Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/8

INTRODUCTION popular favors, the distinction of Germinal is yet more clearly recognised. Seillière, while regarding the capitalistic conditions presented as now of an ancient and almost extinct type, yet sees Germinal standing out as “the poem of social mysticism,” while André Gide, a completely modern critic who had left a deep mark on the present generation, observes somewhere that it may nowadays cause surprise that he should refer with admiration to Germinal, but it is a masterly book that fills him with astonishment; he can hardly believe that it was written in French and still less that it should have been written in any other language; it seems that it should have been created in some international tongue.

The high place thus claimed for Germinal will hardly seem exaggerated. The book was produced when Zola had at length achieved the full mastery of his art and before his hand had, as in his latest novels, begun to lose its firm grasp. The subject lent itself, moreover, to his special aptitude for presenting in vivid outline great human groups, and to his special sympathy with the collective emotions and social aspirations of such groups. We do not, as so often in Zola’s work, become painfully conscious that he is seeking to reproduce aspects of life with which he is imperfectly acquainted, or fitting them into scientific formulas which he has imperfectly understood. He shows a masterly grip of each separate group, and each represents some essential element of the whole; they are harmoniously balanced, and their mutual action and reaction leads on inevitably to the splendid tragic close, with yet its great promise for the future. I will not here discuss Zola’s literary art (I have done so In my book of Affirmations); it is enough to say that, though he was not a great master of style, Zola never again wrote so finely as here.

A word may be added to explain how this translation fell to the lot of one whose work has been in other fields. In 1893 the late A. Texeira de Mattos was arranging for private issue a series of complete versions of some of Zola’s chief novels and offered to assign Germinal to me. My time was taken up with preliminary but as yet unfruitful preparation for what I regarded as my own special task in life, and I felt that I must not neglect the opportunity of spending my [x]