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Item Condition: Collectible; Acceptable
1951 edition. Without Jacket. Binding is worn, spine is torn along one edge. Some signature practice in the cover. AS SHOWN IN IMAGES.
 INTRODUCTION
Guy de MAUPASSANT died in 1893. It is more usual to begin
the description of an author with the date of his birth than
with the date of his death, but it happens that the middle
nineties were of extreme significance in the development of
a particular theory of art. On the other hand, it is doubtful
whether this particular theory, or indeed any theory, makes
itself manifest in the actual masterpieces which Maupassant
left behind him. Anybody presented with a collection or
selection of his works, without any previous information about
his dates, friends or theories, would easily form certain con-
clusions: as, for instance, that he wrote when the bitterness
of defeat in the war of 1870 still lay heavy upon France;
that he was a man whose means and manners had enabled
him to mix in a fairly exclusive society, but that his most
instinctive sympathy went out to the peasantry and the
poor; that he was abnormally preoccupied with the problem
of rostitution, and, for all his greatness as an artist, not
unwilling to exploit that problem for obvious effects of senti-
mentality, achieving sometimes bathos rather than pathos.
So much the reader would gather at the first perusal, almost
at the first glance; but would he learn that Maupassant held
strict theories about literary composition, and imagined
himself to be one of a group entitled to lay down the laws of
art? It is scarcely probable. The general effect of Maupas-
sant's writing is one of such ease and clarity that it seems as
if he wrote almost by a natural process, without having to
trouble to pause and think. Moreover, it is an historical fact
that his output in a comparatively short literary life was
enormous, so that he must have written with speed. Of
course, one result of his having written so much in so short
a time is that his work is unequal. Many of his short stories
have little significance or permanence, and perhaps none of
his novels reaches the standard of an absolute masterpiece.
However, his eminence-one might indeed say
eminence--in the short story, the conte, is pretty well
his pre-...