human
He is perhaps the first Briton to write as a true man of the people on such a subject, that is to say, to take it quite seriously. His story is told with such passion that almost every particle of doctrinaire affectation or easy pattern work is consumed and refined away, and he has created in Tess the most inexpressibly pathetic figure that I know of in literature.
gpt
Perhaps you have read 'Le Rêve.' It and 'La Debâcle' are the only two of Zola's longer novels that could be recommended to a lady, and even the latter with some misgiving. I cannot say that I think 'Le Rêve' one of Zola's best works. I am far from sure that the French critic who said: 'Nous préférons Monsieur Zola à quatre pattes' was not in the right. Nevertheless, there are passages in it stamped by Zola's unique greatness. With regard to its defects, I would rather say nothing at present, except one--the end strikes me as absurd, _franchement mauvais et du placage litteraire_--a recrudescence of something that we have left far behind, something dead that should have been left to bury its dead. All the same there are, I think, truly great things in the book.
human
Concerning Marie Bashkirtseff, she seems to me to have had nearly every gift except two, namely imagination and heart. Above all, a sort of critical intuition, which prevented her from ever resting satisfied in anything second-rate. She was a typical little Russian, small of stature, dark of tint; in temperament sensitive, romantic, versatile; unlike the northern Russians, who are prevalently tall and fair and have a certain contempt for the unpractical. Nearly the whole Russian harvest of folk-songs and cognate treasure comes from the south, from Cossacks and little Russians, the true Muscovite being almost a songless bird. Marie must have had in a high degree the incomparable grace and distinction of her countrywomen, with that wonderful animation and 'fever of life' which makes the atmosphere of Russian society the warmest and brightest in the world. As to your statement that 'some of her failings, like her love of luxury and her desire to be attended to at all costs, are pure vanity and wormwood,' I have always stuck up for this barbaric element, and believe that largely on it depends the prodigious formative power of a _free feminine influence_--that thing of such rarity as to be almost non-existent in our puritanical society. I know a man at half a glance who has ever been under it.