CHAPTER XIV

OTHER NOVELISTS OF 1870-1900

[Sidenote: The last stage.]

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

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

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

Now, in the first place, it is generations since a clerical novel was likely to please the French novel-reading public. In this very book there is an amusing scene where the _abbe_, then a private tutor, induces his employer, a deputy, to invite clerics of distinction to a party, whereat the other guests melt away in disgust. And this was a long time before a certain French minister boasted that his countrymen "had taken God out of Heaven." Moreover, while there are two obvious ways of reconciling extremists to the subject, M. Fabre rejected both. His book is neither a panegyric on clericalism nor a libel on it. His hero is as far as possible from being a saint, but he is perfectly free from all the vulgar vices. The rest of the characters--all, with insignificant exceptions, clerics--are quite human, and in no case--not even in that of Capdepont's not too scrupulous aide-de-camp the Abbe Mical--offensive. But at the beginning the bishop, between whom and the hero there is truceless war, is, though privately an amiable and charitable gentleman (Capdepont is a Pyrenean peasant by origin), rather undignified, and even a little tyrannical; while a cardinal towards the end makes a distinction--between the impossibility of the Church lying and the positive duty of Churchmen, in certain circumstances, to lie--which would have been a godsend to Kingsley in that unequal conflict of his with a colleague of his Eminence's.[521]

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

[Sidenote: _Norine_, etc.]

This criticism--it is not intended for a reproach--does not extend to other, perhaps not so powerful, but more _pastimeous_ books, though M. Fabre seldom entirely excluded the clerical atmosphere of his youth.[524] A very pleasant volume-full is _Norine_, the title-piece of which is full at once of Cevenol scenery and Parisian contrast, of love, and, at least, preparations for feasting; of sketches of that "Institute" life which comes nearest to our collegiate one; and of pleasant bird-worship. But M. Fabre should have told us whether the bishop actually received and appreciated[525] the dinner of Truscas trout and Faugeres wine (alas! this is a blank in my fairly extensive wine-list), and the miscellaneous _maigre_ cookery of the excellent Prudence, and the splendid casket of _liqueurs_ borrowed from a brother _cure_. _Cathinelle_ (an unusual and pretty diminutive of Catherine) is an admirably told pendant to it; and I venture to think the "idyllic" quality of both at least equal, if not superior, to the best of George Sand. _Le R. P. Colomban_ is, according to M. Fabre's habit, a sort of double-edged affair--a severe but just rebuke of the "popular preacher," and a good-humoured touch at the rebuker, Monseigneur Onesime de la Boissiere, Eveque de Saint-Pons, who incidentally proposes to submit _L'Abbe Tigrane_ to the Holy Congregation of the Index. Finally, the book closes with a delightful panegyric of Alexandre Dumas _pere_, and an anecdote avowedly autobiographic (as, indeed, the whole book gives itself out to be, though receivable with divers pinches of salt) of that best-natured of men franking a bevy of impecunious students at a _premiere_ of one of his plays.

[Sidenote: _Le Marquis de Pierrerue._]

To read _Le Marquis de Pierrerue_ after these two books--one the piece with which Fabre established his reputation, and the other a product of his proved mastery--is interesting to the critic. Whether it would be so to the general reader may be more doubtful. It is the longest of its author's novels; in fact its two volumes have separate sub-titles;[526] but there is no real break, either of time, place, or action, between them. It is a queer book, quite evidently of the novitiate, and suggesting now Paul de Kock (the properer but not _quite_ proper Paul), now Daudet (to whom it is actually dedicated), now Feuillet, now Murger, now Sandeau, now one of the melodramatic story-tellers. Very possibly all these had a share in its inspiration. It is redolent of the medical studies which the author actually pursued, between his abandonment of preparation for the Church and his settling down as a man of letters. Its art is palpably imperfect--blocks of _recit_, wedges of not very novel or acute reflection, a continual reluctance or inability to "get forrard." Of the two heroes, Claude Abrial, Marquis de Pierrerue--a fervent Royalist and Catholic, who lavishes his own money, and everybody else's that he can get hold of, on a sort of private Literary Fund,[527] allows himself to be swindled by a scoundrelly man of business, immures his daughter, against her wish, as a Carmelite nun, and dies a pauper--is a quite possible but not quite "brought off" figure. Theven Falgouet, the Breton _buveur d'eau_,[528] who is introduced to us at actual point of starvation, and who dies, self-transfixed on the sharp spikes of the Carmelite _grille_, is perhaps not _im_possible, and occasionally pathetic. But the author seems, in his immaturity as a craftsman, never to have made up his mind whether he is producing an "alienist" study, or giving us a fairly ordinary _etudiant_ and aspirant in letters. Of the two heroines, the noble damsel Claire de Pierrerue--object of Falgouet's love at first sight, a love ill-fated and more insane than even love beseems--is quite nice in her way; and Rose Keller--last of grisettes, but a grisette of the Upper House, an artist grisette, and, as some one calls her, the "soeur de charite de la galanterie"[529]--is quite nice in hers. But Rose's action--in burning, to the extent of several hundred thousand francs' worth, notes and bonds, the wicked gains of one of her lovers (Grippon, the Marquis's fraudulent intendant), and promptly expiring--may pair off with Falgouet's repeating on himself the Spanish torture-death of the _guanches_,[530] as pure melodrama. In fact the whole thing is undigested, and shows, in a high degree, that initial difficulty in getting on with the story which has not quite disappeared in _L'Abbe Tigrane_, but which has been completely conquered[531] in _Norine_ and _Cathinelle_.

