"Zola" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 a ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... occurs throughout literature, but no more can be done than just to allude to a few instances. The theme recurs continually in the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau; it explains the character of the chevalier in Prevost's Manon l'Escault. Scenes of this nature are found in Zola's Nana, in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved, in Albert Juhelle's Les Pecheurs d'Hommes, in Dostojevski. In disguised and unrecognized form it constitutes the undercurrent of much of the sentimental literature of the present day, though in most ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... secularization of the drama, at the end of the fifteenth century, for two reasons. The dramatic spectacle fostered for religious purposes had become, until Lope de Vega rescued it, a medium for that "naturalism" which some of us fancy to be a discovery of M. Zola and M. Catulle Mendes; it had escaped from the control of the Church and had become a mere diversion. Calderon was the one man who could unite the spirit of religion to the form of the drama which the secular renaissance ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... 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 moral ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... 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 ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... farewell between lovers; here a wounded Boer meeting his death at the bayonet of an English dastard; there a Queen Eleanor sucking poison from her husband's arm. A series of illuminated scenes of rapine and disaster might be studied through magnifying glasses. The presence of a wax bust of Zola was due, I imagine, less to his illustrious career than to the untoward circumstances of his death. The usual Sleeping Beauty heaved her breast punctually in the centre of ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Letter from Theodore de Banville Letter from Adolphe Dennery Letter from Alexandre Dumas Fils Letter from Edmond Gondinet Letter by Eugene Labiche Letter by Ernest Legouve Letter from Edouard Pailleron Letter from Victorien Sardou Letter from Emile Zola Notes ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various
... not remember ever 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 of ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... tourist who has been so many times abroad 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. ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... February 23d, M. Zola was found guilty of publishing a letter criticising the Government for its conduct in the Esterhazy court-martial and declaring the innocence of Albert Dreyfus. This letter was published in the Paris Aurore, whose editor ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 11, March 17, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • 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. The naturalists ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... theatre, the audiences are of quite a distinct character, including many who like opera, but do not wish to go to a theatre. Now, this general condemnation of the theatre because it is often used for frivolous purposes is just as unreasonable as it would be to condemn and avoid all novels because Zola writes novels. ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... was (as I remember it) of about an hour and a half; but I passed no object of interest, as the phrase is, whatever. The phrase hardly applies even to Bourg itself, which is simply a town quelconque, as M. Zola would say. Small, peaceful, rustic, it stands in the midst of the great dairy-feeding plains of Bresse, of which fat county, sometime property of the house of Savoy, it was the modest capital. The blue masses of the Jura give it a creditable horizon, but the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... away across country", and the whole lacks in unity and in scientific precision. But there are passages in it that men will not willingly let die. His discussion of the growth of personality, of the relations of Science, Art, Religion, and Life, of Walt Whitman and Zola, and above all, of George Eliot, are worthy of Lanier at his best. These passages and the still more important one on the relation of art to morals are too well known to be quoted; they will be considered in ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Empire, making at the same time the acquaintance of most of the literary lions of the day—Flaubert, with whom he became very intimate; Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the two gifted brothers who may be said to have founded the realistic school of fiction years before Emile Zola came forward as the apostle of realism; Tourguenieff, the two Dumas, and many others who welcomed enthusiastically the young Southern poet ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hypocrisy of the higher classes. George Sand, with 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 paid so dearly. The painters ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... was a sort of half furriner aboard. He wasn't a reg'lar fisherman—never served his apprenticeship to it, you know,—an' was named Zola. The skipper, whose name was John Dewks, couldn't abide him, an' they often used to quarrel, specially when they was in liquor. There was nobody on deck that night except the skipper and Zola, but my old friend—Dawson was his name—was in his bunk lyin' wide awake. ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... because they are immoral, but because they are disturbing to the moral sense. Literature which ignores the fundamental moral principle of the freedom of the will, like the works of Flaubert, Maupassant, much of Zola, Loti, and Thomas Hardy, fails of beauty, inasmuch as it fails of the perfect reposeful harmony of human nature ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... policy. I do not read his books, but I have a great admiration for him. The public feeling is so strong against him that crowds of the populace rush about the streets pushing, howling, and screaming at the top of their lungs, "Conspuez Zola!" which I cannot translate in other words than, "Spit on Zola!" Mrs. Lawrence and I met a mob while driving through the Place de la Concorde, and a more absurd exhibition ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... pursuits. The romantic school began with the worship of subjective sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan and M. Zola, as its principal exponents,—one speaking with its masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice. I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the Renan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates. As I have used the term gnostic, both he ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... great French savant, Emile Zola, penned these words: "Let each one accept his task, a task which should fill his life. It may be very humble; it will not be the less useful. Never mind what it is, so long as it exists and keeps you erect! When you have regulated it, without excess—just the quantity you are ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... us to a very vital question. Is it not possible to amend the law so as to make it possible for a lawyer to advise his client that he may publish the works of Blake, Zola, and Swinburne, or produce the plays of Ibsen and Mr. Granville Barker, or print an ordinary criticism in his newspaper, without the possibility of finding himself in prison, or mulcted in damages and costs in consequence? No doubt it is; but only by a declaration of constitutional right to blaspheme, ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... with disdain. To you, who can amuse the world—to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the battlefield, and the sea—the world must always return: escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the bouges, from the surgeries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the wearisome ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... had at least to retain certain rudimentary characteristics allying it to such "dragons of the prime" as toads and snakes. His scientific sympathies were distinctly reptilian; he loved nature's vulgarians and described himself as the Zola of zoology. His wife and daughters, not having the advantage to share his enlightened curiosity regarding the works and ways of our ill-starred fellow-creatures, were, with needless austerity, excluded from what he called the Snakery, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 for learning and to the desire for delicacy and refinement. This want ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Madame Sidonie, who figures in M. Zola's novel, 'La Curee.' The male cousin, mentioned immediately afterwards, is Octave Mouret, the leading character of 'Pot-Bouille' and 'Au ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... have paraded the streets in small groups, uttering cries against Zola and the Jews, and have been dispersed by ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 5, February 3, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... feel within him the 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 as ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made between novelists and dramatists of diverse schools, why has not M. Zola, who in so many regards should be considered a master, attained the heights of eminence upon which are enrolled the names of Shakespeare, Moliere, Corneille, Schiller, Madame de Stael, and George Sand? It is because M. Zola, profound analyst and charming narrator, even more forcibly than Musset ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... 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
... that are unique in their suggestiveness and originality. Being without rime or meter, the lines oppose almost as many difficulties to a musician as the works of Walt Whitman; and yet, as Alfred Bruneau has set Zola's prose to music, so some brave American composer will find inspiration abundant in the works of Walt Whitman and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power, writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal, is worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers. ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 Balzac's Le Cousin Pons, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... art in which sheer evil, without any compensating development of character, is portrayed; where indeed the struggle may even cause decay of character. In Zola's The Dram Shop, for example, the story is the tale of the moral decline, through unfortunate circumstances and vicious surroundings, of the sweet, pliant Gervaise. Instead of developing a resistance to circumstances which would have made them yield a value even in defeat, she lets herself go ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... other hand, I have never dealt, substantively and in detail, with Chateaubriand, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, Beyle, George Sand, or Zola[2] as novelists, nor with any of the very large number of minors not already mentioned, including some, such as Nodier and Gerard de Nerval, whom, for one thing or another, I should myself very decidedly put above minority. And, further, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... absurdly inscribed on the register of the realistic school, {137} we may say that the difference on this point is not the difference between Balzac and Dumas, but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us take by way of example the character next in importance to that of the heroine—the character of her paramour. A viler figure was never sketched by Balzac; a viler figure was seldom drawn by Thackeray. But as with Balzac, so with the author of this play, the masterful will combining ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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 ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... intimating that time now had its innings and eternity was altogether out of it. Several minutes seemed to pass before any one had the courage to ask whether the degradation of authorship