A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 11

[108] In the opening scene she is something worse. If her writing "Gilliatt" in the snow had been a sort of rustic challenge of the "malo me pet.i.t, et fugit ad salices" kind, there might have been something (not much) to say for her. But she did not know Gilliatt; she did not want to know him; and the proceeding was either mere silly childishness, or else one of those pieces of bad taste of which her great creator was unluckily by no means incapable.

[109] I use this adjective in no contumelious sense, and certainly not because I have lived in Guernsey and only visited Jersey. To the impartial denizen of either, the rivalry of the two is as amusing as is that of Edinburgh and Glasgow, of Liverpool and Manchester, or of Bradford and Leeds. But, at any rate at the time of which I am speaking, Jersey was much more haunted by outsiders (in several senses of that word) than Guernsey. Residents--whether for the purposes unblus.h.i.+ngly avowed by that sometime favourite of the stage, Mr. Eccles, or for the reasons less horrifying to the United Kingdom Alliance--found themselves more at home in "Caesarea" than in "Sarnia," and the "five-pounder," as the summer tripper was despiteously called by natives, liked to go as far as he could for his money, and found St. Helier's "livelier" than St. Peter Port.

[110] Really good wines were proportionally cheap; but the little isle was not quite so good at beer, except some remarkable old ale, which one small brewery had ventured on, and which my friends of the 22nd Regiment discovered and (very wisely) drank up.--It may surprise honest fanatics and annoy others to hear that, despite the cheapness and abundance of their bugbear, there was no serious crime of any kind in Guernsey during the six years I knew it, and no disorder worth speaking of, even among sailors and newly arrived troops.

[111] The shape of the island; the position of its only "residential"

town of any size in the middle of one of the coasts, so that the roads spread fan-wise from it; the absence of any large flat s.p.a.ce except in the northern parish of "The Vale"; the geological formation which tends, as in Devons.h.i.+re, to sink the roads into deep and sometimes "water"

lanes; lastly, perhaps, the extreme subdivision of property, which multiplies the ways of communication--these things contribute to this "_pedestrian_-paradise" character. There are many places where, with plenty of good walking "objectives," you can get to none of them without a disgusting repet.i.tion of the same initial grind. In Guernsey, except as regards the sea, which never wearies, there is no such even partial monotony.

[112] It is well known that even among great writers this habit of duplication is often, though very far from always, present. Hugo is specially liable to it. The oddest example I remember is that the approach to the Dutch s.h.i.+p at the end of _L'Homme Qui Rit_ reproduces on the Thames almost exactly the details of the iron gate of the sewers on the Seine, where Thenardier treacherously exposes Valjean to the clutches of Javert, in _Les Miserables_, though of course the use made of it is quite different.

[113] It must be remembered that this also belongs to the Channel Islands division: and the Angel of the Sea has still some part in it.

[114] Those of _Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ have enraged pedants and amused the elect for a century. But I do not remember much notice being taken of that jump of half a millennium and one year more in _The Talisman_, where Count Henry of Champagne "smiles like a sparkling goblet of his own wine." This was in 1192, while the ever-blessed Dom Perignon did not make champagne "sparkle" till 1693. Idolatry may suggest that "sparkling" is a perpetual epithet of wine; but I fear this will not do.

[115] _Subst.i.tue_ means "entailed" in technical French. But I know no instance of this kind of "contingent remainder" in England.

[116] A compound (as Victor himself might suggest) of "Hardyknut" and "Sine qua non"? Or "Hardbake"?

[117] He has been found out through the agency of one "Barkilphedro"

(Barkis-Phaedrus?), an Irishman of familiar sept, who is "Decanter of the Bottles of the Sea," and who finds, in one of his trovers, a derelict gourd of confession thrown overboard by the Comprachicos when wrecked (in another half-volume earlier) all over the Channel from Portland to Alderney.

[118] Perhaps there is no more conspicuous instance of irritating futility in this way than the famous [Greek: anagke] and [Greek: anagneia] of _Notre-Dame_. Of course anybody who knows no Greek can see that the first four letters of the two words are the same. But anybody who knows some Greek knows that the similarity is purely _literal_, such as exists between "Chateaubriand" and "Chat Botte" and that the [Greek: an] has a different origin in the two cases. Moreover, [Greek: anagneia], "uncleanness," is about the last word one would choose to express the _liaison_ of thought--"The dread constraint of physical pa.s.sion" or "l.u.s.t is Fate"--which Hugo wishes to indicate. It is a mere jingle, suggestive of a schoolboy turning over the dictionary.

[119] That the only person at all likely to be "name-father" of this name was not born till a considerable time after his name-child's death would perhaps be worth remarking in another writer. In Hugo it hardly counts.

