Octave Mirbeau’s scathing 1891 defence of Edmond de Goncourt against critic Robert de Bonnières. A masterclass in literary polemic featuring sharp wit, biting irony, and passionate advocacy for artistic integrity in Belle Époque France.
I have never quite grasped why Ernest Renan got himself into such a state, nor understood the peculiar rage that overtook this philosopher after reading those passages in the Goncourt Journal that concerned him. As you will recall, Edmond de Goncourt had quite innocently attributed to Renan—or rather, given him back—his rather unconventional opinions, which were actually quite elevated and nothing to be ashamed of, assuming one doesn’t inhabit the same intellectual sphere as Monsieur Déroulède. I certainly didn’t recognise the delightfully witty Renan that Maurice Barrès was so fond of conjuring up in that library at Perros-Guirec (which may not even exist) or in that Parisian salon where he shows him chatting with Chincholle (whom he had probably never met).
Edmond de Goncourt’s only sin, I suspect, was to attribute a firm opinion on any given matter to this exquisite intellectual gymnast, whose spiritual coquetry consists in appearing to have no opinions whatsoever—though one shouldn’t always take that at face value. But look here, it’s indisputable that a writer of Renan’s calibre, a thinker of his power, an academician of his dictionary, has every right to speak out if it pleases him, and to be unjust once in a while without causing us to clutch our pearls. On the contrary, the little weaknesses of great men possess a rather special charm that I, for one, find delicious—they make these figures more intimate, more accessible, more human. Nothing is quite so disconcerting, even for admiration, as the immobile face of an impeccable God. We feel their qualities more keenly through the defects they confess to us, provided those defects have grace rather than baseness—which is generally the case in literature.
But what about Monsieur de Bonnières?
Indeed, what on earth is Bonnières doing barging into this debate? His sudden, furious intrusion seems utterly baffling, especially after the long silence (so well received by everyone) in which this man about town—an agreeable if rather unproductive writer—seemed content to remain confined. Word has it that we shouldn’t look for any militant literary intention in this unexpected sally (which is really more of an unfortunate comeback), and that we should instead seek out the Machiavellian and complicated society undercurrents that might diminish its spontaneity and disinterestedness. They also say that Bonnières, playing the ill-informed courtier, has forever wounded the powerful personage whose hatred he wished to serve, and has reaped from his incredible article (supreme misfortune!) no immediate benefits save harsh judgements instead of the expected thanks, and the loss of precious connections he had hoped to strengthen. Naturally, I don’t believe a word of this gossip. I know Robert de Bonnières and consider him perfectly incapable of such machinations. His rectitude, his frankness, his natural skill are certain guarantees of the malevolent falsity of these rumours.
The truth is, Robert de Bonnières is simply an author who is hard to please. He finds only his own books good, and those of Brunetière who publishes his books. It’s a rather exclusive opinion, but ultimately respectable, and so harmless. Really, it can only harm Bonnières himself, for since his books and those of Brunetière are few in number, his literary joys must be rather rare and lacking in surprises. Only Bonnières hasn’t sufficiently considered that when one attacks with such virulence a writer whose work is considerable and beautiful, when one takes it upon oneself to deliver public lessons to an artist whose renovating influence on the literature of his time is notorious and indisputable, one needs to possess an authority that Le Petit Margemont, despite the grand breath it displays, is insufficient to confer.
I wouldn’t want to discourage Bonnières, much less cause him pain, but I fear his books—increasingly brief and improbable, even when propped up by André Maurel’s preventive and psychological enthusiasm, by Maurice Barrès’s disdainful and cold praise, by a society position as fragile as a woman’s beauty—won’t anytime soon win him this necessary authority. Edmond de Goncourt therefore has every right to smile at these attacks and, from the height of his works, standing on the broad and solid pedestal they have erected to his glory, to look down with an amused and paternal eye at Robert de Bonnières, melancholically seated on Jeanne Avril and Le Petit Margemont, attempting to pull his beard with gestures that don’t even reach the base of that hard and lasting granite. But does he even care?
We have in Goncourt’s Journal a complete and deeply moving moral portrait of this noble figure. Sincere with men, sincere with things, he is with himself sincere to the point of scruple, to the minutiae of scruple. And it’s this above all that grips me about the Journal. Goncourt doesn’t try to prettify himself, to make himself heroic: his preoccupation is to reveal himself to us as he is, in the depths of his soul. He tells us his little manias, his melancholies, his discouragements, his anticipation of a newspaper article, his fevers of success, his anguishes of silence, even that egoism of literary passion that makes him write, after the failure of Le Candidat, before Flaubert’s collapse: “At bottom, this failure is deplorable for every book manufacturer: not one of us will be staged for ten years.” This makes Bonnières smile—he is probably detached from all these petty preoccupations. But it moves me, and I love Goncourt for all these little weaknesses, so human, so charming really, in a man like him.
You see, my dear Bonnières, whatever one might think of his Journal—and I don’t always think well of it; in the penultimate volume, for instance, I find much that jars with my ideas and my way of feeling life, and I would have argued with that book had I been charged with reviewing it—Goncourt’s case is rather rare in literature, and I wish you were afflicted with it. And I would also wish, for the moral beauty of your profession and mine, that illustrious writers, debased by society’s caresses and by the genuflections of a civilised press that measures talent by the number of houses where one dines, could show an existence as noble as Goncourt’s.
Goncourt’s case, as you call it, is the case of a man who deeply loved his art, who suffered harshly and painfully for it, who through injustices, insults, and the discouragements they bring, always struggled without failing. This solitary and somewhat abandoned old age, this old age after so many storms, so many disappointments endured, so many bitternesses proudly borne, this old age still vibrating with the ardours of a youth passionate for Beauty, is one of the most moving things I know. And I admired this old age, with leaps in my heart, when at the Théâtre Libre, bravely facing the flood of filth it was about to be covered with, it signed with its aristocratic honour what in La Fille Élisa contains social revolt and human pity.
Truly, my dear Bonnières, you have a courage that surpasses me and I don’t envy it. After reproaching Goncourt for his brother’s death, after mocking the moral distress into which this death threw him—the death of half his soul, half his brain, half his life—you also make the curious and loyal reproach that success came to him later than to his friends. There’s a reason for this whose heroism you probably wouldn’t understand: that Goncourt was faithful to his ideal and always refused to bend his literary probity to easy concessions, to accept betrayals of conscience, to deliver himself to those obscure little tasks whereby, to rise in the world’s esteem and the public’s admiration, one must lower oneself to the level of the one’s filthiness and the other’s stupidity.
Look, I open his latest volume and fall upon this: “Friday 25 July—Today I wrote in large letters on the first page of a blank notebook: La Fille Élisa. Then, having written this title, I was seized by painful anxiety; I began to doubt myself. It seemed to me, interrogating my sad brain, that I no longer had in me the power, the talent to make a book of imagination and I’m afraid… of a work I’m not beginning with the confidence I had when he worked with me!”
These few lines, so desolate in tone, so tender in piety, carry my memory back to those pages about the death you mock so cheerfully—unforgettable and heart-rending pages where words are no longer words but seem like bleeding fibres gathered one by one from an incurable wound. Perhaps this is what you call impotence—this thing that makes one weep.
As for you, I wish you never to know such sorrows and not to meet, at the corner of a newspaper article, the Bonnières who will reproach you for them.
Octave Mirbeau, L’Écho de Paris, 17 March 1891
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