A student of the literature of our own time who has only recently
completed his first half century of life cannot help feeling suddenly
aged and almost antiquated when he awakes to the fact that he has been
privileged to see the completed literary career of two such accomplished
craftsmen as Robert Louis Stevenson and Guy de Maupassant. In youth they
were full of promise, and in maturity they were rich in performance; and
all too soon the lives of both came to an end, when their powers were
still growing, when their outlook on life was still broadening, and when
they bid fair, both of them, to bring forth many another book riper and
wiser than any they had already given us.

The points of contrast between the two men thus untimely taken away are
as striking as the points of similarity. Both were artists ardently in
love with the technic of their craft, delighting in their own skill, and
ever on the alert to find new occasion for the display of their mastery
of the methods of fiction. Stevenson was a Scotchman; and his
pseudo-friend has told us that there was in him something of "the
shorter catechist." Maupassant was a Norman, and he had never given a
thought to the glorifying of God. The man who wrote in English found the
theme of his minor masterpieces in the conflict of which the
battle-ground is the human heart. The man who wrote in French began by
caring little or nothing for the heart or the soul or the mind, and by
concentrating all his skill upon a record of the deeds of the human
body. The one has left us 'Markheim' and the 'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde,' while the other made his first bid for fame with 'Boule
de suif.'

In the preface of 'Pierre et Jean,' Maupassant has recorded how he
acquired from Louis Bouilhet the belief that a single lyric, a scant
hundred lines, would give immortality to a poet if only the work were