Mrs. Piozzi,
in her _Anecdotes of Johnson_, observes that the Doctor, despite his
freedom from gush and his dislike to religious verse, could never repeat
the stanza of _Dies Irae_ which ends "Tantus labor non sit cassus"
without bursting into tears. I know a person very different from Johnson
who, though he had not read the _Anecdotes_ till an advanced period of
his life, had never failed to experience something like the same result
at the same line. And, for a third point, it is well known that actual
agnostics have often confessed to like affections in similar cases. The
numerous and complicated causes of this weakness, or, if any one prefers
to call them so, the numerous and complicated causes of this enjoyment,
had no hold whatever on Maupassant.

But this hemiplegia of the intellect and the imagination--this
sterilising of one-half, or more than one-half, of the sources of
intellectual and imaginative experience and delight--did not prevent him
from leaving durable and perdurable results of the vigour of his mind
and his sense, in the regions which were open to him. He wrote--as
almost every popular writer in these days who does not shut himself up
in a _tour d'ivoire_ and neglect popularity must write--too much; and,
in the special circumstances and limitations of his interests and his
genius, this was specially unfortunate. He repeated himself too often;
and he too frequently failed to come up to himself in the repetition.
The better part of him, as with Flaubert before, transcended--even
openly contemned--the 'isms of his day: but he too often let himself be
subservient to them, if he was never exactly their Helot.

Yet in recompense--a recompense largely if not wholly due to the strong
Romantic[516] element which countervails the Naturalist--he was
certainly the greatest novelist who was specially of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century in France. In verse he showed the dawn, and in
prose the noon-day, of a combination of veracity and vigour, of
succinctness and strength, which no Frenchman who made his _debut_ since
1870 could surpass. The limitations of his art have been sufficiently
dealt with; the excellences of it within those limitations are
unmistakable. He had no tricks--the worst curse of art at all times, and
the commonest in these days of what pretends to be art. He had no splash
of so-called "style"; no acrobatic contortions of thought or what does
duty for thought; no pottering and peddlin