II
He has produced a hundred short tales and only four regular novels; but if the tales deserve the first place in any candid appreciation of his talent it is not simply because they are so much the more numerous: they are also more characteristic; they represent him best in his originality, and their brevity, extreme in some cases, does not prevent them from being a collection of masterpieces. (They are very unequal, and I speak of the best.) The little story is but scantily relished in England, where readers take their fiction rather by the volume than by the page and the novelist’s idea is apt to resemble one of those old-fashioned carriages which require a wide court to turn round. In America, where it is associated preeminently with Hawthorne’s name, with Edgar Poe’s and with that of Mr. Bret Harte, the short tale has had a better fortune. France, however, has been the land of its great prosperity, and M. de Maupassant had from the first the advantage of addressing a public accustomed to catch on, as the modern phrase is, quickly. In some respects, it may be said, he encountered prejudices too friendly, for he found a tradition of indecency ready made to his hand. I say indecency with plainness, though my indication would perhaps please better with another word, for we suffer in English from a lack of roundabout names for the conte leste—that element for which the French, with their grivois, their gaillard, their égrillard, their gaudriole, have so many convenient synonyms. It is an honored tradition in France that the little story, in verse or in prose, should be liable to be more or less obscene (I can think only of that alternative epithet), though I hasten to add that among literary forms it does not monopolize the privilege. Our uncleanness is less producible—at any rate it is less produced.
For the last ten years our author has brought forth with regularity these condensed compositions, of which, probably, to an English reader, at a first glance, the most universal sign will be their licentiousness. They really partake of this quality, however, in a very differing degree, and a second glance shows that they may be divided into numerous groups. It is not fair, I think, even to say that what they have most in common is their being extremely lestes. What they have most in common is their being extremely strong, and after that their being extremely brutal. A story may be obscene without being brutal, and vice versa, and M. de Maupassant’s contempt for those interdictions which are supposed to be made in the interest of good morals is but an incident—a very large one indeed—of his general contempt. A pessimism so great that its alliance with the love of good work, or even with the calculation of the sort of work that pays best in a country of style, is, as I have intimated, the most puzzling of anomalies (for it would seem in the light of such sentiments that nothing is worth anything), this cynical strain is the sign of such gems of narration as “La Maison Tellier,” “L’Histoire dune Fille de Ferme,” “L’Ane,” “Le Chien,” “Mademoiselle Fifi,” “Monsieur Parent,” “L’Héritage,” “En Famille,” “Le Baptème,” “Le Père Amable.” The author fixes a hard eye on some small spot of human life, usually some ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible; but in either case the whole thing is real, observed, noted and represented, not an invention or a castle in the air. M. de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical, but even the comedy is for the most part the comedy of misery, of avidity, of ignorance, helplessness and grossness. When his laugh is not for these things it is for the little saletés (to use one of his own favorite words) of luxurious life, which are intended to be prettier, but which can scarcely be said to brighten the picture. I like “La Bête à Maître Belhomme,” “La Ficelle,” “Le Petit Füt,” “Le Cas de Madame Luneau,” “Tribuneauz Rustiques,” and many others of this category much better than his anecdotes of the mutual confidences of his little marquises and baronnes.
Not counting his novels for the moment, his tales may be divided into the three groups of those which deal with the Norman peasantry, those which deal with the
