A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 40

As for the character of Maupa.s.sant's "illusions," there could never be much doubt about some of them. _Boule de Suif_ itself pretty clearly indicated, and _La Maison Tellier_ shortly after showed, at the very opening of his literary career, the scenes, the society, and the solaces which he most affected: while it was impossible to read even two or three of his stories without discovering that, to M. de Maupa.s.sant, the world was most emphatically _not_ the best of all possible worlds. This was by no means princ.i.p.ally shown in the stories of supernatural terror to which, with an inconsistency by no means uncommon in declared materialists, and, had it not been for his unhappy end, very amusing, he was so much given. The chief of these, _Le Horla_, has not been much of a favourite with the lovers of "ghost-stories" in general. I think they are rather unjust to it. But if it has a fault, that fault lies (and, to avoid the charge of being wise after the event, I may observe that I thought so at the time) in too much conviction. The darkness is darkness which has been felt, and felt so much by the artist that he has lost his artistic grasp and command. There was, perhaps, in his own actual state, too much reason for this. In earlier things of the kind it is less perceptible. _Fou?_ is rather splendid. _Aupres d'un Mort_--an anecdote of the death-bed of Schopenhauer, whom Maupa.s.sant naturally admired as the greatest of _saccageurs de reves_, though there are some who, admiring the first master of thoroughly good German prose style and one of the best of German critics, have kept the fort of their dreams safe from all he could do--has merits. _Lettre trouvee sur un noye_ is good; _L'Horrible_ not quite so good; _Le Loup_ (a sort of fancy from the "bete du Gevaudan" story) better; _Apparition_ of the best, with _La Morte_ to pair it, and _Un Cas de Divorce_ and _Qui sait?_ to make up the quartette. Perhaps the best of all (I do not specify its t.i.tle in order that those who do not know it may read till they find it out) is that where the visionary sees the skeletons of the dead rising and transforming their lying epitaphs into confessions--the last tomb now bearing the true cause of his own mistress's death. But the double-t.i.tled _La Nuit--Cauchemar_ runs it hard.

Yet it is not in these stories of doubt and dread, or in the ostensible and rather shallow philosophisings of the travel-books, that Maupa.s.sant's pessimism is most obvious. His preference for the unhappy ending amounts almost to a _tic_, and would amount wholly to a bore--for _toujours_ unhappy-ending is just as bad as _toujours_ marriage-bells--if it were not relieved and lightened by a real presence of humour. With this sovereign preservative for self, and more sovereign charm for others, Guy de Maupa.s.sant was more richly provided than any of his French contemporaries, and more than any but a very few of his countrymen at any time. And as humour without tenderness is an impossibility, so, too, he could be and was tender. Yet it was seldom and _malgre lui_, while he allowed the mere exercise of his humour itself too scantily for his own safety and his readers' pleasure. That there was any more _fanfaronnade_ either of vice or of misanthropy about him, I do not believe. An unfortunate conformity of innate temperament and acquired theory made such a _fanfaronnade_ as unnecessary as it would have been repugnant to him. But illusion, in such cases, is more dangerous, if less disgusting, than imposture. And so it happened that, in despite of the rare and vast faculties just allowed him, he was constantly found applying them to subjects distasteful if not disgraceful, and allowing the results to be sicklied over with a persistent "soot-wash" of pessimism which was always rather monotonous, and not always very impressive.

It was, of course, inevitable that, on this side of the Channel at least, strictures should be pa.s.sed--and appealed against--on a writer of this kind. The impropriety of M. de Maupa.s.sant's subjects, the "cruelty," the "brutality," the "pessimism," and what not, of his handling, were sure to be denounced or defended, as the case may be.

Although the merely "shoking" tone (as the spelling dear to Frenchmen has it) has waned persistently ever since his day, expressions in it have not been wanting; while, on the other hand, newer-fashioned and probably younger censors have scornfully waved aside the very consideration of this part of the subject. Further, no less a critic than my friend Mr. Traill entered, long ago, a protest against the admission of Maupa.s.sant's pessimism as a drawback. "He did not," says Mr. Traill (I quote from memory), "_pose_ as a pessimist; he was perfectly sincere, and an artist's sincere life-philosophy, whatever it is, is not to be urged against the products of his art."

I think that these questions require a little discussion, even in a general _History_.

