CHAPTER X

LESAGE, MARIVAUX, PREVOST, CREBILLON

The words which closed the last chapter should make it unnecessary to

prefix much of the same kind to this, though at the end we may have

again to summarise rather more fully.

[Sidenote: The subjects of the chapter.]

As was there observed, our figures here are, with the possible exception

of Crebillon _Fils_, "larger" persons than those dealt with before them;

and they also mark a further transition towards the condition--the

"employment or vocation"--of the novelist proper, though the polygraphic

habit which has grown upon all modern literature, and which began in

France almost earlier than anywhere else, affects them. Scarron was even

more of a dramatist than of a novelist; and though this was also the

case with Lesage and Marivaux--while Prevost was, save for his

masterpiece, a polygraph of the polygraphs--their work in fiction was

far larger, both positively and comparatively, than his. _Gil Blas_ for

general popularity, and _Manon Lescaut_ for enthusiastic admiration of

the elect, rank almost, if not quite, among the greatest novels of the

world. Marivaux, for all his irritating habit of leaving things

unfinished, and the almost equally irritating affectation of phrase, in

which he anticipated some English novelists of the late nineteenth and

earliest twentieth century, is almost the first "psychologist" of prose

fiction; that is to say, where Madame de la Fayette had taken the

soul-analysis of hardly more than two persons (Nemours scarcely counts)

in a single situation, Marivaux gives us an almost complete dissection

of the temperament and character of a girl and of a man under many

ordinary life-circumstances for a considerable time.

[Sidenote: Lesage--his Spanish connections.]

But we must begin, not with him but with Lesage, not merely as the older

man by twenty years, but in virtue of that comparative "greatness" of

his greatest work which has been glanced at. There is perhaps a doubt

whether _Gil Blas_ is as much read now as it used to be; it is pretty

certain that _Le Diable Boiteux_ is not. The certainty is a pity; and if

the doubt be true, it is a greater pity still. For more than a century

_Gil Blas_ was almost as much[309] a classic, either in the original or

in translation, in England as it was in France; and the delight which it

gave to thousands of readers was scarcely more important to the history

of fiction generally than the influence it exerted upon generation after

generation of novelists, not merely in its own country, but on the far

greater artists in fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth

century in England from Fielding to Scott, if not to Dickens. Now, I

suppose, that we are told to start with the axiom that even Fielding's

structure of humanity is a simple toy-like thing, how much more is

Lesage's? But for those of us who have not bowed the knee to foolish

modern Baals, "They reconciled us; we embraced, and we have since been

mortal enemies"; and the trout; and the soul of the licentiate; and Dr.

Sangrado; and the Archbishop of Granada--to mention only the most famous

and hackneyed matters--are still things a little larger, a little more

complex, a little more eternal and true, than webs of uninteresting

analysis told in phrase to which Marivaudage itself is golden and

honeyed Atticism.

Yet once more we can banish, with a joyful and quiet mind, a crowd of

idle fancies and disputes, apparently but not really affecting our

subjects. The myth of a direct Spanish origin for _Gil Blas_ is almost

as easily dispersible by the clear sun of criticism as the exaggeration

of the debt of the smaller book to Guevara. On the other hand, the

_general_ filiation of Lesage on his Spanish predecessors is undeniable,

and not worth even shading off and toning down. A man is not ashamed of

having good fathers and grandfathers, whose property he now enjoys,

before him in life; and why should he be in literature?

[Sidenote: Peculiarity of his work generally.]

Lesage's work, in fiction and out of it, is considerable in bulk, but it

is affected (to what extent disadvantageously different judges may judge

differently) by some of the peculiarities of the time which have been

already mentioned, and by some which have not. It is partly original,

partly mere translation, and partly also a mixture of the strangest

kind. Further, its composition took place in a way difficult to adjust

to later ideas. Lesage was not, like Marivaux, a professed and shameless

"_un_finisher," but he took a great deal of time to finish his

work.[310] He was not an early-writing author; and when he did begin, he

showed something of that same strange need of a suggestion, a

"send-off," or whatever anybody likes to call it, which appears even in

his greatest work. He began with the _Letters_ of Aristaenetus, which,

though perhaps they have been abused more than they deserve by people

who have never read them, and would never have heard of them if it had

not been for Alain Rene, are certainly not the things that most

scholars, with the whole range of Greek literature before them to choose

from, would have selected. His second venture was almost worse than his

first; for there _are_ some prettinesses in Aristaenetus, and except for

the one famous passage enshrined by Pope in the _Essay on Criticism_,

there is, I believe,[311] nothing good in the continuation of _Don

Quixote_ by the so-called Avellaneda. But at any rate this job, which

is attributed to the suggestion of the Abbe de Lyonne, "put" Lesage on

Spanish, and never did fitter seed fall on more fertile soil.

[Sidenote: And its variety.]

Longinus would, I think, have liked _Gil Blas_, and indeed Lesage, very

much. You might kill ten asses, of the tallest Poitou standard in size

and the purest Zoilus or Momus sub-variety in breed, under you while

going through his "faults." He translates; he borrows; he "plagiarises"

about as much as is possible for anybody who is not a mere dullard to

do. Of set plot there is nothing in his work, whether you take the two

famous pieces, or the major adaptations like _Estevanille Gonzales_ and

_Guzman d'Alfarache_, or the lesser things, more Lucianic than anything

else, such as the _Cheminees de Madrid_[312] and the _Journee des

Parques_ and the _Valise Trouvee_. "He worked for his living" (as M.

Anatole France long ago began a paper about him which is not quite the

best of its very admirable author's work), and though the pot never

boiled quite so merrily as the cook deserved, the fact of the

pot-boiling makes itself constantly felt. _Les chaines de l'esclavage_

must have cut deep into his soul, and the result of the cutting is

evident enough in his work. But the vital marks on that work are such as

many perfectly free men, who have wished to take literature as a

mistress only, have never been able to impress on theirs. He died full

of years, but scarcely of the honours due to him, failing in power, and

after a life[313] of very little luck, except as regards possession of a

wife who seems to have been beautiful in youth and amiable always, with

at least one son who observed the Fifth Commandment to the utmost. But

he lives among the immortals, and there are few names in our present

history which are of more importance to it than his.

Some of his best and least unequal work is indeed denied us. We have

nothing to do with his drama, though _Turcaret_ is something like a

masterpiece in comedy, and _Crispin Rival de son Maitre_ a capital

farce. We cannot even discuss that remarkable _Theatre de la Foire_,

which, though a mere collection of the lightest Harlequinades, has more

readable matter of literature in it than the whole English comic drama

since Sheridan, with the exception of the productions of the late Sir

William Gilbert.

Nor must much be said even of his minor novel work. The later

translations and adaptations from the Spanish need hardly any notice for

obvious reasons; whatever is good in them being either not his, or

better exemplified in the _Devil_ and in _Gil_. The extremely curious

and very Defoe-like book--almost if not quite his last--_Vie et

Aventures de M. de Beauchesne, Capitaine de Flibustiers_, is rather a

subject for a separate essay than for even a paragraph here. But Lesage,

from our point of view, is _Le Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_, and to

the _Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ let us accordingly turn.

[Sidenote: _Le Diable Boiteux._]

The relations of the earlier and shorter book to the _Diablo Cojuelo_ of

Luis Velez de Guevara are among the most open secrets of literature. The

Frenchman, in a sort of prefatory address to his Spanish parent and

original, has put the matter fairly enough; anybody who will take the

trouble can "control" or check the statement, by comparing the two books

themselves. The idea--the rescuing of an obliging demon from the grasp

of an enchanter, and his unroofing the houses of Madrid to amuse his

liberator--is entirely Guevara's, and for a not inconsiderable space of

time the French follows the Spanish closely. But then it breaks off, and

the remainder of the book is, except for the carrying out of the general

idea, practically original. The unroofing and revealing of secrets, from

being merely casual and confined to a particular neighbourhood, becomes

systematised: a lunatic asylum and a prison are subjected to the

process; a set of dreamers are obliged to deliver up what Queen Mab is

doing with them; and, as an incident, the student Don Cleofas, who has

freed Asmodeus,[314] gains through the friendly spirit's means a rich

and pretty bride whom the demon--naturally immune from fire--has rescued

in Cleofas's likeness from a burning house.

[Sidenote: Lesage and Boileau.]

The thing therefore neither has, nor could possibly pretend to have, any

merit as a plotted and constructed whole in fiction. It is merely a

variety of the old "framed" tale-collection, except that the frame is of

the thinnest; and the individual stories, with a few exceptions, are

extremely short, in fact little more than anecdotes. The power and

attraction of the book lie simply in the crispness of the style, the

ease and flow of the narrative, and the unfailing satiric knowledge of

human nature which animates the whole. As it stands, it is double its

original length; for Lesage, finding it popular, and never being under

the trammels of a fixed design, very wisely, and for a wonder not

unsuccessfully, gave it a continuation. And, except the equally obvious

and arbitrary one of the recapture of the spirit by the magician, it has

and could have no end. The most famous of the anecdotes about it is that

Boileau--in 1707 a very old man--found his page reading it, and declared

that such a book and such a critic as he should never pass a night under

the same roof. Boileau, though he often said rude, unjust, and

uncritical things, did not often say merely silly ones; and it has been

questioned what was his reason for objecting to a book by no means

shocking to anybody but Mrs. Grundy Grundified to the very _n_th,

excellently written, and quite free from the bombast and the

whimsicality which he loathed. Jealousy for Moliere,[315] to whom, in

virtue of _Turcaret_, Lesage had been set up as a sort of rival; mere

senile ill-temper, and other things have been suggested; but the matter

is of no real importance even if it is true. Boileau was one of the

least catholic and the most arbitrary critics who ever lived; he had

long made up and colophoned the catalogue of his approved library; he

did not see his son's coat on the new-comer, and so he cursed him. It is

not the only occasion on which we may bless what Boileau cursed.

[Sidenote: _Gil Blas_--its peculiar cosmopolitanism.]

_Gil Blas_, of course, is in every sense a "bigger" book of literature.

That it has, from the point of view of the straitest sect of the

Unitarians--and not of that sect only--much more unity than the

_Diable_, would require mere cheap paradox to contend. It has neither

the higher unity, say, of _Hamlet_, where every smallest scene and

almost personage is connected with the general theme; nor the lower

unity of such a thing as _Phedre_, where everything is pared down, or,

as Landor put it in his own case, "boiled off" to a meagre residuum of

theme special. It has, at the very most, that species of unity which

Aristotle did not like even in epic, that of a succession of events

happening to an individual; and while most of these might be omitted, or

others substituted for them, without much or any loss, they exist

without prejudice to mere additions to themselves. As the excellent Mr.

Wall, sometime Professor of Logic at Oxford, and now with God, used to

say, "Gentlemen, I can conceive an elephant," so one may conceive a _Gil

Blas_, not merely in five instead of four, but in fifty or five hundred

volumes. But, on the other hand, it has that still different unity (of

which Aristotle does not seem to have thought highly, even if he thought

of it at all), that all these miscellaneous experiences do not merely

happen to a person with the same name--they happen to the same

person.[316] And they have themselves yet another unity, which I hardly

remember any critic duly insisting on and discussing, in the fact that

they all are possibly human accidents or incidents. Though he was a

native of one of the most idiosyncratic provinces of not the least

idiosyncratic country in Europe, Lesage is a citizen not of Brittany,

not of France, not of Europe even, but of the world itself, in far more

than the usual sense of cosmopolitanism. He has indeed coloured

background and costume, incident and even personage itself so deeply

with essence of "things of Spain," that, as has been said, the

Spaniards, the most jealous of all nationalities except the smaller

Celtic tribes, have claimed his work for themselves. Yet though Spain

has one of the noblest languages, one of the greatest literatures in

quality if not in bulk, one of the most striking histories, and one of

the most intensely national characters in the world, it is--perhaps for

the very reason last mentioned--as little cosmopolitan as any country,

and Lesage, as has been said, is inwardly and utterly cosmopolitan or

nothing.

