Octave Mirbeau’s moving obituary for Émile Hennequin (1888), the brilliant young critic who revolutionised literary criticism with his scientific method. A tribute to a pioneering intellect who died tragically at 29, leaving behind groundbreaking work on Hugo, Wagner, Poe and others.
It is with profound anguish that I write this name at the head of this piece, for I loved Émile Hennequin as one of the finest hearts, admired him as one of the most brilliant minds of our age. We all know the unexpected, tragic manner of his death. He had gone to spend the day at Samois with Odilon Redon, that psychic draughtsman, one of his dearest companions. He decided to bathe; the cold water shocked his system; pulmonary congestion struck instantly. Without a cry, without a gesture, in a single second, he collapsed as if struck by lightning. He was buried there through the devoted care of his friends—M. Élémir Bourges, M. Paul Margueritte, M. Odilon Redon, all residents of Samois whom he had come to visit. Émile Hennequin wasn’t yet thirty.
Not yet thirty, and I know few men—even amongst the most illustrious—whose learning was so vast, whose mind, haunted by the loftiest speculations of human understanding, burned so luminously, so powerfully. A tamer of ideas, dispassionate historian of life’s mysteries, he belonged to the intellectual breed of Spencer, Bain, Taine—superior in that the scientist in him hadn’t smothered the artist or poet; quite the reverse. I rather think he had arrived at art through science—a rare thing—for there was nothing in the realm of thought, imagination, or cerebral activity whose origins he hadn’t reasoned through, whose causes he hadn’t investigated, whose analogies he hadn’t weighed. He was charming, with a curiously refined appearance, supremely elegant yet veiled in mystery, with eyes deep and gentle, intoxicated yet cold, piercing yet innocent—a visionary’s eyes, perfectly emblematic of his particular genius and noble emotional qualities. Stéphane Mallarmé told me he bore a striking resemblance, in facial expression and bearing, to Edgar Poe—not the Edgar Poe those lying engravings show us, but as Mallarmé knew him: a man of strange beauty and infinite allure. Émile Hennequin, moreover, through his intellectual kinship with the celebrated American writer, was irresistibly drawn to that great metaphysical poet—perhaps the greatest amongst the great.
He devoted to Poe a magnificent study, more detailed, more harmonious in its judgements, more compelling and expressive even than Baudelaire’s, and produced excellent translations of some of his most obscure tales that delighted the literati. His death isn’t merely a ghastly blow to his family, a cruel loss to his friends; it’s an irreparable loss to the intellectual world, for it carries away, along with Émile Hennequin, the marvellous work we expected from him—the work yet to be done that isn’t done and that he would surely have done. I know it’s both bold and easy to make such claims that, alas, remain unanswered and almost without written evidence. Many will be tempted to smile at them. I appeal to all who knew him, I appeal to M. Taine who, at first glance, had divined this young man’s future, had spontaneously approached him—to M. Taine who esteemed him the equal of the most powerfully tempered great minds of our epoch.
Poor dear Hennequin, with what painful yet sweet sadness I recall our conversations—your conversations, rather, for you alone spoke whilst I listened. Listening to you, I marvelled at the enormous sum of your knowledge, the infinite diversity of your observations, the abundance, brilliance, audacity of your ideas, and that prodigious labour you had imposed upon your frail, delicate youth. It seemed to me, in those moments, that my intelligence was rising towards worlds I had neither glimpsed nor suspected, whose luminous horizons you opened to me. And faced with the recognition of my inferiority, not only did I feel no bitterness—on the contrary, I felt gratitude for all those new and beautiful things you planted in me, those unknown thrills, those enthusiastic resolutions; above all, I felt pride in loving you, and being loved by you… And your projects?… Is it possible that all this is finished, that you are dead?
⁂
Émile Hennequin dies without leaving the magisterial, definitive work he dreamed of, for whose accomplishment he daily, feverishly, passionately amassed materials—prodigies of scientific investigation, human observation, and aesthetic sensation. Nevertheless, he leaves enough fine studies—some already published, others soon to be through his friends’ care—to justify the enthusiasm he had stirred around him and all the hopes (yesterday still certainties) we had placed in him, now shattered by his horrific death. These are remarkable critical pieces that appeared in M. Édouard Rod’s Revue contemporaine, in the Revue indépendante, in the Nouvelle revue, where one was rather surprised to find this proud, free talent amongst the tiresome Tercys and vague Chantavoines. They astonished at first, through their scope and novelty, for they followed no known method—or at least, none applied till then.
This method, Émile Hennequin explained and developed in a doctrinal work that appeared just days before his death: La Critique scientifique, a learned book where one can measure the full extent of this rare, lofty spirit. “From its origin to its current state,” he writes, “art criticism reveals in its development two divergent tendencies whose antagonism we can observe today. We must no longer confuse works as different as a newspaper’s column on the day’s book, a review’s bibliographical notes, the feuilletons describing the Salon or the week’s plays, and certain studies—for instance by M. Taine, a chapter by Rood on painting, Posnett’s research on clan literature, Perker’s on the origin of sentiments we associate with certain colours, Reuton and Bain’s on stylistic forms. Whilst writings of the first sort focus on criticising, judging, pronouncing categorically on the value of this or that work—book, drama, painting, symphony—those of the second pursue an entirely different aim, seeking to deduce from the work’s particular characteristics either certain aesthetic principles, or the existence in its author of a certain cerebral mechanism, or a defined condition of the social whole in which it was born; to explain through historical or organic laws the ideas it expresses and emotions it arouses.
