A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 26

As was there observed, our figures here are, with the possible exception of Crebillon _Fils_, "larger" persons than those dealt with before them; and they also mark a further transition towards the condition--the "employment or vocation"--of the novelist proper, though the polygraphic habit which has grown upon all modern literature, and which began in France almost earlier than anywhere else, affects them. Scarron was even more of a dramatist than of a novelist; and though this was also the case with Lesage and Marivaux--while Prevost was, save for his masterpiece, a polygraph of the polygraphs--their work in fiction was far larger, both positively and comparatively, than his. _Gil Blas_ for general popularity, and _Manon Lescaut_ for enthusiastic admiration of the elect, rank almost, if not quite, among the greatest novels of the world. Marivaux, for all his irritating habit of leaving things unfinished, and the almost equally irritating affectation of phrase, in which he antic.i.p.ated some English novelists of the late nineteenth and earliest twentieth century, is almost the first "psychologist" of prose fiction; that is to say, where Madame de la Fayette had taken the soul-a.n.a.lysis of hardly more than two persons (Nemours scarcely counts) in a single situation, Marivaux gives us an almost complete dissection of the temperament and character of a girl and of a man under many ordinary life-circ.u.mstances for a considerable time.

[Sidenote: Lesage--his Spanish connections.]

But we must begin, not with him but with Lesage, not merely as the older man by twenty years, but in virtue of that comparative "greatness" of his greatest work which has been glanced at. There is perhaps a doubt whether _Gil Blas_ is as much read now as it used to be; it is pretty certain that _Le Diable Boiteux_ is not. The certainty is a pity; and if the doubt be true, it is a greater pity still. For more than a century _Gil Blas_ was almost as much[309] a cla.s.sic, either in the original or in translation, in England as it was in France; and the delight which it gave to thousands of readers was scarcely more important to the history of fiction generally than the influence it exerted upon generation after generation of novelists, not merely in its own country, but on the far greater artists in fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in England from Fielding to Scott, if not to d.i.c.kens. Now, I suppose, that we are told to start with the axiom that even Fielding's structure of humanity is a simple toy-like thing, how much more is Lesage's? But for those of us who have not bowed the knee to foolish modern Baals, "They reconciled us; we embraced, and we have since been mortal enemies"; and the trout; and the soul of the licentiate; and Dr.

Sangrado; and the Archbishop of Granada--to mention only the most famous and hackneyed matters--are still things a little larger, a little more complex, a little more eternal and true, than webs of uninteresting a.n.a.lysis told in phrase to which Marivaudage itself is golden and honeyed Atticism.

Yet once more we can banish, with a joyful and quiet mind, a crowd of idle fancies and disputes, apparently but not really affecting our subjects. The myth of a direct Spanish origin for _Gil Blas_ is almost as easily dispersible by the clear sun of criticism as the exaggeration of the debt of the smaller book to Guevara. On the other hand, the _general_ filiation of Lesage on his Spanish predecessors is undeniable, and not worth even shading off and toning down. A man is not ashamed of having good fathers and grandfathers, whose property he now enjoys, before him in life; and why should he be in literature?

[Sidenote: Peculiarity of his work generally.]

Lesage's work, in fiction and out of it, is considerable in bulk, but it is affected (to what extent disadvantageously different judges may judge differently) by some of the peculiarities of the time which have been already mentioned, and by some which have not. It is partly original, partly mere translation, and partly also a mixture of the strangest kind. Further, its composition took place in a way difficult to adjust to later ideas. Lesage was not, like Marivaux, a professed and shameless "_un_finisher," but he took a great deal of time to finish his work.[310] He was not an early-writing author; and when he did begin, he showed something of that same strange need of a suggestion, a "send-off," or whatever anybody likes to call it, which appears even in his greatest work. He began with the _Letters_ of Aristaenetus, which, though perhaps they have been abused more than they deserve by people who have never read them, and would never have heard of them if it had not been for Alain Rene, are certainly not the things that most scholars, with the whole range of Greek literature before them to choose from, would have selected. His second venture was almost worse than his first; for there _are_ some prettinesses in Aristaenetus, and except for the one famous pa.s.sage enshrined by Pope in the _Essay on Criticism_, there is, I believe,[311] nothing good in the continuation of _Don Quixote_ by the so-called Avellaneda. But at any rate this job, which is attributed to the suggestion of the Abbe de Lyonne, "put" Lesage on Spanish, and never did fitter seed fall on more fertile soil.

[Sidenote: And its variety.]

