A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 33

[377] The corporal's wound in the knee.

[378] Of course, there _are_ exceptions, and with one of the chief of them, Xavier de Maistre, we may have, before long, to deal.

[379] His longest, most avowed, and most famous, the _Paradoxe sur le Comedien_, has been worthily Englished by Mr. Walter H. Pollock.

[380] Its heroine, Suzanne Simonin, was, as far as the attempt to relieve herself of her vows went, a real person; and a benevolent n.o.bleman, the Marquis de Croixmare, actually interested himself in this attempt--which failed. But Diderot and his evil angel Grimm got up sham letters between themselves and her patron, which are usually printed with the book.

[381] _Mon pere, je suis d.a.m.nee_ ... the opening words, and the only ones given, of the confession of the half-mad abbess.

[382] Evangelical Protestantism has more than once adopted the principle that the Devil should not be allowed to have all the best tunes: and I remember in my youth an English religious novel of ultra-anti-Roman purpose, which, though, of course, dropping the "scabrousness," had, as I long afterwards recognised when I came to read _La Religieuse_, almost certainly borrowed a good deal from our most unsaintly Denis of Langres.

[383] She seems to have been, in many ways, far too good for her society, and altogether a lady.--The opinions of the late M. Brunetiere and mine on French literature were often very different--though he was good enough not to disapprove of some of my work on it. But with the terms of his expression of mere opinion one had seldom to quarrel. I must, however, take exception to his attribution of _grossierete_ to _La Religieuse_. Diderot, as has been fully admitted, _was_ too often _grossier_: sometimes when it was almost irrelevant to the subject. But here, "scabrous" as the subject might be, the treatment is scrupulously _not_ coa.r.s.e. Nor do I think, after intimate and long familiarity with the whole of his work, that he was ever a _faux bonhomme_.

[384] They have hardly had a fair opportunity of comparison with Voltaire's _Dictionnaire Philosophique_; but they can stand it.

[385] Unless Dulaurens' not quite stupid, but formless and discreditable, _Compere Mathieu_ be excepted.

[386] In consequence of which Mr. Ruskin's favourite publisher, the late Mr. George Allen, asked the present writer, some twenty years ago, to revise and "introduce" the old translation of his _Contes Moraux_. The volume had, at least, the advantage of very charming ill.u.s.trations by Miss Chris. Hammond.

[387] They were even worse than Leigh Hunt's in the strictly English counterpart torture-house for the victims of tyranny--consisting, for instance, in the supply of so good a dinner, at His Most Christian Majesty's expense, for the prisoner's servant, that the prisoner ate it himself, and had afterwards, on the principles of rigid virtue and distributive justice, to resign, to the minion who accompanied him, his own still better one which came later, also supplied by the tyrant.

[388] One expects something of value from the part-contemporary, part-successor of the novelists from Lesage to Rousseau. But where it is not mere blether about virtue and vice, and _le coeur humain_ and so on, it has some of the worst faults of eighteenth-century criticism. He thinks it would have been more "moral" if Mme. de Cleves had actually succ.u.mbed as a punishment for her self-reliance (certainly one of the most remarkable topsyturvifications of morality ever crotcheted); is, of course, infinitely shocked at being asked and induced to "interest himself in a prost.i.tute and a card-sharper" by _Manon Lescaut_; and, equally of course, extols Richardson, though it is fair to say that he speaks well of _Tom Jones_.

[389] See next chapter.

[390] I wonder whether any one else has noticed that Thackeray, in the very agreeable ill.u.s.tration to one of not quite his greatest "letterpress" things, _A New Naval Drama_ (Oxford Ed. vol. viii. p.

421), makes the press-gang weep ostentatiously in the picture, though not in the text, where they only wave their cutla.s.ses. It may be merely a coincidence: but it may not.

[391] There are reasons for thinking that Marmontel was deliberately "antidoting the _fanfreluches_" of the older tale-teller.

[392] In the original, suiting the rest of the setting, it is _rideaux_.

[393] "Explanations" is quite admirable, and, I think, neither borrowed from, nor, which is more surprising, by others.

[394] She declares that she has never actually "stooped to folly"; but admits that on more than one occasion it was only an accidental interruption which "luckily" (_heureus.e.m.e.nt_) saved her.

[395] It is necessary to retain the French here: for our "likes" is ambiguous.

[396] Cf. the stories, contradictory of each other, as to _our_ brown-coated philosopher's appearance in France. (Boswell, p. 322, Globe ed.)

