girl who fell asleep in the cupboard), the wedding in Sur Veau, and last expression of all, Un cas de divorce. Just what was said by Marcus Aurelius when devising means to destroy the attractiveness of this sin in his imagination, is what Maupassant does in most vivid artistic forms, turning one’s soul inside out. He wished to extol sex-love, but the better he came to know it the more he cursed it. He cursed sex-love for the misfortunes and sufferings it bears within it, and for the disillusionments and, above all, for the falsification of real love, for the fraud which is in it from which man suffers the more acutely the more trustingly he has yielded to the deception.
The powerful moral growth of the author in the course of his literary activity is recorded in indelible traits in these charming short stories and in his best book, Sur Veau.
And not alone in this involuntary and therefore all the more powerful dethronement of sex-love is the moral growth of the author seen, but also in the more and more exalted moral demands he makes upon life.
Not alone in sex-love does he see the innate contradiction between the demands of animal and rational man; he sees it in the whole organization of the world.
He sees that the world as it is, the material world, is not only not the best of worlds, but might on the contrary be quite different — this thought is strikingly expressed in Horla — and that it does not satisfy the demands of reason and life. He sees that there is some other world, or at least the demand for such another world, in the soul of man.
He is tormented not only by the irrationality of the material world and its ugliness, but by its unlovingness, its discord. I do not know a more heartrending cry of horror from one who has lost his way and is conscious of his loneliness, than the expression of this idea in that most charming story, Solitude.
The thing that most tormented Maupassant and to which he returns many times, is the painful state of isolation, spiritual isolation, of man; the barrier standing between him and his fellows; a barrier, he says, the more painfully felt the nearer one’s bodily connexion.
What is it torments him, and what would he have? What can destroy this barrier? What end this isolation? Love — not feminine love, which has become disgusting to him, but pure, spiritual, divine love. And that is what Maupassant seeks. Towards it, towards this saviour of life long since plainly disclosed to all men, he painfully strains from those fetters in which he feels himself bound.
He does not yet know how to name what he seeks. He does not wish to name it with his lips alone, lest he should profane his holy-of-holies. But his unexpressed striving, shown in his dread of loneliness, is so sincere that it infects and attracts one more strongly than many and many sermons about love, uttered only by the lips.
The tragedy of Maupassant’s life is that being in a most monstrous and immoral circle, he by the strength of his talent, by that extraordinary light which was in him, was escaping from the outlook on life held by that circle, and was already near to deliverance, was already breathing the air of freedom but, having exhausted his last strength in the struggle and not being able to make a last effort — perished without having attained freedom.
The tragedy of that ruin lies in what still afflicts the majority of the so-called cultured men of our time.
Men in general never have lived without an expression of the meaning of their life. Always and everywhere, highly-gifted men going in advance of others have appeared — the prophets, as they are called — who have explained to men the meaning and purport of their life; and always the ordinary, average men, who had not the strength to explain that meaning for themselves, have followed the explanation of life their prophets have disclosed to them.
That meaning was explained eighteen hundred years ago by Christianity, simply, clearly, indubitably, and joyfully, as is proved by the lives of all who acknowledge it and follow the guidance of life which results from that conception.
But then people appeared who misinterpreted that meaning so that it became meaningless, and men are placed in the dilemma either of acknowledging Christianity as interpreted by Orthodoxy, Lourdes, the Pope, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and so forth, or of going on with life according to the teachings of Renan and his kind, that is, living without any direction or understanding of life, following only their lusts as long as they are strong, and their habits when their lusts become feeble.
And people, ordinary people, choose the one or the other, sometimes both, first dissoluteness and then Orthodoxy; and thus whole generations live, shielding themselves with various theories, invented not to disclose the truth but to hide it. And ordinary, and more especially dull, people are content.
But there are others — not many, they are rare — such as Maupassant, who with their own eyes see things as they are, see their significance, see the contradictions in life concealed from others, and vividly realize to what these contradictions must inevitably lead them — and seek to solve them in advance. They seek these solutions everywhere except where they are to be found, namely in Christianity, because Christianity appears to them outlived and discarded, repelling them by its absurdity. And vainly trying to find these solutions for themselves, they come to the conviction that there are no solutions, and that it is inherent in life that one should always bear in oneself these unsolved contradictions. And having come to such a conclusion, if these people are feeble unenergetic natures, they put up with such meaningless life and are even proud of their position, accounting their ignorance a quality and a sign of culture. But if they are energetic, truthful, and gifted natures, such as Maupassant was, they do not endure this, but one way or other try to get out of this senseless life.
It is as if men thirsting in a desert sought water everywhere except near those people who, standing round a spring pollute it and offer stinking mire instead of the water that unceasingly flows beneath the mire. Maupassant was in this position; he could not believe — evidently it never even entered his head — that the truth he sought had long ago been found and was so near him; but neither could he believe that man can live in such contradiction as that in which he felt himself to be living.
Life, according to the theories in which he had been brought up, which surrounded him and were corroborated by all the lusts of his young, and mentally and physically strong, being — life consists in pleasure, of which the chief is to be found in woman with her love, and in the reproduction of this pleasure in its reflection, in the presentation of this love, and in exciting it in others. All this might be well; but on examining these pleasures quite other things emerge, alien and hostile to this love and this beauty: woman for some reason is disfigured, becomes unpleasantly pregnant and repulsive, gives birth to children, unwanted children; then come deceptions, cruelties, moral suffering, then mere old age, and ultimately death.
Then is this beauty indeed beauty? And why is all this so? It would be all very well if one could arrest life, but life goes on. And what does that mean? “Life goes on” means that the hair falls out, turns grey, the teeth decay, and there are wrinkles and offensive breath. Even before all is finished, everything becomes dreadful, repulsive: the rouge, the powder, the sweat, the smell, and the disgustingness, are evident. Where then is that which I serve? Where is beauty? But she is all! And if she is not, there is nothing left. There is no life!
But not merely is there no life in what seemed to be life: one begins to forsake it oneself, one becomes weaker, more stupid, one decays; others before one’s eyes seize those delights in which all the good of life lay. Nor is that all. Some other possibility of life begins to glimmer on one’s mind; something else, some other kind of union with men, with the whole world, one which does not admit of all these deceptions, something which cannot by any means be infringed; which is true and forever beautiful. But this cannot be. It is only the tantalizing vision of an oasis when we know that it does not exist and that there is nothing but sand everywhere.
Maupassant reached that tragic
