A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 35

[Sidenote: The first--his general character.]

I have somewhere seen it said that Ponson du Terrail, before he took to driving _feuilletons_ five-in-hand, showed some power of less coa.r.s.e fiction-writing on a smaller scale. But I have not seen any of these essays, and real success in them on his part would surprise me. For it is exactly in the qualities necessary to such a success that he seems to me to come short. He _did_ possess what, though it may seem almost profane to call it imagination, is really a cheap and drossy lower kind thereof. He could frame and acc.u.mulate, even to some extent connect, melodramatic situations, not so very badly, and not in very glaring imitation of anybody else. But, perhaps for that very reason, the difference between him and the others strikes one all the more painfully. _Les Orphelins de la Saint-Barthelemy_ awakes the saddest sighs for Dumas or Merimee. _La Femme Immortelle_, with its _diablerie_ explained and then _dis_-explained and then clumsily solved with a laugh, makes one wish for an hour or two even of Soulie. And when one comes to the nineteenth century and _Les Gandins_ and a fiendish _docteur rouge_[430] (who is in every conceivable way inferior to Vigny's _docteur noir_), and a wicked count who undergoes a spotty transcorporation, it is worse. If any one says, "This is possible, but you yourself have said that excellence in some one else ought not to affect the estimate of the actual subject," I reply, "Granted; but Ponson du Terrail bores me." I have dropped every book of his that I have taken up, and only at a second--even a third--struggle have been able to get knowledge enough of it to speak without critical treason.

Moreover, his style (always under caution given) seems to me flat, savourless, and commonplace; his thought childish, his etceteras (if I may so say) absurd. The very printing is an irritation. Who can read such stuff as this?

Tout a coup une sonnette se fit entendre.

Nana se leva.

Cette sonnette etat celle qui avertissait la soubrette que sa maitresse reclamait son office.

La jolie fille prit un flambeau et quitta la cuisine.

Here you have four separate paragraphs, five lines, and thirty-five words to express, in almost idiotic verbiage, the following:

"Here her mistress's bell rang, and she left the kitchen."

One might conduct not merely five, but five and twenty novels abreast at this rate.

[Sidenote: The second.]

Not thus would it be proper to write of Gaboriau. With him, except incidentally, and when he is diverging from his proper line,[431] one finds no mere "piffle." He has a business and he does that. Moreover, it is a business which, if not intrinsically, is historically important. Of course there had been crime-novels and crime-tales before: there always has been everything before. But Gaboriau undoubtedly refashioned and restarted them, and has been ever since the parent or master of a family, or whole school, of novelists and tale-tellers who have sometimes seemed, at any rate to themselves, to be pillars, and to be ent.i.tled to talk about politics and religion and morals, and the other things which, as Chesterfield so delightfully remarked, need no troublesome preparation in the talker. His place here, therefore, is secured. If it is not a large place, that is not entirely due to the mere fact that, as has been frankly acknowledged, the present writer takes little pleasure in the crime-novel. It is because the kind, plentiful for those who like it to read, can be conveniently knocked off in specimen for others. For the latter purpose it would not matter very much whether _L'Affaire Lerouge_, or _Le Crime d'Orcival_, or _M. Lecoq_ itself, or perhaps even others, were taken. The first named, which was, I think, one of the first, if not the actual overture of the series, and which happens to be best known to the historian, will perhaps suffice.

[Sidenote: _L'Affaire Lerouge._]

No one who takes it up, having some little critical apt.i.tude and experience, will fail to see, very shortly, that it does mean business and does do it. The murder of Claudine Lerouge is well plunged into; the arrangements for its detection--professional and amateur--are "gnostically" laid out; and the plot thickens and presents various sides of itself, like a craftsmanly made and tossed pancake. If you read it at all, you will not skip much; first, because the interest, such as it is, is continuous; and, secondly, for one of those reasons which keep would-be sinners in other paths of rect.i.tude--that, _if_ you skip, you will almost certainly find you have lost your way when you come down from skipping. Some oddities--partly, but not entirely, connected with the strange and well-known differences between French and English criminal procedure--will, of course, strike an Englishman--the collaboration of professional _juge d'instruction_ and amateur detective being perhaps the most remarkable. The love-affair, in which the Judge himself and the plotted-against Albert de Commarin are rivals, though a useful poker to stir the fire, is not quite a well-managed one: and the long harangue of Madame Gerdy, between her resurrection from brain-fever and her death, seems a little to strain probability. But no one of these things, nor all together, need be fatal to the enjoyment of the book on the part of, as was once said, "them as likes" the kind.[432]

[Sidenote: Feydeau--_Sylvie_.]

