Among his contemporaries Tolstoy was the only one who matches him in the accumulation of details, but for the Russian every detail modulates into another, notwithstanding their enormous number. The story marches, the little facts, insignificant at first, range themselves into definite illuminations of the theme, just as a traveller afoot on a hot, dusty road misses the saliency of the landscape, but realises its perspective when he ascends a hill. There is always perspective in Tolstoy; in Zola it is rare. Yet he masses his forces as would some sullen giant, confident in the end of victory through sheer bulk and weight. His power is gloomy, cruel, pitiless; but indubitable power he has.
After the rather dainty writing of his Contes à Ninon, Zola never reached such compression and clarity again until he wrote L'Attaque au Moulin, in Les Soirées de Medan. To be quite frank, he rewrote Flaubert and the Goncourts in many of his books. He was, using the phrase in its real sense, the "grand vulgariser" of those finished, though somewhat remote artists. To the Goncourts fame came slowly; it was by a process of elimination rather than through the voluntary offering of popular esteem. And it is not to be denied that Madame Bovary owed much of its early success to the fact that its author was prosecuted for an outrage against public morals—poor Emma Bovary whose life, as Henry James once confessed, might furnish a moral for a Sunday-school class. Thus fashions in books wax and wane. Zola copied and "vulgarised" Charles de Mailly, Manette Salomon, Germinie Lacerteux (Charles Monselet saluted the book with the amiable title "sculptured slime"), Madame Gervasais—for his Roman story—-Sœur Philomène, all by Goncourt, and he literally founded his method on Madame Bovary and L'Education Sentimentale, particularly upon the latter, the greatest, and one is tempted to say the most genuine realistic novel ever written. Its grey colouring, its daylight atmosphere, its marvellous description of Fontainebleau, of masquerades, of dinners and duels in high and low life, its lifelike characters, were for Zola a treasure-trove. He took Rosanette, the most lifelike cocotte in fiction, and transformed her into Nana, into a symbol of destruction. Zola saw the world through melodramatic eyes.
Mr. Massis has noted Zola's method of literary travail, the formation of his style, the labour of style, the art of writing, the pain of writing, and his infinitely painstaking manner of accumulating heaps of notes, and building his book from them. The Massis study, the most complete of its kind, may interest the student, not alone of Zola, but of literature in general. Not, however, as a model, for Zola, with all his tiresome preparations, never constructed an ideal book—rather, to put it the other way, no one of his books reveals ideal construction. The multiplicity of details, of descriptions weary the reader. A coarse spirit his, he revelled in scenes of lust, bloodshed, vileness, and cruelty.
His people, with a few exceptions, are but agitated silhouettes. You close your eyes after reading La Bête Humaine and think of Eugène Sue, a Sue of 1880. Yet a master of broad, symphonic descriptions. There is a certain resemblance to Richard Wagner; indeed, he patterned after Wagner in his use of the musical symbol: there is a leading motive in each of Zola's novels. And like Wagner he was a sentimental lover of mankind and a hater of all forms of injustice.
From the conception of the work, with its general notes on its nature, its movement, its physiology, its determination, its first sketches of the personages, the milieu—he was an ardent adherent of Taine in this particular—the occupations of the characters, the summary plan with the accumulated details, thence to the writing, the entire method is exposed in this ingenious and entertaining book of Massis. He has no illusions about Zola's originality or the destiny of his works. Zola has long ceased to count in literary evolution.
But Emile Zola is in the Panthéon.
ZOLA AS BEST SELLER
The publication of the number of books sold by a young American novelist previous to his untimely taking off does not prove that a writer has to be alive to be a best seller. If that were the case, what about Dickens and Thackeray as exceptions? The publishers of Dickens say that their sales of his novels in 1910 were 25 per cent more than in 1909, and 750,000 copies were sold in 1911. In many instances a dead author is worth more than a live one. With Zola this is not precisely so, though his books still sell; the only interregnum being the time when the Dreyfus affair was agitating France. Then the source of Zola's income dried up like a rain pond in a desert. Later on he had his revenge.
The figures for the sale of Zola up to the end of 1911 are very instructive. His collected works number forty-eight volumes. Of the Rougon-Macquart series 1,964,000 have been sold; other novels, 764,000; essays and various works bring the total to 2,750,000, approximately. In a word, a few years hence Zola will easily pass 3,000,000. Nana still holds its own as the leader of the list, 215,000; La Terre, 162,000; L'Assommoir, 162,000. This would seem to prove what the critics of the French novelist have asserted: that books in which coarse themes are treated with indescribable coarseness have sold and continue to sell better than his finer work, L'Œuvre, for example, which has only achieved 71,000. But L'Assommoir is Zola at his best; besides, it is not such a vile book as La Terre. And then how about La Débâcle, which has 229,000 copies to its credit? The answer is that patriotism played a greater rôle in the fortune of this work than did vulgar curiosity in the case of the others. Another popular book, Germinal, shows 132,000.
On the appearance of La Terre in 1887 (it was first published as a feuilleton in Gil Blas, from May 28 to September 15), five of Zola's disciples, Paul Bonnetain, J. H. Rosny, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte, and Gustave Guiches, made a public protest which is rather comical if you remember that several of these writers have not turned out Sunday-school literature; Paul Margueritte in particular has in L'Or and an earlier work beaten his master at the game. But a reaction from Zola's naturalism was bound to come. As Remy de Gourmont wrote: "There has been no question of forming a party or issuing orders; no crusade was organised; it is individually that we have separated ourselves, horror stricken, from a literature the baseness of which made us sick." Havelock Ellis, otherwise an admirer of the genius of Emile Zola, has said that his soul "seems to have been starved at the centre and to have encamped at the sensory periphery." Blunt George Saintsbury calls Zola the "naturalist Zeus, Jove the Dirt-Compeller," and adds that as Zola misses the two lasting qualities of literature, style, and artistic presentation of matter, he is doomed; for "the first he probably could not have attained, except in a few passages, if he would; the second he has deliberately rejected, and so the mother of dead dogs awaits him sooner or later." Yet Zola lives despite these predictions, as the above figures show, notwithstanding his loquacity in regard to themes that should be tacenda to every writer.