Maupassant’s philosophy of life is more temperamental than rational.  He expects nothing from gods or men.  He trusts his senses for information and his instinct for deductions.  It may seem that he has made but little use of his mind.  But let me be clearly understood.  His sensibility is really very great; and it is impossible to be sensible, unless one thinks vividly, unless one thinks correctly, starting from intelligible premises to an unsophisticated conclusion.

This is literary honesty.  It may be remarked that it does not differ very greatly from the ideal honesty of the respectable majority, from the honesty of law-givers, of warriors, of kings, of bricklayers, of all those who express their fundamental sentiment in the ordinary course of their activities, by the work of their hands.

The work of Maupassant’s hands is honest.  He thinks sufficiently to concrete his fearless conclusions in illuminative instances.  He renders them with that exact knowledge of the means and that absolute devotion to the aim of creating a true effect—­which is art.  He is the most accomplished of narrators.

It is evident that Maupassant looked upon his mankind in another spirit than those writers who make haste to submerge the difficulties of our holding-place in the universe under a flood of false and sentimental assumptions.  Maupassant was a true and dutiful lover of our earth.  He says himself in one of his descriptive passages:  “Nous autres que seduit la terre . . .”  It was true.  The earth had for him a compelling charm.  He looks upon her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of real passion.  His is the power of detecting the one immutable quality that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the ever-shifting surface of life.  To say that he could not embrace in his glance all its magnificence and all its misery is only to say that he was human.  He lays claim to nothing that his matchless vision has not made his own.  This creative artist has the true imagination; he never condescends to invent anything; he sets up no empty pretences.  And he stoops to no littleness in his art—­least of all to the miserable vanity of a catching phrase.

ANATOLE FRANCE—­1904

I.—­“CRAINQUEBILLE”

The latest volume of M. Anatole France purports, by the declaration of its title-page, to contain several profitable narratives.  The story of Crainquebille’s encounter with human justice stands at the head of them; a tale of a well-bestowed charity closes the book with the touch of playful irony characteristic of the writer on whom the most distinguished amongst his literary countrymen have conferred the rank of Prince of Prose.