The Complete Works: Short Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs and more. Guy de Maupassant
this the fundamental difference between the demands of the novel and of the short story is seen. A novel has for its aim, even for external aim, the description of a whole human life or of many human lives, and therefore its writer should have a clear and firm conception of what is good and bad in life, and this Maupassant lacked; indeed according to the theory he held, that is just what should be avoided. Had he been a novelist like some talentless writers of sensual novels, he would, being without talent, have quietly described what was evil as good, and his novels would have had unity, and would have been interesting to people who shared his view. But Maupassant had talent, that is to say, he saw things in their essentials and therefore involuntarily discerned the truth. He involuntarily saw the evil in what he wished to consider good. That is why, in all his novels except the first, his sympathies continually waver, now presenting the evil as good, and now admitting that the evil is evil and the good good, but continually shifting from the one standpoint to the other. And this destroys the very basis of any artistic impression — the framework on which it is built. People of little artistic sensibility often think that a work of art possesses unity when the same people act in it throughout, or when it is all constructed on one plot, or describes the life of one man. That is a mistake. It only appears so to a superficial observer. The cement which binds any artistic production into one whole and therefore produces the illusion of being a reflection of life, is not the unity of persons or situations, but the unity of the author’s independent moral relation to his subject. In reality, when we read or look at the artistic production of a new author the fundamental question that arises in our soul is always of this kind: “Well, what sort of a man are you? Wherein are you different from all the people I know, and what can you tell me that is new, about how we must look at this life of ours?” Whatever the artist depicts — saints, robbers, kings, or lackeys — we seek and see only the artist’s own soul. If he is an established writer with whom we are already familiar, the question no longer is, “What sort of a man are you?” but, “Well, what more can you tell me that is new?” or, “From what new side will you now illumine life for me?” And therefore a writer who has not a clear definite and just view of the universe, and especially a man who considers that this isn’t even wanted, cannot produce a work of art. He may write much and admirably, but a work of art will not result.
So it was with Maupassant in his novels. In his first two novels, and especially in the first, Une Vie, there was a clear, definite, and new relation to life, and it was an artistic production; but as soon as, submitting to the fashionable theory, he decided that this relation of the author to life was quite unnecessary and began to write merely in order faire quelque chose de beau (to produce something beautiful), his novels ceased to be works of art. In Une Vie and Bel-Ami the author knows whom he should love and whom he should hate, and the reader agrees with him and believes in him — believes in the people and events he describes. But in Notre cœur and Yvette the author does not know whom he should love and whom he should hate, and the reader does not know either. And not knowing this, the reader does not believe in the events described and is not interested in them. And therefore, except the two first or, strictly speaking, excepting only the first novel, all Maupassant’s, as novels, are weak; and if he had left us only his novels he would have been merely a striking instance of the way in which brilliant talents may perish as a result of the false environment in which he developed and of these false theories of art that have been devised by people who neither love nor understand it. But fortunately Maupassant wrote short stories in which he did not subject himself to the false theory he had accepted, and wrote not quelque chose de beau, but what touched or revolted his moral feeling. And in these short stories — not in all, but in the best of them — we see how that moral feeling grew in the author.
And it is in this that the wonderful quality of every true artist lies, if only he does not do violence to himself under the influence of a false theory. His talent teaches its possessor and leads him forward along the path of moral development, compelling him to love what deserves love and to hate what deserves hate. An artist is an artist because he sees things not as he wishes to see them but as they really are. The possessor of a talent, the man, may make mistakes, but his talent if only it is allowed free play, as Maupassant gave it free play in his short stories, discloses, undrapes the object, and compels love of it if it deserves love and hatred of it if it deserves hatred. With every true artist, when under the influence of his circle he begins to represent what should not be represented, there happens what happened to Balaam, who, wishing to bless, cursed what should be cursed, and wishing to curse, blessed what should be blessed: involuntarily he does, not what he wishes to do but what he should do. And this happened to Maupassant.
There has hardly been another writer who so sincerely thought that all the good, all the meaning of life, lies in woman — in love, and who with such strength of passion described woman and her love from all sides; and there has hardly ever been a writer who reached such clearness and exactitude in showing all the awful phases of that very thing which had seemed to him the highest and the greatest of life’s blessings. The more he penetrated into the question the more it revealed itself, and the more did the coverings fall from it and only its horrible results and yet more horrible essence remain.
Read of the idiot son, of the night with a daughter (L’ermite), of the sailor with his sister (Le port). Le champ d’oliviers, La petite Roque, of the English girl (Miss Harriet), Monsieur Parent, L’armoire (the girl who fell asleep in the cupboard), the wedding in Sur Veau, and last expression of all, Un cas de divorce. Just what was said by Marcus Aurelius when devising means to destroy the attractiveness of this sin in his imagination, is what Maupassant does in most vivid artistic forms, turning one’s soul inside out. He wished to extol sex-love, but the better he came to know it the more he cursed it. He cursed sex-love for the misfortunes and sufferings it bears within it, and for the disillusionments and, above all, for the falsification of real love, for the fraud which is in it from which man suffers the more acutely the more trustingly he has yielded to the deception.
The powerful moral growth of the author in the course of his literary activity is recorded in indelible traits in these charming short stories and in his best book, Sur Veau.
And not alone in this involuntary and therefore all the more powerful dethronement of sex-love is the moral growth of the author seen, but also in the more and more exalted moral demands he makes upon life.
Not alone in sex-love does he see the innate contradiction between the demands of animal and rational man; he sees it in the whole organization of the world.
He sees that the world as it is, the material world, is not only not the best of worlds, but might on the contrary be quite different — this thought is strikingly expressed in Horla — and that it does not satisfy the demands of reason and life. He sees that there is some other world, or at least the demand for such another world, in the soul of man.
He is tormented not only by the irrationality of the material world and its ugliness, but by its unlovingness, its discord. I do not know a more heartrending cry of horror from one who has lost his way and is conscious of his loneliness, than the expression of this idea in that most charming story, Solitude.
The thing that most tormented Maupassant and to which he returns many times, is the painful state of isolation, spiritual isolation, of man; the barrier standing between him and his fellows; a barrier, he says, the more painfully felt the nearer one’s bodily connexion.
What is it torments him, and what would he have? What can destroy this barrier? What end this isolation? Love — not feminine love, which has become disgusting to him, but pure, spiritual, divine love. And that is what Maupassant seeks. Towards it, towards this saviour of life long since plainly disclosed to all men, he painfully strains from those fetters in which he feels himself bound.
He does not yet know how to name what he seeks. He does not wish to name it with his lips alone, lest he should profane his holy-of-holies. But his unexpressed striving, shown in his dread of loneliness, is so sincere that it infects and attracts one more strongly than many and many sermons about love, uttered only by the lips.
The tragedy of Maupassant’s life is that being in a most monstrous and immoral circle, he by the strength of his talent, by that extraordinary light which was in him, was escaping from the outlook on life held by that circle, and was already near to deliverance, was already