FRENCH INFLUENCE
In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction
stood at the parting of the ways. Should it follow Scott and the
romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday life? Should
it adopt that form of story-making which puts stress on action
and plot and is objective in its method, roaming all lands and
times for its material; or, dealing with the familiar average of
contemporary society, should it emphasize character analysis and
choose the subjective realm of psychology for its peculiar
domain? The pen dropped from the stricken hand of Scott in 1832;
in that year a young parliamentary reporter in London was
already writing certain lively, closely observed sketches of the
town, and four years later they were to be collected and
published under the title of "Sketches by Boz," while the next
year that incomparable extravaganza, "The Pickwick Papers," was
to go to an eager public. English fiction had decided: the Novel
was to conquer the romance for nearly a century. It was a
victory which to the present day has been a dominant influence
in story-making; establishing a tendency which, until Stevenson
a few years since, with the gaiety of the inveterate boy, cried
up Romance once more, bade fair to sweep all before it.
Before tracing this vigorous development of the Novel of Reality
with Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot (to name three great leaders),
it is important to get an idea of the growth on French soil
which was so deeply influential upon English as well as upon
other modern fiction. Nothing is more certain in literary
evolution than the fact that the French Novel in the nineteenth
century has molded and defined modern fiction, thus repaying an
earlier debt owed the English pioneers, Richardson and Fielding.
English fiction of our own generation may be described as a
native variation on a French model: in fact, the fictionists of
Europe and the English-speaking lands, with whatever
divergencies personal or national, have derived in large measure
from the Gaul the technique, the point of view and the choice of
theme which characterizes the French Novel from Stendhal to
Balzac, from Zola to Guy de Maupassant.
I
The name of Henri Beyle, known to literature under the sobriquet
of Stendhal, has a meaning in the development of the modern type
of fiction out of proportion to the intrinsic value of his
stories.
He was, of course, far surpassed by mightier followers like
Balzac, Flaubert and Zola; yet his significance lies in the very
fact that they were followers. His is all the merit pertaining
to the feat of introducing the Novel of psychic analysis: of
that persistent and increasingly unpleasant bearing-down upon
the darker facts of personality. Hence his "Rouge et Noir,"
dated 1830 and typical of his aim and method, is in a sense an
epoch-making book.
Balzac was at the same time producing the earlier studies to
culminate in that Human Comedy which was to stand as the chief
accomplishment of his nation in the literature of fiction. But
Stendhal, sixteen years older, began to print first and to him
falls the glory of innovation. Balzac gives full praise to his
predecessor in his essay on Beyle, and his letters contain
frequent references to the debt he owed that curious bundle of
fatuities, inconsistencies and brilliancies, the author of "The
Chartreuse de Parme." Later, Zola calls him "the father of us
all," meaning of the naturalistic school of which Zola himself
was High Priest. Beyle's business was the analysis of soul
states: an occupation familiar enough in these times of Hardy,
Meredith and Henry James. He held several posts of importance
under Napoleon, worshiped that leader, loved Italy as his
birthplace, loved England too, and tried to show in his novels
the result of the inactive Restoration upon a generation trained
by Napoleon to action, violence, ambition and passion.
Read to-day, "Le Rouge et Noir," which it is sufficient to
consider for our purposes, seems somewhat slow in movement,
struggling in construction, meticulous in manner. At times, its
interminability recalls "Clarissa Harlowe," but it possesses the
traits' which were to mark the coming school of novel-writing in
France and hence in the modern world: to wit, freedom in dealing
with love in its irregular relation, the tendency towards
tragedy, and that subtlety of handling which makes the main
interest to depend upon motive and thought rather than upon the
external action itself. "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us
all,"--that might be the motto. The young quasi-hero is Julian,
an ambitious worldling of no family, and his use of the Church
as a means of promotion, his amours with several women and his
death because of his love for one of them, are traced with a
kind of tortuous revelation of the inner workings of the human
heart which in its way declares genius in the writer: and which
certainly makes a work disillusioning of human nature. Its more
external aspect of a study of the politic Church and State, of
the rivalry between the reds and the blacks of the state
religion, is entirely secondary to this greater purpose and
result: here, for the first time at full length, a writer shows
the possibility of that realistic portrayal sternly carried
through, no matter how destructive of romantic preconceptions of
men and women. It is the method of Richardson flowering in a
time of greater freedom and more cynical questioning of the
gods.
