A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 1

A History of the French Novel.

Vol. 2.

by George Saintsbury.

PREFACE

"The second chantry" (for it would be absurd to keep "temple") of this work "is not like the first"; in one respect especially, which seems to deserve notice in its Preface or porch--if a chantry may be permitted a porch. In Volume I.--though many of its subjects (not quite all) had been handled by me before in more or less summary fas.h.i.+on, or in reviews of individual books, or in other connections than that of the novel--only Hamilton, Lesage, Marivaux, and the minor "Sensibility" men and women had formed the subjects of separate and somewhat detailed studies, wholly or mainly as novelists. The case is altered in respect of the present volume. The _Essays on French Novelists_, to which I there referred, contain a larger number of such studies appertaining to the present division--studies busied with Charles de Bernard, Gautier, Murger, Flaubert, Dumas, Sandeau, Cherbuliez, Feuillet. On Balzac I have previously written two papers of some length, one as an Introduction to Messrs. Dent's almost complete translation of the _Comedie_, with shorter sequels for each book, the other an article in the _Quarterly Review_ for 1907. Some dozen or more years ago I contributed to an American edition[1] of translations of Merimee by various hands, a long "Introduction" to that most remarkable writer, and I had, somewhat earlier, written on Maupa.s.sant for the _Fortnightly Review_. One or two additional dealings of some substance with the subject might be mentioned, such as another Introduction to _Corinne_, but not to _Delphine_. These, however, and pa.s.sages in more general _Histories_, hardly need specification.

On the other hand, I have never dealt, substantively and in detail, with Chateaubriand, Paul de k.o.c.k, Victor Hugo, Beyle, George Sand, or Zola[2]

as novelists, nor with any of the very large number of minors not already mentioned, including some, such as Nodier and Gerard de Nerval, whom, for one thing or another, I should myself very decidedly put above minority. And, further, my former dealings with the authors in the first list given above having been undertaken without any view to a general history of the French novel, it became not merely proper but easy for me to "triangulate" them anew. So that though there may be more previous work of mine in print on the subjects of the present volume than on those of the last, there will, I hope, be found here actually less, and very considerably less, _rechauffe_--hardly any, in fact (save a few translations[3] and some pa.s.sages on Gautier and Maupa.s.sant)--of the amount and character which seemed excusable, and more than excusable, in the case of the "Sensibility" chapter there. The book, if not actually a "Pisgah-sight reversed," taken from Lebanon instead of Pisgah after more than forty years' journey, not in the wilderness, but in the Promised Land itself, attempts to be so; and uses no more than fairly "reminiscential" (as Sir Thomas Browne would say) notes, taken on that journey itself.

It was very naturally, and by persons of weight, put to me whether I could not extend this history to, or nearer to, the present day. I put my negative to this briefly in the earlier preface: it may be perhaps courteous to others, who may be disposed to regret the refusal, to give it somewhat more fully here. One reason--perhaps sufficient in itself--can be very frankly stated. I do not _know_ enough of the French novel of the last twenty years or so. During the whole of that time I have had no reasons, of duty or profit, to oblige such knowledge. I have had a great many other things to do, and I have found greater recreation in re-reading old books than in experimenting on new ones. I might, no doubt, in the last year or two have made up the deficiency to some extent, but I was indisposed to do so for two, yea, three reasons, which seemed to me sufficient.

In the first place, I have found, both by some actual experiment of my own, and, as it seems to me, by a considerable examination of the experiments of other people, that to co-ordinate satisfactorily accounts of contemporary or very recent work with accounts of older is so difficult as to be nearly impossible. The _foci_ are too different to be easily adjusted, and the result is almost always out of composition, if not of drawing.

Secondly, though I know I am here kicking against certain p.r.i.c.ks, it does not appear to me, either from what I have read or from criticisms on what I have not, that any definitely new and decisively ill.u.s.trated school of novels has arisen since the death of M. Zola.

Thirdly, it would be impossible to deal with the subject, save in an absurdly incomplete fas.h.i.+on, without discussing living persons. To doing this, in a book, I have an unfas.h.i.+onable but unalterable objection. The productions of such persons, as they appear, are, by now established custom, proper subjects for "reviewing" in accordance with the decencies of literature, and such reviews may sometimes, with the same proviso, be extended to studies of their work up to date. But even these latter should, I think, be reserved for very exceptional cases.

