Fiction had dealt with serving-maids before this; for example, the heroine of the first great English novel, Pamela, occupies that station. But Pamela is an innocent child, and our interest is in seeing her raised to the status of a lady. The Goncourts do not tell that kind of story: quite the contrary, their serving-maid sinks to the depths of degradation. The only other novelist of this time who was writing about such “low life” was Charles Dickens. He will tell you about poverty, he will even tell you about seduction, and the sufferings of a seduced woman; but always he is a Victorian gentleman, remembering what is proper for young girls to read. The French writers, on the other hand, take up the sexual conduct and feelings of their women in the spirit of a medical clinic; they make it a matter of honor to spare you no most hideous detail, and if you go with them you will learn all there is to know about sexual pathology.
Now this degradation exists in the world, and it is the duty of every thinking man and woman to know about it; to shrink from knowing, or from telling others about it, is to evade our mental duty. But when we have acquired this knowledge—when we have visited the hospitals and the jails and the brothels and the morgues—our minds are automatically led to the question: what is to be done about it? Not to follow this impulse is to be mentally incompetent or morally diseased.
And that is where we part company with the Goncourt brothers and their theory of art. We learn from them all about the experiences of a Paris prostitute; we learn the details of the life of a young society girl, brought up in a hot-house environment, a prey to abnormal cravings; we learn the symptoms of religious pathology, the half-sensuous hysteria of a woman in the toils of Catholic priestcraft. There are eight or ten such novels, each dealing with a different assortment of abnormalities; but nowhere in these books is there a hint of anything to be done, whether by individual conversion, the renewal of the moral forces, or by political and economic readjustments.
All such things are rigidly excluded by the “naturalist” formula; and it is essential to get clear that the Goncourt brothers, who made the formula, made it because they were sick and impotent men, the victims of a decadent stage of civilization. They thought they were giving us scientific reports upon human life, when as a matter of fact what they were giving us were the by-products of their own headaches and dyspepsias. They toiled with the devotion of martyrs to report every quiver of their nervous sensibility; Edmond watched Jules while Jules was dying—Jules even watched himself—in order to report the details of this experience. Neither of them realized that, much as the world may need information about the sensations of dying, it has even more need of information about how to live. As for the Goncourt brothers, what they needed was fresh air and exercise.
Fiction, according to this “naturalist” formula, was to become “exact science.” But then, there are many kinds of science. It is science to put a beetle under the microscope, and diagram the epidermal cells in its carapace. But science does not stop with such observation; it goes on to experiment. Supposing this beetle be dyed pink; will there be any trace of pink in its offspring, and does that prove the transmission of acquired characteristics?
We have here in California a plant wizard who raises fields of flowers and fruits and vegetables. He is not content to accumulate facts about them, but proceeds to alter them—to make cactus without spines, and blackberries as big as your thumb, and wheat that is rust-proof and peaches that are scale-proof. Will some member of the Goncourt Academy explain why the “exact science” of fiction writing might not include an effort to free human beings from alcoholism and syphilis? As it happened, the greatest disciple of the Goncourt brothers, the man who took up their formula and used it to make himself the most widely read of all French novelists, came in the end to this very conclusion, and evolved into a moralist as intense and determined as Tolstoi.
CHAPTER LXXXVIII
THE TROUGHS OF ZOLAISM
Emile Zola was left an orphan in childhood, and experienced bitter poverty. He began work as a bundle-clerk in a publishing house, and trained himself to be a writer at night. He knew what it was to be half-starved, and to write in bed with his fingers freezing in an unheated room. His struggle for recognition was long; for more than a score of years he wrote pot-boilers without success. But he had faith in his own genius, he was a stubborn plodder, and in his grim, sober fashion he worked his way to the top.
When I was a boy this Frenchman’s name was a synonym for everything loathsome; Tennyson wrote about “wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism.” This writer had used words never before used in literature, and described actions never before described; the critics could find but one explanation—that he was a vile-minded wretch. But in fact he was one of the most conscientious writers and most determined reformers that ever lived. He wrote that “‘l’Assommoir’ is morality in action ... the first story of the people that has the true scent of the people.” And he added: “I do not defend myself, my work will defend me. It is a true book.”
He had set himself to tell the full truth about the world in which he lived; to portray it as it actually was, both high and low, without mercy, without fear or shame, without sparing the hideous facts. Having such a picture before you, you might make what you pleased of it; you might become a cynic or a sensualist, a saint or a revolutionist; but until you had the facts, how could you judge what you ought to become?