"Well?" asks the reader.
"That's all," replies the author. "I describe, because I like such descriptions."
In the next two novels, Pierre et Jean and Fort comme la Mort, no moral demand whatever is to be found. Both novels are constructed on debauchery, deception, and lying, which bring the dramatis personæ to tragic situations.
In the last novel, Notre Cœur, the condition of the dramatis personæ is most monstrous, savage, and immoral, and these persons no longer struggle against anything, but only seek enjoyments, of ambition, of the senses, of the sexual passion, and the author seems to sympathize completely with their strivings. The only conclusion one can draw from this last novel is this, that the greatest happiness in life is sexual intercourse, and that, therefore, we must in the most agreeable manner make use of this happiness.
Still more startling is this immoral relation to life as it is expressed in the quasi-novel, Yvette. The contents of this terribly immoral production are as follows: a charming girl, with an innocent soul, but corrupted in the forms which she has acquired in the corrupt surroundings of her mother, deludes the debauchee. He falls in love with her, but, imagining that this girl consciously talks that insinuating nonsense which she has learned in her mother's company, and which she repeats like a parrot, without understanding it, he imagines that the girl is corrupt, and coarsely proposes a liaison with her. This proposition frightens and offends her (she loves him), opens her eyes to her position and to that of her mother, and makes her suffer deeply. The touching situation—the conflict of the beauty of the innocent soul with the immorality of the world—is beautifully described, and it would have been well to stop here, but the author, without the least external or internal need, continues his narration and causes this gentleman to make his way to the girl at night and seduce her. In the first part of the novel the author had evidently been on the side of the girl, and in the second he suddenly passed over to the side of the debauchee. One impression destroys the other, and the whole novel falls to pieces and breaks up, like bread which has not been kneaded.
In all his novels after Bel-Ami (I am not speaking now of his shorter stories, which form his chief desert and fame,—of them I shall speak later), Maupassant obviously surrendered himself to the theory, which not only existed in his circle in Paris, but which now exists everywhere among artists, that for an artistic production we not only need have no clear conception of what is good and what bad, but that, on the contrary, the artist must absolutely ignore all moral questions,—that in this does a certain merit of the artist consist. According to this theory an artist can and must represent what is true, what exists, or what is beautiful, what, consequently, pleases him, or even what can be useful as material for "science," but it is not the business of the artist to trouble himself about what is moral or immoral, good or bad.
I remember, a famous painter showed me once his painting, which represented a religious procession. Everything was exquisitely painted, but I could not see any relation of the artist to his subject.
"Well, do you consider these rites good, and do you think that they ought to be performed, or do you not?" I asked the artist.
The artist said to me, with a certain condescension to my naïveté, that he did not know and did not consider it necessary to know: his business was to represent life.
"But do you at least love this?"