Nor can my actions, though
condemned
for ill.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v17 - Mai to Mom
- It is a terri-
—
tory under a curse, where even its pleasures carry with them
their thorns and their bitternesses; its sport tires by its furies
and its caprices; its conversations annoy by the oppositions of
its moods and the contrariety of its sentiments; its passions
and criminal attachments have their disgusts, their derangements,
their unpleasant brawls; its shows, hardly finding more in the
spectators than souls grossly dissolute, and incapable of being
awakened but by the most monstrous excesses of debauchery,
become stale, while moving only those delicate passions which
only show crime in the distance, and dress out traps for inno-
cence. The world, in fine, is a place where hope, regarded as a
passion so sweet, renders everybody unhappy; where those who
have nothing to hope for, think themselves still more miserable;
where all that pleases, pleases never for long; and where ennui
is almost the sweetest destiny and the most supportable that one
can expect in it.
This, my brethren, is the world: and it is not the obscure
world, which knows neither the great pleasures nor the charms
of prosperity, of favor, and of wealth,-it is the world at its
best; it is the world of the court; it is you yourselves who hear
me, my brethren.
## p. 9792 (#200) ###########################################
9792
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
This is the world; and it is not, in this aspect, one of those
paintings from imagination of which the resemblance is nowhere
to be found. I am painting the world only after your own
hearts; that is, such as you know it and always feel it yourselves
to be.
There, notwithstanding, is the place where all sinners are seek-
ing their felicity. There is their country. It is there that they
wish they could eternize themselves. This is the world which
they prefer to the eternal joys and to all the promises of faith.
New translation by J. F. B.
An exhaustive, masterly, and tremendous discourse, perhaps without
a parallel in all literature for boldness and terrible severity in scor-
ing the sin of unchastity, was that on the Prodigal Son, pronounced
before Louis XIV. in the chapel at Versailles during the Grand
Carême. His text was: “He went into a far country, and there
wasted his substance with riotous living. ” His exordium consists in
repeating minutely the story, dwelling on the willingness to live far
from home, with swine and like swine, — the nastiness, the emptiness,
the deadliness of such a life,- and closes with this affecting
PRAYER
P"
URIFY my lips, O my God! and while I shall recount the
excess of a voluptuous sinner, furnish me with expressions
which will not offend a virtue, the love of which I come
to-day to inspire in those who hear me; for the world, which
no longer knows any restraint on this vice, exacts much notwith-
standing of us in the language which condemns it.
Then he opens upon this sin his clean-sweeping artillery thus:-
The vice the deadly consequences of which I am to-day un-
dertaking to expose -- this vice so universally spread abroad on
the earth, and which is desolating with such fury the heritage
of Jesus; 'this vice of which the Christian religion had purged
the world, and which to-day has prevailed on religion itself - is
marked by certain peculiar characteristics, all which I find in the
story of the wanderings of the Prodigal Son.
There is never a vice which more separates the sinner from
God; there is never a vice which, after it has separated him from
God, leaves him less resource for returning to Him; there is
a vice which renders the sinner more insupportable to
never
## p. 9793 (#201) ###########################################
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
9793
con-
himself; finally, there is not one which renders him more
temptible in the eyes even of other men. Observe, I pray, all
these characteristics in the story of the sinner of our gospel.
The first characteristic of the vice of which we are speaking
is the putting, as it were, an abyss between God and the volup-
tuous soul, and the leaving him almost no more hope of return.
The prodigal of our gospel went off at first into a very far
country, which left no longer anything in common between him
and his natural father: "He took his journey into a far country. ”
Indeed, in all the other vices, the sinner seems still to hold
upon God by some feeble ties. There are some vices which respect
at least the sacredness of the body, and do not strengthen its
inordinate inclinations; there are others which do not spread so
deep darkness on the mind, and leave at least some use of the
light of reason; finally, there are some which do not occupy
the heart to such a degree as absolutely to take away from it the
relish for all which could lead back to God. But the shameful
passion of which I am speaking dishonors the body, extinguishes
reason, renders all the things of heaven disagreeable, and raises
a wall of separation between God and the sinner which seems to
take away all hope of reunion. —"He took his journey into a far
country. ”
I said that it dishonors the body of the Christian; it profanes
the temple of God in us; it makes the members of Jesus do an
ignominious service: it soils a flesh nourished on his body and
his blood, consecrated by the grace of baptism; a flesh which is
to attain immortality and be conformable to the glorious likeness
of Jesus risen; a flesh which will repose in the holy place, and
whose ashes will await, under the altar of the Lamb, the day of
revelation, mingled with the ashes of the virgins and the martyrs;
a flesh more holy than those august temples where the glory of
the Lord reposes; more worthy of being possessed with honor
and with reverence than the very vases of the sanctuary, conse-
crated by the terrible mysteries which they inclose. But what a
barrier does not the opprobrium of this vice put to the return of
God into us! Can a holy God, in whose sight even the heavenly
spirits are unclean, sufficiently separate himself from a flesh cov-
ered with shame and ignominy? The creature being but dust
and ashes, the holiness of God must suffer by lowering himself
down to it: ah, what then can the sinner promise himself who
joins to his own nothingness and baseness the indignities of a
XVII-613
.
## p. 9794 (#202) ###########################################
9794
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
>
(
body shamefully dishonored ? — "He took his journey into a far
country. ”
I said that this vice extinguishes even in the soul all her
lights, and that the sinner is no longer capable of those salu-
tary reflections which often lead back an unbelieving soul. The
prodigal of our gospel, already blinded by his passion, does not
see the wrong he is doing himself in separating himself from his
paternal home; the ingratitude of which he is rendering himself
culpable towards his natural father; the dangers to which he is
exposing himself in wishing to be the sole arbiter of his own
destiny; the decencies even which he is violating in setting out
for a far country, without the counsel and advice of him to whom
he owes at least the sentiments of reverence and deference which
mere nature itself inspires. He starts, and no longer sees but by
the eyes of his passion. — "He took his journey into a far coun-
try. ”
Such is the characteristic of this ill-fated passion,-it spreads
a thick cloud over reason: men wise, shrewd, brilliant, lose here
at once all their shrewdness, all their wisdom; all their principles
of conduct are instantly effaced; a new manner of thinking is
made up, in which all the ordinary ideas are proscribed, - it is
no longer light and counsel, it is an impetuous inclination which
decides and rules all their proceedings; what one owes to others
and what one owes to one's self is forgotten; one is blind to
one's fortune, to one's duty, to one's reputation, to one's interests,
to the decencies even of which the other passions are so jealous;
and while one is giving one's self for a spectacle to the public,
it is one's self alone that does not see one. One is made blind
to fortune: and Ammon loses his life and crown for not having
been able to subdue his unjust feebleness. One is made blind to
duty: and the impassioned wife of Potiphar no longer remembers
that Joseph is a slave; she forgets her birth, her glory, her pride,
and no longer sees in that Hebrew aught but the object of her
shameful passion. One is made blind to gratitude: and David
has no longer eyes either for Uriah's faithfulness, or for the
ingratitude of which he is going to render himself guilty towards
a God who had drawn him from the dust to set him on the
throne of Judah; from the time that his heart was touched, all
his lights were extinguished.
Thus it is, O my God!
that thou punishest the passions of the flesh by the darkness of
the mind; that thy light shines no longer on souls adulterous and
## p. 9795 (#203) ###########################################
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
9795
.
corrupt, and that their foolish heart is darkened. — "He took his
journey into a far country. ”
Finally, this deplorable passion puts into the heart an invinci-
ble disgust for the things of heaven.
Whatever is not
marked by the shameful characteristic of voluptuousness interests
no longer. Even the duties of society, the functions of a charge,
the decencies of a dignity, domestic cares,--all weary, all become
disagreeable, outside of passion.
Solomon is more attent-
ive to building profane temples to the gods of his foreign wives
than to easing his people of the weight of the public expense.
[A thrust of amazing boldness in the face of Louis XIV. ! ] . .
One employs one s self in occupations all which go to nourish
voluptuousness, -- profane shows, pernicious reading. lascivious
,
music, obscene pictures.
It is the characteristic of this
passion to fill the whole heart entirely; one is no longer able
to occupy one's self but with it; one is possessed, drunk with
it; one finds it everywhere; everything shows the marks of its
deadly impress; everything awakens its iniquitous desires; the
world, solitude, presence, absence, objects the most indifferent,
occupations the most serious, the holy temple itself, the sacred
altars, the terrible mysteries, recall the remembrance of it: and
everything becomes unclean, as the Apostle says, to him who is
already himself unclean. —"He took his journey into a far coun-
try. ”
Look back, unbelieving soul; recall those first sentiments of
modesty and virtue with which you were born, and see all the
way you have made in the road of iniquity, since the fatal day
when this shameful vice soiled your heart; and how much you
have since removed yourself away from your God: «He took his
journey into a far country. ”
Translation of J. F. B.
C
Probably the most visibly effective of all the many extraordinary
bursts of Massillon's oratory was the celebrated passage in the per-
oration of the sermon on the (Small Number of the Saved,' pro-
nounced before Louis XIV. in the chapel royal at Versailles in the
course of the Grand Carême); when, having in a long discourse
wrought up and prepared his auditory, he began :-
If Jesus should appear in this temple, in the midst of this
assembly, the most august in the whole world, to be our judge,
to make the terrible separation between the sheep and the goats,
## p. 9796 (#204) ###########################################
9796
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
do you believe that the greater number of us would be set on
his right hand ? — do you believe that things would be at least
equal ? - do you believe there would be found here only ten
righteous, which the Lord was not able to find formerly in five
entire cities? I ask you; — you do not know, I do not know my-
self. Thou alone, O God, dost know those who belong to thee!
But if we do not know who belong to him, we do know at least
that sinners do not. But who are the faithful believers here as-
sembled ? — Titles and dignities must be counted for nothing; you
will be stripped of them before Jesus. Who are they? A mass
of sinners who do not wish to be converted; still more who wish
to be, but who are putting off their conversion: a good many
who were converted, but only always to backslide; finally, a
great number who think they have no need of conversion: here
is the party of the reprobates. Retrench these four sorts of sin-
ners from this holy assembly; for they will be retrenched in the
great day; - appear now, ye righteous: where are you! Remnant
of Israel, pass to the right; wheat of Jesus, separate yourselves
from this chaff destined to the fire. O God! where are thine
elect? and what remains for thy portion ?
New translation by J. F. B.
It is a curious and very significant tradition that this tremendous
sermon had been pronounced before in St. Eustache in Paris, where
the turn in the passage given above was unexpected, and the effect
unparalleled. At his call for the remnant of Israel,” it is said that
the whole congregation, carried away in sympathy with the orator,
rose to their feet in a body, not knowing what they were doing.
Stranger still, this was known at Versailles, and the passage was
expected and eagerly awaited. Yet hard as it is to credit it, we are
told that the effect was not a whit less tremendous. Strangest per-
haps of all, it is said that Massillon himself, by his posture, by his
look of dejection, by his silence of some seconds (a frequent usage of
his to add emphasis), associated himself with and augmented the ter-
ror of the audience in the chapel royal at Versailles. But we must
suppose that it was an expression of sincere sympathy, as well as a
sentiment of refinement and decency.
