How late may be seen by reading Zola’s Germinal. It was published in 1885. I do not know whether Zola ever read Marx, though I believe that at this time he certainly had not—but he had heard of the First International; he knew the doctrines of Anarchism and its personalities; he had read Darwin. He was familiar with those Siamese twins, the idea of the struggle for life and the struggle of the classes, contests so congenial to his dramatic temperament. He saw not indeed the grey trudge of economic man, but, more picturesquely and not a little mystically—mouths. Mouths wide open, groups of mouths, kinds of mouths; for his curiously divided personality the vision became an orgy of gluttony both gross and idealised. (“Seed” and “gluttony” are the recurring keywords of Germinal.) Where is the English parallel to the bad dream of Germinal? There is none. The religious conscience of the English novelists was certainly troubled by Darwin, their social conscience not at all. The fittest, the English middle-classes and their writers seem to have assumed, had survived.
And, to be more particular, we not only had Darwin but we had the mines. Where still is the English Germinal? There have been English novels about the coal-mines in the last twenty years, novels concerned with the social question. There have even been talent, experience, feeling. What has been lacking? Genius, except in the abortive case of D. H. Lawrence, of course; but above all a philosophy of life which could feed the kind of genius this novel calls for. Zola dug out of nineteenth-century speculation a theatrical but also profound view of mankind. He had temperament, will and curiosity. And he had the chronic ability to write novels on a variety of very different subjects. All these qualities the English mining novelists lack.
Comparing their books with Germinal one sees at once that they suffer also from a fatal moral simplicity. There is the choke of the hard-luck story in their throats. And from their chief fallacy Zola is entirely free: the fallacy that people who are starved, poor and oppressed are good and noble because they are poor and oppressed. And he is also free of the rider to the fallacy: that their sufferings and struggles make them more virtuous. Zola’s drawing undoubtedly exaggerated—temperament is exaggeration—and in the way which his period tended to exaggerate. His inverted idealism idealised the monstrous. But his nineteenth-century preoccupation with corruption and nightmare did show him that poverty may lead to degradation, that souls may become exhausted, that the moral victories of poverty may be at the cost of humanity itself. This was not, it is true, Zola’s final judgment. He appears in Germinal to back the bête humaine, and to admire the brute mob because they are bestial and brutal, or rather, because he sees in them a force of nature which is overthrowing, on Darwinian lines, the weaklier types and eventually transcending them. The miners are the seed sown in the horror of the dark earth and will one day germinate and rise through the mud to free themselves and the world. So there are positive and negative poles to Zola’s philosophy. In the English novels on the subject there is no similar organic conception of the nature of men. They are not tragic figures because they are never struggling with themselves. What miner in an English novel ever misbehaved, unless he was a blackleg or a labelled villain? True, he may drink or fight a bit, but that is merely toughness. He never has evil in his nature. Zola’s central character and hero bashes a man’s brains out. He does this because of an hereditary poison on his soul. One smiles at Zola’s topical little fuss about heredity, but the case shows the difference between the pieties of the political Sunday School and the freedom of imaginative literature.
