his later books, Lourdes and Rome, his best books, whereas I felt that L'Assommoir, La Terre, Germinal and Nona were far better, to say nothing of Page d'Amour, Le Reve and La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret, which I thought at least as good. Lourdes and Paris and the rest were all to me lifeless, machine-made things that had never grown.
I tried to make him see that Balzac's latest tales, La Cousine Bette and Cousin Pans, seemed to me manufactured and mechanical in comparison with Pere Goriot or La Recherche de l'Absolu, or Eugenie Grandet, and in truth many of the earlier works, such as Le Cure de Tours.
Zola would not agree with me. He regarded Cousine Bette and Cousin Pans as the best things Balzac had ever written.
I remember when he came over to London once, he could talk of nothing but the quiet of the place, the strange peace that reigned in the streets. 'What a great city,' he said, 'here, there is no noise.' He wanted to know why La Terre was regarded as pornographic, which incensed him very much. 'If they knew, how much worse life is,' he cried, 'they would stop talking such nonsense.'
And with that sentiment I was in complete agreement.
I got more pleasure from a side of Zola that is almost unknown. I knew that as a young man he had been an art critic of a Paris paper; I think it was Le Figaro; and he interested me enormously when he talked about the modern schools of painting. He was the first person I ever heard say that Cezanne was one of the greatest masters that ever lived. George Moore praised Manet, Monet, and Degas, but said little or nothing about Cezanne, though he was the greatest of the lot, the true head of the school. Zola let out the secret one day when he told me that he had been at school with Cezanne and that when Cezanne came to Paris, he, Zola, was almost the first person whom Cezanne called upon and interested in his work.
It is strange that Zola never wrote any book about painting, and when I asked him why he did not, he told me that it was not his art, that he felt as an outsider to it. But his love of painting and of artistic things generally was seen in his house, which was filled with old furniture and quaint decorations.
I cannot help thinking that Zola might have given us as good a book on modern French art, as Fromentin gave us on the art of Holland, and such a volume would be, as Thucydides called his book, 'a possession forever.'
Zola, though one of the heads of the time, had a peculiarly uninteresting outward. He was a little below ordinary height, but strongly built and rather stout. His hair and beard and walk showed strength, but there was nothing distinctive about his face: an ordinary round face with thick nose and ordinary lips that might have passed in any crowd. He had not even the distinction of ugliness; his pale face, coarse lips and brown beard were merely commonplace.
I was astonished to find that Alphonse Daudet had a very high opinion of Zola. 'Have you ever seen his notes,' he said, 'on any book he is going to write? It is extraordinary, the way he gets up his subject, studies every part of it. I suppose he knew more about Lourdes when he wrote about it than any one living. He went down and spent a month in the place.'
Yet Zola used to interest me by saying that too much knowledge is as dangerous as too little. You had to know enough to see all the peculiarities of a place or a theme, but the moment you knew so much about it, that its resemblance to other places struck you rather than its differences, you had done too much work. 'For my part,' Daudet added, 'I write without any notes, trusting to the idiosyncracy of the characters to develop the plot and, in fact, I trust to what people call inspiration, which is probably another name for laziness, rather than to study.'
In striking contrast to Zola, Daudet was picturesque, very good-looking indeed: he wore his hair long, but his nose was well-cut, his eyes large, the shape of his face excellent. I happened to see Daudet again after Turgenev's letters had been published, and I found him strangely angry. He resented Turgenev's criticism as if it had been a personal offence. 'We all treated him as one of ourselves,' he kept repeating, 'and here he talks of us as if Zola and Flaubert and the rest of us were pigmies and he alone was the great writer and artist.'
I wanted to see whether I could get a new word out of him, so I said: 'Well, you know, some of us think that in Bazarof, Turgenev has depicted the one new character added to European literature since the Mephistopheles of Goethe.'
'Good God,' cried Daudet, 'but is not Madame Bovary a character, and Zola's Lantier? I cannot understand such criticism.'
