August 18, 2025 • 41 mins
In Partial Portraits, acclaimed writer Henry James offers a fascinating exploration into the lives and works of a remarkable array of literary figures, some of whom he knew personally. Delve into the creative minds of legends like Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Alphonse Daudet, Guy De Maupassant, Ivan Turgenev, and George du Maurier. This insightful narrative reveals the rich tapestry of their inspirations and artistic journeys. (Summary by Rita Boutros)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eight of Partial Portraits by Henry James. This LibriVox
recording is in the public domain recording by Rite Boutros,
Chapter eight Gui de Monpissant, Section one. The first artists
in any line are, doubtless not those whose general ideas
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about their art are most often on their lips, those
who most abound in precept, apology, and formula, and can
best tell us the reasons and the philosophy of things
We know the first, usually by their energetic practice, the
constancy with which they apply their principles, and the serenity
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with which they leave us to hunt for their secret.
In the illustration the concrete example. None the less, it
often happens that a valid artist utters, his mystery flashes
upon us for a moment. The light by which he
works shows us the rule by which he holds it
just that he should be measured. This accident is happiest,
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I think, when it is soonest. Over the shortest explanations
of the products of genius are the best, and there
is many a creator of living figures, whose friends, however
full of faith in his inspiration, will do well to
pray for him when he sallies forth into the dim
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wilderness of theory. The doctrine is apt to be so
much less inspired than the work. The work is often
so much more intelligent than the doctrine. Monsieur guill de
Monpessant has lately traversed, with a firm and rapid step,
a literary crisis of this kind. He has clambered safely
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up the bank at the further end of the morass.
If he has relieved himself in the preface to Pierre Jean,
the last published of his tales, he has also rendered
a nervis to his friends. He has not only come
home in a recognizable plight, escaping gross disaster with a
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success which even his extreme good sense was far from
making an advance a matter of course, but he has
expressed in intelligible terms that, by itself is a ground
of felicitation. His most general idea, his own sense of
his direction, He has arranged, as it were, the light
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in which he wishes to sit. If it is a
question of attempting, under however many disadvantages a sketch of him.
The critic's business therefore is simplified. There will be no
difficulty in placing him, for he himself has chosen the
spot he has made the chalk mark on the floor.
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I may as well say at once that in dissertation
Monsieur de Monbesson does not write with his pen. The philosopher,
in his composition is perceptibly inferior to the story teller.
I would rather have written half a page of bous
de Suif than the whole of the introduction to Flaubert's
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letters to Madame's sond, And his little disquisition on the
novel in general attached to that particular example of it
which he has just put forth, is considerably less to
the point than the masterpiece which it ushers in. In short,
as a commentator, Monsieur de Monpesisant is slightly common, while
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as an artist he is wonderfully rare. Of course, we must,
in judging a writer take one thing with another. And
if I could make up my mind that Monsieur de
Monpissant is weak in theory, it would almost make me
like him better, render him more approachable, give him the
touch of softness than he lacks, and show us a
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human flaw. The most general quality of the author of
La Maison Tellier and Bellamie the impression that remains last,
after the others have been accounted for, is an essential hardness,
hardness of form, hardness of nature. And it would put
us more at ease to find that if the fact
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with him, the fact of execution, is so extraordinarily definite
and adequate. His explanations after it were a little vague
and sentimental. But I am not sure that he must
even be held foolish to have noticed the race of critics.
He is, at any rate, so much less foolish than
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several of that fraternity. He has said his say concisely,
and as if he were saying it once for all
in fine. His readers must be grateful to him for
such a passage as that in which he remarks that,
whereas the public at large very legitimately says to a writer,
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console me, amuse me, terrify me, make me cry, make
me dream, or make me think, what the sincere critic
says is make me something fine, in the form that
shall suit you best, according to your temperament. This seems
to me to put into a nutshell the whole question
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of the different classes of fiction, concerning which there has
recently been so much discourse. There are simply as many
different kinds, as there are persons practicing the art. For
if a picture, a tale, or a novel be a
direct impression of life, and that surely constitutes its interest
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and value, the impression will vary according to the plate
that takes it, the particular structure and mixture of the recipient.
I am not sure that I know what Monsieur de
monpaisant means when he says the critic shall appreciate the
result only according to the nature of the effort. He
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has no right to concern himself with tendencies. The second
clause of that observation strikes me as rather in the air,
thanks to the vagueness of the last word. But our
author adds to the definiteness of his contention when he
goes on to say that any form of the novel
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is simply a vision of the world from the standpoint
of a person, constituted after a certain fashion, and that
it is therefore absurd to say that there is, for
the novelist's use only one reality of things. This seems
to me commendable, not as a flight of metaphysics hovering
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over bottomless gulfs of controversy. On the contrary, as a
just indication of the vanity of certain dogmatisms. The particular
way we see the world is our particular illusion about it,
says Monsieur de Monpoisson. And this illusion fits itself to
our organs and senses. Our receptive vessel becomes the furniture
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of our little plot of the universal consciousness. Quote. How
childish moreover to believe in reality. Since we each carry
our own in our thought and in our organs, our eyes,
our ears, our sense of smell, of taste, differing from
one person to another, create as many truths as there
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are men upon earth, and our minds, taking instruction from
these organs, so diversely impressed, understand, analyze, judge, as if
each of us belonged to a different way. Each one
of us therefore forms for himself an illusion of the world,
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which is the illusion poetic or sentimental, or joyous, or melancholy,
or unclean or dismal, according to his nature. And the
writer has no other mission than to reproduce faithfully this illusion,
with all the contrivances of art that he has learned
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and has at his command. The illusion of beauty, which
is a human convention, the illusion of ugliness, which is
a changing opinion, the illusion of truth, which is never immutable,
the illusion of the ignoble, which attracts so many. The
great artists are those who make humanity accept their particular illusion.
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Let us therefore not get angry with any one theory,
since every theory is the generalized expression of a temperament
asking itself questions. What is interesting in this is not
that Monsieur de monpessant happens to hold that we have
no universal measure of the truth, but that it is
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the last word on a question of art from a
writer who is rich in experience and has had success
in a very rare degree. It is of secondary importance
that our impression should be called or not called an illusion.
