“Is it because the novel, of all literary genres, is the freest, the most lawless,” held forth Edouard, “… is it for that very reason, for fear of that very liberty (the artists who are always sighing after liberty are often the most bewildered when they get it), that the novel has always clung to reality with such timidity? And I am not speaking only of the French novel. It is the same with the English novel; and the Russian novel, for all its throwing off of constraints, is a slave to resemblance. The only progress it looks to is to get still nearer to nature. The novel has never known that ‘formidable erosion of contours,’ as Nietzsche calls it; that deliberate avoidance of life, which gave style to the works of the Greek dramatists, for instance, or to the tragedies of the French 17th century. Is there anything more perfectly and deeply human than these works? But that’s just it—they are human only in their depths; they don’t pride themselves on appearing so—or, at any rate, on appearing real. They remain works of art.”
Edouard had got up, and, for fear of seeming to give a lecture, began to pour out the tea as he spoke; then he moved up and down, then squeezed a lemon into his cup, but, nevertheless, continued speaking:
“Because Balzac was a genius, and because every genius seems to bring to his art a final and conclusive solution, it has been decreed that the proper function of the novel is to rival the état-civil.4 Balzac constructed his work; he never claimed to codify the novel; his article on Stendhal proves it. Rival the état-civil! As if there weren’t enough fools and boors in the world as it is! What have I to do with the état-civil? L’état c’est moi! I, the artist; civil or not, my work doesn’t pretend to rival anything.”
Edouard, who was getting excited—a little factitiously, perhaps—sat down. He affected not to look at Bernard; but it was for him that he was speaking. If he had been alone with him, he would not have been able to say a word; he was grateful to the two women for setting him on.
“Sometimes it seems to me there is nothing in all literature I admire so much as, for instance, the discussion between Mithridate and his two sons in Racine; it’s a scene in which the characters speak in a way we know perfectly well no father and no sons could ever have spoken in, and yet (I ought to say for that very reason) it’s a scene in which all fathers and all sons can see themselves. By localizing and specifying one restricts. It is true that there is no psychological truth unless it be particular; but on the other hand there is no art unless it be general. The whole problem lies just in that—how to express the general by the particular—how to make the particular express the general. May I light my pipe?”
“Do, do,” said Sophroniska.
“Well, I should like a novel which should be at the same time as true and as far from reality, as particular and at the same time as general, as human and as fictitious as Athalie, or Tartuffe or Cinna.”
“And … the subject of this novel?”
“It hasn’t got one,” answered Edouard brusquely, “and perhaps that’s the most astonishing thing about it. My novel hasn’t got a subject. Yes, I know, it sounds stupid. Let’s say, if you prefer it, it hasn’t got one subject … ‘a slice of life,’ the naturalist school said. The great defect of that school is that it always cuts its slice in the same direction; in time, lengthwise. Why not in breadth? Or in depth? As for me I should like not to cut at all. Please understand; I should like to put everything into my novel. I don’t want any cut of the scissors to limit its substance at one point rather than at another. For more than a year now that I have been working at it, nothing happens to me that I don’t put into it—everything I see, everything I know, everything that other people’s lives and my own teach me. …”
“And the whole thing stylized into art?” said Sophroniska, feigning the most lively attention, but no doubt a little ironically. Laura could not suppress a smile. Edouard shrugged his shoulders slightly and went on:
“And even that isn’t what I want to do. What I want is to represent reality on the one hand, and on the other that effort to stylize it into art of which I have just been speaking.”
“My poor dear friend, you will make your readers die of boredom,” said Laura; as she could no longer hide her smile, she had made up her mind to laugh outright.
“Not at all. In order to arrive at this effect—do you follow me?—I invent the character of a novelist, whom I make my central figure; and the subject of the book, if you must have one, is just that very struggle between what reality offers him and what he himself desires to make of it.”
“Yes, yes; I’m beginning to see,” said Sophroniska politely, though Laura’s laugh was very near conquering her. “But you know it’s always dangerous to represent intellectuals in novels. The public is bored by them; one only manages to make them say absurdities and they give an air of abstraction to everything they touch.”
“And then I see exactly what will happen,” cried Laura; “in this novelist of yours you won’t be able to help painting yourself.”
She had lately adopted in talking to Edouard a jeering tone which astonished herself and upset Edouard all the more that he saw a reflection
