A bold literary review of Émile Zola’s Fecundity by Octave Mirbeau—exploring themes of resurrection, prophetic vision, and the moral imperative of life through the poetic lens of late 19th-century French criticism.
Here is a sight both august and marvellous. For crying out the truth, a man is disowned, vilified, struck down, threatened with death by cannibalistic mobs; for crying out for justice, he is condemned and driven out by judges in revolt against human conscience. And from his place of exile, this man turns towards his country with a soul immense and made even greater by suffering, by bitterness; he draws from this very bitterness a creative serenity, without disdain or recrimination, all generosity, and through an effort of his passionate imagination, he bestows upon his homeland and the universe not merely another masterpiece, but a code of peace and love, of hope and liberation—a Gospel, in short, of light and future… You would have to have nothing in your heart but the brute’s stupid hatred not to feel, to the point of enthusiasm, the extraordinary beauty of this moral phenomenon…
It seemed Émile Zola had exhausted existence itself—and then some. He had taken from it, one by one, all its miseries, all its shocks, all its abandonments, all its revolts too. One after another, the trades that consume the brain, the machines that devour human flesh, had revealed to him their secrets of torture and their economic inevitabilities. In turn, he had poured the inexhaustible oil of his genius over all the cogs of contemporary society. Everything and everyone had been his subject. He was the great labourer of thought, the master of guilds, the Ecclesiastes of every religion, the bard of art and science. He had then grappled, body to body, with miracles, the Church and the City… Lourdes, Rome, Paris—three enigmas he deciphered… After this formidable analysis, after these syntheses of history, after the passionate and logical coordination of his labours, he needed a greater realisation, a crowning in vigour and light of all his enormous work… Epic painter of truth, observer by turns meticulous and broadly intuitive of nature and life, he had made reality infinite. What remained was to escape the world, to recreate it—better, pacified and more immense—to enter the future and show us all that germinates there of new hopes…
Hence, the Four Gospels.
And in this new series, the first work, Fecundity, opposes the realities we are in to the ideal realities we aspire to, the painful present to the happy future, today’s mediocrity to tomorrow’s Beauty.
It’s more than a novel, something other than a poem: it’s a prophet’s book, a visionary’s, but one who knows how to see singularly true and singularly grand, whether he is looking at the shadows of the earth or questioning the splendours of future dreams…
Need I remind L’Aurore‘s readers of this book’s subject? Never, I think, has a serial been so in harmony with a newspaper’s body. While the talk was most passionately, ever more victoriously, of nothing but truth and justice, while the tragedy, more acute, more pathetic, more enormous, touched on epic, Fecundity unrolled its frescoes and miniatures, its realities and dreams, its struggles and conquests. Day by day, pell-mell, with the just ones’ new efforts, with the iniquity party’s latest crimes, in a chaos of lies and heroisms, of noble disinterestedness and mercenary savageries, of machinations, spinelessness, virtues and cowardices, Émile Zola’s characters lived, created, died—each according to their individual merit and social norm—and they animated enormously, with their essence, today’s fiction, tomorrow’s sublime theme.
Nothing is as simple, as beautiful, as this book’s beginning.
Mathieu Froment, haloed by his dignity as a young father and, at the same time, crushed by his heavy family burdens, prisoner of a plodding existence’s mediocrity, without noble purpose or future, riveted to selfish and tyrannical employers’ patronage, joyful nonetheless—for he is healthy and strong, ever inventive, a poet with practical instincts, man of thought and man of action—has reached that troubling moment when he must choose between sad bread, hard-won but assured, and adventure. He chooses adventure, and adventure here is nothing other than the conquest of life.
Mathieu has perfectly identified one of the principal causes of modern evil. Around him, he sees the family dying out and sinking into inevitable tragedies because it limits its creative ambition to a single child; he sees humanity at every moment robbed of its energies by the slaughter of embryos, the sadness, impoverishment, assassination of childhoods uprooted and delivered into mercenary hands; he sees finally everyone—this one in a madness of sterile pleasure, that one by system, to transmit the inheritance intact, and with the inheritance, the fatality of its declines, its vices and social crimes—evading through fraud, through love’s unpleasantness and through murder, the sacred duty of life.
