Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories | Page 5

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literature depreciated, and seeing him preoccupied with boating, and
listening to his own accounts of love affairs which he did not always
carry on in the highest class, many ended by seeing in him one of those
terrible Normans who, all through his novels and stories, carouse and
commit social crimes with such commanding assurance and such calm
unmorality.
He was undoubtedly a Norman, and, according to those who knew him
best, many of his traits of character show that atavism is not always an
idle word....
To identify Maupassant with his characters is a gross error, but is not
without precedent. We always like to trace the author in the hero of a
romance, and to seek the actor beneath the disguise. No doubt, as Taine
has said, "the works of an intelligence have not the intelligence alone
for father and mother, but the whole personality of the man helps to
produce them...."
That is why Maupassant himself says to us, "No, I have not the soul of
a decadent, I cannot look within myself, and the effort I make to
understand unknown souls is incessant, involuntary and dominant. It is

not an effort; I experience a sort of overpowering sense of insight into
all that surrounds me. I am impregnated with it, I yield to it, I submerge
myself in these surrounding influences."
That is, properly speaking, the peculiarity of all great novelists. Who
experiences this insight, this influence more than Balzac, or Flaubert, in
Madame Bovary? And so with Maupassant, who, pen in hand, is the
character he describes, with his passions, his hatreds, his vices and his
virtues. He so incorporates himself in him that the author disappears,
and we ask ourselves in vain what his own opinion is of what he has
just told us. He has none possibly, or if he has he does not tell it.
This agrees admirably with the theory of impassivity in literature, so
much in vogue when Maupassant became known. But despite that
theory he is, if one understands him, quite other than
"A being without pity who contemplated suffering."
He has the deepest sympathy for the weak, for the victims of the
deceptions of society, for the sufferings of the obscure. If the successful
adventurer, Lesable, and the handsome Maze are the objects of his
veiled irony, he maintains, or feels a sorrowful, though somewhat
disdainful tenderness, for poor old Savon, the old copying clerk of the
Ministry of Marine, who is the drudge of the office and whose
colleagues laugh at him because his wife deceived him, sans espoir
d'"heritage."
Why did Maupassant at the start win universal favor? It is because he
had direct genius, the clear vision of a "primitive" (an artist of the
pre-Renaissance). His materials were just those of a graduate who,
having left college, has satisfied his curiosity. Grasping the simple and
ingenious, but strong and appropriate tools that he himself has forged,
he starts out in the forest of romance, and instead of being overcome by
the enchantment of its mystery, he walks through it unfalteringly with a
joyful step....
He was a minstrel. Offspring of a race, and not the inheritor of a
formula, he narrated to his contemporaries, bewildered by the lyrical

deformities of romanticism, stories of human beings, simple and logical,
like those which formerly delighted our parents.
The French reader who wished to be amused was at once at home, on
the same footing with him.... More spontaneous than the first
troubadours, he banished from his writings abstract and general types,
"romanticized" life itself, and not myths, those eternal legends that
stray through the highways of the world.
Study closely these minstrels in recent works; read M. Joseph Bédier's
beautiful work, Les Fabliaux, and you will see how, in Maupassant's
prose, ancestors, whom he doubtless never knew, are brought to life.
The Minstrel feels neither anger nor sympathy; he neither censures, nor
moralizes; for the self-satisfied Middle Ages cannot conceive the
possibility of a different world. Brief, quick, he despises aims and
methods, his only object is to entertain his auditors. Amusing and witty,
he cares only for laughter and ridicule....
But Maupassant's stories are singularly different in character. In the
nineteenth century the Gallic intellect had long since foundered amid
vileness and debauchery. In the provinces the ancient humor had
disappeared; one chattered still about nothing, but without point,
without wit; "trifling" was over, as they call it in Champagne. The
nauseating pabulum of the newspapers and low political intrigue had
withered the French intellect, that delicate, rare intellect, the last traces
of which fade away in the Alsatian stories of Erckman-Chatrian, in the
Provençal tales of Alphonse Daudet, in the novels of Emile Pouvillon.
Maupassant is not one of them. He knows nothing about humor, for