etites and instincts. He takes
what we call lust, and makes of it the main motive force in his vivid
and terrible sketches. It is perhaps for this very reason that his
stories have such an air of appalling reality.

But it is not only lust or lechery which he exploits. He turns to his
artistic purpose every kind of physiological desire, every sort of
bodily craving. Many of these are quite innocent and harmless, and
the denial of their satisfaction is in the deepest sense tragic. Perhaps
it is in regard to what this word _tragic_ implies that we find the
difference between the brutality of Guy de Maupassant and the
coarseness of the earlier English writers.

The very savagery in de Maupassant's humour is an indication of a
clear intellectual consciousness of something monstrously,
grotesquely, wrong; something mad and blind and devilish about the
whole business, which we miss completely in all English writers
except the great Jonathan Swift.

Guy de Maupassant had the easy magnanimity of the Latin races in
regard to sex matters, but in regard to the sufferings of men and of
animals from the denial of their right to every sort of natural joy,
there smouldered in him a deep black rage--a _saeva indignatio_
--which scorches his pages like a deadly acid.

In his constant preoccupation with the bodies of living creatures, it
is natural enough that animals as well as men should come into the
circle of his interest. He was a great huntsman and fisherman. He
loved to wander over the frozen marshes, gun in hand, searching for
strange wildfowl among the reeds and ditches. But though he slew
these things in the savage passion of the chase as his ancestors had
done for ages, between his own fierce senses and theirs there was a
singular magnetic sympathy.

As may be often noticed in other cases, as we go through the world,
there was between the primitive earth-instincts of this hunter of wild
things and the desperate creatures he pursued, a far deeper bond of
kinship than exists between sedentary humanitarians and the objects
of their philanthropy. It is good that there should be such a writer as
this in the world.

In the sophisticated subtleties of our varnished and velvet-carpeted
civilisation, it is well that we should be brought back to the old
essential candours which forever underlie the frills and frippery. It is
well that the stark bones of the aboriginal skeleton with its raw
"unaccommodated" flesh should peep out