Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/520

496 read the marriage in "Sur l'Eau "; and, last utterance of all, "Un Cas de Divorce." That which Marcus Aurelius advised, namely, the invention of a means of destroying in one's imagination the attractiveness of this sin; this, in bright artistic images that overturn one's soul, De Maupassant achieves. He wished to praise this love, but the more he examined it the more he cursed it. He cursed it for those calamities and sufferings which it carries with it, for its disappointments, and, above all, for that counterfeit of true love, that deceit, that illusion in it, by which the more confidently a man addicts himself to it the profounder grows his suffering.

A powerful moral growth in the author during his literary activity is written in indelible letters in these exquisite short stories, and in his best book, "Sur l'Eau."

Not only in this dethronement of sexual love (involuntary, and therefore so much the more complete) is this moral growth of the author seen; it is seen in all those increasingly higher moral demands which he applies to life.

Not in sexual love alone does he see the innate contradiction between the demands of the animal and rational man; he sees it in all the organization of the world.

He sees that the world as it is, the material world, is not only not the best of worlds, but, on the contrary, might be quite different (this idea is wonderfully expressed in "Horla"), and that it does not satisfy the demands of reason and love; he sees that there is some other world, or at least, the demand for such another world, in the soul of man.

He is tormented, not only by the unreasonableness of the material world and its ugliness, but by its unlovingness, its disunity. I do not know a more heartrending cry of despair from a strayed man feeling his loneliness, than the expression of this idea in that most exquisite story, "Solitude."

The thing that most tormented De Maupassant, to which he returns many times, is the painful state of loneliness, spiritual loneliness, of man, of that bar which