A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 23

[258] But she had to go backwards through the circles between Thermidor and Brumaire, and can hardly be said to have "seen the stars" even then.

Vigny has, as we shall see, touched on the less enormous and flagrant--but as individual things scarcely less atrocious--crimes of the Directory in the first story of his next book.

[259] There might of course have been spy-subordinates (cf. the case of D'Artagnan and Belleisle), with secret commissions to meet and render futile his disobedience; but nothing of the sort is even hinted.

[260] Vigny, with perfect probability, but whether with complete historical accuracy or not I do not know, represents this useless exposure as wanton bravado on Napoleon's part.

[261] There may perhaps have been some private reasons for his enthusiasm. At any rate it is pleasant to compare it with the offensive manner in which this "heroic sailor-soul" and admirably good man has sometimes been treated by the more pedantic kind of naval historian.

CHAPTER VII

THE MINORS OF 1830

There is always a risk (as any one who remembers a somewhat ludicrous outburst of indignation, twenty or thirty years ago, among certain English vers.e.m.e.n will acknowledge) in using the term "minor." But it is too useful to be given up; and in this particular case, if the very greatest novelists are not of the company, there are those whose greatness in other ways, and whose more than mediocrity in this, should appease the admirers of their companions. We shall deal here with the novel work of Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of France; of Eugene Sue, whose mere popularity exceeded that of any other writer discussed in this half of the volume except Dumas; of men like Sandeau, Charles de Bernard, and Murger, whose actual work in prose fiction is not much less than consummate in its own particular key and subdivisions; of one of the best political satirists in French fiction, Louis Reybaud; and of others still, like Soulie, Mery, Achard, Feval, Ourliac, Roger de Beauvoir, Alphonse Karr, emile Souvestre, who, to no small extent individually and to a very great extent when taken in battalion, helped to conquer that supreme reputation for amusingness, for pastime, which the French novel has so long enjoyed throughout Europe. And these will supply not a little material for the survey of the general accomplishment of that novel in the first half of the century, which will form the subject of a "halt" or Interchapter, when Dumas himself--the one "major" left, and left purposely--has been discussed.

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve.--_Volupte._]

When Sainte-Beuve, thirty years after the book first appeared, subjoined a most curious Appendix to his only novel, _Volupte_, he included a letter of his own, in which he confesses that it is "not in the precise sense a novel at all." It is certainly in some respects an outlier, even of the outlying group to which it belongs--the group of _Rene_ and _Adolphe_ and their followers.

[Sidenote: Its "puff-book."]

I do not remember anything, even in a wide sense, quite like this Appendix--at least in the work of an author _majorum gentium_. It consists of a series of extracts, connected by remarks of Sainte-Beuve's own, from the "puff"-letters which distinguished people had sent him, in recompense for the copies of the book which he had sent _them_. Most people who write have had such letters, and "every fellow likes a hand."

The persons who enjoy being biographied expect them, I suppose, to be published after their deaths; and I have known, I think, some writers of "Reminiscences" who did it themselves in their lifetimes. But it certainly is funny to find the acknowledged "first critic" in the Europe or the world of his day paralleling from private sources the collections which are (quite excusably) added as advertis.e.m.e.nts from published criticisms to later editions of a book. Intrinsically the things, no doubt, have interest. Chateaubriand, whose _Rene_ is effusively praised in the novel, opens with an equally effusive but rather brief letter of thanks, not dest.i.tute of the apparent artificiality which, for all his genius, distinguished that "n.o.ble _Why_count," and perhaps, for all its "b.u.t.ter," partly responsible for the _aigre-doux_ fas.h.i.+on in which the prais_ee_ subsequently treated the prais_er_. Michelet, Villemain, and Nisard are equally favourable, and perhaps a little more sincere, though Nisard (of course) is in trouble about Sainte-Beuve's divagations from the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Brizeux applauds in prose _and_ verse. Madame de Castries (Balzac's "d.u.c.h.esse de Langeais"), afterwards an intimate personal friend of the critic's, acknowledges, in an anonymous letter, her "profound emotion." Lesser, but not least, people like Magnin join. Eugenie de Guerin bribes her future eulogist. Madame Desbordes-Valmore, _the_ French poetess of the day, is enthusiastic as to the book: and George Sand herself writes a good half-dozen small-printed and exuberant pages, in which the only (but repeated) complaint is that Sainte-Beuve actually makes his hero find comfort in Christianity. Neither Lamartine (as we might have expected) nor Lamennais (whose disciple Sainte-Beuve had tried to be) liked it; but Lacordaire did not disapprove.

