Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant | Page 6

a romance, he seemed to be as
scientific as in the development of a history of customs, in which the
essential is absolute exactness and local color. He therefore naturally
wished to make the most scrupulous and detailed observation of the
environment.
Thus is explained the immense labor in preparation which his stories
cost him--the story of "Madame Bovary," of "The Sentimental
Education," and "Bouvard and Pecuchet," documents containing as
much minutiae as his historical stories. Beyond everything he tried to
select details that were eminently significant. Consequently he was of
the opinion that the romance writer should discard all that lessened this
significance, that is, extraordinary events and singular heroes. The
exceptional personage, it seemed to him, should be suppressed, as
should also high dramatic incident, since, produced by causes less
general, these have a range more restricted. The truly scientific
romance writer, proposing to paint a certain class, will attain his end
more effectively if he incarnate personages of the middle order, and,
consequently, paint traits common to that class. And not only
middle-class traits, but middle-class adventures.
From this point of view, examine the three great romances of the
Master from Rouen, and you will see that he has not lost sight of this
first and greatest principle of his art, any more than he has of the
second, which was that these documents should be drawn up in prose
of absolutely perfect technique. We know with what passionate care he
worked at his phrases, and how indefatigably he changed them over
and over again. Thus he satisfied that instinct of beauty which was born
of his romantic soul, while he gratified the demand of truth which
inhered from his scientific training by his minute and scrupulous

exactness.
The theory of the mean of truth on one side, as the foundation of the
subject,--"the humble truth," as he termed it at the beginning of "Une
Vie,"--and of the agonizing of beauty on the other side, in composition,
determines the whole use that Maupassant made of his literary gifts. It
helped to make more intense and more systematic that dainty yet
dangerous pessimism which in him was innate. The mid- dle-class
personage, in wearisome society like ours, is always a caricature, and
the happenings are nearly always vulgar. When one studies a great
number of them, one finishes by looking at humanity from the angle of
disgust and despair. The philosophy of the romances and novels of De
Maupassant is so continuously and profoundly surprising that one
becomes overwhelmed by it. It reaches limitation; it seems to deny that
man is susceptible to grandeur, or that motives of a superior order can
uplift and ennoble the soul, but it does so with a sorrow that is
profound. All that portion of the sentimental and moral world which in
itself is the highest remains closed to it.
In revenge, this philosophy finds itself in a relation cruelly exact with
the half-civilization of our day. By that I mean the poorly educated
individual who has rubbed against knowledge enough to justify a
certain egoism, but who is too poor in faculty to conceive an ideal, and
whose native grossness is corrupted beyond redemption. Under his
blouse, or under his coat--whether he calls himself Renardet, as does
the foul assassin in "Petite Roque," or Duroy, as does the sly hero of
"Bel-Ami," or Bretigny, as does the vile seducer of "Mont Oriol," or
Cesaire, the son of Old Amable in the novel of that name, --this
degraded type abounds in Maupassant's stories, evoked with a ferocity
almost jovial where it meets the robustness of temperament which I
have pointed out, a ferocity which gives them a reality more exact still
because the half-civilized person is often impulsive and, in
consequence, the physical easily predominates. There, as elsewhere, the
degenerate is everywhere a degenerate who gives the impression of
being an ordinary man.
There are quantities of men of this stamp in large cities. No writer has
felt and expressed this complex temperament with more justice than De
Maupassant, and, as he was an infinitely careful observer of milieu and
landscape and all that constitutes a precise middle distance, his novels

can be considered an irrefutable record of the social classes which he
studied at a certain time and along certain lines. The Norman peasant
and the Provencal peasant, for example; also the small officeholder, the
gentleman of the provinces, the country squire, the clubman of Paris,
the journalist of the boulevard, the doctor at the spa, the commercial
artist, and, on the feminine side, the servant girl, the working girl, the
demigrisette, the street girl, rich or poor, the gallant lady of the city and
of the provinces, and the society woman--these are some of the figures
that he has painted at many