Chambre Bleue_ in everything but craftsmanship. Two lovers (being French
they have to be unlawful lovers, but the story would be neither injured
nor improved, as a story, if the relation were taken quite out of the
reach of the Divorce and Admiralty division, as it could be by a very
little ingenuity) meet, in slight disguise,[230] at a railway station to
spend "a day and a night and a morrow" together at a country hotel--not
a great way from Paris, but outside the widest _banlieue_. They meet and
start all right; but Fortune begins, almost at once, to play them
tricks. They are not, as of course they wish to be, alone in the
carriage. A third traveller (one knows the wretch) gets in at the last
moment, and when, not to waste too much time, they begin to make love in
English, he very properly tells them that he is an Englishman, assuring
them, however, that he is probably going to sleep, and in any case will
not attend to anything they say. Then he takes a Greek book from his
bag, and devotes himself first to it and then to slumber. When their
journey comes to an end, so does his, and he goes to the same hotel, but
not before he has had an angry interview on the platform with some one
who calls him "uncle." However, at the moment this does not matter much.
Still, the _guignon_ is on them; their _chambre bleue_ is between two
other rooms, and--as is the common habit of French hotels and the not
uncommon one of English--has doors to both, which, though they can be
fastened, by no means exclude sound. One of the next rooms is the
Englishman's; the other, unfortunately, is a large upper chamber, in
which the officers of a departing regiment are entertaining their
successors. They are very noisy, very late, and somewhat impertinent
when asked not to disturb their neighbours; but they break up at last,
and the lovers have, as the poet says, "moonlight [actually] and sleep
[possibly] for repayment." But with the morning a worse thing happens.
The lover, waking, sees at the foot of the bed, flowing sluggishly from
the crack under the Englishman's door, a dark brownish-red fluid. It is
blood, certainly blood! and what on earth is to be done? Apparently the
Englishman (they have heard a heavy bump in the night) has either
committed suicide or been murdered, perhaps by the nephew; the matter
will be enquired into; in the circumstances they themselves cannot
escape examination, and the escapade will come out (blue spectacles and
black veils being alike useless against Commissaries of Police and
Judges of Instruction). The only hope is an early Paris train, if they
can get their bill, obtain some sort of breakfast, and catch it. But,
just as they have determined to do so, the facts next door are
discovered. The Englishman, who has ordered two bottles of _porto_, has
fallen asleep over the second, knocked it down while still half-full,
followed it himself to the floor, and reclined there peacefully, while
the fluid from the broken bottle trickled over the boards,[231] under
the door, and into the agapemone beyond. Once more (but for one
horrible[232] piece of libel), the thing could hardly be better.
[Sidenote: The _Chronique de Charles IX._]
Mérimée's largest and most ambitious attempt at pure prose fiction--the
_Chronique de Charles IX_--has been rather variously judged. That the
present writer once translated the whole of it may, from different
points of view, be regarded as a qualification and a disqualification
for judging it afresh. For a mere amateur (and there are
unfortunately[233] only too many amateur translators) it might be one
or the other, according as the executant had been pleased or bored by
his occupation. But to a person used to the manner, something of an
expert in literary criticism, and brought by the writing of many books
to an even keel between _engouement_ and disgust, it certainly should
not be a _dis_qualification. I do not think that the _Chronique_, as a
romance of the Dumas kind, though written long before Dumas so
fortunately deserted the drama for the kind itself, is entirely a
success. It has excellent characters, if not in the actual hero, in his
two Dalilahs--the camp-follower girl, who is a sort of earlier Carmen,
and the great lady--and in his fear-neither-God-nor-Devil brother; good
scenes in the massacre and in other passages also. But as a whole--as a
modernised _roman d'adventures_--it does not exactly _run_: the reader
does not devour the story as he should. He may be--I am--delighted with
the way in which the teller tells; but the things which he tells are of
much less interest. One cannot exactly say with that acute critic (if
rather uncritical acceptor of the accomplished facts of life and death
and matrimony), Queen Gertrude of Denmark, "More matter with less art,"
for there is plenty of matter as well as amply sufficient and yet not
over-lavish art. But one is not made to take sufficient interest in the
particular matter supplied.
[Sidenote: The semi-dramatic stories. _La Jacquerie._]
The other considerable and early attempt in historical romance, _La
Jacquerie_, is not in pure novel form, but it may fitly introduce some
notice of its actual method, in which Mérimée frequently, Gautier more
than once, and a third eminent man of letters to be noticed presently
most of all, distinguished themselves. This was what, in Old French,
would have been called the story _par personnages_--the manner in which
the whole matter is conveyed, not by _récit_, not by the usual form of
mixed narrative and conversation, but by dramatic or semi-dramatic
dialogue only, with action and stage direction, but no connecting
language of the author to the reader. The early French mysteries and
miracles--still more the farces--were not altogether unlike this; we saw
that some of the curious intermediate work of the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries took it, and that both of Crébillon's most
felicitous, if not most edifying exercises are in dialogue form. The
admiration of the French Romantics for the "accidented" and "matterful"
English, Spanish, and German drama naturally encouraged experiment in
this kind. Gautier has not very much of it, though there is some in _Les
Jeune-France_, and his charming ballets might be counted in. But Mérimée
was particularly addicted thereto. _La Jacquerie_ is injured to some
tastes by excessive indulgence in the grime and horror which the subject
no doubt invited. We do not all rejoice in the notion of a Good Friday
service, "extra-illustrated" by a real crucifixion alive of a generous
Jacques who has surrendered himself; or in violence offered (it is true,
with the object of securing marriage) to a French heiress by an English
captain of Free Companions. Even some of those who may not dislike these
touches of _haut goût_, may, from the coolest point of view of strict
criticism, say that the composition is too _décousu_, and that, as in
the _Chronique_, there is little actual interest of story. But the
phantasmagoria of gloom and blood and fire is powerfully presented. The
earlier _Théâtre de Clara Gazul_,[234] one of the boldest and most
successful of all literary mystifications, belongs more or less to the
same class, which Mérimée never entirely deserted.
[Sidenote: _Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement_, etc.]
The best of all these is, to my thinking, undoubtedly the _Carrosse du
Saint-Sacrement_. It is also, I believe, the only one that ever was
tried on the actual stage--it is said without success--though surely
this cannot have been the form that it took in _La Périchole_, not the
least amusing of those levities of Offenbach's which did so disgust the
Pharisees of academic music and so arride the guileless public. _Le
Carrosse_ itself is a charming thing--very, very merry and by no means
unwise--without a drop of bad blood in it, and, if no better than, very
nearly as good as it should be from the moral point of view. _La Famille
Carvajal_ has the same fault of gruesomeness as _La Jacquerie_, with
less variety, and _Une Femme est un Diable_, a fresh handling of
something like the theme of _Le Diable Amoureux_ and _The Monk_, if
better than Lewis, is not so good as Cazotte. But _L'Occasion_ is almost
great, and I think _Le Ciel et l'Enfer_ absolutely deserves that too
much lavished ticket. Indeed Doña Urraca in this, like La Périchole in
_Le Carrosse_, seems to me to put Mérimée among the greatest masters of
feminine character in the nineteenth century, and far above some others
who have been held to have reached that perilous position.
At the same time, this hybrid form between _nouvelle_ and _drame_ has
some illegitimate advantages. You can, some one has said, "insinuate
character," whereas in a regular story you have to delineate it; and
though in some modern instances critics have seemed disposed to put a
higher price on the insinuation than on the delineation, not merely in
this particular form, I cannot quite agree with them. All the same,
Mérimée's accomplishments in this mixed kind are a great addition to his
achievements in the story proper, and, as has been confessed before, I
should be slow to deny him the place of the greatest "little master" in
fiction all round, though I may like some little masterpieces of others
better than any of his.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Musset: charm of his dramatised stories; his pure narration
unsuccessful.]
By an interesting but not at all inexplicable contrast the only writer
of prose fiction (except those to whom separate chapters have been
allotted and one other who follows him here) to be in any way classed
with Mérimée and Gautier as a man of letters generally--Alfred de
Musset--displays the contrast of values in his work of narrative and
dramatic form in exactly the opposite way to (at least) Mérimée's.
Musset's _Proverbes_, though, I believe, not quite successful at first,
have ever since been the delight of all but vulgar stage-goers: they
have, from the very first, been the delight of all but vulgar readers
for their pure story interest. Even some poems, not given as intended
dramas at all, possess the most admirable narrative quality and
story-turn.
As for the _Comédies-Proverbes_, it is impossible for the abandoned
reader of plays who reads them either as poems or as stories, or as
both, to go wrong there, whichever of the delightful bunch he takes up.
To play upon some of their own titles--you are never so safe in swearing
as when you swear that they are charming; when the door of the library
that contains them is opened you may think yourself happy, and when it
is shut upon you reading them you may know yourself to be happier. But
in pure prose narratives this exquisite poet, delightful playwright, and
unquestionable though too much wasted genius, never seems quite at home.
For though they sometimes have a poignant appeal, it is almost always
the illegitimate or at any rate extrinsic one of revelation of the
author's personal feeling; or else that of formulation of the general
effects of passion, not that of embodiment of its working.
