I have said that I look upon Poe as the world’s supreme short story writer.  His nearest rival, I should say, was Maupassant.  The great Norman never rose to the extreme force and originality of the American, but he had a natural inherited power, an inborn instinct towards the right way of making his effects, which mark him as a great master.  He produced stories because it was in him to do so, as naturally and as perfectly as an apple tree produces apples.  What a fine, sensitive, artistic touch it is!  How easily and delicately the points are made!  How clear and nervous is his style, and how free from that redundancy which disfigures so much of our English work!  He pares it down to the quick all the time.

I cannot write the name of Maupassant without recalling what was either a spiritual interposition or an extraordinary coincidence in my own life.  I had been travelling in Switzerland and had visited, among other places, that Gemmi Pass, where a huge cliff separates a French from a German canton.  On the summit of this cliff was a small inn, where we broke our journey.  It was explained to us that, although the inn was inhabited all the year round, still for about three months in winter it was utterly isolated, because it could at any time only be approached by winding paths on the mountain side, and when these became obliterated by snow it was impossible either to come up or to descend.  They could see the lights in the valley beneath them, but were as lonely as if they lived in the moon.  So curious a situation naturally appealed to one’s imagination, and I speedily began to build up a short story in my own mind, depending upon a group of strong antagonistic characters being penned up in this inn, loathing each other and yet utterly unable to get away from each other’s society, every day bringing them nearer to tragedy.  For a week or so, as I travelled, I was turning over the idea.

At the end of that time I returned through France.  Having nothing to read I happened to buy a volume of Maupassant’s Tales which I had never seen before.  The first story was called “L’Auberge” (The Inn)—­and as I ran my eye down the printed page I was amazed to see the two words, “Kandersteg” and “Gemmi Pass.”  I settled down and read it with ever-growing amazement.  The scene was laid in the inn I had visited.  The plot depended on the isolation of a group of people through the snowfall.  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.  But what is perfectly marvellous is that in that short journey I should have chanced to buy the one book in all the world which would prevent me from making a public fool of myself, for who would ever have believed that my work was not an imitation?  I do not think that the hypothesis of coincidence can cover the facts.  It is one of several incidents in my life which have convinced me of spiritual interposition—­of the promptings of some beneficent force outside ourselves, which tries to help us where it can.  The old Catholic doctrine of the Guardian Angel is not only a beautiful one, but has in it, I believe, a real basis of truth.