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

CONCLUSION

The remaining pages of this book should be occupied partly with a continuation of a former chapter,⁵⁵⁸ partly with a summary of the whole volume, the combination, almost necessary in all cases, being specially motived in this by the overlappings referred to above, and a word added on the whole History. Not only did Victor Hugo hold, to French literature as well as to French poetry, something very like the position⁵⁵⁹ occupied by Tennyson and Browning in English poetry only, by covering every quarter of the century in whole or part with his work; but there was, even in France, nothing like the "general post" of disappearances and accessions which marked the period from 1820 to 1860 in English – a consequence necessarily of the later revival of French. No one except Chateaubriand corresponded to the crowd of distinguished writers who thus made their appearance, at the actual meeting of eighteenth and nineteenth, with us; and though, of course, there were exceptions, the general body of the French reinforcement did not dwindle much till 1870 onwards.

We noted that the first great development of the nineteenth-century novel was in the historical department, though many others made notable fresh starts: and we said something about the second development of the "ordinary" one which followed. It is this latter, of course, which has supplied the main material of the last third of the present volume, though (of course again) there have been many noteworthy and some great examples of the historical itself, of the supernatural, of the eccentric, and of many other kinds. But practically all who tried these later tried the ordinary, and a great many who tried the ordinary did not try the others. It is therefore on the development of the novel of common modern life that we must, at any rate for a little time, spend most of our attention here.

The fact of the change is indeed so certain and so obvious, that there is not much need to enforce or illustrate it, though it must be remembered that, on any true conception of history, the most obvious things are not those least worthy of being chronicled. Even Hugo, likely to be, and actually being, the most recalcitrant to the movement, comes close to modern times, and to such ordinary life as was possible to him, in Les Misérables and Les Travailleurs de la Mer. George Sand had begun as a sort of modernist; but by any one who can perform the (it is true not very easy) task of equating relative modernity, it will not be found that Mlle. la Quintinie, or even Flamarande, are more modern than Lélia or Valentine in the mere ratio of the dates. The ordinary life of the 'thirties and that of the 'sixties and 'seventies was no doubt different, but there is more than that difference in the books referred to. The artist is, consciously or unconsciously, trying to get nearer to her model or sitter. And this though George Sand was really almost as self-centred as Hugo, though in another way.

But it is, of course, in less idiosyncratic writers than these, who continued, and in others who began, to write at this time, that we must look for our real documents. Among the elder of this second class, Jules Sandeau's work is worth recurring to. He had sometimes gone a little earlier than his own time, and he had sometimes employed what is called – perhaps inconsiderately and certainly to some extent misleadingly – "romantic" incident in addition to purely novel-character and presentation. But his general manner of dealing reproduces itself, almost more than that of any of his contemporaries, in those novelists of the last quarter of the century who do not bow the knee to Naturalism: and one finds some actual recognition of the fact in dedications to him by younger novelists such as M. André Theuriet.⁵⁶⁰

But, look where you will, the lesson is unmistakable. Take Alexandre Dumas fils, beginning with a Tristan le Roux and ending with an Affaire Clémenceau. Take Flaubert's Madame Bovary and L'Éducation Sentimentale, in comparison with which Salammbô and two of the Trois Contes (the other is quite in the general drift) are obvious variations, excursions, reliefs.⁵⁶¹ Feuillet is practically (whatever may have been his early practice as a "devil"), when he takes to his own line, modern, and in a sense ordinary or nothing: Daudet the same. Naturalism en bloc would lose almost all pretence of justifying itself if it did not stick to the ordinary, or at least actual, though it may sometimes be a sort of transformed "ordinariness in abnormality." So great and so fertile a writer as Maupassant leaves us – except in his supernaturalisms – nothing at all that goes out of the actual probable or easily possible experience of a Frenchman of 1880-90. The four novelists who supply the bulk of the last chapter never outstep this. But since such indulgence in particulars may be thought mere driving at an open door, let us take the fact for granted, and turn to some consideration of its causes, results, conditions, features, and the like.

