The text that follows, an excerpt from Mirbeau’s 1890 Le Figaro article, serves as an introduction to this absolutely masterly collection of literary criticism—one that, once read, will captivate you for life. Yes, it’s that good. Reading it is like being swept up into a gigantic, ever-intensifying tornado, with beautiful and devastating thunderbolts shattering everything to pieces. It is a symphony where the most discordant notes sound like perfectly calculated harmony, driven relentlessly, in an unstoppable allegro furioso, through ever-mounting crescendos towards some clearing where, after being broken by despair over humanity, you can finally breathe the supreme air of truly human thought and feel less hopeless about our future. If humanity could give voice to its conscience—that timeless, honest, brave and incorruptible voice—I’m certain it would sound exactly like, or very nearly like, the voice that speaks in these pieces: the voice that will always alarm and guide us, if there’s anything still stirring within us at all.
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Today the critics have given up the fight. They accept the movement—that is, they’ve 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’re 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’re 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’re 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’re 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’ll recognise that we’re at civilisation’s dawn and have travelled only a small portion of the path of light before us. We think ourselves decadent when we’re 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
I
(1884-1894)
LOVE, LOVE, AND MORE BLOODY LOVE
II
(1895-1910)
THE SOCIETY COLUMNIST WHO COULDN’T AFFORD DINNER
Léon Hennique Novel 