Latins, and the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin
Zola owed not only the moralistic scope of his literary ambition,
but the depth and strength of his personal conscience, capable of
the austere puritanism which underlies the so-called immoralities
of his books, and incapable of the peculiar lubricity which we
call French, possibly to distinguish it from the lubricity of
other people rather than to declare it a thing solely French. In
the face of all public and private corruptions, his soul is as
Piagnone as Savonarola's, and the vices of Arrabbiati, small and
great, are always his text, upon which he preaches virtue.


II

Zola is to me so vast a theme that I can only hope here to touch
his work at a point or two, leaving the proof of my sayings
mostly to the honesty of the reader. It will not require so
great an effort of his honesty now, as it once would, to own that
Zola's books, though often indecent, are never immoral, but
always most terribly, most pitilessly moral. I am not saying now
that they ought to be in every family library, or that they could
be edifyingly committed to the hands of boys and girls; one of
our first publishing houses is about to issue an edition even of
the Bible "with those passages omitted which are usually skipped
in reading aloud"; and it is always a question how much young
people can be profitably allowed to know; how much they do know,
they alone can tell. But as to the intention of Zola in his
books, I have no doubt of its righteousness. His books may be,
and I suppose they often are, indecent, but they are not immoral;
they may disgust, but they will not deprave; only those already