Chapter XIII: Naturalism--The Goncourts, Zola, and Maupassant (2)

To run through the actual "turn-out" in novel[484] and tale as far as is possible here, _Bel-Ami_ started, in England at least, with the most favouring gales possible. It was just when the decree had gone forth, issued by the younger Later Victorians, that all the world should be made naughty; that the insipid whiteness of their Early and Middle elders should be washed black and scarlet, and especially "blue"; and that if possible, by this and other processes, something like real literature might be made to take the place of the drivellings and botcheries of Tennyson and Browning; of Dickens and Thackeray; of Ruskin and Carlyle. To these persons _Bel-Ami_ was a sweet content, a really "_shady_ boon." The hero never does a decent thing and never says a good one; but he has good looks and insinuating manners of the kind that please some women, whence his name, originally given to him by an innocent little girl, and taken up by her by no means innocent mamma and other quasi-ladies.[485] He starts as a soldier who has served his time in Algeria, but has found nothing better to do than a subordinate post in a railway office. He meets a former comrade who is high up in Paris journalism, and who very amiably introduces Georges Duroy to that bad resting-place but promising passageway. Duroy succeeds, not so much (though he is not a fool) by any brains as by impudence; by a faculty of making use of others; by one of the farce-duels in which combatants are put half a mile off each other to fire _once_, etc.; but most of all by his belamyship (for the word is good old English in a better sense). The women of the book are what is familiarly called "a caution." They revive the old Hélisenne de Crenne[486] "sensual appetite" for the handsome bounder; and though of course jealous of his infidelities, are quite ready to welcome the truant when he returns. They also get drunk at restaurant dinners, and then call their lovers--quite correctly, but not agreeably--"Cochon!" "Sale bête," etc. This of course is what our _fin-de-siècle_ critics _could_ "recommend to a friend."

But if the reader thinks that this summary is a prelude to anything like the "slate" that I thought it proper to bestow upon _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_, or even to such remarks as those made on the Goncourts, he is quite mistaken. Laclos had, as it seemed to me, a disgusting subject and no real compensation of treatment. In _Bel-Ami_ the merits of the treatment are very great. The scenes pass before you; the characters play their part in the scenes--if not in an engaging manner, in a completely life-like one. There is none of the _psychologie de commande_, which I object to in Laclos, but a true adumbration of life. The music-hall opening; the first dinner-party; the journalist scenes; the death of Forestier and the proposal of re-marriage over his corpse;[487] the honeymoon journey to Normandy--a dozen other things--could not be better done in their way, though this way may not be the best. It did not fall to me to review _Bel-Ami_ when it came out, but I do not think I should have made any mistake about it if it had. There are weak points technically; for instance, the character of Madeleine Forestier, afterwards Duroy--still later caught in flagrant delict and divorced--is left rather enigmatic. But the general technique (with the reservations elsewhere made) is masterly, and two passages--a Vigny-like[488] descant on Death by the old poet Norbert de Varenne and the death-scene of Forestier itself--give us Maupassant in that mood of _macabre_ sentiment--almost Romance--which chequers and purifies his Naturalism.

But the main objection which I should take to the book is neither technical nor goody. The late Mr. Locker, in, I think, that most fascinating "New Omniana" _Patchwork_,[489] tells how, in the Travellers' Club one day, a haughty member thereof expressed surprise that he should see Mr. Locker going to the corner-house next door. The amiable author of _London Lyrics_ was good enough to explain that some not uninteresting people also used the humbler establishment--bishops, authors, painters, cabinet-ministers, etc. "Ah!" said the Traverser of Perilous Ways, "that would be all very well if one _wanted_ to meet that sort of people. But, you see, one _doesn't_ want to meet them." Now, I do not want to meet anybody in _Bel-Ami_; in fact, I would much rather not.

[Sidenote: _Une Vie._]

_Une Vie_ is, in this respect and others, a curious pendant to _Bel-Ami_. It illustrates another side of Maupassant's pessimism--the overtly, but for the most part quietly, tragic. It might almost (borrowing a second title from the _Index_) call itself "Jeanne; ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu." The heroine is perfectly innocent, though both a _femmelette_ and a fool. She never does any harm, nor, except through weakness and folly, deserves that any should be done to her. But she has an unwise and not blameless though affectionate and generous father, with a mother who is an invalid, and whom, after her death, the daughter discovers to have been, in early days, no better than she should be. Both of them are, if not exactly spendthrifts, "wasters," very mainly through careless and excessive generosity. She marries the first young man of decent family, looks, and manners that she comes across; and he turns out to be stingy, unfaithful in the most offensive way, with her own maid and others, and unkind. She loses him, by the vengeance of a husband whom he has wronged, and her second child is born dead in consequence of this shock. Her first she spoils for some twenty years, till he goes off with a concubine and nearly ruins his mother. We leave her consoling herself, in a half-imbecile fashion, with a grandchild. Her only earthly providence is her _bonne_ Rosalie, the same who had been her husband's mistress, but a very "good sort" otherwise. The book is charged with grime of all kinds. It certainly cannot be said of M. de Maupassant, to alter the pronoun in Mr. Kipling's line, that "[_He_] never talked obstetrics when the little stranger came," for _Une Vie_ contains two of these delectable scenes; and in other respects we are treated with the utmost "candour." But the book is again saved by some wonderful passages--specially those giving Jeanne's first night at the sea-side _château_ which is to be her own, and her last visit to it a quarter of a century after, when it has passed to strangers--and generally by the true tragedy which pervades it. When Maupassant took Sorrow into cohabitation and collaboration, there was no danger of the result.

