“Le Fiasco Symboliste” was published in La Revue Indépendante, Paris, in the July 1891 number — a moment of particular significance, coming in the immediate aftermath of Jules Huret’s celebrated Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, which had brought the Symbolist controversy to the attention of the wider French reading public. The article’s authors, Gaston and Jules Couturat [Gaston Moreilhon and George Bonnamour], write as committed Naturalists and positivists, and their polemic is a sustained, methodical assault on the Symbolist movement at what they perceived to be the moment of its greatest overreach and imminent decline.
What makes the piece remarkable, beyond its considerable rhetorical energy, is the precision of its critical intelligence. The Couturats are not mere polemicists: their assessments of individual figures — Mallarmé, de Gourmont, de Régnier, Aurier — are often acute, occasionally generous, and always argued from a coherent philosophical position. Their programme, set out in the closing pages, is a striking document of late nineteenth-century positivist aesthetics, rooted in the legacy of Flaubert, Zola, and Taine, and looking forward to a literature armed with science, capable of grand social and philosophical synthesis. Read alongside Huret’s Enquête, it offers an indispensable counter-voice to the Symbolist self-mythologisation of the early 1890s.
THE SYMBOLIST FIASCO1
We have just witnessed the rout of a literary School — one little to be commended, in all conscience, for the unwarranted presumption of its disciples, the lamentable incapacity it has everywhere displayed, the emptiness of its theories, and the shabbiness of its methods2.
That this collapse is richly deserved we shall not seek to deny; yet we have no desire here to exult over it, for as artists unbeholden to any faction, we stand ready to welcome and to honour ALL fine work, wherever and whenever it may appear. We are, indeed, the more saddened that men should have roused the public to a pitch of excitement, trumpeted their geniuses and their masterpieces, and contrived to persuade the world at large that the rising generation of letters consists of nothing but dupes and mountebanks — all in the service of paltry personal ambition. We have waited, patiently and in good faith, for the clamour to subside, for the promised works to materialise, for the essential nullity of the Symbolist School to stand confessed before all men. The daily press has duly sung its praises; it has savoured the fleeting pleasures of a notoriety very nearly purloined. We may now be permitted to arraign its futility, its impotence, and its impostures, and to pronounce our verdict. We may be permitted to speak on behalf of those who have lately gathered in this place to labour — each in the full freedom of his own temper and his own convictions — to say to all these young men, several of whom are young no longer, who so doggedly clamour for recognition and announce works yet unwritten, to them and to their confederates alike, whom we enfold alike in one and the same rancour:
— Be silent, you are the vanquished. Be silent — and work!
I
A mystical vaudevillist — one M. Jules Méry — has lately compiled a chronological account of Symbolism, which has proliferated, we observe, over the past seven years across no fewer than fifty reviews.
It is worthy of note that not one of these periodicals possessed a coherent programme or a definite aim beyond the founding of little private chapels. For those of us who have consistently maintained that the coterie is at once impotent and absurd, this single characteristic tells us all we need to know. Yet candour obliges us to acknowledge that the Symbolist groups did extend their hospitality to M. Charles Henry, whose accomplished technical studies have earned universal admiration, and to M. Rosny, who represented in their midst — alongside that ill-fated and gifted Émile Hennequin — an art at once scientific and philosophical: that art which the prodigious endeavours of Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts, and M. Zola have striven to realise, and which it falls to us in our turn to pursue, if we are to remain faithful to the logic of those ideas and discoveries that do honour to our century.
Now, whilst the Études de Critique Scientifique were appearing on the one hand, together with, in succession, the Corneilles, the Tornadres, Le Septième Sens, and La Légende Sceptique, Messrs. Paul Adam, Gustave Kahn, Édouard Dujardin, and Charles Morice were on the other hand attempting to open new ground for poetry and the novel. Their effort was praiseworthy in so far as it represented a genuine search for something fresh; yet it remains, for all that, futile, puerile, and indefensible, for not one of them felt the least obligation to ground his work upon any coherent philosophy. One must allow them credit, simply, for having sought to restore the POEM to its proper dignity — reacting thereby against the Parnassian habit of producing brief, detached pieces, composed in idle moments and strung together without order or progression to form, at the last, a trim and trivial volume.
M. Paul Adam foundered in magism. His socialism was of the silliest kind — narrow, uninspired, motivated not by any noble impulse of disinterested inquiry but by purely practical considerations and the most parochial of political ambitions.
Messrs. Gustave Kahn and Édouard Dujardin, long since retired from literary life, did at least afford us one curious spectacle: a remarkably self-aware descent into folly. What, precisely, they contributed that was new, we should be genuinely grateful if someone would trouble to explain. On the pretext of “breaking verse,” they contrived to cradle their own mediocrity in the production of leaden, colourless poems possessing, it must be said, neither rhythm, nor colour, nor arresting sensation, nor ideas, nor so much as a gleam of dream. We do not imagine that anyone today would seriously venture to dispute the utter vacancy of these two minds.
