Of the French writers of romance of the latter part of the nineteenth
century no one made a reputation as quickly as did Guy de Maupassant.
Not one has preserved that reputation with more ease, not only during
life, but in death. None so completely hides his personality in his
glory. In an epoch of the utmost publicity, in which the most
insignificant deeds of a celebrated man are spied, recorded, and
commented on, the author of "Boule de Suif," of "Pierre et Jean," of
"Notre Coeur," found a way of effacing his personality in his work.
Of De Maupassant we know that he was born in Normandy about 1850; that
he was the favorite pupil, if one may so express it, the literary
protege, of Gustave Flaubert; that he made his debut late in 1880, with
a novel inserted in a small collection, published by Emile Zola and his
young friends, under the title: "The Soirees of Medan"; that
subsequently he did not fail to publish stories and romances every year
up to 1891, when a disease of the brain struck him down in the fullness
of production; and that he died, finally, in 1893, without having
recovered his reason.
We know, too, that he passionately loved a strenuous physical life and
long journeys, particularly long journeys upon the sea. He owned a
little sailing yacht, named after one of his books, "Bel-Ami," in which
he used to sojourn for weeks and months. These meager details are
almost the only ones that have been gathered as food for the curiosity
of the public.
I leave the legendary side, which is always in evidence in the case of
a celebrated man,--that gossip, for example, which avers that
Maupassant was a high liver and a worldling. The very number of his
volumes is a protest to the contrary. One could not write so large a
number of pages in so small a number of years without the virtue of
industry, a virtue incompatible with habits of dissipation. This does
not mean that the writer of these great romances had no love for
pleasure and had not tasted the world, but that for him these were
secondary things. The psychology of his work ought, then, to find an
interpretation other than that afforded by wholly false or exaggerated
anecdotes. I wish to indicate here how this work, illumined by the
three or four positive data which I have given, appears to me to demand
it.
And first, what does that anxiety to conceal his personality prove,
carried as it was to such an extreme degree? The answer rises
spontaneously in the minds of those who have studied closely the
history of literature. The absolute silence about himself, preserved by
one whose position among us was that of a Tourgenief, or of a Merimee,
and of a Moliere or a Shakespeare among the classic great, reveals, to
a person of instinct, a nervous sensibility of extreme depth. There are
many chances for an artist of his kind, however timid, or for one who
has some grief, to show the depth of his emotion. To take up again only
two of the names just cited, this was the case with the author of
"Terres Vierges," and with the writer of "Colomba."
A somewhat minute analysis of the novels and romances of Maupassant
would suffice to demonstrate, even if we did not know the nature of the
incidents which prompted them, that he also suffered from an excess of
nervous emotionalism. Nine times out of ten, what is the subject of
these stories to which freedom of style gives the appearance of health?
A tragic episode. I cite, at random, "Mademoiselle Fifi," "La Petite
Roque," "Inutile Beaute," "Le Masque," "Le Horla," "L'Epreuve," "Le
Champ d'Oliviers," among the novels, and among the romances, "Une Vie,"
"Pierre et Jean," "Fort comme la Mort," "Notre Coeur." His imagination
aims to represent the human being as imprisoned in a situation at once
insupportable and inevitable. The spell of this grief and trouble
exerts such a power upon the writer that he ends stories commenced in
pleasantry with some sinister drama. Let me instance "Saint-Antonin,"
"A Midnight Revel," "The Little Cask," and "Old Amable." You close the
book at the end of these vigorous sketches, and feel how surely they
point to constant suffering on the part of him who executed them.
This is the leading trait in the literary physiognomy of Maupassant, as
it is the leading and most profound trait in the psychology of his
work, viz, that human life is a snare laid by nature, where joy is
always changed to misery, where noble words and the highest professions
of faith serve the lowest plans and the most cruel egoism, where
chagrin, crime, and folly are forever on hand to pursue implacably our
hopes, nullify our virtues, and annihilate our wisdom. But this is not
the whole.
Maupassant has been called a literary nihilist--but (and this is the
second trait of his singular genius) in him nihilism finds itself
coexistent with an animal energy so fresh and so intense that for a
long time it deceives the closest observer. In an eloquent discourse,
pronounced over his premature grave, Emile Zola well defined this
illusion: "We congratulated him," said he, "upon that health which
seemed unbreakable, and justly credited him with the soundest
constitution of our band, as well as with the clearest mind and the
sanest reason. It was then that this frightful thunderbolt destroyed
him."
