The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1899-09-01

the most hateful to all lovers of their
country and their race.
But while this act of moral heroism
| revealed lola to the majority of Gull
tured Englishmen and Americans, ii
only confirmed the judgment of those
VINO knew the man, not in his books
alone, but in his life. To them his con-
duct in this. case seemed no more than
natural They had long felt that his
devotion to a theory of art had masked
the moral dignity of the man from
those who felt or had heard that the
/ theory was abused, and did not realize
that the man was abused also. lola S
art deviates from our ideal beauty, his
ethics are refraction of our ideal
good, but his art is great, and his eth
les are sincere.
All his life has showed that. 1t has
been exemplary in it's earnest and in
/ defatigable industry. He has much OF
the northern French character of his
mother, something of the Venetian
blood of his father, and a little also
of his Greek grandmother nature. He
is at once a realist and an idealist, ro-
mantle and naturalistic in his art,
sober and hyperbolic in his fancy. His
father had been a man of somewhat
visionary ideals, an engineer to whose
grandoise conceptions the Canal lola
at AK still bears witness He died in
1916, when Emile was a boy of 6, and
the future novelists youth was passed
in growing poverty, partly al AK, part
ly at Paris. He earned some distinc-
ton at school, and then passed two
years in shifty and squalid bohemian
ism, until, at %, he got post as bundle
clerk in the great publishing house of
Hachette.
The instinct of literature was already
strong in him, and four years later he
abandoned his post to give himself
wholly to it-an act that required some
courage, since at that time he had
written nothing of striking merit; moth
ing, certainly, that had any promise
of the kind of success he was finally
to attain. But in 1867 the artist re-
vealed himself at last, and in the full
quin." The intensity and minute vision
of this terrible analysis of remorse are
hardly surpassed. But it is fierce
and sombre art, oppressed with a Wis
ion of the evil that turks in man. 1t is
the voicing of this oppression that lola
calls "naturalism word that he first
used in the preface to this remarkable
volume.
Madeleine Ferat," that followed, is
quite inferior; but we must pause over
it for a moment. because it adds the
one element needed to complete tie
novelistic apprenticeship of the author
of the "Rougon- Macquart'- is, the
conviction of the fatalistic power Of
heredity on the destinies of man. This
thread binds together all the varied
labor of his succeeding years; this is
the brain food on which he nursed and
fortified the philosophic and pseudo
scientific determnism of the twenty
volumes in which he has to trace the
social history of a family under the
second empire, aiming, he, too, to be,
like Balzac, the secretary of French
society,""
The general plan of this series, ex-
tended, though not essentially modified
as it progressed. was conceived in 1862
The last volume of the series appeared
in 1898. Zola has since written 'Lour-
des,' Rome" Paris" He is also au-
thor of some short stories, one of them
THE Attack On the Mill''-a master
piece. But his fame rests so entirely on
the ''Rougon- Macquart' and his genius
is so completely manifested there that
we may wisely confine to it what there
may be space to say of him here.
Let us first take a bird s-eye view of
the series. The scene of the introduc-
tory novel is AK, which he calls Plas-
sans. Here, as The Fortune of the
Rougons" tells US, there was born, in
1887, Pierre Rougon, whose mother.
Adelaide Fouque, after his fathers
death, had another son, Antoine Mac
quart, and a daughter, Ursule Mac
quart. The mother suffered from a
brain lesion, and the effects of this APP
pear in protean forms in her descend
ants. who spread through all the strata
of French society. The children of An
tome sink to the proletariat of labor
or of vice. They appear at their best
in Jean Macquart C"Earth" and THE
Downfall'); they exhibit poised SEN
suality in the Lisa of Partisan Diges-
tion," a resigned courage in the Pau
line of THE Joy of Life and alcohol
ism in the Gervaise of Il Assommoir."
who beuueathes her tendencies to four
children, the socialist mining agitator