A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2
by George Saintsbury · English · Gutenberg #27872 · 1,376,631 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2
Author: George Saintsbury
Release date: January 22, 2009 [eBook #27872]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27872
Credits: Produced by Lee Dawei, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL, VOL. 2 ***
Produced by Lee Dawei, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL
(TO THE CLOSE OF THE 19TH CENTURY)
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
M.A. AND HON. D.LITT. OXON.; HON. L.L.D. ABERD.; HON. D.LITT. DURH.;
FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY; HON. FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD;
LATE PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
EDINBURGH
VOL. II
FROM 1800 TO 1900
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1919
Sólo á veces, con un dejo
de zozobra y de ansiedad,
timido tiembla en sus labios
un viejo y triste cantar,
copla que vibre en el aire
como un toque funeral:
_La Noche Buena se viene,
la Noche Buena se va!
Y nosotros nos iremos
y no volveremos más._
CARLOS FERNANDEZ SHAW,
_La Balada de los Viejos._
COPYRIGHT
PREFACE
"The second chantry" (for it would be absurd to keep "temple") of this
work "is not like the first"; in one respect especially, which seems to
deserve notice in its Preface or porch--if a chantry may be permitted a
porch. In Volume I.--though many of its subjects (not quite all) had
been handled by me before in more or less summary fashion, or in reviews
of individual books, or in other connections than that of the
novel--only Hamilton, Lesage, Marivaux, and the minor "Sensibility" men
and women had formed the subjects of separate and somewhat detailed
studies, wholly or mainly as novelists. The case is altered in respect
of the present volume. The _Essays on French Novelists_, to which I
there referred, contain a larger number of such studies appertaining to
the present division--studies busied with Charles de Bernard, Gautier,
Murger, Flaubert, Dumas, Sandeau, Cherbuliez, Feuillet. On Balzac I have
previously written two papers of some length, one as an Introduction to
Messrs. Dent's almost complete translation of the _Comédie_, with
shorter sequels for each book, the other an article in the _Quarterly
Review_ for 1907. Some dozen or more years ago I contributed to an
American edition[1] of translations of Mérimée by various hands, a long
"Introduction" to that most remarkable writer, and I had, somewhat
earlier, written on Maupassant for the _Fortnightly Review_. One or two
additional dealings of some substance with the subject might be
mentioned, such as another Introduction to _Corinne_, but not to
_Delphine_. These, however, and passages in more general _Histories_,
hardly need specification.
On the other hand, I have never dealt, substantively and in detail, with
Chateaubriand, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, Beyle, George Sand, or Zola[2]
as novelists, nor with any of the very large number of minors not
already mentioned, including some, such as Nodier and Gérard de Nerval,
whom, for one thing or another, I should myself very decidedly put above
minority. And, further, my former dealings with the authors in the first
list given above having been undertaken without any view to a general
history of the French novel, it became not merely proper but easy for me
to "triangulate" them anew. So that though there may be more previous
work of mine in print on the subjects of the present volume than on
those of the last, there will, I hope, be found here actually less, and
very considerably less, _réchauffé_--hardly any, in fact (save a few
translations[3] and some passages on Gautier and Maupassant)--of the
amount and character which seemed excusable, and more than excusable, in
the case of the "Sensibility" chapter there. The book, if not actually a
"Pisgah-sight reversed," taken from Lebanon instead of Pisgah after
more than forty years' journey, not in the wilderness, but in the
Promised Land itself, attempts to be so; and uses no more than fairly
"reminiscential" (as Sir Thomas Browne would say) notes, taken on that
journey itself.
It was very naturally, and by persons of weight, put to me whether I
could not extend this history to, or nearer to, the present day. I put
my negative to this briefly in the earlier preface: it may be perhaps
courteous to others, who may be disposed to regret the refusal, to give
it somewhat more fully here. One reason--perhaps sufficient in
itself--can be very frankly stated. I do not _know_ enough of the French
novel of the last twenty years or so. During the whole of that time I
have had no reasons, of duty or profit, to oblige such knowledge. I have
had a great many other things to do, and I have found greater recreation
in re-reading old books than in experimenting on new ones. I might, no
doubt, in the last year or two have made up the deficiency to some
extent, but I was indisposed to do so for two, yea, three reasons, which
seemed to me sufficient.
In the first place, I have found, both by some actual experiment of my
own, and, as it seems to me, by a considerable examination of the
experiments of other people, that to co-ordinate satisfactorily accounts
of contemporary or very recent work with accounts of older is so
difficult as to be nearly impossible. The _foci_ are too different to be
easily adjusted, and the result is almost always out of composition, if
not of drawing.
Secondly, though I know I am here kicking against certain pricks, it
does not appear to me, either from what I have read or from criticisms
on what I have not, that any definitely new and decisively illustrated
school of novels has arisen since the death of M. Zola.
Thirdly, it would be impossible to deal with the subject, save in an
absurdly incomplete fashion, without discussing living persons. To doing
this, in a book, I have an unfashionable but unalterable objection. The
productions of such persons, as they appear, are, by now established
custom, proper subjects for "reviewing" in accordance with the decencies
of literature, and such reviews may sometimes, with the same proviso, be
extended to studies of their work up to date. But even these latter
should, I think, be reserved for very exceptional cases.
A slight difference of method may be observed in the treatment of
authors in Chapter X. and onwards, this treatment being not only
somewhat less judicial and more "impressionist," but also more general
and less buckrammed out with abstracts of particular works.[4] There
appeared to me to be more than one reason for this, all such reasons
being independent of, though by no means ignoring, the mechanical
pressure of ever-lessening space. In the first place, a very much larger
number of readers may be presumed to be more or less familiar with the
subjects of discussion, thus not only making elaborate "statement of
case" and production of supporting evidence unnecessary, but exposing
the purely judicial attitude to the charge of "no jurisdiction."
Moreover, there is behind all this, as it seems to me, a really
important principle, which is not a mere repetition, but a noteworthy
extension, of that recently laid down. I rather doubt whether the
absolute historico-critical verdict and sentence can ever be pronounced
on work that is, even in the widest sense, contemporary. The "firm
perspective of the past" can in very few instances be acquired: and
those few, who by good luck have acquired something of it, should not
presume too much on this gift of fortune. General opinion of a man is
during his lifetime often wrong, for some time after his death almost
always so: and the absolute balance is very seldom reached till a full
generation--something more than the conventional thirty years--has
passed. Meanwhile, though all readers who have anything critical in them
will be constantly revising their impressions, it is well not to put
one's own out as more than impressions. It is only a very few years
since I myself came to what I may call a provisionally final estimate of
Zola, and I find that there is some slight alteration even in that
which, from the first, I formed of Maupassant. I can hardly hope that
readers of this part of the work will not be brought into collision with
expressions of mine, more frequently than was the case in the first
volume or even the first part of this. But I can at least assure them
that I have no intention of playing Sir Oracle, or of trailing my coat.
The actual arrangement of this volume has been the subject of a good
deal of "pondering and deliberation," almost as much as Sir Thomas
Bertram gave to a matter no doubt of more importance. There was a
considerable temptation to recur to the system on which I have written
some other literary histories--that of "Books" and "Interchapters." This
I had abandoned, in the first volume, because it was not so much
difficult of application as hardly relevant. Here the relevance is much
greater. The single century divides itself, without the slightest
violence offered, into four parts, which, if I had that capacity or
partiality for flowery writing, the absence of which in me some critics
have deplored, I might almost call Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter.
There is the season, of little positive crop but important
seed-sowing,--the season in which the greater writers, Chateaubriand and
Mme. de Staël, perform their office. Here, too, quite humble
folk--Pigault-Lebrun completing what has been already dealt with,
Ducray-Duminil and others doing work to be dealt with here, and Paul de
Kock most of all, get the novel of ordinary life ready in various ways:
while others still, Nodier, Hugo, Vigny, Mérimée, and, with however
different literary value, Arlincourt, implant the New Romance. There is
the sudden, magnificent, and long-continued outburst of all the kinds in
and after 1830. There is the autumn of the Second Empire, continuing and
adding to the fruits and flowers of summer: and there is the gradual
decadence of the last quarter of the century, with some late blossoming
and second-crop fruitage--the medlars of the novel--and the dying off of
the great producers of the past. But the breach of uniformity in formal
arrangement of the divisions would perhaps be too great to the eye
without being absolutely necessary to the sense, and I have endeavoured
to make the necessary recapitulation with a single "halt" of
chapter-length[5] at the exact middle. It will readily be understood
that the loss of my own library has been even more severely felt in this
volume than in the earlier one, while circumstances, public and private,
have made access to larger collections more difficult. But I have
endeavoured to "make good" as much as possible, and grumbling or
complaining supplies worse than no armour against Fate.
I have sometimes, perhaps rashly, during the writing of this book
wondered "What next"? By luck for myself--whether also for my readers it
would be ill even to wonder--I have been permitted to execute all the
literary schemes I ever formed, save two. The first of these (omitting a
work on "Transubstantiation" which I planned at the age of thirteen but
did not carry far) was a _History of the English Scholastics_, which I
thought of some ten years later, which was not unfavoured by good
authority, and which I should certainly have attempted, if other people
at Oxford in my time had not been so much cleverer than myself that I
could not get a fellowship. It has, strangely enough, never been done
yet by anybody; it would be a useful corrective to the exoteric chatter
which has sometimes recently gone by the name of philosophy; and perhaps
it might shake Signor Benedetto Croce (whom it is hardly necessary to
say I do _not_ include among the "chatterers") in his opinion that
though, as he once too kindly said, I am a _valente letterato_, I am
sadly _digiúno di filosofia_.[6] But it is "too late a week" for this.
And I have lost my library.
Then there was a _History of Wine_, which was actually commissioned,
planned, and begun just before I was appointed to my Chair at Edinburgh,
and which I gave up, not from any personal pusillanimity or loss of
interest in the subject, but partly because I had too much else to do,
and because I thought it unfair to expose that respectable institution
to the venom of the most unscrupulous of all fanatics--those of
teetotalism. I could take this up with pleasure: but I have lost my
cellar.
What I should really like to do would be to translate _in extenso_ Dr.
Sommer's re-edition of the Vulgate Arthuriad. But I should probably die
before I had done half of it; no publisher would undertake the risk of
it; and if any did, "Dora," reluctant to die, would no doubt put us both
in 'prison for using so much paper. Therefore I had better be content
with the divine suggestion, and not spoil it by my human failure to
execute.
And so I may say, for good, _Valete_ to the public, abandoning the rest
of the leave-taking to their discretion.[7]
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
1 ROYAL CRESCENT, BATH,
_Christmas_, 1918.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is perhaps worth while to observe that I did not "edit" this, and
that I had nothing whatever to do with any part of it except the
_Introduction_ and my earlier translation of the _Chronique de Charles
IX_, which was, I believe, reprinted in it.
[2] In very great strictness an exception should perhaps be made for
notice of him, and of some others, in _The Later Nineteenth Century_
(Edinburgh and London, 1907).
[3] There will, for pretty obvious reasons, be fewer of these than in
the former volume. The texts are much more accessible; there is no
difficulty about the language, such as people, however unnecessarily,
sometimes feel about French up to the sixteenth century; and the space
is wanted for other things. If I have kept one or two of my old ones it
is because they have won approval from persons whose approval is worth
having, and are now out of print: while I have added one or two
others--to please myself. Translations--in some cases more than one or
two--already exist, for those who read English only, of nearly the whole
of Balzac, of all Victor Hugo's novels, of a great many of Dumas's, and
of others almost innumerable.
[4] The chief exceptions are Dumas _fils_, the earliest, and Maupassant,
the greatest except Flaubert and far more voluminous than Flaubert
himself.
[5] The most unexpected chorus of approval with which Volume I. was
received by reviewers, and which makes me think, in regard to this, of
that unpleasant song of the Koreish "After Bedr, Ohod," leaves little
necessity for defending points attacked. I have made a few addenda and
corrigenda to Volume I. to cover exceptions, and the "Interchapter" or
its equivalent should contain something on one larger matter--the small
account taken here of French _criticism_ of the novel.
[6] I wonder whether he was right, or whether the late Edward Caird was
when he said, "I don't think I ever had a pupil [and he was among the
first inter-collegiate-lecturers] with more of the philosophical _ethos_
than you have. But you're too fond of getting into logical coaches and
letting yourself be carried away in them." I think this was provoked by
a very undergraduate essay arguing that Truth, as actually realised, was
uninteresting, while the possible forms of Falsehood, as conceivably
realisable in other circumstances, were of the highest interest.
[7] I have to give, not only my usual thanks to Professors Elton, Ker,
and Gregory Smith for reading my proofs, and making most valuable
suggestions, but a special acknowledgment to Professor Ker, at whose
request Miss Elsie Hitchcock most kindly looked up for me, at the
British Museum, the exact title of that striking novel of M. H. Cochin
(_v. inf._ p. 554 _note_). I have, in the proper places, already thanked
the authorities of the _Reviews_ above mentioned; but I should like also
to recognise here the liberality of Messrs. Rivington in putting the
contents of my _Essays on French Novelists_ entirely at my disposal. And
I am under another special obligation to Dr. Hagbert Wright for giving
me, of his own motion, knowledge and reading of the fresh batch of
seventeenth-century novels noticed below (pp. xiv-xvi).
ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA FOR VOL. I
P. 13.--"The drawback of explanations is that they almost always require
to be explained." Somebody, or several somebodies, must have said this;
and many more people than have ever said it--at least in print--must
have felt it. The dictum applies to my note on this page. An entirely
well-willing reviewer thought me "piqued" at the American remark, and
proceeded to intimate a doubt whether I knew M. Bédier's work, partly on
lines (as to the _Cantilenae_) which I had myself anticipated, and
partly on the question of the composition of the _chansons_ by this or
that person or class, in this or that place, at that or the other time.
But I had felt no "pique" whatever in the matter, and these latter
points fall entirely outside my own conception of the _chansons_. I look
at them simply as pieces of accomplished literature, no matter how,
where, in what circumstances, or even exactly when, they became so. And
I could therefore by no possibility feel anything but pleasure at praise
bestowed on this most admirable work in a different part of the field.
P. 38, l. 27.--A protest was made, not inexcusably, at the
characterisation of _Launfal_ as "libellous." The fault was only one of
phrasing, or rather of incompleteness. That beautiful story of a knight
and his fairy love is one which I should be the last man in the world to
abuse _as such_. But it contains a libel on Guinevere which is
unnecessary and offensive, besides being absolutely unjustified by any
other legend, and inconsistent with her whole character. It is of this
only that I spoke the evil which it deserves. If I had not, by mere
oversight, omitted notice of Marie de France (for which I can offer no
excuse except the usual one of hesitation in which place to put it and
so putting it nowhere), I should certainly have left no doubt as to my
opinion of Thomas Chester likewise. Anybody who wants this may find it
in my _Short History of English Literature_, p. 194.
P. 55, l. 3.--_Delete_ comma at "French."
P. 60, l. 6.--Insert "and" between "half" and "illegitimate."
P. 72, l. 4.--I have been warned of the "change-over" in "Saracen" and
"Christian"--a slip of the pen which I am afraid I have been guilty of
before now, though I have known the story for full forty years. But
Floire, though a "paynim," was not exactly a "Saracen."
P. 75, l. 2 from bottom.--_For_ "his" _read_ "their."
Pp. 158-163.--When the first proofs of the present volume had already
begun to come in, Dr. Hagbert Wright informed me that the London Library
had just secured at Sotheby's (I believe partly from the sale of Lord
Ellesmere's books) a considerable parcel of early seventeenth-century
French novels. He also very kindly allowed me perusal of such of these
as I had not already noticed (from reading at the B. M.) in Vol. I. Of
some, if not all of them, on the principle stated in the Preface of that
vol., I may say something here. There is the _Histoire des Amours de
Lysandre et de Caliste; avec figures_, in an Amsterdam edition of 1679,
but of necessity some sixty years older, since its author, the Sieur
d'Audiguier, was killed in 1624. He says he wrote it in six months,
during three and a half of which he was laid up with eight
sword-wounds--things of which it is itself full, with the appurtenant
combats on sea and land and in private houses, and all sorts of other
divertisements (he uses the word himself of himself) including a very
agreeable ghost-host--a ghost quite free from the tautology and
grandiloquence which ghosts too often affect, though not so poetical as
Fletcher's. "They told me you were dead," says his guest and
interlocutor, consciously or unconsciously quoting the _Anthology_. "So
I am," quoth the ghost sturdily. But he wants, as they so often do, to
be buried. This is done, and he comes back to return thanks, which is
not equally the game, and in fact rather bores his guest, who, to stop
this jack-in-the-box proceeding, begins to ask favours, such as that the
ghost will give him three days' warning of his own death. "I will, _if I
can_," says the Appearance pointedly. The fault of the book, as of most
of the novels of the period, is the almost complete absence of
character. But there is plenty of adventure, in England as well as in
France, and it must be one of the latest stories in which the actual
tourney figures, for Audiguier writes as of things contemporary and
dedicates his book to Marie de Medicis.
_Cléon ou le Parfait Confidant_ (Paris, 1665), and _Hattigé ou Les
Amours au Roy de Tamaran_ (Cologne, 1676), the first anonymous, the
second written by a certain G. de Brimond, and dedicated to an
Englishman of whom we are not specially proud--Harry Jermyn, Earl of St.
Albans--are two very little books, of intrinsic importance and interest
not disproportioned to their size. They have, however, a little of both
for the student, in reference to the extension of the novel _kind_. For
_Cléon_ is rather like a "fictionising" of an inferior play of Moliere's
time; and _Hattigé_, with its privateering Chevalier de Malte for a hero
and its Turkish heroine who coolly remarks "L'infidélité a des charmes,"
might have been better if the author had known how to make it so. Both
these books have, as has been said, the merit of shortness. Puget de la
Serre's _La Clytié de la Cour_ (2 vols., Paris, 1635) cannot plead even
this; for it fills two fat volumes of some 1500 pages. I have sometimes
been accused, both in France and in England, of unfairness to Boileau,
but I should certainly never quarrel with him for including La Serre
(not, however, in respect of this book, I think) among his herd of
dunces. Like most of the novels of its time, though it has not much
actual _bergerie_ about it, it suggests the _Astrée_, but the contrast
is glaring. Even among the group, I have seldom read, or attempted to
read, anything duller. _Le Mélante du Sieur Vidal_ (Paris, 1624), though
also somewhat wordy (it has 1000 pages), is much more Astréean, and
therefore, perhaps, better. Things do happen in it: among other
incidents a lover is introduced into a garden in a barrow of clothes,
though he has not Sir John Falstaff's fate. There are fresh laws of
love, and discussions of them; a new debate on the old Blonde _v._
Brunette theme, which might be worse, etc. etc. The same year brought
forth _Les Chastes Amours d'Armonde_ by a certain Damiron, which, as its
title may show, belongs rather to the pre-Astréean group (_v. sup._ Vol.
I. p. 157 _note_), and contains a great deal of verse and (by licence of
its title) a good deal of kissing; but is flatly told, despite not a
little _Phébus_. It is a sort of combat of Spiritual and Fleshly Love;
and Armonde ends as a kind of irregular anchorite, having previously
"spent several days in deliberating the cut of his vestments."
_Les Caprices Héroïques_ (Paris, 1644) is a translation, by
Chateaunières de Grenaille, from the Italian of Loredano. It consists of
variations on classical stories, treated rather in the declamation
manner, and ranging in subject from Achilles to "Friné." How many
readers (at least among those who read with their eyes only) will affirm
on their honour that they identified "Friné" at first reading? In
Italian there would, of course, be less hesitation. The book is not
precisely a novel, but it has merits as a collection of rhetorical
exercises. Of a somewhat similar kind, though even further from the
strict novel standard, is the _Diverses Affections de Minerve_ (Paris,
1625) of the above-mentioned Audiguier, where the heroine is _not_ the
goddess, and all sorts of places and personages, mythological,
classical, historic, and modern, compose a miraculous _macédoine_,
Brasidas jostling Gracchus, and Chabrias living in the Faubourg
Saint-Martin. This _is_ a sort of story, but the greatest part of the
volume as it lies before me is composed of _Lettres Espagnoles_,
_Epîtres Françaises_, _Libres Discours_, etc.
We can apparently return to the stricter romance, such as it is, with
the _Histoire Asiatique_ of the Sieur de Gerzan (Paris, 1633), but it is
noteworthy that the title-page of this ballasts itself by an "Avec un
Traité du Trésor de la Vie Humaine et La Philosophie des Dames." I
confess that, as in the case of most of the books here mentioned, I have
not read it with the care I bestowed on the _Cyrus_. But I perceive in
it ladies who love corsairs, universal medicines, poodles who are
sacrificed to save their owners, and other things which may tempt some.
