GUY DE
MAUPASSANT
TO read for the first time, one of the short stories of Guy de
Maupassant is to receive a staggering enlargement of one's ideas as to what
mere literature can do. They hardly seem
like literature at all, these blocks from the quarry of life, flung into one's
face with so unerring an aim.
"If
you pick them, they bleed. If you tickle
them, they laugh." The rough rain-smelling
earth still clings to them; when you take them in your hands, the mud of the
highway comes off upon your fingers. Is
it really, one wonders, mere literary craft, mere cunning artfulness, which
gives these sentences the weight of a guillotine-blade crashing down upon the
prostrate neck of bound helpless reality?
Is
it simply the art of a pupil of the euphonious Flaubert, this power of making
written sentences march full-armed like living men, and fall, when their work
is done, with a metallic ring of absolute finality - "as a dead body
falls"?
As
one reads Guy de Maupassant one breathes heavily as if it were oneself and not
another upon whom the tension and the sweat of one crisis has come. One touches with one's naked hand every
object he describes. One feels the
gasping breath of every person he brings forward. His images slap one's cheeks till they
tingle, and his situations wrestle with one to the ground.
Not
for nothing was he a descendant of that race which, of all races except the Turks,
has loved love better than literature and war better than love. Words are resounding
blows and smacking kisses to Guy de Maupassant.
He writes literature as a Norman baron, and when he rounds off a
sentence it is as if he dug a spur into the flanks of a restless filly. There is nothing like his style in the world.
They
never taught me Tacitus when I was at school. My Latinity stops short at Cæsar and Cicero.
One is, however, led to suppose that the great executioner of imperial
reputations was a mighty pruner, in his day, of the
"many, too many" words. But I
am sure that this other "Great Latin", as Nietzsche calls him, cleans
up his litter and chops off his surplusage quite as
effectively as Tacitus, and I suspect that neither Tacitus nor any other classic writer hits the nail on the
head with so straight, so steady, so effective a stroke.
I
suppose it is the usual habit of destiny to rush into literary paths people who
are essentially dreamers and theorists and utopians; people who by instinct and
temperament shrink away from contact with brute reality.
I
suppose even the great imaginative writers, like Balzac, live, on the whole,
sedentary and exclusive lives, making a great deal, as far as the materials for
their work go, of a very little. Now and
then, however, it happens that a man of action, a man of the world, a man of
love and war and sport, enters the literary arena; and when that occurs, I have
an idea that he hits about him with a more trenchant, more resolute, more
crushing force than the others.
The
art of literature has become perhaps too completely the monopoly of sedentary
people - largely of the bourgeois class - who bring to their work the sedentary
sensitiveness, the sedentary refinement, the sedentary lack of living experience,
which are the natural characteristics of persons who work all day in studies
and studios. That is why the appearance
of a Walt Whitman or a Maxim Gorky is so wholesome and air-clearing an event.
But
not less salutary is the appearance of a ferocious aristocrat from the class
which has ridden roughshod over the fields of submissive actuality for many
tyrannous centuries.
In
the hard shrewd blows of a Maxim Gorky, the monopolising tribes of sedentary
dreamers receive their palpable hit, receive it from
the factory and the furrow. In the
deadly knocks of a Guy de Maupassant they get their "quietus" from
the height, so to speak, of the saddle of a sporting gentleman.
Do
what they can to get the sharp bitter tang of reality into their books, they
bulk of these people, write they never so cleverly, seem somehow to miss it.
The
smell of that crafty old skunk - the genuine truth of things - draws them
forward through the reeds and rushes of the great dim forests' edge, but they
seldom touch the hide of the evasive animal; no, not so much as with the end of
their barge-pole.
But
Guy de Maupassant plunges into the thickets, gun in hand, and we soon hear the
howl of the hunted.
A
love of literature, a reverence and respect for the dignity of words, does not
by any means imply a power of making them plastic before the pressure of
truth. How often one is conscious of the
intervention of "something else", some alien material, marbly and shiny it may be, and with a beauty of its own,
but obtruding quite opaquely between the thing said and the thing felt.
