solitariness of his own inmost self. I know of no more poignant
expression of such a feeling than the cry of despair which rings
out in the short story called "Solitude," in which he describes
the insurmountable barrier which exists between man and man, or
man and woman, however intimate the friendship between them. He
could picture but one way of destroying this terrible loneliness,
the attainment of a spiritual--a divine--state of love, a
condition to which he would give no name utterable by human lips,
lest it be profaned, but for which his whole being yearned. How
acutely he felt his failure to attain his deliverance may be
drawn from his wail that mankind has no UNIVERSAL measure of
happiness.

"Each one of us," writes De Maupassant, "forms for himself an
illusion through which he views the world, be it poetic,
sentimental, joyous, melancholy, or dismal; an illusion of
beauty, which is a human convention; of ugliness, which is a
matter of opinion; of truth, which, alas, is never immutable."
And he concludes by asserting that the happiest artist is he who
approaches most closely to the truth of things as he sees them
through his own particular illusion.

Salient points in De Maupassant's genius were that he possessed
the rare faculty of holding direct communion with his gifts, and
of writing from their dictation as it was interpreted by his
senses. He had no patience with writers who in striving to
present life as a whole purposely omit episodes that reveal the
influence of the senses. "As well," he says, "refrain from
describing the effect of intoxicating perfumes upon man as omit
the influence of beauty on the temperament of man."