CHAPTER VII

THE MINORS OF 1830

There is always a risk (as any one who remembers a somewhat ludicrous

outburst of indignation, twenty or thirty years ago, among certain

English versemen will acknowledge) in using the term "minor." But it is

too useful to be given up; and in this particular case, if the very

greatest novelists are not of the company, there are those whose

greatness in other ways, and whose more than mediocrity in this, should

appease the admirers of their companions. We shall deal here with the

novel work of Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of France; of Eugène

Sue, whose mere popularity exceeded that of any other writer discussed

in this half of the volume except Dumas; of men like Sandeau, Charles de

Bernard, and Murger, whose actual work in prose fiction is not much less

than consummate in its own particular key and subdivisions; of one of

the best political satirists in French fiction, Louis Reybaud; and of

others still, like Soulié, Méry, Achard, Féval, Ourliac, Roger de

Beauvoir, Alphonse Karr, Émile Souvestre, who, to no small extent

individually and to a very great extent when taken in battalion, helped

to conquer that supreme reputation for amusingness, for pastime, which

the French novel has so long enjoyed throughout Europe. And these will

supply not a little material for the survey of the general

accomplishment of that novel in the first half of the century, which

will form the subject of a "halt" or Interchapter, when Dumas

himself--the one "major" left, and left purposely--has been discussed.

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve.--_Volupté._]

When Sainte-Beuve, thirty years after the book first appeared, subjoined

a most curious Appendix to his only novel, _Volupté_, he included a

letter of his own, in which he confesses that it is "not in the precise

sense a novel at all." It is certainly in some respects an outlier, even

of the outlying group to which it belongs--the group of _René_ and

_Adolphe_ and their followers.

[Sidenote: Its "puff-book."]

I do not remember anything, even in a wide sense, quite like this

Appendix--at least in the work of an author _majorum gentium_. It

consists of a series of extracts, connected by remarks of Sainte-Beuve's

own, from the "puff"-letters which distinguished people had sent him, in

recompense for the copies of the book which he had sent _them_. Most

people who write have had such letters, and "every fellow likes a hand."

The persons who enjoy being biographied expect them, I suppose, to be

published after their deaths; and I have known, I think, some writers of

"Reminiscences" who did it themselves in their lifetimes. But it

certainly is funny to find the acknowledged "first critic" in the Europe

or the world of his day paralleling from private sources the collections

which are (quite excusably) added as advertisements from published

criticisms to later editions of a book. Intrinsically the things, no

doubt, have interest. Chateaubriand, whose _René_ is effusively praised

in the novel, opens with an equally effusive but rather brief letter of

thanks, not destitute of the apparent artificiality which, for all his

genius, distinguished that "noble _Why_count," and perhaps, for all its

"butter," partly responsible for the _aigre-doux_ fashion in which the

prais_ee_ subsequently treated the prais_er_. Michelet, Villemain, and

Nisard are equally favourable, and perhaps a little more sincere, though

Nisard (of course) is in trouble about Sainte-Beuve's divagations from

the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Brizeux applauds

in prose _and_ verse. Madame de Castries (Balzac's "Duchesse de

Langeais"), afterwards an intimate personal friend of the critic's,

acknowledges, in an anonymous letter, her "profound emotion." Lesser,

but not least, people like Magnin join. Eugénie de Guérin bribes her

future eulogist. Madame Desbordes-Valmore, _the_ French poetess of the

day, is enthusiastic as to the book: and George Sand herself writes a

good half-dozen small-printed and exuberant pages, in which the only

(but repeated) complaint is that Sainte-Beuve actually makes his hero

find comfort in Christianity. Neither Lamartine (as we might have

expected) nor Lamennais (whose disciple Sainte-Beuve had tried to be)

liked it; but Lacordaire did not disapprove.

[Sidenote: Itself.]

Before saying anything more about it, let us give a brief argument of

it--a thing which it requires more (for reasons to be given later) than

most books, whether "precisely" novels or not. It is the autobiographic

history of a certain "Amaury" (whose surname, I think, we never hear),

addressed as a caution to a younger friend, no name of whom we ever hear

at all. The friend is too much addicted to the pleasures of sense, and

Amaury gives him his own experience of a similar tendency. Despite the

subject and the title, there is nothing in the least "scabrous" in it.

Lacordaire himself, it seems, gave it a "vu et approuvé" as being

something that a seminarist or even a priest (which Amaury finishes, to

the great annoyance of George Sand, as being) might have composed for

edifying purposes. But the whole is written to show the truth of a

quatrain of the Judicious Poet:

The wise have held that joys of sense,

The more their pleasure is intense,

More certainly demand again

Usurious interest of pain;

though the moral is enforced in rather a curious manner. Amaury is the

only, and orphan, representative of a good Norman or Breton family, who

has been brought up by an uncle, and arrives at adolescence just at the

time of the Peace of Amiens or thereabouts. He has escaped the

heathendom which reigned over France a decade previously, and is also a

good Royalist, but very much "left to himself" in other ways.

Inevitably, he falls in love, though at first half-ignorant of what he

is doing or what is being done to him. The first object is a girl,

Amélie de Liniers, in every way desirable in herself, but unluckily not

enough desired by him. He is insensibly divided from her by acquaintance

with the chief royalist family of the district, the Marquis and Marquise

de Couaën, with the latter of whom he falls again in much deeper love,

though never to any guilty extent. She, who is represented as the real

"Elle," is again superseded, at least partially, by a "Madame R.," who

is a much less immaculate person, though the precise extent of the

indulgence of their affections is left veiled. But, meanwhile, Amaury's

tendency towards "Volupté" has, after his first visit to Paris, led him

to indulge in the worship of Venus Pandemos, _parallèlement_ with his

more exalted passions. No individual object or incident is mentioned in

any detail; and the passages relating to this side of the matter are so

obscurely phrased that a very innocent person might--without stupidity

quite equal to the innocence--be rather uncertain what is meant. But the

twin ravages--of more or less pure passion unsatisfied and wholly impure

satisfied appetite--ruin the patient's peace of mind. Alongside of this

conflict there is a certain political interest. The Marquis de Couaën is

a fervent Royalist, and so willing to be a conspirator that he actually

gets arrested. But he is an ineffectual kind of person, though in no

sense a coward or a fool. Amaury meets with a much greater example of

"Thorough" in Georges Cadoudal, and only just escapes being entangled in

the plot which resulted in the execution[262] of Cadoudal himself; the

possible suicide but probable murder[262] of Pichegru, if not of others;

the kidnapping and unquestionable murder[262] of the Duc d'Enghien, and

the collapse of the career of Moreau. Some other real persons are

brought in, though in an indirect fashion. Finally, the conflict of

flesh and spirit and the general tumult of feeling are too much for

Amaury, and he takes refuge, through the seminary, in the priesthood.

The last event of the book is the death and burial of Madame de Couaën,

her husband and Amaury somewhat melodramatically--and perhaps with a

slight suggestion both of awkward allegory and possible

burlesque--hammering literal nails into her coffin, one on each side.

In addition to the element of passion (both "passion_ate_" in the

English and "passion_nel_" in the French sense) and that of politics,

there is a good deal of more abstract theology and philosophy, chiefly

of the mixed kind, as represented in various authors from Pascal--indeed

from the Fathers--to Saint-Martin.[263]

[Sidenote: Its character in various aspects.]

Now the book (which is undoubtedly a very remarkable one, whether it

does or does not deserve that other epithet which I have seen denied to

it, of "interesting") may be regarded in two ways. The first--as a

document in regard to its author--is one which we have seldom taken in

this _History_, and which the present historian avoids taking as often

as he can. Here, however, it may be contended (and discussion under the

next head will strengthen the contention) that it is almost impossible

to do the book justice, and not very easy even to understand it, without

some consideration of the sort. When Sainte-Beuve published it, he had

run up, or down, a rather curious gamut of creeds and crazes. He had

been a fervent Romantic. He had (for whatever mixture of reasons need

not be entered into here) exchanged this first faith, wholly or

partially, for that singular _un_faith of Saint-Simonianism, which, if

we had not seen other things like it since and at the present day, would

seem incredible as even a hallucination of good wits. He had left this

again to endeavour to be a disciple of Lamennais, and had, not

surprisingly, failed. He was now to set himself to the strange Herculean

task of his _Port-Royal_, which had effects upon him, perhaps stranger

at first sight than on reflection. It left him, after these vicissitudes

and pretty certainly some accompanying experiences adumbrated in

_Volupté_ itself, "L'oncle Beuve" of his later associates--a

free-thinker, though not a violent one, in religion; a critic, never

perhaps purely literary, but, as concerns literature and life combined,

of extraordinary range, sanity, and insight; yet sometimes singularly

stunted and limited in respect of the greatest things, and--one has to

say it, though there is no need to stir the mud as it has been stirred[264]

--something of a "porker of Epicurus."

Now, with such additional light as this sketch may furnish, let us

return to the book itself. I have said that it has been pronounced

"uninteresting," and it must be confessed that, in some ways, the author

has done all he could to make it so. In the first place it is much too

long; he has neglected the examples of _René_ and _Adolphe_, and given

nearly four hundred solid and closely packed pages to a story with very

little incident, very little description, only one solidly presented

character, and practically no conversation. There is hardly a novel

known to me from which the disadvantages of some more or less mechanical

fault of presentation--often noticed in this _History_--could be better

illustrated than from _Volupté_. I have called the pages "solid," and

they are so in more than the general, more even than the technical

printer's sense. One might imagine that the author had laid a wager

that he would use the smallest number of paragraph-breaks possible.

There are none at all till page 6 (the fourth of the actual book);

blocks of the same kind occur constantly afterwards, and more than one,

or at most two, "new pars" are very rare indeed on a page. Even such

conversation as there is is not extracted from the matrix of narrative,

and the whole is unbroken _récit_.

It may seem that there is, and has been elsewhere, too much stress laid

upon this point. But if I, who am something of a _helluo librorum_, and

very seldom find anything that resists my devouring faculty, feel this

difficulty, how much more must persons who require to be tempted and

baited on by mechanical and formal allurements?

