August 18, 2025 • 45 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, section two of Partial Portraits by Henry James.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Ritoboutro's chapter eight, section two Gui de Monpassant. He has
produced a hundred short tales and only four regular novels.
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But if the tales deserve the first place in any
candid appreciation of his talent, it is not simply because
they are so much the more numerous. They are also
more characteristic. They represent him best in his originality, and
their brevity, extreme in some cases, does not prevent them
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from being a collection of masterpieces. They are very unequal,
and I speak of the best. The little story is
but scantily relished in England, where readers take their fiction
rather by the volume than by the page, and the
novelists idea is apt to resemble one of those old
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fashioned carriages which require a wide court to turn round.
In America, where it is associated pre eminently with Hawthorne's name,
with Edgar Pose, and with that of mister brett Hart,
the short tale has had a better fortune. France, however,
has been the land of its great prosperity, and Monsieur
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de Monpassant had from the first the advantage of addressing
a public accustomed to catch on as a modern phrase
is quickly. In some respects, it may be said he
encountered prejudices too friendly, for he found a tradition of
indecency ready made to his hand. I say indecency with plainness,
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though my indication would perhaps please better with another word,
For we suffer in English from a lack of roundabout
names for the count leste, that element for which the French,
with their grivois, their guillard, their egriad, their goud riol,
have so many convenient synonyms. It is an honored tradition
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in France that the little story in verse or in
prose should be liable to be more or less obscene.
I can think only of that alternative epithet, though I
hasten to add that among literary forms it does not
monopolize the privilege. Our uncleanness is less producible. At any rate,
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it is less produced. For the last ten years our
author has brought forth with regularity these condensed compositions, of which,
probably to an English reader at a first glance, the
most universal sign will be their licentiousness. They really partake
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of this quality. However, in a very differing degree, and
a second glance shows that they may be divided into
numerous groups. It is not fair, i think, even to
say that what they have most in common is their
being extremely lessed. What they have most in common is
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their being extremely strong, and after that, their being extremely brutal.
A story may be obscene without being brutal, and vice versa.
And Monsieur de Monpoisont's contempt for these interdictions, which are
supposed to be made in the interest of good morals,
is but an incident, a very large one, indeed, of
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his general contempt, a pessimism so great that its alliance
with the love of good work, or even with the
calculation of the sort of work that pays best in
a country of style, is, as I have intimated, the
most puzzling of anomalies. For it would seem, in the
light of such sentiments that nothing is worth anything. This
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cynical strain is the sign of such gems of narration
as la maison Tellier listois, dun fill de ferme, la
nay Lucienne, Mademoiselle Fifill, Monsieur parent leritage, en famille, le baptille,
le pere amab. The author fixes a hard eye on
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some small spot of human life, usually some ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid.
One takes up the particle and squeezes it, either till
it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is
very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible, but in
either case the whole thing is real, observed, noted, and represented,
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not an invention or a castle in the air. Monsieur
de Morpaissant sees human life as a terribly a business,
relieved by the comical. But even the comedy is, for
the most part the comedy of misery, of avidity, of ignorance, helplessness,
and grossness. When his laugh is not for these things,
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it is for the little Salataie to use one of
his own favorite words of luxurious life, which are intended
to be prettier, but which can scarcely be said to
brighten the picture. I like la bette amere bellon, la ficelle,
le petit, foute, le case de madame, lunaut, tribunal rostique,
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and many others of this category, much better than his
anecdotes of the mutual confidences of his little marquis and Baron,
not counting his novels for the moment. His tales may
be divided into the three groups of those which deal
with the Norman peasantry, those which deal with the petite
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employers and small shopkeeper, usually in Paris, and the miscellaneous,
in which the upper walks of life are represented, and
the fantastic, the whimsical, the weird, and even the supernatural figure,
as well as the unexpurgated. These last things range from Leorla,
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which is not a specimen of the author's best vain.
The only occasion on which he has the weakness of
imitation is when he strikes us as emulating Edgar Poe
to Miss Harriet, and from baus de suif a triumph
to that almost inconceivable little growl of anglophobia de couvert.
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Inconceivable I mean in its irresponsibility and ill nature on
the part of a man of Monsieur de Monpissant's distinction,
passing by such little perfections as petits o dat la
bandonnay le collier. The list is too long for complete enumeration,
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and such gross imperfections for it, once in a while
befalls our author to go woefully as stray as la
Femme du Paul Challis les sur Rendolis. To these might
almost be added as a special category. The various forms
in which Monsieur de monpessint relates adventures in railway carriages,
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numerous to his imagination, are the pretexts for enlivening fiction
afforded by first, second and third class compartments. The accidents
which have nothing to do with the conduct of the
train that occur there constitute no inconsiderable part of our
earthly transit. It is surely by his Norman peasant that
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his tales will live. He knows this worthy as if
he had made him, understands him down to the ground,
puts him on his feet with a few of the freest,
most plastic touches. Monsieur de Monpessant does not admire him,
and he is such a master of the subject that
it would ill become an outsider to suggest a revision
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of judgment. He is a part of the contemptible furniture
of the world, but on the whole it would appear
the most grotesque part of it. His caution, his canniness,
his natural astuteness, his stinginess, his general grinding sordidness are
as unmistakable as that quaint and brutish dialect in which
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he expresses himself, and on which our author plays like
a virtuoso. It would be impossible to demonstrate with a
finer sense of the humor of the thing, the fatuities
and densities of his ignorance, the bewilderments of his opposed appetites,
the over reachings of his caution. His existence has a
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gay side, but it is apt to be the barbarous
gayety commemorated in Farse Normand, an anecdote, which, like many
of Monsieur de Mopissant's anecdotes, it is easier to refer
the reader to than to repeat. If it is most
convenient to place La Maisontellier among the tales of the peasantry,
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there is no doubt that it stands at the head
of the list. It is absolutely unadapted to the perusal
of ladies and young persons, but it shares this peculiarity
with most of its fellows, so that to ignore it
on that account would be to imply that we must
forswear Monsieur de Mopissant altogether, which is an incongruous and
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insupportable conclusion. Every good story is of course both a
picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused,
the better the problem is solved. In La Maison Tellier,
they fit each other to perfection. The capacity for sudden,
innocent delights latent in natures which have lost their innocence,
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is vividly illustrated by the singular scenes to which our
acquaintance with Madame and HER's staff, little as it may
be a thing to boast of, successively introduces us. The breadth,
the freedom, and brightness of all this give the measure
of the author's talent, and of that large, keen way
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of looking at life, which sees the pathetic and the droll,
the stuff of which the whole pieces made in the
queerest and humblest patterns. The tone of La Maison Tellier,
and the few compositions which closely resemble it expresses Monsieur
de Mopissont's nearest approach to geniality. Even here, however, it
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is the geniality of the showmen, exhilarated by the success
with which he feels that he makes his mannikins, and
especially his womenkins caper and squeak and who after the
performance tosses them into their box with the irreverence of
a practiced hand. If the pages of the author of
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Bellamie may be searched almost in vain for a manifestation
of the sentiment of respect, it is naturally not by
Madame Tellier and her charges that we must look most
to see it called forth. But they are among the
things that please him most. Sometimes there is a sorrow,
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a misery, or even a little heroism that he handles
with a certain tenderness. Un v is the capital example
of this, without insisting on the poor, the ridiculous, or,
as he is fond of saying, the beastial side of it.
