Léon Hennique Novel

Édouard Rod, who once moved in Naturalist circles and swore allegiance to Zola, gradually forged a path between Naturalism and the psychological novel—a path whose brilliant originality lay in redirecting the famous modern “enquiry” from its subsidiary concern with appearances and the external world towards an exploration of consciousness itself. From the objective formula of the first school, he retained its fundamental attention to physical causes; from the psychological novel, he naturally borrowed its psychology, though stripped of any pedantic overtones. Yet he also inherited its melancholy. For years Édouard Rod passed for a pessimist; people took the title La Course à la Mort at face value, and the book’s tone seemed to confirm their reading. Of course, I trust this clear-eyed consciousness will never turn cheerful, given that it gazes unflinchingly at the soul and life of our age. And yet his new novel bears the title: Le Sens de la Vie. The hero of La Course à la Mort resumes his story. He has married and feels rather unsettled at having relinquished his independence, at having forged chains that now condemn him to go on living, come what may. Still, he lets himself be seduced by the sweetness of companionship and the charm of being loved. Only now and then do incidents or chance encounters stir up old tempests. But a child’s birth shatters this calm: this all-absorbing creature who dominates the household, towards whom he feels even more beholden than to his wife, upends the life he had fashioned and plays havoc with his egoism. Yet he adapts, making room in his heart bit by bit; what begins as pity transforms into genuine attachment, complete with all a father’s illusions. Once pity takes root in this soul, it spreads everywhere. This egoist, who never gave others a second thought, now contemplates the lot of mankind; his horizons expand, the love of humanity opens fresh wellsprings of purpose, imposing a new and noble calling. But he cannot answer it: something holds him back—that something being himself, his weakness, his scepticism, his distrust. Good and evil strike a bargain: for this modern man, love of humanity becomes a rational exercise, devoid of enthusiasm or heart. He discovers, besides, that charity draws its strength only from religious convictions capable of resolving every problem, answering every question he has posed, whilst also offering him lasting release from all the intellectual and moral torments he has endured since consciousness dawned — “But,” Obermann would counter, “when has faith ever bowed to the will?” The protagonist of Le Sens de la Vie knows full well that one cannot kindle the flames of the soul as one lights the lamps of the physical world, and so he wavers, he halts, with but a single step remaining, yet powerless to take it. Perhaps he will manage it. His mistake lies in seeking, hoping for, awaiting a faith that cannot be modern man’s faith; his mistake lies in wanting to escape the reason that tortures him—why not satisfy it instead? Rather than pining for sanctuary in a creed the young man had already rejected, why doesn’t the mature man, since he aches with the need for truth, actually pursue it instead of sighing after it in idle, sterile longing? But such criticism would overstep literature’s bounds. Let us recognise, in Édouard Rod’s new work, the flowering of mystical sentiment: thus he takes his rightful place amongst the poets devoted to life’s essential questions. And let us note that through La Course à la Mort, through Le Sens de la Vie, and I suspect through a third novel of the soul besides, Édouard Rod will have achieved, within a middle register yet profoundly explored, a true synthesis of a certain strand of modern humanity—a synthesis, however, that will always want for Beauty.

Joseph Caraguel yearns for synthesis, yet envisions it contained within a single volume, purged of mysticism. Though this writer possesses an uncommonly rich inner life—nourished by the most refined aesthetic doctrines and, I suspect, by communion with certain distinguished masters—he has come to focus more on human effects than their causes, on the collective rather than the individual. The intimate dramas of conscience interest him less than the movements of crowds, the temperament of communities, the student milieu (Le Boul’ Mich’), a southern village (Les Barthozouls). Steeped in social questions, alert to the political dynamics of human groups, he will surely bring to light that secret life seething beneath the surface—beneath the grand gestures and outcries of assembled humanity. For while Naturalism has left its mark on him—primarily through Goncourt’s influence—and while he grasps precisely how the physical shapes human nature, Caraguel hardly dismisses the claims of the spirit. Indeed, almost against his will, the very sentiment he would suppress erupts unexpectedly throughout his pages. He stands, furthermore, among those stylists who truly command the language—the authentic language, in its etymological depths. If anything, I might fault him for keeping it too rigid, for seeming to chase after le mot juste when dealing with simple souls and everyday matters. His splendid prose, where artistry transcends mundane subject matter, displays learning without pomposity, achieving expression with precision, poise and simplicity. Yet because he deploys exactly the right words, he bewilders the uninformed, who rush to denounce his “affectation” and “eccentricity”—poor fools who fail to grasp these elementary truths: that a distinctive mind’s singularity is simply its authentic life, and that stylistic refinement, when guided by artistic conscience, is nothing more than literary good manners.

