WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
BY PROF. RICHARD BURTON, OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
A FRONTISPIECE AND NUMEROUS
OTHER PORTRAITS WITH
DESCRIPTIVE NOTES BY
OCTAVE UZANNE
P. F. COLLIER & SON
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1902
BY D. APPLETON & COMPANY
*ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN*
Fashions change in literature, but certain things abide. There may be
disputes from generation to generation, even from decade to decade, as
to what is aesthetic, or what is beautiful; there is less as to what is
human. The work of the French writers, whose duality is quite lost in
the long-time association of their names for the purposes of story
making, seems at the least to make this claim to outlast its authors: it
is delightfully saturated with humanity.
And this humanity is of the sort that, since it can be understood of all
men, is therefore very widely acceptable. It is well to emphasize the
point in an attempt to explain the popularity of Erckmann-Chatrian,
immediate or remote. There are other reasons, to be sure: but this one
is at the door, knocking to be heard. But to speak of the essential
humanity of these books is not to deny or ignore their art; that they
have in abundance--quite as truly indeed as the work of your most
insistent advocate of "art for art"; but it is art for life's sake. In
the best sense, the verisimilitude of the Erckmann-Chatrian stories is
admirable, impressive. They are, as a rule, exquisitely in key. They
produce a cumulative effect by steadily, unobtrusively clinging to a
single view-point, that of the speaker who is an eye-witness, and the
result is a double charm--that of reality and that of illusion. One
sees life, not through the eyes of the authors, but through the eyes of
the characters; hence the frequent setting-forth of principles is
relieved from didacticism by the careful way in which the writers
refrain from expressing their own opinion. So artistic are they that
they even indulge in the delicate ruse of opposing the views which are
really their own, thereby producing a still stronger effect of
fair-mindedness and detachment.
Yet, as the world knows, in the most justly famed of their books, the
so-called National Novels, it is their purpose to preach against war;
they are early advocates of the principles of the Peace Congress at The
Hague, forerunners, in their own fashion, of the ideas expressed in art
and literature by later men like Tolstoy and Verestchagin.
The local colour--one still uses the phrase as convenient--is remarkable
for its sympathetic fidelity; the style well-nigh a model of prose whose
purpose it is to depict in homely yet picturesque terms the passage of
great events, seen by humble, it may be Philistine, folk, and hence not
seen _couleur de rose_. When a heartfelt sympathy for average
human-kind rises to the surface of the author's feeling, some candid,
cordial phrase is ever found to express it.
The work of Erckmann-Chatrian, voluminous as it is, can be easily
classified: it mainly consists of the idyl and the picture of war;
_L'lllustre Docteur Matheus_, their first success, happily illustrates
the former _genre_; any one of the half dozen tales making up the
National Novel series may be taken to represent the latter. Both veins
turned out to be gold mines, so rich were they in the free-milling ore
of popular favour. Such stories as _L'Ami Fritz_ and _The Brigadier
Frederick_ are types of the two kinds of fiction which panned out most
richly also for the world. In the idyl dealing with homely provincial
life--the life of their home province--these authors are, of a truth,
masters. The story is naught, the way of telling it, all that breeds
atmosphere and innuendo, is everything. In _L'Ami Fritz_ the plot may
be told in a sentence: 'tis the wooing and winning of a country lass,
daughter of a farmer, by a well-to-do jovial bachelor of middle age in a
small town; _voila tout_; yet the tale makes not only delicious reading,
it leaves a permanent impression of pleasure--one is fain to re-read it.
It is rich in human nature, in a comfortable sense of the good things of
the earth; food and drink, soft beds, one's seat at the tavern, spring
sunlight, and the sound of a fiddle playing dance tunes at the fair:
and, on a higher plane, of the genial joys of comradeship and the stanch
belief in one's native land. When the subtler passion of love comes in
upon this simple pastoral scene, the gradual discovery of Friend Fritz
that the sentiment he has always ridiculed has him at last in its
clutch, is portrayed with a sly unction, a kindly humour overlying an
unmistakable tenderness of heart, which give the tale great charm.
Sweetness and soundness are fundamentals of such literature.
This tale is a type of them all, though deservedly the best liked. Love
of nature and of human nature, a knowledge of the little, significant
things that make up life, an exquisite realism along with a sort of
temperamental optimism which assumes good of men and women--these blend
in the provincial stories in such a way that one's sense of art is
charmed while in no less degree one's sense of life is quickened and
comforted. Erckmann-Chatrian introduced to French readers the genuine
Alsatian, not the puppet of the vaudeville stage. Their books are,
among other things, historical documents. From their sketches and tales
better than in any other way one can gain an understanding of the
present German provinces of Alsace and Lorraine during a period
stretching from the Revolution to and after the Franco-Prussian war.
