A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 45

Beyle and Balzac, the latter of course with important "colours" of his own, and even the former with some modifications, had, as men of genius generally do, felt or found the spirit of change early, and their audiences helped to spread it. And yet minor impulsions might be indicated. It is a commonplace that from the days of the Napoleonic War to the middle 'fifties there were few great European events; commercial progress, developments of colonisation, machinery, literature, and the arts, somewhat peddling politics,[564] and the like taking the place of the big wars and the grandiose revolutions that ushered in the nineteenth century. But these mostly meaner things themselves claimed attention; they filled the life of men if they did not glorify it; cla.s.ses and occupations which had been almost altogether non-vocal began to talk and be talked about, and so the change again held on.

Lastly, of course, there was the increase of education: with which the demand for fiction, plentiful in quant.i.ty and easily comprehended, was sure to grow.

On the whole, however, the results concern us more than the causes. What is the general character of this large province, or, looking at it in another way, of these acc.u.mulated crops, which the fifty years more specially in question saw added to the prose fiction of France?

The answer is pretty much what any wide student of history--political, social, literary, or other--would expect, supposing, which is of course in fact an impossibility, that he could come to the particular study "fresh and fasting." Novel-writing in France, as elsewhere, became more and more a business; and so, while the level of craftsmanship might be to some extent raised, the level of artistic excellence was correspondingly lowered. It has been before observed more than once that, to the present critic, only Flaubert and Maupa.s.sant of the writers we have been discussing in these later chapters can be credited with positive genius, unless the too often smoky and malodorous torch of Zola be admitted to qualify for the Procession of the Chosen. But when we take in the whole century the retrospect is very different; and while the later period may suffer slightly in the respect just indicated, the earlier affords it some compensation in the other noted point.

There is, indeed, no exact parallel, in any literature or any branch of literature within my knowledge, to the manifold development of the French novel during these hundred years. Our own experience in the same department cannot be set in any proper comparison with it, for the four great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century, and their followers from Miss Burney downwards, with the Terror and the Political schools of the extreme close, had advanced our starting-point so far that Scott and Miss Austen possessed advantages not open to any French writer. On the other hand, the Sensibility School, which was far more numerously attended in France than in England, gave other openings, which _were_ taken advantage of in a special direction by Benjamin Constant, and much earlier and less brilliantly, but still with important results, by Madame de Montolieu. The age-long competence of the French in _conte_ and _nouvelle_ was always ready for fresh adaptation; and at the very beginning of the new century, and even earlier, two reinforcements of the most diverse character came to the French novel. Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil (the earliest of whose novels appeared just before the Revolution as Pigault's debut was made just after it) may be said to have democratised the novel to nearly[565] the full meaning of that much abused word. They lowered its value aesthetically, ethically (at least in Pigault's case, while Ducray's morality does not go much above the "Be amiable and honest" standard), logically, rhetorically, and in a good many other ways. But they did not merely increase the number of its readers; in so doing they multiplied correspondingly the number of its pract.i.tioners, and so they helped to make novel-writing a business and--through many failures and half-successes--to give it a sort of regularised practice, if not a theory.

Yet if this democratisation of the novel thus went partly but, as does all democratisation inevitably, to the degradation of it in quality, though to its increase in quant.i.ty, there were fortunately other influences at work to provide new reinforcements, themselves in some cases of quality invaluable. It has been admitted that neither Chateaubriand nor Madame de Stael can be said to have written a first-cla.s.s novel--even _Corinne_ can hardly be called that. But it is nearer thereto than anything that had been written since the first part of _La Nouvelle Helose_: while _Rene_ and _Atala_ recover, and more than recover in tragic material, the narrative power of the best comic tales. And these isolated examples were of less importance for the actual history--being results of individual genius, which are not imitable--than certain more general characteristics of the two writers.

