At the opening ceremony of a new free library at Lambeth in London, not
many weeks ago, Sir John Lubbock is reported to have made the following
remarks regarding fiction:--
'Sir J. Lubbock, in moving a vote of thanks to the Prince of
Wales and the Princess Louise, remarked that the free libraries
of London now contained more than 250,000 books, whilst last
year over 100,000 people borrowed volumes, and on more than
2,500,000 occasions books were used in the libraries
themselves. It was a fallacy to suppose that public libraries
were only used by novel readers. The proportion of works of
fiction used in the Camberwell libraries was only 65 per cent.,
and, of course, in this percentage were included nearly all the
books used by children. It must also be borne in mind that it
took a great deal longer to read a history or a work of science
than it did to run through a story. Under these circumstances
he thought it might fairly be said that the people of London
exercised a very good choice in the books they read. He himself
should be very sorry to undervalue novels. Even nonsense was
extremely refreshing, and he thought the English people had
learnt more of their history from novels and from Shakespeare's
plays than from books of history.'
In these few sentences there are embraced the views entertained in
general by the English nation with regard to the art of fiction. By the
English nation it is, and probably always will be, regarded as on a par
with chromo-lithography, the use of the kodak, and tight-rope dancing.
'Even nonsense is refreshing,' says this kind defender of romance. He
might have added that this depends very much on the character of the
nonsense; there is dull nonsense, strained nonsense, self-conscious
nonsense, vulgar nonsense, which is duller than a dull sermon and
heavier than heavy bread; the nonsense which dilates and delights the
heart of the coarse and common fool, is as a stagnant and stinking pond
to the cultured mind; and true nonsense, _i.e._, _jeux d'esprit_,
caricatures, parodies, 'exquisite fooling,' does not come under the head
of novels at all.
Someone had apparently been objecting to the creation of free libraries
on the score that they were chiefly used by readers of fiction, and in
support of such libraries Sir John Lubbock (not venturing to make so
heterodox an assertion as that the perusal of fiction _per se_ is
valuable and desirable) pleads that only sixty-five per cent. of the
books borrowed were novels, and refers to the rapidity with which a
novel can be 'run through,' as he phrases it, and proceeds, as an
excuse for the perusal of fiction, to state that the English public
chiefly derives its knowledge of history from novels and from
Shakespeare's plays. This declaration, which is enough to make Mr
Freeman turn in his grave, and Mr Froude writhe in his professorial
chair, is, I believe, based on an exact truth, but it never appears to
occur to the speaker that while the history to be learned from fiction
and the drama is not of the purest kind, the fine art of an admirable
book, as of an admirable play, contains many another lesson more
valuable than even those of correct history to the reader who is capable
of assimilating and appreciating it.
Sir John Lubbock kindly adds that he should be 'very sorry to undervalue
novels.' Sweet and gracious condescension! He would be sorry to
'undervalue' Boccaccio, Cervantes, Guerrazzi, Theophile Gautier,
Merimee, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, Walter Scott, Fielding, Octave
Feuillet, Georges Sand, and Bulwer Lytton! Admirable benevolence! A
treatise on the ways of ants or bees must, of course, rank as an
infinitely higher work than a mere study of the manners, characters, and
passions of mankind. To peruse the former work is education; to read the
latter work is recreation, not absolutely injurious, perhaps, but
scarcely beneficial. Sir John Lubbock on an ant-hill has the sublimity
of the scientist: Alphonse Daudet on human nature is a mere trumpery
trifler.
It does not appear even to occur to Sir John Lubbock that a fine novel
contains intellectual qualities of the highest kind, and combines in
itself the widest effects and the most delicate minutiae of creative
art. A fine novel should be no more 'run through' than the sculptures of
the Vatican or the pictures of the Uffizi should be run through in
ignorance and haste: common readers, like common tourists, may do so,
but to do so is as gross and unpardonable an insult to the book as it is
to the sculptures and the paintings.
Reflect but a moment upon all the divers and numerous qualities which
are of necessity existent in the creator of a fine novel before it can
be produced; not only imagination but wit, not only wit but scholarship,
not only scholarship but fancy, not only fancy but discrimination,
observation, knowledge of the passions, sympathy with the most opposite
temperaments, the power to call up character from the void, as the
sculptor creates figures from the clay, and, for amalgamating,
condensing, and vivifying all these talents, the mastery of an exquisite
subtlety, force, and eloquence in language. All these various gifts must
be united in one writer before a fine novel can be produced; and when it
is produced it requires (to be duly estimated) as cultured and as
respectful a study of it as an educated traveller would take to the
Vatican or to the Uffizi.
