"Zola" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hundred other half emotions that make life whole. The only essential of tragedy is that one should take it lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest in the madder novels of Zola (such as that called "The Human Beast", a gross libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the application of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. The students of heredity are savages in this ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... and in no sense epoch. making. His dramas are negligible. His more serious novels, Madelon (1863), L'infame (1867), the three that form the trilogy of the Vieille Roche (1866), and Le roman d'un brave homme (1880)—-a kind of counterblast to the view of the French workman presented in Zola's Assommoir—-contain striking and amusing scenes, no doubt, but scenes which are often suggestive of the stage, while description, dissertation, explanation too frequently take the place of life. His best work after all is to be found in the books that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... singing about love and flowers and death, just as in the days of Theocritus, whom your learned Excellency does well to read. Has your Excellency ever read Longus, a Greek pastoral novelist? He is a trifle free, a trifle nude for us readers of Zola; but the old French of Amyot has a wonderful charm, and he gives one an idea, as no one else does, how folk lived in such valleys, by such sea-boards, as these in the days when daisy-chains and garlands of roses were still ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... London in search of work. He offered himself as a publisher's reader in various houses, and was roughly turned away. He suffered slights and humiliations; but these only strengthened his resolve. In this respect he reminds one of Zola, whom slights and humiliations only strengthened also; and in this connection it may be mentioned that there hangs in Hall Caine's drawing-room, in Peel, a pen-and-ink portrait which one mistakes for that of Emile ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... might be or ought to be, realism shows how it actually is. Unfortunately, realistic writers have not, in many cases, been true to their fundamental principles. The great continental leaders of realism—Tolstoi, Zola, Ibsen—have been tainted with a fatal pessimism. Realists of this type seem to see only one side of life,—the darker side of sin and wretchedness and despair. They often describe what is coarse, impure, obscene. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... constructed by a Major Esterhazy. The officer, Colonel Picquart, was removed, and his place taken by Colonel Henry, who undertook to supply the necessary evidence. Although he imposed on the minister of war, he was unable to endure the moral strain, especially after distinguished men like Zola became champions of the innocence of Dreyfus, and he committed suicide after making a confession. The government was obliged to bring the case before the Court of Cassation in 1898, which ordered a new trial. Although Dreyfus was again convicted by ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... severely criticised by those whose criticism has the most weight, namely by the equals of the sinners in question—as well as by writers of fiction whose opinions may or may not be worth considering. For one Zola, historian of the Rougon-Macquart family, there are a hundred would-be Zolas, censors of a higher class, less unpleasantly fond of accurate detail, perhaps, but as merciless in intention. But even if the case against society be proved, which ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... first of a series of four works in which M. Zola proposes to embody what he considers to be the four cardinal principles of human life. These works spring from the previous series of The Three Cities: "Lourdes," "Rome," and "Paris," which dealt with the principles of Faith, Hope, and Charity. The last scene in "Paris," when Marie, Pierre ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... journalists of the great debate were William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example of the successful journalist as described by Zola—the man who keeps on pounding at a single idea until he has driven it into the head of the public. Everyone knows at least the sentence from his salutatory editorial in "The Liberator" on January 1, 1831: "I am in earnest—I will not retreat ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... of men being drowned in the trenches, they have given a fleeting thought of pity for the soldiers "out there" as they have slushed home through the streets on rainy nights; but they have never realised what mud means, for no photograph can tell its slimy depth, and even the pen of a Zola or a Victor Hugo could give no adequate ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... midsummer nights, of fond lovers led through devious paths to happiness by Puck; of virtuous dukes—one finds such in fairyland; of fate subdued by faith and gentleness. But may we not also, in our more serious humours, find satisfaction in thinking with Hamlet or Coriolanus? May not both Dickens and Zola have their booths in Vanity Fair? If literature is to be a help to us, as well as a pastime, it must deal with the ugly as well as with the beautiful; it must show us ourselves, not as we wish to appear, but as we ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... his hard vivid style, strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous; bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature, "L'homme de genie n'a jamais d'esprit," is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... originality," M. Jules Lemaitre has acutely remarked, "is closely to unite observation and fantasy, to extract from the truth all that it contains of the improbable and the surprising, to satisfy at the same time the readers of M. Cherbuliez and the readers of M. Zola, to write novels which are at the same time realistic and romantic, and which seem romantic only because they are very sincerely ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... easily forget the young Architect who was then getting ready to conquer Philadelphia—to borrow a phrase from Zola, as seems but appropriate in writing of the Eighties—for which great end all the knowledge of the Beaux-Arts could not have served him as well as his conviction that the architecture of Europe had waited ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... shootin' or not. He was certainly in th' neighborhood whin th' fire started, an' th' polis dug up quite a lot iv lead pipe in his back yard. But it's wan thing to sus-pect a man iv doin' a job an' another thing to prove that he didn't. Me frind Zola thinks he's innocint, an' he raised th' divvle at th' thrile. Whin th' judge come up on th' bench an' opined th' coort, Zola was settin' down below with th' lawyers. 