A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 27

[Sidenote: Importance of Marianne herself.]

Yet the question at issue is not whether one can approve of Marianne, nor whether one can like her, nor even whether, approving and liking her or not, one could fall in love with her "for her comely face and for her fair bodie," as King Honour did in the ballad, and as _h.o.m.o rationalis_ usually, though not invariably, does fall in love. The question is whether Marivaux has, in her, created a live girl, and to what extent he has mastered the details of his creation. The only critical answer, I think, must be that he has created such a girl, and that he has not left her a mere outline or type, but has furnished the house as well as built it. She is, in the particular meaning on which Mr. Hardy's defenders insist, as "pure" a "woman" as Tess herself. And if there is a good deal missing from her which fortunately some women have, there is nothing in her which some women have not, and not so very much which the majority of women have not, in this or that degree. It is difficult not to smile when one compares her quintessence with the complicated and elusive caricatures of womanhood which some modern novel-writers--noisily hailed as _gyno_sophists--have put together, and been complimented on putting together. What is more, she is perhaps the first nearly complete character of the kind that had been presented in novel at her date. This is a great thing to say for Marivaux, and it can be said without the slightest fear of inability to support the saying.[334]

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

Although, therefore, we may not care much to enter into calculations as to the details of the indebtedness of Richardson to Marivaux, some approximations of the two, for critical purposes, may be useful. One may even see, without too much folly of the Thaumast kind, an explanation, beyond that of mere idleness, in the Frenchman's inveterate habit of not completing. He did not want you to read him "for the story"; and therefore he cared little for the story itself, and nothing at all for the technical finishing of it. The stories of both his characteristic novels are, as has been fairly shown, of the very thinnest. What he did want to do was to a.n.a.lyse and "display," in a half-technical sense of that word, his characters; and he did this as no man had done before him, and as few have done since, though many, quite ignorant of their indebtedness, have taken the method from him indirectly. In the second place, his combination of method and phrase is for infinite thoughts.

This combination is not necessary; there is, to take up the comparative line, nothing of it in Richardson, nothing in Fielding, nothing in Thackeray. A few French eighteenth-century writers have it in direct imitation of Marivaux himself; but it dies out in France, and in the greatest novel-period there is nothing of it. It revives in the later nineteenth century, especially with us, and, curiously enough, if we look back to the beginnings of Romance in Greek, there is a good deal there, the crown and flower being, as has been before remarked, in Eustathius Macrembolita, but something being noticeable in earlier folk, especially Achilles Tatius, and the trick having evidently come from those rhetoricians[335] of whose cla.s.s the romancers were a kind of offshoot. It is, however, only fair to say that, if Marivaux thought in intricate and sometimes startling ways, his actual expression is never obscure. It is a maze, but a maze with an unbroken clue of speech guiding you through it.[336]

[Sidenote: Examples:--Marianne on the _physique_ and _moral_ of Prioresses and Nuns.]

A few examples of method and style may now be given. Here is Marianne's criticism--rather uncannily shrewd and very characteristic both of her subject and of herself--of that peculiar placid plumpness which has been observed by the profane in devout persons, especially in the Roman Church and in certain dissenting sects (Anglicanism does not seem to be so favourable to it), and in "persons of religion" (in the technical sense) most of all.

This Prioress was a short little person, round and white, with a double chin, and a complexion at once fresh and placid. You never see faces like that in worldly persons: it is a kind of _embonpoint_ quite different from others--one which has been formed more quietly and more methodically--that is to say, something into which there enters more art, more fashioning, nay, more self-love, than into that of such as we.[337]

As a rule, it is either temperament, or feeding, or laziness and luxury, which give _us_ such of it as we have. But in order to acquire the kind of which I am speaking, it is necessary to have given oneself up with a saintlike earnestness to the task. It can only be the result of delicate, loving, and devout attention to the comfort and well-being of the body. It shows not only that life--and a healthy life--is an object of desire, but that it is wanted soft, undisturbed, and dainty; and that, while enjoying the pleasures of good health, the person enjoying it bestows on herself all the pettings and the privileges of a perpetual convalescence.