[Sidenote: _Frédéric et Bernerette._]
Thus, for instance, there are few more pathetic stories in substance, or
in occasional expression of a half-aphoristic kind, than _Frédéric et
Bernerette_. The grisette heroine has shed all the vulgarity of Paul de
Kock's at his worst, and has in part acquired more poignancy than that
of Murger at his best. Her final letter to her lover, just before her
second and successful attempt at suicide, is almost consummate. But,
somehow or other, it strikes one rather as a marvellous single study--a
sort of modernised and transcended _Spectator_ paper--a "Farewell of a
Deserted Damsel"--than as part, or even as _dénouement_, of a story.
When the author says, "Je ne sais pas lequel est le plus cruel, de
perdre tout à coup la femme qu'on aime par son inconstance, ou par sa
mort," he says one of the final things finally. But it would be as final
and as impressive if it were an isolated _pensée_. The whole story is
not well told; Frédéric, though not at all a bad fellow, and an only too
natural one, is a thing of shreds and patches, not gathered together and
grasped as they should be in the hand of the tale-teller; the narrative
"backs and fills" instead of sweeping straight onwards.
[Sidenote: _Les Deux Maîtresses, Le Fils du Titien_, etc.]
So, again, the first story,[235] _Les Deux Maîtresses_, with its
inspiring challenge-overture, "Croyez-vous, madame, qu'il soit possible
d'être amoureux de deux personnes à la fois?" is in parts interesting.
But one reader at least cannot help being haunted as he reads by the
notion how much better Mérimée would have told it. _Le Fils du
Titien_--the story of the great master's lazy son, on whom even love and
entire self-sacrifice--lifelong too--on the part of a great lady, cannot
prevail to do more in his father's craft than one exquisite picture of
herself, inscribed with a sonnet renouncing the pencil thenceforth--is
the best told story in the book. But Gautier would certainly have done
it even better. _Margot_, in the same fatal way and, I fear, in the same
degree, suggests the country tales of Musset's own faithless love.
[Sidenote: _Emmeline._]
But the most crucial example of the "something wrong" which pursues
Musset in pure prose narrative is _Emmeline_. It is quite free from
those unlucky, and possibly unfair, comparisons with contemporaries
which have been affixed to its companions. A maniac of parallels might
indeed call it something of a modernised _Princesse de Clèves_; but this
would be quite idle. The resemblance is simply in situation; that is to
say, in the _publica materies_ which every artist has a right to make
his own by private treatment. Emmeline Duval is a girl of great wealth
and rather eccentric character, who chooses to marry (he has saved her
life, or at any rate saved her from possible death and certain damage) a
person of rank but no means, M. de Marsan. There is real love between
the two, and it continues on his side altogether unimpaired, on hers
untroubled, for years. A conventional lady-killer tries her virtue, but
is sent about his business. But then there turns up one Gilbert, to whom
she yields--exactly how far is not clearly indicated. M. de Marsan finds
it out and takes an unusual line. He will not make any scandal, and will
not even call the lover out. He will simply separate and leave her whole
fortune to his wife. She throws her marriage contract into the fire (one
does not presume to enquire how far this would be effective), dismisses
Gilbert through the medium of her sister, and--we don't know what
happened afterwards.
Now the absence of _finale_ may bribe critics of the present day; for my
part, as I have ventured to say more than once before, it seems that if
you accept this principle you had much better carry it through, have no
middle or beginning, and even no title, but issue, in as many copies as
you please, a nice quire or ream of blank paper with your name on it.
The purchasers could cut the name out, and use it for original
composition in a hundred forms, from washing bills to tragedies.
But I take what Musset has given me, and, having an intense admiration
for the author of _A Saint Blaise_ and _L'Andalouse_ and the _Chanson de
Fortunio_, a lively gratitude to the author of _Il ne faut jurer de
rien_ and _Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée_, call _Emmeline_
a very badly told and uninteresting story. The almost over-elaborate
description of the heroine at the beginning does not fit in with her
subsequent conduct; Gilbert is a nonentity; the husband, though noble in
conduct, is pale in character, and the sister had much better have been
left out.[236] So the rest may be silence.
[Sidenote: Gérard de Nerval--his peculiar position.]
I have been accused (quite good-naturedly) of putting Rabelais in this
history because I liked him, though he was not a novelist. My conscience
is easy there; and I think I have refuted the peculiar charge
beforehand. But I might have a little more difficulty (though I should
still lose neither heart nor hope) in the case of the ill-fated but
well-beloved writer whom gods and men call Gérard de Nerval, or simply
Gérard, though librarians and bibliographers sometimes insist on his
legal surname, Labrunie. It certainly would be difficult, from the same
point of view of strict legality, to call anything of his exactly a
novel. He was a poet, a dramatist, a voyage-and-travel writer, a
bibliographer (strange trade, which associates the driest with the most
"necta_w_eous" of men!) even sometimes a tale-teller by name, but even
then hardly a novelist. Yet he managed to throw over the most unlikely
material a novelish or at least a romantic character, which is
sometimes--nay, very often--utterly wanting in professed and admitted
masters of the business; and he combines with this faculty--or rather he
exalts and transports it into--a strange and exquisite charm, which
nobody else in French, except Nodier[237] (who very possibly taught
Gérard something), possesses, and which, though it is rather commoner in
English and in the best and now almost prehistoric German, is rare
anywhere, and, in Gérard's peculiar brand of it, almost entirely
unknown.
For this "Anodos"--the most unquestionably entitled to that title of all
men in letters; this wayless wanderer on the earth and above the earth;
this inhabitant of mad-houses; this victim, finally, either of his own
despair and sorrow or of some devilry on the part of others,[238]
unites, in the strange spell which he casts over all fit readers, what,
but for him, one might have called the idiosyncrasies in strangeness of
authors quite different from each other and--except at the special
points of contact--from him. He is like Borrow or De Quincey (though he
goes even beyond both) in the singular knack of endowing or investing
known places and commonplace actions with a weird second essence and
second intention. He is like Charles Lamb in his power of dropping from
quaintness and almost burlesque into the most touching sentiment and
emotion. Mr. Lang, in his Introduction to Poe, has noticed how Gérard
resembles America's one "poet of the first order" in fashioning lines
"on the further side of the border between verse and music"--a remark
which applies to his prose as well.[239] He has himself admitted a kind
of _sorites_ of indebtedness to Diderot, Sterne, Swift, Rabelais,
Folengo, Lucian, and Petronius. But this is merely on the comic and
purely intellectual side of him, while it is further confined, or nearly
so, to the trick of deliberate "promiscuousness." On the
emotional-romantic if not even tragic score he may write off all imputed
indebtedness--save once more in some degree, to Nodier. And the
consequence is that those who delight in him derive their delight from
sources of the most extraordinarily various character, probably never
represented by an exactly similar group in the case of any two
individual lovers, but quite inexhaustible. To represent him to those
who do not know him is not easy; to represent him to those who do is
sure, for this very reason, to arouse mild or not mild complaints of
inadequacy. And it must be clear, from what has been already said, that
some critic may very likely exclaim, in reference to any selected piece,
"Why, this is neither a novel nor a romance, nor even in any
legitimate sense a tale!" The inestimable rejoinder already
quoted,[240]--episcopal, and dignifying even that order though it was
made only by a bishop _in partibus_--is the only one here.
[Sidenote: _La Bohême Galante_, _Les Filles du Feu_, and _Le Rêve et la
Vie_.]
The difficulty of discussing or illustrating, in short space and due
proportion, the novel or _roman_ element in such a writer must be
sufficiently obvious. His longer travels in Germany and the East are
steeped in this element; and the shorter compositions which bear names
of novel-character are often "little travels" in his native province,
the Isle of France, and that larger _banlieue_ of Paris, towards Picardy
and Flanders, which our Seventy Thousand saved, by dying, the other day.
But it is impossible--and might even, if possible, be superfluous--to
touch the first group. Of the second there are three subdivisions,
which, however, are represented with not inconsiderable variation in
different issues.[241] Their titles are _La Bohême Galante_, _Les Filles
du Feu_, and _Le Rêve et la Vie_, the last of which contains only one
section, _Aurélia_, never, if I do not mistake, revised by Gérard
himself, and only published after his most tragic death. Its
_supra_-title really describes the most characteristic part or feature
of all the three and of Gérard's whole work.
[Sidenote: Their general character.]
To one who always lived, as Paul de Saint-Victor put it in one of the
best of those curious exercises of his mastery over words, "in the
fringes[242] of the actual world," this confusion of place and no
place, this inextricable blending of fact and dream, imagination and
reality, was natural enough; and no one but a Philistine will find fault
with the sometimes apparently mechanical and Sternian transitions which
form part of its expression. There was, indeed, an inevitable
_mixedness_ in that strange nature of his; and he will pass from almost
"true Dickens" (he actually admits inspiration from him) in accounts of
the Paris _Halles_, or of country towns, to De Quinceyish passages, free
from that slight touch of _apparatus_ which is undeniable now and then
in the Opium Eater. Here are longish excursions of pure family history;
there, patches of criticism in art or drama; once at least an elaborate
and--for the time--very well informed as well as enthusiastic sketch of
French seventeenth-century poetry. It may annoy the captious to find
another kind of confusion, for which one is not sure that Gérard himself
was responsible, though it is consistent enough with his peculiarities.
