CHAPTER XII

THE OTHER "NON-NATURALS" OF THE SECOND EMPIRE

If any excuse is needed for the oddity of the title of this chapter, it

will not be to readers of Burton's _Anatomy_. The way in which the

phrase "Those six non-natural things" occurs and recurs there; the

inextinguishable tendency--in view of the eccentricity of its

application--to forget that the six include things as "natural" (in a

non-technical[407] sense) as Diet, to forget also what it really means

and expect something uncanny--these are matters familiar to all

Burtonians. And they may excuse the borrowing of that phrase as a

general label for those novelists, other than Flaubert and Dumas _fils_,

who, if their work was not limited to 1850-70, began in (but not "with")

that period, and worked chiefly in it, while they were at once _not_

"Naturalists" and yet more or less as "natural" as any of Burton's six.

One of the two least "minor," Alphonse Daudet, was among Naturalists but

scarcely of them. The other, Octave Feuillet, was anti-Naturalist to the

core.

[Sidenote: Feuillet.]

This latter, the elder of the two, though not so much the elder as used

to be thought,[408] was at one time one of the most popular of French

novelists both at home and abroad; but, latterly in particular, there

were in his own country divers "dead sets" at him. He had been an

Imperialist, and this excited one kind of prejudice against him; he

was, in his way, orthodox in religion, and this aroused another; while,

as has been already said, though his subjects, and even his treatment of

them, would have sent our English Mrs. Grundy of earlier days into

"screeching asterisks," the peculiar grime of Naturalism nowhere

smirches his pages. For my own part I have always held him high, though

there is a smatch about his morality which I would rather not have

there. He seems to me to be--with the no doubt numerous transformations

necessary--something of a French Anthony Trollope, though he has a

tragic power which Trollope never showed; and, on the other side of the

account, considerably less comic variety.

[Sidenote: His novels generally.]

As a "thirdsman" to Flaubert and Dumas _fils_, he shows some interesting

differences. Merely as a maker of literature, he cannot touch the

former, and has absolutely nothing of his poetic imagination, while his

grasp of character is somewhat thinner and less firm. But it is more

varied in itself and in the plots and scenery which give it play and

setting--a difference not necessary but fortunate, considering his very

much larger "output." Contrasted with Dumas _fils_, he affords a more

important difference still, indeed one which is very striking. I pointed

out in the appropriate place--not at the moment thinking of Feuillet at

all--the strange fashion in which Alexander the Younger constantly

"makes good" an at first unattractive story; and, even in his most

generally successful work, increases the appeal as he goes on. With

Feuillet the order of things is quite curiously reversed. Almost

(though, as will be seen, not quite) invariably, from the early days of

_Bellah_ and _Onestà_ to _La Morte_, he "lays out" his plan in a

masterly manner, and accumulates a great deal of excellent material, as

it were by the roadside, for use as the story goes on. But, except when

he is at his very best, he flags, and is too apt to keep up his curtain

for a fifth act when it had much better have fallen for good at the end

of the fourth. As has been noted already, his characters are not deeply

cut, though they are faithfully enough sketched. That he is not strong

enough to carry through a purpose-novel is not much to his discredit,

for hardly anybody ever has been. But the _Histoire de Sibylle_--his

swashing blow in the George Sand duel (_v. sup._ p. 204)--though much

less dull than the _riposte_ in _Mlle. la Quintaine_, would hardly

induce "the angels," in Mr. Disraeli's famous phrase, to engage him

further as a Hal-o'-the-Wynd on their side.

But Feuillet's most vulnerable point is the peculiar sentimental

morality-in-immorality which has been more than once glanced at. It was

frankly found fault with by French critics--themselves by no means

strait-laced--and the criticisms were well summed up (I remember the

wording but not the writer of it) thus: "An honest woman does not feel

the temptations" to which the novelist exposes his heroines. That there

_is_ a certain morbid sentimentality about Feuillet's attitude not

merely to the "triangle" but even to simple "exchange of fantasies"

between man and woman in general, can hardly be denied. He has a most

curious and (one might almost say) Judaic idea as to woman as a

temptress, in fashions ranging from the almost innocent seduction of Eve

through the more questionable[409] one of Delilah, down to the sheer

attitude of Zuleika-Phraxanor, and the street-corner woman in the

Proverbs. And this necessitates a correspondingly unheroic presentation

of his heroes. They are always being led into serious mischief ("in a

red-rose chain" or a ribbon one), as Marmontel's sham philosopher[410]

was into comic confusion by that ingenious Présidente. Yet, allowing all

this, there remains to Feuillet's credit such a full and brilliant

series of novels, hardly one of which is an actual failure, as very few

novelists can show. Although he lived long and wrote to the end of his

life, he left no "dotages"; hardly could the youngest and strongest of

any other school in France--Guy de Maupassant himself--have beaten _La

Morte_, though it is not faultless, in power.

[Sidenote: Brief notes on some--_Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre_.]

I suppose few novels, succeeding not by scandal, have ever been much

more popular than the _Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre_, the title of

which good English folk have been known slightly to alter in meaning by

putting the _pauvre_ before the _jeune_. It had got into its third

hundred of editions before the present century had reached the end of

its own first lustrum, and it must have been translated (probably more

than once) into every European language. It is perfectly harmless; it is

admirably written; and the vicissitudes of the loves of the _marquis

déchu_ and the headstrong creole girl are conducted with excellent

skill, no serious improbability, and an absence of that tendency to

"tail off" which has been admitted in some of the author's books. It

was, I suppose, Feuillet's diploma-piece in almost the strictest

technical sense of that phrase, for he was elected of the Academy not

long afterwards. It has plenty of merits and no important faults, but it

is not my favourite.

[Sidenote: _M. de Camors._]

[Sidenote: Other books.]

Neither is the novel which, in old days, the proud and haughty scorners

of this _Roman_, as a _berquinade_, used to prefer--_M. de Camors_.[411]

Here there is plenty of naughtiness, attempts at strong character, and

certainly a good deal of interest of story, with some striking incident.

But it is spoilt, for me, by the failure of the principal personage. I

think it not quite impossible that Feuillet intended M. de Camors as a

sort of modernised, improved, and extended Lovelace, or even

Valmont--superior to scruple, destined and able to get the better of man

or woman as he chooses. Unfortunately he has also endeavoured to make

him a gentleman; and the compound, as the chemists say, is not "stable."

The coxcombry of Lovelace and the priggishness, reversed (though in a

less detestable form), of Valmont, are the elements that chiefly remain

in evidence, unsupported by the vigorous will of either. I have myself

always thought _La Petite Comtesse_ and _Julia de Trécoeur_ among the

earlier novels, _Honneur d'Artiste_ and _La Morte_ among the later, to

be Feuillet's masterpieces, or at least nearest approaches to a

masterpiece. _Un Mariage dans le Monde_ (one or the rare instances in

which the "honest woman" does get the better of her "temptations") is

indeed rather interesting, in the almost fatal cross-misunderstanding of

husband and wife, and the almost fabulous ingenuity and good offices of

the "friend of the family," M. de Kevern, who prevents both from making

irreparable fools of themselves. _Les Amours de Philippe_ is more

commonplace--a prodigal's progress in love, rewarded at last, very

undeservedly, with something better than a fatted calf--a formerly

slighted but angelic cousin. But to notice all his work, more especially

if one took in half- or quarter-dramatic things (his pure drama does not

of course concern us) of the "Scène" and "Proverbe" kind, where he comes

next to Musset, would be here impossible. The two pairs, early and late

respectively, and already selected, must suffice.

[Sidenote: _La Petite Comtesse._]

They are all tragic, though there is comedy in them as well. Perhaps _La

Petite Comtesse_, a very short novel and its author's first thing of

great distinction, might by some be called pathetic rather than tragic;

but the line between the two is a "leaden" barrier (if indeed it is a

barrier at all) and "gives" freely. Perhaps the Gigadibs in any man of

letters may be conciliated by one of his fellows being granted some of

the fascinations of the "clerk" in the old Phyllis-and-Flora _débats_ of

mediaeval times; but the fact that _this_ clerk is also represented as a

fool of the most disastrous, though not the most contemptible kind,

should be held as a set-off to the bribery. It is a "story of

three"--though not at all the usual three--graced (or not) by a really

brilliant picture of the society of the early Second Empire. One of the

leaders of this--a young countess and a member of the "Rantipole"[412]

set of the time, but exempt from its vulgarity--meets in the country,

and falls in love with, a middle-aged _savant_, who is doing

archaeological work for Government in the neighbourhood. He despises her

as a frivolous feather-brain at first, but soon falls under the spell.

Yet what has been called "the fear of the 'Had-I-wist'" and the special

notion--more common perhaps with men than is generally thought--that she

cannot _really_ love him, makes him resist her advances. By rebound, she

falls victim for a time to a commonplace Lovelace; but finds no

satisfaction, languishes and dies, while the lover, who would not take

the goods the gods provided, tries to play a sort of altered part of

Colonel Morden in _Clarissa_, and the gods take their revenge for

"sinned mercies." In abstract (it has been observed elsewhere that

Feuillet seldom abstracts well, his work being too much built up of

delicate touches) there may seem to be something of the preposterous in

this; but it must be a somewhat coarse form of testing which discovers

any real preposterousness in the actual story.

[Sidenote: _Julia de Trécoeur._]

It may, however, as has been said, seem to some to belong to the

pathetic-sentimental rather than to the actually tragic; I at least

could not allow any such judging of _Julia de Trécoeur_, though there

are more actual faults in it than in _La Petite Comtesse_, and though,

as has been mentioned elsewhere, the rather repulsive catastrophe may

have been more or less borrowed. The _donnée_ is one of the great old

simple cross-purposes of Fate--not a mere "conflict," as the silly

modern jargon has it. Julia de Trécoeur is a wilful and wayward girl,

as are many others of Feuillet's heroines. Her mother is widowed early,

but consoles herself; and Julia--as such a girl pretty certainly would

do--resents the proceeding, and refuses to live at home or to see her

stepfather. He, however, is a friend of his wife's own cousin, and this

cousin, conceiving a passion for Julia, offers to marry her. Her

consent, in an English girl, would require some handling, but offers no

difficulties in a French one. As a result, but after a time, she agrees

to meet her mother and that mother's new husband. And then the tragedy

begins. She likes at once, and very soon loves, her stepfather--he

succumbs, more slowly, to Moira and Até. But he is horrified at the

notion of a quasi-incestuous love, and Julia perceives his horror. She

forces her horse, like the Duchess May, but over the cliffs of the

Cotentin, not over a castle wall; and her husband and her stepfather

himself see the act without being able--indeed without trying--to

prevent it. The actual place had nearly been the scene of a joint

suicide by the unhappy lovers before.

