settings--the fishing and prawn-catching; the scenery of port and cliff;
the "interiors"; the final sailing of the great ship--are perfect. The
minor characters--the good-tempered, thick-headed _bourgeois_ husband
and father; the wife and mother, with her bland acceptance of the
transferred wages of shame, and (after discovery only) her breaking down
with the banal blasphemy of "marriage before God" and the rest of it;
the younger brother--not exactly a bad fellow, but thoroughly convinced
of the truth of _non olet_; the widow playing her part and no more,--all
are artistically just what they should be. And so, always remembering
scale and scheme, is Pierre. One neither likes him (for he is not
exactly a likeable person) nor dislikes him (for he is quite excusable)
very much; one is only partially sorry for him. But one knows that he
_is_--he has that actual and indubitable existence which is the test and
quality alike of creator and creation. His first vague envy of his
brother's positive luck in money and probable luck in love--for both
have had floating fancies for the pretty widow; the again perfectly
natural spleen when this lucky brother, by an accident, secures the
particular set of rooms in which Pierre had hoped to improve his
position as a doctor; the crushing blow of finding out his mother's
shame; the process (the truest thing in the whole book, though it is all
true) by which he tortures both her and himself in constant oblique
references to her fault; the explosion when he directly informs his
brother; and all the rest, could hardly be improved. It is not a novel
on the great scale, but rather what may be called a long short story. It
does not quite attain to the position of some books on a small scale in
different kinds--_Manon Lescaut_ itself, _Adolphe_, _La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine_. But the author has done what he meant to do, and has
done it in such a fashion that it could not, on its own lines, be done
better.
Maupassant's last novel of some magnitude, _Notre Coeur_, was written
when the shadow was near enveloping him; and it cannot be said to have
the perfection of _Pierre et Jean_. But it still rises higher in certain
very important ways--it is perhaps the book that one likes him best for,
outside of pure comedy; and there is none which impresses one more with
the sense of his loss to French literature.
[Sidenote: _Notre Coeur._]
The story, like all Maupassant's stories, is of the simplest. André
Mariolle, a well-to-do young Parisian bachelor of no profession, is a
member of a set of mostly literary and artistic people, almost all of
whom have, as a main rendezvous, the house of a beautiful, wealthy, and
variously gifted young widow, Mme. de Burne. She lives chaperoned in a
manner by her father; indisposed to a second marriage by the fact that
she has had a tyrannical husband; accepting homage from all her
familiars and being very gracious in differing degrees to all of them;
but having no "lover in title" and not even being suspected of having
(in the French novel-sense[495]) any "lover" at all. For a long time
Mariolle has, from whim, refused introduction to her, but at last he
consents to be taken to the house by his friend the musician Massival,
and of course falls a victim. It cannot be said that she is a
Circe,[496] nor that, as perhaps might be expected, she revenges herself
for his holding aloof by snaring and throwing him away. Quite the
contrary. She shows him special favour: when she has to go to stay with
friends at Avranches she privately asks him to follow her; and finally,
when the party pass the night at Mont Saint-Michel, she
comes--uninvited, though of course much longed for--to his room, and (as
they used to say with elaborate decency) "crowns his flame." Nor does
she turn on him--as again might be expected--even then. On the contrary,
she comes constantly to a secret Eden which he has prepared for her in
Paris, and though, after long practice of this, she is sometimes rather
late, and once or twice actually puts off her assignation, it is "no
more than reason,"[497] and she by no means jilts or threatens jilting,
though she tells him frankly that his way of loving (which _is_ more
than reason) is not hers. At last he cannot endure seeing her surrounded
with admirers, and flies to Fontainebleau, where he is partly--only
partly--consoled by a pretty and devoted _bonne_. Yet he sends a
despairing cry to Mme. de Burne; and she, gracious as ever, actually
comes to see him, and induces him to return to Paris. He does so, but
takes the _bonne_ Elisabeth with him; and the book ends abruptly,
leaving the reader to imagine what is the outcome of this "double
arrangement"--or failure to arrange.
But, as always with Maupassant's longer stories and not quite never with
his shorter ones, the "fable is the least part." The "atmosphere"; the
projection of character and passion; the setting; the situations; the
phrase--these are the thing. And, except for the enigmatic and
"stump-ended" conclusion, and for a certain overdose of words (which
rather grew on him), they make a very fine thing. It is here that, on
one side at least, the author's conception of love--which at some times
might appear little more than animal, at others conventional-capricious
in a fashion which makes that of Crébillon universal and sincere--has
sublimed itself, as it had begun to do in _Fort comme la Mort_ (_Pierre
et Jean_ is in this respect something of a divagation), into very nearly
the true form of the Canticles and Shakespeare, of Donne and Shelley and
Heine, of Hugo and Musset and Browning. But it is curious, in the first
place, that he whom his friends fondly called a _fier mâle_, who has
sometimes pushed masculinity near to brutality, and who is always
cynical more or less, has made his André Mariolle, though a very good
lover, a distinct weakling in love. He is a "too quick despairer," and
his despair is more illogical than even a lover's has a right to be. And
this is very interesting, because, evidently without the author's
knowledge (though perhaps, if things had gone more happily, he might
have come to that knowledge later), it shows the rottenness of the
foundation, and the flimsiness of the superstructure, on and in which
the Covenant of Adultery--even that of Free Love--is built. Michelle de
Burne gives André Mariolle everything with one exception, if even with
that, that the greediest lover can want. She "distinguishes" him at
once; she shows keen desire for his company; she makes the last (or
first) surrender like a goddess answering a hopeless and unspoken
prayer; she is strangely generous in continuing the _don d'amoureux
merci_; she never really wearies of or jilts him, though he is a most
exacting lover; and when he has flung away from her she allows him, in
the most gracious manner, to whistle himself back. But there is one
thing, or rather two which are one, that she will not, or perhaps
cannot, give him. It is the idealised passion which nature has denied to
her, though not to him, and the absolute faithfulness and "forsaking of
all others" proper to what?--to a perfect wife. So here, in the realms
of spouse-breach, marriage is once more king, or rather the throne is
felt to be empty--the kingdom an anarchy--without it!
The lighter side of the matter reminds one of two celebrated
utterances. The first is Paul de Florac's criticism on the Lady
Clara-Barnes-Highgate triangle, "Do not adopt our institutions _à
demi_." Here the situation is topsy-turvied in the most curious fashion,
for it is the character of marriage that is desiderated in the absence
thereof, and in a country where that character itself is scoffed at.
Further, it reminds one still more of Sydney Smith's excellent jest when
Lady Holland, having previously asked him to stay at Holland House, sent
him a formal invitation to dinner, for a day within the period of the
larger hospitality. This, said Sydney, was "an attempt to combine the
stimulus of gallantry with the security of connubial relations." That
was precisely the moon that Mariolle sighed for, and that his not
exactly Artemis would not--indeed could not be expected to--give him.
