Octave Mirbeau’s witty 1889 essay featuring a German intellectual’s surprising insights on French literature, comparing Alphonse Daudet’s graceful intimacy with Émile Zola’s powerful naturalism, while celebrating Mallarmé’s pure artistry.
Last winter in the South of France, I made the acquaintance of Herr von B—, a German writer of considerable merit and, if I may put it thus, a member of the Reichstag to boot. He was—forgive me, League of Patriots—he was a delightful chap, to whom I owe some truly exquisite hours. Not being an officer in the territorial army, or indeed any sort of army—at least, I don’t think so—I can risk this guilty and blasphemous confession without fear: I was terribly fond of him. Worse still, I’m fond of him yet. Aurélien Scholl won’t believe me, but Herr von B— had read Schopenhauer, savoured him greatly, and—inexplicable detail—possessed infinite wit coupled with infinite kindness. Even more inexplicable: he loathed beer and could only partially digest sauerkraut. I once saw him tucking into a partridge, which he vastly preferred to Frankfurt’s smoked sausages. His German conscience and stomach felt not the slightest qualm in confiding this to me. He was the sort of German you never meet in those comic last lines.
As I spent more time with this hereditary enemy of my race, I came to the sad conviction that he would have been thoroughly embarrassed had the fancy taken him—it didn’t—to become a sympathetic columnist or distinguished critic for one of our serious and widely-read papers, for he was remarkably well-versed in French affairs, and our literature quite simply enthralled him. But what a pity! What traditional Teutonic heaviness! His literary knowledge wasn’t confined to the works of M. Claretie and the plays of M. Meilhac; it embraced, rather irreverently, the whole diversity, the whole disparity of contemporary endeavour. He spoke with enthusiasm, with reverence, of M. Huysmans, of his well-hung pessimism, his refinements of disgust, magnificently adorned with all the gems, all the jewellery of language. He didn’t permit himself—and here the German ear peeped out—he didn’t permit himself any Parisian witticisms about M. Stéphane Mallarmé, whose mystery attracted him, fascinated him, like deep and magical waters hiding beneath cascades of strange flowers, “those strange flowers” plucked by Baudelaire under more beautiful skies to adorn “the shelves” of his dead lovers.
“That one,” he would tell me in his serpentine tongue, “that one is a pure artist. Perhaps he is the pure artist, the essential artist. Of all your poets, he’s the only one, truly extraordinary, who has found the word that expresses simultaneously a form, a colour, a sound, a perfume, a thought. He represents the object as nature creates it—that is, he encloses in a whole, through subtle ellipses, the various qualities that object possesses. Whilst other poets, to describe this object in its form, its colouring, its movement, its harmony with neighbouring objects, are obliged to dissect it into numerous phrases, to scatter it across expressions where it always ends up losing its true character along with its homogeneity, M. Stéphane Mallarmé fixes it with a single verb that becomes the object itself. His words are no longer words; they are beings. His obscurity, for which he’s so reproached, is therefore life itself, that elliptical, enigmatic life that reigns everywhere, in the pistils of flowers as much as in women’s eyes. Obviously life is obscure to those who cannot penetrate it. How many don’t know what a tree is, or a kiss… Ah! M. Mallarmé isn’t popular; so much the better for him, and for us who love him all the more. Like a unique objet d’art, he’s too dear for the crowd of average buyers; only the millionaires of the spirit, who are often the poorest in money, can possess him.”
And he would quote to me, as one sips a delicate wine, these verses from the admirable Hérodiade:
… O mirror Cold water frozen by ennui in your frame…
Herr von B— was inexhaustible on the astonishing, the unsurpassable magnificence of Flaubert, whom he placed well above Goethe.
“I’ve had a dream for France,” he told me… “And this dream, I think, won’t displease you, for you have a propensity to deify all manner of people… Isn’t Alexandre Dumas a sort of God in your country? … So I dreamed this: A hall, in the Louvre perhaps, or in one of your finest buildings… In this hall, a lectern, and on this lectern, a book always open: The Temptation of Saint Anthony.”
“Alas!” I sighed, “you don’t know France. We do deify, that’s certain… But on the very altar where we erect the god’s image, we serve beer to the faithful. There are divinities to whom this accompaniment suits very well. If your dream came true, my dear German, within a fortnight the hall would be leased to some impresario or other, who’d transform it into a café-concert. Paulus would come to sing his ‘latest creations’, and on the very margins of the book would sprawl adverts for Géraudel chocolate.”
The Goncourts also delighted him with their creative sensibility sharpened to the point of illness, to the point of suffering; for their intellectual revolts, so proudly thrust against the bourgeoisification of ideas; for the new atmosphere they discovered, where, after Stendhal, after Balzac, they made the modern novel evolve; for those shivers of soul and light with which their humanity vibrates and their landscapes wrap themselves.