_Mont-Oriol_, though not, save in one respect, the most "arresting" of Maupassant's books, has rather more varied and at the same time coherent interest than some others. It is also that one which most directly illustrates--on the great scale--the general principles of the Naturalist school. Not, indeed, in specially grimy fashion, though there is the usual adultery (_not_ behind the scenes) and the (for Maupassant) not unusual _accouchement_. (His fondness for this most unattractive episode of human life is astonishing: if he were a more pious person and a political feminist, one might think that he was trying to make us modern Adams share the curse of Eve, at least to the extent of the disgust caused by reading about its details.) The main extra-amatory theme throughout is the "physiologie" of an inland watering-place, its extension by the discovery of new springs, the financing of them, the jealousies of the doctors, the megrims of the patients, etc. All these are treated quite on the Zolaesque scheme, but with a lightness and beauty not often reached by the master, though common enough in the pupil.[490] The description of Christiane Andermatt's first bath, and the sensations of mild bliss that it gave her, is as true as it is pretty; and others of scenery have that vividness without over-elaboration which marks their author's work. Nor are his ironic-human touches wanting. Almost at its birth he satirises, in his own quiet Swiftian way, an absurd tendency which has grown mightily since, and flourishes now: "'Très _moderne_'--entre ses lèvres, était le comble de l'admiration." As for the love-affair itself, one's feelings towards it are mixed. A good deal of it shows that unusual grasp of the proper ways of the game with which Maupassant is fully credited here. Personally, I should not, after quoting Baudelaire to a lady (so far so good), inform her that I was a donkey for expecting her to enjoy anything so subtle. But perhaps Paul Brétigny, though neglectful of the Seventh Commandment, was an honester man than I am. And it is quite true that Christiane was _not_ subtle. Her hot lover's[491] cooling partly dated from the time when she expected him to show palpable interest in the fact that she was likely to have a child by him. And though her cry (on the question what name this infant, of course accepted as his own by the unfortunate Andermatt, should bear) that as for _her_ name, "Celà promet trop de souffrances de porter le nom du Crucifié," could not be better as a general sentiment, the particular circumstances in which it is uttered show a slight want of grace of congruity. Still, the minor characters are not only more in number, but more interesting than is always the case; and the book, if you skip the obstetrics, is readable throughout. Yet it is, to use wine-language, not above "Maupassant _premier bourgeois_," except in some of the earlier love-scenes.

[Sidenote: _Fort comme la Mort._]

In _Fort comme la Mort_ the author rises far above these two books, powerful as they are in parts. The basis is indeed the invariable and unsatisfactory "triangle." But the structure built on it might almost have been lifted to another, and stands foursquare in nearly all respects of treatment. The chief technical objection that can be brought against it is that there is a certain want of air and space; the important characters are too few, the situations too uniform; so that a kind of oppression results. Olivier Bertin, one of the most popular of Parisian painters though no longer young, a great man of society, etc., has, for many years, been the lover of the Countess de Guilleroy, and, of course, the dear friend of her husband. We are introduced to them just at the time when a sort of disgust of middle age is coming over him, as well as a certain feeling that the springs of his genius are running low. He is not tired of the Countess, who is passionately devoted to him; and, except that they do not live together, their relations are rather conjugal than anything else. Just at this moment her daughter Annette comes home from a country life with her grandmother, and proves to be the very double of what her mother was in her own youth. Bertin, without ceasing to love the mother, conceives a frantic passion for the daughter; and the vicissitudes of this take up the book. At last the explosives of the situation are "fused," as one may say, by one of the newspaper attacks of youth on age. Annette's approaching marriage, and this _Figaro_ critique of his own "old-fashioned" art, put Bertin beside himself. Either hurrying heedlessly along, or deliberately exposing himself, he is run over by an omnibus, is mortally hurt, and dies with the Countess sitting beside him and receiving his last selfishness--a request that she will bring the girl to see him before he dies.

The story, though perhaps, as has been said, too much concentrated as a whole, is brilliantly illuminated by sketches of society on the greater and smaller scale: of Parisian club-life; of picture-shows; of the diversions of the country, etc.: but its effect, though certainly helped by, is not derived from, these. As always with Maupassant, it is out of the bitter that comes the sweet. Hardly anywhere outside of _Ecclesiastes_, Thackeray,[492] and Flaubert is the irony of life more consummately handled in one peculiar fashion; while the actual _passion_ of love is nowhere better treated by this author,[493] or perhaps by any other French novelist of the later century, except Fromentin.

[Sidenote: _Pierre et Jean._]

The line of ascent was continued in _Pierre et Jean_. It is not a long book--a fact which perhaps has some significance--and no small part of it is taken up by a Preface on "Le Roman" generally (_v. sup._), which is the author's most remarkable piece of criticism; one of the most noteworthy from a man who was not specially a critic; and one of the few but precious examples of an artist dealing, at once judicially and masterfully, with his own art.[494] In fact, recognising the truth of the "poetic moment," he would extend it to the moments of all literature; and lays it down that the business of the novelist is, first to realise his own illusion of the world and then to make others realise it too.