[Sidenote: Itself.]

Before saying anything more about it, let us give a brief argument of it--a thing which it requires more (for reasons to be given later) than most books, whether "precisely" novels or not. It is the autobiographic history of a certain "Amaury" (whose surname, I think, we never hear), addressed as a caution to a younger friend, no name of whom we ever hear at all. The friend is too much addicted to the pleasures of sense, and Amaury gives him his own experience of a similar tendency. Despite the subject and the t.i.tle, there is nothing in the least "scabrous" in it.

Lacordaire himself, it seems, gave it a "vu et approuve" as being something that a seminarist or even a priest (which Amaury finishes, to the great annoyance of George Sand, as being) might have composed for edifying purposes. But the whole is written to show the truth of a quatrain of the Judicious Poet:

The wise have held that joys of sense, The more their pleasure is intense, More certainly demand again Usurious interest of pain;

though the moral is enforced in rather a curious manner. Amaury is the only, and orphan, representative of a good Norman or Breton family, who has been brought up by an uncle, and arrives at adolescence just at the time of the Peace of Amiens or thereabouts. He has escaped the heathendom which reigned over France a decade previously, and is also a good Royalist, but very much "left to himself" in other ways.

Inevitably, he falls in love, though at first half-ignorant of what he is doing or what is being done to him. The first object is a girl, Amelie de Liniers, in every way desirable in herself, but unluckily not enough desired by him. He is insensibly divided from her by acquaintance with the chief royalist family of the district, the Marquis and Marquise de Couaen, with the latter of whom he falls again in much deeper love, though never to any guilty extent. She, who is represented as the real "Elle," is again superseded, at least partially, by a "Madame R.," who is a much less immaculate person, though the precise extent of the indulgence of their affections is left veiled. But, meanwhile, Amaury's tendency towards "Volupte" has, after his first visit to Paris, led him to indulge in the wors.h.i.+p of Venus Pandemos, _parallelement_ with his more exalted pa.s.sions. No individual object or incident is mentioned in any detail; and the pa.s.sages relating to this side of the matter are so obscurely phrased that a very innocent person might--without stupidity quite equal to the innocence--be rather uncertain what is meant. But the twin ravages--of more or less pure pa.s.sion unsatisfied and wholly impure satisfied appet.i.te--ruin the patient's peace of mind. Alongside of this conflict there is a certain political interest. The Marquis de Couaen is a fervent Royalist, and so willing to be a conspirator that he actually gets arrested. But he is an ineffectual kind of person, though in no sense a coward or a fool. Amaury meets with a much greater example of "Thorough" in Georges Cadoudal, and only just escapes being entangled in the plot which resulted in the execution[262] of Cadoudal himself; the possible suicide but probable murder[262] of Pichegru, if not of others; the kidnapping and unquestionable murder[262] of the Duc d'Enghien, and the collapse of the career of Moreau. Some other real persons are brought in, though in an indirect fas.h.i.+on. Finally, the conflict of flesh and spirit and the general tumult of feeling are too much for Amaury, and he takes refuge, through the seminary, in the priesthood.

The last event of the book is the death and burial of Madame de Couaen, her husband and Amaury somewhat melodramatically--and perhaps with a slight suggestion both of awkward allegory and possible burlesque--hammering literal nails into her coffin, one on each side.

In addition to the element of pa.s.sion (both "pa.s.sion_ate_" in the English and "pa.s.sion_nel_" in the French sense) and that of politics, there is a good deal of more abstract theology and philosophy, chiefly of the mixed kind, as represented in various authors from Pascal--indeed from the Fathers--to Saint-Martin.[263]

[Sidenote: Its character in various aspects.]