SFBingham
## p. 9797 (#205) ###########################################
9797
PHILIP MASSINGER
(1583-1640)
BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL
He plays of Philip Massinger embody the prosaic spirit of the
period of decline which followed Shakespeare. This spirit
is not indicated by the subject-matter of his dramas. The
plots of "The Duke of Milan,' (The Guardian,' or 'The Fatal Dowry,'
admit of great treatment. In Massinger's hands they are at least
well woven. His absence of imagination is shown rather by his
lack of moral consistency in the depiction
of character. His men and women are pup-
pets, moved to action by the will of their
artificer, not by the laws of their individu-
ality.
The events of Massinger's life are ob-
scure and elusive. He was born in 1583;
he entered St. Albans Hall, Oxford, in 1602.
During his four years' residence there he
gave his mind more to poetry and romances
than to logic and philosophy. ” After leav-
ing Oxford he went up to London, to throw
in his fortunes with the frequenters of the
Mermaid Tavern. The enchanted world of Philip MASSINGER
the drama was at that time clothed in the
richness and beauty of its prime. The young hearts of Beaumont
and Fletcher, of Webster and Tourneur, still throbbed with «the love
of love, the hate of hate. ” The brain of genius was still unchilled
by doubt and speculation.
Massinger, though contemporary with these great children of a
great age, belongs by his spirit to a duller time. His dramas have
the solidity of prose without its freedom. His characters and situa-
tions lack the spontaneity of nature. He is melodramatic in the
sense that his men and women are personifications of virtue or vice.
The broad via media, the highway on which the majority of mankind
is afoot, has no place in his dramas. He is blind to the half-lights
of character, - to the subtle blendings of shade and color in the minds
of men.
((
## p. 9798 (#206) ###########################################
9798
PHILIP MASSINGER
Camiola and Adorni in 'The Maid of Honour' are exceptions to this
rule. Camiola, who loves Bertoldo and is herself hopelessly beloved
of Adorni, is a small but ravishing substance. ” Her impetuous affec-
tion, like Juliet's, goes directly to its goal without subterfuge or
deviation. When she learns from the servants that Bertoldo is in
prison, abandoned by the King, the impatience of her sorrow leaps to
her lips:
« Possible! Pray you, stand off.
If I do mutter treason to myself
My heart will break; and yet I will not curse him,-
He is my King. The news you have delivered
Makes me weary of your company: we'll salute
When we meet next. I'll bring you to the door.
Nay, pray you, no more compliments. ”
Adorni is a noble and convincing figure. When commissioned by
Camiola to rescue his rival, she asks of him, «You will do this ? ” He
answers, « Faithfully, madam;" then aside, “but not live long after. ”
Massinger rarely clothes such abundance of meaning in so few words.
(The Fatal Dowry' and The Duke of Milan' are generally as
signed the first place among the tragedies of Massinger. They are
stately plays, but dreary and lifeless. His two comedies A New
Way to Pay Old Debts) and The City Madam' are comedies only
in the sense that they do not end in death and disaster. The char-
acter of Sir Giles Overreach in the former play has held the stage
until the present time. Of Massinger's classical dramas, Arthur
Symons assigns the highest place to Believe as You List,' though
the better known play (The Roman Actor' was held by the author
“to be the most perfect work of my Minerva. ”
Massinger is farthest from greatness in his depiction of women.
With the exception of Camiola, of Lidia in the Great Duke of
Florence,' of Bellisant in the Parliament of Love,' of Matilda in the
(Bashful Lover,) and of one or two others, his women are vulgar
and sensual. Their puriiy and their vice are alike unconvincing.
This defect of portrayal is common, however, to the majority of
Massinger's characters. They are uninteresting because their qualities
are imposed upon them. There is no fidelity to the hidden springs
of action.
Massinger wrote a number of plays in conjunction with other
dramatists. The best known is (The Virgin-Martyr. ' Dekker's touch
is recognizable in such lines as these: -
« I could weary stars,
And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes,
With my late watching. ”
## p. 9799 (#207) ###########################################
PHILIP MASSINGER
9799
Massinger was a prolific writer.
a prolific writer. Beside the plays already men-
tioned, he gave to the stage of his day “The Renegado,' 'The Bond-
man,' 'A Very Woman,' 'The Emperor of the East, The Picture,'
and "The Unnatural Combat. ' Coleridge has recommended the diction
of Massinger to the imitation of modern writers, on the ground that
it is the nearest approach to the language of real life at all com-
patible with a fixed metre. It is this very characteristic of it which
deprives it of the highest poetical quality.
Alma Mature Shall
FROM THE MAID OF HONOUR)
[Camiola, who is in love with Bertoldo, is told by his friends Antonio
and Gasparo that he is a prisoner, and that the King has refused to pay his
ransom. ]
Enter a Servant
Servant - The signiors, madam, Gasparo and Antonio,
Selected friends of the renowned Bertoldo,
Put ashore this morning.
Camiola
Without him ?
Servant
I think so.
Camiola - Never think more, then!
Servant
They have been at court,
Kissed the King's hand, and, their first duties done
To him, appear ambitious to tender
To you their second service.
Camiola
Wait. them hither.
Fear, do not rack me! Reason, now if ever
Haste with thy aids, and tell me, such a wonder
As my Bertoldo is, with such care fashioned,
Must not, nay, cannot, in Heaven's providence
So soon miscarry! -
Enter Antonio and Gasparo
Pray you, forbear: ere you take
The privilege as strangers to salute me,
(Excuse my manners) make me first understand
How it is with Bertoldo.
## p. 9800 (#208) ###########################################
9800
PHILIP MASSINGER
-
Gasparo —
The relation
Will not, I fear, deserve your thanks.
Antonio
I wish
Some other should inform you.
Camiola
Is he dead ?
You see, though with some fear, I dare inquire it.
Gasparo - Dead! Would that were the worst: a debt were paid then,
Kings in their birth owe nature.
Camiola -
Is there aught
More terrible than death?
Antonio
Yes, to a spirit
Like his: cruel imprisonment, and that
Without the hope of freedom.
Camiola -
You abuse me:
The royal King cannot, in love to virtue,
(Though all the springs of affection were dried up)
But pay his ransom.
Gasparo
When you know what 'tis,
You will think otherwise: no less will do it
Than fifty thousand crowns.
Camiola -
A petty sum,
The price weighed with the purchase: fifty thousand!
To the King 'tis nothing. He that can spare more
To his minion for a masque, cannot but ransom
Such a brother at a million.
The King's munificence.
Antonio
In your opinion;
But 'tis most certain: he does not alone
In himself refuse to pay it, but forbids
All other men.
Camiola --
Are you sure of this?
Gasparo-
You may read
The edict to that purpose, published by him.
That will resolve you.
Camiola
Possible! Pray you, stand off.
If I do mutter treason to myself
My heart will break; and yet I will not curse him,-
He is my King. The news you have delivered
Makes me weary of your company: we'll salute
When we meet next. I'll bring you to the door.
Nay, pray you, no more compliments.
You wrong
## p. 9801 (#209) ###########################################
PHILIP MASSINGER
9801
FROM A NEW WAY TO PAY OLD DEBTS)
O
(Sir Giles Overreach, on fire with greed and with ambition to found a
great feudal house, treats about marrying his daughter with Lord Lovell. )
VERREACH - To my wish: we are private.
I come not to make offer with my daughter
A certain portion,- that were poor and trivial:
In one word I pronounce all that is mine,
In lands or leases, ready coin or goods,
With her, my lord, comes to you; nor shall you have
One motive to induce you to believe
I live too long, since every year I'll add
Something unto the heap, which shall be yours too.
Lovell -- You are a right kind father.
Overreach
You shall have reason
To think me such. How do you like this seat?
It is well wooded and well watered,- the acres
Fertile and rich: would it not serve for change
To entertain your friends in a summer progress?
What thinks my noble lord ?
Lovell -
'Tis a wholesome air,
And well built; and she that is mistress of it
Worthy the large revenues.
Overreach -
She the mistress!
It may be so for a time; but let my lord
Say only that he but like it, and would have it,-
I say, ere long 'tis his.
Lovell -
Impossible!
Overreach-
You do conclude too fast: not knowing me,
Nor the engines that I work by. 'Tis not alone
The lady Allworth's lands;— but point out any man's
In all the shire, and say they lie convenient
And useful for your Lordship, and once more
I say aloud, they are yours.
Lovell -
I dare not own
What's by unjust and cruel means extorted.
My fame and credit are more dear to me,
Than so to expose 'em to be censured by
The public voice.
Ozerreach
You run, my lord, no hazard :
Your reputation shall stand as fair
In all good men's opinions as now.
Nor can my actions, though condemned for ill.
Cast any foul aspersion upon yours:
## p. 9802 (#210) ###########################################
9802
PHILIP MASSINGER
For though I do contemn report myself,
As a mere sound, I still will be so tender
Of what concerns you in all points of honor,
That the immaculate whiteness of your fame,
Nor your unquestioned integrity,
Shall e'er be sullied with one taint or spot
That may take from your innocence and candor.
All my ambition is to have my daughter
Right Honorable, which my lord can make her;
And might I live to dance upon my knee
A young Lord Lovell, born by her unto you,
I write nil ultra to my proudest hopes.
As for possessions and annual rents,
Equivalent to maintain you in the part
Your noble birth and present state require,
I do remove the burden from your shoulders,
And take it on my own; for though I ruin
The country to supply your riotous waste,
The scourge of prodigals (want) shall never find you.
Lovell - Are you not frighted with the imprecations
And curses of whole families, made wretched
By your sinister practices ?
Overreach
Yes, as rocks are
When foamy billows split themselves against
Their flinty ribs; or as the moon is moved
When wolves, with hunger pined, howl at her brightness.
I am of a solid temper, and like these,
Steer on a constant course: with mine own sword,
If called into the field, I can make that right
Which fearful enemies murmured at as wrong.
Now, for those other piddling complaints,
Breathed out in bitterness: as when they call me
Extortioner, tyrant, cormorant, or intruder
On my poor neighbor's rights, or grand incloser
Of what was common to my private use;
Nay, when my ears are pierced with widows' cries,
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold:
I only think what 'tis to have my daughter
Right Honorable; and 'tis a powerful charm
Makes me insensible of remorse or pity,
Or the least sting of conscience.
Lovell —
I admire
The toughness of your nature.
Overreach-
My lord, and for my daughter, I am marble.
'Tis for you,
## p. 9803 (#211) ###########################################
9803
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
(1850-1893)
BY FIRMIN ROZ
M
HEN, after a volume of poetry, Des Vers’ (Verses: 1880), Guy
de Maupassant published in 1881 the famous story (Boule de
Suif (Tallow-Ball), he was claimed by the naturalists; and
Zola, in an enthusiastic article, introduced the author and the work
to the public. It learned that the new-comer to the Soirées de Médan
was a robust Norman, proud of his strength, skilled in physical exer-
cises. During ten years, Gustave Flaubert,
his godfather, had gradually and patiently
taught him his profession of observer and
writer. According to some, the pupil
equaled the master. He certainly excelled
a great number of those who claimed to be
enrolled in their ranks.
