Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant | Page 4

Moliere or a Shakespeare among the classic great,
reveals, to a person of instinct, a nervous sensibility of extreme depth.
There are many chances for an artist of his kind, however timid, or for
one who has some grief, to show the depth of his emotion. To take up
again only two of the names just cited, this was the case with the author
of "Terres Vierges," and with the writer of "Colomba."
A somewhat minute analysis of the novels and romances of
Maupassant would suffice to demonstrate, even if we did not know the
nature of the incidents which prompted them, that he also suffered from
an excess of nervous emotionalism. Nine times out of ten, what is the
subject of these stories to which freedom of style gives the appearance
of health? A tragic episode. I cite, at random, "Mademoiselle Fifi," "La
Petite Roque," "Inutile Beaute," "Le Masque," "Le Horla,"
"L'Epreuve," "Le Champ d'Oliviers," among the novels, and among the
romances, "Une Vie," "Pierre et Jean," "Fort comme la Mort," "Notre
Coeur." His imagination aims to represent the human being as
imprisoned in a situation at once insupportable and inevitable. The
spell of this grief and trouble exerts such a power upon the writer that
he ends stories commenced in pleasantry with some sinister drama. Let
me instance "Saint-Antonin," "A Midnight Revel," "The Little Cask,"
and "Old Amable." You close the book at the end of these vigorous

sketches, and feel how surely they point to constant suffering on the
part of him who executed them.
This is the leading trait in the literary physiognomy of Maupassant, as
it is the leading and most profound trait in the psychology of his work,
viz, that human life is a snare laid by nature, where joy is always
changed to misery, where noble words and the highest professions of
faith serve the lowest plans and the most cruel egoism, where chagrin,
crime, and folly are forever on hand to pursue implacably our hopes,
nullify our virtues, and annihilate our wisdom. But this is not the
whole.
Maupassant has been called a literary nihilist--but (and this is the
second trait of his singular genius) in him nihilism finds itself
coexistent with an animal energy so fresh and so intense that for a long
time it deceives the closest observer. In an eloquent discourse,
pronounced over his premature grave, Emile Zola well defined this
illusion: "We congratulated him," said he, "upon that health which
seemed unbreakable, and justly credited him with the soundest
constitution of our band, as well as with the clearest mind and the
sanest reason. It was then that this frightful thunderbolt destroyed him."
It is not exact to say that the lofty genius of De Maupassant was that of
an absolutely sane man. We comprehend it to-day, and, on re-reading
him, we find traces everywhere of his final malady. But it is exact to
say that this wounded genius was, by a singular circumstance, the
genius of a robust man. A physiologist would without doubt explain
this anomaly by the coexistence of a nervous lesion, light at first, with a
muscular, athletic temperament. Whatever the cause, the effect is
undeniable. The skilled and dainty pessimism of De Maupassant was
accompanied by a vigor and physique very unusual. His sensations are
in turn those of a hunter and of a sailor, who have, as the old French
saying expressively puts it, "swift foot, eagle eye," and who are attuned
to all the whisperings of nature.
The only confidences that he has ever permitted his pen to tell of the
intoxication of a free, animal existence are in the opening pages of the
story entitled "Mouche," where he recalls, among the sweetest
memories of his youth, his rollicking canoe parties upon the Seine, and
in the description in "La Vie Errante" of a night spent on the sea,--"to
be alone upon the water under the sky, through a warm night,"--in

which he speaks of the happiness of those "who receive sensations
through the whole surface of their flesh, as they do through their eyes,
their mouth, their ears, and sense of smell."
His unique and too scanty collection of verses, written in early youth,
contains the two most fearless, I was going to say the most ingenuous,
paeans, perhaps, that have been written since the Renaissance: "At the
Water's Edge" (Au Bord de l'Eau) and the "Rustic Venus" (La Venus
Rustique). But here is a paganism whose ardor, by a contrast which
brings up the ever present duality of his nature, ends in an inexpressible
shiver of scorn:
"We look at each other, astonished, immovable, And both are so pale
that it makes us fear." * * * * * * *
"Alas! through all our senses slips life itself away."
This