folk not merely with indifference but even with contempt, as though they were animals.
This unconsciousness of the difference between good and evil is particularly striking in the story, Une partie de campagne, in which is given, as a very pleasant and amusing joke, a detailed description of how two men rowing with bare arms in a boat tempt and afterwards seduce at the same time, one of them an elderly mother and the other a young girl, her daughter.
The sympathy of the author is evidently all the time so much on the side of these two wretches that he not merely ignores, but simply does not see, what must have been felt by the seduced mother and the maid (her daughter), by the father, and by a young man who is evidently engaged to the daughter; and therefore, not merely is an objectionable description of a revolting crime presented in the form of an amusing jest, but the occurrence itself is described falsely, for what is given is only one side, and that the most insignificant — namely, the pleasure received by the rascals.
In that same little volume there is a story, Histoire d’une fille de ferme, which Turgénev particularly recommended to me and which particularly displeased me, again by this incorrect relation of the author to his subject. He evidently sees in all the working folk he describes mere animals, who rise to nothing more than sexual and maternal love, so that his descriptions give one an incomplete and artificial impression.
Lack of understanding of the life and interests of working people and the presentation of them as semi-brutes moved only by sensuality, spite, and greed, is one of the chief and most important defects of most recent French writers, including Maupassant, who not only in this but in all his other stories where he refers to the people, always describes them as coarse, dull animals at whom one can only laugh. Of course the French writers should know the nature of their own people better than I do; but despite the fact that I am a Russian and have not lived among the French peasants, I nevertheless affirm that in so representing their people the French authors are wrong, and that the French labourers cannot be such as they represent them to be. If France — such as we know her, with her truly great men and the great contributions those great men have made to science, art, citizenship, and the moral development of mankind — if this France exists, then that working class which has maintained and maintains on its shoulders this France with its great men, must consist not of brutes but of people with great spiritual qualities, and I therefore do not believe what I read in novels such as La terre and in Maupassant’s stories; just as I should not believe it if I were told of the existence of a beautiful house standing without foundations. It may very well be these high qualities of the people are not such as are described to us in La petite Fadette and La mère aux diables, but I am firmly convinced that these qualities exist, and a writer who portrays the people only as Maupassant does, describing with sympathy only the hanches and gorges of the Breton servant-girls and describing with detestation and ridicule the life of the labouring men, commits a great artistic mistake, because he describes his subject only from one, and that the least interesting, physical, side and leaves quite out of sight another, and the most important, spiritual, side wherein the essence of the matter lies.
On the whole, the perusal of the little book handed me by Turgénev left me quite indifferent to the young writer.
So repugnant to me were the stories, Une partie de campagne, La femme de Paul, L’historie d’une fille de ferme, that I did not then notice the beautiful story, Le papa de Simon, and the story, excellent in its description of the night, Sur Veau.
“Are there not in our time, when so many people want to write, plenty of men of talent who do not know to what to apply this gift, or who boldly apply it to what should not, and need not, be described?” thought I. And so I said to Turgénev, and thereupon forgot about Maupassant.
The first thing of his that fell into my hands after that was Une Vie, which someone advised me to read. That book at once compelled me to change my opinion of Maupassant, and since then I have read with interest everything signed by him. Une Vie is excellent, not only incomparably the best of his novels, but perhaps the best French novel since Hugo’s Les Misérables. Here, besides remarkable talent — that special strenuous attention applied to the subject, by which the author perceives quite new features in the life he describes — are united in almost equal degree all three qualities of a true, work of art, first, a correct, that is a moral, relation of the author to his subject; secondly, beauty of form; and thirdly, sincerity, that is, love of what the author describes. Here the meaning of life no longer presents itself to the author as consisting in the adventures of various male and female libertines; here the subject, as the title indicates, is life — the life of a ruined, innocent, amiable woman, predisposed to all that is good, but ruined by precisely the same coarse animal sensuality which in his former stories the author presented as if it were the central feature of life, dominant over all else. And in this book the author’s whole sympathy is on the side of what is good.
The form, which was beautiful in the first stories, is here brought to such a pitch of perfection as, in my opinion, has been attained by no other French writer of prose. And above all, the author here really loves, and deeply loves, the good family he describes; and he really hates that coarse debauchee, who destroys the happiness and peace of that charming family and, in particular, ruins the life of the heroine.
That is why all the events and characters of this novel are so lifelike and memorable. The weak, kindly, debilitated mother; the upright, weak, attractive father; the daughter, still more attractive in her simplicity, artlessness, and sympathy with all that is good; their mutual relations, their first journey, their servants and neighbours; the calculating, grossly sensual, mean, petty, insolent suitor, who as usual deceives the innocent girl by the customary empty idealization of the foulest instincts; the marriage, Corsica with the beautiful descriptions of nature, and then village life, the husband’s coarse faithlessness, his seizure of power over the property, his quarrel with his father-in-law, the yielding of the good people and the victory of insolence; the relations with the neighbours — all this is life itself in its complexity and variety. And not only is all this vividly and finely described, but the sincere pathetic tone of it all involuntarily infects the reader. One feels that the author loves this woman, and loves her not for her external form but for her soul, for the goodness there is in her; that he pities her and suffers on her account, and this feeling is involuntarily communicated to the reader. And the questions: Why, for what end, is this fine creature ruined? Ought it indeed to be so? arise of themselves in the reader’s soul, and compel him to reflect on the meaning of human life.
Despite the false notes which occur in the novel, such as the minute description of the young girl’s skin, or the impossible and unnecessary details of how, by the advice of an abbé, the forsaken wife again became a mother — details which destroy all the charm of the heroine’s purity — and despite the melodramatic and unnatural story of the injured husband’s revenge; notwithstanding these blemishes, the novel not only seemed to me excellent, but I saw behind it no longer a talented chatterer and jester who neither knew nor wished to know right from wrong — as from his first little book Maupassant had appeared to me to be — but a serious man penetrating deeply into life and already beginning to see his way in it.
The next novel of Maupassant’s that I read was Bel-Ami.
Bel-Ami is a very dirty book. The author evidently gives himself a free hand in describing what attracts him, and at times seems to lose his main negative attitude towards his hero and to pass over to his side: but on the whole Bel-Ami, like Une Vie, has at its base a serious idea and sentiment. In Une Vie the fundamental idea is perplexity in face of the cruel meaninglessness of the suffering life of an excellent woman ruined by a man’s coarse sensuality; whereas here it is not only perplexity, but indignation, at the prosperity and success of a coarse, sensual brute who by that very sensuality makes his career and attains a high position in society; and indignation also at the depravity of the whole sphere in which the hero attains his success. In the former novel the author seems to ask: “For what, and why, was a fine creature ruined? Why did it happen?” Here in the latter novel he seems to answer:
