passed over the heads of the outcasts. The sun again forsook them, and
again from leaden skies the snow-flakes were sifted over the land.
Day by day closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last
they looked from their prison over drifted walls of dazzling white,
that towered twenty feet above their heads. It became more and more
difficult to replenish their fires, even from the fallen trees beside
them, now half hidden in the drifts. And yet no one complained. The
lovers turned from the dreary prospect and looked into each other’s
eyes, and were happy. Mr. Oakhurst settled himself coolly to the
losing game before him. The Duchess, more cheerful than she had been,
assumed the care of Piney. Only Mother Shipton--once the strongest of
the party--seemed to sicken and fade. At midnight on the tenth day
she called Oakhurst to her side. “I’m going,” she said, in a voice of
querulous weakness, “but don’t say anything about it. Don’t waken the
kids. Take the bundle from under my head and open it.” Mr. Oakhurst did
so. It contained Mother Shipton’s rations for the last week, untouched.
“Give ’em to the child,” she said, pointing to the sleeping Piney.
“You’ve starved yourself,” said the gambler. “That’s what they call
it,” said the woman, querulously, as she lay down again, and, turning
her face to the wall, passed quietly away.
[Sidenote: PLOT INCIDENT.]
27. The accordion and the bones were put aside that day, and Homer was
forgotten. When the body of Mother Shipton had been committed to the
snow, Mr. Oakhurst took the Innocent aside, and showed him a pair of
snow-shoes, which he had fashioned from the old pack-saddle. “There’s
one chance in a hundred to save her yet,” he said, pointing to Piney;
“but it’s there,” he added, pointing toward Poker Flat. “If you can
reach there in two days she’s safe.” “And you?” asked Tom Simson. “I’ll
stay here,” was the curt reply.
[Sidenote: Preparation for climax.]
28. The lovers parted with a long embrace. “You are not going, too?”
said the Duchess, as she saw Mr. Oakhurst apparently waiting to
accompany him. “As far as the cañon,” he replied. He turned suddenly,
and kissed the Duchess, leaving her pallid face aflame, and her
trembling limbs rigid with amazement.
29. Night came, but not Mr. Oakhurst. It brought the storm again and
the whirling snow. Then the Duchess, feeding the fire, found that some
one had quietly piled beside the hut enough fuel to last a few days
longer. The tears rose to her eyes, but she hid them from Piney.
[Sidenote: Characters in full change.]
[Sidenote: Note the repression of this entire climax. Simple, quiet
sentences are enough.]
30. The women slept but little. In the morning, looking into each
other’s faces, they read their fate. Neither spoke; but Piney,
accepting the position of the stronger, drew near and placed her arm
around the Duchess’s waist. They kept this attitude for the rest of
the day. That night the storm reached its greatest fury, and, rending
asunder the protecting pines, invaded the very hut.
[Sidenote: No melodrama here.]
[Sidenote: SECOND CHARACTER CLIMAX.]
31. Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which
gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess crept
closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours: “Piney, can you
pray?” “No, dear,” said Piney, simply. The Duchess, without knowing
exactly why, felt relieved, and putting her head upon Piney’s shoulder,
spoke no more. And so reclining, the younger and purer pillowing the
head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they fell asleep.
[Sidenote: Local color in harmony with spirit of story.]
[Sidenote: Symbolism of physical nature.]
32. The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of
snow, shaken from the long pine-boughs, flew like white-winged birds,
and settled about them as they slept. The moon through the rifted
clouds looked down upon what had been the camp. But all human stain,
all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle
mercifully flung from above.
[Sidenote: Poetic euphemism.]
33. They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when
voices and footsteps broke the silence of the camp. And when pitying
fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have
told from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had
sinned. Even the law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away,
leaving them still locked in each other’s arms.
[Sidenote: MAIN CHARACTER CLIMAX, AND DENOUEMENT.]
34. But at the head of the gulch, on one of the largest pine-trees,
they found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie-knife. It
bore the following, written in pencil, in a firm hand:--
BENEATH THIS TREE
LIES THE BODY
OF
JOHN OAKHURST,
WHO STRUCK A STREAK OF BAD LUCK
ON THE 23D OF NOVEMBER, 1850,
AND
HANDED IN HIS CHECKS
ON THE 7TH DECEMBER, 1850.
[Sidenote: SWIFT CONCLUSION.]
And pulseless and cold, with a derringer by his side and a bullet in
his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who
was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker
Flat.
