II + 

He has produced a hundred short tales and only four regular novels; 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 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 novelist’s idea is apt to resemble one of those old-fashioned carriages which require a wide court to turn round. In America, where it is associated preeminently with Hawthorne’s name, with Edgar Poe’s and with that of Mr. Bret Harte, the short tale has had a better fortune. France, however, has been the land of its great prosperity, and M. de Maupassant had from the first the advantage of addressing a public accustomed to catch on, as the 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, though my indication would perhaps please better with another word, for we suffer in English from a lack of roundabout names for the conte leste⁠—that element for which the French, with their grivois, their gaillard, their égrillard, their gaudriole, have so many convenient synonyms. It is an honored tradition 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 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 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 lestes. What they have most in common is their being extremely strong, and after that their being extremely brutal. A story may be obscene without being brutal, and vice versa, and M. de Maupassant’s contempt for those interdictions which are supposed to be made in the interest of good morals is but an incident⁠—a very large one indeed⁠—of 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 cynical strain is the sign of such gems of narration as “La Maison Tellier,” “L’Histoire dune Fille de Ferme,” “L’Ane,” “Le Chien,” “Mademoiselle Fifi,” “Monsieur Parent,” “L’Héritage,” “En Famille,” “Le Baptème,” “Le Père Amable.” The author fixes a hard eye on 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, not an invention or a castle in the air. M. de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly 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 it is for the little saletés (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 Bête à Maître Belhomme,” “La Ficelle,” “Le Petit Füt,” “Le Cas de Madame Luneau,” “Tribuneauz Rustiques,” and many others of this category much better than his anecdotes of the mutual confidences of his little marquises and baronnes. + 

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 petit employé 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 unexpurguted. These last things range from “Le Horla” (which is not a specimen of the author’s best vein⁠—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 “Boule de Suif” (a triumph) to that almost inconceivable little growl of Anglophobia, “Décourerte”⁠—inconceivable I mean in its irresponsibility and ill-nature on the part of a man of M. de Maupassant’s distinction; passing by such little perfections as “Petit Soldat,” “L’Abandonné,” “Le Collier” (the list is too long for complete enumeration), and such gross imperfections (for it once in a while befalls our author to go woefully astray), as “La Femme de Paul,” “Cháli,” “Les Soeurs Rondoli.” To these might almost be added as a special category the various forms in which M. de Maupassant relates adventures in railway carriages. 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 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. M. de Maupassant does not admire him, and he is such a master of the subject that it would ill become an outsider to suggest a revision 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 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 overreachings of his caution. His existence has a gay side, but it is apt to be the merciless gaiety commemorated in “Farce Normande,” an anecdote which, like many of M. de Maupassant’s anecdotes, it is easier to refer the reader to than to repeat. If it is most convenient to place “La Maison Tellier” among the tales of the peasantry, 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 M. de Maupassant altogether, which is an incongruous and 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 is vividly illustrated by the singular scenes to which our acquaintance with Madame and her 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 of looking at life which sees the pathetic and the droll, the stuff of which the whole piece is made, in the queerest and humblest patterns. The tone of “La Maison Tellier” and the few compositions which closely resemble it expresses M. de Maupassant’s nearest approach to geniality. Even here, however, it is the geniality of the showman exhilarated by the success with which he feels that he makes his mannequins (and especially his womankins) 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 Bel-Ami may be searched almost in vain for a manifestation of the sentiment of respect, it is naturally not by Mme. 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, a misery, or even a little heroism, that he handles with a certain tenderness (Une Vie is the capital example of this), without insisting on the poor, the ridiculous or, as he is fond of saying, the bestial side of it. Such an attempt, admirable in its sobriety and delicacy, is the sketch, in “L’Abandonné,” of the old lady and gentleman, Mme. de Cadour and M. d’Apreval, 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 interior, to catch a clandestine glimpse of a young farmer, their 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 farmyard, and no sign passes between them; then they turn away and 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 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 maidservant; 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 suspect the good spinster was not so weird and desperate, addicted though her class may be, as he says, to “haunting all the tables d’hôte in Europe, to spoiling Italy, poisoning Switzerland, making the charming towns of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carrying everywhere their queer little manias, their meurs de restales pétrifiées, 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 M. de Maupassant’s friend, the hero of the “Découverte,” who, having married a little Anglaise 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 his compatriot on the steamboat and to relieve his wrath in ejaculations of “Sales Anglais”? + 

