A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 41

personage_s_...." The context confirms this.

[481] There are, of course, comparatively few of these; but the fewness is not positive, even keeping to prose-fiction. Poetry and drama--under their less onerous conditions for this special task--would enlarge the list in goodly fas.h.i.+on.

[482] Shortly after Maupa.s.sant's death, I contributed an article on him to the _Fortnightly Review_. It has never been reprinted, but, by the kindness of the Editor of that _Review_, I have been permitted to use it as a basis for this notice. I have, however, altered, omitted, and added to a much greater extent than in the few other rehandlings acknowledged in this History. The account of the actual books is wholly new.

[483] I had known Verlaine since his appearance in the _Parna.s.se Contemporain_ years earlier, but not yet in his most characteristic work.

[484] The following summary, to p. 505, formed no part of the original article and is based on fresh and continuous reading. It is purposely rather more minute than anything else in these later chapters, and was not the easiest part of the book to do, owing to the large number of Maupa.s.sant's short stories.

[485] Maupa.s.sant _could_ draw gentlemen and ladies, but he often did not do so. His pretty young countesses (_not_ the same persons as those referred to in text), who get drunk together _tete-a-tete_, and discourse on the best way of making more effectual Josephs out of their footmen, are not pleasing, though they are right in holding that no perfume, save Eau de Cologne, doth become a _man_.

[486] Vol. I. pp. 150-1.

[487] The usual gutter-Naturalist certainly would--and even M. Zola, I fear, might--have done the "Ephesian matron" business thoroughly: Maupa.s.sant, as so often, knew other and better things.

[488] It may suggest Leconte de Lisle to others and may even have been meant for him, but I think it worthy of the earlier and greater poet.

[489] It went, I fear, by mistake with the rest of my books; so I quote from memory. But Southey and Locker have had their duet pleasantly changed into a trio since by Mr. Austin Dobson's _Bookman's Budget_.

[490] It may be just, and only just necessary to observe (what I know perfectly well) that Maupa.s.sant was, in the direct sense, Flaubert's pupil and not Zola's.

[491] He was, says his historian well, "de la race des amants et non point de la race des peres."

[492] The resemblances between Thackeray and Maupa.s.sant are very numerous and most remarkable. That they have both been accused of cynicism _and_ sentimentality is only, as it were, the index-finger to the relations.h.i.+p.

[493] At the risk, however, of wearying the reader and "forcing open doors," one may exemplify, from this book also, the artificial character of this obligatory adultery. Anne de Guilleroy has all the qualifications of an almost perfect mistress (in the honourable sense) and wife. She is charming; a flirt to the right point and not beyond it; pa.s.sionate ditto; affectionate; not capricious; inviolably faithful (in her unfaithfulness, of course); jealous to her own pain, but with no result of malice to others. Yet in order to show all this she has to be an adulteress first--in obedience to this mysterious modernisation and topsy-turvification of ancient Babylonian custom, and the _jus primae noctis_, and the proverb as to second thoughts being best, and Heaven or the other place knows what else. Here also, as elsewhere, Maupa.s.sant--satirist of women as he is--makes her lover a very inferior creature to herself. For Bertin is a selfish c.o.xcomb, and _does_, at least half, allow himself to be "snuffed out by an article."

[494] Any one who chooses may compare it with the utterances of the late Mr. Henry James. Maupa.s.sant's own selection of novels, to ill.u.s.trate the impossibility of defining _a_ novel, is of the first interest. They are: _Manon Lescaut_, _Paul et Virginie_, _Don Quichotte_, _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_, _Werther_, _Les Affinites electives_, _Clarissa_ [_he_ adds _Harlowe_, an unauthentic addition, pardonable in a Frenchman, though not in one of us], _emile_, _Candide_, _Cinq-Mars_, _Rene_, _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, _Mauprat_, _Le Pere Goriot_, _La Cousine Bette_, _Colomba_, _Le Rouge et Le Noir_, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, _Notre Dame de Paris_, _Salammbo_, _Madame Bovary_, _Adolphe_, _M. de Camors_, _L'a.s.sommoir_, and _Sapho_.

[495] "Amant" as accurately distinguished by M. Jean Richepin in _Cesarine_ (for the benefit of an innocent Hungarian) from "amoureux."

