A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 44

[522] He is playing whist comfortably with the cathedral keys in his pocket, and has nearly made a slam (Fr. _chelem_), while the pelting of the pitiless storm is on the dead bishop's bier and its faithful guardians.

[523] There is something Browningesque about it, a something by no means confined to the use of the history--actually referred to in the text, but likely to be antic.i.p.ated long before by readers--of Popes Formosus and Stephen. That it did not satisfy Ultramontanes is not surprising; _v. inf._ on one of the smaller pieces in _Norine_.

[524] He had actually been intended for the Church.

[525] One thing, for the credit of the Gallican Church, we may trust that he did _not_ do. An Anglican prelate, like this his brother on a Confirmation tour, is alleged to have pointed to a decanter on his host's sideboard and said, "I hope, on my next visit, I shall not see _that_." I do not know what the rector answered: I do know what _I_ should have said, despite my reverence for the episcopate: "My Lord, you will not have the opportunity."

[526] _La Rue du Puits qui Parle_ and _Le Carmel de Vaugirard_.

[527] The _Societe des Secours Intellectuels_.

[528] See on Murger.

[529] Whenever she hears that any of her numerous lovers has fallen ill, she promptly "plants there" the man in possession, and tends and, as far as she can, supports the afflicted.

[530] _Vide_ the frontispiece of Settle's _Empress of Morocco_.

[531] It would be curmudgeonly to say, "evaded by shortness of s.p.a.ce."

[532] They are, however, orthodox after a fashion; and I do not think that M. Fabre, in the books that I have read, ever introduces descendants of the Camisards, though dealing with their country.

[533] M. Fabre is so fond of these interrupted _recits_ that one is sometimes reminded of _Jacques le Fataliste_ and its landlady. But, to do him justice, he "does it more natural."

[534]

"Come to thy death, Victor _Galbraith_."--LONGFELLOW.

[535] See note above on M. Fabre's weakness for this style of narrative.

[536] The next to be mentioned runs him hard perhaps.

[537] Her girls are perhaps as good, but scarcely her men.

[538] This had _not_ been the case--to an extent which I am puzzled to account for--with those of M. Fabre.

[539] _Deformem vocant quidam_, as in other cases also: but that is because she has eyes and they have none.

[540] For instance, in Highbury or Cranford there might be scandal about a young bachelor's very late visits to a pretty widow. But the adult portion of the population, at any rate, would hardly lay b.o.o.by-traps to trip him in a river on his return.

[541] An old schoolmaster, whom Raymonde has deeply offended by upsetting his just-gathered mushrooms at the beginning of the book, and who is warmly attached to Antoine, turns out to be the girl's legal father--her mother, a disagreeable, handsome person, having been run away twenty years earlier by another character who has pa.s.sed hitherto as respectable husband and paterfamilias.

[542] Excepting some of the "Johnny Ludlow" stories, which were, I think, in their kind, better than anything M. Ohnet ever did to my knowledge--I may perhaps observe that the above notice was written, exactly as it stands, _before_ M. Ohnet's death, but under the impression that the death had occurred. When it did, there were things in the obituaries which made me raise my eyebrows. That he was a "belated Romantic" had certainly never occurred to me; but I have no quarrel with the description of him, in another place, as a pract.i.tioner of the _roman bourgeois_.

[543] _V. sup._ p. 277-280.

[544] The great scene in Mr. Disraeli's _Young Duke_, when that youthful n.o.bleman loses, what is it? two hundred and seventeen thousand pounds, I think; the brief but poignant plucking of Mr. Dawkins; the occasion in _Sans Merci_ where the hero _will_ not lead trumps, and thereby, though not at once, seals his fate; and a quite nice game at Marmora in Mr. E.

F. Benson's _The Babe, B.A._ emerge from many memories, reinforced by some of actual experience. Marmora _is_ a nice game: with penny stakes, and three players only, you may have five pounds in the pool before you know where you are. But I do not know anything more really exciting than a game at which you guess how many marbles the other fellow holds in his fist. The sequel, however, in which you have to ask for an advance of pocket-money to settle your "differences", is not so pleasant.

[545] Another scene, which brings on the _denouement_ and in which Claire is again supposed to have the _beau role_, does not please me much better. Thinking that her husband is flirting with the detested d.u.c.h.ess, she publicly orders her out of the house--a very natural, but a rather "fish-f.a.ggy" proceeding.

