HEADACHES AND DYSPEPSIA
We left the French novel in the hands of Flaubert. We return now to
consider the influence of two French writers, who founded the school
known as “naturalism.” They were contemporaries of Flaubert, but their
influence counted later, for the reason that recognition was so long
delayed.
Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were brothers, who collaborated in writing
to such an extent that they became as one mind and one pen. Jules, the
younger, died at the age of forty; his brother lived to old age. They
came of an aristocratic family, and inherited a competence; they were
bachelors and semi-invalids, and devoted themselves to the cause of art
with a kind of ascetic frenzy. They believed that true art could be
understood only by artists; but they achieved greatness in spite of that
theory, because of the intensity of their sensibility, and the vitality
they gave to the creatures of their brain.
It was the Goncourts who first used the term “naturalism.” It was their
idea that characters are built up and a story made real by infinite
attention to detail. No attempt must be made to generalize, you must
deal with the particular, and you must make that particular known by the
massing of external circumstance. Everything must be subordinated to
that purpose; the style must be flexible, it must, like the music of
the Wagnerian opera, change at every moment, according to the scene it
portrays. These writers broke all the rules of French literary elegance,
they used barbarous and forbidden words, so the critics ridiculed them,
and the academy of Richelieu spurned them, and they had to start an
academy of their own.
Their first work of significance was “Germinie Lacerteux,” which tells
the life history of a French serving-maid. Why should the genteel art of
fiction stoop to such a heroine? The authors answer this question in a
preface:
Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage,
and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are
called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the
people--this world beneath a world--were to remain under the
literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained
silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We
asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still
for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too
low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their
terror. We became curious to know whether Tragedy, that
conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society,
was finally dead; whether, in a country devoid of caste and legal
aristocracy, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would speak to
interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the miseries of the
great and rich; whether, in a word, the tears that are wept below
could provoke weeping like those that are wept above.
Fiction had dealt with serving-maids before this; for example, the
heroine of the first great English novel, Pamela, occupies that station.
But Pamela is an innocent child, and our interest is in seeing her
raised to the status of a lady. The Goncourts do not tell that kind of
story: quite the contrary, their serving-maid sinks to the depths of
degradation. The only other novelist of this time who was writing about
such “low life” was Charles Dickens. He will tell you about poverty, he
will even tell you about seduction, and the sufferings of a seduced
woman; but always he is a Victorian gentleman, remembering what is
proper for young girls to read. The French writers, on the other hand,
take up the sexual conduct and feelings of their women in the spirit of
a medical clinic; they make it a matter of honor to spare you no most
hideous detail, and if you go with them you will learn all there is to
know about sexual pathology.
Now this degradation exists in the world, and it is the duty of every
thinking man and woman to know about it; to shrink from knowing, or from
telling others about it, is to evade our mental duty. But when we have
acquired this knowledge--when we have visited the hospitals and the
jails and the brothels and the morgues--our minds are automatically led
to the question: what is to be done about it? Not to follow this impulse
is to be mentally incompetent or morally diseased.
And that is where we part company with the Goncourt brothers and their
theory of art. We learn from them all about the experiences of a Paris
prostitute; we learn the details of the life of a young society girl,
brought up in a hot-house environment, a prey to abnormal cravings; we
learn the symptoms of religious pathology, the half-sensuous hysteria of
a woman in the toils of Catholic priestcraft. There are eight or ten
such novels, each dealing with a different assortment of abnormalities;
but nowhere in these books is there a hint of anything to be done,
whether by individual conversion, the renewal of the moral forces, or by
political and economic readjustments.
All such things are rigidly excluded by the “naturalist” formula; and it
is essential to get clear that the Goncourt brothers, who made the
formula, made it because they were sick and impotent men, the victims of
a decadent stage of civilization. They thought they were giving us
scientific reports upon human life, when as a matter of fact what they
were giving us were the by-products of their own headaches and
dyspepsias. They toiled with the devotion of martyrs to report every
quiver of their nervous sensibility; Edmond watched Jules while Jules
was dying--Jules even watched himself--in order to report the details of
this experience. Neither of them realized that, much as the world may
need information about the sensations of dying, it has even more need of
information about how to live. As for the Goncourt brothers, what they
needed was fresh air and exercise.
Fiction, according to this “naturalist” formula, was to become “exact
science.” But then, there are many kinds of science. It is science to
put a beetle under the microscope, and diagram the epidermal cells in
its carapace. But science does not stop with such observation; it goes
on to experiment. Supposing this beetle be dyed pink; will there be any
trace of pink in its offspring, and does that prove the transmission of
acquired characteristics?
We have here in California a plant wizard who raises fields of flowers
and fruits and vegetables. He is not content to accumulate facts about
them, but proceeds to alter them--to make cactus without spines, and
blackberries as big as your thumb, and wheat that is rust-proof and
peaches that are scale-proof. Will some member of the Goncourt Academy
explain why the “exact science” of fiction writing might not include an
effort to free human beings from alcoholism and syphilis? As it
happened, the greatest disciple of the Goncourt brothers, the man who
took up their formula and used it to make himself the most widely read
of all French novelists, came in the end to this very conclusion, and
evolved into a moralist as intense and determined as Tolstoi.