when the revolt of men of the world had broken the narrow yoke primitively imposed upon the sect by an exalted fanaticism."[1]
So that, in the opinion of this leader of the young generation, it is only now that the French milliners and hair-dressers have corrected the fault committed by Christianity, and have reëstablished beauty in its true and elevated position.
In order that there should be no doubt as to what we should understand him to mean by beauty, the same celebrated writer, historian, and man of science, wrote the drama, "L'Abbesse de Jouarre," in which he showed that sexual intercourse with woman constitutes an elevated and fine way of serving this beauty. In this drama, which strikes one by its absence of talent, and especially by the coarseness of the conversations between D'Arcy and the Abbesse, where in the first words it becomes evident what kind of love this gentleman discusses with the supposedly innocent and highly moral maiden, who is not in the least shocked—in this drama it is shown that the most highly moral people, in full view of the death to which they are condemned, a few hours before death, cannot find anything better to do than to indulge their animal passion.
So that, in the society in which Maupassant grew up and was educated, the representation of feminine beauty and of sex-love, quite seriously, as a thing long ago admitted and decided by the cleverest and most learned men, was, and is, regarded as the true object of the highest art, of "le grand art."
It is to this very theory, dreadful in its absurdity, that De Maupassant subjected himself when he became a fashionable writer. And, as was to be expected, this false ideal led him, in his novels, into a series of mistakes, and into work weaker and more weak.
In this appears the essential difference between the demands of the novel and of the short story. The novel's object, even its surface object, is the description of one full human life, or of many; and therefore the
- ↑ "Marc Aurèle," p. 555.
