judgment marvelously sure the sounder principles of their school.
They knew how to remain lucid and classic, in taste as much as in
form--Merimee through all the audacity of a fancy most exotic,
and Maupassant in the realism of the most varied and exact
observation. At a little distance they appear to be two patterns,
identical in certain traits, of the same family of minds, and
Tourgenief, who knew and loved the one and the other, never
failed to class them as brethren.

They are separated, however, by profound differences, which
perhaps belong less to their nature than to that of the masters
from whom they received their impulses: Stendhal, so alert, so
mobile, after a youth passed in war and a ripe age spent in
vagabond journeys, rich in experiences, immediate and personal;
Flaubert so poor in direct impressions, so paralyzed by his
health, by his family, by his theories even, and so rich in
reflections, for the most part solitary.

Among the theories of the anatomist of "Madame Bovary," there are
two which appear without ceasing in his Correspondence, under one
form or another, and these are the ones which are most strongly
evident in the art of De Maupassant. We now see the consequences
which were inevitable by reason of them, endowed as Maupassant
was with a double power of feeling life bitterly, and at the same
time with so much of animal force. The first theory bears upon
the choice of personages and the story of the romance, the second
upon the character of the style. The son of a physician, and
brought up in the rigors of scientific method, Flaubert believed
this method to be efficacious in art as in science. For instance,
in the writing of a romance, he seemed to be as scientific as in