A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 34

[Sidenote: _La Morte._]

In _La Morte_, on the other hand, the power is even greater--in fact it is the most powerful book of its author, and one of the most powerful of the later nineteenth century. But there is in it a reversion to the "purpose" heresy; and while it is an infinitely finer novel than the _Histoire de Sibylle_, it is injured, though not quite fatally, by the weapon it wields. One of the heroines, Sabine, niece and pupil of an Agnostic _savant_, deliberately poisons the other, Aliette, that she may marry Aliette's husband. But the Agnostic teaching extends itself soon from the Sixth Commandment to the Seventh, and M. de Vaudricourt, who, though not ceasing to love Aliette, and having no idea of the murder, has been ensnared into second marriage by Sabine, discovers, at almost the same time, that his wife is a murderess and a strumpet. She is also (one was going to say) something worse, a daughter of the horse-leech for wealth and pleasure and position. Now you _may_ be an Agnostic and a murderess and a strumpet and a female sn.o.b all at once: but no anti-Agnostic, who is a critic likewise, will say that the second, third, and fourth characteristics necessarily, and all together, follow from Agnosticism. It may remove some bars in their way; but I can frankly admit that I do not think it need definitely superinduce them, or that it is altogether fair to acc.u.mulate the _post hocs_ with their inevitable suggestion of _propter_.

However, "Purpose" here is simply at its old tricks, and I have known it do worse things than caution people against Agnostics' nieces.

[Sidenote: Misters the a.s.sa.s.sins.]

On the other hand, the vigour, the variety, and (where the purpose does not get too much the upper hand) the satiric skill are very nearly first-rate. And, with the cautions and admissions just given, there is not a little in the purpose itself, with which one may be permitted to sympathise. After all "misters the a.s.sa.s.sins" were being allowed very generous "law," and it was time for other people to "begin." As for Feuillet's opposition to the "modern spirit," which was early denounced, it is not necessary--even for any one who knows that this modern spirit is only an old enemy with a new face, or who, when he sees the statement that "Nothing is ever going anywhere to be the same," chuckles, and, remembering all history to the present minute, mutters, "Everything always has been, is, and always will be the same"--to call in these knowledges of his to the rescue of Feuillet's position as a novelist.

That position is made sure, and would have been made sure if he had been as much of a Naturalist as he was the reverse, by his power of constructing interesting stories; of drawing, if not absolutely perfect, pa.s.sable and probable characters; of throwing in novel-accessories with judgment; and of giving, by dint of manners and talk and other things necessary, vivid and true portrayals of the society and life of his time.

[Sidenote: Alphonse Daudet and his curious position.]

[Sidenote: His "personality."]

Perhaps there is no novelist in French literature--or, indeed, in any other--who, during his lifetime, occupied such a curiously "mixed"

position as Alphonse Daudet.[415] No contemporary of his obtained wider general popularity, without a touch of irregular bait or of appeal to popular silliness in it, than he did with _Le Pet.i.t Chose_, with the charming bundle of pieces called _Lettres de Mon Moulin_, and later with the world-delighting burlesque of _Tartarin de Tarascon_. _Jack_ and _Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine_ contained more serious advances, which were, however, acknowledged as effective by a very large number of readers. But he became more and more personally a.s.sociated with the Naturalist group of Zola and Edmond de Goncourt; and though he never was actually "grimy," he had, from a quite early period, when he was secretary or clerk to the Duc de Morny, adopted, and more and more strenuously persisted in, a kind of "personal" novel-writing, which might be regarded as tainted with the general Naturalist principle that nothing is _tacendum_--that private individuality may be made public use of, to almost any extent. Of course a certain licence in this respect has always been allowed to novelists. In the eighteenth century English writers of fiction had very little scruple in using and abusing that licence, and French, though with the fear of the arbitrary justice or injustice of their time and country before them, had almost less. As the nineteenth went on, the practice by no means disappeared on either side of the Channel. With us Mr. Disraeli indulged in it largely, and even Thackeray, though he condemned it in others, and was furious when it was exercised on himself, in journalism if not in fiction, pretty notoriously fell into it now and then. As to d.i.c.kens, one need not go beyond the too notorious instance of Skimpole. Quite a considerable proportion of Balzac's company are known to have been Balzacified from the life; of George Sand's practice it is unnecessary to say more.