was not partially the result of the stand taken by the naturalists in Zola, who scorned the name of art for his calling and aspired to that of science. The hardy adventurer who suggested this possibility said that it was difficult to imagine the soul stirred to the same high passion by the botanist, the astronomer, the geologist, the electrician, or even ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... novelists to write the story of Gilles de Rais," and after a silence Des Hermies added, "I do not object to the latrine; hospital; and workshop vocabulary of naturalism. For one thing, the subject matter requires some such diction. Again, Zola, in L'Assommoir, has shown that a heavy-handed artist can slap words together hit-or-miss and give an effect of tremendous power. I do not really care how the naturalists maltreat language, but I do strenuously object to the earthiness of their ideas. They have made our literature the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... I have sometimes dealt with human frailty, I have treated it gently. I have never betrayed a Zola-spirit." ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... somewhere called France "the country of Europe where the people is most alive."[333] The people is what interested George Sand. And in France the people is, above all, the peasant. The workman in Paris or in other great towns of France may afford material for such pictures as those which M. Zola[334] has lately given us in L'Assommoir—pictures of a kind long ago labelled by Madame Sand as "the literature of mysteries of iniquity, which men of talent and imagination try to bring into fashion." But the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... like 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 ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... 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
... 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 know ourselves to be. Man has been described as a animal with aspirations ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... "Les Soirees de Medan," the volume in which "Boule de Suif" appeared, there is another story called "Sac au Dos," in which another novelist made his appearance among the five who "publicly affirmed their literary tendencies" about the central figure of Zola. J. K. Huysmans, then but at the outset of his slow and painful course through schools and experiments, was in time to sum up the new tendencies of a new period, as significantly as Maupassant summed up in his short and brilliant, and almost undeviating career, the tendencies ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... The Nights are often coarse and indelicate, and sometimes even gross it is a mistake to suppose that they are demoralising in the same way that a French novel of the Zola type is, or might be. Indeed, what we would call its impropriety is only a reflection of the naive freedom with which talk is to this day carried on in the family circles of the East. They see no harm in what we should regard as indecency. So that when ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... indeed "superior" to Byron and other ranting dreamers of his type, but we produce no Childe Harolds, and we have come to the strange pass of pretending that Don Juan is improper, while we pore over Zola with avidity! To such a pitch has our culture brought us! And, like the Pharisee in the Testament, we thank God we are not as others are. We are glad we are not as the Arab, as the African, as the Hindoo; we are proud of ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... form such a world of their own, and teem at certain hours of the day and night with such exuberance of life, that it was only natural they should attract the attention of a novelist like M. Zola, who, to use his own words, delights "in any subject in which vast masses of people can be shown in motion." Mr. Sherard tells us[*] that the idea of "Le Ventre de Paris" first occurred to M. Zola in 1872, when he used continually to take his friend Paul Alexis for a ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... despondency. Without taking into 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" ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 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 worse ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... 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, nor ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... keen observer, possessed an excellent but not lofty imagination, and never asserted a philosophy of life. His writings are all interesting, terse, precise, and truthful, but lack the glow that comes with a sympathetic and spiritual outlook on life. Zola says of him: ".... a Latin of good, clear, solid head, a maker of beautiful sentences shining like gold...." He chooses a single incident, a few characteristics and then moulds them into a compact story. ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... remote from Europe than in its earlier days. The contact of its romanticism with that of Europe was, as has been seen, imperfect, but its touch with the later developments and reactions of the movement in Europe is far more imperfect. With Tolstoy, Ibsen, d'Annunzio, Zola, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Sudermann, the American people can have no effectual touch; their social tradition and culture make them impenetrable to the present ideas of Europe as they are current in literary forms. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... In Thomas Hardy (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. He has preferred to deal chiefly with persons ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... found in his books, where, side by side with a truth and occasional brutality which makes him in some respects the forerunner of the realists, we find a wealth of imagination and insistence on the power of the higher emotions, which are completely alien to the school of Flaubert and Zola. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... for sanctity. (E.C. Clayton, Queens of Song, vol. i, 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
