In the first place, it must surely be obvious that insistence on the "lesion," even if the other points of the theory were una.s.sailable, is grossly excessive, if not wholly illegitimate. If you are to take observation and experience for your sole magazine of subjects, you must take _all_ experience and _all_ observation. Not the veriest pessimist who retains sense and senses can say that their results are _always_ evil, ugly, and sordid. If you are to go by heredity you must attend to:
Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis,
as well as to:
Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit, etc.
Remounting the stairs, it must be evident that Heredity, Natural Selection, Evolution, Environment, etc., are things which, at the very best, can be allowed an exceedingly small part in artistic re-creation.
Not only do they come under the general ban of Purpose, but their purpose-character is of the most thankless and unsucculent kind. I do not know that any one has ever attempted a mathematical novel, though the great Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe, as we all know, wrote a beautiful mathematical poem, of which the extant fragments are, alas! too few. If he had only lived a generation later, how charming would have been the fytte or canto on Quaternions! But, really, such a thing would not be more than a "farthest" on a road on which heredity-and-selection novels travel far. It is no use to say, "Oh! but human beings exemplifying those things can be made interesting." If they are it will not be because they are dealt with _sub specie hereditatis_, and confined in the circle of _milieu_.
Yet the master error lies, farther back still, in the strictly "Naturalist" idea itself--the theory of Experiment, the observation-doc.u.ment-"note," all for their own sake. Something has been said of this in relation to the Goncourts, but M. Zola"s own exemplification of the doctrine was so far "larger" in every sense than theirs, and reinforced with so much greater literary power, that it cannot be left merely to the treatment which was sufficient for them.
Once more, it is a case of "corruption of the best." It is perfectly true that all novel-writing--even in a fashion all romance-writing too--ought to be based on experience[467] in practical life, and that infinite doc.u.ments are procurable, infinite notes may be made, from that life. It is utterly _un_true that _any_ observation, _any_ experiment, _any_ doc.u.ment is good novel or romance stuff.
A very few remarks may perhaps be made on approaches to Zolaism--not in the sense of scabrousness--before Zola.
[Sidenote: "Doc.u.ment" and "detail" before Naturalism.]
A writer of one of those theses _a la mode Germanorum_, of which, at different times and in different occupations, it is the hard lot of the professional man of letters to read so many, would probably begin with the Catalogue of Ships, or construct an inventory of the "beds and basons" which Barzillai brought to David. Quite a typical "program"
might be made of the lists of birds, beasts, trees, etc., so well known in mediaeval literature, and best known to the ordinary English reader from Chaucer, and from Spenser"s following of him. We may, however, pa.s.s to the Deluge of the Renaissance and the special emergence therefrom of French fiction. It would not be an absolute proof of the "monographitis"
just glanced at if any one were to instance the curious discussions on the propriety of introducing technical terms into heroic poetry--which is, of course, very close to heroic romance, and so to prose fiction generally.
[Sidenote: General stages traced.]
But, for practical purposes, Furetiere and the _Roman Bourgeois_ (_vide_ Vol. I.) give the starting-point. And here the Second Part, of which we formerly said little, acquires special importance, though the first is not without it. _All_ the details of _bourgeois_ life and middle-cla.s.s society belong to the department which was afterwards preferred--and degraded--by the Naturalists; and the legal ins and outs of the Second Part are Zola in a good deal more than the making. Indeed the luckless "Charroselles" himself had, as we pointed out, antic.i.p.ated Furetiere in not a few points, such as that most interesting reference to _bisque_.[468] Scarron himself has a good deal of it; in fact there is so much in the Spanish picaresque novel that it could not be absent from the followings thereof. For which same reason there is not a very little of it in Lesage, while, for an opposite one, there is less in Marivaux, and hardly any at all in Crebillon or Prevost. The _philosophes_, except Diderot--who was busy with other things and used his acquaintance with miscellaneous "doc.u.ments" in another way--would have disdained it, and the Sentimentalists still more so. But it is a sign of the shortcomings of Pigault-Lebrun--especially considering the evident discipleship to Smollett, in whom there is no small amount of such detail--that, while in general he made a distinct advance in "ordinary" treatment, he did not reinforce this advance with circ.u.mstantial accounts of "beds and basons."
