Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant | Page 7

sittings, and whom he used to such effect
that the novels and romances in which they are painted have come to be
history. Just as it is impossible to comprehend the Rome of the Caesars
without the work of Petronius, so is it impossible to fully comprehend
the France of 1850-90 without these stories of Maupassant. They are no
more the whole image of the country than the "Satyricon" was the
whole image of Rome, but what their author has wished to paint, he has
painted to the life and with a brush that is graphic in the extreme.
If Maupassant had only painted, in general fashion, the characters and
the phase of literature mentioned he would not be distinguished from
other writers of the group called "naturalists." His true glory is in the
extraordinary superiority of his art. He did not invent it, and his method
is not alien to that of "Madame Bovary," but he knew how to give it a
suppleness, a variety, and a freedom which were always wanting in
Flaubert. The latter, in his best pages, is always strained. To use the
expressive metaphor of the Greek athletes, he "smells of the oil." When
one recalls that when attacked by hysteric epilepsy, Flaubert postponed
the crisis of the terrible malady by means of sedatives, this strained
atmosphere of labor--I was going to say of stupor--which pervades his
work is explained. He is an athlete, a runner, but one who drags at his
feet a terrible weight. He is in the race only for the prize of effort, an
effort of which every motion reveals the intensity.
Maupassant, on the other hand, if he suffered from a nervous lesion,
gave no sign of it, except in his heart. His intelligence was bright and
lively, and above all, his imagination, served by senses always on the
alert, preserved for some years an astonishing freshness of direct vision.
If his art was due to Flaubert, it is no more belittling to him than if one
call Raphael an imitator of Perugini.
Like Flaubert, he excelled in composing a story, in distributing the

facts with subtle gradation, in bringing in at the end of a familiar
dialogue something startlingly dramatic; but such composition, with
him, seems easy, and while the descriptions are marvelously well
established in his stories, the reverse is true of Flaubert's, which always
appear a little veneered. Maupassant's phrasing, however dramatic it
may be, remains easy and flowing.
Maupassant always sought for large and harmonious rhythm in his
deliberate choice of terms, always chose sound, wholesome language,
with a constant care for technical beauty. Inheriting from his master an
instrument already forged, he wielded it with a surer skill. In the quality
of his style, at once so firm and clear, so gorgeous yet so sober, so
supple and so firm, he equals the writers of the seventeenth century.
His method, so deeply and simply French, succeeds in giving an
indescribable "tang" to his descriptions. If observation from nature
imprints upon his tales the strong accent of reality, the prose in which
they are shrined so conforms to the genius of the race as to smack of
the soil.
It is enough that the critics of to-day place Guy de Maupassant among
our classic writers. He has his place in the ranks of pure French genius,
with the Regniers, the La Fontaines, the Molieres. And those signs of
secret ill divined everywhere under this wholesome prose surround it
for those who knew and loved him with a pathos that is inexpressible.
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INTRODUCTION
BORN in the middle year of the nineteenth century, and fated
unfortunately never to see its close, Guy de Maupassant was probably
the most versatile and brilliant among the galaxy of novelists who
enriched French literature between the years 1800 and 1900. Poetry,
drama, prose of short and sustained effort, and volumes of travel and
description, each sparkling with the same minuteness of detail and
brilliancy of style, flowed from his pen during the twelve years of his
literary life.
Although his genius asserted itself in youth, he had the patience of the
true artist, spending his early manhood in cutting and polishing the
facets of his genius under the stern though paternal mentorship of
Gustave Flaubert. Not until he had attained the age of thirty did he
venture on publication, challenging criticism for the first time with a

volume of poems.
Many and various have been the judgments passed upon Maupassant's
work. But now that the perspective of time is lengthening, enabling us
to form a more deliberate, and therefore a juster, view of his complete
achievement, we are driven irresistibly to the conclusion that the force
that shaped and swayed Maupassant's prose writings was the conviction
that in life there could be no