Short notice may again serve for another novelist enormously popular in his day; very characteristic of the Second Empire; a favourite[433] for a time (rather inexplicably) of Sainte-Beuve; but not much of a rose, and very much of many days before yesterday--Ernest Feydeau. He did one thing, _Sylvie_, as different as possible from Gerard's book of the same name, but still, as it seems to me, good enough, though it never enjoyed a tenth part of the popularity of his more "scabrous" things, though itself is very far from prudish, and though it makes no appearance in some lists and collections of his work. Feydeau (it is a redeeming point) was one of "those about" Gautier, and _Sylvie_ is by no means unlike a pretty free and fairly original transfer from _Les Jeune-France_. The hero is a gentleman, decadent by antic.i.p.ation and romantic by survival to the very _n_th. He abides in a vast chamber, divanned, and hung with Oriental curtains: he smokes endless tchibouks, and lives chiefly upon preserved ginger. To him enters Sylvie, a sort of guardian angel, with a rather Mahometan angelism, who devotes herself to him, and succeeds, by this means and that, in converting him to a somewhat more rational system of life and "tonvelsasens," as Swift would say. It is slight enough, but very far from contemptible.

[Sidenote: _f.a.n.n.y._]

As has been said or hinted, however, this was not at all the sort of thing that brought or, so long as he did keep it, kept Feydeau's vogue.

_f.a.n.n.y_, with which he "broke out" considerably more than "ten thousand strong," as far as sale of copies went, is certainly not a book of the "first-you-meet" kind. There is some real pa.s.sion in its handling of the everlasting triangle. But it is pa.s.sion of the most morbid and least "infinite" kind possible. Whenever Feydeau's heroes are sincere they have a peculiar kind of sentimental immorality--a sort of greasy gush--which is curiously nauseous. His Aphrodite, if the G.o.ddess will pardon the profanation of her name, is neither laughter-loving, nor tragic (as Aphrodite can be), nor Uranian in the sense, not of being superior to physical pa.s.sion, but of transcending it. She is not exactly Pandemic, for Feydeau, like Malvolio, does talk, or tries to talk, of ladies; but she is something like the patroness of the old Sensibility novel "gone to the bad."

[Sidenote: Others--_Daniel_.]

_Madame de Chalis_, according to a memory of many years which I have not thought it worth while to freshen, has a weaker draught of this rancid and mawkish sentimentality. But having in those days missed (or failed over) _Daniel_, I thought it inc.u.mbent on me to gird myself up to its eight hundred pages. A more dismal book, even to skim, I have seldom taken up. The hero--a prig of the first water--marries one of those apparently only half-flesh-and-blood wives who, novelistically, never fail to go wrong. He cannot, in the then state of French law, divorce her, but he is able to return her on her mother's hands. Going to Trouville (about which, then a quite new-fashioned resort, there is a great deal in the book), he meets a beautiful girl, Louise de Grandmont, and the pair fall--not merely hopelessly, which is, in the circ.u.mstances, a matter of course, but, it would seem, innocently--in love with each other. But in such a case scandal must needs come; and it is engineered by revenge of the discarded wife and the mother-in-law, by the treachery of some of Daniel's friends and the folly of others, as well as, it must be added, by his own weak violence, thoughtless conduct, and general imbecility. All this is developed at enormous length, and it ends in a general ma.s.sacre, Louise's uncle being killed in a duel which Daniel ought to have fought (he is no coward, but a hopeless blunderer), the girl herself dying of aneurism, and Daniel putting an end to himself in her grave, much more messily and to quite infinitely less tragic effect than Romeo. There is one scene in which he is represented as gathering all his enemies together (including a lawyer, who is half-rogue, half-dupe) and putting them all to confusion by his oratory. The worst of it is that one does not in the least see _why_ they were confused, except in one case, where the foe is literally kicked downstairs--an effective method, and one rare enough in French novels up to this date to be worth notice.[434]

[Sidenote: Droz.]

