Page images
PDF
EPUB

with indifferent beer and vitriolized spirits, instead of the light wine which was their holiday drink. One scents the vitriol in M. Zola's volumes, 'l'odeur du peuple.' It is part of the 'documentary evidence' offered us in proof of the reality on which he works. The Gallic vivacity which charmed all Europe is changing to a sullen humour, at once cruel and cowardly; it is sinking into 'le terrein fétide et palpitant de la vie,' which is all that the late M. Claude Bernard and the immoral school of literary vivisectionists can discover by observation or experiment, when they would know the nature of things. This, they assure men like M. Brunetière, who reproach them with not depicting the tragedy of a will which thinks,' is the only real life, a mechanism you can take to pieces and put together as you please, a mass of grey tissue to be filled with alcohol or chloral, and its action noted, as in a laboratory. But if you evoke the beast, do you not thereby hypnotise the man? In any case, there are two orders of observation. Will it be said that they are of equal human or even of equal scientific value?

6

However, let us not discuss when we should be telling our story. We now see that Realism sets out with prejudices, no less decided than those of the most fossilized of its opponents. Its great first principle is the essential bestiality of man, the prevalence of instinct over reason, as something primordial, and, so to speak, the way into Nature's secrets, as the supreme utterance of the mouth of knowledge. But is not this the

account we gave of French Romanticism? The wheel has come round to where it started. Victor Hugo's Quasimodo and Triboulet are in the same category with the Muffats and the Coppeaus, while Madame Marneffe and Nana sink into one indistinguishable abomination. Neither Balzac, nor Hugo, nor Flaubert, nor M. Zola, dreams of bringing on the boards what M. Brunetière requires of them, 'the tragedy of a will which thinks.' There is no will in their dramas, as we have seen, but only an environment, or a character doomed by its innate qualities to act as it is made to act. With them, the main interest is not in showing how a man, by mastering himself, becomes lord of his fate; but how irresistibly instinct breaks through hindrances, and the prophecy written in nerves and temperament is fulfilled malgré lui. The identity of principle cannot be mistaken. It is chiefly the treatment that differs.

Not to enlarge on this point, however, we may suggest a comparison between M. Zola, as representing the 'experimental romance' of low life, and the English writers who have dealt

with similar themes, from Smollett to Dickens. In the gift of observation, in true pathos, in the interpretation of character, he will appear immeasurably beneath them. And the reason is not far to seek. It is fellow-feeling' that 'makes us wondrous kind.' The hard-featured Scottish surgeon had a great liking for his Roderick Randoms and his Humphrey Clinkers. Dickens lived in his creations and their troubles were his own; he was Smike, Copperfield, and even 'Jo' of Tom All Alone's. The dangerous quality of stage-sentimentalism, which marred his finest work, could not hide the deep and tender sympathy with all poor friendless creatures, with the outcast, the weak, the vexed and persecuted, with little children and the very dogs and ravens, to which he owes the unique affection cherished towards his memory in English hearts. And he touched these aching wounds of humanity with gentle hands; no stain came upon him from the degradation he studied in its lowest haunts. His pictures are most innocent of all that could hurt or offend. M. Zola will look in vain for cynical shameless details or polluting language to the great predecessor who knew working men and women better than he has ever done, but whose 'documentary evidence' betrays no affection for the foul and the abnormal. It is worth while insisting that even the author of 'L'Assommoir' moves our compassion, when he feels the like himself and is not ashamed to let it appear; in the episode of the murdered child Lalie, for example, which will remind his English readers of Charley in 'Bleak House,' and in the pauses and moments of remorse, not unfaithfully drawn by him, when Coppeau and Gervaise make some effort, though unavailing, to gather up the fragments of their poor lives, shattered to pieces by drink and misery. But, in the main, he is hardly more sympathetic than Flaubert. His study of fallen women in Nana' remains to an incalculable extent untrue, for the very reason that he allows (like a genuine son of Rabelais) a far greater influence to passion than to poverty in crowding these unhappy beings on the midnight pavement. But the statistics, founded on evidence that cannot be disputed, of reformatories, hospitals, and charitable societies, tell another tale. It would be more to the purpose to indict the buyers than the sellers in that dismal market. Like Balzac, M. Žola has a keen relish for the disorders of existence, not of course as practising them, but imaginatively; and he prefers them fullflavoured and vulgar, 'tripes à la mode de Caen,' if one may borrow a dish from the cuisine of 'L'Assommoir.' But his receipts for the preparing of such viands are taken from a sort of abstract chemistry and not from experience. Given,' he would seem

6

to

[ocr errors]

to say, the animal called hare, it should be dressed in the manner following.' But Mrs. Glasse-to say nothing of Brillat Savarin-would tell him that there are twenty ways of dressing hare. The Paris workman is not simply a type; he is a crowd of distinctly marked individuals; and what we desiderate in M. Zola, if he would care to understand, is a little more observation (not of the documentary sort) and the sympathy which makes it possible. He has confessed penitently that when he published La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret,' he was yet under the influence of romantic Idealism. It is perfectly true. Even now he has not quite broken the chain. But that sense of logic which gives to French writing its dramatic squareness and symmetry, as it leads French landscape artists to cut and hack their woods into the most wearisome of straight lines, has induced him and his disciples to adapt living realities to the Procrustean bed of formulas, intelligible indeed, but narrow. There is no abysmal depth of personality' in them. Literature is not to be a method of approximations, but scientific and exact to the last fibre. As though a gallery of photographs could exhaust the expressions, or tell the history, of a human face! Go to,' one feels tempted to say; when your painters have rendered to their own satisfaction a square inch of the living form,—when the infinite gradation of tints in the human hand or cheek has been transferred to canvas, come and tell us that you have put the soul into words.' It is, indeed, 'mere imitation of the inimitable.' Hints and happy suggestions of passing moments are within the artist's power. But the method is one of interpretation, founded on surprisingly scanty data. That gift it is which makes the value of experience in art as in science, in the region of pictured fancies as in the everyday struggle for success. To quote the reverend fable, millions of men see the apple fall and think only whether it is green or ripe,-a Newton sees it, and discovers the system of the universe.

