Anita Brookner, “Zola,” in The Genius of the Future. Studies in French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, The brothers Goncourt, Huysmans. London and New York: Paidon, 1971: 91-117.

Emile Zola has always had a bad press from painters and art-historians, both in his own time and since his death. Great efforts have been made by literary historians to emphasize the unusually fearless stand he made in defence of Manet and the Impressionists before moving on to other battles and defending more important causes. While literary historians do this, art historians tend to concentrate an Zola's apostasy, i.e. his abandonment of Manet and the Impressionists in the later years of the movement's history, his failure to defend Cézanne, and above all, the evidence of his novel L’Œuvre. It is only too easy to point out that Zola is an imperfect critic, and that the man is far greater than the sum of his works. It is equally easy to point out that his taste was not only fairly rudimentary but behind that of the times in which he lived. But having said this, one must then add that Zola's ideal was always the greatest good of the greatest number, and that minorities were only of interest to him as long as they were under attack or being victimized or without a voice to speak for them. Zola is at no stage a critic in the traditional sense of the word; he is a journalist, the greatest journalist of the nineteenth century. And as a journalist he takes the stand that has become so debased in our own time: that of the fearless investigator, the public conscience. He was seen by his contemporaries to be a vulgarian, and his literary reputation was always coloured by this fact. He -was also an arch-combatant, a molder of public opinion: tiresomely candid friend and ultimately invincible foe. Baudelaire, speaking as an unassimilated individual, could virtually ignore Manet in public and toss out a slighting phrase in private without anyone being any the worse off for it. But Zola, writing in a mass-circulation weekly, could not describe Cézanne as ‘a great painter who miscarried’ (un grand peintre avorté) without setting off storms of partisanship which have still not died down.

It would be possible to describe Zola's career as a triumph of journalism over literature, of appeal to the mass over individual taste, but one is always brought up against Zola's activities as a human being. Anatole France's words at his funeral—Il fut un moment de la conscience humaine—provide the correct standard by which to judge him. Zola does not simply write about the heroism of everyday life; he exercises and promotes it, in spheres as (92) widely different as painting and politics. With Zola, therefore, a slight but essential mental adjustment has to be made. His writings on the arts, which are relatively copious, must be put into a wider social context. We are in the presence of a moralist of the left, and seen from this point of view, the hurt feelings of Monet and Cézanne become less important than is generally recognized in histories of the Impressionist movement. It is in any case absurd to concentrate on the break-up of the friendship between Zola and Cézanne without taking into account the quality of the thirty-year intimacy that preceded it. It is equally absurd to read Zola's last Salon, that of 1896, without remembering the heartfelt letters of admiration from Monet and Pissarro on the occasion of the Dreyfus affair. In fact Zola's relations with the painters of his time take us out of the narrow confines of textual criticism or art history and situate us in the middle of a vast Romantic epic of friendship, such as Zola himself described in L’Œuvre, a novel too often read for partial or didactic reasons.

One of the many small tragedies of Zola's life—small only because he was great enough to surmount them—lay in his knowledge that his work as a critic could not co-exist with his ideal of friendship. In May 1866 Zola dedicated his first victorious critical campaign to Cézanne with these moving words: Il y a dix ans que nous parlons art et littérature. Nous avons habité ensemble—te souviens-tu?—et souvent le jour nous a surpris discutant encore, fouillant le passé, interrogeant le présent, tâchant de trouver la vérité et de nous créer une religion infaillible et complète. (‘For ten years we have been talking art and literature. We have lived together—do you remember?—and often daybreak came when we were still discussing, ransacking the past, questioning the present, seeking the truth and trying to create for ourselves a complete and infallible religion.’) This solidarity was not to last. In an essay on Sainte-Beuve, published first in the Russian journal Vestnik Evropy or Messager de I'Europe and reprinted with other literary essays in book form in Paris in 1881, i.e. five years before the publication of L’Œuvre, Zola indicates that the original alliance has already broken down: C'est qu'il faut un véritable courage pour dire la vérité en tout et partout. On est sûr d'abord d'être accusé de brutalité, d'envie ou d'orgueil. Mais le pis est qu'on doit renoncer à toute camaraderie… (93) ('Real courage is needed to speak the truth everywhere and in everything. You can be sure to be accused at first of violence, envy or of pride. But the worst is having to give up all friendship…') From the idyllic friendships of his youth Zola proceeded to greater and greater isolation in the cause of his understanding of the truth, until he suffocated in his own bed, with his sick wife beside him, from a blocked chimney, perhaps the handiwork of a political or social enemy. It would be possible to interpret his entire career as a continued conflict between friendship and duty to the truth, and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that this is how Zola himself saw it.

To many people Zola's isolation was obscured by the fact that he spoke for the masses and therefore gave the impression of being a robust and positive character surrounded by an army of fervent supporters. Nothing was further from the truth, a truth perceived by the clinicians of the rue S. Georges, the brothers Goncourt, writing in their Journal on 14 December 1868. 'Our admirer and pupil Zola came to lunch today. It was the first time we had ever seen him. Our immediate impression was of a worn-out normalien, at once sturdy and puny, with Sarcey's neck and shoulders and a waxy anaemic complexion … The dominant side of him, the sickly suffering, hypersensitive side, occasionally gives you the impression of being in the company of a gentle victim of some heart disease. In a word, an incomprehensible, deep, complex character; unhappy, worried, evasive and disquieting.' This is deeply perceptive. Although written in 1868, before Zola's fortunes were really consolidated by the vast success of L'Assommoir, it already departs in every respect from the popular notion of the bluff fearless warrior who had made Manet famous and lost his own livelihood in the process. This standard view of Zola tended to harden as the years went by until he was accepted, in the 1880s, as the archetypal middlebrow, popular with the average reader, having capitalized on the 'new' scientific principles of Claude Bernard, and put into practice Guizot's hated maxim, 'Enrichissez-vous'.

