A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century

CHAPTER XIII
NATURALISM – THE GONCOURTS, ZOLA, AND MAUPASSANT

The beginnings.

If I were writing this History on the lines which some of my critics (of whom, let it be observed, I do not make the least complaint) seem to prefer, or at least to miss their absence, a very large part of this chapter would give me the least possible difficulty. I should simply take M. Zola's Le Roman Expérimental and M. Brunetière's Le Roman Naturaliste and "combine my information." The process – easy to any one of some practice in letters – could be easier to no one than to me. For I read and reviewed both books very carefully at their first appearance; I had them on my shelves for many years; and the turning of either over for a quarter of an hour, or half at the most, would put its contents once more at my fingers' ends. But, as I have more than once pointed out, elaborate boiling down of them would not accord with my scheme and plan. Inasmuch as the episode or passage⁴⁵⁵ is perhaps, of all those which make up our story, the most remarkable instance of a deliberate "school" – of a body of work planned and executed under more or less definite schedules – something if not much more of the critical kind than usual may be given, either here or in the Conclusion.⁴⁵⁶ But we shall, I think, learn far better things as to M. Zola and those about him by considering what they – at least what he, his would-be teachers, and his greatest disciple – actually did, than by inquiring what they meant, or thought they meant, to do, or what other people thought about them and their doings.

Let us therefore, in the first place and as usual, stick to the history, though even this may require more than one mode and division of dealing.

"Les deux Goncourt."

The body of Naturalist or Experimental novels which, beginning in the 'sixties of the century, extended to, and a little over, its close, has long been, and will probably always continue to be, associated with the name of Émile Zola. But the honour or dishonour of the invention and pioneering of the thing was claimed by another, for himself and a third writer, that is to say, by Edmond de Goncourt for himself and his brother Jules. The elder of the Goncourts – the younger died in early middle age, and knowledge of him is in a way indirect, though we have some letters – might be said to have, like Restif, a manie de paternité, though his children were of a different class. He thought he invented Naturalism; he thought he introduced into France what some unkind contemporaries called "Japoniaiserie";⁴⁵⁷ he certainly had a good deal to do with reviving the fancy for eighteenth-century art, artists, bric-à-brac generally, and in a way letters; and he ended by fathering and endowing an opposition Academy. It was with art that "Les deux Goncourt"⁴⁵⁸ (who were inseparable in their lives, and whom Edmond – to do him the justice which in his case can rarely be done pleasantly – did his best to keep undivided after Jules's death) began their dealings with eighteenth-century and other artists⁴⁵⁹– perhaps the most valuable of all their work. But it was not till the Second Empire was nearly half-way through, till Jules was thirty and Edmond thirty-eight, that they tried fiction (drama also, but always unsuccessfully), and brought out, always together and before 1870 (when Jules died), a series of some half-dozen novels: Charles Demailly (afterwards re-titled) (1860), Sœur Philomène (next year), Renée Mauperin (1864), Germinie Lacerteux (next year), Manette Salomon (1867), and Madame Gervaisais (1869).

Their work.

It is desirable to add that, besides the work already mentioned and published before 1870, the two had given a book called Idées et Sensations, setting forth their literary psychology; and that, after the cataclysm, Edmond published a description of their house and its collections, his brother's letters, and an immense Journal des Goncourt in some half-score of volumes, which was, naturally enough, one of the most read books of its time. Naturally, for it appealed to all sorts of tastes, reputable and disreputable, literary-artistic and Philistine, with pairs enough of antithetic or complementary epithets enough to fill this page. Here you could read about Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, about Taine and Renan, about Tourguénieff and Flaubert, as well as about Daudet and Zola, and a score of other more or less interesting people. Here you could read how Edmond as a boy made irruptions into a newly-married cousin's bedroom, and about the interesting sight he saw there; how an English virtuoso had his books bound in human skin; how people dined during the siege of Paris, and a million other things; the whole being saturated, larded, or whatever word of the kind be preferred, with observations on the taste, intellect, and general greatness of the MM. de Goncourt, and on the lamentable inferiority of other people, etc., etc. If it could be purged of its bad blood, the book would really deserve to rank, for substance, with Pepys' diary or with Walpole's letters.⁴⁶⁰ As it is, when it has become a little forgotten, the quarterly reviewers, or their representatives, of the twenty-first century will be able to make endless réchauffés of it. And though not titularly or directly of our subject, it belongs thereto, because it shows the process of accumulation or incubation, and the temper of the accumulators and incubators in regard to the subjects of the novels themselves.

