OTHER NOVELISTS OF 1870-1900
[Sidenote: The last stage.]
The remaining novelists of the Third Republic, apart from the survivors
of the Second Empire and the Naturalist School, need not occupy us very
long, but must have some space. There would be no difficulty on my part
in writing a volume on them, for during half the time I had to produce
an article on new French books, including novels, every month,[519] and
during no small part of the rest, I did similar work on a smaller and
less regular scale, reading also a great deal for my own purposes. But
acknowledging, as I have elsewhere done, the difficulty of equating
judgment of contemporary and non-contemporary work exactly, I think I
shall hardly be doing the new writers of this time injustice if I say
that no one, except some excluded by our specifications as living, could
put in any pretensions to be rated on level with the greater novelists
from Lesage to Maupassant. There are those, of course, who would protest
in favour of M. Ferdinand Fabre, and yet others would "throw for" M.
André Theuriet, both of whom shall have due honour. I cannot wholly
agree with them. But both of them, as well as, for very opposite
reasons, MM. Ohnet and Rod, may at least require notice of some length.
[Sidenote: Ferdinand Fabre: _L'Abbé Tigrane_.]
_L'Abbé Tigrane_, by Ferdinand Fabre, may be described as one of not the
least remarkable, and as certainly one of the most remarked, novels of
the later nineteenth century. It never, I think, had a very large sale;
for though at the time of its author's death, over thirty years and more
after its appearance, it had reached its sixteenth thousand, that is not
much for a _popular_ French novel. Books of such different appeal as
Zola's and Feuillet's (not to mention for the present a capital example
to be noted below) boasted ten times the number. But it dared an
extremely non-popular subject, and treated that subject with an
audacious disregard of anything like claptrap. There is no love in it
and hardly a woman; there is no--at least no military--fighting; no
adventure of any ordinary sort. It is neither a _berquinade_, nor a
crime-story, nor (except in a very peculiar way) a novel of analysis. It
relies on no preciousness of style, and has not very much description,
though its author was a great hand at this when and where he chose. It
is simply the history of an ambitious, strong-willed, strong-minded, and
violent-tempered priest in an out-of-the-way diocese, who strives for
and attains the episcopate, and after it the archiepiscopate, and is
left aspiring to the Papacy--which, considering the characters of the
actual successors of Pius IX., the Abbé Capdepont[520] cannot have
reached, in the fifty years (or nearly so) since the book was published.
Now, in the first place, it is generations since a clerical novel was
likely to please the French novel-reading public. In this very book
there is an amusing scene where the _abbé_, then a private tutor,
induces his employer, a deputy, to invite clerics of distinction to a
party, whereat the other guests melt away in disgust. And this was a
long time before a certain French minister boasted that his countrymen
"had taken God out of Heaven." Moreover, while there are two obvious
ways of reconciling extremists to the subject, M. Fabre rejected both.
His book is neither a panegyric on clericalism nor a libel on it. His
hero is as far as possible from being a saint, but he is perfectly free
from all the vulgar vices. The rest of the characters--all, with
insignificant exceptions, clerics--are quite human, and in no case--not
even in that of Capdepont's not too scrupulous aide-de-camp the Abbé
Mical--offensive. But at the beginning the bishop, between whom and the
hero there is truceless war, is, though privately an amiable and
charitable gentleman (Capdepont is a Pyrenean peasant by origin), rather
undignified, and even a little tyrannical; while a cardinal towards the
end makes a distinction--between the impossibility of the Church lying
and the positive duty of Churchmen, in certain circumstances, to
lie--which would have been a godsend to Kingsley in that unequal
conflict of his with a colleague of his Eminence's.[521]
Yet critics of almost all shades agreed, I think, in recognising the
merits of M. Fabre's book; and it established him in a special position
among French novelists, which he sustained not unworthily with nearly a
score of novels in a score and a half of years. It is undoubtedly a book
of no small power, which is by no means confined to the petty matters of
chapter-and-seminary wrangling and intrigue. On the contrary, the scene
where, owing to Capdepont's spite, the bishop's coffin is kept, in a
frightful storm, waiting for admission to its inmate's own cathedral, is
a very fine thing indeed--almost, if not quite, in the grand
style--according to some, if not according to Mr. Arnold. The figure of
the arch-priest Clamousse, both in connection with this scene[522] and
others--old, timid, self-indulgent, but not an absolutely bad fellow--is
of first-rate subordinate quality. Whether Capdepont himself has not a
little too much of that synthetic character which I have discussed
elsewhere--whether he is quite a real man, and not something of a
composition of the bad qualities of the peasant type, the intriguing
ecclesiastic type, the ambitious man, the angry man, and so on--must, I
suppose, be left to individual tastes and judgments. If I am not so
enthusiastic about the book as some have been, it is perhaps because it
seems to me rather a study than a story.[523]
[Sidenote: _Norine_, etc.]
This criticism--it is not intended for a reproach--does not extend to
other, perhaps not so powerful, but more _pastimeous_ books, though M.
Fabre seldom entirely excluded the clerical atmosphere of his
youth.[524] A very pleasant volume-full is _Norine_, the title-piece of
which is full at once of Cevenol scenery and Parisian contrast, of love,
and, at least, preparations for feasting; of sketches of that
"Institute" life which comes nearest to our collegiate one; and of
pleasant bird-worship. But M. Fabre should have told us whether the
bishop actually received and appreciated[525] the dinner of Truscas
trout and Faugères wine (alas! this is a blank in my fairly extensive
wine-list), and the miscellaneous _maigre_ cookery of the excellent
Prudence, and the splendid casket of _liqueurs_ borrowed from a brother
_curé_. _Cathinelle_ (an unusual and pretty diminutive of Catherine) is
an admirably told pendant to it; and I venture to think the "idyllic"
quality of both at least equal, if not superior, to the best of George
Sand. _Le R. P. Colomban_ is, according to M. Fabre's habit, a sort of
double-edged affair--a severe but just rebuke of the "popular
preacher," and a good-humoured touch at the rebuker, Monseigneur Onésime
de la Boissière, Evêque de Saint-Pons, who incidentally proposes to
submit _L'Abbé Tigrane_ to the Holy Congregation of the Index. Finally,
the book closes with a delightful panegyric of Alexandre Dumas _père_,
and an anecdote avowedly autobiographic (as, indeed, the whole book
gives itself out to be, though receivable with divers pinches of salt)
of that best-natured of men franking a bevy of impecunious students at a
_première_ of one of his plays.
[Sidenote: _Le Marquis de Pierrerue._]
To read _Le Marquis de Pierrerue_ after these two books--one the piece
with which Fabre established his reputation, and the other a product of
his proved mastery--is interesting to the critic. Whether it would be so
to the general reader may be more doubtful. It is the longest of its
author's novels; in fact its two volumes have separate sub-titles;[526]
but there is no real break, either of time, place, or action, between
them. It is a queer book, quite evidently of the novitiate, and
suggesting now Paul de Kock (the properer but not _quite_ proper Paul),
now Daudet (to whom it is actually dedicated), now Feuillet, now Murger,
now Sandeau, now one of the melodramatic story-tellers. Very possibly
all these had a share in its inspiration. It is redolent of the medical
studies which the author actually pursued, between his abandonment of
preparation for the Church and his settling down as a man of letters.
Its art is palpably imperfect--blocks of _récit_, wedges of not very
novel or acute reflection, a continual reluctance or inability to "get
forrard." Of the two heroes, Claude Abrial, Marquis de Pierrerue--a
fervent Royalist and Catholic, who lavishes his own money, and everybody
else's that he can get hold of, on a sort of private Literary Fund,[527]
allows himself to be swindled by a scoundrelly man of business, immures
his daughter, against her wish, as a Carmelite nun, and dies a
pauper--is a quite possible but not quite "brought off" figure. Théven
Falgouët, the Breton _buveur d'eau_,[528] who is introduced to us at
actual point of starvation, and who dies, self-transfixed on the sharp
spikes of the Carmelite _grille_, is perhaps not _im_possible, and
occasionally pathetic. But the author seems, in his immaturity as a
craftsman, never to have made up his mind whether he is producing an
"alienist" study, or giving us a fairly ordinary _étudiant_ and aspirant
in letters. Of the two heroines, the noble damsel Claire de
Pierrerue--object of Falgouët's love at first sight, a love ill-fated
and more insane than even love beseems--is quite nice in her way; and
Rose Keller--last of grisettes, but a grisette of the Upper House, an
artist grisette, and, as some one calls her, the "soeur de charité de
la galanterie"[529]--is quite nice in hers. But Rose's action--in
burning, to the extent of several hundred thousand francs' worth, notes
and bonds, the wicked gains of one of her lovers (Grippon, the Marquis's
fraudulent intendant), and promptly expiring--may pair off with
Falgouët's repeating on himself the Spanish torture-death of the
_guanches_,[530] as pure melodrama. In fact the whole thing is
undigested, and shows, in a high degree, that initial difficulty in
getting on with the story which has not quite disappeared in _L'Abbé
Tigrane_, but which has been completely conquered[531] in _Norine_ and
_Cathinelle_.
[Sidenote: _Mon Oncle Célestin._]
This mixed quality makes itself felt in others of Fabre's books. Perhaps
there is none of them, except _L'Abbé Tigrane_ itself, which has been a
greater favourite with his partisans than _Mon Oncle Célestin_. Here we
have something of the same easy autobiographic quality, with the same
general scene and the same relations of the narrator and the principal
characters, as in other books; but "Mr. the nephew" (the agreeable and
continuous title by which the faithful parishioners address their
beloved pastor's boy relative) has a different uncle and a different
_gouvernante_, at least in name, from those in _Norine_ and
_Cathinelle_. The Abbé Célestin, threatened with consumption, exchanges
the living in which he has worked for many years, and little good comes
of it. He is persecuted, actually to the death, by his rural dean, a
sort of duplicate of the hero of _L'Abbé Tigrane_; but the circumstances
are not purely ecclesiastical. He has, in his new parish, taken for
goat-girl a certain Marie Galtier, daughter of his beadle, but,
unluckily, also step-daughter of a most abominable step-mother. Marie,
as innocently as possible, "gets into trouble," and dies of it,
accusations being brought against her guiltless and guileless master in
consequence. There are many good passages; the opening is (as nearly
always with M. Fabre) excellent; but both the parts and the whole are,
once more, too long--the mere "flitting" from one parish to another
seems never to be coming to an end. Still, the book should be read; and
it has one very curious class of personages, the "hermits" of the
Cevennes--probably the latest (the date is 1846) of their kind in
literature. The general characteristics of that kind do not seem to have
been exactly saintly;[532] and the best of them, Adon Laborie, after
being "good" throughout, and always intending to be so, brings about the
catastrophe by calmly suppressing, in the notion that he will save the
Abbé trouble, three successive citations from the Diocesan Council,
thereby getting him "interdicted." The shock, when the judgment in
contumacy is announced by the brutal dean, proves fatal.
[Sidenote: _Lucifer._]
In Lucifer M. Fabre is still nearer, though with no repetition, to the
_Tigrane_ motive. The book justifies its title by being the most
ambitious of all the novels, and justifies the ambition itself by
showing a great deal of power--most perhaps again, of all; though
whether that power is used to the satisfaction of the reader must
depend, even more than is usual, on individual tastes. Bernard Jourfier,
at the beginning of the book and of the Second Empire, is a young
_vicaire_, known to be of great talents and, in especial, of unusual
preaching faculty, but of a violent temper, ill at ease about his own
vocation, and suspected--at least by Ultramontanes--of very doubtful
orthodoxy and not at all doubtful Gallicanism. He is, moreover, the
grandson of a _conventionnel_ who voted for the King's death, and the
son of a deputy of extreme Liberal views. So the Jesuits, after trying
to catch him for themselves, make a dead set at him, and secure his
appointment to out-of-the-way country parishes only, and even in these
his constant removal, so that he may acquire as little influence as
possible anywhere. At last, in a very striking interview with his
bishop, he succeeds in clearing his character, and enters on the way of
promotion. The cabals continue; but later, on the overthrow of
Bonapartism, he is actually raised to the episcopate. His violent
temper, however, is always giving handles to the enemy, and he finally
determines that life is intolerable. After trying to starve himself, he
makes use of the picturesque but dangerous situation of his palace, and
is crushed by falling, in apparent accident, through a breach in the
garden wall with a precipice beneath--"falling like Lucifer," as his
lifelong enemy and rival whispers to a confederate at the end. For the
appellation has been an Ultramontane nickname for him long before, and
has been not altogether undeserved by his pride at least. It has been
said that the book is powerful; but it is almost unrelievedly gloomy
throughout, and suffers from the extremely narrow range of its interest.
[Sidenote: _Sylviane_ and _Taillevent_.]