There is a grain of truth in this simplistic reading of Zola's progress. Zola is not an ironic commentator like Stendhal or a dandy like Baudelaire; he writes for a wide public and he is basically a member of that public. He bears a certain resemblance not only to Balzac, whom he so greatly admired, but (94) also to Hugo, of whom he disapproved. All three are concerned with the production of an epic, and all three had the staying power to accomplish it. But there is perhaps a closer comparison to be drawn between Zola and Hugo, for both have the Messianic faculty well developed, both create literary miracles of sustained greatness interspersed with large slices of banality, and, most important of all, both are Romantics. Je trempe dans le romantisme jusqu'à la ceinture ('I am steeped in Romanticism up to the hilt'), confessed Zola in 1882.1 It is significant that his own literary contemporaries, notably Flaubert and Maupassant, also saw him as a Romantic. Leaving aside for a moment the exact nature of Zola's Romanticism, it could perhaps be suggested that his personal loneliness was in part due to the fact that he had outraged some widely shared primitive conviction by being a Romantic who not only obtained popular success but also made a great deal of money out of it. Like Hugo, Zola frequently made his contemporaries wince; he had, without being altogether aware of it, the gift of setting teeth on edge, of upsetting prejudices, but unlike Hugo, who revelled in the ensuing uproar, Zola never fully understood it. It is as if he repressed whole areas of self-examination and comprehension, not out of crudeness but out of fear. He was not unaware of this deeply secret operation although he tried to confine it within purely literary limits. Bon courage et bon succès, he wrote to Huysmans on the publication of A Rebours in 1884. Moi, je tâche de travailler le plus tranquillement possible mais je renonce à voir clair dans ce que je fais, car plus je vais et plus je suis convaincu que nos œuvres en gestation échappent absolument à notre volonté. ('As for me, I am trying to work as quietly as possible, but I give up trying to understand what I am doing, because the further I go, the more I am convinced that the works germinating inside us are entirely beyond the control of our will.') Our destiny also escapes the operations of our will, as Zola, flushed with determinism, would agree. But at the heart of the matter, determinism is not enough. It cannot explain the melancholy of Zola, a melancholy all the more poignant for being played down; it cannot explain his fear of death, which made his love of life so dynamic; it cannot explain his peculiar relationship with what was later to be known as the collective unconscious. In his most personal works, the brisk explanations of Claude (95) Bernard are transmuted into the darker and more ancient concept of fatality.2 This is surely the message of L'Assommoir, La Joie de Vivre, and above all Germinal, and art historians, transfixed by the fiery gaiety of the Salon of 1866, or the almost peevish disappointment of that of 1896, may merely be judging without the dimension of experience which occasioned Huysmans to pronounce when he had read Germinal, ... ça dégage une sacrée, une sacrée tristesse … ('what appalling sadness emerges from that book').3

Art historians are accustomed to read Zola's life as a sort of shadow accompaniment to that of Cézanne, although Cézanne's life is virtually free of incident and that of Zola packed with high drama. Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a French woman and a father of mixed blood, part Greek, part north Italian. The father was a civil engineer and in 1842 the family moved to Aix-en-Provence where François Zola was given the important job of canalizing the city's water supply. He died in 1847 before he was able to complete his task, and an aura of failure hung over the whole Aix enterprise, particularly as the authorities refused to pay any compensation to the widow. Much litigation and recrimination took place, which makes it easy to understand why Zola later became interested, to the point of obsession, in the power and money nexus of Second Empire society, particularly in a small town, the town he calls Plassans in his novels. The mother was forced to work to keep her son at school. Meanwhile, Zola was enjoying himself in and around Aix with his friends Cézanne and Baille, and biographers of both Cézanne and Zola have emphasized this idyllic moment in their friendship. Zola himself has described it in lyrical terms in his article on Musset.4 The friends had predictably Romantic tastes, wrote poetry and envisaged a career in the arts, and at this stage Zola was very much the leader, Cézanne the pupil. In their youth the two men were astonishingly alike, linked, in particular, by a rather lurid, old-fashioned Romanticism coloured by precocious erotic yearnings which neither of them was in a position to canalize profitably. If there is to be any comparison at all, it must be on the basis of their early experiments, e.g. Cézanne's murder and rape scenes with Zola's hectic 'black' novels, La Confession de Claude and Thérèse Raquin. The comparison, however, must end there. Cézanne abandons this style (96) completely for one of increasing purity. Zola retains it, and to the end of his life remains the celebrant of the primary emotions.

In 1858 the free country happiness ended for Zola. He and his mother moved to Paris, where they lived in extreme poverty. Zola tried to pass his examinations and failed, and it may be legitimate to blame his lack of what is now called further education for his critical acceptance of the popular scientific theories circulating at the time, notably Darwin's Origin of Species, translated into French in 1862, and Claude Bernard's Introduction à la Médecine expérimentale, which appeared in 1865. By 1860, Zola was working in a warehouse and supporting his mother, which he continued to do until her death in 1880. He suffered from hunger, from cold, and eventually from a severe illness; he suffered above all from loneliness, and he wrote to his friends urging them to join him in Paris as they had originally planned. By 1862 he was working in the packing department at the publishing house of Hachette. By titanic efforts he got himself transferred to the publicity department, and there Zola the Romantic turned himself into Zola the careerist. He began to make friends with editors, publishers and men of letters by sending out free samples of books published by Hachette. He had already started to publish a few stories and reviews, notably of Dore's illustrations to Don Quixote and the Bible, which appeared in the Journal populaire de Lille and the Salut publique of Lyons in 1863, and by 1865 he was writing a regular gossip column entitled Les Confidences d'une Curieuse for Le Petit Journal. It was in 1865 that his first novel, La Confession de Claude, was published. In view of the fact that 'Claude' was to become something of a fetish-name, that Zola signed his 1866 Salon articles in L'Événement 'Claude' and that the hero of L’Œuvre is called Claude Lantier, this work has an importance beyond its literary merit. It also occasioned, almost fortuitously, a change in Zola's life. An air of immorality hung over it and although this was dispersed by the Procureur-Général after suitable enquiry, the publicity was considered undesirable by Zola's employers at Hachette. Zola resigned, determined to ‘me consacrer entièrement à la littérature.’5

More important publications, however, were seeing the light of day at that time. In 1865 the Goncourts published Germinie Lacerteux, which they (97) described in a resounding preface as the first truly working-class novel. Also in 1865 came Taine's important but now little read Philosophie de l'Art, which propounds the general thesis that schools of art are the product of a set of circumstances dominated by heredity, environment and moment in time ('race, milieu, moment'). This determinist explanation, eagerly adopted by Zola, is coloured by Darwin's theories and gained great currency in this age of popular science. The idea that man was descended from the apes rather than the angels, that he was the product of his heredity and environment rather than a highly individualized entity trailing clouds of glory, was to produce a deep division in belief, desolating some and consoling others with a vision of science as the great living force of progress which would inevitably bring about the bravest of new worlds. In aesthetic terms, the conflict took the shape of two opposed ideologies: that of le vrai and that of le beau. For all Zola's adolescent yearnings, he is firmly on the side of le vrai. Indeed his entire intellectual platform is that of naturalism, of which the classic description has been provided by Professor Harry Levin:6 'a term belonging to the vocabulary of French philosophy, designating any system of thought which accounts for the human condition without recourse to the supernatural and with a consequent emphasis on material factors.' As an art critic, however, Zola's role is more traditionally that of a realist, in the sense in which the term was used by Duranty in 1856-7: on the side of the here and now, for the individual, against the school. This was the position of Stendhal, the position of Baudelaire, the original Romantic position that forms the link between these three great writers.

