these condensed compositions, of which, probably, to an English reader,
at a first glance, the most universal sign will be their licentiousness.
They really partake of this quality, however, in a very differing
degree, and a second glance shows that they may be divided into numerous
groups. It is not fair, I think, even to say that what they have most in
common is their being extremely _lestes_. What they have most in common
is their being extremely strong, and after that their being extremely
brutal. A story may be obscene without being brutal, and _vice versâ_,
and M. de Maupassant’s contempt for those interdictions which are
supposed to be made in the interest of good morals is but an incident--a
very large one indeed--of his general contempt. A pessimism so great
that its alliance with the love of good work, or even with the
calculation of the sort of work that pays best in a country of style,
is, as I have intimated, the most puzzling of anomalies (for it would
seem in the light of such sentiments that nothing is worth anything),
this cynical strain is the sign of such gems of narration as _La Maison
Tellier_, _L’Histoire d’une Fille de Ferme_, _L’Ane_, _Le Chien_,
_Mademoiselle Fifi_, _Monsieur Parent_, _L’Héritage_, _En Famille_, _Le
Baptême_, _Le Père Amable_. The author fixes a hard eye on some small
spot of human life, usually some ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid one, takes
up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it
bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is very droll, sometimes the wound is very
horrible; but in either case the whole thing is real, observed, noted,
and represented, not an invention or a castle in the air. 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. When his laugh is
not for these things, it is for the little _saletés_ (to use one of his
own favourite words) of luxurious life, which are intended to be
prettier, but which can scarcely be said to brighten the picture. I like
_La Bête à Maître Belhomme_, _La Ficelle_, _Le Petit Fût_, _Le Cas de
Madame Luneau_, _Tribuneaux Rustiques_, and many others of this category
much better than his anecdotes of the mutual confidences of his little
_marquises_ and _baronnes_.
Not counting his novels for the moment, his tales may be divided into
the three groups of those which deal with the Norman peasantry, those
which deal with the _petit employé_ and small shopkeeper, usually in
Paris, and the miscellaneous, in which the upper walks of life are
represented, and the fantastic, the whimsical, the weird, and even the
supernatural, figure as well as the unexpurgated. These last things
range from _Le Horla_ (which is not a specimen of the author’s best
vein--the only occasion on which he has the weakness of imitation is
when he strikes us as emulating Edgar Poe) to _Miss Harriet_, and from
_Boule de Suif_ (a triumph) to that almost inconceivable little growl of
Anglophobia, _Découverte_--inconceivable I mean in its irresponsibility
and ill-nature on the part of a man of M. de Maupassant’s distinction;
passing by such little perfections as _Petit Soldat_, _L’Abandonné_, _Le
Collier_ (the list is too long for complete enumeration), and such gross
imperfections (for it once in a while befalls our author to go woefully
astray), as _La Femme de Paul_, _Châli_, _Les Sœurs Rondoli_. To these
might almost be added as a special category the various forms in which
M. de Maupassant relates adventures in railway carriages. Numerous, to
his imagination, are the pretexts for enlivening fiction afforded by
first, second, and third class compartments; the accidents (which have
nothing to do with the conduct of the train) that occur there constitute
no inconsiderable part of our earthly transit.
It is surely by his Norman peasant that his tales will live; he knows
this worthy as if he had made him, understands him down to the ground,
puts him on his feet with a few of the freest, most plastic touches. M.
