Chapter IV: Preface (4)

If then childhood needs its pure fairy-land, and youth its fairy-land of impossible adventure, what fairy-land is left for adult age? Scarcely the novel. The modern novel in its finest manifestations, however engrossingly interesting, takes us but a little step from the passionate interests of our own lives. If I turn to the two recent novels which have most powerfully interested me--Huysmans’ _En Route_ and Hardy’s _Jude the Obscure_--I find that their interest lies largely in the skill with which they present and concentrate two mighty problems of actual life, the greatest of all problems, religion and sex. In adult life we seek a fairy-land occupied by beings at once as real as ourselves, and yet far removed from the sphere of our own actual interests and the heavy burden of the atmosphere under which we live; only so can it fascinate the imaginations of those who have outgrown the simple imaginative joys of early life. Casanova’s _Mémoires_ is the perfected type of the books which answer these requirements. It is unflinchingly real, immensely varied, the audaciously truthful narrative of undeniably human impulses. And yet it carries us out of relation with the problems of our actual life; it leads us into the realm of fairy-land.

But--analysing the matter a little more closely--it may still fairly be asked whether a book which, in spite of its remoteness, represents a form of human life, must not have a certain bearing on morals. Is not a part of its attraction, and indeed that of all fairy-lands, the existence of a different code of morals? It seems to me that this is so. But precisely in that lies the moral value of such literature. Indeed the whole question of the moral value of art--that is to say, of æsthetic enjoyment--is really involved here. The matter is worth looking into.

It is one of Schopenhauer’s unforgettable sayings, that whatever course of action we take in life there is always some element in our nature which could only find satisfaction in an exactly contrary course; so that, take what road we will, we yet always remain restless and unsatisfied in part. To Schopenhauer that reflection made for pessimism; it need not. The more finely and adequately we adjust ourselves to the actual conditions of our life the larger, no doubt, the unused and unsatisfied region within us. But it is just here that art comes in. Art largely counts for its effects on playing on these unused fibres of our organism, and by so doing it serves to bring them into a state of harmonious satisfaction--moralises them, if you will. Alienists have described a distressing form of insanity peculiar to old maids who have led honourable lives of abstinence and abnegation. After years of seeming content with the conditions of their lot they begin to manifest uncontrollable obsessions and erotic impulses; the unused elements of life, which they had shut down in the cellars of their souls and almost forgotten, have at last arisen in rebellion, clamouring tumultuously for satisfaction. The old orgies--the Saturnalian festival at Christmas and the Midsummer Festival on St. John’s Day--bear witness that the ancients in their wisdom recognised that the bonds of the actual daily moral life must sometimes be relaxed lest they break from over-tension. We have lost the orgy, but in its place we have art. Our respectable matrons no longer send out their daughters with torches at midnight into the woods and among the hills, where dancing and wine and blood may lash into their flesh the knowledge of the mysteries of life, but they take them to _Tristan_, and are fortunately unable to see into those carefully brought-up young souls on such occasions. The moralising force of art lies, not in its capacity to present a timid imitation of our experiences, but in its power to go beyond our experience, satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled activities of our nature. That art should have such an effect on those who contemplate it is not surprising when we remember that, to some extent, art has a similar influence on its creators. “Libertin d’esprit mais sage de mœurs,” it was said of Watteau. Mohammed when he wrote so voluptuously of the black-eyed houris of Paradise was still young and the blameless husband of an aged woman.

“Singing is sweet; but be sure of this,
Lips only sing when they cannot kiss.”

It has been said of Wagner that he had in him the instincts of an ascetic and of a satyr, and the first is just as necessary as the second to the making of a great artist. It is a very ancient observation that the most unchaste verse has often been written by the chastest poets, and that the writers who have written most purely have found their compensation in living impurely.[5] In the same manner it has always been found in Christendom, both among Catholics and Protestants, that much of the most licentious literature has been written by the clergy, by no means because the clergy are a depraved class, but precisely because the austerity of their lives renders necessary for them these emotional athletics. Of course, from the standpoint of simple nature, such literature is bad, it is merely a form of that obscenity which, as Huysmans has acutely remarked, can, only be produced by those who are chaste; in Nature desire passes swiftly into action, leaving little or no trace on the mind. A certain degree of continence--I do not mean merely in the region of sex but in the other fields of human action also--is needed as a breeding-ground for the dreams and images of desire to develop into the perfected visions of art. But the point of view of society is scarcely that of unadulterated nature. In society we have not always room for the swift and free passage of impulse into action; to avoid the evils of repressed impulse this play of the emotions on a higher and serener plane becomes essential. Just as we need athletics to expand and harmonise the coarser unused energies of the organism, so we need art and literature to expand and harmonise its finer energies, emotion being, as it may not be superfluous to point out, itself largely a muscular process, motion in a more or less arrested form, so that there is here more than a mere analogy. Art from this point of view is the athletics of the emotions.

