Léon Hennique Novel

Summary. — I. Between that precious generation of the Parnassians and our own, there remains to observe the almost negligible—though curiously so—passage of those who occupy this void without filling it: transitions of feverish exhaustion, courting perpetual commotion whilst having precious little to show for it. — II. There remains also to note the solitary indulgence of certain artists who—whether rightly or wrongly I dare not say—cut themselves off from the century’s momentum: perhaps they too sought the Absolute but came up short on hope. — III. There remains, finally, to conclude with depositions from several weighty witnesses.

One of the poets who came before us told me, with sincere sadness: “Call it peasant superstition if you will, but they say when storms brew before the eggs hatch, half the brood fails, and the chicks prove barren.” The storm was indeed brewing as the generation of Messrs Richepin and Loti came of age.

They will leave behind nothing save the memory of vast, hazy pretensions. A conspiracy of Nothingness. Even their self-appointed labels have sunk without trace. Who now recalls the Vivants and the Brutalists? Yet through the perverse logic of things, several occupy what they call—and what one must call—positions of prominence. Every so often, some considerable abortion by M. Jean Richepin holds Paris captive for three hours at least. Or it’s M. Jean Aicard collecting his annual Academy prize. Or M. Hugues tours the provinces with an entire theatrical company, parading Danton’s ghastly spectre. M. Pierre Loti, whose novels command a delightful if picturesque following—nervous women who see themselves in Rarahu, superannuated naval officers who exclaim of exotic landscapes “Spot on!”, and those innocent boulevardiers who champion a novelist as they would vouch for their confectioner—M. Pierre Loti troubles only his senior, M. Alphonse Daudet. Were they in better spirits, they might strike a bargain: one trades in the perverse and byzantine, the ultra-Parisian and achingly modern; the other has given Florian’s pastoral straw a makeover (in seaweed, no less—how ingenious!). Both write with comparable ineptitude. Both possess minds equally barren of profound thought or noble conception, whilst boasting considerable worldliness and proven insight into public taste. Indeed, I should rather enjoy watching these shrewd operators join forces, batting between them—like a rubber ball that chimes gold at every bounce—this contemporary public which deserves no better. One would drug them with his intoxicating parisine, the other would revive them in salt baths amongst the pungent kelp. One would play the metropolis, the other the holiday resort. Or should one bludgeon them to death with laughter at Tarascon or in the Alps, the other would restore their equanimity with his broad vistas and “innocent folk tales”. Who could possibly complain about such an arrangement?⁸³

What a sorry lot! For it truly is pathetic to watch them scramble through their careers, scavenging fragments of originality from sundry imitations. M. Richepin exemplifies the type perfectly. Whom does he ape initially? Villon, Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, M. de Banville, and does so with consummate facility and a swaggering air that tickles the bourgeois, who, unwittingly heeding divine wisdom, relishes being held in contempt. On he goes. Then who? Victor Hugo again, now with Lucretius and Messrs Leconte de Lisle, Coppée and Verlaine thrown in. The early imitations date from his bohemian phase; the later ones from his atheist incarnation. But today this mania for becoming someone else in order to become someone has turned pathetic. Having caught the prevailing wind, M. Richepin—yes, the atheist himself!—has gone mystical! He has cottoned on that the rising generations burn for origins and endings, that they crave mystery. He has ransacked his soul. Lo and behold, he shares these passions and cravings, just like us! Some months back, I chanced upon his verses in a journal: they were trite, yet mystical! Bloated in form, threadbare in content, yet mystical! I hear he has just penned Le Mage, an opera libretto. Hedging his bets, you might think—no, it’s too calculated, mere vacant ambition. A pity, really, for with greater humility M. Richepin might have produced decent work. Madame André contains some splendid passages. La Chanson des Gueux offers merry and peculiar refrains, though their coarseness nearly always grates. Good grief! This manufacturer of hefty tomes is nothing but an intimist and ballad-monger whom the École Normale has corrupted with rhetoric and delusions of grandeur!

This is their stamp, almost to a man: they nurse ambitions that might pass for generous but prove equally absurd, hurling themselves at doors already flung wide. Thus proceeds M. Bergerat, trumpeting the new and the bold whilst devoutly mimicking the established masters. Thus proceeds M. Montégut, who invokes the public over masterpieces spurned by some Director or other—spurned, mind you, just as you or I would have done. M. Maurice Rollinat emerges as the most intriguing casualty of this unfortunate moment. Here is a musician of strange originality, a painter too of genuine, intuitive feeling for nature—those deep plains where the eye loses itself in visions of infinity, those sorrowful houses with their sorrowful tenants, the troubling ordinariness of farmstead and grange, the mired and vicious world in miniature of the pond, its frogs and toads. Amongst such creatures, such things and plain folk, M. Rollinat found his poetry. Paris was his undoing. This poet of simple gifts sought sophistication there, and since simplicity was his lifeblood, sophistication proved his death—hence Les Névroses. With remarkable dignity, M. Rollinat abruptly turned his back on a fame he knew to be hollow, a fame that stands as one of the most bewildering reversals of public taste and surest indicators of the work’s essential poverty. He retreated to his rustic province yet returned transformed into psychologist and moralist. Parisian gaslight had scorched those once keen and guileless eyes…

