Octave Mirbeau’s scathing 1886 essay demolishing critics who championed Alexandre Dumas’s adventure novels over Tolstoy and the realists. A masterpiece of literary satire from the Belle Époque, translated into English for the first time.
In these enlightened times, some truly extraordinary things are being written. I’m talking, of course, about what appears in our solemn, influential, and venerated criticism—from the frothy reportage of light-footed society columnists to the ponderous pronouncements of those hefty scribblers at the Revue des Deux-Mondes. Whether expressed in flat witticisms or prudish proclamations weighing a thousand kilos, it’s always the same opinions, genuflecting before the same old rubbish. A single thought of intellectual narrowness circulates beneath the skulls of our critics. They share one soul amongst two thousand of them; only their gestures differ. May I be permitted to make an exception for those precious artists like Messrs Gustave Geffroy, Émile Hennequin, and Gustave Kahn, who possess a very clear, very lofty, very personal aesthetic, and who defend it with great talent, great elevation, and—alas!—great futility.
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Regarding The Power of Darkness, the critics were unanimous in their denigration. They were, moreover, solidly backed and absolutely covered by the prior judgements of M. Alexandre Dumas fils, M. Émile Augier, and Victorien Sardou, who don’t care for anyone disturbing their little theatrical schemes, and to whom Tolstoy’s translator had had the unfortunate and rather comical naivety to ask for their opinion. The opinion was exactly what one might expect.
“It may be very beautiful,” they replied from the heights of their three hundred performances, “but it’s impossible in France.”
Which has been repeated a hundred thousand times since Voltaire—who divined Scribe and prepared the way for Edmond Gondinet—in order to stifle Shakespeare, in order to stifle anything that unsettles and confounds the mediocre aims and enormous vanities of our illustrious dramatists. In France, whether he comes from Russia or Montmartre, the moment a man of genius appears, it’s like being in wolf-haunted woods. At every step one spots warning signs reading: “Beware of Genius”. And believe me, everyone takes care to avoid genius, just as everyone avoids the wolf traps in our forests. They give it a wide berth, terrified.
So the critics had a field day with The Power of Darkness—though you would think the title would rather suit them. They first declared that the Russian play, being Russian and not Parisian, was utterly incomprehensible; then they judged it to be an old melodrama, because it features infanticide, and there’s infanticide in M. Dennery’s tragedies too. Then, whilst the opinion was the same for all, there were some variations in the gestures. This one, who poses as a peaceful revolutionary, a centre-left innovator, a man in favour of new artistic formulas—provided they remain hypothetical—maintained that slang words didn’t displease him, didn’t shock him, when they were necessary. Unfortunately, it follows from these liberal doctrines that they are never necessary, that never, and nowhere, are they in their proper place. That one scattered praise about: praise so awkward, so embarrassed, so shamefaced that one could sense quite clearly that if someone had come along with plausible reasons to say The Power of Darkness was a bad play and Tolstoy a mere pornographer, it would have relieved him enormously. At bottom, from all sides, in the panning as much as in the praise, there was contempt. And it’s astonishing, because the critics are generally patriotic and everything that comes to us from Russia is sacred nowadays—even M. Floquet, that former Polonophile turned more Muscovite than Rostopchine.
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By contrast, they all expressed nothing but enthusiasm for The Youth of the Musketeers by M. Alexandre Dumas père. Ah! Now there’s a play, and there’s a novel. That’s more like it. What magic, what gaiety, what wholesomeness, what prodigious verve, what history, what style too! What youth above all, what marvellous youth! Sword thrusts and flowing cloaks, and swigs straight from pewter tankards, and boots that ring out, and Bonacieux… I mean, Bonacieux… And Planchet… I mean, Planchet… And no psychology: and no art, and nothing… nothing… It’s the dream… One very recent critic, barely emerged from the limbo of first Paris columns and ministerial snippets, distinguished himself by his excitement. He said, in a fit of generous eloquence:
“Enough of all the filth of the analytical novel; enough of the mud with which the naturalists, under the pretext of truth, splatter us daily… Silence to Stendhal, to Balzac, to Goncourt, to Daudet, to Zola… Away with you who see, who feel, who think…”
And addressing the French people, he adds:
“Do you wish to recover your faith, your youth, your love of country, all the sympathetic and chivalrous sentiments that once flourished in men’s hearts? Well then! Read Alexandre Dumas père. He is the sun that warms after the darkness that freezes… How is it that in an age so preoccupied with childhood education, with the instruction of youth, no pedagogue has yet thought to transform Alexandre Dumas’s serials into classics?”
