Pierre et Jean |EN|

1

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

The Earl of Crewe

In the long portrait-gallery of men of letters there are many figures, including some of the most famous, which in one aspect, at any rate, have baffled the analysis of countless critics. The relation between the training of these writers and their art, between the lives they led and the work they did, between their surroundings and their message, remains untraced and obscure despite every effort of loving or malicious research. Thus, above all others, it is with Shakespeare; and thus it would remain if every fact of his daily existence were known to us. Thus, in differing degrees and for various reasons, it is with Cervantes and Swift, with Keats and with Heine. Others, on the contrary, stand out clearly as the best product of the particular set of circumstances grouped about their lives. They seem to be the finished result of a given up-bringing, of a precise tutelage, and of a chosen career. Of this second category Guy de Maupassant is a singularly complete example. Any difficulty in classifying his genius, or in estimating the permanency of his fame, arises from no mystery enshrouding his life or his work. The evolution of each is absolutely straightforward and coherent: he traversed no caverns measureless to man on his way to the sunless sea which engulfed him at last. Through his single volume of verse, through his six novels, through the multitude of his short stories and feuilletons, the succeeding phases of a not very eventful life can be unerringly traced, like the path of an explorer on a map. There are glimpses of his boyhood at Étretat and Yvetot, of his school-days at Rouen, of his brief service as a volunteer in 1870, of his clerkship at a public department in Paris. Then, still traceable in the stories, came a spell of life in the capital, first in a small lettered society, later in a wider circle of acquaintance. From time to time there was a little travel, quite insufficient to free him from national limitations, a great deal of rowing and sailing, and a taste of fashion on the Riviera. This was all; and amid the astonishing variety of incident found in his stories he never passed out-side these simple bounds. Other great writers, though not many, have refrained from describing what they have not themselves seen. Except for a few rather unsuccessful excursions into the supernatural and the unnatural, Maupassant very rarely touched any class of persons, or any order of subjects, which he did not know to the core. Whenever he broke this rule, his hand somewhat lost its cunning; he was completely at home only when he moulded and remoulded for the purposes of his art every fragment of personal experience, every scrap of confirmatory information and illustration. There were not many tints on his palette; but he blended them almost to perfection.

The form in which these experiences were given to the world was regulated by the bent of a strong animal nature, by early association with a peculiar rural society, and by his intimacy with Gustave Flaubert. Never perhaps in the history of letters did the relation of master and disciple dovetail more nicely than between Flaubert and Maupassant. It was not the outcome of a casual enthusiasm on one side, or of a blind favouritism on the other, but the development of an old family friendship into a close intellectual bond. Gamaliel's yoke was not easy. For six years, steadily guiding Maupassant's course of study and criticising its results, he forbade the publication of a single line. As his pupil had written verses furiously from the age of thirteen at latest, and did not publish a volume till he was thirty, Flaubert's curb was tightly applied. But Maupassant never ceased to be grateful to l'irréprochable maître que j'admire avant tous,[1] and it is pretty evident that the elder man's literary influence was exercised almost entirely for good.

As a matter of course, Maupassant first tried his wings in verse. Flaubert, when recommending Des Vers to the good offices of his own publisher, wrote, His verses are not tiresome, which is the prime consideration for the public, and he really is a poet, without any stars and dicky-birds. There certainly are no stars, and prudish readers might complain that there is a certain amount of mud. One or two of the poems merely celebrate facile amours: Fin d'amour and La dernière escapade are feuilletons in rhyme: Propos de rues is a sort of Horatian dialogue, and Venus Rustique, the most ambitious attempt, for which Flaubert had a word of praise, possesses some of the eerieness of Baudelaire, and might not have been disclaimed by Mr. Swinburne or Arthur O'Shaughnessy. But in the same year 1880, the plant which had been so long maturing, and which had been so rigidly pruned, bore its first real fruit in its true form of prose. The incomparable Boule de suif, which appeared with Zola's Attaque du Moulin and other episodes of the war by different hands in a volume styled Les Soirées de Medan, was at once hailed by the author of Madame Bovary as a veritable master-piece, in a verdict which nobody has wished to dispute.

Eight years later, in his well-known preface to Pierre et Jean, Maupassant expounded his opinions on the writing of stories. It is a somewhat ragged piece of criticism in itself, but necessarily interesting, and demands a word here. What, he asks, are the set rules for writing a novel? The answer is simple: there are no such rules. A story can only be a personal conception, transfigured by its author into his personal realisation of a work of art. As Mr. Kipling puts it:

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays. And every single one of them is right!