Of Michelle de Burne herself there is less to be said. The curious
misogyny which chequered Maupassant's gynomania seems to have tried hard
to express itself in her portrait. It is less certain that it does. The
other characters are quite subordinate, except the _bonne_ Elisabeth
(who, promising as she is, merely makes her _début_) and a novelist,
Gaston de Lamarthe, who may sometimes be taken as the author's
mouthpiece, but who does not do him justice. The book on the whole does
much to confirm, and hardly anything to invalidate, the position that
its writer had far more to say than he ever said.
[Sidenote: _Les Dimanches_, etc.]
The ordinary list of Maupassant's "Romans," as distinct from "Nouvelles"
and "Contes," ends with _Les Dimanches d'un Bourgeois de Paris_. This,
however, is merely a series of tales (some of them actually rehandled
from earlier ones), with a single figure for centre, to wit, a certain
M. Patissot, a bachelor government-official, who is a sort of mixture of
Leech's Mr. Briggs and of Jérôme Paturot, with other predecessors who
get into scrapes and "fixtures." It is not unamusing, but scarcely
first-class, the two political skits at the end being about the best
part of it.
[Sidenote: _Yvette._]
On the other hand, _Yvette_, which is only allowed the eponymship of a
volume of short stories, though it fills to itself some hundred and
seventy pages, is one of Maupassant's most carefully written things and
one of his best--till the not fully explained, but in any case
unsatisfactory, end[498]. Its heroine is the daughter of a sham Marquise
and real courtesan, who has attained wealth, who can afford herself
lovers "for love"[499] and not for money, when she chooses, and who
keeps up a sort of demi-monde society, in which most of the men are
adventurers and all the women adventuresses, but which maintains outward
decencies. In consequence of this Yvette herself--in a fashion a little
impossible, but artistically made not improbable--though she allows
herself the extreme "tricks and manners" of faster society, calls half
the men by nicknames, wanders about alone with them, etc., preserves not
merely her personal purity but even her ignorance of unclean things in
general, and especially of her mother's real character and conduct. Her
relations with a clever and not ungentlemanly _roué_, one M. de
Servigny; his difficulties (these are very curiously and cleverly told)
in making love to a girl not of the lower class (at least apparently)
and not vicious; his attempt to brusque the matter; her horror at it and
at the coincident discovery of her mother's ways; her attempt to poison
herself; and her salvage by Servigny's coolness and devotion--are
capitally done. Out of many passages, one, where Madame la Marquise
Obardi, otherwise Octavie Bardin, formerly domestic servant, drops her
mask, opens her mouth, and uses the crude language of a procuress-mother
to her daughter, is masterly. But the end is not from any point of view
satisfactory. Apparently (for it is not made quite clear) Yvette
retracts her refusal to be a kept mistress. In that case certainly, and
in the almost impossible one of marriage probably, it may be feared that
the catastrophe is only postponed. Now Yvette has been made too good (I
do not mean goody) to be allowed to pine or poison herself, as a
soon-to-be-neglected concubine or a not-much-longer-to-be-loved wife.
[Sidenote: Short stories--the various collections.]
That the very large multitude[500] of his short stories (or, one begs
pardon, brief-narratives) is composed of units very different in merit
is not wonderful. It was as certain that the covers of the author of
_Boule de Suif_[501] would be drawn for the kind of thing frequently, as
that these would sometimes be drawn either blank, or with the result of
a very indifferent run. To an eye of some expertness, indeed, a good
many of these pieces are, at best, the sort of thing that a clever
contributor would turn off to editorial order, when he looked into a
newspaper office between three and five, or ten and midnight. I confess
that I once burst out laughing when, having thought to myself on reading
one, "This is not much above a better written Paul-de-Kockery," I found
at the end something like a frank acknowledgment of the fact, _with the
name_. In fact, Maupassant was not good at the pure _grivoiserie_; his
contemporary M. Armand Silvestre (_v. inf._) did it much better. Touches
of tragedy, as has been said, save the situation sometimes, and at
others the supernatural element of dread (which was to culminate in _Le
Horla_, and finally to overpower the author himself) gives help; but the
zigzags of the line of artistic success are sharp and far too numerous.
For a short story proper and a "proper" short story, _L'Épave_, where an
inspector of marine insurance visits a wreck far out on the sands of the
Isle of Rhé, and, finding an Englishman and his daughter there, most
unprofessionally forgets that the tides come up rapidly in such places,
is nearly perfect. On the other hand, _Le Rosier de Mme. Husson_, one of
the longest, is almost worthless.
[Sidenote: Classes--stories of 1870-71.]
At one time I had designed--and to no small extent written--a running
survey of a large number of these stories as they turn up in the
volumes, most of which--the _Contes de la Bécasse_ is the chief
exception--have no unity, and are merely "scoopings" of pieces enough to
fill three hundred pages or so. But it would have occupied far too much
space for its importance and interest. As a matter of fact, they are to
some extent classifiable, and so may be dealt with on a representative
system. There is the division of "La Revanche," which might have saved
some of our fools at home from mistaking the Prussian for anything but a
Prussian. _Boule de Suif_ heads this, of course; but _Mlle. Fifi_, which
is a sort of tragic _Boule de Suif_--the tragedy being, one is glad to
say, at the invaders' expense--is not far below it. _Deux Amis_, one of
the best, records how two harmless Parisian anglers, pursuing their
beloved sport too far, were shot for refusing to betray the password
back; and _La Mère Sauvage_, the finest of all, how a French mother,
hearing of her son's death, burnt her own house with some Germans
billeted in it, and was, on her frank confession, shot. But _Un Duel_,
though a Prussian officer (_vile damnum_) pays for his brutality with
his life, restores the comic element, partly at the expense of the two
English seconds.[502]
Connected with the war of 1870 too, though not military, is the capital
_Coup d'État_, in which a Monarchist French squire checkmates, for the
moment at least, a blatant Republican village doctor.
[Sidenote: Norman stories.]
Very much larger than any other group is, naturally enough, that on
Norman subjects. Maupassant does not flatter his fellow-subjects of the
great Duchy, but he loves them, and knows them, and delights to talk of
them--talking always well and often at his best. There must be, in all,
several volumes-full of these, though they are actually scattered over a
dozen: and it is not easy to go wrong with them. Perhaps a new "Farce du
Cuvier," quite different from those known to readers of Boccaccio and
the Fabliaux (a very drunk peasant sells his wife[503] by weight or
measure to another, and scientifically ascertains the exact sum to be
paid by making her fill a butt with water and putting her into it--the
displacement giving the required result) is the merriest. The story of
the schoolboy who negotiates a marriage between his Latin tutor and a
young person is excellent; and that of "Boitelle," a poor fellow who is
prevented (through that singular abuse of _patria potestas_ so long
allowed by French law) from marrying an agreeable negress, is the most
pathetic. But I myself am rather fond of the _Légende du Mont
Saint-Michel_. At first one is a little shocked at finding "the great
vision of the guarded mount"[504] yoked to the old Scandinavian
troll-and-farmer story of the fraudulent bargain as to alternate upper-
and under-ground crops. But the magnificent opening description of "the
fairy castle planted in the sea"[505] excuses, and is thrown up by, the
sequel. Mont-Saint-Michel is not like Naples. When you have seen it, it
is not your business to die, but to live and remember the sight of it;
and, if you are lucky, your remembrance will have anticipated
Maupassant's words, and be freshened by them.