With reference to the impropriety matter, I have myself, after a lifetime of fighting against the _heresie de l'enseignement_, not the very slightest intention of deserting to or transacting with it. I do most heartily agree and affirm that the subject of a work of art is not, as such, the better or the worse, the more or the less legitimate, because of its tastefulness or distastefulness on moral considerations.

But there is a perpetual danger, when we are clearing our minds of one cant, of allowing them to be invaded by another; and I think I have seen cases where the determination not to be moral of malice prepense has been so great that it has toppled over into a determination to be immoral of malice prepense. Now, the question is, whether Maupa.s.sant and some of Maupa.s.sant's admirers are not somewhat in this case? It is surely impossible for any impartial critic to contend that the unlucky novelist's devotion to the cla.s.s of subjects referred to, and his manner of handling them, did not amount to what has been pedantically, but accurately, termed an "obsession of the _lupanar_." Now, it seems to me that all obsession, no matter of what cla.s.s or kind, is fatal, or, at least, injurious, to the artist. It is almost impossible that he should keep his judgment and his taste cool and clear under it; it is almost impossible that his poring shall not turn into preaching. And I think it not much less hard to defend Maupa.s.sant from the charge of having become a kind of preacher in this way, and so a heretic of instruction, just as much as if he had taken to theology, dogmatic or undogmatic. Perpetual representation amounts to inculcation.[514]

So, again, in reference to the apologies for Maupa.s.sant's pessimism. I cannot see how it can be contended that the perpetual obtrusion of a life-philosophy of any special kind is other than a fault in art. I have no particular objection to pessimism as such; I suppose most people who have thought and felt a good deal are nearer to it than to its opposite; and, though both opposites bore me when they are obtruded, I think rose-pink and sky-blue bore me rather more than the various shades of grey and brown and black. I admit further that, but for the pessimist _diathesis_, we might not have had that peculiar tragedy in which he has been admitted to excel. But it seems to me that the creative artist, as such, and as distinguished from the critical, has no more business to display--to _arborer_--a life-philosophy, than he has to display a philosophy of any other kind. Signs of it may escape him at times; but they should be escapes, not deliberate exhibitions. He is to see life whole as far as he can; and it is impossible that he should see it whole if he is under the domination of any 'ism to the extent that Maupa.s.sant was under the domination of this. In the one supreme artist (I am talking, of course, throughout of the art of letters only) whom we know, there is, perhaps, no more distinctive peculiarity than his elusion of all attempts to cla.s.s him as "Thissist" or "Thattist." And in those who come nearest to him, though they may have strong beliefs and strong proclivities, we always see the capacity of taking the other side. The fervent theologian of the _Paradiso_ treats hardly any of his victims with more consideration than the inhabitants of the City of Dis: the prophet and poet of his own Uranian love for Beatrice swoons at the sight of Francesca's punishment, and feels "so that boiling gla.s.s were coolness," the very penalty of the Seventh Circle of Purgatory. But Maupa.s.sant's materialism and his pessimism combined shut out from him vast parts and regions of life and thought and feeling, as it were with the blank wall of his very earliest poem. The fantastic shadows of his peculiar imagination play on that wall fascinatingly enough; and the region of pa.s.sion and of gloom within is not without a charm, if a somewhat unholy and unhealthy one. But beyond the wall there is a whole universe which Maupa.s.sant does not merely neglect, but of which he seems to be blankly ignorant and unconscious, except in flashes of ignorant disdain. That the infinite province of religious emotion and reflection is shut out is a matter of course; but most of the other regions, in which those who decline religion take refuge, are equally closed. I can remember in Maupa.s.sant only the slightest signs of interest in general literature (except so far as it bears upon his own special craft), in the illimitable ranges of history, in politics, in the higher philosophy.[515] It cannot be said of him, as of his master's dismal heroes, that _tout lui a craque dans la main_. There is no sign of trial on his part; he starts where Bouvard and Pecuchet end, and takes for granted a failure which he has not given himself the trouble to experience.

