by Émile Zola
One of the most important aspects of Claude’s art is his role as a pioneer of ‘Open Air’ painting. ‘… that’s what we need now’, he tells Sandoz, ‘sunlight, open air, something bright and fresh, people and things as seen in real daylight’ (p. 37). In this he represents the revolution in painting brought about by the Impressionists, notably Monet, who forsook the even daylight of the traditional north-facing studio and sought to capture the play of sunlight in the open with ever more subtly juxtaposed dabs of colour. The term ‘Impressionism’ was first given currency in an article written by the artist and dramatist Louis Leroy (1812–85) in Le Charivari on 25 April about the first independent exhibition of paintings by the new school in 1874: it derives from Monet’s painting Impression. Soleil levant (Impression. Sun rising) which was one of the exhibits. As a label (intended pejoratively by Leroy) it stuck successfully because it conveyed well what was the central ambition of the new generation of painters, namely to capture on canvas how a person or object actually (and fleetingly) strikes the eye and not how we think it ought to look or ‘really’ is. If, in a certain light, grass appears blue, then blue it shall be.
Writing later in the European Herald in July 1879 Zola shows how well he understands the painters’ purpose:
The Impressionists have introduced open-air painting, the study of shifting effects in nature depending on the innumerable variations of weather and the time of day. They consider that Courbet’s technique, superb as it is, leads only to magnificent studio paintings. They themselves take the analysis of nature further, breaking light down into its constituent parts, studying the effects of air movement, the shading of colour, the random variations of light and shadow, all the optical phenomena which make a vista so changing and so difficult to render.
Obviously this ambition is directly comparable with Sandoz’s expression of the Naturalist aesthetic (‘not too dirty and not too clean, but just as it is’). The term ‘Naturalist’ (one who studies nature) had been used by Zola as early as 1866 to define the proper function of the literary or art critic as being to uncover the true workings of human society from beneath the aesthetic surface under observation. In adopting this term Zola was following on from the famous essay on Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) by Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), first published in the Journal des Débats in 1858, and his preface to the second edition of his Essais de critique et d’histoire in 1866. In the first of these essays, Taine, who succeeded Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) as professor of aesthetics and the history of art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1864, compares Balzac’s methods as a novelist with those of a naturalist and notes how the author of La Comédie humaine observes the human species within a natural world governed by determinism. In the preface he develops a parallel between the naturalist and the historian, the essential task of both being to examine man as but one member of the animal kingdom and just as subject as its other members to the shaping influences of heredity and environment.
The importance of heredity apart, Balzac himself had said much the same thing in his Foreword to La Comédie humaine in 1842; but Taine was developing the analogy under the influence of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and his Positivism, in which scientific method is brought to bear in the analysis of human society to the exclusion of all theological or metaphysical concerns. In his Introduction to his History of English Literature (1863), Taine asserts the interdependence of the physical and the psychological and stresses the importance of these factors in the study of cultural and social development. In particular he elaborates on the need to examine the relative roles of race, milieu, and moment (i.e. racial and familial inheritance, environment, and historical circumstances) as determining forces in the emergence and particular manifestations of any social or cultural phenomenon. His notorious statement that ‘vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar’ was used by Zola as the epigraph for the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868).
Not for nothing had Zola ended up as head of publicity at Hachette. The man who was later to use sandwich-men to advertise his novels soon began to bandy the words ‘Naturalist’ and ‘Naturalism’ with a frequency which his job as a journalist greatly facilitated, hammering the nail into the public consciousness (as he later expressed it to a disapproving Flaubert) centimetre by centimetre. With one particular blow of his promotional hammer he ceased referring to the future Impressionists as Realists (in 1866) and started calling them Naturalists (from 1868). Needless to say, the publicist was somewhat put out six years later when the term ‘Impressionism’ began to catch on. ‘Realist’ had been a term of abuse recently levelled at the work of Courbet and then, like ‘Impressionism’ itself, proudly taken over as a compliment (just as Théophile Gautier (1811–72) had become the champion of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’). In literature the novelist and art historian Champfleury (1821–89) sought to found a school of Realism (with a manifesto in 1857), and was seconded by another novelist Edmond Duranty (1833–80), who started a short-lived journal called Realism. Dedicated to the scrupulous and unsensational reproduction of the details of everyday life, these particular Realists produced little more than unreadable accounts of the squalid and the mundane.
The young and ambitious Zola wanted to distance himself from their second-rate productions and to make a name for himself: hence the importance of his new tag ‘Naturalism’. At the same time he believed that the new generation of painters, including Manet and Pissarro (who were ten years older than Zola, Monet, Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and the other Impressionists), were heading in the same direction as he: they, too, therefore were ‘Naturalists’. Just as Claude Lantier is contemptuous of the classical style of Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) and feels that the Romantic Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and the Realist Courbet are both played out, so Zola (like Sandoz) rejects the tradition of the ‘psychological novel’ and strives to break out of the shadow of Romantic Victor Hugo (1802–85) and Balzac, the foreunner of the Realists. The Lantier of ‘Open Air’ wants to capture nature ‘as it is’: the subject does not matter as long as the artist is sincere in his portrayal of it. Hence his notorious claim that ‘a bunch of carrots, studied directly and painted simply, personally, as you see it yourself, [is] as good as any of the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure École des Beaux-Arts stuff’ (p. 35). Similarly Sandoz (like Zola) wants to ‘devote [his] whole life to one work and put everything into it, men, animals, everything under the sun!’ (p. 37). Painter and novelist both rise to the challenge of exploiting the aesthetic potential inherent in the banal and the ugly (thus seeking out what Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) called the ‘Flowers of Evil’), and both see themselves as servants of ‘the truth’ as they aspire to complete honesty and accuracy of observation.