II
But giving Stendhal his full mint and cummin of praise, he yet
was but the forerunner of a mightier man. Undoubtedly, he
prepared the soil and was a necessary link in the chain of
development wherewith fiction was to forge itself an unbreakable
sequence of strength. Balzac was to put out his lesser light, as
indeed the refulgence of his genius was to overshine all French
fiction, before and since. It would be an exaggeration to say
that the major English novelists of the middle nineteenth
century were consciously disciples of Balzac--for something
greater even than he moved them; the spirit of the Time. But it
is quite within bounds to say that of all modern fiction he is
the leader and shaper. Without him, his greatest native
follower, Zola, is inconceivable. He gathers up into himself and
expresses at its fullest all that was latent in the striking
modern growth whose banner-cry was Truth, and whose method was
that of the social scientist. Here was a man who, early in his
career, for the first time in the history of the Novel,
deliberately planned to constitute himself the social historian
of his epoch and race: and who, in upwards of a hundred
remarkable pieces of fiction in Novel form executed that plan in
such fulness that his completed work stands not only as a
monument of industry, but as perhaps the most inspiring example
of literary synthesis in the history of letters. In bigness of
conception and of construction--let alone the way in which the
work was performed--the Human Comedy is awe-begetting; it drives
one to Shakspere for like largeness of scale. Such a
performance, ordered and directed to a foreseen end, is unique
in literature.
As Balzac thus gave birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention,
to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his
story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite
intention: to become the Secretary of an Age of which he
declared society to be the historian. He wished to exhibit man
in his species as he was to be seen in the France of the
novelist's era, just as a naturalist aims to study beast-kind,
segregating them into classes for zoological investigation.
Later, Balzac's great successor (as we shall see) applied this
analogy with more rigid insistence upon the scientific method
which should obtain in all literary study. The survey proposed
covered a period of about half a century and included the
Republic, the Empire and the Restoration: it ranged through all
classes and conditions of men with no appearance of prejudice,
preference or parti-pris (this is one of the marvels of Balzac),
thus gaining the immense advantage of an apparently complete and
catholic comprehension of the human show. Of all modern
novelists, Balzac is the one whose work seems like life instead
of an opinion of life; he has the objectivity of Shakspere. Even
a Tolstoy set beside him seems limited.
This idea of a plan was not crystallized into the famous title
given to his collective works--La Comedie Humaine--until 1842,
when but eight years of life remained to him. But four years
earlier it had been mentioned in a letter, and when Balzac was
only a little over thirty, at a time when his better-known books
were just beginning to appear, he had signified his sense of an
inclusive scheme by giving such a running title to a group of
his stories as the familiar "Scenes from Private Life"--to
which, in due course, were added other designations for the
various parts of the great plan. The encyclopedic survey was
never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the
laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation
of an almost incredible amount of human data. As for finishing
the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects
its place in literature. Neither Spenser's "Faery Queen" nor
Wordsworth's "The Excursion" was completed, and, per contra, it
were as well for Browning if "The Ring and the Book" had not
been. In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one
recognizes Hercules from the feet. Had this mighty story-teller
and student of humanity carried out his full intention there
would have been nearly 150 pieces of fiction; of the plan-on-paper
he actually completed ninety-seven, two-thirds of the
whole, and enough to illustrate the conception. And it must be
remembered that Balzac died at fifty. One result of the
incompletion, as Brunetiere has pointed out, is to give
disproportionate treatment to certain phases of life, to the
military, for instance, for which Balzac has twenty-four stories
on his list, whereas only two, "The Chouans" and "A Passion in
the Desert," were executed. But surely, sufficient was done,
looking to the comedy as a whole, to force us to describe the
execution as well as the conception as gigantic. Had the work
been more mechanically pushed to its end for the exact plan's
sake, the perfection of scheme might have been attained at the
expense of vitality and inspiration. Ninety-seven pieces of
fiction, the majority of them elaborate novels, the whole
involving several thousand characters, would be impressive in
any case, but when they come from an author who marvelously
reproduces his time and country, creating his scenes in a way to
afford us a sense of the complexity of life--its depth and
height, its beauty, terror and mystery--we can but hail him as
Master.