The Alsatian in their hands is seen distinctly as one of the most
interesting of Gallic provincial types.
The attitude of Dr. Matheus, that charming physician savant, who is in
love with science, with the great world of scholarship and literary
fame, and so is fain to leave his simple countryside in quest of
renown--in his final return to his home as, after all, the best spot on
earth, typifies the teaching of these authors in all their works. The
tale is a sort of allegory, veiling a sermon on the value of the
"fireside clime" of home hearths and hearts. Nor must it be forgotten
that these writers cultivated the short story or tale with vigour and
success; _The Dean's Watch_, printed in the present volume, is an
excellent example of the _genre_. Erckmann-Chatrian, especially in the
earlier years of their conjoined labour, wrote numerous pieces of short
fiction which abounded in gruesome adventure and situations more or less
startling--witness the Heidelberg murder story. They possessed a
considerable talent for the detective fiction brought to a fine art by
Poe and worthily carried on in our day by Conan Doyle. Yet even here
the work has a higher value--perhaps the highest--for the thoughtful
reader in that it affords a faithful transcript of German life in time
gone by; the authors, although so circumscribed in space, are in some
sort historians of piquant social conditions. It is commonly said that
your true short-story writer is not a novelist, nor the other way about.
But _The Dean's Watch_, and a dozen other tales that could be named, are
little master-pieces not to be omitted in any just, comprehensive survey
of these fecund authors.
The National Novels differ from these simpler tales in more than theme
and the fuller body and greater variety they possess; the authors' aim
in the series sets the books apart from the other stories. This group
is made up of tales that fairly may be called "purpose fiction," in the
present cant. Erckmann-Chatrian agree to hate war and to justify their
hate by writing a succession of books portraying its horrors, always
from the disadvantage-point of actual humble participants and onlookers,
so that the plea shall appear to be at once fairly made and yet be
overwhelming in effect. Of the result, surely it may be said of the
National Novels that if they are not magnificent, they are war--war
stript of its glory, reduced to the one grim denominator of human
misery.
The successive national struggles of France towards that peaceful
Republicanism which has now endured long enough to induce the outside
world into a belief that this volatile, fiery people will never revert
to any form of monarchy, are sketched so graphically as to give a clear
comprehension of their history. Nowhere is the artistry of the authors
better exhibited than in the skill with which, by placing their own
position in the mouths of others and by means of their remarkable power
in characterization, they rob special pleading of that didacticism which
is so deadly an enemy of good fiction. To secure an effect of
verisimilitude no method of story-telling is perhaps so useful as that
in which one of the characters speaks in proper person. What the author
loses in omniscience, he more than gains in the impression of reality.
This method is admirable in the hands of Erckmann-Chatrian, who
consistently use it in their fiction. Do the writers of any other
nation, one is tempted to query, offer such frequent examples of good
taste in this avoidance of the too didactic as do the French? In some
English hands so strenuous an attempt would have seemed heavily
intolerable. Here one forgets all but the naturalness of word and action
in the characters; and the lesson sinks the deeper into the mind.
In justice both to our authors and the present-day temper, it may be
declared that the Twentieth Century is likely to be more sympathetic to
their particular thesis than was their own time. There is a popular
treatment of war which bedecks it in a sort of stage tinsel, to the
hiding of its gaunt figure and cadaverous face. Some of Scott's
romances are of this order. Zola, with his epic sweep in _Le Debacle_,
does not disguise the horrors of the Franco-Prussian struggle. Yet epic
it is, and in a sense, romantic; handled by a poet whose imagination is
aroused by the magnitude and movement of his theme. Erckmann-Chatrian
set themselves squarely against this conception; they reduce the
splendid trappings and _elan_ of battle to its true hideousness.
In order to depict the inevitable, wretched results of the killing of
men for purposes of political ambition, or national aggrandizement,
Erckmann-Chatrian, as in their provincial idyls, cling steadily to the
position of the average man, who cannot for the life of him see the use
of leaving all that is pleasant and dear, of fighting, marching,
sickening, and dying for the sake of a cause he does not understand or
believe in, as the slave of men whom he perhaps despises. Joseph Berta,
the lame conscript, the shrewd, kindly Jew Mathieu, the common-sense
miller Christian Weber, protagonists in three well-known stories, each
distinct from the other, are all alike in their preference for peace
over war, for the joy of home and the quiet prosecution of their
respective affairs, instead of the dubious pleasures of siege and
campaign.