As for M. Charles Morice, we shall have occasion to return to him presently. Let us note only in passing that his Mort des papillons is a wan allegory well within the grasp of any primary-school child — pretty enough, if thoroughly commonplace — written at least without that monstrous presumption, monstrous precisely because so wholly unwarranted, which has since rendered this nebulous pontiff insufferable to every man of cultivated intelligence.
From the day the Revue Indépendante finally shed its Symbolist allegiance, a succession of periodicals arose to carry the movement forward — yet neither the man of genius nor the masterpiece ever materialised within their pages3.
La Pléiade, La Vogue, Le Scapin, and Le Symboliste followed one upon another without the School once commanding serious attention. And so it would have remained, had not M. Moréas, by the most extraordinary stroke of fortune, discovered in M. Anatole France a thurifer perfectly matched to his pretensions — one whose voice was sufficient to rouse a critical establishment hitherto more indifferent than hostile, and whose endorsement served only to betray, once again, both the ignorance and the bad faith of that establishment.
Let those who, in their innocence, believe in the literary integrity of M. Anatole France be swiftly undeceived. Nothing is more inimical to genuine talent than this indifferent poet, whose trivial critical writings are praised with a generosity they do nothing to deserve. Incapable of producing any work of real distinction, M. Anatole France has adroitly confined himself to that parasitism of the intellect pompously styled literary criticism, subsisting comfortably upon the talents of others. This might be forgiven him, were he to discharge even so flat a vocation with some semblance of honesty. But, alas — for the better part of ten years he has pursued it, and do not all his manoeuvres reveal themselves, in their remorseless and treacherous concatenation, as serving one end alone: the systematic exaltation of mediocrity at the expense of genuine force? Is it not perfectly well known that M. France is the least-informed man alive on everything pertaining to the men and ideas of his own time? And is it not equally a matter of public record that when he celebrated M. Paul Verlaine, his sole purpose was to “put M. François Coppée’s nose out of joint” — just as, more recently, his apologia for M. Jean Moréas and his circle was aimed squarely at M. Leconte de Lisle?
Is not all of this wretched and small-minded? Had M. Charles Maurras not known how to prime his master’s enthusiasm at precisely the right moment, through a judicious course of private readings, would M. France have bestowed upon Le Pèlerin passionné the encomium he did? Plainly not. And the critical establishment, which would have greeted M. Barrès’s article with no more than an indulgent smile, was thoroughly taken in when the aged Parnassian of Les Noces Corinthiennes, in his portentous feuilleton in Le Temps, elevated the Symbolist School to the standing of a recognised movement.
It would be an instructive exercise to gather up all the inanities written about that supreme art, Poetry, by the journalists who condescend to judge us from the foot of their feuilleton — on the rare occasions when they chance to address the subject at all. We might render no small service by laying bare the consummate incompetence of these gentlemen, an incompetence compounded, in almost every case, by abysmal ignorance and insufferable self-satisfaction. But another matter presses upon us.
We must say plainly to all of you who gathered, for the space of a single evening — alas, no more — about M. Jean Moréas: you showed yourselves unworthy. We know well enough, having heard you proclaim it on any number of occasions, and having read your almost invariably anonymous attacks here and there, that you too profess to hold Criticism in contempt. How richly Criticism must have laughed, then, on that memorable evening when a hundred men, each despising the rest, clinked their glasses and declaimed at one another with equal measures of banality and disdain4 — for you were observed, the moment the dinner was over, soliciting puffs and making your most agreeable faces at every person of critical influence in the room. This you will never live down, do what you may; and M. Jules Huret’s Enquête stands as permanent testimony that you were contemptible, and that beneath your professed affections and your professed hatreds there lies, in every case, one and the same thing: impotent envy.
All that was deplorable enough. But we have since witnessed worse.
We have seen how one of your number, M. Charles Morice, lending himself with characteristic docility to the private grudges of M. Henri Bauër, went cap in hand to solicit that gentleman’s goodwill. It showed precious little nerve, to say the least, to choose precisely the moment when a handful of malcontents were making their cowardly attempt to throttle the Théâtre Libre, in order to set the Théâtre d’Art up against M. Antoine. But what is most damaging to your cause is that M. Bauër should have become, alongside M. Anatole France, the man upon whom you have chosen to rely. It is he who now vouches for you before the public, and who, on the eve of your first nights, announces with charitable conviction: “A triumph!” — a futile falsehood, alas, which serves only to make your collapse on the following evening the more humiliating and the more complete. And so we have M. Bauër, whose aesthetic is lauded on all sides yet has never once been realised in practice; M. Bauër, whose posture of the swaggering blusterer has made him generally insufferable; M. Bauër, all-powerful, whom no one dares to challenge; M. Bauër, who by everything he champions and everything he admires ought long since to have made you deeply uneasy — M. Bauër is your patron and protector.
