Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/518

494 me that is new? From what standpoint will you now illuminate life for me?" Therefore, a writer who has not a clear, definite, and fresh view of the universe, and especially a writer who does not even consider this necessary, cannot produce a work of art. He may write much and beautifully, but a work of art will not result. So it was with De Maupassant in his novels.

If, in his first two novels, and especially in the first, he had an evident and firm sympathy for what is good and dislike for what is evil, it was for two reasons. Firstly, because he evidently heartily loved and respected that person who had served as the prototype of his heroine in "Une Vie," and heartily hated that living or collective personage which served as a model for Duroy (in which he was himself partly personified). Secondly, because in his first novel he had not yet become a fashionable writer, had not succumbed to all the snares of this position, and therefore did not as yet hold the theory, dominant in his circle, that the object of art consists only in making "quelque chose de beau."

But when he did begin to write his novels according to this theory, then involuntarily took place what occurred in "Yvette" and in "Notre Cœur," namely, a contradictory estimation of the conduct of his personages. The author does not know whom he should love, and whom hate; therefore neither does the reader. And, not knowing this, the reader takes no interest in the events described. And therefore with the exception of the first two (strictly speaking, excepting only the first one), all the novels of De Maupassant, as novels, are weak; and had De Maupassant left us only these, he would have been merely a remarkable illustration of how a brilliant genius may perish on account of the abnormal society in which it is developed, and those false theories about art which are invented by people who do not love art and therefore do not understand it. But, fortunately, De Maupassant wrote short stories in which he did not subject himself to the false theory he had accepted; writing, not "quelque chose de beau," but what touched or revolted his moral feeling. And in these stories (not in all, but in the best