M. de Maupassant 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 petit bourgeois in general. It is true that he has treated the petit bourgeois in Pierre et 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 et Jean, a production neither comic nor cynical (in the degree, that is, of its predecessors), but serious and fresh, I will speak anon. In “Monsieur Parent,” “l’Heritage,” “En Famille,” “Une Partie de Campagne,” “Promenade,” and many other pitiless little pieces, the author opens the window wide to his perception of everything mean, narrow and sordid. The subject is ever the struggle for existence in hard conditions, lighted up simply by more or less polissonnerie. Nothing is more striking to an Anglo-Saxon reader than the omission of all the other lights, those with which our imagination, and I 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 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 expansive tendency of the race, are a few of the qualities (the analysis might, 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 M. de Maupassant. No doubt there is in our literature an immense amount of conventional blinking, and it may be questioned whether pessimistic representation in M. de Maupassant’s manner does not follow his particular original more closely than our perpetual quest of pleasantness (does not Mr. Rider Haggard make even his African carnage pleasant?) adheres to the lines of the world we ourselves know. + 

Fierce indeed is the 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; in other words the optimism of ignorance as well as of delicacy. It might be supposed that the French, with their mastery of the arts d’agrément, 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 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 Bel-Ami, of Mont-Oriol, of Une Vie, “Yvette” and En Famille, and our own vision 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 et d’autre, 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 is most ironic pity life more and hate it less than M. de Maupassant 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 tolerances about our Philistinism, forbearances about our blows and a general friendliness of conception about our possibilities, which take the cruelty 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 Parent,” which 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. M. Parent comes in from a walk with his little boy, at dinnertime, 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 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, 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 Arthur Pendennis goes home to take potluck with the insolvent Newcomes at Boulogne and how the dreadful Mrs. 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 M. and Mme. Caravan and their attempt, after the death (or supposed 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), but by the shock of battle when a married daughter and her husband appear. No one gives us like M. de Maupassant 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 are very apt to be “fury”; that word is of strikingly frequent occurrence in his pages. “L’Héritage” is a drama of private life in the little world of the Ministère de la Marine⁠—a world, according to M. de Maupassant, of dreadful little jealousies and ineptitudes. Readers of a robust complexion should learn how the wretched M. Lesable 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 dangling like a beaten rag. + 

Where does M. de Maupassant find the great multitude of his detestable women? or where at least does he find the courage to represent them in such colors? Jeanne de Lamare, in Une Vie, receives the outrages of fate with a passive fortitude; and there is something touching in Mme. Roland’s âme tendre de caissière, as exhibited in Pierre et Jean. But for the most part M. de Maupassant’s heroines are a mixture of extreme sensuality and extreme mendacity. They are a large element in that general disfigurement, that illusion de l’ignoble, qui attire tant d’êtres, 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 yeux de brute of the nurses; or if he speaks of the longing for a taste of the country which haunts the shopkeeper fenced in behind his counter, to identify it as the amour bête de la nature; 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 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 because of the inadequacy of these indications when applied to the long stretch that M. de Maupassant’s novels strike us as less complete, in proportion to the talent expended upon them, than his contes and nouvelles? I make this invidious distinction in spite of the fact that Une Vie (the first of the novels in the order of time) is a remarkably interesting experiment, and that Pierre et Jean is, so far as my judgment goes, a faultless production. Bel-Ami is full of the bustle and the crudity of life (its energy and expressiveness almost bribe one to like it), 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 every woman a harlot. M. de Maupassant 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, 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 Mme. Walter; but the reply to that is⁠—hardly! Moreover the author’s whole treatment of the episode of Mme. 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 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 Bel-Ami 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-Oriol is full of queerness to the English mind. Here again the picture has much more importance than the idea, which is simply that a gentleman, if he happen 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 gentleman who in M. de Maupassant’s pages exemplify this interesting truth are not united in wedlock⁠—that is with each other. + 