[Sidenote: Algerian and Sporting.]
Algiers and the Riviera were also fruitful in quantity, rather less so
in quality. But on the former two stories, _Allouma_ and _Au Soir_, may
be found together, the whole of the first of which, and the beginning of
the second, are first-rate. The above mentioned _Contes de la Bécasse_
are almost all good, though by no means all sporting.
[Sidenote: Purely comic.]
For pure comedy one might put as the first three--with the caution that
Mrs. Grundy had better keep away from them--_Les Soeurs Rondoli_,[506]
for which I feel certain that, when Maupassant reached the Elysian
Fields, Aristophanes and Rabelais jointly requested the pleasure of
introducing him to the company, and crowned him with the choicest
laurels; _Mouche_, which is really touching as well as tickling at the
end, though the grave and precise must be doubly warned off this; and
_Enragée_--which is a sort of blend of an old smoking-room story of the
perils of the honeymoon when new, and that curious tale[507] of Vigny's
which has been given above.
[Sidenote: Tragic.]
For pure, or almost pure, tragedy and pathos, again, _Monsieur Parent_
stands first--the history of the late vengeance of a deceived husband
and friend. _Miss Harriet_ gives us something more than a stage
Englishwoman with large feet, projecting teeth, tartan skirts, and
tracts, though it gives us this too. _Madame Baptiste_--the very short
tale of a hapless woman who, having been the victim of crime in her
youth, is pursued by the scandal thereof to suicide, in spite of her
having found a worthy husband--is one of Maupassant's intensest.
[Sidenote: Tales of Life's Irony.]
As examples, bending sometimes to the comic, sometimes to the pathetic
side of studies in the irony of life, one may recommend _A Cheval_ (a
holiday taken by a poor but well-born family, which saddles them with an
unconscionable "run-over" Old-_Wo_man-of-the-_Land_); _La Parure_ and
_Les Bijous_ (the first a variant of _A Cheval_, the second a discovery
by a husband, after his wife's death, of her shame); and perhaps best of
all, _Regret_, in which a gentleman of sixty, reflecting on his wasted
life, remembers a picnic, decades earlier, where the wife of his
lifelong friend--both of them still friends and neighbours--behaved
rather oddly. He hurries across to ask her (whom he finds jam-making)
what she would have done if he had "failed in respect," and receives the
cool answer, "J'aurais cédé." It is good; but fancy not being able to
take a walk, and observe the primroses by the river's brim, without
being bound in honour to observe likewise whether the lady by your side
was ready to "cede" or not! It seems to me that in such circumstances
one would, to quote a French critic on an entirely different author and
matter, "lose all the grace and liberty of the composition."
[Sidenote: Oddments.]
Some oddments[508] may deserve addition. _Fini_, which might have been
mentioned in the last group, is a very perfect thing. A well-preserved
dandy in middle age meets, after many years, an old love, and sees,
mirrored in _her_ decay, his own so long ignored. Nobody save a master
could have done this as it is done. _Julie Romain_ is a quaint
half-dream based on some points in George Sand's life, and attractive.
The _title_ of _L'Inutile Beauté_ has also always been so to me (the
_story_ is worth little). It would be, I think, a fair test of any man's
taste in style, whether he did or did not see any difference between it
and _La Beauté Inutile_. In _Adieu_, I think, Maupassant has been guilty
of a fearful heresy in speaking of part of a lady's face as "ce _sot_
organe qu'on appelle le nez." Now that a nose, both in man and woman,
can be foolish, nobody will deny. But that foolishness is an organic
characteristic of it--in the sense of inexpressiveness, want of
character, want of charm--is flatly a falsehood.[509] Neither mouth nor
eyes can beat it in that respect; and if it has less variety
individually, it gives perhaps more general character to the face than
either. However, he is, if I mistake not, obliged to retract partially
in the very story.
I have notes of many others--some of which may be special favourites
with readers of mine--but room for no more. Yet for me at least among
all these, despite the glaring inequality, despite the presence of some
things utterly ephemeral and not in the least worth giving a new day to;
despite the "_saleté_ bête"[510] and the monotonous and obligatory
adultery,[511] there abides, as in the large books, and from
circumstances now and then with gathered intensity, that quality of
above-the-commonness which has obliged me to speak of Maupassant as I
have spoken.
[Sidenote: General considerations.]
The vividness and actuality of his power of presentation are
unquestioned, and there has been complaint rather of the character of
his "illusions" (_v. sup._) than of his failure to convey them to
others. It is not merely that nature, helped by the discipline of
practice under the severest of masters, had endowed him with a style of
the most extraordinary sobriety and accuracy--the style of a more
scholarly, reticent, and tightly-girt Defoe. It is not merely that his
vision, and his capacity of reproducing that vision, were unsurpassed
and rarely equalled for sharpness of outline and perfection of
disengagement. He had something else which it is much less easy to put
into words--the power of treating an incident or a character (character,
it is true, less often and less fully than incident) as if it were a
phrase or a landscape, of separating it, carving it out (so to speak),
and presenting it isolated and framed for survey. His performances in
these tracks are so numerous that it is difficult to single out any. But
I do not know that finer examples (besides those noticed above in _Une
Vie_) of his power of thus isolating and projecting a scene are to be
found than two of the passages in _Pierre et Jean_, the prawn-catching
party and Pierre's meditation at the jetty-head. Of his similar but
greater faculty of treating incident _and_ character _Monsieur Parent_
is perhaps the very finest example (for _Boule de Suif_ is something
greater than a mere slice), though _Promenade_, _Les Soeurs Rondoli_,
_Boitelle_, _Deux Amis_, and others are almost as good. But this very
excellence of our author's carries with it a danger which most of his
readers must have recognised. His definition and vignetting of separate
scenes, incidents, and characters is so sharp and complete that he finds
a difficulty in combining them. The attempt to disdain and depreciate
plot which the above-mentioned Preface contains is, I suspect (though I
am, as often confessed, no plot-worshipper), as our disdains and
depreciations so often are, itself a confession. At any rate, it is
allowed that the longer books, with the exception of _Pierre et Jean_
(which was for that very reason, and perhaps for others, disdained by
the youngest and most impressionist school of critics), are deficient in
beginning, middle, and end. _Une Vie_ and _Bel-Ami_ are surveys or
chronicles, not dramas or histories. _Mont-Oriol_, open enough to
objection in some ways, is rather better in this point. _Fort Comme la
Mort_ relapses under the old curse of the situation of teasing
unhappiness from which there is no outlet, and in which there is little
action. _Notre Coeur_ should perhaps escape criticism on this head, as
the shadow of the author's fate was already heavy on him. In fact, as
observed above, it is little more than a torso. Even _Pierre et Jean_,
by far the greatest of all, if scale and artistic perfection be taken
together, falls short in the latter respect of _Boule de Suif_, which,
small as it is, is a complete tragi-comedy in little, furnished with
beginning, middle, and end, complying fully with those older exigences
which its author affected to despise, and really as great as anything of
Mérimée's--greater it could not be.
