cost--that of his poor little juvenile constitution, and of his innocent
affections and aspirations. He is sent to the horrible Gymnase Moronval,
where he has no beguiling works of fiction to read. The Gymnase Moronval
is a Dotheboys’ Hall in a Parisian “passage”--a very special class of
academy. Nothing could be more effective than Daudet’s picture of this
horrible institution, with its bankrupt and exasperated proprietors, the
greasy penitentiary of a group of unremunerative children whose parents
and guardians have found it convenient to forget them. The episode of
the wretched little hereditary monarch of an African tribe who has been
placed there for a royal education, and who, livid with cold, short
rations, and rough usage, and with his teeth chattering with a sense of
dishonour, steals away and wanders in the streets of Paris, and then,
recaptured and ferociously punished, surrenders his little dusky soul in
the pestilential dormitory of the establishment--all this part of the
tale is a masterpiece of vivid description. We seem to assist at the
terrible soirées where the _ratés_ exhibit their talents (M. Moronval is
of course a _raté_), and where the wife of the principal, a very small
woman with a very big head and a very high forehead, expounds the
wonderful Méthode-Décostère (invented by herself and designated by her
maiden name), for pronouncing the French tongue with elegance. My
criticism of this portion of the book, and indeed of much of the rest of
it, would be that the pathetic element is too intentional, too _voulu_,
as the French say. And I am not sure that the reader enters into the
author’s reason for making Charlotte, Jack’s mother, a woman of the
class that we do not specify in American magazines. She is an
accommodating idiot, but her good nature is unfortunately not
consecutive, and she consents, at the instigation of the diabolical
d’Argenton, to her child’s being brought up like a pauper. D’Argenton,
like Delobelle, is a study of egotism pushed to the grotesque; but the
portrait is still more complete, and some of the details are inimitable.
As regards the infatuated Charlotte, who sacrifices her child to the
malignity of her lover, I repeat that certain of the features of her
character appear to me a mistake, judged in relation to the effect that
the author wishes to produce. He wishes to show us all that the boy
loses in being disinherited--if I may use that term with respect to a
situation in which there is nothing to inherit. But his loss is not
great when we consider that his mother had, after all, very little to
give him. She had divested herself of important properties. Bernard
Jansoulet, in _Le Nabab_, is not, like the two most successful figures
that Daudet has previously created, a representation of full-blown
selfishness. The unhappy nabob is generous to a fault; he is the most
good-natured and free-handed of men, and if he has made use of all sorts
of means to build up his enormous fortune, he knows an equal number of
ways of spending it. This voluminous tale had an immense success; it
seemed to show that Daudet had found his manner, a manner that was
perfectly new and remarkably ingenious. As I have said, it held up the
mirror to contemporary history, and attempted to complete for us, by
supplementary revelations, those images which are projected by the
modern newspaper and the album of photographs. _Les Rois en Exil_ is an
historical novel of this pattern, in which the process is applied with
still more spirit. In these two works Daudet enlarged his canvas
surprisingly, and showed his ability to deal with a multitude of
figures.
The distance traversed artistically from the little anecdotes of the
_Lettres de mon Moulin_ to the complex narrative of _Le Nabab_ and its
successor, are like the transformation--often so rapid--of a slim and
charming young girl into a blooming and accomplished woman of the world.
The author’s style had taken on bone and muscle, and become conscious of
treasures of nervous agility. I have left myself no space to speak of
these things in detail, and it was not part of my purpose to examine
Daudet’s novels piece by piece; but I may say that it is the items, the
particular touches, that make the value of writing of this kind. I am
not concerned to defend the process, the system, so far as there is a
system; but I cannot open either _Le Nabab_ or _Les Rois en Exil_,
cannot rest my eyes upon a page, without being charmed by the brilliancy
of execution. It is difficult to give an idea, by any general terms, of
Daudet’s style--a style which defies convention, tradition, homogeneity,
prudence, and sometimes even syntax, gathers up every patch of colour,
every colloquial note, that will help to illustrate, and moves eagerly,
lightly, triumphantly along, like a clever woman in the costume of an
eclectic age. There is nothing classic in this mode of expression; it is
not the old-fashioned drawing in black and white. It never rests, never
is satisfied, never leaves the idea sitting half-draped, like patience
on a monument; it is always panting, straining, fluttering, trying to
add a little more, to produce the effect which shall make the reader see
with his eyes, or rather with the marvellous eyes of Alphonse Daudet.