Without him, without M. Anatole France, you would be nothing whatsoever. The public would attend your plays no more readily than it reads your books. All the noise and clamour in which you exhaust yourselves would avail you nothing. Yet rest assured that your fleeting triumph caused us no very great alarm, for it was brief and without consequence, and once again the proper order of things asserted itself in the end. For if it is true that the only father who ever desired his son to be a poet begot Chapelain for the lasting entertainment of Boileau, it is equally well established that whenever criticism sets out to make a great man, it invariably errs — its applause and its encouragements finding their way, without exception, to the mediocre alone, for criticism is itself mediocre, and to acknowledge genuine force is, for such critics, nothing less than a humiliation.
II
The Men of Symbolism. — At the head of the Symbolist group one must place M. STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ. This very great poet exerts a considerable influence over the literary youth of the day, and no one, until now, has had the courage to call that influence to account. It seems to us, however, that on close examination, the imitation of M. Mallarmé can only prove ruinous. No one admires more unreservedly than we do the purity of conception and beauty of execution that place this artist in the very first rank of the poets of our time; but we are not so enslaved to our own enthusiasm as to be blind to its nature, and we confess with all sincerity that we cannot but suffer in recognising that the entire poetic system of M. Stéphane Mallarmé is founded upon a very precise and very profound awareness of his own limitations. Possessed of so lucid and so painful an understanding of the laws governing his own mind, M. Mallarmé could not, without abandoning all logic, have conceived of any aesthetic other than that which his work realises with near perfection. It is no part of our intention to reproach him for being what he is — the most contradictory theories of art are capable of yielding masterpieces; but where M. Mallarmé justly lays himself open to the severest attack is at the point where, ceasing to be a singular and unrepeatable genius, he sets himself up as a literary lawgiver and attempts to confine the horizons of the young men of our time to the narrow compass of that magical but diminutive mirror in which his noble dreams are reflected in all their splendour and their uncontested beauty.
It costs us something to write thus; but M. Mallarmé has drawn too many young men away from their proper selves for it to go unsaid that a responsibility, and a crushing one, weighs upon his conscience as poet and artist. He has systematically evaded that double obligation which governs us all, great and small alike: to produce and to publish. Devoted admirers of M. Mallarmé assure us that this is to be attributed to nothing more than an exaggerated diffidence. So long as his reputation extended no further than the walls of the salon where his disciples assemble, such an explanation might just pass. Today it will no longer serve. To acquaint oneself with M. Mallarmé’s work — printed in negligible quantities and offered to the public at an extravagant price — one must happen by good fortune to find oneself acquainted with one of the rare possessors of that slender manuscript lately produced under the supervision of M. Dujardin. And when, more recently, M. Mallarmé has at last condescended to publish a volume in the ordinary manner, he gives us Proses — mediocre on the whole, and altogether insufficient to justify the reputation that surrounds him. Finally, and this is the gravest charge of all: can M. Mallarmé honestly maintain that a desire for POSE plays no considerable part in the mysterious aesthetic that any serious reader will readily discern in his pages?
Is not this studied determination to remain, at whatever cost, obscure, designed above all to present himself to the eyes of the young as a genius misunderstood by the world? The genuinely unrecognised command our admiration and our sympathy; but those who, out of sheer ambition, seek to assume that noble and painful mantle are, in our estimation, without character and without credit. It may be, indeed, that more than anything else — as much as, if not more than, all the foregoing — what has truly captivated the young in M. Mallarmé is the perfect dignity of his life entire. But he is not the only man, alas, who has accepted a workaday profession in order to earn the right to be an artist on his own terms. M. Huysmans has shown the same fortitude, and M. Rosny likewise; and it occurs to no one to make a particular virtue of it in their case.
M. JEAN MORÉAS (see the study by our friend M. Camille Mauclair, further on in this issue).
M. CHARLES MORICE. — Were we to judge M. Charles Morice solely by what he has written, he would have no place in this catalogue at all. But M. Morice enjoys the remarkable distinction of occupying a prominent position in the literary world without having produced anything to speak of. We do not suppose that anyone will seriously contend that La Littérature de tout à l’heure and Chérubin constitute works admitting of any serious discussion. Should anyone attempt to prove otherwise, we should find ourselves perfectly at ease: La Littérature de tout à l’heure is swollen with accumulated inanities. Philosophically, there is not a page that does not amount to a puerile rehashing of old, discredited theories that no one any longer troubles to debate. From the critical standpoint, the partialities and injustices are beyond counting. The eighteenth century receives from M. Morice a notably curious treatment; and as for the elaborate announcement with which he concludes, detailing the great works yet to come, one can only smile, shrug, and move on.
