except when Nana, provoked at the tedious
prolongation of a professional engagement, exclaims, "Ca ne finissait
pas!" or "Ca ne voulait pas finir."[474] The strange up-and-down of the
whole scheme reappears in _L'Oeuvre_--chiefly devoted to art, but
partly to literature--where the opening is extraordinarily good, and
there are fine passages later, interspersed with tedious grime of the
commoner kind. _La Terre_ and _Germinal_ are, I suppose, generally
regarded as, even beyond _L'Assommoir_ and _Nana_, the "farthest" of
this griminess. Whether the filth-stored broom of the former really does
blot out George Sand's and other pictures of a modified Arcadia in the
French provinces, nothing but experience, which I cannot boast, could
tell us; and the same may be said of _Germinal_, as to the mining
districts which have since received so awful a purification by fire.
That more and more important person the railway-man takes his turn in
_La Bete Humaine_, and the book supplies perhaps the most striking
instance of the radically inartistic character of the plan of flooding
fiction with technical details. But there is, in the vision of the
driver and his engine as it were going mad together, one of the earliest
and not the least effective of those nightmare-pieces in which Zola,
evidently inspired by Hugo, indulged more and more latterly. Then came
what was intended, apparently, for the light star of this dark group,
_Le Reve_. Although always strongly anti-clerical, and at the last, as
we shall see, a "Deicide" of the most uncompromising fanaticism, M. Zola
here devoted himself to cathedral services and church ritual generally,
and, as a climax, the administration of extreme unction to his innocent
heroine. But, as too often happens in such cases, the saints were not
grateful and the sinners were bored. _L'Argent_ was at least in
concatenation accordingly, seeing that the great financial swindle and
"crash"[475] it took for subject had had strong clerical support; but
purely financial matters, stock-exchange dealings, and some exceedingly
scabrous "trimmings" occupied the greater part of it. Of the penultimate
novel, _La Debacle_, a history of the terrible birth-year of the series
itself, few fair critics, I think, could speak other than highly; of the
actual ultimatum, _Le Docteur Pascal_, opinions have varied much. It is
very unequal, but I thought when it came out that it contained some of
its author's very best things, and I