'Let us pro-ceed,' says th' impartial an' fair-minded judge, 'to th' thrile iv th' haynious monsther Cap Dhry-fuss,' ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... Goethe and Heine, there were but few Germans worthy to be mentioned side by side with the great writers of other European countries. True, there is no German Tolstoy, no German Ibsen, no German Zola—but then, is there a Russian Nietzsche, or a Norwegian Wagner, or a French Bismarck? Men like these, men of revolutionary genius, men who start new movements and mark new epochs, are necessarily ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Department of the Seine, which includes Paris, the proportion rises to 28 to the hundred thousand, and in the agricultural Department of the Eure, which is the champion criminal Department of France, to 30 to the hundred thousand. One might almost imagine that M. Zola must have gone to the Eure for ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... happened that was for all the world like an incident described by Zola in his "Debacle," when during the bombardment before Sedan a man went on ploughing in a valley with a white horse, while an artillery duel continued over his head. Precisely the same thing occurred here—the only difference being that ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... writers have passed very lightly over them; others, stating plain facts with a formal accuracy, have used their skill to give to the picture an untruthful miscoloring; two or three, instinct with the spirit of Zola, have made their sketch with plain unsparing realism in color as well as in lines, and so have brought upon themselves abuse, and perhaps have deserved much of it, by reason of a lack of skill in doing an unwelcome thing, or rather by reason of overdoing it. The feeling ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... who was able to take up a firm position on the ground of his acquaintance with "The Origin and History of the French Language," came to the assistance of his friend with a string of the most frightful quotations from Rabelais to Zola. Both then began to compare the women of their own country with those of Northern Europe generally, and managed to make the comparison a very favourable one, holding up their countrywomen as veritable heroines; and ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise. These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged with revolt. The transcendentalism of Emerson, the naturalism of Zola, the cynicism of La Rochefoucauld are all convergent streams in the torrent of reforming words which make ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... argument. I abominate what is now known as "realism" just as much as he does, but you don't have much of an argument without some apparent difference of opinion, so, for the nonce, I became a realist of whom Zola himself would have been proud. "Why, man," I said, "realism is truth. You certainly can't have any quarrel with that." I knew this would have the effect of a red rag flaunted in the face ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... to be found in the fact that the author, who has recently passed from negation to Catholicism, carries with him the language, the modes of thought, the taste and temper of the literary school of which he was, and, in so many of his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. En Route, and its sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism and faith. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... longer knows where to turn. "I who have fought so much for Positivism," moans Emile Zola, "well, yes! after thirty years of this struggle, I feel my convictions are shaken. Religious faith would have prevented such theories from being propagated; but has it not almost disappeared to-day? Who will give us ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... the tendencies of these men coincided with Germany's growing interest in science and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy. Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement. But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola with him and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of French naturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: "The modern—everything for the artist is there: in the sensation, the intuition of the contemporary, of this spectacle of life with ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... story, when there is a story. And the argument consists chiefly of "this happened to me," "I saw this and did not like it," "I was driven to this or that," until the mass of circumstantial incident and sensation reminds one of the works of Zola and the scientific naturalists who half a century ago tried to put society as an organism into fiction ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he, as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly's suggestion and had been helped by him—helped and frightened and made to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a second-hand book store in Cleveland ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... his possession for some time, and in part it had been used before in earlier work. It was now utilised with a masterly hand, and the result goes some way, perhaps, to justify the well-meant but erratic comparisons that have been made between Gissing and such writers as Zola, Maupassant and the projector of the Comedie Humaine. The savage