Once more, the thing comes badly out of analysis--perhaps by the

analyst's fault, perhaps not. But in its own presentation, with some

faults hardly necessary to point out, it is both poignant and

_empoignant_, and it gives a special blend of pity and terror, the two

feelings being aroused by no means merely through the catastrophe, but

by the rise and progress of the fatal passion which leads to it. I know

very few, if any, things of the same kind, in a French novel, superior,

or indeed equal to, the management of this, and to the fashion in which

the particular characters, or wants of character, of Julia's mother and

Julia's husband (excellent persons both) are made to hurry on the

calamity[413] to which she was fated.

[Sidenote: _Honneur d'Artiste._]

This tragic undercurrent, surging up to a more tragic catastrophe,

reappears in the two best of the later issues, when Feuillet was making

better head against the burst sewers[414] of Naturalism. _Honneur

d'Artiste_ is the less powerful of the two; but what of failure there

is in it is rather less glaring. Beatrice de Sardonne, the heroine, is a

sort of "Petite Comtesse" transformed--very cleverly, but perhaps not

quite successfully. _Her_ "triangle" consists of herself, a somewhat

New-Yorkised young French lady of society (but too good for the worst

part of her); and her two lovers, the Marquis de Pierrepont, a much

better Lovelace, in fact hardly a Lovelace at all, whom she is

engineered into refusing for honourable love--with a fatal relapse into

dishonourable; and the "Artiste" Jacques Fabrice. He adores her, but

she, alas! does not know whether she loves him or not till too late;

and, after the irreparable, he falls by the hazard of the lot in that

toss-up for suicide, the pros and cons of which (as in a former

instance) I should like to see treated by a philosophical historian of

the duello.

[Sidenote: _La Morte._]

In _La Morte_, on the other hand, the power is even greater--in fact it

is the most powerful book of its author, and one of the most powerful of

the later nineteenth century. But there is in it a reversion to the

"purpose" heresy; and while it is an infinitely finer novel than the

_Histoire de Sibylle_, it is injured, though not quite fatally, by the

weapon it wields. One of the heroines, Sabine, niece and pupil of an

Agnostic _savant_, deliberately poisons the other, Aliette, that she may

marry Aliette's husband. But the Agnostic teaching extends itself soon

from the Sixth Commandment to the Seventh, and M. de Vaudricourt, who,

though not ceasing to love Aliette, and having no idea of the murder,

has been ensnared into second marriage by Sabine, discovers, at almost

the same time, that his wife is a murderess and a strumpet. She is also

(one was going to say) something worse, a daughter of the horse-leech

for wealth and pleasure and position. Now you _may_ be an Agnostic and a

murderess and a strumpet and a female snob all at once: but no

anti-Agnostic, who is a critic likewise, will say that the second,

third, and fourth characteristics necessarily, and all together, follow

from Agnosticism. It may remove some bars in their way; but I can

frankly admit that I do not think it need definitely superinduce them,

or that it is altogether fair to accumulate the _post hocs_ with their

inevitable suggestion of _propter_.

However, "Purpose" here is simply at its old tricks, and I have known it

do worse things than caution people against Agnostics' nieces.

[Sidenote: Misters the assassins.]

On the other hand, the vigour, the variety, and (where the purpose does

not get too much the upper hand) the satiric skill are very nearly

first-rate. And, with the cautions and admissions just given, there is

not a little in the purpose itself, with which one may be permitted to

sympathise. After all "misters the assassins" were being allowed very

generous "law," and it was time for other people to "begin." As for

Feuillet's opposition to the "modern spirit," which was early denounced,

it is not necessary--even for any one who knows that this modern spirit

is only an old enemy with a new face, or who, when he sees the statement

that "Nothing is ever going anywhere to be the same," chuckles, and,

remembering all history to the present minute, mutters, "Everything

always has been, is, and always will be the same"--to call in these

knowledges of his to the rescue of Feuillet's position as a novelist.

That position is made sure, and would have been made sure if he had been

as much of a Naturalist as he was the reverse, by his power of

constructing interesting stories; of drawing, if not absolutely perfect,

passable and probable characters; of throwing in novel-accessories with

judgment; and of giving, by dint of manners and talk and other things

necessary, vivid and true portrayals of the society and life of his

time.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Alphonse Daudet and his curious position.]

[Sidenote: His "personality."]

Perhaps there is no novelist in French literature--or, indeed, in any

other--who, during his lifetime, occupied such a curiously "mixed"

position as Alphonse Daudet.[415] No contemporary of his obtained wider

general popularity, without a touch of irregular bait or of appeal to

popular silliness in it, than he did with _Le Petit Chose_, with the

charming bundle of pieces called _Lettres de Mon Moulin_, and later with

the world-delighting burlesque of _Tartarin de Tarascon_. _Jack_ and

_Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné_ contained more serious advances, which

were, however, acknowledged as effective by a very large number of

readers. But he became more and more personally associated with the

Naturalist group of Zola and Edmond de Goncourt; and though he never was

actually "grimy," he had, from a quite early period, when he was

secretary or clerk to the Duc de Morny, adopted, and more and more

strenuously persisted in, a kind of "personal" novel-writing, which

might be regarded as tainted with the general Naturalist principle that

nothing is _tacendum_--that private individuality may be made public use

of, to almost any extent. Of course a certain licence in this respect

has always been allowed to novelists. In the eighteenth century English

writers of fiction had very little scruple in using and abusing that

licence, and French, though with the fear of the arbitrary justice or

injustice of their time and country before them, had almost less. As the

nineteenth went on, the practice by no means disappeared on either side

of the Channel. With us Mr. Disraeli indulged in it largely, and even

Thackeray, though he condemned it in others, and was furious when it was

exercised on himself, in journalism if not in fiction, pretty

notoriously fell into it now and then. As to Dickens, one need not go

beyond the too notorious instance of Skimpole. Quite a considerable

proportion of Balzac's company are known to have been Balzacified from

the life; of George Sand's practice it is unnecessary to say more.

[Sidenote: His books from this point of view and others.]

But none of these is so saturated with personality as Daudet; and while

some of his "gentle" readers seem not to care much about this, even if

they do not share the partiality of the vulgar herd for it, it disgusts

others not a little. Morny was not an estimable public or private

character, though if he had been a "people's man" not much fault would

probably have been found with him. I daresay Daudet, when in his

service, was not overpaid, or treated with any particular private

confidence. But still I doubt whether any gentleman could have written

_Le Nabab_. The last Bourbon King of Naples was not hedged with much

divinity; but it is hardly a question, with some, that his _déchéance_,

not less than that of his nobler spouse, should have protected them from

the catch-penny vulgarity of _Les Rois en Exil_. Gambetta was not the

worst of demagogues; there was something in him of Danton, and one might

find more recent analogies without confining the researches to France.

But even if his weaknesses gave a handle, which his merits could not

save from the grasp of the vulgariser, _Numa Roumestan_ bore the style

of a vulture who stoops upon recent corpses, not that of a dispassionate

investigator of an interesting character made accessible by length of

time. _L'Évangéliste_ had at least the excuse that the Salvation Army

was fair game; and that, if there was personal satire, it was not

necessarily obvious--a palliation which (not to mention another for a

moment) extends to _Sapho_. But _L'Immortel_ revived--unfortunately, as

a sort of last word--the ugliness of this besetting sin of Daudet's.

Even the saner members of Academies would probably scout the idea of

their being sacrosanct and immune from criticism. But _L'Immortel_,

despite its author's cleverness, is once more an essentially vulgar

book, and a vulturine or ghoulish one--fixing on the wounds and the

bruises and the putrefying sores of its subject--dragging out of his

grave, for posthumous crucifixion, a harmless enough pedant of not very

old time; and throwing dirty missiles at living magnates. It is one of

the books--unfortunately not its author's only contribution to the

list--which leave a bad taste in the mouth, a "flavour of poisonous

brass and metal sick."

[Sidenote: His "plagiarisms."]

Of another charge brought against Daudet I should make much shorter

work; and, without absolutely clearing him of it, dismiss it as, though

not unfounded, comparatively unimportant. It is that of

plagiarism--plagiarism not from any French writer, but from Dickens and

Thackeray. As to the last, one scene in _Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné_

simply _must_ be "lifted" from the famous culmination of _Vanity Fair_,

when Rawdon Crawley returns from prison and catches Lord Steyne with his

wife. But, beyond registering the fact, I do not know that we need do

much more with it. In regard to Dickens, the resemblance is more

pervading, but more problematical. "Boz" had been earlier, and has been

always, popular in France. _L'excentricité anglaise_ warranted, if it

did not quite make intelligible, his extravaganza; his semi-republican

sentimentalism suited one side of the French temperament, etc. etc.

Moreover, Daudet had actually, in his own youth, passed through

experiences not entirely unlike those of David Copperfield and Charles

Dickens himself, while perhaps the records of the elder novelist were

not unknown to the younger. In judging men of letters as shown in their

works, however, a sort of "_cadi_-justice"--a counter-valuation of

merits and faults--is allowable. I cannot forgive Daudet his inveterate

personality: I can bid him sit down quickly and write off his

plagiarism--or most of it--without feeling the withers of my judicial

conscience in the very least wrung. For if he did not, as others have

done, make what he stole entirely his own, he had, _of_ his own, very

considerable property in rather unusually various kinds.

[Sidenote: His merits.]

The charm of his short Tales, whether in the _Lettres de Mon Moulin_ or

in collections assuming the definite title, is undeniable. The

satiric-pathetic--a not very common and very difficult kind--has few

better representatives than _La Chèvre de M. Séguin_, and the purely

comic stories are thoroughly "rejoicing." _Tartarin_, in his original

appearances, "touches the spot," "carries off all the point" in a manner

suggestive at once of Horace and Homocea; and though, as was almost

inevitable, its sequels are less effective, one would have been very

glad indeed of them if they had had no forerunner. In almost all the

books--_Robert Helmont_, by the way, though not yet mentioned, has some

strong partisans--the grip of actual modern society, which is the boast

of the later, as opposed to the earlier, nineteenth-century novel,

cannot be missed. Even those who are most disgusted by the personalities

cannot deny the power of the satiric presentation from _Le Nabab_ to

_Numa Roumestan_. _Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné_ is, quite independently

of the definite borrowing from us, more like an English novel, in some

respects, than almost any other French one known to me up to its date;

and I have found persons, not in the least sentimentalists and very

widely read in novels both English and French, who were absolutely

enthusiastic about _Jack_.

_L'Évangéliste_ is perhaps the nearest approach to a failure, the

atmosphere being too alien from anything French to be favourable to the

development of a good story, and perhaps the very subject being unsuited

to anything, either English or French, but an episode. In more congenial

matter, as in the remark in _Numa Roumestan_ as to the peculiar kind of

unholy pleasure which a man may enjoy when he sees his wife and his

mistress kissing each other, Daudet sometimes showed cynic acumen nearer

to La Rochefoucauld than to Laclos, and worthy of Beyle at his very

best. And I have no shame in avowing real admiration for _Sapho_. It

does not by any means confound itself with the numerous studies of the

infatuation of strange women which French fiction contains; and it is

almost a sufficient tribute to its power to say that it does not, as

almost all the rest do, at once serve itself heir to, and enter into

hopeless competition with, _Manon Lescaut_. Nor is the heroine in the

least like either Marguerite Gautier or Iza Clémenceau, while the

comparison with Nana, whose class she also shares, vindicates her

individuality most importantly of all these trials. She seems to me

Daudet's best single figure: though the book is of too specialised a

kind to be called exactly his best book.

He never had strong health, and broke down early, so that his total

production is decidedly smaller than that of most of his fellows.[416]

Nor has he, I think, any pretensions to be considered a novelist of the

very first class, even putting bulk out of the question. But he can be

both extremely amusing and really pathetic; he is never unnatural; and

if there is less to be said about him than about some others, it is

certainly not because he is less good to read. On the contrary, he is so

easy and so good to read, and he has been read so much, that elaborate

discussion of him is specially superfluous. It is almost a pity that he

was not born ten or fifteen years earlier, so that he might have had

more chance of hitting a strictly distinct style. As it is, with all his

pathos and all his fun, you feel that he is of the _Epigoni_ a successor

of more than one or two Alexanders, that he has a whole library of

modern fiction behind--and, in more than one sense of the word,

before--him.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: About: _Le Roi des Montagnes_.]

There was a time when Englishmen of worth and Englishwomen of grace

thought a good deal of Edmond About. Possibly this was because he was

one of the pillars of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Far be it from me to

speak with the slightest disrespect of that famous periodical, to which

I have myself divers indebtednesses, and which has, in the last hundred

years or thereabouts, harboured and fostered many of the greatest

writers of France and much of her best literary work. But persons of

some age and some memory must remember a time in England when it used to

be "mentioned with _hor_" as Policeman X mentioned something or somebody

else about the same date or a little earlier. Even Matthew Arnold, in

whose comely head the bump of Veneration was not the most remarkable

protuberance, used to point to it--as something far above _us_--to be

regarded with reverence and striven towards with might and main. What

justification there might be for this in general we need not now

consider; but at any rate About has never seemed to the present

historian very much of a pillar of anything. His chief generally

accepted titles to the position in novel-writing are, I suppose, _Le Roi

des Montagnes_ and _Tolla_, each of which, and perhaps one other, we may

examine in some detail, grouping the rest (with one further exception)

more summarily. They are the better suited for our purpose in that one

is comedy if not farce, and the other a gradually threatening and at

last accomplished tragedy.

Of course it would be a very dull or a very curmudgeonly person who

should fail to see or refuse to acknowledge "fun" in the history of

Hadji or Hadgi Stavros. The mixture of sense, science, stupidity, and

unconscious humour[417] in the German narrator; the satire on the

toleration of brigandage by government in Greece (it must be confessed

that, of all the reductions to the absurd of parliamentary and

constitutional arrangements in countries unsuited for them, wherein the

last hundred years have been so prolific, Greece has provided the most

constant and reversed-sublime examples, as Russia has the most tragic);

the contrast of amiability and atrocity in the brigands themselves--all

these provide excellent opportunities, by no means always missed, for

the display of a sort of anticipated and Gallicised Gilbertianism. Nor

need the addition of stage Englishness in Mrs. Simons and her brother

and Mary Ann, of stage Americanism in Captain John Harris and his nephew

Lobster, spoil the broth.

But, to the possibly erroneous taste[418] of the present taster, it does

not seem to be a consummated _consommé_. To begin with, there is too

much of it; it is watered out to over three hundred pages when it might

have been "reduced" with great advantage to one hundred. Nor is this a

mere easy general complaint; it would be perfectly possible to point out

where reductions should take place in detail. No one skilled in the use

of the blue pencil could be at a loss where to apply it in the

preliminary matter; in the journey; in the Hadgi's gravely burlesqued

correspondence; in the escape of the ladies; in Hermann's too prolonged

yet absurdly ineffective tortures; in the civil war between the King and

his subjects; in the rather transpontine victory of the two Americans

and the Maltese over both; and, above all, in the Royal Ball, where

English etiquette requires that the rescuer must be duly introduced to

those he has rescued. Less matter (or rather less talking about matter)

with more art might have made it a capital thing, especially if certain

traces of vulgarity, too common in About, were removed together with the

mere superfluities. At any rate, this is how it strikes, and always has

struck, a younger but now old contemporary.

[Sidenote: _Tolla._]

The same fault of _longueurs_ makes itself felt in _Tolla_: and indeed

the author seems to have been conscious of it, and confesses it in an

apologetic _Preface_ to the editions after the first. But this does not

form the chief ground of accusation against it. Nor, certainly, do the

facts, as summarised in a note, justify any serious charge of

plagiarism,[419] though the celebrated Buloz seems for once to have been

an unwise editor, in objecting to a fuller acknowledgment of

indebtedness on the part of his contributor. A story of this tragical

kind will bear much fuller handling than a comic tale of scarcely more

than one situation, recounted with a perpetual "tongue-in-cheek"

accompaniment.

But, from another point of view, the book does justify the drawing of a

general literary moral, that true _données_ are very far from being

certain blessings--that they are, in fact, _dona Danaorum_--to the

novelist; that he should not hug the shore of fact, but launch out into

the ocean of invention. About, in a fashion rather cheerfully recalling

the boasts of poor Shadwell, who could "truly say that he had made

it[420] into a play" and that "four of the humours were entirely new,"

assures us that he has invented everything but the main situation, and

written everything out of his own head except a few of the letters of

Tolla. Some of these added things are good, though one of the author's

besetting sins may be illustrated by the fact that he gives nearly half

a score pages to a retrospective review of the history of a Russian

General's widow and her daughter, when as many lines--or, better still,

a line or two of explanation here and there--would be all that the story

requires.[421] But the "given" situation itself is a difficult one to

handle interestingly: and, in some estimates at any rate, the difficulty

has not been overcome here. The son--a younger, but still amply endowed

son--of one of the greatest Roman families, compact of Princes and

Cardinals, with reminiscences of Venetian dogedom, falls in love, after

a half-hearted fashion, with the daughter of another house of somewhat

less, but still old repute, and of fair, though much lesser wealth. By a

good deal of "shepherding" on the part of her family and friends, and

(one is bound to say) some rather "downright Dunstable" on her own, he

is made to propose; but _her_ family accepts the demand that the thing

shall, for a time, be kept secret from _his_. Of course no such secrecy

is long possible; and his people, especially a certain wicked

cavaliere-colonel, with the aid of a French Monseigneur and the Russians

above mentioned, plot to break the thing off, and finally succeed.

"Lello" (Manuel) Coromila finds out the plot too late. Tolla dies of a

broken heart.

It seems to me--speaking with the humility which I do not merely affect,

but really feel on the particular point--that this might make a good

subject for a play: that in the hands of Shakespeare or Shelley it might

make a very great one in two different kinds. But--now speaking with

very much less diffidence--I do not think it a promising one for a

novel; and, speaking with hardly any at all, I think that it has

certainly not made a good one here. Shut up into the narrow action of

the stage; divested of the intervals which make its improbabilities more

palpable; and with the presentation of Lello as a weaker and baser

Hamlet, of Tolla as a betrayed Juliet--with all this brought out and

made urgent by a clever actor and actress, the thing might be made very

effective. Dawdled over in a novel again of three hundred pages, it

loses appeal to the sympathy and constantly starts fresh difficulties

for the understanding.

That a very delightful girl[422] may fall in love with a nincompoop who

is also notoriously a light-of-love, is quite possible: and, no doubt,

is fortunate for the nincompoops, and, after a fashion, good for the

continuation of the human race. But, in a novel, you must make the

process interesting, and that is not, _me judice_, done here. The

nincompoop, too, is such an utter nincompoop (he is not a villain, nor

even a rascal) that, no comic use being made of his nincompoopery, he is

of no use at all. And though an old and haughty Italian family like the

Feraldis _might_ no doubt in real life--there is nothing that may not

happen in real life--consent to clandestine engagements of the kind

described, it certainly is one of the possible-improbables which are

fatal, or nearly so, to art. Two or three subordinate characters--the

good-natured and good-witted Marquis Filippo Trasimeni, the faithful

peasant Menico, Tolla's foster-brother, and even the bad chambermaid

Amarella--have some merit. But twenty of them could not save the book,

which, after dawdling till close upon its end, huddles itself up in a

few pages, chiefly of _récit_, in a singularly inartistic fashion.

[Sidenote: _Germaine._]

_Germaine_, which has been (speaking under correction) a much less

popular book than either _Le Roi des Montagnes_ or _Tolla_, is perhaps

better than either. Except for a very few pages, it does not attempt the

somewhat cackling irony of the Greek book; and though it ends with one

failure of a murder, one accomplished ditto, and two more deaths of no

ordinary kind, it does not even attempt, as the Italian one does, real

tragedy. But it has a fairly well-knit plot, some attempt at character,

sufficient change of incident and scene, and hardly any _longueurs_.

Even the hinge of the whole, though it presents certain improbabilities,

is not of the brittle and creaking kind reprobated in that of _Tolla_.

A Neapolitan-Spanish Count of Villanera, whose second title is "Marquis

of the Mounts of Iron," possessed also not only of the bluest of

blood, but of mountains of gold, has fallen in love, after an

honour-in-dishonour fashion, with the grass-widow of a French naval

captain, Honorine Chermidy, and has had a child by her. She is really a

worse Becky Sharp, or a rather cleverer Valérie Marneffe (who perhaps

was her model[423]), and she forms a cunning plan by which the child may

be legitimated and she herself, apparently renouncing, will really

secure a chance of, the countdom, the marquisate, and the mountains of

iron and gold. (Of the latter she has got a good share out of her lover

already.) The plan is that Villanera shall marry some girl (of noble

birth but feeble health and no fortune), which will, according to French

law, effect or at least permit the legitimation of the little Marques de

las Montes de Hierro--certain further possibilities being left

ostensibly to Providence, but, in Madame Chermidy's private intentions,

to the care of quite another Power. The Dowager Countess de

Villanera--rather improbably, but not quite impossibly--accepts this,

being, though proud, willing to derogate a little to make sure of an

heir to the House of Villanera with at any rate a portion (the

sceptical would say a rather doubtful portion[424]) of its own blood.

Villanera himself, though in most ways the soul of honour, accepts this

shady scheme chiefly through blind devotion to his mistress; and it only

remains to find a family whose poverty, if not their will, consents to

sell their daughter. Through the agency of that stock and pet French

novel-character, a doctor who is very clever, very benevolent, very

sceptical, and not over-scrupulous, the exact material for the mischief

is found. There is an old Duc de la Tour-D'Embleuse, who, half-ruined by

the original Revolution, has been almost completely so by that of 1830,

has thrown away what remained, and has become an amiable and adored but

utterly selfish burden on his angelic wife and daughter, the latter of

whom, like so many of the heroines of the 'fifties, especially in

France, is an all but "given-up" _poitrinaire_. The price of the

bargain--an "inscription" of fifty thousand francs a year in Rentes--is

offered on the very day when the family has come to its last _sou_;

accepted, after short and sham refusal, by the duke; acquiesced in

unselfishly by the mother, who despairs of saving her husband and

daughter from starvation in any other way; and submitted to by the

daughter herself in a spirit of martyrdom, strengthened by the certainty

that it is but for a little while. How the situation works out to an end

of liberal but not excessive poetical justice, the reader may discover

for himself: the book being, though not a masterpiece, nor even very

high in the second rank, quite worth reading. One or two things may be

noticed. The first is a really clever sketch, the best thing perhaps in

About's novel-work, of the peculiar "naughty-childishness"[425] which

belongs to lovely woman, which does not materially affect her charm or

even her usefulness in some ways, but makes her as politically

impossible in one way as does that "incapacity for taking more than one

side of a question" which Lord Halsbury has pointed out, in

another.[426] The second is the picture, in the later half of the book,

of those Ionian Islands, then still English, the abandonment of which

was the first of the many blessings conferred by Mr. Gladstone[427] on

his country, and the possession of which, during the late or any war,

would have enabled us almost to pique, repique, and capot the attempts

of our enemies in the adjacent Mediterranean regions.

[Sidenote: _Madelon._]

All these books, and perhaps one or two others, are about the same

length--an equality possibly due (as we have seen in English examples on

a different scale) to periodical publication. But once, in _Madelon_,

About attempted something of much "longer breath," as his countrymen

say. Here we have nearly six hundred pages instead of three hundred, and

each page (which is a large one) contains at least half as much again as

a page of the others. The book is a handsome one, with a title in red

ink; and the author says he took three years to write the novel--of

course as an avocation from his vocation in journalism. It is difficult

to repress, though probably needless to utter, the most obvious remark

on this; but it is not hard to give it another turn. Diderot said (and

though some people believe him not, I do) that Rousseau originally

intended, in the Dijon prize essay which made his fate and fame, to

argue that science and letters had _improved_ morality, etc.; and that

he, Diderot, had told Jean Jacques that this was _le pont aux ânes_, and

determined him to take the paradoxical side instead. The "Asses' bridge"

(_not_ in the Euclidic sense, nor as meaning that all who took it were

asses) of the mid-nineteenth century French novelist was the biography

of the _demi-monde_. Balzac had been the first and greatest engineer of

these _ponts et chaussées_; Dumas _fils_ had shown that they might lead

to no mean success; so all the others followed in a fashion certainly

rather ovine and occasionally asinine. Madelon is a young woman,

attractive rather than beautiful, who begins as a somewhat mysterious

favourite of men of fashion in Paris; establishes herself for a time as

a married woman in an Alsatian town; ruins nearly, _mais non tout_, a

country baron; and ends, as far as the book goes, by being a sort of

inferior Lola Montès to a German princeling. It has cost considerable

effort to justify even this short summary. I have found few French

novels harder to read. But there is at least one smart remark--of the

"publicist" rather than the novelist kind--towards the end:

C'est un besoin inné chez les peuplades germaniques; il

faut, bon gré mal gré, qu'ils adorent quelqu'un.

They did not dislike puns and verbal jingles, either in France or in

England in the mid-nineteenth century, as much as their ancestors and

their descendants in both countries have done before and since. A

survivor to-day might annotate "Et quel quelqu'un quelquefois!"

[Sidenote: _Maître Pierre_, etc. Summing up.]

In fact, to put the matter brutally, but honestly, as far as the present

writer's knowledge extends, Edmond About was not a novelist at all "in

his heart." He was a journalist (he himself admits the impeachment so

far), and he was a journalist in a country where novel- or at least

tale-writing had long established itself as part of the journalist's

business. Also he was really a good _raconteur_--a gift which, though

perhaps few people have been good novelists without it, does not by

itself make a good novelist. As a publicist, too, he was of no small

mark: his _Question Romaine_ could not be left out of any sufficient

political library of the nineteenth century. Some of his shorter tales,

such as _Le Nez d'un Notaire_ and _L'Homme à l'Oreille Cassée_, have had

a great vogue with those who like comic situations described with

lively, if not very refined, wit. He was also a good topographer; indeed

this element enters largely into most of his so-called novels already

noticed, and constitutes nearly all the interest of a very pleasant book

called _Maître Pierre_. This is a description of the _Landes_ between

Bordeaux and Arcachon, and something like a "puff" of the methods used

to reclaim them, diversified by an agreeable enough romance. The hero is

a local "king," a foundling-hunter-agriculturist who uses his kingdom,

not like Hadji Stavros, to pillage and torment, but to benefit his

subjects. The heroine is his protégée Marinette, a sort of minor Isopel

Berners, with a happier end.[428] The throwing into actual tale-form of

curious and decidedly costly local fashions of courtship is clever; but

the whole thing is a sort of glorified advertisement. Other books, _Les

Mariages de Paris_ and _Les Mariages de Province_, almost tell their

tales, and something more,[429] in their titles.

One cannot but be sorry if this seems an unfair or shabby account of a

pleasant and popular writer, but the right and duty of historical

criticism is not to be surrendered. One of the main objects of literary

history is to separate what is quotidian from what is not. To neglect

the quotidian altogether is--whatever some people may say--to fall short

of the historian's duty; to put it in its proper place _is_ that duty.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau.]

What ought to be said and done about Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau--the

younger Sue and Soulié; the protagonists of the melodramatic and

criminal _feuilleton_ during the later middle of the century--has been

rather a problem with me. Clearly they cannot be altogether neglected.

Deep would answer to deep, Rocambole to M. Lecoq, in protesting against

such an omission of their manufacturers. I do not know, indeed, that any

English writer of distinction has done for M. le Vicomte Ponson du

Terrail what Mr. Lang did, "under the species of eternity" which verse

confers, for "(Miss Braddon and) Gaboriau." I have known those who

preferred that _other_ Viscount, "Richard O'Monroy"--who shared with

"Gyp" and Armand Silvestre the cheerful office of cheering the cheerable

during the 'eighties and later--to the more canonical possessor of the

title before him. But du Terrail was what I believe is called, in

Scottish "kirk" language, a "supply"--a person who could undertake the

duty of filling gaps--of enormous efficacy in his day. That is a claim

on this history which cannot be neglected, though the people who would

fain have Martin Tupper blotted out of the history of English poetry,

might like to drop Ponson du Terrail in that of the French novel down an

oubliette, like one of his own heroes, and _not_ give him the file

mercifully furnished to that robustious marquis. Gaboriau claims, in the

same way, even more "clamantly."

The worst of it is (to play cards on table with the strictness which is

the only virtue of this book, save perhaps an occasional absence of

ignorance) that neither of them appeals to me. I have no doubt that this

recalcitrance to the crime-novel is a _culpa_, if not a _culpa maxima_.

I suppose it was born in me. It is certainly not merely due to the fact

that, in my journalist days, perhaps because I was a kind of abortion of

a barrister, I had to write endless articles on crimes.

Penge murders knew

The pencil blue

as regards my "copy," and a colleague once upbraided me for arguing in

favour of Mrs. Maybrick. But I had read crime-novels before those days,

and they never amused me. Yet perhaps it may be possible to show

cause--other than my personal likings--for not ranking these high.

[Sidenote: The first--his general character.]

I have somewhere seen it said that Ponson du Terrail, before he took to

driving _feuilletons_ five-in-hand, showed some power of less coarse

fiction-writing on a smaller scale. But I have not seen any of these

essays, and real success in them on his part would surprise me. For it

is exactly in the qualities necessary to such a success that he seems to

me to come short. He _did_ possess what, though it may seem almost

profane to call it imagination, is really a cheap and drossy lower kind

thereof. He could frame and accumulate, even to some extent connect,

melodramatic situations, not so very badly, and not in very glaring

imitation of anybody else. But, perhaps for that very reason, the

difference between him and the others strikes one all the more

painfully. _Les Orphelins de la Saint-Barthélemy_ awakes the saddest

sighs for Dumas or Mérimée. _La Femme Immortelle_, with its _diablerie_

explained and then _dis_-explained and then clumsily solved with a

laugh, makes one wish for an hour or two even of Soulié. And when one

comes to the nineteenth century and _Les Gandins_ and a fiendish

_docteur rouge_[430] (who is in every conceivable way inferior to

Vigny's _docteur noir_), and a wicked count who undergoes a spotty

transcorporation, it is worse. If any one says, "This is possible, but

you yourself have said that excellence in some one else ought not to

affect the estimate of the actual subject," I reply, "Granted; but

Ponson du Terrail bores me." I have dropped every book of his that I

have taken up, and only at a second--even a third--struggle have been

able to get knowledge enough of it to speak without critical treason.

Moreover, his style (always under caution given) seems to me flat,

savourless, and commonplace; his thought childish, his etceteras (if I

may so say) absurd. The very printing is an irritation. Who can read

such stuff as this?

Tout à coup une sonnette se fit entendre.

Nana se leva.

Cette sonnette état celle qui avertissait la soubrette que

sa maîtresse réclamait son office.

La jolie fille prit un flambeau et quitta la cuisine.