[Sidenote: His books from this point of view and others.]

But none of these is so saturated with personality as Daudet; and while some of his "gentle" readers seem not to care much about this, even if they do not share the partiality of the vulgar herd for it, it disgusts others not a little. Morny was not an estimable public or private character, though if he had been a "people's man" not much fault would probably have been found with him. I daresay Daudet, when in his service, was not overpaid, or treated with any particular private confidence. But still I doubt whether any gentleman could have written _Le Nabab_. The last Bourbon King of Naples was not hedged with much divinity; but it is hardly a question, with some, that his _decheance_, not less than that of his n.o.bler spouse, should have protected them from the catch-penny vulgarity of _Les Rois en Exil_. Gambetta was not the worst of demagogues; there was something in him of Danton, and one might find more recent a.n.a.logies without confining the researches to France.

But even if his weaknesses gave a handle, which his merits could not save from the grasp of the vulgariser, _Numa Roumestan_ bore the style of a vulture who stoops upon recent corpses, not that of a dispa.s.sionate investigator of an interesting character made accessible by length of time. _L'evangeliste_ had at least the excuse that the Salvation Army was fair game; and that, if there was personal satire, it was not necessarily obvious--a palliation which (not to mention another for a moment) extends to _Sapho_. But _L'Immortel_ revived--unfortunately, as a sort of last word--the ugliness of this besetting sin of Daudet's.

Even the saner members of Academies would probably scout the idea of their being sacrosanct and immune from criticism. But _L'Immortel_, despite its author's cleverness, is once more an essentially vulgar book, and a vulturine or ghoulish one--fixing on the wounds and the bruises and the putrefying sores of its subject--dragging out of his grave, for posthumous crucifixion, a harmless enough pedant of not very old time; and throwing dirty missiles at living magnates. It is one of the books--unfortunately not its author's only contribution to the list--which leave a bad taste in the mouth, a "flavour of poisonous bra.s.s and metal sick."

[Sidenote: His "plagiarisms."]

Of another charge brought against Daudet I should make much shorter work; and, without absolutely clearing him of it, dismiss it as, though not unfounded, comparatively unimportant. It is that of plagiarism--plagiarism not from any French writer, but from d.i.c.kens and Thackeray. As to the last, one scene in _Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine_ simply _must_ be "lifted" from the famous culmination of _Vanity Fair_, when Rawdon Crawley returns from prison and catches Lord Steyne with his wife. But, beyond registering the fact, I do not know that we need do much more with it. In regard to d.i.c.kens, the resemblance is more pervading, but more problematical. "Boz" had been earlier, and has been always, popular in France. _L'excentricite anglaise_ warranted, if it did not quite make intelligible, his extravaganza; his semi-republican sentimentalism suited one side of the French temperament, etc. etc.

Moreover, Daudet had actually, in his own youth, pa.s.sed through experiences not entirely unlike those of David Copperfield and Charles d.i.c.kens himself, while perhaps the records of the elder novelist were not unknown to the younger. In judging men of letters as shown in their works, however, a sort of "_cadi_-justice"--a counter-valuation of merits and faults--is allowable. I cannot forgive Daudet his inveterate personality: I can bid him sit down quickly and write off his plagiarism--or most of it--without feeling the withers of my judicial conscience in the very least wrung. For if he did not, as others have done, make what he stole entirely his own, he had, _of_ his own, very considerable property in rather unusually various kinds.

[Sidenote: His merits.]