At Paris, at Rome, at the Hague he's at home;

and though he seems to have known little of England, and, as most

Frenchmen of his time had reason to do, to have disliked us, he has

certainly never been anywhere more at home than in London. In fact--and

it bears out what has been said--there is perhaps no capital in Europe

where, in the two hundred years he has had to nationalise himself,

Lesage has been less at home than at Paris itself. The French are of

course proud of him in a way, but there is hardly one of their great

writers about whom they have been less enthusiastic. The technical, and

especially the neo-classically technical, shortcomings which have been

pointed out may have had something to do with this; but the

cosmopolitanism has perhaps more.

[Sidenote: And its adoption of the _homme sensuel moyen_ fashion.]

For us Lesage occupies a position of immense importance in the history

of the French novel; but if we were writing a history of the novel at

large it would scarcely be lessened, and might even be relatively

larger. He had come to it perhaps by rather strange ways; but it is no

novelty to find that conjunction of road and goal. The Spanish

picaresque romance was not in itself a very great literary kind; but it

had in it a great faculty of _emancipation_. Outside the drama[317] it

was about the first division of literature to proclaim boldly the

refusal to consider anything human as alien from human literary

interest. But, as nearly always happens, it had exaggerated its

protests, and become sordid, merely in revolt from the high-flown

non-sordidness of previous romance. Lesage took the principle and

rejected the application. He dared, practically for the first time, to

take the average man of unheroic stamp, the _homme sensuel moyen_ of a

later French phrase, for his subject. _Gil Blas_ is not a virtuous

person,[318] but he is not very often an actual scoundrel.[319] (Is

there any of us who has never been a scoundrel at all at all?) He is

clever after his fashion, but he is not a genius; he is a little bit of

a coward, but can face it out fairly at a pinch; he has some luck and

ill-luck; but he does not come in for _montes et maria_, either of gold

or of misery. I have no doubt that the comparison of _Gil Blas_ and _Don

Quixote_ has often been made, and it would be rather an _excursus_ here.

But inferior as Lesage's work is in not a few ways, it has, like other

non-quintessential things, much more virtue as model and pattern.

Imitations of _Don Quixote_ (except Graves's capital book, where the

following is of the freest character) have usually been failures. It is

hardly an extravagance to say that every novel of miscellaneous

adventure since its date owes something, directly or indirectly, to _Gil

Blas_.

One of the "faults"--it must be understood that between "faults" with

inverted commas and faults without them there is a wide and sometimes an

unbridgeable gulf--lies in the fact that the book is after all not much

more of a whole, in any sense but that noted above, than _Le Diable

Boiteux_ itself. The innumerable incidents are to a very large extent

episodes merely, and episodes in the loose, not the precise, sense of

the term. That is to say, they are not merely detachable; they might be

reattached to almost any number of other stories. But the redeeming

feature--which is very much more than a _mere_ redeeming feature--is the

personality of the hero which has been already referred to. Lesage's

scrip and staff, to apply the old images exactly enough, are his

inexhaustible fertility in well-told stories and his faculty of

delineating a possible and interesting human character.

[Sidenote: Its inequality--in the Second and Fourth Books especially.]

The characteristics of the successive parts of _Gil Blas_ are distinct

and interesting, the distinctions themselves being also rather curious.

The anecdote cited above as to the Fourth and last volume is certainly

confirmed by, and does not seem, as so many anecdotes of the kind do, to

have been even possibly drawn from, the volume itself. Although the old

power is by no means gone, the marks of its failing are pretty obvious.

A glance has been given already to the unnecessary and disgusting

repetition of the Pandar business--made, as it is, more disgusting by

the distinctly tragic touch infused into it. The actual _finale_ is, on

the other hand, a good comedy ending of a commonplace kind, except that

a comic author, such as Lesage once had been on and off the stage, would

certainly have made _Gil Blas_ suffer in his second marriage for his

misdeeds of various kinds earlier, instead of leaving him in the not too

clean cotton or clover of an old rip with a good young wife. If he had

wanted a happy ending of a still conventional but satisfactory kind, he

should have married Gil to Laure or Estelle (they were, in modern slang,

sufficiently "shop-worn goods" not to be ill-mated, and Laure is perhaps

the most attractive character in the whole book); have legitimated

Lucrece, as by some odd crotchet he definitely refuses to do;[320] have

dropped the later Leporello business, in which his old love and her

daughter are concerned, altogether, and have left us in a mild sunset of

"reconciliation." If anybody scorns this suggestion as evidence of a

futile liking for "rose-pink," let him remember that Gil Blas,

_ci-devant picaro_ and other ugly things, is actually left lapped in an

Elysium not less improbable and much more undeserved than this. But it

is disagreeable to dwell on the shortcomings of age, and it has only

been done to show that this is a criticism and not a mere panegyric.

Oddly enough, the Second volume is also open to much exception of

something, though not quite, the same kind; it seems as if Lesage, after

making strong running, had a habit of nursing himself and even

going to sleep for a while. The more than questionable habit of

_histoire_-insertions revives; that of the rascal-hermit _picaro_, "Don

Raphael," is, as the author admits, rather long, and, as he might have

admitted, and as any one else may be allowed to say, very tiresome. Gil

Blas himself goes through a long period of occultation, and the whole

rather drags.

The First and the Third are the pillars of the house; and the Third,

though (with the exception of the episode of the Archbishop, and that

eternal sentence governing the relations of author and critic that "the

homily which has the misfortune not to be approved" by the one is the

very best ever produced by the other) not so well known, is perhaps even

better than anything in the First. But the later part has, of course,

not quite so much freshness; and nobody need want anything better than

the successive scenes, slightly glanced at already, in which Gil Blas is

taught, by no means finally,[321] the ways of the world; the pure

adventure interest of the robbers' cave, so admirably managed and so

little over-dwelt on; the experiences of travel and of the capital; the

vivid pictures of _petit maitre_ and actress life; the double

deception--thoroughly Spanish this, but most freshly and universally

handled--by Laure and Gil; many other well-known things; all deserve the

knowledge and the admiration that they have won. But the Third, in which

the hero is hardly ever off the scene from first to last, is my own

favourite. He shows himself--not at his best, but humanly enough--in the

affair with the ill-fated Lorenca, on which the Leyva family might have

looked less excusingly if the culprit had been anybody but Gil. The

Granada scenes, however, and not by any means merely those with the

Archbishop, are of the very first class; and the reappearance of Laure,

with the admirable coolness by which she hoodwinks her "keeper"

Marialva, yields to nothing in the book. For fifty pages it is all

novel-gold; and though Gil Blas, in decamping from the place, and

leaving Laure to bear the brunt of a possible discovery, commits one of

his least heroic deeds, it is so characteristic that one forgives, not

indeed him, but his creator. The whole of the Lerma part is excellent

and not in the least improbably impossible; there is infinitely more

"human natur'" in it, as Marryat's waterman would have said, than in the

_rechauffe_ of the situation with Olivares.

[Sidenote: Lesage's quality--not requiring many words, but

indisputable.]

The effect indeed which is produced, in re-reading, by _Le Diable

Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_, but especially by the latter, is of that

especial kind which is a sort of "_a posteriori_ intuition," if such a

phrase may be permitted, of "classical" quality.[322] This sensation,

which appears, unfortunately, to be unknown to a great many people, is

sometimes set down by the more critical or, let us say, the more

censorious of them, to a sort of childish prepossession--akin to that

which makes a not ill-conditioned child fail to discover any

uncomeliness in his mother's or a favourite nurse's face. There is no

retort to such a proposition as this so proper as the argument not _ad

hominem_, but _ab_ or _ex homine_. The present writer did not read the

_Devil_ till he had reached quite critical years; and though he read

_Gil Blas_ much earlier, he was not (for what reason he cannot say)

particularly fond of it until the same period was reached. And yet its

attractions cannot possibly be said to be of any recondite or artificial

kind, and its defects are likely to be more, not less, recognised as the

critical faculty acquires strength and practice. Nevertheless, recent

reperusal has made him more conscious than ever of the existence of this

quality of a classic in both, but especially in the larger and more

famous book. And this is a mere pailful added to an ocean of previous

and more important testimony. _Gil Blas_ has certainly "classed" itself

in the most various instances, of essentially critical, not specially

critical but generally acute and appreciative, and more or less

unsophisticated and ordinary judgments, as a thing that is past all

question, equally enjoyable for its incidents, its character-sketches,

and its phrasing--though the first are (for time and country) in no

sense out of the way, the second scarcely go beyond the individualised

type, and the third is neither gorgeous nor "alambicated," as the French

say, nor in any way peculiar, except for its saturation with a sharp,

shrewd, salt wit which may be described as the spirit of the popular

proverb, somehow bodied and clothed with more purely literary form. It

is true that, in the last few clauses, plenty of ground has been

indicated for ascription of classicality in the best sense; and perhaps

Lesage himself has summed the whole thing up when, in the "Declaration"

of the author at the beginning of _Gil Blas_, he claims "to have set

before himself only the representation of human life as it is." He has

said it; and in saying and doing it he has said and done everything for

his merits as a novelist and his place in the history of the novel.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Marivaux--_Les Effets de la Sympathie (?)_]

The Archbishop of Sens, who had the duty of "answering" Marivaux's

"discourse of reception" into the Academy in the usual _aigre-doux_

manner, informed him, with Academic frankness and Archiepiscopal

propriety, that "in the small part of your work which I have run

through, I soon recognised that the reading of these agreeable romances

did not suit the austere dignity with which I am invested, or the purity

of the ideas which religion prescribes me." This was all in the game,

both for an Academician and for an Archbishop, and it probably did not

discompose the novelist much. But if his Grace had read _Les Effets de

la Sympathie_, and had chosen to criticise it, he might have made its

author (always supposing that Marivaux _was_ its author, which does not

seem to be at all certain) much more uncomfortable. Although there is

plenty of incident, it is but a dull book, and it contains not a trace

of "Marivaudage" in style. A hero's father, who dies of poison in the

first few pages, and is shown to have been brought round by an obliging

gaoler in the last few; a hero himself, who thinks he has fallen in love

with a beautiful and rich widow, playing good Samaritaness to him after

he has fallen in among thieves, but a page or two later really does fall

in love with a fair unknown looking languishingly out of a window; a

_corsaire_,[323] with the appropriate name of Turcamene, who is

robustious almost from the very beginning, and receives at the end a

fatal stab with his own poniard from the superfluous widow, herself also

fatally wounded at the same moment by the same weapon (an economy of

time, incident, and munitions uncommon off the stage); an intermediate

personage who, straying--without any earthly business there--into one of

those park "pavilions" which play so large a part in these romances,

finds a lady asleep on the sofa, with her hand invitingly dropped,

promptly kneels down, and kisses it: these and many other things fill up

a Spanish kind of story, not uningeniously though rather improbably

engineered, but dependent for its interest almost wholly on incident;

for though it is not devoid of conversation, this conversation is

without spirit or sparkle. It is, in fact, a "circulating library" novel

before--at any rate at an early period of--circulating libraries: not

unworkmanlike, probably not very unsatisfactory to its actual readers,

and something of a document as to the kind of satisfaction they

demanded; but not intrinsically important.

One has not seen much, in English,[324] about Marivaux, despite the

existence, in French, of one of the best[325] of those monographs which

assist the foreign critic so much, and sometimes perhaps help to beget

his own lucubrations. Yet he is one of the most interesting writers of

France, one of the most curious, and, one may almost say, one of the

most puzzling. This latter quality he owes, in part at least, to a

"skiey influence" of the time, which he shares with Lesage and Prevost,

and indeed to some extent with most French writers of the eighteenth

century--the influence of the polygraphic habit.

[Sidenote: His work in general.]