[Sidenote: _Mon Oncle Celestin._]

This mixed quality makes itself felt in others of Fabre's books. Perhaps there is none of them, except _L'Abbe Tigrane_ itself, which has been a greater favourite with his partisans than _Mon Oncle Celestin_. Here we have something of the same easy autobiographic quality, with the same general scene and the same relations of the narrator and the principal characters, as in other books; but "Mr. the nephew" (the agreeable and continuous title by which the faithful parishioners address their beloved pastor's boy relative) has a different uncle and a different _gouvernante_, at least in name, from those in _Norine_ and _Cathinelle_. The Abbe Celestin, threatened with consumption, exchanges the living in which he has worked for many years, and little good comes of it. He is persecuted, actually to the death, by his rural dean, a sort of duplicate of the hero of _L'Abbe Tigrane_; but the circumstances are not purely ecclesiastical. He has, in his new parish, taken for goat-girl a certain Marie Galtier, daughter of his beadle, but, unluckily, also step-daughter of a most abominable step-mother. Marie, as innocently as possible, "gets into trouble," and dies of it, accusations being brought against her guiltless and guileless master in consequence. There are many good passages; the opening is (as nearly always with M. Fabre) excellent; but both the parts and the whole are, once more, too long--the mere "flitting" from one parish to another seems never to be coming to an end. Still, the book should be read; and it has one very curious class of personages, the "hermits" of the Cevennes--probably the latest (the date is 1846) of their kind in literature. The general characteristics of that kind do not seem to have been exactly saintly;[532] and the best of them, Adon Laborie, after being "good" throughout, and always intending to be so, brings about the catastrophe by calmly suppressing, in the notion that he will save the Abbe trouble, three successive citations from the Diocesan Council, thereby getting him "interdicted." The shock, when the judgment in contumacy is announced by the brutal dean, proves fatal.

[Sidenote: _Lucifer._]

In Lucifer M. Fabre is still nearer, though with no repetition, to the _Tigrane_ motive. The book justifies its title by being the most ambitious of all the novels, and justifies the ambition itself by showing a great deal of power--most perhaps again, of all; though whether that power is used to the satisfaction of the reader must depend, even more than is usual, on individual tastes. Bernard Jourfier, at the beginning of the book and of the Second Empire, is a young _vicaire_, known to be of great talents and, in especial, of unusual preaching faculty, but of a violent temper, ill at ease about his own vocation, and suspected--at least by Ultramontanes--of very doubtful orthodoxy and not at all doubtful Gallicanism. He is, moreover, the grandson of a _conventionnel_ who voted for the King's death, and the son of a deputy of extreme Liberal views. So the Jesuits, after trying to catch him for themselves, make a dead set at him, and secure his appointment to out-of-the-way country parishes only, and even in these his constant removal, so that he may acquire as little influence as possible anywhere. At last, in a very striking interview with his bishop, he succeeds in clearing his character, and enters on the way of promotion. The cabals continue; but later, on the overthrow of Bonapartism, he is actually raised to the episcopate. His violent temper, however, is always giving handles to the enemy, and he finally determines that life is intolerable. After trying to starve himself, he makes use of the picturesque but dangerous situation of his palace, and is crushed by falling, in apparent accident, through a breach in the garden wall with a precipice beneath--"falling like Lucifer," as his lifelong enemy and rival whispers to a confederate at the end. For the appellation has been an Ultramontane nickname for him long before, and has been not altogether undeserved by his pride at least. It has been said that the book is powerful; but it is almost unrelievedly gloomy throughout, and suffers from the extremely narrow range of its interest.

[Sidenote: _Sylviane_ and _Taillevent_.]

Those who are not tired of the Cevenol atmosphere--which, it must be admitted, is quite a refreshing one--will find a lighter example in _Sylviane_, once more recounted by "Mr. the nephew," but with his movable uncle and _gouvernante_ shifted back to "M. Fulcran" and "Prudence"; and in _Taillevent_, a much longer book, which is independent of uncle and nephew both. _Sylviane_ has agreeable things in it, but perhaps might have been better if its form had been different. It is a long _recit_ told by a gamekeeper, with frequent interruptions[533] and a very thin "frame." _Taillevent_ ends with two murders, the second a quite excusable lynch-punishment for the first, and the marriage of the avenger just afterwards to the daughter of the original victim, a combination of "the murders _and_ the marriages" deserving Osric's encomia on sword furniture. So vigorous a conclusion had need have a well-stuffed course of narrative to lead up to it, and this is not wanting. There is a wicked--a _very_ wicked--Spaniard for the lynched-murderer part; an exceedingly good dog-, bear-, and man-fight in the middle; an extensive and well-utilised wolf-trap in the woods; bankruptcies; floods; all sorts of things; with a course of "idyllic" true love running through the whole. There _is_ a _cure_--a rather foolish one; but the ecclesiastical interest in itself is almost absent from the book. The weakest part of it lies in the characters of what may be called the hero and heroine of the beginning and middle--Frederic Servieres and Madeleine his wife. That the former should fall into the most frantic love before marriage, and almost neglect his wife as soon as she has borne him a child, may be said to be common enough in books, and, unluckily, by no means uncommon in life. But there may be more question about the repetition of the inconsistency in other parts of the character--extreme business aptitude and fatal neglect of business, extreme energy and fatal depression over quite small things, etc. The general combination is not impossible; it is not even improbable; but it is not quite "made so." And something is the same with Madeleine, who is, moreover, left "in the air" in so curious a fashion that one begins to wonder whether the Mrs. Martha Buskbody attitude, so often jibed at, does not possess some excuse.

[Sidenote: _Toussaint Galabru._]

A pleasant contrast in this respect, though the end here is tragic in a way, may be found in _Toussaint Galabru_, the last, perhaps, of M. Fabre's books for which we can find special room here, though no doubt some favourites of particular readers may have been omitted. The novel is divided into two pretty equal halves, with an interval first of ten years between them and, almost immediately, of sixteen more. The first half is occupied by an adventure of "Mr. the nephew's," though he is not here "Mr. the nephew," but "Mr. the son," living with his father and mother at Bedarieux, M. Fabre's actual birthplace. He plays truant from Church on Advent Sunday to join a shooting expedition with his school-fellow Baptistin and that school-fellow's not too pious father, who is actually a church _suisse_, but has received an exeat from the _cure_ to catch a famous hare for that _cure_ to eat. The vicissitudes of the chase are numerous, and the whole is narrated with extraordinary skill as from the boy's point of view, his entire innocence, when he is brought into contact with very shady incidents, being--and this is a most difficult thing to do--hit off marvellously well. It is only towards the end of this part (he has been heard of before) that Toussaint Galabru, sorcerer and Lothario, makes his appearance--as clever as he is handsome, and as vicious as he is clever. When he does appear he has his way--with the game shot by others, and with a certain _metayer's_ wife--after the same hand-gallop fashion in which the personage in Blake's lines enjoyed both the peach and the lady.

