The
Odd Number
Thirteen Tales
By Guy de Maupassant
Contents
Introduction
Happiness
A Coward
The Wolf
The Necklace
The Piece of String
La Mère Sauvage
Moonlight
The Confession
On the Journey
The Beggar
A Ghost
Little Soldier
The Wreck
INTRODUCTION.
GUY
DE MAUPASSANT.
It is
so embarrassing to speak of the writers of one country to the readers of
another that I sometimes wonder at the complacency with which the
delicate task is entered upon. These are cases in which the difficult
art of criticism becomes doubly difficult, inasmuch as they compel the
critic to forfeit what I may call his natural advantages. The first of
these natural advantages is that those who read him shall help him by
taking a great many things for granted; shall allow him his general
point of view and his terms—terms which he is not obliged to define.
The relation of the American reader to the French writer, for instance,
is, on the contrary, so indirect that it gives him who proposes to
mediate between them a great deal more to do. Here he has in a manner to
define his terms and establish his point of view.
The first simplification he is prompted to effect is therefore to
ask the reader to make the effort to approach the author as nearly as
possible in the supposed spirit of one of his own (one of the
author’s) fellow-countrymen. If the author be French, remember that,
as it is to Frenchmen he addresses himself, it is profitless to read
him without a certain displacement of tradition. If he be German,
reflect in the same way that it was far from his business to write in
such a manner as would conciliate most the habits and prejudices of the
English-speaking mind. There are doubtless many people all ready to
regard themselves as injured by a suggestion that they should for the
hour, and even in the decent privacy of the imagination, comport
themselves as creatures of alien (by which we usually understand inferior)
race. To them it is only to be answered that they had better never
touch a foreign book on any terms, but lead a contented life in the
homogeneous medium of the dear old mother-speech. That life, by
compensation, they will of course endeavor to make as rich as possible;
and there is one question they will always be able to ask without
getting an immediate answer, so that the little inquiry will retain more
or less its triumphant air. “Why should we concern ourselves so much
about French literature, when those who produce it concern themselves
so little about ours?”
That strong argument will always be in order, especially among
those who do not really know how little the French are, as they say,
preoccupied with English and American work; and on some occasions it
will be supported by the further inquiry “Is not the very perfection
of French literature to-day an exemplary consequence of the fact that
its principal exponents stay at home and mind their business—shut
their doors and ‘take care of’ (soingner)
their form? They don’t waste time,” it will be added, “in
superficial excursions, nor have they any confidence in the lessons that
are to be learned beyond the frontier. Watch them a little and you will
see plenty of examples of that want of confidence. They accept their
own order of things as their limit, and in that order they dig, as we
know, very deep. To speak only of fiction, there are multitudes of tales
by English and American writers which profess to deal with French and
with Italian life, yet probably not one of which, unless it be George
Eliot’s ‘Romola,’ has any verisimilitude or any value for
Frenchmen or for Italians. Few indeed are the works of fiction which
they on their side have dedicated to the portraiture of the Anglo-Saxon
world; and great, doubtless, do they deem the artistic naiveté
of a race which can content itself with that sort of stuff as a
substitute for thoroughness.” Thus, it will be seen, the very
“perfection” of French literature (which a hundred observers will
also of course contest) may, oddly enough, be offered as a reason
for having nothing to do with it.
These are the embroilments of a flirtation—an expression which
is really the only proper one to apply to our interest in the “sort of
stuff” which has enabled such a writer as M. Guy de Maupassant, whose
name I have prefixed to these remarks, to be possible. To a serious and
well-regulated union with such a writer the American public must, in
the nature of things, shrink from pretending; but nothing need prevent
it—not even the sense of danger (often, it must be said, much rather
an incentive), from enjoying those desultory snatches of intercourse
which represent, in the world of books, the broken opportunities of
Rosin a or Juliet. These young ladies, it is true, eventually went much
further, and the situation of the Anglo-Saxon reader, when craning over
the creaking fourth or fifth floor balcony of a translation, must be
understood as that to which the romance of curiosity would have been
restricted if the Guardian and the Nurse—in other words public
opinion—had succeeded in keeping the affair within limits. M. de
Maupassant is an Almaviva who strums his guitar with the expectation of
raising the street, and he performs most skilfully under those windows
from which the flower of attention at any price is flung down to him. If
he is a capital specimen of the foreign writer with whom the critic
has most trouble, there could at the same time be no better exhibition
of the force which sets this inquiring, admiring spirit in motion.
The only excuse the critic has for braving the embarrassments I
have mentioned is that he wishes to perform a work of recommendation,
and indeed there is no profit in talking, in English, of M. de
Maupassant unless it be in the sense of recommending him. One should
never go out of one’s way to differ, and translation, interpretation,
the business of adjusting to another medium, are a going out of one’s
way. Silence is the best disapproval, and to take people up, with an
earnest grip, only to put them down, is to add to the vain gesticulation
of the human scene. That reader will therefore be most intelligent who,
if he does not leave M. de Maupassant quite alone, makes him a present,
as it were, of the conditions. My purpose was to enumerate these, but I
shall not accomplish it properly if I fail to recognize that they are
manifold.
