Octave Mirbeau defends Émile Zola with biting wit in this first-ever English translation of his 1880s essay on the Germinal censorship controversy.
The row that broke out between M. Émile Zola, the Censorship, and the ministry has now blown over. Little by little it’s fizzling out into the gossipy tittle-tattle of hack journalism. They have gone round dutifully collecting the opinions of theatre directors, and it’s to M. Brasseur, that profound thinker, that the last word in this affair has fallen. M. Goblet is licking his wounds. M. Turquet, his spirits restored, is dreaming up some vague circulars, and the Censorship is saved. Thank God for that.
Public opinion has been generally favourable to M. Émile Zola. Yet there have been plenty of holdouts – not just amongst the grubby little nobodies of journalism, who don’t count anyway, but also amongst our colleagues who have made something of themselves in the press, whose thoughts are supposedly paved with solid truths. And I have been able to convince myself, once again and quite clearly, that if the politician is the natural enemy of the man of letters, the journalist runs him a close second. I won’t delve into this question today; I will simply note it in passing.
What struck me most in what’s been written about Germinal is the hatred that bourgeois, respectable criticism still harbours against M. Zola. It no longer expresses itself in quite the same way as before; it puts on gloves, pins a flower to its buttonhole, and deigns to smile between grimaces. But don’t be fooled – for all its change of manners, for all it has tucked its old crow’s feet under lace cuffs, it has remained exactly the same, which is to say, utterly vicious. Gone are the days when it portrayed M. Zola as some sort of wild and dangerous anarchist of art, writing atop a barricade with sticks of dynamite. No, now it paints him with a tuft of straw on his head, a bass drum between his legs, shouting himself hoarse outside his tent, trying to lure the gawpers in. From a rebel black with gunpowder, they have turned him into a clown smeared with greasepaint. The good faith, as you see, hasn’t changed; only the costume is different.
It’s a curious thing, really, that a man can no longer profess a literary faith, fight for an idea because he believes it just, beautiful and fertile, without being accused of base motives – the hunger for publicity, the greed for money. He is forbidden to aspire to an artistic ideal that he judges superior to others; he can’t have a preference or express disgust; they deny him the right to defend himself when he is vilely attacked from all sides, not just in the execution but in the very intentions of his work; above all, they deny him the right to be rich and famous. And this man is supposed to let himself be blissfully exploited, robbed, slandered, dragged through the mud. If he cries out, well then, it’s just vanity or the perverse need to make his name ring out over the crowd of idiots and suckers. But why, for heaven’s sake? Who still gets passionate about literary battles? Don’t we know that art long ago abdicated its sovereignty to the hands of speculators and croupiers, and that, driven from the temples where the sacred flame burns, it takes refuge in the banks where the golden numbers gleam?
The hatred that pursues M. Zola – through much admiration, I hasten to add – is easy to identify and define. It comes first from his great talent, for the mediocre never forgive the strong for being strong; it comes next from the fact that M. Zola has made his own way in life. For it’s the selfish pleasure of the mediocre to imagine they have had something to do with a writer’s glory and to cry out in chorus: “I discovered him!” Now the unfortunate fact is that M. Zola discovered himself. He is not the product of any old boys’ network; unlike so many others, he didn’t emerge from the usual reputation factories. Supported only by the force of his genius, by the fierce tenacity of his courage, he marched straight ahead and made his breakthrough magnificently. He never stooped to any concession; he never entered into the compromises, the submissions, the grand intrigues and petty cowardices that make up literary life… and here he is.
His beginnings, though, were painful, and bitterness was not spared him. When he began to shine above the mob of regimented writers, when with his ardent words that inspire faith he began to preach the gospel of the new doctrine, an immense cry of indignation rose up around him. In the studios, the newspapers, the literary cafés, the name Émile Zola became synonymous with a gross insult, an outrageous obscenity that people flung in each other’s faces during arguments and polemics. The year-end revues dragged him through the filth of their verses, they lampooned him in the music halls. Then, from those intelligent centres where the fashions of the hour and the glories of a day take flight – soap bubbles soon burst – this name descended even into the street where it reappeared, that flower of the gutter, blooming on the muddy lips of coachmen, on the twisted mouths of street urchins:
“Get stuffed, you Zola!”
True artists know what courage it takes to remain – I won’t say insensitive to these injustices, these mockeries, these insults – but sufficiently in command of one’s faculties, sufficiently self-confident, to continue the fight and not succumb to discouragement, broken like so many others by eternal ignorance and eternal routine. It’s long and cruel, the martyrology of artists: tears and blood have dampened and reddened more than one page. Though he suffered from these persecutions, M. Zola not only didn’t lose heart – for he had no taste for the martyr’s trade – but he stood up to the unleashed pack of howlers, and to force them to shut up, he hurled his books at their heads and knocked them out with masterpieces.
No man this century has been more stupidly mocked, more harshly insulted than Zola – no one except Manet, who shared with his friend and defender this enviable first consecration of contempt. Like Zola, Manet had a fighter’s temperament, resistant to concessions, but more highly strung than the writer; of a more delicate constitution and more sensitive nature, the painter suffered more keenly from injustices; and the attacks, if they didn’t kill him, at least hastened his end. Just as Zola pursues a beautiful dream of literature, Manet had dreamed a beautiful dream of art. He had tried to return drawing to the admirable syntheses of the primitives, to drive darkness from the studios, to let light flood in; he had tried to put vision into painters’ eyes, bubbling life into their cold tubes, air, sky, sunlight onto their muddy palettes. And for this they insulted him?
Today, Manet is dead, in the faith of his art, glorified by the very people who once despised him. The hatred falls silent for Zola too, while awaiting the definitive glorification; at least it barks from afar, timidly, sheltering behind ramparts of praise and, despairing of reaching the writer through his talent, it sometimes seeks to strike the man in his dignity. In vain – M. Zola has given us, in this age so indulgent to compromises of every kind, the almost fierce example of a rare dignity that we must know how to admire perhaps even more than we admire his talent; for the artist’s talent is made more beautiful still by the man’s dignity.
Knowing how to admire – that’s the excuse of humble folk like us, who toil away in newspapers at obscure and useless tasks, and it’s what distinguishes us from the wretched little vandals, unconscious destroyers of beauty, who miss all grandeur, all eloquence, all truth. A gathering of jokers, a grimacing multitude of hams who love only the exaggeration of words, the stupid grinding of laughter, the theatrical draping of sorrows; who see everything through fifth acts of melodrama or vaudeville, and who force nature and life to bend to all the deformations of wit… the wit of concierges and gossip columnists.
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Léon Hennique Novel 