It is not exact to say that the lofty genius of De Maupassant was that
of an absolutely sane man. We comprehend it to-day, and, on re-reading
him, we find traces everywhere of his final malady. But it is exact to
say that this wounded genius was, by a singular circumstance, the
genius of a robust man. A physiologist would without doubt explain this
anomaly by the coexistence of a nervous lesion, light at first, with a
muscular, athletic temperament. Whatever the cause, the effect is
undeniable. The skilled and dainty pessimism of De Maupassant was
accompanied by a vigor and physique very unusual. His sensations are in
turn those of a hunter and of a sailor, who have, as the old French
saying expressively puts it, "swift foot, eagle eye," and who are
attuned to all the whisperings of nature.
The only confidences that he has ever permitted his pen to tell of the
intoxication of a free, animal existence are in the opening pages of
the story entitled "Mouche," where he recalls, among the sweetest
memories of his youth, his rollicking canoe parties upon the Seine, and
in the description in "La Vie Errante" of a night spent on the
sea,--"to be alone upon the water under the sky, through a warm
night,"--in which he speaks of the happiness of those "who receive
sensations through the whole surface of their flesh, as they do through
their eyes, their mouth, their ears, and sense of smell."
His unique and too scanty collection of verses, written in early youth,
contains the two most fearless, I was going to say the most ingenuous,
paeans, perhaps, that have been written since the Renaissance: "At the
Water's Edge" (Au Bord de l'Eau) and the "Rustic Venus" (La Venus
Rustique). But here is a paganism whose ardor, by a contrast which
brings up the ever present duality of his nature, ends in an
inexpressible shiver of scorn:
"We look at each other, astonished, immovable,
And both are so pale that it makes us fear."
* * * * *
"Alas! through all our senses slips life itself away."
This ending of the "Water's Edge" is less sinister than the murder and
the vision of horror which terminate the pantheistic hymn of the
"Rustic Venus." Considered as documents revealing the cast of mind of
him who composed them, these two lyrical essays are especially
significant, since they were spontaneous. They explain why De
Maupassant, in the early years of production, voluntarily chose, as the
heroes of his stories, creatures very near to primitive existence,
peasants, sailors, poachers, girls of the farm, and the source of the
vigor with which he describes these rude figures. The robustness of his
animalism permits him fully to imagine all the simple sensations of
these beings, while his pessimism, which tinges these sketches of
brutal customs with an element of delicate scorn, preserves him from
coarseness. It is this constant and involuntary antithesis which gives
unique value to those Norman scenes which have contributed so much to
his glory. It corresponds to, those two contradictory tendencies in
literary art, which seek always to render life in motion with the most
intense coloring, and still to make more and more subtle the impression
of this life. How is one ambition to be satisfied at the same time as
the other, since all gain in color and movement brings about a
diminution of sensibility, and conversely? The paradox of his
constitution permitted to Maupassant this seemingly impossible accord,
aided as he was by an intellect whose influence was all powerful upon
his development--the writer I mention above, Gustave Flaubert.
These meetings of a pupil and a master, both great, are indeed rare.
They present, in fact, some troublesome conditions, the first of which
is a profound analogy between two types of thought. There must have
been, besides, a reciprocity of affection, which does not often obtain
between a renowned senior who is growing old and an obscure junior,
whose renown is increasing. From generation to generation, envy
reascends no less than she redescends. For the honor of French men of
letters, let us add that this exceptional phenomenon has manifested
itself twice in the nineteenth century. Merimee, whom I have also
named, received from Stendhal, at twenty, the same benefits that
Maupassant received from Flaubert.