But to return. The nameless horror which clings to M. Zola's description of a world stricken with leprosy, fit only to be shovelled out of sight or passed through a winnowing fire, brings to a certain extent its own cure. Vice and vulgarity, in themselves, have no charm; the author of La Terre' and Germinal' is compelled to feign a virtue if he have it not, and to assure his audience that a high moral indignation makes him a realist, as it made Juvenal a poet. But the flame of righteous anger is less perceptible in volumes of which the public opinion and, we are happy to say, the law of this country forbid the translation to be circulated, than the

dull

dull red glare of lust and obscenity, or the noisome fumes of an atmosphere fit only for Yahoos to dwell in. That the classics of a civilized nation, long held to be the first in Europe for its refinement, should include M. Zola's writings, is a portent of unexampled significance. The licence of the eighteenth century culminated in '89 and '93. In what moral earthquake or culbute générale are we to behold the outcome of a literature which is read by hundreds of thousands, and which inflames while it expresses their vilest fancies. Baudelaire has called his poetry of the Decadence Les Fleurs du Mal. It is the epigraph of the French literature of our time, the very virtues of which are grafted upon vice. Corruption breeds creatures of one kindred with itself. These dark and poisonous toadstools, growing upon the grave of an illustrious people, bear witness to the life in death which is fast consuming the France we have known and admired.

For not even M. Zola has touched the floor of this great deep, covered with a vegetation that springs only in darkness. His robust vulgarity has still some strength in it; the wild beasts, tearing one another with bloody jaws, display primeval fierceness that, if it were only tamed, might serve better purposes than to devour and be devoured. The disgust which overcomes us, when we read the chronicles of 'Les RougonMacquart,' may possibly mislead us. M. Zola has neither languors nor lilies to offer the young and imaginative, except in Le Rêve,' a curious, not altogether unsuccessful resuscitation of the quasi-religious novel. Angélique and Félicien, however, have but a holiday importance in the movement we are following. But, paradoxical as it may seem, we feel that writers like M. Alphonse Daudet, and still more like M. Bourget, represent lower circles of this Inferno than do the unmixed Realists. It is all the difference between Belial and his sons 'flushed with insolence and wine' on the one hand, and Lucifer with his self-torment and blank despair on the other.

M. Daudet, a versatile genius with touches of Southern humour and gay lightness in him, is, for the intrinsic quality of his work, by far the most considerable of French novelists that have arisen since Flaubert. In the drawing of character, in a certain freedom and we had almost said largeness of handling, and in the faculty of arousing sympathy with the rival personages which come forward on his stage, it will hardly be contended that he has a living equal. 'Les Rois en Exil' has drawn from M. Brunetière the observation that its author is 'moving towards something new;' that he has perhaps come upon a fresh vein, in the country of romance. The drama Vol. 171.-No. 341.

G

of

of character, the shock of passions, have little interest, comparatively, for M. Daudet. He prefers to paint what any one may see if he will drive or walk down the Champs Elysées, or enter a café at the corner of the Rue Royale. But whereas M. Zola, in attempting these effects, shows the want of tone and colour which makes a photograph so disappointing, M. Daudet possesses a rare originality, and is not only an artist, says M. Brunetière again, but a poet. The French, perhaps from a feeling of the limits of their language, readily condone the absence of metre in poetry. To them a prose poet seems not inferior to the muse which floats and soars upon the wings of music. However, let it be granted that M. Daudet has his portion of the poet's gifts. Among them is that of seizing fugitive and elementary impressions, an aptitude which he has developed by the study of Flaubert, like those others of rendering thought by physical sensations, and of bringing out his characters by establishing them where the action itself will reveal what they are. That he does violence to the French language, and stretches it on the rack of his invention, is no less true than symptomatic of the disease which the nation has fallen into. But he has much spontaneous feeling; he knows how to animate the figures which he openly borrows from the pavement and the newspaper. He has not read Dickens for nothing; and he is one of the few French novelists who have been sufficiently at home with nature to describe children. The little Prince, Zara, in 'Les Rois en Exil,' is a pathetic study, with his boyish nobleness of bearing, and most pitiful destiny, due to the corrupted royal blood which calls forth words of astonishment from the great physician. He is not afraid to express an interest in the men and women whose story he tells, for M. Daudet has renounced the 'impersonal' art of Flaubert. And his laughter is human and pleasant, as in the Tartarin,' who represents for us the extravagance of the Provençal or the Gascon.

With one whom we are thus warranted in calling genial,—and there is, if the word be rightly taken, no higher praise, it was to be hoped that a chapter of French literature would begin altogether unlike the foul caricatures of reality which were all that the Zolas could produce. Le Nabab' might be leniently judged as a vehement but by no means unmerited satire on the dramatis person who flourished under Napoleon III. And if 'Les Rois en Exil' gave a misleading, and even false view of the royal houses of Europe, which are not all sunk in corruption and effeminacy, in spite of the Prince of Axel and Christian II., there was yet something of an historical breadth in the picture

« PreviousContinue »