THE FRENCH NOVEL IN 1850
[Sidenote: The peculiarity of the moment.]
It was not found necessary, in the last volume, to suspend the current
of narrative or survey for the purpose of drawing interim conclusions in
special "Interchapters."[328] But the subjects of this present are so
much more bulky and varied, in proportion to the space available and the
time considered; while the fortunes of the novel itself altered so
prodigiously during that time, that something of the kind seemed to be
desirable, if not absolutely necessary. Moreover, the actual centre of
the century in France, or rather what may be called its precinct, the
political interregnum of 1848-1852, is more than a _mere_ political and
chronological date. To take it as an absolute apex or culmination would
be absurd; and even to take it as a definite turning-point might be
excessive. Not a few of the greatest novelists then living and
working--Hugo, whose most popular and bulkiest work in novel was yet to
come; George Sand, Mérimée, Gautier--were still to write for the best
part of a quarter of a century, if not more; and the most definite fresh
start of the second period, the rise of Naturalism, was not to take
place till a little later. But already Chateaubriand, Beyle, Charles de
Bernard, and, above all, Balzac, were dead or soon to die: and it cannot
be said that any of the survivors developed new characters of work, for
even Hugo's was (_v. sup._) only the earlier "writ large" and
modernised in non-essentials. On the other hand, it was only after this
time that Dumas _fils_, the earliest of what may be called the new
school, produced his most remarkable work.
But the justification of such an "Interchapter" as this practically is
depends, not on what is to come after, but on what has come before; and
in this respect we shall find little difficulty in vindicating the
position and arrangement assigned to the remarks which are to follow,
though some of these may look forward as well as backward.[329]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A political nadir.]
I should imagine that few Frenchmen--despite the almost infinite and
sometimes very startling variety of selection which the _laudator
temporis acti_ exhibits--look back upon the reign of Louis Philippe as a
golden age in any respect but one. Regarding it from the point of view
of general politics, the ridiculous change[330] from "King of France" to
"King of the French" stamped it at once, finally and hopelessly, as the
worst kind of compromise--as a sort of spiritual imitation of the
methods of the Triumvirate, where everybody gives up, not exactly his
father or his uncle or his brother, but his dearest and most respectable
convictions, together with the historical, logical, and sentimental
supports of them. The king himself--though certainly no fool, and though
hardly to be called an unmitigated knave--was one of those unfortunate
persons whose merits do not in the least interest and whose defects do
very strongly disgust. Domestically, the reign was a reign, in the other
sense, of silly minor revolutions, which, till the end, came to nothing,
and then came to something only less absurd than the Russian revolution
of the other day, though fortunately less disastrous;[331] of
bureaucracy of the corrupt and shabby character which seemed to cling
to the whole _régime_; and of remarkable vying between two distinguished
men of letters, Guizot and Thiers, as to which should do most to confirm
the saying of the wicked that men of letters had much better have
nothing to do with politics.[332] Abroad (with the exception of the
acquisition of Algeria, which had begun earlier, and which conferred no
great honour, though some profit, and a little snatching up of a few
loose trifles such as the Society Islands, which we had, according to
our custom, carelessly or benevolently left to gleaners), French arms,
despite a great deal of brag and swagger, obtained little glory, while
French diplomacy let itself wallow in one of the foulest sloughs in
history, the matter of the Spanish marriages.
[Sidenote: And almost a literary zenith.]
But this unsatisfactory state of things was made up--and more than made
up--for posterity if not for contemporaries--by the extraordinary
development of literature and the arts--especially literature and most
especially of all the _belles-lettres_. If (which would be rather
impossible) one were to evaluate the relative excellence of poetry and
of prose fiction in the time itself, a great deal could be said on both
sides. But if one took the larger historic view, it would certainly have
to be admitted that, while the excellence of French poetry was a
magnificent Renaissance after a long period of something like sterility,
the excellence of the novel was something more--an achievement of things
never yet achieved; an acquisition and settlement of territory which had
never previously been even explored.
I venture to hope that no great injustice has been done to the previous
accomplishments of France in this department as they were surveyed in
the last volume. She had been, if not the inventress of Romance, the
[Greek: aidoiê tamiê]--the revered distributress--of it to all nations;
she had made the short story her own to such an extent that, in almost
all its forms, she had reached and kept mastery of it; and in various
isolated instances she had done very important, if not now universally
acceptable, work in the practice of the "Heroic." With Rabelais, Lesage,
almost Marivaux, certainly, in his one diploma-piece, Prévost, she had
contributed persons and things of more or less consummateness to the
novel-staff and the novel treasury. But she had never quite reached, as
England for two full generations had reached before 1800, the consummate
expression of the--_pure_ novel--the story which, not neglecting
incident, but as a rule confining itself to the incidents of ordinary
life; advancing character to a position at least equal with plot;
presenting the manners of its own day, but charging them with essence of
humanity in all days; re-creates, for the delectation of readers, a new
world of probable, indeed of actual, life through the medium of
literature. And she had rarely--except in the fairy-tale and a very few
masterpieces like _Manon Lescaut_ again and _La Nouvelle
Héloïse_[333]--achieved what may be called the Romantic or passionate
novel; while, except in such very imperfect admixtures of the historic
element as _La Princesse de Clèves_, she had never attempted, and even
in these had never attained, the historical novel proper.