Still, some strong-minded person may say: "These are 'shallows and

miseries'--base mechanical considerations. Tell me _why_ the book, as

matter, has been found uninteresting." In this instance there will be no

difficulty in complying with the request. Let me at once say that I do

not consider it uninteresting myself; that, in fact (and stronger

testimony is hardly possible), after reading great part of it without

appetite and "against the grain," I began to take a very considerable

interest in it. But this did not prevent my having a pretty clear notion

of what seem to me faults of treatment, and even of conception, quite

independent of those already mentioned.

The main one is somewhat "tickle of the sere" to handle. It has been

said that, despite its alarming title, there is nothing in the book that

even prudery, unless it were of the most irritable and morbid kind,

could object to. There is no dwelling on what Defoe ingeniously calls

"the vicious part" of the matter; there is no description of it closer

than, if as close as, some passages of the Book of Proverbs (which are

actually quoted), and, above all, there is no hint of any satisfaction

whatever being derived from the sins by the sinner. His course in this

respect might have been a succession of fits of vertigo or epilepsy as

far as pleasure goes. There is even a rather fine piece of real

psychology as to his state of mind after his first succumbing to

temptation. But all this abstinence and reticence, however laudable in a

sense it may be, necessarily deprives the passages of anything but

purely psychological interest, and leaves most of them not much of that.

Luxury _in vacuo_ may, no doubt, be perilous to the culprit; but it has,

for others, nearly as much of the unreal and chimerical as Gluttony

confined to "Second intentions."

Yet there is another objection to _Volupté_ which is even more closely

"psychological," and which has been indicated in the word

"parallèlement," suggested by, though largely transposed from,

Verlaine's use thereof in a title. There is no connection

established--there is even, it may seem, a great gulf fixed between

Amaury's actual "loves" for Amélie de Liniers, for Lucy de Couaën, and

even for the more questionable Madame R., and those "sippings of the

lower draught" which are so industriously veiled. If Amaury had

"disdamaged" himself, for his inability to possess any of his real and

superior loves, by lower indulgences, it would have been discreditable

but human. But there is certainly no expression--there is, unless I

mistake, hardly any suggestion--of anything of the kind. The currents of

spiritual and animal passion seem to have run independently of each

other, like canals at different heights on the slope of a hill. I do not

know that this is less discreditable; but it seems to me infinitely less

human. And, while carefully abstaining from any attempt to connect the

peculiarity with the above-mentioned scandals about Sainte-Beuve's life

and conversation in detail, one may suggest that it offers some

explanation of the unquestioned facts about this; also (and this is of

infinitely more importance) of that absence of ability to love

literature in anything like a passionate way, which, with a certain

other inability to love literature for itself, prevents him from

attaining the absolutely highest level in criticism, though his command

of ranges just below the highest is wider and firmer than that of any

other critic on record.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Jules Sandeau and Charles de Bernard.]

We may next take, to some extent together, two writers of the novel who

made their reputation in the July Monarchy, though one of them long

outlived it; who, though this one inclined to a sort of domestic tragedy

and the other to pure comedy, resembled each other not a little in

clinging to ordinary life, and my estimate of whom is considerably

higher than that recently (or, I think, at present) entertained by

French critics or by those English critics who think it right to be

guided by their French _confrères_. This estimate, however, has been

given at length in another place,[265] and I quite admit that the

subjects, though I have not in the least lowered my opinion of them, can

hardly be said (like Gautier, Mérimée, Balzac, and Dumas, in the present

part of this volume, or others later) to demand, in a general History,

very large space in dealing with them. I shall therefore endeavour to

summarise my corrected impressions more briefly than in those other

cases. This shortening may, I think, be justified doubly: in the first

place, because any one who is enough of a student to want more can go to

the other handling; and, in the second, because the only excellent way,

of reading the books themselves, may be adopted with very unusual

absence of any danger of disappointment. I hardly know any work of

either Jules Sandeau or of Charles de Bernard which is not worth reading

by persons of fairly catholic tastes in novel pastime.

The first-named--the younger by some half-dozen years, but the first to

publish by more than as many--concerns those who take a merely or mainly

anecdotic interest in literature by his well-known _liaison_ with George

Sand--to whom he gave _dimidium nominis_, and perhaps for a time at

least _dimidium cordis_, though he probably did not get it back so much

"in a worse estate"[266] as was the case with Musset and Chopin.

Sandeau's collaboration with her in novel-writing was long afterwards

succeeded by another in dramaturgy with Émile Augier, which resulted in

at least one of the most famous French plays of the nineteenth century,

_Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, based on Sandeau's _Sacs et Parchemins_. But

we need busy ourselves only with the novels themselves.

[Sidenote: Sandeau's work.]

Sandeau was barely twenty when he wrote _Rose et Blanche_, during the

time of, and with his partner in, that most dangerous of all possible

_liaisons_. But he was nearly thirty when he produced his own first work

of note, _Marianna_. In this, in _Fernand_, and in _Valcreuse_, all

books above the average in merit, there is what may be called, from no

mere Grundyite point of view, the drawback that they are all studies of

"the triangle." They are quite decently, and in fact morally, though not

goodily, handled. But it certainly may be objected that

trigonometry[267] of this kind occupies an exorbitant place in French

literature, and one may be a little sorry to see a neophyte of talent

taking to it. However, though Sandeau in these books showed his ability,

his way did not really lie _in_, though it might lie _through_, them. He

had, indeed, as a novelist should have, good changes of strings to his

bow, if not even more than one or two bows to shoot in.

No Frenchman has written a better boy's book than _La Roche aux

Mouettes_, deservedly well known to English readers in translation: and

whether he did or did not enter into designed competition with his

_quondam_ companion on the theme of Pastoral _berquinade_, I do not

myself think that _Catherine_ is much below _La Petite Fadette_ or _La

Mare au Diable_. He was a very considerable master of the short story;

you cannot have much better things of the kind than _Le Jour sans

Lendemain_ and _Un Début dans la Magistrature_. But his special gift lay

in treating two situations which sometimes met, or crossed, or even

substantially coincided. The one was the contrast of new and old,

whether from the side of actual "money-bags and archives" or from

others. The second and higher development of, or alternative to, this

was the working out of the subdued tragical, in which, short of the very

great masters, he had few superiors, while the quietness of his tones

and values even, enhances to some tastes the poignancy of the general

effect. _Mlle. de La Seiglière_ is, I suppose, the best representative

of the first class as a novel, for _Sacs et Parchemins_, as has been

said, waited for dramatisation to bring out its merits. The pearls or

pinks of the other are _Mlle. de Kérouare_ and _La Maison de Penarvan_,

the latter the general favourite, the former mine. Both have admirably

managed _peripeteias_, the shorter story (_Mlle. de Kérouare_) having,

in particular, a memorable setting of that inexorable irony of Fate

against which not only is there no armour, but not even the chance and

consolement of fighting armourless. When Marie de Kérouare accepts, at

her father's wish, a suitor suitable in every way, but somewhat

undemonstrative; when she falls in love (or thinks she does) with a

handsome young cousin; when the other aspirant loses or risks all his

fortune as a Royalist, and she will not accept what she might have, his

retirement, thereby eliciting from her father a _mot_ like the best of

Corneille's;[268] when, having written to a cousin excusing herself, she

gets a mocking letter telling her that _he_ is married already; when

the remorseless turn of Fortune's wheel loses her the real lover whom

she at last really does love--then it is not mere sentimental-Romantic

twaddle; it is a slice of life, soaked in the wine of Romantic

tragedy.[269]

[Sidenote: Bernard's]

In Charles de Bernard (or, if anybody is unable to read novels published

under a pseudonym with sufficient comfort, Charles Bernard du Grail de

la Villette[270]) one need not look for high passions and great actions

of this kind. He does try tragedy sometimes,[271] but, as has been

already admitted, it is not his trade. Occasionally, as in _Gerfaut_, he

takes the "triangle" rather seriously _à la_

George-Sand-and-the-rest-of-them. The satirists have said that, though

not invariably (our present author contains cautions on that point) yet

as a rule, if you take yourself with sufficient seriousness, mankind

will follow suit. It is certainly very risky to appear to take yourself

not seriously. _Gerfaut_, I believe, is generally held to be Bernard's

masterpiece. I remember that even my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, who seldom

differed with me on points of pure literature, almost gravely

remonstrated with me for not thinking enough of it. There are admirable

things in _Gerfaut_; but they are, as it seems to me, _separately_

admirable, and so are more like grouped short stories than like a whole

long novel. He wrote other books of substance, two of them, _Un

Beau-père_ and _Le Gentilhomme Campagnard_, each extending to a brace of

well-filled volumes. But these, as well as the single-volume but still

substantial _Un Homme Sérieux_ and _Les Ailes d'Icare_, like _Gerfaut_

itself, could all, I think, be split up into shorter stories without

difficulty and with advantage. It is of course very likely that the

comparative slighting which the author has received from M. Brunetière

and other French critics of the more theoretic kind is due to this. The

strict rule-system no doubt disapproves of the mere concatenation of

scenes--still more of the mere accumulation of them.