In
reading Guy de Maupassant, it does not seem to be words at all which touch
us. It seems to be things - things
living or dead, things in motion or at rest.
Words are there indeed; they must be there - but they are so hammered on
the anvil of his hard purpose that they have become porous and
transparent. Their one rôle now is to get themselves out of the way; or rather to
turn themselves into thin air and clean water, through which the reality beyond
can come at us with unblurred outlines.
It
is a wonderful commentary, when one thinks of it, upon the malleability of
human language that it can so take shape and colour from the pressure of a
single temperament. The words in the
dictionary are all there - all at the disposal of every one of us - but how
miraculous a thing to make their choice and their arrangement expressive of
nothing on earth but the peculiar turn of one particular mind!
The
whole mystery of life is in this; this power of the unique and solitary soul to
twist the universe into the shape of its vision.
Without
any doubt Guy de Maupassant is the greatest realist that ever lived. All other realists seem idealists in
comparison. Many of the situations he
describes are situations doubtless in which he himself "had a
hand". Others are situations which
he came across, in his enterprising debouchings here
and there, in curious by-alleys, and which he observed with a morose scowl of
amusement, from outside. A few - very
few - are situations which he evoked from the more recondite places of his own
turbulent soul.
But
one cannot read a page of him without feeling that he is a writer who writes
from out of his own experiences, from out of the shocks and jolts and rough
file-like edges of raw reality.
It
is a huge encouragement to all literary ambitions, this immense achievement of
his. The scope and sweep of a great
creative imagination is given to few among us, and Guy de Maupassant was not
one of these. His imagination was
rigorously earth-bound, and not only earth-bound but
bound to certain obvious and sensual aspects of earth-life. Except when he tore open the bleeding wounds
of his own mutilated sensibility and wrote stories of his madness with a pen
dipped in the evil humours of his diseased blood, he was a master of a certain
brutal and sunburnt objectivity.
But
how cheerful and encouraging it is for those among us who are engaged in
literature, to see what this astonishing man was able to make of experiences
which, in some measure, wee must all have shared!
There
is never any need to leave one's own town or village or city to get
"copy". There is scarcely any
need to leave one's own house. The
physiological peculiarities of the people who jostle against us in the common
routine of things will completely suffice.
That is the whole point of de Maupassant's
achievement.
The
same thing, of course, is true of the great imaginative writers. They also are able to derive grist for
their mill from the common occurrences; they also are free to remain at
home. But their sphere is the sphere of
the human soul; his was the sphere of the human body.
He
was pre-eminently the master of physiology - the physiological writer. Bodies, not souls, were his "métier" - or souls only insofar as they are directly
affected by bodies.
But
bodies - bodies of men and women are everywhere; living ones on the earth; dead
ones under the earth. One need not go to
the antipodes to find the nerves and the tissues, the flesh and the blood, of
these planetary evocations, of these microcosms of the universe. The great imaginative writers have the soul
of man always under their hand, and Guy de Maupassant has the body of man
always under his hand.
It
is not the masters who are found journeying to remote regions to get inspiration
for their work. Their "
It
is singularly encouraging to us men of letters to contemplate what Guy de
Maupassant could do with the natural animal instincts and gestures and
mutterings and struggles of the bodies of men and women as their desires make
them skip.
"Encouraging"
did I say? Tantalizing rather, and provocative of helpless rage. For just as the spiritual insensitiveness of our
bourgeois tyrants renders them dull and obtuse to the noble imaginations of
great souls, so their moral bigotry and stupidity renders them obstinately
averse to the freedom of the artist in dealing with the physical eccentricities
of the grotesque human animal.
We
must not deal at large with the spirit lest we weary the vulgar and the
frivolous; we must not deal at large with the body, lest we infuriate the
Puritanical and the squeamish.
It
is absurd to rail at de Maupassant because of his "brutality". One cannot help suspecting that those who do
so have never recognised the absurd comedy of their own bodily activities and
desires.