The author of "Une Vie" and the writer of "Clara Jozul" resemble each
other, besides, in a singular and analogous circumstance. Both achieved
renown at the first blow, and by a masterpiece which they were able to
equal but never surpass. Both were misanthropes early in life, and
practised to the end the ancient advice that the disciple of Beyle
carried upon his seal: [Greek: memneso apistein]--"Remember to
distrust." And, at the same time, both had delicate, tender hearts
under this affectation of cynicism, both were excellent sons,
irreproachable friends, indulgent masters, and both were idolized by
their inferiors. Both were worldly, yet still loved a wanderer's life;
both joined to a constant taste for luxury an irresistible desire for
solitude. Both belonged to the extreme left of the literature of their
epoch, but kept themselves from excess and used with a judgment
marvelously sure the sounder principles of their school. They knew how
to remain lucid and classic, in taste as much as in form--Merimee
through all the audacity of a fancy most exotic, and Maupassant in the
realism of the most varied and exact observation. At a little distance
they appear to be two patterns, identical in certain traits, of the
same family of minds, and Tourgenief, who knew and loved the one and
the other, never failed to class them as brethren.
They are separated, however, by profound differences, which perhaps
belong less to their nature than to that of the masters from whom they
received their impulses: Stendhal, so alert, so mobile, after a youth
passed in war and a ripe age spent in vagabond journeys, rich in
experiences, immediate and personal; Flaubert so poor in direct
impressions, so paralyzed by his health, by his family, by his theories
even, and so rich in reflections, for the most part solitary.
Among the theories of the anatomist of "Madame Bovary," there are two
which appear without ceasing in his Correspondence, under one form or
another, and these are the ones which are most strongly evident in the
art of De Maupassant. We now see the consequences which were inevitable
by reason of them, endowed as Maupassant was with a double power of
feeling life bitterly, and at the same time with so much of animal
force. The first theory bears upon the choice of personages and the
story of the romance, the second upon the character of the style. The
son of a physician, and brought up in the rigors of scientific method,
Flaubert believed this method to be efficacious in art as in science.
For instance, in the writing of a romance, he seemed to be as
scientific as in the development of a history of customs, in which the
essential is absolute exactness and local color. He therefore naturally
wished to make the most scrupulous and detailed observation of the
environment.
Thus is explained the immense labor in preparation which his stories
cost him--the story of "Madame Bovary," of "The Sentimental Education,"
and "Bouvard and Pecuchet," documents containing as much minutiae as
his historical stories. Beyond everything he tried to select details
that were eminently significant. Consequently he was of the opinion
that the romance writer should discard all that lessened this
significance, that is, extraordinary events and singular heroes. The
exceptional personage, it seemed to him, should be suppressed, as
should also high dramatic incident, since, produced by causes less
general, these have a range more restricted. The truly scientific
romance writer, proposing to paint a certain class, will attain his end
more effectively if he incarnate personages of the middle order, and,
consequently, paint traits common to that class. And not only
middle-class traits, but middle-class adventures.
From this point of view, examine the three great romances of the Master
from Rouen, and you will see that he has not lost sight of this first
and greatest principle of his art, any more than he has of the second,
which was that these documents should be drawn up in prose of
absolutely perfect technique. We know with what passionate care he
worked at his phrases, and how indefatigably he changed them over and
over again. Thus he satisfied that instinct of beauty which was born of
his romantic soul, while he gratified the demand of truth which inhered
from his scientific training by his minute and scrupulous exactness.
The theory of the mean of truth on one side, as the foundation of the
subject,--"the humble truth," as he termed it at the beginning of "Une
Vie,"--and of the agonizing of beauty on the other side, in
composition, determines the whole use that Maupassant made of his
literary gifts. It helped to make more intense and more systematic that
dainty yet dangerous pessimism which in him was innate. The
middle-class personage, in wearisome society like ours, is always a
caricature, and the happenings are nearly always vulgar. When one
studies a great number of them, one finishes by looking at humanity
from the angle of disgust and despair. The philosophy of the romances
and novels of De Maupassant is so continuously and profoundly
surprising that one becomes overwhelmed by it. It reaches limitation;
it seems to deny that man is susceptible to grandeur, or that motives
of a superior order can uplift and ennoble the soul, but it does so
with a sorrow that is profound. All that portion of the sentimental and
moral world which in itself is the highest remains closed to it.