What is excellent is that our author has stated, more
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neatly than we have lately seen it done, that the
value of the artist resides in the clearness with which
he gives forth that impression. His particular organism constitutes a case,
and the critic is intelligent in proportion as he apprehends
and enters into that case to quarrel with it. Because
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it is not another, which it could not possibly have
been without a wholly different outfit. Appears to Monsieur de
Monpaisson a deplorable waste of time. If this appeal to
our disinterestedness may strike some readers as chilling through their
inability to conceive of any other form than the one
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they like, a limitation excellent for a reader, but poor
for a judge. The occasion happens to be none of
the best for saying so, for Monsieur de Monpison himself
precisely presents all the symptoms of a case in the
most striking way, and shows us how far the consideration
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of them may take us. Embracing such an opportunity as
this and giving ourselves to it freely seems to me, indeed,
to be a course more fruitful in valid conclusions as
well as in entertainment, by the way, than the more
common method of establishing one's own premises. To make clear
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to ourselves those of the author of Pierre Ejean, those
to which he is committed by the very nature of
his mind, is an attempt that will both stimulate and
repay curiosity. There is no way of looking at his
work less dry, less academic, For as we proceed from
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one of his peculiarities to another, the whole horizon widens
yet without our leaving firm ground, and we see ourselves
landed step by step in the most general questions, those
explanations of things which reside in the race. In the society,
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of course, there are cases and cases, and it is
the salient ones that the disinterested critic is delighted to meet.
What makes Monsieur de monpessant salient is two facts, the
first of which is that his gifts are remarkably strong
and definite, and the second that he writes directly from them,
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as it were, holds the fullest, the most uninterrupted. I
scarcely know what to call it, the boldest communication with them.
A case is poor when the cluster of the artist's
sensibilities is small, or they themselves are wanting in keenness,
or else when the personage fails to admit them, either
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through ignorance or diffidence, or stupidity, or the error of
a false ideal to what may be called a legitimate
share in his attempt. It is I think, among English
and American writers that this latter accident is most liable
to occur more than the French. We are apt to
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be misled by some convention or other as to the
sort of feeling or we ought to put forth, forgetting
that the best one will be the one that nature
happens to have given us. We have doubtless often enough
the courage of our opinions when it befalls that we
have opinions, But we have not so constantly that of
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our perceptions. There is a whole side of our perceptive
apparatus that we in fact neglect, And there are probably
many among us who would erect this tendency into a duty.
Monsieur de Monpassant neglects nothing that he possesses. He cultivates
his garden with admirable energy, and if there is a
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flower you miss from the rich parterre, you may be
sure that it could not possibly have been raised his mind,
not containing the soil for it. He is plainly of
the opinion that the first duty of the artist, and
the thing that makes him most useful to his fellow men,
is to master his instrument, whatever it may happen to
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be his own, is that of the senses. And it
is through them alone, or almost alone, that life appeals
to him. It is almost alone by their help that
he describes it that he produces brilliant works. They render
him this great assistance because they are, evidently, in his constitution,
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extraordinarily alive. There is scarcely a page in all his
twenty volumes that does not testify to their vivacity. Nothing
could be further from his thought than to disavow them
and to minimize their importance. He accepts them, frankly, gratefully,
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works them, rejoices in them. If he were told that
there are many English writers who would be sorry to
go with him in this, he would, i imagine, staring,
say that that is about what was to have been
expected of the Anglo Saxon race, or even that many
of them probably could not go with him. If they would,
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then he would ask how our authors can be so
foolish as to sacrifice such a moyen, How they can
afford to and exclaim they must be pretty works those
they produce and give a fine, true, complete account of
life with such omissions. Such Lacunae Monsieur de Monpessont's productions
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teach us, for instance, that his sense of smell is
exceptionally acute, as acute as that of those animals of
the field and forest whose subsistence and security depend upon it.
It might be thought that he would, as a student
of the human race, have found an abnormal development of
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this faculty, embarrassing, scarcely knowing what to do with it,
where to play. But such an apprehension betrays an imperfect
conception of his directness and resolution, as well as of
his constant economy of means. Nothing whatever prevents him from
representing the relations of men and women as largely governed
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by the scent of the parties human life in his pages.
Would this not be the most general description he would
give of It appears for the most part as a
sort of concert of odors, and his people are perpetually engaged,
or he is engaged on their behalf, in sniffing up
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and distinguishing them in some pleasant or painful exercise of
the nostril. If everything in life speaks to the nostril,
why on earth shouldn't we say so? I suppose him
to inquire, And what a proof of the empire of
poor conventions and hypocrisies shay vus off that you should
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pretend to describe and characterize, and yet take no note,
or so little that it comes to the same thing
of that essential sign not less powerful is his visual sense,
the quick, direct discrimination of his eye, which explains the
singularly vivid concision of his descriptions. These are never prolonged
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nor analytic, have nothing of enumeration of the quality of
the observer who counts the items to be sure he
has made up the sum. His eye selects unerringly, unscrupulously,
almost impudently catches the particular thing in which the character
of the object or the scene resides, and by expressing
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it with the artful brevity of a master, leaves a
convincing original picture. If he is inveterately synth he is
never more so than in the way he brings this hard, short,
intelligent gaze to bear. His vision of the world is,
for the most part a vision of ugliness, and even
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when it is not, there is in his easy power
to generalize a certain absence of love, a sort of
bird's eye view contempt. He has none of the superstitions
of observation, none of our English indulgences, our tender and
often imaginative superficialities. If he glances into a railway carriage
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bearing its freight into the Parisian suburbs of a summer Sunday,
a dozen dreary lives map themselves out in a flash quote.
There were stout ladies in farcical clothes, those middle class
good wives of the banlieux, who replace the distinction they
don't possess by an irrelevant dignity. Gentlemen weary of the office,
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with sallow faces and twisted bodies, and one of their
shoulders a little forced up by perpetual bending at work
over a table. Their anxious, joyless faces spoke moreover of
domestic worries, incessant needs for money, old hopes finally shattered,
for they all belonged to the army of poor, threadbareed
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devils who vegetate frugally in a mean little plaster house
with a flower bed for a garden. Even in a
brighter picture, such as the admirable vignette of the drive
of Madame Tellier and her companions, the whole thing is
an impression, as painters say nowadays, in which the figures
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are cheap. The six women at the station clamber into
a country cart and go jolting through the Norman landscape
to the village, which but presently the jerky trot of
the nag shook the vehicle so terribly that the chairs
began to dance, tossing up the travelers to right to left,
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with movements like puppets, scared grimaces, cries of dismay, suddenly
interrupted by a more violent bump. They clutched the sides
of the trap, their bonnets turned over on to their backs,
or upon the nose or the shoulder, and the white
horse continued to go, thrusting out his head and straightening
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the little tail, hairless like that of a rat, with
which from time to time he whisked his buttocks. Josepherey,
they with one foot stretched upon the shaft, the other
leg bent under him, and his elbows very high, held
the reins, and emitted from his throat every moment a
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kind of cluck, which caused the animal to prick up
his ears and quicken his pace. On either side of
the road, the green country stretched away. The colza in
flower produced in spots a great carpet of undulating yellow,
from which there rose a strong, wholesome smell, a smell
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penetrating and pleasant, carried very far by the breeze. In
the tall rye, the corn flowers held up their little
azure heads, which the women wished to pluck, but Monsieur
Levais refused to stop. Then in some place a whole
field looked as if it were sprinkled with blood, it
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was so crowded with poppies, and in the midst of
the great level, taking color in this fashion from the
flowers of the soil. The trap passed on with the
jog of the white horse, seeming itself to carry a
nosegay of richer hues. It disappeared behind the big trees
of a farm, to come out again, where the foliage stopped,
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and parade afresh through the green and yellow crops pricked
with red or blue, its blazing cartload of women, which
receded in the sunshine. As regards the other's sense, the
sense par excellence, the sense which we scarcely mention in
English fiction, and which I am not very sure I
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shall be allowed to mention in an English periodical, Monsieur
de Montessant speaks for that, and of it with extraordinary
distinctness and authority. To say that it occupies the first
place in his picture is to say too little. It
covers in truth the whole canvas, and his work is
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little else but a report of its innumerable manifestations. These
manifestations are not for him so many incidents of life.