The two great things in the main outline of Germinal are its romantic grasp of the scene—the sustained symbolism—and the handling of groups of people. As he approaches it at night through the freezing gale, the mine appears to Etienne first of all as two points of yellow light like the eyes of a night animal; then its dragon-like form takes shape, the gasp of steam from its engine is like a monster’s breathing. The monster squats on the plain; the cages whirr down full of men; up comes the coal; the mine is a monster devouring men, excreting coal. That sombre opening character is unforgettable. One is overpowered and frightened. What a relief to meet the sardonic old night-watchman, Bonnemort, the first character, the old man whom the mine cannot kill; and then how brilliant of Zola, a master of the strategy of story-telling, to show us that the relief we found in Bonnemort is deceptive. His is no sunny face to charm the visitor with; he is—the malice of the mine itself, the shrewd grin that remains on life when it is maimed. There are the gluttony of that animal the mine, the gluttony of those animals the Hennebeaus, the owning family with their terrible, overfed daughter; and this is set against the gluttony of the miners which is very different: the rabid gluttony of the starved. Zola’s poetic symbolism no doubt gets out of hand at times, especially later on when the shouting mouths of the rioters are caught by the red light of the setting sun and seem to be blotched with guzzled blood. That is a bad moment; the fresco becomes as false as a poster; but, in general, the romanticism of Zola transfigures the enormous dossier which he collected. At the end, in that terrifying chapter where the underground landslides make the mine cave in, so that the monster, which has devoured so many, is itself devoured, the preposterous symbolism comes off because Zola has prepared the way with extraordinary technical thoroughness. The engine goes:
And then a terrible thing was seen; the engine, dislocated from its massive foundation, with broken limbs was struggling against death; it moved; it straightened its crank, its giant’s knee, as though to rise: but crushed and swallowed up, it was dying.
“Its crank, its giant’s knee”—fact and symbol continue their fertile marriage to the end.
Too much nightmare, it has been said. Yes, but it is a nightmare of fact not of mere eloquence. Still it must be admitted that Germinal destroys one’s capacity to feel. At least it does that to mine. Each agony wrings the neck of its predecessor. One is broken at the end, not by feeling, but by the unremittingly documented thunderclaps of the drama. Strangely enough it is the briefly drawn soldiers, rather than the miners, who move one most. This may be because they are silent; or simply because Zola with his genius for getting the feeling of groups of people, has got their essential passive pathos. Then that copulation! The mines appear like an erotic gymnasium, and it gets a bit dubious after the first two or three hundred acts of rutting, though Zola’s invariable note of the positions adopted by lovers is as professionally pernicketty as Casanova’s and is a relief after Lawrence. (Is this realism or mania? Zola’s personal anxiety about impotence?) And what a lot of dangling breasts and posturing bottoms!
The real stuff of Germinal is the documentation and the groups of people on which the nightmare throws its strange light. This most bourgeois of all the bourgeois gave himself six months to get up the facts for Germinal; in that time he seems to have assimilated not merely all the technical, economic and social details of mining—see, for example, his knowledge of the structure of the pit-shaft, which becomes important in that terrific chapter when Souvarine, the anarchist, goes down alone by the ladder to saw through the beams and wreck the mine—but to have fertilised them so that they are no longer dead stuff in a notebook, but life. I do not know whether it is a defect of our novels about mining that they are written by ex-miners. Zola, who came from outside, surpasses them, perhaps because what is thoroughly and consciously conquered by force of will is enormously stimulating to invention. The fault of the modern novelist in general is that he does not go outside his own world for his material and I think that the decline of the power to tell a story or of the interest in doing so is due to this. Zola is an example of the value of pure curiosity. It is said that he had no natural power of observation; he relied upon learned facts, and when a piece of observation is put in to clinch a picture—the woman bringing her children to enjoy the sight of the riot, another woman stopping and re-starting her work at the sink while she quarrels, so that potato peeling goes on half the morning, the soldier blinking just before he is provoked to fire at the crowd, the comical
formal politeness of the Mde. Raisseneur, a real tricoteuse, as she agrees with Souvarine’s bloodiest theories—it is wonderful in its effect because it is exact. Zola’s ability to describe the movements of crowds is due to the fact that, unlike natural observers, he had to study crowds like a statistician and is therefore not carried away. Timid and plump, fussing with pencil and paper, Zola stands on the outskirts, noting not only the leaf-like swirl of humanity, but those single eddies, those sudden arrivals and departures of individuals, which indicate more than anything the pulse of a crowd’s unreason.
