Octave Mirbeau’s penetrating 1896 critical essay on Léon Daudet, exploring the young writer’s passionate, intellectual style and his major works including Les Morticoles and Suzanne. A masterpiece of Belle Époque literary criticism.
Of all the young writers who have made names for themselves in recent years, M. Léon Daudet—along with M. Paul Claudel, the latter more obscure but no less compelling—interests me most. Here is someone from whom we can expect, with absolute certainty, the finest works, perhaps even the definitive work. Am I being too ambitious on his behalf? Am I setting him up for disappointment by predicting such heights? I think not. Edmond de Goncourt, whose personal friendships never clouded his critical judgement, who was often brutally honest even with those he held dear, wasn’t mistaken when he hailed this young man’s first books with such enthusiasm. He spoke to me warmly of them, many times. No literary personality troubled or excited him more, and he showed an unshakeable confidence in the future of this precocious, already powerful talent—a confidence I cherished, since I shared it completely.
I know few writers whose vocation announced itself as imperiously, as impetuously—if I may say so—as M. Léon Daudet’s. He had the good fortune of a family that neither thwarted nor steered his course, understanding that one doesn’t simply repeat a work, however glorious, and that a work must belong to its creator. So M. Léon Daudet was free to pursue his own originality, following his nature’s bent. He shaped himself, with no masters save his reading. Even when he thought he should turn his mind to science and attended medical school, they let him be—not one person close to him doubted for a moment that this scientific excursion would lead straight back to literature. For it was, at heart, merely a literary need, a burning thirst for knowledge, and the youthful certainty that science would usher him into life’s marvellous world. This impression proved false, at least not in the way he had anticipated. In that milieu hemmed in by matter’s suffocating walls like a prison, where the study of human personality is reduced to scalpel-work in pus, clotted blood, and the green flesh of amphitheatre corpses; where grave heads interrogate dead hearts and dried veins; where Thought is explained by a tailor’s measurements; where Love fits entirely within the empiricism of illusory anthropometries—he gained, along with the subject for a magnificent and terrible pamphlet, the future Morticoles, those disenchantments with scientific pride that would later give all his works their passionately bitter taste, their painfully exalted character of ideal and faith.
But hadn’t he asked too much of science? Hadn’t he demanded clarifications that all philosophies, all religions, and God himself, retreating behind his impenetrable clouds, obstinately deny us? And what new disenchantments await a restless soul like his—one that demands reasons for man, nature, the universe beyond their mere existence—in Suzanne‘s blazing faith and devouring mysticism! Peace never comes to those who think, and pain always finds those who love.
⁂
M. Léon Daudet doesn’t write to amuse himself and us with little romantic tales, trivial adulteries, pathetic little immoralities for laughs. Nor does he write merely to set the dazzling, naked jewels of language in hollow golden phrases. He writes because a superior force within compels him to write essential things, to cry out his thoughts, to give life and expression to ideas that torment and boil in his brain. Here is someone we can truly call “an intellectual” in the pure sense of that much-abused word. Not an intellectual like those psychologists—systematic and cold reasoners and classifiers who display their sensations under analysis’s dreary glass case, labelled and catalogued like an entomologist’s dead insects or a botanist’s dried herbs. A spirit full of tumultuous sap and rumbling activity, he is always marching, always galloping towards the heights. Nothing stops him; everything excites his fever. Rather than skirting obstacles and chasms with minute caution, he leaps them with robust momentum, risking broken bones. Ideas and images—reflections of ideas—crowd together, accumulate, blaze, heating his brain’s powerful engine, keeping it constantly at highest pressure, and they lead him, carry him off in great jolts, with strange tremors, to summits where enthusiasm’s divine light shines. Ardent to the point of brutality, passionate to the point of fury, he is also anxious to the point of suffering before all that human destiny and mysterious nature reveal as unexplained, under their double yet single face of life and death. Like Guillaume Harlon in Suzanne, he is that “nervous type whom his brain devours while exalting him, bound to his marrow by links of burning coal.”
One trait of his artistic temperament that I love, because it’s rare, is a sort of violent, passionate logic that drives him to pursue his ideas and images to the end, even through the most certain dangers. Never a hesitation, never a holding back. He goes his way, bravely and straight ahead, until he arrives. And he always arrives. Some reproached him, for instance, for the foot-licking scene in Les Morticoles. I find it admirable and superior that M. Léon Daudet didn’t shrink from fully realising this revolting and perilous symbol. And because this realisation was complete, because no hideous, repulsive detail was spared, the writer achieved a kind of epic beauty where others, more prudent, would have achieved only disgust. In its accent of formidable exaggeration, it’s the finest, highest satire.
Besides, I search in vain for anyone endowed like him with the heroic faculty—rarer than one thinks—of satire: not the breathless, grating satire that sullies with its slobbering laughter the ideas it brushes and the men it grazes, but enormous, passionate satire that springs from the deepest sources of disappointed enthusiasm and betrayed love, the judiciary satire that marks faces and things with bloody strokes that won’t fade, satire that rises like a poem to the lyrical summits of Shakespearean comedy. For everything is enormous, passionate, and entirely intellectual—yet still human—in M. Léon Daudet: tears as much as laughter, ideas like sensations, realities that bring despair, and dreams that, after the divine moment’s exaltation, leave you only with the awful anguish of never having been reached.
And all this, in M. Léon Daudet’s work—so complex and gripping—has a character of torrential improvisation, such is the unflagging verve that bursts forth and hastens, such is the abundance of ideas succeeding one another, grand, rich, adorned, strangely jangling, swept along at the gallop of a marvellous imagination that never knew creative fatigue. Pages, chapters, entire books written in a single breath, in lucid fever, in light intoxication yet still in self-possession—pages, chapters, books where you don’t feel the effort, the panting that makes fingers cramp over paper and cold sweat fall from pallid brows in exhaustion.
⁂
I needn’t discuss Suzanne here, that quivering, admirable book, all flesh and dream, all hell and heaven—our readers know it and must reread it. I will leave M. Armand Silvestre, legitimately jealous of his critical prerogatives, the task and joy of conveying all the emotion it brought me. But one reflection strikes me about this book.
M. Léon Daudet has definitively conquered his personality. With Suzanne, even more than with Les Morticoles and Le Voyage de Shakespeare, he has completely shed what remained in his other works—among beauties of the first order and personal inventions—from his early youth’s reading. Here is life, nature, soul, himself. And I doubt anyone will write anything more beautiful about human passion than the incestuous lovers’ journey through “ardent and sumptuous” Spain, anything more tragic than the possession of these souls burnt like the red earth where they slake their lustful rage. And I doubt the mystical landscape of the forest where autumn earth drinks the repentant sinner’s blood will ever find a more moving or magnificently inspired poet.
1896.
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