The interest of the thing began inside that frame, and what remained outside was merely material.Ī story of Maupassant, more than almost anything in the world, gives you the impression of manual dexterity.

He saw no farther than the lines of his frame. The world existed for him as something formless which could be cut up into little pictures. Love-making, drunkenness, cheating, quarreling, the mere idleness of sitting drowsily in a chair, the gross life of the farmyard and the fields, civic dissensions, the sordid provincial dance of the seven deadly sins, he saw in the same direct, unilluminating way as the Dutch painters finding, indeed, no beauty in any of these things, but getting his beauty in the deft arrangement of them, in the mere act of placing them in a picture. His sense of desire, of greed, of all the baser passions, was profound: he had the terrible logic of animalism. He had the same view of humanity, and shows us, with the same indifference, the same violent ferment of life – the life of full-blooded people who have to elbow their way through the world. He saw the world as the Dutch painters saw it, and he was as great a master of form, of rich and sober color, of the imitation of the outward gestures of life, and of the fashion of external things.

Maupassant's vision was of solid superficies, of texture which his hands could touch, of actions which his mind could comprehend from the mere sight of its incidents.

He paints a kind of reality which it is easier for us to recognize that is all.Įvery artist has his own vision of the world. Properly speaking, Maupassant is no more a realist than Maeterlinck. The soul, for instance, is at heart as real as the body but, as we can hear it only through the body speaking, and see it only through bodily eyes, and measure it, often enough, only in the insignificant moment of its action, it may come to seem to us, at all events less realizable and thus it is that we speak of those who have vividly painted exterior things as realists. Reality may be so definite and so false, just as it may be so fantastic and so true and, among work which we can apprehend as dealing justly with reality, there may be quite as much difference in all that constitutes outward form and likeness as there is between a Dutch interior by Peter van der Hooch, the portrait of a king by Velasquez, and the image of a woman smiling by Leonardo da Vinci. But then things are as our eyes see them and as our minds make them and it is thus of primary importance for the critic to distinguish the precise qualities of the eyes and minds which make the world into imaginative literature. The first aim of art, no doubt, is the representation of things as they are.

Nicolay the dutch masters vol 1 zip