There is a superbly _bourgeois_ flavour to it all. Yet one feels its
force, its sound humanity. The republicanism of these writers is of the
broadest kind. They hate Bonaparte or Bourbon, because in their belief
either house stands for tyranny and corruption; while Napoleon is their
special detestation, the later Empire is vigorously assailed because it,
too, is opposed to the interests of the people. Napoleon III., whom in
high satiric scorn they pillory as "The Honest Man," comes in for savage
condemnation, since he again brings woe upon the working folk, in
pursuit of his own selfish ends. And underneath all, like a
ground-swell can be felt a deep and genuine, if homely, patriotism.
Human nature, as it is witnessed in the pages of Erckmann-Chatrian, is
not hard to decipher. It lacks the subtlety of the modern psychologue,
miscalled a novelist. Humanity for them is made up of two great
contrasted elements--the people and the enemies of the people; the
latter made up of kings, politicians, government leaders, and the
general world of bureaucracy, who fleece the former, "that vast flock
which they were always accustomed to shear, and which they call the
people." But the people themselves, how veritable and charming they
are! Not a whit are they idealized; the fictional folk of these writers
are always recognisable; they give us that pleasure of recognition which
Mr. James points out as one of the principal virtues of modern
novel-making. The title of one of the well-known books, _The History of
a Man of the People_, might almost stand as a description of their
complete works. There is no sentimentalizing of average humanity; none
of the Auerbach or George Sand prettification of country life.
Erckmann-Chatrian are as truthful as a later realist like Thomas Hardy.
The family life in _The Brigadier Frederick_ is almost lyrically set
forth, until it seems, mayhap, too good for human nature's daily food;
but similar scenes in other stories have a Dutch-like fidelity in their
transcripts of the coarser, less lovely human traits; recall the wife
and daughter of Weber, for example, or the well-nigh craven fear of
Joseph Berta in _The Plebiscite_, who seems half a poltroon until he is
seasoned in a Napoleonic campaign; the psychologic treatment here
suggesting Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_. The blend of
grim realism and heroic patriotism in the figure of the old sergeant in
_The Plebiscite_ is a fine illustration of that truth to both the shell
and kernel of life which Erckmann-Chatrian maintain throughout their
work.
On the whole, then, it is a comfortable, enheartening conception of Man
they present. Poor theologians they would make; men are by nature good
and kind; only warped by cruel misuse and bad masters, as in war. "Ah,
it is a great joy to love and to be loved, the only one joy of life,"
exclaims the Jew Mathieu in _The Blockade_. This simple yet sufficient
creed pervades their thought. Again and again is it declared that
whatever the apparent evil, so that the faithful-hearted and devout of
the world, like Father Frederick, lose courage for the moment, the fault
is with men upon earth, not in heaven. High over all, God reigns. A
spirit of kindliness, quiet, unheroic, but deep and tender, enswathes
the more serious part of these novels like an atmosphere; and if the
mood shifts to indignation, it is the righteous indignation of the good
in the face of that which is wrong and evil. And these better human
attributes are most commonly found in the provinces; the city, as a
rule, spells sin. The touch of mother earth brings purity and strength.
"La mauvaise race qui trompe," declares the Brigadier Frederick,
"n'existe pas au pays; elle est toujours venue d'ailleurs." One smiles
at this, but it offends not nor seems absurd. Its very prejudice is
lovable.
Perhaps none of the stories make so moving an appeal against war as _The
Brigadier Frederick_. Its sadness is the most heartfelt, its realism the
most truthful, and hence effective. Nor in any other book of the War
Series does the French character shine more clearly in its typical
virtues. Family love and faith, _camaraderie_, humble devoutness in
religion, and earnest patriotism are constantly made manifest in this
fine tale. Instead of conducting their hero through the spectacular
scenes of military campaigns, the authors depict only the stay-at-home
aspects of war, which because of their lack of strut and epic colour
are, as a rule, overlooked, and which yet illustrate far better than the
most Zolaesque details the wretched _milieu_ and after effects of a
great national struggle. Frederick, the old guard of the Alsatian
forest domains, loses in turn his post, his son-in-law, wife, and
daughter, and at last his native land; and through all his misery
remains proudly a Frenchman, who refuses to declare allegiance to the
German invaders; and, in being true to his convictions, furnishes a
noble example of a man who, by the moral test, rises superior to any
fate, his head being
"bloody but unbowed."
