[Wilson is generally considered twentieth-century America's foremost man of letters. A prolific reviewer, creative writer, and social and literary critic endowed with formidable intellectual powers, he exercised his greatest literary influence as the author of Axel's Castle (1931), a seminal study of literary symbolism, and as the author of widely read reviews and essays in which he introduced the best works of modern literature to the reading public. In the following essay, which originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1949, he reflects on Mirbeau's career and literary reputation.]

Dear me, how far from infinite the world is! Talking to my cousin today, I mentioned Octave Mirbeau's name. "Why, Mirbeau," she said, "let me see—that's the son of the doctor at Remalard, the place where we have our estate. I remember that two or three times I lashed him over the head with my whip. He was an impudent little thing as a child—his great idea was to show his bravado by throwing himself under the feet of our horses when we or the Andlaus were out driving."

Edmond de Goncourt: Diary,
August 26, 1889

I should like to take the occasion of the reprint of a very respectable translation by Alvah C. Bessie of Octave Mirbeau's novel Le Jardin dès Supplices to look back at a remarkable French writer whose reputation, after his death in 1917, almost immediately evaporated both abroad and in his own country. Mirbeau belonged so much to his period that I may perhaps be pardoned for explaining that I first read him, and almost completely through, at the time of the first World War, and that he will always remain for me an old companion of my experiences of those years. As such a companion, he had perhaps more value than he might have had in other conditions. In the first place, he is at his best when he is describing those wretched French villages, with their doll-bedecked rundown churches, their diseased and deformed inhabitants and their pervasive smell of manure, among which I was then living on more intimate terms than those of the tourist who stares at them from the train and is thrilled by their look of antiquity. It is enough for me to open certain books of Mirbeau to see again their gray walls embedded in mud. In the second place, his favorite theme, the persistence in modern society of predatory and destructive appetites at variance with civilized pretentions, was particularly acceptable then, at a time when it was actually reassuring to read someone who was not trying to convince you that only the Germans had ever been bloodthirsty, who had never even fooled himself with the assumption that our exploiting competitive world was a respectable and reliable affair. And though I saw Mirbeau's faults even then, my opinion of him will always be colored by a certain special affection.

His compatriots, as we trace him through their criticism and journals, seem to have become toward him colder and colder. For Edmond de Goncourt, in the eighties, Mirbeau was a young colleague in the naturalistic movement, who was beginning to show distinguished abilities and who dedicated a novel to him. On Andre Gide, in the first years of this century, when Gide was an ally of the symbolists by no means enamored of naturalism, Mirbeau made a mixed impression. He responded to Mirbeau's warm indignations and admired some of his work, but complained that "the satirical spirit prevents his having any critical sense." By this time, it had become apparent that Mirbeau repudiated defiantly those versions of the French tradition that were in vogue at the turn of the century. He was not elegant and detached, like the Parnassians, not exquisite like the followers of Mallarmé, and he sometimes made heavy fun of the professional Parisian aesthetes. Nor would he attempt to adjust himself to the demands of a bourgeois audience. He scored against Paul Bourget, in his Journal d'une Femme de Chambre, by attributing to his servant-girl heroine a passion for the works of that fashionable novelist but making her conclude, after meeting him once, that, in the eyes of M. Bourget "people didn't begin to have souls below an income of a hundred thousand francs"; and he had none of the quiet discretion in running counter to accepted ideas that caused Anatole France to say of himself that the principal business of his life had been doing up dynamite in bonbon wrappers. He had not even the detachment of the naturalists. He was not only outspoken and tactless: he did not even value the classical "bon sens franqais"—behaved habitually, from the French point of view, intemperately, quixotically, absurdly. A Normand, he was in some ways quite close to the English, who figure in his books in a way that shows a special interest in them—that is, he was blunt, self-willed and not particularly intelligent at the same time that he was subject to moral passion and capable of profound insights and had the courage to give voice to both at the risk of being thought eccentric. In his character as publicist and journalist, in which he played for years a conspicuous role, he was vigorous and audacious. At the time of the Dreyfus case, he went on the stump in the provinces, rousing opinion in Dreyfus' defense; he forfeited by his very first article, in 1889, a job as a newspaper art critic by running down the academic painters and praising Manet and Cézanne; he loved to champion unrecognized writers like Maeterlinck and the seamstress Marguerite Audoux whose work had a lily-like innocence at the opposite pole from his own productions. In politics, he passed at an early stage from fire-breathing royalism to fire-breathing anarchism—the two attitudes having in common a violent hatred of politicians; and remained thereafter consistently pro-worker, anti-bourgeois and anticlerical. He wrote a labor play, Les Mauvais Bergers, produced in 1897, with Sarah Bernhardt and Lucien Guitry, the long heroic speeches of which make very dull reading today, but which differs from most such dramas by its pessimism in regard to the workers' cause; and he created a scandal in 1908 by a play (written with Thadée Natanson), Le Foyer, that attacked the philanthropical workshops subsidized by the rich for the relief of the poor.