Passages are redistributed among different books and pieces in a rather
bewildering manner; and you occasionally rub your eyes at coming
across--in a very different context, or simply shorn of its old
one--something that you have met before. To others this, if not exactly
an added charm, will at any rate be admitted to "grace of congruity." It
would be less like Gérard if it were otherwise.
[Sidenote: Particular examples.]
In fact it is in these mixed pieces that Gérard's great attraction lies.
His regular stories, professedly of a Hoffmannesque kind, such as _La
Main Enchantée_ and _Le Monstre Vert_, are good, but not extraordinarily
good, and classable with many other things of many other people. I, at
least, know nothing quite like _Aurélia_ and _Sylvie_, though the
dream-pieces of Landor and De Quincey have a certain likeness, and
Nodier's _La Fée aux Miettes_ a closer one.
[Sidenote: _Aurélia._]
_Aurélia_ (which, whether complete in itself or not, was pretty clearly
intended to be followed by other things under the general title of _Le
Rêve et la Vie_) has, as might be expected, more dream than life in it.
Or rather it is like one of those actual dreams which themselves mix up
life--a dream in the composition. Aurélia is the book-name of a lady,
loved (actually, it seems) and in some degree responsible for her
lover's aberrations of mind. He thinks he loves another, but finds he
does not. The two objects of his passion meet, and the second generously
brings about a sort of reconciliation with the first. But he has to go
to Paris on business, and there he becomes a mere John-a-Dreams, if not,
in a mild way, a mere Tom of Bedlam. The chief drops into reality,
indeed, are mentions of his actual visits to _maisons de santé_. But the
thing is impossible to abstract or analyse, too long to translate as a
whole, and too much woven in one piece to cut up. It must be read as it
stands, and any person of tolerable intelligence will know in a page or
two whether Gérard is the man for him or not. But when he was writing it
he was already over even the fringe of ordinary sane life, and near the
close of life itself. In _Sylvie_ he had not drifted so far; and it is
perhaps his best diploma-piece.[243]
[Sidenote: And especially _Sylvie_.]
For _Sylvie_, with its sub-title, "Souvenirs du Valois," surely exhibits
Gérard, outside the pure travel-books, at his very best, as far as
concerns that mixture of _rêve_ and _réalité_--the far-off goal of
Gautier's[244] _Chimère_--which has been spoken of. The author comes out
of a theatre where he has only seen Her, having never, though a constant
worshipper, troubled himself to ask, much less to seek out, what She
might be off the stage. And here we may give an actual piece of him.
We were living then in a strange kind of time,[245] one of
those which are wont to come after revolutions, or the
decadences of great reigns. There was no longer any
gallantry of the heroic kind, as in the time of the Fronde;
no vice, elegant and in full dress, as in that of the
Regency; no "Directory" scepticism and foolish orgies. It
was a mixture of activity, hesitation, and idleness--of
brilliant utopias; of religious or philosophical aspiration;
of vague enthusiasms mingled with certain instincts of a
sort of Renaissance. Men were weary of past discords; of
uncertain hopes, much as in the time of Petronius or
Peregrinus. The materialist part of us hungered for the
bouquet of roses which in the hands of Isis was to
regenerate it--the Goddess, eternally young and pure,
appeared to us at night and made us ashamed of the hours we
had lost in the day. We were not at the age of ambition, and
the greedy hunt for place and honours kept us out of
possible spheres of work. Only the poet's Ivory Tower
remained for us, and we climbed it ever higher and higher to
be clear of the mob. At the heights whither our masters
guided us we breathed at last the pure air of solitude; we
drank in the golden cup of legend; we were intoxicated with
poetry and with love. But, alas! it was only love of vague
forms; of tints roseal and azure; of metaphysical phantoms.
The real woman, seen close, revolted our ingenuousness: we
would have had her a queen or a goddess, and to draw near
her was fatal.
But he went from the play to his club, and there somebody asked him for
what person (in such cases one regrets _laquelle_) he went so constantly
to the same house; and, on the actress being named, kindly pointed out
to him a third member of this club as the lady's lover-in-title. The
peculiar etiquette of the institution demanded, it seems, that the
fortunate gallant should escort the beloved home, but then go to the
_cercle_ and play (they were wise enough to play whist then) for great
part of the night before exercising the remainder of his rights and
privileges. In the interval, apparently, other cats might be grey. And,
as it happened, Gérard saw in a paper that some shares of his, long
rubbish, had become of value. He would be better off; he might aspire
to a portion of the lady's spare hours. But this notion, it is not
surprising to hear, did not appeal to our Gérard. He sees in the same
paper that a _fête_ is going to take place in his old country of the
Valois; and when at last he goes home two "faces in the fire" rise for
him, those of the little peasant girl Sylvie and of the châtelaine
Adrienne--beautiful, triumphant, but destined to be a nun. Unable to
sleep, he gets up at one in the morning, and manages to find himself at
Loisy, the scene of the _fête_, in time.
One would fain go on, but duty forbids a larger allotment of space; and,
after all, the thing itself may be read by any one in half an hour or
so, and will not, at least ought not, to be forgotten for half a
lifetime--or a whole one. The finding of Sylvie, no longer a _little_
girl, but still a girl, still not married, though, as turns out, about
to be so, is chequered with all sorts of things--sketches of landscape;
touches of literature; black-and-white renderings of the _Voyage à
Cythère_; verses to Adrienne; to the actress Aurélie (to become later
the dream-Aurélia); and, lastly--in the earlier forms of the piece at
any rate--snatches of folk-song, including that really noble ballad:
Quand Jean Renaud de la guerre revint,
which falls very little, if at all, short of the greatest specimens of
English, German, Danish, or Spanish.
And over and through it all, and in other pieces as well, there is the
faint, quaint, music--prose, when not verse--which reminds one[246]
somehow of Browning's famous Toccata-piece. Only the "dear dead women"
are dear dead fairies; and the whole might be sung at that "Fairy's
Funeral" which Christopher North imagined so well, though he did not
carry it out quite impeccably.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Alfred de Vigny: _Cinq-Mars_.]
The felicity of being enabled to know the causes of things, a recognised
and respectable form of happiness, is also one which I have recently
enjoyed in respect of Alfred de Vigny's _Cinq-Mars_. For Vigny as a poet
my admiration has always been profound. He appears to me to have
completed, with Agrippa d'Aubigné, Corneille, and Victor Hugo, the
_quatuor_ of French poets who have the secret of magnificence;[247] and,
scanty as the amount of his poetical work is, _Éloa_, _Dolorida_, _Le
Cor_, and the finest passages in _Les Destinées_ have a definite variety
of excellence and essence which it would not be easy to surpass in kind,
though it might be in number, with the very greatest masters of poetry.
But I have never been able, frankly and fully, to enjoy his novels,
especially _Cinq-Mars_. In my last reading of the chief of them I came
upon an edition which contains what I had never seen before--the
somewhat triumphant and strongly defiant tract, _Réflexions sur la
Vérité dans l'Art_, which the author prefixed to his book after its
success. This tractate is indeed not quite consistent with itself, for
it ends in confession that truth in art is truth in observation of human
nature, not mere authenticity of fact, and that such authenticity is of
merely secondary importance at best. But in the opening he had taken
lines--or at any rate had said things--which, if not absolutely
inconsistent with, certainly do not lead to, this sound conclusion. In
writing historical novels (he tells us) he thought it better not to
imitate the foreigners (it is clear that this is a polite way of
indicating Scott), who in their pictures put the historical dominators
of them in the background; he has himself made such persons principal
actors. And though he admits that "a treatise on the decline and fall of
feudalism in France; on the internal conditions and external relations
of that country; on the question of military alliances with foreigners;
on justice as administered by parliaments, and by secret commissions on
charges of sorcery," might not have been read while the novel _was_;
the sentence suggests, with hardly a possibility of rebuttal, that a
treatise of this kind was pretty constantly in his own mind while he was
writing the novel itself. And the earlier sentence about putting the
more important historical characters in the foreground remains "firm,"
without any necessity for argument or suggestion.
[Sidenote: The faults in its general scheme.]