One of our number has put it well: “This man drags at his ankle the ball and chain of plagiarism through the prison hulk of impotence.” The word plagiarism must of course be taken in its broadest sense — rarely applicable to the letter, invariably applicable to the idea. At no moment of his literary career has M. Morice had any clear conception of what he wished to achieve, nor has he ever possessed the self-respect to be himself. At twenty-seven he imitated M. François Coppée. A little later he copied M. Paul Verlaine. Today he cribs from M. Mallarmé. Yet this utter want of originality in both conception and execution has not prevented him from being taken seriously; and M. Jules Huret’s Enquête has revealed that his friends consider him no less than the presiding intellect of Symbolism. One could weep — with sadness, and with disgust. To think that this man, devoid of ideas and of conviction, this servile copyist, this philosopher of farce, should march at your head! We are told that his portfolios are stuffed with masterpieces. Very well — we are not in the least alarmed, and we call upon him to publish them, to have them performed.
The publisher Perrin holds, it is said, the manuscript of a volume of verse: Le Rêve de vivre, which M. Charles Morice’s friends are pleased to consider a fine work. What are we waiting for? Let us be confounded once and for all. For our part, we have no desire whatsoever to suppress whatever genius M. Morice may possess; and if M. Perrin requires a certain number of subscriptions to launch this Rêve de vivre, he may count upon ours without hesitation. So much for the poet, whom we can assess only on the rare and meagre fragments he has condescended to publish here and there.
The playwright, at least, we know. It was with undisguised stupefaction that we sat through that wretched piece which promised us the “new formula,” and in which we discovered nothing but a third-rate melodrama. Life, character, passion and its gradations, the human soul and its complexities — M. Charles Morice is magnificently ignorant of all of it. Hammered out in one crude piece, without art, without delicacy, and without elevation, his Harpagon, his Chérubin, and his Don Juan stand as testimony to nothing more profound than the old saw that miserly fathers breed prodigal sons and prodigal fathers breed miserly ones. And it is platitudes of this order that form the philosophical bedrock of M. Morice’s work?
Really, the time has come to speak plainly and put an end to this comedy. M. Morice does not love his age — or rather, his own time — and he demonstrates as much by dressing his modern characters in “plumed toques and resplendent doublets.” Everything that fires and engages us in the present hour wounds and irritates him. Were one to follow his lead, one would resign oneself to a retreat of fifty years into the past and immure oneself there in the proud enjoyment of one’s own ignorance and folly. This revulsion from the present, which may be found even more intensely developed in artists of the first order, we perfectly understand; and when we encountered its traces in the very rare pages that M. Morice has seen fit to lay before the admiration of his contemporaries, we felt neither surprise nor indignation. His foolish declamations, his howls of alarm against the “science-mongers” — these too left us unmoved. We supposed that he had, no doubt, a philosophy of his own to set against ours, and that it is both unjust and unintelligent to deny the validity of different and parallel lines of talent, theory, and achievement. We waited, with every patience, governed by the desire to understand and to be fair; and never once did M. Morice trouble to justify his contempts and his hatreds. Yet his reputation has done nothing but grow. The débacle of Chérubin, which collapsed amid the laughter and bewilderment of the author’s own friends, has left no stain upon him — he contrives to appear the injured party. And yet — God knows — few writers have ever been more bountifully favoured by circumstance. He wished to see his work performed, and men of critical influence duly primed the public’s admiration in advance. He wished to address the public directly, and the newspaper least disposed towards any artistic tendency not already consecrated by fashionable success — Le Gaulois — threw open its columns to him without reserve. From all of this, nothing has emerged: no ideas, no works — only promises and bravado, the most puerile self-importance wedded to the most insufferable vanity. We, who began as curious, have become sceptical. We decline to linger any further before this prophet who, being without talent, cannot even offer those who tax him with his meagre reputation the one excuse that might carry some weight: that he has at least worked. We pass on, with contempt; and the public has already done the same.
