of the rich which is none the less never the rare. Gervaise, the most immediately “felt,” I cannot but think, of all his characters, is a lame washerwoman, loose and gluttonous, without will, without any principle of cohesion, the sport of every wind that assaults her exposed life, and who, rolling from one gross mistake to another, finds her end in misery, drink and despair. But her career, as presented, has fairly the largeness that, throughout the chronicle, we feel as epic, and the intensity of her creator’s vision of it and of the dense sordid life hanging about it is one of the great things the modern novel has been able to do. It has done nothing more completely constitutive and of a tone so rich and full and sustained. The tone of “L’Assommoir” is, for mere “keeping up,” unsurpassable, a vast deep steady tide on which every object represented is triumphantly borne. It never shrinks nor flows thin, and nothing for an instant drops, dips or catches; the high-water mark of sincerity, of the genial, as I have called it, is unfailingly kept.

For the artist in the same general “line” such a production has an interest almost inexpressible, a mystery as to origin and growth over which he fondly but rather vainly bends. How after all does it so get itself done? — the “done” being admirably the sign and crown of it. The light of the richer mind has been elsewhere, as I have sufficiently hinted, frequent enough, but nothing truly in all fiction was ever built so strong or made so dense as here. Needless to say there are a thousand things with more charm in their truth, with more beguilement of every sort, more prettiness of pathos, more innocence of drollery, for the spectator’s sense of truth. But I doubt if there has ever been a more totally represented world, anything more founded and established, more provided for all round, more organised and carried on. It is a world practically workable, with every part as functional as every other, and with the parts all chosen for direct mutual aid. Let it not be said either that the equal constitution of parts makes for repletion or excess; the air circulates and the subject blooms; deadness comes in these matters only when the right parts are absent and there is vain beating of the air in their place — the refuge of the fumbler incapable of the thing “done” at all.

The mystery I speak of, for the reader who reflects as he goes, is the wonder of the scale and energy of Zola’s assimilations. This wonder besets us above all throughout the three books I have placed first. How, all sedentary and “scientific,” did he get so near? By what art, inscrutable, immeasurable, indefatigable, did he arrange to make of his documents, in these connections, a use so vivified? Say he was “near” the subject of “L’Assommoir” in imagination, in more or less familiar impression, in temperament and humour, he could not after all have been near it in personal experience, and the copious per- sonalism of the picture, not to say its frank animalism, yet remains its note and its strength. When the note had been struck in a thousand forms we had, by multiplication, as a kind of cumulative consequence, the finished and rounded book; just as we had the same result by the same process in “Germinal.” It is not of course that multiplication and accumulation, the extraordinary pair of legs on which he walks, are easily or directly consistent with his projecting himself morally; this immense diffusion, with its appropriation of everything it meets, affects us on the contrary as perpetually delaying access to what we may call the private world, the world of the individual. Yet since the individual — for it so happens — is simple and shallow our author’s dealings with him, as met and measured, maintain their resemblance to those of the lusty bee who succeeds in plumping for an instant, of a summer morning, into every flower-cup of the garden.