_Pierre et Jean_ itself has no weakness except that _narrowing_ of interest which has been already noted in Maupassant, and which is rather a limitation than a positive fault. There is practically one situation throughout; and though there are several characters, their interest depends almost wholly on their relations with the central personage. This is Pierre Roland, a full-fledged physician of thirty, but not yet successful, and still living with, and on, his parents. His father is a retired Paris tradesman, who has come to live at Havre to indulge a mania for sea-fishing; he has a mother who is rather above her husband in some ways; and a brother, Jean, who, though considerably younger, is also ready to start in his own profession--that of the law. A "friend of the family," Mme. Rosémilly--a young, pretty, and rather well-to-do widow--completes the company, with one or two "supers." Just as the story opens, a large legacy to Jean by an older friend of the family--this time a man--is announced, to the surprise of almost everybody, but at first only causing a little natural jealousy in Pierre. Charitable remarks of outsiders, however, suggest to him the truth--that Jean is the fruit of his mother's adultery with the testator--and this "works like poison in his brain," till--Jean, having gained another piece of luck in Mme. Rosémilly's hand, and having, though enlightened by Pierre and by his mother's confession, very common-sensibly decided that he will not resign the legacy, smirched as it is--Pierre accepts a surgeon-ship on a Transatlantic steamer, and the story ends.

On its own scheme and showing there is scarcely a fault in it. The mere settings--the fishing and prawn-catching; the scenery of port and cliff; the "interiors"; the final sailing of the great ship--are perfect. The minor characters--the good-tempered, thick-headed _bourgeois_ husband and father; the wife and mother, with her bland acceptance of the transferred wages of shame, and (after discovery only) her breaking down with the banal blasphemy of "marriage before God" and the rest of it; the younger brother--not exactly a bad fellow, but thoroughly convinced of the truth of _non olet_; the widow playing her part and no more,--all are artistically just what they should be. And so, always remembering scale and scheme, is Pierre. One neither likes him (for he is not exactly a likeable person) nor dislikes him (for he is quite excusable) very much; one is only partially sorry for him. But one knows that he _is_--he has that actual and indubitable existence which is the test and quality alike of creator and creation. His first vague envy of his brother's positive luck in money and probable luck in love--for both have had floating fancies for the pretty widow; the again perfectly natural spleen when this lucky brother, by an accident, secures the particular set of rooms in which Pierre had hoped to improve his position as a doctor; the crushing blow of finding out his mother's shame; the process (the truest thing in the whole book, though it is all true) by which he tortures both her and himself in constant oblique references to her fault; the explosion when he directly informs his brother; and all the rest, could hardly be improved. It is not a novel on the great scale, but rather what may be called a long short story. It does not quite attain to the position of some books on a small scale in different kinds--_Manon Lescaut_ itself, _Adolphe_, _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_. But the author has done what he meant to do, and has done it in such a fashion that it could not, on its own lines, be done better.

Maupassant's last novel of some magnitude, _Notre Coeur_, was written when the shadow was near enveloping him; and it cannot be said to have the perfection of _Pierre et Jean_. But it still rises higher in certain very important ways--it is perhaps the book that one likes him best for, outside of pure comedy; and there is none which impresses one more with the sense of his loss to French literature.

[Sidenote: _Notre Coeur._]

The story, like all Maupassant's stories, is of the simplest. André Mariolle, a well-to-do young Parisian bachelor of no profession, is a member of a set of mostly literary and artistic people, almost all of whom have, as a main rendezvous, the house of a beautiful, wealthy, and variously gifted young widow, Mme. de Burne. She lives chaperoned in a manner by her father; indisposed to a second marriage by the fact that she has had a tyrannical husband; accepting homage from all her familiars and being very gracious in differing degrees to all of them; but having no "lover in title" and not even being suspected of having (in the French novel-sense[495]) any "lover" at all. For a long time Mariolle has, from whim, refused introduction to her, but at last he consents to be taken to the house by his friend the musician Massival, and of course falls a victim. It cannot be said that she is a Circe,[496] nor that, as perhaps might be expected, she revenges herself for his holding aloof by snaring and throwing him away. Quite the contrary. She shows him special favour: when she has to go to stay with friends at Avranches she privately asks him to follow her; and finally, when the party pass the night at Mont Saint-Michel, she comes--uninvited, though of course much longed for--to his room, and (as they used to say with elaborate decency) "crowns his flame." Nor does she turn on him--as again might be expected--even then. On the contrary, she comes constantly to a secret Eden which he has prepared for her in Paris, and though, after long practice of this, she is sometimes rather late, and once or twice actually puts off her assignation, it is "no more than reason,"[497] and she by no means jilts or threatens jilting, though she tells him frankly that his way of loving (which _is_ more than reason) is not hers. At last he cannot endure seeing her surrounded with admirers, and flies to Fontainebleau, where he is partly--only partly--consoled by a pretty and devoted _bonne_. Yet he sends a despairing cry to Mme. de Burne; and she, gracious as ever, actually comes to see him, and induces him to return to Paris. He does so, but takes the _bonne_ Elisabeth with him; and the book ends abruptly, leaving the reader to imagine what is the outcome of this "double arrangement"--or failure to arrange.

