alone, that life appeals to him; it is almost alone by their help that
he describes it, that he produces brilliant works. They render him this
great assistance because they are evidently, in his constitution,
extraordinarily alive; there is scarcely a page in all his twenty
volumes that does not testify to their vivacity. Nothing could be
further from his thought than to disavow them and to minimise their
importance. He accepts them frankly, gratefully, works them, rejoices in
them. If he were told that there are many English writers who would be
sorry to go with him in this, he would, I imagine, staring, say that
that is about what was to have been expected of the Anglo-Saxon race, or
even that many of them probably could not go with him if they would.
Then he would ask how our authors can be so foolish as to sacrifice such
a _moyen_, how they can afford to, and exclaim, “They must be pretty
works, those they produce, and give a fine, true, complete account of
life, with such omissions, such lacunæ!” M. de Maupassant’s productions
teach us, for instance, that his sense of smell is exceptionally
acute--as acute as that of those animals of the field and forest whose
subsistence and security depend upon it. It might be thought that he
would, as a student of the human race, have found an abnormal
development of this faculty embarrassing, scarcely knowing what to do
with it, where to place it. But such an apprehension betrays an
imperfect conception of his directness and resolution, as well as of his
constant economy of means. Nothing whatever prevents him from
representing the relations of men and women as largely governed by the
scent of the parties. Human life in his pages (would this not be the
most general description he would give of it?) appears for the most part
as a sort of concert of odours, and his people are perpetually engaged,
or he is engaged on their behalf, in sniffing up and distinguishing
them, in some pleasant or painful exercise of the nostril. “If
everything in life speaks to the nostril, why on earth shouldn’t we say
so?” I suppose him to inquire; “and what a proof of the empire of poor
conventions and hypocrisies, _chez vous autres_, that you should pretend
to describe and characterise, and yet take no note (or so little that it
comes to the same thing) of that essential sign!”
Not less powerful is his visual sense, the quick, direct discrimination
of his eye, which explains the singularly vivid concision of his
descriptions. These are never prolonged nor analytic, have nothing of
enumeration, of the quality of the observer, who counts the items to be
sure he has made up the sum. His eye _selects_ unerringly,
unscrupulously, almost impudently--catches the particular thing in which
the character of the object or the scene resides, and, by expressing it
with the artful brevity of a master, leaves a convincing, original
picture. If he is inveterately synthetic, he is never more so than in
the way he brings this hard, short, intelligent gaze to bear. His vision
of the world is for the most part a vision of ugliness, and even when it
is not, there is in his easy power to generalise a certain absence of
love, a sort of bird’s-eye-view contempt. He has none of the
superstitions of observation, none of our English indulgences, our
tender and often imaginative superficialities. If he glances into a
railway carriage bearing its freight into the Parisian suburbs of a
summer Sunday, a dozen dreary lives map themselves out in a flash.
“There were stout ladies in farcical clothes, those middle-class
goodwives of the _banlieue_ who replace the distinction they don’t
possess by an irrelevant dignity; gentlemen weary of the office,
with sallow faces and twisted bodies, and one of their shoulders a
little forced up by perpetual bending at work over a table. Their
anxious, joyless faces spoke moreover of domestic worries,
incessant needs for money, old hopes finally shattered; for they
all belonged to the army of poor threadbare devils who vegetate
frugally in a mean little plaster house, with a flower-bed for a
garden.” ...
Even in a brighter picture, such as the admirable vignette of the drive
of Madame Tellier and her companions, the whole thing is an impression,
as painters say nowadays, in which the figures are cheap. The six women
at the station clamber into a country cart and go jolting through the
Norman landscape to the village.
“But presently the jerky trot of the nag shook the vehicle so
terribly that the chairs began to dance, tossing up the travellers
to right, to left, with movements like puppets, scared grimaces,
cries of dismay suddenly interrupted by a more violent bump. They
clutched the sides of the trap, their bonnets turned over on to
their backs, or upon the nose or the shoulder; and the white horse
continued to go, thrusting out his head and straightening the
little tail, hairless like that of a rat, with which from time to
time he whisked his buttocks. Joseph Rivet, with one foot stretched
upon the shaft, the other leg bent under him, and his elbows very
high, held the reins and emitted from his throat every moment a
kind of cluck which caused the animal to prick up his ears and
quicken his pace. On either side of the road the green country
stretched away. The colza, in flower, produced in spots a great
carpet of undulating yellow, from which there rose a strong,
wholesome smell, a smell penetrating and pleasant, carried very far
by the breeze. In the tall rye the cornflowers held up their little
azure heads, which the women wished to pluck; but M. Rivet refused
to stop. Then, in some place, a whole field looked as if it were
sprinkled with blood, it was so crowded with poppies. And in the
midst of the great level, taking colour in this fashion from the
flowers of the soil, the trap passed on with the jog of the white
horse, seeming itself to carry a nosegay of richer hues; it
disappeared behind the big trees of a farm, to come out again where
the foliage stopped and parade afresh through the green and yellow
crops, pricked with red or blue, its blazing cartload of women,
which receded in the sunshine.”