And in spite of the range and variety in Balzac's unique
product, it has an effect of unity based upon a sense of social
solidarity. He conceives it his duty to present the unity of
society in his day, whatever its apparent class and other
divergencies. He would show that men and women are members of
the one body social, interacting upon each other in manifold
relations and so producing the dramas of earth; each story plays
its part in this general aim, illustrating the social laws and
reactions, even as the human beings themselves play their parts
in the world. In this way Balzac's Human Comedy is an organism,
however much it may fall short of symmetry and completion.
In the outline of the plan we find him separating his studies
into three groups or classes: The Studies of Manners, the
Philosophical Studies, and the Analytic Studies. In the first
division were placed the related groups of scenes of Private
life, Provincial life, Parisian life, Political life, Military
life and Country life. It was his desire, as he says in a letter
to Madame Hanska, to have the group of studies of Manners
"represent all social effects"; in the philosophic studies the
causes of those effects: the one exhibits individualities
typified, the other, types individualized: and in the Analytic
Studies he searches for the principles. "Manners are the
performance; the causes are the wings and the machinery. The
principles--they are the author.... Thus man, society and
humanity will be described, judged, analyzed without repetition
and in a work which will be, as it were, 'The Thousand and One
Nights' of the west."
The scheme thus categorically laid down sounds rather dry and
formal, nor is it too easy to understand. But all trouble
vanishes when once the Human Comedy itself, in any example of
it, is taken up; you launch upon the great swollen tide of life
and are carried irresistibly along.
It is plain that with an author of Balzac's productive powers,
any attempt to convey an idea of his quality must perforce
confine itself to a few representative specimens. A few of them,
rightly chosen, give a fair notion of his general
interpretation. What then are some illustrative creations?
In the case of most novelists, although of first rank, it is not
as a rule difficult to define their class and name their
tendency: their temperaments and beliefs are so-and-so, and they
readily fall under the designation of realist or romanticist,
pessimist, or optimist, student of character or maker of plots.
This is, in a sense, impossible with Balzac. The more he be
read, the harder to detect his bias: he seems, one is almost
tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind.
Persons read two or three--perhaps half a dozen of his books--and
then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the
base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been assimilated, it
will be realized that but a phase of Balzac had been seen.
When the passion of creation, the birth-throes of a novel were
on him, he became so immersed in the aspect of life he was
depicting that he saw, felt, knew naught else: externally this
obsession was expressed by his way of life and work while the
story was growing under his hand: his recluse habits, his
monkish abstention from worldly indulgences, the abnormal night
hours of activity, the loss of flesh, so that the robust man who
went into the guarded chamber came out at the end of six weeks
the shadow of himself.
As a consequence of the consecration to the particular task (as
if it embraced the one view of existence), the reader perhaps
experiences a shock of surprise in passing from "The Country
Doctor" to "Pere Goriot." But the former is just as truly part
of his interpretation as the latter. A dozen fictions can be
drawn from the body of his production which portray humanity in
its more beautiful, idealistic manifestations. Books like "The
Country Doctor" and "Eugenic Grandet" are not alone in the list.
And how beautiful both are! "The Country Doctor" has all the
idyllic charm of setting which a poetic interpretation of life
in a rural community can give. Not alone Nature, but human
nature is hymned. The kindly old physician, whose model is the
great Physician himself, is like Chaucer's good parson, an
unforgettable vision of the higher potentialities of the race.
Such a novel deserves to be called quite as truly romance and
prose poem, save that Balzac's vraisemblance, his gift for
photographic detail and the contemporaneousness of the setting,
make it modern. And thus with "Eugenie Grandet" the same method
applied in "The Country Doctor" to the study of a noble
profession in a rural atmosphere, is here used for the portrait
of a good woman whose entourage is again that of simple, natural
conditions. There is more of light and shade in the revelation
of character because Eugenie's father, the miser--a masterly
sketch--furnishes a dark background for her radiant personality.
But the same effect is produced, that of throwing into bold
relief the sweet, noble, high and pure in our common humanity.
And in this case it is a girl of humble station far removed from
the shams and shameful passions of the town. The conventional
contrast would be to present in another novel some woman of the
city as foul as this daughter of Grandet is fair. Not so Balzac.