In 1866 several things happened. On 1 February, Zola was taken on as a book reviewer by the newspaper L'Événement. In the same month Cézanne returned to Paris, his third or fourth visit, resolved to submit a work to the Salon. Zola now had four of his boyhood friends in Paris: Cézanne, Baptistin Baille, Numa Coste and Philippe Solari. They met on Thursdays at Zola's home, and Cézanne brought his friend Camille Pissarro. They talked of their personal ambitions and of the forthcoming Salon. In May came the news that the Salon jury had rejected Cézanne's works. Cézanne wrote to the Directeur des Beaux-Arts, the Comte de Nieuwekerke, to (98) demand the re-establishment of the Salon des Refusés, that annexe to the official Salon, held in 1863, for works on which the Jury had been unable to agree. His letter was not answered. A second letter, slightly more militant in tone, met with the same fate. Cézanne then appealed to Zola to print something about all this in his newspaper, and the result was the series of articles in L'Événement, most of which were axed by the editor in response to the protests of his furious subscribers but eventually published separately by Zola as a short book called Mon Salon. This appeared in May 1866 and was dedicated to Cézanne.7

It is clear that Zola undertook these articles as an act of friendship. Basically, he considered painting to be a limited activity, to which he had a limited attachment. He believed, as he said, in the present and the future, but beyond this fact he was better acquainted with painters than with paintings, and he would certainly not at this point have considered himself a professional art critic. However, he was a journalist and he knew how to make an article. At any time after 1863 and before 1870 there was one foolproof way of writing a review of the Salon: one attacked the Jury, which was a symbol of reaction, and one demanded the re-establishment of the Salon des Refusés. Zola proceeded along these lines but he did so with passion. His attack on the members of the jury, written before the Salon opened, was so actionable that the editor was eventually forced to suspend him, but the method, which Zola found congenial, served him as well in 1866 as it did thirty years later when he attacked, in exactly the same manner, those members of the military and government commission which had convicted Captain Dreyfus. Secondly, Zola not only demanded the re-establishment of the Salon des Refusés, he devoted his fourth article to the arch-refusé himself, Edouard Manet, whose pictures Le Fifre and L'Acteur Tragique had been rejected by the Salon of 1866. He did this out of sympathy but also because to do so symbolized a fight against censorship and reaction—most of the phrases in the Salon of 1866 have a political ring to them. Nevertheless Zola made an honest attempt to rationalize his enjoyment of Manet's paintings. It may even be that Le Fifre was perhaps his ideal picture: a man of the south, Zola appreciated strong colours, simple shapes and black outlines. He also performed an immense (99) service to the general public which, if it cared to, could read an article on controversial contemporary painting which dispensed with the jargon of criticism. The results surpassed all expectations. Zola won a moral victory for himself and wide publicity for his friends. Above all, he achieved something relatively new in the history of nineteenth-century aesthetics: the integration of the critic into a new artistic movement. It has even been suggested that Zola's championship of Manet was responsible for the formation of a group—Manet being considered as chef d'école—and that Zola 'was the first combatant of this circle'.8

The tone of the Salon of 1866 is militant and republican. After making the point that the jury is not elected by universal suffrage, Zola asserts his own understanding of this matter: Pour moi, un Salon n'est jamais que la constatation du moment artistique ... (‘for me a Salon is only an account of the artistic moment…'), and says that to accept Manet one year and reject him the next is an absurdity. He goes on to define his own theory of the 'artistic moment', although artistic theory is not something one instinctively connects with Zola's name. (Yet is it not his theory that carries him from an objective to a subjective view of Manet and the Impressionists?) Ce que je demande à l'artiste, ce n'est pas de me donner de tendres visions ou des cauchemars effroyables; c'est de se livrer lui-même, coeur et chair, c'est d'affirmer hautement un esprit puissant et particulier, une nature âpre et forte qui saisisse largement la nature en sa main et la plante tout debout devant nous, telle qu'il la voit ... Donc, une œuvre d'art n'est jamais que la combinaison d'un homme, élément variable, et de la nature, élément fixe. Le mot réaliste ne signifie rien pour moi, qui déclare subordonner le réel au tempérament. Faîtes vrai, j'applaudis; mais surtout faîtes individuel et vivant et j’applaudis plus fort. ('What I expect from the artist is not to give me tender visions or appalling nightmares; but to give himself body and soul, and boldly to declare himself a powerful and individual mind, a just and strong nature who can grasp life broadly in his hands and set it whole before us as he sees it … Thus a work of art is never anything but the combination of a man, the variable factor, and of life, the unchanging factor. The word Realist means nothing to me, since I proclaim reality subordinate to temperament. When you paint the truth, I shall applaud; but when you paint what is (100) living and individual I shall applaud even louder.') His article on Manet is an attack on the ignorant public rather than a defence of the artist, although he does mention three works in detail, the Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, the Olympia and the Fifre. His simple summing-up is that Manet's canvases put the whole Salon out of joint, underlining the insipidity of the popular favourites. He winds up, La place de M. Manet est marquée au Louvre, comme celle de Courbet, comme celle de tout artiste d'un tempérament fort et implacable. ('M. Manet's place is marked out in the Louvre, like Courbet's, like that of every artist with a strong and unrelenting temperament.') His identification with Manet does not on this occasion invalidate his appreciation of the artist. In his section on the realists he singles out Monet and goes on to make his famous statement, Une œuvre d'art est un coin de la création vu à travers un temperament (‘a work of art is a corner of the creation seen through a temperament’), which is not so very different from Baudelaire's admittedly more subtle evaluation of Constantin Guys. He ends with a profession of faith to which he will never prove unequal: J'ai défendu M. Manet, comme je défendrai dans ma vie toute individualité franche que sera attaquée. Je serai toujours du parti des vaincus. ('I have defended M. Manet, as I will always in my life defend every honest form of individuality under attack. I shall always be on the side of the defeated.')

This ideal situation persisted throughout 1867 and 1868. In 1867 Zola again made his sympathies quite clear by reviewing the Exposition Universelle, i.e. the official artistic manifestation, in one paper, La Situation, and a selection of works by Manet in another, La Revue du dix-neuvième siècle. The Salon fares badly, as Zola concentrates on its more popular representatives, Meissonnier, Cabanel, Gérôme, and Rousseau, who had incurred Zola's ire because he had fallen into a predictable method which did not conform to Zola's standards of truth. This is a short article because Zola had the tact not to drag it out; in any event he preferred a short clean fight to a prolonged smear campaign. The article on Manet, entitled Une nouvelle manière en peinture, is by contrast elegant, carefully written, and almost certainly based on Baudelaire's essay on Le Peintre de la Vie moderne, or if not based on it, at least inspired by it. It contains, in addition, a certain amount of studio (101) parlance which may remind one of Baudelaire sitting at the feet of Delacroix in 1846. Zola makes a noteworthy attempt to judge Manet ni en moraliste, ni en littérateur: on doit le juger en peintre ('neither from the point of view of the moralist nor of the man of letters: he should be judged from the point of view of the painter'). This procedure is so contrary to Zola's normal method—or even to that of Stendhal and Baudelaire—that it merits attention. He notes the similarity between Manet's paintings and images d'Epinal and Japanese prints, refutes the suggestion that he was influence by Baudelaire's poems, and sums up his manner, memorably, as 'une brutalité douce'. Also on this rare occasion Zola undertakes to criticize 'la foule' for its lack of understanding, yet at the same time tries to explain the artist to the public in such a way that those with no aesthetic responses at all will be a able to understand him. There is no doubt that this article marks the peak of Zola's achievement as an art critic.