Now, in 1850, she had done all this, and more.
[Sidenote: The performance of the time in novel.]
As has been seen, the doing was, if not solely effected between 1830 and
1848, mainly and almost wholly carried out in the second quarter of the
century. In the first, only three persons possessing anything like
genius--Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël, and Chateaubriand--had
busied themselves with the novel, and they were all strongly charged
with eighteenth-century spirit. Indeed, Constant, as we saw in the last
volume, though he left pattern and stimulus for the nineteenth and the
future generally, really represented the last dying words of that
"Sensibility" school which was essentially of the past, though it was
undoubtedly necessary to the future. Likewise in Madame de Staël, and
still more in Chateaubriand, there was model, stimulus, germ. But they
also were, on the whole, of the eve rather than of the morrow. I have
indeed sometimes wondered what would have happened if Chateaubriand had
gone on writing novels, and had devoted to fiction the talent which he
wasted on the _mesquin_[334] politics of the France of his later days
and on the interesting but restricted and egotistic _Mémoires
d'Outre-Tombe_. It is no doubt true that, though old men have often
written great poetry and excellent serious prose, nobody, so
far as I remember, has written a great novel after seventy. For
_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, if it be great, is a romance rather than a novel,
and a romance which had much better have been poetry. But this is an
excursion into the Forbidden Country of the Might-Have-Been. We are
concerned with what was.
The accomplishment of these twenty or five-and-twenty years is so
extraordinary--when bulk, variety, novelty, and greatness of achievement
are considered together--that there is hardly anything like it
elsewhere. The single work of Balzac would mark and make an epoch; and
this is wholly the property of the period. And though there is still,
and is likely always to be, controversy as to whether the Balzacian men
and women are exactly men and women of _this_ world, there can, as may
have been shown, be no rational denial of the fact that they represent
_a_ world--not of pure romance, not of fairy-tale, not of convention or
fashion or coterie, but a world human and synthetically possible in its
kind.
[Sidenote: The _personnel_.]
But while the possession of Balzac alone would have sufficed, by itself,
to give the time front rank among the periods of the novel, it is not in
the least extravagant to add that if Balzac had been blotted out of its
record it could still prove title-deeds enough, and more than enough, to
such a place. Fault has here been found--perhaps not a few readers may
think to an excessive, certainly to a considerable extent--with the
novel-work of Hugo and with that of George Sand. But the fault-finder
has not dreamed of denying that, as literature in novel-form, _Les
Misérables_ and _L'Homme Qui Rit_ and _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ are great,
and that _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ is of the greatest.[335] And on
the other hand, while strong exceptions have been taken from several
sides to the work of George Sand, the fact remains--and no attempt has
been made to obscure or to shake it--that George Sand gave novel
delectation, in no vulgar fashion, and to no small extent in the form of
the pure novel itself, probably to as large a number of readers as any
novelist except Scott and Dumas; and perhaps Dickens, has ever given. Of
the miraculous production of Dumas himself almost enough should have
been said before, though a little more may come after; and whatever
controversy there may be about its purely literary value, there
can--with reasonable people who are prepared to give and take--be little
anxiety to deny that each of these three, like Balzac, might have taken
the burden of the period on his or her own shoulders, while as a matter
of fact they have but to take each a corner. Nor, even when thus
divided, is the burden left wholly to them. The utmost perfection, at
least in the short story, is reached by Mérimée and Gautier, little less
than such perfection by others. For suggestions of new kinds and new
treatments, if for no single performance, few periods, if any, have a
superior to Beyle.
But, once more, just as the time need not rely on any single champion of
its greatest to maintain its position, so, if all the greater names just
mentioned were struck out, it would still be able to "make good" by dint
of the number, the talent, the variety, the novelty of its second- and
third-rate representatives. Even those who may think that I have taken
Paul de Kock too seriously cannot deny--for it is a simple fact--the
vigorous impulse that he gave to the _popularity_ of the novel as a form
of the printed book, if not of literature; while I can hardly imagine
any one who takes the trouble to examine this fact refusing to admit
that it is largely due to an advance in reality of a kind--though they
may think this kind itself but a shady and sordid one. On the other
hand, I think less of Eugène Sue than at one time "men of good" used to
think; but I, in my turn, should not dream of denying his popularity, or
the advance which he too effected in procuring for the novel its share,
and a vast share, in the attention of the general reader. Jules Sandeau
and Charles de Bernard, Soulié and Féval and Achard, and not a few
others mentioned or not mentioned in the text, come up to support their
priors, while, as I have endeavoured to point out, two others still,
Charles Nodier and Gérard de Nerval, though it may seem absurd to claim
primacy for them, contribute that idiosyncrasy without which, whether it
be sufficient to establish primacy or not, nothing can ever claim to
possess that quality.
