It is generally held by the critics that the descriptions of Paris appended to each section of "Une Page d'Amour" are among the finest passages to be found in the Rougon-Macquart novels. But the present writer after reperusing them, is inclined to regard their beauty as being somewhat too artificial, too elaborate. One may well prefer the panorama of the quays of Paris in "L'Œuvre," the picture of daybreak at the central markets in "Le Ventre de Paris," the descente and the rentrée of the workers in "L'Assommoir," and the march of the pitmen in "Germinal." In the former instances the spectacle which Zola sets before the reader has a vividness that leaves a lasting impression; in the latter you are borne along with the crowds which the author has conjured forth, you can see and hear their tramp, the sensation of motion being rendered with a skill which few writers have ever equalled. Further, as a superb example of the horrible blended with the pathetic, one may cite the wonderful description of the death of little Charles, in "Le Docteur Pascal."
"Germinal," "L'Assommoir," "La Débâcle," and "La Terre" are ranked as the four pillars of the Rougon-Macquart series. From a purely literary standpoint the first is superior to the second, because it contains less slang. The use of slang in dialogue is often advisable, even necessary; but in narrative and descriptive passages it is difficult to defend it unless the story be told in the first person by one who habitually speaks slang. Zola had some such idea in writing "L'Assommoir" (which he pictured as a book about the people by one of them), but shrank from carrying it to its logical conclusion, and the result, in a literary sense, was not quite pleasing.[9] However, both "Germinal" and "L'Assommoir" are living books, the greatest their author ever penned.
Passing to "La Débâcle," this is certainly a wonderfully truthful panorama of war and its horrors, though the psychology of several of its characters is open to criticism. Too many of them lack robustness; they seem too full of nerves to be regarded as typical. In the case of Maurice, a mere degenerate, the picture is accurate enough; but assuredly many feelings which Zola and others have attributed to soldiers are little known in actual war. The majority of military men are far less sensitive than some have said, and incident often follows incident so rapidly in real battle that there is no time for thought or emotion at all. "La Terre" also has faults, the outcome of Zola's reforming purpose, which led him to assemble too many black characters within a small circle; had they been more dispersed among people of an average kind the effect would have been more lifelike. In "Nana" the general blackness of the characters does not seem out of place, for only men and women of a sorry sort gravitate around a harlot. A few more average characters in "La Terre," or, rather, more prominence given to some who scarcely appear in its pages would have greatly improved the book. Here, however, as in "Pot-Bouille," Zola, carried away by his feelings, overlooked that doctrine of average truth, of which Ste.-Beuve had reminded him apropos of "Thérèse Raquin." He then admitted that he had piled on the agony unduly, and he made the same mistake in two or three volumes of "Les Rougon-Macquart." But when all is said "La Terre" remains one of his strongest and most truthful books.[10]
The savage brutishness of the chief characters in the work may well seem impossible to the ignorant; but although in reading "La Terre" one should always bear in mind that Zola never pretended that all peasants were like those in his grim picture, it is certain that his personages, individually, are accurately drawn. Awful is the record of parricides, matricides, fratricides, common murders, murderous assaults, rapes, and offences of inferior degree perpetrated in rural France. And earth hunger, disputes about property, boundaries, inheritances, and so forth, will be found at the bottom of the great majority of cases. But "La Terre" does not deal exclusively with the criminal side of peasant life. It pictures many other features: it describes the drawbacks of the small-holdings system, shows agriculture hampered by the extreme subdivision of the soil, traces the march of revolutionary and socialist principles among those who till it; sketching, too, on the way, the treatment which the imperial régime accorded to the peasantry.
