Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/517

Rh novel writer must have a clear and firm idea of what is right and what is wrong in life.

This De Maupassant had not; on the contrary, according to the theory he held, such was regarded undesirable. Had he been a novelist like some talentless writers of sensual novels, he would, being without genius, quietly have described what was wrong as being right, and his novels would have been full and interesting for people of the same views as himself. But De Maupassant had genius, i.e. he saw things in their essentials, and therefore involuntarily discovered truth—he involuntarily saw the evil in that which he wished to consider good.

This is why, in all his novels except the first, his sympathies continually waver. At one moment he represents wrong as being right; at another, he admits that wrong is wrong, and right is right; at another, again, he keeps shifting from the one standpoint to the other. And this destroys the very essence of every artistic impression, the framework on which it is built. People little sensitive to art often think that a work of art possesses unity when the same personages act in it from beginning to end, when all is built on one and the same fundamental plan of incidents, or when the life of one and the same man is described. This is a mistake; and the unity appears true only to the superficial observer. The cement which binds together every work of art into a whole and thereby produces the effect of lifelike illusion, is not the unity of persons and places, but that of the author's independent moral relation to the subject. In reality, when we read or examine the art-work of a new author, the fundamental questions which arise in our mind are always of this kind: "Well, what sort of a man are you? What distinguishes you from all the people I know, and what information can you give me as to how we must look upon our life?" Whatever the artist depicts, whether it be saints or robbers, kings or lackeys, we seek and see only the soul of the artist himself. And if he be an established writer, with whom we are already acquainted, the question is no longer: "Who are you?" but, "Well, what more can you tell