The earlier and shorter, but not short, interval, mentioned above, passes to 1852, and does little more than bring the now "Parisian" narrator into fresh contact with his old school-fellow Baptistin, now a full-grown priest, but, though very pious, in some difficulties from his persistent love of sport. Sixteen years later, again, in 1868, reappears, "coming to his death,"[534] Galabru himself. The part is chiefly occupied by a _recit_ of intervening history (including a sadly unsuccessful attempt, both at spiritual and physical combat, by Baptistin) and by a much-interrupted journey in snow.[535] But it gives occasion for another agreeable "idyll" between Vincinet, Galabru's son, and the Abbe Baptistin's god-child Lalie; and it ends with a striking procession to carry, hardly in time, the _viaticum_ to the dying wizard, whereby, if not his own weal in the other world, that of the lovers in this is happily brought about.

Not very many generalities are required on M. Ferdinand Fabre. How completely his way lies out of most of the ruts in which the wain of the French novel usually travels must have been shown; and it may be hoped that enough has been said also to show that there are plenty of minor originalities about him. No novelist[536] in any language known to me (unless you call Richard Jefferies a novelist) has such an extraordinary command of "the country"--bird-nature and rock scenery being his favourite but by no means his only subjects. For "Scenes of Clerical Life" he stands admittedly alone in France, and has naturally been dealt with most often from this point of view. Of that intense provincialism, in the good sense, which is characteristic of French literature, there have been few better representatives. Wordsworth himself is scarcely more the poet of our Lake and Hill country than Fabre is the novelist of the Cevennes. Peasant life and child life of the country (he meddles little, and not so happily, with towns of any size) find in him admirably "vatical" properties and combinations; and if he does not run any risk of Feste's rebuke by talking much of "ladies," he knows as much about women as a man well may. His comedy is never coarse or trivial, and the tragedy never goes off through the touch-hole. Of one situation--very easy to spoil by rendering it mawkish--the early but not "calf"-love of rustic man and maid, beginning in childhood, he was curiously master. George Sand herself[537] has nothing to beat (if she has anything to equal) the pairs of Taillevent and Riquette (in the novel named from the lover), and of Vincinet and Lalie (in _Toussaint Galabru_). As for his pictures of clerical cabals and clerical weaknesses, they may be too much of a good thing for some tastes; but that they are a good thing, both as an exercise in craftsmanship and as an alternative to the common run of French novel subjects, can hardly be denied. In this respect, and not in this respect only, M. Fabre has his own place, and that no low one.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Andre Theuriet.]

In coming to M. Andre Theuriet I felt a mixture of curiosity with a slight uneasiness. For I had read not a few of his books[538] carefully and critically at their first appearance, and in such cases--when novels are not of the _very_ first order (which, good as these are, I think few really critical readers would allot them) nor possessed of those "oddments" of appeal which sometimes make more or less inferior books readable and readable again--fresh acquaintance, after a long time, is dangerous. It has been said here (possibly more than once) that, when a book possesses this peculiar readableness, a second reading is positively beneficial to it, because you neglect the "knots in the reed" and slip along it easily. This is not quite the case with others: and, unless great critical care is taken, a new acquaintance, itself thirty years old, has, I fear, a better chance than an old one renewed after that time. However, the knight of Criticism, as of other ladies,[539] must dare any adventure, and ought to be able to bring the proper arms and methods to the task. For the purposes of renewal I chose _Sauvageonne_, _Le Fils Maugars_, and _Raymonde_. With the first, though I did not remember much more than its central situation and its catastrophe, with one striking incident, I do remember being originally pleased; the second has, I believe, at least sometimes, been thought Theuriet's masterpiece; and the third (which, by the way, is a "philippine" containing another story besides the title-one) is an early book which I had not previously read.

[Sidenote: _Sauvageonne._]

The argument of _Sauvageonne_ can be put very shortly. A young man of four-and-twenty, of no fortune, marries a rich widow ten years older than himself, and, as it happens, possessed of an adopted daughter of seventeen. He--who is by no means an intentional scoundrel, but a commonplace and selfish person, and a gentleman neither by birth nor by nature--soon wearies of his somewhat effusive and exacting wife; the girl takes a violent fancy to him; accident hurries on the natural if not laudable consequences; the wife covers the shame by succeeding in passing off their result as her own child, but the strain is too much for her, and she goes mad, but does not die.

This tragic theme (really a tragic [Greek: hamartia], for there is much good in Sauvageonne, as she is called, from her tomboy habits, and, with happier chance and a nobler lover, all might have been well with her) is handled with no little power, and with abundant display of skill in two different departments which M. Theuriet made particularly his own--sketches of the society of small country towns, and elaborate description of the country itself, especially wood-scenery. In regard to the former, it must be admitted that, though there is plenty of scandal and not a little ill-nature in English society of the same kind, the latter nuisance seems, according to French novelists, to be more _active_ with their country folk than it is with ours[540]--a thing, in a way, convenient for fiction. Of the descriptive part the only unfavourable criticism (and that a rather ungracious one) that could be made is that it is almost too elaborate. Of two fateful scenes of _Sauvageonne_, that where Francis Pommeret, the unheroic hero, comes across Denise (the girl's proper name) sitting in a crab-tree in the forest and pelting small boys with the fruit, is almost startlingly vivid. You see every detail of it as if it were on the Academy walls. In fact, it is almost more like a picture than like reality, which is more shaded off and less sharp in outline and vivid in colour. As for the character-drawing, if it does not attain to that consummateness which has been elsewhere described and desiderated--the production of people that you _know_--it attains the second rank; the three prominent characters (the rest are merely sets-off) are all people that you _might_ know. Denise herself is very near the first rank, and Francis Pommeret--not, as has been said, by any means a scoundrel, for he only succumbs to strong and continued temptation, but an ordinary selfish creature--is nearer than those who wish to think nobly of human nature may like, to complete reality. One is less certain about the unhappy Adrienne Lebreton or Pommeret, but discussion of her would be rather "an intricate impeach." And one may have a question about the end. We are told that Francis and Denise keep together (the luckless wife living on in spite of her madness) because of the child, though they absolutely hate each other. Would it not be more natural that, if they do not part, they should vary the hatred with spasms of passion and repulsion?