They are life itself. They represent the standing ants or
to any question that we may ask about it. He
describes them in detail, with a familiarity and a frankness
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which leave nothing to be added. I should say, with
singular truth, if I did not consider that in regard
to this article, he may be taxed with a certain exaggeration.
Monsieur de Monpessant would doubtless affirm that, where the empire
of the sexual sense is concerned, no exaggeration is possible. Nevertheless,
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it may be said that whatever depths may be discovered
by those who dig for them, the impression of the
human spectacle, for him who takes it as it comes,
has less analogy with that of the monkey's cage than
this admirable writer's account of it. I speak of the
human spectacle as we Anglo Saxons see it, as we
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Anglo Saxons pretend we see it. Miss Monsieur de Morpissant
would probably say, at any rate, I have perhaps touched
upon this peculiarity sufficiently to explain my remark that his
point of view is almost solely that of the senses.
If he is a very interesting case, this makes him
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also an embarrassing one, embarrassing and mystifying for the moralist.
I may as well admit that no writer of the
days strikes me as equally so to find Monsieur de
Monpissant a lion in the path that may seem to
some people a singular proof of want of courage. But
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I think the obstacle will not be made light of
by those who have really taken the measure of the animal.
We are accustomed to think, we of the English faith,
that a cynic is a living advertisement of his errors,
especially in proportion as he is a thorough going one.
And Monsieur de morp Nissan's cynicism, unrelieved as it is,
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will not be disposed of off hand by a critic
of a competent literary sense. Such a critic is not
slow to perceive to his no small confusion, that though,
judging from usual premises, the author of Bellamy ought to
be a warning, he somehow is not. His baseness, as
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it pervades him, ought to be written all over him.
Yet somehow there are there certain aspects and those commanding
as the house agents say in which it is not
in the least to be perceived. It is easy to
exclaim that if he judges life only from the point
of view of the senses, many are the noble and
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exquisite things that he must leave out. What he leaves
out has no claim to get itself considered till after
we have done justice to what he takes in. It
is this positive side of Monsieur de Monpesson that is
most remarkable, the fact that his literary character is so
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complete and edifying. Hauteur a poupre irreprochabre don on genre
qui ne lespins, as that excellent critic Monsieur Jean le
Mate says of him, he disturbs us by associating a
conscience and a high standard with a temper long synonymous
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in our eyes, with an absence of scruples. The situation
would be simpler, certainly if he were a bad writer,
But none the less, it is possible, i think, on
the whole, to circumvent him, even without attempting to prove that,
after all, he is one. The latter part of his
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introduction to Pierre et Jean is less felicitous than the
beginning but we learn from it. And this is interesting
that he regards the analytic fashion of telling a story,
which has lately begotten in his own country some such
remarkable experiments few votaries, as it has attracted among ourselves
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as very much less profitable than the simple epic manner,
which avoids with care all complicated explanations, all dissertations upon motives,
and confines itself to making persons and events pass before
our eyes. Monsieur de Mopisson adds that, in his view,
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psychology should be hidden in a book as it is
hidden in reality, under the facts of existence. The novel
conceived in this manner gains interest, movement, color, the bustle
of life. When it is a question of an artistic process,
we must always mistrust very sharp distinctions, for there is
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surely in every manas it a little of every other method.
It is as difficult to describe an action without glancing
at its motive its moral history, as it is to
describe a motive without glancing at its practical consequence. Our
history and our fiction are what we do. But it
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surely is not more easy to determine where what we
do begins than to determine where it ends notoriously a
hopeless task. Therefore, it would take a very subtle sense
to draw a hard and fast line on the border
land of explanation and illustration. If psychology be hidden in life,
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as according to Monsieur de Monpassant, it should be in
a book, the question immediately comes up from whom is
it hidden from? Some people, no doubt, but very much
less from others? And all depends upon the observer than
nature of one's observation and one's curiosity. For some people, motives, reasons, relations,
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explanations are a part of the very surface of the drama,
with the footlights beating full upon them. For me, an act,
an incident, an attitude may be a sharp, detached, isolated
thing of which I give a full account in saying
that in such and such a way it came off
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for you. It may be hung about with implications, with
relations and conditions, as necessary to help you to recognize it,
as the clothes of your friends are to help you
know them in the street you feel that they would
seem strange to you without petticoats and trousers. Monsieur de
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Monpissant would probably urge that the right thing is to
know or to guess how events come to pass, but
to say as little about it as possible. There are
matters in regard to which he feels the importance of
being explicit, but that is not one of them. The
contention to which I allude strikes me as rather arbitrary.
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So difficult is it to put one's finger upon the
reason why, for instance, there should be so little mystery
about what happened to Christiane and deer Matt in Monte
Auriole when she went to walk on the hills with
Paul Brettigni, and so much say about the forces that
formed her for that gentleman's convenience, or those lying behind
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any other ought collapse that our reader may have related.
The rule misleads, and the best rules certainly is the
tact of the individual writer, which will adapt itself to
the material as the material comes to him. The cause
we plead is, ever, are pretty sure to be the
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cause of our idiosyncrasies. And if Monsieur de Mopissant thinks
meanly of explanations, it is I suspect that they come
to him in no great affluence. His view of the
conduct of man is so simple as scarcely to require them,
and indeed, so far as they are needed, he is
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virtually explanatory. He deprecates reference to motives, but there is
one covering an immense ground in his horizon, as I
have already hinted to which he perpetually refers. If the
sexual impulse be not a moral antecedent, it is none
the less the wire that moves almost all Monsieur de
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Mopissant's puppets. And as he has not hidden it, I
cannot see that he has eliminated analysis or made a
sacrifice to discretion. His pages are studied with that particular analysis.
