Octave Mirbeau’s sharp, witty critique of Paul Hervieu’s work, exploring the writer’s evolution from savage pessimism to profound consciousness. A masterful essay on 19th century French literature, comparing Hervieu with Maeterlinck and Barrès.
I haven’t a clue which critic first decided, upon encountering M. Paul Hervieu’s work, that the man was “a deadpan joker.” That’s apparently all that reading Diogène-le-chien inspired in this critic – such profound, definitive, and intimate insight into a nineteen-year-old writer whose future was announced by a work of such power, originality, and truly extraordinary precocity. Clearly, this critic possessed a vast and precise understanding of the people and affairs of his time. Must have been someone terribly distinguished, whose judgements carry the force of law. Because ever since, with each of M. Paul Hervieu’s books, I have watched this initial and thoroughly reasoned opinion trotted out again. Once it was regarding L’Alpe homicide, with its tragic, splendid landscapes and the spine-tingling human dramas unfolding within them; another time – God help me – about L’Inconnu, that disturbing, staggering book where M. Paul Hervieu, persistent deadpan joker that he is, leads the anguished reader down into the deepest abysses of the soul, through the darkness of mental life where strange, sudden, maddening lights flash. Again with Flirt, where the rot of fashionable society is conjured in unsettling miniature. I have no idea what the critics have said or will say about L’Exorcisée, this book so grand in its brevity, so troubling beneath the exquisite grace it wears and the brilliant, refined intelligence illuminating it; this book at once so tender, so ironic, so painful, which opens onto love’s unexplored mysteries and extensions of pity, containing thoughts that are large, grave, thoughts that go all the way. They will doubtless say what they have always said: that it’s the work of a deadpan joker, and infinitely droll. Why would they say anything else? Criticism is a marvellous art, in that it dispenses with actually reading and understanding the works it must judge. To be an undisputed and glorious master of it, one need only repeat ad nauseam opinions fixed by a sort of anthropometric system, stamped upon certain writers at their debut, without considering what progress a writer might have made, or whether they have struck out on new paths. And if no pre-existing opinions are available, then criticism falls silent.
M. Paul Hervieu occupies quite a singular place in contemporary criticism. While he hasn’t yet reached that broad public which creates popular but ephemeral reputations, he enjoys among another, more enviable public – the artistic and literary one – a reputation that grows daily. If I weren’t the enemy of literary categories and groupings, I would place him between two writers whose talent I particularly cherish, and who also resemble no one else, whatever’s been said: M. Maurice Maeterlinck and M. Maurice Barrès. Though quite different from them, and resembling only himself, M. Hervieu has moral affinities with these two powerful and charming minds through ways of feeling and understanding that aren’t identical, certainly, but parallel – through natural and irresistible impulses toward greatness, where one glimpses, in a different personality with dissimilar literary or philosophical preoccupations, the same intellectual breed. While I admire and love certain writers, I know in advance what they have in store. I know them in their future works as well as their past ones. With them, no surprises. So my admiration, however sincere, comes with a touch of boredom. With M. Paul Hervieu, as with M. Maeterlinck and M. Barrès, I know I must expect the unexpected each time; I know that in tomorrow’s book I will taste joys not yet tasted in yesterday’s, joys I can’t even imagine. That’s what moves me most, that’s the only way literature still thrills me, now that nearly all writers have talent – and worse, the same talent.
What characterises M. Paul Hervieu’s talent is that rare and grand thing one seldom encounters in poets: consciousness. The poet is most often merely an admirable machine, but still a machine; a sort of very precious, highly decorated mirror that reflects, magnifying them to deformity, the images of things. One can be a great poet without always being an intellectual. But when one is an intellectual, one is also, always, a great poet. M. Paul Hervieu, who is so fundamentally the one, is equally the other. He knows what he feels, and he feels what he says. In him, sensation isn’t merely reflexive – that is, enslaved to his nerves, his organs, the momentary exaltation of a jolt or shock; it is consciousness. And it’s this consciousness that doubles the power and variety of sensation. He doesn’t obey impulsive acts, only reasoned ones. In ordinary brains, in small, merely intuitive minds, this mode of conceiving and feeling is a danger, almost an inferiority; it leads straight to dryness; it suppresses nature’s impulses. In elite beings, it augments and dramatises them, because it directs them. See how, since Diogène le Chien, under the influence of pure intelligence constantly listening to life, M. Paul Hervieu’s spirit develops. At first aggressive and almost savage, his pessimism gradually softens, turns to irony, then to tenderness, then to pity – a charming and almost perverse pity that loses nothing of the painful observations, the moral ugliness, but rather exalts them, because amidst all the passions traversed, among the cerebral imbalances and strange vanities where sentimental life moves in certain circles, he has encountered the eternal fatality of suffering, which ennobles even what’s corrupt, even what’s degraded. Flirt is, from this perspective, a masterpiece. In perhaps no other book has the absence of moral sense in elegant, pleasure-seeking societies been so cruelly evoked – societies for whom all social duties amount to exchanges of politeness, and all virtues to futile rituals of etiquette. There were, in that book, for those who know how to read, terrible pages where the elegant form, the refined and pretty style made more visible the filth of those hearts, the cynicism of those souls. Well, from it arose a great and beautiful pity, all the more active for being more self-possessed, more lucid and reasoning. It’s because no one knows the springs of the human soul like M. Paul Hervieu; no one has leaned further over the edge of that abyss which is a man’s brow, no one has ventured further upon that sea of joys and illusions which is a woman’s eye, and no one has brought back more from these voyages – poignant sensations of that infinity and mystery which is life.
M. Paul Hervieu has been reproached for not resisting the literary disease of the moment, what’s called snobbery. This is a great injustice. I search his entire work in vain for a single phrase showing him afflicted with this fault, this ridicule, where certain notable talents foundered – talents that promised better than to marvel at footmen’s livery and clubmen’s boots. I find, on the contrary, that M. Paul Hervieu has constantly guarded against this defect, which anyway only takes hold of small souls, poorly defended by small brains. M. Paul Hervieu doesn’t paint what are called milieus; he doesn’t inventory drawing rooms and bedrooms. All that descriptive detail he simplifies – not to the point of erasure, but he evokes it with a word, with the precision and vagueness appropriate to these things of pure exteriority. See how, in L’Exorcisée, the knick-knacks, the outfits, the surroundings where others linger with a bailiff’s delight, occupy so little space. See how indifferent the subject itself is, so to speak. All the décor, all the emotion is in the thoughts, in the passions, and in that supreme intelligence which allows M. Paul Hervieu to show you everything in a man’s heart and brain, just as others show you what’s in a coquette’s salon or a dandy’s dressing room. And that’s why, where others remain so low, he rises so high, into the serene regions of intellectuality.
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Léon Hennique Novel 