Text: Frederick Rowland Marvin, “Maupassant and Poe,” Fireside Papers, Boston: Sherman, French & Company, 1915, pp. 65-73

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IT may be we should never have heard of Guy de Maupassant had there been no Edgar Allan Poe. Both men were masters of the short story ; both were gifted with that clear, penetrating intellectual sight which goes at once with unerring certainty to the heart of the thing to be portrayed; both were able to compress a world of meaning into the narrow compass of a few pages; both were cynical and took dark, pessimistic views of life; both passed in youth through the dismal process of endeavoring to adapt a highly poetic temperament, fine tastes, and unusual gifts to a commercial pursuit; and both made a failure as dismal as the process itself. But when you come to the substance of their work, the material selected, the situations chosen, and the effect produced, you find in the productions of Maupassant, to remind you of Poe, only here and there a lowering storm-cloud that soon dissolves in light and flowers and song. Of Poe's soul of horror, that “mystic obsession” of terror, that weird and desolating beauty that unites in one alluring romance and companionless despair, almost nothing is to be found in the brilliant pages of our French author.

Though both writers were cynical, pessimistic, and at times despondent, Maupassant's view of life had in it some of those brighter and more pleasing features the want of which often renders [page 68:] the work of Poe distressing to the ordinary reader. Maupassant had great delight in nature. He could lie for hours upon the grass or beneath the spreading branches of a leafy tree, perfectly happy in the contemplation of the verdured earth and so much of the blue sky as could disclose itself through interlacing boughs. Flowers gave him exquisite pleasure. The sounds of nature intoxicated him. The moaning of the wind in the tree-tops, the chirp of insects, and the song of birds, — especially that of the nightingale, — filled him with indescribable satisfaction. The roar of the ocean rendered him oblivious of all else. The sights of nature had upon him much the same effect that natural sounds had. Cattle browsing in the fields, the simple life of the peasant, the landscape, and, above all, the joyous existence of children, — of these he could not have too much. His was not the old pagan pleasure ; it was rather the artistic delight of the modern mind. His senses were keen and alert. He had what has been called “ a joyous animalism,” in which the spiritual element was singularly wanting. He reveled in form and color with an artist's joy. His ears were sensitive to every sound. The whisper of love, the cry of passion, the note of terror, and the shout of triumph all seized upon him and held him fast. But the seizure was upon the physical side of his nature.

Of course he reappears in his books. Every man is in a measure the hero of his own story. [page 69:] His life was not pure; why should we expect to find immaculate purity in his work? Where the flame is not without smoke there must be some smudge of soot. His stories are coarse and some of them are, if we mince not our words, libidinous. But they are not all of them evil, and perhaps few that are evil are wholly so. He portrayed vice, but it can hardly be said that he rendered it attractive. There was with it too much of the horror of its fruitage. His descriptive powers were great, but he could describe only that of which he had himself knowledge. Passion he could paint, and as well “ the raptures and roses of vice,” but of love in its better meaning he knew nothing. Of marriage he had a poor opinion. His soul was incapable of that sacred union. “Boule de Suif,” which gave Maupassant his sudden recognition, illustrates what we are saying. The motif of the story is certainly not elevating. It presents us with a clear, remorseless, and witty picture of selfishness and insincerity. It brings out the sordid side of human nature. It shows up the meanness and rottenness of those who pretend to a virtue they do not possess. Uncleanness plays a large part, but surely the reader is not made to love evil. The reading brings with it an inward disgust, a loathing, a sense of foulness, but the story is moral in the same way that Daudet's “Sappho” is moral. The latter romance may be played upon the stage in such a way as to make it lascivious to the very last degree, — it was so played. [page 70:] But the tale as we have it from Daudet is good and only good. Any young man reading it may see with fearful distinctness how from first to last a bad woman may ruin a pure life, how under her baneful shadow the most noble and manly virtues may themselves become the servitors of vice.

It is a good thing to know that Maupassant, unlike most young authors, restrained himself from premature publication. For seven long years he toiled at the unattractive duties of a clerk of the navy and education departments. Wearisome work it must have been. The old life in Normandy during all that time haunted his imagination. He dreamed of the dear hills, fields, and brooks of earlier days. He grew homesick and despondent, but still he worked on. Only upon a Sunday could he visit the beautiful environs of Paris. Sometimes a holiday gave him a few hours of canoeing on the Seine — an occasional “holiday and six francs!” During all that time he wrote, but no one knew what he wrote. He entered into no communication with any one, until suddenly the young toiler made his debut, and astonished Paris gave him cordial recognition, — gave him more, for the immediate demand for his work was so great that neither he nor his publishers could meet it. Fortune and fame came with a sudden rush.

The unclean life of the gay French capital was not good for the delicate and sensitive author. [page 71:] Why repeat the sad tale? Suffice it to say that overwork, licentiousness, drugs, alcohol, entire neglect of the ordinary laws of health, were more than his fine temperament could endure. Over the blinded mental vision of our gifted writer the shadows began to fall. Slowly at first, and later with great swiftness, melancholy thoughts pursued him. The mental faculties crumbled, and in a fit of despair he made an assault upon his own life. A watchful friend prevented the suicide, and foreign travel was tried as a remedial agent, but with no marked result. His physician prescribed a period of rest and retirement in a villa at Cannes, but this also failed to benefit him. It was too late. The gifted author, — gifted as few have been, praised and admired by an enthusiastic public, — lingered eighteen months in a straitjacket, and then died of general paresis.

Poe's life also was one of dissipation. So far as the world knows the author of “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Raven,” and “Annabel Lee” was pure in all his relations with women. He married the woman he loved, and he faced the great sorrow of her death. Whatever wrongs Maupassant may have committed, he never committed that of wedding a pure and devoted woman. Among the women of Paris who understood him and who chose to live as he lived, he counted, it is said, “his bonnes fortunes by the score.” Poe's life, as has been said, was pure. If he used narcotics we do not know of it. [page 72:] though true it is the suspicion has been entertained. His one great enemy was alcohol, and of it he died.

Maupassant's sensual enjoyment was restricted by a constant fear of death which, Goncourt thinks, grew out of an intense love of life. Maupassant's theories of both life and death were wholly materialistic. He held that with the last breath one ceased to exist. When a man lost life he lost everything. He found solitude unendurable. Like Aaron Burr, he was unhappy when alone, and preferred almost any company to no company at all. He obtained relief in the presence of other lives, for the presence of such lives seemed to add a measure of stability to his own.

You have the whole of Maupassant's intent and purpose in the story he tells, whatever it may be. The interest centers always in the story, and in the story alone. He introduces no problem and suggests no theories. There are few preachments. He is to be read solely for the story. Since the story is true to life, it conveys its own lesson; but the lesson is always a part of the story, and what may be its contents does not concern the writer.

Here again we come upon a point of resemblance between Poe and Maupassant. Poe makes himself the hero or principal character in many of his tales, and in most of his poems, but you do not feel his personality. So far as the story goes, he is a mere phantom or abstraction masquerading [page 73:] in a personal pronoun. In his tales, as in those of Maupassant, the interest is in the tale itself, and not in any thing it suggests. What moral conclusions may come of the narrative is immaterial to him.