NATURALISM--THE GONCOURTS, ZOLA, AND MAUPASSANT
[Sidenote: The beginnings.]
If I were writing this _History_ on the lines which some of my critics
(of whom, let it be observed, I do not make the least complaint) seem to
prefer, or at least to miss their absence, a very large part of this
chapter would give me the least possible difficulty. I should simply
take M. Zola's _Le Roman Expérimental_ and M. Brunetière's _Le Roman
Naturaliste_ and "combine my information." The process--easy to any one
of some practice in letters--could be easier to no one than to me. For I
read and reviewed both books very carefully at their first appearance; I
had them on my shelves for many years; and the turning of either over
for a quarter of an hour, or half at the most, would put its contents
once more at my fingers' ends. But, as I have more than once pointed
out, elaborate boiling down of them would not accord with my scheme and
plan. Inasmuch as the episode or passage[455] is perhaps, of all those
which make up our story, the most remarkable instance of a deliberate
"school"--of a body of work planned and executed under more or less
definite schedules--something if not much more of the critical kind
than usual may be given, either here or in the Conclusion.[456] But we
shall, I think, learn far better things as to M. Zola and those about
him by considering what they--at least what he, his would-be teachers,
and his greatest disciple--actually did, than by inquiring what they
meant, or thought they meant, to do, or what other people thought about
them and their doings.
Let us therefore, in the first place and as usual, stick to the history,
though even this may require more than one mode and division of dealing.
[Sidenote: "Les deux Goncourt."]
The body of Naturalist or Experimental novels which, beginning in the
'sixties of the century, extended to, and a little over, its close, has
long been, and will probably always continue to be, associated with the
name of Émile Zola. But the honour or dishonour of the invention and
pioneering of the thing was claimed by another, for himself and a third
writer, that is to say, by Edmond de Goncourt for himself and his
brother Jules. The elder of the Goncourts--the younger died in early
middle age, and knowledge of him is in a way indirect, though we have
some letters--might be said to have, like Restif, a _manie de
paternité_, though his children were of a different class. He thought he
invented Naturalism; he thought he introduced into France what some
unkind contemporaries called "Japon_i_aiserie";[457] he certainly had a
good deal to do with reviving the fancy for eighteenth-century art,
artists, _bric-à-brac_ generally, and in a way letters; and he ended by
fathering and endowing an opposition Academy. It was with art that "Les
deux Goncourt"[458] (who were inseparable in their lives, and whom
Edmond--to do him the justice which in his case can rarely be done
pleasantly--did his best to keep undivided after Jules's death) began
their dealings with eighteenth-century and other artists[459]--perhaps
the most valuable of all their work. But it was not till the Second
Empire was nearly half-way through, till Jules was thirty and Edmond
thirty-eight, that they tried fiction (drama also, but always
unsuccessfully), and brought out, always together and before 1870 (when
Jules died), a series of some half-dozen novels: _Charles Demailly_
(afterwards re-titled) (1860), _Soeur Philomène_ (next year), _Renée
Mauperin_ (1864), _Germinie Lacerteux_ (next year), _Manette Salomon_
(1867), and _Madame Gervaisais_ (1869).
[Sidenote: Their work.]
It is desirable to add that, besides the work already mentioned and
published before 1870, the two had given a book called _Idées et
Sensations_, setting forth their literary psychology; and that, after
the cataclysm, Edmond published a description of their house and its
collections, his brother's letters, and an immense _Journal des
Goncourt_ in some half-score of volumes, which was, naturally enough,
one of the most read books of its time. Naturally, for it appealed to
all sorts of tastes, reputable and disreputable, literary-artistic and
Philistine, with pairs enough of antithetic or complementary epithets
enough to fill this page. Here you could read about Sainte-Beuve and
Gautier, about Taine and Renan, about Tourguénieff and Flaubert, as well
as about Daudet and Zola, and a score of other more or less interesting
people. Here you could read how Edmond as a boy made irruptions into a
newly-married cousin's bedroom, and about the interesting sight he saw
there; how an English virtuoso had his books bound in human skin; how
people dined during the siege of Paris, and a million other things; the
whole being saturated, larded, or whatever word of the kind be
preferred, with observations on the taste, intellect, and general
greatness of the MM. de Goncourt, and on the lamentable inferiority of
other people, etc., etc. If it could be purged of its bad blood, the
book would really deserve to rank, for substance, with Pepys' diary or
with Walpole's letters.[460] As it is, when it has become a little
forgotten, the quarterly reviewers, or their representatives, of the
twenty-first century will be able to make endless _réchauffés_ of it.
And though not titularly or directly of our subject, it belongs thereto,
because it shows the process of accumulation or incubation, and the
temper of the accumulators and incubators in regard to the subjects of
the novels themselves.
[Sidenote: The novels.]
To analyse all these novels, or even one of them, at length, would be a
process as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable. The "chronicles of
wasted _grime_" may be left to themselves, not out of any mere finical
or fastidious superiority, but simply because their own postulates and
axioms make such analysis (if the word unfairness can be used in such a
connection) unfair to them. For they claimed--and the justice, if not
the value, of the claim must be allowed--to have rested their fashion of
novel-writing upon two bases. The substance was to be provided by an
elaborate observation and reproduction of the facts of actual life, not
in the least transcendentalised, inspirited, or in any other way brought
near Romance, but considered largely from the points of view which their
friend Taine, writing earlier, used for his philosophical and historical
work--that of the _milieu_ or "environment," that of heredity, though
they did not lay so much stress on this as Zola did--and the like. The
treatment, on the other hand, was to be effected by the use of an
intensely "personal" style, a new Marivaudage, compared to which, as we
remarked above, Flaubert's doctrine of the single word was merely
rudimentary. After Jules's death Edmond wrote, alone, _La Fille Elisa_,
which was very popular, _La Faustin_, and _Chérie_, the last of which,
with _Germinie Lacerteux_, may form the basis of a short critical
examination. Those who merely wish to see if they can like or tolerate
the Goncourtian novel had perhaps better begin with _Renée Mauperin_ or
_Madame Gervaisais_. Both have been very highly praised,[461] and the
first named of them has the proud distinction of putting "le mot de
Cambronne" in the mouth of a colonel who has been mortally wounded in a
duel.
[Sidenote: _Germinie Lacerteux_ and _Chérie_ taken as specimens.]
To return to our selected examples, _Germinie Lacerteux_ is the story of
an actual _bonne_ of the brothers, whose story, without "trimmings," is
told in the _Journal_ itself.[462] The poor creature is as different as
possible, not merely from the usual heroine, but from the _grisette_ of
the first half of the century and from the _demi-mondaine_ of Dumas
_fils_, and Daudet, and even Zola. She is not pretty; she is not
fascinating in any way; she is neither good- nor ill-natured in any
special fashion; she is not even ambitious of "bettering" herself or of
having much pleasure, wealth, etc. If she goes to the bad it is in the
most commonplace way and with the most unseductive seducer possible. Her
progress and her end are, to borrow a later phrase and title
metaphorically, merely a tale of the meanest streets; untouched and
unconfirmed by the very slightest art; as destitute of any aesthetic
attraction, or any evidence of artistic power, as the log-books of a
common lodging-house and a hospital ward could be. In _Chérie_ there is
nothing exactly improper; it is merely an elaborate study of a
spoilt--at least petted--and unhealthy girl in the upper stages of
society, who has at last the kindness--to herself, her relations, and
the reader--to die. If M. de Goncourt had had the slightest particle of
humour, of which there is no trace in any of his works, one might have
taken this, like other things perhaps, as a slightly cryptic parody--of
the _poitrinaire_-heroine mania of times a little earlier; but there is
no hope of this. The subject was, in the sense attached to the word by
these writers, "real"; it could be made useful for combined
physiological and psychological detail; and, most important of all, it
was more or less repulsive.[463]
[Sidenote: The impression produced by them.]
