A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century

On the whole, I think Entre Nous contains the very best things, and most good ones. The pathos of the first (which is itself by no means mere pleurnicherie) is balanced at the other end by the audacity of "Le Sentiment à l'Épreuve," a most agreeable "washing white" of the main idea of Wycherley's Country Wife; and between the two, few in the whole score are inferior. "Nocturne," "Oscar," "Causerie," and "Le Maillot de Madame" were once marked for special commendation by a critic who certainly deserved the epithet of competent, in addition to those of fair and gentle. It is, however, in this volume that what seems to me Droz's one absolute failure occurs. It is neither comic nor tragic, neither naughty nor nice, and one really wonders how it came to be put in. It is entitled "Les de Saint-Paon," and is a commonplace, hackneyed, quite unhumorous, and rather ill-tempered satire on certain dubious aristocrats and anti-modernists. Nothing could be cheaper or less pointed. And the insertion of it is all the stranger because, elsewhere, there is something very similar, in subject and tendency, but of half the length and ten times the wit, in "Le Petit Lever," a conversation between a certain Count and his valet.

The plain critical fact is that the non-pathetic serious was in no way Droz's trade. His satire on matters ecclesiastical is sometimes delightful when it is mere persiflage: an Archbishop might relax over the conversation in Paradise between two great ladies, one of whom has charitably stirred up the efforts of her director in favour of her own coachman to such effect, that she actually finds that menial promoted to a much higher sphere Above than that which she herself occupies. But here, also, the more gravity the less goodness.

Yet, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, we ought not to quarrel with him for this, and to do so would be again to fall into the old "gin-shop and leg-of-mutton" unreasonableness. It was M. Droz's mission to start a new form of Crébillonade —panaché (to use an excellent term of French cookery), here and there, with another new form of Sensibility. He did it quite admirably, and he taught the simpler device – 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 I think the best of his and their work capital stuff, continuing worthily one of the oldest and most characteristic strains of French literature; displaying no contemptible artistry; and contributing very considerably to that work of pleasure-giving which has been acknowledged as supplying the main subject of this book.

Cherbuliez.

His general characteristics.

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

Short survey of his books.

He did not find his way at once, beginning with "mixed" novels of 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-œuvre. But these things, which have not often been successes, certainly were not so in M. Cherbuliez's hands. He broke fresh ground and "grew" a real novel in Le Comte Kostia, and he continued to till this plot, with good results, for the rest of his life. The "scenes and characters" are sufficiently varied, those in the book just mentioned being Russian and those in Ladislas Bolski Polish – neither particularly complimentary to the nationalities concerned, and the latter decidedly melodramatic. Le Comte Kostia is sometimes considered his best novel; but I should put above it both Le Roman d'une Honnête Femme (his principal attempt in purely French society and on Feuilletesque lines, with a tighter morality) and Meta Holdenis, a story of a Swiss girl – not beautiful, but "vurry attractive," and not actually "no better than she should be," but quite ready to be so if it suited her. Miss Rovel with another girl-heroine – eccentric, but not in the lines of the usual French-English caricatures – is a great favourite with some. La Revanche de Joseph Noirel is again melodramatic; and Prosper Randoce is not good for much. But Paule Méré, one of its author's best character-books, is very much better – it is a study of ill-starred love, as is Le Fiancé 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 know that any of his subsequent novels, L'Idée de Jean Téterol, Noirs et Rouges, La Ferme du Choquard, Olivier Maugant, La Vocation du Comte Ghislain, La Bête, Une Gageure, which closes the list of my acquaintance with them, will disappoint the reader who does not raise his expectation too high. Olivier Maugant is perhaps the strongest. But the expression just used must not be taken as belittling. In both France and England such novel-writing had become almost a trade – certainly a profession: and the turning out of workmanlike and fairly satisfying articles for daily consumption is, if not a noble ambition, a quite respectable aim. M. Cherbuliez did something more than this: there are numerous scenes and situations in his work which do not merely interest, but excite, if they never exactly transport. And the provision of interest itself is, as has been allowed, remarkably bounteous. I should not despise, though I should be a little sorry for, a reader – especially an English reader – who found more of it in Cherbuliez than even in Feuillet, and much more than in Flaubert or Maupassant. The causes of such preference require no extensive indication, 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

Three eccentrics.

