A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 13

[Sidenote: Beroalde de Verville outside the _Moyen de Parvenir_.]

The minor works--if the term may be used when the attribution of the major is by no means certain--of Beroalde de Verville have, as is usual, been used both ways as arguments for and against his authorship of the _Moyen de Parvenir_. _Les Aventures de Floride_ is simply an attempt, and a big one in size, to _amadigauliser_, as the literary slang of the time went. The _Histoire Veritable_, owing nothing but its t.i.tle and part of its idea to Lucian, and sub-t.i.tled _Les Princes Fortunes_, is less conventional. It has a large fancy map for a frontispiece; there are fairies in it, and a sort of _pot-pourri_ of queernesses which might not impossibly have come from the author or editor of the _Moyen_ in his less inconveniently ultra-Pantagruelist moments. _Le Cabinet de Minerve_ is actually a glorification of "honest" love. In fact, Beroalde is one of the oddest of "polygraphers," and there is n.o.body quite like him in English, though some of his fellows may be matched, after a fashion, with our Elizabethan pamphleteers. I have long wished to read the whole of him, but I suppose I never shall.

And it is time to leave these very minor stars and come to the full and gracious moon of the _Astree_ itself.

[Sidenote: The _Astree_--its author.]

Honore D'Urfe, who was three years younger than Shakespeare, and died in the year in which Charles I. came to the throne, was a cadet of a very ancient family in the district or minor province of Forez, where his own famous Lignon runs into the Loire. He was a pupil of the Jesuits and early _fort en theme_, was a strenuous _ligueur_, and, though (or perhaps also because) he was very good friends with Henri's estranged wife, Margot, for some time decidedly suspect to Henri IV. For this reason, and others of property, etc., he became almost a naturalised Savoyard, but died in the service of his own country at the beginning of Richelieu's Valtelline war. The most noteworthy thing in his rather eventful life was, however, his marriage. This also has a direct literary interest, at least in tradition, which will have his wife, Diane de Chateaumorand, to be Astree herself, and so the heroine of "the first [great] sentimental romance." The circ.u.mstances of the union, however, were scarcely sentimental, much less romantic. They were even, as people used to say yesterday, "not quite nice," and the Abbe Reure, a devotee of both parties to it, admits that they "_heurte[nt] violemment nos idees_." In fact Diane was not only eight years older than Honore and thirty-eight years of age, but she had been for a quarter of a century the wife of his elder brother, Anne, while he himself was a knight of Malta, and vowed to celibacy. Of course (as the Canon points out with irrefragably literal accuracy in logic and law) the marriage being declared null _ab initio_ (for the cause most likely to suggest itself, though alleged after extraordinary delay), Diane and Honore were not sister- and brother-in-law at all, and no "divorce" or even "dispensation" was needed. In the same way, Honore, having been introduced into the Order of St. John irregularly in various ways, never was a knight of it at all, and could not be bound by its rules. Q.E.D.

Wicked people, of course, on the other hand, said that it was a device to retain Diane's great wealth (for Honore was quite poor in comparison) in the family; sentimental ones that it was a fortunate and blameless crowning of a long and pure attachment. As a matter of fact, no "permanent children" (to adopt an excellent phrase of the late Mr.

Traill's) resulted; Diane outlived her husband, though but for a short time, and left all her property to her relations of the Levis family.

The pair are also said not to have been the most united of couples. In connection with the _Astree_ their portraits are interesting. Honore d'Urfe, though he had the benefit of Van Dyck's marvellous art of cavalier creation, must have been a very handsome man. Diane's portrait, by a much harder and dryer hand, purports to have been taken at the age of sixty-four. At first sight there is no beauty in it; but on reinspection one admits possibilities--a high forehead, rather "enigmatic" eyes, not at all "extinguished," a nose prominent and rather large, but straight and with well, but not too much, developed "wings,"

and, above all, a full and rather voluptuous mouth. Such may have been the first identified novel-heroine. It is a popular error to think that sixty-four and beauty are incompatibles, but one certainly would have liked to see her at sixteen, or better still and perhaps best of all, at six and twenty.

[Sidenote: The book.]

