A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 31

Even the "talking-book" is here hardly excessive, and comes legitimately under the excuse of showing how the relations between the hero and heroine originally got themselves established.[369]

[Sidenote: But little probability of more good work in novel from its author.]

Are we, then, from the excellence of the "Confessions" _in pari materia_ and _in ipsa_ of _Julie_, to lament that Rousseau did not take to novel-writing as a special and serious occupation? Probably not. The extreme weakness and almost _fadeur_ of the strictly novel part of _emile_, and the going-off of _Julie_ itself, are very open warnings; the mere absence of any other attempts worth mentioning[370] is evidence of a kind; and the character of all the rest of the work, and of all this part of the work but the opening of _Julie_, and even of that opening itself, counsel abstention, here as everywhere, from quarrelling with Providence. Rousseau's superhuman concentration on himself, while it has inspired the relevant parts of the _Confessions_ and of _Julie_, has spoilt a good deal else that we have, and would a.s.suredly have spoilt other things that we have not. It has been observed, by all acute students of the novel, that the egotistic variety will not bear heavy crops of fruit by itself; and that it is incapable, or capable with very great difficulty, of letting the observed and so far altruistic kind grow from the same stool. Of what is sometimes called the dramatic faculty (though, in fact, it is only one side of that),--the faculty which in different guise and with different means the general novelist must also possess,--Rousseau had nothing. He could put himself in no other man's skin, being so absolutely wrapped up in his own, which was itself much too sensitive to be disturbed, much less shed. Anything or anybody that was (to use Mill's language) a permanent or even a temporary possibility of sensation to him was within his power; anything out of immediate or closely impending contact was not. Now some of the great novelists have the external power--or at least the will to use that power--alone, others have had both; but Rousseau had the internal only, and so was, except by miracle of intensive exercise, incapable of further range.

[Sidenote: The different case of Diderot.]

Neither of the disabilities which weighed on Voltaire and Rousseau--the incapacity of the former to construct any complex character, and of the latter to portray any but his own, or some other brought into intensest communion, actually or as a matter of wish, with his own--weighed upon the third of the great trio of _philosophe_ leaders. There is every probability that Diderot might have been a very great novelist if he had lived a hundred years later; and not a little evidence that he only missed being such, even as it was, because of that mysterious curse which was epigrammatically expressed about him long ago (I really forget who said it first), "Good pages, no good book." So far from being self-centred or of limited interests, he could, as hardly any other man ever could, claim the hackneyed _h.o.m.o sum_, etc., as his rightful motto.

He had, when he allowed himself to give it fair play, an admirable gift of tale-telling; he could create character, and set it to work, almost after the fas.h.i.+on of the very greatest novelists; his universal interest and "curiosity" included such vivid appreciation of literature, and of art, and of other things useful to the novel-writer, that he never could have been at a loss for various kinds of "seasoning." He had keen observation, an admittedly marvellous flow of ideas, and a style which (though, like everything else about him, careless) was of singular vigour and freshness when, once more, he let it have fair play. But his time, his nature, and his circ.u.mstances combined to throw in his way traps and snares and nets which he could not, or would not, avoid. His anti-religiosity, though sometimes greatly exaggerated, was a bad stumbling-block; although he was free from the sn.i.g.g.e.r of Voltaire and of Sterne, you could not prevent him, as Horace Walpole complains of his distinguished sire, from blurting out the most improper remarks and stories at the most inconvenient times and in the most unsuitable companies; while his very multiscience, and his fertility of thought and imagination, kept him in a whirl which hindered his "settling" to anything. Although in one sense he had the finest and wisest critical taste of any man then living--I do not bar even Gray or even Lessing--his taste in some other ways was utterly untrustworthy and sometimes horribly bad; while even his strictly critical faculty seems never to have been exercised on his own books--a failure forming part of the "ostrich-like indifference" with which he produced and abandoned them.[371]

[Sidenote: His gifts and the waste of them.]

