ness
of life.

These other people may easily be assumed to be fidgety, meticulous,
self-complacent purists; and as we read the short stories of Guy de
Maupassant, we cannot resist calling up an imaginary company of
such poor devils and forcing them to listen to a page of the great
book of human judgment upon Nature's perversity.

Finally at the bottom of all there is a much more subtle cause for our
pleasure; nothing less in fact than that old wild dark Dionysian
embracing of fate, of fate however monstrous and bizarre, simply
because it is there--an integral part of the universe--and we ourselves
with something of that ingredient in our own heathen hearts.

An imaginary symposium of modern writers upon the causes of
human pleasure in the grosser elements of art lends itself to very
free speculation. Personally I must confess to very serious
limitations in my own capacity for such enjoyment. I have a
sneaking sympathy with tender nerves. I can relish de Maupassant
up to a certain point--and that point is well this side of idolatry--but I
fancy I relish him because I discern in him a certain vibrant nerve of
revolt against the brutality of things, a certain quivering irony of
savage protest. When you get the brutality represented without this
revolt and with a certain unction of sympathetic zest, as you do in
the great eighteenth century novelists in England, I confess it
becomes more than I can endure.

This is a most grievous limitation and I apologise to the reader most
humbly for it. It is indeed a lamentable confession of weakness. But
since the limitations of critics are, consciously or unconsciously,
part of their contribution to the problems at issue, I offer mine
without further comment.

It is an odd thing that while I can relish and even hugely enjoy
ribaldry in a Latin writer, I cannot so much as tolerate vulgarity in
an English or Scotch one. Perhaps it is their own hidden
consciousness that, if they once let themselves go, they would go
unpleasantly far, which gives this morbid uneasiness to the strictures
of the Puritans. Or is it that the English-speaking races are born
between the deep sea of undiluted coarseness and the devil of a
diseased conscience? Is this the reason why every artist in the world
and every critic of art, feels himself essentially an exile everywhere
except upon Latin soil?

Guy de Maupassant visualises human life as a thing completely and
helplessly in the grip of animal app