Mirbeau tears into literary obscenity and naturalist vice, scorning sensationalists like Mendès while defending sincerity, dignity, and the moral imperative to separate art from filth.
There exists, courtesy of naturalism, one M. Desprez, who has just been sentenced to a month in prison and a thousand-franc fine for writing an obscene book. Whereupon several right-thinking souls get agitated and worked up. They declare it’s oppressing human thought to drag it like a tart before the magistrates’ court and generally demand that my country’s justice kindly concern itself with thieves, murderers, and bankers, but leave literature in peace. The publisher Kistemaekers, who apparently published M. Desprez’s filth, seizes the occasion to launch a literary manifesto of admirable Belgianness and deliver, from the depths of his little secret museum in Brussels, a lesson to French law—a severe lesson, I assure you. According to this Kistemaekers, literature will be obscene or it won’t exist at all. This Kistemaekers is a bold fellow.
I haven’t read M. Desprez’s book and won’t read it. Such things don’t interest me in the slightest. When I encounter filth spread across a road, I avoid it; when I see certain names heading certain books, I pass quickly by, holding my nose. M. Catulle Mendès, M. Maizeroy, Mme de Martel, and Mlle Colombier have the gift of making me take flight. They may well say: “Pretty young man, do listen,” but I don’t listen. Not only do the little stories of these eminent pornographers fail utterly to deprave me, they bore me considerably. I know nothing as stupid as these adventures written with dirty bidet water, and I think one must really have time to waste and a very poor imagination to get one’s brain excited by these barracks-room or brothel tales. But that’s a particular taste, or rather distaste, I have. The public, unfortunately, isn’t like this. You can see it in the editions that fly off the shelves, and the more filth they find in a book, the more ordure they sniff out, the more they buy it.
M. Catulle Mendès, to speak only of him today, has really only had success and really only made money since he has been rolling us in his heroines’ bedsheets and showing them to us in positions the baroness wouldn’t disavow. M. Catulle Mendès—this Onan of literature, this Charlot who perhaps amuses himself but bores an entire generation—had started with poetry. Measuring the length of his uncombed hair, admiring the grime on his bohemian overcoats, he had doubtless told himself he wouldn’t cut too poor a figure as a poet, for poets were then recognised by their slovenly appearance, and the dirtier and more stinking their linen, the more their verses must sparkle and smell sweet. But verses didn’t sell. Despite adorning them with his etched portrait—perhaps it would have been better had he washed it in pure water—the volumes rotted on bookshop displays. No one bought them. He tried the novel and dabbled in theatre; everywhere he had failures and reaped only flops.
That’s when, with his Jewish nose for business, he threw himself into smut and opened, in book and newspaper form, a veritable house of assignation. He had found his calling, this Rabagas of burning alcoves and banal beds. Obscenity was his career. He succeeded immediately. Since then, no author is as popular as he among tarts and schoolboys. Tarts have his complete works between transparent playing cards and obscene photographs. It’s recognised that nothing rekindles old men’s extinguished flames like a good Catulle Mendès applied to the right spot, and as for schoolboys, they go off to secluded corners, far from the monitor’s eye, to ask the author of Tous les baisers for solitary joys.
Such books—forgive me, my friend Émile Bergerat—have a pernicious influence. If they don’t deprave us, we who don’t let ourselves be taken in by these old procuress airs, they deprave others, and believe me, their number is great. I think it’s right to prosecute them and condemn their authors. This has nothing in common with literature and doesn’t fall under criticism; it belongs to prostitution and falls under the vice squad. Since no one’s yet been authorised to show their arse in public and fornicate on park benches; since we still arrest, in urinals, pretty gentlemen who indulge in frolics that nature condemns, I don’t see by what principle we would allow these books to display themselves on pavements and solicit passers-by from bookshop windows.
Literature isn’t wholly contained in these books, any more than perfumers’ back rooms sum up all commerce. If it repulses you, in the name of a misunderstood liberty and a sort of misplaced solidarity, to drag these books before the courts, at least mark their covers with a brand of infamy to make them recognisable. Register these strange writers on special lists, as is done for certain creatures; make registered writers, as we have registered girls, and subject them to the same severe regulations, the same shameful regimentations, the same dishonourable surveillance. But as long as you have found nothing better than the magistrates’ court to punish them and defend us from them, stick with it.
Human thought has nothing to do with these adventures. When, under the pretext of documentation, analysis, naturalism, it falls to such base exploitations of vice, it has no right to any respect, any indulgence, any indifferent contempt. It’s useful for beautiful works, disinterested and sincere, that they not be confused in the public mind—often unskilled at judging them—with filth and the speculation in filth. The magistrates’ court is excellent in that it always leaves a bit of shame on those it’s marked, and the odour, whatever one does and says, lingers long.
I know well that it sometimes errs, and for one Desprez it justly condemns, it sometimes also attacks a Flaubert. But it’s the same with all human things. People cite those who were innocent and condemned to death. You will never stop magistrates being men, and men being imbeciles.
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Léon Hennique Novel 