Between them--a little perhaps owing to their social position, but much more by their pure literary quality--they reinstated the novel in the Upper House of literature itself. In Madame de Stael there was more than adequacy--in Chateaubriand there was sometimes consummateness--of style; in both, with whatever varnish of contemporary affectation, there was genuine n.o.bility of thought. They both chose subjects worthy of their powers, and Madame de Stael at least contented herself with ordinary, or not very extraordinary, modern life. But the greatest things they did, from the historian's point of view, were introductions of the novel to new fields of exercise and endeavour. Art and religion were brought into its sphere, and if _Les Natchez_ and _Les Martyrs_ cannot exactly be called modern historical novels, they are considerable advances, both upon the model of _Telemaque_ and upon that of _Belisaire_. And even putting this aside, the whole body of Chateaubriand's work, as well as not a little in Madame de Stael's, tended to introduce and to encourage the spirit of Romance.

Now the proposition which--though never, I trust, pushed to the unliterary extent of warping the judgment, and never yet, I hope, unduly flaunted or flourished in the reader's face--dominates this volume, is that Romanticism, or, to use the shorter and more glorious name, Romance, itself dominates the whole of the French nineteenth-century novel. If any one considers that this proposition is at variance with the other, that the main function of the novel during the period has been to bring the novel closer to ordinary life, he has failed to grasp what it might be presumptuous plumply to call the true meaning of Romance, but what is certainly that meaning as it has always appeared to me.

To attempt discussion, or even enumeration, of all the definitions or descriptions of Romance in general which have been given by others would not only be impossible in the s.p.a.ce at command, but would be really irrelevant. As it happens, the matter can be cut short, without inadequacy and without disingenuousness, by quoting a single pair of epithets, affixed by a critic, for whom I have great respect, a day or two before I wrote these words. This critic held that Romantic treatment--in stage matters more particularly, but we can extend the phrase to fiction without unfairness--was "generous but false." _I_ should call it "generous" certainly, but before all things "true." Nor is this a mere play upon the words of the original. It so happens that our friend the enemy has supplied a most admirable help. Legally, as we know, veracity requires "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." I admit that the last clause will not fit Romance. She does give us something more than the truth, and that is her generosity, but it is a generosity which is necessitated by the fact that Romance is a quality or function not so much of nature essentially--though happily it is sometimes so by accident--as of Art, the essence of which is to require, whether it be art cla.s.sic or art romantic, art of literature or art of design, art of sight or art of sound, something _added_ to the truth--as that truth exists in reality.

Of what this addition is presently. But Romance, as I see it, insists upon and gives the truth and the whole truth of nature itself. Who is the greatest of Romantics? By agreement of all but the purblind and the paradoxer, Shakespeare. Who is the truest and the most universal of all writers? By consent of cla.s.sic and romantic, at least of those of either kind who "count"--again Shakespeare. Let me say at once that, having early sworn allegiance to Logic, I am perfectly aware that a coincidence of two things in one person does not prove the ident.i.ty of the things.

But it proves their compossibility, and when it is found _in excelsis_, it surely goes near to prove a good deal more. Nor is one in the least confined to this argument from example, strong as it is. When you examine Cla.s.sicism, which, whatever we may say or not say of it, will always stand as the opposite of Romance, you find that it always leaves something out. It may--it does in its best examples--give you truth; it may--it does in its best examples--add something which is its own "generosity"--its castigation, its order, its reason, its this and that and the other. To be very liberal, it may be admitted that the perpetual and meticulous presence in it of "Thou shalt not" do or say this or that, is most conspicuous--let us go to the extreme of generosity ourselves and say, is only conspicuous--in its feebler examples. But there is always something that it does not give, and some of us think that there are not a few things which it cannot give. There is nothing, not even ugliness itself, which Romance cannot give, though there its form of generosity comes in, and the ugly in simple essence becomes beautiful by treatment.