Longinus would, I think, have liked _Gil Blas_, and indeed Lesage, very much. You might kill ten a.s.ses, of the tallest Poitou standard in size and the purest Zoilus or Momus sub-variety in breed, under you while going through his "faults." He translates; he borrows; he "plagiarises"

about as much as is possible for anybody who is not a mere dullard to do. Of set plot there is nothing in his work, whether you take the two famous pieces, or the major adaptations like _Estevanille Gonzales_ and _Guzman d'Alfarache_, or the lesser things, more Lucianic than anything else, such as the _Cheminees de Madrid_[312] and the _Journee des Parques_ and the _Valise Trouvee_. "He worked for his living" (as M.

Anatole France long ago began a paper about him which is not quite the best of its very admirable author's work), and though the pot never boiled quite so merrily as the cook deserved, the fact of the pot-boiling makes itself constantly felt. _Les chaines de l'esclavage_ must have cut deep into his soul, and the result of the cutting is evident enough in his work. But the vital marks on that work are such as many perfectly free men, who have wished to take literature as a mistress only, have never been able to impress on theirs. He died full of years, but scarcely of the honours due to him, failing in power, and after a life[313] of very little luck, except as regards possession of a wife who seems to have been beautiful in youth and amiable always, with at least one son who observed the Fifth Commandment to the utmost. But he lives among the immortals, and there are few names in our present history which are of more importance to it than his.

Some of his best and least unequal work is indeed denied us. We have nothing to do with his drama, though _Turcaret_ is something like a masterpiece in comedy, and _Crispin Rival de son Maitre_ a capital farce. We cannot even discuss that remarkable _Theatre de la Foire_, which, though a mere collection of the lightest Harlequinades, has more readable matter of literature in it than the whole English comic drama since Sheridan, with the exception of the productions of the late Sir William Gilbert.

Nor must much be said even of his minor novel work. The later translations and adaptations from the Spanish need hardly any notice for obvious reasons; whatever is good in them being either not his, or better exemplified in the _Devil_ and in _Gil_. The extremely curious and very Defoe-like book--almost if not quite his last--_Vie et Aventures de M. de Beauchesne, Capitaine de Flibustiers_, is rather a subject for a separate essay than for even a paragraph here. But Lesage, from our point of view, is _Le Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_, and to the _Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ let us accordingly turn.

[Sidenote: _Le Diable Boiteux._]

The relations of the earlier and shorter book to the _Diablo Cojuelo_ of Luis Velez de Guevara are among the most open secrets of literature. The Frenchman, in a sort of prefatory address to his Spanish parent and original, has put the matter fairly enough; anybody who will take the trouble can "control" or check the statement, by comparing the two books themselves. The idea--the rescuing of an obliging demon from the grasp of an enchanter, and his unroofing the houses of Madrid to amuse his liberator--is entirely Guevara's, and for a not inconsiderable s.p.a.ce of time the French follows the Spanish closely. But then it breaks off, and the remainder of the book is, except for the carrying out of the general idea, practically original. The unroofing and revealing of secrets, from being merely casual and confined to a particular neighbourhood, becomes systematised: a lunatic asylum and a prison are subjected to the process; a set of dreamers are obliged to deliver up what Queen Mab is doing with them; and, as an incident, the student Don Cleofas, who has freed Asmodeus,[314] gains through the friendly spirit's means a rich and pretty bride whom the demon--naturally immune from fire--has rescued in Cleofas's likeness from a burning house.

[Sidenote: Lesage and Boileau.]

The thing therefore neither has, nor could possibly pretend to have, any merit as a plotted and constructed whole in fiction. It is merely a variety of the old "framed" tale-collection, except that the frame is of the thinnest; and the individual stories, with a few exceptions, are extremely short, in fact little more than anecdotes. The power and attraction of the book lie simply in the crispness of the style, the ease and flow of the narrative, and the unfailing satiric knowledge of human nature which animates the whole. As it stands, it is double its original length; for Lesage, finding it popular, and never being under the trammels of a fixed design, very wisely, and for a wonder not unsuccessfully, gave it a continuation. And, except the equally obvious and arbitrary one of the recapture of the spirit by the magician, it has and could have no end. The most famous of the anecdotes about it is that Boileau--in 1707 a very old man--found his page reading it, and declared that such a book and such a critic as he should never pa.s.s a night under the same roof. Boileau, though he often said rude, unjust, and uncritical things, did not often say merely silly ones; and it has been questioned what was his reason for objecting to a book by no means shocking to anybody but Mrs. Grundy Grundified to the very _n_th, excellently written, and quite free from the bombast and the whimsicality which he loathed. Jealousy for Moliere,[315] to whom, in virtue of _Turcaret_, Lesage had been set up as a sort of rival; mere senile ill-temper, and other things have been suggested; but the matter is of no real importance even if it is true. Boileau was one of the least catholic and the most arbitrary critics who ever lived; he had long made up and colophoned the catalogue of his approved library; he did not see his son's coat on the new-comer, and so he cursed him. It is not the only occasion on which we may bless what Boileau cursed.