The novels.

To analyse all these novels, or even one of them, at length, would be a process as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable. The "chronicles of wasted grime" may be left to themselves, not out of any mere finical or fastidious superiority, but simply because their own postulates and axioms make such analysis (if the word unfairness can be used in such a connection) unfair to them. For they claimed – and the justice, if not the value, of the claim must be allowed – to have rested their fashion of novel-writing upon two bases. The substance was to be provided by an elaborate observation and reproduction of the facts of actual life, not in the least transcendentalised, inspirited, or in any other way brought near Romance, but considered largely from the points of view which their friend Taine, writing earlier, used for his philosophical and historical work – that of the milieu or "environment," that of heredity, though they did not lay so much stress on this as Zola did – and the like. The treatment, on the other hand, was to be effected by the use of an intensely "personal" style, a new Marivaudage, compared to which, as we remarked above, Flaubert's doctrine of the single word was merely rudimentary. After Jules's death Edmond wrote, alone, La Fille Elisa, which was very popular, La Faustin, and Chérie, the last of which, with Germinie Lacerteux, may form the basis of a short critical examination. Those who merely wish to see if they can like or tolerate the Goncourtian novel had perhaps better begin with Renée Mauperin or Madame Gervaisais. Both have been very highly praised,⁴⁶¹ and the first named of them has the proud distinction of putting "le mot de Cambronne" in the mouth of a colonel who has been mortally wounded in a duel.

Germinie Lacerteux and Chérie taken as specimens.

To return to our selected examples, Germinie Lacerteux is the story of an actual bonne of the brothers, whose story, without "trimmings," is told in the Journal itself.⁴⁶² The poor creature is as different as possible, not merely from the usual heroine, but from the grisette of the first half of the century and from the demi-mondaine of Dumas fils, and Daudet, and even Zola. She is not pretty; she is not fascinating in any way; she is neither good- nor ill-natured in any special fashion; she is not even ambitious of "bettering" herself or of having much pleasure, wealth, etc. If she goes to the bad it is in the most commonplace way and with the most unseductive seducer possible. Her progress and her end are, to borrow a later phrase and title metaphorically, merely a tale of the meanest streets; untouched and unconfirmed by the very slightest art; as destitute of any aesthetic attraction, or any evidence of artistic power, as the log-books of a common lodging-house and a hospital ward could be. In Chérie there is nothing exactly improper; it is merely an elaborate study of a spoilt – at least petted – and unhealthy girl in the upper stages of society, who has at last the kindness – to herself, her relations, and the reader – to die. If M. de Goncourt had had the slightest particle of humour, of which there is no trace in any of his works, one might have taken this, like other things perhaps, as a slightly cryptic parody – of the poitrinaire-heroine mania of times a little earlier; but there is no hope of this. The subject was, in the sense attached to the word by these writers, "real"; it could be made useful for combined physiological and psychological detail; and, most important of all, it was more or less repulsive.⁴⁶³

The impression produced by them.

For this is what it really comes to in the Goncourts, in Zola, and in the rest, till Guy de Maupassant, not seldom dealing with the same material, sublimes it, and so robs it of its repulsiveness, by the force of true comic, tragic, or romantic art. Or course it is open to any one to say, "It may repel you, but it does not repel me." But this is very cheap sophistry. We do not require to be told, in the words which shocked Lord Chesterfield but do not annoy a humble admirer of his, that "One man's meat is another man's poison." Carrion is not repulsive to a vulture. Immediately before writing these words I was reading the confession of an unfortunate American that he or she found The Roundabout Papers "depressing." For my part, I have never given up the doctrine that any subject may be deprived of its repulsiveness by the treatment of it. But when you find a writer, or a set of writers, deliberately and habitually selecting subjects which are generally held to be repellent, and deliberately and habitually refusing or failing to pass them through the alembic in the manner suggested – then I think you are justified, not merely in condemning their taste, but in thinking not at all highly of their art. A cook who cannot make his meat savoury unless it is "high" is not a good cook, and if he cannot do without pepper and garlic⁴⁶⁴ he is not much better.