[496] Not that I wish to blaspheme Circe, who always seems to me to have adjusted herself to a disconcertingly changed situation with more than demi-G.o.ddesslike dexterity and good humour. It may perhaps be not irrelevant, to discussion of novels in general, to mention something which I have never yet seen put in Homeric discussion, though the bare idea of anything new there being possible may seem preposterous. The arguments of the splitters-up are, naturally enough, seldom if ever literary, belonging as they do to the cla.s.s of Biblical, that is to say, _un_literary, criticism. But strictly literary considerations, furnis.h.i.+ng argument of the strongest kind for unity, might be brought by comparing the behaviour of Circe, at the moment referred to, and that of Helen when Paris returned from his defeat. These situations are, of course, in initial circ.u.mstance as opposite as possible, though they _arrivent a pareille fin_. But behind their very opposition there is a conception of the eternal feminine--partly human, partly divine--which it would be very surprising to find in two different persons, and which might, if any one cared to do it, be interestingly worked out from divers other Homeric characters of women or G.o.ddesses, from Hera and Aphrodite in the one poem to Nausicaa and Calypso in the other. "How great a _novelist_ was in _Homer_ lost" is a theme too much neglected.

[497] For do not fixed hours always become a bore--except in respect of meals? To have to love, or to lecture, or to do anything but eat, at _x_ A. or P.M. precisely, on such and such days in the week, is a weariness to the spirit and the flesh alike.

[498] "The Novelists Who Cannot End" is one of the t.i.tle-subjects which, "reponing my senescent art," I relinquish to others.

[499] In the card sense.

[500] They run well into, if not over, the second hundred, and it is proper to warn readers (and still more buyers) that different editions vary the contents of individual volumes; so that, without some care, and even with it, duplication is nearly certain. This bad habit, not quite unknown in England, is rather common in France.

[501] If any one is fortunate, or unfortunate, enough not to know this admirable story, it may be well to say that the t.i.tle is the nickname of a young person, more pleasing than proper, who forms part of a convoy or cartel of non-combatants pa.s.sing through the Prussian lines in 1871. The Prussian officer, imitating more mildly (and without the additional villainy) the conduct of Colonel Kirke, refuses pa.s.sage to the whole party, unless she will give him a cast of her office. The story is told as inoffensively as possible, and the crowning irony of the shocked att.i.tude of her respectable companions at her liberating them, though they have been frantically anxious she should do so, is sublime.

[502] Maupa.s.sant does not caricature us (at least our men) very extravagantly. But he, like the rest of them, always makes us say, "Aoh." I have frequently endeavoured to produce, otherwise than as a diphthong, this mysterious word (a descendant, perhaps, of the equally mysterious _Aoi_ of the _Chanson de Roland_?). But I cannot make it like the way in which I say, or in which any well-educated Englishman says, "Oh!" American it may be, and it is not unlike the "Ow" of some dialects, but pure English it is not. It may be, for aught I know, phonetic: and has been explained as representing an affected sneer. The curious thing is that "Oh-_a_" actually is a not unfrequent, though slovenly, p.r.o.nunciation.

[503] Evidently, therefore, the practice with which we have been so often reproached is of French--at least Norman--origin.

[504] The _other_ one, of course, but here one must admit the superiority of the foreign "strength." And the "story" has French antecedents.

[505] This is an actual translation of the Norman poet's words. It makes no bad blank-verse line.

[506] Its companions, in the volume to which it gives t.i.tle, are mostly inferior specimens of the same cla.s.s. But some, especially _Le Pain Maudit_, are very amusing, and _Lui_? is a curious and melancholy antic.i.p.ation of _Le Horla_. _La Maison Tellier_, which opens and t.i.tles another volume of no very different kind, has never seemed to me quite worthy of its fame. It is not unamusing in itself, and very amusing when one thinks of its greatly-daring imitators, but rather schoolboyish or even monkeyish in its determination to shock. (It doesn't shock _me_.) Another "shocker," but tragic, not comic, _La Femme de Paul_, which closes the book, is more powerful. (It is on the theme of _Mlle. Giraud ma Femme_ (_v. inf._); only the male person, instead of drowning his she-rival, far less wisely drowns himself.) But most of its contents suffer, not merely from Naturalist grime, but from Naturalist _meticulousness_.

