The Man.
Champfleury--novelist, dramatist, archaeologist, humourist, and literary
historian--belonged to a later generation than that of Petrus Borel and
Philothee O'Neddy; but he could remember the production of _les
Burgraves_, and was able of his own personal knowledge to laugh at the
melancholy speech of poor Celestin Nanteuil--the famous 'Il n'y a plus de
jeunesse' of a man grown old and incredulous and apathetic before his
time: the lament over a yesterday already a hundred years behind. He had
lived in the Latin quarter; he had dined with Flicoteaux, and listened to
the orchestras of Habeneck and Musard; he had heard the chimes at
midnight with Baudelaire and Murger, hissed the tragedies of Ponsard,
applauded Deburau and Rouviere, and seen the rise and fall of Courbet and
Dupont. If he was not of the giants he was of their immediate
successors, and he had seen them actually at work. He had hacked for
Balzac, and read romantic prose at Victor Hugo's; he had lived so near
the red waistcoat of Theophile Gautier as to dare to go up and down in
Paris (under the inspiration of the artist of _la Femme qui taille la
Soupe_) in 'un habit en bouracan vert avec col a la Marat, un gilet de
couleur bachique, et une culotte en drap d'un jaune assez malseant,'
together with 'une triomphante cravate de soie jaune'--a vice of
Baudelaire's inventing--and 'un feutre ras dans le gout de la coiffure de
Camille Desmoulins.' And having seen for himself, he could judge for
himself as well. From first to last he showed himself to be out of
sympathy with the ambitions and effects of romanticism. He was born a
humourist and an observer, and he became a 'realist' as soon as he began
to write.
The Writer.
His work is an antipodes not only of _Hernani_ and _Notre-Dame_ but of
_Sarrazine_ and _la Cousine Bette_ and _Beatrix_ as well. For the
commonplace types and incidents, the everyday passions and fortunes, of
the _Aventures de Mariette_ and the _Mascarade de la Vie Parisienne_
represent a reaction not alone against the sublimities and the
extravagance of Hugo but against the heroic aggrandisement of things
trivial of Balzac as well. True, they deal with kindred subjects, and
they purport to be a record of life as it is and not of life as it ought
to be. But the pupil's point of view is poles apart from the master's;
his intention, his ambition, his inspiration, belong to another order of
ideas. He contents himself with observing and noting and reflecting;
with making prose prosaic and adding sobriety and plainness to a plain
and sober story; with being merely curious and intelligent; with using
experience not as an intoxicant but as a staple of diet; with considering
fact not as the raw material of inspiration but as inspiration itself.
Between an artist of this sort--pedestrian, good-tempered, touched with
malice, a little cynical--and the noble desperadoes of 1830 there could
be little sympathy; and there seems no reason why the one should be the
others' historian, and none why, if their historian he should be, his
history should be other than partial and narrow--than at best an
achievement in special pleading. But Champfleury's was a personality
apart. His master quality was curiosity; he was interested in
everything, and he was above all things interested in men and women; he
had a liberal mind and no prejudices; he had the scientific spirit and
the scientific intelligence, if he sometimes spoke with the voice of the
humourist and in the terms of the artist in words; and his studies in
romanticism are far better literature than his experiments in fiction.