The rottenness of their theory.

Dismissing, however, for a moment the question of mere taste, it should be evident that the doctrine of rigid "observation," "document," "experience," and the like is bad in art. Like so many – some optimists would say like all – bad things, it is, of course, a corruption, by excess and defect both, of something good or at least true. It cannot be necessary here, after scores of expressions of opinion on the subject throughout this book, to admit or urge the importance of observation of actual life to the novelist. The most ethereal of fairy-tales and the wildest of extravaganzas would be flimsy rubbish if not corroborated by and contrasted with it: it can be strengthened, increased, varied almost at discretion in the novel proper. I hold it, as may be argued perhaps in the Conclusion, to be the principle and the justification of Romance itself. But, independently of the law just mentioned, that you must not confine your observation to Ugliness and exclude Beauty – it will not do to pull out the pin of your cart, and tilt a collection of observed facts on the hapless pavement of the reader's mind. You are not a reporter; not a compiler of dossiers; not a photographer. You are an artist, and you must do something with your materials, add something of yourself to them, present something not vamped from parts of actual life itself, but reinforcing those parts with aesthetic re-creation and with the sense of "the whole." I find this – to confine ourselves strictly to the famous society so often mentioned in the Journal– eminently in Flaubert, and as far as one can judge from translations, in Tourguénieff; I find it, to a less extent, in Daudet; I find it sometimes even in Zola, especially, but not merely, in his shorter stories; I find it again, and abundantly, in Maupassant. But I never find it in the Goncourts: and when I find it in the others it is because they have either never bowed the knee to, or have for the nonce discarded, the cult of the Naturalist, experimental, documentary idol, in itself and for itself.

"But," some one may say, "you have neglected one very important point to which you have yourself referred, and as to which you have just recommitted yourself. Did not les deux 'add something,' a very considerable something, 'of their own'? How about their style?"

And the unattractiveness of their style.

Certainly they prided themselves on this, and certainly they took a great deal of trouble about it. If any one likes the result, let him like it. It appears to me only to prove that an unsound principle is not a certain means to secure sound practice. Possibly, as Edmond boasted, this style is not the style de tout le monde. And tout le monde may congratulate itself on the fact. One can see that it must have given them a good deal of trouble – perhaps as much as, say, Paul de Saint-Victor's gave him. But then his excites a cheerful glow of satisfaction, whereas theirs only creates, as Saint-Victor himself (to one's regret) says of Swift, un morne étonnement.

Émile Zola to be treated differently.

The tone which has been adopted⁴⁶⁵ in speaking of the Goncourts (or rather of Edmond de Goncourt, for Jules seems to have been the better fellow pretty certainly, as well as probably the more genuine talent, of the two) would be grossly unfair in dealing with Émile Zola. One may think his principle demonstrably wrong, and his practice for the most part a calamitous mistake. One may, while, if indeed it concerned us, clearing him of the charge of doing any moral harm – such harm would be as likely to be done by records of Bedlam, or the Lock Hospital, or a dipsomaniacs' home – put on the wrong side of his account a quantity of dull and dirty trash,⁴⁶⁶ which, without his precept and example, would never have been written, or, if written, read. But the great, if mostly wasted, power displayed in his work is quite undeniable by any real critic; he did some things – and more parts of things – absolutely good; and if, as has been admitted, he did literary evil, he upset in a curious fashion the usual dictum that the evil that men do lives after them. At least it was not his fault if such was the case. He undoubtedly, whether he actually invented it or not, established, communicated, spread the error of Naturalism. But he lived long enough and wrote hard enough to "work it out" in a singular fashion – to illustrate the rottenness of the tree by the canker of the fruit to such an extent, and in such variety of application and example, that nobody for a long time has had any excuse for grafting the one or eating the other. Personally – in those points of personality which touch literature really, and out of the range of mere gossip – he had many good qualities. He was transparently honest, his honesty being tested and attested by a defect which will be noticed presently. He appears to have had no bad blood in him. His fidelity and devotion to what he thought art were as unflinching as Flaubert's own.

