University of Virginia Library

EMILE ZOLA.

ONE of the hardest workers and most popular authors of our time passed suddenly from our midst at the end of last month. There are many opinions concerning the political and ethical value of much of Zola's work, but there can be no difference of opinion as to the immense industry, marvelous fertility, and lofty aim of the French novelist, who was asphyxiated in his own chamber by the fumes of his own stove.

There are novelists of many kinds, but M. Zola was one of the rarest — namely, a journalist-novelist, a man who is by nature a supreme special correspondent or newspaper-investigator, who, after completing an exhaustive first-hand investigation into some phase of human life, instead of embodying it in a series of special articles, presents his report in the shape of a novel. There are social investigators as painstaking as Zola; there are men of letters who write more brilliant novels; but no one hitherto has combined to the same extent the capacity for rapid but patient study of social, moral, and political questions with the capacity to express the results

of his investigations in the form of a popular romance. The serious side of him, and the earnest purpose which inspired his life-work, were obscured in the minds of many English readers by the license which he allowed himself in dealing with the seamy side of human nature. Yet, let it never be forgotten that the greatest of all living novelists, — and one who is not merely a novelist, but a great preacher of the loftiest and almost transcendental morality, — has paid emphatic tribute to the worth of Zola's works. Count Tolstoy declared that, in his opinion, Zola was almost the only man who was doing serious work in France among the innumerable swarm of her novelists.

"The pictures which he paints are not agreeable," said his great Russian contemporary. "His portrait of the miner and the peasant are not pleasant to hang on your chamber walls; but it is good that they should have been painted once for all — having been painted, you can hang them behind your door or put their faces to the wall; but it is well that we should be reminded of the conditions in which multitudes of our brothers live."

The novelist's father, François Zola, was a Venetian, the mother a Greek. Emile was born April 2, 1840, at Paris, and spent his childhood at Aix. The father died when Emile was seven years old, and the Zola family was finally, in 1858, driven by extreme poverty to Paris. The young man lived here in absolute squalor, until, at the age of twenty-two, he obtained a clerkship with M. Hachette, the publisher. His first volume was a collection of fanciful stories, "Contes a Ninon." In 1865, he began to write for the press. After several novels appeared with moderate success, "Thérèse Racquin," published in 1867, obtained an immense circulation, and gave the author a good start on the path to fame and fortune. M. Zola's later work gave him a very large income.

Zola, at the beginning of life, seems to have been seized by a loftier ambition than that which inspires the pens of most of our writing folk. In the Rougon-Macquart series he attempted to portray in a series of vividly-colored stereoscopic views the whole complex life of modern society. A lofty idealist he was not; a painstaking realist he was; and he equipped himself for his herculean task by most painstaking and conscientious labor. At the beginning of his career he aimed at nothing more than the reproduction, as in a colored photograph, of life as he found it palpitating around him in the boulevards, streets and alleys, and fields, of France. But in his later years there was witnessed the gradual evolution of the artist into the prophet or moralist. In one of his latest works, "Fécondite," he attacked the limitation of families and the resulting organized infanticide which prevails in France, with all the fervor of a Hebrew seer. His book, which he devoted to a study of labor in Paris, and his extraordinarily accurate delineation of contemporary life in the Eternal City, showed the same tendency to subordinate the mere story-teller to the ethical teacher and social reformer. This, probably, reached its ultimate development in his last book on "Work" — a novel surcharged with gloom and serious to the point of dullness. Perhaps for that reason none of his later books attained anything approaching the vogue of the earlier volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series.

Only in "La Rêve" did he attempt a purely idyllic work. In "La Débâcle" he ventured upon the field of the historical novelist, and produced a picture of the gory welter of confusion in which the Second Empire went down that can never be forgotten by any one who read it. Lourdes attracted him also, and in his novel of that name he dealt with that mystical side of life which can be studied round the shrine of Notre Dame de Lourdes, with more sympathy and insight than might have been expected in the author of "Nana" and "La Terre." But even "Nana" — a novel in which he sets himself to delineate the life of the Parisian prostitute — was miles removed from the ordinary pornographic putridity which is served up by some revelers in the roses and raptures of vice. It is a great sermon on the text in the Old Book, in which, speaking of the "Strange Woman," it is said of the visitor to her house: "He knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell."

The fame of Zola as a novelist, however, has in the last few years been somewhat eclipsed by the fame of the author of "J'Accuse." His sudden intervention in the Dreyfus controversy is still fresh in the memory. His famous indictment of the organized machinery of perjury, and the military conspiracy by which justice was denied to the prisoner in Devil's Island, was a great service rendered to the cause of humanity. It was a thankless, and even a dangerous, task to plunge into the midst of the turbulent arena in which every one who spoke for justice was denounced as a traitor to his country. Like Professor Virchow, he was one of the earliest adherents of the International Union; like him, he appended his signature to the international protest against the South African War. His death removes one of the half-dozen men of letters whose names are familiar as household words throughout the whole civilized world.