The artist, then, says Maupassant, is in a sense the slave of his personality; he must write as he can, not as he would. Romantic or realist, he must follow his bent. The goal, therefore, of training such as Maupassant's own is not the attainment of an absolutely best method, but the discovery of the special subject and the scheme of treatment which are most in harmony with the writer's mind. As Louis Bouilhet, another early adviser, used to remind him, an output of a hundred lines is enough to stamp a man as an artist, if they are the hundred which express his essence of originality. But if no rules exist, is there no preferable plan of writing? Yes, Maupassant replies, there is. The objective method on the whole gives the happiest results, when the writer, having formed his private conception of a character, decides what action is the inevitable result, in a given situation, of that character's state of mind. On the other hand, the analytical writer pure and simple, who sets himself to explain why his character acts as he does, is brought up short, so to speak, by his ego, which forbids him to do more than guess at the working of a mind alien to his own. Thus, by the exercise of intense and untiring observation it is possible to conclude how a man of well-defined general type, such as a strong sensualist, a weak amourist, an ascetic, will probably act in the situation created for him. But since no writer can himself be all these three men, his analysis will often be at fault when he attempts to trace the mental processes of his opposite.

Nevertheless Maupassant admitted that admirable work might be done on these lines—as indeed on many others; and though most of his writing was based on objectivity (a dreadful word, as he says), he by no means neglected the formal analysis of character. Pierre et Jean itself is to a great extent a psychological story; Notre Cœur is nothing else, and one or two of the short sketches, such as L'Inutile beauté, are designed on a similar principle.

Maupassant no doubt believed that the objective novel found its best modern expression in Madame Bovary, that unforgettable work which, like the Lyrical Ballads and Waverley, lives by the double title of intrinsic merit and of the interest attaching to a literary revolution. Flaubert pointed out the road, Maupassant rarely quitted it; but his claim to be numbered among great writers is enforced by the fact that from the first he never slavishly imitated his master's gait, or paused, so to speak, at the same wayside inns. Of the six novels, the first, Une Vie, which appeared in 1883, naturally shows the most direct stamp of Flaubert's influence, in its gray pessimism and its uniformity of background. It is the life-history of a girl belonging to the petite noblesse, the only child of kind and rather foolish parents, married early to a worthless vicomte, who turns out to be a stingy profligate. After a very brief love-dream she finds herself deceived and outraged, and is tragically left a widow with one son. This child of tears proves as weak and reckless as his father, being extravagant besides. The book ends leaving Jeanne, the much-tried heroine, realizing an afterglow of tenderness in the care of his child by a dead mistress who has robbed her of his love and helped him to ruin the old home. It would be difficult to name a more depressing book, but the whole workmanship is admirable, the local colour is faultless, and the characters are alive. The only blot on the story, as a story, is the vengeance of a rather melodramatic husband on the vicomte, by machinery which Maupassant borrowed from an early short story of his own, and which is scarcely worthy of him. Une Vie is not fitted for what is called family reading, but it is difficult to see why the Bibliothéque des Chemins de Fer should have refused to sell it in a country where the extravagances of M. Catulle Mendès and M. Octave Mirbeau can be had for the asking. A boycott of this kind is, however, an excellent advertisement, as Flaubert found in the case of Madame Bovary; though a threatened prosecution of Maupassant, on account of some verses printed in a country newspaper, might have had graver consequences, owing to their author's official position.

Three of the remaining novels treat of different phases of life in Paris. Bel-Ami depicts the glorious ascent of M. Georges Duroy, scamp, coward, liar, and blackmailer, from ancien sous-off. of hussars to courted journalist and bridegroom of an heiress. Fort comme La Mort and Notre Cœur are concerned with a quieter society in the capital. The scene of Pierre et Jean, in some ways the most perfect of his writings, is laid at Havre; while Mont-Oriol, a very clever and observant story, which yet displays here and there a certain flagging in Maupassant's wonderful gift of amusement, dissects the heart of M. Andermatt's wife, and the financial operations of M. Andermatt himself in creating his new watering-place in Auvergne.

Remarkable as the novels are, both in style and construction, the popular estimate is probably not far wrong when it attaches even greater importance to the short stories. It would be untrue to say of Maupassant, as might be said of two very distinguished living writers, English and American,[2] that his genius, so far as prose is concerned, found in the short story its only outlet for dramatic expression. But the fact remains that while some of his contemporaries produced novels of a class certainly equal, and some might say superior, to his, in the briefer form of composition he was unapproached. These stories were collected from time to time between 1881 and 1890 in sixteen volumes, which include, however, a few duplicates. Since his death one or two more have appeared, containing, with some fresh matter, interesting early drafts of sketches afterward worked up, or used as episodes in the longer books.

