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

53

Frédérique, Madame Dauberny (who has, without legal sanction, relieved herself of a loathsome creature whom she has married, and lives a free though not at all immoral life), was not very easy to do, and is very well done.

54

This, which is short and thoroughly lively, is, I imagine, the latest of Paul's good books. It is indeed so late that instead of the jupons, striped and black and white, of which Georgette has made irreproachable but profitable use, she appears at the denouement in a crinoline!

55

The most interesting thing in it is a longish account by Jacques of his association with a travelling quack and fortune-teller, which at once reminds one of Japhet in Search of a Father. The resemblances and the differences are almost equally characteristic.

56

Of course I am not comparing him with Paul on any other point.

57

Except in regard to the historical and other matters noticed above, hardly at all.

58

For a picture of an actual grisette, drawn by perhaps the greatest master of artistic realism (adjective and substantive so seldom found in company!) who ever lived, see that Britannia article of Thackeray's before referred to – an article, for a long time, unreprinted, and therefore, till a comparatively short time ago, practically unknown. This and its companion articles from the Britannia and the Corsair, all of 1840-41, but summarising ten or twelve years' knowledge of Paris, form, with the same author's Paris Sketch Book (but as representing a more mature state of his genius), the best commentary on Paul de Kock. They may be found together in the third volume of the Oxford Thackeray edited by the present writer.

59

Unless they start from the position that an English writer on the French novel is bound to follow – or at least to pay express attention to – French criticism of it. This position I respectfully but unalterably decline to accept. A critical tub that has no bottom of its own is the very worst Danaid's vessel in all the household gear of literature.

60

The scene and society are German, but the author knows the name to have been originally English.

61

Such, perhaps, as Gibbon himself may have used while he "sighed as a lover" and before he "obeyed as a son." It should perhaps be said that Mme. de Montolieu produced many other books, mostly translations – among the latter a French version of The Swiss Family Robinson.

62

In dealing with "Sensibility" earlier, it was pointed out how extensively things were dealt with by letter. In such cases as these the fashion came in rather usefully.

63

The treatment of the authors here mentioned, infra, will, I hope, show that the introduction of their names is not merely "promiscuous."

64

I am quite prepared to be told that this was somebody else or nobody at all. "Moi, je dis Madame de Genlis."

65

P. 436.

66

The kind endeavours of the Librarian of the London Library to obtain some in Paris itself were fruitless, but the old saying about neglecting things at your own door came true. My friend Mr. Kipling urged me to try Mr. George Gregory of Bath, and Mr. Gregory procured me almost all the books I am noticing in this division.

67

The British Museum (see Preface) being inaccessible to me.

68

Readers will doubtless remember that the too wild career of this kind of vehicle, charioteered by wicked aristocrats, has been among the thousand-and-three causes assigned for the French Revolution.

69

Of course the author of the glossaries himself was, by actual surname, Dufresne, Ducange being a seignory.

70

It should be observed that a very large number of these minor novels, besides those specially mentioned as having undergone the process, from Ducray's downwards, were melodramatised.

71

That is to say, in the text: the second title of the whole book, "ou Les Enfants de Maître Jacques," does in some sort give a warning, though it is with Maître Jacques rather than with his children that the fresh start is made.

72

He has, though unknown and supposed to be an intruder, carried her off from an English adorer – a sort of Lovelace-Byron, whose name is Lord Gousberycharipay (an advance on Paul de Kock and even Parny in the nomenclature of the English peerage), and who inserts h's before French words!

73

If novels do not exaggerate the unpopularity of these persons (strictly the lay members of the S.J., but often used for the whole body of religious orders and their lay partisans), the success of "July" needs little further explanation.

74

That is to say, not a bogey, but a buggy.

75

Here is another instance. Ludovica's father and a bad Russo-Prussian colonel have to be finished off at Waterloo. One might suppose that Waterloo itself would suffice. But no: they must engage in single combat, and even then not kill each other, the Russian's head being carried off by some kind of a cannon-ball and the Frenchman's breast pierced by half a dozen Prussian lances. This is really "good measure."

76

Ousting others which deserved the place better? It may be so, but one may perhaps "find the whole" without particularising everything. Of short books especially, from Fiévée's Dot de Suzette (1798), which charmed society in its day, to Eugénie Foa's Petit Robinson de Paris (1840), which amused me when I was about ten years old, there were no end if one talked.

77

V. inf. on M. Ohnet's books.

78

Many people have probably noticed the frequency of this name – not a very pretty one in itself, and with no particular historical or other attraction – in France and French of the earlier nineteenth century. It was certainly due to Le Solitaire.

