A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2

  CHAPTER XII

  THE OTHER "NON-NATURALS" OF THE SECOND EMPIRE

  If any excuse is needed for the oddity of the title of this chapter, itwill not be to readers of Burton's _Anatomy_. The way in which thephrase "Those six non-natural things" occurs and recurs there; theinextinguishable tendency--in view of the eccentricity of itsapplication--to forget that the six include things as "natural" (in anon-technical[407] sense) as Diet, to forget also what it really meansand expect something uncanny--these are matters familiar to allBurtonians. And they may excuse the borrowing of that phrase as ageneral label for those novelists, other than Flaubert and Dumas _fils_,who, if their work was not limited to 1850-70, began in (but not "with")that period, and worked chiefly in it, while they were at once _not_"Naturalists" and yet more or less as "natural" as any of Burton's six.One of the two least "minor," Alphonse Daudet, was among Naturalists butscarcely of them. The other, Octave Feuillet, was anti-Naturalist to thecore.

  [Sidenote: Feuillet.]

  This latter, the elder of the two, though not so much the elder as usedto be thought,[408] was at one time one of the most popular of Frenchnovelists both at home and abroad; but, latterly in particular, therewere in his own country divers "dead sets" at him. He had been anImperialist, and this excited one kind of prejudice against him; hewas, in his way, orthodox in religion, and this aroused another; while,as has been already said, though his subjects, and even his treatment ofthem, would have sent our English Mrs. Grundy of earlier days into"screeching asterisks," the peculiar grime of Naturalism nowheresmirches his pages. For my own part I have always held him high, thoughthere is a smatch about his morality which I would rather not havethere. He seems to me to be--with the no doubt numerous transformationsnecessary--something of a French Anthony Trollope, though he has atragic power which Trollope never showed; and, on the other side of theaccount, considerably less comic variety.

  [Sidenote: His novels generally.]

  As a "thirdsman" to Flaubert and Dumas _fils_, he shows some interestingdifferences. Merely as a maker of literature, he cannot touch theformer, and has absolutely nothing of his poetic imagination, while hisgrasp of character is somewhat thinner and less firm. But it is morevaried in itself and in the plots and scenery which give it play andsetting--a difference not necessary but fortunate, considering his verymuch larger "output." Contrasted with Dumas _fils_, he affords a moreimportant difference still, indeed one which is very striking. I pointedout in the appropriate place--not at the moment thinking of Feuillet atall--the strange fashion in which Alexander the Younger constantly"makes good" an at first unattractive story; and, even in his mostgenerally successful work, increases the appeal as he goes on. WithFeuillet the order of things is quite curiously reversed. Almost(though, as will be seen, not quite) invariably, from the early days of_Bellah_ and _Onesta_ to _La Morte_, he "lays out" his plan in amasterly manner, and accumulates a great deal of excellent material, asit were by the roadside, for use as the story goes on. But, except whenhe is at his very best, he flags, and is too apt to keep up his curtainfor a fifth act when it had much better have fallen for good at the endof the fourth. As has been noted already, his characters are not deeplycut, though they are faithfully enough sketched. That he is not strongenough to carry through a purpose-novel is not much to his discredit,for hardly anybody ever has been. But the _Histoire de Sibylle_--hisswashing blow in the George Sand duel (_v. sup._ p. 204)--though muchless dull than the _riposte_ in _Mlle. la Quintaine_, would hardlyinduce "the angels," in Mr. Disraeli's famous phrase, to engage himfurther as a Hal-o'-the-Wynd on their side.

  But Feuillet's most vulnerable point is the peculiar sentimentalmorality-in-immorality which has been more than once glanced at. It wasfrankly found fault with by French critics--themselves by no meansstrait-laced--and the criticisms were well summed up (I remember thewording but not the writer of it) thus: "An honest woman does not feelthe temptations" to which the novelist exposes his heroines. That there_is_ a certain morbid sentimentality about Feuillet's attitude notmerely to the "triangle" but even to simple "exchange of fantasies"between man and woman in general, can hardly be denied. He has a mostcurious and (one might almost say) Judaic idea as to woman as atemptress, in fashions ranging from the almost innocent seduction of Evethrough the more questionable[409] one of Delilah, down to the sheerattitude of Zuleika-Phraxanor, and the street-corner woman in theProverbs. And this necessitates a correspondingly unheroic presentationof his heroes. They are always being led into serious mischief ("in ared-rose chain" or a ribbon one), as Marmontel's sham philosopher[410]was into comic confusion by that ingenious Presidente. Yet, allowing allthis, there remains to Feuillet's credit such a full and brilliantseries of novels, hardly one of which is an actual failure, as very fewnovelists can show. Although he lived long and wrote to the end of hislife, he left no "dotages"; hardly could the youngest and strongest ofany other school in France--Guy de Maupassant himself--have beaten _LaMorte_, though it is not faultless, in power.

  [Sidenote: Brief notes on some--_Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre_.]

  I suppose few novels, succeeding not by scandal, have ever been muchmore popular than the _Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre_, the title ofwhich good English folk have been known slightly to alter in meaning byputting the _pauvre_ before the _jeune_. It had got into its thirdhundred of editions before the present century had reached the end ofits own first lustrum, and it must have been translated (probably morethan once) into every European language. It is perfectly harmless; it isadmirably written; and the vicissitudes of the loves of the _marquisdechu_ and the headstrong creole girl are conducted with excellentskill, no serious improbability, and an absence of that tendency to"tail off" which has been admitted in some of the author's books. Itwas, I suppose, Feuillet's diploma-piece in almost the strictesttechnical sense of that phrase, for he was elected of the Academy notlong afterwards. It has plenty of merits and no important faults, but itis not my favourite.

  [Sidenote: _M. de Camors._]

  [Sidenote: Other books.]

  Neither is the novel which, in old days, the proud and haughty scornersof this _Roman_, as a _berquinade_, used to prefer--_M. de Camors_.[411]Here there is plenty of naughtiness, attempts at strong character, andcertainly a good deal of interest of story, with some striking incident.But it is spoilt, for me, by the failure of the principal personage. Ithink it not quite impossible that Feuillet intended M. de Camors as asort of modernised, improved, and extended Lovelace, or evenValmont--superior to scruple, destined and able to get the better of manor woman as he chooses. Unfortunately he has also endeavoured to makehim a gentleman; and the compound, as the chemists say, is not "stable."The coxcombry of Lovelace and the priggishness, reversed (though in aless detestable form), of Valmont, are the elements that chiefly remainin evidence, unsupported by the vigorous will of either. I have myselfalways thought _La Petite Comtesse_ and _Julia de Trecoeur_ among theearlier novels, _Honneur d'Artiste_ and _La Morte_ among the later, tobe Feuillet's masterpieces, or at least nearest approaches to amasterpiece. _Un Mariage dans le Monde_ (one or the rare instances inwhich the "honest woman" does get the better of her "temptations") isindeed rather interesting, in the almost fatal cross-misunderstanding ofhusband and wife, and the almost fabulous ingenuity and good offices ofthe "friend of the family," M. de Kevern, who prevents both from makingirreparable fools of themselves. _Les Amours de Philippe_ is morecommonplace--a prodigal's progress in love, rewarded at last, veryundeservedly, with something better than a fatted calf--a formerlyslighted but angelic cousin. But to notice all his work, more especiallyif one took in half- or quarter-dramatic things (his pure drama does notof course concern us) of the "Scene" and "Proverbe" kind, where he comesnext to Musset, would be here impossible. The two pairs, early and laterespectively, and already selected, must suffice.

  [Sidenote: _La Petite Comtesse._]

  They are all tragic, though there is comedy in them as well. Perhaps _LaPetite Comtesse_, a very short novel and its
author's first thing ofgreat distinction, might by some be called pathetic rather than tragic;but the line between the two is a "leaden" barrier (if indeed it is abarrier at all) and "gives" freely. Perhaps the Gigadibs in any man ofletters may be conciliated by one of his fellows being granted some ofthe fascinations of the "clerk" in the old Phyllis-and-Flora _debats_ ofmediaeval times; but the fact that _this_ clerk is also represented as afool of the most disastrous, though not the most contemptible kind,should be held as a set-off to the bribery. It is a "story ofthree"--though not at all the usual three--graced (or not) by a reallybrilliant picture of the society of the early Second Empire. One of theleaders of this--a young countess and a member of the "Rantipole"[412]set of the time, but exempt from its vulgarity--meets in the country,and falls in love with, a middle-aged _savant_, who is doingarchaeological work for Government in the neighbourhood. He despises heras a frivolous feather-brain at first, but soon falls under the spell.Yet what has been called "the fear of the 'Had-I-wist'" and the specialnotion--more common perhaps with men than is generally thought--that shecannot _really_ love him, makes him resist her advances. By rebound, shefalls victim for a time to a commonplace Lovelace; but finds nosatisfaction, languishes and dies, while the lover, who would not takethe goods the gods provided, tries to play a sort of altered part ofColonel Morden in _Clarissa_, and the gods take their revenge for"sinned mercies." In abstract (it has been observed elsewhere thatFeuillet seldom abstracts well, his work being too much built up ofdelicate touches) there may seem to be something of the preposterous inthis; but it must be a somewhat coarse form of testing which discoversany real preposterousness in the actual story.