He was a dramatist, and a voluminous one, long before he was a novelist:

and some of his thirty or forty plays, especially _Les Fausses

Confidences_ and _Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard_, still rank among at

least the second-class classics of the French comic stage. He tried, for

a time, one of the worst kinds of merely fashionable literature, the

travesty-burlesque.[326] He was a journalist, following Addison openly

in the title, and to some extent in the manner, of _Le Spectateur_,

which he afterwards followed by _Le Cabinet d'un Philosophe_, showing,

however, here, as he was more specially tempted to do, his curious, and

it would seem unconquerable, habit of leaving things unfinished, which

only does not appear in his plays, for the simple and obvious reason

that managers will not put an unfinished play on the stage, and that, if

they did, the afterpiece would be premature and of a very lively

character. But the completeness of his very plays is incomplete; they

"run huddling" to their conclusion, and are rather bundles of good or

not so good acts and scenes than entire dramas. We are, however, only

concerned with the stories, of which there are three: the early,

complete, but doubtful _Effets de la Sympathie_, already discussed; the

central in every way, but endlessly dawdled over, _Marianne_, which

never got finished at all (though Mme. Riccoboni continued it in

Marivaux's own lifetime, and with his placid approval, and somebody

afterwards botched a clumsy _Fin_); and _Le Paysan Parvenu_, the latter

part of which is not likely to be genuine, and, even if so, is not a

real conclusion. We may, however, with some, advantage, take it before

_Marianne_, if only because it is not the book generally connected with

its author's name.

[Sidenote: _Le Paysan Parvenu._]

Notwithstanding this comparative oblivion, _Le Paysan Parvenu_ is an

almost astonishingly clever and original book, at least as far as the

five of its eight parts, which are certainly Marivaux's, go. I have read

the three last twice critically, at a long interval of time, and I feel

sure that the positive internal evidence confirms, against their

authenticity, the negative want of external for it. In any case they add

nothing--they do not, as has been said, even really "conclude"--and we

may, therefore, without any more apology, confine ourselves to the part

which is certain. Some readers may possibly know that when that

strangest of strange persons, Restif de la Bretonne (see the last

chapter of this book), took up the title with the slight change or gloss

of _Parvenu_ to _Perverti_, he was at least partly actuated by his own

very peculiar, but distinctly existing, variety of moral indignation.

And though Pierre Carlet (which was Marivaux's real name) and "Monsieur

Nicolas" (which was as near a real name as any that Restif had) were,

the one a quite respectable person on ordinary standards, and the other

an infinitely disreputable creature, still the later novelist was

perhaps ethically justified. Marivaux's successful rustic does not, so

far as we are told, actually do anything that contravenes popular

morality, though he is more than once on the point of doing so. He is

not a bad-blooded person either; and he has nothing of the wild-beast

element in the French peasantry which history shows us from the

Jacquerie to the Revolution, and which some folk try to excuse as the

result of aristocratic tyranny. But he is an elaborate and exceedingly

able portrait of another side of the peasant, and, if we may trust

literature, even with some administration of salt, of the French peasant

more particularly. He is what we may perhaps be allowed to call

unconsciously determined to get on, though he does not go quite to the

length of the _quocunque modo_, and has, as far as men are concerned,

some scruples. But in relation to the other sex he has few if any,

though he is never brutal. He is, as we may say, first "perverted,"

though not as yet _parvenu_,[327] in the house of a Parisian, himself a

_nouveau riche_ and _novus homo_, on whose property in Champagne his own

father is a wine-farmer. He is early selected for the beginnings of

Lady-Booby-like attentions by "Madame," while he, as far as he is

capable of the proceeding, falls in love with one of Madame's maids,

Genevieve. It does not appear that, if the lady's part of the matter had

gone further, Jacob (that is his name) would have been at all like

Joseph. But when he finds that the maid is also the object of

"Monsieur's" attentions, and when he is asked to take the profits of

this affair (the attitude[328] of the girl herself is very skilfully

delineated) and marry her, his own _point d'honneur_ is reached.[329]

Everything is, however, cut short by the sudden death, in hopelessly

embarrassed circumstances, of Monsieur, and the consequent cessation of

Madame's attraction for a young man who wishes to better himself. He

leaves both her and Genevieve with perfect nonchalance; though he has

good reason for believing that the girl really loves him, however she

may have made a peculiar sort of hay when the sun shone, and that both

she and his lady are penniless, or almost so.

He has, however, the luck which makes the _parvenu_, if in this instance

he can hardly be said to deserve it. On the Pont Neuf he sees an elderly

lady, apparently about to swoon. He supports her home, and finds that

she is the younger and more attractive of two old-maid and _devote_

sisters. The irresistibleness to this class of the feminine sex (and

indeed by no means to this class only) of a strapping and handsome

footman is a commonplace of satire with eighteenth-century writers, both

French and English. It is exercised possibly on both sisters, though the

elder is a shrew; certainly on the younger, and also on their elderly

_bonne_, Catherine. But it necessarily leads to trouble. The younger,

Mlle. Habert (the curious hiding of Christian names reappears here),

wants to retain Jacob in the joint service, and Catherine at least makes

no objection, for obvious reasons. But the elder sister recalcitrates

violently, summoning to her aid her "director," and the younger, who is

financially independent,[330] determines to leave the house. She does so

(_not_ taking Catherine with her, though the _bonne_ would willingly

have shared Jacob's society), and having secured lodgings, regularly

proposes to her (the word may be used almost accurately) "swain." Jacob

has no scruples of delicacy here, though the nymph is thirty years older

than himself, and though he has, if no dislike, no particular affection

for her. But it is an obvious step upwards, and he makes no

difficulties. The elder sister, however, makes strong efforts to forbid

the banns, and her interest prevails on a "President" (the half-regular

power of the French _noblesse de robe_, though perhaps less violently

exercised, must have been almost as galling as the irresponsibleness of

men of birth and "sword") to interpose and actually stop the arranged

ceremony. But Jacob appears in person, and states his case convincingly;

the obstacle is removed, and the pair are made happy at an extraordinary

hour (two or three in the morning), which seems to have been then

fashionable for marriages. The conventional phrase is fairly justified;

for the bride is completely satisfied, and Jacob is not displeased.

His marriage, however, interferes not in the very least with his

intention to "get on" by dint of his handsome face and brawny figure. On

the very day of his wedding he goes to visit a lady of position, and

also of devoutness, who is a great friend of the President and his wife,

has been present at the irregular enquiry, and has done something for

him. This quickly results in a regular assignation, which, however, is

comically broken off. Moreover this lady introduces him to another of

the same temperament--which indeed seems to have been common with French

ladies (the Bellaston type being not the exception, but the rule). _She_

is to introduce him to her brother-in-law, an influential financier, and

she quickly makes plain the kind of gratitude she expects. This also is,

as far as we are told, rather comically interfered with--Marivaux's

dramatic practice made him good at these disappointments. She does give

the introduction, and her brother-in-law, though a curmudgeon, is at

first disposed to honour her draft. But here an unexpected change is

made by the presentation of Jacob as a man of noble sentiment. The place

he is to have is one taken from an invalid holder of it, whose wife

comes to beg mercy: whereat Jacob, magnanimously and to the financier's

great wrath, declines to profit by another's misfortune. Whether the

fact that the lady is very pretty has anything to do with the matter

need not be discussed. His--let us call it at least--good nature,

however, indirectly makes his fortune. Going to visit the husband and

wife whom he has obliged, he sees a young man attacked by three enemies

and ill-bested. Jacob (who is no coward, and, thanks to his wife

insisting on his being a gentleman and "M. de la Vallee," has a sword)

draws and uses it on the weaker side, with no skill whatever, but in the

downright, swash-and-stab, short- and tall-sailor fashion, which (in

novels at least) is almost always effective. The assailants decamp, and

the wounded but rescued person, who is of very high rank, conceives a

strong friendship for his rescuer, and, as was said above, makes his

fortune. The last and doubtful three-eighths of the book kill off poor

Mlle. Habert (who, although Jacob would never have been unkind to her,

was already beginning to be very jealous and by no means happy), and

marry him again to a younger lady of rank, beauty, fashion, and fortune,

in the imparted possession of all of which we leave him. But, except to

the insatiables of "what happened next," these parts are as questionably

important as they are decidedly doubtful.

The really important points of the book are, in the first place, the

ease and narrative skill with which the story is told in the difficult

form of autobiography, and, secondly, the vivacity of the characters.

Jacob himself is, as will have been seen already, a piebald sort of

personage, entirely devoid of scruple in some ways, but not ill-natured,

and with his own points of honour. He is perfectly natural, and so are

all the others (not half of whom have been mentioned) as far as they go.

The cross sister and the "kind" one; the false prude and false _devote_

Mme. de Ferval, and the jolly, reckless, rather coarse Mme. de Fecour;

the tyrannical, corrupt, and licentious financier, with others more

slightly drawn, are seldom, if ever, out of drawing. The contemporary

wash of colour passes, as it should, into something "fast"; you are in

the Paris of the Regency, but you are at the same time in general human

time and place, if not in eternity and infinity.

[Sidenote: _Marianne_--outline of the story.]

The general selection, however, of _Marianne_ as Marivaux's masterpiece

is undoubtedly right, though in more ways than one it has less engaging

power than the _Paysan_, and forebodes to some extent, if it does not

actually display, the boring qualities which novels of combined analysis

and jargon have developed since. The opening is odd: the author having

apparently transplanted to the beginning of a novel the promiscuous

slaughter with which we are familiar at the end of a play. Marianne (let

us hail the appearance of a Christian-named heroine at last), a small

child of the tenderest years, is, with the exception of an ecclesiastic,

who takes to his heels and gets off, the sole survivor of a coachful of

travellers who are butchered by a gang of footpads,[331] because two of

the passengers have rashly endeavoured to defend themselves. Nothing can

be found out about the child--an initial improbability, for the party

has consisted of father, mother, and servants, as well as Marianne. But

the good _cure_ of the place and his sister take charge of her, and

bring her up carefully (they are themselves "gentle-people," as the good

old phrase, now doubtless difficult of application, went) till she is

fifteen, is very pretty, and evidently must be disposed of in some way,

for her guardians are poor and have no influential relations. The

sister, however, takes her to Paris--whither she herself goes to secure,

if possible, the succession of a relative--to try to obtain some

situation. But the inheritance proves illusory; the sister falls ill at

Paris and dies there; while the brother is disabled, and his living has

to be, if not transferred to, provided with, a substitute. This second

massacre (for the brother dies soon) provides Marivaux with the

situation he requires--that of a pretty girl, alone in the capital, and

absolutely unfriended. Fortunately a benevolent Director knows a pious

gentleman, M. de Climal, who is fond of doing good, and also, as it

appears shortly by the story, of pretty girls. Marianne, with the

earliest touch of distinct "snobbishness"--let it be proudly pointed out

that the example is not English,[332]--declines to go into service, but

does not so much mind being a shop-girl, and M. de Climal establishes

her with his _lingere_, a certain Mme. Dutour.

This good lady is no procuress, but her morals are of a somewhat

accommodating kind, and she sets to work, experiencing very little

difficulty in the process, to remove Marianne's scruples about accepting

presents from M. de Climal--pointing out, very logically, that there is

no obligation to (as Chesterfield put it not long after) _payer de sa

personne_; though she is naturally somewhat disgusted when the gifts

take the form of handsome _lingerie_ bought at another shop. When this,

and a dress to match, are made up, Marianne as naturally goes to church

to show them: and indulges in very shrewd if not particularly amiable

remarks on her "even-Christians"--a delightful English archaism, which

surely needs no apology for its revival. Coming out, she slips and

sprains her ankle, whereupon, still naturally, appears the inevitable

young man, a M. de Valville, who, after endless amicable wrangling,

procures her a coach, but not without an awkward meeting. For M. de

Valville turns out to be the nephew of M. de Climal; and the uncle, with

a lady, comes upon the nephew and Marianne; while, a little later, each

finds the other in turn at the girl's feet. Result: of course more than

suspicion on the younger man's part, and a mixture of wrath and desire

to hurry matters on the elder's. He offers Marianne a regular (or

irregular) "establishment" at a dependent's of his own, with a small

income settled upon her, etc. She refuses indignantly, the indignation

being rather suspiciously divided between her two lovers; is "planted

there" by the old sinner Climal, and of course requested to leave by

Mme. Dutour; returns all the presents, much to her landlady's disgust,

and once more seeks, though in a different mood, the shelter of the

Church. Her old helper the priest for some time absolutely declines to

admit the notion of Climal's rascality; but fortunately a charitable

lady is more favourable, and Marianne gets taken in as a _pensionnaire_

at a convent. Climal, whose sister and Valville's mother the lady turns

out to be, falls ill, repents, confesses, and leaves Marianne a

comfortable annuity. Union with Valville is not opposed by the mother;

but other members of the family are less obliging, and Valville himself

wanders after an English girl of a Jacobite exiled family, Miss Warton

(Varthon). The story then waters itself out, before suddenly collapsing,

with a huge and uninteresting _Histoire d'une Religieuse_. Whereat some

folk may grumble; but others, more philosophically, may be satisfied, in

no uncomplimentary sense, without hearing what finally made Marianne

Countess of Three Stars, or indeed knowing any more of her actual

history.