The charm of his short Tales, whether in the _Lettres de Mon Moulin_ or in collections a.s.suming the definite t.i.tle, is undeniable. The satiric-pathetic--a not very common and very difficult kind--has few better representatives than _La Chevre de M. Seguin_, and the purely comic stories are thoroughly "rejoicing." _Tartarin_, in his original appearances, "touches the spot," "carries off all the point" in a manner suggestive at once of Horace and h.o.m.ocea; and though, as was almost inevitable, its sequels are less effective, one would have been very glad indeed of them if they had had no forerunner. In almost all the books--_Robert Helmont_, by the way, though not yet mentioned, has some strong partisans--the grip of actual modern society, which is the boast of the later, as opposed to the earlier, nineteenth-century novel, cannot be missed. Even those who are most disgusted by the personalities cannot deny the power of the satiric presentation from _Le Nabab_ to _Numa Roumestan_. _Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine_ is, quite independently of the definite borrowing from us, more like an English novel, in some respects, than almost any other French one known to me up to its date; and I have found persons, not in the least sentimentalists and very widely read in novels both English and French, who were absolutely enthusiastic about _Jack_.

_L'evangeliste_ is perhaps the nearest approach to a failure, the atmosphere being too alien from anything French to be favourable to the development of a good story, and perhaps the very subject being unsuited to anything, either English or French, but an episode. In more congenial matter, as in the remark in _Numa Roumestan_ as to the peculiar kind of unholy pleasure which a man may enjoy when he sees his wife and his mistress kissing each other, Daudet sometimes showed cynic ac.u.men nearer to La Rochefoucauld than to Laclos, and worthy of Beyle at his very best. And I have no shame in avowing real admiration for _Sapho_. It does not by any means confound itself with the numerous studies of the infatuation of strange women which French fiction contains; and it is almost a sufficient tribute to its power to say that it does not, as almost all the rest do, at once serve itself heir to, and enter into hopeless compet.i.tion with, _Manon Lescaut_. Nor is the heroine in the least like either Marguerite Gautier or Iza Clemenceau, while the comparison with Nana, whose cla.s.s she also shares, vindicates her individuality most importantly of all these trials. She seems to me Daudet's best single figure: though the book is of too specialised a kind to be called exactly his best book.

He never had strong health, and broke down early, so that his total production is decidedly smaller than that of most of his fellows.[416]

Nor has he, I think, any pretensions to be considered a novelist of the very first cla.s.s, even putting bulk out of the question. But he can be both extremely amusing and really pathetic; he is never unnatural; and if there is less to be said about him than about some others, it is certainly not because he is less good to read. On the contrary, he is so easy and so good to read, and he has been read so much, that elaborate discussion of him is specially superfluous. It is almost a pity that he was not born ten or fifteen years earlier, so that he might have had more chance of hitting a strictly distinct style. As it is, with all his pathos and all his fun, you feel that he is of the _Epigoni_ a successor of more than one or two Alexanders, that he has a whole library of modern fiction behind--and, in more than one sense of the word, before--him.

[Sidenote: About: _Le Roi des Montagnes_.]

There was a time when Englishmen of worth and Englishwomen of grace thought a good deal of Edmond About. Possibly this was because he was one of the pillars of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Far be it from me to speak with the slightest disrespect of that famous periodical, to which I have myself divers indebtednesses, and which has, in the last hundred years or thereabouts, harboured and fostered many of the greatest writers of France and much of her best literary work. But persons of some age and some memory must remember a time in England when it used to be "mentioned with _hor_" as Policeman X mentioned something or somebody else about the same date or a little earlier. Even Matthew Arnold, in whose comely head the b.u.mp of Veneration was not the most remarkable protuberance, used to point to it--as something far above _us_--to be regarded with reverence and striven towards with might and main. What justification there might be for this in general we need not now consider; but at any rate About has never seemed to the present historian very much of a pillar of anything. His chief generally accepted t.i.tles to the position in novel-writing are, I suppose, _Le Roi des Montagnes_ and _Tolla_, each of which, and perhaps one other, we may examine in some detail, grouping the rest (with one further exception) more summarily. They are the better suited for our purpose in that one is comedy if not farce, and the other a gradually threatening and at last accomplished tragedy.