I could bestow any amount of tediousness in these generalities on my readers if I thought it necessary: but having developed my proposition and its meaning, I think it better to pa.s.s to the applications thereof in the present subject.

Of the wide extension of aim and object effected by Romantic influence in the novel, as in other departments of literature, there can be little denial, though of course it may be contended that this extension took place not as it ought and as it ought not. But of the fact of it and of the corresponding variety introduced with it, the very pioneers of the so-called Romantic movement give ample proof. We have seen this even in the extremely inchoate stage of the first two decades; when the great definitely Romantic leaders made their appearance it was more remarkable still. The four chief writers who gave the Romantic lead before 1830 itself may be taken to be Nodier, Hugo, Merimee, and Vigny. They stand in choice of subjects, as in treatment of them, wide apart; and just as it has been noted of Vigny's poetry, that its three chief pieces, "eloa," "Dolorida," and "Le Cor" point the way to three quite different kinds of Romantic verse, so, confining ourselves to the same example, it may be repeated that _Cinq-Mars_ and the smaller stories exemplify, and in a way pattern, kinds of Romantic prose fiction even further apart from each other. Always, through the work of these and that of Gautier, and of all the others who immediately or subsequently follow them, this broadening and branching out of the Romantic influence--this opening of fresh channels, historical and fanciful, supernatural and ordinary--shows itself. The contention, common in books, that this somehow ceased about the middle of the century, or at least died off with the death of those who had carried it out, appears to me, I confess, to be wildly unhistorical and uncritical. At no time--the proofs fill this volume--do we find any restriction, of choice of subject or conduct of treatment, to anything like the older limits. But the most unhistorical and the most uncritical form of this contention is the astonishing endeavour to vindicate a "cla.s.sical" character for Naturalism. Most certainly there is "impropriety" in some of the cla.s.sics and "impropriety" in all the Naturalists, but other resemblance I can see none. As for the argument that as Naturalism is opposed to Romance and Cla.s.sicalism is opposed to Romance, _therefore_ Naturalism is Cla.s.sical--this is undoubtedly a very common form of b.a.s.t.a.r.d syllogism, but to labour at proving its b.a.s.t.a.r.dy would be somewhat ridiculous.

The fact is, as should have been sufficiently made good above, that Naturalism is not opposed to Romance in anything like the sense that Cla.s.sicism is: it is nothing but a degradation and exaggeration at once of certain things in Romance itself. Nor do I think that there is the slightest difficulty in showing that every form of novel-writing which we have been surveying in this book--that the work of every one of those distinguished or undistinguished writers who have been, with or without regret, declined--is still essentially Romantic. It is Romantic in its inflexible resolution to choose subjects for itself and not according to rule; Romantic in its wise or unwise individuality of treatment; Romantic in its preferential appeal to emotion rather than to pure intelligence; above all, Romantic in its quest--often no doubt ill-guided and unsuccessful, but always more or less present--for that element of strangeness which, though invisible to many who live, is a pervading character of Life itself, and the presence of which it is the glory of Romance itself, from its earliest to its latest manifestations, to have recognised and to some extent fixed, in artistic representation.

And so, I hope, that what has been discovered in this volume--in the way of pageant and procession even more than that of examination, though with something of that also--may have shown further progress towards--nay, actual attainment of, the goal which I ventured to mark out in the earlier volume as that of the novelist by the words, "Here is the whole of human life before you. Copy it or, better, re-create it--with variation and decoration _ad libitum_--as faithfully, but as fully, as you can."

Thesis-writing, however, is but dismal reading, unless (as Mrs. Scott told Jeffrey she hoped he was for the _Marmion_ review) "you are very well paid for it." Nor do I, as I have previously explained, consider it a necessary part of history, though common honesty may require that the presence of a doctrine, behind the delivery of an account, should be confessed. I think the account itself should be sufficient to make good my point; others may differ. But even if they do, some of them at least will, I hope, have found in that account some modic.u.m of the amazing supply of rest and refreshment contained in the ma.s.s of literature we have been surveying.