The _Astree_ itself is not the easiest of subjects to deal with. It is indeed not so huge as the _Grand Cyrus_, but it is much more difficult to get at--a very rare flower except in the "grey old gardens" of secular libraries. It and its author have indeed for a few years past had the benefit (as a result partly of another doubtful thing, an _x_-centenary) of one[140] of the rather-to-seek good specimens among the endless number of modern literary monographs. But it has never been reprinted--even extracts of it, with the exception of a few stock pa.s.sages, are not common or extensive; and though a not small library has been written about it in successive waves of eulogy, reaction, mostly ignorant contempt, rehabilitation, and mere bookmaking; though there have been (as noted) recent anniversaries and celebrations, and so forth; though it is one of the not numerous books which have given a name-type--Celadon,--and a place--"les bords du Lignon,"--to their own, if not to universal literature, it seems to be "as a book" very little known. The faithful monographer above cited admits merit in Dunlop; but Dunlop does not say very much about it. Herr Korting (_v. sup._) a.n.a.lyses it. Possibly there may be, also in German, a comparison, tempting to those who like such things, between it and its twenty years'

predecessor, Sidney's _Arcadia_, the first French translation of which, in 1625, just after Urfe's death, was actually dedicated to his widow.

But I suspect that few English writers about Sidney have known much of the _Astree_, and I feel sure that still fewer French writers[141] on this have known anything of Sidney save perhaps his name. Of course the indebtedness of both books to Montemayor's _Diana_ is a commonplace.

[Sidenote: Its likeness to the _Arcadia_.]

[Sidenote: Its philosophy and its general temper.]

One of the numerous resemblances between the two, and one which, considering their respective positions in the history of the French and English novel, is most interesting, is the strong philosophical and specially Platonic influence which the Renaissance exercised on both.[142] Sidney, however full of it elsewhere, put less of it in his actual novel; while, on the other hand, nothing did so much to create and spread the rather rococo notion of pseudo-platonic love in France, and from France throughout Europe, as the _Astree_ itself. The further union of the philosophic mind with an eminently cavalier temperament--the united _ethos_ of scholar, soldier, lover, and courtier--fills out the comparison: and dwarfs such merely mechanical things as the mixed use of prose and verse (which both may have taken, nay pretty certainly did take, from Montemayor) and the pastoralities, for which they in the same way owed royalty to the Spaniard, to Ta.s.so, to Sannazar, and to the Greek romances, let alone Theocritus and Virgil.

And, to confine ourselves henceforward to our own special subject, it is this double infusion of idealism--of spiritual and intellectual enthusiasm on the one hand and practical fire of life and act on the other--which makes the great difference, not merely between the _Astree_ and its predecessors of the _Amadis_ cla.s.s, but between it and its successors the strictly "Heroic" romances, though these owe it so much.

The first--except in some points of pa.s.sion--hardly touch reality at all; the last are perpetually endeavouring to simulate and insinuate a sort of reality under cover of adventures and conventions which, though fict.i.tious, are hardly at all fantastic. But the _Astree_ might almost be called a French prose _Faerie Queene_, allowing for the difference of the two nations, languages, vehicles, and _milieux_ generally, in its representation of the above-mentioned cavalier-philosophic _ethos_--a thing never so well realised in France as in England or in Spain, but of which Honore d'Urfe, from many traits in life and book, seems to have been a real example, and which certainly vindicates its place in history and literature.

[Sidenote: Its appearance and its author's other work.]

The _Astree_ appeared in five instalments, 1607-10-12-19 and posthumously, the several parts being frequently printed: and it is said to be almost impossible to find a copy, all the parts of which are of the first issue in each case. The two later parts probably, the last certainly, were collaborated in, if not wholly written by, the author's secretary Baro. But it was by no means Honore's only work; indeed the Urfes up to his time were an unusually literary family; and, while his grandfather Claude collected a remarkable library (whence, at its dispersion in the evil days of the house[143] during the eighteenth century, came some of not the least precious possessions of French public and private collections), his unfortunate brother Anne was a poet. Honore himself, besides school exercises, wrote _Epistres Morales_ which were rather popular, and display qualities useful in appreciating the novel itself; a poem in octosyllables, usually and perhaps naturally called "_La_ Sireine," but really ent.i.tled in the masculine, and having nothing to do with a mermaid; a curious thing, semi-dramatic in form and in irregular blank verse, ent.i.tled _Silvanire ou La Morte Vive_, which was rehandled soon after his death by Corneille's most dangerous rival Mairet; and an epic called _La Savoisiade_, which seems to have no merit, and all but a very small portion of which is still unprinted.

[Sidenote: Its character and appeals.]