Of course it would be a very dull or a very curmudgeonly person who should fail to see or refuse to acknowledge "fun" in the history of Hadji or Hadgi Stavros. The mixture of sense, science, stupidity, and unconscious humour[417] in the German narrator; the satire on the toleration of brigandage by government in Greece (it must be confessed that, of all the reductions to the absurd of parliamentary and const.i.tutional arrangements in countries unsuited for them, wherein the last hundred years have been so prolific, Greece has provided the most constant and reversed-sublime examples, as Russia has the most tragic); the contrast of amiability and atrocity in the brigands themselves--all these provide excellent opportunities, by no means always missed, for the display of a sort of antic.i.p.ated and Gallicised Gilbertianism. Nor need the addition of stage Englishness in Mrs. Simons and her brother and Mary Ann, of stage Americanism in Captain John Harris and his nephew Lobster, spoil the broth.

But, to the possibly erroneous taste[418] of the present taster, it does not seem to be a consummated _consomme_. To begin with, there is too much of it; it is watered out to over three hundred pages when it might have been "reduced" with great advantage to one hundred. Nor is this a mere easy general complaint; it would be perfectly possible to point out where reductions should take place in detail. No one skilled in the use of the blue pencil could be at a loss where to apply it in the preliminary matter; in the journey; in the Hadgi's gravely burlesqued correspondence; in the escape of the ladies; in Hermann's too prolonged yet absurdly ineffective tortures; in the civil war between the King and his subjects; in the rather transpontine victory of the two Americans and the Maltese over both; and, above all, in the Royal Ball, where English etiquette requires that the rescuer must be duly introduced to those he has rescued. Less matter (or rather less talking about matter) with more art might have made it a capital thing, especially if certain traces of vulgarity, too common in About, were removed together with the mere superfluities. At any rate, this is how it strikes, and always has struck, a younger but now old contemporary.

[Sidenote: _Tolla._]

The same fault of _longueurs_ makes itself felt in _Tolla_: and indeed the author seems to have been conscious of it, and confesses it in an apologetic _Preface_ to the editions after the first. But this does not form the chief ground of accusation against it. Nor, certainly, do the facts, as summarised in a note, justify any serious charge of plagiarism,[419] though the celebrated Buloz seems for once to have been an unwise editor, in objecting to a fuller acknowledgment of indebtedness on the part of his contributor. A story of this tragical kind will bear much fuller handling than a comic tale of scarcely more than one situation, recounted with a perpetual "tongue-in-cheek"

accompaniment.

But, from another point of view, the book does justify the drawing of a general literary moral, that true _donnees_ are very far from being certain blessings--that they are, in fact, _dona Danaorum_--to the novelist; that he should not hug the sh.o.r.e of fact, but launch out into the ocean of invention. About, in a fas.h.i.+on rather cheerfully recalling the boasts of poor Shadwell, who could "truly say that he had made it[420] into a play" and that "four of the humours were entirely new,"

a.s.sures us that he has invented everything but the main situation, and written everything out of his own head except a few of the letters of Tolla. Some of these added things are good, though one of the author's besetting sins may be ill.u.s.trated by the fact that he gives nearly half a score pages to a retrospective review of the history of a Russian General's widow and her daughter, when as many lines--or, better still, a line or two of explanation here and there--would be all that the story requires.[421] But the "given" situation itself is a difficult one to handle interestingly: and, in some estimates at any rate, the difficulty has not been overcome here. The son--a younger, but still amply endowed son--of one of the greatest Roman families, compact of Princes and Cardinals, with reminiscences of Venetian dogedom, falls in love, after a half-hearted fas.h.i.+on, with the daughter of another house of somewhat less, but still old repute, and of fair, though much lesser wealth. By a good deal of "shepherding" on the part of her family and friends, and (one is bound to say) some rather "downright Dunstable" on her own, he is made to propose; but _her_ family accepts the demand that the thing shall, for a time, be kept secret from _his_. Of course no such secrecy is long possible; and his people, especially a certain wicked cavaliere-colonel, with the aid of a French Monseigneur and the Russians above mentioned, plot to break the thing off, and finally succeed.