A slight difference of method may be observed in the treatment of authors in Chapter X. and onwards, this treatment being not only somewhat less judicial and more "impressionist," but also more general and less buckrammed out with abstracts of particular works.[4] There appeared to me to be more than one reason for this, all such reasons being independent of, though by no means ignoring, the mechanical pressure of ever-lessening s.p.a.ce. In the first place, a very much larger number of readers may be presumed to be more or less familiar with the subjects of discussion, thus not only making elaborate "statement of case" and production of supporting evidence unnecessary, but exposing the purely judicial att.i.tude to the charge of "no jurisdiction."

Moreover, there is behind all this, as it seems to me, a really important principle, which is not a mere repet.i.tion, but a noteworthy extension, of that recently laid down. I rather doubt whether the absolute historico-critical verdict and sentence can ever be p.r.o.nounced on work that is, even in the widest sense, contemporary. The "firm perspective of the past" can in very few instances be acquired: and those few, who by good luck have acquired something of it, should not presume too much on this gift of fortune. General opinion of a man is during his lifetime often wrong, for some time after his death almost always so: and the absolute balance is very seldom reached till a full generation--something more than the conventional thirty years--has pa.s.sed. Meanwhile, though all readers who have anything critical in them will be constantly revising their impressions, it is well not to put one's own out as more than impressions. It is only a very few years since I myself came to what I may call a provisionally final estimate of Zola, and I find that there is some slight alteration even in that which, from the first, I formed of Maupa.s.sant. I can hardly hope that readers of this part of the work will not be brought into collision with expressions of mine, more frequently than was the case in the first volume or even the first part of this. But I can at least a.s.sure them that I have no intention of playing Sir Oracle, or of trailing my coat.

The actual arrangement of this volume has been the subject of a good deal of "pondering and deliberation," almost as much as Sir Thomas Bertram gave to a matter no doubt of more importance. There was a considerable temptation to recur to the system on which I have written some other literary histories--that of "Books" and "Interchapters." This I had abandoned, in the first volume, because it was not so much difficult of application as hardly relevant. Here the relevance is much greater. The single century divides itself, without the slightest violence offered, into four parts, which, if I had that capacity or partiality for flowery writing, the absence of which in me some critics have deplored, I might almost call Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter.

There is the season, of little positive crop but important seed-sowing,--the season in which the greater writers, Chateaubriand and Mme. de Stael, perform their office. Here, too, quite humble folk--Pigault-Lebrun completing what has been already dealt with, Ducray-Duminil and others doing work to be dealt with here, and Paul de k.o.c.k most of all, get the novel of ordinary life ready in various ways: while others still, Nodier, Hugo, Vigny, Merimee, and, with however different literary value, Arlincourt, implant the New Romance. There is the sudden, magnificent, and long-continued outburst of all the kinds in and after 1830. There is the autumn of the Second Empire, continuing and adding to the fruits and flowers of summer: and there is the gradual decadence of the last quarter of the century, with some late blossoming and second-crop fruitage--the medlars of the novel--and the dying off of the great producers of the past. But the breach of uniformity in formal arrangement of the divisions would perhaps be too great to the eye without being absolutely necessary to the sense, and I have endeavoured to make the necessary recapitulation with a single "halt" of chapter-length[5] at the exact middle. It will readily be understood that the loss of my own library has been even more severely felt in this volume than in the earlier one, while circ.u.mstances, public and private, have made access to larger collections more difficult. But I have endeavoured to "make good" as much as possible, and grumbling or complaining supplies worse than no armour against Fate.

I have sometimes, perhaps rashly, during the writing of this book wondered "What next"? By luck for myself--whether also for my readers it would be ill even to wonder--I have been permitted to execute all the literary schemes I ever formed, save two. The first of these (omitting a work on "Transubstantiation" which I planned at the age of thirteen but did not carry far) was a _History of the English Scholastics_, which I thought of some ten years later, which was not unfavoured by good authority, and which I should certainly have attempted, if other people at Oxford in my time had not been so much cleverer than myself that I could not get a fellows.h.i.+p. It has, strangely enough, never been done yet by anybody; it would be a useful corrective to the exoteric chatter which has sometimes recently gone by the name of philosophy; and perhaps it might shake Signor Benedetto Croce (whom it is hardly necessary to say I do _not_ include among the "chatterers") in his opinion that though, as he once too kindly said, I am a _valente letterato_, I am sadly _digiuno di filosofia_.[6] But it is "too late a week" for this.

And I have lost my library.