I have derived month by month, as it has appeared in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, the most delicate and acute pleasure from the perusal of _Le
Secret du Precepteur_, yet it is a pleasure which can only be obtained
from it by a serene, leisurely, artistic enjoyment of its exquisite
literary qualities. It is like a wine of which the bouquet can only be
appreciated by educated palates. There is but little movement in it;
the incident is slight, the situations derive their fascination for the
reader not from their violence or their singularity, but from their
perfect probability, and from their psychological interests; and the
whole tone of it is kept carefully throughout to the smooth bantering
semi-_gouailleur_ tone of the opening recital. Ah, that style!--clear as
water, delicate, full of grace, limpid, harmonious, exquisite! It has
all the polished charm of the man of the world, and all the eloquence
and brilliancy of the artist. I have heard a great ambassador in a
beautiful tapestried chamber play the music of Schumann and Chopin and
Bach with admirable and sympathetic _maestria_; the style of Cherbuliez
reminds me of that _diplomat-virtuose_. We hear incessantly of the
magical style of Paul Bourget; but beside the style of Cherbuliez that
of Bourget is strained, tortuous, affected, artificial. The supreme
excellence of that of Cherbuliez is its consummate ease, like the ease
of a perfect manner in society. To employ all the resources of such a
style is as great a delight to the master of it as the use of the rapier
to the master of fencing, as the handling of the plastic clay to the
sculptor. To relate a narrative in such a style is as warm and full a
pleasure to the possessor of it as it is to the painter to create a
winter's night or summer's day, youth or age, dawn or moonlight, a dance
of nymphs, or a frolic of fauns, out of a few ground earths, a little
oil, and a square of canvas. But to appreciate it the reader of it must
bring with him some qualities on his own behalf.
There are in it none of those Anglicisms so irritating in the works of
Bourget and others, such as Henry for Henri, Francis for Francois,
'window' for 'fenetre,' 'le cab stoppait' for 'le fiacre s'arretait,'
and so many similar disfigurements of the most polished and elegant
language of the world. The temptation to use a foreign language is great
when its expressions are such as no other language can equally well
render. But who can think that 'cab' is better than 'fiacre,' or
'window' than 'fenetre'? The French of Cherbuliez is the French of an
elegant writer, of a man of the world, and is, beside that of 'les
jeunes,' as a pure and limpid river beside a crooked and choked-up
stream. Without their professorial jargon of psychology or their
strained analysis, which so greatly fatigues the reader and resembles
nothing so much as the efforts of a cyclist to run smoothly on a stony
road, _Le Secret du Precepteur_ is full of delicate and interesting
studies of the human mind and character. Its especial triumph is to
excite and retain the interest of the reader in a character which in the
hands of most writers would have been either insignificant or absurd.
The teller of the story is the preceptor himself, who, unlovely in face
and form, filling a subordinate and somewhat absurd position, frankly
confessing his own follies and errors, is yet the most lovable and the
most dignified of men; the intellectual grace of the scholar and the
philosopher wholly atoning for and effacing the inferiority of place and
the deformity of features. He tells us of his own extreme ugliness, so
that we are not deluded into thinking it a _belle laideur_, but accept
it as what he calls it, an ugliness which, coupled with poverty, would
scare all women away from him all the years of his life; but, despite
of it, we feel the irresistible charm of his personality, we admire his
tact, we adore his unselfishness, we are as delighted by his
self-restraint as by his courage and his will, and we take leave of him
with the regret which we feel when we part for an indefinite period from
a companion of the finest culture and the warmest sympathies. We regret
also that, like most unselfish persons, he is forced to be content with
the crumbs of happiness instead of its bread. It is strictly true to
life that he should receive no more; it proves the author a true artist
that he has been able to resist the temptation of giving so attractive a
character a happy and unnatural fate, and we who know how the awards of
life are proportioned, know that it is entirely in keeping both with art
and truth that the _bon chien_ should receive no more than the good dog
usually gets in recompense for his fidelity. We know that it could not
be otherwise; yet we regret the necessity for leaving the good dog with
his dry broken crusts.
