and the last of the Latins, and
the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin Zola owed not only
the moralistic scope of his literary ambition, but the depth and
strength of his personal conscience, capable of the austere puritanism
which underlies the so-called immoralities of his books, and incapable
of the peculiar lubricity which we call French, possibly to distinguish
it from the lubricity of other people rather than to declare it a thing
solely French. In the face of all public and private corruptions, his
soul is as Piagnone as Savonarola's, and the vices of Arrabbiati, small
and great, are always his text, upon which he preaches virtue.

II

Zola is to me so vast a theme that I can only hope here to touch his
work at a point or two, leaving the proof of my sayings mostly to the
honesty of the reader. It will not require so great an effort of his
honesty now, as it once would, to own that Zola's books, though often
indecent, are never immoral, but always most terribly, most pitilessly
moral. I am not saying now that they ought to be in every family
library, or that they could be edifyingly committed to the hands of
boys and girls; one of our first publishing houses is about to issue an
edition even of the Bible "with those passages omitted which are
usually skipped in reading aloud"; and it is always a question how much
young people can be profitably allowed to know; how much they do know,
they alone can tell. But as to the intention of Zola in his books, I
have no doubt of its righteousness. His books may be, and I suppose
they often are, indecent, but they are not immoral; they may disgust,
but they will not deprave; only those already rotten can scent
corruption in them, and these, I think, may be deceived by effluvia
from within themselves.

It is to the glory of the French realists that they broke, one and all,
with the tradition of the French romanticists that vice was or might be
something graceful, something poetic, something gay, brilliant,
something superior almost, and at once boldly presented it in its true
figure, its spiritual and social and physical squalor. Beginning with
Flaubert in his "Madame Bovary," and passing through the whole line of
their studies in morbid anatomy, as the "Germinie Lacerteux" of the
Goncourts, as the "Bel-Ami" of Maupassant, and as all the books of
Zola, you have portraits as veracious as those of the Russians, or
those of Defoe, whom, indeed, more than