"But," some one may say, "you have neglected one very important point to which you have yourself referred, and as to which you have just recommitted yourself. Did not les deux 'add something,' a very considerable something, 'of their own'? How about their style?"
And the unattractiveness of their style.
Certainly they prided themselves on this, and certainly they took a great deal of trouble about it. If any one likes the result, let him like it. It appears to me only to prove that an unsound principle is not a certain means to secure sound practice. Possibly, as Edmond boasted, this style is not the style de tout le monde. And tout le monde may congratulate itself on the fact. One can see that it must have given them a good deal of trouble—perhaps as much as, say, Paul de Saint-Victor's gave him. But then his excites a cheerful glow of satisfaction, whereas theirs only creates, as Saint-Victor himself (to one's regret) says of Swift, un morne étonnement.
Émile Zola to be treated differently.
The tone which has been adopted[465] in speaking of the Goncourts (or rather of Edmond de Goncourt, for Jules seems to have been the better fellow pretty certainly, as well as probably the more genuine talent, of the two) would be grossly unfair in dealing with Émile Zola. One may think his principle demonstrably wrong, and his practice for the most part a calamitous mistake. One may, while, if indeed it concerned us, clearing him of the charge of doing any moral harm—such harm would be as likely to be done by records of Bedlam, or the Lock Hospital, or a dipsomaniacs' home—put on the wrong side of his account a quantity of dull and dirty trash,[466] which, without his precept and example, would never have been written, or, if written, read. But the great, if mostly wasted, power displayed in his work is quite undeniable by any real critic; he did some things—and more parts of things—absolutely good; and if, as has been admitted, he did literary evil, he upset in a curious fashion the usual dictum that the evil that men do lives after them. At least it was not his fault if such was the case. He undoubtedly, whether he actually invented it or not, established, communicated, spread the error of Naturalism. But he lived long enough and wrote hard enough to "work it out" in a singular fashion—to illustrate the rottenness of the tree by the canker of the fruit to such an extent, and in such variety of application and example, that nobody for a long time has had any excuse for grafting the one or eating the other. Personally—in those points of personality which touch literature really, and out of the range of mere gossip—he had many good qualities. He was transparently honest, his honesty being tested and attested by a defect which will be noticed presently. He appears to have had no bad blood in him. His fidelity and devotion to what he thought art were as unflinching as Flaubert's own.
Some points in his personality—literary and other.
Nor was he deficient in good qualities which were still more purely literary. We shall speak later of the excellence of his short stories; if he had never written anything else there would be hardly anything but praise for him. When he does not lose himself in the wilderness of particulars, he sometimes manages to rise from it to wonderful Pisgah-sights of description. He has a really vast, though never an absolute or consummate, and always a morbid, hold on what may be called the second range of character, and a drastic, if rather mechanical, faculty of combining scenes and incidents. The mass of the Rougon-Macquart books is very much more coherent than the Comédie Humaine. He has real pathos. But perhaps his greatest quality, shown at intervals throughout but never fully developed till the chaotic and sometimes almost Blake-like Apocalypses of his last stage, was a grandiosity of fancy—nearly reaching imagination, and not incapable of dressing itself in suitable language—which, though one traces some indebtedness to Lamennais and Michelet and Hugo, has sufficient individuality, and, except in these four, is very rarely found in French literature later than the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. To set against these merits—still leaving the main fault alone—there are some strange defects. Probably worst of all, for it has its usual appalling pervasiveness, is his almost absolute want of humour. Humour and Naturalism, indeed, could not possibly keep house together; as we shall see in Maupassant, the attempt has happier results than in the case of "Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell," for the fairy expels the Devil at times wholly. The minor and particular absurdities which result from this want of humour crop up constantly in the books; and it is said to have been taken advantage of by Maupassant himself in one instance, the disciple "bamming" the master into recording the existences of peculiarly specialised places of entertainment, which the fertile fancy of the author of Boule de Suif had created.
The Pillars of Naturalism.
The Naturalist Novel, as practised by Zola, rests on three principal supports, or rather draws its materials from, and guides its treatment by, three several processes or doctrines. The general observational-experimental theory of the Goncourts is very widely, in fact almost infinitely extended, "documents" being found or made in or out of the literal farrago of all occupations and states of life. But, as concerns the definitely "human" part of the matter, immense stress is laid on the Darwinian or Spencerian doctrines of heredity, environment, evolution, and the like. While, last of all in order, if the influence be taken as converging towards the reason of the failure, comes the "medico-legal" notion of a "lesion"—of some flaw or vicious and cancerous element—a sort of modernised πρωταρχος ατη in the family, which develops itself variously in individuals.