pose, will not fail of a moral result that has in it the possibility of good; but "Fort comme la mort," a tale of incestuous love, is hardly profitable, and "Notre cœur" is not profitable at all. It is difficult to convey an idea of Maupassant's style, though it is easy to cite characteristic passages, nor need they be long ones. His descriptions are always packed into the smallest space. He studies compression as Balzac and Zola do completeness. He is as easy as Flaubert is labored, as graceful as the Goncourts are artificial. But his apparent limpidity often masks a meaning that is not at once perceived. Here is an approach to Paris at evening: "The carriage passed the fortifications. Duroy saw before him a ruddy brightness in the sky, like the glow of a gigantic forge. He heard a confused, vast, unbroken murmur, made up of innumerable and different noises, a dull panting, now near, now distant, a vast, vague palpitation of life, the breath of Paris gasping in the spring night like a colossus worn out with fatigue." (Bel-ami, p. 273.) In this there is something of Zola's force with the added strength of condensation. But Maupassant has also at his command a lightness of touch reached by none of the Naturalists and hardly attained even by Daudet. Listen, for instance, to this organ study: "Sometimes the pipes cast out prolonged vast clamors, swelling like waves, so sonorous and so mighty that it seemed as though they would lift and burst the roof to spread themselves in the blue sky. Their vibrations filled all the church, and made flesh and blood tremble. Then all at once they grew calm. Delicious notes fluttered alert in the air, and touched the ear like light breaths. There were little melodies, graceful, pretty, tripping, that flitted like birds. And suddenly the coquettish music swelled anew, became terrible in its strength and amplitude, as though a grain of sand had become a world." (Bel-ami, p. 439.) Often a single phrase or word of Maupassant will print itself on the mind with startling vividness. Of all the' sombre disciples of Taine he is beyond question the greatest master of language, the most finished stylist. In the short story Maupassant's compact style has made him an unchallenged master. The artistic selfrestraint of "Une Fille de ferme," "Monsieur Parent," "Hautôt père et fils," or "Le Baptême," is as art wholly admirable. There has been in our generation a noteworthy revival of this genre so much cultivated in the eighteenth century. Here we shall see Daudet win his first success; here Coppée, Halévy, Lavedan, and many others have done work of much merit; but above them all ranks Maupassant. He has published more than a hundred such tales. There are stories of Normandy, chiefly tragic, though touching at times a delightfully comic vein. There are tales, perhaps too many, of Parisian foibles, of life in strange lands, of hunting, of medicine, and of love, crime, horror, misery, over all of which there plays a delicate psychological analysis, keen and often kindly. To all he brings the same careful elaboration, the conscientious effort of a man seeking in work emancipation from self. It cannot be denied, however, that his æsthetic feeling is keener than his ethical instinct. Tales like "Imprudence " 2 show the writer at his best, the author at his worst. Still it is by his stories rather than by his novels that 1 E. g., Tribunaux rustiques, in "M. Parent," p. 189. Maupassant will hold his place in French fiction, not, indeed, on the highest peak of Parnassus, but yet “far from the limits of a vulgar fate," though in his cynicism, as in his art and in his life, he too is a champion of Naturalism pushed to that unnatural excess where it merges into perverted Idealism. CHAPTER XIII. MODERN FICTION.-III. THE WANING OF NATURALISM. WHILE the theorists of the "experimental novel " were combating the idealism of the beautiful with the idealism of the base, in works of unquestionable though sometimes misdirected genius, several writers who had been born in the early years of Romanticism were developing a saner though feebler realism; and close upon them followed Daudet, born in the same year as Zola, who was the first to show to the extreme Naturalists the more excellent way of realistic sympathetic Impressionism, thus opening the path for the devolution of Naturalism and for the varied developments of the last twenty years that we associate with the names of Loti, Bourget, Barrès, Prévost, and Margueritte. For Daudet's novels, and especially those of the seventies, from "Fromont" to "Numa Roumestan," are cardinal points in the evolution of the new fiction; but before his position can be well defined it is necessary to consider briefly the secondary elements in the literary environment of his younger years. The oldest among the men who might have influenced his development was Feuillet, whose general characteristics have already claimed attention.1 As a novelist he first won distinction by the idealistic and somewhat sentimental" Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre," just 1 See chap. x. p. 392. a year after Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" had inaugurated the movement from which his own later works drew much of their power. Feuillet was the favorite novelist of the brilliant but hollow society of the Second Empire. He poses as the advocate of conventional morality and of the aristocracy of birth and feeling. But under this thin disguise he involves his gentlemen and ladies in highly romantic complications whose fundamental immorality is often far from doubtful. Yet as the accredited painter of the Faubourg St. Germain he contributed in his way and in a narrow sphere an essential element to the development of realistic fiction. No one has rendered so well as he the highstrung, neuropathic women of the upper class, who neither understand themselves nor are wholly comprehensible to others. But his earlier manner, that of the "Family Musset," yielded in "M. de Camors" to the demands of a stricter realism. Especially after the fall of the Empire had removed a powerful motive for glozing the vices of aristocratic society, he came to paint its hard and selfish cynicism as none of his contemporaries could have done, though he still made himself the preacher of that fashionable Catholicity which is a sort of shibboleth of the aristocratic Adullamites under the Third Republic.2 A lesser and somewhat younger romancer, of more tact than talent, is Cherbuliez,3 who treats his stories 1 Compare, for instance, "M. de Camors," 1867, with "Julia de Trécœur," 1872, "Histoire d'une parisienne," 1881, and "Amours de Philippe," 1887. 2 Especially in "La Morte," 1886. 3 Born 1829. Chronology of the chief novels: Le Comte Kostia, 1863; Ladislas Blowski, 1869; Méta Holdennis, 1873; Samuel Brohl et Cie, 1877; La Bête, 1887. Besides many other novels, he has published several volumes of critical studies. |