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

Édouard Rod.

I have quite a lively remembrance of the advent of M. Édouard Rod, of the crowning of Le Sens de la Vie, and so forth. That advent formed part of the just mentioned counter-attack on Naturalism, in which, as usual, some of the Naturalist methods and weapons themselves were used; but it had a distinct character of its own. Unless I mistake, it was not at first very warmly welcomed by "mortal" French criticism. There may have been something in this of that curious grudge⁵⁴⁹ against Swiss-French, on the part of purely French-French, men of letters which never seems to have entirely ceased. But there was something more than this, though this something more was in a way the reason, some might say the justification, of the grudge. M. Rod was exceedingly serious; the title of his laureated book is of itself almost sufficient to show it; and though the exclusive notion of "the gay and frivolous Frenchman" always was something of a vulgar error, and has been increasingly so since the Revolution, Swiss seriousness, with its strong Germanic leaven, is not French seriousness at all. But he became, if not exactly a popular novelist to the tune of hundreds or even scores of editions, a prolific and fairly accepted one. I think, though he died in middle age and produced other things besides novels, he wrote some twenty or thirty stories, and his production rather increased than slackened as he went on. With the later ones I am not so well acquainted as with the earlier, but there is a pervading character about these earlier ones which is not likely to have changed much, and they alone belong strictly to our subject.

La Vie Privée de Michel Teissier.

Next to Le Sens de la Vie and perhaps in a way, as far as popularity goes, above it, may be ranked, I suppose, La Vie Privée de Michel Teissier, with its sequel, La Seconde Vie de M. T. These books certainly made a bold and wide separation of aim and subject from the subject and the aim of most French novels in these recent years. Here you have, instead of a man who attempts somebody else's wife, one who wishes to get rid – on at least legally respectable terms – of his own, and to marry a girl for whom he has, and who has for him, a passion which is, until legal matrimony enfranchises it, able to restrain itself from any practical satisfaction of the as yet illicit kind. He avails himself of the then pretty new facilities for divorce (the famous "Loi Naquet," which used to "deave" all of us who minded such things many years ago), and the situation is (at least intentionally) made more piquant by the fact that Teissier, who is a prominent statesman and gives up not merely his wife but his political position for this new love of his, starts as an actual supporter of the repeal of the divorce laws. To an English reader, of course, the precise problem would not have the same charm of novelty, except in his capacity as a reader of French novels. But, putting that aside, the position is obviously capable of being treated with very considerable appeal. The struggles of the husband, who has loved his wife – M. Rod had not the audacity or the strength to make him love her still – between his duties and his desires; the indignant suffering of the wife; and most of all, the position of the girl who, by ill-fortune or the fault of others, finds herself expending, on an at first illicit and always ill-famed love, what she might have devoted to an honourable one, certainly has great capabilities. But I did not think when I read it first, and I do not think now when I have read it again, that these various opportunities are fully taken. It is not that M. Rod has no idea of passion. He is constantly handling it and, as will be seen presently, not without success occasionally. But he was too much what he calls his eidolon in one book, "Monsieur le psychologue," and the Psyche he deals with is too often a skinny and spectacled creature – not the love of Cupid and the mother of Voluptas.⁵⁵⁰

La Sacrifiée.

