A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 36

_La Famille Luceval_--something of an expanded and considerably Pigaultified story _a la_ Marmontel--is duller than any of these, and the opening is marred by an exaggerated study of a cla.s.sical mania on the part of the hero; but still the novel quality is not quite absent from it.

[Sidenote: Further examples.]

Of the rest, _M. Botte_, which seems to have been a favourite, is a rather conventional extravaganza with a rich, testy, but occasionally generous uncle; a nephew who falls in love with the charming but penniless daughter of an _emigre_; a n.o.ble rustic, who manages to keep some of his exiled landlord's property together, etc. _M. de Roberval_, though in its original issue not so long as _Adelade de Meran_, becomes longer by a _suite_ of another full volume, and is a rather tedious chronicle of ups and downs. There may be silence about the remainder.

[Sidenote: Last words on him.]

The stock and, as it may be called, "semi-official" ticket for Pigault-Lebrun in such French literary history as takes notice of him, appears to be _verve_: and the recognised dictionary-sense of _verve_ is "heat of imagination, which animates the artist in his composition." In the higher sense in which the word imagination is used with us, it could never be applied here; but he certainly has a good deal of "go," which is perhaps not wholly improper as a colloquial Anglicising of the label.

These semi-official descriptions, which have always pleased the Latin races, are of more authority in France than in England, though as long as we go on calling Chaucer "the father of English poetry" and Wyclif "the father of English prose" we need not boast ourselves too much. But Pigault has this "go"--never perhaps for a whole book, but sometimes for pa.s.sages of considerable length, which possess "carrying" power. It undoubtedly gave him his original popularity, and we need not despise it now, inasmuch as it makes less tedious the task of ascertaining and justifying his true place in the further "domestication"--if only in domesticities too often mean and grimy--of the French novel.

[Sidenote: The French novel in 1800.]

There are more reasons than the convenience of furnishing a separately published first volume with an interim conclusion, for making, at the close of this, a few remarks on the general state of the French novel at the end of the eighteenth century. No thoroughly similar point is reached in the literary history of France, or of any country known to me, in regard to a particular department of literature. In England--the only place, which can, in this same department, be even considered in comparison, although at this very time two novelists, vastly superior to any of whom France has to boast, were just writing, or just about to write, and were a little later to revolutionise the novel itself--the general state and history of the kind had, for nearly two generations, reached a stage far beyond anything that France could claim. She had made earlier "running"; on the whole period of some seven hundred years she had always, till very recently, been in front. But in the novel, as distinguished from the romance, she had absolutely nothing to show like our great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century, and hardly anything to match the later developments of Miss Burney and others in domestic, of Mrs. Radcliffe and others still in revived romantic fiction. Very great Frenchmen or French writers had written novels; but, with the exceptions of Lesage in _Gil Blas_, Prevost in that everlastingly wonderful "single-speech" of his, and Rousseau in _La Nouvelle Helose_, none had written a great novel. No single writer of any greatness had been a novelist pure and simple. No species[433] of fiction, except the short tale, in which, through varying forms, France held an age-long mastery, had been thoroughly developed in her literature.

The main point, where England went right and France went wrong--to be only in the most equivocal way corrected by such a writer as Pigault-Lebrun--was the recognition of the connection--the intimate and all but necessary connection--of the completed novel with ordinary life.

Look over the long history of fiction which we have surveyed in the last three or four or five chapters. There is much and sometimes great literary talent; sometimes, again, even genius; there are episodes of reality; there are most artful adjustments of type and convention and the like, of fashion in morals (or immorals) and sentiments. But a real objective novel of ordinary life, such as _Tom Jones_, or even _Humphry Clinker_, nay, such inferior approaches to it as exist elsewhere in English, you will not find. Of the Scudery romances we need not speak again; for all their key-references to persons, and their abstention from the supernatural, etc., they are, as wholes, hardly more real than _Amadis_ and its family themselves. Scarron has some and Furetiere more objectivity that may be argued for, but the Spanish picaresque has become a convention, and they, especially Scarron, are aiming more at the pattern than at the life-model. Madame de la Fayette has much, and some of her followers a little, real pa.s.sion; but her manners, descriptions, etc., are all conventional, though of another kind. The fairy tales are of course not "real." Marivaux is aiming directly at Sensibility, preciousness, "psychology," if you like, but not at holding up the gla.s.s to any ordinary nature as such.[434] And though Crebillon might plead that his convention was actually the convention of hundreds and almost thousands of accomplished ladies and gentlemen, no one can deny that it was almost as much a convention as the historical or legendary acting of the _Comedie Humaine_ by living persons a hundred years later at Venice.

