Short Fiction

indication is not pushed very far. An aptitude for this exercise is a part of disciplined manhood, and disciplined manhood M. de Maupassant has simply not attempted to represent. I can remember no instance in which he sketches any considerable capacity for conduct, and his women betray that capacity as little as his men. I am much mistaken if he has once painted a gentleman, in the English sense of the term. His gentlemen, like Paul Brétigny and Gontran de Ravenel, are guilty of the most extraordinary deflections. For those who are conscious of this element in life, look for it and like it, the gap will appear to be immense. It will lead them to say, “No wonder you have a contempt if that is the way you limit the field. No wonder you judge people roughly if that is the way you see them. Your work, on your premises, remains the admirable thing it is, but is your case not adequately explained?”

The erotic element in M. de Maupassant, about which much more might have been said, seems to me to be explained by the same limitation and explicable in a similar way wherever else its literature occurs in excess. The carnal side of man appears the most characteristic if you look at it a great deal; and you look at it a great deal if you don’t look at the other, at the side by which he reacts against his weaknesses, his defects. The more you look at the other the less the whole business to which French novelists have ever appeared to English readers to give a disproportionate place⁠—the business, as I may say, of the senses⁠—will strike you as the only typical one. Is not this the most useful reflection to make in regard to the famous question of the morality, the decency, of the novel? It is the only one, it seems to me, that will meet the case as we find the case today. Hard and fast rules, à priori restrictions, mere interdictions (you shall not speak of this, you shall not look at that), have surely served their time and will in the nature of the case never strike an energetic talent as anything but arbitrary. A healthy, living and growing art, full of curiosity and fond of exercise, has an indefeasible mistrust of rigid prohibitions. Let us then leave this magnificent art of the novelist to itself and to its perfect freedom, in the faith that one example is as good as another and that our fiction will always be decent enough if it be sufficiently general. Let us not be alarmed at this prodigy (though prodigies are alarming) of M. de Maupassant, who is at once so licentious and so impeccable, but gird ourselves up with the conviction that another point of view will yield another perfection.

Henry James.

Short Fiction

The Dead Hand

One evening, about eight months ago, a friend of mine, Louis R., had invited together some college friends. We drank punch, and smoked, and talked about literature and art, telling amusing stories from time to time, as young men do when they come together. Suddenly the door opened wide, and one of my best friends from childhood entered like a hurricane. “Guess where I come from!” he shouted immediately. “Mabille’s, I bet,” one of us replied. “No,” said another, “you are too cheerful; you have just borrowed some money, or buried your uncle, or pawned your watch.” A third said: “You have been drunk, and as you smelt Louis’s punch, you came up to start all over again.”

“You are all wrong. I have come from P⁠⸺ in Normandy, where I have been spending a week, and from which I have brought along a distinguished criminal friend of mine, whom I will introduce, with your permission.” With these words he drew from his pocket a skinned hand. It was a horrible object; black and dried, very long and looking as if it were contracted. The muscles, of extraordinary power, were held in place on the back and palm by a strip of parchment-like skin, while the narrow, yellow nails still remained at the tips of the fingers. The whole hand reeked of crime a mile off.

“Just fancy,” said my friend, “the other day the belongings of an old sorcerer were sold who was very well known all over the countryside. He used to ride to the sabbath every Saturday night on a broomstick, he practised white and black magic, caused the cows to give blue milk and to wear their tails like that of Saint Anthony’s companion. At all events, the old ruffian had a great affection for this hand, which, he said, was that of a celebrated criminal, who was tortured in 1736 for having thrown his legitimate spouse head foremost into a well, and then hung the priest who married them to the spire of his church. After this twofold exploit he went wandering all over the world, and during a short but busy career he had robbed twelve travellers, smoked out some twenty monks in a monastery, and turned a nunnery into a harem.”

“But,” we cried, “what are you going to do with that horrible thing?”

“Why, I’ll use it as a bell handle to frighten away my criditors.”

“My dear fellow,” said Henry Smith, a tall, phlegmatic Englishman, “I believe this hand is simply a piece of Indian meat, preserved by some new method. I should advise you to make soup of it.”

“Don’t joke about it, gentlemen,” said a medical student, who was three sheets in the wind, with the utmost solemnity. “Pierre, if you take my advice, give this piece of human remains a Christian burial, for fear the owner of it may come and demand its return. Besides, this hand may perhaps have acquired bad habits. You know the proverb: ‘Once a thief always a thief.’ ”

“And ‘once a drunkard always a drunkard,’ ” retorted our host, pouring out a