Octave Mirbeau, portrait
From: Bibliothèque de Octave Mirbeau
(auction catalogue, 1919)
Posterity
Octave Mirbeau’s scathing 1887 essay on literary posterity and false reputations. A devastating critique of Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, and Saint-Victor, while championing Flaubert’s enduring genius. Mirbeau exposes how time strips away hollow fame from celebrated mediocrities.
She is already arriving for men we knew, men we loved, who seem to have died only yesterday, so thoroughly are they still tangled up in our daily quarrels, our passions and our dreams; she arrives without all that blinding retinue of fawning camaraderie and ferocious self-interest, without all those mirages and lies from which the success of some and the martyrdom of others are manufactured. But she doesn’t only raise up apotheoses. If she flings wide the doors of light for those who were scorned or reviled, being too free in spirit and too proud in soul for that public of slaves we have become, she also makes heavier the coffin’s darkness and deeper the oblivion for those who, whilst living, saw the ephemeral world crown their feeble brows with laurels. You can multiply all the monuments and statues you like in honour of the fortunate mediocrities — nothing remains of these flimsy constructions and fragile images; time wears away bad stone as quickly as bad talent, erasing from hard bronze, as from the soft memory of men, the names that routine and ignorance engraved there.
And I think with melancholy of today’s acclaimed, who every evening drift off to sleep to the lullaby of their immortality. When one has been — like M. Alexandre Dumas, like M. Émile Augier, like M. Meissonier, like so many others whose resounding fame completes this quarter-century —merely the servile summary of an era’s amusements, merely the bourgeois form of wit of an epoch, the distance from momentary triumph to definitive oblivion is no greater than that which separates the house where one dies from the pit where they bury you beneath flowers that are mute and withered at once. For epochs hurry on, and each brings with it its songs and its false gods, its glories — songs that fall silent, false gods whose altars collapse, glories that suddenly vanish and return to the great silence of dead things. And so in this exhausting and painful business of letters, the honest artist must accomplish his work without troubling himself about what stirs and buzzes around him, and with ears and heart closed to everything but the beloved music and beloved sufferings of his dream, he passes without stopping before those howling booths erected at every crossroads, where anyone can buy themselves glory in gingerbread, just as one goes to special offices to purchase honour by the ribbon.
I was making these reflections whilst reading the Goncourt Journal, a curious book always, often poignant like a friend’s confession, disenchanting too, like a veil torn away from unexpected intimacies — revealed too soon perhaps —but finally, such as it is, in its disconnectedness, in its irreverent undress of life noted down in haste, a masterwork in which one feels vibrating in every line the soul of the two noble artists who lived it and wrote it. There are many nerves in this book, many exacerbated sensibilities; there’s a perpetual throbbing of a wound that still bleeds, a wound caused by the long and stupid indifference in which they were held; there is, piercing through the proud contempt, an irritated aspiration, an almost morbid yearning for success — which they admit, moreover, with touching and manly sincerity. Consequently, it’s impossible that there shouldn’t slip in here and there some involuntary prejudices and — M. Edmond de Goncourt will forgive me this frankness — some unfortunate injustices. This injustice I find particularly in several passages of the Journal concerning Gustave Flaubert. It seems to me they haven’t spoken of him as they could have, as they should have done, and this saddens me somewhat. It would have been beautiful, nevertheless, to see the Goncourts, anticipating posterity, building for this “great fellow” who through death became their grand ancestor, the monument of glory he still awaits, and which others will build who weren’t known and loved by him.
These reservations made, I have heard, throughout this book that stirs up so many men and shakes so many ideas, that unveils so many intimacies, that defies so many confidences and gathers up so many indiscretions, that very often has the ribaldry and irreverence of secret memoirs — I have heard something like a precursory echo of posterity. Certainly it wasn’t her grave voice, dictating through the classical mouth of bronze her solemn decrees and implacable judgements: it was, in a sense, her first cry. But this cry of contemporary literary history, I listen to it and retain it, for what it expresses about certain men corresponds too exactly with what many have long felt and dared not formulate. A thousand characters parade before us, some famous, others already forgotten, almost all restored with surprising skill of notation, with their tics, their manias, their gestures, their naked thought and something of their soul’s mystery. What vanities, however solid, could resist the ferocious frankness of these observations? Sometimes it’s just a stroke, a contour, or an enveloping of the line, or a shaft of bright light on a patch of shadow, and there’s a man stripped from head to toe. And we say to ourselves: “What, was that all there was!” Such is, in this genre of rapid evocation, Nestor Roqueplan, surprised one morning in his room. One sees him, one knows him, one has seen through him, this complicated one, this refined one, this formidable Parisian, so highly praised for his wit that never rose above the parodic boorishness of a reversed aphorism, for his caricatural old dandy’s elegance, which consisted of wearing brimless hats and Utrecht velvet waistcoats. But I don’t want to linger, amusing though they are, over these sketches of vanished puppets.