Those who are not tired of the Cevenol atmosphere--which, it must be
admitted, is quite a refreshing one--will find a lighter example in
_Sylviane_, once more recounted by "Mr. the nephew," but with his
movable uncle and _gouvernante_ shifted back to "M. Fulcran" and
"Prudence"; and in _Taillevent_, a much longer book, which is
independent of uncle and nephew both. _Sylviane_ has agreeable things in
it, but perhaps might have been better if its form had been different.
It is a long _récit_ told by a gamekeeper, with frequent
interruptions[533] and a very thin "frame." _Taillevent_ ends with two
murders, the second a quite excusable lynch-punishment for the first,
and the marriage of the avenger just afterwards to the daughter of the
original victim, a combination of "the murders _and_ the marriages"
deserving Osric's encomia on sword furniture. So vigorous a conclusion
had need have a well-stuffed course of narrative to lead up to it, and
this is not wanting. There is a wicked--a _very_ wicked--Spaniard for
the lynched-murderer part; an exceedingly good dog-, bear-, and
man-fight in the middle; an extensive and well-utilised wolf-trap in the
woods; bankruptcies; floods; all sorts of things; with a course of
"idyllic" true love running through the whole. There _is_ a _curé_--a
rather foolish one; but the ecclesiastical interest in itself is almost
absent from the book. The weakest part of it lies in the characters of
what may be called the hero and heroine of the beginning and
middle--Frédéric Servières and Madeleine his wife. That the former
should fall into the most frantic love before marriage, and almost
neglect his wife as soon as she has borne him a child, may be said to be
common enough in books, and, unluckily, by no means uncommon in life.
But there may be more question about the repetition of the inconsistency
in other parts of the character--extreme business aptitude and fatal
neglect of business, extreme energy and fatal depression over quite
small things, etc. The general combination is not impossible; it is not
even improbable; but it is not quite "made so." And something is the
same with Madeleine, who is, moreover, left "in the air" in so curious a
fashion that one begins to wonder whether the Mrs. Martha Buskbody
attitude, so often jibed at, does not possess some excuse.
[Sidenote: _Toussaint Galabru._]
A pleasant contrast in this respect, though the end here is tragic in a
way, may be found in _Toussaint Galabru_, the last, perhaps, of M.
Fabre's books for which we can find special room here, though no doubt
some favourites of particular readers may have been omitted. The novel
is divided into two pretty equal halves, with an interval first of ten
years between them and, almost immediately, of sixteen more. The first
half is occupied by an adventure of "Mr. the nephew's," though he is not
here "Mr. the nephew," but "Mr. the son," living with his father and
mother at Bédarieux, M. Fabre's actual birthplace. He plays truant from
Church on Advent Sunday to join a shooting expedition with his
school-fellow Baptistin and that school-fellow's not too pious father,
who is actually a church _suisse_, but has received an exeat from the
_curé_ to catch a famous hare for that _curé_ to eat. The vicissitudes
of the chase are numerous, and the whole is narrated with extraordinary
skill as from the boy's point of view, his entire innocence, when he is
brought into contact with very shady incidents, being--and this is a
most difficult thing to do--hit off marvellously well. It is only
towards the end of this part (he has been heard of before) that
Toussaint Galabru, sorcerer and Lothario, makes his appearance--as
clever as he is handsome, and as vicious as he is clever. When he does
appear he has his way--with the game shot by others, and with a certain
_métayer's_ wife--after the same hand-gallop fashion in which the
personage in Blake's lines enjoyed both the peach and the lady.
The earlier and shorter, but not short, interval, mentioned above,
passes to 1852, and does little more than bring the now "Parisian"
narrator into fresh contact with his old school-fellow Baptistin, now a
full-grown priest, but, though very pious, in some difficulties from his
persistent love of sport. Sixteen years later, again, in 1868,
reappears, "coming to his death,"[534] Galabru himself. The part is
chiefly occupied by a _récit_ of intervening history (including a sadly
unsuccessful attempt, both at spiritual and physical combat, by
Baptistin) and by a much-interrupted journey in snow.[535] But it gives
occasion for another agreeable "idyll" between Vincinet, Galabru's son,
and the Abbé Baptistin's god-child Lalie; and it ends with a striking
procession to carry, hardly in time, the _viaticum_ to the dying wizard,
whereby, if not his own weal in the other world, that of the lovers in
this is happily brought about.
Not very many generalities are required on M. Ferdinand Fabre. How
completely his way lies out of most of the ruts in which the wain of the
French novel usually travels must have been shown; and it may be hoped
that enough has been said also to show that there are plenty of minor
originalities about him. No novelist[536] in any language known to me
(unless you call Richard Jefferies a novelist) has such an extraordinary
command of "the country"--bird-nature and rock scenery being his
favourite but by no means his only subjects. For "Scenes of Clerical
Life" he stands admittedly alone in France, and has naturally been dealt
with most often from this point of view. Of that intense provincialism,
in the good sense, which is characteristic of French literature, there
have been few better representatives. Wordsworth himself is scarcely
more the poet of our Lake and Hill country than Fabre is the novelist of
the Cevennes. Peasant life and child life of the country (he meddles
little, and not so happily, with towns of any size) find in him
admirably "vatical" properties and combinations; and if he does not run
any risk of Feste's rebuke by talking much of "ladies," he knows as much
about women as a man well may. His comedy is never coarse or trivial,
and the tragedy never goes off through the touch-hole. Of one
situation--very easy to spoil by rendering it mawkish--the early but not
"calf"-love of rustic man and maid, beginning in childhood, he was
curiously master. George Sand herself[537] has nothing to beat (if she
has anything to equal) the pairs of Taillevent and Riquette (in the
novel named from the lover), and of Vincinet and Lalie (in _Toussaint
Galabru_). As for his pictures of clerical cabals and clerical
weaknesses, they may be too much of a good thing for some tastes; but
that they are a good thing, both as an exercise in craftsmanship and as
an alternative to the common run of French novel subjects, can hardly be
denied. In this respect, and not in this respect only, M. Fabre has his
own place, and that no low one.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: André Theuriet.]
In coming to M. André Theuriet I felt a mixture of curiosity with a
slight uneasiness. For I had read not a few of his books[538] carefully
and critically at their first appearance, and in such cases--when novels
are not of the _very_ first order (which, good as these are, I think few
really critical readers would allot them) nor possessed of those
"oddments" of appeal which sometimes make more or less inferior books
readable and readable again--fresh acquaintance, after a long time, is
dangerous. It has been said here (possibly more than once) that, when a
book possesses this peculiar readableness, a second reading is
positively beneficial to it, because you neglect the "knots in the reed"
and slip along it easily. This is not quite the case with others: and,
unless great critical care is taken, a new acquaintance, itself thirty
years old, has, I fear, a better chance than an old one renewed after
that time. However, the knight of Criticism, as of other ladies,[539]
must dare any adventure, and ought to be able to bring the proper arms
and methods to the task. For the purposes of renewal I chose
_Sauvageonne_, _Le Fils Maugars_, and _Raymonde_. With the first, though
I did not remember much more than its central situation and its
catastrophe, with one striking incident, I do remember being originally
pleased; the second has, I believe, at least sometimes, been thought
Theuriet's masterpiece; and the third (which, by the way, is a
"philippine" containing another story besides the title-one) is an early
book which I had not previously read.
[Sidenote: _Sauvageonne._]
The argument of _Sauvageonne_ can be put very shortly. A young man of
four-and-twenty, of no fortune, marries a rich widow ten years older
than himself, and, as it happens, possessed of an adopted daughter of
seventeen. He--who is by no means an intentional scoundrel, but a
commonplace and selfish person, and a gentleman neither by birth nor by
nature--soon wearies of his somewhat effusive and exacting wife; the
girl takes a violent fancy to him; accident hurries on the natural if
not laudable consequences; the wife covers the shame by succeeding in
passing off their result as her own child, but the strain is too much
for her, and she goes mad, but does not die.
This tragic theme (really a tragic [Greek: hamartia], for there is much
good in Sauvageonne, as she is called, from her tomboy habits, and, with
happier chance and a nobler lover, all might have been well with her) is
handled with no little power, and with abundant display of skill in two
different departments which M. Theuriet made particularly his
own--sketches of the society of small country towns, and elaborate
description of the country itself, especially wood-scenery. In regard to
the former, it must be admitted that, though there is plenty of scandal
and not a little ill-nature in English society of the same kind, the
latter nuisance seems, according to French novelists, to be more
_active_ with their country folk than it is with ours[540]--a thing, in
a way, convenient for fiction. Of the descriptive part the only
unfavourable criticism (and that a rather ungracious one) that could be
made is that it is almost too elaborate. Of two fateful scenes of
_Sauvageonne_, that where Francis Pommeret, the unheroic hero, comes
across Denise (the girl's proper name) sitting in a crab-tree in the
forest and pelting small boys with the fruit, is almost startlingly
vivid. You see every detail of it as if it were on the Academy walls. In
fact, it is almost more like a picture than like reality, which is more
shaded off and less sharp in outline and vivid in colour. As for the
character-drawing, if it does not attain to that consummateness which
has been elsewhere described and desiderated--the production of people
that you _know_--it attains the second rank; the three prominent
characters (the rest are merely sets-off) are all people that you
_might_ know. Denise herself is very near the first rank, and Francis
Pommeret--not, as has been said, by any means a scoundrel, for he only
succumbs to strong and continued temptation, but an ordinary selfish
creature--is nearer than those who wish to think nobly of human nature
may like, to complete reality. One is less certain about the unhappy
Adrienne Lebreton or Pommeret, but discussion of her would be rather "an
intricate impeach." And one may have a question about the end. We are
told that Francis and Denise keep together (the luckless wife living on
in spite of her madness) because of the child, though they absolutely
hate each other. Would it not be more natural that, if they do not part,
they should vary the hatred with spasms of passion and repulsion?
[Sidenote: _Le Fils Maugars._]
_Le Fils Maugars_ is not only a longer book, but its space is less
exclusively filled with a single situation, and the necessary prelude to
it. In fact, the whole thing is expanded, varied, and peopled. Auberive,
near Langres, the place of _Sauvageonne_, is hardly more than a large
village; Saint-Clémentin, on the Charente, though not a large town, is
the seat of a judicial Presidency, of a _sous-préfecture_, etc. "Le
_père_ Maugars" is a banker who, from having been a working stone-mason,
has enriched himself by sharp practice in money-lending. His son is a
lawyer by the profession chosen for him, and a painter by preference.
The heroine, Thérèse Desroches, is the daughter of a Republican doctor,
whose wife has been unfaithful, and who suspects Thérèse of not being
his own child. The scene shifts from Saint-Clémentin itself to the
country districts where Poitou and Touraine meet, as well as to Paris.
The time begins on the eve of the Coup d'État, and allows itself a gap
of five years between the first and second halves of the book. Besides
the love-scenes and the country descriptions and the country feasts
there is a little general society; much business; some politics,
including the attempted and at last accomplished arrest of the doctor
for treason to the new _régime_; a well-told account of a contest for
the Prix de Rome; a trial of the elder Maugars for conspiracy (with a
subordinate usurer) to defraud, etc. The whole begins with more than a
little aversion on everybody's part for the innocent Étienne Maugars,
who, having been away from home for years, knows neither the fact nor
the cause of his father's unpopularity; and it ends with condign
poetical justice, on the extortioner in the form of punishment, and for
the lovers in another way. It is thus, though a less poignant book than
_Sauvageonne_, a fuller and wider one, and it displays, better than that
book, the competence and adequacy which mark the author, though there
may be something else to be said about it (or rather about its
illustration of his general characteristics) presently.
[Sidenote: _Le Don Juan de Vireloup_ and _Raymonde_.]
_Le Don Juan de Vireloup_, a story of about a hundred pages long, which
acts as makeweight to _Raymonde_, itself only about twice the length, is
a capital example of Theuriet at nearly his best--a pleasant mixture of
_berquinade_ and _gaillardise_ (there are at least two passages at
either of which Mrs. Grundy would require _sal volatile_, and would then
put the book in the fire). The reformation and salvation of Jean de
Santenoge--a poor (indeed penniless) gentleman, who lives in a little
old manor, or rather farm-house, buried in the woods, and whose sole
occupations are poaching and making love to peasant girls--are most
agreeably conducted by the agency of the daughter of a curmudgeonly
forest-inspector (who naturally regards Santenoge with special
abhorrence). She is helped by her grand-uncle, a doctor of the familiar
stamp, who has known Diderot's child, Madame de Vandeul (the scene, as
in so many of the author's books, is close to Langres), and worships
Denis himself. As for _Raymonde_, its heroine comes closer to
"Sauvageonne," though she is less of a savagess: and the worst that can
be said against her lucky winner is that he is a little of a prig. But,
to borrow, and very slightly alter, one of Sir Walter's pieces of divine
charity, "The man is mortal, and a scientific person." Perhaps fate and
M. Theuriet are a little too harsh to another (but not this time
beggarly) _gentillâtre_, Osmin de Préfontaine, to whom, one regrets to
say, Raymonde positively, or almost positively, engages herself, before
she in the same way virtually accepts the physiological Antoine Verdier.