Some points in his personality – literary and other.

Nor was he deficient in good qualities which were still more purely literary. We shall speak later of the excellence of his short stories; if he had never written anything else there would be hardly anything but praise for him. When he does not lose himself in the wilderness of particulars, he sometimes manages to rise from it to wonderful Pisgah-sights of description. He has a really vast, though never an absolute or consummate, and always a morbid, hold on what may be called the second range of character, and a drastic, if rather mechanical, faculty of combining scenes and incidents. The mass of the Rougon-Macquart books is very much more coherent than the Comédie Humaine. He has real pathos. But perhaps his greatest quality, shown at intervals throughout but never fully developed till the chaotic and sometimes almost Blake-like Apocalypses of his last stage, was a grandiosity of fancy – nearly reaching imagination, and not incapable of dressing itself in suitable language – which, though one traces some indebtedness to Lamennais and Michelet and Hugo, has sufficient individuality, and, except in these four, is very rarely found in French literature later than the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. To set against these merits – still leaving the main fault alone – there are some strange defects. Probably worst of all, for it has its usual appalling pervasiveness, is his almost absolute want of humour. Humour and Naturalism, indeed, could not possibly keep house together; as we shall see in Maupassant, the attempt has happier results than in the case of "Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell," for the fairy expels the Devil at times wholly. The minor and particular absurdities which result from this want of humour crop up constantly in the books; and it is said to have been taken advantage of by Maupassant himself in one instance, the disciple "bamming" the master into recording the existences of peculiarly specialised places of entertainment, which the fertile fancy of the author of Boule de Suif had created.

The Pillars of Naturalism.

The Naturalist Novel, as practised by Zola, rests on three principal supports, or rather draws its materials from, and guides its treatment by, three several processes or doctrines. The general observational-experimental theory of the Goncourts is very widely, in fact almost infinitely extended, "documents" being found or made in or out of the literal farrago of all occupations and states of life. But, as concerns the definitely "human" part of the matter, immense stress is laid on the Darwinian or Spencerian doctrines of heredity, environment, evolution, and the like. While, last of all in order, if the influence be taken as converging towards the reason of the failure, comes the "medico-legal" notion of a "lesion" – of some flaw or vicious and cancerous element – a sort of modernised πρωταρχος ατη in the family, which develops itself variously in individuals.

Now, before pointing out the faulty results of this as shown generally in the various books, let us, reversing the order in which the influences or elements have been stated, set out the main lines of error in the elements themselves.

In the first place, it must surely be obvious that insistence on the "lesion," even if the other points of the theory were unassailable, is grossly excessive, if not wholly illegitimate. If you are to take observation and experience for your sole magazine of subjects, you must take all experience and all observation. Not the veriest pessimist who retains sense and senses can say that their results are always evil, ugly, and sordid. If you are to go by heredity you must attend to:

 
Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis,
 

as well as to:

 
Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit, etc.
 

Remounting the stairs, it must be evident that Heredity, Natural Selection, Evolution, Environment, etc., are things which, at the very best, can be allowed an exceedingly small part in artistic re-creation. Not only do they come under the general ban of Purpose, but their purpose-character is of the most thankless and unsucculent kind. I do not know that any one has ever attempted a mathematical novel, though the great Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe, as we all know, wrote a beautiful mathematical poem, of which the extant fragments are, alas! too few. If he had only lived a generation later, how charming would have been the fytte or canto on Quaternions! But, really, such a thing would not be more than a "farthest" on a road on which heredity-and-selection novels travel far. It is no use to say, "Oh! but human beings exemplifying those things can be made interesting." If they are it will not be because they are dealt with sub specie hereditatis, and confined in the circle of milieu.

