[Lalou was a prominent French essayist and critic and the author of a comprehensive history of modern French literature entitled La litterature francaise contemporaine (Contemporary French Literature, 1922; revised editions 1924, 1941). In the following excerpt from that work, he provides a brief assessment of Mirbeau's major fiction and dramas.]

There are few writers as tiresome and as diverting as Octave Mirbeau—tiresome to read, but so diverting on reflection! Mirbeau's work accomplishes as a matter of fact, the miracle of clothing with the most outworn Romantic ornaments a naturalistic philosophy the meditations of which invariably end in platitude. Beginning with Sfbasden Roch, dedicated to Edmond de Goncourt, he extolled "the sublime beauty of the ugly." Le Jardin dès supplices, inspired by this thought, that "Love and Death are identical," pretends to imitate, in a garden borrowed from the Paradon, the art of the Chinese executioner who "extracts from the human flesh all its prodigies of suffering." Le Journal d'une femme de chambre expresses "the sadness and the comedy of being a man—a sadness which makes noble souls laugh, comedy which makes them weep." Les 21 Jours d'un neurausthinique proves that "men are everywhere the same" and Dingo sings the praises of a dog which, in spite of some vices borrowed from man, has kept its precious canine superiority. Everything in Mirbeau is enormous, and first of all the puerility. Generous, ever ready to write the article or the preface which would launch some unknown genius, which would denounce some social injustice, his enthusiasm was often mistaken. In his books, monotonous examples of the novel of odds and ends, he relieves himself of a scorn for modern society which would be scathing could it be taken quite seriously. They are receptacles into which he casts pell-mell his rancours as an anti-clerical, as a Dreyfusist and as a pamphleteer. His love of opposition carries him, in La 628-ES, to the point of a eulogy of Germany which the Prussian "squirearchy" must have relished. The results he obtains have always this paradoxical character. If he gives wellknown names to his heroes, no one accepts these caricatures. If he portrays a Pere Roch or an Abbé Jules, the author's truculence alone is appreciated. If he talks about himself, the reader yawns. He dreams of writing "pages of murder and blood," pages which will exhale "a strong stench of rottenness," and succeeds in attracting only the amateurs of pure pornography. He goes lion-hunting and brings back merely a little vermin. Excellent when he narrates, in his natural voice, some rough Breton buffoonery, he usually wearies by the outbursts of a uniform violence. Huysmans had embalmed dead Naturalism in his decadent style. Mirbeau rejects this artifice and gives back the corpse its odour.

Yet this man has composed the one play of our epoch which stands comparison with Becque's. Perhaps he sought in the theatrical form an opportunity to discipline his impetuosity. Les Mauvais Bergers reveals a schematic Mirbeau who imagines a revolutionary workman, a wavering employer and a young idealistic bourgeois to pit them against each other in a brutal, mystic strike. Le Foyer, on the contrary, in spite of Thadee Natanson's collaboration, is written in the same ink as his novels. This virulent, painful caricature which in vain caused a sensation, shows above all his inability to confine his fierce and infantile misanthropy in a living action. To compare Armand Biron with Isidore Lechat is useful only to emphasize the extraordinary relief of Les Affaires sont les affaires.

This comedy offers a fine artistic situation. Its exposition is admirable. Two scenes suffice to evoke the setting in which the action is to take place and to paint soberly two characters one of whom, by his revolt, will provoke the crisis. Isidore Lechat enters. Mirbeau's habitual excess threatens to compromise this beginning. In his protagonist he has accumulated everything he detests in contemporary society: bourgeois cruelty, garrulous egotism, belief in material facts, scorn for artistic truth, opportunist socialism; but the necessity for rendering this symbolical character convincing on the stage has compelled Mirbeau to depict the business man in full strife. There he is great. The interview with the engineers reveals his power and, in the principal scene with the Marquis, he achieves quite naturally a lyric breadth which would not be unworthy of Toussaint Tourelure. The author conducts his drama with implacable determination towards the double catastrophe. His impenitent romanticism unleashes the fatalities of modern life. Of all the images of fright he so frantically sought none surpasses the tragic final scene in which Isidore Lechat, whose daughter has just run away and his son been killed, foils the two partners who wanted to take advantage of a father's grief to outdo the business man of whom Mirbeau has drawn this grandiose and enduring portrait.

Rene Lalou, "The Contemporary Drama," in his Contemporary French Literature, translated by William Aspenwall Bradley, Alfred A. Knopf 1924, pp. 271-86.