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-Woman-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."
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.
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 Sœurs 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 Cœur 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."