He is too broad an observer of humanity, and as artist too much
the master for such cheap effects of chiaroscuro. In "The
Duchess De Langeais" e sets his central character amidst the
frivolities of fashion and behold, yet another beautiful type of
the sex! As Richardson drew his Pamela and Clarissa, so Balzac
his Eugenie and the Duchess: and let us not refrain from
carrying out the comparison, and add, how feeble seems the
Englishman in creation when one thinks of the half a hundred
other female figures, good and bad, high and low, distinctly
etched upon the memory by the mordant pen of the Frenchman!
Then if we turn to that great tragedy of family, "Pere Goriot,"
the change is complete. Now are we plunged into an atmosphere of
greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the
bourgeois street air of Paris. In this tale of thankless
daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness
possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet
fascinated eye. The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame
Vautrin's boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells!
Compare it with Dickens' Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you
have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius.
Suppose, now, the purpose be to reveal not a group or community,
but one human soul, a woman's this time: read "A Woman of
Thirty" and see how the novelist,--for the first time--and one
is inclined to add, for all time,--has pierced through the
integuments and reached the very quick of psychologic exposure.
It is often said that he has created the type of young-old, or
old-young woman: meaning that before him, novelists overlooked
the fact that a woman of this age, maturer in experience and
still ripe in physical charms, is really of intense social
attraction, richly worth study. But this is because Balzac knows
that all souls are interesting, if only we go beneath the
surface. The only work of modern fiction which seems to me so
nakedly to lay open the recesses of the human spirit as does "A
Woman of Thirty" is Meredith's "The Egoist"; and, of course,
master against master, Balzac is easily the superior, since the
English author's wonderful book is so mannered and grotesque.
Utter sympathy is shown in these studies of femininity, whether
the subject be a harlot, a saint or a patrician of the Grande
Monde.
If the quest be for the handling of mankind en masse, with big
effects of dark and light: broad brush-work on a canvas suited
to heroical, even epic, themes,--a sort of fiction the later
Zola was to excel in--Balzac will not fail us. His work here is
as noteworthy as it is in the fine detailed manner of his most
realistical modern studies--or in the searching analysis of the
human spirit. "The Chouans" may stand for this class: it has all
the fire, the color, the elan that emanate from the army and the
call of country. We have flashed before us one of those
reactionary movements, after the French Revolution, which take
on a magic romanticism because they culminate in the name of
Napoleon. While one reads, one thinks war, breathes war--it is
the only life for the moment. Just ahead a step, one feels, is
the "imminent deadly breach"; the social or business or Bohemian
doings of later Paris are as if they did not exist. And this
particular novel will achieve such a result with the reader,
even although it is not by any means one of Balzac's supreme
achievements, being in truth, a little aside from his metier,
since it is historical and suggests in spots the manner of
Scott. But this power of envisaging war (which will be farther
realized if such slighter works as "A Dark Affair" and "An
Episode Under the Terror" be also perused), is only a single
manifestation of a general gift. Suppose there is desired a
picture very common in our present civilization--most common it
may be in America,--that of the country boy going up to the city
to become--what? Perhaps a captain of commerce, or a leader of
fashion: perhaps a great writer or artist; or a politician who
shall rule the capitol. It is a venture packed full of realistic
experience but equally full of romance, drama, poetry--of an
epic suggestiveness. In two such volumes as "A Great Provincial
Man in Paris" and "Lost Illusions," all this, with its dire
chances of evil as well as its roseate promise of success, has
been wonderfully expressed. So cogently modern a motive had
never been so used before.
Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and
back-side of some certain section of life: as in "Cousin Pons"
and "Cousine Bette."--The corner of Paris where artists,
courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art
capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity,
picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of
mankind,--this he paints so that we do not so much look on as
move amidst the throng. In the first-named novel, assuredly a
very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one
of fiction's superlative successes: to know him is to love him
in all his weakness. In the second book, Bette is a female
vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is
heart-warming and sweet. And you know that both are true, true
as they would not have been apart: "helpless each without the
other."
Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business
are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces,
"Caesar Birotteau." We can see in it the prototype of much that
comes later in French fiction: Daudet's "Risler Aine et Froment
Jeune" and Zola's "L'Argent," to name but two. Such a story sums
up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.