"Lello" (Manuel) Coromila finds out the plot too late. Tolla dies of a broken heart.

It seems to me--speaking with the humility which I do not merely affect, but really feel on the particular point--that this might make a good subject for a play: that in the hands of Shakespeare or Sh.e.l.ley it might make a very great one in two different kinds. But--now speaking with very much less diffidence--I do not think it a promising one for a novel; and, speaking with hardly any at all, I think that it has certainly not made a good one here. Shut up into the narrow action of the stage; divested of the intervals which make its improbabilities more palpable; and with the presentation of Lello as a weaker and baser Hamlet, of Tolla as a betrayed Juliet--with all this brought out and made urgent by a clever actor and actress, the thing might be made very effective. Dawdled over in a novel again of three hundred pages, it loses appeal to the sympathy and constantly starts fresh difficulties for the understanding.

That a very delightful girl[422] may fall in love with a nincomp.o.o.p who is also notoriously a light-of-love, is quite possible: and, no doubt, is fortunate for the nincomp.o.o.ps, and, after a fas.h.i.+on, good for the continuation of the human race. But, in a novel, you must make the process interesting, and that is not, _me judice_, done here. The nincomp.o.o.p, too, is such an utter nincomp.o.o.p (he is not a villain, nor even a rascal) that, no comic use being made of his nincomp.o.o.pery, he is of no use at all. And though an old and haughty Italian family like the Feraldis _might_ no doubt in real life--there is nothing that may not happen in real life--consent to clandestine engagements of the kind described, it certainly is one of the possible-improbables which are fatal, or nearly so, to art. Two or three subordinate characters--the good-natured and good-witted Marquis Filippo Trasimeni, the faithful peasant Menico, Tolla's foster-brother, and even the bad chambermaid Amarella--have some merit. But twenty of them could not save the book, which, after dawdling till close upon its end, huddles itself up in a few pages, chiefly of _recit_, in a singularly inartistic fas.h.i.+on.

[Sidenote: _Germaine._]

_Germaine_, which has been (speaking under correction) a much less popular book than either _Le Roi des Montagnes_ or _Tolla_, is perhaps better than either. Except for a very few pages, it does not attempt the somewhat cackling irony of the Greek book; and though it ends with one failure of a murder, one accomplished ditto, and two more deaths of no ordinary kind, it does not even attempt, as the Italian one does, real tragedy. But it has a fairly well-knit plot, some attempt at character, sufficient change of incident and scene, and hardly any _longueurs_.

Even the hinge of the whole, though it presents certain improbabilities, is not of the brittle and creaking kind reprobated in that of _Tolla_.

A Neapolitan-Spanish Count of Villanera, whose second t.i.tle is "Marquis of the Mounts of Iron," possessed also not only of the bluest of blood, but of mountains of gold, has fallen in love, after an honour-in-dishonour fas.h.i.+on, with the gra.s.s-widow of a French naval captain, Honorine Chermidy, and has had a child by her. She is really a worse Becky Sharp, or a rather cleverer Valerie Marneffe (who perhaps was her model[423]), and she forms a cunning plan by which the child may be legitimated and she herself, apparently renouncing, will really secure a chance of, the countdom, the marquisate, and the mountains of iron and gold. (Of the latter she has got a good share out of her lover already.) The plan is that Villanera shall marry some girl (of n.o.ble birth but feeble health and no fortune), which will, according to French law, effect or at least permit the legitimation of the little Marques de las Montes de Hierro--certain further possibilities being left ostensibly to Providence, but, in Madame Chermidy's private intentions, to the care of quite another Power. The Dowager Countess de Villanera--rather improbably, but not quite impossibly--accepts this, being, though proud, willing to derogate a little to make sure of an heir to the House of Villanera with at any rate a portion (the sceptical would say a rather doubtful portion[424]) of its own blood.