Now the book (which is undoubtedly a very remarkable one, whether it does or does not deserve that other epithet which I have seen denied to it, of "interesting") may be regarded in two ways. The first--as a doc.u.ment in regard to its author--is one which we have seldom taken in this _History_, and which the present historian avoids taking as often as he can. Here, however, it may be contended (and discussion under the next head will strengthen the contention) that it is almost impossible to do the book justice, and not very easy even to understand it, without some consideration of the sort. When Sainte-Beuve published it, he had run up, or down, a rather curious gamut of creeds and crazes. He had been a fervent Romantic. He had (for whatever mixture of reasons need not be entered into here) exchanged this first faith, wholly or partially, for that singular _un_faith of Saint-Simonianism, which, if we had not seen other things like it since and at the present day, would seem incredible as even a hallucination of good wits. He had left this again to endeavour to be a disciple of Lamennais, and had, not surprisingly, failed. He was now to set himself to the strange Herculean task of his _Port-Royal_, which had effects upon him, perhaps stranger at first sight than on reflection. It left him, after these vicissitudes and pretty certainly some accompanying experiences adumbrated in _Volupte_ itself, "L'oncle Beuve" of his later a.s.sociates--a free-thinker, though not a violent one, in religion; a critic, never perhaps purely literary, but, as concerns literature and life combined, of extraordinary range, sanity, and insight; yet sometimes singularly stunted and limited in respect of the greatest things, and--one has to say it, though there is no need to stir the mud as it has been stirred[264]

--something of a "porker of Epicurus."

Now, with such additional light as this sketch may furnish, let us return to the book itself. I have said that it has been p.r.o.nounced "uninteresting," and it must be confessed that, in some ways, the author has done all he could to make it so. In the first place it is much too long; he has neglected the examples of _Rene_ and _Adolphe_, and given nearly four hundred solid and closely packed pages to a story with very little incident, very little description, only one solidly presented character, and practically no conversation. There is hardly a novel known to me from which the disadvantages of some more or less mechanical fault of presentation--often noticed in this _History_--could be better ill.u.s.trated than from _Volupte_. I have called the pages "solid," and they are so in more than the general, more even than the technical printer's sense. One might imagine that the author had laid a wager that he would use the smallest number of paragraph-breaks possible.

There are none at all till page 6 (the fourth of the actual book); blocks of the same kind occur constantly afterwards, and more than one, or at most two, "new pars" are very rare indeed on a page. Even such conversation as there is is not extracted from the matrix of narrative, and the whole is unbroken _recit_.

It may seem that there is, and has been elsewhere, too much stress laid upon this point. But if I, who am something of a _h.e.l.luo librorum_, and very seldom find anything that resists my devouring faculty, feel this difficulty, how much more must persons who require to be tempted and baited on by mechanical and formal allurements?

Still, some strong-minded person may say: "These are 'shallows and miseries'--base mechanical considerations. Tell me _why_ the book, as matter, has been found uninteresting." In this instance there will be no difficulty in complying with the request. Let me at once say that I do not consider it uninteresting myself; that, in fact (and stronger testimony is hardly possible), after reading great part of it without appet.i.te and "against the grain," I began to take a very considerable interest in it. But this did not prevent my having a pretty clear notion of what seem to me faults of treatment, and even of conception, quite independent of those already mentioned.

The main one is somewhat "tickle of the sere" to handle. It has been said that, despite its alarming t.i.tle, there is nothing in the book that even prudery, unless it were of the most irritable and morbid kind, could object to. There is no dwelling on what Defoe ingeniously calls "the vicious part" of the matter; there is no description of it closer than, if as close as, some pa.s.sages of the Book of Proverbs (which are actually quoted), and, above all, there is no hint of any satisfaction whatever being derived from the sins by the sinner. His course in this respect might have been a succession of fits of vertigo or epilepsy as far as pleasure goes. There is even a rather fine piece of real psychology as to his state of mind after his first succ.u.mbing to temptation. But all this abstinence and reticence, however laudable in a sense it may be, necessarily deprives the pa.s.sages of anything but purely psychological interest, and leaves most of them not much of that.

Luxury _in vacuo_ may, no doubt, be perilous to the culprit; but it has, for others, nearly as much of the unreal and chimerical as Gluttony confined to "Second intentions."

