A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 19

One of the cleverest of all the later fairy tales is the _Acajou et Zirphile_ of Duclos, who, indeed, had sufficient wits to do anything well, and was a novelist, though not a very distinguished one, on a larger scale. The tale itself (which is said to have been written "up to" ill.u.s.trations of Boucher designed for something else) has, indeed, a smatch of vulgarity, but a purely superfluous and easily removable one. It is almost as cleverly written as any thing of Voltaire's: and the final situation, where the hero, who has gone through all the mischiefs and triumphs of one of Crebillon's, recovers his only real love, Zirphile, in a torment and tornado of heads separated from bodies and hands separated from arms, is rather capital.

Not much less so, in the different way of a pretty sentimentality, is the _Aglae ou Naboline_ of the painter Coypel; while the batch of short stories from Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont's _Magasin des Enfants_ have had a curious fate. They are rather pooh-poohed by French editors and critics, and they are certainly _very_ moral, too much so, in fact, as has been already objected to one of them, _Le Prince Cheri_. But allowances have been allowed even there, and, somehow or other, _Fatal et Fortune_, _Le Prince Charmant_, _Joliette_, and the rest have recovered more of the root of the matter than most others, and have established a just popularity in translation.

And then comes the shortest, I think, of all the stories in the one and forty volumes; the silliest as a composition; the most contemptibly _thought_--but by the accidents of fate endowed later with a tragic-satiric _moralitas_ almost if not quite unrivalled in literature.

Its author was a certain M. Selis, apparently a very respectable schoolmaster, professor, and bookmaker of not the lowest cla.s.s--employments and occupations in respect of all of which not a few of us have earned our bread and paid our income-tax. Unluckily for him, there was born in his time a Dauphin, and he wrote a little adulatory tale of the birth, and the editors of the _Cabinet_ Appendix thanked him much for giving it them. It is not four pages long; it tells how an ancestral genie--a great king named Louis--blessed the child, and said that he would be called "the father of his people," and another followed suit with "the father of letters," and a third swore _Ventre Saint Gris!_ and named the baby's uncle as "Joseph," and a still greater Louis said other things, and a fairy named Maria Theresa crowned the blessings. Then came an ogre mounted on a leopard and eating raw meat, who was of Albion, and said he was king of the country, and observed "_G.o.d ham_" [_sic_], and was told that he would be beaten and made to lay down his arms by the child.

And the Dauphin, unless this _signalement_ is strangely delusive, lived to know the worst ogres in the world (their chief was named Simon), who were of his own people, and to die the most unhappy prince or king in that world. And he of the Leopard who said _G.o.d ham_, would have saved that Dauphin if he could, and did slay many of his less guiltless relations and subjects, and beat the rest "thorough and thorough," and restored (could they have had the will and wit to profit by it) the race of Louis and Francis, and of the genie who said "Ventre Saint Gris!" to their throne. And this was the end of the vaticinations of M. Selis, and such are the tears of things.

The rest of this volume is occupied by a baker's dozen of _Contes Choisis_, the first of which, _Les Trois Epreuves_, seems to imitate Voltaire, and is smartly written, while some of the others are not bad.

Volume x.x.xvi. is occupied (not too appositely, though inoffensively in itself) by a translation of Wieland's _Don Silvia de Rosalva_, which is a German _Sir Launcelot Greaves_ or _Spiritual Quixote_, with fairy tales subst.i.tuted for romances of chivalry. The author of _Oberon_ was seldom, if ever, unreadable, and he is not so here; but the thing is neither a tale proper (seeing that it fills a whole volume), nor a real fairy tale, nor French, so we may let it alone.

Then this curious collection once more comes to an end, which is not an end, with a very useful though not too absolutely trustworthy volume of _Notices des Auteurs_, containing not only "bio-bibliographical"

articles on the actual writers collected, but references to others, great and small, from Marivaux, Lesage, Prevost, and Voltaire downwards, and glances, sometimes with actual _comptes rendus_, at pieces of the cla.s.s not included. That it is conducted on the somewhat irresponsible and indolent principles of its time might be antic.i.p.ated from previous things, such as the clause in the Preface to Wieland's just noticed book, that the author had "gone to Weimar, where perhaps he is still,"

an observation which, from the context, seems not to be so much an attempt at _persiflage_ as a pure piece of lazy _navete_. The volume, however, contains a great deal of information such as it is; some sketches, ingeniously draped or Bowdlerised, of the "naughty" tales excluded from the collection itself, and a few amusing stories.[245]

As, however, has been said, there was to be still another joint to this crocodile, and the four last volumes, x.x.xviii. to xli. (_not_, as is wrongly said by some, x.x.xvii. to xl.), contain a somewhat rash continuation of the _Arabian Nights_ themselves, with which Cazotte[246]

appears to have had a good deal to do, though an actual Arab monk of the name of Chavis is said to have been mainly concerned. They are not bad reading; but even less of fairy tales than Gueulette's orientalities.