MAUPASSANT AND HIS WRITINGS
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy, France, in
1850. In that picturesque region he passed his youth, and returned
thither for frequent sojourns in later life. Having finished his
studies, he became an employé in the government service in Paris.
This experience, his love for athletics, and his recollections of the
Franco-Prussian war, he turned to good account in his fictional work.
His literary education was conducted by Gustave Flaubert, his uncle and
god-father, under whom he served so rigid an apprenticeship that when
he produced his first short-story, “Tallow Ball” (_Boule de Suif_),
his preceptor pronounced it a masterpiece, as indeed it is. He died in
1893, at the age of 43, by his own hand, his reason having failed after
some years of increasing depression and gloom.
Though his productive period covered only ten years, Guy de Maupassant
has left several notable novels, some fair poetry, and a large number
of remarkable short-stories. Most of his work deals more frankly with
the sordid side of life than American society approves, but many of his
short-stories are unexceptionable. Among the best of these are “The
Necklace,” “The Horla,” “Happiness,” “Vain Beauty,” “A Coward,” “A
Ghost,” “Little Soldier,” “The Wolf,” “Moonlight,” and “The Piece of
String.”
Technically, Maupassant was the most finished short-story writer
of all; but he lacked spiritual power, and so he himself missed
much of the world’s beauty, and disclosed but little to others.
Rarely can the reader feel the least throb of sympathy of the author
for his characters. Technically flawless, his work is too often
cold, and the warm ideals of a tender heart are chiefly absent. An
inflexible realist, he pressed his method farther than did Flaubert,
a really strong novelist. From life’s raw materials Maupassant wove
incomparably brilliant fiction-fabrics, equally distinguished for plot,
characterization, and style; but it cannot be said that he interpreted
life with a wholesome, uplifting spirit.
Happy are they whom life satisfies, who can amuse themselves, and
be content ... who have not discovered, with a vast disgust, ...
that all things are a weariness.--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
He who destroys the ideal destroys himself. In art and in life
Maupassant lived in the lower order of facts, the brutal world of
events unrelated to a spiritual order. He drained his senses of the
last power of sensation and reaction; he plunged headlong into the
sensual life upon which they opened when the luminous heaven above
the material world was obliterated. Madness always lies that way as
a matter of physiology as well as of morals, and Maupassant went
the tragic way of the sensualist since time began.--HAMILTON W.
MABIE, in _The Outlook_.
Maupassant saw life with his senses, and he reflected on it
in a purely animal revolt, the recoil of the hurt animal. His
observation is not, as it has been hastily assumed to be, cold; it
is as superficially emotional as that of the average sensual man,
and its cynicism is only another, not less superficial, kind of
feeling. He saw life in all its details, and his soul was entangled
in the details. He saw it without order, without recompense,
without pity; he saw it too clearly to be duped by appearances, and
too narrowly to distinguish any light beyond what seemed to him the
enclosing bounds of darkness.--ARTHUR SYMONS, _Studies in Prose and
Verse_.
He has produced a hundred short tales and only four regular novels;
but if the tales deserve the first place in any candid appreciation
of his talent it is not simply because they are so much the more
numerous: they are also more characteristic; they represent him
best in his originality, and their brevity, extreme in some cases,
does not prevent them from being a collection of masterpieces....
What they have most in common is their being extremely strong, and
after that their being extremely brutal.... M. de Maupassant sees
human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical,
but even the comedy is for the most part the comedy of misery, of
avidity, of ignorance, helplessness, and grossness.--HENRY JAMES,
_Partial Portraits_.
His short-stories are masterpieces of the art of story-telling,
because he had a Greek sense of form, a Latin power of
construction, and a French felicity of style. They are simple,
most of them; direct, swift, inevitable, and inexorable in their
straightforward movement. If art consists in the suppression of
non-essentials, there have been few greater artists in fiction
than Maupassant. In his Short-stories there is never a word
wasted, and there is never an excursus. Nor is there any feebleness
or fumbling. What he wanted to do he did, with the unerring
certainty of Leatherstocking, hitting the bull’s-eye again and
again. He had the abundance and the ease of the very great artists;
and the half-dozen or the half-score of his best stories are among
the very best Short-stories in any language.--BRANDER MATTHEWS,
_The Philosophy of the Short-Story_.
