Maupassant himself would have answered: Nothing. For he was one of the fighting art-for-art’s-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an art-work is an insult. But the fact is that he has a propaganda, as definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi. His message is that life is a cheat and a snare, and that human beings are beasts decked in fine clothing and pretenses. Maupassant dislikes them so that he eats himself up. He tries to believe in play, in natural, animal enjoyment of the passions; but instead of being content with such pleasures, he shuts himself up like a hermit in a cell, to acquire mastery of a difficult art, and have the satisfaction before he dies of voicing his hatred of that fate, whatever it may be, which has created his own life, and the bourgeois France which he sees about him.
Maupassant watches with eager eye and alert fancy for a scene, an episode, a trait of character, which will enable him to illustrate the pettiness and ignominy of human destiny, and the falsity of man’s dignities and honors. He collects such things, as a naturalist collects biting bugs and stinging serpents. His characters are the French peasants with their greed and cruelty, and the French bourgeois and cultured classes, who, underneath their silks and satins, their moralities and intellectualities, are the same vile animals as the peasants. But Maupassant’s quarrel is not merely with men and women; it is with life itself. The thing which brings him the keenest satisfaction is an incident which shows the futility even of virtue; which exhibits God as a sportive demon, amusing himself by pulling off the wings of the butterflies he has created.
Out of the two hundred and twelve specimens in the Maupassant museum, any one will suffice. I choose one called “The Necklace,” simply because it has stayed in my memory for twenty-five years. A lovely woman, married to a poor clerk, and living a starved life, borrows from a wealthy friend a beautiful diamond necklace, in order to make a show at some function. She loses the necklace, and she and her husband pledge everything they own, buy another to replace it, and take it to the owner without revealing what has happened. For ten years they slave and drudge to pay off their debts, and the lovely woman is turned into a haggard wreck. The friend who loaned the necklace meets her, and is horrified at her condition; the poor woman tells how she has drudged all these years—and learns that she has wasted her life in order to replace an imitation necklace, of no value worth considering!
There is subtlety in the technique of Maupassant, but none in his view of life. There can be no subtlety, when you lay down the law that human beings are beasts. There are only a few beast emotions, and they never vary; you can always be sure what a man will do in the presence of a woman, and what the woman will let him do. And when God is a sportive demon, all stories have the same ending. You may not foresee the particular trick this demon will play—for example, that the lost necklace would turn out to have been paste—but you can be sure that something will happen to make a mockery of all human effort and hope.
And likewise you can foresee the ending of such a man. If he takes life seriously enough to become a great artist, he is apt to take it seriously enough to act upon his convictions. He will seek refuge from despair in debauchery and drink; not finding it, he will go on to opium and hashish. He will be one of those who from fear of death commit suicide, or who from brooding over insanity go insane. Maupassant was in a strait-jacket at the age of forty; thus proving himself a moralist, and a teacher of precious lessons: more than we can say about the art dilettanti of our own time, who write delicately perfumed impropriety, and live conventional and pampered lives upon the backs of the working class.
CHAPTER XC
THE FOE OF FORMULAS
Up in the gloomy, ice-bound North, where men dream about God and drink strong liquor, another teacher was engaged in undermining bourgeois morality, and raising a storm of controversy about his head. The name of Henrik Ibsen brings before us a grim-faced old man with set mouth and large spectacles and a fringe of defiant white whiskers. He was a fighting man, a dogmatic antidogmatist, a propagandist if ever there was one in the field of art.
He also was born of the people, and educated in the school of hardship. He was an apothecary’s assistant in a small Norwegian port, then a poor student, journalist and poet, then the director of a provincial theater, which struggled for six years in a vain fight against bankruptcy. Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, Ibsen received a pension of four or five hundred dollars a year from the king, and on this he lived a stern, penurious life, raising a family, sewing the buttons on his own clothes, and making over the theater and the moral ideas of the thinking world.
Except for some pot-boilers written in his youth, all the works of Ibsen have one theme, the problem of ideals in relation to reality. Men and women form a conception of right conduct, and they try to apply it, and it doesn’t work out as it is supposed to; in most of Ibsen’s plays it works out exactly the opposite way. His thesis is that life cannot be guided by formulas; those of democracy are just as dangerous as those of authority; either will destroy you if you apply them blindly. Ibsen is in revolt against religious creeds and social conventions which repress the individual and thwart his full development. But you must not assume that he is willing to make a formula out of self-realization; straightway he will turn about and show you some selfish egotist engaged in realizing himself and wrecking everyone else.
Ibsen wrote two long poems, “Brand” and “Peer Gynt,” into which he put ideas resembling those of “Don Quixote.” Brand is a Norwegian preacher, who has his formula of perfect righteousness, the sacrifice of the individual to God. He acts as blindly as Don Quixote tilting at wind-mills, and destroys a number of people, himself included. “Peer Gynt,” on the other hand, is a scamp who, like Sancho Panza, fools himself by those very qualities of which he is most proud, his ability to take care of himself, his unwillingness to consider anything but his own interest.