We, on the other hand, _quibus est nihil negatum_, or who at any rate

deny nothing to our favourite authors so long as they amuse or interest

us, ought to be--and some of the best as well as the not-best of us have

been--very fond of Charles de Bernard. How frankly and freely Thackeray

praised, translated, and adapted him ought to be known to everybody; and

indeed there was a great similarity between the two. The Frenchman had

nothing of Thackeray's strength--of his power of creating character; of

his intensity when he cared to be intense; of his satiric sweep and

"stoop"; of his spacious view and masterly grasp of life. But in some

ways he was a kind of Thackeray several degrees underproof--a small-beer

Thackeray that was a very excellent creature. In his grasp of a pure and

simple comic situation; in his faculty of carrying this out decently to

its appropriate end; and, above all, in the admirable quality of his

conversation, he was really a not so very minor edition of his great

English contemporary. Almost the only non-technical fault that can be

found with him--and it has been found by French as well as English

critics, so there is no room for dismissing the charge as due to a

merely insular cult of "good form"--is the extreme unscrupulousness of

some of his heroes, who appear to have no sense of honour at all. Yet,

in other ways, no French novelist of the century has obtained or

deserved more credit for drawing ladies and gentlemen. It has been

hinted that the inability to do this has been brought as a charge

against even the mighty Honoré,[272] and that, here at any rate, it has

been found impossible to deny it absolutely. But if the company of the

Human Comedy falls short in this respect, it is not because some of its

members do "shady" things. It is because the indefinable, but to those

who can perceive it unmistakable, _aura_ of "gentility"--in the true and

not the debased sense--is, at best, questionably present. This is not

the case with Bernard.

It is particularly difficult, in such a book as this, to deal with so

large a collection of what may be most appropriately called "Scenes and

Characters" as that which constitutes his most valuable if not all his

valuable work. In the older handling referred to, I selected, for pretty

full abstract and some translation, _Un Homme Sérieux_ among longer

books, and _Le Gendre_ among the short stories; and I still think them

the best, except _Le Pied d'Argile_, which, from Thackeray's

incomparable adaptation[273] of it in _The Bedford Row Conspiracy_,

remains as a standing possibility of acquaintance with Charles de

Bernard's way for those who do not read French, or do not care to

"research" for the original. Thackeray also gave a good deal of _Les

Ailes d'Icare_ in abstract and translation, and he borrowed something

more from it in _A Shabby Genteel Story_. _La Peau du Lion_ and _La

Chasse aux Amants_ have some slight resemblance to _Le Gendre_, in that

the gist of all three is concerned with the defeat of unscrupulous

lovers, and neither is much inferior to it. I never knew anybody who had

read _La Femme de Quarante Ans_ and its history of sentimental

star-gazing _à deux_ without huge enjoyment; and _L'Arbre de la

Science_, as well as the shorter _Un Acte de Vertu_, deserve special

mention.

But, in fact, take the volumes entitled _L'Écueil_, _Le Noeud

Gordien_, _Le Paravent,_ and _Le Paratonnerre_; open any of them where

you like, and it will go hard but, in the comic stories at any rate, you

will find yourself well off. The finest of the tragic ones is, I think,

_L'Anneau d'Argent_, which in utilising the sad inefficacy of the

Legitimist endeavours to upset the July Monarchy, comes close to the

already-mentioned things of Sandeau and Ourliac.

That a critic like M. Brunetière should dismiss Bernard as "commonplace"

(I forget the exact French word, but the meaning was either this or

"mediocre"), extending something the same condemnation, or damningly

faint praise, to Sandeau, may seem strange at first sight, but explains

itself pretty quickly to those who have the requisite knowledge. Neither

could, by any reasonable person, be accused of that _grossièreté_ which

offended the censor so much, and to no small extent so rightly. Neither

was extravagantly unacademic or in other ways unorthodox. But both might

be called _vulgaire_ from the same point of view which made Madame de

Staël so call her greatest contemporary as a she-novelist--one, too, so

much greater than herself.[274] That is to say, they did deal with

strictly ordinary life, and neither attempted that close psychological

analysis and ambitious _schematism_ which (we have been told) is the

pride of the French novel, and which, certainly, some French critics

have supposed to be of its essence. These points of view I have left

undiscussed for the most part, but have consistently in practice

declined to take, in the first volume, while they are definitely opposed

and combated in more than one passage of this.[275] I admit that

Sandeau, save in the one situation where I think he comes near to the

first class--that of subdued resignation to calamity--is not passionate;

I admit that Bernard has a certain superficiality, and that, as has been

confessed already, his "form" sometimes leaves to desire. But they both

seem to me to have, in whatever measure and degree, what, with me, is

the article of standing or falling in novels--humanity. And they

seem--also to me, and speaking under correction--to _write_, if not

consummately, far more than moderately well, and to _tell_ in a fashion

for which consummate is not too strong a word. While for pure gaiety,

unsmirched by coarseness and unspoilt by ill-nature, you will not find

much better pastime anywhere than in the work of the author of

_L'Écueil_ and _Le Paratonnerre_.

Indeed these two--though the _berquinade_ tendency, considerably

_masculated_, prevails in one, and the _esprit gaulois_, decorously

draped, in the other--seem to me to run together better than any two

other novelists of our company. They do not attempt elaborate analysis;

they do not grapple with thorny or grimy problems; they are not

purveyors of the indecent, or dealers in the supernatural and fantastic,

or poignant satirists of society at large or individuals in particular.

But they can both, in their different ways, tell a plain tale uncommonly

well, and season it with wit or pathos when either is suitable. Their

men and women are real men and women, and the stages on which they move

are not _mere_ stages, but pieces of real earth.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Sue, Soulié, and the novel of melodrama--_Le Juif Errant_,

etc.]

As regards one formerly almost famous and still well-known novelist,

Eugène Sue, I am afraid I shall be an unprofitable servant to such

masters in the guise of readers as desire to hear about him. For he is

one more of those--I do not think I have had or shall have to confess to

many--whom I have found it almost impossible to read. I acknowledge,

indeed, that though at the first reading (I do not know how many years

ago) of his most famous work, _Le Juif Errant_, I found no merit in it

at all, at a second, though I do not think that even then I quite got

through it, I had to allow a certain grandiosity. _The Mysteries of

Paris_ has always defeated me, and I am now content to enjoy Thackeray's

very admirable _précis_ of part of it. Out of pure goodness and sheer

equity I endeavoured, for the present volume, to make myself acquainted

with one of his later books--the immense _Sept Péchés Capitaux_, which

is said to be a Fourierist novel, and explains how the vices may be

induced, in a sort of Mandeville-made-amiable fashion, to promote the

good of society. I found it what Mrs. Browning has made somebody

pronounce Fourier himself in _Aurora Leigh_, "Naught!"[276] except that

I left them at the end actually committing an Eighth deadly sin by

drinking _iced_ Constantia![277] Sue, who had been an army surgeon and

had served during the Napoleonic war, both on land and at sea, wrote,

before he took to his great melodramas, some rather extravagant naval

novels, which are simply rubbish compared with Marryat, but in

themselves not quite, I think, so difficult to read as his better known

work. I remember one in particular, but I am not certain whether it was

_La Coucaratcha_ or _La Vigie de Koatven_. They are both very nice

titles, and I am so much afraid of disillusionment that I have thought

it better to look neither up for this occasion.[278]

[Sidenote: Melodramatic fiction generally.]

The fact is, as it seems to me, that the proper place for melodrama is

not the study but the stage. I fear I have uttered some heresies about

the theatre in this book, and I should not be sorry if I never passed

through its doors again. If I must, I had rather the entertainment were

melodrama than anything else. The better the play is as literature, the

more I wish that I might be left to read it in comfort and see it acted

with my mind's eye only. But I can rejoice in the valiant curate when

(with the aid of an avalanche, if I remember rightly) he triumphs over

the wicked baronet, who is treading on the fingers of the heroine as

she hangs over the precipice. I can laugh and applaud when the heroic

mother slashes her daughter's surreptitious portrait in full Academy.

The object of melodrama is to make men rejoice and laugh; but it seems

to me to require the stage to do it on, or at any rate to receive an

immense assistance from theatrical presentation. So given, it escapes

the curse of _segnius irritant_, because it attacks both ear and eye;

being entirely independent of style (which _is_ in such cases actually

_gênant_), it does not need the quiet and solitary devotion which

enjoyment of style demands; and it is immensely improved by dresses and

_décor_, scenery and music, and "spectacle" generally--all things which,

again, interfere with pure literary enjoyment. I shall hope to have

demonstrated, or at any rate done something to show, how Dumas, when at

his best, and even not quite at his best, escapes the actual

melodramatic. Perhaps this was because he had purged himself of the

stagy element in his abundant theatric exercise earlier. Sue, of course,

dramatised or got dramatised a considerable part of his many inventions;

but I think one can see that they were not originally stage-stuff.

If, however, any one must have melodrama, but at the same time does not

want it in stage form, I should myself recommend to him Frédéric Soulié

in preference to Eugène Sue. Soulié is, indeed, a sort of blend of Dumas

and Sue, but more melodramatic than the former, and less full of grime

and purpose and other "non-naturals" of the novel than the latter. It is

evident that he has taken what we may call his schedules pretty directly

from Scott himself; but he has filled them up with more melodramatic

material. It is very noteworthy, too, that Soulié, like Dumas, turned

_his_ stagy tastes and powers on to actual stage-work, and so kept the

two currents duly separate. And it seems to be admitted that he had

actual literary power, if he did not achieve much actual literary

performance.

[Sidenote: _Le Château des Pyrénées._]

For myself, I think that _Le Château des Pyrénées_ is a thing, that in

De Quincey's famous phrase, you _can_ recommend to a friend whose

appetite in fiction is melodramatic. Here is, if not exactly "_God's_

plenty," at any rate plenty of a kind--plenty whose horn is

inexhaustible and the reverse of monotonous. You never, though you have

read novels as the waves of the sea or the sands of the shore in number,

know exactly what is going to happen, and when you think you know what

is happening, it turns out to be something else. Persons who wear, as to

the manner born, the jackets of lackeys turn out to be bishops; and

bishops prove to be coiners. An important _jeune premier_ or

_quasi-premier_, having just got off what seems to be imminent danger,

is stabbed in the throat, is left for dead, and then carries out a

series of risky operations and conversations for several hours. A

castle, more than Udolphian in site, size, incidents, and opportunities,

is burnt at a moment's notice, as if it were a wigwam. Everybody's sons

and daughters are somebody else's daughters and sons--a state of things

not a little facilitated by the other fact that everybody's wife is

somebody else's mistress. Everybody knows something mysterious and

exceedingly damaging about everybody else; and the whole company would

be cleared off the stage in the first few chapters if something did not

always happen to make them drop the daggers in a continual stalemate.