The document school was then in all its
glory. It was the heroic time of the so-
called realistic novel, composed of slices out
of life; of the scientific and psychologic
novel, in which the study of the passions,
the conflicts of reason with instinct, — all
the old-time psychology, in short, — was
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
replaced by the organic dissection of the
characters, atavism, the influence of environment and circumstances,–
all determinism, in a word. In this examination of facts, hearts were
neglected; and novels laboriously constructed according to the posi-
tivist method set forth by Zola in Le Roman Experimental'— novels
in which all must be explained and demonstrated, which attempted
to reproduce the very movement of life — were sometimes as false and
devoid of life as photographs, which exactly reproduce the details of
a face without catching its expression.
By temperament, by education, Guy de Maupassant was above all
a realist. He had learned from Flaubert that anything is worthy of
art when the artist knows how to fashion it. A country pharmacist,
pretentious and commonplace (Bournisien in Madame Bovary'), is
no less interesting than a scholar, a poet, or a prince. The writer
## p. 9804 (#212) ###########################################
9804
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
>
should not accord any preference to one or another of his heroes.
His impartiality guarantees the sureness of his observation. His rôle
is to express life simply and purely, without seeking its meaning,
without choosing this or that form to the exclusion of some other.
But if the vulgarity or even coarseness of the characters and environ-
ment, the crudeness of scene and language, aroused the curiosity of
the public, and assisted the author's success by winning admirations
not always addressed perhaps to what was truly admirable,—the
learned, the connoisseurs, were not deceived. They greeted him as
a master writer, an unequaled story-teller, who in spite of Zola pre-
served the classic virtues-precision, clearness, art of composition --
which are necessary to the novel, indispensable to the short story.
This alone was enough to distinguish Maupassant from the Zolaists
and the De Goncourtists, who were then swarming: his firm, alert
prose is so profoundly French, free from neologisms, strong in verbs,
sober in adjectives, every sentence standing out with no apparent
effort, no excess, like a muscle in the perfect body of a young
athlete.
In less than twelve years Guy de Maupassant published ten collec-
tions of short stories and tales: Mademoiselle Fifi, Miss Harriett,'
Au Soleil' (In the Sunshine), Les Sæurs Rondoli? (The Sisters
Rondoli), Contes de la Bécasse,' (M. Parent,' (L'Inutile Beauté' (Vain
Beauty), etc. ; and six novels: “Une Vie) (A Life: 1883), Mont-Oriol,'
(Bel-Ami? (1885), Pierre et Jean' (Peter and John: 1888), 'Fort comme
la Mort' (Strong as Death: 1889), Notre Ceur' (Our Heart: 1893). *
Guy de Maupassant's place, then, is in the first rank of the real-
ists, and nearer to Flaubert than to De Goncourt and Zola. For the
purest expression of naturalism, one must seek him and his master.
He has that sense of the real which so many naturalists lack, and
which the care for exact detail does not replace. Beside the con-
gealed works of that school his work lives, not as a representation of
life but as life itself, - interior life expressed by exterior life, life of
men and of animals, the complex and multiform life of the universe
weighed down by eternal fatalities. And in the least little stories,
most often far from gay,— between two phrases of Rachel Rondoli or
of M. Parent; through evocation of a sky, a perfume, a landscape, -
one experiences the disquiet of physical mysteries, the shudder of
love or of death. This living realism is absolutely pure with Guy de
Maupassant. There is no longer any trace of that romantic heredity
which is still apparent with the author of Salammbô' and of 'La
Tentation de Saint Antoine. He was rarely even tempted toward
the study and description of what are called the upper classes; or by
the luxury which fascinated Balzac. His predilection for ordinary
* Published by V. Havard in nine volumes; by Ollendorff in eight volumes.
## p. 9805 (#213) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9805
-
scenes and ordinary types is everywhere evident; he uses all kinds
of settings,- a café, a furnished room, a farm-yard, seen in their act-
ual character without poetic transfiguration, with all their vulgarity,
their poverty, their ugliness. And he uses too all kinds of charac-
ters,-clerks, peasants of Normandy, petty bourgeois of Paris and of
the country. They live the empty, tragic, or grotesque hours of their
lives; are sometimes touching, sometimes odious; and never achieve
greatness either in heroism or in wickedness.
They are not gay, these stories; and the kind of amusement they
afford is strongly mixed with irony, pity, and contempt. Gayety,
whether brutal, frank, mocking, or delicate, never leaves this bitter
taste in the heart. How pitiful in its folly, in its vanity, in its weak-
ness, is the humanity which loves, weeps, or agitates in the tales of
Maupassant! There, virtue if awkward is never recompensed, nor vice
if skillful punished; mothers are not always saints, nor sons always
grateful and respectful; the guilty are often ignorant of remorse.
Then are these beings immoral ? To tell the truth, they are guided
by their instincts, by events, submissive to the laws of necessity, and
apparently released by the author from all responsibility.
Such is the individual humor of Guy de Maupassant, - a humor
rarely joyous, without sparkling shocks of repartee; a humor tinged
with bitterness and contempt, arising usually from the seriousness of
ridiculous people and from the ridiculousness of serious people, and
nearly always from the universal powerlessness to advance beyond
mediocrity. And if Maupassant is cruel to his heroes, he would
doubtless say that it is because life too is cruel, unjust, sad, deceiv-
ing; and that beauty, virtue, and happiness are only exceptions.
Thence the pessimistic tendency of his work. Nothing shows this
original pessimism - rough and lucid, emotional without lyricism --
better than the novel Une Vie. ' It is the story of a co
commonplace
existence: the life of a country woman, married to a brutal and ava-
ricious country squire, delivered from him through a neighbor's ven-
geance, deceived by her son as well as by her husband, and fixing
her obstinate hope upon the grandchild, who perhaps, if death does
not liberate her in time, will add one supreme deception to all the
others. This woman, who believes herself the victim of a special
fatality, has against her nothing but the chance of a bad choice,
and the weakness of her own tender spirit, incapable of struggle or
action. She is good, pure, and perhaps more sympathetic than any
other of Maupassant's heroines. Her life is like many other lives,
and doubtless the sadness which emanates from it widens to infinity.
In the short stories, this pessimistic tendency grows finer and
sharper so as sometimes to find expression in a tragic element.
But with Maupassant the tragic is of very special essence, and not
## p. 9806 (#214) ###########################################
9806
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
>
expressed in grand melodramatic effects or catastrophes as in roman-
ticism. Nor does it consist in the classic debate between duty and
passion. No, it consists rather in a wholly physical emotion, excited
by the wretchedness of certain destinies, and evoking in its turn the
mysterious menaces which hover over us. Disease, madness, death,
are in ambush behind every door of our house; and no
one has
expressed better than Maupassant the terror of the being who feels
their breath or sees them face to face. No one has felt with deeper
sorrow behind this human misery, the frightful solitude of man
among men; the black chasm which separates us from those whom
we love; the impossibility of uniting two hearts or two thoughts;
the slow succession of the little miseries of life; the fatal disorgan-
ization of a solitary existence whose dreams have vanished; and the
reason of those tragic endings which only nervous, sensitive minds
can understand.
This enables us to grasp the very principle of Maupassant's pes-
simism, and of this disorganization in which his clear and vigorous
intellect foundered. Even his first volume, Des Vers,' showed this
haunting thought of death, this sadness of the supersensitive soul har-
assed and unsatisfied, powerless to take pleasure in the joys which
are scattered through the universe. In the two little poems (La
Venus Rustique (The Country Venus) and (Au Bord de l'Eau' (On
the Water's Brink), there is as it were an intoxication with life, which
at first appears the sane and happy expression of a robust tempera-
ment, but which quickly ends in nostalgia and horror of nothingness.
And here is the keynote to Maupassant's sensualism: it is the fran-
tic desire to concentrate in the senses of a single man all that the
material world contains of delight,— colors, sounds, perfumes, beauty
under all its forms; it is the adoration of matter, and it is the de-
spair of a being crushed by the blind, implacable, and eternal divinity
which it has chosen. What does feeling become in this pagan joy,
this mother of pains and slaveries? It is easy to see: love is as fatal
as death. It is a force of nature which we can neither control nor
avoid, nor fix according to our wish; and its very nature explains
the derangements of hearts, the betrayals, the jealousies, which deck
it in fictitious sentimentality. Final conclusion: our free will, our
liberty, are illusions; and morality is suppressed at the same time
that remorses, internal conflicts, duties are reduced to mere conven-
tions useful to society.
This is the principle of Maupassant's pessimism. As is evident, it
springs directly from his naturalism. His conception of art and his
conception of life are closely allied. This pessimism became more
and more accentuated from one work to another; from Une Vie'
(1883) to Notre Cour) (1892). But in the measure of the novelist's
## p. 9807 (#215) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9807
more and more profound investigation of life, he imperceptibly and to
a certain degree substituted psychological study for realism according
to Flaubert's formula. This evolution of Guy de Maupassant's talent
asserts itself in Pierre et Jean (1888), and is still more clearly
delineated in Fort comme la Mort' and Notre Cæur. ' We are far
away from the Boule de Suifs' and the like. His observation has
become acuter, his language better shaded. There is a more flexible
precision in the study of more delicate sentiments and of more
complicated minds. Is not the love of the old painter Bertin for
the daughter of the woman he has passionately loved an exceptional
sentiment ? It was a ticklish subject; and the author presented it
very ably, without brutalities. We cannot help pitying the woman
who feels herself growing old, the man who cherished in his friend's
daughter the young beauty of the mother whom he once loved. But
the charming child is ignorant of the harm she is innocently doing.
She marries, and the old painter bears his passion with him 'in death;
while Madame de Guilleroy burns the old letters, their love letters,
found in a drawer, and Olivier's resigned agony is lighted up by the
reflection of their blazing leaves.
This novel was less successful than its predecessors. The ordi-
nary public, who had enjoyed Maître Hauchecorne) and Mademoi-
selle Fifi,' thought that its author had been changed. It asserted
that the success of the psychologic novel had fascinated Maupassant.
Perhaps we should see in this new phase of his talent only a conse-
quence of the modification which years and the events of his inti-
mate life had little by little brought about. Notre Cour) would
confirm this view. It resembles an autobiography. It is the eternal
misunderstanding between man and woman, — drawing near for an
ant, never united, and never giving the same words the same
meaning. What an exquisite charming face is that of Michelle de
Burne! a costly flower blossoming after centuries of extreme civiliza-
tion; a positive, gently egoistic being, in whom nothing is left of
primitive woman except the need of dazzling others and of being
adored. Simple sincere Elizabeth may console André Mariolle; but
neither brilliant orchid nor humble daisy can replace or make the
other forgotten. That is why André, uniting the two in a single
bouquet, renounces the torturing dream of one only love.