No writer perhaps ill.u.s.trates what is being said better than Prevost. No one of his books, voluminous as they are, has the very slightest reality, except _Manon Lescaut_; and that, like _La Princesse de Cleves_, though with much more intensity and fortunately with no alloy of convention whatever, is simply a study of pa.s.sion, not of life at large at all. With the greater men the case alters to some extent in proportion to their greatness, but, again with one exception, not to such an extent as to affect the general rule. Voltaire avowedly never attempts ordinary representation of ordinary life--save as the merest by-work, it is all "purpose," satire, fancy. Rousseau may not, in one sense, go beyond that life in _Julie_, but in touching it he is almost as limited and exclusive as Prevost in his masterpiece. Diderot has to get hold of the abnormal, if not the unreal, before he can give you something like a true novel. Marmontel is half-fanciful, and though he does touch reality, subordinates it constantly to half-allegorical and wholly moral purpose. All the minor "Sensibility" folk follow their leaders, and so do all the minor _conteurs_.

The people (believed to be a numerous folk) who are uncomfortable with a fact unless some explanation of it is given, may be humoured here. The failure of a very literary nation--applying the most disciplined literary language in Europe to a department, in the earlier stages of which they had led Europe itself--to get out of the trammels which we had easily discarded, is almost demonstrably connected with the very nature of their own literary character. Until the most recent years, if not up to the very present day, few Frenchmen have ever been happy without a type, a "kind," a set of type-and kind-rules, a cla.s.sification and specification, as it were, which has to be filled up and worked over. Of all this the novel had nothing in ancient times, while in modern it had only been wrestling and struggling towards something of the sort, and had only in one country discovered, and not quite consciously there, that the beauty of the novel lies in having no type, no kind, no rules, no limitations, no general precept or motto for the craftsman except "Here is the whole of human life before you. Copy it, or, better, recreate it--with variation and decoration _ad libitum_--as faithfully, but as freely, as you can." Of this great fact even Fielding, the creator of the modern novel, was perhaps not wholly aware as a matter of theory, though he made no error about it in practice.

Indeed the "comic prose epic" notion _might_ reduce to rules like those of the verse. Both Scott and Miss Austen abstained likewise from formalising it. But every really great novel has ill.u.s.trated it; and attempts, such as have been recently made, to contest it and draw up a novelists' code, have certainly not yet justified themselves according to the Covenant of Works, and have at least not disposed some of us to welcome them as a Covenant of Faith. It is because Pigault-Lebrun, though a low kind of creature from every point of view, except that of mere craftsmanship, did, like his betters, recognise the fact in practice, that he has been allowed here a place of greater consideration than perhaps has ever fallen to his lot before in literary history.

Still, even putting out of sight the new developments which had shown the irrepressible vitality of the French _conte_, the seven hundred years had not been wasted. The product of the first half of them remained, indeed, at this time sealed up in the "gazophile" of the older age, or was popularised only by well-meaning misinterpreters like the Comte de Tressan;[435] but the treasure-house was very soon to be broken open and utilised. It is open to any one to contend--it is, indeed, pretty much the opinion of the present writer--that it was this very neglect which had made the progress of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries themselves so slow and so imperfect in its total results. For those who like to look for literary causes outside literature, there may be other explanations. But any intelligent reader can do something for himself if he has the facts before him. It is these facts that it has been and will be our business to give and to summarise here.

They have been given; let us attempt to summarise them in the briefest possible way. France possibly did not invent Romance; no man or men could do that; it was a sort of deferred heritage which Humankind, like the Heir of Lynne, discovered when it was ready to hang itself (speaking in terms of literature) during the Dark Ages. But she certainly grew the seed for all other countries, and dispersed the growth to the ends of the earth. Very much the same was the case with the short tale in the "Middle" period. From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth (both included) she entered upon a curious kind of wilderness, studded with oases of a more curious character still. In one of them Rabelais was born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding--more fortunate than the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen--was born Pantagruelism.