Yet there is another objection to _Volupte_ which is even more closely "psychological," and which has been indicated in the word "parallelement," suggested by, though largely transposed from, Verlaine's use thereof in a t.i.tle. There is no connection established--there is even, it may seem, a great gulf fixed between Amaury's actual "loves" for Amelie de Liniers, for Lucy de Couaen, and even for the more questionable Madame R., and those "sippings of the lower draught" which are so industriously veiled. If Amaury had "disdamaged" himself, for his inability to possess any of his real and superior loves, by lower indulgences, it would have been discreditable but human. But there is certainly no expression--there is, unless I mistake, hardly any suggestion--of anything of the kind. The currents of spiritual and animal pa.s.sion seem to have run independently of each other, like ca.n.a.ls at different heights on the slope of a hill. I do not know that this is less discreditable; but it seems to me infinitely less human. And, while carefully abstaining from any attempt to connect the peculiarity with the above-mentioned scandals about Sainte-Beuve's life and conversation in detail, one may suggest that it offers some explanation of the unquestioned facts about this; also (and this is of infinitely more importance) of that absence of ability to love literature in anything like a pa.s.sionate way, which, with a certain other inability to love literature for itself, prevents him from attaining the absolutely highest level in criticism, though his command of ranges just below the highest is wider and firmer than that of any other critic on record.

[Sidenote: Jules Sandeau and Charles de Bernard.]

We may next take, to some extent together, two writers of the novel who made their reputation in the July Monarchy, though one of them long outlived it; who, though this one inclined to a sort of domestic tragedy and the other to pure comedy, resembled each other not a little in clinging to ordinary life, and my estimate of whom is considerably higher than that recently (or, I think, at present) entertained by French critics or by those English critics who think it right to be guided by their French _confreres_. This estimate, however, has been given at length in another place,[265] and I quite admit that the subjects, though I have not in the least lowered my opinion of them, can hardly be said (like Gautier, Merimee, Balzac, and Dumas, in the present part of this volume, or others later) to demand, in a general History, very large s.p.a.ce in dealing with them. I shall therefore endeavour to summarise my corrected impressions more briefly than in those other cases. This shortening may, I think, be justified doubly: in the first place, because any one who is enough of a student to want more can go to the other handling; and, in the second, because the only excellent way, of reading the books themselves, may be adopted with very unusual absence of any danger of disappointment. I hardly know any work of either Jules Sandeau or of Charles de Bernard which is not worth reading by persons of fairly catholic tastes in novel pastime.

The first-named--the younger by some half-dozen years, but the first to publish by more than as many--concerns those who take a merely or mainly anecdotic interest in literature by his well-known _liaison_ with George Sand--to whom he gave _dimidium nominis_, and perhaps for a time at least _dimidium cordis_, though he probably did not get it back so much "in a worse estate"[266] as was the case with Musset and Chopin.

Sandeau's collaboration with her in novel-writing was long afterwards succeeded by another in dramaturgy with emile Augier, which resulted in at least one of the most famous French plays of the nineteenth century, _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, based on Sandeau's _Sacs et Parchemins_. But we need busy ourselves only with the novels themselves.

[Sidenote: Sandeau's work.]

Sandeau was barely twenty when he wrote _Rose et Blanche_, during the time of, and with his partner in, that most dangerous of all possible _liaisons_. But he was nearly thirty when he produced his own first work of note, _Marianna_. In this, in _Fernand_, and in _Valcreuse_, all books above the average in merit, there is what may be called, from no mere Grundyite point of view, the drawback that they are all studies of "the triangle." They are quite decently, and in fact morally, though not goodily, handled. But it certainly may be objected that trigonometry[267] of this kind occupies an exorbitant place in French literature, and one may be a little sorry to see a neophyte of talent taking to it. However, though Sandeau in these books showed his ability, his way did not really lie _in_, though it might lie _through_, them. He had, indeed, as a novelist should have, good changes of strings to his bow, if not even more than one or two bows to shoot in.