One of the causes is of such certainty and importance that a person, not indolent or prejudiced, might ask for no other. It is that sempiternal desire for change⁵⁶²– that principle of revolution, which is so much more certain than any evolution, and which governs human life, though it is always bringing that life back to the old places, "camouflaged," as they say nowadays, in a fashion that disguises them to the simple. The romance of incident, historical and other, had had a long innings, and people were tired of it. But though this was undoubtedly the main influence, there were some others which it would be hardly judicious to neglect. It is true that the greatest of these were, in a fashion, only partial actions or reactions of the larger one already mentioned.⁵⁶³ Beyle and Balzac, the latter of course with important "colours" of his own, and even the former with some modifications, had, as men of genius generally do, felt or found the spirit of change early, and their audiences helped to spread it. And yet minor impulsions might be indicated. It is a commonplace that from the days of the Napoleonic War to the middle 'fifties there were few great European events; commercial progress, developments of colonisation, machinery, literature, and the arts, somewhat peddling politics,⁵⁶⁴ and the like taking the place of the big wars and the grandiose revolutions that ushered in the nineteenth century. But these mostly meaner things themselves claimed attention; they filled the life of men if they did not glorify it; classes and occupations which had been almost altogether non-vocal began to talk and be talked about, and so the change again held on.

Lastly, of course, there was the increase of education: with which the demand for fiction, plentiful in quantity and easily comprehended, was sure to grow.

On the whole, however, the results concern us more than the causes. What is the general character of this large province, or, looking at it in another way, of these accumulated crops, which the fifty years more specially in question saw added to the prose fiction of France?

The answer is pretty much what any wide student of history – political, social, literary, or other – would expect, supposing, which is of course in fact an impossibility, that he could come to the particular study "fresh and fasting." Novel-writing in France, as elsewhere, became more and more a business; and so, while the level of craftsmanship might be to some extent raised, the level of artistic excellence was correspondingly lowered. It has been before observed more than once that, to the present critic, only Flaubert and Maupassant of the writers we have been discussing in these later chapters can be credited with positive genius, unless the too often smoky and malodorous torch of Zola be admitted to qualify for the Procession of the Chosen. But when we take in the whole century the retrospect is very different; and while the later period may suffer slightly in the respect just indicated, the earlier affords it some compensation in the other noted point.

There is, indeed, no exact parallel, in any literature or any branch of literature within my knowledge, to the manifold development of the French novel during these hundred years. Our own experience in the same department cannot be set in any proper comparison with it, for the four great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century, and their followers from Miss Burney downwards, with the Terror and the Political schools of the extreme close, had advanced our starting-point so far that Scott and Miss Austen possessed advantages not open to any French writer. On the other hand, the Sensibility School, which was far more numerously attended in France than in England, gave other openings, which were taken advantage of in a special direction by Benjamin Constant, and much earlier and less brilliantly, but still with important results, by Madame de Montolieu. The age-long competence of the French in conte and nouvelle was always ready for fresh adaptation; and at the very beginning of the new century, and even earlier, two reinforcements of the most diverse character came to the French novel. Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil (the earliest of whose novels appeared just before the Revolution as Pigault's début was made just after it) may be said to have democratised the novel to nearly⁵⁶⁵ the full meaning of that much abused word. They lowered its value aesthetically, ethically (at least in Pigault's case, while Ducray's morality does not go much above the "Be amiable and honest" standard), logically, rhetorically, and in a good many other ways. But they did not merely increase the number of its readers; in so doing they multiplied correspondingly the number of its practitioners, and so they helped to make novel-writing a business and – through many failures and half-successes – to give it a sort of regularised practice, if not a theory.

Yet if this democratisation of the novel thus went partly but, as does all democratisation inevitably, to the degradation of it in quality, though to its increase in quantity, there were fortunately other influences at work to provide new reinforcements, themselves in some cases of quality invaluable. It has been admitted that neither Chateaubriand nor Madame de Staël can be said to have written a first-class novel – even Corinne can hardly be called that. But it is nearer thereto than anything that had been written since the first part of La Nouvelle Héloïse: while René and Atala recover, and more than recover in tragic material, the narrative power of the best comic tales. And these isolated examples were of less importance for the actual history – being results of individual genius, which are not imitable – than certain more general characteristics of the two writers. Between them – a little perhaps owing to their social position, but much more by their pure literary quality – they reinstated the novel in the Upper House of literature itself. In Madame de Staël there was more than adequacy – in Chateaubriand there was sometimes consummateness – of style; in both, with whatever varnish of contemporary affectation, there was genuine nobility of thought. They both chose subjects worthy of their powers, and Madame de Staël at least contented herself with ordinary, or not very extraordinary, modern life. But the greatest things they did, from the historian's point of view, were introductions of the novel to new fields of exercise and endeavour. Art and religion were brought into its sphere, and if Les Natchez and Les Martyrs cannot exactly be called modern historical novels, they are considerable advances, both upon the model of Télémaque and upon that of Bélisaire. And even putting this aside, the whole body of Chateaubriand's work, as well as not a little in Madame de Staël's, tended to introduce and to encourage the spirit of Romance.