As regards the other sense, the sense _par excellence_, the sense which
we scarcely mention in English fiction, and which I am not very sure I
shall be allowed to mention in an English periodical, M. de Maupassant
speaks for that, and of it, with extraordinary distinctness and
authority. To say that it occupies the first place in his picture is to
say too little; it covers in truth the whole canvas, and his work is
little else but a report of its innumerable manifestations. These
manifestations are not, for him, so many incidents of life; they are
life itself, they represent the standing answer to any question that we
may ask about it. He describes them in detail, with a familiarity and a
frankness which leave nothing to be added; I should say with singular
truth, if I did not consider that in regard to this article he may be
taxed with a certain exaggeration. M. de Maupassant would doubtless
affirm that where the empire of the sexual sense is concerned, no
exaggeration is possible: nevertheless it may be said that whatever
depths may be discovered by those who dig for them, the impression of
the human spectacle for him who takes it as it comes has less analogy
with that of the monkeys’ cage than this admirable writer’s account of
it. I speak of the human spectacle as we Anglo-Saxons see it--as we
Anglo-Saxons pretend we see it, M. de Maupassant would possibly say.
At any rate, I have perhaps touched upon this peculiarity sufficiently
to explain my remark that his point of view is almost solely that of the
senses. If he is a very interesting case, this makes him also an
embarrassing one, embarrassing and mystifying for the moralist. I may as
well admit that no writer of the day strikes me as equally so. To find
M. de Maupassant a lion in the path--that may seem to some people a
singular proof of want of courage; but I think the obstacle will not be
made light of by those who have really taken the measure of the animal.
We are accustomed to think, we of the English faith, that a cynic is a
living advertisement of his errors, especially in proportion as he is a
thorough-going one; and M. de Maupassant’s cynicism, unrelieved as it
is, will not be disposed of off-hand by a critic of a competent literary
sense. Such a critic is not slow to perceive, to his no small confusion,
that though, judging from usual premises, the author of _Bel-Ami_ ought
to be a warning, he somehow is not. His baseness, as it pervades him,
ought to be written all over him; yet somehow there are there certain
aspects--and those commanding, as the house-agents say--in which it is
not in the least to be perceived. It is easy to exclaim that if he
judges life only from the point of view of the senses, many are the
noble and exquisite things that he must leave out. What he leaves out
has no claim to get itself considered till after we have done justice to
what he takes in. It is this positive side of M. de Maupassant that is
most remarkable--the fact that his literary character is so complete and
edifying. “Auteur à peu près irréprochable dans un genre qui ne l’est
pas,” as that excellent critic M. Jules Lemaître says of him, he
disturbs us by associating a conscience and a high standard with a
temper long synonymous, in our eyes, with an absence of scruples. The
situation would be simpler certainly if he were a bad writer; but none
the less it is possible, I think, on the whole, to circumvent him, even
without attempting to prove that after all he is one.
The latter part of his introduction to _Pierre et Jean_ is less
felicitous than the beginning, but we learn from it--and this is
interesting--that he regards the analytic fashion of telling a story,
which has lately begotten in his own country some such remarkable
experiments (few votaries as it has attracted among ourselves), as very
much less profitable than the simple epic manner which “avoids with care
all complicated explanations, all dissertations upon motives, and
confines itself to making persons and events pass before our eyes.” M.
de Maupassant adds that in his view “psychology should be hidden in a
book, as it is hidden in reality under the facts of existence. The novel
conceived in this manner gains interest, movement, colour, the bustle of
life.” When it is a question of an artistic process, we must always
mistrust very sharp distinctions, for there is surely in every method a
little of every other method. It is as difficult to describe an action
without glancing at its motive, its moral history, as it is to describe
a motive without glancing at its practical consequence. Our history and
our fiction are what we do; but it surely is not more easy to determine
where what we do begins than to determine where it ends--notoriously a
hopeless task. Therefore it would take a very subtle sense to draw a
hard and fast line on the borderland of explanation and illustration. If
psychology be hidden in life, as, according to M. de Maupassant, it
should be in a book, the question immediately comes up, “From whom is
it hidden?” From some people, no doubt, but very much less from others;
and all depends upon the observer, the nature of one’s observation, and
one’s curiosity. For some people motives, reasons, relations,
explanations, are a part of the very surface of the drama, with the
footlights beating full upon them. For me an act, an incident, an
attitude, may be a sharp, detached, isolated thing, of which I give a
full account in saying that in such and such a way it came off. For you
it may be hung about with implications, with relations, and conditions
as necessary to help you to recognise it as the clothes of your friends
are to help you know them in the street. You feel that they would seem
strange to you without petticoats and trousers.