It is sometimes contended, and in many cases, no doubt, is the fact, that "Selections" are disgraceful and unscholarly. But what has been said will show that this is an exceptional case. The present writer waded through the whole of twenty-volume edition of a.s.sezat and Tourneux when it first appeared, and is very glad he did; nor is there perhaps one volume (he does not say one page, chapter, or even work) which he has not revisited more or fewer times during the forty years in which (alas! for the preterite) they remained on his shelves. But it is scarcely to be expected that every one, that many, or that more than a very few readers, have done or will do the same. It so happens, however, that Genin's _Oeuvres Choisies_--though it has been abused by some anti-Ydgrunites as too much Bowdlerised--gives a remarkably full and satisfactory idea of this great and seldom[372] quite rightly valued writer. It must have cost much, besides use of paste and scissors, to do; for the extracts are often very short, and the bulk of matter to be thoroughly searched for extraction is, as has just been said, huge. A third volume might perhaps be added;[373] but the actual two are far from unrepresentative, while the Bowdlerising is by no means ultra-Bowdlerish.

[Sidenote: The various display of them.]

The reader, even of this selection, will see how, in quite miscellaneous or heterogeneous writing, Diderot bubbles out into a perfectly told tale or anecdote, no matter what the envelope (as we may call it) of this tale or anecdote may be. All his work is more or less like conversation: and these excursus are like the stories which, if good, are among the best, just as, if bad, they are the worst, sets-off to conversation itself. Next to these come the longer _histoires_--as one would call them in the Heroic novel and its successors--things sometimes found by themselves, sometimes ensconced in larger work[374]--the story of Desroches and Mme. de la Carliere, _Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne_, the almost famous _Le Marquis des Arcis et Mme. de la Pommeraye_, of which more may be said presently; and things which are not exactly tales, but which have the tale-quality in part, like the charming _Regrets sur ma Vieille Robe de Chambre, Ceci n'est pas un conte_, etc. Thirdly, and to be spoken of in more detail, come the things that are nearest actual novels, and in some cases are called so, _Le Neveu de Rameau_, the "unspeakable" _Bijoux Indiscrets_, _Jacques le Fataliste_ (the matrix of _Le Marquis des Arcis_) and _La Religieuse_.

The "unspeakable" one does not need much speaking from any point of view. If it is not positively what Carlyle called it, "the beastliest of all dull novels, past, present, or to come," it really would require a most unpleasant apprentices.h.i.+p to scavenging in order to discover a dirtier and duller. The framework is a flat imitation of Crebillon, the "insets" are sometimes mere p.o.r.nography, and the whole thing is evidently scribbled at a gallop--it was actually a few days' work, to get money, from some French Curll or Dryb.u.t.ter, to give (the appropriateness of the thing at least is humorous) to the mistress of the moment, a Madame de Puisieux,[375] who, if she was like Crebillon's heroines in morals, cannot have been like the best of them in manners.

Its existence shows, of course, Diderot's worst side, that is to say, the combination of want of breeding with readiness to get money anyhow.

If it is worth reading at all, which may be doubted, it is to show the real, if equivocal, value of Crebillon himself. For it is vulgar, which he never is.

[Sidenote: _Le Neveu de Rameau._]

_Le Neveu de Rameau_, has only touches of obscenity, and it has been enormously praised by great persons. It is very clever, but it seems to me that, as a notable critic is said to have observed of something else, "it has been praised quite enough." It is a sketch, worked out in a sort of monologue,[376] of something like Diderot's own character without his genius and without his good fellows.h.i.+p--a gutter-snipe of art and letters possessed of some talent and of infinite impudence. It shows Diderot's own power of observation and easy fluid representation of character and manners, but not, as I venture to think, much more.

