vices and his virtues. He so incorporates himself in him that the
author disappears, and we ask ourselves in vain what his own opinion
is of what he has just told us. He has none possibly, or if he has he
does not tell it.

This agrees admirably with the theory of impassivity in literature, so
much in vogue when Maupassant became known. But despite that theory he
is, if one understands him, quite other than

"A being without pity who contemplated suffering."

He has the deepest sympathy for the weak, for the victims of the
deceptions of society, for the sufferings of the obscure. If the
successful adventurer, Lesable, and the handsome Maze are the objects
of his veiled irony, he maintains, or feels a sorrowful, though
somewhat disdainful tenderness, for poor old Savon, the old copying
clerk of the Ministry of Marine, who is the drudge of the office and
whose colleagues laugh at him because his wife deceived him, _sans
espoir d'"heritage."_

Why did Maupassant at the start win universal favor? It is because he
had direct genius, the clear vision of a "primitive" (an artist of the
pre-Renaissance). His materials were just those of a graduate who,
having left college, has satisfied his curiosity. Grasping the simple
and ingenious, but strong and appropriate tools that he himself has
forged, he starts out in the forest of romance, and instead of being
overcome by the enchantment of its mystery, he walks through it
unfalteringly with a joyful step....

He was a minstrel. Offspring of a race, and not the inheritor of a