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M. Zola's device is Nulla dies sine linea, and even before the materials for 'Fecondite' were brought to him from France he had given an hour or two each day to the penning of notes and impressions for subsequent use. With the arrival of his books and memoranda, work began in a more systematic way.
However, the missing letter turned up at last, and from that time till the conclusion of the master's exile the arrangements devised between him, Wareham, and myself worked without a hitch. Already at the time of M. Zola's arrival in London I had received a summons to serve upon the jury at the July Sessions of the Central Criminal court.
We can see in it the prototype of much that comes later in French fiction: Daudet's "Risler Aine et Froment Jeune" and Zola's "L'Argent," to name but two. Such a story sums up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.
This is, of course, the whole question of Zola. I am grown up, and I do not worry myself much about Zola's immorality. The thing I cannot stand is his morality. If ever a man on this earth lived to embody the tremendous text, "But if the light in your body be darkness, how great is the darkness," it was certainly he.
His thorough-going conviction in the prime necessity of realism even leads him out of his way to commend Gabriele d'Annunzio, in whom some of us can detect little but a more than Zolaesque coarseness with a total lack of Zola's genius, insight, purpose, or philosophy.
Watson began to talk of other things. But as he and Fenwick discussed the pictures on the easels, or Fenwick's own projects, as they talked of Manet, and Zola's 'L'Oeuvre, and the Goncourts, as they compared the state of painting in London and Paris, employing all the latest phrases, both of them astonishingly well informed as to men and tendencies Watson as an outsider, Fenwick as a passionate partisan, loathing the Impressionists, denouncing a show of Manet and Renoir recently opened at a Paris dealer's Watson's inner mind was really full of Madame de Pastourelles, and that salon of hers in the old Westminster house in Dean's Yard, of which during so many years Fenwick had made one of the principal figures.
The press, with a few exceptions, was against him, and so were nearly all the artists of influence. Zola's aggressive articles only made the situation worse. Who was this Zola but a writer of doubtful taste and sensational style!
So is the agony of Flaubert on hearing that Zola was anticipating him in the name of Bouvard, which it had cost Flaubert six years' search to find. Zola's magnanimity in parting with it deserves a fauteuil.
It was evident that the 'great success' referred to in the message was the discovery of Henry's forgery and possibly his arrest. Directly I saw the news in a London newspaper I hurried off to M. Zola's, and when I reached his abode about noon I found him expecting me. We then went over matters together, the press telegrams, my daughter's dream and the probable outcome of the whole affair.
Thus M. Zola hopes much from her, and who will gainsay him? Not I, who can apply to her the words which Byron addressed to the home of my own and M. Zola's forefathers: "I loved her from my boyhood; she to me Was as a fairy city of the heart."
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