In the 1860s Zola had warmed to the originality of Manet and the future Impressionists as they sought to free themselves from the dead hand of the École des Beaux-Arts. Eager to make his name by associating himself with the scandalous avant-garde, but also genuinely in tune with the desire to jettison tired convention and to pass beyond the inflated posturing of second-rate Romanticism, he became their courageous champion in print. The outcry was such that no French newspaper editor would agree to publish his art criticism between 1868 and 1880. In 1875, however, thanks to the intervention of Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), he found an outlet in the St Petersburg monthly magazine the Vestnik Evropy (European Herald ) to which he was to contribute some sixty-four ‘Letters from Paris’ over the following years. In some of these he reported fully and forthrightly on the world of Parisian art, particularly the Salons of 1875 and 1876, the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, and the Exposition Universelle in 1879.
From these articles one can see that during the 1870s Zola remained a loyal admirer of Manet, whom he continued to praise as ‘a realist, a positivist’, ‘a naturalist, an analyst’. Gradually, however, his attitude towards the Impressionists became more critical. He lost touch with many of the exponents of the new school, never frequenting their new m
eeting-place, the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, as he had the Café Guerbois; and in his article on the second Impressionist exhibition, he is prepared to find fault with several of the artists, such as Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94) (too photographic) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) (good at sketches but likely to spoil everything ‘when he adds the finishing touch’). He bestows praise on the paintings of Monet, Berthe Morisot (1841–95), Pissarro, Renoir, and Alfred Sisley (1839–99), hailing them as innovators and as the saviours of French art; but he ends by exhorting them to keep searching ‘for one or more painters sufficiently talented to bolster the new artistic formula with master-pieces’. By implication, therefore, they had yet to produce either a master or a masterpiece. And in his article of July 1879 even Manet begins to come in for criticism, as Zola comments that ‘his hand is not comparable with his eye … If the technical side of the business equalled the accuracy of his impressions, he would be the great painter of the second half of the nineteenth century’.
The story of Claude Lantier thus represents Zola’s view of the development of French painting between 1860 and 1885. The bold originality which is mocked at the Salon des Refusés and the invigorating removal of the painter’s easel from the studio to the riverbank are followed by an endless process of experimentation which somehow fails to produce the desired masterpiece that would clinch the final victory over the École des Beaux-Arts. In the case of Monet and others Zola felt that there was undue facility and sloppiness of execution, that they never tried hard enough (or, like Manet, were simply unable) to ‘finish’ a picture satisfactorily. (For them, of course, such ‘finishedness’ would have been detrimental to the truth of an ‘impression’.) Worst of all, he felt that they gave insufficiently of themselves: they were merely pioneers, and not accomplished masters, because they failed to give expression to their innermost selves.
Claude Lantier at least tries to do this: ‘What was Art, after all, if not simply giving out what you have inside you?’ (p. 35). But there seems to be a congenital flaw in his eyesight which means that, as with Manet, vision and technique are never successfully in accord. Lantier’s sketch for his final, great painting of the Île de la Cité is masterly, and he paints in the barge-unloading scene with accomplishment; but the more he continues to strive after special effects of light and shadow, the more of a mess his painting becomes. Finally, like French art itself (in Zola’s view), he falls victim to Symbolism, which is but another, yet more bizarre manifestation of the old canker of Romanticism.
When Sandoz objects to the presence of the dominant figure of the nude in the centre of Claude’s final painting, he represents the voice of Naturalism speaking out against the new trend represented in the works of Gustave Moreau (1826–98), Odilon Redon (1840–1916), and others. For Sandoz women simply do not swim or stand up naked on a boat in the middle of the Seine, whatever the season: for Lantier his great, obsessing nude figure is the symbol of Paris, a physical manifestation of the soul of the city which he has sought to evoke in his depiction of the Île de la Cité itself. By the end of the novel she has become ‘like an idol belonging to some unknown religion … made … of marble and gold and precious stones … the mystic rose of her sex blooming between the precious columns that were her thighs, beneath the sacred canopy that was her belly’ (p. 346). Nature ‘as it is’ has become a Decadent emblem of unassuageable sexual desire; and the wholesome, girlish body of Christine Hallegrain at the beginning of the novel has been replaced by an evil goddess demanding the sacrifice of human flesh. The sculptor Mahoudeau survives the violent embrace of his disintegrating statue, but Lantier pays with his life. He, and not the picture, finally hangs.