1868 was an even more triumphant year. Manet, Monet, Renoir, Bazille and Pissarro were accepted by the Salon Jury, and in reviewing the Salon of that year Zola concentrates on them almost to the exclusion of other painters. There is no mention of Cézanne but then Cézanne is still, on his own admission, a virtual beginner. In 1868 Zola's first campaign ends. The naturalistes, the actualistes, as he calls them, have won the day—they are hung in the Salon. Zola the fighter is almost disappointed at the ease with which victory has been achieved. Now, he feels, the campaign must be waged by the painters themselves; it is up to them to justify the claims he has made for them, and made at the risk of compromising his own livelihood. J'interroge l'avenir, he says, et je me demande quelle est la personnalité qui va surgir assez large, assez humaine, pour comprendre notre civilisation et la rendre artistique en l'interprétant avec l'ampleur magistrale du génie. (‘As I look to the future, I wonder whose personality will emerge broad and human enough to understand our civilization and to make it artistic by interpreting it with the magisterial breadth of genius.') This sentence is a virtual paraphrase of Baudelaire's conclusion to the Salon of 1845: Celui-là sera le peintre, le vrai peintre, qui saura arracher à la vie actuelle son côté épique, et nous faire voir et comprendre, avec de la couleur ou du dessin, combien nous sommes grands et (102) poétiques dans nos cravates et nos bottes vernies. Puissent les vrais chercheurs nous donner l'année prochaine cette joie singulière de célébrer l'avènement du neuf. ('That man will be the painter, the true painter, who manages to snatch the epic side from modem life, and to make us see and realize, by means of colour or draughtsmanship, how great and poetic we are in our cravats and polished boots. May the true seekers give us next year that rare delight of greeting the advent of novelty.’) But Zola's phrase contains a warning which was overlooked by the painters themselves. Zola knew that he had other things to do, that he was not to be permanently on hand to promote an artistic revolution, that his own career, in fact, was a matter of equal importance. Yet in 1868 Zola was known to the public mainly as the critic who defended Manet, and there is evidence that Manet and his group continued to think of Zola in this light despite the passage of the years. Manet's portrait (Fig. 18), painted in the winter of 1867-8, is not devoid of complacency, for Zola is seen as an attribute of the painter along with the engraving after Velazquez' Los Borrachos and the Japanese print and screen. But for the time being, all was well. Zola was delighted with the portrait and in 1868 dedicated his novel Madeleine Férat to Manet. Other painters paid homage to their champion. Cézanne portrayed his father reading L'Événement (Fig. I7); the newspaper figures largely in the riverside restaurant in Renoir's Le Cabaret de la Mère Anthony, while a young, solemn and virtuous Zola peers out of the gloom of Fantin-Latour's Groupe des Batignolles (Fig. 19), perhaps the most touching evocation of this moment of friendship and solidarity.9

This early and intoxicating unity, which might have cooled considerably had the situation remained static, was brought to a much more natural conclusion by the war of 1870 which caused the protagonists to leave Paris and pursue their individual interests without being dominated by any form of group consciousness. Zola, exempted from conscription because he was the only son of a widowed mother, went to Marseilles with his wife and mother and tried to start a new periodical. When this failed, and his return to Paris was blocked, he went to Bordeaux where he acted as secretary to a minor minister in the Gambetta administration. His interest in painting, which had always been an affair of warm personal sympathies rather than an objective delight, faded quite naturally from his mind. His own career as a serious writer, (103) sacrificed to circumstances so many times since he decided to free-lance in 1866, was once again menaced because at this juncture. Zola's publisher went bankrupt and the serialization of his new novel, La Fortune des Rougon, was suspended. This event, in reality a minor setback for a man of Zola's energy and determination, took on a more serious aspect. La Fortune des Rougon is the first of those twenty novels which represent Zola's major literary undertaking, the novels that were to rival Balzac's Comédie Humaine, and to provide a complete survey—sociological, psychological, phenomenological—of Second Empire France. To Balzac, avarice and ambition are the main-springs of human conduct; to Zola, human conduct is determined in advance by heredity and environment, the thesis, in fact, of Darwin and Claude Bernard adapted to a literary purpose. In his twenty novels Zola constructs an elaborate dynasty, the issue of two unpromising families, Rougon and Macquart, injects into this dynasty two hereditary weaknesses, alcoholism and syphilis, and works out the ravages that these inherited tendencies inflict on his characters and on the society in which they live.

This titanic undertaking has been gently but mercilessly characterized by Henry James. 'If we imagine him asking himself what he knew of the "social" life of the Second Empire to start with, we imagine him answering in all honesty: "I have my eyes and my ears—I have all my senses; I have what I've seen and heard, what I've smelled and tasted and touched. And then I've my curiosity and my pertinacity; I've libraries, books, newspapers, witnesses, the material, from step to step, of an enquête. And then I've my genius—that is, my imagination, my passion, my sensibility to life. Lastly I've my method, and that will be half the battle. Best of all perhaps even, I've plentiful lack of doubt."’10

There is, of course, more to it than this. Although Zola had a completely genuine belief in determinism as the precipitating factor in human behaviour, he was not a sublimated policeman, as James seems to imply, or a frustrated scientist, and the task of creating a family—a task which he was denied in his own life until very late on—developed a faculty in his make-up which had so far been inadequately exercised: his imagination. The weakest of the Rougon-Macquart novels are those in which the formula is predictably (104) worked out, and in this category one must place the novel which was to have such vast consequences for Zola's personal life, L’Œuvre. The strongest are those in which it is possible to forget the original formula altogether or to attach it to some other basic cause, as in L'Assommoir, La Joie de Vivre, Germinal and La Terre. These novels were to carry Zola to heights of literary fame and fortune. The most sensational of them, Nana, published in 1880, ran into ninety editions in one year. Zola's prodigious output says much for his own heredity and environment, and one marvels at his ability to start another book almost as soon as one was finished. His paper family became more real to him than his publisher and his readers and translators and admirers in France, England and Russia. Zola's real communion was with his documentation, his notes, his 'ébauches', many volumes of which are now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix. These notes are characterized by an extraordinary vivacity of tone which indicates that writing, even at such length, never became journeyman's work for Zola.

