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René Sully-Prudhomme (1839-1907) - original name RENÉ FRANCOIS ARMAND PRUDHOMME |
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French poet, who won the first Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901. The decision stirred controversy at the time – René Sully-Prudhomme had not published much poetry after 1888. Today Sully-Prudhomme is also relatively little read either in France or abroad. His early works were lyrical and expressed melancholic view of the world – in later volumes he favored the calm, impersonal techniques of the Parnassians, who reacted against the excessive emotion and subjectivity of Romaticism. The vase that holds this dying rose, René François Armand Sully-Prudhomme was born in Paris. His parents, M. Sully Prudhomme and Clotilde Caillat, had been engaged for ten years, and after gaining financial security they married. At the age of two Sully-Prudhomme lost his father, a shopkeeper, and he grew up in his uncle's house, where mother moved. His father was called "Sully" and the poet joined it with his surname Prudhomme. At school he was interested in classic literature and mathematics. He also thought seriously of entering the Dominican order, but his fervor did not last long. The sonnets entitled 'Doubt' reflected his familiarity with the work of David F. Strauss and other religious critics. After graduating from the Lycée Bonaparte, Sully-Prudhomme took his bachelor's degree in the sciences in 1857, but severe eye disorder caused him to abandon his plans to study engineering. In 1858 he passed his examination as bachelor of letters. For a period he was employed as a factory correspondence at the industrial firm of Schneider-Creuzot. Having returned to Paris, Sully-Prudhomme began studiying law, without much enthusiasm, and worked in a solicitor's office. While
recovering from an unhappy love affair – he remained a lifelong
bachelor – Sully-Prudhomme read philosophy and wrote poetry.
He joined the Conférence La Bruyère, a student society, and read there
his poems. His efforts were encouraged by Leconte de Lisle, a leading
Parnassian poet, who noted that his protégée was not faithful to the
ideals of classical poetry, but preferred to depict his own inner
feelings. Some take Théophile Gautier as the leader of the
Parnassian movement; he held that art was and end in itself, not
a means to an end. To England the doctrine of l'art pour l'art came
through the writings of Théodore de Banville. (The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms
and Literary Theory by J.A Cuddon, fourth edition, 1998, pp.
639-640) Being made temporarily independent by inheriting a small fortune, Sully-Prudhomme devoted himself to writing. At the age of 26, he published his first book, Stances et Poèmes. It contained his best-known piece, 'Le Vase Brisé' (The Broken Vase). "Le vase où meurt cette vervaine / D'un coup d'éventail fut fêlé; / Le coup dut l'effleurer à peine, / Aucun bruit ne l'a révélé." The collection of sorrowful poems – 'The Broken Vase' is about a broken heart – was praised by the literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beauve. The book sold so well that Sully-Prudhomme decided to devote himself to literature. In 1866 he became one of the contributors to the anthology Le Parnasse Contemporain, and produced then Les Écuries d'Augias (1866), Croquis Italiens (1866-68), and Les Solitudes (1869). Sully-Prudhomme wanted to restore the classical standards of elegance in verse. In his striving for direct and simple expression, the work of Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (99-55 B.C.) influenced him deeply. Sully-Prudhomme published a translation of the first volume of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), together with the accompanying preface. Lucretius had advocated in the didactic poem Epicurean doctrines, stating that "one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest wealth is to live on little with contended mind; for a little is never lacking." Later Sully-Prudhomme expressing his philosophical thoughts through poetry and under the form of dialogue, as in La Justice (1878). When the Franco-Prussian War began, Sully-Prudhomme enlisted in the militia, which defended Paris during the siege. As a response to the national crisis, whe wrote Impressions de la Guerre, which came out in 1870. In the same year his mother, uncle, and aunt died, and the poet had a stroke, which nearly paralyzed his lower body, a condition with which he would struggle for the rest of his life. His works from that decade include Les Vaines Tendresses (1875) and 'Le Zénith'. The latter, published in the Revue des deux mondes, dealt with the fatal ascent of three balloonists. In spite of melancholic undertones of his poems and Epicurean wiew of the world, he was considered the poet of life, "of joy, of beauty, of energy, and of novelty." No self-appointed messiah like Victor Hugo but no nihilist like Leconte de Lisle, he lifted poetry from some of the gloom into which positivistic pessimism had plunged it for a generation and taught his belief that the road to happiness lies through pain, self-sacrifice, and brotherly love. ('Sully-Prudhomme' by J.-A.B., rev. D.W.A. [Jean-Albert Béde; Douglas W. Alden], in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited by Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, p. 783) Sully-Prudhomme's major works include the 4 000 line epic Le
Bonheur (1888),
an ambitious attempt to create a scientific-philosophic poem. For the
rest of his career he devoted to the philosophy of poetry. Testament Poétique (1901) voiced
out his objections both to free verse and the work of the
symbolists. La Vraie Religion Selon Pascal (True
Religion According to Pascal) from 1905 was about Blaise Pascal's
Christian views. Other essays from this year include 'The History of
the Social State,' 'The Credit of Science' and 'On National and