Then there was a _History of Wine_, which was actually commissioned, planned, and begun just before I was appointed to my Chair at Edinburgh, and which I gave up, not from any personal pusillanimity or loss of interest in the subject, but partly because I had too much else to do, and because I thought it unfair to expose that respectable inst.i.tution to the venom of the most unscrupulous of all fanatics--those of teetotalism. I could take this up with pleasure: but I have lost my cellar.

What I should really like to do would be to translate _in extenso_ Dr.

Sommer's re-edition of the Vulgate Arthuriad. But I should probably die before I had done half of it; no publisher would undertake the risk of it; and if any did, "Dora," reluctant to die, would no doubt put us both in 'prison for using so much paper. Therefore I had better be content with the divine suggestion, and not spoil it by my human failure to execute.

And so I may say, for good, _Valete_ to the public, abandoning the rest of the leave-taking to their discretion.[7]

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

1 ROYAL CRESCENT, BATH, _Christmas_, 1918.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is perhaps worth while to observe that I did not "edit" this, and that I had nothing whatever to do with any part of it except the _Introduction_ and my earlier translation of the _Chronique de Charles IX_, which was, I believe, reprinted in it.

[2] In very great strictness an exception should perhaps be made for notice of him, and of some others, in _The Later Nineteenth Century_ (Edinburgh and London, 1907).

[3] There will, for pretty obvious reasons, be fewer of these than in the former volume. The texts are much more accessible; there is no difficulty about the language, such as people, however unnecessarily, sometimes feel about French up to the sixteenth century; and the s.p.a.ce is wanted for other things. If I have kept one or two of my old ones it is because they have won approval from persons whose approval is worth having, and are now out of print: while I have added one or two others--to please myself. Translations--in some cases more than one or two--already exist, for those who read English only, of nearly the whole of Balzac, of all Victor Hugo's novels, of a great many of Dumas's, and of others almost innumerable.

[4] The chief exceptions are Dumas _fils_, the earliest, and Maupa.s.sant, the greatest except Flaubert and far more voluminous than Flaubert himself.

[5] The most unexpected chorus of approval with which Volume I. was received by reviewers, and which makes me think, in regard to this, of that unpleasant song of the Koreish "After Bedr, Ohod," leaves little necessity for defending points attacked. I have made a few addenda and corrigenda to Volume I. to cover exceptions, and the "Interchapter" or its equivalent should contain something on one larger matter--the small account taken here of French _criticism_ of the novel.

[6] I wonder whether he was right, or whether the late Edward Caird was when he said, "I don't think I ever had a pupil [and he was among the first inter-collegiate-lecturers] with more of the philosophical _ethos_ than you have. But you're too fond of getting into logical coaches and letting yourself be carried away in them." I think this was provoked by a very undergraduate essay arguing that Truth, as actually realised, was uninteresting, while the possible forms of Falsehood, as conceivably realisable in other circ.u.mstances, were of the highest interest.

[7] I have to give, not only my usual thanks to Professors Elton, Ker, and Gregory Smith for reading my proofs, and making most valuable suggestions, but a special acknowledgment to Professor Ker, at whose request Miss Elsie Hitchc.o.c.k most kindly looked up for me, at the British Museum, the exact t.i.tle of that striking novel of M. H. Cochin (_v. inf._ p. 554 _note_). I have, in the proper places, already thanked the authorities of the _Reviews_ above mentioned; but I should like also to recognise here the liberality of Messrs. Rivington in putting the contents of my _Essays on French Novelists_ entirely at my disposal. And I am under another special obligation to Dr. Hagbert Wright for giving me, of his own motion, knowledge and reading of the fresh batch of seventeenth-century novels noticed below (pp. xiv-xvi).

ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA FOR VOL. I

P. 13.--"The drawback of explanations is that they almost always require to be explained." Somebody, or several somebodies, must have said this; and many more people than have ever said it--at least in print--must have felt it. The dictum applies to my note on this page. An entirely well-willing reviewer thought me "piqued" at the American remark, and proceeded to intimate a doubt whether I knew M. Bedier's work, partly on lines (as to the _Cantilenae_) which I had myself antic.i.p.ated, and partly on the question of the composition of the _chansons_ by this or that person or cla.s.s, in this or that place, at that or the other time.

But I had felt no "pique" whatever in the matter, and these latter points fall entirely outside my own conception of the _chansons_. I look at them simply as pieces of accomplished literature, no matter how, where, in what circ.u.mstances, or even exactly when, they became so. And I could therefore by no possibility feel anything but pleasure at praise bestowed on this most admirable work in a different part of the field.

