he evasive animal;
no, not so much as with the end of their barge-pole.

But Guy de Maupassant plunges into the thickets, gun in hand, and
we soon hear the howl of the hunted.

A love of literature, a reverence and respect for the dignity of words,
does not by any means imply a power of making them plastic before
the pressure of truth. How often one is conscious of the intervention
of "something else," some alien material, marbly and shiny it may
be, and with a beauty of its own, but obtruding quite opaquely
between the thing said and the thing felt.

In reading Guy de Maupassant, it does not seem to be words at all
which touch us. It seems to be things--things living or dead, things
in motion or at rest. Words are there indeed; they must be there--but
they are so hammered on the anvil of his hard purpose that they have
become porous and transparent. Their one role now is to get
themselves out of the way; or rather to turn themselves into thin air
and clean water, through which the reality beyond can come at us
with unblurred outlines.

It is a wonderful commentary, when one thinks of it, upon the
malleability of human language that it can so take shape and colour
from the pressure of a single temperament. The words in the
dictionary are all there--all at the disposal of every one of us--but
how miraculous a thing to make their choice and their arrangement
expressive of nothing on earth but the peculiar turn of one particular
mind!

The whole mystery of life is in this; this power of the unique and
solitary soul to twist the universe into the shape of its vision.

Without any doubt Guy de Maupassant is the greatest realist that
ever lived. All other realists seem idealists in comparison. Many of
the situations he describes are situations doubtless in which he
himself "had a hand." Others are situations which he came across, in
his enterprising debouchings here and there, in curious by-alleys,
and which he observed with a morose scowl of amusement, from
outside. A few--very few--are situations which he evoked from the
more recondite places of his own turbulent soul.

But one cannot read a page of him without feeling that he is a writer
who writes from out of his own experiences, from out of the shocks
and jolts and rough file-like edges of raw reality.

It is a huge encouragement to all literary ambitions, this immense
achievement of his. The scope and sweep of a great creative
imagination is given to few amon