[Sidenote: The kinds--the historical novel.]
But while it is not necessary to repeat the favourable estimates already
given of individuals, it is almost superfluous to rest the claims of the
period to importance in novel history upon them. Elsewhere[336] I have
laid some emphatic and reiterated stress on the mischief which has
sometimes arisen from too exclusive critical attention to "kinds,"
classes, and the like in literature--to the oblivion or obscuring of
individual men and works of letters. But as there has been, and I hope
will be, no ignoring of individuals here, and as this whole book
endeavours to be a history of a kind, remarks on subdivisions of that
kind as such can hardly be regarded as inopportune or inconsistent.
[Sidenote: Appearance of new classes--the historical.]
Now it is impossible that anybody who is at all inclined or accustomed
to think about the characteristics of the pleasure he receives from
literature, should not have noticed in this period the fact--beside and
outside of the other fact of a provision of delectable novelists--of a
great splitting up and (as scientific slang would put it) fissiparous
generation of the the classes of novel. It is, indeed, open to the
advocates or generic or specific criticism--though I think they cannot
possibly maintain their position as to poetry--to urge that a great deal
of harm was done to the novel, or at least that its development was
unnecessarily retarded, by the absence of this division earlier. And in
particular they might lay stress on the fortunes and misfortunes of the
historical element. That element had at least helped to start--and had
largely provided the material of--the earlier verse-romances and stories
generally; but the entire absence of criticism at the time had merged
it, almost or altogether, in mere fiction. It had played, as we saw, a
great part in the novels of the seventeenth century; but it had for the
most part merely "got in the way" of its companion ingredients and in
its own. I have admitted that there are diversities of opinion as to its
value in the _Astrée_; but I hold strongly to my own that it would be
much better away there. I can hardly think that any one, uninfluenced by
the sillier, not the nobler, estimate of the classics, can think that
the "heroic" novels gain anything, though they may possibly not lose
very much, by the presence in them of Cyrus and Clélia, Arminius and
Candace, Roxana and Scipio. But perhaps the most fruitful example for
consideration is _La Princesse de Clèves_. Here, small as is the total
space, there is a great deal of history and a crowd, if for the most
part mute, of historical persons. But not one of these has the very
slightest importance in the story; and the Prince and the Princess and
the Duke--we may add the Vidame--who are the only figures that _have_
importance, might be the Prince and Princess of Kennaquhair, the Duke of
Chose, and the Vidame of Gonesse, in any time or no time since the
creation of the world, while retaining their fullest power of situation
and appeal.
But this side of the matter is of far less consequence than another.
This historical element of the _historia mixta_[337] was not merely
rather a nuisance and quite a superfluity as regarded the whole of the
stories in which it appeared; but its presence there and the tricks that
had to be played with it prevented the development of the historical
novel proper--that, as it has been ticketed, "bodiless childful of
life," which waited two thousand years in the ante-natal gloom before it
could get itself born. Here, indeed, one may claim--and I suppose no
sensible Frenchmen would for a moment hesitate to admit it--that even
more than in the case of Richardson's influence nearly a century
earlier, help came to their Troy from a Greek city. To France as to
England, and to all the world, Scott unlocked the hoard of this
delightful variety of fictitious literature, though it was not quite at
once that she took advantage of the treasury.
But when she did, the way in which she turned over the borrowed capital
was certainly amazing, and for a long time she quite distanced the
followers of Scott himself in England. James, Ainsworth, and even Bulwer
cannot possibly challenge comparison with the author of _Notre Dame de
Paris_ as writers, or with Dumas as story-tellers; and it was not till
the second half of the century was well advanced, and when Dumas' own
best days were very nearly over, that England, with Thackeray's _Esmond_
and Kingsley's _Westward Ho!_ and Charles Reade's _The Cloister and the
Hearth_, re-formed the kind afresh into something which France has never
yet been able to rival.