I will pass over several others. Let us accord a place of honour to M. Chantavoine, whose bitter sensibility remains, for all that, humane and genuine. Yet none rises above the rest. Messrs Valabrègue, Blémont, Arène⁸⁴ aren’t wanting in application: they execute admirably what everyone has executed before them. To what end? Their motto appears to be, unflinchingly: “No innovations!” The Frémines, Grandmougins, Goudeaus, Lafenestres, Lemaîtres⁸⁵, Pigeons, Tiercelins, and so forth, and so forth! guard against innovation with equal vigilance. Their boldest departure, when they hazard one, is to sally forth, as on a sortie, to “apply” Parnassian precepts to scenes and physiognomies beyond the Parisian pale. The very blueprint of these minor geographical forays offends against Art’s true nature, which recognises but two native grounds: the soul and the ether, being spirit’s wing, and knows but one duration, eternity. Still, it remains M. Gabriel Marc’s modest achievement to have faithfully transcribed Auvergne and its natives. It remains M. Gabriel Vicaire’s modest achievement to have laid before us certain Bressan vistas and hostelries⁸⁶. We have, too, the Provençal literature and the Félibres—those counterfeit naïfs, artfully artless, composing in a tongue both academic and extinct. They persist still⁸⁷. The author of Émaux Bressans boasts another distinction—impossible to overlook! Together with that excellent fellow M. Beauclair, M. Vicaire—styling himself “Adoré Floupette” for the enterprise—lampooned in Les Déliquescences the “extravagances” of the Décadents. The piece brims with wit. One hardly dares fault it for providing journalists with their laugh. Mind you, at Poets’ expense, when all’s said and done, though that is its real import, which perhaps not everyone has grasped, or cares to grasp. My conclusion: Here stands a spokesman for a generation that has produced nothing original, that either ignores its immediate forebears (those we actually attend to) or apes them servilely, that has let the vital chain of tradition snap. Confronted with the Young guard struggling to mend that chain and fulfill their poetic calling—to forge the new “though the world be emptied of it”—he sees only what might seem puerile in this splendid endeavour and offers only mockery. In truth, had these Young ones possessed the leisure to pay back our wag in kind, they would have found themselves at sea. Parody requires an object, and I challenge M. Vicaire and M. Ponchon, for all their cleverness, to parody even one of their immediate contemporaries.

All this will strike some as unduly severe, intemperate even. But perspective shifts when we remember that younger brothers call their elders to account for the patrimony. The elders have allowed it to moulder through negligence. The younger brothers protest, and rightly, for the crown of the work would weigh less heavily had the ground not been abandoned to weeds…

I overstate the case. Some have laboured, M. Bourget being one of them, through his early novels (and alongside or after him, all who have advanced the psychological novel) and through his verse. We might add M. Bouchor to their number. They will leave their mark.

M. Bouchor began badly, with pieces in the crude and buffoonish taste of his friends Messrs Richepin and Ponchon. Hence his immediate and considerable “success”. But the higher he climbed, the further success receded. The Poèmes de l’Amour et de la Mer claim a hundred readers, L’Aurore perhaps twenty, the Symboles none whatsoever—an excellent sign. Irony, and of the saddest kind! Just as M. Vicaire would mock the young poets still groping their way, so M. Bouchor mocked those elders who had found theirs, and both men, mark you, did so not through rational prose argument or doctrine, but in verse itself. M. Bouchor’s punishment? As he improves daily, he daily grows more like those he once derided. Indeed, he overshoots the mark. Where once he merely laughed, thought now holds him captive. The artist suffers for it, and already in the Symboles one repeatedly asks: why verse at all? and recalls M. Sully-Prudhomme’s rhymed prose⁸⁸. M. Bouchor’s signal virtue, the very reason we cherish him, is his responsiveness to that profound voice urging the Poet, in our age, to remember the most ancient teachings, to heed the immemorial wisdom of the first Magi, to peer into the depths of antique Metaphysics and Religions. Alas, without faith, all threatens to remain barren—Art and Philosophy alike. The verses, learned but cold, refuse to sing; the thoughts, bent on negation, cannot create. Want of faith—here lies what makes this once excessively merry soul now excessively melancholy. He lacks faith in those very religions he celebrates, which from the dawn of time form but one Religion evolving with humanity itself. He dwells on successive errors that were, each in its season, truths. He lacks faith in his artistic instrument, in this Verse he overworks, in this Rhyme that neither guides nor sustains him… M. Bouchor’s spiritual journey remains incomplete. Besides, young as he is, he belongs to this generation through early associations rather than age.