His firm, alert prose is so profoundly French, free from
neologisms, strong in verbs, sober in adjectives, every sentence
standing out with no apparent effort, no excess, like a muscle in
the perfect body of a young athlete.... He has that sense of the
real which so many naturalists lack, and which the care for exact
detail does not replace.... His predilection for ordinary scenes
and ordinary types is everywhere evident; he uses all kinds of
settings,--a café, a furnished room, a farmyard, seen in their
actual character without poetic transfiguration, with all their
vulgarity, their poverty, their ugliness. And he uses, too, all
kinds of characters,--clerks, peasants of Normandy, petty bourgeois
of Paris and of the country. They live the empty, tragic, or
grotesque hours of their lives; are sometimes touching, sometimes
odious; and never achieve greatness either in heroism or in
wickedness.
They are not gay, these stories; and the kind of amusement they
afford is strongly mixed with irony, pity, and contempt. Gayety,
whether brutal, frank, mocking, or delicate, never leaves this
bitter taste in the heart. How pitiful in its folly, in its
vanity, in its weakness, is the humanity which loves, weeps, or
agitates in the tales of Maupassant! There, virtue if awkward is
never recompensed, nor vice if skillful punished; mothers are not
always saints, nor sons always grateful and respectful; the guilty
are often ignorant of remorse. Then are these beings immoral? To
tell the truth, they are guided by their instincts, by events,
submissive to the laws of necessity, and apparently released by the
author from all responsibility.--FIRMIN ROZ, _Guy de Maupassant_,
in WARNER’S _Library of the World’s Best Literature_.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON MAUPASSANT
_French Fiction of To-day_, M. S. Van de Velde (1891); _Some French
Writers_, Edward Delille (1893); _Studies in Two Literatures_, Arthur
Symons (1897); _French Literature of To-day_, Yetta Blaze de Bury
(1898); _A Century of French Fiction_, Benjamin W. Wells (1898);
_Contemporary French Novelists_, René Doumic (1899).
FOR ANALYSIS
MOONLIGHT
(CLAIR DE LUNE)
BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT
_Translation by The Editor_[26]
The Abbé Marignan bore well his title of Soldier of the Church. He
was a tall priest, and spare; fanatical, perpetually in a state of
spiritual exaltation, but upright of soul. His every belief was
settled, without even a thought of wavering. He imagined sincerely that
he understood his God thoroughly, that he penetrated His designs, His
will, His purposes.
2. As with long strides he promenaded the garden walk of his little
country presbytery, sometimes a question would arise in his mind:
“Why did God create that?” And, mentally taking the place of God, he
searched obstinately for the answer--and nearly always found it.
It would not have been like him to murmur, in an outburst of pious
humility: “O Lord, thy designs are impenetrable!” Rather might he say
to himself: “I am the servant of God; I ought to know the reasons for
what He does, or, if I know them not, I ought to divine them.”
3. To him all nature seemed created with a logic as absolute as it
was admirable. The “wherefore” and the “because” always corresponded
perfectly. Dawn was made to gladden our waking, the day to ripen the
crops, the rain to water them, the evening to prepare for slumber, and
the night was darkened for sleep.
4. The four seasons met perfectly all the needs of agriculture; and
to the priest it was quite inconceivable that nature had no designs,
and that, on the contrary, all living things were subjects of the same
inexorable laws of period, climate, and matter.
5. But he did hate woman! He hated her unconscionably, and by instinct
held her in contempt. Often did he repeat the words of Christ, “Woman,
what have I to do with thee?” And he would add, “One might think that
God Himself did not feel quite content with this one work of his
hands!” To him, indeed, woman was the child twelve times unclean of
whom the poet speaks. She was the temptress who had ensnared the first
man, and who constantly kept up her work of damnation--she was a
feeble, dangerous, and mysteriously troublous creature. And even more
than her accursed body did he hate her loving spirit.
6. He had often felt that women were regarding him tenderly, and even
though he knew himself to be invulnerable, it exasperated him to
recognize that need for loving which fluttered ever-present in their
hearts.
7. In his opinion, God had created woman only to tempt man and to
test him. She should never be even approached without those defensive
measures which one would take, and those fears which one would harbor,
when nearing a trap. In fact, she was precisely like a trap, with her
lips open and arms extended towards man.
8. Only toward nuns did he exercise any indulgence, for they were
rendered harmless by their vow. But he treated them harshly just the
same, because, ever-living in the depths of their pent-up and humble
hearts, he discerned that everlasting tenderness which constantly
surged up toward him, priest though he was.
