There is subtlety in the technique of Maupassant, but none in his view of life. There can be no subtlety, when you lay down the law that human beings are beasts. There are only a few beast emotions, and they never vary; you can always be sure what a man will do in the presence of a woman, and what the woman will let him do. And when God is a sportive demon, all stories have the same ending. You may not foresee the particular trick this demon will play--for example, that the lost necklace would turn out to have been paste--but you can be sure that something will happen to make a mockery of all human effort and hope. And likewise you can foresee the ending of such a man. If he takes life seriously enough to become a great artist, he is apt to take it seriously enough to act upon his convictions. He will seek refuge from despair in debauchery and drink; not finding it, he will go on to opium and hashish. He will be one of those who from fear of death commit suicide, or who from brooding over insanity go insane. Maupassant was in a strait-jacket at the age of forty; thus proving himself a moralist, and a teacher of precious lessons: more than we can say about the art dilettanti of our own time, who write delicately perfumed impropriety, and live conventional and pampered lives upon the backs of the working class. CHAPTER XC THE FOE OF FORMULAS Up in the gloomy, ice-bound North, where men dream about God and drink strong liquor, another teacher was engaged in undermining bourgeois morality, and raising a storm of controversy about his head. The name of Henrik Ibsen brings before us a grim-faced old man with set mouth and large spectacles and a fringe of defiant white whiskers. He was a fighting man, a dogmatic antidogmatist, a propagandist if ever there was one in the field of art. He also was born of the people, and educated in the school of hardship. He was an apothecary’s assistant in a small Norwegian port, then a poor student, journalist and poet, then the director of a provincial theater, which struggled for six years in a vain fight against bankruptcy. Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, Ibsen received a pension of four or five hundred dollars a year from the king, and on this he lived a stern, penurious life, raising a family, sewing the buttons on his own clothes, and making over the theater and the moral ideas of the thinking world.