Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/510

486 other, beseechingly flatter the author, and, no longer considering the merits of the works offered, accept enthusiastically everything signed by a name now estabblishedestablished [sic] with the public. All these temptations are so great that they evidently turn his head, and he succumbs to them. He continues to elaborate the form of his novels as well as before, sometimes even better. He even loves and hates what he describes, but no longer loves it because it is good and moral, i.e. loved by all, nor hates it because it is evil and hated by all, but only because this or that accidentally pleases or displeases him.

From the time of "Bel Ami," this stamp of hurriedness, and, still more, of artifice, is upon all Maupassant's novels. Henceforth he forsakes the method of his first two novels: he no longer takes as the basis of them certain demands, and on that ground describes the conduct of his character, but writes his novels as do all the common hack novelists; that is, he invents the most interesting and pathetic or the most contemporary persons and situations, and of them composes his novel, adorning it with all those observations which he has had the opportunity of making, and which fit into the framework of the story, and does not in the least trouble himself as to how the events described relate to the demands of morality. Such are "Pierre et Jean," "Fort comme la Mort," and "Notre Cœur."

However much, in French novels, we may have become accustomed to read about "the married life of three," about the ever present lover whose existence is known to every one except the husband, it still remains altogether incomprehensible to us how it should happen that all husbands are always fools, cheated and ridiculous, whereas all lovers, who in the end themselves marry and become husbands, not only are neither ridiculous nor deceived, but are heroic. And it is even less comprehensible how all women are depraved, and yet all mothers saintly.

Yet it is upon these most unnatural and unlikely, and above all deeply immoral, ideas, that "Pierre et Jean" and "Fort comme la Mort" are founded. Therefore,