Leo Tolstoy on Art and Guy de Maupassant
I read The Works of Guy de Maupassant by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Leo Wiener today because my father mentioned Guy de Maupassant after reading a short piece of mine titled “Intuit.”
No it was not in any direct refrence to my work but it came up as we discussed how some naturally take notice of what most miss, given “Intuit” is about a horses hooves! Anyway, this conversation was followed by a short quiz on Maupassant which I failed and my father asked me if I had ever read Tolstoy’s essay on Maupassant. I hadn’t. Here, I must openly confess I have never finished War and Peace, either.
The essay is long and it has taken me an entire day to fully absorb it. Here I share some excerpts that have stayed with.
Tolstoy writes:
The author [Maupassant] was endowed with that particular gift, called talent, which consists in the author’s ability to direct, according to his tastes, his intensified, strained attention to this or that subject, in consequence of which the author who is endowed with this ability sees in those subjects upon which he directs his attention, something new, something which others did not see. Maupassant evidently possessed that gift of seeing in subjects something which others did not see. But, to judge from the small volume which I had read, he was devoid of the chief condition necessary, besides talent, for a truly artistic production.
Of the three conditions:
- a correct, that is, a moral relation of the author to the subject,
- the clearness of exposition, or the beauty of form, which is the same, and
- sincerity, that is, an undisguised feeling of love or hatred for what the artist describes
Maupassant possessed only the last two, and was entirely devoid of the first. He had no correct, that is, no moral relation to the subjects described. From what I had read, I was convinced that Maupassant possessed talent, that is, the gift of attention, which in the objects and phenomena of life revealed to him those qualities which are not visible to other men; he also possessed a beautiful form, that is, he expressed clearly, simply, and beautifully what he wished to say, and also possessed that condition of the worth of an artistic production, without which it does not produce any effect, — sincerity, — that is, he did not simulate love or hatred, but actually loved and hated what he described. But unfortunately, being devoid of the first, almost the most important condition of the worth of an artistic production, of the correct, moral relation to what he represented, that is, of the knowledge of the difference between good and evil, he loved and represented what it was not right to love and represent, and did not love and did not represent what he ought to have loved and represented.
[…]
In all his novels after Bel-Ami (I am not speaking now of his shorter stories, which form his chief desert and fame, — of them I shall speak later), Maupassant obviously surrendered himself to the theory, which not only existed in his circle in Paris, but which now exists everywhere among artists, that for an artistic production we not only need have no clear conception of what is good and what bad, but that, on the contrary, the artist must absolutely ignore all moral questions, — that in this does a certain merit of the artist consist. According to this theory an artist can and must represent what is true, what exists, or what is beautiful, what, consequently, pleases him or even what can be useful as material for “science,” but it is not the business of the artist to trouble himself about what is moral or immoral, good or bad.
I remember, a famous painter showed me once his painting, which represented a religious procession. Everything was exquisitely painted, but I could not see any relation of the artist to his subject.
“Well, do you consider these rites good, and do you think that they ought to be performed or do you not?” I asked that artist.
The artist said to me, with a certain condescension to my naivete, that he did not know and did not consider it necessary to know: his business was to represent life.
“But do you at least love this?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Well, do you despise these rites?”
“Neither the one nor the other,” replied, with a smile of compassion for my stupidity, the modern highly cultured artist, who represented life without understanding its meaning and without
either loving or hating its phenomena.
Even so unfortunately thought Maupassant.
In his introduction to Pierre et Jean he says that people tell the writer: “Consolez-moi, attristez-moi, attendrissez-moi, faites-moi rever, faites-moi rire, faites-moi fremir, faites-moi pleurer, faites-moi penser. Seuls quel-eues esprits d’elites demandent a l’artist: faites-moi quel-que chose de beau dans la forme qui vous conviendra le mieux d’apres votre temperament.”
It was to satisfy the demand of these chosen spirits that Maupassant wrote his novels, imagining naively that that which was considered beautiful in his circle was the beautiful which art ought to serve.
[…]
People who are not very sensitive to art frequently imagine that an artistic production forms one whole, because the same persons act in it all the time, because everything is constructed on one plot, or because the life on one man is described. That is not true. That only seems to the superficial observer: the cement which binds every artistic production into one whole and so produces the illusion of a reflection of life is not the unity of persons and situations, but the unity of the original, moral relation of the author to his subject. In reality, when we read or contemplate an artistic production by a new author, the fundamental question which arises in our soul is always this: “Well, what kind of a man are you? How do you differ from all other men whom I know, and what new thing can you tell me about the way we ought to look upon our life?” No matter what the artist may represent, — saints, robbers, kings, lackeys, — we seek and see only the artist’s soul.
[…]
An artist is an artist for the very reason that he sees the objects, not as he wants to see them, but as they are. The bearer of talent, — man, — may make mistakes, but the talent, as soon as the reins are given to it, as was done by Maupassant in his stories, will reveal and lay bare the subject and will make the writer love it, if it is worth of love, and hate it, if it is worthy of hatred. What happens to every true artist, when, under the influence of his surroundings, he begins to describe something different from what he ought to describe, is what happened to Balaam, who, when he wanted to bless, cursed that which ought to have been cursed, and, when he wanted to curse, began to bless that which ought to have been blessed; he will involuntarily do, not what he wants, but what he ought to do. The same happened with Maupassant.
One source for entire essay can be found here.
