training by his minute and scrupulous exactness.

The theory of the mean of truth on one side, as the foundation of
the subject,--"the humble truth," as he termed it at the
beginning of "Une Vie,"--and of the agonizing of beauty on the
other side, in composition, determines the whole use that
Maupassant made of his literary gifts. It helped to make more
intense and more systematic that dainty yet dangerous pessimism
which in him was innate. The mid- dle-class personage, in
wearisome society like ours, is always a caricature, and the
happenings are nearly always vulgar. When one studies a great
number of them, one finishes by looking at humanity from the
angle of disgust and despair. The philosophy of the romances and
novels of De Maupassant is so continuously and profoundly
surprising that one becomes overwhelmed by it. It reaches
limitation; it seems to deny that man is susceptible to grandeur,
or that motives of a superior order can uplift and ennoble the
soul, but it does so with a sorrow that is profound. All that
portion of the sentimental and moral world which in itself is the
highest remains closed to it.

In revenge, this philosophy finds itself in a relation cruelly
exact with the half-civilization of our day. By that I mean the
poorly educated individual who has rubbed against knowledge
enough to justify a certain egoism, but who is too poor in
faculty to conceive an ideal, and whose native grossness is
corrupted beyond redemption. Under his blouse, or under his
coat--whether he calls himself Renardet, as does the foul
assassin in "Petite Roque," or Duroy, as does the sly hero of
"Bel-Ami," or Bretigny, as does the vile seducer of "Mont Oriol,"