He was that
pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches,
who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith.
Zola was none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He
conceived of reality poetically and always saw his human
documents, as he began early to call them, ranged in the form of
an epic poem. He fell below the greatest of the Russians, to
whom alone he was inferior, in imagining that the affairs of men
group themselves strongly about a central interest to which they
constantly refer, and after whatever excursions definitely or
definitively return. He was not willingly an epic poet, perhaps,
but he was an epic poet, nevertheless; and the imperfection of
his realism began with the perfection of his form. Nature is
sometimes dramatic, though never on the hard and fast terms of
the theatre, but she is almost never epic; and Zola was always
epic. One need only think over his books and his subjects to be
convinced of this: "L'Assommoir" and drunkenness; "Nana" and
harlotry; "Germinale" and strikes; "L'Argent" and money getting
and losing in all its branches; "Pot-Bouille" and the cruel
squalor of poverty; "La Terre" and the life of the peasant; "Le
Debacle" and the decay of imperialism.
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