Also this religious plumpness is different in outward form from ours, which is profane of aspect; it does not so much make a face fat, as it makes it grave and decent; and so it gives the countenance an air, not so much joyous, as tranquil and contented.

Further, when you look at these good ladies, you find in them an affable exterior; but perhaps, for all that, an interior indifference. Their faces, and not their souls, give you sympathy and tenderness; they are comely images, which seem to possess sensibility, and which yet have merely a surface of kindness and sentiment.[338]

Acute as this is, it may be said to be somewhat displaced--though it must be remembered that it is the Marianne of fifty, "Mme. la Comtesse de * * *," who is supposed to be writing, not the Marianne of fifteen.

No such objection can be taken to what follows.

[_She is, after the breach with Climal, and after Valville has earlier discovered his wicked uncle on his knees before her, packing up the--well! not wages of iniquity, but baits for it--to send back to the giver. A little "cutting" may be made._]

[Sidenote: She returns the gift-clothes.]

Thereupon I opened my trunk to take out first the newly bought linen. "Yes, M. de Valville, yes!" said I, pulling it out, "you shall learn to know me and to think of me as you ought." This thought spurred me on, so that, without my exactly thinking of it, it was rather to him than to his uncle that I was returning the whole, all the more so that the return of linen, dress, and money, with a note I should write, could not fail to disabuse Valville, and make him regret the loss of me. He had seemed to me to possess a generous soul; and I applauded myself beforehand on the sorrow which he would feel at having treated so outrageously a girl so worthy of respectful treatment as I was--for I saw in myself, confessedly, I don't know how many t.i.tles to respect.

In the first place I put my bad luck, which was unique; to add to this bad luck I had virtue, and they went so well together! Then I was young, and on the top of it all I was pretty, and what more do you want? If I had arranged matters designedly to render myself an object of sympathy, to make a generous lover sigh at having maltreated me, I could not have succeeded better; and, provided I hurt Valville's feelings, I was satisfied. My little plan was never to see him again in my lifetime; and this seemed to me a very fair and proud one; for I loved him, and I was even very glad to have loved him, because he had perceived my love, and, seeing me break with him, notwithstanding, would see also what a heart he had had to do with.

The little person goes on very delectably describing the packing, and how she grudged getting rid of the pretty things, and at last sighed and wept--whether for herself, or Valville, or the beautiful gown, she didn't know. But, alas! there is no more room, except to salute her as the agreeable ancestress of all the beloved coquettes and piquant minxes in prose fiction since. Could anything handsomer be said of her creator?

[Sidenote: Prevost.]

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

[Sidenote: And of Planche.]

It is, though an absolute and stereotyped commonplace, an almost equally absolute necessity, to begin any notice of the Abbe Prevost by remarking that nothing of his voluminous work is now, or has been for a long time, read, except _Manon Lescaut_. It may be added, though one is here repeating predecessors to not quite the same extent, that nothing else of his, in fiction at least, is worth reading. The faithful few who do not dislike old criticism may indeed turn over his _Le Pour et [le]

Contre_ not without reward. But his historical and other compilations[339]--his total production in volumes is said to run over the hundred, and the standard edition of his _Oeuvres Choisies_ extends to thirty-nine not small ones--are admittedly worthless. As to his minor novels--if one may use that term, albeit they are as major in bulk as they are minor in merit--opinions of importance, and presumably founded on actual knowledge, have differed somewhat strangely.

