tives. In the result, however, it may be found that his influence has not been more injurious than that of many writers more pretentiously moral. He may sometimes be corrupt, but he is not corrupting; weak minds are vitiated by "poisonous honey," but not by the crude acid which he pours into them. It seems, indeed, to be a case where vice loses some of its evil by retaining most of its grossness. Again, the honesty of his method enforces a lesson of its own. If the battle between good and evil is fought out as moralists say it is, if sin brings its own punishment in some shape or other, even in the form of impunity, the novelist's record, if really true to life, must be instructive. And surely this is so. The moral of a book like Fort comme La Mort is nowhere formulated, but it could not be more patent if it were presented in the leaves of a religious tract.
Enough has been said above of Maupassant's aim as an artist, but it must be added that he carefully withstood the besetting temptation of the realist, the endeavour to create an illusion of reality by the multiplication of trivial details. A certain resemblance to Defoe has been suggested; but the modern English writer nearest akin to Maupassant, in spite of obvious difference of outlook, is Anthony Trollope. This may sound like a para-
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