Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/513

Rh, vain, sensual, and sexual: and the author appears to sympathize with their inclinations. The only deduction that can possibly be drawn from this last novel is, that the greatest happiness in life is sexual intercourse, and that, therefore, one must secure this happiness in the pleasantest possible way.

The immoral relation to life is yet more striking in the novelette, "Yvette." The subject of this work, awful in its immorality, is as follows: A beautiful girl, innocent in soul, but depraved in the manners she has learnt in the dissolute circle of her mother, leads a libertine into error. He falls in love with her, but, imagining that the girl knowingly chatters the obscene nonsense she has learnt in the society of her mother, and which she merely repeats, parrot-like, without understanding it,—imagining that the girl is already depraved, he coarsely proposes to her an immoral union. This proposal terrifies, insults her (for she loves him); it opens her eyes to her own position and that of her mother, and she suffers deeply. This profoundly touching scene is beautifully described: the collision between a beautiful, innocent soul and the depravity of the world. And here one might have stopped, but the author, without any external or inner necessity, continues his story, making this man penetrate to the girl at night and debauch her. It is evident that the author, in the early part of the novel, was on the side of the girl, but in the later part he suddenly goes over to the side of the libertine. One impression destroys the other. And the whole novel falls to pieces; crumbles like bread which has not been kneaded.

In all his novels after "Bel Ami" (I am not now alluding to his short stories, which are his chief merit and glory; of them, later), De Maupassant has evidently submitted to the theories now reigning, not only in his Parisian circle, but everywhere among artists; theories that for a work of art, is not only unnecessary to have any clear conception of what is right and what is wrong; but that, on the contrary, the artist must totally ignore all moral questions, there even being a certain artistic