  [Sidenote: _Julia de Trecoeur._]

  It may, however, as has been said, seem to some to belong to thepathetic-sentimental rather than to the actually tragic; I at leastcould not allow any such judging of _Julia de Trecoeur_, though thereare more actual faults in it than in _La Petite Comtesse_, and though,as has been mentioned elsewhere, the rather repulsive catastrophe mayhave been more or less borrowed. The _donnee_ is one of the great oldsimple cross-purposes of Fate--not a mere "conflict," as the sillymodern jargon has it. Julia de Trecoeur is a wilful and wayward girl,as are many others of Feuillet's heroines. Her mother is widowed early,but consoles herself; and Julia--as such a girl pretty certainly woulddo--resents the proceeding, and refuses to live at home or to see herstepfather. He, however, is a friend of his wife's own cousin, and thiscousin, conceiving a passion for Julia, offers to marry her. Herconsent, in an English girl, would require some handling, but offers nodifficulties in a French one. As a result, but after a time, she agreesto meet her mother and that mother's new husband. And then the tragedybegins. She likes at once, and very soon loves, her stepfather--hesuccumbs, more slowly, to Moira and Ate. But he is horrified at thenotion of a quasi-incestuous love, and Julia perceives his horror. Sheforces her horse, like the Duchess May, but over the cliffs of theCotentin, not over a castle wall; and her husband and her stepfatherhimself see the act without being able--indeed without trying--toprevent it. The actual place had nearly been the scene of a jointsuicide by the unhappy lovers before.

  Once more, the thing comes badly out of analysis--perhaps by theanalyst's fault, perhaps not. But in its own presentation, with somefaults hardly necessary to point out, it is both poignant and_empoignant_, and it gives a special blend of pity and terror, the twofeelings being aroused by no means merely through the catastrophe, butby the rise and progress of the fatal passion which leads to it. I knowvery few, if any, things of the same kind, in a French novel, superior,or indeed equal to, the management of this, and to the fashion in whichthe particular characters, or wants of character, of Julia's mother andJulia's husband (excellent persons both) are made to hurry on thecalamity[413] to which she was fated.

  [Sidenote: _Honneur d'Artiste._]

  This tragic undercurrent, surging up to a more tragic catastrophe,reappears in the two best of the later issues, when Feuillet was makingbetter head against the burst sewers[414] of Naturalism. _Honneurd'Artiste_ is the less powerful of the two; but what of failure thereis in it is rather less glaring. Beatrice de Sardonne, the heroine, is asort of "Petite Comtesse" transformed--very cleverly, but perhaps notquite successfully. _Her_ "triangle" consists of herself, a somewhatNew-Yorkised young French lady of society (but too good for the worstpart of her); and her two lovers, the Marquis de Pierrepont, a muchbetter Lovelace, in fact hardly a Lovelace at all, whom she isengineered into refusing for honourable love--with a fatal relapse intodishonourable; and the "Artiste" Jacques Fabrice. He adores her, butshe, alas! does not know whether she loves him or not till too late;and, after the irreparable, he falls by the hazard of the lot in thattoss-up for suicide, the pros and cons of which (as in a formerinstance) I should like to see treated by a philosophical historian ofthe duello.

  [Sidenote: _La Morte._]

  In _La Morte_, on the other hand, the power is even greater--in fact itis the most powerful book of its author, and one of the most powerful ofthe 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 theweapon it wields. One of the heroines, Sabine, niece and pupil of anAgnostic _savant_, deliberately poisons the other, Aliette, that she maymarry Aliette's husband. But the Agnostic teaching extends itself soonfrom 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 almostthe 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-leechfor wealth and pleasure and position. Now you _may_ be an Agnostic and amurderess and a strumpet and a female snob all at once: but noanti-Agnostic, who is a critic likewise, will say that the second,third, and fourth characteristics necessarily, and all together, followfrom Agnosticism. It may remove some bars in their way; but I canfrankly admit that I do not think it need definitely superinduce them,or that it is altogether fair to accumulate the _post hocs_ with theirinevitable suggestion of _propter_.

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

  [Sidenote: Misters the assassins.]

  On the other hand, the vigour, the variety, and (where the purpose doesnot get too much the upper hand) the satiric skill are very nearlyfirst-rate. And, with the cautions and admissions just given, there isnot a little in the purpose itself, with which one may be permitted tosympathise. After all "misters the assassins" were being allowed verygenerous "law," and it was time for other people to "begin." As forFeuillet's opposition to the "modern spirit," which was early denounced,it is not necessary--even for any one who knows that this modern spiritis only an old enemy with a new face, or who, when he sees the statementthat "Nothing is ever going anywhere to be the same," chuckles, and,remembering all history to the present minute, mutters, "Everythingalways has been, is, and always will be the same"--to call in theseknowledges 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 beenas much of a Naturalist as he was the reverse, by his power ofconstructing interesting stories; of drawing, if not absolutely perfect,passable and probable characters; of throwing in novel-accessories withjudgment; and of giving, by dint of manners and talk and other thingsnecessary, vivid and true portrayals of the society and life of histime.

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Alphonse Daudet and his curious position.]

  [Sidenote: His "personality."]

  Perhaps there is no novelist in French literature--or, indeed, in anyother--who, during his lifetime, occupied such a curiously "mixed"position as Alphonse Daudet.[415] No contemporary of his obtained widergeneral popularity, without a touch of irregular bait or of appeal topopular silliness in it, than he did with _Le Petit C
hose_, with thecharming bundle of pieces called _Lettres de Mon Moulin_, and later withthe world-delighting burlesque of _Tartarin de Tarascon_. _Jack_ and_Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine_ contained more serious advances, whichwere, however, acknowledged as effective by a very large number ofreaders. But he became more and more personally associated with theNaturalist group of Zola and Edmond de Goncourt; and though he never wasactually "grimy," he had, from a quite early period, when he wassecretary or clerk to the Duc de Morny, adopted, and more and morestrenuously persisted in, a kind of "personal" novel-writing, whichmight be regarded as tainted with the general Naturalist principle thatnothing is _tacendum_--that private individuality may be made public useof, to almost any extent. Of course a certain licence in this respecthas always been allowed to novelists. In the eighteenth century Englishwriters of fiction had very little scruple in using and abusing thatlicence, and French, though with the fear of the arbitrary justice orinjustice of their time and country before them, had almost less. As thenineteenth went on, the practice by no means disappeared on either sideof the Channel. With us Mr. Disraeli indulged in it largely, and evenThackeray, though he condemned it in others, and was furious when it wasexercised on himself, in journalism if not in fiction, prettynotoriously fell into it now and then. As to Dickens, one need not gobeyond the too notorious instance of Skimpole. Quite a considerableproportion of Balzac's company are known to have been Balzacified fromthe 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 whilesome of his "gentle" readers seem not to care much about this, even ifthey do not share the partiality of the vulgar herd for it, it disgustsothers not a little. Morny was not an estimable public or privatecharacter, though if he had been a "people's man" not much fault wouldprobably have been found with him. I daresay Daudet, when in hisservice, was not overpaid, or treated with any particular privateconfidence. But still I doubt whether any gentleman could have written_Le Nabab_. The last Bourbon King of Naples was not hedged with muchdivinity; but it is hardly a question, with some, that his _decheance_,not less than that of his nobler spouse, should have protected them fromthe catch-penny vulgarity of _Les Rois en Exil_. Gambetta was not theworst of demagogues; there was something in him of Danton, and one mightfind more recent analogies without confining the researches to France.But even if his weaknesses gave a handle, which his merits could notsave from the grasp of the vulgariser, _Numa Roumestan_ bore the styleof a vulture who stoops upon recent corpses, not that of a dispassionateinvestigator of an interesting character made accessible by length oftime. _L'Evangeliste_ had at least the excuse that the Salvation Armywas fair game; and that, if there was personal satire, it was notnecessarily obvious--a palliation which (not to mention another for amoment) extends to _Sapho_. But _L'Immortel_ revived--unfortunately, asa sort of last word--the ugliness of this besetting sin of Daudet's.Even the saner members of Academies would probably scout the idea oftheir being sacrosanct and immune from criticism. But _L'Immortel_,despite its author's cleverness, is once more an essentially vulgarbook, and a vulturine or ghoulish one--fixing on the wounds and thebruises and the putrefying sores of its subject--dragging out of hisgrave, for posthumous crucifixion, a harmless enough pedant of not veryold time; and throwing dirty missiles at living magnates. It is one ofthe books--unfortunately not its author's only contribution to thelist--which leave a bad taste in the mouth, a "flavour of poisonousbrass and metal sick."

  [Sidenote: His "plagiarisms."]

  Of another charge brought against Daudet I should make much shorterwork; and, without absolutely clearing him of it, dismiss it as, thoughnot unfounded, comparatively unimportant. It is that ofplagiarism--plagiarism not from any French writer, but from Dickens andThackeray. 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 hiswife. But, beyond registering the fact, I do not know that we need domuch more with it. In regard to Dickens, the resemblance is morepervading, but more problematical. "Boz" had been earlier, and has beenalways, popular in France. _L'excentricite anglaise_ warranted, if itdid not quite make intelligible, his extravaganza; his semi-republicansentimentalism suited one side of the French temperament, etc. etc.Moreover, Daudet had actually, in his own youth, passed throughexperiences not entirely unlike those of David Copperfield and CharlesDickens himself, while perhaps the records of the elder novelist werenot unknown to the younger. In judging men of letters as shown in theirworks, however, a sort of "_cadi_-justice"--a counter-valuation ofmerits and faults--is allowable. I cannot forgive Daudet his inveteratepersonality: I can bid him sit down quickly and write off hisplagiarism--or most of it--without feeling the withers of my judicialconscience in the very least wrung. For if he did not, as others havedone, make what he stole entirely his own, he had, _of_ his own, veryconsiderable property in rather unusually various kinds.

  [Sidenote: His merits.]

  The charm of his short Tales, whether in the _Lettres de Mon Moulin_ orin collections assuming the definite title, is undeniable. Thesatiric-pathetic--a not very common and very difficult kind--has fewbetter representatives than _La Chevre de M. Seguin_, and the purelycomic stories are thoroughly "rejoicing." _Tartarin_, in his originalappearances, "touches the spot," "carries off all the point" in a mannersuggestive at once of Horace and Homocea; and though, as was almostinevitable, its sequels are less effective, one would have been veryglad indeed of them if they had had no forerunner. In almost all thebooks--_Robert Helmont_, by the way, though not yet mentioned, has somestrong partisans--the grip of actual modern society, which is the boastof the later, as opposed to the earlier, nineteenth-century novel,cannot be missed. Even those who are most disgusted by the personalitiescannot deny the power of the satiric presentation from _Le Nabab_ to_Numa Roumestan_. _Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine_ is, quite independentlyof the definite borrowing from us, more like an English novel, in somerespects, than almost any other French one known to me up to its date;and I have found persons, not in the least sentimentalists and verywidely read in novels both English and French, who were absolutelyenthusiastic about _Jack_.