[Sidenote: _Le Fils Maugars._]

_Le Fils Maugars_ is not only a longer book, but its space is less exclusively filled with a single situation, and the necessary prelude to it. In fact, the whole thing is expanded, varied, and peopled. Auberive, near Langres, the place of _Sauvageonne_, is hardly more than a large village; Saint-Clementin, on the Charente, though not a large town, is the seat of a judicial Presidency, of a _sous-prefecture_, etc. "Le _pere_ Maugars" is a banker who, from having been a working stone-mason, has enriched himself by sharp practice in money-lending. His son is a lawyer by the profession chosen for him, and a painter by preference. The heroine, Therese Desroches, is the daughter of a Republican doctor, whose wife has been unfaithful, and who suspects Therese of not being his own child. The scene shifts from Saint-Clementin itself to the country districts where Poitou and Touraine meet, as well as to Paris. The time begins on the eve of the Coup d'Etat, and allows itself a gap of five years between the first and second halves of the book. Besides the love-scenes and the country descriptions and the country feasts there is a little general society; much business; some politics, including the attempted and at last accomplished arrest of the doctor for treason to the new _regime_; a well-told account of a contest for the Prix de Rome; a trial of the elder Maugars for conspiracy (with a subordinate usurer) to defraud, etc. The whole begins with more than a little aversion on everybody's part for the innocent Etienne Maugars, who, having been away from home for years, knows neither the fact nor the cause of his father's unpopularity; and it ends with condign poetical justice, on the extortioner in the form of punishment, and for the lovers in another way. It is thus, though a less poignant book than _Sauvageonne_, a fuller and wider one, and it displays, better than that book, the competence and adequacy which mark the author, though there may be something else to be said about it (or rather about its illustration of his general characteristics) presently.

[Sidenote: _Le Don Juan de Vireloup_ and _Raymonde_.]

_Le Don Juan de Vireloup_, a story of about a hundred pages long, which acts as makeweight to _Raymonde_, itself only about twice the length, is a capital example of Theuriet at nearly his best--a pleasant mixture of _berquinade_ and _gaillardise_ (there are at least two passages at either of which Mrs. Grundy would require _sal volatile_, and would then put the book in the fire). The reformation and salvation of Jean de Santenoge--a poor (indeed penniless) gentleman, who lives in a little old manor, or rather farm-house, buried in the woods, and whose sole occupations are poaching and making love to peasant girls--are most agreeably conducted by the agency of the daughter of a curmudgeonly forest-inspector (who naturally regards Santenoge with special abhorrence). She is helped by her grand-uncle, a doctor of the familiar stamp, who has known Diderot's child, Madame de Vandeul (the scene, as in so many of the author's books, is close to Langres), and worships Denis himself. As for _Raymonde_, its heroine comes closer to "Sauvageonne," though she is less of a savagess: and the worst that can be said against her lucky winner is that he is a little of a prig. But, to borrow, and very slightly alter, one of Sir Walter's pieces of divine charity, "The man is mortal, and a scientific person." Perhaps fate and M. Theuriet are a little too harsh to another (but not this time beggarly) _gentillatre_, Osmin de Prefontaine, to whom, one regrets to say, Raymonde positively, or almost positively, engages herself, before she in the same way virtually accepts the physiological Antoine Verdier. And the _denouement_, where everything comes right, is a little stagy.[541] But the whole is thoroughly readable, competently charactered, and illustrated by some of the best of the author's forest descriptions.

[Sidenote: General characteristics.]

One has thus been able to give an account, very favourable in the main, of these three or four stories--selected with no hidden design, and in two cases previously unknown to the critic, who has, in addition, a fair remembrance of several others. But it will be observed that there is in them, with all their merits, some evidence of that "rut" or "mould" character which has been specified as absent in greater novelists, but as often found in company with a certain accomplishment, in _ordonnance_ and readable quality, that marks the later novel. The very great prominence of description is common to all of them, and in three out of the four the scenes are from the same district--almost from the same patch--of country. The heroine is the most prominent character and, as she should be, the most attractive figure of all; but she is made up and presented, if not exactly _a la douzaine_, yet with a strong, almost a sisterly, family likeness. Far be it from the present writer to regret or desiderate the adorably candid creature who so soon smirches her whiteness. Even the luckless Sauvageonne--worst mannered, worst moralled, and worst fated of all--is a jewel and a cynosure compared with that other class of girl; while Raymonde (whose maltreatment of M. de Prefontaine is to a great extent excused by her mother's bullying, her real father's weakness, and her own impulsive temperament); the Therese of _Le Fils Maugars_; and the Marianne of _Le Don Juan de Vireloup_ are, in ascending degrees, girls of quite a right kind. Only, it is just a little too much the _same_ kind. And without unfairness, without even ingratitude, one may say that this sameness does somewhat characterise M. Theuriet.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Georges Ohnet.]

