Octave Mirbeau’s witty 1890 essay defending Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck against French literary chauvinism. A masterful satire on artistic nationalism and the pretensions of young French writers who dismiss Belgium’s cultural contributions.
The article I published here about Maurice Maeterlinck has brought me a deluge of letters, not to mention countless pieces in minor newspapers and little reviews. They have been of every conceivable variety. Truth compels me to admit that my modest self had nothing to do with it—the whole business was down to M. Maeterlinck’s grand and mysterious talent. I wouldn’t have imagined, especially in these shabby times when public curiosity seems to chase after quite different thrills, that literature could still inflame minds to such a degree. And this surprise at seeing so many people, so very different from one another, taking an interest in such lofty and noble art—well, it filled me with genuine joy. Yet some of these letters and articles have left me rather deeply disturbed. They reproach me, with a bitter courtesy that perhaps doesn’t quite conceal the impatient hunger for publicity afflicting most of our dear dreamers and our most admirable martyrs—they reproach me for having chosen, of all people to praise, a Belgian poet, when France apparently teems with so many young and marvellous ones about whom nobody ever breathes a word.
This is all the more inconceivable and scandalous of me because I ought to have known what everyone knows, what L’Indépendance belge knows better than anyone: namely, that there are no poets in Belgium, that there’s nothing whatsoever in Belgium, and indeed that Belgium doesn’t exist. It seems I have been taken in by crude geographical mirages, mistaking dead shadows and vanished appearances for living realities. Belgium fools no one these days. Belgium—this has been proved in every possible way—is merely a joke invented one banquet evening by M. Camille Lemonnier: a poor joke, as you can see. Incorrigible and extreme gull that I am, I have been hoodwinked once again, and properly so. Now there’s a trap that M. Jules Lemaître and M. Bérardi wouldn’t fall into. Oh, how they must have laughed at my credulity! My case is humiliating, I confess, and I confess I have felt rather ashamed and considerably vexed.
Others, less categorical and more judicious, though equally ironic—and these are young people too: the young are terrible—think that Belgium might conceivably exist, at a pinch, but that it would be terribly wrong to boast of its problematic existence, given that there’s really nothing particularly splendid about it. According to these latter authorities, who are frightfully learned, the Belgians, if indeed they exist in the strictly biological sense of the word, would be, properly speaking, merely a variety of ape. You can’t call that a nation—it’s at best a zoological species, rather curious in itself, utterly devoid of conscience or moral responsibility, and endowed with the dangerous instinct for imitation. The Belgians imitate what we French, who have invented everything, do or dream of doing. Not only do they imitate, they counterfeit; not only do they counterfeit, they pre-counterfeit. They engage, if I may put it thus, in preventive counterfeiting. That’s how these animals—the Belgians will forgive me this scientific term—show themselves to be real and formidable as apes, and perfectly unreal and formidable as men.
So, regarding Princess Maleine, why did I need to cry “masterpiece”? No doubt Princess Maleine is a masterpiece. But why is it a masterpiece, this tiresome Princess Maleine, who seems at first glance to arrive from Belgium, from that ideal Belgium which probably doesn’t exist? Because fifty young writers, a hundred young writers, all the young writers were preparing to conceive it when M. Maurice Maeterlinck had the bizarre audacity to publish it. With such methods, which are ordinary Belgian methods, literature becomes impossible. One might as well sell pickled herrings, especially if French writers, whether tactless or ill-intentioned, start maintaining this unsustainable paradox that there exists on the terrestrial globe a Belgium, and in this Belgium some Belgians, and among these Belgians some poets, and poets of talent… Where was my head when this fancy struck me?
So I would ask nothing better than to make honourable amends, and to get back into the good graces of my country’s youth, I would be quite prepared to strike out publicly with a stroke of the pen—what would it cost me?—both Belgium and the Belgians. Easy enough. But—such is the anxious cast of my mind—I have certain scruples. Deep within the rebel that I am, there slumbers a timid reactionary. I cannot entirely forget what I once learned, what I have seen, what has moved me, what has charmed me. Brussels, Antwerp, Bruges, Liège, Ghent, all these marvels where a whole glorious past lies sleeping, where the eternal and protective soul of so many geniuses still radiates: the Van Eycks, the Rubenses, the Van Dycks, etc.—how can one accept that all this is merely a dream or one of M. Camille Lemonnier’s jokes? How can one accept, too, that the Belgians, so hospitable, so passionate about art, always the first to courageously welcome our free works, to defend them against the routines of servile or indifferent criticism, the first to rescue them from the shadows where, at home, everything conspires, everything strives to bury them, the first to acclaim them, to bring them to living form—how can one accept that these Belgians are merely apes, or that they aren’t?
