Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/509

Rh activity of the doctors in it, we have here the same debauchee, Paul, as trivial and merciless as the husband in "Une Vie"; and the same deceived, ruined, meek, feeble, lonely—always lonely—sympathetic woman, and the same impassive triumph of pettiness and triviality as "Bel Ami."

The idea is the same, but the moral attitude of the author toward what he describes is already much lower, lower than in "Une Vie" especially. The author's inner appreciation of right and wrong begins to get confused. Notwithstanding his abstract wish to be impartially objective, the scoundrel Paul evidently has all his sympathy. Accordingly, the love story of this Paul, and his attempts at and success in seduction, produce a discordant impression. The reader does not know what the author intends; whether he wishes to show all the emptiness and vileness of Paul (who in one scene unconcernedly turns away from and insults a woman merely because her waist is spoiled by her pregnancy with his child); or, on the contrary, to show how pleasant and easy it is to live as did this Paul.

In the succeeding novels, "Pierre et Jean," "Fort comme la Mort," and "Notre Cœur," the moral attitude of the author toward the personages of his stories becomes yet more confused, and in the last named disappears altogether. All these novels bear the seal of indifference, haste, artificiality, and above all, again that same absence of a correct moral relation to life which was evident in the author's first writings. This begins precisely with the time when Maupassant's reputation as a fashionable author had become established, and he had fallen a victim to that temptation, so dreadful in our time, to which every celebrated writer is subjected, and especially one so attractive as Maupassant. On the one hand is the success of his first novels, the praise of the press, and the flattery of society, especially of women; on the other, the continually increasing amount of remuneration (never, however, keeping up with the continually increasing expenses); and yet further the insistent demands of the editors, who, outbidding each