The adventures of fairy-land--of which for our age I take Casanova’s _Mémoires_ as the type--constitute an important part of this athletics. It may be abused, just as we have the grosser excesses of the runner and the cyclist; but it is the abuse and not the use which is pernicious, and under the artificial conditions of civilisation the contemplation of the life and adventures of the heroically natural man is an exercise with fine spiritual uses. Such literature thus has a moral value: it helps us to live peacefully within the highly specialised routine of civilisation.

That is the underlying justification for Casanova’s _Mémoires_ as moral literature. But there is no reason why it should emerge into consciousness when we take up these _Mémoires_, any more than a man need take up a branch of physical athletics with any definite hygienic aim. It is sufficient to be moved by the pure enjoyment of it. And there must be something unwholesome and abnormal--something corrupt at the core--in any civilised man or woman who cannot win some enjoyment from this book.

III.

The more I contemplate the eighteenth century the more interesting I find it. In my youth it seemed to me unworthy of a glance. The books and the men, Shelley above all, who stirred my young blood belonged to the early nineteenth century. I was led to regard the last century as a dull period of stagnation and decay, a tomb into which the spirit of man sank after the slow death which followed the Renaissance. The dawn of the nineteenth century was an Easter Day of the human soul, rising from the sepulchre and flinging aside the old eighteenth century winding-sheet.

I have nothing yet to say against the early nineteenth century, which was indeed only the outcome of the years that went before, but I have gained a new delight in the men of the eighteenth century. It was in that age that the English spirit found its most complete intellectual expression, unaffected by foreign influence. When that spirit, reviving after the wars that lamentably cut short the development of Chaucer’s magnificent song, again began its free literary development--no doubt with some stimulus from Humanism--it was suddenly smothered at birth by the Renaissance wave from Italy and France. We may divine how it would have developed independently if we think of John Heywood’s dramatic sketches--pale as those are after the Miller’s tale in which for the first and last time Chaucer perfectly mated English realism to the lyric grace of English idealism--and to some extent, also, when we turn to the later Heywood’s plays, or Dekker’s, and especially to the robust and tolerant humanity, the sober artistic breadth of the one play of Porter’s which has come down to us. But the intoxicating melodies of Ronsard and his fellows were heard from over sea, and the men of the English Renaissance arose--Lyly and Lodge and Campion with their refinements, Greene and Nash with their gay and brilliant music, Marlowe with his arrogant, irresistible energy--and brought to birth an absolutely new spirit, which may have been English enough in its rich and virginal elements, but received the seminal principle from abroad. It needed a century and more for that magnificent tumult to subside, and for the old English spirit to reappear and reach at last full maturity, by happy chance again in association with France, though this time it is England that chiefly plays the masculine part and impregnates France. Thus the eighteenth century was an age in which the English spirit found complete self-expression, and also an age in which England and France joined hands intellectually, and stood together at the summit of civilisation, with no rivals, unless Goethe and Kant may suffice to stand for a whole people. In the great Englishmen of these days we find the qualities which are truly native to Britain, and which have too often been torn and distracted by insane aberrations. There is a fine sobriety and sagacity in the English spirit, a mellow human solidity, such as the Romans possessed always, but which we in our misty and storm-swept island have often exchanged, perhaps for better, but certainly for other qualities. It was not so in the eighteenth century, and by no accident the historian who has most finely expressed the genius of Rome was an eighteenth century Englishman. All the most typical men of that age possessed in varying degree the same qualities: Locke, Swift, Fielding, Hume, Richardson, Goldsmith, Hogarth, Johnson, Godwin. Thus the eighteenth century should undoubtedly be a source of pride to the British heart. England’s reputation in the world rests largely on our poetic aptitudes and our political capacity. Eighteenth century England is not obviously pre-eminent in either respect, although it was the great age of our political development and the seed-time of our second great poetic age; it produced scarcely more than a single first-class poet exclusively within its limits, and it lost America. Yet our greatest philosopher, our greatest historian, our greatest biographer, nearly all our greatest novelists, our great initiators in painting, who were indirectly the initiators of the greater art of France, belong wholly to this century, and an unequalled cluster of our greatest poets belongs to its close. And these men were marked by sanity and catholicity, a superb solidity of spirit; they became genuinely cosmopolitan without losing any of their indigenous virtues. Without the eighteenth century we should never have known many of the greatest qualities which are latent, and too often only latent, in our race. Landor and Wordsworth alone were left to carry something of the spirit of the English eighteenth century far on into the literature of our own wholly alien century.