[Sidenote: _Jacques le Fataliste._]

_Jacques le Fataliste_ is what may be called, without pedantry or preciousness, eminently a "doc.u.ment." It is a doc.u.ment of Diderot's genius only indirectly (save in part), and to those who can read not only in the lines but between them: it is a doc.u.ment, directly, of the insatiable and restless energy of the man, and of the damage which this restlessness, with its accompanying and inevitable want of self-criticism, imposed upon that genius. Diderot, though he did not rhapsodise about Sterne as he rhapsodised about Richardson, was, like most of his countrymen then, a great admirer of "Tristram," and in an evil hour he took it into his head to Shandyise. The book starts with an actual adaptation of Sterne,[377] which is more than once repeated; its scheme--of a master (who is as different as possible from my Uncle Toby, except that when not in a pa.s.sion he is rather good-natured, and at almost all times very easily humbugged) and a man (who is what Trim never is, both insolent and indecent)--is at least partially the same.

But the most constant and the most unfortunate imitation is of Sterne's literally eccentric, or rather zigzag and pillar-to-post, fas.h.i.+on of narration. In the Englishman's own hands, by some prestidigitation of genius, this never becomes boring, though it probably would have become so if either book had been finished; for which reason we may be quite certain that it was not only his death which left both in fragments. In the hands of his imitators the boredom--simple or in the form of irritation--has been almost invariable;[378] and with all his great intellectual power, his tale-telling faculty, his _bonhomie_, and other good qualities, Diderot has not escaped it--has, in fact, rushed upon it and compelled it to come in. It is comparatively of little moment that the main ostensible theme--the very unedifying account of the loves, or at least the erotic exercises, of Jacques and his master--is deliberately, tediously, inartistically interrupted and "put off." The great feature of the book, which has redeemed it with some who would otherwise condemn it entirely, the Arcis and La Pommeraye episode (_v.

inf._), is handled after a fas.h.i.+on which suggests Mr. Ruskin's famous denunciation in another art. The _ink_pot is "flung in the face of the public" by a purely farcical series of interruptions, occasioned by the affairs of the inn-landlady, who tells the story, by her servants, dog, customers, and Heaven only knows what else; while the minor incidents and accidents of the book are treated in the same way, in and out of proportion to their own importance; the author's "simple plan," though by no means "good old rule," being that _everything_ shall be interrupted. Although, in the erotic part, the author never returns quite to his worst _Bijoux Indiscrets_ style, he once or twice goes very near it, except that he is not quite so dull; and when the book comes to an end in a very lame and impotent fas.h.i.+on (the farce being kept up to the last, and even this end being "recounted" and not made part of the mainly dialogic action), one is rather relieved at there being no more.

One has seen talent; one has almost glimpsed genius; but what one has been most impressed with is the glaring fas.h.i.+on in which both the certainty and the possibility have been thrown away.

[Sidenote: Its "Arcis-Pommeraye" episode.]

The story which has been referred to in pa.s.sing as muddled, or, to adopt a better French word, for which we have no exact equivalent, _affuble_ (travestied and overlaid) with eccentricities and interruptions, the _Histoire_ of the Marquis des Arcis and the Marquise de la Pommeraye, has received a great deal of praise, most of which it deserves. The Marquis and the Marquise have entered upon one of the fas.h.i.+onable _liaisons_ which Crebillon described in his own way. Diderot describes this one in another. The Marquis gets tired--it is fair to say that he has offered marriage at the very first, but Madame de la Pommeraye, a widow with an unpleasant first experience of the state, has declined it.

He shows his tiredness in a gentlemanly manner, but not very mistakably.

His mistress, who is not at first _femina furens_, but who possesses some feminine characteristics in a dangerous degree, as he might perhaps have found out earlier if he had been a different person, determines to make sure of it. She intimates _her_ tiredness, and the Marquis makes his first step downwards by jumping at the release. They are--the old, old hopeless folly!--to remain friends, but friends only. But she really loves him, and after almost a.s.suring herself that he has really ceased to love her (which, in the real language of love, means that he has never loved her at all), devises a further, a very clever, but a rather diabolical system of last proof, involving vengeance if it fails. She has known, in exercises of charity (the _femme du monde_ has seldom quite abandoned these), a mother and daughter who, having lost their means, have taken to a questionable, or rather a very unquestionable manner of life, keeping a sort of private gaming-house, and extending to those frequenters of it who choose, what the late George Augustus Sala not inelegantly called, in an actual police-court instance, "the thorough hospitality characteristic of their domicile." She prevails on them to leave the house, get rid of all their belongings (down to clothes) which could possibly be identified, change their name, move to another quarter of Paris, and set up as _devotes_ under the full protection of the local clergy. Then she manages an introduction, of an apparently accidental kind, to the Marquis. He falls in love at once with the daughter, who is very pretty, and with masculine (or at least _some_ masculine) fatuity, makes Madame de la Pommeraye his confidante.