[Sidenote: _Gil Blas_--its peculiar cosmopolitanism.]

_Gil Blas_, of course, is in every sense a "bigger" book of literature.

That it has, from the point of view of the straitest sect of the Unitarians--and not of that sect only--much more unity than the _Diable_, would require mere cheap paradox to contend. It has neither the higher unity, say, of _Hamlet_, where every smallest scene and almost personage is connected with the general theme; nor the lower unity of such a thing as _Phedre_, where everything is pared down, or, as Landor put it in his own case, "boiled off" to a meagre residuum of theme special. It has, at the very most, that species of unity which Aristotle did not like even in epic, that of a succession of events happening to an individual; and while most of these might be omitted, or others subst.i.tuted for them, without much or any loss, they exist without prejudice to mere additions to themselves. As the excellent Mr.

Wall, sometime Professor of Logic at Oxford, and now with G.o.d, used to say, "Gentlemen, I can conceive an elephant," so one may conceive a _Gil Blas_, not merely in five instead of four, but in fifty or five hundred volumes. But, on the other hand, it has that still different unity (of which Aristotle does not seem to have thought highly, even if he thought of it at all), that all these miscellaneous experiences do not merely happen to a person with the same name--they happen to the same person.[316] And they have themselves yet another unity, which I hardly remember any critic duly insisting on and discussing, in the fact that they all are possibly human accidents or incidents. Though he was a native of one of the most idiosyncratic provinces of not the least idiosyncratic country in Europe, Lesage is a citizen not of Brittany, not of France, not of Europe even, but of the world itself, in far more than the usual sense of cosmopolitanism. He has indeed coloured background and costume, incident and even personage itself so deeply with essence of "things of Spain," that, as has been said, the Spaniards, the most jealous of all nationalities except the smaller Celtic tribes, have claimed his work for themselves. Yet though Spain has one of the n.o.blest languages, one of the greatest literatures in quality if not in bulk, one of the most striking histories, and one of the most intensely national characters in the world, it is--perhaps for the very reason last mentioned--as little cosmopolitan as any country, and Lesage, as has been said, is inwardly and utterly cosmopolitan or nothing.

At Paris, at Rome, at the Hague he's at home;

and though he seems to have known little of England, and, as most Frenchmen of his time had reason to do, to have disliked us, he has certainly never been anywhere more at home than in London. In fact--and it bears out what has been said--there is perhaps no capital in Europe where, in the two hundred years he has had to nationalise himself, Lesage has been less at home than at Paris itself. The French are of course proud of him in a way, but there is hardly one of their great writers about whom they have been less enthusiastic. The technical, and especially the neo-cla.s.sically technical, shortcomings which have been pointed out may have had something to do with this; but the cosmopolitanism has perhaps more.

[Sidenote: And its adoption of the _homme sensuel moyen_ fas.h.i.+on.]

For us Lesage occupies a position of immense importance in the history of the French novel; but if we were writing a history of the novel at large it would scarcely be lessened, and might even be relatively larger. He had come to it perhaps by rather strange ways; but it is no novelty to find that conjunction of road and goal. The Spanish picaresque romance was not in itself a very great literary kind; but it had in it a great faculty of _emanc.i.p.ation_. Outside the drama[317] it was about the first division of literature to proclaim boldly the refusal to consider anything human as alien from human literary interest. But, as nearly always happens, it had exaggerated its protests, and become sordid, merely in revolt from the high-flown non-sordidness of previous romance. Lesage took the principle and rejected the application. He dared, practically for the first time, to take the average man of unheroic stamp, the _homme sensuel moyen_ of a later French phrase, for his subject. _Gil Blas_ is not a virtuous person,[318] but he is not very often an actual scoundrel.[319] (Is there any of us who has never been a scoundrel at all at all?) He is clever after his fas.h.i.+on, but he is not a genius; he is a little bit of a coward, but can face it out fairly at a pinch; he has some luck and ill-luck; but he does not come in for _montes et maria_, either of gold or of misery. I have no doubt that the comparison of _Gil Blas_ and _Don Quixote_ has often been made, and it would be rather an _excursus_ here.

But inferior as Lesage's work is in not a few ways, it has, like other non-quintessential things, much more virtue as model and pattern.

Imitations of _Don Quixote_ (except Graves's capital book, where the following is of the freest character) have usually been failures. It is hardly an extravagance to say that every novel of miscellaneous adventure since its date owes something, directly or indirectly, to _Gil Blas_.

