By choosing his subject in the domain of the most extraordinary and most exceptional, by the childish or crazy symbolism and anthropomorphism displayed in his extremely unreal survey of the world, the ‘realist’ Zola proves himself to be the immediate descendant in a direct line of the romanticists. His works are distinguished from those of his literary ancestors by only two peculiarities, which M. Brunetière has well discerned, viz., by ‘pessimism and premeditated coarseness.’[443] These peculiarities of M. Zola furnish us finally with a characteristic sign also of so-called realism or naturalism, which we should have in vain attempted to discover by psychological, æsthetic, historical, and literary inquiries. Naturalism, which has nothing to do with Nature or reality, is, taken all in all, the premeditated worship of pessimism and obscenity.
Pessimism, as a philosophy, is the last remains of the superstition of primitive times, which looked upon man as the centre and end of the universe. It is one of the philosophic forms of ego-mania. All the objections of pessimist philosophers to Nature and life have but one meaning, if their premise be correct as to the sovereignty of man in the Cosmos. When the philosopher says, Nature is irrational, Nature is immoral, Nature is cruel, what is this, in other words, but: I do not understand Nature, and yet she is only there that I may understand her; Nature does not consider what is for my utility alone, and yet she has no other task than to be useful to me; Nature grants me but a short period of existence, often crossed by troubles, and yet it is her duty to make provision for the eternity of my life and my continual joys? When Oscar Wilde is indignant that Nature makes no difference between himself and the grazing ox, we smile at his childishness. But have Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Mainländer, Bahnsen, done anything more than inflate into thick books Oscar Wilde’s ingenuous self-conceit? and that with terrible seriousness. Philosophic pessimism has the geocentric conception of the world as its postulate. It stands and falls with the Ptolemaic doctrine. As soon as we recognise the Copernican point of view we lose the right, and also the desire to apply to Nature the measure of our logic, our morals, and our own advantage, and there ceases to be any meaning in calling it irrational, immoral, or cruel.
But what is also true is that pessimism is not a philosophy, but a temperament. ‘The systemic or organic sensations which arise from the simultaneous states of the several organs, digestive, respiratory, etc.,’ says Professor James Sully, ‘appear, as Professor Ferrier has lately pointed out, to be the basis of our emotional life. When the condition of these organs is a healthy one, and their functions vigorous, the psychical result is an undiscriminated mass of agreeable feeling. When the state of the organs is unhealthy, and their functions feeble or impeded, the psychical result is a similar mass of disagreeable feeling.’[444] Pessimism is always the form under which the patient becomes conscious of certain morbid conditions, and first and foremost of his nervous exhaustion. Tædium vitæ, or disgust of life, is an early premonition of insanity, and constantly accompanies neurasthenia and hysteria. It is evident that a period which suffers from general organic fatigue must necessarily be a pessimistic period. We recognise also the constant habit which consciousness has of inventing, post facto, apparently plausible motives, borrowed from its store of representations, and in conformity with the rules of its formal logic, to justify the emotional states of which it has acquired the knowledge. Thus, for the datum of the pessimistic disposition of mind, which is the consequence of organic fatigue, there arises the pessimist philosophy as an ulterior creation of interpretative consciousness. In Germany, in conformity with the speculative tendency and high intellectual culture of the German people, this state of mind has sought expression in philosophical systems. In France it has adopted an artistic form in accordance with the predominating æsthetic character of the national mind. M. Emile Zola and his naturalism are the French equivalent of the German Schopenhauer and his philosophical pessimism. That naturalism should see nothing in the world but brutality, infamy, ugliness, and corruption, corresponds with all that we know of the laws of thought. We know that the association of ideas is strongly influenced by emotion. A Zola, filled from the outset with organically unpleasant sensations, perceives in the world those phenomena alone which accord with his organically fundamental disposition, and does not notice or take into consideration those which differ from or contradict it. And from the associated ideas which every perception awakens in him, consciousness likewise only retains the disagreeable, which are in sympathy with the fundamentally sour disposition, and suppresses the others. Zola’s novels do not prove that things are badly managed in this world, but merely that Zola’s nervous system is out of order.