On the two volumes together there may be a little more to say. I have touched, I hope not too frequently, on the curious pleasure which I myself have felt in reading again books sometimes unopened for more than half a century, sometimes read at different times during that period, sometimes positively familiar; and on the contrasted enjoyment of reading others written long ago in all but a few cases, but not, as it happened, read at the time of their appearance. I am indeed inclined to lay much stress on the quality of re-readableness in a novel. Perhaps, as indeed is pretty generally the fact in such cases, a capacity of reading again is required in the person as well as one of being read again in the book. The late Mr. Mark Pattison was not a friend of mine, and we once had a pitched battle; nor was he in any case given to borrow other people's expressions. But he was a critic, if he was anything, and he once did me the honour to repeat _verbatim_--whether consciously or not I cannot say, but in the very periodical where it had originally appeared--a sentence of mine about "people who would rather read any circulating-library trash, for the first time, than _Pendennis_ or _Pride and Prejudice_ for the second." I think this difference between the two cla.s.ses is as worthy to rank, among the criteria of opposed races of mankind and womankind, as those between borrowers and lenders, Platonists and Aristotelians, or Big- and Little-Endians.

But the vast library through which I have had the privilege of conducting my readers does not exercise any invidious separation between the two. I have read a good many French novels--hundreds certainly, I do not know that it would be preposterous to say thousands--that I have not even mentioned in this book.[566] But I have been a very busy man, and have had to read and to do a great many other things. If I had had nothing else to do and had devoted my entire life to the occupation which Gray thought not undesirable as regards Marivaux and Crebillon, I doubt whether I could have "overtaken," as the Scotch say, the entire prose fiction of 1800-1900 in French. On the back of one of the volumes of fiction--itself pretty obscure--which I have noticed in Chapter II.

of this volume, I find advertised the works of a certain Dinocourt, of whom I never heard before, and who is not to be found in at least some tolerably full French dictionaries of literature. They have quite appetising t.i.tles (one or two given in the pa.s.sage referred to), and there are in all sixty-two volumes of them, distributed in fours, fives, and sixes among the several works. Ought I to have read these sixty odd volumes of Dinocourt? That is a moral question. That there _are_ sixty odd volumes of him, probably not now very easily obtainable, but somewhere for some one to read if he likes, is a simple fact. And there are no doubt many more than sixty such batches waiting likewise,[567]

and quite likely to prove as readable as I found M. Ricard.

I have by no means always felt inclined to acquiesce in the endlessly repeated complaints that the hackwork of literature is worse done in England than it is in France. But having had a very large experience of the novels of both languages, having reviewed hundreds of English novels side by side with hundreds of French as they came from the press, and having also read, for pleasure or duty, hundreds of older ones in each literature, I think that the mysterious quality of readableness pure and simple _has_ more generally belonged to the French novel than to the English. This, as I have endeavoured to point out, is not a question of naughtiness or niceness, of candour or convention. I have indeed admitted that the conventions of the French novel bore me quite as much as anything in ours. It _may_ be partly a question of length, for, as everybody knows, the French took to the average single volume, of some three hundred not very closely printed pages, much sooner than we took to anything of the kind. It is perhaps partly also due to what one of the reviewers of my former volume well called the greater "s.p.a.ciousness"

of the English novel, that is to say, its inclusion of more diverse aims, and episodic subjects, and minor interests generally. For this, while it makes for superior greatness when there is strength enough to carry it off, undoubtedly requires _more_ strength, and so gives more openings for weakness to show itself. There are many average English novels which I should not mind reading, and not a few that I should like to read, again, while there are but few French novels that I should care to read so often as I have cared to read the great English ones. But I could read, for a second time, a very much larger proportion of average French fiction.