[507] _V. sup._ p. 269 _sq._

[508] For the "Terror" group see below.

[509] Curiously enough, a few days _after_ writing the above I came across, in the last _Diabolique_ of that curious flawed genius, Barbey d'Aurevilly (_v. sup._ p. 453), the words which redress, by long antic.i.p.ation, the wrong done by his fellow Norman: "Les ailes du nez, _aussi expressives que des yeux_."

[510] In a novel by a contemporary of his, otherwise not worth notice, Sir Walter Scott was accused of "_pruderie_ bete"; I am sure the adjective and substantive are much better mated in my text.

[511] I remember, in a book which I have not seen for about two-thirds of a century, Miss Martineau's _Crofton Boys_, an agreeable anecdote (for the good Harriet, when not under the influence of Radicalism, the dismal science, Anti-Christianity, or Mr. Atkinson, could tell a story very well) of a little English girl. It occurred to her one morning that she should have to wash, dress, do her hair, etc., _every day for her whole life_, and she sat down and wept bitterly. Now, if I were a little boy or girl in French novel-world, when as I remembered that I should have, as the one, never to marry, or to commit adultery with every one who asked me; that, as the other, I must not be left five minutes alone with a married woman, without offering her the means of carrying out her and her husband's destiny; I really think I should imitate Miss Martineau's child, if I did not even go and hang myself. "Fay ce que voudras" may be rather a wide commandment. "Fay ce que dois" may require a little enlarging. But "Do what you ought not, not because you wish to do it, but because it is the proper thing to do" is not only "the limit," but beyond it. I think that if I were a Frenchman of the novel-type I should hate the sight of a married woman. Stone walls would not a prison make nor iron bars a cage--so odious as this unrelieved tyranny of _concupiscentia carnis_--to order! Perhaps Wilberforce's Agathos had a tedious time of it in being always ready to resist the Dragon; but how much more wearisome would it be to be always on the _qui vive_, lest you should miss a chance of _not_ resisting him!

[512] The "time" was five and twenty years ago. But this pa.s.sage, trifling as it may seem to some readers, appeared to me worth preserving, because my recent very careful reperusal of Maupa.s.sant, as a whole, made its appositeness constantly recur to me.

[513] Nearest, perhaps, in the story called "En Famille," to be found in the _Maison Tellier_ volume.

[514] Remarks already made on the particular novels and stories from this point of view need only be referred to, not repeated. But it is fair to say that some good judges plead for "warning off" instead of "inculcation."

[515] There are some, but they are very few.

[516] See Conclusion. After the above notice of Maupa.s.sant was, in its reconst.i.tuted form, entirely completed, there came into my hands a long and careful paper on the novelist's Romanticism, published by Mr. Oliver H. Moore in the Transactions of the American Modern Language a.s.sociation for March 1918. Those who are curious as to French opinion of him, and especially as to the strange superst.i.tion of his "cla.s.sicism" (see Conclusion again), will find large extracts and references on this subject given by Mr. Moore, who promises further discussion.

[517] One never knows what is necessary or not in the way of explanation. But perhaps it is wiser to say that I am quite aware that, besides writing _votre_, not "notre," Baudelaire had originally written "ce long hurlement" before the immense improvement in the text, and that original "Light-houses" were painters.

[518] One slight alteration may seem almost to justify Belot's criticism of life: "Uncomfortable herself, she thought it natural to make others uncomfortable." There is certainly no want of psychological observation _there_.

CHAPTER XIV

OTHER NOVELISTS OF 1870-1900

[Sidenote: The last stage.]

The remaining novelists of the Third Republic, apart from the survivors of the Second Empire and the Naturalist School, need not occupy us very long, but must have some s.p.a.ce. There would be no difficulty on my part in writing a volume on them, for during half the time I had to produce an article on new French books, including novels, every month,[519] and during no small part of the rest, I did similar work on a smaller and less regular scale, reading also a great deal for my own purposes. But acknowledging, as I have elsewhere done, the difficulty of equating judgment of contemporary and non-contemporary work exactly, I think I shall hardly be doing the new writers of this time injustice if I say that no one, except some excluded by our specifications as living, could put in any pretensions to be rated on level with the greater novelists from Lesage to Maupa.s.sant. There are those, of course, who would protest in favour of M. Ferdinand Fabre, and yet others would "throw for" M.

Andre Theuriet, both of whom shall have due honour. I cannot wholly agree with them. But both of them, as well as, for very opposite reasons, MM. Ohnet and Rod, may at least require notice of some length.

[Sidenote: Ferdinand Fabre: _L'Abbe Tigrane_.]

_L'Abbe Tigrane_, by Ferdinand Fabre, may be described as one of not the least remarkable, and as certainly one of the most remarked, novels of the later nineteenth century. It never, I think, had a very large sale; for though at the time of its author's death, over thirty years and more after its appearance, it had reached its sixteenth thousand, that is not much for a _popular_ French novel. Books of such different appeal as Zola's and Feuillet's (not to mention for the present a capital example to be noted below) boasted ten times the number. But it dared an extremely non-popular subject, and treated that subject with an audacious disregard of anything like claptrap. There is no love in it and hardly a woman; there is no--at least no military--fighting; no adventure of any ordinary sort. It is neither a _berquinade_, nor a crime-story, nor (except in a very peculiar way) a novel of a.n.a.lysis. It relies on no preciousness of style, and has not very much description, though its author was a great hand at this when and where he chose. It is simply the history of an ambitious, strong-willed, strong-minded, and violent-tempered priest in an out-of-the-way diocese, who strives for and attains the episcopate, and after it the archiepiscopate, and is left aspiring to the Papacy--which, considering the characters of the actual successors of Pius IX., the Abbe Capdepont[520] cannot have reached, in the fifty years (or nearly so) since the book was published.

Now, in the first place, it is generations since a clerical novel was likely to please the French novel-reading public. In this very book there is an amusing scene where the _abbe_, then a private tutor, induces his employer, a deputy, to invite clerics of distinction to a party, whereat the other guests melt away in disgust. And this was a long time before a certain French minister boasted that his countrymen "had taken G.o.d out of Heaven." Moreover, while there are two obvious ways of reconciling extremists to the subject, M. Fabre rejected both.

His book is neither a panegyric on clericalism nor a libel on it. His hero is as far as possible from being a saint, but he is perfectly free from all the vulgar vices. The rest of the characters--all, with insignificant exceptions, clerics--are quite human, and in no case--not even in that of Capdepont's not too scrupulous aide-de-camp the Abbe Mical--offensive. But at the beginning the bishop, between whom and the hero there is truceless war, is, though privately an amiable and charitable gentleman (Capdepont is a Pyrenean peasant by origin), rather undignified, and even a little tyrannical; while a cardinal towards the end makes a distinction--between the impossibility of the Church lying and the positive duty of Churchmen, in certain circ.u.mstances, to lie--which would have been a G.o.dsend to Kingsley in that unequal conflict of his with a colleague of his Eminence's.[521]

Yet critics of almost all shades agreed, I think, in recognising the merits of M. Fabre's book; and it established him in a special position among French novelists, which he sustained not unworthily with nearly a score of novels in a score and a half of years. It is undoubtedly a book of no small power, which is by no means confined to the petty matters of chapter-and-seminary wrangling and intrigue. On the contrary, the scene where, owing to Capdepont's spite, the bishop's coffin is kept, in a frightful storm, waiting for admission to its inmate's own cathedral, is a very fine thing indeed--almost, if not quite, in the grand style--according to some, if not according to Mr. Arnold. The figure of the arch-priest Clamousse, both in connection with this scene[522] and others--old, timid, self-indulgent, but not an absolutely bad fellow--is of first-rate subordinate quality. Whether Capdepont himself has not a little too much of that synthetic character which I have discussed elsewhere--whether he is quite a real man, and not something of a composition of the bad qualities of the peasant type, the intriguing ecclesiastic type, the ambitious man, the angry man, and so on--must, I suppose, be left to individual tastes and judgments. If I am not so enthusiastic about the book as some have been, it is perhaps because it seems to me rather a study than a story.[523]