And the _dénouement_, where everything comes right, is a little
stagy.[541] But the whole is thoroughly readable, competently
charactered, and illustrated by some of the best of the author's forest
descriptions.
[Sidenote: General characteristics.]
One has thus been able to give an account, very favourable in the main,
of these three or four stories--selected with no hidden design, and in
two cases previously unknown to the critic, who has, in addition, a fair
remembrance of several others. But it will be observed that there is in
them, with all their merits, some evidence of that "rut" or "mould"
character which has been specified as absent in greater novelists, but
as often found in company with a certain accomplishment, in _ordonnance_
and readable quality, that marks the later novel. The very great
prominence of description is common to all of them, and in three out of
the four the scenes are from the same district--almost from the same
patch--of country. The heroine is the most prominent character and, as
she should be, the most attractive figure of all; but she is made up and
presented, if not exactly _à la douzaine_, yet with a strong, almost a
sisterly, family likeness. Far be it from the present writer to regret
or desiderate the adorably candid creature who so soon smirches her
whiteness. Even the luckless Sauvageonne--worst mannered, worst
moralled, and worst fated of all--is a jewel and a cynosure compared
with that other class of girl; while Raymonde (whose maltreatment of M.
de Préfontaine is to a great extent excused by her mother's bullying,
her real father's weakness, and her own impulsive temperament); the
Thérèse of _Le Fils Maugars_; and the Marianne of _Le Don Juan de
Vireloup_ are, in ascending degrees, girls of quite a right kind. Only,
it is just a little too much the _same_ kind. And without unfairness,
without even ingratitude, one may say that this sameness does somewhat
characterise M. Theuriet.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Georges Ohnet.]
There were some who did not share the general admiration, a good many
years ago, of the dictum of a popular French critic on a more popular
French novelist to the effect that, though it was his habit, in the
articles he was writing, to confine himself to literature, he would
break this good custom for once and discuss M. Ohnet. In the first
place, this appeared to the dissidents a very easy kind of witticism;
they knew many men, many women, and many schoolboys who could have
uttered it. In the second, they were probably of the opinion (changing
the matter, instead of, like that wicked Prince Seithenyn, merely
reversing the order, of the old Welsh saying) that "The goodness of wit
sleeps in the badness of manners." But if the question had been then, or
were now, asked seriously whether the literary value of _Le Maître de
Forges_ and its companion novels was high, few of them would, as
probably, have been or be able to answer in the affirmative. For my own
part, I always used to think, when M. Ohnet's novels came out, that they
were remarkably like those of the eminent Mrs. Henry Wood[542] in
English--of course _mutatis mutandis_. They displayed very fair aptitude
for the _business_ of novel manufacture, and the results were such as,
in almost every way, to satisfy the average subscriber to a circulating
library, supposing him or her to possess respectable tastes (scarcely
"taste"), moderate intelligence, and a desire to pass the time
comfortably enough in reading them once, without the slightest
expectation of being, or wish to be, able to read them again. They might
even sometimes excite readers who possessed an adjustable "tally" of
excitableness. But beyond this, as it seemed to their critic of those
days, they never went.
Re-reading, therefore--though perhaps the consequence may not seem
downright to laymen--promised some critical interest. I first selected
for the purpose, to give the author as good a chance as possible, _Serge
Panine_, which the Academy crowned, and which went near its hundred and
fifty editions when it was still a four-year-old; and _Le Maître de
Forges_ itself, the most popular of all, adding _Le Docteur Rameau_ and
_La Grande Marnière_, which my memory gave me as having seemed to be of
such pillars as the particular structure could boast.
[Sidenote: _Serge Panine._]
I suppose the Forty crowned _Serge Panine_ because it was a virtuous
book, and an attack on the financial trickeries which, about the time
and a little later, enriched the French language with the word "krach."
Otherwise, though no one could call it bad, its royalty could hardly
seem much other than that which qualifies for the kingdom of the blind.
The situations are good, and they are worked up into a Fifth Act, as we
may call it (it occupies almost exactly a fifth of the book, which was,
of course, dramatised), _melo_dramatic to the _n_th, ending in a
discovery of flagrant delict, or something very like it, and in the
shooting of a son-in-law by his mother-in-law to save the downfall of
his reputation. But the characters do not play up to their parts, or
each other, very well, with the possible or passable exception of the
mother-in-law, and of one very minor personage, the secretary Maréchal,
whom M. Ohnet, perhaps distrustful of his power to make him more, left
minor. The hero is a Polish prince, with everything that a stage Polish
prince requires about him--handsome, superficially amiable, what the
precise call "caressing" and the vulgar "carneying" in manner, but
extravagant, quite non-moral, and not possessed of much common sense.
His princess Micheline is a silly jilt before marriage and a sillier
"door-mat" (as some women call others) of a wife. Her rival, and in a
fashion foster-sister (she has been adopted before Micheline's birth),
does things which many people might do, but does not do them in a
concatenation accordingly. The jilted serious young man Pierre accepts a
perfectly impossible position in reference to his former _fiancée_ and
his supplanter, and gives more proofs of its impossibility by his
conduct and speech than was at all necessary. The conversation is very
flat, and the descriptions are chiefly confined to long, gaudy
inventories of rich parvenus' houses, which read like auctioneers'
catalogues.
But the worst part of the book, and probably that which at its
appearance exasperated the critics, though it did not disturb the
_abonné_--or, more surprisingly, the Immortals--is the flatness of style
which has been already noted in the conversation, but which overflows
insupportably into the narrative. M. Ohnet speaks somewhere, justly
enough, of "le style à la fois prétentieux et plat, familier aux
reporters." But was he trying--there is no sign of it--to parody these
unfortunate persons when he himself described dinner-rolls as "Ces
boules dorées qui sollicitent l'appétit le plus rebelle, et accommodées
dans une serviette damassée artistement pliée, parent si élégamment un
couvert"? Or when he tells us that at a ball "Les femmes, leurs
splendides toilettes gracieusement étalées sur les meubles bas et
moëlleux, causaient chiffons sous l'éventail, ou écoutaient les
cantilènes d'un chanteur exotique pendant que les jeunes gens leur
chuchotaient des galanteries à l'oreille." This last is really worthy of
the feeblest member of our "_plated_ silver fork school" between the
time of Scott and Miss Austen and that of Dickens and Thackeray.
[Sidenote: _Le Maître de Forges._]
In the year 1902, _Le Maître de Forges_, which was then just twenty
years old, had reached its three hundred and sixty-seventh edition. Six
years later Fromentin's _Dominique_, which was then forty-five years
old, had reached its twenty-seventh. The accident of the two books lying
side by side on my table has enabled me to make this comparison, the
moral of which will be sufficiently drawn by a reference to what has
been said of _Dominique_ above,[543] and by the few remarks on M.
Ohnet's most popular book which follow.
One old receipt for popularity, "Put your characters up several steps in
society," M. Ohnet has faithfully obeyed. We begin with a marquis
unintentionally poaching on the ironmaster's ground, and (rather oddly)
accepting game which he has _not_ shot thereon. We end with the
marquis's sister putting her dainty fingers before the mouth of a duke's
exploding pistol--to the not surprising damage of those digits, but with
the result of happiness ever afterwards for the respectable characters
of the book. There is a great deal of gambling, though, unfortunately
told in a rather uninteresting manner of _récit_, which is a pity, for
gambling can be made excellent in fiction.[544] There are several of M.
Ohnet's favourite inventories, and a baroness--not a bad baroness--who
has frequented sales, and knows all about _bric-à-brac_. Also there are
several exciting situations, even before we come to the application of a
lady's fingers as tompions. M. Ohnet is, it has been said, rather good
at situations. But situations, to speak frankly, are rather things for
the stage than for the story, except very rarely, and of a very
striking--which does not mean melodramatic--kind. And it is very
important, off the stage, that they should be led up to, and acted in
by, vigorously drawn and well filled in characters.
To do M. Ohnet justice, he has attempted to meet this requirement in one
instance at least, the one instance by which the book has to stand or
fall. Some of the minor personages (like Maréchal in _Serge Panine_) are
fair enough; and the little baroness who, arriving at a country-house in
a whirl of travel and baggage, cries, "Où est mon mari? Est-ce que j'ai
_déjà_ égaré mon mari?" puts one, for the moment, in quite a good
temper. The ironmaster's sister, too, is not a bad sort of girl. He
himself is too much of the virtuous, loyal, amiable, but not weak man of
the people; the marquis is rather null, and the duke, who jilts his
cousin Claire de Beaulieu, gambles, marries a rich and detestable
daughter of a chocolate-man, and finally fires through Claire's fingers,
is very much, to use our old phrase, _à la douzaine_. But Claire might
save the book, and probably does so for those who like it. To me she
seems quite wrongly put together. The novel has been so very widely
read, in the original and in translations, that it is perhaps
unnecessary to waste space on a full analysis of its central scene--a
thing not to be done very shortly. It may be sufficient to say that
Claire, treacherously and spitefully informed, by her successful rival,
of the fact that she has been jilted, and shortly afterwards confronted
with the jilter himself, recovers, as it seems to her, to the company,
and I suppose to the author, the whip-hand by summoning the ironmaster
(who is hanging about "promiscuous," and is already known to be attached
to her, though she has given him no direct encouragement) and bestowing
her hand upon him, insisting, too, upon being married at once, before
the other pair. The act is supposed to be that of an exceptionally calm,
haughty, and aristocratic damsel: and the acceptance of it is made by a
man certainly deep in love, but independent, sharp-sighted, and
strong-willed. To be sure, he could not very well refuse; but this very
fact should have weighed additionally, with a girl of Claire's supposed
temperament, in deciding her not to make a special Leap Year for the
occasion. To hand yourself over to Dick because Tom has declined to have
anything to do with you is no doubt not a very unusual proceeding: but
it is not usually done quite so much _coram populo_, or with such
acknowledgment of its being done to spite Tom and Tom's preferred
one.[545]
[Sidenote: _Le Docteur Rameau._]
Two more of "Les Batailles de la Vie" (as, for some not too obvious[546]
reason, it pleased M. Ohnet to _super_-title his novels) may perhaps
suffice to give a basis for a more general judgment of his position. _Le
Docteur Rameau_ is, at least towards its close, one of the most
ambitious, if not _the_ most ambitious of all its author's books. The
hero is one of those atheistic and republican physicians who are apt
rather to _embêter_ us by their frequency in French novels. He is thrown
into the also familiar situation of ascertaining, after his wife's
death, that she has been false, and that his daughter, of whom he is
very fond, is probably or certainly not his own. At the end, however,
things come right as usual. Rameau is converted from hating his
daughter, which is well, and from being an atheist, which is better.
But, unluckily, M. Ohnet devotes several pages, in his own peculiar
style, to a rhetorical exhibition of the logic of these conclusions. It
seems to come to this. There is no God and no soul, because freewill is
sufficient to account for everything. But M. le Docteur Rameau has
willed, in the free-willingest manner, to hate his daughter, and finds
he cannot. Therefore there is a God and a soul. A most satisfactory
conclusion, but a most singular major premiss. Why should there be no
God and no soul because there is (if there is) freewill?[547] But all is
well that ends well: and how can you end better than by being heard to
ejaculate, "Mon Dieu!" (quite seriously and piously, and not in the
ordinary trivial way) by a scientific friend, at the church of
Sainte-Clotilde, during your daughter's wedding?
[Sidenote: _La Grande Marnière._]
_La Grande Marnière_ does not aspire to such heights, and is perhaps one
of the best "machined" of M. Ohnet's books. The main plot is not very
novel--his plots seldom are--and, in parts as well as plots, any one who
cared for rag-picking and hole-picking might find a good deal of
indebtedness. It is the old jealousy of a clever and unscrupulous
self-made man towards an improvident _seigneur_ and his somewhat
robustious son. The seigniorial improvidence, however, is not of the
usual kind, for M. le Marquis de Clairefont wastes his substance, and
gets into his enemy's debt and power, by costly experiments on
agricultural and other machinery, partly due to the fact that he
possesses on his estate a huge marl-pit and hill which want developing.
There is the again usual cross-action of an at first hopeless affection
on the part of the _roturier's_ son, Pascal Carvajan, a rising lawyer,
for Antoinette de Clairefont. But M. Ohnet--still fertile in
situations--adds a useful sort of conspiracy among Carvajan's tools of
various stations against the house of Clairefont; a conspiracy which
actually culminates in a murder-charge against Robert de Clairefont, the
victim being the pretty daughter of a local poacher, one of the gang,
with whom the Viscount has notoriously and indeed quite openly flirted.