luck which dogs Kirkwood and Jane, and the worse than savage—the inhuman—cruelty of Clem Peckover, who has been compared to the Madame Cibot of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... "little human praise," would be missed if they were not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell. The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author of the Apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely characteristic of Browning. The quickened spiritual pulse which these poems betoken betrays itself just in his more daringly assured embrace of the heights and the depths of the universe, as communicating and akin, prompting also that not less daring embrace ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... he was doing for his mother what Shakespeare in Measure for Measure is doing for the lust-spotted world. The play is a trenchant satire on the evils of society. Such realistic pictures of the things that are, but should not be, have always jarred on our aesthetic sense from Aristophanes to Zola, and Measure for Measure is one of the most disagreeable of Shakespeare's plays. But no one can ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... history of Fleet Street, I should be looked upon as the most wonderful exponent of human life that had ever touched a pen. Balzac—whom everybody talks of and nobody has read, because the discrimination of Paternoster Row has refused him a translation till quite lately—Zola, who professes to be realistic, who is nothing if not realistic, but whose writings are so curiously crude and merely skim the surface; even the great Hugo, who produced the masterpiece of all fiction, Les Miserables; ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... to have read an autobiography, a biography, or a piece of fiction that told the TRUTH. Of course, I have read stuff such as Rousseau and Zola and George Moore and various memoirs that were supposed to be window panes in their respective breasts; but, mostly, all of them were either liars, actors, or posers. (Of course, I'm not trying to belittle the greatness ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... that a description which lasts longer than two minutes is never attempted in conversation. The listener cannot hold the details enumerated. The clearest statement regarding this comes from Jules Lemaitre in a criticism upon some descriptions by Emile Zola which the critic says are praised by persons who have never read them. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... French novelist whose books have a circulation approaching the works of Daudet and of Zola is Georges Ohnet, a writer whose popularity is as interesting as his stories, because it explains, though it does not excuse, the contempt the Goncourts had for the favor of the great French public, and also because it shows how the highest ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of the Post-mortem examination of the colons of hundreds of subjects reveals a series of horrors more weird and ghastly than were ever penned by Eugene Sue, or Emile Zola. The mind shrinks in dismay at the appalling revelations, and shudders at the possibly of the "human form divine" becoming such ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... fasten upon ugliness, vice, pain, and disease, as though these imperfections of our nature were more real than beauty, goodness, pleasure, and health. Therefore Caravaggio, the leader of a school which the Italians christened Naturalists, may be compared to Zola. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Zola tells us in Nouvelle Campagne that his vivid impressions are all received during the first twenty-four hours in a new surrounding,—the mind, like a photographic film, quickly losing ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Mary to prove her case are, it must be admitted, disagreeable, and the minor details too frequently revolting. The stories of Maria, Darnford, and Jemima are records of shame, crime, and human bestiality little less unpleasant than the realism of a Zola. It is an astonishing production, even for an age when Fielding and Smollett were not considered coarse. But, as was the case in the "Rights of Women," this plainness of speech was due not to a delight in impurity and ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Voltaire, as abstract as a parable —begin to be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details developed a particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on technical successes. To afford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him, he feels his heart opening to the truth, which he follows up with the determination of a real Gorkyan hero. The life of the people appears to him in its sublime simplicity. And it is in the midst of a dazzling apotheosis—which reminds one of the most grandiose pages of Zola's "Lourdes"—that he finally confesses the God of his ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... of these houses lived Commodore Nicholson, and in another lived Admiral Radford, whose lovely daughter, Sophy, became the bride of Valdemar de Meisner, secretary of the Russian Legation. In Number Four, lived Mrs. Zola Green with her daughter and her two sisters, named Pyle—one of them was called Miss "Chit-Chat." Mr. Green, who was a descendant of Uriah Forrest, had been given the name of Oceola after the Indian Chief who had saved the life of his father years ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... Shakespeare ... found at least once the grand bitter buffoonery, the harsh sentiment of human baseness', and he demonstrates that, however odious and painful the episodes of senator and whore may be, they are true to the uttermost. Even the great nineteenth-century realist Zola did not disdain to take a hint thence for his chapters in Nana of the masochist Count Muffat and the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... but all my travels have convinced me that a bad peasantry is the exception. Such exceptions there are, though I don't mean to give them. If Zola had not made himself ridiculous in the act, so ridiculous as to show himself negligible, he would stand as the greatest traducer of his adopted country that France