... up Zola's "Fecundite," which he had taken from stock; tried to read it; put it down; sent for "Tom Sawyer"; got up, went after Dickens's "Christmas Books," and put them down; peeped into "Little Women," and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... was waiting for you I glanced at your new books—Emerson—Dickens—Zola." He was looking toward the row of paper backs that filled almost the whole length of the mantel. "I must read them. I always like your books. You spend nearly as much time reading as I do—and you don't need it, for you've got a good education. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto, became president of the Republic of Texas, organized the futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six volumes of notes and letters for a history of Texas that might have been as raw-meat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Then as a poet he reached his climax in "The Daughter of Mendoza"—a graceful but moonshiny imitation of Tom Moore and Lord Byron. Perhaps it is better for the weak to imitate than to ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... of Emile Edouard Charles Antoine Zola were sordid and unromantic. He was born at Paris, on April 2, 1840, his father dying while the son was quite young, and leaving his family no legacy except a lawsuit against the municipality of the town of Aix. And ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... glisten glass of Venetian pattern and china from the bankrupt stock of kings. According to their intellectualities their talk is of labor and capital, of working-girls' clubs and model tenement-houses, of Buddha and Zola, of foreign titles, and transplanted fox-hunting. To-day a hundred thousand dollars is barely a competency, and a building less than a dozen stories high dwarfs the highway of trade. The vestibule limited, the ocean grey-hound, the Atlantic cable, and the voice-bearing telephone have made ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... 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 ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... found "it" on back shelves or stuck away in corners. Angrily he would blow off the dust and then settle himself with a sigh to read. There was always something wistful to me in the way Joe opened each new book. But what a joy when he found "it"—Darwin, Nietzsche, Henry George, Walt Whitman, Zola, Samuel Butler. What a sudden sort of glee the night ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... that in everything that was external, except her beauty, she fell short of a fastidious taste. She was intensely ignorant even for that time. She spoke in a broad Cockney dialect. She had lived the life of the Coal Yard, and, like Zola's Nana, she could never remember the time when she had ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... command; for while Borrow, the man of genius, throws by the very necessities of his temperament the colours of romance around his gipsies, the characters of ‘In Gypsy Tents,’ depicted by a man of remarkable talent merely, are as realistic as though painted by Zola, while the wealth of gipsy lore at his command ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... and 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 immediately, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... decent restraints upon social intercourse seem removed. Subjects which the common consent of civilized creatures has banished from mixed society are freely opened and discussed. To people like the ordinary run of the believers in spiritism, the opera, the ballet, and the annual Zola are unknown, and they must take their excitements where they can find them. The dim light, the unhealthy commerce of fictitious ghosts, the unreality of act and sentiment, the unwonted abandon, form an atmosphere in which these second-hand mystics float away into a sphere where ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... canoeing on the Seine on Sundays and holidays. Gustave Flaubert took him under his protection and acted as a kind of literary guardian to him, guiding his debut in journalism and literature. At Flaubert's home he befriended the Russian novelist Tourgueneff and Emilie Zola, as well as many of the protagonists of the realistic school. He wrote considerable verse and short plays. In 1878 he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and became a contributing editor to several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... running after the bits of lost inspiration. Goethe, likewise, in a letter to Humboldt regarding his Faust, which occupied him for sixty years, full of interruptions and gaps: "The difficulty has been to get through strength of will what is really to be gotten only by a spontaneous act of nature." Zola, according to his biographer, Toulouse, "imagines a novel, always starting out with a general idea that dominates the work; then, from induction to induction, he draws out of it the characters and all ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... contemporaries, though winning the admiration of Merimee and the praise of Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about 1880. If to be studied and admired is to be understood, the prediction has been fulfilled. Taine pronounced him the greatest psychologist of the century; M. Zola, doing violence to facts, claimed him as a literary ancestor; M. Bourget discovered in him the author of a nineteenth-century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters. During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride in isolation. Born at Grenoble in 1783, he ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... than the actual world. In the latter case he is generally more or less unhappy, for he is compelled to see the world as it really is, and he finds it not all nice. The realistic small boy can have very little true happiness. Fancy M. Zola's childhood: assuming, of course, that he was then a Realist, which he probably was not, judging from the fact that he is only a Realist professionally at the present day. To the childish Zola, life must have presented itself as a series of human documents. He saw ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... glanced past her, not quick enough to follow the wit that evoked those ripples of silvery laughter from the two fair-haired, pale-faced girls in sea-green cashmere. She felt as an Englishman may feel who has made himself master of academical French, and who takes up one of Zola's novels, or goes into artistic society, and finds that there is another French, a complete and copious language, of which he knows not ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... implied argument is often more important than the 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 ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... 