What would M. Cladel say, or M. Émile Bergerat, M. Chabrier, M. Reyer? What would all those rejected by our theatres, publishers, and official exhibitions say, all the unlucky ones who found there, for their works despised by us, insulted by us, a fraternal and secure refuge? What would the shade of Villiers say, whom we let die of hunger, and who could glimpse, in the last years of his life, in this insubstantial Belgium where his painful poverty was surrounded with respect, what glory would have been due to his exceptional genius, by us unrecognised or denied? What would M. Stéphane Mallarmé say, who only yesterday was making his eloquent and faithful voice heard by these Belgians who not only didn’t sneer but understood him, delighted by the nobility of this lofty, rare, and exquisite spirit, so often mocked by the wits of the press, incapable of conceiving that there could be so much art in a brain, so much simplicity in a soul? Where better than in Belgium have they celebrated the inimitable works of those luxury beings: Huysmans, the sumptuous and disgusted seeker of beyonds; Verlaine, the sorrowful vagabond of human pity; Laforgue, who knew how to make the winged dream of invisible souls beat in his phrases, and give words that murmur and shiver of things that only death’s precocious elect can hear, can feel?
And what if Belgium were, on the contrary, the unique land where those among us, drunk with bitterness, sickened by injustice, weary of sterile and hopeless struggles, have had this joy, so delicious and so grave, of feeling themselves finally understood, finally loved? For I remember Villiers when he returned from his last trip to Belgium. He was completely transfigured. He, known at home only to a few friends and artists, was astonished, with that naive excess that made him so touching, to have encountered there so many people familiar with his work. You should have heard him recount the incidents of that triumphal journey, the friendly honours rendered him, the marks of deference that attached themselves everywhere to his poor person, until then so harshly deprived of glory’s caresses, even of praise’s sweetness. It had restored his confidence. He was making plans, plans he explained with a child’s grand gestures. And this memory, which was like a brief pause of happiness in his life full of aborted dreams, accompanied him to his death.
These memories of the past, and these memories of yesterday, make it awkward for me to speak all the ill that certain young people think of Belgium, hungry for publicity as they are, imagining they are being robbed when anyone speaks of writers other than themselves. To speak of a Belgian, that is, someone who uses the same language as they do, whose books can be displayed in the same shop windows alongside theirs—isn’t that odious treachery? And then, when I have nothing to defend myself against this temptation—which doesn’t tempt me anyway—but the intellectual gratitude I owe M. Maurice Maeterlinck, that would suffice to stay my pen. In citing the other day some admirable extracts from The Hothouse and Princess Maleine, I hadn’t read The Blind, which has just recently appeared. And The Blind, this marvellous Blind, has further strengthened my enthusiasm for this young poet, who is truly the poet of our time who has revealed to me the most things about the soul, and in whom are incarnated, most powerfully, the genius for feeling human sorrow and the art of rendering it in its infinite sad beauty and tender pity.
And then, and then, there’s something else.
The young—certain young people—the young I’m talking about make me laugh with the works theyaare always promising and never delivering. They make me laugh with their newspapers and their reviews, their manifestos and their programmes. To hear them tell it, they are going to revolutionise everything. Enough of dead old arts and rotten old literatures! Something new, something new, the inaccessible, the ungraspable, the unexpressed! And all this fine ardour, all this noisy racket reduces to this: calling M. Édouard Noël a “flat-foot” because he refuses them complimentary tickets to the Opéra-Comique. “Down with M. Édouard Noël”—that’s their battle cry. And they are astonished that the indifferent public doesn’t ask: “But who is this M. Édouard Noël, by whom literature is served, and who is such a dreadful impediment to the evolution of new art? And when will he be definitively crushed?”
These young people would almost make me love old Sarcey.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Figaro, 26 September 1890
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 