For in fact the entire interest of _Marianne_ is concentrated in and on

Marianne herself, and the fact that this is so at once makes

continuation superfluous, and gives the novel its place in the history

of fiction. We have quite enough, as it is, to show us--as the Princess

Augusta said to Fanny Burney of the ill-starred last of French "Mesdames

Royales"--"what sort of a girl she is." And her biographer has made her

a very interesting sort of girl, and himself in making her so, a very

interesting, and almost entirely novel, sort of novelist. To say that

she is a wholly attractive character would be entirely false, except

from the point of view of the pure student of art. She is technically

virtuous, which is, of course, greatly to her credit.[333] She is not

bad-blooded, but if there were such a word as "good-blooded" it could

hardly be applied to her. With all her preserving borax- or

formalin-like touch of "good form," she is something of a minx. She is

vain, selfish--in fact wrapped up in self--without any sense of other

than technical honour. But she is very pretty (which covers a multitude

of sins), and she is really clever.

[Sidenote: Importance of Marianne herself.]

Yet the question at issue is not whether one can approve of Marianne,

nor whether one can like her, nor even whether, approving and liking her

or not, one could fall in love with her "for her comely face and for her

fair bodie," as King Honour did in the ballad, and as _homo rationalis_

usually, though not invariably, does fall in love. The question is

whether Marivaux has, in her, created a live girl, and to what extent he

has mastered the details of his creation. The only critical answer, I

think, must be that he has created such a girl, and that he has not left

her a mere outline or type, but has furnished the house as well as built

it. She is, in the particular meaning on which Mr. Hardy's defenders

insist, as "pure" a "woman" as Tess herself. And if there is a good deal

missing from her which fortunately some women have, there is nothing in

her which some women have not, and not so very much which the majority

of women have not, in this or that degree. It is difficult not to smile

when one compares her quintessence with the complicated and elusive

caricatures of womanhood which some modern novel-writers--noisily hailed

as _gyno_sophists--have put together, and been complimented on putting

together. What is more, she is perhaps the first nearly complete

character of the kind that had been presented in novel at her date. This

is a great thing to say for Marivaux, and it can be said without the

slightest fear of inability to support the saying.[334]

[Sidenote: Marivaux and Richardson--"Marivaudage."]

Although, therefore, we may not care much to enter into calculations as

to the details of the indebtedness of Richardson to Marivaux, some

approximations of the two, for critical purposes, may be useful. One may

even see, without too much folly of the Thaumast kind, an explanation,

beyond that of mere idleness, in the Frenchman's inveterate habit of not

completing. He did not want you to read him "for the story"; and

therefore he cared little for the story itself, and nothing at all for

the technical finishing of it. The stories of both his characteristic

novels are, as has been fairly shown, of the very thinnest. What he did

want to do was to analyse and "display," in a half-technical sense of

that word, his characters; and he did this as no man had done before

him, and as few have done since, though many, quite ignorant of their

indebtedness, have taken the method from him indirectly. In the second

place, his combination of method and phrase is for infinite thoughts.

This combination is not necessary; there is, to take up the comparative

line, nothing of it in Richardson, nothing in Fielding, nothing in

Thackeray. A few French eighteenth-century writers have it in direct

imitation of Marivaux himself; but it dies out in France, and in the

greatest novel-period there is nothing of it. It revives in the later

nineteenth century, especially with us, and, curiously enough, if we

look back to the beginnings of Romance in Greek, there is a good deal

there, the crown and flower being, as has been before remarked, in

Eustathius Macrembolita, but something being noticeable in earlier folk,

especially Achilles Tatius, and the trick having evidently come from

those rhetoricians[335] of whose class the romancers were a kind of

offshoot. It is, however, only fair to say that, if Marivaux thought in

intricate and sometimes startling ways, his actual expression is never

obscure. It is a maze, but a maze with an unbroken clue of speech

guiding you through it.[336]

[Sidenote: Examples:--Marianne on the _physique_ and _moral_ of

Prioresses and Nuns.]

A few examples of method and style may now be given. Here is Marianne's

criticism--rather uncannily shrewd and very characteristic both of her

subject and of herself--of that peculiar placid plumpness which has been

observed by the profane in devout persons, especially in the Roman

Church and in certain dissenting sects (Anglicanism does not seem to be

so favourable to it), and in "persons of religion" (in the technical

sense) most of all.

This Prioress was a short little person, round and white,

with a double chin, and a complexion at once fresh and

placid. You never see faces like that in worldly persons: it

is a kind of _embonpoint_ quite different from others--one

which has been formed more quietly and more

methodically--that is to say, something into which there

enters more art, more fashioning, nay, more self-love, than

into that of such as we.[337]

As a rule, it is either temperament, or feeding, or laziness

and luxury, which give _us_ such of it as we have. But in

order to acquire the kind of which I am speaking, it is

necessary to have given oneself up with a saintlike

earnestness to the task. It can only be the result of

delicate, loving, and devout attention to the comfort and

well-being of the body. It shows not only that life--and a

healthy life--is an object of desire, but that it is wanted

soft, undisturbed, and dainty; and that, while enjoying the

pleasures of good health, the person enjoying it bestows on

herself all the pettings and the privileges of a perpetual

convalescence.

Also this religious plumpness is different in outward form

from ours, which is profane of aspect; it does not so much

make a face fat, as it makes it grave and decent; and so it

gives the countenance an air, not so much joyous, as

tranquil and contented.

Further, when you look at these good ladies, you find in

them an affable exterior; but perhaps, for all that, an

interior indifference. Their faces, and not their souls,

give you sympathy and tenderness; they are comely images,

which seem to possess sensibility, and which yet have merely

a surface of kindness and sentiment.[338]

Acute as this is, it may be said to be somewhat displaced--though it

must be remembered that it is the Marianne of fifty, "Mme. la Comtesse

de * * *," who is supposed to be writing, not the Marianne of fifteen.

No such objection can be taken to what follows.

[_She is, after the breach with Climal, and after Valville has earlier

discovered his wicked uncle on his knees before her, packing up

the--well! not wages of iniquity, but baits for it--to send back to the

giver. A little "cutting" may be made._]

[Sidenote: She returns the gift-clothes.]

Thereupon I opened my trunk to take out first the newly

bought linen. "Yes, M. de Valville, yes!" said I, pulling it

out, "you shall learn to know me and to think of me as you

ought." This thought spurred me on, so that, without my

exactly thinking of it, it was rather to him than to his

uncle that I was returning the whole, all the more so that

the return of linen, dress, and money, with a note I should

write, could not fail to disabuse Valville, and make him

regret the loss of me. He had seemed to me to possess a

generous soul; and I applauded myself beforehand on the

sorrow which he would feel at having treated so

outrageously a girl so worthy of respectful treatment as I

was--for I saw in myself, confessedly, I don't know how many

titles to respect.

In the first place I put my bad luck, which was unique; to

add to this bad luck I had virtue, and they went so well

together! Then I was young, and on the top of it all I was

pretty, and what more do you want? If I had arranged matters

designedly to render myself an object of sympathy, to make a

generous lover sigh at having maltreated me, I could not

have succeeded better; and, provided I hurt Valville's

feelings, I was satisfied. My little plan was never to see

him again in my lifetime; and this seemed to me a very fair

and proud one; for I loved him, and I was even very glad to

have loved him, because he had perceived my love, and,

seeing me break with him, notwithstanding, would see also

what a heart he had had to do with.

The little person goes on very delectably describing the packing, and

how she grudged getting rid of the pretty things, and at last sighed and

wept--whether for herself, or Valville, or the beautiful gown, she

didn't know. But, alas! there is no more room, except to salute her as

the agreeable ancestress of all the beloved coquettes and piquant minxes

in prose fiction since. Could anything handsomer be said of her creator?

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Prevost.]

[Sidenote: His minor novels--the opinions on them of Sainte-Beuve.]

[Sidenote: And of Planche.]

It is, though an absolute and stereotyped commonplace, an almost equally

absolute necessity, to begin any notice of the Abbe Prevost by remarking

that nothing of his voluminous work is now, or has been for a long time,

read, except _Manon Lescaut_. It may be added, though one is here

repeating predecessors to not quite the same extent, that nothing else

of his, in fiction at least, is worth reading. The faithful few who do

not dislike old criticism may indeed turn over his _Le Pour et [le]

Contre_ not without reward. But his historical and other

compilations[339]--his total production in volumes is said to run over

the hundred, and the standard edition of his _Oeuvres Choisies_

extends to thirty-nine not small ones--are admittedly worthless. As to

his minor novels--if one may use that term, albeit they are as major in

bulk as they are minor in merit--opinions of importance, and presumably

founded on actual knowledge, have differed somewhat strangely.

Sainte-Beuve made something of a fight for them, but it was the

Sainte-Beuve of almost the earliest years (1831), when, according to a

weakness of beginners in criticism, he was a little inclined "to be

different," for the sake of difference. Against _Cleveland_ even he

lifts up his heel, though in a rather unfortunate manner, declaring the

reading of the greater part to be "aussi fade que celle d'_Amadis_." Now

to some of us the reading of _Amadis_ is not "fade" at all. But he finds

some philosophical and psychological passages of merit. Over the

_Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_--that huge and unwieldy galleon to

which the frail shallop of _Manon_ was originally attached, and which

has long been stranded on the reefs of oblivion, while its fly-boat

sails for ever more--he is quite enthusiastic, finds it, though with a

certain relativity, "natural," "frank," and "well-preserved," gives it a

long analysis, actually discovers in it "an inexpressible savour"

surpassing modern "local colour," and thinks the handling of it

comparable in some respects to that of _The Vicar of Wakefield_! The

_Doyen de Killerine_--the third of Prevost's long books--is "infinitely

agreeable," "si l'on y met un peu de complaisance." (The Sainte-Beuve of

later years would have noticed that an infinity which has to be made

infinite by a little complaisance is curiously finite). The later and

shorter _Histoire d'une Grecque moderne_ is a _joli roman_, and

_gracieux_, though it is not so charming and subtle as Crebillon _fils_

would have made it, and is "knocked off rather haphazardly." Another

critic of 1830, now perhaps too much forgotten, Gustave Planche, does

not mention the _Grecque_, and brushes aside the three earlier and

bigger books rather hastily, though he allows "interest" to both

_Cleveland_ and the _Doyen_. Perhaps, before "coming to real things" (as

Balzac once said of his own work) in _Manon_, some remarks, not long,

but first-hand, and based on actual reading at more than one time of

life, as to her very unreal family, may be permitted here, though they

may differ in opinion from the judgment of these two redoubtable

critics.

[Sidenote: The books themselves--_Histoire d'une Grecque Moderne_.]

I do not think that when I first wrote about Prevost (I had read _Manon_

long before) more than thirty years ago, in a _Short History of French

Literature_, I paid very much attention to these books. I evidently had

not read the _Grecque Moderne_, for I said nothing about it. Of the

others I said only that they are "romances of adventure, occupying a

middle place between those of Lesage and Marivaux." It is perfectly

true, but of course not very "in-going," and whatever reading I then

gave any of them had not left very much impression on my mind, when

recently, and for the purpose of the present work, I took them up again,

and the _Histoire_ as well. This last is the story of a young modern

Greek slave named Theophe (a form of which the last syllable seems more

modern than Greek), who is made visible in full harem by her

particularly complaisant master, a Turkish pasha, to a young Frenchman,

admired and bought by this Frenchman (the relater of the story), and

freed by him. He does not at first think of making her his mistress, but

later does propose it, only to meet a refusal of a somewhat

sentimental-romantic character, though she protests not merely

gratitude, but love for him. The latter part of the book is occupied by

what Sainte-Beuve calls "delicate" ambiguities, which leave us in doubt

whether her "cruelty" is shown to others as well, or whether it is not.