  _L'Evangeliste_ is perhaps the nearest approach to a failure, theatmosphere being too alien from anything French to be favourable to thedevelopment of a good story, and perhaps the very subject being unsuitedto anything, either English or French, but an episode. In more congenialmatter, as in the remark in _Numa Roumestan_ as to the peculiar kind ofunholy pleasure which a man may enjoy when he sees his wife and hismistress kissing each other, Daudet sometimes showed cynic acumen nearerto La Rochefoucauld than to Laclos, and worthy of Beyle at his verybest. And I have no shame in avowing real admiration for _Sapho_. Itdoes not by any means confound itself with the numerous studies of theinfatuation of strange women which French fiction contains; and it isalmost a sufficient tribute to its power to say that it does not, asalmost all the rest do, at once serve itself heir to, and enter intohopeless competition with, _Manon Lescaut_. Nor is the heroine in theleast like either Marguerite Gautier or Iza Clemenceau, while thecomparison with Nana, whose class she also shares, vindicates herindividuality most importantly of all these trials. She seems to meDaudet's best single figure: though the book is of too specialised akind to be called exactly his best book.

  He never had strong health, and broke down early, so that his totalproduction is decidedly smaller than that of most of his fellows.[416]Nor has he, I think, any pretensions to be considered a novelist of thevery first class, even putting bulk out of the question. But he can beboth extremely amusing and really pathetic; he is never unnatural; andif there is less to be said about him than about some others, it iscertainly not because he is less good to read. On the contrary, he is soeasy and so good to read, and he has been read so much, that elaboratediscussion of him is specially superfluous. It is almost a pi
ty that hewas not born ten or fifteen years earlier, so that he might have hadmore chance of hitting a strictly distinct style. As it is, with all hispathos and all his fun, you feel that he is of the _Epigoni_ a successorof more than one or two Alexanders, that he has a whole library ofmodern 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 gracethought a good deal of Edmond About. Possibly this was because he wasone of the pillars of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Far be it from me tospeak with the slightest disrespect of that famous periodical, to whichI have myself divers indebtednesses, and which has, in the last hundredyears or thereabouts, harboured and fostered many of the greatestwriters of France and much of her best literary work. But persons ofsome age and some memory must remember a time in England when it used tobe "mentioned with _hor_" as Policeman X mentioned something or somebodyelse about the same date or a little earlier. Even Matthew Arnold, inwhose comely head the bump of Veneration was not the most remarkableprotuberance, used to point to it--as something far above _us_--to beregarded with reverence and striven towards with might and main. Whatjustification there might be for this in general we need not nowconsider; but at any rate About has never seemed to the presenthistorian very much of a pillar of anything. His chief generallyaccepted titles to the position in novel-writing are, I suppose, _Le Roides Montagnes_ and _Tolla_, each of which, and perhaps one other, we mayexamine in some detail, grouping the rest (with one further exception)more summarily. They are the better suited for our purpose in that oneis comedy if not farce, and the other a gradually threatening and atlast accomplished tragedy.

  Of course it would be a very dull or a very curmudgeonly person whoshould fail to see or refuse to acknowledge "fun" in the history ofHadji or Hadgi Stavros. The mixture of sense, science, stupidity, andunconscious humour[417] in the German narrator; the satire on thetoleration of brigandage by government in Greece (it must be confessedthat, of all the reductions to the absurd of parliamentary andconstitutional arrangements in countries unsuited for them, wherein thelast hundred years have been so prolific, Greece has provided the mostconstant and reversed-sublime examples, as Russia has the most tragic);the contrast of amiability and atrocity in the brigands themselves--allthese provide excellent opportunities, by no means always missed, forthe display of a sort of anticipated and Gallicised Gilbertianism. Norneed the addition of stage Englishness in Mrs. Simons and her brotherand Mary Ann, of stage Americanism in Captain John Harris and his nephewLobster, spoil the broth.

  But, to the possibly erroneous taste[418] of the present taster, it doesnot seem to be a consummated _consomme_. To begin with, there is toomuch of it; it is watered out to over three hundred pages when it mighthave been "reduced" with great advantage to one hundred. Nor is this amere easy general complaint; it would be perfectly possible to point outwhere reductions should take place in detail. No one skilled in the useof the blue pencil could be at a loss where to apply it in thepreliminary matter; in the journey; in the Hadgi's gravely burlesquedcorrespondence; in the escape of the ladies; in Hermann's too prolongedyet absurdly ineffective tortures; in the civil war between the King andhis subjects; in the rather transpontine victory of the two Americansand the Maltese over both; and, above all, in the Royal Ball, whereEnglish etiquette requires that the rescuer must be duly introduced tothose he has rescued. Less matter (or rather less talking about matter)with more art might have made it a capital thing, especially if certaintraces of vulgarity, too common in About, were removed together with themere superfluities. At any rate, this is how it strikes, and always hasstruck, a younger but now old contemporary.

  [Sidenote: _Tolla._]

  The same fault of _longueurs_ makes itself felt in _Tolla_: and indeedthe author seems to have been conscious of it, and confesses it in anapologetic _Preface_ to the editions after the first. But this does notform the chief ground of accusation against it. Nor, certainly, do thefacts, as summarised in a note, justify any serious charge ofplagiarism,[419] though the celebrated Buloz seems for once to have beenan unwise editor, in objecting to a fuller acknowledgment ofindebtedness on the part of his contributor. A story of this tragicalkind will bear much fuller handling than a comic tale of scarcely morethan one situation, recounted with a perpetual "tongue-in-cheek"accompaniment.

  But, from another point of view, the book does justify the drawing of ageneral literary moral, that true _donnees_ are very far from beingcertain blessings--that they are, in fact, _dona Danaorum_--to thenovelist; that he should not hug the shore of fact, but launch out intothe ocean of invention. About, in a fashion rather cheerfully recallingthe boasts of poor Shadwell, who could "truly say that he had madeit[420] into a play" and that "four of the humours were entirely new,"assures us that he has invented everything but the main situation, andwritten everything out of his own head except a few of the letters ofTolla. Some of these added things are good, though one of the author'sbesetting sins may be illustrated by the fact that he gives nearly halfa score pages to a retrospective review of the history of a RussianGeneral'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 storyrequires.[421] But the "given" situation itself is a difficult one tohandle interestingly: and, in some estimates at any rate, the difficultyhas not been overcome here. The son--a younger, but still amply endowedson--of one of the greatest Roman families, compact of Princes andCardinals, with reminiscences of Venetian dogedom, falls in love, aftera half-hearted fashion, with the daughter of another house of somewhatless, but still old repute, and of fair, though much lesser wealth. By agood deal of "shepherding" on the part of her family and friends, and(one is bound to say) some rather "downright Dunstable" on her own, heis made to propose; but _her_ family accepts the demand that the thingshall, for a time, be kept secret from _his_. Of course no such secrecyis long possible; and his people, especially a certain wickedcavaliere-colonel, with the aid of a French Monseigneur and the Russiansabove mentioned, plot to break the thing off, and finally succeed."Lello" (Manuel) Coromila finds out the plot too late. Tolla dies of abroken 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 goodsubject for a play: that in the hands of Shakespeare or Shelley it mightmake a very great one in two different kinds. But--now speaking withvery much less diffidence--I do not think it a promising one for anovel; and, speaking with hardly any at all, I think that it hascertainly not made a good one here. Shut up into the narrow action ofthe stage; divested of the intervals which make its improbabilities morepalpable; and with the presentation of Lello as a weaker and baserHamlet, of Tolla as a betrayed Juliet--with all this brought out andmade urgent by a clever actor and actress, the thing might be made veryeffective. Dawdled over in a novel again of three hundred pages, itloses appeal to the sympathy and constantly starts fresh difficultiesfor the understanding.

  That a very delightful girl[422] may fall in love with a nincompoop whois also notoriously a light-of-love, is quite possible: and, no doubt,is fortunate for the nincompoops, and, after a fashion, good for thecontinuation of the human race. But, in a novel, you must make theprocess interesting, and that is not, _me judice_, done here. Thenincompoop, too, is such an utter nincompoop (he is not a villain, noreven a rascal) that, no comic use being made of his nincompoopery, he isof no use at all. And though an old and haughty Italian family like theFeraldis _might_ no doubt in real life--there is nothing that may nothappen in real life--consent to clandestine engagements of the kinddescribed, it certainly is one of the possible-improbables which arefatal, or nearly so, to art. Two or three subordinate characters--thegood-natured and good-witted Marquis Filippo Trasimeni, the faithfulpeasant Menico, Tolla's foster-brother, and even the bad chambermaidAmarella--have some merit. But twenty of them could no
t save the book,which, after dawdling till close upon its end, huddles itself up in afew pages, chiefly of _recit_, in a singularly inartistic fashion.

