Part 12 (1/2)
What I mean is this: Maupa.s.sant's temperament was utterly different from Flaubert's. They were both prosecuted for certain things they wrote, Guy for a poem in 1880, at Estampes; there had been a detraque nervous system in both cases. Yet, similar in ideals and physical peculiarities as were these two men, there was a profound psychical gulf between their temperaments. Flaubert was a great genius, a path breaker, a philosophic poet, and the author of La Tentation de St.
Antoine, the nearest approach that France can show to a prose epic, and a book of beauty and originality. Maupa.s.sant was a great talent, and a growing one when disease cut him down. He imitated the externals of Flaubert, his irony, his vivid power of picture-making; even his pessimism he developed--though that was personal, as we shall soon see. And yet his work is utterly unlike Flaubert, probably unlike what Flaubert had hoped for--the old man died in 1881 and therefore did not live to enjoy Maupa.s.sant in full bloom. If it did not sound quite heretical I should be tempted to a.s.sert that the writer Maupa.s.sant most patterned after, was Prosper Merimee, an artist detested by Flaubert because of his hard style. It is this precise style that Maupa.s.sant exhibits but coupled with a clarity, an ease, and a grace that Merimee could not boast. Of Flaubert's harmonious and imaginatively coloured manner, Maupa.s.sant shows no trace in his six novels and his two hundred and odd tales.
Maupa.s.sant was not altogether faithful to Flaubert's injunctions regarding the publication of his early attempts. He made many secret flights under different pen-names, though Boule de Suif was the first prose signed by him. It appeared in Les Soirees de Medan, and its originality quite outshone the more solid qualities of Zola's L'Attaque au Moulin, and a realistic tale of Huysmans's, Sac au dos.
It was this knapsack of story, nevertheless, that opened the eyes of both Zola and Goncourt to the genuine realism of Huysmans as opposed to the more human but also more sentimental surface realism of Maupa.s.sant. Huysmans proved himself devoid of the story-telling gift, of dramatic power; yet he has, if compared to Maupa.s.sant, without an iota of doubt, the more vivid vision of the two; ”the intensest vision of the modern world,” says Havelock Ellis. Pictorial, not imaginative vision, be it understood. In his mystic latter-day rhapsodies it is the realist who sees, the realist who makes those poignant, image-breeding phrases. Take up Maupa.s.sant and in his best tales and novels, such as La Maison Tellier, Boule de Suif, Une Vie, Fort Comme la Mort, to mention a few, you will be surprised at the fluidity, the artful devices to elude the harshness of reality, the pessimistic poetry that suffuses his pages after reading Huysmans's immitigable exposition of the ugly and his unflinching att.i.tude before the unpleasant. And Huysmans's point of departure is seldom from an idea; facts furnish him with an adequate spring-board. Maupa.s.sant is more lyric in tone and texture. Edmond de Goncourt, jealous of the success of the newcomer, wrote in his diary that Maupa.s.sant was an admirable conteur, but a great writer, never. Zola admitted to a few intimates that Guy was not the realist that Huysmans was. All of which is interesting, but proves nothing except that Maupa.s.sant wrote a marvellous collection of short stories, real, hyphenated short-stories, as Mr. Brander Matthews makes the delicate distinction, while Huysmans did not.
Edouard Maynial's La Vie et l'Oeuvre de Guy de Maupa.s.sant is the most recent of the biographical studies devoted to our subject, though Baron Albert Lumbroso, who escapes by a single letter from being confounded with the theory-ridden Turin psychiatrist, has given us, with the approval of Guy's mother, the definitive study of Maupa.s.sant's malady and death. It is frequently quoted by Maynial; there is a careful study of it which appeared in _Mercure de France_, June, 1905, by Louis Thomas. And there is that charming volume, Amitie amoureuse, in which Guy is said to figure as the Philippe, by Henri Amic and Madame Lecomte du Nouy. Here we get another Maupa.s.sant, not the taureau triste of Taine, but a delightful, sweet-tempered, unselfish, and altogether lovable fellow. What was the cause of his downfall? Dissipation? Mental overwork--which is the same thing?