Consider the notorious opening of Les Barthozouls, which scandalised so many readers, with its supposedly outlandish word “coruscation”—found in any decent dictionary:

Beneath the coruscation of the August sun, the high road—along which only the soft complaint of slow wheels sighed—scored a raw line through the plain’s exhausted verdure, like an infinite strap of incandescent iron. Yet nearing Ferralzan-l’Arvieu, as if there one were completing its riveting to the earth, it rang out as beneath hammer-blows and dissolved into ascending veils of dense dust. For here the gait of the carts bearing vintners from the lowlands to the fair would suddenly transform. Proud to arrive at a gallant pace, at coach-like velocities, their beasts still dry-coated, the drivers—young men for the most part—would wait until the fairground hove into view before lifting their reins and applying perpetual prods, to which the heavy plough-horses, whom trotting discommoded, answered with impetuous galloping; and—setting the seats of women perched amongst dust-covers bouncing, shaking wheels, whip, tackle, every loose timber in the vehicles, jangling bells and harness-irons, drumming the roadway with the rhythmic thunder of hooves—they unleashed themselves blindly into the void, in the furious madness of a cavalry charge.

To be fair, the author himself regards these stylistic and observational works as preparatory exercises, études towards the comprehensive portrait of modern society he intends to capture in one definitive volume.

J.-H. Rosny shares this preoccupation with sociology and socialism; moreover, he brings scientific expertise to bear, wedding the scientist and the socialist through a mysticism entirely free of metaphysical pretensions. “Modern mysticism is either socialist or scientific,” he declares in an epigraph to psalms celebrating the universal “ontological symphony”—and Rosny’s mysticism is both. Let me identify straightaway what damages his books: an arbitrary scheme seemingly hostile to art itself. The prose turns pedantic. Greek and Latin terms everywhere! Physiological and chemical analogies that summon no images whatsoever! Remarkably, the style often remains fresh and nimble—wherever the author abandons his laboratory jargon—which makes one regret all the more this pointless parade of learning. His characters lead truncated lives: creatures of sensation apparently lacking minds, while the author, too much the scientist, seems to run experiments on “subjects” manufactured to the latest specifications. Then there are those ponderous, sprawling compositions without focus—what a glut of grim tales and dire encounters! What relentless, almost violent appetite for catastrophe!

That said, J.-H. Rosny commands formidable evocative powers. His scientific excesses stem from genuine strength: an acute sensitivity to a major current in human thought, to what must be modern art’s fundamental condition: the marriage of religious and scientific sensibility. Hence this scientist’s mysticism. Without socialism, I believe, this twin impulse—scientific and mystical—would lead our poet to transcend the immediately verifiable present in his fiction. One fears his persistent social concerns may trap him in a rather outmoded novelistic formula. Nevertheless, his originality remains undeniable: he is already our most compelling interpreter of how natural phenomena shape the human organism.

“Francis Poictevin is a landscape artist in Corot’s tradition, a painter of sea and plant life beyond compare, a masterful etcher who understands the still, dead calms of light. The human soul and flesh seem to slip through his fingers.¹²³” His thought therefore shrinks from human beings with trembling astonishment, almost yearning to disappear rather than disturb this consummate analyst of his own feelings as they are transmuted into nature’s forms: trees, stones, water. Yet his analysis, through uncanny powers of precision and insight, manages to surpass itself, conjuring in mere lines the complete life, the secret life that dreams in beech trees, in droplets of water, and in realms beyond the infinitesimal. At times his analysis, buoyed by the extraordinary vision of a poet-painter, ventures to grapple with human figures through the genius of a Primitive or Gustave Moreau; more often it mines the past for memories—youth, adolescence, childhood—and recovers the face of former days in that exquisite uncertainty of first light, when things stand clear yet retain the fresh potential to become something else.

I would follow this artist even more willingly—one for whom “delicacy” is far too crude a label—through his gossamer notations of the ineffable, such as:

Blue goes forth, beyond the passions of love and death, or rather dwells in lost extremity. From turquoise to indigo, one moves from chaste convergences to final ravages. Births and griefs, so true they are struck dumb.¹²⁴

Or this:

Between my soul and the longed-for beyond I sense some ineffably delicate tapestry that yet divides. Behind it I divine worlds of eternal newness, for at moments it stirs, troubling and delicious, beneath wafts from distant places; and the wavering figures of this tapestry wrought by no human hand, rather like ancient memories, harmonise with the slow arabesque rhythms of the fabric where something smoulders and whence escapes an echo of the ineffable.

