To read for the first time, one of the short stories of Guy de
Maupassant is to receive a staggering enlargement of one's ideas as
to what mere literature can do. They hardly seem like literature at all,
these blocks from the quarry of life, flung into one's face with so
unerring an aim.
"If you prick them, they bleed. If you tickle them, they laugh." The
rough rain-smelling earth still clings to them; when you take them in
your hands, the mud of the highway comes off upon your fingers. Is
it really, one wonders, mere literary craft, mere cunning artfulness,
which gives these sentences the weight of a guillotine-blade
crashing down upon the prostrate neck of bound helpless reality?
Is it simply the art of a pupil of the euphonious Flaubert, this power
of making written sentences march full-armed like living men, and
fall, when their work is done, with a metallic ring of absolute
finality--"as a dead body falls"?
As one reads Guy de Maupassant one breathes heavily as if it were
oneself and not another upon whom the tension and the sweat of the
crisis has come. One touches with one's naked hand every object he
describes. One feels the gasping breath of every person he brings
forward. His images slap one's cheeks till they tingle, and his
situations wrestle with one to the ground.
Not for nothing was he a descendant of that race which, of all races
except the Turks, has loved love better than literature and war better
than love. Words are resounding blows and smacking kisses to Guy
de Maupassant. He writes literature as a Norman baron, and when he
rounds off a sentence it is as if he dug a spur into the flanks of a
restless filly. There is nothing like his style in the world.
They never taught me Tacitus when I was at school. My Latinity
stops short at Caesar and Cicero. One is, however, led to suppose
that the great executioner of imperial reputations was a mighty
pruner, in his day, of the "many, too many" words. But I am sure
that this other "Great Latin," as Nietzsche calls him, cleans up his
litter and chops off his surplusage quite as effectively as Tacitus,
and I suspect that neither Tacitus nor any other classic writer hits the
nail on the head with so straight, so steady, so effective a stroke.
I suppose it is the usual habit of destiny to rush into literary paths
people who are essentially dreamers and theorists and Utopians;
people who by instinct and temperament shrink away from contact
with brute reality.
I suppose even the great imaginative writers, like Balzac, live, on
the whole, sedentary and exclusive lives, making a great deal, as far
as the materials for their work go, of a very little. Now and then,
however, it happens that a man of action, a man of the world, a man
of love and war and sport, enters the literary arena; and when that
occurs, I have an idea that he hits about him with a more trenchant,
more resolute, more crushing force than the others.
The art of literature has become perhaps too completely the
monopoly of sedentary people--largely of the bourgeois class--who
bring to their work the sedentary sensitiveness, the sedentary
refinement, the sedentary lack of living experience, which are the
natural characteristics of persons who work all day in studies and
studios. That is why the appearance of a Walt Whitman or a Maxim
Gorki is so wholesome and air-clearing an event.
But not less salutary is the appearance of a ferocious aristocrat from
the class which has ridden rough-shod over the fields of submissive
actuality for many tyrannous centuries.
In the hard shrewd blows of a Maxim Gorki, the monopolising tribes
of sedentary dreamers receive their palpable hit, receive it from the
factory and the furrow. In the deadly knocks of a Guy de
Maupassant they get their "quietus" from the height, so to speak, of
the saddle of a sporting gentleman.
Do what they can to get the sharp bitter tang of reality into their
books, the bulk of these people, write they never so cleverly, seem
somehow to miss it.
The smell of that crafty old skunk--the genuine truth of
things--draws them forward through the reeds and rushes of the great dim
forests' edge, but they seldom touch the hide of the evasive animal;
no, not so much as with the end of their barge-pole.
But Guy de Maupassant plunges into the thickets, gun in hand, and
we soon hear the howl of the hunted.
A love of literature, a reverence and respect for the dignity of words,
does not by any means imply a power of making them plastic before
the pressure of truth. How often one is conscious of the intervention
of "something else," some alien material, marbly and shiny it may
be, and with a beauty of its own, but obtruding quite opaquely
between the thing said and the thing felt.
