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Emile Zola By: William Dean Howells (1837-1920) |
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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 were men like Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and
Tolstoy, and Galdos and Valdes because 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... Continue reading book >>
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