Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories | Page 6

he
never found it in Life....
His ambition was not to make one laugh; he writes for the pleasure of
recalling, without bias, what, to him, seems a halfway and dangerous
truth.... In his pessimism, Maupassant despises the race, society,
civilization and the world....
If Maupassant draws from anyone it is Schopenhauer and Herbert
Spencer, of whom he often speaks, although one does not know if he

studied them very deeply. In all his books, excepting, of course, in the
case of lines from the great tragic poets, one finds only one credited
reference, which in to Sir John Lubbock's work on ants, an extract from
which is introduced into Yvette.
No one was less bookish than himself. He was a designer, and one of
the greatest in literature. His heroes, little folk, artisans or rustics,
bureaucrats or shopkeepers, prostitutes or rakes, he places them in
faintly colored, but well-defined surroundings. And, immediately, the
simplified landscape gives the keynote of the story.
In his descriptions he resists the temptation of asserting his personal
view. He will not allow himself to see more of his landscape than his
characters themselves see. He is also careful to avoid all refined terms
and expressions, to introduce no element superior to the characters of
his heroes.
He never makes inanimate nature intervene directly in human
tribulations; she laughs at our joys and our sorrows.... Once, only, in
one of his works, the trees join in the universal mourning--the great,
sad beeches weep in autumn for the soul, the little soul, of la petite
Roque.
And yet Maupassant adores this nature, the one thing that moves him....
But, in spite of this, he can control himself; the artist is aware of the
danger to his narration should he indulge in the transports of a lover.
With an inborn perception, Maupassant at once seizes on the principal
detail, the essential peculiarity that distinguishes a character and builds
round it. He also, in the presentation of his character, assumes an
authority that no writer, not even Balzac, ever equalled....
He traces what he sees with rapid strokes. His work is a vast collection
of powerful sketches, synthetic draftings. Like all great artists, he was a
simplifier; he knew how to "sacrifice" like the Egyptians and Greeks....
Thanks to his rapid methods the master "cinematographed," if I may
use the word, inexhaustible stories. Among them, each person may find

himself represented, the artist, the clerk, the thinker, and the
non-commissioned officer.
Maupassant was always impatient to "realize" his observations. He
might forget, and above all, the flower of the sensation might lose its
perfume. In Une Vie he hastens to sum up his childhood's recollections.
As for Bel Ami, he wrote it from day to day as he haunted the offices of
Editors.
As for his style, it is limpid, accurate, easy and strongly marked, with a
sound framework and having the suppleness of a living organism.
Very industrious and very careful at first, Maupassant, in the fever of
production, became less careful. He early accustomed himself to
composing in his mind. "Composition amuses me," he said, "when I am
thinking it out, and not when I am writing it." ... Once he had thought
out his novels or romances, he transcribed them hurriedly, almost
mechanically. In his manuscripts, long pages follow each other without
an erasure.
His language appears natural, easy, and at first sight seems spontaneous.
But at the price of what effort was it not acquired! ...
In reality, in the writer, his sense of sight and smell were perfected, to
the detriment of the sense of hearing which is not very musical.
Repetitions, assonances, do not always shock Maupassant, who is
sometimes insensible to quantity as he is to harmony. He does not
"orchestrate," he has not inherited the "organ pipes" of Flaubert.
In his vocabulary there is no research; he never even requires a rare
word....
Those whom Flaubert's great organ tones delighted, those whom
Theophile Gautier's frescoes enchanted, were not satisfied, and accused
Maupassant, somewhat harshly, of not being a "writer" in the highest
sense of the term. The reproach is unmerited, for there is but one style.
But, on the other hand, it is difficult to admit, with an eminent

academician that Maupassant must be a great writer, a classical writer,
in fact, simply because he "had no style," a condition of perfection "in
that form of literary art in which the personality of the author should
not appear, in the romance, the story, and the drama."
A classic, Maupassant undoubtedly is, as the critic to whom I alluded
has said, "through the simple aptness of his terms and his contempt for
frivolous ornamentation."
He remains a great writer because, like Molière, La Bruyère, and La
Fontaine, he is always close to nature, disdaining