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 the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... cordially, and after they were on their way he said that the young writer "seemed to be a youth of promise, and that he hoped he should meet him again." But when they did hear of him again it was as the lecturer of a series of talks on Zola, "which, as may be supposed," notes Mrs. Bronson, "the poet expressed no desire to attend." The marvelous days of that unearthly loveliness of Venice in the early autumn flew by, and Mrs. Bronson's guest returned to DeVere Gardens. To his ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... discussed. The author was one who, with 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 school. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... way to the Russian Government and its methods. At the time of our visit "Quo Vadis" was on everybody's lips, and the solitary copy had been read and re-read into rags, although it had only been a month in the settlement. Dickens, Thackeray, Zola, and Anthony Hope were favourite authors, but whole pages were missing from most of the volumes in the tiny library, and the books were otherwise mutilated, not by carelessness or ill usage, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... representation of human beings the laws of beauty, such as were taught by the School. And on this point one might apply to them all that one knows of the ideas of the Goncourts and Flaubert, and later of Zola, in the domain of the novel. They were moved by the same ideas; to speak of the one group is to speak of the other. The longing for truth, the horror of emphasis and of false idealism which paralysed the novelist as well as the painter, led the Impressionists ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... You insisted absolutely. What I foresaw has happened. The result of the performance has surpassed my anticipations. A critic pretended that I played Virginie of L'Assommoir instead of Dona Clorinde of L'Aventuriere. May Emile Augier and Zola absolve me! It is my first rebuff at the Comedie; it shall be my last. I warned you on the day of the dress rehearsal. You have gone too far. I keep my word. By the time you receive this letter I shall have left Paris. Will you ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... 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 ideal: ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... overpoweringly noble, because all geniuses and all peers are supposed to like their birds of paradise a little high. I wonder why. I have met and talked with a good many men of genius, from Wagner and Liszt to Zola and some still living contemporaries, and, really, their general preference for highly correct social gatherings has struck me as phenomenal. There are even noblemen who seem to be quite respectable, and pretend that they would rather ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... still living in the literature of France. Fat Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still surpasses them in native power. The old author, breaking with an ECLAT DE VOIX, out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his own ground, and still gives us the most vivid ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... feign there was no such thing as coal. It was too horrible. Only a Zola would admit it. It was the epoch of concealment. The thing purchased was like a little cupboard on four legs; it might have held any convenient trifle; and there was a shelf upon the top and a book of poetry ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... perhaps his 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 to ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... "You call it that? Yes, I call it kidnapped, and poor old Zola was so harmless if they would but let her ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... easily induced and is exhibited in all varieties of activity—mental, physical, or visceral. Mental work may produce fatigue with extreme readiness even although the quality of the work may remain of a high standard. To Darwin and to Zola work for more than three hours daily was an impossibility, and yet their work done under these restrictions excites all men's admiration. The palpitation and breathlessness which follows upon trivial exertion, such as climbing a flight of ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... require that one should give oneself; the French-cooked dinner as much as the pot of beer; the game of chance, whether with clean cards at a club or with greasy ones in a tap-room; the outdoing of one's neighbours, whether by the ragged heroes of Zola or the well-groomed heroes of Balzac, require no such coming forward of the soul: they take us, without any need for our giving ourselves. Hence, as I have just said, the preference for them does not imply original baseness, but only lack of higher energy. We can judge of the condition of those ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... it was very nearly dismissed in the Victorian time) the differences between human beings become overpoweringly plain; whether they are expressed in the high caricatures of Dickens or the low lunacies of Zola. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... they read the best too; and the worst don't seem to hurt them. I'll warrant that Mees Gay—that is her name, is it not?