In order, however, to obviate any possible charge of insular unfairness,
it may be well to note that Chateaubriand, though he had never reached
(or in all probability attempted to reach) anything of the true Scott
kind, had made a great advance in something the same direction, and had
indeed to some extent sketched a different variety of historical novel
from Scott's own; while, before Scott's death, Victor Hugo imbued the
Scott romance itself with intenser doses of passion, of the subsidiary
interests of art, etc., and of what may be in a way called "theory,"
than Scott had cared for. In fact, the Hugonic romance is a sort of
blending of Scott and Byron, with a good deal of the author's country,
and still more of himself, added. The connection again between Scott and
Dumas is simpler and less blended with other influences; the chief
differences should have been already pointed out. But the important
thing to notice is that, with a few actual gaps, and several patches
which have been more fully worked over and occupied than others,
practically the whole of French history from the fourteenth century to,
and including, the Revolution was "novelised" by the wand of this second
magician.[338]
That the danger of the historical variety was entirely avoided by these
its French practitioners cannot indeed be said. Even Scott had not
wholly got the better of it in his less perfect pieces, such, for
instance, as those already glanced-at parts of _The Monastery_, where
historical _récit_ now and then supplies the place of vigorous
novel-action and talk. Dumas' co-operative habits (which are as little
to be denied as they are to be exaggerated) lent themselves to it much
more freely. But, notwithstanding this, the total accession of pleasure
to the novel-reader was immense, and the further possibility of such
accession practically unlimited. And accordingly the kind, though
sometimes belittled by foolish criticism, and sometimes going out of
favour by the vicissitudes of mere fashion, has constantly renewed
itself, and is likely to do so. Its special advantages and its special
warnings are of some interest to discuss briefly. Among the first may be
ranked something which the foolish belittlers above mentioned entirely
fail to appreciate, and indeed positively dislike. The danger of the
novel of ordinary and contemporary life (which accompanied this and
which is to be considered shortly as such) is that there may be so much
_mere_ ordinariness and contemporariness that the result may be
distasteful, if not sickening, to future ages. This has (to take one
example out of many) happened with the novels of so clever a person as
Theodore Hook in England, even with comparatively elect judges; with the
vulgar it is said to have happened even with such consummate things as
those of Miss Austen. With a large number of another sort of vulgar it
is said to happen with "Victorian" novels generally, while even the
elect sometimes find it difficult to prevent its happening with
Edwardian and Fifth Georgian. Now the historical novelist has before him
the entire range of the most interesting fashions, manners, incidents,
characters, literary styles of recorded time. He has but to select from
this inexhaustible store of general material, and to charge it with
sufficient power of humanity of all time, and the thing is done.[339]
Under no circumstances can the best historical novels ever lose their
attraction with the best readers; and as for the others in each kind,
who cares what happens to _them_?
There are, moreover, some interesting general rules about the historical
novel which are well worth a moment's notice, even if this partake to
some extent of the nature of repetition. The chief of them, which at
least ought to be well known, is that it is never safe to make a
prominent historical character, and seldom safe to make a prominent
historical event, the central subject of your story. The reason is of
course obvious. The generally known facts cramp and hamper the writer;
he is constantly knocking against them, and finding them in the way of
the natural development of his tale. No doubt there is, and has been, a
good deal of otiose and even rather silly criticism of details in
historical novels which do not satisfy the strict historian. The fuss
which some people used to make about Scott's anachronisms in _Ivanhoe_
and _Kenilworth_; the shakings of heads which ought to know better, over
Thackeray's dealings with the Old Chevalier and his scandals about Miss
Oglethorpe in _Esmond_, can be laughed or wondered at merely. But then
these are matters of no importance to the main story. It is Ivanhoe and
Rebecca, Henry Esmond and Beatrix,[340] all of them persons absolutely
unknown to history, in whom we are really interested; and in the other
case mentioned, Amy Robsart is such a creature or "daughter," if not "of
dreams" "of debate," that you may do almost what you like with her; and
the book does not sin by presentation of a Leicester so very different
from the historical.[341] But, on the other hand, the introduction of
historical persons, skilfully used, seasons, enforces, and vivifies the
interest of a book mightily; and the action of great historical scenes
supports that of the general plot in a still more remarkable manner. On
the whole, we may perhaps say that Dumas depends more on the latter,
Scott on the former, and that the difference is perhaps connected with
their respective bulk and position as dramatists. Dumas has made of no
historical magnate anything like what Scott has made of Richard and of
Mary and of Elizabeth; but Scott has not laid actual historical scenes
under contribution to anything like the same extent as that by which
Dumas has in a fashion achieved a running panorama-companion to the
history of France from the fourteenth century to the Revolution and,
more intensively, from the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew to the
establishment of Louis XIV.'s autocracy.
In fact, the advantages, both to the novelist and to his readers, of the
historical kind can hardly be exaggerated. The great danger of invented
prose narrative--of _all_ invented narrative, indeed, prose or
verse--has always been, and has always from the first shown itself as
being, that of running into moulds. In the old epics (the Classical, not
the _Chansons_) this danger was accentuated by the rise of
rule-criticism; but the facts had induced, if they did not justify, that
rule-system itself. The monotony of the mediaeval romance, whether
_Chanson_ or _Roman_, has been declared more than once in this book to
be exaggerated, but it certainly exists. The "heroic" succumbs to a
similar fate rather fatally, though the heroic element itself comes
slightly to the rescue; and even the picaresque by no means escapes. To
descend, or rather to look, into the gutter for a moment, the sameness
of the deliberately obscene novel is a byword to those who, in pursuit
of knowledge, have incurred the necessity of "washing themselves in
water and being unclean until the evening"; and we saw that even such a
light and lively talent as Crébillon's, keeping above the very lowest
gutter-depths, could not escape the same danger wholly. In the upper air
the fairy-tale flies too often in prescribed gyres; and the most modern
kinds of all--the novel of analysis, the problem-novel, and all the rest
of them--strive in vain to avoid the curse of--as Rabelais put something
not dissimilar long ago--"fatras _à la douzaine_." "All the stories are
told," saith the New, even as the Old, Preacher; all but the highest
genius is apt to show ruts, brain-marks, common orientations of route
and specifications of design. Only the novel of creative--not merely
synthetised--character in the most expert hands escapes--for human
character undoubtedly partakes of the Infinite; but few are they who can
command the days and ways of creation.
