Une Vie, a Piece of String and Other Stories

by Guy de Maupassant

Still there are contradictions and not unimportant ones in him. The
most striking is certainly his fear of Death. He sees it everywhere,
it haunts him. He sees it on the horizon of landscapes, and it crosses
his path on lonely roads. When it is not hovering over his head, it is
circling round him as around Gustave Moreau's pale youth.... Can he,
the determined materialist, really fear the stupor of eternal sleep,
or the dispersion of the transient individuality? ...

Another contradiction. He who says that contact with the crowd
"tortures his nerves," and who professes such contempt for mankind,
yet considers solitude as one of the bitterest torments of existence.
And he bewails the fact that he cannot live just for himself, "keep
within himself that secret place of the ego, where none can enter."

"Alas!" said his master, "we are all in a desert." Nobody understands
anyone else and "whatever we attempt, whatever be the impulse of our
heart and the appeal of our lips, we shall always be alone!"

In this gehenna of death, in these nostalgias of the past, in these
trances of eternal isolation, may we not find some relinquishing of
his philosophy? Certainly not, for these contradictions accentuate all
the more the pain of existence and become a new source of suffering.

In any case, Maupassant's pessimism becomes logical in terminating in
pity, like that of Schopenhauer. I know that I am running foul of
certain admirers of the author who do not see any pity in his work,
and it is understood that he is pitiless. But examine his stories more
closely and you will find it revealed in every page, provided you go
to the very bottom of the subject. That is where it exists naturally,
almost against the desire of the writer, who does not arouse pity, nor
teach it.

And, again, if it remains concealed from so many readers, it is
because it has nothing to do with the humanitarian pity retailed by
rhetoricians. It is philosophical and haughty, detached from any
"anthropocentric" characteristics. It is universal suffering that it
covers. And to tell the truth, it is man, the hypocritical and cunning
biped who has the least share in it. Maupassant is helpful to all
those of his fellows who are tortured by physical suffering, social
cruelty and the criminal dangers of life, but he pities them without
caring for them, and his kindness makes distinctions.

On the other hand, the pessimist has all the tenderness of a Buddhist
for animals, whom the gospels despise. When he pities the animals, who
are worth more than ourselves, their executioners, when he pities the
elementary existences, the plants and trees, those exquisite
creations, he unbends and pours out his heart. The humbler the victim,
the more generously does he espouse its suffering. His compassion is
unbounded for all that lives in misery, that is buffeted about without
understanding why, that "suffers and dies without a word." And if he
mourned Miss Harriet, in this unaccustomed outburst of enthusiasm, it
is because, like himself, the poor outcast cherished a similar love
for "all things, all living beings."

Such appears to me to be Maupassant, the novelist, a story-teller, a
writer, and a philosopher by turns. I will add one more trait; he was
devoid of all spirit of criticism. When he essays to demolish a
theory, one is amazed to find in this great, clear writer such lack of
precision of thought, and such weak argument. He wrote the least
eloquent and the most diffuse study of Flaubert, of "that old, dead
master who had won his heart in a manner he could not explain." And,
later, he shows the same weakness in setting forth, as in proving his
theory, in his essay on the "Evolution of the Novel," in the
introduction to Pierre et Jean.

On the other hand, he possesses, above many others, a power of
creating, hidden and inborn, which he exercises almost unconsciously.
Living, spontaneous and yet impassive he is the glorious agent of a
mysterious function, through which he dominated literature and will
continue to dominate it until the day when he desires to become
literary.

He is as big as a tree. The author of "Contemporains" has written that
Maupassant produced novels as an apple-tree yields apples. Never was a
criticism more irrefutable.