He is constantly peeping behind the curtain, telling us what
he discovers there. The truth is that the admirable system
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of simplification, which makes his tales so rapid and so concise,
especially his shorter ones for his novels, in some degree
I think suffer from it, strikes us as not in
the least a conscious intellectual effort, a selective comparative process.
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He tells us all he knows, all he suspects, and
if these things take no account of the moral nature
of man, it is because he has no window looking
in that direction, and not because artistic scruples have compelled
him to close it up. The very compact mansion in
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which he dwells presents on that side a perfectly dead wall.
That is why, if his axiom that you produce the
effect of truth better by painting people from the outside
than from the inside has a large utility, his example
is convincing in a much higher degree. A writer is
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fortunate when his theory and his limitations so exactly correspond,
when his curiosities may be appeased with such precision and promptitude.
Monsieur de Mopissant contends that the most that the analytic
novelist can do is to put himself his own peculiarities
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into the costume of the figure analyzed. This may be true,
but if it applies to one manner of representing people
who are not ourselves, it applies also to any other manner.
It is the limitation the difficulty of the novelist to
whatever clan or camp he may belong. Monsieur de Mopissant
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is remarkably a objective and impersonal, But he would go
too far if he were to entertain the belief that
he has kept himself out of his books. They speak
of him eloquently, even if it only be to tell
us how easy, how easy, given his talent, of course,
he has found this impersonality. Let us hasten to add
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that in the case of describing a character, it is
doubtless more difficult to convey the impression of something that
is not oneself. The constant effort, however, delusive at bottom
of the novelist than in the case of describing some
object more immediately visible. The operation is more delicate, but
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that circumstance only increases the beauty of the problem. On
the question of style, our author has some excellent remarks.
We may be grateful, indeed for every one of them,
save an odd reflection about the way to become original
if we happen not to be so. The recipe for
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this transformation, it would appear, is to sit down in
front of a blazing fire, or a tree in a plane,
or any object we encounter in the regular way of business,
and remain there until the tree or the fire, or
the object, whatever it be, become different for us from
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all other specimens of the same class. I doubt whether
this system would always answer, For surely the resemblance is
what we wish to discover quite as much as the difference,
and the best way to preserve it is not to
look for something opposed to it. Is not this indication
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of the road to take to become as a writer
original touched with the same fallacy as the recommendation about
eschewing analysis. It is the only naivete I have encountered
in Monsieur de Monpoissont's many volumes. The best originality is
the most unconscious, and the best way to describe a
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try is the way in which it has struck us. Ah,
But we don't always know how it has struck us.
The answer to that may be, and it takes some
time and ingenuity, much fasting and prayer to find out.
If we do not know, it probably has not struck
us very much, so little, indeed, that our inquiry had
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better be relegated to that closed chamber of an artist's meditations,
that sacred back kitchen which no a priori rule can
light up. The best thing the artist's adviser can do
in such a case is to trust him and turn away,
to let him fight the matter out with his conscience.
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And be this said with a full appreciation of the
degree in which Monsieur de Monpoissont's observation on the whole
question of a writer's style at the point we have
come to to day bear the stamp of intelligence and experience.
His own style is of so excellent a tradition that
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the presumption is altogether in favor of what he may
have to say. He feels oppressively discouragingly, as many another
of his countrymen must have felt, For the French have
worked their language as no other people have done, the
penalty of coming at the end of three centuries of literature,
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the difficulty of dealing with an instrument of expression so
worn by friction, of drawing new sounds from the old
familiar pipe quote. When we read so saturated with French
writing as we are, that our whole body gives us
the impression of being a paste made of words, do
(37:59):
we ever find a line a thought which is not
familiar to us, and of which we have not had
at least a confused presentiment? And he adds that the
matter is simple enough for the writer who only seeks
to amuse the public by means already known. He attempts little,
(38:20):
and he produces with confidence in the candor of his mediocrity,
works which answer no question and leave no trace. It
is he who wants to do more than this, that
has less and less an easy time of it. Everything
seems to him to have been done, every effect produced,
(38:42):
every combination already made. If he be a man of genius,
his trouble is lightened, for mysterious ways are revealed to him,
and new combinations spring up for him, even after novelty
is dead. It is to the simple man, man of
taste and talent, who has only a conscience and a will,
(39:05):
that the situation may sometimes well appear desperate. He judges
himself as he goes, and he can only go step
by step over ground, where every step is already a footprint.
If it be a miracle, whenever there is a fresh tone,
the miracle has been wrought for Monsieur de Montissant. Or
(39:26):
is he simply a man of genius to whom short
cuts have been disclosed in the watches of the night.
At any rate, he has had faith, religion has come
to his aid. I mean the religion of his mother tongue,
which he has loved well enough to be patient for
her sake. He has arrived at the peace which passeth
(39:49):
understanding at a kind of conservative piety. He has taken
his stand on simplicity, on a studied sobriety, being persuaded
that the deepest science lies in that direction, rather than
in the multiplication of new terms. And on this subject
he delivers himself with superlative wisdom. Quote. There is no
(40:14):
need of the queer, complicated, numerous, and Chinese vocabulary which
is imposed on us to day under the name of
artistic writing, to fix all the shades of thought. The
right way is to distinguish with an extreme clearness all
those modifications of the value of a word which comes
(40:36):
from the place it occupies. Let us have fewer nouns,
verbs and adjectives of an almost imperceptible sense, and more
different phrases, variously constructed, ingeniously cast full of the science
of sound and rhythm. Let us have an excellent general form,
(40:57):
rather than be collectors of rare turn Monsieur de Mopissant's
practice does not fall below his exhortation, though I must
confess that in the foregoing passage he makes use of
the detestable expression stylist, which I have not reproduced. Nothing
(41:18):
can exceed the masculine firmness, the quiet force of his
own style, in which every phrase is a close sequence,
every epithet a paying piece, and the ground is completely
cleared of the vague, the ready made, and the second best.
Less than any one. To day does he beat the
(41:39):
air more than any one. Does he hid out from
the shoulder end of Chapter eight, Section one, Gui de
Mopissant
Chapter eight of Partial Portraits by Henry James. This LibriVox
recording is in the public domain recording by Rite Boutros,
Chapter eight Gui de Monpissant, Section one. The first artists
in any line are, doubtless not those whose general ideas
(00:20):
about their art are most often on their lips, those
who most abound in precept, apology, and formula, and can
best tell us the reasons and the philosophy of things
We know the first, usually by their energetic practice, the
constancy with which they apply their principles, and the serenity
(00:42):
with which they leave us to hunt for their secret.