Now I have more than once in this very book, and often elsewhere,
contended, rightly or wrongly, that this "practice of the foreigners,"
in _not_ making dominant historical characters their own dominant
personages, is _the_ secret of success in historical novel-writing, and
the very feather (and something more) in the cap of Scott himself which
shows his chieftainship. And, again rightly or wrongly, I have also
contended that the hand of purpose deadens and mummifies story. Vigny's
own remarks, despite subsequent--if not recantation--qualification of
them, show that the lie of his land, the tendency of his exertion, _was_
in these two, as I think, wrong directions. And I own that this
explained to me what I had chiefly before noticed as merely a fact,
without enquiring into it, that _Cinq-Mars_, admirably written as it is;
possessing as it does, with a hero who might have been made interesting,
a great person like Richelieu to make due and not undue use of; plenty
of thrilling incident at hand, and some actually brought in; love
interest _ad libitum_ and fighting hardly less so; a tragic finish from
history, and opportunity for plenty of lighter contrast from Tallemant
and the Memoirs--that, I say, _Cinq-Mars_, with all this and the
greatness of its author in other work, has always been to me not a live
book, and hardly one which I can even praise as statuesque.[248]
It is no doubt a misfortune for the book with its later readers--the
earlier for nearly twenty years were free from this--that it comes into
closest comparison with Dumas' best work. Its action, indeed, takes
place in the very "Vingt Ans" during which we know (except from slight
retrospect) nothing of what D'Artagnan and the Three were doing. But
more than one or two of the same historical characters figure, and in
the chapters dealing with the obscure _émeute_ which preceded the actual
conspiracy, as well as in the scenes touching Anne of Austria's private
apartments, the parallel is very close indeed.
[Sidenote: And in its details.]
Now of course Dumas could not write like Vigny; and though, as is
pointed out elsewhere, to regard him as a vulgar fellow is the grossest
of blunders as well as a great injustice, Vigny, in thought and taste
and _dianoia_ generally, was as far above him as in style.[249] But that
is not the question. I have said[250] that I do not quite _know_
D'Artagnan, though I think I know Athos, as a man; but as a novel-hero
the Gascon seems to me to "fill all numbers." Cinq-Mars may be a
succession or chain of type-personages--generous but headlong youth,
spoilt favourite, conspirator and something like traitor, finally
victim; but these are the "flat" characters (if one may so speak) of the
treatise, not the "round" ones of the novel. And I cannot _unite_ them.
His love-affair with Marie de Gonzague leaves me cold. His friend, the
younger De Thou, is hardly more than "an excellent person." The
persecution of Urbain Grandier and the sufferings of the Ursuline Abbess
seem to me--to use the old schoolboy word--to be hopelessly "muffed";
and if any one will compare the accounts of the taking of the
"Spanish bastion" at Perpignan with the exploit at that other
bastion--Saint-Gervais at Rochelle--he will see what I mean as well as
in any single instance. The second part, where we come to the actual
conspiracy, is rather better than the first, if not much; and I think
Vigny's presentment of Richelieu has been too much censured. Armand
Duplessis was a very great man; but unless you accept the older
Machiavellian and the more modern German doctrines as to what a great
man may do, he must also be pronounced a most unscrupulous one; while
there is little doubt (unless you go back to Louis XI.) that Vigny was
right in regarding him as the original begetter of the French
Revolution. But he is not here made by any means wholly inhuman, and
Vigny makes it justly clear that, if he had not killed Cinq-Mars,
Cinq-Mars would have killed him. In such cases of course the person who
begins may be regarded as the assassin; but it is doubtful whether this
is distributive justice of the highest order. And I do not see much
salvation for France in Henry d'Effiat.
This, however, is a digression from our proper subject, but one
justifying itself after a fashion, inasmuch as it results from Vigny's
own faulty handling of the subject itself and is appropriate to his line
of argument in his _Examen_. He has written the novel not as he ought
and as he ought not. The political and historical interests overshadow,
confuse, and hamper the purely "fictional" (as people say now), and when
he has got hold of a scene which _is_ either purely "fictional," or
historical with fictitious possibilities, he does not seem (to me) to
know how to deal with it. There is one--of the extremest melodramatic
character and opportunities--where, in a hut perched on the side of a
Pyrenean gorge or cañon, Richelieu's villainous tool, the magistrate
Laubardemont; his mad niece, the former Ursuline Abbess, who has helped
to ruin Urbain Grandier; his outcast son Jacques, who has turned Spanish
officer and general bravo; and a smuggler who has also figured in the
Grandier business, forgather; where the mad Abbess dies in terror, and
Jacques de Laubardemont by falling through the flimsy hut-boards into
the gorge, his father taking from him, by a false pretence before his
death, the treaty between the Cinq-Mars conspirators and Spain. All this
is sufficiently "horrid," as the girls in _Northanger Abbey_ would say,
and divers French contemporaries of Vigny's from Hugo to Soulié would
have made good horrors of it. In his hands it seems (to me) to miss
fire. So, again, he has a well-conceived interview, in which Richelieu,
for almost the last time, shows "the power of a strong mind over a weak
one," and brings the King to abject submission and the surrender of
Cinq-Mars, by the simple process of leaving his Majesty to settle by
himself the problems that drop in from France, England, and where or
whence not, during the time of the Cardinal's absence. It is less of a
failure than the other, being more in Vigny's own line; but it is
impossible not to remember several scenes--not one only--in _Quentin
Durward_, and think how much better Scott would have done it; several in
the Musketeer-trilogy, if not also in the Margot-Chicot series, and make
a parallel reflection. And as a final parry by anticipation to the
objection that such comparison is "rascally," let it be said that
nothing of the kind ever created any prejudice against the book in my
case. I failed to get on with it long before I took the least trouble to
discover critical reasons that might excuse that failure.
[Sidenote: _Stello_ less of a novel, but containing better novel-stuff.]
But if any one be of taste sufficiently like mine to find disappointment
of the unpleasant kind in _Cinq-Mars_, I think I can promise him an
agreeable, if somewhat chequered, surprise when, remembering _Cinq-Mars_
and basing his expectations upon it, he turns to _Stello_. It is true
that the book is, as a whole, even less "precisely a novel" than
Sainte-Beuve's _Volupté_. But for that very reason it escapes the
display of the disabilities which _Cinq-Mars_, being, or incurring
obligation to be, precisely a novel, suffers. It is true also that it
exhibits that fancy for putting historical persons in the first "plan"
which he had avowed, and over which heads have been shaken. The bulk of
it, indeed, consists of romanticised _histoires_ or historiettes (the
narrator calls them "anecdotes") of the sad and famous fates of two
French poets, Gilbert and André Chénier, and of our English Chatterton.
But, then, no one of these can be called "a dominant historical
personage," and the known facts permit themselves to be, and are,
"romanticised" effectively enough. So the flower is in each case plucked
from the nettle. And there is another flower of more positive and less
compensatory kind which blooms here, which is particularly welcome to
some readers, and which, from _Cinq-Mars_ alone, they could hardly have
expected to find in any garden of Alfred de Vigny's. For this springs
from a root of ironic wit which almost approaches humour, which, though
never merry, is not seldom merciful, and is very seldom actually savage,
though often sad. Now irony is, to those who love it, the saving grace
of everything that possesses it, almost equal in charm, and still more
nearly equal in power, to the sheer beauty, which can dispense with it,
but which sometimes, and not so very rarely, is found in its company.
[Sidenote: Its framework and "anecdotes."]
The substance, or rather the framework, of _Stello, ou Les Diables
Bleus_, requires very little amplification of its double title to
explain it. Putting that title in charade form, one might say that its
first is a young poet who suffers from its second--like many other young
persons, poetical and unpoetical, of times Romantic and un-Romantic.
Having an excessively bad fit of his complaint, he sends for a certain
_docteur noir_ to treat the case. This "Black Doctor" is not a
trout-fly, nor the sort of person who might be expected in a story of
_diablerie_. It is even suggested that he derived the name, by which he
was known to society, from the not specially individual habit of wearing
black clothes. But there must have been something not quite ordinarily
human about him, inasmuch as, having been resident in London at the time
of Chatterton's death in 1770, he was--apparently without any signs of
Old Parr-like age--a fashionable doctor at Paris in the year 1832. His
visit ends, as usual, in a prescription, but a prescription of a very
unusual kind. The bulk of it consists of the "anecdotes"--again perhaps
not a very uncommon feature of a doctor's visit, but told at such length
on the three subjects above mentioned that, with "links" and
conclusion,[251] they run to nearly four hundred pages.
It is possible that some one may say "_Connu!_" both to the stories
themselves and to the moral of real suffering, as opposed to mere
megrim, which is so obviously deducible from them. But Stello was quite
as clever as the objectors, and knew these things quite as
well--perhaps, as far as the case of Gilbert is concerned, rather better
than most Englishmen. It is in the manner of the Black Doctor's telling
and handling that the charm lies.
[Sidenote: The death of Gilbert.]
Even for those gluttons of matter who do not care much for manner there
is a good deal in the three stories. The first avails itself--as Vigny
had unwisely _not_ availed himself in _Cinq-Mars_, though he was well
acquainted with Shakespeare and lesser English masters--of the mixture
of comic and tragic. The suffering[252] of the unfortunate youth who was
partly a French Chatterton and partly a French Clare, his strange visit
to the benevolent but rather ineffectual Archbishop of Paris, and the
scene at his death-bed, exhibit, at nearly its best, the tragic power
which Vigny possessed in a very high, though not always well exercised,
degree. And the passage of the poet's death is of such _macabre_ power
that one must risk a translation:
(_The doctor has been summoned, has found the patient in his
garret, bare of all furniture save a bed with tattered
clothes and an old trunk._)
His face was very noble and very beautiful; he looked at me
with fixed eyes, and between them and the nose, above the
cheeks, he showed that nervous contraction which no ordinary
convulsion can imitate, which no illness gives, but which
says to the physician, "Go your ways!" and is, as it were, a
standard which Death plants on his conquests. He clutched in
one hand his pen, his poor last pen, inky and ragged, in the
other a crust of his last piece of bread. His legs knocked
together, so as to make the crazy bed crackle. I listened
carefully to his hard breathing; I heard the rattle with
its hollow husk; and I recognised Death in the room as a
practised sailor recognises the tempest in the whistle of
the wind that precedes it.
