unfortunately never to see its close, Guy de Maupassant was
probably the most versatile and brilliant among the galaxy of
novelists who enriched French literature between the years 1800
and 1900. Poetry, drama, prose of short and sustained effort, and
volumes of travel and description, each sparkling with the same
minuteness of detail and brilliancy of style, flowed from his pen
during the twelve years of his literary life.

Although his genius asserted itself in youth, he had the patience
of the true artist, spending his early manhood in cutting and
polishing the facets of his genius under the stern though
paternal mentorship of Gustave Flaubert. Not until he had
attained the age of thirty did he venture on publication,
challenging criticism for the first time with a volume of poems.

Many and various have been the judgments passed upon Maupassant's
work. But now that the perspective of time is lengthening,
enabling us to form a more deliberate, and therefore a juster,
view of his complete achievement, we are driven irresistibly to
the conclusion that the force that shaped and swayed Maupassant's
prose writings was the conviction that in life there could be no
phase so noble or so mean, so honorable or so contemptible, so
lofty or so low as to be unworthy of chronicling,--no groove of
human virtue or fault, success or failure, wisdom or folly that
did not possess its own peculiar psychological aspect and
therefore demanded analysis.

To this analysis Maupassant brought a facile and dramatic pen, a
penetration as searching as a probe, and a power of psychological
vision that in its minute detail, now pathetic, now ironical, in