The author of _Mystère des Foules_ strongly recalls Balzac; he has his
power and dispersive force. Like Balzac, but to a much smaller extent,
he wrote, while very young, execrable books where no one could have
forseen the future genius of an intelligence truly cyclical; _la Force
du mal_ is no more in the germ in _le Thé chez Miranda_ than _le Pere
Goriot_ in _Jane la Pâle_ or _le Vicaire des Ardennes._ Paul Adam,
nevertheless, is a precocious person, but there are limits to precocity
especially in a writer destined to narrate life exactly as he sees
and feels it. It was needful that the education of the senses should
have had time to mature and that experience should have fortified
the mind in the art of comparisons and choice, the association and
disassociation of ideas. A novelist still needs a large erudition and
all kinds of ideas that are solidly acquired, but slowly and by chance,
by the good will of things and the favorableness of events.
Today Paul Adam is in all his radiance and on the very eve of glory.
Each of his gestures, each pace of his brings him nearer to the
bomb-ketch ready to explode, and if he withstands the qualing from the
thunderclap, he will be king and master. By this bomb-ketch, I do not
mean the great mob, but that large public, already selected, which,
insensible to pure art, nevertheless demands that its romantic emotions
be served enrobed in true literary style, original, strongly perfumed,
of long dough cleverly kneaded, and in a form new enough to surprise
and charm. This was Balzac's public; it is the public which Paul Adam
seems on the point of reconquering. The novel of maimers (I omit three
or four masters whom I have not to judge here) is fallen lower than
ever since the century and a half when it was brought from England.
Neglecting observation, style, imagination and especially ideas, which
were rather general than particular, the fictionists who took up the
trade of telling stories, have brought fiction to such a point of
disrepute that an intelligent man, mindful of employing his leisure in
a manner worthy of his intelligence, no longer dares open one of these
books, which even the quay book-stalls rebel against and dam up against
the yellow current. Paul Adam certainly has suffered through this
convulsion of scorn: the lettered men and women, badly informed, have
long supposed that his books were like all the rest. They are different.
First by style: Paul Adam uses a language that is vigorous, concise,
full of images; new to the point of inaugurating syntactic forms.
By observation: his keen glance pierces like a wasp sting through
things and souls; like the new photography, he reads through skins and
caskets. By the imagination, which permits him to evoke and vivify the
most diverse, characteristic and personal beings, he has, like Balzac,
the genius not only of giving life to his characters, but personality,
of making them true individuals, all well-endowed with an individual
soul: in _la Force du Mal_, a young girl is placed so sharply under our
eyes that she becomes unforgettable; her character, unfortunately, too
abruptly summed up, wavers at the end. By fecundity, finally: fecundity
not only linear and of the nature of cleared fields, but of works whose
slightest are still works.
He has undertaken two great romantic epopees which his ardent bold
spirit will perfect to the condition of monuments, _l'Epoque_ and _les
Volontés merveilleuses_. He works alone, like a swarm, and at the first
ray of sunshine, the bee ideas rush tumultuously forth and disperse
across the vast fields of life.
Paul Adam is a magnificient spectacle.