There are few dramatists among the newcomers, I mean fervent observers
of the human drama, endowed with that large sympathy which urges the
writer to fraternize with all modes and forms of life. To some the
people's actions seem unimportant, perhaps because they lack that
spirit of philosophic generalization which elevates the humblest
happenings to the height of a tragedy. Others have and confess the
tendency to simplify everything. They observe and compare facts only
to extract summaries and quintessences from them; they have qualms and
shame at narrating the mechanisms so often described: they set up soul
portraits, keeping of physical anatomy only the materiality necessary
to hold the play of colors. Such an art, beside having the disadvantage
of being disliked by the reading public (which desires that it be
told stories, and which demands it of the newcomer) is the sign of an
evident and too disdainful absence of passion. But the dramatist is an
impassioned being, a mad lover of life and of the present life, not the
things of yesterday, dead representations whose faded decorations are
recognizable in lead coffins, but beings of today with all their beauty
and animal grossness, their mysterious souls, their true blood that
will flow from a heart and not from a swollen bladder, if stabbed in
the fifth act.
Georges Eekhoud is a dramatist, a passionate soul, a quaffer of life
and of blood.
His sympathies are multifarious and diverse; he loves everything.
"Nourish thyself with all that has life." Obeying the biblical word,
he gathers strength from all the repasts the world offers him, he
assimilates the tender or the harsh wildness of peasants or sailors
with as much sureness as the most deliberate and hypocritical
psychology of creatures drunk with civilization, the disquieting infamy
of eccentric loves and the nobility of consecrated passions, the brutal
sport of clumsy popular customs and the delicate perversion of certain
adolescent souls. He makes no choice, but understands everything
because he loves everything.
Nevertheless, whether voluntarily or whether fixed to the natal soil by
social necessities, he has limited the field of his fantastic pursuits
to the very limits of old Flanders. This agrees marvelously with his
genius, which is Flemish, excessive in his sentimental raptures as in
his debauches, Phillippe de Champaigne or Jordaens, drawing out lean
faces dramatized by the eyes of the fixed idea or displaying all the
red irruptions of joyous flesh. Eekhoud, then, is a representative
writer of a race, or of a moment of this race. This is important to
assure permanence to a work, and a place in the literary histories.
_Cycle patibulaire_ and _Mes communions_ seem the two books of Eekhoud
where this impassioned man cries his charities, angers, compassions,
scorns and loves most clearly and loudly, he himself the third book of
that marvelous trilogy whose two first have for title, Maeterlinck and
Verhaeren.
Playing a little on the word, I have called him "dramatist," in
defiance of the etymologies and usages, although he has never written
for the theater; but we divine a genius essentially dramatic by the way
in which his narratives are planned and as though miraculously balanced
to the sudden changes, the return to their true nature of characters
maddened by passion.
He has the genius for sudden changes. A character: then life presses
down and the character bends; a new weight straightens and sets
him up according to his original truth. It is the very essence
of psychological drama, and if the setting shares in the human
modifications, the work assumes an air of finality and plenitude,
giving an impression of unforseen art by the accepted logic of natural
simplicities. This might be a system of composition (not however
deficient), but not here: the whisperings of the instinct are hearkened
to and welcomed; the necessity of the catastrophe is thrust upon this
lucid mind (who has not dulled his mirror by breathing upon it),
and he clearly relates the consequences of the seismic movement of
the human soul. There are good examples of this art in the tales of
Balzac: _El Verdugo_ is only a succession of sudden changes, but too
concise: Eekhoud's _le Coq Rouge_, just as dramatic, has a much deeper
analysis and then is unveiled with grandeur, like a lovely land-scape'
effortlessly transformed by the play of clouds and the luminous space.
Equally grand, though with a cruel beauty, is the tragic story
simply called _Une mauvaise rencontre_ where is seen the heroic
transfiguration of the piteous soul of a weak vagrant, overpowered by
the strength of a gesture of love and, under the imperious magnetism of
the word, blossomed martyr, a stream of pure blood rushing miraculously
from the putrefied veins of the social carrion. Later on Mauxgraves
enjoys and dies of the terror of having beheld his words realized to
their very supreme convulsion, and the red cravat of the predestined
become the steel garrote which cuts the white neck in two.
In a novel of Balzac is a rapid, confused episode, which will recall
this tragedy to genealogists of ideas. Through hatred of humanity, M.
de Grandville has given a note for a thousand francs to a ragpicker,
so as to turn him into a drunkard, an idler, a thief; when he returns
to his home, he learns that his natural son has just been arrested for
theft; it is only romantic. This same anecdote, minus the conclusion,
is found in _A Rebours_ where des Esseintes acts, but on a young
blackguard, nearly like M. de Grandville and through a motive of
malignant scepticism. Here is a possible tree of Jesse, but which I
declare unauthentic, for the tragic perversity of Eekhoud, chimera or
screech-owl, is an original and sincere monster.
If sincerity is a merit, it is doubtless not an absolute literary
merit. Art is well pleased with falsehood and no one is particular to
confess either his "communions" or his repulsions; but by sincerity I
here understand the artistic disinterestedness which acts so that the
writer, unafraid of terrifying the average brain or of vexing certain
friends or masters, disrobes his thought with the calm wantonness
of the extreme innocence of perfect vice--or of passion. Eekhoud's
"communions" are impassioned; he eagerly sits down to table and having
nourished himself on charity, anger, pity and scorn, having tasted all
the love elixirs piously formed by his hate, he rises, drunks but not
fed, with the future joys.