  [Sidenote: _Germaine._]

  _Germaine_, which has been (speaking under correction) a much lesspopular book than either _Le Roi des Montagnes_ or _Tolla_, is perhapsbetter than either. Except for a very few pages, it does not attempt thesomewhat cackling irony of the Greek book; and though it ends with onefailure of a murder, one accomplished ditto, and two more deaths of noordinary kind, it does not even attempt, as the Italian one does, realtragedy. 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 title is "Marquisof the Mounts of Iron," possessed also not only of the bluest ofblood, but of mountains of gold, has fallen in love, after anhonour-in-dishonour fashion, with the grass-widow of a French navalcaptain, Honorine Chermidy, and has had a child by her. She is really aworse Becky Sharp, or a rather cleverer Valerie Marneffe (who perhapswas her model[423]), and she forms a cunning plan by which the child maybe legitimated and she herself, apparently renouncing, will reallysecure a chance of, the countdom, the marquisate, and the mountains ofiron and gold. (Of the latter she has got a good share out of her loveralready.) The plan is that Villanera shall marry some girl (of noblebirth but feeble health and no fortune), which will, according to Frenchlaw, effect or at least permit the legitimation of the little Marques delas Montes de Hierro--certain further possibilities being leftostensibly to Providence, but, in Madame Chermidy's private intentions,to the care of quite another Power. The Dowager Countess deVillanera--rather improbably, but not quite impossibly--accepts this,being, though proud, willing to derogate a little to make sure of anheir to the House of Villanera with at any rate a portion (thesceptical would say a rather doubtful portion[424]) of its own blood.

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

  [Sidenote: _Madelon._]

  All these books, and perhaps one or two others, are about the samelength--an equality possibly due (as we have seen in English examples ona different scale) to periodical publication. But once, in _Madelon_,About attempted something of much "longer breath," as his countrymensay. Here we have nearly six hundred pages instead of three hundred, andeach page (which is a large one) contains at least half as much again asa page of the others. The book is a handsome one, with a title in redink; and the author says he took three years to write the novel--ofcourse as an avocation from his vocation in journalism. It is difficultto repress, though probably needless to utter, the most obvious remarkon this; but it is not hard to give it another turn. Diderot said (andthough some people believe him not, I do) that Rousseau originallyintended, in the Dijon prize essay which made his fate and fame, toargue that science and letters had _improved_ morality, etc.; and thathe, Diderot, had told Jean Jacques that this was _le pont aux anes_, anddetermined him to take the paradoxical side instead. The "Asses' bridge"(_not_ in the Euclidic sense, nor as meaning that all who took it wereasses) of the mid-nineteenth century French novelist was the biographyof the _demi-monde_. Balzac had been the first and greatest engineer ofthese _ponts et chaussees_; Dumas _fils_ had shown that they might leadto no mean success; so all the others followed in a fashion certainlyrather ovine and occasionally asinine. Madelon is a young woman,attractive rather than beautiful, who begins as a somewhat mysteriousfavourite of men of fashion in Paris; establishes herself for a time asa married woman in an Alsatian town; ruins nearly, _mais non tout_, acountry baron; and ends, as far as the book goes, by being a sort ofinferior Lola Montes to a German princeling. It has cost considerableeffort to justify even this short summary. I have found few Frenchnovels 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 inEngland in the mid-nineteenth century, as much as their ancestors andtheir descendants in both countries have done before and since. Asurvivor 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 presentwriter's knowledge extends, Edmond About was not a novelist at all "inhis heart." He was a journalist (he himself admits the impeachment sofar), and he was a journalist in a country where novel- or at leasttale-writing had long established itself as part of the journalist'sbusiness. Also he was really a good _raconteur_--a gift which, thoughperhaps few people have been good novelists without it, does not byitself make a good novelist. As a publicist, too, he was of no smallmark: his _Question Romaine_ could not be left out of any sufficientpolitical library of the nineteenth century. Some of his shorter tales,such as _Le Nez d'un Notaire_ and _L'Homme a l'Oreille Cassee_, have hada great vogue with those who like comic situations described withlively, if not very refined, wit. He was also a good topographer; indeedthis element enters largely into most of his so-called novels alreadynoticed, and constitutes nearly all the interest of a very pleasant bookcalled _Maitre Pierre_. This is a description of the _Landes_ betweenBordeaux and Arcachon, and something like a "puff" of the methods usedto reclaim them, diversified by an agreeable enough romance. The hero isa local "king," a foundling-hunter-agriculturist who uses his kingdom,not like Hadji Stavros, to pillage and torment, but to benefit hissubjects. The heroine is his protegee Marinette, a sort of minor IsopelBerners, with a happier end.[428] The throwing into actual tale-form ofcurious and decidedly costly local fashions of courtship is clever; butthe whole thing is a sort of glorified advertisement. Other books, _LesMariages de Paris_ and _Les Mariages de Province_, almost tell thei
rtales, and something more,[429] in their titles.

  One cannot but be sorry if this seems an unfair or shabby account of apleasant and popular writer, but the right and duty of historicalcriticism is not to be surrendered. One of the main objects of literaryhistory is to separate what is quotidian from what is not. To neglectthe quotidian altogether is--whatever some people may say--to fall shortof 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--theyounger Sue and Soulie; the protagonists of the melodramatic andcriminal _feuilleton_ during the later middle of the century--has beenrather a problem with me. Clearly they cannot be altogether neglected.Deep would answer to deep, Rocambole to M. Lecoq, in protesting againstsuch an omission of their manufacturers. I do not know, indeed, that anyEnglish writer of distinction has done for M. le Vicomte Ponson duTerrail what Mr. Lang did, "under the species of eternity" which verseconfers, for "(Miss Braddon and) Gaboriau." I have known those whopreferred that _other_ Viscount, "Richard O'Monroy"--who shared with"Gyp" and Armand Silvestre the cheerful office of cheering the cheerableduring the 'eighties and later--to the more canonical possessor of thetitle before him. But du Terrail was what I believe is called, inScottish "kirk" language, a "supply"--a person who could undertake theduty of filling gaps--of enormous efficacy in his day. That is a claimon this history which cannot be neglected, though the people who wouldfain 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 anoubliette, like one of his own heroes, and _not_ give him the filemercifully furnished to that robustious marquis. Gaboriau claims, in thesame way, even more "clamantly."

  The worst of it is (to play cards on table with the strictness which isthe only virtue of this book, save perhaps an occasional absence ofignorance) that neither of them appeals to me. I have no doubt that thisrecalcitrance 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 factthat, in my journalist days, perhaps because I was a kind of abortion ofa 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 infavour of Mrs. Maybrick. But I had read crime-novels before those days,and they never amused me. Yet perhaps it may be possible to showcause--other than my personal likings--for not ranking these high.

  [Sidenote: The first--his general character.]

  I have somewhere seen it said that Ponson du Terrail, before he took todriving _feuilletons_ five-in-hand, showed some power of less coarsefiction-writing on a smaller scale. But I have not seen any of theseessays, and real success in them on his part would surprise me. For itis exactly in the qualities necessary to such a success that he seems tome to come short. He _did_ possess what, though it may seem almostprofane to call it imagination, is really a cheap and drossy lower kindthereof. He could frame and accumulate, even to some extent connect,melodramatic situations, not so very badly, and not in very glaringimitation of anybody else. But, perhaps for that very reason, thedifference between him and the others strikes one all the morepainfully. _Les Orphelins de la Saint-Barthelemy_ awakes the saddestsighs for Dumas or Merimee. _La Femme Immortelle_, with its _diablerie_explained and then _dis_-explained and then clumsily solved with alaugh, makes one wish for an hour or two even of Soulie. And when onecomes to the nineteenth century and _Les Gandins_ and a fiendish_docteur rouge_[430] (who is in every conceivable way inferior toVigny's _docteur noir_), and a wicked count who undergoes a spottytranscorporation, it is worse. If any one says, "This is possible, butyou yourself have said that excellence in some one else ought not toaffect the estimate of the actual subject," I reply, "Granted; butPonson du Terrail bores me." I have dropped every book of his that Ihave taken up, and only at a second--even a third--struggle have beenable to get knowledge enough of it to speak without critical treason.Moreover, his style (always under caution given) seems to me flat,savourless, and commonplace; his thought childish, his etceteras (if Imay so say) absurd. The very printing is an irritation. Who can readsuch stuff as this?

  Tout a coup une sonnette se fit entendre.

  Nana se leva.

  Cette sonnette etat celle qui avertissait la soubrette que sa maitresse reclamait son office.

  La jolie fille prit un flambeau et quitta la cuisine.

  Here you have four separate paragraphs, five lines, and thirty-fivewords to express, in almost idiotic verbiage, the following:

  "Here her mistress's bell rang, and she left the kitchen."

  One might conduct not merely five, but five and twenty novels abreast atthis rate.

  [Sidenote: The second.]

  Not thus would it be proper to write of Gaboriau. With him, exceptincidentally, and when he is diverging from his proper line,[431] onefinds no mere "piffle." He has a business and he does that. Moreover, itis a business which, if not intrinsically, is historically important. Ofcourse there had been crime-novels and crime-tales before: there alwayshas been everything before. But Gaboriau undoubtedly refashioned andrestarted them, and has been ever since the parent or master of afamily, or whole school, of novelists and tale-tellers who havesometimes seemed, at any rate to themselves, to be pillars, and to beentitled to talk about politics and religion and morals, and the otherthings which, as Chesterfield so delightfully remarked, need notroublesome preparation in the talker. His place here, therefore, issecured. If it is not a large place, that is not entirely due to themere fact that, as has been frankly acknowledged, the present writertakes little pleasure in the crime-novel. It is because the kind,plentiful for those who like it to read, can be conveniently knocked offin specimen for others. For the latter purpose it would not matter verymuch whether _L'Affaire Lerouge_, or _Le Crime d'Orcival_, or _M. Lecoq_itself, or perhaps even others, were taken. The first named, which was,I think, one of the first, if not the actual overture of the series, andwhich happens to be best known to the historian, will perhaps suffice.