There is no doubt that the theory which Maupassant says he learnt from
Flaubert (in whose own hands it was always subordinated to an effort at
larger completeness) does lead to the composition of a series or flock
of isolated vignettes or scenes rather than to that of a great picture
or drama. For it comes perilously close--though perhaps in Maupassant's
own case it never actually reached--the barest and boldest (or baldest)
individualising of impressions, and leaving them as they are, without an
attempt at architectonic. For instance, once upon a time[512] I was
walking down the Euston Road. There passed me a fellow dragging a
truck, on which truck there were three barrels with the heads knocked
out, so that each barrel ensheathed, to a certain extent, the one in
front of it. Astride of the centre barrel, his arms folded and a pipe in
his mouth, there sat a man in a sort of sailor-costume--trousers,
guernsey, and night-cap--surveying the world, and his fellow who dragged
him, with an air of placid _goguenarderie_. It was really a striking
impression, and absorbed me, I should think, for five or six seconds. I
can conceive its coming into a story very well. But Maupassant's
theories would have led to his making a whole story out of it, and his
followers have already done things quite as bad, while he has himself
come near to it more than once.[513] In other words, the method tends to
the presentations of scraps, orts, fragments, instead of complete
wholes. And Art should always seek the whole.
As for the character of Maupassant's "illusions," there could never be
much doubt about some of them. _Boule de Suif_ itself pretty clearly
indicated, and _La Maison Tellier_ shortly after showed, at the very
opening of his literary career, the scenes, the society, and the solaces
which he most affected: while it was impossible to read even two or
three of his stories without discovering that, to M. de Maupassant, the
world was most emphatically _not_ the best of all possible worlds. This
was by no means principally shown in the stories of supernatural terror
to which, with an inconsistency by no means uncommon in declared
materialists, and, had it not been for his unhappy end, very amusing, he
was so much given. The chief of these, _Le Horla_, has not been much of
a favourite with the lovers of "ghost-stories" in general. I think they
are rather unjust to it. But if it has a fault, that fault lies (and, to
avoid the charge of being wise after the event, I may observe that I
thought so at the time) in too much conviction. The darkness is darkness
which has been felt, and felt so much by the artist that he has lost
his artistic grasp and command. There was, perhaps, in his own actual
state, too much reason for this. In earlier things of the kind it is
less perceptible. _Fou?_ is rather splendid. _Auprès d'un Mort_--an
anecdote of the death-bed of Schopenhauer, whom Maupassant naturally
admired as the greatest of _saccageurs de rêves_, though there are some
who, admiring the first master of thoroughly good German prose style and
one of the best of German critics, have kept the fort of their dreams
safe from all he could do--has merits. _Lettre trouvée sur un noyé_ is
good; _L'Horrible_ not quite so good; _Le Loup_ (a sort of fancy from
the "bête du Gévaudan" story) better; _Apparition_ of the best, with _La
Morte_ to pair it, and _Un Cas de Divorce_ and _Qui sait?_ to make up
the quartette. Perhaps the best of all (I do not specify its title in
order that those who do not know it may read till they find it out) is
that where the visionary sees the skeletons of the dead rising and
transforming their lying epitaphs into confessions--the last tomb now
bearing the true cause of his own mistress's death. But the
double-titled _La Nuit--Cauchemar_ runs it hard.
Yet it is not in these stories of doubt and dread, or in the ostensible
and rather shallow philosophisings of the travel-books, that
Maupassant's pessimism is most obvious. His preference for the unhappy
ending amounts almost to a _tic_, and would amount wholly to a
bore--for _toujours_ unhappy-ending is just as bad as _toujours_
marriage-bells--if it were not relieved and lightened by a real presence
of humour. With this sovereign preservative for self, and more sovereign
charm for others, Guy de Maupassant was more richly provided than any of
his French contemporaries, and more than any but a very few of his
countrymen at any time. And as humour without tenderness is an
impossibility, so, too, he could be and was tender. Yet it was seldom
and _malgré lui_, while he allowed the mere exercise of his humour
itself too scantily for his own safety and his readers' pleasure. That
there was any more _fanfaronnade_ either of vice or of misanthropy
about him, I do not believe. An unfortunate conformity of innate
temperament and acquired theory made such a _fanfaronnade_ as
unnecessary as it would have been repugnant to him. But illusion, in
such cases, is more dangerous, if less disgusting, than imposture. And
so it happened that, in despite of the rare and vast faculties just
allowed him, he was constantly found applying them to subjects
distasteful if not disgraceful, and allowing the results to be sicklied
over with a persistent "soot-wash" of pessimism which was always rather
monotonous, and not always very impressive.
It was, of course, inevitable that, on this side of the Channel at
least, strictures should be passed--and appealed against--on a writer of
this kind. The impropriety of M. de Maupassant's subjects, the
"cruelty," the "brutality," the "pessimism," and what not, of his
handling, were sure to be denounced or defended, as the case may be.
Although the merely "shoking" tone (as the spelling dear to Frenchmen
has it) has waned persistently ever since his day, expressions in it
have not been wanting; while, on the other hand, newer-fashioned and
probably younger censors have scornfully waved aside the very
consideration of this part of the subject. Further, no less a critic
than my friend Mr. Traill entered, long ago, a protest against the
admission of Maupassant's pessimism as a drawback. "He did not," says
Mr. Traill (I quote from memory), "_pose_ as a pessimist; he was
perfectly sincere, and an artist's sincere life-philosophy, whatever it
is, is not to be urged against the products of his art."
I think that these questions require a little discussion, even in a
general _History_.
With reference to the impropriety matter, I have myself, after a
lifetime of fighting against the _hérésie de l'enseignement_, not the
very slightest intention of deserting to or transacting with it. I do
most heartily agree and affirm that the subject of a work of art is not,
as such, the better or the worse, the more or the less legitimate,
because of its tastefulness or distastefulness on moral considerations.