If he has ever made his story hot enough to make this pale cast glow, it is in La Sacrifiée. This is all the more remarkable in that the beginning of the book itself is far from promising. There is a rather unnecessary usher-chapter – a thing which M. Rod was fond of, and which, unless very cleverly done, is more of an obstacle than of a "shoe-horn." The hero-narrator of the main story is one of the obligatorily atheistic doctors – nearly as great a nuisance as obligatorily adulterous heroines – whom M. Rod has mostly discarded; and what is more, he is one of the pseudo-scientific fanatics who believe in the irresponsibility of murderers, and do not see that, the more irresponsible a criminal is, the sooner he ought to be put out of the way. Moreover, he has the ill-manners to bore the company at dinner with this craze, and the indecency (for which in some countries he might have smarted) to condemn out loud, in a court of justice, the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge on his pet. Neither can one approve the haste with which he suggests to the wife of his oldest and most intimate friend that she is not happy with her husband. But this time M. Rod had got the forge working, and the bellows dead on the charcoal. The development of the situation has something of that twist or boomerang effect which we have noticed in Michel Teissier. Dr. Morgex begins by defending murderers; he does not end, but starts the end, by becoming a murderer himself, though one with far more "extenuating circumstances" than those so often allowed in French courts. His friend – who is an advocate of no mean powers but loose life and dangerously full habit – has, when the doctor warns him against apoplexy, half scoffed, but also begged him, if a seizure should take place, to afford him a chance of euthanasia instead of lingering misery. The actual situation, though with stages and variations which are well handled, arises; the doctor, who has long since been frantically in love with the wife, succumbs to the temptation – which has been aggravated by the old request, by the sufferings of the victim, and by the urgent supplications of the family, that he shall give morphia to relieve these sufferings. He gives it – but in a dose which he knows to be lethal.

After a time, and having gone through no little mental agony, he marries the widow, who is in every sense perfectly innocent; and a brief period of happiness follows. But his own remorse continues; the well-meaning chatter of a lady, who has done much to bring about the marriage, and to whom Morgex had unwarily mentioned "obstacles," awakes the wife's suspicion, and, literally, "the murder is out." Morgex confesses, first to a lawyer friend, who, to his intense surprise, pronounces him legally guilty, of course, but morally excusable; then to a priest, who takes almost exactly the opposite point of view, and admitting that the legal crime may be excusable, declares the moral guilt not lessened; while he points out that while the wages of iniquity are retained, no pardon can be deserved or expected. And so the pair part. Morgex gives himself up to the hardest and least profitable practitioner-work. Of what the wife does we hear nothing. She has been perfectly guiltless throughout; she has loved her second husband without knowing his crime, and after knowing it; and so she is "La Sacrifiée." But this (as some would call it) sentimental appeal is not the real appeal of the book, though it is delicately led up to from an early point. The gist throughout is the tempering and purifying of the character and disposition of Morgex himself, through trial and love, through crime and sacrifice. It is not perfectly done. If it were, it would land the author at once in those upper regions of art which I cannot say I think he attains. But it is a very remarkable "try," and, with one other to be mentioned presently, it is nearest the goal of any of his books.

Le Silence.

On the other hand, if he ever wrote a worse book than Le Silence, I have not read, and I do not wish to read, that. The title is singularly unhappy. Silence is so much greater a thing than speech that a speaker, unless he is Shakespeare or Dante or Lucretius,⁵⁵¹ or at least the best kind of Wordsworth, had better avoid the subject, avoid even the word for it. And M. Rod's examples of silence, preluded in each case (for the book has two parts) by one of those curious harbingerings of his which are doubtfully satisfactory, are not what they call nowadays "convincing." The first and longest – it is, indeed, much too long and might have been more acceptable in twenty pages than in two hundred – deals with the usual triangle – brutal husband, suffering wife, interesting lover. But the last two never declare themselves, or are declared; and they both die and make no sign. In the second part there is another triangle, where the illegitimate side is established and results in a duel, the lover killing the husband and establishing himself with the wife. But a stove for tea-making explodes; she loses her beauty, and (apparently for that reason) poisons herself, though it does not appear that her lover's love has been affected by the change. In each case the situation comes under that famous and often-quoted ban of helpless and unmanageable misery.

Là-Haut.

