BORN in the middle year of the nineteenth century, and fated
unfortunately never to see its close, Guy de Maupassant was probably
the most versatile and brilliant among the galaxy of novelists who
enriched French literature between the years 1800 and 1900. Poetry,
drama, prose of short and sustained effort, and volumes of travel and
description, each sparkling with the same minuteness of detail and
brilliancy of style, flowed from his pen during the twelve years of his
literary life.
Although his genius asserted itself in youth, he had the patience of
the true artist, spending his early manhood in cutting and polishing
the facets of his genius under the stern though paternal mentorship of
Gustave Flaubert. Not until he had attained the age of thirty did he
venture on publication, challenging criticism for the first time with a
volume of poems.
Many and various have been the judgments passed upon Maupassant's work.
But now that the perspective of time is lengthening, enabling us to
form a more deliberate, and therefore a juster, view of his complete
achievement, we are driven irresistibly to the conclusion that the
force that shaped and swayed Maupassant's prose writings was the
conviction that in life there could be no phase so noble or so mean, so
honorable or so contemptible, so lofty or so low as to be unworthy of
chronicling,--no groove of human virtue or fault, success or failure,
wisdom or folly that did not possess its own peculiar psychological
aspect and therefore demanded analysis.
To this analysis Maupassant brought a facile and dramatic pen, a
penetration as searching as a probe, and a power of psychological
vision that in its minute detail, now pathetic, now ironical, in its
merciless revelation of the hidden springs of the human heart, whether
of aristocrat, bourgeois, peasant, or priest, allow one to call him a
Meissonier in words.
The school of romantic realism which was founded by Merimee and Balzac
found its culmination in De Maupassant. He surpassed his mentor,
Flaubert, in the breadth and vividness of his work, and one of the
greatest of modern French critics has recorded the deliberate opinion,
that of all Taine's pupils Maupassant had the greatest command of
language and the most finished and incisive style. Robust in
imagination and fired with natural passion, his psychological curiosity
kept him true to human nature, while at the same time his mental eye,
when fixed upon the most ordinary phases of human conduct, could see
some new motive or aspect of things hitherto unnoticed by the careless
crowd.
It has been said by casual critics that Maupassant lacked one quality
indispensable to the production of truly artistic work, viz: an
absolutely normal, that is, moral, point of view. The answer to this
criticism is obvious. No dissector of the gamut of human passion and
folly in all its tones could present aught that could be called new, if
ungifted with a viewpoint totally out of the ordinary plane. Cold and
merciless in the use of this point de vue De Maupassant undoubtedly is,
especially in such vivid depictions of love, both physical and
maternal, as we find in "L'histoire d'une fille de ferme" and "La femme
de Paul." But then the surgeon's scalpel never hesitates at giving
pain, and pain is often the road to health and ease. Some of
Maupassant's short stories are sermons more forcible than any moral
dissertation could ever be.
Of De Maupassant's sustained efforts "Une Vie" may bear the palm. This
romance has the distinction of having changed Tolstoi from an adverse
critic into a warm admirer of the author. To quote the Russian moralist
upon the book:
"'Une Vie' is a romance of the best type, and in my judgment the
greatest that has been produced by any French writer since Victor Hugo
penned 'Les Miserables.' Passing over the force and directness of the
narrative, I am struck by the intensity, the grace, and the insight
with which the writer treats the new aspects of human nature which he
finds in the life he describes."
And as if gracefully to recall a former adverse criticism, Tolstoi adds:
"I find in the book, in almost equal strength, the three cardinal
qualities essential to great work, viz: moral purpose, perfect style,
and absolute sincerity.... Maupassant is a man whose vision has
penetrated the silent depths of human life, and from that
vantage-ground interprets the struggle of humanity."
"Bel-Ami" appeared almost two years after "Une Vie," that is to say,
about 1885. Discussed and criticised as it has been, it is in reality a
satire, an indignant outburst against the corruption of society which
in the story enables an ex-soldier, devoid of conscience, honor, even
of the commonest regard for others, to gain wealth and rank. The
purport of the story is clear to those who recognize the ideas that
governed Maupassant's work, and even the hasty reader or critic, on
reading "Mont Oriol," which was published two years later and is based
on a combination of the motifs which inspired "Une Vie" and "Bel-Ami,"
will reconsider former hasty judgments, and feel, too, that beneath the
triumph of evil which calls forth Maupassant's satiric anger there lies
the substratum on which all his work is founded, viz: the persistent,
ceaseless questioning of a soul unable to reconcile or explain the
contradiction between love in life and inevitable death. Who can read
in "Bel-Ami" the terribly graphic description of the consumptive
journalist's demise, his frantic clinging to life, and his refusal to
credit the slow and merciless approach of death, without feeling that
the question asked at Naishapur many centuries ago is still waiting for
the solution that is always promised but never comes?
In the romances which followed, dating from 1888 to 1890, a sort of
calm despair seems to have settled down upon De Maupassant's attitude
toward life. Psychologically acute as ever, and as perfect in style and
sincerity as before, we miss the note of anger. Fatality is the
keynote, and yet, sounding low, we detect a genuine subtone of sorrow.
Was it a prescience of 1893? So much work to be done, so much work
demanded of him, the world of Paris, in all its brilliant and
attractive phases, at his feet, and yet--inevitable, ever advancing
death, with the question of life still unanswered.