79

If any proper moral reader is disturbed at this conjunction of amante and mère, he will be glad to know that M. d'Arlincourt elsewhere regularises the situation and calls Night "l'épouse d'Érèbe."

80

In the Radcliffian-literary not the Robespierrean-political sense. For the Wertherism, v. sup. on Chateaubriand, p. 24 note.

81

He was four years older than Nodier, but did not begin to write fiction nearly so early. The Phantasiestücke are of 1814, while Nodier had been writing stories, under German influence, as early as 1803. It is, however, also fair to say that all those now to be noticed are later than 1814, and even than Hoffmann's later collections, the Elixiere des Teufels and Nachtstücke.

82

The prudent as well as judicious poet who wrote these lines provided a variant to suit those who, basing their position on "Ramillies cock," maintain that it was a hat, not a wig, that was named after Villeroy's defeat. For "grave – big" read "where Gallic hopes fell flat," and for "wig" "hat" simpliciter, and the thing is done. But Thackeray has "Ramillies wig" and Scott implies it.

83

Nodier, who had been in Scotland and, as has been said, was a philologist of the better class, is scrupulously exact in spelling proper names as a rule. Perhaps Loch Fyne is not exactly "Le Lac Beau" (I have not the Gaelic). But from Pentland to Solway (literally) he makes no blunder, and he actually knows all about "Argyle's Bowling Green."

84

If phonetics had never done anything worse than this they would not be as loathsome to literature as they sometimes are.

85

On the other hand, compared with its slightly elder contemporary, Le Solitaire (v. sup.), it is a masterpiece.

86

Two little passages towards the end are very precious. A certain bridegroom (I abridge a little) is "perfectly healthy, perfectly self-possessed, a great talker, a successful man of business, with some knowledge of physics, chemistry, jurisprudence, politics, statistics, and phrenology; enjoying all the requirements of a deputy; and for the rest, a liberal, an anti-romantic, a philanthropist, a very good fellow – and absolutely intolerable." This person later changes the humble home of tragedy into a "school of mutual instruction, where the children learn to hate and envy each other and to read and write, which was all they needed to become detestable creatures." These words "please the soul well."

87

The description is worth comparing with that of Gautier's Château de la Misère– the difference between all but complete ruin and mere, though extreme, disrepair being admirably, and by the later master in all probability designedly, worked out.

88

Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.

89

Note, too, a hint at a never filled in romance of the captain's own.

90

I must ask for special emphasis on "beauty." Nothing can be finer or fitter than the style of Steenie's ghostly experiences. And the famous Claverhouse passage is beautiful.

91

As Rossetti saw it in "Sibylla Palmifera":

"Under the arch of Life, where Love and Death, Terror and Mystery guard her shrine, I saw Beauty enthroned."

92

Perhaps there are few writers mentioned in this book to whose lovers exactly the same kind of apology is desirable as it is in the case of Nodier. "Where," I hear reproaching voices crying, "is Jean Sbogar? Where is Laure Ruthwen ou les Vampires in novel-plural or Le Vampire in melodrama-singular? Where are a score or a hundred other books, pieces, pages, paragraphs, passages from five to fifty words long?" They are not here, and I could not find room for them here. "But you found more room for Paul de Kock?" Yes: and I have tried to show why.

93

Mr. Swinburne's magnificent pæans are "vatical" certainly, but scarcely critical, save now and then. Mr. Stevenson wrote on the Romances, but not on "the whole."

94

See note in Vol. I. p. 472 of this History, and in the present volume, sup. p. 40.

95

These crazes were not in origin, though they probably were in influence, political: Hugo held more than one of them while he was still a Royalist.

96

She is of course not really Spanish or a gipsy, but is presented as such at first.

97

Stated in the Preface to Cromwell, the critical division of his fourfold attack on neo-Classicism, as Les Orientales were the poetical, Hernani was the dramatic, and Notre-Dame itself the prose-narrative.

98

It is scarcely excessive to say that this mixture of wilful temper and unbridled theorising was the Saturnian influence, or the "infortune of Mart," in Hugo's horoscope throughout.

99

Unless anybody chooses to say that the gallows and the guillotine are Hugo's monsters here.

100

The failure of the riskiest and most important scene of the whole (where her surrender of herself to Phœbus is counteracted by Frollo's stabbing the soldier, the act itself leading to Esmeralda's incarceration) is glaring.

101

Le Beau Pécopin in his Rhine-book is, of course, fairly substantial in one sense, but it is only an episode or inset-tale in something else, which is neither novel or romance.

102

It must be four or five times the length of Scott's average, more than twice that of the longest books with which Dickens and Thackeray used to occupy nearly two years in monthly instalments, and very nearly, if not quite, that of Dumas' longest and most "spun-out" achievements in Monte Cristo, the Vicomte de Bragelonne and La Comtesse de Charny.