Such an tempt admirable in its sobriety and delicacy, is
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the sketch in La Bandonnais of the old lady and
gentleman Madame Decadour and Monsieur de Preval, who, staying with
the husband of the former, at a little watering place
on the Normandy coast, take a long hot walk on
a summer's day on a straight white road into the
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interior to catch a clandestine glimpse of a young farmer
there illegitimate son. He has been pensioned. He is ignorant
of his origin and is a commonplace and unconciliatory rustic.
They look at him in his dirty farm yard, and
no sign passes between them. Then they turn away and
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crawl back in melancholy silence along the dull French road.
The manner in which this dreary little occurrence is related
makes it as large as a chapter of history. There
is tenderness in Miss Harriet, which sets forth how an
English old maid, fantastic, hideous, sentimental, and tract distributing with
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a smell of India rubber fell in love with an
irresistible French painter and drowned herself in the well because
she saw him kissing the maid servant. But the figure
of the lady grazes the farcical. Is it because we
know Miss Harriet, if we are not mistaken in the
type the author has had in his eye, that we
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suspect the good spinster was not so weird and desperate, addicted,
though her class may be, as he says too, haunting
all the table dot in Europe, to spoiling Italy, poisoning Switzerland,
making the charming towns of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carrying everywhere
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their queer little manias, their more de vastal petrifi, their
indescribable garments, and that odor of India rubber, which makes
one think that at night they must be slipped into
a case. What would miss harriet have said to Monsieur
de Mopissant's friend, the hero of the de Couverts, who,
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having married a little Anglais, because he thought she was
charming when she spoke broken French, finds she is very
flat as she becomes more fluent, and has nothing more
urgent than to denounce her to a gentleman. He meets
on the steamboat and to relieve his wrath in ejaculations
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of sal Anglais. Monsieur de Mopissant evidently knows a great
deal about the army of clerks who work under government,
but it is a terrible tale that he has to
tell of them, and of the petty bourgeois in general.
It is true that he has treated the petty bourgeois
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in Pierre de Jean without holding him up to our derision,
and the effort has been so fruitful that we owe
to it the work for which on the whole in
the long list of his successes, we are most thankful,
but of Pierre Jean, a production neither comic nor cynical
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in the degree that is of its predecessors, but serious
and fresh. I will speak Anon in monsieur parent leritainge
en femie, un partis de campaigne promenade, and many other
pitiless little pieces. The author opens the window wide to
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his perception of everything mean, narrow and sordid. The subject is,
ever the struggle for existence in heart conditions, lighted up
simply by more or less POLISSONERI. Nothing is more striking
to an Anglo Saxon reader than the omission of all
the other lights, those with which our imagination, and I
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think it ought to be said our observation is familiar,
and which our own works of fiction, at any rate,
do not permit us to forget. Those of which the
most general description is that they spring from a certain
mixture of good humor and piety. Piety I mean in
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the civil and domestic sense, quite as much as in
the religious. The love of sport, the sense of decorum,
the necessity for action, the habit of respect, the absence
of irony, the pervasiveness of childhood, the expensive tendency of
the race are a few of the qualities. The analysis might,
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I think, be pushed much further, which ease us off,
mitigate our tension and irritation, rescue us from the nervous
exasperation which is almost the commonest element of life, as
depicted by Monsieur de Morpissant. No doubt there is in
our literature an immense amount of conventional blinking. And it
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may be questioned whether pessimistic representation in Monsieur de Mopissant's
manner do not follow his particular original more closely than
our perpetual quest of pleasantness. Does not mister rider Haggard
make even his African carnage pleasant adheres to the lines
of the world we ourselves know. Fierce, indeed is the
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struggle for existence among even our pious and good humored millions,
and it is attended with incidents as to which, after all,
little testimony is to be extracted from our literature of fiction.
It must never be forgotten that the optimism of that
literature is partly the optimism of women and of spinsters,
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in other words, the optimism of ignorance as well of delicacy.
It might be supposed that the French with their mastery
of the Arte da griment would have more consolations than we.
But such is not the account of the matter given
by the new generation of painters. To the French, we
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seem superficial, and we are certainly open to the reproach.
But none the less, even to the infinite majority of
readers of good faith, there will be a wonderful want
of correspondence between the general picture of Bellamie, of Monte Auriol,
of unvill Yvette and en famill and our own vision
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of reality. It is an old impression, of course, that
the satire of the French has a very different tone
from ours. But few English readers will admit that the
feeling of life is less in ours than in theirs.
The feeling of life is evidently, de part a dot
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a very different thing. If in ours, as the novel
illustrates it, there are superficialities, there are also qualities which
are far from being negatives and omissions a large imagination,
and is it fatuous to say a large experience of
the positive kind. Even those of our novelists, whose manner
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is most ironic pity life more and hate it less
than Monsieur de Monpissant and his great initiator Flaubert. It
comes back, I suppose, to our good humor, which may
apparently also be an artistic force. At any rate, we
have reserves about our shames and our sorrows, indulgences and
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tolerances about our philistinism, forbearances about our blows, and a
general friendliness of conception about our possibilities, which take the
cruel time from our self derision, and operate in the
last resort as a sort of tribute to our freedom.
There is a horrible admirable scene in Monsieur part which
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is a capital example of triumphant ugliness. The harmless gentleman
who gives his name to the tale has an abominable wife,
one of whose offensive attributes is a lover unsuspected by
her husband, only less impudent than herself. Monsieur Perant comes
in from a walk with his little boy at dinner
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time to encounter suddenly in his abused, dishonored, deserted home.
Convincing proof of her misbehavior, he waits and waits dinner
for her, giving her the benefit of every doubt. But
when at last she enters late in the evening, accompanied
by the partner of her guilt. There is a tremendous
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domestic concussion. It is to the peculiar vividness of this
scene that I allude the way we hear it and
see it, and its most repulsive details are evoked for us.
The sordid confusion, the vulgar noise, the disordered table and
ruined dinner, the shrill insolence of the wife, her brazen mendacity,
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the scared inferiority of the lover, the mere momentary heroics
of the weak husband, the scuffle and somersault, the eminently
unpoetic justice with which it all ends. When Thackeray relates
how author Pendennis goes home to take pot luck with
the insolvent new comes at Boulogne, and how the dreadful
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Missus Mackenzie receives him, and how she makes a scene
when the frugal repast is served over the diminished mutton bone,
we feel that the notation of that order of misery
goes about as far as we can bear it. But
this is child's play. To the history of Monsieur and
Madame Caravan, and their attempt, after the death or supposed
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death of the husband's mother, to transfer to their apartment
before the arrival of the other heirs, certain miserable little
articles of furniture belonging to the deceased, together with the
frustration of the maneuver not only by the grim resurrection
of the old woman, which is a sufficiently fantastic item,
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but by the shock of battle when a married daughter
and her husband appear. No one gives us, like Monsieur
de Monpissant the odious words exchanged on such an occasion
as that no one depicts with so just a hand
the feelings of small people about small things. These feelings
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are very apt to be fury. That word is of
strikingly frequent occurrence in his pages. Gritage is a drama
of private life in the little world of the Ministere
de Lamarine, a world, according to Monsieur de Morpissant, of
dreadful little jealousies and ineptitudes. Readers of a robust complexion
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should learn how the wretched Monsieur Lessambre was handled by
his wife and her father on his failing to satisfy
their just expectations, and how he comported himself in the
singular situation thus prepared for him. The story is a
model of narration, but it leaves our poor average humanity
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dangling like a beaten rag. Where does Monsieur de Morpissant
find the great multitude of his detestable women, or where
at least does he find the courage to represent them
in such colors. Jean de la Maire in unvi receives
the outrages of fate with a passive fortitude. And there
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is something touching in Madame Roland's arms tintre de Cassier,
as exhibited in Pierre Rejean. But for the most part,
Monsieur de Monpissant's heroines are a mixture of extreme sensuality
and extreme mendacity. They are a large element in that
general disfigurement, that elusion de la gnob quill etire tante deet,
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which makes the perverse or the stupid side of things,
the one which strikes him first, which leads him if
he glances at a group of nurses and children sunning
themselves in a Parisian square, to notice primarily the u
de brute of the nurses, or if he speaks of
the longing for a taste of the country which haunts
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the shopkeeper fenced in behind his counter to identify it
as the amor bette d'u la nerteur, or if he
has occasion to put the boulevards before us on a
summer's evening, to seek his effect. In these terms, the city,
as hot as a stew, seemed to sweat in the
suffocating night. The drains puffed their pestilential breath from their
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mouths of granite, and the underground kitchens poured into the
streets through their low windows the infamous miasmas of their
dishwater and old sauces. I do not contest the truth
of such indications. I only note the particular selection and
their seeming to the writer the most apropos is it
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because of the inadequacy of these indications, when applied to
the long stretch, that Monsieur de Mopson's novels strike us
as less complete in proportion to the talent expended upon
them than his comte and Nouvelle. I make this invidious
distinction in spite of the fact that un v, the
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first of the novels in the order of Time, is
a remarkably interesting experiment, and that Pierre Ejean is, so
far as my judgment goes, a faultless production. Belle Amie
is full of the bustle and the crudity of life.