I regard the extreme interest and attachment with which this character
inspires us as one of the greatest triumphs of fiction, because its
attraction is stripped of all the adventitious aids to interest which
accompany beauty, rank, or position. We have a plain, poor man, in a
paltry and invidious situation, who conquers all which is against him as
a hero of romance, and arrives at the highest place in the reader's
esteem and affection by mere force of natural dignity, excellence of
heart, and the irresistible superiority of wit and intellect. He is
throughout all his actions, moreover, entirely natural. It is difficult,
in reading his account of them, to believe that he is a fictitious
character; all that he does and says is so real, so human. No one who
reads _Terre Promise_ or _Coeur de Femme_ is ever for an instant
tempted to think that the characters ever did live or ever could have
lived; they are _cartonnages_, lay figures, draped in clothes from the
costume maker's, and moving in obedience to the hand of their
manipulator. But as Maupassant's Pierre et Jean are living, as Loti's
Gaud and Fatougay live, as Rod's Michael Teissier lives, as the
delicious Yette lives, so, and with even more vitality than they, the
tutor Tristan lives in this admirable novel. And all the people around
him live in this country house near Epernay, which is the scene of
nearly all his joys and sufferings. We wish, indeed, that this scene
never changed; so well does its landscape accord with the narrative,
that one wishes the unities could have been preserved to the end. One
regrets the change of venue when the story is carried to Paris. It is
perhaps probable that the end is not what was originally intended by
Cherbuliez.
It is a story which it is very difficult to end artistically. In point
of fact it is not ended at all; it is only broken off at a certain
crisis, and leaves the reader in the persuasion that Monique will have
many adventures, and her 'bon chien' and her husband many anxieties. The
fault in it, if fault there is, seems to me to be that, if this crisis
had been contemplated from the beginning, the character of Louis
Moufrin, extremely natural as far as it goes, should have been rendered
a little more heroic, so that more interest would have attached to his
transformation under the stings of jealousy. If this were not done the
_coup de pistolet_ should have been given, not by him, but by the
preceptor; indeed, since Tristan tells us early in his story that he is
a very fine pistol-shot, we are always expecting him to prove his skill
on someone, and one could wish that he had exercised it as he desired to
do on the odious coxcomb, Trigueres. The impression is irresistibly made
on the reader's mind that this was the _denouement_ originally
contemplated by the author, and it would have been one stronger and more
satisfactory. But perhaps he renounced it from the feeling that tragedy
as a climax would have jarred on the harmony of a book which is
throughout kept to the good-humoured and jesting tone of cultured
society.
It would take many pages to do justice to the other persons of the
novel; all are admirably drawn; there is only some exaggeration in that
of Madame Moufrin, _mere_. But the cheery and generous merchant Brogues,
the high-bred, high-born _devote_ who is his wife, the charming priest
Verlet, the shy, silent, tender-hearted and timid Moufrin, the
inimitable portrait of the learned, excellent and insufferable Sidonie,
and lastly, the entirely uncommon conception of the captious and
provoking _petite Japonaise_, who rules her faithful two-legged dog with
a rod of iron; all these are admirably pourtrayed, even if they yield in
importance to the central figure of the preceptor himself. The finest
and most complicated study of them all is that of Madame Brogues, with
her piety, her sensuality, her instinctive patrician revolt against the
monotony of a bourgeois interior, her complex and scornful nature, her
mingled indifference and tenderness for her daughters, the union of
touching maternal sadness and devotion to the superior claims of
_chiffons_, which traits are so admirably depicted in her last meeting
with her younger daughter Monique.
Cherbuliez has, it is plain to see, been much struck with the large
place which _chiffons_ occupy in the lives of women of the world, and
with the power of consolation which the interests of the toilette
possess for them. The mother and daughter are both extremely touched by
their accidental meeting (the first since the elopement of the former
and the marriage of the latter); but this meeting takes place in the
Exhibition building in Paris, and their emotions do not prevent them
from studying, discussing, and purchasing beautiful fabrics. It is
exactly the union of conflicting feelings which is really to be observed
in life: the mingling of deep sentiment and sincere regret with
interests of a totally different kind which appear trivial but are
really absorbing distractions, perhaps frivolous, but entirely natural,
arising from those cares and pleasures of personal appearance which are
indestructible in the _elegante_ by anything short of death.
There is also another passage which equally illustrates the ability and
insight of the author in his perception and representation of that dual
motive, that twin yet conflicting sentiment, which so frequently moves
us and so especially characterises the modern mind, which is frequently
complex and artificial, trivial and analytic, and thereby incapable of a
single, or of a simple, emotion. Sidonie, a very proud, chaste, and
implacable maiden, is stung to the core by her discovery of her
mother's flight; the thought of what the neighbours and the servants
will think is torture to her, and a generous and genuine grief for the
blow to her father moves her to the first tears which she has ever shed.