Dukes who are governors of provinces and peers of France are also heads

(or think they are) of secret societies--the orthodox members of which

chiefly do the coining, but are quite ignorant that a large number of

other members are Huguenots (it is not long after the "Revocation") and

are, in the same castle, storing arms for an insurrection. Spanish

counts who are supposed to have been murdered fifteen years ago turn up

quite uninjured, and ready for the story to go on sixteen years longer.

When you have got an ivory casket supposed to be full of all sorts of

compromising documents, somebody produces another, exactly like it, but

containing documents more compromising still. There is a counsellor of

the Parliament of Toulouse--supposed to be not merely a severe

magistrate, but a man of spotless virtue, and one who actually submits

fearlessly to great danger in doing his duty, but who turns out to be an

atrocious criminal. And in the centre of all the turmoil there is a

wondrous figure, a sorcerer-shepherd, who is really an Italian prince,

who pulls all the strings, makes all cups slip at all lips, sets up and

upsets all the puppets, and is finally poniarded by the wicked

counsellor, both of them having been caught at last, and the counsellor

going mad after commission of his final crime.

Now, if anybody wants more than this--there is, in fact, a great deal

more in the compass of two volumes,[279] containing between them less

than six hundred pages--all I can say is that he is vexatious and

unreasonable, and that I have no sympathy whatever with him. Of course

the book is of its own kind, and not of another. Some people may like

that kind less than others; some may not like it at all. But in that

case nobody obliges them to have anything to do with it.

Soulié wrote nearly two score novels or works of fiction, ranging from

_Contes pour les Enfants_ to _Mémoires du Diable_. I do not pretend to

have read all or even very many of them, for, as I have confessed, they

are not my special kind. In novels of action there should be a great

deal of fighting and a great deal of love-making, and it does not seem

to me that either[280] was Soulié's forte. But as the _Mémoires_ are

sometimes quoted as his masterpiece, something should, I suppose, be

said about them.

[Sidenote: _Les Mémoires du Diable._]

One thing about the book is certain--that it is much more ambitiously

planned than the _Château_; and I do not think it uncritical to say that

the ambition is, to a certain extent, successful. One credit, at any

rate, can hardly be denied it. Considering the immense variety in

circumstances of the bargains with the Devil which are made in actual

life, it may seem strange that the literary treatment of the subject

should be so comparatively monotonous as it is. Soulié, I think, has

been at least as original as anybody else, though it was of course

almost impossible for him to avoid suggestions, if not of Marlowe, of

Lesage, Goethe, Maturin (whose wide popularity in France at this time

must never be forgotten), and others. At the very beginning there is one

touch which, if not absolutely invented, is newish in the connection.

The Château of Ronquerolles, again in the Pyrenean district (besides the

advantages of a mountainous country, Soulié himself was born at Foix),

has a range of mysterious windows, each of which has for many

generations emerged, with the room appertaining, from wall and corridor

without anybody remembering it before.[281] As a matter of fact these

chambers have been the scenes of successive bargains between the Lords

of Ronquerolles and the Prince of Darkness; and a fresh one is opened

whenever the last inheritor of an ancestral curse (details of which are

explained later) has gone to close his account. The new Count de Luizzi

knows what he has to do, which is to summon Satan by a certain little

silver bell at the not most usual but sufficiently witching hour of

_two_ A.M., saying at the same time, "Come!" After a slightly trivial

farce-overture of apparitions in various banal forms, Luizzi compels the

fallen archangel to show himself in his proper shape; and the bargain is

concluded after some chaffering. It again is not quite the usual form;

there being, as in Melmoth's case, a redemption clause, though a

different one. If the man can say and show, after ten years, that he has

been happy he will escape. The "consideration" is also uncommon. Luizzi

does not want wealth, which, indeed, he possesses; nor, directly,

pleasure, etc., which he thinks he can procure for himself. He wants

(God help him!) to know all about other people, their past lives, their

temptations, etc.--a thing which a person of sense and taste would do

anything, short of selling himself to the Devil, _not_ to know. There

are, however, some apparently liberal, if discreditable,

concessions--that Luizzi may reveal, print, and in any other way avail

himself of the diabolic information. But, almost immediately, the

metaphorical cloven foot and false dice appear. For it seems that in

certain circumstances Luizzi can only rid himself of his ally when

unwelcome, and perform other acts, at the price of forfeiting a month of

his life--a thing likely to abridge and qualify the ten years very

considerably, and the "happiness" more considerably still.[282] And this

foul play, or at any rate sharp practice, continues, as might be

expected, throughout. The evil actions which Luizzi commits are not, as

usual, committed with impunity as to ordinary worldly consequences,

while he is constantly enlarging the debt against his soul. He is also

always getting into trouble by mixing up his supernatural knowledge with

his ordinary life, and he even commits murder without intending or

indeed knowing it. This is all rather cleverly managed; though the

end--the usual sudden "foreclosure" by Diabolus, despite the effort of

no less than three Gretchens who go upwards, and of a sort of inchoate

repentance on Luizzi's own part before he goes downwards--might be

better.

The bulk, however, of the book, which is a very long one--three volumes

and nearly a thousand closely printed pages--consists of the _histoires_

or "memoirs" (whence the title) of other people which the Devil tells

Luizzi, sometimes by actual _récit_, sometimes otherwise. Naturally they

are most of them grimy; though there is nothing of the Laclos or even of

the Paul de Kock kind. I find them, however, a little tedious.

[Sidenote: Later writers and writings of the class.]

The fact, indeed, is that this kind of novel--as has been hinted

sometimes, and sometimes frankly asserted--has its own peculiar

appeals; and that these appeals, as is always the case when they are

peculiar, leave some ears deaf. There is no intention here to intimate

any superfine scorn of it. It has another and a purely literary, or at

least literary-scientific, interest as descending from the Terror Novel

of the end of the eighteenth century. It shows no sign of ceasing to

exist or to appeal to those to whom it is fitted to appeal, and who are

fitted to be appealed to by it. Towards the close of the period at which

I ceased to see French novels generally, I remember meeting with many

examples of it. There was one which, with engaging candour, called

itself _L'Hôtellerie Sanglante_, and in which persons, after drinking

wine which was, as Rogue Riderhood says, "fur from a 'ealthy wine,"

retired to a rest which knew no or only a very brief and painful waking,

under the guardianship of a young person, who, to any one in any other

condition, would have seemed equally "fur" from an attractive young

person. There was another, the title of which I forget, in which the

intended victim of a plunge into a water-logged _souterrain_ connected

with the Seine made his way out and saw dreadful things in the house

above. There is really no great interval or discrepancy (except in

details of manners and morals) between these and the novels of

detective, gentleman-thief, and other impolite life which delight many

persons indubitably respectable and presumably intelligent in England

to-day.[283] To sneer at these would be ridiculous.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Murger.]

Henry Murger is not the least of the witnesses to the truth of a

remark--which I owe to one of the critics of my earlier volume--that in

England people (he was kind enough to except me) are too apt to accept

the contemporary French estimates of French contemporary literature and

the traditional French estimates of earlier authors. Murger had, I

believe, a hardly earned and too brief popularity in his own country;

and though it was a little before my time, I can believe that this

overflowed into England. But the posthumous and accepted judgments of

him altered _there_ to a sort of slighting patronage; and I remember

that when, nearly twenty years after his death, I wrote on him in the

_Fortnightly Review_,[284] some surprise at my loftier estimate was

expressed _here_. The reasons for this depreciation are not hard to

give, and as they form a base for, and indeed really a part of, my

critical estimate they may be stated shortly. The "Bohemia"[285] of

which Murger was the laureate, both in prose and verse, is a country

whose charms have been admitted by some of the greatest, but which no

wise person has ever regarded, much less recommended, as providing any

city to dwell in; and which has certainly been the scene if not the

occasion, not merely of much mischief, which does not particularly

concern us, but of much foolishness and bad taste, which partly does. It

was almost--not quite--the only theme of Murger's songs and words.

And--last and perhaps most dangerous of all--there was the fact that, if

not in definite Bohemianism, there was in other respects a good deal in

him of a far minor Musset, and both in Bohemianism and other things

still more of an inferior Gérard de Nerval. I believe the case _against_

has been fairly stated here.

[Sidenote: The _Vie de Bohême_.]

The case _for_ I have put in the essay referred to with the full,

though, I think, not more than the fair emphasis allowed to even a

critical advocate when he has to demolish charges. The historian passes

from bar to bench; and neither ought to speak, nor in this instance is

inclined to speak, quite so enthusiastically. I admitted there that I

did not think Murger's comparatively early death lost us much; and I

admit even more frankly here, that in what he has left there is no great

variety of excellence, and that while there are numerous good things in

the work, there is little that can be called actually great. But after

these admissions no small amount remains to his credit as a writer who

can manage both comedy and pathos; who, if he has no wide range or

variety of subject, can vary his treatment quite efficiently, and who

has a certain freshness rarely surviving the first years of journalism

of all work. His faintly but truly charming verse is outside our bounds,

and even prose poetry like "The Loves of a Cricket and a Spark of

Flame"[286] are on the line, though this particular thing is not far

below Gérard himself. The longer novels, _Adeline Protat_ and _Le Sabot

Rouge_, are competent in execution and pleasant enough to read; yet they

are not above good circulating-library strength. But the _Vie de

Bohême_, in its various sections, and a great number of shorter tales

and sketches, are thoroughly agreeable if not even delightful. Murger

has completely shaken off the vulgarity which almost spoilt Pigault, and

damaged Paul de Kock not a little. If any one who has not yet reached

age, or has not let it make him "crabbed," cannot enjoy Schaunard and

the tame lobster; the philosophic humours of Gustave (afterwards His

Excellency Gustave) Colline; the great journal _Le Castor_,[287] which

combined the service of the hat-trade with the promotion of high

thinking and great writing; and the rest of the comedy of _La Vie de

Bohême_ proper, I am sorry for him. He must have been, somehow, born

wrong.

