e
best English fiction more just or more felicitous than those in which
Mr. Henry James welcomed its first appearance:--"_Pierre et Jean_ is, so
far as my judgment goes, a faultless production.... It is the best of M.
de Maupassant's novels, mainly because M. de Maupassant has never before
been so clever. It is a pleasure to see a mature talent able to renew
itself, strike another note, and appear still young.... The author's
choice of a _milieu_, moreover, will serve to English readers as an
example of how much more democratic contemporary French fiction is than
that of his own country. The greater part of it--almost all the work of
Zola and of Daudet, the list of Flaubert's novels, and the best of those
of the brothers De Goncourt--treat of that vast, dim section of society,
which, lying between those luxurious walks on whose behalf there are
easy suppositions and that darkness of misery which, in addition to
being picturesque, brings philanthropy also to the writer's aid,
constitutes really, in extent and expressiveness, the substance of every
nation. In England, where the fashion of fiction still sets mainly to
the country-house and the hunting-field, and yet more novels are
published than anywhere else in the world, that thick twilight of
mediocrity of condition has been little explored. May it yield triumphs
in the years to come!"

The great merit of M. de Maupassant as a writer is his frank and
masculine directness. He sees life clearly, and he undertakes to
describe it as he sees it, in concise and vigorous language. He is a
realist, yet without the gloominess of Zola, over whom he claims one
great advantage, that of possessing a rich sense of humor, and a large
share of the old Gallic wit. His pessimism, indeed, is inexorable, and
he pushes the misfortune, or more often the degradation, of his
characters to its extreme logical conclusion. Yet, even in his saddest
stories, the general design is rarely sordid. For a long while he was
almost exclusively concerned with impressions of Normandy; a little
later he became one of the many painters of Paris. Then he traveled
widely, in the south of Europe, in Africa; wherever he went he took with
him a quick and sensitive eye for the aspects of nature, and his
descriptive passages, which are never pushed to a tiresome excess of
length, are often faultlessly vivid. He attempted, with a good deal of
cleverness, to analyze character, but his real power seems to lie in
desc