It was, for all contemporary readers of the French novel, except those of the gravest and most precise kind, a day to be marked, not with vanishing forms in chalk, but with alabaster or Parian, when "Marcellin"

of the _Vie Parisienne_--one of those remarkable editors who, without ever writing themselves, seem to have the knack of attracting and almost creating writers, enlisted one "Z," the actual final letter of the name of Gustave Droz, and published the first article of those to be later collected as _Monsieur, Madame et Bebe_ and _Entre Nous_. Although the contents of these books only added a fresh sprout to the age-old tree that, for more than half a millennium, had borne _fabliau_ and _nouvelle_ and _conte_ and _histoire_, and so forth, they had a remarkable, if not easily definable, differentia of their own, and have influenced fiction-writing of the same kind for a good half-century since. The later-working "Gyp" and others owed a good deal to them; and I am bound to say that--reading the two books recently after a long interval--I found my old favourites just as amusing as I found them the very first time, shortly after they came out.

Of course--and only those who have made much study of criticism know how seldom critics recognise this "of course"--you must take the things in, and not out of, their own cla.s.s. They are not bread, or meat, or milk of literature. They are, to take one order of gastronomic preference and taste, devilled biscuits; to take another, chocolate with whipped cream on it. And the devilling and the creaming are sometimes better than the chocolate and the biscuit.

[Sidenote: _Mr., Mme. et Bebe_ and _Entre Nous_.]

It is not very easy to say--and perhaps not very important to know--whether the mixture of naughtiness and sentimentality which characterises these books[435] was what Mr. Carlyle, I think, was first to call an "insurance" or only a spontaneous and in no way "dodgy" or "hedgy" expression of the two sides of the French character. For everybody ought to know that the complaint of d.i.c.kens's "Mr. the Englishman" as to the French being "so d--d sentimental" is at least as well justified as Mr. Arnold's disapproval of their "worship of Lubricity." I suppose there are some people who would prefer the sentiment and are others who would choose the "tum-te-dy," while yet a third set might find each a disagreeable alternative to the other. For myself, without considering so curiously, I can very frankly enjoy the best of both. The opening story of the earlier and, I think, more popular book, "Mon Premier Reveillon," is not characteristic. It might have been written by almost anybody, and is in substance a softened and genteel version of the story of Miss Jemima Ivins, and her luckless (but there virtuous) suitor, in the "Boz" _Sketches_. "L'ame en Peine," which follows, strikes the peculiar Drozian note for the first time; and very pleasant is the painting of the struggles of a pious youth--pious and pudibund to a quite miraculous extent for a French _collegien_ of good family--with the temptations of a beautiful Marquise and cousin who, arrayed in an ultra-Second-Empire bathing-costume, insists on his bathing with her. "Tout le Reste de Madame de K." may a little remind an English reader of the venerable chestnut about the Bishop and the housemaid's knee; but the application is different. There is nothing wicked in it, but it contains some of the touches of varying estimate of "good form" in different countries which make the comparative reading of English and French novels so interesting. "Souvenirs de Careme" is (or rather are, for the piece is subdivided) the longest of several bits of Voltairianism, sometimes very funny and seldom offensive. But, alas!

one cannot go through them all. The most remarkable exercise in the curious combination or contrast noticed above is afforded by _Une Nuit de Noce_ and _Le Cahier Bleu_ (tricks of ingeniously "pa.s.sed-off"

naughtiness which need not shock anybody), combined with the charming and pathetic "Omelette" which opens the second book, and which gives the happy progress and the sad termination of the union so merrily begun.

All are drawn with equal skill and with no real bad taste. In one or two articles of both books the _gauloiserie_ broadens and coa.r.s.ens, while in the more purely "Bebe" sections of the first the sentimentality may seem a little watered out. But you cannot expect acrobatics on wine-gla.s.ses of this kind always to "come off" without some slips and breakages.