[Sidenote: _Les Buveurs d'Eau_ and the Miscellanies.]

The serious Bohemia of the _Buveurs d'Eau_ (the devotees of High Art who

carry their devotion to the point of contemning all "commission" work

whatsoever) may require more effort, or more special predestination, to

get into full sympathy with it. The thing is noble; but it is nobility

_party per_ a very thin _pale_ with and from silliness; and the Devil's

Advocate has no very hard task in suggesting that it is not even

nobility at all, but a compound of idleness and affectation.[288] With

rare exceptions, the greatest men of art and letters have never

disdained, though they might not love, what one of them called "honest

journey-work in default of better"; and when those exceptions come to be

examined--as in the leading English cases of Milton[289] and

Wordsworth--you generally find that the persons concerned never really

felt the pinch of necessity. However, Murger makes the best of his

Lazare and the rest of them; and his power over pathos, which is

certainly not small, assists him as much here as it does _more_ than

assist him--as it practically carries him through--in other stories such

as _Le Manchon de Francine_ and _La Biographie d'un Inconnu_. And,

moreover, he can use all these means and more in handfuls of little

things--some mere _bleuettes_ (as the French call them)--_Comment on

Devient Coloriste_, _Le Victime du Bonheur_, _La Fleur Bretonne_, _Le

Fauteuil Enchanté_, _Les Premières Amours du Jeune Bleuet_.

With such high praise still allotted to an author, it may seem unfair

not to give him more room; and I should certainly have done so if I had

not had the other treatment to refer to. Since that existed, as in the

similar cases of Sandeau, Bernard, and perhaps one or two more, it

seemed to me that space, becoming more and more valuable, might be

economised, especially as, in his case and theirs, there is nothing

extraordinary to interest, nothing difficult to discuss. _Tolle_, _lege_

is the suitable word for all three, and no fit person who obeys will

regret his obedience.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Reybaud--_Jérôme Paturot_, and Thackeray on its earlier

part.]

Any one who attempts to rival Thackeray's abstract ("_with_

translations, Sir!") of the first part of Louis Reybaud's _Jérôme

Paturot_ must have a better conceit of himself than that with which the

present writer has been gifted, by the Divinity or any other power. The

essay[290] in which this appears contains some of the rather rash and

random judgments to which its great author was too much addicted; he had

not, for instance, come to his later and saner estimate of Dumas,[291]

and still ranks him with Sue and Soulié. But the Paturot part itself is

simply delightful, and must have sent many who were not fortunate enough

to know (or fortunate enough _not_ to know) it already to the book. This

well deserved and deserves to be known. Jérôme's own earlier career as a

romantic and unread poet is not so brilliantly done as similar things in

Gautier's _Les Jeune-France_ and other books; but the Saint-Simonian

sequel, in which so many _mil-huit-cent-trentiers_ besides Jérôme

himself and (so surprisingly) Sainte-Beuve indulged, is most capitally

hit off. The hero's further experiences in company-meddling (with not

dissimilar results to those experienced by Thackeray's own Samuel

Titmarsh, and probably or certainly by Thackeray himself); and as the

editor of a journal enticing the _abonné_ with a _bonus_, which may be

either a pair of boots, a greatcoat, or a _gigot_ at choice; the

side-hits at law and medicine; the relapse into trade and National

Guardism; the visit to the Tuileries; the sad bankruptcy and the

subsequent retirement to a little place in the prefecture of a remote

department--all these things are treated in the best Gallic fashion, and

with a certain weight of metal not always achievable by "Gigadibs, the

literary man," whether Gallic or Anglo-Saxon. Reybaud himself was a

serious historian, a student of social philosophy, who has the

melancholy honour of having popularised, if he did not invent, the word

"Socialist" and the cheerfuller one of having faithfully dealt with the

thing Socialism. And Jérôme is well set off by his still more

"Jeune-France" friend Oscar, a painter, not exactly a bad fellow, but a

_poseur_, a dauber (he would have been a great Futurist or Cubist

to-day), a very Bragadochio in words and flourish, and, alas! as he

turns out presently, a Bragadochio also in deeds and courage.

[Sidenote: The windfall of Malvina.]

But the gem of the book perhaps, as far as good novel-matter is

concerned (for Jérôme himself is not much more than a stalking-horse for

satire), is Malvina, his first left-handed and then "regularised"

spouse, and very much his better half. Malvina is Paul de Kock's

grisette (like all good daughters, she is very fond of her literary

father) raised to a higher power, dealt with in a satiric fashion

unknown to her parent, but in perfectly kindly temper. She is, though

just a little imperious, a thoroughly "good sort," and, with occasional

blunders, really a guardian angel to her good-hearted, not uncourageous,

but visionary and unpractical lover and husband. She has the sharpest of

tongues; the most housewifely and motherly of attitudes; the flamingest

of bonnets. It is she who suggests Saint-Simonianism (as a resource, not

as a creed), and actually herself becomes a priestess of the first

class--till the funds give out. She, being an untiring and unabashed

canvasser, gets Jérôme his various places; she reconciles his

nightcap-making uncle to him; she, when the pair go to the Palace and he

is basely occupied with supper, carries him off in dudgeon because none

of the princes (and in fact nobody at all) has asked her to dance. And

when at last he subsides upon his shelf at the country prefecture, she

becomes delightfully domesticated--and keeps canaries.

The book (at least its first two parts) appeared in 1843, when the July

Monarchy was still in days of such palminess as it ever possessed, and

Thackeray reviewed it soon after. At the close of his article he

expressed a hope that M. Reybaud "had more of it, in brain or portfolio,

for the benefit of the lazy, novel-reading, unscientific world."

Whether, at that time, the hope was in course of gratification I do not

know; but years later, when February had killed July, Thackeray's wish

was granted. It cannot be said that, as too often happens with wishes,

the result was entirely disappointing; but it certainly justified the

famous description of a still larger number of them, in that only half

was granted and the rest "whistled down the wind."

[Sidenote: The difference of the Second Part.]

_Jérôme Paturot à la recherche de la meilleure des Républiques_ almost

dooms itself, by its title, to be a very much less merry book than

_Jérôme Paturot à la recherche d'une position sociale_. The "sparkle"

which Thackeray had justly seen in the first part is far rarer in the

second; in fact, were it not for Oscar to some extent and Malvina to a

much greater, there would hardly be any sparkle at all. The Republic has

been proclaimed; a new "Commissary" ("Prefect" is an altogether

unrepublican word) is appointed; he is shortly after stirred up to

vigorous action (usually in the way of cashiering officials), and Jérôme

is a victim of this _mot d'ordre_. He goes to Paris to solicit; after a

certain interval (of course of failure) Malvina comes to look after him,

and to exercise the charms of her _chapeau grénat_ once more. But even

she fails to find the birds which (such as they were) she had caught in

the earlier years' nests, until after the bloodshed of the barricades,

where Oscar unfortunately fails to show himself a hero, while Jérôme

does useful work as a fighter on the side of comparative Order, and

Malvina herself shines as a nurse. At last Paturot is appointed

"Inspector-General of Arab Civilisation in North Africa," and the pair

set out for this promised, if not promising, land. He, like Gigadibs,

provides himself with "instruments of labour"; Malvina, agreeable to the

last, provides _herself_ with several new dress-patterns of the latest

fashion, and a complete collection of the _Journal des Modes_.

This not very elaborate scenario, as worked out, fills nearly a thousand

pages; but it is very much to be feared that the "lazy novel-reader"

will get through but a few of them, and will readily return the book to

his own or other library shelves. It is, in fact, a bitterly satiric but

perfectly serious study--almost history--of the actual events of the

earlier part of the interregnum between Louis Philippe and Napoleon the

Third, of the latter of whom Reybaud (writing, it would seem, before he

was even President), gives a very unflattering, though unnamed,

description. Certainly more than half, perhaps more than three-quarters,

of the book can claim no novel character at all.[292]

[Sidenote: Not much of a novel.]

It would be possible to extract (if one had space and it were

proportionately worth while) passages from the remaining portion of very

fair novel interest--the visit of the "Super-Commissary" to the

Commissary; the history of the way in which, under the _régime_ of that

_atelier national_ which some wiseacres want now with us, a large body

of citizens was detailed to carry trees of liberty from a nursery garden

in the suburbs of Paris to the _boulevards_; how these were uprooted

without any regard to their arboreal welfare; how the national

working-men got mainly drunk and wholly skylarky on the way, and how the

unfortunate vegetables were good for nothing but firewood by the time

they reached their destination; the humours of the open-air feast of the

Republic; the storming of the Assembly by the clubs; the oratory of

Malvina (a very delectable morsel) in one of the said clubs devoted to

the Rights of Women;[293] the scene where Oscar, coming by his own

account from the barricades "with his hands and his feet and his raiment

all red," manifests a decided disinclination to return thither--all

these are admirable. But they would have to be dug out of a mass of

history and philosophy which the "lazy novel-reader" would, it is to be

feared, refuse with by no means lazy indignation and disgust.

[Sidenote: But an invaluable document.]