There is not space here to pass all the Rougon-Macquart volumes in review from a critical point of view. One may say, however, that generally, though not invariably, those dealing with a multiplicity of characters are superior to those in which Zola analyses the feelings and actions of a few. It is acknowledged he excelled in portraying the "crowd." Structural faults are to be found in various volumes. For instance, the long idyll of Silvère and Miette interrupts the narrative of "La Fortune des Rougon" unduly; and the poetical Paradou portion of "La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret" is hardly compatible with the realism of the opening and concluding chapters. Then "Le Rêve" is almost out of place in the series, for though the Naturalist writer must take account of the dreamy aspirations and imaginings of certain hearts and minds, it is perhaps excessive to picture those dreams fulfilled in actual happenings. Again, there is some artificiality in "Une Page d'Amour." Innumerable as are the love intrigues in French society one may well doubt if an analysis of any would yield the psychology of Zola's work. "La Curée," on the other hand, within the limitations imposed on the author by circumstances and personal knowledge, is a sound piece of work, quite irrespective of the poetical intentions which some critics have ascribed to it. Passing to such volumes as "La Conquête de Plassans," "Le Ventre de Paris," and "Son Excellence," one finds that though they may be minor works they are very near to life and historical truth. Then "Nana," a great book from the social standpoint, is almost one in the literary sense also. But while freely admitting the greatness of "L'Assommoir" and "Germinal," the volume which particularly appeals to the present writer is "Le Docteur Pascal," perhaps because Zola therein expounds and defends his theory of life. The love of uncle and niece, pictured in this book, may offend the feelings of English and American Protestants, but they ought to remember that in Catholic countries marriages often take place between people connected by that tie of relationship. The writer, for his part, has nothing whatever to say against them from the moral standpoint; he deprecates them, even as he deprecates all marriages between relations, on physiological grounds. But the affections bow neither to legal enactments nor to scientific rules; love, as we are all aware, has no master; and if, therefore, one accept the position of Dr. Pascal and his niece Clotilde, Zola's work will be found one of absorbing interest for the thinking mind. True, it is disfigured by an error which the reader must set aside: the death of the old drunkard Macquart by spontaneous combustion, for scientists have declared such a death to be impossible. Zola, however, long before writing "Le Docteur Pascal," had found a case of the kind recorded in a scientific work; and for years, as several of his letters and utterances show, he had nursed the idea of bringing it into his final volume. Nobody then warned him of his error, but directly his book appeared several scientists protested that, whatever might be the effects of alcoholism, it could not lead to a death like Macquart's. That episode, then, must be dismissed, but the bulk of the book remains, with its terrible lessons, its pages of vivid and merciless analysis, its pictures of the evils of life relieved by a glowing faith in nature's power for good, an optimism which nothing dismays, which points to the dawn of a brighter day for humanity, whatever may be its present condition. And from the purely literary standpoint "Le Docteur Pascal" is admirable. Its style is perfect. The descriptive and the analytical passages are replete with beauty, depth, and force of expression. Poetry is here so thoroughly welded with prose that one cannot object to it as one may in some other volumes, such, for instance, as "Une Page d'Amour," where it seems merely a beautiful excrescence. The psychology of the characters in "Le Docteur Pascal" is also good. In point of fact, no doubt, this was a long meditated work. Almost from the time when Zola began his series—at least as soon as the Empire had fallen—he pictured the finale ahead of him, he thought of it during all the years when he was writing the intervening volumes, he gradually planned and perfected it in his mind long before he actually wrote it. It is not a book for the vulgar, who come and go, heedless of the problems, possibilities, and purposes of life; but though the love of Pascal and Clotilde may offend moral prejudices, though from the standpoint of scientific accuracy the narrative may be disfigured by the error of Macquart's death, we hold this to be the noblest, the most convincing, the most consoling book that Zola ever wrote. Such an opinion, however, may not find much acceptance in England and America where the bias in favour of revealed religion is so strong.
Without insisting further on the merits or demerits of particular volumes, if we glance at the series as a whole we shall find it to be an unexampled achievement. It is more self-contained than "La Comédie Humaine," in writing which Balzac really had no definite plan. As M. Chaumié, French Minister of Public Instruction, has said: "In Zola's work one finds all society... with the milieux in which it displays its activity, the men composing it, the passions which stir and sway them, their vices, sorrows, and miseries, the sufferings too of the disinherited,—the whole forming so striking and so true a picture that after contemplating it those with the poorest like those with the keenest sight must realise the necessity of remedying those sufferings, contending against those vices, and assuaging those sorrows.... Thus, what might have been only an admirable literary achievement, an inestimable document on a period, an ever-living picture of a given time... acquires greater grandeur, is insured of yet loftier glory, by the generous spirit which inspired it."[11]
Maître Labori
Further, though it has been suggested here that some exaggeration and some flaws may appear in the psychology of certain individual characters, the series as a whole responds to Taine's definition of literature as "a living psychology." As M. Paul Bourget has said: "Zola regarded the novel as a kind of hypothetical experiment, attempted on positive bases, the first condition for success being that the bases should be accurate and the hypothesis logical. When the hour of justice strikes for that unwearying toiler people will recognise what immense preliminary toil and study lay beneath each of his books. They will also discern his unwavering purpose to inquire fully into the condition of contemporary France, to carry his inquiry as far as possible in order to set the social problem completely and accurately before one. His right to depict all reality (la réalité totale), which is that of every sociologist, even of every historian, will not be disputed then."