M. de Maupassant evidently knows a great deal about the army of clerks who work under government, but it is a terrible tale that he has to tell of them and of the petit bourgeois in general. It is true that he has treated the petit bourgeois in Pierre et Jean without holding him up to our derision, and the effort has been so fruitful that we owe to it the work for which, on the whole, in the long list of his successes, we are most thankful. But of Pierre et Jean, a production neither comic nor cynical (in the degree, that is, of its predecessors), but serious and fresh, I will speak anon. In “Monsieur Parent,” “l’Heritage,” “En Famille,” “Une Partie de Campagne,” “Promenade,” and many other pitiless little pieces, the author opens the window wide to his perception of everything mean, narrow and sordid. The subject is ever the struggle for existence in hard conditions, lighted up simply by more or less polissonnerie. Nothing is more striking to an Anglo-Saxon reader than the omission of all the other lights, those with which our imagination, and I think it ought to be said our observation, is familiar, and which our own works of fiction at any rate do not permit us to forget: those of which the most general description is that they spring from a certain mixture of good humor and piety—piety, I mean, in the civil and domestic sense quite as much as in the religious. The love of sport, the sense of decorum, the necessity for action, the habit of respect, the absence of irony, the pervasiveness of childhood, the expansive tendency of the race, are a few of the qualities (the analysis might, I think, be pushed much further), which ease us off, mitigate our tension and irritation, rescue us from the nervous exasperation which is almost the commonest element of life as depicted by M. de Maupassant. No doubt there is in our literature an immense amount of conventional blinking, and it may be questioned whether pessimistic representation in M. de Maupassant’s manner does not follow his particular original more closely than our perpetual quest of pleasantness (does not Mr. Rider Haggard make even his African carnage pleasant?) adheres to the lines of the world we ourselves know.
Fierce indeed is the struggle for existence among even our pious and good-humored millions, and it is attended with incidents as to which after all little testimony is to be extracted from our literature of fiction. It must never be forgotten that the optimism of that literature is partly the optimism of women and of spinsters; in other words the optimism of ignorance as well as of delicacy. It might be supposed that the French, with their mastery of the arts d’agrément, would have more consolations than we, but such is not the account of the matter given by the new generation of painters. To the French we seem superficial, and we are certainly open to the reproach; but none the less even to the infinite majority of readers of good faith there will be a wonderful want of correspondence between the general picture of Bel-Ami, of Mont-Oriol, of Une Vie, “Yvette” and En Famille, and our own vision of reality. It is an old impression of course that the satire of the French has a very different tone from ours; but few English readers will admit that the feeling of life is less in ours than in theirs. The feeling of life is evidently, de part et d’autre, a very different thing. If in ours, as the novel illustrates it, there are superficialities, there are also qualities which are far from being negatives and omissions: a large imagination and (is it fatuous to say?) a large experience of the positive kind. Even those of our novelists whose manner is most ironic pity life more and hate it less than M. de Maupassant and his great initiator Flaubert. It comes back I suppose to our good-humor (which may apparently also be an artistic force); at any rate we have reserves about our shames and our sorrows, indulgences and tolerances about our Philistinism, forbearances about our blows and a general friendliness of conception about our possibilities, which take the cruelty from our self-derision and operate in the last resort as a sort of tribute to our freedom. There is a horrible, admirable scene in “Monsieur Parent,” which is a capital example of triumphant ugliness. The harmless gentleman who gives his name to the tale has an abominable wife, one of whose offensive attributes is a lover (unsuspected by her husband) only less impudent than herself. M. Parent comes in from a walk with his little boy, at dinnertime, to encounter suddenly in his abused, dishonored, deserted home, convincing proof of her misbehavior. He waits and waits dinner for her, giving her the benefit of every doubt; but when at last she enters, late in the evening, accompanied by the partner of her guilt,