Whereupon he implores the ministers, the deputies, the teachers, M. Jules Simon, M. Michel Bréal, M. Raoul Frary, M. Gréard, M. le duc de Broglie, M. Jules Ferry, all the philosophers, all the academicians, all the mothers, to replace physics, geometry, chemistry, history, literature, gymnastics and German with the profound study, the sole study of Queen Margot. And he concludes, with unheard-of tremors as if speaking of Pascal, Montaigne, or Ronsard:
“Spread The Vicomte de Bragelonne about, and henceforth only heroes shall be born. Make the smallest children and the students at the École Normale alike learn The Count of Monte Cristo and The Knight of Harmenthal by heart, and in three years we’ll have recovered Alsace, Lorraine; perhaps even the Duchy of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria… Make Alexandre Dumas compulsory in all schools, and I tell you, France is saved.”
I wonder how M. Hector Pessard would go about raising up France by simply giving the French, as models of all chivalrous and domestic virtues, the ridiculous puppets, the crude mannequins, the rudimentary dolls of M. Alexandre Dumas père: Porthos who was a glutton and a pimp; Athos who was a gloomy drunkard; Aramis, a spy whose entire ambition and knowledge of intrigue consisted in possessing fripperies on his sword-guard; d’Artagnan, that boaster who was a sort of Tartarin, less gay, less ironic, less alive, more meridional than the other; and finally, to limit myself in enumerating these straw-stuffed characters, Bussy d’Amboise who killed seventy-five men armed with arquebuses and daggers, with a chair, in three minutes.
But this quite hair-raising opinion isn’t unique to M. Hector Pessard, who reformulated it the other day in a dramatic criticism column. That column was even, if I recall correctly, the literary debut of this thinker grown old in ministerial habits and cradled on the knees of M. Thiers and M. Clément Duvernois. All self-respecting critics preach this holy crusade from time to time. They inform us that the level of public morality and human intelligence has been falling dreadfully since Alexandre Dumas died, since the novel that contains something made the novel that contained absolutely nothing disappear. Such is criticism, our beloved mother. Faced with Sapho, Germinie Lacerteux, L’Assommoir, L’Éducation sentimentale, she invokes with tears the cape of M. Alexandre Dumas and the sword of M. Auguste Maquet. Alas! both are no more. In vain does M. Hector Pessard seek them in the bric-à-brac, in the old-clothes shops of vanished romanticism. The cape is moth-eaten; the sword, rusted and reforged, turns creaking before a gas flame at a roast-meat seller’s shop.
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It’s indisputable that M. Alexandre Dumas père exercised, for some years, an influence as considerable as it was harmful. But that had its day, and it’s dead now, just as in his time Ann Radcliffe was dead and buried in the depths of oblivion. Only the critics persist in always looking backwards, never seeing what’s in front of them, to shake this corpse about. People still go, very rarely it’s true, to his dramas, revived every two or three years. There’s a reason for this. It’s that the theatre, being a very inferior trade, contents itself with a sort of dazzlement of the eyes, a factitious and disordered movement. Alexandre Dumas, lacking psychology and art, knew how to provide this dazzlement and movement more than anyone else, and even more than any of our successful contemporaries. It’s not so with the novel, where the public demands something other than a masquerade of puppets, however colourful. Among the common people who once delighted in these improbable tales, and who remained the last readers of Alexandre Dumas, no one wants to hear of him anymore. And the proof is mathematical, irrefutable. A little reprint newspaper that published only adventure novels—many by Alexandre Dumas—was vegetating with a circulation of thirty thousand copies. It had the idea of abandoning this outdated genre, which no longer speaks to anyone’s mind; it reprinted Balzac, Daudet, Goncourt, Zola, and within two months its circulation reached one hundred and fifty thousand.
I don’t know if this literature, this unbelievable caricature of history and life, ever amused our fathers. They say it did. I’m willing to believe it. What I do know is that it no longer amuses even our concierges. And the critics who want to resurrect these dead admirations, this wretched abolished past, in the face of the movement carrying art towards higher speculations, strike me as those provincial fellows who spend their time lamenting the old stagecoaches and diligences, and stubbornly refuse to travel anymore in protest against the railways.
As for you, Monsieur Hector Pessard, you shall copy out The Lady of Montsoreau a hundred times… and then come and talk to us about M. Alexandre Dumas père.
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