And their brothers of France were their most worthy peers. This spirit, indeed, which we see so conspicuously in the finest men of their age in England and France, was singularly widespread throughout Europe, a cheerful sobriety, a solid humanity, little troubled by any of those “movements” which were to become so prolific and so noisy in the next century. Christianity, it seemed, was decaying. Diderot, well informed on English affairs, wrote to a friend that in a few years it would be extinct, and looking at the state of the English Church at that time, no one could reasonably have surmised that Zinzendorf in Germany, and after him Wesley in England on a lower plane and Law on a higher plane, had already initiated that revival of Christianity which in our own century was destined to work itself out so obstreperously. But the world seemed none the worse for the apparent subsidence of Christianity; in the opinion of many it seemed to be very much the better. The tolerant paganism of classic days appeared to be reasserting itself, robustly in England, with a delicate refinement in France,--setting the paganism of Watteau against the paganism of Fielding--while Goethe and the Germans generally were striving to rescue and harmonise the best of Christianity with the best of antiquity. European civilisation was fully expanded; for a long time no great disturbing force had arisen, and though on every side the tender buds of coming growths might have been detected, they could not yet reveal their strength. Such a period certainly has its terrible defects; mellowness is not far from rottenness. But then youth also has its defects, and its crude acidity is still further from perfection. The nineteenth century has a higher moral standard than the eighteenth, so at least we in our self-righteousness have been accustomed to think. But even if so, the abstract existence of a high moral standard is another thing from the prevalence of high moral living. Whatever the standard may be, it is a question whether the lives are much different. In the one case the standard is much above the practice, in the other only a little above it--that is the chief difference. And the advantages of winding the standard up to the higher pitch are not so unmixed as is sometimes assumed. One need not question these advantages, well recognised in the present century. But the advantages of a lower standard are less often recognised. There is especially the great advantage that we attain a higher degree of sincerity, and sincerity, if not itself the prime virtue, is surely, whatever the virtue may be, its chief accompaniment. A life that is swathed and deformed in much drapery is not so wholesome or so effective as one that can live nearer to the sun. And the unrecognisable villain is most pernicious; the brigand who holds a revolver at your head is better than the sleek and well-dressed thief who opens the proceedings with prayer. The eighteenth has been called a gross and unintelligent century. In the department of criticism, indeed, this century in England (for it was far otherwise in Germany) comes very short of our own century, and it is largely this failure to measure the precise value of things in æsthetic perception which now makes that age seem so shocking. From this point of view every great age--and not least our own greatest Elizabethan age--is equally defective. A period of energetic life cannot afford to spend much time on the solitary contemplation of its own bowels of æsthetic emotion. To produce a Pater is the one exquisite function of a spiritually barren and exhausted age. And still the eighteenth century redeems its critical grossness by making even this later development possible; it lifted the man of letters from the place of a dependent to the place of a free man boldly prophesying in his own right; and, moreover, it was the first century which dared to claim the complete equality of men and women with all which that involves.

If it has required a certain insight for the child of our own century to discover the great qualities of the last century, there cannot be much doubt about the final judgment of the most competent judges. The eighteenth was, as Renouvier has called it, the first century of humanity since Christ, while at the same time, as Lange has said, it was penetrated through by the search for the ideal, or, as a more recent thinker concludes, it was a century dominated by the maxim _Salus populi suprema est lex_, holding in its noble aspirations after general happiness the germs of all modern socialism. In art and literature it saw the fresh spring of those blossoms which opened so splendidly and faded so swiftly in our century; it was the century not only of Hogarth and Fielding and Voltaire, but of Blake and Rousseau, of Diderot, of Swedenborg and Mesmer, of the development of modern music with Mozart and Beethoven, of the unparalleled enthusiasm awakened by the discovery of the Keltic world. And as its crowning glory the eighteenth century claims Goethe. Men will scarcely look back to our own century as so good to live in. One may well say that he would have gladly lived in the thirteenth century, perhaps the most interesting of all since Christ, or in the sixteenth, probably the most alive of all, or the eighteenth, surely the most human. But why have lived in the nineteenth, the golden age of machinery, and of men used as machines?

Eighteenth century Europe, being what it was, formed a perfect stage for Casanova to play his part on. With his Spanish and Italian blood, he was of the race of those who had come so actively to the front in the last days of old classic Rome, and his immediate ancestors had lived in the centre of the pagan Rome of the Renaissance. Thus he carried with him traditions which consorted well with much in the eighteenth century. And he had that in him, moreover, which no tradition can give, the incommunicable vitality in the presence of which all tradition shrivels into nothingness.

Casanova knew not only Italy, France, England, Germany, and Holland; he had visited Spain, Russia, Poland, Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor. He was received by Benedict XII., by Frederick II. of Prussia, by the Empress Catherine, by Joseph II. He was at home in Paris, in London, in Berlin, in Vienna; he knew Munich, Dresden, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Barcelona. His picture of London is of great interest. He spent much of the year 1763 there, and some of his most interesting experiences, romantic and psychological, occurred during that period. He even dated the close of what he calls the second act in the comedy of his life from that visit to London, the next and concluding act being one of slow declination. So profound was his depression at this time that one day he went towards the Thames at the Tower with the deliberate intention of drowning himself, having first filled his pockets with bullets to ensure sinking. Fortunately an English friend (to whom the world owes thanks) met him on the way, read his resolve in his face, and insisted on carrying him off to a very convivial party, whose indecorous proceedings, although Casanova only remained a passive witness, served to dissipate all thoughts of suicide. He is not, however, prejudiced against England; on the contrary, he finds that no nation offers so many interesting peculiarities to the attentive observer. As usual, in London Casanova mixed indiscriminately with the best and the worst society; his wit, his knowledge, his imperturbable effrontery, his charming conversation, served to open any door that he desired to open. He gives us curious glimpses into the lives of English noblemen of the day, and not less intimate pictures of the _chevaliers d’industrie_ who preyed upon them. In the course of one adventure with people of the latter sort he was haled before the eminent blind magistrate Sir John Fielding, whom he seems to have mistaken, though this is not quite clear, for his yet more eminent brother Henry. He also met Kitty Fischer, the most fashionable _cocotte_ of her day, whom we may yet see as Reynolds caught her in a well-inspired moment, dilating her sensitive nostrils, radiantly inhaling the joy of life, and he tells us anecdotes of her extravagance, of the jewels she wore, of the thousand guinea banknote which she ate in a sandwich.[6]

