interested him, not ideas, nor even
characters, and he wanted every incident to be immediately effective.
Now cynicism, in France, supplies a sufficient basis for all these
requirements; it is the equivalent, for popular purposes, of that appeal
to the average which in England is sentimentality. Compare, for
instance, the admirable story "Boule de Suif," perhaps the best story
which Maupassant ever wrote, with a story of somewhat similar
motive--Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat." Both stories are
pathetic; but the pathos of the American (who had formed himself upon
Dickens, and in the English tradition) becomes sentimental, and gets its
success by being sentimental; while the pathos of the Frenchman (who has
formed himself on Flaubert, and on French lines) gets its success
precisely by being cynical.

And then the particular variety of Maupassant's cynicism was just that
variation of the artistic idea upon the temperament which puts the best
finish upon work necessarily so limited, obliged to be so clenching, as
the short story. Flaubert's gigantic dissatisfaction with life, his
really philosophic sense of its vanity, would have overweighted a writer
so thoroughly equipped for his work as the writer of "Boule de Suif" and
"La Maison Tellier." Maupassant had no time, he allowed himself no
space, to reason about life; the need was upon him to tell story after
story, each with its crisis, its thrill, its summing up of a single
existence or a single action. The sharp, telling thrust that his
conception of art demanded could be given only by a very specious, not
very profound, very forthright, kind of cynicism, like the half kindly,
half contemptuous laugh of the man who tells a good story at the club.
For him it was the point of the epigram.

Maupassant was the man of his period, and his period was that of
Naturalism. In "Les Soirees de Medan," the volume in which "Boule de
Suif" appeared, there is another story called "Sac au Dos," in which
another novelist made his appearance among the five who "publicly
affirmed their literary tendencies" about the central figure of Zola. J.
K. Huysmans, then but at the outset of his slow and painful course
through schools and experiments, was in time to sum up the new
tendencies of a new period, as significantly as Maupassant summed up in
his short and brilliant, and almost undeviating career, the tendencies
of that period in which Taine and science seemed to have at last found
o