For this is what it really comes to in the Goncourts, in Zola, and in
the rest, till Guy de Maupassant, not seldom dealing with the same
material, sublimes it, and so robs it of its repulsiveness, by the force
of true comic, tragic, or romantic art. Or course it is open to any one
to say, "It may repel _you_, but it does not repel _me_." But this is
very cheap sophistry. We do not require to be told, in the words which
shocked Lord Chesterfield but do not annoy a humble admirer of his, that
"One man's meat is another man's poison." Carrion is not repulsive to a
vulture. Immediately before writing these words I was reading the
confession of an unfortunate American that he or she found _The
Roundabout Papers_ "depressing." For my part, I have never given up the
doctrine that _any_ subject _may_ be deprived of its repulsiveness by
the treatment of it. But when you find a writer, or a set of writers,
deliberately and habitually selecting subjects which are generally held
to be repellent, and deliberately and habitually refusing or failing to
pass them through the alembic in the manner suggested--then I think you
are justified, not merely in condemning their taste, but in thinking not
at all highly of their art. A cook who cannot make his meat savoury
unless it is "high" is not a good cook, and if he cannot do without
pepper and garlic[464] he is not much better.
[Sidenote: The rottenness of their theory.]
Dismissing, however, for a moment the question of mere taste, it should
be evident that the doctrine of rigid "observation," "document,"
"experience," and the like is bad in art. Like so many--some optimists
would say like all--bad things, it is, of course, a corruption, by
excess and defect both, of something good or at least true. It cannot be
necessary here, after scores of expressions of opinion on the subject
throughout this book, to admit or urge the importance of observation of
actual life to the novelist. The most ethereal of fairy-tales and the
wildest of extravaganzas would be flimsy rubbish if not corroborated by
and contrasted with it: it can be strengthened, increased, varied almost
at discretion in the novel proper. I hold it, as may be argued perhaps
in the Conclusion, to be the principle and the justification of Romance
itself. But, independently of the law just mentioned, that you must not
confine your observation to Ugliness and exclude Beauty--it will not do
to pull out the pin of your cart, and tilt a collection of observed
facts on the hapless pavement of the reader's mind. You are not a
reporter; not a compiler of _dossiers_; not a photographer. You are an
artist, and you must do something with your materials, add something of
yourself to them, present something not vamped from parts of actual life
itself, but reinforcing those parts with aesthetic re-creation and with
the sense of "the whole." I find this--to confine ourselves strictly to
the famous society so often mentioned in the _Journal_--eminently in
Flaubert, and as far as one can judge from translations, in
Tourguénieff; I find it, to a less extent, in Daudet; I find it
sometimes even in Zola, especially, but not merely, in his shorter
stories; I find it again, and abundantly, in Maupassant. But I never
find it in the Goncourts: and when I find it in the others it is because
they have either never bowed the knee to, or have for the nonce
discarded, the cult of the Naturalist, experimental, documentary idol,
in itself and for itself.
"But," some one may say, "you have neglected one very important point to
which you have yourself referred, and as to which you have just
recommitted yourself. Did not _les deux_ 'add something,' a very
considerable something, 'of their own'? How about their style?"
[Sidenote: And the unattractiveness of their style.]
Certainly they prided themselves on this, and certainly they took a
great deal of trouble about it. If any one likes the result, let him
like it. It appears to me only to prove that an unsound principle is not
a certain means to secure sound practice. Possibly, as Edmond boasted,
this style is not the style _de tout le monde_. And _tout le monde_ may
congratulate itself on the fact. One can see that it _must_ have given
them a good deal of trouble--perhaps as much as, say, Paul de
Saint-Victor's gave him. But then his excites a cheerful glow of
satisfaction, whereas theirs only creates, as Saint-Victor himself (to
one's regret) says of Swift, _un morne étonnement_.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Émile Zola to be treated differently.]
The tone which has been adopted[465] in speaking of the Goncourts (or
rather of Edmond de Goncourt, for Jules seems to have been the better
fellow pretty certainly, as well as probably the more genuine talent, of
the two) would be grossly unfair in dealing with Émile Zola. One may
think his principle demonstrably wrong, and his practice for the most
part a calamitous mistake. One may, while, if indeed it concerned us,
clearing him of the charge of doing any moral harm--such harm would be
as likely to be done by records of Bedlam, or the Lock Hospital, or a
dipsomaniacs' home--put on the wrong side of his account a quantity of
dull and dirty trash,[466] which, without his precept and example, would
never have been written, or, if written, read. But the great, if mostly
wasted, power displayed in his work is quite undeniable by any real
critic; he did some things--and more parts of things--absolutely good;
and if, as has been admitted, he did literary evil, he upset in a
curious fashion the usual dictum that the evil that men do lives after
them. At least it was not his fault if such was the case. He
undoubtedly, whether he actually invented it or not, established,
communicated, spread the error of Naturalism. But he lived long enough
and wrote hard enough to "work it out" in a singular fashion--to
illustrate the rottenness of the tree by the canker of the fruit to such
an extent, and in such variety of application and example, that nobody
for a long time has had any excuse for grafting the one or eating the
other. Personally--in those points of personality which touch literature
really, and out of the range of mere gossip--he had many good qualities.
He was transparently honest, his honesty being tested and attested by a
defect which will be noticed presently. He appears to have had no bad
blood in him. His fidelity and devotion to what he thought art were as
unflinching as Flaubert's own.
[Sidenote: Some points in his personality--literary and other.]
Nor was he deficient in good qualities which were still more purely
literary. We shall speak later of the excellence of his short stories;
if he had never written anything else there would be hardly anything but
praise for him. When he does not lose himself in the wilderness of
particulars, he sometimes manages to rise from it to wonderful
Pisgah-sights of description. He has a really vast, though never an
absolute or consummate, and always a morbid, hold on what may be called
the second range of character, and a drastic, if rather mechanical,
faculty of combining scenes and incidents. The mass of the
Rougon-Macquart books is very much more coherent than the _Comédie
Humaine_. He has real pathos. But perhaps his greatest quality, shown at
intervals throughout but never fully developed till the chaotic and
sometimes almost Blake-like Apocalypses of his last stage, was a
grandiosity of fancy--nearly reaching imagination, and not incapable of
dressing itself in suitable language--which, though one traces some
indebtedness to Lamennais and Michelet and Hugo, has sufficient
individuality, and, except in these four, is very rarely found in French
literature later than the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. To set
against these merits--still leaving the main fault alone--there are some
strange defects. Probably worst of all, for it has its usual appalling
pervasiveness, is his almost absolute want of humour. Humour and
Naturalism, indeed, could not possibly keep house together; as we shall
see in Maupassant, the attempt has happier results than in the case of
"Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell," for the fairy expels the Devil
at times wholly. The minor and particular absurdities which result from
this want of humour crop up constantly in the books; and it is said to
have been taken advantage of by Maupassant himself in one instance, the
disciple "bamming" the master into recording the existences of
peculiarly specialised places of entertainment, which the fertile fancy
of the author of _Boule de Suif_ had created.