But still the idea, the knowledge that since she means never to marry,
she is now and will be for ever supreme mistress of her father's house
is a source of irresistible pleasure and consolation, and as she goes
upstairs she cannot resist, even on this terrible night, exercising her
first despotic and unshared power. Her mother, who loved softness and
shadow, had always insisted on the electric lamp at the foot of the
staircase being shaded and softened by folds of rose-coloured stuff,
Sidonie had the rose-coloured stuff taken away, and even on this first
evening of her reign the undimmed and intense radiance of the unveiled
light proclaims the change of domestic government, and the absolute
authority of the new ruler. This is one of the many exquisite finenesses
of touch which reveal the delicacy of observation in the writer
throughout this novel, and can be only appreciated by a reader who
brings to it that attention and capacity which Sir John Lubbock and his
audience would think it only worth while to devote to a treatise on the
stalk-eyed crustacea or a monograph upon the household flea.
M. Jules Lemaitre, in his story of _Les Rois_, says with a sneer that
one of his personages was 'nee pour gouter Auber, Cabanel, et les romans
de la _Revue des Deux Mondes_.' Now in his own volume, entitled _Les
Rois_, published this season, and received with great curiosity in
Paris, M. Jules Lemaitre has merely mixed up the tragedy of Meyerling,
the mystery of Johann Orth, and recent well-known card and debt
scandals concerning living princes; and, having reproduced with these
the individuality of Louise Michel, the life of Kropotkine, and the
career of a well-known financier, he has introduced some essays on
social and political problems into his reproductions of these
personages, dated the whole 1900, and called it a novel. But it is not a
novel, for the imagination does not enter into it. It is a photograph,
or a travesty, whatever the reader may please to call it, of actual
recent modern events, thinly disguised, but unjustly exaggerated, and an
almost impudent imitation in many ways of Daudet's _Rois en Exil_. There
is some brilliant writing in it, and some fine thoughts and expressions,
which is, of course, always the case when the writer is so intelligent a
man as Lemaitre, but a novel it is not; it is a series of scenes, almost
all borrowed or imitated from well-known events; it is a patchwork with
little harmony in its arrangement, and it has the supreme fault of
introducing long descriptions of anterior events, and bringing in new
characters, at the close of the action. There is also one suggestion, if
not more, concerning a royal person, so horrible that it seems unfair
and even cruel to make it of one who cannot resent it or defend herself.
The date of the story may be called 1900, but the events on which it is
built have already been lived through by conspicuous characters.
It is not becoming, therefore, in so immature a story-teller as M.
Lemaitre proves himself to be, and one who is obliged to go for his
incidents to the scandals of courts, to sneer at the novels of the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, in which, to go no further back than last
year, such admirable works as _La Vie Privet de Michael Teissier_ and
_Le Secret du Precepteur_ have first seen the light. To be a critic of
it is much easier than to be a creator of fine fiction; to pull to
pieces requires lesser qualities than to construct.
In the past twenty months there have been some very fine novels in
French literature. _A l'Abime_, by Paul Vassili, is a masterpiece of
originality, and the character of the great egoist, who is its hero, is
matchless in its intuition, its philosophy, and its realism; it is a
narrative of intense interest without its having any other source for
its interest than that which lies in following the evolution of a type
wholly new in literature, and the crystallisation of a naturally
generous nature into a complete philosophic selfishness through
circumstances which lead to its moral isolation amidst the full success
of a triumphant career. _Amants_ and _La Force des Choses_, of Paul
Margueritte, are beautiful novels, remarkable for originality of
conception, correctness of observation, and the talent of interesting
the reader in perfectly natural events. The former in especial is full
of truth, poetic feeling, and novelty of situation and of character; it
is entirely a story of love, but it is love pourtrayed with equal
sympathy and comprehension, and embracing scenes entirely dramatic
whilst entirely natural. If Sir John Lubbock will read these three books
and end with _Le Secret du Precepteur_, he will, I think, feel bound to
admit that such works require for their due appreciation quite as much
attentive respect in their perusal, and quite as many intellectual and
perceptive qualities in their reader, as the analysis, however
interesting, of a wasp's social habits, and the diary, however
delightful, of a caged bluebottle's appetite. The study of earthworms
demands, no doubt, the exercise of much higher faculties than are
necessary for the study of human nature. Still it is difficult to
believe that the earthworm can afford such varied and complicated
interest as man, and nowhere are the portraiture and analysis of man so
ably depicted as in a fine novel.[6]
[Footnote 6: Since this was written Sir J. Lubbock has been made a peer;
and alas! _notre cher Maitre_, Cherbuliez, has passed over to the great
majority.]
V