A biting satirical essay by Octave Mirbeau mocking pseudo-scientific surveys of artists and writers. The French master of irony skewers vanity and pretension in this witty critique of Belle Époque intellectual culture.
Under this title: An Inquiry into the Psychological State of Artists and Scientists, one M. A. Hamon, bi-mentalist sociologist, aided by M. René Ghil, biometric and Sully-Prudhommesque poet, has launched the following circular throughout thinking Europe and the artistic New World. Need I say that I found it absolutely extraordinary? Stupefaction—that was my psychological state upon reading this document… ah yes, this document, if I dare put it that way.
132, Avenue de Clichy.
Dear Sir,
We have thought it would be interesting to investigate the psychological state—essential and comparative—of artists (painters, musicians, poets, novelists) and scientists (naturalists, biologists, philosophers, sociologists, etc.).
To this end, we have drawn up the following questionnaire. Our intention is to use the submitted documents in a work to appear fragmentarily in French and foreign journals, and subsequently in book form.
Convinced that you will kindly assist us in this scientific endeavour, we request your response at your earliest convenience.
Yours sincerely, etc.
A. Hamon,
René Ghil.
N.B. — Responses may be submitted in Portuguese.
What follows is the questionnaire, divided into four main chapters, each subdivided into an infinity of sub-chapters that converge, whilst diverging, towards the dominant idea of the chapters, cleverly arranged according to tangential and circumstantial rhythms. I’m not sure I’m explaining M. A. Hamon’s thinking clearly.
To my great regret, I find myself materially unable to publish this curious questionnaire. Not that laws on decency or state security would prevent it. But because the Journal’s twenty-four columns wouldn’t suffice to contain the hundred and twenty-eight questions—delightfully scientific, mind you—that compose this monumental piece. You’ll forgive me.
⁂
You will forgive me, I should like to think. But no force on earth will stop me from shouting out and proclaiming that here is an idea that isn’t stupid. Not only is this idea not stupid, but one can, one must affirm, without exaggeration or getting carried away, that it is truly and scientifically brilliant. Yes, brilliant: I stand by the word for those poor devils who might be tempted—oh, the ignorance!—to laugh at it.
Already, in The Psychology of the Anarchist-Socialist, M. A. Hamon had masterfully shown us how—for the greater glory of documentation, certainly!—one must know how to make use of other people’s copy, and how one can be, on the cheap, without ever writing oneself, an inexhaustible and prestigious writer. I had applauded this attempt that offered weakened biologists and impotent poets the miraculous and easy means of not interrupting a production whose source had long since irreparably dried up within them. Parodying a famous phrase, I had exclaimed: “Literature is making others work!” So you know with what sympathy I had welcomed this innovation. But sympathy soon became enthusiasm. And how much that enthusiasm grows today, when I’m given to see to what heights of perfection M. A. Hamon has been able to raise this attempt whose social impact is incalculable, and whose trajectory through universal bi-mentality remains unfortunately unobservable still, like so many things.
With a very exact sense of contingencies and the flair of a supremely gifted psychologist, M. A. Hamon, amplifying his method and generalising his conception of literature, addresses himself this time to a category of citizens who are naturally talkative, incredibly vain, and for whom talking about themselves constitutes, if not their sole reason for being, at least their favourite preoccupation. If all the solicited artists and scientists respond to the hundred and twenty-eight questions from MM. A. Hamon and René Ghil, the latter will have ready-made volumes on the shelf for the rest of their lives… Statistics tell us, in fact, that in France and the principality of Monaco alone, there exist four hundred and four thousand painters, not excepting M. Carolus-Duran; eighteen thousand nine hundred and twelve sculptors; six hundred and thirty thousand musicians; one million poets and fourteen million novelists, with the various scientists designated by M. A. Hamon, including photographers, truss-makers and civil engineers, making up the rest of the population. At ten autobiographies per volume, calculate how many volumes that makes. O Eugène Fasquelle, dear and intrepid publisher, whose well-deserved decoration we celebrated yesterday at a cordial banquet, could you ever have foreseen such a tidal bore of books in the sleepy, tranquil Caudebec of our literatures?
⁂
What delights me even more than the holy beauty of this working method, so ingeniously inaugurated by MM. A. Hamon and René Ghil, is its scientific reliability. With such a wealth of empirical precautions, no errors are possible: one can, moreover, get a reduced preview of it each week in Le Figaro, where painters, invited to establish their psychological state, essential and comparative, to rapidly draw up the nomenclature of their moral anthropometry, speak only of their marvellous genius and the exceptional prodigies that are their pictorial, visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, intellectual, amorous and literary faculties, like M. Benjamin Constant, who, when devoutly questioned about the sensations his own painting causes him, modestly declared:
“Yes, I am the greatest painter of this age, and perhaps of all ages… But what do you expect? There’s nothing surprising about that… It’s my natural function, really… So there’s no reason for me to derive any particular pride from this incontestable superiority… No… What makes me truly special—shall I say superhuman, why not?—is my genius as a writer and philosopher… I often amuse myself by chiselling maxims and thoughts of a truly unique spiritual order, so unique indeed that the maxims of a La Rochefoucauld, the thoughts of a Pascal or a Goethe seem, compared to mine, like the pitiful reflections of an idiot child.”
And this other one who said:
“Oh, me!… I don’t give a fig for the syntax of my drawing… What characterises it, you see, and ensures mankind’s eternal admiration… is the punctuation!… It’s sublime!”
I dedicate these two documents to M. A. Hamon and M. René Ghil, to give them a foretaste of all those whose immeasurable vanities they are called upon to publish in volumes of rigorous science…
⁂
Yesterday, I ran into M. A. Hamon. Armed with a mentaloscope, which is a bizarre and complicated instrument, reminiscent in form of the very curious brain-extraction machine recently invented by M. Alfred Jarry, he was collecting the psychological state, essential and comparative, of citizen Faberot.
“You see,” he told me… “It’s going well… going well… While waiting for responses to my questionnaire, I go out in the street, to cafés, to people’s homes… with my instrument…”
And when I showed my astonishment:
“Oh!” he said… “Don’t worry. It writes by itself… Very convenient!”
Addressing citizen Faberot, M. Hamon commanded:
“Attention!… I’m continuing.”
In his left hand, he held his questionnaire… with his right, he adjusted the mentaloscope on the skull of citizen Faberot, who looked astonished and serious.
“Fourthly!” he read whilst rapidly turning a small crank that went: “Crrr… crrr… crrr…” “Fourthly… Are you more of a harmonist than a colourist? A melodist than a draughtsman?… or vice versa?”
M. Hamon stopped turning the crank, and from deep within the instrument, amidst clicking noises and vibrating springs, I heard a tiny, angry, muffled voice saying, in Portuguese:
“I’m a bloody hatter! You pompous arse!”
“Rigorously scientific!” declared M. Hamon, who repositioned the instrument on the citizen’s skull… and resumed turning the crank. “Fifthly…”
But I fled, laughing…
1896.
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