de Maupassant does not admire him, and he is such a master of the
subject that it would ill become an outsider to suggest a revision of
judgment. He is a part of the contemptible furniture of the world, but
on the whole, it would appear, the most grotesque part of it. His
caution, his canniness, his natural astuteness, his stinginess, his
general grinding sordidness, are as unmistakable as that quaint and
brutish dialect in which he expresses himself, and on which our author
plays like a virtuoso. It would be impossible to demonstrate with a
finer sense of the humour of the thing the fatuities and densities of
his ignorance, the bewilderments of his opposed appetites, the
overreachings of his caution. His existence has a gay side, but it is
apt to be the barbarous gaiety commemorated in _Farce Normande_, an
anecdote which, like many of M. de Maupassant’s anecdotes, it is easier
to refer the reader to than to repeat. If it is most convenient to place
_La Maison Tellier_ among the tales of the peasantry, there is no doubt
that it stands at the head of the list. It is absolutely unadapted to
the perusal of ladies and young persons, but it shares this peculiarity
with most of its fellows, so that to ignore it on that account would be
to imply that we must forswear M. de Maupassant altogether, which is an
incongruous and insupportable conclusion. Every good story is of course
both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better
the problem is solved. In _La Maison Tellier_ they fit each other to
perfection; the capacity for sudden innocent delights latent in natures
which have lost their innocence is vividly illustrated by the singular
scenes to which our acquaintance with Madame and her staff (little as it
may be a thing to boast of), successively introduces us. The breadth,
the freedom, and brightness of all this give the measure of the author’s
talent, and of that large, keen way of looking at life which sees the
pathetic and the droll, the stuff of which the whole piece is made, in
the queerest and humblest patterns. The tone of _La Maison Tellier_ and
the few compositions which closely resemble it, expresses M. de
Maupassant’s nearest approach to geniality. Even here, however, it is
the geniality of the showman exhilarated by the success with which he
feels that he makes his mannikins (and especially his womankins) caper
and squeak, and who after the performance tosses them into their box
with the irreverence of a practised hand. If the pages of the author of
_Bel-Ami_ may be searched almost in vain for a manifestation of the
sentiment of respect, it is naturally not by Mme. Tellier and her
charges that we must look most to see it called forth; but they are
among the things that please him most.
Sometimes there is a sorrow, a misery, or even a little heroism, that he
handles with a certain tenderness (_Une Vie_ is the capital example of
this), without insisting on the poor, the ridiculous, or, as he is fond
of saying, the bestial side of it. Such an attempt, admirable in its
sobriety and delicacy, is the sketch, in _L’Abandonné_, of the old lady
and gentleman, Mme. de Cadour and M. d’Apreval, who, staying with the
husband of the former at a little watering-place on the Normandy coast,
take a long, hot walk on a summer’s day, on a straight, white road, into
the interior, to catch a clandestine glimpse of a young farmer, their
illegitimate son. He has been pensioned, he is ignorant of his origin,
and is a common-place and unconciliatory rustic. They look at him, in
his dirty farmyard, and no sign passes between them; then they turn away
and crawl back, in melancholy silence, along the dull French road. The
manner in which this dreary little occurrence is related makes it as
large as a chapter of history. There is tenderness in _Miss Harriet_,
which sets forth how an English old maid, fantastic, hideous,
sentimental, and tract-distributing, with a smell of india-rubber, fell
in love with an irresistible French painter, and drowned herself in the
well because she saw him kissing the maid-servant; but the figure of the
lady grazes the farcical. Is it because we know Miss Harriet (if we are
not mistaken in the type the author has had in his eye) that we suspect
the good spinster was not so weird and desperate, addicted though her
class may be, as he says, to “haunting all the _tables d’hôte_ in
Europe, to spoiling Italy, poisoning Switzerland, making the charming
towns of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carrying everywhere their
queer little manias, their _mœurs de vestales pétrifiées_, their
indescribable garments, and that odour of india-rubber which makes one
think that at night they must be slipped into a case?” What would Miss
Harriet have said to M. de Maupassant’s friend, the hero of the
_Découverte_, who, having married a little Anglaise because he thought
she was charming when she spoke broken French, finds she is very flat as
she becomes more fluent, and has nothing more urgent than to denounce
her to a gentleman he meets on the steamboat, and to relieve his wrath
in ejaculations of “Sales Anglais”?
