Yet the dignity of Poets, however incommunicable, remains all too violable. The bitter truth is they need an audience and are forever tempted to court the wavering sympathies that might yet be won. How they would love to pander to the Mob’s taste, to win the Barbarians’ vote! But no: that way is barred. To curry favour with such masters now means nothing less than betraying one’s Destiny. These Publics make for more jealous, more capricious overlords—alas!—than any Duke of Ferrara or Prince of Condé, whilst being decidedly less noble and, needless to say, less generous. What sincere artist can bear being kept by lending-library subscribers or theatre-going crowds? The people, goaded on by success’s toadies, have sunk so low in their tastes—I have said it before, but doesn’t it bear repeating?—that satisfying them would take a positive genius for the sordid. The signs are unmistakable, the hour has struck. Our fine French tongue has degenerated in contemporary mouths into a jargon stripped of nearly all its native genius; to speak correctly today is practically to speak a dead language—”tedious”, they call it. Meanwhile, our literary forms appear spent, moribund even, whilst the neighbouring arts surge forward with something new that encroaches upon Literature itself without quite breaching their own frontiers8. And now the Religions—those age-old cornerstones of every Fiction—are crumbling, tottering on their ancient foundations, ready to collapse, and we seem to watch a twilight settling over the world, herald of a night blacker than the Dark Ages, made worse by the complicity of all our futile cleverness, all our experience that has taught us only disillusionment.
Faced with imminent catastrophe, the Poets have done the one thing they could: instinctively recoiled towards Origins. They have broken free from this stifling artificial atmosphere and turned towards Nature—only to be branded “artificial” by a world of artifice. But this is merely one delusion amongst the countless delusions of a society that has everything backwards, that fancies its problem is knowing too much, imagining the masses have absorbed the learning of a few exceptional minds, when in truth the masses have lost all sense of the most basic principles—the primal sense of order, the sense of ultimate purpose.
We have contrived an infinity of essential trivialities to obscure the single reality underlying everything. In all things we put—how perfectly the saying captures it!—the cart before the horse. The cart gets refined; the horses deteriorate. Never have the means been so minutely studied as now; the end has ceased to matter. The hordes of versifiers who turn out impeccable lines are terrifying—but what goes into them? We have foolproof recipes for concocting novels in the romantic or naturalist manner, yet these eleventh-hour romantics and naturalists don’t even seem to grasp that the whole point is to dig out of themselves whatever is most intimate, most singular, most opaque to others and to their own awareness, and forge their novels from that. Instead, their novels plod along exactly like M. de Fontanes’s verses at the century’s dawn, lumbering down well-worn, flat roads towards foregone, insignificant destinations. Leaving novels without resolution has been the fashion for ages now. Well, it’s just another fashion, no better or worse than the rest (rather worse, actually), born of hatred for Imagination and the cult—now outright idolatry—of the “human document”. Not that I would have them return to cloaks and daggers; in mediocrity, everything is equally worthless. I am simply observing how craftsmanship has invaded Art—a monstrous development which, whilst hardly new, has this novel feature today: it no longer even hides itself but proclaims, insists upon, advertises itself as legitimate, natural. We now recognise a “profession of man of letters”, a calling somewhere between consulting solicitor and dancing-master, not exactly liberal to be sure, and we have quite forgotten what an extraordinary state of being a man must attain before taking that strange step of writing things devoid of the immediate, obvious utility of a business letter or legal plea. But nowhere does this illogic-become-orthodoxy, this madness-turned-proverb, show itself more starkly than in the theatre. Every talent matters to the dramatic work we applaud: the actor’s talent first and above all, then the director’s talent, the designer’s talent, and I daresay the prompter’s talent too, every talent save one—the author’s, who supplies merely the raw material to be worked up in that collaboration (risible if it weren’t so pitiful!) amongst impresario, actor, and lastly author, with success measured doubly by the actor’s personal style, his individual flair for gesture and grimace, and by the director’s grasp of what he calls “public taste”—the whole thing faithfully, punctiliously, abjectly made to order by that universal lackey, the Poet!
Exceptions exist, I hasten to add, but how rare, and with what suspicion the first-night crowds receive them! Les Erynnie9flickered briefly on the Odéon’s bills before vanishing; Le Baiser10—does it provoke the noble laughter it deserves? Doesn’t it owe its success merely to its punning rhymes, never approaching its true significance? Pure chance—a competition—brought Le Nouveau Monde11 to the stage, where it promptly failed; Les Corbeaux12—what a nightmare for respectable bourgeois sensibilities! Formosa13 garnered tepid approval at best; Le Passant14 rode on Musset’s coattails… No, the authentic dramatic triumphs of our time—ask Monsieur Sarcey!—are Le Monde où l’on s’ennuie and Trois Femmes pour un Mari. Do I exaggerate?
The fact remains: today’s state of taste in this country, the Poet’s bondage to publishers who know “what the lending libraries demand,” to directors who divine the whims of both boxes and gods, to actors who dictate their roles—this whole arrangement is perverse and imbecilic, lethal to talent’s natural growth, the enemy of all sincerity.
And how rich—this public that feeds on theatrical swill daring to call us eccentric because we choose to offend rather than betray the truth that drives us, to cry decadence at us who struggle against all odds to revive the noble traditions they have destroyed. People claim they cannot understand us, and with that insufferable boulevard smugness they dress up this refusal of justice as false modesty: “It’s above my head, I’m afraid.”
— Quite.
Léon Hennique Novel 