e.

His best effects are achieved in sudden striking images which seem
to have in them a depth of fantastic diablerie worthy of the
wreck-strewn "humming waters" whose secrets he loved to penetrate.

It is not sufficiently realised how much there was of the "macabre"
about Victor Hugo. Like the prophet Ezekiel, he had strange visions
from the power he served, and in the primordial valleys of his
imagination there lie, strewn to the bleaching winds, the bones of
men and of demons and of gods; and the breath that blows upon
them and makes them live--live their weird phantasmal life of
mediaeval goblins in some wild procession of madness--is the breath
of the spirit of childhood's fancies.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

To read for the first time, one of the short stories of Guy de
Maupassant is to receive a staggering enlargement of one's ideas as
to what mere literature can do. They hardly seem like literature at all,
these blocks from the quarry of life, flung into one's face with so
unerring an aim.

"If you prick them, they bleed. If you tickle them, they laugh." The
rough rain-smelling earth still clings to them; when you take them in
your hands, the mud of the highway comes off upon your fingers. Is
it really, one wonders, mere literary craft, mere cunning artfulness,
which gives these sentences the weight of a guillotine-blade
crashing down upon the prostrate neck of bound helpless reality?

Is it simply the art of a pupil of the euphonious Flaubert, this power
of making written sentences march full-armed like living men, and
fall, when their work is done, with a metallic ring of absolute
finality--"as a dead body falls"?

As one reads Guy de Maupassant one breathes heavily as if it were
oneself and not another upon whom the tension and the sweat of the
crisis has come. One touches with one's naked hand every object he
describes. One feels the gasping breath of every person he brings
forward. His images slap one's cheeks till they tingle, and his
situations wrestle with one to the ground.

Not for nothing was he a descendant of that race which, of all races
except the Turks, has loved love better than literature and war better
than love. Words are resounding blows and smacking kisses to Guy
de Maupassant. He writes literature as a Norman baron, and when he
rounds off a sentence it is as if he dug a spur into the flanks of a
restless filly. There is nothing like his style in the world.

They never taught me Tac