[546] It has been, and will be, pointed out that he was in all ways studious to run before the wind; and it was just at this time, if I remember rightly, that the catchword of "conflict" began to pester one in criticism. Perhaps this was the reason.

[547] The argument, or a.s.sumption rather, is all the odder because, on the one hand, orthodoxy holds Free-will (if it accepts that) as a Divine endowment of the Soul: and, on the other, serious Atheism is almost always Determinist. But the study of M. Ohnet was probably not much among the Sentences.

[548] The obituarist above mentioned, who thought M. Ohnet a belated Romantic, thought also that he was "struggling against the rising tide of Realism." I do not think you would ever have found him struggling against rising tides, and, as a matter of fact, the tide was already on the turn.

[549] Already mentioned in the case of M. Cherbuliez (_v. sup._ p. 447).

[550]

[Sidenote: Note on _La Seconde Vie de M. T._]

The second part is occupied with two different but connected subjects.

Suzanne, the first wife, dies suddenly, and the two daughters, the elder, Annie, quite, and the second, Laurence, nearly grown up--return to the custody of their father, and therefore to the society at least of his second wife, Blanche, who, though of course feeling the awkwardness, welcomes them as well as she can. The situation, though much _more_ awkward, is something like that of Miss Yonge's _Young Stepmother_: but M. Rod makes it more tragic by Annie's death, partly in consequence of a love-marriage failing, through the lover's father's objection to the state of her family. The other subject is the gradual hankering of Michel after a return to political life, and his (consequentially inevitable) ratting from Right to Left. M. Rod brought into the matter direct reminiscences of the Parnell and Dilke cases, and possibly owed the conception of the whole book to them; but he has, as is sometimes his wont, rather "sicklied it over" with political and other discussion.

[551] A pleasant study, in poetic use of imagery and phrase, is the gradation from the bare and grand Lucretian simplicity of _silentia noctis_, through the "favour and prettiness" (slightly tautological though) of the Virgilian _tacitae per amica silentia lunae_, to the recovery and intensifying of magnificence in _dove il sol tace_. By the way, _silentia_ (for the singular undergoes Quintilian's apology for the Latin _-um_) is one of the few instances in which a Latin word beats the Greek. [Greek: sige] is really inferior.

[552] What annoys him most of all is that he should have an uncomfortable feeling about the woman "_comme_ si je l'avais _aimee_!"

He had only, you see, done something else.

[553] They should not have done this, and I do not think they did; it was the couples that jostled them. And even this ought not to have happened. The fastest waltzing (I am speaking of the old _deux-temps_, which this must have been) conveyed an almost uncanny extra power of vision, and at the same time of avoidance, to the right persons. Indeed, the first three lines of this extract have been objected to as base and inconsistent. I think not; the common out of which you rise to the uncommon is worth indication.

[554] It may be added that the contrast of an earlier mazurka--in the slowness of which the pair had time to look at each other, feel each other, and otherwise remain in Paradise, but outside of the double Nirvana--is highly creditable. But I hope they _waltzed_ to the mazurka.

It is rather annoying to other people who are doing the orthodox step; but it is the perfection of the slow movement, which affords, as above, opportunities that do not exist in the faster and more delirious gyration.

[555] This (which may be called M. Rod's novel-headquarters) occurs also not merely in _L'Eau Courante_ but in _Les Roches Blanches_, a book which opens very well in a Mrs. Gaskell or Mrs. Oliphant vein, with the introduction of a new pastor, but ends much less satisfactorily, with a guiltless but not at all convincing love-affair between this pastor and the wife of his chief parishioner.

[556] His wife for a time, Madame Judith Gautier, who died very recently, wrote in a fashion not unworthy of her blood both in verse and prose (part of her production being translations from Chinese), and was the only lady-member of the quaint _Contre_-academie formed by E. de Goncourt.

[557] And this shame becomes more acute when I think of one or two individual books, such especially as M. Henry Cochin's _Ma.n.u.scrit de Monsieur C. A. L. Larsonnier_--a most pathetic and delightful story of a mental malady which makes time and memory seem to go backward though the victim can force himself to continue his ordinary duties, and record his sufferings.