But with the immense and multifarious new birth of the novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this development also received, in the most curiously diverse ways, reinforcement and extension. The Terror novel itself had earlier given a hand, for you had to describe, more or less minutely, the furniture of your haunted rooms, the number and volume of your drops of blood, the anatomical characteristics of your skeletons, and the values of your palette of coloured fires. The Historical novel lugged doc.u.ment in too often by head and shoulders, introducing it on happier occasions as the main and distinguishing ornament of its kind. Romanticism generally, with its tendency to antiquarian detail, its liking for _couleur locale_, its insistence on the "streaks of the tulip" and the rest, prompted the use and at least suggested the abuse.
[Sidenote: Some individual pioneers--especially Hugo.]
Nor did the great individual French novelists--for we need not specify any others--of the earlier part of the century, while they themselves kept to the pleasant slopes above the abyss, fail to point the way to it. Chateaubriand with his flowery descriptions of East and West, and Madame de Stael with her deliberate guide-bookery, encouraged the doc.u.ment-hunter and detail-devotee. Balzac, especially in the directions of finance and commerce, actually set him an example. George Sand, especially in pure country stories, was prodigal of local and technical matters and manners. The gorgeous scenery of Gautier, and the soberer but important "settings" of Merimee, might be claimed as models. And others might be added.
But from one point of view, as an authority above all earlier authorities, and from another as a sinner beyond all earlier sinners, might be quoted Victor Hugo, even putting his _juvenilia_ aside. He had flung a whole glossary of architecture, not to mention other things of similar kind, into _Notre Dame de Paris_; and when after a long interval he resumed prose fiction, he had ransacked the encyclopaedia for _Les Miserables_. _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ is half a great poem and half a _real-lexikon_ of mechanics, weather-lore, seafaring, ichthyology, and G.o.d knows what else! If _L"Homme Qui Rit_ had been written a very little later, parts of it might have been taken as a deliberate burlesque, by a French Sir Francis Burnand, of Naturalist method. Now, as the most acute literary historians have always seen, Naturalism was practically nothing but a degeneration of Romanticism:[469] and degeneracy always shows itself in exaggeration. Naturalism exaggerated detail, streak of tulip, local colour, and all the rest, of which Romanticism had made such good use at its best. But what it exaggerated most of all was the Romantic neglect of cla.s.sical _decorum_, in the wider as well as the narrower sense of that word. Cla.s.sicism had said, "Keep everything indecorous out." Naturalism seemed sometimes to say, "Let nothing that is not indecorous come in."[470]
[Sidenote: Survey of books--the short stories.]
It was, however, by no means at first that M. Zola took to the "doc.u.ment" or elaborated the enormous scheme of the Rougon-Macquart cycle: though whether the excogitation of this was or was not due to the frequentation, exhortation, and imitation of MM. de Goncourt is not a point that we need discuss. He began, after melodramatic and negligible _juvenilia_, in 1864 with a volume of delightful short stories,[471]
_Contes a Ninon_, in which kind he long afterwards showed undiminished powers. And he continued this practice at intervals for a great number of years, with results collected, after the first set, in _Nouveaux Contes a Ninon_, and in volumes taking their general t.i.tles from special tales--_Le Capitaine Burle_ and _Nas Micoulin_. In 1880 he gave the first story, _L"Attaque du Moulin_, to that most remarkable Naturalist "symposium," _Les Soirees de Medan_, which, if nothing of it survived but that story itself and Maupa.s.sant"s _Boule de Suif_, and if this represented the sole extant work of the School, would certainly induce the fortieth century to think that School one of the very best in fiction, and to utter the most pathetic wails over the loss of the rest of its production. Of _Boule de Suif_--in more senses than one the feminine of the pair--more presently. But _L"Attaque_ itself is a splendid and masculine success--the best thing by far, in respect of flawlessness, that its author ever did, and not far below Merimee"s _Prise de la Redoute_.
Unfortunately it was not in these breaches that M. Zola chose to abide.
