stands between man and his fellows; a bar which, as he says, is the more painfully felt, the nearer the bodily connection.
What then torments him, and what would he have? What will destroy this bar? What suppress this loneliness? Love. Not that love of woman, a love with which he is disgusted; but pure, spiritual, divine love.
And it is that which De Maupassant seeks; it is toward this savior of life long ago plainly disclosed to man, that he painfully strives amid those fetters in which he feels himself bound.
He cannot yet give name to what he seeks; he would not name it with his lips, not wishing to defile his holy of holies. But his unexpressed yearning, shown in his dread of loneliness, is so sincere that it infects and attracts one more strongly than many and many a sermon about love pronounced only with the lips.
The tragedy of De Maupassant's life is that, being in the most monstrous and immoral circle, he by the force of his genius, that extraordinary light which was in him, had struggled out of the views of that circle and was already near to deliverance, already breathing the air of liberty. But, having spent his last force upon this struggle, not able to make one more effort, he perished unfreed.
The tragedy of this ruin consists in that it continues even now for the majority of so-called educated men of our time.
Men at large have never lived without the conception of a meaning in their life. Always and everywhere there have appeared in the front highly gifted men—prophets, as they are called—who explained to men this meaning and purport of life; and always the ordinary, average men, who have not the strength to make the discovery for themselves, have followed that explanation of life which their prophets have discovered for them.
Our present conception has been, eighteen hundred years ago, revealed by Christianity, simply, clearly, unerringly, and joyously, as is proved by the life of all those who have accepted it and followed that course in life which results from this conception.