And I can, by at least sampling, rather recommend _Les Travaux du Prince
Inconnu_ (Paris, 1633) by the Sieur de Logeas. It calls itself, and its
700 pages, the completion of two earlier performances, the _Roman
Historique_ and the _Histoire des Trois Frères Princes de
Constantinople_, which have not come in my way. There is, however,
probably no cause to regret this, for the author assures us that his new
work is "as far above the two former in beauty as the sun is above the
stars." If any light-minded person be disposed to scoff at him for this,
let it be added that he has the grace to abstract the whole in the _Avis
au Lecteur_ which contains the boast, and to give full chapter-headings,
things too often wanting in the group. The hero is named Rosidor, the
heroine Floralinde; and they are married with "la réjouissance générale
de toute la Chrétienté." What can mortals ask for more?
_Polémire ou l'Illustre Polonais_ (Paris, 1647), is dedicated to no less
a person than Madame de Montbazon, and contains much piety, a good deal
of fighting, and some verse. _L'Amour Aventureux_ (Paris, 1623), by the
not unknown Du Verdier, is a book with _Histoires_, and I am not sure
that the volume I have seen contains the whole of it. _L'Empire de
l'Inconstance_ (Paris, 1635), by the Sieur de Ville, and published "at
the entry of the little gallery of Prisoners under the sign of the
Vermilion Roses," has a most admirable title to start with, and a table
of over thirty _Histoires_, a dozen letters, and two "amorous judgments"
at the end. _Les Fortunes Diverses de Chrysomire et de Kalinde_ (Paris,
1635), by a certain Humbert, blazons "love and war" on its very
title-page, while _Celandre_ (Paris, 1671), a much later book than most
of these, has the rather uncommon feature of a single name for title.
Thirty or forty years ago I should have taken some pleasure in "cooking"
this batch of mostly early romances into a twenty-page article which,
unless it had been unlucky, would have found its way into some magazine
or review. Somebody might do so now. But I think it sufficient, and not
superfluous, to add this brief sketch here to the notices of similar
things in the last volume, in order to show how abundant the crop of
French romance--of which even these are only further samples--was at the
time.
P. 231, l. 9 from bottom.--_Add_ 's (Herman sla lerman's).
P. 237, _note_ 2, l. 1.--_For_ "revision" _read_ "revisal."
P. 241, 2nd par., last line but two.--_For_ "But" _read_ "Still."
P. 278, l. 7 from bottom.--Delete comma at "Thackeray's."
P. 286, l. 18.--It occurred to me (among the usual discoveries which one
makes in reading one's book after it has passed the irremeable press)
that I ought to have said "Planchet's" horse, not "D'Artagnan's." True,
as a kindly fellow-Alexandrian (who had not noticed the slip) consoled
my remorse by saying, the horse was D'Artagnan's _property_; but the
phrase usually implies riding at the moment. And Aramis, brave as he
was, would have been sure to reflect that to play a feat of possibly
hostile acrobatism on the Gascon, without notice, might be a little
dangerous.
P. 304, ll. 4 and 7.--Shift "with his wife and mistress" to l. 4,
reading "the relations with his wife and mistress of that Henri II.,"
etc.
P. 314, l. 12 from bottom.--_For_ "usual" _read_ "common" (common
norm.)
P. 338, l. 21.--Delete "in" before "among."
P. 381.--One or two reviewers and some private correspondents have
expressed surprise at my not knowing, or at any rate not mentioning, the
late Professor Morley's publication of _Rasselas_ and a translation of
_Candide_ together. I cannot say positively whether I knew of it or not,
though I must have done so, having often gone over the lists of that
editor's numerous "libraries" to secure for my students texts not
overlaid with commentary. But I can say very truthfully that no slight
whatever was intended, in regard to a scholar who did more than almost
any other single man to "vulgarise" (in the wholly laudable sense of
that too often degraded word) the body of English literature. Only, such
a book would not have been what I was thinking of. To bring out the full
contrast-complement of these two strangely coincident masterpieces, both
must be read in the originals. Paradoxically, one might even say that a
French translation of Johnson, with the original of Voltaire, would show
it better than the converse presentment. _Candide_ is so intensely
French--it is even to such an extent an embodiment of one side of
Frenchness--that you cannot receive its virtues except through the
original tongue. I am personally fond of translating; I have had some
practice in it; and some good wits have not disapproved some of my
efforts. But, unless I knew that in case of refusal I should be ranked
as a Conscientious Objector, I would not attempt _Candide_. The French
would ring in my ears too reproachfully.
P. 396, last line.--Shift comma from after to before "even."
P. 399, l. 10.--_For_ "Rousseau" _read_ "his author."
P. 424, _note_, first line.--Delete quotes before "The."
P. 453, l. 15.--_For_ "Courray" _read_ "Cou_v_ray."
P. 468, l. 17.--_For_ "France has" _read_ "France had."
P. 477.--In the original preface I apologised--not in the idle hope of
conciliating one kind of critic, but out of respect for a very different
class--for slips due to the loss of my own library, and to the
difficulty (a difficulty which has now increased owing to circumstances
of no public interest, in respect of the present volume) of consulting
others in regard to small matters of fact. I have very gratefully to
acknowledge that I found the latter class very much larger than the
former. Such a note as that at Vol. I. p. xiii, will show that I have
not spared trouble to ensure accuracy. The charge of _in_accuracy can
always be made by anybody who cares to take "the other authority." This
has been done in reference to the dates of Prévost's books. But I may
perhaps say, without _outrecuidance_, that there is an _Art de négliger
les dates_ as well as one _de les verifier_. For the purposes of such a
history as this it is very rarely of the slightest importance, whether a
book was published in the year one or the year three: though the
importance of course increases when units pass into decades, and becomes
grave where decades pass into half-centuries. Unless you can collate
actual first editions in every case (and sometimes even then) dates of
books as given are always second-hand. In reference to the same subject
I have also been rebuked for not taking account of M. Harrisse's
correction of the legend of Prévost's death. As a matter of fact I knew
but had forgotten it, and it has not the slightest importance in
connection with Prévost's work. Besides, somebody will probably, sooner
or later, correct M. Harrisse. These things pass: _Manon Lescaut_
remains.
ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA FOR VOL. II
P. 65.--A reviewer of my first volume, who objected to my omission there
of Madame de Charrières, may possibly think that omission made more
sinful by the admission of Madame de Montolieu. But there seems to me to
be a sufficient distinction between the two cases. Isabella Agnes
Elizabeth Van Tuyll (or, as she liked to call herself, Belle de Zuylen),
subsequently Madame de Saint-Hyacinthe de Charrières (how mellifluously
these names pass over one's tongue!), was a very interesting person, and
highly characteristic of the later eighteenth century. I first met with
her long ago (see Vol. I. p. 443) in my "Sensibility" researches, as
having, in her maturer years, played that curious, but at the time not
uncommon, part of "Governess in erotics" to Benjamin Constant, who was
then quite young, and with whose uncle, Constant d'Hermenches, she had,
years earlier and before her own marriage, carried on a long and very
intimate but platonic correspondence. This is largely occupied with
oddly business-like discussions of marriage schemes for herself, one of
the _prétendants_ being no less a person than our own precious Bozzy,
who met her on the Continental tour for which Johnson started him at
Harwich. But--and let this always be a warning to literary lovers--the
two fell out over a translation of the Corsica book which she began.
Boswell was not the wisest of men, especially where women were
concerned. But even he might have known that, if you trust the
bluest-eyed of gazelles to do such things for you, she will probably
marry a market-gardener. (He seems also to have been a little afraid of
her superiority of talent, _v._ his letters to Temple and his _Johnson_,
pp. 192-3, Globe Ed.)
Besides these, and other genuine letters, she wrote not a few novels,
concocted often, if not always, in epistolary form. Their French was so
good that it attracted Sainte-Beuve's attention and praise, while quite
recently she has had a devoted panegyrist and editor in Switzerland,
where, after her marriage, she was domiciled. But (and here come the
reasons for the former exclusion) she learnt her French as a foreign
language. She was French neither by birth nor by extraction, nor, if I
do not mistake, by even temporary residence, though she did stay in
England for a considerable time. Some of these points distinguish her
from Hamilton as others do from Madame de Montolieu. If I put her in, I
do not quite see how I could leave Beckford out.
P. 400, ll. 2, 3.--_For_ "1859 ... 1858" _read_ "1857--a year, with its
successors 1858 and 1859,"
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
MADAME DE STAËL AND CHATEAUBRIAND 1
Reasons for beginning with Mme. de Staël--_Delphine_--The
tone--The story--_Corinne_--Its improved conditions--An
illustrated edition of it--The story--The character of
Nelvil--And the book's absurdities--Compensations: Corinne
herself--Nelvil again--Its aesthetics--The author's position
in the History of the Novel--Chateaubriand: his peculiar
position as a novelist--And the remarkable interconnection
of his works in fiction--_Atala_--_René_--Difference between
its importance and its merit--_Les Natchez_--_Les
Martyrs_--The story--Its "panoramic" quality--And its
remarkable advance in style--Chateaubriand's Janus-position
in this--Illustrated.
CHAPTER II
PAUL DE KOCK, OTHER MINORS OF 1800-1830, AND NODIER 39
The fate of popular minor novelists--Examples of
them--Paul de Kock--_L'Enfant de ma Femme_--_Petits Tableaux
de Moeurs_--_Gustave_--The caricatured _Anglais_--_Edmond et
sa Cousine_--_André le Savoyard_--_Jean_--_La Femme_, _le
Mari et l'Amant_--_Mon Voisin Raymond_--_Le Barbier de
Paris_--The Pauline grisette--Others--The minors before
1830--Mme. de Montolieu: _Caroline de Lichtfield_--Its
advance on "Sensibility"--Madame de Genlis _iterum_--The
minor popular novel--Ducray-Duminil: _Le Petit
Carillonneur_--V. Ducange--_L'Artiste et le
Soldat_--_Ludovica_--Auguste Ricard: _L'Ouvreuse de
Loges_--The importance of these minors not
inconsiderable--The Vicomte d'Arlincourt: _Le
Solitaire_--Nodier--His short stories--_Trilby_--_Le Songe
d'Or_--The minors--_La Fée aux Miettes_--_Smarra_ and _Soeur
Béatrix_--_Inès de las Sierras_--Nodier's special quality.
CHAPTER III
VICTOR HUGO 96
Limitations--_Han d'Islande_--_Bug-Jargal_--_Le Dernier Jour
d'un Condamné_--_Claude Gueux_--_Notre-Dame de Paris_--The
story easy to anticipate--Importance of the actual
_title_--The working out of the one under the other--The
story recovers itself latterly--But the characters?--The
thirty years' interval--_Les Misérables_--_Les Travailleurs
de la Mer_--The _genius loci_--Guernsey at the
time--_L'Homme Qui Rit_--_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_--Final
remarks.
CHAPTER IV
BEYLE AND BALZAC 133
Beyle: his peculiarity--_Armance_--_La Chartreuse de
Parme_--The Waterloo episode--The subject and general
colour--_L'Abbesse de Castro_, etc.--_Le Rouge et le
Noir_--Beyle's masterpiece, and why--Julien Sorel and
Mathilde de la Mole--The resuscitated work: _Lamiel_--The
_Nouvelles Inédites_--_Le Chasseur Vert_--Beyle's place in
the story--Balzac: conditions of the present
dealing--Limitations of subject--And of Balzac
himself--Balzac's "general ideas"--Abstinence from
abstract--The _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_--_Les Chouans_--_La Peau
de Chagrin_--The short stories--The _Contes
Drolatiques_--Notes on select larger books: _Eugénie
Grandet_--_Le Père Goriot_ and _Les Parents
Pauvres_--Others: the general "scenic"
division--"Balzacity": its constitution--Its effect on
successors--And its own character--The "occult" element--Its
action and reaction--Peculiarity of the conversation--And of
the "story" interest.
CHAPTER V
GEORGE SAND 176
George Sand: generalities about her--Note on _Elle et
Lui_, etc., and on _Un Hiver à Majorque_--Phases of her
work--_Indiana_--_Valentine_--_Lélia_--The moral of the
group and its tragi-comedy--_Consuelo_--Much better in
parts--The degeneration--Recovery; but not maintained quite
to the end--_La Comtesse de Rudolstadt_--The "making good"
of _Lucrezia Floriani_--The story--Its balance of power--The
"Idylls": _La Petite Fadette_--_La Mare au
Diable_--_François le Champi_--Others: _Mauprat_--_La
Daniella_--_Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré_--_Le Marquis
de Villemer_--_Mlle. La Quintinie_--_Flamarande_--Summary
and judgment--Style--Conversation and description.
CHAPTER VI
THE NOVEL OF STYLE--GAUTIER, MÉRIMÉE, GÉRARD DE NERVAL,
MUSSET, VIGNY 208
Gautier: his burden of "style"--Abstract (with translations)
of _La Morte Amoureuse_--Criticism thereof--A parallel from
painting--The reality--And the passion of it--Other short
stories--Gautier's humour: _Les Jeune-France_--Return to
_Fortunio_--And others--Longer books: _Le Capitaine
Fracasse_ and others--_Mlle. De
Maupin_--Mérimée--Carmen--_Colomba_--Its smaller companions:
_Mateo Falcone_, etc.--Those of _Carmen_; _Arsène
Guillot_--And _L'Abbé Aubain_--_La Prise de la Redoute_--The
_Dernières Nouvelles_; _Il Viccolo di Madama
Lucrezia_--_Djoumane_--_Lokis_--_La Chambre Bleue_--The
_Chronique de Charles IX_--The semi-dramatic stories: _La
Jacquerie_--_Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement_, etc.--Musset:
charm of his dramatised stories; his pure narration
unsuccessful--_Frédéric et Bernerette_--_Les Deux
Maîtresses_, _Le Fils du Titien_, etc.--_Emmeline_--Gérard
de Nerval: his peculiar position--_La Bohême Galante_, _Les
Filles du Feu_, and _Le Rêve et la Vie_--Their general
character--Particular examples--_Aurélia_--And especially
_Sylvie_--Alfred de Vigny: _Cinq-Mars_--The faults in its
general scheme--And in its details--_Stello_ less of a
novel, but containing better novel-stuff--Its framework and
"anecdotes"--The death of Gilbert--The satiric episode:
contrast--The Chatterton part--The tragedy of André
Chénier--_Servitude et Grandeur Militaires_--The first
story--The second--and third--The moral of the three--Note
on Fromentin's _Dominique_: its altogether exceptional
character.
CHAPTER VII
THE MINORS OF 1830 281
Sainte-Beuve: _Volupté_--Its "puff-book"--Itself--Its
character in various aspects--Jules Sandeau and Charles de
Bernard--Sandeau's work--Bernard's--Sue, Soulié, and the
novel of melodrama: _Le Juif Errant_, etc.--Melodramatic
fiction generally--_Le Château des Pyrénées_--_Les Mémoires
du Diable_--Later writers and writings of the
class--Murger--The _Vie de Bohême_--_Les Buveurs d'Eau_ and
the Miscellanies--Reybaud: _Jérôme Paturot_, and Thackeray
on its earlier part--The windfall of Malvina--The difference
of the Second Part--Not much of a novel--But an invaluable
document--Méry--_Les Nuits Anglaises_--The minor
stories--_Histoire d'une Colline_--The "Manchester"
article--Karr--Roger de Beauvoir: _Les Cabaret des
Morts_--Ourliac: _Contes du Bocage_--Achard--Souvestre,
Féval, etc.--Borel's _Champavert_.
CHAPTER VIII
DUMAS THE ELDER 323
The case of Dumas--Charge and
discharge--Morality--Plagiarism and devilling--The
collaborators?--The positive value as fiction and as
literature of the books: the less worthy works--The
worthier: treatment of them not so much individually as
under heads--His attitude to plot--To character--To
description (and "style")--To conversation.
CHAPTER IX
THE FRENCH NOVEL IN 1850 343
The peculiarity of the moment--A political nadir--And almost
a literary zenith--The performance of the time in novel--The
_personnel_--The kinds: the historical novel--Appearance of
new classes: the historical--Other kinds and classes--The
Novel of Romanticism generally--The "ordinary"--Discussion
on a point of general novel criticism.
CHAPTER X
DUMAS THE YOUNGER 365
Division of future subjects--A confession--His general
character--_La Dame aux Camélias_--_Tristan le
Roux_--_Antonine_--_La Vie à Vingt Ans_--_Aventures de
Quatre Femmes_--_Trois Hommes Forts_--_Diane de
Lys_--Shorter stories: _Une Loge à Camille_--_Le Docteur
Servans_--_Le Roman d'une Femme_--The habit of quickening up
at the end--_Contes et
Nouvelles_--_Ilka_--_Revenants_--_Sophie
Printemps_--_Affaire Clémenceau_--Story of it--Criticism of
it and of its author's work generally--Note on Dumas _fils'_
drama, etc.--Reflections.
CHAPTER XI
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 397
The contrast of Flaubert and Dumas _fils_--Some former
dealings with him--His style--The books: _Madame
Bovary_--_Salammbô_--_L'Éducation Sentimentale_--_La
Tentation de Saint-Antoine_--_Trois Contes_--_Bouvard et
Pécuchet_--General considerations.
CHAPTER XII
THE OTHER "NON-NATURALS" OF THE SECOND EMPIRE 414
Feuillet--His novels generally--Brief notes on some: _Le
Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre_--_M. de Camors_--Other
books--_La Petite Comtesse_--_Julia de Trécoeur_--_Honneur
d'Artiste_--_La Morte_--Misters the assassins--Alphonse
Daudet and his curious position--His "personality"--His
books from this point of view and others--His
"plagiarisms"--His merits--About: _Le Roi des
Montagnes_--_Tolla_--_Germaine_--_Madelon_--_Maître Pierre_,
etc.--Summing up--Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau--The first:
his general character--The second--_L'Affaire
Lerouge_--Feydeau: _Sylvie_--_Fanny_--Others:
_Daniel_--Droz--_Mr., Mme. et Bébé_ and _Entre
Nous_--Cherbuliez--His general characteristics--Short survey
of his books--Three eccentrics--Léon Cladel: _Les
Va-nu-pieds_, etc.--Barbey d'Aurevilly: his criticism of
novels--His novels themselves: _Les Diaboliques_ and
others--His merits--And defects--Especially as shown in
_L'Ensorcelée_--Champfleury--_Les Excentriques_.
CHAPTER XIII
NATURALISM--THE GONCOURTS, ZOLA, AND MAUPASSANT 459
The beginnings--"Les deux Goncourts"--Their work--The
novels--_Germinie Lacerteux_ and _Chérie_ taken as
specimens--The impression produced by them--The rottenness
of their theory--And the unattractiveness of their
style--Émile Zola to be treated differently--Some points in
his personality: literary and other--The Pillars of
Naturalism--"Document" and "detail" before
Naturalism--General stages traced--Some individual pioneers;
especially Hugo--Survey of books: the short stories--"Les
Rougon-Macquart"--"Les Trois Villes"--"Les Quatre
Évangiles"--General considerations--Especially in regard to
character--[Maupassant]--_Bel-Ami_--_Une Vie_--_Fort comme
la Mort_--_Pierre et Jean_--_Notre Coeur_--_Les Dimanches_,
etc.--_Yvette_--Short stories: the various
collections--Classes: stories of 1870-71--Norman
stories--Algerian and Sporting--Purely comic--Tragic--Tales
of Life's Irony--Oddments--General
considerations--Huysmans--Belot and others.
CHAPTER XIV
OTHER NOVELISTS OF 1870-1900 518
The last stage--Ferdinand Fabre--_L'Abbé Tigrane_--_Norine_,
etc.--_Le Marquis de Pierrerue_--_Mon Oncle
Célestin_--_Lucifer_--_Sylviane_ and
_Taillevent_--_Toussaint Galabru_--André
Theuriet--_Sauvageonne_--_Le Fils Maugars_--_Le Don Juan de
Vireloup_ and _Raymonde_--General characteristics--Georges
Ohnet--_Serge Panine_--_Le Maître de Forges_--_Le Docteur
Rameau_--_La Grande Marnière_--Reflections--Édouard Rod--_La
Vie Privée de Michel Teissier_--_La Sacrifiée_--Note on _La
Seconde Vie de M. T._--_Le Silence_--_Là-Haut_--_La Course à
la Mort_--_Le Ménage du Pasteur Naudié_--_Mademoiselle
Annette_--_L'Eau Courante_--_Scènes de la Vie
Cosmopolite_--Catulle Mendès.
CONCLUSION 556
APPENDIX 571
INDEX 577
CHAPTER I
MADAME DE STAËL AND CHATEAUBRIAND
[Sidenote: Reasons for beginning with Mme. de Staël.]
It has often been thought, and sometimes said, that the period of the
French Revolution and of the Napoleonic wars--extending as it does
strictly to more than a quarter of a century, while four decades were
more than completed before a distinct turn of tide--is, for France, the
least individual and least satisfactorily productive time in all her
great literature. And it is, to a large extent, true. But the loss of
individuality implies the presence of indiscernibility; and not to go
out of our own department, there are at least three writers who, if but
partially, cancel this entry to discredit. Of one of them--the lowest in
general literature, if not quite in our division of
it--Pigault-Lebrun--we have spoken in the last volume. The other
two--much less craftsmanlike novelists merely as such, but immeasurably
greater as man and woman of letters--remain for discussion in the first
chapter of this. In pure chronological order Chateaubriand should come
first, as well as in other "ranks" of various kinds. But History, though
it may never neglect, may sometimes overrule Chronology by help of a
larger and higher point of view: sex and birth hardly count here, and
the departmental primes the intrinsic literary importance.
