The inflexible realist in fiction can be faithful only to what he sees;
and what he sees is inevitably colored by the lens of his real self.
For the literary observer of life there is no way of falsifying the
reports which his senses, physical and moral, make to his own brain. If
he wishes, he may make alterations in transcribing for his readers, but
in so doing he confesses to himself a departure from truth as he sees
it.
Pure realism, then, demands of its apostle both a faithful observation
of life and a faithful statement of what he sees. True, the realist
uses his artist’s privilege of selecting those facts of life which
seem best suited to picturing his characters in their natures, their
persons, and their careers, for he knows that many irrelevant,
confusing, and contradictory things happen in the everyday lives
of everyday men. So in point of practice his realism is not so
uncompromising as his theories sound when baldly stated.
How near any great artist’s transcriptions of life approach to absolute
truth will always be a question, both because we none of us know what
is final truth, and because realists, each seeing life through his
own nature, will disagree among themselves just as widely as their
temperaments, their predispositions, and their experiences vary. Thus
we are left to the common sense for our standards, and to this common
sense we may with some confidence appeal for a judgment.
Guy de Maupassant was a realist. “The writer’s eye,” he says in
_Sur l’Eau_, “is like a suction-pump, absorbing everything;
like a pickpocket’s hand, always at work. Nothing escapes him. He
is constantly collecting material; gathering up glances, gestures,
intentions, everything that goes on in his presence--the slightest
look, the least act, the merest trifle.”
But Maupassant was more than a realist--he was an artist, a realistic
artist, frank and wise enough to conform his theories to his own
efficient literary practice. He saw as a realist, selected as an
artist, and then was uncompromising in his literary presentation.
Here at the outstart another word is needed: Maupassant was also a
literalist, and this native trait served to render his realism colder
and more unsympathetic. By this I mean that to him two and three
always summed up five--his temperament would not allow for the unseen,
imponderable force of spiritual things; and even when he mentions the
spiritual, it is with a sort of tolerant unbelief which scorns to deny
the superstitious solace of women, weaklings, and zealots. It was this
pervading quality in both character and method which has caused his
critics to class him is a disciple of naturalism in fiction. However,
Maupassant’s pessimism was not so great that he could not dwell upon
scenes of joy; but a preacher of hope he never was, nor could have been.
Maupassant led so individual a life, was so unnormal in his tastes,
and ended his career so unusually, that common sense decides at once
the validity of this one contention: his realism was marvellously true
in details, but less trustworthy in its general results. His pictures
of incidents were miracles of accuracy; his philosophy of life was
incomplete, morbid, and unnatural.
Think how unnormal must be a spirit who could write, in the work just
quoted: “I feel vibrating through me something akin to every form of
animal life; I thrill with all the instincts and confused desires of
the lower creatures. Like them I love the earth, not men, as you do. I
love it without admiring it, without poetizing or exalting it; I love,
with a profound and bestial love, at once contemptible and sacred, all
that lives, all that thinks, all that we see about us,--days, nights,
rivers, seas, and forests, the dawn, the rosy flesh and beaming eye of
woman; for all these things, while they leave my mind calm, trouble my
eyes and my heart.”
But this author’s life may not be read in his works, for, unlike his
contemporary, Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant’s writings are singularly
barren of personal detail. True to his naturalistic school, and
growing out of his method as well as by reason of his individualistic
philosophy, he avoided all attempt at interpreting life and character
by the lights and leadings of his own personality. And yet I have
already intimated that he was biased--as similarly we all are
biased--by his own nature; but it was not an artistic prejudice;
rather was it the temperamental bias of a cynical eye trained to view
the minute rather than the large, the sordid rather than the ideal,
the pessimistic rather than the hopeful, the physical rather than the
spiritual--for this was the sort of life he lived, first and last.
Persistently refusing to give to the public any record of his life, he
dwelt, as it were, behind closed doors. No soul, he held, could enter
into the life of another soul, so he had no real intimates, and those
who called him friend and knew the frank charm of his manner discussed
with him mainly impersonal themes. Thus in spite of importunities he
gave no encouragement to that impertinent curiosity which avidly seizes
upon the details of an author’s private life and flaunts it to a
gaping public. We, then, are concerned with Maupassant’s temperament
and personal career only in so far as they color his work.
