Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer: An Account of His Life & WorkVizetelly, Ernest Alfred
General
Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer: An Account of His Life & Work
Vizetelly, Ernest Alfred
Zola, Émile, 1840-1902
In that same year, 1881, Zola republished in book form most of the
biographical and literary papers which he had written of recent years.
"Le Roman Expérimental" had led the way in 1880, and now there came
four more volumes: first "Les Romanciers Naturalistes,"[34] a series
of papers on Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Daudet, and the Goncourts, to
which was added the much discussed review of contemporary novelists;
secondly, "Documents Littéraires: Études et Portraits,"[35] in which
will be found papers on Chateaubriand, Hugo, Musset, Gautier, George
Sand, Dumas _fils_, Ste.-Beuve, contemporary poets such as Leconte de
Lisle, Baudelaire, Banville, Catulle Mendès, Dierx, Anatole France,
Mallarmé, Hérédia, Coppée, Bouchor, Richepin, and Sully-Prudhomme;
and critics such as Taine, Pontmartin, Levallois, Babou, Barbey
d'Aurévilly, and Sarcey, with some curious notes on Buloz, the founder
of the famous "Revue des Deux-Mondes." Next there came "Le Naturalisme
au Théâtre," divided into two sections, theory and example; the former
including papers on the special gift alleged to be necessary in all
writers for the stage, on acting, costumes, scenery, government
subventions, etc.; and the latter running through the whole scale
of the playwright's art, tragedy, drama, comedy, vaudeville and
pantomime, with selections from the many articles which Zola had
written as a dramatic critic between 1876 and 1880. Finally there was
a fourth volume entitled, "Nos Auteurs Dramatiques," in which plays
by Hugo, Augier, Dumas _fils_, Sardou, Labiche, Halévy, Gondinet,
Pailleron, D'Ennery, Barrière, Feuillet, and others, were analysed and
discussed.[36]
To some of the theories set forth in those four volumes it may be
necessary to refer when we survey Zola's work generally. The books
have been mentioned here because they were issued at the period we
have now reached, and because it is advisable that the reader should
realise how energetic, how zealous Zola always was, how great was his
versatility, and how strenuous his life. This man who subsequently
preached the gospel of work had practised it unremittingly since the
day he emerged from Bohemia. Fortune might frown or success might come,
he did not alter in his industrious habits. In spite of every rebuff,
every attack, he continued striving undauntedly, even as his father had
striven before him. He was a living example of the axiom that life is a
battle. He fought for his ideas, his principles, without a pause, until
his last hour.
[1] £360 = about $1,800.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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