h meaning and with
philosophy. And like Moliere again, Mark Twain has kept solid hold of
the material world; his doctrine is not of the earth earthy, but it is
never sublimated into sentimentality. He sympathizes with the spiritual
side of humanity, while never ignoring the sensual. Like Moliere, Mark
Twain takes his stand on common-sense and thinks scorn of affectation of
every sort. He understands sinners and strugglers and weaklings; and he
is not harsh with them, reserving his scorching hatred for hypocrites
and pretenders and frauds.

At how long an interval Mark Twain shall be rated after Moliere and
Cervantes it is for the future to declare. All that we can see clearly
now is that it is with them that he is to be classed,--with Moliere and
Cervantes, with Chaucer and Fielding, humorists all of them, and all of
them manly men.

(1898.)

A NOTE ON MAUPASSANT

A student of the literature of our own time who has only recently
completed his first half century of life cannot help feeling suddenly
aged and almost antiquated when he awakes to the fact that he has been
privileged to see the completed literary career of two such accomplished
craftsmen as Robert Louis Stevenson and Guy de Maupassant. In youth they
were full of promise, and in maturity they were rich in performance; and
all too soon the lives of both came to an end, when their powers were
still growing, when their outlook on life was still broadening, and when
they bid fair, both of them, to bring forth many another book riper and
wiser than any they had already given us.

The points of contrast between the two men thus untimely taken away are
as striking as the points of similarity. Both were artists ardently in
love with the technic of their craft, delighting in their own skill, and
ever on the alert to find new occasion for the display of their mastery
of the methods of fiction. Stevenson was a Scotchman; and his
pseudo-friend has told us that there was in him something of "the
shorter catechist." Maupassant was a Norman, and he had never given a
thought to the glorifying of God. The man who wrote in English found the
theme of his minor masterpieces in the conflict of which the
battle-ground is the human heart. The man who wrote in French began by
caring little or nothing for the heart or the soul or the mind, and by
concentrating all his skill upon a record of the deeds of the human
body. The one has left us 'Markheim' and the 'Strange