Yet one may venture, at the risk of the charge of stepping out of one's

proper sphere, to recommend the perusal of the book, very strongly, to

all who care either to understand its "moment" or to prepare themselves

for other moments which are at least announced as certain to come. The

French revolutionary period of 1848 and the following years was perhaps

the most perfect example in all history of a thing being allowed to show

itself, in all its natural and therefore ineluctable developments,

without disturbing influences of any kind. It was (if one may use

patristic if not classical Latin in the first word of the phrase)

_Revolutio sibi permissa_. There was, of course, a good deal of somewhat

similar trouble elsewhere in Europe at the time; but there was no

European war of much importance, and no other power threatened or was in

a position to threaten interference with French affairs--for the

excellent reason that all were too much occupied with their own. There

was no internal tyranny or trouble such as had undoubtedly caused--and

as has been held by some to justify--the outburst of sixty years

earlier, nor was there even any serious, though perhaps there was some

minor, maladministration. But there had been, for twenty years, a weak,

amorphous, discreditable, and discredited government; and there was a

great deal of revolutionary spirit, old and new, about. So France

determined--in a word unacademic but tempting--to "revolute," and she

"revoluted" at discretion, or indiscretion, to the top of her bent. This

part of _Jérôme Paturot_ gives a minute and (having had a good deal to

do with the study both of history and of politics in my time), I think I

may say boldly, a faithful account of _how_ she did it. And I think,

further, that, if at least some of the innocent folk who the other day

hailed the dawn of the Russian revolution had been acquainted with the

book, they might have been less jubilant; while acquaintance would have

helped others to anticipate the actual consequences. And I wish that

some one would, in some form or other, bring its contents before those

who, without being actual scoundrels, utter fanatics, or hopeless

fools, want to bring revolution nearer home. Reybaud brings out, too

verbosely and heavily perhaps, but with absolute truth and justice, the

waste, the folly, the absolute illogicality of the popular cries,

movements, everything. "Labour" was, happily, not then organised in

France as it is in England to-day. But if any one would extract, and

translate in a pamphlet form, the dying speech of the misguided tool

Comtois in reference to his misleader, the typical "shop-steward"

Percheron, he would do a mighty good deed.

Still, of course this is a parenthesis; and the parenthesis is a thing

hateful, I am told, perhaps not to gods but to some men.

* * * * *

Students of literature, even in a single language, much more in wider

range, are well acquainted with a class of writers, largely increased

since the introduction of printing, and more largely still since that of

"periodicals," who enjoy a considerable--sometimes almost a

great--reputation in their own time, and then are not so much

discredited or disapproved as simply forgotten. They disappear, and

their habitation is hardly even the dust-bin; it is the _oubliette_; and

their places are taken by others whose fates are _not_ other. In fact,

they are, in the famous phrase, "Priests who slay the slayer," etc.

[Sidenote: Méry.]

Of these, in French, I myself hardly know a more remarkable example than

Joseph Méry, who, born two years before the end of the eighteenth

century, lived for just two-thirds of the nineteenth, wrote, from a very

early age till his death, in prose and in verse and in drama; epics,

satires, criticisms, novels, travels, Heaven knows what; who had the

reputation of being one of the most brilliant talkers of his day; who

collaborated[294] with Gautier and Gérard de Nerval and Sandeau and Mme.

de Girardin, and other people much greater than himself; from whose pen

the beloved old "Collection Michel Lévy" contained at least thirty

volumes at the date of his death--the wreckage of perhaps a possible

three hundred--and of whom, though I have several times in the

half-century since dived into his work, I do not think I can find a

single story of first, second, or even third-rate quality.[295]

[Sidenote: _Les Nuits Anglaises._]

As it happens, one volume of his, _Les Nuits Anglaises_, contains

examples of his various manners, some of which may be noticed. Not all

of them are stories, but it is fair to throw in a non-story because it

is so very much better than the others. This is a "physionomie" of

Manchester, written, it would seem, just at the beginning of the reign

of Queen Victoria; and it shows that Méry, as a writer of those middle

articles or transformed _Spectator_ essays, which have played so large a

part in the literature of the last century and a quarter, was not quite

a negligible person. Moreover, the sort of thing, though not essential

to the novelist's art, is a valuable tool at his disposal.

[Sidenote: The minor stories.]

But here the author, who was a considerable traveller and not a bad

judge of art, was to a large extent under the grip of fact: when he got

into fiction he exhibited a sad want of discipline. One must allow

something, no doubt, for the fact that the _goguenard_ element is

avowedly strong in him. The second English Night, with its Oxfordshire

election (he has actually got the name of "Parker" right, though

Woodstock wobbles from the proper form to "Woostock," "Wostoog," etc.)

and its experiences of an Indian gentleman who is exposed at Ellora

(near Madras) to the influence of the upas tree, by a wicked emissary of

the Royal Society, Sir Wales, as a scientific experiment; and the last,

where two Frenchmen, liberated from the hulks at the close of the

Napoleonic War, make a fortune by threatening to blow up the city of

Dublin; may sue out their writ of ease under the statute of

Goguenarderie. A third half-Eastern, half-English story (Méry was fond

of the East), _Anglais et Chinois_, telling quite delicately the

surprising adventures of a mate of H.M.S. _Jamesina_[296] in a sort of

Chinese harem, has some positive merit, though it is too long. The

longest and most ambitious tale, _Histoire d'une Colline_, if not

"wholly serious" (as a famous phrase has it), seems to aim at a good

deal of seriousness. Yet it is, as a matter of fact, rather more absurd

than the pure extravaganzas.

[Sidenote: _Histoire d'une Colline._]

Sir John Lively--who appears neither to have inherited the title (seeing

that his sainted father, a victim of English tyranny, was named Arthur

O'Tooley, perhaps one of the tailors of that ilk) nor to have paid M.

Méry five or ten thousand pounds for it--is an Irishman of the purest

virtue and the noblest sentiments, who possesses a cottage on a hill not

far from the village and castle of Stafford. From this interesting

height there are two views: one over the beautiful plains of Lancashire,

another towards the brumous mountains of Oxfordshire. Lively always

looks this latter way, because in coming from London he has seen, at the

other village of Bucks, a divine creature who dispenses soda-water and

some stronger liquors to the thirsty. She, like the ninepenny kettle of

the song, "is Irish _tu_," and belongs to the well-known sept of the

O'Killinghams. They are both fervent Roman Catholics (Méry is

astoundingly severe on our "apostate" church, with its "insulted" Saint

Paul's and Saint Martin's). She is also persecuted by an abominable

English landlord, Mr. Igoghlein. The two meet at mass in "_the_ Catholic

Church of the City," to which, "as in the time of Diocletian" (slightly

altered to 1830-40), "a few faithful ones furtively glide, and seem to

be in fear." To get money, Lively gambles, and (this is the sanest part

of the book, for the reason that things went on in much the same way at

Paris and at London) is cheated. But the cottage, and the hill with such

commanding views, are discovered to be in the way of a new line and to

conceal coal. He sells them to a Mr. Copperas; marries the beautiful

O'Killingham; the bells of Dublin ring head over heels, "and Ireland

hopes." Let it also be mentioned that in the course of the story we are

more than once told of the double file of Mauresque, Spanish, Gothic,

and Italian _colonnades_ which line the marvellous High Street of

Oxford; and that Mr. Copperas visited that seat of learning to consult

an expert in railways[297] and see his three largest shareholders. (Oh,

these bloated dons!) That three members of "the society of _ti_total

abstinence" drank, at the beautiful O'Killingham's cottage, twenty pints

of porter (White-bread), two flagons of whisky, and three of claret, may

meet with less incredulity, though the assortment of liquor is barbarous

and the quantity is certainly large. But let us turn from this nonsense

to the remarkable Manchester article.

[Sidenote: The "Manchester" article.]

It was not for some thirty years later than Méry's visit that I myself

knew, and for some time lived in, the new-made "city," as it became, to

the horror of Mr. Bright, just before Méry saw it. But though there must

have been many changes in those thirty years, they were nothing to those

which have taken place in the fifty that have passed subsequently. And I

can recognise the Manchester I knew in Méry's sketch. This may seem to

be at first an exceedingly moderate compliment--in fact something close

to an insult. But it is nothing of the kind. It is true that there is

considerable _naïveté_ in a sentence of his own: "En général les

nationaux sont fort ignorants sur les phénomènes de leur pays; il faut

s'adresser aux étrangers pour en obtenir la solution." And it is also

true that our "nationals," at that time and since, have been

excessively ignorant of phenomena which the French tourists of Louis

Philippe's reign discovered here, and surprised, not to say diverted, at

the solutions thereof preferred by these obliging strangers. That Méry

had something of the Michiels[298] in him, what has been said above

should show. But in some strange way Manchester--foggiest and rainiest

of all our industrial hells,[299] except Sheffield--seems to have made

his brain clear and his sight dry, even in drawing a sort of

half-Rembrandt, half-Callot picture. He takes, it is true, some time in

freeing himself from that obsession by one of our _not_-prettiest

institutions, "street-walking," which has always beset the French.[300]

But he does get clear, and makes a striking picture of the great

thoroughfares of Market Street and Piccadilly; of the view--a wonderful

one certainly, and then not interfered with by railway viaducts--from

and of the Cathedral; and of the extraordinary utilisation of the scanty

"naval" capabilities of Irk and Irwell and Medlock. But, as has been

said, such things are at best but accidents of the novel.

[Sidenote: Karr.]

If not much is found here about Alphonse Karr, it is certainly not

because the present writer undervalues his general literary position. As

a journalist and miscellanist, Karr had few superiors in a century of

miscellaneous journalism; and as a maker of telling and at the same time

solid phrase, he was Voltaire's equal in the first respect and his

superior in the second. The immortal "Que MM. les assassins commencent,"

already referred to, is perhaps the best example in all literature of

the terse _argumentum joculare_ which is not more sparkling as a joke

than it is crushing as an argument; "Plus ça change plus c'est la même

chose"[301] is nearly as good; and if one were writing a history, not of

the novel, but of journalism or essay-writing of the lighter kind, Karr

would have high place and large room. But as a novelist he does not seem

to me to be of much importance, nor even as a tale-teller, except of the

anecdotic kind. He can hardly be dull, and you seldom read him long

without coming to something[302] refreshing in his own line; but his

tales, as tales, are rarely first-rate, and I do not think that even

_Sous les Tilleuls_, his best-known and perhaps best production, needs

much delay over it.

[Sidenote: Roger de Beauvoir--_Le Cabaret des Morts_.]

