Selected Writings
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Guy De Maupassant >> Selected Writings
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20 A SELECTION from the WRITINGS of GUY DE MAUPASSANT
SHORT STORIES of the TRAGEDY AND COMEDY OF LIFE
WITH A CRITICAL PREFACE BY PAUL BOURGET of the French Academy
AND AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT ARNOT, M.A.
VOL. I {of III ??}
TABLE OF CONTENTS.[*]
VOLUME I.
1. MADEMOISELLE FIFI
2. AN AFFAIR OF STATE
3. THE ARTIST
4. THE HORLA
5. MISS HARRIET
6. THE HOLE
7. LOVE
8. THE INN
9. A FAMILY
10. BELLFLOWER
11. WHO KNOWS?
12. THE DEVIL
13. EPIPHANY
14. SIMON'S PAPA
15. WAITER, A "BOCK"
16. THE SEQUEL TO A DIVORCE
17. THE MAD WOMAN
18. IN VARIOUS ROLES
19. THE FALSE GEMS
20. COUNTESS SATAN
21. THE COLONEL'S IDEAS
22. TWO LITTLE SOLDIERS
23. GHOSTS
24. WAS IT A DREAM?
25. THE DIARY OF A MADMAN
26. AN UNFORTUNATE LIKENESS
27. A COUNTRY EXCURSION
[*] At the close of the last volume will be found a complete list
of the French Titles of De Maupassant's writings, with their
English equivalents.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
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:
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 mid- dle-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}
INTRODUCTION
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 pas- sion 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:
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