CONCLUSION

The remaining pages of this book should be occupied partly with a continuation of a former chapter,[558] partly with a summary of the whole volume, the combination, almost necessary in all cases, being specially motived in this by the overlappings referred to above, and a word added on the whole _History_. Not only did Victor Hugo hold, to French literature as well as to French poetry, something very like the position[559] occupied by Tennyson and Browning in English poetry only, by covering every quarter of the century in whole or part with his work; but there was, even in France, nothing like the "general post" of disappearances and accessions which marked the period from 1820 to 1860 in English--a consequence necessarily of the later revival of French. No one except Chateaubriand corresponded to the crowd of distinguished writers who thus made their appearance, at the actual meeting of eighteenth and nineteenth, with us; and though, of course, there were exceptions, the general body of the French reinforcement did not dwindle much till 1870 onwards.

We noted that the first great development of the nineteenth-century novel was in the historical department, though many others made notable fresh starts: and we said something about the second development of the "ordinary" one which followed. It is this latter, of course, which has supplied the main material of the last third of the present volume, though (of course again) there have been many noteworthy and some great examples of the historical itself, of the supernatural, of the eccentric, and of many other kinds. But practically all who tried these later tried the ordinary, and a great many who tried the ordinary did not try the others. It is therefore on the development of the novel of common modern life that we must, at any rate for a little time, spend most of our attention here.

The fact of the change is indeed so certain and so obvious, that there is not much need to enforce or ill.u.s.trate it, though it must be remembered that, on any true conception of history, the most obvious things are not those least worthy of being chronicled. Even Hugo, likely to be, and actually being, the most recalcitrant to the movement, comes close to modern times, and to such ordinary life as was possible to him, in _Les Miserables_ and _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_. George Sand had begun as a sort of modernist; but by any one who can perform the (it is true not very easy) task of equating relative modernity, it will not be found that _Mlle. la Quintinie_, or even _Flamarande_, are more modern than _Lelia_ or _Valentine_ in the mere ratio of the dates. The ordinary life of the 'thirties and that of the 'sixties and 'seventies was no doubt different, but there is more than that difference in the books referred to. The artist is, consciously or unconsciously, trying to get nearer to her model or sitter. And this though George Sand was really almost as self-centred as Hugo, though in another way.

But it is, of course, in less idiosyncratic writers than these, who continued, and in others who began, to write at this time, that we must look for our real doc.u.ments. Among the elder of this second cla.s.s, Jules Sandeau's work is worth recurring to. He had sometimes gone a little earlier than his own time, and he had sometimes employed what is called--perhaps inconsiderately and certainly to some extent misleadingly--"romantic" incident in addition to purely novel-character and presentation. But his general manner of dealing reproduces itself, almost more than that of any of his contemporaries, in those novelists of the last quarter of the century who do not bow the knee to Naturalism: and one finds some actual recognition of the fact in dedications to him by younger novelists such as M. Andre Theuriet.[560]

But, look where you will, the lesson is unmistakable. Take Alexandre Dumas _fils_, beginning with a _Tristan le Roux_ and ending with an _Affaire Clemenceau_. Take Flaubert's _Madame Bovary_ and _L'education Sentimentale_, in comparison with which _Salammbo_ and two of the _Trois Contes_ (the other is quite in the general drift) are obvious variations, excursions, reliefs.[561] Feuillet is practically (whatever may have been his early practice as a "devil"), when he takes to his own line, modern, and in a sense ordinary or nothing: Daudet the same.

Naturalism _en bloc_ would lose almost all pretence of justifying itself if it did not stick to the ordinary, or at least actual, though it may sometimes be a sort of transformed "ordinariness in abnormality." So great and so fertile a writer as Maupa.s.sant leaves us--except in his supernaturalisms--nothing at all that goes out of the actual probable or easily possible experience of a Frenchman of 1880-90. The four novelists who supply the bulk of the last chapter never outstep this. But since such indulgence in particulars may be thought mere driving at an open door, let us take the fact for granted, and turn to some consideration of its causes, results, conditions, features, and the like.

One of the causes is of such certainty and importance that a person, not indolent or prejudiced, might ask for no other. It is that sempiternal desire for change[562]--that principle of revolution, which is so much more certain than any evolution, and which governs human life, though it is always bringing that life back to the old places, "camouflaged," as they say nowadays, in a fashion that disguises them to the simple. The romance of incident, historical and other, had had a long innings, and people were tired of it. But though this was undoubtedly the main influence, there were some others which it would be hardly judicious to neglect. It is true that the greatest of these were, in a fashion, only partial actions or reactions of the larger one already mentioned.[563]