One of the "faults"--it must be understood that between "faults" with inverted commas and faults without them there is a wide and sometimes an unbridgeable gulf--lies in the fact that the book is after all not much more of a whole, in any sense but that noted above, than _Le Diable Boiteux_ itself. The innumerable incidents are to a very large extent episodes merely, and episodes in the loose, not the precise, sense of the term. That is to say, they are not merely detachable; they might be reattached to almost any number of other stories. But the redeeming feature--which is very much more than a _mere_ redeeming feature--is the personality of the hero which has been already referred to. Lesage's scrip and staff, to apply the old images exactly enough, are his inexhaustible fertility in well-told stories and his faculty of delineating a possible and interesting human character.

[Sidenote: Its inequality--in the Second and Fourth Books especially.]

The characteristics of the successive parts of _Gil Blas_ are distinct and interesting, the distinctions themselves being also rather curious.

The anecdote cited above as to the Fourth and last volume is certainly confirmed by, and does not seem, as so many anecdotes of the kind do, to have been even possibly drawn from, the volume itself. Although the old power is by no means gone, the marks of its failing are pretty obvious.

A glance has been given already to the unnecessary and disgusting repet.i.tion of the Pandar business--made, as it is, more disgusting by the distinctly tragic touch infused into it. The actual _finale_ is, on the other hand, a good comedy ending of a commonplace kind, except that a comic author, such as Lesage once had been on and off the stage, would certainly have made _Gil Blas_ suffer in his second marriage for his misdeeds of various kinds earlier, instead of leaving him in the not too clean cotton or clover of an old rip with a good young wife. If he had wanted a happy ending of a still conventional but satisfactory kind, he should have married Gil to Laure or Estelle (they were, in modern slang, sufficiently "shop-worn goods" not to be ill-mated, and Laure is perhaps the most attractive character in the whole book); have legitimated Lucrece, as by some odd crotchet he definitely refuses to do;[320] have dropped the later Leporello business, in which his old love and her daughter are concerned, altogether, and have left us in a mild sunset of "reconciliation." If anybody scorns this suggestion as evidence of a futile liking for "rose-pink," let him remember that Gil Blas, _ci-devant picaro_ and other ugly things, is actually left lapped in an Elysium not less improbable and much more undeserved than this. But it is disagreeable to dwell on the shortcomings of age, and it has only been done to show that this is a criticism and not a mere panegyric.

Oddly enough, the Second volume is also open to much exception of something, though not quite, the same kind; it seems as if Lesage, after making strong running, had a habit of nursing himself and even going to sleep for a while. The more than questionable habit of _histoire_-insertions revives; that of the rascal-hermit _picaro_, "Don Raphael," is, as the author admits, rather long, and, as he might have admitted, and as any one else may be allowed to say, very tiresome. Gil Blas himself goes through a long period of occultation, and the whole rather drags.

The First and the Third are the pillars of the house; and the Third, though (with the exception of the episode of the Archbishop, and that eternal sentence governing the relations of author and critic that "the homily which has the misfortune not to be approved" by the one is the very best ever produced by the other) not so well known, is perhaps even better than anything in the First. But the later part has, of course, not quite so much freshness; and n.o.body need want anything better than the successive scenes, slightly glanced at already, in which Gil Blas is taught, by no means finally,[321] the ways of the world; the pure adventure interest of the robbers' cave, so admirably managed and so little over-dwelt on; the experiences of travel and of the capital; the vivid pictures of _pet.i.t maitre_ and actress life; the double deception--thoroughly Spanish this, but most freshly and universally handled--by Laure and Gil; many other well-known things; all deserve the knowledge and the admiration that they have won. But the Third, in which the hero is hardly ever off the scene from first to last, is my own favourite. He shows himself--not at his best, but humanly enough--in the affair with the ill-fated Lorenca, on which the Leyva family might have looked less excusingly if the culprit had been anybody but Gil. The Granada scenes, however, and not by any means merely those with the Archbishop, are of the very first cla.s.s; and the reappearance of Laure, with the admirable coolness by which she hoodwinks her "keeper"

Marialva, yields to nothing in the book. For fifty pages it is all novel-gold; and though Gil Blas, in decamping from the place, and leaving Laure to bear the brunt of a possible discovery, commits one of his least heroic deeds, it is so characteristic that one forgives, not indeed him, but his creator. The whole of the Lerma part is excellent and not in the least improbably impossible; there is infinitely more "human natur'" in it, as Marryat's waterman would have said, than in the _rechauffe_ of the situation with Olivares.

[Sidenote: Lesage's quality--not requiring many words, but indisputable.]