[120] Let me do even _them_ one justice in this connection. They did not suppose that the only way to make people get up earlier was to make these people's clocks and watches tell lies.

[121] There is a smaller point which might be taken up. Undoubtedly there were many double traitors on both sides in the other Great War.

But, like all their kind, they had a knack for being found out. Dumas would, I think, have given us something satisfactory as to the "aristocrat" at Jersey who betrayed the _Claymore_ to the Revolutionary authorities.

[122] It is impossible, with him, not to think of Baudelaire's great line in _L'Albatros_ (which some may have read even before _Les Travailleurs_)--

"Ses ailes de geant l'empechent de _marcher_,"

though the sense is not absolutely coextensive.

[123] If I have spoken above "so that the Congregation be thereby offended," let me point out that there is no other way of dealing with the subject critically, except perhaps by leaving a page blank save for such words, in the middle of it, as "Victor Hugo is Victor Hugo; and he is for each reader to take or to leave." _He_ would, I think, have rather liked this; _I_ should not, as a person, dislike it; but I fear it might not suit with my duty as a critic and a historian.

CHAPTER IV

BEYLE AND BALZAC

There may possibly be some readers who might prefer that the two novelists whose names head this chapter should be treated each in a chapter to himself. But after trying several plans (for I can a.s.sure such readers that the arrangement of this History has been the reverse of haphazard) I have thought it best to yoke them. That they have more in common with each other, not merely than either has with Hugo or Dumas, or even George Sand, but than either of these three has with the others, few will deny. And as a _practising_ novelist Beyle has hardly substance enough to stand by himself, though as an influence--for a time and that no short one and still existing--scarcely any writer in our whole list has been more efficacious. It is not my purpose, nor, I think, my duty, to say much about their relations to each other; indeed Beyle delayed his novel-work so long, and Balzac codified his own so carefully and so early, that the examination of the question would need to be meticulous, and might even be a little futile in a general history, though it is an interesting subject for a monograph. It is enough to say that, _generally_, both belong to the a.n.a.lytical rather than to the synthetical branch of novel-writing, and may almost be said between them to have introduced the a.n.a.lytical romance; that they compose their palettes of sombre and neutral rather than of brilliant colours; that actual "story interest" is not what they, as a rule,[124]

aim at. Finally--though this may be a proposition likely to be disputed with some heat in one case if not in both--their conception of humanity has a certain "other-worldliness" about it, though it is as far as possible from being what is usually understood by the adjective "unworldly" and though the forms thereof in the two only partially coincide.

[Sidenote: Beyle--his peculiarity.]

Of the books of Henri Beyle, otherwise Stendhal,[125] to say that they are not like anything else will only seem ba.n.a.l to those who bring the ba.n.a.lity with them. To annoy these further by opposing pedantry to ba.n.a.lity, one might say that the aseity is quintessential. There never--to be a man of great power, almost genius, a commanding influence, and something like the founder of a characteristic school of literature--was such a _habitans in sicco_ as Beyle; indeed his substance and his atmosphere are not so much dry as _desiccated_. The dryness is not like that which was attributed in the last volume to Hamilton, which is the dryness of wine: it is almost the dryness of ashes. By bringing some humour of your own[126] you may confection a sort of grim comedy out of parts of his work, but that is all. At the same time, he has an astonis.h.i.+ng command of such reality, and even vitality, as will (one cannot say survive but) remain over the process of desiccation.

That Beyle was not such a pa.s.sionless person as he gave himself out to be in his published works was of course always suspected, and more than suspected, by readers with any knowledge of human nature. It was finally proved by the autobiographic _Vie de Henri Brulard_, and the other remains which were at last given to the world, nearly half a century after the author's death, by M. Casimir Stryienski. But the great part which he played in producing a new kind of novel is properly concerned with the earlier and larger division of the work, though the posthumous stuff reinforces this.

[Sidenote: _Armance._]