Nor did the literary cuisine of Mirbeau quite come up to the current French standards. He was always a conscientious workman: his books are never botched or sloppy; he has trained himself with earnest discipline to make the very best of his powers, and he can sometimes write with trenchant lucidity, if rarely with felicitous brilliance. But the seasoning is a little coarse; the ingredients are not well mixed. The flavor is sometimes flat; and there is even a kind of false taste that is calculated to horripilate the French. For example, Mirbeau had a passion for flowers, which he raised and of which he was a connoisseur, but his writing about them—of which there is a good deal in Le Jardin dès Supplices—combines the botanical and the gaudy in a way that does not conduce to good literature. And his writing about love—xemplified, also, in this book—has similar characteristics. He thus scandalized the bourgeois public and often bored the men of letters, and when he died, his countrymen dropped him. I once talked about him with Jean Cocteau just after the last war. Cocteau expressed surprise that anybody at that late date should be reading Mirbeau at all. "That's a whole generation," he said, "that my generation has skipped." But he approved of Sébastien Roch, one of Mirbeau's early books, which had made an impression on me, and suggested that a serious and chronic illness had caused a deterioration in his later work. If you consult the Histoire de la Litterature Franaise Contemporaine by Rene Lalou, published in 1922, you will find a discussion of Mirbeau, which is almost completely contemptuous and which takes it for granted that his novels are no longer of any interest. Though there are two or three brochures on Mirbeau in various journalistic series dealing with the writers of his period, there is, so far as I know, no reliable biography of him, and it is curiously difficult at the present time even to find out the main facts about his life.

Octave Mirbeau's fiction falls into two groups, quite distinct from one another and with a gap of a decade between them. His first three novels—Le Calvaire, L'Abbé Jules and Sébastien Roch—were written during the late eighties. All deal more or less with provincial life, and especially with personalities which have become distorted or stunted by not finding their true vocations or appropriate milieux. There is a good deal of original insight—contemporary with Freud's first researches—into the infantile causes of neurosis and the consequences of sexual repression. The first of these books is a study of an unstable young man from the country demoralized by a Parisian cocotte; the second, a strange and repellent tale, is a kind of imaginary memoir which a nephew has written of his uncle: a man of superior abilities, from a bourgeois village background, whose personality has been deformed by his mistake of entering the priesthood—a profession in which his intellectual arrogance, his intractable sensual appetites and his very gift of moral vision make him tragically out of place. L'Abbé Jules has vivid flashes when the subject is brought to life dramatically—as when the Abbé, returning to his family, frustrated, embittered, forbidding, and hardly condescending to talk to them, examines as if astonished the quilt that they have handed him for a carriage-robe; and both books have a clinical interest: Mirbeau, like Flaubert, was a doctor's son. But the third novel, Sébastien Roch, is much better and was to remain probably Mirbeau's best book. This is the story of a gifted boy who is sent away from home to a Jesuit school, where one of the priests seduces him, and who then comes back to his little town, with his emotions in agonized disorder and with no field for the exercise of his talents. He tries to give himself an outlet by writing in a diary and has an awkward love affair with a girl whom he has known since childhood, and, finally, conscripted for the Franco-Prussian War, is unheroically, ridiculously killed. Everyone who has read this book knowing James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been struck by parallels between them, in form as well as in content. One would like to know whether Joyce had read SMbastien Roch. It is not quite up to the Portrait. It has elements of the romantic sentimentality and of the dead mechanical caricature that impair the soundness of all Mirbeau's work. But Mirbeau did his most successful writing in his description of the Breton countryside, and the anguish of adolescence has never been more truthfully treated. If one compares these early stories of Mirbeau with the fiction of his friend Guy de Maupassant, who worked also in the naturalistic tradition, the advantage is not all with the latter. Maupassant has more skill and more style. But such a figure as the conventional wife and mother of Maupassant's Une Vie is simply the victim of a melodrama in which the villain is the masculine sex. In Le CalFvaire, the mother of the hero is a somewhat similar case, but Mirbeau's psychological insight makes it impossible for him to deal in this one-sided pathos, and he shows us that the woman, from a "trauma" of her childhood, has a special predisposition to succumb to such a situation as that later created by her marriage. To the brilliant raconteur of Boule de Suif, the war of 1870, again, presents itself mainly in terms of the hatred between Germans and French, whereas with Mirbeau, when he touches on it, the patriotic antagonisms are undercut by a sense of what all men have in common.