Here you have four separate paragraphs, five lines, and thirty-five

words to express, in almost idiotic verbiage, the following:

"Here her mistress's bell rang, and she left the kitchen."

One might conduct not merely five, but five and twenty novels abreast at

this rate.

[Sidenote: The second.]

Not thus would it be proper to write of Gaboriau. With him, except

incidentally, and when he is diverging from his proper line,[431] one

finds no mere "piffle." He has a business and he does that. Moreover, it

is a business which, if not intrinsically, is historically important. Of

course there had been crime-novels and crime-tales before: there always

has been everything before. But Gaboriau undoubtedly refashioned and

restarted them, and has been ever since the parent or master of a

family, or whole school, of novelists and tale-tellers who have

sometimes seemed, at any rate to themselves, to be pillars, and to be

entitled to talk about politics and religion and morals, and the other

things which, as Chesterfield so delightfully remarked, need no

troublesome preparation in the talker. His place here, therefore, is

secured. If it is not a large place, that is not entirely due to the

mere fact that, as has been frankly acknowledged, the present writer

takes little pleasure in the crime-novel. It is because the kind,

plentiful for those who like it to read, can be conveniently knocked off

in specimen for others. For the latter purpose it would not matter very

much whether _L'Affaire Lerouge_, or _Le Crime d'Orcival_, or _M. Lecoq_

itself, or perhaps even others, were taken. The first named, which was,

I think, one of the first, if not the actual overture of the series, and

which happens to be best known to the historian, will perhaps suffice.

[Sidenote: _L'Affaire Lerouge._]

No one who takes it up, having some little critical aptitude and

experience, will fail to see, very shortly, that it does mean business

and does do it. The murder of Claudine Lerouge is well plunged into; the

arrangements for its detection--professional and amateur--are

"gnostically" laid out; and the plot thickens and presents various sides

of itself, like a craftsmanly made and tossed pancake. If you read it at

all, you will not skip much; first, because the interest, such as it is,

is continuous; and, secondly, for one of those reasons which keep

would-be sinners in other paths of rectitude--that, _if_ you skip, you

will almost certainly find you have lost your way when you come down

from skipping. Some oddities--partly, but not entirely, connected with

the strange and well-known differences between French and English

criminal procedure--will, of course, strike an Englishman--the

collaboration of professional _juge d'instruction_ and amateur detective

being perhaps the most remarkable. The love-affair, in which the Judge

himself and the plotted-against Albert de Commarin are rivals, though a

useful poker to stir the fire, is not quite a well-managed one: and the

long harangue of Madame Gerdy, between her resurrection from brain-fever

and her death, seems a little to strain probability. But no one of these

things, nor all together, need be fatal to the enjoyment of the book on

the part of, as was once said, "them as likes" the kind.[432]

[Sidenote: Feydeau--_Sylvie_.]

Short notice may again serve for another novelist enormously popular in

his day; very characteristic of the Second Empire; a favourite[433] for

a time (rather inexplicably) of Sainte-Beuve; but not much of a rose,

and very much of many days before yesterday--Ernest Feydeau. He did one

thing, _Sylvie_, as different as possible from Gérard's book of the same

name, but still, as it seems to me, good enough, though it never enjoyed

a tenth part of the popularity of his more "scabrous" things, though

itself is very far from prudish, and though it makes no appearance in

some lists and collections of his work. Feydeau (it is a redeeming

point) was one of "those about" Gautier, and _Sylvie_ is by no means

unlike a pretty free and fairly original transfer from _Les

Jeune-France_. The hero is a gentleman, decadent by anticipation and

romantic by survival to the very _n_th. He abides in a vast chamber,

divanned, and hung with Oriental curtains: he smokes endless tchibouks,

and lives chiefly upon preserved ginger. To him enters Sylvie, a sort of

guardian angel, with a rather Mahometan angelism, who devotes herself to

him, and succeeds, by this means and that, in converting him to a

somewhat more rational system of life and "tonvelsasens," as Swift would

say. It is slight enough, but very far from contemptible.

[Sidenote: _Fanny._]

As has been said or hinted, however, this was not at all the sort of

thing that brought or, so long as he did keep it, kept Feydeau's vogue.

_Fanny_, with which he "broke out" considerably more than "ten thousand

strong," as far as sale of copies went, is certainly not a book of the

"first-you-meet" kind. There is some real passion in its handling of the

everlasting triangle. But it is passion of the most morbid and least

"infinite" kind possible. Whenever Feydeau's heroes are sincere they

have a peculiar kind of sentimental immorality--a sort of greasy

gush--which is curiously nauseous. His Aphrodite, if the goddess will

pardon the profanation of her name, is neither laughter-loving, nor

tragic (as Aphrodite can be), nor Uranian in the sense, not of being

superior to physical passion, but of transcending it. She is not

exactly Pandemic, for Feydeau, like Malvolio, does talk, or tries to

talk, of ladies; but she is something like the patroness of the old

Sensibility novel "gone to the bad."

[Sidenote: Others--_Daniel_.]

_Madame de Chalis_, according to a memory of many years which I have not

thought it worth while to freshen, has a weaker draught of this rancid

and mawkish sentimentality. But having in those days missed (or failed

over) _Daniel_, I thought it incumbent on me to gird myself up to its

eight hundred pages. A more dismal book, even to skim, I have seldom

taken up. The hero--a prig of the first water--marries one of those

apparently only half-flesh-and-blood wives who, novelistically, never

fail to go wrong. He cannot, in the then state of French law, divorce

her, but he is able to return her on her mother's hands. Going to

Trouville (about which, then a quite new-fashioned resort, there is a

great deal in the book), he meets a beautiful girl, Louise de Grandmont,

and the pair fall--not merely hopelessly, which is, in the

circumstances, a matter of course, but, it would seem, innocently--in

love with each other. But in such a case scandal must needs come; and it

is engineered by revenge of the discarded wife and the mother-in-law, by

the treachery of some of Daniel's friends and the folly of others, as

well as, it must be added, by his own weak violence, thoughtless

conduct, and general imbecility. All this is developed at enormous

length, and it ends in a general massacre, Louise's uncle being killed

in a duel which Daniel ought to have fought (he is no coward, but a

hopeless blunderer), the girl herself dying of aneurism, and Daniel

putting an end to himself in her grave, much more messily and to quite

infinitely less tragic effect than Romeo. There is one scene in which he

is represented as gathering all his enemies together (including a

lawyer, who is half-rogue, half-dupe) and putting them all to confusion

by his oratory. The worst of it is that one does not in the least see

_why_ they were confused, except in one case, where the foe is literally

kicked downstairs--an effective method, and one rare enough in French

novels up to this date to be worth notice.[434]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Droz.]

It was, for all contemporary readers of the French novel, except those

of the gravest and most precise kind, a day to be marked, not with

vanishing forms in chalk, but with alabaster or Parian, when "Marcellin"

of the _Vie Parisienne_--one of those remarkable editors who, without

ever writing themselves, seem to have the knack of attracting and almost

creating writers, enlisted one "Z," the actual final letter of the name

of Gustave Droz, and published the first article of those to be later

collected as _Monsieur, Madame et Bébé_ and _Entre Nous_. Although the

contents of these books only added a fresh sprout to the age-old tree

that, for more than half a millennium, had borne _fabliau_ and

_nouvelle_ and _conte_ and _histoire_, and so forth, they had a

remarkable, if not easily definable, differentia of their own, and have

influenced fiction-writing of the same kind for a good half-century

since. The later-working "Gyp" and others owed a good deal to them; and

I am bound to say that--reading the two books recently after a long

interval--I found my old favourites just as amusing as I found them the

very first time, shortly after they came out.

Of course--and only those who have made much study of criticism know how

seldom critics recognise this "of course"--you must take the things in,

and not out of, their own class. They are not bread, or meat, or milk of

literature. They are, to take one order of gastronomic preference and

taste, devilled biscuits; to take another, chocolate with whipped cream

on it. And the devilling and the creaming are sometimes better than the

chocolate and the biscuit.

[Sidenote: _Mr., Mme. et Bébé_ and _Entre Nous_.]

It is not very easy to say--and perhaps not very important to

know--whether the mixture of naughtiness and sentimentality which

characterises these books[435] was what Mr. Carlyle, I think, was first

to call an "insurance" or only a spontaneous and in no way "dodgy" or

"hedgy" expression of the two sides of the French character. For

everybody ought to know that the complaint of Dickens's "Mr. the

Englishman" as to the French being "so d--d sentimental" is at least as

well justified as Mr. Arnold's disapproval of their "worship of

Lubricity." I suppose there are some people who would prefer the

sentiment and are others who would choose the "tum-te-dy," while yet a

third set might find each a disagreeable alternative to the other. For

myself, without considering so curiously, I can very frankly enjoy the

best of both. The opening story of the earlier and, I think, more

popular book, "Mon Premier Reveillon," is not characteristic. It might

have been written by almost anybody, and is in substance a softened and

genteel version of the story of Miss Jemima Ivins, and her luckless (but

there virtuous) suitor, in the "Boz" _Sketches_. "L'Âme en Peine," which

follows, strikes the peculiar Drozian note for the first time; and very

pleasant is the painting of the struggles of a pious youth--pious and

pudibund to a quite miraculous extent for a French _collégien_ of good

family--with the temptations of a beautiful Marquise and cousin who,

arrayed in an ultra-Second-Empire bathing-costume, insists on his

bathing with her. "Tout le Reste de Madame de K." may a little remind an

English reader of the venerable chestnut about the Bishop and the

housemaid's knee; but the application is different. There is nothing

wicked in it, but it contains some of the touches of varying estimate

of "good form" in different countries which make the comparative reading

of English and French novels so interesting. "Souvenirs de Carême" is

(or rather are, for the piece is subdivided) the longest of several bits

of Voltairianism, sometimes very funny and seldom offensive. But, alas!

one cannot go through them all. The most remarkable exercise in the

curious combination or contrast noticed above is afforded by _Une Nuit

de Noce_ and _Le Cahier Bleu_ (tricks of ingeniously "passed-off"

naughtiness which need not shock anybody), combined with the charming

and pathetic "Omelette" which opens the second book, and which gives the

happy progress and the sad termination of the union so merrily begun.

All are drawn with equal skill and with no real bad taste. In one or two

articles of both books the _gauloiserie_ broadens and coarsens, while in

the more purely "Bébé" sections of the first the sentimentality may seem

a little watered out. But you cannot expect acrobatics on wine-glasses

of this kind always to "come off" without some slips and breakages.

On the whole, I think _Entre Nous_ contains the very best things, and

most good ones. The pathos of the first (which is itself by no means

mere _pleurnicherie_) is balanced at the other end by the audacity of

"Le Sentiment à l'Épreuve," a most agreeable "washing white" of the main

idea of Wycherley's _Country Wife_; and between the two, few in the

whole score are inferior. "Nocturne," "Oscar," "Causerie," and "Le

Maillot de Madame" were once marked for special commendation by a critic

who certainly deserved the epithet of competent, in addition to those of

fair and gentle. It is, however, in this volume that what seems to me

Droz's one absolute failure occurs. It is neither comic nor tragic,

neither naughty nor nice, and one really wonders how it came to be put

in. It is entitled "Les de Saint-Paon," and is a commonplace, hackneyed,

quite unhumorous, and rather ill-tempered satire on certain dubious

aristocrats and anti-modernists. Nothing could be cheaper or less

pointed. And the insertion of it is all the stranger because, elsewhere,

there is something very similar, in subject and tendency, but of half

the length and ten times the wit, in "Le Petit Lever," a conversation

between a certain Count and his valet.

The plain critical fact is that the non-pathetic serious was in no way

Droz's trade. His satire on matters ecclesiastical is sometimes

delightful when it is mere _persiflage_: an Archbishop might relax over

the conversation in Paradise between two great ladies, one of whom has

charitably stirred up the efforts of her director in favour of her own

coachman to such effect, that she actually finds that menial promoted to

a much higher sphere Above than that which she herself occupies. But

here, also, the more gravity the less goodness.

Yet, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, we ought not to

quarrel with him for this, and to do so would be again to fall into the

old "gin-shop and leg-of-mutton" unreasonableness. It was M. Droz's

mission to start a new form of Crébillonade--_panaché_ (to use an

excellent term of French cookery), here and there, with another new form

of Sensibility. He did it quite admirably, and he taught the simpler

device--the compound one hardly--to pupils, some of whom still divert,

or at least distract, the world. I am not at all ashamed to say that I

think the best of his and their work capital stuff, continuing worthily

one of the oldest and most characteristic strains of French literature;

displaying no contemptible artistry; and contributing very considerably

to that work of pleasure-giving which has been acknowledged as supplying

the main subject of this book.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Cherbuliez.]

[Sidenote: His general characteristics.]

Few more striking contrasts--though we have been able to supply a fair

number of such things--could be found than by passing from Gustave Droz

to Victor Cherbuliez. Scion of a Genevese family already distinguished

in letters, M. Cherbuliez became one of the _Deux-Mondains_, a

"publicist" as well as a novelist of great ability, and finally an

Academician; but his novels, clever as they are, were never quite

"frankly" liked in France--at least, by the critics. This may have been

partly due to the curious latent grudge with which French writers--to

the country as well as to the language and manners born--have always

regarded their Swiss comrades or competitors--the attitude as to a kind

of poacher or interloper.[436] But to leave the matter there would be

not only to miss thoroughness in the individual case, but also to

overlook a point of very considerable importance to the history of the

French novel generally. There is undoubtedly something in M.

Cherbuliez's numerous, vigorous, and excellently readable novels which

reminds one more of English than of French fiction. We have noticed a

certain resemblance in Feuillet to Trollope: it is stronger still in

Cherbuliez. Not, of course, that the Swiss novelist denies

himself--though he uses them more sparingly--the usual latitudes of the

French as contrasted with the English novelist during nine-tenths of the

nineteenth century. But he does use them more sparingly, and he is apt

to make his heroines out of unmarried girls, to an extent which might at

that time seem, to the conventional French eye, simply indecent. He is

much more prodigal of "interest"--that is to say, of incident, accident,

occurrence--than most French novelists who do not affect somewhat

melodramatic romance. On the other hand, his character-drawing, though

always efficient, is seldom if ever masterly; and that "schematisation,"

on which, as is pointed out in various places of this book, French

critics are apt to insist so much, is not always present. Of actual

passion he has little, and his books are somewhat open to the

charge--which has been brought against those of so many of our own

second-best novelists--that they are somewhat machine-made, or, if that

word be too unkind, are rather works of craft than of art. Yet the work

of a sound craftsman, using good materials, is a great help in life; and

a person who wants good story-pastime for a certain number of nights,

without possessing a Scheherazade of his own, will find plenty of it in

the thirty years' novel turn-out of Victor Cherbuliez.

[Sidenote: Short survey of his books.]

He did not find his way at once, beginning with "mixed" novels

of a Germanish kind--art-fiction in _Un Cheval de Phidias_;

psychological-literary matter (Tasso's madness) in _Le Prince Vitale_;

politico-social subjects in _Le Grand-oeuvre_. But these things, which

have not often been successes, certainly were not so in M. Cherbuliez's

hands. He broke fresh ground and "grew" a real novel in _Le Comte

Kostia_, and he continued to till this plot, with good results, for the

rest of his life. The "scenes and characters" are sufficiently varied,

those in the book just mentioned being Russian and those in _Ladislas

Bolski_ Polish--neither particularly complimentary to the nationalities

concerned, and the latter decidedly melodramatic. _Le Comte Kostia_ is

sometimes considered his best novel; but I should put above it both _Le

Roman d'une Honnête Femme_ (his principal attempt in purely French

society and on Feuilletesque lines, with a tighter morality) and _Meta

Holdenis_, a story of a Swiss girl--not beautiful, but "_vurry_

attractive," and not actually "no better than she should be," but quite

ready to be so if it suited her. _Miss Rovel_ with another

girl-heroine--eccentric, but not in the lines of the usual

French-English caricatures--is a great favourite with some. _La Revanche

de Joseph Noirel_ is again melodramatic; and _Prosper Randoce_ is not

good for much. But _Paule Méré_, one of its author's best

character-books, is very much better--it is a study of ill-starred love,

as is _Le Fiancé de Mlle. Saint-Maur_, a book not so good, but not bad.

_Samuel Brohl et Cie_ is a very clever story of a rascal. I do not know

that any of his subsequent novels, _L'Idée de Jean Téterol_, _Noirs et

Rouges_, _La Ferme du Choquard_, _Olivier Maugant_, _La Vocation du

Comte Ghislain_, _La Bête_, _Une Gageure_, which closes the list of my

acquaintance with them, will disappoint the reader who does not raise

his expectation too high. _Olivier Maugant_ is perhaps the strongest.

But the expression just used must not be taken as belittling. In both

France and England such novel-writing had become almost a

trade--certainly a profession: and the turning out of workmanlike and

fairly satisfying articles for daily consumption is, if not a noble

ambition, a quite respectable aim. M. Cherbuliez did something more than

this: there are numerous scenes and situations in his work which do not

merely interest, but excite, if they never exactly transport. And the

provision of interest itself is, as has been allowed, remarkably

bounteous. I should not despise, though I should be a little sorry for,

a reader--especially an English reader--who found more of it in

Cherbuliez than even in Feuillet, and much more than in Flaubert or

Maupassant. The causes of such preference require no extensive

indication, and I need not say, after or before what is said elsewhere,

that this order of estimate is not mine. But it is to some extent a

"fact in the case."[437]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Three eccentrics.]

Before finishing this chapter we ought, perhaps, to consider three odd

persons, two of them much extolled by some--Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly,

Léon Cladel, and "Champfleury" of _Les Excentriques_. The two first were

themselves emphatically "eccentrics"--one an apostle of dandyism (he

actually wrote a book about Brummel, whom he had met early), a

disdainful critic of rather untrustworthy vigour, and a stalwart

reactionary to Catholicism and Royalism; the other a devotee of the

exact opposite of dandyism, as the title of his best-known book, _Les

Va-nu-pieds_, shows, and a Republican to the point of admiring the

Commune. The opposition has at least the advantage of disproving

prejudice, in any unfavourable remarks that may be made about either. To

Barbey d'Aurevilly's criticism I have endeavoured to do justice in a

more appropriate place than this.[438] His fiction occupied a much

smaller, but not a small, proportion of his very voluminous work. _Les

Diaboliques_ and _L'Ensorcelée_, as well as _Les Va-nu-pieds_, are

titles which entitle a reader to form certain more or less definite

expectations about the books they label; and an author, by choosing

them, deprives himself, to some extent, of the right justly claimed for

him in Victor Hugo's well-known manifesto, to be judged _merely_

according to his own scheme, and the goodness or badness of its carrying

out. If Hugo himself had made _Les Orientales_ studies of Montmartre and

the Palais Royal, he could not have made out his right to the privilege

he asserted. The objection applies to Barbey d'Aurevilly even more than

to Cladel, but as the work of the latter is the less important, we may

take it first.

[Sidenote: Léon Cladel--_Les Va-nu-pieds_, etc.]

At more times in my life than one I have striven to like--or at any rate

to take an interest in--_Les Va-nu-pieds_. Long ago it had for me the

passport of the admiration of Baudelaire,[439] to whom and to Victor

Hugo (this latter circumstance an important _visa_ to the former) Cladel

announced himself a pupil. But an absolute, if perhaps unfortunate,

inability to follow anything but my own genuine opinion prevented me

from enjoying it. And I cannot enjoy it now. It is not a commonplace

book, nor is anything else of its author's; but the price paid for the

absence of commonplaceness is excessive. A person possessing genius, and

sure of it, does not tell you that he has been rewriting his book (not

for correction of fact, but for improvement of style) for ten years, and

that now he doesn't care anything for critics, and endorses it NE

VARIETUR (_sic_).[440] The style itself is a mosaic of preciousness,

literary jargon, and positive _argot_--not quite contemptible, but, like

some actual mosaic, unattractive; and the matter does not attract me,

though it may attract people who like tiger-taming scenes, crimes,

grimes, etc. The address of the dedication, "Mienne," and nothing more,

is rather nice, and some of the local scenes (Cladel was passionately

patriotic towards his remote province of Quercy-Rouergue) are worth

reading. But this devotion is better shown in the short single book

(_Les Va-nu-pieds_ is a collection) called _Crête-Rouge_--the regimental

nickname of the heroine (an Amazon), who actually serves in the war of

the Terrible Year, and comes off much better, when her sex is discovered

by the Prussians, than she would have done forty and odd years later.