After the war, having no doubt laid his plans long before, he undertook the vast Rougon-Macquart scheme with its score of volumes; and when this was finished, carried on two others, smaller in bulk but hardly less ambitious in scope, "Les Trois Villes"--_Lourdes_, _Paris_, _Rome_; and "Les Quatre evangiles"--_Fecondite_, _Travail_, and _Verite_, the fourth of which was never written, while the third, _Verite_, appeared with a black line round its cover, denoting posthumous issue.
[Sidenote: "Les Rougon-Macquart."]
In all these books the Experimental and Doc.u.mentary idea is worked out, with an important development in the other directions above glanced at.
The whole of the Rougon-Macquart series was intended to picture the varying careers of the branches, legitimate and illegitimate, of two families, under the control of heredity, and the evolution of the cerebral lesion into various kinds of disease, fault, vice, crime, etc.
But further scope was found for the use of the doc.u.ment, human and other, by allotment of the various books, both in this and in the later groups, to the special ill.u.s.tration of particular places, trades, professions, habits of life, and _quicquid agunt homines_ generally. The _super_-t.i.tle of the first and largest series, "Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d"une famille sous le Second Empire," can hardly need comment or amplification to any intellect that is not hopelessly enslaved to the custom of having its meat not only killed, dressed, cooked, and dished, but cut up, salted, peppered, and put into its mouth with a.s.siduous spoonings. _La Fortune des Rougon_, in the very year when Europe invited a _polemos aspondos_ by acquiescing in the seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, laid the foundation of the whole. _La Curee_ and _Son Excellence Eugene Rougon_ show how the more fortunate members of the clan prospered in the somewhat ign.o.ble _tripotage_ of their time.
Anybody could see the "power" of which the thing was "effect" (to borrow one half of a celebrated aphorism of Hobbes"s); but it must have been a curious taste to which (borrowing the other) the books were "a cause of pleasure." _La Faute de l"Abbe Mouret_ rose to a much higher level. To regard it as merely an attack on clerical celibacy is to take a very obvious and limited view of it. It is so, of course, but it is much more. The picture of the struggle between conscience and pa.s.sion is, for once, absolutely true and human. There is no mistake in the psychology; there is no resort to "sculduddery"; there is no exaggeration of any kind, or, if there is any, it is in a horticultural extravagance--a piece of fairy Bower-of-Bliss scene-painting, in part of the book, which is in itself almost if not quite beautiful--a Garden of Eden provided for a different form of temptation.[472] There is no poetry in _La Conquete de Pla.s.sans_ or in _Le Ventre de Paris_; but the one is a digression, not yet scavenging, into country life, and the other empties one of M. Zola"s note-books on a theme devoted to the Paris Markets--the famous "Halles" which Gerard had done so lightly and differently long before.[473] The key of this latter is pretty well kept in one of the most famous books of the whole series, _L"a.s.sommoir_, where the beastlier side of pot-house sotting receives hundreds of pages to do what William Langland had done better five centuries earlier in a few score lines. _Pot-Bouille_--ascending a little in the social but not in the spiritual scale--deals with lower middle-cla.s.s life, and _Au Bonheur des Dames_ with the enormous "stores" which, beginning in America, had already spread through Paris to London. _Une Page d"Amour_ recovers something of the n.o.bler tone of _L"Abbe Mouret_; and _La Joie de Vivre_--a t.i.tle, as will readily be guessed, ironical in intention--still keeps out of the gutter. _Nana_ may be said, combining decency with exact.i.tude, to stand in the same relation to the service of Venus as _L"a.s.sommoir_ does to that of Bacchus, though one apologises to both divinities for so using their names. It was supposed, like other books of the kind, to be founded on fact--the history of a certain young person known as Blanche d"Antigny--and charitable critics have pleaded for it as a healthy corrective or corrosive to the morbid tone of sentimentality-books like _La Dame aux Camelias_. I never could find much amus.e.m.e.nt in the book, except when Nana, provoked at the tedious prolongation of a professional engagement, exclaims, "ca ne finissait pas!" or "ca ne voulait pas finir."[474] The strange up-and-down of the whole scheme reappears in _L"Oeuvre_--chiefly devoted to art, but partly to literature--where the opening is extraordinarily good, and there are fine pa.s.sages later, interspersed with tedious grime of the commoner kind. _La Terre_ and _Germinal_ are, I suppose, generally regarded as, even beyond _L"a.s.sommoir_ and _Nana_, the "farthest" of this griminess. Whether the filth-stored broom of the former really does blot out George Sand"s and other pictures of a modified Arcadia in the French provinces, nothing but experience, which I cannot boast, could tell us; and the same may be said of _Germinal_, as to the mining districts which have since received so awful a purification by fire.