Now the proposition which – though never, I trust, pushed to the unliterary extent of warping the judgment, and never yet, I hope, unduly flaunted or flourished in the reader's face – dominates this volume, is that Romanticism, or, to use the shorter and more glorious name, Romance, itself dominates the whole of the French nineteenth-century novel. If any one considers that this proposition is at variance with the other, that the main function of the novel during the period has been to bring the novel closer to ordinary life, he has failed to grasp what it might be presumptuous plumply to call the true meaning of Romance, but what is certainly that meaning as it has always appeared to me.

To attempt discussion, or even enumeration, of all the definitions or descriptions of Romance in general which have been given by others would not only be impossible in the space at command, but would be really irrelevant. As it happens, the matter can be cut short, without inadequacy and without disingenuousness, by quoting a single pair of epithets, affixed by a critic, for whom I have great respect, a day or two before I wrote these words. This critic held that Romantic treatment – in stage matters more particularly, but we can extend the phrase to fiction without unfairness – was "generous but false." I should call it "generous" certainly, but before all things "true." Nor is this a mere play upon the words of the original. It so happens that our friend the enemy has supplied a most admirable help. Legally, as we know, veracity requires "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." I admit that the last clause will not fit Romance. She does give us something more than the truth, and that is her generosity, but it is a generosity which is necessitated by the fact that Romance is a quality or function not so much of nature essentially – though happily it is sometimes so by accident – as of Art, the essence of which is to require, whether it be art classic or art romantic, art of literature or art of design, art of sight or art of sound, something added to the truth – as that truth exists in reality.

Of what this addition is presently. But Romance, as I see it, insists upon and gives the truth and the whole truth of nature itself. Who is the greatest of Romantics? By agreement of all but the purblind and the paradoxer, Shakespeare. Who is the truest and the most universal of all writers? By consent of classic and romantic, at least of those of either kind who "count" – again Shakespeare. Let me say at once that, having early sworn allegiance to Logic, I am perfectly aware that a coincidence of two things in one person does not prove the identity of the things. But it proves their compossibility, and when it is found in excelsis, it surely goes near to prove a good deal more. Nor is one in the least confined to this argument from example, strong as it is. When you examine Classicism, which, whatever we may say or not say of it, will always stand as the opposite of Romance, you find that it always leaves something out. It may – it does in its best examples – give you truth; it may – it does in its best examples – add something which is its own "generosity" – its castigation, its order, its reason, its this and that and the other. To be very liberal, it may be admitted that the perpetual and meticulous presence in it of "Thou shalt not" do or say this or that, is most conspicuous – let us go to the extreme of generosity ourselves and say, is only conspicuous – in its feebler examples. But there is always something that it does not give, and some of us think that there are not a few things which it cannot give. There is nothing, not even ugliness itself, which Romance cannot give, though there its form of generosity comes in, and the ugly in simple essence becomes beautiful by treatment.

I could bestow any amount of tediousness in these generalities on my readers if I thought it necessary: but having developed my proposition and its meaning, I think it better to pass to the applications thereof in the present subject.