M. Bourget has traced an arc through literature. Starting from authentic springs—Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendhal—toward the proper destination, he suddenly swerved, not backwards, but astray, down those dreary paths haunted by fatigue and compromise, toward unwholesome regions ruled by Messrs Daudet and Loti. — Of this lamentable conversion, no more need be said; let us recall his former distinction. — M. Bourget’s voice has ever been faint, yet true, aristocratic, penetrating. In his verses⁸⁹, nearly all deliciously Lakist, he diluted Baudelaire’s grand dark beauty—that death-rattle shriek!—into the plaint of a soul where intellect smothers feeling. In doing so, he discovered how to remain a poet through somewhat neutral psychology, more anxious than anguished. His stories and early novels marked a reaction against rabid Naturalism, whilst preserving certain merits, for “the delicate idealisation with which he aureoles his women does not render them unreal”⁹⁰. — Granted, M. Bourget lacked the requisite force to wrench art from a path it needed to traverse but not inhabit, back onto the highway that truly leads to Synthesis. That demanded a more metaphysical mind, more buoyant imagination, sensibility unencumbered by petty irritations. Yet what he could and should accomplish, M. Bourget accomplished. He revisited Balzac, especially Stendhal, M. Feuillet too, and against novelists who recognised only creatures of raw sensation, he set creatures driven by sentiment. Here, Deuxième Amour stands as masterwork. But M. Bourget’s cardinal error, prompted I suspect by his delicately sensual, excessively plaintive, even pampered nature, was permitting the brute melancholy of fleshly novels to infiltrate his novels of spirit. He has contributed his quota to the “grand inquest”. Like others, he chronicles contemporary mores, and with him as with all, fiction’s “noble falsehood” merely enables “truthful details”. A fait divers he prefers refined where others prefer it coarse—negligible difference. Exquisite poet and novelist, M. Bourget remains a critic of real consequence, admirably schooled by Sainte-Beuve and M. Taine, with works to show for it.

Another critic has versified. I have assessed M. Lemaître’s verses: they surpass the tender Sully-Prudhomme he mimics only through mimicking Théophile Gautier too. His criticism proves highly refined, highly intelligent, highly normalien and highly unqualified. — Did he not cavil at M. Paul Verlaine over grammar? I concede, regrettably, that M. Lemaître writes correctly, commands respectable general intelligence, possesses all that instruction provides. Yet I seek his critical principle and discover it neither in masterworks he hasn’t produced, nor in doctrine he surely doesn’t claim to have established. I can acknowledge him only as M. Sarcey’s pupil, rival, or heir, and, bluntly stated, the Dilettante-Critic.

A third critic demands more of our attention: M. Gabriel Sarrazin. I should properly place him amongst the new generation, were he not linked through early connections to its predecessor. Free from academic or other affectations, M. Sarrazin possesses strength through faith. Throughout his studies Les Poètes modernes de l’Angleterre, throughout his new volume (La Renaissance de la Poésie anglaise), one feels at every turn a man who worships and comprehends Beauty. Through these works of learning, discernment and integrity, he has rendered Literature invaluable service.

Round M. Bourget, though he is no captain to them, rather gathered through shared tendencies, let us assemble those novelists half-idealist, half-naturalist like himself. M. Mirbeau, gifted with passionate force and genuine, elevated devotion to Letters, Messrs de Bonnières, Pouvillon, Dodillon, Hervieux, Lavedan, Caze, all craft sincere, studious works whose sole reproach is tarrying in transitional territory. — M. Harry Alis, working naturalism leavened with irony, gives us the faultless Petite Ville. — Standing apart, I would cite M. Elémir Bourges (Le Crépuscule des Dieux proves a Poet’s splendid achievement), M. Pinard, whose Madame X betrays a remarkably peculiar psychological bent, M. Blondel, whose Le Bonheur d’aimer I prize for its tender, authentically sentimental melancholy, and M. Léon Bloy, pamphleteer⁹¹ and novelist who makes novels of pamphlets and pamphlets of novels. Here is another writer pledged to the Church who horrifies the Church. Such men rattle her dying hours when she’d rather drift off to elderly women’s whispers… I marvel at M. Bloy’s inexhaustible vituperation. He reigns as Master of Invective. Nothing astounds like his adverbs. Yet I unreservedly admire certain singular passages on historical Symbolism in the Désespéré.