Octave Mirbeau’s scathing review of Jules Huret’s ‘Literary Inquiry’ – a brilliant satirical exposé of vanity, envy and pettiness among 64 prominent French writers of the Belle Époque. Sharp wit meets literary criticism in this masterful takedown of literary pretensions.
You simply must read this book: The Inquiry into Literary Evolution by M. Jules Huret. It’s quite simply extraordinary, this collection of sixty-four autobiographies bellowed out – oh, so pitifully – by the sixty-four writers who represent, at this fleeting hour as I write – eight in the evening – the glory of contemporary French literature. As for the actual inquiry and the evolution in question, barely a couple of uncertain, muddled words were uttered here and there. What could one possibly have said, anyway, about this deceptive subject that might have been even remotely reasonable or plausible? Literary theories are built on sand, school systems on smoke, and the slightest breeze that passes brings down the earthbound instability of the former whilst dispersing the airy frivolity of the latter. But in place of theories and systems, what childish hatreds, what imperturbable vanities, what surges of boundless pride! The old, the mature, the young, the tiny tots barely gurgling in their swaddling clothes, the fat and the thin, the illustrious and the obscure – oh, the poor devils! And how they all resemble one another beneath the uniform mask of green envy! “All poseurs, these young people,” concludes M. Leconte de Lisle with academic finality. Alas! All poseurs too, these old men, and theirs is a more sinister and less pardonable posturing, for they haven’t got the excuse of obscurity like their young rivals, no existence to create, no tomorrow to secure. And how ugly the literary soul is, and how – let’s say it to our shame – stupid! Oh yes, stupid, with an incomparable stupidity, blazing and so unique amongst all other human stupidities that truly, in the light it casts, the spirit of the grocer we so mock becomes marvellous, dazzling, magnificent, and the unrecognised imagination of the petty clerk, that grubby little functionary encrusted with depressing routines and grovelling disciplines, appears heroic at the peaks of intelligence.
Oh! God in heaven, O illusory and Masonic deities of Coppée and Péladan, of Vacquerie and Maupassant, gods of Rod, of Zola and Leconte de Lisle – how many today ought to regret not having resisted the tempter, not having imitated the disdainful, modest and exemplary silence of M. Léon Hennique and M. Jean Richepin, those well-advised and far-sighted Conrarts. But no, it seems that despite the punishment of this expiatory volume, those writers whom M. Jules Huret disdained, neglected, forgot to consult, instead of blessing him forever, harbour immortal grudges against him. It seems they were countless and persistent, those who came of their own accord to offer themselves up to ridicule: “Listen to me, I promise I’ll be even more ridiculous than the others. I’ve got insults, slanders, infamies you can’t even imagine. Listen to me.” And they begged. Oh! How M. Jules Huret must have laughed, how he must still be laughing, how he will have to keep laughing for ages! And what a sudden, unexpected initiation – for he is very young, and before his inquiry, he was a young man full of faith – what a sudden, unexpected and disenchanting initiation into this absurd, this harmful profession of poet where no one understands each other, where everyone tears each other apart, where they hurl at each other’s heads, like common crockery, editions, print runs, moons, suns, paradises and infinities, all smeared with mud.
If I were M. Jules Huret and had seen, as he did, those greedy looks, those nasty mouths, those grasping hands, and had breathed, as he did, the fetid breath of those bilious souls, it seems to me that by the fifth staircase, seized with disgust, I would have fled to the silent fields, and I would have vowed, whilst stroking the silky spine of some loyal pig, ignorant of literature and aesthetics, to end my days amongst beasts, beautiful beasts, good beasts, beautiful, good and consoling beasts, beasts whose gaze is so gentle, beasts who never speak.
O moonlit and insipid women, stale virgins, unsatisfied adulteresses who, from the depths of your inconsolable provinces, beside your ill-matched spouse or in your solitary beds, dream of those fine knights of the Ideal – here they are, here they are, all your poets, dipped in blue, clothed in infinity, illuminated with love, your radiant poets who come across lakes of light, riding swans, bearing golden armour and Lohengrin’s adamantine sword – here they are, you have them in flesh, in bone, in spirit, you see them with their fingers stained by laborious inks, their lips green with gall, their lips where envy lurks, where insult makes a bitter, caustic mud. And you can say, as Jules Laforgue sang sadly:
Feeble, feeble
And it’s a beautiful soul on a bender
That sips itself and hurts itself
And makes with its great sobs
On the beautiful lakes of the ideal
Ripples in the water
Feeble, feeble.
What emerges from this volume, apart from these painful observations – and this too is painful to observe – is that M. Jules Huret alone has shown any wit. Unlike the forty academicians who had wit like four, M. Jules Huret, all by himself, has had more wit than his sixty-four interviewees, a very fine wit, very discreet, with a charming and lively irony. How all these diverse physiognomies are restored in their complete and profound reality! How they move about in their intimate moral atmosphere, how they live! You see them and hear them. Three or four remain sympathetic; they have lost nothing in this familiar display. But the others, all the others… With a skill that knows how to efface itself, by means of insidious and polite interrogations that seem like nothing, M. Jules Huret obliges each one to reveal himself entirely, to show what’s in him beneath the make-up of false sentiments and grand ideas – the grotesque, the ridiculous, the grimacing. He forces confidences, extracts base confessions, he tames unforgettable grudges. It’s deliciously done, without heaviness, with a lightness, a sureness of hand that astonishes and delights. It turned out that the little reporter they expected, just like all the others, a little reporter with whom there was no need to stand on ceremony – it turned out that this little reporter was a sharp, dangerous and faithful observer, and that he was also the cleverest man in the world at playing all the springs of vanity in these marionettes, at setting their unsuspecting pride in motion. How could one guess? O good Coppée, how could one guess? How could one divine so much irony beneath so much propriety? And one can’t even be angry with him, at least not in any apparent and direct way, for he effaced himself so modestly, leaving each person to build their own ridicule. The comedy of these things is truly supreme and, if it leaves, at bottom, an impression of great sadness and supreme mystification, we must only blame ourselves, who gave the public this comedy, very human this one, and very literary above all, oh yes very literary, the slut.
Decidedly, Monsieur Renan has perfectly summed up M. Jules Huret’s inquiry in saying: “Literature is a mediocre preoccupation”; one might add: “and a great mystifier”. And now, let’s re-read the preface of stinging and pretty prose that M. Jules Huret has placed at the head of his volume, of our volume. It’s a good lesson, deserved and necessary. Whatever M. Anatole France may say, whose disdain – discreet and hardly sincere, moreover – seems to me a bit too late and… how shall I put it? posthumous, no one but M. Jules Huret could have given it to us better, and in better terms of distinguished irony. We must even thank him that it wasn’t harsher, and be greatly astonished that, in contact with these sixty-four rabid writers, he didn’t catch their disease of rabid insult.
Hush… all is well, no soul decries,
Bloom on, O Earth of circumstance,
Toward Zion’s mirage-like expanse
And bind us, under Art that plies,
Sisyphuses by choice and chance,
Who pipe Christ’s fables deplorable,
At the capstan incurable
Of Why. — Why?
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 