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

CHAPTER IX

THE FRENCH NOVEL IN 1850

The peculiarity of the moment.

It was not found necessary, in the last volume, to suspend the current of narrative or survey for the purpose of drawing interim conclusions in special "Interchapters."328 But the subjects of this present are so much more bulky and varied, in proportion to the space available and the time considered; while the fortunes of the novel itself altered so prodigiously during that time, that something of the kind seemed to be desirable, if not absolutely necessary. Moreover, the actual centre of the century in France, or rather what may be called its precinct, the political interregnum of 1848-1852, is more than a mere political and chronological date. To take it as an absolute apex or culmination would be absurd; and even to take it as a definite turning-point might be excessive. Not a few of the greatest novelists then living and working – Hugo, whose most popular and bulkiest work in novel was yet to come; George Sand, Mérimée, Gautier – were still to write for the best part of a quarter of a century, if not more; and the most definite fresh start of the second period, the rise of Naturalism, was not to take place till a little later. But already Chateaubriand, Beyle, Charles de Bernard, and, above all, Balzac, were dead or soon to die: and it cannot be said that any of the survivors developed new characters of work, for even Hugo's was (v. sup.) only the earlier "writ large" and modernised in non-essentials. On the other hand, it was only after this time that Dumas fils, the earliest of what may be called the new school, produced his most remarkable work.

But the justification of such an "Interchapter" as this practically is depends, not on what is to come after, but on what has come before; and in this respect we shall find little difficulty in vindicating the position and arrangement assigned to the remarks which are to follow, though some of these may look forward as well as backward.329

A political nadir.

I should imagine that few Frenchmen – despite the almost infinite and sometimes very startling variety of selection which the laudator temporis acti exhibits – look back upon the reign of Louis Philippe as a golden age in any respect but one. Regarding it from the point of view of general politics, the ridiculous change330 from "King of France" to "King of the French" stamped it at once, finally and hopelessly, as the worst kind of compromise – as a sort of spiritual imitation of the methods of the Triumvirate, where everybody gives up, not exactly his father or his uncle or his brother, but his dearest and most respectable convictions, together with the historical, logical, and sentimental supports of them. The king himself – though certainly no fool, and though hardly to be called an unmitigated knave – was one of those unfortunate persons whose merits do not in the least interest and whose defects do very strongly disgust. Domestically, the reign was a reign, in the other sense, of silly minor revolutions, which, till the end, came to nothing, and then came to something only less absurd than the Russian revolution of the other day, though fortunately less disastrous;331 of bureaucracy of the corrupt and shabby character which seemed to cling to the whole régime; and of remarkable vying between two distinguished men of letters, Guizot and Thiers, as to which should do most to confirm the saying of the wicked that men of letters had much better have nothing to do with politics.332 Abroad (with the exception of the acquisition of Algeria, which had begun earlier, and which conferred no great honour, though some profit, and a little snatching up of a few loose trifles such as the Society Islands, which we had, according to our custom, carelessly or benevolently left to gleaners), French arms, despite a great deal of brag and swagger, obtained little glory, while French diplomacy let itself wallow in one of the foulest sloughs in history, the matter of the Spanish marriages.

And almost a literary zenith.

But this unsatisfactory state of things was made up – and more than made up – for posterity if not for contemporaries – by the extraordinary development of literature and the arts – especially literature and most especially of all the belles-lettres. If (which would be rather impossible) one were to evaluate the relative excellence of poetry and of prose fiction in the time itself, a great deal could be said on both sides. But if one took the larger historic view, it would certainly have to be admitted that, while the excellence of French poetry was a magnificent Renaissance after a long period of something like sterility, the excellence of the novel was something more – an achievement of things never yet achieved; an acquisition and settlement of territory which had never previously been even explored.

I venture to hope that no great injustice has been done to the previous accomplishments of France in this department as they were surveyed in the last volume. She had been, if not the inventress of Romance, the αιδοη ταμιη – the revered distributress – of it to all nations; she had made the short story her own to such an extent that, in almost all its forms, she had reached and kept mastery of it; and in various isolated instances she had done very important, if not now universally acceptable, work in the practice of the "Heroic." With Rabelais, Lesage, almost Marivaux, certainly, in his one diploma-piece, Prévost, she had contributed persons and things of more or less consummateness to the novel-staff and the novel treasury. But she had never quite reached, as England for two full generations had reached before 1800, the consummate expression of the —pure novel – the story which, not neglecting incident, but as a rule confining itself to the incidents of ordinary life; advancing character to a position at least equal with plot; presenting the manners of its own day, but charging them with essence of humanity in all days; re-creates, for the delectation of readers, a new world of probable, indeed of actual, life through the medium of literature. And she had rarely – except in the fairy-tale and a very few masterpieces like Manon Lescaut again and La Nouvelle Héloïse333– achieved what may be called the Romantic or passionate novel; while, except in such very imperfect admixtures of the historic element as La Princesse de Clèves, she had never attempted, and even in these had never attained, the historical novel proper.