Some one, I believe, has said--many people may have said--that you never get a much truer notion, though you may afterwards get a clearer and fuller, of a writer than from his earliest work.[127] _Armance_, Beyle's first published novel,[128] though by no means the one which has received most attention, is certainly illuminating. Or rather, perhaps one should say that it poses the puzzle which Beyle himself put briefly in the words quoted by his editor and biographer: "Qu'ai-j'ete? que suis-je? En verite je serais bien embarra.s.se de le dire." To tell equal truth, it is but a dull book in itself, surcharged with a vague political spite, containing no personage whom we are permitted to like (it would be quite possible to like Armance de Zohiloff if we were only told less _about_ her and allowed to see and hear more _of_ her), and possessing, for a hero, one of the most obnoxious and foolish prigs that I can remember in any novel. Octave de Malivert unites varieties of detestableness in a way which might be interesting if (to speak with only apparent flippancy) it were made so. He is commonplace in his adoration of his mother and his neglect (though his historian calls it "respect") of his father; he is constantly a prig, as when he is shocked at people for paying more attention to him when they hear that his parents are going to be indemnified to a large extent for the thefts of their property at the Revolution; he is such a sneak and such a sn.o.b that he is always eavesdropping to hear what people say about him; such a bounder that he disturbs his neighbours by talking loud at the play; such a brute that he deliberately kills a rather harmless c.o.xcomb of a marquis who rebukes him for making this _tapage_; and such a still greater brute (for in the duel he had himself been wounded) that he throws out of the window an unfortunate lackey who gets in his way at a party where Octave has, as usual, lost his temper. Finally, he is a combination of prig, sneak, cad, brute, and fool when (having picked up and read a forged letter which is not addressed to him, though it has been put by enemies in his way) he believes, without any enquiry, that his unlucky cousin Armance, to whom he is at last engaged, is deceiving him, but marries her all the same, lives with her (she loves him frantically) for a few days, and then, pretending to go to the succour of the Greeks, poisons himself on board s.h.i.+p--rather more, as far as one can make out, in order to annoy her than for any other reason. That there are the elements, and something more than the elements, of a powerful story in this is of course evident; there nearly always are such elements in Beyle, and that is why he has his place here. But, as has been said, the story is almost as dull as it is disagreeable.

Unluckily, too, it is, like most of his other books, pervaded by an unpleasant suggestion that the disagreeableness is intimately connected with the author's own nature. As with Julien Sorel (_v. inf._) so with Octave de Malivert, one feels that, though Beyle would never have behaved exactly like his book-child, that book-child has a great deal too much of the uncanny and semi-diabolical doubles of some occult stories in it--is, in fact, an incarnation of the bad Beyle, the seamy side of Beyle, the creature that Beyle might have been but for the grace of that G.o.d in whom he did not believe. Which things, however one may have schooled oneself not to let book and author interfere with each other, are not comfortable.

It ought, however, to be said that _Armance_ is an early and remarkable Romantic experiment in several ways, not least in the foreign mottoes, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, which are prefixed to the chapters. Unluckily some of them[129] are obviously retranslated from French versions unverified by the originals, and once there is a most curious blunder. Pope's description of Belinda's neck and cross, not quite in the original words but otherwise exact, is attributed to--Schiller!

[Sidenote: _La Chartreuse de Parme._]

I have read, I believe, as much criticism as most men, possibly, indeed, a little more than most, and I ought long ago to have been beyond the reach of shocking, startling, or any other movement of surprise at any critical utterance whatsoever. But I own that an access of _fou rire_ once came upon me when I was told in a printed page that _La Chartreuse de Parme_ was a "very lively and very amusing book." A book of great and peculiar power it most undoubtedly is, a book standing out in the formidable genealogy of "psychological" novels as (_salva reverentia_) certain names stand out from the others in the greater list that opens the first chapter of St. Matthew. But "lively"? and "amusing"? Wondrous hot indeed is this snow, and more l.u.s.trous than any ebony are the clerestories towards the south-north of this structure.

[Sidenote: The Waterloo episode.]

[Sidenote: The subject and general colour.]

To begin with, there rests on the whole book that oppression of _recit_ which has been not unfrequently dwelt upon in the last volume, and sometimes this. Of the 440 pages, tightly printed, of the usual reprint, I should say that two-thirds at least are solid, or merely broken by one or two paragraphs, which are seldom conversational. This, it may be said, is a purely mechanical objection. But it is not so. Although the action is laid in the time contemporary with the writer and writing, from the fall of Napoleon onwards, and in the country (Italy) that he knew best, the whole cast and scheme are historical, the method is that of a lecturer at a panorama, who describes and points while the panorama itself pa.s.ses a long way off behind a screen of clear but thick gla.s.s.

In two or perhaps three mostly minute parts or scenes this description may seem unjust. One, the first, the longest, and the best, is perhaps also the best-known of all Beyle's work: it is the sketch of the _debacle_ after Waterloo. (It is not wonderful that Beyle should know something about retreats, for, though he was not at Waterloo, he had come through the Moscow trial.) This is a really marvellous thing and intensely interesting, though, as is almost always the case with the author, strangely unexciting. The interest is purely intellectual, and is actually increased by comparison with Hugo's imaginative account of the battle itself; but you do not care the snap of a finger whether the hero, Fabrice, gets off or not. Another patch later, where this same Fabrice is attacked by, and after a rough-and-tumble struggle kills, his saltimbanque rival in the affections of a low-cla.s.s actress, and then has a series of escapes from the Austrian police on the banks of the Po, has a little more of the exciting about it. So perhaps for some--I am not sure that it has for me--may have the final, or provisionally final, escape from the Farnese Tower. And there is, even outside of these pa.s.sages, a good deal of scattered incident.