Throughout Europe Casanova knew many of the most celebrated people of his time, though it is clear--as one would expect from a man of his impartial humanity--he seldom went out of his way to meet them. His visit to Voltaire is a distinct contribution to our knowledge of that sage; he admired Helvetius, and wondered how a man of so many virtues could have denied virtue; D’Alembert he thought the most truly modest man he had ever met, an interesting tribute from the most truly immodest man of that period. The value of Casanova’s record of the eighteenth century lies, however, by no means in the glimpses he has given us of great personalities: that has been much better done by much more insignificant writers. It is as a picture of the manners and customs of the eighteenth century throughout Europe that the _Mémoires_ are invaluable. Casanova saw Europe from the courts of kings to the lowest _bas fonds_. He lived in the castles of French and Italian nobles, in the comfortable homes of Dutch merchants, in his own house in Pall Mall, in taverns and inns and peasants’ cottages anywhere. He had no intellectual prejudices, he had an immense versatility in tastes and practical aptitudes, he was genuinely interested in all human things. Thus he approached life with no stereotyped set of opinions, but with all the aloofness of an unclassed adventurer, who was at the same time a scholar and a man of letters. It can scarcely be that there is any record to compare with this as a vivid and impartial picture of the eighteenth century, in its robust solidity, its cheerful and tolerant scepticism, its serene and easy gaiety, its mellow decay. That is our final debt to this unique and immortal book.

What should be our last word about Casanova? It is true that although--if indeed one should not say because--he was so heroically natural Casanova was not an average normal man. It is scarcely given to the average man to expend such versatile and reckless skill in the field of the world, or to find so large a part wherein to play off that skill. But neither are the saints and philosophers normal; St. Bernard was not normal, nor yet Spinoza. And surely it is a poor picture of the world which would show us St. Bernard and Spinoza and shut out Casanova. “Vous avez l’outil universel,” Fabrice said to Gil Blas. Casanova’s brain was just such a tool of universal use, and he never failed to use it. For if you would find the supreme type of the human animal in the completest development of his rankness and cunning, in the very plenitude of his most excellent wits, I know not where you may more safely go than to the _Mémoires_ of the self-ennobled Jacques Casanova Chevalier de Seingalt.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: I take the first example which comes to hand, for whatever it may be worth:--“Luttrell was talking of Moore and Rogers--the poetry of the former so licentious, that of the latter so pure; much of its popularity owing to its being so carefully weeded of everything approaching to indelicacy; and the contrast between the _lives_ and the _works_ of the two men--the former a pattern of conjugal and domestic regularity, the latter of all the men he had ever known the greatest sensualist” (Greville’s _Memoirs_, vol. iii. p. 324).]

[Footnote 6: For another side of life we may read his description of the English Sunday:--“On Sunday one dares neither to play at cards nor to perform music. The numerous spies who infest the streets of this capital listen to the sounds which come from the parlours of the houses, and if they suspect any gaming or singing they conceal themselves and slip in at the first opportunity to seize those bad Christians who dare to profane the Lord’s Day by amusements which everywhere else are counted innocent. In revenge the English may go with impunity to sanctify the holy day in the taverns and brothels which are so plentiful in this city.” One may compare with this Mme. de Staël’s almost Dantesque description--so at least it remains in the memory--of the gloom of the Scotch Sabbath in the days of Burns. This statement of the matter remained substantially accurate until almost yesterday. So long it remained for the English spirit to re-conquer Sunday! It must be remembered that Puritanism, while always a part of the English spirit, was not originally its predominant note; it only became so as an inevitable reaction against the exotic Renaissance movement. Mary Stuart made Knox, Charles I. made Cromwell, and both monarchs were intimately associated with the last wave of the Renaissance.]

ZOLA.

ZOLA’S name--a barbarous, explosive name, like an anarchist’s bomb--has been tossed about amid hoots and yells for a quarter of a century. In every civilised country we have heard of the man who has dragged literature into the gutter, who has gone down to pick up the filth of the streets, and has put it into books for the filthy to read. And in every civilised country his books have been read, by the hundred thousand.

To-day, his great life-work is completed. At the same time, the uproar that it aroused has, to a large extent, fallen silent. Not that there is any general agreement as to the rank of the author of the Rougon-Macquart series; but the storms that greeted it have worn themselves out, and it is recognised that there are at least two sides to this as to any other question. Such a time is favourable to the calm discussion of Zola’s precise position.

