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Updated: May 10, 2025
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.
The school of romantic realism which was founded by Merimee and Balzac found its culmination in De Maupassant. He surpassed his mentor, Flaubert, in the breadth and vividness of his work, and one of the greatest of modern French critics has recorded the deliberate opinion, that of all Taine's pupils Maupassant had the greatest command of language and the most finished and incisive style.
Everything that I imagined was there, save that Maupassant had brought in a savage hound. Of course, the genesis of the thing is clear enough. He had chanced to visit the inn, and had been impressed as I had been by the same train of thought. All that is quite intelligible.
At Flaubert's dictation Maupassant gave up verse for prose; and for seven years he wrote incessantly and published nothing. The stories and tales and verses and dramas of those seven years of apprenticeship were ruthlessly criticized by the author of 'Salammbô, and then they were destroyed unprinted.
It was in 1880 that De Maupassant was suddenly made famous by two published volumes. One of these, slightly exceeding its fellows in crudity, was threatened with a prosecution in law as an outrage upon manners, and the fortune of the volume was secured.
You will seek in vain, in studying the fictitious people of Guy de Maupassant, for any indication of the author's approval or disapproval of them; and there is something very admirable in this absolute impassiveness of art.
This legend of the fraudulent bargain between a sprite and a farmer as to alternate upper- and under-ground crops, with which “the great vision of the guarded mount” is here connected, is of Northern origin, but has travelled South as far as Arabia. It was reserved for Maupassant to make St. Michael get the better of Satan on earth as in heaven.
We find Verga painting the violent passions of the Sicilians, and Reuter depicting the calmer joys of the Platt-Deutsch. We see Maupassant etching the canny and cautious Normans, while Daudet brushed in broadly the expansive exuberance of the Provençals. We delight alike in the Wessex-folk of Mr. Hardy and in the humorous Scots of Mr. Barrie.
His only point of contact with Tolstoi is his grim fidelity to detail, the peculiar Russian realism common to every Russian novelist. Tolstoi said that Chekhov resembled Guy de Maupassant. This is entirely wide of the mark. He resembles Guy de Maupassant merely in the fact that, like the Frenchman, he wrote short stories.
It was not until he had won a very great reputation as a short story-teller, that De Maupassant attempted a long novel. He published only six single volume stories, all of which are included in the present edition.
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