M. de Maupassant evidently knows a great deal about the army of clerks
who work under government, but it is a terrible tale that he has to tell
of them and of the _petit bourgeois_ in general. It is true that he has
treated the _petit bourgeois_ in _Pierre et Jean_ without holding him up
to our derision, and the effort has been so fruitful, that we owe to it
the work for which, on the whole, in the long list of his successes, we
are most thankful. But of _Pierre et Jean_, a production neither comic
nor cynical (in the degree, that is, of its predecessors), but serious
and fresh, I will speak anon. In _Monsieur Parent_, _L’Héritage_, _En
Famille_, _Une Partie de Campagne_, _Promenade_, and many other pitiless
little pieces, the author opens the window wide to his perception of
everything mean, narrow, and sordid. The subject is ever the struggle
for existence in hard conditions, lighted up simply by more or less
_polissonnerie_. Nothing is more striking to an Anglo-Saxon reader than
the omission of all the other lights, those with which our imagination,
and I think it ought to be said our observation, is familiar, and which
our own works of fiction at any rate do not permit us to forget: those
of which the most general description is that they spring from a certain
mixture of good-humour and piety--piety, I mean, in the civil and
domestic sense quite as much as in the religious. The love of sport, the
sense of decorum, the necessity for action, the habit of respect, the
absence of irony, the pervasiveness of childhood, the expansive tendency
of the race, are a few of the qualities (the analysis might, I think, be
pushed much further) which ease us off, mitigate our tension and
irritation, rescue us from the nervous exasperation which is almost the
commonest element of life as depicted by M. de Maupassant. No doubt
there is in our literature an immense amount of conventional blinking,
and it may be questioned whether pessimistic representation in M. de
Maupassant’s manner do not follow his particular original more closely
than our perpetual quest of pleasantness (does not Mr. Rider Haggard
make even his African carnage pleasant?) adheres to the lines of the
world we ourselves know.
Fierce indeed is the struggle for existence among even our pious and
good-humoured millions, and it is attended with incidents as to which
after all little testimony is to be extracted from our literature of
fiction. It must never be forgotten that the optimism of that literature
is partly the optimism of women and of spinsters; in other words the
optimism of ignorance as well as of delicacy. It might be supposed that
the French, with their mastery of the _arts d’agrément_, would have more
consolations than we, but such is not the account of the matter given by
the new generation of painters. To the French we seem superficial, and
we are certainly open to the reproach; but none the less even to the
infinite majority of readers of good faith there will be a wonderful
want of correspondence between the general picture of _Bel-Ami_, of
_Mont-Oriol_, of _Une Vie_, _Yvette_ and _En Famille_, and our own
vision of reality. It is an old impression of course that the satire of
the French has a very different tone from ours; but few English readers
will admit that the feeling of life is less in ours than in theirs. The
feeling of life is evidently, _de part et d’autre_, a very different
thing. If in ours, as the novel illustrates it, there are
superficialities, there are also qualities which are far from being
negatives and omissions: a large imagination and (is it fatuous to say?)
a large experience of the positive kind. Even those of our novelists
whose manner is most ironic pity life more and hate it less than M. de
Maupassant and his great initiator Flaubert. It comes back I suppose to
our good-humour (which may apparently also be an artistic force); at any
rate, we have reserves about our shames and our sorrows, indulgences
and tolerances about our Philistinism, forbearances about our blows, and
a general friendliness of conception about our possibilities, which take
the cruelty from our self-derision and operate in the last resort as a
sort of tribute to our freedom. There is a horrible, admirable scene in
_Monsieur Parent_, which is a capital example of triumphant ugliness.
The harmless gentleman who gives his name to the tale has an abominable
wife, one of whose offensive attributes is a lover (unsuspected by her
husband), only less impudent than herself. M. Parent comes in from a
walk with his little boy, at dinner-time, to encounter suddenly in his
abused, dishonoured, deserted home, convincing proof of her
misbehaviour. He waits and waits dinner for her, giving her the benefit
of every doubt; but when at last she enters, late in the evening,
accompanied by the partner of her guilt, there is a tremendous domestic
concussion. It is to the peculiar vividness of this scene that I allude,
the way we hear it and see it, and its most repulsive details are evoked
for us: the sordid confusion, the vulgar noise, the disordered table and
ruined dinner, the shrill insolence of the wife, her brazen mendacity,
the scared inferiority of the lover, the mere momentary heroics of the
weak husband, the scuffle and somersault, the eminently unpoetic justice
with which it all ends.
When Thackeray relates how Arthur Pendennis goes home to take pot-luck
with the insolvent Newcomes at Boulogne, and how the dreadful Mrs.
Mackenzie receives him, and how she makes a scene, when the frugal
repast is served, over the diminished mutton-bone, we feel that the
notation of that order of misery goes about as far as we can bear it.