In the illustration the concrete example. None the less, it
often happens that a valid artist utters, his mystery flashes
upon us for a moment. The light by which he
works shows us the rule by which he holds it
just that he should be measured. This accident is happiest,
(01:06):
I think, when it is soonest. Over the shortest explanations
of the products of genius are the best, and there
is many a creator of living figures, whose friends, however
full of faith in his inspiration, will do well to
pray for him when he sallies forth into the dim
(01:26):
wilderness of theory. The doctrine is apt to be so
much less inspired than the work. The work is often
so much more intelligent than the doctrine. Monsieur guill de
Monpessant has lately traversed, with a firm and rapid step,
a literary crisis of this kind. He has clambered safely
(01:47):
up the bank at the further end of the morass.
If he has relieved himself in the preface to Pierre Jean,
the last published of his tales, he has also rendered
a nervis to his friends. He has not only come
home in a recognizable plight, escaping gross disaster with a
(02:08):
success which even his extreme good sense was far from
making an advance a matter of course, but he has
expressed in intelligible terms that, by itself is a ground
of felicitation. His most general idea, his own sense of
his direction, He has arranged, as it were, the light
(02:31):
in which he wishes to sit. If it is a
question of attempting, under however many disadvantages a sketch of him.
The critic's business therefore is simplified. There will be no
difficulty in placing him, for he himself has chosen the
spot he has made the chalk mark on the floor.
(02:53):
I may as well say at once that in dissertation
Monsieur de Monbesson does not write with his pen. The philosopher,
in his composition is perceptibly inferior to the story teller.
I would rather have written half a page of bous
de Suif than the whole of the introduction to Flaubert's
(03:14):
letters to Madame's sond, And his little disquisition on the
novel in general attached to that particular example of it
which he has just put forth, is considerably less to
the point than the masterpiece which it ushers in. In short,
as a commentator, Monsieur de Monpesisant is slightly common, while
(03:39):
as an artist he is wonderfully rare. Of course, we must,
in judging a writer take one thing with another. And
if I could make up my mind that Monsieur de
Monpissant is weak in theory, it would almost make me
like him better, render him more approachable, give him the
touch of softness than he lacks, and show us a
(04:02):
human flaw. The most general quality of the author of
La Maison Tellier and Bellamie the impression that remains last,
after the others have been accounted for, is an essential hardness,
hardness of form, hardness of nature. And it would put
us more at ease to find that if the fact
(04:25):
with him, the fact of execution, is so extraordinarily definite
and adequate. His explanations after it were a little vague
and sentimental. But I am not sure that he must
even be held foolish to have noticed the race of critics.
He is, at any rate, so much less foolish than
(04:48):
several of that fraternity. He has said his say concisely,
and as if he were saying it once for all
in fine. His readers must be grateful to him for
such a passage as that in which he remarks that,
whereas the public at large very legitimately says to a writer,
(05:09):
console me, amuse me, terrify me, make me cry, make
me dream, or make me think, what the sincere critic
says is make me something fine, in the form that
shall suit you best, according to your temperament. This seems
to me to put into a nutshell the whole question
(05:30):
of the different classes of fiction, concerning which there has
recently been so much discourse. There are simply as many
different kinds, as there are persons practicing the art. For
if a picture, a tale, or a novel be a
direct impression of life, and that surely constitutes its interest
(05:52):
and value, the impression will vary according to the plate
that takes it, the particular structure and mixture of the recipient.
I am not sure that I know what Monsieur de
monpaisant means when he says the critic shall appreciate the
result only according to the nature of the effort. He
(06:13):
has no right to concern himself with tendencies. The second
clause of that observation strikes me as rather in the air,
thanks to the vagueness of the last word. But our
author adds to the definiteness of his contention when he
goes on to say that any form of the novel
(06:34):
is simply a vision of the world from the standpoint
of a person, constituted after a certain fashion, and that
it is therefore absurd to say that there is, for
the novelist's use only one reality of things. This seems
to me commendable, not as a flight of metaphysics hovering
(06:56):
over bottomless gulfs of controversy. On the contrary, as a
just indication of the vanity of certain dogmatisms. The particular
way we see the world is our particular illusion about it,
says Monsieur de Monpoisson. And this illusion fits itself to
our organs and senses. Our receptive vessel becomes the furniture
(07:22):
of our little plot of the universal consciousness. Quote. How
childish moreover to believe in reality. Since we each carry
our own in our thought and in our organs, our eyes,
our ears, our sense of smell, of taste, differing from
one person to another, create as many truths as there
(07:46):
are men upon earth, and our minds, taking instruction from
these organs, so diversely impressed, understand, analyze, judge, as if
each of us belonged to a different way. Each one
of us therefore forms for himself an illusion of the world,
(08:06):
which is the illusion poetic or sentimental, or joyous, or melancholy,
or unclean or dismal, according to his nature. And the
writer has no other mission than to reproduce faithfully this illusion,
with all the contrivances of art that he has learned
(08:26):
and has at his command. The illusion of beauty, which
is a human convention, the illusion of ugliness, which is
a changing opinion, the illusion of truth, which is never immutable,
the illusion of the ignoble, which attracts so many. The
great artists are those who make humanity accept their particular illusion.
(08:51):
Let us therefore not get angry with any one theory,
since every theory is the generalized expression of a temperament
asking itself questions. What is interesting in this is not
that Monsieur de monpessant happens to hold that we have
no universal measure of the truth, but that it is
(09:14):
the last word on a question of art from a
writer who is rich in experience and has had success
in a very rare degree. It is of secondary importance
that our impression should be called or not called an illusion.
What is excellent is that our author has stated, more
(09:35):
neatly than we have lately seen it done, that the
value of the artist resides in the clearness with which
he gives forth that impression. His particular organism constitutes a case,
and the critic is intelligent in proportion as he apprehends
and enters into that case to quarrel with it. Because
(09:58):
it is not another, which it could not possibly have
been without a wholly different outfit. Appears to Monsieur de
Monpaisson a deplorable waste of time. If this appeal to
our disinterestedness may strike some readers as chilling through their
inability to conceive of any other form than the one
(10:21):
they like, a limitation excellent for a reader, but poor
for a judge. The occasion happens to be none of
the best for saying so, for Monsieur de Monpison himself
precisely presents all the symptoms of a case in the
most striking way, and shows us how far the consideration
(10:42):
of them may take us. Embracing such an opportunity as
this and giving ourselves to it freely seems to me, indeed,
to be a course more fruitful in valid conclusions as
well as in entertainment, by the way, than the more
common method of establishing one's own premises. To make clear
(11:05):
to ourselves those of the author of Pierre Ejean, those
to which he is committed by the very nature of
his mind, is an attempt that will both stimulate and
repay curiosity. There is no way of looking at his
work less dry, less academic, For as we proceed from
(11:26):
one of his peculiarities to another, the whole horizon widens
yet without our leaving firm ground, and we see ourselves
landed step by step in the most general questions, those
explanations of things which reside in the race. In the society,
(11:46):
of course, there are cases and cases, and it is
the salient ones that the disinterested critic is delighted to meet.
