In these times of electrical movement, the sort of construction in themoral world for which ages were once needed, takes place almostsimultaneously with the event to be adjusted in history, and as true aperspective forms itself as any in the past. A few weeks after thedeath of a poet of such great epical imagination, such great ethicalforce, as Emile Zola, we may see him as clearly and judge him as fairlyas posterity alone was formerly supposed able to see and to judge theheroes that antedated it. The present is always holding in solutionthe elements of the future and the past, in fact; and whilst Zola stilllived, in the moments of his highest activity, the love and hate, theintelligence and ignorance, of his motives and his work were asevident, and were as accurately the measure of progressive andretrogressive criticism, as they will be hereafter in any of theliterary periods to come. There will never be criticism to appreciatehim more justly, to depreciate him more unjustly, than that of hisimmediate contemporaries. There will never be a day when criticismwill be of one mind about him, when he will no longer be a question,and will have become a conclusion. A conclusion is an accomplishedfact, something finally ended, something dead; and the extraordinaryvitality of Zola, when he was doing the things most characteristic ofhim, forbids the notion of this in his case. Like every man whoembodies an ideal, his individuality partook of what was imperishablein that ideal. Because he believed with his whole soul that fictionshould be the representation, and in no measure the misrepresentation,of life, he will live as long as any history of literature survives.He will live as a question, a dispute, an affair of inextinguishabledebate; for the two principles of the human mind, the love of thenatural and the love of the unnatural, the real and the unreal, thetruthful and the fanciful, are inalienable and indestructible.
Zola embodied his ideal inadequately, as every man who embodies anideal must. His realism was his creed, which he tried to make hisdeed; but, before his fight was ended, and almost before he began toforebode it a losing fight, he began to feel and to say (for to feel,with that most virtuous and voracious spirit, implied saying) that hewas too much a romanticist by birth and tradition, to exemplify realismin his work. He could not be all to the cause he honored that othermen were—men like Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff andTolstoy, and Galdos and Valdes—because his intellectual youth had beennurtured on the milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time.He grew up in the day when the great novelists and poets wereromanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first adored. He wasthat pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches,who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith. Zolawas none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He conceived ofreality poetically and always saw his human documents, as he beganearly to call them, ranged in the form of an epic poem. He fell belowthe greatest of the Russians, to whom alone he was inferior, inimagining that the affairs of men group themselves strongly about acentral interest to which they constantly refer, and after whateverexcursions definitely or definitively return. He was not willingly anepic poet, perhaps, but he was an epic poet, nevertheless; and theimperfection of