Octave Mirbeau’s scathing 1890 critique of literature’s obsession with love stories. A brilliant satirical essay arguing that while science explores the universe, literature remains stuck in the bedroom.
“We need love,
Even if there were none left in the world.” — Ludovic Halévy
Save for a few rare exceptions (hardly encouraged at that), literature rarely ventures into the lofty realms of ideas, empirical knowledge, or serious psychological inquiry. It remains, immutably, mere public entertainment. Its social function? To amuse the idle and the passers-by, to give women something to dream about. Literature wouldn’t have it any other way. Should it dare a timid foray into intellectual territory, the critics—those self-appointed guardians of literary propriety—sound the alarm. They must have their love stories. And the reading, book-buying public echoes the critics: “Give us love!”
Whilst science labours to clear away the metaphysical undergrowth that obscures the wellsprings of life like so much dreary bramble; whilst it conquers unexplored worlds, interrogates the infinity of space and the eternity of matter; whilst it plumbs the primordial seas seeking the original matter from which we sprang, tracing its slow development through millions of years and millions of forms up to its crowning achievement—mankind—literature, meanwhile, is still bleating out its pathetic ditties about two or three artificial, conventional emotions that ought to be thoroughly exhausted by now, given how long they have been trotted out for our amusement. Because apparently, we find them amusing.
Literature has drawn no benefit whatsoever from the magnificent new modes of education that science offers, nor from the fresh aesthetic possibilities these might yield. With pig-headed obstinacy, it refuses to join science in the nearly limitless field now open to all human mental and artistic endeavour. Instead, it fixates on love—that is, on the earth-shattering question of whether John will marry Jane, whether little Petra will cheat on Peter, and precisely how, and vice versa. It must have its love stories.
On this point, all writers agree: naturalists, idealists, verists, modernists, and psychologists alike. Works like Zola’s Germinal, which shows us the terrible, uncanny spectre of the social question, are rare. Equally rare are those that, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Nordau’s The Malady of the Century, stir profound ideas and cast powerful light on humanity’s future. How quickly we scurry back to those adulterous alcoves where love bleats its eternal lament!
Stop and think for a moment, and something utterly mad becomes apparent. In our literary puppet show, fictional characters express and possess but one preoccupation: love. They love from the first page to the last, and when they have finished loving in one book, they start all over again in the next. You would think they had some special, incomplete anatomy—for they suppress, with astonishing ease, all other physical needs—and a peculiar cranial structure, for with a stroke of the pen they erase all manifestations of intellectual life. They are scarcely different from those Alpine cretins with flattened skulls, their brains devoid of convolutions or grey matter, in whom nothing remains alive and functioning in the darkness of their sub-animal existence save the sexual instinct.
Love has its merits. In youth, it provides hours of charming illusion, quickly shattered beliefs, and pain—rarely productive pain, at that. Moreover, it drives people to abnormal acts, some tragic, others comic, all or nearly all displaying a telling madness that would be interesting to study if the field weren’t already so overcrowded. Finally, it perpetuates the species, despite itself. Love is at once delicious, extravagant, dishonourable, stupefying, criminal, and reproductive. It’s only fair, then, that it should occupy in literature the important place it holds in life. But life isn’t only about love. Dare I suggest there’s rather a lot else going on, even if it doesn’t seem that way?
The other day, Francis Magnard asked whether, after the eternal story of the heart eternally retold, someone might finally deign to write the history of our brain. Now there’s a neglected organ! Yet what a splendid book it would make, and there’s no shortage of material. “The world is narrow,” says Schiller, “but the brain is vast.” And Huschke exclaims: “The brain is the temple of what interests us most in the world. Yes, the destiny of humankind is intimately bound to the sixty-five or seventy folds of cerebral matter, and the history of humanity is inscribed there as in a great book full of hieroglyphs.” Little chance, however, that such a book will be attempted anytime soon—not in literature, at any rate. The reasons are numerous and excellent, quite apart from the incurable ignorance afflicting modern writers. First, the subject would lack that wholesome gaiety and heartfelt emotion so recommended by critics who spend their time contemplating Renan’s navel. Any book risking such an adventure would risk not selling. And books exist only to be sold; love alone sells, whether at publishers’ or on street corners. Literature is a business like any other—more demanding than most, in that it operates within a narrow circle of production limited to matters of love. The public wants love and nothing but love. Writers have no choice but to sell it. They sell it tinned, bagged, bottled, and jarred. They sell it fresh, preserved, pickled, and smoked. The wonder is that after selling so much, they still have any left to sell in any form whatsoever.
