Mirbeau champions the poetic dream against naturalist precision, celebrating Émile Bergerat’s Enguerrande as a bold stand for artistic imagination, idealism, and lyrical revolt in an age of soulless documentation.
At a time when all literature syndicates itself into a commercial enterprise under the company name Document & Co., we must be grateful to M. Émile Bergerat for giving us a work of dreams and pure art, which also happens to be a work of protest and combat. It takes courage today to publish a poem whose only excuse is the beauty of its verse and the valiant extremity of its thought—even if this poem is, like Enguerrande, a dramatic poem, set in a splendid edition with sixteenth-century typefaces that make the rhymes ring out like victory songs; with etchings by M. Rodin, that almost unknown artist who created the beautiful decorative figures for the Théâtre du Palais-Royal and has made for M. Émile Bergerat’s book two lyrical pages of the first order. And yet it’s happened that this courage of a convinced poet has become a shrewd merchant’s good speculation, for Enguerrande, from its first appearance, has won great success—which delights me enormously.
This success shouldn’t be sought merely in the poet’s qualities; it owes itself above all to the work’s timeliness, though it seems paradoxical to claim that in this society starved for sentimental frippery and displayed filth, a dramatic poem could ever appear timely. And yet so it is.
We are weary, glutted, nauseated to the point of sickness with the data, the documents, the exactitude of naturalist novels, as much as with the stupid farces and idiotic fantasies of operettas. After having acclaimed as the definitive evolution this new form of literature which was, in sum, only a literature of attitudes and gestures, a literature for the short-sighted, a Meissonier literature that saw in a human being only the buttons and folds of his frock coat, counted the leaves on a tree and the shine on each leaf, we are crying out for something else. We have had enough of penetrating the souls of concierges, probing the hearts and loins of cooks, wallowing in every cesspit on the pretext that it’s experimental, breathing nothing but latrine odours on the pretext that it’s scientific, and seeing everywhere only vapours—golden vapours, red vapours, hot vapours—on the pretext that imagination must be cooked in M. Claude Bernard’s retorts and M. Berthelot’s test tubes. We no longer want literature and poetry—these mysteries of the human brain—to be physics and chemistry, love translated into algebraic formulas, human passion made into a trigonometry problem, and to have to search in logarithm tables for the murderous reason of our enthusiasms and the disenchanting why of our dreams. Since M. Zola, a wayward romantic, and M. Alphonse Daudet, a naturalist for export, and the whole pack of howling writers grimacing in their wake, have tried to lay their heavy paws smeared with data upon life, we no longer want life as they express it to us—deformed, hideous, empty and stiffened in filth. We call for dreams, dreams with golden wings, to carry us away while leaving us our human resources, into chimerical landscapes, into the blue sky, and warm our frozen limbs and aching souls in beautiful apotheosis suns. Shakespeare, whom they always invoke, from whom they claim direct descent—didn’t he conjure before the charmed mind dazzling visions of melancholy graces with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It? And Watteau, that great poet they admire—didn’t he parade all our dreams in crimson taffeta skirts and all our dreams’ enchantments through a rose-bushed nature, in paradises of golden light, consoling and false as the ideal?
In art, exactitude is deformation and truth is lies. There’s nothing absolutely exact and nothing absolutely true, or rather there exist as many human truths as individuals. We have quite enough trouble penetrating ourselves and analysing what we see and feel, without additionally attempting to penetrate others’ intimate being and substitute our eyes, our nerves, our soul for the eyes, nerves, and souls of others. Why, anyway? The true creator is he who, in his works—book, painting, symphony—creates himself, who like Baudelaire and Stendhal puts his own soul into life’s dream as he conceives and understands it, one with his exasperated, anxious form, the other with his implacable tranquillity, both visionaries, both artists, both ravaged by passion for the ideal and the dream of love. When Rembrandt resurrected Jesus, did he worry about being exact, about giving God’s resurrection a mathematical, stiff-collared documentary manner? He painted Dutchmen; the light entering through the half-open window is Holland’s yellow daylight. And yet Rembrandt made an immortal masterpiece. Mantegna crucified Christ in a bright Italian landscape. The cross rises, bearing its divine and bloody burden, into Naples’ all-blue sky, and over there, quite near on the mountain, it’s not Jerusalem raising its fierce temples, it’s a tranquil, restful Italian town spreading its familiar little houses. And yet Mantegna made an immortal masterpiece.
You see a woman at the theatre, leaning on a box’s edge. Everything about her is in its place and has its value—the shadow enveloping her, the jewels gleaming at her neck, the flower wilting at her breast, and the indecision, the vaporisation of her features… She has charmed you; you find her beautiful at this distance, and truly she is beautiful thus. Your dreams drift toward this exquisite form you adorn yourself. It matters little to you whether she is good or wicked, intelligent or stupid—she is what you make her and what you want her to be… You approach; often the dream has fled, nothing remains but an old, ugly woman with sagging flesh, mouth twisted in a stupid smile… Well, naturalism always approaches, it never sees beings and things in the truth of distance, in the exactitude of shadow, it strips them of that floating charm—also true—that surrounds beings and things, which is the dream; it’s the magnifying mirror that only enlarges defects and reproduces only horribly deformed images. Is it therefore true and exact?
Art isn’t made to teach us something; it’s made to move us, to cradle us, to charm us, to make us forget brutal realities and everyday disgusts, to stir in man what’s best in him, what’s been stifled by life, abandoned and asleep in the depths of his being. As science goes on stripping him of his hopes and pride, art lifts and ennobles him. It’s the highest expression of love, and love is the dream, humanity’s great pursued dream. That’s why among all peoples, in all epochs, it’s been somehow deified and why a great artist has always been greater, more celebrated, more acclaimed than a great scientist.
Let’s keep the dream, for the dream is our most precious heritage. It’s what makes the priest, the soldier, and the artist—that trinity necessary to social life. Literature and art alone can preserve it in man’s heart, and man dies of his broken dreams.
M. Émile Bergerat will have had this honour, in this moment of exact and observed platitudes, of having knowingly made, with premeditation and long-prepared combinations, an artistic work, curiously written, bizarrely conceived, and devoid to a rare degree of any kind of common sense. I mean common sense in the naturalists’ fashion. I hope that the success of Enguerrande, whose very title protests against the names of novel heroines, will have a happy influence on literary production, that young writers will lose their mania for recounting, in coarse style, random adventures happening to uninteresting characters, and that instead of denying everything—love, tenderness, beauty, music and perfumes—they will attempt to make their dream sing in the void of nothingness that is life.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Gaulois, 3 November 1884
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Léon Hennique Novel 