Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/42

 ; but if the spirit of Wycherley had guided the pen for the author of the Barsetshire series and The Way We Live Now, the result would have been, not a Pierre et Jean, but something not much unlike Mont-Oriol. Phineas Finn, again, carefully considered, is a cleanly analogue of Bel-Ami.

It may be reckoned among Maupassant's minor merits that in one respect at least he always writes "like a gentleman at ease." He refrains from raptures over the mere apparatus of luxury and wealth, the Louis Seize furniture and the divine toilettes which lure some other novelists astray. His utter unconsciousness of the duties of authorship is also delightful: there are none of those windy appeals to the reader which irritate the most loyal devotees of Thackeray. On the other hand, a student might note one or two curious and exceptional longueurs. The engineering business in Mont-Oriol becomcs rather tiresome; and in Notre Cœr an irrelevant sculptor occupies several pages, only to show, apparently, that the would-be-clever ladies thought his conversation a bore—as possibly it was. The habit, too, of framing very short stories in a narration of the supposed circumstances under which they were told by a friend, is sometimes a little trying. Not much else can be said to depreciate the genius of this remarkable xxxiv