Examples of his criticism.

Consult other places to fill out M. Zola’s ideas of literature, and they will be found all of a piece. Read[[880]] his “Lettre à La Jeunesse,” with its almost frenzied cry for a literature of formula, excluding genius, excluding individuality, though only to smuggle them in again afterwards by a backdoor. Read his account (very well done and producing quite the opposite effect to that which he intends) of the old man of letters, the man of letters à la Sainte-Beuve, in “L’Argent dans la Littérature,” and the funny details about royalties and centimes which follow. Read him on “L’expression personnelle” in the novel—where he is specially interesting, because with all his talent this is exactly what he himself had not got. Read him on the famous “Human Document,” where he misses—misses blindly and obstinately, almost ferociously, with the ferocity of the man who will not see—the hopeless, the insuperable rejoinder, “Study your documents as much as you like, but transform the results of the study before you give them as art.” Read the astonishing paralogism entitled “La Moralité,” where he excuses the product of tacenda in literature because tacenda are constantly recurring in life, and even being inserted in the newspapers which object to them in fiction. Read his queer reversal of a truth (certainly not too generally recognised) that Naturalism is only Romanticism “drawn to the dregs”—“le Romantisme est la période initiale et troublé du Naturalisme.” And read above all, in another of the papers, generally headed “De la Critique,” the monumental, fatal sentence, “Balzac, qui avait pour Walter Scott une admiration difficile à concevoir aujourd’hui.”[[881]]

He has said it. Not—let it be also said and underlined with all the emphasis possible, that M. Zola—that anybody—is to be put out of court because he does not admire Scott. We may be extremely sorry for him; we may think him quoad hoc utterly wrong; but he can plead the old privilege. He likes what he can—what he does like: and there is no more to be said. But if he cannot understand why Balzac (whom he himself admires for certain, not for all, of his qualities) should have admired an author whom he himself does not admire, because his qualities are different—then he shows himself at once to be destitute of the primal and necessary organ of criticism—the organ which appreciates, which at any rate comprehends and admits the appreciation of, things that are different. He is even as those Neo-classics, who could not understand how anybody could admire what was not like Virgil, or like something else, as the case might be. He has cut the ground from under his own feet, thrown up his own charter and passport. He cannot object if he be bound hand and foot and carried into the outer darkness, where La Harpe is Minos and M. Nisard Rhadamanthus, with the third place on the infernal bench left vacant for the reader to fill at his pleasure.

The reasons of his critical incompetency.

The truth, I think, of it all is, that M. Zola, though in his way a rather great man of not the best kind of letters, knew nothing critically about literature, and did not even take any real interest in it. I do not know that it has been generally remarked, but I am sure that if any one who is familiar with the enormous stretch of the novels will exert his memory, he will find an almost unexampled absence of literary reference, literary allusion, literary flavour in them. Even Dickens is not to be named in this respect beside Zola. Nay, his very critical works themselves, though they deal with books, have nothing of the book-atmosphere about them. When a man is really saturated with literature, he carries the aroma of it with him like a violet or a piece of Russian leather (less complimentary comparisons can be added at the taste and pleasure of the reader). He cannot dissociate himself from it if he would: just as another cannot attain it, however hard he pretends. When M. Zola read books it seems generally to have been to coach up his documents and his details: indeed, why should a person who despised poetry and rhetoric read them for anything else? Given this ignorance or this want of appetite, given a consuming desire to philosophise, combined with a very weak logical faculty, an intense belief in one formula or set of formulas, and a highly combative temperament, and you get a set of conditions which even M. Hennequin might admit as sufficient to turn out or account for a personage nothing if not uncritical.

“Les Deux Goncourt.”

The state of his friends, the MM. de Goncourt, was not much more gracious; but though they were even more influential, as holding up the general critical doctrine and practice of naturalist-impressionism, they have left very little direct criticism, and what they have is of art rather than of letters. They too seem to have read not much belles lettres. The elder brother, towards the very end of his days (when, by the way, he thought that Shakespeare manque d’imagination), discovered with much interest that there had been a man named Defoe who was a considerable Realist or Naturalist, and that M. Maspero had hit upon a remarkably interesting story about one Rhampsinitus. Their general principle—that all literature (they, like so many moderns who cannot write poetry, thought that prose had quite superseded it) should consist of direct personal observation clothed in deliberately and jealously “personal” expression—may be dealt with later. Of individual applications of it, the most attractive is Edmond’s quarrel with Flaubert because he, with all his labour, hit only on “the epithets of all the world in excelsis,”[[882]] while “we” achieved the “personal” epithets. From which it will appear that our old friend, Miss Edgeworth’s Frederick, when he called his hat by the extremely personal epithet of “cadwallader,” had finished the art of literature, had sounded the depths and scaled the heights of possible writing.