From this swarming of glory of marionettes, heroes and Punchinellos, three figures emerge who pass by ceaselessly; barely left on one side before being taken up on the other, and returning each time richer by a characteristic detail, an accent that completes them, an angle that perfects them, all three different in appearance and of almost equal celebrity: Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Paul de Saint-Victor. Our generation still knows them; the generation coming will know them more through anecdotes transmitted from old to young than through their books, for they will hardly be read. They are already no longer of our time. Were they of their own? When one shakes off the dust of our libraries and interrogates them, it seems they have retained only an archaeological value, a conventional beauty of ruins, celebrated by Joanne and Baedeker for the curiosity of tourists. Beside Balzac, Stendhal, Heine, Flaubert, to whom death daily remakes an immortal youth, they take on the bearing of wandering shades or vanished forms of spectres. It’s that with rare and brilliant qualities that suffice for the contemporaneity that acclaims them, they didn’t possess the superior gifts that make works strong and lasting: the sense of life and the love of nature. And it’s of this that they die. Writings change, the word renews itself, schools abolish themselves and make way for others, but in the evolution of things, in the incessant recommencement of fashions, man remains the immutable and never-exhausted source of the artist’s noblest studies, noblest emotions. Alongside the history of political facts, of architectures and costumes, there’s the history of souls, and this is what one expects from whoever possesses a thought and holds a pen. Everything in them was artifice and convention, from the analytical preciosity, the reversals of sensation in which Sainte-Beuve delighted, to Gautier’s formidable paradoxes — the most gifted, nevertheless, the most artistic of the three, who voluntarily hid the man from his work and immobilised himself in a dream of stone.
Great epochs had no critics, they were content to have artists. Today critics, who are powerless to create anything whatsoever, proliferate; they have become a resounding and yapping army that nothing resists. Under the pretext of analysis, psychology, morality, healthy literature, they install themselves in others’ works, rather like invading soldiers in a country they have ravaged and conquered. Despite Joseph Delorme, in whom a poet sang, despite Volupté, where beneath the irritating subtleties and sentimentalities, the observer sometimes cast strange lights on the shadows of love, Sainte-Beuve remained merely a critic. What there was in him of poet and creator dried up in this desiccating trade. Through his enormous influence and universal credit, he could have done much for literature, and he gave it nothing, no more of himself than of others, he gave it nothing but criticism, very fine wit, very wicked, very convoluted, a very sharp and very myopic intelligence, as skilled at grasping the small sides of a man without seeing the great ones, an extreme art in flowering epigrams and chiselling ironies, a prestidigitator’s dexterity in making the pinpricks he applied skin-deep pass for prodigious soundings of the depths of human intellect, an affected and mincing grace of an old coquette playing those little academic games whose antiquated mechanism barely conceals their ridiculousness and puerilities, and that’s all. Not a generosity, not a courage, and the instinctive horror of the true, the simple, the living, and the fear of the new. Never did he spontaneously interest himself in a young talent. For him to speak of writers, they had to have been dead for two centuries or arrive before him aged with success. Baudelaire, the Goncourts who were his protégés and friends, had to wait ten years of hard labour, painful struggles, anguishing doubts, before Sainte-Beuve deigned to make the public understand that he knew them. And one wonders sadly whether the author of the Lundis, by the results of his influence and his judgements, was truly superior to M. Francisque Sarcey and M. de Pontmartin.
As for Paul de Saint-Victor, he was nothing but noise, a cacophonous and discordant noise of words, in a masquerade of phrases. Someone said of him: “He’s a bugle whose stupidity tears the brass.” If only he could have been just a bugle… But he was an entire orchestra! And what an orchestra! An enraged and howling orchestra, like those heard in southern India at the threshold of Buddhist temples. And beneath the reverberations of gongs, beneath the caterwauling of rebecs, beneath the sneezing of his phrases’ cracked cymbals, the most narrow spirit imaginable, a professor’s limited vision, a Prix de Rome aesthetic, an enslavement to all prejudices, all routines, the worst conventions, an exasperating rehashing of all bourgeois clichés. During the time he dreamed of art, his sole doctrine was to destroy originality, temperament, personality in the artist, and to reduce him to flat copying of what he called the Greek ideal. He too believed that the Greeks had invented a special beauty, a dream ideal, a chimerical fantasy of lines, an entire fairyland world glimpsed through poets’ dreams and gods’ slumbers. He still didn’t know that not only the most sublime statues of Greece, but her humblest pottery, were the exact, fervent copy of the only god she adored, the only ideal she practised: nature.
Soon, of this trinity that sparkled over the literary world, there will remain only some of Sainte-Beuve’s stuffed malices, some of Gautier’s bold metaphors, some charming rhythms from Émaux et Camées and the legendary red waistcoat of Hernani, which — oh supreme disillusion — wasn’t red at all, but pink, a pink to make the fading pink flowers beloved by M. Paul Bourget despair. By drawing them for a few minutes from the indifference where they were beginning to slumber, the Goncourts, whether they intended it or not, have sounded the posthumous knell of their irreducible death.
And one feels a greater pride and a greater love thinking of Flaubert. At least his glory is of solid metal, which time will clothe with a patina more beautiful by the day.
And one tells oneself that if we weren’t the nation of vaudevillians that we are, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, that admirable book where Flaubert cries out all his soul’s tortures and doubts, would already be our national book as Goethe’s Faust is in Germany.
Octave MIRBEAU
Le Figaro, 19 November 1887
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.