It is evident that Maupassant looked upon his mankind in another spirit than those writers who make haste to submerge the difficulties of our holding-place in the universe under a flood of false and sentimental assumptions.  Maupassant was a true and dutiful lover of our earth.  He says himself in one of his descriptive passages: "Nous autres que séduit la terre . . ." It was true.  The earth had for him a compelling charm.  He looks upon her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of real passion.  His is the power of detecting the one immutable quality that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the ever-shifting surface of life.  To say that he could not embrace in his glance all its magnificence and all its misery is only to say that he was human.  He lays claim to nothing that his matchless vision has not made his own.  This creative artist has the true imagination; he never condescends to invent anything; he sets up no empty pretenses.  And he stoops to no littleness in his art—least of all to the miserable vanity of a catching phrase.