CHAPTER I

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A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL

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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.