Sainte-Beuve made something of a fight for them, but it was the Sainte-Beuve of almost the earliest years (1831), when, according to a weakness of beginners in criticism, he was a little inclined "to be different," for the sake of difference. Against _Cleveland_ even he lifts up his heel, though in a rather unfortunate manner, declaring the reading of the greater part to be "aussi fade que celle d'_Amadis_." Now to some of us the reading of _Amadis_ is not "fade" at all. But he finds some philosophical and psychological pa.s.sages of merit. Over the _Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_--that huge and unwieldy galleon to which the frail shallop of _Manon_ was originally attached, and which has long been stranded on the reefs of oblivion, while its fly-boat sails for ever more--he is quite enthusiastic, finds it, though with a certain relativity, "natural," "frank," and "well-preserved," gives it a long a.n.a.lysis, actually discovers in it "an inexpressible savour"

surpa.s.sing modern "local colour," and thinks the handling of it comparable in some respects to that of _The Vicar of Wakefield_! The _Doyen de Killerine_--the third of Prevost's long books--is "infinitely agreeable," "si l'on y met un peu de complaisance." (The Sainte-Beuve of later years would have noticed that an infinity which has to be made infinite by a little complaisance is curiously finite). The later and shorter _Histoire d'une Grecque moderne_ is a _joli roman_, and _gracieux_, though it is not so charming and subtle as Crebillon _fils_ would have made it, and is "knocked off rather haphazardly." Another critic of 1830, now perhaps too much forgotten, Gustave Planche, does not mention the _Grecque_, and brushes aside the three earlier and bigger books rather hastily, though he allows "interest" to both _Cleveland_ and the _Doyen_. Perhaps, before "coming to real things" (as Balzac once said of his own work) in _Manon_, some remarks, not long, but first-hand, and based on actual reading at more than one time of life, as to her very unreal family, may be permitted here, though they may differ in opinion from the judgment of these two redoubtable critics.

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

I do not think that when I first wrote about Prevost (I had read _Manon_ long before) more than thirty years ago, in a _Short History of French Literature_, I paid very much attention to these books. I evidently had not read the _Grecque Moderne_, for I said nothing about it. Of the others I said only that they are "romances of adventure, occupying a middle place between those of Lesage and Marivaux." It is perfectly true, but of course not very "in-going," and whatever reading I then gave any of them had not left very much impression on my mind, when recently, and for the purpose of the present work, I took them up again, and the _Histoire_ as well. This last is the story of a young modern Greek slave named Theophe (a form of which the last syllable seems more modern than Greek), who is made visible in full harem by her particularly complaisant master, a Turkish pasha, to a young Frenchman, admired and bought by this Frenchman (the relater of the story), and freed by him. He does not at first think of making her his mistress, but later does propose it, only to meet a refusal of a somewhat sentimental-romantic character, though she protests not merely grat.i.tude, but love for him. The latter part of the book is occupied by what Sainte-Beuve calls "delicate" ambiguities, which leave us in doubt whether her "cruelty" is shown to others as well, or whether it is not.

In suggesting that Crebillon would have made it charming, the great critic has perhaps made another of those slips which show the novitiate.

The fact is that it is an exceedingly dull book: and that to have made it anything else, while retaining anything like its present "propriety,"

either an entire metamorphosis of spirit, which might have made it as pa.s.sionate as _Manon_ itself, or the sort of filigree play with thought and phrase which Marivaux would have given, would be required. As a "Crebillonnade" (_v. inf._) it might have been both pleasant and subtle, but it could only have been made so by becoming exceedingly indecent.

[Sidenote: _Cleveland._]