"Always the same, to all thou comest," I said to Death, he
himself speaking low enough for my lips to make, in dying
ears, only an indistinct murmur. "I know thee always by
thine own hollow voice, lent to youth and age alike. How
well I know thee and thy terrors, which are no longer such
to me![253] I feel the dust that thy wings scatter in the
air as thou comest; I breathe the sickly odour of it; I see
its pale ashes fly, invisible as they may be to other men's
sight. O! thou Inevitable One, thou art here, verily thou
comest to save this man from his misery. Take him in thine
arms like a child; carry him off; save him; I give him to
thee. Save him only from the devouring sorrow that
accompanies us ever on the earth till we come to rest in
thee, O Benefactor and Friend!"
I had not deceived myself, for Death it was. The sick man
ceased to suffer, and began suddenly to enjoy the divine
moment of repose which precedes the eternal immobility of
the body. His eyes grew larger, and were charged with
amazement; his mouth relaxed and smiled; his tongue twice
passed over his lips as if to taste once more, from some
unseen cup, a last drop of the balm of Life. And then he
said with that hoarse voice of the dying which comes from
the inwards and seems to come from the very feet:
At the banquet of life a guest ill-fated.[254]
[Sidenote: The satiric episode--contrast.]
But this death-bed, and the less final but hardly less tragic wanderings
of the victim in his visit to the Archbishop (by whom also the doctor
has been summoned), are contrasted and entangled, very skilfully indeed,
with a scene--the most different possible--in which he still appears.
The main personages in this, however, are his Majesty Louis XV. and the
reigning favourite, Mademoiselle de Coulanges, a young lady who, from
the account given of her, might justify the description, assigned
earlier to one of her official predecessors in a former reign, of being
"belle comme un ange, et bête comme un panier."[255] At first the lovers
(if we are to call them so) are lying, most beautifully dressed and
quite decorously, on different sofas, both of them with books in their
hands, but one asleep and the other yawning. Suddenly the lady springs
up shrieking, and the polite and amiable monarch (apart from his
Solomonic or Sultanic weaknesses, and the perhaps graver indifference
with which he knowingly allowed France to go to the devil, Louis le
Bien-Aimé was really _le meilleur fils du monde_) does his best to
console his beloved and find out the reason of her woes. It appears at
last that she thinks she has been bitten by a flea, and as the summer is
very hot, and there has been much talk of mad dogs, she is convinced
that the flea was a mad flea, and that she shall die of hydrophobia. (As
it happens, the flea is not a flea at all, but a grain of snuff.)
However, the Black Doctor is sent for, and finds the King as affable as
usual, but Mlle. de Coulanges coiled up on a sofa--like something
between a cat and a naughty child afraid of being scolded--and hiding
her face. On being coaxed with the proper medical manner, she at last
bursts out laughing, and finally they all laugh together, till his
Majesty spills his coffee on his gold waistcoat, and then pulls the
doctor down on a sofa to talk Paris gossip. And now the Black One clears
himself from any connection with the serpent as far as wisdom is
concerned, though he has plenty of a better kind. Fresh from Gilbert's
appeal to the Archbishop, he tries to interest this so amiable Royalty
in the subject. But the result is altogether unfortunate. The lady is
merely contemptuous and bored. The King gets angry, and displays that
indifference to anybody else's suffering which moralists (whether to an
exaggerated extent or not, is another question) are wont to connect with
excessive attention to a man's own sensual enjoyments. After some by no
means stupid but decidedly acid remarks on Voltaire, Rousseau, and
others, he takes (quite good-naturedly in appearance) the doctor's arm,
walks with him to the end of the long apartment, opens the door, quotes
certain satiric verses on literary and scientific "gents," and--shuts it
on his medical adviser and guest.
I know few things of the kind more neatly done, or better adjusted to
heighten the tragic purpose.
[Sidenote: The Chatteron part.]
To an Englishman the next episode may be less satisfactory, though it
was very popular in France under its original form, and still more so
when Vigny dramatised it in his famous _Chatterton_. It is not that
there is any (or at any rate much) of the usual caricature which was
(let us be absolutely equitable and say) exchanged between the two
countries for so long a time. Vigny married an English wife, knew
something of England, and a good deal of English literature. But,
regardless of his own historical _penchants_ and of the moral of this
very book--that Sentiment must be kept under the control of Reason--he
was pleased to transmogrify Chatterton's compassionate Holborn landlady
into a certain Kitty Bell--a pastry-shop keeper close to the Houses of
Parliament, who is very beautiful except that she has the inevitable
"large feet" (let us hope that M. le Comte de Vigny, who was a
gentleman, took only the first _signalement_ from Madame la Comtesse),
extraordinarily sentimental, and desperately though (let us hope again,
for she has a husband and two children) quite virtuously in love with
the boy from Bristol. He entirely transforms Lord Mayor Beckford's part
in the matter;[256] changes, for his own purposes, the arsenic into
opium (a point of more importance than it may seem), and in one blunt
word does all he can to spoil the story. It is too common an experience
when foreigners treat such things, and I say this with the fullest
awareness of the danger of _De te fabula_.
[Sidenote: The tragedy of André Chénier.]
These two stories, however, fill scarcely more than a third of the book,
and the other two-thirds, subtracting the moral at the end, deal with a
matter which Vigny, once more, understood thoroughly. The fate of André
Chénier is "fictionised" in nearly the best manner, though with the
author's usual fault of inability to "round out" character. We do not
sufficiently realise the poet himself. But his brother, Marie-Joseph,
requiring slighter presentment, has it; and so, on a still smaller
scale, has the well-meaning but fatuous father, who, hopelessly
misunderstanding the signs of the times, actually precipitates his elder
son's fate by applying, in spite of remonstrance, to the tiger-pole-cat
Robespierre for mercy. The scene where this happens--and where the
"sea-green incorruptible" himself, Saint-Just (prototype of so many
Republican enthusiasts, ever since and to-day), Marie-Joseph, and the
Black Doctor figure--is singularly good. Hardly less so are the
pictures--often painted by others but seldom better--of the ghastly
though in a way heroic merriment of the lost souls in Saint-Lazare,
between their doom and its execution, and the finale. In this the
doctor's soldier-servant Blaireau ("Badger"), still a gunner on active
service (partly, one fancies, from former touches,[257] by concealed
good intention, partly from mere whim and from disgust at the drunken
hectorings of General Henriot), refuses to turn his guns on the
Thermidorists, and thus saves France from at least the lowest depths of
the Revolutionary Inferno.[258] Perhaps there is here, as with Vigny's
fiction throughout, a certain amateurishness, and a very distinct
inability to keep apart things that had better not be mixed. But there
is also evidence of power throughout, and there is actually some
performance.
[Sidenote: _Servitude et Grandeur Militaires._]
His third and last work, of anything like the kind, _Servitude et
Grandeur Militaires_, is no more of a regular novel than _Stello_; but,
though perhaps in an inferior degree, it shares the superiority of
_Stello_ itself over _Cinq-Mars_ in power of telling a story. Like
_Stello_, too, it is a frame of short tales, not a continuous narrative;
and like that, and even to a greater degree, it exhibits the intense
melancholy (almost unique in its particular shade, though I suppose it
comes nearer to Leopardi's than to that of any other great man of
letters) which characterises Alfred de Vigny. His own experience of
soldiering had not been fortunate. He had begun, as a mere boy, by
accompanying Louis XVIII. in his flight before the Hundred Days; he had
seen, for another fourteen or fifteen years during the Restoration,
No wars where triumphs on the victors wait,
but only the dreary garrison life (see on Beyle, _sup._ p. 149) of
French peace time, and, in the way of active service, only what all
soldiers hate, the thankless and inglorious police-work which comes on
them through civil disturbance. Whether he was exactly the kind of man
to have enjoyed the livelier side of martialism may be the subject of
considerable doubt. But at any rate he had no chance of it, and his
framework here is little more than a tissue of transcendental
"grousing."
[Sidenote: The first story.]