It is chiefly in such consummate yet compact prose poems that the analyst gives way to a fuller poet, better armed; and as the mystic emerges, so too the metaphysician can be glimpsed. Yet Francis Poictevin’s books, for all their delicious suggestiveness and novel beauties, still convey only imperfectly the poet’s true aesthetic intent. The art he envisions—at once subtle and universal—delivers little more than subtleties. Does this artist, who knows precisely what work cries out to be done, lack nerve? One shouldn’t think so, though one might worry he has too many scruples.

Moreover, this universality, this absent fiction round which a thousand reflected facets of the Idea would so beautifully hover and unfurl within a principal and expanding unity—perhaps this fiction does exist, albeit as fiction. Doesn’t it take shape in the reader’s memory of Paysages and Songes? Might it not be that unspoken human face, the soul’s reality that betrays itself only at its edges? In retrospect, Francis Poictevin’s books appear like a precious ancient chasuble, so time-worn that the main coarse weave, threadbare and unravelling beneath broken metallic ornaments surviving only here and there, persists as nothing more than the finest filaments one daren’t touch for fear they might snap.

Perhaps Poictevin’s affliction is that he lacks command of Verse—and how magnificently Verse would bind these unmoored prose pieces! How it would prevent the necessary incompleteness the writer quite rightly insists upon from degenerating into mere scattered addenda! His own doctrine on composition: “Revealed on the last page, yet revealed as an extension, everything must be suggested rather than stated, held in ineffable reserve. And thus this reserve, this tacit understanding, this final veiled confession which the rare reader must divine in his own soul—there lies the work’s seal.”

In probing the depths of the human condition, Adrien Remacle has struck upon one of those mysteries where the natural becomes supernatural—seemingly the only territory now open to the novelist who seeks the Absolute. To embody this extraordinary dimension of ordinary existence, the writer, having no recourse to verse, has necessarily woven his prose with varied cadences, creating the illusion of rhythm through an interplay of prose poetry and psychological analysis. The story¹²⁵. From his mother’s husband the child inherits a violent, impulsive sensuality that cripples the spirituality bequeathed by her lover. This child, who becomes a painter, never outgrows his childhood: his yearnings for absolute Beauty and absolute Love undermine one another, leaving both forever incomplete. He burns with excessive ardour; in happiness, he thirsts insatiably for the feminine; in sorrow, he retreats into the austere abstractions of divine love, then drives his art to impossible heights, only to plunge into the coarsest suspicions and vulgar abasements. In one beloved woman he seeks to unite both mysteries—feminine and beautiful, warmth and light. Yet this woman remains but an absent soul, a mere reflection, and the artist drains himself trying to conjure her into reality—he who is himself so phantasmal, forever torn between the poles of spiritual and sensual existence. The work, as it must, offers no resolution, abandoning this soul to an interior purgatory bereft of hope: doubting himself, doubting the beloved. The artist stands naked before the great winds of natural forces, unable to divine whether this breath rises from the void or from some luminous wellspring of life; alone amongst forms he takes by turns for empty illusions or distant intimations of the infinite. This prose poem:

The Poet walks the road alone, apart from crowds, ages ahead, ages behind the marching throngs. Child, man, and elder—yet ever young and beautiful. He journeys on, believing he glimpses hourly, through morning mists, beyond the noonday suns, above the evening clouds, emerging from opaque nights blue beneath serene moons, the glittering domes of the Dream City.

And he sings this City, and walks on.

He sees far mountains, blue and rose, skies of purple gold torn by vast blazing rifts, haloed with phantom cities glittering in dark recesses: behind these peaks, beneath these heavens, stands the City’s mighty portal.

And he sings this City, and walks on.

Rivers and seas unveil before him green depths, blue chasms, strange reflections of past splendours, prophetic mirages of monuments to come: these are but heralds and harbingers of the City’s magnificence.

And he sings this City, and walks the water’s edge.

War howls across the plains, around the mountains. He pauses to contemplate, listening, the shriek of swords, the thunder of iron. He trembles: these men must battle for the City.

And he sings this City, and walks amongst men.

When warrior hosts fall silent, he passes through peaceful gardens. Young women admire him, follow—he wears a golden nimbus, his words breathe unknown perfumes, the breeze makes music in his hair. He pauses: here are fugitives from the City.

He asks them his way, sings to them, and walks on.

When the Poet has long journeyed, road-weary, he meets a woman robed in white—he knows her. She approaches: she will guide me to the City. And he sings the City and sleeps within the Dream.