Disease? Maynial, Lumbroso, and Thomas offer us such a variety of doc.u.ments that there can be no doubt as to the determining element.
From 1880 to his death in 1893 Guy de Maupa.s.sant was ”a candidate for general paralysis.” These are the words of his doctor, later approved by Doctor Blanche, to whose sanitarium in Paris he was taken, January 7, 1893.
The father of Guy was Gustave de Maupa.s.sant, of an ancient Lorraine family. This family was n.o.ble. His mother was of Norman extraction, Laure de Poittevin, the sister of Alfred de Poittevin, Flaubert's dearest friend, a poet who died young. There is no truth in the gossip that Guy was the son of Flaubert. Flaubert loved both the Poittevins; hence his lively interest in Guy. There was a younger brother, Herve de Maupa.s.sant, who died of a mental disorder. His daughter, Simone, is the legatee of her uncle. The marriage of the elder Maupa.s.sants proved a failure. They are both dead now, and the subject may be discussed to the point of admitting that the father was not a domestic man; Guy inherited his taste for Bohemian life, and Madame Laure de Maupa.s.sant, after separating from her husband, was subject to nervous crises in which she attempted her life by swallowing laudanum and by strangling herself with her own hair. She was rescued both times, but she was an invalid to the last. A loving mother, she overlooked the education of Guy, and let it be said that no happier child ever lived. His early days were pa.s.sed at Etretat, at the Villa Verguies, and generally in the open air.
The future writer adored the sea; he has written many tales of the water, of yachts and river sports. He went to the seminary at Yvetot and the lyceum of Rouen, but his education was desultory, his reading princ.i.p.ally of his own selection--like most men of individual character. He was a farceur, fond of mystifications, of rough practical jokes, of horseplay. His physique was more Flemish than French--a deep chest, broad shoulders, heavy muscular arms and legs, a small head, a bull-neck. He looked like the mate of a deep-sea s.h.i.+p rather than a literary man. Add to this a craze for rowing, canoeing, swimming, boxing, fencing, and running. An all-round athlete, as the phrase goes, Guy, it is related, once paid a hulking chap to let himself be kicked. So hard was Guy's kick, done in an experimental humour, that the victim became enraged and knocked the kicker off his pins. Flaubert, the apostle of the immobile, objected. Too many flirtations, too much exercise! he admonis.h.i.+ngly cried. A writer must cultivate repose.
In sooth Maupa.s.sant went a terrific pace. He abused his const.i.tution from the beginning, seemingly tormented by seven restless devils. He spent five hours a day at his office in the Ministry, in the afternoon he rowed on the Seine, in the evening he wrote. After he had resigned as a bureaucrat he worked from seven until twelve every morning, no matter the excesses of the previous night; the afternoon he spent on the river, retiring very late. ”Toujours les femmes, pet.i.t cochon,”
wrote Flaubert in 1876, ”il faut travailler.” But it was precisely work that helped to kill the man. Those six pages a day, while they seldom showed erasures, were carefully written, and not until after much thought. Guy was the type of the apparently spontaneous writers.
His ma.n.u.scripts are free from the interlineations of Flaubert. He wrote at one jet; but there was elaborate mental preparation. Toward the last began the ether inhalations, the chloroform, hasheesh, the absinthe, cocaine, and the ”odour symphonies”--Huysmans's des Esseintes, and his symphonic perfume sprays were not altogether the result of invention. On his yacht _Bel Ami_ Guy never ceased his daily travail. It was Taine who called him un taureau triste. Paul Bourget relates that when he told Maupa.s.sant of this epigram, he calmly replied: ”Better a bull than an ox.”