The fundamental assertion of those who, in their irreconcilable opposition to Zola, have rightly felt that abuse is not argument, has always been that Zola is no artist. The matter has usually presented itself to them as a question of Idealism _versus_ Realism. Idealism, as used by the literary critic, seems to mean a careful selection of the facts of life for artistic treatment, certain facts being suited for treatment in the novel, certain other facts being not so suited; while the realist, from the literary critic’s point of view, is one who flings all facts indiscriminately into his pages. I think that is a fair statement of the matter, for the literary critic does not define very clearly; still less does he ask himself how far the idealism he advocates is merely traditional, nor, usually, to what extent the manner of presentation should influence us. He does not ask himself these questions, nor need we ask him, for in the case of Zola (or, indeed, of any other so-called “realist”) there is no such distinction. There is no absolute realism, merely a variety of idealisms; the only absolute realism would be a phonographic record, illustrated photographically, after the manner of the cinematograph. Zola is just as much an idealist as George Sand. It is true that he selects very largely from material things, and that he selects very profusely. But the selection remains, and where there is deliberate selection there is art. We need not trouble ourselves here--and I doubt whether we are ever called upon to trouble ourselves--about “Realism” and “Idealism.” The questions are: Has the artist selected the right materials? Has he selected them with due restraint?

The first question is a large one, and, in Zola’s case at all events, it cannot, I think, be answered on purely æsthetic grounds; the second may be answered without difficulty. Zola has himself answered it; he admits that he has been carried away by his enthusiasm, and perhaps, also, by his extraordinary memory for recently-acquired facts (a memory like a sponge, as he has put it, quickly swollen and quickly emptied); he has sown details across his page with too profuse a hand. It is the same kind of error as Whitman made, impelled by the same kind of enthusiasm. Zola expends immense trouble to get his facts; he has told how he ransacked the theologians to obtain body and colour for _La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_, perhaps the best of his earlier books. But he certainly spent no more preliminary labour on it than Flaubert spent on _Madame Bovary_, very far less than Flaubert spent on the study of Carthage for _Salammbô_. But the results are different; the one artist gets his effects by profusion and multiplicity of touches, the other by the deliberate self-restraint with which he selects and emphasises solely the salient and significant touches. The latter method seems to strike more swiftly and deeply the ends of art. Three strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth a thousand of Denner’s. Rich and minute detail may impress us, but it irritates and wearies in the end. If a man takes his two children on to his knees, it matters little whether he places Lénore on his right knee and Henri on his left, or the other way about; the man himself may fail to know or to realise, and the more intense his feelings the less likely is he to know. When we are living deeply, the facts of our external life do not present themselves to us in elaborate detail; a very few points are--as it has been termed--focal in consciousness, while the rest are marginal in subconsciousness. A few things stand out vividly at each moment of life; the rest are dim. The supreme artist is shown by the insight and boldness with which he seizes and illuminates these bright points at each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due subordination. Dramatists so unlike as Ford and Ibsen, novelists so unlike as Flaubert and Tolstoi, yet alike impress us by the simple vividness of their artistic effects. The methods adopted by Zola render such effects extremely difficult of attainment. Perhaps the best proof of Zola’s remarkable art is the skill with which he has neutralised the evil results of his ponderous method. In his most characteristic novels, as _L’Assommoir_, _Nana_, _Germinal_, his efforts to attain salient perspective in the mass of trivial or technical things--to build a single elaborate effect out of manifold details--are often admirably conducted. Take, for instance, the Voreux, the coal-pit which may almost be said to be the hero of _Germinal_ rather than any of the persons in the book. The details are not interesting, but they are carefully elaborated, and the Voreux is finally symbolised as a stupendous idol, sated with human blood, crouching in its mysterious sanctuary. Whenever Zola wishes to bring the Voreux before us, this formula is repeated. And it is the same, in a slighter degree, with the other material personalities of the book. Sometimes, in the case of a crowd, this formula is simply a cry. It is so with the Parisian mob who yell “A Berlin!” in the highly-wrought conclusion to _Nana_; it is so with the crowd of strikers in _Germinal_ who shout for bread. It is more than the tricky repetition of a word or a gesture, overdone by Dickens and others; it is the artful manipulation of a carefully-elaborated, significant phrase. Zola seems to have been the first who has, deliberately and systematically, introduced this sort of _leit-motiv_ into literature, as a method of summarising a complex mass of details, and bringing the total impression of them before the reader. In this way he contrives to minimise the defects of his method, and to render his complex detail focal. He sometimes attains poignantly simple effects by the mere repetition of a _leit-motiv_ at the right moment. And he is able at times, also, to throw aside his detailed method altogether, and to reach effects of tragic intensity. The mutilation of Maigrat’s corpse is a scene which can scarcely have been described in a novel before. Given the subject, Zola’s treatment of it has the strength, brevity, and certainty of touch which only belong to great masters of art. That Zola is a great master of his art, _L’Assommoir_ and _Germinal_--which, so far as I have read Zola, seem his two finest works--are enough to prove. Such works are related to the ordinary novel much as Wagner’s music-dramas are related to the ordinary Italian opera. Wagner reaches a loftier height of art than Zola; he had a more complete grasp of all the elements he took in hand to unite. Zola has not seen with sufficient clearness the point of view of science, and the limits of its capacity for harmonising with fiction; nor has he with perfect sureness of vision always realised the ends of art. He has left far too much of the scaffolding standing amid his huge literary structures; there is too much mere brute fact which has not been wrought into art. But, if Zola is not among the world’s greatest artists, I do not think we can finally deny that he is a great artist.