Before finishing this chapter we ought, perhaps, to consider three odd persons, two of them much extolled by some – Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Léon Cladel, and "Champfleury" of Les Excentriques. The two first were themselves emphatically "eccentrics" – one an apostle of dandyism (he actually wrote a book about Brummel, whom he had met early), a disdainful critic of rather untrustworthy vigour, and a stalwart reactionary to Catholicism and Royalism; the other a devotee of the exact opposite of dandyism, as the title of his best-known book, Les Va-nu-pieds, shows, and a Republican to the point of admiring the Commune. The opposition has at least the advantage of disproving prejudice, in any unfavourable remarks that may be made about either. To Barbey d'Aurevilly's criticism I have endeavoured to do justice in a more appropriate place than this.⁴³⁸ His fiction occupied a much smaller, but not a small, proportion of his very voluminous work. Les Diaboliques and L'Ensorcelée, as well as Les Va-nu-pieds, are titles which entitle a reader to form certain more or less definite expectations about the books they label; and an author, by choosing them, deprives himself, to some extent, of the right justly claimed for him in Victor Hugo's well-known manifesto, to be judged merely according to his own scheme, and the goodness or badness of its carrying out. If Hugo himself had made Les Orientales studies of Montmartre and the Palais Royal, he could not have made out his right to the privilege he asserted. The objection applies to Barbey d'Aurevilly even more than to Cladel, but as the work of the latter is the less important, we may take it first.

Léon Cladel —Les Va-nu-pieds, etc.

At more times in my life than one I have striven to like – or at any rate to take an interest in —Les Va-nu-pieds. Long ago it had for me the passport of the admiration of Baudelaire,⁴³⁹ to whom and to Victor Hugo (this latter circumstance an important visa to the former) Cladel announced himself a pupil. But an absolute, if perhaps unfortunate, inability to follow anything but my own genuine opinion prevented me from enjoying it. And I cannot enjoy it now. It is not a commonplace book, nor is anything else of its author's; but the price paid for the absence of commonplaceness is excessive. A person possessing genius, and sure of it, does not tell you that he has been rewriting his book (not for correction of fact, but for improvement of style) for ten years, and that now he doesn't care anything for critics, and endorses it Ne Varietur (sic).⁴⁴⁰ The style itself is a mosaic of preciousness, literary jargon, and positive argot– not quite contemptible, but, like some 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 passionately patriotic towards his remote province of Quercy-Rouergue) are worth reading. But this devotion is better shown in the short single book (Les Va-nu-pieds is a collection) called Crête-Rouge– the regimental nickname of the heroine (an Amazon), who actually serves in the war of the Terrible Year, and comes off much better, when her sex is discovered by 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 Bouscassié, Titi-Froissac IV, and La Fête Votive de Saint-Bartholomée Porte-Glaive I shall not say much. The "province," which is strong in them, saves them sometimes. But Cladel's hopeless lack of self-criticism shows itself in the fact of his actually reprinting in full an article of Veuillot's (by no means uncomplimentary) 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 But nothing could better throw up his clear, vigorous, classical French and trenchant logic, than the verbose and ambaginous preciousness, and the cabbage-stick cudgel-play, of Cladel.⁴⁴²

Barbey d'Aurevilly – his criticism of novels.

Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, also a favourite of Baudelaire's, is a writer of an altogether greater clan – indeed one of those who come short but a little, and one does not quite know how, of individual greatness. Something has been said of his criticism, but a volume of it which was not within my reach when I wrote what is there quoted, Le Roman Contemporain, is a closer introduction to a notice of him as a novelist. As of all his work it may be said of this, that anybody who does not know the subjects will probably go away with a wrong idea of them, but that anybody who does know them will receive some very valuable cross-lights. The book consists⁴⁴³ of a belittlement, slightly redressed at the end, of Feuillet as a feeble person and an impertinent patroniser of religion; of a rather "magpie" survey of the Goncourts; of a violent and quite blind attack on Flaubert (the worst criticism of Barbey's that I have ever read); of a somewhat unexpectedly appreciative notice of Daudet; of an almost obligatory panegyric of Fabre; of another éreintement, at great length, of Zola; and of shorter articles, again "magpied" of praise and blame, on MM. Richepin, Catulle Mendès, and Huysmans.⁴⁴⁴

His novels themselves —Les Diaboliques and others.