His output--as they say in publis.h.i.+ng circles--was breath-catching. It is whispered that he worked all the better after a ”hard night.” Now there can be but one end to such an expenditure of nervous energy, and that end came, not suddenly, but with the treacherous, creeping approach of paralysis. ”Literary” criticism of the Nordau type is usually a foolish thing; yet in Maupa.s.sant's case one does not need to be a skilled psychiatrist to follow and note the gradual palsy of the writer's higher centres. Such stories as Qui Sait? Lui, Le Horla--a terrifying conception that beats Poe on his own chosen field--Fou, Un Fou, and several others show the nature of his malady. Guy de Maupa.s.sant came fairly by his cracked nervous const.i.tution, and instead of dissipation, mental and physical, being the determining causes of his shattered health, they were really the outcome of an inherited predisposition to all that is self-destructive. The French alienists called it une heredite chargee. (No doubt the dread Spirochaeta pallida.)
He never relaxed his diligence, even writing criticism. He saluted the literary debuts of Paul Hervieu and Edouard Rod in an article which appeared in _Gil Blas_. At the time of his death he was contemplating an extensive study of Turgenieff. Edmond de Goncourt did not like him, suspecting him of irreverence because of some words Guy had written in the preface to Pierre et Jean about complicated exotic vocabularies; meaning the Goncourts, of course. It is to be believed that Flaubert also had some quiet fun with the brothers and with Zola regarding their mania for note taking; read Bouvard et Pecuchet for confirmation of this idea of mine.
Maupa.s.sant was paid one franc a line for his novels in the periodicals, and 500 francs for the newspaper rights of publication only; good prices twenty-five years ago in Paris.
His annual income was about 28,000 to 35,000 francs, and it kept up for at least ten years. A table shows us that to December, 1891, the sale of his books was as follows: short stories, 169,000; novels, 180,000; travel, 24,000; in all 373,000 volumes. Maupa.s.sant was even for these days of swollen figures a big ”seller.” His mother had an income of 5,000 francs, but she far excelled the amount in her living expenses. Guy was an admirable son--tender, thoughtful, and generous.
He made her an allowance, and at his death left her in comfort, if not actually wealthy. She died at Nice, December 8, 1904, his father surviving him until 1899.
And that death was achieved by the most hideous route--insanity.
Restless, travelling incessantly, fearful of darkness, of his own shadow, he was like an Oriental magician who had summoned malignant spirits from outer s.p.a.ce only to be destroyed by them. Not in Corsica or Sicily, in Africa nor the south of France, did Guy fight off his rapidly growing disease. He worked hard, he drank hard, but to no avail; the blackness of his brain increased. Melancholia and irritability supervened; he spelled words wrong, he quarrelled with his friends, he inst.i.tuted a lawsuit against a New York newspaper, _The Star_; then the persecution craze, folie des grandeurs, frenzy.
The case was ”cla.s.sic” from the beginning, even to the dilated pupils of his eyes, as far back as 1880. The 1st of January, 1892, he had promised to spend with his mother at Villa de Ravenelles, at Nice. But he went, instead, against his mother's wishes, to Ste.-Marguerite in company with two sisters, society women, one of them said to have been the heroine of Notre Coeur.
The next day he arrived, his features discomposed, and in a state of great mental excitement. He was tearful and soon left for Cannes with his valet, Francois. What pa.s.sed during the night was never exactly known, except that Guy attempted suicide by shooting, and with a paper-knife. The knife inflicted a slight wound; the pistol contained blank cartridges--Francois had suspected his master's mood, and told the world later of it in his simple loving memoirs--and his forehead was slightly burned. Some months previous he had told Doctor Fremy that between madness and death he would not hesitate; a lucid moment had shown him his fate, and he sought death. After a week, during which two stout sailors of his yacht, _Bel Ami_, guarded him, as he sadly walked on the beach regarding with tear-stained cheeks his favourite boat, he was taken to Pa.s.sy, to Doctor Blanche's inst.i.tution. One of his examining physicians there was Doctor Franklin Grout, who later married Flaubert's niece, Caroline Commanville.
July 6, 1893, Maupa.s.sant died, as a lamp is extinguished for lack of oil. But the year he spent at the asylum was wretched; he became a mere machine, and perhaps the only pleasure he experienced was the hallucination of bands of black b.u.t.terflies that seemed to sweep across his room. Monsieur Maynial does not tell of the black b.u.t.terflies, the truth of which I can vouch for, as I heard the story from La.s.salle, the French barytone, a friend of Maupa.s.sant's.