Its energy and expressiveness almost bribe one to like it.
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But it has the great defect that the physiological explanation
of things here too visibly contracts the problem in order
to meet it. The world represented is too special, too little, inevitable,
too much to take or to leave as we like
a world in which every man is a cad and
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every woman a Harlot. Monsieur de Monpessint traces the career
of a finished blackguard who succeeds in life through women,
and he represents him primarily as succeeding in the profession
of journalism. His colleagues and his mistresses are as depraved
as himself, greatly to the injury of the ironic idea,
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for the real force of satire would have come from
seeing him engaged and victorious with natures better than his own.
It may be remarked that this was the case with
the nature of Madame Walter, but the reply to that
is hardly Moreover, the author's whole treatment of the episode
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of Madame Walter is the thing on which his admirers
have least to congratulate him. The taste of it is
so atrocious that it is difficult to do justice to
the way it is made. To stand out. Such an
instance as this pleads with irresistible eloquence, as it seems
to me the cause of that salutary diffidence or practical
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generosity which I mentioned on a preceding page. I know
not the English or American novelist who could have written
this portion of the history of Bellamie if he would,
But I also find it impossible to conceive of a
member of that fraternity who would have written it if
he could. The subject of mont Auriole is full of
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queerness to the English mind. Here again the picture has
much more importance than the idea, which is simply that
a gentleman, if he happened to be a low animal,
is liable to love a lady very much less if
she presents him with a pledge of their affection. It
need scarcely be said that the lady and gentlemen, who,
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in Monsieur de Mopisson's pages exemplify this interesting truth, are
not united in wedlock, that is, with each other. Monsieur
de Morpissant tells us that he has imbibed many of
his principles from Gustave Flaubert, from the study of his works,
as well as formerly the enjoyment of his words. It
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is in un V that Flaubert's influence is most directly traceable,
For the thing has a marked analogy with leeducacion sentimentale.
That is, it is the presentation of a simple piece
of a life, in this case a long piece, a
series of observations upon an episode kelconc, as the French say,
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with the minimum of arrangement of the given objects. It
is an excellent example of the way the impression of
truth may be conveyed by that form. But it would
have been a still better one if, in his search
for the effect of dreariness, the effect of dreariness may
be said to be the subject of UNV. So far
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as the subject is reducible, the author had not eliminated excessively.
He has arranged, as I say, as little as possible.
The necessity of a plot has in no degree imposed
itself upon him, and his effort has been to give
the uncomposed, unrounded look of life, with its accidents, its
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broken rhythm, its queer resemblance to the famous description of
Bradshaw a compound of trains that start but don't arrive,
and trains that arrive but don't start. It is almost
an arrangement of the history of poor Madame de la
Maire to have left so many things out of it,
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For after all, she is described in very few of
the relations of life. The principal ones are there. Certainly
we see her as a daughter, a wife, and a mother.
But there is a certain accumulation of secondary experience that
marks any passage from youth to old age, which is
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a wholly absent element in Monsieur de Monpaison's narrative, and
the suppression of which gives the thing a tinge of
the arbitrary. It is in the power of this secondary
experience to make a great difference. But nothing makes any
difference for Jean de la Maire, as Monsieur de Mopissant
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puts her before us, had she no other points of
contact than those he describes, No friends, no phases, no episodes,
no chances, none of the miscellaneous ramplissage of life. No doubt,
Monsieur de Morpissant would say that he has had to
select that the most comprehensive enumeration is only a condensation,
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and that, in accordance with the very just principles enunciated
in that preface to which I have perhaps too repeatedly referred,
he has sacrificed what is uncharacteristic to what is characteristic.
It characterizes the career of this French country lady of
fifty years ago, that its long gray expanse should be
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seen as peopled with but five or six figures. The
essence of the matter is that she was deceived in
almost every affection, and that essence is given if the
persons who deceived her are given. The reply is doubtless adequate,
and I have only intended my criticism to suggest the
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degree of my interest. What it really amounts to is
that if the subject of this artistic experiment had been
the existence of an English lady, even a very dull one,
the air of verisimilitude would have demanded that she should
have been placed in a denser medium. Un v may,
after all, be only a testimony to the fact of
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the melancholy void of the coast of Normandy, even within
a moderate drive of a great seaport. Under the restoration
and Louis Philippe It is especially to be recommended to
those who are interested in the question of what constitutes
a story, offering as it does the most definite sequences
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at the same time that it has nothing that corresponds
to the usual idea of a plot, and closing with
an implication that finds us prepared. The picture, again, in
this case, is much more dominant than the idea, unless
it be an idea that loneliness and grief are terrible.
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The picture, at any rate, is full of truthful touches,
and the work has the merit and the charm that
it is the most delicate of the author's productions, and
the least hard. In none other has he occupied himself
so continuously with so innocent a figure as his soft
bruised heroine. In none other has he paid our poor,
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blind human history the compliment. And this is remarkable, considering
the flatness of so much of the particulars subject of
finding it so little bet he may think it here,
but comparatively he does not say it. He almost betrays
a sense of moral things. Jean is absolutely passive. She
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has no moral spring, no active moral life, none of
the edifying attributes of character. It costs her apparently as
little as may be in the way of a shock
a complication of feeling, to discover by letters after her
mother's death that this lady has not been the virtuous
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woman she has supposed, but her chronicler has had to
handle the immaterial forces of patience and renunciation. And this
has given the book a certain purity in spite of
two or three physiological passages that come in with violence,
a violence the greater as we feel it to be
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a result of selection. It is. It is very much
a mark of Monsieur de Morpissant that, on the most
striking occasion, with a single exception, on which his picture
is not a picture of libertinage, it is a picture
of unmitigated suffering. Would he suggest that these are the
only alternatives. The exception that I here allude to is
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for Pierre e Jean, which I have left myself small
space to speak of. Is it because in this masterly
little novel there is a show of those immaterial forces
which I just mentioned, and because Pierre Roland is one
of the few instances of operative character that can be
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recalled from so many volumes that many readers will place
Monsieur de Mopisant's latest production altogether at the head of
his longer ones. I am not sure, inasmuch as, after all,
the character in question is not extraordinarily distinguished, and the
moral problem not presented in much complexity. The case is
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only relative. Perhaps it is not of importance to fix
the reasons of preference in respect to a piece of
writing so essentially a work of art and of talent.