In reading Guy de Maupassant, it does not seem to be words at all
which touch us. It seems to be things--things living or dead, things
in motion or at rest. Words are there indeed; they must be there--but
they are so hammered on the anvil of his hard purpose that they have
become porous and transparent. Their one rôle now is to get
themselves out of the way; or rather to turn themselves into thin air
and clean water, through which the reality beyond can come at us
with unblurred outlines.
It is a wonderful commentary, when one thinks of it, upon the
malleability of human language that it can so take shape and colour
from the pressure of a single temperament. The words in the
dictionary are all there--all at the disposal of every one of us--but
how miraculous a thing to make their choice and their arrangement
expressive of nothing on earth but the peculiar turn of one particular
mind!
The whole mystery of life is in this; this power of the unique and
solitary soul to twist the universe into the shape of its vision.
Without any doubt Guy de Maupassant is the greatest realist that
ever lived. All other realists seem idealists in comparison. Many of
the situations he describes are situations doubtless in which he
himself "had a hand." Others are situations which he came across, in
his enterprising debouchings here and there, in curious by-alleys,
and which he observed with a morose scowl of amusement, from
outside. A few--very few--are situations which he evoked from the
more recondite places of his own turbulent soul.
But one cannot read a page of him without feeling that he is a writer
who writes from out of his own experiences, from out of the shocks
and jolts and rough file-like edges of raw reality.
It is a huge encouragement to all literary ambitions, this immense
achievement of his. The scope and sweep of a great creative
imagination is given to few among us, and Guy de Maupassant was
not one of these. His imagination was rigorously earth-bound, and
not only earth-bound but bound to certain obvious and sensual
aspects of earth-life. Except when he tore open the bleeding wounds
of his own mutilated sensibility and wrote stories of his madness
with a pen dipped in the evil humours of his diseased blood, he was
a master of a certain brutal and sunburnt objectivity.
But how cheerful and encouraging it is for those among us who are
engaged in literature, to see what this astonishing man was able to
make of experiences which, in some measure, we must all have
shared!
There is never any need to leave one's own town or village or city to
get "copy." There is scarcely any need to leave one's own house. The
physiological peculiarities of the people who jostle against us in the
common routine of things will completely suffice. That is the whole
point of de Maupassant's achievement.
The same thing, of course, is true of the great imaginative writers.
_They_ also are able to derive grist for their mill from the common
occurrences; they also are free to remain at home. But their sphere is
the sphere of the human soul; his was the sphere of the human body.
He was pre-eminently the master of physiology--the physiological
writer. Bodies, not souls, were his "métier"--or souls only in so far
as they are directly affected by bodies.
But bodies--bodies of men and women are everywhere; living ones
on the earth; dead ones under the earth. One need not go to the
antipodes to find the nerves and the tissues, the flesh and the blood,
of these planetary evocations, of these microcosms of the universe.
The great imaginative writers have the soul of man always under
their hand, and Guy de Maupassant has the body of man always
under his hand.
It is not the masters who are found journeying to remote regions to
get inspiration for their work. Their "America," as Goethe puts it,
lies close to their door.
It is singularly encouraging to us men of letters to contemplate what
Guy de Maupassant could do with the natural animal instincts and
gestures and mutterings and struggles of the bodies of men and
women as their desires make them skip.
"Encouraging" did I say? Tantalizing rather, and provocative of
helpless rage. For just as the spiritual insensitiveness of our
bourgeois tyrants renders them dull and obtuse to the noble
imaginations of great souls, so their moral bigotry and stupidity
renders them obstinately averse to the freedom of the artist in
dealing with the physical eccentricities of the grotesque human
animal.
We must not deal at large with the spirit lest we weary the vulgar
and the frivolous; we must not deal at large with the body, lest we
infuriate the Puritanical and the squeamish.
It is absurd to rail at de Maupassant because of his "brutality." One
cannot help suspecting that those who do so have never recognised
the absurd comedy of their own bodily activities and desires.
It is idle to protest against the outrageous excursions of his predatory
humour. The raw bleeding pieces--each, as one almost feels, with its
own peculiar cry--of the living body of the world, clawed as if by
tiger claws, are strange morsels for the taste of some among us. But
for others, there is an exultant pleasure in this great hunt, with the
deep-mouthed hounds of veracity and sincerity, after the authentic
truth.