The end-scenes of this book, with her Druid-stone marriage to a comrade,

are really good. Of _Le Bouscassié_, _Titi-Froissac IV_, and _La Fête

Votive de Saint-Bartholomée Porte-Glaive_ I shall not say much. The

"province," which is strong in them, saves them sometimes. But Cladel's

hopeless lack of self-criticism shows itself in the fact of his actually

reprinting in full an article of Veuillot's (by no means

uncomplimentary) on himself, as a prelude in the book last mentioned,

and adding a long reply. The proceeding was honest, but rather suicidal.

One may not wholly admire the famous editor of the _Univers_.[441] But

nothing could better throw up his clear, vigorous, classical French and

trenchant logic, than the verbose and ambaginous preciousness, and the

cabbage-stick cudgel-play, of Cladel.[442]

[Sidenote: Barbey d'Aurevilly--his criticism of novels.]

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, also a favourite of Baudelaire's, is a writer

of an altogether greater clan--indeed one of those who come short but a

little, and one does not quite know how, of individual greatness.

Something has been said of his criticism, but a volume of it which was

not within my reach when I wrote what is there quoted, _Le Roman

Contemporain_, is a closer introduction to a notice of him as a

novelist. As of all his work it may be said of this, that anybody who

does not know the subjects will probably go away with a wrong idea of

them, but that anybody who does know them will receive some very

valuable cross-lights. The book consists[443] of a belittlement,

slightly redressed at the end, of Feuillet as a feeble person and an

impertinent patroniser of religion; of a rather "magpie" survey of the

Goncourts; of a violent and quite blind attack on Flaubert (the worst

criticism of Barbey's that I have ever read); of a somewhat unexpectedly

appreciative notice of Daudet; of an almost obligatory panegyric of

Fabre; of another _éreintement_, at great length, of Zola; and of

shorter articles, again "magpied" of praise and blame, on MM. Richepin,

Catulle Mendès, and Huysmans.[444]

[Sidenote: His novels themselves--_Les Diaboliques_ and others.]

[Sidenote: His merits.]

All this is interesting, but I fear it confirms a variation of the title

of a famous Elizabethan play--"Novelists beware novelists." Poets have a

worse reputation in this way, or course; but, I think, unjustly. Perhaps

the reason is that the quality of poetry is more _definite_, if not more

definable, than that of prose fiction, or else that poets are more

really sure of themselves. Barbey d'Aurevilly[445] had an apparently

undoubting mind, but perhaps there were unacknowledged doubts, which

transformed themselves into jealousies, in his heart of hearts. For

myself, I sympathise with his political and religious (if not exactly

with his ecclesiastical) views pretty decidedly; I think (speaking as

usual with the due hesitation of a foreigner) that he writes excellent

French; and I am sure--a point of some consequence with me, and not too

commonly met--that he generally writes (when he does not get _too_

angry) like a gentleman. He sometimes has phrases which please me very

much, as when he describes two lovers embracing so long that they "must

have drunk a whole bottle of kisses," or when he speaks of the voice of

a preacher "_tombant_ de la chaire dans cette église où _pleuvaient_ les

ténèbres du soir," where the opposition-combination of "tombant" and

"pleuvaient," and the image it arouses, seem to me of a most absolute

fancy. He can write scenes--the finale of his best book, _L'Ensorcelée_;

the overture of _Un Prêtre Marié_; and nearly the whole of the last and

best _Diabolique_, "Une Vengeance de Femme"--which very closely approach

the first class. And, whether he meant me to do so or not, I like him

when in "Un Dîner d'Athées" he makes one of them "swig off" (_lamper_) a

bumper of Picardan, the one wine in all my experience which I should

consider fit _only_ for an atheist.[446] But a good novelist I cannot

hold him.

The inability does not come from any mere "unpleasantness" in his

subjects, though few pleasant ones seem to have lain in his way, and he

certainly did not go out of that way to find them. But _L'Ensorcelée_

can only be objected to on this score by an absurdly fastidious person,

and I do not myself want any more rose-pink and sky-blue in _Un Prêtre

Marié_;[447] while the last _Diabolique_, already mentioned, is a

capital example of grime made more than tolerable.[448] Indeed, nothing

of the sort can be more unmistakable than the sincerity of Barbey's

"horrors." They mark, in that respect, nearly the apex of the triangle,

the almost disappearing lower angles of which may be said to be

represented by the crude and clumsy vulgarities of Janin's _Âne Mort_,

and the more craftsmanlike, indeed in a way almost artistic, but

unconvinced and unconvincing atrocities of Borel's _Champavert_.

[Sidenote: And defects.]

[Sidenote: Especially as shown in _L'Ensorcelée_.]

The objection, and the defect which occasions the objection, are quite

different. Barbey d'Aurevilly has many gifts and some excellencies. But

his work in novel constantly reminds me of the old and doubtless

well-known story of a marriage which was almost ideally perfect in all

respects but one--that the girl "couldna bide her man." He can do many

things, but he cannot or will not tell a story, save in such fragments

and flashes as those noted above. His _longueurs_ are exasperating and

sometimes nearly maddening, though perhaps many readers would save

themselves by simply discontinuing perusal. The first _Diabolique_ has

metal attractive enough of its kind. A young officer boards with a

provincial family, where the beautiful but at first silent, abstracted,

and, as the Pléiade would have said, _marbrine_ daughter suddenly,

though secretly, develops frantic affection for him, and shows it by

constant indulgence in the practice which that abominable cad in

Ophelia's song put forward as an excuse for not "wedding." But, on one

of these occasions, she translates trivial metaphor into ghastly fact by

literally dying in his arms. Better stuff--again of its kind--for a

twenty-page story, or a little more, could hardly be found. But Barbey

gives us _ninety_, not indeed large, but, in the usual editions, of

exceptionally close and small print, watering out the tale intolerably

almost throughout, and giving it a blunt and maimed conclusion. _Le

Bonheur dans le Crime_,[449] _Le Dessous de Cartes_, and the

above-mentioned _Dîner d'Athées_, which fill a quarter of a thousand of

such pages, invite slashing with a hook desperate enough to cut each

down to a quarter of a hundred. _Un Prêtre Marié_, which perhaps comes

next to _L'Ensorcelée_ in merit, would be enormously improved by being

in one volume instead of two. Of _Une Vieille Maîtresse_ I think I could

spare both, except a vigorously told variant (the suggestion is

acknowledged, for Barbey d'Aurevilly was much too proud to steal) of

Buckingham's duel[450] and the Countess (not "Duchess," by the way) of

Shrewsbury. _Une Histoire sans Nom_, a substantial though not a very

long book, is only a short story spun out. Even in _L'Ensorcelée_ itself

the author, as a critic, might, and probably would, have found serious

fault, had it been the work of another novelist. There is less

surplusage and more continuous power, so that one is carried through

from the fine opening on the desolate moor (a _little_ suggested,

perhaps, by the meeting of Harry Bertram and Dandie Dinmont, but quite

independently worked out) to the vigorous close above referred to. But

the story is quite unnecessarily muddled by information that part of it

was supplied by the Norman Mr. Dinmont, and part by an ancient countess.

We never get any clear idea _why_ Jeanne le Hardouey was bewitched, and

_why_ the Chevalier-Abbé de la Croix-Jugan suffered and diffused so

gruesome a fate.[451] Yet the fate itself is enough to make one close,

with the sweet mouth, remarks on this very singular failure of a genius.

Few things of the sort in fiction are finer than the picture of the

terrible unfinished mass (heralded over the desolate moor at uncertain

times by uncanny bell-ringing), which the reprobate priest (who has been

shot at the altar-steps before he could accomplish the Sacrifice of

Reconciliation[452]) endeavours after his death to complete, being

always baffled before the consecrating moment.

[Sidenote: Champfleury.]

Cladel had a considerable, and Barbey d'Aurevilly an almost exclusive,

fancy for the tragical. On the other hand, Champfleury (who, no doubt

partly for a bibliographical memory,[453] prefixed the Champ- to his

actual surname) occupies, as has been said, a curious, but in part far

from unsatisfactory, position in regard to our subject, and one blessed

by the Comic Spirit. His confessed fictions are, indeed, not very

successful. To take one volume only, _Madame Eugénio_, the title-story,

_not_ the first in order, but the longest, is most unfortunately, but

far too accurately, characterised by a phrase towards its end, "ce

_triste_ récit," the adjective, like our "poor," being capable of two

different meanings. _Histoire du Lieutenant Valentin_, on the other

hand--a story of a young soldier, who, leaving Saint-Cyr in

cholera-time, has to go to hospital, and, convalescing pleasantly while

shelling peas and making rose-gays for the Sisters, is naïvely surprised

at one of them being at first very kind and then very cold to him--is a

miss of a masterpiece, but still a miss, partly owing to too great

length. And so with others.

[Sidenote: _Les Excentriques._]

But in his much earlier _Les Excentriques_ (not unnaturally but wrongly

called "_Contes_ Excentriques" by some), handling what profess to be

true stories, he shows a most excellent narrative faculty. Whether they

are true or not (they rather resemble, and were perhaps inspired by,

some things of Gautier and Gérard) matters little--they are quite good

enough to be false. They are, necessarily, not quite equal, and there

may be for some tastes, not for all, too much of the Fourierism and

other queernesses of the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, the book is of

1852, and its subjects are almost all of the decade preceding. But some

are exceedingly refreshing, the dedication, of some length, to the great

caricaturist Daumier being not the least so. Yet it is not so unwise as

to disappoint the reader by being better than the text. "Lucas," the

circle-squarer, who explains how, when he was in a room with a lady and

her two daughters, he perceived that "this was all that was necessary

for him to attain the cubation of two pyramids," is very choice.

"Cambriel"--who not only attained the philosopher's stone and the

universal medicine, but ascertained that God is six feet six high, of

flame-coloured complexion, and with particularly perfect ankles--runs

him hard. And so does Rose Marius Sardat, who sent a copy of his _Loi

d'Union_, a large and nicely printed octavo, to every Parisian

newspaper-office, informing the editors that they might reprint it in

_feuilletons_ for nothing, but that he should not write the second

volume unless the first were a success. Some of us ought to be

particularly obliged to Rose Marius for holding that persons over

seventy are indispensable, and that, if there are not enough in France,

they must be imported. The difference of this from the callous

short-sightedness which talks about "fixed periods" is most gratifying.

