Zola's Painters Gatan Picon; J. L. Logan Yale French Studies, No. 42, Zola. (1969), pp. 126-142.

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Gaetan Picon

Zola's painters*

Few contemporary judgments have withstood the test of time so well as those Zola expresses in his first Salons. To be sure, the marvelous subtlety and the prophetic insights of Baudelaire's art criticism have nothing in common with the simple judgments Zola makes. Baudelaire speaks quite differently of Delacroix than Zola of Manet; but that Zola should speak of Manet as early as 1866 reveals the boldness of his vision. Baudelaire overestimates the genius of Constantin Guys; Zola fails fully to appreciate Manet's excellence; but it is none the less remarkable that he was so quick to praise Manet. All in all, values are more confused in Baudelaire's Salons than in the first Salons of Zola - the Salons of 1866 and 1867 and 1868. At first, his artistic sensibility is unsure, immature; he admires Greuze and calls Ary Scheffer a "painter of genius." To a lesser extent, we might attribute his predilection for Gustave Dort to the same lack of maturity. But later on he sees infallibly. Sees, or knows? His vision becomes sharper at the same time as he becomes an apostle of realism. If he now turns against DorC, it is because he has come to realize that "the most solid base for the work of art is reality constantly studied." But the word "realism" and the corresponding doctrine provide only an equivocal and vague description of the common ground where different works meet, the place to which they must be assigned on the basis of certain obvious similarities. It is his clairvoyant perception of an outstanding moment in the history of painting that arms Zola with his knowledge. He thinks what he thinks because he sees what he sees.
*A longer version of this article will serve as an introduction to Zola's Mes salons, to appear in the Miroirs de I'Art series, Hermann, Paris.

Are his eyes his own? Is his vision really only Ctzanne's or the group's? (It is often said that Apollinaire saw only with the eyes of Braque and Picasso.) Had he not known Cdanne, would he have been able to free himself of his high opinion of Greuze, Ary Scheffer, Dort? But at this time Ctzanne himself appreciated not only these painters, but even Gtrome, Cabanel and Meissonier. Furthermore, so great was the misunderstanding between Ctzanne and Zola that I don't think we can point to any real influence. Manet's influence was greater, for there a real communication existed, if only for a short time. Needless to say the painters whom he frequented helped form his sensibility, but he frequented them only because he was interested in what they were doing and appreciated their work. You choose your influences, and no-one sees anything with borrowed vision. Zola sees immediately and clearly that which takes fire and gleams in the brief flash of the "artistic moment." He sees it at once, he anticipates the future: "Our fathers laughed at Courbet, and here we are in ecstasy about him; we laugh at Manet, but our sons will be ecstatic about him." As soon as he sees a canvas of Monet's, without even knowing its creator, he singles it out: "I don't know M. Monet, in fact I don't believe that I've ever seen one of his paintings before. But it seems to me that I am one of his old friends." And the same quick judgment takes the measure of Pissarro ("an unknown painter, of whom no-one will say a word, no doubt"), of Jongkind ("an artist who paints like that is a master"), and of Boudin, Degas, Renoir and Sisely. At the same time he makes appropriate comments about Miessonier (whom he treats more severely than Baudelaire had), about Cabanel, about Gtrome. He is doubtless rather too generous to Carolus Duran, Detaille, Bonnat, Bastien-Le Page and others we have completely forgotten. But these errors of judgment are rare and insignificant, and in any event Zola never confuses the painters whom we have forgotten or relegated to the storage-rooms of museums with those whose greatness he recognized from the first. The eye perceives, discerns and transmits the specific reality of painting. It is the intermediary between this reality and its verbal expression. And the simplicity, the monotony, the limitations of the