M. de Maupassant would probably urge that the right thing is to know, or
to guess, how events come to pass, but to say as little about it as
possible. There are matters in regard to which he feels the importance
of being explicit, but that is not one of them. The contention to which
I allude strikes me as rather arbitrary, so difficult is it to put one’s
finger upon the reason why, for instance, there should be so little
mystery about what happened to Christiane Andermatt, in _Mont-Oriol_,
when she went to walk on the hills with Paul Brétigny, and so much, say,
about the forces that formed her for that gentleman’s convenience, or
those lying behind any other odd collapse that our author may have
related. The rule misleads, and the best rule certainly is the tact of
the individual writer, which will adapt itself to the material as the
material comes to him. The cause we plead is ever pretty sure to be the
cause of our idiosyncrasies, and if M. de Maupassant thinks meanly of
“explanations,” it is, I suspect, that they come to him in no great
affluence. His view of the conduct of man is so simple as scarcely to
require them; and indeed so far as they are needed he _is_, virtually,
explanatory. He deprecates reference to motives, but there is one,
covering an immense ground in his horizon, as I have already hinted, to
which he perpetually refers. If the sexual impulse be not a moral
antecedent, it is none the less the wire that moves almost all M. de
Maupassant’s puppets, and as he has not hidden it, I cannot see that he
has eliminated analysis or made a sacrifice to discretion. His pages are
studded with that particular analysis; he is constantly peeping behind
the curtain, telling us what he discovers there. The truth is that the
admirable system of simplification which makes his tales so rapid and so
concise (especially his shorter ones, for his novels in some degree, I
think, suffer from it), strikes us as not in the least a conscious
intellectual effort, a selective, comparative process. He tells us all
he knows, all he suspects, and if these things take no account of the
moral nature of man, it is because he has no window looking in that
direction, and not because artistic scruples have compelled him to close
it up. The very compact mansion in which he dwells presents on that
side a perfectly dead wall.
This is why, if his axiom that you produce the effect of truth better by
painting people from the outside than from the inside has a large
utility, his example is convincing in a much higher degree. A writer is
fortunate when his theory and his limitations so exactly correspond,
when his curiosities may be appeased with such precision and
promptitude. M. de Maupassant contends that the most that the analytic
novelist can do is to put himself--his own peculiarities--into the
costume of the figure analysed. This may be true, but if it applies to
one manner of representing people who are not ourselves, it applies also
to any other manner. It is the limitation, the difficulty of the
novelist, to whatever clan or camp he may belong. M. de Maupassant is
remarkably objective and impersonal, but he would go too far if he were
to entertain the belief that he has kept himself out of his books. They
speak of him eloquently, even if it only be to tell us how easy--how
easy, given his talent of course--he has found this impersonality. Let
us hasten to add that in the case of describing a character it is
doubtless more difficult to convey the impression of something that is
not one’s self (the constant effort, however delusive at bottom, of the
novelist), than in the case of describing some object more immediately
visible. The operation is more delicate, but that circumstance only
increases the beauty of the problem.
On the question of style our author has some excellent remarks; we may
be grateful indeed for every one of them, save an odd reflection about
the way to “become original” if we happen not to be so. The recipe for
this transformation, it would appear, is to sit down in front of a
blazing fire, or a tree in a plain, or any object we encounter in the
regular way of business, and remain there until the tree, or the fire,
or the object, whatever it be, become different for us from all other
specimens of the same class. I doubt whether this system would always
answer, for surely the resemblance is what we wish to discover, quite as
much as the difference, and the best way to preserve it is not to look
for something opposed to it. Is not this indication of the road to take
to become, as a writer, original touched with the same fallacy as the
recommendation about eschewing analysis? It is the only _naïveté_ I have
encountered in M. de Maupassant’s many volumes. The best originality is
the most unconscious, and the best way to describe a tree is the way in
which it has struck us. “Ah, but we don’t always know how it has struck
us,” the answer to that may be, “and it takes some time and
ingenuity--much fasting and prayer--to find out.” If we do not know, it
probably has not struck us very much: so little indeed that our inquiry
had better be relegated to that closed chamber of an artist’s
meditations, that sacred back kitchen, which no _a priori_ rule can
light up. The best thing the artist’s adviser can do in such a case is
to trust him and turn away, to let him fight the matter out with his
conscience. And be this said with a full appreciation of the degree in
which M. de Maupassant’s observations on the whole question of a
writer’s style, at the point we have come to to-day, bear the stamp of
intelligence and experience. His own style is of so excellent a
tradition that the presumption is altogether in favour of what he may
have to say.