Between Sébastien Roch of 1889 and Le Jardin dès Supplices of 1899, Mirbeau published no more fiction; but the first two of his plays were performed, and in the years that immediately followed he wrote half a dozen others. These plays are less interesting than his fiction, but they occupy, in the history of the French theater, an almost unique place. When Bernard Shaw bestowed his accolade on the second-rate Eugene Brieux, accepting him as the great French practitioner of his own peculiar kind of drama, the comedy of social analysis, he might better have selected Mirbeau. Mirbeau's plays are, so far as I know, the only French work of merit that has anything in common with this English school. One of them, Les Affuires sont les Affaires (1903), enjoyed an immense success. It was admitted into the repertoire of the Comedie Frangaise at a time when the Comedie produced almost no modern plays, and it continued to be done there for years, thus becoming the only work of Mirbeau's that has been endorsed as a classic, so that it is always well spoken of by such writers as M. Lalou. It is certainly Mirbeau's best play, though not so good as the best of his novels. It suffers from his characteristic fault of introducing incredible monstrosities, against a familiar realistic background, into a story that is meant to be plausible; but such a scene as the conversation between the business man and the ruined marquis is admirable in its confrontation, very similar to such scenes in Shaw, of the spokesmen of two social classes, who expound their opposing roles. And Mirbeau's one-acter L'Epidémie, in which a provincial town council declines to do anything about a typhoid epidemic that is killing off the local garrison, till they hear that a bourgeois has died of it, is closer to English satire than to the irony of Anatole France. "Typhoid fever," declares in a quavering voice the oldest member of the council, "is a national institution. Let us not lay impious hands upon our old French institutions"; and, "Let us not," seconds the doctor, "present foreign countries with the deplorable spectacle of a French army beating an ignoble retreat before a few problematical microbes."

Sebastien Roch, the Abbé Jules and the hero of Le Calvaire are all subject to a waking delirium—day-dreams in which sexual images are mixed nightmarishly with images of horror—of which Mirbeau sometimes gives descriptions almost as elaborate and solid as his accounts of actual events. The key to most of these fantasies is to be found in Mirbeau's perception that inescapable sexual repression or neurotic emotional impotence may result in sadistic impulses. Now, in the fiction of his second period, he ceases to try to present us with difficult cases of real human beings: it is as if he had allowed these fantasies to take possession of his imagination and to impose themselves upon him as generalized pictures of life. At their soundest, these later novels arrive through distortion at satire; at their worst, they are artistically meaningless, a mere procession of obsessive grotesques.

The first of these books, Le Jardin dès Supplices, is an epitome of Mirbeau's whole vision after his shift to phantasmagoric mythology from naturalistic observation, and it states the Grand Guignol philosophy which he tries to derive from this vision. The story opens in the noxious atmosphere of corrupt Parisian politics under the Third Republic. A scoundrelly Cabinet Minister, whose future is a toss-up between jail and advancement, is blackmailed by one of his jackals and buys him off by sending him away to Ceylon on a scientific expedition financed by government funds. The object of this expedition is to study marine biology in the Indian Ocean—"to discover the primordial cell," as his chief rather vaguely explains to him, "the protoplasmic initium of organized life, or something of the kind." The lesser scoundrel (who tells the story), pretending to be a great biologist, embarks for the East and meets on the ship a beautiful young English lady named Clara, the daughter of an opium-dealer, who is returning to her home in Canton. She gives the impression of great virtue and dignity, and the impostor falls deeply in love with her. He has retained, unlike his chief, some remnants of moral feeling, and all the idealism of which he is capable comes to life under the influence of his passion. He grows ashamed of his bogus role, of his debauched and dishonest past—cannot bear that he should be deceiving a being whom he so much respects, and one day makes a clean breast to Clara of all the disgraceful truth. To his astonishment, she shows at once, and for the first time in their acquaintance, a vivid interest in him. She had paid no attention to him when she had thought he was a serious scientist, but the idea of his vileness pleases her. She is, it turns out, more corrupt than he: more positively perverse and more formidable. She goes to bed with him immediately in her cabin, and he becomes her abject slave. Instead of getting off at Ceylon, he goes on with Clara to China.