Nevertheless, it was Zola's method of documentation that now began to embarrass his friends. As Henry James had indicated, Zola placed great value on the evidence of his senses. His idea of creativity was very close to a heroic concept of paternity; he was, as he had called Courbet, 'un faiseur de chair'.11 For the actual details, he was dependent on a number of helpers, either voluntary or involuntary, and the figure of Zola walking the streets of Paris with his notebook, interrogating porters, market workers, laundresses, and department store sales assistants, is a familiar and slightly ridiculous one in literary history. For the local colour in Nana he was obliged to write to a friend for information, adding, by way of excuse, 'Moi, je suis un chaste'. Slightly less ridiculous, and in fact totally impressive in human terms, is the sight of Zola taking his notebook down the mines to write Germinal or actually riding on the platform of an express train in order to write La Bête Humaine. And although these activities may reveal him, once again, as the journalist turned novelist, they were to have surprising results, because when Zola came up from the mine or away from the goods yard, he was so engrossed in conditions of labour, in matters of social justice, that the man of letters began to give way to the practical philanthropist. A letter to a Dutch (105) correspondent, Jacques van Santen Kolff, written in June 1886, contains the key sentence, Toutes les fois que j'entreprends une étude maintenant, je me heurte au socialisme. ('Every time I begin a study now I run up against Socialism.') It is surely impossible to read Germinal or La Débâcle without feeling that in comparison all previous nineteenth-century literary or artistic creeds have been puny and self-interested. If one now re-reads the alit criticism one perceives that Zola had from the start carried within him the two faculties that expand to such heroic proportions in the novels: a natural socialism, which made him demand equal representation for the Impressionists in the Salon of 1866, and a form of paternalism which led him to believe that, given the right circumstances, creative spirits could contribute to the life of their times in terms of strength and clear-sightedness, and mutatis mutandis, that artists had obligations towards society, not merely towards themselves.

The novels reveal Zola as a writer of genius, a writer with an extraordinary visual sense. Because of his crushing work programme, it is usually his opening chapters which are the freshest, although the great set-pieces of description have a kind of orgiastic energy which is not easily forgotten. In particular it is the descriptions of Paris which are so vivid and these have been used, wrong-headedly, to underline the natural affinity between Zola and the Impressionists. This is a claim one might be able to make for the Goncourts, but not for Zola, because Zola was a man committed to words, not one, like Baudelaire, who could feast on images. Perhaps this is why Zola tired of painting and of painters' problems. Conversely, it was becoming clear to Zola that although Monet might be able to capture the picturesque aspect of the Gare Saint-Lazare, he was in no way able, or even anxious, to convey the crippling strain of the man in charge of the train. From being a favour done for friends, criticism, for Zola, became a more general moral responsibility. As far as he himself was, concerned, he had fought the Impressionist fight by 1868; now other causes, notably those of the workers, awaited him. The painters, having with his help stormed the citadel of the Salon, had only to make good their victory by taking it over. If they wished to prolong their sectarianism by holding separate exhibitions, that was their affair. Zola the critic opts out of the sphere of aesthetics, where (106) the recompenses for total commitment are small, for that of human activity, where they are all-rewarding. As he became more of a revolutionary himself, Zola began to lose patience with those earlier and smaller revolutionaries, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Cézanne.

The novels also made Zola extremely rich, and in 1878 he was able to buy himself a villa at Médan. This also produced a widening of the breach between Zola and his former friends because in furnishing his villa Zola revealed himself to be in possession of the most dubious natural taste. His ideas of decoration were in fact entirely typical of the Second Empire. Both Maupassant and Edmond de Goncourt have left descriptions of the stained glass windows, the Japanese armour, the fake medieval reliquaries, the Turkish carpets, and the tapestries, on which were hung his eleven Cézannes and his pictures by Manet, Monet and Pissarro. In this villa, which Cézanne visited, painted and stayed in several times, Zola could give full vent to his paternalism, to the occasional discomfiture of his guests. Meals were gargantuan; Zola's appetite was, predictably, huge. One gets very good food in his novels. One of these banquets is described in L’Œuvre, when the writer Sandoz, who is Zola thinly disguised, feasts his former friends. To the host's consternation, the guests, perhaps inflamed by the conjunction of caviare, red mullet, roast beef, truffles and ice cream, behave very badly; instead of being impressed by this abundance of worldly delights, which Zola himself enjoyed enormously, they turn up in their working clothes, ignore Madame Sandoz, smoke their pipes, and discuss the next Salon. We may assume that this situation was repeated many times in real life; the more fallible aspects of Zola's triumphant success were ironically appraised by the trained eyes of his former companions, and the tiny seed of potential resentment which occurs towards the end of the Salon of 1868 grows to something more sizeable and more truculent.

Yet in the 1870s, when editors of French papers were reluctant to employ him, Zola continued to plead for his friends, although they were now committed to a policy of which he could not approve: that of holding independent exhibitions. Zola was one of those moralists who are obsessed with vindication. The original miscreants must be seen to eat their words; those (107) who denied Manet a place in the Louvre must be shot down at their official posts, not overcome, in the fullness of time, by a subtle outflanking movement. Nevertheless, Zola, writing for the Russian paper Vestnik Evropy in which he has to give a broad picture of the French artistic scene, continues to bring the names of Manet and the Impressionists to the notice of the public, even if it means dragging in an allusion to the Impressionist exhibition in the rue Le Peletier which had already closed a month earlier than the official Salon (that of 1876) he was purporting to review. The writing of these Russian articles, of 1875 and 1876, is much more sober in tone than the extremely radical reviews of the 1860s, but Zola is constant in his opinions. He has been won round again to Manet by the sight of that most literary of pictures, Argenteuil (Fig. 20), in the Salon of 1875, but he refuses to believe that this is the last word on the subject of what he had formerly hailed as a revolution. Here he comes curiously close to Baudelaire, whose admiration for Manet was always tempered by his memory of the standards set by Delacroix. In 1875, with a note of unmistakable emotion, Zola restates this position: Hélas, avec quelle joie ardente je me livrerais à l'enthousiasme pour quelque maître. Mais je ne puis qu'évoquer les grandes ombres de Delacroix et d'Ingres, ces génies obstinés, disparus du monde sans avoir trahi leur don. Ces géants n'ont pas laissé d'héritiers, et nous attendons toujours les génies de l'avenir. Courbet, vieilli, chassé comme un lépreux, s'en va déjà à leur suite dans l'histoire. Lui aussi appartient dès aujourd'hui aux morts, aux artistes dont les tableaux seront éternels par leur force et leur vérité. Parmi les vivants, a peine un ou deux s'efforcent de se hausser au rang des créateurs. ('Alas, with the most passionate joy I would give myself over to enthusiasm for some great artist. But I can only evoke the shades of Delacroix and Ingres, those stubborn geniuses who vanished from the world without betraying their secrets. Those giants have left no posterity and still we await the geniuses of the future. Courbet, aged and driven out like a leper, is already following their steps into history. From now on he too belongs with the dead, with the artists whose pictures will last eternally by their power and truth. Among the living, there are barely one or two who strive to raise themselves to the level of the creators.’)

