all those others in which he treats of the people, always describes them as coarse, dull animals at whom one can only laugh. Certainly, French writers ought to know the nature of their own people better than I. But, notwithstanding that I am a Russian and have not lived with French peasants, I still assert that in so representing their own people French authors are wrong, and that the French laboring men cannot be such as they represent. If France—the France we know—with her truly great men, and the valuable contributions with which these great men have enriched science, art, and social life, and have assisted the moral development of humanity; if this France exists, then, also, that laboring class on whose shoulders has been, and is, supported this France of great men, must consist, not of brutes, but of men of great mental capacity.
Therefore, I do not believe what is written in novels like "La Terre"[1] and in Maupassant's stories: just as I should not believe what I might be told concerning the existence of a beautiful house standing without foundations. It may well be that the virtues of the people are not so lofty as described to me in "La Petite Fadette" and "La Mare aux Diables."[2] Yet they exist—of that I am firmly persuaded. And a writer who portrays the people only as Maupassant does, describing with relish only the hanches and gorges[3] of Breton servant-girls, and alluding to the life of laboring men with abhorrence and scoffing, commits a great mistake from the artistic point of view, because he describes his subject only from one, and that the most uninteresting, physical side, utterly leaving out of sight the other and more important spiritual side where lies the essence of the matter.
On the whole, the reading of the little book given me by Turgenief left me altogether indifferent to the young writer.
So repugnant to me were the stories, "Une Partie de