Born in Normandy in 1850, he passed his youth in that charming section
where he has laid the scenes of many of his provincial narratives.
The picturesque Norman characters, the narrow-browed country life,
the colorful phases of town, market, and church, appear with intaglio
clearness in a thousand wonderfully-wrought settings. The sordid and
ungracious bourgeoisie with whom he came most in contact predominate in
these stories, just as his strenuous days as an oarsman live again in
his aquatic tales, and his life as a minor clerk in the government and
his experiences as a soldier during the Franco-Prussian War are used
for material in other stories. It was his later life in the Capital
that gave him his knowledge of society life, and of the underworld
peopled by courtesan and roué.
The gifted Flaubert, as everyone knows, left a profound impress
upon his young nephew, Maupassant, who served under him a literary
apprenticeship at once rigid and productive. It was Flaubert who taught
the man of thirty to seek for the one inevitably fitting word, made
him tear up early poems, plays, and stories, taught him to suppress
relentlessly all his unformed work, until, full panoplied, he sprang
into being as a brilliant maker of artistic fictions.
His later years--he died by his own hand in 1893 at the age of
forty-three--were darkened by the approaching madness which he so
terribly pictures in “The Horla.” In _Bel Ami_ he writes:
“There comes a day, you know, when no matter what you are looking at,
you see Death lurking behind it.... As for me, for the last fifteen
years I have felt the torment of it, as if I were carrying a gnawing
beast. I have felt it dragging me down, little by little, month by
month, hour by hour, like a house that is crumbling away.... Each step
I take brings me nearer to it, every moment that passes, every breath
I draw, hurries on its odious work.... Breathing, sleeping, eating,
drinking, working, dreaming,--everything we do is simply dying by
inches.... Now I see it so near that I often stretch out my arm to
thrust it back!”
But under the shadow of this terrible phantasm as he was, latterly his
cold, unsympathetic scrutiny of men and things had warmed somewhat,
and his latest writings--his productive period covers only about ten
intensely active years--show more gentleness, more sympathy with
struggling humanity. But never did he really depart from the morbid and
cynical view of life, and the horror of death as the final breakdown of
all things desirable, which showed so plainly in most of his fictions.
If we see but little of Guy de Maupassant’s life in his writings,
it is to them we must turn to discover his temperament and his
philosophy--glimpses of which we have already had.
Absolutely French, almost a typical Latin, Maupassant was not
unemotional; he merely refused to allow _his_ emotions to
color the characters he delineated. He was himself a passionate
pleasure-seeker, determined to extract the last drop of satisfaction
from life, but he erred in thinking that one may at the same time drain
the cup of mental joys and that of physical pleasures. What wonder that
this vampire, in love with the blood of life, should suck final poison
whence he had thought to draw only pulsing bliss. His very repressions
supplied power for each fresh explosion of private excess--yet always
the cold precision of his artistry grew, until the perfection of his
chiselling left critics wordless. The deft maker of word-masterpieces
never lost the artist in the man.
According to this warped genius, life was intended to amuse, to gratify
self. Inner beauty he scouted--the beauty of the seen he adored. For
such a nature the ideal existed only as a foolish figment. Even ideal
love he scouted, depicting with relentless fidelity the sins of a
mother as discovered by her loving children, the universal laxity of
the Norman peasants as condoned by complacent priests, the ravishing of
every illusion, the degradation of every virtue. What other conclusion
was there for so sad, so hopeless, so pitiless, so materialistic, a
philosophy, than _What’s the use!_
But if there was little of apparent beauty in our author’s character,
it is impossible not to admire his industry, his will, his passionate
devotion to a perfect art, his relentless literary fidelity to truth as
he saw it, his magic mastery of diction and of dialogue, his incisive
though unmoral analysis of character and life, his constant advance in
craftsmanship to the end. To turn out something beautiful in form was
to him worth a lifetime of effort. How great would he have grown had
his eyes been opened to the inner light!
I have chosen his _Clair de Lune_ for presentation here because it
more nearly approaches spiritual beauty than any other of his stories.
It needs no commentary--it speaks its own beauties in tones subtly
delicate yet silver clear.
MOONLIGHT
(_CLAIR DE LUNE_)