The first of them to be mentioned is doubtless that he came into
the literary world, as he himself has related, under the protection of
the great Flaubert. This was but a dozen years ago, for Guy de Maupassant
belongs, among the distinguished Frenchmen of his period, to the new
generation. His celebrity has been gathered in a short career, and his
experience, which, in certain ways, suggests the helping hand of time,
in a rapid life, inasmuch as he was born in i8~o. These things go fast
in France, and there is already a newer generation still, with its
dates and its notabilities but we need scarcely yet open a parenthesis
for the so-called décadents: they
have produced no talent that seems particularly alive—to do so would
indeed be a disloyalty to their name. Besides the link of the same
literary ideal, Gustave Flaubert had with his young purl a strong
community of local sense—the sap of the rich old Norman country was
in the veins of both. It is not too much to say that there is a large
element in Maupassant that the reader will care for in proportion as
he has a kindly impression of the large, bountiful Norman land, with its
abbeys and its nestling farms, its scented hedges and hard white roads,
where the Sunday blouse of the rustic is picked out in color, its
succulent domestic life, and its canny and humorous peasantry. There is
something in the accumulated heritage of such a province which may
well have fed the imagination of an artist whose vision was to be
altogether of this life.
That is another of M. de Maupassant’s conditions: what is
clearest to him is the immitigability of our mortal predicament, with
its occasional beguilements and innumerable. Flaubert would have been
sorry to blur this sharpness, and indeed he ministered to it in helping
to place his young friend in possession of a style which completely
reflects it. Guy de Maupassant, from his own account (in the preface to
“Pierre et Jean”), devoted much time to the moral that to prove that
you have a first-rate talent you must have a first-rate style. He
therefore learned to write, and acquired an instrument which emits no
uncertain sound. He is wonderfully concise and direct, yet at the same
time it would be difficult to characterize more vividly. To have color
and be sober with it is an ideal, and this ideal M. de Maupassant
constantly touches. The complete possession of his instrument has
enabled him to attack a great variety of subjects—usually within rigid
limits of space. He has accepted the necessity of being brief, and has
made brevity very full, through making it an energetic selection. He
has published less than half a dozen novels and more than a hundred
tales, and it is upon his tales that his reputation will mainly rest.
The short tale is infinitely relished in France, which can show, in this
form, an array of masterpieces; and no small part of Maupassant’s
success, I think, comes from his countrymen’s pride in seeing him
add to a collection which is already a national glory. He has done so,
as I say, by putting selection really upon its mettle—by going, in
every picture, straight to the strongest ingredients, and to them alone.
The turn of his mind has helped him to do this, an extraordinary
perceptive apparatus of the personal, material, immediate sort. M. de
Maupassant takes his stand on everything that solicits the sentient
creature who lives in his senses; gives the impression of the active,
independent observer who is ashamed of none of his faculties, describes
what he sees, renders, with a rare reproduction of tone, what he
hears, and is more anxious to see and to hear than to make sure, in
advance, of prepping up some particular theory of things. He has indeed
a theory to the effect that they are pretty bad, but practically the air
of truth in the given case is almost never sacrificed to it. His strong,
hard, cynical, slightly cruel humor can scarcely be called a theory;
what one may say of this rather is that his drollery is a direct emanation
from the facts, and especially from the rural facts, which he knows with
extraordinary knowledge. His most brilliantly clever tales deal with
the life, pervaded, for the most part, by a strong smell of the
barn-yard and the wine-shop, of the Norman cottage and market-place.
Such a little picture as “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”) is
a pure gem, so caught in the fact are the whimsicalities of the
thick-witted rustic world.
For the last ten years M. de Maupassant has contributed an almost
weekly nouvelle to some
Parisian sheet which has allowed him a luxurious liberty. They have been
very unequal, too numerous, and occasionally bad enough to be by an
inferior hand (an inevitable accident, in copious production); but
they have contained an immense element of delightful work. Taken all
together, they are full of life (of life as the author conceives it,
of course—he is far from having taken its measure in all directions),
and between the lines of them we seem to read of that partly pleasant
and wholly modern invention, a roving existence in which, for art, no
impression is wasted. M. de Maupassant travels, explores, navigates,
shoots, goes up in balloons, and writes. He treats of the north and of
the south, evidently makes “copy” of everything that happens to him,
and, in the interest of such copy and such happenings, ranges from
Etretat to the depths of Algeria. Lately he has given signs of adding a
new cord to his bow—a silver cord, of intenser vibration. His two last
novels, “Pierre et Jean” and “Fort comme la Mort,” deal with
shades of feeling and delicacies of experience to which he had shown
himself rather a stranger. They are work of an older man, and of a man
who has achieved the feat of keeping his talent fresh when other
elements have turned stale. In default of other convictions it may
still, for the artist, be an adequate working faith to turn out
something fine. Guy de Maupassant is a striking illustration of this
curious truth and of the practical advantage of having a first-rate
ability. Such a gift may produce surprises in the mere exercise of its
natural health. The dogmatist is never safe with it.—Henry James,
LONDON, August 6, 1889.
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