through the embroideries.

It is, after all, the "thing itself" which matters--the thing which
"owes the worm no silk, the cat no perfume." Forked straddling
animals are we all, as the mad king says in the play, and it is mere
effeminacy and affectation to cover up the truth.

Guy de Maupassant is never greater than when appealing to the
primitive link of tragic affiliation that binds us to all living flesh and
blood. A horse mercilessly starved in the fields; a wild bird wailing
for its murdered mate; a tramp driven by hunger and primitive desire,
and harried by the "insolence of office"; an old man denied the little
luxuries of his senile greed; an old maid torn and rent in the flesh
that is barren and the breasts that never gave suck; these are the
natural subjects of his genius--the sort of "copy" that one certainly
need not leave one's "home town" to find.

One is inclined to feel that those who miss the tragic generosity at
the heart of the brutality of Guy de Maupassant, are not really aware
of the bitter cry of this mad planet. Let them content themselves,
these people, with their pretty little touching stories, their nice blobs
of cheerful "local colour" thrown in here and there, and their sweet
impossible endings. Sunday school literature for Sunday school
children; but let there be at least one writer who writes for those who
know what the world is.

The question of the legitimacy in art of the kind of realism which
Guy de Maupassant practised, goes incalculably deep. Consider
yourself at this moment, gentle reader, lightly turning over--as
doubtless you are doing--the harmless pages of this academic book,
as you drink your tea from a well appointed tray in a sunny corner of
some friendly cake-shop. You are at this moment--come, confess
it--hiding up, perhaps from yourself but certainly from the world, some
outrageous annoyance, some grotesque resolution, some fear, some
memory, some suspicion, that has--as is natural and proper enough,
for your father was a man, your mother a woman--its physiological
origin. You turn to this elegant book of mine, with its mild and
persuasive thoughts, as if you turned away from reality into some
pleasant arbour of innocent recreation. It is a sort of little lullaby for
you amid the troubles of this rough world.

But suppose instead of the soothing cadences of this harmless
volume, you had just perused a short story of Guy de Maupassant;
would not your feelings be diffe