Thus Guy
de Maupassant had been led by the progress of his observation and
his analysis to penetrate into the intimate regions of the heart, where
our most secret and most diverse sentiments hide, struggle, suppli-
cate, and contend with each other. This progress of the novelist is
natural. As his observation grows sharper and finer, it penetrates
deeper; proceeds from faces to minds, and from gestures to feelings.
Psychological analysis appears, and with it reflection. The mind falls
## p. 9808 (#216) ###########################################
9808
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
back upon itself; the man returns to his own thoughts, his dreams,
his emotions. He descends into his own heart, and irony becomes pity
and tenderness. His art is perhaps more human.
Neither Fort comme la Mort) nor Notre Cour,' Guy de Mau-
passant's last two novels, shows any trace of insanity. Yet when
the world learned in 1893 that this terrible disease had seized the
famous novelist, those who had read and studied his work were only
half surprised. It was then some years since the reading of Horla'
had made them anxious.
What is Horla’? – It is not a spirit, it is not a phantom of the
imagination. It is not any kind of a creature either natural or su-
pernatural. It is not even an illusion of sick senses, a hallucination
of fever. No; it is something both more real and less real, less dis-
quieting and more so: it is the unknown hostility surrounding one in
the invisible. It is everywhere,- in the bed curtains, in the water
pitcher, in the fire lighted to drive it from the house. Dream of a
madman, whom the wing of insanity had brushed! Already in 1884,
in the story entitled Lui, there had been signs of this fear of fears,
fear of the spasms of a wandering mind, fear of that horrible sensa-
tion of incomprehensible terror:-“I am afraid of the walls, of the
furniture, of the familiar objects which seem to me to assume a kind
of animal life. Above all I fear the horrible confusion of my thought,
of my reason escaping, entangled and scattered by an invisible and
mysterious anguish. ”
Sensuality, pessimism, obsession of nothingness, hallucinations of
the strange,- these different states cruelly asserted their logical
dependence in the intellectual history of Guy de Maupassant. The
mind which had seemed so profoundly sane and free from any mor-
bid germ became disordered, and then shattered entirely. The uni-
verse of forms, sounds, colors, and perfumes, to which he had so
complaisantly surrendered himself, became uninhabitable. Perhaps it
is necessary that in its attitude toward matter the mind should
always retain a kind of distrust, and dominate it without yielding
completely to its sorceries and enchantments. To this feast Maupas-
sant had opened all his senses. The day came when he felt his ideas
flying around him, he said, like butterflies. With his habitual grasp
he still sought to seize them while they were already far from his
empty brain.
Guy de Maupassant died in 1893, when forty-three
years old. His robust constitution could not resist the excessive ex-
penditure of all his energies.
Firmin Roz
## p. 9809 (#217) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9809
THE LAST YEARS OF MADAME JEANNE
From A Life)
J
EANNE did not go out any more. She hardly bestirred herself.
Each morning she got up at the same hour; took notice of
the weather outside; and then went down and seated her-
self before the fire in the hall.
She would remain there whole days, immovable, her eyes
fixed upon the flame, giving course to lamentable thoughts, fol-
lowing the melancholy retrospect of her sorrows. Little by little
darkness would invade the small room as the day closed, without
her having made any other movement than to put more wood on
the fire. Then Rosalie would bring the lamp, exclaiming to her,
"Come, come, Madame Jeanne! You must shake yourself up a
bit, or really you won't have any appetite this evening for sup-
per. ”
__
Often, too, she was persecuted by fixed ideas, which besieged
and tortured her; by insignificant preoccupations,— mere trifles
which took in her dim brain a false importance.
More than anything else she took to living over the past, –
her past that lay furthest back, haunted by the early days of
her life, - by her wedding trip, over there in Corsica. Suddenly
there would rise up before her, landscapes of that island so long
forgotten, seen now in the embers of the fireplace: she would
recall all the details, all the trivial little episodes, every face
once met in that time; the fine head of the guide that they had
employed — Jean Ravoli — kept coming before her, and she some-
times fancied that she heard his voice.
Then too she would fall into a revery upon the happy years
of her son's childhood, when she and Aunt Lison, with Paul, had
worked in the salad-bed together, kneeling side by side in the soft
ground, the two women rivals in their effort to amuse the child
as they toiled among the young plants.
So musing, her lips would murmur, “Poulet, Poulet! my little
Poulet,” — as if she were speaking to him; and, her revery broken
as she spoke, she would try during whole hours to write the boy's
name in the air, shaping with her outstretched finger these letters.
She would trace them slowly in space before the fire, sometimes
imagining that she really saw them, then believing that her eyes
had deceived her; and so she would rewrite the capital P again,
her old arm trembling with fatigue, but forcing herself to trace
XV11-614
## p. 9810 (#218) ###########################################
9810
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
was
the name to its end; then when she had finished it she would
write it over again. At last she could not write it any more.
She would confuse everything,— form other words at random,
enfeebled almost to idiocy.
All the little manias of those who live solitary took hold of
her. The least change in her surroundings irritated her,
Rosalie would often insist upon making her walk about, and
even carry her off to the roadside: but Jeanne at the end of
twenty minutes would always end up by saying, “No, I am too
tired out, my good girl;” and then she would sit down on the
edge of the green roadside.
Indeed, movement of any
kind soon distasteful to her,
and she would stay in bed in the morning as late as possible.
Ever since her infancy one particular habit had remained tena-
ciously with her,—that of jumping up out of bed just as soon as
she had swallowed her morning coffee. She was very much set
on that way of breakfasting, and the privation would have been
felt more than anything else. Each morning she would await
Rosalie's arrival at her bedside with an exaggerated impatience;
and just as soon as the cup was put upon the table at her side,
she would start up and empty it almost greedily, and then begin
to dress herself at once.
But now, little by little, she had grown into the habit of
dreamily waiting some seconds after she had put back the cup
into the plate; then she would settle herself again in her bed;
and then, little by little, would lengthen her idleness from day
to day, until Rosalie would come back furious at such delay, and
would dress her mistress almost by force.
Besides all this, she did not seem to have now any appear-
ance of a will about matters; and each time that Rosalie would
ask her opinion as to whether something was to be one way or
another, she would answer, “Do as you think best, my girl. ”
She fancied herself directly pursued by obstinate misfortune,
against which she made herself as fatalistic as an Oriental: the
habit of seeing her dreams evaporate, and her hopes come to
nothing, put her into the attitude of being afraid to undertake
anything; and she hesitated whole days before accomplishing the
most simple affair, convinced that she would only set out the
wrong way to do it, and that it would turn out badly. She
repeated continually, "I have never had any luck in my life. ”
Then it was Rosalie's turn to cry to her, “What would you say
## p. 9811 (#219) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9811
if you had had to work for your bread, - if you were obliged to
get up every morning at six o'clock and go out for your day's
doings? There are lots of people who are obliged to do that,
nevertheless; and when such people becoine too old, they have to
die - just of their poverty. ”
A little more strength came to her when the air softened into
the first days of spring; but she used this new activity only to
throw herself more and more into sombre thoughts.
One morning, when she had climbed up into the garret to
hunt for something, she happened to open a trunk full of old
calendars; somebody had kept them, as certain country people
have a habit of doing. It seemed to her that in finding them
she found the very years themselves of her past life; and she
remained stricken with a strange and confused emotion before
that pile of cardboard squares.
She took them up and carried them down-stairs. They were
of all shapes, big and little. She began to arrange them year
by year, upon the table; and then, all at once, she found the very
first one that had belonged to her,— the same one that she had
brought to Peuples. She looked at this one a long time, with
the dates marked off by her the morning of her departure from
Rouen, the day after her going away from the convent. She
wept over it. Sadly and slowly the tears fell; the bitter tears
of an old woman whose life was spread out before her on that
table.
With the calendars came to her an idea that soon became a
sort of obsession; terrible, incessant, inexorable. She would try to
remember just whatever she had done from day to day during
all her life. She pinned the calendars against the walls and on
the carpet one after the other — those faded pieces of cardboard;
and so she came to pass hours face to face with them, continually
asking herself, “Now let me see, - what was it happened to me
that month ? ”
She had checked certain memorable days in the course of her
life, hence now and then she was able to recall the episodes of
an entire month, bringing them up one by one, grouping them
together, connecting one by another all those little matters which
had preceded or followed some important event. She succeeded
by sheer force of attention, by force of memory and of concen-
trated will, in bringing back to mind almost completely her two
first years at Peuples. Far-away souvenirs of her life returned to
## p. 9812 (#220) ###########################################
9812
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
her with a singular facility, and with a kind of relief in them;
but the later years gradually seemed to lose themselves in a
mist, - to become mixed one with another: and so Jeanne would
remain now and then an indefinite time, her head bowed toward
one of the calendars, her mind spellbound by the past, without
being able to remember whether it was in this or that calendar
that such or such a remembrance ought to be decided. She
ranged them around the room like the religious pictures that
point out the Way of the Cross in a church, - these tableaux
of days that were no more. Then she would abruptly set down
her chair before one of them; and there she would sit until
night came, immobile, staring at it, buried in her vague re-
searches.
All at once, when the sap began to awaken in the boughs
beneath the warmth of the sun; when the crops began to spring
up in the fields, the trees to become verdant; when the apple-
trees in the orchard swelled out roundly like rosy balls, and per-
fumed the plain,--then a great counter-agitation came over her;
she could not seem to stay still. She went and came; she left
the house and returned to it twenty times a day, and even took
now and then a stroll the length of the farming tracts, excited
to a sort of fever of regret. The sight of a daisy blossoming in
a tuft of grass, the flash of a ray of sun slipping down between
the leaves, the glittering of a strip of water in which the blue
sky was mirrored, -all moved her; awakened a tenderness in
her; gave her sensations very far away, like an echo of her
emotions as a young girl, when she went dreaming about the
country-side.
One morning the faithful Rosalie came later than usual into
her room, and said, setting down upon the table the bowl of cof-
fee: Come now, drink this. Denis is down-stairs waiting for us
at the door. We will go over to Peuples to-day: I've got some
business to attend to over there. ”
Jeanne thought that she was going to faint, so deep was her
emotion at the sound of that name, at the thought of going to
the home of her girlhood. She dressed herself, trembling with
emotion, frightened and tremulous at the mere idea of seeing
again that dear house.
A radiant sky spread out above over all the world; the horse,
in fits and starts of liveliness, sometimes went almost at a gallop.
When they entered into the commune of Etouvent, Jeanne could
## p. 9813 (#221) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9813
hardly breathe, so much did her heart beat; and when she saw
from a distance the brick pillars of the boundary-line of her old
home, she exclaimed in a low voice two or three times, and as if
in spite of herself, “Qh! --oh! -oh! ” as if before things that
threatened to revolutionize all her heart.
They left the wagon with the Couillard family: then, while
Rosalie and her son went off to attend to their business, the care-
takers offered Jeanne the chance of taking a little turn around
the château, the present owners of it being absent; so they gave
her the keys.
Alone she set out; and when she was fairly before the old
manor house by the seaside, she stopped to look at its outside
once again. It had changed in nothing outside. The large,
grayish building that day showed upon its old walls the smile of
the sunshine.
