De Maupassant's position in this book is commensurate neither with his genius nor with what I should like to say of him, and hope to write in another place. I had wished my book to end with the Romantic Movement, and so with Flaubert, who seems to me to mark its ultimate development without a change of name. De Maupassant is here only to show how direct is the descent of the least exuberant of modern story-telling from the Romanticism that made possible the work of Chateaubriand, Hugo, or Balzac. His true position is in a book that should begin with Flaubert and end with some great writer of to-morrow, whose work should show by what alchemy the story-telling of to-day will be changed into that of the future. [Illustration: GUY DE MAUPASSANT] CONCLUSION CONCLUSION MY table is covered with a green cloth, and on it, under the lamplight, are two bowls of roses. One is full of the rich garden flowers, whose hundred folded petals hold in their depths the shadows of their colourings--cream, crimson, and the rose and orange of an autumn sunset. In the other are three or four wild roses from the hedge on the far side of the lane. I scarcely know which give me greater pleasure. In comparing them I seem to be setting _Aucassin and Nicolete_ by the side of _La Morte Amoureuse_. How many flowers must represent the gradual growth of one into the other. How large a collection would be necessary to illustrate every stage of the transformation of the simple beauty of the wild blossoms into the luxuriant loveliness, majesty, and variety of the roses in the opposite bowl. I have attempted such a task in this book; not the impossible one of collecting every flower in any way different from those that had opened before it, but of bringing together a score or so to make the difference between first and last a little less tantalising and obscure. [Genius a stationary quality.]