But, it may be said, "What does it matter what he does not do, know, feel, care for, if he treats what he does do, know, feel, and care for, well?" The objection is ingenious, and, as Petruchio would say, "'a might have a little galled me" if its ingenuity had not been the ingenuity of fallacy. For the question is whether this insensibility to large parts of life has not injured Maupa.s.sant's treatment of the parts in which he did feel an interest. I think it has. There were too many things in emotion and in thought of which he was ignorant. Mrs. Piozzi, in her _Anecdotes of Johnson_, observes that the Doctor, despite his freedom from gush and his dislike to religious verse, could never repeat the stanza of _Dies Irae_ which ends "Tantus labor non sit ca.s.sus"

without bursting into tears. I know a person very different from Johnson who, though he had not read the _Anecdotes_ till an advanced period of his life, had never failed to experience something like the same result at the same line. And, for a third point, it is well known that actual agnostics have often confessed to like affections in similar cases. The numerous and complicated causes of this weakness, or, if any one prefers to call them so, the numerous and complicated causes of this enjoyment, had no hold whatever on Maupa.s.sant.

But this hemiplegia of the intellect and the imagination--this sterilising of one-half, or more than one-half, of the sources of intellectual and imaginative experience and delight--did not prevent him from leaving durable and perdurable results of the vigour of his mind and his sense, in the regions which were open to him. He wrote--as almost every popular writer in these days who does not shut himself up in a _tour d'ivoire_ and neglect popularity must write--too much; and, in the special circ.u.mstances and limitations of his interests and his genius, this was specially unfortunate. He repeated himself too often; and he too frequently failed to come up to himself in the repet.i.tion.

The better part of him, as with Flaubert before, transcended--even openly contemned--the 'isms of his day: but he too often let himself be subservient to them, if he was never exactly their Helot.

Yet in recompense--a recompense largely if not wholly due to the strong Romantic[516] element which countervails the Naturalist--he was certainly the greatest novelist who was specially of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in France. In verse he showed the dawn, and in prose the noon-day, of a combination of veracity and vigour, of succinctness and strength, which no Frenchman who made his _debut_ since 1870 could surpa.s.s. The limitations of his art have been sufficiently dealt with; the excellences of it within those limitations are unmistakable. He had no tricks--the worst curse of art at all times, and the commonest in these days of what pretends to be art. He had no splash of so-called "style"; no acrobatic contortions of thought or what does duty for thought; no pottering and peddling of the psychological kind, which would fain make up for a faulty product by ostentatiously parading the processes of production. Had he once got free--as more than once it seemed that he might--from the fatal conventionalities of his unconventionalism, from the trammels of his obtrusive negations, there is hardly a height in prose fiction which he might not have attained. As it is, he gave us in verse _Au bord de l'eau_, which is nearly the "farthest possible" in a certain expression, of a certain mood of youth, and not of youth only; in prose _Boule de Suif_, _Monsieur Parent_, _Pierre et Jean_, which are all in their way masterpieces, and a hundred things hardly inferior. And so he put himself in the company of "Les Phares"--a light-giver at once and a warner of danger, as well as a part of

cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'age en age, Et vient mourir au bord de _notre_ eternite.[517]

[Sidenote: Huysmans.]

The Naturalist rank and file are so far below Zola and Maupa.s.sant that they cannot now, whatever they might have done twenty years ago, claim much notice in such a history as this. The most remarkable of them was probably J. K. Huysmans. It has been charitably suggested or admitted above that his contribution to the _Soirees de Medan_--a deeply felt story, showing the extreme disadvantage, when, as Mr. De la Pluche delicately put it, "your midlands are out of order," of wandering quarters and vicissitudes in the country, and the intense relief experienced on return to your own comfortable chambers in town,--that this _may_ have been written in the spirit of a _farceur_, reducing the Goncourtian and Zolaesque principle to the lowest terms of the absurd.

But I am by no means sure that it was so, though this suspicion of parody pursues the earlier work of Huysmans to such an extent that a certain cla.s.s of critic might take his later developments as evidence of design in it. _Les Soeurs Vatard_ is a sort of _apodiabolosis_ of the Goncourts and Zola--a history of entirely uninteresting persons (the "sisters" are work-girls in a printing-house, and their companions suit them) doing entirely uninteresting things, in an atmosphere of foul smells, on a scene littered with garbage, cheered by wine which is red ink, and brandy which is vitriol. _a Rebours_, not really a novel at all, is the history of a certain M. Des Esseintes, who is a sort of transposed "Bouvard et Pecuchet" in one--trying all arts and sensations; his experiences being made by his historian a vehicle of mostly virulent and almost always worthless criticism on contemporaries. Perhaps the most intolerable thing is the _affiche_ of idolatry for Baudelaire. One remembers the glorious lines:

Et Charles Baudelaire Dedaigneux du salaire.