The second half of the novel is devoted to a detailed account of their visit to a Chinese prison. This prison has a magnificent garden, in which the convicts are tortured. The Frenchman is shocked and revolted, but he recognizes in what he sees simply a franker and more elegant version of the kind of thing that is going on, in a disguised and hypocritical way, in the Europe he has left behind. It is in vain that, trying to shut out the garden, he summons his familiar Paris. In a moment of revelation, he identifies these executioners with "all the men and all the women whom I have loved or imagined I loved, little indifferent frivolous souls, on whom is spreading now the ineffacable red stain," with "the judges, the soldiers, the priests, who everywhere in the churches, the barracks and the temples of justice, are busy at the work of death," and with "the man as individual and the man as mob," and with "the animal, the plant, the element, all nature, in fact, which, urged by the cosmic forces of love, rushes toward murder, in the hope of thus finding beyond life a satisfaction of life's furious desires, which devour it and which gush from it in spurts of dirty froth." Clara, however, is enjoying herself. Among the gorgeous flowers which are a feature of the garden and which seem to grow out of its putrescence and blood, she becomes hysterically excited and later, when they leave the garden, collapses in a fit of convulsions. When she comes to, she seems calmed and purged, and declares that she will never return there, but her Chinese maid assures her lover that she will be back on the next visitor's day. The traveller, though he has given up his mission, has, after all, from one point of view, discovered the secret of life.

It will be seen that Le Jardin dès Supplices has, in conception, its Swiftian strength. The trouble is that, though the scenes in the garden sometimes verge on a true tragic irony, Mirbeau, where a Swift or a Dante would have kept them under severe control, indulges himself, like his Clara, a little too much in horror. The same kind of wrong exploitation of a promising satirical idea—which Swift, again, would have handled better—appears in the second of these later books, Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre. Here Mirbeau set out to expose the meanness and sordidness of the French bourgeoisie by showing how they look to a servant who goes from one of their households to another. But the book is full of scandalous episodes that are not merely repulsive but also completely unreal. The whole effect is turbid and boring. Almost the only memorable thing in the book is the chapter that describes the humiliations to which women looking for jobs are subjected in employment agencies, and this suffers, like so much else in the later Mirbeau, from systematic exaggeration. The moral ofLe Jardin dès Supplices is repeated by the unlikely conclusion, in which Mirbeau has the victimizedfemme de chambre marry a brutal coachman whose attraction for her is partly due to her believing him to have committed an atrocious murder.

If one has read the contemporary accounts of Mirbeau during the years when he was writing these books, it is quite easy to diagnose the reason—aside from his overindulgence in the salacious aspects of his subjects—that they do not succeed as satires or as what he called some of his plays, "moralites." There is much testimony on the part of those who knew Mirbeau at this period that, however one might like him, his conversation made one uncomfortable, because it consisted so largely of the hair-raisingly implausible stories he would tell about every kind of public figure and about all the people he knew. He was not merely trying to be funny; nor were his stories merely exercises in the expected professional malice of the Parisian literary man. What made his talk disconcerting was that he had evidently fabricated these scandals yet believed them to be actual happenings. (He was, also, it seems, untruthful in his ordinary relations with people.) And his books produce the same effect. In Swift, one feels almost to the end, no matter to what lengths he goes, a sound basis in common sense: he is perfectly well aware that human beings are not really Yahoos and that the poor cannot eat their babies. But Octave Mirbeau does not seem to know when or how much he is deforming reality. The truth is that these stories are a little mad. For all their careful planning and deliberate execution, they represent psychological hypertrophies that are destroying a true sense of the world and preventing the development of the artist. Even the texture of the writing is coarser than that of the early novels. If Mirbeau began by anticipating Freud in the case histories of his early fiction, he took later, in a retrogression, to concocting the kind of nightmare that Freud found it profitable to analyze.

