g us, and Guy de Maupassant was
not one of these. His imagination was rigorously earth-bound, and
not only earth-bound but bound to certain obvious and sensual
aspects of earth-life. Except when he tore open the bleeding wounds
of his own mutilated sensibility and wrote stories of his madness
with a pen dipped in the evil humours of his diseased blood, he was
a master of a certain brutal and sunburnt objectivity.

But how cheerful and encouraging it is for those among us who are
engaged in literature, to see what this astonishing man was able to
make of experiences which, in some measure, we must all have
shared!

There is never any need to leave one's own town or village or city to
get "copy." There is scarcely any need to leave one's own house. The
physiological peculiarities of the people who jostle against us in the
common routine of things will completely suffice. That is the whole
point of de Maupassant's achievement.

The same thing, of course, is true of the great imaginative writers.
_They_ also are able to derive grist for their mill from the common
occurrences; they also are free to remain at home. But their sphere is
the sphere of the human soul; his was the sphere of the human body.

He was pre-eminently the master of physiology--the physiological
writer. Bodies, not souls, were his "metier"--or souls only in so far
as they are directly affected by bodies.

But bodies--bodies of men and women are everywhere; living ones
on the earth; dead ones under the earth. One need not go to the
antipodes to find the nerves and the tissues, the flesh and the blood,
of these planetary evocations, of these microcosms of the universe.
The great imaginative writers have the soul of man always under
their hand, and Guy de Maupassant has the body of man always
under his hand.

It is not the masters who are found journeying to remote regions to
get inspiration for their work. Their "America," as Goethe puts it,
lies close to their door.

It is singularly encouraging to us men of letters to contemplate what
Guy de Maupassant could do with the natural animal instincts and
gestures and mutterings and struggles of the bodies of men and
women as their desires make them skip.

"Encouraging" did I say? Tantalizing rather, and provocative of
helpless rage. For just as the spiritual insensitiveness of our
bourgeois tyrants renders them dull and obtuse to the noble
imaginations of great souls, so their moral bigotry and stupi