Not much apology is needed, it may be hoped, for the s.p.a.ce given to this curious kind; the bulk of its production, the length of its popularity, and the intrinsic merit of some few of its better examples vindicate its position here. But a confession should take the place of the unnecessary excuse already partly made. The artificial fairy tale of the more regular kind was not, by the law of its being, prevented almost unavoidably from doing service to the novel at large, as the Eastern story was; but, as a matter of fact, it did little except what will be mentioned in the next paragraph. That it helped to exemplify afresh what had been shown over and over again for centuries, the singular recreative faculty of the nation and the language, was about all. But another national characteristic, the as yet incurable set of the French mind towards types--which, if the second volume of this work ever appears, will, it is hoped, be shown to have spared the later novel--seized on these tales. They are "as like as my fingers to my fingers," and they are not very pretty fingers as a rule. Incidentally they served as frameworks to some of the worst verse in the world, nor, for the most part, did they even encourage very good prose. You may get some good out of them; but unless you like hunting, and are not vexed by frequent failures to "draw," the _Cabinet des Fees_ is best left to exploration at second-hand.

To collect the results of this long chapter, we may observe that in these three departments--Pastoral, Heroic, and Fairy--various important elements of _general_ novel material and construction are provided in a manner not yet noticed. The Pastoral may seem to be the most obsolete, the most of a mere curiosity. But the singular persistence and, in a way, universality of this apparently fossil convention has been already pointed out; and it is perhaps only necessary to shift the pointer to the fact that the novels with which one of the most modern, in perhaps the truest sense of that word, of modern novelists, though one of the eldest, Mr. Thomas Hardy, began to make his mark--_Under the Greenwood Tree_ and _Far from the Madding Crowd_--may be claimed by the pastoral with some reason. And it has another and a wider claim--that it keeps up, in its own way, the element of the imaginative, of the fanciful--let us say even of the unreal--without which romance cannot live, without which novel is almost repulsive, and which the increasing advances of realism itself were to render more than ever indispensable. As for the Heroic, we have already shown how much, with all its faults, it did for the novel generally in construction and in other ways. It has been shown likewise, it is hoped, how the Fairy story, besides that additional provision of imagination, fancy, and dream which has just been said to be so important--mingled with this a kind of realism which was totally lacking in the others, and which showed itself especially in one immensely important department wherein they had been so much to seek.

Fairies may be (they are not to my mind) things that "do not happen"; but the best of these fairies are fifty times more natural, not merely than the characters of Scudery and Gomberville, but than those (I hold to my old blasphemy) of Racine. Animals may not talk; but the animals of Perrault and even of Madame d'Aulnoy talk divinely well, and, what is more, in a way most humanly probable and interesting. Never was there such a triumph of the famous impossible-probable as a good fairy story.

Except to the mere scientist and to (of course, quite a different person) the unmitigated fool, these stories, at least the best of them, fully deserve the delightful phrase which Southey attributes to a friend of his. They are "necessary and voluptuous and right." They were, to the French eighteenth century and to French prose, almost what the ballad was to the English eighteenth century and to English verse; almost what the _Marchen_ was to the prose and verse alike of yet un-Prussianised Germany. They were more than twice blessed: for they were charming in themselves; they exercised good influence on other literary productions; and they served as precious antidotes to bad things that they could not improve, and almost as precious alternatives to things good in themselves but of a different kind from theirs.

What, however, none of the kinds discussed in this chapter gave entirely, while only the fairy story gave in part, and that in strong contrast to another part of itself, was a history of ordinary life--high, low, or middle--dealing with characters more or less representing live and individual personages; furnished with incidents of a possible and probable character more or less regularly constructed; furnished further with effective description of the usual scenery, manners, and general accessories of living; and, finally, giving such conversation as might be thought necessary in forms suitable to "men of this world," in the Shakespearian phrase. In other words, none of them attained, or even attempted to fulfil, the full definition of the novel.

The scattered books to be mentioned in the next chapter did not, perhaps, in any one case--even Madame de la Fayette's--quite achieve this; but in all of them, even in Sorel's, we see more or less conscious or unconscious attempt at it.