[Sidenote: The Pillars of Naturalism.]
The Naturalist Novel, as practised by Zola, rests on three principal
supports, or rather draws its materials from, and guides its
treatment by, three several processes or doctrines. The general
observational-experimental theory of the Goncourts is very widely, in
fact almost infinitely extended, "documents" being found or made in or
out of the literal farrago of all occupations and states of life. But,
as concerns the definitely "human" part of the matter, immense stress is
laid on the Darwinian or Spencerian doctrines of heredity, environment,
evolution, and the like. While, last of all in order, if the influence
be taken as converging towards the reason of the failure, comes the
"medico-legal" notion of a "lesion"--of some flaw or vicious and
cancerous element--a sort of modernised [Greek: prôtarchos atê] in the
family, which develops itself variously in individuals.
Now, before pointing out the faulty results of this as shown generally
in the various books, let us, reversing the order in which the
influences or elements have been stated, set out the main lines of error
in the elements themselves.
In the first place, it must surely be obvious that insistence on the
"lesion," even if the other points of the theory were unassailable, is
grossly excessive, if not wholly illegitimate. If you are to take
observation and experience for your sole magazine of subjects, you must
take _all_ experience and _all_ observation. Not the veriest pessimist
who retains sense and senses can say that their results are _always_
evil, ugly, and sordid. If you are to go by heredity you must attend to:
Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis,
as well as to:
Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit, etc.
Remounting the stairs, it must be evident that Heredity, Natural
Selection, Evolution, Environment, etc., are things which, at the very
best, can be allowed an exceedingly small part in artistic re-creation.
Not only do they come under the general ban of Purpose, but their
purpose-character is of the most thankless and unsucculent kind. I do
not know that any one has ever attempted a mathematical novel, though
the great Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe, as we all know, wrote a beautiful
mathematical poem, of which the extant fragments are, alas! too few. If
he had only lived a generation later, how charming would have been the
fytte or canto on Quaternions! But, really, such a thing would not be
more than a "farthest" on a road on which heredity-and-selection novels
travel far. It is no use to say, "Oh! but human beings exemplifying
those things can be made interesting." If they are it will not be
because they are dealt with _sub specie hereditatis_, and confined in
the circle of _milieu_.
Yet the master error lies, farther back still, in the strictly
"Naturalist" idea itself--the theory of Experiment, the
observation-document-"note," all for their own sake. Something has been
said of this in relation to the Goncourts, but M. Zola's own
exemplification of the doctrine was so far "larger" in every sense than
theirs, and reinforced with so much greater literary power, that it
cannot be left merely to the treatment which was sufficient for them.
Once more, it is a case of "corruption of the best." It is perfectly
true that all novel-writing--even in a fashion all romance-writing
too--ought to be based on experience[467] in practical life, and that
infinite documents are procurable, infinite notes may be made, from that
life. It is utterly _un_true that _any_ observation, _any_ experiment,
_any_ document is good novel or romance stuff.
A very few remarks may perhaps be made on approaches to Zolaism--not in
the sense of scabrousness--before Zola.
[Sidenote: "Document" and "detail" before Naturalism.]
A writer of one of those theses _à la mode Germanorum_, of which, at
different times and in different occupations, it is the hard lot of the
professional man of letters to read so many, would probably begin with
the Catalogue of Ships, or construct an inventory of the "beds and
basons" which Barzillai brought to David. Quite a typical "program"
might be made of the lists of birds, beasts, trees, etc., so well known
in mediaeval literature, and best known to the ordinary English reader
from Chaucer, and from Spenser's following of him. We may, however, pass
to the Deluge of the Renaissance and the special emergence therefrom of
French fiction. It would not be an absolute proof of the "monographitis"
just glanced at if any one were to instance the curious discussions on
the propriety of introducing technical terms into heroic poetry--which
is, of course, very close to heroic romance, and so to prose fiction
generally.
[Sidenote: General stages traced.]
But, for practical purposes, Furetière and the _Roman Bourgeois_ (_vide_
Vol. I.) give the starting-point. And here the Second Part, of which we
formerly said little, acquires special importance, though the first is
not without it. _All_ the details of _bourgeois_ life and middle-class
society belong to the department which was afterwards preferred--and
degraded--by the Naturalists; and the legal ins and outs of the Second
Part are Zola in a good deal more than the making. Indeed the luckless
"Charroselles" himself had, as we pointed out, anticipated Furetière in
not a few points, such as that most interesting reference to
_bisque_.[468] Scarron himself has a good deal of it; in fact there is
so much in the Spanish picaresque novel that it could not be absent from
the followings thereof. For which same reason there is not a very little
of it in Lesage, while, for an opposite one, there is less in Marivaux,
and hardly any at all in Crébillon or Prévost. The _philosophes_, except
Diderot--who was busy with other things and used his acquaintance with
miscellaneous "documents" in another way--would have disdained it, and
the Sentimentalists still more so. But it is a sign of the shortcomings
of Pigault-Lebrun--especially considering the evident discipleship to
Smollett, in whom there is no small amount of such detail--that, while
in general he made a distinct advance in "ordinary" treatment, he did
not reinforce this advance with circumstantial accounts of "beds and
basons."
But with the immense and multifarious new birth of the novel at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, this development also received, in
the most curiously diverse ways, reinforcement and extension. The Terror
novel itself had earlier given a hand, for you had to describe, more or
less minutely, the furniture of your haunted rooms, the number and
volume of your drops of blood, the anatomical characteristics of your
skeletons, and the values of your palette of coloured fires. The
Historical novel lugged document in too often by head and shoulders,
introducing it on happier occasions as the main and distinguishing
ornament of its kind. Romanticism generally, with its tendency to
antiquarian detail, its liking for _couleur locale_, its insistence on
the "streaks of the tulip" and the rest, prompted the use and at least
suggested the abuse.
[Sidenote: Some individual pioneers--especially Hugo.]
Nor did the great individual French novelists--for we need not specify
any others--of the earlier part of the century, while they themselves
kept to the pleasant slopes above the abyss, fail to point the way to
it. Chateaubriand with his flowery descriptions of East and West, and
Madame de Staël with her deliberate guide-bookery, encouraged the
document-hunter and detail-devotee. Balzac, especially in the directions
of finance and commerce, actually set him an example. George Sand,
especially in pure country stories, was prodigal of local and technical
matters and manners. The gorgeous scenery of Gautier, and the soberer
but important "settings" of Mérimée, might be claimed as models. And
others might be added.
