The vocabulary of Hugo and Zola is tremendous. No other French writers are comparable. Hugo of course is the greater. Coming from their fluent range to moderns, Duhamel for instance, is like coming to one-syllable words on a baby’s blocks. The range of the two older writers is prodigious. One can not help but be impressed by virtuousity. It is astonishing, the swinging around the head of the dictionary of a race.
Only French and Russians have understood, then portrayed faithfully in fiction, the natures of women. Beside Zola and Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, the best of the English are cold, and a little dull. The bonfire of vision which illuminates is seldom at their command; the thin-edged penetration. Restraint of soul hinders. Some insufficiency hobbles, keeps the writer poised in a safe, less poignant place. In the seeing he is seldom able to forget, then create from the unmeasured which is beyond self. He stands in his shadow. There is a habit not to carry the novel to its logical end as was way with the great Frenchmen. In brittle, new-world atmosphere, the subject crumbles long before the supreme moment. Now our novelists are writing dull imitations of difficult, melancholy, sad-skied Russian novels, trying to make believe they suit our light, bright, lyrically dramatic atmosphere, and our young land, where promise is paramount, and experience and wisdom slight.
In the person of Nana, the courtesan, proud Venus of the modern world, Zola symbolized the ultimate fall, then decay of France through unrestrained living. Powerful prose is here. It is style founded upon plasticity of logically marshalled fact. It is great in reach, conviction, resonance.
The balanced exigencies of life Zola could feel, then express. His exposition resembles the regal unfolding of a rose. It is full, natural, complete. The result is fine, intellectual satisfaction.
Zola, in Nana, speaks of the forties as the dangerous age for women. This may have suggested the novel by that name: Das Gefährliche Alter. (The Dangerous Age.)
Zola’s unfolding an idea, then pushing logical progression on, in sequence after sequence, is remarkable. With security he steps from the individual to the universal. His novel construction resembles an uncoiling spiral; tiny at first, scarcely larger than a dot; at last, huge enough to embrace the universe. Nana is a little outcast of the Parisian gutter. When he finishes the novel she has been lifted to represent not only Paris, then France, but the devouring sin of Latin peoples; passion, debauchery, lust. And still he is not satisfied with sublime expanding of idea. On, on he goes, a god now, marching toward unseen worlds! Before our astonished eyes we see Nana symbolizing the world-force the Greeks named Venus, which the pagan soul of Zola believes still to rule.
In his Rome, too, he shows world forces again, again expanding, magnificently triumphant. Over them, queening it as of yore, stands the glorified Venus of the Greeks, meaning that natural impulses in the heart outlast laws made to subdue them, just as after building, destroying again what is built, the red earth remains, insolent, sullen, but always dominant.
History tells how poor people of Rome went, for generations, to the crumbling Colosseum for material with which to build humble homes. Just so today lesser novelists go to these massive creative monuments, such as Zola’s Rome, for purpose of a similar quarrying. The tiny germ for little novels, stories, is concealed in these giant accumulations. We find what may have been initial impulse for Imperial Purple, by Saltus. We recall Zola saying, in this book, that the imperial purple of the Caesars has slipped down upon the shoulders of the priests. Here is the ghost of Bourget’s Cosmopolis. In the labyrinths of Zola’s rich, masterful Rome not only these books, but others I might name, float, disembodied shadows.
There are only a few novelists counting all races. They can be counted on fingers of the hand. Other novels are woven out of the floating, uncounted richly wasteful threads of the great. In the little popular story tellers of any day or race, there are few ideas, seldom profound seeing nor anything worth while. There are few originators. The works of Zola marked the death of the old novel. Zola is not using imagination, but the cold observation of the scientist. The scientific mind is dawning.
The fear which was to make Maupassant mad is the hidden, dramatic motif in his stories. It sat in his brain weaving patiently a Penelope-web, which, at last, smothered him. Maupassant was cynic, sensualist, and sumptuous master of the hidden soul. He touches the heart, the intellect, and the senses.