But there is a perpetual danger, when we are clearing our minds of one
cant, of allowing them to be invaded by another; and I think I have seen
cases where the determination not to be moral of malice prepense has
been so great that it has toppled over into a determination to be
immoral of malice prepense. Now, the question is, whether Maupassant and
some of Maupassant's admirers are not somewhat in this case? It is
surely impossible for any impartial critic to contend that the unlucky
novelist's devotion to the class of subjects referred to, and his manner
of handling them, did not amount to what has been pedantically, but
accurately, termed an "obsession of the _lupanar_." Now, it seems to me
that all obsession, no matter of what class or kind, is fatal, or, at
least, injurious, to the artist. It is almost impossible that he should
keep his judgment and his taste cool and clear under it; it is almost
impossible that his poring shall not turn into preaching. And I think it
not much less hard to defend Maupassant from the charge of having become
a kind of preacher in this way, and so a heretic of instruction, just as
much as if he had taken to theology, dogmatic or undogmatic. Perpetual
representation amounts to inculcation.[514]
So, again, in reference to the apologies for Maupassant's pessimism. I
cannot see how it can be contended that the perpetual obtrusion of a
life-philosophy of any special kind is other than a fault in art. I have
no particular objection to pessimism as such; I suppose most people who
have thought and felt a good deal are nearer to it than to its opposite;
and, though both opposites bore me when they are obtruded, I think
rose-pink and sky-blue bore me rather more than the various shades of
grey and brown and black. I admit further that, but for the pessimist
_diathesis_, we might not have had that peculiar tragedy in which he
has been admitted to excel. But it seems to me that the creative artist,
as such, and as distinguished from the critical, has no more business to
display--to _arborer_--a life-philosophy, than he has to display a
philosophy of any other kind. Signs of it may escape him at times; but
they should be escapes, not deliberate exhibitions. He is to see life
whole as far as he can; and it is impossible that he should see it whole
if he is under the domination of any 'ism to the extent that Maupassant
was under the domination of this. In the one supreme artist (I am
talking, of course, throughout of the art of letters only) whom we know,
there is, perhaps, no more distinctive peculiarity than his elusion of
all attempts to class him as "Thissist" or "Thattist." And in those who
come nearest to him, though they may have strong beliefs and strong
proclivities, we always see the capacity of taking the other side. The
fervent theologian of the _Paradiso_ treats hardly any of his victims
with more consideration than the inhabitants of the City of Dis: the
prophet and poet of his own Uranian love for Beatrice swoons at the
sight of Francesca's punishment, and feels "so that boiling glass were
coolness," the very penalty of the Seventh Circle of Purgatory. But
Maupassant's materialism and his pessimism combined shut out from him
vast parts and regions of life and thought and feeling, as it were with
the blank wall of his very earliest poem. The fantastic shadows of his
peculiar imagination play on that wall fascinatingly enough; and the
region of passion and of gloom within is not without a charm, if a
somewhat unholy and unhealthy one. But beyond the wall there is a whole
universe which Maupassant does not merely neglect, but of which he seems
to be blankly ignorant and unconscious, except in flashes of ignorant
disdain. That the infinite province of religious emotion and reflection
is shut out is a matter of course; but most of the other regions, in
which those who decline religion take refuge, are equally closed. I can
remember in Maupassant only the slightest signs of interest in general
literature (except so far as it bears upon his own special craft), in
the illimitable ranges of history, in politics, in the higher
philosophy.[515] It cannot be said of him, as of his master's dismal
heroes, that _tout lui a craqué dans la main_. There is no sign of trial
on his part; he starts where Bouvard and Pécuchet end, and takes for
granted a failure which he has not given himself the trouble to
experience.
But, it may be said, "What does it matter what he does not do, know,
feel, care for, if he treats what he does do, know, feel, and care for,
well?" The objection is ingenious, and, as Petruchio would say, "'a
might have a little galled me" if its ingenuity had not been the
ingenuity of fallacy. For the question is whether this insensibility to
large parts of life has not injured Maupassant's treatment of the parts
in which he did feel an interest. I think it has. There were too many
things in emotion and in thought of which he was ignorant. Mrs. Piozzi,
in her _Anecdotes of Johnson_, observes that the Doctor, despite his
freedom from gush and his dislike to religious verse, could never repeat
the stanza of _Dies Irae_ which ends "Tantus labor non sit cassus"
without bursting into tears. I know a person very different from Johnson
who, though he had not read the _Anecdotes_ till an advanced period of
his life, had never failed to experience something like the same result
at the same line. And, for a third point, it is well known that actual
agnostics have often confessed to like affections in similar cases. The
numerous and complicated causes of this weakness, or, if any one prefers
to call them so, the numerous and complicated causes of this enjoyment,
had no hold whatever on Maupassant.
But this hemiplegia of the intellect and the imagination--this
sterilising of one-half, or more than one-half, of the sources of
intellectual and imaginative experience and delight--did not prevent him
from leaving durable and perdurable results of the vigour of his mind
and his sense, in the regions which were open to him. He wrote--as
almost every popular writer in these days who does not shut himself up
in a _tour d'ivoire_ and neglect popularity must write--too much; and,
in the special circumstances and limitations of his interests and his
genius, this was specially unfortunate. He repeated himself too often;
and he too frequently failed to come up to himself in the repetition.
The better part of him, as with Flaubert before, transcended--even
openly contemned--the 'isms of his day: but he too often let himself be
subservient to them, if he was never exactly their Helot.
Yet in recompense--a recompense largely if not wholly due to the strong
Romantic[516] element which countervails the Naturalist--he was
certainly the greatest novelist who was specially of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century in France. In verse he showed the dawn, and in
prose the noon-day, of a combination of veracity and vigour, of
succinctness and strength, which no Frenchman who made his _début_ since
1870 could surpass. The limitations of his art have been sufficiently
dealt with; the excellences of it within those limitations are
unmistakable. He had no tricks--the worst curse of art at all times, and
the commonest in these days of what pretends to be art. He had no splash
of so-called "style"; no acrobatic contortions of thought or what does
duty for thought; no pottering and peddling of the psychological kind,
which would fain make up for a faulty product by ostentatiously parading
the processes of production. Had he once got free--as more than once it
seemed that he might--from the fatal conventionalities of his
unconventionalism, from the trammels of his obtrusive negations, there
is hardly a height in prose fiction which he might not have attained. As
it is, he gave us in verse _Au bord de l'eau_, which is nearly the
"farthest possible" in a certain expression, of a certain mood of youth,
and not of youth only; in prose _Boule de Suif_, _Monsieur Parent_,
_Pierre et Jean_, which are all in their way masterpieces, and a hundred
things hardly inferior. And so he put himself in the company of "Les
Phares"--a light-giver at once and a warner of danger, as well as a part
of
cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'âge en âge,
Et vient mourir au bord de _notre_ éternité.[517]
[Sidenote: Huysmans.]
The Naturalist rank and file are so far below Zola and Maupassant that
they cannot now, whatever they might have done twenty years ago, claim
much notice in such a history as this. The most remarkable of them was
probably J. K. Huysmans. It has been charitably suggested or admitted
above that his contribution to the _Soirées de Médan_--a deeply felt
story, showing the extreme disadvantage, when, as Mr. De la Pluche
delicately put it, "your midlands are out of order," of wandering
quarters and vicissitudes in the country, and the intense relief
experienced on return to your own comfortable chambers in town,--that
this _may_ have been written in the spirit of a _farceur_, reducing the
Goncourtian and Zolaesque principle to the lowest terms of the absurd.
