Guy de Maupassant
I had been to a hypnotic séance and was on my way home across the Paris boulevards. The sirens of the trottoirs were sitting in front of the brightly-lit brasseries with their lords, drinking beer, while others were still wandering up and down under the wide awnings in front of the cafés. The thought occurred to me how much the type had altered during the last four years; it used to be the fashion to be as slim as a willow, with stays like a coat of mail, but now loose, negligent figures were to be seen under tight-fitting dresses, and where formerly people used to wear buds, they now decorated themselves with full-blown flowers. The rattling of the omnibuses mingled with the strident music of a Roumanian band in one of the neighbouring brasseries, and one’s eyes were dazzled by the glitter of real and false diamonds, and by the glances of their wearers, real or false as the case might be. The faces of the multitude as they swept past me were confounded in my mind with those I had just seen in the over-heated hall where the hypnotic séance had taken place. The perfumes that were wafted through the air were transformed in the memory of my olfactory nerves to the penetrating scents of musk, patchouli and poudre-de-riz, which the Parisian ladies carry with them into all theatres, omnibuses, and picture galleries whither they go, charging the atmosphere with a strong, oppressive, artificial odour, exquisitely compounded, and dry as the colours of the majority of modern French artists—a suspicious atmosphere, the excessive sensibility of which suggests sickness and hidden corruption. Again I seemed to see the faces of those who surrounded me in the close atmosphere of the small room where the newest fashionable pastime, a demonstration of the “magic circle,” had taken place—empty, weak, brutal, affected faces, such as form the larger portion of every popular assembly; and suddenly I realised, what my instinct had long since told me, the difference that exists between the expression on the faces of this race and the expression on the faces of that other race, to which I myself belonged, and which in its national varieties I had taken infinite trouble to understand, perhaps not altogether without success.
This séance of hypnotic, magnetic experiments was given by a new literary and theosophical set of young Frenchmen, called “the Adepts”; the people who assembled to witness the performance were members of the lower middle class, and ladies and gentlemen from all circles of society. The discovery of which I have spoken came upon me suddenly from under the giant roof of a straw hat trimmed with a wreath of roses, where I caught sight of a strange, death-like, glassy look in the eyes of a smiling beauty of uncertain age. I was struck by the number of cadaverous physiognomies which rendered it almost impossible to guess the age of Parisians, whether men or women. Young people wore the same expression as those of riper years, and even extreme youth had something ashen grey in the complexion, something that was like a breath of mildew, unpalpable, deceptive, as of premature old age. In the north everybody looks about as old as he is, not only according to the fixed sum of his years, but also according to the varying life-limit which is determined by a person’s vitality. There we have old and young and middle-aged. But here the majority are neither old nor young, and for the women there is no middle age. What is the reason? Is it entirely owing to the art of dress? Or is it due to that memento mori of an ancient civilisation—a counterfeit susceptibility? When we compare the French fashion papers with the faces of young Frenchwomen, the former might be taken for portraits. Here and there the same sweet smile which renders the mouth small and pointed, the same studied charm, the same artificial personality and excessive caution which mask the woman’s real nature until all that is spontaneous about her—age, soul, instinct—is for ever lost. It is perfectly true that these expressionless faces are to be met with everywhere. In Germany there is a large percentage of ladies in good society whose faces look like copies of the illustrations in magazines provided for family reading. But beneath it all there is something else, something absolutely different, a kind of broad, and as yet unspoilt, natural foundation in the Teutonic race, which compares favourably with the more and more narrowed, almost extinct nature in the Gallic race.
That which struck me most about these restless, expressionless eyes, was not the absence of soul in them which one notices in the German who broods over his beer and toddy, but an empty look such as you find in the eyes of a dead animal—an absence of feeling, a vacant stare, the Narcissus-look of self-reflecting satisfaction....
The omnibus for which I was waiting had not arrived, and I remained standing in front of a bookseller’s table where the newest publications were displayed. There in a row, side by side, lay Flirt, by Paul Hervieux; L’Amour Artificiel, by Jules Cazes; L’Inutile Beauté and Notre Cœur, by Guy de Maupassant. They lay there like a continuation of my thoughts, confirming the truth of those observations of which I had as yet hardly convinced myself. I came nearer and examined Notre Cœur, and meditated on the new element which this book contains, and on the old element which caused it to run through three editions in a fortnight. Old mingled with new, boldness with conventionality, there you have the secret of the best and most critical of modern French romance writers, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, and J. K. Huysmans, combined with that unsurpassable art of telling a story, that short, simple clearness of diction which renders Guy de Maupassant the greatest of the three.
