Octave Mirbeau’s intimate portrait of Belgian Symbolist poet Georges Rodenbach, exploring his fear of death, love of urban life, and the melancholic beauty of Bruges that shaped his celebrated works. A touching tribute from 1899.
I
Edmond de Goncourt, who had little love for poets – or rather, who loved very few poets – once said to me, as we were discussing Georges Rodenbach:
“Ah, that one! He’s my poet!”
He admired him tremendously. The thing was, both of them – the old prose writer and the young poet – shared a similar understanding of many aspects of art and life, and their tastes were equally refined. Both possessed a violent love of life, a sensitivity to life that sometimes reached the point of nervous exasperation, even anguish, in their attempts to express the fluid, the vaporous, the elusive, the inexpressible – all those reflections and tremors, all those fugitive ripples that pass across mirrors and water, across windowpanes and eyes.
Like Goncourt, Rodenbach insisted that poetry should emanate directly from life, from life’s very intimacy. He refused to go hunting for it in those cold, ancient mythologies or outdated legends. He rejected as a blight all that heroic tin-plating in which so many wretched versifiers still imprison their impoverished imaginations. He found true emotion and genuine poetic grandeur only in the human faces around him, and in the familiar things he knew how to endow with a real, intimate, profound, adorable existence.
This is what would have made him – like Baudelaire and Verlaine, though with a different temperament – that rare and precious creature we call a modern poet. This is why Goncourt loved him so, and why we cherished him with particular affection – we who believed that a work of art, whether prose, poem, statue or painting, is only beautiful, moving and alive when it comes from life, from the very wellsprings of life, and remains within life!
I said that Rodenbach loved life. He loved it with intelligence and passion, and he enjoyed it more than others because, more deeply than others, he penetrated its beauties and mysteries with an over-sharpened sense of people and things. But he also dreaded death. His entire work, so strangely suggestive, so clear and white, is made of this mingled joy and terror. Joy made melancholy by that terror; terror made serene by that joy! The Reign of Silence, Journey into Eyes, Enclosed Lives, Bruges-la-Morte, The Carillonneur, and that recent, admirable poem, The Mirror of the Native Sky – all these books are full of this double impression, which blends and fades into vague, radiant whiteness of pure, piercing, infinite charm.
II
Though he avoided speaking of it, Georges Rodenbach confessed to me several times his fear of death. It dated from long ago, from early childhood, from school! And how he could give the slightest anecdote such a fascinating and distinguished turn! It was in Bruges, with the Jesuits. Each week – Wednesday, I believe – they would take him for walks, not in the countryside as he would have wished, but around the city, through the suburbs, which in Bruges, as elsewhere, are so dreary; dreary from no longer being the city and not yet being the fields; dreary from being that uncertain, funereal landscape made only of these two non-existences, or these two agonies. Each time, by some singular choice, they would make him stop before the cemetery… This was the spot they had chosen to encourage recreation and games… Grey tombstones, black cones of cypresses, little gardens of stone, funeral processions passing through the gates, families in mourning and weeping; his mind gradually became steeped in all these miseries and precocious thoughts of death. His young soul, barely emerged from limbo, had only these macabre visions with which to affirm itself before life, to become conscious of life… So it was with genuine dread that he saw those Wednesdays arrive, marked with black crosses, and he preferred the dreary inner courtyards and study halls full of boredom and silence to those desolating spectacles outside.
This impression that weighed heavily on his early years always persisted in him. From that distant but lasting contact with what he then believed to be the countryside, there remained in him not hatred, not horror, but a certain mistrust of it. Just as before the gates of Bruges cemetery, he always felt ill at ease in the countryside, full of troubling anxieties, for it reminded him of death! That silence, that solitude, those roads leading who knows where, that vast cemetery of so many dead lives that is the brown or grassy earth, those scythed harvests, those blurred horizons – he could not only not fix a serene thought upon them, but could not bear the sight of them. Certainly, sensitive and responsive to all beauty, he understood its enormous poetry. But it was too heavy for him, too painful. And he only found himself happy, only found himself again in cities, among living people, between houses full of the living!
He would have been wrong to curse these childhood impressions, and that cemetery, and the dead water of the canals, and the slow curve of swans on lakes that had slept for centuries upon centuries, and all those things where his eye as a sickly, delicate and tender child learned to decipher the enigma of death within the enigma of life – for his talent, so poignant and sweet, so knowing and resigned, so evocative and intimately human, comes from there! And if he sang of Bruges with that unique accent, its illustrious stones and bells, its silence and human shadows and distant faces, and all that terrible and charming past, it’s because Bruges is still death, a death as white as the swans sleeping on the Lake of Love, white as the beguines’ wimples, and as the souls of those women one sees in the ancient streets at closed windows, behind transparent curtains of lace…
III
Rodenbach was a very tender man who lived only for his family. He was also a very proud man who lived only for his art. Before money, before glory, he aspired only to satisfy himself. I have never known anyone more jealous of perfection than he. Nor have I known a more charming and delicate friend. He was the link between carefully chosen friendships that he loved to gather around him. We enjoyed his conversation as much as his poems. There was in him a ceaselessly flowing spring of inspiration. Like the adorable Mallarmé, he was one of those who give life and friendship an inestimable value.
In hours of sadness and discouragement, we were certain to find in Rodenbach, as in Mallarmé, comfort and joy. From these two noble spirits came a powerful emulation and the ardent desire to live well and do better. Their hearts were a sure refuge for us, a marvellous hospitality we shall never find again.
Alas! We have lost them both! And before we can speak of them as our tenderness, our gratitude, our admiration will make it our duty – an imperative and sweet duty – we can only weep for them!
1899.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 