But I am by no means sure that it was so, though this suspicion of
parody pursues the earlier work of Huysmans to such an extent that a
certain class of critic might take his later developments as evidence of
design in it. _Les Soeurs Vatard_ is a sort of _apodiabolosis_ of the
Goncourts and Zola--a history of entirely uninteresting persons (the
"sisters" are work-girls in a printing-house, and their companions suit
them) doing entirely uninteresting things, in an atmosphere of foul
smells, on a scene littered with garbage, cheered by wine which is red
ink, and brandy which is vitriol. _À Rebours_, not really a novel at
all, is the history of a certain M. Des Esseintes, who is a sort of
transposed "Bouvard et Pécuchet" in one--trying all arts and sensations;
his experiences being made by his historian a vehicle of mostly virulent
and almost always worthless criticism on contemporaries. Perhaps the
most intolerable thing is the _affiche_ of idolatry for Baudelaire. One
remembers the glorious lines:
Et Charles Baudelaire
Dédaigneux du salaire.
He certainly might have been disdainful of the salary of the admiration
of one of the _farceurs_ of his own "Coucher du Soleil Romantique." But
on the whole there is a better way of taking leave of this first
Naturalist, and then mystic, and always _blagueur_. "Almost thou
persuadest me to be a Philistine." Which perhaps was his cryptic and
circuitous intention. Later M. Huysmans took to Black Arts; and at the
last he turned devout--a sort of sequence not by any means uncommon, and
one of the innumerable illustrations of the irony of things. Gautier and
others had anticipated and satirised all these stages in the Romantic
dawn; they reappeared, serious and dreary, in the twilight of the dusk.
[Sidenote: Belot and others.]
Adolphe Belot was not, strictly speaking, a Naturalist, for he was a
dozen years older than Zola, and ran up a huge list of novels ranging in
character between Naturalism and melodrama. His most famous book, _Mlle.
Giraud ma Femme_, was the most popular of a large number of attempts,
about the last third of the century, in the school of _La Religieuse_,
but with more or less deliberately pornographic effect. There is,
however, some power in this book, and the "curtain"--the foiled husband,
after Mlle. Giraud's death, seeing his she-rival swimming, swims out
after and drowns her--is quite refreshing. But I have always liked M.
Belot best for a thoughtful and delightful remark in _La Femme de Feu_.
"Heureuse elle-même, elle trouva naturel de faire les autres heureux,"
which, translated into plain English, means that she was so happy with
her husband that she couldn't help making her lover happy. M. Belot did
not work out this modification of the Golden Rule--he was not a
philosophic novelist. But it is very humorous in itself, and the
extensions and applications of it are illimitable and vertiginous.[518]
Below him it is unnecessary to go.
FOOTNOTES:
[455] For the early divisions of verse and prose story were all Topsies,
and simply "growed"; although the smaller romances of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth century, and the larger of the latter date, were
undoubtedly influenced by the Greek, it was more a case of general
imitation than specific endeavour; the Sensibility school was very
limited and chiefly attended to tricks of manner; and the "Romantic
vague" was never vaguer than in the vast and rather formless, though
magnificent and delightful, novel-work started by Nodier, Mérimée,
Vigny, and Hugo. The Naturalists, on the other hand, had a deliberate
idea of revolutionising the novel--of abolishing old things and creating
new. They could not, and did not, succeed: but their scheme, as well as
its results, may claim consideration.
[456] To which a brief consideration of the curious fancy of some French
critics that there is something "classical" about Naturalism may be
specially relegated.
[457] Mérimée, though after his fashion making no fuss about it, was
also an early virtuoso in this kind; and one of his letters contains an
excellent example of the quiet cynicism in which he excelled. Some
ladies had asked to see his collection, and he had very properly warned
them that the "curios" of that ingenious and valiant nation were
sometimes "curious" in a special sense, and had offered to "select."
"Elles ont tout vu," he adds simply, and one hopes his correspondent (I
forgot whether it was one of the _Inconnues_ or Madame de Montijo)
appreciated the Mount-Everest-like Laconism.
[458] The banal phrase has been framed in the amber of "Théo's" verse,
and so debanalised.
[459] The first book of theirs, or rather of Edmond's, though it bore
both names, that I read, and the second French book I ever reviewed, was
the mainly artistic _Gavarni_ of 1873. One has a human weakness in such
cases, but I think one might not have been wholly well disposed to the
author from it.
[460] Pepys had nothing that could be called _bad_ blood. Horace perhaps
had a little, but it was sweet and childlike compared to the
"acrid-quack" fluid of Edmond de Goncourt's veins and heart. Probably
several people have seen in M. de Goncourt the suggestion of an
_un_-Puritan Malvolio.
[461] Not, however, in the second case, by Sainte-Beuve, whose
lukewarmness Edmond--a "Sensitive Plant" in this way if hardly in
others--never forgave.
[462] She served them for a very long period without giving them any
apparent cause for complaint. They only found out her delinquencies
after her death, or in her last illness--I forget which. Probably
nothing could better show "the nature of the animals" than this
_post-mortem_ grubbing belowstairs for a "subject," and washing your own
household dirty linen in public--for profit.
[463] It may be well to smash, in a passing note, a silly catchword
popular with some rather belated English admirers of the Naturalist
school a few years ago. They praised its "frankness." You might as well
praise the "straightforwardness" of a man who goes out of his way to
explore laystalls and, having picked up ordure, holds it up to public
view.
[464] Both excellent things in their way, of course. Perhaps it would be
better to say asafoetida.
[465] It is perhaps only fair to warn readers who may not know the fact,
that some very good and (in the French as well as the English sense)
respectable judges think much better of the work, and even of the men or
man, than I do. _Renée Mauperin_ especially (as indeed I have admitted)
has a considerable body of suffrage; the general style pleases some, and
it has been urged for Edmond that good men liked him. But these good men
had not read his diary. There is, however, no doubt that it is an
exceptionally strong case of "rubbing the [right or the] wrong way."
Books and men and style all rub me the wrong way; and, though I have
some knack at using the brushes and _fixatures_ of pure criticism, I
can't get myself smoothed down.
[466] See note at close of chapter. One of the most comic things in the
whole Naturalist episode was the rising up of some of these disciples to
rebuke their master, in a round robin, for "right-hand and left-hand
defections" from the pure gospel of the sect.
[467] The word is used, designedly but not fraudulently, as combining
"observation" and "experiment" _to the extent proper to art_. Deliberate
and after-thought "experi_ments_" in actual life are (except in trivial
matters) very risky things; and the _Summa Rerum_ itself is apt to
resent them, as, for instance, Mr. Thomas Day and Mr. Felix Graham found
in the matter of wife-culture.
[468] _V. sup._ Vol. I. p. 278. I was much pleased to find that the
quotation considerably "put out" one of my few unfavourable critics.
"The Importance of Gastronomy in Novels" is a beautiful subject--still,
I think, virgin, though Thackeray has touched on it in others once or
twice, and illustrated it magnificently himself.
[469] For something on the opposite view, that Naturalism is
"classical," see Conclusion.
[470] That Flaubert escaped their error only so far as by fire has been
allowed. One might indeed say so by death. For _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ as
it stands, and as outlined further, is very near Naturalism. Earlier he
had carried the principle far in _Salammbô_, and would have carried it
farther if he had not listened to good advice for once. But he had fire
enough in his interior to burn the rubbish and smelt the ore in his
better books, and skill enough to run off the metal from the dross, into
proper shape. The others had not.