_Le Nabab_ is full of episodes which are above all pages of execution,
triumphs of translation. The author has drawn up a list of the Parisian
solemnities and painted the portrait--or given a summary--of each of
them. The opening day at the Salon, a funeral at Père-la-Chaise, a
debate in the Chamber of Deputies, the _première_ of a new play at a
favourite theatre, furnish him with so many opportunities for his
gymnastics of observation. I should like to say how rich and
entertaining I think the figure of Jansoulet, the robust and
good-natured son of his own works (originally a dock-porter at
Marseilles), who, after amassing a fabulous number of millions in
selling European luxuries on commission to the Bey of Tunis, comes to
Paris to try to make his social fortune as he has already made his
financial, and after being a nine-days’ wonder, a public joke, and the
victim of his boundless hospitality; after being flattered by
charlatans, rifled by adventurers, belaboured by newspapers, and
“exploited” to the last penny of his coffers and the last pulsation of
his vanity by every one who comes near him, dies of apoplexy in his box
at the theatre, while the public hoots him for being unseated for
electoral frauds in the Chamber of Deputies, where for a single mocking
hour he has tasted the sweetness of political life. I should like to
say, too, that however much or however little the Duc de Mora may
resemble the Duc de Morny, the character depicted by Daudet is a
wonderful study of that modern passion, the love of “good form.” The
chapter that relates the death of the Duke, and describes the tumult,
the confusion, of his palace, the sudden extinction of the rapacious
interests that crowd about him, and to which the collapse of his
splendid security comes as the first breath of a revolution--this
chapter is famous, and gives the fullest measure of what Daudet can do
when he fairly warms to his work.
_Les Rois en Exil_, however, has a greater perfection; it is simpler,
more equal, and it contains much more of the beautiful. In _Le Nabab_
there are various lacunæ and a certain want of logic; it is not a
sustained narrative, but a series of almost diabolically clever
pictures. But the other book has more largeness of line--a fine tragic
movement which deepens and presses to the catastrophe. Daudet had
observed that several dispossessed monarchs had taken up their residence
in the French capital--some of them waiting and plotting for a
restoration, and chafing under their disgrace; others indifferent,
resigned, relieved, eager to console themselves with the pleasures of
Paris. It occurred to him to suppose a drama in which these exalted
personages should be the actors, and which, unlike either of his former
productions, should have a pure and noble heroine. He was conscious of a
dauntless little imagination, the idea of making kings and queens talk
among themselves had no terror for him; he had faith in his good taste,
in his exquisite powers of divination. The success is worthy of the
spirit--the gallant artistic spirit--in which it was invoked. _Les Rois
en Exil_ is a finished picture. He has had, it is true, to simplify his
subject a good deal to make it practicable; the court of the king and
queen of Illyria, in the suburb of Saint-Mandé, is a little too much
like a court in a fairy-tale. But the amiable depravity of Christian,
in whom conviction, resolution, ambition, are hopelessly dead, and whose
one desire is to enjoy Paris with the impunity of a young man about
town; the proud, serious, concentrated nature of Frederica, who believes
ardently in her royal function, and lives with her eyes fixed on the
crown, which she regards as a symbol of duty; both of these conceptions
do M. Daudet the utmost honour, and prove that he is capable of handling
great situations--situations which have a depth of their own, and do not
depend for their interest on amusing accidents. It takes perhaps some
courage to say so, but the feelings, the passions, the view of life, of
royal personages, differ essentially from those of common mortals; their
education, their companions, their traditions, their exceptional
position, take sufficient care of that. Alphonse Daudet has comprehended
the difference; and I scarcely know, in the last few years, a straighter
flight of imagination. The history of the queen of Illyria is a tragedy.