He would pass from the powerful visions of The Twilight of the Gods by M. Élémir Bourges to the mysterious pages of The Unknown by M. Paul Hervieu; from the sociological researches of M. J.-H. Rosny to the almost sublime ironies of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Tomorrow’s Eve. And M. Gustave Kahn enchanted him with the perspicacity of his criticism, beautiful as a poet’s and philosopher’s creation, for his intelligence so supple, sometimes so lofty, in conceiving and explaining forms of art.
Hearing him speak thus of these men, for the most part unknown or disdained, a suspicion crept into me, plausible and torturing:
“What if he’s a spy,” I thought, whilst the shadow of nirvanas invaded the arcana of my brain.
One day, as we were strolling, he said to me:
“And M. Alphonse Daudet? … Ah! that one is all clarity, all charm, all intelligence. He warms me and vivifies me. I love him as I love the perfumed air we breathe here, as I love the transparent sun that gilds the lemons on the blonde hillsides, sets the oranges ablaze, and gives the moving olive foliage those silky, brilliant, changing reflections you so admire. Whilst other writers evolve towards Germany, England and Russia, he has remained of his race. And his race is French. He has the clarity, the elegance, the tenderness and the admirable irony that are the qualities of your intellectual soil. Don’t be surprised, after I’ve praised M. Stéphane Mallarmé’s obscurity, by my enthusiasm for M. Alphonse Daudet’s limpid clarity. I have the good fortune to be an eclectic and thus to multiply, through different and vivid sensations, the joys that works of art procure me. Now, both awaken in me dissimilar dreams, it’s true, but which, by their very dissimilarity, embellish my life and double my mind’s activity… Besides, isn’t it one of conversation’s most charming surprises, these unexpected juxtapositions of names, so far from one another yet, and which would make critics smile with pity? … Look, one thing distresses me… When a French newspaper speaks of M. Alphonse Daudet, which is frequent, it’s rare that a parallel isn’t immediately drawn between the author of Sapho and M. Émile Zola. And I’ve often noticed that the advantage, in the end, remains with the latter. They bludgeon M. Daudet’s grace with M. Zola’s force. Doesn’t that seem to you, as to me, supremely unjust? Certainly, M. Zola is strong. His work is powerful. A great current carries it along, rolling pure gold and rubble pell-mell. It unleashes itself in storms, foams, bubbles, lifts rocks, carries away uprooted trees as well as the little pale flowers of the invaded bank. The spectacle is grandiose, and the sonority that rises from it impresses and subjugates.
“Perhaps there’s only, at bottom, the illusion of this décor and this sonority. Just as, in the howling voice of crowds, it’s impossible to perceive the cry of a soul; so too, in this great current, images blur one into another and the tormented surface reproduces them only in truncated, confused reflections. I picture M. Alphonse Daudet differently. He’s a river whose waters are deep and clear, flowing slowly, reflecting the vast sky between flowered banks all covered with beautiful harvests. This grace is also power, believe me… But enough of classical comparisons… What seduces me in M. Alphonse Daudet and what M. Émile Zola possesses to a lesser degree is the intelligence of man’s inner life. One is all décor, the other all soul. M. Émile Zola’s work is solidly constructed. It has six storeys. The façade is square, imposing and beautiful. But listen carefully—the walls ring hollow. Man passes through it and doesn’t live there.
“In M. Daudet’s work, less square in form and more limited in proportion, the interior is more carefully done, more liveable, more intimate. You can see that beings like us have passed through, have lived there, have loved there, have thought there, have suffered there. You note, at every step, the imprint of their brain and their heart. And how he possesses it, this poor heart of man! How he counts its pulsations, how he shows its tears and most secret sorrows! How he lays bare, with his delicate and supple hand, its best-hidden springs! How he assembles and disassembles the fragile, complicated mechanism of human clockwork, which breaks quickly between M. Zola’s too rough fists.”
“And if you knew,” I told him, “the spoken work of this prodigious charmer, that work of every minute, which will never be written and which is nonetheless genius. A word dropped in conversation, a trinket, a noise, a perfume, nothing… and there ideas take off, fly away, swarm, sparkling and pressing, with such a prodigality, such spontaneity of intellect that his oldest friends are astonished each time. Living memories of the past, profound visions of the future, hissing ironies, unforgettable evocations of humanity glimpsed and immediately unveiled, tender melancholies, poignant sadnesses, all this buzzes, sings and weeps on those lips where nonetheless sorrow prowls, never tired of being vanquished by this bending genius.”
“Yes,” said the German… “M. Zola’s work is a work of will, M. Daudet’s a work of spontaneity; a work lived and wept. And, you see, at a given moment, it’s always the latter that drive home the former.”
And I wanted, my dear Daudet, on the occasion of your new work, to send you this little memory of a conversation that Herr von B— and I had, facing that sea you love so much and in that flowered nature where I seemed to hear the music of your voice dropping note by note.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Figaro, 4 November 1889
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