But, as always with Maupassant's longer stories and not quite never with his shorter ones, the "fable is the least part." The "atmosphere"; the projection of character and passion; the setting; the situations; the phrase--these are the thing. And, except for the enigmatic and "stump-ended" conclusion, and for a certain overdose of words (which rather grew on him), they make a very fine thing. It is here that, on one side at least, the author's conception of love--which at some times might appear little more than animal, at others conventional-capricious in a fashion which makes that of Crébillon universal and sincere--has sublimed itself, as it had begun to do in _Fort comme la Mort_ (_Pierre et Jean_ is in this respect something of a divagation), into very nearly the true form of the Canticles and Shakespeare, of Donne and Shelley and Heine, of Hugo and Musset and Browning. But it is curious, in the first place, that he whom his friends fondly called a _fier mâle_, who has sometimes pushed masculinity near to brutality, and who is always cynical more or less, has made his André Mariolle, though a very good lover, a distinct weakling in love. He is a "too quick despairer," and his despair is more illogical than even a lover's has a right to be. And this is very interesting, because, evidently without the author's knowledge (though perhaps, if things had gone more happily, he might have come to that knowledge later), it shows the rottenness of the foundation, and the flimsiness of the superstructure, on and in which the Covenant of Adultery--even that of Free Love--is built. Michelle de Burne gives André Mariolle everything with one exception, if even with that, that the greediest lover can want. She "distinguishes" him at once; she shows keen desire for his company; she makes the last (or first) surrender like a goddess answering a hopeless and unspoken prayer; she is strangely generous in continuing the _don d'amoureux merci_; she never really wearies of or jilts him, though he is a most exacting lover; and when he has flung away from her she allows him, in the most gracious manner, to whistle himself back. But there is one thing, or rather two which are one, that she will not, or perhaps cannot, give him. It is the idealised passion which nature has denied to her, though not to him, and the absolute faithfulness and "forsaking of all others" proper to what?--to a perfect wife. So here, in the realms of spouse-breach, marriage is once more king, or rather the throne is felt to be empty--the kingdom an anarchy--without it!

The lighter side of the matter reminds one of two celebrated utterances. The first is Paul de Florac's criticism on the Lady Clara-Barnes-Highgate triangle, "Do not adopt our institutions _à demi_." Here the situation is topsy-turvied in the most curious fashion, for it is the character of marriage that is desiderated in the absence thereof, and in a country where that character itself is scoffed at. Further, it reminds one still more of Sydney Smith's excellent jest when Lady Holland, having previously asked him to stay at Holland House, sent him a formal invitation to dinner, for a day within the period of the larger hospitality. This, said Sydney, was "an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with the security of connubial relations." That was precisely the moon that Mariolle sighed for, and that his not exactly Artemis would not--indeed could not be expected to--give him.

Of Michelle de Burne herself there is less to be said. The curious misogyny which chequered Maupassant's gynomania seems to have tried hard to express itself in her portrait. It is less certain that it does. The other characters are quite subordinate, except the _bonne_ Elisabeth (who, promising as she is, merely makes her _début_) and a novelist, Gaston de Lamarthe, who may sometimes be taken as the author's mouthpiece, but who does not do him justice. The book on the whole does much to confirm, and hardly anything to invalidate, the position that its writer had far more to say than he ever said.

[Sidenote: _Les Dimanches_, etc.]

The ordinary list of Maupassant's "Romans," as distinct from "Nouvelles" and "Contes," ends with _Les Dimanches d'un Bourgeois de Paris_. This, however, is merely a series of tales (some of them actually rehandled from earlier ones), with a single figure for centre, to wit, a certain M. Patissot, a bachelor government-official, who is a sort of mixture of Leech's Mr. Briggs and of Jérôme Paturot, with other predecessors who get into scrapes and "fixtures." It is not unamusing, but scarcely first-class, the two political skits at the end being about the best part of it.

[Sidenote: _Yvette._]

On the other hand, _Yvette_, which is only allowed the eponymship of a volume of short stories, though it fills to itself some hundred and seventy pages, is one of Maupassant's most carefully written things and one of his best--till the not fully explained, but in any case unsatisfactory, end[498]. Its heroine is the daughter of a sham Marquise and real courtesan, who has attained wealth, who can afford herself lovers "for love"[499] and not for money, when she chooses, and who keeps up a sort of demi-monde society, in which most of the men are adventurers and all the women adventuresses, but which maintains outward decencies. In consequence of this Yvette herself--in a fashion a little impossible, but artistically made not improbable--though she allows herself the extreme "tricks and manners" of faster society, calls half the men by nicknames, wanders about alone with them, etc., preserves not merely her personal purity but even her ignorance of unclean things in general, and especially of her mother's real character and conduct. Her relations with a clever and not ungentlemanly _roué_, one M. de Servigny; his difficulties (these are very curiously and cleverly told) in making love to a girl not of the lower class (at least apparently) and not vicious; his attempt to brusque the matter; her horror at it and at the coincident discovery of her mother's ways; her attempt to poison herself; and her salvage by Servigny's coolness and devotion--are capitally done. Out of many passages, one, where Madame la Marquise Obardi, otherwise Octavie Bardin, formerly domestic servant, drops her mask, opens her mouth, and uses the crude language of a procuress-mother to her daughter, is masterly. But the end is not from any point of view satisfactory. Apparently (for it is not made quite clear) Yvette retracts her refusal to be a kept mistress. In that case certainly, and in the almost impossible one of marriage probably, it may be feared that the catastrophe is only postponed. Now Yvette has been made too good (I do not mean goody) to be allowed to pine or poison herself, as a soon-to-be-neglected concubine or a not-much-longer-to-be-loved wife.

[Sidenote: Short stories--the various collections.]