[471] I learn from the lucubrations of some Americans--who, having been,
rather late and with some difficulty, induced to perceive that Edgar Poe
was their chief literary glory, have taken vehemently to his favourite
kind, and written voluminously in and on it--that it ought to be called
a "brief-narrative," the hyphen being apparently essential. This is very
interesting: and throws much light on the subject. However, having read
a great deal on it, I do not find myself much advanced beyond a position
which I think I occupied some fifty years ago--to wit, that a short
story is not merely a long one cut down, nor a long story a short one
spun out.
[472] Barbey d'Aurevilly's (_v. sup._) attack on the book is one of the
most remarkable instances of the irresponsibility of his criticism.
[473] _V. sup._ p. 258.
[474] One ought perhaps to verify; but that would be hard lines to have
to read _Nana_ twice!
[475] That of the _Union Générale_.
[476] _Vérité_, though a remarkable "human document" itself, and an
indispensable _historical_ document for any student of the particular
popular madness with which it deals, need surely be inflicted a second
time on no mortal. It is a transposition into the regions of the
unmentionable, of the Dreyfus case itself. But nobody save a failure of
something like a novelist of genius, with this failure pushed near the
confines of madness, could have written it.
[477] "M. Zola [is] apparently persuaded that, if you can only kill God,
the Devil will die--an idea which seems to leave out of consideration
the idiosyncrasy of a third personage, Man" (_The Later Nineteenth
Century_, Edinburgh and London, 1907, pp. 93, 94).
[478] Only it would have to be real Blake, not imitation, which latter
is one of the furthest examples of dreary futility known to the present
writer.
[479] The horticulture of _L'Abbé Mouret_ is nearest to an exception;
but even that is overdone.
[480] Who might even say, "Is not this a slip of pen or press? Has not
'might' dropped out?" I should doubt it, even if a copy of the original
edition had the missing word, for it might easily have been put in by a
dull but conscientious "reader." The plural, in Thackeray's careless
way, comes from his _thinking_ as he wrote "Are they not _all_ ...
personage_s_...." The context confirms this.
[481] There are, of course, comparatively few of these; but the fewness
is not positive, even keeping to prose-fiction. Poetry and drama--under
their less onerous conditions for this special task--would enlarge the
list in goodly fashion.
[482] Shortly after Maupassant's death, I contributed an article on him
to the _Fortnightly Review_. It has never been reprinted, but, by the
kindness of the Editor of that _Review_, I have been permitted to use it
as a basis for this notice. I have, however, altered, omitted, and added
to a much greater extent than in the few other rehandlings acknowledged
in this History. The account of the actual books is wholly new.
[483] I had known Verlaine since his appearance in the _Parnasse
Contemporain_ years earlier, but not yet in his most characteristic
work.
[484] The following summary, to p. 505, formed no part of the original
article and is based on fresh and continuous reading. It is purposely
rather more minute than anything else in these later chapters, and was
not the easiest part of the book to do, owing to the large number of
Maupassant's short stories.
[485] Maupassant _could_ draw gentlemen and ladies, but he often did not
do so. His pretty young countesses (_not_ the same persons as those
referred to in text), who get drunk together _tête-à-tête_, and
discourse on the best way of making more effectual Josephs out of their
footmen, are not pleasing, though they are right in holding that no
perfume, save Eau de Cologne, doth become a _man_.
[486] Vol. I. pp. 150-1.
[487] The usual gutter-Naturalist certainly would--and even M. Zola, I
fear, might--have done the "Ephesian matron" business thoroughly:
Maupassant, as so often, knew other and better things.
[488] It may suggest Leconte de Lisle to others and may even have been
meant for him, but I think it worthy of the earlier and greater poet.
[489] It went, I fear, by mistake with the rest of my books; so I quote
from memory. But Southey and Locker have had their duet pleasantly
changed into a trio since by Mr. Austin Dobson's _Bookman's Budget_.
[490] It may be just, and only just necessary to observe (what I know
perfectly well) that Maupassant was, in the direct sense, Flaubert's
pupil and not Zola's.
[491] He was, says his historian well, "de la race des amants et non
point de la race des pères."
[492] The resemblances between Thackeray and Maupassant are very
numerous and most remarkable. That they have both been accused of
cynicism _and_ sentimentality is only, as it were, the index-finger to
the relationship.
[493] At the risk, however, of wearying the reader and "forcing open
doors," one may exemplify, from this book also, the artificial character
of this obligatory adultery. Anne de Guilleroy has all the
qualifications of an almost perfect mistress (in the honourable sense)
and wife. She is charming; a flirt to the right point and not beyond it;
passionate ditto; affectionate; not capricious; inviolably faithful (in
her unfaithfulness, of course); jealous to her own pain, but with no
result of malice to others. Yet in order to show all this she has to be
an adulteress first--in obedience to this mysterious modernisation and
topsy-turvification of ancient Babylonian custom, and the _jus primae
noctis_, and the proverb as to second thoughts being best, and Heaven or
the other place knows what else. Here also, as elsewhere,
Maupassant--satirist of women as he is--makes her lover a very inferior
creature to herself. For Bertin is a selfish coxcomb, and _does_, at
least half, allow himself to be "snuffed out by an article."
[494] Any one who chooses may compare it with the utterances of the late
Mr. Henry James. Maupassant's own selection of novels, to illustrate the
impossibility of defining _a_ novel, is of the first interest. They are:
_Manon Lescaut_, _Paul et Virginie_, _Don Quichotte_, _Les Liaisons
Dangereuses_, _Werther_, _Les Affinités Électives_, _Clarissa_ [_he_
adds _Harlowe_, an unauthentic addition, pardonable in a Frenchman,
though not in one of us], _Émile_, _Candide_, _Cinq-Mars_, _René_, _Les
Trois Mousquetaires_, _Mauprat_, _Le Père Goriot_, _La Cousine Bette_,
_Colomba_, _Le Rouge et Le Noir_, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, _Notre Dame
de Paris_, _Salammbô_, _Madame Bovary_, _Adolphe_, _M. de Camors_,
_L'Assommoir_, and _Sapho_.
[495] "Amant" as accurately distinguished by M. Jean Richepin in
_Césarine_ (for the benefit of an innocent Hungarian) from "amoureux."
[496] Not that I wish to blaspheme Circe, who always seems to me to have
adjusted herself to a disconcertingly changed situation with more than
demi-goddesslike dexterity and good humour. It may perhaps be not
irrelevant, to discussion of novels in general, to mention something
which I have never yet seen put in Homeric discussion, though the bare
idea of anything new there being possible may seem preposterous. The
arguments of the splitters-up are, naturally enough, seldom if ever
literary, belonging as they do to the class of Biblical, that is to say,
_un_literary, criticism. But strictly literary considerations,
furnishing argument of the strongest kind for unity, might be brought by
comparing the behaviour of Circe, at the moment referred to, and that of
Helen when Paris returned from his defeat. These situations are, of
course, in initial circumstance as opposite as possible, though they
_arrivent à pareille fin_. But behind their very opposition there is a
conception of the eternal feminine--partly human, partly divine--which
it would be very surprising to find in two different persons, and which
might, if any one cared to do it, be interestingly worked out from
divers other Homeric characters of women or goddesses, from Hera and
Aphrodite in the one poem to Nausicaa and Calypso in the other. "How
great a _novelist_ was in _Homer_ lost" is a theme too much neglected.
