It must be admitted at once that many of Maupassant’s earlier short-stories have to do with the lower aspects of man’s merely animal activity.  Maupassant had an abundance of what the French themselves called “Gallic salt.”  His humor was not squeamish; it delighted in dealing with themes that our Anglo-Saxon prudery prefers not to touch.  But even at the beginning this liking of his for the sort of thing that we who speak English prefer to avoid in print never led him to put dirt where dirt was not a necessary element of his narrative.  Dirty many of these tales were, no doubt; but many of them were perfectly clean.  He never went out of his way to offend, as not a few of his compatriots seem to enjoy doing.  He handled whatever subject he took with the same absolute understanding of its value, of the precise treatment best suited to it.  If it was a dirty theme he had chosen—­and he had no prejudice against such a theme—­he did whatever was needful to get the most out of his subject.  If it was not a dirty theme, then there was never any touch of the tar-brush.  Whenever the subject itself was inoffensive his treatment was also immaculate.  There is never any difficulty in making a choice out of his hundred or two brief tales; and it is easy to pick out a dozen or a score of his short-stories needing absolutely no expurgation, because they are wholly free from any phrase or any suggestion likely to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of innocence.  In matters of taste, as we Anglo-Saxons regard them, Maupassant was a man without prejudices.  But he was a man also of immitigable veracity in his dealing with the material of his art, in his handling of life itself.  He told the truth as it was given to him to see the truth; not the whole truth, of course, for it is given to no man to see that.  His artistic standard was lofty; and he did his best not to lie about life.  And in some ways this veracity of his may be accepted, if not as an equivalent for morality, at least as a not wholly unworthy substitute.

The most of Maupassant’s earlier tales were not a little hard and stern and unsympathetic; and here again Maupassant was the disciple of Flaubert.  His manner was not only unemotional at first, it was icily impassive.  These first stories of his were cold and they were contemptuous;—­at least they made the reader feel that the author heartily despised the pitiable and pitiful creatures he was depicting.  They dealt mainly with the externals of life,—­with outward actions; and the internal motives of the several actors were not always adequately implied.  But in time the mind came to interest Maupassant as much as the body.  In the beginning he seems to have considered solely what his characters did, and he cared little to tell us what they felt and what they thought; probably he did not know himself and did not try to know.