Yale French Studies language of art criticism bear witness to the resistance it meets at its origin. Somewhat awkward, somewhat limited; the words that describe the new light are inadequate to it, but as far as we can tell, this light has been seen. The sudden brightness of the new day fades works that were colorless to begin with, like the paintings of Cabanel and Gtrome. But it is also so blinding that it obscures another light equally bright but not so new. So Pissarro and Jongkind put Courbet and Corot in the shade, and Zola is surely unfair to them. Not to mention his inborn or willful blindness to ancient art: "I like neither the Egyptians nor the Greeks . . ." His eye is what it is, but it is after all his eye that sees, so that when an intellectual or emotional prejudice comes to the fore say his liking for great decorative compositions -his eye intervenes, limiting the degree of error. Thus though he likes Puvis de Chevannes he is not led to admire Jean-Paul Laurens. For Laurens paints poorly and coldly, but Purvis shows strength and grandeur even though he was wrong to paint Radegonde. Zola could properly say that his judgments are those of an artist, while Proudhon's are those of a moralist. When he writes in praise of Manet, the argument he offers is the only unprovable one, the only irrefutable one: "Look at the nearby paintings, and see what a sorry figure they cut in comparison to this window open on nature." Is "nature" a subject, is it the privileged object of attention? Might a general intellectual appreciation replace the eye's exact reaction to and perception of nature? But what Zola calls "nature" is in fact a dazzle of light that has nothing to do with optical laws and calls for no intellectual judgments. It is as though nature were painting left to itself, to its own spontaneity. He praises Monet for having painted "that nature which men have put in modern dress," adding, "of course I should scarcely admire these works if Claude Monet were not a real painter; I simply wanted to note his attraction to modern subjects." Explicitly, Zola distinguishes between the order of painting and the order of subjects. He sets admiration (which alone is appropriate to the order of painting) against known facts and cognitive judgments (which are unrelated to matters of taste and appropriate to the order of subjects). Implicitly, modernity like nature itself becomes equivalent to pure presence, pure optical imma-

Gaetan Picon nence. If Zola says that one must judge the work of Manet "neither as a moralist nor as a writer" but "as a painter," we may say that he surely means "by order of painting" that order which is defined by the limits and the immanence of visuality. He means this more than he says it, no doubt, and he does not say it without simplifications and equivocations. But he still says it. To judge Manet as a painter is to admit that painters like him (whom Zola rather strangely calls "analysts") "are not worried about the subject which bothers ordinary people above all," that "to these artists the subject is a pretext for painting, while for ordinary people the subject alone exists." That which is outside of "optical immanence" as I have called it could certainly be called by other names than the one Zola gives it. But at the time he writes, the subject is the most obvious sign of exteriority, whose empire, so to speak, is beginning to decline. And Zola goes further than this very general statement. With a great deal of precision, he discovers that the painting is being created by a new process: he sees a number of plastic requirements that evoke their subject as at random, that come closer and closer to fulfilling its r61e:

You needed a nude woman, and you have chosen Olympia, the first to come to mind; you needed clear and luminous taches,l and you have put a bouquet in; you needed black taches, and you have put a Negress and a cat in one corner. What does all this mean? You hardly know, nor do I. But I do know that you have admirably succeeded in creating a painter's work, and a great painter's, too; I mean that you have energetically translated, by a special language, the truth of light and shadow, the reality of objects and creatures.

Zola does not go very far in his analysis of this special language: he even seems incapable of continuing on this plane alone. The most

'Tachs: "blob" of paint, of color (trans.)

