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
MOONLIGHT
(CLAIR DE LUNE)
BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT
Translation by The Editor[26]