What makes Monsieur de monpessant salient is two facts, the
first of which is that his gifts are remarkably strong
and definite, and the second that he writes directly from them,
(12:10):
as it were, holds the fullest, the most uninterrupted. I
scarcely know what to call it, the boldest communication with them.
A case is poor when the cluster of the artist's
sensibilities is small, or they themselves are wanting in keenness,
or else when the personage fails to admit them, either
(12:32):
through ignorance or diffidence, or stupidity, or the error of
a false ideal to what may be called a legitimate
share in his attempt. It is I think, among English
and American writers that this latter accident is most liable
to occur more than the French. We are apt to
(12:55):
be misled by some convention or other as to the
sort of feeling or we ought to put forth, forgetting
that the best one will be the one that nature
happens to have given us. We have doubtless often enough
the courage of our opinions when it befalls that we
have opinions, But we have not so constantly that of
(13:18):
our perceptions. There is a whole side of our perceptive
apparatus that we in fact neglect, And there are probably
many among us who would erect this tendency into a duty.
Monsieur de Monpassant neglects nothing that he possesses. He cultivates
his garden with admirable energy, and if there is a
(13:41):
flower you miss from the rich parterre, you may be
sure that it could not possibly have been raised his mind,
not containing the soil for it. He is plainly of
the opinion that the first duty of the artist, and
the thing that makes him most useful to his fellow men,
is to master his instrument, whatever it may happen to
(14:04):
be his own, is that of the senses. And it
is through them alone, or almost alone, that life appeals
to him. It is almost alone by their help that
he describes it that he produces brilliant works. They render
him this great assistance because they are, evidently, in his constitution,
(14:27):
extraordinarily alive. There is scarcely a page in all his
twenty volumes that does not testify to their vivacity. Nothing
could be further from his thought than to disavow them
and to minimize their importance. He accepts them, frankly, gratefully,
(14:47):
works them, rejoices in them. If he were told that
there are many English writers who would be sorry to
go with him in this, he would, i imagine, staring,
say that that is about what was to have been
expected of the Anglo Saxon race, or even that many
of them probably could not go with him. If they would,
(15:10):
then he would ask how our authors can be so
foolish as to sacrifice such a moyen, How they can
afford to and exclaim they must be pretty works those
they produce and give a fine, true, complete account of
life with such omissions. Such Lacunae Monsieur de Monpessont's productions
(15:34):
teach us, for instance, that his sense of smell is
exceptionally acute, as acute as that of those animals of
the field and forest whose subsistence and security depend upon it.
It might be thought that he would, as a student
of the human race, have found an abnormal development of
(15:54):
this faculty, embarrassing, scarcely knowing what to do with it,
where to play. But such an apprehension betrays an imperfect
conception of his directness and resolution, as well as of
his constant economy of means. Nothing whatever prevents him from
representing the relations of men and women as largely governed
(16:18):
by the scent of the parties human life in his pages.
Would this not be the most general description he would
give of It appears for the most part as a
sort of concert of odors, and his people are perpetually engaged,
or he is engaged on their behalf, in sniffing up
(16:39):
and distinguishing them in some pleasant or painful exercise of
the nostril. If everything in life speaks to the nostril,
why on earth shouldn't we say so? I suppose him
to inquire, And what a proof of the empire of
poor conventions and hypocrisies shay vus off that you should
(17:01):
pretend to describe and characterize, and yet take no note,
or so little that it comes to the same thing
of that essential sign not less powerful is his visual sense,
the quick, direct discrimination of his eye, which explains the
singularly vivid concision of his descriptions. These are never prolonged
(17:26):
nor analytic, have nothing of enumeration of the quality of
the observer who counts the items to be sure he
has made up the sum. His eye selects unerringly, unscrupulously,
almost impudently catches the particular thing in which the character
of the object or the scene resides, and by expressing
(17:51):
it with the artful brevity of a master, leaves a
convincing original picture. If he is inveterately synth he is
never more so than in the way he brings this hard, short,
intelligent gaze to bear. His vision of the world is,
for the most part a vision of ugliness, and even
(18:14):
when it is not, there is in his easy power
to generalize a certain absence of love, a sort of
bird's eye view contempt. He has none of the superstitions
of observation, none of our English indulgences, our tender and
often imaginative superficialities. If he glances into a railway carriage
(18:39):
bearing its freight into the Parisian suburbs of a summer Sunday,
a dozen dreary lives map themselves out in a flash quote.
There were stout ladies in farcical clothes, those middle class
good wives of the banlieux, who replace the distinction they
don't possess by an irrelevant dignity. Gentlemen weary of the office,
(19:04):
with sallow faces and twisted bodies, and one of their
shoulders a little forced up by perpetual bending at work
over a table. Their anxious, joyless faces spoke moreover of
domestic worries, incessant needs for money, old hopes finally shattered,
for they all belonged to the army of poor, threadbareed
(19:27):
devils who vegetate frugally in a mean little plaster house
with a flower bed for a garden. Even in a
brighter picture, such as the admirable vignette of the drive
of Madame Tellier and her companions, the whole thing is
an impression, as painters say nowadays, in which the figures
(19:50):
are cheap. The six women at the station clamber into
a country cart and go jolting through the Norman landscape
to the village, which but presently the jerky trot of
the nag shook the vehicle so terribly that the chairs
began to dance, tossing up the travelers to right to left,
(20:13):
with movements like puppets, scared grimaces, cries of dismay, suddenly
interrupted by a more violent bump. They clutched the sides
of the trap, their bonnets turned over on to their backs,
or upon the nose or the shoulder, and the white
horse continued to go, thrusting out his head and straightening
(20:34):
the little tail, hairless like that of a rat, with
which from time to time he whisked his buttocks. Josepherey,
they with one foot stretched upon the shaft, the other
leg bent under him, and his elbows very high, held
the reins, and emitted from his throat every moment a
(20:55):
kind of cluck, which caused the animal to prick up
his ears and quicken his pace. On either side of
the road, the green country stretched away. The colza in
flower produced in spots a great carpet of undulating yellow,
from which there rose a strong, wholesome smell, a smell
(21:17):
penetrating and pleasant, carried very far by the breeze. In
the tall rye, the corn flowers held up their little
azure heads, which the women wished to pluck, but Monsieur
Levais refused to stop. Then in some place a whole
field looked as if it were sprinkled with blood, it
(21:38):
was so crowded with poppies, and in the midst of
the great level, taking color in this fashion from the
flowers of the soil. The trap passed on with the
jog of the white horse, seeming itself to carry a
nosegay of richer hues. It disappeared behind the big trees
of a farm, to come out again, where the foliage stopped,
(22:01):
and parade afresh through the green and yellow crops pricked
with red or blue, its blazing cartload of women, which
receded in the sunshine. As regards the other's sense, the
sense par excellence, the sense which we scarcely mention in
English fiction, and which I am not very sure I
(22:24):
shall be allowed to mention in an English periodical, Monsieur
de Montessant speaks for that, and of it with extraordinary
distinctness and authority. To say that it occupies the first
place in his picture is to say too little. It
covers in truth the whole canvas, and his work is
(22:45):
little else but a report of its innumerable manifestations. These
manifestations are not for him so many incidents of life.
