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?

He planned a tremendous work, to consist of more than a score of volumes, the “Rougon-Macquart series,” to tell the history of a family under the Second Empire. We are back in the time of Napoleon the Little, when Victor Hugo was driven into exile, and the French bourgeoisie set up their puppet emperor. Zola had imbibed the materialistic science of his time; he believed that human life was determined by heredity, and he wished to exhibit this force working in society. He chose two people suffering from a nervous disease, and showed their descendants, the rich ones plundering and squandering, the poor ones sunk in drunkenness and degradation.

For years the critics spurned these books, and the public neglected them; but at last came a masterpiece, “l’Assommoir,” which had an enormous sale. The title means, literally, “The Slaughter-House”; it is the name of a saloon in the working-class quarter of Paris, where the poor are lured to their doom. It has been just twenty-five years since I read this book, but I still see the procession of ghastly scenes: the poor woman slave in a laundry, the husband a house-painter, and their brood of wretched, neglected children. I gasp as I see the painter slip and fall from the roof to his death; I shudder as I see the child Nana, peeping through the key-hole at the obscenities her parents are committing.

Zola has no graces of style, no charms of personality, no humor, hardly even any sentiment. He is hag-ridden by the misery of the modern world, and in plodding, matter-of-fact, relentless fashion he proceeds to overwhelm you with a mass of facts. A few such facts you might evade, but the sum of them is irresistible; you know that this is the truth. Over the whole picture you feel the brooding pity of a master spirit, to whom these suffering millions are an obsession, haunting his imagination and driving him to his task.

There are no heroes and no heroines in Zola’s works; his hero is the human swarms who breed like flies in our teeming cities, and struggle and suffer and perish, without ever a gleam of understanding of their fate. He takes us into the mining country, and in “Germinal” shows us the slaves of the pits, coal-blackened hordes, starving, oppressed, poisoned by alcohol, surging up in a blind fury of revolt. In “Nana” he shows us prostitution; and to me this is the most frightful book of all--the life-story of the little girl whom we saw getting her first lessons in vice through the key-hole. This daughter of the working class becomes their instrument of vengeance upon the exploiters; a seductress, a wanton, luring men old and young to their doom, she is a kind of symbol of wastefulness. Her life becomes a frenzy of destruction; silks, jewels, food and wine are poured upon her in floods, and she throws them about like a drunken giant wrecking a city. While she lies dying of small-pox, we hear the mob outside shrieking: “To Berlin! To Berlin!” The Franco-Prussian war is on, and Napoleon the Little is about to try out his dream of glory, and provide Zola with the theme for yet another masterpiece, “The Downfall,” showing war with all its horror of mass suffering and national collapse.

Zola, raved at and prosecuted as a sensationalist and corrupter, had now become a national figure; and he met this responsibility by evolving from a materialist and fatalist into a scientific Socialist, a rationalist and preacher of humanity. He wrote three long novels, “Lourdes,” “Rome” and “Paris,” which exposed the church as a bulwark of hereditary privilege, and became the text-books of anti-clericalism in France. Then came the Dreyfus case, calling for a hero to carry the anti-clerical banner into action; and the man with the sewer name came forward to answer the call. France had become a republic, but the army had remained monarchist and clerical. Some of these pious aristocrats, needing money to lavish on their Nanas, had been selling army secrets to Germany, and were caught. They decided to put the blame upon a certain cavalry officer, who happened to be guilty of a quite different crime, that of being a Jew. Captain Dreyfus was convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the convict settlement on Devil’s Island. Another officer, who investigated the case and attempted to defend Dreyfus, was shipped off to Africa.

It was nearly a hundred and fifty years since Voltaire had made his fight in the Calas case; and here was “l’Infame” at the same old game of the “frame-up.” Zola came forward with a terrific challenge entitled “J’Accuse.” He was arrested, tried and convicted, and escaped from France. For years this Dreyfus case remained an international scandal, and finally it was proved that the documents used against Zola had been forged, and later on one of the guilty men committed suicide, and Dreyfus was released and reinstated. As I write this book the papers record that Premier Herriot has abolished the penal settlement on Devil’s Island, and so Zola’s task is completed.

He had now become the leader of the French masses in the war against reaction; and his last novels were tracts written in this cause. In “Labor” he portrays his ideal of the free men and women of the revolutionary movement, living frugal and abstemious lives, and consecrating themselves to the cause of human emancipation. Another, called “Truth,” deals with the Dreyfus case. Another had been planned, “Justice,” but this he did not live to write. In all these works you notice that the old theories of materialistic science have been modified enough to permit men to fight for truth and freedom; and so Emile Zola shares with Walt Whitman the rôle of prophet of democracy. He served the masses even better than Whitman, because he achieved complete insight into the economic forces of modern times, and pointed out to the people the exact road they had to travel. More than any other artist of the nineteenth century he voiced and guided the movement of proletarian revolt, the mass action of the workers of factory and farm to whom the future belongs.