One touches here--in this question of the brutality of Guy de
Maupassant--upon a very deep matter; the matter namely of what
our pleasure exactly consists, as we watch, in one of his more
savage stories, the flesh of the world's truth thus clawed at.
I think it is a pleasure composed of several different elements. The
first of these is that deep and curious satisfaction which we derive
from the exhibition in art of the essential grossness and
unscrupulousness of life. We revenge ourselves in this way upon
what makes us suffer. The clear presentation of an outrage, of an
insult, of an indecency, is in itself a sort of vengeance upon the
power that wrought it, and though it may sound ridiculous enough to
speak of being avenged upon Nature, still the basic instinct is there,
and we can, if we will, personify the immense malignity of things,
and fancy that we are striking back at the gods and causing the gods
some degree of perturbation; at least letting them know that we are
not deceived by the illusions they dole out to us!
The quiet gods may well be imagined as quite as indifferent to our
artistic vengeance as Nature herself, but at any rate, like the man in
the Inferno who "makes the fig" at the Almighty, we have found
vent for our human feelings. Another element in it is the pleasure we
get--not perhaps a very Christian one, but Literature deviates from
Christianity in several important ways--from having other people
made fully aware, as we may be, of the grossness and unscrupulousness
of life.
These other people may easily be assumed to be fidgety, meticulous,
self-complacent purists; and as we read the short stories of Guy de
Maupassant, we cannot resist calling up an imaginary company of
such poor devils and forcing them to listen to a page of the great
book of human judgment upon Nature's perversity.
Finally at the bottom of all there is a much more subtle cause for our
pleasure; nothing less in fact than that old wild dark Dionysian
embracing of fate, of fate however monstrous and bizarre, simply
because it is there--an integral part of the universe--and we ourselves
with something of that ingredient in our own heathen hearts.
An imaginary symposium of modern writers upon the causes of
human pleasure in the grosser elements of art lends itself to very
free speculation. Personally I must confess to very serious
limitations in my own capacity for such enjoyment. I have a
sneaking sympathy with tender nerves. I can relish de Maupassant
up to a certain point--and that point is well this side of idolatry--but I
fancy I relish him because I discern in him a certain vibrant nerve of
revolt against the brutality of things, a certain quivering irony of
savage protest. When you get the brutality represented without this
revolt and with a certain unction of sympathetic zest, as you do in
the great eighteenth century novelists in England, I confess it
becomes more than I can endure.
This is a most grievous limitation and I apologise to the reader most
humbly for it. It is indeed a lamentable confession of weakness. But
since the limitations of critics are, consciously or unconsciously,
part of their contribution to the problems at issue, I offer mine
without further comment.
It is an odd thing that while I can relish and even hugely enjoy
ribaldry in a Latin writer, I cannot so much as tolerate vulgarity in
an English or Scotch one. Perhaps it is their own hidden
consciousness that, if they once let themselves go, they would go
unpleasantly far, which gives this morbid uneasiness to the strictures
of the Puritans. Or is it that the English-speaking races are born
between the deep sea of undiluted coarseness and the devil of a
diseased conscience? Is this the reason why every artist in the world
and every critic of art, feels himself essentially an exile everywhere
except upon Latin soil?
Guy de Maupassant visualises human life as a thing completely and
helplessly in the grip of animal appetites and instincts. He takes
what we call lust, and makes of it the main motive force in his vivid
and terrible sketches. It is perhaps for this very reason that his
stories have such an air of appalling reality.
But it is not only lust or lechery which he exploits. He turns to his
artistic purpose every kind of physiological desire, every sort of
bodily craving. Many of these are quite innocent and harmless, and
the denial of their satisfaction is in the deepest sense tragic. Perhaps
it is in regard to what this word _tragic_ implies that we find the
difference between the brutality of Guy de Maupassant and the
coarseness of the earlier English writers.
The very savagery in de Maupassant's humour is an indication of a
clear intellectual consciousness of something monstrously,
grotesquely, wrong; something mad and blind and devilish about the
whole business, which we miss completely in all English writers
except the great Jonathan Swift.