She gives him rope, but he uses it, of course, only to hang himself. He tries the usual temptations; but though the mother at least would not refuse them, Madame de la Pommeraye's hand on the pair is too tight. At last he offers marriage, and--with her at least apparent consent--is married. The next day she tells him the truth. But her diabolism fails.

At first there is of course a furious outburst. But the girl is beautiful, affectionate, and humble; the mother is pensioned off; the Marquis and Marquise des Arcis retire for some years to those invaluable _terres_, after a sojourn at which everything is forgotten; and the story ends. Diderot, by not too skilfully throwing in casuistical attacks and defences of the two princ.i.p.al characters, but telling us nothing of Madame de la Pommeraye's subsequent feelings or history, does what he can, unluckily after his too frequent fas.h.i.+on, to spoil or at least to blunt his tale. It is not necessary to imitate him by discussing the _pros_ and _cons_ at length. I think myself that the Marquis, both earlier and later, is made rather too much of a _benet_, or, in plain English, a nincomp.o.o.p. But nincomp.o.o.ps exist: in fact how many of us are not nincomp.o.o.ps in certain circ.u.mstances? Madame de la Pommeraye is, I fear, rather true, and is certainly sketched with extraordinary ability. On a larger scale the thing would probably, at that time and by so hasty and careless a workman, have been quite spoilt. But it is obviously the skeleton--and something more--of a really great novel.

[Sidenote: _La Religieuse._]

It may seem that a critic who speaks in this fas.h.i.+on, after an initial promise of laudation, is a sort of Balaam topsyturvied, and merely curses where he is expected to bless. But ample warning was given of the peculiar position of Diderot, and when we come to his latest known and by far his best novel, _La Religieuse_, the paradox (he was himself very fond of paradoxes,[379] though not of the wretched things which now disgrace the name) remains. The very subject of the book, or of the greatest part of it, was for a long time, if it is not still, taboo; and even if this had not been the case, it has other drawbacks. It originated in, and to some extent still retains traces of, one of the silly and ill-bred "mystifications" in which the eighteenth and early nineteenth century delighted.[380] It is, at least in appearance, badly tainted with purpose; and while it is actually left unfinished, the last pages of it, as they stand, are utterly unworthy of the earlier part, and in fact quite uninteresting. Momus or Zoilus must be allowed to say so much: but having heard him, let us cease to listen to the half-G.o.d or the whole philologist.

[Sidenote: Its story.]

Yet _La Religieuse_, for all its drawbacks, is almost a great, and might conceivably have been a very great book. Madame d'Holbach is credited by Diderot's own generosity with having suggested its crowning _mot_,[381]

and her influence may have been in other ways good by governing the force and fire, so often wasted or ill-directed, of Diderot's genius.