The tales divide themselves into two distinct classes, short stories, properly so called, and sketches and feuilletons. Of the short stories Boule de Suif was the first, and not the least striking. Something must be said later of Maupassant's choice of subjects, but setting this aside, it may be questioned if fifty pages were ever more cleverly filled. The economy and clearness of description, the sharp characterization, the whimsical pathos and the scorching satire, place this first-fruit of genius almost above criticism. It is hardly necessary to repeat that it is a late episode of the War of 1870, from which no Frenchman or Frenchwoman emerges with credit, except for such left-handed honours as attach to the poor heroine. It says much for the French sense of humour, that irony which so ingeniously pierces all classes in civil life was not only forgiven but enjoyed.

The list also includes La Maison Tellier, with its extraordinary theme, its roistering humour, and its strange touches of humanity; L'Héritage, the outcome of Maupassant's official career, a master-piece of irony and portraiture; Yvette, a rather brutal story, which would have fared better in the hands of Alphonse Daudet; and Monsieur Parent, a most masterly study of middle-class infidelity in Paris. All these exhibit much of their author's very finest work. Never did he find himself more completely; the tool fitted exactly to his hand, and the material shaped itself at his bidding.

It is impossible here to attempt any formal classification of Maupassant's other stories, which are of all lengths from eight or ten pages, and even less. But in discussing their character, it is convenient to group them in a rough arrangement. Foremost, as inspired with perhaps the most enduring quality, come the Norman tales of farm and peasant life. Maupassant's annexation of the province is as complete as Mr. Hardy's of Wessex. Himself sprung from a race of Norman squires, it happened that his mother followed with particular interest the simple, if often eccentric, annals of their humbler compatriots, and never tired of discussing them with her son. He was something of a sportsman, too; and in France shooting brings different classes into closer contact than it does here. Thus equipped, he produced some twenty tales, chiefly objective, founded on the nicest observation and saturated with local feeling. Their rigid truth is that of an affidavit; there is no extenuation and no malice; the shrewdness, the parsimony, the sordid brutality, the simplicity, the faithful devotion of his different types are recorded with unsparing frankness, and without the slightest attempt to point a moral. Such portraits as those of the adopted son in Aux Champs, of the supplanted child in Le Père Amable, of Hautôt Père et Fils, stick closely to the memory. The story of the Fille de Ferme is not unworthy of Turgenev. Such studies of manners as Farce Normande, Le Baptême, and the very characteristic La Martine speak for themselves with their spacious breeziness, and their fidelity to fact, which, like that of the great Russian novelists, convinces those who have no means of testing it. It is a great merit, too (would that some of our writers on mœurs de province could claim it!), that the dialect, depending largely on astounding elisions, is neither so frequent nor so obscure as to puzzle or distract the reader. The following excerpt from La Martine is typical. It describes the awakening of a rustic lover. Benoist had known La Martine all his life, but only realized her charms one Sunday morning, walking home from church.

"'Nom d'un nom,' he said to himself, 'that's a pretty girl all the same, La Martine.' He watched her walking, all at once beginning to admire her, and struck with a sort of longing. He had no need to see her face again—no. He kept his eyes fixed on her figure, repeating to himself, as though speaking aloud, 'Nom d'un nom, that's a pretty girl.' . . . When he reached home, dinner was on the table. He sat down opposite his mother, between the labourer and the farm-lad, while the maid went to draw the cider. He ate a few spoonfuls of broth, then pushed his plate away. His mother asked, 'Have you anything the matter?'[3] 'No,' he answered, 'it's a turning-like in the stomach, which stops me fancying my victuals.' He watched the others eating, cutting from time to time a mouthful of bread, which he carried slowly to his lips, and went on chewing. He thought of La Martine, . . . 'all the same, that's a pretty girl.' And to think that he never noticed it before, and now it came on him like that, all of a sudden, and so upset him that he could not eat. He hardly touched the stew. 'Come, Benoist,' said his mother, 'make yourself eat a bit;[4] it's off the neck of mutton; it'll do you good. When you've no fancy to eat, you must make yourself.' He swallowed a mouthful or two, then pushed his plate away again. No, it wouldn't go down, no mistake about it. When dinner was over, he went for a walk on the farm, and gave the lad a holiday, saying he would shift the beasts as he passed. On this day of rest the landscape was empty. Here and there in a clover-field the cows lay heavily stretched on their bellies, chewing the cud,