On the whole, I think _Entre Nous_ contains the very best things, and most good ones. The pathos of the first (which is itself by no means mere _pleurnicherie_) is balanced at the other end by the audacity of "Le Sentiment a l'epreuve," a most agreeable "washing white" of the main idea of Wycherley's _Country Wife_; and between the two, few in the whole score are inferior. "Nocturne," "Oscar," "Causerie," and "Le Maillot de Madame" were once marked for special commendation by a critic who certainly deserved the epithet of competent, in addition to those of fair and gentle. It is, however, in this volume that what seems to me Droz's one absolute failure occurs. It is neither comic nor tragic, neither naughty nor nice, and one really wonders how it came to be put in. It is ent.i.tled "Les de Saint-Paon," and is a commonplace, hackneyed, quite unhumorous, and rather ill-tempered satire on certain dubious aristocrats and anti-modernists. Nothing could be cheaper or less pointed. And the insertion of it is all the stranger because, elsewhere, there is something very similar, in subject and tendency, but of half the length and ten times the wit, in "Le Pet.i.t Lever," a conversation between a certain Count and his valet.

The plain critical fact is that the non-pathetic serious was in no way Droz's trade. His satire on matters ecclesiastical is sometimes delightful when it is mere _persiflage_: an Archbishop might relax over the conversation in Paradise between two great ladies, one of whom has charitably stirred up the efforts of her director in favour of her own coachman to such effect, that she actually finds that menial promoted to a much higher sphere Above than that which she herself occupies. But here, also, the more gravity the less goodness.

Yet, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, we ought not to quarrel with him for this, and to do so would be again to fall into the old "gin-shop and leg-of-mutton" unreasonableness. It was M. Droz's mission to start a new form of Crebillonade--_panache_ (to use an excellent term of French cookery), here and there, with another new form of Sensibility. He did it quite admirably, and he taught the simpler device--the compound one hardly--to pupils, some of whom still divert, or at least distract, the world. I am not at all ashamed to say that I think the best of his and their work capital stuff, continuing worthily one of the oldest and most characteristic strains of French literature; displaying no contemptible artistry; and contributing very considerably to that work of pleasure-giving which has been acknowledged as supplying the main subject of this book.

[Sidenote: Cherbuliez.]

[Sidenote: His general characteristics.]

Few more striking contrasts--though we have been able to supply a fair number of such things--could be found than by pa.s.sing from Gustave Droz to Victor Cherbuliez. Scion of a Genevese family already distinguished in letters, M. Cherbuliez became one of the _Deux-Mondains_, a "publicist" as well as a novelist of great ability, and finally an Academician; but his novels, clever as they are, were never quite "frankly" liked in France--at least, by the critics. This may have been partly due to the curious latent grudge with which French writers--to the country as well as to the language and manners born--have always regarded their Swiss comrades or compet.i.tors--the att.i.tude as to a kind of poacher or interloper.[436] But to leave the matter there would be not only to miss thoroughness in the individual case, but also to overlook a point of very considerable importance to the history of the French novel generally. There is undoubtedly something in M.

Cherbuliez's numerous, vigorous, and excellently readable novels which reminds one more of English than of French fiction. We have noticed a certain resemblance in Feuillet to Trollope: it is stronger still in Cherbuliez. Not, of course, that the Swiss novelist denies himself--though he uses them more sparingly--the usual lat.i.tudes of the French as contrasted with the English novelist during nine-tenths of the nineteenth century. But he does use them more sparingly, and he is apt to make his heroines out of unmarried girls, to an extent which might at that time seem, to the conventional French eye, simply indecent. He is much more prodigal of "interest"--that is to say, of incident, accident, occurrence--than most French novelists who do not affect somewhat melodramatic romance. On the other hand, his character-drawing, though always efficient, is seldom if ever masterly; and that "schematisation,"

on which, as is pointed out in various places of this book, French critics are apt to insist so much, is not always present. Of actual pa.s.sion he has little, and his books are somewhat open to the charge--which has been brought against those of so many of our own second-best novelists--that they are somewhat machine-made, or, if that word be too unkind, are rather works of craft than of art. Yet the work of a sound craftsman, using good materials, is a great help in life; and a person who wants good story-pastime for a certain number of nights, without possessing a Scheherazade of his own, will find plenty of it in the thirty years' novel turn-out of Victor Cherbuliez.