His merits.

All this is interesting, but I fear it confirms a variation of the title of a famous Elizabethan play – "Novelists beware novelists." Poets have a worse reputation in this way, or course; but, I think, unjustly. Perhaps the reason is that the quality of poetry is more definite, if not more definable, than that of prose fiction, or else that poets are more really sure of themselves. Barbey d'Aurevilly⁴⁴⁵ had an apparently undoubting mind, but perhaps there were unacknowledged doubts, which transformed themselves into jealousies, in his heart of hearts. For myself, I sympathise with his political and religious (if not exactly with his ecclesiastical) views pretty decidedly; I think (speaking as usual with the due hesitation of a foreigner) that he writes excellent French; and I am sure – a point of some consequence with me, and not too commonly met – that he generally writes (when he does not get too angry) like a gentleman. He sometimes has phrases which please me very much, as when he describes two lovers embracing so long that they "must have drunk a whole bottle of kisses," or when he speaks of the voice of a preacher "tombant de la chaire dans cette église où pleuvaient les ténèbres du soir," where the opposition-combination of "tombant" and "pleuvaient," and the image it arouses, seem to me of a most absolute fancy. He can write scenes – the finale of his best book, L'Ensorcelée; the overture of Un Prêtre Marié; and nearly the whole of the last and best Diabolique, "Une Vengeance de Femme" – which very closely approach the first class. And, whether he meant me to do so or not, I like him when in "Un Dîner d'Athées" he makes one of them "swig off" (lamper) a bumper of Picardan, the one wine in all my experience which I should consider fit only for an atheist.⁴⁴⁶ But a good novelist I cannot hold him.

The inability does not come from any mere "unpleasantness" in his subjects, though few pleasant ones seem to have lain in his way, and he certainly did not go out of that way to find them. But L'Ensorcelée 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 Prêtre Marié;⁴⁴⁷ while the last Diabolique, already mentioned, is a capital example of grime made more than tolerable.⁴⁴⁸ Indeed, nothing of 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 be represented by the crude and clumsy vulgarities of Janin's Âne Mort, and the more craftsmanlike, indeed in a way almost artistic, but unconvinced and unconvincing atrocities of Borel's Champavert.

And defects.

Especially as shown in L'Ensorcelée.

The objection, and the defect which occasions the objection, are quite different. Barbey d'Aurevilly has many gifts and some excellencies. But his work in novel constantly reminds me of the old and doubtless well-known story of a marriage which was almost ideally perfect in all respects but one – that the girl "couldna bide her man." He can do many things, but he cannot or will not tell a story, save in such fragments and flashes as those noted above. His longueurs are exasperating and sometimes nearly maddening, though perhaps many readers would save themselves by simply discontinuing perusal. The first Diabolique has metal attractive enough of its kind. A young officer boards with a provincial family, where the beautiful but at first silent, abstracted, and, as the Pléiade would have said, marbrine daughter suddenly, though secretly, develops frantic affection for him, and shows it by constant indulgence in the practice which that abominable cad in Ophelia's song put forward as an excuse for not "wedding." But, on one of these occasions, she translates trivial metaphor into ghastly fact by literally dying in his arms. Better stuff – again of its kind – for a twenty-page story, or a little more, could hardly be found. But Barbey gives us ninety, not indeed large, but, in the usual editions, of exceptionally close and small print, watering out the tale intolerably almost throughout, and giving it a blunt and maimed conclusion. Le Bonheur dans le Crime,⁴⁴⁹ Le Dessous de Cartes, and the above-mentioned Dîner d'Athées, which fill a quarter of a thousand of such pages, invite slashing with a hook desperate enough to cut each down to a quarter of a hundred. Un Prêtre Marié, which perhaps comes next to L'Ensorcelée in merit, would be enormously improved by being in one volume instead of two. Of Une Vieille Maîtresse I think I could spare both, except a vigorously told variant (the suggestion is acknowledged, for Barbey d'Aurevilly was much too proud to steal) of Buckingham's duel⁴⁵⁰ and the Countess (not "Duchess," by the way) of Shrewsbury. Une Histoire sans Nom, a substantial though not a very long book, is only a short story spun out. Even in L'Ensorcelée itself the author, as a critic, might, and probably would, have found serious fault, had it been the work of another novelist. There is less surplusage and more continuous power, so that one is carried through from the fine opening on the desolate moor (a little suggested, perhaps, by the meeting of Harry Bertram and Dandie Dinmont, but quite independently worked out) to the vigorous close above referred to. But the story is quite unnecessarily muddled by information that part of it was 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-Abbé de la Croix-Jugan suffered and diffused so gruesome 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 the terrible unfinished mass (heralded over the desolate moor at uncertain times by uncanny bell-ringing), which the reprobate priest (who has been shot at the altar-steps before he could accomplish the Sacrifice of Reconciliation⁴⁵²) endeavours after his death to complete, being always baffled before the consecrating moment.

