know that this is the truth. Over the whole picture you feel the brooding pity of a master spirit, to whom these suffering millions are an obsession, haunting his imagination and driving him to his task.

There are no heroes and no heroines in Zola's works; his hero is the human swarms who breed like flies in our teeming cities, and struggle and suffer and perish, without ever a gleam of understanding of their fate. He takes us into the mining country, and in "Germinal" shows us the slaves of the pits, coal-blackened hordes, starving, oppressed, poisoned by alcohol, surging up in a blind fury of revolt. In "Nana" he shows us prostitution; and to me this is the most frightful book of all-the life-story of the little girl whom we saw getting her first lessons in vice through the key-hole. This daughter of the working class becomes their instrument of vengeance upon the exploiters; a seductress, a wanton, luring men old and young to their doom, she is a kind of symbol of wastefulness. Her life becomes a frenzy of destruction; silks, jewels, food and wine are poured upon her in floods, and she throws them about like a drunken giant wrecking a city. While she lies dying of small-pox, we hear the mob outside shrieking: "To Berlin! To Berlin!" The Franco-Prussian war is on, and Napoleon the Little is about to try out his dream of glory, and provide Zola with the theme for yet another masterpiece, "The Downfall," showing war with all its horror of mass suffering and national collapse.

Zola, raved at and prosecuted as a sensationalist and corrupter, had now become a national figure; and he met this responsibility by evolving from a materialist and fatalist into a scientific Socialist, a rationalist and preacher of humanity. He wrote three long novels, "Lourdes," "Rome" and "Paris," which exposed the church as a bulwark of hereditary privilege, and became the text-books of anti-clericalism in France. Then came the Dreyfus case, calling for a hero to carry the anti-clerical banner into action; and the man with the sewer name came forward to answer the call. France had become a republic, but the army had remained monarchist and clerical. Some of these pious aristocrats, needing money to lavish on their Nanas, had been selling army secrets to Germany, and were caught. They decided to put the blame upon

a certain cavalry officer, who happened to be guilty of a quite different crime, that of being a Jew. Captain Dreyfus was convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the convict settlement on Devil's Island. Another officer, who investigated the case and attempted to defend Dreyfus, was shipped off to Africa.

It was nearly a hundred and fifty years since Voltaire had made his fight in the Calas case; and here was "l'Infame" at the same old game of the "frame-up. Zola came forward with a terrific challenge entitled "J'Accuse." He was arrested, tried and convicted, and escaped from France. For years this Dreyfus case remained an international scandal, and finally it was proved that the documents used against Zola had been forged, and later on one of the guilty men committed suicide, and Dreyfus was released and reinstated. As I write this book the papers record that Premier Herriot has abolished the penal settlement on Devil's Island, and so Zola's task is completed.

He had now become the leader of the French masses in the war against reaction; and his last novels were tracts written in this cause. In "Labor" he portrays his ideal of the free men and women of the revolutionary movement, living frugal and abstemious lives, and consecrating themselves to the cause of human emancipation. Another, called "Truth," deals with the Dreyfus case. Another had been planned, "Justice," but this he did not live to write. In all these works you notice that the old theories of materialistic science have been modified enough to permit men to fight for truth and freedom; and so Emile Zola shares with Walt Whitman the rôle of prophet of democracy. He served the masses even better than Whitman, because he achieved complete insight into the economic forces of modern times, and pointed out to the people the exact road they had to travel. More than any other artist of the nineteenth century he voiced and guided the movement of proletarian revolt, the mass action of the workers of factory and farm to whom the future belongs.

CHAPTER LXXXIX

THE SPORTIVE DEMON

What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and revolutionary hope? This question was answered for us by a disciple and friend of Zola, ten years his junior, who proceeded to make a laboratory

test.

Guy de Maupassant was a healthy young Norman animal, who came up to Paris to make his way as a journalist. He was a tremendous worker; in the course of his short life he wrote six novels and two hundred and twelve short stories. He made himself master of the latter form, and has had a dominating influence upon it. No one has been able to pack more meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a character in a couple of thousand words. Therefore all young writers of short stories go to school to him. What has he to give them-aside from the tricks of the trade?

