Maupassant's short-stories are generally conceded to be the best in
French literature. He handles his materials with great care, and his
descriptions of scenes and characters are unequalled. In his first
writings he seems impassive to the point of frigidity. He is a recorder
who sets down exactly the life before him. This is one of the lessons
he learned from Flaubert. He was not interested in what a character
thought or felt, but he noted and fondled every action of his
characters.
He loved life, despite the lack of solutions. At times his fondness for
mere physical life leads him to the brutal stage. In his story, _On the
Water_, he gives a confession of a purely sensual man: "How gladly, at
times, I would think no more, feel no more, live the life of a brute,
in a warm, bright country, in a yellow country, without crude and
brutal verdure, in one of those Eastern countries in which one falls
asleep without concern, is active and has no cares, loves and has no
distress, and is scarcely aware that one is going on living!"
Maupassant was a keen observer, possessed an excellent but not lofty
imagination, and never asserted a philosophy of life. His writings are
all interesting, terse, precise, and truthful, but lack the glow that
comes with a sympathetic and spiritual outlook on life. Zola says of
him: "…. a Latin of good, clear, solid head, a maker of beautiful
sentences shining like gold…." He chooses a single incident, a few
characteristics and then moulds them into a compact story. Nine-tenths
of his stories deal with selfishness and hypocrisy.
Tolstoi wrote: "Maupassant possessed genius, that gift of attention
revealing in the objects and facts of life properties not perceived by
others; he possessed a beautiful form of expression, uttering clearly,
simply, and with charm what he wished to say; and he possessed also the
merit of sincerity, without which a work of art produces no effect;
that is he did not merely pretend to love or hate, but did indeed love
or hate what he described."