with life, at fifty, still rich in him, strength only to undermine all the “authority” he had gathered. He had not grown old and he had not grown feeble; he had only grown all too wrongly insistent, setting himself to wreck, poetically, his so massive identity—to wreck it in the very waters in which he had formally arrayed his victorious fleet, (I say “poetically” on purpose to give him the just benefit of all the beauty of his power.) The process of the disaster, so full of the effect, though so without the intention, of perversity, is difficult to trace in a few words; it may best be indicated by an example or two of its action.
The example that perhaps most comes home to me is again connected with a personal reminiscence. In the course of some talk that I had with him during his first visit to England I happened to ask him what opportunity to travel (if any) his immense application had ever left him, and whether in particular he had been able to see Italy, a country from which I had either just returned or which I was luckily—not having the Natural History of a Family on my hands—about to revisit. “All I’ve done, alas,” he replied, “was, the other year, in the course of a little journey to the south, to my own pays—all that has been possible was then to make a little dash as far as Genoa, a matter of only a few days.” “Le Docteur Pascal,” the conclusion of Les Rougon-Macquart, had appeared shortly before, and it further befell that I asked him what plans he had for the future, now that, still dans la force de l’âge, he had so cleared the ground. I shall never forget the fine promptitude of his answer—“Oh, I shall begin at once Les Trois Villes.” “And which cities are they to be?” The reply was finer still—“Lourdes, Paris, Rome.”
It was splendid for confidence and cheer, but it left me, I fear, more or less gaping, and it was to give me afterwards the key, critically speaking, to many a mystery. It struck me as breathing to an almost tragic degree the fatuity of those in whom the gods stimulate that vice to their ruin. He was an honest man—he had always bristled with it at every pore; but no artistic reverse was inconceivable for an adventurer who, stating in one breath that his knowledge of Italy consisted of a few days spent at Genoa, was ready to declare in the next that he had planned, on a scale, a picture of Rome. It flooded his career, to my sense, with light; it showed how he had marched from subject to subject and had “got up” each in turn—showing also how consummately he had reduced such getting-up to an artifice. He had success and a rare impunity behind him, but nothing would now be so interesting as to see if he could again play the trick. One would leave him, and welcome, Lourdes and Paris—he had already dealt, on a scale, with his own country and people. But was the adored Rome also to be his on such terms, the Rome he was already giving away before possessing an inch of it? One thought of one’s own frequentations, saturations—a history of long years, and of how the effect of them had somehow been but to make the subject too august. Was he to find it easy through a visit of a month or two with “introductions” and a Bædeker?
It was not indeed that the Bædeker and the introductions didn’t show, to my sense, at that hour, as extremely suggestive; they were positively a part of the light struck out by his announcement. They defined the system on which he had brought Les Rougon-Macquart safely into port. He had had his Bædeker and his introductions for “Germinal,” for “L’Assommoir,” for “L’Argent,” for “La Débâcle,” for “Au Bonheur des Dames”; which advantages, which researches, had clearly been all the more in character for being documentary, extractive, a matter of renseignements, published or private, even when most mixed with personal impressions snatched, with enquêtes sur les lieux, with facts obtained from the best authorities, proud and happy to co-operate in so famous a connection. That was, as we say, all right, all the more that the process, to my imagination, became vivid and was wonderfully reflected back from its fruits. There were the fruits—so it hadn’t been presumptuous. Presumption, however, was now to begin, and what omen mightn’t there be in its beginning with such complacency? Well, time would show—as time in due course effectually did. “Rome,” as the second volume of The Three Cities, appeared with high punctuality a year or two later; and the interesting question, an occasion really for the moralist, was by that time not to recognise in it the mere triumph of a mechanical art, a “receipt” applied with the skill of long practice, but to do much more than this—that is really to give a name to the particular shade of blindness that could constitute a trap for so great an artistic intelligence. The presumptuous volume, without sweetness, without antecedents, superficial and violent, has the minimum instead of the maximum of value; so that it betrayed or “gave away” just in this degree the state of mind on the author’s part responsible for its inflated hollowness. To put one’s finger on the state of mind was to find out accordingly what was, as we say, the matter with him.
It seemed to me, I remember, that I found out as never before when, in its turn, “Fécondité” began the work of crowning the edifice. “Fécondité” is physiological, whereas “Rome” is not, whereas “Vérité” 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 “Fécondité,” which are without a sense of the ridiculous, books like “Vérité,” 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. “Vérité” 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 “Fécondité” 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 Curée,” as “Eugène Rougon” and even “Nana,” as “Pot-Bouille,” as “L’Œuvre” 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 Curée” 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. “Eugène Rougon” carries out this view in the high colour of a political portrait, not other than scandalous,