—
tory under a curse, where even its pleasures carry with them
their thorns and their bitternesses; its sport tires by its furies
and its caprices; its conversations annoy by the oppositions of
its moods and the contrariety of its sentiments; its passions
and criminal attachments have their disgusts, their derangements,
their unpleasant brawls; its shows, hardly finding more in the
spectators than souls grossly dissolute, and incapable of being
awakened but by the most monstrous excesses of debauchery,
become stale, while moving only those delicate passions which
only show crime in the distance, and dress out traps for inno-
cence. The world, in fine, is a place where hope, regarded as a
passion so sweet, renders everybody unhappy; where those who
have nothing to hope for, think themselves still more miserable;
where all that pleases, pleases never for long; and where ennui
is almost the sweetest destiny and the most supportable that one
can expect in it.
This, my brethren, is the world: and it is not the obscure
world, which knows neither the great pleasures nor the charms
of prosperity, of favor, and of wealth,-it is the world at its
best; it is the world of the court; it is you yourselves who hear
me, my brethren.
## p. 9792 (#200) ###########################################
9792
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
This is the world; and it is not, in this aspect, one of those
paintings from imagination of which the resemblance is nowhere
to be found. I am painting the world only after your own
hearts; that is, such as you know it and always feel it yourselves
to be.
There, notwithstanding, is the place where all sinners are seek-
ing their felicity. There is their country. It is there that they
wish they could eternize themselves. This is the world which
they prefer to the eternal joys and to all the promises of faith.
New translation by J. F. B.
An exhaustive, masterly, and tremendous discourse, perhaps without
a parallel in all literature for boldness and terrible severity in scor-
ing the sin of unchastity, was that on the Prodigal Son, pronounced
before Louis XIV. in the chapel at Versailles during the Grand
Carême. His text was: “He went into a far country, and there
wasted his substance with riotous living. ” His exordium consists in
repeating minutely the story, dwelling on the willingness to live far
from home, with swine and like swine, — the nastiness, the emptiness,
the deadliness of such a life,- and closes with this affecting
PRAYER
P"
URIFY my lips, O my God! and while I shall recount the
excess of a voluptuous sinner, furnish me with expressions
which will not offend a virtue, the love of which I come
to-day to inspire in those who hear me; for the world, which
no longer knows any restraint on this vice, exacts much notwith-
standing of us in the language which condemns it.
Then he opens upon this sin his clean-sweeping artillery thus:-
The vice the deadly consequences of which I am to-day un-
dertaking to expose -- this vice so universally spread abroad on
the earth, and which is desolating with such fury the heritage
of Jesus; 'this vice of which the Christian religion had purged
the world, and which to-day has prevailed on religion itself - is
marked by certain peculiar characteristics, all which I find in the
story of the wanderings of the Prodigal Son.
There is never a vice which more separates the sinner from
God; there is never a vice which, after it has separated him from
God, leaves him less resource for returning to Him; there is
a vice which renders the sinner more insupportable to
never
## p. 9793 (#201) ###########################################
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
9793
con-
himself; finally, there is not one which renders him more
temptible in the eyes even of other men. Observe, I pray, all
these characteristics in the story of the sinner of our gospel.
The first characteristic of the vice of which we are speaking
is the putting, as it were, an abyss between God and the volup-
tuous soul, and the leaving him almost no more hope of return.
The prodigal of our gospel went off at first into a very far
country, which left no longer anything in common between him
and his natural father: "He took his journey into a far country. ”
Indeed, in all the other vices, the sinner seems still to hold
upon God by some feeble ties. There are some vices which respect
at least the sacredness of the body, and do not strengthen its
inordinate inclinations; there are others which do not spread so
deep darkness on the mind, and leave at least some use of the
light of reason; finally, there are some which do not occupy
the heart to such a degree as absolutely to take away from it the
relish for all which could lead back to God. But the shameful
passion of which I am speaking dishonors the body, extinguishes
reason, renders all the things of heaven disagreeable, and raises
a wall of separation between God and the sinner which seems to
take away all hope of reunion. —"He took his journey into a far
country. ”
I said that it dishonors the body of the Christian; it profanes
the temple of God in us; it makes the members of Jesus do an
ignominious service: it soils a flesh nourished on his body and
his blood, consecrated by the grace of baptism; a flesh which is
to attain immortality and be conformable to the glorious likeness
of Jesus risen; a flesh which will repose in the holy place, and
whose ashes will await, under the altar of the Lamb, the day of
revelation, mingled with the ashes of the virgins and the martyrs;
a flesh more holy than those august temples where the glory of
the Lord reposes; more worthy of being possessed with honor
and with reverence than the very vases of the sanctuary, conse-
crated by the terrible mysteries which they inclose. But what a
barrier does not the opprobrium of this vice put to the return of
God into us! Can a holy God, in whose sight even the heavenly
spirits are unclean, sufficiently separate himself from a flesh cov-
ered with shame and ignominy? The creature being but dust
and ashes, the holiness of God must suffer by lowering himself
down to it: ah, what then can the sinner promise himself who
joins to his own nothingness and baseness the indignities of a
XVII-613
.
## p. 9794 (#202) ###########################################
9794
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
>
(
body shamefully dishonored ? — "He took his journey into a far
country. ”
I said that this vice extinguishes even in the soul all her
lights, and that the sinner is no longer capable of those salu-
tary reflections which often lead back an unbelieving soul. The
prodigal of our gospel, already blinded by his passion, does not
see the wrong he is doing himself in separating himself from his
paternal home; the ingratitude of which he is rendering himself
culpable towards his natural father; the dangers to which he is
exposing himself in wishing to be the sole arbiter of his own
destiny; the decencies even which he is violating in setting out
for a far country, without the counsel and advice of him to whom
he owes at least the sentiments of reverence and deference which
mere nature itself inspires. He starts, and no longer sees but by
the eyes of his passion. — "He took his journey into a far coun-
try. ”
Such is the characteristic of this ill-fated passion,-it spreads
a thick cloud over reason: men wise, shrewd, brilliant, lose here
at once all their shrewdness, all their wisdom; all their principles
of conduct are instantly effaced; a new manner of thinking is
made up, in which all the ordinary ideas are proscribed, - it is
no longer light and counsel, it is an impetuous inclination which
decides and rules all their proceedings; what one owes to others
and what one owes to one's self is forgotten; one is blind to
one's fortune, to one's duty, to one's reputation, to one's interests,
to the decencies even of which the other passions are so jealous;
and while one is giving one's self for a spectacle to the public,
it is one's self alone that does not see one. One is made blind
to fortune: and Ammon loses his life and crown for not having
been able to subdue his unjust feebleness. One is made blind to
duty: and the impassioned wife of Potiphar no longer remembers
that Joseph is a slave; she forgets her birth, her glory, her pride,
and no longer sees in that Hebrew aught but the object of her
shameful passion. One is made blind to gratitude: and David
has no longer eyes either for Uriah's faithfulness, or for the
ingratitude of which he is going to render himself guilty towards
a God who had drawn him from the dust to set him on the
throne of Judah; from the time that his heart was touched, all
his lights were extinguished.
Thus it is, O my God!
that thou punishest the passions of the flesh by the darkness of
the mind; that thy light shines no longer on souls adulterous and
## p. 9795 (#203) ###########################################
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
9795
.
corrupt, and that their foolish heart is darkened. — "He took his
journey into a far country. ”
Finally, this deplorable passion puts into the heart an invinci-
ble disgust for the things of heaven.
Whatever is not
marked by the shameful characteristic of voluptuousness interests
no longer. Even the duties of society, the functions of a charge,
the decencies of a dignity, domestic cares,--all weary, all become
disagreeable, outside of passion.
Solomon is more attent-
ive to building profane temples to the gods of his foreign wives
than to easing his people of the weight of the public expense.
[A thrust of amazing boldness in the face of Louis XIV. ! ] . .
One employs one s self in occupations all which go to nourish
voluptuousness, -- profane shows, pernicious reading. lascivious
,
music, obscene pictures.
It is the characteristic of this
passion to fill the whole heart entirely; one is no longer able
to occupy one's self but with it; one is possessed, drunk with
it; one finds it everywhere; everything shows the marks of its
deadly impress; everything awakens its iniquitous desires; the
world, solitude, presence, absence, objects the most indifferent,
occupations the most serious, the holy temple itself, the sacred
altars, the terrible mysteries, recall the remembrance of it: and
everything becomes unclean, as the Apostle says, to him who is
already himself unclean. —"He took his journey into a far coun-
try. ”
Look back, unbelieving soul; recall those first sentiments of
modesty and virtue with which you were born, and see all the
way you have made in the road of iniquity, since the fatal day
when this shameful vice soiled your heart; and how much you
have since removed yourself away from your God: «He took his
journey into a far country. ”
Translation of J. F. B.
C
Probably the most visibly effective of all the many extraordinary
bursts of Massillon's oratory was the celebrated passage in the per-
oration of the sermon on the (Small Number of the Saved,' pro-
nounced before Louis XIV. in the chapel royal at Versailles in the
course of the Grand Carême); when, having in a long discourse
wrought up and prepared his auditory, he began :-
If Jesus should appear in this temple, in the midst of this
assembly, the most august in the whole world, to be our judge,
to make the terrible separation between the sheep and the goats,
## p. 9796 (#204) ###########################################
9796
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
do you believe that the greater number of us would be set on
his right hand ? — do you believe that things would be at least
equal ? - do you believe there would be found here only ten
righteous, which the Lord was not able to find formerly in five
entire cities? I ask you; — you do not know, I do not know my-
self. Thou alone, O God, dost know those who belong to thee!
But if we do not know who belong to him, we do know at least
that sinners do not. But who are the faithful believers here as-
sembled ? — Titles and dignities must be counted for nothing; you
will be stripped of them before Jesus. Who are they? A mass
of sinners who do not wish to be converted; still more who wish
to be, but who are putting off their conversion: a good many
who were converted, but only always to backslide; finally, a
great number who think they have no need of conversion: here
is the party of the reprobates. Retrench these four sorts of sin-
ners from this holy assembly; for they will be retrenched in the
great day; - appear now, ye righteous: where are you! Remnant
of Israel, pass to the right; wheat of Jesus, separate yourselves
from this chaff destined to the fire. O God! where are thine
elect? and what remains for thy portion ?
New translation by J. F. B.
It is a curious and very significant tradition that this tremendous
sermon had been pronounced before in St. Eustache in Paris, where
the turn in the passage given above was unexpected, and the effect
unparalleled. At his call for the remnant of Israel,” it is said that
the whole congregation, carried away in sympathy with the orator,
rose to their feet in a body, not knowing what they were doing.
Stranger still, this was known at Versailles, and the passage was
expected and eagerly awaited. Yet hard as it is to credit it, we are
told that the effect was not a whit less tremendous. Strangest per-
haps of all, it is said that Massillon himself, by his posture, by his
look of dejection, by his silence of some seconds (a frequent usage of
his to add emphasis), associated himself with and augmented the ter-
ror of the audience in the chapel royal at Versailles. But we must
suppose that it was an expression of sincere sympathy, as well as a
sentiment of refinement and decency.