Nor can I think highly of Là-Haut, which is quite literally an account of an Alpine village, and of its gradual vulgarisation by an enterprising man of business. Of the ordinary novel-interests there is little more than the introduction at the beginning of a gentleman who has triangled as usual, till, the husband has, in his, the lover's, presence, most inconsiderately shot his wife dead, has missed (which was a pity) M. Julien Sterny himself, and, more unconscionably still, has been acquitted by a court of justice, in which the officials, and the public in general, actually seemed to think that M. Sterny was to blame! He is much upset by this, and, coming to Vallanches to recuperate, is rewarded later for his good deeds and sufferings,⁵⁵² by the hand of a very attractive young woman with a fortune. This poetic justice, however, is by no means the point of the book, which, indeed, has no particular point. It is filled up by details of Swiss hotel-life: of the wicked conduct of English tourists, who not merely sing hymns on Sunday, but dance on wet evenings in the week (nearly the oddest combination of crimes known to the present writer); of a death in climbing of one of the characters which is not in the least required by the story; of the scalding of her arm by a paysanne in a sort of "ragging" flirtation, and the operation on the mortifying member by a curé who knows something of chirurgy; and of the ruin of some greedy peasants who turn their châlet into a hotel with no capital to work it, and are bought out, with just enough to cover their outlay and leave them penniless, by the general entrepreneur. It is a curious book, but the very reverse of a successful one.

La Course à la Mort.

The centre, not by any means in the chronological sense (for they were among his earliest), but in the logical and psychological, of M. Rod's novel production, is undoubtedly to be found in the two contrastedly titled books Le Sens de la Vie and La Course à la Mort. The first, which, as has been said, received Academic distinction, I approached many years ago without any predisposition against it, and closed with a distinct feeling of disappointment. The other I read more recently with a distinct apprehension of disapproval, which was, if not entirely, to a very large extent removed as I went on. It was strongly attacked as morbid and mischievous at its first appearance in 1885; and the author, some years afterwards, prefixed a defence to his fifth edition, which is not much more effective than such defences usually are. It takes something like the line which, as was mentioned above, Mr. Traill took about Maupassant – that Pessimism was a fact like other facts, and one was entitled to take it as a subject or motive. But it also contained a slip into that obvious but, somehow or other, seldom avoided trap – the argument that a book is "dramatic," and does not necessarily express the author's own attitude. Perhaps not; but the rejoinder that almost all, if not all, M. Rod's books are "sicklied o'er" in this way is rather fatal. One gets to expect, and seldom misses, a close and dreary air throughout, often aggravated by an actual final sentence or paragraph of lamentation and mourning and woe. But I do not resent the "nervous impression" left on me by La Course à la Mort, with its indefinitely stated but certain end of suicide, and its unbroken soliloquy of dreary dream. For it is in one key all through; it never falls out of tune or time; and it does actually represent a true, an existent, though a partial and morbid attitude of mind. It is also in parts very well written, and the blending of life and dream is sometimes almost Poesque. A novel, except by the extremest stretch of courtesy, it is not, being simply a panorama of the moods of its scarcely heroic hero. And he does not "set one's back up" like René, or, in my case at least, produce boredom like most of the other "World-pain" – ers. The still more shadowy appearances of the heroine Cécile, who dies before her lover, while the course of his love is more dream than action, are well brought in and attractive; and there is one passage descriptive of waltzing which would atone for anything. Many people have tried to write about waltzing, but few have done it well; this is almost adequate. I wonder if I dare translate it?

We never thought that people might be turning an evil eye on us; we cared nothing for the indignation of the mammas sitting passive and motionless; we hardly felt the couples that we jostled.⁵⁵³ Thanks to the cradling of the rhythm, to the intoxication of our rapid and regular movement, there fell on us something like a great calm. Drunk with one another, hurried by the absorbing voluptuousness of the waltz, we went on and on vertiginously. People and things turned with us, surrounding us with a gyre of moving shadows, under a fantastic light formed of crossing reflections, in an atmosphere where one breathed inebriating perfumes, and where every atom vibrated to the ever more bewildering sound of music. Time passed, and we still went on; losing little by little all consciousness except that of our own movement. Then it even seemed that we came out of ourselves; we heard nothing but a single beat, marking the cadence with strokes more and more muffled. The lights, melting into one, bathed us in a dreamy glow; we felt not the floor under our feet; we felt nothing but an immense oblivion – the oblivion of a void which was swallowing us up.

And doubtless it was so, as has been seen of many in the Time of Roses.⁵⁵⁴

Le Ménage du Pasteur Naudié.

