Here at the outstart another word is needed: Maupassant was also a literalist, and this native trait served to render his realism colder and more unsympathetic. By this I mean that to him two and three always summed up five--his temperament would not allow for the unseen, imponderable force of spiritual things; and even when he mentions the spiritual, it is with a sort of tolerant unbelief which scorns to deny the superstitious solace of women, weaklings, and zealots. It was this pervading quality in both character and method which has caused his critics to class him is a disciple of naturalism in fiction. However, Maupassant’s pessimism was not so great that he could not dwell upon scenes of joy; but a preacher of hope he never was, nor could have been. Maupassant led so individual a life, was so unnormal in his tastes, and ended his career so unusually, that common sense decides at once the validity of this one contention: his realism was marvellously true in details, but less trustworthy in its general results. His pictures of incidents were miracles of accuracy; his philosophy of life was incomplete, morbid, and unnatural. Think how unnormal must be a spirit who could write, in the work just quoted: “I feel vibrating through me something akin to every form of animal life; I thrill with all the instincts and confused desires of the lower creatures. Like them I love the earth, not men, as you do. I love it without admiring it, without poetizing or exalting it; I love, with a profound and bestial love, at once contemptible and sacred, all that lives, all that thinks, all that we see about us,--days, nights, rivers, seas, and forests, the dawn, the rosy flesh and beaming eye of woman; for all these things, while they leave my mind calm, trouble my eyes and my heart.” But this author’s life may not be read in his works, for, unlike his contemporary, Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant’s writings are singularly barren of personal detail. True to his naturalistic school, and growing out of his method as well as by reason of his individualistic philosophy, he avoided all attempt at interpreting life and character by the lights and leadings of his own personality. And yet I have already intimated that he was biased--as similarly we all are biased--by his own nature; but it was not an artistic prejudice; rather was it the temperamental bias of a cynical eye trained to view the minute rather than the large, the sordid rather than the ideal, the pessimistic rather than the hopeful, the physical rather than the spiritual--for this was the sort of life he lived, first and last.