P. 38, l. 27.--A protest was made, not inexcusably, at the characterisation of _Launfal_ as "libellous." The fault was only one of phrasing, or rather of incompleteness. That beautiful story of a knight and his fairy love is one which I should be the last man in the world to abuse _as such_. But it contains a libel on Guinevere which is unnecessary and offensive, besides being absolutely unjustified by any other legend, and inconsistent with her whole character. It is of this only that I spoke the evil which it deserves. If I had not, by mere oversight, omitted notice of Marie de France (for which I can offer no excuse except the usual one of hesitation in which place to put it and so putting it nowhere), I should certainly have left no doubt as to my opinion of Thomas Chester likewise. Anybody who wants this may find it in my _Short History of English Literature_, p. 194.

P. 55, l. 3.--_Delete_ comma at "French."

P. 60, l. 6.--Insert "and" between "half" and "illegitimate."

P. 72, l. 4.--I have been warned of the "change-over" in "Saracen" and "Christian"--a slip of the pen which I am afraid I have been guilty of before now, though I have known the story for full forty years. But Floire, though a "paynim," was not exactly a "Saracen."

P. 75, l. 2 from bottom.--_For_ "his" _read_ "their."

Pp. 158-163.--When the first proofs of the present volume had already begun to come in, Dr. Hagbert Wright informed me that the London Library had just secured at Sotheby's (I believe partly from the sale of Lord Ellesmere's books) a considerable parcel of early seventeenth-century French novels. He also very kindly allowed me perusal of such of these as I had not already noticed (from reading at the B. M.) in Vol. I. Of some, if not all of them, on the principle stated in the Preface of that vol., I may say something here. There is the _Histoire des Amours de Lysandre et de Caliste; avec figures_, in an Amsterdam edition of 1679, but of necessity some sixty years older, since its author, the Sieur d'Audiguier, was killed in 1624. He says he wrote it in six months, during three and a half of which he was laid up with eight sword-wounds--things of which it is itself full, with the appurtenant combats on sea and land and in private houses, and all sorts of other divertis.e.m.e.nts (he uses the word himself of himself) including a very agreeable ghost-host--a ghost quite free from the tautology and grandiloquence which ghosts too often affect, though not so poetical as Fletcher's. "They told me you were dead," says his guest and interlocutor, consciously or unconsciously quoting the _Anthology_. "So I am," quoth the ghost st.u.r.dily. But he wants, as they so often do, to be buried. This is done, and he comes back to return thanks, which is not equally the game, and in fact rather bores his guest, who, to stop this jack-in-the-box proceeding, begins to ask favours, such as that the ghost will give him three days' warning of his own death. "I will, _if I can_," says the Appearance pointedly. The fault of the book, as of most of the novels of the period, is the almost complete absence of character. But there is plenty of adventure, in England as well as in France, and it must be one of the latest stories in which the actual tourney figures, for Audiguier writes as of things contemporary and dedicates his book to Marie de Medicis.

_Cleon ou le Parfait Confidant_ (Paris, 1665), and _Hattige ou Les Amours au Roy de Tamaran_ (Cologne, 1676), the first anonymous, the second written by a certain G. de Brimond, and dedicated to an Englishman of whom we are not specially proud--Harry Jermyn, Earl of St.

Albans--are two very little books, of intrinsic importance and interest not disproportioned to their size. They have, however, a little of both for the student, in reference to the extension of the novel _kind_. For _Cleon_ is rather like a "fictionising" of an inferior play of Moliere's time; and _Hattige_, with its privateering Chevalier de Malte for a hero and its Turkish heroine who coolly remarks "L'infidelite a des charmes,"

might have been better if the author had known how to make it so. Both these books have, as has been said, the merit of shortness. Puget de la Serre's _La Clytie de la Cour_ (2 vols., Paris, 1635) cannot plead even this; for it fills two fat volumes of some 1500 pages. I have sometimes been accused, both in France and in England, of unfairness to Boileau, but I should certainly never quarrel with him for including La Serre (not, however, in respect of this book, I think) among his herd of dunces. Like most of the novels of its time, though it has not much actual _bergerie_ about it, it suggests the _Astree_, but the contrast is glaring. Even among the group, I have seldom read, or attempted to read, anything duller. _Le Melante du Sieur Vidal_ (Paris, 1624), though also somewhat wordy (it has 1000 pages), is much more Astreean, and therefore, perhaps, better. Things do happen in it: among other incidents a lover is introduced into a garden in a barrow of clothes, though he has not Sir John Falstaff's fate. There are fresh laws of love, and discussions of them; a new debate on the old Blonde _v._ Brunette theme, which might be worse, etc. etc. The same year brought forth _Les Chastes Amours d'Armonde_ by a certain Damiron, which, as its t.i.tle may show, belongs rather to the pre-Astreean group (_v. sup._ Vol.