The effect indeed which is produced, in re-reading, by _Le Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_, but especially by the latter, is of that especial kind which is a sort of "_a posteriori_ intuition," if such a phrase may be permitted, of "cla.s.sical" quality.[322] This sensation, which appears, unfortunately, to be unknown to a great many people, is sometimes set down by the more critical or, let us say, the more censorious of them, to a sort of childish prepossession--akin to that which makes a not ill-conditioned child fail to discover any uncomeliness in his mother's or a favourite nurse's face. There is no retort to such a proposition as this so proper as the argument not _ad hominem_, but _ab_ or _ex homine_. The present writer did not read the _Devil_ till he had reached quite critical years; and though he read _Gil Blas_ much earlier, he was not (for what reason he cannot say) particularly fond of it until the same period was reached. And yet its attractions cannot possibly be said to be of any recondite or artificial kind, and its defects are likely to be more, not less, recognised as the critical faculty acquires strength and practice. Nevertheless, recent reperusal has made him more conscious than ever of the existence of this quality of a cla.s.sic in both, but especially in the larger and more famous book. And this is a mere pailful added to an ocean of previous and more important testimony. _Gil Blas_ has certainly "cla.s.sed" itself in the most various instances, of essentially critical, not specially critical but generally acute and appreciative, and more or less unsophisticated and ordinary judgments, as a thing that is past all question, equally enjoyable for its incidents, its character-sketches, and its phrasing--though the first are (for time and country) in no sense out of the way, the second scarcely go beyond the individualised type, and the third is neither gorgeous nor "alambicated," as the French say, nor in any way peculiar, except for its saturation with a sharp, shrewd, salt wit which may be described as the spirit of the popular proverb, somehow bodied and clothed with more purely literary form. It is true that, in the last few clauses, plenty of ground has been indicated for ascription of cla.s.sicality in the best sense; and perhaps Lesage himself has summed the whole thing up when, in the "Declaration"

of the author at the beginning of _Gil Blas_, he claims "to have set before himself only the representation of human life as it is." He has said it; and in saying and doing it he has said and done everything for his merits as a novelist and his place in the history of the novel.

[Sidenote: Marivaux--_Les Effets de la Sympathie (?)_]

The Archbishop of Sens, who had the duty of "answering" Marivaux's "discourse of reception" into the Academy in the usual _aigre-doux_ manner, informed him, with Academic frankness and Archiepiscopal propriety, that "in the small part of your work which I have run through, I soon recognised that the reading of these agreeable romances did not suit the austere dignity with which I am invested, or the purity of the ideas which religion prescribes me." This was all in the game, both for an Academician and for an Archbishop, and it probably did not discompose the novelist much. But if his Grace had read _Les Effets de la Sympathie_, and had chosen to criticise it, he might have made its author (always supposing that Marivaux _was_ its author, which does not seem to be at all certain) much more uncomfortable. Although there is plenty of incident, it is but a dull book, and it contains not a trace of "Marivaudage" in style. A hero's father, who dies of poison in the first few pages, and is shown to have been brought round by an obliging gaoler in the last few; a hero himself, who thinks he has fallen in love with a beautiful and rich widow, playing good Samaritaness to him after he has fallen in among thieves, but a page or two later really does fall in love with a fair unknown looking languis.h.i.+ngly out of a window; a _corsaire_,[323] with the appropriate name of Turcamene, who is robustious almost from the very beginning, and receives at the end a fatal stab with his own poniard from the superfluous widow, herself also fatally wounded at the same moment by the same weapon (an economy of time, incident, and munitions uncommon off the stage); an intermediate personage who, straying--without any earthly business there--into one of those park "pavilions" which play so large a part in these romances, finds a lady asleep on the sofa, with her hand invitingly dropped, promptly kneels down, and kisses it: these and many other things fill up a Spanish kind of story, not uningeniously though rather improbably engineered, but dependent for its interest almost wholly on incident; for though it is not devoid of conversation, this conversation is without spirit or sparkle. It is, in fact, a "circulating library" novel before--at any rate at an early period of--circulating libraries: not unworkmanlike, probably not very unsatisfactory to its actual readers, and something of a doc.u.ment as to the kind of satisfaction they demanded; but not intrinsically important.

One has not seen much, in English,[324] about Marivaux, despite the existence, in French, of one of the best[325] of those monographs which a.s.sist the foreign critic so much, and sometimes perhaps help to beget his own lucubrations. Yet he is one of the most interesting writers of France, one of the most curious, and, one may almost say, one of the most puzzling. This latter quality he owes, in part at least, to a "skiey influence" of the time, which he shares with Lesage and Prevost, and indeed to some extent with most French writers of the eighteenth century--the influence of the polygraphic habit.

[Sidenote: His work in general.]