Chateaubriand, too, was a little younger than Madame de Staël in years,
though his actual publication, in anything like our kind, came before
hers. And he reached much farther than she did, though curiously enough
some of his worst faults were more of the eighteenth century than hers.
She helped to finish "Sensibility"; she transformed "Philosophism" into
something more modern; she borrowed a good deal (especially in the
region of aesthetics) that was to be importantly germinal from Germany.
But she had practically nothing of that sense of the past and of the
strange which was to rejuvenate all literature, and which he had; while
she died before the great French Romantic outburst began. So let us
begin with her.[8]
[Sidenote: _Delphine._]
"This dismal trash, which has nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic
who has read it," was the extremely rude judgment pronounced by Sydney
Smith on Madame de Staël's _Delphine_. Sydney was a good-natured person
and a gentleman, nor had he, merely as a Whig, any reason to quarrel
with the lady's general attitude to politics--a circumstance which, one
regrets to say, did in those days, on both sides, rather improperly
qualify the attitude of gentlemen to literary ladies as well as to each
other. It is true that the author of _Corinne_ and of _Delphine_ itself
had been rather a thorn in the side of the English Whigs by dint of some
of her opinions, by much of her conduct, and, above all, by certain
peculiarities which may be noticed presently. But Sydney, though a Whig,
was not "a _vile_ Whig," for which reason the Upper Powers, in his later
years, made him something rather indistinguishable from a Tory. And that
blunt common sense, which in his case cohabited with the finest
_un_common wit, must have found itself, in this instance, by no means
at variance with its housemate in respect of Anne Germaine Necker.
There are many _worse_ books than _Delphine_. It is excellently written;
there is no bad blood in it; there is no intentional licentiousness; on
the contrary, there are the most desperate attempts to live up to a New
Morality by no means entirely of the Wiggins kind. But there is an
absence of humour which is perfectly devastating: and there is a
presence of the most disastrous atmosphere of sham sentiment, sham
morality, sham almost everything, that can be imagined. It was hinted in
the last volume that Madame de Staël's lover, Benjamin Constant, shows
in one way the Nemesis of Sensibility; so does she herself in another.
But the difference! In _Adolphe_ a coal from the altar of true passion
has touched lips in themselves polluted enough, and the result is what
it always is in such, alas! rare cases, whether the lips were polluted
or not. In _Delphine_ there is a desperate pother to strike some sort of
light and get some sort of heat; but the steel is naught, the flint is
clay, the tinder is mouldy, and the wood is damp and rotten. No glow of
brand or charcoal follows, and the lips, untouched by it, utter nothing
but rhetoric and fustian and, as the Sydneian sentence speaks it,
"trash."[9]
[Sidenote: The tone.]
In fact, to get any appropriate metaphorical description of it one has
to change the terminology altogether. In a very great line Mr. Kipling
has spoken of a metaphorical ship--
With a drogue of dead convictions to keep her head to gale.
Madame de Staël has cast off not only that drogue, but even the other
and perhaps commoner floating ballast and steadier of dead
_conventions_, and is trying to beat up against the gale by help of all
sorts of jury-masts and extemporised try-sails of other new conventions
that are mostly blowing out of the bolt-ropes. We said that Crébillon's
world was an artificial one, and one of not very respectable artifice.
But it worked after a fashion; it was founded on some real, however
unrespectable, facts of humanity; and it was at least amusing to the
naughty players on its stage to begin with, and long afterwards to the
guiltless spectators of the commonty. In _Delphine_ there is not a
glimmer of amusement from first to last, and the whole story is compact
(if that word were not totally inapplicable) of windbags of sentiment,
copy-book headings, and the strangest husks of neo-classic type-worship,
stock character, and hollow generalisation. An Italian is necessarily a
person of volcanic passions; an Englishman or an American (at this time
the identification was particularly unlucky) has, of equal necessity, a
grave and reserved physiognomy. Orthodox religion is a mistake, but a
kind of moral-philosophical Deism (something of the Wolmar type) is
highly extolled. You must be technically "virtuous" yourself, even if
you bring a whole second volume of tedious tortures on you by being so;
but you may play Lady Pandara to a friend who is a devout adulteress,
may force yourself into her husband's carriage when he is carrying her
off from one assignation, and may bring about his death by contriving
another in your own house. In fact, the whole thing is topsy-turvy,
without the slightest touch of that animation and interested curiosity
which topsy-turviness sometimes contributes. But perhaps one should give
a more regular account of it.
[Sidenote: The story.]
Delphine d'Albémar is a young, beautiful, rich, clever, generous, and,
in the special and fashionable sense, extravagantly "sensible" widow,
who opens the story (it is in the troublesome epistolary form) by
handing over about a third of her fortune to render possible the
marriage of a cousin of her deceased husband. This cousin, Matilde de
Vernon, is also beautiful and accomplished, but a _dévote_, altogether
well-regulated and well-conducted, and (though it turns out that she has
strong and permanent affections) the reverse of "sensible"--in fact
rather hard and disagreeable--in manner. She has a scheming mother, who
has run herself deeply, though privately, into debt, and the intended
husband and son-in-law, Léonce de Mandeville, also has a mother, who is
half Spanish by blood and residence, and wholly so (according to the
type-theory above glanced at) in family pride, personal _morgue_, and so
forth. A good deal of this has descended to her son, with whom, in spite
or because of it, Delphine (she has not seen him before her rash
generosity) proceeds to fall frantically in love, as he does with her.
The marriage, however, partly by trickery on Madame de Vernon's part,
and partly owing to Delphine's more than indiscreet furthering of her
friend Madame d'Ervin's intrigue with the Italian M. de Serbellane, does
take place, and Mme. de Staël's idea of a nice heroine makes her station
Delphine in a white veil, behind a pillar of the church, muttering
reproaches at the bridegroom. No open family rupture, however, is
caused; on the contrary, a remarkable and inevitably disastrous "triple
arrangement" follows (as mentioned above), for an entire volume, in
which the widow and the bridegroom make despairing love to each other,
refraining, however, from any impropriety, and the wife, though
suffering (for she, in her apparently frigid way, really loves her
husband), tolerates the proceeding after a fashion. This impossible and
preposterous situation is at last broken up by the passion and violence
of another admirer of Delphine--a certain M. de Valorbe. These bring
about duels, wounds, and Delphine's flight to Switzerland, where she
puts up in a convent with a most superfluous and in every way
unrefreshing new personage, a widowed sister of Madame de Mandeville.
Valorbe follows, and, to get hold of Delphine, machinates one of the
most absurd scenes in the whole realm of fiction. He lures her into
Austrian territory and a chamber with himself alone, locks the door and
throws the key out of the window,[10] storms, rants, threatens, but
proceeds to no _voie de fait_, and merely gets himself and the object of
his desires arrested by the Austrians! He thus succeeds, while procuring
no gratification for himself, in entirely demolishing the last shred of
reputation which, virtuous as she is in her own way, Delphine's various
eccentricities and escapades have left her; and she takes the veil. In
the first form the authoress crowned this mass of absurdities with the
suicide of the heroine and the judicial shooting of the hero. Somebody
remonstrated, and she made Delphine throw off her vows, engage herself
to Léonce (whose unhappy wife has died from too much carrying out of the
duty of a mother to her child), and go with him to his estates in La
Vendée, where he is to take up arms for the king. Unfortunately, the
Vendéans by no means "see" their _seigneur_ marrying an apostate nun,
and strong language is used. So Delphine dies, not actually by her own
hand, and Léonce gets shot, more honourably than he deserves, on the
patriot-royalist side.
Among the minor characters not yet referred to are an old-maid
sister-in-law of Delphine's, who, though tolerably sensible in the
better sense, plays the part of confidante to her brother's _mijaurée_
of a widow much too indulgently; a M. Barton, Léonce's mentor, who,
despite his English-looking name, is not (one is glad to find) English,
but is, to one's sorrow, one of the detestable "parsons-in-tie-wigs"
whom French Anglomania at this time foisted on us as characteristic of
England; a sort of double of his, M. de Lerensei, a Protestant
free-thinker, who, with his _divorcée_ wife, puts up grass altars in
their garden with inscriptions recording the happiness of their queer
union; an ill-natured Mme. du Marset and her old cicisbeo, M. de
Fierville, who suggest, in the dismallest way, the weakest wine of
Marmontel gone stale and filtered through the dullest, though not the
dirtiest, part of Laclos.
Yet the thing, "dismal trash" as Sydney almost justly called it, is
perhaps worth reading once (nothing but the sternest voice of duty
could have made me read it twice) because of the existence of _Corinne_,
and because also of the undoubted fact that, here as there, though much
more surprisingly, a woman of unusual ability was drawing a picture of
what she would have liked to be--if not of what she actually thought
herself.[11] The borrowed beauty goes for nothing--it were indeed hard
if one did not, in the case of a woman of letters, "let her make her
dream All that she would," like Tennyson's Prince, but in this other
respect. The generosity, less actually exaggerated, might also pass.
That Delphine makes a frantic fool of herself for a lover whose
attractions can only make male readers shrug their shoulders--for though
we are _told_ that Léonce is clever, brave, charming, and what not, we
see nothing of it in speech or action--may be matter of taste; but that
her heroine's part should seem to any woman one worth playing is indeed
wonderful. Delphine behaves throughout like a child, and by no means
always like a very well-brought-up child; she never seems to have the
very slightest idea that "things are as they are and that their
consequences will be what they will be"; and though, once more, we are
_told_ of passion carrying all before it, we are never _shown_ it. It is
all "words, words." To speak of her love in the same breath with Julie's
is to break off the speech in laughter; to consider her woes and
remember Clarissa's is to be ready to read another seven or eight
volumes of Richardson in lieu of these three of Madame de Staël's.
And yet this lady could do something in the novel way, and, when the
time came, she did it.
[Sidenote: _Corinne._]
Between _Delphine_ and _Corinne_ Madame de Staël had, in the fullest
sense of a banal phrase, "seen a great of the world." She had lost the
illusions which the Duessa Revolution usually spreads among clever but
not wise persons at her first appearance, and had not left her bones,
as too many[12] such persons do, in the _pieuvre_-caves which the
monster keeps ready. She had seen England, being "coached" by
Crabb-Robinson and others, so as to give some substance to the vague
_philosophe-Anglomane_ flimsiness of her earlier fancy. She had seen
Republicanism turn to actual Tyranny, and had made exceedingly
unsuccessful attempts to captivate the tyrant. She had seen Germany, and
had got something of its then not by any means poisonous, if somewhat
windy, "culture"; a little romance of a kind, though she was never a
real Romantic; some aesthetics; some very exoteric philosophy, etc. She
had done a great deal of not very happy love-making; had been a woman of
letters, a patroness of men of letters, and--most important of all--had
never dismounted from her old hobby "Sensibility," though she had learnt
how to put it through new paces.
A critical reader of _Corinne_ must remember all this, and he must
remember something else, though the reminder has been thought to savour
of brutality. It is perfectly clear to me, and always has been so from
reading (in and between the lines) of her own works, of Lady
Blennerhassett's monumental book on her, of M. Sorel's excellent
monograph, and of scores of longer and shorter studies on and references
to her English and German and Swiss and French--from her own time
downwards, that the central secret, mainspring, or whatever any one may
choose to call it, of Madame de Staël's life was a frantic desire for
the physical beauty which she did not possess,[13] and a persistent
attempt, occasionally successful, to delude herself into believing that
she had achieved a sufficient substitute by literary, philosophical,
political, and other exertion.
[Sidenote: Its improved conditions.]
This partly pathetic, partly, alas! ridiculous, but on the whole (with a
little charity) quite commiserable endeavour, attained some success,
though probably with not a little extraneous help, in _De l'Allemagne_,
and the posthumous _Considérations_ on the Revolution; but these books
do not concern us, and illustrate only part of the writer's character,
temperament, and talent, if not genius. _Corinne_ gives us the rest, and
nearly, if not quite, the whole. The author had no doubt tried to do
this in _Delphine_, but had then had neither art nor equipment for the
task, and she had failed utterly. She was now well, if not perfectly,
equipped, and had learnt not a little of the art to use her
acquisitions. _Delphine_ had been dull, absurd, preposterous; _Corinne_,
if it has dull patches, saves them from being intolerable. If its
sentiment is extravagant, it is never exactly preposterous or exactly
absurd; for the truth and reality of passion which are absent from the
other book are actually present here, though sometimes in unintentional
masquerade.
In fact, _Corinne_, though the sisterhood of the two books is obvious
enough, has almost, though not quite, all the faults of _Delphine_
removed and some merits added, of which in the earlier novel there is
not the slightest trace. The history of my own acquaintance with it is,
I hope, not quite irrelevant. I read it--a very rare thing for me with a
French novel (in fact I can hardly recollect another instance, except, a
quaint contrast, Paul de Kock's _André le Savoyard_)--first in English,
and at a very early period of life, and I then thought it nearly as
great "rot" as I have always thought its predecessor. But though I had,
I hope, sense enough to see its faults, I had neither age nor experience
nor literature enough to appreciate its merits. I read it a good deal
later in French, and, being then better qualified, _did_ perceive these
merits, though it still did not greatly "arride" me. Later still--in
fact, only some twenty years ago--I was asked to re-edit and "introduce"
the English translation. It is a popular mistake to think that an
editor, like an advocate, is entitled, if not actually bound, to make
the best case for his client, quite apart from his actual opinions; but
in this instance my opinion of the book mounted considerably. And it has
certainly not declined since, though this _History_ has necessitated a
fourth study of the original, and though I shall neither repeat what I
said in the Introduction referred to, nor give the impression there
recorded in merely altered words. Indeed, the very purpose of the
present notice, forming part, as it should, of a connected history of
the whole department to which the book belongs, requires different
treatment, and an application of what may be called critical
"triangulation" from different stand-points.
[Sidenote: An illustrated edition of it.]
By an odd chance and counter-chance, the edition which served for this
last perusal, after threatening to disserve its text, had an exactly
contrary result. It was the handsome two-volume issue of 1841 copiously
adorned with all sorts of ingenious initial-devices, _culs-de-lampe_,
etc., and with numerous illustrative "cuts" beautifully engraved (for
the most part by English engravers, such as Orrin Smith, the Williamses,
etc.), excellently drawn and composed by French artists from Gros
downwards, but costumed in what is now perhaps the least tolerable style
of dress even to the most catholic taste--that of the Empire in France
and the Regency in England--and most comically "thought."[14] At first
sight this might seem to be a disadvantage, as calling attention to, and
aggravating, certain defects of the text itself. I found it just the
reverse. One was slightly distracted from, and half inclined to make
allowances for, Nelvil's performances in the novel when one saw him--in
a Tom-and-Jerry early chimneypot hat, a large coachman's coat flung off
his shoulders and hanging down to his heels, a swallow-tail, tight
pantaloons, and Hessian boots--extracting from his bosom his father's
portrait and expressing filial sentiments to it. One was less likely to
accuse Corinne of peevishness when one beheld the delineation of family
worship in the Edgermond household from which she fled. And the
faithful eyes remonstrated with the petulant brain for scoffing at
excessive sentiment, when they saw how everybody was always at somebody
else's feet, or supporting somebody else in a fainting condition, or
resting his or her burning brow on a hand, the elbow of which rested, in
its turn, on a pedestal like that of Mr. Poseidon Hicks in _Mrs.
Perkins's Ball_. The plates gave a safety-valve to the letterpress in a
curiously anodyne fashion which I hardly ever remember to have
experienced before. Or rather, one transferred to them part, if not the
whole, of the somewhat contemptuous amusement which the manners had
excited, and had one's more appreciative faculties clear for the book
itself.
[Sidenote: The story.]
The story of _Corinne_, though not extraordinarily "accidented" and, as
will be seen, adulterated, or at least mixed, with a good many things
that are not story at all, is fairly solid, much more so than that of
_Delphine_. It turns--though the reader is not definitely informed of
this till the book is half over--on the fact of an English nobleman,
Lord Edgermond (dead at _temp._ of tale), having had two wives, the
first an Italian. By her he had one daughter, whose actual Christian
name (unless I forget) we are never told, and he lived with them in
Italy till his wife's death. Then he went home and married a second
wife, an English or Scotch woman (for her name seems to have been
Maclinson--a well-known clan) of very prudish disposition. By her he had
another daughter, Lucile--younger by a good many years than her sister.
To that sister Lady Edgermond the second does not behave exactly in the
traditionally novercal fashion, but she is scandalised by the girl's
Italian ways, artistic and literary temperament, desire for society,
etc. After Lord Edgermond's death the discord of the two becomes
intolerable, and the elder Miss Edgermond, coming of age and into an
independent fortune, breaks loose and returns to Italy, her stepmother
stipulating that she shall drop her family name altogether and allow
herself to be given out as dead. She consents (unwisely, but perhaps
not unnaturally), appears in Italy under the name of "Corinne," and
establishes herself without difficulty in the best Roman society as a
lady of means, great beauty, irreproachable character, but given to
private displays of her talents as singer, improvisatrice, actress, and
what not.
But before she has thus thrown a still respectable bonnet over a not too
disreputable mill, something has happened which has, in the long run,
fatal consequences. Lord Edgermond has a friend, Lord Nelvil, who has a
son rather younger than Corinne. Both fathers think that a marriage
would be a good thing, and the elder Nelvil comes to stay with the
Edgermonds to propose it. Corinne (or whatever her name was then) lays
herself out in a perfectly innocent but, as he thinks, forward manner to
please him, and he, being apparently (we never see him in person) not a
little of an old fool, cries off this project, but tells Edgermond that
he should like his son to marry Lucile when she grows up.
Without an intolerable dose of "argument," it is only possible to say
here that Nelvil, after his father's death, journeys to the Continent
(where he has been already engaged in a questionable _liaison_), meets
Corinne, and, not at first knowing in the least who she is, falls, or
thinks he falls, frantically in love with her, while she really does
fall more frantically in love with him. After a sojourn, of which a
little more presently, circumstances make him (or he thinks they make
him) return home, and he falls, or thinks he falls,[15] out of love with
Corinne and into it (after a fashion) with Lucile. Corinne undertakes an
incognito journey to England to find out what is happening, but (this,
though not impossible in itself, is, as told, the weakest part of the
story) never makes herself known till too late, and Nelvil, partly out
of respect for his father's wishes, and partly, one fears, because
Lucile is very pretty and Corinne seems to be very far off, marries the
younger sister.
It would have greatly improved the book if, with or even without a
"curtain," it had ended here. But Madame de Staël goes on to tell us how
Nelvil, who is a soldier by profession,[16] leaves his wife and a little
daughter, Juliette, and goes to "Les Iles" on active service for four
years; how Lucile, not unnaturally, suspects hankering after the sister
she has not seen since her childhood; how, Nelvil being invalided home,
they all go to Italy, and find Corinne in a dying condition; how Lucile
at first refuses to see her, but, communications being opened by the
child Juliette, reconciliations follow; and how Corinne dies with Nelvil
and Lucile duly kneeling at her bedside.
The minor personages of any importance are not numerous. Besides Lady
Edgermond, they consist of the Comte d'Erfeuil, a French travelling
companion of Nelvil's; the Prince of Castel-Forte, an Italian of the
highest rank; a Mr. Edgermond, who does not make much appearance, but is
more like a real Englishman in his ways and manners than Nelvil; an old
Scotch nincompoop named Dickson, who, unintentionally, makes mischief
wherever he goes as surely as the personage in the song made music. Lady
Edgermond, though she is neither bad nor exactly ill-natured, is the
evil genius of the story. Castel-Forte, a most honourable and excellent
gentleman, has so little of typical Italianism in him that, finding
Corinne will not have him, he actually serves as common friend,
confidant, and almost as honourable go-between, to her and Nelvil.
On the other hand, French critics have justly complained, and critics
not French may endorse the complaint, that the Comte d'Erfeuil is a mere
caricature of the "frivolous" French type too commonly accepted out of
France. He is well-mannered, not ill-natured, and even not, personally,
very conceited, but utterly shallow, incapable of a serious interest in
art, letters, or anything else, blandly convinced that everything French
is superlative and that nothing not French is worthy of attention.
Although he appears rather frequently, he plays no real part in the
story, and, unless there was some personal grudge to pay off (which is
not unlikely), it is difficult to imagine why Madame de Staël should
have introduced a character which certainly does her skill as a
character-drawer very little credit.
[Sidenote: The character of Nelvil.]
