e these two men, there was a profound psychical
gulf between their temperaments. Flaubert was a great genius, a path
breaker, a philosophic poet, and the author of La Tentation de St.
Antoine, the nearest approach that France can show to a prose epic,
and a book of beauty and originality. Maupassant was a great talent,
and a growing one when disease cut him down. He imitated the externals
of Flaubert, his irony, his vivid power of picture-making; even his
pessimism he developed--though that was personal, as we shall soon
see. And yet his work is utterly unlike Flaubert, probably unlike what
Flaubert had hoped for--the old man died in 1881 and therefore did not
live to enjoy Maupassant in full bloom. If it did not sound quite
heretical I should be tempted to assert that the writer Maupassant
most patterned after, was Prosper Merimee, an artist detested by
Flaubert because of his hard style. It is this precise style that
Maupassant exhibits but coupled with a clarity, an ease, and a grace
that Merimee could not boast. Of Flaubert's harmonious and
imaginatively coloured manner, Maupassant shows no trace in his six
novels and his two hundred and odd tales.

Maupassant was not altogether faithful to Flaubert's injunctions
regarding the publication of his early attempts. He made many secret
flights under different pen-names, though Boule de Suif was the first
prose signed by him. It appeared in Les Soirees de Medan, and its
originality quite outshone the more solid qualities of Zola's
L'Attaque au Moulin, and a realistic tale of Huysmans's, Sac au dos.
It was this knapsack of story, nevertheless, that opened the eyes of
both Zola and Goncourt to the genuine realism of Huysmans as opposed
to the more human but also more sentimental surface realism of
Maupassant. Huysmans proved himself devoid of the story-telling gift,
of dramatic power; yet he has, if compared to Maupassant, without an
iota of doubt, the more vivid vision of the two; "the intensest vision
of the modern world," says Havelock Ellis. Pictorial, not imaginative
vision, be it understood. In his mystic latter-day rhapsodies it is
the realist who sees, the realist who makes those poignant,
image-breeding phrases. Take up Maupassant and in his best tales and
novels, such as La Maison Tellier, Boule de Suif, Une Vie, Fort Comme
la Mort, to mention a few, you will be surprised at the fluidity, the
artful devices to elude the harshness of reality, the pessimistic
poetr