103

I am not forgetting or contradicting what was said above (page 26) of René. But René does very little except when he kills the she-beavers; Marius is always doing something, and doing it offensively.

104

The "Je ne sais pas lire" argument has more than once suggested to me a certain historical comparison. There have probably never been in all history two more abominable scoundrels for cold-blooded cruelty, the worst of all vices, than Eccelino da Romano and the late Mr. Broadhead, patron saint and great exemplar of Trade-Unionism. Broadhead could certainly read. Could Ezzelin? I do not know. But if he could not, the Hugonic belief in the efficacy of reading is not strongly supported. If he could, it is definitely damaged.

105

Vide what is said below on Quatre-Vingt-Treize.

106

After the lapse of more than half a century some readers may have forgotten, and more may never have heard, the anecdote connected with this. It was rashly and somewhat foolishly pointed out to the poet-romancer himself that the air of "Bonny Dundee" was the very reverse of melancholy, and that he must have mistaken the name. His reply was the most categoric declaration possible of his general attitude, in such cases, "Et moi, je l'appelle 'Bonny Dundee.'" Victor locutus est: causa finita est (he liked tags of not recondite Latin himself). And the leading case governs those of the bug-pipe and the (later) wapentake and justicier-quorum, and all the other wondrous things of which but a few can be mentioned here.

107

I do not know whether any one has ever attempted to estimate his actual debt to Scott. There are better classics of inquiry, but in the class many worse subjects.

108

In the opening scene she is something worse. If her writing "Gilliatt" in the snow had been a sort of rustic challenge of the "malo me petit, et fugit ad salices" kind, there might have been something (not much) to say for her. But she did not know Gilliatt; she did not want to know him; and the proceeding was either mere silly childishness, or else one of those pieces of bad taste of which her great creator was unluckily by no means incapable.

109

I use this adjective in no contumelious sense, and certainly not because I have lived in Guernsey and only visited Jersey. To the impartial denizen of either, the rivalry of the two is as amusing as is that of Edinburgh and Glasgow, of Liverpool and Manchester, or of Bradford and Leeds. But, at any rate at the time of which I am speaking, Jersey was much more haunted by outsiders (in several senses of that word) than Guernsey. Residents – whether for the purposes unblushingly avowed by that sometime favourite of the stage, Mr. Eccles, or for the reasons less horrifying to the United Kingdom Alliance – found themselves more at home in "Caesarea" than in "Sarnia," and the "five-pounder," as the summer tripper was despiteously called by natives, liked to go as far as he could for his money, and found St. Helier's "livelier" than St. Peter Port.

110

Really good wines were proportionally cheap; but the little isle was not quite so good at beer, except some remarkable old ale, which one small brewery had ventured on, and which my friends of the 22nd Regiment discovered and (very wisely) drank up. – It may surprise honest fanatics and annoy others to hear that, despite the cheapness and abundance of their bugbear, there was no serious crime of any kind in Guernsey during the six years I knew it, and no disorder worth speaking of, even among sailors and newly arrived troops.

111

The shape of the island; the position of its only "residential" town of any size in the middle of one of the coasts, so that the roads spread fan-wise from it; the absence of any large flat space except in the northern parish of "The Vale"; the geological formation which tends, as in Devonshire, to sink the roads into deep and sometimes "water" lanes; lastly, perhaps, the extreme subdivision of property, which multiplies the ways of communication – these things contribute to this "pedestrian-paradise" character. There are many places where, with plenty of good walking "objectives," you can get to none of them without a disgusting repetition of the same initial grind. In Guernsey, except as regards the sea, which never wearies, there is no such even partial monotony.

112

It is well known that even among great writers this habit of duplication is often, though very far from always, present. Hugo is specially liable to it. The oddest example I remember is that the approach to the Dutch ship at the end of L'Homme Qui Rit reproduces on the Thames almost exactly the details of the iron gate of the sewers on the Seine, where Thénardier treacherously exposes Valjean to the clutches of Javert, in Les Misérables, though of course the use made of it is quite different.

113

It must be remembered that this also belongs to the Channel Islands division: and the Angel of the Sea has still some part in it.

114

Those of Ivanhoe and Kenilworth have enraged pedants and amused the elect for a century. But I do not remember much notice being taken of that jump of half a millennium and one year more in The Talisman, where Count Henry of Champagne "smiles like a sparkling goblet of his own wine." This was in 1192, while the ever-blessed Dom Pérignon did not make champagne "sparkle" till 1693. Idolatry may suggest that "sparkling" is a perpetual epithet of wine; but I fear this will not do.