Again, sad as the story is, it differs from too much of the tragedy of
current literature; it is sad for the sake of a purpose, not for
sadness' sake. Alleviation is offered the reader from the beginning, in
that he knows that Frederick himself has survived all his woes, since he
is telling his tale to a friend in after years. These qualities make
the work wholesome and beautiful, sound both for art and life.
Erckmann-Chatrian draw strength from mother-soil. Their stories are laid
in Alsace-Lorraine, or at least it is that debatable land whence the
characters go only to return for the peaceful denouement, which these
authors, in the good old-fashioned style, like to offer their readers.
The popularity of such writers brings us back, happily, to that
untechnical valuation of literature which insists, first of all, in
regarding it as an exposition of human experience. Their books bear
translation especially well because there is something in them besides
incommunicable flavours of style, though style is not wanting; namely,
vital folk, vivid scenes, significant happenings. Theirs is the
misleading simplicity of method and manner which hides technique of a
rare and admirable kind. Allowing for all exaggeration for altered
ideals in fiction, and for the waning of interest in the historical
circumstances which they portray, there remain such elements of
permanent appeal as to give their books far more than a transient worth.
For more than forty years, Erckmann-Chatrian wrote as one man; their
collaboration was, in effect, a chemical union. No example in
literature better illustrates the possibility of the merging of
individualities for the purposes of artistic unity. The double work of
the English Besant and Rice is by no means so important nor do they
stand and fall together in the same sense; much of Besant's typical
fiction being produced after his partner's death. In the case of the
most famed collaboration of older days, that of the dramatists Beaumont
and Fletcher, the union was more intimate. But the early death of
Beaumont, the consideration that he wrote less than half the plays
conventionally attributed to their joint authorship, and the additional
consideration that some of the best and most enjoyable dramas associated
with these great names--_The Loyal Subject_, to mention but one--are
unquestionably of Fletcher's sole composition, make the
Beaumont-Fletcher alliance not so perfect an example of literary
collaboration as is offered by Erckmann-Chatrian. When Chatrian died in
1890, it was as if, for literary purposes, both died. Their work had a
unity testifying to a remarkable if not unique congeniality in
temperament, view and aim, as well as to a fraternal unity which--alas!
the irony of all human friendships--was dispelled when their quarrel,
just before the death of Chatrian, put an end to an association so
fruitful and famous.
From the very nature of fiction in contrast with drama, it would seem as
if collaboration in stage literature were more likely to yield happy
results than in the case of the novel. Here, however, is an example
setting aside _a priori_ reasoning; seemingly "helpless each without the
other," the final breach in their personal relations would seem to have
written Finis to their literary endeavour. Yet Erckmann survived for
nearly a decade and wrote military stories, which in tone and temper
carried on the traditions of the two men. But we may easily detect in
this last effort the penalty of their literary severance: the loss of
the craftsmanship of Chatrian was a loss indeed. Nor is this subjective
guess-work of the critic; Erckmann himself described nearly twenty years
ago the respective parts played by the two in their literary work. He
declared that after a story had been blocked out and thoroughly talked
over between them, he did all the actual composition. Then was it
Chatrian's business to point out faults, to suggest, here a change in
perspective, there less emphasis upon a subsidiary character, or here
again, a better handling of proportion--in short, to do all the
retouching that looks to artistry. And Erckmann goes on to testify in
good set terms how necessary his collaborator was to the final perfected
form of the story; how much it must have suffered without his sense of
technique. It would appear from this that the senior member of the firm
did what is commonly called the creative work of composition, the junior
filling the role of critic. From France one hears that Erckmann was
very German in taste and sympathy (_mirabile dictu!_ in view of so much
of what he wrote); Chatrian, French to the core, a man who insisted on
residing on the French side of the national line, who reared his sons to
be French soldiers; whereas Erckmann in later years hobnobbed with the
Germans, members of his family, in fact, inter-marrying with his ancient
enemies.
Indeed, this last act of their personal history has its disillusionment.
But after all, men shall be judged in their works. Whatever their
private quarrellings, their respective parts in literary labour, their
attributes or national leanings, the world, justly caring most in the
long run for the fiction they wrote, will continue to think of them as
provincial patriots, lovers of their country, and Frenchmen of the
French, not only in the tongue they used, but in those deep-lying
characteristics and qualities which make their production worthily
Gallic in the nobler implication of the word.