They are life itself. They represent the standing ants or
to any question that we may ask about it. He
describes them in detail, with a familiarity and a frankness
(23:09):
which leave nothing to be added. I should say, with
singular truth, if I did not consider that in regard
to this article, he may be taxed with a certain exaggeration.
Monsieur de Monpessant would doubtless affirm that, where the empire
of the sexual sense is concerned, no exaggeration is possible. Nevertheless,
(23:33):
it may be said that whatever depths may be discovered
by those who dig for them, the impression of the
human spectacle, for him who takes it as it comes,
has less analogy with that of the monkey's cage than
this admirable writer's account of it. I speak of the
human spectacle as we Anglo Saxons see it, as we
(23:57):
Anglo Saxons pretend we see it. Miss Monsieur de Morpissant
would probably say, at any rate, I have perhaps touched
upon this peculiarity sufficiently to explain my remark that his
point of view is almost solely that of the senses.
If he is a very interesting case, this makes him
(24:18):
also an embarrassing one, embarrassing and mystifying for the moralist.
I may as well admit that no writer of the
days strikes me as equally so to find Monsieur de
Monpissant a lion in the path that may seem to
some people a singular proof of want of courage. But
(24:38):
I think the obstacle will not be made light of
by those who have really taken the measure of the animal.
We are accustomed to think, we of the English faith,
that a cynic is a living advertisement of his errors,
especially in proportion as he is a thorough going one.
And Monsieur de morp Nissan's cynicism, unrelieved as it is,
(25:03):
will not be disposed of off hand by a critic
of a competent literary sense. Such a critic is not
slow to perceive to his no small confusion, that though,
judging from usual premises, the author of Bellamy ought to
be a warning, he somehow is not. His baseness, as
(25:25):
it pervades him, ought to be written all over him.
Yet somehow there are there certain aspects and those commanding
as the house agents say in which it is not
in the least to be perceived. It is easy to
exclaim that if he judges life only from the point
of view of the senses, many are the noble and
(25:48):
exquisite things that he must leave out. What he leaves
out has no claim to get itself considered till after
we have done justice to what he takes in. It
is this positive side of Monsieur de Monpesson that is
most remarkable, the fact that his literary character is so
(26:09):
complete and edifying. Hauteur a poupre irreprochabre don on genre
qui ne lespins, as that excellent critic Monsieur Jean le
Mate says of him, he disturbs us by associating a
conscience and a high standard with a temper long synonymous
(26:29):
in our eyes, with an absence of scruples. The situation
would be simpler, certainly if he were a bad writer,
But none the less, it is possible, i think, on
the whole, to circumvent him, even without attempting to prove that,
after all, he is one. The latter part of his
(26:51):
introduction to Pierre et Jean is less felicitous than the
beginning but we learn from it. And this is interesting
that he regards the analytic fashion of telling a story,
which has lately begotten in his own country some such
remarkable experiments few votaries, as it has attracted among ourselves
(27:14):
as very much less profitable than the simple epic manner,
which avoids with care all complicated explanations, all dissertations upon motives,
and confines itself to making persons and events pass before
our eyes. Monsieur de Mopisson adds that, in his view,
(27:36):
psychology should be hidden in a book as it is
hidden in reality, under the facts of existence. The novel
conceived in this manner gains interest, movement, color, the bustle
of life. When it is a question of an artistic process,
we must always mistrust very sharp distinctions, for there is
(27:58):
surely in every manas it a little of every other method.
It is as difficult to describe an action without glancing
at its motive its moral history, as it is to
describe a motive without glancing at its practical consequence. Our
history and our fiction are what we do. But it
(28:20):
surely is not more easy to determine where what we
do begins than to determine where it ends notoriously a
hopeless task. Therefore, it would take a very subtle sense
to draw a hard and fast line on the border
land of explanation and illustration. If psychology be hidden in life,
(28:43):
as according to Monsieur de Monpassant, it should be in
a book, the question immediately comes up from whom is
it hidden from? Some people, no doubt, but very much
less from others? And all depends upon the observer than
nature of one's observation and one's curiosity. For some people, motives, reasons, relations,
(29:08):
explanations are a part of the very surface of the drama,
with the footlights beating full upon them. For me, an act,
an incident, an attitude may be a sharp, detached, isolated
thing of which I give a full account in saying
that in such and such a way it came off
(29:30):
for you. It may be hung about with implications, with
relations and conditions, as necessary to help you to recognize it,
as the clothes of your friends are to help you
know them in the street you feel that they would
seem strange to you without petticoats and trousers. Monsieur de
(29:51):
Monpissant would probably urge that the right thing is to
know or to guess how events come to pass, but
to say as little about it as possible. There are
matters in regard to which he feels the importance of
being explicit, but that is not one of them. The
contention to which I allude strikes me as rather arbitrary.
(30:16):
So difficult is it to put one's finger upon the
reason why, for instance, there should be so little mystery
about what happened to Christiane and deer Matt in Monte
Auriole when she went to walk on the hills with
Paul Brettigni, and so much say about the forces that
formed her for that gentleman's convenience, or those lying behind
(30:40):
any other ought collapse that our reader may have related.
The rule misleads, and the best rules certainly is the
tact of the individual writer, which will adapt itself to
the material as the material comes to him. The cause
we plead is, ever, are pretty sure to be the
(31:01):
cause of our idiosyncrasies. And if Monsieur de Mopissant thinks
meanly of explanations, it is I suspect that they come
to him in no great affluence. His view of the
conduct of man is so simple as scarcely to require them,
and indeed, so far as they are needed, he is
(31:23):
virtually explanatory. He deprecates reference to motives, but there is
one covering an immense ground in his horizon, as I
have already hinted to which he perpetually refers. If the
sexual impulse be not a moral antecedent, it is none
the less the wire that moves almost all Monsieur de
(31:47):
Mopissant's puppets. And as he has not hidden it, I
cannot see that he has eliminated analysis or made a
sacrifice to discretion. His pages are studied with that particular analysis.
