Zola's ‘Thérèse Raquin' by Frederick Wedmore

On Saturday I went to _Thérèse Raquin_ at the Royalty Theatre; and while I found the piece itself -- as indeed I expected to find it -- far less of a melodrama than certain of its critics had said, I discovered that the performance, though good and creditable, was not quite so noteworthy as it had been pronounced. The thing is worth seeing, though -- would indeed in any case be worth seeing. It is but the second piece of M. Zola's which has found hospitality among us: nay, in a certain sense, it is the first, for _L'Assommoir_ was hardly seen in its nakedness and truth, though it was seen with fulness of horror in Charles Reade's version _Drink_. The version of _Thérèse Raquin_ -- executed mainly, as I suppose, by Mr. De Mattos, but overlooked by Mr. George Moore -- does not widely depart from the original. It is not a bad translation, though it might, with advantage, have been a little more colloquial. It suggests nowhere that it has been subjected to the process which I believe to be the only satisfactory one, in translation, to a writer who is ambitious, as he ought to be, to write the English that we talk: the process of wholly discarding the original at a certain point -- when the bare but real equivalent of that original has once been secured -- of forgetting, from that moment, the existence of the original, and of setting oneself solely to say well and naturally what the translation, which is still beside one, says with awkwardness. The translation of _Thérèse Raquin_ is good enough, it may be, for most people's requirements on the stage; but it is not good enough to be counted as literature. The thing -- that is -- has not become Mr. De Mattos's own: he has remained its somewhat mechanical interpreter.

_Thérèse Raquin_ occupies a middle place in M. Zola's work. In point of date, it is early; but I mean ‘a middle place' in that it displays neither the exaggerated and sterile realism of the uglier of the writer's books nor the abounding poetry of the finer of them. A problem in itself less interesting than the problem of the _Page d'Amour_ is, in _Thérèse Raquin_, treated with hardly a trace of the poetic tragedy which gives the _Page d'Amour_ so much of its value. _Thérèse Raquin_ contains only one or two sentences -- they are those in which the wicked little _bourgeoise_ expresses her desire to live for ever in the sunshine -- which permit one to realise that its author is the author of the passionate idyl _La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret_. But, on the other hand, in _Thérèse Raquin_ we are not face to face with the superfluous and unveracious hideousness of _La Terre_; and the view of humanity is not so brutal and so gross as that which is taken in _Nana_. No; in these respects we may rank _Thérèse Raquin_ rather with _L'Assommoir_ itself: in both a sad and ugly and degraded world, but a glimpse of the skies. In both -- as in everything, for the matter of that, that M. Zola writes -- an austere moral: the assured march of evil-doing to its own punishment.