[397] Cf. again the bestowal of this t.i.tle by Horace Walpole, in his later days, on Edward Jerningham, playwright, poetaster, and _pet.i.t maitre_, who, unluckily for himself, lived into the more roughly satirical times of the Revolutionary War.

[398] "The _sylph_ishness of _Le Mari Sylphe_ is only an ingenious and defensible fraud; and the philtre-flasks of _Alcidonis_ are little more than "properties.""

[399] Here is a specimen of his largest and most ambitious production, the _etudes de la Nature_. "La femelle du tigre, exhalant l'odeur du carnage, fait retentir les solitudes de l'Afrique de ses miaulements affreux, et parait remplie d'attraits a ses cruels amants." By an odd chance, I once saw a real scene contrasting remarkably with Saint-Pierre's sentimental melodrama. It was in the Clifton Zoological Gardens, which, as possibly some readers may know, were at one time regarded as particularly home-like by the larger carnivora. It was a very fine day, and an equally fine young tigress was endeavouring to attract the attention of her cruel lover. She rolled delicately about, like a very large, very pretty, and exceptionally graceful cat; she made fantastic gestures with her paws and tail; and she purred literally "as gently as any sucking dove"--_roucoulement_ was the only word for it.

But her "lover," though he certainly looked "cruel" and as if he would very much like to eat _me_, appeared totally indifferent to her attractions.

[400] So, also, when one is told that he called his son Paul and his daughter Virginie, it is cheerful to remember, with a pleasant sense of contrast, Scott's good-humoured contempt for the tourists who wanted to know whether Abbotsford was to be called Tullyveolan or Tillietudlem.

[401] As the story is not now, I believe, the universal school-book it once was, something more than mere allusion may be desirable. The ship in which Virginie is returning to the Isle of France gets into shallows during a hurricane, and is being beaten to pieces close to land. One stalwart sailor, stripped to swim for his life, approaches Virginie, imploring her to strip likewise and let him try to pilot her through the surf. But she (like the lady in the coach, at an early part of _Joseph Andrews_) won't so much as look at a naked man, clasps her arms round her own garments, and is very deservedly drowned. The sailor, to one's great relief, is not.

[402] Julie herself is an intense type rather than individual.

[403] I have not thought it necessary, except in regard to those of them who have been touched in treating of the _Cabinet des Fees_, to speak at any length of the minor tale-tellers of the century. They are sometimes not bad reading; but as a whole minor in almost all senses.

CHAPTER XII

"SENSIBILITY." MINOR AND LATER NOVELISTS.

THE FRENCH NOVEL, _C._ 1800

[Sidenote: "Sensibility."]

Frequent reference has been made, in the last two chapters, to the curious phenomenon called in French _sensibilite_ (with a derivative of contempt, _sensiblerie_), the exact English form of which supplies part of the t.i.tle, and the meaning an even greater part of the subject, of one of Miss Austen's novels. The thing itself appears first definitely[404] in Madame de la Fayette, largely, though not unmixedly, in Marivaux, and to some extent in Prevost and Marmontel, while it is, as it were, sublimed in Rousseau, and present very strongly in Saint-Pierre. There are, however, some minor writers and books displaying it in some cases even more extensively and intensively; and in this final chapter of the present volume they may appropriately find a place, not merely because some of them are late, but because Sensibility is not confined to any part of the century, but, beginning before its birth, continued till after its end. We may thus have to encroach on the nineteenth a little, but more in appearance than in reality. In quintessence, and as a reigning fashion, Sensibility was the property of the eighteenth century.[405]

[Sidenote: A glance at Miss Austen.]

To recur for a moment to Miss Austen and _Sense and Sensibility_, everybody has laughed, let us hope not unkindly, over Marianne Dashwood's woes. But she herself was only an example, exaggerated in the genial fashion of her creatress, of the proper and recognised standard of feminine feeling in and long before her time. The "man of feeling"

was admitted as something out of the way--on which side of the way opinions might differ. But the woman of feeling was emphatically the accepted type--a type which lasted far into the next century, though it was obsolete at least by the Mid-Victorian period, of which some do so vainly talk. The extraordinary development of emotion which was expected from women need not be ill.u.s.trated merely from love-stories. The wonderful transports of Miss Ferrier's heroines at sight of their long-lost mothers; even those of sober f.a.n.n.y Price in _Mansfield Park_, at the recovery of her estimable but not particularly interesting brother William, give the keynote much better than any more questionable ecstasies. "Sensibility, so charming," was the pet affectation of the period--an affectation carried on till it became quite natural, and was only cured by the half-caricature, half-reaction of Byronism.

[Sidenote: The thing essentially French.]