M. HENRI DE RÉGNIER. — A poet of genuine distinction, M. de Régnier captivates by the grace and fluency of a real and considerable talent. One must add, however, that his artist’s dreams invariably arrive at sumptuous decorative effects that amount to nothing more than a versified paraphrase of M. Gustave Moreau’s watercolours. As a writer of prose poems — in Soirs intimes et mondains — he has registered sensations of real delicacy and particularity; but the influence of M. Mallarmé declares itself on every page, and strips these pieces, mannered yet almost exquisite as they are, of whatever claim to originality they might otherwise possess. The full extent of M. de Régnier’s intellectual poverty becomes apparent, however, in the articles he has contributed to Les Entretiens politiques et littéraires. One searches them in vain for the qualities that ordinarily recommend him — his grace, his finesse, the dreamlike haze that softens both his phrases and his visions. In a hard, brittle style, with something of the snap of flint, he appears stiff, rigid, and cramped — without wit, without understanding, without a single critical idea to his name. His Commentaire sur l’argent demonstrates with some force how narrow a construction he places upon the word “poet”: he takes it in its most literal sense, and the results lead him into prodigious bewilderments — among them a fit of moral indignation at the notion that Saccard should be, for M. Zola, “the poet of money.”
Still more ridiculous, and if possible still more devoid of sense or justice, are the lines entitled Victor Hugo et les symbolistes. There one discovers “that irreverence, contrary to ADMIRATION, which is a somewhat base sentiment, proves a certain freedom of mind.” “To be disrespectful of established reputations,” M. de Régnier adds a little further on, “is without doubt simply the consciousness of having to oppose to them, still in the secret of oneself, tacit glories whose inevitable expansion, if they exist, will one day be freed from this tendency which does nothing but signal their internal presence.“
These pronouncements, solemn with a somewhat fatuous solemnity, provoke a smile by their combination of the ridiculously false and the arrogantly foolish. One may, however, forgive M. de Régnier for having no ideas and no arguments to bring against those he attacks, and absolve him in the same breath of his tangled syntax and his ungracious vanity. Within the Symbolist group he remains one of the most genuinely distinguished of the younger men, and the most capable of engaging our sympathy — by virtue of a singular and beautiful poetic gift which lacks but one thing, a thing held in rather low regard at present, to be truly and deservedly ranked among the first: originality.
M. RÉMY DE GOURMONT. — M. de Gourmont is a noble artist. If his ideas give us pause, if we find ourselves in agreement with him on no point of aesthetics or philosophy, we esteem none the less his integrity of character and salute his talent unreservedly.
M. de Gourmont made his début with an obscure book in which the banality of the subject conceals itself beneath adroit symbolic transpositions — pure tricks of the trade, easy enough to manipulate — and to the deployment of which M. de Gourmont brings a solemnity that is neither free from puerility nor free from tedium. As for the form: M. de Gourmont, who has shown himself more than once unjust towards M. Zola, will not take it amiss if we observe that it falls considerably short of the best pages of the Naturalists. There is in M. de Gourmont a natural grace, a love of the pale, the vague, and the pretty, that bespeaks a delicate and tender sensibility, one keenly alive to nuance. The misfortune is that M. de Gourmont, whose ideal of style is — to borrow his own expression — “bluish,” never achieves the vaporous and the indistinct with quite the mastery one could wish. Beneath the prettiness of his descriptions, beneath the loose rhythm of his phrases, one feels the effort, the nerves straining and rearing, the will stretched taut; and this jars and grates in an artist possessed of no energy whatsoever, whom one would gladly see surrendering himself without reserve to his natural temper — dreamy, charming, and instinctively his own.
Philosophically, M. de Gourmont, who is a thinker of considerable vagueness, presents himself as a metaphysician. Atavism has triumphed in him, and declares itself in his mysticism. For our part, mysticism admits of no better definition than this: it is the sensuality of the lymphatic temperament. When M. de Gourmont publishes his Latin mystique, we shall return to this idea and develop it with the proofs in hand.
One must regret that M. de Gourmont, one of the most genuinely gifted men of the new generation, should confine himself within a priori systems, the puerilities and wilful ignorances of an old world already in ruins. One must regret that his personality, warped by the triple influence of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, M. Huysmans, and M. Catulle Mendès, has failed to discover, in order to affirm itself properly: in the novel, an art richer, nobler, and more philosophically grounded than Symbolism; in criticism, a stance a little less purely reactionary than the one it has adopted — which is to say, the blanket contempt of Naturalism.
M. FRANCIS VIELÉ-GRIFFIN — a poet without grace, without breadth of vision. M. Vielé-Griffin is, however, a courageous polemicist. He defended the memory of Jules Laforgue against the contempt and crass ignorance of M. Henry Fouquier, and did so with real nobility. Is M. Vielé-Griffin a man of genuine conviction? If we remind him that he once wrote an article on the relations between Symbolism and Volapük, he will understand and excuse the impertinence of the question.