To look at Zola from the purely artistic standpoint, however, is scarcely to see him at all. His significance for the world generally, and even for literature, lies less in a certain method of using his material--as it may be said to lie, for example, in the case of the Goncourts--than in the material itself, and the impulses and ideas that prompted his selection of that material. These growing piles of large books are the volcanic ejecta of an original and exuberant temperament. To understand them we must investigate this temperament.

A considerable and confused amount of racial energy was stored up in Zola. At once French, Italian, and Greek--with a mother from the central Beauce country of France, more fruitful in corn than in intellect, and a father of mixed Italian and Greek race, a mechanical genius in his way, with enthusiastic energies and large schemes--he presents a curious combination of potential forces, perhaps not altogether a very promising combination. One notes that the mechanical engineer in the father seems to have persisted in the son, not necessarily by heredity, but perhaps by early familiarity and association. Young Zola was a delicate child and by no means a brilliant schoolboy, though he once won a prize for memory; such ability as he showed was in the direction of science; he had no literary aptitudes. He seems to have adopted literature chiefly because pen and ink come handiest to the eager energies of a poor clerk. It is scarcely fanciful to detect the mechanical aptitudes still. Just as all Huxley’s natural instincts were towards mechanics, and in physiology he always sought for the “go” of the organism, so Zola, however imperfect his scientific equipment may be, has always sought for the “go” of the social organism. The history of the Rougon-Macquart family is a study in social mathematics: given certain family strains, what is the dynamic hereditary outcome of their contact?

To the making of Zola there went, therefore, this curious racial blend, as a soil ready to be fertilised by any new seed, and a certain almost instinctive tendency to look at things from the mechanical and material point of view. To these, in very early life, a third factor was added of the first importance. During long years after his father’s death, Zola, as a child and youth, suffered from poverty, poverty almost amounting to actual starvation, the terrible poverty of respectability. The whole temper of his work and his outlook on the world are clearly conditioned by this prolonged starvation of adolescence. The timid and reserved youth--for such, it is said, has been Zola’s character both in youth and manhood--was shut up with his fresh energies in a garret while the panorama of the Paris world was unfolded below him. Forced both by circumstances and by temperament to practise the strictest chastity and sobriety, there was but one indulgence left open to him, an orgy of vision. Of this, as we read his books, we cannot doubt that he fully availed himself, for each volume of the Rougon-Macquart series is an orgy of material vision.[7]

Zola remained chaste, and, it is said, he is still sober--though we are told that his melancholy morose face lights up like a gourmet’s at the hour of his abstemious dinner--but this early eagerness to absorb the sights as well as the sounds, and one may add the smells, of the external world, has at length become moulded into a routine method. To take some corner of life, and to catalogue every detail of it, to place a living person there, and to describe every sight and smell and sound around him, although he himself may be quite unconscious of them--that, in the simplest form, is the recipe for making a _roman expérimental_. The method, I wish to insist, was rooted in the author’s experience of the world. Life only came to him as the sights, sounds, smells, that reached his garret window. His soul seems to have been starved at the centre, and to have encamped at the sensory periphery. He never tasted deep of life, he stored up none of those wells of purely personal emotion from which great artists have hoisted up the precious fluid which makes the bright living blood of their creations. How different he is in this respect from the other great novelist of our day, who has also been a volcanic force of world-wide significance! Tolstoi comes before us as a man who has himself lived deeply, a man who has had an intense thirst for life, and who has satisfied that thirst. He has craved to know life, to know women, the joy of wine, the fury of battle, the taste of the ploughman’s sweat in the field. He has known all these things, not as material to make books, but as the slaking of instinctive personal passions. And in knowing them he has stored up a wealth of experiences from which he drew as he came to make books, and which bear about them that peculiar haunting fragrance only yielded by the things which have been lived through, personally, in the far past. Zola’s method has been quite otherwise: when he wished to describe a great house he sat outside the palatial residence of M. Menier, the chocolate manufacturer, and imagined for himself the luxurious fittings inside, discovering in after years that his description had come far short of the reality; before writing _Nana_, he obtained an introduction to a courtesan, with whom he was privileged to lunch; his laborious preparation for the wonderful account of the war of 1870, in _La Débâcle_, was purely one of books, documents, and second-hand experiences; when he wished to write of labour he went to the mines and to the fields, but never appears to have done a day’s manual work. Zola’s literary methods are those of the _parvenu_ who has tried to thrust himself in from outside, who has never been seated at the table of life, who has never really lived. That is their weakness. It is also their virtue. There is no sense of satiety in Zola’s work as there is in Tolstoi’s. One can understand how it is that, although their methods are so unlike, Tolstoi himself regards Zola as the one French novelist of the day who is really alive. The starved lad, whose eyes were concentrated with longing on the visible world, has reaped a certain reward from his intellectual chastity; he has preserved his clearness of vision for material things, an eager, insatiable, impartial vision. He is a zealot in his devotion to life, to the smallest details of life. He has fought like the doughtiest knight of old-world romance for his lady’s honour, and has suffered more contumely than they all. “On barde de fer nos urinoirs!” he shouts in a fury of indignation in one of his essays; it is a curious instance of the fanatic’s austere determination that no barrier shall be set up to shut out the sights and smells of the external world. The virgin freshness of his thirst for life gives its swelling, youthful vigour to his work, its irrepressible energy.

