The Project Gutenberg EBook of Emile Zola, by William Dean Howells

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Emile Zola

Author: William Dean Howells

Posting Date: July 23, 2008 [EBook #728]
Release Date: November, 1996

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EMILE ZOLA ***

Produced by Anthony J. Adam.

EMILE ZOLA

by

William Dean Howells

In these times of electrical movement, the sort of construction in the
moral world for which ages were once needed, takes place almost
simultaneously with the event to be adjusted in history, and as true a
perspective forms itself as any in the past. A few weeks after the
death of a poet of such great epical imagination, such great ethical
force, as Emile Zola, we may see him as clearly and judge him as fairly
as posterity alone was formerly supposed able to see and to judge the
heroes that antedated it. The present is always holding in solution
the elements of the future and the past, in fact; and whilst Zola still
lived, in the moments of his highest activity, the love and hate, the
intelligence and ignorance, of his motives and his work were as
evident, and were as accurately the measure of progressive and
retrogressive criticism, as they will be hereafter in any of the
literary periods to come. There will never be criticism to appreciate
him more justly, to depreciate him more unjustly, than that of his
immediate contemporaries. There will never be a day when criticism
will be of one mind about him, when he will no longer be a question,
and will have become a conclusion. A conclusion is an accomplished
fact, something finally ended, something dead; and the extraordinary
vitality of Zola, when he was doing the things most characteristic of
him, forbids the notion of this in his case. Like every man who
embodies an ideal, his individuality partook of what was imperishable
in that ideal. Because he believed with his whole soul that fiction
should 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 inextinguishable
debate; for the two pri