Pierre e Jean is the best of Monsieur de Mopissant's novels,
mainly because Monsieur de Mopissant has never before been so clever.
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It is a pleasure to see a mature talent able
to renew itself, strike another note and appear still young.
This story suggests the growth of a perception that everything
has not been said about the actors on the world's stage,
when they are represented either as helpless victims or as
(36:48):
mere bundles of appetites. There is an air of responsibility
about Pierre Roland, the person on whose behalf the tale
is mainly told, which almost constant totes a pledge. An
inquisitive critic may ask why, in this particular case Monsieur
de Monpissant should have stuck to the petit bourgeois, the
(37:10):
circumstances not being such as to typify that class more
than another. There are reasons, indeed, which on reflection are perceptible.
It was necessary that his people should be poor, and
necessary even that to attenuate Madame Rolen's misbehavior, she should
(37:31):
have had the excuse of the contracted life of a
shopwoman in the rue montmart. Were the inquisitive critics slightly
malicious as well, he might suspect the author of a
fear that he should seem to give way to the
elusion du beaut if. In addition to representing the little
group in Pierre e Jean as persons of about the
(37:54):
normal conscience, he had also represented them as of the
cultivated class, if they belong to the humble life. This belittles,
and I am still quoting the supposedly malicious critic. Monsieur
de Monpiant must, in one way or the other, be
little to the English reader. It will appear I think
(38:15):
that Pierre and John are rather more of the cultivated
class than two young englishmen in the same social position.
It belongs to the drama that the struggle of the
elder brother, educated, proud and acute, should be partly with
the pettiness of his opportunities. The author's choice of a milieume, moreover,
(38:38):
will serve to English readers as an example of how
much more democratic contemporary French fiction is than that of
his own country. The greater part of it, almost all
the work of Zola and of Daudets, the best of
Flaubert's novels, and the best of those of the brothers
de jen Courts, treat of that vast dim section of
(39:01):
society which, lying between those luxurious walks, on whose behalf
there are easy presuppositions, and that darkness of misery, which,
in addition to being picturesque, brings philanthropy also to the
writer's aid, constitutes really, in extent and expressiveness the substance
(39:23):
of any nation. In England, where the fashion of fiction
still sets mainly to the country house and the hunting field,
and yet more novels are published than anywhere else in
the world, that thick twilight of mediocrity of condition has
been little explored. May it yield triumphs in the years
(39:45):
to come. It may seem that I have claimed little
for Monsieur de Monpissant, so far as English readers are
concerned with him in saying that, after publishing twenty improper volumes,
had at last published a twenty first, which is neither
indecent nor cynical. It is not this circumstance that has
(40:08):
led me to dedicate so many pages to him, but
the circumstance that, in producing all the others, he yet
remained for those who are interested in these matters, a
writer with whom it was impossible not to reckon. That
is why I called him to begin with so many
ineffectual names, a rarity, a case, an embarrassment, a lion
(40:33):
in the path. He is still in the path as
I conclude these observations, but I think that in making
them we have discovered a legitimate way round. If he
is a master of his art, and it is discouraging
to find what low views are compatible with mastery, there
is satisfaction, on the other hand, in learning on what
(40:55):
particular condition he holds his strange success. This condition, it
seems to me, is that of having totally omitted one
of the items of the problem, an omission which has
made the problem so much easier that it may almost
be described as a short cut to a solution. The
(41:16):
question is whether it be a fair cut. Monsieur de
Monpissant has simply skipped the whole reflective part of his
men and women, that reflective part which governs conduct and
produces character. He may say that he does not see it,
does not know it, to which the answer is so
(41:36):
much the better for you. If you wish to describe
life without it. The strings you pull are by so
much the less numerous, and you can therefore pull those
that remain with greater promptitude, consequently with greater firmness, with
a greater air of knowledge. Pierre Rolande, I repeat, shows
(41:58):
a capacity for reflection, but I cannot think who else
does among the thousand figures who compete with him. I
mean for reflection addressed to anything higher than the gratification
of an instinct. We have an impression that Monsieur de
Prevalles and Madame de Cadour reflect as they trudge back
(42:20):
from their mournful excursion, but that indication is not pushed
very far. An aptitude for this exercise is a part
of disciplined manhood. And disciplined manhood, Monsieur de Monpissant has
simply not attempted to represent I can remember no instance
in which he sketches any considerable capacity for conduct, and
(42:45):
his women betray that capacity as little as his men.
I am much mistaken. If he has once painted a
gentleman in the English sense of the term, his gentlemen,
like Paul Brettany and Gontranderre are guilty of the most
extraordinary deflections. For those who are conscious of this element
(43:06):
in life, look for it and like it. The gap
will appear to be immense. It will lead them to say,
no wonder you have a contempt if that is the
way you limit the field. No wonder you judge people roughly,
if that is the way you see them. Your work
on your premises remains the admirable thing it is. But
(43:28):
is your case not adequately explained? The erotic element in
Monsieur de Monpissant, about which much more might have been said,
seems to me to be explained by the same limitation,
and explicable in a similar way. Whatever else its literature
occurs in excess. The carnal side of man appears the
(43:52):
most characteristic if you look at it a great deal,
and you look at it a great deal if you
do not look at the other at the side by
which he reacts against his weaknesses, his defeats. The more
you look at the other, the less the whole business
to which French novelists have ever appeared to English readers
(44:13):
to give a disproportionate place. The business, as I may say,
of the senses, will strike you as the only typical one.
Is not this the most useful reflection to make in
regard to the famous question of the morality the decency
of the novel? It is the only one, it seems
(44:34):
to me, that will meet the case, as we find
the case to day, hard and fast rules a priori restrictions,
mere interdictions. You shall not speak of this. You shall
not look at that have surely served their time, and will,
in the nature of the case, never strike an energetic
(44:54):
talent as anything but arbitrary. A healthy, living and growing arm,
full of curiosity and fond of exercise, has an indefeasible
mistrust of rigid prohibitions. Let us then, leave this magnificent
art of the novelist to itself and to its perfect freedom,
(45:16):
in the faith that one example is as good as another,
and that our fiction will always be decent enough if
it be sufficiently general. Let us not be alarmed at
this prodigy, though prodigies are alarming of Monsieur de Morpissant,
who is at once so licentious and so impeccable. But
(45:38):
gird ourselves up with the conviction that another point of
view will yield another perfection. Eighteen eighty eight, end of
Chapter eight, Section two, Gui de Mopissant
Chapter eight, section two of Partial Portraits by Henry James.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
Ritoboutro's chapter eight, section two Gui de Monpassant. He has
produced a hundred short tales and only four regular novels.
(00:22):
But if the tales deserve the first place in any
candid appreciation of his talent, it is not simply because
they are so much the more numerous. They are also
more characteristic. They represent him best in his originality, and
their brevity, extreme in some cases, does not prevent them
(00:42):
from being a collection of masterpieces. They are very unequal,
and I speak of the best. The little story is
but scantily relished in England, where readers take their fiction
rather by the volume than by the page, and the
novelists idea is apt to resemble one of those old
(01:03):
fashioned carriages which require a wide court to turn round.