Yale French Studies thorough commentaries - of the DLjeuner sur l'herbe, of the Olympia - merely note the clarity and the simplification of the masses; Manet paints large and golden, and connoisseurs will understand what he means if he speaks of the "slightly bitter charm" of Manet's paintings. Though he says that one needn't wonder what all that means, Zola writes less about what he sees than what he wants the work to say, or what he believes it says. But these two planes may be indistinguishable. If this kind of painting shines, alone, with its absolute radiance, it is because the statement it makes corresponds not only to the "artistic moment" but also to a particular moment in the history of thought, of the human imagination. And this is the moment of realism: the vocation of this time is reality in the time of space, the reality of sensitive perception and of the historical moment. In the name of reality, Zola outlaws the fantastic, oneiric imagination of an Ary Scheffer, a Dort, a Gustave Moreau (though he does admit that Dort and Moreau have a certain attraction); he rules out historical evasion, but not without noting his profound admiration for Puvis; he condemns academic imitations (whence his disapproval of Ribot's Hispanism, though Ribot is a painter whom Zola admires in other respects). For "reality constantly studied is the most solid base for the work of art." This criterion doubtless seems extrinsic in that it is related to the most general attitude of the time, an attitude which embraces much more than painting alone: "Our prevailing wind is scientific: we are pushed in spite of ourselves to the precise study of facts and things . . . the movement of our era is surely realistic, or rather positivistic." Is he not henceforth guilty of judging art as Proudhon did, in the name of a morality, a philosophy, a religion? But the general quest for reality coincides with the optical plenitude, the unmitigated visuality of the new painting, as if reality were what will later be called pure painting. The law of reality confines the painting within the bounds of that which was really seen: it excludes dreams and the past as well as preconceived concepts, whether from secondhand experience or other paintings. A painter is born when he decides to paint only what he sees: "One fine day, Monet understood that he had only to try to see nature as it is, without looking at it

Gaetan Picon through the works and the opinions of others." Unaffected by ideas and subjects, the quality of painting depends upon a frankness and a closeness of vision. The abstract and general term "naturalism," as it is used in these strange words about Monet, describes this vision: "If I approve of his decision to look for his points of view in the milieu in which he lives. I congratulate him even more for knowing how to paint, for having an accurate and a frank eye, for belonging to the great school of naturalists." But the words "realist" and "naturalist" bother Zola. In the same pages, he speaks again of Monet: "Here is a temperament, here you have more than a realist, you have a delicate and forceful interpreter." As he talks about the works he likes, Zola constantly juxtaposes epithets like "truthful" and "living" and "energetic." If it were simply a question of creating a scientific work, "truthful" would suffice. But if it is temperament that is essential, we are far from a positivistic aesthetic, and Zola realizes it: "I support my own side, the side of life and truth, that's all. I am somewhat like Diogenes who was looking for a man. In art, I also look for men, for new and powerful temperaments."

I scoff at realism because this word has no precise meaning for me. If you mean by this term the necessity for artists to study and render true nature, it is unquestionable that all artists must be realists. Men must paint realities. They take nature and they render it, they render it as it is seen through their particular temperaments. Each artist thus gives us a different world, and I shall willingly accept all of these various worlds, provided that each be the living expression of a human heart. I admire the worlds of Delacroix and of Courbet. In view of this declaration, you could not put me with any school.

So in the presence of reality, of truth, the personal touch is what counts. "The work of art is a part of creation seen through a tempera-

Yale French Studies ment." This is an individualistic aesthetic, a romantic one too, opposed to the classic notion of absolute beauty, to the notion that a tradition exists which must be taken up once again and perfected. It is also opposed to the scientistic notion of an objective reality. Nothing is beautiful but the living, that is to say divergencies of truth, the differences between truths :

I like neither the Egyptians, nor the Greeks, nor the Asian artists, for in art I allow only life and personality. On the contrary, I like the free manifestation of personal thoughts. Proudhon calls this anarchy. I like the Renaissance and our era, I love these fights between artists, men who come forth, all of them, to say a word unknown only yesterday.

Is there not some tension between the exigencies of reality and those of temperament, between truth and life? If a work has life to the extent that its form is uncommon, then why the reference to a "real" which cannot but be a common standard? In connection with Gustave Dort, Zola writes:

The real, we must say, has sometimes taken its revenge. One cannot retreat into dreams with impunity: a day comes when one hasn't the strength to play thus at being a creator. Besides, when works are too personal, they inevitably repeat themselves. The eye of the visionary is always replete with the same vision, and the sketcher adopts certain forms which he can no longer get rid of. Reality on the contrary is a good mother who gives her children ever renewed nourishment: she gives them new faces all the time; she shows herself to them, profound, infinite, full of a vitality which constantly renews itself.

