Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant | Page 9

the keynote,
and yet, sounding low, we detect a genuine subtone of sorrow. Was it a
prescience of 1893? So much work to be done, so much work
demanded of him, the world of Paris, in all its brilliant and attractive
phases, at his feet, and yet--inevitable, ever advancing death, with the
question of life still unanswered.
This may account for some of the strained situations we find in his later
romances. Vigorous in frame and hearty as he was, the atmosphere of
his mental processes must have been vitiated to produce the dainty but
dangerous pessimism that pervades some of his later work. This was
partly a consequence of his honesty and partly of mental despair. He
never accepted other people's views on the questions of life. He looked
into such problems for himself, arriving at the truth, as it appeared to
him, by the logic of events, often finding evil where he wished to find
good, but never hoodwinking himself or his readers by adapting or
distorting the reality of things to suit a preconceived idea.
Maupassant was essentially a worshiper of the eternal feminine. He was
persuaded that without the continual presence of the gentler sex man's
existence would be an emotionally silent wilderness. No other French
writer has described and analyzed so minutely and comprehensively the
many and various motives and moods that shape the conduct of a
woman in life. Take for instance the wonderfully subtle analysis of a
woman's heart as wife and mother that we find in "Une Vie." Could
aught be more delicately incisive? Sometimes in describing the
apparently inexplicable conduct of a certain woman he leads his readers
to a point where a false step would destroy the spell and bring the
reproach of banality and ridicule upon the tale. But the catastrophe
never occurs. It was necessary to stand poised upon the brink of the
precipice to realize the depth of the abyss and feel the terror of the fall.
Closely allied to this phase of Maupassant's nature was the peculiar
feeling of loneliness that every now and then breaks irresistibly forth in
the course of some short story. Of kindly soul and genial heart, he
suffered not only from the oppression of spirit caused by the lack of

humanity, kindliness, sanity, and harmony which he encountered daily
in the world at large, but he had an ever abiding sense of the invincible,
unbanishable solitariness of his own inmost self. I know of no more
poignant expression of such a feeling than the cry of despair which
rings out in the short story called "Solitude," in which he describes the
insurmountable barrier which exists between man and man, or man and
woman, however intimate the friendship between them. He could
picture but one way of destroying this terrible loneliness, the attainment
of a spiritual--a divine--state of love, a condition to which he would
give no name utterable by human lips, lest it be profaned, but for which
his whole being yearned. How acutely he felt his failure to attain his
deliverance may be drawn from his wail that mankind has no
UNIVERSAL measure of happiness.
"Each one of us," writes De Maupassant, "forms for himself an illusion
through which he views the world, be it poetic, sentimental, joyous,
melancholy, or dismal; an illusion of beauty, which is a human
convention; of ugliness, which is a matter of opinion; of truth, which,
alas, is never immutable." And he concludes by asserting that the
happiest artist is he who approaches most closely to the truth of things
as he sees them through his own particular illusion.
Salient points in De Maupassant's genius were that he possessed the
rare faculty of holding direct communion with his gifts, and of writing
from their dictation as it was interpreted by his senses. He had no
patience with writers who in striving to present life as a whole
purposely omit episodes that reveal the influence of the senses. "As
well," he says, "refrain from describing the effect of intoxicating
perfumes upon man as omit the influence of beauty on the temperament
of man."
De Maupassant's dramatic instinct was supremely powerful. He seems
to select unerringly the one thing in which the soul of the scene is
prisoned, and, making that his keynote, gives a picture in words which
haunt the memory like a strain of music. The description of the ride of
Madame Tellier and her companions in a country cart through a
Norman landscape is an admirable example. You smell the masses of
the colza in blossom, you see the yellow carpets of ripe corn spotted
here and there by the blue coronets of the cornflower, and rapt by the
red blaze of the poppy beds and bathed in the fresh greenery of the

landscape, you share