It is at this point that Zola's contribution to art criticism can be fully (108) appreciated. From the first, he has joined the honourable company of Stendhal and Baudelaire in proclaiming the necessity of contemporaneity, of fidelity to, and enjoyment of, the times in which one lives. Although rudimentary and untutored, his taste is strong enough to condemn the outworn formula and to delight in the new vision. His entirely general response is in fact correct in a surprising number of cases, although his journalistic formation and his positive temperament have led to a slight impoverishment of the vocabulary of art appreciation, a factor for which the Goncourts will more than compensate. To Zola, the critic was not an aesthete so much as an essential witness: ... je dirai que chaque génération, chaque groupe d'écrivains a besoin d'avoir son critique, qui le comprenne et qui le vulgarise. (' ... I believe that every generation and every group of writers needs its critic who will understand it and popularize it.')12 This function of spreading the word was one which Zola took very seriously. Through the purest motives of friendship, he had done much to establish an artistic movement in the eyes of the general public against the greatest possible opposition and at severe personal inconvenience. It was one thing to carry off a moral victory by getting the sack from L'Événement in 1866; it was quite another to be boycotted by French newspapers in the mid-1870s. Now Zola begins to tire. Like Baudelaire, he allows his obsessions to take over. Where is the great creative personality, the Courbet of the new generation? Why do the Impressionists not improve and concentrate their original formula? In his article of 1879, again written for the Russian paper, Zola permits himself to take an independent line. He criticizes Manet for his sketchiness, implying that it is easy enough to be a pioneer but that a more sustained effort is necessary for total victory. The Impressionists, he says, are too easily satisfied. They are wrong to break so completely with the past; a solidly composed masterpiece would not do them any harm. (Ironically enough, a similar conviction was held by Cézanne, who wanted to make of Impressionism quelque chose de solide et de durable comme I'art des musées).13 Zola, bearing in mind the crushing fatigue that went into the composition of his own novels and indeed suffering from that fatigue, resented the rapidity with which the Impressionists painted their pictures. Again the solemn warning is issued: La place est balayée pour (109) le génie de l'avenir (‘the place is swept clean for the genius of the future').

This Messianic note was built into Zola's make-up, and it would be a serious mistake to suppose that he confined his strictures to the art of painting.14 Utopia, or the Millennium, is clearly postulated in Germinal and La Débâcle, although in general terms of man's humanity to man. But in his article on La Critique contemporaine, Zola quite specifically looks for the Messiah of criticism and does so in almost flagrantly religious terms, although he may well have been unaware of the overtones. Le critique attendu se produira, il faut l'espérer, et il fera la lumière sur notre situation, il mettra chaque chose à sa place, reculera le passé dans l'ombre et posera debout la présent dans une grande lueur de vérité et de justice. ('The awaited critic will arrive, let us hope, and he will shed light on our own situation, and put everything in proper perspective; he will place the past back in the shadow and will stand the present upright in the great radiance of truth and justice.’)15

From the height of a conviction such as this, the plight of the Impressionists must have seemed a minor problem. So that when Cézanne, in 1880, once again enlisted Zola's help on behalf of Renoir and Monet, it was a rude shock to read in Le Voltaire, to which Zola had been reinstated, what looked like an attack but was in fact a revision, in slightly stronger terms, of Zola's argument of 1879, with the addition of one very significant word: 'impuissance'. It is now no longer a question of what the Impressionists will not do; Zola begins to feel that they are unable to do it. Le grand malheur, c'est que pas un artiste de ce groupe n'a réalisé puissamment et définitivement la formule qu'ils apportent tous, éparse dans leurs œuvres. La formule est là, divisée à l'infini; mais nulle part, dans aucun d'eux, on ne la trouve appliquée par un maître. Ce sont tous des précurseurs, l'homme de génie n'est pas né. On voit bien ce qu'ils veulent, on leur donne raison; mais on cherche en vain le chef d'œuvre qui doit imposer la formule et faire courber toutes les têtes. Voilà pourquoi la lutte des impressionistes n'a pas encore abouti: ils restent inférieurs a l’œuvre qu'ils tentent, ils bégayent sans pouvoir trouver le mot ... On peut leur reprocher leur impuissance personnelle, ils n'en sont pas moins les véritables ouvriers du siècle ... Ils ont bien des trous, ils làchent trop souvent leur facture, ils se satisfont trop aisément, ils se montrent incomplets, illogiques, exagérés, impuissants; n'importe, il leur suffit de travailler au naturalisme (110) contemporain pour se mettre à la tête d'un mouvement et pour jouer un rôle considerable dans notre école de peinture. ('The great misfortune is that not one artist of this group has given powerful and definitive expression to the formula which all of them bring diffused throughout their works. The formula is there, but split up ad infinitum; nowhere, in none of them, does one find it applied by a master. They are all precursors, the man of genius has yet to be born. People see clearly what they are looking for and give them credit for it; but in vain one seeks the work of art which will make the formula accepted and bow all heads in admiration. This is why the struggle of the Impressionists has not yet reached its term: they remain inferior to the attempted work, they are stammering and cannot find the right words… They can be criticized for personal sterility, but they are still the true workmen of the century... They have many gaps, they are often careless in execution, too easily satisfied, unfinished, illogical, exaggerated, sterile; nevertheless, they only need work at contemporary Naturalism in order to put themselves at the head of a movement and to play an important part in our school of painting.') Thus, in the article of 1880 is adumbrated the theme of L’Œuvre, a novel about artistic impotence. This was precisely the factor that so wounded Cézanne and brought the long friendship between the two men to an end.

Zola, however, had his own worries. The publication in book form of his masterpiece L'Assommoir in 1877 had brought him literary supremacy in France, a fact unacceptable to another associate of earlier times, Edmond de Goncourt, who claimed that Zola had stolen his method. Zola's fantastic industry can be judged by the output of his novels. The ninety editions of Nana in 1880 might have satisfied a lesser man but Zola refused to relax. In 1882 he published Pot-Bouille, in 1883 Au Bonheur des Dames, in 1884 La Joie de Vivre, in 1885 Germinal, in 1886 L’Œuvre, in 1887 La Terre. There is a reason for this phenomenal record. In 1880 Zola's mother died, and Zola, to whom the idea of death was a nightmare, went through a prolonged nervous crisis, with hallucinations of the kind suffered by Baudelaire before his stroke. The Zolas were childless, a circumstance particularly painful to a man whose idea of creativity was associated with the natural reproductive process. Zola's (111) compulsive productivity begins to strike a harsh note. La Joie de Vivre is an ominous book about frustration, while Germinal, with its terrifying black symbolism, is taken from the month in the Revolutionary calendar which indicates new growth and is the equivalent of April, here very definitely perceived as the cruellest month. In addition to these internal pressures, Zola was beginning to suffer professionally. After the publication of La Terre, there appeared on the front page of Le Figaro an attack on the novel's alleged obscenity signed by five of Zola's former disciples who thus signified their break with naturalism. This manifeste des cinq, inspired, one imagines, by Edmond de Goncourt, who denies all responsibility, merely reinforced earlier failures like the theoretical works Zola had published on the naturalist novel and the naturalist drama in 1879 and the early 1880s. Zola was no theorist; he was, moreover, by the 1880s, somewhat out of date. The symbolist movement was well under way while Zola was still trapped in the coils of his epic celebration of determinism. Moreover, the idea that had fertilized his early writings, particularly on painting, the idea of the value of individual temperament,16 had been replaced by his increasing preoccupation with collective undertakings, particularly on a democratic level. This explains why Germinal, which deals with the struggle of the workers against a corrupt mine owner, is a novel of passion and genius, and why L’Œuvre, a Romantic, even sentimental, study of a painter working in isolation, is a failure.