—has read Zola, for instance; and yet, see how simple and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... considered by many critics the novelist of biggest stature as yet produced by America, the nature and sources of his strength and of his weakness deserve careful analysis. Observe (1) that his attitude toward life and his general method derive from Zola; (2) that his materials are drawn from his extensive and varied experience as a journalist; (3) that these two facts are exemplified in brief in his biographical studies, Twelve Men, which ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... one of his essays 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 ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... in a period of revolution, prepared by the evolution begotten by the bourgeois organization itself and promoted by utopian socialism as well as by scientific socialism. Likewise, we are in that period of social life which Bagehot calls "the age of discussion,"[69] and already we can see what Zola has called, in Germinal, the cracking of the politico-social crust, and, in fact, all those symptoms which Taine has described in his l'Ancien Regime, in relating the history of the twenty years which preceded 1789. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... sensation - and an idea IN PETTO that the game is about played out. I have got too realistic, and I must break the trammels - I mean I would if I could; but the yoke is heavy. I saw with amusement that Zola says the same thing; and truly the DEBACLE was a mighty big book, I have no need for a bigger, though the last part is a mere mistake in my opinion. But the Emperor, and Sedan, and the doctor at the ambulance, and the horses in the field of battle, Lord, how gripped it is! What ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... last under the Empire. It is the one described in Zola's Nana. The prize for the third race was 100,000 francs. After English horses had been victorious for several years in succession, the prize was carried off in 1870—as in Nana—by a native-born horse, and the jubilation was great; ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... marvellous. Such was the expressed object of Thackeray, and such is the general character of the works of George Eliot and of Mr. Anthony Trollope. This tendency has been carried to an extreme by some English novelists, and above all by the Frenchman, Emile Zola, who have not only thrown aside entirely the romantic element in their fictions, but have shown their ideas of realism to consist in the base and the ignoble, and have confined their studies to the vices and degradation of the ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... go horse and rider down. Ho, Robert Elsmere! count thy beads; lo, champion of the fray, With brandished colt, comes Felix Holt, all of the Modern day. And Silas Lapham's six-shooter is cocked: the Colonel's spry! There spurs the wary Egoist, defiance in his eye; There Zola's ragged regiment comes, with dynamite in hand, And Flaubert's crew of country doctors devastate the land. On Robert Elsmere Friar Tuck falls with his quarter-staff, Nom De! to see the clerics fight ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... work, it is as well that the reader should understand M. Zola's aim in writing it, and his views—as distinct from those of his characters—upon Lourdes, its Grotto, and its cures. A short time before the book appeared M. Zola was interviewed upon the subject by his friend and biographer, Mr. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the rightful successor of Wagner, while the conservative party in music have not hesitated to stigmatise him as a wearisome impostor. 'Kerim' (1887), his first work, passed almost unnoticed. 'Le Reve,' an adaptation of Zola's novel, was produced in 1891 at the Opera Comique, and in the same year was performed in London. The scene is laid in a French cathedral city. The period is that of ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... 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. And how well he succeeds! He is not without ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... its meaning had never been taught; and though industrial schools increase, hours are now shortened, and inspection is active, it remains true that almost the same conditions perpetuate themselves at many points,—the descriptions given by the great realist, Zola, of women and children in the mines, and the hideousness of their home life, being very literal and ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... quivering soul. Marriage had been to them both very sacred. They hated, beyond most good women, anything that seemed to materialise or lower the ideal. If there can be imagined a scale of standards for the relations of men and women, of which Zola had not touched the extremity at one end, the first place at the other extremity might be assigned to such Englishwomen as Rose and her mother. The most subtle and amazingly high motives had been assigned to Lord Charlton's most ordinary actions, and happily he had been so ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... the only exception, and pre-Raphaelitism was a violent and emotional counter-revolution rather than a movement characterized by catholicity of critical appreciation. Literary criticism is certainly full of similar intolerance; though when Gautier talks about Racine, or Zola about "Mes Haines," or Mr. Howells about Scott, the polemic temper, the temper most opposed to the critical, is very generally recognized. And in spite of their admirable accomplishment in various branches of literature, these writers ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... process of selection, of symbolizing (not photographically representing) the Ideas beneath the Things—the Substance beneath the Accidents—the Thought beneath the Expression—(you can call it what you like). Zola in literature, Strauss in music, the French school of painting—these reduced Realism ad absurdum. Thus once more the Catholic Church, in this as in everything else, was discovered to have possessed the secret all along. The Symbolic Reaction therefore began, and all our music, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson |
