A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 12

[Sidenote: Note on Helisenne de Crenne.]

There should be added here a very curious, and now, if not in its own time, very rare book, my first knowledge of which I owed to a work already mentioned, M. Gustave Reynier's _Le Roman Sentimental avant l'Astree_ (Paris, 1908), though I was able, after this chapter was composed, to find and read the original in the British Museum. It was first printed in 1538, and bears, like other books of its time, a disproportionately long t.i.tle, which may, however, be easily shortened, "_Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procedent d'Amour_ ... composees par dame Helisenne de Crenne." This Helisenne or Helisaine seems to have been a real person: and not the least of the remarkable group of women authors who ill.u.s.trate her time in France, though M. Reynier himself admits that "it is difficult to know exactly _who_ she was." She appears to have been of Picardy, and other extant and non-extant works are attributed to her. Like almost everybody of her time she wrote in the extreme _rhetoriqueur_ style--so much so indeed as to lead even Pasquier into the blunder of supposing that Rabelais. .h.i.t at her in the dialect of the "Limousin scholar." The _Angoisses_, which M. Reynier's acute examination shows to have been written by some one who must have known Boccaccio's _Fiammetta_ (more than once Frenched about this time), is, or gives itself out to be, the autobiography of a girl of n.o.ble birth who, married at eleven years old and at first very fond of her husband, becomes at thirteen the object of much courtship from many gallants. Of these she selects, entirely on the love-at-first-sight principle, a very handsome young man who pa.s.ses in the street. She is well read and tries to keep herself in order by stock examples, cla.s.sical and romantic, of ill-placed and ill-fated affection. Her husband (who seems to have been a very good fellow for his time) gives her unconsciously what should have been the best help of all, by praising her self-selected lover's good looks and laughing at the young man's habit of staring at her. But she has already spoken frankly of her own _appet.i.t sensuel_, and she proceeds to show this in the fashion which makes the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth a sort of trough of animalism between the alt.i.tudes of Mediaeval and Renaissance pa.s.sion. Her lover turns out to be an utter cad, boastful, blabbing, and almost cowardly (he tells her in the usual stolen church interview, _Je crains merveilleus.e.m.e.nt monsieur votre mari_). But it makes not the slightest difference; nor does the at last awakened wrath of an at last not merely threatened but wideawake husband. Apparently she never has the chance of being actually guilty, for her husband finally, and very properly, shuts her up in a country house under strong duennaship. This finishes the first part, but there are two more, which return to more ancient ways. The lover Guenelic goes off to seek adventures, which he himself recounts, and acquires considerable improvement in them. He comes back, endeavours to free his mistress from her captivity, and does actually fly with her; but they are pursued; and though the lover and a friend of his with the rather Amadisian name of "Quezinstra" do their best, the heroine dies of weariness and shock, to be followed by her lover.

This latter part is comparatively commonplace. M. Reynier thinks very highly of the first. It is possible to go with him a certain part of the way, but not, I think, the whole, except from a purely "naturalist" and not at all "sentimental" point of view. Some bold bad men have, of course, maintained that when the other s.e.x is possessed by an _appet.i.t sensuel_ this overcomes everything else, and seems, if not actually to exclude, at any rate by no means always or often to excite, that accompanying transcendentalism which is not uncommon with men, and which, comprised with the appet.i.te, makes the love of the great lovers, whether they are represented by Dante or by Donne, by Shakespeare or by Sh.e.l.ley. Whether this be truth or libel _non nostrum est_. But it is certain that Helisenne, as she represents herself, does not make the smallest attempt to spiritualise (even in the lowest sense) or inspirit the animality of her affection. She wants her lover as she might want a pork chop instead of a mutton one; and if she is sometimes satisfied with seeing him, it is as if she were looking at that pork chop through a restaurateur's window and finding it better than not seeing it at all and contenting herself with the mutton. Still this result is probably the result at least as much of want of art as of original _mis_feeling; and the book certainly does deserve notice here.