Gaetan Picon These are remarkable lines. Because reality is more varied than temperament one cannot conceive of an art which could go beyond the real. Here reality appears not as a common standard but rather as an agent of diversification, a principle of individuation. It is the sudden flash of personal vision, a flash which not only stands out against a background of reality, but also finds its nourishment and its source in reality: it is this special mark that Zola sees and likes in the work of Manet, Monet, Jongkind and Pissarro during these years of discovery in which his admiration reaches its highest point. Why then does his enthusiasm begin to wane? After a few years of silence, why does he express his doubts in the articles sent off to the Messager de 1'Europe between 1875 and 1880, doubts no-one could have foreseen? Why the disappointment plainly admitted in the Salon of 1896 - and the self-searching it inspires - not to mention a novel like L'Oeuvre whose historical significance as we know is even more ambiguous? In the Salon of 1896, he writes complainingly of the triumph of the kind of painting he had backed when it was the doubtful battle of only a few artists. Bright painting, outdoor painting, painting by taches, of reflections. "Nothing now but Manets, Monets, Pissarros!" The kind of painting he had championed no longer allows its contrary to exist. He misses it; he would like to see a coal-black black again! To be nostalgic for battle at victory, to reject uniformity, to be annoyed with an invention become the object of imitation - these reactions are consistent with the logic of Zola's polemical psychology and his pluralistic and "anarchistic" aesthetic. But his condemnation of "multicolored women," of "violet landscapes" and of "orange horses" brings into play a more complex and more equivocal change of heart. And this sends us back to our examination of the notion of reality:

If one goes beyond academy figures painted in the artificial light of the studio, if one deals with changing and immense nature, light, ceaselessly varying, becomes the soul of the work. Nothing however is more difficult to catch and to render than

Yale French Studies the refraction and the accidents of light, the play of sunlight in which creatures and things bathe, but without being distorted. Thus, as soon as there is overemphasis, as soon as thinking becomes i n v o l ~ e dcaricature ,~ results. And these are truly disconcerting works, these multicolored women, these violet landscapes and these orange horses, things the painters offer to us while explaining that they are like that because of such and such accidents of light or such and such refractions of the spectrum. Oh! those ladies who have a blue cheek by moonlight, and a bright red one by the light of a shaded lamp! Oh! those horizons with blue trees, red water and green skies! It's hideous, hideous, hideous!

But what kind of painting is he talking about? We see here that it is not a question merely of imitations of Manet, Monet or Pissarro, even though no other names are mentioned. Zola runs not so much into a repetition of things that he has liked as into a bifurcation which he did not realize was inherent in the painting he liked. Perhaps the canvases he found so hideous at the Salon of 1896 were in fact mediocre: I find no great painters in the list of exhibitors. But they are under the star of a style of painting which already exists, whose heroes are well in the limelight. And it is surely odd that Zola does not seem to be aware of the new style. In 1896 Bonnard first exhibits at DurandRuel's; in 1895 Ctzanne has a large show at Vollard's; in 1892 the Seurat retrospective takes place at the Revue blanche; in 1891 the Van Gogh retrospective is held at the Salon des Znd&pendants.Furthermore, the preceding years had given art critics an opportunity to see paintings by Redon, Henri Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaugin. Now Zola never mentions any of these painters, with the exception of course of his old friend CQanne. He continues to repeat the names of artists he has known since the first Salons: Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Jongkind, Renoir, Degas and Sisely. In his articles for the Messager de Z'Europe,
=My italics