In suggesting that Crebillon would have made it charming, the great

critic has perhaps made another of those slips which show the novitiate.

The fact is that it is an exceedingly dull book: and that to have made

it anything else, while retaining anything like its present "propriety,"

either an entire metamorphosis of spirit, which might have made it as

passionate as _Manon_ itself, or the sort of filigree play with thought

and phrase which Marivaux would have given, would be required. As a

"Crebillonnade" (_v. inf._) it might have been both pleasant and subtle,

but it could only have been made so by becoming exceedingly indecent.

[Sidenote: _Cleveland._]

Still, its comparative (though only comparative) shortness, and a

certain possibility rather than actuality of interest in the

situation,[340] may recommend this novel at least to mercy. If the

present writer were on a jury trying _Cleveland_, no want of food or

fire should induce him to endorse any such recommendation in regard to

that intolerable book. It is, to speak frankly, one of the very few

books--one of the still fewer novels--which I have found it practically

impossible to read even in the "skim and skip and dip" fashion which

should, no doubt, be only practised as a work of necessity (_i.e._ duty

to others) and of mercy (to oneself) on extraordinary occasions, but

which nobody but a prig and a pedant will absolutely disallow. Almost

the only good thing I can find to say about it is that Prevost, who

lived indeed for some time in England, is now and then, if not always,

miraculously correct in his proper names. He can actually spell

Hammersmith! Other merit--and this is not constant (in the dips which I

have actually made, to rise exhausted from each, and skip rather than

even skim to the rest)--I can find none. The beginning is absurd and

rather offensive, the hero being a natural son of Cromwell by a woman

who has previously been the mistress of Charles I. The continuation is a

mish-mash of adventure, sometimes sanguinary, but never exciting, travel

(in fancy parts of the West Indies, etc.), and the philosophical

disputations which Sainte-Beuve found interesting. As for the end, no

two persons seem quite agreed what _is_ the end. Sainte-Beuve speaks of

it as an attempted suicide of the hero--the most justifiable of all his

actions, if he had succeeded. Prevost himself, in the Preface to the

_Doyen de Killerine_, repeats an earlier disavowal (which he says he

had previously made in Holland) of a fifth volume, and says that his own

work ended with the murder of Cleveland by one of the characters. Again,

this is a comprehensible and almost excusable action, and might have

followed, though it could not have preceded, the other. But if it was

the end, the other was not. A certain kind of critic may say that it is

my duty to search and argue this out. But, for my part, I say as a

reader to _Cleveland_, "No more _in_ thee my steps shall be, For ever

and for ever."[341]

[Sidenote: _Le Doyen de Killerine._]

_Le Doyen de Killerine_ is not perhaps so utterly to be excommunicated

as _Cleveland_, and, as has been said above, some have found real

interest in it. It is not, however, free either from the

preposterousness or from the dulness of the earlier book, though the

first characteristic is less preposterous as such preposterousness goes.

The Dean of Killerine (Coleraine) is a Roman Catholic dean, just after

the expulsion of James II., when, we learn with some surprise, that

neighbourhood was rather specially full of his co-religionists. He is a

sort of _lusus naturae_, being bow-legged, humpbacked, potbellied, and

possessing warts on his brows, which make him a sort of later horned

Moses. The eccentricity of his appearance is equalled by that of his

conduct. He is the eldest son of an Irish gentleman (nobleman, it would

sometimes seem), and his father finds a pretty girl who is somehow

willing to marry him. But, feeling no vocation for marriage, he suggests

to her (a suggestion perhaps unique in fiction if not in fact) that she

should marry his father instead. This singular match comes off, and a

second family results, the members of which are, fortunately, not _lusus

naturae_, but a brace of very handsome and accomplished boys, George and

Patrick, and an extremely pretty girl, Rosa. Of these three, their

parents dying when they are something short of full age, the excellent

dean becomes a sort of guardian. He takes them to the exiled court of

Versailles, and his very hen-like anxieties over the escapades of these

most lively ducklings supply the main subject of the book. It might have

been made amusing by humorous treatment, but Prevost had no humour in

him: and it might have been made thrilling by passion, but he never,

except in the one great little instance, compressed or distilled his

heaps and floods of sensibility and sensationalism into that. The scene

where a wicked Mme. de S---- plays, and almost outplays, Potiphar's wife

to the good but hideous Dean's Joseph is one of the most curious in

novel-literature, though one of the least amusing.

[Sidenote: The _Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_.]

We may now go back to the _Memoires_, partly in compliment to the master

of all mid-nineteenth-century critics, but more because of their almost

fortuitous good luck in ushering _Manon_ into the world. There is

something in them of both their successors, _Cleveland_ and the _Doyen_,

but it may be admitted that they are less unreadable than the first, and

less trivial than the second. The plan--if it deserve that name--is odd,

one marquis first telling his own fortunes and voyages and whatnots, and

then serving as Mentor (the application, though of course not original,

is inevitable) to another marquis in further voyages and adventures.

There are Turkish brides and Spanish murdered damsels; English politics

and literature, where, unfortunately, the spelling _does_ sometimes

break down; glances backward, in "Histoires" of the _Grand Siecle_, at

meetings with Charles de Sevigne, Racine, etc.; mysterious remedies, a

great deal of moralising, and a great deal more of weeping. Indeed the

whole of Prevost, like the whole of that "Sensibility Novel" of which he

is a considerable though rather an outside practitioner, is pervaded

with a gentle rain of tears wherein the personages seem to revel--indeed

admit that they do so--in the midst of their woes.

[Sidenote: Its miscellaneous curiosities.]

On the whole, however, the youthful--or almost youthful--half-wisdom of

Sainte-Beuve is better justified of its preference for the _Memoires_

than of other things in the same article. I found it, reading it later

on purpose and with "preventions" rather the other way, very much more

readable than any of its companions (_Manon_ is not its companion, but

in a way its constituent), without being exactly readable _simpliciter_.

All sorts of curious things might be dug out of it: for instance, quite

at the beginning, a more definite declaration than I know elsewhere of

that curious French title-system which has always been such a puzzle to

Englishmen. "Il _se fit_ appeler le Comte de ... et, se voyant un fils,

il _lui donna_ celui de Marquis de ..." There is a good deal in it which

makes us think that Prevost had read Defoe, and something which makes it

not extravagant to fancy that Thackeray had read Prevost. But once more

"let us come to the real things--let us speak of" _Manon Lescaut_.

[Sidenote: _Manon Lescaut._]

[Sidenote: Its uniqueness.]

It would be a very interesting question in that study of

literature--rather unacademic, or perhaps academic in the best sense

only--which might be so near and is so far--whether the man is most to

be envied who reads _Manon Lescaut_ for the first time in blissful

ignorance of these other things, and even of what has been said of them;

or he who has, by accident or design, toiled through the twenty volumes

of the others and comes upon Her. My own case is the former: and I am

far from quarrelling with it. But I sometimes like to fancy--now that I

have reversed the proceeding--what it would have been like to dare the

voices--the endless, dull, half-meaningless, though not threatening

voices--of those other books--to refrain even from the appendix to the

_Memoires_ as such, and never, till the _Modern Greekess_ has been

dispatched, return to and possess the entire and perfect jewel of

_Manon_. I used to wonder, when, for nearer five and twenty than twenty

years, I read for review hundreds of novels, English and French, whether

anybody would ever repeat Prevost's extraordinary spurt and "sport" in

this wonderful little book. I am bound to say that I never knew an

instance. The "first book" which gives a promise--dubious it may be, but

still promising--and is never followed by anything that fulfils this, is

not so very uncommon, though less common in prose fiction than in

poetry. The not so very rare "single-speech" poems are also not real

parallels. It is of the essence of poetry, according to almost every

theory, that it should be, occasionally at least, inexplicable and

unaccountable. I believe that every human being is capable of poetry,

though I should admit that the exhibition of the capability would be in

most cases--I am sure it would be in my own--"highly to be deprecated."

But with a sober prose fiction of some scope and room and verge it is

different. The face of Helen; the taste of nectar; the vision of the

clouds or of the sea; the passion of a great action in oneself or

others; the infinite poignancy of suffering or of pleasure, may

draw--once and never again--immortal verse from an exceedingly mortal

person. Such things might also draw a phrase or a paragraph of prose.

But they could not extract a systematic and organised prose tale of some

two hundred pages, each of them much fuller than those of our average

six-shilling stuff; and yet leave the author, who had never shown

himself capable of producing anything similar before, unable to produce

anything in the least like it again. I wonder that the usual literary

busybodies have never busied themselves--perhaps they have, for during a

couple of decades I have not had the opportunity of knowing everything

that goes on in French literature as I once did--with Prevost,

demonstrating that _Manon_ was a posthumous work of the Regent (who was

a clever man), or an expression of a real passion which lay at the back

of Richelieu's debauchery, or written by some unknown author from whom

the Abbe bought it, and who died early, or something else of the kind.

There does not, however, appear to be the slightest chance or hope or

fear (whichever expression be preferred) of the kind. Although Prevost

elsewhere indulges--as everybody else for a long time in France and

England alike did, save creative geniuses like Fielding--in

transparently feigned talk about the origins of his stories, he was a

very respectable man in his way, and not at all likely to father or to

steal any one else's work in a disreputable fashion. There are no other

claimants for the book: and though it may be difficult for a foreigner

to find the faults of style that Gustave Planche rebukes in Prevost

generally, there is nothing in the mere style of _Manon_ which sets it

above the others.

For once one may concede that the whole attraction of the piece, barring

one or two transient but almost Shakespearian flashes of

expression--such as the famous "Perfide Manon! Perfide!" when she and

Des Grieux first meet after her earliest treason--is to be found in its

marvellous humanity, its equally marvellous grasp of character, and the

intense, the absolutely shattering pathos of the relations of the hero

and heroine. There are those, of course, who make much of the _persona

tertia_, Tiberge, the virtuous and friendly priest, who has a remarkable

command of money for a not highly placed ecclesiastic, lends it with

singular want of circumspection, and then meddles with the best of

intentions and the most futile or mischievous of results. Very

respectable man, Tiberge; but one with whom _on n'a que faire_. Manon

and Des Grieux; Des Grieux and Manon--these are as all-sufficient to the

reader as Manon was more than sufficient to Des Grieux, and as he, alas!

was, if only in some ways, _in_sufficient to Manon.

One of the things which are nuisances in Prevost's other books becomes

pardonable, almost admirable, in this. His habit of incessant,

straight-on narration by a single person, his avoidance of dialogue

properly so called, is, as has been noted, a habit common to all these

early novels, and, to our taste if not to that of their early readers,

often disastrous. Here it is a positive advantage. Manon speaks very

little; and so much the better. Her "comely face and her fair bodie" (to

repeat once more a beloved quotation) speak for her to the ruin of her

lover and herself--to the age-long delectation of readers. On the other

hand, the whole speech is Des Grieux', and never was a monologue better

suited or justified. The worst of such things is usually that there are

in them all sorts of second thoughts of the author. There is none of

this littleness in the speech of Des Grieux. He is a gentle youth in the

very best sense of the term, and as we gather--not from anything he says

of himself, but from the general tenor--by no means a "wild gallant";

affectionate, respectful to his parents, altogether "douce," and,

indeed, rather (to start with) like Lord Glenvarloch in _The Fortunes of

Nigel_. He meets Manon (Prevost has had the wits to make her a little

older than her lover), and _actum est de_ both of them.

[Sidenote: The character of its heroine.]

But Manon herself? She talks (it has been said) very little, and it was

not necessary that she should talk much. If she had talked as Marianne

talks, we should probably hate her, unless, as is equally probable, we

ceased to take any interest in her. She is a girl not of talk but of

deeds: and her deeds are of course quite inexcusable. But still that

great and long unknown verse of Prior, which tells how a more harmless

heroine did various things--

As answered the end of her being created,

fits her, and the deeds create her in their process, according to the

wonderful magic of the novelist's art. Manon is not in the least a

Messalina; it is not what Messalina wanted that she wants at all, though

she may have no physical objection to it, and may rejoice in it when it

is shared by her lover. Still less is she a Margaret of Burgundy, or one

of the tigress-enchantresses of the Fronde, who would kill their lovers

after enjoying their love. It has been said often, and is beyond all

doubt true, that she would have been perfectly happy with Des Grieux if

he had fulfilled the expostulations of George the Fourth as to Mr.