9. Of all this he was conscious in their upturned glances, more
limpid with pious feeling than the looks of monks; in the spiritual
exaltations in which their sex indulged; in their ecstasies of love
toward Christ, which made the priest indignant because it was really
woman’s love, carnal love. Of this detestable tenderness he was
conscious, too, in their very docility, in the gentleness of their
voices when they addressed him, in their downcast eyes, and in their
submissive tears when he rudely rebuked them.
10. So he would shake his cassock when he left the convent door, and
stride off, stretching his legs as if fleeing before some danger.
11. Now the abbé had a niece who lived with her mother in a little
house near by. He was determined to make of her a sister of charity.
12. She was pretty, giddy, and a born tease. When he preached at
her, she laughed; and when he became angry with her, she kissed him
vehemently, pressing him to her bosom, while he would instinctively
seek to disengage himself from this embrace--which, all the same,
gave him a thrill of exquisite joy, awaking deep within his soul that
feeling of fatherhood which slumbers in every man.
13. Often as they walked together along the foot-paths through the
fields, he would talk with her of God, of his God; but she scarcely
heard him, for she was looking at the sky, the grass, the flowers, with
a joy of life which beamed from her eyes. Sometimes she would dart away
to catch some flying creature, crying as she brought it back: “See, my
uncle, how pretty it is; I should like to kiss it.” And that passion to
kiss insects, or lilac flowers, disturbed, irritated, and repelled the
priest, who recognized even in that longing the ineradicable love which
blooms perennial in the heart of woman.
14. And now one day the sacristan’s wife, who was the Abbé Marignan’s
housekeeper, cautiously told him that his niece had a lover!
15. He was dreadfully shocked, and stood gasping for breath, lather all
over his face, for he was shaving.
16. When at length he was able to think and speak, he cried: “It is not
true. You are lying, Mélanie!”
17. But the peasant woman laid her hand over her heart: “May our Lord
judge me if I am lying, _monsieur le curé_. I tell you she goes out to
meet him every night as soon as your sister is in bed. They meet each
other down by the river. You need only go there between ten o’clock and
midnight to see for yourself.”
18. He stopped rubbing his chin and began pacing the room violently, as
was his custom in times of serious thought. When at length he did try
to finish his shaving he cut himself three times, from nose to ear.
19. All day long he was silent, though almost exploding with
indignation and wrath. To his priestly rage against the power of love
was now added the indignation of a spiritual father, of a teacher, of
the guardian of souls, who has been deceived, robbed, and trifled with
by a mere child. He felt that egotistical suffocation which parents
experience when their daughter tells them that she has selected a
husband without their advice and in defiance of their wishes.
20. After dinner he tried to read a little, but he could not--he grew
more and more exasperated. When the clock struck ten, he grasped his
cane, a formidable oaken club which he always carried when he went
out at night to visit the sick. With a smile he examined this huge
cudgel, gripped it in his solid, countryman’s fist, and flourished it
menacingly in the air. Then, suddenly, with grinding teeth, he brought
it down upon a chair-back, which fell splintered to the floor.
21. He opened his door to go out; but paused upon the threshold,
surprised by such a glory of moonlight as one rarely sees.
22. And as he was endowed with an exalted soul of such a sort as the
Fathers of the Church, those poetic seers, must have possessed, he
became suddenly entranced, moved by the grand and tranquil beauty of
the pale-faced night.
23. In his little garden, all suffused with the tender radiance,
his fruit-trees, set in rows, outlined in shadows upon the paths
their slender limbs of wood, scarce clothed with verdure. The giant
honeysuckle, clinging to the house wall, exhaled its delicious, honeyed
breath--the soul of perfume seemed to hover about in the warm, clear
night.
24. He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink
their wine; and he walked slowly, ravished, amazed, his niece almost
forgotten.
25. When he reached the open country he paused to gaze upon the broad
sweep of landscape, all deluged by that caressing radiance, all drowned
in that soft and sensuous charm of peaceful night. Momently the frogs
sounded out their quick metallic notes, and distant nightingales added
to the seductive moonlight their welling music, which charms to dreams
without thought--that gossamer, vibrant melody born only to mate with
kisses.
26. The Abbé moved again, his courage unaccountably failing. He felt as
though he were enfeebled, suddenly exhausted--he longed to sit down, to
linger there, to glorify God for all His works.
27. A little farther on, following the winding of the little river,
curved a row of tall poplars. Suspended about and above the banks,
enwrapping the whole sinuous course of the stream with a sort of light,
transparent down, was a fine white mist, shot through by the moon-rays,
and transmuted by them into gleaming silver.