Soeur Sainte-Suzanne is the youngest daughter of a respectable middle-cla.s.s family. She perceives, or half-perceives (for, though no fool, she is a guileless and unsuspicious creature), that she is unwelcome there; the most certain sign of which is that, while her sisters are married and dowered handsomely, she is condemned to be a nun. She has, though quite real piety, no "vocation," and though she allows herself to be coaxed through her novitiate, she at last, in face of almost insuperable difficulties, summons up courage enough to refuse, at the very altar, the final profession. There is, of course, a terrible scandal; she has more black looks in the family than ever, and at last her mother confesses that she is an illegitimate child, and therefore hated by her putative father, whose love for his wife, however, has induced him to forgive her, and not actually renounce (as indeed, by French law, he could not) the child. Broken in heart and spirit, Suzanne at last accepts her doom. She is fortunate in one abbess, but the next persecutes her, brings all sorts of false accusations against her, strips, starves, imprisons, and actually tortures her by means of the _amende honorable_. She manages to get her complaints known and to secure a counsel, and though she cannot obtain liberation from her vows, the priest who conducts the ecclesiastical part of the enquiry is a just man, and utterly repudiates the methods of persecution, while he and her lay lawyer procure her transference to another convent. Here her last trial (except those of the foolish post-_sc.r.a.p_, as we may call it) begins, as well as the most equivocal and the greatest part of the book. Her new superior is in every respect different from any she has known--of a luxurious temperament, good-natured, though capricious, and inclined to be very much too affectionate. Her temptation of the innocent Suzanne is defeated by this very innocence, and by timely revelation, though the revealer does not know what she reveals, to a "director"; and the wayward and corrupted fancy turns by degrees to actual madness, which proves fatal, Suzanne remaining unharmed, though a piece of not inexcusable eavesdropping removes the ignorance of her innocence.

[Sidenote: A hardly missed, if missed, masterpiece.]

If the subject be not simply ruled out, and the book indexed for silence, it is practically impossible to suggest that it could have been treated better. Even the earlier parts, which could easily have been made dull, are not so; and it is noteworthy that, anti-religionist as Diderot was, and directly as the book is aimed at the conventual system,[382] all the priests who are introduced are men of honour, justice, and humanity. But the wonder is in the treatment of the "scabrous" part of the matter by the author of Diderot's other books.

Whether Madame d'Holbach's[383] influence, as has been suggested, was more widely and subtly extended than we know, or whatever else may be the cause, there is not a coa.r.s.e word, not even a coa.r.s.ely drawn situation, in the whole. Suzanne's innocence is, in the subtlest manner, prevented from being in the least _bete_. The fluctuations and ficklenesses of the abbess's pa.s.sion, and in a less degree of that of another young nun, whom Suzanne has partially ousted from her favour, are marvellously and almost inoffensively drawn, and the stages by which erotomania pa.s.ses into mania general and mortal, are sketched slightly, but with equal power. There is, I suppose, hardly a book which one ought to discommend to the young person more than _La Religieuse_. There are not many in which the powers required by the novelist, in delineating morbid, and not only morbid, character, are more brilliantly shown.

It is not the least remarkable thing about this remarkable book, and not the least characteristic of its most remarkable author, that its very survival has something extraordinary about it. Grimm, who was more likely than any one else to know, apparently thought it was destroyed or lost; it never appeared at all during Diderot's life, nor for a dozen years after his death, nor till seven after the outbreak of the Revolution, and six after the suppression of the religious orders in France. That it might have brought its author into difficulties is more than probable; but the undisguised editor of the _Encyclopedie_, the author, earlier, of the actually disgraceful _Bijoux Indiscrets_, and the much more than suspected princ.i.p.al begetter of the _Systeme de la Nature_, could not have been much influenced by this. The true cause of its abscondence, as in so much else of his work, was undoubtedly that ultra-Bohemian quality of indifference which distinguished Diderot--the first in a way, probably for ever the greatest, and, above all, the most altruistic of literary Bohemians. Ask him to do something definite, especially for somebody else's profit, to be done off-hand, and it was done. Ask him to bear the brunt of a dangerous, laborious, by no means lucrative, but rather exciting adventure, and he would, one cannot quite say consecrate, but devote (which has two senses) his life to it. But set him to elaborate artistic creation, confine him to it, and expect him to finish it, and you were certain to be disappointed. At another time, even at this time, if his surroundings and his society, his education and his breeding had been less unfortunate, he might, as it seems to me, have become a very great novelist indeed. As it is, he is a great possibility of novel and of much other writing, with occasional outbursts of actuality. The _Encyclopedie_ itself, for aught I care, might have gone in all its copies, and with all possibility of recovering or remembering it on earth, to the place where so many people at the time would have liked to send it. But in the rest of him, and even in some of his own Encyclopaedia articles,[384] there is much of quite different stuff. And among the various gifts, critical and creative, which this stuff shows, not the least, I think, was the half-used and mostly ill-used gift of novel-writing.