SFBingham
## p. 9797 (#205) ###########################################
9797
PHILIP MASSINGER
(1583-1640)
BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL
He plays of Philip Massinger embody the prosaic spirit of the
period of decline which followed Shakespeare. This spirit
is not indicated by the subject-matter of his dramas. The
plots of "The Duke of Milan,' (The Guardian,' or 'The Fatal Dowry,'
admit of great treatment. In Massinger's hands they are at least
well woven. His absence of imagination is shown rather by his
lack of moral consistency in the depiction
of character. His men and women are pup-
pets, moved to action by the will of their
artificer, not by the laws of their individu-
ality.
The events of Massinger's life are ob-
scure and elusive. He was born in 1583;
he entered St. Albans Hall, Oxford, in 1602.
During his four years' residence there he
gave his mind more to poetry and romances
than to logic and philosophy. ” After leav-
ing Oxford he went up to London, to throw
in his fortunes with the frequenters of the
Mermaid Tavern. The enchanted world of Philip MASSINGER
the drama was at that time clothed in the
richness and beauty of its prime. The young hearts of Beaumont
and Fletcher, of Webster and Tourneur, still throbbed with «the love
of love, the hate of hate. ” The brain of genius was still unchilled
by doubt and speculation.
Massinger, though contemporary with these great children of a
great age, belongs by his spirit to a duller time. His dramas have
the solidity of prose without its freedom. His characters and situa-
tions lack the spontaneity of nature. He is melodramatic in the
sense that his men and women are personifications of virtue or vice.
The broad via media, the highway on which the majority of mankind
is afoot, has no place in his dramas. He is blind to the half-lights
of character, - to the subtle blendings of shade and color in the minds
of men.
((
## p. 9798 (#206) ###########################################
9798
PHILIP MASSINGER
Camiola and Adorni in 'The Maid of Honour' are exceptions to this
rule. Camiola, who loves Bertoldo and is herself hopelessly beloved
of Adorni, is a small but ravishing substance. ” Her impetuous affec-
tion, like Juliet's, goes directly to its goal without subterfuge or
deviation. When she learns from the servants that Bertoldo is in
prison, abandoned by the King, the impatience of her sorrow leaps to
her lips:
« Possible! Pray you, stand off.
If I do mutter treason to myself
My heart will break; and yet I will not curse him,-
He is my King. The news you have delivered
Makes me weary of your company: we'll salute
When we meet next. I'll bring you to the door.
Nay, pray you, no more compliments. ”
Adorni is a noble and convincing figure. When commissioned by
Camiola to rescue his rival, she asks of him, «You will do this ? ” He
answers, « Faithfully, madam;" then aside, “but not live long after. ”
Massinger rarely clothes such abundance of meaning in so few words.
(The Fatal Dowry' and The Duke of Milan' are generally as
signed the first place among the tragedies of Massinger. They are
stately plays, but dreary and lifeless. His two comedies A New
Way to Pay Old Debts) and The City Madam' are comedies only
in the sense that they do not end in death and disaster. The char-
acter of Sir Giles Overreach in the former play has held the stage
until the present time. Of Massinger's classical dramas, Arthur
Symons assigns the highest place to Believe as You List,' though
the better known play (The Roman Actor' was held by the author
“to be the most perfect work of my Minerva. ”
Massinger is farthest from greatness in his depiction of women.
With the exception of Camiola, of Lidia in the Great Duke of
Florence,' of Bellisant in the Parliament of Love,' of Matilda in the
(Bashful Lover,) and of one or two others, his women are vulgar
and sensual. Their puriiy and their vice are alike unconvincing.
This defect of portrayal is common, however, to the majority of
Massinger's characters. They are uninteresting because their qualities
are imposed upon them. There is no fidelity to the hidden springs
of action.
Massinger wrote a number of plays in conjunction with other
dramatists. The best known is (The Virgin-Martyr. ' Dekker's touch
is recognizable in such lines as these: -
« I could weary stars,
And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes,
With my late watching. ”
## p. 9799 (#207) ###########################################
PHILIP MASSINGER
9799
Massinger was a prolific writer.
a prolific writer. Beside the plays already men-
tioned, he gave to the stage of his day “The Renegado,' 'The Bond-
man,' 'A Very Woman,' 'The Emperor of the East, The Picture,'
and "The Unnatural Combat. ' Coleridge has recommended the diction
of Massinger to the imitation of modern writers, on the ground that
it is the nearest approach to the language of real life at all com-
patible with a fixed metre. It is this very characteristic of it which
deprives it of the highest poetical quality.
Alma Mature Shall
FROM THE MAID OF HONOUR)
[Camiola, who is in love with Bertoldo, is told by his friends Antonio
and Gasparo that he is a prisoner, and that the King has refused to pay his
ransom. ]
Enter a Servant
Servant - The signiors, madam, Gasparo and Antonio,
Selected friends of the renowned Bertoldo,
Put ashore this morning.
Camiola
Without him ?
Servant
I think so.
Camiola - Never think more, then!
Servant
They have been at court,
Kissed the King's hand, and, their first duties done
To him, appear ambitious to tender
To you their second service.
Camiola
Wait. them hither.
Fear, do not rack me! Reason, now if ever
Haste with thy aids, and tell me, such a wonder
As my Bertoldo is, with such care fashioned,
Must not, nay, cannot, in Heaven's providence
So soon miscarry! -
Enter Antonio and Gasparo
Pray you, forbear: ere you take
The privilege as strangers to salute me,
(Excuse my manners) make me first understand
How it is with Bertoldo.
## p. 9800 (#208) ###########################################
9800
PHILIP MASSINGER
-
Gasparo —
The relation
Will not, I fear, deserve your thanks.
Antonio
I wish
Some other should inform you.
Camiola
Is he dead ?
You see, though with some fear, I dare inquire it.
Gasparo - Dead! Would that were the worst: a debt were paid then,
Kings in their birth owe nature.
Camiola -
Is there aught
More terrible than death?
Antonio
Yes, to a spirit
Like his: cruel imprisonment, and that
Without the hope of freedom.
Camiola -
You abuse me:
The royal King cannot, in love to virtue,
(Though all the springs of affection were dried up)
But pay his ransom.
Gasparo
When you know what 'tis,
You will think otherwise: no less will do it
Than fifty thousand crowns.
Camiola -
A petty sum,
The price weighed with the purchase: fifty thousand!
To the King 'tis nothing. He that can spare more
To his minion for a masque, cannot but ransom
Such a brother at a million.
The King's munificence.
Antonio
In your opinion;
But 'tis most certain: he does not alone
In himself refuse to pay it, but forbids
All other men.
Camiola --
Are you sure of this?
Gasparo-
You may read
The edict to that purpose, published by him.
That will resolve you.
Camiola
Possible! Pray you, stand off.
If I do mutter treason to myself
My heart will break; and yet I will not curse him,-
He is my King. The news you have delivered
Makes me weary of your company: we'll salute
When we meet next. I'll bring you to the door.
Nay, pray you, no more compliments.
You wrong
## p. 9801 (#209) ###########################################
PHILIP MASSINGER
9801
FROM A NEW WAY TO PAY OLD DEBTS)
O
(Sir Giles Overreach, on fire with greed and with ambition to found a
great feudal house, treats about marrying his daughter with Lord Lovell. )
VERREACH - To my wish: we are private.
I come not to make offer with my daughter
A certain portion,- that were poor and trivial:
In one word I pronounce all that is mine,
In lands or leases, ready coin or goods,
With her, my lord, comes to you; nor shall you have
One motive to induce you to believe
I live too long, since every year I'll add
Something unto the heap, which shall be yours too.
Lovell -- You are a right kind father.
Overreach
You shall have reason
To think me such. How do you like this seat?
It is well wooded and well watered,- the acres
Fertile and rich: would it not serve for change
To entertain your friends in a summer progress?
What thinks my noble lord ?
Lovell -
'Tis a wholesome air,
And well built; and she that is mistress of it
Worthy the large revenues.
Overreach -
She the mistress!
It may be so for a time; but let my lord
Say only that he but like it, and would have it,-
I say, ere long 'tis his.
Lovell -
Impossible!
Overreach-
You do conclude too fast: not knowing me,
Nor the engines that I work by. 'Tis not alone
The lady Allworth's lands;— but point out any man's
In all the shire, and say they lie convenient
And useful for your Lordship, and once more
I say aloud, they are yours.
Lovell -
I dare not own
What's by unjust and cruel means extorted.
My fame and credit are more dear to me,
Than so to expose 'em to be censured by
The public voice.
Ozerreach
You run, my lord, no hazard :
Your reputation shall stand as fair
In all good men's opinions as now.
Nor can my actions, though condemned for ill.
Cast any foul aspersion upon yours:
## p. 9802 (#210) ###########################################
9802
PHILIP MASSINGER
For though I do contemn report myself,
As a mere sound, I still will be so tender
Of what concerns you in all points of honor,
That the immaculate whiteness of your fame,
Nor your unquestioned integrity,
Shall e'er be sullied with one taint or spot
That may take from your innocence and candor.
All my ambition is to have my daughter
Right Honorable, which my lord can make her;
And might I live to dance upon my knee
A young Lord Lovell, born by her unto you,
I write nil ultra to my proudest hopes.
As for possessions and annual rents,
Equivalent to maintain you in the part
Your noble birth and present state require,
I do remove the burden from your shoulders,
And take it on my own; for though I ruin
The country to supply your riotous waste,
The scourge of prodigals (want) shall never find you.
Lovell - Are you not frighted with the imprecations
And curses of whole families, made wretched
By your sinister practices ?
Overreach
Yes, as rocks are
When foamy billows split themselves against
Their flinty ribs; or as the moon is moved
When wolves, with hunger pined, howl at her brightness.
I am of a solid temper, and like these,
Steer on a constant course: with mine own sword,
If called into the field, I can make that right
Which fearful enemies murmured at as wrong.
Now, for those other piddling complaints,
Breathed out in bitterness: as when they call me
Extortioner, tyrant, cormorant, or intruder
On my poor neighbor's rights, or grand incloser
Of what was common to my private use;
Nay, when my ears are pierced with widows' cries,
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold:
I only think what 'tis to have my daughter
Right Honorable; and 'tis a powerful charm
Makes me insensible of remorse or pity,
Or the least sting of conscience.
Lovell —
I admire
The toughness of your nature.
Overreach-
My lord, and for my daughter, I am marble.
'Tis for you,
## p. 9803 (#211) ###########################################
9803
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
(1850-1893)
BY FIRMIN ROZ
M
HEN, after a volume of poetry, Des Vers’ (Verses: 1880), Guy
de Maupassant published in 1881 the famous story (Boule de
Suif (Tallow-Ball), he was claimed by the naturalists; and
Zola, in an enthusiastic article, introduced the author and the work
to the public. It learned that the new-comer to the Soirées de Médan
was a robust Norman, proud of his strength, skilled in physical exer-
cises. During ten years, Gustave Flaubert,
his godfather, had gradually and patiently
taught him his profession of observer and
writer. According to some, the pupil
equaled the master. He certainly excelled
a great number of those who claimed to be
enrolled in their ranks.