  [Sidenote: _L'Affaire Lerouge._]

  No one who takes it up, having some little critical aptitude andexperience, will fail to see, very shortly, that it does mean businessand does do it. The murder of Claudine Lerouge is well plunged into; thearrangements for its detection--professional and amateur--are"gnostically" laid out; and the plot thickens and presents various sidesof itself, like a craftsmanly made and tossed pancake. If you read it atall, you will not skip much; first, because the interest, such as it is,is continuous; and, secondly, for one of those reasons which keepwould-be sinners in other paths of rectitude--that, _if_ you skip, youwill almost certainly find you have lost your way when you come downfrom skipping. Some oddities--partly, but not entirely, connected withthe strange and well-known differences between French and Englishcriminal procedure--will, of course, strike an Englishman--thecollaboration of professional _juge d'instruction_ and amateur detectivebeing perhaps the most remarkable. The love-affair, in which the Judgehimself and the plotted-against Albert de Commarin are rivals, though auseful poker to stir the fire, is not quite a well-managed one: and thelong harangue of Madame Gerdy, between her resurrection from brain-feverand her death, seems a little to strain probability. But no one of thesethings, nor all together, need be fatal to the enjoyment of the book onthe part of, as was once said, "them as likes" the kind.[432]

  [Sidenote: Feydeau--_Sylvie_.]

  Short notice may again serve for another novelist enormously popular inhis day; very characteristic of the Second Empire; a favourite[433] fora time (rather inexplicably) of Sainte-Beuve; but not much of a rose,and very much of many days before yesterday--Ernest Feydeau. He did onething, _Sylvie_, as different as possible from Gerard's book of the samename, but still, as it seems to me, good enough, though it never enjoyeda tenth part of th
e popularity of his more "scabrous" things, thoughitself is very far from prudish, and though it makes no appearance insome lists and collections of his work. Feydeau (it is a redeemingpoint) was one of "those about" Gautier, and _Sylvie_ is by no meansunlike a pretty free and fairly original transfer from _LesJeune-France_. The hero is a gentleman, decadent by anticipation andromantic by survival to the very _n_th. He abides in a vast chamber,divanned, and hung with Oriental curtains: he smokes endless tchibouks,and lives chiefly upon preserved ginger. To him enters Sylvie, a sort ofguardian angel, with a rather Mahometan angelism, who devotes herself tohim, and succeeds, by this means and that, in converting him to asomewhat more rational system of life and "tonvelsasens," as Swift wouldsay. It is slight enough, but very far from contemptible.

  [Sidenote: _Fanny._]

  As has been said or hinted, however, this was not at all the sort ofthing that brought or, so long as he did keep it, kept Feydeau's vogue._Fanny_, with which he "broke out" considerably more than "ten thousandstrong," as far as sale of copies went, is certainly not a book of the"first-you-meet" kind. There is some real passion in its handling of theeverlasting triangle. But it is passion of the most morbid and least"infinite" kind possible. Whenever Feydeau's heroes are sincere theyhave a peculiar kind of sentimental immorality--a sort of greasygush--which is curiously nauseous. His Aphrodite, if the goddess willpardon the profanation of her name, is neither laughter-loving, nortragic (as Aphrodite can be), nor Uranian in the sense, not of beingsuperior to physical passion, but of transcending it. She is notexactly Pandemic, for Feydeau, like Malvolio, does talk, or tries totalk, of ladies; but she is something like the patroness of the oldSensibility novel "gone to the bad."

  [Sidenote: Others--_Daniel_.]

  _Madame de Chalis_, according to a memory of many years which I have notthought it worth while to freshen, has a weaker draught of this rancidand mawkish sentimentality. But having in those days missed (or failedover) _Daniel_, I thought it incumbent on me to gird myself up to itseight hundred pages. A more dismal book, even to skim, I have seldomtaken up. The hero--a prig of the first water--marries one of thoseapparently only half-flesh-and-blood wives who, novelistically, neverfail to go wrong. He cannot, in the then state of French law, divorceher, but he is able to return her on her mother's hands. Going toTrouville (about which, then a quite new-fashioned resort, there is agreat deal in the book), he meets a beautiful girl, Louise de Grandmont,and the pair fall--not merely hopelessly, which is, in thecircumstances, a matter of course, but, it would seem, innocently--inlove with each other. But in such a case scandal must needs come; and itis engineered by revenge of the discarded wife and the mother-in-law, bythe treachery of some of Daniel's friends and the folly of others, aswell as, it must be added, by his own weak violence, thoughtlessconduct, and general imbecility. All this is developed at enormouslength, and it ends in a general massacre, Louise's uncle being killedin a duel which Daniel ought to have fought (he is no coward, but ahopeless blunderer), the girl herself dying of aneurism, and Danielputting an end to himself in her grave, much more messily and to quiteinfinitely less tragic effect than Romeo. There is one scene in which heis represented as gathering all his enemies together (including alawyer, who is half-rogue, half-dupe) and putting them all to confusionby his oratory. The worst of it is that one does not in the least see_why_ they were confused, except in one case, where the foe is literallykicked downstairs--an effective method, and one rare enough in Frenchnovels up to this date to be worth notice.[434]

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Droz.]

  It was, for all contemporary readers of the French novel, except thoseof the gravest and most precise kind, a day to be marked, not withvanishing forms in chalk, but with alabaster or Parian, when "Marcellin"of the _Vie Parisienne_--one of those remarkable editors who, withoutever writing themselves, seem to have the knack of attracting and almostcreating writers, enlisted one "Z," the actual final letter of the nameof Gustave Droz, and published the first article of those to be latercollected as _Monsieur, Madame et Bebe_ and _Entre Nous_. Although thecontents of these books only added a fresh sprout to the age-old treethat, for more than half a millennium, had borne _fabliau_ and_nouvelle_ and _conte_ and _histoire_, and so forth, they had aremarkable, if not easily definable, differentia of their own, and haveinfluenced fiction-writing of the same kind for a good half-centurysince. The later-working "Gyp" and others owed a good deal to them; andI am bound to say that--reading the two books recently after a longinterval--I found my old favourites just as amusing as I found them thevery first time, shortly after they came out.

  Of course--and only those who have made much study of criticism know howseldom critics recognise this "of course"--you must take the things in,and not out of, their own class. They are not bread, or meat, or milk ofliterature. They are, to take one order of gastronomic preference andtaste, devilled biscuits; to take another, chocolate with whipped creamon it. And the devilling and the creaming are sometimes better than thechocolate and the biscuit.

  [Sidenote: _Mr., Mme. et Bebe_ and _Entre Nous_.]

  It is not very easy to say--and perhaps not very important toknow--whether the mixture of naughtiness and sentimentality whichcharacterises these books[435] was what Mr. Carlyle, I think, was firstto call an "insurance" or only a spontaneous and in no way "dodgy" or"hedgy" expression of the two sides of the French character. Foreverybody ought to know that the complaint of Dickens's "Mr. theEnglishman" as to the French being "so d--d sentimental" is at least aswell justified as Mr. Arnold's disapproval of their "worship ofLubricity." I suppose there are some people who would prefer thesentiment and are others who would choose the "tum-te-dy," while yet athird set might find each a disagreeable alternative to the other. Formyself, without considering so curiously, I can very frankly enjoy thebest of both. The opening story of the earlier and, I think, morepopular book, "Mon Premier Reveillon," is not characteristic. It mighthave been written by almost anybody, and is in substance a softened andgenteel version of the story of Miss Jemima Ivins, and her luckless (butthere virtuous) suitor, in the "Boz" _Sketches_. "L'Ame en Peine," whichfollows, strikes the peculiar Drozian note for the first time; and verypleasant is the painting of the struggles of a pious youth--pious andpudibund to a quite miraculous extent for a French _collegien_ of goodfamily--with the temptations of a beautiful Marquise and cousin who,arrayed in an ultra-Second-Empire bathing-costume, insists on hisbathing with her. "Tout le Reste de Madame de K." may a little remind anEnglish reader of the venerable chestnut about the Bishop and thehousemaid's knee; but the application is different. There is nothingwicked in it, but it contains some of the touches of varying estimateof "good form" in different countries which make the comparative readingof English and French novels so interesting. "Souvenirs de Careme" is(or rather are, for the piece is subdivided) the longest of several bitsof Voltairianism, sometimes very funny and seldom offensive. But, alas!one cannot go through them all. The most remarkable exercise in thecurious combination or contrast noticed above is afforded by _Une Nuitde Noce_ and _Le Cahier Bleu_ (tricks of ingeniously "passed-off"naughtiness which need not shock anybody), combined with the charmingand pathetic "Omelette" which opens the second book, and which gives thehappy progress and the sad termination of the union so merrily begun.All are drawn with equal skill and with no real bad taste. In one or twoarticles of both books the _gauloiserie_ broadens and coarsens, while inthe more purely "Bebe" sections of the first the sentimentality may seema little watered out. But you cannot expect acrobatics on wine-glassesof this kind always to "come off" without some slips and breakages.

  On the whole, I think _Entre Nous_ contains the very best things, andmost good ones. The pathos of the first (which is itself by no meansmere _pleurnicherie_) is balanced at the other end by the audacity of"Le Sentiment a l'Epreuve," a most agreeable "washing white" of the mainidea of Wycherley's _Country Wife_; and between the two, few in thewhole score are inferior. "Nocturne," "Oscar," "
Causerie," and "LeMaillot de Madame" were once marked for special commendation by a criticwho certainly deserved the epithet of competent, in addition to those offair and gentle. It is, however, in this volume that what seems to meDroz's one absolute failure occurs. It is neither comic nor tragic,neither naughty nor nice, and one really wonders how it came to be putin. It is entitled "Les de Saint-Paon," and is a commonplace, hackneyed,quite unhumorous, and rather ill-tempered satire on certain dubiousaristocrats and anti-modernists. Nothing could be cheaper or lesspointed. And the insertion of it is all the stranger because, elsewhere,there is something very similar, in subject and tendency, but of halfthe length and ten times the wit, in "Le Petit Lever," a conversationbetween a certain Count and his valet.

  The plain critical fact is that the non-pathetic serious was in no wayDroz's trade. His satire on matters ecclesiastical is sometimesdelightful when it is mere _persiflage_: an Archbishop might relax overthe conversation in Paradise between two great ladies, one of whom hascharitably stirred up the efforts of her director in favour of her owncoachman to such effect, that she actually finds that menial promoted toa much higher sphere Above than that which she herself occupies. Buthere, also, the more gravity the less goodness.