Of those books which are "above average" I have tried to say what I thought ought to be said in the volume itself, and there is no need of a "peroration with _much_ circ.u.mstance" about them. It is a long way--a perfect maze of long ways leading through the most different countries of thought and feeling--from Atala dying in the wilderness to Chiffon doing exquisitely balanced justice to herself and the Jesuit, by allowing that while he and she were both _bien eleves_, he was _un peu trop_ and she was not. It is not so far, except in time, nor separated by such a difference of intervening country, from the song of the Mandragore in Nodier to those m.u.f.fled shrieks of a better-known variety of the same mystic plant, that tell us of Maupa.s.sant's growing progress to his fate. As you explore the time and the s.p.a.ce of the interval you come across wonderful things. There are the micro- macrocosms of Hugo, where, as in Baudelaire's line on the albatross quoted above, he is partly hampered because he has come down from the air of poetry to the earth of prose; of Balzac, where there is no such difficulty, but where the cosmos itself is something other than yours; of Dumas, where half the actual history of France is _dis_realised for your delectation. On a lesser scale you have the manners of town and country, of high life and low life, of Paris most of all, given you through all sorts of perspectives and in all sorts of settings by Paul de k.o.c.k and George Sand, by Sandeau and Bernard, by Alexandre Dumas _fils_ and Feuillet, by Theuriet and Fabre. Gautier and Merimee make for you that marriage of story and style which, before them, so few had attempted at all, yet which, since them, so many have tried with such doubtful success. Once more in Flaubert and then for the last time, as far as our survey goes, in Maupa.s.sant, you come to that touch of genius which exalts the novel, as it exalts all kinds, indefinably, unmistakably, finally.

And this journey is not like the one great journey, and more than one of the lesser journeys, of our life, irremeable; there is no denial, no curse, no fiend with outstretched claw, to prevent your going back as often as you like, wandering in any direction you please, pa.s.sing or staying as and where you wish. It has been perhaps unconscionable of me to inflict so big a book on my readers as a cover for giving myself the pleasure of making and remaking such journeys. But if I have persuaded any one of them to explore the country for himself, by him at least I shall not remain unforgiven.

FOOTNOTES:

[558] _V. sup._ "The French Novel in 1850."

[559] Called by some a "deadening" one. There was some very cheerful Life in that Death.

[560] The better part even of M. Ohnet is a sort of vulgarised Sandeau.

[561] _La Tentation_, like others of the very greatest novels, is independent of its time, save in mere unimportant "colour."

[562] How little this change was one back to cla.s.sicism--as some would have it--we may see presently.

[563] The greatest of all--the direction and maintenance of the revolution under the inspiration of what is called Romance--must be again postponed for a little while.

[564] Of course the convulsions of '48 were ominous enough, but they seemed to be everywhere repressed or placated for a considerable time; and if there had been a single statesman of genius besides Herr von Bismarck (I antic.i.p.ate but decline the suggestion of Cavour) in the Europe of the next two decades, they might not have broken out again for a much longer time than was actually the case.

[565] Nearly--but fortunately for literature--not quite. The jobbery and the tyranny which are inseparable from democracy in politics find room with difficulty in _our_ "Republic."

[566] I am prepared for blame on account of some of the absences of mention. Perhaps the most provoking, to some readers, will be those affecting two industrious members of the aristocracy: Mme. la Comtesse Dash--more beautifully and properly though less exaltedly, Gabrelli Anna Cisterne de Courtiras, _Vi_comtesse de Saint-Mars--and M. le Comte Xavier de Montepin. They overlapped each other in pouring forth, from the 'forties to the 'nineties, torrents of mostly sensational fiction.

But I had rather read them than write about them.

[567] In the same place another novelist, M. Amedee de Bast, of whom I again acknowledge ignorance, advertises no less than _four_ novels of _four_ volumes each, as being actually all at press, _pour paraitre a diverses epoques_. Dryden says somewhere "in epoches mistakes." Let us hope there were none here.

THE END