Turveydrop, and had not only been known to the King, but had had twenty

thousand a year. She wants nobody and nothing but him, as far as the

"Him" is concerned: but she does not want him in a cottage. And here the

subtlety comes in. She does not in the least mind giving to others what

she gives him, provided that they will give her what he cannot give. The

possibility of this combination is of course not only shocking to Mrs.

Grundy, but deniable by persons who are not Mrs. Grundy at all. Its

existence is not really doubtful, though hardly anybody, except Prevost

and (I repeat it, little as I am of an Ibsenite) Ibsen in the _Wild

Duck_, has put it into real literature. Manon, like Gina and probably

like others, does not really think what she gives of immense, or of any

great, importance. People will give her, in exchange for it, what she

does think of great, of immense importance; the person to whom she would

quite honestly prefer to give it cannot give her these other things. And

she concludes her bargain as composedly as any _bonne_ who takes the

basket to the shops and "makes its handle dance"--to use the French

idiom--for her own best advantage. It does annoy her when she has to

part from Des Grieux, and it does annoy her that Des Grieux should be

annoyed at what she does. But she is made of no nun's flesh, and such

soul as she has is filled with much desire for luxury and pleasure. The

desire of the soul will have its way, and the flesh lends itself readily

enough to the satisfaction thereof.

[Sidenote: And that of the hero.]

So, too, there is no such instance known to me of the presentation of

two different characters, in two different ways, so complete and yet so

idiosyncratic in each. Sainte-Beuve showed what he was going to become

(as well, perhaps, as something which he was going to lose) in his

slight but suggestive remarks on the relation of Des Grieux to the

average _roue_ hero of that most _roue_ time. It is only a suggestion;

he does not work it out. But it is worth working out a little. Des

Grieux is _ab initio_, and in some ways _usque ad finem_, a sort of

_ingenu_. He seems to have no vicious tendencies whatever; and had Manon

not supervened, might have been a very much more exemplary Chevalier de

Malte than the usual run of those dignitaries, who differed chiefly

from their uncrossed comrades and brethren in having no wife to be

unfaithful to. He is never false to Manon--the incident of one of

Manon's lovers trying vainly to tempt his rival, with a pretty cast-off

mistress of his own, is one of the most striking features of the book.

He positively reveres, not his mother, who is dead, and reverence for

whom would be nothing in a Frenchman, but his father, and even, it would

seem, his elder brother--a last stretch of reverence quite unknown to

many young English gentlemen who certainly would not do things that Des

Grieux did. Except when Manon is concerned, it would seem that he might

have been a kind of saint--as good at least as Tiberge. But his love for

her and his desire for her entirely saturate and transform him. That he

disobeys his father and disregards his brother is nothing: we all do

that in less serious cases than his, and there is almost warrant for it

in Scripture. But he cheats at play (let us frankly allow, remembering

Grammont and others, that this was not in France the unpardonable sin

that it has--for many generations, fortunately--been with us), at the

suggestion of his rascally left-hand brother-in-law, in order to supply

Manon's wants. He commits an almost deliberate (though he makes some

excuses on this point) and almost cowardly murder, on an unarmed

lay-brother of Saint-Sulpice, to get to Manon. And, worst of all, he

consents to the stealing of moneys given to her by his supplanters in

order to feed her extravagance. After this his suborning the King's

soldiers to attack the King's constabulary on the King's highway to

rescue Manon is nothing. But observe that, though it is certainly not

"All for God," it _is_ "All for Her." And observe further that all these

things--even the murder--were quite common among the rank and file of

that French aristocracy which was so busily hurrying on the French

Revolution. Only, Des Grieux himself would pretty certainly not have

done them if She had never come in his way. And he tells it all with a

limpid and convincing clarity (as they would say now) which puts the

whole thing before us. No apology is made, and no apology is needed. It

is written in the books of the chronicles of Manon and Des Grieux; in

the lives of Des Grieux and Manon, suppose them ever to have existed or

to exist, it could not but happen.

[Sidenote: The inevitableness of both and the inestimableness of their

history.]

It is surely not profane (and perhaps it has been done already) to

borrow for these luckless, and, if you will, somewhat graceless persons,

the words of the mighty colophon of Matthew Arnold's most unequal but in

parts almost finest poem, at least the first and last lines:

So rest, for ever rest, immortal pair,

and

The rustle of the eternal rain of love.

Nor is it perhaps extravagant to claim for their creator--even for their

reporter--the position of the first person who definitely vindicated for

the novel the possibility of creating a passionate masterpiece,

outstripping _La Princesse de Cleves_ as _Othello_ outstrips _A Woman

Killed with Kindness_. As for the enormous remainder of him, if it is

very frankly negligible by the mere reader, it is not quite so by the

student. He was very popular, and, careless bookmaker as he was in a

very critical time, his popularity scarcely failed him till his horrible

death.[342] It can scarcely be said that, except in the one great cited

instance, he heightened or intensified the French novel, but he enlarged

its scope, varied its interests, and combined new objectives with its

already existing schemes, even in his less good work. In _Manon Lescaut_

itself he gave a masterpiece, not only to the novel, not only to France,

but to all literature and all the world.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Crebillon _fils_.]

The unfortunate nobleman as to whom Dickens has left us in doubt whether

he was a peer in his own right or the younger son or a Marquis or Duke,

pronounced Shakespeare "a clayver man." It was perhaps, in the

particular instance, inadequate though true. I hardly know any one in

literature of whom it is truer and more adequate than it is of Claude

Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon the younger, commonly called Crebillon

_fils_.[343] His very name is an abomination to Mrs. Grundy, who

probably never read, or even attempted to read, one of his naughty

books. Gray's famous tribute[344] to him--also known to a large number

who are in much the same case with Mrs. Grundy--is distinctly

patronising. But he is a very clever man indeed, and the cleverness of

some of his books--especially those in dialogue--is positively amazing.

[Sidenote: The case against him.]

At the same time it is of the first importance to make the due provisos

and allowances, the want of which so frequently causes disappointment,

if not positive disgust, when readers have been induced by unbalanced

laudation to take up works of the literature of other days. There are,

undoubtedly, things--many and heavy things--to be said against

Crebillon. A may say, "I am not, I think, _Mr._ Grundy: but I cannot

stand your Crebillon. I do not like a world where all the men are

apparently atheists, and all the women are certainly the other thing

mentioned in Donne's famous line. It disgusts and sickens me: and I will

have none of it, however clever it may be." B, not quite agreeing with

A, may take another tone, and observe, "He _is_ clever and he _is_

amusing: but he is terribly monotonous. I do not mind a visit to the

'oyster-bearing shores' now and then, but I do not want to live in

Lampsacus. After all, even in a pagan Pantheon, there are other

divinities besides a cleverly palliated Priapus and a comparatively

ladylike Cotytto. Seven volumes of however delicately veiled

'sculduddery' are nearly as bad as a whole evening's golf-talk in a St.

Andrews hotel, or a long men's dinner, where everybody but yourself is a

member of an Amateur Dramatic Society." The present writer is not far

from agreeing with B, while he has for A a respect which disguises no

shadow of a sneer. Crebillon does harp far too much on one string, and

that one of no pure tone: and even the individual handlings of the

subject are chargeable throughout his work with _longueurs_, in the

greater part of it with sheer tedium. It is very curious, and for us of

the greatest importance, to notice how this curse of long-windedness,

episodic and hardly episodic "inset," endless talk "about it and about

it," besets these pioneers of the modern novel. Whether it was a legacy

of the "Heroics" or not it is difficult to say. I think it was--to some

extent. But, as we have seen, it exists even in Lesage; it is found

conspicuously in Marivaux; it "advances insupportably" in Prevost,

except when some God intervenes to make him write (and to stop him

writing) _Manon_; and it rests heavily even on Crebillon, one of the

lightest, if not one of the purest, of literary talents. It is

impossible to deny that he suffers from monotony of general theme: and

equally impossible to deny that he suffers from spinning out of

particular pieces. There is perhaps not a single thing of his which

would not have been better if it had been shorter: and two of his

liveliest if also most risky pieces, _La Nuit et le Moment_ and _Le

Hasard au Coin du Feu_, might have been cut down to one half with

advantage, and to a quarter with greater advantage still.

There are, however, excuses for Crebillon: and though it may seem a rash

thing to say, and even one which gives the case away, there is, at least

in these two and parts of _Le Sopha_, hardly a page--even of the parts

which, if "cut," would improve the work as a whole--that does not in

itself prove the almost elfish cleverness now assigned to him.

[Sidenote: For the defendant--The veracity of his artificiality and his

consummate cleverness.]

The great excuse for him, from the non-literary point of view, is that

this world of his--narrow though crowded as it is, corrupt,

preposterous, inviting the Judgment that came after it as no period

perhaps has ever done, except that immediately before the Deluge, that

of the earlier Roman empire, and one other--was a real world in its day,

and left, as all real things do, an abiding mark and influence on what

followed. One of the scores and almost hundreds of sayings which

distinguish him, trivial as he seems to some and no doubt disgusting as

he seems to others, is made by one of his most characteristic and most

impudent but not most offensive heroes _a la_ Richelieu, who says, not

in soliloquy nor to a brother _roue_, but to the mistress of the moment:

"If love-making is not always a pleasure, at any rate it is always a

kind of occupation." That is the keynote of the Crebillon novel: it is

the handbook, with illustrative examples, of the business, employment,

or vocation of flirting, in the most extensive and intensive meanings of

that term comprehensible to the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: The Crebillonesque atmosphere and method.]

Now you should never scamp or hurry over business: and Crebillon

observes this doctrine in the most praiseworthy fashion. With the

thorough practicality of his century and of his nation (which has always

been in reality the most practical of all nations) he sets to work to

give us the ways and manners of his world. It is an odd world at first

sight, but one gets used to its conventions. It is a world of what they

used to call, in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century,

"high fellers" and of great ladies, all of whom--saving for glimpses of

military and other appointments for the men, which sometimes take them

away and are useful for change of scene, of theatres, balls,

gaming-tables for men and women both--"have nothing in the world to do"

but carry on that occupation which Clitandre of "The Night and the

Moment," at an extremely suitable time and in equally appropriate

circumstances, refers to in the words quoted above. There are some other

oddities about this world. In some parts of it nobody seems to be

married. Mrs. Grundy, and even persons more exercised in actual fact

than Mrs. Grundy, would expect them all to be, and to neglect the tie.

But sometimes Crebillon finds it easier to mask this fact. Often his

ladies are actual widows, which is of course very convenient, and might

be taken as a sign of grace in him by Mrs. G.: oftener it is difficult

to say what they are legally. They are nearly all duchesses or

marchionesses or countesses, just as the men hold corresponding ranks:

and they all seem to be very well off. But their sole occupation is that

conducted under the three great verbs, _Prendre_; _Avoir_; _Quitter_.

These verbs are used rather more frequently, but by no means

exclusively, of and by the men. Taking the stage nomenclature familiar

to everybody from Moliere, which Crebillon also uses in some of his

books, though he exchanges it for proper names elsewhere, let us suppose

a society composed of Oronte, Clitandre, Eraste, Damis (men), and

Cydalise, Celie, Lucinde, Julie (ladies). Oronte "takes" Lucinde,

"possesses" her for a time, and "quits" her for Julie, who has been

meanwhile "taken," "possessed," and "quitted" by Eraste. Eraste passes

to the conjugation of the three verbs with Cydalise, who, however, takes

the initiative of "quitting" and conjugates "take" in joint active and

passive with Damis. Meanwhile Celie and Clitandre are similarly occupied

with each other, and ready to "cut in" with the rest at fresh

arrangements. These processes require much serious conversation, and

this is related with the same mixture of gravity and irony which is

bestowed on the livelier passages of action.