That the very large multitude[500] of his short stories (or, one begs pardon, brief-narratives) is composed of units very different in merit is not wonderful. It was as certain that the covers of the author of _Boule de Suif_[501] would be drawn for the kind of thing frequently, as that these would sometimes be drawn either blank, or with the result of a very indifferent run. To an eye of some expertness, indeed, a good many of these pieces are, at best, the sort of thing that a clever contributor would turn off to editorial order, when he looked into a newspaper office between three and five, or ten and midnight. I confess that I once burst out laughing when, having thought to myself on reading one, "This is not much above a better written Paul-de-Kockery," I found at the end something like a frank acknowledgment of the fact, _with the name_. In fact, Maupassant was not good at the pure _grivoiserie_; his contemporary M. Armand Silvestre (_v. inf._) did it much better. Touches of tragedy, as has been said, save the situation sometimes, and at others the supernatural element of dread (which was to culminate in _Le Horla_, and finally to overpower the author himself) gives help; but the zigzags of the line of artistic success are sharp and far too numerous. For a short story proper and a "proper" short story, _L'Épave_, where an inspector of marine insurance visits a wreck far out on the sands of the Isle of Rhé, and, finding an Englishman and his daughter there, most unprofessionally forgets that the tides come up rapidly in such places, is nearly perfect. On the other hand, _Le Rosier de Mme. Husson_, one of the longest, is almost worthless.

[Sidenote: Classes--stories of 1870-71.]

At one time I had designed--and to no small extent written--a running survey of a large number of these stories as they turn up in the volumes, most of which--the _Contes de la Bécasse_ is the chief exception--have no unity, and are merely "scoopings" of pieces enough to fill three hundred pages or so. But it would have occupied far too much space for its importance and interest. As a matter of fact, they are to some extent classifiable, and so may be dealt with on a representative system. There is the division of "La Revanche," which might have saved some of our fools at home from mistaking the Prussian for anything but a Prussian. _Boule de Suif_ heads this, of course; but _Mlle. Fifi_, which is a sort of tragic _Boule de Suif_--the tragedy being, one is glad to say, at the invaders' expense--is not far below it. _Deux Amis_, one of the best, records how two harmless Parisian anglers, pursuing their beloved sport too far, were shot for refusing to betray the password back; and _La Mère Sauvage_, the finest of all, how a French mother, hearing of her son's death, burnt her own house with some Germans billeted in it, and was, on her frank confession, shot. But _Un Duel_, though a Prussian officer (_vile damnum_) pays for his brutality with his life, restores the comic element, partly at the expense of the two English seconds.[502]

Connected with the war of 1870 too, though not military, is the capital _Coup d'État_, in which a Monarchist French squire checkmates, for the moment at least, a blatant Republican village doctor.

[Sidenote: Norman stories.]

Very much larger than any other group is, naturally enough, that on Norman subjects. Maupassant does not flatter his fellow-subjects of the great Duchy, but he loves them, and knows them, and delights to talk of them--talking always well and often at his best. There must be, in all, several volumes-full of these, though they are actually scattered over a dozen: and it is not easy to go wrong with them. Perhaps a new "Farce du Cuvier," quite different from those known to readers of Boccaccio and the Fabliaux (a very drunk peasant sells his wife[503] by weight or measure to another, and scientifically ascertains the exact sum to be paid by making her fill a butt with water and putting her into it--the displacement giving the required result) is the merriest. The story of the schoolboy who negotiates a marriage between his Latin tutor and a young person is excellent; and that of "Boitelle," a poor fellow who is prevented (through that singular abuse of _patria potestas_ so long allowed by French law) from marrying an agreeable negress, is the most pathetic. But I myself am rather fond of the _Légende du Mont Saint-Michel_. At first one is a little shocked at finding "the great vision of the guarded mount"[504] yoked to the old Scandinavian troll-and-farmer story of the fraudulent bargain as to alternate upper- and under-ground crops. But the magnificent opening description of "the fairy castle planted in the sea"[505] excuses, and is thrown up by, the sequel. Mont-Saint-Michel is not like Naples. When you have seen it, it is not your business to die, but to live and remember the sight of it; and, if you are lucky, your remembrance will have anticipated Maupassant's words, and be freshened by them.

[Sidenote: Algerian and Sporting.]

Algiers and the Riviera were also fruitful in quantity, rather less so in quality. But on the former two stories, _Allouma_ and _Au Soir_, may be found together, the whole of the first of which, and the beginning of the second, are first-rate. The above mentioned _Contes de la Bécasse_ are almost all good, though by no means all sporting.

[Sidenote: Purely comic.]

For pure comedy one might put as the first three--with the caution that Mrs. Grundy had better keep away from them--_Les Soeurs Rondoli_,[506] for which I feel certain that, when Maupassant reached the Elysian Fields, Aristophanes and Rabelais jointly requested the pleasure of introducing him to the company, and crowned him with the choicest laurels; _Mouche_, which is really touching as well as tickling at the end, though the grave and precise must be doubly warned off this; and _Enragée_--which is a sort of blend of an old smoking-room story of the perils of the honeymoon when new, and that curious tale[507] of Vigny's which has been given above.

[Sidenote: Tragic.]

For pure, or almost pure, tragedy and pathos, again, _Monsieur Parent_ stands first--the history of the late vengeance of a deceived husband and friend. _Miss Harriet_ gives us something more than a stage Englishwoman with large feet, projecting teeth, tartan skirts, and tracts, though it gives us this too. _Madame Baptiste_--the very short tale of a hapless woman who, having been the victim of crime in her youth, is pursued by the scandal thereof to suicide, in spite of her having found a worthy husband--is one of Maupassant's intensest.