But this is child’s play to the history of M. and Mme. Caravan and their
attempt, after the death (or supposed death) of the husband’s mother, to
transfer to their apartment before the arrival of the other heirs
certain miserable little articles of furniture belonging to the
deceased, together with the frustration of the manœuvre not only by the
grim resurrection of the old woman (which is a sufficiently fantastic
item), but by the shock of battle when a married daughter and her
husband appear. No one gives us like M. de Maupassant the odious words
exchanged on such an occasion as that: no one depicts with so just a
hand the feelings of small people about small things. These feelings are
very apt to be “fury”; that word is of strikingly frequent occurrence in
his pages. _L’Héritage_ is a drama of private life in the little world
of the Ministère de la Marine--a world, according to M. de Maupassant,
of dreadful little jealousies and ineptitudes. Readers of a robust
complexion should learn how the wretched M. Lesable was handled by his
wife and her father on his failing to satisfy their just expectations,
and how he comported himself in the singular situation thus prepared for
him. The story is a model of narration, but it leaves our poor average
humanity dangling like a beaten rag.
Where does M. de Maupassant find the great multitude of his detestable
women? or where at least does he find the courage to represent them in
such colours? Jeanne de Lamare, in _Une Vie_, receives the outrages of
fate with a passive fortitude; and there is something touching in Mme.
Roland’s _âme tendre de caissière_, as exhibited in _Pierre et Jean_.
But for the most part M. de Maupassant’s heroines are a mixture of
extreme sensuality and extreme mendacity. They are a large element in
that general disfigurement, that _illusion de l’ignoble, qui attire tant
d’êtres_, which makes the perverse or the stupid side of things the one
which strikes him first, which leads him, if he glances at a group of
nurses and children sunning themselves in a Parisian square, to notice
primarily the _yeux de brute_ of the nurses; or if he speaks of the
longing for a taste of the country which haunts the shopkeeper fenced in
behind his counter, to identify it as the _amour bête de la nature_; or
if he has occasion to put the boulevards before us on a summer’s
evening, to seek his effect in these terms: “The city, as hot as a stew,
seemed to sweat in the suffocating night. The drains puffed their
pestilential breath from their mouths of granite, and the underground
kitchens poured into the streets, through their low windows, the
infamous miasmas of their dishwater and old sauces.” I do not contest
the truth of such indications, I only note the particular selection and
their seeming to the writer the most _apropos_.
Is it because of the inadequacy of these indications when applied to the
long stretch that M. de Maupassant’s novels strike us as less complete,
in proportion to the talent expended upon them, than his _contes_ and
_nouvelles_? I make this invidious distinction in spite of the fact that
_Une Vie_ (the first of the novels in the order of time) is a remarkably
interesting experiment, and that _Pierre et Jean_ is, so far as my
judgment goes, a faultless production. _Bel-Ami_ is full of the bustle
and the crudity of life (its energy and expressiveness almost bribe one
to like it), but it has the great defect that the physiological
explanation of things here too visibly contracts the problem in order to
meet it. The world represented is too special, too little inevitable,
too much to take or to leave as we like--a world in which every man is a
cad and every woman a harlot. M. de Maupassant traces the career of a
finished blackguard who succeeds in life through women, and he
represents him primarily as succeeding in the profession of journalism.
His colleagues and his mistresses are as depraved as himself, greatly to
the injury of the ironic idea, for the real force of satire would have
come from seeing him engaged and victorious with natures better than his
own. It may be remarked that this was the case with the nature of Mme.
Walter; but the reply to that is--hardly! Moreover the author’s whole
treatment of the episode of Mme. Walter is the thing on which his
admirers have least to congratulate him. The taste of it is so
atrocious, that it is difficult to do justice to the way it is made to
stand out. Such an instance as this pleads with irresistible eloquence,
as it seems to me, the cause of that salutary diffidence or practical
generosity which I mentioned on a preceding page. I know not the English
or American novelist who could have written this portion of the history
of _Bel-Ami_ if he would. But I also find it impossible to conceive of a
member of that fraternity who would have written it if he could. The
subject of _Mont-Oriol_ is full of queerness to the English mind. Here
again the picture has much more importance than the idea, which is
simply that a gentleman, if he happen to be a low animal, is liable to
love a lady very much less if she presents him with a pledge of their
affection. It need scarcely be said that the lady and gentleman who in
M. de Maupassant’s pages exemplify this interesting truth are not united
in wedlock--that is with each other.