  Yet, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, we ought not toquarrel with him for this, and to do so would be again to fall into theold "gin-shop and leg-of-mutton" unreasonableness. It was M. Droz'smission to start a new form of Crebillonade--_panache_ (to use anexcellent term of French cookery), here and there, with another new formof Sensibility. He did it quite admirably, and he taught the simplerdevice--the compound one hardly--to pupils, some of whom still divert,or at least distract, the world. I am not at all ashamed to say that Ithink the best of his and their work capital stuff, continuing worthilyone of the oldest and most characteristic strains of French literature;displaying no contemptible artistry; and contributing very considerablyto that work of pleasure-giving which has been acknowledged as supplyingthe main subject of this book.

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Cherbuliez.]

  [Sidenote: His general characteristics.]

  Few more striking contrasts--though we have been able to supply a fairnumber of such things--could be found than by passing from Gustave Drozto Victor Cherbuliez. Scion of a Genevese family already distinguishedin letters, M. Cherbuliez became one of the _Deux-Mondains_, a"publicist" as well as a novelist of great ability, and finally anAcademician; but his novels, clever as they are, were never quite"frankly" liked in France--at least, by the critics. This may have beenpartly due to the curious latent grudge with which French writers--tothe country as well as to the language and manners born--have alwaysregarded their Swiss comrades or competitors--the attitude as to a kindof poacher or interloper.[436] But to leave the matter there would benot only to miss thoroughness in the individual case, but also tooverlook a point of very considerable importance to the history of theFrench novel generally. There is undoubtedly something in M.Cherbuliez's numerous, vigorous, and excellently readable novels whichreminds one more of English than of French fiction. We have noticed acertain resemblance in Feuillet to Trollope: it is stronger still inCherbuliez. Not, of course, that the Swiss novelist denieshimself--though he uses them more sparingly--the usual latitudes of theFrench as contrasted with the English novelist during nine-tenths of thenineteenth century. But he does use them more sparingly, and he is aptto make his heroines out of unmarried girls, to an extent which might atthat time seem, to the conventional French eye, simply indecent. He ismuch more prodigal of "interest"--that is to say, of incident, accident,occurrence--than most French novelists who do not affect somewhatmelodramatic romance. On the other hand, his character-drawing, thoughalways efficient, is seldom if ever masterly; and that "schematisation,"on which, as is pointed out in various places of this book, Frenchcritics are apt to insist so much, is not always present. Of actualpassion he has little, and his books are somewhat open to thecharge--which has been brought against those of so many of our ownsecond-best novelists--that they are somewhat machine-made, or, if thatword be too unkind, are rather works of craft than of art. Yet the workof a sound craftsman, using good materials, is a great help in life; anda person who wants good story-pastime for a certain number of nights,without possessing a Scheherazade of his own, will find plenty of it inthe thirty years' novel turn-out of Victor Cherbuliez.

  [Sidenote: Short survey of his books.]

  He did not find his way at once, beginning with "mixed" novelsof a Germanish kind--art-fiction in _Un Cheval de Phidias_;psychological-literary matter (Tasso's madness) in _Le Prince Vitale_;politico-social subjects in _Le Grand-oeuvre_. But these things, whichhave not often been successes, certainly were not so in M. Cherbuliez'shands. He broke fresh ground and "grew" a real novel in _Le ComteKostia_, and he continued to till this plot, with good results, for therest of his life. The "scenes and characters" are sufficiently varied,those in the book just mentioned being Russian and those in _LadislasBolski_ Polish--neither particularly complimentary to the nationalitiesconcerned, and the latter decidedly melodramatic. _Le Comte Kostia_ issometimes considered his best novel; but I should put above it both _LeRoman d'une Honnete Femme_ (his principal attempt in purely Frenchsociety and on Feuilletesque lines, with a tighter morality) and _MetaHoldenis_, a story of a Swiss girl--not beautiful, but "_vurry_attractive," and not actually "no better than she should be," but quiteready to be so if it suited her. _Miss Rovel_ with anothergirl-heroine--eccentric, but not in the lines of the usualFrench-English caricatures--is a great favourite with some. _La Revanchede Joseph Noirel_ is again melodramatic; and _Prosper Randoce_ is notgood for much. But _Paule Mere_, one of its author's bestcharacter-books, is very much better--it is a study of ill-starred love,as is _Le Fiance de Mlle. Saint-Maur_, a book not so good, but not bad._Samuel Brohl et Cie_ is a very clever story of a rascal. I do not knowthat any of his subsequent novels, _L'Idee de Jean Teterol_, _Noirs etRouges_, _La Ferme du Choquard_, _Olivier Maugant_, _La Vocation duComte Ghislain_, _La Bete_, _Une Gageure_, which closes the list of myacquaintance with them, will disappoint the reader who does not raisehis expectation too high. _Olivier Maugant_ is perhaps the strongest.But the expression just used must not be taken as belittling. In bothFrance and England such novel-writing had become almost atrade--certainly a profession: and the turning out of workmanlike andfairly satisfying articles for daily consumption is, if not a nobleambition, a quite respectable aim. M. Cherbuliez did something more thanthis: there are numerous scenes and situations in his work which do notmerely interest, but excite, if they never exactly transport. And theprovision of interest itself is, as has been allowed, remarkablybounteous. I should not despise, though I should be a little sorry for,a reader--especially an English reader--who found more of it inCherbuliez than even in Feuillet, and much more than in Flaubert orMaupassant. The causes of such preference require no extensiveindication, and I need not say, after or before what is said elsewhere,that this order of estimate is not mine. But it is to some extent a"fact in the case."[437]

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Three eccentrics.]

  Before finishing this chapter we ought, perhaps, to consider three oddpersons, two of them much extolled by some--Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly,Leon Cladel, and "Champfleury" of _Les Excentriques_. The two first werethemselves emphatically "eccentrics"--one an apostle of dandyism (heactually wrote a book about Brummel, whom he had met early), adisdainful critic of rather untrustworthy vigour, and a stalwartreactionary to Catholicism and Royalism; the other a devotee of theexact opposite of dandyism, as the title of his best-known book, _LesVa-nu-pieds_, shows, and a Republican to the point of admiring theCommune. The opposition has at least the advantage of disprovingprejudice, in any unfavourable remarks that may be made about either. ToBarbey d'Aurevilly's criticism I have endeavoured to do justice in amore appropriate place than this.[438] His fiction occupied a muchsmaller, but not a small, proportion o
f his very voluminous work. _LesDiaboliques_ and _L'Ensorcelee_, as well as _Les Va-nu-pieds_, aretitles which entitle a reader to form certain more or less definiteexpectations about the books they label; and an author, by choosingthem, deprives himself, to some extent, of the right justly claimed forhim in Victor Hugo's well-known manifesto, to be judged _merely_according to his own scheme, and the goodness or badness of its carryingout. If Hugo himself had made _Les Orientales_ studies of Montmartre andthe Palais Royal, he could not have made out his right to the privilegehe asserted. The objection applies to Barbey d'Aurevilly even more thanto Cladel, but as the work of the latter is the less important, we maytake it first.

  [Sidenote: Leon Cladel--_Les Va-nu-pieds_, etc.]

  At more times in my life than one I have striven to like--or at any rateto take an interest in--_Les Va-nu-pieds_. Long ago it had for me thepassport of the admiration of Baudelaire,[439] to whom and to VictorHugo (this latter circumstance an important _visa_ to the former) Cladelannounced himself a pupil. But an absolute, if perhaps unfortunate,inability to follow anything but my own genuine opinion prevented mefrom enjoying it. And I cannot enjoy it now. It is not a commonplacebook, nor is anything else of its author's; but the price paid for theabsence of commonplaceness is excessive. A person possessing genius, andsure of it, does not tell you that he has been rewriting his book (notfor correction of fact, but for improvement of style) for ten years, andthat now he doesn't care anything for critics, and endorses it NEVARIETUR (_sic_).[440] The style itself is a mosaic of preciousness,literary jargon, and positive _argot_--not quite contemptible, but, likesome actual mosaic, unattractive; and the matter does not attract me,though it may attract people who like tiger-taming scenes, crimes,grimes, etc. The address of the dedication, "Mienne," and nothing more,is rather nice, and some of the local scenes (Cladel was passionatelypatriotic towards his remote province of Quercy-Rouergue) are worthreading. But this devotion is better shown in the short single book(_Les Va-nu-pieds_ is a collection) called _Crete-Rouge_--the regimentalnickname of the heroine (an Amazon), who actually serves in the war ofthe Terrible Year, and comes off much better, when her sex is discoveredby the Prussians, than she would have done forty and odd years later.The end-scenes of this book, with her Druid-stone marriage to a comrade,are really good. Of _Le Bouscassie_, _Titi-Froissac IV_, and _La FeteVotive de Saint-Bartholomee Porte-Glaive_ I shall not say much. The"province," which is strong in them, saves them sometimes. But Cladel'shopeless lack of self-criticism shows itself in the fact of his actuallyreprinting in full an article of Veuillot's (by no meansuncomplimentary) on himself, as a prelude in the book last mentioned,and adding a long reply. The proceeding was honest, but rather suicidal.One may not wholly admire the famous editor of the _Univers_.[441] Butnothing could better throw up his clear, vigorous, classical French andtrenchant logic, than the verbose and ambaginous preciousness, and thecabbage-stick cudgel-play, of Cladel.[442]

  [Sidenote: Barbey d'Aurevilly--his criticism of novels.]

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, also a favourite of Baudelaire's, is a writerof an altogether greater clan--indeed one of those who come short but alittle, and one does not quite know how, of individual greatness.Something has been said of his criticism, but a volume of it which wasnot within my reach when I wrote what is there quoted, _Le RomanContemporain_, is a closer introduction to a notice of him as anovelist. As of all his work it may be said of this, that anybody whodoes not know the subjects will probably go away with a wrong idea ofthem, but that anybody who does know them will receive some veryvaluable cross-lights. The book consists[443] of a belittlement,slightly redressed at the end, of Feuillet as a feeble person and animpertinent patroniser of religion; of a rather "magpie" survey of theGoncourts; of a violent and quite blind attack on Flaubert (the worstcriticism of Barbey's that I have ever read); of a somewhat unexpectedlyappreciative notice of Daudet; of an almost obligatory panegyric ofFabre; of another _ereintement_, at great length, of Zola; and ofshorter articles, again "magpied" of praise and blame, on MM. Richepin,Catulle Mendes, and Huysmans.[444]

  [Sidenote: His novels themselves--_Les Diaboliques_ and others.]

