Mimesis (85 page)

But however we may feel about the individual motifs in this preface and in general about the way in which the Goncourts plead their cause, there is no doubt that they were right, and the suit has long since been settled in their favor. With the first great realists of the century, with Stendhal, Balzac, and even with Flaubert, the lower strata of the people, and indeed the people as such in general, hardly appear. And when it appears, it is seen not on its own premises, within its own life, but from above. Even with Flaubert (whose
Cœur simple
, by the way, did not appear until a decade after
Germinie Lacerteux
, so that at the time of our preface almost nothing of
Madame Bovary
had been written except the scene of the awarding of prizes at the
Comices agricoles
) the people is on the whole represented by servants and background figures only. But the advance of the realistic mixture of styles which Stendhal and Balzac had brought about could not stop short of the fourth estate; it had to follow the social and political development of the time. Realism had to embrace the whole reality of contemporary civilization, in which to be sure the bourgeoisie played a dominant role, but in which the masses were beginning to press threateningly ahead as they became ever more conscious of their own function and power. The common people in all its ramifications had to be taken into the subject matter of serious realism: the Goncourts were right, and they were to be borne out in it. The development of realistic art has proved it.

The first defenders of the rights of the fourth estate—politically as well as in literature—almost all belonged not to it but to the bourgeoisie. This is also true of the Goncourts, who, by the way, had little sympathy with political socialism. They were half-aristocratic upper bourgeois, not only by birth but also in their attitude and way of life, in their views, concerns, and instincts. In addition they were endowed with hypersensitive nerves; they dedicated their lives to a search for aesthetic sense impressions. They were, more completely and exclusively than anyone else, aesthetes and eclecticists of literature. To find them in the role of champions of the fourth estate, even though only of the fourth estate as a source of literary subject matter, is a surprise. What was it that connected them with the fourth estate? What did they know about its life, its problems, and reactions? And was it really nothing but a sense of social and aesthetic justice which induced them
to dare this experiment? It is not difficult to answer these questions. It can be done simply on the basis of the Goncourts’ bibliography. They wrote a considerable number of novels, almost all of them based on their own experience and observation. In these novels, in addition to the milieu of the lower classes, other milieux appear—the upper bourgeoisie, the underworld of the metropolis, various types of artistic circles; but whatever the milieu, the subjects treated are always strange and unusual, often pathological. In addition they wrote books on their travels, on contemporary artists, on women and art in the eighteenth century, and on Japanese art. Then there is that mirror of their life, the Diary. Their bibliography alone, then, reveals the principle of their choice of subject matter. They were collectors and depicters of sensory impressions, especially of sensory impressions valuable for their strangeness or novelty. They were professional discoverers or rediscoverers of aesthetic, and particularly of morbidly aesthetic, experiences suited to satisfy an exacting taste surfeited with the usual. It was from this point of view that the common people appealed to them as a literary subject. Edmond de Goncourt expressed this excellently in a diary entry of December 3, 1871:

Mais pourquoi … choisir ces milieux? Parce que c’est dans le bas que dans l’effacement d’une civilisation se conserve le caractère des choses, des personnes, de la langue, de tout …. Pourquoi encore? peut-être parce que je suis un littérateur bien né, et que le peuple, la canaille, si vous voulez, a pour moi l’attrait de populations inconnues, et non découvertes, quelque chose de
l’exotique
que les voyageurs vont chercher. …

(But why … choose these milieux? Because it is at the bottom that, in the obliteration of a civilization, the character of things, of persons, of the language, of everything, is preserved. … Why again? perhaps because I am a well-born man of letters, and because the people, the mob, if you will, has for me the attraction of unknown and undiscovered populations, something of the
exoticism
which travelers go to seek. …)

