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Updated: May 5, 2025
How many openings the last offers for the gratuitous display of the author's wit or clever buffoonery, the first for an unmeasured display of sentiment! And both sentiment and buffoonery could have been made very good too, in a way accessible to the meanest intelligence, at the cost of truth and honesty. Here it is where Maupassant's austerity comes in.
Many and various have been the judgments passed upon Maupassant's work.
You see, madame did not sleep well last night, and I read to her. It was a little difficult, and there was not much choice of books." "What did you read?" I asked mechanically, as I prepared her medicine. "Oh, some French novel first De Maupassant's; but madame said he was impertinent that he made women fools and men devils. Then I tried some modern English tales, but she said they were silly.
Zola had contributed the manuscript of the "Attaque du Moulin," and it was at Maupassant's house that the five young men gave in their contributions. Each one read his story, Maupassant being the last.
It is true that Daudet's stories do not attain the tremendous impressiveness that Balzac's occasionally do, as, for example, in La Grande Breteche, nor has his clear-cut art the almost disconcerting firmness, the surgeon-like quality of Maupassant's; but the author of the ironical Elixir of Father Gaucher and of the pathetic Last Class, to name no others, could certainly claim with Musset that his glass was his own, and had no reason to concede its smallness.
"Black Masks" is the study of a pathological case which Andreyev has dramatized after the fashion of de Maupassant's "The Horla." The Duke Lorenzo, young, noble, and the owner of a magnificent palace, is getting ready to receive his guests, to whom he is giving, on this evening, a masked ball. The masks arrive: they are all black, and all look alike.
"A beautiful book deserves a beautiful binding and paper. I believe in the whole effect. It is not fair to Ruskin to read him in paper covers, and fancy Le Gallienne in an eighteenpenny series." "You have Pater!" he exclaimed; "and isn't that a volume of De Maupassant's?" His fingers shook with eagerness. She put a tiny volume into his hands.
And he concludes by asserting that the happiest artist is he who approaches most closely to the truth of things as he sees them through his own particular illusion. Salient points in De Maupassant's genius were that he possessed the rare faculty of holding direct communion with his gifts, and of writing from their dictation as it was interpreted by his senses.
Likewise, the last sentence of de Maupassant's "The Necklace," quoted earlier in this chapter, is emphatic by surprise as well as by position; and the same is true of the clever and unexpected close of H. C. Bunner's "A Sisterly Scheme," in many ways a little masterpiece of art.
This is not to say that Maupassant's austerity has never faltered; but the fact remains that no tempting demon has ever succeeded in hurling him down from his high, if narrow, pedestal. It is the austerity of his talent, of course, that is in question.
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