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In this narrative one found Mme. Zola equipping her husband with a nightgown for his perilous journey abroad, and secreting bank notes in the lining of his garments.
Flaubert is the most noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. I mean the Novel of sexual relations in their irregular aspects. The stormy artist of the Goncourt dinners has much to answer for, if we regard him only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary.
But the event, however indirectly and involuntarily, was justice which no other people in Europe would have done, and perhaps not any people of this more enlightened continent. The success of Zola as a literary man has its imperfections, its phases of defeat, but his success as a humanist is without flaw.
After Scott we beheld the starveling story once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable begin to be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details developed a particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on technical successes.
NICE, February 6, 1898. ... You write that you are annoyed with Zola, and here everyone has a feeling as though a new, better Zola had arisen. In his trial he has been cleansed as though in turpentine from grease-spots, and now shines before the French in his true brilliance. There is a purity and moral elevation that was not suspected in him.
If he thinks it is his censors, he clings to his opinions with an abiding constance, while ridicule, obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical refutation and personal detraction follow unsparingly upon every expression, for instance, of his belief that romantic fiction is the highest form of fiction, and that the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school of Tolstoy, Tourguenief, Zola, Hardy, and James, are unworthy a moment's comparison with the school of Rider Haggard.
It paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone. And she is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles.
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."
It is in this respect that his enormous superiority over Zola is most clearly shown. When "L'Assommoir" was published, George Moore asked Turgenev how he liked it, and he replied: "What difference does it make to me whether a woman sweats in the middle of her back or under her arm? I want to know how she thinks, not how she feels."
Like all Southerners, Zola helps out his voice with frequent gestures; but he has none of the exuberant eloquence of his race. In society he is still, to a certain degree, and must always remain the victim of bashfulness; and his one attempt at public speaking was a complete failure. He has in him nothing of the boulevardier, and he is happy only when at work.
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