THE SPORTIVE DEMON
What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and
revolutionary hope? This question was answered for us by a disciple and
friend of Zola, ten years his junior, who proceeded to make a laboratory
test.
Guy de Maupassant was a healthy young Norman animal, who came up to
Paris to make his way as a journalist. He was a tremendous worker; in
the course of his short life he wrote six novels and two hundred and
twelve short stories. He made himself master of the latter form, and has
had a dominating influence upon it. No one has been able to pack more
meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a
character in a couple of thousand words. Therefore all young writers of
short stories go to school to him. What has he to give them--aside from
the tricks of the trade?
Maupassant himself would have answered: Nothing. For he was one of the
fighting art-for-art’s-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an
art-work is an insult. But the fact is that he has a propaganda, as
definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a
tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi. His message is
that life is a cheat and a snare, and that human beings are beasts
decked in fine clothing and pretenses. Maupassant dislikes them so that
he eats himself up. He tries to believe in play, in natural, animal
enjoyment of the passions; but instead of being content with such
pleasures, he shuts himself up like a hermit in a cell, to acquire
mastery of a difficult art, and have the satisfaction before he dies of
voicing his hatred of that fate, whatever it may be, which has created
his own life, and the bourgeois France which he sees about him.
Maupassant watches with eager eye and alert fancy for a scene, an
episode, a trait of character, which will enable him to illustrate the
pettiness and ignominy of human destiny, and the falsity of man’s
dignities and honors. He collects such things, as a naturalist collects
biting bugs and stinging serpents. His characters are the French
peasants with their greed and cruelty, and the French bourgeois and
cultured classes, who, underneath their silks and satins, their
moralities and intellectualities, are the same vile animals as the
peasants. But Maupassant’s quarrel is not merely with men and women; it
is with life itself. The thing which brings him the keenest satisfaction
is an incident which shows the futility even of virtue; which exhibits
God as a sportive demon, amusing himself by pulling off the wings of the
butterflies he has created.
Out of the two hundred and twelve specimens in the Maupassant museum,
any one will suffice. I choose one called “The Necklace,” simply because
it has stayed in my memory for twenty-five years. A lovely woman,
married to a poor clerk, and living a starved life, borrows from a
wealthy friend a beautiful diamond necklace, in order to make a show at
some function. She loses the necklace, and she and her husband pledge
everything they own, buy another to replace it, and take it to the owner
without revealing what has happened. For ten years they slave and drudge
to pay off their debts, and the lovely woman is turned into a haggard
wreck. The friend who loaned the necklace meets her, and is horrified at
her condition; the poor woman tells how she has drudged all these
years--and learns that she has wasted her life in order to replace an
imitation necklace, of no value worth considering!
There is subtlety in the technique of Maupassant, but none in his view
of life. There can be no subtlety, when you lay down the law that human
beings are beasts. There are only a few beast emotions, and they never
vary; you can always be sure what a man will do in the presence of a
woman, and what the woman will let him do. And when God is a sportive
demon, all stories have the same ending. You may not foresee the
particular trick this demon will play--for example, that the lost
necklace would turn out to have been paste--but you can be sure that
something will happen to make a mockery of all human effort and hope.
And likewise you can foresee the ending of such a man. If he takes life
seriously enough to become a great artist, he is apt to take it
seriously enough to act upon his convictions. He will seek refuge from
despair in debauchery and drink; not finding it, he will go on to opium
and hashish. He will be one of those who from fear of death commit
suicide, or who from brooding over insanity go insane. Maupassant was in
a strait-jacket at the age of forty; thus proving himself a moralist,
and a teacher of precious lessons: more than we can say about the art
dilettanti of our own time, who write delicately perfumed impropriety,
and live conventional and pampered lives upon the backs of the working
class.