Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames
O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of
the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the
Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the
unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger
will than his own and that he was being hypnotized to his doom by a
being whom he could not see, but whose presence he could feel. There is
more than one of these later tales in which we seem to perceive the
premonition of the madness which came upon Maupassant before his death.

At first he was an observer only, a recorder of the outward facts of
average humanity. He had no theories about life, or even about art. He
had no ideas of his own, no general ideas, no interest in ideas. He did
not care to talk about technic or even about his own writings. He put on
paper what he had seen, the peasants of Normandy, the episodes of the
war, the nether-world of the newspaper. He cared nothing for morality,
but he was unfailingly veracious, never falsifying the facts of
existence as he had seen it himself. Then, at the end, it is not what
his characters do that most interested him, not what they are, not what
they think, but what they feel, and, above all, what they fear.

In every work of art there are at least four elements, which we may
separate if we wish to consider each of them in turn. First of all,
there is the technic of the author, his craftsmanship, his mastery of
the tools of his trade; and by almost universal consent Maupassant is
held to be one of the master craftsmen of the short-story. Second, there
is the amount of observation of life which the author reveals; and here
again Maupassant takes rank among the leaders, altho the sphere in which
he observed had its marked limitations and its obvious exclusions.
Thirdly, there is the underlying and informing imagination which invents