He was a dramatist, and a voluminous one, long before he was a novelist: and some of his thirty or forty plays, especially _Les Fausses Confidences_ and _Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard_, still rank among at least the second-cla.s.s cla.s.sics of the French comic stage. He tried, for a time, one of the worst kinds of merely fas.h.i.+onable literature, the travesty-burlesque.[326] He was a journalist, following Addison openly in the t.i.tle, and to some extent in the manner, of _Le Spectateur_, which he afterwards followed by _Le Cabinet d'un Philosophe_, showing, however, here, as he was more specially tempted to do, his curious, and it would seem unconquerable, habit of leaving things unfinished, which only does not appear in his plays, for the simple and obvious reason that managers will not put an unfinished play on the stage, and that, if they did, the afterpiece would be premature and of a very lively character. But the completeness of his very plays is incomplete; they "run huddling" to their conclusion, and are rather bundles of good or not so good acts and scenes than entire dramas. We are, however, only concerned with the stories, of which there are three: the early, complete, but doubtful _Effets de la Sympathie_, already discussed; the central in every way, but endlessly dawdled over, _Marianne_, which never got finished at all (though Mme. Riccoboni continued it in Marivaux's own lifetime, and with his placid approval, and somebody afterwards botched a clumsy _Fin_); and _Le Paysan Parvenu_, the latter part of which is not likely to be genuine, and, even if so, is not a real conclusion. We may, however, with some, advantage, take it before _Marianne_, if only because it is not the book generally connected with its author's name.

[Sidenote: _Le Paysan Parvenu._]

Notwithstanding this comparative oblivion, _Le Paysan Parvenu_ is an almost astonis.h.i.+ngly clever and original book, at least as far as the five of its eight parts, which are certainly Marivaux's, go. I have read the three last twice critically, at a long interval of time, and I feel sure that the positive internal evidence confirms, against their authenticity, the negative want of external for it. In any case they add nothing--they do not, as has been said, even really "conclude"--and we may, therefore, without any more apology, confine ourselves to the part which is certain. Some readers may possibly know that when that strangest of strange persons, Restif de la Bretonne (see the last chapter of this book), took up the t.i.tle with the slight change or gloss of _Parvenu_ to _Perverti_, he was at least partly actuated by his own very peculiar, but distinctly existing, variety of moral indignation.

And though Pierre Carlet (which was Marivaux's real name) and "Monsieur Nicolas" (which was as near a real name as any that Restif had) were, the one a quite respectable person on ordinary standards, and the other an infinitely disreputable creature, still the later novelist was perhaps ethically justified. Marivaux's successful rustic does not, so far as we are told, actually do anything that contravenes popular morality, though he is more than once on the point of doing so. He is not a bad-blooded person either; and he has nothing of the wild-beast element in the French peasantry which history shows us from the Jacquerie to the Revolution, and which some folk try to excuse as the result of aristocratic tyranny. But he is an elaborate and exceedingly able portrait of another side of the peasant, and, if we may trust literature, even with some administration of salt, of the French peasant more particularly. He is what we may perhaps be allowed to call unconsciously determined to get on, though he does not go quite to the length of the _quocunque modo_, and has, as far as men are concerned, some scruples. But in relation to the other s.e.x he has few if any, though he is never brutal. He is, as we may say, first "perverted,"

though not as yet _parvenu_,[327] in the house of a Parisian, himself a _nouveau riche_ and _novus h.o.m.o_, on whose property in Champagne his own father is a wine-farmer. He is early selected for the beginnings of Lady-b.o.o.by-like attentions by "Madame," while he, as far as he is capable of the proceeding, falls in love with one of Madame's maids, Genevieve. It does not appear that, if the lady's part of the matter had gone further, Jacob (that is his name) would have been at all like Joseph. But when he finds that the maid is also the object of "Monsieur's" attentions, and when he is asked to take the profits of this affair (the att.i.tude[328] of the girl herself is very skilfully delineated) and marry her, his own _point d'honneur_ is reached.[329]

Everything is, however, cut short by the sudden death, in hopelessly embarra.s.sed circ.u.mstances, of Monsieur, and the consequent cessation of Madame's attraction for a young man who wishes to better himself. He leaves both her and Genevieve with perfect nonchalance; though he has good reason for believing that the girl really loves him, however she may have made a peculiar sort of hay when the sun shone, and that both she and his lady are penniless, or almost so.