M. PIERRE QUILLARD. — M. Pierre Quillard is a Symbolist today by virtue of that same instinct for imitation and solidarity which would have made him, in the closing years of the Empire, a solemn and frigid Parnassian. In his Gloire du Verbe, one may discern beneath the accomplishments of the craft a double influence: that of Ephraïm Mikaël and that of M. Henri de Régnier. Such as it is, this début does the young M. Quillard sufficient credit. His various critical articles reveal a mind that is active but not greatly curious, and one without any troubled sense of what the future holds — a future that will render its verdict upon the old literary education and open new paths to Beauty by new means. The baneful influence of Messrs. Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Morice weighs heavily upon this newcomer; and it will make of him, if he does not take heed, a straggler — a man of the past, of old and venerable doctrines, museum pieces all, and of no use whatever to the intellectual life of the coming century. Which would be a pity.
M. SAINT-POL ROUX THE MAGNIFICENT. — Here we enter the realm of the grotesque. MAGNIFICISM, as invented by M. Saint-Pol Roux in a letter published by L’Écho de Paris — a letter well worth studying by anyone who wishes to trace back from the tumultuous incoherence of the phrases to the cracks in the brain that produced them — is nothing other than an excess of metaphor: a metaphorism not of ideas, alas, which might at least have been interesting, but of words, which is commonplace, well within any man’s reach, and of a puerility that simply disarms. It is the extravagance of the born southerner — a wild, intoxicated extravagance, loud but hollow. Which was, moreover, entirely as it should be; for without this quality, M. Saint-Pol Roux would have forfeited his rightful place in the Symbolist tradition.
M. ALBERT AURIER. — Art critic, novelist, poet, M. Albert Aurier made his début with Vieux. This novel, not without a certain merit on the score of style, is marked by observation of the most factitious kind and a singularly commonplace conception. It bespeaks in its author a temperament of some vigour, one naturally closer to the concrete than to the abstract and to analysis than to synthesis; and it is with no small astonishment that we observe this mediocre beginning followed by M. Albert Aurier enlisting beneath the banner of that other Salvation Army: the Symbolist school.
As an art critic, M. Aurier inspires us with serious reservations. His enthusiasm for M. Gauguin was no doubt sincere, but stood, alas, in singular disproportion to M. Gauguin’s very modest talent. As a poet, M. Aurier contributes to the Mercure de France verse that is neither bad nor good — which is, in our estimation, the harshest verdict one can pass upon him.
As an aesthetician, M. Aurier descends by degrees into the worst, tumbles headlong into the ridiculous, and drowns there. He has vouchsafed us the intelligence that he believes in the existence of three worlds: the external world revealed by the Naturalists; the internal world over which the psychologists hold sway; and a third, which M. Aurier proposes to explore — a vague beyond of which he furnishes no precise definition, and which strikes us as the childish invention of a chimerical mind devoid alike of logic and of any capacity for sustained thought. Two pearls from M. Aurier, to be carefully preserved:
“That Lamartine is the greatest poet of the century, and that Victor Hugo is an inspired mumbler!”
There remain the unpublished, the minores — those who publish here and there their critical essays, their brief poems, their puerile little pamphlets, their fragments of prose. We shall note them for the record alone, without pausing to judge, on the strength of promises, the rearguard of the Symbolist group: Messrs. Édouard Dubus, Julien Leclercq, Jean Court, Charles Merki, Gabriel Randon, Maurice Du Plessys, Albert Saint-Paul, and Dauphin Meunier.
III
The Organs of Symbolism. — In truth, this School possesses no official organs closed to all parallel artistic tendencies. Nevertheless, Les Entretiens politiques et littéraires and the Mercure de France count among their contributors the principal adherents of the literary reaction we are here opposing. A single attitude is common to them both: the hatred and contempt of Zola. That, frankly, is very little. M. Émile Zola can still, should he choose, bestride our path with all the prodigious amplitude of a stubborn colossus; and his recantations and his academic ambitions have robbed him of nothing of his force or his genius.
The Mercure and the Entretiens also display vague socialist tendencies that appear to rest on no very solid foundation. Behind the declamations and the hollow rhetoric, one detects neither the contagious ardour of an unquestioning faith nor any scientific conception of government. Those who profess this literary politics are, moreover, neo-Catholics to a man — minds of fixed routine who dream of an impossible supreme intervention of the Church between the people and their government. They are chimerical visionaries whose exaltation crumbles before the logic of facts, and who insist that socialism must be Christian rather than scientific.
From the literary standpoint, the Mercure de France and the Entretiens rarely rise above mediocrity. Between themselves, the two periodicals nurse a simmering mutual hostility, which leads us to conclude that the proselytes are in agreement on neither the tendencies nor the theories of the School. We should have taken more than a little pleasure in refuting those tendencies and theories, had either review taken the trouble to set them out with any clarity. Jules Tellier, not long ago, in a slight volume of criticism, amused himself by attaching labels to the contemporary poets. He distinguished the Symbolists from the Moderns, the Parnassians, and the Adroit. By what criterion he arrived at these distinctions we cannot say; and since this young man carried the secret of his classifications and his preferences with him to the grave, we must resign ourselves to waiting until some aesthetician of the new group has had the courage to speak plainly — for the puerile chatter of M. Maurras5 is not something we can accept, even in the most charitable spirit, as a statement of position deserving serious consideration.