But these interesting plums, such as even they are, are stuck in an enormous pudding of presentation of the intrigues and vicissitudes of a petty Italian court,[130] in which, and in the persons who take part in them, I at least find it difficult to take the very slightest interest.

Fabrice del Dongo himself,[131] with whom every woman falls in love, and who candidly confesses that he does not know whether he has ever been really in love with any woman--though there is one possible exception precedent, his aunt, the d.u.c.h.ess of Sanseverina, and one subsequent, Clelia Conti, who saves him from prison, as above--is depicted with extraordinary science of human nature. But it is a science which, once more, excludes pa.s.sion, humour, gusto--all the _fluids_ of real or fict.i.tious life. Fabrice is like (only "much more also") the simulacra of humanity that were popular in music-halls a few years ago. He walks, talks, fights, eats, drinks, _thinks_ even, and makes love if he does not feel it, exactly like a human being. Except the "fluids" just mentioned, it is impossible to mention anything human that he lacks. But he lacks these, and by not having them lacks everything that moves the reader.

And so it is more or less with all of them: with the d.u.c.h.ess and Clelia least perhaps, but even with them to some extent; with the d.u.c.h.ess's first _cicisbeo_ and then husband, Count Mosca, prime minister of the Duke of Parma; with his master, the feebly cruel and feebly tyrannical Ranuce-Ernest IV.; with the opposition intriguers at court; with the Archbishop, to whom Fabrice is made, by the influence of Count and d.u.c.h.ess, coadjutor and actual successor; with Clelia's father and her very much belated husband--with all of them in short. You cannot say they are "out"; on the contrary they do and say exactly what in the circ.u.mstances they would do and say. Their creator's remarks about them are sometimes of a marvellous subtlety, expressed in a laconism which seems to regard Marivaudage or Meredithese with an aristocratic disdain.

But at other times this laconic letter literally killeth. Perhaps two examples of the two effects should be given:

(_Fabrice has found favour in the eyes and arms of the actress Marietta_)

The love of this pretty Marietta gave Fabrice all the charms of the sweetest friends.h.i.+p. _And this made him think of the happiness of the same kind which he might have found with the d.u.c.h.ess herself._

If this is not "piercing to the accepted h.e.l.ls beneath" with a diamond-pointed plunger, I know not what is.

But much later, quite towards the end of the book, the author has to tell how Fabrice again and Clelia "forgot all but love" in one of their stolen meetings to arrange his escape.

(_He has, by the way, told a lie to make her think he is poisoned_)

She was so beautiful--half-dressed and in a state of extreme pa.s.sion as she was--that Fabrice could not resist an almost involuntary movement. No resistance was opposed.[132]

Now I am not (see _Addenda and Corrigenda_ of the last volume) avid of expatiations of the Laclosian kind. But this is really a little too much of the "Spanish-fleet-taken-and-burnt-as-per-margin" order.

[Sidenote: _L'Abbesse de Castro_, etc.]

Much the same characteristics, but necessarily on a small scale, appear in the short stories usually found under the t.i.tle of the first and longest of them, _L'Abbesse de Castro_. Two of these, _Mina de w.a.n.gel_ and _Le Philtre_, are _historiettes_ of the pa.s.sion which is absent from _La Chartreuse de Parme_; but each is tainted with the _macabre_ touch which Beyle affected or which (for that word is hardly fair) was natural to him. In one a German girl of high rank and great wealth falls in love with a married man, separates him from his wife by a gross deception, lives with him for a time; and when he leaves her on finding out the fraud, blows her brains out. In the other a Spanish lady, seduced and maltreated by a creole circus-rider of the worst character, declares to a more honourable lover her incurable pa.s.sion for the scoundrel and takes the veil. The rest are stories of the Italian Renaissance, grimy and gory as usual. Vittoria Accoramboni herself figures, but there is no evidence that Beyle (although he had some knowledge of English literature[133]) knew at the time our glorious "White Devil," and his story dwells little on her faults and much on the punishment of her murderers. _L'Abbesse de Castro_ itself, _La d.u.c.h.esse de Palliano_, _San Francesco a Ripa_, _Vanina Vanini_ are all of the same type and all full of the gloomier items seen by the Dreamer of Fair Women--