In America, where it is associated pre eminently with Hawthorne's name,
with Edgar Pose, and with that of mister brett Hart,
the short tale has had a better fortune. France, however,
has been the land of its great prosperity, and Monsieur
(01:26):
de Monpassant had from the first the advantage of addressing
a public accustomed to catch on as a modern phrase
is quickly. In some respects, it may be said he
encountered prejudices too friendly, for he found a tradition of
indecency ready made to his hand. I say indecency with plainness,
(01:49):
though my indication would perhaps please better with another word,
For we suffer in English from a lack of roundabout
names for the count leste, that element for which the French,
with their grivois, their guillard, their egriad, their goud riol,
have so many convenient synonyms. It is an honored tradition
(02:13):
in France that the little story in verse or in
prose should be liable to be more or less obscene.
I can think only of that alternative epithet, though I
hasten to add that among literary forms it does not
monopolize the privilege. Our uncleanness is less producible. At any rate,
(02:36):
it is less produced. For the last ten years our
author has brought forth with regularity these condensed compositions, of which,
probably to an English reader at a first glance, the
most universal sign will be their licentiousness. They really partake
(02:56):
of this quality. However, in a very differing degree, and
a second glance shows that they may be divided into
numerous groups. It is not fair, i think, even to
say that what they have most in common is their
being extremely lessed. What they have most in common is
(03:17):
their being extremely strong, and after that, their being extremely brutal.
A story may be obscene without being brutal, and vice versa.
And Monsieur de Monpoisont's contempt for these interdictions, which are
supposed to be made in the interest of good morals,
is but an incident, a very large one, indeed, of
(03:40):
his general contempt, a pessimism so great that its alliance
with the love of good work, or even with the
calculation of the sort of work that pays best in
a country of style, is, as I have intimated, the
most puzzling of anomalies. For it would seem, in the
light of such sentiments that nothing is worth anything. This
(04:04):
cynical strain is the sign of such gems of narration
as la maison Tellier listois, dun fill de ferme, la
nay Lucienne, Mademoiselle Fifill, Monsieur parent leritage, en famille, le baptille,
le pere amab. The author fixes a hard eye on
(04:26):
some small spot of human life, usually some ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid.
One takes up the particle and squeezes it, either till
it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is
very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible, but in
either case the whole thing is real, observed, noted, and represented,
(04:52):
not an invention or a castle in the air. Monsieur
de Morpaissant sees human life as a terribly a business,
relieved by the comical. But even the comedy is, for
the most part the comedy of misery, of avidity, of ignorance, helplessness,
and grossness. When his laugh is not for these things,
(05:16):
it is for the little Salataie to use one of
his own favorite words of luxurious life, which are intended
to be prettier, but which can scarcely be said to
brighten the picture. I like la bette amere bellon, la ficelle,
le petit, foute, le case de madame, lunaut, tribunal rostique,
(05:40):
and many others of this category, much better than his
anecdotes of the mutual confidences of his little marquis and Baron,
not counting his novels for the moment. His tales may
be divided into the three groups of those which deal
with the Norman peasantry, those which deal with the petite
(06:02):
employers and small shopkeeper, usually in Paris, and the miscellaneous,
in which the upper walks of life are represented, and
the fantastic, the whimsical, the weird, and even the supernatural figure,
as well as the unexpurgated. These last things range from Leorla,
(06:23):
which is not a specimen of the author's best vain.
The only occasion on which he has the weakness of
imitation is when he strikes us as emulating Edgar Poe
to Miss Harriet, and from baus de suif a triumph
to that almost inconceivable little growl of anglophobia de couvert.
(06:46):
Inconceivable I mean in its irresponsibility and ill nature on
the part of a man of Monsieur de Monpissant's distinction,
passing by such little perfections as petits o dat la
bandonnay le collier. The list is too long for complete enumeration,
(07:06):
and such gross imperfections for it, once in a while
befalls our author to go woefully as stray as la
Femme du Paul Challis les sur Rendolis. To these might
almost be added as a special category. The various forms
in which Monsieur de monpessint relates adventures in railway carriages,
(07:30):
numerous to his imagination, are the pretexts for enlivening fiction
afforded by first, second and third class compartments. The accidents
which have nothing to do with the conduct of the
train that occur there constitute no inconsiderable part of our
earthly transit. It is surely by his Norman peasant that
(07:55):
his tales will live. He knows this worthy as if
he had made him, understands him down to the ground,
puts him on his feet with a few of the freest,
most plastic touches. Monsieur de Monpessant does not admire him,
and he is such a master of the subject that
it would ill become an outsider to suggest a revision
(08:17):
of judgment. He is a part of the contemptible furniture
of the world, but on the whole it would appear
the most grotesque part of it. His caution, his canniness,
his natural astuteness, his stinginess, his general grinding sordidness are
as unmistakable as that quaint and brutish dialect in which
(08:41):
he expresses himself, and on which our author plays like
a virtuoso. It would be impossible to demonstrate with a
finer sense of the humor of the thing, the fatuities
and densities of his ignorance, the bewilderments of his opposed appetites,
the over reachings of his caution. His existence has a
(09:04):
gay side, but it is apt to be the barbarous
gayety commemorated in Farse Normand, an anecdote, which, like many
of Monsieur de Mopissant's anecdotes, it is easier to refer
the reader to than to repeat. If it is most
convenient to place La Maisontellier among the tales of the peasantry,
(09:26):
there is no doubt that it stands at the head
of the list. It is absolutely unadapted to the perusal
of ladies and young persons, but it shares this peculiarity
with most of its fellows, so that to ignore it
on that account would be to imply that we must
forswear Monsieur de Mopissant altogether, which is an incongruous and
(09:50):
insupportable conclusion. Every good story is of course both a
picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused,
the better the problem is solved. In La Maison Tellier,
they fit each other to perfection. The capacity for sudden,
innocent delights latent in natures which have lost their innocence,
(10:13):
is vividly illustrated by the singular scenes to which our
acquaintance with Madame and HER's staff, little as it may
be a thing to boast of, successively introduces us. The breadth,
the freedom, and brightness of all this give the measure
of the author's talent, and of that large, keen way
(10:34):
of looking at life, which sees the pathetic and the droll,
the stuff of which the whole pieces made in the
queerest and humblest patterns. The tone of La Maison Tellier,
and the few compositions which closely resemble it expresses Monsieur
de Mopissont's nearest approach to geniality. Even here, however, it
(10:58):
is the geniality of the showmen, exhilarated by the success
with which he feels that he makes his mannikins, and
especially his womenkins caper and squeak and who after the
performance tosses them into their box with the irreverence of
a practiced hand. If the pages of the author of
(11:20):
Bellamie may be searched almost in vain for a manifestation
of the sentiment of respect, it is naturally not by
Madame Tellier and her charges that we must look most
to see it called forth. But they are among the
things that please him most. Sometimes there is a sorrow,
(11:42):
a misery, or even a little heroism that he handles
with a certain tenderness. Un v is the capital example
of this, without insisting on the poor, the ridiculous, or,
as he is fond of saying, the beastial side of it.
Such an tempt admirable in its sobriety and delicacy, is
(12:04):
the sketch in La Bandonnais of the old lady and
gentleman Madame Decadour and Monsieur de Preval, who, staying with
the husband of the former, at a little watering place
on the Normandy coast, take a long hot walk on
a summer's day on a straight white road into the
(12:24):
interior to catch a clandestine glimpse of a young farmer
there illegitimate son. He has been pensioned. He is ignorant
of his origin and is a commonplace and unconciliatory rustic.
