'La Joie de Vivre,' here translated as 'The Joy of Life,' was
written by M. Zola in 1883, partly at his country house at Médan,
and partly at Bénodet, a little seaside place in Brittany. The
scene of the story is laid, however, on the coast of the
neighbouring province of Normandy, between the mouth of the Orne
and the rocks of Grandcamp, where the author had sojourned, more
than once, in previous years. The title selected by him for this
book is to be taken in an ironical or sarcastic sense. There is no
joy at all in the lives of the characters whom he portrays in it.
The story of the 'hero' is one of mental weakness, poisoned by a
constantly recurring fear of death; whilst that of his father is
one of intense physical suffering, blended with an eager desire to
continue living, even at the cost of yet greater torture. Again,
the story of the heroine is one of blighted affections, the
wrecking of all which might have made her life worth living. And
there is a great deal of truth in the various pictures of human
existence which are thus presented to us; however much some people,
in their egregious vanity, may recoil from the idea that life and
love and talent and glory are all very poor and paltry
things.
M. Zola is not usually a pessimist. One finds many of his
darkest pictures relieved by a touch of hopefulness; but there is
extremely little in the pages of 'La Joie de Vivre,' which is
essentially an analysis of human suffering and misery.
Nevertheless, the heroine, Pauline Quenu, the daughter of the
Quenus who figure largely in 'Le Ventre de Paris' ('The Fat and the
Thin'), is a beautiful, touching, and almost consolatory creature.
She appears to the reader as the embodiment of human abnegation and
devotion. Her guardians rob her, but she scarcely heeds it; her
lover Lazare, their son, discards her for another woman, but she
forgives him. It is she who infuses life into the lungs of her
rival's puny babe; and when Lazare yields to his horrible fear of
death it is she who tries to comfort him, who endeavours to dispel
the gloomy thoughts which poison his hours. No sacrifice is too
great for her—money, love, she relinquishes everything, in the vain
hope of securing a transient happiness for the man to whom she has
given her heart. At times, no doubt, she yearns for his affection,
she experiences momentary weaknesses, but her spirit is strong, and
it invariably triumphs over her rebellious flesh.
Lazare, on the other hand, is one of those wretched beings
whose number seems to be constantly increasing in our midst, the
product of our corrupt civilisation, our grotesque educational
systems, our restlessness and thirst for wealth, our thousand vices
and our blatant hypocrisy. At the same time he is a talented young
fellow, as are so many of the wretched
décadents of nowadays; and 'something
more or something less' in his brain might have turned his talent
into genius. In this respect, indeed, he suggests another of M.
Zola's characters, Claude Lantier, the painter of 'L'Œuvre'; but he
is far weaker than was Claude, whose insanity sprang from his
passion for his art, whereas Lazare's mental disorder is the fruit
of that lack, both of will-power and of the spirit of perseverance,
which always becomes manifest in decaying races. Briefly, he is a
type of the talented, versatile, erratic weakling—a variety of what
Paris expressively calls the arriviste
, who loomed so largely through the final years of the last
century, and who by force of numbers, not of power, threatens to
dominate the century which has just begun.
In one respect Lazare differs greatly from Claude Lantier.
Claude's insanity drove him to suicide, but Lazare shrinks from the
idea of annihilation. His whole life indeed is blighted by the
unreasoning fear of death to which I have previously alluded. In
the brightest moments of Lazare's existence, in the broad sunshine,
amid the fairest scenes of Nature, in the very transports of love,
as in moments of anxiety and bereavement, and as in the gloom, the
silence, and the solitude of night, the terrible, ever-recurring
thought flashes on him: 'My God, my God, so one must die!' In the
course of years this dread is intensified by the death of his
mother and his old dog; and neither of the women who love him—the
devoted Pauline, whom he discards, and the puppet Louise, whom he
marries—can dispel it. The pious may argue that this fear of death
is only natural on the part of an unbeliever, and that the proper
course for Lazare to have pursued was to have sought the
consolation of religion. But they have only to visit a few lunatic
asylums to find in them extremely devout patients, who, whilst
believing in a resurrection and a future life, nevertheless dread
death quite as keenly as Lazare Chanteau did. Indeed, this fear of
dissolution constitutes a well-known and perfectly defined disorder
of the brain, rebellious alike to scientific and to spiritual
treatment.
By the side of Lazare and Pauline 'La Joie de Vivre' shows us
the former's parents. There is Lazare's mother, who despoils and
wrongs Pauline for his benefit, who lives a life of sour envy, and
who dies a wretched death, fearful of punishment. And there is his
father, whose only thought is his stomach, and who, as I have
mentioned, clings despairingly to a semblance of life amid the
direst physical anguish. Louise, whom Lazare marries, is a
skilfully drawn type of the weak, pretty, scented, coquettish,
frivolous woman, who seems to have been with us ever since the
world began, the woman to whom men are drawn by a perversion of
natural instincts, and whom they need, perhaps, in order that in
their saner moments they may the better appreciate the qualities of
those few who resemble Pauline. As for the subordinate characters
of the story, the grumpy Norman servant, though of a type often met
with in M. Zola's stories, is perhaps the best, the various changes
in her disposition towards the heroine being described with great
fidelity to human nature. Then the rough but kind-hearted old
doctor, the sturdy, tolerant priest, the artful and vicious village
children, are all admirably delineated by M. Zola, and grouped
around the central figures in such wise as to add to the truth,
interest, and impressiveness of his narrative. And, painful as the
tale at times may be, it is perhaps as well, in these days of pride
and vanity, that one should be recalled now and again to a sense of
the abject grovelling which unhappily characterises such a vast
number of human lives. It may slightly console one, no doubt, to
remember that there are at least some Paulines among us. But then,
how few they are, and how numerous on the other hand are the men
like Lazare and the women like his mother! When all is considered,
judging by what one sees around one every day, one is forced to the
conclusion that this diseased world of ours makes extremely little
progress towards real sanity and health.
E. A. V.
MERTON, SURREY.
THE JOY OF LIFE