Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/15

Rh supernatural and the unnatural, Maupassant very rarely touched any class of persons, or any order of subjects, which he did not know to the core. Whenever he broke this rule, his hand somewhat lost its cunning; he was completely at home only when he moulded and remoulded for the purposes of his art every fragment of personal experience, every scrap of confirmatory information and illustration. There were not many tints on his palette; but he blended them almost to perfection.

The form in which these experiences were given to the world was regulated by the bent of a strong animal nature, by early association with a peculiar rural society, and by his intimacy with Gustave Flaubert. Never perhaps in the history of letters did the relation of master and disciple dovetail more nicely than between Flaubert and Maupassant. It was not the outcome of a casual enthusiasm on one side, or of a blind favouritism on the other, but the development of an old family friendship into a close intellectual bond. Gamaliel's yoke was not easy. For six years, steadily guiding Maupassant's course of study and criticising its results, he forbade the publication of a single line. As his pupil had written verses furiously from the age of thirteen at latest, and did not publish a volume till he was thirty, Flaubert's