It
is idle to protest against the outrageous excursions of his predatory
humour. The raw bleeding pieces - each,
as one almost feels, with its own peculiar cry - of the living body of the
world, clawed as if by tiger claws, are strange morsels for the taste of some
among us. But for others, there is an
exultant pleasure in this great hunt, with the deep-mouthed hounds of veracity
and sincerity, after the authentic truth.
One
touches here - in this question of the brutality of Guy de Maupassant - upon a
very deep matter; the matter namely of what our pleasure exactly consists, as
we watch, in one of his more savage stories, the flesh of the world's truth
thus clawed at.
I
think it is a pleasure composed of several different elements. The first of these is that deep and curious
satisfaction which we derive from the exhibition in art of the essential
grossness and unscrupulousness of life.
We revenge ourselves in this way upon what makes us suffer. The clear presentation of an outrage, of an
insult, of an indecency, is in itself a sort of vengeance upon the power that
wrought it, and though it may sound ridiculous enough to speak of being avenged
upon Nature, still the basic instinct is there, and we can, if we will,
personify the immense malignity of things, and fancy that we are striking back
at the gods and causing the gods some degree of perturbation; at least letting
them know that we are not deceived by the illusions they dole out to us!
The
quiet gods may well be imagined as quite as indifferent to our artistic
vengeance as Nature herself, but at any rate, like the man in the Inferno who
"makes the fig" at the Almighty, we have found vent for our human
feelings. Another element in it is the
pleasure we get - not perhaps a very Christian one, but Literature deviates
from Christianity in several important ways - from having other people made
fully aware, as we may be, of the grossness and unscrupulousness of life.
These
other people may easily be assumed to be fidgety, meticulous, self-complacent
purists; and as we read the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, we cannot
resist calling up an imaginary company of such poor devils and forcing them to
listen to a page of the great book of human judgement upon Nature's perversity.
Finally
at the bottom of all there is a much more subtle cause for our pleasure;
nothing less in fact than that old wild dark Dionysian embracing of fate, of
fate however monstrous and bizarre, simply because it is there - an integral
part of the universe - and we ourselves with something of that ingredient in
our own heathen hearts.
An
imaginary symposium of modern writers upon the causes of human pleasure in the
grosser elements of art lends itself to very free speculation. Personally I must confess to very serious
limitations in my own capacity for such enjoyment. I have a sneaking sympathy with tender
nerves. I can relish de Maupassant up to
a certain point - and that point is well this side of idolatry - but I fancy I
relish him because I discern in him a certain vibrant nerve of revolt against
the brutality of things, a certain quivering irony of savage protest. When you get the brutality represented
without this revolt and with a certain unction of sympathetic zest, as you do
in the great eighteenth-century novelists in
This
is a most grievous limitation and I apologise to the reader most humbly for
it. It is indeed a lamentable confession
of weakness. But since the limitations
of critics are, consciously or unconsciously, part of their contribution to the
problems at issue, I offer mine without further comment.
It
is an odd thing that while I can relish and even hugely enjoy ribaldry in a
Latin writer, I cannot so much as tolerate vulgarity in an
English or Scotch one. Perhaps it
is their own hidden consciousness that, if they once let themselves go, they
would go unpleasantly far, which gives them this morbid uneasiness to the
strictures of the Puritans. Or is it
that the English-speaking races are born between the deep sea of undiluted
coarseness and the devil of a diseased conscience? Is this the reason why every artist in the world
and every critic of art, feels himself essentially an exile everywhere except
upon Latin soil?
Guy
de Maupassant visualises human life as a thing completely and helplessly in the
grip of animal appetites and instincts.
He takes what we call lust, and makes of it the main motive force in his
vivid and terrible sketches. It is
perhaps for this very reason that his stories have such an air of appalling
reality.
But
it is not only lust or lechery which he exploits. He turns to his artistic purpose every kind
of physiological desire, every sort of bodily craving. Many of these are quite innocent and
harmless, and the denial of their satisfaction is in the deepest sense
tragic. Perhaps it is in regard to what
this word tragic implies that we find the difference between the
brutality of Guy de Maupassant and the coarseness of the earlier English
writers.
