Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/505

Rh Campagne," "La Femme de Paul," and "L'histoire d'une Fille de Ferme," that I did not then remark the pretty story, "Le Papa de Simon," and the story, excellent in its description of the night, "Sur l'eau."

"Have we not," I thought, "in our time, when there are so many book-writing amateurs, a sufficiency of men of genius, who either do not know how to apply their gift, or else boldly apply it to what it is utterly wrong and unnecessary to describe?" And so I said to Turgenief. After which, I forgot all about Maupassant.

The first work of his I saw after that was "Une Vie," which some one advised me to read. This book immediately made me change my opinion of Maupassant, and from that time forward I read with interest everything signed by his name. "Une Vie" is an excellent novel; not only incomparably the best novel by Maupassant, but perhaps the best French novel, after Hugo's "Les Miserables." Besides a remarkable power of genius, of that peculiar strenuous attention applied to the subject, by which the author perceives quite new features in the life he describes; in this novel are united, almost in equal degree, all the three qualifications for a true work of art: namely, a correct, that is, a moral, relation of the author to his subject; a beautiful form of expression; and sincerity, that is, love toward that which the author describes. Here the purport of life no longer appears to the author as consisting in the adventures of various male and female libertines; here the subject represents, as the title indicates, life; the life of a ruined, innocent, amiable woman, disposed to all that is good, and ruined precisely by the same coarse animal sensuality, which, in his former stories, stood to the author as the central and dominant feature of life. Here all the sympathies of the author are on the side of good.

The form, beautiful in the first stories, is here brought to so high a pitch of perfection as, in my opinion, has been attained by no other French prose writer. And above all, the author does indeed love, and deeply love, that good family which he describes; and he does indeed hate the coarse debauchee who destroys the happiness