FOOTNOTES:

[124] Herr Korting (_v. sup._ p. 133) gave considerable s.p.a.ce to Barclay's famous _Argenis_, which also appeared fairly early in the century. To treat, however, a Latin book, written by a Scotsman, with admittedly large if not main reference to European politics, as a "French novel," seems a literary solecism. I do not know whether it is rash to add that the _Argenis_ itself seems to me to have been wildly overpraised. It is at any rate one of the few books--one of the still fewer romances--which have defied my own powers of reading at more than one attempt.

[125]

[Sidenote: Note on marked influence of Greek Romance.]

The repet.i.tion, in the seventeenth century, of something very like a phenomenon which we noticed in the twelfth, is certainly striking, and may seem at first sight rather uncanny. But those who have made some attempt to "find the whole" in literature, and in that attempt have at least found out something about the curious laws of revolution and recurrence which take the place of any progress in a straight line, will deem the thing natural enough. We declined, in the earlier case, to admit much, if any, direct influence of the accomplished Greek Romance on the Romance of the West; but we showed how cla.s.sical subjects, whether pure or tinctured with Oriental influence, induced an immensely important development of this same Western Romance in two directions--that of manners, character, and pa.s.sion, and that of marvel.

In the later period cla.s.sical influences of all sorts are again at work; but infinitely the larger part of that work is done by the Greek Romances themselves--pastoral, adventurous, and sentimental,--the dates of the translations of which will be given presently. And the newer Oriental kind--coming considerably later still and sharing its nature certainly, and perhaps its origin, not now with cla.s.sical mythology, but again, in the most curious way, with Western folk stories--supplements and diversifies the reinforcement.

[126] Scudery writes "Urfe," and this confirms the _obiter dictum_ of Sainte-Beuve, that with the Christian name, the "Monsieur," or some other t.i.tle you must use the "_de_," otherwise not. But in this particular instance I think most French writers give the particle.

[127] I myself, in writing a _Short History of French Literature_ many years ago, had to apologise for incomplete knowledge; and I will not undertake even now to have read every romance cursorily mentioned in this chapter--indeed, some are not very easy to get at. But I have done my best to extend my knowledge, a.s.sisted by a rather minute study of the contemporary English heroic romance in prose and verse; and I believe I may say that I do now really know the _Grand Cyrus_, though even now I will again not say that I have read every one of its perhaps two million words, or even the whole of every one of its more than 12,000 pages. In regard to the _Astree_ I have been less fortunately situated; but "I have been there and still would go."

[128] The above remarks are most emphatically _not_ intended to refer to the work of Mr. Greg.

[129] The sheep, whether as a beast of most mult.i.tude or for more recondite reasons, has, of course, the preference; but it may be permissible to say that no guardian of animals is excluded. Goat-herds in the Greek ran the shepherd hard; neat-herds and swine-herds abound everywhere except, as concerns the last, in Jewry; even the goose-girl figures, and has in Provencal at least a very pretty name--_auquiera_.

[130] The mediaeval _pastourelle_ is no doubt to some extent conventional and "made in moulds." But it is by no means so unreal as (whether Greek was so or not) Roman pastoral pretty certainly was, and as modern has been beyond possibility of doubt. How good it could be, without any convention at all, Henryson showed once for all in our own language by _Robene and Makyne_.

[131] _Theagenes and Chariclea_ had preceded it by thirteen years, though a fresh translation appeared in the same year, as did the first of _Hysminias and Hysmine_. Achilles Tatius (_Cleitophon and Leucippe_) had been partly done in 1545, but waited till 1568 for completion.

[132] _Op. cit. sup._

[133] They are almost always _Amours_ after their Greek prototypes, sometimes simple, often qualified, and these most frequently by such adjectives as "Infortunees et chastes," "Constantes et infortunees,"

"Chastes et heureuses," "Pudiques," etc. etc. Not a few are taken direct from episodes of Ariosto or other elders; otherwise they are "loves" of Laoniphile, Lozie, Poliphile and Mellonimphe, Pegase (who has somehow or other become a nymph) and Leandre, Dachmion and Deflore (a rather unlucky heroine-name), etc. etc. Their authors are nearly as numerous as their t.i.tles; but the chief were a certain Sieur de Nerveze, whose numerous individual efforts were collected more than once to the number at least of a good baker's dozen, and a Sieur des Escuteaux, who had the same fortune. Sometimes the h.e.l.lenism went rather to seed in such t.i.tles as _Erocaligenese_, which supposed itself to be Greek for "Naissance d'un bel amour." It is only (at least in England) in the very largest libraries, perhaps in the British Museum alone, that there is any chance of examining these things directly; some of them escaped even the mighty hunt of M. Reynier himself. What the present writer has found is treated shortly in the text.