One Zola believed that evil existed in all men and also that man was an amoral natural force; another Zola—the plump little professor with a halo in Forain’s funny caricature—believed in man’s ideal aims. This duality enables him to make the agitator, Etienne, a complete human being. Germinal can be read as the case against the miners as well as the case for them and, looking at Etienne, you can say on the evidence, either that here is a man exploiting the workers in his own ambition to get out of the working class; or here is an idealist who, though he sacrifices the workers in fact, is in effect leading them to their emancipation. Working-class leaders are not commonly studied with Zola’s candour; they are never presented as egotists unless the novelist’s object is to denounce them.
Of course, one may read Germinal and think that its philosophical background is as dated as the bestial conditions it describes; the mines are no longer brothels; people no longer starve at work; they starve for lack of it. War has become the crux of the social problem. But the greatness of Germinal lies in the exalted thoroughness of its exposure of the situation as it was during Zola’s time, and equally in the mastery of its story. Its lesson to English novelists is that their education is incomplete and sterile if it does not apply itself to reinterpreting contemporary history.
Sofa and Cheroot
When we ask ourselves what the heroes of novels did with themselves in their spare time, a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago, there can be no hesitation in the answer. Novel after novel confirms it, from Tom Brown at Oxford back to Fielding and Smollett: they stretched themselves on a sofa, lit a cheroot and picked up again The Adventures of Gil Bias. Once more they were on the road with that hopeful young valet from the Asturias as he went from town to town in Old Castile in the reign of Philip IV, always involved in the love affairs and the money secrets of his employers, until, a model of Self-Help, he enters the valet-keeping classes himself and becomes secretary to the Prime Minister. Say your prayers (his loving parents advised him when he set out for the University of Salamanca which he never reached, at least not to become a student), avoid bad company, and above all keep your fingers out of other people’s property. Gil Blas ignored this good advice from the beginning and returned home at last to a benign retirement as a rich man and a noble. Not exactly a sinner, not exactly virtuous, Gil Blas is a kind of public statue to what we would call the main chance and to what the Spaniards call conformidad or accepting the world for what it is and being no better than your neighbour.
English taste has always been responsive to Le Sage; his influence on English writers and his vogue were far greater among us than they were in France. Defoe probably read him; Smollett translated and copied him. Le Sage became the intermediary between ourselves and that raw, farcical, sour, bitter picaresque literature of Spain which, for some reason, has always taken the English fancy. Gil Blas took the strong meat of the rogues’ tales and made it palatable for us. He put a few clothes on the awful, goose-fleshed and pimpled carnality of Spanish realism, disguised starvation as commercial anxiety, filled the coarse vacuum, which the blatant passions of the Spaniards create around them, with the rustle and crackle of intrigue. We who live in the north feel that no man has the right to be so utterly stripped of illusions as the Spaniard seems to be; Gil Blas covered that blank and too virile nakedness, not indeed with illusions, but with a degree of elegance. It was necessary. For though the picaresque novel appealed to that practical, empirical, rule-of-thumb strain in the English mind, to that strong instinct of sympathy we have for an ingenious success story—and all picaresque novels are really unholy success stories—we have not the nervous system to stand some of the things the Spaniards can stand. What is Lazarillo de Tormes, the most famous of the picaresque novels, but the subject of starvation treated as farce? We could never make jokes about starvation.
Compared to the real Spanish thing, Gil Blas is a concoction which lacks the native vividness. It belongs to the middle period of picaresque literature when the rogue has become a good deal of the puritan. Historically this transition is extraordinarily interesting. One could not have a clearer example of the way in which the form and matter of literature are gradually fashioned by economic change in society. The literature of roguery which Le Sage burgled for the compilation of Gil Blas is the fruit of that economic anarchy which early capitalism introduced into Spanish life. In England the typical character of the period is the puritan; in Spain his opposite number is the man who has to live by his wits. A system has broken down, amid imperialist war and civil revolt, poverty has become general among those who rely on honest labour. There is only one way for the energetic to get their living. They can rush to the cities and especially to the Court and help themselves to the conquered wealth of the New World, to that wealth or new money which has brought poverty to the rest of the population by destroying the value of the old money. I am not sure how far economists would confirm the generalisation, but it seems that Spain used foreign conquest and the gold of the New World to stave off the introduction of private capitalism, and the parallel with Nazi policy is close. At any rate, instead of the successful trader, Spain produces the trader frustrated, in other words, the rogue.