Yet though history has its unaltering laws; though human nature in
general is always the same; though that which hath been shall be, and
the dreams of new worlds and new societies are the most fatuous of vain
imaginations--the details of historical incident vary as much as those
of individual character or feature, and the whole of recorded time
offers them, more than half ready for use, in something like the same
condition as those patterns of work which ladies buy, fill up, and
regard as their own. To make an historical novel of the very highest
class, such as the best of Scott and Thackeray, requires of course very
much more than this--to make one of all but the highest class, such as
_Les Trois Mousquetaires_, requires much more. But that "tolerable
pastime," which it is the business of the average novelist to supply at
the demand of the average reader, can perhaps be attained more easily,
more abundantly, and with better prospect of average satisfaction in the
historical way than in any other.
[Sidenote: Other kinds and classes.]
[Sidenote: The Novel of Romanticism generally.]
It would, however, of course be an intolerable absurdity to rest the
claims of the French novel of 1825 to 1850 wholly--it would be somewhat
absurd to rest them mainly--on its performances in this single kind. It
found out, continued, or improved many others; and perhaps most of its
greatest achievements were in these others. In fact "others" is an
incorrect or at least an inexact term; for the historic novel itself is
only a subdivision or offshoot of the great literary revolution which we
call Romanticism. Indeed the entire novel of the nineteenth century,
misapprehend the fact as people may, is in fact Romantic, from the first
novel of Chateaubriand to the last of Zola, though the Romanticism is
chequered and to a certain extent warped by that invincible French
determination towards "Rule" which has vindicated itself so often, and
on which shortly we may have to make something almost like an excursus.
But this very fact, if nothing else, would make a discussion of the
Romantic novel as such out of place _here_; it will have to come, to
some extent at any rate, in the Conclusion itself. Only for the present
need it be said, without quite the same danger of meeting with scornful
or indignant protest, that all the books hitherto discussed from _René_
to _Dominique_, from _Le Solitaire_ to _Monte Cristo_--even the work of
Mérimée and Sainte-Beuve, those celebrated "apostates" as some would
have them to be--is really Romantic. It may follow the more poetical
romanticism of Nodier and Hugo, of Gautier and Gérard; the historical
romanticism of Vigny and Mérimée; the individualism and analysis of
Beyle and his disciples; the supernaturalism of George Sand and Nodier
again; the adventurous incident of Sue and Soulié and Dumas and the
Dumasians generally; it may content itself with that modified form of
the great Revolt which admits "low" or "middle" subjects and discards
the classical theories that a hero ought to be dignified. But always
there is something of the general Romantic colour about--something over
which M. Nisard has shaken or would have shaken his respectable
_perruque_.[342]
So turn we to the other larger group--the largest group of all that come
under our survey--the New Ordinary Novel, that which concerns itself
with the last shade of his colour just described.
[Sidenote: The "ordinary."]
We had seen, before the beginning of this volume, how Pigault-Lebrun, in
vulgar ways and with restricted talent, had nevertheless made distinct
advances in this direction; and we saw in the beginning of this how Paul
de Kock--with something of the same limitations but with the advantage
of a predecessor in Pigault and of further changes in society towards
the normal--improved upon the earlier progression. But Pigault and Paul
were thrown into the shade by those writers, younger contemporaries of
both, who brought to their task greater genius, better taste, and if not
knowledge of better society, at any rate better knowledge how to use
their knowledge. Whether Balzac's books can be ticketed _sans phrase_,
as "novels of _ordinary_ life," has been, or should have been, duly
discussed already. It is certain that, as a rule, they intend to be so.
So it is with at least the majority of George Sand's; so with all those
of her first lover and half name-father Sandeau; so with Charles de
Bernard; so with some at least of Mérimée's best short stories and
Musset's, if not exactly of Gautier's; so with others who have had
places, and a good many more for whom no place could be found. France,
indeed, may be said to have caught up and passed England in this kind,
between the time when Miss Austen died and that when Thackeray at last
did justice to himself with _Vanity Fair_. And this novel of ordinary
life has continued, and shows no signs of ceasing, to be the kind most
in demand, according to the usual law of "Like to Like." We shall see
further developments of it and shall have to exercise careful critical
discretion in deciding whether the apparent improvement only means
nearer approximation to our own standard of ordinariness, or to a more
abstract one. But that it was in these twenty or five and twenty years
that something like a norm of ordinariness was first reached, hardly
admits of any question. Still, very much question may arise, and must be
faced, on the point whether this novel of ordinary life has not
redeveloped a _non_-ordinary subdivision, or many such, in the "problem"
novel, the novel of analysis, of abnormal individualism, of theory,
naturalist and other, etc. To this we must turn; for at least part of
this new question is a very important one, though it may require
something of a digression to deal with it properly.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Discussion on a point of general novel criticism.]