An open carriage came driving out of a side street. A pretty little woman in a light-coloured dress lay back with her head resting against the cushions as though exhausted with lassitude and ecstasy, and under her large, yellow straw hat, pressed against her face, was the face of a man dressed in black who was sitting beside her, kissing her like one possessed, without ever raising his head, oblivious of all else....
It looked like the old French love, the love of Heloïse and Manon Lescaut and George Sand. The French women of to-day have ceased to love like that; it is only paid love that loves in that fashion now. The ladies of the bourgeoisie and the hautes mondaines do not love any more, and cannot love any more. That is exactly what those three books, lying side by side on the bookseller’s table, have to tell: Flirt, L’Amour Artificiel, and Notre Cœur.
There is a strangely feeble pulsation in these three books, the voice is hushed, the colours broken. In reading them we seem to sit as on a rainy day in a finely furnished, richly perfumed drawing-room, before an open fire-place with a red glass screen, in which the flame flickers and is magnified, producing an effect that is wonderfully sleepifying and unreal. Yet in the midst of all this luxury we can hear the pattering of the rain outside, and our souls shiver as the artificial home comforts glide further and further away, and we are left surrounded by cold and emptiness....
The reason is that the women who live in this home have no warmth to give, their charms are restless and unsatisfying, their vanity is cruel and insatiable, they need men as they need the mirrors in their dressing-rooms, in order that they may be surrounded by them and able to see their own images reflected from every possible point of view.
The new element in these French writers consists in their having simultaneously discovered and appropriated this type, a type which is international, but which, in its psycho-physiological development can only be properly studied through the medium of a French author’s unprejudiced views, and only properly appreciated by the moral large-heartedness of a French public.
The women in these books are ladies, of whom it is said in society that they are “without reproach.” Their conduct is blameless, they never forget themselves. They keep within the bounds of innocent flirtation, and have developed the same to the dimensions of a science which renders them almost irresistible; they are intelligent coquettes, and they are more, they are creative coquettes, who turn themselves into works of art, and only as such do they wish to be admired and enjoyed; they are objets d’art which must not be touched or handled, and their cunning consists in endowing these works of art with an appearance of life, soul and passion. They, with their empty natures, are not satisfied with emptiness in the opposite sex.
They have a longing to replenish their own natures at the cost of others, and they cling like vampires to the men who have something to give, and who are able to vouchsafe to them the delight of seeing them suffer. For they never satisfy the wishes which they have awakened. They never forget themselves.
So far it is fortunate for the man who falls in love with them that they do not forget themselves, for however worthless their gifts may be, there is nothing so worthless as the gift of themselves. All the disappointments of which they are the cause are as nothing compared to the disappointment of the man when he clasps them in his arms. There is something strangely soulless and impersonal about them, his heart seems to beat against a lifeless body, no warmth encircles him, no electric stream proceeds from them, they give him no joy, nor do they experience any. These women who have so much mind, cleverness, intelligence and reflection, who are so beautiful, so fashionable, so superior—they have no nature. They are like those barren ears of corn that tower above the corn-field with their long stalks and slender pannicles, waving to and fro, and attracting attention to themselves, but in whose husks we find no seed. They are like those large empty nuts, which, when cracked, are found to contain nothing but a little mildew. And all the while they seek for that which is lacking in themselves, they like to talk about the weariness of life, the vanity of hope, the secret attractions of love; they tease and charm and beckon from afar, they let it be supposed that they have much to give, yet all their desire is to play with their idle delicate fingers upon the soul of man as upon an instrument of music. They want to strike a note to hear it sound and vibrate, and they make themselves his friends for the sake of being loved, and of quivering with the passion of self-love, they nod to their reflections in the mirror, and invent a new way of doing the hair, or a new and sprightly aperçu when they find that they have succeeded in their desire, which is to experience a faint reflex glow from the feelings which they have kindled in man.
Their looking-glass is their lover, their sole interest is centred in themselves, the aim and object of their lives is to be self-conscious, and life for them consists in circling round themselves.
Men of this sort, men who are sterile egoists, have frequently been described; but until now no one has ever probed the depths of woman’s lack of feeling. Here, as in almost every subject that is new to literature, the French are the first to lead the way. But in real life these types meet us long before literature sees them and makes them her own, and women have long been familiar with this side of one another’s nature. The silent struggles which man does not perceive, and which both parties conceal from him, the coquette from vanity and her rival from pride, these silent struggles are legion as the sacrifices which they have cost.