Now, in 1850, she had done all this, and more.

The performance of the time in novel.

As has been seen, the doing was, if not solely effected between 1830 and 1848, mainly and almost wholly carried out in the second quarter of the century. In the first, only three persons possessing anything like genius – Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël, and Chateaubriand – had busied themselves with the novel, and they were all strongly charged with eighteenth-century spirit. Indeed, Constant, as we saw in the last volume, though he left pattern and stimulus for the nineteenth and the future generally, really represented the last dying words of that "Sensibility" school which was essentially of the past, though it was undoubtedly necessary to the future. Likewise in Madame de Staël, and still more in Chateaubriand, there was model, stimulus, germ. But they also were, on the whole, of the eve rather than of the morrow. I have indeed sometimes wondered what would have happened if Chateaubriand had gone on writing novels, and had devoted to fiction the talent which he wasted on the mesquin334 politics of the France of his later days and on the interesting but restricted and egotistic Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe. It is no doubt true that, though old men have often written great poetry and excellent serious prose, nobody, so far as I remember, has written a great novel after seventy. For Quatre-Vingt-Treize, if it be great, is a romance rather than a novel, and a romance which had much better have been poetry. But this is an excursion into the Forbidden Country of the Might-Have-Been. We are concerned with what was.

The accomplishment of these twenty or five-and-twenty years is so extraordinary – when bulk, variety, novelty, and greatness of achievement are considered together – that there is hardly anything like it elsewhere. The single work of Balzac would mark and make an epoch; and this is wholly the property of the period. And though there is still, and is likely always to be, controversy as to whether the Balzacian men and women are exactly men and women of this world, there can, as may have been shown, be no rational denial of the fact that they represent a world – not of pure romance, not of fairy-tale, not of convention or fashion or coterie, but a world human and synthetically possible in its kind.

The personnel.

But while the possession of Balzac alone would have sufficed, by itself, to give the time front rank among the periods of the novel, it is not in the least extravagant to add that if Balzac had been blotted out of its record it could still prove title-deeds enough, and more than enough, to such a place. Fault has here been found – perhaps not a few readers may think to an excessive, certainly to a considerable extent – with the novel-work of Hugo and with that of George Sand. But the fault-finder has not dreamed of denying that, as literature in novel-form, Les Misérables and L'Homme Qui Rit and Quatre-Vingt-Treize are great, and that Les Travailleurs de la Mer is of the greatest.335 And on the other hand, while strong exceptions have been taken from several sides to the work of George Sand, the fact remains – and no attempt has been made to obscure or to shake it – that George Sand gave novel delectation, in no vulgar fashion, and to no small extent in the form of the pure novel itself, probably to as large a number of readers as any novelist except Scott and Dumas; and perhaps Dickens, has ever given. Of the miraculous production of Dumas himself almost enough should have been said before, though a little more may come after; and whatever controversy there may be about its purely literary value, there can – with reasonable people who are prepared to give and take – be little anxiety to deny that each of these three, like Balzac, might have taken the burden of the period on his or her own shoulders, while as a matter of fact they have but to take each a corner. Nor, even when thus divided, is the burden left wholly to them. The utmost perfection, at least in the short story, is reached by Mérimée and Gautier, little less than such perfection by others. For suggestions of new kinds and new treatments, if for no single performance, few periods, if any, have a superior to Beyle.

But, once more, just as the time need not rely on any single champion of its greatest to maintain its position, so, if all the greater names just mentioned were struck out, it would still be able to "make good" by dint of the number, the talent, the variety, the novelty of its second- and third-rate representatives. Even those who may think that I have taken Paul de Kock too seriously cannot deny – for it is a simple fact – the vigorous impulse that he gave to the popularity of the novel as a form of the printed book, if not of literature; while I can hardly imagine any one who takes the trouble to examine this fact refusing to admit that it is largely due to an advance in reality of a kind – though they may think this kind itself but a shady and sordid one. On the other hand, I think less of Eugène Sue than at one time "men of good" used to think; but I, in my turn, should not dream of denying his popularity, or the advance which he too effected in procuring for the novel its share, and a vast share, in the attention of the general reader. Jules Sandeau and Charles de Bernard, Soulié and Féval and Achard, and not a few others mentioned or not mentioned in the text, come up to support their priors, while, as I have endeavoured to point out, two others still, Charles Nodier and Gérard de Nerval, though it may seem absurd to claim primacy for them, contribute that idiosyncrasy without which, whether it be sufficient to establish primacy or not, nothing can ever claim to possess that quality.