Now comes Pascal's opportunity: he defends Robert, and not merely
obtains acquittal, but manages to discover that the crime was actually
committed by the village idiot, who betrays himself by remorse and
sleep-walking. There is a patient, jilted lover, M. de Croix-Mesnil (it
may just be noted that since French novel-heroines were allowed any
choice at all in marriage, they have developed a faculty of altering
that choice which might be urged by praisers of times past against the
enfranchisement); a comic aunt; and several other promoters of business.
It is no wonder that, given a public for the kind of book, this
particular example of it should have been popular. It had reached its
sixtieth edition before it had been published a twelvemonth.
[Sidenote: Reflections.]
Sixty editions of one book in one year; three hundred and sixty-seven of
another in twenty; a hundred and forty-two of _Serge Panine_ in five;
sixty-nine of _Le Docteur Rameau_ in certainly at the outside not more;
these are facts which, whatever may be insinuated about the number of an
"edition," cannot be simply put aside. Popularity, as the wiser critics
have always maintained, is no test of excellence; but as they have also
maintained when they were wise, it is a "fact in the case," and it will
not do merely to sneer at it. I should say that the popularity of M.
Ohnet, like other popularities in England as well as in France, is quite
explicable. Novel-writing, once again, had become a business, and he set
himself to carry that business out with a thorough comprehension of what
was wanted. His books, it is to be observed, are generally quite modern,
dealing either with his own day or a few years before it; and modernity
has, for a long time, been almost a _sine qua non_ of what is to please
the public. They are, it has been said, full of situations, and the
situation is what pleases the public most in everything. They came just
when the first popularity of Naturalism was exhausting itself,[548] and
they are not grimy; but, on the other hand, they do not aim at an
excessive propriety. Their characters are not of the best, or even of
the second-best class, as so often defined, but they are sufficient to
work out the situations without startling inadequacy. The public never
really cares, though part of it is sometimes taught to pretend to care,
for style, and the same may be said of the finer kind of description.
The conversation is not brilliant, but, like the character, it serves
its turn. I once knew an excellent gentleman, of old lineage and fair
fortune, who used to say that for his part he could not tell mutton from
venison or Marsala from Madeira, and he thanked God for it. The
novel-reading public,--that at least which reads novels by the three
hundred and fifty thousand,--is very much of the same taste, and I am
sure I hope it is equally pious.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Édouard Rod.]
I have quite a lively remembrance of the advent of M. Édouard Rod, of
the crowning of _Le Sens de la Vie_, and so forth. That advent formed
part of the just mentioned counter-attack on Naturalism, in which, as
usual, some of the Naturalist methods and weapons themselves were used;
but it had a distinct character of its own. Unless I mistake, it was not
at first very warmly welcomed by "mortal" French criticism. There may
have been something in this of that curious grudge[549] against
Swiss-French, on the part of purely French-French, men of letters which
never seems to have entirely ceased. But there was something more than
this, though this something more was in a way the reason, some might say
the justification, of the grudge. M. Rod was exceedingly serious; the
title of his laureated book is of itself almost sufficient to show it;
and though the exclusive notion of "the gay and frivolous Frenchman"
always was something of a vulgar error, and has been increasingly so
since the Revolution, Swiss seriousness, with its strong Germanic
leaven, is not French seriousness at all. But he became, if not exactly
a popular novelist to the tune of hundreds or even scores of editions, a
prolific and fairly accepted one. I think, though he died in middle age
and produced other things besides novels, he wrote some twenty or thirty
stories, and his production rather increased than slackened as he went
on. With the later ones I am not so well acquainted as with the earlier,
but there is a pervading character about these earlier ones which is not
likely to have changed much, and they alone belong strictly to our
subject.
[Sidenote: _La Vie Privée de Michel Teissier._]
Next to _Le Sens de la Vie_ and perhaps in a way, as far as popularity
goes, above it, may be ranked, I suppose, _La Vie Privée de Michel
Teissier_, with its sequel, _La Seconde Vie de M. T._ These books
certainly made a bold and wide separation of aim and subject from the
subject and the aim of most French novels in these recent years. Here
you have, instead of a man who attempts somebody else's wife, one who
wishes to get rid--on at least legally respectable terms--of his own,
and to marry a girl for whom he has, and who has for him, a passion
which is, until legal matrimony enfranchises it, able to restrain itself
from any practical satisfaction of the as yet illicit kind. He avails
himself of the then pretty new facilities for divorce (the famous "Loi
Naquet," which used to "deave" all of us who minded such things many
years ago), and the situation is (at least intentionally) made more
piquant by the fact that Teissier, who is a prominent statesman and
gives up not merely his wife but his political position for this new
love of his, starts as an actual supporter of the repeal of the divorce
laws. To an English reader, of course, the precise problem would not
have the same charm of novelty, except in his capacity as a reader of
French novels. But, putting that aside, the position is obviously
capable of being treated with very considerable appeal. The struggles of
the husband, who _has_ loved his wife--M. Rod had not the audacity or
the strength to make him love her still--between his duties and his
desires; the indignant suffering of the wife; and most of all, the
position of the girl who, by ill-fortune or the fault of others, finds
herself expending, on an at first illicit and always ill-famed love,
what she might have devoted to an honourable one, certainly has great
capabilities. But I did not think when I read it first, and I do not
think now when I have read it again, that these various opportunities
are fully taken. It is not that M. Rod has no idea of passion. He is
constantly handling it and, as will be seen presently, not without
success occasionally. But he was too much what he calls his eidolon in
one book, "Monsieur le psychologue," and the Psyche he deals with is too
often a skinny and spectacled creature--not the love of Cupid and the
mother of Voluptas.[550]
[Sidenote: _La Sacrifiée._]
If he has ever made his story hot enough to make this pale cast glow, it
is in _La Sacrifiée_. This is all the more remarkable in that the
beginning of the book itself is far from promising. There is a rather
unnecessary usher-chapter--a thing which M. Rod was fond of, and which,
unless very cleverly done, is more of an obstacle than of a "shoe-horn."
The hero-narrator of the main story is one of the obligatorily atheistic
doctors--nearly as great a nuisance as obligatorily adulterous
heroines--whom M. Rod has mostly discarded; and what is more, he is one
of the pseudo-scientific fanatics who believe in the irresponsibility of
murderers, and do not see that, the more irresponsible a criminal is,
the sooner he ought to be put out of the way. Moreover, he has the
ill-manners to bore the company at dinner with this craze, and the
indecency (for which in some countries he might have smarted) to condemn
out loud, in a court of justice, the verdict of the jury and the
sentence of the judge on his pet. Neither can one approve the haste with
which he suggests to the wife of his oldest and most intimate friend
that she is not happy with her husband. But this time M. Rod had got the
forge working, and the bellows dead on the charcoal. The development of
the situation has something of that twist or boomerang effect which we
have noticed in _Michel Teissier_. Dr. Morgex begins by defending
murderers; he does not end, but starts the end, by becoming a murderer
himself, though one with far more "extenuating circumstances" than those
so often allowed in French courts. His friend--who is an advocate of no
mean powers but loose life and dangerously full habit--has, when the
doctor warns him against apoplexy, half scoffed, but also begged him, if
a seizure should take place, to afford him a chance of euthanasia
instead of lingering misery. The actual situation, though with stages
and variations which are well handled, arises; the doctor, who has long
since been frantically in love with the wife, succumbs to the
temptation--which has been aggravated by the old request, by the
sufferings of the victim, and by the urgent supplications of the family,
that he _shall_ give morphia to relieve these sufferings. He gives
it--but in a dose which he knows to be lethal.
After a time, and having gone through no little mental agony, he marries
the widow, who is in every sense perfectly innocent; and a brief period
of happiness follows. But his own remorse continues; the well-meaning
chatter of a lady, who has done much to bring about the marriage, and to
whom Morgex had unwarily mentioned "obstacles," awakes the wife's
suspicion, and, literally, "the murder is out." Morgex confesses, first
to a lawyer friend, who, to his intense surprise, pronounces him legally
guilty, of course, but morally excusable; then to a priest, who takes
almost exactly the opposite point of view, and admitting that the legal
crime may be excusable, declares the moral guilt not lessened; while he
points out that while the wages of iniquity are retained, no pardon can
be deserved or expected. And so the pair part. Morgex gives himself up
to the hardest and least profitable practitioner-work. Of what the wife
does we hear nothing. She has been perfectly guiltless throughout; she
has loved her second husband without knowing his crime, and after
knowing it; and so she is "La Sacrifiée." But this (as some would call
it) sentimental appeal is not the real appeal of the book, though it is
delicately led up to from an early point. The gist throughout is the
tempering and purifying of the character and disposition of Morgex
himself, through trial and love, through crime and sacrifice. It is not
perfectly done. If it were, it would land the author at once in those
upper regions of art which I cannot say I think he attains. But it is a
very remarkable "try," and, with one other to be mentioned presently, it
is nearest the goal of any of his books.
[Sidenote: _Le Silence._]
On the other hand, if he ever wrote a worse book than _Le Silence_, I
have not read, and I do not wish to read, that. The title is singularly
unhappy. Silence is so much greater a thing than speech that a speaker,
unless he is Shakespeare or Dante or Lucretius,[551] or at least the
best kind of Wordsworth, had better avoid the subject, avoid even the
word for it. And M. Rod's examples of silence, preluded in each case
(for the book has two parts) by one of those curious harbingerings of
his which are doubtfully satisfactory, are not what they call nowadays
"convincing." The first and longest--it is, indeed, much too long and
might have been more acceptable in twenty pages than in two
hundred--deals with the usual triangle--brutal husband, suffering wife,
interesting lover. But the last two never declare themselves, or are
declared; and they both die and make no sign. In the second part there
is another triangle, where the illegitimate side is established and
results in a duel, the lover killing the husband and establishing
himself with the wife. But a stove for tea-making explodes; she loses
her beauty, and (apparently for that reason) poisons herself, though it
does not appear that her lover's love has been affected by the change.
In each case the situation comes under that famous and often-quoted ban
of helpless and unmanageable misery.
[Sidenote: _Là-Haut._]
Nor can I think highly of _Là-Haut_, which is quite literally an account
of an Alpine village, and of its gradual vulgarisation by an
enterprising man of business. Of the ordinary novel-interests there is
little more than the introduction at the beginning of a gentleman who
has triangled as usual, till, the husband has, in his, the lover's,
presence, most inconsiderately shot his wife dead, has missed (which was
a pity) M. Julien Sterny himself, and, more unconscionably still, has
been acquitted by a court of justice, in which the officials, and the
public in general, actually seemed to think that M. Sterny was to blame!
He is much upset by this, and, coming to Vallanches to recuperate, is
rewarded later for his good deeds and sufferings,[552] by the hand of a
very attractive young woman with a fortune. This poetic justice,
however, is by no means the point of the book, which, indeed, has no
particular point. It is filled up by details of Swiss hotel-life: of the
wicked conduct of English tourists, who not merely sing hymns on Sunday,
but dance on wet evenings in the week (nearly the oddest combination of
crimes known to the present writer); of a death in climbing of one of
the characters which is not in the least required by the story; of the
scalding of her arm by a _paysanne_ in a sort of "ragging" flirtation,
and the operation on the mortifying member by a curé who knows
something of chirurgy; and of the ruin of some greedy peasants who turn
their châlet into a hotel with no capital to work it, and are bought
out, with just enough to cover their outlay and leave them penniless, by
the general _entrepreneur_. It is a curious book, but the very reverse
of a successful one.
[Sidenote: _La Course à la Mort._]
The centre, not by any means in the chronological sense (for they were
among his earliest), but in the logical and psychological, of M. Rod's
novel production, is undoubtedly to be found in the two contrastedly
titled books _Le Sens de la Vie_ and _La Course à la Mort_. The first,
which, as has been said, received Academic distinction, I approached
many years ago without any predisposition against it, and closed with a
distinct feeling of disappointment. The other I read more recently with
a distinct apprehension of disapproval, which was, if not entirely, to a
very large extent removed as I went on. It was strongly attacked as
morbid and mischievous at its first appearance in 1885; and the author,
some years afterwards, prefixed a defence to his fifth edition, which is
not much more effective than such defences usually are. It takes
something like the line which, as was mentioned above, Mr. Traill took
about Maupassant--that Pessimism was a fact like other facts, and one
was entitled to take it as a subject or motive. But it also contained a
slip into that obvious but, somehow or other, seldom avoided trap--the
argument that a book is "dramatic," and does not necessarily express the
author's own attitude. Perhaps not; but the rejoinder that almost all,
if not all, M. Rod's books are "sicklied o'er" in this way is rather
fatal. One gets to expect, and seldom misses, a close and dreary air
throughout, often aggravated by an actual final sentence or paragraph of
lamentation and mourning and woe. But I do not resent the "nervous
impression" left on me by _La Course à la Mort_, with its indefinitely
stated but certain end of suicide, and its unbroken soliloquy of dreary
dream. For it is in one key all through; it never falls out of tune or
time; and it does actually represent a true, an existent, though a
partial and morbid attitude of mind. It is also in parts very well
written, and the blending of life and dream is sometimes almost Poesque.