He feels oppressively, discouragingly, as many another of his countrymen
must have felt--for the French have worked their language as no other
people have done--the penalty of coming at the end of three centuries of
literature, the difficulty of dealing with an instrument of expression
so worn by friction, of drawing new sounds from the old familiar pipe.
“When we read, so saturated with French writing as we are that our whole
body gives us the impression of being a paste made of words, do we ever
find a line, a thought, which is not familiar to us, and of which we
have not had at least a confused presentiment?” And he adds that the
matter is simple enough for the writer who only seeks to amuse the
public by means already known; he attempts little, and he produces “with
confidence, in the candour of his mediocrity,” works which answer no
question and leave no trace. It is he who wants to do more than this
that has less and less an easy time of it. Everything seems to him to
have been done, every effect produced, every combination already made.
If he be a man of genius, his trouble is lightened, for mysterious ways
are revealed to him, and new combinations spring up for him even after
novelty is dead. It is to the simple man of taste and talent, who has
only a conscience and a will, that the situation may sometimes well
appear desperate; he judges himself as he goes, and he can only go step
by step over ground where every step is already a footprint.
If it be a miracle whenever there is a fresh tone, the miracle has been
wrought for M. de Maupassant. Or is he simply a man of genius to whom
short cuts have been disclosed in the watches of the night? At any rate
he has had faith--religion has come to his aid; I mean the religion of
his mother tongue, which he has loved well enough to be patient for her
sake. He has arrived at the peace which passeth understanding, at a kind
of conservative piety. He has taken his stand on simplicity, on a
studied sobriety, being persuaded that the deepest science lies in that
direction rather than in the multiplication of new terms, and on this
subject he delivers himself with superlative wisdom. “There is no need
of the queer, complicated, numerous, and Chinese vocabulary which is
imposed on us to-day under the name of artistic writing, to fix all the
shades of thought; the right way is to distinguish with an extreme
clearness all those modifications of the value of a word which come from
the place it occupies. Let us have fewer nouns, verbs and adjectives of
an almost imperceptible sense, and more different phrases variously
constructed, ingeniously cast, full of the science of sound and rhythm.
Let us have an excellent general form rather than be collectors of rare
terms.” M. de Maupassant’s practice does not fall below his exhortation
(though I must confess that in the foregoing passage he makes use of the
detestable expression “stylist,” which I have not reproduced). Nothing
can exceed the masculine firmness, the quiet force of his own style, in
which every phrase is a close sequence, every epithet a paying piece,
and the ground is completely cleared of the vague, the ready-made and
the second-best. Less than any one to-day does he beat the air; more
than any one does he hit out from the shoulder.
II
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. (They are very unequal,
and I speak of the best.) The little story is but scantily relished in
England, where readers take their fiction rather by the volume than by
the page, and the novelist’s idea is apt to resemble one of those
old-fashioned carriages which require a wide court to turn round. In
America, where it is associated pre-eminently with Hawthorne’s name,
with Edgar Poe’s, and with that of Mr. Bret Harte, the short tale has
had a better fortune. France, however, has been the land of its great
prosperity, and M. de Maupassant had from the first the advantage of
addressing a public accustomed to catch on, as the modern phrase is,
quickly. In some respects, it may be said, he encountered prejudices
too friendly, for he found a tradition of indecency ready made to his
hand. I say indecency with plainness, though my indication would perhaps
please better with another word, for we suffer in English from a lack of
roundabout names for the _conte leste_--that element for which the
French, with their _grivois_, their _gaillard_, their _égrillard_, their
_gaudriole_, have so many convenient synonyms. It is an honoured
tradition in France that the little story, in verse or in prose, should
be liable to be more or less obscene (I can think only of that
alternative epithet), though I hasten to add that among literary forms
it does not monopolise the privilege. Our uncleanness is less
producible--at any rate it is less produced.