No Frenchman has written a better boy's book than _La Roche aux Mouettes_, deservedly well known to English readers in translation: and whether he did or did not enter into designed compet.i.tion with his _quondam_ companion on the theme of Pastoral _berquinade_, I do not myself think that _Catherine_ is much below _La Pet.i.te Fadette_ or _La Mare au Diable_. He was a very considerable master of the short story; you cannot have much better things of the kind than _Le Jour sans Lendemain_ and _Un Debut dans la Magistrature_. But his special gift lay in treating two situations which sometimes met, or crossed, or even substantially coincided. The one was the contrast of new and old, whether from the side of actual "money-bags and archives" or from others. The second and higher development of, or alternative to, this was the working out of the subdued tragical, in which, short of the very great masters, he had few superiors, while the quietness of his tones and values even, enhances to some tastes the poignancy of the general effect. _Mlle. de La Seigliere_ is, I suppose, the best representative of the first cla.s.s as a novel, for _Sacs et Parchemins_, as has been said, waited for dramatisation to bring out its merits. The pearls or pinks of the other are _Mlle. de Kerouare_ and _La Maison de Penarvan_, the latter the general favourite, the former mine. Both have admirably managed _peripeteias_, the shorter story (_Mlle. de Kerouare_) having, in particular, a memorable setting of that inexorable irony of Fate against which not only is there no armour, but not even the chance and consolement of fighting armourless. When Marie de Kerouare accepts, at her father's wish, a suitor suitable in every way, but somewhat undemonstrative; when she falls in love (or thinks she does) with a handsome young cousin; when the other aspirant loses or risks all his fortune as a Royalist, and she will not accept what she might have, his retirement, thereby eliciting from her father a _mot_ like the best of Corneille's;[268] when, having written to a cousin excusing herself, she gets a mocking letter telling her that _he_ is married already; when the remorseless turn of Fortune's wheel loses her the real lover whom she at last really does love--then it is not mere sentimental-Romantic twaddle; it is a slice of life, soaked in the wine of Romantic tragedy.[269]

[Sidenote: Bernard's]

In Charles de Bernard (or, if anybody is unable to read novels published under a pseudonym with sufficient comfort, Charles Bernard du Grail de la Villette[270]) one need not look for high pa.s.sions and great actions of this kind. He does try tragedy sometimes,[271] but, as has been already admitted, it is not his trade. Occasionally, as in _Gerfaut_, he takes the "triangle" rather seriously _a la_ George-Sand-and-the-rest-of-them. The satirists have said that, though not invariably (our present author contains cautions on that point) yet as a rule, if you take yourself with sufficient seriousness, mankind will follow suit. It is certainly very risky to appear to take yourself not seriously. _Gerfaut_, I believe, is generally held to be Bernard's masterpiece. I remember that even my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, who seldom differed with me on points of pure literature, almost gravely remonstrated with me for not thinking enough of it. There are admirable things in _Gerfaut_; but they are, as it seems to me, _separately_ admirable, and so are more like grouped short stories than like a whole long novel. He wrote other books of substance, two of them, _Un Beau-pere_ and _Le Gentilhomme Campagnard_, each extending to a brace of well-filled volumes. But these, as well as the single-volume but still substantial _Un Homme Serieux_ and _Les Ailes d'Icare_, like _Gerfaut_ itself, could all, I think, be split up into shorter stories without difficulty and with advantage. It is of course very likely that the comparative slighting which the author has received from M. Brunetiere and other French critics of the more theoretic kind is due to this. The strict rule-system no doubt disapproves of the mere concatenation of scenes--still more of the mere acc.u.mulation of them.

