In the beginning he seems to have considered solely what his
characters did, and he cared little to tell us what they felt and what
they thought; probably he did not know himself and did not try to know.

The inquirers who should read his stories in the strict sequence of
their production could not fail to be struck with the first awakening of
his curiosity about human feeling; and they might easily trace the
steady growth of his interest in psychologic states. Telling us at first
bluntly and barely what his characters did, he came in time to find his
chief pleasure in suggesting to us not only what they felt, but
especially what they vaguely feared. Toward the end of his brief career
the thought of death and the dread of mental disease seemed to possess
him more and more with a haunting horror that kept recurring with a
pathetic persistence. He came to have a close terror of death, almost an
obsession of the grave; and to find a parallel to this we should have to
go back four hundred years, to Villon, also a realist and a humorist
with a profound relish for the outward appearances of life. But
Maupassant went far beyond the earlier poet, and he even developed a
fondness for the morbid and the abnormal. This is revealed in 'Le
Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames
O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of
the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the
Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the
unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger
will than his own and that he was being hypnotized to his doom by a
being whom he could not see, but whose presence he could feel. There is
more than one of these later tales in which we seem to perceive the
premonition of the madness which came upon Maupassant before his death.

At first he was an observer only, a recorder of the outward facts of
average humanity. He had no theories about life, or even about art. He
had no ideas of his own, no general ideas, no interest in ideas. He did
not care to talk about technic or even about his own writings. He put on
paper what he had seen, the peasants of Normandy, the episodes of the
war, the nether-world of the newspaper. He cared nothing for morality,
but he was unfailingly veracious, never falsifying the facts of
existence as he had seen it himself. Then, at the end, it is not what
his characters do that mos