have left myself small space to speak of. Is it because in this
masterly little novel there is a show of those immaterial forces which I
just mentioned, and because Pierre Roland is one of the few instances of
operative character that can be recalled from so many volumes, that many
readers will place M. de Maupassant’s latest production altogether at
the head of his longer ones? I am not sure, inasmuch as after all the
character in question is not extraordinarily distinguished, and the
moral problem not presented in much complexity. The case is only
relative. Perhaps it is not of importance to fix the reasons of
preference in respect to a piece of writing so essentially a work of art
and of talent. _Pierre et Jean_ is the best of M. de Maupassant’s novels
mainly because M. de Maupassant has never before been so clever. It is a
pleasure to see a mature talent able to renew itself, strike another
note, and appear still young. This story suggests the growth of a
perception that everything has not been said about the actors on the
world’s stage when they are represented either as helpless victims or as
mere bundles of appetites. There is an air of responsibility about
Pierre Roland, the person on whose behalf the tale is mainly told, which
almost constitutes a pledge. An inquisitive critic may ask why in this
particular case M. de Maupassant should have stuck to the _petit
bourgeois_, the circumstances not being such as to typify that class
more than another. There are reasons indeed which on reflection are
perceptible; it was necessary that his people should be poor, and
necessary even that to attenuate Madame Roland’s misbehaviour she should
have had the excuse of the contracted life of a shopwoman in the Rue
Montmartre. Were the inquisitive critic slightly malicious as well, he
might suspect the author of a fear that he should seem to give way to
the _illusion du beau_ if in addition to representing the little group
in _Pierre et Jean_ as persons of about the normal conscience he had
also represented them as of the cultivated class. If they belong to the
humble life this belittles and--I am still quoting the supposedly
malicious critic--M. de Maupassant _must_, in one way or the other,
belittle. To the English reader it will appear, I think, that Pierre and
Jean are rather more of the cultivated class than two young Englishmen
in the same social position. It belongs to the drama that the struggle
of the elder brother--educated, proud, and acute--should be partly with
the pettiness of his opportunities. The author’s choice of a _milieu_,
moreover, will serve to English readers as an example of how much more
democratic contemporary French fiction is than that of his own country.
The greater part of it--almost all the work of Zola and of Daudet, the
best of Flaubert’s novels, and the best of those of the brothers De
Goncourt--treat of that vast, dim section of society which, lying
between those luxurious walks on whose behalf there are easy
presuppositions and that darkness of misery which, in addition to being
picturesque, brings philanthropy also to the writer’s aid, constitutes
really, in extent and expressiveness, the substance of any nation. In
England, where the fashion of fiction still sets mainly to the country
house and the hunting-field, and yet more novels are published than
anywhere else in the world, that thick twilight of mediocrity of
condition has been little explored. May it yield triumphs in the years
to come!
It may seem that I have claimed little for M. de Maupassant, so far as
English readers are concerned with him, in saying that after publishing
twenty improper volumes he has at last published a twenty-first, which
is neither indecent nor cynical. It is not this circumstance that has
led me to dedicate so many pages to him, but the circumstance that in
producing all the others he yet remained, for those who are interested
in these matters, a writer with whom it was impossible not to reckon.
This is why I called him, to begin with, so many ineffectual names: a
rarity, a “case,” an embarrassment, a lion in the path. He is still in
the path as I conclude these observations, but I think that in making
them we have discovered a legitimate way round. If he is a master of his
art and it is discouraging to find what low views are compatible with
mastery, there is satisfaction, on the other hand in learning on what
particular condition he holds his strange success. This condition, it
seems to me, is that of having totally omitted one of the items of the
problem, an omission which has made the problem so much easier that it
may almost be described as a short cut to a solution. The question is
whether it be a fair cut. M. de Maupassant has simply skipped the whole
reflective part of his men and women--that reflective part which governs
conduct and produces character. He may say that he does not see it, does
not know it; to which the answer is, “So much the better for you, if you
wish to describe life without it. The strings you pull are by so much
the less numerous, and you can therefore pull those that remain with
greater promptitude, consequently with greater firmness, with a greater
air of knowledge.” Pierre Roland, I repeat, shows a capacity for
reflection, but I cannot think who else does, among the thousand figures
who compete with him--I mean for reflection addressed to anything higher
than the gratification of an instinct. We have an impression that M.