The document school was then in all its
glory. It was the heroic time of the so-
called realistic novel, composed of slices out
of life; of the scientific and psychologic
novel, in which the study of the passions,
the conflicts of reason with instinct, — all
the old-time psychology, in short, — was
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
replaced by the organic dissection of the
characters, atavism, the influence of environment and circumstances,–
all determinism, in a word. In this examination of facts, hearts were
neglected; and novels laboriously constructed according to the posi-
tivist method set forth by Zola in Le Roman Experimental'— novels
in which all must be explained and demonstrated, which attempted
to reproduce the very movement of life — were sometimes as false and
devoid of life as photographs, which exactly reproduce the details of
a face without catching its expression.
By temperament, by education, Guy de Maupassant was above all
a realist. He had learned from Flaubert that anything is worthy of
art when the artist knows how to fashion it. A country pharmacist,
pretentious and commonplace (Bournisien in Madame Bovary'), is
no less interesting than a scholar, a poet, or a prince. The writer
## p. 9804 (#212) ###########################################
9804
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
>
should not accord any preference to one or another of his heroes.
His impartiality guarantees the sureness of his observation. His rôle
is to express life simply and purely, without seeking its meaning,
without choosing this or that form to the exclusion of some other.
But if the vulgarity or even coarseness of the characters and environ-
ment, the crudeness of scene and language, aroused the curiosity of
the public, and assisted the author's success by winning admirations
not always addressed perhaps to what was truly admirable,—the
learned, the connoisseurs, were not deceived. They greeted him as
a master writer, an unequaled story-teller, who in spite of Zola pre-
served the classic virtues-precision, clearness, art of composition --
which are necessary to the novel, indispensable to the short story.
This alone was enough to distinguish Maupassant from the Zolaists
and the De Goncourtists, who were then swarming: his firm, alert
prose is so profoundly French, free from neologisms, strong in verbs,
sober in adjectives, every sentence standing out with no apparent
effort, no excess, like a muscle in the perfect body of a young
athlete.
In less than twelve years Guy de Maupassant published ten collec-
tions of short stories and tales: Mademoiselle Fifi, Miss Harriett,'
Au Soleil' (In the Sunshine), Les Sæurs Rondoli? (The Sisters
Rondoli), Contes de la Bécasse,' (M. Parent,' (L'Inutile Beauté' (Vain
Beauty), etc. ; and six novels: “Une Vie) (A Life: 1883), Mont-Oriol,'
(Bel-Ami? (1885), Pierre et Jean' (Peter and John: 1888), 'Fort comme
la Mort' (Strong as Death: 1889), Notre Ceur' (Our Heart: 1893). *
Guy de Maupassant's place, then, is in the first rank of the real-
ists, and nearer to Flaubert than to De Goncourt and Zola. For the
purest expression of naturalism, one must seek him and his master.
He has that sense of the real which so many naturalists lack, and
which the care for exact detail does not replace. Beside the con-
gealed works of that school his work lives, not as a representation of
life but as life itself, - interior life expressed by exterior life, life of
men and of animals, the complex and multiform life of the universe
weighed down by eternal fatalities. And in the least little stories,
most often far from gay,— between two phrases of Rachel Rondoli or
of M. Parent; through evocation of a sky, a perfume, a landscape, -
one experiences the disquiet of physical mysteries, the shudder of
love or of death. This living realism is absolutely pure with Guy de
Maupassant. There is no longer any trace of that romantic heredity
which is still apparent with the author of Salammbô' and of 'La
Tentation de Saint Antoine. He was rarely even tempted toward
the study and description of what are called the upper classes; or by
the luxury which fascinated Balzac. His predilection for ordinary
* Published by V. Havard in nine volumes; by Ollendorff in eight volumes.
## p. 9805 (#213) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9805
-
scenes and ordinary types is everywhere evident; he uses all kinds
of settings,- a café, a furnished room, a farm-yard, seen in their act-
ual character without poetic transfiguration, with all their vulgarity,
their poverty, their ugliness. And he uses too all kinds of charac-
ters,-clerks, peasants of Normandy, petty bourgeois of Paris and of
the country. They live the empty, tragic, or grotesque hours of their
lives; are sometimes touching, sometimes odious; and never achieve
greatness either in heroism or in wickedness.
They are not gay, these stories; and the kind of amusement they
afford is strongly mixed with irony, pity, and contempt. Gayety,
whether brutal, frank, mocking, or delicate, never leaves this bitter
taste in the heart. How pitiful in its folly, in its vanity, in its weak-
ness, is the humanity which loves, weeps, or agitates in the tales of
Maupassant! There, virtue if awkward is never recompensed, nor vice
if skillful punished; mothers are not always saints, nor sons always
grateful and respectful; the guilty are often ignorant of remorse.
Then are these beings immoral ? To tell the truth, they are guided
by their instincts, by events, submissive to the laws of necessity, and
apparently released by the author from all responsibility.
Such is the individual humor of Guy de Maupassant, - a humor
rarely joyous, without sparkling shocks of repartee; a humor tinged
with bitterness and contempt, arising usually from the seriousness of
ridiculous people and from the ridiculousness of serious people, and
nearly always from the universal powerlessness to advance beyond
mediocrity. And if Maupassant is cruel to his heroes, he would
doubtless say that it is because life too is cruel, unjust, sad, deceiv-
ing; and that beauty, virtue, and happiness are only exceptions.
Thence the pessimistic tendency of his work. Nothing shows this
original pessimism - rough and lucid, emotional without lyricism --
better than the novel Une Vie. ' It is the story of a co
commonplace
existence: the life of a country woman, married to a brutal and ava-
ricious country squire, delivered from him through a neighbor's ven-
geance, deceived by her son as well as by her husband, and fixing
her obstinate hope upon the grandchild, who perhaps, if death does
not liberate her in time, will add one supreme deception to all the
others. This woman, who believes herself the victim of a special
fatality, has against her nothing but the chance of a bad choice,
and the weakness of her own tender spirit, incapable of struggle or
action. She is good, pure, and perhaps more sympathetic than any
other of Maupassant's heroines. Her life is like many other lives,
and doubtless the sadness which emanates from it widens to infinity.
In the short stories, this pessimistic tendency grows finer and
sharper so as sometimes to find expression in a tragic element.
But with Maupassant the tragic is of very special essence, and not
## p. 9806 (#214) ###########################################
9806
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
>
expressed in grand melodramatic effects or catastrophes as in roman-
ticism. Nor does it consist in the classic debate between duty and
passion. No, it consists rather in a wholly physical emotion, excited
by the wretchedness of certain destinies, and evoking in its turn the
mysterious menaces which hover over us. Disease, madness, death,
are in ambush behind every door of our house; and no
one has
expressed better than Maupassant the terror of the being who feels
their breath or sees them face to face. No one has felt with deeper
sorrow behind this human misery, the frightful solitude of man
among men; the black chasm which separates us from those whom
we love; the impossibility of uniting two hearts or two thoughts;
the slow succession of the little miseries of life; the fatal disorgan-
ization of a solitary existence whose dreams have vanished; and the
reason of those tragic endings which only nervous, sensitive minds
can understand.
This enables us to grasp the very principle of Maupassant's pes-
simism, and of this disorganization in which his clear and vigorous
intellect foundered. Even his first volume, Des Vers,' showed this
haunting thought of death, this sadness of the supersensitive soul har-
assed and unsatisfied, powerless to take pleasure in the joys which
are scattered through the universe. In the two little poems (La
Venus Rustique (The Country Venus) and (Au Bord de l'Eau' (On
the Water's Brink), there is as it were an intoxication with life, which
at first appears the sane and happy expression of a robust tempera-
ment, but which quickly ends in nostalgia and horror of nothingness.
And here is the keynote to Maupassant's sensualism: it is the fran-
tic desire to concentrate in the senses of a single man all that the
material world contains of delight,— colors, sounds, perfumes, beauty
under all its forms; it is the adoration of matter, and it is the de-
spair of a being crushed by the blind, implacable, and eternal divinity
which it has chosen. What does feeling become in this pagan joy,
this mother of pains and slaveries? It is easy to see: love is as fatal
as death. It is a force of nature which we can neither control nor
avoid, nor fix according to our wish; and its very nature explains
the derangements of hearts, the betrayals, the jealousies, which deck
it in fictitious sentimentality. Final conclusion: our free will, our
liberty, are illusions; and morality is suppressed at the same time
that remorses, internal conflicts, duties are reduced to mere conven-
tions useful to society.
This is the principle of Maupassant's pessimism. As is evident, it
springs directly from his naturalism. His conception of art and his
conception of life are closely allied. This pessimism became more
and more accentuated from one work to another; from Une Vie'
(1883) to Notre Cour) (1892). But in the measure of the novelist's
## p. 9807 (#215) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9807
more and more profound investigation of life, he imperceptibly and to
a certain degree substituted psychological study for realism according
to Flaubert's formula. This evolution of Guy de Maupassant's talent
asserts itself in Pierre et Jean (1888), and is still more clearly
delineated in Fort comme la Mort' and Notre Cæur. ' We are far
away from the Boule de Suifs' and the like. His observation has
become acuter, his language better shaded. There is a more flexible
precision in the study of more delicate sentiments and of more
complicated minds. Is not the love of the old painter Bertin for
the daughter of the woman he has passionately loved an exceptional
sentiment ? It was a ticklish subject; and the author presented it
very ably, without brutalities. We cannot help pitying the woman
who feels herself growing old, the man who cherished in his friend's
daughter the young beauty of the mother whom he once loved. But
the charming child is ignorant of the harm she is innocently doing.
She marries, and the old painter bears his passion with him 'in death;
while Madame de Guilleroy burns the old letters, their love letters,
found in a drawer, and Olivier's resigned agony is lighted up by the
reflection of their blazing leaves.
This novel was less successful than its predecessors. The ordi-
nary public, who had enjoyed Maître Hauchecorne) and Mademoi-
selle Fifi,' thought that its author had been changed. It asserted
that the success of the psychologic novel had fascinated Maupassant.
Perhaps we should see in this new phase of his talent only a conse-
quence of the modification which years and the events of his inti-
mate life had little by little brought about. Notre Cour) would
confirm this view. It resembles an autobiography. It is the eternal
misunderstanding between man and woman, — drawing near for an
ant, never united, and never giving the same words the same
meaning. What an exquisite charming face is that of Michelle de
Burne! a costly flower blossoming after centuries of extreme civiliza-
tion; a positive, gently egoistic being, in whom nothing is left of
primitive woman except the need of dazzling others and of being
adored. Simple sincere Elizabeth may console André Mariolle; but
neither brilliant orchid nor humble daisy can replace or make the
other forgotten. That is why André, uniting the two in a single
bouquet, renounces the torturing dream of one only love.