Guy de Maupassant had the easy magnanimity of the Latin races in
regard to sex matters, but in regard to the sufferings of men and of
animals from the denial of their right to every sort of natural joy,
there smouldered in him a deep black rage--a _saeva indignatio_
--which scorches his pages like a deadly acid.
In his constant preoccupation with the bodies of living creatures, it
is natural enough that animals as well as men should come into the
circle of his interest. He was a great huntsman and fisherman. He
loved to wander over the frozen marshes, gun in hand, searching for
strange wildfowl among the reeds and ditches. But though he slew
these things in the savage passion of the chase as his ancestors had
done for ages, between his own fierce senses and theirs there was a
singular magnetic sympathy.
As may be often noticed in other cases, as we go through the world,
there was between the primitive earth-instincts of this hunter of wild
things and the desperate creatures he pursued, a far deeper bond of
kinship than exists between sedentary humanitarians and the objects
of their philanthropy. It is good that there should be such a writer as
this in the world.
In the sophisticated subtleties of our varnished and velvet-carpeted
civilisation, it is well that we should be brought back to the old
essential candours which forever underlie the frills and frippery. It is
well that the stark bones of the aboriginal skeleton with its raw
"unaccommodated" flesh should peep out through the embroideries.
It is, after all, the "thing itself" which matters--the thing which
"owes the worm no silk, the cat no perfume." Forked straddling
animals are we all, as the mad king says in the play, and it is mere
effeminacy and affectation to cover up the truth.
Guy de Maupassant is never greater than when appealing to the
primitive link of tragic affiliation that binds us to all living flesh and
blood. A horse mercilessly starved in the fields; a wild bird wailing
for its murdered mate; a tramp driven by hunger and primitive desire,
and harried by the "insolence of office"; an old man denied the little
luxuries of his senile greed; an old maid torn and rent in the flesh
that is barren and the breasts that never gave suck; these are the
natural subjects of his genius--the sort of "copy" that one certainly
need not leave one's "home town" to find.
One is inclined to feel that those who miss the tragic generosity at
the heart of the brutality of Guy de Maupassant, are not really aware
of the bitter cry of this mad planet. Let them content themselves,
these people, with their pretty little touching stories, their nice blobs
of cheerful "local colour" thrown in here and there, and their sweet
impossible endings. Sunday school literature for Sunday school
children; but let there be at least one writer who writes for those who
know what the world is.
The question of the legitimacy in art of the kind of realism which
Guy de Maupassant practised, goes incalculably deep. Consider
yourself at this moment, gentle reader, lightly turning over--as
doubtless you are doing--the harmless pages of this academic book,
as you drink your tea from a well appointed tray in a sunny corner of
some friendly cake-shop. You are at this moment--come, confess
it--hiding up, perhaps from yourself but certainly from the world, some
outrageous annoyance, some grotesque resolution, some fear, some
memory, some suspicion, that has--as is natural and proper enough,
for your father was a man, your mother a woman--its physiological
origin. You turn to this elegant book of mine, with its mild and
persuasive thoughts, as if you turned away from reality into some
pleasant arbour of innocent recreation. It is a sort of little lullaby for
you amid the troubles of this rough world.
But suppose instead of the soothing cadences of this harmless
volume, you had just perused a short story of Guy de Maupassant;
would not your feelings be different? Would you not have the
sensation of being fortified in your courage, in your humour, in your
brave embracing of the fantastic truth? Would you not contemplate
the most grotesque matters lightly, wisely, sanely and with a
magnanimous heart?
The perverted moral training to which we have been all of us
subjected, has "sicklied o'er with the pale cast" of a most evil
scrupulousness our natural free enjoyment of the absurd contrasts
and accidents and chances of life.
French humour may be savage--all the better--we need a humour
with some gall in it to deal with the humour of the universe. But our
humour, stopping short so timorously of stripping the world to its
smock, is content to remain vulgar. That is the only definition of
vulgarity that I recognise--a temptation to be coarse without the
spiritual courage to be outrageous! Coarseness--our Anglo Saxon
peculiarity--is due to temperamental insensitiveness. Outrageous
grossness--with its ironical, beautiful blasphemy against the great
mother's amazing tricks--is an intellectual and spiritual thing, worthy
of all noble souls. The one is the rank breath of a bourgeois
democracy, the other is the free laughter of civilised intelligences
through all human history.