“Nothing less alike than examining a poem to find it good or bad—an almost judicial task and confidential communication consisting largely of circumlocutions to pass judgements and confess preferences—or analysing that poem in search of aesthetic, psychological, sociological information, a work of pure science where one applies oneself to untangling causes beneath facts, laws beneath phenomena, studied without bias or selection.”
I have insisted on reproducing this passage from his work’s foreword because it summarises Émile Hennequin’s critical theory and clearly defines that bold, vast method he applies with surprising facility to studying men like Victor Hugo, Wagner, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dickens. He had thus expanded criticism’s narrow field—where only petty grudges, petty intrigues, and worst ignorances grow—to the scope of science, pushed it back to creation itself. But I fear this fine example Hennequin pioneered won’t be followed. Minds and characters of such calibre are rare. Such work requires a philosophical education, a strength of soul he possessed and one isn’t accustomed to finding in our critics, who, faced with great men, either waltz about in a dancer’s light costume or plod in a peasant’s heavy clogs.
I cannot recall without heartache the confidences Émile Hennequin sometimes shared about his projects. He would tell me a writer should accomplish only a single work, concentrate all his forces in it, devote his whole life to it—already too short, too hampered by ambient difficulties to pursue several dreams at once. And his dream was grandiose. It embraced the entire century. Hennequin wanted to write the history of the nineteenth century—not history as professors understand it, limited to political facts, circumscribed by military evolutions, but the history of minds and souls, the history of spiritual aspirations and moral conquests, personified in the men who, from Napoleon to Gambetta, represent this century in all manifestations of the human spirit and advances of social progress. And I want to apply to this work—which he was equipped to carry out gloriously, for which he armed and prepared himself daily—what he himself said about the “ideal” work whose sublime sketch he traced in broad strokes in his book. “Scientific criticism of works of art, through a system of interpreting signs we have explained, sets in full light men forming one of two phalanxes that summarise all humanity and represent it. If one conceives the sequence of sciences that, taking organic matter at its beginnings in chemists’ retorts or ocean depths, conduct its study through the ascending series of plants and animals to man, describe and analyse him in his body, bones, muscles, humours, dissect him in his nerves and spirit; if, abandoning here the individual man, one passes to the series of sciences studying the social being, from ethnography to history, one will see that these two orders of knowledge—the most important, doubtless, and those to which the most immediate interest attaches—terminate at a point where they join: in the notion of the social individual, in the integral, biological, psychological knowledge of the individual worthy to mark society, himself constituting through his adherents and similars a noble group, propagating in his particular ensemble or the total ensemble those great series of shared admirations, enterprises, and institutions that form States and aggregate humanity.”
And further:
“In the ethnopsychology of writers, in the biographical physiology of heroes, these men are stood upright, analysed and revealed from within, described and shown from without, reproduced at the head of the social movement they lead, erected before their exemplars, one and several, individuals and crowd, in tableaux that, based on scientific analysis requiring recourse to the whole edifice of vital sciences, and on a synthesis supposing aid from all modern historical and literary method, may pass for the highest condensation of anthropological notions one can accomplish today.”
This is what Émile Hennequin would have done for our time. Alas, death came instead.
For three years, Hennequin had been contributing to Le Temps. He wrote the political bulletin with a rectitude of judgement, a profound knowledge of European politics that the finest diplomats would have envied—for his aptitudes were universal. How often I have seen our best statesmen draw inspiration from his opinions. In that rather cold, rather stiff milieu, so ill-suited to his spirit’s independence and nature’s generosity, he had nevertheless won everyone’s esteem and respect. Being poor, he had accepted this position with joy, for it supported him and his family; moreover, he found there, amidst dispatches and information of every kind, a mine of observations on men and events for the work to which he was about to devote his life.
Alas! I must touch here on a delicate and painful point.
Hennequin was poor, as I have said. His position at Le Temps was his only means of support. And he leaves a young wife and tiny one-year-old daughter in the deepest distress. With him gone, they have nothing. It’s complete, irremediable destitution. The dead man’s friends, understanding, are doing what they can to alleviate this misfortune worthy of all respect and pity. But what’s possible isn’t enough. I don’t wish to dwell on this subject; and I would be truly happy if, by noting without emphasis his noble wife’s frightful situation—horribly struck in her dearest affection, her dearest hopes, and threatened in her very life—I might awaken in some charitable soul the thought of a good deed and urgent aid. The world of actors has till now almost alone benefited from public generosity. It’s not possible that an appeal made for the wife of the worthiest of men, who was also the finest of talents, should go unanswered.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Figaro, 27 July 1888
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 