But from one point of view, as an authority above all earlier
authorities, and from another as a sinner beyond all earlier sinners,
might be quoted Victor Hugo, even putting his _juvenilia_ aside. He had
flung a whole glossary of architecture, not to mention other things of
similar kind, into _Notre Dame de Paris_; and when after a long interval
he resumed prose fiction, he had ransacked the encyclopaedia for _Les
Misérables_. _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ is half a great poem and half
a _real-lexikon_ of mechanics, weather-lore, seafaring, ichthyology, and
God knows what else! If _L'Homme Qui Rit_ had been written a very little
later, parts of it might have been taken as a deliberate burlesque, by a
French Sir Francis Burnand, of Naturalist method. Now, as the most acute
literary historians have always seen, Naturalism was practically
nothing but a degeneration of Romanticism:[469] and degeneracy always
shows itself in exaggeration. Naturalism exaggerated detail, streak of
tulip, local colour, and all the rest, of which Romanticism had made
such good use at its best. But what it exaggerated most of all was the
Romantic neglect of classical _decorum_, in the wider as well as the
narrower sense of that word. Classicism had said, "Keep everything
indecorous out." Naturalism seemed sometimes to say, "Let nothing that
is not indecorous come in."[470]
[Sidenote: Survey of books--the short stories.]
It was, however, by no means at first that M. Zola took to the
"document" or elaborated the enormous scheme of the Rougon-Macquart
cycle: though whether the excogitation of this was or was not due to the
frequentation, exhortation, and imitation of MM. de Goncourt is not a
point that we need discuss. He began, after melodramatic and negligible
_juvenilia_, in 1864 with a volume of delightful short stories,[471]
_Contes à Ninon_, in which kind he long afterwards showed undiminished
powers. And he continued this practice at intervals for a great number
of years, with results collected, after the first set, in _Nouveaux
Contes à Ninon_, and in volumes taking their general titles from special
tales--_Le Capitaine Burle_ and _Naïs Micoulin_. In 1880 he gave the
first story, _L'Attaque du Moulin_, to that most remarkable Naturalist
"symposium," _Les Soirées de Médan_, which, if nothing of it survived
but that story itself and Maupassant's _Boule de Suif_, and if this
represented the sole extant work of the School, would certainly induce
the fortieth century to think that School one of the very best in
fiction, and to utter the most pathetic wails over the loss of the rest
of its production. Of _Boule de Suif_--in more senses than one the
feminine of the pair--more presently. But _L'Attaque_ itself is a
splendid and masculine success--the best thing by far, in respect of
flawlessness, that its author ever did, and not far below Mérimée's
_Prise de la Redoute_.
Unfortunately it was not in these breaches that M. Zola chose to abide.
After the war, having no doubt laid his plans long before, he undertook
the vast Rougon-Macquart scheme with its score of volumes; and when this
was finished, carried on two others, smaller in bulk but hardly less
ambitious in scope, "Les Trois Villes"--_Lourdes_, _Paris_, _Rome_; and
"Les Quatre Évangiles"--_Fécondité_, _Travail_, and _Vérité_, the fourth
of which was never written, while the third, _Vérité_, appeared with a
black line round its cover, denoting posthumous issue.
[Sidenote: "Les Rougon-Macquart."]
In all these books the Experimental and Documentary idea is worked out,
with an important development in the other directions above glanced at.
The whole of the Rougon-Macquart series was intended to picture the
varying careers of the branches, legitimate and illegitimate, of two
families, under the control of heredity, and the evolution of the
cerebral lesion into various kinds of disease, fault, vice, crime, etc.
But further scope was found for the use of the document, human and
other, by allotment of the various books, both in this and in the later
groups, to the special illustration of particular places, trades,
professions, habits of life, and _quicquid agunt homines_ generally. The
_super_-title of the first and largest series, "Les Rougon-Macquart:
Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire," can
hardly need comment or amplification to any intellect that is not
hopelessly enslaved to the custom of having its meat not only killed,
dressed, cooked, and dished, but cut up, salted, peppered, and put into
its mouth with assiduous spoonings. _La Fortune des Rougon_, in the
very year when Europe invited a _polemos aspondos_ by acquiescing in the
seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, laid the foundation of the whole. _La Curée_
and _Son Excellence Eugène Rougon_ show how the more fortunate members
of the clan prospered in the somewhat ignoble _tripotage_ of their time.
Anybody could see the "power" of which the thing was "effect" (to borrow
one half of a celebrated aphorism of Hobbes's); but it must have been a
curious taste to which (borrowing the other) the books were "a cause of
pleasure." _La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret_ rose to a much higher level. To
regard it as merely an attack on clerical celibacy is to take a very
obvious and limited view of it. It is so, of course, but it is much
more. The picture of the struggle between conscience and passion is, for
once, absolutely true and human. There is no mistake in the psychology;
there is no resort to "sculduddery"; there is no exaggeration of any
kind, or, if there is any, it is in a horticultural extravagance--a
piece of fairy Bower-of-Bliss scene-painting, in part of the book, which
is in itself almost if not quite beautiful--a Garden of Eden provided
for a different form of temptation.[472] There is no poetry in _La
Conquête de Plassans_ or in _Le Ventre de Paris_; but the one is a
digression, not yet scavenging, into country life, and the other empties
one of M. Zola's note-books on a theme devoted to the Paris Markets--the
famous "Halles" which Gérard had done so lightly and differently long
before.[473] The key of this latter is pretty well kept in one of the
most famous books of the whole series, _L'Assommoir_, where the
beastlier side of pot-house sotting receives hundreds of pages to do
what William Langland had done better five centuries earlier in a few
score lines. _Pot-Bouille_--ascending a little in the social but not in
the spiritual scale--deals with lower middle-class life, and _Au Bonheur
des Dames_ with the enormous "stores" which, beginning in America, had
already spread through Paris to London. _Une Page d'Amour_ recovers
something of the nobler tone of _L'Abbé Mouret_; and _La Joie de
Vivre_--a title, as will readily be guessed, ironical in
intention--still keeps out of the gutter. _Nana_ may be said, combining
decency with exactitude, to stand in the same relation to the service of
Venus as _L'Assommoir_ does to that of Bacchus, though one apologises to
both divinities for so using their names. It was supposed, like other
books of the kind, to be founded on fact--the history of a certain young
person known as Blanche d'Antigny--and charitable critics have pleaded
for it as a healthy corrective or corrosive to the morbid tone of
sentimentality-books like _La Dame aux Camélias_. I never could find
much amusement in the book, except when Nana, provoked at the tedious
prolongation of a professional engagement, exclaims, "Ça ne finissait
pas!" or "Ça ne voulait pas finir."[474] The strange up-and-down of the
whole scheme reappears in _L'Oeuvre_--chiefly devoted to art, but
partly to literature--where the opening is extraordinarily good, and
there are fine passages later, interspersed with tedious grime of the
commoner kind. _La Terre_ and _Germinal_ are, I suppose, generally
regarded as, even beyond _L'Assommoir_ and _Nana_, the "farthest" of
this griminess. Whether the filth-stored broom of the former really does
blot out George Sand's and other pictures of a modified Arcadia in the
French provinces, nothing but experience, which I cannot boast, could
tell us; and the same may be said of _Germinal_, as to the mining
districts which have since received so awful a purification by fire.