d’Apreval and Madame de Cadour reflect, as they trudge back from their
mournful excursion, but that indication is not pushed very far. An
aptitude for this exercise is a part of disciplined manhood, and
disciplined manhood M. de Maupassant has simply not attempted to
represent. I can remember no instance in which he sketches any
considerable capacity for conduct, and his women betray that capacity as
little as his men. I am much mistaken if he has once painted a
gentleman, in the English sense of the term. His gentlemen, like Paul
Brétigny and Gontran de Ravenel, are guilty of the most extraordinary
deflections. For those who are conscious of this element in life, look
for it and like it, the gap will appear to be immense. It will lead
them to say, “No wonder you have a contempt if that is the way you limit
the field. No wonder you judge people roughly if that is the way you see
them. Your work, on your premisses, remains the admirable thing it is,
but is your ‘case’ not adequately explained?”
The erotic element in M. de Maupassant, about which much more might have
been said, seems to me to be explained by the same limitation, and
explicable in a similar way wherever else its literature occurs in
excess. The carnal side of man appears the most characteristic if you
look at it a great deal; and you look at it a great deal if you do not
look at the other, at the side by which he reacts against his
weaknesses, his defeats. The more you look at the other, the less the
whole business to which French novelists have ever appeared to English
readers to give a disproportionate place--the business, as I may say, of
the senses--will strike you as the only typical one. Is not this the
most useful reflection to make in regard to the famous question of the
morality, the decency, of the novel? It is the only one, it seems to me,
that will meet the case as we find the case to-day. Hard and fast rules,
_a priori_ restrictions, mere interdictions (you shall not speak of
this, you shall not look at that), have surely served their time, and
will in the nature of the case never strike an energetic talent as
anything but arbitrary. A healthy, living and growing art, full of
curiosity and fond of exercise, has an indefeasible mistrust of rigid
prohibitions. Let us then leave this magnificent art of the novelist to
itself and to its perfect freedom, in the faith that one example is as
good as another, and that our fiction will always be decent enough if it
be sufficiently general. Let us not be alarmed at this prodigy (though
prodigies are alarming) of M. de Maupassant, who is at once so
licentious and so impeccable, but gird ourselves up with the conviction
that another point of view will yield another perfection.
1888.
IX
IVAN TURGÉNIEFF
When the mortal remains of Ivan Turgénieff were about to be transported
from Paris for interment in his own country, a short commemorative
service was held at the Gare du Nord. Ernest Renan and Edmond About,
standing beside the train in which his coffin had been placed, bade
farewell in the name of the French people to the illustrious stranger
who for so many years had been their honoured and grateful guest. M.
Renan made a beautiful speech, and M. About a very clever one, and each
of them characterised, with ingenuity, the genius and the moral nature
of the most touching of writers, the most lovable of men. “Turgénieff,”
said M. Renan, “received by the mysterious decree which marks out human
vocations the gift which is noble beyond all others: he was born
essentially impersonal.” The passage is so eloquent that one must repeat
the whole of it. “His conscience was not that of an individual to whom
nature had been more or less generous: it was in some sort the
conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of
years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the
depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a
whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries,
speechless, came through him to life and utterance.”
I quote these lines for the pleasure of quoting them; for while I see
what M. Renan means by calling Turgénieff impersonal, it has been my
wish to devote to his delightful memory a few pages written under the
impression of contact and intercourse. He seems to us impersonal,
because it is from his writings almost alone that we of English, French
and German speech have derived our notions--even yet, I fear, rather
meagre and erroneous--of the Russian people. His genius for us is the
Slav genius; his voice the voice of those vaguely-imagined multitudes
whom we think of more and more to-day as waiting their turn, in the
arena of civilisation, in the grey expanses of the North. There is much
in his writings to encourage this view, and it is certain that he
interpreted with wonderful vividness the temperament of his
fellow-countrymen. Cosmopolite that he had become by the force of
circumstances, his roots had never been loosened in his native soil. The
ignorance with regard to Russia and the Russians which he found in
abundance in the rest of Europe--and not least in the country he
inhabited for ten years before his death--had indeed the effect, to a
certain degree, to throw him back upon the deep feelings which so many
of his companions were unable to share with him, the memories of his
early years, the sense of wide Russian horizons, the joy and pride of
his mother-tongue. In the collection of short pieces, so deeply
interesting, written during the last few years of his life, and
translated into German under the name of _Senilia_, I find a passage--it
is the last in the little book--which illustrates perfectly this
reactionary impulse: “In days of doubt, in days of anxious thought on
the destiny of my native land, thou alone art my support and my staff, O
great powerful Russian tongue, truthful and free! If it were not for
thee how should man not despair at the sight of what is going on at
home? But it is inconceivable that such a language has not been given to
a great people.” This Muscovite, home-loving note pervades his
productions, though it is between the lines, as it were, that we must
listen for it. None the less does it remain true that he was not a
simple conduit or mouthpiece; the inspiration was his own as well as the
voice. He was an individual, in other words, of the most unmistakable
kind, and those who had the happiness to know him have no difficulty
to-day in thinking of him as an eminent, responsible figure. This
pleasure, for the writer of these lines, was as great as the pleasure of
reading the admirable tales into which he put such a world of life and
feeling: it was perhaps even greater, for it was not only with the pen
that nature had given Turgénieff the power to express himself. He was
the richest, the most delightful, of talkers, and his face, his person,
his temper, the thoroughness with which he had been equipped for human
intercourse, make in the memory of his friends an image which is
completed, but not thrown into the shade, by his literary distinction.
