In this connection, and as a commentary on “The Attack on the Windmill,” we may commend the three short papers appended to this story to the earnest attention of readers. Nothing on the subject has been written more picturesque, nor, in its simple way, more poignant, than the chain of reminiscences called “Three Wars.” Whether Louis and Julien existed under those forms, or whether the episodes which they illustrate are fictitious, matters little or nothing. The brothers are natural enough, delightful enough, to belong to the world of fiction, and if their story is, in the historical sense, true, it is one of those rare instances in which fact is better than fancy. The crisis under which the timid Julien, having learned the death of his spirited martial brother, is not broken down, but merely frozen into a cold soldierly passion, and spends the remainder of the campaign—he, the poet, the nestler by the fireside, the timid club-man—in watching behind hedges for Prussians to shoot or stab, is one of the most extraordinary and most interesting that a novelist has ever tried to describe. And the light that it throws on war as a disturber of the moral nature, as a dynamitic force exploding in the midst of an elaborately co-related society, is unsurpassed, even by the studies which Count Lyof Tolstoi has made in a similar direction. It is unsurpassed, because it is essentially without prejudice. It admits the discomfort, the horrible vexation and shame of war, and it tears aside the conventional purple and tinsel of it; but at the same time it admits, not without a sigh, that even this clumsy artifice may be the only one available for the cleansing of the people.
IV.
In 1883, M. Zola published a third volume of short stories, under the title of the opening one, Le Capitaine Burle. This collection contains the delicate series of brief semi-autobiographical essays called “Aux Champs,” little studies of past impression, touched with a charm which is almost kindred to that of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s memories. With this exception, the volume consists of four short stories, and of a set of little death-bed anecdotes, called “Comment on Meurt.” This latter is hardly in the writer’s best style, and suffers by suggesting the immeasurably finer and deeper studies of the same kind which the genius of Tolstoi has elaborated. Of these little sketches of death, one alone, that of Madame Rousseau, the stationer’s wife, is quite of the best class. This is an excellent episode from the sort of Parisian life which M. Zola seems to understand best, the lower middle class, the small and active shopkeeper, who just contrives to be respectable and no more. The others seem to be invented rather than observed.
The four stories which make up the bulk of this book are almost typical examples of M. Zola’s mature style. They are worked out with extreme care, they display in every turn the skill of the practised narrator, they are solid and yet buoyant in style, and the construction of each may be said to be faultless. It is faultless to a fault; in other words, the error of the author is to be mechanically and inevitably correct. It is difficult to define wherein the over-elaboration shows itself, but in every case the close of the story leaves us sceptical and cold. The dénouement is too brilliant and conclusive, the threads are drawn together with too much evidence of preoccupation. The impression is not so much of a true tale told as of an extraordinary situation frigidly written up to and accounted for. In each case a certain social condition is described at the beginning, and a totally opposite condition is discovered at the end of the story. We are tempted to believe that the author determined to do this, to turn the whole box of bricks absolutely topsy-turvy. This disregard of the soft and supple contours of nature, this rugged air of molten metal, takes away from the pleasure we should otherwise legitimately receive from the exhibition of so much fancy, so much knowledge, so many proofs of observation.
The story which gives its name to the book, “Le Capitaine Burle” is perhaps the best, because it has least of this air of artifice. In a military county town, a captain, who lives with his anxious mother and his little pallid, motherless son, sinks into vicious excesses, and pilfers from the regiment to pay for his vices. It is a great object with the excellent major, who discovers this condition, to save his friend the captain in some way which will prevent an open scandal, and leave the child free for ultimate success in the army. After trying every method, and discovering that the moral nature of the captain is altogether too soft and too far sunken to be redeemed, as the inevitable hour of publicity approaches, the major insults his friend in a café, so as to give him an opportunity of fighting a duel and dying honourably. This is done, and the scandal is evaded, without, however, any good being thereby secured to the family, for the little boy dies of weakness and his grandmother starves. Still, the name of Burle has not been dragged through the mud.
M. Zola has rarely displayed the quality of humour, but it is present in the story called “La Fête à Coqueville.” Coqueville is the name given to a very remote Norman fishing-village, set in a gorge of rocks, and almost inaccessible except from the sea. Here a sturdy population of some hundred and eighty souls, all sprung from one or other of two rival families, live in the condition of a tiny Verona, torn between contending interests. A ship laden with liqueurs is wrecked on the rocks outside, and one precious cask after another comes riding into Coqueville over the breakers. The villagers, to whom brandy itself has hitherto been the rarest of luxuries, spend a glorious week of perfumed inebriety, sucking splinters that drip with bénédictine, catching noyeau in iron cups, and supping up curaçao from the bottom of a boat. Upon this happy shore chartreuse flows like cider, and trappistine is drunk out of a mug. The rarest drinks of the world—Chios mastic and Servian sliwowitz, Jamaica rum and arrack, crême de moka and raki drip among the mackerel nets and deluge the seaweed. In the presence of this extraordinary and fantastic bacchanal all the disputes of the rival families are forgotten, class prejudices are drowned, and the mayor’s rich daughter marries the poorest of the fisher-sons of the enemy’s camp. It is very amusingly and very picturesquely told, but spoiled a little by M. Zola’s pet sin—the overcrowding of details, the theatrical completeness and orchestral big-drum of the final scene. Too many barrels of liqueur come in, the village becomes too universally drunk, the scene at last becomes too Lydian for credence.
In the two remaining stories of this collection—“Pour une Nuit d’Amour” and “L’Inondation”—the fault of mechanical construction is still more plainly obvious. Each of these narratives begins with a carefully accentuated picture of a serene life: in the first instance, that of a timid lad sequestered in a country town; in the second, that of a prosperous farmer, surrounded by his family and enjoying all the delights of material and moral success. In each case this serenity is but the prelude to events of the most appalling tragedy—a tragedy which does not merely strike or wound, but positively annihilates. The story called “L’Inondation,” which describes the results of a bore on the Garonne, would be as pathetic as it is enthralling, exciting, and effective, if the destruction were not so absolutely complete, if the persons so carefully enumerated at the opening of the piece were not all of them sacrificed, and, as in the once popular song called “An ’Orrible Tale,” each by some different death of peculiar ingenuity. As to “Pour une Nuit d’Amour,” it is not needful to do more than say that it is one of the most repulsive productions ever published by its author, and a vivid exception to the general innocuous character of his short stories.
No little interest, to the practical student of literature, attaches to the fact that in “L’Inondation” M. Zola is really re-writing, in a more elaborate form, the fourth section of his “Jean Gourdon.” Here, as there, a farmer who has lived in the greatest prosperity, close to a great river, is stripped of everything—of his house, his wealth, and his family—by a sudden rising of the waters. It is unusual for an author thus to re-edit a work, or tell the same tale a second time at fuller length, but the sequences of incidents will be found to be closely identical, although the later is by far the larger and the more populous story. It is not uninteresting to the technical student to compare the two pieces, the composition of which was separated by about ten years.