[Sidenote: The successors--Marmontel.]

What has been called the second generation of the _philosophes_, who were naturally the pupils of the first, "were not like [that] first,"

that is to say, they did not reproduce the special talents of their immediate masters in this department of ours, save in two instances.

Diderot's genius did not propagate itself in the novel way at all[385]: indeed, as has been said, his best novel was not known till this second generation itself was waning. The most brilliant of his direct hearers, Joubert, took to another department; or rather, in his famous _Pensees_, isolated and perfected the utterances scattered through the master's immense and disorderly work. Naigeon, the most devoted, who might have taken for his motto a slight alteration of the Mahometan confession of faith, "There is no G.o.d; but there is only one Diderot, and I am his prophet," was a dull fellow, and also, to adopt a Carlylian epithet, a "dull-snuffling" one, who could not have told a neck-tale if the Hairibee of the guillotine had caught him and given him a merciful chance. Voltaire in Marmontel, and Rousseau in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, were more fortunate, though both the juniors considerably transformed their masters' fas.h.i.+ons; and Marmontel was always more or less, and latterly altogether, an apostate from the principle that the first and last duty of man is summed up in _ecrasons l'infame_.

This latter writer has had vicissitudes both in English and French appreciation. We translated him early, and he had an immense influence on the general Edgeworthian school, and on Miss Edgeworth herself. Much later Mr. Ruskin "took him up."[386] But neither his good nor his bad points have, for a long time, been such as greatly to commend themselves, either to the major part of the nineteenth century, or to what has yet pa.s.sed of the twentieth, on either side of the channel.

He was, no doubt, only a second-cla.s.s man of letters, and though he ranks really high in this cla.s.s, he was unfortunately much influenced by more or less pa.s.sing fas.h.i.+ons, fads, and fancies of his time--_sensibilite_ (see next chapter) philosophism, politico-philanthropic economy, and what not. He was also much of a "polygraph," and naturally a good deal of his polygraphy does not concern us, though parts of his _Memoirs_, especially the rather well-known accounts of his sufferings as a new-comer[387] in the atrocious Bastille, show capital tale-telling faculty. His unequal criticism, sometimes very acute, hardly concerns us at all; his _Essai sur les Romans_ being very disappointing.[388] But he wrote not a little which must, in different ways and "strengths," be cla.s.sed as actual fiction, and this concerns us pretty nearly, both as evidencing that general set towards the novel which is so important, and also in detail.

[Sidenote: His "Telemachic" imitations worth little.]

It divides itself quite obviously into two cla.s.ses, the almost didactic matter of _Belisaire_ and _Les Incas_, and the still partly didactic, but much more "fictionised" _Contes Moraux_. The first part (which is evidently of the family of _Telemaque_) may be rapidly dismissed. Except for its good French and good intentions, it has long had, and is likely always to have, very little to say for itself. We have seen that Prevost attempted a sort of quasi-historical novel. Of actual history there is little in _Belisaire_, rather more in _Les Incas_. But historical fact and story-telling art are entirely subordinated in both to moral purpose, endless talk about virtue and the affections and justice and all the rest of it--the sort of thing, in short, which provoked the immortal outburst, "In the name of the Devil and his grandmother, _be_ virtuous and have done with it!" There is, as has just been said, a great deal of this in the _Contes_ also; but fortunately there is something else.

[Sidenote: The best of his _Contes Moraux_ worth a good deal.]

The something else is not to be found in the "Sensibility" parts,[389]

and could not be expected to be. They do, indeed, contain perhaps the most absolutely ludicrous instance of the absurdest side of that remarkable thing, except Mackenzie's great _trouvaille_ of the press-gang who unanimously melted into tears[390] at the plea of an affectionate father. Marmontel's masterpiece is not so very far removed in subject from this. It represents a good young man, who stirs up the timorous captain and crew of a s.h.i.+p against an Algerine pirate, and in the ensuing engagement, sabre in hand, makes a terrible carnage: "As soon as he sees an African coming on board, he runs to him and cuts him in half, crying, 'My poor mother!'" The filial hero varies this a little, when "disembowelling" the Algerine commander, by requesting the Deity to "have pity on" his parent--a proceeding faintly suggestive of a survival in his mind of the human-sacrifice period.

