As in the case of Flaubert and “Realism,” so in the case of “Naturalism” and M. Zola, the more general considerations will be for the Conclusion, the selection of facts and documents, on which they are based, for this place. To obtain these facts and documents we must a little break the rule of not noticing persons who have lived very recently, in the case of M. Zola himself and his friend M. de Goncourt. Their numerus must undergo the law of representation by chiefs which presses ever and ever more upon us. Of the host opposed to them, the chief and principal, M. Ferdinand Brunetière, is still living.
Zola.
The author of Les Rougon-Macquart (for out of those good manners which do not determine by death, I shall not call him by the periphrasis against which he specially protested, “the author of L’Assommoir”) wrote a good deal of criticism; his combative temperament supplying the impulse, and his journalist experience the means.[[877]]
But of the nearly half-score volumes[[878]] in which this criticism has been collected, perhaps only one, Le Roman Expérimental,[[879]] is much worth re-reading; at any rate, it will give us quite sufficient “document” here. Issued at the very culminating-point of its author’s talent and popularity, in 1880, long after he had come through the struggles of his youth, and long before he had fallen into that condition of a naturalist and anti-theistic voyant which we find in Travail and Vérité, it is thoroughly characteristic, thoroughly equipped. There is no reason, if the author had had the same talent for criticism that he had (after making all allowances) for creation, why it should not display as much power in the one direction as the nearly contemporary Attaque du Moulin does in the other.
Le Roman Expérimental.
Not to mince matters (and waste time in the mincing), it does nothing of the sort: but, on the contrary, proves that he had next to no critical aptitude. The contention of the title-paper—that the exploits of M. Zola and his friends in fiction correspond to those of Claude Bernard in physics, supported as it is by extensive quotation and adaptation of the famous vivisector’s own words—can, I fear, receive no other epithet than puerile. The physiologist can, of course, experiment very abundantly. But how, in the name of transcendentalism and common-sense alike, can the artist in fiction experiment? One artist in fiction did do so certainly: to wit, the unlucky author of Sandford and Merton, who trained up a little girl that she might become his wife, with the natural result that she became somebody else’s. That was a roman expérimental, on all-fours with physiological and other experiments, if you like. Many persons who are entertained at His Majesty’s expense, or who have stretched His Majesty’s hemp, might also be described as romanciers expérimentaux, and the company could be strengthened from less sinister sources.
But how can the writer experiment? He can observe, he can experience, he can (the ambiguous sense of the word is probably the source of M. Zola’s blunder) analyse, as we call it. But he can never experiment, he can only imagine. The check of nature and of the actual, the blow of the quintain if you charge at it and fail, can never be his except in the metaphorical and transformed sense of “literary” success or failure, which brings us back to another region altogether. Now “imagination,” “idealism,” and the like are M. Zola’s abomination, the constant targets of his ineffectual arrows. He does not see that he is himself using them all the time to form his subjects, just as he is using the “rhetoric,” which he abominates equally, to convey his expression.