In the hard shrewd blows of a Maxim Gorki, the monopolising tribes of sedentary dreamers receive their palpable hit, receive it from the factory and the furrow. In the deadly knocks of a Guy de Maupassant they get their "quietus" from the height, so to speak, of the saddle of a sporting gentleman.
Do what they can to get the sharp bitter tang of reality into their books, the bulk of these people, write they never so cleverly, seem somehow to miss it.
The smell of that crafty old skunk—the genuine truth of things—draws them forward through the reeds and rushes of the great dim forests' edge, but they seldom touch the hide of the evasive animal; no, not so much as with the end of their barge-pole.
But Guy de Maupassant plunges into the thickets, gun in hand, and we soon hear the howl of the hunted.
A love of literature, a reverence and respect for the dignity of words, does not by any means imply a power of making them plastic before the pressure of truth. How often one is conscious of the intervention of "something else," some alien material, marbly and shiny it may be, and with a beauty of its own, but obtruding quite opaquely between the thing said and the thing felt.
In reading Guy de Maupassant, it does not seem to be words at all which touch us. It seems to be things—things living or dead, things in motion or at rest. Words are there indeed; they must be there—but they are so hammered on the anvil of his hard purpose that they have become porous and transparent. Their one rôle now is to get themselves out of the way; or rather to turn themselves into thin air and clean water, through which the reality beyond can come at us with unblurred outlines.
It is a wonderful commentary, when one thinks of it, upon the malleability of human language that it can so take shape and colour from the pressure of a single temperament. The words in the dictionary are all there—all at the disposal of every one of us—but how miraculous a thing to make their choice and their arrangement expressive of nothing on earth but the peculiar turn of one particular mind!
The whole mystery of life is in this; this power of the unique and solitary soul to twist the universe into the shape of its vision.
Without any doubt Guy de Maupassant is the greatest realist that ever lived. All other realists seem idealists in comparison. Many of the situations he describes are situations doubtless in which he himself "had a hand." Others are situations which he came across, in his enterprising debouchings here and there, in curious by-alleys, and which he observed with a morose scowl of amusement, from outside. A few—very few—are situations which he evoked from the more recondite places of his own turbulent soul.
But one cannot read a page of him without feeling that he is a writer who writes from out of his own experiences, from out of the shocks and jolts and rough file-like edges of raw reality.