Roger de Beauvoir (whose _de_ was genuine, but who embellished "Bully,"

his actual surname, into the one by which he was generally known) also

had, like Bernard and Reybaud, the honour of being noticed, translated,

and to some extent commented on by Thackeray.[303] I have, in old times,

read more of his novels than I distinctly remember; and they are not

very easy to procure in England now. Moreover, though he was of the

right third or fourth _cru_ of _mil-huit-cent-trente_, there was

something wanting in his execution. I have before me a volume of short

stories, excellently entitled (from the first of them) _Le Cabaret des

Morts_. One imagines at once what Poe or Gautier, what even Bulwer or

Washington Irving, would have made of this. Roger (one may call him this

without undue familiarity, because it is the true factor in both his

names) has a good idea--the muster of defunct painters in an ancient

Antwerp pot-house at ghost-time, and their story-telling. The contrast

of them with the beautiful _living_ barmaid might have been--but is

not--made extremely effective. In fact the fatal improbability--in the

Aristotelian, not the Barbauldian sense--broods over the whole. And the

Cabaret des Morts itself ceases, not in a suitable way, but because the

Burgomaster shuts it up!!! All the other stories--one of Marie

Antoinette's Trianon dairy; another of an anonymous pamphlet; yet

another of an Italian noble and his use of malaria for vengeance; as

well as the last, told by a Sister of Mercy while watching a

patient--miss fire in one way or another, though all have good subjects

and are all in a way well told. It is curious, and might be made rather

instructive by an intelligent Professor of the Art of Story-telling, who

should analyse the causes of failure. But it is somewhat out of the way

of the mere historian.[304]

[Sidenote: Ourliac--_Contes du Bocage_.]

Édouard Ourliac, one of the minor and also one of the shorter-lived men

of 1830, seems to have been pleasant in his life--at least all the

personal references to him that I remember to have seen, in a long

course of years, were amiable; and he is still pleasant in literature.

He managed, though he only reached the middle of the road, to accumulate

work enough for twelve volumes of collection, while probably more was

uncollected. Of what I have read of his, the _Contes_ and _Nouveaux

Contes du Bocage_--tales of La Vendée, with a brief and almost

brilliant, certainly vivid, sketch of the actual history of that

glorious though ill-fated struggle--deserve most notice. Two of the

_Nouveaux Contes_, _Le Carton D._ (a story of the rescue of her husband

by a courageous woman, with the help of the more amiable weaknesses of

the only amiable Jacobin leader, Danton) and _Le Chemin de Keroulaz_

(one of treachery only half-defeated on the Breton coast), may rank with

all but the very best of their kind. In another, _Belle-Fontaine_,

people who cannot be content with a story unless it instructs their

minds on points of history, morality, cosmogony, organo-therapy, and

everything _quod exit in y_, except jollity and sympathy, may find a

section on the youth of 1830--really interesting to compare with the

much less enthusiastic account by Gérard de Nerval, which is given

above. And those who like to argue about cases of conscience may be glad

to discuss whether Jean Reveillère, in the story which bears his name,

_ought_ to have spared, as he actually did, the accursed

_conventionnel_, who, after receiving shelter and care from women of

Jean's family, had caused them to be massacred by the _bleus_, and then

again fell into the Vendéan's hands.

* * * * *

But, with one or two more notices, we must close this chapter.

Although Dumas, by an odd anticipatory reversal of what was to be his

son's way, spent a great deal of time on more or less trashy[305] plays

before he took to his true line of romance, and so gave opportunity to

others to get a start of him in the following of Scott, it was

inevitable that his own immense success should stir emulation in this

kind afresh. In a way, even, Sue and Soulié may be said to belong to the

class of his unequal competitors, and others may be noticed briefly in

this place or that. But there is one author who, for one book at least,

belonging to the successors rather than the _avant-coureurs_, but

decidedly of the pre-Empire kind, must have a more detailed mention.

[Sidenote: Achard.]

Many years ago somebody was passing the small tavern which, dating for

aught I know to the times of Henry Esmond, and still, or very lately,

surviving, sustained the old fashion of a thoroughfare, fallen, but

still fair, and fondly loved of some--Kensington High Street, just

opposite the entrance to the Palace. The passer-by heard one loiterer in

front of it say to his companion in a tone of emotion, and almost of

awe: "There was beef, and beer, and bread, and greens, and _everything

you can imagine_." This _pheme_ occurred to me when, after more than

half a century, I read again Amédée Achard's _Belle-Rose_. I had taken

it up with some qualms lest crabbed age should not confirm the judgment

of ardent youth; and for a short space the extreme nobility of its

sentiments did provoke the giggle of degeneracy. But forty of the little

pages of its four original volumes had not been turned when it reassured

me as to the presence of "beef, and beer, and bread, and greens, and

everything you can imagine" in its particular style of romance. The

hero, who begins as a falconer's son and ends as a rich enough colonel

in the army and a Viscount by special grace of the Roi Soleil, is a

_sapeur_, but far indeed from being one of those graceless comrades of

his to whom nothing is sacred. At one time he does indeed succumb to the

sorceries of a certain Geneviève de Châteaufort, a duchess _aux narines

frémissantes_. But who could resist this combination? even if there were

a marquise of the most beautiful and virtuous kind, only waiting to be a

widow in order to be lawfully his. Besides, the Lady of the Quivering

Nostrils becomes an abbess, her rather odd abbey somehow accommodating

not merely her own irregularly arrived child (_not_ Belle-Rose's), but

Belle-Rose himself and his marchioness after their marriage; and she is

poisoned at the end in the most admirably retributive fashion. There are

actually two villains--a pomp and prodigality (for your villain is a

more difficult person than your hero) very unusual--one of whom is

despatched at the end of the second volume and the other at the actual

curtain. There is the proper persecuting minister--Louvois in this case.

There are valiant and comic non-commissioned officers. There is a brave,

witty, and generous Count; a lover of the "fatal" and ill-fated kind;

his bluff and soldierly brother; and more of the "affair of the poisons"

than even that mentioned above. You have the Passage of the Rhine,

fire-raisings, duels, battles, skirmishes, ambuscades, treachery,

chivalry--in fact, what you will comes in. And you must be a very

ill-conditioned or feeble-minded person if you _don't_ will. Every now

and then one might, no doubt, "smoke" a little reminiscence; more

frequently slight improbabilities; everywhere, of course, an absence of

any fine character-drawing. But these things are the usual spots, and

very pardonable ones, of the particular sun. I do not remember any

French book of the type, outside the Alexandrian realm, that is as good

as _Belle-Rose_;[306] and I am bound to say that it strikes me as better

than anything of its kind with us, from James and Ainsworth to the

excellent lady[307] who wrote _Whitehall_, and _Whitefriars_, and _Owen

Tudor_.

[Sidenote: Souvestre, Féval, etc.]

It must, however, be evident that of this way in making books, and of

speaking of them, there is no end.[308] Fain would I dwell a little on

Émile Souvestre, in whom the "moral heresy," of which he was supposed to

be a sectary, certainly did not corrupt the pure milk of the

tale-telling gift in such charming things as _Les Derniers Bretons_, _Le

Foyer Breton_, and the rather different _Un Philosophe sous les Toits_;

also on the better work of Paul Féval, who as certainly did not

invariably do suit and service to morality, but Sue'd and Soulié'd it in

many books with promising titles;[309] and who, once at least, was

inspired (again by the witchery of the country between the Baie des

Trépassés and the Rock of Dol) to write _La Fée des Grèves_, a most

agreeable thing of its kind. Auguste Maquet (or Augustus MacKeat) will

come better in the next chapter, for reasons obvious to some readers no

doubt already, but to be made so to others there. And so--for this

division or subdivision--an end, with one word more on Pétrus Borel's

_Champavert_.

[Sidenote: Borel's _Champavert_.]

Borel, whose real Christian name, it is almost unnecessary to say, was

Pierre, and who was a sort of incarnation of a "Jeune-France" (beginning

as a _bousingot_--not ill translated by the contemporary English

"bang-up" for an extreme variety of the kind--and ending as a

_sous-préfet_), wrote other things, including a longer and rather

tedious novel, _Madame Putiphar_. But the tales of _Champavert_,[310]

which had the doubly-"speaking" sub-title of _Contes Immoraux_, are

capital examples of the more literary kind of "rotting." They are

admirably written; they show considerable power. But though one would

not be much surprised at reading any day in the newspaper a case in

which a boatman, plying for hire, had taken a beautiful girl for "fare,"

violated her on the way, and thrown her into the river, the subject is

not one for art.

FOOTNOTES:

[262] It will be observed that I use the words referred to in this note

with more discrimination than is always the case with some excellent

folk. I sympathise with Cadoudal most of the three, but I quite

recognise that Bonaparte had a kind of right to try, and to execute him.

So, if Pichegru had been tried, he might have been executed. The Enghien

business was pure murder. In some more recent instances these

distinctions have not, I think, been correctly observed by public

speakers and writers.

[263] This _philosophe inconnu_ (as his ticket-name goes in French) is,

I fancy, even more unknown in England. I have not read much of him; but

I think, if it had come in my way, I should have read more.

[264] Without doing this, it my be suggested that the contrast elsewhere

quoted "Mérimée était gentilhomme; Sainte-Beuve ne l'était pas," was

likely to make its unfavourable side specially felt in this connection.

He seems to have disgusted even the Princess Mathilde, one of the

staunchest of friends and certainly not the most squeamish or prudish of

women. Nor, in another matter, can I approve his favourite mixture of

rum and curaçao as a liqueur. I gave it a patient trial once, thinking

it might be critically inspiring. But the rum muddles the curaçao, and

the curaçao does not really improve the rum. It is a pity he did not

know the excellent Cape liqueur called Vanderhum, which is not a mixture

but a true hybrid of the two.

[265] In articles written for the _Fortnightly Review_ during a large

part of the year 1878, and reprinted in the volume of _Essays on French

Novelists_ frequently referred to.

[266] _Vide_ the wonderful poem--one of Mr. Anon's pearls, but Donne's

for more than a ducat--"Thou sent'st to me a heart was crowned," etc.

However, the bitter remark quoted elsewhere (_v. inf._) looks like a

lasting wound.