[Sidenote: Tales of Life's Irony.]

As examples, bending sometimes to the comic, sometimes to the pathetic side of studies in the irony of life, one may recommend _A Cheval_ (a holiday taken by a poor but well-born family, which saddles them with an unconscionable "run-over" Old-_Wo_man-of-the-_Land_); _La Parure_ and _Les Bijous_ (the first a variant of _A Cheval_, the second a discovery by a husband, after his wife's death, of her shame); and perhaps best of all, _Regret_, in which a gentleman of sixty, reflecting on his wasted life, remembers a picnic, decades earlier, where the wife of his lifelong friend--both of them still friends and neighbours--behaved rather oddly. He hurries across to ask her (whom he finds jam-making) what she would have done if he had "failed in respect," and receives the cool answer, "J'aurais cédé." It is good; but fancy not being able to take a walk, and observe the primroses by the river's brim, without being bound in honour to observe likewise whether the lady by your side was ready to "cede" or not! It seems to me that in such circumstances one would, to quote a French critic on an entirely different author and matter, "lose all the grace and liberty of the composition."

[Sidenote: Oddments.]

Some oddments[508] may deserve addition. _Fini_, which might have been mentioned in the last group, is a very perfect thing. A well-preserved dandy in middle age meets, after many years, an old love, and sees, mirrored in _her_ decay, his own so long ignored. Nobody save a master could have done this as it is done. _Julie Romain_ is a quaint half-dream based on some points in George Sand's life, and attractive. The _title_ of _L'Inutile Beauté_ has also always been so to me (the _story_ is worth little). It would be, I think, a fair test of any man's taste in style, whether he did or did not see any difference between it and _La Beauté Inutile_. In _Adieu_, I think, Maupassant has been guilty of a fearful heresy in speaking of part of a lady's face as "ce _sot_ organe qu'on appelle le nez." Now that a nose, both in man and woman, can be foolish, nobody will deny. But that foolishness is an organic characteristic of it--in the sense of inexpressiveness, want of character, want of charm--is flatly a falsehood.[509] Neither mouth nor eyes can beat it in that respect; and if it has less variety individually, it gives perhaps more general character to the face than either. However, he is, if I mistake not, obliged to retract partially in the very story.

I have notes of many others--some of which may be special favourites with readers of mine--but room for no more. Yet for me at least among all these, despite the glaring inequality, despite the presence of some things utterly ephemeral and not in the least worth giving a new day to; despite the "_saleté_ bête"[510] and the monotonous and obligatory adultery,[511] there abides, as in the large books, and from circumstances now and then with gathered intensity, that quality of above-the-commonness which has obliged me to speak of Maupassant as I have spoken.

[Sidenote: General considerations.]

The vividness and actuality of his power of presentation are unquestioned, and there has been complaint rather of the character of his "illusions" (_v. sup._) than of his failure to convey them to others. It is not merely that nature, helped by the discipline of practice under the severest of masters, had endowed him with a style of the most extraordinary sobriety and accuracy--the style of a more scholarly, reticent, and tightly-girt Defoe. It is not merely that his vision, and his capacity of reproducing that vision, were unsurpassed and rarely equalled for sharpness of outline and perfection of disengagement. He had something else which it is much less easy to put into words--the power of treating an incident or a character (character, it is true, less often and less fully than incident) as if it were a phrase or a landscape, of separating it, carving it out (so to speak), and presenting it isolated and framed for survey. His performances in these tracks are so numerous that it is difficult to single out any. But I do not know that finer examples (besides those noticed above in _Une Vie_) of his power of thus isolating and projecting a scene are to be found than two of the passages in _Pierre et Jean_, the prawn-catching party and Pierre's meditation at the jetty-head. Of his similar but greater faculty of treating incident _and_ character _Monsieur Parent_ is perhaps the very finest example (for _Boule de Suif_ is something greater than a mere slice), though _Promenade_, _Les Soeurs Rondoli_, _Boitelle_, _Deux Amis_, and others are almost as good. But this very excellence of our author's carries with it a danger which most of his readers must have recognised. His definition and vignetting of separate scenes, incidents, and characters is so sharp and complete that he finds a difficulty in combining them. The attempt to disdain and depreciate plot which the above-mentioned Preface contains is, I suspect (though I am, as often confessed, no plot-worshipper), as our disdains and depreciations so often are, itself a confession. At any rate, it is allowed that the longer books, with the exception of _Pierre et Jean_ (which was for that very reason, and perhaps for others, disdained by the youngest and most impressionist school of critics), are deficient in beginning, middle, and end. _Une Vie_ and _Bel-Ami_ are surveys or chronicles, not dramas or histories. _Mont-Oriol_, open enough to objection in some ways, is rather better in this point. _Fort Comme la Mort_ relapses under the old curse of the situation of teasing unhappiness from which there is no outlet, and in which there is little action. _Notre Coeur_ should perhaps escape criticism on this head, as the shadow of the author's fate was already heavy on him. In fact, as observed above, it is little more than a torso. Even _Pierre et Jean_, by far the greatest of all, if scale and artistic perfection be taken together, falls short in the latter respect of _Boule de Suif_, which, small as it is, is a complete tragi-comedy in little, furnished with beginning, middle, and end, complying fully with those older exigences which its author affected to despise, and really as great as anything of Mérimée's--greater it could not be.