And there they stand, these two organs, like emblematic mirrors in which a portion of literary youth comes to contemplate its own ambitious and undignified mediocrity, its intolerance, and its bad faith. There they stand, solemn and null, vitiated by the coterie spirit, without any bedrock independence, edited by false revolutionaries whose sole ambition is success — not the success of the brasserie and the boulevard, but universal success, consecrated by Money. And this explains the chorus of abuse in which they confound, with a fine disregard for the ridicule they thereby invite, M. Georges Ohnet and M. Zola; M. de Maupassant and M. Delpit. It explains why M. Paul Bourget, for all his keen intelligence and that concern of his — rare, indeed unique, among our literary elders — to understand the generations that come after him and to lend them his support, has found no more favour in their eyes than the rest.
Fortunately, we stand at the final hours of a counterfeit success, and at the first light of a defeat which a little determined effort can transform into irreparable rout. This battle — a literary battle and nothing more — we both desire and intend to fight, for it is a disgrace that a handful of fools and schemers should have obtained, without a stroke of honest work, a renown and a standing that the great dead upon whom they presume to call never enjoyed, that Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts, and M. Zola spent twenty years in winning, and that every man of genuine force has purchased at the cost of the best that was in him — without mendacious manifestos, without base manoeuvring: by the sole power of faith and of talent.
IV
We must now draw our conclusions; and what follows is offered on our own sole responsibility.
Let the Symbolists take heed: Naturalism is not dead. It is reborn, and reborn to grow and to triumph once more. M. J.-H. Rosny marches at its head, with a patience daunted neither by the hostility of some nor the silence of others; he is preparing the way for the new novel which, armed with Science, will penetrate further into Man — into his animality and his intellectuality alike — will illuminate his complexity, and will descend, with each day a surer step, into the infinitely small of the heart and the brain, thence to rise again towards the vast syntheses of humanity and cosmos.
Through Science, too, the novel will come to possess Dream — a Dream singular and new, which will recount the evolutions of matter, sing the poetry of Forces, coordinate the inner lives of Beings, and find in the interpretation of the Unknown its motives for speculation.
Poetry will be rational and speculative — scientific also in its instrumentalist aspect, or else, as M. Taine has predicted, it will founder irretrievably in music.
Criticism and Philosophy will be experimental; their function will not be to appreciate or to judge, but simply to record results, to classify them, and to extract from them LAWS.
All this may appear absurd, and one may smile at it freely. It has been foreseen, nevertheless. Clear-sighted minds — gifted minds — have declared their hope for precisely such an orientation of the modern spirit, from Gustave Flaubert to Émile Hennequin.
We do not deny, however, that beyond this great line of development there may appear both remarkable works and even masterpieces; our intellectual impartiality obliges us to say so plainly. From the purely artistic standpoint, the Symbolists — wretched philosophers, verbalists without logic, possessed of the imbecile presumption, as formulated by M. Morice, of achieving a “definitive synthesis,” when every book they have produced demonstrates their incapacity to rise from the concrete to the abstract — the Symbolists may, we grant, furnish some pretty notations, some curious realisations of their vague concepts. That will be the sum of it.
That will be the sum of it; and in truth it will be very little.
The future now in preparation demands artists who are thinkers, men stirred by all the great social problems of their age — not egotistical Byzantines crouching at a remove from the world in their hatred of an epoch they do not understand, and which they persuade themselves has dealt more harshly with them than any past age would have done. In the past, one may be sure, they would have reasoned in precisely the same fashion when faced with analogous difficulties.
The future now in preparation demands the reconciliation, foretold by Flaubert, of Art and Science — “which will meet at the summit after having parted at the base.” To dissuade us from that belief, to prevent us — humble beginners that we are — from contributing our modest portion of energy and labour to that great evolution, something considerably more substantial is required than this convenient transition, devised by the Symbolists, from reality to dream and from the concrete to the abstract, as though these two poles were not mutually dependent and complementary. That is too simple, too crude, too foolish; and in rising to oppose them, we shall not even trouble to extend to them the consideration one owes to enlightened adversaries — men fortified by solid achievement, hard-won conviction, and unimpeachable integrity.