To take one or two more of his books, Le Ménage du Pasteur Naudié, though less poignant than La Sacrifiée and with no approach to the extra-novelish merit of La Course à la Mort, starts not badly with an interesting scene, no less a place than La Rochelle, very rarely met, since its great days, in a French novel – a rather unfamiliar society, that of French Protestantism at Rochelle itself and Montauban – and a certainly unusual situation, the desire of a young, pretty, and wealthy girl, Jane Defos, to marry an elderly pastor who is poor, and, though a widower, has four children.

That nothing but mischief can come of this proceeding – as of an abnormal leap-year – is clear enough: whether the way in which the mischief is brought about and recounted is good may be more doubtful. That a person like M. Naudié, simple, though by no means a fool, should be taken in by a very pretty girl falling apparently in love with him – even though, to the general dangers of the situation, are added frank warnings that she has been given to a series of freakish fancies – is not unnatural; that she should soon tire of him, and sooner still of the four step-children, is very natural indeed. But the immediate cause of the final disruption – her taking a new fancy to, and being atheistically converted by, a cousin who, after all, runs away from temptation – is not very natural, and is unconvincingly told. Indeed the whole character of Jane is insufficiently presented. She is meant to be a sort of Blanche Amory, with nothing real in her – only a succession of false and fleeting fancies. But M. Rod was not Thackeray.

Mademoiselle Annette.

L'Eau Courante.

With two or three more of his later-middle books (it does not seem necessary to deal with the very latest, which are actually beyond our limit, and could not alter the general estimate very favourably) the preparation of judgment may cease. Mademoiselle Annette is the history of a "house-angel" and her family, and the fortunes and misfortunes they go through, and the little town of Bielle on the Lake of Geneva.⁵⁵⁵ It is told, rather in M. Ferdinand Fabre's way, by a bystander, from the time when the heroine was his school-dame and, as such dames sometimes, if not often, are, adored by her pupils. Annette dies at last, and M. Rod strews the dust of many others on her way to death. An American brother of the typical kind plays a large part. He is tamed partly by Annette, partly by a charming wife, whom M. Rod must needs kill, without any particular reason. L'Eau Courante is an even gloomier story. It begins with a fair picture of a home-coming of bride and bridegroom, on a beautiful evening, to an ideal farm high up on the shore of Leman. In a very few pages M. Rod, as usual, kills the wife after subjecting her to exceptional tortures at the births of her children, and then settles down comfortably to tell us the ruin of the husband, who ends by arson of his own lost home and drowning in his own lost pond. The interval is all blunder, misfortune, and folly – the chief causa malorum being a senseless interference with the "servitude" rights of neighbours, whom he does not like, by stopping, for a week, a spring on his own land. Almost the only cheerful character in the book (except a delightful juge de conciliation, who carries out his benevolent duties in his cellar, dispensing its contents to soften litigants) is a black billy-goat named Samuel, who, though rather diabolical, is in a way the "Luck of the Bertignys," and after selling whom their state is doomed. But we see very little of him.

The summing up need probably not be long. That M. Rod was no mere stuffer of the shelves of circulating libraries must have been made clear; that he could write excellently has been (with all due modesty) confessed; that he could sometimes be poignant, often vivid, even occasionally humorous, is true. He has given us a fresh illustration of that tendency of the later novel, to "fill all numbers" of ordinary life, which has been insisted upon. But that he is too much of a "dismal Jemmy" of novel-writing is certainly true also. The House of Mourning is one of the Houses of Life, and therefore open to the novelist. But it is not the only house. It would sometimes seem as if M. Rod were (as usual without his being able to help it) a sort of jettatore, – as if there were no times or places for him except that

 
When all the world is old,
And all the trees are brown,
And all the sport is cold,
And all the wheels run down.
 

Scènes de la Vie Cosmopolite.

