Zola's Rougon-Macquart Family [pp. 412-422]

Zola's Rougoii-Mlacqzart Family.
Finally he became a farm laborer, and
in La Terre his wife is outraged and
murdered and his home taken from him.
And yet he is powerless to avenge him self.
This book has been called less a novel
than an impassioned treatise on political
economy. Zola believes that the crav ing for individual owhership of land has
become in France a monomania, absorb ing all that is noble and elevating even
most of what is human, in the one over mastering greed for another slice of
land.
The picture he paints is repulsive, and
is doubtless exaggerated in that it gives
only the darker side of the picture. It
is perhaps true, as his critics have
claimed, that the book was inspired by
his disgust at the difficulty of buying
additional land for his country place on
the Seine. Yet it is interesting to note
that so fair-minded an observer as Frederick Harrison, a firm believer in the
subdivision of land, has lately confessed
that, while the French peasant is not the
monster Zola has pictured him, he yet
manifests many of the vices that Zola
ascribes to him: that he is low-minded,
and lecherous, and penuripus beyond
belief.
Finally, in the last of these sixteen
volumes-not in the order of their appearance, but as I have grouped them to
show the relationship of the characters
-we have the sad love-story of H6lene,
sister of Franqois Mouret, Sie Page
d'Aimour. Here the great city of Paris
appears as the chorus of the old Greek
plays, and is described in all its phases,
as seen from Passy.
What a picture these sixteen books
furnish of French life in the middle of
the nineteenth century! Here are the
church, the state, the {arm, the market, the mine, the real estate speculator,
the merchant prince, the artist, the politician,-city and provincial,-the courtesan, the dram-seller and his victims.
When the three other special volumes
appear, dealing, if one may judge from
their titles, with the railroad, the bank ing-house, and the army, with the final
volume summing up the whole from the
point of view of the truly scientific phy sician, we may say securely that no
period of the world's history has been
more minutely and vividly recorded than
the French life of this era in this series
of novels.
But are they wholesome reading? The
question is a fair one, and deserves a
frank answer. Zola is known as a real ist. He thinks there is nothing that
may not be described in literature, and
that whatever is described at all should
be described just as it is, as vividly and
exactly as possible. Hence he admits
many scenes that most writers and most
readers of English consider improper;
and in place of veiled allusion and innu endo he uses. plain and direct language,
speaking, the average reader will think,
with brutal openness.
This is often startling and disagreeable. We are accustomed to regard it a
mark of advancing civilization that the
functions of the body, in proportion as
they are more respectedand more health
fully provided for, disappear more and
more from common observation, and become individually private. If I offer a
man at dinner a slice of Strasbourg pie,
for instance, it is sufficient for him to
decline it; and 1 do not expect him to
explain the imperfections of his digestive apparatus that make it unwise for
him to eat it. This may be a matter of
moment to him and to his physician, but
it is not to be intruded upon the public.
It is not that he keeps a secret from me:
he is simply reticent about what is a matter of only personal concern.
This reticence, the traveler learns, is
more marked in America than in England; and when one crosses the Channel
he finds less and less of it as he journeys
south through France and Italy, while
in some parts of Spain it seems unknown.
Zola is of Italian descent, and there may
421
1890.]