Fortunately, as has been said, it is not always thus: and some of the tales are amusing in almost the highest degree, being nearly as witty as Voltaire's, and entirely free from ill-nature and sculduddery. Not that Marmontel--though a great advocate for marriage, and even (for a Frenchman of his time) wonderfully favourable to falling in love _before_ marriage--pretends to be altogether superior to the customs of his own day. We still sometimes have the "Prendre-Avoir-Quitter" series of Crebillon,[391] though with fewer details; and Mrs. Newcome would have been almost more horrified than she was at _Joseph Andrews_ by the perusal of one of Marmontel's most well-intentioned things, _Annette et Lubin_. But he never lays himself out for attractions of a doubtful kind, and none of his best stories, even when they may sometimes involve bowing in the house of Ashtoreth as well as that of Rimmon, derive their bait from this kind. Indeed they rather "a.s.sume and pa.s.s it by" as a fas.h.i.+on of the time.

[Sidenote: _Alcibiade ou le Moi._]

We may take three or four of them as examples. One is the very first of the collection, _Alcibiade ou le Moi_. Hardly anybody need be told that the Alcibiades of the tale, though nominally, is not in the least really the Alcibiades of history, or that his Athens is altogether Paris; while his Socrates is a kind of _philosophe_, the good points of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot being combined with the faults of none of them, and his ladies are persons who--with one exception--simply could not have existed in Greece. This Alcibiades wishes to be loved "for himself," and is (not without reason) very doubtful whether he ever has been, though he is the most popular and "successful" man in Athens. His _avoir_, for the moment, is concerned with a "Prude." (Were there prudes in Greece? I think Diogenes would have gladly lent his lantern for the search.) He is desperately afraid that she only loves him for _her_self.

He determines to try her; takes her, not at her deeds, but at her words, which are, of course, such as would have made the Greeks laugh as inextinguishably as their G.o.ds once did. She expresses grat.i.tude for his unselfishness, but is anything but pleased. Divers experiments are tried by her, and when at last he hopes she will not tempt him any more, exclaiming that he is really "l'amant le plus fidele, le plus tendre et le plus respectueux" ... "et le plus sot," adds she, sharply, concluding the conversation and shutting her, let us say, doors[392] on him.

He is furious, and tries "Glicerie" (the form might be more Greek), an _ingenue_ of fifteen, who was "like a rose," who had attracted already the vows of the most gallant youths, etc. The most brilliant of these youths instantly retire before the invincible Alcibiades. But in the first place she wishes that before "explanations"[393] take place, a marriage shall be arranged; while he, oddly enough, wishes that the explanations should precede the hymen. Also she is particular about the consent of her parents: and, finally, when he asks her whether she will swear constancy against every trial, to be his, and his only, whatever happens, she replies, with equal firmness and point, "Never!" So he is furious again. But there is a widow, and, as we have seen in former cases, there was not, in the French eighteenth century, the illiberal prejudice against widows expressed by Mr. Weller. She is, of course, inconsolable for her dear first, but admits, after a time, the possibility of a dear second. Only it must be kept secret as yet. For a time Alcibiades behaves n.o.bly, but somehow or other he finds that everybody knows the fact; he is treated by his lady-love with obvious superiority; and breaks with her. An interlude with a "magistrate's"

wife, on less proper and more Crebillonish lines, is not more successful. So one day meeting by the seash.o.r.e a beautiful courtesan, Erigone, he determines, in the not contemptible language of that single-speech poetess, Maria del Occidente, to "descend and sip a lower draught." He is happy after a fas.h.i.+on with her for two whole months: but at the end of that time he is beaten in a chariot race, and, going to Erigone for consolation, finds the winner's vehicle at her door.