Of the wide extension of aim and object effected by Romantic influence in the novel, as in other departments of literature, there can be little denial, though of course it may be contended that this extension took place not as it ought and as it ought not. But of the fact of it and of the corresponding variety introduced with it, the very pioneers of the so-called Romantic movement give ample proof. We have seen this even in the extremely inchoate stage of the first two decades; when the great definitely Romantic leaders made their appearance it was more remarkable still. The four chief writers who gave the Romantic lead before 1830 itself may be taken to be Nodier, Hugo, Mérimée, and Vigny. They stand in choice of subjects, as in treatment of them, wide apart; and just as it has been noted of Vigny's poetry, that its three chief pieces, "Éloa," "Dolorida," and "Le Cor" point the way to three quite different kinds of Romantic verse, so, confining ourselves to the same example, it may be repeated that Cinq-Mars and the smaller stories exemplify, and in a way pattern, kinds of Romantic prose fiction even further apart from each other. Always, through the work of these and that of Gautier, and of all the others who immediately or subsequently follow them, this broadening and branching out of the Romantic influence – this opening of fresh channels, historical and fanciful, supernatural and ordinary – shows itself. The contention, common in books, that this somehow ceased about the middle of the century, or at least died off with the death of those who had carried it out, appears to me, I confess, to be wildly unhistorical and uncritical. At no time – the proofs fill this volume – do we find any restriction, of choice of subject or conduct of treatment, to anything like the older limits. But the most unhistorical and the most uncritical form of this contention is the astonishing endeavour to vindicate a "classical" character for Naturalism. Most certainly there is "impropriety" in some of the classics and "impropriety" in all the Naturalists, but other resemblance I can see none. As for the argument that as Naturalism is opposed to Romance and Classicalism is opposed to Romance, therefore Naturalism is Classical – this is undoubtedly a very common form of bastard syllogism, but to labour at proving its bastardy would be somewhat ridiculous.

The fact is, as should have been sufficiently made good above, that Naturalism is not opposed to Romance in anything like the sense that Classicism is: it is nothing but a degradation and exaggeration at once of certain things in Romance itself. Nor do I think that there is the slightest difficulty in showing that every form of novel-writing which we have been surveying in this book – that the work of every one of those distinguished or undistinguished writers who have been, with or without regret, declined – is still essentially Romantic. It is Romantic in its inflexible resolution to choose subjects for itself and not according to rule; Romantic in its wise or unwise individuality of treatment; Romantic in its preferential appeal to emotion rather than to pure intelligence; above all, Romantic in its quest – often no doubt ill-guided and unsuccessful, but always more or less present – for that element of strangeness which, though invisible to many who live, is a pervading character of Life itself, and the presence of which it is the glory of Romance itself, from its earliest to its latest manifestations, to have recognised and to some extent fixed, in artistic representation. And so, I hope, that what has been discovered in this volume – in the way of pageant and procession even more than that of examination, though with something of that also – may have shown further progress towards – nay, actual attainment of, the goal which I ventured to mark out in the earlier volume as that of the novelist by the words, "Here is the whole of human life before you. Copy it or, better, re-create it – with variation and decoration ad libitum– as faithfully, but as fully, as you can."

Thesis-writing, however, is but dismal reading, unless (as Mrs. Scott told Jeffrey she hoped he was for the Marmion review) "you are very well paid for it." Nor do I, as I have previously explained, consider it a necessary part of history, though common honesty may require that the presence of a doctrine, behind the delivery of an account, should be confessed. I think the account itself should be sufficient to make good my point; others may differ. But even if they do, some of them at least will, I hope, have found in that account some modicum of the amazing supply of rest and refreshment contained in the mass of literature we have been surveying.

On the two volumes together there may be a little more to say. I have touched, I hope not too frequently, on the curious pleasure which I myself have felt in reading again books sometimes unopened for more than half a century, sometimes read at different times during that period, sometimes positively familiar; and on the contrasted enjoyment of reading others written long ago in all but a few cases, but not, as it happened, read at the time of their appearance. I am indeed inclined to lay much stress on the quality of re-readableness in a novel. Perhaps, as indeed is pretty generally the fact in such cases, a capacity of reading again is required in the person as well as one of being read again in the book. The late Mr. Mark Pattison was not a friend of mine, and we once had a pitched battle; nor was he in any case given to borrow other people's expressions. But he was a critic, if he was anything, and he once did me the honour to repeat verbatim– whether consciously or not I cannot say, but in the very periodical where it had originally appeared – a sentence of mine about "people who would rather read any circulating-library trash, for the first time, than Pendennis or Pride and Prejudice for the second." I think this difference between the two classes is as worthy to rank, among the criteria of opposed races of mankind and womankind, as those between borrowers and lenders, Platonists and Aristotelians, or Big- and Little-Endians.