Maupassant himself would have answered: Nothing. For he was one of the fighting art-for-art's-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an art-work is an insult. But the fact is that he has a propaganda, as definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi. His message is that life is a cheat and a snare, and that human beings are beasts decked in fine clothing and pretenses. Maupassant dislikes them so that he eats himself

He tries to believe in play, in natural, animal enjoyment of the passions; but instead of being content with such pleasures, he shuts himself up like a hermit in a cell, to acquire mastery of a difficult art, and have the satisfaction before he dies of voicing his hatred of that fate, whatever it may be, which has created his own life, and the bourgeois France which he sees about him.

Maupassant watches with eager eye and alert fancy for a scene, an episode, a trait of character, which will enable him to illustrate the pettiness and ignominy of human destiny, and the falsity of man's dignities and honors. He collects such things, as a naturalist collects biting bugs and stinging serpents. His characters are the French peasants with their greed and cruelty, and

the French bourgeois and cultured classes, who, underneath their silks and satins, their moralities and intellectualities, are the same vile animals as the peasants. But Maupassant's quarrel is not merely with men and women; it is with life itself. The thing which brings him the keenest satisfaction is an incident which shows the futility even of virtue; which exhibits God as a sportive demon, amusing himself by pulling off the wings of the butterflies he has created.

Out of the two hundred and twelve specimens in the Maupassant museum, any one will suffice. I choose one called "The Necklace," simply because it has stayed in my memory for twenty-five years. A lovely woman, married to a poor clerk, and living a starved life, borrows from a wealthy friend a beautiful diamond necklace, in order to make a show at some function. She loses the necklace, and she and her husband pledge everything they own, buy another to replace it, and take it to the owner without revealing what has happened. For ten years they slave and drudge to pay off their debts, and the lovely woman is turned into a haggard wreck. The friend who loaned the necklace meets her, and is horrified at her condition; the poor woman tells how she has drudged all these years and learns that she has wasted her life in order to replace an imitation necklace, of no value worth considering!

There is subtlety in the technique of Maupassant, but none in his view of life. There can be no subtlety, when you lay down the law that human beings are beasts. There are only a few beast emotions, and they never vary; you can always be sure what a man will do in the presence of a woman, and what the woman will let him do. And when God is a sportive demon, all stories have the same ending. You may not foresee the particular trick this demon will play-for example, that the lost necklace would turn out to have been paste-but you can be sure that something will happen to make a mockery of all human effort and hope.

And likewise you can foresee the ending of such a

If he takes life seriously enough to become a great artist, he is apt to take it seriously enough to act upon his convictions. He will seek refuge from despair in debauchery and drink; not finding it, he will go on to

opium and hashish. He will be one of those who from fear of death commit suicide, or who from brooding over insanity go insane. Maupassant was in a strait-jacket at the age of forty; thus proving himself a moralist, and a teacher of precious lessons: more than we can say about the art dilettanti of our own time, who write delicately perfumed impropriety, and live conventional and pampered lives upon the backs of the working class.

CHAPTER XC

THE FOE OF FORMULAS

Up in the gloomy, ice-bound North, where men dream about God and drink strong liquor, another teacher was engaged in undermining bourgeois morality, and raising a storm of controversy about his head. The name of Henrik Ibsen brings before us a grim-faced old man with set mouth and large spectacles and a fringe of defiant white whiskers. He was a fighting man, a dogmatic antidogmatist, a propagandist if ever there was one in the field of art.

He also was born of the people, and educated in the school of hardship. He was an apothecary's assistant in a small Norwegian port, then a poor student, journalist and poet, then the director of a provincial theater, which struggled for six years in a vain fight against bankruptcy. Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, Ibsen received a pension of four or five hundred dollars a year from the king, and on this he lived a stern, penurious life, raising a family, sewing the buttons on his own clothes, and making over the theater and the moral ideas of the thinking world.

Except for some pot-boilers written in his youth, all the works of Ibsen have one theme, the problem of ideals in relation to reality. Men and women form a conception of right conduct, and they try to apply it, and it doesn't work out as it is supposed to; in most of Ibsen's plays it works out exactly the opposite way. His thesis is that life cannot be guided by formulas; those of democracy are just as dangerous as those of authority; either will destroy you if you apply them blindly. Ibsen is in revolt against religious creeds and social conventions which repress the individual and thwart his full development. But.