The thing, however, was not English in origin, and never was thoroughly English at all. The main current of the Sensibility novelists, who impressed their curious morals or manners on all men and women in civilised Europe, was French in unbroken succession, from the day when Madame de la Fayette first broke ground against the ponderous romances of Madeleine de Scudery, to the day when Benjamin Constant forged, in _Adolphe_, the link between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century romance, between the novel of sentiment and the novel of a.n.a.lysis.

[Sidenote: Its history.]

Of the relations to it of the greater novelists of the main century we have already spoken: and as for the two greatest of the extreme close, Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, they mix too many secondary purposes with their philandering, and moreover do not form part of the plan of the present volume. For the true Sensibility, the odd quintessence of conventional feeling, played at steadily till it is half real, if not wholly so, which ends in the peculiarities of two such wholesome young Britonesses as Marianne Dashwood and f.a.n.n.y Price, we must look elsewhere. After Madame de la Fayette, and excluding with her other names already treated, we come to Madame de Fontaines, Madame de Tencin (most heartless and therefore naturally not least sentimental of women), Madame Riccoboni, the group of lady-novelists of whom Mesdames de Souza and de Duras are the chief, and, finally, the two really remarkable names of Xavier de Maistre and Benjamin Constant. These are our "doc.u.ments." Even the minor subjects of this inquiry are pleasant pieces of literary _bric-a-brac_; perhaps they are something a little more than that. For Sensibility was actually once a great power in the world.

Transformed a little, it did wonderful things in the hands of Rousseau and Goethe and Chateaubriand and Byron. It lingers in odd nooks and corners even at the present day, when it is usually and irreverently called "gush," and Heaven only knows whether it may not be resuscitated in full force before some of us are dead.[406] For it has exactly the peculiarities which characterise all recurrent fashions--the appeal to something which is genuine connected with the suggestion of a great deal that is not.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Tencin and _Le Comte de Comminge_.]

In the followers of Madame de la Fayette[407] we find that a good many years have pa.s.sed by. The jargon appropriated to the subject has grown still more official; and instead of using it to express genuine sentiments, which in another language might deserve expression well enough, the characters are constantly suspected by the callous modern reader or elaborately, though perhaps unconsciously, feigning the sentiments which the jargon seems to imply that they ought to have. This is somewhat less noticeable in the work of Madame de Tencin than elsewhere, because d'Alembert's mother was so very much cleverer a person than the generality of the novel-writers of her day that she could hardly fail to hide defects more cunningly. But it is evident enough in the _Comte de Comminge_ and in the _Malheurs de l'Amour_.

Having as questionable morals as any lady of the time (the time of the Regency), Madame de Tencin of course always had a moral purpose in her writings, and this again gives her books a certain difference. But, like the former, this difference only exposes, all the more clearly, the defects of the style, and the drawbacks from which it was almost impossible that those who practised it should escape.

Madame de Tencin tried to escape by several gates. Besides her moral purposes and her _esprit_, she indulged in a good deal of rather complicated and sometimes extravagant incident. _M. de Comminge_, which is very short, contains, not to mention other things, the rather startling detail of a son who, out of chivalrous affection for his lady-love, burns certain of his father's t.i.tle-deeds which he has been charged to recover, and the still more startling incident of the heroine living for some years in disguise as a monk. The following epistle, however, from the heroine to the hero, will show better than anything else the topsy-turvy condition which sensibility had already reached.

All that need be said in explanation of it is that the father (who is furious with his son, and not unreasonably so) has shut him up in a dungeon, in order to force him to give up his beloved Adelaide.[408]

Your father's fury has told me all I owe you: I know what your generosity had concealed from me. I know, too, the terrible situation in which you are, and I have no means of extracting you therefrom save one. This will perhaps make you more unhappy still. But I shall be as unhappy as yourself, _and this gives me the courage to do what I am required to do_. They would have me, by engaging myself to another, give a pledge never to be yours: 'tis at this price that M. de Comminge sets your liberty. It will cost me perhaps my life, certainly my peace. But I am resolved. I shall in a few days be married to the Marquis de Benavides.

What I know of his character forewarns me of what I shall have to suffer; _but I owe you at least so much constancy as to make only misery for myself in the engagement I am contracting_.

The extremity of calculated absurdity indicated by the italicised pa.s.sages was reached, let it be remembered, by one of the cleverest women of the century: and the chief excuse for it is that the restrictions of the La Fayette novel, confined as it was to the upper cla.s.ses and to a limited number of elaborately distressing situations, were very embarra.s.sing.

[Sidenote: Mme. Riccoboni and _Le Marquis de Cressy_.]