His proceeding was not to group expressive words, that mean nothing, around misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging neither to earth nor to heaven. His vision by a more scrupulous, prolonged and devoted attention to the aspects of the visible world, discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and events. That, no doubt, is how Mr. Conrad learned the art of writing, and we may read autobiography into his praise of Maupassant again when he says: “He stoops to no littleness in his art--least of all to the miserable vanity of a catchy phrase.” But his appreciation of Maupassant, though admirable in so far as it defines certain qualities in his own and Maupassant’s work, is worded in a manner that savours of intolerance of the work of many other good writers, from Shakespeare to Dickens and, if one may include a more Lilliputian artist, Stevenson. Thus he observes: He will not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment, of eloquence, of humour, pathos; of all that splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank sheet of paper, like the glittering cortège of deadly sins before the austere anchorite in the desert air of the Thebaïde. Maupassant’s austerity may have been an excellent thing for Maupassant, but to write like this is surely to reduce austerity to the level of a formula. That “splendid pageant of faults” may well be the salvation of another writer. We may admit that they remain faults unless they fit in as organic parts of a writer’s work. But Maupassant was a smaller, not a greater, writer in so far as he was unable so to fit them in.