rent? Would you not have the
sensation of being fortified in your courage, in your humour, in your
brave embracing of the fantastic truth? Would you not contemplate
the most grotesque matters lightly, wisely, sanely and with a
magnanimous heart?

The perverted moral training to which we have been all of us
subjected, has "sicklied o'er with the pale cast" of a most evil
scrupulousness our natural free enjoyment of the absurd contrasts
and accidents and chances of life.

French humour may be savage--all the better--we need a humour
with some gall in it to deal with the humour of the universe. But our
humour, stopping short so timorously of stripping the world to its
smock, is content to remain vulgar. That is the only definition of
vulgarity that I recognise--a temptation to be coarse without the
spiritual courage to be outrageous! Coarseness--our Anglo Saxon
peculiarity--is due to temperamental insensitiveness. Outrageous
grossness--with its ironical, beautiful blasphemy against the great
mother's amazing tricks--is an intellectual and spiritual thing, worthy
of all noble souls. The one is the rank breath of a bourgeois
democracy, the other is the free laughter of civilised intelligences
through all human history.

English and Americans find it difficult to understand each other's
humour. One can well understand this difficulty. No one finds any
obstacle--except Puritan prejudice--in understanding French humour;
because French humour is universal; the humour of the human spirit
contemplating the tragic comedy of the human body.

One very interesting thing must be noted here in regard to the
method of Guy de Maupassant's writings; I mean the power of the
short story to give a sense of the general stream of life which is
denied to the long story.

Personally I prefer long stories; but that is only because I have an
insatiable love of the story for its own sake, apart from its
interpretation of life. I am not in the least ashamed to confess that
when I read books, I do so to escape from the pinch of actual facts. I
have a right to this little peculiarity as much as to any other as long
as I don't let it invade the clarity of my reason. But in the short
story--and I have no scruple about admitting it--one seems to get the
flavour of the writer's general philosophy of life more completely
than in any other literary form.

It is a snatch at the passing procession, a dip into the flowing stream,
and one gets from it t