I have in these volumes, rather sedulously--some readers no doubt may
think too sedulously--avoided "fighting prizes" on general points of the
criticism or novel-theory. Not that I have the slightest objection to
fighting "for my own hand" or to seeing or reading about a good fight
between others--very much the contrary. I never thought it the worst
compliment paid to Englishmen--the Indian opinion of us, as reported by
the late M. Darmesteter--that we cared for nothing but fighting, sport,
and making love. But the question now to be discussed is so germane to
our subject, both general and special; and the discussion of it once for
all (with _renvois_ thereto elsewhere) will save so much space, trouble,
and inconvenience, that it may as well be handled at full length.
There was hinted--in a review[343] of the first volume of this work
otherwise so complimentary that it must have satisfied the Archbishop of
Granada himself--a doubt whether I had given sufficient weight to
something which I shall let the reviewer express in his own words;[344]
and whether my admission of Rabelais (of which admission, except on
principle, he was himself very glad); my relegation of Laclos to the
Condemned Corps; and my comparative toleration of Pigault-Lebrun, did
not indicate heresy. Now I feel pretty certain that such a well-wisher
would hardly suspect me of doing any of these things by inadvertence;
and as I must have gone, and shall still go, much further from what is
the right line in his (and no doubt others') opinion, I may as well
state my point of view here. It should supply a sort of justificatory
comment not merely on the chapters and passages just referred to, and
others in the last volume, but on a much larger number in this--in fact,
after a fashion, to the whole of this. Any difference of it from the
normal French view will even help to explain my attitude in those parts
of this book (_e.g._ the remarks on Dumas _père_) to which it does not
directly apply, as well as those (_e.g._ on Dumas _fils_) to which it
does.
The whole question seems to me to turn on the curiously different
estimates which different people make of what constitutes "humanity." To
cite another dictum of my friend the enemy, he, while, as I have said,
speaking with extraordinary kindness of my chapter on Rabelais in
itself, disallows it in a _History of the Novel_ because, among other
reasons, Panurge is not, or is very slightly, human. I should have said
that Panurge was as human as Hamlet, though certainly not so
_gentle_human.[345] I never met either; but I might do so, and I am
sure I should recognise both as men and brothers. Still, the comparison
here is of course somewhat rhetorical. Let us take Panurge with Laclos'
Valmont, whom, I think, my critic _does_ consider human; whom I am sure
I never have met and never shall meet, even if I should be so
unfortunate as to go to the place which (but, of course, for the
consolations of the Church) would have been his, _if_ he had been human;
and whom I never could in the most impossible event or _milieu_
recognise as anything but a synthetised specification. One may perhaps
dwell on this, for it is of immense importance to the general question.
Panurge and Valmont, comparatively considered, have beyond doubt points
in common. Both are extremely immoral, and both are--though the one only
sometimes, the other always--ill-natured. Neither is a fool, though the
one does, or is going to do, at least one very foolish thing with his
eyes open; while nothing that the other does--even his provocation of
Madame de Merteuil--can be said to be exactly "foolish." Both are
attempts to do what Thackeray said he attempted to do in most of the
characters of _Vanity Fair_--to draw people "living without God in the
world." Yet I can tolerate Panurge, and recognise him as human even when
he indirectly murders Dindenault, even when (which is worse) he behaves
so atrociously to the Lady of Paris; and I cannot tolerate or validate
Valmont even when he excogitates and puts in practice that very
ingenious and picturesque idea of a writing-desk, or when he seeks the
consolations and fortifications of the Church after Danceny has done on
him the first part of the judgment of God. And I think I can give
reasons, both for my intolerance and for my toleration, "rightly and in
mine own division."
The reason why I think that Panurge is rightly and Valmont wrongly
"copied or re-created" is that Panurge is made at the hazard of the
artist, Valmont according to prescription. There might be--there have
been--fifty or a hundred Valmonts, the prescription being followed, and
slightly--still remaining a prescription--altered. There is and can be
only one Panurge. This difference reminds me of, and may be illustrated
by, a fact which, in one form or another, must be familiar to many
people. I was once talking to a lady who had just come over from China,
and who wore a dress of soft figured silk of the most perfect
love-in-a-mist colour-shade which I had ever seen, even in turning over
the wonder-drawers at Liberty's. I asked her if (for she then intended
to go back almost at once) she could get me any like it. "No," she said,
"at least not exactly. They never make two pieces of just the same
shade, and in fact they couldn't if they tried. They take handfuls of
different dyes, measured and mixed, as it seems, at random." Now that is
the way God and, in a lesser degree, the great artists work, and the
result is living creatures, according to the limitations of artistic and
the no-limitations of natural life. The others weigh out a dram of lust,
a scruple of cleverness, an ounce of malice, half an ounce of
superficial good manners, etc., and say, "Here is a character for you.
