author has wished to paint, he has painted to the life and with a
brush that is graphic in the extreme.

If Maupassant had only painted, in general fashion, the
characters and the phase of literature mentioned he would not be
distinguished from other writers
of the group called "naturalists." His true glory is in the
extraordinary superiority of his art. He did not invent it, and
his method is not alien to that of "Madame Bovary," but he knew
how to give it a suppleness, a variety, and a freedom which were
always wanting in Flaubert. The latter, in his best pages, is
always strained. To use the expressive metaphor of the Greek
athletes, he "smells of the oil." When one recalls that when
attacked by hysteric epilepsy, Flaubert postponed the crisis of
the terrible malady by means of sedatives, this strained
atmosphere of labor--I was going to say of stupor--which pervades
his work is explained. He is an athlete, a runner, but one who
drags at his feet a terrible weight. He is in the race only for
the prize of effort, an effort of which every motion reveals the
intensity.

Maupassant, on the other hand, if he suffered from a nervous
lesion, gave no sign of it, except in his heart. His intelligence
was bright and lively, and above all, his imagination, served by
senses always on the alert, preserved for some years an
astonishing freshness of direct vision. If his art was due to
Flaubert, it is no more belittling to him than if one call
Raphael an imitator of Perugini.

Like Flaubert, he excelled in composing a story, in distributing