It is not moral prejudice that restrains the best types of the species from satisfying the more or less forbidden love which they awaken, for they pride themselves on their open minds; and it is not cowardice, for they are clever enough to escape any suspicion of scandal attaching to themselves; their inward coldness is the only cause. They are not willing to disturb themselves, lest in so doing the work of art, which is their own selves, should discover its defects. They lose nothing, or if they do, it is their imagination that is the loser. And if at the last they forget themselves it is not their blood or their heart, but it is the glow of reflex desire that forgets itself.
The coquette in Flirt is a lady of the ordinary bourgeois type. She is determined to have admirers at any price, and despises no means whereby to capture the indifferent, fears no humiliation if only she can render submissive those who seek to resist her, nor does she hesitate to hold out hopes wherewith to attract the doubtful. She would have them all burn on the altar of her vanity like incense rising in her nostrils, but for the sake of convenience she remains an honourable woman. Her toilet is the sole occupation of her mind; to charm and afterwards reject is the daily excitement without which she cannot live.
L’Amour Artificiel is a truer and more striking picture of the age. Jules Cazes has emancipated himself from the conventional French custom of never describing any erotic experiences except those of married women. This story takes place before marriage. Stella is a daughter of the Plutocracy, probably half a Jewess, spoilt, pretentious, talented, with all the coldness of soul and temperament that belongs to the emancipated woman, and which she mistakes for pride, she has that same feeling of superiority over the man combined with the consciousness of being unloveable—a new type that is very un-French, and which offers a singular proof of the manner in which foreign influence has forced its way through the closed circle of culture belonging to French perception. Stella is a young lady imbued with the tone of Ibsen’s and Kielland’s women’s rights women. Her story is a continual withering of the soul.
She has a fine voice and a remarkable talent for execution, but what is she to sing when she feels nothing? She is a stranger to the depths of life; a young girl comme il faut, belonging to the moneyed aristocracy, is not likely to experience anything very deep—from lack of disposition, lack of opportunity, or both; she is unbearably bored in the society to which she belongs, and has a longing for sensations; her mornings are spent in gazing at herself in the looking-glass, in paying visits and trying on dresses, in annoying her friends, and in practising the newest songs; but how in the world is she to spend her evenings? She lures a penniless young author, flirts with him and makes prodigious advances, only to chase him away again like a dog. The young man sees through her game, but his poor, foolish head is turned by her perfumes, her fashionable dresses and her cold, proud beauty, and his sufferings are quite sufficient to afford her an agreeable distraction. The type which she represents bears a certain resemblance to that which Marie Bashkirtseff records in her diary. It is the same fever of girlhood, the same wild desire to attract men, the same self-deification combined with the utter incapacity for loving which undermined that great talent and hot temperament, and drove its possessor to an early illness and death. But Stella is far from possessing a hot temperament. She has that injured consciousness of her actions which is the property of all calculating souls. She seizes one initiative after the other with regard to the poor silly youth, to whose modest mind the idea never occurs of seducing such a self-possessed young lady. But Stella, who has been over hasty in breaking with her intended who did not allow himself to be sufficiently tyrannised over to please her, has grown anxious to be married. Without love, without tenderness, without ever forgetting herself, cold and brutal, she tempts him to the act of love. The hardness of her heart undergoes no change through the experience, and when soon afterwards her father becomes bankrupt, she marries a rich old dandy who had always been the object of her scorn.
In this study of a girl the new element is compounded of shallow curiosity and soulless impulse; it is an unprejudiced attempt to depict a degenerate woman, who among the many caricatures of nature and society, is no rarity; it is a step on the way towards a psychological analysis of modern humanity. Though it were nothing more than a search after a truer description of human nature than that presented to us in the models of the old æsthetic school, the author would still have rendered an undoubted service.
The cleverest and most profound study of a woman occurs in the description of Madame de Burne in Maupassant’s Notre Cœur.
Maupassant was in fact the only realist among modern French authors, whereby I mean that he had the clearest and most spontaneous vision for the nature of things and their connection with one another; he had that nobility of temperament and sense of proportion that never thrust itself between the world and himself, to distort the former after the manner of a bad looking-glass. He let the facts speak for themselves, and as he was possessed of that health which neither requires the digestive expedient of moralising, not yet that of sentimentalising, one could feel tolerably certain of protection from the so-called “contemplation of the world,” from which one never escapes in the writings of Daudet, Zola and Bourget. It is certainly not the great depths that are measured in such transparent water, but we will return to that subject another time.
Notre Cœur is a very clever book, and Madame de Burne, herself a clever lady, is at the same time a very clever study of a woman. There is a philosopher in the book, a French novelist called Lamarthe, who has many characteristics in common with Paul Bourget, amongst others an unceasing interest in the analysis of woman. This man, who loves in order that he may study the object of his affections, and in whose mind the most intimate experiences are changed into psychological perceptions, passes the following judgment on the present generation of ladies in society.
