It is because, I believe, I know and understand Emile Zola so well, that I never once lost confidence in him throughout the events which led to his exile in England.  That exile, curiously enough, I foreshadowed in a letter addressed to the ‘Star’ some months before it actually began.  When, however, one has been intimate with the French for thirty years or so it is not, to my thinking, so very difficult to tell what is likely to happen in a given French crisis.  The unexpected has to be reckoned with, of course; and much depends on ability to estimate the form which the unexpected may take.  Here experience, familiarity with details of contemporary French history, and personal knowledge of the men concerned in the issue, become indispensable.

On January 16, 1898, three days after M. Zola’s famous ‘J’accuse’ letter appeared in ‘L’Aurore,’ and two days before the French Government instructed the Public Prosecutor to proceed against its author, I wrote to the ‘Westminster Gazette’ a long letter dealing with M. Zola’s position.  In this letter, which appeared in the issue of the 19th, I began by establishing a comparison between Zola and Voltaire, whose action with regard to the memory of Jean Calas I briefly epitomised.  Curiously enough at that moment M. Zola, as I afterwards learnt, was telling the Paris correspondent of the ‘Daily Chronicle’ that the opposition offered to his advocacy of the cause of Alfred Dreyfus was identical with that encountered by Voltaire in his championship of Calas.  This was a curious little coincidence, for I wrote my letter without having any communication with M. Zola respecting it.  It contained some passes which I here venture to quote.  In a book dealing with the great novelist these passages may not be out of place, as they serve to illustrate his general attitude towards the Dreyfus case.

‘Truth,’ I wrote, ’has been the one passion of Emile Zola’s life.* “May all be revealed so that all may be cured” has been his sole motto in dealing with social problems.  “Light, more light!”—­the last words gasped by Goethe on his death-bed—­has ever been his cry.  Holding the views he holds, he could not do otherwise than come forward at this crisis in French history as the champion of truth and justice.  Silence on his part would have been a denial of all his principles, all his past life. . . .  Against him are marshalled all the Powers of Darkness, all the energy of those who prefer concealment to light, all the enmity of the military hierarchy which has never forgotten “La Debacle,” all the hatred of the Roman hierarchy which will never forgive “Lourdes” and “Rome.”  And the fetish of Patriotism is brandished hither and thither, rallying even free-thinkers to the cause of concealment, while each and every appeal for light and truth is met by the clamorous cry:  “Down with the dirty Jews!”

  * He himself wrote these very words seventeen months later in
    his article ‘Justice,’ published in Paris on his return from
    exile.