The whole image is tinted with sadness: partly because the element of
melancholy in his nature was deep and constant--readers of his novels
have no need to be told of that; and partly because, during the last
years of his life, he had been condemned to suffer atrociously.
Intolerable pain had been his portion for too many months before he
died; his end was not a soft decline, but a deepening distress. But of
brightness, of the faculty of enjoyment, he had also the large allowance
usually made to first-rate men, and he was a singularly complete human
being. The author of these pages had greatly admired his writings before
having the fortune to make his acquaintance, and this privilege, when it
presented itself, was highly illuminating. The man and the writer
together occupied from that moment a very high place in his affection.
Some time before knowing him I committed to print certain reflections
which his tales had led me to make; and I may perhaps, therefore,
without impropriety give them a supplement which shall have a more
vivifying reference. It is almost irresistible to attempt to say, from
one’s own point of view, what manner of man he was.
It was in consequence of the article I just mentioned that I found
reason to meet him, in Paris, where he was then living, in 1875. I
shall never forget the impression he made upon me at that first
interview. I found him adorable; I could scarcely believe that he would
prove--that any man could prove--on nearer acquaintance so delightful as
that. Nearer acquaintance only confirmed my hope, and he remained the
most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius
it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest,
so destitute of personal pretension and of what is called the
consciousness of powers, that one almost doubted at moments whether he
were a man of genius after all. Everything good and fruitful lay near to
him; he was interested in everything; and he was absolutely without that
eagerness of self-reference which sometimes accompanies great, and even
small, reputations. He had not a particle of vanity; nothing whatever of
the air of having a part to play or a reputation to keep up. His humour
exercised itself as freely upon himself as upon other subjects, and he
told stories at his own expense with a sweetness of hilarity which made
his peculiarities really sacred in the eyes of a friend. I remember
vividly the smile and tone of voice with which he once repeated to me a
figurative epithet which Gustave Flaubert (of whom he was extremely
fond) had applied to him--an epithet intended to characterise a certain
expansive softness, a comprehensive indecision, which pervaded his
nature, just as it pervades so many of the characters he has painted. He
enjoyed Flaubert’s use of this term, good-naturedly opprobrious, more
even than Flaubert himself, and recognised perfectly the element of
truth in it. He was natural to an extraordinary degree; I do not think I
have ever seen his match in this respect, certainly not among people who
bear, as he did, at the same time, the stamp of the highest cultivation.
Like all men of a large pattern, he was composed of many different
pieces; and what was always striking in him was the mixture of
simplicity with the fruit of the most various observation. In the little
article in which I had attempted to express my admiration for his works,
I had been moved to say of him that he had the aristocratic temperament:
a remark which in the light of further knowledge seemed to me singularly
inane. He was not subject to any definition of that sort, and to say
that he was democratic would be (though his political ideal was a
democracy), to give an equally superficial account of him. He felt and
understood the opposite sides of life; he was imaginative, speculative,
anything but literal. He had not in his mind a grain of prejudice as
large as the point of a needle, and people (there are many) who think
this a defect would have missed it immensely in Ivan Serguéitch. (I give
his name, without attempting the Russian orthography, as it was uttered
by his friends when they addressed him in French.) Our Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, moralistic, conventional standards were far away from him,
and he judged things with a freedom and spontaneity in which I found a
perpetual refreshment. His sense of beauty, his love of truth and
right, were the foundation of his nature; but half the charm of
conversation with him was that one breathed an air in which cant phrases
and arbitrary measurements simply sounded ridiculous.
