Léon Hennique Novel

Three men and three works perfectly embody and epitomise the three Formulas.

Of these three, only the representative of the classical formula achieves greatness (though he is now almost forgotten). Between the second and third lies roughly the same gulf in merit as between the first and second. These gradations of mind themselves proclaim the varying worth of the Formulas.

Joubert was born in the mid-eighteenth century yet remained proof against its influence. If, as he claims, the Revolution banished his spirit from the real world by rendering it too ghastly to contemplate, the collapse of Christian and classical Art drove him to despair of neither God nor Art. Though somewhat hemmed in by evangelical boundaries, he is as metaphysical as any French mind can be through its own resources—he coins phrases like, Space is the stature of God. Rather than see his style falter under the laxity that marked the period, he draws it taut and distils it. He aspires to compress “an entire book into a page, an entire page into a sentence, and that sentence into a single word”. This sensibility leads him to divine the prose poem. He articulates it through observations such as: “It would be curious if style were beautiful only when veiled in some obscurity, that is, wreathed in clouds. Perhaps this holds true when such obscurity springs from its very excellence, from choosing words that shun the commonplace, that eschew the vulgar. Beauty certainly always possesses both visible and hidden dimensions. It certainly never charms us more than when we read it attentively in a language we but half comprehend… The French language contains small words with which almost no one knows what to do… It is equivocation, uncertainty—the suppleness of words, in short—that constitutes one of their chief virtues and permits their precise employment… Etc.” He possesses, as none in his age, the feeling for modern verse. “Beautiful verses are those that breathe forth like sounds or perfumes.” He neither whimpers nor jeers. He thinks. After La Bruyère, even after Pascal, Joubert thinks. His thoughts, cast in the purest seventeenth-century tradition yet with something modern in their tone, something keen in their substance, achieve essential form in swift, economical expression. He lacks both movement and colour. He is scarcely more than pure intellect. Yet Chateaubriand reveres and consults him as the most reliable guardian of all those certainties he hopes to preserve for future generations. The one from whom the great modern synthesis will mystically flow hearkens, in Joubert, to the pure, profound echo of the past—further purified and deepened by a mind gifted with critical acumen and receptive to the winds of change.

Théophile Gautier dozes through performances of Racine, yet when the curtain falls, he rises and, if asked, will dash off—without a moment’s thought—the most brilliant review of this play he never watched. For Gautier cares nothing for subject, nothing for thought. He seeks no subjects. “What are they going to have me do now?” Nor does he ponder what he is about to write. Does he ever think? He paints forms in motion that he has the gift of seeing as beautiful. But these forms’ inner life eludes him, which is why he cannot paint life: he paints animation, beauty, coldness. When he treats passion, it remains forever secondary, at least in the quality of execution if not in the object’s worth. His sensuality is crude and commonplace. His mind occasionally displays curiosity—but to what depths? Yet his hand, his eyes are extraordinary. They eclipse the absent soul. Gautier thinks so little that his talent’s sheer brilliance sometimes nearly persuades us that Thought itself is superfluous. He makes us forget the life he himself forgets. His characters and landscapes possess something other than life: they possess the enchantment of surfaces; they are canvases and statuary. — The work shaped by this master craftsman remains as indifferent and precious to us as a museum collection: one may come to study its marvels, to unlock art’s secrets, but it’s a perilous refuge for anyone lacking a truly burning flame within. A simple tale would illuminate Théophile Gautier’s temperament better than his longest books or any commentary. Not that Fortunio represents his masterpiece. Indeed, the term has no meaning with Gautier—he created nothing but masterpieces! But Fortunio‘s subject afforded him the opportunity, in treating passion there, and violent passion at that, to “externalise” this very passion, rendering it through tones and sounds, colours and gestures. His characters are splendid automata, or rather authentic androids. One small phrase proves particularly telling: “Fortunio ran his hand along Cinthia’s back, but with the same sangfroid as if he were touching marble.” In that phrase lies the essence of the entire Romantic movement. What else has it done but breathe artificial life into beautiful—or grotesque, though the grotesque is Beauty’s reverse—forms in motion, yet never forms that move us, for they possess neither nerves nor thoughts. Small wonder Fortunio maintains his sangfroid: it is indeed marble he caresses⁴⁸.

Guy de Maupassant began, as Flaubert’s disciple, with a masterpiece, Boule-de-Suif—the quintessential achievement of the narrowest, most rigorous naturalist formula. The subject is dismal and sordid, the style fitting. What matter that Maupassant has since plummeted to the depths of journalistic hackwork, forfeiting everything there: his feel for external and physical life, his colour, his language, his very identity. What matter that reading the tales he churns out by the dozen—which he “rattles off smartly and polishes off briskly” (to quote the reviewers’ cant)—proves as pointless as it is impossible. I believe he has even “proclaimed” somewhere, has formulated the ideal of this swashbuckling literature. What matter. He had his hour of literary integrity. Bereft of all thought, lacking even the ghost of an idea, he nonetheless proved brave enough to probe the vilest depths of human motivation. He captured the squalid truth of a humanity without soul, heart, mind, or imagination—thoroughly modern, in short—and echoed its retch with pitiless accuracy. — Our hurried age grows weary of prolific scribblers. It takes on trust those “authorised” critics who trumpet Madame Bovary, Germinie Lacerteux and L’Assommoir as naturalist masterworks. Yet readers know that the first of these novels contains a Poet’s qualities, the second an artistic grasp of modernity, and the third a Romantic inheritance—all things that transcend mere Sensation. Sensation alone inhabits Maupassant’s tale, itself the pure distillation of Naturalism.