What is the reason of this prodigious success? How is it that Barbusse, who was an unknown young poet in 1913, should satisfy to-day the souls of so vast a public. One may say that he has inherited the immense unsatisfied public left desolate since the death of Zola. He has most of Zola’s qualities, imagination; a tragic realism that impresses an image lastingly on the reader’s brain; and a sort of public passion, rather than public spirit, that makes him feel other men’s grievances and wrongs more keenly than his own. Moreover, he has all Zola’s faults—and they are of a kind that do not prejudice the sale of a book—he has Zola’s filth, his sexual obsession; Zola’s anarchism, and his Utopias; Zola’s abuse of horror in the evocation of physical torture.
L’Enfer, M. Barbusse’s first great success, is a really bad book! a far worse book, I think, than Pot-bouille, with which it invites comparison. Zola showed us an ordinary Paris mansion, or system of ‘flats,’ and, taking off the roof Asmodeus-wise, revealed on every floor the iniquities it contained, and by so doing the novelist sought to demonstrate the corruption of society in its actual form. His earnestness to some extent redeemed his foulness. And the same holds good of Barbusse. But how miserable is his treatment of the theme. He imagines a respectable boarding-house a kind of Maison Vauquer of a less dilapidated sort. The narrator is one of the boarders. In his wall, a cleft or crevice in a panel puts his bedroom into unsuspected communication with the chamber on the other side. He looks and listens; and what goes on under his spyhole is the unsavoury theme of the volume tersely called: Hell. Debauch, despair, adultery, death, birth; at one moment the consultation of two doctors on a case of cancer; at another, the vigil beside a corpse; such are the things discovered by the peephole of an undreamed-of witness. They are described with a luxury of nastiness which suggests some medical student afflicted with erotomania. He spies upon lust; he prys into the last spasms of pain; his mind is unbalanced. And we imagine him saying to himself, ‘Oh, I’ll make your flesh creep and your blood run cold!’ When he leaves description for theory, he is an Anarchist. Above all, he is a cad. (We are speaking, of course, of the fictitious narrator, and not of M. Henri Barbusse.) But we must admit that he is a gifted and sensitive cad. That is why, although we devote the book to the flames, we read it first....
We have heard how Gautama, brought up until adolescence amid the false enchantments of a sequestered palace, one day crossed the threshold and met, ere he had taken twenty steps, a corpse, a leper, and an old man bent double and blind in his decrepitude: Death—Disease—Old Age—and was told it was the common lot. Whereupon Gautama forsook the world and henceforth his conversation was in Heaven.
M. Barbusse also has met the three spectres, and with them their attendant spirits, Lust and Cruelty. But pity has turned in his heart, not to prayer, but to a passionate anger, a violent reaction against civilisation as it stands. On every page of this first book he shouts ‘Follow your instincts! Eat, drink, and make merry, for to-morrow you die!’ And sotto voce he seems to add: ‘Destroy! lest ye be destroyed!’
The popularity of Barbusse is therefore a disquieting symptom, but all his novels are not as outrageous as L’Enfer. In Le Feu he discovered a theme exactly suited to his genius. Le Feu is perhaps the only war book which really gives a living image of the war. It is unique and unforgettable. L’Enfer, as I have said, is a bad book; but Le Feu, with all its faults, is a masterpiece.
It is the journal of a squad—fifteen or a dozen common soldiers in the trenches; their infinite pettiness, their infinite grandeur; the horrors they succumb to or surmount. The first page shows the strange moats or living wells of the trenches—and the strange creatures (huge bears, no doubt) who growl and waddle and stumble therein—‘des espèces d’ours qui pataugent et grognent. C’est nous.’
The book is a series of episodes rather than a novel. Strange how this form—which the French call the ‘Chest-of-Drawers,’ the roman-à-tiroirs, comprising a set of independent though sequestered events contained in a solid framework—has taken possession of French literature. M. Duhamel also employs it. Jean-Christophe was a roman-à-tiroirs. Most popular during the Middle Ages and Renaissance (both the Divine Comedy and Don Quixote are on this model), the Nineteenth Century preferred the firm organic contexture of the novel of character. La Cousine Bette or Madame Bovary, The Mill on the Floss, Vanity Fair, The Old Curiosity Shop, appeared to us of the Nineteenth Century, a finer development, an evolution. But the world goes round!
Some of these episodes, once read, are fixed in the memory for ever; and of these the finest, I think, is Le Portique. Who can forget the death of Poterloo in the explosion of the obus, as he rises from the earth, bolt upright, black, his two arms stretched full length as on a cross, and a flame on his shoulders in place of the shattered head? We cannot banish that terrible image if we would. There are pages of Le Feu, which, just glanced at, imprint themselves on our consciousness—like the death of the horse, Trompette, in the mine of Germinal, for we are always brought back to our initial comparison of M. Barbusse with Zola. And those who appreciate what I can but call the epic grandeur of Germinal or L’Assommoir, will do well to read Le Feu; while those who cannot endure the foul images, the filthy realism, the coarse slang, the half-mad enthusiasms and indignations of Zola, will be wise in avoiding any book by Henri Barbusse.
For M. Barbusse, like Zola, is an apostle and writes inspired by the energy of his social revolt. Like Péguy—although he is so different from Péguy—he longs to fly to the rescue. There was a medieval saint and poetess, Mechtild of Magdeburg, who sang in one of her lyric prayers, ‘Ô Christ on the Cross, lend me Thine arms to save a suffering world!’ That is the prayer of M. Barbusse, only he addresses it to Socialism—or rather, if I understand him aright, to Bolshevism. He would save the dumb dwellers in that dark underworld which, in the present state of things, appears to have no issue. ‘And he went down into Hell.’ More than once the line has slid into my mind in reading his unedifying pages, and I understood that here, too, was a sort of Gospel—the most modern of the apocrypha.
One may doubt of the wisdom of a social theory which, seeing the stain on our vesture, would simply turn it wrong side out. The stain may go right through. The world may prove no stronger and no saner if you set it upside down. I am not M. Barbusse’s political convert. But I admire him for his reaction, his revolt against that which most of us so readily accept—the sufferings of the unknown mass. It is well that there should be writers who rouse and reveal, though their trumpet notes be harsh and unmodulated—well there should be those who shake the sleepers from their sloth and bid them save their neighbours and themselves, building anew, lest the pillars of the temple fall and crush us all in their ruin.