Octave Mirbeau’s sharp 1885 critique examining Guy de Maupassant’s dominance in French short story writing, while defending other overlooked masters of the genre. A witty analysis of literary fame and the perils of excessive praise in 19th century French literature.
Literary production grows more enormous, more menacing by the day. Books rise, overflow, spread everywhere: it’s a deluge. They gush in torrents from crammed bookshops, tumble in yellow, blue, green and red cascades from dizzying displays. You can’t imagine all the names, dragged up from the depths of obscurity, that this tidal wave lifts momentarily on the crest of its waves, rolls about pell-mell like bits of seaweed against the pebbles, then casts aside into some forgotten corner of the shore where no one passes, not even the beachcombers. Through great skill and great talent, Guy de Maupassant has managed to save his name from such a fate. Not only does it float above the flood, but it shines over this sea of books like a lighthouse.
No one admires Maupassant’s talent more than I do. Among his already numerous works, three or four are definitive and will endure. That, I believe, is the finest tribute one can pay a writer in this age of ephemeral literature, barely acknowledged by Today and forgotten by Tomorrow. A few rare critics have reproached Guy de Maupassant for scattering his energies in abbreviated tales instead of concentrating them in hefty tomes. This reproach strikes me as unfair, for Maupassant moves with infinitely more ease and grace in the short story than in the novel, and besides, the short story is a charming and very French genre that has enriched our literary heritage with many masterpieces. I can’t quite see what we would gain by forcing the author of Bel-Ami to write nothing but novels from now on, and I can see everything we would lose. Maupassant is the master of the short story; no one disputes this position—quite the contrary. Everyone strives to hoist him so high above all storytellers past, present and future that soon we will see nothing of him but rays of light. His physical form will have vanished, and the moment isn’t far off when Maupassant will have become an abstraction, a sort of apotheosised god, the Short Story itself. Secure in his divinity within the short story, Maupassant shouldn’t easily resign himself to being merely a demigod in the novel.
In the novel, things work rather differently. No one can claim to be the sole and absolute hero. Everyone has their champion. Some worship Zola, others sacrifice at Flaubert’s altar; some prostrate themselves before Goncourt, others before Daudet; there are those who say their prayers to Claretie and Richebourg. Even Montépin has temples in the hearts of concierges. So the novel gives us no indisputable deity. There are as many gods as there are novelists—I might even say as many as there are readers—and for a superior mind like Maupassant’s, it’s hardly desirable to aspire to a divinity so commonplace that it can be conquered by anyone, by Ohnet as much as by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, those two poles of contemporary literature. I know the bulletins of bibliography-by-the-line claim that literature begins with Maupassant and ends with him; to hear them tell it, Maupassant dethrones Flaubert, eclipses Zola, erases Goncourt, extinguishes Huysmans; everyone smiles a bit at this excessive aggrandisement, and one searches in vain through his works for the equivalent of Sentimental Education, Germinal, The Joy of Life, Germinie Lacerteux, or Against Nature. Maupassant himself, who has as much modesty as he has talent, must be starting to find that publicity sometimes overshoots the mark and is often embarrassing. Certainly, Maupassant deserves an enviable place alongside his masters, but he understands he still has efforts to make and works to produce before he can leap from the student’s bench to the master’s chair. The works, he will produce them, I’m convinced; the master, he will become. It just needs a few more years to pass.
Meanwhile, the short story belongs to him, the short story is his exclusive property, and this property is as good as any other when you know how to cultivate it. If Boccaccio, La Fontaine, or Voltaire were alive today, they would have no chance of achieving fame and would be condemned to being very small fry next to Maupassant. Note that I’m speaking seriously, and it’s with deep conviction that I declare Maupassant creates, in this genre, immortal masterpieces that will not perish: Boule de Suif, That Pig of a Morin, The Return, On Horseback, Pierrot are admirable, incomparable things, destined to remain as models in our French literature, eternally.
I think, nonetheless, that one does the young writer rather a disservice by saying every day that apart from what Maupassant writes, nothing is worth reading, and I’m convinced he is the first to be embarrassed and distressed by it. These fits of fashion are terrible in that they cannot last, and the more exaggerated the praise has been, the more irreparable and profound the indifference that arrives one day. Besides, they are almost always unjust, not towards the person they exalt, but towards the people they forget and sacrifice to the ferocity of a single admiration. You would really think our century is too weak to bear the weight of several admirations.
Maupassant is a master in this delicate and difficult genre: the short story. He is not the only master; he has written some that are comparable in beauty to those we are offered daily as models; yet I believe Balzac’s glory is neither touched nor diminished by this, that Barbey d’Aurevilly has put into his brief tales tremors of passion, rapid visions, dazzling syntheses that are quite worth Maupassant’s exactitude. I know short stories by Jules Lemaître that have given me poignant sensations of nature and humanity, and just yesterday I was reading a book by Paul Hervieu: The Homicidal Alp, which deserves lengthy attention and a proper savouring of that strange, wild perfume of a very personal and very living literature.
One can’t compare Maupassant to Paul Hervieu. Each of these two writers has his different personality, his different artistic ideal, his different method. But each is a master of the short story. I would even add that Hervieu seems to me to conceive grander things, and that his mountain landscapes, at once epic and exact, seem to me swollen with a nobler life, a more mysterious depth, a fiercer and somehow more divinised love of nature, that they leave the brain with more thoughts, the heart with more emotions, than Maupassant’s landscapes—admirable too, but where nature’s soul and human truth have passed through a dryness and scepticism of analysis that diminishes them, shrinks them instead of enlarging them. Through sheer analysis and detail, Maupassant manages to represent beings and things exactly; Hervieu shows them to us in foreshortened glimpses that fix them definitively whilst giving them extensions: that sort of mystery and disquiet that floats around life.
But one would waste one’s time trying to demonstrate to the public that there might be room for other writers alongside Maupassant. It’s an opinion that would have no chance of being accepted, and the best arguments in the world, the most striking facts, would achieve nothing. One doesn’t easily revise universally accepted ideas, and each man of letters always bears the mark of first impressions and first judgements. So Maupassant is a storyteller. He could rise through some work full of breath to the summits of art; he could give us today a novel blazing with power, a sublime comedy—he will never be anything but a storyteller. Criticism—I mean the kind that counts, that influences the general public, the criticism with which publishers cram the fourth pages of newspapers—has always represented the author of Une vie and Bel-Ami as a storyteller. It’s a settled and definitive matter. Fortunately, it was also decided on the same occasion that he would be the only storyteller of his time. It would be madness for any author to try to acquire a reputation alongside Maupassant.
Octave Mirbeau, Le Matin, 11 December 1885
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