Ibsen is a fearless, implacable, self-confessed destroyer of dogma and tradition, whom the anarchists may claim without doing violence either to themselves or to him.
The attitude of Zola towards society and the social problem is not so easy to define.
Zola exposed with a frankness bordering on brutality the rottenness of the wealthy and privileged classes, the oppressions and cruelty of capital, the selfishness and hypocrisy of ministers, magistrates, army officers, and priests; pictured with a friendliness bordering on advocacy the sufferings and struggles of the labourers, and stated with perfect fairness the most revolutionary ideas and ideals. That he had in him little enough of the stuff of which real martyrs are made—in spite of his constitutional inability to “shut himself up in his works, and act only through them,” as he a hundred times announced his intention of doing—was shown clearly enough by his ignominious flight when things turned against him in the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, no novelist of his time—at least none in France—has portrayed so masterfully, so sympathetically, one might almost say so devoutly, the character of the extreme, the martyr type of anarchist, the _propagandiste par le fait_.
Zola is said to have boasted of the progress anarchistic violence made after he “launched his Souvarine into the world.” The charge is probably a libel; but from this cold, calculating, consecrated Souvarine of _Germinal_ to the generous, sentimental Salvat of Paris the sincere _propagandiste par le fait_ was explained, excused, admired, extolled by him.
This is not saying that Zola was consciously (or unconsciously) an advocate of the _propagande par le fait_. He extended an equal cordiality to all the reformers and innovators who are groping towards a new and better world. The evils of contemporary society are so gigantic, in his view, and the necessity for a change of some sort so imperative, that he could understand and condone any and every honest protest, no matter how imprudent and no matter how fruitless.
Besides, Zola was more of an observer than a philosopher, and more of a poet than either. His later works, and _Germinal_ at least among his earlier ones, are primarily prose epics. He loved the dynamiter for his epic value as Milton loved his magnificent Satan, and may have had no more intention of holding him up to men as an exemplar than Milton had of instituting devil-worship.