has ever harboured. But he was a specialist in his particular line of disgustfulness, and saw in ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... and an absolute certainty of touch; and Dumas was neither a Shakespeare nor an AEschylus—he was not even an Augier. All the same, he has produced in la Tour de Nesle a romantic play which M. Zola himself pronounces the ideal of the genre and in Antony an achievement in drawing-room tragedy which is out of all questioning the first, and in the opinion of a critic so competent and so keen as the master's son is probably the strongest, thing of its kind in modern literature. On this ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... of the peasant in the face of the great calamity was a continual source of amazement to us. Zola in "Le Debacle" puts into his picture of the battle of Sedan an old peasant plowing on his farm in the valley. While shells go screaming overhead he placidly drives his old white horse through the accustomed furrows. One naturally presumed ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... of which Zola, Tolstoi, De Maupassant, and others of that ilk are followers, claims its descent from the author of Salammbo. Perhaps their claim is well-founded, perhaps not; we are inclined to believe that it is, for every page in this novel is crowded with details, ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... (born 1840) the pessimistic interpretation of modern science is expressed frankly and fully, with much the same pitiless consistency that distinguishes contemporary European writers such as Zola. Mr. Hardy early turned to literature from architecture and he has lived a secluded life in southern England, the ancient Wessex, which he makes the scene of all his novels. His knowledge of life is sure and his technique in all respects masterly. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... biggest vision is felt. It was published in French soon after it appeared in Sweden, with an introduction by Zola in which he says, "To be brief, you have written a mighty and captivating work. It is one of the few dramas that have had the power to stir me ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... of the most infamous trials in the history of the world. Zola is a great man, a genius, the best man in France. His trial was a travesty on justice. The judge acted like a bandit. The proceedings were a disgrace to human nature. The jurors must have been ignorant beasts. The French have ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... altruistic, exaltation becomes mere megalomania. This egotism is, of course, a danger inherent in all art. The suspension of motor-reactions to the practical world isolates the artist, cuts him off from his fellow-men, makes him in a sense an egotist. Art, said Zola, is "the world seen through a temperament." But this suspension is, not that he should turn inward to feed on his own vitals, but rather to free him for contemplation. All ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... literature of that country. Yet he had never supposed that residence in England involved a knowledge of English literature. Sophia had read practically nothing since 1870; for her the latest author was Cherbuliez. Moreover, her impression of Zola was that he was not at all nice, and that he was the enemy of his race, though at that date the world had scarcely heard of Dreyfus. Dr. Stirling had too hastily assumed that the opinions of the bourgeois upon art ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... even so in mines. We know what mines are like nowadays from Zola's descriptions and from newspaper reports. But the mine of the future will be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a library; there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth: underground traction will be carried on by means of an automatic cable put into ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... eccentric, improvident genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so persistently denied them. And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe come up for ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... voice of a prophetic mission. The virtue of his writings consists in their wholesome ethical quality, in their solid health. Fresh air is often better for the soul than the swinging of the priest's censer. At a time when the school of Zola was at its climax, Stevenson opened the windows and let in the pleasant breeze. For the morbid and unhealthy period of adolescence, his books are more healthful than many serious moral works. He purges the mind of uncleanness, just ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mean anything. There is a sort of legend among the simple that it means five hundred copies. The better informed, however, are aware that it often means less. Thus, in the case of the later novels of Emile Zola, an edition meant two hundred copies. This was chiefly to save the self-love of his publishers, who did not care to admit that the idol of a capricious populace had fallen off its pedestal. The vast fiction was created that Zola sold as well as ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... that his allusions are naturally and unaffectedly made. But the man just back from a first trip on the continent has astonishment stamped upon his face, and he speaks of Paris and of the Alps as if he had discovered both. Zola is one of those practitioners who, big with recently acquired knowledge, appear to labor under the idea that the chief end of a novel is to convey miscellaneous information. This is probably a mistake. Novels are not handbooks on floriculture, banking, railways, or the management of department ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... her beautiful Utopian genius, poured forth a torrent of rural narrative of a crystalline limpidity ("Mouny Robin," "La Mare au Diable," "La Petite Fadette," etc., 1841-1849), which is as far removed from the turbid stream of Balzac ("Les Paysans") and Zola ("La Terre"), as Paradise is from the Inferno. There is an echo of Rousseau's gospel of nature in all these tales, and the same optimistic delusion regarding "the people" for which the eighteenth century ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... sometimes they even deliberately oppress themselves. Thus, when the mob of Paris could make a Government to please itself, it made a sort of sublime tyranny to order itself about. The spirit is the same from the Crusades or St. Bartholomew to the apotheosis of Zola. The old religionists tortured men physically for a moral truth. The new realists torture men ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... drama, art, and music (in all of which departments certain names are equal to an appalling plexus of questions—Wagner, Ibsen, Meredith, Browning, Comte, Goethe, Shakespeare, Dante, Degas, Rousseau, Tolstoi, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Zola, Whistler, Leopardi, Emerson, Carlyle, Swedenborg, Rabelais). Socialism, its various schools, its past and its future; Anarchism: bombs. Labour questions: the Eight Hours' Day, the Unemployed, the Living Wage, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... seventeen). Three years ago she had the thrice-blessed idea of opening a sort of pension for the entertainment and instruction of the blundering barbarians who come to Paris in the hope of picking up a few stray particles of the language of Voltaire—or of Zola. The idea lui a porte bonheur; the shop does a very good business. Until within a few months ago it was carried on by my cousins alone; but lately the need of a few extensions and embellishments has caused itself to be felt. My cousin has undertaken them, regardless of expense; she ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... pp, 52-61; F. Karsch, "Mademoiselle Maupin," Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. v, 1903, pp. 694-706.) A still greater writer, Flaubert, in Salammbo (1862) made his heroine homosexual. Zola has described sexual inversion in Nona and elsewhere. Some thirty years ago a popular novelist, A. Belot, published a novel called Mademoiselle Giraud, ma Femme, which was much read; the novelist took the attitude ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... become one of those typical figures, like the Puritan and the buccaneer. Though less exploited in fiction than he was in the days of Dumas, Eugene Sue and Zola, the mention of his name calls to the imagination the picture of a tall, spare man, handsome, courteous, obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of then. When the Revolution set him free in France it was an act of grace—the grace of other people; he does not appear in it as a helper. I do not know that he helped when England set him free. Among the Twelve Sane Men of France who have stepped forward with great Zola at their head to fight (and win, I hope and believe[3]) the battle for the most infamously misused Jew of modern times, do you find a great or rich or illustrious Jew helping? In the United States he was created free in the beginning—he did not need to help, of course. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... have special prices for them. They all come to me, Monsieur Varin. Yesterday, Monsieur Busnach bought a large, antique goblet of me, and the other day I sold two candelabra like this (is it not handsome?) to Monsieur Alexander Dumas. If Monsieur Zola were to see that Japanese figure, he would buy it ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... it off by forbidding her to work in a factory for a month after her confinement. Everything that can make birth a misfortune to the parents as well as a danger to the mother is conscientiously done. When a great French writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation, wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige of parentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of this character, with such a title as Fecundity, was too ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... account this new mood, it is vain to try to understand the latest in art, music, fiction, poetry, thought, politics. The one word "despair" is the key that opens up the meaning of Ibsen's dramas, and Tolstoi's ethics, of Zola's novels, and Carmen Sylva's poems, of Bourget's romances, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner's operas with Turgenieff's novels, Amiel's journal with Marie Bashkirtseff's diary. Naturalism in fiction, "decadence" in poetry, realism in art, tragedy in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... it may be added. Sarcey comments on the impossibility of a scene in Zola's Pot Bouille in which the so-called "lovers," Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard outside discussing their intrigue. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... and stray was so repulsive, no drudge was so mean, no criminal was so atrocious, but what Charles Dickens could feel for him some ray of sympathy, or extract some pathetic mirth out of his abject state. And Dickens does not look on the mean and the vile as do Balzac and Zola, that is, from without, like the detective or the surgeon. He sees things more or less from their point of view: he feels with the Marchioness: he himself as a child was once a Smike: he cannot help liking the fun of the ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... adaptiveness of his race—French poems with Hellenic inspiration, and erotic lyrics—half felt, half feigned, delicately chiselled. He saw now with a sudden intuition that he had never really expressed himself in art, save perhaps in that one brutal Italian novel written under the influence of Zola, which had been so denounced by a world with no perception of the love and the tears that prompted the relentless unmasking ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Zola's early manhood witnessed a bitter struggle against poverty and deprivation. Until twenty he was a spoiled child; but, on his father's death, he and his mother began the battle of life in Paris. Of his ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... Shakespeare had so fine, so accurate, so infallible a sense of the delicate line of demarcation which divides the impressive and the terrible from the horrible and the loathsome—Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac from Eugene Sue and Emile Zola. On his theatre we find no presentation