Type No. 12345." And it is not a living creature at all. But, having
been made by regular synthesis,[346] it can be regularly analysed, and
people say, "Oh, how clever he is." The first product, having grown
rather than been made, defies analysis, and they say, "How commonplace!"
One can perhaps lay out the ropes of the ring of combat most
satisfactorily and fairly by using the distinction of the reviewer (if I
do not misunderstand him), that I have neglected the interval between
"to copy" and "to re-create." I accept this dependence, which may
perhaps be illustrated further from that (in itself) foolish and vulgar
boast of Edmond de Goncourt's that his and his brother's epithets were
"personal" while Flaubert's were only "admirably good specimens of the
epithets of _tout le monde_."
To translate: Should the novelist aim, by _mimesis_--it is a misfortune
which I have lamented over and over again in print that "Imitation" and
"Copying" are such misleading versions of this--of actual characters, to
evolve a personality which will be recognised by all competent observers
as somebody whom he has actually met or might have met? Or should he,
trusting to his own personal powers of putting together qualities and
traits, but more or less neglecting the patterns which the Almighty has
put before him in _tout le monde_--sometimes also regarding conventional
types and "academies"--either (for this is important) to follow or
violently _not_ to follow them--produce something that owes _its_
personality to himself only? The former has been the aim of the great
English novelists since Fielding, if not since Richardson[347] or even
Defoe. It was the aim of Lesage: he has told us so in so many words. It
is by no means alien from that of Marivaux, though he did not pursue it
with a single eye; and the same may be said even of Crébillon. Whether
Prévost aimed at it or not, he hit the white in _Manon_ as certainly and
unmistakably as he lost his arrows elsewhere. Rousseau both did it and
meant it in the first part of _Julie_. Pigault, in a clumsy, botcherly
fashion, made "outers" not infrequently. But Laclos seems to me to have
(as his in some sense follower Dumas _fils_ has it in the passage noted
above) "proceeded by synthesis"--to have said, "Let us make a
mischievous Marquise and a vile Viscount. Let us deprive them of every
amiable quality and of every one that can be called in any sense 'good,'
except a certain kind of intellectual ability, and, in the Viscount's
case, an ingenious fancy in the matter of extemporising writing-desks."
And he did it; and then the people who think that because (to adopt the
language of George de Barnwell) "the True is not always the Beautiful"
the Ugly must always be the True, hail him as a master.[348]
That this half-digression, half-dilemma, is prospective as well as
retrospective will hardly form a subject of objection for any one but a
mere fault-finder. From the top of a watershed you necessarily survey
both slopes. The tendency which we have been discussing is certainly
more prevalent in the second half of the century than in the first half.
It is prominent in Dumas _fils_, with whom we shall be dealing shortly;
it increases as time goes on; and it becomes almost paramount in the
practice of and the discussions about the Naturalist School. In the time
on which we look back it is certainly important in Beyle and Balzac. But
I cannot admit that it is predominant elsewhere, and I am prepared to
deny utterly that, until the time of the Sensibility and _Philosophe_
novels, it is even a notable characteristic of French fiction. Many hard
things have been said of criticism; but, acknowledging the badness of a
bird who even admits any foulness in his own nest--far more in one who
causes it--I am bound to say that I think the state of the department of
literature now under discussion was happier before we meddled with it.
Offence must come; it would even be sometimes rather a pity if it didn't
come: but perhaps the old saying is true in the case of those by whom
some kinds of it come. If criticism and creation could be kept as
separate as some creators pridefully pretend, it would not matter. And
the best critics never attempt to show how things should be done, but
merely to point out how they have been done--well or badly. But when men
begin to write according to criticism, they generally begin to write
badly, just as when women begin to dress themselves according to
fashion-mongers they usually begin (or would but for the grace of God)
to look ugly. And there are some mistakes which appear to be absolutely
incorrigible. When I was a Professor of Literature I used to say every
year in so many words, as I had previously written for more than as many
years, when I was only a critic of it, "I do not wish to teach you how
to write. I wish to teach you how to read, and to tell you what there is
to read." The same is my wish in regard to the French Novel. What has
been done in it--not what these, even the practitioners themselves, have
said of it--is the burden of my possibly unmusical song.