A novel, except by the extremest stretch of courtesy, it is not, being
simply a panorama of the moods of its scarcely heroic hero. And he does
not "set one's back up" like René, or, in my case at least, produce
boredom like most of the other "World-pain"-ers. The still more shadowy
appearances of the heroine Cécile, who dies before her lover, while the
course of his love is more dream than action, are well brought in and
attractive; and there is one passage descriptive of waltzing which would
atone for anything. Many people have tried to write about waltzing, but
few have done it well; this is almost adequate. I wonder if I dare
translate it?
We never thought that people might be turning an evil eye on
us; we cared nothing for the indignation of the mammas
sitting passive and motionless; we hardly felt the couples
that we jostled.[553] Thanks to the cradling of the rhythm,
to the intoxication of our rapid and regular movement, there
fell on us something like a great calm. Drunk with one
another, hurried by the absorbing voluptuousness of the
waltz, we went on and on vertiginously. People and things
turned with us, surrounding us with a gyre of moving
shadows, under a fantastic light formed of crossing
reflections, in an atmosphere where one breathed inebriating
perfumes, and where every atom vibrated to the ever more
bewildering sound of music. Time passed, and we still went
on; losing little by little all consciousness except that of
our own movement. Then it even seemed that we came out of
ourselves; we heard nothing but a single beat, marking the
cadence with strokes more and more muffled. The lights,
melting into one, bathed us in a dreamy glow; we felt not
the floor under our feet; we felt nothing but an immense
oblivion--the oblivion of a void which was swallowing us up.
And doubtless it was so, as has been seen of many in the Time of
Roses.[554]
[Sidenote: _Le Ménage du Pasteur Naudié._]
To take one or two more of his books, _Le Ménage du Pasteur Naudié_,
though less poignant than _La Sacrifiée_ and with no approach to the
extra-novelish merit of _La Course à la Mort_, starts not badly with an
interesting scene, no less a place than La Rochelle, very rarely met,
since its great days, in a French novel--a rather unfamiliar society,
that of French Protestantism at Rochelle itself and Montauban--and a
certainly unusual situation, the desire of a young, pretty, and wealthy
girl, Jane Defos, to marry an elderly pastor who is poor, and, though a
widower, has four children.
That nothing but mischief can come of this proceeding--as of an abnormal
leap-year--is clear enough: whether the way in which the mischief is
brought about and recounted is good may be more doubtful. That a person
like M. Naudié, simple, though by no means a fool, should be taken in by
a very pretty girl falling apparently in love with him--even though, to
the general dangers of the situation, are added frank warnings that she
has been given to a series of freakish fancies--is not unnatural; that
she should soon tire of him, and sooner still of the four step-children,
is very natural indeed. But the immediate cause of the final
disruption--her taking a new fancy to, and being atheistically converted
by, a cousin who, after all, runs away from temptation--is not very
natural, and is unconvincingly told. Indeed the whole character of Jane
is insufficiently presented. She is meant to be a sort of Blanche Amory,
with nothing real in her--only a succession of false and fleeting
fancies. But M. Rod was not Thackeray.
[Sidenote: _Mademoiselle Annette._]
[Sidenote: _L'Eau Courante._]
With two or three more of his later-middle books (it does not seem
necessary to deal with the very latest, which are actually beyond our
limit, and could not alter the general estimate very favourably) the
preparation of judgment may cease. _Mademoiselle Annette_ is the history
of a "house-angel" and her family, and the fortunes and misfortunes they
go through, and the little town of Bielle on the Lake of Geneva.[555] It
is told, rather in M. Ferdinand Fabre's way, by a bystander, from the
time when the heroine was his school-dame and, as such dames sometimes,
if not often, are, adored by her pupils. Annette dies at last, and M.
Rod strews the dust of many others on her way to death. An American
brother of the typical kind plays a large part. He is tamed partly by
Annette, partly by a charming wife, whom M. Rod must needs kill, without
any particular reason. _L'Eau Courante_ is an even gloomier story. It
begins with a fair picture of a home-coming of bride and bridegroom, on
a beautiful evening, to an ideal farm high up on the shore of Leman. In
a very few pages M. Rod, as usual, kills the wife after subjecting her
to exceptional tortures at the births of her children, and then settles
down comfortably to tell us the ruin of the husband, who ends by arson
of his own lost home and drowning in his own lost pond. The interval is
all blunder, misfortune, and folly--the chief _causa malorum_ being a
senseless interference with the "servitude" rights of neighbours, whom
he does not like, by stopping, for a week, a spring on his own land.
Almost the only cheerful character in the book (except a delightful
_juge de conciliation_, who carries out his benevolent duties in his
cellar, dispensing its contents to soften litigants) is a black
billy-goat named Samuel, who, though rather diabolical, is in a way the
"Luck of the Bertignys," and after selling whom their state is doomed.
But we see very little of him.
The summing up need probably not be long. That M. Rod was no mere
stuffer of the shelves of circulating libraries must have been made
clear; that he could write excellently has been (with all due modesty)
confessed; that he could sometimes be poignant, often vivid, even
occasionally humorous, is true. He has given us a fresh illustration of
that tendency of the later novel, to "fill all numbers" of ordinary
life, which has been insisted upon. But that he is too much of a "dismal
Jemmy" of novel-writing is certainly true also. The House of Mourning is
one of the Houses of Life, and therefore open to the novelist. But it is
not the _only_ house. It would sometimes seem as if M. Rod were (as
usual without his being able to help it) a sort of _jettatore_,--as if
there were no times or places for him except that
When all the world is old,
And all the trees are brown,
And all the sport is cold,
And all the wheels run down.
[Sidenote: _Scènes de la Vie Cosmopolite._]
But there is something to add, and even one book not yet noticed to
comment on, which may serve as a real light on this remarkable novelist.
The way in which I have already spoken of _La Course à la Mort,_ which
was a very early book, may be referred to. Even earlier, or at least as
early, M. Rod wrote some short stories, which were published as _Scènes
de la Vie Cosmopolite_. They include "Lilith" (the author, though far
from an Anglophile, had a creditable liking for Rossetti), which is a
story of the rejection of a French suitor by an English governess; the
ending of a liaison between a coxcomb and a lady much older than himself
("Le Feu et l'Eau"); "L'Idéal de M. Gindre," with a doubtful
marriage-close; a discovery of falseness ("Le Pardon"); "La Dernière
Idylle" (which may be judged from some of its last words: "I have made a
spectacle of myself long enough, and now the play is over"), and "Noces
d'Or," the shortest and bitterest of all, in which the wife, who has
felt herself tyrannised over for the fifty years, mildly retaliates by
providing for dinner _nearly_ all the things that she likes and her
husband does not, though she effects a reconciliation with _pâté de
canard d'Amiens_. I wonder if they ate duck-pies at Amiens in the spring
of 1918?
The purpose of this postscript-account, and of the reference to _La
Course_, should not be very obscure. It is clear that, at first and from
the first, M. Rod's vocation was to be a prophet of discouragement and
disappointment. You may be this and be quite a major prophet; but if you
are not a major prophet your minority will become somewhat painfully
apparent, and it will often, if not always, go near to failure. I think
this was rather the case with M. Rod.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Catulle Mendès.]
It is with reluctance that I find myself unable to give more than praise
for admirable French, and "form" in the strict sense, to the work in
prose fiction of M. Catulle Mendès, sometime Gautier's son-in-law[556]
and always, I think, his disciple. His early verse-work in the _Parnasse
Contemporain_ fifty years ago, was attractive and promising, though
perhaps open to the exception which some took to the _Parnasse_
generally, and which may be echoed here, _not_ with that general
concernment, but as to his own novel and tale-work. His late critical
survey of modern French poetry was a really difficult thing admirably
done. But his fiction leaves me cold, as Parnassian poetry did others,
but not me. A friend of mine, whom I should have thought quite
unshockable, either by principles or practice, once professed himself to
me aghast at _Méphistophéla_. But M. Mendès's improprieties neither
shock nor excite nor amuse me, because they have a certain air of being
"machined." If anybody wishes to sample them at their very best, the
half-score loosely and largely printed pages of "Tourterelle" in the
volume entitled _Lesbia_ will be no severe experiment. He may then take
his choice of not going further at all, or of going further at the
hazard of faring worse, or as well now and then, but hardly, I think,
better.
* * * * *
I do not propose to add any further studies in detail to those already
presented in this chapter. As I have (perhaps more than once) remarked,
there are few periods of the century with the minor as well as major
novel work of which I am better acquainted than with that of its last
quarter. As I remember independently, or am in this or that way
reminded, of the names of Jules de Glouvet; of at least three
Pauls--Alexis, Arène, and Mahalin; of Ernest d'Hervilly; of the prolific
Hector Malot; of Oscar Meténier, and Octave Mirbeau, and Jules Vallès of
the Commune, of the brothers Margueritte and of others too many to
mention, a sort of shame invades me at leaving them out.[557] Some of
them may be alive still, though most, I think, are dead. But dead or
alive, I have no room for them, and, for reasons also elsewhere stated,
it is perhaps as well. The blossoming of the aloe, not once in a hundred
years but all through them, has been told as best I could tell it.
Not shame but sorrow attends the exclusion of others, some of them, I
think, better novelists than those actually discussed in this
chapter--especially "Gyp" and MM. Anatole France, Paul Bourget, Jean
Richepin, and "Pierre Loti." It would have been agreeable to pay, once
more, suit and service to the adorable chronicler of the little rascal
Bob and the unpretentiously divine Chiffon; to recall the delighted
surprise with which one read _Le Crime de Silvestre Bonnard_, and follow
the train of triumphs that succeeded it; to do justice (unbribed, but
pleasantly seasoned, by some private gratitude) to the vigour and
acuteness of _L'Irréparable_ and its companions; to salute that
masterpiece of Realism at its best, _La Glu_, and the more complicated
as well as more pathetic history of _Césarine_; and to re-discover the
countries and the manners depicted for us from _Aziyadé_ to _Pêcheur
d'Islande_. But the _consigne_ elsewhere laid down and experienced
forbids it, and I think that _consigne_ should not be "forced."
FOOTNOTES:
[519] It was in connection with this, at some time in the 'eighties,
that I came across a curious survival of the old prejudice against
novels--deserving perhaps, with better claim than as a mere personal
anecdote, record in this history. One French publisher, who held himself
above the "three-fifty," and produced dainty books of art and letters,
once sent a pathetic remonstrance against his wares being reviewed
"sometimes unkindly, _and always with the novels_."
[520] "Tigrane" is a nickname, early accounted for and perhaps
suggesting its own explanation.
[521] At the extreme end there is an interesting reminder of that
curious moment when it was thought on the cards that Pius IX. might
accept an English asylum at Malta, and that, as a part-consequence, not
of course Newman but Manning might be his successor. The probable
results of this, to "those who knew" at the time, are still matter of
interesting, if unpractical, speculation.
[522] He is playing whist comfortably with the cathedral keys in his
pocket, and has nearly made a slam (Fr. _chelem_), while the pelting of
the pitiless storm is on the dead bishop's bier and its faithful
guardians.
[523] There is something Browningesque about it, a something by no means
confined to the use of the history--actually referred to in the text,
but likely to be anticipated long before by readers--of Popes Formosus
and Stephen. That it did not satisfy Ultramontanes is not surprising;
_v. inf._ on one of the smaller pieces in _Norine_.
[524] He had actually been intended for the Church.
[525] One thing, for the credit of the Gallican Church, we may trust
that he did _not_ do. An Anglican prelate, like this his brother on a
Confirmation tour, is alleged to have pointed to a decanter on his
host's sideboard and said, "I hope, on my next visit, I shall not see
_that_." I do not know what the rector answered: I do know what _I_
should have said, despite my reverence for the episcopate: "My Lord, you
will not have the opportunity."
[526] _La Rue du Puits qui Parle_ and _Le Carmel de Vaugirard_.
[527] The _Société des Secours Intellectuels_.
[528] See on Murger.
[529] Whenever she hears that any of her numerous lovers has fallen ill,
she promptly "plants there" the man in possession, and tends and, as far
as she can, supports the afflicted.
[530] _Vide_ the frontispiece of Settle's _Empress of Morocco_.
[531] It would be curmudgeonly to say, "evaded by shortness of space."
[532] They are, however, orthodox after a fashion; and I do not think
that M. Fabre, in the books that I have read, ever introduces
descendants of the Camisards, though dealing with their country.
[533] M. Fabre is so fond of these interrupted _récits_ that one is
sometimes reminded of _Jacques le Fataliste_ and its landlady. But, to
do him justice, he "does it more natural."
[534]
"Come to thy death,
Victor _Galbraith_."--LONGFELLOW.
[535] See note above on M. Fabre's weakness for this style of narrative.
