Short Fiction

The first artists, in any line, are doubtless not those whose general ideas about their art are most often on their lips—those who most abound in precept, apology and formula and can best tell us the reasons and the philosophy of things. We know the first usually by their energetic practice, the constancy with which they apply their principles and the serenity with which they leave us to hunt for their secret in the illustration, the concrete example. None the less it often happens that a valid artist flashes upon us for a moment the light by which he works, utters his mystery and shows us the rule by which he holds it just that he should be measured. This accident is happiest, I think, when it is soonest over; the shortest explanations of the products of genius are the best, and there is many a creator of living figures whose friends, however full of faith in his inspiration, will do well to pray for him when he sallies forth into the dim wilderness of theory. The doctrine is apt to be so much less inspired than the work, the work is often so much more intelligent than the doctrine. M. Guy de Maupassant has lately traversed with a firm and rapid step a literary crisis of this kind; he has clambered safely up the bank at the farther end of the morass. If he has relieved himself in the preface to Pierre et Jean, the last-published of his tales, he has also rendered a service to his friends; he has not only come home in a recognizable plight, escaping gross disaster with a success which even his extreme good sense was far from making in advance a matter of course, but he has expressed in intelligible terms (that by itself is a ground of felicitation) his most general idea, his own sense of his direction. He has arranged, as it were, the light in which he wishes to sit. If it is a question of attempting, under however many disadvantages, a sketch of him, the critic’s business therefore is simplified: there will be no difficulty about placing him, for he himself has chosen the spot, he has made the chalk-mark on the floor.

I may as well say at once that in dissertation M. de Maupassant does not write with his best pen; the philosopher in his composition is perceptibly inferior to the storyteller. I would rather have written half a page of “Boule de Suif” than the whole of the introduction to Flaubert’s Letters to Madame Sand; and his little disquisition on the novel in general, attached to that particular example of it which he has just put forth, is considerably less to the point than the masterpiece which it ushers in. In short, as a commentator M. de Maupassant is slightly vulgar, while as an artist he is wonderfully rare. Of course we must, in judging a writer, take one thing with another, and if I could make up my mind that M. de Maupassant is weak in theory it would almost make me like him better, render him more approachable, give him the touch of softness that he lacks and show us a human flaw. The most general quality of the author of “La Maison Tellier” and Bel-Ami, the impression that remains last, after the others have been accounted for, is an essential hardness—hardness of form, hardness of nature; and it would put us more at ease to find that if the fact with him (the fact of execution) is so extraordinarily definite and adequate, his explanations, after it, were a little vague and sentimental. But I am not sure that he must even be held foolish to have noticed the race of critics; he is at any rate so much less foolish than …