  [Sidenote: His merits.]

  All this is interesting, but I fear it confirms a variation of the titleof a famous Elizabethan play--"Novelists beware novelists." Poets have aworse reputation in this way, or course; but, I think, unjustly. Perhapsthe reason is that the quality of poetry is more _definite_, if not moredefinable, than that of prose fiction, or else that poets are morereally sure of themselves. Barbey d'Aurevilly[445] had an apparentlyundoubting mind, but perhaps there were unacknowledged doubts, whichtransformed themselves into jealousies, in his heart of hearts. Formyself, I sympathise with his political and religious (if not exactlywith his ecclesiastical) views pretty decidedly; I think (speaking asusual with the due hesitation of a foreigner) that he writes excellentFrench; and I am sure--a point of some consequence with me, and not toocommonly met--that he generally writes (when he does not get _too_angry) like a gentleman. He sometimes has phrases which please me verymuch, as when he describes two lovers embracing so long that they "musthave drunk a whole bottle of kisses," or when he speaks of the voice ofa preacher "_tombant_ de la chaire dans cette eglise ou _pleuvaient_ lestenebres du soir," where the opposition-combination of "tombant" and"pleuvaient," and the image it arouses, seem to me of a most absolutefancy. He can write scenes--the finale of his best book, _L'Ensorcelee_;the overture of _Un Pretre Marie_; and nearly the whole of the last andbest _Diabolique_, "Une Vengeance de Femme"--which very closely approachthe first class. And, whether he meant me to do so or not, I like himwhen in "Un Diner d'Athees" he makes one of them "swig off" (_lamper_) abumper of Picardan, the one wine in all my experience which I shouldconsider fit _only_ for an atheist.[446] But a good novelist I cannothold him.

  The inability does not come from any mere "unpleasantness" in hissubjects, though few pleasant ones seem to have lain in his way, and hecertainly did not go out of that way to find them. But _L'Ensorcelee_can only be objected to on this score by an absurdly fastidious person,and I do not myself want any more rose-pink and sky-blue in _Un PretreMarie_;[447] while the last _Diabolique_, already mentioned, is acapital example of grime made more than tolerable.[448] Indeed, nothingof the sort can be more unmistakable than the sincerity of Barbey's"horrors." They mark, in that respect, nearly the apex of the triangle,the almost disappearing lower angles of which may be said to berepresented by the crude and clumsy vulgarities of Janin's _Ane Mort_,and the more craftsmanlike, indeed in a way almost artistic, butunconvinced and unconvincing atrocities of Borel's _Champavert_.

  [Sidenote: And defects.]

  [Sidenote: Especially as shown in _L'Ensorcelee_.]

  The objection, and the defect which occasions the objection, are quitedifferent. Barbey d'Aurevilly has many gifts and some excellencies. Buthis work in novel constantly reminds me of the old and doubtlesswell-known story of a marriage which was almost ideally perfect in allrespects but one--that the girl "couldna bide her man." He can do manythings, but he cannot or will not tell a story, save in such fragmentsand flashes as those noted above. His _longueurs_ are exasperating andsometimes nearly maddening, though perhaps many readers would savethemselves by simply discontinuing perusal. The first _Diabolique_ hasmetal attractive enough of its kind. A young officer boards with aprovincial family, where the beautiful but at first silent, abstracted,and, as the Pleiade would have said, _marbrine_ daughter suddenly,though secretly, develops frantic affection for him, and shows it byconstant indulgence in the practice which that abominable cad inOphelia's song put forward as an excuse for not "wedding." But, on oneof these occasions, she translates trivial metaphor into ghastly fact byliterally dying in his arms. Better stuff--again of its kind--for atwenty-page story, or a little more, could hardly be found. But Barbeygives us _ninety_, not indeed large, but, in the usual editions, ofexceptionally close and small print, watering out the tale intolerablyalmost throughout, and giving it a blunt and mai
med conclusion. _LeBonheur dans le Crime_,[449] _Le Dessous de Cartes_, and theabove-mentioned _Diner d'Athees_, which fill a quarter of a thousand ofsuch pages, invite slashing with a hook desperate enough to cut eachdown to a quarter of a hundred. _Un Pretre Marie_, which perhaps comesnext to _L'Ensorcelee_ in merit, would be enormously improved by beingin one volume instead of two. Of _Une Vieille Maitresse_ I think I couldspare both, except a vigorously told variant (the suggestion isacknowledged, for Barbey d'Aurevilly was much too proud to steal) ofBuckingham's duel[450] and the Countess (not "Duchess," by the way) ofShrewsbury. _Une Histoire sans Nom_, a substantial though not a verylong book, is only a short story spun out. Even in _L'Ensorcelee_ itselfthe author, as a critic, might, and probably would, have found seriousfault, had it been the work of another novelist. There is lesssurplusage and more continuous power, so that one is carried throughfrom the fine opening on the desolate moor (a _little_ suggested,perhaps, by the meeting of Harry Bertram and Dandie Dinmont, but quiteindependently worked out) to the vigorous close above referred to. Butthe story is quite unnecessarily muddled by information that part of itwas supplied by the Norman Mr. Dinmont, and part by an ancient countess.We never get any clear idea _why_ Jeanne le Hardouey was bewitched, and_why_ the Chevalier-Abbe de la Croix-Jugan suffered and diffused sogruesome a fate.[451] Yet the fate itself is enough to make one close,with the sweet mouth, remarks on this very singular failure of a genius.Few things of the sort in fiction are finer than the picture of theterrible unfinished mass (heralded over the desolate moor at uncertaintimes by uncanny bell-ringing), which the reprobate priest (who has beenshot at the altar-steps before he could accomplish the Sacrifice ofReconciliation[452]) endeavours after his death to complete, beingalways baffled before the consecrating moment.

  [Sidenote: Champfleury.]

  Cladel had a considerable, and Barbey d'Aurevilly an almost exclusive,fancy for the tragical. On the other hand, Champfleury (who, no doubtpartly for a bibliographical memory,[453] prefixed the Champ- to hisactual surname) occupies, as has been said, a curious, but in part farfrom unsatisfactory, position in regard to our subject, and one blessedby the Comic Spirit. His confessed fictions are, indeed, not verysuccessful. To take one volume only, _Madame Eugenio_, the title-story,_not_ the first in order, but the longest, is most unfortunately, butfar too accurately, characterised by a phrase towards its end, "ce_triste_ recit," the adjective, like our "poor," being capable of twodifferent meanings. _Histoire du Lieutenant Valentin_, on the otherhand--a story of a young soldier, who, leaving Saint-Cyr incholera-time, has to go to hospital, and, convalescing pleasantly whileshelling peas and making rose-gays for the Sisters, is naively surprisedat one of them being at first very kind and then very cold to him--is amiss of a masterpiece, but still a miss, partly owing to too greatlength. And so with others.

  [Sidenote: _Les Excentriques._]

  But in his much earlier _Les Excentriques_ (not unnaturally but wronglycalled "_Contes_ Excentriques" by some), handling what profess to betrue stories, he shows a most excellent narrative faculty. Whether theyare true or not (they rather resemble, and were perhaps inspired by,some things of Gautier and Gerard) matters little--they are quite goodenough to be false. They are, necessarily, not quite equal, and theremay be for some tastes, not for all, too much of the Fourierism andother queernesses of the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, the book is of1852, and its subjects are almost all of the decade preceding. But someare exceedingly refreshing, the dedication, of some length, to the greatcaricaturist Daumier being not the least so. Yet it is not so unwise asto disappoint the reader by being better than the text. "Lucas," thecircle-squarer, who explains how, when he was in a room with a lady andher two daughters, he perceived that "this was all that was necessaryfor him to attain the cubation of two pyramids," is very choice."Cambriel"--who not only attained the philosopher's stone and theuniversal medicine, but ascertained that God is six feet six high, offlame-coloured complexion, and with particularly perfect ankles--runshim hard. And so does Rose Marius Sardat, who sent a copy of his _Loid'Union_, a large and nicely printed octavo, to every Parisiannewspaper-office, informing the editors that they might reprint it in_feuilletons_ for nothing, but that he should not write the secondvolume unless the first were a success. Some of us ought to beparticularly obliged to Rose Marius for holding that persons overseventy are indispensable, and that, if there are not enough in France,they must be imported. The difference of this from the callousshort-sightedness which talks about "fixed periods" is most gratifying.But perhaps the crown and flower of the book is the vegetarian Jupille,who wrote pamphlets addressed:

  AUX GOURMANDS DE CHAIR!

  decided that meat is of itself atheistical, though he admitted a "siren"quality about it; and held that the fact of onions making human beingsweep attests their own "touching sensibility for us" (albeit he had toadmit again that garlic was demoniac). M. Jupille (who was a practicalman, and cooked cabbage and cauliflower so that his meat-eating visitorcould not but acknowledge their charm) explained St. Peter's net ofanimal food with ease as a diabolic deception, but was floored bycrocodiles' teeth. And not the worst thing in the book is the last,where a waxwork-keeper--a much less respectable person than Mrs. Jarley,and of the other sex--falls in love with one of his specimens, waltzeswith her, and unwittingly presents a sort of third companion to one ofthe less saintly kings of the early Graal legends, and to yet anothercharacter of Dickens's, much less well known than Mrs. Jarley, thehairdresser in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, who, to the disgust of hisfemale acquaintances, "worshipped a hidle" in the shape of the turningbust of a beautiful creature in his own shop-window. The book is a bookto put a man in a good temper--and to keep him in one--for which reasonit affords an excellent colophon to a chapter.[454]

  FOOTNOTES:

  [407] The technical-scholastic being "things born _with_ a man."