As far as this impulse took them, they could understand the people. But no further. And that automatically excludes everything functionally essential, the people’s work, its position within modern society, the political, social, and moral ferments which are alive in it and which point to the future. The very fact that
Germinie Lacerteux
is once again a novel about a maid, that is, about an appendage of the
bourgeoisie, shows that the task of including the fourth estate in the subject matter of serious artistic representation is not centrally understood and approached. The thing that drew the Goncourts in the subject matter of
Germinie Lacerteux
was something quite different. It was the sensory fascination of the ugly, the repulsive, and the morbid. In this, to be sure, the Goncourts are not entirely original, for Baudelaire’s
Fleurs du mal
had appeared as early as 1857. But they would seem to have been the first to import such motifs into the novel; and this was the fascination which the strange erotic adventures of an elderly maidservant had for them. For it is a true story, of which they learned after the woman’s death and from which they built up their novel. In an unexpected fashion the inclusion of the common people connected itself in them (and not only in them) with the need for sensory representation of the ugly, repulsive, and pathological—a need which went far beyond the factually requisite, the typical and representative. There was in it a radical and bitter protest against the forms of an idealizing and palliating elevated style, whether of classical or romantic origin, which despite its decline continued to govern the average taste of the public; against the conception of literature (and the arts in general) as a pleasant and soothing form of recreation—a basic about-face in the interpretation of the
prodesse
and
delectare
which constitutes its goal. And with this we come to the first part of the preface, the polemic against the public.

It is astounding. Perhaps not so much for us today, for we have heard the like and worse from our authors on many occasions. But if we think of earlier periods, so outspoken an attack upon those to whom the work is addressed constitutes an amazing phenomenon. The writer is a producer; the public is his customer. We can formulate the relationship between the two in other terms, looking at it from another point of view. We can regard the writer as an educator, a guide, a representative and occasionally prophetic voice. But aside from and indeed before all that, our economic formulation of the relationship is perfectly justified, and the Goncourts recognized as much. Although they did not exactly depend on their literary income, since they had means, they were yet most keenly interested in the success and sale of their books. How can the producer attack his customer in so outspoken a fashion! During the centuries when the writer depended on a princely patron or a definite aristocratic minority, such a tone would have been quite impossible. In the sixties of the past century an author could risk such a thing because he faced an anonymous and not
clearly defined public. It is obvious that in doing so he counted upon the sensation which such a preface would cause. For the worst danger for his work was neither opposition, nor ill will on the part of the critics, nor even suppression by the authorities—all these things could occasion annoyance, delay, and personal unpleasantness, but they were not insuperable and often resulted in making the work better known—the worst danger which threatened a work of art was indifference.

The Goncourts charge the public with corrupt and perverted taste; with preferring false values, pseudo-refinement, pruriency, reading as a comfortable and soporific pastime, books which end happily and make no serious demands on the reader. Instead, they continue, they offer the public a novel which is true, which found its subject in the street, which, in its serious and pure content, presents the pathology of love, which will upset the public’s habits and prove harmful to its hygiene. The tone of the passage as a whole is one of irritation. It is apparent that the writers have long been aware how far their taste has moved away from that of the average public, that they are convinced of being right, that they are trying by every means to shake the public out of its comfortable security, and that, already a little embittered, they can hardly believe in any great success for their efforts.

The polemic of this preface is a symptom; it is characteristic of the relationship which had developed in the course of the nineteenth century between the public and almost all important poets and writers, as well as painters, sculptors, and musicians—and not only in France, although earlier and more sharply there than anywhere else. It can safely be said that, with few exceptions, the significant artists of the later nineteenth century encountered hostility, lack of comprehension, or indifference on the part of the public. They achieved general recognition only at the price of violent and prolonged struggles, many of them only posthumously, or, before their deaths, among but a small circle of followers. Inversely, and again with but few exceptions, it is observable that during the nineteenth century, especially during its second half, and on into the beginning of the twentieth, those artists who quickly and easily achieved general recognition had no real and lasting importance. On the basis of this experience many critics and artists became convinced that this was necessarily so: that the very originality of a significant new work had as its concomitant that the public, not yet accustomed to its style, found it confusing and disturbing and could become accustomed only gradually to the new language of form. Yet this phenomenon was never so general and so extreme
in the past. Often, to be sure, public recognition of great artists was diminished by unfortunate circumstances or by envy; they were often put on a par with rivals whom we today regard as totally unworthy of the honor. But that, despite the most favorable facilities for dissemination, the mediocre should almost generally be preferred to the significant, that almost all important artists should, according to their individual temperaments, regard the average public with bitterness or contempt or simply as nonexistent—this is a special feature of the past century. It is a situation which began to develop during the romantic period. Thereafter it grew worse and worse. Toward the end of the century there were a few great poets whose behavior and manner made it clear that they renounced every kind of general dissemination and recognition from the outset.

