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

or its morose artisan bestiality, as well
as in the life of the shops and stores,
of studio and camp, of offices, bankers,
demagogues, officials, aristocrats, OF
those on whose folly these batten and
of those who batten on their vices. 1t
is, as lola said, "a world, a society. a
civilization" the whole life of a gen
Grafton is there.
Throughout lola has sought to tell
the truth and the whole truth as he
saw it. He took scenes from observa-
ton, studied characters from life. Yet
what he gives us is not a true perspect-
i've of reality, but the vision of an epic
poet, gloomy and pessimistic, perhaps,
but grand and masterful in its presen-
tation of the animal instincts in human
nature. His theory of fiction, combined
from Taine and Flaubert, was weak,
and the volumes of criticism in which
he defended it are negligible. His mer-
its lie quite elsewhere. He imagines
himself realist offering in his novels
slices of crude life He is, in fact,
rare combination of pessimist and
idealist. tormented as by a nightmare
with visions of the blind materialistic
forces that drag the beast in man
through folly and misery to vice and
infamy. He does not paint baseness
as it is, but, like the poet and the ar
fist, he gives us the illusion of it, and
he does this always with an ethical
purpose that in his mind justifies the
sordidneSs and even the obScenity of
some melancholy pages that we could
wish absent from his work, less in
deed on moral than on aesthetic
grounds.
The topsy- turvy romanticism will ap-
pear at it's best in descriptions of masses
and crowds, at it's weakest in the anal
ysis of character. Hence Zola's best
novels are 'Germnal,' with it's brutal
lied masses of striking miners, and
THE Downfall where the individual
soldier is lost in the mass of regiments
on the march, or herded in cattle cars,
or surging to and fro on hardfought
fields, or charging to certain destruc-
ton. And in both novels we may note,
as we may in nearly all the others,
some inanimate thing, that recurS SYM
bolcally at rhythmic intervals until it
seems to have almost as much person.
ality as the actors themselves. In
"Germinal' it is the mining engine, in
THE DOWNFALL Napoleon's luxurious
camp train knocking the misery of the
soldier, in Il Assommoir" it is the
brandy still, in The Beast in Man" the
locomotive, and so with the rest.
The novels correspond in language
and structure to these characteristics
copious, sometimes redundant, depend
ing more on masses than on details,
inaccurate and occasionally even in
correct. 1t is objective, architectural,
methodical, for lola works more from
documents than from sympathetic OBJ
servation of life. And yet, though we
feel that at times his work is ponder
Gus, tactless, gross, it's very monotony
has a power and it's very brutality
seems the struggle of titan to ex-
press fierce and bitter truths. Always
a man of intense convictions, Zola has
been for thirty years in France a
power, not only in literature and in art
but in morals. He has not always been
d power for good, but he has always
striven strenuously and gradually he
has been coming to a clearer vision.
He was always to be reckoned with.
He has become a man with whom we
are glad to reckon.