To insist would have been surely rude, yet to some of us Madame Bovary is poor stuff and Lantier poorer still in comparison with Bazarof. Bazarof is the model of the realist for all time, deeper than Tartuffe or Le Misanthrope, and they are both greater creations than Madame Bovary or Lantier.
Daudet's novels were better than his criticism.
I don't know why, but Daudet often reminded me of W. E. Henley. I met Henley first at dinner at Sidney Low's house, who had followed Greenwood as editor of the St. James Gazette. Henley was then editing the Scots Observer, which he later removed to London as the National Observer.
Seated at the table, Henley was a great big man with broad shoulders, looking at least six feet in height, with an immense leonine head, full golden beard, large blue eyes and good features, a handsome and striking personality.
Almost immediately we came to some difference about the relative value of the play and the novel. I spoke of the novel as the most complex and therefore the highest form of art, and he replied: 'That's nonsense,' so rudely that I retorted: 'Let us wait until the ladies go and then we'll continue the argument.' Too surprised to find words, Henley grunted 'Hmph!' But after the ladies had left the table, he turned on me and said: 'Now I would like to know why you think the novel a higher form of art than a play, or for that matter, a poem?'
'It can include poems,' I retorted, 'as Goethe showed, and it has all the powers of a play and many that the play lacks.'
Henley grunted again: 'I don't see that mere assertion proves anything!'
'The dramatic presentation of character,' I went on, 'is, of course, the best for simple characters, but suppose you want to make a complex character.
Suppose, for instance, you want to show your readers a man of great courage, who for some reason or other, (a weakness of heredity, drink, let us say, or some hereditary murder) is a coward at night: the spectators would not understand what you meant. You have to put in the finer qualifying shades of character by explanations. This you can do in the novel, (1849–1903); he was a considerable critic and editor, as well as a writer, and that's why I said that the novel was the largest form of art, a more complex form even than the play.'
To my astonishment, Henley replied quite frankly: 'I never thought of it, but I believe you are right'; and we became, to a certain extent, friends.
When he afterwards laid down the law about poetry, I did not contradict him, and when he asked me whether I agreed with him or not, I told him I only believed in criticizing the art that I myself practiced, and not being a poet, I never disputed with poets about their mystery.
When we got up to join the ladies, I was horrified. Henley's legs were all twisted, and instead of being a man of six feet and over, he was only middle height. My host told me that from his poems in hospital, it was pretty clear that syphilis had turned him from a giant into a cripple.
I remember some later meetings with Henley; once when he sent me his Song of the Sword for the Fortnightly Review, which I should have liked to publish, but Chapman, the managing director, would not hear of it. 'Free verse,' he said, 'is neither poetry nor prose,' and he begged me not to have anything to do with it.
Henley was not a great man, but a very interesting one. He thought it his duty to edit every contribution sent him, and he did edit every word, every phrase, weighed every comma and colon, until the whole of his paper was steeped in his own style, so that it often seemed as if it were all written by one man.
My chief object, when I got a paper of my own, the Saturday Review, was the antipodes of his. I encouraged everybody to express himself as personally as possible, and the more he differed with me, as a rule, the more I liked his work. I do not see how one could have got Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, McColl, Chalmers Mitchell and Cunninghame Graham to do their best on any other terms.
What then was Henley's success? He got together a band of youthful admirers who wrote for him and afterwards became known as journalists. I don't remember one man of real ability in Henley's crowd; not one, so far as I recollect, made a great name for himself in the future. But success in the day and hour he had in abundance and admirers, such as the Right Hon. George Wyndham, who always called Henley a remarkable poet, mainly I used to think, because Henley's poetry, second rate as it was, was better than his own.
There was another figure whom I got to know very well in the nineties, an infinitely more gifted man than Henley in another art: Auguste Rodin. I have done a portrait of him, but here I wish to add a few more words.
