Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories | Page 8

has nothing to do with the humanitarian pity retailed by rhetoricians.
It is philosophical and haughty, detached from any "anthropocentric"
characteristics. It is universal suffering that it covers. And to tell the
truth, it is man, the hypocritical and cunning biped who has the least
share in it. Maupassant is helpful to all those of his fellows who are
tortured by physical suffering, social cruelty and the criminal dangers
of life, but he pities them without caring for them, and his kindness
makes distinctions.
On the other hand, the pessimist has all the tenderness of a Buddhist for
animals, whom the gospels despise. When he pities the animals, who
are worth more than ourselves, their executioners, when he pities the
elementary existences, the plants and trees, those exquisite creations, he
unbends and pours out his heart. The humbler the victim, the more
generously does he espouse its suffering. His compassion is unbounded
for all that lives in misery, that is buffeted about without understanding
why, that "suffers and dies without a word." And if he mourned Miss

Harriet, in this unaccustomed outburst of enthusiasm, it is because, like
himself, the poor outcast cherished a similar love for "all things, all
living beings."
Such appears to me to be Maupassant, the novelist, a story-teller, a
writer, and a philosopher by turns. I will add one more trait; he was
devoid of all spirit of criticism. When he essays to demolish a theory,
one is amazed to find in this great, clear writer such lack of precision of
thought, and such weak argument. He wrote the least eloquent and the
most diffuse study of Flaubert, of "that old, dead master who had won
his heart in a manner he could not explain." And, later, he shows the
same weakness in setting forth, as in proving his theory, in his essay on
the "Evolution of the Novel," in the introduction to Pierre et Jean.
On the other hand, he possesses, above many others, a power of
creating, hidden and inborn, which he exercises almost unconsciously.
Living, spontaneous and yet impassive he is the glorious agent of a
mysterious function, through which he dominated literature and will
continue to dominate it until the day when he desires to become
literary.
He is as big as a tree. The author of "Contemporains" has written that
Maupassant produced novels as an apple-tree yields apples. Never was
a criticism more irrefutable.
On various occasions he was pleased with himself at the fertility that
had developed in him amid those rich soils where a frenzy mounts to
your brain through the senses of smell and sight. He even feels the
influence of the seasons, and writes from Provence: "The sap is rising
in me, it is true. The spring that I find just awakening here stirs all my
plant nature, and causes me to produce those literary fruits that ripen in
me, I know not how."
The "meteor" is at its apogee. All admire and glorify him. It is the
period when Alexandre Dumas, fils, wrote to him thrice: "You are the
only author whose books I await with impatience."
The day came, however, when this dominant impassivity became

stirred, when the marble became flesh by contact with life and suffering.
And the work of the romancer, begun by the novelist, became warm
with a tenderness that is found for the first time in Mont Oriol....
But this sentimental outburst that astonished his admirers quickly dies
down, for the following year, there appeared the sober Pierre et Jean,
that admirable masterpiece of typical reality constructed with "human
leaven," without any admixture of literary seasoning, or romantic
combinations. The reader finds once more in his splendid integrity the
master of yore.
But his heart has been touched, nevertheless. In the books that follow,
his impassivity gives way like an edifice that has been slowly
undermined. With an ever-growing emotion he relates under slight
disguises all his physical distress, all the terrors of his mind and heart.
What is the secret of this evolution? The perusal of his works gives us a
sufficient insight into it.
The Minstrel has been received in country houses; has been admitted to
"the ladies' apartments." He has given up composing those hurried tales
which made his fame, in order to construct beautiful romances of love
and death.... The story teller has forsaken rustics and peasants, the
comrades of the "Repues franches," for the nobility and the wealthy. He
who formerly frequented Mme. Tellier's establishment now praises
Michèle de Burne.
Ysolde replaces Macette. In "l'Ostel de Courtoisie," Maupassant
cultivates the usual abstractions of the modern Round Table:
Distinction and Moderation; Fervor and Delicacy. We see him inditing
love sonnets and becoming a knight of chivalry. The apologist of brutal
pleasures has become a devotee of the "culte