We, on the other hand, _quibus est nihil negatum_, or who at any rate deny nothing to our favourite authors so long as they amuse or interest us, ought to be--and some of the best as well as the not-best of us have been--very fond of Charles de Bernard. How frankly and freely Thackeray praised, translated, and adapted him ought to be known to everybody; and indeed there was a great similarity between the two. The Frenchman had nothing of Thackeray's strength--of his power of creating character; of his intensity when he cared to be intense; of his satiric sweep and "stoop"; of his s.p.a.cious view and masterly grasp of life. But in some ways he was a kind of Thackeray several degrees underproof--a small-beer Thackeray that was a very excellent creature. In his grasp of a pure and simple comic situation; in his faculty of carrying this out decently to its appropriate end; and, above all, in the admirable quality of his conversation, he was really a not so very minor edition of his great English contemporary. Almost the only non-technical fault that can be found with him--and it has been found by French as well as English critics, so there is no room for dismissing the charge as due to a merely insular cult of "good form"--is the extreme unscrupulousness of some of his heroes, who appear to have no sense of honour at all. Yet, in other ways, no French novelist of the century has obtained or deserved more credit for drawing ladies and gentlemen. It has been hinted that the inability to do this has been brought as a charge against even the mighty Honore,[272] and that, here at any rate, it has been found impossible to deny it absolutely. But if the company of the Human Comedy falls short in this respect, it is not because some of its members do "shady" things. It is because the indefinable, but to those who can perceive it unmistakable, _aura_ of "gentility"--in the true and not the debased sense--is, at best, questionably present. This is not the case with Bernard.

It is particularly difficult, in such a book as this, to deal with so large a collection of what may be most appropriately called "Scenes and Characters" as that which const.i.tutes his most valuable if not all his valuable work. In the older handling referred to, I selected, for pretty full abstract and some translation, _Un Homme Serieux_ among longer books, and _Le Gendre_ among the short stories; and I still think them the best, except _Le Pied d'Argile_, which, from Thackeray's incomparable adaptation[273] of it in _The Bedford Row Conspiracy_, remains as a standing possibility of acquaintance with Charles de Bernard's way for those who do not read French, or do not care to "research" for the original. Thackeray also gave a good deal of _Les Ailes d'Icare_ in abstract and translation, and he borrowed something more from it in _A Shabby Genteel Story_. _La Peau du Lion_ and _La Cha.s.se aux Amants_ have some slight resemblance to _Le Gendre_, in that the gist of all three is concerned with the defeat of unscrupulous lovers, and neither is much inferior to it. I never knew anybody who had read _La Femme de Quarante Ans_ and its history of sentimental star-gazing _a deux_ without huge enjoyment; and _L'Arbre de la Science_, as well as the shorter _Un Acte de Vertu_, deserve special mention.

But, in fact, take the volumes ent.i.tled _L'ecueil_, _Le Noeud Gordien_, _Le Paravent,_ and _Le Paratonnerre_; open any of them where you like, and it will go hard but, in the comic stories at any rate, you will find yourself well off. The finest of the tragic ones is, I think, _L'Anneau d'Argent_, which in utilising the sad inefficacy of the Legitimist endeavours to upset the July Monarchy, comes close to the already-mentioned things of Sandeau and Ourliac.

That a critic like M. Brunetiere should dismiss Bernard as "commonplace"

(I forget the exact French word, but the meaning was either this or "mediocre"), extending something the same condemnation, or d.a.m.ningly faint praise, to Sandeau, may seem strange at first sight, but explains itself pretty quickly to those who have the requisite knowledge. Neither could, by any reasonable person, be accused of that _grossierete_ which offended the censor so much, and to no small extent so rightly. Neither was extravagantly unacademic or in other ways unorthodox. But both might be called _vulgaire_ from the same point of view which made Madame de Stael so call her greatest contemporary as a she-novelist--one, too, so much greater than herself.[274] That is to say, they did deal with strictly ordinary life, and neither attempted that close psychological a.n.a.lysis and ambitious _schematism_ which (we have been told) is the pride of the French novel, and which, certainly, some French critics have supposed to be of its essence. These points of view I have left undiscussed for the most part, but have consistently in practice declined to take, in the first volume, while they are definitely opposed and combated in more than one pa.s.sage of this.[275] I admit that Sandeau, save in the one situation where I think he comes near to the first cla.s.s--that of subdued resignation to calamity--is not pa.s.sionate; I admit that Bernard has a certain superficiality, and that, as has been confessed already, his "form" sometimes leaves to desire. But they both seem to me to have, in whatever measure and degree, what, with me, is the article of standing or falling in novels--humanity. And they seem--also to me, and speaking under correction--to _write_, if not consummately, far more than moderately well, and to _tell_ in a fas.h.i.+on for which consummate is not too strong a word. While for pure gaiety, unsmirched by coa.r.s.eness and unspoilt by ill-nature, you will not find much better pastime anywhere than in the work of the author of _L'ecueil_ and _Le Paratonnerre_.