He certainly might have been disdainful of the salary of the admiration of one of the _farceurs_ of his own "Coucher du Soleil Romantique." But on the whole there is a better way of taking leave of this first Naturalist, and then mystic, and always _blagueur_. "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Philistine." Which perhaps was his cryptic and circuitous intention. Later M. Huysmans took to Black Arts; and at the last he turned devout--a sort of sequence not by any means uncommon, and one of the innumerable ill.u.s.trations of the irony of things. Gautier and others had antic.i.p.ated and satirised all these stages in the Romantic dawn; they reappeared, serious and dreary, in the twilight of the dusk.

[Sidenote: Belot and others.]

Adolphe Belot was not, strictly speaking, a Naturalist, for he was a dozen years older than Zola, and ran up a huge list of novels ranging in character between Naturalism and melodrama. His most famous book, _Mlle.

Giraud ma Femme_, was the most popular of a large number of attempts, about the last third of the century, in the school of _La Religieuse_, but with more or less deliberately p.o.r.nographic effect. There is, however, some power in this book, and the "curtain"--the foiled husband, after Mlle. Giraud's death, seeing his she-rival swimming, swims out after and drowns her--is quite refreshing. But I have always liked M.

Belot best for a thoughtful and delightful remark in _La Femme de Feu_.

"Heureuse elle-meme, elle trouva naturel de faire les autres heureux,"

which, translated into plain English, means that she was so happy with her husband that she couldn't help making her lover happy. M. Belot did not work out this modification of the Golden Rule--he was not a philosophic novelist. But it is very humorous in itself, and the extensions and applications of it are illimitable and vertiginous.[518]

Below him it is unnecessary to go.

FOOTNOTES:

[455] For the early divisions of verse and prose story were all Topsies, and simply "growed"; although the smaller romances of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and the larger of the latter date, were undoubtedly influenced by the Greek, it was more a case of general imitation than specific endeavour; the Sensibility school was very limited and chiefly attended to tricks of manner; and the "Romantic vague" was never vaguer than in the vast and rather formless, though magnificent and delightful, novel-work started by Nodier, Merimee, Vigny, and Hugo. The Naturalists, on the other hand, had a deliberate idea of revolutionising the novel--of abolishing old things and creating new. They could not, and did not, succeed: but their scheme, as well as its results, may claim consideration.

[456] To which a brief consideration of the curious fancy of some French critics that there is something "cla.s.sical" about Naturalism may be specially relegated.

[457] Merimee, though after his fashion making no fuss about it, was also an early virtuoso in this kind; and one of his letters contains an excellent example of the quiet cynicism in which he excelled. Some ladies had asked to see his collection, and he had very properly warned them that the "curios" of that ingenious and valiant nation were sometimes "curious" in a special sense, and had offered to "select."

"Elles ont tout vu," he adds simply, and one hopes his correspondent (I forgot whether it was one of the _Inconnues_ or Madame de Montijo) appreciated the Mount-Everest-like Laconism.

[458] The ba.n.a.l phrase has been framed in the amber of "Theo's" verse, and so deba.n.a.lised.

[459] The first book of theirs, or rather of Edmond's, though it bore both names, that I read, and the second French book I ever reviewed, was the mainly artistic _Gavarni_ of 1873. One has a human weakness in such cases, but I think one might not have been wholly well disposed to the author from it.

[460] Pepys had nothing that could be called _bad_ blood. Horace perhaps had a little, but it was sweet and childlike compared to the "acrid-quack" fluid of Edmond de Goncourt's veins and heart. Probably several people have seen in M. de Goncourt the suggestion of an _un_-Puritan Malvolio.

[461] Not, however, in the second case, by Sainte-Beuve, whose lukewarmness Edmond--a "Sensitive Plant" in this way if hardly in others--never forgave.

[462] She served them for a very long period without giving them any apparent cause for complaint. They only found out her delinquencies after her death, or in her last illness--I forget which. Probably nothing could better show "the nature of the animals" than this _post-mortem_ grubbing belowstairs for a "subject," and washing your own household dirty linen in public--for profit.