The original _Oeuvres_ of Helisenne form a rather appetising little volume, fat, and close and small printed, as indeed is the case with most, but not quite all, of the books now under notice. The complementary pieces are mainly moralities, as indeed are, in intention, the _Angoisses_ themselves. These latter seem to me better worth reprinting than most other things as yet not reprinted, from the _Heptameron_ (Helisenne, be it remembered, preceded Marguerite) for nearly a hundred years. The later parts, though (or perhaps even because) they contrast curiously with the first, are by no means dest.i.tute of interest; and M. Reynier, I think, is a little hard on them if he has perhaps been a little kind to their predecessor. The lingo is indeed almost always stupendous and occasionally terrible. The printer aids sometimes; for it was not at once that I could emend the description of the B. V. M. as "Mere et Fille de _l'aliltonat_ [ant]

plasmateur" into "_alt.i.tonant_" ("loud-thundering"), while _plasmateur_ itself, though perfectly intelligible and legitimate, a favourite with the _rhetoriqueurs_, and borrowed from them even in Middle Scots, is not exactly everybody's word. But from her very exordium she may be fairly judged. "Au temps que la Deesse Cibele despouilla son glacial et gelide habit, et vest.i.t sa verdoyante robe, tap.i.s.see de diverses couleurs, je fus procree, de n.o.blesse." And, after all, there _is_ a certain n.o.bility in this fashion of speech and of literary presentation.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL--I

_The Pastoral and Heroic Romance, and the Fairy Story_

[Sidenote: Immense importance of the seventeenth century in our subject.]

The seventeenth century, almost if not quite from its beginning, ranks in French literature as the eighteenth does with us, that is to say, as the time of origin of novels or romances which can be called, in any sense, modern. In its first decade appeared the epoch-making pastoral-heroic _Astree_ of Honore d'Urfe;[124] its middle period, from 1620 to 1670, was the princ.i.p.al birth-time of the famous "Heroic"

variety, pure and simple; while, from that division into the last third, the curiously contrasted kind of the fairy tale came to add its quota of influence. At various periods, too, individuals of more or less note (and sometimes of much more than almost any of the "school-writers" just mentioned) helped mightily in strengthening and diversifying the subjects and manners of tales. To this period also belongs the continuance and prominence of that element of actual "lived" anecdote and personal history which has been mentioned more than once before. The _Historiettes_ of Tallemant contain short suggestions for a hundred novels and romances; the memoirs, genuine or forged, of public and private persons have not seldom, in more modern times, formed the actual basis of some of the greatest fiction. Everybody ought long to have known Thackeray's perhaps rather whimsical declaration that he positively preferred the forged D'Artagnan memoirs of Courtils de Sandras (as far at least as the Gascon himself was concerned) to the work of that Alexander, the truly Great, of which he was nevertheless such a generous admirer: and recently mere English readers have had the opportunity of seeing whether they agree with him. In fact, as the century went on, almost all kinds of literature began to be more or less pervaded with the novel appeal and quality.

[Sidenote: The divisions of its contribution.]

The letters of "Notre Dame des Rochers" constantly read like parts or scenes of a novel, and so do various compositions of her ill-conditioned but not unintelligent cousin Bussy-Rabutin. Camus de Pontcarre in the earlier and Fenelon in the later century determined that the Devil should not have this good prose to himself, and our own Anthony Hamilton showed the way to Voltaire in a kind, of which, though the Devil had nothing immediately to do with it, he might perhaps make use later. In fact, the whole century teems with the spirit of tale-telling, _plus_ character-a.n.a.lysis; and in the eighteenth itself, with a few notable exceptions, there was rather a falling-off from, than a further advance towards, the full blossoming of the aloe in the nineteenth.

It will probably, therefore, not be excessive to give two chapters (and two not short ones) to this period. In the first of them we may take the two apparently opposite, but by no means irreconcilable schools of Pastoral and Heroic Romance[125] and of Fairy Tale, including perhaps only four persons, if so many, of first-rate literary rank--Urfe,[126]

Madeleine de Scudery, Madame d'Aulnoy, and Perrault; in the second, the more isolated but in some cases not unimportant names and works of Sorel, Scarron, Furetiere, and the capital ones of Madame de la Fayette and Hamilton. According to the plan previously pursued, less attempt will be made to give exhaustive or even full lists of pract.i.tioners than to ill.u.s.trate their practice thoroughly by example, translated or abstracted, and by criticism; and it is necessary that this latter course should be used without mercy to readers or to the historian himself in this first chapter. For there is hardly any department of literature which has been more left to the rather treacherous care of traditional and second- or seventh-hand judgment than the Heroic romance.[127]

[Sidenote: The Pastoral in general.]