The
very savagery in de Maupassant's humour is an
indication of a clear intellectual consciousness of something monstrously,
grotesquely, wrong; something mad and blind and devilish about the whole
business, which we miss completely in all English writers
except the great Jonathan Swift.
Guy
de Maupassant had the easy magnanimity of the Latin races in regard to sex
matters, but in regard to the sufferings of men and of animals from the denial
of their right to every sort of natural joy, there smouldered in him a deep
black rage - a saeva indignatio
- which scorches his pages like a deadly acid.
In
his constant preoccupation with the bodies of living creatures, it is natural
enough that animals as well as men should come into the circle of his
interest. He was a great huntsman and
fisherman. He loved to wander over the
frozen marshes, gun in hand, searching for strange wildfowl among the reeds and
ditches. But though he slew these things
in the savage passion of the chase as his ancestors had done for ages, between
his own fierce senses and theirs there was a singular magnetic sympathy.
As
may be often noticed in other cases, as we go through the world, there was
between the primitive earth-instincts of this hunter of wild things and the
desperate creatures he pursued, a far deeper bond of kinship than exists
between sedentary humanitarians and the objects of their philanthropy. It is good that there should be such a writer
as this in the world.
In
the sophisticated subtleties of our varnished and velvet-carpeted civilisation,
it is well that we should be brought back to the old essential candours which
forever underlie the frills and frippery.
It is well that the stark bones of the aboriginal skeleton with its raw
"unaccommodated" flesh should peep out
through the embroideries.
It
is, after all, the "thing itself" which matters - the thing which
"owes the worm no silk, the cat no perfume." Forked straddling animals are we all, as the
mad king says in the play, and it is mere effeminacy and affectation to cover
up the truth.
Guy
de Maupassant is never greater than when appealing to the primitive link of
tragic affiliation that binds us to all living flesh and blood. A horse mercilessly starved in the fields; a
wild bird wailing for its murdered mate; a tramp driven by hunger and primitive
desire, an harried by the "insolence of office"; an old man denied
the little luxuries of his senile greed; an old maid torn and rent in the flesh
that is barren and the breasts that never gave suck; these are the natural
subjects of his genius - the sort of "copy" that one certainly need
not leave one's "home town" to find.
One
is inclined to feel that those who miss the tragic generosity at the heart of
the brutality of Guy de Maupassant, are not really
aware of the bitter cry of this mad planet.
Let them content themselves, these people, with their pretty little
touching stories, their nice blobs of cheerful "local colour" thrown
in here and there, and their sweet impossible endings. Sunday-school literature for Sunday-school
children; but let there be at least one writer who writes for those who know
what the world is.
The
question of the legitimacy in art of the kind of realism which Guy de
Maupassant practised, goes incalculably deep. Consider yourself at this moment, gentle
reader, lightly turning over - as doubtless you are doing - the harmless pages
of this academic book, as you drink your tea from a well-appointed tray in a
sunny corner of some friendly cake-shop.
You are at this moment - come, confess it - hiding up, perhaps from
yourself but certainly from the world, some outrageous annoyance, some
grotesque resolution, some fear, some memory, some suspicion, that has - as is
natural and proper enough, for your father was a man, your mother a woman - its
physiological origin. You turn to this
elegant book of mine, with its mild and persuasive thoughts, as if you turned
away from reality into some pleasant arbour of innocent recreation. It is a sort of little lullaby for you amid
the troubles of this rough world.
But
suppose instead of the soothing cadences of this harmless volume, you had just
perused a short story of Guy de Maupassant; would not your feelings be
different? Would you not have the
sensation of being fortified in your courage, in your humour, in your brave
embracing of the fantastic truth? Would
you not contemplate the most grotesque matters lightly, wisely, sanely and with
a magnanimous heart?
The
perverted moral training to which we have been all of us subjected, has "sicklied o'er with the pale cast" of a most evil
scrupulousness our natural free enjoyment of the absurd contrasts and accidents
and chances of life.
French
humour may be savage - all the better - we need a humour with some gall in it
to deal with the humour of the universe.