* * * * *
The excuse, indeed, for this long digression may be, I think, made
without impropriety or "forcing" to coincide with the natural sequel and
correlation of this chapter. The development of the novel of ordinary
life in the second half of the century _was_ extraordinary; but it was
to a very large extent marked by the peculiarities--some of them near to
corruptions--which have been just discussed. With the possible exception
of Beyle, there was little more theory, or attempt at synthesis in
accordance therewith, in the "ordinary" than in the "historical"
division of this earlier time. We have seen how the absence of "general
ideas"--another way of putting it--has been actually brought as a charge
against Balzac. George Sand had, especially at first, something of it;
and this something seems, to me at least, by no means to have improved
her work. In none or hardly any of the rest is there any evidence of
"school," "system," "pattern," "problem," or the like. Yet they give us
an immense amount of pastime, and I do not think their or their readers'
state was any the less gracious for what they did _not_ give us.
FOOTNOTES:
[328] I have not called this so, because the division into "Books," with
which the _raison d'être_ of "Interchapters" is almost inseparably
connected, has not been adopted in this _History_.
[329] This fact, as well, perhaps, as others, should be taken into
account by any one who may be at first sight surprised, and perhaps in
the Biblical sense "offended," at finding two-thirds of the volume
allotted to half of the time.
[330] To vary a good epigram of the _Rolliad_ crew on Pitt:
"'The French' for 'France' can't please the _Blanc_,
The _Bleu_ detests the 'King.'"
[331] _V. sup._ on Reybaud.
[332] This is of course quite a different thing from saying that
politicians had better have nothing to do with letters, or that men of
letters may not _discuss_ politics. It is when they become Ministers
that they too often disgust men and amuse angels.
[333] _Adolphe_ actually belongs to the nineteenth century.
[334] As I write this I remember how my friend the late M. Beljame, who
and whose "tribe" have come so nobly for English literature in France
for forty years past, was shocked long ago at my writing "Mazar_in_
Library," and refused to be consoled by my assurance that I should never
dream of writing anything but "Bibliothèque Mazar_ine_." But I had, and
have, no doubt on the principle.
[335] I _hope_, but do not trust, that no descendant of the persons who
told Charles Lamb that Burns could not at the time be present because he
was dead, will say, "But all these were subsequent to 1850."
[336] In my _History of Criticism_, _passim_.
[337] _V. sup._ Vol. I., on the "heroic" romance.
[338] It seems unnecessary to repeat what has been said on Vigny and
Mérimée; but it is important to keep constantly in mind that they came
before Dumas. As for the still earlier _Solitaire_, I must repeat that
M. d'Arlincourt's utter failure as an individual ought not completely to
obscure his importance as a pioneer in kind.
[339] "Suppose you go and do it?" as Thackeray says of another matter,
no doubt. But I am Crites, not Poietes.
[340] Pedantius may urge, "But 'James III.' is made to affect the
fortunes of Esmond and Beatrix very powerfully." True; but he himself is
by no means a _very_ "prominent historical character," and the exact
circumstances of the agony of Queen Anne, and the _coup d'état_ of
Shrewsbury and Argyle, have still enough of the unexplained in or about
them to permit somewhat free dealing.
[341] If any one says "_Leicester's Commonwealth?_" I say "_The Faërie
Queene?_"
[342] I intend nothing offensive in thus mentioning his attitude. In my
_History of Criticism_ I have aimed at justice both to his short stage
of going with, or at least not definitely against, the Romantic vein,
and his much longer one of reaction. He was always vigorous in argument
and dignified in manner; but his nature, when he found it, was
essentially neo-classic.
[343] In the _Times Literary Supplement_ for Thursday, Nov. 1, 1917.
[344] "It is vain to ask, as is the modern custom, whether the leap from
the word 'copy' to the word 'recreate' (_v. sup._ Vol. I. p. 471) does
not cover a difference in kind.... One feels that Prof. S. is rather
sympathetic to that which traditional French criticism regards as
essential ... close psychological analysis of motive," etc. And so he
even questions whether what I have given, much as he likes and praises
it, _is_ "A History of The French Novel." But did I ever undertake to
give this _from the French point of view_, or to write a _History of
French Novel-Criticism_? Or need I do so?
[345] It might, however, be a not uninteresting matter of debate whether
Panurge's conduct to the Lady of Paris was _really_ so very much worse
than part of Hamlet's to Ophelia.
[346] By one of those odd coincidences which diversify and relieve
literary work, I read, for the first time in my life, and a few hours
_after_ writing the above words, these in Dumas _fils'_ _Thérèse_: "Il
procède par synthése." They do not there apply to authorship, but to the
motives and conduct of one of the writer's questionable quasi-heroes.
But the whole context, and the usual methods of Dumas _fils_ himself,
are saturated with synthesis _by rule_. (Of course the other process is,
as also according to the strict meaning of the word, "synthetic," but
_not_ "by rule.")
[347] I own I see a little less of it and a little more of the other in
him; whence a certain lukewarmness with which I have sometimes been
reproached.
[348] My very amiable reviewer thinks that eighteenth-century French
society _did_ behave _à la Laclos_. I don't, though I think it did _à la
Crébillon_.