Gaetan Picon he always comes back to these men. And if he moderates his earlier enthusiasm for their works, it is because he feels that their inadequacies have been revealed by the paintings of their successors (whose names he does not even mention). Zola does not see that the younger artists have responded to the fertility of their predecessors by surpassing them. The only precise historical reference is an allusion to theories of refracting light (the "divisionism" of Seurat, Signac and Cross but again no names are mentioned). This allusion allows Zola to imply that though the art in question is scientifically accurate, it may still be rejected on aesthetic grounds. Reality has been betrayed: hence the aesthetic censure ("It's hideous"). To be sure, impressionists analyzed phenomena, but without deforming them; with its lines and its colors, the new style distorts to the point of caricature. But no matter what it is in itself, this betrayed reality is that which the subject sees: even if they revealed noumenous reality these multicolored women wouldn't be any the less hideous. Oddly enough, Zola attributes the overemphasis, the excess leading to distortion, to the fact that reasoning has entered into the process of creating. According to Zola, an artist's temperament should cast a new light upon something which everyone can still recognize; the work must be a particular expression of a vision grounded in universal experience. We now see that this reality, with which it is fatal to lose contact, is not so much a principle of diversification as an indispensable common standard. For reality is the necessary and fruitful source of differences which would be shapeless and unintelligible without a common standard. So the increasing reservations in the Messager de I'Europe about the paintings he formerly admired, and his condemnation of the new painting in the Salon of 1896 are the result of the same attitude. But that the progressive detachment from the past should be linked with a refusal of the new art proves without question that Zola did not truly seize the "artistic moment" of which he had been the vigorous and effective propagandist. For this "artistic moment" was the first hour of the future. The lines I quoted on the Olympia and the Dbjeuner sur l'herbe must be corrected by those in which, while speaking of Gustave Dort,

Yale French Studies Zola sets the variety of the real against the monotony of the imaginary. For when he refers to the subject as "a pretext for painting" he seems to admit and to understand what the painting of Manet implies: the liberation from the object, the process by which'a work creates itself. But in connection with Dort, he warns that a painter cannot depart from the real without falling into repetition, emptiness, exaggeration. If the complaints about impressionism are not without equivocation, they are all based at bottom on the primacy accorded to the object, in so far as it is the principle of a communicable diversity, that is to say in so far as it is a common standard. In a youthful letter to Ctzanne, Zola writes:

Without form, one can be a great painter for oneself, but not for others. . . . Each genius is born with his view of life and with his original form: these are things which cannot be separated without causing, at least in appearance, a complete emptiness in a man. This is especially noticeable when thought alone rules: the poor great man is put with all misunderstood people; much as his soul dreams, it cannot communicate with others; this man is ridiculous and unhappy.

We will have a clue to the complaints and the equivocal judgments if we compare this youthful warning (and that it is addressed to Ctzanne is revealing) first with all of the texts in which he gloomily mentions what the works he likes leave to be desired, then with the pages of condemnation, and finally with the pages of Rome (in chapter 6 ) that he devotes to Michelangelo. He has just mentioned "form"; elsewhere, he blames his painters for their lack of "technique." In 1879 Zola writes that Manet, "despite his perspicatious vision so able to discern the right tonalities, nevertheless finds it difficult to realize his vision: his hand is not equal to his eye." But the notion of form is closely related to the notion of technique, as this judgment of 1880 seems to indicate: "For the impressionists are at fault because of their

Gaetan Picon technical inadequacy. In the arts as in literature only form sustains new ideas and new methods." What then does he mean by "technical inadequacy?" Neither clumsiness nor mediocrity but rather, it would seem, facility.

Hasty production seems to have exhausted Monet; he is content with approximations. He does not study nature with the passion of true creators. All of these artists are too easily satisfied. They wrongly disdain the solidity of works that are carefully thought out; this is why one might fear that they only point the way to the great artist of the future whom the world awaits.

Writing about Manet now and blaming him for not having known how to "constitute a technique for himself," Zola goes into details:

He remains the enthusiastic schoolboy who always distinctly sees what is going on in nature, but who is not always sure of being able to render his impressions precisely and definitively. This is why you never know, once he has started off, how he will reach his destination, nor even whether he will reach it at all. He proceeds by guesswork. For the last sixteen years, in short, we haven't had a more subjective painter than Manet.