[536] The next to be mentioned runs him hard perhaps.
[537] Her girls are perhaps as good, but scarcely her men.
[538] This had _not_ been the case--to an extent which I am puzzled to
account for--with those of M. Fabre.
[539] _Deformem vocant quidam_, as in other cases also: but that is
because she has eyes and they have none.
[540] For instance, in Highbury or Cranford there might be scandal about
a young bachelor's very late visits to a pretty widow. But the adult
portion of the population, at any rate, would hardly lay booby-traps to
trip him in a river on his return.
[541] An old schoolmaster, whom Raymonde has deeply offended by
upsetting his just-gathered mushrooms at the beginning of the book, and
who is warmly attached to Antoine, turns out to be the girl's legal
father--her mother, a disagreeable, handsome person, having been run
away twenty years earlier by another character who has passed hitherto
as respectable husband and paterfamilias.
[542] Excepting some of the "Johnny Ludlow" stories, which were, I
think, in their kind, better than anything M. Ohnet ever did to my
knowledge--I may perhaps observe that the above notice was written,
exactly as it stands, _before_ M. Ohnet's death, but under the
impression that the death had occurred. When it did, there were things
in the obituaries which made me raise my eyebrows. That he was a
"belated Romantic" had certainly never occurred to me; but I have no
quarrel with the description of him, in another place, as a practitioner
of the _roman bourgeois_.
[543] _V. sup._ p. 277-280.
[544] The great scene in Mr. Disraeli's _Young Duke_, when that youthful
nobleman loses, what is it? two hundred and seventeen thousand pounds, I
think; the brief but poignant plucking of Mr. Dawkins; the occasion in
_Sans Merci_ where the hero _will_ not lead trumps, and thereby, though
not at once, seals his fate; and a quite nice game at Marmora in Mr. E.
F. Benson's _The Babe, B.A._ emerge from many memories, reinforced by
some of actual experience. Marmora _is_ a nice game: with penny stakes,
and three players only, you may have five pounds in the pool before you
know where you are. But I do not know anything more really exciting than
a game at which you guess how many marbles the other fellow holds in his
fist. The sequel, however, in which you have to ask for an advance of
pocket-money to settle your "differences", is not so pleasant.
[545] Another scene, which brings on the _dénouement_ and in which
Claire is again supposed to have the _beau rôle_, does not please me
much better. Thinking that her husband is flirting with the detested
Duchess, she publicly orders her out of the house--a very natural, but a
rather "fish-faggy" proceeding.
[546] It has been, and will be, pointed out that he was in all ways
studious to run before the wind; and it was just at this time, if I
remember rightly, that the catchword of "conflict" began to pester one
in criticism. Perhaps this was the reason.
[547] The argument, or assumption rather, is all the odder because, on
the one hand, orthodoxy holds Free-will (if it accepts that) as a Divine
endowment of the Soul: and, on the other, serious Atheism is almost
always Determinist. But the study of M. Ohnet was probably not much
among the Sentences.
[548] The obituarist above mentioned, who thought M. Ohnet a belated
Romantic, thought also that he was "struggling against the rising tide
of Realism." I do not think you would ever have found him struggling
against rising tides, and, as a matter of fact, the tide was already on
the turn.
[549] Already mentioned in the case of M. Cherbuliez (_v. sup._ p. 447).
[550]
[Sidenote: Note on _La Seconde Vie de M. T._]
The second part is occupied with two different but connected subjects.
Suzanne, the first wife, dies suddenly, and the two daughters, the
elder, Annie, quite, and the second, Laurence, nearly grown up--return
to the custody of their father, and therefore to the society at least of
his second wife, Blanche, who, though of course feeling the awkwardness,
welcomes them as well as she can. The situation, though much _more_
awkward, is something like that of Miss Yonge's _Young Stepmother_: but
M. Rod makes it more tragic by Annie's death, partly in consequence of a
love-marriage failing, through the lover's father's objection to the
state of her family. The other subject is the gradual hankering of
Michel after a return to political life, and his (consequentially
inevitable) ratting from Right to Left. M. Rod brought into the matter
direct reminiscences of the Parnell and Dilke cases, and possibly owed
the conception of the whole book to them; but he has, as is sometimes
his wont, rather "sicklied it over" with political and other discussion.
[551] A pleasant study, in poetic use of imagery and phrase, is the
gradation from the bare and grand Lucretian simplicity of _silentia
noctis_, through the "favour and prettiness" (slightly tautological
though) of the Virgilian _tacitae per amica silentia lunae_, to the
recovery and intensifying of magnificence in _dove il sol tace_. By the
way, _silentia_ (for the singular undergoes Quintilian's apology for the
Latin _-um_) is one of the few instances in which a Latin word beats the
Greek. [Greek: sigê] is really inferior.
[552] What annoys him most of all is that he should have an
uncomfortable feeling about the woman "_comme_ si je l'avais _aimée_!"
He had only, you see, done something else.
[553] They should not have done this, and I do not think they did; it
was the couples that jostled them. And even this ought not to have
happened. The fastest waltzing (I am speaking of the old _deux-temps_,
which this must have been) conveyed an almost uncanny extra power of
vision, and at the same time of avoidance, to the right persons. Indeed,
the first three lines of this extract have been objected to as base and
inconsistent. I think not; the common out of which you rise to the
uncommon is worth indication.
[554] It may be added that the contrast of an earlier mazurka--in the
slowness of which the pair had time to look at each other, feel each
other, and otherwise remain in Paradise, but outside of the double
Nirvana--is highly creditable. But I hope they _waltzed_ to the mazurka.
It is rather annoying to other people who are doing the orthodox step;
but it is the perfection of the slow movement, which affords, as above,
opportunities that do not exist in the faster and more delirious
gyration.
[555] This (which may be called M. Rod's novel-headquarters) occurs also
not merely in _L'Eau Courante_ but in _Les Roches Blanches_, a book
which opens very well in a Mrs. Gaskell or Mrs. Oliphant vein, with the
introduction of a new pastor, but ends much less satisfactorily, with a
guiltless but not at all convincing love-affair between this pastor and
the wife of his chief parishioner.
[556] His wife for a time, Madame Judith Gautier, who died very
recently, wrote in a fashion not unworthy of her blood both in verse and
prose (part of her production being translations from Chinese), and was
the only lady-member of the quaint _Contre_-académie formed by E. de
Goncourt.
[557] And this shame becomes more acute when I think of one or two
individual books, such especially as M. Henry Cochin's _Manuscrit de
Monsieur C. A. L. Larsonnier_--a most pathetic and delightful story of a
mental malady which makes time and memory seem to go backward though the
victim can force himself to continue his ordinary duties, and record his
sufferings.
CONCLUSION
The remaining pages of this book should be occupied partly with a
continuation of a former chapter,[558] partly with a summary of the
whole volume, the combination, almost necessary in all cases, being
specially motived in this by the overlappings referred to above, and a
word added on the whole _History_. Not only did Victor Hugo hold, to
French literature as well as to French poetry, something very like the
position[559] occupied by Tennyson and Browning in English poetry only,
by covering every quarter of the century in whole or part with his work;
but there was, even in France, nothing like the "general post" of
disappearances and accessions which marked the period from 1820 to 1860
in English--a consequence necessarily of the later revival of French. No
one except Chateaubriand corresponded to the crowd of distinguished
writers who thus made their appearance, at the actual meeting of
eighteenth and nineteenth, with us; and though, of course, there were
exceptions, the general body of the French reinforcement did not dwindle
much till 1870 onwards.
We noted that the first great development of the nineteenth-century
novel was in the historical department, though many others made notable
fresh starts: and we said something about the second development of the
"ordinary" one which followed. It is this latter, of course, which has
supplied the main material of the last third of the present volume,
though (of course again) there have been many noteworthy and some great
examples of the historical itself, of the supernatural, of the
eccentric, and of many other kinds. But practically all who tried these
later tried the ordinary, and a great many who tried the ordinary did
not try the others. It is therefore on the development of the novel of
common modern life that we must, at any rate for a little time, spend
most of our attention here.
The fact of the change is indeed so certain and so obvious, that there
is not much need to enforce or illustrate it, though it must be
remembered that, on any true conception of history, the most obvious
things are not those least worthy of being chronicled. Even Hugo, likely
to be, and actually being, the most recalcitrant to the movement, comes
close to modern times, and to such ordinary life as was possible to him,
in _Les Misérables_ and _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_. George Sand had
begun as a sort of modernist; but by any one who can perform the (it is
true not very easy) task of equating relative modernity, it will not be
found that _Mlle. la Quintinie_, or even _Flamarande_, are more modern
than _Lélia_ or _Valentine_ in the mere ratio of the dates. The ordinary
life of the 'thirties and that of the 'sixties and 'seventies was no
doubt different, but there is more than that difference in the books
referred to. The artist is, consciously or unconsciously, trying to get
nearer to her model or sitter. And this though George Sand was really
almost as self-centred as Hugo, though in another way.
But it is, of course, in less idiosyncratic writers than these, who
continued, and in others who began, to write at this time, that we must
look for our real documents. Among the elder of this second class, Jules
Sandeau's work is worth recurring to. He had sometimes gone a little
earlier than his own time, and he had sometimes employed what is
called--perhaps inconsiderately and certainly to some extent
misleadingly--"romantic" incident in addition to purely novel-character
and presentation. But his general manner of dealing reproduces itself,
almost more than that of any of his contemporaries, in those novelists
of the last quarter of the century who do not bow the knee to
Naturalism: and one finds some actual recognition of the fact in
dedications to him by younger novelists such as M. André Theuriet.[560]
But, look where you will, the lesson is unmistakable. Take Alexandre
Dumas _fils_, beginning with a _Tristan le Roux_ and ending with an
_Affaire Clémenceau_. Take Flaubert's _Madame Bovary_ and _L'Éducation
Sentimentale_, in comparison with which _Salammbô_ and two of the _Trois
Contes_ (the other is quite in the general drift) are obvious
variations, excursions, reliefs.[561] Feuillet is practically (whatever
may have been his early practice as a "devil"), when he takes to his own
line, modern, and in a sense ordinary or nothing: Daudet the same.
Naturalism _en bloc_ would lose almost all pretence of justifying itself
if it did not stick to the ordinary, or at least actual, though it may
sometimes be a sort of transformed "ordinariness in abnormality." So
great and so fertile a writer as Maupassant leaves us--except in his
supernaturalisms--nothing at all that goes out of the actual probable or
easily possible experience of a Frenchman of 1880-90. The four novelists
who supply the bulk of the last chapter never outstep this. But since
such indulgence in particulars may be thought mere driving at an open
door, let us take the fact for granted, and turn to some consideration
of its causes, results, conditions, features, and the like.
One of the causes is of such certainty and importance that a person, not
indolent or prejudiced, might ask for no other. It is that sempiternal
desire for change[562]--that principle of revolution, which is so much
more certain than any evolution, and which governs human life, though it
is always bringing that life back to the old places, "camouflaged," as
they say nowadays, in a fashion that disguises them to the simple. The
romance of incident, historical and other, had had a long innings, and
people were tired of it. But though this was undoubtedly the main
influence, there were some others which it would be hardly judicious to
neglect. It is true that the greatest of these were, in a fashion, only
partial actions or reactions of the larger one already mentioned.[563]
Beyle and Balzac, the latter of course with important "colours" of his
own, and even the former with some modifications, had, as men of genius
generally do, felt or found the spirit of change early, and their
audiences helped to spread it. And yet minor impulsions might be
indicated. It is a commonplace that from the days of the Napoleonic War
to the middle 'fifties there were few great European events; commercial
progress, developments of colonisation, machinery, literature, and the
arts, somewhat peddling politics,[564] and the like taking the place of
the big wars and the grandiose revolutions that ushered in the
nineteenth century. But these mostly meaner things themselves claimed
attention; they filled the life of men if they did not glorify it;
classes and occupations which had been almost altogether non-vocal began
to talk and be talked about, and so the change again held on.
Lastly, of course, there was the increase of education: with which the
demand for fiction, plentiful in quantity and easily comprehended, was
sure to grow.
On the whole, however, the results concern us more than the causes. What
is the general character of this large province, or, looking at it in
another way, of these accumulated crops, which the fifty years more
specially in question saw added to the prose fiction of France?
The answer is pretty much what any wide student of history--political,
social, literary, or other--would expect, supposing, which is of course
in fact an impossibility, that he could come to the particular study
"fresh and fasting." Novel-writing in France, as elsewhere, became more
and more a business; and so, while the level of craftsmanship might be
to some extent raised, the level of artistic excellence was
correspondingly lowered. It has been before observed more than once
that, to the present critic, only Flaubert and Maupassant of the writers
we have been discussing in these later chapters can be credited with
positive genius, unless the too often smoky and malodorous torch of Zola
be admitted to qualify for the Procession of the Chosen. But when we
take in the whole century the retrospect is very different; and while
the later period may suffer slightly in the respect just indicated, the
earlier affords it some compensation in the other noted point.