But the vast library through which I have had the privilege of conducting my readers does not exercise any invidious separation between the two. I have read a good many French novels – hundreds certainly, I do not know that it would be preposterous to say thousands – that I have not even mentioned in this book.⁵⁶⁶ But I have been a very busy man, and have had to read and to do a great many other things. If I had had nothing else to do and had devoted my entire life to the occupation which Gray thought not undesirable as regards Marivaux and Crébillon, I doubt whether I could have "overtaken," as the Scotch say, the entire prose fiction of 1800-1900 in French. On the back of one of the volumes of fiction – itself pretty obscure – which I have noticed in Chapter II. of this volume, I find advertised the works of a certain Dinocourt, of whom I never heard before, and who is not to be found in at least some tolerably full French dictionaries of literature. They have quite appetising titles (one or two given in the passage referred to), and there are in all sixty-two volumes of them, distributed in fours, fives, and sixes among the several works. Ought I to have read these sixty odd volumes of Dinocourt? That is a moral question. That there are sixty odd volumes of him, probably not now very easily obtainable, but somewhere for some one to read if he likes, is a simple fact. And there are no doubt many more than sixty such batches waiting likewise,⁵⁶⁷ and quite likely to prove as readable as I found M. Ricard.

I have by no means always felt inclined to acquiesce in the endlessly repeated complaints that the hackwork of literature is worse done in England than it is in France. But having had a very large experience of the novels of both languages, having reviewed hundreds of English novels side by side with hundreds of French as they came from the press, and having also read, for pleasure or duty, hundreds of older ones in each literature, I think that the mysterious quality of readableness pure and simple has more generally belonged to the French novel than to the English. This, as I have endeavoured to point out, is not a question of naughtiness or niceness, of candour or convention. I have indeed admitted that the conventions of the French novel bore me quite as much as anything in ours. It may be partly a question of length, for, as everybody knows, the French took to the average single volume, of some three hundred not very closely printed pages, much sooner than we took to anything of the kind. It is perhaps partly also due to what one of the reviewers of my former volume well called the greater "spaciousness" of the English novel, that is to say, its inclusion of more diverse aims, and episodic subjects, and minor interests generally. For this, while it makes for superior greatness when there is strength enough to carry it off, undoubtedly requires more strength, and so gives more openings for weakness to show itself. There are many average English novels which I should not mind reading, and not a few that I should like to read, again, while there are but few French novels that I should care to read so often as I have cared to read the great English ones. But I could read, for a second time, a very much larger proportion of average French fiction.

Of those books which are "above average" I have tried to say what I thought ought to be said in the volume itself, and there is no need of a "peroration with much circumstance" about them. It is a long way – a perfect maze of long ways leading through the most different countries of thought and feeling – from Atala dying in the wilderness to Chiffon doing exquisitely balanced justice to herself and the Jesuit, by allowing that while he and she were both bien élevés, he was un peu trop and she was not. It is not so far, except in time, nor separated by such a difference of intervening country, from the song of the Mandragore in Nodier to those muffled shrieks of a better-known variety of the same mystic plant, that tell us of Maupassant's growing progress to his fate. As you explore the time and the space of the interval you come across wonderful things. There are the micro- macrocosms of Hugo, where, as in Baudelaire's line on the albatross quoted above, he is partly hampered because he has come down from the air of poetry to the earth of prose; of Balzac, where there is no such difficulty, but where the cosmos itself is something other than yours; of Dumas, where half the actual history of France is disrealised for your delectation. On a lesser scale you have the manners of town and country, of high life and low life, of Paris most of all, given you through all sorts of perspectives and in all sorts of settings by Paul de Kock and George Sand, by Sandeau and Bernard, by Alexandre Dumas fils and Feuillet, by Theuriet and Fabre. Gautier and Mérimée make for you that marriage of story and style which, before them, so few had attempted at all, yet which, since them, so many have tried with such doubtful success. Once more in Flaubert and then for the last time, as far as our survey goes, in Maupassant, you come to that touch of genius which exalts the novel, as it exalts all kinds, indefinably, unmistakably, finally.

And this journey is not like the one great journey, and more than one of the lesser journeys, of our life, irremeable; there is no denial, no curse, no fiend with outstretched claw, to prevent your going back as often as you like, wandering in any direction you please, passing or staying as and where you wish. It has been perhaps unconscionable of me to inflict so big a book on my readers as a cover for giving myself the pleasure of making and remaking such journeys. But if I have persuaded any one of them to explore the country for himself, by him at least I shall not remain unforgiven.

THE END