The first story illustrating "Servitude" is sufficiently horrible, and
has a certain element of paradox in it. The author, actually on his very
disagreeable introduction to a military career by flight, meets with an
old officer who tells him his history. He has been at one time a
merchant sailor; and then in the service of the Directory, by whom he
was commissioned to carry convicts to Cayenne. The most noteworthy of
these, a young man of letters, who had libelled one of the tyrants, and
his still younger wife, are very charming people; and the captain, who
makes them his guests, becomes so fond of them that he even proposes to
give up his profession and farm with them in the colony. He has,
however, sealed orders, to be opened only in mid-Atlantic; and when he
does open them, he finds, to his unspeakable horror, a simple command to
shoot the poet at once. He obeys; and the "frightfulness" is doubled by
the fact that a rather clumsy device of his to spare the wife the sight
of the husband's death is defeated by the still greater clumsiness of a
subordinate. She goes mad; and, as expiation, he takes charge of her,
shifts from navy to army, and carries her with him on all his campaigns,
being actually engaged in escorting her on a little mule-cart when Vigny
meets him. They part; and ten years afterwards Vigny hears that the
officer was killed at Waterloo--his victim-charge following him a few
days later. The story is well told, and not, as actual things go,
impossible. But there are some questions which it suggests. "Is it, _as
literature_, a whole?" "Is it worth telling?" and "Why on earth did the
captain obey such an order from a self-constituted authority of
scoundrels to whom no 'sacrament' could ever be binding, if it could
even exist?"[259]
[Sidenote: The second]
The second is also tragical, but less so; and is again very well told.
It is concerned with the explosion of a powder-magazine--fortunately not
the main one--at Vincennes, brought about by the over-zeal of a good old
adjutant, the happiness of whose domestic interior just before his fate
(with some other things) forms one of Vigny's favourite contrasts.
[Sidenote: and third.]
But, as in _Stello_, he has kept the best wine to the last. The single
illustration of _Grandeur_ must have, for some people, though it may not
have for all, the very rare interest of a story which would rather gain
than lose if it were true. It opens in the thick of the July
Revolution, when the veteran French army--half-hearted and gaining no
new heart from the half-dead hands which ought to have guided it--was
subjected, on a larger scale, to the same sort of treatment which the
fresh-recruited Sherwood Foresters (fortunately _not_ half-hearted)
experienced in Dublin at Easter 1916. The author, having, luckily for
himself, resigned his commission a year or two before, meets an old
friend--a certain Captain Renaud--who, though a _vieux de la vieille_,
has reached no higher position, but is adored by his men, and generally
known as "Canne de Jonc," because he always carries that not very lethal
weapon, and has been known to take it into action instead of a sword.
In the "sullen interval" of the crisis the two talk; and Renaud is led
into telling the chief experiences of his life. He had known little of
his father--a soldier before him--but had been taken by that father on
Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition till, at Malta, he was stopped by
Bonaparte himself, who would have no boy on it save Casabianca's (pity
he did not stop him too!). But he only sends Renaud back to the Military
Academy, and afterwards makes him his page. The father is blown up in
the _Orient_, but saved, and, though made prisoner by us, is well
treated, and, as being of great age and broken health, allowed, by
Collingwood's interest, to go to Sicily. He dies on the way; but is able
to send a letter to his son, which is one of the finest examples of
Vigny's peculiar melancholy irony. In this he recants his worship of the
(now) Emperor. It has, however, no immediate effect on the son. But
before long, by an accident, he is an unwilling and at first unperceived
witness of the famous historical or half-historical interview at
Fontainebleau between Napoleon and the Pope, where the bullied Holy
Father enrages, but vanquishes, the conqueror by successively
ejaculating the two words _Commediante!_ and _Tragediante!_ (This scene
is again admirable.) The page's absence from his ordinary duty excites
suspicion, and the Emperor, _more_ _suo_, exiles him to the
farce-tragedy of the Boulogne flotilla, where the clumsy flat-bottoms
are sunk at pleasure as they exercise[260] by English frigates. The
father's experience is repeated with the son, for he also is captured
and also falls into the beneficent power of Collingwood, whom Vigny
almost literally beatifies.[261] The Admiral keeps the young man on
parole with him four years at sea, and when he has--"so as by water" if
not fire--overcome the temptation of breaking his word, effects exchange
for him. But, as is well known (the very words occur here, though I do
not know whether for the first time or not), Napoleon's motto in such
cases was: "Je n'aime pas les prisonniers. On se fait tuer." He goes
back to his duty, but avoids recognition as much as possible, and
receives no, or hardly any, promotion. Once, just after Montmirail, he
and the Emperor meet, whether with full knowledge on the latter's part
is skilfully veiled. But they touch hands. Still Captain Renaud's
_guignon_ pursues him in strange fashion; and during a night attack on a
Russian post near Reims he kills, in a mere blind mellay, a boy officer
of barely fourteen, and is haunted by remorse ever afterwards.
A few days after telling the story he is shot by a _gamin_ whom older
men have made half-drunk and furnished with a pistol with directions to
do what he does. And all this is preserved from being merely sentimental
("Riccobonish," as I think Vigny himself--but it may be somebody
else--has it) by the touch of true melancholy on the one hand and of
all-saving irony on the other.
[Sidenote: The moral of the three.]
So also these two curious books save Vigny himself to some extent from
the condemnation, or at any rate the exceedingly faint praise, which his
principal novel may bring upon him as a novelist. But they do so to some
extent only. It is clear even from them, though not so clear as it is
from their more famous companion, that he was not to the manner born.
The riddles of the painful earth were far too much with him to permit
him to be an unembarrassed master or creator of pastime--not necessarily
horse-collar pastime by any means, but pastime pure and simple. His
preoccupations with philosophy, politics, world-sorrow, and other things
were constantly cropping up and getting in the way of his narrative
faculty. I do not know that, even of the scenes that I have praised, any
one except the expurgated Crébillonade of the King and the Lady and the
Doctor goes off with complete "currency," and this is an episode rather
than a whole tale, though it gives itself the half-title of _Histoire
d'une Puce Enragée_. He could never, I think, have done anything but
short stories; and even as a short-story teller he ranks with the other
Alfred, Musset, rather than with Mérimée or Gautier. But, like Musset,
he presents us, as neither of the other two did (for Mérimée was not a
poet, and Gautier was hardly a dramatist), with a writer, of mark all
but the greatest, in verse and prose and drama; while in prose and verse
at least he shows that quality of melancholy magnificence which has been
noted, as hardly any one else does in all three forms, except Hugo
himself.
* * * * *
NOTE ON FROMENTIN'S _DOMINIQUE_
[Sidenote: Note on Fromentin's _Dominique_: its altogether exceptional
character.]
I have found it rather difficult to determine the place most proper for
noticing the _Dominique_ of Eugène Fromentin--one of the most remarkable
"single-speech" novels in any literature. It was not published till the
Second Empire was more than half-way through, but it seems to have been
written considerably earlier; and as it is equally remarkable for
_lexis_ and for _dianoia_, it may, on the double ground, be best
attached to this chapter, though Fromentin was younger than any one else
here dealt with, and belonged, in fact, to the generation of our later,
though not latest, constituents. But, in fact, it is a book like no
other, and it is for this reason, and by no means as confessing omission
or after-thought, that I have made the notice of it a note. In an
outside way, indeed, it may be said to belong to the school of _René_,
but the resemblance is very partial.
The author was a painter--perhaps the only painter-novelist of merit,
though there are bright examples of painter-poets. His other literary
work consists of a good book on his Netherlandish brethren in art, and
of two still better ones, descriptive of Algeria. And _Dominique_ itself
has unsurpassed passages of description at length, as well as numerous
tiny touches like actual _remarques_ on the margin of the page. Only
once does his painter's eye seem to have failed him as to situation. The
hero, when he has thrown himself on his knees before his beloved, and
she (who is married and "honest") has started back in terror, "drags
himself after her." Now I believe it to be impossible for any one to
execute this manoeuvre without producing a ludicrous effect. For which
reason the wise have laid it down that the kneeling posture should never
be resorted to unless the object of worship is likely to remain fairly
still. But this is, I think, the only slip in the book. It is
exceedingly interesting to compare Fromentin's descriptions with those
of Gautier on the one hand before him, and with those of Fabre and
Theuriet on the other later. I should like to point out the differences,
but it is probably better merely to suggest the comparison. His actual
work in design and colour I never saw, but I think (from attacks on it
that I _have_ seen) I should like it.