International Lines'. Seven
of Sully-Prudhomme's essays, written in the form of letters addressed to the
French physiologist and proponent of eugenics Charles Richet, were published in Le problème des causes finales
(1902, The Problem of Final Causes), which also contained Richet's essay L’effort vers la vie et la théorie des
causes finales, originally published in the Revue Sientifique. His arguments in the first essay show that he had a
good grasp of Darwinism and Lamarckism; it was even better than what
Richet had. In his final work, Psychologie du Libre Arbitre (1906, Psychology of Free Will) and in the posthumously published Journal Intime (1922) Sully-Prudhomme contemplated the concept of free will, and concluded that the course of the universe is not determined. In
1881 Sully-Prudhomme was elected to the French Academy. He
wrote
comparetively little poetry, focusing on theoretical and metaphysical
works. Along with Charles Gounod, Leconte de Lisle, Guy de Maupassant,
Auguste Renoir, and others, he signed the manifesto 'Les artistes
contre la Tour Eiffel' (1887), about the demolition of the Eiffel Tower
– they described is as "useless and monstrous". Sully-Prudhomme's
opinion changed when the building was finished in 1889: "I feel
consoled by the proud joy common to all to see the French flag float
higher than all the other flags ion the world, of not as a sign of the
warlike, at least as an emblem of the invincible spirations of my
country." (Eiffel: The Genius Who Reinvented Himself by David I. Harvie, 2006, p. 134) From the beginning, Sully-Prudhomme was a staunch
supporter of Captain Alfred
Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, who was falsely accused
and convicted for espionage. During the last years of his life he
was seriously disabled by paralysis. In 1906, when a literary journal asked, "Who is the poet you love best?" Sully-Prudhomme received not one vote. (Some Diversions of a Man of Letters by Edmund Gosse, 1919, p. 9) As a poet he belonged to the nineteenth century rather than to the twentieth century. "Intellectual and profound, but losing his bloom," wrote Anatole France in his diary. "Rich and handsome. Finds life a bore." (Anatole France: The Man and His Work: An Essay in Critical Biography by J. Lewis May, Port Washington, N. Y./London: Kennikat Press, 1924, p. 56) René Sully-Prudhomme died at his villa in Châtenay-Malabry, near Paris, on September 7, 1907. He was buried at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise, Paris. The marthematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré was admitted in 1909 to the French Academy to the place left vacant by his death. Sully-Prudhomme was awarded the first Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1901. August Strindberg, along with many other writers
and artists, protested the decision and argued that the award should
have gone to Leo Tolstoy. Strindberg himself never received the prize,
although his countrywoman Selma Lagerlöf was deemed worthy of the
honour. Also writers such as Emile Zola (1902), Anton Chekhov (d.
1904), and Henry James (d. 1916) were overlooked by the Nobel
Committee. The money Sully-Prudhomme donated to the
French writers' association to help aspiring poets with the publication
of their first book. Gabriel Fauré set three of his poems to music. Two
of them, 'Au bord de l'eau' (At the Water's Edge), which was
collected in Les Vaines tendresses, and 'Les
Berceaux' (The Cradles), which appeared in Stances et poèmes
under the title 'Le Long du quai les grands vaisseaux,' are considered
masterpieces. 'Le Vase brisé' was set to music by César Franck. Henry
Peyre listed in 1951 Sully-Prudhomme in his article in Books Abroad, published by the
University of Oklahoma, among those names "which should never have
stood on a list of Nobel prize winners." ('What's
Wrong with the Nobel Prize?' by Henri Peyre, Books Abroad, Vol. 25, No. 3,
Summer, 1951, pp. 213-219) For further reading: Studies in Literature 1789-1877 by Edward Dowden (1892); The Technique of the French Alexandrine; a Study of the Works of Leconte de Lisle, Jose Maria de Heredia, François Coppee, Sully Prudhomme, and Paul Verlaine by Hugo Paul Thieme (1897); Entretiens avec Sully-Prudhomme by Edouard Champion (1900); La Philosophie de M. Sully-Prudhomme by Camille Hémon (1907); Sully Prudhomme by Ernest Zyromski (1907); Parisian Portraits by Francis Grierson (1913); On Life and Letters by Anatole France (1922); Punch and Judy and Other Essays by Maurice Baring (1924); Sully Prudhomme, poète sentimental et poète philosophe by Edmond Estève (1925); Sully Prudhomme et sa pensée by Pierre Flottes (1930); French Lyrics in English Verse, edited by William Frederic Giese (1946); 'On Mending the Broken Vase: Sully Prudhomme's Aspiration to a Unifying Aesthetic' by Max I. Baym, in The French Review: Special Issue, Vol. 44, No. 2, Studies in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Winter, 1971); 'René Sully-Prudhomme: 1901,' in Nelly Sachs, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, René Sully-Prudhomme, published under the sponsorship of the Nobel Foundation & The Swedish Academy (1971); 'Prudhomme, René-François-Armand,' in The Who's Who of Nobel Prize Winners, edited by Bernard S. Schlessinger and June H. Schlessinger (1986); 'Sully-Prudmomme, René,' in Nobel Prize Winners: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Bictionary, edited by T. Wasson (1987); 'The Pleasures of Passé Poets' by Fred C. Robinson, Sewanee Review, Volume 121, Number 2 (Spring 2013) - Poets associated with the Parnassians: Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, François Coppée, Sully Prudhomme, and Paul Verlaine. Suomeksi kirjailijalta on käännetty runoja mm. teokseen Ranskan kirjallisuuden kultainen kirja, toim. Anna-Maria Tallgren, 1934. Otto Manninen on suomentanut runon 'Särkynyt maljakko'. Selected works:
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