Here it can be seen how the lack of technique can point to the lack of form, and how the lack of form points to a certain failure in the statement of the real: subjectivity. What is missing is neither exactness, nor vitality, but a technique which would make for a regular and assured grasp of life, an ample development free from the risks and the limitations of immediate impression. The technical weakness consists in the absence of a style capable of seizing something other than the

Yale French Studies immediate, the absence of a world seen as a whole and as a common place: the artist of genius whom we await will express an assuredly particular vision, unknown before him, his world, but he will none the less catch the communicable totality which is the world. And the painters whom Zola has most fervently loved now strike him as experimenters, makers of sketches, mere pioneers, precursors of an art which he hopes will produce complete, monumental images of the reality of his time. There is nothing left to do but wait for a painter of genius whose grip will be strong enough to impose reality upon us. Genius alone is sovereign in art. I don't believe in truth simply for truth or by truth. I believe in a temperament which in our school of painting will stand the contemporary world on its feet. This temperament will revive the world with the life of its creative breath.

He writes these lines in 1881. In 1883, he calls Degas "a constipated artist of the prettiest talent," and adds these words: "The more I get away from mere strange posts of observation, the more I love the abundant creators who bring forth a whole world." And the shock he felt in Rome the year before, when he discovered Michelangelo's genius, is certainly not unrelated to his condemnation of the Salon of 1896. Everything that is lacking in modern art he saw in triumph on the Sistine ceiling: vitality in grandeur, the power of a temperament which reality neither defines nor limits (for it brings forth a "world"), a true and patient technique capable of solving all the problems posed by a vast surface and the particular difficulty inherent in painting "flat curves.'' Zola stops hoping, in the end, when he realizes that he has always been waiting for a nineteenth-century Michelangelo: an artist who would be free of the studio and the academy, who could paint the present world and account for accidents of light, who would paint by natural light, using taches. In a pinch, a Manet perhaps with the force of Delacroix or Courbet. But Zola is hopeless.

Gaetan Picon Thus he who so promptly and so vigorously seized the "artistic moment" finds himself, a few years later, dreaming of what should have been, turning back to the past. Did he then really seize the moment? The painters whom Zola rejects in the last years of the century knew better than he that this moment had to be surpassed; he does not see that they did surpass it, and with its help so to speak. They responded to its call. Seurat and CQanne also reject the sketch-style (as do Gauguin and Degas too) : from their immediate sensations and their studies, they patiently bring forth, with genius, with difficulty, a structured world. They are the contemporary Michelangelos, but Zola cannot know that this is so. For in his view great art should represent a world already there, the world of ordinary perception, all the while adding to it its force, the vibrations of its soul, like an invisible harpoon stuck into a recognizable image. This is creation, then: God's creation, with in addition to the temperament of the great individual the voice and the breath of genius. The work restores what was seen, it is the meeting-place of an ordinary reality and a particular affectivity. That it might be the space in which something never seen before might be constituted according to the laws of a logic without passion, that it might allow one to see a new architecture of the visible arising from a nullified and remodeled world - this thought does not cross his mind. The unknown of which Zola speaks ("these men who come, all of them, to say a word unknown only yesterday") is the unknown that exists for us spectators before we encounter the canvas that reveals how genius has seen the world. But Zola does not understand that this unknown exists in the first place for the artist; or rather if he has an inkling of it (as for example when he says that Manet starts at random without knowing how he will finish, or even whether he will reach his destination), he finds the idea disturbing. For Zola there can be only the mediation of technical execution between the conception and the work; thus the positive aspect of this emptiness, this initial uncertainty, does not occur to him. The "throes of style" of which Flaubert speaks - Flaubert who wanted to write a "book on nothing"; the "worries with nature" of which his old friend CCzanne complains: these are simply admissions of impotence to the mind of our writer who always