But his descriptions, though they would always have given the book
distinction, would not--or would not by themselves--have given it its
special appeal. Neither does that appeal lie in such story as there
is--which, in fact, is very little. A French squire (he is more nearly
that than most French landlords have cared to be, or indeed have been
able to be, since the Revolution and the Code Napoléon) is orphaned
early, brought up at his remote country house by an aunt, privately
tutored for a time, not by an abbé, but by a young schoolmaster and
literary aspirant; then sent for three or four years to the nearest
"collége," where he is bored but triumphant: and at last, about his
_vingt ans_, let loose in Paris. But--except once, and with the result,
usual for him, of finding the thing a failure--he does not make the
stock use of liberty at that age and in that place. He has, at school,
made friends with another youth of good family in the same province, who
has an uncle and cousins living in the town where the college is. The
eldest she-cousin of Olivier d'Orsel, Madeleine, is a year older than
Dominique de Bray, and of course he falls in love with her. But though
she, in a way, knows his passion, and, as one finds out afterwards,
shares or might have been made to share it, the love is "never told,"
and she marries another. The destined victims of the _un_smooth course,
however, meet in Paris, where Dominique and Olivier, though they do not
share chambers, live in the same house and flat; and the story of just
overcome temptation is broken off at last in a passionate scene like
that of "Love and Duty"--which noble and strangely undervalued poem
might serve as a long motto or verse-prelude to the book. It is rather
questionable whether it would not be better without the thin frame of
actual proem and conclusion, which does actually enclose the body of the
novel as a sort of _récit_, provoked partly by the suicide, or attempted
suicide, of Olivier after a life of fastidiousness and frivolity. The
proem gives us Dominique as--after his passion-years, and his as yet
unmentioned failure to achieve more than mediocrity in letters--a quiet
if not cheerful married man with a charming wife, pretty children, a
good estate, and some peasants not in the least like those of _La
Terre_; while in the epilogue the tutor Augustin, who has made his way
at last and has also married happily, drives up to the door, and the
book ends abruptly. It is perhaps naughty, but one does not want the
wife, or the children, or the good peasants, or the tutor Augustin,
while the suicide of Olivier appears rather copy-booky. It is especially
annoying thus to have what one does not want to know, and not what one,
however childishly, does want to know--that is to say, the after-history
of Madeleine.
Yet even in the preliminary forty or fifty pages few readers can fail to
perceive that they have got hold of a most uncommon book. Its
uncommonness, as was partly said above, does not consist merely in the
excellence of its description; nor in the acuteness of the occasional
_mots_; nor in the passion of the two main characters; nor in the
representation of the mood of that "discouraged generation of 1850" of
which it is, in prose and French, the other Testament corresponding to
Matthew Arnold's in verse and English. Nor does it even consist in all
these added together; but in the way in which they are fused; in which
they permeate each other and make, not a group, but a whole. It might
even, like Sainte-Beuve's _Volupté_ (_v. inf._). be called "not
precisely a novel" at all, and even more than Fabre's _Abbé Tigrane_
(_v. inf._ again), rather a study than a story. And it is partly from
this point of view that one regrets the prologue and epilogue. No
doubt--and the plea is a recurring one--in life these storms and
stresses, these failures and disappointments, do often subside into
something parallel to Dominique's second existence as squire, sportsman,
husband, father, and farmer. No doubt they
Pulveris exigui jactu compacta quiescunt,
whether the dust is of the actual grave and its ashes, or the more
symbolical one of the end of love. But on the whole, for art's sake,
this somewhat prosaic _Versöhnung_ is better left behind the scenes. Yet
this may be a private--it may be an erroneous--criticism. The positive
part of what has been said in favour of _Dominique_ is, I think,
something more. There are few novels like it; none exactly like, and
perhaps one does not want many or any more. But by itself it stands--and
stands crowned.
FOOTNOTES:
[198] Some years after its original appearance Mr. Andrew Lang, in
collaboration with another friend of mine, who adopted the _nom de
guerre_ of "Paul Sylvester," published a complete translation under the
title of _The Dead Leman_; and I believe that the late Mr. Lafacido
Hearn more recently executed another. But this last I have never seen.
(The new pages which follow to 222, it may not be superfluous to repeat,
appeared originally in the _Fortnightly Review_ for 1878, and were
reprinted in _Essays on French Novelists_, London, 1891. The Essay
itself contains, of course, a wider criticism of Gautier's work than
would be proper here.)
[199] For, as a rule, the critical faculty is like wine--it steadily
improves with age. But of course anybody is at liberty to say, "Only, in
both cases, when it is good to begin with."
[200] I suppose this was what attracted Mr. Hearn; but, as I have said,
I do not know his book itself.
[201] I do not know how many of the users of the catchword "purely
decorative," as applied to Moore, knew what they meant by it; but if
they meant what I have just said, I have no quarrel with them.
[202] Yet even inside poetry not so very much before 1830.
[203] Of course I know what a dangerous word this is; how often people
who have not a glimmering of it themselves deny it to others; and how it
is sometimes seen in mere horseplay, often confounded with "wit" itself,
and generally "taken in vain." But one must sometimes be content with
[Greek: phônêenta] or [Greek: phônanta] (the choice is open, but I
prefer the latter) [Greek: synetoisi], and take the consequences of them
with the [Greek: asynetoi].
[204] Some would allow it to Plautus, but I doubt; and even Martial did
not draw as much of it from Spanish soil as must have been latent
there--unless the Goths absolutely imported it. Perhaps the nearest
approach in him is the sudden turn when the obliging Phyllis, just as he
is meditating with what choice and costly gifts he shall reward her
varied kindnesses, anticipates him by modestly asking, with the sweetest
preliminary blandishments, for a jar of wine (xii. 65).
[205] La Fontaine may be desiderated. His is certainly one of the most
_humouresque_ of wits; but whether he has pure humour I am not sure.
[206] This is an exception to the rule of _tout passe_, if not of _tout
casse_. You can still buy avanturine wax; only, like all waxes, except
red and black, it seals very badly, and makes "kisses" in a most untidy
fashion. Avanturine should be left to the original stone--to peat-water
running over pebbles with the sun on it--and to eyes.
[207] I once knew an incident which might have figured in these scenes,
and which would, I think, have pleased Théo. But it happened just after
his own death, in the dawn of the aesthetic movement. A man, whom we may
call A, visited a friend, say B, who was doing his utmost to be in the
mode. A had for some time been away from the centre; and B showed him,
in hopes to impress, the blue china the Japanese mats and fans, the
rush-bottomed chairs, the Morris paper and curtains, the peacock
feathers, etc. But A looked coldly on them and said, "Where is your
brass tray?" And B was saddened and could only plead, "It is coming
directly; but you know too much."
[208] They are both connected with the "orgie"-mania, and the last is a
deliberate burlesque of the originals of P. L. Jacob, Janin, Eugène Sue,
and Balzac himself.
[209] It is here that the famous return of a kiss _revu, corrigé et
considérablement augmenté_ is recorded.
[210] He (it is some excuse for him that this suggested a better thing
in certain _New Arabian Nights_) buys, furnishes, and subsequently
deserts an empty house to give a ball in, and put his friends on no
scent of his own abode; but he makes this "own abode" a sort of Crystal
Palace in the centre of a whole ring-fence of streets, with the old
fronts of the houses kept to avert suspicion of the Seraglio of Eastern
beauties, the menagerie and beast fights, and the slaves whom (it is
rather suggested than definitely stated) he occasionally murders. He
performs circus-rider feats when he meets a lady (or at least a woman)
in the Bois de Boulogne; he sets her house on fire when it occurs to him
that she has received other lovers there; and we are given to understand
that he blows up his own palace when he returns to the East. In fact, he
is a pure anticipated cognition of a Ouidesque super-hero as parodied by
Sir Francis Burnand (and independently by divers schoolboys and
undergraduates) some fifty years ago.
[211] I have seen an admirable criticism of this "thing" in one word,
"Cold!"
[212] On the cayenne-and-claret principle which Haydon (one hopes
libellously, in point of degree) attributed to Keats. (It was probably a
devilled-biscuit, and so quite allowable.)
[213] "Théo" has no repute as a psychologist; but I have known such
repute attained by far less subtle touches than this.
[214] For more on them, with a pretty full abstract of _Le Capitaine
Fracasse_, see the Essay more than once mentioned.
[215] _V. sup._ Vol. I. p. 279-286. Of course the duplication, _as
literature_, is positively interesting and welcome.
[216] I--some fifty years since--knew a man who, with even greater
juvenility, put pretty much the same doctrine in a Fellowship Essay. He
did not obtain that Fellowship.
[217] It might possibly have been shortened with advantage in
concentration of effect. But the story (pleasantly invented, if not
true) of Gautier's mother locking him up in his room that he might not
neglect his work (of the nature of which she was blissfully ignorant)
nearly excuses him. A prisoner will naturally be copious rather than
terse.
[218] It may amuse some readers to know that I saw the rather famous
lithograph (of a lady and gentleman kissing each other at full speed on
horseback), which owes its subject to the book, in no more romantic a
place that a very small public-house in "Scarlet town," to which I had
gone, not to quench my thirst or for any other licentious purpose, but
to make an appointment with--a chimney-sweep.
[219] Some might even say he had too much.
[220] For reference to previous dealings of mine with Mérimée see
_Preface_.
[221] It is sad, but necessary, to include M. Brunetière among the
latter class.
[222] He was never a professor, but was an inspector; and, though I may
be biassed, I think the inspector is usually the more "donnish" animal
of the two.
[223] And perhaps in actual life, if not in literature, I should prefer
a young woman who might possibly have me murdered if she discovered a
blood-feud between my ancestors and hers, to one in whose company it
would certainly be necessary to keep a very sharp look-out on my watch.
The two risks are not equally "the game."
[224] Many a reader, I hope, has been reminded, by one or the other, or
both, of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, which also contains the story: and
has gone to it with the usual consequence of reading nothing else for
some time.
[225] "Mérimée était gentilhomme: Sainte-Beuve ne l'était pas." I forget
who said this, but it was certainly said, and I think it was true.