Nor should it be forgotten that this close student of human
nature, whose work appears so often severely mundane, and most
strong when its roots go down into the earth, sometimes seeming
to prefer the rankness and slime of human growths,--can on
occasion soar into the empyrean, into the mystic region of
dreams and ideals and all manner of subtle imaginings. Witness
such fiction as "The Magic Skin," "Seraphita," and "The Quest of
the Absolute." It is hard to believe that the author of such
creations is he of "Pere Goriot" or "Cousine Bette." But it is
Balzac's wisdom to see that such pictures are quite as truly
part of the Human Comedy: because they represent man giving play
to his soul--exercising his highest faculties. Nor does the
realistic novelist in such efforts have the air of one who has
left his true business in order to disport himself for once in
an alien element. On the contrary, he seems absolutely at home:
for the time, this is his only affair, his natural interest.
And so with illustrations practically inexhaustible, which the
long list prodigally offers. But the scope and variety have been
already suggested; the best rule with Balzac is, each one to his
taste, always remembering that in a writer so catholic, there is
a peculiar advantage in an extended study. Nor can from twenty
to twenty-five of his best books be read without a growing
conviction that here is a man of genius who has done a unique
thing.
It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the
French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first
in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in
modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of
verity, came a generation before. But, as always when a
compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question
dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than
this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half.
In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac's recipe. English
fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence. We
shall see in dealing with Dickens how definitely the English
writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and
sympathetic to Dickens' own nature.
As to the accuracy with which he gave a representation of
contemporary life--thus deserving the name realist--considerable
may be said in the way of qualification. Much of it applies with
similar force to Zola, later to be hailed as a king among modern
realists in the naturalistic extreme to which he pushed the
movement. Balzac, through his remarkable instinct for detail and
particularity, did introduce into nineteenth century fiction an
effect of greater truth in the depiction of life. Nobody perhaps
had--nobody has since--presented mis-en-scene as did he. He
builds up an impression by hundreds of strokes, each seemingly
insignificant, but adding to a totality that becomes impressive.
Moreover, again and again in his psychologic analysis there are
home-thrusts which bring the blood to the face of any honest
person. His detail is thus quite as much subjective as external.
It were a great mistake to regard Balzac as merely a writer who
photographed things outside in the world; he is intensely
interested in the things within--and if objectivity meant
realism exclusively, he would be no realist at all.
But farther than this; with all his care for minute touches and
his broad and painstaking observation, it is not so much life,
after all, as a vision of life which he gives. This contradicts
what was said early in the present chapter: but the two
statements stand for the change likely to come to any student of
Balzac: his objective personality at last resolves itself into a
vividly personal interpretation. His breadth blinds one for a
while, that is all. Hence Balzac may be called an incurable
romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist. Like all first-class
art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better
instruction. He said in the Preface to "Pere Goriot" that the
novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but "a
possibly better world." He has done so. The most untrue thing in
a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life? Truth
is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer
than truth. Balzac understood this, remembered it in his heart.
He is too big as man and artist to be confined within the narrow
realistic formula. While, as we have seen, he does not take
sides on moral issues, nor allow himself to be a special pleader
for this or that view, his work strikes a moral balance in that
it shows universal humanity--not humanity tranced in
metaphysics, or pathologic in analysis, or enmeshed in
sensualism. In this sense, Balzac is a great realist. There is
no danger of any novelist--any painter of life--doing harm, if
he but gives us the whole. It is the story-teller who rolls some
prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him: he
who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his
audience. Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the
moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed
any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of
representing things as they are. But this matters not, if only a
writer's nature be large and vigorous enough to report of
humanity in a trustworthy way. Balzac was much too well endowed
in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to
look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual
meaning.
In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty
of the social historian was more than to give a statement of
present conditions--the social documents of the moment,--variable
as they might be for purposes of deduction. He insisted
that the coming,--perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be
prophesied;--those future ameliorations, whether individual or
collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast. Let me
again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man
who is called arch-realist of his day: "The novelist should
depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better
world." In the very novel where he said it ("Pere Goriot") he
may seem to have violated the principle: but taking his fiction
in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the pronunciamento
exemplifies his practice.