[Sidenote: Short survey of his books.]

He did not find his way at once, beginning with "mixed" novels of a Germanish kind--art-fiction in _Un Cheval de Phidias_; psychological-literary matter (Ta.s.so's madness) in _Le Prince Vitale_; politico-social subjects in _Le Grand-oeuvre_. But these things, which have not often been successes, certainly were not so in M. Cherbuliez's hands. He broke fresh ground and "grew" a real novel in _Le Comte Kostia_, and he continued to till this plot, with good results, for the rest of his life. The "scenes and characters" are sufficiently varied, those in the book just mentioned being Russian and those in _Ladislas Bolski_ Polish--neither particularly complimentary to the nationalities concerned, and the latter decidedly melodramatic. _Le Comte Kostia_ is sometimes considered his best novel; but I should put above it both _Le Roman d'une Honnete Femme_ (his princ.i.p.al attempt in purely French society and on Feuilletesque lines, with a tighter morality) and _Meta Holdenis_, a story of a Swiss girl--not beautiful, but "_vurry_ attractive," and not actually "no better than she should be," but quite ready to be so if it suited her. _Miss Rovel_ with another girl-heroine--eccentric, but not in the lines of the usual French-English caricatures--is a great favourite with some. _La Revanche de Joseph Noirel_ is again melodramatic; and _Prosper Randoce_ is not good for much. But _Paule Mere_, one of its author's best character-books, is very much better--it is a study of ill-starred love, as is _Le Fiance de Mlle. Saint-Maur_, a book not so good, but not bad.

_Samuel Brohl et Cie_ is a very clever story of a rascal. I do not know that any of his subsequent novels, _L'Idee de Jean Teterol_, _Noirs et Rouges_, _La Ferme du Choquard_, _Olivier Maugant_, _La Vocation du Comte Ghislain_, _La Bete_, _Une Gageure_, which closes the list of my acquaintance with them, will disappoint the reader who does not raise his expectation too high. _Olivier Maugant_ is perhaps the strongest.

But the expression just used must not be taken as belittling. In both France and England such novel-writing had become almost a trade--certainly a profession: and the turning out of workmanlike and fairly satisfying articles for daily consumption is, if not a n.o.ble ambition, a quite respectable aim. M. Cherbuliez did something more than this: there are numerous scenes and situations in his work which do not merely interest, but excite, if they never exactly transport. And the provision of interest itself is, as has been allowed, remarkably bounteous. I should not despise, though I should be a little sorry for, a reader--especially an English reader--who found more of it in Cherbuliez than even in Feuillet, and much more than in Flaubert or Maupa.s.sant. The causes of such preference require no extensive indication, and I need not say, after or before what is said elsewhere, that this order of estimate is not mine. But it is to some extent a "fact in the case."[437]

[Sidenote: Three eccentrics.]

Before finishing this chapter we ought, perhaps, to consider three odd persons, two of them much extolled by some--Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Leon Cladel, and "Champfleury" of _Les Excentriques_. The two first were themselves emphatically "eccentrics"--one an apostle of dandyism (he actually wrote a book about Brummel, whom he had met early), a disdainful critic of rather untrustworthy vigour, and a stalwart reactionary to Catholicism and Royalism; the other a devotee of the exact opposite of dandyism, as the t.i.tle of his best-known book, _Les Va-nu-pieds_, shows, and a Republican to the point of admiring the Commune. The opposition has at least the advantage of disproving prejudice, in any unfavourable remarks that may be made about either. To Barbey d'Aurevilly's criticism I have endeavoured to do justice in a more appropriate place than this.[438] His fiction occupied a much smaller, but not a small, proportion of his very voluminous work. _Les Diaboliques_ and _L'Ensorcelee_, as well as _Les Va-nu-pieds_, are t.i.tles which ent.i.tle a reader to form certain more or less definite expectations about the books they label; and an author, by choosing them, deprives himself, to some extent, of the right justly claimed for him in Victor Hugo's well-known manifesto, to be judged _merely_ according to his own scheme, and the goodness or badness of its carrying out. If Hugo himself had made _Les Orientales_ studies of Montmartre and the Palais Royal, he could not have made out his right to the privilege he a.s.serted. The objection applies to Barbey d'Aurevilly even more than to Cladel, but as the work of the latter is the less important, we may take it first.