Much the best of Mirbeau's later books is the last thing he published, Dingo, which appeared in 1913, four years before his death; but, containing no scandalous material, it has never been translated into English and has attained less celebrity than Le Jardin dès Supplices and Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre. Dingo, which is told by the author as if in his own character and which sounds as if it were based on a real experience, is the story of an Australian wild dog that has been sent as a puppy to France and grows up in a small French town: perhaps the most debased and revolting of all Mirbeau's dreadful towns. The animal, more wolf than dog, is handsome, remarkably intelligent and devoted to his master and the family; but as soon as he grows out of puppyhood, he begins killing sheep, fowl and game at a rate that makes him a menace. In all this, however, we are made to see, with a subtlety rare in the later Mirbeau, how the master, without at first quite admitting it even to himself, is deriving a certain satisfaction from these crimes against his neighbors, whom he has gradually come to loathe for their self-righteous pusillanimity and cruelty. On one occasion, when he has gone to visit a family of old friends, whom he supposes himself to like, he vicariously betrays his real scorn of them by doing nothing to prevent the dog from slaughtering their pet sheep, which he associates with their feeble personalities. This dog, at least, is frankly a hunter and loyal to those who have cared for him as well as to a family cat with which he has been brought up. But he becomes more and more of a problem. The master is forced to leave the village; he goes to live in Paris, but here Dingo one day leaps at the throat of a man who is trying to steal him and gives rise to disquieting doubts. Then they travel abroad, but wherever they go, they get into some kind of trouble, and the owner is finally obliged to settle down in the country, at the edge of a large forest, in which the dog is free to roam and where he sometimes disappears for days. While they are living there, the master's wife breaks her ribs in a runaway, and the dog, understanding what has happened, keeps watch day and night in her room, resisting attempts to turn him out and refusing to take any food. He wastes away and dies.

This makes a much better book than my summary may suggest. Dingo and Sébastien Roch are Mirbeau's most successful novels. He loved animals, and in his later phase sometimes wrote about them more satisfactorily than he did about human beings. Andre Gide is quite correct in singling out the episode of the fight between the hedgehog and the viper as one of the only interesting things in Les Vingt et un Jours d'un Neurasthbnique, another of Mirbeau's books of this period, the Arabian Nights of a nerve sanitarium, which in general represents an even less appetizing combination of dreariness with abnormality than Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre. In Dingo, the dog and the cat are splendidly depicted and analyzed, and the humans are more human than usual. The book has an emotional effect, creates a disturbing suspense. Animal stories were rather fashionable in the early nineteen hundreds, but this is one of the most unconventional and one of the most remarkable, and almost achieves the plane of Tolstoy's wonderful horse story, Kholstomer. (Mirbeau, who greatly admired Tolstoy, is said to have had the dubious reciprocal honor of being regarded by the latter, in his later years, as the most important living French novelist.) Yet, like everything else of Mirbeau's, it misses the highest level. Dingo's depredations are on too enormous a scale. His virtues—he loves the poor and makes a point of cheering up the unhappy—a little too sentimental (the Ernest Seton Thompson touch); for Mirbeau has his great sentimentalities to compensate for his chronic ferocities. And the master's inexhaustible complacence, and the immunity that both he and the dog enjoy in connection with Dingo's killings, become rather improbable, too. The element of fantasy gets in again, and it impairs the interest of the record of what was evidently a real animal.

And now what about Mirbeau today, when the ferocity of modern man has demonstrated itself on a scale that even he had not imagined? Already at the time of the first World War, a book like Le Jardin dès Supplices seemed definitely out of date. Mirbeau did have hold of a terrible truth; and yet, reading the book, as I did, in a military hospital behind the lines, one realized that the impression made by human pain as a part of one's daily routine was different from anything felt by a prosperous pre-war civilian writing at his ease about it (I have not been able to learn whether Mirbeau actually served in the war of 1870). There was too much Parisian upholstery, too much conventional literature, about Le Jardin dès Supplices. The characters of Ernest Hemingway, with their bad nerves and their ugly conduct, reflected the cruelty of the time more effectively than Mirbeau's enormities and his rhetorical paroxysms. Brett of The Sun Also Rises is the Clara of the later generation, and a more convincing creation. Since then, the indiscriminate bombings of London and Berlin, the death-houses of Dachau and Belsen, the annihilation of Hiroshima, have made Mirbeau and Hemingway both seem somewhat obsolete. Is anyone troubled at present by the idea that human beings are torturing or murdering each other? Don't the bugaboo books of the later Mirbeau, with their melange of human sympathy and sadism, look today like the slightly cracked fairy-tales of a not ungenial old romantic who was still naive enough not to take such things for granted?

Edmund Wilson, "In Memory of Octave Mirbeau," in his Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950, pp. 471-85.