Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/503

Rh little volume, the author described with great minuteness and fondness how women seduce men, and men women; he even, as in "La Femme de Paul," referred to certain obscenities difficult to understand. And not only with indifference, but even with contempt, he described the country laboring people as he would animals.

This ignorance of the distinction between good and evil is especially striking in the story, "Une Partie de Campagne." In this, as a most charming and amusing joke, is related a minute account of how two gentlemen, rowing with bare arms in a boat, seduced, at the same time, one of them an elderly mother, the other a young girl, her daughter.

The sympathy of the author is evidently all the time so much on the side of these two villains, that he, I will not say ignores, but simply does not see what must have been experienced by the seduced mother and maiden daughter, by the father, and by the young man evidently engaged to the daughter. And, therefore, we not only have the revolting description of a disgusting crime represented as an amusing joke, but, moreover, the event itself is described falsely, in that only one side of the subject is presented, and that the most insignificant one, namely, the pleasure taken by the scoundrels.

In this same little volume there is a story, "Histoire d'une Fille de Ferme," which was specially recommended to me by Turgenief, and which specially displeased me by again this incorrect relation of the author to his subject. He evidently sees in all the working folk whom he describes, only animals rising no higher than sexual and maternal love, and therefore his descriptions produce an impression of incompleteness and artificiality.

Lack of understanding of the life and interests of the working people, and the representation of them as semi-brutes moved only by sensuality, spite, and greed, constitute two of the greatest and most serious deficiencies of most of the latest French authors, and, in their number, of Maupassant, who, not only in this story, but in