[134] M. Reynier (most justly, but of course after many predecessors) points out that the common filiation of these things on Marini and Gongora is chronologically impossible. We could, equally of course, supply older examples still in English; and persons of any reading can carry the thing back through sixteenth- and fifteenth-century examples to the Dark Ages and the late Greek cla.s.sics--if no further.

[135] It is fair to say that the first is "make-weighted" with a pastoral play ent.i.tled _Athlette_, from the heroine's rather curious name.

[136] It _has_ two poems and some miscellanea. Something like this is the case with another bookmaker of the cla.s.s, Du Souhait.

[137] It may be childish, but the a.s.sociation in this group of ladies--three of them bearing some of the greatest historic names of France, and the fourth that of the admirable critic with no other namesake of whom I ever met--seemed to me interesting. It is perhaps worth adding that Isabel de Rochechouart seems to have been not merely dedicatee but part author of the first tale.

[138] The habit is common with these authors.

[139] He gives more a.n.a.lysis than usual, but complains of the author's "affectation and bad taste." I venture to think this relatively rather harsh, though it is positively too true of the whole group.

[140] _La Vie et les Oeuvres de Honore d'Urfe._ Par le Chanoine O. C.

Reure, Paris, 1910.

[141] The Abbe Reure, to whom I owe my own knowledge of the translation and dedication, says nothing more.

[142] M. Reynier, in the useful book so often quoted, has shown that, as one would expect, this influence is not absent from the smaller French love-novels which preceded the _Astree_; indeed, as we saw, it is obvious, though in a form of more religiosity, as early as the _Heptameron_. But it was not till the seventeenth century in France, or till a little before it in some cases with us, that "Love in fantastic triumph sat" between the shadowing wings of sensual and intellectual pa.s.sion.

[143] They had, indeed, neither luck nor distinction after Honore's death: and the last of the family died, like others of the renegade n.o.bles of France, by his own hand, to escape the guillotine which he himself had helped to establish.

[144] The more orthodox "laws of love" which Celadon puts up in his "Temple of Astraea" are less amusing.

[145] He constantly plays this part of referee and moraliser. But he is by no means exempt from the pleasing fever of the place, and some have been profane enough to think his mistress, Diane, more attractive than the divine Astree herself.

[146] Very delicate persons have been shocked by the advantages afforded to Celadon in his disguise as the Druid's daughter, and the consequent familiarity with the innocent unrecognising heroine. But _honi soit_ will cover them.

[147] There is plenty of this, including a regular siege of the capital, Marcilly.

[148] The constant confusion, in these quasi-cla.s.sical romances, of masculine and feminine names is a rather curious feature. But the late Sir W. Gilbert played some tricks of the kind in _Pygmalion and Galatea_, and I remember an English novelist, with more pretensions to scholarship than Gilbert, making the particularly unfortunate blunder of attributing to Longus a book called "_Doris_ and Chloe."

[149] It is fair to say that Urfe has been praised for these historical excursions or incursions of his.

[150] Its difficulty of access in the French has been noted. The English translation may be less rare, but it is not a good one even of its kind.

And, in face of the most false and misleading statements, never more frequent than at the present moment, about the efficacy of translations, it may be well to insist on the truth. For science, history philosophy (though in a descending ratio through these three) translations may serve. The man who knows Greek or Latin or any other _literature_ only through them knows next to nothing of that literature as such, and in its literary quality. The version may be, as in the leading case of FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam, literature itself of the highest cla.s.s; but it is quite other literature than the original, and is, in fact, a new original itself. It may, while keeping closer, be as good as Catullus on Sappho or as bad as Mr. Gladstone on Toplady in form; but the form, even if copied, is always again other.

[151] Some reasons will be given later for taking this first--not the least being the juxtaposition with the _Astree_. The actual order of the chief "Heroic" authors and books is as follows: Gomberville, _La Caritee_, 1622; _Polexandre_, 1632; _Citheree_, 1640-42. _La Calprenede_, _Ca.s.sandre_, 1642; _Cleopatre_, 1648; _Faramond_, 1662.

Mlle. de Scudery, _Ibrahim_, 1641; _Artamene_, 1649; _Clelie_, 1656; _Almahide_, 1660.