But there is something to add, and even one book not yet noticed to comment on, which may serve as a real light on this remarkable novelist. The way in which I have already spoken of La Course à la Mort, which was a very early book, may be referred to. Even earlier, or at least as early, M. Rod wrote some short stories, which were published as Scènes de la Vie Cosmopolite. They include "Lilith" (the author, though far from an Anglophile, had a creditable liking for Rossetti), which is a story of the rejection of a French suitor by an English governess; the ending of a liaison between a coxcomb and a lady much older than himself ("Le Feu et l'Eau"); "L'Idéal de M. Gindre," with a doubtful marriage-close; a discovery of falseness ("Le Pardon"); "La Dernière Idylle" (which may be judged from some of its last words: "I have made a spectacle of myself long enough, and now the play is over"), and "Noces d'Or," the shortest and bitterest of all, in which the wife, who has felt herself tyrannised over for the fifty years, mildly retaliates by providing for dinner nearly all the things that she likes and her husband does not, though she effects a reconciliation with pâté de canard d'Amiens. I wonder if they ate duck-pies at Amiens in the spring of 1918?

The purpose of this postscript-account, and of the reference to La Course, should not be very obscure. It is clear that, at first and from the first, M. Rod's vocation was to be a prophet of discouragement and disappointment. You may be this and be quite a major prophet; but if you are not a major prophet your minority will become somewhat painfully apparent, and it will often, if not always, go near to failure. I think this was rather the case with M. Rod.

Catulle Mendès.

It is with reluctance that I find myself unable to give more than praise for admirable French, and "form" in the strict sense, to the work in prose fiction of M. Catulle Mendès, sometime Gautier's son-in-law⁵⁵⁶ and always, I think, his disciple. His early verse-work in the Parnasse Contemporain fifty years ago, was attractive and promising, though perhaps open to the exception which some took to the Parnasse generally, and which may be echoed here, not with that general concernment, but as to his own novel and tale-work. His late critical survey of modern French poetry was a really difficult thing admirably done. But his fiction leaves me cold, as Parnassian poetry did others, but not me. A friend of mine, whom I should have thought quite unshockable, either by principles or practice, once professed himself to me aghast at Méphistophéla. But M. Mendès's improprieties neither shock nor excite nor amuse me, because they have a certain air of being "machined." If anybody wishes to sample them at their very best, the half-score loosely and largely printed pages of "Tourterelle" in the volume entitled Lesbia will be no severe experiment. He may then take his choice of not going further at all, or of going further at the hazard of faring worse, or as well now and then, but hardly, I think, better.

I do not propose to add any further studies in detail to those already presented in this chapter. As I have (perhaps more than once) remarked, there are few periods of the century with the minor as well as major novel work of which I am better acquainted than with that of its last quarter. As I remember independently, or am in this or that way reminded, of the names of Jules de Glouvet; of at least three Pauls – Alexis, Arène, and Mahalin; of Ernest d'Hervilly; of the prolific Hector Malot; of Oscar Meténier, and Octave Mirbeau, and Jules Vallès of the Commune, of the brothers Margueritte and of others too many to mention, a sort of shame invades me at leaving them out.⁵⁵⁷ Some of them may be alive still, though most, I think, are dead. But dead or alive, I have no room for them, and, for reasons also elsewhere stated, it is perhaps as well. The blossoming of the aloe, not once in a hundred years but all through them, has been told as best I could tell it.

Not shame but sorrow attends the exclusion of others, some of them, I think, better novelists than those actually discussed in this chapter – especially "Gyp" and MM. Anatole France, Paul Bourget, Jean Richepin, and "Pierre Loti." It would have been agreeable to pay, once more, suit and service to the adorable chronicler of the little rascal Bob and the unpretentiously divine Chiffon; to recall the delighted surprise with which one read Le Crime de Silvestre Bonnard, and follow the train of triumphs that succeeded it; to do justice (unbribed, but pleasantly seasoned, by some private gratitude) to the vigour and acuteness of L'Irréparable and its companions; to salute that masterpiece of Realism at its best, La Glu, and the more complicated as well as more pathetic history of Césarine; and to re-discover the countries and the manners depicted for us from Aziyadé to Pêcheur d'Islande. But the consigne elsewhere laid down and experienced forbids it, and I think that consigne should not be "forced."