There is, indeed, no exact parallel, in any literature or any branch of
literature within my knowledge, to the manifold development of the
French novel during these hundred years. Our own experience in the same
department cannot be set in any proper comparison with it, for the four
great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century, and their followers from
Miss Burney downwards, with the Terror and the Political schools of the
extreme close, had advanced our starting-point so far that Scott and
Miss Austen possessed advantages not open to any French writer. On the
other hand, the Sensibility School, which was far more numerously
attended in France than in England, gave other openings, which _were_
taken advantage of in a special direction by Benjamin Constant, and much
earlier and less brilliantly, but still with important results, by
Madame de Montolieu. The age-long competence of the French in _conte_
and _nouvelle_ was always ready for fresh adaptation; and at the very
beginning of the new century, and even earlier, two reinforcements of
the most diverse character came to the French novel. Pigault-Lebrun and
Ducray-Duminil (the earliest of whose novels appeared just before the
Revolution as Pigault's début was made just after it) may be said to
have democratised the novel to nearly[565] the full meaning of that much
abused word. They lowered its value aesthetically, ethically (at least
in Pigault's case, while Ducray's morality does not go much above the
"Be amiable and honest" standard), logically, rhetorically, and in a
good many other ways. But they did not merely increase the number of its
readers; in so doing they multiplied correspondingly the number of its
practitioners, and so they helped to make novel-writing a business
and--through many failures and half-successes--to give it a sort of
regularised practice, if not a theory.
Yet if this democratisation of the novel thus went partly but, as does
all democratisation inevitably, to the degradation of it in quality,
though to its increase in quantity, there were fortunately other
influences at work to provide new reinforcements, themselves in some
cases of quality invaluable. It has been admitted that neither
Chateaubriand nor Madame de Staël can be said to have written a
first-class novel--even _Corinne_ can hardly be called that. But it is
nearer thereto than anything that had been written since the first part
of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_: while _René_ and _Atala_ recover, and more
than recover in tragic material, the narrative power of the best comic
tales. And these isolated examples were of less importance for the
actual history--being results of individual genius, which are not
imitable--than certain more general characteristics of the two writers.
Between them--a little perhaps owing to their social position, but much
more by their pure literary quality--they reinstated the novel in the
Upper House of literature itself. In Madame de Staël there was more than
adequacy--in Chateaubriand there was sometimes consummateness--of style;
in both, with whatever varnish of contemporary affectation, there was
genuine nobility of thought. They both chose subjects worthy of their
powers, and Madame de Staël at least contented herself with ordinary, or
not very extraordinary, modern life. But the greatest things they did,
from the historian's point of view, were introductions of the novel to
new fields of exercise and endeavour. Art and religion were brought into
its sphere, and if _Les Natchez_ and _Les Martyrs_ cannot exactly be
called modern historical novels, they are considerable advances, both
upon the model of _Télémaque_ and upon that of _Bélisaire_. And even
putting this aside, the whole body of Chateaubriand's work, as well as
not a little in Madame de Staël's, tended to introduce and to encourage
the spirit of Romance.
Now the proposition which--though never, I trust, pushed to the
unliterary extent of warping the judgment, and never yet, I hope, unduly
flaunted or flourished in the reader's face--dominates this volume, is
that Romanticism, or, to use the shorter and more glorious name,
Romance, itself dominates the whole of the French nineteenth-century
novel. If any one considers that this proposition is at variance with
the other, that the main function of the novel during the period has
been to bring the novel closer to ordinary life, he has failed to grasp
what it might be presumptuous plumply to call the true meaning of
Romance, but what is certainly that meaning as it has always appeared to
me.
To attempt discussion, or even enumeration, of all the definitions or
descriptions of Romance in general which have been given by others would
not only be impossible in the space at command, but would be really
irrelevant. As it happens, the matter can be cut short, without
inadequacy and without disingenuousness, by quoting a single pair of
epithets, affixed by a critic, for whom I have great respect, a day or
two before I wrote these words. This critic held that Romantic
treatment--in stage matters more particularly, but we can extend the
phrase to fiction without unfairness--was "generous but false." _I_
should call it "generous" certainly, but before all things "true." Nor
is this a mere play upon the words of the original. It so happens that
our friend the enemy has supplied a most admirable help. Legally, as we
know, veracity requires "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth." I admit that the last clause will not fit Romance. She does give
us something more than the truth, and that is her generosity, but it is
a generosity which is necessitated by the fact that Romance is a quality
or function not so much of nature essentially--though happily it is
sometimes so by accident--as of Art, the essence of which is to require,
whether it be art classic or art romantic, art of literature or art of
design, art of sight or art of sound, something _added_ to the truth--as
that truth exists in reality.
Of what this addition is presently. But Romance, as I see it, insists
upon and gives the truth and the whole truth of nature itself. Who is
the greatest of Romantics? By agreement of all but the purblind and the
paradoxer, Shakespeare. Who is the truest and the most universal of all
writers? By consent of classic and romantic, at least of those of either
kind who "count"--again Shakespeare. Let me say at once that, having
early sworn allegiance to Logic, I am perfectly aware that a coincidence
of two things in one person does not prove the identity of the things.
But it proves their compossibility, and when it is found _in excelsis_,
it surely goes near to prove a good deal more. Nor is one in the least
confined to this argument from example, strong as it is. When you
examine Classicism, which, whatever we may say or not say of it, will
always stand as the opposite of Romance, you find that it always leaves
something out. It may--it does in its best examples--give you truth; it
may--it does in its best examples--add something which is its own
"generosity"--its castigation, its order, its reason, its this and that
and the other. To be very liberal, it may be admitted that the perpetual
and meticulous presence in it of "Thou shalt not" do or say this or
that, is most conspicuous--let us go to the extreme of generosity
ourselves and say, is only conspicuous--in its feebler examples. But
there is always something that it does not give, and some of us think
that there are not a few things which it cannot give. There is nothing,
not even ugliness itself, which Romance cannot give, though there its
form of generosity comes in, and the ugly in simple essence becomes
beautiful by treatment.
I could bestow any amount of tediousness in these generalities on my
readers if I thought it necessary: but having developed my proposition
and its meaning, I think it better to pass to the applications thereof
in the present subject.
Of the wide extension of aim and object effected by Romantic influence
in the novel, as in other departments of literature, there can be little
denial, though of course it may be contended that this extension took
place not as it ought and as it ought not. But of the fact of it and of
the corresponding variety introduced with it, the very pioneers of the
so-called Romantic movement give ample proof. We have seen this even in
the extremely inchoate stage of the first two decades; when the great
definitely Romantic leaders made their appearance it was more remarkable
still. The four chief writers who gave the Romantic lead before 1830
itself may be taken to be Nodier, Hugo, Mérimée, and Vigny. They stand
in choice of subjects, as in treatment of them, wide apart; and just as
it has been noted of Vigny's poetry, that its three chief pieces,
"Éloa," "Dolorida," and "Le Cor" point the way to three quite different
kinds of Romantic verse, so, confining ourselves to the same example, it
may be repeated that _Cinq-Mars_ and the smaller stories exemplify, and
in a way pattern, kinds of Romantic prose fiction even further apart
from each other. Always, through the work of these and that of Gautier,
and of all the others who immediately or subsequently follow them, this
broadening and branching out of the Romantic influence--this opening of
fresh channels, historical and fanciful, supernatural and
ordinary--shows itself. The contention, common in books, that this
somehow ceased about the middle of the century, or at least died off
with the death of those who had carried it out, appears to me, I
confess, to be wildly unhistorical and uncritical. At no time--the
proofs fill this volume--do we find any restriction, of choice of
subject or conduct of treatment, to anything like the older limits. But
the most unhistorical and the most uncritical form of this contention is
the astonishing endeavour to vindicate a "classical" character for
Naturalism. Most certainly there is "impropriety" in some of the
classics and "impropriety" in all the Naturalists, but other resemblance
I can see none. As for the argument that as Naturalism is opposed to
Romance and Classicalism is opposed to Romance, _therefore_ Naturalism
is Classical--this is undoubtedly a very common form of bastard
syllogism, but to labour at proving its bastardy would be somewhat
ridiculous.
The fact is, as should have been sufficiently made good above, that
Naturalism is not opposed to Romance in anything like the sense that
Classicism is: it is nothing but a degradation and exaggeration at once
of certain things in Romance itself. Nor do I think that there is the
slightest difficulty in showing that every form of novel-writing which
we have been surveying in this book--that the work of every one of those
distinguished or undistinguished writers who have been, with or without
regret, declined--is still essentially Romantic. It is Romantic in its
inflexible resolution to choose subjects for itself and not according to
rule; Romantic in its wise or unwise individuality of treatment;
Romantic in its preferential appeal to emotion rather than to pure
intelligence; above all, Romantic in its quest--often no doubt
ill-guided and unsuccessful, but always more or less present--for that
element of strangeness which, though invisible to many who live, is a
pervading character of Life itself, and the presence of which it is the
glory of Romance itself, from its earliest to its latest manifestations,
to have recognised and to some extent fixed, in artistic representation.
And so, I hope, that what has been discovered in this volume--in the way
of pageant and procession even more than that of examination, though
with something of that also--may have shown further progress
towards--nay, actual attainment of, the goal which I ventured to mark
out in the earlier volume as that of the novelist by the words, "Here is
the whole of human life before you. Copy it or, better, re-create
it--with variation and decoration _ad libitum_--as faithfully, but as
fully, as you can."
Thesis-writing, however, is but dismal reading, unless (as Mrs. Scott
told Jeffrey she hoped he was for the _Marmion_ review) "you are very
well paid for it." Nor do I, as I have previously explained, consider it
a necessary part of history, though common honesty may require that the
presence of a doctrine, behind the delivery of an account, should be
confessed. I think the account itself should be sufficient to make good
my point; others may differ. But even if they do, some of them at least
will, I hope, have found in that account some modicum of the amazing
supply of rest and refreshment contained in the mass of literature we
have been surveying.
On the two volumes together there may be a little more to say. I have
touched, I hope not too frequently, on the curious pleasure which I
myself have felt in reading again books sometimes unopened for more than
half a century, sometimes read at different times during that period,
sometimes positively familiar; and on the contrasted enjoyment of
reading others written long ago in all but a few cases, but not, as it
happened, read at the time of their appearance. I am indeed inclined to
lay much stress on the quality of re-readableness in a novel. Perhaps,
as indeed is pretty generally the fact in such cases, a capacity of
reading again is required in the person as well as one of being read
again in the book. The late Mr. Mark Pattison was not a friend of mine,
and we once had a pitched battle; nor was he in any case given to borrow
other people's expressions. But he was a critic, if he was anything, and
he once did me the honour to repeat _verbatim_--whether consciously or
not I cannot say, but in the very periodical where it had originally
appeared--a sentence of mine about "people who would rather read any
circulating-library trash, for the first time, than _Pendennis_ or
_Pride and Prejudice_ for the second." I think this difference between
the two classes is as worthy to rank, among the criteria of opposed
races of mankind and womankind, as those between borrowers and lenders,
Platonists and Aristotelians, or Big- and Little-Endians.
But the vast library through which I have had the privilege of
conducting my readers does not exercise any invidious separation between
the two. I have read a good many French novels--hundreds certainly, I do
not know that it would be preposterous to say thousands--that I have not
even mentioned in this book.[566] But I have been a very busy man, and
have had to read and to do a great many other things. If I had had
nothing else to do and had devoted my entire life to the occupation
which Gray thought not undesirable as regards Marivaux and Crébillon, I
doubt whether I could have "overtaken," as the Scotch say, the entire
prose fiction of 1800-1900 in French. On the back of one of the volumes
of fiction--itself pretty obscure--which I have noticed in Chapter II.
of this volume, I find advertised the works of a certain Dinocourt, of
whom I never heard before, and who is not to be found in at least some
tolerably full French dictionaries of literature. They have quite
appetising titles (one or two given in the passage referred to), and
there are in all sixty-two volumes of them, distributed in fours, fives,
and sixes among the several works. Ought I to have read these sixty odd
volumes of Dinocourt? That is a moral question. That there _are_ sixty
odd volumes of him, probably not now very easily obtainable, but
somewhere for some one to read if he likes, is a simple fact. And there
are no doubt many more than sixty such batches waiting likewise,[567]
and quite likely to prove as readable as I found M. Ricard.