I. p. 157 _note_), and contains a great deal of verse and (by licence of its t.i.tle) a good deal of kissing; but is flatly told, despite not a little _Phebus_. It is a sort of combat of Spiritual and Fleshly Love; and Armonde ends as a kind of irregular anchorite, having previously "spent several days in deliberating the cut of his vestments."

_Les Caprices Heroques_ (Paris, 1644) is a translation, by Chateaunieres de Grenaille, from the Italian of Loredano. It consists of variations on cla.s.sical stories, treated rather in the declamation manner, and ranging in subject from Achilles to "Frine." How many readers (at least among those who read with their eyes only) will affirm on their honour that they identified "Frine" at first reading? In Italian there would, of course, be less hesitation. The book is not precisely a novel, but it has merits as a collection of rhetorical exercises. Of a somewhat similar kind, though even further from the strict novel standard, is the _Diverses Affections de Minerve_ (Paris, 1625) of the above-mentioned Audiguier, where the heroine is _not_ the G.o.ddess, and all sorts of places and personages, mythological, cla.s.sical, historic, and modern, compose a miraculous _macedoine_, Brasidas jostling Gracchus, and Chabrias living in the Faubourg Saint-Martin. This _is_ a sort of story, but the greatest part of the volume as it lies before me is composed of _Lettres Espagnoles_, _Epitres Francaises_, _Libres Discours_, etc.

We can apparently return to the stricter romance, such as it is, with the _Histoire Asiatique_ of the Sieur de Gerzan (Paris, 1633), but it is noteworthy that the t.i.tle-page of this ballasts itself by an "Avec un Traite du Tresor de la Vie Humaine et La Philosophie des Dames." I confess that, as in the case of most of the books here mentioned, I have not read it with the care I bestowed on the _Cyrus_. But I perceive in it ladies who love corsairs, universal medicines, poodles who are sacrificed to save their owners, and other things which may tempt some.

And I can, by at least sampling, rather recommend _Les Travaux du Prince Inconnu_ (Paris, 1633) by the Sieur de Logeas. It calls itself, and its 700 pages, the completion of two earlier performances, the _Roman Historique_ and the _Histoire des Trois Freres Princes de Constantinople_, which have not come in my way. There is, however, probably no cause to regret this, for the author a.s.sures us that his new work is "as far above the two former in beauty as the sun is above the stars." If any light-minded person be disposed to scoff at him for this, let it be added that he has the grace to abstract the whole in the _Avis au Lecteur_ which contains the boast, and to give full chapter-headings, things too often wanting in the group. The hero is named Rosidor, the heroine Floralinde; and they are married with "la rejouissance generale de toute la Chretiente." What can mortals ask for more?

_Polemire ou l'Ill.u.s.tre Polonais_ (Paris, 1647), is dedicated to no less a person than Madame de Montbazon, and contains much piety, a good deal of fighting, and some verse. _L'Amour Aventureux_ (Paris, 1623), by the not unknown Du Verdier, is a book with _Histoires_, and I am not sure that the volume I have seen contains the whole of it. _L'Empire de l'Inconstance_ (Paris, 1635), by the Sieur de Ville, and published "at the entry of the little gallery of Prisoners under the sign of the Vermilion Roses," has a most admirable t.i.tle to start with, and a table of over thirty _Histoires_, a dozen letters, and two "amorous judgments"

at the end. _Les Fortunes Diverses de Chrysomire et de Kalinde_ (Paris, 1635), by a certain Humbert, blazons "love and war" on its very t.i.tle-page, while _Celandre_ (Paris, 1671), a much later book than most of these, has the rather uncommon feature of a single name for t.i.tle.

Thirty or forty years ago I should have taken some pleasure in "cooking"

this batch of mostly early romances into a twenty-page article which, unless it had been unlucky, would have found its way into some magazine or review. Somebody might do so now. But I think it sufficient, and not superfluous, to add this brief sketch here to the notices of similar things in the last volume, in order to show how abundant the crop of French romance--of which even these are only further samples--was at the time.

P. 231, l. 9 from bottom.--_Add_ 's (Herman sla lerman's).

P. 237, _note_ 2, l. 1.--_For_ "revision" _read_ "revisal."

P. 241, 2nd par., last line but two.--_For_ "But" _read_ "Still."