Her husband sells his birthright for a few millions of francs, and rolls
himself in the Parisian gutter; her child perishes from poverty of
blood; she herself dries up in her despair. There is nothing finer in
all Daudet than the pages, at the end of the book, which describe her
visits to the great physician Bouchereau, when she takes her poor
half-blind child by the hand, and (wishing an opinion unbiassed by the
knowledge of her rank) goes to sit in his waiting-room like one of the
vulgar multitude. Wonderful are the delicacy, the verity, the
tenderness of these pages; we always point to them to justify our
predilection. But we must stop pointing. We will not say more of _Numa
Roumestan_ than we have already said; for it is better to pass so happy
a work by than to speak of it inadequately. We will only repeat that we
delight in _Numa Roumestan_. Alphonse Daudet’s last book is a novelty at
the time I write; _L’Evangéliste_ has been before the public but a month
or two. I will say but little of it, partly because my opportunity is
already over, and partly because I have found that, for a fair judgment
of one of Daudet’s works, the book should be read a second time, after a
certain interval has elapsed. This interval has not brought round my
second perusal of _L’Evangéliste_. My first suggests that with all the
author’s present mastery of his resources the book has a grave defect.
It is not that the story is painful; that is a defect only when the
sources of this element are not, as I may say, abundant. It treats of a
young girl (a Danish Protestant) who is turned to stone by a Medusa of
Calvinism, the sombre and fanatical wife of a great Protestant banker.
Madame Autheman persuades Eline Ebsen to wash her hands of the poor old
mother with whom up to this moment she has lived in the closest
affection, and go forth into strange countries to stir up the wicked to
conversion. The excellent Madame Ebsen, bewildered, heart-broken,
desperate, terrified at the imagined penalties of her denunciation of
the rich and powerful bigot (so that she leaves her habitation and
hides in a household of small mechanics to escape from them--one of the
best episodes in the book), protests, struggles, goes down on her knees
in vain; then, at last, stupefied and exhausted, desists, looks for the
last time at her inexorable, impenetrable daughter, who has hard texts
on her lips and no recognition in her eye, and who lets her pass away,
without an embrace, for ever. The incident in itself is perfectly
conceivable: many well-meaning persons have held human relationships
cheap in the face of a religious call. But Daudet’s weakness has been
simply a want of acquaintance with his subject. Proposing to himself to
describe a particular phase of French Protestantism, he has “got up”
certain of his facts with commendable zeal; but he has not felt nor
understood the matter, has looked at it solely from the outside, sought
to make it above all things grotesque and extravagant. Into these
excesses it doubtless frequently falls; but there is a general human
verity which regulates even the most stubborn wills, the most perverted
lives; and of this saving principle the author, in quest of striking
pictures, has rather lost his grasp. His pictures are striking, as a
matter of course; but to us readers of Protestant race, familiar with
the large, free, salubrious life which the children of that faith have
carried with them over the globe, there is almost a kind of drollery in
these fearsome pictures of the Protestant temperament. The fact is that
M. Daudet has not (to my belief) any natural understanding of the
religious passion; he has a quick perception of many things, but that
province of the human mind cannot be _fait de chic_--experience, there,
is the only explorer. Madame Autheman is not a real bigot; she is simply
a dusky effigy, she is undemonstrated. Eline Ebsen is not a victim,
inasmuch as she is but half alive, and victims are victims only in
virtue of being thoroughly sentient. I do not easily perceive her
spiritual joints. All the human part of the book, however, has the
author’s habitual felicity; and the reader of these remarks knows what I
hold that to be. It may seem to him, indeed, that in making the
concession I made just above--in saying that Alphonse Daudet’s insight
fails him when he begins to take the soul into account--I partly retract
some of the admiration I have expressed for him. For that amounts, after
all, to saying that he has no high imagination, and, as a consequence,
no ideas. It is very true, I am afraid, that he has not a great number
of ideas. There are certain things he does not conceive--certain forms
that never appear to him. Imaginative writers of the first order always
give us an impression that they have a kind of philosophy. We should be
embarrassed to put our finger on Daudet’s philosophy. “And yet you have
praised him so much,” we fancy we hear it urged; “you have praised him
as if he were one of the very first.” All that is very true, and yet we
take nothing back. Determinations of rank are a delicate matter, and it
is sufficient priority for an author that one likes him immensely.
Daudet is bright, vivid, tender; he has an intense artistic life. And
then he is so free. For the spirit that moves slowly, going carefully
from point to point, not sure whether this or that or the other will
“do,” the sight of such freedom is delightful.