He remains, therefore, the author of the _Astree_, and, taking things on the whole (a mighty whole, beyond contest, as far as bulk goes), there are not so many authors of the second rank (for one of the first he can hardly be called) who would lose very much by an exchange with him.

One's estimates of the book are apt to vary in different places, even as, though not in the same degree as, the estimates of others have varied at different times; but I myself have found that the more I read of it the more I liked and esteemed it; and I believe that, if I had a copy of my own and could turn it over in the proper diurnal and nocturnal fashion, not as duty- but as pleasure-reading, I should like it better still. Certain points that have appealed to me have been noticed already--its combination of sensuous and ideal pa.s.sion is perhaps the most important of them; but there are not a few others, themselves by no means void of importance. One is the union, not common in French books between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, of sentiment and seriousness with something very like humour. Hylas, the not exactly "comic man," but light-o'-love and inconstant shepherd, was rather a bone of contention among critics of the book's own century. But he certainly seasons it well; and there is one almost Shakespearean scene in which he is concerned--a scene which Bened.i.c.k and Beatrice, who may have read it not so very many years after their own marriage, must have enjoyed considerably. Hylas and the shepherdess Stella (who is something of a girl-counterpart of his, as in the case just cited) draw up a convention of love[144] between them. The tables, though they are not actually numbered in the original, are twelve, and, shortened a little, run as follows:

[Sidenote: Hylas and Stella and their Convention.]

1. Neither is to be sovereign over the other.

2. Both are to be at once Lover and Beloved. [They knew something about the matter, these two, for all their jesting.]

3. There is to be no constraint of any kind.

4. They are to love for as long or as short a time as they please.

5. No charge of infidelity is ever to be brought on either side.

6. It is quite permitted to either or both to love somebody else, and yet to continue loving each other.

7. There is to be no jealousy, no complaints, no sulks.

8. They are to do and say exactly what they please.

9. Words like "faithfulness," etc., are taboo.

10. They may leave off playing whenever they like.

11. And begin again ditto.

12. They are to forget both the favours they receive from each other and the offences they may commit against each other.

Now, of course, any one may say of the Land where such a code might be realised, in the very words of one of the most charming of songs, set to one of the happiest of tunes:

Cette rive, ma chere, On ne la connait guere Au pays des amours!

But that is not the question, and if it _were_ possible it undoubtedly would be a very agreeable Utopia, combining the transcendental charms of the country of Quintessence with the material ones of the Pays de Cocagne. From its own point of view there seems to be no fault to find with it, except, perhaps, with the first part of the Twelfth Commandment; for the remembrance of former favours heightens the enjoyment of later ones, and the danger of _nessun maggior dolore_ is excluded by the hypothesis of indifference after breach. But a sort of umpire, or at any rate thirdsman, the shepherd Silvandre,[145] when asked his opinion, makes an ingenious objection. To carry out Article Three, he says, there ought to be a Thirteenth:

13. That they may break any of these rules just as they please.

For what comes of this further the reader may go to the book, but enough of it should have been given to show that there is no want of salt, though there is no (or very little) _gros sel_[146] in the _Astree_.

[Sidenote: Narrative skill frequent.]

Yet again there is very considerable narrative power. Abstracts may be found, not merely in older books mentioned or to be mentioned, but in the recent publications of Korting and the Abbe Reure, and there is neither room nor need for a fresh one here. As some one (or more than one) has said, the book is really a sort of half-allegorical tableau of honourable Love worked out in a crowd of couples (some I believe, have counted as many as sixty), from Celadon and Astree themselves downwards.

The course of these loves is necessarily "accidented," and the accidents are well enough managed from the first, and naturally enough best known, where Celadon flings himself into the river and is rescued, insensible but alive, by nymphs, who all admire him very much, though none of them can affect his pa.s.sion for Astree. But one cares--at least I have found myself caring--less for the story than for the way in which it is told--a state of things exactly contrary, as will be seen, to that produced with or in me by the _Grand Cyrus_. There we have a really well, if too intricately, engineered plot, in the telling of which it is difficult to take much interest. Here it is just the reverse. And one of the consequences is that you can dip in the _Astree_ much more refreshingly than in its famous follower, where, if you do so, you constantly "don't know where you are."

[Sidenote: The Fountain of the Truth of Love.]