But our humour, stopping short so timorously of stripping the world to
its smock, is content to remain vulgar.
That is the only definition of vulgarity that I recognise - a temptation
to be coarse without the spiritual courage to be outrageous! Coarseness - our Anglo-Saxon peculiarity - is
due to temperamental insensitiveness.
Outrageous grossness - with its ironical, beautiful blasphemy against the
great mother's amazing tricks - is an intellectual and spiritual thing, worthy
of all noble souls. The one is the rank
breath of a bourgeois democracy, the other is the free
laughter of civilised intelligences through all human history.
English
and Americans find it difficult to understand each other's humour. One can well understand this difficulty. No-one finds any obstacle - except Puritan
prejudice - in understanding French humour; because French humour is universal;
the humour of the human spirit contemplating the tragic comedy of the human
body.
One
very interesting thing must be noted here in regard to the method of Guy de Maupassant's writings; I mean the power of the short story
to give a sense of the general stream of life which is denied to the long
story.
Personally
I prefer long stories; but that is only because I have an insatiable love of
the story for its own sake, apart from its interpretation of life. I am not in the least ashamed to confess that
when I read books, I do so to escape from the pinch of actual facts. I have a right to this little peculiarity as
much as to any other as long as I don't let it invade the clarity of my reason. But in the short story - and I have no
scruple about admitted it - one seems to get the flavour of the writer's
general philosophy of life more completely than in any other literary form.
It
is a snatch at the passing procession, a dip into the flowing stream, and one
gets from it the sort of sudden illumination that one gets from catching a
significant gesture under the street lamp, or meeting a swift tale-telling
glance beneath a crowded doorway.
Bitterly
inspired as he is by the irony of the physiological tragedy of human life, Guy
de Maupassant is at his greatest when he deals with the bizarre accidents that
happen to the body; greatest of all when he deals with the last bizarre
accident of all, the accident of death.
The
appalling grotesqueness of death, its brutal and impious levity, its crushing
finality, have never been better written of.
The savage ferocity with which he tears off the mask which the
sentimental piety of generations has thrown over the features of their dead is
no sign of frivolousness in him. The
gravity of the undertaker is not an indication of deep emotion; nor is the
jesting of Hamlet, as he stands above Ophelias's
grave, a sign of an inhuman heart.
The
last insult of the scurrilous gods - their flinging us upon oblivion with so
indecent, so lewd a disregard for every sort of seemliness - is answered in Guy
de Maupassant by a ferocious irony almost equal to their own.
But
it would be unfair to let this dark-browed Norman go, without at least a
passing allusion to the large and friendly manner in which he rakes up, out of
brothel, out of gutter, out of tenement, out of sweatshop, out of circus-tent,
out of wharf shanty, out of barge cabin, every kind and species of human
derelict to immortalise their vagrant humanity in the amber of his flawless
style.
There
is a spacious hospitality about the man's genius which is a rare tonic to weary
æsthetes, sick of the thin-spun theories of the
schools. The sunburnt humour of many
queer tatterdemalions warms us, as we read him, into a fine indifference to
nice points of human distinction. All
manner of ragged nondescripts blink at us out of their tragic resignation and
hint at a ribald reciprocity of nature, making the whole world kin.
In
his ultimate view of life, he was a drastic pessimist, and what we call
materialism receives from his hands the clinching fiat of a terrific
imprimatur. And this is well; this is as
it should be. There are always literary
persons to uphold the banners of mysticism and morality, idealism and good
hope. There will always be plenty of
talent "on the side of the angels" in these days, when it has become
a kind of intellectual cant to cry aloud, "I am no materialist! Materialism has been disproved by the latest
scientific thinkers!"
To
come back to the old, honest, downright heathen recognition of the
There
will always be optimists in the countries where "the standards of living
are high." There will always be
writers - scientific or otherwise - to dispose of materialism. But meanwhile it is well that there should be
at least one great modern among us for whom that pulvis
et umbra is the last word. At least one, if only for the sake of those
whom we mourn most; so that, beholding their lives, like torch-flames against
black darkness, we shall not stint them of their remembrance.