philosophical. But they seldom produce an illusion, because they fail to give their ideas the form and semblance of reality. Such as they were, however, they corrected our literature of the mediavalism which still clung to it, and they established a sound prose tradition for the language in much the same way that Shakespeare may be said to have established our national poetic tradition.

MAUPASSANT IN ENGLISH

T is only ten years since Maupassant was buried-on Saturday, July 8, 1893, as Goncourt records in the Journal, "in the Church of Chaillot, where I saw Louise L. married." And already our attention, like his friend's, has begun to turn elsewhere. Nor is there, indeed, very much in Maupassant to attach us permanently. His vision of life is contemptible. And as for his ideas-of any considerable body of literary work that has ever made its way in the world, his, with the possible exception of Gautier's, contains the smallest modicum of intellect. In these respects his work is so foreign to the genius and the ideals of our own literature that it has hitherto received but partial and unsatisfactory treatment at the hands of English translators. It is only at this rather late day, when his fame has already declined a little, that we are finally promised a thoroughly definitive version in fifteen volumes, handsomely illustrated, and preceded by an introduction by M. Bourget.1 By the excellence

The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant Rendered into English by a Corps of Distinguished Translators, with a Critical Preface by Paul Bourget,

of its details, both literary and mechanical, as well as by its completeness, this edition bids fair to attract a good deal of attention to its author. And for this reason it seems desirable to undertake some more exact characterisation of his work as a whole and to estimate its value from the point of view of the literature into which it is about to be naturalised.

Like Flaubert, then, whom he styles "Master," and whom he strikingly resembles in several respects, Maupassant seems to have been dominated exclusively by an obsession of the bête, a mixture of vulgarity, ignorance, and fatuity almost impossible of translation, which had for him a snaky horror and fascination. He is like his master also in the practice of a rigid "imperturbability"-heartlessness, we should call it; only, while Flaubert was occasionally carried away by a great enthusiasm, there is never the faintest glimmer of moral sense in all Maupassant's uncleanly pages. And yet his cynicism is not entirely without relief. The constant preoccupation with the mean, the trivial, and the commonplace tends, particularly in the case of a sensitive nature, to induce an undue respect for the petty as well as an undue contempt for it. And in the midst of his contemptuous indifference to the miseries of existof the French Academy. Fifteen Volumes.

trated.

New York: M. Walter Dunne.

Illus

ence, it is not uncommon to come across some lean streak of feeling-a humour or a pathos so rudimentary and animal that it makes his cynicism appear enlightened in comparison. He "fixes a hard eye," says Mr. Henry James, "on some small spot of human life, usually some ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it bleeds." But rather the wound, if it must be, than the smirk-the frank brutality of L'Héritage than the ambiguous sentimentality of Boule de Suife. His favourite subject is the peasant-perhaps because it gratified the taste for saleté, for the malodorous, which, like most of his contemporaries, he shared with Baudelaire-the peasant and the petit bourgeois, the lower middle class, whose sensuality is aggra-, vated by a life of airless and unnatural confiné- ̈` ment. At the bottom of his cup there is always this one motive, which relieves him from making any very elaborate psychology about his figures, twitched as they all are by a single unmentionable appetite. No doubt in this way, by eliminating the moral element entirely and reducing life to the dimensions of a primary instinct, he was able to give an amazing concision and rapidity, a marvellous saliency and relief to what remained. But, aside from the purely secondary consideration that it makes discussion of his work almost impossible in English except

in a very general fashion, his simplicity is dearly bought. It distorts his scheme of creation to the figure of a grotesque; and, what seems worse, though it amounts to the same thing in the end, it confines his literary activity to the exercise of a particularly narrow and exclusive art.

For art, as it touches life, is to a great extent a matter of proportion. It is hardly necessary for the writer to eschew the evil for the sake of delineating only the good; the result would still be distortion of a kind to which we English are too prone already, and of which Dickens's gingerly treatment of little Emily is still a pretty fair example. But as a whole his vision of the world ought to bear some recognisable relation to the human spectacle, which he pretends to represent, particularly if he has produced more than a hundred tales and half a dozen novels; for, though things may be very much worse in France than they are in America, it is difficult to believe them quite so bad as Maupassant makes out. And yet the fundamental weakness of his work is not its baseness after all-that we might be able to tolerate if it meant anything-but its irrelevance. Une Vie for instance, is not a very offensive book in comparison with Bel Ami; it is only, like most of its author's, a perfectly meaningless one. The former is merely the story of a