[Sidenote: Leon Cladel--_Les Va-nu-pieds_, etc.]

At more times in my life than one I have striven to like--or at any rate to take an interest in--_Les Va-nu-pieds_. Long ago it had for me the pa.s.sport of the admiration of Baudelaire,[439] to whom and to Victor Hugo (this latter circ.u.mstance an important _visa_ to the former) Cladel announced himself a pupil. But an absolute, if perhaps unfortunate, inability to follow anything but my own genuine opinion prevented me from enjoying it. And I cannot enjoy it now. It is not a commonplace book, nor is anything else of its author's; but the price paid for the absence of commonplaceness is excessive. A person possessing genius, and sure of it, does not tell you that he has been rewriting his book (not for correction of fact, but for improvement of style) for ten years, and that now he doesn't care anything for critics, and endorses it NE VARIETUR (_sic_).[440] The style itself is a mosaic of preciousness, literary jargon, and positive _argot_--not quite contemptible, but, like some actual mosaic, unattractive; and the matter does not attract me, though it may attract people who like tiger-taming scenes, crimes, grimes, etc. The address of the dedication, "Mienne," and nothing more, is rather nice, and some of the local scenes (Cladel was pa.s.sionately patriotic towards his remote province of Quercy-Rouergue) are worth reading. But this devotion is better shown in the short single book (_Les Va-nu-pieds_ is a collection) called _Crete-Rouge_--the regimental nickname of the heroine (an Amazon), who actually serves in the war of the Terrible Year, and comes off much better, when her s.e.x is discovered by the Prussians, than she would have done forty and odd years later.

The end-scenes of this book, with her Druid-stone marriage to a comrade, are really good. Of _Le Bousca.s.sie_, _t.i.ti-Froissac IV_, and _La Fete Votive de Saint-Bartholomee Porte-Glaive_ I shall not say much. The "province," which is strong in them, saves them sometimes. But Cladel's hopeless lack of self-criticism shows itself in the fact of his actually reprinting in full an article of Veuillot's (by no means uncomplimentary) on himself, as a prelude in the book last mentioned, and adding a long reply. The proceeding was honest, but rather suicidal.

One may not wholly admire the famous editor of the _Univers_.[441] But nothing could better throw up his clear, vigorous, cla.s.sical French and trenchant logic, than the verbose and ambaginous preciousness, and the cabbage-stick cudgel-play, of Cladel.[442]

[Sidenote: Barbey d'Aurevilly--his criticism of novels.]

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, also a favourite of Baudelaire's, is a writer of an altogether greater clan--indeed one of those who come short but a little, and one does not quite know how, of individual greatness.

Something has been said of his criticism, but a volume of it which was not within my reach when I wrote what is there quoted, _Le Roman Contemporain_, is a closer introduction to a notice of him as a novelist. As of all his work it may be said of this, that anybody who does not know the subjects will probably go away with a wrong idea of them, but that anybody who does know them will receive some very valuable cross-lights. The book consists[443] of a belittlement, slightly redressed at the end, of Feuillet as a feeble person and an impertinent patroniser of religion; of a rather "magpie" survey of the Goncourts; of a violent and quite blind attack on Flaubert (the worst criticism of Barbey's that I have ever read); of a somewhat unexpectedly appreciative notice of Daudet; of an almost obligatory panegyric of Fabre; of another _ereintement_, at great length, of Zola; and of shorter articles, again "magpied" of praise and blame, on MM. Richepin, Catulle Mendes, and Huysmans.[444]

[Sidenote: His novels themselves--_Les Diaboliques_ and others.]

[Sidenote: His merits.]