One of the most famous things in the book, and one of the most important to its conduct, is the "Fountain of the Truth of Love," a few words on which will ill.u.s.trate the general handling very fairly. This Fountain (presided over by a Druid, a very important personage otherwise, who is a sort of high priest thereof) has nothing in common with the more usual waters which are philtres or anti-philtres, etc. Its function is to be gazed in rather than to be drunk, and if you look into it, loving somebody, you see your mistress. If she loves you, you see yourself as well, beside her, and (which is not so nice) if she loves some one else you see _him_; while if she is fancy-free you see her only. Clidaman, one of the numerous lovers above mentioned, tries the water; and his love, Silvie, presents herself again and again as he looks, "almost setting on fire with her lovely eyes the wave which seemed to laugh around her." But she is quite alone.

The presiding Druid interprets, not merely in the sense already given, but with one of the philosophic commentaries, which, as has been said, are distinctive of the book. The nature of the fountain is to reflect not body but spirit. Spirit includes Will, Memory, and Judgment, and when a man loves, his spirit transforms itself through all these ways into the thing loved. Therefore when he looks into the fountain he sees Her. In the same way She is changed into Him or some one else whom she loves, and He sees that image also; but if she loves no one He sees her image alone.

"This is very satisfactory" (as Lady Kew would say) to the inquiring mind, but not so much so to the lover. He wants to have the fountain shut up, I suppose (for my notes and memory do not cover this point exactly), that no rival may have the chance denied to himself. He would even destroy it, but that--the Druid tells and shows him--is quite impossible. What can be done shall be. And here comes in another of the agreeable things (to me) in the book--its curious fairy-tale character, which is shown by numerous supernaturalities, much more _humanised_ than those of the _Amadis_ group, and probably by no means without effect on the fairy-tale proper which was to follow. Clidaman himself happens, in the most natural way in the world, to "keep"--as an ordinary man keeps cats and dogs--a couple of extraordinary big and savage lions and another couple of unicorns to fight, not with each other, but with miscellaneous animals. The lions and the unicorns are forthwith extra-enchanted, so as to guard the fountain--an excellent arrangement, but subject to some awkwardnesses in the sequel. For the lions take turns to seek their meat in the ordinary way, and though they can hurt n.o.body who does not meddle with the fountain, and have no wish to be man-eaters, complications naturally supervene. And sometimes, besides fighting,[147] and love-making, and love casuistry, and fairy-tales, and oracles, and the finer comedy above mentioned, "Messire d'Urfe" (for he did not live too late to have that most gracious of all designations of a gentleman used in regard to him) did not disdain, and could not ill manage, sheer farce. The scene with Cryseide and Arimant and Clorine and the nurse and the ointment in Part III. Book VII., though it contains little or nothing to _effaroucher la pudeur_, is like one of the broader but not broadest tales of the Fabliaux and their descendants.

[Sidenote: Some drawbacks--awkward history.]

The book, therefore, has not merely a variety, but a certain liveliness, neither of which is commonplace; but it would of course be uncritical to suppress its drawbacks. It is far too long: and while bowing to those to the manner born who say that Baro carried out his master's plan well in point of style, and acknowledging that I have paid less attention to Parts IV. and V. than to the others, it seems to me that we could spare a good deal of them. One error, common to almost the whole century in fiction, is sometimes flagrant. n.o.body except a pedant need object to the establishment, in the time of the early fifth century and the place of Gaul, of a non-historical kinglet- or queenletdom of Forez or "Seguse" under Amasis (here a feminine name[148]), etc.; nor, though (as may perhaps be remarked again later) things Merovingian bring little luck in literature, need we absolutely bar Chilperics and Alarics, or a reference to "all the beauties of Neustria." But why, in the midst of the generally gracious _macedoine_ of serious and comic loves, and jokes, and adventures, should we have thrust in the entirely unnecessary, however historical, crime whereby Valentinian the Third lost his worthless life and his decaying Empire? It has, however, been remarked, perhaps often enough, by those who have busied themselves with the history of the novel, how curious it is that the historical variety, though it never succeeded in being born for two thousand years after the _Cyropaedia_ and more, constantly strove to be so. At no time were the throes more frequent than during the seventeenth century in France; at no time, there or anywhere else, were they more abortive.[149]

[Sidenote: But attractive on the whole.]