28. The priest paused once again, stirred to the deeps of his soul by a
growing, an irresistible feeling of tenderness.
29. And a doubt, an undefined disquietude, crept over him; he
discerned the birth of one of those questions which now and again came
to him.
30. Why had God made all this? Since the night was ordained for
slumber, for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of
everything, why should He make it lovelier than the day, sweeter than
dawn and sunset? And that star, slow-moving, seductive, more poetic
than the sun, so like to destiny, and so delicate that seemingly it was
created to irradiate things too subtle, too refined, for the greater
orb--why was it come to illumine all the shades?
31. Why did not the most accomplished of all singing birds repose now
like the others, but sing in the unquiet dark?
32. Why was this semi-veil cast over the world? Why this sighing of the
heart, this tumult of the soul, this languor of the flesh?
33. Why this show of charms, never seen by men because they are asleep?
For whose eyes was all this sublime spectacle designed, all this wealth
of poetic loveliness diffused from heaven over the earth?
34. And the Abbé did not understand it at all.
35. But there below, at the very edge of the field, under the arching
trees wet with luminous mist, two shadows appeared, walking side by
side.
36. The man was the taller, and had his arm about his sweetheart’s
neck; and from time to time he bent to kiss her forehead. They animated
suddenly the lifeless landscape, which enveloped their figures like a
divine frame fashioned expressly for them. They seemed, those two, like
a single being, the being for whom was created this tranquil, silent
night. Like a living answer, the answer which his Master had sent to
his question, they moved toward the priest.
37. Overwhelmed, his heart throbbing, he stood still, and it seemed
as though there spread before him some Biblical scene, like the loves
of Ruth and Boaz, the working out of the Lord’s will in one of those
majestic dramas set forth in the lives of the saints. The verses of the
Song of Songs, the ardent cries, the call of the body--all the glowing
romance of that poem so aflame with tenderness and love, began to sing
itself into his mind.
38. And he said to himself: “Perhaps God made nights such as this in
order to cast the veil of the ideal over the loves of men.”
39. He withdrew before this pair, who went on arm in arm. True, it was
his niece; but now he asked himself if he had not been upon the verge
of disobeying God. And, indeed, if God did not permit love, why did he
visibly encompass it with glory such as this?
40. And he fled, bewildered, almost ashamed, as if he had penetrated in
a temple wherein he had no right to enter.
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY
1. Precisely why do our surroundings affect our moods and actions? Give
examples from your own experience.
2. Which seems to you to be the more frequent in fiction: harmony, or
contrast of character with setting?
3. Which seems to you to be the more effective? Why?
4. Outline the motives which actuated at least three of the characters
in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.”
5. Is the story overdrawn?
6. Is the influence of the moonlight enough to account for the change
in the priest in “Moonlight,” or must we allow something for romance?
7. Trace the several physical crises of Harte’s story from the very
beginning.
8. Do the same for the moral crises.
9. Show their inter-relation.
10. Select from a magazine a story in which setting influences in some
way the actions of the characters, and point out precisely how.
TEN REPRESENTATIVE STORIES OF SETTING
“A Leaf in the Storm,” Ouida, in _Stories by English Authors_.
“Mrs. Knollys,” F. J. Stimson, _Century Magazine_, Nov., 1883.
“Up the Coulée,” Hamlin Garland, in _Main Travelled Roads_.
“The Girl at Duke’s,” James W. Linn, _McClure’s Magazine_, Aug.,
1903.
“The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove,” Charles Egbert Craddock,
_Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1878.
“Twenty-Six and One,” Maxim Gorky, translated in volume of same
title.
“The Unknown Masterpiece,” Honoré de Balzac, translated in _Little
French Masterpieces, Balzac_.
“Red Bird,” Elizabeth Maury Coombs, _Lippincott’s Magazine_, Dec.,
1911.
“The Wall Opposite,” Pierre Loti, translated in _Short Story
Classics, Foreign_.
“The End of the Tether,” Joseph Conrad, in _Youth_.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] From the author’s _Writing the Short-Story_, p. 149, which see for
a chapter on “The Setting of the Story.”
[25] _Writing the Short-Story_, pp. 151-152.
[26] Copyright, 1911, by J. B. Lippincott Co., and used by permission.
VI
IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES
_The White Old Maid._--NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
_The Fall of the House of Usher._--EDGAR ALLAN POE