He is constantly peeping behind the curtain, telling us what
he discovers there. The truth is that the admirable system
(32:10):
of simplification, which makes his tales so rapid and so concise,
especially his shorter ones for his novels, in some degree
I think suffer from it, strikes us as not in
the least a conscious intellectual effort, a selective comparative process.
(32:30):
He tells us all he knows, all he suspects, and
if these things take no account of the moral nature
of man, it is because he has no window looking
in that direction, and not because artistic scruples have compelled
him to close it up. The very compact mansion in
(32:51):
which he dwells presents on that side a perfectly dead wall.
That is why, if his axiom that you produce the
effect of truth better by painting people from the outside
than from the inside has a large utility, his example
is convincing in a much higher degree. A writer is
(33:13):
fortunate when his theory and his limitations so exactly correspond,
when his curiosities may be appeased with such precision and promptitude.
Monsieur de Mopissant contends that the most that the analytic
novelist can do is to put himself his own peculiarities
(33:36):
into the costume of the figure analyzed. This may be true,
but if it applies to one manner of representing people
who are not ourselves, it applies also to any other manner.
It is the limitation the difficulty of the novelist to
whatever clan or camp he may belong. Monsieur de Mopissant
(33:59):
is remarkably a objective and impersonal, But he would go
too far if he were to entertain the belief that
he has kept himself out of his books. They speak
of him eloquently, even if it only be to tell
us how easy, how easy, given his talent, of course,
he has found this impersonality. Let us hasten to add
(34:24):
that in the case of describing a character, it is
doubtless more difficult to convey the impression of something that
is not oneself. The constant effort, however, delusive at bottom
of the novelist than in the case of describing some
object more immediately visible. The operation is more delicate, but
(34:46):
that circumstance only increases the beauty of the problem. On
the question of style, our author has some excellent remarks.
We may be grateful, indeed for every one of them,
save an odd reflection about the way to become original
if we happen not to be so. The recipe for
(35:07):
this transformation, it would appear, is to sit down in
front of a blazing fire, or a tree in a plane,
or any object we encounter in the regular way of business,
and remain there until the tree or the fire, or
the object, whatever it be, become different for us from
(35:28):
all other specimens of the same class. I doubt whether
this system would always answer, For surely the resemblance is
what we wish to discover quite as much as the difference,
and the best way to preserve it is not to
look for something opposed to it. Is not this indication
(35:48):
of the road to take to become as a writer
original touched with the same fallacy as the recommendation about
eschewing analysis. It is the only naivete I have encountered
in Monsieur de Monpoissont's many volumes. The best originality is
the most unconscious, and the best way to describe a
(36:10):
try is the way in which it has struck us. Ah,
But we don't always know how it has struck us.
The answer to that may be, and it takes some
time and ingenuity, much fasting and prayer to find out.
If we do not know, it probably has not struck
us very much, so little, indeed, that our inquiry had
(36:34):
better be relegated to that closed chamber of an artist's meditations,
that sacred back kitchen which no a priori rule can
light up. The best thing the artist's adviser can do
in such a case is to trust him and turn away,
to let him fight the matter out with his conscience.
(36:56):
And be this said with a full appreciation of the
degree in which Monsieur de Monpoissont's observation on the whole
question of a writer's style at the point we have
come to to day bear the stamp of intelligence and experience.
His own style is of so excellent a tradition that
(37:17):
the presumption is altogether in favor of what he may
have to say. He feels oppressively discouragingly, as many another
of his countrymen must have felt, For the French have
worked their language as no other people have done, the
penalty of coming at the end of three centuries of literature,
(37:38):
the difficulty of dealing with an instrument of expression so
worn by friction, of drawing new sounds from the old
familiar pipe quote. When we read so saturated with French
writing as we are, that our whole body gives us
the impression of being a paste made of words, do
(37:59):
we ever find a line a thought which is not
familiar to us, and of which we have not had
at least a confused presentiment? And he adds that the
matter is simple enough for the writer who only seeks
to amuse the public by means already known. He attempts little,
(38:20):
and he produces with confidence in the candor of his mediocrity,
works which answer no question and leave no trace. It
is he who wants to do more than this, that
has less and less an easy time of it. Everything
seems to him to have been done, every effect produced,
(38:42):
every combination already made. If he be a man of genius,
his trouble is lightened, for mysterious ways are revealed to him,
and new combinations spring up for him, even after novelty
is dead. It is to the simple man, man of
taste and talent, who has only a conscience and a will,
(39:05):
that the situation may sometimes well appear desperate. He judges
himself as he goes, and he can only go step
by step over ground, where every step is already a footprint.
If it be a miracle, whenever there is a fresh tone,
the miracle has been wrought for Monsieur de Montissant. Or
(39:26):
is he simply a man of genius to whom short
cuts have been disclosed in the watches of the night.
At any rate, he has had faith, religion has come
to his aid. I mean the religion of his mother tongue,
which he has loved well enough to be patient for
her sake. He has arrived at the peace which passeth
(39:49):
understanding at a kind of conservative piety. He has taken
his stand on simplicity, on a studied sobriety, being persuaded
that the deepest science lies in that direction, rather than
in the multiplication of new terms. And on this subject
he delivers himself with superlative wisdom. Quote. There is no
(40:14):
need of the queer, complicated, numerous, and Chinese vocabulary which
is imposed on us to day under the name of
artistic writing, to fix all the shades of thought. The
right way is to distinguish with an extreme clearness all
those modifications of the value of a word which comes
(40:36):
from the place it occupies. Let us have fewer nouns,
verbs and adjectives of an almost imperceptible sense, and more
different phrases, variously constructed, ingeniously cast full of the science
of sound and rhythm. Let us have an excellent general form,
(40:57):
rather than be collectors of rare turn Monsieur de Mopissant's
practice does not fall below his exhortation, though I must
confess that in the foregoing passage he makes use of
the detestable expression stylist, which I have not reproduced. Nothing
(41:18):
can exceed the masculine firmness, the quiet force of his
own style, in which every phrase is a close sequence,
every epithet a paying piece, and the ground is completely
cleared of the vague, the ready made, and the second best.
Less than any one. To day does he beat the
(41:39):
air more than any one. Does he hid out from
the shoulder end of Chapter eight, Section one, Gui de
Mopissant
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