To most American readers of fiction I fancy that M. Ludovic Halévy is
known chiefly, if not solely, as the author of that most charming of
modern French novels, _The Abbé Constantin_. Some of these readers may
have disliked this or that novel of M. Zola's because of its bad moral,
and this or that novel of M. Ohnet's because of its bad taste, and all
of them were delighted to discover in M. Halévy's interesting and
artistic work a story written by a French gentleman for young ladies.
Here and there a scoffer might sneer at the tale of the old French
priest and the young women from Canada as innocuous and saccharine; but
the story of the good Abbé Constantin and of his nephew, and of the girl
the nephew loved in spite of her American millions--this story had the
rare good fortune of pleasing at once the broad public of indiscriminate
readers of fiction and the narrower circle of real lovers of literature.
Artificial the atmosphere of the tale might be, but it was with an
artifice at once delicate and delicious; and the tale itself won its way
into the hearts of the women of America as it had into the hearts of the
women of France.
There is even a legend--although how solid a foundation it may have in
fact I do not dare to discuss--there is a legend that the lady-superior
of a certain convent near Paris was so fascinated by _The Abbé
Constantin_, and so thoroughly convinced of the piety of its author,
that she ordered all his other works, receiving in due season the lively
volumes wherein are recorded the sayings and doings of Monsieur and
Madame Cardinal, and of the two lovely daughters of Monsieur and Madame
Cardinal. To note that these very amusing studies of certain aspects of
life in a modern capital originally appeared in that extraordinary
journal, _La Vie Parisienne_--now sadly degenerate--is enough to
indicate that they are not precisely what the good lady-superior
expected to receive. We may not say that _La Famille Cardinal_ is one of
the books every gentleman's library should be without; but to appreciate
its value requires a far different knowledge of the world and of its
wickedness than is needed to understand _The Abbé Constantin_.
Yet the picture of the good priest and the portraits of the little
Cardinals are the work of the same hand, plainly enough. In both of
these books, as in _Criquette_ (M. Halévy's only other novel), as in _A
Marriage for Love_, and the twoscore other short stories he has written
during the past thirty years, there are the same artistic qualities, the
same sharpness of vision, the same gentle irony, the same constructive
skill, and the same dramatic touch. It is to be remembered always that
the author of _L'Abbé Constantin_ is also the half-author of "Froufrou"
and of "Tricoche et Cacolet," as well as of the librettos of "La Belle
Hélène" and of "La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein."
In the two novels, as in the twoscore short stories and sketches--the
_contes_ and the _nouvelles_ which are now spring-like idyls and now
wintry episodes, now sombre etchings and now gayly-colored pastels--in
all the works of the story-teller we see the firm grasp of the
dramatist. The characters speak for themselves; each reveals himself
with the swift directness of the personages of a play. They are not
talked about and about, for all analysis has been done by the playwright
before he rings up the curtain in the first paragraph. And the story
unrolls itself, also, as rapidly as does a comedy. The movement is
straightforward. There is the cleverness and the ingenuity of the
accomplished dramatist, but the construction has the simplicity of the
highest skill. The arrangement of incidents is so artistic that it seems
inevitable; and no one is ever moved to wonder whether or not the tale
might have been better told in different fashion.
Nephew of the composer of "La Juive"--an opera not now heard as often as
it deserves, perhaps--and son of a playwright no one of whose
productions now survives, M. Halévy grew up in the theatre. At fourteen
he was on the free-list of the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and the Odéon.
After he left school and went into the civil service his one wish was to
write plays, and so to be able to afford to resign his post. In the
civil service he had an inside view of French politics, which gave him a
distaste for the mere game of government without in any way impairing
the vigor of his patriotism; as is proved by certain of the short stones
dealing with the war of 1870 and the revolt of the Paris Communists. And
while he did his work faithfully, he had spare hours to give to
literature. He wrote plays and stories, and they were rejected. The
manager of the Odéon declared that one early play of M. Halévy's was
exactly suited to the Gymnase, and the manager of the Gymnase protested
that it was exactly suited to the Odéon. The editor of a daily journal
said that one early tale of M. Halévy's was too brief for a novel, and
the editor of a weekly paper said that it was too long for a short
story.
In time, of course, his luck turned; he had plays performed and stories
published; and at last he met M. Henri Meilhac, and entered on that
collaboration of nearly twenty years' duration to which we owe
"Froufrou" and "Tricoche et Cacolet," on the one hand, and on the other
the books of Offenbach's most brilliant operas--"Barbebleue," for
example, and "La Périchole." When this collaboration terminated, shortly
before M. Halévy wrote _The Abbé Constantin_, he gave up writing for the
stage. The training of the playwright he could not give up, if he
would, nor the intimacy with the manners and customs of the people who
live, move, and have their being on the far side of the curtain.