There were some who did not share the general admiration, a good many years ago, of the dictum of a popular French critic on a more popular French novelist to the effect that, though it was his habit, in the articles he was writing, to confine himself to literature, he would break this good custom for once and discuss M. Ohnet. In the first place, this appeared to the dissidents a very easy kind of witticism; they knew many men, many women, and many schoolboys who could have uttered it. In the second, they were probably of the opinion (changing the matter, instead of, like that wicked Prince Seithenyn, merely reversing the order, of the old Welsh saying) that "The goodness of wit sleeps in the badness of manners." But if the question had been then, or were now, asked seriously whether the literary value of _Le Maitre de Forges_ and its companion novels was high, few of them would, as probably, have been or be able to answer in the affirmative. For my own part, I always used to think, when M. Ohnet's novels came out, that they were remarkably like those of the eminent Mrs. Henry Wood[542] in English--of course _mutatis mutandis_. They displayed very fair aptitude for the _business_ of novel manufacture, and the results were such as, in almost every way, to satisfy the average subscriber to a circulating library, supposing him or her to possess respectable tastes (scarcely "taste"), moderate intelligence, and a desire to pass the time comfortably enough in reading them once, without the slightest expectation of being, or wish to be, able to read them again. They might even sometimes excite readers who possessed an adjustable "tally" of excitableness. But beyond this, as it seemed to their critic of those days, they never went.

Re-reading, therefore--though perhaps the consequence may not seem downright to laymen--promised some critical interest. I first selected for the purpose, to give the author as good a chance as possible, _Serge Panine_, which the Academy crowned, and which went near its hundred and fifty editions when it was still a four-year-old; and _Le Maitre de Forges_ itself, the most popular of all, adding _Le Docteur Rameau_ and _La Grande Marniere_, which my memory gave me as having seemed to be of such pillars as the particular structure could boast.

[Sidenote: _Serge Panine._]

I suppose the Forty crowned _Serge Panine_ because it was a virtuous book, and an attack on the financial trickeries which, about the time and a little later, enriched the French language with the word "krach." Otherwise, though no one could call it bad, its royalty could hardly seem much other than that which qualifies for the kingdom of the blind. The situations are good, and they are worked up into a Fifth Act, as we may call it (it occupies almost exactly a fifth of the book, which was, of course, dramatised), _melo_dramatic to the _n_th, ending in a discovery of flagrant delict, or something very like it, and in the shooting of a son-in-law by his mother-in-law to save the downfall of his reputation. But the characters do not play up to their parts, or each other, very well, with the possible or passable exception of the mother-in-law, and of one very minor personage, the secretary Marechal, whom M. Ohnet, perhaps distrustful of his power to make him more, left minor. The hero is a Polish prince, with everything that a stage Polish prince requires about him--handsome, superficially amiable, what the precise call "caressing" and the vulgar "carneying" in manner, but extravagant, quite non-moral, and not possessed of much common sense. His princess Micheline is a silly jilt before marriage and a sillier "door-mat" (as some women call others) of a wife. Her rival, and in a fashion foster-sister (she has been adopted before Micheline's birth), does things which many people might do, but does not do them in a concatenation accordingly. The jilted serious young man Pierre accepts a perfectly impossible position in reference to his former _fiancee_ and his supplanter, and gives more proofs of its impossibility by his conduct and speech than was at all necessary. The conversation is very flat, and the descriptions are chiefly confined to long, gaudy inventories of rich parvenus' houses, which read like auctioneers' catalogues.

But the worst part of the book, and probably that which at its appearance exasperated the critics, though it did not disturb the _abonne_--or, more surprisingly, the Immortals--is the flatness of style which has been already noted in the conversation, but which overflows insupportably into the narrative. M. Ohnet speaks somewhere, justly enough, of "le style a la fois pretentieux et plat, familier aux reporters." But was he trying--there is no sign of it--to parody these unfortunate persons when he himself described dinner-rolls as "Ces boules dorees qui sollicitent l'appetit le plus rebelle, et accommodees dans une serviette damassee artistement pliee, parent si elegamment un couvert"? Or when he tells us that at a ball "Les femmes, leurs splendides toilettes gracieusement etalees sur les meubles bas et moelleux, causaient chiffons sous l'eventail, ou ecoutaient les cantilenes d'un chanteur exotique pendant que les jeunes gens leur chuchotaient des galanteries a l'oreille." This last is really worthy of the feeblest member of our "_plated_ silver fork school" between the time of Scott and Miss Austen and that of Dickens and Thackeray.

[Sidenote: _Le Maitre de Forges._]

In the year 1902, _Le Maitre de Forges_, which was then just twenty years old, had reached its three hundred and sixty-seventh edition. Six years later Fromentin's _Dominique_, which was then forty-five years old, had reached its twenty-seventh. The accident of the two books lying side by side on my table has enabled me to make this comparison, the moral of which will be sufficiently drawn by a reference to what has been said of _Dominique_ above,[543] and by the few remarks on M. Ohnet's most popular book which follow.

One old receipt for popularity, "Put your characters up several steps in society," M. Ohnet has faithfully obeyed. We begin with a marquis unintentionally poaching on the ironmaster's ground, and (rather oddly) accepting game which he has _not_ shot thereon. We end with the marquis's sister putting her dainty fingers before the mouth of a duke's exploding pistol--to the not surprising damage of those digits, but with the result of happiness ever afterwards for the respectable characters of the book. There is a great deal of gambling, though, unfortunately told in a rather uninteresting manner of _recit_, which is a pity, for gambling can be made excellent in fiction.[544] There are several of M. Ohnet's favourite inventories, and a baroness--not a bad baroness--who has frequented sales, and knows all about _bric-a-brac_. Also there are several exciting situations, even before we come to the application of a lady's fingers as tompions. M. Ohnet is, it has been said, rather good at situations. But situations, to speak frankly, are rather things for the stage than for the story, except very rarely, and of a very striking--which does not mean melodramatic--kind. And it is very important, off the stage, that they should be led up to, and acted in by, vigorously drawn and well filled in characters.