115

Substitué means "entailed" in technical French. But I know no instance of this kind of "contingent remainder" in England.

116

A compound (as Victor himself might suggest) of "Hardyknut" and "Sine qua non"? Or "Hardbake"?

117

He has been found out through the agency of one "Barkilphedro" (Barkis-Phaedrus?), an Irishman of familiar sept, who is "Decanter of the Bottles of the Sea," and who finds, in one of his trovers, a derelict gourd of confession thrown overboard by the Comprachicos when wrecked (in another half-volume earlier) all over the Channel from Portland to Alderney.

118

Perhaps there is no more conspicuous instance of irritating futility in this way than the famous αναγκη and αναγνεια of Notre-Dame. Of course anybody who knows no Greek can see that the first four letters of the two words are the same. But anybody who knows some Greek knows that the similarity is purely literal, such as exists between "Chateaubriand" and "Chat Botté" and that the αν has a different origin in the two cases. Moreover, αναγνεια, "uncleanness," is about the last word one would choose to express the liaison of thought – "The dread constraint of physical passion" or "Lust is Fate" – which Hugo wishes to indicate. It is a mere jingle, suggestive of a schoolboy turning over the dictionary.

119

That the only person at all likely to be "name-father" of this name was not born till a considerable time after his name-child's death would perhaps be worth remarking in another writer. In Hugo it hardly counts.

120

Let me do even them one justice in this connection. They did not suppose that the only way to make people get up earlier was to make these people's clocks and watches tell lies.

121

There is a smaller point which might be taken up. Undoubtedly there were many double traitors on both sides in the other Great War. But, like all their kind, they had a knack for being found out. Dumas would, I think, have given us something satisfactory as to the "aristocrat" at Jersey who betrayed the Claymore to the Revolutionary authorities.

122

It is impossible, with him, not to think of Baudelaire's great line in L'Albatros (which some may have read even before Les Travailleurs) —

"Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher,"

though the sense is not absolutely coextensive.

123

If I have spoken above "so that the Congregation be thereby offended," let me point out that there is no other way of dealing with the subject critically, except perhaps by leaving a page blank save for such words, in the middle of it, as "Victor Hugo is Victor Hugo; and he is for each reader to take or to leave." He would, I think, have rather liked this; I should not, as a person, dislike it; but I fear it might not suit with my duty as a critic and a historian.

124

Of course there are exceptions, Le Rouge et le Noir and La Peau de Chagrin being perhaps the chief among long novels; while some of Balzac's short stories possess the quality in almost the highest degree.

125

He tried several pseudonyms, but settled on this. Unfortunately, he sometimes (not always) made it "De Stendhal," without anything before the "De," and more unfortunately still, in the days of his Napoleonic employment he, if he had not called himself, had allowed himself to be called "M. de Beyle" – an assumption which though dropped, was not forgotten in the days of his later anti-aristocratism.

126

Beyle himself recognized the necessity of the reader's collaboration.

127

This does not apply to poets as much as to prose writers: a fact for which reasons could perhaps be given. And it certainly does not apply to Balzac.

128

He was now forty-four, and had published not a few volumes, mostly small, of other kinds – travel description (which he did uncommonly well), and miscellaneous writing, and criticism, including the famous Racine et Shakespeare, an avant-coureur of Romanticism which contained, besides matter on its title-subjects, some sound estimate of Scott as a writer and some very unsound abuse about him as a man. This last drew from Byron, who had met Beyle earlier at Milan, a letter of expostulation and vindication which did that noble poet infinite credit, but of which Beyle, by no means to his credit, took notice. He was only too like Hazlitt in more ways than one: though few books with practically the same title can be more different than De l'Amour and Liber Amoris.

129

As for instance, those from Dekker and Massiger; Camoens and Ercilla are allowed their native tongues "neat."

130

The actual "Chartreuse" of Parma only makes its appearance on the very last page of the book, when the hero, resigning his arch bishopric, retires to it.

131

He is the younger son of a rich and noble family, but his father disowns and his older brother denounces him quite early. It is characteristic of Beyle that we hear very little of the father and are practically never even introduced to the brother.

132

These four words somehow make me think of Samuel Newcome's comment on the unfortunate dinner where "Farintosh" did not appear: "Scarcely anything was drank."

133

See note above.

134

Both would have declined to meddle with her, I think, but for different reasons.

135

Beyle, who had himself no good looks, is particularly lavish of them to his heroes.

136

Perhaps one of the rare biographical details which, as has been explained, may "force the consigne" here, is that Beyle in his youth, and almost up to middle age, was acquainted with an old lady who had the very unenviable reputation of having actually "sat for" Madame de Merteuil.