L’Œuvre, published in 1886, is the least successful of the Rougon-Macquart novels and the most personal. It tells the story of Claude Lantier, a painter first met with in Le Ventre de Paris, who hangs himself when he cannot complete the masterpiece that will vindicate his entire career by being hung in the Salon. In fact he hangs himself because his heredity is so disastrous that the cards are stacked against him: Claude is first and foremost the son of the wretched Gervaise of L'Assommoir and her ponceing lover Lantier, and therefore a prime example of the negative effects of determinism. However, Claude also bears a sinister resemblance to Cézanne—in the notes for the novel he is described as ‘un Manet, un Cézanne dramatisé, plus près de Cézanne'—and although one of his pictures is very close to Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, it is easy to see that the hirsute and unsociable character Claude is (111)based physically on Cézanne, particularly as he purports to come from a Provençal town which Zola calls Plassans.17 It was on this level that the novel gave such offence to Cézanne, although fellow writers were quick to seize the inference that Lantier represented a fair slice of Zola's own experience. Claude was the name adopted by Zola when he wrote his articles in L'Événement in 1866 and when he was known to the public simply as 'Monsieur Claude'. In a sense Zola is present throughout L’Œuvre. He is not only the healthy, 'arrived' journalist, Sandoz; he is the depressed struggler of twenty years earlier in time, timid, poor and shy, Claude Lantier, in fact. Edmond de Goncourt took the point right away. Writing in the Journal on 10 April 1886 and evidently reporting a conversation he had just had with Zola, he notes, '… I added that in my opinion he had made a mistake in introducing himself into the novel in the characters of both Sandoz and Claude …’

The book is disappointing in practically every respect, except for the reminiscences of Aix-Plassans, the brief idyll enjoyed by Claude and his mistress Christine in the country at Bennecourt, and the clumsy homage paid by Zola to the great painter of the day, a thinly disguised portrait of Courbet, whose qualities are contained in his name: Bongrand. On the whole, Zola's, painters do not otherwise appear in an attractive light and one can understand the anxiety of Monet and his friends when the book appeared. Pissarro, whose judgement was always more disinterested than that of his fellow painters in the Impressionist group, remarked, correctly, that it was merely a bad novel. And here he shows himself to be perceptive, for L’Œuvre is essentially a literary creation, and the actions turn on events which are by no means the exclusive property of the Impressionists. In fact, Claude Lantier has a distinguished ancestry both in fact and fiction. The idea of the painter committing suicide is based on a real circumstance, for in May 1866, a painter named Jules Holtzapfel shot himself because the Salon jury refused his picture, an event which inspired some of the generous indignation which Zola manifested in print in his articles in L'Événement. Perhaps more telling in this context is an anecdote told by Zola himself in his article on Gautier: On raconte que le peintre Flandrin, après de longs silences désespérés devant ses (113) tableaux, levait parfois ses mains tremblantes' en murmurant: 'Ah! si j'osais, si j'osais!' Quel superbe cri d'impuissance, quelle cruelle conscience d'un artiste capable de comprendre et incapable de réaliser! ('It is said that the painter Flandrin, after long despairing silences in front of his pictures, sometimes used to raise his trembling hands and groan: "Oh! If only I had the courage, if only I had the courage!" What a magnificent cry of impotence, what terrible awareness in an artist capable of understanding and yet incapable of creating.')18 Over and above this, the idea of the painter's masterpiece being a jumble of colours and shapes intelligible only to the painter himself is lifted straight from another story, Balzac's Chef d'Œuvre inconnu, which Cézanne knew and admired.19 But Balzac's painter, Frenhofer, although mad, is given the benefit of his genius throughout, whereas Claude Lantier suffers from a form of spiritual impotence, and Cézanne applied this stricture to himself. Zola sent him the novel, as he sent him all his books, and Cézanne acknowledged it. They never spoke or wrote to each other again.

No overt mention of disloyalty was made but an atmosphere of unspoken accusation and counter-accusation prevailed. Perhaps it is in this context that one should look back, as Zola does both in L’Œuvre and in his last Salon of 1896, to younger days. Zola's blistering experience of early poverty in Paris was absorbed by the optimism of youth. He saw no discrepancy in urging a life of art and high endeavour on his friend Cézanne, the banker's son, or in losing his first important job as an independent journalist over Manet, the lawyer's son, but at some point in middle life, when his own gigantic labours had finally brought him the kind of security essential to himself and his two female dependants, some memory of that early inequality took possession of him and would not easily be shaken off. Zola was a transparently courageous and heroic man but he had a certain fear of his own feelings. He never fully worked out his attitude to Cézanne but it was surely coloured by the fact that Cézanne represented failure in worldly terms, and Zola felt literally menaced by him, much as Baudelaire had felt menaced by a roomful of works by Ingres. For Zola, the person, not the painting, was the symbol. That is why Claude Lantier is half Cézanne, half Zola himself, or rather a projection of Zola's anxieties. Again, Zola was a political animal. When he defended the (114) Impressionists in 1866, he did so because he wanted equality of opportunity for them; he was not interested in turning their equality, once acquired, into a form of privilege. This point the Impressionists were unwilling to concede. So that Zola must be allowed a certain amount of edginess and vulnerability. He had been a risk-taker in the Stendhalian sense, but there is evidence that the Impressionists considered him mainly as a useful property. If there is any personal animosity in L’Œuvre—and what there is is largely unconscious—it must surely stem from these factors.

It is with these considerations in mind that one should consider Zola's last Salon, published in Le Figaro in May 1896. And what a piece of writing it is! In histories of painting, this Salon is dismissed or ridiculed as final evidence of Zola's philistinism because it refers to Cézanne as un grand peintre avorté, because it bemoans the invasion of the Salon by artists painting in the manner of the Impressionists but without that primal vigour that the original group possessed, because it seemed to Zola that he had been waging a paper war on behalf of an inferior army. And it is true that at this point his indignation has something comic about it: Eh quoi! vraiment, c'est pour ça que je me suis battu? c'est pour cette peinture claire, pour ces taches, pour ces reflets, pour cette décomposition de la lumière? Seigneur, étais-je fou? Mais c'est très laid, cela me fait horreur! ('What, is that really what I fought for? for that bright painting with its spots and reflections and decomposed light? God, was I mad? But it's so ugly, I loathe it!')