To do M. Ohnet justice, he has attempted to meet this requirement in one instance at least, the one instance by which the book has to stand or fall. Some of the minor personages (like Marechal in _Serge Panine_) are fair enough; and the little baroness who, arriving at a country-house in a whirl of travel and baggage, cries, "Ou est mon mari? Est-ce que j'ai _deja_ egare mon mari?" puts one, for the moment, in quite a good temper. The ironmaster's sister, too, is not a bad sort of girl. He himself is too much of the virtuous, loyal, amiable, but not weak man of the people; the marquis is rather null, and the duke, who jilts his cousin Claire de Beaulieu, gambles, marries a rich and detestable daughter of a chocolate-man, and finally fires through Claire's fingers, is very much, to use our old phrase, _a la douzaine_. But Claire might save the book, and probably does so for those who like it. To me she seems quite wrongly put together. The novel has been so very widely read, in the original and in translations, that it is perhaps unnecessary to waste space on a full analysis of its central scene--a thing not to be done very shortly. It may be sufficient to say that Claire, treacherously and spitefully informed, by her successful rival, of the fact that she has been jilted, and shortly afterwards confronted with the jilter himself, recovers, as it seems to her, to the company, and I suppose to the author, the whip-hand by summoning the ironmaster (who is hanging about "promiscuous," and is already known to be attached to her, though she has given him no direct encouragement) and bestowing her hand upon him, insisting, too, upon being married at once, before the other pair. The act is supposed to be that of an exceptionally calm, haughty, and aristocratic damsel: and the acceptance of it is made by a man certainly deep in love, but independent, sharp-sighted, and strong-willed. To be sure, he could not very well refuse; but this very fact should have weighed additionally, with a girl of Claire's supposed temperament, in deciding her not to make a special Leap Year for the occasion. To hand yourself over to Dick because Tom has declined to have anything to do with you is no doubt not a very unusual proceeding: but it is not usually done quite so much _coram populo_, or with such acknowledgment of its being done to spite Tom and Tom's preferred one.[545]

[Sidenote: _Le Docteur Rameau._]

Two more of "Les Batailles de la Vie" (as, for some not too obvious[546] reason, it pleased M. Ohnet to _super_-title his novels) may perhaps suffice to give a basis for a more general judgment of his position. _Le Docteur Rameau_ is, at least towards its close, one of the most ambitious, if not _the_ most ambitious of all its author's books. The hero is one of those atheistic and republican physicians who are apt rather to _embeter_ us by their frequency in French novels. He is thrown into the also familiar situation of ascertaining, after his wife's death, that she has been false, and that his daughter, of whom he is very fond, is probably or certainly not his own. At the end, however, things come right as usual. Rameau is converted from hating his daughter, which is well, and from being an atheist, which is better. But, unluckily, M. Ohnet devotes several pages, in his own peculiar style, to a rhetorical exhibition of the logic of these conclusions. It seems to come to this. There is no God and no soul, because freewill is sufficient to account for everything. But M. le Docteur Rameau has willed, in the free-willingest manner, to hate his daughter, and finds he cannot. Therefore there is a God and a soul. A most satisfactory conclusion, but a most singular major premiss. Why should there be no God and no soul because there is (if there is) freewill?[547] But all is well that ends well: and how can you end better than by being heard to ejaculate, "Mon Dieu!" (quite seriously and piously, and not in the ordinary trivial way) by a scientific friend, at the church of Sainte-Clotilde, during your daughter's wedding?

[Sidenote: _La Grande Marniere._]

_La Grande Marniere_ does not aspire to such heights, and is perhaps one of the best "machined" of M. Ohnet's books. The main plot is not very novel--his plots seldom are--and, in parts as well as plots, any one who cared for rag-picking and hole-picking might find a good deal of indebtedness. It is the old jealousy of a clever and unscrupulous self-made man towards an improvident _seigneur_ and his somewhat robustious son. The seigniorial improvidence, however, is not of the usual kind, for M. le Marquis de Clairefont wastes his substance, and gets into his enemy's debt and power, by costly experiments on agricultural and other machinery, partly due to the fact that he possesses on his estate a huge marl-pit and hill which want developing. There is the again usual cross-action of an at first hopeless affection on the part of the _roturier's_ son, Pascal Carvajan, a rising lawyer, for Antoinette de Clairefont. But M. Ohnet--still fertile in situations--adds a useful sort of conspiracy among Carvajan's tools of various stations against the house of Clairefont; a conspiracy which actually culminates in a murder-charge against Robert de Clairefont, the victim being the pretty daughter of a local poacher, one of the gang, with whom the Viscount has notoriously and indeed quite openly flirted. Now comes Pascal's opportunity: he defends Robert, and not merely obtains acquittal, but manages to discover that the crime was actually committed by the village idiot, who betrays himself by remorse and sleep-walking. There is a patient, jilted lover, M. de Croix-Mesnil (it may just be noted that since French novel-heroines were allowed any choice at all in marriage, they have developed a faculty of altering that choice which might be urged by praisers of times past against the enfranchisement); a comic aunt; and several other promoters of business. It is no wonder that, given a public for the kind of book, this

## particular example of it should have been popular. It had reached its

sixtieth edition before it had been published a twelvemonth.

[Sidenote: Reflections.]

Sixty editions of one book in one year; three hundred and sixty-seven of another in twenty; a hundred and forty-two of _Serge Panine_ in five; sixty-nine of _Le Docteur Rameau_ in certainly at the outside not more; these are facts which, whatever may be insinuated about the number of an "edition," cannot be simply put aside. Popularity, as the wiser critics have always maintained, is no test of excellence; but as they have also maintained when they were wise, it is a "fact in the case," and it will not do merely to sneer at it. I should say that the popularity of M. Ohnet, like other popularities in England as well as in France, is quite explicable. Novel-writing, once again, had become a business, and he set himself to carry that business out with a thorough comprehension of what was wanted. His books, it is to be observed, are generally quite modern, dealing either with his own day or a few years before it; and modernity has, for a long time, been almost a _sine qua non_ of what is to please the public. They are, it has been said, full of situations, and the situation is what pleases the public most in everything. They came just when the first popularity of Naturalism was exhausting itself,[548] and they are not grimy; but, on the other hand, they do not aim at an excessive propriety. Their characters are not of the best, or even of the second-best class, as so often defined, but they are sufficient to work out the situations without startling inadequacy. The public never really cares, though part of it is sometimes taught to pretend to care, for style, and the same may be said of the finer kind of description. The conversation is not brilliant, but, like the character, it serves its turn. I once knew an excellent gentleman, of old lineage and fair fortune, who used to say that for his part he could not tell mutton from venison or Marsala from Madeira, and he thanked God for it. The novel-reading public,--that at least which reads novels by the three hundred and fifty thousand,--is very much of the same taste, and I am sure I hope it is equally pious.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Edouard Rod.]