It may be interesting to the curious to learn that the good-hearted, brave heroine of Boule de Suif was a certain Adrienne Legay of Rouen, and that she heartily reprobated the writer for giving her story to the world. She even went so far as to say that Guy did it in a spirit of revenge. Madame Laure de Maupa.s.sant made inquiries about the patriotic little sinner so as to help her. It was too late. She had died in extreme poverty. The heroine of Mademoiselle Fifi was a brunette, Rachel by name; the hero was a young German officer, Baron William d'Eyrick.
Would Maupa.s.sant have reached the sunlit heights, as Tolstoy believed?
Who may say? Truth lies not at the bottom of a well, but in suffering; suffering alone reveals the truth of himself, of his soul to man, and Guy had suffered as few; he had pa.s.sed into the Inferno that later Nietzsche entered, pa.s.sed into though not through it. Turgenieff, for whom Guy entertained a profound regard, had influenced him more than he, with his doglike fidelity for Flaubert, would have cared to acknowledge. Paul Bourget gives us chapter and verse for this statement; furthermore, the same authority, has described--in his Etudes et Portraits--the enormous travail of Maupa.s.sant in pursuit of style--he, seemingly, the most spontaneous writer of his generation.
His books offend, delight, startle, and edify thousands of readers.
That they have done absolute harm we are not prepared to say; book wickedness is, after all, an academic, not a vital question. If all the wicked books that have seen the light of publication had wrought the evil predicted of them the earth would be an abomination. In reality, we discuss with varying shades of enthusiasm or detestation such frank literature--naturally when it is literature--and after the hullabaloo of the moral bell-boys has ceased, the book is quietly forgotten on its shelf. Flaubert once wrote of the vast fund of indifference possessed by society. Dramas, books, pictures, statues have never ruined our overmoral world. The day for such things--if there ever was such a day--has pa.s.sed. Besides, among the people of most nations, the hatred of art and literature is pushed to the point of lecturing boastfully about that same hatred.
XVII
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES
Although he has been dead since October 24, 1898, critical battles are still fought over the artistic merits of Puvis de Chavannes. Whether you agree with Huysmans and call this mural painter a pasticheur of the Italian Primitives, or else the greatest artist in decoration since Paolo Veronese, depends much on your critical temperament. There are many to whom Henri Martin's gorgeous colour--really the methods of Monet applied to vast s.p.a.ces--or the blazing originality of Albert Besnard make more intimate appeal than the pallid poetry, solemn rhythms, and faded moonlit tonal gamut of Puvis. Because the names of Gustave Moreau and Puvis were often a.s.sociated, Huysmans, ab irato, cries against the ”obsequious heresy” of the conjunction, forgetting that the two men were friends. Marius Vauchon, despite his excessive admiration for Puvis has rendered a service to his memory in his study, because he has shown us the real, not the legendary man. With Vauchon, we are far from Huysmans, and his succinct, but disagreeable, epigram: C'est un vieux rigaudon qui s'essaie dans le requiem. The truth is, that some idealists were disappointed to find Puvis to be a sane, healthy, solidly built man, a bon vivant in the best sense of the phrase, without a suggestion of the morbid, vapouring pontiff or haughty Olympian. Personally he was not in the least like his art, a crime that sentimental persons seldom forgive. A Burgundian--born at Lyons, December 14, 1824--he possessed all the characteristics of his race. Asceticism was the last quality to seek in him. A good dinner with old vintage, plenty of comrades, above all the society of his beloved Princess Cantacuzene, whose love of her husband was the one romance in his career; these, and twelve hours' toil a day in his atelier made up the long life of this distinguished painter. He lived for a half-century between his two ateliers, on the Place Pigalle, and at Neuilly. Notwithstanding his arduous combat with the Inst.i.tute and public indifference, his cannot be called an unhappy existence. He had his art, in the practice of which he was a veritable fanatic; he was rich through inheritance, and he was happy in his love; affluence, art, love, a triad to attain, for which most men yearn, came to Puvis.