The Pastoral, as being of the most ancient and in a literary sense of the highest formal rank, may occupy us first, but by no means longest. A great deal of attention (perhaps a great deal more than was at all necessary) has been paid to the pastoral element in various kinds of literature. The thing is certainly curious, and inevitably invited comment; but unfortunately it has peculiar temptations to a kind of comment which, though very fashionable for some time past, is rarely profitable. Pastorals of the most interesting kind actually exist in literature: "pastoralism" in the abstract, unless treated in the pure historical manner, is apt, like all similar criticism and discussion of "kinds" in general, to tend to [Greek: phlyaria].[128] For a history in a nutsh.e.l.l there is perhaps room even here, because the relations of the thing to fiction cannot be well understood without it. That the a.s.sociation of shepherds,[129] with songs, and with the telling of "tales" in both senses, is immensely old, is a fact which the Hebrew Scriptures establish, and almost the earliest Greek mythology and poetry confirm; but the wiser mind, here as elsewhere, will probably be content with the fact, and not enquire too busybodily into the reason. The connection between Sicily--apparently a land of actual pastoral life--and Alexandria--the home of the first professional man-of-letters school, as it may be called--perhaps supplies something more; the actual beauty of the Sicilian-Alexandrian poems, more still; the adoption of the form by Virgil, who was revered at Rome, renowned somewhat heterodoxically in the Middle Ages, and simply adored by the Renaissance, most of all. So, in English, Spenser and Milton, in French, Marot and others niched it solidly in the nation's poetry; and the certainly charming _Daphnis and Chloe_, when vernacularised, transferred its influence from verse to prose in almost all the countries of Europe.

To what may be called "common-sense" criticism, there is, of course, no form of literature, in either prose or verse, which is more utterly abhorrent and more helplessly exposed. Unsympathetic, and in some points unfair and even unintelligent, as Johnson's criticism of _Lycidas_ may seem, to the censure of its actual "pastorality" there is no answer, except that "these things are an allegory" as well as a convention. To go further out of mere common-sense objections, and yet stick to the Devil's-Advocate line, there is no form which lends itself to--which, indeed, insists upon--conventions of the most glaring unreality more than the pastoral, and none in which the decorations, unless managed with extraordinary genius, have such a tendency to be tawdry at best, draggled and withered at worst. Nevertheless, the fact remains that at almost all times, both in ancient literature and since the revival of letters, as well as in some probably more spontaneous forms during the Middle Ages themselves,[130] pastorals have been popular with the vulgar, and practised by the elect; while within the very last hundred years such a towering genius as Sh.e.l.ley's, and such a manifold and effectual talent as Mr. Arnold's, have selected it for some of their very best work.

Such adoption, moreover, had, for the writer of prose fiction, some peculiar and pretty obvious inducements. It has been noticed by all careful students of fiction that one of the initial difficulties in its way, and one of those which do not seem to get out of that way very quickly, is diffidence on the writer's part "how to begin." It may be said that this is not peculiar to fiction; but extends from the poet who never can get beyond the first lines of his epic to the journalist who sits for an hour gazing at the blank paper for his article, and returns home at midnight, if not like Miss Bolo "in a flood of tears and a sedan chair," at any rate in a tornado of swearing at himself and (while there were such things) a hansom cab. Pastoral gives both easy beginning and supporting framework.

[Sidenote: Its beginnings in France.]

[Sidenote: Minor romances preceding the _Astree_.]

The transformation of the older pastoral form into the newer began, doubtless, with the rendering into French of _Daphnis and Chloe_,[131]

which appeared in the same year with the complete _Heptameron_ (1559).

Twelve years later, in 1571, Belleforest's _La Pyrenee et Pastorale Amoureuse_ rather took the t.i.tle than exemplified the kind; but in 1578 the translation of Montemayor's _Diana_ definitely turned the current into the new-old channel. It was not, however, till seven years later still that "_Les Bergeries de Juliette_, de l'invention d'Ollenix du Mont Sacre" (a rather exceptionally foolish anagram of Nicolas de Montreux) essayed something original in the style. Montreux issued his work, of which more presently, again and again in five instalments, the last of which appeared thirteen years later than the first. And it has been proved with immense bibliographical labour by M. Reynier,[132] that though the last decade of the sixteenth century in France was almost as fertile in short love-romances[133] as ours was in sonnet-cycles, the pastoral form was, whether deliberately or not, for the most part eschewed, though there were one or two exceptions of little if any consequence. It is indeed noteworthy that (only four years before the first part of the _Astree_) a second translation or the _Diana_ came out. But it was not till 1607 that this first part actually appeared, and in the opinion of its own time generally, and our own time for the most part, though not in that of the interval, made a new epoch in the history of French fiction.