Yet the master error lies, farther back still, in the strictly "Naturalist" idea itself – the theory of Experiment, the observation-document-"note," all for their own sake. Something has been said of this in relation to the Goncourts, but M. Zola's own exemplification of the doctrine was so far "larger" in every sense than theirs, and reinforced with so much greater literary power, that it cannot be left merely to the treatment which was sufficient for them. Once more, it is a case of "corruption of the best." It is perfectly true that all novel-writing – even in a fashion all romance-writing too – ought to be based on experience⁴⁶⁷ in practical life, and that infinite documents are procurable, infinite notes may be made, from that life. It is utterly untrue that any observation, any experiment, any document is good novel or romance stuff.

A very few remarks may perhaps be made on approaches to Zolaism – not in the sense of scabrousness – before Zola.

"Document" and "detail" before Naturalism.

A writer of one of those theses à la mode Germanorum, of which, at different times and in different occupations, it is the hard lot of the professional man of letters to read so many, would probably begin with the Catalogue of Ships, or construct an inventory of the "beds and basons" which Barzillai brought to David. Quite a typical "program" might be made of the lists of birds, beasts, trees, etc., so well known in mediaeval literature, and best known to the ordinary English reader from Chaucer, and from Spenser's following of him. We may, however, pass to the Deluge of the Renaissance and the special emergence therefrom of French fiction. It would not be an absolute proof of the "monographitis" just glanced at if any one were to instance the curious discussions on the propriety of introducing technical terms into heroic poetry – which is, of course, very close to heroic romance, and so to prose fiction generally.

General stages traced.

But, for practical purposes, Furetière and the Roman Bourgeois (vide Vol. I.) give the starting-point. And here the Second Part, of which we formerly said little, acquires special importance, though the first is not without it. All the details of bourgeois life and middle-class society belong to the department which was afterwards preferred – and degraded – by the Naturalists; and the legal ins and outs of the Second Part are Zola in a good deal more than the making. Indeed the luckless "Charroselles" himself had, as we pointed out, anticipated Furetière in not a few points, such as that most interesting reference to bisque.⁴⁶⁸ Scarron himself has a good deal of it; in fact there is so much in the Spanish picaresque novel that it could not be absent from the followings thereof. For which same reason there is not a very little of it in Lesage, while, for an opposite one, there is less in Marivaux, and hardly any at all in Crébillon or Prévost. The philosophes, except Diderot – who was busy with other things and used his acquaintance with miscellaneous "documents" in another way – would have disdained it, and the Sentimentalists still more so. But it is a sign of the shortcomings of Pigault-Lebrun – especially considering the evident discipleship to Smollett, in whom there is no small amount of such detail – that, while in general he made a distinct advance in "ordinary" treatment, he did not reinforce this advance with circumstantial accounts of "beds and basons."

But with the immense and multifarious new birth of the novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this development also received, in the most curiously diverse ways, reinforcement and extension. The Terror novel itself had earlier given a hand, for you had to describe, more or less minutely, the furniture of your haunted rooms, the number and volume of your drops of blood, the anatomical characteristics of your skeletons, and the values of your palette of coloured fires. The Historical novel lugged document in too often by head and shoulders, introducing it on happier occasions as the main and distinguishing ornament of its kind. Romanticism generally, with its tendency to antiquarian detail, its liking for couleur locale, its insistence on the "streaks of the tulip" and the rest, prompted the use and at least suggested the abuse.

Some individual pioneers – especially Hugo.

Nor did the great individual French novelists – for we need not specify any others – of the earlier part of the century, while they themselves kept to the pleasant slopes above the abyss, fail to point the way to it. Chateaubriand with his flowery descriptions of East and West, and Madame de Staël with her deliberate guide-bookery, encouraged the document-hunter and detail-devotee. Balzac, especially in the directions of finance and commerce, actually set him an example. George Sand, especially in pure country stories, was prodigal of local and technical matters and manners. The gorgeous scenery of Gautier, and the soberer but important "settings" of Mérimée, might be claimed as models. And others might be added.

