e appearance of La Terre in 1887 (it was first published as a
feuilleton in _Gil Blas_, from May 28 to September 15), five of Zola's
disciples, Paul Bonnetain, J. H. Rosny, Lucien Descaves, Paul
Margueritte, and Gustave Guiches, made a public protest which is
rather comical if you remember that several of these writers have not
turned out Sunday-school literature; Paul Margueritte in particular
has in L'Or and an earlier work beaten his master at the game. But a
reaction from Zola's naturalism was bound to come. As Remy de Gourmont
wrote: "There has been no question of forming a party or issuing
orders; no crusade was organised; it is individually that we have
separated ourselves, horror stricken, from a literature the baseness
of which made us sick." Havelock Ellis, otherwise an admirer of the
genius of Emile Zola, has said that his soul "seems to have been
starved at the centre and to have encamped at the sensory periphery."
Blunt George Saintsbury calls Zola the "naturalist Zeus, Jove the
Dirt-Compeller," and adds that as Zola misses the two lasting
qualities of literature, style, and artistic presentation of matter,
he is doomed; for "the first he probably could not have attained,
except in a few passages, if he would; the second he has deliberately
rejected, and so the mother of dead dogs awaits him sooner or later."
Yet Zola lives despite these predictions, as the above figures show,
notwithstanding his loquacity in regard to themes that should be
tacenda to every writer.

But in this matter of forbidden subjects Zola is regarded by the
present generation as a trifle old-fashioned. When alive he was
grouped with Aretino and the Marquis de Sade, or with Restif de la
Bretonne. To-day Paris has not only Paul Margueritte, who when
writing in conjunction with his brother Victor gave much promise, but
also Octave Mirbeau. With Zola, the newer men assert that their work
makes for morality, exposing as it does public and private abuses, an
excuse as classic as Aristophanes.

In 1893 the figures for the principal novels of Zola stood thus: Nana,
160,000; L'Assommoir, 127,000; La Debacle, 143,000; Germinal, 88,000;
La Terre, 100,000; La Bete Humaine, 83,000; the same number for Le
Reve; Pot-Bouille, 82,000; whereas L'Oeuvre only counted 55,000; La
Conquete de Plassans, 25,000; La Curee, 36,000, and La Joie de Vivre,
44,000. La Terre, then, the most unmentionable story of them all, has
jumped since 1893 to the end of 1911