I have quite a lively remembrance of the advent of M. Edouard 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 grudge[549] 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.

[Sidenote: _La Vie Privee 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 Privee 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]

[Sidenote: _La Sacrifiee._]

If he has ever made his story hot enough to make this pale cast glow, it is in _La Sacrifiee_. 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 Sacrifiee." 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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _La-Haut._]

Nor can I think highly of _La-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 cure who knows something of chirurgy; and of the ruin of some greedy peasants who turn their chalet 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.

[Sidenote: _La Course a 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 a 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 a 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 Rene, or, in my case at least, produce boredom like most of the other "World-pain"-ers. The still more shadowy appearances of the heroine Cecile, 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]

[Sidenote: _Le Menage du Pasteur Naudie._]

To take one or two more of his books, _Le Menage du Pasteur Naudie_, though less poignant than _La Sacrifiee_ and with no approach to the extra-novelish merit of _La Course a 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. Naudie, 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.

[Sidenote: _Mademoiselle Annette._]

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _Scenes 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 a 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 _Scenes 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'Ideal de M. Gindre," with a doubtful marriage-close; a discovery of falseness ("Le Pardon"); "La Derniere 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 _pate 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.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Catulle Mendes.]

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 Mendes, sometime Gautier's son-in-law[556] 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 _Mephistophela_. But M. Mendes'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, Arene, and Mahalin; of Ernest d'Hervilly; of the prolific Hector Malot; of Oscar Metenier, and Octave Mirbeau, and Jules Valles 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'Irreparable_ 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 _Cesarine_; and to re-discover the countries and the manners depicted for us from _Aziyade_ to _Pecheur d'Islande_. But the _consigne_ elsewhere laid down and experienced forbids it, and I think that _consigne_ should not be "forced."

FOOTNOTES:

[519] It was in connection with this, at some time in the 'eighties, that I came across a curious survival of the old prejudice against novels--deserving perhaps, with better claim than as a mere personal anecdote, record in this history. One French publisher, who held himself above the "three-fifty," and produced dainty books of art and letters, once sent a pathetic remonstrance against his wares being reviewed "sometimes unkindly, _and always with the novels_."

[520] "Tigrane" is a nickname, early accounted for and perhaps suggesting its own explanation.

[521] At the extreme end there is an interesting reminder of that curious moment when it was thought on the cards that Pius IX. might accept an English asylum at Malta, and that, as a part-consequence, not of course Newman but Manning might be his successor. The probable results of this, to "those who knew" at the time, are still matter of interesting, if unpractical, speculation.

[522] He is playing whist comfortably with the cathedral keys in his pocket, and has nearly made a slam (Fr. _chelem_), while the pelting of the pitiless storm is on the dead bishop's bier and its faithful guardians.

[523] There is something Browningesque about it, a something by no means confined to the use of the history--actually referred to in the text, but likely to be anticipated long before by readers--of Popes Formosus and Stephen. That it did not satisfy Ultramontanes is not surprising; _v. inf._ on one of the smaller pieces in _Norine_.

[524] He had actually been intended for the Church.

[525] One thing, for the credit of the Gallican Church, we may trust that he did _not_ do. An Anglican prelate, like this his brother on a Confirmation tour, is alleged to have pointed to a decanter on his host's sideboard and said, "I hope, on my next visit, I shall not see _that_." I do not know what the rector answered: I do know what _I_ should have said, despite my reverence for the episcopate: "My Lord, you will not have the opportunity."

[526] _La Rue du Puits qui Parle_ and _Le Carmel de Vaugirard_.

[527] The _Societe des Secours Intellectuels_.

[528] See on Murger.

[529] Whenever she hears that any of her numerous lovers has fallen ill, she promptly "plants there" the man in possession, and tends and, as far as she can, supports the afflicted.

[530] _Vide_ the frontispiece of Settle's _Empress of Morocco_.

[531] It would be curmudgeonly to say, "evaded by shortness of space."

[532] They are, however, orthodox after a fashion; and I do not think that M. Fabre, in the books that I have read, ever introduces descendants of the Camisards, though dealing with their country.

[533] M. Fabre is so fond of these interrupted _recits_ that one is sometimes reminded of _Jacques le Fataliste_ and its landlady. But, to do him justice, he "does it more natural."

[534]

"Come to thy death, Victor _Galbraith_."--LONGFELLOW.

[535] See note above on M. Fabre's weakness for this style of narrative.

[536] The next to be mentioned runs him hard perhaps.

[537] Her girls are perhaps as good, but scarcely her men.

[538] This had _not_ been the case--to an extent which I am puzzled to account for--with those of M. Fabre.

[539] _Deformem vocant quidam_, as in other cases also: but that is because she has eyes and they have none.

[540] For instance, in Highbury or Cranford there might be scandal about a young bachelor's very late visits to a pretty widow. But the adult portion of the population, at any rate, would hardly lay booby-traps to trip him in a river on his return.

[541] An old schoolmaster, whom Raymonde has deeply offended by upsetting his just-gathered mushrooms at the beginning of the book, and who is warmly attached to Antoine, turns out to be the girl's legal father--her mother, a disagreeable, handsome person, having been run away twenty years earlier by another character who has passed hitherto as respectable husband and paterfamilias.

[542] Excepting some of the "Johnny Ludlow" stories, which were, I think, in their kind, better than anything M. Ohnet ever did to my knowledge--I may perhaps observe that the above notice was written, exactly as it stands, _before_ M. Ohnet's death, but under the impression that the death had occurred. When it did, there were things in the obituaries which made me raise my eyebrows. That he was a "belated Romantic" had certainly never occurred to me; but I have no quarrel with the description of him, in another place, as a practitioner of the _roman bourgeois_.