Thus Guy
de Maupassant had been led by the progress of his observation and
his analysis to penetrate into the intimate regions of the heart, where
our most secret and most diverse sentiments hide, struggle, suppli-
cate, and contend with each other. This progress of the novelist is
natural. As his observation grows sharper and finer, it penetrates
deeper; proceeds from faces to minds, and from gestures to feelings.
Psychological analysis appears, and with it reflection. The mind falls
## p. 9808 (#216) ###########################################
9808
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
back upon itself; the man returns to his own thoughts, his dreams,
his emotions. He descends into his own heart, and irony becomes pity
and tenderness. His art is perhaps more human.
Neither Fort comme la Mort) nor Notre Cour,' Guy de Mau-
passant's last two novels, shows any trace of insanity. Yet when
the world learned in 1893 that this terrible disease had seized the
famous novelist, those who had read and studied his work were only
half surprised. It was then some years since the reading of Horla'
had made them anxious.
What is Horla’? – It is not a spirit, it is not a phantom of the
imagination. It is not any kind of a creature either natural or su-
pernatural. It is not even an illusion of sick senses, a hallucination
of fever. No; it is something both more real and less real, less dis-
quieting and more so: it is the unknown hostility surrounding one in
the invisible. It is everywhere,- in the bed curtains, in the water
pitcher, in the fire lighted to drive it from the house. Dream of a
madman, whom the wing of insanity had brushed! Already in 1884,
in the story entitled Lui, there had been signs of this fear of fears,
fear of the spasms of a wandering mind, fear of that horrible sensa-
tion of incomprehensible terror:-“I am afraid of the walls, of the
furniture, of the familiar objects which seem to me to assume a kind
of animal life. Above all I fear the horrible confusion of my thought,
of my reason escaping, entangled and scattered by an invisible and
mysterious anguish. ”
Sensuality, pessimism, obsession of nothingness, hallucinations of
the strange,- these different states cruelly asserted their logical
dependence in the intellectual history of Guy de Maupassant. The
mind which had seemed so profoundly sane and free from any mor-
bid germ became disordered, and then shattered entirely. The uni-
verse of forms, sounds, colors, and perfumes, to which he had so
complaisantly surrendered himself, became uninhabitable. Perhaps it
is necessary that in its attitude toward matter the mind should
always retain a kind of distrust, and dominate it without yielding
completely to its sorceries and enchantments. To this feast Maupas-
sant had opened all his senses. The day came when he felt his ideas
flying around him, he said, like butterflies. With his habitual grasp
he still sought to seize them while they were already far from his
empty brain.
Guy de Maupassant died in 1893, when forty-three
years old. His robust constitution could not resist the excessive ex-
penditure of all his energies.
Firmin Roz
## p. 9809 (#217) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9809
THE LAST YEARS OF MADAME JEANNE
From A Life)
J
EANNE did not go out any more. She hardly bestirred herself.
Each morning she got up at the same hour; took notice of
the weather outside; and then went down and seated her-
self before the fire in the hall.
She would remain there whole days, immovable, her eyes
fixed upon the flame, giving course to lamentable thoughts, fol-
lowing the melancholy retrospect of her sorrows. Little by little
darkness would invade the small room as the day closed, without
her having made any other movement than to put more wood on
the fire. Then Rosalie would bring the lamp, exclaiming to her,
"Come, come, Madame Jeanne! You must shake yourself up a
bit, or really you won't have any appetite this evening for sup-
per. ”
__
Often, too, she was persecuted by fixed ideas, which besieged
and tortured her; by insignificant preoccupations,— mere trifles
which took in her dim brain a false importance.
More than anything else she took to living over the past, –
her past that lay furthest back, haunted by the early days of
her life, - by her wedding trip, over there in Corsica. Suddenly
there would rise up before her, landscapes of that island so long
forgotten, seen now in the embers of the fireplace: she would
recall all the details, all the trivial little episodes, every face
once met in that time; the fine head of the guide that they had
employed — Jean Ravoli — kept coming before her, and she some-
times fancied that she heard his voice.
Then too she would fall into a revery upon the happy years
of her son's childhood, when she and Aunt Lison, with Paul, had
worked in the salad-bed together, kneeling side by side in the soft
ground, the two women rivals in their effort to amuse the child
as they toiled among the young plants.
So musing, her lips would murmur, “Poulet, Poulet! my little
Poulet,” — as if she were speaking to him; and, her revery broken
as she spoke, she would try during whole hours to write the boy's
name in the air, shaping with her outstretched finger these letters.
She would trace them slowly in space before the fire, sometimes
imagining that she really saw them, then believing that her eyes
had deceived her; and so she would rewrite the capital P again,
her old arm trembling with fatigue, but forcing herself to trace
XV11-614
## p. 9810 (#218) ###########################################
9810
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
was
the name to its end; then when she had finished it she would
write it over again. At last she could not write it any more.
She would confuse everything,— form other words at random,
enfeebled almost to idiocy.
All the little manias of those who live solitary took hold of
her. The least change in her surroundings irritated her,
Rosalie would often insist upon making her walk about, and
even carry her off to the roadside: but Jeanne at the end of
twenty minutes would always end up by saying, “No, I am too
tired out, my good girl;” and then she would sit down on the
edge of the green roadside.
Indeed, movement of any
kind soon distasteful to her,
and she would stay in bed in the morning as late as possible.
Ever since her infancy one particular habit had remained tena-
ciously with her,—that of jumping up out of bed just as soon as
she had swallowed her morning coffee. She was very much set
on that way of breakfasting, and the privation would have been
felt more than anything else. Each morning she would await
Rosalie's arrival at her bedside with an exaggerated impatience;
and just as soon as the cup was put upon the table at her side,
she would start up and empty it almost greedily, and then begin
to dress herself at once.
But now, little by little, she had grown into the habit of
dreamily waiting some seconds after she had put back the cup
into the plate; then she would settle herself again in her bed;
and then, little by little, would lengthen her idleness from day
to day, until Rosalie would come back furious at such delay, and
would dress her mistress almost by force.
Besides all this, she did not seem to have now any appear-
ance of a will about matters; and each time that Rosalie would
ask her opinion as to whether something was to be one way or
another, she would answer, “Do as you think best, my girl. ”
She fancied herself directly pursued by obstinate misfortune,
against which she made herself as fatalistic as an Oriental: the
habit of seeing her dreams evaporate, and her hopes come to
nothing, put her into the attitude of being afraid to undertake
anything; and she hesitated whole days before accomplishing the
most simple affair, convinced that she would only set out the
wrong way to do it, and that it would turn out badly. She
repeated continually, "I have never had any luck in my life. ”
Then it was Rosalie's turn to cry to her, “What would you say
## p. 9811 (#219) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9811
if you had had to work for your bread, - if you were obliged to
get up every morning at six o'clock and go out for your day's
doings? There are lots of people who are obliged to do that,
nevertheless; and when such people becoine too old, they have to
die - just of their poverty. ”
A little more strength came to her when the air softened into
the first days of spring; but she used this new activity only to
throw herself more and more into sombre thoughts.
One morning, when she had climbed up into the garret to
hunt for something, she happened to open a trunk full of old
calendars; somebody had kept them, as certain country people
have a habit of doing. It seemed to her that in finding them
she found the very years themselves of her past life; and she
remained stricken with a strange and confused emotion before
that pile of cardboard squares.
She took them up and carried them down-stairs. They were
of all shapes, big and little. She began to arrange them year
by year, upon the table; and then, all at once, she found the very
first one that had belonged to her,— the same one that she had
brought to Peuples. She looked at this one a long time, with
the dates marked off by her the morning of her departure from
Rouen, the day after her going away from the convent. She
wept over it. Sadly and slowly the tears fell; the bitter tears
of an old woman whose life was spread out before her on that
table.
With the calendars came to her an idea that soon became a
sort of obsession; terrible, incessant, inexorable. She would try to
remember just whatever she had done from day to day during
all her life. She pinned the calendars against the walls and on
the carpet one after the other — those faded pieces of cardboard;
and so she came to pass hours face to face with them, continually
asking herself, “Now let me see, - what was it happened to me
that month ? ”
She had checked certain memorable days in the course of her
life, hence now and then she was able to recall the episodes of
an entire month, bringing them up one by one, grouping them
together, connecting one by another all those little matters which
had preceded or followed some important event. She succeeded
by sheer force of attention, by force of memory and of concen-
trated will, in bringing back to mind almost completely her two
first years at Peuples. Far-away souvenirs of her life returned to
## p. 9812 (#220) ###########################################
9812
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
her with a singular facility, and with a kind of relief in them;
but the later years gradually seemed to lose themselves in a
mist, - to become mixed one with another: and so Jeanne would
remain now and then an indefinite time, her head bowed toward
one of the calendars, her mind spellbound by the past, without
being able to remember whether it was in this or that calendar
that such or such a remembrance ought to be decided. She
ranged them around the room like the religious pictures that
point out the Way of the Cross in a church, - these tableaux
of days that were no more. Then she would abruptly set down
her chair before one of them; and there she would sit until
night came, immobile, staring at it, buried in her vague re-
searches.
All at once, when the sap began to awaken in the boughs
beneath the warmth of the sun; when the crops began to spring
up in the fields, the trees to become verdant; when the apple-
trees in the orchard swelled out roundly like rosy balls, and per-
fumed the plain,--then a great counter-agitation came over her;
she could not seem to stay still. She went and came; she left
the house and returned to it twenty times a day, and even took
now and then a stroll the length of the farming tracts, excited
to a sort of fever of regret. The sight of a daisy blossoming in
a tuft of grass, the flash of a ray of sun slipping down between
the leaves, the glittering of a strip of water in which the blue
sky was mirrored, -all moved her; awakened a tenderness in
her; gave her sensations very far away, like an echo of her
emotions as a young girl, when she went dreaming about the
country-side.
One morning the faithful Rosalie came later than usual into
her room, and said, setting down upon the table the bowl of cof-
fee: Come now, drink this. Denis is down-stairs waiting for us
at the door. We will go over to Peuples to-day: I've got some
business to attend to over there. ”
Jeanne thought that she was going to faint, so deep was her
emotion at the sound of that name, at the thought of going to
the home of her girlhood. She dressed herself, trembling with
emotion, frightened and tremulous at the mere idea of seeing
again that dear house.
A radiant sky spread out above over all the world; the horse,
in fits and starts of liveliness, sometimes went almost at a gallop.
When they entered into the commune of Etouvent, Jeanne could
## p. 9813 (#221) ###########################################
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
9813
hardly breathe, so much did her heart beat; and when she saw
from a distance the brick pillars of the boundary-line of her old
home, she exclaimed in a low voice two or three times, and as if
in spite of herself, “Qh! --oh! -oh! ” as if before things that
threatened to revolutionize all her heart.
They left the wagon with the Couillard family: then, while
Rosalie and her son went off to attend to their business, the care-
takers offered Jeanne the chance of taking a little turn around
the château, the present owners of it being absent; so they gave
her the keys.
Alone she set out; and when she was fairly before the old
manor house by the seaside, she stopped to look at its outside
once again. It had changed in nothing outside. The large,
grayish building that day showed upon its old walls the smile of
the sunshine.