But from one point of view, as an authority above all earlier authorities, and from another as a sinner beyond all earlier sinners, might be quoted Victor Hugo, even putting his juvenilia aside. He had flung a whole glossary of architecture, not to mention other things of similar kind, into Notre Dame de Paris; and when after a long interval he resumed prose fiction, he had ransacked the encyclopaedia for Les Misérables. Les Travailleurs de la Mer is half a great poem and half a real-lexikon of mechanics, weather-lore, seafaring, ichthyology, and God knows what else! If L'Homme Qui Rit had been written a very little later, parts of it might have been taken as a deliberate burlesque, by a French Sir Francis Burnand, of Naturalist method. Now, as the most acute literary historians have always seen, Naturalism was practically nothing but a degeneration of Romanticism:⁴⁶⁹ and degeneracy always shows itself in exaggeration. Naturalism exaggerated detail, streak of tulip, local colour, and all the rest, of which Romanticism had made such good use at its best. But what it exaggerated most of all was the Romantic neglect of classical decorum, in the wider as well as the narrower sense of that word. Classicism had said, "Keep everything indecorous out." Naturalism seemed sometimes to say, "Let nothing that is not indecorous come in."⁴⁷⁰

Survey of books – the short stories.

It was, however, by no means at first that M. Zola took to the "document" or elaborated the enormous scheme of the Rougon-Macquart cycle: though whether the excogitation of this was or was not due to the frequentation, exhortation, and imitation of MM. de Goncourt is not a point that we need discuss. He began, after melodramatic and negligible juvenilia, in 1864 with a volume of delightful short stories,⁴⁷¹ Contes à Ninon, in which kind he long afterwards showed undiminished powers. And he continued this practice at intervals for a great number of years, with results collected, after the first set, in Nouveaux Contes à Ninon, and in volumes taking their general titles from special tales —Le Capitaine Burle and Naïs Micoulin. In 1880 he gave the first story, L'Attaque du Moulin, to that most remarkable Naturalist "symposium," Les Soirées de Médan, which, if nothing of it survived but that story itself and Maupassant's Boule de Suif, and if this represented the sole extant work of the School, would certainly induce the fortieth century to think that School one of the very best in fiction, and to utter the most pathetic wails over the loss of the rest of its production. Of Boule de Suif– in more senses than one the feminine of the pair – more presently. But L'Attaque itself is a splendid and masculine success – the best thing by far, in respect of flawlessness, that its author ever did, and not far below Mérimée's Prise de la Redoute.

Unfortunately it was not in these breaches that M. Zola chose to abide. After the war, having no doubt laid his plans long before, he undertook the vast Rougon-Macquart scheme with its score of volumes; and when this was finished, carried on two others, smaller in bulk but hardly less ambitious in scope, "Les Trois Villes" —Lourdes, Paris, Rome; and "Les Quatre Évangiles" —Fécondité, Travail, and Vérité, the fourth of which was never written, while the third, Vérité, appeared with a black line round its cover, denoting posthumous issue.

"Les Rougon-Macquart."