That more and more important person the railway-man takes his turn in
_La Bête Humaine_, and the book supplies perhaps the most striking
instance of the radically inartistic character of the plan of flooding
fiction with technical details. But there is, in the vision of the
driver and his engine as it were going mad together, one of the earliest
and not the least effective of those nightmare-pieces in which Zola,
evidently inspired by Hugo, indulged more and more latterly. Then came
what was intended, apparently, for the light star of this dark group,
_Le Rêve_. Although always strongly anti-clerical, and at the last, as
we shall see, a "Deicide" of the most uncompromising fanaticism, M. Zola
here devoted himself to cathedral services and church ritual generally,
and, as a climax, the administration of extreme unction to his innocent
heroine. But, as too often happens in such cases, the saints were not
grateful and the sinners were bored. _L'Argent_ was at least in
concatenation accordingly, seeing that the great financial swindle and
"crash"[475] it took for subject had had strong clerical support; but
purely financial matters, stock-exchange dealings, and some exceedingly
scabrous "trimmings" occupied the greater part of it. Of the penultimate
novel, _La Débâcle_, a history of the terrible birth-year of the series
itself, few fair critics, I think, could speak other than highly; of the
actual ultimatum, _Le Docteur Pascal_, opinions have varied much. It is
very unequal, but I thought when it came out that it contained some of
its author's very best things, and I am not disposed to change my
opinion.
[Sidenote: "Les Trois Villes."]
Before giving any general comment on this mass of fiction, it will
probably be best to continue the process of brief survey, with the two
remaining groups. It is, I believe, generally admitted that in "Les
Trois Villes" purpose, and the document, got altogether the better of
any true novel-intention. The anti-religiosity which has been already
remarked upon seems not only to have increased, but for the moment to
have simply flooded our author's ship of thought and art, and to have
stopped the working of that part of its engine-room which did the
novel-business. The miracles at, and the pilgrimages to, Lourdes filled
the newspapers at one time, and Zola could think of nothing else; the
transition to Rome was almost inevitable in any such case; and the
return upon Paris quite inevitable in a Frenchman.
[Sidenote: "Les Quatre Évangiles."]
With the final and incomplete series--coinciding in its latter part with
the novelist's passionate interference, at no small inconvenience to
himself, in that inconceivable modern replica of the Hermocopidae
business, the Dreyfus case, and cut short by his unfortunate
death--things are different. I have known people far less "prejudiced,"
as the word goes, against the ideas of these books than I am myself, who
plumply declare that they cannot read _Fécondité_, _Travail_, or (most
especially) _Vérité_: while of course there are others who declare them
to be not "Gospels" at all, but what Mr. Carlyle used to call
"Ba'spels"--not Evangels but Cacodaemonics. I read every word of them
carefully some years since, and I should not mind reading _Fécondité_ or
_Travail_ again, though I have no special desire to do so.[476]
Both are "novels of purpose," with the purpose developing into mania.
_Fécondité_ is only in part--and in that part mainly as regards
France--revolutionary. It is a passionate gospel of "Cultivate _both_
gardens! Produce every ounce of food that can be raised to eat, and
every child that can be got to eat it:" an anti-Malthusian and
Cobbettist Apocalypse, smeared with Zolaesque grime and lighted up with
flashes, or rather flares, of more than Zolaesque brilliancy. The scene
where the hero (so far as there is one) looks back on Paris at night,
and his tottering virtue sees in it one enormous theatre of Lubricity,
has something of Flaubert and something of Hugo.
_Travail_ is revolutionary or nothing, revolutionary "in the most
approved style," as a certain apologist of robbery and murder put it not
long ago as to Bolshevism, amid the "laughter and cheers" of English
aspirants thereto. It takes for scene a quite openly borrowed
representation of the famous forges of Creusot, and attacks Capital, the
_bourgeois_, and everything established, quite in the purest Bolshevist
fashion. Both books, and _Vérité_, display throughout a singular
delusion, aggravating the anti-theism rather than atheism above
mentioned, my own formulation of which, in another book some decade ago,
I may as well, in a note,[477] borrow, instead of merely paraphrasing
it. The milder idiosyncrasy referred to therein will certainly not
adjust itself, whatever it might do to the not ungenial ideals of
_Fécondité_, to those of _Travail_. This ends in a sort of Paradise of
Man, where electricity takes every kind of labour (except that of
cultivating the gardens?) off men's hands, and the Coquecigrues have
come again, and the pigs run about ready roasted, and a millennium or
mill_iard_ennium of Cocaigne begins. Yet there are fine passages in
_Travail_, and the author reflects, powerfully enough, the grime and
glare and scorch of the furnaces; the thirst and lust and struggles of
their slaves; the baser side of the life of their owners and
officials--and of the wives of these. There is nothing in the book quite
equal to the Vision of the City of Lubricity in _Fécondité_, but there
are one or two things not much below it. And the whole is once more
Blake-like, with a degraded or defiled Blakishness. In fact, _Fécondité_
and _Travail_, illustrated in the spirit of the Prophetic Books, are
quite imaginable possessions; and, though a nervous person might not
like to go to sleep in the same room with them, not uncovetable
ones.[478]
The everlasting irony of things has seldom, in literature (though, as we
have seen, it reigns there if anywhere), secured for itself a more
striking opportunity of exemplification than this ending, in a
pseudo-apocalyptic paroxysm, of the _Roman Expérimental_; perhaps one
may add that never has Romanticism, or indeed any school of letters,
scored such a triumphant victory over its decriers. It has been
contended here, and for many years in other places by the present
writer, that Naturalism was itself only a "lesion," a _sarcoma_, a
morbidly allotropic form of Romance. At this point the degeneration
turned into a sort of parody of the attitude of Ezekiel or Hosea; the
business-like observer, in counting-house and workshop, in church and
stock-exchange, in tavern and brothel, in field and town generally,
became himself a _voyant_, beholding all things in nightmare. Yet, in
doing so, he effected a strange semi-reconciliation with some who had
been, if not exactly his enemies, the exceedingly frank critics and
unsparing denouncers of his system. Not much more than half sane, and
almost more than half disgusting, as are _Fécondité_ and _Travail_, they
connect themselves, as wholes, not with _L'Assommoir_ or _Nana_, not
with _La Terre_ or _Germinal_, but with _La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret_,
with _Une Page d'Amour_, and _La Joie de Vivre_, with the best things in
_L'Oeuvre_, _La Débâcle_, and _Le Docteur Pascal_. Students of English
literature will remember how the doctrine of _Furor poeticus_ was once
applied to Ben Jonson by a commentator who, addressing him, pointed out
that he was very mad in his primer works, not so mad in his dotages.
There was always a good deal of _furor prosaicus_ smouldering in Zola,
and it broke out with an opposite result on these occasions, the flames,
alas! being rather devastating, but affording spectacles at least
grandiose. _He_ kept sane and sordid to his loss earlier, and went mad
later--partially at least to his advantage.
[Sidebar: General considerations.]
