If ever a man on this earth lived to embody the
tremendous text, "But if the light in your body be darkness, how great
is the darkness," it was certainly he. Great men like Ariosto, Rabelais,
and Shakspere fall in foul places, flounder in violent but venial sin,
sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are dirty, are
indefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still speak with a
convincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the best things in the
world: Rabelais, of the instruction of ardent and austere youth;
Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakspere, of the splendid stillness of
mercy. But in Zola even the ideals are undesirable; Zola's mercy is
colder than justice--nay, Zola's mercy is more bitter in the mouth than
injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us,
like Rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning. He takes us
into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books
nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass bottles,
and where the rule is taught from the exceptions. Zola's truth answers
the exact description of the skeleton in the cupboard; that is, it is
something of which a domestic custom forbids the discovery, but which is
quite dead, even when it is discovered.
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