invents and relates and sustains; and there is no disputing the vigor of Maupassant’s imagination, altho it was not lofty and altho it lacked variety.  Finally, there is always to be taken into account what one may term the author’s philosophy of life, his attitude toward the common problems of humanity; and here it is that Maupassant is most lacking,—­for his opinions are negligible and his attempts at intellectual speculation are of slight value.

Technic can be acquired; and Maupassant had studied at the feet of that master technician Flaubert.  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.  Philosophy, however, is dependent upon the sum total of a man’s faculties, upon his training, upon his temperament, upon the essential elements of his character; and Maupassant was not a sound thinker, and his attitude toward life is not that by which he can best withstand the adverse criticism of posterity.  Primarily, he was not a thinker any more than Hugo was a thinker, or Dickens.  He was only an artist—­an artist in fiction; and an artist is not called upon to be a thinker, altho the supreme artists seem nearly all of them to have been men of real intellectual force.

     (1902.)

THE MODERN NOVEL AND THE MODERN PLAY

As we glance down the long history of literature, we cannot but remark that certain literary forms, the novel at one time and the drama at another, have achieved a sweeping popularity, seemingly out of all proportion to their actual merit at the moment when they were flourishing most luxuriantly.  In these periods of undue expansion, the prevalent form absorbed many talents not naturally attracted toward it.  In the beginning of the sixteenth century in England, for instance, the drama was more profitable, and, therefore, more alluring, than any other field of literary endeavor; and so it was that many a young fellow of poetic temperament adventured himself in the rude theater of those spacious days, even tho his native gift was only doubtfully dramatic.  No reader of Peele’s plays and of Greene’s can fail to feel that these two gentle poets were, neither of them, born play-makers called to the stage by irresistible vocation.  Two hundred years later, after Steele and Addison had set the pattern of the eighteenth-century essay, the drama was comparatively neglected, and every man of letters was found striving for the unattainable ease and charm of the ‘Tatler’ and the ‘Spectator.’  Even the elephantine Johnson, congenitally incapable of airy nothings and prone always to “make little fishes talk like whales,” disported ponderously in the ‘Idler’ and the ‘Rambler.’  The vogue of the essay was fleeting also; and a century later it was followed by the vogue of the novel,—­a vogue