and relates and sustains; and there is no disputing the vigor of
Maupassant's imagination, altho it was not lofty and altho it lacked
variety. Finally, there is always to be taken into account what one may
term the author's philosophy of life, his attitude toward the common
problems of humanity; and here it is that Maupassant is most
lacking,--for his opinions are negligible and his attempts at
intellectual speculation are of slight value.

Technic can be acquired; and Maupassant had studied at the feet of that
master technician Flaubert. Observation can be trained; and Maupassant
had deliberately developed his power of vision. Imagination may be
stimulated by constant endeavor to a higher achievement; and
Maupassant's ambitions were ever tending upward. Philosophy, however, is
dependent upon the sum total of a man's faculties, upon his training,
upon his temperament, upon the essential elements of his character; and
Maupassant was not a sound thinker, and his attitude toward life is not
that by which he can best withstand the adverse criticism of posterity.
Primarily, he was not a thinker any more than Hugo was a thinker, or
Dickens. He was only an artist--an artist in fiction; and an artist is
not called upon to be a thinker, altho the supreme artists seem nearly
all of them to have been men of real intellectual force.

(1902.)




THE MODERN NOVEL AND THE MODERN PLAY