we did not know the nature of the
incidents which prompted them, that he also suffered from an excess of
nervous emotionalism. Nine times out of ten, what is the subject of
these stories to which freedom of style gives the appearance of health?
A tragic episode. I cite, at random, "Mademoiselle Fifi," "La Petite
Roque," "Inutile Beaute," "Le Masque," "Le Horla," "L'Epreuve," "Le
Champ d'Oliviers," among the novels, and among the romances, "Une Vie,"
"Pierre et Jean," "Fort comme la Mort," "Notre Coeur." His imagination
aims to represent the human being as imprisoned in a situation at once
insupportable and inevitable. The spell of this grief and trouble
exerts such a power upon the writer that he ends stories commenced in
pleasantry with some sinister drama. Let me instance "Saint-Antonin,"
"A Midnight Revel," "The Little Cask," and "Old Amable." You close the
book at the end of these vigorous sketches, and feel how surely they
point to constant suffering on the part of him who executed them.

This is the leading trait in the literary physiognomy of Maupassant, as
it is the leading and most profound trait in the psychology of his
work, viz, that human life is a snare laid by nature, where joy is
always changed to misery, where noble words and the highest professions
of faith serve the lowest plans and the most cruel egoism, where
chagrin, crime, and folly are forever on hand to pursue implacably our
hopes, nullify our virtues, and annihilate our wisdom. But this is not
the whole.

Maupassant has been called a literary nihilist--but (and this is the
second trait of his singular genius) in him nihilism finds itself
coexistent with an animal energy so fresh and so intense that for a
long time it deceives the closest observer. In an eloquent discourse,
pronounced over his premature grave, Emile Zola well defined this
illusion: "We congratulated him," said he, "upon that health which
seemed unbreakable, and justly credited him with the soundest
constitution of our band, as well as with the clearest mind and the
sanest reason. It was then that this frightful thunderbolt destroyed
him."

It is not exact to say that the lofty genius of De Maupassant was that
of an absolutely sane man. We comprehend it to-day, and, on re-reading
him, we find traces everywhere of his final malady. But it is exact to
say that this wounded genius was, by a singular circumstance, the
genius of a robust man. A physiologist would without doubt expl