Passing to those more general considerations which have been
promised--and which seem to be to some readers a Promised Land
indeed, as compared with the wilderness of _compte-rendu_ and
book-appreciation--let us endeavour briefly to answer the question,
"What is the general lesson of Zola's work?" I think we may say,
borrowing that true and final judgment of Wordsworth which doth so
enrage Wordsworthians, that whenever Zola does well he either violates
or neglects his principles, and that the more carefully he carries
these out the worse, as a rule, his work is. The similarity, of course,
is the more quaint because of the dissimilarity of the personages and
their productions; but it has not been insisted on from any mere spirit
of mischief, or desire to make a paradoxical parallel. On the contrary,
this parallel has been made in order to support, at least _obiter_, a
more general dictum still, that principles are much more often fatal
than useful to the artist. The successful miniatures of the short
stories hardly prove more thoroughly than the smoky flaming
Blakish-Turneresque cartoons of the latest "Gospels," though they may do
so more satisfactorily, that Émile Zola had the root of the Art of
Fiction in him. But he chose to subject the bulk of the growths from
this root to something much worse than the _ars topiaria_, to twist and
maim and distort them like Hugo's Comprachicos; to load their boughs,
forbidding them to bear natural fruit, with clumsy crops of dull and
foul detail, like a bedevilled Christmas-tree. One dares say quite
unblushingly, that in no single instance[479] has this abuse of the
encyclopaedia added charm, or value, or even force to Zola's work. A man
with far less ability than he possessed could have given the necessary
touch of specialism when it _was_ necessary, without dumping and
deluging loads and floods of technicalities on the unhappy reader.
Little more need be said about the disastrous _ugliness_ which, with
still rarer exception, pervades the whole work. There are those who like
the ugly, and those--perhaps more numerous--who think they _ought_ to
like it. With neither is it worth while to argue. As for me and my
house, we will serve Beauty, giving that blessed word the widest
possible extension, of course, but never going beyond or against it.
[Sidenote: Especially in regard to character.]
A point where there is no such precedent inaccessibility of common
ground concerns Zola's grasp of character. It seems to me to have been,
if not exactly weak, curiously limited. I do not know that his people
are ever unhuman; in fact, by his time the merely wooden character had
ceased to be "stocked" (as an unpleasant modern phrase has it) by the
novelist. The "divers and disgusting things" that they do are never
incredible. The unspeakable villain-hero of _Vérité_ itself is a not
impossible person. But the defect, again as it seems to me, of all the
personages may best be illustrated by quoting one of those strange
flashes of consummate critical acuteness which diversify the frequent
critical lapses of Thackeray. As early as _The Paris Sketch-book_, in
the article entitled "Caricatures and Lithography," Mr. Titmarsh wrote,
in respect of Fielding's people, "Is not every one of them a real
substantial _have been_ personage now?... We will not take upon
ourselves to say that they do not exist somewhere else, that the actions
attributed to them have not really taken place."
There, put by a rather raw critic of some seven and twenty, who was not
himself to give a perfect creative exemplification of what he wrote for
nearly a decade, is the crux of the matter. Observe, not "_might_ have
been" merely, but "have been now." The phrase might have holes picked in
it by a composition-master or -monger.[480] Thackeray is often liable to
this process. But it states an eternal verity, and so marks an essential
differentia.
This differentia is what the present writer has, in many various forms,
endeavoured to make good in respect of the novels and the novelists with
which and whom he has dealt in this book, and in many books and articles
for the last forty years and more. There are the characters who never
might or could have been--the characters who, by limp and flaccid
drawing; by the lumping together of "incompossibilities"; by slavish
following of popular models; by equally slavish, though rather less
ignoble, carrying out of supposed rules; by this, that, and the other
want or fault, have deprived themselves of the fictitious right to live,
or to have lived, though they occupy the most ghastly of all limbos and
the most crowded shelves of all circulating libraries. At the other end
of the scale are the real men and women of fiction--those whom more or
less (for there are degrees here as everywhere) you _know_, whose life
is as your life, except that you live by the grace of God and they by
that of God's artists. These exist in all great drama, poetry, fiction;
and it never would cause you the least surprise or feeling of
unfamiliarity if they passed from one sphere to the other, and you met
them--to live with, to love or to hate, to dance or to dine with, to
murder (for you would occasionally like to kill them) or to marry.[481]
But between the two--and perhaps the largest crowd of the three, at
least since novel-writing came to be a business--is a vast multitude of
figures occupying a middle position, sometimes with little real vitality
but with a certain stage-competence; sometimes quite reaching the
"might-have-been," but never the full substance of "has been" for us. To
these last, I think, though to a high division of them, do Zola's
characters belong.
Of plot I never care to say very much, because it is not with me a
wedding-garment, though I know an ugly or ill-fitting one when I see it,
and can say, "Well tailored or dress-made!" in the more satisfactory
circumstances. Moreover, Zola hardly enters himself for much competition
here. There is none in the first two Apocalypses; _Vérité_ has what it
has, supplied by the "case" and merely adjusted with fair skill; the
_Trois Villes_ lie quite outside plot; and the huge synoptic scheme of
the Rougon-Macquart series deals little with it in individual books. Of
conversation one might say very much what has been said of character.
The books have the conversation which they require, and sometimes (in
examples generally even more difficult to quote than that of Nana's
given above) a little more. But in Description, the Naturalist leader
rises when he does not fall. It is obviously here that the boredom and
the beastliness of the details offend most. But it is also by means of
description that almost all the books well spoken of before, from the
too earthly Paradise of _L'Abbé Mouret_ to the Inferno of _Travail_,
produce some of their greatest effects.
So let this suffice as banning for what is bad in him, and as blessing
for what is good, in regard to Émile Zola: a great talent--at least a
failure of a genius--in literature; a marvellous worker in literary
craft. As for his life, it can be honestly avowed that the close of it,
in something like martyrdom, had little or nothing to do with the fact
that the writer's estimate of his work changed, from very unfavourable,
to the parti-coloured one given above. Until about 1880 I did not read
his books regularly as they came out, and the first "nervous impression"
of what I did read required time and elaboration to check and correct,
to fill in and to balance it. I have never varied my opinion that his
methods and principles--with everything of that sort--were wrong. But I
have been more and more convinced that his practice sometimes came
astonishingly near being right.
* * * * *
My introduction to the greatest of M. Zola's associates was more
fortunate, for it was impossible to mistake the quality of the new
planet.[482] One day in 1880 the editor of a London paper put into my
hands a copy of a just-issued volume of French verse, which had been
specially sent to him by his Paris correspondent in a fit of moral
indignation. It was entitled _Des Vers_, and the author of it was a
certain Guy de Maupassant, of whom I then knew nothing. The
correspondent had seen in it a good opportunity for a denunciation of
French wickedness; and my editor handed it over to me to see what was to
be done with it. I saw no exceptional wickedness, and a very great deal
of power; indeed, though I was tolerably familiar with French verse and
prose of the day, it seemed to me that I had not seen so much promise in
any new writer since Baudelaire's death;[483] and I informed my editor
that, though I had not the slightest objection to blessing Maupassant, I
certainly would not curse him. He thought the blessing not likely to
please his public, while it would annoy his correspondent, and on my
representation declined to have anything to do with the cursing. So
_nous passasmes oultre_, except that, like Mr. Bludyer, I "impounded"
the book; but, unlike him, did not either sell it, dine off it, or abuse
the author.