In another came Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it was consummate. None of these happy sojourns produced a _Don Quixote_ or a _Tom Jones_, but divers smaller things resulted. And again and again, as had happened in the Middle Ages themselves, but on a smaller scale, what France did found development and improvement in other lands; while her own miniature masterpieces, from the best of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and the _Heptameron_, through all others that we noticed down to _Adolphe_, showed the enormous power which was working half blindly.

How the strength got eyes, and the eyes found the right objects to fix upon, must be left, if fortune favour, for the next volume to tell.[436]

FOOTNOTES:

[404] We have seen above how things were "shaping for" it, in the Pastoral and Heroic romances. But the shape was not definitely taken in them.

[405] In the following pages, and here only in this volume, the author has utilised, though with very considerable alterations, some previously published work, _A Study of Sensibility_, which appeared originally in the _Fortnightly Review_ for September 1882, and was republished in a volume (_Essays on French Novelists_, London, 1891) which has been for some years out of print. Much of the original essay, dealing with Marivaux and others already treated here, has been removed, and the whole has been cut down, revised, and adjusted to its new contexts. But it seemed unnecessary to waste time in an endeavour to say the same thing differently about matters which, though as a whole indispensable, are, with perhaps one exception, individually not of the first importance.

[406] These words were originally written more than thirty years ago. I am not sure that there was not something prophetic in them.

[407] Madame de Fontaines in _La Comtesse de Savoie_ and _Amenophis_ "follows her leader" in more senses than one--including a sort of pseudo-historical setting or insetting which became almost a habit. But she is hardly important.

[408] Readers of Thackeray may remember in _The Paris Sketch Book_ ("On the French School of Painting," p. 52, Oxford ed.) some remarks on Jacquand's picture, "The Death of Adelaide de Comminge," which he thought "neither more nor less than beautiful." But from his "it appears," in reference to the circ.u.mstances, it would seem that he did not know the book, save perhaps from a catalogue-extract or summary.

[409] The extreme shortness of all these books may be just worth noticing. Reaction from the enormous romances of the preceding century may have had something to do with it; and the popularity of the "tale"

something more. But the _causa verissima_ was probably the impossibility of keeping up sentiment at high pressure for any length of time, incident, or talk.

[410] _Vide_ on the process Crebillon's _Les egarements du Coeur et de l'Esprit_, as above, pp. 371, 372.

[411] The parallel with "George Eliot" will strike most people.

[412] But for uniformity's sake I should not have translated this, for fear of doing it injustice. "Not presume to dictate," in Mr. Jingle's constantly useful phrase, but it seems to me one of the finest in French prose.

[413] "Craze" has been suggested; but is, I think, hardly an exact synonym.

[414] This may seem to contradict, or at any rate to be inconsistent with, a pa.s.sage above (p. 367) on the "flirtations" of Crebillon's personages. It is, however, only a more strictly accurate use of the word.

[415] Two remarkable and short pa.s.sages of his, not quoted in the special notice of him, may be given--one in English, because of its remarkable antic.i.p.ation of the state of mind of Catherine Morland in _Northanger Abbey_; the other in French, as a curious "conclusion of the whole matter." They are both from _Marianne_.

"I had resolved not to sleep another night in the house. I cannot indeed tell you what was the exact object of my fear, or why it was so lively.

All that I know is that I constantly beheld before me the countenance of my landlord, to which I had hitherto paid no particular attention, and then I began to find terrible things in this countenance His wife's face, too, seemed to be gloomy and dark; the servants looked like scoundrels; all their faces made me in a state of unbearable alarm. I saw before me swords, daggers, murders, thefts, insults. My blood grew cold at the perils I imagined."

"Enfin ces agitations, tant agreables que penibles, s'affaiblirent et se pa.s.serent. L'ame s'accoutume a tout; sa sensibilite s'use: et je me familiarisais avec mes esperances et mes inquietudes."