M. de Maupassant tells us that he has imbibed many of his principles
from Gustave Flaubert, from the study of his works as well as, formerly,
the enjoyment of his words. It is in _Une Vie_ that Flaubert’s influence
is most directly traceable, for the thing has a marked analogy with
_L’Education Sentimentale_. That is, it is the presentation of a simple
piece of a life (in this case a long piece), a series of observations
upon an episode _quelconque_, as the French say, with the minimum of
arrangement of the given objects. It is an excellent example of the way
the impression of truth may be conveyed by that form, but it would have
been a still better one if in his search for the effect of dreariness
(the effect of dreariness may be said to be the subject of _Une Vie_, so
far as the subject is reducible) the author had not eliminated
excessively. He has arranged, as I say, as little as possible; the
necessity of a “plot” has in no degree imposed itself upon him, and his
effort has been to give the uncomposed, unrounded look of life, with its
accidents, its broken rhythm, its queer resemblance to the famous
description of “Bradshaw”--a compound of trains that start but don’t
arrive, and trains that arrive but don’t start. It is almost an
arrangement of the history of poor Mme. de Lamare to have left so many
things out of it, for after all she is described in very few of the
relations of life. The principal ones are there certainly; we see her as
a daughter, a wife, and a mother, but there is a certain accumulation of
secondary experience that marks any passage from youth to old age which
is a wholly absent element in M. de Maupassant’s narrative, and the
suppression of which gives the thing a tinge of the arbitrary. It is in
the power of this secondary experience to make a great difference, but
nothing makes any difference for Jeanne de Lamare as M. de Maupassant
puts her before us. Had she no other points of contact than those he
describes?--no friends, no phases, no episodes, no chances, none of the
miscellaneous _remplissage_ of life? No doubt M. de Maupassant would say
that he has had to select, that the most comprehensive enumeration is
only a condensation, and that, in accordance with the very just
principles enunciated in that preface to which I have perhaps too
repeatedly referred, he has sacrificed what is uncharacteristic to what
is characteristic. It characterises the career of this French country
lady of fifty years ago that its long gray expanse should be seen as
peopled with but five or six figures. The essence of the matter is that
she was deceived in almost every affection, and that essence is given if
the persons who deceived her are given.
The reply is doubtless adequate, and I have only intended my criticism
to suggest the degree of my interest. What it really amounts to is that
if the subject of this artistic experiment had been the existence of an
English lady, even a very dull one, the air of verisimilitude would have
demanded that she should have been placed in a denser medium. _Une Vie_
may after all be only a testimony to the fact of the melancholy void of
the coast of Normandy, even within a moderate drive of a great seaport,
under the Restoration and Louis Philippe. It is especially to be
recommended to those who are interested in the question of what
constitutes a “story,” offering as it does the most definite sequences
at the same time that it has nothing that corresponds to the usual idea
of a plot, and closing with an implication that finds us prepared. The
picture again in this case is much more dominant than the idea, unless
it be an idea that loneliness and grief are terrible. The picture, at
any rate, is full of truthful touches, and the work has the merit and
the charm that it is the most delicate of the author’s productions and
the least hard. In none other has he occupied himself so continuously
with so innocent a figure as his soft, bruised heroine; in none other
has he paid our poor blind human history the compliment (and this is
remarkable, considering the flatness of so much of the particular
subject) of finding it so little _bête_. He may think it, here, but
comparatively he does not say it. He almost betrays a sense of moral
things. Jeanne is absolutely passive, she has no moral spring, no active
moral life, none of the edifying attributes of character (it costs her
apparently as little as may be in the way of a shock, a complication of
feeling, to discover, by letters, after her mother’s death, that this
lady has not been the virtuous woman she has supposed); but her
chronicler has had to handle the immaterial forces of patience and
renunciation, and this has given the book a certain purity, in spite of
two or three “physiological” passages that come in with violence--a
violence the greater as we feel it to be a result of selection. It is
very much a mark of M. de Maupassant that on the most striking occasion,
with a single exception, on which his picture is not a picture of
libertinage it is a picture of unmitigated suffering. Would he suggest
that these are the only alternatives?