In all these books the Experimental and Documentary idea is worked out, with an important development in the other directions above glanced at. The whole of the Rougon-Macquart series was intended to picture the varying careers of the branches, legitimate and illegitimate, of two families, under the control of heredity, and the evolution of the cerebral lesion into various kinds of disease, fault, vice, crime, etc. But further scope was found for the use of the document, human and other, by allotment of the various books, both in this and in the later groups, to the special illustration of particular places, trades, professions, habits of life, and quicquid agunt homines generally. The super-title of the first and largest series, "Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire," can hardly need comment or amplification to any intellect that is not hopelessly enslaved to the custom of having its meat not only killed, dressed, cooked, and dished, but cut up, salted, peppered, and put into its mouth with assiduous spoonings. La Fortune des Rougon, in the very year when Europe invited a polemos aspondos by acquiescing in the seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, laid the foundation of the whole. La Curée and Son Excellence Eugène Rougon show how the more fortunate members of the clan prospered in the somewhat ignoble tripotage of their time. Anybody could see the "power" of which the thing was "effect" (to borrow one half of a celebrated aphorism of Hobbes's); but it must have been a curious taste to which (borrowing the other) the books were "a cause of pleasure." La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret rose to a much higher level. To regard it as merely an attack on clerical celibacy is to take a very obvious and limited view of it. It is so, of course, but it is much more. The picture of the struggle between conscience and passion is, for once, absolutely true and human. There is no mistake in the psychology; there is no resort to "sculduddery"; there is no exaggeration of any kind, or, if there is any, it is in a horticultural extravagance – a piece of fairy Bower-of-Bliss scene-painting, in part of the book, which is in itself almost if not quite beautiful – a Garden of Eden provided for a different form of temptation.⁴⁷² There is no poetry in La Conquête de Plassans or in Le Ventre de Paris; but the one is a digression, not yet scavenging, into country life, and the other empties one of M. Zola's note-books on a theme devoted to the Paris Markets – the famous "Halles" which Gérard had done so lightly and differently long before.⁴⁷³ The key of this latter is pretty well kept in one of the most famous books of the whole series, L'Assommoir, where the beastlier side of pot-house sotting receives hundreds of pages to do what William Langland had done better five centuries earlier in a few score lines. Pot-Bouille– ascending a little in the social but not in the spiritual scale – deals with lower middle-class life, and Au Bonheur des Dames with the enormous "stores" which, beginning in America, had already spread through Paris to London. Une Page d'Amour recovers something of the nobler tone of L'Abbé Mouret; and La Joie de Vivre– a title, as will readily be guessed, ironical in intention – still keeps out of the gutter. Nana may be said, combining decency with exactitude, to stand in the same relation to the service of Venus as L'Assommoir does to that of Bacchus, though one apologises to both divinities for so using their names. It was supposed, like other books of the kind, to be founded on fact – the history of a certain young person known as Blanche d'Antigny – and charitable critics have pleaded for it as a healthy corrective or corrosive to the morbid tone of sentimentality-books like La Dame aux Camélias. I never could find much amusement in the book, except when Nana, provoked at the tedious prolongation of a professional engagement, exclaims, "Ça ne finissait pas!" or "Ça ne voulait pas finir."⁴⁷⁴ The strange up-and-down of the whole scheme reappears in L'Œuvre– chiefly devoted to art, but partly to literature – where the opening is extraordinarily good, and there are fine passages later, interspersed with tedious grime of the commoner kind. La Terre and Germinal are, I suppose, generally regarded as, even beyond L'Assommoir and Nana, the "farthest" of this griminess. Whether the filth-stored broom of the former really does blot out George Sand's and other pictures of a modified Arcadia in the French provinces, nothing but experience, which I cannot boast, could tell us; and the same may be said of Germinal, as to the mining districts which have since received so awful a purification by fire. That more and more important person the railway-man takes his turn in La Bête Humaine, and the book supplies perhaps the most striking instance of the radically inartistic character of the plan of flooding fiction with technical details. But there is, in the vision of the driver and his engine as it were going mad together, one of the earliest and not the least effective of those nightmare-pieces in which Zola, evidently inspired by Hugo, indulged more and more latterly. Then came what was intended, apparently, for the light star of this dark group, Le Rêve. Although always strongly anti-clerical, and at the last, as we shall see, a "Deicide" of the most uncompromising fanaticism, M. Zola here devoted himself to cathedral services and church ritual generally, and, as a climax, the administration of extreme unction to his innocent heroine. But, as too often happens in such cases, the saints were not grateful and the sinners were bored. L'Argent was at least in concatenation accordingly, seeing that the great financial swindle and "crash"⁴⁷⁵ it took for subject had had strong clerical support; but purely financial matters, stock-exchange dealings, and some exceedingly scabrous "trimmings" occupied the greater part of it. Of the penultimate novel, La Débâcle, a history of the terrible birth-year of the series itself, few fair critics, I think, could speak other than highly; of the actual ultimatum, Le Docteur Pascal, opinions have varied much. It is very unequal, but I thought when it came out that it contained some of its author's very best things, and I am not disposed to change my opinion.