[416] Since, long ago, I formed the opinion of _Adolphe_ embodied above, I have, I think, seen French criticisms which took it rather differently--as a personal confession of the "confusions of a wasted youth," misled by pa.s.sion. The reader must judge which is the juster view.

[417] By a little allowance for influence, if not for intrinsic value.

[418] On representations from persons of distinction I have given Laclos a place in an outhouse (see "Add. and Corr."). But I have made this place as much of a penitentiary as I could.

[419] I must apologise by antic.i.p.ation to the _official_ French critic.

To him, I know, even if he is no mere minor Malherbe, Restif's style is very faulty; but I should not presume to take his point of view, either for praise or blame.

[420] There is a separate bibliography by Cubieres-Palmezeaux (1875).

The useful _Dictionnaire des Litteratures_ of Vapereau contains a list of between thirty and forty separate works of Restif's, divided into nearer two than one hundred volumes. He followed Prevost in _Nouveaux Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_ as he had followed Marivaux in the _Paysan Perverti_. He completed this work of his own with _La Paysanne Pervertie_; he wrote, besides the _p.o.r.nographe_, numerous books of social, general, and would-be philosophical reform--_Le Mimographe_, dealing with the stage; _Les Gynographes_, with a general plan for rearranging the status of women; _L'Andrographe_, a "whole duty of man"

of a very novel kind; _Le Thesmographe_, etc.,--besides, close upon the end and after the autobiography above described, a _Philosophie de M.

Nicolas_. His more or less directly narrative pieces, _Le Pied de Fanchette_, _Lucile_, _Adele_, _La Femme Infidele_, _Ingenue Saxancour_, are nearly always more or less tinged with biography of himself and of persons closely connected with him, as _La Vie de Mon Pere_, his most respectable book, is wholly. It may be added, perhaps, that the notice in Vapereau, while not bearing very hard on Restif on the whole, repeats the words _cynisme_ and _cynique_ in regard to him. Unless the term is in part limited and in part extended, so as to mean nothing but "exposure of things generally kept secret without apparent shame," it is entirely misplaced. Not merely outside of, but actually in his erotomania, Restif was a sentimental philanthropist of the all but most genuine kind, tainted indeed with the vanity and self-centredness which had reached their acme in Rousseau, but very much more certainly sincere, and of a temperament as different as possible from what is commonly called cynicism.

[421] There are, however, contradictory statements on this point.

[422] Nicolas [Edme] Restif being apparently his baptismal name, and "de la Bretonne" merely one of the self-bestowed agnominal nourishes so common in the French eighteenth century. He chose to consider the surname evidence of descent from the Emperor Pertinax; and as for his Christian name he seems to have varied it freely. Rose Lambelin, one of his harem, and a _soubrette_ of some literature, used to address him as "Anne-Augustin," Anne being, as no doubt most readers know, a masculine as well as a feminine _prenom_ in French.

[423] Some, and perhaps not a few of their objects, may have been imaginary "dream-mistresses," created by Morpheus in an impurer mood than when he created Lamb's "dream-children." But some, I believe, have been identified; and others of the singular "Calendar" affixed to _Monsieur Nicolas_ have probably escaped identification.

[Sidenote: His life and the reasons for giving it.]

[424]