of old men with their beards torn off and their eyes gouged out, of young men imprisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with red-hot spits. Again and again his passionate and daring genius attains the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of that work euphuism is much less prominent than in the first. The romance of chivalry and the Italian tale would be still more distasteful to the new woman than they were to the new courtier. Doubtless Boccaccio may have found a place in many a lady's secret bookshelf as Zola and Guy de Maupassant do perchance to-day, but he was scarcely suitable for the boudoir table or for polite literary discussion. Something was needed which would appeal at once to the feminine taste ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... naturalism, with its systematically crude presentation of life, was at its height in France, and France, during the nineteenth century, had more often than not set the fashion for Spain in literary matters. The baldness of Zola and the pessimism of de Maupassant were quickly taken up on the French stage, and Henri Becque and the Thtre libre served slices of raw life to audiences fascinated by a tickling horror. The same naturalism had, indeed, crossed the Pyrenees and found a few half-hearted ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... descriptions which belong to the physician's private library, and not to the shelves devoted to polite literature. Goldsmith and even Smollett, both having studied and practised medicine, could not by any possibility have outraged all the natural feelings of delicacy and decency as Swift and Zola have outraged them. But without handling doubtful subjects, there are many curious medical experiences which have interest for every one as extreme illustrations of ordinary conditions with which all are acquainted. No one can study the now familiar history of clairvoyance ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... signature.... It could not be possible! but it seemed to be inscribed with the name of a novelist famous for his investigations of capitalistic abuses of the people ... the author of the sensational novel, The Slaughter House, which was said to out-Zola Zola—Penton Baxter. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... life as from a scientific treatise on agriculture or a volume of pastoral theology. Thus the tract which lies before us to explore is equally remote from the idyllic imagination of George Sand, the gross actuality of Zola, and the combination of simple charm with minute and essential realism of Mr. Hardy's sketches in Wessex. Nor does the adoption of the pastoral label suffice to bring within the fold the fanciful ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... appearance of O Mulato by Aluizio Azevedo (1857-1912), the literature of Brazil, prepared for such a reorientation by the direct influence of the great Portuguese, Eca de Queiroz, and Emile Zola, was definitely steered toward naturalism. "In Aluizio Azevedo," says Benedicto Costa, "one finds neither the poetry of Jose de Alencar, nor the delicacy,—I should even say, archness—of Macedo, nor the sentimental preciosity of Taunay, ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... University, and, after returning from France, he practised for a year or two at Bath. But he could not expect to be successful among fashionable invalids, and, in "Humphrey Clinker," he make Matthew Bramble give such an account of the Bath waters as M. Zola might envy. He was still trying to gain ground in his profession, when, in March 1751, Mr. D. Wilson published the first edition of "Peregrine Pickle" "for the Author," unnamed. I have never seen this first edition, which was "very curious and disgusting." Smollett, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... somewhat squalid home in the Quartier Mouffetard, surrounded by a tribe of children, and he immediately informed me that he was one of the "agents" appointed to attend the Emperor on the campaign. The somewhat lavish Imperial equipage, on which Zola so frequently dilated in "The Downfall," had, I think, already been despatched to Metz, where the Emperor proposed to fix his headquarters, and the escort of Cent Gardes was about to proceed thither. Moulin told ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... shall have a lie upon my conscience. I like Symonds very well, though he is much, I think, of an invalid in mind and character. But his mind is interesting, with many beautiful corners, and his consumptive smile very winning to see. We have had some good talks; one went over Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Whitman, Christ, Handel, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne; do you see the liaison?—in another, I, the Bohnist, the un-Grecian, was the means of his conversion in the matter of the Ajax. It is truly not for nothing that I have read ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... against Lemberg the Russians began once more to drive against Kovel, with the beginning of October, 1916. On October 1 and 2, 1916, the most stubborn fighting developed west of Lutsk in the neighborhood of Zaturze, Zola Savovskaia, and Shelvov. In some places Russian troops stormed twelve times against one and the same position, and at one point they made seventeen attacks. These attacks were kept up for a number of days, but met with little success, and by October 5, 1916, comparative ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... an English possession in the early translations of the work of Zola; its methods were transplanted into English fiction by Mr. George Moore. From his novels, both in passages of direct statement and in the light of his practice, it is possible to gather together the materials of a manifesto of the English Naturalistic school. ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... second room in the library, to which Mr. Gladstone has given the name of the "Humanity room." It is arranged on exactly the same plan as the first, and contains secular works chiefly. You note Madame de Sevigne's Letters on one shelf, in neat and dainty little volumes; and yellow-backed Zola lower down.'