That more and more important person the railway-man takes his turn in _La Bete Humaine_, and the book supplies perhaps the most striking instance of the radically inartistic character of the plan of flooding fiction with technical details. But there is, in the vision of the driver and his engine as it were going mad together, one of the earliest and not the least effective of those nightmare-pieces in which Zola, evidently inspired by Hugo, indulged more and more latterly. Then came what was intended, apparently, for the light star of this dark group, _Le Reve_. Although always strongly anti-clerical, and at the last, as we shall see, a "Deicide" of the most uncompromising fanaticism, M. Zola here devoted himself to cathedral services and church ritual generally, and, as a climax, the administration of extreme unction to his innocent heroine. But, as too often happens in such cases, the saints were not grateful and the sinners were bored. _L"Argent_ was at least in concatenation accordingly, seeing that the great financial swindle and "crash"[475] it took for subject had had strong clerical support; but purely financial matters, stock-exchange dealings, and some exceedingly scabrous "tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs" occupied the greater part of it. Of the penultimate novel, _La Debacle_, a history of the terrible birth-year of the series itself, few fair critics, I think, could speak other than highly; of the actual ultimatum, _Le Docteur Pascal_, opinions have varied much. It is very unequal, but I thought when it came out that it contained some of its author"s very best things, and I am not disposed to change my opinion.
[Sidenote: "Les Trois Villes."]
Before giving any general comment on this ma.s.s of fiction, it will probably be best to continue the process of brief survey, with the two remaining groups. It is, I believe, generally admitted that in "Les Trois Villes" purpose, and the doc.u.ment, got altogether the better of any true novel-intention. The anti-religiosity which has been already remarked upon seems not only to have increased, but for the moment to have simply flooded our author"s ship of thought and art, and to have stopped the working of that part of its engine-room which did the novel-business. The miracles at, and the pilgrimages to, Lourdes filled the newspapers at one time, and Zola could think of nothing else; the transition to Rome was almost inevitable in any such case; and the return upon Paris quite inevitable in a Frenchman.
[Sidenote: "Les Quatre evangiles."]
With the final and incomplete series--coinciding in its latter part with the novelist"s pa.s.sionate interference, at no small inconvenience to himself, in that inconceivable modern replica of the Hermocopidae business, the Dreyfus case, and cut short by his unfortunate death--things are different. I have known people far less "prejudiced,"
as the word goes, against the ideas of these books than I am myself, who plumply declare that they cannot read _Fecondite_, _Travail_, or (most especially) _Verite_: while of course there are others who declare them to be not "Gospels" at all, but what Mr. Carlyle used to call "Ba"spels"--not Evangels but Cacodaemonics. I read every word of them carefully some years since, and I should not mind reading _Fecondite_ or _Travail_ again, though I have no special desire to do so.[476]
Both are "novels of purpose," with the purpose developing into mania.
_Fecondite_ is only in part--and in that part mainly as regards France--revolutionary. It is a pa.s.sionate gospel of "Cultivate _both_ gardens! Produce every ounce of food that can be raised to eat, and every child that can be got to eat it:" an anti-Malthusian and Cobbettist Apocalypse, smeared with Zolaesque grime and lighted up with flashes, or rather flares, of more than Zolaesque brilliancy. The scene where the hero (so far as there is one) looks back on Paris at night, and his tottering virtue sees in it one enormous theatre of Lubricity, has something of Flaubert and something of Hugo.
_Travail_ is revolutionary or nothing, revolutionary "in the most approved style," as a certain apologist of robbery and murder put it not long ago as to Bolshevism, amid the "laughter and cheers" of English aspirants thereto. It takes for scene a quite openly borrowed representation of the famous forges of Creusot, and attacks Capital, the _bourgeois_, and everything established, quite in the purest Bolshevist fashion. Both books, and _Verite_, display throughout a singular delusion, aggravating the anti-theism rather than atheism above mentioned, my own formulation of which, in another book some decade ago, I may as well, in a note,[477] borrow, instead of merely paraphrasing it. The milder idiosyncrasy referred to therein will certainly not adjust itself, whatever it might do to the not ungenial ideals of _Fecondite_, to those of _Travail_. This ends in a sort of Paradise of Man, where electricity takes every kind of labour (except that of cultivating the gardens?) off men"s hands, and the Coquecigrues have come again, and the pigs run about ready roasted, and a millennium or mill_iard_ennium of Cocaigne begins. Yet there are fine pa.s.sages in _Travail_, and the author reflects, powerfully enough, the grime and glare and scorch of the furnaces; the thirst and l.u.s.t and struggles of their slaves; the baser side of the life of their owners and officials--and of the wives of these. There is nothing in the book quite equal to the Vision of the City of Lubricity in _Fecondite_, but there are one or two things not much below it. And the whole is once more Blake-like, with a degraded or defiled Blakishness. In fact, _Fecondite_ and _Travail_, ill.u.s.trated in the spirit of the Prophetic Books, are quite imaginable possessions; and, though a nervous person might not like to go to sleep in the same room with them, not uncovetable ones.[478]
The everlasting irony of things has seldom, in literature (though, as we have seen, it reigns there if anywhere), secured for itself a more striking opportunity of exemplification than this ending, in a pseudo-apocalyptic paroxysm, of the _Roman Experimental_; perhaps one may add that never has Romanticism, or indeed any school of letters, scored such a triumphant victory over its decriers. It has been contended here, and for many years in other places by the present writer, that Naturalism was itself only a "lesion," a _sarcoma_, a morbidly allotropic form of Romance. At this point the degeneration turned into a sort of parody of the att.i.tude of Ezekiel or Hosea; the business-like observer, in counting-house and workshop, in church and stock-exchange, in tavern and brothel, in field and town generally, became himself a _voyant_, beholding all things in nightmare. Yet, in doing so, he effected a strange semi-reconciliation with some who had been, if not exactly his enemies, the exceedingly frank critics and unsparing denouncers of his system. Not much more than half sane, and almost more than half disgusting, as are _Fecondite_ and _Travail_, they connect themselves, as wholes, not with _L"a.s.sommoir_ or _Nana_, not with _La Terre_ or _Germinal_, but with _La Faute de l"Abbe Mouret_, with _Une Page d"Amour_, and _La Joie de Vivre_, with the best things in _L"Oeuvre_, _La Debacle_, and _Le Docteur Pascal_. Students of English literature will remember how the doctrine of _Furor poeticus_ was once applied to Ben Jonson by a commentator who, addressing him, pointed out that he was very mad in his primer works, not so mad in his dotages.
There was always a good deal of _furor prosaicus_ smouldering in Zola, and it broke out with an opposite result on these occasions, the flames, alas! being rather devastating, but affording spectacles at least grandiose. _He_ kept sane and sordid to his loss earlier, and went mad later--partially at least to his advantage.
[Sidebar: General considerations.]
Pa.s.sing to those more general considerations which have been promised--and which seem to be to some readers a Promised Land indeed, as compared with the wilderness of _compte-rendu_ and book-appreciation--let us endeavour briefly to answer the question, "What is the general lesson of Zola"s work?" I think we may say, borrowing that true and final judgment of Wordsworth which doth so enrage Wordsworthians, that whenever Zola does well he either violates or neglects his principles, and that the more carefully he carries these out the worse, as a rule, his work is. The similarity, of course, is the more quaint because of the dissimilarity of the personages and their productions; but it has not been insisted on from any mere spirit of mischief, or desire to make a paradoxical parallel. On the contrary, this parallel has been made in order to support, at least _obiter_, a more general dictum still, that principles are much more often fatal than useful to the artist. The successful miniatures of the short stories hardly prove more thoroughly than the smoky flaming Blakish-Turneresque cartoons of the latest "Gospels," though they may do so more satisfactorily, that emile Zola had the root of the Art of Fiction in him. But he chose to subject the bulk of the growths from this root to something much worse than the _ars topiaria_, to twist and maim and distort them like Hugo"s Comprachicos; to load their boughs, forbidding them to bear natural fruit, with clumsy crops of dull and foul detail, like a bedevilled Christmas-tree. One dares say quite unblushingly, that in no single instance[479] has this abuse of the encyclopaedia added charm, or value, or even force to Zola"s work. A man with far less ability than he possessed could have given the necessary touch of specialism when it _was_ necessary, without dumping and deluging loads and floods of technicalities on the unhappy reader.