Indeed these two--though the _berquinade_ tendency, considerably _masculated_, prevails in one, and the _esprit gaulois_, decorously draped, in the other--seem to me to run together better than any two other novelists of our company. They do not attempt elaborate a.n.a.lysis; they do not grapple with th.o.r.n.y or grimy problems; they are not purveyors of the indecent, or dealers in the supernatural and fantastic, or poignant satirists of society at large or individuals in particular.

But they can both, in their different ways, tell a plain tale uncommonly well, and season it with wit or pathos when either is suitable. Their men and women are real men and women, and the stages on which they move are not _mere_ stages, but pieces of real earth.

[Sidenote: Sue, Soulie, and the novel of melodrama--_Le Juif Errant_, etc.]

As regards one formerly almost famous and still well-known novelist, Eugene Sue, I am afraid I shall be an unprofitable servant to such masters in the guise of readers as desire to hear about him. For he is one more of those--I do not think I have had or shall have to confess to many--whom I have found it almost impossible to read. I acknowledge, indeed, that though at the first reading (I do not know how many years ago) of his most famous work, _Le Juif Errant_, I found no merit in it at all, at a second, though I do not think that even then I quite got through it, I had to allow a certain grandiosity. _The Mysteries of Paris_ has always defeated me, and I am now content to enjoy Thackeray's very admirable _precis_ of part of it. Out of pure goodness and sheer equity I endeavoured, for the present volume, to make myself acquainted with one of his later books--the immense _Sept Peches Capitaux_, which is said to be a Fourierist novel, and explains how the vices may be induced, in a sort of Mandeville-made-amiable fas.h.i.+on, to promote the good of society. I found it what Mrs. Browning has made somebody p.r.o.nounce Fourier himself in _Aurora Leigh_, "Naught!"[276] except that I left them at the end actually committing an Eighth deadly sin by drinking _iced_ Constantia![277] Sue, who had been an army surgeon and had served during the Napoleonic war, both on land and at sea, wrote, before he took to his great melodramas, some rather extravagant naval novels, which are simply rubbish compared with Marryat, but in themselves not quite, I think, so difficult to read as his better known work. I remember one in particular, but I am not certain whether it was _La Coucaratcha_ or _La Vigie de Koatven_. They are both very nice t.i.tles, and I am so much afraid of disillusionment that I have thought it better to look neither up for this occasion.[278]

[Sidenote: Melodramatic fiction generally.]

The fact is, as it seems to me, that the proper place for melodrama is not the study but the stage. I fear I have uttered some heresies about the theatre in this book, and I should not be sorry if I never pa.s.sed through its doors again. If I must, I had rather the entertainment were melodrama than anything else. The better the play is as literature, the more I wish that I might be left to read it in comfort and see it acted with my mind's eye only. But I can rejoice in the valiant curate when (with the aid of an avalanche, if I remember rightly) he triumphs over the wicked baronet, who is treading on the fingers of the heroine as she hangs over the precipice. I can laugh and applaud when the heroic mother slashes her daughter's surrept.i.tious portrait in full Academy.

The object of melodrama is to make men rejoice and laugh; but it seems to me to require the stage to do it on, or at any rate to receive an immense a.s.sistance from theatrical presentation. So given, it escapes the curse of _segnius irritant_, because it attacks both ear and eye; being entirely independent of style (which _is_ in such cases actually _genant_), it does not need the quiet and solitary devotion which enjoyment of style demands; and it is immensely improved by dresses and _decor_, scenery and music, and "spectacle" generally--all things which, again, interfere with pure literary enjoyment. I shall hope to have demonstrated, or at any rate done something to show, how Dumas, when at his best, and even not quite at his best, escapes the actual melodramatic. Perhaps this was because he had purged himself of the stagy element in his abundant theatric exercise earlier. Sue, of course, dramatised or got dramatised a considerable part of his many inventions; but I think one can see that they were not originally stage-stuff.