They are, of course, both aspects of the same kind of man, and that is one of the reasons why Defoe and English literature got so much out of the picaresque novel, so that it is hard to distinguish between Defoe’s diligent nonconformists and his ingenious cheats and gold-diggers. Gil Blas himself represents the mingling of the types. He is not many hours on the road before he is adroitly flattered and cheated. It is the first lesson of the young and trusting go-getter in the ways of the world. Until he gets to Madrid his career is one long list of disasters. He is captured by robbers, robbed by cocottes in the jewel racket. The hopeful young man on the road to an estimable career at the university is soon nothing but a beggar and is well on the way to becoming a knave by the time he sets up in partnership with a provincial quack doctor. Madrid really saves him from the louder kinds of crime. Intrigue is, he learns, far more remunerative. He goes from one household to another as a valet, filling his pockets as he goes. The knave has given place to the young man with an eye for a good situation and whose chief social ambition is to become a señorito or petit maître, extravagantly dressed and practising the gaudy manners of the innumerable imitators of the aristocracy. No one is more the new bourgeois than Gil Blas—especially in his great scorn for the bourgeois. And there is something very oily about him. How careful he is to worm his way into his master’s confidence so that he may become a secretary and rake off small commissions or in the hope that he will be left something in the old man’s will! Much later, by his attention to duty, he becomes a secretary to a Minister, and sells offices and pockets bribes. What of it?—he is no worse, he says, than the Minister himself, or the heir to the throne who has dirty money dealings all round, or those old ladies who pose as aristocrats in order to palm off their daughters on wealthy lovers. There is a sentence describing an old actress which puts Gil Blas’s ambition in a nutshell. She was
Une de ces héroïnes de galanterie qui savent plaire jusque dans leur vieillesse et qui meurent chargées des depouilles de deux ou trois générations.
“To be loaded with the spoils”—that is very different from the fate of the real picaro of the earlier dispensation, and Gil Blas is not entirely cynical about it. “After all” (he seems to say, his eyes sharp with that frantic anxiety
which still exercises Spaniards when there is a question of money), “after all, I worked for it, didn’t I? I served my master’s interest? I’m a sort of honest man.” And when he decides to keep a valet of his own and interviews the applicants, there is a charm in the way he rejects the one who has a pious face and picks out one who has been a bit of a twister too.
The character of Gil Blas himself could hardly be the attraction of Le Sage’s book, and indeed he is little more than a lay figure. The pleasures of picaresque literature are like the pleasures of travel. There is continuous movement, variety of people, change of scene. The assumption that secret self-interest, secret passions, are the main motives in human conduct does not enlarge the sensibility—Le Sage came before the sensibility of the eighteenth century awakened—but it sharpens the wits, fertilises invention and enlarges gaiety. But again, the book is poor in individual characters. One must get out of one’s head all expectation of a gallery of living portraits. Le Sage belonged to the earlier tradition of Molière and Jonson and foreshadowed creations like Jonathan Wild: his people are types, endeared to us because they are familiar and perennial. You get the quack, the quarrelling doctors fighting over the body of the patient, the efficient robber, the impotent old man and his young mistress, the blue-stocking, the elderly virgin on the verge of wantonness, the man of honour, the jealous man, the poet, the actress, the courtier. Each is presented vivaciously, with an eye for self-deception and the bizarre. The story of the Bishop of Granada has become the proverbial fable of the vanity of authors. And that scene in the Escorial when the Prime Minister, in order to impress the King and the Court, takes his secretary and papers out into the garden and pretends to be dictating though he is really gossiping, is delicious debunking of that rising type—the great business man.
In My Good Books Page 4