Shortly afterwards, I think, the _Soirées de Médan_ reached me, and this
very remarkable person appeared likewise, but in a new character.
Certainly no one can ever have shown to better advantage in company than
M. de Maupassant did on this occasion. _L'Attaque du Moulin_, which
opened the volume, has already been spoken of as part of the best of all
M. Zola's voluminous work. But as for the works of the young men, other
than M. de Maupassant, they had the Naturalist faults in fullest
measure, unredeemed by their master's massive vigour and his desperate
intensity. The contribution of M. Huysmans, in particular (_v. inf._)
has always appeared to me one of those voluntary or involuntary
caricatures, of the writer's own style and school, which are well known
at all times, and have never been more frequent than recently. But
_Boule de Suif_? Among the others that pleasant and pathetic person was
not a _boule_; she was a pyramid, a Colossus, a spire of Cologne
Cathedral. Putting the unconventionality of its subject aside, there is
absolutely no fault to be found with the story. It is as round and
smooth as "Boule de Suif" herself.
Maupassant's work is of very substantial bulk. Of the verse enough for
our purpose has been or will be said, though I should like to repeat
that I put it much higher than do most of Maupassant's admirers. The
volumes of travel-sketches do not appear to me particularly successful,
despite the almost unsurpassed faculty of their writer for sober yet
vivid description. They have the air of being written to order, and they
do not seem, as a rule, to arrive at artistic completeness either
objectively or subjectively. Of the criticism, which concerns us more
nearly, by far the most remarkable piece is the famous Preface to
_Pierre et Jean_ (to be mentioned again below), which contains the
author's literary creed, refined and castigated by years of practice
from the cruder form which he had already promulgated in the Preface to
Flaubert's _Correspondence with George Sand_. It extols the "objective"
as against the psychological method of novel-writing, but directs itself
most strongly against the older romance of plot, and places the
excellence of the novelist in the complete and vivid projection of that
novelist's own particular "illusion" of the world, yet so as to present
events and characters in the most actual manner. But, as promised, we
shall return to it.
[Sidenote: _Bel-Ami._]
To run through the actual "turn-out" in novel[484] and tale as far as is
possible here, _Bel-Ami_ started, in England at least, with the most
favouring gales possible. It was just when the decree had gone forth,
issued by the younger Later Victorians, that all the world should be
made naughty; that the insipid whiteness of their Early and Middle
elders should be washed black and scarlet, and especially "blue"; and
that if possible, by this and other processes, something like real
literature might be made to take the place of the drivellings and
botcheries of Tennyson and Browning; of Dickens and Thackeray; of Ruskin
and Carlyle. To these persons _Bel-Ami_ was a sweet content, a really
"_shady_ boon." The hero never does a decent thing and never says a good
one; but he has good looks and insinuating manners of the kind that
please some women, whence his name, originally given to him by an
innocent little girl, and taken up by her by no means innocent mamma and
other quasi-ladies.[485] He starts as a soldier who has served his time
in Algeria, but has found nothing better to do than a subordinate post
in a railway office. He meets a former comrade who is high up in Paris
journalism, and who very amiably introduces Georges Duroy to that bad
resting-place but promising passageway. Duroy succeeds, not so much
(though he is not a fool) by any brains as by impudence; by a faculty of
making use of others; by one of the farce-duels in which combatants are
put half a mile off each other to fire _once_, etc.; but most of all by
his belamyship (for the word is good old English in a better sense). The
women of the book are what is familiarly called "a caution." They revive
the old Hélisenne de Crenne[486] "sensual appetite" for the handsome
bounder; and though of course jealous of his infidelities, are quite
ready to welcome the truant when he returns. They also get drunk at
restaurant dinners, and then call their lovers--quite correctly, but not
agreeably--"Cochon!" "Sale bête," etc. This of course is what our
_fin-de-siècle_ critics _could_ "recommend to a friend."
But if the reader thinks that this summary is a prelude to anything like
the "slate" that I thought it proper to bestow upon _Les Liaisons
Dangereuses_, or even to such remarks as those made on the Goncourts, he
is quite mistaken. Laclos had, as it seemed to me, a disgusting subject
and no real compensation of treatment. In _Bel-Ami_ the merits of the
treatment are very great. The scenes pass before you; the characters
play their part in the scenes--if not in an engaging manner, in a
completely life-like one. There is none of the _psychologie de
commande_, which I object to in Laclos, but a true adumbration of life.
The music-hall opening; the first dinner-party; the journalist scenes;
the death of Forestier and the proposal of re-marriage over his
corpse;[487] the honeymoon journey to Normandy--a dozen other
things--could not be better done in their way, though this way may not
be the best. It did not fall to me to review _Bel-Ami_ when it came out,
but I do not think I should have made any mistake about it if it had.
There are weak points technically; for instance, the character of
Madeleine Forestier, afterwards Duroy--still later caught in flagrant
delict and divorced--is left rather enigmatic. But the general technique
(with the reservations elsewhere made) is masterly, and two passages--a
Vigny-like[488] descant on Death by the old poet Norbert de Varenne and
the death-scene of Forestier itself--give us Maupassant in that mood of
_macabre_ sentiment--almost Romance--which chequers and purifies his
Naturalism.
But the main objection which I should take to the book is neither
technical nor goody. The late Mr. Locker, in, I think, that most
fascinating "New Omniana" _Patchwork_,[489] tells how, in the
Travellers' Club one day, a haughty member thereof expressed surprise
that he should see Mr. Locker going to the corner-house next door. The
amiable author of _London Lyrics_ was good enough to explain that some
not uninteresting people also used the humbler establishment--bishops,
authors, painters, cabinet-ministers, etc. "Ah!" said the Traverser of
Perilous Ways, "that would be all very well if one _wanted_ to meet that
sort of people. But, you see, one _doesn't_ want to meet them." Now, I
do not want to meet anybody in _Bel-Ami_; in fact, I would much rather
not.
[Sidenote: _Une Vie._]
_Une Vie_ is, in this respect and others, a curious pendant to
_Bel-Ami_. It illustrates another side of Maupassant's pessimism--the
overtly, but for the most part quietly, tragic. It might almost
(borrowing a second title from the _Index_) call itself "Jeanne; ou Les
Malheurs de la Vertu." The heroine is perfectly innocent, though both a
_femmelette_ and a fool. She never does any harm, nor, except through
weakness and folly, deserves that any should be done to her. But she has
an unwise and not blameless though affectionate and generous father,
with a mother who is an invalid, and whom, after her death, the daughter
discovers to have been, in early days, no better than she should be.
Both of them are, if not exactly spendthrifts, "wasters," very mainly
through careless and excessive generosity. She marries the first young
man of decent family, looks, and manners that she comes across; and he
turns out to be stingy, unfaithful in the most offensive way, with her
own maid and others, and unkind. She loses him, by the vengeance of a
husband whom he has wronged, and her second child is born dead in
consequence of this shock. Her first she spoils for some twenty years,
till he goes off with a concubine and nearly ruins his mother. We leave
her consoling herself, in a half-imbecile fashion, with a grandchild.