The thing, in short, is most like an intensely intricate dance, with

endless figures--with elaborate, innumerable, and sometimes

indescribable stage directions. And the whole of it is written down

carefully by M. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon.

He might have occupied his time much better? Perhaps, as to the subject

of occupation. But with that we have, if not nothing, very little to do.

The point is, How did he handle these better-let-alone subjects? and

what contribution, in so handling them, did he make to the general

development of the novel?

I am bound to say that I think, with the caution given above, he handled

them, when he was at his best, singularly well, and gave hints, to be

taken or left as they chose, to handlers of less disputable subjects

than his.

One at least of the most remarkable things about him is connected with

this very disputableness. Voltaire and Sterne were no doubt greater men

than Crebillon _fils_: and though both of them dealt with the same class

of subject, they also dealt with others, while he did not. But,

curiously enough, the reproach of sniggering, which lies so heavily on

Laurence Sterne and Francois Arouet, does not lie on Crebillon. He has

an audacity of grave persiflage[345] which is sometimes almost Swiftian

in a lower sphere: and it saves him from the unpardonable sin of the

snigger. He has also--as, to have this grave persiflage, he almost

necessarily must have--a singularly clear and flexible style, which is

only made more piquant by the "-assiez's" and "-ussiez's" of the older

language. Further, and of still greater importance for the novelist, he

has a pretty wit, which sometimes almost approaches humour, and, if not

a diabolically, a _diablotin_ically acute perception of human nature as

it affects his subject. This perception rarely fails: and conventional,

and very unhealthily conventional, as the Crebillon world is, the people

who inhabit it are made real people. He is, in those best things of his

at least, never "out." We can see the ever-victorious duke (M. de

Clerval of the _Hasard_ is perhaps the closest to the Richelieu model of

all Crebillon's coxcomb-gallants), who, even after a lady has given him

most unequivocal proofs of her affection, refuses for a long time, if

not finally, to say that he loves her, because he has himself a

graduated scheme of values in that direction, and though she may have

touched his heart, etc., she has not quite come up to his "love"

standard.[346] And we know, too, though she is less common, the

philosophical Marquise herself, who, "possessing" the most notoriously

inconstant lover in all Paris (this same M. de Clerval, it happens),

maintains her comparative indifference to the circumstance, alleging

that even when he is most inconstant he is always "very affectionate,

though a little _extinguished_." And in fact he goes off to her from the

very fireside, where such curious things have chanced. Extravagant as

are the situations in _La Nuit et le Moment_, the other best thing, they

are, but for the _longueurs_ already censured, singularly verisimilar on

their own postulates. The trusty coachman, who always drives

particularly slowly when a lady accompanies his master in the carriage,

but would never think of obeying the check-string if his master's own

voice did not authorise it; the invaluable _soubrette_ who will sit up

to any hour to play propriety, when her mistress is according a

_tete-a-tete_, but who, most naturally, always falls asleep--these

complete, at the lower end of the scale, what the dukes and the

countesses have begun at the upper. And Crebillon, despite his

verbosity, is never at a loss for pointed sayings to relieve and froth

it up. Nor are these mere _mots_ or _pointes_ or conceits--there is a

singular amount of life-wisdom in them, and a short anthology might be

made here, if there were room for it, which would entirely vindicate the

assertion.

[Sidenote: Inequality of his general work--a survey of it.]

It is true that the praises just given to Crebillon do not (as was

indeed hinted above) apply to the whole of his work, or even to the

larger part of it. An unfavourable critic might indeed say that, in

strictness, they only apply to parts of _Le Sopha_ and to the two little

dialogue-stories just referred to. The method is, no doubt, one by no

means easy to apply on the great scale, and the restriction of the

subject adds to the difficulty. The longest regular stories of all, _Ah!

Quel Conte!_ and _Le Sopha_ itself, though they should have been

mentioned in reverse order, are resumptions of the Hamiltonian idea[347]

of chaining things on to the _Arabian Nights_. Crebillon, however, does

not actually resuscitate Shahriar and the sisters, but substitutes a

later Caliph, Shah Baham, and his Sultana. The Sultan is exceedingly

stupid, but also very talkative, and fond of interrupting his vizier and

the other tale-tellers with wiseacreries; the Sultana is an acute enough

lady, who governs her tongue in order to save her neck. The framework is

not bad for a short story, but becomes a little tedious when it is made

to enshrine two volumes, one of them pretty big. It is better in _Le

Sopha_ than in _Ah! Quel Conte!_ and some of the tales that it gives us

in the former are almost equal to the two excepted dialogues. Moreover,

it is unluckily true that _Ah! Quel Conte!_ (an ejaculation of the

Sultana's at the beginning) might be, as Crebillon himself doubtless

foresaw, repeated with a sinister meaning by a reader at the end.

_Tanzai et Neadarne_ or _L'Ecumoire_, another fairy story, though

livelier in its incidents than _Ah! Quel Conte!_--nay, though it

contains some of Crebillon's smartest sayings, and has perhaps his

nicest heroine,--is heavy on the whole, and in it, the author's

_gauffre_-like lightness of "impropriety" being absent, the tone

approaches nearer to that dismallest form of literature or

non-literature--the deliberate obscene.

_Les Egarements du Coeur et de l'Esprit_, on the other hand--one of

the author's earliest books--is the furthest from that most undesirable

consummation, and one of the most curious, if not of the most amusing,

of all. It recounts, from the mouth of the neophyte himself, the

"forming" of a very young man--almost a boy--to this strange kind of

commerce, by an elderly, but not yet old, and still attractive

coquette, Madame de Lursay, whose earlier life has scandalised even the

not easily scandalisable society of her time (we are not told quite

how), but who has recovered a reputation very slightly tarnished. The

hero is flattered, but for a long time too timid and innocent to avail

himself of the advantages offered to him; while, before very long,

Madame de Lursay's wiles are interfered with by an "Inconnue-Ingenue,"

with whom he falls in deep calf-love of a quasi-genuine kind. The book

includes sketches of the half-bravo gallants of the time, and is not

negligible: but it is not vividly interesting.

Still less so, though they contain some very lively passages, and are

the chief _locus_ for Crebillon's treatment of the actual trio of

husband, wife, and lover, are the _Lettres de la Marquise de M---- au

Comte de P----_. The scene in which the husband--unfaithful, peevish,

and a _petit maitre_--enters his wife's room to find an ancient, gouty

Marquis, who cannot get off his knees quick enough, and terminates the

situation with all the _aplomb_ of the Regency, is rather nice: and the

gradual "slide" of the at first quite virtuous writer (the wife herself,

of course) is well depicted. But love-letters which are neither

half-badinage--which these are not--nor wholly passionate--which these

never are till the last,[348] when the writer is describing a state of

things which Crebillon could not manage at all--are very difficult

things to bring off, and Claude Prosper is not quite equal to the

situation.

It will thus be seen that the objectors whom we have called A and B--or

at least B--will find that they or he need not read all the pages of all

the seven volumes to justify their views: and some other work, still to

be mentioned, completes the exhibition. I confess, indeed, once more

unblushingly, that I have not read every page of them myself. Had they

fallen in my way forty years ago I should, no doubt, have done so; but

forty years of critical experience and exercise give one the power, and

grant one the right, of a more summary procedure in respect of matter

thus postponed, unless it is perceived to be of very exceptional

quality. These larger works of Crebillon's are not good, though they are

not by any means so bad as those of Prevost. There are nuggets, of the

shrewd sense and the neat phrase with which he has been credited, in

nearly all of them: and these the skilled prospector of reading gold

will always detect and profit by. But, barring the possibility of a

collection of such, the _Oeuvres Choisies_ of Crebillon need not

contain more than the best parts of _Le Sopha_, the two comparatively

short dialogue-tales, and a longer passage or two from _Tanzai et

Neadarne_. It would constitute (I was going to say a respectable, but as

that is hardly the right word, I will say rather) a tolerable volume.

Even in a wider representation _Les Heureux Orphelins_ and _Lettres

Atheniennes_ would yield very little.

The first begins sensationally with the discovery, by a young English

squire in his own park, of a foundling girl and boy--_not_ of his own

production--whom he brings up; and it ends with a tedious description of

how somebody founded the first _petite maison_ in England--a worthy work

indeed. It is also noteworthy for a piece of bad manners, which, one

regrets to say, French writers have too often committed; lords and

ladies of the best known names and titles in or near Crebillon's own

day--such as Oxford, Suffolk, Pembroke--being introduced with the utmost

nonchalance.[349] Our novelists have many faults to charge themselves

with, and Anthony Trollope, in _The Three Clerks_, produced a Frenchman

with perhaps as impossible a name as any English travesty in French

literature. But I do not remember any one introducing, in a _not_

historical novel, a Duc de la Tremoille or a member of any of the

branches of Rohan, at a time when actual bearers of these titles existed

in France. As for the _Lettres Atheniennes_, if it were not for

completeness, I should scarcely even mention them. Alcibiades is the

chief male writer; Aspasia the chief female; but all of them, male and

female, are equally destitute of Atticism and of interest. The contrast

of the contrasts between Crebillon's and Prevost's best and worst work

is one of the oddest things in letters. One wonders how Prevost came to

write anything so admirable as _Manon Lescaut_; one wonders how

Crebillon came to write anything so insufficient as the two books just

criticised, and even others.

It may be said, "This being so, why have you given half a chapter to

these two writers, even with Lesage and Marivaux to carry it off?" The

reason is that this is (or attempts to be) a history of the French

novel, and that, in such a history, the canons of importance are not the

same as those of the novel itself. _Gil Blas_, _Marianne_, _Manon

Lescaut_, and perhaps even _Le Hasard au Coin du Feu_ are interesting in

themselves; but the whole work of their authors is important, and

therefore interesting, to the historical student. For these authors

carried further--a great deal further--the process of laying the

foundations and providing the materials and plant for what was to come.

Of actual masterpieces they only achieved the great, but not _equally_

great, one of _Gil Blas_ and the little one of _Manon Lescaut_. But it

is not by masterpieces alone that the world of literature lives in the

sense of prolonging its life. One may even say--touching the unclean

thing paradox for a moment, and purifying oneself with incense, and

salt, and wine--that the masterpieces of literature are more beautiful

and memorable and delectable in themselves than fertile in results. They

catch up the sum of their own possibilities, and utter it in such a

fashion that there is no more to say in that fashion. The dreary

imitation _Iliads_, the impossible sham _Divina Commedias_, the

Sheridan-Knowles Shakespearian plays, rise up and terrify or bore us.

Whereas these second-rate experimenters, these adventurers in quest of

what they themselves hardly know, strike out paths, throw seed, sketch

designs which others afterwards pursue, and plant out, and fill up.

There are probably not many persons now who would echo Gray's wish for

eternal romances of either Marivaux or Crebillon; and the accompanying

remarks in the same letter on _Joseph Andrews_, though they show some

appreciation of the best characters, are quite inappreciative of the

merit of the novel as a whole. For eternal variations of _Joseph

Andrews_, "_Passe!_" as a French Gray might have said.

Nevertheless, I am myself pretty sure that Marivaux at least helped

Richardson and Fielding, and there can be no doubt that Crebillon helped

Sterne. And what is more important to our present purpose, they and

their companions in this chapter helped the novel in general, and the

French novel in particular, to an extent far more considerable. We may

not, of course, take the course of literary history--general or

particular--which has been, as the course which in any case must have

been. But at the same time we cannot neglect the facts. And it is a

quite certain fact that, for the whole of the last half of the

eighteenth century, and nearly the whole of the first quarter of the

nineteenth, the French novel, as a novel, made singularly little

progress. We shall have to deal in the next chapter, if not in the next

two chapters, with at least two persons of far greater powers than any

one mentioned in the last two. But we shall perhaps be able to show

cause why even Voltaire and Rousseau, why certainly Diderot, why

Marmontel and almost every one else till we come, not in this volume, to

Chateaubriand, whose own position is a little doubtful, somehow failed

to attain the position of a great advancer of the novel.

