_La
Joie de Vivre_, that drab story of hypochondria and self-sacrifice, was
succeeded by _Germinal_, the greatest, if not the only really great,
novel of labour that has ever been written in any language. After
_Germinal_ came _L'Oeuvre_, which deals with art life in Paris, and is
in part an autobiography of the author. We now come to _La Terre_
around which the greatest controversy has raged. In parts the book is
Shakespearian in its strength and insight, but it has to be admitted at
once that the artistic quality of the work has been destroyed in large
measure by the gratuitous coarseness which the author has thought
necessary to put into it. Even allowing for the fact that the subject is
the brutishness and animality of French peasant life, and admitting that
the picture drawn may be a true one, the effect had been lessened by the
fact that nothing has been left to the imagination. On the other hand
there has, since Shakespeare, been nothing so fine as the treatment of
Pere Fouan, that peasant King Lear, by his ungrateful family. It has
been urged that Zola overdid the horrors of the situation and that no
parent would have been so treated by his children.
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