I have by no means always felt inclined to acquiesce in the endlessly
repeated complaints that the hackwork of literature is worse done in
England than it is in France. But having had a very large experience of
the novels of both languages, having reviewed hundreds of English novels
side by side with hundreds of French as they came from the press, and
having also read, for pleasure or duty, hundreds of older ones in each
literature, I think that the mysterious quality of readableness pure and
simple _has_ more generally belonged to the French novel than to the
English. This, as I have endeavoured to point out, is not a question of
naughtiness or niceness, of candour or convention. I have indeed
admitted that the conventions of the French novel bore me quite as much
as anything in ours. It _may_ be partly a question of length, for, as
everybody knows, the French took to the average single volume, of some
three hundred not very closely printed pages, much sooner than we took
to anything of the kind. It is perhaps partly also due to what one of
the reviewers of my former volume well called the greater "spaciousness"
of the English novel, that is to say, its inclusion of more diverse
aims, and episodic subjects, and minor interests generally. For this,
while it makes for superior greatness when there is strength enough to
carry it off, undoubtedly requires _more_ strength, and so gives more
openings for weakness to show itself. There are many average English
novels which I should not mind reading, and not a few that I should like
to read, again, while there are but few French novels that I should care
to read so often as I have cared to read the great English ones. But I
could read, for a second time, a very much larger proportion of average
French fiction.
Of those books which are "above average" I have tried to say what I
thought ought to be said in the volume itself, and there is no need of a
"peroration with _much_ circumstance" about them. It is a long way--a
perfect maze of long ways leading through the most different countries
of thought and feeling--from Atala dying in the wilderness to Chiffon
doing exquisitely balanced justice to herself and the Jesuit, by
allowing that while he and she were both _bien élevés_, he was _un peu
trop_ and she was not. It is not so far, except in time, nor separated
by such a difference of intervening country, from the song of the
Mandragore in Nodier to those muffled shrieks of a better-known variety
of the same mystic plant, that tell us of Maupassant's growing progress
to his fate. As you explore the time and the space of the interval you
come across wonderful things. There are the micro- macrocosms of Hugo,
where, as in Baudelaire's line on the albatross quoted above, he is
partly hampered because he has come down from the air of poetry to the
earth of prose; of Balzac, where there is no such difficulty, but where
the cosmos itself is something other than yours; of Dumas, where half
the actual history of France is _dis_realised for your delectation. On a
lesser scale you have the manners of town and country, of high life and
low life, of Paris most of all, given you through all sorts of
perspectives and in all sorts of settings by Paul de Kock and George
Sand, by Sandeau and Bernard, by Alexandre Dumas _fils_ and Feuillet, by
Theuriet and Fabre. Gautier and Mérimée make for you that marriage of
story and style which, before them, so few had attempted at all, yet
which, since them, so many have tried with such doubtful success. Once
more in Flaubert and then for the last time, as far as our survey goes,
in Maupassant, you come to that touch of genius which exalts the novel,
as it exalts all kinds, indefinably, unmistakably, finally.
And this journey is not like the one great journey, and more than one of
the lesser journeys, of our life, irremeable; there is no denial, no
curse, no fiend with outstretched claw, to prevent your going back as
often as you like, wandering in any direction you please, passing or
staying as and where you wish. It has been perhaps unconscionable of me
to inflict so big a book on my readers as a cover for giving myself the
pleasure of making and remaking such journeys. But if I have persuaded
any one of them to explore the country for himself, by him at least I
shall not remain unforgiven.
FOOTNOTES:
[558] _V. sup._ "The French Novel in 1850."
[559] Called by some a "deadening" one. There was some very cheerful
Life in that Death.
[560] The better part even of M. Ohnet is a sort of vulgarised Sandeau.
[561] _La Tentation_, like others of the very greatest novels, is
independent of its time, save in mere unimportant "colour."
[562] How little this change was one back to classicism--as some would
have it--we may see presently.
[563] The greatest of all--the direction and maintenance of the
revolution under the inspiration of what is called Romance--must be
again postponed for a little while.
[564] Of course the convulsions of '48 were ominous enough, but they
seemed to be everywhere repressed or placated for a considerable time;
and if there had been a single statesman of genius besides Herr von
Bismarck (I anticipate but decline the suggestion of Cavour) in the
Europe of the next two decades, they might not have broken out again for
a much longer time than was actually the case.
[565] Nearly--but fortunately for literature--not quite. The jobbery and
the tyranny which are inseparable from democracy in politics find room
with difficulty in _our_ "Republic."
[566] I am prepared for blame on account of some of the absences of
mention. Perhaps the most provoking, to some readers, will be those
affecting two industrious members of the aristocracy: Mme. la Comtesse
Dash--more beautifully and properly though less exaltedly, Gabrelli Anna
Cisterne de Courtiras, _Vi_comtesse de Saint-Mars--and M. le Comte
Xavier de Montépin. They overlapped each other in pouring forth, from
the 'forties to the 'nineties, torrents of mostly sensational fiction.
But I had rather read them than write about them.
[567] In the same place another novelist, M. Amédée de Bast, of whom I
again acknowledge ignorance, advertises no less than _four_ novels of
_four_ volumes each, as being actually all at press, _pour paraître à
diverses époques_. Dryden says somewhere "in epoches mistakes." Let us
hope there were none here.
APPENDIX
DATES OF PUBLICATION OF NOVELS ARRANGED UNDER AUTHOR'S NAMES IN THE
ORDER OF NOTICE HERE
(_These dates are given subject to the caution stated under Addenda and
Corrigenda for Vol. I., p. xvii of this present volume. It has not been
thought necessary to add editions, etc., as was done in Vol. I.: almost
all the books referred to being in common sale. For dates of the authors
themselves, see Index as before. Those of some books merely glanced at
are excluded to save room._)
Staël, Mme. de. _Delphine_, 1802; _Corinne_, 1807.
Chateaubriand. _Atala_, 1801, in the _Mercure_; _René_, 1802, in _Génie
du Christianisme_, 1805; _Le Dernier Abencérage_, 1805; _Les Martyrs_,
1809; _Les Natchez_ in _Oeuvres Complètes_, 1826-31.
Paul de Kock. _L'Enfant de ma Femme_, 1812; _Gustave_, 1821; _La Femme,
le Mari et l'Amant_, 1829; _Edmond et sa Cousine_, 1843; _André le
Savoyard_, 1825; _Jean_, 1828. _Mon Voisin Raymond_; 1822; _Le Barbier
de Paris_, 1826.
Ducray-Duminil. _Fanfan et Lolotte_, 1787; _Le Petit Carillonneur_,
1809.
Ducange, V. _L'Artiste et la Soldat_, 1827; _Ludovica_, 1830.
Montolieu, Mme. de. _Caroline de Lichtfield_, 1786.
Ricard, A. _L'Ouvreuse de Loges_, 1829-32.
Arlincourt, Vicomte d'. _Le Solitaire_, 1821.
Nodier, Charles. _Les Proscrits_, _Le Peintre de Salzbourg_, etc.,
1802-6; _Jean Sbogar_, 1818; _Smarra_, 1821; _Trilby_, 1822; _La Fée aux
Miettes_, 1831.
Hugo, Victor. _Han d'Islande_, 1823; _Bug-Jargal_, 1824-26; _Notre Dame
de Paris_, 1830; _Les Misérables_, 1862; _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_,
1866; _L'Homme qui Rit_, 1869; _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, 1873.
Beyle, Henri. _Armance_, 1827; _Le Rouge et le Noir_, 1830; _La
Chartreuse de Parme_, 1839; _L'Abbesse de Castro_, 1832. First set of
posthumous _Nouvelles_, etc., 1854 onwards; second ditto (_Lamiel_,
etc.), 1887 onwards.
Balzac, H. de. Most of the _Juvenilia_ were written, alone or in
collaboration, during the years 1821, 1822, 1823, and 1824, but the
period of the whole extends to that of _Les Chouans_ (originally _Le
Dernier Chouan_), 1829. The dates of the rest, especially considering
their frequent rearrangement, are too numerous to give. Those chiefly
commented on in text appeared as follows: _Le Peau de Chagrin_, 1831;
_Eugénie Grandet_, 1833; _Le Père Goriot_, 1834; _Les Parents Pauvres_,
1846-47.
Sand, George. _Indiana_, 1832; _Valentine_, 1832; _Lélia_, 1833;
_Consuelo_, 1842-43; _La Comtesse de Rudolstadt_, 1844-45; _Lucrezia
Floriani_, 1847; _Elle et Lui_, 1859; _Un Hiver à Majorque_, 1842; _La
Mare au Diable_, 1846; _La Petite Fadette_, 1840; _F. le Champi_, 1849;
_Mauprat_, 1837; _La Daniella_, 1857; _Les Beaux Messieurs de
Bois-Doré_, 1858; _Le Marquis de Villemer_, 1861; _Mlle. la Quintinie_,
1863; _Flamarande_, 1875.
Gautier, Théophile. _Les Jeune-France_, 1833; _Mlle. de Maupin_, 1835;
_Fortunio_, 1838; _Nouvelles_, 1845; _Jettatura_, 1857; _Le Capitaine
Fracasse_, 1863; _Spirite_, 1866.
Mérimée, Prosper. (_Clara Gazul_, 1825; _La Guzla_, 1827; _Le Carrosse
du Saint-Sacrement_, part of _Clara Gazul_ originally, did not reach the
stage till 1850.) _La Jacquerie_, 1828; _Chronique de Charles IX_, 1829.
Most of the stories, including _Colomba_, appeared between 1830 and
1840. _Carmen_, 1847; _Dernières Nouvelles_, 1873.
Musset, A. de. Most of the stories noticed in text appeared originally
after 1840 in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and were not collected till
after his death in 1857. _Mimi Pinson_ had been published in 1852.
Gérard de Nerval. Work noticed appeared sporadically, in many papers and
some books, between 1828 and his death in 1855. The best edition of the
_Oeuvres Complètes_ is of 1868.
Vigny, A. de. _Cinq-Mars_, 1826; _Stello_, 1832; _Servitude et Grandeur
Militaires_, 1835.
Fromentin, Eugène. _Dominique_, 1863.
Sainte-Beuve, C. A. _Volupté_, 1834.
Bernard, Ch. de. _Gerfaut_, 1838; _Le Noeud Gordien_, 1838; _Le
Paravent_, 1839. The rest between 1840 and his death in 1850.
Sandeau, Jules. _Marianna_, 1839; _Fernand_, 1844; _Valcreuse_, 1846;
_La Roche aux Mouettes_, 1871; _Mlle. de La Seiglière_, 1851; _Sacs et
Parchemins_, 1851; _Mlle. de Kérouare_, 1842; _La Maison de Penarvon_,
1858.
Sue, Eugène. _Le Coucaratcha_, 1832-34; _La Vigie de Koatven_, 1833;
_Les Mystères de Paris_, 1842-43; _Le Juif Errant_, 1844-45; _Les Sept
Péchés Capitaux_, 1847-49.
Soulié, Frédéric. _Mémoires du Diable_, 1837-38; _Le Lion Amoureux_,
1839; _Le Château des Pyrénées_, 1843.
Murger, Henri. _[Scènes de] La Vie de Bohême_, 1851; _Les Buveurs
d'Eau_, 1855; _Adeline Protat_, 1853; _Le Sabot Rouge_, 1860. (Shorter
stories at different dates between 1848 (?) and his death in 1861.)
Reybaud, Louis. _Jérome Paturot_, Part I., 1843; _Jérome Paturot_, Part
II., 1848.
Méry, Joseph. _Les Nuits Anglaises_, 1853.
Karr, Alphonse. _Sous les Tilleuls_, 1832.
Beauvoir, Roger de. _Stories mostly, 1832-53.
Ourliac, Édouard. _Stories mostly_, 1835-48.
Achard, Amédée. _Belle-Rose_, 1847.
Souvestre, Émile. _Les Derniers Bretons_, 1835-37; _Le Foyer Breton_,
1844; _Un Philosophe sous les Toits_, 1850.
Féval, Paul. _La Fée des Grèves_, 1851.
Borel, Pétrus. _Champavert_, 1833; _Madame Putiphar_, 1839.
Dumas père. _Isabeau? [-bel? -belle?] de Bavière_, 1835; _Le Comte de
Monte Cristo_, 1844-45; _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, 1844; _Vingt Ans
Après_, 1845; _La Reine Margot_, 1845; _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_,
1848-50.
The sequels of _La Reine Margot_ and the major part of the
eighteenth-century series appeared between 1846 and 1850; _Olympe de
Clèves_ in 1852; _Les Louves de Machecoul_ in 1859. Little of real value
in novel later. The period of chief attack on him for plagiarism,
_supercherie_, "novel-manufacture," etc., was 1845-48.
Dumas fils. _Tristan le Roux_, 1850; _La Dame aux Camélias_, 1848;
_Antonine_, 1849; _La Vie à Vingt Ans_, 1854; _Aventures de Quatre
Femmes et d'un Perroquet_, 1846-47; _Trois Hommes Forts_, 1851; _Diane
de Lys_, 1853; _Affaire Clémenceau_, 1866; _Ilka_, 1895.
Janin, Jules. _L'Âne Mort et la Femme Guillotinée_, 1829; _Barnave_,
1831.