It must be admitted at once that many of Maupassant's earlier
short-stories have to do with the lower aspects of man's merely animal
activity. Maupassant had an abundance of what the French themselves
called "Gallic salt." His humor was not squeamish; it delighted in
dealing with themes that our Anglo-Saxon prudery prefers not to touch.
But even at the beginning this liking of his for the sort of thing that
we who speak English prefer to avoid in print never led him to put dirt
where dirt was not a necessary element of his narrative. Dirty many of
these tales were, no doubt; but many of them were perfectly clean. He
never went out of his way to offend, as not a few of his compatriots
seem to enjoy doing. He handled whatever subject he took with the same
absolute understanding of its value, of the precise treatment best
suited to it. If it was a dirty theme he had chosen--and he had no
prejudice against such a theme--he did whatever was needful to get the
most out of his subject. If it was not a dirty theme, then there was
never any touch of the tar-brush. Whenever the subject itself was
inoffensive his treatment was also immaculate. There is never any
difficulty in making a choice out of his hundred or two brief tales;
and it is easy to pick out a dozen or a score of his short-stories
needing absolutely no expurgation, because they are wholly free from any
phrase or any suggestion likely to bring the blush of shame to the cheek
of innocence. In matters of taste, as we Anglo-Saxons regard them,
Maupassant was a man without prejudices. But he was a man also of
immitigable veracity in his dealing with the material of his art, in his
handling of life itself. He told the truth as it was given to him to see
the truth; not the whole truth, of course, for it is given to no man to
see that. His artistic standard was lofty; and he did his best not to
lie about life. And in some ways this veracity of his may be accepted,
if not as an equivalent for morality, at least as a not wholly unworthy