Balzac's work has a Shaksperian universality, because it is so
distinctly French,--a familiar paradox in literature. He was
French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen
receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the
social organisms through which man could best work out his
salvation. We find him teaching that humanity, in terms of
Gallic temperament, and in time limits between the Revolution
and the Second Republic, is on the whole best served by living
under a constitutional monarchy and in vital touch with Mother
Church,--that form of religion which is a racial inheritance
from the Past. In a sense, then, he was a man with the
limitations of his place and time, as, in truth, was Shakspere.
But the study of literature instructs us that it is exactly
those who most vitally grasp and voice their own land and
period, who are apt to give a comprehensive view of humanity at
large; to present man sub specie aeternitatis. This is so
because, thoroughly to present any particular part of mankind,
is to portray all mankind. It is all tarred by the same stick,
after all. It is only in the superficials that unlikenesses lie.
Balzac was intensely modern. Had he lived today, he might have
been foremost in championing the separation of Church and State
and looked on serenely at the sequestration of the religious
houses. But writing his main fiction from 1830 to 1850, his
attitude was an enlightened one, that of a thoughtful patriot.
His influence upon nineteenth century English fiction was both
direct and indirect. It was direct in its effect upon several of
the major novelists, as will be noted in studying them; the
indirect influence is perhaps still more important, because it
was so all-pervasive, like an emanation that expressed the Time.
It became impossible, after Balzac had lived and wrought, for
any artist who took his art seriously to write fiction as if the
great Frenchman had not come first. He set his seal upon that
form of literature, as Ibsen, a generation later, was to set his
seal upon the drama, revolutionizing its technique. To the
student therefore he is a factor of potent power in explaining
the modern fictional development. Nor should he be a negligible
quantity to the cultivated reader seeking to come genially into
acquaintance with the best that European letters has
accomplished. While upon the lover of the Novel as a form of
literature--which means the mass of all readers to-day--Balzac
cannot fail to exercise a personal fascination.--Life widens
before us at his touch, and that glamour which is the
imperishable gift of great art, returns again as one turns the
pages of the little library of yellow books which contain the
Human Comedy.
Balzac died in 1850, when in the prime of his powers. Seven
years later was published the "Madame Bovary" of Flaubert, one
of the most remarkable novels of the nineteenth century and the
most unrelenting depiction of the devolution of a woman's soul
in all fiction: certainly it deserved that description up to the
hour of its appearance, if not now, when so much has been done
in the realm of female pathology. Flaubert is the most
noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. He seems
personally of our own day, for, living to be an old man, he was
friend and fellow-worker with the brothers Goncourt (whom we
associate with Zola) and extended a fatherly hand to the young
Maupassant at the beginning of the latter's career,--so
brilliant, brief, tragic. The influence of this one novel
(overlooking that of "Salambo," in its way also of influence in
the modern growth) has been especially great upon a kind of
fiction most characteristic of the present generation: in which,
in fact, it has assumed a "bad preeminence." I mean the Novel of
sexual relations in their irregular aspects. The stormy artist
of the Goncourt dinners has much to answer for, if we regard him
only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary. Many
later books were to surpass this in license, in coarseness, or
in the effect of evoking a libidinous taste; but none in its
unrelenting gloom, the cold detachment of the artist-scientist
obsessed with the idea of truthfully reflecting certain sinister
facets of the many-faced gem called life! It is hardly too much
to say, in the light of the facts, that "Madame Bovary" was
epochal. It paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for
the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest
thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary
is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the
force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone. And she
is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles. Behind the
story is an absolutely fatalistic philosophy; given a certain
environment, any woman (especially if assisted a bit by her
ancestors) will go to hell,--such seems the lesson. Now there is
nothing just like this in Balzac, We hear in it a new note, the
latter-day note of quiescence, and despair. And if we compare
Flaubert's indifference to his heroine's fate with the
tenderness of Dumas fils, or of Daudet, or the English Reade and
Dickens--we shall realize that we have here a mixture of a
personal and a coming general interpretation: Flaubert having by
nature a kind of aloof determinism, yet feeling, like the first
puffs of a cold chilling wind, the oncoming of an age of Doubt.
III.
These three French writers then, Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert,
molded the Novel before 1860 into such a shape as to make it
plastic to the hand of Zola a decade later. Zola's influence
upon our present generation of English fiction has been great,
as it has upon all novel-making since 1870. Before explaining
this further, it will be best to return to the study of the
mid-century English novelists who were too early to be affected
by him to any perceptible degree.