It is, however, quite possible that she was led astray by a
will-o'-the-wisp, which has often misled artists not of the very first
class--the chance of an easy contrast. The light-hearted, light-minded
Erfeuil was to set off the tense and serious Nelvil--a type again, as he
was evidently intended to be, but a somewhat new type of Englishman. She
was a devotee of Rousseau, and she undoubtedly had the egregious Bomston
before her. But, though her sojourn in England had not taught her very
much about actual Englishman, she had probably read Mackenzie, and knew
that the "Man of Feeling" touch had to some extent affected us. She
tried to combine the two, with divers hints of hearsay and a good deal
of pure fancy, and the result was Oswald, Lord Nelvil. As with that
other curious contemporary of hers with whom we deal in this chapter,
the result was startlingly powerful in literature. There is no doubt
that the Byronic hero, whose importance of a kind is unmistakable and
undeniable, is Schedoni, René, and Nelvil sliced up, pounded in a
mortar, and made into a rissole with Byron's own sauce of style in
rhetoric or (if anybody will have it so) poetry, but with very little
more substantial ingredients. As for the worthy peer of Scotland or
England, more recent estimates have seldom been favourable, and never
ought to have been so. M. Sorel calls him a "snob"; but that is only one
of the numerous and, according to amiable judgments, creditable
instances of the inability of the French to discern exactly what
"snobbishness" is.[17] My Lord Nelvil has many faults and very few
merits, but among the former I do not perceive any snobbishness. He is
not in the least attracted by Corinne's popularity, either with the
great vulgar or the small, and his hesitations about marrying her do not
arise from any doubt (while he is still ignorant on the subject) of her
social worthiness to be his wife. He _is_ a prig doubtless, but he is a
prig of a very peculiar character--a sort of passionate prig, or, to put
it in another way, one of Baudelaire's "Enfants de la lune," who, not
content with always pining after the place where he is not and the love
that he has not, is constantly making not merely himself, but the place
where he is and the love whom he has, uncomfortable and miserable. There
can, I think, be little doubt that Madame de Staël, who frequently
insists on his "irresolution" (remember that she had been in Germany and
heard the Weimar people talk), meant him for a sort of modern Hamlet in
very different circumstances as well as times. But it takes your
Shakespeare to manage your Hamlet, and Madame de Staël was not
Shakespeare, even in petticoats.
[Sidenote: And the book's absurdities.]
The absurdities of the book are sufficiently numerous. Lord Nelvil, who
has not apparently had any special experience of the sea, "advises" the
sailors, and takes the helm during a storm on his passage from Harwich
to Emden; while these English mariners, unworthy professional
descendants of that admirable man, the boatswain of the opening scenes
of _The Tempest_, are actually grateful to him, and when he goes 'ashore
"press themselves round him" to take leave of him (that is to say, they
do this in the book; what in all probability they actually _said_ would
not be fit for these pages). He is always saving people--imprisoned
Jews and lunatics at a fire in Ancona; aged lazzaroni who get
caught in a sudden storm-wave at Naples; and this in spite of the
convenient-inconvenient blood-vessels which break when it is necessary,
but still make it quite easy for him to perform these Herculean feats
and resume his rather interim military duties when he pleases. As for
Corinne, her exploits with her "schall" (a vestment of which Madame de
Staël also was fond), and her crowning in the Capitol, where the crown
tumbles off--an incident which in real life would be slightly comical,
but which here only gives Nelvil an opportunity of picking it up--form a
similar prelude to a long series of extravagances. The culmination of
them is that altogether possible-improbable visit to England, which
might have put everything right and does put everything wrong, and the
incurable staginess which makes her, as above related, refuse to see
Oswald and Lucile _together_ till she is actually in _articulo mortis_.
And yet--"for all this and all this and twice as much as all this"--I
should be sorry for any one who regards Corinne as merely a tedious and
not at all brief subject for laughter. One solid claim which it
possesses has been, and is still for a moment, definitely postponed; but
in another point there is, if not exactly a defence, an immense
counterpoise to the faults and follies just mentioned. Corinne to far
too great an extent, and Oswald to an extent nearly but not quite fatal,
are loaded (_affublés_, to use the word we borrowed formerly) with a
mass of corporal and spiritual wiglomeration (as Mr. Carlyle used
expressively and succinctly to call it) in costume and fashion and
sentiment and action and speech. But when we have stripped this off,
_manet res_--reality of truth and fact and nature.
[Sidenote: Compensations--Corinne herself.]
There should be no doubt of this in Corinne's own case. It has been said
from the very first that she is, as Delphine had been, if not what her
creatress was, what she would have liked to be. The ideal in the former
case was more than questionable, and the execution was very bad. Here
the ideal is far from flawless, but it is greatly improved, and the
execution is improved far more than in proportion. Corinne is not "a
reasonable woman"; but reason, though very heartily to be welcomed on
its rare occurrences in that division of humanity, when it does not
exclude other things more to be welcomed still, is very decidedly not to
be preferred to the other things themselves. Corinne has these--or most
of them. She is beautiful; she is amiable; she is unselfish; without the
slightest touch of prudery she has the true as well as the technical
chastity; and she is really the victim of inauspicious stars, and of the
misconduct of other people--the questionable wisdom of her own father;
the folly of Nelvil's; the wilfulness in the bad sense, and the weakness
of will in the good, of her lover; the sour virtue and _borné_
temperament of Lady Edgermond. Almost all her faults and not a few of
her misfortunes are due to the "sensibility" of her time, or the time a
little before her; for, as has been more than hinted already, _Corinne_,
though a book of far less genius, strength, and concentration than
_Adolphe_, is, like it, though from the other side, and on a far larger
scale, the history of the Nemesis of Sensibility.
[Sidenote: Nelvil again.]
But Nelvil? He is, it has been said, a deplorable kind of creature--a
kind of creature (to vary Dr. Johnson's doom on the unlucky mutton)
ill-_bred_, ill-educated, ill- (though not quite in the ordinary sense)
natured, ill-fated to an extent which he could partly, but only partly,
have helped; and ill-conducted to an extent which he might have helped
almost altogether. But is he unnatural? I fear--I trow--not. He is, I
think, rather more natural than Edgar of Ravenswood, who is something of
the same class, and who may perhaps owe a very little to him. At any
rate, though he has more to do with the theatre, he is less purely
theatrical than that black-plumed Master. And it seems to me that he is
more differentiated from the Sensibility heroes than even Corinne
herself is from the Sensibility heroines, though one sympathises with
her much more than with him. _Homo est_, though scarcely _vir_. Now it
is humanity which we have been always seeking, but not always finding,
in the long and often brilliant list of French novels before his day.
And we have found it here once more.
[Sidenote: Its aesthetics.]
But we find also something more; and this something more gives it not
merely an additional but even to some extent a fresh hold upon the
history of the novel itself. To say that it is in great part a
"guide-book novel," as indeed its second title[18] honestly declares,
may seem nowadays a doubtful testimonial. It is not really so. For it
was, with certain exceptions in German, the _first_ "guide-book" novel:
and though some of those exceptions may have shown greater 'literary
genius than Madame de Staël's, the Germans, though they have, in certain
lines, had no superiors as producers of tales, have never produced a
good novel yet.[19] Moreover, the guide-book element is a great set-off
to the novel. It is not--or at any rate it is not necessarily--liable to
the objections to "purpose," for it is ornamental and not structural. It
takes a new and important and almost illimitably fresh province of
nature and of art, which is a part of nature, to be its appanage. It
would be out of place here to trace the development of this system of
reinforcing the novel beyond France, in Scott more particularly. It is
not out of place to remind the reader that even Rousseau (to whom Madame
de Staël owed so much) to some extent, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and
Chateaubriand to more, as far as what we may call scenery-guide-booking
goes, had preceded her. But for the "art," the aesthetic addition, she
was indebted only to the Germans; and almost all her French successors
were indebted to her.[20]
[Sidenote: The author's position in the History of the Novel.]
Although, therefore, it is hardly possible to call Madame de Staël a
good novelist, she occupies a very important position in the history of
the novel. She sees, or helps to see, the "sensibility" novel out, with
forcible demonstration of the inconveniences of its theory. She helps to
see the aesthetic novel--or the novel highly seasoned and even
sandwiched with aesthetics--in. She manages to create at least one
character to whom the epithets of "noble" and "pathetic" can hardly be
refused; and at least one other to which that of "only too natural," if
with an exceptional and faulty kind of nature, must be accorded. At a
time when the most popular, prolific, and in a way craftsmanlike
practitioner of the kind, Pigault-Lebrun, was dragging it through
vulgarity, she keeps it at any rate clear of that. Her description is
adequate: and her society-and-manners painting (not least in the _récit_
giving Corinne's trials in Northumberland) is a good deal more than
adequate. Moreover, she preserves the tradition of the great
_philosophe_ group by showing that the writer of novels can also be the
author of serious and valuable literature of another kind. These are no
small things to have done: and when one thinks of them one is almost
able to wipe off the slate of memory that awful picture of a turbaned or
"schalled" Blowsalind, with arms[21] like a "daughter of the plough,"
which a cruel tradition has perpetuated as frontispiece to some cheap
editions of her works.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Chateaubriand--his peculiar position as a novelist.]
There is perhaps no more difficult person to appraise in all French
literature--there are not many in the literature of the world--than
François René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand. It is almost more difficult
than in the case of his two great disciples, Byron and Hugo, to keep his
personality out of the record: and it is a not wholly agreeable
personality. Old experience may perhaps attain to this, and leave to
ghouls and large or small coffin-worms the business of investigating and
possibly fattening on the thing. But even the oldest experience dealing
with his novels (which were practically all early) may find itself
considerably _tabusté_, as Rabelais has it, that is to say, "bothered"
with faults which are mitigated in the _Génie du Christianisme_,
comparatively (not quite) unimportant in the _Voyages_, and almost
entirely whelmed in the _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_. These faults are of
such a complicated and various kind that the whole armour of criticism
is necessary to deal with them, on the defensive in the sense of not
being too much influenced by them, and on the offensive in the sense of
being severe but not too severe on them.
[Sidenote: And the remarkable interconnection of his works in fiction.]
The mere reader of Chateaubriand's novels generally begins with _Atala_
and _René_, and not uncommonly stops there. In a certain sense this
reader is wise in his generation. But he will never understand his
author as a novelist if he does so; and his appreciation of the books or
booklets themselves will be very incomplete. They are both not
unfrequently spoken of as detached episodes of the _Génie du
Christianisme_; and so they are, in the illustrative sense. They are
actually, and in the purely constitutive way, episodes of another book,
_Les Natchez_, while this book itself is also a novel "after a sort."
The author's work in the kind is completed by the later _Les Martyrs_,
which has nothing to do, in persons or time, with the others, being
occupied with the end of the third century, while they deal (throwing
back a little in _Atala_) with the beginning of the eighteenth. But this
also is an illustrative companion or reinforcement of the _Génie_. With
that book the whole body of Chateaubriand's fiction[22] is thus directly
connected; and the entire collection, not a little supported by the
_Voyages_, constitutes a deliberate "literary offensive," intended to
counter-work the proceedings of the _philosophes_, though with aid drawn
from one of them--Rousseau,--and only secondarily designed to provide
pure novel-interest. If this is forgotten, the student will find himself
at sea without a rudder; and the mere reader will be in danger of
exaggerating very greatly, because he does not in the least understand,
the faults just referred to, and of failing altogether to appreciate the
real success and merit of the work as judged on that only criterion,
"Has the author done what he meant to do, and done it well, on the lines
he chose?" Of course, if our reader says, "I don't care about all this,
I merely want to be amused and interested," one cannot prevent him. He
had, in fact, as was hinted just now, better read nothing but _Atala_
and _René_, if not, indeed, _Atala_ only, immense as is the literary
importance of its companion. But in a history of the novel one is
entitled to hope, at any rate to wish, for a somewhat better kind of
customer or client.
According to Chateaubriand's own account, when he quitted England after
his not altogether cheerful experiences there as an almost penniless
_émigré_, he left behind him, in the charge of his landlady, exactly
2383 folio pages of MSS. enclosed in a trunk, and (by a combination of
merit on the custodian's part and luck on his own) recovered them
fifteen years afterwards, _Atala_, _René_, and a few other fragments
having alone accompanied him. These were published independently, the
_Génie_ following. _Les Martyrs_ was a later composition altogether,
while _Les Natchez_, the _matrix_ of both the shorter stories, and
included, as one supposes, in the 2383 waifs, was partly rewritten and
wholly published later still. A body of fiction of such a singular
character is, as has been said, not altogether easy to treat; but,
without much change in the method usually pursued in this _History_, we
may perhaps do best by first giving a brief argument of the various
contents and then taking up the censure, in no evil sense, of the
whole.
[Sidenote: _Atala._]
_Atala_ is short and almost entirely to the point. The heroine is a
half-breed girl with a Spanish father and for mother an Indian of some
rank in her tribe, who has subsequently married a benevolent chief. She
is regarded as a native princess, and succeeds in rescuing from the
usual torture and death, and fleeing with, a captive chief of another
"nation." This is Chactas, important in _René_ and also in the _Natchez_
framework. They direct their flight northwards to the French settlements
(it is late seventeenth or early eighteenth century throughout), and of
course fall in love with each other. But Atala's mother, a Christian,
has, in the tumult of her early misfortunes, vowed her daughter's
virginity or death; and when, just before the crucial moment, a
missionary opportunely or inopportunely occurs, Atala has already taken
poison, with the object, it would appear, not so much of preventing as
of avenging, of her own free will, a breach of the vow. The rest of the
story is supplied by the vain attempts of the good father to save her,
his evangelising efforts towards the pair, and the sorrows of Chactas
after his beloved's death. The piece, of course, shows that exaggerated
and somewhat morbid pathos of circumstance which is the common form of
the early romantic efforts, whether in England, Germany, or France. But
the pathos _is_ pathos; the unfamiliar scenery, unlike that of Bernardin
de Saint-Pierre (to whom, of course, Chateaubriand is much indebted,
though he had actually seen what he describes), is not overdone, and
suits the action and characters very well indeed. Chactas here is the
best of all the "noble savages," and (what hardly any other of them is)
positively good. Atala is really tragic and really gracious. The
missionary stands to other fictitious, and perhaps some real,
missionaries very much as Chactas does to other savages of story, if not
of life. The proportion of the whole is good, and in the humble opinion
of the present critic it is by far Chateaubriand's best thing in all
perhaps but mere writing.
And even in this it is bad to beat, in him or out of him. The small
space forbids mere surplusage of description, and the plot--as all plots
should do, but, alas! as few succeed in doing--acts as a bellows to
kindle the flame and intensify the heat of something far better than
description itself--passionate character. There are many fine
things--mixed, no doubt, with others not so fine--in the tempestuous
scene of the death of Atala, which should have been the conclusion of
the story. But this, in its own way, seems to me little short of
magnificent:
"I implored you to fly; and yet I knew I should die if you
were not with me. I longed for the shadow of the forest; and
yet I feared to be with you in a desert place. Ah! if the
cost had only been that of quitting parents, friends,
country! if--terrible as it is to say it--there had been
nothing at stake but the loss of my own soul.[23] But, O my
mother! thy shade was always there--thy shade reproaching me
with the torments it would suffer. I heard thy complaints; I
saw the flames of Hell ready to consume thee. My nights were
dry places full of ghosts; my days were desolate; the dew of
the evening dried up as it touched my burning skin. I opened
my lips to the breeze; and the breeze, instead of cooling
me, was itself set aglow by the fire of my breath. What
torment, Chactas! to see you always near me, far from all
other humankind in the deepest solitude, and yet to feel
that between us there was an insuperable barrier! To pass my
life at your feet, to serve you as a slave, to bring you
food and lay your couch in some secret corner of the
universe, would have been for me supremest happiness; and
this happiness was within my touch, yet I could not enjoy
it. Of what plans did I not dream? What vision did not arise
from this sad heart? Sometimes, as I gazed on you, I went so
far as to form desires as mad as they were guilty: sometimes
I could have wished that there were no living creatures on
earth but you and me; sometimes, feeling that there was a
divinity mocking my wicked transports, I could have wished
that divinity annihilated, if only, locked in your arms, I
might have sunk from abyss to abyss with the ruins of God
and of the world. Even now--shall I say it?--even now, when
eternity waits to engulf me, when I am about to appear
before the inexorable Judge--at the very moment when my
mother may be rejoicing to see my virginity devour my
life--even now, by a terrible contradiction, I carry with me
the regret that I have not been yours!"
At this let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it
looks back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great
love-poetry since, while as something that is even greater than
literature--life--it carries us up to the highest Heaven and down to the
nethermost Hell.
[Sidenote: _René._]
_René_[24] has greater fame and no doubt exercised far more influence;
indeed in this respect _Atala_ could not do much, for it is not the
eternal, but the temporal, which "influences." But, in the same humble
opinion, it is extremely inferior. The French Werther[25] (for the
attempt to rival Goethe on his own lines is hardly, if at all, veiled)
is a younger son of a gentle family in France, whose father dies. He
lives for a time with an elder brother, who seems to be "more kin than
kind," and a sister Amélie, to whom he is fondly, but fraternally,
attached. René has begun the trick of disappointment early, and, after a
time, determines to travel, fancying when he leaves home that his sister
is actually glad to get rid of him. Of course it is a case of _coelum
non animum_. When he returns he is half-surprised but (for him) wholly
glad to be at first warmly welcomed by Amélie; but after a little while
she leaves him, takes the veil, and lets him know at the last moment
that it is because her affection for him is more than sisterly, that
this was the reason of her apparent joy when he left her, and that
association with him is too much for her passion.[26] _She_ makes an
exemplary nun in a sea-side convent, and dies early of disease caught
while nursing others. _He_, his wretchedness and hatred of life reaching
their acme, exiles himself to Louisiana, and gets himself adopted by the
tribe of the Natchez, where Chactas is a (though not _the_) chief.
[Sidenote: Difference between its importance and its merit.]
Now, of course, if we are content to take a bill and write down Byron
and Lamartine, Senancour and _Jacopo Ortis_ (otherwise Ugo Foscolo),
Musset, Matthew Arnold, and _tutti quanti_, as debtors to _René_, we
give the tale or episode a historical value which cannot be denied;
while its positive aesthetic quality, though it may vary very much in
different estimates, cannot be regarded as merely worthless. Also, once
more, there is real pathos, especially as far as Amélie is concerned,
though the entire unexpectedness of the revelation of her fatal passion,
and the absolute lack of any details as to its origin, rise, and
circumstances, injure sympathy to some extent. But that sympathy, as far
as the present writer is concerned, fails altogether with regard to René
himself. If his melancholy were traceable to _mutual_ passion of the
forbidden kind, or if it had arisen from the stunning effect of the
revelation thereof on his sister's side, there would be no difficulty.
But, though these circumstances may to some extent accentuate, they have
nothing to do with causing the _weltschmerz_ or _selbst-schmerz_, or
whatever it is to be called, of this not very heroic hero. Nor has
Chateaubriand taken the trouble--which Goethe, with his more critical
sense of art, _did_ take--to make René go through the whole course of
the Preacher, or great part of it, before discovering that all was
vanity. He is merely, from the beginning, a young gentleman affected
with mental jaundice, who cannot or will not discover or take
psychological calomel enough to cure him. It does not seem in the least
likely that if Amélie had been content to live with him as merely "in
all good, all honour" a loving and comforting sister, he would have
really been able to say, like Geraldine in Coleridge's original draft of
_Christabel_, "I'm better now."
He is, in fact, what Werther is not--though his own followers to a large
extent are--mainly if not merely a Sulky Young Man: and one cannot help
imagining that if, in pretty early days, some one had been good enough
to apply to him that Herb Pantagruelion, in form not exactly of a halter
but of a rope's end, with which O'Brien cured Peter Simple's _mal de
mer_, his _mal du siècle_ would have been cured likewise.
Of course it is possible for any one to say, "You are a Philistine and a
Vulgarian. You wish to regard life through a horse-collar," etc., etc.
But these reproaches would leave my withers quite ungalled. I think
_Ecclesiastes_ one of the very greatest books in the world's literature,
and _Hamlet_ the greatest play, with the possible exception of the
_Agamemnon_. It is the abysmal sadness quite as much as the _furor
arduus_ of Lucretius that makes me think him the mightiest of Latin
poets. I would not give the mystical melancholy of certain poems of
Donne's for half a hundred of the liveliest love-songs of the time, and
could extend the list page-long and more if it would not savour of
ostentation in more ways than one. But mere temperamental [Greek:
heôlokrasia] or [Greek: kraipalê] (next-day nausea), without even the
exaltation of a previous orgy to ransom it,--mere spleen and sulks and
naughty-childishness,--seem to me not great things at all. You may not
be able to help your spleen, but you can "cook" it; you may have qualm
and headache, but in work of some sort, warlike or peaceful, there is
always small beer, or brandy and soda (with even, if necessary,
capsicum or bromide), for the ailment. The Renés who can do nothing but
sulk, except when they blunder themselves and make other people
uncomfortable in attempting to do something, who "never do a [manly]
thing and never say a [kind] one," are, I confess, not to my taste.[27]
[Sidenote: _Les Natchez._]
Both these stories, as will have been seen, have a distinctly religious
element; in fact, a distinctly religious purpose. The larger
novel-romance of which they form episodes, as well as its later and
greater successor, _Les Martyrs_, increase the element in both cases,
the purpose in the latter; but one of the means by which this increase
is effected has certainly lost--whether it may or may not ever
recover--its attraction, except to a student of literary history who is
well out of his novitiate. Such a person should see at once that
Chateaubriand's elaborate adoption, from Tasso and Milton, of the system
of interspersed scenes of Divine and diabolic conclaves and
interferences with the story, is an important, if not a wholly happy,
instance of that general Romantic _reversion_ to earlier literary
devices, and even atmospheres, of which the still rather enigmatic
personage who rests enisled off Saint-Malo was so great an apostle. And
it was probably effectual for its time. Classicists could not quarrel
with it, for it had its precedents, indeed its origin, in Homer and
Virgil; Romanticists (of that less exclusive class who admitted the
Renaissance as well as the Dark and Middle Ages) could not but welcome
it for its great modern defenders and examples. I cannot say that I
enjoy it: but I can tolerate it, and there is no doubt at all, odd as it
may seem to the merely twentieth-century reader, that it did something
to revive the half-extinct religiosity which had been starved and
poisoned in the later days of the _ancien régime_, forcibly suppressed
under the Republic, and only officially licensed by the Napoleonic
system. In _Les Martyrs_ it has even a certain "grace of congruity,"[28]
but in regard to _Les Natchez_, with which we are for the moment
concerned, almost enough (with an example or two to come presently) has
been said about it.
