"This is the limit" was the one remark that went uncontradicted. Not only was the book outspoken, but it was indubitably salacious and unspeakably suggestive and provocative. Serious people at once began to talk of prosecution. And with this in mind I hurried to call on Daudet, Dumas fils and others.
Daudet received me with his usual kindness.
"I regret the book," he said. "I am sorry that Zola wrote it; it will give French literature a worse name than it has already in Europe, and, really, the stigma will be deserved. Zola has gone too far this time. I have only glanced at the book, but there are pages in it that are more provocative than the youthful indiscretions of Mirabeau or Gustave Droz."
"Then you would be in favor of prosecution?" I asked.
"Of course not," Daudet cried. "How can you imagine such a thing? Zola is a great writer. He must be allowed license that one would never accord to an ordinary penman. There will be no prosecution. We would all unite against that at once. No ordinary magistrate could sit in judgment on Emile Zola. But I am sorry he published the book. It can only damage his reputation."
"Yet everybody says that it will add greatly to his bank balance," I ventured.
Daudet held up his hands.
"Zola assuredly did not care for that aspect of it," he replied.
Dumas and the others agreed with Daudet, and Nana was left unpursued.
What will be the outcome of the prosecution of my book, I am unable even to guess. I can only abide the issue. Meanwhile I often catch myself reciting what Matthew Arnold called My Last Word:
Let the long contention cease,
Geese are swans and swans are geese;
Let them have it as they will
Thou are tired, best be still.
They out-talked thee, jeered thee, cursed thee, Better men fared thus before thee Fired their ringing shot and passed Hotly charged, though broke at last.
Charge once more and then be dumb;
Let the victors when they come,
When the forts of folly fall
Find thy body by the wall.
Let me now for a moment talk of old age again. I said in my second volume that old age had little to recommend it, but I find a good many authorities against me on the matter.
And many friends have reproached me for the sadness of the last chapter in my previous volume, which I wrote when I was about seventy. A dozen, at least, have written to me, asking me whether there were no consolations peculiar to old age. There may be many, but not for the man who after seventy still feels young. Fortenelle at the age of ninety-five, was asked which were the twenty years of his life that he regretted the most; he replied that he regretted none of them, but that nevertheless the period he would wish to relive, the period in which he had been happiest, was from fifty-five to seventy-five. "At fifty-five," he said, "one's fortune is made; one's reputation established; one is well considered by the many, honored perhaps by the few. Moreover, one sees things as they are; most of one's passions are cooled and calmed; one has reached the goal of one's career; done what one could for society; and one has then fewer enemies, or perhaps one should say fewer envious people, because one's merit is generally recognized."
Buff on, f too, at seventy years of age, declares that the philosopher can only regard old age as a foolish prejudice; and he goes on to paint a picture of senile pleasures.
"Every day," he says, "that I get up in good health, have I not the full enjoyment of the day as much as ever I had? If I order my appetites, my desires, my hopes according to the dictates of wisdom and reason, am I not as happy as I ever could have been; and the thought of the past and its pleasures, which seem to give some regrets to old fools, affords me, on the contrary a joyful memory of charming pictures, precious recollections of pleasurable incidents; and these pictures and memories are free of taint and perfectly pure and bring to the soul only an agreeable emotion. The restlessness, the disappointments, the mistakes which accompany the pleasures of youth have all disappeared in age, and every regret should disappear with them, for what is regret, after all, but the last quiver of that foolish personal vanity which refuses to grow old."
There is a good deal of truth in all this, but not, as I say about myself, for the man who after seventy still feels young. To him, old age is like poverty; its blessings must be sought in their rarity. Bernard Shaw writes me that he is "a ruin and that all the pre-seventy in him is dead." All the pre-seventy and the pre-fifty are nearly as much alive in me as they were twenty years ago. The keenest regret I have is that I haven't money enough to go around the world for the third time and see it all again and tell of the changes which fifty years have shown in it. I should have thought some paper would be willing to pay for my account of this journey, but no one offers to, and my autobiography and my works of the last four or five years have brought me in less than any single year's work of my whole life.
I had no idea, when I determined to write my life frankly, that I should be punished as I have been for my outspokenness. I knew, of course, that most of the foolish and all the envious would declare that I was writing pornography in my old age; they would say "Harris was always dirty, you know; filthy minded." I knew the popular verdict beforehand and smiled at it, but I had no idea that this Anglo-Saxon condemnation would injure the sale of my other books as it has. I used to receive ten thousand dollars a year from them; the publication of the first volume of My Life cut this income down to less than a thousand dollars yearly, and injured in like degree the sale value of anything I may write. Moreover, this condemnation keeps me from returning to London or New York and beginning life again if I wanted to, utilizing my knowledge of the stock exchange to rebuild my fortune.
Thirty odd years ago my friend, Burton, published his Arabian Nights, which was freer, not to say viler, than anything I have ever written, and the books went through the post freely, and he made ten thousand pounds out of the publication. But now England has copied America in one of its worst acts: every one knows that if you send an obscene book through the post in America, you can be had up and punished as if you had published the book.
But this execrable law, which allows a foolish official to judge the great innovators on the same level as the corrupters, has now been adopted by England. Twenty-five or thirty years ago she had better sense. Nevertheless, an English translation of Brantome is now being published and freely distributed in England; but the best English lawyers assure me that I could not hope for any leniency.
I remember in the prosecution of Mrs. Besant and Bradlaugh the judge stated that if the book was a dear book, it was not to be condemned like a cheap book, which might fall into the hands of boys and girls. This sane English compromise now has been tossed aside and the public prosecutor can proceed against any one for sending an obscene or indecent book through the mails, just as in America, even if one put a price on it, as I do, that should prevent it falling into the hands of any except those who really want it. But now that aristocratic England has taken on the livery of democratic America, there is no room for the man who uses English as his mother tongue to warn or to guide his fellows frankly. "God's spies" are punished as if they were the devil's minions.
I don't think I have committed any violation even of these idiotic laws, but I am assured that I should find scant justice in America at the hands of the Justices Levys and Mayers; and just as little perhaps in London at the hands of the Horridges.
He who wishes to give a true record of his life is almost compelled to leave out the most interesting incidents of it. But some amusing ones, the brave soul may still record.