M. de Maupassant 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 is in Une Vie that Flaubert’s influence is most directly traceable, for the thing has a marked analogy with L’Education 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 quelconque, as the French say, 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 Une Vie, so far 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 broken rhythm, its queer resemblance to the famous description of “Bradshaw,” as 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 Mme. de Lamare to have left so many things out of it, 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 a wholly absent element in M. de Maupassant’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 Jeanne de Lamare as M. de Maupassant 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 remplissage of life? No doubt M. de Maupassant would say that he has had to select, that the most comprehensive enumeration is only a condensation, 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 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 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. Une Vie may after all be only a testimony to the fact of 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 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. 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 blind human history the compliment (and this is remarkable, considering the fatness of so much of the particular subject), of finding it so little béte. He may think it, here, but comparatively he doesn’t say it. He almost betrays a sense of moral things. Jeanne is absolutely passive, she 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 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 a result of selection. It is very much a mark of M. de Maupassant 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 for Pierre et 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 recalled from so many volumes, that many readers will place M. de Maupassant’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 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 et Jean is the best of M. de Maupassant’s novels mainly because M. de Maupassant has never before been so clever. 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 as either helpless victims or as 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 constitutes a pledge. An inquisitive critic may ask why in this particular case M. de Maupassant should have stuck to the petit bourgeois, the 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 Roland’s misbehavior she should have had the excuse of the contracted life of a shopwoman in the Rue Montmartre. Were the inquisitive critic slightly malicious as well, he might suspect the author of a fear that he should seem to give way to the illusion du beau if, in addition to representing the little group in Pierre et Jean as persons of about the 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—M. de Maupassant must, in one way or the other, belittle. To the English reader it will appear, I think, that Pierre and Jean 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 milieu, moreover, 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 Daudet, the best of Flaubert’s novels and the best of those of the brothers De Goncourt⁠—treat of that vast, dim section of 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 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 to come! + 

It may seem that I have claimed little for M. de Maupassant, so far as English readers are concerned with him, in saying that after publishing twenty improper volumes he has at last published a twenty-first which is neither indecent nor cynical. It is not this circumstance that has 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. This is why I called him, to begin with, so many ineffectual names: a rarity, a “case,” an embarrassment, a lion 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 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 shortcut to a solution. The question is whether it is a fair cut. M. de Maupassant 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 doesn’t see it, doesn’t know it; to which the answer is, “So 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 Roland, I repeat, shows 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 M. d’Apreval and Madame de Cadour reflect, as they trudge back 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 M. de Maupassant has simply not attempted to represent. I can remember no instance in which he sketches any considerable capacity for conduct, and 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 Brétigny and Gontran de Ravenel, are guilty of the most extraordinary deflections. For those who are conscious of this element 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 is your case not adequately explained?” + 

The erotic element in M. de Maupassant, about which much more might have been said, seems to me to be explained by the same limitation and explicable in a similar way wherever else its literature occurs in excess. The carnal side of man appears the most characteristic if you look at it a great deal; and you look at it a great deal if you don’t look at the other, at the side by which he reacts against his weaknesses, his defects. The more you look at the other the less the whole business to which French novelists have ever appeared to English readers 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 to me, that will meet the case as we find the case today. Hard and fast rules, à 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 talent as anything but arbitrary. A healthy, living and growing art, 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, 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 M. de Maupassant, who is at once so licentious and so impeccable, but gird ourselves up with the conviction that another point of view will yield another perfection. + 