Socrates, on being consulted, recommends Glicerie as, after all, the best of them, in a rather sensible discourse. But the concluding words of the sage and the story are, as indeed might be expected from Xanthippe's husband, not entirely optimist: "If your wife is well conducted and amiable, you will be a happy man; if she is ill-tempered and a coquette, you will become a philosopher--so you must gain in any case." An "obvious," perhaps, but a neat and uncommonly well-told story.

[Sidenote: _Soliman the Second._]

_Soliman the Second_ is probably the best known of Marmontel's tales, and it certainly has great merits. It is hardly inferior in wit to Voltaire, and is entirely free from the smears of uncomeliness and the sn.i.g.g.e.rs of bad taste which he would have been sure to put in. The subject is, of course, partly historical, though the reader of Knollys (and one knows more unhappy persons) will look in vain there, not, indeed, for Roxelana, but for the _nez retrousse_, which is the important point of the story. The great Sultan tires of his Asiatic harem, complaisant but uninteresting, and orders European damsels to be caught or bought for him. The most noteworthy of the catch or batch are Elmire, Delia, and Roxelane. Elmire comes first to Soliman's notice, charms him by her sentimental ways, and reigns for a time, but loses her piquancy, and (by no means wholly to her satisfaction) is able to avail herself of the conditional enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, and return to her country, which his magnanimity has granted her. Her immediate supplanter, Delia, is an admirable singer, and possessed of many of the qualifications of an accomplished _hetaera_. But for that very reason the Sultan tires of her likewise; and for the same, she is not inconsolable or restive: indeed she acts as a sort of Lady Pandara, if not to introduce, at any rate to tame, the third, Roxelane, a French girl of no very regular beauty, but with infinite attractions, and in particular possessed of what Mr. Dobson elegantly calls "a madding ineffable nose" of the _retrousse_ type.

The first thing the Sultan hears of this damsel is that the Master of the Eunuchs cannot in the least manage her; for she merely laughs at all he says. The Sultan, out of curiosity, orders her to be brought to him, and she immediately cries: "Thank Heaven! here is a face like a man's.

Of course you are the sublime Sultan whose slave I have the honour to be? Please cas.h.i.+er this disgusting old rascal." To which extremely irreverent address Soliman makes a dignified reply of the proper kind, including due reference to "obedience" and his "will." This brings down a small pageful of raillery from the young person, who asks "whether this is Turkish gallantry?" suggests that the restrictions of the seraglio involve a fear that "the skies should rain men," and more than hints that she should be very glad if they did. For the moment Soliman, though much taken with her, finds no way of saving his dignity except by a retreat. The next time he sends for her, or rather announces his own arrival, she tells the messenger to pack himself off: and when the Commander of the Faithful does visit her and gives a little good advice, she is still incorrigible. She will, once more, have nothing to do with the words _dois_ and _devoir_. When asked if she knows what he is and what _she_ is, she answers with perfect _aplomb_, "What we are? You are powerful, and I am pretty; so we are quite on an equality." In the most painfully confidential and at the same time quite decent manner, she asks him what he can possibly do with five hundred wives? and, still more intolerably, tells him that she likes his looks, and has already loved people who were not worth him. The horror with which this Turkish soldan, himself so full of sin, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es, "Vous _avez_ aime?" may be easily imagined, and again she simply puts him to flight. When he gets over it a little, he sends Delia to negotiate. But Roxelane tells the go-between to stay to supper, declaring that she herself does not feel inclined for a _tete-a-tete_ yet, and finally sends him off with this obliging predecessor and subst.i.tute, presenting her with the legendary handkerchief, which she has actually borrowed from the guileless Padishah. There is some, but not too much more of it; there can but be one end; and as he takes her to the Mosque to make her legitimate Sultana, quite contrary to proper Mussulman usage, he says to himself, "Is it really possible that a little _retrousse_ nose should upset the laws of an empire?" Probably, though Marmontel does not say so, he looked down at the said nose, as he communed with himself, and decided that cause and effect were not unworthy of each other. There is hardly a righter and better hit-off tale of the kind, even in French.