They look at him in his dirty farm yard, and
no sign passes between them. Then they turn away and
(12:48):
crawl back in melancholy silence along the dull French road.
The manner in which this dreary little occurrence is related
makes it as large as a chapter of history. There
is tenderness in Miss Harriet, which sets forth how an
English old maid, fantastic, hideous, sentimental, and tract distributing with
(13:12):
a smell of India rubber fell in love with an
irresistible French painter and drowned herself in the well because
she saw him kissing the maid servant. But the figure
of the lady grazes the farcical. Is it because we
know Miss Harriet, if we are not mistaken in the
type the author has had in his eye, that we
(13:34):
suspect the good spinster was not so weird and desperate, addicted,
though her class may be, as he says too, haunting
all the table dot in Europe, to spoiling Italy, poisoning Switzerland,
making the charming towns of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carrying everywhere
(13:55):
their queer little manias, their more de vastal petrifi, their
indescribable garments, and that odor of India rubber, which makes
one think that at night they must be slipped into
a case. What would miss harriet have said to Monsieur
de Mopissant's friend, the hero of the de Couverts, who,
(14:17):
having married a little Anglais, because he thought she was
charming when she spoke broken French, finds she is very
flat as she becomes more fluent, and has nothing more
urgent than to denounce her to a gentleman. He meets
on the steamboat and to relieve his wrath in ejaculations
(14:37):
of sal Anglais. Monsieur de Mopissant evidently knows a great
deal about the army of clerks who work under government,
but it is a terrible tale that he has to
tell of them, and of the petty bourgeois in general.
It is true that he has treated the petty bourgeois
(14:58):
in Pierre de Jean without holding him up to our derision,
and the effort has been so fruitful that we owe
to it the work for which on the whole in
the long list of his successes, we are most thankful,
but of Pierre Jean, a production neither comic nor cynical
(15:19):
in the degree that is of its predecessors, but serious
and fresh. I will speak Anon in monsieur parent leritainge
en femie, un partis de campaigne promenade, and many other
pitiless little pieces. The author opens the window wide to
(15:39):
his perception of everything mean, narrow and sordid. The subject is,
ever the struggle for existence in heart conditions, lighted up
simply by more or less POLISSONERI. Nothing is more striking
to an Anglo Saxon reader than the omission of all
the other lights, those with which our imagination, and I
(16:02):
think it ought to be said our observation is familiar,
and which our own works of fiction, at any rate,
do not permit us to forget. Those of which the
most general description is that they spring from a certain
mixture of good humor and piety. Piety I mean in
(16:23):
the civil and domestic sense, quite as much as in
the religious. The love of sport, the sense of decorum,
the necessity for action, the habit of respect, the absence
of irony, the pervasiveness of childhood, the expensive tendency of
the race are a few of the qualities. The analysis might,
(16:45):
I think, be pushed much further, which ease us off,
mitigate our tension and irritation, rescue us from the nervous
exasperation which is almost the commonest element of life, as
depicted by Monsieur de Morpissant. No doubt there is in
our literature an immense amount of conventional blinking. And it
(17:08):
may be questioned whether pessimistic representation in Monsieur de Mopissant's
manner do not follow his particular original more closely than
our perpetual quest of pleasantness. Does not mister rider Haggard
make even his African carnage pleasant adheres to the lines
of the world we ourselves know. Fierce, indeed is the
(17:32):
struggle for existence among even our pious and good humored millions,
and it is attended with incidents as to which, after all,
little testimony is to be extracted from our literature of fiction.
It must never be forgotten that the optimism of that
literature is partly the optimism of women and of spinsters,
(17:56):
in other words, the optimism of ignorance as well of delicacy.
It might be supposed that the French with their mastery
of the Arte da griment would have more consolations than we.
But such is not the account of the matter given
by the new generation of painters. To the French, we
(18:17):
seem superficial, and we are certainly open to the reproach.
But none the less, even to the infinite majority of
readers of good faith, there will be a wonderful want
of correspondence between the general picture of Bellamie, of Monte Auriol,
of unvill Yvette and en famill and our own vision
(18:40):
of reality. It is an old impression, of course, that
the satire of the French has a very different tone
from ours. But few English readers will admit that the
feeling of life is less in ours than in theirs.
The feeling of life is evidently, de part a dot
(19:01):
a very different thing. If in ours, as the novel
illustrates it, there are superficialities, there are also qualities which
are far from being negatives and omissions a large imagination,
and is it fatuous to say a large experience of
the positive kind. Even those of our novelists, whose manner
(19:25):
is most ironic pity life more and hate it less
than Monsieur de Monpissant and his great initiator Flaubert. It
comes back, I suppose, to our good humor, which may
apparently also be an artistic force. At any rate, we
have reserves about our shames and our sorrows, indulgences and
(19:48):
tolerances about our philistinism, forbearances about our blows, and a
general friendliness of conception about our possibilities, which take the
cruel time from our self derision, and operate in the
last resort as a sort of tribute to our freedom.
There is a horrible admirable scene in Monsieur part which
(20:13):
is a capital example of triumphant ugliness. The harmless gentleman
who gives his name to the tale has an abominable wife,
one of whose offensive attributes is a lover unsuspected by
her husband, only less impudent than herself. Monsieur Perant comes
in from a walk with his little boy at dinner
(20:35):
time to encounter suddenly in his abused, dishonored, deserted home.
Convincing proof of her misbehavior, he waits and waits dinner
for her, giving her the benefit of every doubt. But
when at last she enters late in the evening, accompanied
by the partner of her guilt. There is a tremendous
(20:58):
domestic concussion. It is to the peculiar vividness of this
scene that I allude the way we hear it and
see it, and its most repulsive details are evoked for us.