There is no doubt that the theory which Maupassant says he learnt from Flaubert (in whose own hands it was always subordinated to an effort at larger completeness) does lead to the composition of a series or flock of isolated vignettes or scenes rather than to that of a great picture or drama. For it comes perilously close--though perhaps in Maupassant's own case it never actually reached--the barest and boldest (or baldest) individualising of impressions, and leaving them as they are, without an attempt at architectonic. For instance, once upon a time[512] I was walking down the Euston Road. There passed me a fellow dragging a truck, on which truck there were three barrels with the heads knocked out, so that each barrel ensheathed, to a certain extent, the one in front of it. Astride of the centre barrel, his arms folded and a pipe in his mouth, there sat a man in a sort of sailor-costume--trousers, guernsey, and night-cap--surveying the world, and his fellow who dragged him, with an air of placid _goguenarderie_. It was really a striking impression, and absorbed me, I should think, for five or six seconds. I can conceive its coming into a story very well. But Maupassant's theories would have led to his making a whole story out of it, and his followers have already done things quite as bad, while he has himself come near to it more than once.[513] In other words, the method tends to the presentations of scraps, orts, fragments, instead of complete wholes. And Art should always seek the whole.

As for the character of Maupassant's "illusions," there could never be much doubt about some of them. _Boule de Suif_ itself pretty clearly indicated, and _La Maison Tellier_ shortly after showed, at the very opening of his literary career, the scenes, the society, and the solaces which he most affected: while it was impossible to read even two or three of his stories without discovering that, to M. de Maupassant, the world was most emphatically _not_ the best of all possible worlds. This was by no means principally shown in the stories of supernatural terror to which, with an inconsistency by no means uncommon in declared materialists, and, had it not been for his unhappy end, very amusing, he was so much given. The chief of these, _Le Horla_, has not been much of a favourite with the lovers of "ghost-stories" in general. I think they are rather unjust to it. But if it has a fault, that fault lies (and, to avoid the charge of being wise after the event, I may observe that I thought so at the time) in too much conviction. The darkness is darkness which has been felt, and felt so much by the artist that he has lost his artistic grasp and command. There was, perhaps, in his own actual state, too much reason for this. In earlier things of the kind it is less perceptible. _Fou?_ is rather splendid. _Auprès d'un Mort_--an anecdote of the death-bed of Schopenhauer, whom Maupassant naturally admired as the greatest of _saccageurs de rêves_, though there are some who, admiring the first master of thoroughly good German prose style and one of the best of German critics, have kept the fort of their dreams safe from all he could do--has merits. _Lettre trouvée sur un noyé_ is good; _L'Horrible_ not quite so good; _Le Loup_ (a sort of fancy from the "bête du Gévaudan" story) better; _Apparition_ of the best, with _La Morte_ to pair it, and _Un Cas de Divorce_ and _Qui sait?_ to make up the quartette. Perhaps the best of all (I do not specify its title in order that those who do not know it may read till they find it out) is that where the visionary sees the skeletons of the dead rising and transforming their lying epitaphs into confessions--the last tomb now bearing the true cause of his own mistress's death. But the double-titled _La Nuit--Cauchemar_ runs it hard.

Yet it is not in these stories of doubt and dread, or in the ostensible and rather shallow philosophisings of the travel-books, that Maupassant's pessimism is most obvious. His preference for the unhappy ending amounts almost to a _tic_, and would amount wholly to a bore--for _toujours_ unhappy-ending is just as bad as _toujours_ marriage-bells--if it were not relieved and lightened by a real presence of humour. With this sovereign preservative for self, and more sovereign charm for others, Guy de Maupassant was more richly provided than any of his French contemporaries, and more than any but a very few of his countrymen at any time. And as humour without tenderness is an impossibility, so, too, he could be and was tender. Yet it was seldom and _malgré lui_, while he allowed the mere exercise of his humour itself too scantily for his own safety and his readers' pleasure. That there was any more _fanfaronnade_ either of vice or of misanthropy about him, I do not believe. An unfortunate conformity of innate temperament and acquired theory made such a _fanfaronnade_ as unnecessary as it would have been repugnant to him. But illusion, in such cases, is more dangerous, if less disgusting, than imposture. And so it happened that, in despite of the rare and vast faculties just allowed him, he was constantly found applying them to subjects distasteful if not disgraceful, and allowing the results to be sicklied over with a persistent "soot-wash" of pessimism which was always rather monotonous, and not always very impressive.

It was, of course, inevitable that, on this side of the Channel at least, strictures should be passed--and appealed against--on a writer of this kind. The impropriety of M. de Maupassant's subjects, the "cruelty," the "brutality," the "pessimism," and what not, of his handling, were sure to be denounced or defended, as the case may be. Although the merely "shoking" tone (as the spelling dear to Frenchmen has it) has waned persistently ever since his day, expressions in it have not been wanting; while, on the other hand, newer-fashioned and probably younger censors have scornfully waved aside the very consideration of this part of the subject. Further, no less a critic than my friend Mr. Traill entered, long ago, a protest against the admission of Maupassant's pessimism as a drawback. "He did not," says Mr. Traill (I quote from memory), "_pose_ as a pessimist; he was perfectly sincere, and an artist's sincere life-philosophy, whatever it is, is not to be urged against the products of his art."

I think that these questions require a little discussion, even in a general _History_.

