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Updated: May 5, 2025
Wharton's fine art of narrative is that it is narrow an art of dress suit and sophistication. And this book is the answer. For, of course, her art is narrow like Jane Austen's, like Sheridan's, like Pope's, like Maupassant's, like that of all writers who prefer to study human nature in its most articulate instead of its broadest manifestations.
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.
When Maupassant chose he could run Poe close in that domain of the strange and weird which the American had made so entirely his own. Have you read Maupassant's story called "Le Horla"? That is as good a bit of diablerie as you could wish for. And the Frenchman has, of course, far the broader range.
But one cannot insist enough upon this, that his subtlety, his humour, his grimness, though no doubt they are his own, are never presented otherwise but as belonging to our life, as found in nature, whose beauties and cruelties alike breathe the spirit of serene unconsciousness. Maupassant's philosophy of life is more temperamental than rational. He expects nothing from gods or men.
A glimpse like that of Hardy's mind separates him at once from Maupassant's view of the world. The traditions of English fiction, which he has insisted on disturbing, have, after all, been strong to direct his work, as they have that of all the writers born into the speech and nourished on its racial ideals.
His encounters with prosody had left him with that monotonous weariness that the horseman and the fencer feel after a period in the riding school, or a bout with the foils. Such, in very broad lines, is the story of Maupassant's literary apprenticeship. The day following the publication of "Boule de Suif," his reputation began to grow rapidly.
When she went up to bed, he was very near to stealing out, driving up to the Dromores' door, and inquiring of the confidential man; but the thought of the confounded fellow's eyes was too much for him, and he held out. He took up Sylvia's book, De Maupassant's 'Fort comme la mort' open at the page where the poor woman finds that her lover has passed away from her to her own daughter.
I do not mean that the prevailing temper in the village was sordid, bitter, cruel, like that, say, of the Norman peasantry in De Maupassant's short stories. In by far the greater majority the people have usually seemed to me at the worst a little suspicious, a little callous, a little undemonstrative, and at the best generous and happy-go-lucky to a fault.
For a week or so, as I travelled, I was turning over the idea. At the end of that time I returned through France. Having nothing to read I happened to buy a volume of Maupassant's Tales which I had never seen before. I settled down and read it with ever-growing amazement. The scene was laid in the inn I had visited. The plot depended on the isolation of a group of people through the snowfall.
Maupassant's conception of his art is such as one would expect from a practical and resolute mind; but in the consummate simplicity of his technique it ceases to be perceptible. This is one of its greatest qualities, and like all the great virtues it is based primarily on self- denial. To pronounce a judgment upon the general tendency of an author is a difficult task.
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