The book, as a whole, suffers, unquestionably and considerably, from the
results of two defects in its author. He was not born, as Scott was a
little later, to get the historical novel at last into full life and
activity; and it would not be unfair to question whether he was a born
novelist at all, though he had not a few of the qualifications necessary
to the kind, and exercised, coming as and when he did, an immense
influence upon it. The subject is too obscure. Its only original
_vates_, Charlevoix, though always a respectable name to persons of some
acquaintance with literature and history, has never been much more,
either in France or in England. The French, unluckily for themselves,
never took much interest in their transatlantic possessions while they
had them; and their dealings with the Indians then, and ours afterwards,
and those of the Americans since, have never been exactly of the kind
that give on both sides a subject such as may be found in all mediaeval
and most Renaissance matters; in the Fronde; in the English Civil War;
in the great struggles of France and England from 1688 to 1815; in the
Jacobite risings; in La Vendée; and in other historical periods and
provinces too many to mention. On the other hand, the abstract "noble
savage" is a faded object of exhausted _engouement_, than which there
are few things less exhilarating. The Indian _ingénu_ (a very different
one from Voltaire's) Outougamiz and his _ingénue_ Mila are rather nice;
but Celuta (the ill-fated girl who loves René and whom he marries,
because in a sort of way he cannot help it) is an eminent example of
that helpless kind of quiet misfortune the unprofitableness of which Mr.
Arnold has confessed and registered in a famous passage. Chactas
maintains a respectable amount of interest, and his visit to the court
of Louis XIV. takes very fair rank among a well-known group of things of
which it is not Philistine to speak as old-fashioned, because they never
possessed much attraction, except as being new- or regular-fashioned.
But the villain Ondouré has almost as little of the fire of Hell as of
that of Heaven, and his paramour and accomplice Akansie carries very
little "conviction" with her. In short, the merit of the book, besides
the faint one of having been the original framework of _Atala_ and
_René_, is almost limited to its atmosphere, and the alterative
qualities thereof--things now in a way ancient history--requiring even a
considerable dose of the not-universally-possessed historic sense to
discern and appreciate them.
Outside the "Histoire de Chactas" (which might, like _Atala_ and _René_
themselves, have been isolated with great advantage), and excepting
likewise the passages concerning Outougamiz and Mila--which possess, in
considerable measure and gracious fashion, what some call the "idyllic"
quality--I have found it, on more than one attempt, difficult to take
much interest in _Les Natchez_, not merely for the reasons already
given, but chiefly owing to them. René's appearances (and he is
generally in background or foreground) serve better than anything in any
other book, perhaps, to explain and justify the old notion that
_accidia_[29] of his kind is not only a fault in the individual, but a
positive ill omen and nuisance[30] to others. Neither in the Indian
characters (with the exceptions named) nor among the French and creole
does one find relief: and when one passes from them to the "machinery"
parts--where, for instance, a "perverse couple," Satan and La Renommée
(_not_ the ship that Trunnion took), embark on a journey in a car with
winged horses--it must be an odd taste which finds things improved. In
Greek verse, in Latin verse, or even in Milton's English one could stand
Night, docile to the orders of Satan, condescending to deflect a hatchet
which is whistling unpleasantly close to René's ear, not that he may be
benefited, but preserved for more sufferings. In comparatively plain
French prose--the qualification is intentional, as will be seen a little
later--with a scene and time barely two hundred years off now and not a
hundred then, though in a way unfamiliar--the thing won't do. "Time," at
the orders of the Prince of Darkness, cutting down trees to make a
stockade for the Natchez in the eighteenth century, alas! contributes
again the touch of weak allegory, in neither case helping the effect;
while, although the plot is by no means badly evolved, the want of
interest in the characters renders it ineffective.
[Sidenote: _Les Martyrs._]
The defects of _Les Martyrs_[31] are fewer in number and less in degree,
while its merits are far more than proportionally greater and more
numerous. Needing less historical reinforcement, it enjoys much more.
_Les Natchez_ is almost the last, certainly the last important novel of
savage life, as distinguished from "boys' books" about savages. _Les
Martyrs_ is the first of a line of remarkable if not always successful
classical novels from Lockhart's _Valerius_ to Gissing's _Veranilda_. It
has nothing really in common with the kind of classical story which
lasted from _Télémaque_ to _Belisarius_ and later. And what is more, it
is perhaps better than any of its followers except Kingsley's
_Hypatia_, which is admittedly of a mixed kind--a nineteenth-century
novel, with events, scenes, and _décor_ of the fifth century. If it has
not the spectacular and popular appeal of _The Last Days of Pompeii_, it
escapes, as that does not, the main drawback of almost all the
others--the "classical-dictionary" element: and if, on the other, its
author knew less about Christianity than Cardinals Wiseman and Newman,
he knew more about lay "humans" than the authors of _Fabiola_ and
_Callista_.
It is probably unnecessary to point out at any great length that some of
the drawbacks of _Les Natchez_ disappear almost automatically in _Les
Martyrs_. The supernatural machinery is, on the hypothesis and at the
time of the book, strictly congruous and proper; while, as a matter of
fact, it is in proportion rather less than more used. The time and
events--those of the persecution under Diocletian--are familiar,
interesting, and, in a French term for which we have no exact
equivalent, _dignes_. There is no sulky spider of a René crawling
about the piece; and though history is a little strained to
provide incidents,[32] "that's not much," and they are not in
themselves improbable in any bad sense or degree. Moreover, the
classical-dictionary element, which, as has been said, is so awkward to
handle, is, at least after the beginning, not too much drawn upon.
The book, in its later modern editions, is preceded not merely by
several Prefaces, but by an _Examen_ in the old fashion, and fortified
by those elaborate citation-notes[33] from authorities ancient and
modern which were a mania at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning
of the nineteenth century, and which sometimes divert and sometimes
enrage more modern readers in work so different as _Lalla Rookh_ and
_The Pursuits of Literature_, while they provided at the time material
for immortal jokes in such other work as the _Anti-Jacobin_ poems. In
the Prefaces Chateaubriand discusses the prose epic, and puts himself,
quite unnecessarily, under the protection of _Télémaque_: in the
_Examen_ he deals systematically with the objections, religious, moral,
and literary, which had been made against the earlier editions of the
book. But these things are now little more than curiosities for the
student, though they retain some general historical importance.
[Sidenote: The story.]
The book starts (after an "Invocation," proper to its scheme but perhaps
not specially attractive "to us") with an account of the household of
Demodocus, a Homerid of Chios, who in Diocletian's earlier and
unpersecuting days, after living happily but for too short a time in
Crete with his wife Epicharis, loses her, though she leaves him one
little daughter, Cymodocée, born in the sacred woods of Mount Ida
itself. Demodocus is only too glad to accept an invitation to become
high priest of a new Temple of Homer in Messenia, on the slopes of
another mountain, less, but not so much less, famous, Ithome. Cymodocée
becomes very beautiful, and receives, but rejects, the addresses of
Hierocles, proconsul of Achaia, and a favourite of Galerius. One day,
worshipping in the forest at a solitary Altar of the Nymphs, she meets a
young stranger whom (she is of course still a pagan) she mistakes for
Endymion, but who talks Christianity to her, and reveals himself as
Eudore, son of Lasthenes. As it turns out, her father knows this person,
who has the renown of a distinguished soldier.
From this almost any one who has read a few thousand novels--almost any
intelligent person who has read a few hundred--can lay out the probable
plot. Love of Eudore and Cymodocée; conversion of the latter; jealousy
and intrigues of Hierocles; adventures past and future of Eudore;
transfer of scene to Rome; prevalence of Galerius over Diocletian;
persecution, martyrdom, and supernatural triumph. But the "fillings up"
are not banal; and the book is well worth reading from divers points of
view. In the earliest part there is a little too much Homer,[34]
naturally enough perhaps. The ancient world changed slowly, and we know
that at this particular time Greeks (if not also Romans) rather played
at archaising manners. Still, it is probably not quite safe to take the
memorable, if not very resultful, journey in which Telemachus was,
rather undeservedly, so lucky as to see Helen and drink Nepenthe[35] and
to reproduce it with guide- and etiquette-book exactness, _c._ A. D.
300. Yet this is, as has been said, very natural; and it arouses many
pleasant reminiscences.
[Sidenote: Its "panoramic" quality.]
The book, moreover, has two great qualities which were almost,
if not quite, new in the novel. In the first place, it has a
certain _panoramic_ element which admits--which indeed
necessitates--picturesqueness. Much of it is, almost as necessarily,
_récit_ (Eudore giving the history of his travels and campaigns); but it
is _récit_ of a vividness which had never before been known in French,
out of the most accomplished drama, and hardly at all in prose. The
adventures of Eudore require this most, of course, and they get it. His
early wild-oats at Rome, which earn him temporary excommunication; his
service in the wars with the Franks, where, for almost the only time in
literature, Pharamond and Mérovée become living creatures; his captivity
with them; his triumphs in Britain and his official position in
Brittany, where the entrance of the Druidess Velléda and the fatal love
between them provide perhaps the most famous and actually one of the
most effective of the episodes of the book--all "stand out from the
canvas," as the old phrase goes. Nor is the mastery lost when _récit_
becomes direct action, in the scenes of the persecution, and the final
purification of the hero and crowning of the heroine in the
amphitheatre. "The work burns"; and, while it is practically certain
that the writer knew the Scudéry romances, the contrast of this
"burning" quality becomes so striking as almost to justify,
comparatively if not positively, the accusations of frigidity and
languor which have been somewhat excessively brought against the earlier
performances. There is not the passion of _Atala_--it would have been
out of place: and there is not the soul-dissection of _René_, for there
is nothing morbid enough to require the scalpel. But, on the other hand,
there is the bustle--if that be not too degrading a word--which is
wanting in both; the vividness of action and of change; colour, variety,
suspense, what may perhaps best be called in one word "pulse," giving,
as a necessary consequence, life.
[Sidenote: And its remarkable advance in style.]
And this great advance is partly, if not mainly, achieved by
another--the novelty of _style_. Chateaubriand had set out to give--has,
indeed, as far as his intention goes, maintained throughout--an effort
at _le style noble_, the already familiar rhetoric, of which, in French,
Corneille had been the Dryden and Racine the Pope, while it had, in his
own youth, sunk to the artifice of Delille in verse and the "emphasis"
of Thomas in prose. He has sometimes achieved the best, and not seldom
something that is by no means the worst, of this. But, consciously or
unconsciously, he has more often put in the old bottles of form new wine
of spirit, which has not only burst them, but by some very satisfactory
miracle of literature shed itself into new receptacles, this time not at
all leathery but glass of iridescent colour and graceful shape. It was
almost inevitable that such a process, at such a time, and with such a
language--for Chateaubriand did not go to the real "ancient mother" of
pre-_grand siècle_ French--should be now and then merely magniloquent,
that it should sometimes fall short of, or overleap, even magniloquence
and become bombast. But sometimes also, and not so seldom, it attains
magnificence as well; and the promise, at least the opportunity, of such
magnificence in capable followers can hardly be mistaken. As in his
younger contemporary, compatriot, and, beyond all doubt, disciple,
Lamennais, the results are often crude, unequal, disappointing;
insufficiently smelted ore, insufficiently ripened and cellared wine.
But the quantity and quality of pure metal--the inspiriting virtue of
the vintage--in them is extraordinary: and once more it must be
remembered that, for the novel, all this was absolutely new. In this
respect, if in no other, though perhaps he was so in others also,
Chateaubriand is a Columbus of prose fiction. Neither in French nor in
English, very imperfectly in German, and, so far as I know, not in any
other language to even the smallest degree, had "prose-poetry" been
attempted in this department. "Ossian" perhaps must have some of the
credit: the Bible still more. But wherever the capital was found it was
Chateaubriand who put it into the business of novel-writing and turned
out the first specimens of that business with the new materials and
plant procured by the funds.
[Sidenote: Chateaubriand's Janus-position in this.]
Some difficulties, which hamper any attempt to illustrate and support
this high praise, cannot require much explanation to make them obvious.
It has not been the custom of this book to give large untranslated
extracts: and it is at least the opinion of its author that in matters
of style, translation, even if it be of a much higher quality than he
conceives himself able to offer, is, if not quite worthless, very
inadequate. Moreover, it is (or should be) well known that the qualities
of the old French _style noble_--which, as has been said, Chateaubriand
deliberately adopted, as his starting-point if nothing more--are, even
in their own language, and still more when reproduced in any other, full
of dangers for foreign appreciation. The no doubt largely ignorant and
in any case mistaken contempt for French poetry and poetic prose which
so long prevailed among us, and from which even such a critic and such a
lover (to some extent) of French as Matthew Arnold was not free, was
mainly concerned with this very point. To take a single instance, the
part of De Quincey's "Essay on Rhetoric" which deals with French is made
positively worthless by the effects of this almost racial prejudice.
Literal translation of the more _flamboyant_ kind of French writing has
been, even with some of our greatest, an effective, if a somewhat
facile, means of procuring a laugh. Furthermore, it has to be remembered
that this application of ornate style to prose fiction is undoubtedly to
some extent an extraneous thing in the consideration of the novel
itself. It is "a grand set off" (in the old phrase) to tale-telling; but
it is not precisely of its essence. It deserves to be _constaté_,
recorded and set to the credit of those who practise it, and especially
of those who first introduced it. But it is a question whether, in the
necessarily limited space of a book like this, the consideration of it
ought to occupy a large room.
Still, though the warning, "Be not too bold," should never be forgotten,
it should be remembered that it was given only once and its contrary
reiterated: so here goes for one of the most perilous of all possible
adventures--a translation of Chateaubriand's own boldest undertaking,
the description of the City of God, in which he was following not only
the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, but the Vision of Patmos itself.
(_"Les Martyrs," Book III., opening. The Prayer of Cyril,
Bishop of Lacedaemon, has come before the Throne._)
[Sidenote: Illustrated.]
At the centre of all created worlds, in the midst of
innumerable stars which serve as its bastions as well as
avenues and roads to it, there floats the limitless City of
God, the marvels whereof no mortal tongue can tell. The
Eternal Himself laid its twelve foundations, and surrounded
it with the wall of jasper that the beloved disciple saw
measured by an angel with a rod of gold. Clothed with the
glory of the Most High, the unseen Jerusalem is decked as a
bride for her bridegroom. O monumental structures of earth!
ye come not near these of the Holy City. There the richness
of the matter rivals the perfection of the form. There hang,
royally suspended, the galleries of diamond and sapphire
feebly imitated by human skill in the gardens of Babylon.
There rise triumphal arches, fashioned of brightest stars.
There are linked together porticoes of suns extended across
the spaces of the firmament, like the columns of Palmyra
over the sands of the desert. This architecture is alive.
The City of God has a soul of its own. There is no mere
matter in the abiding places of the Spirit; no death in the
locality of eternal existence. The grosser words which our
muse is forced to employ deceive us, for they invest with
body that which is only as a divine dream, in the passing of
a blissful sleep.
Gardens of delight extend round the radiant Jerusalem. A
river flows from the throne of the Almighty, watering the
Celestial Eden with floods of pure love and of the wisdom of
God. The mystic wave divides into streams which entwine
themselves, separate, rejoin, and part again, giving
nourishment to the immortal vine, to the lily that is like
unto the Bride, and to all the flowers which perfume the
couch of the Spouse. The Tree of Life shoots up on the Hill
of Incense; and, but a little farther, that of Knowledge
spreads on all sides its deep-planted roots and its
innumerable branches, carrying hidden in the golden leafage
the secrets of the Godhead, the occult laws of Nature, the
truths of morality and of the intellect, the immutable
principles of good and of evil. The learning which
intoxicates _us_ is the common food of the Elect; for in the
empire of Sovereign Intelligence the fruit of science no
longer brings death. Often do the two great ancestors of the
human race come and shed such tears as the Just can still
let flow in the shadow of the wondrous Tree.
The light which lightens these abodes of bliss is compact of
the rose of morning, of the flame of noon, of the purple of
even; yet no star appears on the glowing horizon. No sun
rises and no sun goes down on the country where nothing
ends, where nothing begins. But an ineffable clearness,
showering from all sides like a tender dew, maintains the
unbroken[36] daylight in a delectable eternity.
Of course any one who is so minded may belittle this as classically
cold; even as to some extent _neo_-classically bedizened; as more like,
let us say, Moore's _Epicurean_ than like our greater "prose-poets" of
the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. The presence in
Chateaubriand of this dose of the style that was passing, and that he
helped to make pass, has been admitted already: but I confess I think it
is only a dose. Those who care to look up the matter for themselves
might, if they do not choose to read the whole, turn to the admirable
picture of camp-life on the Lower Rhine at the opening of Book VI. as a
short contrast, while the story is full of others. Nor should one forget
to add that Chateaubriand can, when he chooses, be epigrammatic as well
as declamatory. "Such is the ugliness of man when he bids farewell to
his soul and, so to speak, keeps house only with his body" is a phrase
which might possibly shock La Harpe, but which is, as far as I remember,
original, and is certainly crisp and effective enough.
Reassembling, then, the various points which we have endeavoured to make
in respect of his position as novelist, it may once more be urged that
if not precisely a great master of the complete art of novel-writing, by
actual example, he shows no small expertness in various parts of it: and
that, as a teacher and experimenter in new developments of method and
indication of new material, he has few superiors in his own country and
not very many elsewhere. That in this pioneer quality, as well as in
mere contemporaneousness, he may, though a greater writer, be yoked with
the authoress of _Corinne_ need hardly be argued, for the accounts given
of the two should have sufficiently established it.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Although, except in special cases, biographical notices are not
given here, the reader may be reminded that she was born in 1766, the
daughter of Necker and of Gibbon's early love, Susanne Curchod; married
at twenty the Swedish ambassador, Baron of Staël-Holstein; sympathised
at first with the Revolution, but was horrified at the murder of the
king, and escaped, with some difficulty, from Paris to England, where,
as well as in' Germany and at Coppet, her own house in Switzerland, she
passed the time till French things settled down under Napoleon. With him
she tried to get on, as a duplicate of himself in petticoats and the
realm of mind. But this was clearly impossible, and she had once more to
retire to Coppet. She had separated, though without positive quarrel,
from her husband, whom, however, she attended on his death-bed; and the
exact character of her _liaisons_ with others, especially M. de Narbonne
and Benjamin Constant, is not easy to determine. In 1812 she married,
privately, a young officer, Rocca by name, returned to Paris before and
after the Hundred Days, and died there in 1817.
[9] I never can make up my mind whether I am more sorry that Madame
Necker did not marry Gibbon or that Mademoiselle Necker did not, as was
subsequently on the cards, marry Pitt. The results in either case--both,
alas! could hardly have come off--would have been most curious.
[10] The most obvious if not the only possible reason for this would be
intended outrage, murder, and suicide; but though Valorbe is a
robustious kind of idiot, he does not seem to have made up such mind as
he has to this agreeable combination.
[11] I forget whether other characters have been identified, but Léonce
does not appear to have much in him of M. de Narbonne, Corinne's chief
lover of the period, who seems to have been a sort of French
Chesterfield, without the wit, which nobody denies our man, or the real
good-nature which he possessed.
[12] Perhaps, after all, _not_ too many, for they all richly deserve it.
[13] Eyes like the Ravenswing's, "as b-b-big as billiard balls" and of
some brightness, are allowed her, but hardly any other good point.
[14] I never pretended to be an art-critic, save as complying with
Blake's negative injunction or qualification "not to be connoisseured
out of my senses," and I do not know what is the technical word in the
arts of design corresponding to [Greek: dianoia] in literature.
[15] I hope this iteration may not seem too damnable. It is intended to
bring before the reader's mind the utterly _willowish_ character of
Oswald, Lord Nelvil. The slightest impact of accident will bend down,
the weakest wind of circumstance blow about, his plans and preferences.
[16] That he seems to have unlimited leave is not perhaps, for a peer in
the period, to be cavilled at; the manner in which he alternately breaks
blood-vessels and is up to fighting in the tropics may be rather more
so.
[17] As I may have remarked elsewhere, they often seem to confuse it
with "priggishness," "cant," and other amiable _cosas de Inglaterra_.