[Sidenote: Their general character.]

The general characteristics of this curious and numerous, but almost forgotten, body of work--which must, be it remembered, have exercised influence, more or less, on the progress of the novel by the ways of supply, demand, and reaction alike--have been carefully a.n.a.lysed by M.

Reynier, with whom, in regard to one or two points of opinion, one may differ, but whose statements of fact are certainly trustworthy. Short as they usually are, and small as is the literary power displayed in most of them, it is clear that they, long before Rambouillet and the _precieuses_, indicate a distinct reaction against merely brutal and ferocious manners, with a standard of "courtiership" in both senses. Our dear Reine Margot herself in one case prescribes, what one hopes she found not merely in La Mole, but in others of those transitorily happy ones whose desiccated hearts did or did not distend the pockets of her farthingale as live Persian kittens do those of their merchants. To be a lover you must have "a stocking void of holes, a ruff, a sword, a plume, _and a knowledge how to talk_." This last point is ill.u.s.trated in these miniature romances after a fashion on which one of the differences of opinion above hinted at may arise. It is not, as in the later "Heroics,"

shown merely in lengthy harangues, but in short and almost dramatised dialogue. No doubt this is often clumsy, but it may seem to have been not a whole mistake in itself--only an abortive attempt at something which, much later again, had to come before real novel-writing could be achieved, and which the harangues of the Scudery type could never have provided. There is a little actual history in them--not the key-cryptograms of the "Heroics" or their adoption of ancient and distant historic frames. In a very large proportion, forced marriages, proposed and escaped from, supply the plot; in not a few, forced "vocations" to the conventual life. Elopements are as common as abductions in the next stage, and are generally conducted with as much propriety. Courtships of married women, and lapses by them, are very rare.

[Sidenote: Examples of their style.]

No one will be surprised to hear that the "Phebus" or systematised conceit, for which the period is famous, and which the beloved Marguerite herself did not a little favour, is abundant in them. From a large selection of M. Reynier's, I cull, as perhaps the most delightful of all these, if not also of all known to me in any language, the following:

During this task, Love, who had ambushed himself, plunged his wings in the tears of the lover, and dried them in the burning breast of the maiden.

"A squadron of sighs" is unambitious, but neat, terse, and very tempting to the imagination. More complicated is a lady "floating on the sea of the persecution of her Prince, who would fain give her up to the shipwreck of his own concupiscence."

And I like this:

The grafts of our desires being inarched long since in the tree of our loves, the branches thereof bore the lovely bouquets of our hopes.

And this is fine:

Paper! that the rest of your white surface may not blush at my shame, suffer me to blacken it with my sorrow!

It has always been a sad mystery to me why rude and dull intelligences should sneer at, or denounce, these delightful fantastries, the very stuff of which dreams and love and poetry--the three best things of life--are made.[134]

[Sidenote: Montreux and the _Bergeries de Juliette_.]

The British Museum possesses not very many of the, I believe, numerous works of Nicolas de Montreux, _alias_, as has been said, Ollenix du Mont Sacre, a "gentleman of Maine," as he scrupulously designates himself.

But it does possess two parts (the first two) of the _Bergeries de Juliette_, and I am not in the least surprised that no reader of them should have worried any librarian into completing the set. Each of these parts is a stout volume of some five hundred pages,[135] not very small, of close small print, filled with stuff of the most deadly dulness. For instance, Ollenix is desirous to ill.u.s.trate the magnificence and the danger of those professional persons of the other s.e.x at Venice who have filled no small place in literature from Coryat to Rousseau. So he tells us, without a gleam or suspicion of humour, that one customer was so astonied at the decorations of the bedroom, the bed, etc., that he remained for two whole hours considering them, and forgetting to pay any attention to the lady. It is satisfactory to know that she revenged herself by raising the fee to an inordinate amount, and insisting on her absurd client's lackey being sent to fetch it before the actual conference took place. But the silliness of the story itself is a fair sample of Montreux' wits, and these wits manage to make anything they deal with duller by their way of telling it.

