he literary side. On the human side, the civic
side, he was what he wished to be, and not what any perversity of his
elements made him. He heard one of those calls to supreme duty, which
from time to time select one man and not another for the response which
they require; and he rose to that duty with a grandeur which had all
the simplicity possible to a man of French civilization. We may think
that there was something a little too dramatic in the manner of his
heroism, his martyry, and we may smile at certain turns of rhetoric in
the immortal letter accusing the French nation of intolerable wrong,
just as, in our smug Anglo-Saxon conceit, we laughed at the procedure
of the emotional courts which he compelled to take cognizance of the
immense misdeed other courts had as emotionally committed. But the
event, however indirectly and involuntarily, was justice which no other
people in Europe would have done, and perhaps not any people of this
more enlightened continent.

The success of Zola as a literary man has its imperfections, its phases
of defeat, but his success as a humanist is without flaw. He triumphed
as wholly and as finally as it has ever been given a man to triumph,
and he made France triumph with him. By his hand, she added to the
laurels she had won in the war of American Independence, in the wars of
the Revolution for liberty and equality, in the campaigns for Italian
Unity, the imperishable leaf of a national acknowledgement of national
error.

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