(The late M. Jules Lemaître, as Professor Ker reminds me, even gave the
picturesque but quite inadequate description: "Le snob est un mouton de
Panurge prétentieux, un mouton qui saute à la file, mais d'un air
suffisant.") We cannot disclaim the general origin, but we may protest
against confusion of the particular substance.
[18] _Corinne, ou l'Italie._
[19] If anybody thinks _Wilhelm Meister_ or the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ a
good novel, I am his very humble servant in begging to differ. Freytag's
_Soll und Haben_ is perhaps the nearest approach; but, on English or
French standards, it could only get a fair second class.
[20] Corinne "walks and talks" (as the lady in the song was asked to do,
but without requiring the offer of a blue silk gown) with her Oswald all
over the churches and palaces and monuments of Rome, "doing" also
Naples, Venice, etc.
[21] She was rather proud of these mighty members: and some readers may
recall that not least Heinesque remark of the poet who so much shocks
Kaiser Wilhelm II., "Those of the Venus of Milo are not more beautiful."
[22] Including also a third short story, _Le Dernier Abencérage_, which
belongs, constructively, rather to the _Voyages_. It is in a way the
liveliest (at least the most "incidented") of all, but not the most
interesting, and with very little _temporal_ colour, though some local.
It may, however, be taken as another proof of Chateaubriand's importance
in the germinal way, for it starts the Romantic interest in Spanish
things. The contrast with the dirty rubbish of Pigault-Lebrun's _La
Folie Espagnole_ is also not negligible.
[23] For the mother, in a fashion which the good Father-missionary most
righteously and indignantly denounces as unchristian, had staked her own
salvation on her daughter's obedience to the vow.
[24] Its author, in the _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_, expressed a warm wish
that he had never written it, and hearty disgust at its puling admirers
and imitators. This has been set down to hypocritical insincerity or the
sourness of age: I see neither in it. It ought perhaps to be said that
he "cut" a good deal of the original version. The confession of Amélie
was at first less abrupt and so less effective, but the newer form does
not seem to me to better the state of René himself.
[25] There had been a very early French imitation of _Werther_ itself
(of the end especially), _Les dernières aventures du sieur d'Olban_, by
a certain Ramond, published in 1777, only three years after Goethe. It
had a great influence on Ch. Nodier (_v. inf._), who actually
republished the thing in 1829.
[26] This "out-of-bounds" passion will of course be recognised as a
Romantic trait, though it had Classical suggestions. Chateaubriand
appears to have been rather specially "obsessed" by this form of it, for
he not merely speaks constantly of René as _le frère d'Amélie_, but goes
out of his way to make the good Father in _Atala_ refer, almost
ecstatically, to the happiness of the more immediate descendants of Adam
who were _compelled_ to marry their sisters, if they married anybody. As
I have never been able to take any interest in the discussions of the
Byron and Mrs. Leigh scandal, I am not sure whether this _tic_ of
Chateaubriand's has been noticed therein. But his influence on Byron was
strong and manifold, and Byron was particularly apt to do things,
naughty and other, because somebody else had done or suggested them. And
of course it has, from very early days, been suggested that Amélie is an
experience of Chateaubriand's own. But this, like the investigations as
to time and distance and possibility in his travels and much else also,
is not for us. Once more I must be permitted to say that I am writing
much about French novels, little about French novelists, and least of
all about those novelists' biographers, critics, and so forth.
Exceptions may be admitted, but as exceptions only.
[27] I once had to fight it out in public with a valued and valiant
friend for saying something like this in regard to Edgar of
Ravenswood--no doubt, in some sort a child of René's or of Nelvil's; but
I was not put to submission. And Edgar had truer causes for sulks than
his spiritual ancestor had--at least before the tragedy of Amélie.
[28] Not in the strict theological meaning of this phrase, of course;
but the misuse of it has aesthetic justification.
[29] _I.e._ not mere "sloth," but the black-blooded and sluggish
melancholy to which Dante pays so much attention in the _Inferno_. This
deadly sin we inadequately translate "sloth," and (on one side of it) it
is best defined in Dante's famous lines (_Inf._ vii. 121-3):
Tristi fummo Nell' aer dolce che dal sol s' allegra, Portando dentro
accidioso fummo.
Had Amélie sinned and not repented she might have been found in the
Second circle, flying alone; René, except _speciali gratia_, must have
sunk to the Fourth.
[30] For instance, he goes a-beaver-hunting with the Natchez, but his
usual selfish moping prevents him from troubling to learn the laws of
the sport, and he kills females--an act at once offensive to Indian
religion, sportsmanship, and etiquette, horrifying to the consciences of
his adopted countrymen, and an actual _casus belli_ with the
neighbouring tribes.
[31] Its second title, _ou Le Triomphe de la Religion Chrétienne_,
connects it still more closely than _Les Natchez_ with _Le Génie du
Christianisme_, which it immediately succeeded in composition, though
this took a long time. No book (it would seem in consequence)
exemplifies the mania for annotation and "justification" more
extensively. In vol. i. the proportion of notes to text is 112 to 270,
in vol. ii. 123 to 221, and in vol. iii., including some extracts from
the Père Mambrun, 149 to 225.
[32] Such as Eudore's early friendship at Rome, before the persecution
under Diocletian, with Augustine, who was not born till twenty years
later.
[33] See note above.
[34] There cannot be too much Homer in Homer; there may be too much
outside Homer.
[35] If one had only been Telemachus at this time! It would have been a
good "Declamation" theme in the days of such things, "Should a man--for
this one experience--consent to be Telemachus for the rest of his
life--and after?"
[36] In the original the word which I have translated "unbroken" is
_éternel_, and with the adjacent _éternité_ illustrates (as do
_tonnerre_ and _étonnante_ in Bossuet's famous passage on the death of
"Madame") one of the minor but striking differences between French and
English rhetoric. Save for some very special purpose, we should consider
such repetition a jingle at best, a cacophony at worst: they think it a
beauty.
CHAPTER II
PAUL DE KOCK, OTHER MINORS OF 1800-1830, AND NODIER
[Sidenote: The fate of popular minor novelists.]
The mediocre poet has had a hard fate pronounced against him of old; but
the minor novelist, perhaps because he is much more likely to get some
good things in his own time, has usually a harder lot still, and in more
than one way, after physical or popular death. In fact it may be said
that, the more popular he is in the one day, the more utterly forgotten
he is likely to be in the other. Besides the obvious facts that his
popularity must always have been gained by the adoption of some more or
less ephemeral fashion, and that plenty of his own kind are always ready
to take his place--doing, like the heir in the old story, all they can
to substitute _Requiescat in Pace_ for _Resurgam_ on his
hatchment--there is a more mechanical reason for his occultation. The
more widely he or she has been read the more certain either has been of
being "read to pieces."
[Sidenote: Examples of them.]
These fates, and especially the last, have weighed upon the minor French
novelists of the early nineteenth century perhaps even more heavily than
upon our own: for the circulating library was an earlier and a more
widely spread institution in France than in England, and the lower and
lowest middle classes were a good deal more given to reading, and
especially to "light" reading, there than here. Nor can it be said that
any of the writers to be now mentioned, with one possible and one
certain exception, is of importance to literature as literature.
But all have their importance to literary--and especially
departmental-literary--history, in ways which it is hoped presently to
show: and there is still amusement in some. The chief, though not the
only, names that require notice here are those of Mesdames de Montolieu
and (again) de Genlis, of Ducray-Duminil, born almost as early as
Pigault-Lebrun, even earlier a novelist, and yoked with him by Victor
Hugo in respect of his novel _Lolotte et Fanfan_ in the sneer noted in
the last volume;[37] the _other_ Ducange, again as much "other" as the
other Molière;[38] the Vicomte d'Arlincourt; and--a comparative (if,
according to some, blackish) swan among these not quite positive
geese--Paul de Kock. The eldest put in his work before the Revolution
and the youngest before Waterloo, but the most prolific time of all was
that of the first two or three decades of the century with which we are
dealing.
With these, but not of them--a producer at last of real "letters" and
more than any one else except Chateaubriand (more "intensively" perhaps
even than he was) a pioneer of Romanticism--comes Charles Nodier.
[Sidenote: Paul de Kock.]
Major Pendennis, in a passage which will probably, at least in England,
preserve the name of the author mentioned long after his own works are
even more forgotten with us than they are at present, allowed, when
disparaging novels generally, and wondering how his nephew could have
got so much money for one, that Paul de Kock "certainly made him laugh."
In his own country he had an enormous vogue, till the far greater
literary powers and the wider range of the school of 1830 put the times
out of joint for him, and even much later. He actually survived the
Terrible Year: but something like a lustrum earlier, when running over a
not small collection of cheap novels in a French country inn, I do not
remember coming across anything of his. And he had long been classed as
"not a serious person" (which, indeed, he certainly was not) by French
criticism, not merely of the most academic sort, but of all decidedly
literary kinds. People allowed him _entrain_, a word even more difficult
than _verve_ to English exactly, though "go" does in a rough sort of way
for both. They were of course not very much shocked at his indecorums,
which sometimes gave occasion for not bad jokes.[39] But if any
foreigner made any great case of him they would probably have looked, if
they did not speak their thoughts, very much as some of us have looked,
if we have not spoken, when foreigners take certain popular scribes and
playwrights of our own time and country seriously.[40]
Let us see what his work is really like to the eyes of impartial and
comparative, if not cosmopolitan, criticism.
[Sidenote: _L'Enfant de ma Femme._]
Paul de Kock, whose father, a banker, was a victim, but must have been a
late one, of the Terror, was born in 1794, and took very early to
letters. If the date of his first book, _L'Enfant de ma Femme_, is
correctly given as 1812, he must apparently have written it before he
was eighteen. There is certainly nothing either in the quantity or the
quality of the performance which makes this incredible, for it does not
fill quite two hundred pages of the ordinary 18mo size and not very
closely packed type of the usual cheap French novel, and though it is
not unreadable, any tolerably clever boy might easily write it between
the time when he gets his scholarship in spring and the time when he
goes up in October. The author had evidently read his Pigault and
adopted that writer's revised picaresque scheme. His most prominent
character (the hero, Henri de Framberg, is very "small doings"), the
hussar-soldier-servant, and most oddly selected "governor" of this hero
as a boy, Mullern, is obviously studied off those semi-savage "old
moustaches" of whom we spoke in the last volume, though he is much
softened, if not in morals, in manners. In fact this softening process
is quite obvious throughout. There is plenty of "impropriety" but no
mere nastiness, and the impropriety itself is, so to speak, rather
indicated than described. As nearly the last sentence announces, "Hymen
hides the faults of love" wherever it is possible, though it would
require a most complicated system of polygamy and cross-unions to enable
that amiable divinity to cover them all. There is a villain, but he is a
villain of straw, and outside of him there is no ill-nature. There seems
to be going to be a touch of "out-of-boundness" when Henri, just about
to marry his beloved Pauline, is informed that she is his sister, and
when the pair, separating in horror, meet again and, let us say, forget
to separate. But the information turns out to be false, and Hymen duly
uses the not uncomfortable extinguisher which, as noted above, is
supplied to him as well as the more usual torch.
To call the book good would be ridiculous, but a very large experience
of first novels of dates before, the same as, and after its own may
warrant allotment to it of possibilities of future good gifts. The
history, such as it is, runs currently; there are no hitches and stops
and stagnations, the plentiful improbabilities are managed in such
fashion that one does not trouble about them, and there is an
atmosphere, sometimes of horseplay but almost always of good humour.
[Sidenote: _Petits Tableaux de Moeurs._]
The matter which, by accident or design, goes with this in mid-century
reprints of Paul, is of much later date, but it shows that, for some
time, its author had been exercising himself in a way valuable to the
novelist at any time but by no means as yet frequently practised.
_Petits Tableaux de Moeurs_ consists of about sixty short sketches of
a very few pages each (usually two or three) and of almost exactly the
same kind as those with which Leigh Hunt, a little earlier in England,
transformed the old _Spectator_ essay into the kind of thing taken up
soon afterwards by "Boz" and never disused since. They are sketches of
types of men, of Parisian cafés, gardens, and restaurants; fresh
handlings of old subjects, such as the person who insists on taking you
home to a very bad "pot-luck" dinner, and the like. Once more, there is
no great brilliance in these. But they are lightly and pleasantly done;
it must be obvious to every one that they are simply invaluable training
for a novelist who is to leave the beaten track of picaresque adventure
and tackle real ordinary life. To which it may be added, as at least
possible, that Thackeray himself may have had the creation of Woolsey
and Eglantine in _The Ravenswing_ partly suggested by a conversation
between a tailor and a hairdresser in Paul's "Le Banc de Pierre des
Tuileries." As this is very short it may be worth giving:
To finish our observations, my friend and I went and sat
behind two young men dressed in the extreme of the fashion,
who, with their feet placed on chairs as far as possible
from those in which they were sitting, gracefully rocked
themselves, and evidently hoped to attract general
attention.
In a minute we heard the following conversation:
"Do you think my coat a success?" "Superb! delicious! an
admirable cut!" "And the pantaloons?" "Ravishing! Your get
up is really stunning." "The governor told me to spend three
hours in the Grand Alley, and put myself well forward. He
wants people to take up this new shape and make it
fashionable. He has already one order of some consequence."
"And, as for me, do you think my hair well done?" "Why, you
look like a very Adonis. By the way, _my_ hair is falling
off. Do give me something to stop that." "You must give it
nourishment. You see hairs are plants or flowers. If you
don't water a flower, you can see it withering." "Very true.
Then must I use pommade?" "Yes, but in moderation; just as a
tree too much watered stops growing. Hair is exactly like
vegetables." "And both want cutting?" "Why, yes; it's like a
plantation; if you don't prune and thin the branches it
kills the young shoots. Cutting helps the rise of the sap."
"Do you hold with false fronts?" "I believe you! Why, I make
them; it's just like putting a new roof on a house." "And
that does no harm to one's head?" "Impossible! neither glue
nor white of egg, which needs must hinder growth, are used.
People who wear them mix their own hair with the front. They
are two flocks, which unite to feed together, as M. Marty
says so well in the _Solitaire_."[41] "Two torrents which
join in the valley: that is the image of life!"
We had heard enough, and so we left the tailor's young man
and the romantic hairdresser to themselves.
[Sidenote: _Gustave._]
In _Gustave ou Le Mauvais Sujet_, a book still early but some years
later than _L'Enfant_, Paul de Kock got nearer to his proper or improper
subject--bachelor life in Paris, in the sense of his contemporary Pierce
Egan's _Life in London_.[42] The hero may be called a French Tom Jones
in something (but not so much as in the original phrase) of the sense in
which Klopstock was allowed to be a German Milton. He has his Allworthy
in a benevolent uncle-colonel, peppery but placable; he is far more
plentifully supplied than even Tom was with persons of the other sex who
play the parts of Black George's daughter and Mrs. Waters, if not
exactly of Lady Bellaston. A Sophia could hardly enter into the Kockian
plan, but her place in that scheme (with something, one regrets to add,
of Lady Bellaston's) is put in commission, and held by a leash of
amiable persons--the erring Madame de Berly, who sacrifices honour and
beauty and very nearly life for the rascal Gustave; Eugénie Fonbelle, a
rich, accomplished, and almost wholly desirable widow, whom he is
actually about to marry when, luckily for her, she discovers his
_fredaines_, and "calls off"; and, lastly, a peasant girl, Suzon, whom
he seduces, whom he keeps for six weeks in his uncle's house, after a
fashion possibly just not impossible in a large Parisian establishment;
who is detected at last by the uncle; who runs away when she hears that
Gustave is going to marry Eugénie, and who is at the end produced, with
an infant ready-made, for Paul's favourite "curtain" of Hymen, covering
(like the curtain) all faults. The book has more "scabrous" detail than
_L'Enfant de ma Femme_, and (worse still) it relapses into
Smollettian-Pigaultian dirt; but it displays a positive and even large
increase of that singular readableness which has been noticed. One would
hardly, except in cases of actual novel-famine, or after an immense
interval, almost or quite involving oblivion, read a book of Paul's
twice, but there is seldom any difficulty in reading him once. Only,
beware his moral moods! When he is immoral it is in the bargain; if you
do not want him you leave him, or do not go to him at all. But when, for
instance, the unfortunate Madame de Berly has been frightfully burnt and
disfigured for life by an act of her own, intended to save--and
successful in saving--her _vaurien_ of a lover, Paul moralises thus at
the end of a chapter--
Julie perdit en effet tous ses attraits: elle fut punie par
où elle avait pêché. Juste retour des choses ici-bas.
there being absolutely no such _retour_ for Gustave--one feels rather
inclined, as his countrymen would say, to "conspue" Paul.[43] It is
fair, however, to say that these accesses of morality or moralising are
not very frequent.
[Sidenote: The caricatured _Anglais_.]
But there is one thing of some interest about _Gustave_ which has not
yet been noticed. Paul de Kock was certainly not the author,[44] but he
must have been one of the first, and he as certainly was one of the most
effective and continuous, promoters of that curious caricature of
Englishmen which everybody knows from French draughtsmen, and some from
French writers, of the first half of the nineteenth century. It is only
fair to say that we had long preceded it by caricaturing Frenchmen. But
they had been slow in retaliating, at least in anything like the same
fashion. For a long time (as is again doubtless known to many people)
French literature had mostly ignored foreigners. During the late
seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries few, except the
aristocracy, of either country knew much of the other, and there was
comparatively little (of course there was always some) difference
between the manners and customs of the upper classes of both. Prévost
and Crébillon, if not Marivaux,[45] knew something about England. Then
arose in France a caricature, no doubt, but almost a reverential one,
due to the _philosophes_, in the drawing whereof the Englishman is
indeed represented as eccentric and splenetic, but himself philosophical
and by no means ridiculous. Even in the severe period of national
struggle which preceded the Revolutionary war, and for some time after
the beginning of that war itself, the scarecrow-comic _Anglais_ was slow
to make his appearance. Pigault-Lebrun himself, as was noted in the last
volume, indulges in him little if at all. But things soon changed.
In the book of which we have been speaking, Gustave and a scapegrace
friend of his determine to give a dinner to two young persons of the
other sex, but find themselves penniless, and a fresh edition of one of
the famous old _Repues Franches_ (which date in French literature back
to Villon and no doubt earlier) follows. With this, as such, we need not
trouble ourselves. But Olivier, the friend, takes upon him the duty of
providing the wine, and does so by persuading a luckless vintner that he
is a "Milord."
In order to dress the part, he puts on a cravat well folded, a very long
coat, and a very short waistcoat. He combs down his hair till it is
quite straight, rouges the tip of his nose, takes a whip, puts on
gaiters and a little pointed hat, and studies himself in the glass in
order to give himself a stupid and insolent air, the result of the
make-up being entirely successful. It may be difficult for the most
unbiassed Englishman of to-day to recognise himself in this portrait or
to find it half-way somewhere about 1860, or even, going back to actual
"_temp._ of tale," to discover anything much like it in physiognomies
so different as those of Castlereagh and Wellington, of Southey and
Lockhart, nay, even of Tom and Jerry.[46] But that it is the Englishman
of Daumier and Gavarni, _artistement complet_ already, nobody can deny.
Later in the novel (before he comes to his very problematical "settling
down" with Suzon and the ready-made child) Gustave is allowed a rather
superfluous scattering of probably not final wild oats in Italy and
Germany, in Poland and in England. But the English meesses are too
_sentimentales_ (note the change from _sensibles_); he does not like the
courses of horses, the combats of cocks, the bets and the punches and
the plum-puddings. He is angry because people look at him when he pours
his tea into the saucer. But what annoys him most of all is the custom
of the ladies leaving the table after dinner, and that of preferring
cemeteries for the purpose of taking the air and refreshing oneself
after business. It may perhaps diminish surprise, but should increase
interest, when one remembers that, after Frenchmen had got tired of
Locke, and before they took to Shakespeare, their idea of our literature
was largely derived from "Les Nuits de Young" and Hervey's _Meditations
among the Tombs_.
Another bit of copy-book (to revert to the Pauline moralities) is at the
end of the same very unedifying novel, when the benevolent and
long-suffering colonel, joining the hands of Gustave and Suzon, remarks
to the latter that she has proved to him that "virtues, gentleness,
wits, and beauty can serve as substitutes for birth and fortune." It
would be unkind to ask which of the "virtues" presided over Suzon's
original acquaintance with her future husband, or whether the same or
another undertook the charge of that wonderful six weeks' abscondence of
hers with him in this very uncle's house.