English and Americans find it difficult to understand each other's
humour. One can well understand this difficulty. No one finds any
obstacle--except Puritan prejudice--in understanding French humour;
because French humour is universal; the humour of the human spirit
contemplating the tragic comedy of the human body.
One very interesting thing must be noted here in regard to the
method of Guy de Maupassant's writings; I mean the power of the
short story to give a sense of the general stream of life which is
denied to the long story.
Personally I prefer long stories; but that is only because I have an
insatiable love of the story for its own sake, apart from its
interpretation of life. I am not in the least ashamed to confess that
when I read books, I do so to escape from the pinch of actual facts. I
have a right to this little peculiarity as much as to any other as long
as I don't let it invade the clarity of my reason. But in the short
story--and I have no scruple about admitting it--one seems to get the
flavour of the writer's general philosophy of life more completely
than in any other literary form.
It is a snatch at the passing procession, a dip into the flowing stream,
and one gets from it the sort of sudden illumination that one gets
from catching a significant gesture under the street lamp, or meeting
a swift tale-telling glance beneath a crowded doorway.
Bitterly inspired as he is by the irony of the physiological tragedy of
human life, Guy de Maupassant is at his greatest when he deals with
the bizarre accidents that happen to the body; greatest of all when he
deals with the last bizarre accident of all, the accident of death.
The appalling grotesqueness of death, its brutal and impious levity,
its crushing finality, have never been better written of. The savage
ferocity with which he tears off the mask which the sentimental
piety of generations has thrown over the features of their dead is no
sign of frivolousness in him. The gravity of the undertaker is not an
indication of deep emotion; nor is the jesting of Hamlet, as he stands
above Ophelia's grave, a sign of an inhuman heart.
The last insult of the scurrilous gods--their flinging us upon oblivion
with so indecent, so lewd a disregard for every sort of seemliness--is
answered in Guy de Maupassant by a ferocious irony almost equal
to their own.
But it would be unfair to let this dark-browed Norman go, without at
least a passing allusion to the large and friendly manner in which he
rakes up, out of brothel, out of gutter, out of tenement, out of
sweat-shop, out of circus-tent, out of wharf shanty, out of barge cabin,
every kind and species of human derelict to immortalise their
vagrant humanity in the amber of his flawless style.
There is a spacious hospitality about the man's genius which is a rare
tonic to weary aesthetes, sick of the thin-spun theories of the schools.
The sun-burnt humour of many queer tatterdemalions warms us, as
we read him, into a fine indifference to nice points of human
distinction. All manner of ragged nondescripts blink at us out of
their tragic resignation and hint at a ribald reciprocity of nature,
making the whole world kin.
In his ultimate view of life, he was a drastic pessimist, and what we
call materialism receives from his hands the clinching fiat of a
terrific imprimatur. And this is well; this is as it should be. There are
always literary persons to uphold the banners of mysticism and
morality, idealism and good hope. There will always be plenty of
talent "on the side of the angels" in these days, when it has become a
kind of intellectual cant to cry aloud, "I am no materialist!
Materialism has been disproved by the latest scientific thinkers!"
To come back to the old, honest, downright, heathen recognition of
the midnight, wherein all candles are put out, is quite a salutary
experience. It is good that there should be a few great geniuses that
are unmitigated materialists, and to whom the visible world is
absolutely all there is. One is rendered more tolerant of the
boisterousness of the players when one feels the play ends so finally
and so soon. One is rendered less exacting towards the poor
creatures of the earth when one recognises that their hour is so brief.
There will always be optimists in the countries where "the standards
of living are high." There will always be writers--scientific or
otherwise--to dispose of materialism. But meanwhile it is well that
there should be at least one great modern among us for whom that
_pulvis et umbra_ is the last word. At least, one, if only for the sake
of those whom we mourn most; so that, beholding their lives, like
torch-flames against black darkness, we shall not stint them of their
remembrance.