With reference to the impropriety matter, I have myself, after a lifetime of fighting against the _hérésie de l'enseignement_, not the very slightest intention of deserting to or transacting with it. I do most heartily agree and affirm that the subject of a work of art is not, as such, the better or the worse, the more or the less legitimate, because of its tastefulness or distastefulness on moral considerations. But there is a perpetual danger, when we are clearing our minds of one cant, of allowing them to be invaded by another; and I think I have seen cases where the determination not to be moral of malice prepense has been so great that it has toppled over into a determination to be immoral of malice prepense. Now, the question is, whether Maupassant and some of Maupassant's admirers are not somewhat in this case? It is surely impossible for any impartial critic to contend that the unlucky novelist's devotion to the class of subjects referred to, and his manner of handling them, did not amount to what has been pedantically, but accurately, termed an "obsession of the _lupanar_." Now, it seems to me that all obsession, no matter of what class or kind, is fatal, or, at least, injurious, to the artist. It is almost impossible that he should keep his judgment and his taste cool and clear under it; it is almost impossible that his poring shall not turn into preaching. And I think it not much less hard to defend Maupassant from the charge of having become a kind of preacher in this way, and so a heretic of instruction, just as much as if he had taken to theology, dogmatic or undogmatic. Perpetual representation amounts to inculcation.[514]

So, again, in reference to the apologies for Maupassant's pessimism. I cannot see how it can be contended that the perpetual obtrusion of a life-philosophy of any special kind is other than a fault in art. I have no particular objection to pessimism as such; I suppose most people who have thought and felt a good deal are nearer to it than to its opposite; and, though both opposites bore me when they are obtruded, I think rose-pink and sky-blue bore me rather more than the various shades of grey and brown and black. I admit further that, but for the pessimist _diathesis_, we might not have had that peculiar tragedy in which he has been admitted to excel. But it seems to me that the creative artist, as such, and as distinguished from the critical, has no more business to display--to _arborer_--a life-philosophy, than he has to display a philosophy of any other kind. Signs of it may escape him at times; but they should be escapes, not deliberate exhibitions. He is to see life whole as far as he can; and it is impossible that he should see it whole if he is under the domination of any 'ism to the extent that Maupassant was under the domination of this. In the one supreme artist (I am talking, of course, throughout of the art of letters only) whom we know, there is, perhaps, no more distinctive peculiarity than his elusion of all attempts to class him as "Thissist" or "Thattist." And in those who come nearest to him, though they may have strong beliefs and strong proclivities, we always see the capacity of taking the other side. The fervent theologian of the _Paradiso_ treats hardly any of his victims with more consideration than the inhabitants of the City of Dis: the prophet and poet of his own Uranian love for Beatrice swoons at the sight of Francesca's punishment, and feels "so that boiling glass were coolness," the very penalty of the Seventh Circle of Purgatory. But Maupassant's materialism and his pessimism combined shut out from him vast parts and regions of life and thought and feeling, as it were with the blank wall of his very earliest poem. The fantastic shadows of his peculiar imagination play on that wall fascinatingly enough; and the region of passion and of gloom within is not without a charm, if a somewhat unholy and unhealthy one. But beyond the wall there is a whole universe which Maupassant does not merely neglect, but of which he seems to be blankly ignorant and unconscious, except in flashes of ignorant disdain. That the infinite province of religious emotion and reflection is shut out is a matter of course; but most of the other regions, in which those who decline religion take refuge, are equally closed. I can remember in Maupassant only the slightest signs of interest in general literature (except so far as it bears upon his own special craft), in the illimitable ranges of history, in politics, in the higher philosophy.[515] It cannot be said of him, as of his master's dismal heroes, that _tout lui a craqué dans la main_. There is no sign of trial on his part; he starts where Bouvard and Pécuchet end, and takes for granted a failure which he has not given himself the trouble to experience.

But, it may be said, "What does it matter what he does not do, know, feel, care for, if he treats what he does do, know, feel, and care for, well?" The objection is ingenious, and, as Petruchio would say, "'a might have a little galled me" if its ingenuity had not been the ingenuity of fallacy. For the question is whether this insensibility to large parts of life has not injured Maupassant's treatment of the parts in which he did feel an interest. I think it has. There were too many things in emotion and in thought of which he was ignorant. Mrs. Piozzi, in her _Anecdotes of Johnson_, observes that the Doctor, despite his freedom from gush and his dislike to religious verse, could never repeat the stanza of _Dies Irae_ which ends "Tantus labor non sit cassus" without bursting into tears. I know a person very different from Johnson who, though he had not read the _Anecdotes_ till an advanced period of his life, had never failed to experience something like the same result at the same line. And, for a third point, it is well known that actual agnostics have often confessed to like affections in similar cases. The numerous and complicated causes of this weakness, or, if any one prefers to call them so, the numerous and complicated causes of this enjoyment, had no hold whatever on Maupassant.

But this hemiplegia of the intellect and the imagination--this sterilising of one-half, or more than one-half, of the sources of intellectual and imaginative experience and delight--did not prevent him from leaving durable and perdurable results of the vigour of his mind and his sense, in the regions which were open to him. He wrote--as almost every popular writer in these days who does not shut himself up in a _tour d'ivoire_ and neglect popularity must write--too much; and, in the special circumstances and limitations of his interests and his genius, this was specially unfortunate. He repeated himself too often; and he too frequently failed to come up to himself in the repetition. The better part of him, as with Flaubert before, transcended--even openly contemned--the 'isms of his day: but he too often let himself be subservient to them, if he was never exactly their Helot.