Still, its comparative (though only comparative) shortness, and a certain possibility rather than actuality of interest in the situation,[340] may recommend this novel at least to mercy. If the present writer were on a jury trying _Cleveland_, no want of food or fire should induce him to endorse any such recommendation in regard to that intolerable book. It is, to speak frankly, one of the very few books--one of the still fewer novels--which I have found it practically impossible to read even in the "skim and skip and dip" fashion which should, no doubt, be only practised as a work of necessity (_i.e._ duty to others) and of mercy (to oneself) on extraordinary occasions, but which n.o.body but a prig and a pedant will absolutely disallow. Almost the only good thing I can find to say about it is that Prevost, who lived indeed for some time in England, is now and then, if not always, miraculously correct in his proper names. He can actually spell Hammersmith! Other merit--and this is not constant (in the dips which I have actually made, to rise exhausted from each, and skip rather than even skim to the rest)--I can find none. The beginning is absurd and rather offensive, the hero being a natural son of Cromwell by a woman who has previously been the mistress of Charles I. The continuation is a mish-mash of adventure, sometimes sanguinary, but never exciting, travel (in fancy parts of the West Indies, etc.), and the philosophical disputations which Sainte-Beuve found interesting. As for the end, no two persons seem quite agreed what _is_ the end. Sainte-Beuve speaks of it as an attempted suicide of the hero--the most justifiable of all his actions, if he had succeeded. Prevost himself, in the Preface to the _Doyen de Killerine_, repeats an earlier disavowal (which he says he had previously made in Holland) of a fifth volume, and says that his own work ended with the murder of Cleveland by one of the characters. Again, this is a comprehensible and almost excusable action, and might have followed, though it could not have preceded, the other. But if it was the end, the other was not. A certain kind of critic may say that it is my duty to search and argue this out. But, for my part, I say as a reader to _Cleveland_, "No more _in_ thee my steps shall be, For ever and for ever."[341]

[Sidenote: _Le Doyen de Killerine._]

_Le Doyen de Killerine_ is not perhaps so utterly to be excommunicated as _Cleveland_, and, as has been said above, some have found real interest in it. It is not, however, free either from the preposterousness or from the dulness of the earlier book, though the first characteristic is less preposterous as such preposterousness goes.

The Dean of Killerine (Coleraine) is a Roman Catholic dean, just after the expulsion of James II., when, we learn with some surprise, that neighbourhood was rather specially full of his co-religionists. He is a sort of _lusus naturae_, being bow-legged, humpbacked, potbellied, and possessing warts on his brows, which make him a sort of later horned Moses. The eccentricity of his appearance is equalled by that of his conduct. He is the eldest son of an Irish gentleman (n.o.bleman, it would sometimes seem), and his father finds a pretty girl who is somehow willing to marry him. But, feeling no vocation for marriage, he suggests to her (a suggestion perhaps unique in fiction if not in fact) that she should marry his father instead. This singular match comes off, and a second family results, the members of which are, fortunately, not _lusus naturae_, but a brace of very handsome and accomplished boys, George and Patrick, and an extremely pretty girl, Rosa. Of these three, their parents dying when they are something short of full age, the excellent dean becomes a sort of guardian. He takes them to the exiled court of Versailles, and his very hen-like anxieties over the escapades of these most lively ducklings supply the main subject of the book. It might have been made amusing by humorous treatment, but Prevost had no humour in him: and it might have been made thrilling by pa.s.sion, but he never, except in the one great little instance, compressed or distilled his heaps and floods of sensibility and sensationalism into that. The scene where a wicked Mme. de S---- plays, and almost outplays, Potiphar's wife to the good but hideous Dean's Joseph is one of the most curious in novel-literature, though one of the least amusing.

[Sidenote: The _Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_.]

We may now go back to the _Memoires_, partly in compliment to the master of all mid-nineteenth-century critics, but more because of their almost fortuitous good luck in ushering _Manon_ into the world. There is something in them of both their successors, _Cleveland_ and the _Doyen_, but it may be admitted that they are less unreadable than the first, and less trivial than the second. The plan--if it deserve that name--is odd, one marquis first telling his own fortunes and voyages and whatnots, and then serving as Mentor (the application, though of course not original, is inevitable) to another marquis in further voyages and adventures.

There are Turkish brides and Spanish murdered damsels; English politics and literature, where, unfortunately, the spelling _does_ sometimes break down; glances backward, in "Histoires" of the _Grand Siecle_, at meetings with Charles de Sevigne, Racine, etc.; mysterious remedies, a great deal of moralising, and a great deal more of weeping. Indeed the whole of Prevost, like the whole of that "Sensibility Novel" of which he is a considerable though rather an outside pract.i.tioner, is pervaded with a gentle rain of tears wherein the personages seem to revel--indeed admit that they do so--in the midst of their woes.

[Sidenote: Its miscellaneous curiosities.]