[226] This is not merely a waste of explosives. I have actually seen the
story dismissed as a "merely faithful record of the facts" or something
of the sort. One was at least obliged to the man for reminding one of
Partridge on Garrick.
[227] A very "gentle" reader may perceive something _not_ quite
explained, and I should be happy to allow it.
[228] And perhaps--though Mérimée does not allege this--by doing good to
his neighbours likewise; for he rescues twelve companions of his own
naughtiness from the infernal regions. The mixture of pagan and
Christian eschatology, if not borrowed, is exceedingly well and suitably
"found."
[229] He had at one time introduced a smirch of grime by which nothing
was gained and a good deal lost--the abduction being not at once cut
short, and the bear being suggested as the Count's actual sire (see
Burton again). But he had the taste as well as the sense to cut this
out. The management of the outsiders mentioned above contrasts
remarkably in point of art with the similar things which, as noted (_v.
sup._ pp. 93-4), do _not_ improve _Inès de las Sierras_.
[230] He blue-spectacled, she black-veiled.
[231] Uncarpeted and polished, French fashion, of course.
[232] Mérimée represents his Englishman (and an Englishman who can read
Greek, too!) as satisfied with, and ordering a second bottle of, an
extemporised "port" made of ratafia, "quinze sous" _ordinaire_, and
brandy! This could deceive few Englishmen; and (till very recent years)
absolutely no Englishman who could read Greek at a fairly advanced
period of life. From most of the French Novelists of the time it would
not surprise us; but from Mérimée, who was constantly visiting England
and had numerous English friends, it is a little odd. It may have been
done _lectoris gratia_ (but hardly _lectricis_), to suit what even the
other novelists just mentioned occasionally speak of as the _Anglais de
vaudeville_.
[233] I use this adverb from no trade-jealously: for I have made as many
translations myself as I have ever wished to do, and have always been
adequately paid for them. But there is no doubt that the competition of
amateur translation too often, on the one hand, reduces fees to sweating
point, and on the other affects the standard of competence rather
disastrously. I once had to review a version of _Das Kalte Herz_, in
which the wicked husband persecuted his wife with a "_pitcher_,"
_Peitsche_ being so translated by the light of nature, or the darkness
of no dictionary.
[234] Professed renderings of Spanish plays which never existed. _La
Guzla_--a companion volume with an audacious anagrammatising of "Gazul,"
etc., etc.--is a collection of pure ballads similarly attributed to a
non-existent Slav poet, Hyacinthe Maglanovich. Both, in their influence
on the Romantic movement, were only second to the work of actual
English, German, and Spanish predecessors, and may rank with that of
Nodier.
[235] Of the collection definitely called _Nouvelles_.
[236] I have left the shortest story in the volume, _Croisilles_, to a
note. It has, I believe, been rather a favourite with some, but it seems
to me that almost anybody could have written it, as far as anything but
the mere writing goes. Nor shall I criticise _Mimi Pinson_ and other
things at length. I cannot go so far as a late friend of mine, who
maintained that you must always praise the work of a writer you like.
But I think one has the option of silence--partial at any rate.
[237] If anybody pleads for Louis Bertrand of _Gaspard de la Nuit_ as a
thirdsman, I should accept him gladly, though he is even farther from
the novel-norm than Gérard himself. I once had the pleasure of bringing
him to the knowledge of the late Lord Houghton, who, the next time I met
him, ejaculated, "I've got him, and covered him all over with moons and
stars as he deserves." I hope Lord Crewe has the copy. (For Baudelaire's
still less novelish following of _Gaspard_, see below. As far as style
goes, both would enter this chapter "by acclamation.")
[238] This has been already referred to above. After one of the
abscondences or disappearances brought about by his madness, he was
found dead--hanging to a balcony, or outside stair, or lamp-post, or
what not, in one of those purlieus of Old Paris which were afterwards
swept away, but which Hugo and Méryon have preserved for us in different
forms of "black and white." Suicide, as always in such cases, is the
orthodox word in this, and may be correct. But some of his friends were
inclined to think that he had been the victim of pure murderous sport on
the part of the gangs of _voyous_, ancestors of the later "apaches," who
infested the capital.
[239] The quality will not be sought in vain by those who read Mr.
Lang's own poems--there are several--on and from Gérard.
[240] "Perhaps not, my dear; perhaps not."
[241] What, I suppose, is the "standard" edition--that of the so-called
_Oeuvres Complètes_--contains them all, but with some additions and more
omissions to and from the earlier issues. And the individual pieces,
especially _Sylvie_, which is to be more fully dealt with here than any
other, are subjected to a good deal of rehandling.
[242] I may be taken to task for rendering _lisière_ "fringes," but the
actual English equivalent "list" is not only ambiguous, not only too
homely in its specific connotation, but wrong in rhythm. And "selvage,"
escaping the first and last objections, may be thought to incur the
middle one. Moreover, while both words signify a well-defined edge,
_lisière_ has a sense--special enough to be noted in dictionaries--of
the looser-planted border of trees and shrubs which almost literally
"fringes" a regular forest.
[243] _Angélique_, which used to head _Les Filles du Feu_, in front of
_Sylvie_, but was afterwards cut away by the editors of the _Oeuvres
Complètes_ for reasons given under the head of _Les Faux Saulniers_
(vol. iv. of that edition), is a specially Sternian piece, mixing up the
chase for a rare book, and some other matters, with the adventures of a
seventeenth-century ancestress of this book's author, who eloped with a
servant, zigzagged as much as possible. It is quite good reading, but a
little _mechanical_. Perhaps it is not too officious to remark that
_Filles du Feu_ is to be interpreted here in the sense of our "_Faces_
in the fire."
[244] Gérard was a slightly older man than Théo, but they were, as they
could not but be, close friends.
[245] Even those who care little for mere beauty of style--or who cannot
stand the loss of it in translation--may find here a vivid picture, by a
hand of the most qualified, of the mental condition which produced the
masterpieces of 1825-1850. And the contrast with the "discouraged
generation" which immediately followed is as striking.
[246] Especially, it may be, if one has heard Galuppi's own music played
by a friend who is himself now dead.
[247] Some would make it a quintet with Leconte de Lisle, but I think
"the King should consider of it" as to this. He is grand _sometimes_:
but so are Père Le Moyne and others. It is hit or miss with them; the
Four can make sure of it.
[248] It does, of course, deserve, and in this place specially should
receive, the credit of being the first French historical novel of the
modern kind which possessed great literary merit.
[249] Alexander, though he actually wrote histories of a kind, was far
below Alfred in political judgment.
[250] _Vide infra_ on Dumas himself.
[251] About Plato and Homer, who are very welcome, and "Le Mensonge
Social," which is, perhaps, a little less so.
[252] But see note 2 on next page.
[253] One wonders if the Black Doctor was so sure of this on his own
death-bed?
[254] The first line of Gilbert's swan-song--the only song of his that
is remembered. It sets Stello himself on the track which the "Black
Doctor" has concealed up to the point. As the original rhythm could not
be kept without altering the substance, I have substituted another--not
so unconnected as it may seem.--By the way, Vigny has taken as much
liberty with French dates in this story as with English facts in the
Chatterton one. Gilbert died in 1780, and Louis XV. had passed from the
arms of his last mistress, Scarlatina Maligna, six years before, to be
actually made the subject of a funeral panegyric by the poet. In fact,
the sufferings of the latter have been argued to be pure legend. But
this of course affects _literature_ hardly at all; and Vigny had a
perfect right to use the accepted version.
[255] Why should a "basket" be specially silly? The answer is that the
original comparison was to a "panier _percé_," a basket which won't hold
anything. But the phrase got shortened.
[256] He not only, in the face of generally known and public history,
makes the man who was positively insolent to George III. a flunky of
royalty, but assigns, as the immediate cause of the poet's suicide, the
offer to him of a lucrative but menial office in the Mansion House! Now,
if not history, biography tells us that Beckford's own death, and the
consequent loss of hope from him, were at least among the causes, if not
the sole cause, of the _subsequent_ catastrophe.
[257] He has contrived, with the help of the gaoler's daughter Rose, to
suppress an earlier inclusion of Chénier's name in the tumbril-list; and
thus might have saved him altogether, but for the father's insane
reminder to Robespierre.
[258] But she had to go backwards through the circles between Thermidor
and Brumaire, and can hardly be said to have "seen the stars" even then.
Vigny has, as we shall see, touched on the less enormous and
flagrant--but as individual things scarcely less atrocious--crimes of
the Directory in the first story of his next book.
[259] There might of course have been spy-subordinates (cf. the case of
D'Artagnan and Belleisle), with secret commissions to meet and render
futile his disobedience; but nothing of the sort is even hinted.
[260] Vigny, with perfect probability, but whether with complete
historical accuracy or not I do not know, represents this useless
exposure as wanton bravado on Napoleon's part.
[261] There may perhaps have been some private reasons for his
enthusiasm. At any rate it is pleasant to compare it with the offensive
manner in which this "heroic sailor-soul" and admirably good man has
sometimes been treated by the more pedantic kind of naval historian.