[Sidenote: Des Escuteaux and his _Amours Diverses_.]

It is still more unfortunate that our national collection has none of the numerous fictions[136] of A(ntoine?) de Nerveze. His _Amours Diverses_ (1606), in which he collected no less than seven love-stories, published separately earlier, would be useful. But it luckily does provide the similarly t.i.tled book of Des Escuteaux, who is perhaps the most representative and prolific writer, next to Montreux and Nerveze, of the whole, and who seems to me, from what I have read of the first and what others say of the second, to be their superior. The collections consist of (_Amours de_ in every case) _Filiris et Isolia_, dedicated to Isabel (not "-bel_le_") de Rochechouart; _Clarimond et Antoinette_ (to Lucresse [_sic_] de Bouille); _Clidamant et Marilinde_ (to _Jane_ de la Brunetiere), and _Ipsilis et Alixee_ (to Renee de Cosse, Amirale de France!).[137]

Some readers may be a little "put off" by a habit which Des Escuteaux has, especially in the first story of the volume, of prefixing, as in drama, the names of the speakers--_Le Prince_, _La Princesse_, etc.--to the first paragraphs of the harangues and _histoires_ of which these books so largely consist.[138] But it is not universal. The most interesting of the four is, I think, _Clidamant et Marilinde_, for it introduces the religious wars, a sojourn of the lovers on a desert island, which M. Reynier[139] not unjustly calls Crusoe-like, and other "varieties."

[Sidenote: Francois de Moliere--_Polyxene._]

I have not seen the other--quite other, and Francois--Moliere's _Semaine Amoureuse_, which belongs to this cla.s.s, though later than most; but his still later _Polyxene_, a sort of half-way house between these shorter novels and the ever-enlarged "Heroics," is a very fat duodecimo of 1100 pages. The heroine has two lovers--one with the singular name of Cloryman,--but love does not run smooth with either, and she ends by taking the (pagan) veil. The bathos of the thought and style may be judged from the heroine's affecting mention of an entertainment as "the last _ballet_ my unhappy father ever saw."

[Sidenote: Du Perier--_Arnoult et Clarimonde._]

Not one of the worst of these four or five score minors, though scarcely in itself a positively good thing, is the Sieur du Perier's _La Haine et l'Amour d'Arnoult et de Clarimonde_. It begins with a singularly ba.n.a.l exordium, gravely announcing that Hate and Love _are_ among the most important pa.s.sions, with other statements of a similar kind couched in commonplace language. But it does something to bring the novel from an uninteresting cloudland to earth by dealing with the recent and still vividly felt League wars: and there is some ingenuity shown in plotting the conversion of the pair from more than "a little aversion" at the beginning to nuptial union--_not_ at the end. For it is one of the points about the book which are not commonplace, though it may be a survival or atavism from mediaeval practice--that the latter part of it is occupied mainly, not with Arnoult and Clarimonde, but with the loves, fortunes, and misfortunes of their daughter Claride.

[Sidenote: Du Croset--_Philocalie._ Corbin--_Philocaste._]

The _Philocalie_ of Du Croset (1593) derives its princ.i.p.al interest from its being not merely a _Bergerie_ before the _Astree_, but, like it, the work of a Forezian gentleman who proudly a.s.serts his territoriality, and dedicates his book to the "Chevalier D'Urfe." And its part name-fellow, the _Philocaste_ of Jean Corbin--a very tiny book, the heroine of which is (one would hardly have thought it from her name) a Princess of England--is almost entirely composed of letters, discourse on them, and a few interspersed verses. It belongs to the division of backward-looking novels, semi-chivalrous in type, and its hero is as often called "The Black Knight" as by his name.

[Sidenote: Jean de Lannoi and his _Roman Satirique_.]

The _Roman Satirique_ (1624) of Jean de Lannoi is another example of the curious inability to "hit it off" which has been mentioned so often as characterising the period. Its 1100 pages are far too many, though it is fair to say that the print is exceptionally large and loose. Much of it is not in any sense "satiric," and it seems to have derived what popularity it had almost wholly from the "key" interest.