On the whole, however, the youthful--or almost youthful--half-wisdom of Sainte-Beuve is better justified of its preference for the _Memoires_ than of other things in the same article. I found it, reading it later on purpose and with "preventions" rather the other way, very much more readable than any of its companions (_Manon_ is not its companion, but in a way its const.i.tuent), without being exactly readable _simpliciter_.

All sorts of curious things might be dug out of it: for instance, quite at the beginning, a more definite declaration than I know elsewhere of that curious French t.i.tle-system which has always been such a puzzle to Englishmen. "Il _se fit_ appeler le Comte de ... et, se voyant un fils, il _lui donna_ celui de Marquis de ..." There is a good deal in it which makes us think that Prevost had read Defoe, and something which makes it not extravagant to fancy that Thackeray had read Prevost. But once more "let us come to the real things--let us speak of" _Manon Lescaut_.

[Sidenote: _Manon Lescaut._]

[Sidenote: Its uniqueness.]

It would be a very interesting question in that study of literature--rather unacademic, or perhaps academic in the best sense only--which might be so near and is so far--whether the man is most to be envied who reads _Manon Lescaut_ for the first time in blissful ignorance of these other things, and even of what has been said of them; or he who has, by accident or design, toiled through the twenty volumes of the others and comes upon Her. My own case is the former: and I am far from quarrelling with it. But I sometimes like to fancy--now that I have reversed the proceeding--what it would have been like to dare the voices--the endless, dull, half-meaningless, though not threatening voices--of those other books--to refrain even from the appendix to the _Memoires_ as such, and never, till the _Modern Greekess_ has been dispatched, return to and possess the entire and perfect jewel of _Manon_. I used to wonder, when, for nearer five and twenty than twenty years, I read for review hundreds of novels, English and French, whether anybody would ever repeat Prevost's extraordinary spurt and "sport" in this wonderful little book. I am bound to say that I never knew an instance. The "first book" which gives a promise--dubious it may be, but still promising--and is never followed by anything that fulfils this, is not so very uncommon, though less common in prose fiction than in poetry. The not so very rare "single-speech" poems are also not real parallels. It is of the essence of poetry, according to almost every theory, that it should be, occasionally at least, inexplicable and unaccountable. I believe that every human being is capable of poetry, though I should admit that the exhibition of the capability would be in most cases--I am sure it would be in my own--"highly to be deprecated."

But with a sober prose fiction of some scope and room and verge it is different. The face of Helen; the taste of nectar; the vision of the clouds or of the sea; the pa.s.sion of a great action in oneself or others; the infinite poignancy of suffering or of pleasure, may draw--once and never again--immortal verse from an exceedingly mortal person. Such things might also draw a phrase or a paragraph of prose.

But they could not extract a systematic and organised prose tale of some two hundred pages, each of them much fuller than those of our average six-shilling stuff; and yet leave the author, who had never shown himself capable of producing anything similar before, unable to produce anything in the least like it again. I wonder that the usual literary busybodies have never busied themselves--perhaps they have, for during a couple of decades I have not had the opportunity of knowing everything that goes on in French literature as I once did--with Prevost, demonstrating that _Manon_ was a posthumous work of the Regent (who was a clever man), or an expression of a real pa.s.sion which lay at the back of Richelieu's debauchery, or written by some unknown author from whom the Abbe bought it, and who died early, or something else of the kind.

There does not, however, appear to be the slightest chance or hope or fear (whichever expression be preferred) of the kind. Although Prevost elsewhere indulges--as everybody else for a long time in France and England alike did, save creative geniuses like Fielding--in transparently feigned talk about the origins of his stories, he was a very respectable man in his way, and not at all likely to father or to steal any one else's work in a disreputable fashion. There are no other claimants for the book: and though it may be difficult for a foreigner to find the faults of style that Gustave Planche rebukes in Prevost generally, there is nothing in the mere style of _Manon_ which sets it above the others.