1883.
VIII
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
I
The first artists, in any line, are doubtless not those whose general
ideas about their art are most often on their lips--those who most
abound in precept, apology, and formula and can best tell us the reasons
and the philosophy of things. We know the first usually by their
energetic practice, the constancy with which they apply their
principles, and the serenity with which they leave us to hunt for their
secret in the illustration, the concrete example. None the less it often
happens that a valid artist utters his mystery, flashes upon us for a
moment the light by which he works, shows us the rule by which he holds
it just that he should be measured. This accident is happiest, I think,
when it is soonest over; the shortest explanations of the products of
genius are the best, and there is many a creator of living figures whose
friends, however full of faith in his inspiration, will do well to pray
for him when he sallies forth into the dim wilderness of theory. The
doctrine is apt to be so much less inspired than the work, the work is
often so much more intelligent than the doctrine. M. Guy de Maupassant
has lately traversed with a firm and rapid step a literary crisis of
this kind; he has clambered safely up the bank at the further end of the
morass. If he has relieved himself in the preface to _Pierre et Jean_,
the last-published of his tales, he has also rendered a service to his
friends; he has not only come home in a recognisable plight, escaping
gross disaster with a success which even his extreme good sense was far
from making in advance a matter of course, but he has expressed in
intelligible terms (that by itself is a ground of felicitation) his most
general idea, his own sense of his direction. He has arranged, as it
were, the light in which he wishes to sit. If it is a question of
attempting, under however many disadvantages, a sketch of him, the
critic’s business therefore is simplified: there will be no difficulty
in placing him, for he himself has chosen the spot, he has made the
chalk-mark on the floor.
I may as well say at once that in dissertation M. de Maupassant does not
write with his best pen; the philosopher in his composition is
perceptibly inferior to the story-teller. I would rather have written
half a page of _Boule de Suif_ than the whole of the introduction to
Flaubert’s _Letters to Madame Sand_; and his little disquisition on the
novel in general, attached to that particular example of it which he has
just put forth,[5] is considerably less to the point than the
masterpiece which it ushers in. In short, as a commentator M. de
Maupassant is slightly common, while as an artist he is wonderfully
rare. Of course we must, in judging a writer, take one thing with
another, and if I could make up my mind that M. de Maupassant is weak in
theory, it would almost make me like him better, render him more
approachable, give him the touch of softness that he lacks, and show us
a human flaw. The most general quality of the author of _La Maison
Tellier_ and _Bel-Ami_, the impression that remains last, after the
others have been accounted for, is an essential hardness--hardness of
form, hardness of nature; and it would put us more at ease to find that
if the fact with him (the fact of execution) is so extraordinarily
definite and adequate, his explanations, after it, were a little vague
and sentimental. But I am not sure that he must even be held foolish to
have noticed the race of critics: he is at any rate so much less foolish
than several of that fraternity. He has said his say concisely and as if
he were saying it once for all. In fine, his readers must be grateful to
him for such a passage as that in which he remarks that whereas the
public at large very legitimately says to a writer, “Console me, amuse
me, terrify me, make me cry, make me dream, or make me think,” what the
sincere critic says is, “Make me something fine in the form that shall
suit you best, according to your temperament.” This seems to me to put
into a nutshell the whole question of the different classes of fiction,
concerning which there has recently been so much discourse. There are
simply as many different kinds as there are persons practising the art,
for if a picture, a tale, or a novel be a direct impression of life (and
that surely constitutes its interest and value), the impression will
vary according to the plate that takes it, the particular structure and
mixture of the recipient.
I am not sure that I know what M. de Maupassant means when he says, “The
critic shall appreciate the result only according to the nature of the
effort; he has no right to concern himself with tendencies.” The second
clause of that observation strikes me as rather in the air, thanks to
the vagueness of the last word. But our author adds to the definiteness
of his contention when he goes on to say that any form of the novel is
simply a vision of the world from the standpoint of a person constituted
after a certain fashion, and that it is therefore absurd to say that
there is, for the novelist’s use, only one reality of things. This seems
to me commendable, not as a flight of metaphysics, hovering over
bottomless gulfs of controversy, but, on the contrary, as a just
indication of the vanity of certain dogmatisms. The particular way we
see the world is our particular illusion about it, says M. de
Maupassant, and this illusion fits itself to our organs and senses; our
receptive vessel becomes the furniture of _our_ little plot of the
universal consciousness.