Yale French Studies knows what he is going to say (or thinks he does), our critic who thinks that the same principle applies to painting. Zola hasn't the faintest idea of the way in which the blankness of a page or a canvas beckons, gives form (and discourages), or at least separates experience and sensation from the creation of a work. Zola's aesthetic is the contrary of that which is already the aesthetic of his time, and which was the aesthetic of the eras he consistently rejects ("I like neither the Egyptians, nor the Greeks, nor the Asiatic artists . . .") - an aesthetic which bases a style of the visible on departures from common perception. Zola's realistic aesthetic is analogous to the classic aesthetic and to the romantic (i.e., to the confused amalgam of tradition during these years of the nineteenth century when he is writing), which defines art as ordinary perception to which divergencies of reason or affectivity are added. Zola doubtless comes into contact with Manet's art when it is deliberately expressive and not form-giving; it does not keep its distance, and it is meant to be constantly open to immediate sensation. But this blinding flash of the immediate, which causes something never seen before to surge forth, also destroys and dissipates preconceived perspectives, the models of the world. Zola seems to have an intimation of this when he says that for Manet, the subject is no longer anything but a pretext for painting. But while he notes the preliminary disappearance of the subject, he continues to think of painting as a movement proceeding towards an encounter with a subject. Even if painting no longer entirely expresses known models of the world, it nevertheless calls for new ones and creates them. But Zola does not realize that painting can remodel the world, starting not from given models but from zero. Nor did Manet, perhaps. But Manet did not need to know this before he could create works that were, that became a remodeling of the world. Keeping Zola from a clear perception of the "artistic moment" is his inability to understand its quest for finality. Nothing blinds him more than his belief that as painting has invented itself, it has reached a point of equilibrium. He believes that this kind of painting expresses the truth of an age which finds its definition in a mental attitude of a certain stability; he thinks that as long as this age of thought lasts, this

Gaetan Picon kind of painting can be an object of immediate communication, of unequivocal, final completeness. In that which exists he does not see the forces which work to keep it from being its own end, from being something completely and immediately understandable as it is. Zola has seen in that which is a state of things both unquestionable and harmonious; he does not see the active forces that this state implies and that it sets in motion. Several years later he finds the state of things visibly transformed by these forces; to the wearing away of things he is sensitive, but he is blind to the meaning of their transformation. So it happens that Zola, who had stood up for the new art in its infancy, now asks the past to provide impossible finalities, finalities which would replace those he cannot now perceive. And it could be said that Zola the novelist (and certainly a great one) found himself in a rather similar situation. He did not understand himself any better than he understood Manet. His own art is inextricably related to everything which begins with the painters he liked: a great wave of the real and the immediate subordinates retrospective exposition to the present immediacy of scene and dialogue, as indeed in painting the model is subordinated to sheer painting. Consider for example the opening scene of La Cure'e: odors of foliage and horses, noises of clogs and axles, gleamings of copper and leather - these sensations come to us in a confused rush before they are organized into an intelligible scene. We could say of this what Zola says of the Olympia: "What does all this mean? You hardly know, nor do I." And as in painting, so in literature: the destruction of old models is conducive to the creation of new matter, of unwritten and undefined substances. Take that silk, for example, with the perfume, the texture and the whiteness of a woman's flesh, stretched between all the words of Nana, that silk which Mallarmt admired and praised. But Zola does not allow his works to find their own shape, to create their own form. He wants them to conform to a certain idea of the novel; he wants them to express themselves in terms of this idea, without reservations, without circumlocutions. So, wanting to write for his own time, he actually writes for a past era, and the Rougon-Macquart series ends up as an inferior Comkdie humaine -though in Zola's work we catch the gleam of metals found only in

Yale French Studies another soil, an earth of which Balzac had not the remotest idea. To write for your time, to paint for your time, while rejecting the obscurity and the incomprehensibility of that which is being done, of that which is being born, is to run the risk of going back to things which have already been done. Those who prescribe the order of the new soon feel an inevitable and reactionary nostalgia for the old. Only he who is never quite in tune with his time remains attuned to the workings of time.

Translated by J. L. Logan