Édouard Dujardin began¹²⁶ by examining certain highly peculiar cases of existence at its limits. His style, though marred by simplifications that regrettably corrupted traditional language, nevertheless achieved something like a special sheath perfectly suited to these extraordinary subjects. Subsequently, driven by the twin ambitions of realising authentic realism and fulfilling the Wagnerian imperative to render feelings in their entirety as aesthetic form, Dujardin produced that remarkable work Les lauriers sont coupés, wherein he attempted to record with scrupulous precision every action, gesture, word, thought, emotion and sensation experienced by a particular character over a specific duration. Such an enterprise, which cannot properly be called literary, is in any case impossible. Dujardin nonetheless achieved an approximation which, alas, yields only crushing boredom. — Yet this novelist, who turned poet for the 1888 New Year offerings, struck upon the notion — which would have earned him a place amongst the poets had he not previously written solely in prose — of fusing verse and prose in his poem Pour la Vierge du roc ardent. But was this genuine intuition, or merely accident? For this poem, judged on its own merits, might well appear a futile exercise. Still, in all fairness, we must acknowledge that Dujardin was the first to attempt this marriage of the two literary forms; and whilst his prose may want for vigour and his verse for poetry, his ambitions remain praiseworthy.

Maurice Barrès grasps the essential aesthetic imperatives of our age — formal, synthetic, mystical; untouched by contingency and bringing art as near as possible to pure thought, into the Soul itself where, had the poet so chosen, the symbolic décor required by Fiction might equally find sanctuary. This is his method in his book¹²⁷: proceeding through successive states of soul, first outlined through what he terms concordances, then evoked through his protagonist’s reveries.

Each vision of the universe, with its mediating images and particular atmosphere, distilled into one emblematic episode; — the initial scenes, hazy and rather abstract, honouring the dimness of recollection and emerging from a guarded youth that transformed everything into dream; — select details, carefully chosen, accumulating as we draw nearer to the present moment of writing; — until finally, in one minutely observed evening, our analyst abandons himself to the vagrant impulses of mind and heart.

Here we have the psychological novel’s design. The execution nearly matches it. The shortcomings are those of a lesser Stendhal conscious of his deficiencies. What he lacks is a mind so thoroughly critical that it transcends critical opinion altogether; what he lacks is ignorance of his own rare sensibility’s worth. I do not demand unconsciousness from this writer at this juncture; rather, I hope for a consciousness so intense it forgets its own watching, sees only what is watched, eliminates between observer and observed all the machinery of technique and studied pose — eliminates the dandy’s gesture that betrays this genuine heart, this heart of sincere artifice, perhaps feigning shame at being a heart at all. — Barrès errs chiefly in subordinating his almost consummate art to the baser dictates of psychology given free rein. He has stopped short of Fiction. He declared too hastily that the time had come to write. And yet, what exquisitely elegant prose! Consider these lines:

Borne upon this vast river of thought that runs confined between sunset and dawn, it seemed to him that the river, now overflowing the narrow channel of a single night, would burst its banks and sweep him across the whole expanse of life. The rapture of comprehending, unfolding, vibrating, harmonising self and world, becoming filled with images at once indefinite and profound! Those beautiful eyes glimpsed within oneself, brimming with passion, knowledge and irony, intoxicating us whilst withholding themselves, revealing of their secret only this: “We are of your race, ardent and disheartened.”

Nothing is so wanting in this artist as faith; and, symbolically, faith’s very form is likewise absent: Verse.

Jean Jullien (Trouble-Cœur) may lack a sufficiently deliberate aesthetic programme, yet his instinctive return to the primitives offers us precious testimony.

Henri d’Argis (Sodome), who made the error of saddling his first book with a sensational—and frankly misleading—title merely to attract readers (though he will spare us Gomorrhe), hovers between openly symbolic art and documentary realism. He would profit from understanding that the latter is but a stepping-stone to the former.

Paul Margueritte, despite several works of varying merit, remains the author of Tous Quatre, one of this generation’s finest achievements and a book that shows the most penetrating grasp of the harsh new psychological realities facing literary creation.

Here, however, I draw the line on this survey of young writers. Despite their varied guises, they know one another by certain hallmarks—and many bear them all: mysticism; synthesis in thought or expression; the influence of science wedded to religious feeling; formal liberation bent on achieving rarer means for more powerful effects; symbolism; a return to first principles. Little would be gained by showing how, beside these seeking and striving poets and artists, other young writers—old before their time—are merely going through yesterday’s motions. Little would be gained by measuring the death-throes of naturalism, by cataloguing those who ape the late Parnassians, or by listing the new novelists pandering to the salon crowd. Between these various breeds of irrelevance and the poets and novelists whose work and convictions I have sketched above, few would dispute where the Future truly lies.