require; and he rose to that duty with a grandeur which had all
the simplicity possible to a man of French civilization. We may
think that there was something a little too dramatic in the
manner of his heroism, his martyry, and we may smile at certain
turns of rhetoric in the immortal letter accusing the French
nation of intolerable wrong, just as, in our smug Anglo-Saxon
conceit, we laughed at the procedure of the emotional courts
which he compelled to take cognizance of the immense misdeed
other courts had as emotionally committed. But the event,
however indirectly and involuntarily, was justice which no other
people in Europe would have done, and perhaps not any people of
this more enlightened continent.

The success of Zola as a literary man has its imperfections, its
phases of defeat, but his success as a humanist is without flaw.
He triumphed as wholly and as finally as it has ever been given a
man to triumph, and he made France triumph with him. By his
hand, she added to the laurels she had won in the war of American
Independence, in the wars of the Revolution for liberty and
equality, in the campaigns for Italian Unity, the imperishable
leaf of a national acknowledgement of national error.