By way of explanation the first point that comes to mind is the tremendous and ever increasing expansion of the reading public since the beginning of the century, and the concomitant coarsening of taste. Intelligence, choiceness of feeling, concern for the forms of life and expression deteriorated. Stendhal in his time lamented this loss, as we pointed out earlier. The lowering of all standards was further accelerated by the commercial exploitation of the tremendous demand for reading matter on the part of publishers of books and periodicals, the majority of whom (there were exceptions) followed the path of least resistance and easy profits, supplying the public with what it wanted and possibly even with worse than it would have demanded if left to its own devices. But who was the reading public? It consisted largely of the urban middle class, which had greatly increased in numbers and, in consequence of the spread of education, had become able and willing to read. Here we have the “bourgeois,” the creature whose stupidity, intellectual inertia, conceit, hypocrisy, and cowardice were attacked and ridiculed by poets, writers, artists, and critics from the romantic period on. Can we simply subscribe to their verdict? Are not these bourgeois the same people who undertook the tremendous task, the bold adventure, of the economic, scientific, and technological civilization of the nineteenth century, and who also produced the leaders of the revolutionary movements which were the first to recognize the crises, dangers, and foci of corruption inherent in that civilization? Even the average bourgeois of the nineteenth century shared in the tremendous activity in life and labor which characterized the age. Day in and day out he led a life which was much more dynamic and exacting than the life of the élite, with their routine of idleness and their
almost complete immunity from the pressure of time and duty, who represented the literary public of the
ancien régime
. His physical security and his property were better guarded than in former times; he had incomparably greater possibilities of rising in the world. But acquiring and preserving property, exploiting opportunities for advancement, adjusting to quickly changing conditions—all as part of the bitter competitive struggle for survival—made such great and ceaseless demands on his strength and his nerves as had never been known in earlier times. From the pages on the life of the Parisians which Balzac wrote at the beginning of his novel
la Fille aux yeux d’or
, and which, though imaginative, are full of realistic observation, we can infer how exhausting the life there was even during the early years of the bourgeois monarchy. It is not surprising that these people expected and insisted that literature, and art in general, should give them relaxation, recreation, and at best an easily attained intoxication, and that they objected to the
triste et violente distraction
, to use an expressive phrase of the Goncourts, which most of the important authors offered.

But there is something else. In France, the influence of religion had been more profoundly shaken than elsewhere. Political institutions were undergoing constant change and afforded no moral support. The great ideas of the Enlightenment and the Revolution had quickly staled and become mere phrases. What they had resulted in was a vigorous fight of ego against ego which was regarded as justified because free enterprise was taken to be a natural and self-regulatory prerequisite for general prosperity and progress. But the self-regulation did not operate so as to satisfy the demand for justice. The success and failure of individuals and of whole strata of society were not exclusively decided only by intelligence and industry but also by conditions at the start, personal relations, luck, and not infrequently by a robust callousness of conscience. To be sure, justice had never ruled supreme in this world. But now it was no longer seriously possible, as it had been in earlier times, to interpret and accept injustice as decreed by God. A strong feeling of moral discomfort very soon arose. But the impetus of the economic movement was too powerful to be stopped by purely moral attempts to apply the brakes. The will to economic expansion and the moral discomfort existed side by side. In course of time the real dangers threatening the economic development and the structure of bourgeois society began to become apparent: the struggle of the great powers for markets and the threat from the progressive organization of the fourth estate. It was the time of preparation for
the tremendous crisis the outbreak of which we have seen and continue to see in our day. In the nineteenth century there were very few men endowed with the perspicacity correctly to evaluate the decisive danger areas. Least of all perhaps the statesmen. They were still involved in ideas, desires, and methods of a kind which made it impossible for them to understand the economic and basically human situation.