We have before us nothing but the cunning, the ignorant, and the naïve, bound together by self-interest yet despising one another; and in answer to the lies of their programmes and the ruses of their tactics, we have this to say:
— Yes, “the world is moving towards a new morality”; but it is not you who will give it form. For that, other hearts and other minds are needed than yours. You are repeaters of stale ideas, reactionaries, and incompetents. You deny the age in the midst of which you live — an age which, for those who have the wit to understand it, possesses its own grandeur and its own nobility. “You deny Science, which stands, far above your ignorance and your prejudices, as a marvellous instrument of enquiry.” Confronted with the imminent upheaval of societies, you have neither the ambition to play a great part nor the sublime sense of a mission to discharge. You imagine that it suffices, in order to claim the right to respect and renown, to be so many benighted little mountebanks — grey novelists, bluish metaphysicians. You are wrong. You imagine that to command an audience it suffices for twenty of you to award one another daily certificates of profundity and genius. The confidence of the public, which is not so easily duped as all that, is harder to win. You are wrong. You imagine that by traducing the strong, the thinkers and the philosophers, those who have made the Novel what it is — a work of truth, of science, and of moral purpose — you will persuade us of the greatness of your conceptions and the nobility of your designs. You are wrong.
We are not of those who are bought with words and beguiled by excursions through the azure of the clouds; nor of those who are held in line beneath a banner; nor of those, finally, who are cowed by tactics. There is a faith within us, vigorous and alive, and it will render its verdict upon your lies — blow by blow, article by article, book by book. What we want, for our own part, is definite enough. We have stated it elsewhere already6; and even at the risk of seeming presumptuous, speaking now for ourselves alone, we shall gladly restate it here:
“— In sum, what we wish to attempt is this: with one vigorous heave of the shoulder, to thrust this end of century out of its rut of decrepitude, metaphysical foolishness, and a priori philosophy; to fight for positivism and science against the madness of the mystics, the magists, and the neo-Catholics, and against pessimistic egoism; to contribute, alongside others, to the realisation of what must be the goal — not the chimerical goal of exalted rhymers, but the practically attainable goal of a group of serious thinkers — namely: above the old Aryan and Judaic religions, to establish the RELIGION OF HUMANITY; through Poetry and Art and their visions, to replace the symbols and the dreams of the beyond; through reasoned socialism and altruism, to render sterile and dangerous charity superfluous; and finally, to substitute for outmoded cosmogonies the hypothesis — increasingly confirmed — of an evolving Kosmos.
“Alongside this, we should have the further ambition of laying the rigorously scientific foundations of Poetry — the methodical classification of sensations, feelings, and emotions; human sensitivity and aesthetics conceived henceforth as a form of spiritual gymnastics, with the aim of making available to the reader all the discoveries of the soul since the most ancient times, of exercising and developing the senses and carrying them to their paroxysm in the subtle refinement of feeling, seeing, touching, divining, dreaming: of enlarging the Science of the human heart and imagination, as Experimentation enlarges the sum of knowledge and Philosophy synthesises Ideas.”
Behind us we have MASTERS — men whose names will only grow greater in the century to come. You may deny them, treat them as “barbarians,” and set against them the impotent genius of a Stéphane Mallarmé; you will not alter the fact that they are right — right together with all the scientists and philosophers whose theories and labours you are ignorant of, and against whom your ignorance and your mediocrity wage their unrelenting war.
Behind you, we look and we find nothing. In vain you proclaim: “Youth is with us!” A handful of snobs and fifty brasserie aesthetes do not constitute Youth. Your works, your ideas, your masters — what remains of them when one reads and examines you? Nothing. And in ten years, what will remain of all your programmes, all your manifestos? Nothing.
It may be, of course, that we are mistaken, and that you will yet become great men. But that will not come to pass without your having renounced, one by one, every error, every pettiness, every manoeuvre by which you have contrived, today, to seduce the intellectual good faith of an Anatole France and the discernment of a Henry Bauër! Nor will it come to pass without your having meditated long and deeply, and then put into practice, that word of honest counsel with which we first addressed you, and with which we now take our leave:
— Be silent, you are the vanquished. Be silent — and work!
GASTON AND JULES COUTURAT.
Notes:
¹ See the interviews with Messrs. Jean Moréas, Charles Morice, Pierre Quillard, Rémy de Gourmont, Albert Aurier, and others, in the Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire.
² See Chérubin, by Charles Morice, and the Préface du Théatre of Mme Rachilde.
³ The Symbolists have not scrupled to exploit the death of Jules Laforgue in order to insinuate that this highly original spirit was of their persuasion. It would be no difficult matter to demonstrate how thoroughly they deceive themselves. Be that as it may, we are glad to salute in this poet, taken so untimely, not a genius, but a mind of rare and superior quality, whose memory deserves to be kept with reverence and with tender regret.
4 One must except the toast proposed by M. Bernard Lazare, who administered to M. Anatole France a masterly public slap with the open hand of his loftiest irony.
5 Jean Moréas, by Charles Maurras. (See under Books.)
6 Écrits pour l’Art, May 1891.
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