and is perishing in our society, because that society is depraved, senseless, and horrible.
The last scene in the novel — the marriage in a fashionable church of the triumphant scoundrel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, to the pure girl, the daughter of an elderly and formerly irreproachable mother whom he had seduced; a wedding blessed by a bishop and regarded as something good and proper by everybody — expresses this idea with extraordinary force. In this novel, despite the fact that it is encumbered with dirty details (in which it is to be regretted that the author seems to find pleasure) the same serious demands are presented to life.
Read the conversation of the old poet with Duroy when after dinner, if I remember rightly, they are leaving the Walters. The old poet bares life to his young companion, and shows it as it is, with its eternal and inevitable concomitant and end — death.
“She has hold of me already, la gueuse (the old hag) says he of death. “She has already shaken out my teeth, torn out my hair, crippled my limbs, and is now ready to swallow me. I am already in her power. She is only playing with me, as a cat does with a mouse, knowing that I cannot escape. Fame? Riches? What is the use of them, since they cannot buy a woman’s love? For it is only a woman’s love that makes life worth living, and that too death takes away. It takes that away, and then one’s health, strength, and life itself. It is the same for everyone, and there is nothing else.”
Such is the meaning of what the old poet says. But Duroy, the successful lover of all the women who please him, is so full of sensual energy and strength that he hears and does not hear, understands and does not understand, the old poet’s words. He hears and understands, but the source of sensual life throbs in him so strongly that this unquestionable truth, foretelling the same end for him, does not disturb him.
This inner contradiction, besides its satirical value, gives the novel its chief significance. The same idea gleams in the fine scenes of the death of the consumptive journalist. The author sets himself the question: What is this life? How solve the contradiction between the love of life, and the knowledge of inevitable death? He seems to seek, pauses, and does not decide either one way or the other. And therefore the moral relation to life in this novel continues to be correct.
But in the novels that follow, this moral relation to life grows confused. The appraisement of the phenomena of life begins to waver, to grow obscure, and in the last novels it is quite perverted.
In Mont-Oriol Maupassant seems to unite the motives of his two previous novels and repeats himself to order. Despite the fine descriptions of the fashionable watering-place and of the medical activity in it, which is executed with delicate taste, we have here the same bull-like Paul, just as empty and despicable as the husband in Une Vie; and the same deceived, frank, meek, weak, lonely — always lonely — good woman, and the same impassive triumph of pettiness and triviality as in Bel-Ami.
The thought is the same, but the author’s moral relation to what he describes is already much lower, lower especially than in Une Vie. The author’s inner appraisement of right and wrong begins to get confused. Notwithstanding his abstract wish to be impartially objective, the scoundrel Paul evidently has all his sympathy, and therefore the love story of this Paul and his attempts at and success in seduction produce a discordant impression. The reader does not know what the author intends: is it to show the whole emptiness and vileness of Paul (who turns indifferently away from, and insults, a woman merely because her waist has been spoilt by her pregnancy with his child); or, on the contrary, is it to show how pleasant and easy it is to live as this Paul lives?
In the next novels, Pierre et Jean, Fort comme la mort, and Notre cœur, the authors moral attitude towards his characters becomes still more confused, and in the last-named is quite lost. All these novels bear the stamp of indifference, haste, unreality, and, above all, again that same absence of a correct moral relation to life which was present in his first writings. This began from the time when Maupassant’s reputation as a fashionable author had become established and he became liable to the temptation, so terrible in our day, to which every celebrated writer is subject, especially one so attractive as Maupassant. In the first place the success of his first novels, the praise of the press, and the flattery of society, especially of women; in the second the ever increasing amount of remuneration (never however keeping up with his continually increasing wants); in the third the pertinacity of editors outbidding one another, flattering, begging, and no longer judging the merits of the works the author offers but enthusiastically accepting everything signed by a name now established with the public. All these temptations are so great that they evidently turn his head, and he succumbs to them; and though he continues to elaborate the form of his work as well as or sometimes even better than before, and even though he is fond of what he describes, yet he no longer loves it because it is good or moral and lovable to all, or hates it because it is evil and hateful to all, but only because one thing pleases and another thing happens to displease him.
On all Maupassant’s novels, beginning with Bel-Ami, there lies this stamp of haste and still more of artificiality. From that time Maupassant no longer did what he had done in his first two novels. He did not take as his basis certain moral demands and on that ground describe the actions of his characters, but wrote as all hack novelists do, that is, he devised the most interesting and pathetic, or most up-to-date persons and situations, and made a novel out of them, adorning it with whatever observations he had opportunity to make which fitted into the framework of the story, quite indifferent as to how the incidents described were related to the demands of morality. Such are Pierre et Jean, Fort comme la mort, and Notre cœur.
Accustomed as we are to read in French novels of how families live in threes, always with a lover known to everyone except the husband, it still remains quite unintelligible to us how it happens that all husbands are always fools, cocus et ridicules, (Deceived and ridiculous) but all lovers (who themselves in the end marry and become husbands) are not only not cocus et ridicules, but are heroic! And still less comprehensible is it how all women can be depraved, and yet all mothers saintly.
And on these unnatural and unlikely, and above all profoundly immoral, propositions Pierre et Jean and Fort comme la mort are built, and therefore the sufferings of the characters so situated affect us but little. The mother of Pierre and Jean, who can live her whole life deceiving her husband, evokes little sympathy when she is obliged to confess her sin to her son, and still less when she justifies herself by asserting that she could not but avail herself of the chance of happiness which presented itself. Still less can we sympathize with the gentleman who, in Fort comme la mort, having all his life deceived his friend and debauched his friend’s wife, now only regrets that having grown old he cannot seduce his mistress’s daughter. The last novel, Notre cœur, has even no kernel at all beyond the description of various kinds of sex-love. The satiated emotions of an idle debauchee are described, who does not know what he wants, and who first lives with a woman yet more depraved than himself — a mentally depraved woman, who lacks even the excuse of sensuality — then leaves her and lives with a servant girl, and then again rejoins the former, and, it seems, lives with them both. If in Pierre et Jean and Fort comme la mort there are still some touching scenes, this last novel excites only disgust.
The question in Maupassant’s first novel, Une Vie, consists in this: here is a human being, good, wise, pleasing, ready for all that is good, and this creature is for some reason offered up as a sacrifice first to a coarse, small-minded, stupid animal of a husband, without having given anything to the world. Why is this? The author puts that question and as it were gives no answer, but his whole novel, all his feeling of pity for her and abhorrence of what has ruined her, serves as answer. If there is a man who has understood her suffering and expressed it, then it is redeemed, as Job put it to his friends when they said that no one would know of his sufferings. When suffering is recognized and understood, it is redeemed; and here the author has recognized and understood and shown men this suffering, and the suffering is redeemed, for once it is understood by men it will sooner or later be done away with.
In the next novel, Bel-Ami,
