Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/282

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MASSOL


MAUPASSANT


boatman, and was sent to the mill at the age of eight. He settled in London, studied much, and was influenced by Paine and Volney. The advanced movements of the time filled him with enthusiasm, and he wrote songs for the Chartists and edited The Spirit of Freedom. In the fifties he published several volumes of verse, which were considered of high quality, and had a considerable literary position. His later years were spent in futile investigations into the history of Spiritualism (to which he adhered) and mysticism, and the origin of such ideas in ancient Egypt (Ancient Egypt the Light of the World, 1907). D. Oct. 29, 1907.

MASSOL, Marie Alexandra, French writer. B. Mar. 18, 1805. Ed. by his father, an ex-priest. After teaching for some years in his father s school at Mar seilles, he went to Paris (1831) and became an apostle of Saint- Simonianism. He was banished, but he returned after the 1848 Eevolution, edited La Reforme, and colla borated with Proudhon in his Voix du peuple. In 1865 he established La Morale Independante, in which he pleaded for the severance of ethics from theology. D. Apr. 20, 1875.

MAUBERT DE GOUYEST, Jean Henri,

French writer. B. Nov. 20, 1721. He was a Capuchin monk, who deserted the creed and the Church and joined the army. Being taken prisoner in Poland, he was compelled to resume his monastic habit, but he escaped again and fled to Switzerland and took to letters. The Protestant theology, which he had now embraced, proved as distasteful as the Catholic, and he fled to England and was engaged in the Foreign Office. Betrayed by friends, he wandered from country to country, and was again arrested as an apostate monk, in Germany, in 1764, and suffered eleven months in prison. D. Nov. 26, 1767.

MAUDE, Aylmer, writer. B. Mar. 28, 491


1858. Ed. Christ s Hospital, London, and Moscow Lyceum. He was engaged in business at Moscow from 1880 to 1897, and became an intimate friend of Tolstoi, whose mysticism, however, he does not entirely share. His wife is partly Eussian, and has collaborated in his translations of Tolstoi s works. He has written also Tolstoi and his Friends (1901) and Life of Tolstoi (2 vols., 1908-10). Mr. Maude is director of various commercial companies.

MAUDSLEY, Professor Henry, M.D.,

LL.D., F.E.C.P., alienist. Ed. Giggleswick School and University College Hospital. He was Superintendent of the Manchester Eoyal Lunatic Hospital 1859-62, physician to the West London Hospital 1864-74, and professor of medical jurisprudence at London University College 1869-79. From 1862 to 1878 he edited the Journal of Medical Science ; and he was admitted to the Eoyal College of Physicians in 1869, and was Gulstonian Lecturer in 1870. Professor Maudsley was an outspoken Materialist, not only in lectures for the London Sunday Lecture Society, but in his numerous popular works (The Physiology of Mind, 1867 ; The Pathology of Mind, 1867 ; Body and Mind, 1870 ; Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886). In 1908 he gave 30,000 to the London County Council Asylums Committee for the treat ment of the mentally deranged. D. Jan. 23, 1918.

MAUPASSANT, Henri Rene Albert

Guy de, French novelist. B. Aug. 5, 1850. He was at first a clerk in the Ministry of Marine, and he fought in the Franco- German War. Becoming friendly with Flaubert and Zola, he turned his mind to writing, and his first story, Boule de suif (1880), gave him at once a high position in the naturalistic school. A volume of verse in the same year (Des Vers) showed the same high art and sensual sentiment. Maupassant was a consummate master of the art of the short story, of which he wrote more than two hundred. His 492