Little more need be said about the disastrous _ugliness_ which, with still rarer exception, pervades the whole work. There are those who like the ugly, and those--perhaps more numerous--who think they _ought_ to like it. With neither is it worth while to argue. As for me and my house, we will serve Beauty, giving that blessed word the widest possible extension, of course, but never going beyond or against it.
[Sidenote: Especially in regard to character.]
A point where there is no such precedent inaccessibility of common ground concerns Zola"s grasp of character. It seems to me to have been, if not exactly weak, curiously limited. I do not know that his people are ever unhuman; in fact, by his time the merely wooden character had ceased to be "stocked" (as an unpleasant modern phrase has it) by the novelist. The "divers and disgusting things" that they do are never incredible. The unspeakable villain-hero of _Verite_ itself is a not impossible person. But the defect, again as it seems to me, of all the personages may best be ill.u.s.trated by quoting one of those strange flashes of consummate critical acuteness which diversify the frequent critical lapses of Thackeray. As early as _The Paris Sketch-book_, in the article ent.i.tled "Caricatures and Lithography," Mr. t.i.tmarsh wrote, in respect of Fielding"s people, "Is not every one of them a real substantial _have been_ personage now?... We will not take upon ourselves to say that they do not exist somewhere else, that the actions attributed to them have not really taken place."
There, put by a rather raw critic of some seven and twenty, who was not himself to give a perfect creative exemplification of what he wrote for nearly a decade, is the crux of the matter. Observe, not "_might_ have been" merely, but "have been now." The phrase might have holes picked in it by a composition-master or -monger.[480] Thackeray is often liable to this process. But it states an eternal verity, and so marks an essential differentia.
This differentia is what the present writer has, in many various forms, endeavoured to make good in respect of the novels and the novelists with which and whom he has dealt in this book, and in many books and articles for the last forty years and more. There are the characters who never might or could have been--the characters who, by limp and flaccid drawing; by the lumping together of "incompossibilities"; by slavish following of popular models; by equally slavish, though rather less ign.o.ble, carrying out of supposed rules; by this, that, and the other want or fault, have deprived themselves of the fict.i.tious right to live, or to have lived, though they occupy the most ghastly of all limbos and the most crowded shelves of all circulating libraries. At the other end of the scale are the real men and women of fiction--those whom more or less (for there are degrees here as everywhere) you _know_, whose life is as your life, except that you live by the grace of G.o.d and they by that of G.o.d"s artists. These exist in all great drama, poetry, fiction; and it never would cause you the least surprise or feeling of unfamiliarity if they pa.s.sed from one sphere to the other, and you met them--to live with, to love or to hate, to dance or to dine with, to murder (for you would occasionally like to kill them) or to marry.[481]
But between the two--and perhaps the largest crowd of the three, at least since novel-writing came to be a business--is a vast mult.i.tude of figures occupying a middle position, sometimes with little real vitality but with a certain stage-competence; sometimes quite reaching the "might-have-been," but never the full substance of "has been" for us. To these last, I think, though to a high division of them, do Zola"s characters belong.
Of plot I never care to say very much, because it is not with me a wedding-garment, though I know an ugly or ill-fitting one when I see it, and can say, "Well tailored or dress-made!" in the more satisfactory circ.u.mstances. Moreover, Zola hardly enters himself for much compet.i.tion here. There is none in the first two Apocalypses; _Verite_ has what it has, supplied by the "case" and merely adjusted with fair skill; the _Trois Villes_ lie quite outside plot; and the huge synoptic scheme of the Rougon-Macquart series deals little with it in individual books. Of conversation one might say very much what has been said of character.