[Sidenote: _Edmond et sa Cousine._]
But no doubt this capacity for "dropping into" morality stood Paul in
good stead when he undertook (as it was almost incumbent on such a
universal provider of popular fiction to do) what the French, among
other nicknames for them, call _berquinades_--stories for children and
the young person, more or less in the style of the _Ami des Enfants_. He
diversified his _gauloiseries_ with these not very seldom. An example is
bound up with _Gustave_ itself in some editions, and they make a very
choice assortment of brimstone and treacle. The hero and heroine of
_Edmond et sa Cousine_ are two young people who have been betrothed from
their youth up, and neither of whom objects to the situation, while
Constance, the "She-cosen" (as Pepys puts it) is deeply in love with
Edmond. He also is really fond of her, but he is a bumptious and
superficial snob, who, not content with the comfortable[47] income which
he has, and which will be doubled at his marriage, wants to make fame
and fortune in some way. He never will give sufficient scope and
application to his moderate talents, and accordingly fails very plumply
in music, playwriting, and painting. Then he takes to stock-exchange
gambling, and of course, after the usual "devil's _arles_" of success,
completely ruins himself, owes double what he has, and is about to blow
out his somewhat unimportant brains. But Constance, in the truest spirit
of melodrama, and having long sought him in vain under the guidance of a
_quarta persona_, of whom more presently, realises almost the whole of
her fortune, except a small pittance, dashes it down before him in the
nick of time, and saves him for the moment.
Perhaps the straitest sect of the Berquinaders would have finished the
story here, made the two marry on Constance's pittance, reconciled
Edmond to honest work, and so on. Paul, however, had a soul both above
and below this. Edmond, with the easy and cheap sham honour of his kind,
will not "subject her to privations," still hopes for something to turn
up, and in society meets with a certain family of the name of
Bringuesingue--a father who is a retired mustard-maker with some money
and no brains, a mother who is a nonentity, and a daughter Clodora,[48]
a not bad-looking and not unamiable girl, unfortunately dowered with the
silliness of her father and the nullity of her mother combined and
intensified. There is some pretty bad stock farce about M. Bringuesingue
and his valet, whom he pays to scratch his nose when his master is
committing solecisms; and about Edmond's adroitness in saving the
situations. The result is that the Bringuesingues throw their not
unwilling daughter at Edmond's head. To do him the only justice he ever
deserves, he does not like to give up Constance; but she, more
melodramatic than ever, contrives to imbue him with the idea that she is
false to him, and he marries Clodora. Again the thing might have been
stopped; but Paul once more goes on, and what, I fear, must be called
his hopeless bad taste (there is no actual bad _blood_ in him), and the
precious stage notion that "Tom the young dog" may do anything and be
forgiven, make him bring about a happy ending in a very shabby fashion.
Edmond is bored by his stupid though quite harmless and affectionate
wife, neglects her, and treats his parents-in-law with more contempt
still. Poor Clodora dies, but persuades her parents to hand over her
fortune to Edmond, and with it he marries Constance. "Hide, blushing
honour! hide that wedding-day." But, you see, the Paul-de-Kockian hero
was not like Lord Welter. There was hardly anything that _this_ "fellow
couldn't do."
Paul, however, has kept his word with his subscribers by shutting out
all sculduddery, even of the mildest kind, and has, if not reconciled,
partly conciliated critics by throwing in some tolerable minor
personages. Pélagie, Constance's lively friend, has a character which he
could somehow manage without Richardsonian vulgarity. Her amiable
father, an orchestra musician, who manages to find _des jolies choses_
even in a damned piece, is not bad; and, above all, Pélagie's lover,
and, till Edmond's misconduct, his friend, M. Ginguet--a modest
Government clerk, who adores his mistress, is constantly snubbed by her,
but has his flames crowned at last,--is, though not a particularly novel
character, a very well-played part.
[Sidenote: _André le Savoyard._]
One of the author's longer books, _André le Savoyard_, is a curious
blend of the _berquinade_ with what some English critics have been kind
enough to call the "candour" of the more usual French novel. The
candour, however, is in very small proportion to the berquinity. This, I
suppose, helped it to pass the English censorship of the mid-nineteenth
century; for I remember a translation (it was the first book of the
author's I ever read) far away in the 'fifties, among a collection of
books where nothing flagrantly scabrous would have been admitted. It
begins, and for the most part continues, in an almost completely
Marmontelish or Edgeworthian fashion. A selfish glutton and
_petit-maître_ of a French count, M. de Francornard, loses his way (with
a postilion, a valet, and his little daughter, whom he has carried off
from her mother) in the hills of Savoy, and is rescued and guested by a
good peasant, whom he rewards with a _petit écu_ (three _livres_, not
five or six). The peasant dies, and his two eldest boys set out for
Paris as chimney-sweeps. The elder (eleven-year-old) André himself is
befriended by a good Auvergnat water-carrier and his little daughter
Manette; after which he falls in with the Francornards--now, after a
fashion, a united family. He is taken into their household and made a
sort of protégé by the countess, the child Adolphine being also very
fond of him; while, though in another way, their _soubrette_ Lucile, a
pretty damsel of eighteen, is fonder still. Years pass, and the
fortunate André distributes his affections between the three girls.
Manette, though she ends as his wife, is more of a sister at first;
Adolphine is an adored and unhoped-for idol; while Lucile (it is hardly
necessary to say that it is in the scenes with her that "candour" comes
in) is at first a protectress, then a schoolmistress of the school of
Cupid, in process of time a mistress in the other sense, and always a
very good-natured and unselfish helper. In fact, Manette is so
preternaturally good (she can't even be jealous in a sufficiently human
way), Adolphine so prettily and at last tragically null, that one really
feels inclined to observe to André, if he were worth it, the recondite
quotation
Ne sit ancillae tibi amor pudori,
though perhaps seven years _is_ a long interval in the first third of
life.
[Sidenote: _Jean._]
A still better instance of the modified _berquinade_--indeed, except for
the absence of riotous fun, one of the best of all Paul de Kock's
books--is _Jean_, also an example of his middle and ripest period. If
translated into English it might have for second title "or, The History
of a Good Lout." The career of Jean Durand (one of the French
equivalents for John Brown or Jones or Robinson) we have from the moment
of, and indeed a little before, his birth to that crowning of a virtuous
young Frenchman's hopes, which consists in his marrying a pretty,
amiable, sensible, and well-to-do young widow.[49] Jean is the son of a
herbalist father who is an eccentric but not a fool, and a mother who
is very much of a fool but not in the least eccentric. The child, who is
born in the actual presence (result of the usual farcical opening) of a
corporal and four fusiliers, is put out to nurse at Saint-Germain in the
way they did then, brought home and put out to school, but, in
consequence of his mother's absurd spoiling, allowed to learn absolutely
nothing, and (though he is not exactly a bad fellow) to get into very
bad company. With two of the choicest specimens of this he runs away
(having, again by his mother's folly, been trusted with a round sum in
gold) at the age of sixteen, and executes a sort of picaresque journey
in the environs of Paris, till he is brought to his senses through an
actual robbery committed by the worst of his companions. He returns home
to find his father dead: and having had a substantial income left him
already by an aunt, with the practical control of his mother's
resources, he goes on living entirely _à sa guise_. This involves no
positive debauchery or ruination, but includes smoking (then, it must be
remembered, almost as great a crime in French as in English middle-class
circles), playing at billiards (ditto), and a free use of strong drink
and strong language. He spends and gives money freely, but does not get
into debt; flirts with grisettes, but falls into no discreditable
entanglement, etc., etc.
His most characteristic peculiarity, however, is his absolute refusal to
learn the rudiments of manners. He keeps his hat on in all companies;
neglects all neatness in dress, etc.; goes (when he _does_ go) among
ladies with garments reeking of tobacco and a mouth full of strange
oaths, and generally remains ignorant of, or recalcitrant to, every form
of conventional politeness in speech and behaviour.
The only person of any sense with whom he has hitherto come in contact,
an old hairdresser named Bellequeue (it must be remembered that this
profession or vocation is not as traditionally ridiculous in French
literature as in ours), persuades his mother that the one chance of
reforming Jean and making him like other people is to marry him off.
They select an eligible _parti_, one Mademoiselle Adelaide Chopard, a
young lady of great bodily height, some facial charms, not exactly a
fool, but not of the most amiable disposition, and possessed of no
actual accomplishment (though she thinks herself almost a "blue") except
that of preserving different fruits in brandy, her father being a
retired liqueur manufacturer. Jean, who has never been in the least "in
love," has no particular objection to Adelaide, and none at all to the
preserved cherries, apricots, etc., and the scenes of his introduction
and, after a fashion, proposal to the damsel, with her first resentment
at his unceremonious behaviour and later positive attraction by it, are
far from bad. Luckily or unluckily--for the marriage might have turned
out at least as well as most marriages of the kind--before it is brought
about, this French Cymon at last meets his real Iphigenia. Walking
rather late at night, he hears a cry, and a footpad (one of his own old
comrades, as it happens) rushes past him with a shawl which he has
snatched from two ladies. Jean counter-snatches the shawl from him and
succours the ladies, one of whom strikes his attention. They ask him to
put them into a cab, and go off--grateful, but giving no address.
However, he picks up a reticule, which the thief in his fright has
dropped, discovers in it the address he wants, and actually ventures to
call on Madame Caroline Derville, who possesses, in addition to viduity,
all the other attractions catalogued above.
Another scene of farce, which is not so far short of comedy, follows
between the lout and the lady, the fun being, among other things, caused
by Jean's unconventional strolling about the room, looking at
engravings, etc., and showing, by his remarks on things--"The Death of
Tasso," "The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis," and the like--that he is
utterly uneducated.
There is about half the book to come, but no more abstract can be
necessary. The way in which Jean is delivered from his Adelaide and
rewarded with his Caroline, if not quite probable (for Adelaide is made
to blacken her own character to her rival), is not without ingenuity.
And the narrative (which has Paul de Kock's curious "holding" quality
for the hour or two one is likely to bestow on it) is diversified by the
usual duel, by Jean's noble and rather rash conduct, in putting down his
pistols to bestow sacks of five-franc pieces on his two old friends (who
try to burgle and--one of them at least--would rather like to murder
him), etc., etc.[50] But the real value--for it has some--of the book
lies in the vivid sketches of ordinary life which it gives. The curious
Cockneydom, diversified by glimpses of a suburban Arcadia, in which the
French _bourgeois_ of the first half of the nineteenth century seems to
have passed his time; the humours of a _coucou_ journey from Paris to
Saint-Germain; all sorts of details of the Durand and Chopard
households--supply these. And not the least of them is given by the
bachelor ménage of Bellequeue with his eighteen-year-old _bonne_ Rose,
the story whereof need not sadden or shock even Mrs. Grundy, unless she
scents unrecounted, indeed not even hinted at, improprieties.
Bellequeue, as noted above, is by no means a fool, and achieves as near
an approach to a successful "character" as Paul de Kock has ever drawn;
while Rose plays the same part of piebald angel as Lucile in _André_,
with a little more cleverness in her espièglerie and at least no
vouched-for unlawfulnesses.
[Sidenote: _La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant._]
But perhaps if any one wants a single book to judge Paul de Kock by
(with one possible exception, to follow this), he cannot do better than
take _La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant_, a novel again of his middle period,
and one which, if it shows some of his less desirable points, shows them
characteristically and with comparatively little offence, while it
exhibits what the shopkeepers would, I believe, call "a range of his
best lines." The autobiographic hero, Paul Deligny, is one of his
nearest approaches to a gentleman, yet no one can call him insipid or
priggish; the heroine, Augustine Luceval, by marriage Jenneville, is in
the same way one of his nearest approaches to a lady, and, though not
such a madcap as the similarly situated Frédérique of _Une Gaillarde_
(_v. inf._), by no means mawkish. It is needless to say that these are
"l'Amant" and "la Femme," or that they are happily united at the end: it
may be more necessary to add that there is no scandal, but at the same
time no prunes and prism, earlier. "Le Mari," M. Jenneville, is very
much less of a success, being an exceedingly foolish as well as
reprobate person, who not only deserts a beautiful, charming, and
affectionate wife, but treats his lower-class loves shabbily, and allows
himself to be swindled and fooled to the _n_th by an adventuress of
fashion and a plausible speculator. On the other hand, one of this
book's rather numerous grisettes, Ninie, is of the more if not most
gracious of that questionable but not unappetising sisterhood. Dubois,
the funny man, and Jolivet, the parsimonious reveller, who generally
manages to make his friends pay the bill, are not bad common form of
farce. One of the best of Paul's own special scenes, the pancake party,
with a bevy of grisettes, is perhaps the liveliest of all such things,
and, but for one piece of quite unnecessary Smollettism or Pigaulterie,
need only scandalise the "unco guid." The whole has, in unusual measure,
that curious _readableness_ which has been allowed to most of our
author's books. Almost inevitably there is a melodramatic end; but this,
to speak rather Hibernically, is made up for by a minute and curious
account, at the beginning, of the actual presentation of a melodrama,
with humours of pit, box, and gallery. If the reader does not like the
book he will hardly like anything else of its author's; if he does, he
will find plenty of the same sort of stuff, less concentrated perhaps,
elsewhere. But if he be a student, as well as a consumer, of the novel,
he can hardly fail to see that, at its time and in its kind, it is not
so trivial a thing as its subjects and their treatment might, in the
abstract, be pronounced to be by the grave and precise.
[Sidenote: _Mon Voisin Raymond._]
Yet somebody may say, "This is all very well, but what was it that made
Major Pendennis laugh?" Probably a good many things in a good many
books; but I do not know any one more likely to have received that crown
than the exception above mentioned, _Mon Voisin Raymond_, which also
bears (to me) the recommendation of a very competent friend of mine. My
experience is that you certainly do begin laughing at the very
beginning, and that the laughter is kept up, if not without cessation,
with very few intervals, through a remarkable series of comic scenes.
The book, in fact, is Paul de Kock's _Gilbert Gurney_, and I cannot sink
the critic in the patriot to such an extent as to enable me to put
Theodore, even in what is, I suppose, his best long story, above, or
even on a level with, Paul here.
The central point, as one sees almost at once, is that this Raymond (I
think we are never told his other name), a not entirely ill-meaning
person, but a _fâcheux_ of almost ultra-Molièresque strength, is
perpetually spoiling his unlucky neighbour's, the autobiographic Eugène
Dorsan's, sport, and, though sometimes paid out in kind, bringing
calamities upon him, while at last he actually capots his friend and
enemy by making him one of the _derniers_ already mentioned! This is
very bold of Paul, and I do not know any exact parallel to it. On the
other hand, Eugène is consoled, not only by Raymond's death in the Alps
(Paul de Kock is curiously fond of Switzerland as a place of punishment
for his bad characters), but by the final possession of a certain
Nicette, the very pearl of the grisette kind. We meet her in the first
scene of the story, where Dorsan, having given the girl a guiltless
sojourn of rescue in his own rooms, is detected and exposed to the
malice of a cast mistress by Raymond. I am afraid that Paul rather
forgot that final sentence of his own first book; for though Pélagie,
Dorsan's erring and unpleasant wife, dies in the last chapter, I do not
observe that an actual Hymen with Nicette "covers the fault" which,
after long innocence, she has at last committed or permitted. But
perhaps it would have been indecent to contract a second marriage so
soon, and it is only postponed to the unwritten first chapter of the
missing fifth volume.[51]
The interval between overture and finale is, as has been said or hinted,
uncommonly lively, and for once, not only in the final retribution, Paul
has distributed the _peine du talion_ pretty equally between his
personages. Dorsan has already lost another grisette mistress, Caroline
(for whose sake he has neglected Nicette), and a _femme du monde_, with
whom he has for a short time intrigued; while in both cases Raymond,
though not exactly the cause of the deprivation, has, in his meddling
way, been mixed up with it. In yet other scenes we have a travelling
magic-lantern exhibition in the Champs Élysées; a night in the Tivoli
Gardens; an expedition to a party at a country house, which, of course,
Raymond's folly upsets, literally as well as metaphorically; a long
(rather too long) account of a musical evening at a very
lower-middle-class house; a roaringly farcical interchange of dinners
_en cabinet particulier_ at a restaurant, in which Raymond is the
victim. But, on the whole, he scores, and is a sort of double cause of
the hero's last and greatest misfortune. For it is a lie of his about
Nicette which determines Dorsan to make a long-postponed visit to his
sister in the country, and submit at last to her efforts to get him
married to the exaggeratedly _ingénue_ Pélagie, and saddled with her
detestable aunt, Madame de Pontchartrain. The end of the book is not
quite equal to some other parts of it. But there is abundance of
excellent farce, and Nicette might reconcile the veriest sentimentalist.
[Sidenote: _Le Barbier de Paris._]
At one time in England--I cannot speak for the times of his greatest
popularity in France--Paul de Kock's name, except for a vague knowledge
of his grisette and _mauvais sujet_ studies, was very mainly connected
with _Le Barbier de Paris_. It was an instance of the constant mistakes
which almost all countries make about foreign authors. I imagine, from a
fresh and recent reading of it, that he probably did take more trouble
with it than with most of his books. But, unfortunately, instances of
lost labour are not confined to literature. The subject and the author
are very ill matched. It is a romance of 1632, and so in a way competing
with the most successful efforts of the great Romantics. But for such a
task Paul had no gifts, except his invariable one of concocting a
readable story. As for style, imagination, atmosphere, and such high
graces, it would be not so much cruel as absurd to "enter" the book with
_Notre-Dame de Paris_ or the _Contes Drolatiques_, _Le Capitaine
Fracasse_ or the _Chronique de Charles IX_. But even the lower ways he
could not tread here. He did not know anything about the time, and his
wicked Marquis de Villebelle is not early Louis Treize at all, but
rather late Louis Quinze. He had not the gift (which Scott first showed
and Dumas possessed in no small measure) of writing his conversations,
if not in actual temporal colour of language, at any rate in a kind of
_lingua franca_ suitable to, or at the worst not flagrantly discordant
with, _any_ particular time and _any_ particular state of manners. He
could throw in types of the kind so much admired by no less a person
than Sir Philip Sidney--a garrulous old servant, an innocent young girl,
a gasconading coward, a revengeful daughter of Italy, a this and that
and the other. But he could neither make individual character nor vivid
historical scene. And so the thing breaks down.
The barber-hero-villain himself is the most "unconvincing" of barbers
(who have profited fiction not so ill in other cases), of heroes (who
are too often unconvincing), and even of villains (who have rather a
habit of being so).[52] Why a man who is represented as being intensely,
diabolically, wicked, but almost diabolically shrewd, should employ, and
go on employing, as his instrument a blundering poltroon like the Gascon
Chaudoreille, is a question which recurs almost throughout the book,
and, being unanswered, is almost sufficient to damn it. And at the end
the other question, why M. le Marquis de Villebelle--represented as,
though also a villain, a person of superior intelligence--when he has
discovered that the girl whom he has abducted and sought to ruin is
really his daughter; when he has run upstairs to tell her, has knocked
at her locked door, and has heard a heavy body splashing into the lake
under her window,--why, instead of making his way at once to the water,
he should run about the house for keys, break into the room, and at
last, going to the window, draw from the fact that "an object shows
itself at intervals on the surface, and appears to be still in a state
of agitation," the no doubt quite logical inference that Blanche is
drowning--when, and only then, he precipitates himself after her,--this
question would achieve, if it were necessary, the damnation.
[Sidenote: The Pauline grisette.]
The fact is, that Paul had no turn for melodrama, history, or tragic
matter of any kind. He wrote nearly a hundred novels, and I neither
pretend to have read the whole of them, nor, if I had done so, should I
feel justified in inflicting abstracts on my readers. As always happens
in such cases, the feast he offers us is "pot-luck," but, as too seldom
happens, the luck of the pot is quite often good. With the grisette, to
whom he did much to give a niche (one can hardly call it a shrine) in
literature, whom he celebrated so lovingly, and whose gradual
disappearance he has so touchingly bewailed, or with any feminine person
of partly grisettish kind, such as the curious and already briefly
mentioned heroine of _Une Gaillarde_,[53] he is almost invariably happy.
The above-mentioned Lucile is not technically a grisette (who should be
a girl living on her own resources or in a shop, not in service) nor is
Rose in _Jean_, but both have the requirements of the type--_minois
chiffonné_ (including what is absolutely indispensable, a _nez
retroussé_), inexhaustible gaiety, extreme though by no means
promiscuous complaisance, thorough good-nature--all the gifts, in short,
of Béranger's _bonne fille_, who laughs at everything, but is perfectly
capable of good sense and good service at need, and who not seldom
marries and makes as good a wife as, "in a higher _spear_," the English
"garrison hack" has had the credit of being. Quite a late, but a very
successful example, with the complaisance limited to strictly legitimate
extent, and the good-nature tempered by a shrewd determination to avenge
two sisters of hers who had been weaker than herself, is the Georgette
of _La Fille aux Trois Jupons_, who outwits in the cleverest way three
would-be gallants, two of them her sisters' actual seducers, and
extracts thumping solatia from these for their victims.[54]
[Sidenote: Others.]
On the other hand, the older and, I think, more famous book which
suggested the title of this--_L'Homme aux Trois Culottes_, symbolising
and in a way giving a history of the times of the Revolution, the
Empire, and the Restoration, and finishing with "July"--seems to me
again a failure. As I have said, Paul could not manage history, least of
all spread-out history like this; and the characters, or rather
personages, though of the lower and lower-middle rank, which he _could_
manage best, are to me totally uninteresting. Others may have been, or
may be, more fortunate with them.