His predilection also for coarseness is a well-known morbid phenomenon. ‘They’ (the imbeciles), says Sollier, ‘love to talk of obscenities.... This is a peculiar tendency of mind observable specially among degenerates; it is as natural to them as a wholesome “tone” is to normal minds.’[445] Gilles de la Tourette has coined the word ‘coprolalia’ (mucktalk) for obsessional explosions of blasphemies and obscenities which characterize a malady described most exhaustively by M. Catrou, and called by him ‘disease of convulsive tics.’[446] M. Zola is affected by coprolalia to a very high degree. It is a necessity for him to employ foul expressions, and his consciousness is continually pursued by representations referring to ordure, abdominal functions, and everything connected with them. Andreas Verga described some years ago a form of onomatomania, or word-madness, which he called mania blasphematoria, or oath-madness. It is manifested when the patient experiences an irresistible desire to utter curses or blasphemies. Verga’s diagnosis applies completely to Zola. It can only be interpreted as mania blasphematoria, when in La Terre he gives the nickname of Jesus Christ to a creature afflicted with flatulency, and that without any artistic necessity or any aiming thereby at æsthetic effect either of cheerfulness or of local colour. Finally, he has a striking predilection for slang, for the professional language of thieves and bullies, etc., which he does not only employ when making personages of this kind speak, but makes use of himself, as an author, in descriptions or reflections. This inclination for slang is expressly noticed by Lombroso as an indication of degeneration in the born criminal.[447]
The confusion of thought which is shown in his theoretic writings, in his invention of the word ‘naturalism,’ in his conception of the ‘experimental novel,’ his instinctive inclination to depict demented persons, criminals, prostitutes, and semi-maniacs,[448] his anthropomorphism and his symbolism, his pessimism, his coprolalia, and his predilection for slang, sufficiently characterize M. Zola as a high-class degenerate. But he shows in addition some peculiarly characteristic stigmata, which completely establish the diagnosis.
That he is a sexual psychopath is betrayed on every page of his novels. He revels continually in representations from the region of the basest sensuality, and interweaves them in all the events of his novels without being able in any way to assign an artistic reason for this forced introduction. His consciousness is peopled with images of unnatural vice, bestiality, passivism, and other aberrations, and he is not satisfied with lingering libidinously over human acts of such a nature, but he even produces pairing animals (see La Terre, pp. 9, 10). The sight of a woman’s linen produces a peculiar excitation in him, and he can never speak without betraying, by the emotional colouring of his descriptions, that representations of this kind are voluptuously accentuated in him. This effect of female linen on degenerates affected by sexual psychopathy is well known in mental therapeutics, and has often been described by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and others.[449]
Connected with the sexual psychopathy of M. Zola is the part played in him by the olfactory sensations. The predominance of the sense of smell and its connection with the sexual life is very striking among many degenerates. Scents acquire a high importance in their works. Tolstoi (in War and Peace) represents to us Prince Pierre suddenly deciding on marrying the Princess Hélène when he smells her fragrance at a ball.[450] In the narrative entitled The Cossacks he never mentions the uncle Ieroschka without speaking of the smell he emitted.[451] We have seen in the previous chapters with what satisfaction the Diabolists and Decadents, Baudelaire, Huysmans, etc., lingered on odours, and especially on bad odours. M. Barrès makes his little princess say, in L’Ennemi des Lois: ‘I go every morning to the stables. Oh, that little stabley smell, so warm and pleasant! And she inhaled with a pretty[!] sensual expression....’[452] M. de Goncourt describes, in La Faustin, how the actress lets her Lord Annandale smell her bosom: ‘“Smell! What do you smell?” she asked Lord Annandale. “Why, carnations!” he replied, tasting it with his lips. “And what else?” “Your skin!”’[453] M. A. Binet declares that ‘it is the odours of the human body which are the causes responsible for a certain number of marriages contracted by clever men with female subordinates belonging to their households. For certain men, the most essential thing in a woman is not beauty, mind, or elevation of character; it is her smell. The pursuit of the beloved odour determines them to pursue some ugly, old, vicious, degraded woman. Carried to this point, the pleasure in smell becomes a malady of love’[454]—a malady, I will add, from which only the degenerate suffer. The examples that Binet quotes in the course of his work, and which can be there referred to, as I have no inclination to repeat them here, prove this abundantly; and Krafft-Ebing, while insisting on the ‘close connection between the sexual and the olfactory sense,’ nevertheless expressly declares: ‘At all events, the perceptions of smell play a very subordinate part within the physiological limits (i.e., within the limits of the healthy life).[455] Even after the abstraction of its sexual significance, the development of the sense of smell among degenerates, not only of the higher, but even of the lowest type, has struck many observers. Séguin speaks of ‘idiots who discriminated species of woods and stones merely by smell without having recourse to sight, and who, nevertheless, were not disagreeably affected by the smell and taste of human ordure, and whose sense of touch was obtuse and unequal.’[456]