The sordid confusion, the vulgar noise, the disordered table and
ruined dinner, the shrill insolence of the wife, her brazen mendacity,
(21:22):
the scared inferiority of the lover, the mere momentary heroics
of the weak husband, the scuffle and somersault, the eminently
unpoetic justice with which it all ends. When Thackeray relates
how author Pendennis goes home to take pot luck with
the insolvent new comes at Boulogne, and how the dreadful
(21:44):
Missus Mackenzie receives him, and how she makes a scene
when the frugal repast is served over the diminished mutton bone,
we feel that the notation of that order of misery
goes about as far as we can bear it. But
this is child's play. To the history of Monsieur and
Madame Caravan, and their attempt, after the death or supposed
(22:09):
death of the husband's mother, to transfer to their apartment
before the arrival of the other heirs, certain miserable little
articles of furniture belonging to the deceased, together with the
frustration of the maneuver not only by the grim resurrection
of the old woman, which is a sufficiently fantastic item,
(22:31):
but by the shock of battle when a married daughter
and her husband appear. No one gives us, like Monsieur
de Monpissant the odious words exchanged on such an occasion
as that no one depicts with so just a hand
the feelings of small people about small things. These feelings
(22:52):
are very apt to be fury. That word is of
strikingly frequent occurrence in his pages. Gritage is a drama
of private life in the little world of the Ministere
de Lamarine, a world, according to Monsieur de Morpissant, of
dreadful little jealousies and ineptitudes. Readers of a robust complexion
(23:17):
should learn how the wretched Monsieur Lessambre was handled by
his wife and her father on his failing to satisfy
their just expectations, and how he comported himself in the
singular situation thus prepared for him. The story is a
model of narration, but it leaves our poor average humanity
(23:39):
dangling like a beaten rag. Where does Monsieur de Morpissant
find the great multitude of his detestable women, or where
at least does he find the courage to represent them
in such colors. Jean de la Maire in unvi receives
the outrages of fate with a passive fortitude. And there
(24:02):
is something touching in Madame Roland's arms tintre de Cassier,
as exhibited in Pierre Rejean. But for the most part,
Monsieur de Monpissant's heroines are a mixture of extreme sensuality
and extreme mendacity. They are a large element in that
general disfigurement, that elusion de la gnob quill etire tante deet,
(24:28):
which makes the perverse or the stupid side of things,
the one which strikes him first, which leads him if
he glances at a group of nurses and children sunning
themselves in a Parisian square, to notice primarily the u
de brute of the nurses, or if he speaks of
the longing for a taste of the country which haunts
(24:51):
the shopkeeper fenced in behind his counter to identify it
as the amor bette d'u la nerteur, or if he
has occasion to put the boulevards before us on a
summer's evening, to seek his effect. In these terms, the city,
as hot as a stew, seemed to sweat in the
suffocating night. The drains puffed their pestilential breath from their
(25:17):
mouths of granite, and the underground kitchens poured into the
streets through their low windows the infamous miasmas of their
dishwater and old sauces. I do not contest the truth
of such indications. I only note the particular selection and
their seeming to the writer the most apropos is it
(25:39):
because of the inadequacy of these indications, when applied to
the long stretch, that Monsieur de Mopson's novels strike us
as less complete in proportion to the talent expended upon
them than his comte and Nouvelle. I make this invidious
distinction in spite of the fact that un v, the
(26:01):
first of the novels in the order of Time, is
a remarkably interesting experiment, and that Pierre Ejean is, so
far as my judgment goes, a faultless production. Belle Amie
is full of the bustle and the crudity of life.
Its energy and expressiveness almost bribe one to like it.
(26:23):
But it has the great defect that the physiological explanation
of things here too visibly contracts the problem in order
to meet it. The world represented is too special, too little, inevitable,
too much to take or to leave as we like
a world in which every man is a cad and
(26:43):
every woman a Harlot. Monsieur de Monpessint traces the career
of a finished blackguard who succeeds in life through women,
and he represents him primarily as succeeding in the profession
of journalism. His colleagues and his mistresses are as depraved
as himself, greatly to the injury of the ironic idea,
(27:07):
for the real force of satire would have come from
seeing him engaged and victorious with natures better than his own.
It may be remarked that this was the case with
the nature of Madame Walter, but the reply to that
is hardly Moreover, the author's whole treatment of the episode
(27:28):
of Madame Walter is the thing on which his admirers
have least to congratulate him. The taste of it is
so atrocious that it is difficult to do justice to
the way it is made. To stand out. Such an
instance as this pleads with irresistible eloquence, as it seems
to me the cause of that salutary diffidence or practical
(27:52):
generosity which I mentioned on a preceding page. I know
not the English or American novelist who could have written
this portion of the history of Bellamie if he would,
But I also find it impossible to conceive of a
member of that fraternity who would have written it if
he could. The subject of mont Auriole is full of
(28:16):
queerness to the English mind. Here again the picture has
much more importance than the idea, which is simply that
a gentleman, if he happened to be a low animal,
is liable to love a lady very much less if
she presents him with a pledge of their affection. It
need scarcely be said that the lady and gentlemen, who,
(28:39):
in Monsieur de Mopisson's pages exemplify this interesting truth, are
not united in wedlock, that is, with each other. Monsieur
de Morpissant tells us that he has imbibed many of
his principles from Gustave Flaubert, from the study of his works,
as well as formerly the enjoyment of his words. It
(29:02):
is in un V that Flaubert's influence is most directly traceable,
For the thing has a marked analogy with leeducacion sentimentale.
That is, it is the presentation of a simple piece
of a life, in this case a long piece, a
series of observations upon an episode kelconc, as the French say,
(29:25):
with the minimum of arrangement of the given objects. It
is an excellent example of the way the impression of
truth may be conveyed by that form. But it would
have been a still better one if, in his search
for the effect of dreariness, the effect of dreariness may
be said to be the subject of UNV. So far
(29:45):
as the subject is reducible, the author had not eliminated excessively.
He has arranged, as I say, as little as possible.
The necessity of a plot has in no degree imposed
itself upon him, and his effort has been to give
the uncomposed, unrounded look of life, with its accidents, its
(30:09):
broken rhythm, its queer resemblance to the famous description of
Bradshaw a compound of trains that start but don't arrive,
and trains that arrive but don't start. It is almost
an arrangement of the history of poor Madame de la
Maire to have left so many things out of it,
(30:29):
For after all, she is described in very few of
the relations of life. The principal ones are there. Certainly
we see her as a daughter, a wife, and a mother.
But there is a certain accumulation of secondary experience that
marks any passage from youth to old age, which is
(30:50):
a wholly absent element in Monsieur de Monpaison's narrative, and
the suppression of which gives the thing a tinge of
the arbitrary. It is in the power of this secondary
experience to make a great difference. But nothing makes any
difference for Jean de la Maire, as Monsieur de Mopissant
(31:11):
puts her before us, had she no other points of
contact than those he describes, No friends, no phases, no episodes,
no chances, none of the miscellaneous ramplissage of life. No doubt,
Monsieur de Morpissant would say that he has had to
select that the most comprehensive enumeration is only a condensation,
(31:35):
and that, in accordance with the very just principles enunciated
in that preface to which I have perhaps too repeatedly referred,
he has sacrificed what is uncharacteristic to what is characteristic.
It characterizes the career of this French country lady of
fifty years ago, that its long gray expanse should be
(31:59):
seen as peopled with but five or six figures. The
essence of the matter is that she was deceived in
almost every affection, and that essence is given if the
persons who deceived her are given. The reply is doubtless adequate,
and I have only intended my criticism to suggest the
(32:20):
degree of my interest. What it really amounts to is
that if the subject of this artistic experiment had been
the existence of an English lady, even a very dull one,
the air of verisimilitude would have demanded that she should
have been placed in a denser medium. Un v may,
after all, be only a testimony to the fact of
(32:44):
the melancholy void of the coast of Normandy, even within
a moderate drive of a great seaport. Under the restoration
and Louis Philippe It is especially to be recommended to
those who are interested in the question of what constitutes
a story, offering as it does the most definite sequences
(33:07):
at the same time that it has nothing that corresponds
to the usual idea of a plot, and closing with
an implication that finds us prepared. The picture, again, in
this case, is much more dominant than the idea, unless
it be an idea that loneliness and grief are terrible.