[543] _V. sup._ p. 277-280.

[544] The great scene in Mr. Disraeli's _Young Duke_, when that youthful nobleman loses, what is it? two hundred and seventeen thousand pounds, I think; the brief but poignant plucking of Mr. Dawkins; the occasion in _Sans Merci_ where the hero _will_ not lead trumps, and thereby, though not at once, seals his fate; and a quite nice game at Marmora in Mr. E. F. Benson's _The Babe, B.A._ emerge from many memories, reinforced by some of actual experience. Marmora _is_ a nice game: with penny stakes, and three players only, you may have five pounds in the pool before you know where you are. But I do not know anything more really exciting than a game at which you guess how many marbles the other fellow holds in his fist. The sequel, however, in which you have to ask for an advance of pocket-money to settle your "differences", is not so pleasant.

[545] Another scene, which brings on the _denouement_ and in which Claire is again supposed to have the _beau role_, does not please me much better. Thinking that her husband is flirting with the detested Duchess, she publicly orders her out of the house--a very natural, but a rather "fish-faggy" proceeding.

[546] It has been, and will be, pointed out that he was in all ways studious to run before the wind; and it was just at this time, if I remember rightly, that the catchword of "conflict" began to pester one in criticism. Perhaps this was the reason.

[547] The argument, or assumption rather, is all the odder because, on the one hand, orthodoxy holds Free-will (if it accepts that) as a Divine endowment of the Soul: and, on the other, serious Atheism is almost always Determinist. But the study of M. Ohnet was probably not much among the Sentences.

[548] The obituarist above mentioned, who thought M. Ohnet a belated Romantic, thought also that he was "struggling against the rising tide of Realism." I do not think you would ever have found him struggling against rising tides, and, as a matter of fact, the tide was already on the turn.

[549] Already mentioned in the case of M. Cherbuliez (_v. sup._ p. 447).

[550]

[Sidenote: Note on _La Seconde Vie de M. T._]

The second part is occupied with two different but connected subjects. Suzanne, the first wife, dies suddenly, and the two daughters, the elder, Annie, quite, and the second, Laurence, nearly grown up--return to the custody of their father, and therefore to the society at least of his second wife, Blanche, who, though of course feeling the awkwardness, welcomes them as well as she can. The situation, though much _more_ awkward, is something like that of Miss Yonge's _Young Stepmother_: but M. Rod makes it more tragic by Annie's death, partly in consequence of a love-marriage failing, through the lover's father's objection to the state of her family. The other subject is the gradual hankering of Michel after a return to political life, and his (consequentially inevitable) ratting from Right to Left. M. Rod brought into the matter direct reminiscences of the Parnell and Dilke cases, and possibly owed the conception of the whole book to them; but he has, as is sometimes his wont, rather "sicklied it over" with political and other discussion.

[551] A pleasant study, in poetic use of imagery and phrase, is the gradation from the bare and grand Lucretian simplicity of _silentia noctis_, through the "favour and prettiness" (slightly tautological though) of the Virgilian _tacitae per amica silentia lunae_, to the recovery and intensifying of magnificence in _dove il sol tace_. By the way, _silentia_ (for the singular undergoes Quintilian's apology for the Latin _-um_) is one of the few instances in which a Latin word beats the Greek. [Greek: sige] is really inferior.

[552] What annoys him most of all is that he should have an uncomfortable feeling about the woman "_comme_ si je l'avais _aimee_!" He had only, you see, done something else.

[553] They should not have done this, and I do not think they did; it was the couples that jostled them. And even this ought not to have happened. The fastest waltzing (I am speaking of the old _deux-temps_, which this must have been) conveyed an almost uncanny extra power of vision, and at the same time of avoidance, to the right persons. Indeed, the first three lines of this extract have been objected to as base and inconsistent. I think not; the common out of which you rise to the uncommon is worth indication.

[554] It may be added that the contrast of an earlier mazurka--in the slowness of which the pair had time to look at each other, feel each other, and otherwise remain in Paradise, but outside of the double Nirvana--is highly creditable. But I hope they _waltzed_ to the mazurka. It is rather annoying to other people who are doing the orthodox step; but it is the perfection of the slow movement, which affords, as above, opportunities that do not exist in the faster and more delirious gyration.

[555] This (which may be called M. Rod's novel-headquarters) occurs also not merely in _L'Eau Courante_ but in _Les Roches Blanches_, a book which opens very well in a Mrs. Gaskell or Mrs. Oliphant vein, with the introduction of a new pastor, but ends much less satisfactorily, with a guiltless but not at all convincing love-affair between this pastor and the wife of his chief parishioner.

[556] His wife for a time, Madame Judith Gautier, who died very recently, wrote in a fashion not unworthy of her blood both in verse and prose (part of her production being translations from Chinese), and was the only lady-member of the quaint _Contre_-academie formed by E. de Goncourt.

[557] And this shame becomes more acute when I think of one or two individual books, such especially as M. Henry Cochin's _Manuscrit de Monsieur C. A. L. Larsonnier_--a most pathetic and delightful story of a mental malady which makes time and memory seem to go backward though the victim can force himself to continue his ordinary duties, and record his sufferings.

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 position[559] 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 Miserables_ 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 _Lelia_ 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. Andre 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 Clemenceau_. Take Flaubert's _Madame Bovary_ and _L'Education Sentimentale_, in comparison with which _Salammbo_ 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 change[562]--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 debut was made just after it) may be said to have democratised the novel to nearly[565] 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 Stael 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 Heloise_: while _Rene_ 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 Stael 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 Stael 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 _Telemaque_ and upon that of _Belisaire_. And even putting this aside, the whole body of Chateaubriand's work, as well as not a little in Madame de Stael'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, Merimee, 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, "Eloa," "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 Crebillon, 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