But it remains on the whole an attractive book, and the secret of at least part of this attractiveness is no doubt to be found stated in a sentence of Madame de Sevigne's, which has startled some people, that "everything in it is natural and true." To the startled persons this may seem either a deliberate paradox, or a mere extravagance of affection, or even downright bad taste and folly. But the Lady of all Beautiful Letter-writers was almost of the family of Neverout in literary criticism. If she had been a professional critic (which is perhaps impossible), she might have safeguarded her dictum by the addition, "according to its own scheme and division." It is the neglect of this implication which has caused the demurs. "'Natural!'" and "'true!'" they say, "why, the Pastoral is the most frankly and in fact outrageously unnatural and false of all literary kinds. Does not Urfe himself warn us that we are not to expect ordinary shepherds and shepherdesses at all?"

Or perhaps they go more to detail. "The whole book is unabashedly occupied with love-making; and love is not the whole, it is even a very small part, of life, that is to say, of truth and nature." Or, to come still closer to particulars, "Where, for instance, did Celadon, who is represented as having been reduced to utter dest.i.tution when, _more heroum_, he started a quasi-hermit life in the wood, get the decorations, etc., of the Temple he erected to Love and Astree?" One almost blushes at having to explain, in a popular style, the mistakenness, to use the mildest word, of these objections. The present writer, in a book less ambitious than the present on the sister subject of the English novel, once ventured to point out that if you ask "where Sir Guyon got that particularly convenient padlock with which he fastened Occasion's tongue, and still more the hundred iron chains with which he bound Furor?" that is to say, if you ask such a question seriously, you have no business to read romance at all. As to the Love matter, of that it is still less use to talk. There are some who would go so far as to deny the major; even short of that hardiness it may be safely urged that in poetry and romance Love _is_ the chief and princ.i.p.al thing, and that the poet and the romancer are only acting up to their commission in representing it as such. But the source of all these errors is best reached, and if it may be, stopped, by dealing with the first article of the indictment in the same way. What if Pastoral _is_ artificial? That may be an argument against the kind as a whole, but it cannot lie against a particular example of it, because that example is bound to act up to its kind's law. And I think it not extravagant to contend that the _Astree_ acts up to its law in the most inoffensive fashion possible--in such a fashion, in fact, as is hardly ever elsewhere found in the larger specimens, and by no means very often in the smaller. Hardly even in _As You Like It_, certainly not in the _Arcadia_, do the crook and the pipe get less in the way than they do here. A minor cavil has been urged--that the "shepherds" and the "knights," the "shepherdesses" and the "nymphs" are very little distinguishable from each other; but why should they be? Urfe had sufficient art to throw over all these things an air of glamour which, to those who can themselves take the benefit of the spell, banishes all inconsistencies, all improbabilities, all specks and knots and the like.

It has been said that the _Astree_ has in it something of the genuine fairy-tale element. And the objections taken to it are really not much more reasonable than would be the poser whether even the cleverest of wolves, with or without a whole human grandmother inside it, would find it easy to wrap itself up in bedclothes, or whether, seeing that even walnut sh.e.l.ls subject cats to such extreme discomfort, top-boots would not be even more intolerable to the most faithful of feline retainers.

[Sidenote: The general importance and influence.]

The literary influence and importance of the book have never been denied by any competent criticism which had taken the trouble to inform itself of the facts. It can be pointed out that while the "Heroics," great as was their popularity for a time, did not keep it very long, and lost it by sharp and long continued--indeed never reversed--reaction, the influence of the _Astree_ on this later school itself was great, was not effaced by that of its pupils, and worked in directions different, as well as conjoint. It begat or helped to beget the _Precieuses_; it did a great deal, if not exactly to set, to continue that historical character which, though we have not been able to speak very favourably of its immediate exercise, was at last to be so important. Above all, it reformed and reinforced the "sentimental" novel, as it is called. We have tried to show that there was much more of this in the mediaeval romance proper than it has been the fashion in recent times to allow.

There was a great deal in the _Amadis_ cla.s.s, but extravaganzaed out of reason as well as out of rhyme. To us, or some of us, the _Astree_ type may still seem extravagant, but in comparison it brings things back to that truth and nature which were granted it by Madame de Sevigne. Its charms actually soothed the savage breast of Boileau, and it is not surprising that La Fontaine loved it. Few things of the kind are more creditable to the better side of Jean Jacques a full century later, than that he was not indifferent to its beauty; and there were few greater omissions on the part of _mil-huit-cent-trente_ (which, however, had so much to do!) than its comparative neglect to stray on to the gracious banks of the Lignon. All honour to Saint-Marc Girardin (not exactly the man from whom one would have expected it) for having been, as it seems, though in a kind of _palinodic_ fashion, the first to render serious attention, and to do fair justice, to this vast and curious wilderness of delights.[150]