Villanera himself, though in most ways the soul of honour, accepts this shady scheme chiefly through blind devotion to his mistress; and it only remains to find a family whose poverty, if not their will, consents to sell their daughter. Through the agency of that stock and pet French novel-character, a doctor who is very clever, very benevolent, very sceptical, and not over-scrupulous, the exact material for the mischief is found. There is an old Duc de la Tour-D'Embleuse, who, half-ruined by the original Revolution, has been almost completely so by that of 1830, has thrown away what remained, and has become an amiable and adored but utterly selfish burden on his angelic wife and daughter, the latter of whom, like so many of the heroines of the 'fifties, especially in France, is an all but "given-up" _poitrinaire_. The price of the bargain--an "inscription" of fifty thousand francs a year in Rentes--is offered on the very day when the family has come to its last _sou_; accepted, after short and sham refusal, by the duke; acquiesced in unselfishly by the mother, who despairs of saving her husband and daughter from starvation in any other way; and submitted to by the daughter herself in a spirit of martyrdom, strengthened by the certainty that it is but for a little while. How the situation works out to an end of liberal but not excessive poetical justice, the reader may discover for himself: the book being, though not a masterpiece, nor even very high in the second rank, quite worth reading. One or two things may be noticed. The first is a really clever sketch, the best thing perhaps in About's novel-work, of the peculiar "naughty-childishness"[425] which belongs to lovely woman, which does not materially affect her charm or even her usefulness in some ways, but makes her as politically impossible in one way as does that "incapacity for taking more than one side of a question" which Lord Halsbury has pointed out, in another.[426] The second is the picture, in the later half of the book, of those Ionian Islands, then still English, the abandonment of which was the first of the many blessings conferred by Mr. Gladstone[427] on his country, and the possession of which, during the late or any war, would have enabled us almost to pique, repique, and capot the attempts of our enemies in the adjacent Mediterranean regions.

[Sidenote: _Madelon._]

All these books, and perhaps one or two others, are about the same length--an equality possibly due (as we have seen in English examples on a different scale) to periodical publication. But once, in _Madelon_, About attempted something of much "longer breath," as his countrymen say. Here we have nearly six hundred pages instead of three hundred, and each page (which is a large one) contains at least half as much again as a page of the others. The book is a handsome one, with a t.i.tle in red ink; and the author says he took three years to write the novel--of course as an avocation from his vocation in journalism. It is difficult to repress, though probably needless to utter, the most obvious remark on this; but it is not hard to give it another turn. Diderot said (and though some people believe him not, I do) that Rousseau originally intended, in the Dijon prize essay which made his fate and fame, to argue that science and letters had _improved_ morality, etc.; and that he, Diderot, had told Jean Jacques that this was _le pont aux anes_, and determined him to take the paradoxical side instead. The "a.s.ses' bridge"

(_not_ in the Euclidic sense, nor as meaning that all who took it were a.s.ses) of the mid-nineteenth century French novelist was the biography of the _demi-monde_. Balzac had been the first and greatest engineer of these _ponts et chaussees_; Dumas _fils_ had shown that they might lead to no mean success; so all the others followed in a fas.h.i.+on certainly rather ovine and occasionally asinine. Madelon is a young woman, attractive rather than beautiful, who begins as a somewhat mysterious favourite of men of fas.h.i.+on in Paris; establishes herself for a time as a married woman in an Alsatian town; ruins nearly, _mais non tout_, a country baron; and ends, as far as the book goes, by being a sort of inferior Lola Montes to a German princeling. It has cost considerable effort to justify even this short summary. I have found few French novels harder to read. But there is at least one smart remark--of the "publicist" rather than the novelist kind--towards the end:

C'est un besoin inne chez les peuplades germaniques; il faut, bon gre mal gre, qu'ils adorent quelqu'un.

They did not dislike puns and verbal jingles, either in France or in England in the mid-nineteenth century, as much as their ancestors and their descendants in both countries have done before and since. A survivor to-day might annotate "Et quel quelqu'un quelquefois!"