Champfleury.

Cladel had a considerable, and Barbey d'Aurevilly an almost exclusive, fancy for the tragical. On the other hand, Champfleury (who, no doubt partly for a bibliographical memory,⁴⁵³ prefixed the Champ- to his actual surname) occupies, as has been said, a curious, but in part far from unsatisfactory, position in regard to our subject, and one blessed by the Comic Spirit. His confessed fictions are, indeed, not very successful. To take one volume only, Madame Eugénio, the title-story, not the first in order, but the longest, is most unfortunately, but far too accurately, characterised by a phrase towards its end, "ce triste récit," the adjective, like our "poor," being capable of two different meanings. Histoire du Lieutenant Valentin, on the other hand – a story of a young soldier, who, leaving Saint-Cyr in cholera-time, has to go to hospital, and, convalescing pleasantly while shelling peas and making rose-gays for the Sisters, is naïvely surprised at one of them being at first very kind and then very cold to him – is a miss of a masterpiece, but still a miss, partly owing to too great length. And so with others.

Les Excentriques.

But in his much earlier Les Excentriques (not unnaturally but wrongly called "Contes Excentriques" by some), handling what profess to be true stories, he shows a most excellent narrative faculty. Whether they are true or not (they rather resemble, and were perhaps inspired by, some things of Gautier and Gérard) matters little – they are quite good enough to be false. They are, necessarily, not quite equal, and there may be for some tastes, not for all, too much of the Fourierism and other queernesses of the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, the book is of 1852, and its subjects are almost all of the decade preceding. But some are exceedingly refreshing, the dedication, of some length, to the great caricaturist Daumier being not the least so. Yet it is not so unwise as to disappoint the reader by being better than the text. "Lucas," the circle-squarer, who explains how, when he was in a room with a lady and her two daughters, he perceived that "this was all that was necessary for him to attain the cubation of two pyramids," is very choice. "Cambriel" – who not only attained the philosopher's stone and the universal medicine, but ascertained that God is six feet six high, of flame-coloured complexion, and with particularly perfect ankles – runs him hard. And so does Rose Marius Sardat, who sent a copy of his Loi d'Union, a large and nicely printed octavo, to every Parisian newspaper-office, informing the editors that they might reprint it in feuilletons for nothing, but that he should not write the second volume unless the first were a success. Some of us ought to be particularly obliged to Rose Marius for holding that persons over seventy are indispensable, and that, if there are not enough in France, they must be imported. The difference of this from the callous short-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 beings weep attests their own "touching sensibility for us" (albeit he had to admit again that garlic was demoniac). M. Jupille (who was a practical man, and cooked cabbage and cauliflower so that his meat-eating visitor could not but acknowledge their charm) explained St. Peter's net of animal food with ease as a diabolic deception, but was floored by crocodiles' 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, waltzes with her, and unwittingly presents a sort of third companion to one of the less saintly kings of the early Graal legends, and to yet another character of Dickens's, much less well known than Mrs. Jarley, the hairdresser in Master Humphrey's Clock, who, to the disgust of his female acquaintances, "worshipped a hidle" in the shape of the turning bust of a beautiful creature in his own shop-window. The book is a book to put a man in a good temper – and to keep him in one – for which reason it affords an excellent colophon to a chapter.⁴⁵⁴