The books have the conversation which they require, and sometimes (in examples generally even more difficult to quote than that of Nana"s given above) a little more. But in Description, the Naturalist leader rises when he does not fall. It is obviously here that the boredom and the beastliness of the details offend most. But it is also by means of description that almost all the books well spoken of before, from the too earthly Paradise of _L"Abbe Mouret_ to the Inferno of _Travail_, produce some of their greatest effects.
So let this suffice as banning for what is bad in him, and as blessing for what is good, in regard to emile Zola: a great talent--at least a failure of a genius--in literature; a marvellous worker in literary craft. As for his life, it can be honestly avowed that the close of it, in something like martyrdom, had little or nothing to do with the fact that the writer"s estimate of his work changed, from very unfavourable, to the parti-coloured one given above. Until about 1880 I did not read his books regularly as they came out, and the first "nervous impression"
of what I did read required time and elaboration to check and correct, to fill in and to balance it. I have never varied my opinion that his methods and principles--with everything of that sort--were wrong. But I have been more and more convinced that his practice sometimes came astonishingly near being right.
My introduction to the greatest of M. Zola"s a.s.sociates was more fortunate, for it was impossible to mistake the quality of the new planet.[482] One day in 1880 the editor of a London paper put into my hands a copy of a just-issued volume of French verse, which had been specially sent to him by his Paris correspondent in a fit of moral indignation. It was ent.i.tled _Des Vers_, and the author of it was a certain Guy de Maupa.s.sant, of whom I then knew nothing. The correspondent had seen in it a good opportunity for a denunciation of French wickedness; and my editor handed it over to me to see what was to be done with it. I saw no exceptional wickedness, and a very great deal of power; indeed, though I was tolerably familiar with French verse and prose of the day, it seemed to me that I had not seen so much promise in any new writer since Baudelaire"s death;[483] and I informed my editor that, though I had not the slightest objection to blessing Maupa.s.sant, I certainly would not curse him. He thought the blessing not likely to please his public, while it would annoy his correspondent, and on my representation declined to have anything to do with the cursing. So _nous pa.s.sasmes oultre_, except that, like Mr. Bludyer, I "impounded"
the book; but, unlike him, did not either sell it, dine off it, or abuse the author.
Shortly afterwards, I think, the _Soirees de Medan_ reached me, and this very remarkable person appeared likewise, but in a new character.
Certainly no one can ever have shown to better advantage in company than M. de Maupa.s.sant did on this occasion. _L"Attaque du Moulin_, which opened the volume, has already been spoken of as part of the best of all M. Zola"s voluminous work. But as for the works of the young men, other than M. de Maupa.s.sant, they had the Naturalist faults in fullest measure, unredeemed by their master"s ma.s.sive vigour and his desperate intensity. The contribution of M. Huysmans, in particular (_v. inf._) has always appeared to me one of those voluntary or involuntary caricatures, of the writer"s own style and school, which are well known at all times, and have never been more frequent than recently. But _Boule de Suif_? Among the others that pleasant and pathetic person was not a _boule_; she was a pyramid, a Colossus, a spire of Cologne Cathedral. Putting the unconventionality of its subject aside, there is absolutely no fault to be found with the story. It is as round and smooth as "Boule de Suif" herself.
Maupa.s.sant"s work is of very substantial bulk. Of the verse enough for our purpose has been or will be said, though I should like to repeat that I put it much higher than do most of Maupa.s.sant"s admirers. The volumes of travel-sketches do not appear to me particularly successful, despite the almost unsurpa.s.sed faculty of their writer for sober yet vivid description. They have the air of being written to order, and they do not seem, as a rule, to arrive at artistic completeness either objectively or subjectively. Of the criticism, which concerns us more nearly, by far the most remarkable piece is the famous Preface to _Pierre et Jean_ (to be mentioned again below), which contains the author"s literary creed, refined and castigated by years of practice from the cruder form which he had already promulgated in the Preface to Flaubert"s _Correspondence with George Sand_. It extols the "objective"
as against the psychological method of novel-writing, but directs itself most strongly against the older romance of plot, and places the excellence of the novelist in the complete and vivid projection of that novelist"s own particular "illusion" of the world, yet so as to present events and characters in the most actual manner. But, as promised, we shall return to it.
[Sidenote: _Bel-Ami._]