Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/43

Rh story-teller, artist doubled with Norman hobereau in a combination which never may recur.

A final paragraph may be devoted to Maupassant's style. It is presumptuous, perhaps, for a foreigner to offer any opinion, but it certainly seems that no modern writer has made more rational use of his splendid inheritance, the French language, that unrivalled medium of logical, epigrammatic and nervous expression. He himself has explained his simple principle. There is always one word, and one word only, to express a writer's full meaning, and that word has to be found. It is useless to attempt picturesqueness by using strange or obsolete terms; true originality and force come from the arrangement of plain and familiar words according to their exact value and rhythm. An admirable precept, for once in a way illustrated by its author's unvarying example. Guy de Maupassant will long be remembered as an extraordinarily skilful and original writer of stories: it should not be forgotten that nobody of his generation has done more to maintain the purity of the French tongue, which, as he said, flows through the centuries in a limpid current, into whose waters the archaisms and preciosities of succeeding generations are cast in vain.

Rh