These others, whatever their shortcomings, _had_ advanced it by bringing

it, in various ways, a great deal nearer to its actual ideal of a

completed picture of real human life. Lesage had blended with his

representation a good deal of the conventional picaresque; Marivaux had

abused preciousness of language and petty psychology; Prevost, save in

that marvellous windfall of his and the Muses which the historian of

novels can hardly mention without taking off his hat if he has one on,

or making his best bow if he has not, had gone wandering after

impossible and uninteresting will-o'-the-wisps; Crebillon had done worse

than "abide in his inn," he had abided almost always in his polite[350]

bordello. But all of them had meant to be real; and all of them had, if

only now and then, to an extent which even Madame de la Fayette had

scarcely achieved before, attained reality.

FOOTNOTES:

[309] In fact it has been said, and may be said again, that Lesage is

one of the prophets who have never had so much justice done them in

their own countries as abroad.

[310] The first part of _Gil Blas_ appeared in 1715; and nearly twenty

years later gossip said that the fourth was not ready, though the author

had been paid in advance for it six or seven years earlier.

[311] I have never read it in the original, being, though a great

admirer of Spanish, but slightly versed therein.

[312] This, which is a sort of Appendix to the _Diable Boiteux_, is much

the best of these _opera minora_.

[313] He had a temper of the most _Breton-Bretonnant_ type--not

ill-natured but sturdy and independent, recalcitrant alike to

ill-treatment and to patronage. He got on neither at the Bar, his first

profession, nor with the regular actors, and he took vengeance in his

books on both; while at least one famous anecdote shows his way of

treating a patron--indeed, as it happened, a patroness--who presumed.

[314] Asmodeus, according to his usual station in the infernal

hierarchy, is _demon de la luxure_: but any fears or hopes which may be

aroused by this description, and the circumstances of the action, will

be disappointed. Lesage has plenty of risky situations, but his language

is strictly "proper."

[315] Against this may be cited his equally anecdotic acceptance of

Regnard, who was also "run" against Moliere. But Regnard was a "classic"

and orthodox in his way; Lesage was a free-lance, and even a Romantic

before Romanticism. Boileau knew that evil, as evil seemed to him, _had_

come from Spain; he saw more coming in this, and if he anticipated more

still in the future, 1830 proved him no false prophet.

[316] In other words, there is a unity of personality in the attitude

which the hero takes to and in them.

[317] And in it too, of course; as well as in Spain's remarkable but too

soon re-enslaved criticism.

[318] As he says of himself (vii. x.): _Enfin, apres un severe examen je

tombais d'accord avec moi-meme, que si je n'etais pas un fripon, il ne

s'en fallait guere._ And the Duke of Lerma tells him later, "_M. de

Santillane, a ce que je vois, vous avez ete tant soit peu_ picaro."

[319] The two most undoubted cases--his ugly and, unluckily, repeated

acceptance of the part of Pandarus-Leporello--were only too ordinary

rascalities in the seventeenth century. The books of the chronicles of

England and France show us not merely clerks and valets but gentlemen of

every rank, from esquire to duke, eagerly accepting this office.

[320] In a curious passage of Bk. XII. Chap. I. in which Gil disclaims

paternity and resigns it to Marialva. This may have been prompted by a

desire to lessen the turpitude of the go-between business; but it is a

clumsy device, and makes Gil look a fool as well as a knave.

[321] One of Lesage's triumphs is the way in which, almost to the last,

"M. de Santillane," despite the rogueries practised often on and

sometimes by him, retains a certain gullibility, or at least

ingenuousness.

[322] Not of course as opposed to "romantic," but as = "chief and

principal."

[323] The reader must not forget that this formidable word means

"privateer" rather than "pirate" in French, and that this was the golden

age of the business in that country.

[324] Those who are curious may find something on him by the present

writer, not identical with the above account, in an essay entitled _A

Study of Sensibility_, reprinted in _Essays on French Novelists_

(London, 1891), and partly, but outside of the Marivaux part, reproduced

in Chap. XII. of the present volume.

[325] By M. Gustave Larroumet. Paris, 1882.

[326] I need hardly say that I am not referring to things like _Rebecca

and Rowena_ or _A Legend of the Rhine_, which "burst the outer shell of

sin," and, like Mrs. Martha Gwynne in the epitaph, "hatch themselves a

cherubin" in each case.

[327] The reader will perhaps excuse the reminder that the sense in

which we (almost exclusively) use this word, and which it had gained in

French itself by the time of Talleyrand's famous double-edged sarcasm on

person and world (_Il n'est pas parvenu: il est arrive_), was not quite

original. The _parvenu_ was simply a person who _had_ "got on": the

disobliging slur of implication on his former position, and perhaps on

his means of freeing himself from it, came later. It is doubtful whether

there is much, if indeed there is any, of this slur in Marivaux's title.

[328] It is the acme of what may be called innocent corruption. She does

not care for her master, nor apparently for vicious pleasure,

nor--certainly--for money as such. She does care for Jacob, and wants to

marry him; the money will make this possible; so she earns it by the

means that present themselves, and puts it at his disposal.

[329] He is proof against his master's threats if he refuses; as well as

against the money if he accepts. Unluckily for Genevieve, when he breaks

away she faints. Her door and the money-box are both left open, and the

latter disappears.

[330] Here and elsewhere the curious cheapness of French living (despite

what history tells of crushing taxation, etc.) appears. The _locus

classicus_ for this is generally taken to be Mme. de Maintenon's

well-known letter about her brother's housekeeping. But here, well into

another century, Mlle. Habert's 4000 _livres_ a year are supposed to be

at least relative affluence, while in _Marianne_ (_v. inf._) M. de

Climal thinks 500 or 600 enough to tempt her, and his final bequest of

double that annuity is represented as making a far from despicable _dot_

even for a good marriage.

[331] The much greater blood-thirstiness of the French highwayman, as

compared with the English, has been sometimes attributed by

humanitarians to the "wheel"--and has often been considered by persons

of sense as justifying that implement.

[332] The Devil's Advocate may say that Marianne turns out to be of

English extraction after all--but it is not Marivaux who tells us so.

[333] To question or qualify Marianne's virtue, even in the slightest

degree, may seem ungracious; for it certainly withstands what to some

girls would have been the hardest test of all--that is to say, not so

much the offer of riches if she consents, as the apparent certainty of

utter destitution if she refuses. At the same time, the Devil's Advocate

need not be a Kelly or a Cockburn to make out some damaging suggestions.

Her vague, and in no way solidly justified, but decided family pride

seems to have a good deal to do with her refusal; and though this shows

the value of the said family pride, it is not exactly virtue in itself.

Still more would appear to be due to the character of the suit and the

suitor. M. de Climal is not only old and unattractive; not only a sneak

and a libertine; but he is a clumsy person, and he has not, as he might

have done, taken Marianne's measure. The mere shock of his sudden

transformation from a pious protector into a prospective "keeper," who

is making a bid for a new concubine, has evidently an immense effect on

her quick nervous temperament. She is not at all the kind of girl to

like to be the plaything of an old man; and she is perfectly shrewd

enough to see that vengeance, and fear as regards his nephew, have as

much as anything else, or more, to do with the way in which he brusques

his addresses and hurries his gift. Further, she has already conceived a

fancy, at least, for that nephew himself; and one sees the "jury droop,"

as Dickens has put it, with which the Counsel of the Prince of the Air

would hint that, if the offers had come in a more seductive fashion from

Valville himself, they might not have been so summarily rejected. But

let it be observed that these considerations, while possibly unfair to

Marianne, are not in the least derogatory to Marivaux himself. On the

contrary, it is greatly to his credit that he should have created a

character of sufficient lifelikeness and sufficient complexity to serve

as basis for "problem"-discussions of the kind.

[334] To put the drift of the above in other words, we do not need to

hear any more of Marianne in any position, because we have had enough

shown us to know generally what she would do, say, and think, in all

positions.

[335] It has been observed that there is actually a Meredithian quality

in Aristides of Smyrna, though he wrote no novel. A tale in Greek, to

illustrate the parallel, would be an admirable subject for a University

Prize.

[336] Two descriptions of "Marivaudage" (which, by the way, was partly

anticipated by Fontenelle)--both, if I do not mistake, by Crebillon

_fils_--are famous: "Putting down not only everything you said and

thought, but also everything you would like to have thought and said,

but did not," and, "Introducing to each other words which never had

thought of being acquainted." Both of these perhaps hit the modern forms

of the phenomenon even harder than they hit their original butt.

[337] It is only fair to the poor Prioress to say that there is hardly a

heroine in fiction who is more deeply in love with her own pretty little

self than Marianne.

[338] One does not know whether it was prudence, or that materialism

which, though he was no _philosophe_, he shared with most of his

contemporaries, which prevented Marivaux from completing this sharp

though mildly worded criticism. The above-mentioned profane have hinted

that both the placidity and the indifference of the persons concerned,

whether Catholic or Calvinist, arise from their certainty of their own

safety in another world, and their looking down on less "guaranteed"

creatures in this. It may be just permissible to add that a comparison

of Chaucer's and Marivaux's prioresses will suggest itself to many

persons, and should be found delectable by all fit ones.

[339] His books on Margaret of Anjou and William the Conqueror are odd

crosses between actual historical essays and the still unborn historical

novel.

[340] Mlle. de Launay, better known as Mme. de Staal-Delaunay, saw, as

most would have seen, a resemblance in this to the famous Mlle. Aisse's.

But the latter was bought as a little child by her provident

"protector," M. de Ferreol. Mlle. Aisse herself had earlier read the

_Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_ and did not think much of them. But

this was the earlier part. It would be odd if she had not appreciated

Manon had she read it: but she died in the year of its appearance.

[341] The excellent but rather stupid editor of the [Dutch] _Oeuvres

Choisies_ above noticed has given abstracts of Prevost's novels as well

as of Richardson's, which the Abbe translated. These, with

Sainte-Beuve's of the _Memoires_, will help those who want something

more than what is in the text, while declining the Sahara of the

original. But, curiously enough, the Dutchman does not deal with the end

of _Cleveland_.

[342] He had a fit of apoplexy when walking, and instead of being bled

was actually cut open by a village super-Sangrado, who thought him dead

and only brought him to life--to expire actually in torment.

[343] Crebillon _pere_, tragedian and academician, is one of the persons

who have never had justice done to them: perhaps because they never

quite did justice to themselves. His plays are unequal, rhetorical, and

as over-heavy as his son's work is over-light. But, if we want to find

the true tragic touch of verse in the French eighteenth century, we must

go to him.

[344] "Be it mine to read endless romances of Marivaux and Crebillon."

[345] Learnt, no doubt, to a great extent from Anthony Hamilton, with

whose family, as has been noticed, he had early relations.

[346] He goes further, and points out that, as she is his _really_

beloved Marquise's most intimate friend, she surely wouldn't wish him to

declare himself false to that other lady?--having also previously

observed that, after what has occurred, he could never think of

deceiving his Celie herself by false declarations. These

topsy-turvinesses are among Crebillon's best points, and infinitely

superior to the silly "platitudes reversed" which have tried to produce

the same effect in more recent times.

[347] It has been said more than once that Crebillon had early access to

Hamilton's MSS. He refers directly to the Facardins in _Ah! Quel Conte!_

and makes one of his characters claim to be grand-daughter of

Cristalline la Curieuse herself.

[348] Nor perhaps even then, for passion is absolutely unknown to our

author. One touch of it would send the curious Rupert's drop of his

microcosm to shivers, as _Manon Lescaut_ itself in his time, and

_Adolphe_ long after, show.

[349] Some remarks are made by "Madame _Hepenny_"--a very pleasing

phoneticism, and, though an actual name, not likely to offend any actual

person.

[350] No sneer is intended in this adjective. Except in one or two of

the personages of _Les Egarements_, Crebillon's intended gentlemen are

nearly always well-bred, however ill-moralled they may be, and his

ladies (with the same caution) are ladies. It is with him, in this last

point at any rate, as with our own Congreve, whom he rather closely

resembles in some ways: though I was amused the other day to find some

twentieth-century critical objections to actresses' rendering of _Love

for Love_ as "too well-bred." The fact is that the tradition of

"breeding" never broke down in France till the _philosophe_ period,

while with us it lasted till--when shall we say?