countries; but like all such questions, it has come first to a head in France; because France is the battlefield of Christendom.  That question is, of course, roughly this:  whether in that ill-defined area of verbal licence on certain dangerous topics it is an extenuation of indelicacy or an aggravation of it that the indelicacy was deliberate and solemn.  Is indecency more indecent if it is grave, or more indecent if it is gay?  For my part, I belong to an old school in this matter.  When a book or a play strikes me as a crime, I am not disarmed by being told that it is a serious crime.  If a man has written something vile, I am not comforted by the explanation that he quite meant to do it.  I know all the evils of flippancy; I do not like the man who laughs at the sight of virtue.  But I prefer him to the man who weeps at the sight of virtue and complains bitterly of there being any such thing.  I am not reassured, when ethics are as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that they are also as grave and sincere as suicide.  And I think there is an obvious fallacy in the bitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between the aversion to Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the popularity of some such joke as “Dear Old Charlie.”  Surely there is nothing mysterious or unphilosophic in the popular preference.  The joke of “Dear Old Charlie” is passed—­because it is a joke.  “Ghosts” are exorcised—­because they are ghosts.

This is, of course, the whole question of Zola.  I am grown up, and I do not worry myself much about Zola’s immorality.  The thing I cannot stand is his morality.  If ever a man on this earth lived to embody the tremendous text, “But if the light in your body be darkness, how great is the darkness,” it was certainly he.  Great men like Ariosto, Rabelais, and Shakspere fall in foul places, flounder in violent but venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the best things in the world:  Rabelais, of the instruction of ardent and austere youth; Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakspere, of the splendid stillness of mercy.  But in Zola even the ideals are undesirable; Zola’s mercy is colder than justice—­nay, Zola’s mercy is more bitter in the mouth than injustice.  When Zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us, like Rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning.  He takes us into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass bottles, and where the rule is taught from the exceptions.  Zola’s truth answers the exact description of the skeleton in the cupboard; that is, it is something of which a domestic custom forbids the discovery, but which is quite dead, even when it is discovered.  Macaulay said that the Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.  Of such substance also was this Puritan who had lost his God.  A Puritan of this type is worse than the Puritan who hates pleasure because there is evil in it.  This man actually hates evil because there is pleasure in it.  Zola was worse than a pornographer, he was a pessimist.  He did worse than encourage sin:  he encouraged discouragement.  He made lust loathsome because to him lust meant life.