It has, indeed, happened with this unsatisfied energy as it will happen with such energies; it has retained its robustness at the sacrifice of the sweetness it might otherwise have gained. There is a certain bitterness in Zola’s fury of vision, as there is also in his gospel of “Work! work! work!” One is conscious of a savage assault on a citadel which, the assailant now well knows, can never be scaled. Life cannot be reached by the senses alone; there is always something that cannot be caught by the utmost tension of eyes and ears and nose; a well-balanced soul is built up, not alone on sensory memories, but also on the harmonious satisfaction of the motor and emotional energies. That cardinal fact must be faced even when we are attempting to define the fruitful and positive element in Zola’s activity.

The chief service which Zola has rendered to his fellow-artists and successors, the reason of the immense stimulus he supplies, seems to lie in the proofs he has brought of the latent artistic uses of the rough, neglected details of life. The Rougon-Macquart series has been to his weaker brethren like that great sheet knit at the four corners, let down from Heaven full of four-footed beasts and creeping things and fowls of the air, and bearing in it the demonstration that to the artist as to the moralist nothing can be called common or unclean. It has henceforth become possible for other novelists to find inspiration where before they could never have turned, to touch life with a vigour and audacity of phrase which, without Zola’s example, they would have trembled to use, while they still remain free to bring to their work the simplicity, precision, and inner experience which he has never possessed. Zola has enlarged the field of the novel. He has brought the modern material world into fiction in a more definite and thorough manner than it has ever been brought before, just as Richardson brought the modern emotional world into fiction; such an achievement necessarily marks an epoch. In spite of all his blunders, Zola has given the novel new power and directness, a vigour of fibre which was hard indeed to attain, but which, once attained, we may chasten as we will. And in doing this he has put out of court, perhaps for ever, those unwholesome devotees of the novelist’s art who work out of their vacuity, having neither inner nor outer world to tell of.

Zola’s delight in exuberant detail, it is true, is open to severe criticism. When, however, we look at his work, not as great art but as an important moment in the evolution of the novel, this exuberance is amply justified. Such furious energy in hammering home this demonstration of the artistic utility of the whole visible modern world may detract from the demonstrator’s reputation for skill; it has certainly added to the force of the demonstration. Zola’s luxuriance of detail--the heritage of that romantic movement of which he was the child--has extended impartially to every aspect of life he has investigated, to the working of a mine, to the vegetation of the Paradou, to the ritual of the Catholic Church. But it is not on the details of inanimate life, or the elaborate description of the industrial and religious functions of men, that the rage of Zola’s adversaries has chiefly been spent. It is rather on his use of the language of the common people and on his descriptions of the sexual and digestive functions of humanity. Zola has used slang--the _argot_ of the populace--copiously, chiefly indeed in _L’Assommoir_, which is professedly a study of low life, but to a less extent in his other books. A considerable part of the power of _L’Assommoir_, in many respects Zola’s most perfect work, lies in the skill with which he uses the language of the people he is dealing with; the reader is bathed throughout in an atmosphere of picturesque, vigorous, often coarse _argot_. There is, no doubt, a lack of critical sobriety in the profusion and reiteration of vulgarisms, of coarse oaths, of the varied common synonyms for common things. But they achieve the end that Zola sought, and so justify themselves.

They are of even greater interest as a protest against the exaggerated purism which has ruled the French language for nearly three centuries, and while rendering it a more delicate and precise instrument for scientific purposes, has caused it to become rather bloodless and colourless for the artist’s purposes, as compared with the speech used by Rabelais, Montaigne, and even Molière, the great classics who have chiefly influenced Zola. The romantic movement of the present century, it is true, added colour to the language, but scarcely blood; it was an exotic, feverish colour which has not permanently enriched French speech. A language rendered anæmic by over-clarification cannot be fed by exotic luxuries but by an increase in the vigorous staples of speech, and Zola was on the right track when he went to the people’s common speech, which is often classic in the true sense and always robust. Doubtless he has been indiscriminate and even inaccurate in his use of _argot_, sometimes giving undue place to what is of merely temporary growth. But the main thing was to give literary place and prestige to words and phrases which had fallen so low in general esteem, in spite of their admirable expressiveness, that only a writer of the first rank and of unequalled audacity could venture to lift them from the mire. This Zola has done; and those who follow him may easily exercise the judgment and discretion in which he has been lacking.

Zola’s treatment of the sexual and the digestive functions, as I pointed out, has chiefly aroused his critics. If you think of it, these two functions are precisely the central functions of life, the two poles of hunger and love around which the world revolves. It is natural that it should be precisely these fundamental aspects of life which in the superficial contact of ordinary social intercourse we are for ever trying more and more to refine away and ignore. They are subjected to an ever-encroaching process of attenuation and circumlocution, and as a social tendency this influence is possibly harmless or even beneficial. But it is constantly extending to literature also, and here it is disastrous. It is true that a few great authors--classics of the first rank--have gone to extremes in their resistance to this tendency. These extremes are of two kinds: the first issuing in a sort of coprolalia, or inclination to dwell on excrement, which we find to a slight extent in Rabelais and to a marked extent in the half-mad Swift; in its fully-developed shape this coprolalia is an uncontrollable instinct found in some forms of insanity. The other extreme is that of pruriency, or the perpetual itch to circle round sexual matters, accompanied by a timidity which makes it impossible to come right up to them; this sort of impotent fumbling in women’s placket-holes finds its supreme literary exponent in Sterne. Like coprolalia, when uncontrolled, prurience is a well-recognised characteristic of the insane, leading them to find a vague eroticism everywhere. But both these extreme tendencies have not been found incompatible with the highest literary art. Moreover, their most pronounced exponents have been clerics, the conventional representatives of the Almighty. However far Zola might go in these directions, he would still be in what is universally recognised as very good company. He has in these respects by no means come up with Father Rabelais and Dean Swift and the Rev. Laurence Sterne; but there can be little doubt that, along both lines, he has missed the restraint of well-balanced art. On the one hand he over-emphasises what is repulsive in the nutritive side of life, and on the other hand, with the timid obsession of chastity, he over-emphasises the nakedness of flesh. In so doing, he has revealed a certain flabbiness in his art, although he has by no means diminished his service in widening the horizon of literary speech and subject. Bearing in mind that many crowned kings of literature have approached these subjects quite as closely as Zola, and far less seriously, it does not seem necessary to enter any severer judgment here.

To enlarge the sphere of language is an unthankful task, but in the long run literature owes an immense debt to the writers who courageously add to the stock of strong and simple words. Our own literature for two centuries has been hampered by the social tendency of life to slur expression, and to paraphrase or suppress all forceful and poignant words. If we go back to Chaucer, or even to Shakespeare, we realise what power of expression we have lost. It is enough, indeed, to turn to our English Bible. The literary power of the English Bible is largely due to the unconscious instinct for style which happened to be in the air when it was chiefly moulded, to the simple, direct, unashamed vigour of its speech. Certainly, if the discovery of the Bible had been left for us to make, any English translation would have to be issued at a high price by some esoteric society, for fear lest it should fall into the hands of the British matron. It is our British love of compromise, we say, that makes it possible for a spade to be called a spade on one day of the week, but on no other; our neighbours, whose minds are more logically constituted, call it _le cant Britannique_. But our mental compartments remain very water-tight, and on the whole we are even worse off than the French who have no Bible. For instance, we have almost lost the indispensable words “belly” and “bowels,” both used so often and with such admirable effect in the Psalms; we talk of the “stomach,” a word which is not only an incorrect equivalent, but at best totally inapt for serious or poetic uses. Any one who is acquainted with our old literature, or with the familiar speech of the common folk, will recall similar instances of simple, powerful expressions which are lost or vanishing from literary language, leaving no available substitute behind. In modern literary language, indeed, man scarcely exists save in his extremities. For we take the pubes as a centre, and we thence describe a circle with a radius of some eighteen inches--in America the radius is rather longer--and we forbid any reference to any organ within the circle, save that maid-of-all-work the “stomach”; in other words, we make it impossible to say anything to the point concerning the central functions of life.

It is a question how far real literature can be produced under such conditions, not merely because literature is thus shut out from close contact with the vital facts of life, but because the writer who is willing to be so shut out, who finds himself most at home within the social limits of speech, will probably not be made of the heroic stuff that goes to the moulding of a great writer. The social limits of speech are useful enough, for we are all members of society, and it is well that we should have some protection against the assaults of unbridled vulgarity. But in literature we may choose to read what we will, or to read nothing, and the man who enters the world of literature timidly equipped with the topics and language of the drawing-room is not likely to go far. I once saw it stated depreciatingly in a grave literary review that a certain novel by a woman writer dealt with topics that are not even discussed by men at their clubs. I had never read it, but it seemed to me then that there might be hope for that novel. No doubt it is even possible in literature to fall below the club standard, but unless you can rise above the club standard, better stay at the club, tell stories there, or sweep the crossing outside.