But perhaps the crown and flower of the book is the vegetarian Jupille,

who wrote pamphlets addressed:

AUX GOURMANDS DE CHAIR!

decided that meat is of itself atheistical, though he admitted a "siren"

quality about it; and held that the fact of onions making human beings

weep attests their own "touching sensibility for us" (albeit he had to

admit again that garlic was demoniac). M. Jupille (who was a practical

man, and cooked cabbage and cauliflower so that his meat-eating visitor

could not but acknowledge their charm) explained St. Peter's net of

animal food with ease as a diabolic deception, but was floored by

crocodiles' teeth. And not the worst thing in the book is the last,

where a waxwork-keeper--a much less respectable person than Mrs. Jarley,

and of the other sex--falls in love with one of his specimens, waltzes

with her, and unwittingly presents a sort of third companion to one of

the less saintly kings of the early Graal legends, and to yet another

character of Dickens's, much less well known than Mrs. Jarley, the

hairdresser in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, who, to the disgust of his

female acquaintances, "worshipped a hidle" in the shape of the turning

bust of a beautiful creature in his own shop-window. The book is a book

to put a man in a good temper--and to keep him in one--for which reason

it affords an excellent colophon to a chapter.[454]

FOOTNOTES:

[407] The technical-scholastic being "things born _with_ a man."

[408] By some curious mistake, his birth used for a long time to be

ante-dated ten years from 1822 to 1812. At the risk of annoying my

readers by repeating such references, I should perhaps mention that

there is an essay on Feuillet in the book already cited.

[409] I give Delilah (for whom Milton's excessive rudeness naturally

inspires a sort of partisanship) the benefit of a notion that her action

was, partly if not mainly, due to unbearable curiosity. How many women

are there who could resist the double temptation of seeing whether the

secret _did_ lie in the hair, and if so, of possessing complete

mistress-ship of their lovers? Some perhaps: but many?

[410] _V. sup._ Vol. I. pp. 420-1.

[411] It may be worth while to remind the reader that Maupassant

included this in his selection of remarkable novels of all modern times

and languages.

[412] How sad it is to think that a specific reference to that

all-but-masterpiece, as a picture of earlier _fin-de-siècle_ society,

Miss Edgeworth's _Belinda_, may perhaps be necessary to escape the

damning charge of unexplained allusion!

[413]

"Where'er I came I brought _calamity_."

When I read the foolish things that foolish people still write about

Tennyson, I like to repeat to myself that "lonely word" in its immediate

context.

[414] If you can "take arms against a sea" you can, I suppose, make head

against a sewer.

[415] His brother Ernest was a novelist of merit sufficient to make it

not unnatural that he should--as, unless my memory plays me tricks, he

did--resent being whelmed in the fraternal reputation. But he does not

require much notice here.

[416] I do not call Flaubert "his fellow," or the fellow of any one

noticed in this chapter, for which reason I kept him out of it.

[417] It must be remembered that it was long before even 1870. I suppose

some one, in the mass of war-literature, must have dealt with "The Ideal

German in European Literature between 1815 and 1864." If nobody has, an

excellent subject has been neglected.

[418] And, according to one reviewer, the deficient sense of humour.

[419] They _might_ serve to exemplify About's often doubtful taste. The

central story and main figures of _Tolla_ were taken from a collection

of the poor girl's letters published by her family a few years before;

and the original of "Lello" was still alive. _His_ relations tried to

buy up the book, and nearly succeeded. In the MS. About had, while

slightly altering the names, referred pretty fully to this document. The

whole thing has, however, rather a much-ado-about-nothing air and, save

as connected with a periodical of such undoubted "seriousness," might

suggest a trick.

[420] "It" was _Timon of Athens_.

[421] It may please the historically given reader to regard this as an

actual survival of the Scudéry _histoire_--_Histoire de Madame Fratieff

et de sa fille Nadine_. Only it would, as such, have occupied a score or

two of pages for each one.

[422] Tolla is not so _very_ delightful: but she is meant to be.

[423] About has a gird or two at Balzac, but evidently imitates him. In

this very book, when the old duke (_v. inf._) comes under Madame

Chermidy's influence, he suggests Baron Hulot; and _Madelon_ (_v. inf.

ib._) is almost throughout imitation-Balzacian.

[424] For Honorine, though managing to retain some public reputation,

has long been practically "unclassed"; and it is not only her husband's

profession which has made him leave her.

[425] Germaine, quite naturally and properly, starts with a strong

dislike to her husband. When he takes her to Italy, and devotes himself

to the care of her health, this changes to affection. And the more it

changes, the more disagreeable she makes herself to him.

[426] This also has, in matters not political, the "charming and useful"

side. It would be very unpleasant if she always saw all sides of all

questions.

[427] I am quite aware that the giving up of the islands was not the

_immediate_ result of his mission.

[428] That is to say, supposing that Isopel ever could have been happy

with a lover

So _laggard_ in love, _though_ so dauntless in war

as George Borrow.

[429] As well as the Balzacian following, _haud passibus aequis_, above

referred to.

[430] I do not know whether any other novelists continued the series of

diversely coloured "doctors," as the fly-makers have done.

[431] He _could_ "piffle" when he went out of it. The would-be satirical

characterisation of two aristocrats, Madame d'Arlange and M. de

Commarin, in the book shortly to be noticed, is the thinnest

and most conventional of things, except, perhaps, the companion

trap-to-catch-the-French-Philistine of anti-clericalism which also shows

itself sometimes.

[432] Two people, thinking of moving house in London, went once to

inspect an advertised abode in the Kensington district. They did not

much like the street; they still less liked a very grim female who

opened the door and showed them over the house; and there was nothing to

reconcile them in the house itself. But, wishing to be polite, the lady

of the couple, as they were leaving, addressed to the grim guardian some

feeble compliment on something or other as being "nice." "P'raps," was

the reply, "for them as likes the ---- Road." It is unnecessary to say

that the visitors went down the steps in a fashion for which we have no

exact English term, but which is admirably expressed by the French verb

_dégringoler_.

[433] The favouritism declined, and the history of its decline was

anecdotised in a fashion somewhat _gaulois_, but quite harmless. "Uncle

Beuve," to the astonishment of literary mankind, put the portrait of

this "nephew" of his in his _salon_. After _Daniel_ (I think) it was

moved to the dining-room, and thence to his bedroom. Later it was missed

even there, and was, or was said to be, relegated to _un lieu plus

intime encore_. The _trovatore_ of this probably remembered his

Rabelais.

[434] The labour of reading the book has been repaid by a few useful

specimens of Feydeau's want of anything like distinction of thought or

style. He makes his hero (whom he does not in the least mean for a fool,

though he is one) express surprise at the fact that when he was _in

statu pupillari_ he liked _fredaines_, but when he became his own master

did not care about them! Again: "Were I to possess the power and

infinite charm of HIM [_sic_] who invented the stars I could never

exactly paint the delightful creature who stood before me." Comment on

either of these should be quite needless. Again: "Her nose, by a happy

and bold curve, joined itself to the lobes, lightly expanded, of her

diaphanous nostrils." Did it never occur to the man that a nose,

separately considered from its curve and its nostrils, is terribly like

that of La Camarde herself? I wasted some time over the tedious trilogy

of _Un Début à L'Opera_, _M. de Saint Bertrand_, _Le Mari de la

Danseuse_. Nobody--not even anybody _qui_ Laclos _non odit_--need follow

me.

[435] Their author wrote others--_Babolin_, _Autour d'une Source_ etc.

But the wise who can understand words will perhaps confine themselves to

_Mr., Mme. et Bébé_ and its sequel.

[436] Cf. _inf._ on M. Rod.

[437] There is a paper on Cherbuliez in _Essays on French Novelists_,

where fuller account of individual works, and very full notice, with

translations, of _Le Roman d'une Honnéte Femme_ and _Meta Holdenis_ will

be found.

[438] _History of Criticism_, vol. iii. See also below.

[439] The author of the _Fleurs du Mal_ himself might have been

distinguished in prose fiction. The _Petits Poëmes en Prose_ indeed

abstain from story-interest even more strictly than their avowed

pattern, _Gaspard de la Nuit_. But _La Fanfarlo_ is capitally told.

[440] Hugo might do this; hardly a Hugonicule.

[441] There used to be a fancy for writing books about groups of

characters. Somebody might do worse in book-making than "Great Editors,"

and Veuillot should certainly be one of them.

[442] The inadvertences which characterise him could hardly be better

instanced than in his calling the eminent O'Donovan Rossa "_le

député-martyr_ de Tipperary." In English, if not in French, a

"deputy-martyr" is a delightful person.

[443] Its articles are made up--rather dangerously, but very

skilfully--of shorter reviews of individual books published sometimes at

long intervals.

[444] Who replied explosively.

[445] There used to be something of a controversy whether it should be

thus or Aur_é_villy. But the modern editions, at least, never have the

accent.

[446] Very little above it I should put the not wholly dissimilar liquor

obtained, at great expense and trouble, by a late nobleman of high

character and great ability from (it was said) an old monkish vineyard

in the Isle of Britain. The monks must have exhausted the goodness of

that _clos_; or else have taken the wine as a penance.

[447] Huysmans on this is very funny.

[448] A Spanish duchess of doubly and trebly "azured" blood revenges

herself on her husband, who has massacred her lover before her eyes and

given his heart to dogs, by becoming a public prostitute in Paris, and

dying in the Salpêtrière. It is almost, if not quite, a masterpiece.

[449] Barbey's dislike of Feuillet was, evidently and half-confessedly,

increased by his notion that _M. de Camors_ had "lifted" something from

_L'Ensorcelée_. There is also perhaps a touch of _Le Bonheur dans le

Crime_ in _La Morte_.

[450] He knew a good deal (quite independently of Byron and Brummel)

about English literature. One is surprised to find somewhere a reference

to Walpole's story of Fielding and his dinner-companions.

[451] Observe that this is no demand for the explanation of the

supernatural. Let the supernatural remain as it is, by all means. But

curses should have causes. Até and Weird are terrible goddesses, but

they are not unreasonable ones. They might be less _terrible_ if they

were.

[452] He has for two years been ordered to be present, but forbidden to

celebrate; in punishment for his having, uncanonically, fought as a

Chouan--if not also for attempted suicide. But we hear of no

amorousness, and the husband Le Hardouey's jealousy, though prompted by

his wife's apparent self-destruction, is definitely stated to have no

foundation in actual guilt with the priest. On the contrary, she

declares that he cared nothing for her.

[453] Of Geoffroy Tory's book which (_v. sup._ Vol. I. p. 124) helped to

give us the Limousin student.

[454] It is possible that some readers may say, "Where are

Erckmann-Chatrian?" The fact is that I have never been able to find, in

those twin-brethren, either literature or that not quite literary

interest which some others have found. But I do not wish to abuse them,

and they have given much pleasure to these others. So I let them alone.