[51] ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... "milieu" and "character," as contrasted with the novel which emphasizes "action" and "plot," is a literary device for the analysis of human nature and society. Emile Zola in an essay The Experimental Novel has presented with characteristic audacity the case for works of fiction as instruments for the scientific dissection and explanation ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a power which no one had wielded before him, carried off his readers into exotic lands, and whose art, in appearance most simple, proved a genuine enchantment for the imagination. It was the time when M. Zola and his school stood at the head of the literary movement. There breathed forth from Loti's writings an all-penetrating fragrance of poesy, which liberated French literary ideals from the heavy and oppressive yoke of the Naturalistic ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... Melchior de Voguee in France, who is best known to readers in this country for his standard tome on the Russian novel. In the austere pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes he carefully explained to his readers that d'Annunzio's lewdness must not be confused with the obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be far away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little library,—poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly anyone else in Coalchester ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... on meaningless trifles are as disappointing as possible, and are the more disappointing in proportion to the greatness of the gifts; so that the decadence of Cherbuliez—or, if this is too severe, his lack of improvement after his brilliant beginning—is a very melancholy thing. Zola is among the younger men, the head of a number of enthusiasts who revel in the exact study of social ordure, and who threaten to destroy fiction by ridding it of what makes its life—imagination, that is—and substituting for it scientific ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... peasants of the fertile plain round about Valencia, of the fishermen and sailors of El Grao, the port, a sturdy violent people living amid a snappy fury of vegetation unexampled in Europe. His method is inspired to a certain extent by Zola, taking from him a little of the newspaper-horror mode of realism, with inevitable murder and sudden death in the last chapters. Yet he expresses that life vividly, although even then more given to grand vague ideas than to a careful scrutiny ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... But perhaps, as Zola says, it is only the soft-hearted philosophers who are loud in their curses of war, and the truer wisdom was that of the stoical ancients, who could look with indifference on the massacre of millions. To keep manly, to remind ourselves that the generations come and go, ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... an accurate account of Emile Zola's exile in this country; but some matters I have treated briefly because he himself proposes to give the world—probably in diary form—some impressions of his sojourn in England with a record of his feelings day by day whilst the great campaign in favour of the unfortunate ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... the fortunes of the Philadelphia Ring have fluctuated. Its hold upon the city, however, is not broken, but is still strong enough to justify Owen Wister's observation: "Not a Dickens, only a Zola, would have the face (and the stomach) to tell ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... is in the cynical observation that the only believers in heredity nowadays are the fathers of very clever sons I am not prepared to say. I do say, however, that with the cruel and hopeless law of heredity as laid down by Zola and Ibsen I have little sympathy. According to these pessimists, who ride heredity to death, we inherit only the vices, the weaknesses, and the diseases of our ancestors. If this, however, were really the case, the world would be growing ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... prepare herself as midwife and nurse, and where at the same time she studied social conditions. She also found opportunity to acquaint herself with the newest literature of Europe: Hauptmann, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Zola, Thomas Hardy, and other artist rebels ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... seducible, nor a single man who was not a libertine; for "The Son of Porthros" [Transcriber's note: Porthos?] and his bride are not of Dumas' creation. He is not open to the charge of having drawn the picture of one pure man or woman. Zola is the natural goal of Dumas; and we enjoy neither the route nor the terminus. Louis XIV, Charles II, and George IV are modeled after the old licentious pretense at manhood, but we may all rejoice that they deceive nobody now. Our civilization has outgrown them, and will not, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... accountable for many of the strange records of history. The wonderful cures at Lourdes (of which we have read in Zola's novel of that name) are no doubt the effect of hypnotization by the priests. Some of the strange movements of whole communities during the Crusades are to be explained either on the theory of hypnotization or ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume. A full hall-dozen he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of Lecky, Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, several of Carlyle, and eight or ten of Zola. Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... jackal and snatched what is precious for themselves while their fellows starve and freeze. Insoluble as are the dilemmas he propounded and tense and unrelieved as his accusations were, he stood in his methods nearer, say, to the humane Millet than to the angry Zola. There is a clear, high splendor about his landscapes; youth and love on his desolate plains, as well as anywhere, can find glory in the most difficult existence; he might strip particular lives relentlessly bare but he no less relentlessly clung to the conviction that human life has an inalienable ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren |
