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.