Obviously M. Halévy is fond of the actors and the actresses with whom he
spent the years of his manhood. They appear again and again in his
tales; and in his treatment of them there is never anything
ungentlemanly as there was in M. Jean Richepin's recent volume of
theatrical sketches. M. Halévy's liking for the men and women of the
stage is deep; and wide is his knowledge of their changing moods. The
young Criquette and the old Karikari and the aged Dancing-master--he
knows them all thoroughly, and he likes them heartily, and he
sympathizes with them cordially. Indeed, nowhere can one find more
kindly portraits of the kindly player-folk than in the writings of this
half-author of "Froufrou"; it is as though the successful dramatist felt
ever grateful towards the partners of his toil, the companions of his
struggles. He is not blind to their manifold weaknesses, nor is he the
dupe of their easy emotionalism, but he is tolerant of their failings,
and towards them, at least, his irony is never mordant.
Irony is one of M. Halévy's chief characteristics, perhaps the chiefest.
It is gentle when he deals with the people of the stage--far gentler
then than when he is dealing with the people of Society, with
fashionable folk, with the aristocracy of wealth. When he is telling us
of the young loves of millionaires and of million-heiresses, his touch
may seem caressing, but for all its softness the velvet paw has claws
none the less. It is amusing to note how often M. Halévy has chosen to
tell the tale of love among the very rich. The heroine of _The Abbé
Constantin_ is immensely wealthy, as we all know, and immensely wealthy
are the heroines of _Princesse_, of _A Grand Marriage,_ and of _In the
Express_.[A] Sometimes the heroes and the heroines are not only
immensely wealthy, they are also of the loftiest birth; such, for
instance, are the young couple whose acquaintance we make in the pages
of _Only a Waltz_.
[Footnote A: Perhaps the present writer will be forgiven if he wishes to
record here that _In the Express (Par le Rapide)_ was published in Paris
only towards the end of 1892, while a tale not wholly unlike it, _In the
Vestibule Limited_, was published in New York in the spring of 1891.]
There is no trace or taint of snobbery in M. Halévy's treatment of all
this magnificence; there is none of the vulgarity which marks the pages
of _Lothair_, for example; there is no mean admiration of mean things.
There is, on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging satire. He lets
us see that all this luxury is a little cloying and perhaps not a little
enervating. He suggests (although he takes care never to say it) that
perhaps wealth and birth are not really the best the world can offer.
The amiable egotism of the hero of _In the Express_, and the not
unkindly selfishness of the heroine of that most Parisian love-story,
are set before us without insistence, it is true, but with an irony so
keen that even he who runs as he reads may not mistake the author's real
opinion of the characters he has evoked.
To say this is to say that M. Halévy's irony is delicate and playful.
There is no harshness in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We do not
find in his pages any of the pessimism which is perhaps the dominant
characteristic of the best French fiction of our time. To M. Halévy, as
to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need not be
taken sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems still enjoyable, as it
must to most of those who have a vivid sense of humor. He is not
disillusioned utterly, he is not reduced to the blankness of despair as
are so many of the disciples of Flaubert, who are cast into the outer
darkness, and who hopelessly revolt against the doom they have brought
on themselves.
Indeed, it is Merimée that M. Halévy would hail as his master, and not
Flaubert, whom most of his fellow French writers of fiction follow
blindly. Now, while the author of _Salamnbo_ was a romanticist turned
sour, the author of _Carmen_ was a sentimentalist sheathed in irony. To
Gustave Flaubert the world was hideously ugly, and he wished it
strangely and splendidly beautiful, and he detested it the more because
of his impossible ideal. To Prosper Merimée the world was what it is,
to be taken and made the best of, every man keeping himself carefully
guarded. Like Merimée, M. Halévy is detached, but he is not
disenchanted. His work is more joyous than Merimée's, if not so vigorous
and compact, and his delight in it is less disguised. Even in the
Cardinal sketches there is nothing that leaves an acrid after-taste,
nothing corroding--as there is not seldom in the stronger and sterner
short stories of Maupassant.
More than Maupassant or Flaubert or Merimée, is M. Halévy a Parisian.
Whether or not the characters of his tale are dwellers in the capital,
whether or not the scene of his story is laid in the city by the Seine,
the point of view is always Parisian. The _Circus Charger_ did his duty
in the stately avenues of a noble country-place, and _Blacky_ performed
his task near a rustic water-fall; but the men who record their
intelligent actions are Parisians of the strictest sect. Even in the
patriotic pieces called forth by the war of 1870, in the _Insurgent_ and
in the _Chinese Ambassador_, it is the siege of Paris and the struggle
of the Communists which seem to the author most important. His style
even, his swift and limpid prose--the prose which somehow corresponds to
the best _vers de société_ in its brilliancy and buoyancy--is the style
of one who lives at the centre of things. Cardinal Newman once said that
while Livy and Tacitus and Terence and Seneca wrote Latin, Cicero wrote
Roman; so while M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet on the
other, may write French, M. Halévy writes Parisian.