This may account for some of the strained situations we find in his
later romances. Vigorous in frame and hearty as he was, the atmosphere
of his mental processes must have been vitiated to produce the dainty
but dangerous pessimism that pervades some of his later work. This was
partly a consequence of his honesty and partly of mental despair. He
never accepted other people's views on the questions of life. He looked
into such problems for himself, arriving at the truth, as it appeared
to him, by the logic of events, often finding evil where he wished to
find good, but never hoodwinking himself or his readers by adapting or
distorting the reality of things to suit a preconceived idea.
Maupassant was essentially a worshiper of the eternal feminine. He was
persuaded that without the continual presence of the gentler sex man's
existence would be an emotionally silent wilderness. No other French
writer has described and analyzed so minutely and comprehensively the
many and various motives and moods that shape the conduct of a woman in
life. Take for instance the wonderfully subtle analysis of a woman's
heart as wife and mother that we find in "Une Vie." Could aught be more
delicately incisive? Sometimes in describing the apparently
inexplicable conduct of a certain woman he leads his readers to a point
where a false step would destroy the spell and bring the reproach of
banality and ridicule upon the tale. But the catastrophe never occurs.
It was necessary to stand poised upon the brink of the precipice to
realize the depth of the abyss and feel the terror of the fall.
Closely allied to this phase of Maupassant's nature was the peculiar
feeling of loneliness that every now and then breaks irresistibly forth
in the course of some short story. Of kindly soul and genial heart, he
suffered not only from the oppression of spirit caused by the lack of
humanity, kindliness, sanity, and harmony which he encountered daily in
the world at large, but he had an ever abiding sense of the invincible,
unbanishable solitariness of his own inmost self. I know of no more
poignant expression of such a feeling than the cry of despair which
rings out in the short story called "Solitude," in which he describes
the insurmountable barrier which exists between man and man, or man and
woman, however intimate the friendship between them. He could picture
but one way of destroying this terrible loneliness, the attainment of a
spiritual--a divine--state of love, a condition to which he would give
no name utterable by human lips, lest it be profaned, but for which his
whole being yearned. How acutely he felt his failure to attain his
deliverance may be drawn from his wail that mankind has no UNIVERSAL
measure of happiness.
"Each one of us," writes De Maupassant, "forms for himself an illusion
through which he views the world, be it poetic, sentimental, joyous,
melancholy, or dismal; an illusion of beauty, which is a human
convention; of ugliness, which is a matter of opinion; of truth, which,
alas, is never immutable." And he concludes by asserting that the
happiest artist is he who approaches most closely to the truth of
things as he sees them through his own particular illusion.
Salient points in De Maupassant's genius were that he possessed the
rare faculty of holding direct communion with his gifts, and of writing
from their dictation as it was interpreted by his senses. He had no
patience with writers who in striving to present life as a whole
purposely omit episodes that reveal the influence of the senses. "As
well," he says, "refrain from describing the effect of intoxicating
perfumes upon man as omit the influence of beauty on the temperament of
man."
De Maupassant's dramatic instinct was supremely powerful. He seems to
select unerringly the one thing in which the soul of the scene is
prisoned, and, making that his keynote, gives a picture in words which
haunt the memory like a strain of music. The description of the ride of
Madame Tellier and her companions in a country cart through a Norman
landscape is an admirable example. You smell the masses of the colza in
blossom, you see the yellow carpets of ripe corn spotted here and there
by the blue coronets of the cornflower, and rapt by the red blaze of
the poppy beds and bathed in the fresh greenery of the landscape, you
share in the emotions felt by the happy party in the country cart. And
yet with all his vividness of description, De Maupassant is always
sober and brief. He had the genius of condensation and the reserve
which is innate in power, and to his reader could convey as much in a
paragraph as could be expressed in a page by many of his predecessors
and contemporaries, Flaubert not excepted.
Apart from his novels, De Maupassant's tales may be arranged under
three heads: Those that concern themselves with Norman peasant life;
those that deal with Government employees (Maupassant himself had long
been one) and the Paris middle classes, and those that represent the
life of the fashionable world, as well as the weird and fantastic ideas
of the later years of his career. Of these three groups the tales of
the Norman peasantry perhaps rank highest. He depicts the Norman farmer
in surprisingly free and bold strokes, revealing him in all his
caution, astuteness, rough gaiety, and homely virtue.
The tragic stage of De Maupassant's life may, I think, be set down as
beginning just before the drama of "Musotte" was issued, in conjunction
with Jacques Normand, in 1891. He had almost given up the hope of
interpreting his puzzles, and the struggle between the falsity of the
life which surrounded him and the nobler visions which possessed him
was wearing him out. Doubtless he resorted to unwise methods for the
dispelling of physical lassitude or for surcease from troubling mental
problems. To this period belong such weird and horrible fancies as are
contained in the short stories known as "He" and "The Diary of a
Madman." Here and there, we know, were rising in him inklings of a
finer and less sordid attitude 'twixt man and woman throughout the
world and of a purer constitution of existing things which no exterior
force should blemish or destroy. But with these yearningly prophetic
gleams came a period of mental death. Then the physical veil was torn
aside and for Guy de Maupassant the riddle of existence was answered.
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