[267] I can conceive a modernist rising up and saying, "And your mawkish

ante-nuptial wooings? Haven't _we_ had enough of _them_?" To which I

should reply, "Impossible." The sages of old have rightly said that 'The

way of a man with a maid' is a mystery always, and the proofs thereof

are well seen in literature as in life. But the way of an extra-man with

another person's wife can, as illustrated, if not demonstrated, by the

myriads of treatises thereon in French and the thousands of imitations

in other languages (reinforced, if not the Stoic scavenger-researcher so

pleases, by the annals of the Divorce Court and its predecessors), be

almost scientifically reduced to two classes. (1) Is the lady

_adulteraturient_? In that case results can be attained anyhow. (2) Is

she not? In that case results can be attained nohow. Which considerably

minishes the interest of this situation. The interest of the other is

the interest of "the world's going round" in quality, and almost

infinitely various in detail. But when something has once happened the

variety ceases, or is immensely reduced.

[268] "_Bien! mon sang._" I suppose "democratic" sentiment is quite

insensible to this, which seems to be a pity.

[269] I think it should be added to Sandeau's credit that (as it appears

to me at least) he had a strong influence on the reaction against

Naturalism at the end of the century.

[270] Most of his contemporaries would have envied him this admirably

_moyen-âge_ and sonorous designation. But it is certainly cumbrous for a

title-page, and its owner--a modest man with a sense of humour--may

perhaps have thought that it _might_ be rather more ridiculous than

sublime there.

[271] As is usual and natural with men of his time, La Vendée mostly

supplies it; but that glorious failure did not inspire him quite so well

as it did Sandeau or even (_v. inf._) Édouard Ourliac. However, he was a

sound Royalist, for which peace be to his soul!

[272] Who, by the way, was a good friend and a good appreciator of

Bernard.

[273] For any one who cares for the minor "arts and crafts" of

literature this is _the_ example of Adaptation itself. The story is not

translated; it is not imitated; it is not parodied. It is simply

_transfused_ from one body of a national literature into another, and I

defy the acutest and most experienced critic to find in the English, if

he did not previously know the facts, any trace of a French original.

[274] Corinne made a great blunder: but admirers of Miss Austen have

sometimes taken it as being greater than it was. "Vulgaire" and "vulgar"

are by no means exact synonyms: in fact the French word is probably used

much oftener in a more or less inoffensive sense than otherwise.

[275] Especially in the next chapter but one.

[276] Or was it Comte that was "naught" and Fourier that was "void"? I

am sure the third person, namely, Cabet, was "puerile"; but I do not

think I could read _Aurora Leigh_ again, even to make sure of the

distribution of the other epithets.

[277] The real _old_ Constantia has, I believe, ceased to exist. It was

a delicious _vin de liqueur_, but you might as well ice Madeira or a

brown sherry.

[278] Thackeray pays Sue the very high compliment of having "tried

almost always [to attain], and in _Mathilde_ very nearly succeeded in

attaining, a tone of _bonne compagnie_," I found the particular book

difficult to get hold of. Apropos of French naval novels, will somebody

tell me who wrote _Le Roi des Gabiers_, an immense _feuilleton_-romance,

which I remember reading a vast number of years ago? I think he had (or

took) a Breton name, and wrote others. But the navy, even with Jean Bart

and Surcouf and the Bailli, has never attracted any of the _great_

French novelists.

[279] I ought perhaps to say that the second volume does not seem to me

to be quite equal to the first. The "sixteen years allowed for

refreshment" do not justify themselves.

[280] In _La Lionne_ (which is not to be confused with _Le Lion

Amoureux_, a "psychological" diploma-piece praised by some) there are

chapters and chapters of love-making "of a sort." But it is not the

right sort.

[281] The famous or legendary chamber at Glamis--and perhaps another not

so generally known story of a mansion farther north still, where you see

from the courtyard a window the room belonging to which cannot be found

from the inside--will occur. But Soulié, though he might have heard of

the former, is very unlikely to have known the latter, which comes

nearer to his arrangement.

[282] The contact _here_ with the _Peau de Chagrin_ need hardly be dwelt

upon.

[283] A little more on this subject may be given later to Gaboriau and

Ponson du Terrail.

[284] Reprinted in _Essays on French Novelists_.

[285] A somewhat fuller discussion of this heretical _bona patria_ of

literature may be found in the original Essay. I had at one time thought

of reprinting it--in text or appendix--here. But perhaps it would be

superfluous. I ought, however, to add that I have seen, in French

writers, later again than those referred to in the text, some touches of

revived interest in Murger.

[286] Translated at length in the Essay.

[287] I have always been a little curious to know whether that

remarkable periodical, Cope's _Tobacco Plant_, which gave us not a

little of James Thomson the Second's work, was really, as it might have

been, conceived as a follower of _Le Castor_.

[288] Murger knows this and allows it.

[289] Who, moreover, _did_ work, and that pretty hard, in his

Secretaryship, and by no means disdained pay for it--purely "patriotic"

as (in his view) it was.

[290] _Jérôme Paturot, with Considerations on Novels in General_,

originally appeared in _Fraser_ for September 1843. Not reprinted in the

author's lifetime, or till the supplementary collection of 1885-86. May

be found, with some remarks by the present writer, in the "Oxford"

Thackeray, vol. vi. pp. 318-342.

[291] It is fair to say that some of the best Alexandriana were still to

come.

[292] The retort courteous, if not even the countercheck quarrelsome,

"Then why do you notice it?" is pretty obvious. Taking it as the former,

it may be answered, "The political novel, if not the most strictly

legitimate species of the kind, is numerous and not unimportant. It may

therefore be allowed a specimen, and an examination of that specimen."

[293] Malvina, as one might expect, is by this time an "Anti-" of the

most stalwart kind; though in the Saint-Simonian salad days, she had (as

naturally) taken the other side.

[294] Probably more people know _La Croix de Berny_, which he wrote with

Sandeau, Gautier, and Madame de Girardin, than anything exclusively his.

[295] Others may have been more fortunate. In any case, what follows,

whatever its intrinsic merit, is typical of a great mass of similar

French fiction, and therefore may claim attention here.

[296] It would be interesting to know where Méry got this hideous,

cacophonous, hopelessly anti-analogical and anti-etymological but alas!

actually existing name. I never heard of a ship called by it, but I once

knew a poor lady on whom it had been inflicted at her baptism. Why any

one with Jemima (not, of course, originally a feminine of "Jem," but

adopted as such), which, though a little comic, is not intolerable,

Jacqueline and Jaquetta (which are exceedingly pretty), and Jacobina

(which, though with unfortunate historical associations, is not itself

ugly) to choose from, should have invented this horrible solecism, I

never could make out. It is, I believe, confined to Scotland, and the

only comfort connected with it is the negative one that, in two

considerable residences there, I never heard of a "_Charles_ina." I

suppose "Caroline" and "Charlotte" sufficed; or perhaps, while Whigs

disliked the name (at least before that curious purifier of it, Fox),

Tories shrank from profanation thereof.

[297] Was it Mr. Augustus Dunshunner? It was just about the time of the

Glenmutchkin Railway, and most of "Maga's" men were Oxonians.

[298] See in vol. v. of the Oxford edition of Thackeray (for the thing,

though never acknowledged, is certainly his) an exemplary

"justification" of this very impudent offender.

[299] I have no quarrel with Manchester--quite the reverse--in

consequence of divers sojourns, longer and shorter, in the place, and of

much kindness shown to me by the not at all barbarous people. But

neither the climate nor the general "conditions" of the city can be

called paradisaical.

[300] They were as much shocked at it as we were at their "Houses of

Tolerance" and at the institution of the _grisette_.

[301] Not the worst perhaps of the myriad attempts to do something of

the same kind in English was made recently: "If a man conscientiously

objects to be shot _for_ his country, he may be conscientiously shot

_by_ it."

[302] Here is one from "Un Diamant" (_Contes et Nouvelles_), which,

though destitute of the charms of poetry, rivals and perhaps indeed

suggested our own

And even an Eastern Counties' train Comes in at last.

"Quelque loin qu'on aille, on finit par arriver; _on arrive bien à

Saint-Maur--trois lieues à faire--en coucou_."

[303] In the same article in which he dealt with Charles de Bernard.

[304] I know that many people do not agree with me here; but Blake did:

"Tell me the facts, O historian, and leave me to reason on them as I

please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish.... Tell me the What:

I do not want you to tell me the Why and the How. I can find that out

for myself."

[305] If my friend Mr. Henley were alive (and I would he were) I should

have to "look out for squalls." It was, as ought to be well known, his

idea that _Henri Trois et Sa Cour_ was much more the rallying trumpet of

1830 that _Hernani_, and I believe a large part of his dislike for

Thackeray was due to the cruel fun which _The Paris Sketch-book_ makes

of _Kean_. But I speak as I think and find, after long re-thinking and

researching.

[306] I have made some further excursions in the work of Achard, but

they did not incline me to continue them, and I do not propose to say

anything of the results here. I learn from the books that there were

some other Achards, one of whom "improved the production of the

beet-root sugar." I would much rather have written _Belle-Rose_.

[307] Emma Robinson. I used, I think, to prefer her to either of her

more famous companions in the list. But I have never read her _Caesar

Borgia_. It sounds appetising.

[308] Some may say, "There might have been an end much sooner with some

of the foregoing." Perhaps so--once more. I do not claim to be _hujus

orbis Papa_ and infallible. But I sample to the best of my knowledge and

judgment.

[309] _Beau Démon_, _Coeur d'Acier_, _La Tache Rouge_, etc. Féval began

a little later than most of the others in this chapter, but he is of

their class.

[310] Thackeray, when very young and wasting his time and money in

editing the _National Standard_, wrote a short and very savage review of

this which may be found in the Oxford Edition of his works (vol. i., as

arranged by the present writer). It is virtuously indignant (and no

wonder, seeing that the writer takes it quite seriously), but, as

Thackeray was almost to the last when in that mood, quite

bull-in-a-china-shoppy. You _might_ take it seriously, and yet

critically in another way, as a "degeneracy" of the Terror-Novel. But

the "rotting" view is better.