He has, however, the luck which makes the _parvenu_, if in this instance he can hardly be said to deserve it. On the Pont Neuf he sees an elderly lady, apparently about to swoon. He supports her home, and finds that she is the younger and more attractive of two old-maid and _devote_ sisters. The irresistibleness to this cla.s.s of the feminine s.e.x (and indeed by no means to this cla.s.s only) of a strapping and handsome footman is a commonplace of satire with eighteenth-century writers, both French and English. It is exercised possibly on both sisters, though the elder is a shrew; certainly on the younger, and also on their elderly _bonne_, Catherine. But it necessarily leads to trouble. The younger, Mlle. Habert (the curious hiding of Christian names reappears here), wants to retain Jacob in the joint service, and Catherine at least makes no objection, for obvious reasons. But the elder sister recalcitrates violently, summoning to her aid her "director," and the younger, who is financially independent,[330] determines to leave the house. She does so (_not_ taking Catherine with her, though the _bonne_ would willingly have shared Jacob's society), and having secured lodgings, regularly proposes to her (the word may be used almost accurately) "swain." Jacob has no scruples of delicacy here, though the nymph is thirty years older than himself, and though he has, if no dislike, no particular affection for her. But it is an obvious step upwards, and he makes no difficulties. The elder sister, however, makes strong efforts to forbid the banns, and her interest prevails on a "President" (the half-regular power of the French _n.o.blesse de robe_, though perhaps less violently exercised, must have been almost as galling as the irresponsibleness of men of birth and "sword") to interpose and actually stop the arranged ceremony. But Jacob appears in person, and states his case convincingly; the obstacle is removed, and the pair are made happy at an extraordinary hour (two or three in the morning), which seems to have been then fas.h.i.+onable for marriages. The conventional phrase is fairly justified; for the bride is completely satisfied, and Jacob is not displeased.

His marriage, however, interferes not in the very least with his intention to "get on" by dint of his handsome face and brawny figure. On the very day of his wedding he goes to visit a lady of position, and also of devoutness, who is a great friend of the President and his wife, has been present at the irregular enquiry, and has done something for him. This quickly results in a regular a.s.signation, which, however, is comically broken off. Moreover this lady introduces him to another of the same temperament--which indeed seems to have been common with French ladies (the Bellaston type being not the exception, but the rule). _She_ is to introduce him to her brother-in-law, an influential financier, and she quickly makes plain the kind of grat.i.tude she expects. This also is, as far as we are told, rather comically interfered with--Marivaux's dramatic practice made him good at these disappointments. She does give the introduction, and her brother-in-law, though a curmudgeon, is at first disposed to honour her draft. But here an unexpected change is made by the presentation of Jacob as a man of n.o.ble sentiment. The place he is to have is one taken from an invalid holder of it, whose wife comes to beg mercy: whereat Jacob, magnanimously and to the financier's great wrath, declines to profit by another's misfortune. Whether the fact that the lady is very pretty has anything to do with the matter need not be discussed. His--let us call it at least--good nature, however, indirectly makes his fortune. Going to visit the husband and wife whom he has obliged, he sees a young man attacked by three enemies and ill-bested. Jacob (who is no coward, and, thanks to his wife insisting on his being a gentleman and "M. de la Vallee," has a sword) draws and uses it on the weaker side, with no skill whatever, but in the downright, swash-and-stab, short- and tall-sailor fas.h.i.+on, which (in novels at least) is almost always effective. The a.s.sailants decamp, and the wounded but rescued person, who is of very high rank, conceives a strong friends.h.i.+p for his rescuer, and, as was said above, makes his fortune. The last and doubtful three-eighths of the book kill off poor Mlle. Habert (who, although Jacob would never have been unkind to her, was already beginning to be very jealous and by no means happy), and marry him again to a younger lady of rank, beauty, fas.h.i.+on, and fortune, in the imparted possession of all of which we leave him. But, except to the insatiables of "what happened next," these parts are as questionably important as they are decidedly doubtful.

The really important points of the book are, in the first place, the ease and narrative skill with which the story is told in the difficult form of autobiography, and, secondly, the vivacity of the characters.

Jacob himself is, as will have been seen already, a piebald sort of personage, entirely devoid of scruple in some ways, but not ill-natured, and with his own points of honour. He is perfectly natural, and so are all the others (not half of whom have been mentioned) as far as they go.

The cross sister and the "kind" one; the false prude and false _devote_ Mme. de Ferval, and the jolly, reckless, rather coa.r.s.e Mme. de Fecour; the tyrannical, corrupt, and licentious financier, with others more slightly drawn, are seldom, if ever, out of drawing. The contemporary wash of colour pa.s.ses, as it should, into something "fast"; you are in the Paris of the Regency, but you are at the same time in general human time and place, if not in eternity and infinity.

[Sidenote: _Marianne_--outline of the story.]