“No, they are not women; the more we know them, the less they give us that sensation of sweet intoxication which the real woman never fails to give. Look at their toilets; they are birds, they are flowers, they are serpents, but they are not women. The object of their lives is to rival one another and to pursue their admirers. It amuses them to see men overpowered, conquered and governed by the irresistible force of woman, and, as time goes on, the tendency develops like a hidden instinct, and grows gradually into an instinct of war and conquest. Take Madame de Burne for an example. She is a widow. Perhaps it was her marriage with a despotic churl that awoke in her heart a longing to execute vengeance, a sombre craving to make men suffer for all that she had endured at the hands of one of them, to feel herself for once the strongest, able to bend the will of others, to inflict suffering, and to conquer opposition. But before all else she is a born coquette. Her heart does not hunger for emotion, like the hearts of tender and sensitive women. She does not desire the love of one man, she does not seek the happiness of a strong passion; what she would like is the admiration of all, and if you would remain her friend, you must love her. It is not the real wine of former times. Love was different under the Restoration, it was different under the Second Empire, and now it has become different again. When the romanticists idealised women and made them dream dreams, women introduced into life the experiences of their hearts whilst reading. Nowadays you pride yourselves on the suppression of all deceitful, poetic glamour, and your novels are as dry as your lives; but believe me, no more love in your books, no more love in your lives!”
Afterwards he continues: “Look at this Madame de Burne who is so charming, so amiable, so clever and so fascinating. It is not her wishes that torment her, it is her nerves. She thinks, she does not feel; or she thinks her feelings. She is proud of her intellect and has no idea of the narrowness of her intelligence. Nothing interests her in which she cannot make herself the central point. She expects too much from men, she expects too much from their goodness, their nature, their character, their delicacy, while she herself never has anything to give that is not for every one alike. Woman was created and came into the world for two purposes—for love and for the child. But this kind of woman is incapable of loving and does not wish for children. If she happens to have any, they are a misfortune and a burden to her.”
Then follows a subtle criticism of this entire group of women, who are to be met with in all countries at a certain level of culture, especially where comfortable circumstances predominate. Flowery declaimers for the most part, women who interest themselves in every kind of question—pampered beings with numerous wants and an affectation of simplicity. A description of these “détraquées contemporaines,” to whom Madame de Burne belongs, flows from the pen of Lamarthe in his novel called One of Them. He writes as follows:
“They are a new race of women with reasoning, hysterical nerves excited by a thousand contradictory emotions, which are hardly worthy of being called wishes; disappointed with life without having tasted anything owing to lack of experience; void of passion, void of affection, they unite the temper of spoilt children with the dulness of aged sceptics.”
The great merit of these books consists in the boldness with which they force their way into a new and intricate sphere of psychological study. They lay hold on woman in the hidden depths of her personality, as one who stands alone and lives her own life—her life of the many days, weeks, months, years, when she grows in herself, educates and miseducates herself in the loneliness of her being, in that inner life which is made up of wishes, dreams, hopes and disillusions, before any appointed man and any appointed event appears on the horizon of her soul. And should the appointed man and the appointed event come at last, or should anything else, anything unexpected come into her life, it very often happens that the entire spiritual construction is already completed, the material hardened, and the feelings have lost their power of adaptability. These phenomena and their offshoots have as yet scarcely been taken into consideration by literature. Novels have always begun with love when dealing with woman, and the subject was always her relationship to man, or her preparation for that relationship. But this is a simplification of the subject which rests on the ingenuousness of an obsolete philosophy of life. Life is not as simple as ruder minds would have us think; and before all else there is one fact that deserves recognition: Life advances and humanity changes.
We are standing on the threshold of a new culture, the nature of which depends on the mental and spiritual qualities of the individuals who are its bearers. It may be like a mighty bird which spreads its broad wings and soars into the darkest space of futurity, or it may be like a misshapen monster that falls to the earth. We have never yet caught sight of the bird with the broad wings, but of monsters we have already seen several.
The contributions of French culture have hitherto been the forerunners of a highly susceptible race. But the signs are not wanting to show that the genuine stream of literary production in France is beginning to wane.
Even in these books there are interesting and deep-rooted problems leading up to the conventional Chambre garnie love, which must never be absent from any novel that is to satisfy the French public. The French are conquerors, but they are not colonists.
It is left to the Teutonic intellect to force its way into these preserves, to plough the ground and to enter into possession.