(33:28):
The picture, at any rate, is full of truthful touches,
and the work has the merit and the charm that
it is the most delicate of the author's productions, and
the least hard. In none other has he occupied himself
so continuously with so innocent a figure as his soft
bruised heroine. In none other has he paid our poor,
(33:52):
blind human history the compliment. And this is remarkable, considering
the flatness of so much of the particulars subject of
finding it so little bet he may think it here,
but comparatively he does not say it. He almost betrays
a sense of moral things. Jean is absolutely passive. She
(34:15):
has no moral spring, no active moral life, none of
the edifying attributes of character. It costs her apparently as
little as may be in the way of a shock
a complication of feeling, to discover by letters after her
mother's death that this lady has not been the virtuous
(34:35):
woman she has supposed, but her chronicler has had to
handle the immaterial forces of patience and renunciation. And this
has given the book a certain purity in spite of
two or three physiological passages that come in with violence,
a violence the greater as we feel it to be
(34:57):
a result of selection. It is. It is very much
a mark of Monsieur de Morpissant that, on the most
striking occasion, with a single exception, on which his picture
is not a picture of libertinage, it is a picture
of unmitigated suffering. Would he suggest that these are the
only alternatives. The exception that I here allude to is
(35:22):
for Pierre e Jean, which I have left myself small
space to speak of. Is it because in this masterly
little novel there is a show of those immaterial forces
which I just mentioned, and because Pierre Roland is one
of the few instances of operative character that can be
(35:42):
recalled from so many volumes that many readers will place
Monsieur de Mopisant's latest production altogether at the head of
his longer ones. I am not sure, inasmuch as, after all,
the character in question is not extraordinarily distinguished, and the
moral problem not presented in much complexity. The case is
(36:05):
only relative. Perhaps it is not of importance to fix
the reasons of preference in respect to a piece of
writing so essentially a work of art and of talent.
Pierre e Jean is the best of Monsieur de Mopissant's novels,
mainly because Monsieur de Mopissant has never before been so clever.
(36:27):
It is a pleasure to see a mature talent able
to renew itself, strike another note and appear still young.
This story suggests the growth of a perception that everything
has not been said about the actors on the world's stage,
when they are represented either as helpless victims or as
(36:48):
mere bundles of appetites. There is an air of responsibility
about Pierre Roland, the person on whose behalf the tale
is mainly told, which almost constant totes a pledge. An
inquisitive critic may ask why, in this particular case Monsieur
de Monpissant should have stuck to the petit bourgeois, the
(37:10):
circumstances not being such as to typify that class more
than another. There are reasons, indeed, which on reflection are perceptible.
It was necessary that his people should be poor, and
necessary even that to attenuate Madame Rolen's misbehavior, she should
(37:31):
have had the excuse of the contracted life of a
shopwoman in the rue montmart. Were the inquisitive critics slightly
malicious as well, he might suspect the author of a
fear that he should seem to give way to the
elusion du beaut if. In addition to representing the little
group in Pierre e Jean as persons of about the
(37:54):
normal conscience, he had also represented them as of the
cultivated class, if they belong to the humble life. This belittles,
and I am still quoting the supposedly malicious critic. Monsieur
de Monpiant must, in one way or the other, be
little to the English reader. It will appear I think
(38:15):
that Pierre and John are rather more of the cultivated
class than two young englishmen in the same social position.
It belongs to the drama that the struggle of the
elder brother, educated, proud and acute, should be partly with
the pettiness of his opportunities. The author's choice of a milieume, moreover,
(38:38):
will serve to English readers as an example of how
much more democratic contemporary French fiction is than that of
his own country. The greater part of it, almost all
the work of Zola and of Daudets, the best of
Flaubert's novels, and the best of those of the brothers
de jen Courts, treat of that vast dim section of
(39:01):
society which, lying between those luxurious walks, on whose behalf
there are easy presuppositions, and that darkness of misery, which,
in addition to being picturesque, brings philanthropy also to the
writer's aid, constitutes really, in extent and expressiveness the substance
(39:23):
of any nation. In England, where the fashion of fiction
still sets mainly to the country house and the hunting field,
and yet more novels are published than anywhere else in
the world, that thick twilight of mediocrity of condition has
been little explored. May it yield triumphs in the years
(39:45):
to come. It may seem that I have claimed little
for Monsieur de Monpissant, so far as English readers are
concerned with him in saying that, after publishing twenty improper volumes,
had at last published a twenty first, which is neither
indecent nor cynical. It is not this circumstance that has
(40:08):
led me to dedicate so many pages to him, but
the circumstance that, in producing all the others, he yet
remained for those who are interested in these matters, a
writer with whom it was impossible not to reckon. That
is why I called him to begin with so many
ineffectual names, a rarity, a case, an embarrassment, a lion
(40:33):
in the path. He is still in the path as
I conclude these observations, but I think that in making
them we have discovered a legitimate way round. If he
is a master of his art, and it is discouraging
to find what low views are compatible with mastery, there
is satisfaction, on the other hand, in learning on what
(40:55):
particular condition he holds his strange success. This condition, it
seems to me, is that of having totally omitted one
of the items of the problem, an omission which has
made the problem so much easier that it may almost
be described as a short cut to a solution. The
(41:16):
question is whether it be a fair cut. Monsieur de
Monpissant has simply skipped the whole reflective part of his
men and women, that reflective part which governs conduct and
produces character. He may say that he does not see it,
does not know it, to which the answer is so
(41:36):
much the better for you. If you wish to describe
life without it. The strings you pull are by so
much the less numerous, and you can therefore pull those
that remain with greater promptitude, consequently with greater firmness, with
a greater air of knowledge. Pierre Rolande, I repeat, shows
(41:58):
a capacity for reflection, but I cannot think who else
does among the thousand figures who compete with him. I
mean for reflection addressed to anything higher than the gratification
of an instinct. We have an impression that Monsieur de
Prevalles and Madame de Cadour reflect as they trudge back
(42:20):
from their mournful excursion, but that indication is not pushed
very far. An aptitude for this exercise is a part
of disciplined manhood. And disciplined manhood, Monsieur de Monpissant has
simply not attempted to represent I can remember no instance
in which he sketches any considerable capacity for conduct, and
(42:45):
his women betray that capacity as little as his men.
I am much mistaken. If he has once painted a
gentleman in the English sense of the term, his gentlemen,
like Paul Brettany and Gontranderre are guilty of the most
extraordinary deflections. For those who are conscious of this element
(43:06):
in life, look for it and like it. The gap
will appear to be immense. It will lead them to say,
no wonder you have a contempt if that is the
way you limit the field. No wonder you judge people roughly,
if that is the way you see them. Your work
on your premises remains the admirable thing it is. But
(43:28):
is your case not adequately explained? The erotic element in
Monsieur de Monpissant, about which much more might have been said,
seems to me to be explained by the same limitation,
and explicable in a similar way. Whatever else its literature
occurs in excess. The carnal side of man appears the
(43:52):
most characteristic if you look at it a great deal,
and you look at it a great deal if you
do not look at the other at the side by
which he reacts against his weaknesses, his defeats. The more
you look at the other, the less the whole business
to which French novelists have ever appeared to English readers
(44:13):
to give a disproportionate place. The business, as I may say,
of the senses, will strike you as the only typical one.
Is not this the most useful reflection to make in
regard to the famous question of the morality the decency
of the novel? It is the only one, it seems
(44:34):
to me, that will meet the case, as we find
the case to day, hard and fast rules a priori restrictions,
mere interdictions. You shall not speak of this. You shall
not look at that have surely served their time, and will,
in the nature of the case, never strike an energetic
(44:54):
talent as anything but arbitrary. A healthy, living and growing arm,
full of curiosity and fond of exercise, has an indefeasible
mistrust of rigid prohibitions. Let us then, leave this magnificent
art of the novelist to itself and to its perfect freedom,
(45:16):
in the faith that one example is as good as another,
and that our fiction will always be decent enough if
it be sufficiently general. Let us not be alarmed at
this prodigy, though prodigies are alarming of Monsieur de Morpissant,
who is at once so licentious and so impeccable. But
(45:38):
gird ourselves up with the conviction that another point of
view will yield another perfection. Eighteen eighty eight, end of
Chapter eight, Section two, Gui de Mopissant
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