etimes his subjects are
unclean and he treats them as such, but, if his subject is clean, his
treatment is undefiled.

In 1887 the shadows of insanity began to creep athwart his life. Even
in 1884 he seemed to feel a premonition of his coming catastrophe when
he wrote: "I am afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of the familiar
objects which seem to me to assume a kind of animal life. Above all, I
fear the horrible confusion of my thought, of my reason escaping,
entangled and scattered by an invisible and mysterious anguish." The
dreaded disease developed until, in 1890, he had to suspend his
writing. In 1892 he became wholly insane and had to be committed to an
insane asylum where he died in a padded cell one year later.

BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

_The New International Encyclopaedia_.

_Encyclopaedia Britannica_.

_Bookman_, 25:290-294_.

CRITICISMS

Maupassant's short-stories are generally conceded to be the best in
French literature. He handles his materials with great care, and his
descriptions of scenes and characters are unequalled. In his first
writings he seems impassive to the point of frigidity. He is a
recorder who sets down exactly the life before him. This is one of the
lessons he learned from Flaubert. He was not interested in what a
character thought or felt, but he noted and fondled every action of
his characters.

He loved life, despite the lack of solutions. At times his fondness
for mere physical life leads him to the brutal stage. In his story,
_On the Water_, he gives a confession of a purely sensual man: "How
gladly, at times, I would think no more, feel no more, live the life
of a brute, in a warm, bright country, in a yellow country, without
crude and brutal verdure, in one of those Eastern countries in which
one falls asleep without concern, is active and has no cares, loves
and has no distress, and is scarcely aware that one is going on
living!"

Maupassant was a keen observer, possessed an excellent but not lofty
imagination, and never asserted a philosophy of life. His writings are
all interesting, terse, precise, and truthful, but lack the glow that
comes with a sympathetic and spiritual outlook on life. Zola says of
him: ".... a Latin of good, clear, solid head, a maker of beautiful
sentences shining like gold...." He chooses a single incident, a few
characteristics and then moulds them into a compact story. Nine-tenths
of his stories deal with selfishness and hypocrisy.