only) whom we know,
there is, perhaps, no more distinctive peculiarity than his elusion of
all attempts to class him as "Thissist" or "Thattist." And in those who
come nearest to him, though they may have strong beliefs and strong
proclivities, we always see the capacity of taking the other side. The
fervent theologian of the _Paradiso_ treats hardly any of his victims
with more consideration than the inhabitants of the City of Dis: the
prophet and poet of his own Uranian love for Beatrice swoons at the
sight of Francesca's punishment, and feels "so that boiling glass were
coolness," the very penalty of the Seventh Circle of Purgatory. But
Maupassant's materialism and his pessimism combined shut out from him
vast parts and regions of life and thought and feeling, as it were with
the blank wall of his very earliest poem. The fantastic shadows of his
peculiar imagination play on that wall fascinatingly enough; and the
region of passion and of gloom within is not without a charm, if a
somewhat unholy and unhealthy one. But beyond the wall there is a whole
universe which Maupassant does not merely neglect, but of which he seems
to be blankly ignorant and unconscious, except in flashes of ignorant
disdain. That the infinite province of religious emotion and reflection
is shut out is a matter of course; but most of the other regions, in
which those who decline religion take refuge, are equally closed. I can
remember in Maupassant only the slightest signs of interest in general
literature (except so far as it bears upon his own special craft), in
the illimitable ranges of history, in politics, in the higher
philosophy.[515] It cannot be said of him, as of his master's dismal
heroes, that _tout lui a craque dans la main_. There is no sign of trial
on his part; he starts where Bouvard and Pecuchet end, and takes for
granted a failure which he has not given himself the trouble to
experience.

But, it may be said, "What does it matter what he does not do, know,
feel, care for, if he treats what he does do, know, feel, and care for,
well?" The objection is ingenious, and, as Petruchio would say, "'a
might have a little galled me" if its ingenuity had not been the
ingenuity of fallacy. For the question is whether this insensibility to
large parts of life has not injured Maupassant's treatment of the parts
in which he did feel an interest. I think it has. There were too many
things in emotion and in thought of which he was ignorant.