In this way Lantier’s final hours are symbolic of what Zola believes to have happened to his contemporaries, and what Sandoz describes at Lantier’s funeral:
The century has been a failure. Hearts are tortured with pessimism and brains clouded with mysticism for, try as we may to put imagination to flight with the cold light of science, we have the supernatural once more in arms against us and the whole world of legend in revolt, bent on enslaving us again in our moment of fatigue and uncertainty. (p. 359)
It is no wonder, therefore, that Monet found The Masterpiece ‘troubling’ and that Cézanne refused to have anything more to do with his friend. In the novel Impressionism succeeds only in the derivative hands of second-rate panderers to bourgeois taste, and any real originality seems both to be inherently flawed and a sign of madness. Supposedly respectable artistic success, on the other hand, is represented by the somewhat implausibly decent figure of Sandoz, complete with gastronomically gifted wife and lovable dog.
But Zola is ‘doing something’ more than merely showing off that he has succeeded where his artist friends have not. For, as its French title suggests, the novel is about ‘working’, about the human effort to create, about what Zola calls ‘the struggle with the angel’. Nowadays we might say that it is a study of workaholics. Such a term may seem unacceptably anachronistic if applied to Claude Lantier. After all, is he not the gifted genius living in a garret (later a shed) and devoting himself to Art? But that, precisely, is the Romantic cliché. Compare Sandoz:
The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it’s robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It’s like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I’ve even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I’m chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It’s so completely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it’s impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I’m asleep … Outside that, nothing, nobody exists. (p. 258)
Like Claude at the end, Sandoz feels himself to be a human sacrifice: ‘do what I will, I can’t escape entirely from the monster’s clutches, … in the end it’ll devour me, and that will be the end of that!’ (p. 258).
As Sandoz, like Lantier, sacrifices the present in the cause of a future masterpiece, he is keenly aware that such an achievement may in any case have no lasting value. The ‘after-life’ of posterity’s acclaim may be as illusory as the Christian’s paradise. What if all this effort is for nothing? ‘What is the good of trying to fill the void? We know there’s nothing beyond it, yet we’re all too proud to admit it!’ And Lantier agrees: ‘When the earth falls to dust in space like a withered walnut, our works won’t even be a speck among the rest!’ (p. 319).
Here the central characters of The Masterpiece confront what twentieth-century writers would call the Absurd, the problem of finding a reason for living in the absence of religious faith. The novel thereby transcends the realm of art and poses a question about human activity in general, about man’s ‘work’ here on earth. Is the human condition more accurately represented by Claude Lantier, with mankind as mad fools wishing to achieve the unachievable, overreaching our limitations and coming inevitably face to face with death? Or by Sandoz who accepts that all his creations are imperfect and, though never satisfied, at least compromises with the ideal sufficiently to survive? Should we devote our time and energy to leaving a mark in some way (a painting, a sculpture, an opera, a fortune), or should we indeed ‘spend more time with our family’ and live for the present?
Sandoz’s dilemma offers a more prosaic, modern version of the traditional theme of the artist’s struggle for perfection. It is difficult to imagine Victor Hugo worrying like this about neglecting his family, or Hector Berlioz sighing: ‘As for my wife, she has no husband, poor thing’ (p. 258). Zola is thus undermining a certain Romantic view of the artist, and yet all the while he is reinforcing the central Romantic notion of an unbridgeable dichotomy between art and life. The role of Christine in the novel is to represent th
e claims of life over art, of present involvement in the day-to-day activity of human beings versus self-absenting devotion to a quite possibly vain, and vainglorious, goal. From her initial disturbing physical presence, through the lovers’ idyll at Bennecourt, to the final paroxysm of sexual passion, she is the life-force: ‘Come with me … and love me. … Aren’t you human? … Come with me, and you’ll see life’s still worth living. … ’ (p. 348). Yet for Lantier the call of ‘work’ is too strong and, when finally he sees the folly of his ‘masterpiece’, the end is inevitable: ‘But how can I go on living if there’s no point in going on working?’ (p. 348).
The antithesis of art and life is but one of many oppositions and parallels in the novel which Zola, a master of careful construction, uses to shape his story. Sandoz speaks patronizingly of ‘Victor Hugo’s mighty settings where dream figures immeasurably larger than life stalked through an everlasting battle of antitheses’ (p. 31), but such a description might well be applied to the Rougon-Macquart novels in general and to The Masterpiece in particular. For in Zola’s works ‘science’ and Romanticism continually compete for the upper hand. Many of the characters may be no larger than life, and indeed many are ‘smaller’, but the passion with which the central protagonists conduct their lives transcends the everyday. And antithesis is central to Zola’s vision. Just as Lantier’s great canvas depicts the duality of Paris at work and Paris at play, so Zola repeatedly presents both sides of every coin: birth and death, day and night, summer and winter, youth and age, success and failure, wealth and poverty, authenticity and sham, purity and prostitution. As the preparatory notes for the novel show (as do those for so many of the Rougon-Macquart novels), Zola sketched out both plot and characters with almost geometric precision.
