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emile zola-第1章

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Emile Zola



by William Dean Howells







In these times of electrical movement; the sort of construction

in the moral world for which ages were once needed; takes place

almost simultaneously with the event to be adjusted in history;

and as true a perspective forms itself as any in the past。  A few

weeks after the death of a poet of such great epical imagination;

such great ethical force; as Emile Zola; we may see him as

clearly and judge him as fairly as posterity alone was formerly

supposed able to see and to judge the heroes that antedated it。 

The present is always holding in solution the elements of the

future and the past; in fact; and whilst Zola still lived; in the

moments of his highest activity; the love and hate; the

intelligence and ignorance; of his motives and his work were as

evident; and were as accurately the measure of progressive and

retrogressive criticism; as they will be hereafter in any of the

literary periods to come。  There will never be criticism to

appreciate him more justly; to depreciate him more unjustly; than

that of his immediate contemporaries。  There will never be a day

when criticism will be of one mind about him; when he will no

longer be a question; and will have become a conclusion。

A conclusion is an accomplished fact; something finally ended;

something dead; and the extraordinary vitality of Zola; when he

was doing the things most characteristic of him; forbids the

notion of this in his case。  Like every man who embodies an

ideal; his individuality partook of what was imperishable in that

ideal。  Because he believed with his whole soul that fiction

should be the representation; and in no measure the

misrepresentation; of life; he will live as long as any history

of literature survives。  He will live as a question; a dispute;

an affair of inextinguishable debate; for the two principles of

the human mind; the love of the natural and the love of the

unnatural; the real and the unreal; the truthful and the

fanciful; are inalienable and indestructible。 

                            



I



Zola embodied his ideal inadequately; as every man who embodies

an ideal must。  His realism was his creed; which he tried to make

his deed; but; before his fight was ended; and almost before he

began to forebode it a losing fight; he began to feel and to say

(for to feel; with that most virtuous and voracious spirit;

implied saying) that he was too much a romanticist by birth and

tradition; to exemplify realism in his work。  He could not be all

to the cause he honored that other men weremen like Flaubert

and Maupassant; and Tourguenieff and Tolstoy; and Galdos and

Valdesbecause his intellectual youth had been nurtured on the

milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother…time。  He grew up

in the day when the great novelists and poets were romanticists;

and what he came to abhor he had first adored。  He was that

pathetic paradox; a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches;

who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith。

Zola was none the less; but all the more; a poet in this。  He

conceived of reality poetically and always saw his human

documents; as he began early to call them; ranged in the form of

an epic poem。  He fell below the greatest of the Russians; to

whom alone he was inferior; in imagining that the affairs of men

group themselves strongly about a central interest to which they

constantly refer; and after whatever excursions definitely or

definitively return。  He was not willingly an epic poet; perhaps;

but he was an epic poet; nevertheless; and the imperfection of

his realism began with the perfection of his form。  Nature is

sometimes dramatic; though never on the hard and fast terms of

the theatre; but she is almost never epic; and Zola was always

epic。  One need only think over his books and his subjects to be

convinced of this:  〃L'Assommoir〃 and drunkenness; 〃Nana〃 and

harlotry; 〃Germinale〃 and strikes; 〃L'Argent〃 and money getting

and losing in all its branches; 〃Pot…Bouille〃 and the cruel

squalor of poverty; 〃La Terre〃 and the life of the peasant; 〃Le

Debacle〃 and the decay of imperialism。  The largest of these

schemes does not extend beyond the periphery described by the

centrifugal whirl of its central motive; and the least of the

Rougon…Macquart series is of the same epicality as the grandest。 

Each is bound to a thesis; but reality is bound to no thesis。 

You cannot say where it begins or where it leaves off; and it

will not allow you to say precisely what its meaning or argument

is。  For this reason; there are no such perfect pieces of realism

as the plays of Ibsen; which have all or each a thesis; but do

not hold themselves bound to prove it; or even fully to state it;

after these; for reality; come the novels of Tolstoy; which are

of a direction so profound because so patient of aberration and

exception。



We think of beauty as implicated in symmetry; but there are

distinctly two kinds of beauty: the symmetrical and the

unsymmetrical; the beauty of the temple and the beauty of the

tree。  Life is not more symmetrical than a tree; and the effort

of art to give it balance and proportion is to make it as false

in effect as a tree clipped and trained to a certain shape。  The

Russians and the Scandinavians alone seem to have risen to a

consciousness of this in their imaginative literature; though the

English have always unconsciously obeyed the law of our being in

their generally crude and involuntary formulations of it。  In the

northern masters there is no appearance of what M。 Ernest Dupuy

calls the joiner…work of the French fictionalists; and there is;

in the process; no joiner…work in Zola; but the final effect is

joiner…work。  It is a temple he builds; and not a tree he plants

and lets grow after he has planted the seed; and here he betrays

not only his French school but his Italian instinct。



In his form; Zola is classic; that is regular; symmetrical;

seeking the beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the

tree。  If the fight in his day had been the earlier fight between

classicism and romanticism; instead of romanticism and realism;

his nature and tradition would have ranged him on the side of

classicism; though; as in the later event; his feeling might have

been romantic。  I think it has been the error of criticism not to

take due account of his Italian origin; or to recognize that he

was only half French; and that this half was his superficial

half。  At the bottom of his soul; though not perhaps at the

bottom of his heart; he was Italian; and of the great race which

in every science and every art seems to win the primacy when it

will。  The French; through the rhetoric of Napoleon III。; imposed

themselves on the imagination of the world as the representatives

of the Latin race; but they are the least and the last of the

Latins; and the Italians are the first。  To his Italian origin

Zola owed not only the moralistic scope of his literary ambition;

but the depth and strength of his personal conscience; capable of

the austere puritanism which underlies the so…called immoralities

of his books; and incapable of the peculiar lubricity which we

call French; possibly to distinguish it from the lubricity of

other people rather than to declare it a thing solely French。  In

the face of all public and private corruptions; his soul is as

Piagnone as Savonarola's; and the vices of Arrabbiati; small and

great; are always his text; upon which he preaches virtue。 

                           



II 



Zola is to me so vast a theme that I can only hope here to touch

his work at a point or two; leaving the proof of my sayings

mostly to the honesty of the reader。  It will not require so

great an effort of his honesty now; as it once would; to own that

Zola's books; though often indecent; are never immoral; but

always most terribly; most pitilessly moral。  I am not saying now

that they ought to be in every family library; or that they could

be edifyingly committed to the hands of boys and girls; one of

our first publishing houses is about to issue an edition even of

the Bible 〃with those passages omitted which are usually skipped

in reading aloud〃; and it is always a question how much young

people can be profitably allowed to know; how much they do know;

they alone can tell。  But as to the intention of Zola in his

books; I have no doubt of its righteousness。  His books may be;

and I suppose they often are; indecent; but they are not immoral;

they may disgust; but they will not deprave; only those already

rotten can scent corruption in them; and these; I think; may be

deceived by effluvia from within themselves。



It is to the glory of the French realists that they broke; one

and all; with the tradition of the French romanticists that vice

was or might be something graceful; something poetic; something

gay; brilliant; something super
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