  [408] By some curious mistake, his birth used for a long time to beante-dated ten years from 1822 to 1812. At the risk of annoying myreaders by repeating such references, I should perhaps mention thatthere is an essay on Feuillet in the book already cited.

  [409] I give Delilah (for whom Milton's excessive rudeness naturallyinspires a sort of partisanship) the benefit of a notion that her actionwas, partly if not mainly, due to unbearable curiosity. How many womenare there who could resist the double temptation of seeing whether thesecret _did_ lie in the hair, and if so, of possessing completemistress-ship of their lovers? Some perhaps: but many?

  [410] _V. sup._ Vol. I. pp. 420-1.

  [411] It may be worth while to remind the reader that Maupassantincluded this in his selection of remarkable novels of all modern timesand languages.

  [412] How sad it is to think that a specific reference to thatall-but-masterpiece, as a picture of earlier _fin-de-siecle_ society,Miss Edgeworth's _Belinda_, may perhaps be necessary to escape thedamning charge of unexplained allusion!

  [413]

  "Where'er I came I brought _calamity_."

  When I read the foolish things that foolish people still write aboutTennyson, I like to repeat to myself that "lonely word" in its immediatecontext.

  [414] If you can "take arms against a sea" you can, I suppose, make headagainst a sewer.

  [415] His brother Ernest was a novelist of merit sufficient to make itnot unnatural that he should--as, unless my memory plays me tricks, hedid--resent being whelmed in the fraternal reputation. But he does notrequire much notice here.

  [416] I do not call Flaubert "his fellow," or the fellow of any onenoticed in this chapter, for which reason I kept him out of it.

  [417] It must be remembered that it was long before even 1870. I supposesome one, in the mass of war-literature, must have dealt with "The IdealGerman in European Literature between 1815 and 1864." If nobody has, anexcellent subject has been neglected.

  [418] And, according to one reviewer, the deficient sense of humour.

  [419] They _might_ serve to exemplify About's often doubtful taste. Thecentral sto
ry and main figures of _Tolla_ were taken from a collectionof the poor girl's letters published by her family a few years before;and the original of "Lello" was still alive. _His_ relations tried tobuy up the book, and nearly succeeded. In the MS. About had, whileslightly altering the names, referred pretty fully to this document. Thewhole thing has, however, rather a much-ado-about-nothing air and, saveas connected with a periodical of such undoubted "seriousness," mightsuggest a trick.

  [420] "It" was _Timon of Athens_.

  [421] It may please the historically given reader to regard this as anactual survival of the Scudery _histoire_--_Histoire de Madame Fratieffet de sa fille Nadine_. Only it would, as such, have occupied a score ortwo of pages for each one.

  [422] Tolla is not so _very_ delightful: but she is meant to be.

  [423] About has a gird or two at Balzac, but evidently imitates him. Inthis very book, when the old duke (_v. inf._) comes under MadameChermidy's influence, he suggests Baron Hulot; and _Madelon_ (_v. inf.ib._) is almost throughout imitation-Balzacian.

  [424] For Honorine, though managing to retain some public reputation,has long been practically "unclassed"; and it is not only her husband'sprofession which has made him leave her.

  [425] Germaine, quite naturally and properly, starts with a strongdislike to her husband. When he takes her to Italy, and devotes himselfto the care of her health, this changes to affection. And the more itchanges, the more disagreeable she makes herself to him.

  [426] This also has, in matters not political, the "charming and useful"side. It would be very unpleasant if she always saw all sides of allquestions.

  [427] I am quite aware that the giving up of the islands was not the_immediate_ result of his mission.

  [428] That is to say, supposing that Isopel ever could have been happywith a lover

  So _laggard_ in love, _though_ so dauntless in war

  as George Borrow.

  [429] As well as the Balzacian following, _haud passibus aequis_, abovereferred to.

  [430] I do not know whether any other novelists continued the series ofdiversely coloured "doctors," as the fly-makers have done.

  [431] He _could_ "piffle" when he went out of it. The would-be satiricalcharacterisation of two aristocrats, Madame d'Arlange and M. deCommarin, in the book shortly to be noticed, is the thinnestand most conventional of things, except, perhaps, the companiontrap-to-catch-the-French-Philistine of anti-clericalism which also showsitself sometimes.

  [432] Two people, thinking of moving house in London, went once toinspect an advertised abode in the Kensington district. They did notmuch like the street; they still less liked a very grim female whoopened the door and showed them over the house; and there was nothing toreconcile them in the house itself. But, wishing to be polite, the ladyof the couple, as they were leaving, addressed to the grim guardian somefeeble compliment on something or other as being "nice." "P'raps," wasthe reply, "for them as likes the ---- Road." It is unnecessary to saythat the visitors went down the steps in a fashion for which we have noexact English term, but which is admirably expressed by the French verb_degringoler_.

  [433] The favouritism declined, and the history of its decline wasanecdotised in a fashion somewhat _gaulois_, but quite harmless. "UncleBeuve," to the astonishment of literary mankind, put the portrait ofthis "nephew" of his in his _salon_. After _Daniel_ (I think) it wasmoved to the dining-room, and thence to his bedroom. Later it was missedeven there, and was, or was said to be, relegated to _un lieu plusintime encore_. The _trovatore_ of this probably remembered hisRabelais.

  [434] The labour of reading the book has been repaid by a few usefulspecimens of Feydeau's want of anything like distinction of thought orstyle. He makes his hero (whom he does not in the least mean for a fool,though he is one) express surprise at the fact that when he was _instatu pupillari_ he liked _fredaines_, but when he became his own masterdid not care about them! Again: "Were I to possess the power andinfinite charm of HIM [_sic_] who invented the stars I could neverexactly paint the delightful creature who stood before me." Comment oneither of these should be quite needless. Again: "Her nose, by a happyand bold curve, joined itself to the lobes, lightly expanded, of herdiaphanous nostrils." Did it never occur to the man that a nose,separately considered from its curve and its nostrils, is terribly likethat of La Camarde herself? I wasted some time over the tedious trilogyof _Un Debut a L'Opera_, _M. de Saint Bertrand_, _Le Mari de laDanseuse_. Nobody--not even anybody _qui_ Laclos _non odit_--need followme.

  [435] Their author wrote others--_Babolin_, _Autour d'une Source_ etc.But the wise who can understand words will perhaps confine themselves to_Mr., Mme. et Bebe_ and its sequel.

  [436] Cf. _inf._ on M. Rod.

  [437] There is a paper on Cherbuliez in _Essays on French Novelists_,where fuller account of individual works, and very full notice, withtranslations, of _Le Roman d'une Honnete Femme_ and _Meta Holdenis_ willbe found.

  [438] _History of Criticism_, vol. iii. See also below.

  [439] The author of the _Fleurs du Mal_ himself might have beendistinguished in prose fiction. The _Petits Poemes en Prose_ indeedabstain from story-interest even more strictly than their avowedpattern, _Gaspard de la Nuit_. But _La Fanfarlo_ is capitally told.

  [440] Hugo might do this; hardly a Hugonicule.

  [441] There used to be a fancy for writing books about groups ofcharacters. Somebody might do worse in book-making than "Great Editors,"and Veuillot should certainly be one of them.

  [442] The inadvertences which characterise him could hardly be betterinstanced than in his calling the eminent O'Donovan Rossa "_ledepute-martyr_ de Tipperary." In English, if not in French, a"deputy-martyr" is a delightful person.

  [443] Its articles are made up--rather dangerously, but veryskilfully--of shorter reviews of individual books published sometimes atlong intervals.

  [444] Who replied explosively.

  [445] There used to be something of a controversy whether it should bethus or Aur_e_villy. But the modern editions, at least, never have theaccent.

  [446] Very little above it I should put the not wholly dissimilar liquorobtained, at great expense and trouble, by a late nobleman of highcharacter and great ability from (it was said) an old monkish vineyardin the Isle of Britain. The monks must have exhausted the goodness ofthat _clos_; or else have taken the wine as a penance.

  [447] Huysmans on this is very funny.

  [448] A Spanish duchess of doubly and trebly "azured" blood revengesherself on her husband, who has massacred her lover before her eyes andgiven his heart to dogs, by becoming a public prostitute in Paris, anddying in the Salpetriere. It is almost, if not quite, a masterpiece.

  [449] Barbey's dislike of Feuillet was, evidently and half-confessedly,increased by his notion that _M. de Camors_ had "lifted" something from_L'Ensorcelee_. There is also perhaps a touch of _Le Bonheur dans leCrime_ in _La Morte_.

  [450] He knew a good deal (quite independently of Byron and Brummel)about English literature. One is surprised to find somewhere a referenceto Walpole's story of Fielding and his dinner-companions.

  [451] Observe that this is no demand for the explanation of thesupernatural. Let the supernatural remain as it is, by all means. Butcurses should have causes. Ate and Weird are terrible goddesses, butthey are not unreasonable ones. They might be less _terrible_ if theywere.

  [452] He has for two years been ordered to be present, but forbidden tocelebrate; in punishment for his having, uncanonically, fought as aChouan--if not also for attempted suicide. But we hear of noamorousness, and the husband Le Hardouey's jealousy, though prompted byhis wife's apparent self-destruction, is definitely stated to have nofoundation in actual guilt with the priest. On the contrary, shedeclares that he cared nothing for her.

  [453] Of Geoffroy Tory's book which (_v. sup._ Vol. I. p. 124) helped togive us the Limousin student.

  [454] It is possible that some readers may say, "Where areErckmann-Chatrian?" The fact is that I have never been able to find, inthose twin
-brethren, either literature or that not quite literaryinterest which some others have found. But I do not wish to abuse them,and they have given much pleasure to these others. So I let them alone.