[Sidenote: _Maitre Pierre_, etc. Summing up.]

In fact, to put the matter brutally, but honestly, as far as the present writer's knowledge extends, Edmond About was not a novelist at all "in his heart." He was a journalist (he himself admits the impeachment so far), and he was a journalist in a country where novel- or at least tale-writing had long established itself as part of the journalist's business. Also he was really a good _raconteur_--a gift which, though perhaps few people have been good novelists without it, does not by itself make a good novelist. As a publicist, too, he was of no small mark: his _Question Romaine_ could not be left out of any sufficient political library of the nineteenth century. Some of his shorter tales, such as _Le Nez d'un Notaire_ and _L'Homme a l'Oreille Ca.s.see_, have had a great vogue with those who like comic situations described with lively, if not very refined, wit. He was also a good topographer; indeed this element enters largely into most of his so-called novels already noticed, and const.i.tutes nearly all the interest of a very pleasant book called _Maitre Pierre_. This is a description of the _Landes_ between Bordeaux and Arcachon, and something like a "puff" of the methods used to reclaim them, diversified by an agreeable enough romance. The hero is a local "king," a foundling-hunter-agriculturist who uses his kingdom, not like Hadji Stavros, to pillage and torment, but to benefit his subjects. The heroine is his protegee Marinette, a sort of minor Isopel Berners, with a happier end.[428] The throwing into actual tale-form of curious and decidedly costly local fas.h.i.+ons of courts.h.i.+p is clever; but the whole thing is a sort of glorified advertis.e.m.e.nt. Other books, _Les Mariages de Paris_ and _Les Mariages de Province_, almost tell their tales, and something more,[429] in their t.i.tles.

One cannot but be sorry if this seems an unfair or shabby account of a pleasant and popular writer, but the right and duty of historical criticism is not to be surrendered. One of the main objects of literary history is to separate what is quotidian from what is not. To neglect the quotidian altogether is--whatever some people may say--to fall short of the historian's duty; to put it in its proper place _is_ that duty.

[Sidenote: Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau.]

What ought to be said and done about Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau--the younger Sue and Soulie; the protagonists of the melodramatic and criminal _feuilleton_ during the later middle of the century--has been rather a problem with me. Clearly they cannot be altogether neglected.

Deep would answer to deep, Rocambole to M. Lecoq, in protesting against such an omission of their manufacturers. I do not know, indeed, that any English writer of distinction has done for M. le Vicomte Ponson du Terrail what Mr. Lang did, "under the species of eternity" which verse confers, for "(Miss Braddon and) Gaboriau." I have known those who preferred that _other_ Viscount, "Richard O'Monroy"--who shared with "Gyp" and Armand Silvestre the cheerful office of cheering the cheerable during the 'eighties and later--to the more canonical possessor of the t.i.tle before him. But du Terrail was what I believe is called, in Scottish "kirk" language, a "supply"--a person who could undertake the duty of filling gaps--of enormous efficacy in his day. That is a claim on this history which cannot be neglected, though the people who would fain have Martin Tupper blotted out of the history of English poetry, might like to drop Ponson du Terrail in that of the French novel down an oubliette, like one of his own heroes, and _not_ give him the file mercifully furnished to that robustious marquis. Gaboriau claims, in the same way, even more "clamantly."

The worst of it is (to play cards on table with the strictness which is the only virtue of this book, save perhaps an occasional absence of ignorance) that neither of them appeals to me. I have no doubt that this recalcitrance to the crime-novel is a _culpa_, if not a _culpa maxima_.

I suppose it was born in me. It is certainly not merely due to the fact that, in my journalist days, perhaps because I was a kind of abortion of a barrister, I had to write endless articles on crimes.

Penge murders knew The pencil blue

as regards my "copy," and a colleague once upbraided me for arguing in favour of Mrs. Maybrick. But I had read crime-novels before those days, and they never amused me. Yet perhaps it may be possible to show cause--other than my personal likings--for not ranking these high.