[463] It may be well to smash, in a pa.s.sing note, a silly catchword popular with some rather belated English admirers of the Naturalist school a few years ago. They praised its "frankness." You might as well praise the "straightforwardness" of a man who goes out of his way to explore laystalls and, having picked up ordure, holds it up to public view.

[464] Both excellent things in their way, of course. Perhaps it would be better to say asafoetida.

[465] It is perhaps only fair to warn readers who may not know the fact, that some very good and (in the French as well as the English sense) respectable judges think much better of the work, and even of the men or man, than I do. _Renee Mauperin_ especially (as indeed I have admitted) has a considerable body of suffrage; the general style pleases some, and it has been urged for Edmond that good men liked him. But these good men had not read his diary. There is, however, no doubt that it is an exceptionally strong case of "rubbing the [right or the] wrong way."

Books and men and style all rub me the wrong way; and, though I have some knack at using the brushes and _fixatures_ of pure criticism, I can't get myself smoothed down.

[466] See note at close of chapter. One of the most comic things in the whole Naturalist episode was the rising up of some of these disciples to rebuke their master, in a round robin, for "right-hand and left-hand defections" from the pure gospel of the sect.

[467] The word is used, designedly but not fraudulently, as combining "observation" and "experiment" _to the extent proper to art_. Deliberate and after-thought "experi_ments_" in actual life are (except in trivial matters) very risky things; and the _Summa Rerum_ itself is apt to resent them, as, for instance, Mr. Thomas Day and Mr. Felix Graham found in the matter of wife-culture.

[468] _V. sup._ Vol. I. p. 278. I was much pleased to find that the quotation considerably "put out" one of my few unfavourable critics.

"The Importance of Gastronomy in Novels" is a beautiful subject--still, I think, virgin, though Thackeray has touched on it in others once or twice, and ill.u.s.trated it magnificently himself.

[469] For something on the opposite view, that Naturalism is "cla.s.sical," see Conclusion.

[470] That Flaubert escaped their error only so far as by fire has been allowed. One might indeed say so by death. For _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ as it stands, and as outlined further, is very near Naturalism. Earlier he had carried the principle far in _Salammbo_, and would have carried it farther if he had not listened to good advice for once. But he had fire enough in his interior to burn the rubbish and smelt the ore in his better books, and skill enough to run off the metal from the dross, into proper shape. The others had not.

[471] I learn from the lucubrations of some Americans--who, having been, rather late and with some difficulty, induced to perceive that Edgar Poe was their chief literary glory, have taken vehemently to his favourite kind, and written voluminously in and on it--that it ought to be called a "brief-narrative," the hyphen being apparently essential. This is very interesting: and throws much light on the subject. However, having read a great deal on it, I do not find myself much advanced beyond a position which I think I occupied some fifty years ago--to wit, that a short story is not merely a long one cut down, nor a long story a short one spun out.

[472] Barbey d'Aurevilly's (_v. sup._) attack on the book is one of the most remarkable instances of the irresponsibility of his criticism.

[473] _V. sup._ p. 258.

[474] One ought perhaps to verify; but that would be hard lines to have to read _Nana_ twice!

[475] That of the _Union Generale_.

[476] _Verite_, though a remarkable "human doc.u.ment" itself, and an indispensable _historical_ doc.u.ment for any student of the particular popular madness with which it deals, need surely be inflicted a second time on no mortal. It is a transposition into the regions of the unmentionable, of the Dreyfus case itself. But n.o.body save a failure of something like a novelist of genius, with this failure pushed near the confines of madness, could have written it.

[477] "M. Zola [is] apparently persuaded that, if you can only kill G.o.d, the Devil will die--an idea which seems to leave out of consideration the idiosyncrasy of a third personage, Man" (_The Later Nineteenth Century_, Edinburgh and London, 1907, pp. 93, 94).

[478] Only it would have to be real Blake, not imitation, which latter is one of the furthest examples of dreary futility known to the present writer.

[479] The horticulture of _L'Abbe Mouret_ is nearest to an exception; but even that is overdone.

[480] Who might even say, "Is not this a slip of pen or press? Has not 'might' dropped out?" I should doubt it, even if a copy of the original edition had the missing word, for it might easily have been put in by a dull but conscientious "reader." The plural, in Thackeray's careless way, comes from his _thinking_ as he wrote "Are they not _all_ ...