The general selection, however, of _Marianne_ as Marivaux's masterpiece is undoubtedly right, though in more ways than one it has less engaging power than the _Paysan_, and forebodes to some extent, if it does not actually display, the boring qualities which novels of combined a.n.a.lysis and jargon have developed since. The opening is odd: the author having apparently transplanted to the beginning of a novel the promiscuous slaughter with which we are familiar at the end of a play. Marianne (let us hail the appearance of a Christian-named heroine at last), a small child of the tenderest years, is, with the exception of an ecclesiastic, who takes to his heels and gets off, the sole survivor of a coachful of travellers who are butchered by a gang of footpads,[331] because two of the pa.s.sengers have rashly endeavoured to defend themselves. Nothing can be found out about the child--an initial improbability, for the party has consisted of father, mother, and servants, as well as Marianne. But the good _cure_ of the place and his sister take charge of her, and bring her up carefully (they are themselves "gentle-people," as the good old phrase, now doubtless difficult of application, went) till she is fifteen, is very pretty, and evidently must be disposed of in some way, for her guardians are poor and have no influential relations. The sister, however, takes her to Paris--whither she herself goes to secure, if possible, the succession of a relative--to try to obtain some situation. But the inheritance proves illusory; the sister falls ill at Paris and dies there; while the brother is disabled, and his living has to be, if not transferred to, provided with, a subst.i.tute. This second ma.s.sacre (for the brother dies soon) provides Marivaux with the situation he requires--that of a pretty girl, alone in the capital, and absolutely unfriended. Fortunately a benevolent Director knows a pious gentleman, M. de Climal, who is fond of doing good, and also, as it appears shortly by the story, of pretty girls. Marianne, with the earliest touch of distinct "sn.o.bbishness"--let it be proudly pointed out that the example is not English,[332]--declines to go into service, but does not so much mind being a shop-girl, and M. de Climal establishes her with his _lingere_, a certain Mme. Dutour.

This good lady is no procuress, but her morals are of a somewhat accommodating kind, and she sets to work, experiencing very little difficulty in the process, to remove Marianne's scruples about accepting presents from M. de Climal--pointing out, very logically, that there is no obligation to (as Chesterfield put it not long after) _payer de sa personne_; though she is naturally somewhat disgusted when the gifts take the form of handsome _lingerie_ bought at another shop. When this, and a dress to match, are made up, Marianne as naturally goes to church to show them: and indulges in very shrewd if not particularly amiable remarks on her "even-Christians"--a delightful English archaism, which surely needs no apology for its revival. Coming out, she slips and sprains her ankle, whereupon, still naturally, appears the inevitable young man, a M. de Valville, who, after endless amicable wrangling, procures her a coach, but not without an awkward meeting. For M. de Valville turns out to be the nephew of M. de Climal; and the uncle, with a lady, comes upon the nephew and Marianne; while, a little later, each finds the other in turn at the girl's feet. Result: of course more than suspicion on the younger man's part, and a mixture of wrath and desire to hurry matters on the elder's. He offers Marianne a regular (or irregular) "establishment" at a dependent's of his own, with a small income settled upon her, etc. She refuses indignantly, the indignation being rather suspiciously divided between her two lovers; is "planted there" by the old sinner Climal, and of course requested to leave by Mme. Dutour; returns all the presents, much to her landlady's disgust, and once more seeks, though in a different mood, the shelter of the Church. Her old helper the priest for some time absolutely declines to admit the notion of Climal's rascality; but fortunately a charitable lady is more favourable, and Marianne gets taken in as a _pensionnaire_ at a convent. Climal, whose sister and Valville's mother the lady turns out to be, falls ill, repents, confesses, and leaves Marianne a comfortable annuity. Union with Valville is not opposed by the mother; but other members of the family are less obliging, and Valville himself wanders after an English girl of a Jacobite exiled family, Miss Warton (Varthon). The story then waters itself out, before suddenly collapsing, with a huge and uninteresting _Histoire d'une Religieuse_. Whereat some folk may grumble; but others, more philosophically, may be satisfied, in no uncomplimentary sense, without hearing what finally made Marianne Countess of Three Stars, or indeed knowing any more of her actual history.

For in fact the entire interest of _Marianne_ is concentrated in and on Marianne herself, and the fact that this is so at once makes continuation superfluous, and gives the novel its place in the history of fiction. We have quite enough, as it is, to show us--as the Princess Augusta said to f.a.n.n.y Burney of the ill-starred last of French "Mesdames Royales"--"what sort of a girl she is." And her biographer has made her a very interesting sort of girl, and himself in making her so, a very interesting, and almost entirely novel, sort of novelist. To say that she is a wholly attractive character would be entirely false, except from the point of view of the pure student of art. She is technically virtuous, which is, of course, greatly to her credit.[333] She is not bad-blooded, but if there were such a word as "good-blooded" it could hardly be applied to her. With all her preserving borax- or formalin-like touch of "good form," she is something of a minx. She is vain, selfish--in fact wrapped up in self--without any sense of other than technical honour. But she is very pretty (which covers a mult.i.tude of sins), and she is really clever.