So, too, _Le Petit Fils de Cartouche_ (which I read before coming
across its first part, _Les Enfants du Boulevard_) did not inspire me
with any desire to look up this earlier novel; and _La Pucelle de
Belleville_, another of Paul's attempts to depict the unconventional but
virtuous young person, has very slight interest as a story, and is
disfigured by some real examples of the "coarse vulgarity" which has
been somewhat excessively charged against its author generally. _Frère
Jacques_ is a little better, but not much.[55]
Something has been said of "periods"; but, after all, when Paul has once
"got into his stride" there is little difference on the average. I have
read, for instance, in succession, _M. Dupont_, which, even in the
Belgian piracy, is of 1838, and _Les Demoiselles de Magazin_, which must
be some quarter of a century later--so late, indeed, that Madame Patti
is mentioned in it. The title-hero of the first--a most respectable
man--has an _ingénue_, who loves somebody else, forced upon him,
experiences more recalcitrance than is usually allowed in such cases,
and at last, with Paul's usual unpoetical injustice, is butchered to
make way for the Adolphe of the piece, who does not so very distinctly
deserve his Eugénie. It contains also one Zélie, who is perhaps the
author's most impudent, but by no means most unamusing or most
disagreeable, grisette. _Les Demoiselles de Magazin_ gives us a whole
posy of these curious flower-weeds of the garden of girls--pretty,
middling, and ugly, astonishingly virtuous, not virtuous at all, and
_couci-couci_ (one of them, by the way, is nicknamed "Bouci-Boula,"
because she is plump and plain), but all good-natured, and on occasion
almost noble-sentimented; a guileless provincial; his friend, who has a
mania for testing his wife's fidelity, and who accomplishes one of
Paul's favourite fairy-tale or rather pantomime endings by coming down
with fifteen thousand francs for an old mistress (she has lost her
beauty by the bite of a parrot, and is the mother of the
extraordinarily virtuous Marie); a scapegrace "young first" or
half-first; a superior ditto, who is an artist, who rejects the advances
of Marie's mother, and finally marries Marie herself, etc. etc. You
might change over some of the personages and scenes of the two books;
but they are scarcely unequal in such merit as they possess, and both
lazily readable in the fashion so often noted.
If any one asks where this readableness comes from, I do not think the
answer is very difficult to give, and it will of itself supply a fuller
explanation (the words apology or excuse are not really necessary) for
the space here allotted to its possessor. It comes, no doubt, in the
first place, from sheer and unanalysable narrative faculty, the secret
of the business, the mystery in one sense of the mystery in the other.
But it also comes, as it seems to me, from the fact that Paul de Kock is
the very first of French novelists who, though he has no closely woven
plot, no striking character, no vivid conversation or arresting phrases,
is thoroughly _real_, and in the good, not the bad, sense _quotidian_.
The statement may surprise some people and shock others, but I believe
it can be as fully sustained as that other statement about the most
different subject possible, the _Astrée_, which was quoted from Madame
de Sévigné in the last volume. Paul knew the world he dealt with as well
almost as Dickens[56] knew his very different but somewhat corresponding
one; and, unlike Dickens, the Frenchman had the good sense to meddle
very little[57] with worlds that he did not know. Of course it would be
simply _bête_ to take it for granted that the majority of Parisian shop-
and work- and servant-girls have or had either the beauty or the
amiability or the less praiseworthy qualities of his grisettes. But
somehow or other one feels that the general _ethos_ of the class has
been caught.[58] His _bourgeois_ interiors and outings have the same
real and not merely stagy quality; though his melodramatic or pantomimic
endings may smack of "the boards" a little. The world to which he holds
up the mirror may be a rather vulgar sort of Vanity Fair, but there are
unfortunately few places more real than Vanity Fair, and few things less
unreal than vulgarity.
The last sentence may lead to a remark of a graver kind than has been
often indulged in here. Thackeray defined his own plan in _Vanity Fair_
itself as at least partly an attempt to show people "living without God
in the world." There certainly is not much godliness in the book, but he
could not keep it out altogether; he would have been false to nature
(which he never was) if he had. In Paul de Kock's extensive work, on the
other hand, the exclusion is complete. It is not that there is any
expressed Voltairianism as there is in Pigault. But though the people
are married in church as well as at the _mairie_, and I remember one
casual remark about a mother and her daughter going to mass, the whole
spiritual region--religious, theological, ecclesiastical, and what
not--is left blank. I do not remember so much as a _curé_ figuring
personally, though there may be one. And it is worth noting that Paul
was born in 1794, and therefore passed his earliest childhood in the
time when the Republic had actually gagged, if not stifled, religion in
France--when children grew up, in some cases at any rate, without ever
hearing the name of God, except perhaps in phrases like _pardieu_ or
_parbleu_. It is not my business or my intention to make reflections or
draw inferences; I merely indicate the fact.
Another fact--perhaps so obvious already that it hardly needs
stating--is that Paul de Kock is not exactly the person to "take a
course of," unless under such conditions as those under which Mr.
Carlyle took a course of a far superior writer, Marryat, and was (one
regrets to remember) very ungrateful for the good it did him. He is
(what some of his too critical countrymen have so falsely called Dumas)
a mere _amuseur_, and his amusement is somewhat lacking in variety.
Nevertheless, few critical readers[59] of the present history will, I
think, consider the space given to him here as wasted. He was a really
powerful schoolmaster to bring the popular novel into still further
popularity; and he made a distinct advance upon such persons as
Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil--upon the former in comparative
decency, if not of subject, of expression; upon the latter in getting
close to actual life; and upon both in what may be called the
_furniture_ of his novels--the scene-painting, property-arranging, and
general staging. This has been most unfairly assigned to Balzac as
originator, not merely in France, but generally, whereas, not to mention
our own men, Paul began to write nearly a decade before the beginning of
those curious efforts, half-prenatal, of Balzac's, which we shall deal
with later, and nearly two decades before _Les Chouans_. And, horrifying
as the statement may be to some, I venture to say that his mere _mise en
scène_ is sometimes, if not always, better than Balzac's own, though he
may be to that younger contemporary of his as a China orange to Lombard
Street in respect of plot, character, thought, conversation, and all the
higher elements, as they are commonly taken to be, of the novel.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The minors before 1830.]
It has been said that the filling-up of this chapter, as to the rank and
file of the novelists of 1800-1830, has been a matter of some difficulty
in the peculiar circumstances of the case. I have, however, been enabled
to read, for the first time or afresh, examples not merely of those
writers who have preserved any notoriety, but of some who have not, and
to assure myself on fair grounds that I need not wait for further
exploration. The authors now to be dealt with have already been named.
But I may add another novelist on the very eve of 1830, Auguste Ricard,
whose name I never saw in any history of literature, but whose work fell
almost by accident into my hands, and seems worth taking as "pot-luck."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mme. de Montolieu--_Caroline de Lichtfield_.]
Isabelle de Montolieu--a Swiss by birth but a French-woman by
extraction, and Madame de Crousaz by her first marriage--was a friend of
Gibbon's friend Georges Deyverdun, and indeed of Gibbon himself, who,
she says, actually offered to father her novel. Odd as this seems, there
really is in _Caroline de Lichtfield_[60] not merely something which
distinguishes it from the ordinary "sensibility" tale of its time (it
was first printed at Lausanne in 1786), but a kind of crispness of
thought now and then which sometimes does suggest Gibbon, in something
the same way as that in which Fanny Burney suggests Johnson. This is
indeed mixed with a certain amount of mere "sensibility" jargon,[61] as
when a lover, making a surprisingly honest confession to his beloved,
observes that he is going "to destroy those sentiments which had made
him forget how unworthy he was of them," or when the lady (who has been
quite guiltless, and has at last fallen in love with her own husband)
tells this latter of her weakness in these very engaging words: "Yes! I
did love Lindorf; _at least I think I recognise some relation between
the sentiments I had for him and those that I feel at present_!"
[Sidenote: Its advance on "Sensibility."]
A kind of affection was avowed in the last volume for the "Phoebus" of
the "heroics," and something similar may be confessed for this "Jupiter
Pluvius," this mixture of tears and stateliness, in the Sentimentalists.
But Madame de Montolieu has emerged from the most _larmoyante_ kind of
"sensible" comedy. If her book had been cut a little shorter, and if
(which can be easily done by the reader) the eccentric survival of a
_histoire_, appended instead of episodically inserted, were lopped off,
_Caroline de Lichtfield_ would not be a bad story. The heroine, having
lost her mother, has been brought up to the age of fifteen by an amiable
canoness, who (to speak rather Hibernically) ought to have been her
mother but wasn't, because the actual mother was so much richer. She
bears no malice, however, even to the father who, well preserved in
looks, manners, and selfishness, is Great Chamberlain to Frederick the
Great.
That very unsacred majesty has another favourite, a certain Count von
Walstein, who is ambassador of Prussia at St. Petersburg. It pleases
Frederick, and of course his chamberlain, that Caroline, young as she
is, shall marry Walstein. As the girl is told that her intended is not
more than thirty, and knows his position (she has, naturally, been
brought up without the slightest idea of choosing for herself), she is
not displeased. She will be a countess and an ambassadress; she will
have infinite jewels; her husband will probably be handsome and
agreeable; he will certainly dance with her, and may very possibly not
object to joining in innocent sports like butterfly-catching. So she
sets off to Berlin quite cheerfully, and the meeting takes place. Alas!
the count is a "civil count" (as Beatrice says) enough, but he is the
reverse of handsome and charming. He has only one eye; he has a huge
scar on his cheek; a wig (men, remember, were beginning to "wear their
own hair"), a bent figure, and a leaden complexion. Caroline, promptly
and not unnaturally, "screams and disappears like lightning." Nor can
any way be found out of this extremely awkward situation. The count (who
is a thoroughly good fellow) would give Caroline up, though he has
taken a great fancy to her, and even the selfish Lichtfield tries (or
_says_ he tries) to alter his master's determination. But Frederick of
course persists, and with a peculiarly Frederician enjoyment in
conferring an ostensible honour which is in reality a punishment, sees
the marriage ceremony carried out under his own eye. Caroline, however,
exemplifies in combination certain old adages to the effect that there
is "No will, no wit like a woman's." She submits quite decently in
public, but immediately after the ceremony writes a letter[62] to her
husband (whose character she has partly, though imperfectly, gauged)
requesting permission to retire to the canoness till she is a little
older, under a covert but quite clearly intelligible threat of suicide
in case of refusal. There are of course difficulties, but the count,
like a man and a gentleman, consents at once; the father, _bon gré mal
gré_, has to do so, and the King, a tyrant who has had his way, gives a
sulky and qualified acquiescence. What follows need only be very rapidly
sketched. After a little time Caroline sees, at her old-new home, an
engaging young man, a Herr von Lindorf; and matters, though she is quite
virtuous, are going far when she receives an enormous epistle[62] from
her lover, confessing that he himself is the author of her husband's
disfigurement (under circumstances discreditable to himself and
creditable to Walstein), enclosing, too, a very handsome portrait of the
count _as he was_, and but for this disfigurement might be still. What
happens then nobody ought to need, or if he does he does not deserve, to
be told. There is no greatness about this book, but to any one who has
an eye for consequences it will probably seem to have some future in it.
It shows the breaking of the Sensibility mould and the running of the
materials into a new pattern as early as 1786. In 1886 M. Feuillet or M.
Theuriet would of course have clothed the story-skeleton differently,
but one can quite imagine either making use of a skeleton by no means
much altered. M. Rod would have given it an unhappy ending, but one can
see it in his form likewise.[63]
[Sidenote: Madame de Genlis _iterum_.]
Of Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis, it were tempting to say a
good deal personally if we did biographies here when they can easily be
found elsewhere. How she became a canoness at six years old, and shortly
afterwards had for her ordinary dress (with something supplementary, one
hopes) the costume of a Cupid, including quiver and wings; how she
combined the offices of governess to the Orleans children and mistress
to their father; how she also combined the voluptuousness and the
philanthropy of her century by taking baths of milk and afterwards
giving that milk to the poor;[64] how, rather late in life, she attained
the very Crown-Imperial of governess-ship in being chosen by Napoleon to
teach him and his Court how to behave; and how she wrote infinite
books--many of them taking the form of fiction--on education, history,
religion, everything, can only be summarised. The last item of the
summary alone concerns us, and that must be dealt with summarily too.
_Mlle. de Clermont_--a sort of historico-"sensible" story in style, and
evidently imitated from _La Princesse de Clèves_--is about the best
thing she did as literature; but we dealt with that in the last
volume[65] among its congeners. In my youth all girls and some boys knew
_Adèle et Théodore_ and _Les Veillées du Château_. From a later book,
_Les Battuécas_, George Sand is said to have said that she learnt
Socialism: and the fact is that Stéphanie Félicité had seen so much,
felt so much, read so much, and done so much that, having also a quick
feminine wit, she could put into her immense body of work all sorts of
crude second-hand notions. The two last things that I read of hers to
complete my idea of her were _Le Comte_ _de Corke_ and _Les Chevaliers
du Cygne_, books at least possessing an element of surprise in their
titles. The first is a collection of short tales, the title-piece
inspired and prefaced by an account of the Boyle family, and all rather
like a duller and more spun-out Miss Edgeworth, the common relation to
Marmontel accounting for this. The concluding stories of each volume,
"Les Amants sans Amour" and "Sanclair," are about the best. _Les
Chevaliers du Cygne_ is a book likely to stir up the Old Adam in some
persons. It was, for some mysterious reason, intended as a sort of
appendix--for "grown-ups"--to the _Veillées du Château_, and is supposed
to have incorporated parabolically many of the lessons of the French
Revolution (it appeared in 1795). But though its three volumes and
eleven hundred pages deal with Charlemagne, and the Empress Irene, and
the Caliph "Aaron" (Haroun), and Oliver (Roland is dead at Roncevaux),
and Ogier, and other great and beloved names; though the authoress, who
was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has actually
consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest
flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about
the book, and the whole treatment is in the _pre_-historical-novel
style. Indeed the writer of the _Veillées_ was altogether of the
_veille_--the day just expired--or of the transitional and
half-understood present--never of the past seen in some perspective, of
the real new day, or, still less, of the morrow.
[Sidenote: The minor popular novel--Ducray-Duminil--_Le Petit
Carilloneur_.]
The batch of books into which we are now going to dip does not represent
the height of society and the interests of education like Madame de
Genlis; nor high society again and at least strivings after the new day,
like the noble author of the _Solitaire_ who will follow them. They are,
in fact, the minors of the class in which Pigault-Lebrun earlier and
Paul de Kock later represent such "majority" as it possesses. But they
ought not to be neglected here: and I am bound to say that the very
considerable trouble they cost me has not been wholly vain.[66] The
most noted of the whole group, and one of the earliest, Ducray-Duminil's
_Lolotte et Fanfan_, escaped[67] a long search; but the possession and
careful study of the four volumes of his _Petit Carillonneur_ (1819)
has, I think, enabled me to form a pretty clear notion of what not
merely _Lolotte_ (the second title of which is _Histoire de Deux Enfants
abandonnés dans une île déserte_), but _Victor ou L'Enfant de la Forêt_,
_Cælina ou L'Enfant du Mystère_, _Jules ou le Toit paternel_, or any
other of the author's score or so of novels would be like.
The book, I confess, was rather hard to read at first, for
Ducray-Duminil is a sort of Pigault-Lebrun _des enfants_; he writes
rather kitchen French; the historic present (as in all these books)
loses its one excuse by the wearisome abundance of it, and the first
hundred pages (in which little Dominique, having been unceremoniously
tumbled out of a cabriolet[68] by wicked men, and left to the chances of
divine and human assistance, is made to earn his living by
framed-bell-ringing in the streets of Paris) became something of a
_corvée_. But the author is really a sort of deacon, though in no high
division of his craft. He expands and duplicates his situations with no
inconsiderable cunning, and the way in which new friends, new enemies,
and new should-be-indifferent persons are perpetually trying to find out
whether the boy is really the Dominique d'Alinvil of Marseilles, whose
father and mother have been foully made away with, or not, shows command
of its own particular kind of ingenuity. Intrigues of all sorts--violent
and other (for his wicked relative, the Comtesse d'Alinvil, is always
trying to play Potiphar's wife to him, and there is a certain
Mademoiselle Gothon who would not figure as she does here in a book by
Mr. Thomas Day)--beset him constantly; he is induced not merely to
trust his enemies, but to distrust his friends; there is a good deal of
underground work and of the explained supernatural; a benevolent
musician; an excellent curé; a rather "coming" but agreeable Adrienne de
Surval, who, close to the end of the book, hides her trouble in the
bosom of her aunt while Dominique presses her hand to his heart (the
aunt seems here superfluous), etc., etc. Altogether the book is, to the
historian, a not unsatisfactory one, and joins its evidence to that of
Pigault as showing that new sources of interest and new ways of dealing
with them are being asked for and found. In filling up the map of
general novel-development and admitting English examples, we may assign
to its author a place between Mrs. Radcliffe and the _Family Herald_:
confining ourselves to French only, he has again, like Pigault,
something of the credit of making a new start. He may appeal to the
taste of the vulgar (which is not quite the same sort of thing as "a
vulgar taste"), but he sees that the novel is capable of providing
general pastime, and he does his best to make it do so.
[Sidenote: V. Ducange.]
[Sidenote: _L'Artiste et le Soldat._]
"The other Ducange," whose patronymic appears to have been Brahain, and
who perhaps took the name of the great scholar[69] for the sake of
contrast, was even more famous for his melodramas[70] than for his
fiction, one piece especially, "Trente Ans, ou La Vie d'un Joueur,"
having been among the triumphs of the Porte-Saint-Martin and of
Frédérick Lemaître. As a novelist he did not write for children like
Ducray-Duminil, and one of his novels contains a boastful preface
scoffing at and glorying in the accusations of impropriety brought
against him. I have found nothing very shocking in those books of his
which I have read, and I certainly have not thought it necessary to
extend my acquaintance in search of it. He seems to have been a
quarrelsome sort of person, for he got into trouble not only with the
moralists, not only with the Restoration government, but with the
Academy, which he attacked; and he is rather fond of "scratchy"
references such as "On peut mériter encore quelque intérêt sans être un
Amadis, un Vic-van-Vor [poor Fergus!], un Han, ou un Vampire." But his
intrinsic merit as a novelist did not at first seem to me great. A book
worse _charpenté_ than that just quoted from, _L'Artiste et le Soldat_,
I have seldom read. The first of its five volumes is entirely occupied
with the story (not badly, though much too voluminously told) of a
captain who has lost his leg at Waterloo, and though tended by a pretty
and charming daughter, is in great straits till helped by a mysterious
Black Nun, who loves _les militaires_, and has been entrusted with money
to help them by the Empress Josephine. The second, "without with your
leave or by your leave" of any kind,[71] jumps back to give us, under a
different name for a long time, the early history of this captain, which
occupies two whole volumes and part of a third (the fourth of the book).
Then another abrupt shift introduces us to the "artist," the younger
brother, who bears a _third_ name, itself explained by another jump back
of great length. Then a lover turns up for Suzanne, the captain's
daughter, and we end the fifth volume with a wedding procession in ten
distinct carriages.
[Sidenote: _Ludovica._]
_Ludovica ou Le Testament de Waterloo_, a much later book, was, the
author tells us, finished in June 1830 under the fiendish tyranny of
"all-powerful bigots, implacable Jesuits, and restored marquises"; but
the glorious days of July came; a new dynasty, "jeune, forte, sincère"
(Louis Philippe "young and sincere"!), was on the throne; the ship of
state entered the vast sea of liberty; France revived; all Europe seemed
to start from its shroud--and _Ludovica_ got published. But the author's
joy was a little dashed by the sense that, unlike its half-score of
forerunners, the book had not to battle with the bigots and the Jesuits
and the "restored marquises"--the last a phrase which has considerable
charms of suggestion.
All this, of course, has its absurd side; but it shows, by way of
redemption, that Ducange, in one of the many agreeable phrases of his
country, "did not go to it with a dead hand." He seems, indeed, to have
been a thoroughly "live" person, if not a very wise one: and _Ludovica_
begins with a rousing situation--a crowd and block in the streets of
Paris, brought about by nobody quite knows what, but ending in a
pistol-shot, a dead body, the flight of the assassin, the dispersal of
the crowd by the _gendarmes_, and finally the discovery by a young
painter, who has just returned from seeing his mother at Versailles, of
a very youthful, very pretty, and very terrified girl, speaking an
unknown tongue, and not understanding French, who has fled for refuge
into a dark alley ending in a flight of cellar-steps. It is to the point
that among the confused cries attending the disturbance have been some
about a girl being carried off.
It must be admitted that this is not unpromising, and I really think
_Ludovica_ (with a caution as to the excessive prolixity of its kind and
time) might be recommended to lovers of the detective novel, of which it
is a rather early sample. I have confessed, in a later chapter, that
this particular "wanity" is not my favourite; but I found myself getting
through M. Victor Ducange's six volumes--burdened rather than ballasted
as they are by political outbursts, rather "thorn-crackling" attempts at
humour, and the like--with considerably less effort than has sometimes
attended similar excursions. If they had been three instead of six I
hardly think I should have felt the collar at all. The
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/27872