In revenge, this philosophy finds itself in a relation cruelly exact
with the half-civilization of our day. By that I mean the poorly
educated individual who has rubbed against knowledge enough to justify
a certain egoism, but who is too poor in faculty to conceive an ideal,
and whose native grossness is corrupted beyond redemption. Under his
blouse, or under his coat--whether he calls himself Renardet, as does
the foul assassin in "Petite Roque," or Duroy, as does the sly hero of
"Bel-Ami," or Bretigny, as does the vile seducer of "Mont Oriol," or
Cesaire, the son of Old Amable in the novel of that name,--this
degraded type abounds in Maupassant's stories, evoked with a ferocity
almost jovial where it meets the robustness of temperament which I have
pointed out, a ferocity which gives them a reality more exact still
because the half-civilized person is often impulsive and, in
consequence, the physical easily predominates. There, as elsewhere, the
degenerate is everywhere a degenerate who gives the impression of being
an ordinary man.
There are quantities of men of this stamp in large cities. No writer
has felt and expressed this complex temperament with more justice than
De Maupassant, and, as he was an infinitely careful observer of milieu
and landscape and all that constitutes a precise middle distance, his
novels can be considered an irrefutable record of the social classes
which he studied at a certain time and along certain lines. The Norman
peasant and the Provencal peasant, for example; also the small
officeholder, the gentleman of the provinces, the country squire, the
clubman of Paris, the journalist of the boulevard, the doctor at the
spa, the commercial artist, and, on the feminine side, the servant
girl, the working girl, the demigrisette, the street girl, rich or
poor, the gallant lady of the city and of the provinces, and the
society woman--these are some of the figures that he has painted at
many sittings, and whom he used to such effect that the novels and
romances in which they are painted have come to be history. Just as it
is impossible to comprehend the Rome of the Caesars without the work of
Petronius, so is it impossible to fully comprehend the France of
1850-90 without these stories of Maupassant. They are no more the whole
image of the country than the "Satyricon" was the whole image of Rome,
but what their author has wished to paint, he has painted to the life
and with a brush that is graphic in the extreme.
If Maupassant had only painted, in general fashion, the characters and
the phase of literature mentioned he would not be distinguished from
other writers of the group called "naturalists." His true glory is in
the extraordinary superiority of his art. He did not invent it, and his
method is not alien to that of "Madame Bovary," but he knew how to give
it a suppleness, a variety, and a freedom which were always wanting in
Flaubert. The latter, in his best pages, is always strained. To use the
expressive metaphor of the Greek athletes, he "smells of the oil." When
one recalls that when attacked by hysteric epilepsy, Flaubert postponed
the crisis of the terrible malady by means of sedatives, this strained
atmosphere of labor--I was going to say of stupor--which pervades his
work is explained. He is an athlete, a runner, but one who drags at his
feet a terrible weight. He is in the race only for the prize of effort,
an effort of which every motion reveals the intensity.
Maupassant, on the other hand, if he suffered from a nervous lesion,
gave no sign of it, except in his heart. His intelligence was bright
and lively, and above all, his imagination, served by senses always on
the alert, preserved for some years an astonishing freshness of direct
vision. If his art was due to Flaubert, it is no more belittling to him
than if one call Raphael an imitator of Perugini.
Like Flaubert, he excelled in composing a story, in distributing the
facts with subtle gradation, in bringing in at the end of a familiar
dialogue something startlingly dramatic; but such composition, with
him, seems easy, and while the descriptions are marvelously well
established in his stories, the reverse is true of Flaubert's, which
always appear a little veneered. Maupassant's phrasing, however
dramatic it may be, remains easy and flowing.
Maupassant always sought for large and harmonious rhythm in his
deliberate choice of terms, always chose sound, wholesome language,
with a constant care for technical beauty. Inheriting from his master
an instrument already forged, he wielded it with a surer skill. In the
quality of his style, at once so firm and clear, so gorgeous yet so
sober, so supple and so firm, he equals the writers of the seventeenth
century. His method, so deeply and simply French, succeeds in giving an
indescribable "tang" to his descriptions. If observation from nature
imprints upon his tales the strong accent of reality, the prose in
which they are shrined so conforms to the genius of the race as to
smack of the soil.
It is enough that the critics of to-day place Guy de Maupassant among
our classic writers. He has his place in the ranks of pure French
genius, with the Regniers, the La Fontaines, the Molieres. And those
signs of secret ill divined everywhere under this wholesome prose
surround it for those who knew and loved him with a pathos that is
inexpressible. {signature}