For once one may concede that the whole attraction of the piece, barring one or two transient but almost Shakespearian flashes of expression--such as the famous "Perfide Manon! Perfide!" when she and Des Grieux first meet after her earliest treason--is to be found in its marvellous humanity, its equally marvellous grasp of character, and the intense, the absolutely shattering pathos of the relations of the hero and heroine. There are those, of course, who make much of the _persona tertia_, Tiberge, the virtuous and friendly priest, who has a remarkable command of money for a not highly placed ecclesiastic, lends it with singular want of circ.u.mspection, and then meddles with the best of intentions and the most futile or mischievous of results. Very respectable man, Tiberge; but one with whom _on n'a que faire_. Manon and Des Grieux; Des Grieux and Manon--these are as all-sufficient to the reader as Manon was more than sufficient to Des Grieux, and as he, alas!

was, if only in some ways, _in_sufficient to Manon.

One of the things which are nuisances in Prevost's other books becomes pardonable, almost admirable, in this. His habit of incessant, straight-on narration by a single person, his avoidance of dialogue properly so called, is, as has been noted, a habit common to all these early novels, and, to our taste if not to that of their early readers, often disastrous. Here it is a positive advantage. Manon speaks very little; and so much the better. Her "comely face and her fair bodie" (to repeat once more a beloved quotation) speak for her to the ruin of her lover and herself--to the age-long delectation of readers. On the other hand, the whole speech is Des Grieux', and never was a monologue better suited or justified. The worst of such things is usually that there are in them all sorts of second thoughts of the author. There is none of this littleness in the speech of Des Grieux. He is a gentle youth in the very best sense of the term, and as we gather--not from anything he says of himself, but from the general tenor--by no means a "wild gallant"; affectionate, respectful to his parents, altogether "douce," and, indeed, rather (to start with) like Lord Glenvarloch in _The Fortunes of Nigel_. He meets Manon (Prevost has had the wits to make her a little older than her lover), and _actum est de_ both of them.

[Sidenote: The character of its heroine.]

But Manon herself? She talks (it has been said) very little, and it was not necessary that she should talk much. If she had talked as Marianne talks, we should probably hate her, unless, as is equally probable, we ceased to take any interest in her. She is a girl not of talk but of deeds: and her deeds are of course quite inexcusable. But still that great and long unknown verse of Prior, which tells how a more harmless heroine did various things--

As answered the end of her being created,

fits her, and the deeds create her in their process, according to the wonderful magic of the novelist's art. Manon is not in the least a Messalina; it is not what Messalina wanted that she wants at all, though she may have no physical objection to it, and may rejoice in it when it is shared by her lover. Still less is she a Margaret of Burgundy, or one of the tigress-enchantresses of the Fronde, who would kill their lovers after enjoying their love. It has been said often, and is beyond all doubt true, that she would have been perfectly happy with Des Grieux if he had fulfilled the expostulations of George the Fourth as to Mr.

Turveydrop, and had not only been known to the King, but had had twenty thousand a year. She wants n.o.body and nothing but him, as far as the "Him" is concerned: but she does not want him in a cottage. And here the subtlety comes in. She does not in the least mind giving to others what she gives him, provided that they will give her what he cannot give. The possibility of this combination is of course not only shocking to Mrs.

Grundy, but deniable by persons who are not Mrs. Grundy at all. Its existence is not really doubtful, though hardly anybody, except Prevost and (I repeat it, little as I am of an Ibsenite) Ibsen in the _Wild Duck_, has put it into real literature. Manon, like Gina and probably like others, does not really think what she gives of immense, or of any great, importance. People will give her, in exchange for it, what she does think of great, of immense importance; the person to whom she would quite honestly prefer to give it cannot give her these other things. And she concludes her bargain as composedly as any _bonne_ who takes the basket to the shops and "makes its handle dance"--to use the French idiom--for her own best advantage. It does annoy her when she has to part from Des Grieux, and it does annoy her that Des Grieux should be annoyed at what she does. But she is made of no nun's flesh, and such soul as she has is filled with much desire for luxury and pleasure. The desire of the soul will have its way, and the flesh lends itself readily enough to the satisfaction thereof.

[Sidenote: And that of the hero.]