In fact, this Salon is only marginally about painting. It is, in essence, the lament of a great Romantic, surveying the battles he fought and won in earlier and more candid days, and it is impossible to read the conclusion without experiencing some kind of revelation about the true nature of Romanticism and the Romantic temperament. It deserves to be quoted in full. Non, j'ai fait ma tâche, j'ai combattu le bon combat. J'avais vingt-six ans, j'étais avec les jeunes et avec les braves. Ce que j'ai défendu, je le défendrais encore, car c'était l'audace du moment, le drapeau qu'il s'agissait de planter sur les terres ennemies. Nous avions raison parce que nous étions l'enthousiasme et la foi. Si peu que nous ayons fait de vérité, elle est aujourd'hui acquise. Et, si la voie ouverte est banale, c'est que nous l'avons élargie, pour que l'art d'un moment puisse y passer. (115) Et puis, les maîtres restent. D'autres viendront dans des voies nouvelles; mais tous ceux qui déterminent l'évolution demeurent, sur les ruines de leurs écoles. Et il n'y a décidément que les créateurs qui triomphent, les faiseurs d’hommes, le génie qui enfante, qui fait de la vie et de la vérité. ('No, I've done my duty, I've fought the good fight. I was twenty-six and I was on the side of the young and the brave. What I defended then I should defend now, for it was the daring of the moment, the flag which had to be planted on enemy territory. We were right because we had enthusiasm and faith. Whatever little truth we created is accepted today. And if the path we opened up has become well-trodden, that is because we widened it for the art of a moment to pass freely. Now we have the great masters. Others will come along new paths; but all those who will determine future evolution remain over and above the ruins of their schools. Decidedly it is only the creators who triumph, the creators of men, only the genius who begets life, who creates life and truth.')

It has been suggested, by Henry James among others, that Zola spent his life gravitating towards the defence of Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer wrongly convicted of passing documents to German army headquarters. Certainly the Salon of 1866 can be read as a blueprint for his journalistic campaign, J'accuse, and the Salon of 1896 as the regret of a fighter who found all his earlier battles to be of insufficient stature. Zola's five articles demanding a re-trial of Dreyfus, who was already serving his sentence on Devil's Island, arc the crowning achievement of a lifetime; they turned the author into a kind of folk hero whose lustre remained undimmed in Europe until the outbreak of the first World War and was resurrected in the 1930s.20 The writing is of a peculiarly inspired kind, as if Zola has at last found the cause worthy of his energy. It is curious to reflect that while the brothers Goncourt, through their passion for the eighteenth century, had evolved a style of writing as precious and as delicate as that of their favourite period, Zola, concerned purely with the circumstances of his own time, manages instinctively to recapture the spirit of the rhetoric of 1789, or perhaps to put on the mantle of Voltaire in his defence of the Calas family. Zola took no money for these articles and was rewarded with a heavy fine and a year's exile. It is touching to know that with the whole of Europe to choose from, Zola made (116) straight for those old Impressionist haunts, Norwood, Sydenham, and Penge. He even made a brief and, to him, baffling stay at a temperance hotel in Tulse Hill, before retiring to wear out his year in Surrey.

Zola died in 1902 in extremely unusual circumstances. Returning to their Paris apartment from Médan, Zola and his wife woke in the night of 28 September unable to breathe. Madame Zola stumbled to the bathroom and managed to clear her lungs but Zola was dead by the morning. The cause was found to be a blocked chimney, and the fire which Zola had lit in the bedroom proved fatal. Foul play was immediately suspected and indeed has never been disproved. Zola's disappearance was regarded as a national tragedy, his funeral cortege was immense, his position as moral leader universally acknowledged. Retrospectively, one can see that art criticism was the least of his activities, yet as an art critic he is not unimportant. He operates at a practical and emotional level rather than at an intellectual one, but his ideas are in the honourable tradition of Stendhal and Baudelaire. The words with which he concludes his Salon of 1879—La place est balayée pour le genie de l'avenir—are in fact a reprise of the lesson of Stendhal and Baudelaire who spend a great deal of their time looking for the ideal painter who will justify their predictions. Zola is the last of the Romantic idealist critics who place their hope in some unspecified painter of the future. The next development is a regression, an inversion; idealism will be projected back into the past. The masters of this particular phase are the Goncourts and Huysmans. Yet it is appropriate to mark a pause here and to recognize the accuracy and the importance of Zola's prophetic instinct. In 1860, as a very young man, he wrote to Cézanne, rallying that more inhibited spirit to action. J'ai fait un rêve l'autre jour. J'avais écrit un beau livre, un livre sublime que tu avais illustré de belles, de sublimes gravures. Nos deux noms en lettres d'or brillaient, unis sur le premier feuillet, et dans cette fraternité de génie, passaient inséparables à la postérité. (‘I had a dream the other day. I had written a beautiful book, a sublime book which you had illustrated with beautiful, sublime prints. Side by side on the first page, our two names shone in golden letters and in this fraternity of genius came down inseparable to posterity.')21 Posterity may have arranged the details a little differently but in essence the prophecy was fulfilled a hundredfold.

Notes

1. Letter to G. Giacosa, 28.12.1882.

2. See F.W.J. Hemmings, Émile Zola, The Listener, 21.4.1966; also Hemmings, Émile Zola, Clarendon Press, 1953; and Émile Zola, Salons, recueillis, annotés et présentés par F.W. J. Hemmings et Robert J. Niess, et précédés d'une étude sur Émile Zola critique d'art de F.W.J. Hemmings. Geneva, Droz, 1959.

3. Letter of March 1885, quoted Lambert and Coigny, J. K. Huysmans. Lettres inédites à Émile Zola, Geneva, Droz, 1953.

4. Zola, Documents Littéraires, Paris, Charpentier, 1881.

5. Zola to Valabregue, Paris, 6.2.1865.

6. In his marvellous book, The Gates of Horn, Oxford University Press, 1966.

7. Henri Mitterand, Zola journaliste, Paris, Armand Colin, 1962, says July.

8. Ima Ebin, Manet and Zola, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 27, 1945.

9. These examples are quoted by John Rewald, whose book, Cézanne et Zola, Paris, Sedrowski, 1936, is the standard account of the relationship between the two men. The present writer, however, cannot agree with Rewald's evaluation of Zola as a critic.

10. Henry James, Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Morris Shapira with a preface by F. R. Leavis. A Peregrine Book, Y. 73. N.d.

11. Courbet est le seul peintre de notre époque; il appartient à la famille des faiseurs de chair. ('Courbet is the only painter of our times; he belongs to the family of the creators of flesh.') Proudhon et Courbet, 26.7.1865.

12. 'La Critique contemporaine', in Documents litteraires, op. cit.

13. Quoted Rewald, op. cit.

14. Pierre Coigny (in Lambert and Coigny, op. cit.) speaks of Zola as animé de la foi des fondateurs de religion ('moved by the faith of the religious pioneers').

15. Documents littéraires, op. cit.

16. Une œuvre d'art est un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament. ('A work of art is a corner of the creation seen through a temperament.') Proudhon et Courbet, op. cit.

17. For other derivations, see R. J. Niess, Zola, Cézanne and Manet. A study of l’Œuvre. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1968.

18. Documents litteraires, op. cit.

19. 'Frenhofer, c'est moi!' Quoted Rewald, op. cit.

20. Henri Barbusse, Zola. Translated by M. B. Green and F. C. Green. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1932.

21. Zola to Cézanne, 25.3.1860. Quoted Rewald, op. cit.