MAUPASSANT AND HIS WRITINGS
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy, France, in 1850. In that picturesque region he passed his youth, and returned thither for frequent sojourns in later life. Having finished his studies, he became an employé in the government service in Paris. This experience, his love for athletics, and his recollections of the Franco-Prussian war, he turned to good account in his fictional work. His literary education was conducted by Gustave Flaubert, his uncle and god-father, under whom he served so rigid an apprenticeship that when he produced his first short-story, “Tallow Ball” (Boule de Suif), his preceptor pronounced it a masterpiece, as indeed it is. He died in 1893, at the age of 43, by his own hand, his reason having failed after some years of increasing depression and gloom.
Though his productive period covered only ten years, Guy de Maupassant has left several notable novels, some fair poetry, and a large number of remarkable short-stories. Most of his work deals more frankly with the sordid side of life than American society approves, but many of his short-stories are unexceptionable. Among the best of these are “The Necklace,” “The Horla,” “Happiness,” “Vain Beauty,” “A Coward,” “A Ghost,” “Little Soldier,” “The Wolf,” “Moonlight,” and “The Piece of String.”
Technically, Maupassant was the most finished short-story writer of all; but he lacked spiritual power, and so he himself missed much of the world’s beauty, and disclosed but little to others. Rarely can the reader feel the least throb of sympathy of the author for his characters. Technically flawless, his work is too often cold, and the warm ideals of a tender heart are chiefly absent. An inflexible realist, he pressed his method farther than did Flaubert, a really strong novelist. From life’s raw materials Maupassant wove incomparably brilliant fiction-fabrics, equally distinguished for plot, characterization, and style; but it cannot be said that he interpreted life with a wholesome, uplifting spirit.
Happy are they whom life satisfies, who can amuse themselves, and be content ... who have not discovered, with a vast disgust, ... that all things are a weariness.—Guy de Maupassant.
He who destroys the ideal destroys himself. In art and in life Maupassant lived in the lower order of facts, the brutal world of events unrelated to a spiritual order. He drained his senses of the last power of sensation and reaction; he plunged headlong into the sensual life upon which they opened when the luminous heaven above the material world was obliterated. Madness always lies that way as a matter of physiology as well as of morals, and Maupassant went the tragic way of the sensualist since time began.—Hamilton W. Mabie, in The Outlook.
Maupassant saw life with his senses, and he reflected on it in a purely animal revolt, the recoil of the hurt animal. His observation is not, as it has been hastily assumed to be, cold; it is as superficially emotional as that of the average sensual man, and its cynicism is only another, not less superficial, kind of feeling. He saw life in all its details, and his soul was entangled in the details. He saw it without order, without recompense, without pity; he saw it too clearly to be duped by appearances, and too narrowly to distinguish any light beyond what seemed to him the enclosing bounds of darkness.—Arthur Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse.
He has produced a hundred short tales and only four regular novels; but if the tales deserve the first place in any candid appreciation of his talent it is not simply because they are so much the more numerous: they are also more characteristic; they represent him best in his originality, and their brevity, extreme in some cases, does not prevent them from being a collection of masterpieces.... What they have most in common is their being extremely strong, and after that their being extremely brutal.... M. de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical, but even the comedy is for the most part the comedy of misery, of avidity, of ignorance, helplessness, and grossness.—Henry James, Partial Portraits.
His short-stories are masterpieces of the art of story-telling, because he had a Greek sense of form, a Latin power of construction, and a French felicity of style. They are simple, most of them; direct, swift, inevitable, and inexorable in their straightforward movement. If art consists in the suppression of non-essentials, there have been few greater artists in fiction than Maupassant. In his Short-stories there is never a word wasted, and there is never an excursus. Nor is there any feebleness or fumbling. What he wanted to do he did, with the unerring certainty of Leatherstocking, hitting the bull’s-eye again and again. He had the abundance and the ease of the very great artists; and the half-dozen or the half-score of his best stories are among the very best Short-stories in any language.—Brander Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short-Story.
His firm, alert prose is so profoundly French, free from neologisms, strong in verbs, sober in adjectives, every sentence standing out with no apparent effort, no excess, like a muscle in the perfect body of a young athlete.... He has that sense of the real which so many naturalists lack, and which the care for exact detail does not replace.... His predilection for ordinary scenes and ordinary types is everywhere evident; he uses all kinds of settings,—a café, a furnished room, a farmyard, seen in their actual character without poetic transfiguration, with all their vulgarity, their poverty, their ugliness. And he uses, too, all kinds of characters,—clerks, peasants of Normandy, petty bourgeois of Paris and of the country. They live the empty, tragic, or grotesque hours of their lives; are sometimes touching, sometimes odious; and never achieve greatness either in heroism or in wickedness.
They are not gay, these stories; and the kind of amusement they afford is strongly mixed with irony, pity, and contempt. Gayety, whether brutal, frank, mocking, or delicate, never leaves this bitter taste in the heart. How pitiful in its folly, in its vanity, in its weakness, is the humanity which loves, weeps, or agitates in the tales of Maupassant! There, virtue if awkward is never recompensed, nor vice if skillful punished; mothers are not always saints, nor sons always grateful and respectful; the guilty are often ignorant of remorse. Then are these beings immoral? To tell the truth, they are guided by their instincts, by events, submissive to the laws of necessity, and apparently released by the author from all responsibility.—Firmin Roz, Guy de Maupassant, in Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON MAUPASSANT
French Fiction of To-day, M. S. Van de Velde (1891); Some French Writers, Edward Delille (1893); Studies in Two Literatures, Arthur Symons (1897); French Literature of To-day, Yetta Blaze de Bury (1898); A Century of French Fiction, Benjamin W. Wells (1898); Contemporary French Novelists, René Doumic (1899).
FOR ANALYSIS