It has not been necessary (and this is fortunate, for even if it had been necessary, it would have been scarcely possible) to give biographies of the various authors mentioned in this book, except in special cases. Something was generally known of most of them in the days before education received a large E, with laws and rates to suit: and something is still in a way, supposed to be known since. But of the life of Pigault, who called himself Lebrun, it may be desirable to say something, for more reasons than one. In the first place, this life had rather more to do with his work than is always the case; in the second, very little will be found about him in most histories of French literature; in the third, there will be found a.s.signed to him, in the text--not out of crotchet, or contumacy, or desire to innovate, but as a result of rather painful reading--a considerably higher place in the history of the novel than he has usually occupied. His correct name--till, by one of the extremest eccentricities of the French _Chats-Fourres_, he was formally unbegot by his Roman father, and the unbegetting (plus declaration of death) confirmed by the Parlement of Paris--was the imposing one of Charles Antoine Guillaume Pigault de L'epinoy. The paternal Pigault, as may be guessed from his proceedings, was himself a lawyer, but of an old Calais family tracing itself to Queen Philippa's _protege_, Eustache de Saint-Pierre; and, besides the mysterious life-in-death or death-in-life, Charles Antoine Guillaume had to suffer from him, while such things existed, several _lettres de cachet_. The son certainly did his best to deserve them. Having been settled, on leaving school as a clerk in an English commercial house, he seduced his master's daughter, ran away with her, and would no doubt have married her--for Pigault was never a really bad fellow--if she had not been drowned in the vessel which carried the pair back to France. He escaped--one hopes not without trying to save her. After another scandal--not the second only--of the same kind, he did marry the victim, and the marriage was the occasion of the singular exertion of _patria potestas_ referred to above. At least two _lettres de cachet_ had preceded it, and it is said that only the taking of the Bastille prevented the issue, or at least the effect, of a third. Meanwhile, he had been a gentleman-trooper in the _gendarmerie d'elite de la pet.i.te maison du roi_, which, seeing that the _roi_ was Louis Quinze, probably did not conduct itself after the fashion of the Thundering Legion, or of Cromwell's Ironsides, or even of Captain Steele's "Christian Hero." The life of this establishment, though as probably merry, was not long, and Pigault became an actor--a very bad but rather popular actor, it was said. Like other bad actors he wrote plays, which, if not good (they are certainly not very cheerful to read), were far from unsuccessful. But it was not till after the Revolution, and till he was near forty, that he undertook prose fiction; his first book being _L'Enfant du Carnaval_ in 1792 (noticed in text). The revolutionary fury, however, of which there are so many traces in his writings, caught him; he went back to soldiering and fought at Valmy. He did not stay long in the army, but went on novel-writing, his success having the rather unexpected, and certainly very unusual, effect of reconciling his father. Indeed, this arbitrary parent wished not only to recall him to life, which was perhaps superfluous, but to "make an eldest son of him." This, Pigault, who was a loose fish and a vulgar fellow, but, as was said above, not a scoundrel, could not suffer; and he shared and shared alike with his brothers and sisters. Under the Empire he obtained a place in the customs, and held it under succeeding reigns till 1824, dying eleven years later at over eighty, and having written novels continuously till a short time before his death, and till the very eve of 1830. This odd career was crowned by an odd accident, for his daughter's son was emile Augier. I never knew this fact till after the death of my friend, the late Mr. H. D. Traill. If I had, I should certainly have asked him to write an Imaginary Conversation between grandfather and grandson. Some years (1822-1824) before his last novel, a complete edition of novels, plays, and very valueless miscellanies had been issued in twenty octavo volumes. The reader, like the river Iser in Campbell's great poem, will be justified for the most part in "rolling rapidly" through them. But he will find his course rather unexpectedly delayed sometimes, and it is the fact and the reasons of these delays which must form the subject of the text.--There is no doubt that Pigault was very largely read abroad as well as at home. We know that Miss Matilda Crawley read him before Waterloo. She must have inherited from her father, Sir Walpole, a strong stomach: and must have been less affected by the change of times than was the case with her contemporary, Scott's old friend, who having enjoyed "your bonny Mrs. Behn" in her youth, could not read her in age.

For our poor maligned Afra (in her prose stories at any rate, and most of her verse, if not in her plays) is an antic.i.p.ated model of Victorian prudery and nicety compared with Pigault. I cannot help thinking that Marryat knew him too. Chapter and verse may not be forthcoming, and the resemblance may be accounted for by common likeness to Smollett: but not, to my thinking, quite sufficiently.

[425] He had a younger brother, in a small way also a novelist, and, apparently, in the Radcliffian style, who extra-named himself rather in the manner of 1830--Pigault-_Maubaillarck_. I have not yet come across this junior's work.--For remarks of Hugo himself on Pigault and Restif, see note at end of chapter.

[426] At least in his early books; it improves a little later. But see note on p. 453.

[427] For a defence of this word, _v. sup._ p. 280, _note_.

[428] It may be objected, "Did not the Scuderys and others do this?" The answer is that their public was not, strictly speaking, a "public" at all--it was a larger or smaller coterie.