Her only earthly providence is her _bonne_ Rosalie, the same who had
been her husband's mistress, but a very "good sort" otherwise. The book
is charged with grime of all kinds. It certainly cannot be said of M. de
Maupassant, to alter the pronoun in Mr. Kipling's line, that "[_He_]
never talked obstetrics when the little stranger came," for _Une Vie_
contains two of these delectable scenes; and in other respects we are
treated with the utmost "candour." But the book is again saved by some
wonderful passages--specially those giving Jeanne's first night at the
sea-side _château_ which is to be her own, and her last visit to it a
quarter of a century after, when it has passed to strangers--and
generally by the true tragedy which pervades it. When Maupassant took
Sorrow into cohabitation and collaboration, there was no danger of the
result.
_Mont-Oriol_, though not, save in one respect, the most "arresting" of
Maupassant's books, has rather more varied and at the same time coherent
interest than some others. It is also that one which most directly
illustrates--on the great scale--the general principles of the
Naturalist school. Not, indeed, in specially grimy fashion, though there
is the usual adultery (_not_ behind the scenes) and the (for Maupassant)
not unusual _accouchement_. (His fondness for this most unattractive
episode of human life is astonishing: if he were a more pious person and
a political feminist, one might think that he was trying to make us
modern Adams share the curse of Eve, at least to the extent of the
disgust caused by reading about its details.) The main extra-amatory
theme throughout is the "physiologie" of an inland watering-place, its
extension by the discovery of new springs, the financing of them, the
jealousies of the doctors, the megrims of the patients, etc. All these
are treated quite on the Zolaesque scheme, but with a lightness and
beauty not often reached by the master, though common enough in the
pupil.[490] The description of Christiane Andermatt's first bath, and
the sensations of mild bliss that it gave her, is as true as it is
pretty; and others of scenery have that vividness without
over-elaboration which marks their author's work. Nor are his
ironic-human touches wanting. Almost at its birth he satirises, in his
own quiet Swiftian way, an absurd tendency which has grown mightily
since, and flourishes now: "'Très _moderne_'--entre ses lèvres, était le
comble de l'admiration." As for the love-affair itself, one's feelings
towards it are mixed. A good deal of it shows that unusual grasp of the
proper ways of the game with which Maupassant is fully credited here.
Personally, I should not, after quoting Baudelaire to a lady (so far so
good), inform her that I was a donkey for expecting her to enjoy
anything so subtle. But perhaps Paul Brétigny, though neglectful of the
Seventh Commandment, was an honester man than I am. And it is quite true
that Christiane was _not_ subtle. Her hot lover's[491] cooling partly
dated from the time when she expected him to show palpable interest in
the fact that she was likely to have a child by him. And though her cry
(on the question what name this infant, of course accepted as his own by
the unfortunate Andermatt, should bear) that as for _her_ name, "Celà
promet trop de souffrances de porter le nom du Crucifié," could not be
better as a general sentiment, the particular circumstances in which it
is uttered show a slight want of grace of congruity. Still, the minor
characters are not only more in number, but more interesting than is
always the case; and the book, if you skip the obstetrics, is readable
throughout. Yet it is, to use wine-language, not above "Maupassant
_premier bourgeois_," except in some of the earlier love-scenes.
[Sidenote: _Fort comme la Mort._]
In _Fort comme la Mort_ the author rises far above these two books,
powerful as they are in parts. The basis is indeed the invariable and
unsatisfactory "triangle." But the structure built on it might almost
have been lifted to another, and stands foursquare in nearly all
respects of treatment. The chief technical objection that can be brought
against it is that there is a certain want of air and space; the
important characters are too few, the situations too uniform; so that a
kind of oppression results. Olivier Bertin, one of the most popular of
Parisian painters though no longer young, a great man of society, etc.,
has, for many years, been the lover of the Countess de Guilleroy, and,
of course, the dear friend of her husband. We are introduced to them
just at the time when a sort of disgust of middle age is coming over
him, as well as a certain feeling that the springs of his genius are
running low. He is not tired of the Countess, who is passionately
devoted to him; and, except that they do not live together, their
relations are rather conjugal than anything else. Just at this moment
her daughter Annette comes home from a country life with her
grandmother, and proves to be the very double of what her mother was in
her own youth. Bertin, without ceasing to love the mother, conceives a
frantic passion for the daughter; and the vicissitudes of this take up
the book. At last the explosives of the situation are "fused," as one
may say, by one of the newspaper attacks of youth on age. Annette's
approaching marriage, and this _Figaro_ critique of his own
"old-fashioned" art, put Bertin beside himself. Either hurrying
heedlessly along, or deliberately exposing himself, he is run over by an
omnibus, is mortally hurt, and dies with the Countess sitting beside him
and receiving his last selfishness--a request that she will bring the
girl to see him before he dies.
The story, though perhaps, as has been said, too much concentrated as a
whole, is brilliantly illuminated by sketches of society on the greater
and smaller scale: of Parisian club-life; of picture-shows; of the
diversions of the country, etc.: but its effect, though certainly helped
by, is not derived from, these. As always with Maupassant, it is out of
the bitter that comes the sweet. Hardly anywhere outside of
_Ecclesiastes_, Thackeray,[492] and Flaubert is the irony of life more
consummately handled in one peculiar fashion; while the actual _passion_
of love is nowhere better treated by this author,[493] or perhaps by
any other French novelist of the later century, except Fromentin.
[Sidenote: _Pierre et Jean._]
The line of ascent was continued in _Pierre et Jean_. It is not a long
book--a fact which perhaps has some significance--and no small part of
it is taken up by a Preface on "Le Roman" generally (_v. sup._), which
is the author's most remarkable piece of criticism; one of the most
noteworthy from a man who was not specially a critic; and one of the few
but precious examples of an artist dealing, at once judicially and
masterfully, with his own art.[494] In fact, recognising the truth of
the "poetic moment," he would extend it to the moments of all
literature; and lays it down that the business of the novelist is, first
to realise his own illusion of the world and then to make others realise
it too.
_Pierre et Jean_ itself has no weakness except that _narrowing_ of
interest which has been already noted in Maupassant, and which is rather
a limitation than a positive fault. There is practically one situation
throughout; and though there are several characters, their interest
depends almost wholly on their relations with the central personage.
This is Pierre Roland, a full-fledged physician of thirty, but not yet
successful, and still living with, and on, his parents. His father is a
retired Paris tradesman, who has come to live at Havre to indulge a
mania for sea-fishing; he has a mother who is rather above her husband
in some ways; and a brother, Jean, who, though considerably younger, is
also ready to start in his own profession--that of the law. A "friend of
the family," Mme. Rosémilly--a young, pretty, and rather well-to-do
widow--completes the company, with one or two "supers." Just as the
story opens, a large legacy to Jean by an older friend of the
family--this time a man--is announced, to the surprise of almost
everybody, but at first only causing a little natural jealousy in
Pierre. Charitable remarks of outsiders, however, suggest to him the
truth--that Jean is the fruit of his mother's adultery with the
testator--and this "works like poison in his brain," till--Jean, having
gained another piece of luck in Mme. Rosémilly's hand, and having,
though enlightened by Pierre and by his mother's confession, very
common-sensibly decided that he will not resign the legacy, smirched as
it is--Pierre accepts a surgeon-ship on a Transatlantic steamer, and the
story ends.