“How childish, moreover, to believe in reality, since we each carry
our own in our thought and in our organs. Our eyes, our ears, our
sense of smell, of taste, differing from one person to another,
create as many truths as there are men upon earth. And our minds,
taking instruction from these organs, so diversely impressed,
understand, analyse, judge, as if each of us belonged to a
different race. Each one of us, therefore, forms for himself an
illusion of the world, which is the illusion poetic, or
sentimental, or joyous, or melancholy, or unclean, or dismal,
according to his nature. And the writer has no other mission than
to reproduce faithfully this illusion, with all the contrivances of
art that he has learned and has at his command. The illusion of
beauty, which is a human convention! The illusion of ugliness,
which is a changing opinion! The illusion of truth, which is never
immutable! The illusion of the ignoble, which attracts so many! The
great artists are those who make humanity accept their particular
illusion. Let us, therefore, not get angry with any one theory,
since every theory is the generalised expression of a temperament
asking itself questions.”
What is interesting in this is not that M. de Maupassant happens to hold
that we have no universal measure of the truth, but that it is the last
word on a question of art from a writer who is rich in experience and
has had success in a very rare degree. It is of secondary importance
that our impression should be called, or not called, an illusion; what
is excellent is that our author has stated more neatly than we have
lately seen it done that the value of the artist resides in the
clearness with which he gives forth that impression. His particular
organism constitutes a _case_, and the critic is intelligent in
proportion as he apprehends and enters into that case. To quarrel with
it because it is not another, which it could not possibly have been
without a wholly different outfit, appears to M. de Maupassant a
deplorable waste of time. If this appeal to our disinterestedness may
strike some readers as chilling (through their inability to conceive of
any other form than the one they like--a limitation excellent for a
reader but poor for a judge), the occasion happens to be none of the
best for saying so, for M. de Maupassant himself precisely presents all
the symptoms of a “case” in the most striking way, and shows us how far
the consideration of them may take us. Embracing such an opportunity as
this, and giving ourselves to it freely, seems to me indeed to be a
course more fruitful in valid conclusions, as well as in entertainment
by the way, than the more common method of establishing one’s own
premises. To make clear to ourselves those of the author of _Pierre et
Jean_--those to which he is committed by the very nature of his mind--is
an attempt that will both stimulate and repay curiosity. There is no way
of looking at his work less dry, less academic, for as we proceed from
one of his peculiarities to another, the whole horizon widens, yet
without our leaving firm ground, and we see ourselves landed, step by
step, in the most general questions--those explanations of things which
reside in the race, in the society. Of course there are cases and cases,
and it is the salient ones that the disinterested critic is delighted to
meet.
What makes M. de Maupassant salient is two facts: the first of which is
that his gifts are remarkably strong and definite, and the second that
he writes directly _from_ them, as it were: holds the fullest, the most
uninterrupted--I scarcely know what to call it--the boldest
communication with them. A case is poor when the cluster of the artist’s
sensibilities is small, or they themselves are wanting in keenness, or
else when the personage fails to admit them--either through ignorance,
or diffidence, or stupidity, or the error of a false ideal--to what may
be called a legitimate share in his attempt. It is, I think, among
English and American writers that this latter accident is most liable to
occur; more than the French we are apt to be misled by some convention
or other as to the sort of feeler we _ought_ to put forth, forgetting
that the best one will be the one that nature happens to have given us.
We have doubtless often enough the courage of our opinions (when it
befalls that we have opinions), but we have not so constantly that of
our perceptions. There is a whole side of our perceptive apparatus that
we in fact neglect, and there are probably many among us who would erect
this tendency into a duty. M. de Maupassant neglects nothing that he
possesses; he cultivates his garden with admirable energy; and if there
is a flower you miss from the rich parterre, you may be sure that it
could not possibly have been raised, his mind not containing the soil
for it. He is plainly of the opinion that the first duty of the artist,
and the thing that makes him most useful to his fellow-men, is to
master his instrument, whatever it may happen to be.