M. Zola’s case belongs to this series. He shows at times an unhealthy predominance of the sensations of smell in his consciousness, and a perversion of the olfactory sense which make the worst odours, especially those of all human excretions, appear to him particularly agreeable and sensually stimulating. The inspector of the Montpellier Academy, Leopold Bernard, has taken the trouble, in an elaborate work—which, curiously, has remained almost unknown[457]—to bring together all the passages in Zola’s novels which touch on the question of odours, and to show that men and things do not present themselves to him as to normal individuals, viz., in the first instance as optical and acoustic phenomena, but as olfactory perceptions. He characterizes all his personages by their smell. In La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, Albine appears ‘like a great nosegay of strong scent.’ Serge, at the seminary, was ‘a lily whose sweet scent charmed his masters’(!!) Désirée ‘smells of health.’ Nana ‘dégage une odeur de vie, une toute-puissance de femme.’ In Pot-Bouille, Bachelard exhales ‘une odeur de débauche canaille’; Madame Campardon has ‘a good fresh perfume of autumn fruit.’ In Le Ventre de Paris, Françoise ‘smells of earth, hay, the open air, the open sky.’ In the same novel the ‘cheese-symphony’ occurs, as celebrated among Zola’s enthusiasts as the minute description of the variety of offensive smells of the dirty linen in L’Assommoir.
To the ‘comprehensives’ whom we have learnt to know, this insistence on the odours emitted by men and things is naturally one more merit and perfection. A poet who scents so well and receives through the nose such rich impressions of the world, is ‘a more keenly vibrating instrument of observation,’ and his art in representing things is more many-sided than that of poets who reproduce their impressions from fewer senses. Why should the sense of smell be neglected in poetry? Has it not the same rights as all the other senses? And thereupon they rapidly built an æsthetic theory which, as we have seen, induces Huysmans’ Des Esseintes to compose a symphony of perfumes, and prompts the Symbolists to accompany the recital of their compositions on the stage with odours, which they pretend are assorted to the contents of the verses. The ‘comprehensive’ drivellers do not for a moment suspect that they are simply fencing with the march of organic evolution in the animal kingdom. It does not depend on the good pleasure of a being to construct for himself his idea of the external world with the help of a group of such or such sense-perceptions. In this respect he is completely subservient to the conformation of his nervous system. The senses which predominate are those which his being utilizes in acquiring knowledge. The undeveloped or insufficiently developed senses help the brain little or not at all, to know and understand the world. To the vulture and condor the world is a picture; to the bat and the mole it is a sound and a tactile sensation; to the dog it is a collection of smells. Concerning the sense of smell in particular, it has its central seat in the so-called olfactory lobe of the brain, which diminishes in proportion as the frontal lobe is developed. The more we descend in the vertebrates the greater is the olfactory, the smaller the frontal, lobe. In man the olfactory lobe is quite subordinated, and the frontal lobe, the presumable seat of the highest mental functions, including language, greatly predominates. The consequence of these anatomical relations, which evade our influence, is that the sense of smell has scarcely any further share in man’s knowledge. He obtains his impressions of the external world no longer by the nose, but principally by the eye and ear. The olfactory perceptions only furnish a minimum contribution to the concepts which are formed out of ideational elements. It is only in the most limited degree that smells can awaken abstract concepts, i.e., a higher and complex mental activity, and stimulate their accompanying emotions; a ‘symphony of perfumes’ in the Des Esseintes sense can, therefore, no longer give the impression of moral beauty, this being an idea which is elaborated by the centres of conception. In order to inspire a man with logical sequences of ideas and judgments, with abstract concepts by scents alone; to make him conceive the phenomenon of the world, its changes and causes of motion, by a succession of perfumes, his frontal lobe must be depressed and the olfactory lobe of a dog substituted for it, and this, it must be admitted, is beyond the capacity of ‘comprehensive’ imbeciles, however fanatically they may preach their æsthetic folly. Smellers among degenerates represent an atavism going back, not only to the primeval period of man, but infinitely more remote still, to an epoch anterior to man. Their atavism retrogrades to animals amongst whom sexual activity was directly excited by odoriferous substances, as it is still at the present day in the muskdeer, or who, like the dog, obtained their knowledge of the world by the action of their noses.