GUY DE MAUPASSANT, REALIST
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.