I may add that it was not because I had written a laudatory article
about his books that he gave me a friendly welcome; for in the first
place my article could have very little importance for him, and in the
second it had never been either his habit or his hope to bask in the
light of criticism. Supremely modest as he was, I think he attached no
great weight to what might happen to be said about him; for he felt that
he was destined to encounter a very small amount of intelligent
appreciation, especially in foreign countries. I never heard him even
allude to any judgment which might have been passed upon his productions
in England. In France he knew that he was read very moderately; the
“demand” for his volumes was small, and he had no illusions whatever on
the subject of his popularity. He had heard with pleasure that many
intelligent persons in the United States were impatient for everything
that might come from his pen; but I think he was never convinced, as one
or two of the more zealous of these persons had endeavoured to convince
him, that he could boast of a “public” in America. He gave me the
impression of thinking of criticism as most serious workers think of
it--that it is the amusement, the exercise, the subsistence of the
critic (and, so far as this goes, of immense use); but that though it
may often concern other readers, it does not much concern the artist
himself. In comparison with all those things which the production of a
considered work forces the artist little by little to say to himself,
the remarks of the critic are vague and of the moment; and yet, owing to
the large publicity of the proceeding, they have a power to irritate or
discourage which is quite out of proportion to their use to the person
criticised. It was not, moreover (if this explanation be not more gross
than the spectre it is meant to conjure away), on account of any esteem
which he accorded to my own productions (I used regularly to send them
to him) that I found him so agreeable, for to the best of my belief he
was unable to read them. As regards one of the first that I had offered
him he wrote me a little note to tell me that a distinguished friend,
who was his constant companion, had read three or four chapters aloud to
him the evening before and that one of them was written _de main de
maître_! This gave me great pleasure, but it was my first and last
pleasure of the kind. I continued, as I say, to send him my fictions,
because they were the only thing I had to give; but he never alluded to
the rest of the work in question, which he evidently did not finish, and
never gave any sign of having read its successors. Presently I quite
ceased to expect this, and saw why it was (it interested me much), that
my writings could not appeal to him. He cared, more than anything else,
for the air of reality, and my reality was not to the purpose. I do not
think my stories struck him as quite meat for men. The manner was more
apparent than the matter; they were too _tarabiscoté_, as I once heard
him say of the style of a book--had on the surface too many little
flowers and knots of ribbon. He had read a great deal of English, and
knew the language remarkably well--too well, I used often to think, for
he liked to speak it with those to whom it was native, and, successful
as the effort always was, it deprived him of the facility and raciness
with which he expressed himself in French.
I have said that he had no prejudices, but perhaps after all he had one.
I think he imagined it to be impossible to a person of English speech to
converse in French with complete correctness. He knew Shakespeare
thoroughly, and at one time had wandered far and wide in English
literature. His opportunities for speaking English were not at all
frequent, so that when the necessity (or at least the occasion)
presented itself, he remembered the phrases he had encountered in books.
This often gave a charming quaintness and an unexpected literary turn to
what he said. “In Russia, in spring, if you enter a beechen
grove”--those words come back to me from the last time I saw him. He
continued to read English books and was not incapable of attacking the
usual Tauchnitz novel. The English writer (of our day) of whom I
remember to have heard him speak with most admiration was Dickens, of
whose faults he was conscious, but whose power of presenting to the eye
a vivid, salient figure he rated very high. In the young French school
he was much interested; I mean, in the new votaries of realism, the
grandsons of Balzac. He was a good friend of most of them, and with
Gustave Flaubert, the most singular and most original of the group, he
was altogether intimate. He had his reservations and discriminations,
and he had, above all, the great back-garden of his Slav imagination and
his Germanic culture, into which the door constantly stood open, and the
grandsons of Balzac were not, I think, particularly free to accompany
him. But he had much sympathy with their experiment, their general
movement, and it was on the side of the careful study of life as the
best line of the novelist that, as may easily be supposed, he ranged
himself. For some of the manifestations of the opposite tradition he had
a great contempt. This was a kind of emotion he rarely expressed, save
in regard to certain public wrongs and iniquities; bitterness and
denunciation seldom passed his mild lips. But I remember well the little
flush of conviction, the seriousness, with which he once said, in
allusion to a novel which had just been running through the _Revue des
Deux Mondes_, “If I had written anything so bad as that, I should blush
for it all my life.”