Stuart Mill, no fantasist but a logician who loved music as his sole consolation during a critical period of moral anguish, nearly went mad at the sudden thought that musical harmonies might be exhausted: “The octave,” he writes in his memoirs, “consists of tones and semitones that can form only a small number of combinations, of which only some are beautiful. Most have already been invented. Humanity might therefore never see a second Mozart.” This fear brought him to the brink of suicide.
We needn’t fear such a catastrophe regarding love. The tones and semitones of its octave exhausted their combinations long ago, yet humanity sees new novelists born daily who repeat, without ever tiring us, their predecessors’ literary combinations. Besides, it would be rich indeed if they tried to foist upon the public some other merchandise for which it has neither habit nor use. We have already witnessed one terrible revolution that nearly went badly for writers. In the past, love in works of “imagination” was the exclusive privilege of the upper classes. One had to be at least a baron or viscountess to merit the novelists’ attention. That a washerwoman and a carpenter might love each other? Inconceivable. Oh, we knew they produced children, but that was surely chance, not the result of love.
Some bold, brutal writers, suddenly breaking with the tradition of elegant, titled loves, had the temerity to introduce washerwomen and carpenters into their novels and have them love each other as if they were marquises or dukes. This was an untenable, dishonest pretension. The scandal was enormous. People protested in the name of good taste, morality, and truth. Critics declared it the end of the world. But the innovative writers held firm. In memorable prefaces invoking determinism, social inquiry, and natural sciences, they declared that not only would they continue having carpenters and washerwomen fall in love, but if anyone gave them trouble, they would have them think! Faced with this threat, the scandal gradually subsided, and people concluded that, however improbable a washerwoman’s love might be, it was still love, and that was better than nothing.
Today the critics have given up the fight. They accept the movement—that is, they have completely lost interest, concerning themselves only with dining out and pushing one another toward honours and success. Jules Lemaître celebrates Anatole France; Anatole France celebrates Jules Lemaître; and in the Revue des deux mondes, tender Brunetière, discussing Voltaire and Faguet, shows us a tiny Voltaire and a very grand Faguet. Naturally, Faguet returns Brunetière’s courtesy. It never ends, producing volumes nearly as numerous as love novels, where we witness, not without emotion, critics weaving reciprocal crowns and speaking of their genius with touching piety. Meanwhile, they are reborn. True, they still tolerate three writers alongside them, not for their undisputed talent or the beauty of their works, but because the first two are invited daily to select tables, and the third is a sailor. This astonishes them, and they admire.
Such is literature’s current state. There’s no sign it will change anytime soon. We are condemned to lengthy adulteries and innumerable declarations of “Tell me you love me.” The pen that will write the book Magnard dreams of—the book containing the contemporary, entirely new history of our ideas rather than the eternal rehashing of our musty sentimentalities—is nowhere near being forged.
Yet the moment would be favourable for such a work. We are at a historical juncture, probably on the eve of great transformations. One needn’t be profound to understand that events are brewing more momentous than any in the past. Science’s multiple discoveries, the results of biological, anthropological, and astronomical inquiries that restore to matter phenomena we habitually attribute to supernatural forces, their application to human welfare—all make our present hour particularly unsettling. The political, economic, and social institutions that govern peoples, all based on oppression and lies, no longer correspond to our needs or to ideas awakening in us dreams of justice, liberty, and happiness. We oscillate between a past we no longer believe in and a future still uncertain and ill-defined, which frightens and attracts us simultaneously. The result is a general malaise, expressed in some through tenfold resistance to inevitable dispossession, in others through impatience to hasten movement toward more rational, more scientific forms of life.
In reality, we are only at civilisation’s threshold. If we compare the relatively brief duration of civilisation’s development to prehistoric times; if, as the great Büchner observes, we note that only a small portion of the globe is preparing for this development; if we consider that progress accelerates as it continues; if we remember that amidst our refined life, the crude impulses and instincts of our barbarous past persist in considerable number, and that the struggle for life, whose savage character has passed from animals to us, still rages among men—then we will recognise that we are at civilisation’s dawn and have travelled only a small portion of the path of light before us. We think ourselves decadent when we are merely a sort of savage. A Russian scientist, Professor W. Betz, I believe, studying how many nerve fibres and cells are needed to develop an idea, found in the human brain a prodigious quantity of empty spaces, immense steppes little used, awaiting Progress and Evolution’s beneficent rain to fill and fertilise them.
If literature has lagged behind science in the upward march toward conquering ideas, it’s because, greedier for immediate success and money, it has more thoroughly embodied the prejudices, routines, vices, and ignorance of a public that wants to be lulled and fooled with fairy tales.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Figaro, 25 July 1890
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 