But he has seen the remedy too. It lies in life’s overflow, in life’s pullulation… in incessant creation, in the perpetual clearing of woman and earth, in awakening all nature’s dormant forces. Certainly, nature doesn’t offer herself up; she will only let herself be conquered with difficulty, atrociously, bit by bit, plot by plot… Fortune will make herself deserved slowly… Free life will at first be overwhelming… In the new condition of peasant, one must endure all the struggles, all the hostilities, all the ill will of those born peasants who covet the cities and their deceptive advantages, the mirage of frock coats and coins that come all by themselves to white hands… Nothing deters Mathieu, and everything encourages him in life’s great work… Courageous, strong in his hopes and the principles of fecundity that are in the woman he loves and the virgin earth he has chosen, he accepts cheerfully, with a tranquil and powerful heart, the marvellous adventure. He offers nature, not as a sacrifice but as a joy, the effort of his soul and body—lives, creates, acts finally, in beauty and simplicity… And it’s the sowing of earth and woman; it’s the harvest. It’s nature ever more subdued, sterility driven from soil and humanity, and wealth coming, flowing from these two primary sources, the fecund woman and virgin earth, in communion of love…
And while Mathieu goes from conquest to creations, while life germinates, pullulates from his will and his love, around him, near and far from him, false and traditional existence deteriorates, existence as destructive egoisms, prejudices, social habits, poverty of heart have made it, pursues its ravages and multiplies its terrible dramas. And it’s the definitive decline, the cracking, crumbling of fortunes, it’s final imbecility, madness, crime, the casting out of life, finally, of all those who, through selfish calculation, or by system, or through weakness, refused to accept life’s laws. All of them fall into the worst misfortunes, or they die of their sumptuous sterility, their impotent luxury, their infecund and murderous passions.
What cries out, what proclaims this new work’s unaccustomed beauty, even in Zola’s oeuvre, what makes this book different not only from other books but from the book itself, isn’t the dramatic plot, against which, moreover, we might raise some objections; it’s at once a new feeling and an old idea, a prescience of the future, an intelligence of what must be, consequently a prophecy and an order… It’s above all this long, this powerful, this formidable call to resurrection that he sounds, and that must be heard if we don’t want to die… So we mustn’t dwell on what we might find, here and there, illogical and arbitrary in this Gospel. The arbitrary here is a superior compositional necessity. What everywhere else would be judged convention is only simplicity; willed simplicity, the heroic simplicity befitting eternal works. The divine flow of the Froment family, the admirable progression of its children and its laborious fortune, needed the shadow of families that die out, that abandon themselves to death and decline—it needed these light, unconscious Seguins, gradually vicious and degenerate, these debauched or atrociously proud Beauchênes, denatured for love of the name, this shameless Séraphine, calm in her debaucheries, corrupting and triumphant until the moment when, no longer being woman, she will no longer be alive, and this deplorable Morange, twice widower of his wife and daughter, for having amassed, worked, only for the only daughter he wanted rich, beautiful and happy; it needed, above all, this fatality of all the only sons dying and leaving after their tragic disappearance only despair, ruin, and the shame of voluntary sterilities.
There are pages of scalpel-sharp acuity slicing open a wound… with a hospital smell under the great sky of full view, and under truth’s harsh sun: the operations that kill life’s organs, the matrons who steal newborns and doom them to death, the surgeons of nothingness, the lamentable Moineaud family, society’s victim!… These are figures, souls, scenes from hell. Their desolation and cruelty were never equalled and will seem to some excessive and not always justified… They are necessary, though, for the comfort is certain in finding again the milk, pure blood, sun, harvests, trees of the Froment family, and this Chantebled estate, verdant, yellowing, reclaimed from fallow and desert, ever growing, humanity of wheat ears, radiance of stars that would unite to spring forth as fountains… There, hideous death can strike, it can take the family’s most beautiful, most dear, a son, a daughter… What matter!… The gaps fill, life necessarily triumphs over death; effort in its diffusion, over hatreds and grudges, goes everywhere, fills the countryside, Paris, virgin Africa, everywhere there’s life to conquer… It’s the conquest of the world, victory of the Better and Beautiful and Good, and it’s the sublime apotheosis, august and young, of old oaks that have borne high branches and radiate over the universe and future with their coupled sigh, their same fecundating smile, happy and free with eternity!…
It’s useless trying to categorise this poem. It escapes all assimilation, all classification. It strikes, it pleases, it terrifies and charms. It’s all reality and all ideal, a pamphlet and a lesson, a utopia and a microcosm. But above all, Fecundity challenges emotion and admiration—emotion for the great citizen, admiration for the immense work…
And reading Fecundity, at each of these ardent, passionate pages, I felt too a kind of indescribable tenderness for this sort of wonder-worker that is Zola, who destroys to better rebuild, and who, greater, more sincere, more optimistic than ever, through insults and incomprehension, from dead end to calvary, from arenas where wild beasts roar to alleys where knives are sharpened, from exile to courtroom, travels, for the world’s glory, his career as man and god.
L’Aurore, 29 November 1899.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 