[497] For do not fixed hours always become a bore--except in respect of
meals? To have to love, or to lecture, or to do anything but eat, at _x_
A. or P.M. precisely, on such and such days in the week, is a weariness
to the spirit and the flesh alike.
[498] "The Novelists Who Cannot End" is one of the title-subjects which,
"reponing my senescent art," I relinquish to others.
[499] In the card sense.
[500] They run well into, if not over, the second hundred, and it is
proper to warn readers (and still more buyers) that different editions
vary the contents of individual volumes; so that, without some care, and
even with it, duplication is nearly certain. This bad habit, not quite
unknown in England, is rather common in France.
[501] If any one is fortunate, or unfortunate, enough not to know this
admirable story, it may be well to say that the title is the nickname of
a young person, more pleasing than proper, who forms part of a convoy or
cartel of non-combatants passing through the Prussian lines in 1871. The
Prussian officer, imitating more mildly (and without the additional
villainy) the conduct of Colonel Kirke, refuses passage to the whole
party, unless she will give him a cast of her office. The story is told
as inoffensively as possible, and the crowning irony of the shocked
attitude of her respectable companions at her liberating them, though
they have been frantically anxious she should do so, is sublime.
[502] Maupassant does not caricature us (at least our men) very
extravagantly. But he, like the rest of them, always makes us say,
"Aoh." I have frequently endeavoured to produce, otherwise than as a
diphthong, this mysterious word (a descendant, perhaps, of the equally
mysterious _Aoi_ of the _Chanson de Roland_?). But I cannot make it like
the way in which I say, or in which any well-educated Englishman says,
"Oh!" American it may be, and it is not unlike the "Ow" of some
dialects, but pure English it is not. It may be, for aught I know,
phonetic: and has been explained as representing an affected sneer. The
curious thing is that "Oh-_a_" actually is a not unfrequent, though
slovenly, pronunciation.
[503] Evidently, therefore, the practice with which we have been so
often reproached is of French--at least Norman--origin.
[504] The _other_ one, of course, but here one must admit the
superiority of the foreign "strength." And the "story" has French
antecedents.
[505] This is an actual translation of the Norman poet's words. It makes
no bad blank-verse line.
[506] Its companions, in the volume to which it gives title, are mostly
inferior specimens of the same class. But some, especially _Le Pain
Maudit_, are very amusing, and _Lui_? is a curious and melancholy
anticipation of _Le Horla_. _La Maison Tellier_, which opens and titles
another volume of no very different kind, has never seemed to me quite
worthy of its fame. It is not unamusing in itself, and very amusing when
one thinks of its greatly-daring imitators, but rather schoolboyish or
even monkeyish in its determination to shock. (It doesn't shock _me_.)
Another "shocker," but tragic, not comic, _La Femme de Paul_, which
closes the book, is more powerful. (It is on the theme of _Mlle. Giraud
ma Femme_ (_v. inf._); only the male person, instead of drowning his
she-rival, far less wisely drowns himself.) But most of its contents
suffer, not merely from Naturalist grime, but from Naturalist
_meticulousness_.
[507] _V. sup._ p. 269 _sq._
[508] For the "Terror" group see below.
[509] Curiously enough, a few days _after_ writing the above I came
across, in the last _Diabolique_ of that curious flawed genius, Barbey
d'Aurevilly (_v. sup._ p. 453), the words which redress, by long
anticipation, the wrong done by his fellow Norman: "Les ailes du nez,
_aussi expressives que des yeux_."
[510] In a novel by a contemporary of his, otherwise not worth notice,
Sir Walter Scott was accused of "_pruderie_ bête"; I am sure the
adjective and substantive are much better mated in my text.
[511] I remember, in a book which I have not seen for about two-thirds
of a century, Miss Martineau's _Crofton Boys_, an agreeable anecdote
(for the good Harriet, when not under the influence of Radicalism, the
dismal science, Anti-Christianity, or Mr. Atkinson, could tell a story
very well) of a little English girl. It occurred to her one morning that
she should have to wash, dress, do her hair, etc., _every day for her
whole life_, and she sat down and wept bitterly. Now, if I were a little
boy or girl in French novel-world, when as I remembered that I should
have, as the one, never to marry, or to commit adultery with every one
who asked me; that, as the other, I must not be left five minutes alone
with a married woman, without offering her the means of carrying out her
and her husband's destiny; I really think I should imitate Miss
Martineau's child, if I did not even go and hang myself. "Fay ce que
voudras" may be rather a wide commandment. "Fay ce que dois" may require
a little enlarging. But "Do what you ought not, not because you wish to
do it, but because it is the proper thing to do" is not only "the
limit," but beyond it. I think that if I were a Frenchman of the
novel-type I should hate the sight of a married woman. Stone walls would
not a prison make nor iron bars a cage--so odious as this unrelieved
tyranny of _concupiscentia carnis_--to order! Perhaps Wilberforce's
Agathos had a tedious time of it in being always ready to resist the
Dragon; but how much more wearisome would it be to be always on the _qui
vive_, lest you should miss a chance of _not_ resisting him!
[512] The "time" was five and twenty years ago. But this passage,
trifling as it may seem to some readers, appeared to me worth
preserving, because my recent very careful reperusal of Maupassant, as a
whole, made its appositeness constantly recur to me.
[513] Nearest, perhaps, in the story called "En Famille," to be found in
the _Maison Tellier_ volume.
[514] Remarks already made on the particular novels and stories from
this point of view need only be referred to, not repeated. But it is
fair to say that some good judges plead for "warning off" instead of
"inculcation."
[515] There are some, but they are very few.
[516] See Conclusion. After the above notice of Maupassant was, in its
reconstituted form, entirely completed, there came into my hands a long
and careful paper on the novelist's Romanticism, published by Mr. Oliver
H. Moore in the Transactions of the American Modern Language Association
for March 1918. Those who are curious as to French opinion of him, and
especially as to the strange superstition of his "classicism" (see
Conclusion again), will find large extracts and references on this
subject given by Mr. Moore, who promises further discussion.
[517] One never knows what is necessary or not in the way of
explanation. But perhaps it is wiser to say that I am quite aware that,
besides writing _votre_, not "notre," Baudelaire had originally written
"ce long hurlement" before the immense improvement in the text, and that
original "Light-houses" were painters.
[518] One slight alteration may seem almost to justify Belot's criticism
of life: "Uncomfortable herself, she thought it natural to make others
uncomfortable." There is certainly no want of psychological observation
_there_.