The kinds – the historical novel.

But while it is not necessary to repeat the favourable estimates already given of individuals, it is almost superfluous to rest the claims of the period to importance in novel history upon them. Elsewhere336 I have laid some emphatic and reiterated stress on the mischief which has sometimes arisen from too exclusive critical attention to "kinds," classes, and the like in literature – to the oblivion or obscuring of individual men and works of letters. But as there has been, and I hope will be, no ignoring of individuals here, and as this whole book endeavours to be a history of a kind, remarks on subdivisions of that kind as such can hardly be regarded as inopportune or inconsistent.

Appearance of new classes – the historical.

Now it is impossible that anybody who is at all inclined or accustomed to think about the characteristics of the pleasure he receives from literature, should not have noticed in this period the fact – beside and outside of the other fact of a provision of delectable novelists – of a great splitting up and (as scientific slang would put it) fissiparous generation of the the classes of novel. It is, indeed, open to the advocates or generic or specific criticism – though I think they cannot possibly maintain their position as to poetry – to urge that a great deal of harm was done to the novel, or at least that its development was unnecessarily retarded, by the absence of this division earlier. And in particular they might lay stress on the fortunes and misfortunes of the historical element. That element had at least helped to start – and had largely provided the material of – the earlier verse-romances and stories generally; but the entire absence of criticism at the time had merged it, almost or altogether, in mere fiction. It had played, as we saw, a great part in the novels of the seventeenth century; but it had for the most part merely "got in the way" of its companion ingredients and in its own. I have admitted that there are diversities of opinion as to its value in the Astrée; but I hold strongly to my own that it would be much better away there. I can hardly think that any one, uninfluenced by the sillier, not the nobler, estimate of the classics, can think that the "heroic" novels gain anything, though they may possibly not lose very much, by the presence in them of Cyrus and Clélia, Arminius and Candace, Roxana and Scipio. But perhaps the most fruitful example for consideration is La Princesse de Clèves. Here, small as is the total space, there is a great deal of history and a crowd, if for the most part mute, of historical persons. But not one of these has the very slightest importance in the story; and the Prince and the Princess and the Duke – we may add the Vidame – who are the only figures that have importance, might be the Prince and Princess of Kennaquhair, the Duke of Chose, and the Vidame of Gonesse, in any time or no time since the creation of the world, while retaining their fullest power of situation and appeal.

But this side of the matter is of far less consequence than another. This historical element of the historia mixta337 was not merely rather a nuisance and quite a superfluity as regarded the whole of the stories in which it appeared; but its presence there and the tricks that had to be played with it prevented the development of the historical novel proper – that, as it has been ticketed, "bodiless childful of life," which waited two thousand years in the ante-natal gloom before it could get itself born. Here, indeed, one may claim – and I suppose no sensible Frenchmen would for a moment hesitate to admit it – that even more than in the case of Richardson's influence nearly a century earlier, help came to their Troy from a Greek city. To France as to England, and to all the world, Scott unlocked the hoard of this delightful variety of fictitious literature, though it was not quite at once that she took advantage of the treasury.

But when she did, the way in which she turned over the borrowed capital was certainly amazing, and for a long time she quite distanced the followers of Scott himself in England. James, Ainsworth, and even Bulwer cannot possibly challenge comparison with the author of Notre Dame de Paris as writers, or with Dumas as story-tellers; and it was not till the second half of the century was well advanced, and when Dumas' own best days were very nearly over, that England, with Thackeray's Esmond and Kingsley's Westward Ho! and Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, re-formed the kind afresh into something which France has never yet been able to rival.

In order, however, to obviate any possible charge of insular unfairness, it may be well to note that Chateaubriand, though he had never reached (or in all probability attempted to reach) anything of the true Scott kind, had made a great advance in something the same direction, and had indeed to some extent sketched a different variety of historical novel from Scott's own; while, before Scott's death, Victor Hugo imbued the Scott romance itself with intenser doses of passion, of the subsidiary interests of art, etc., and of what may be in a way called "theory," than Scott had cared for. In fact, the Hugonic romance is a sort of blending of Scott and Byron, with a good deal of the author's country, and still more of himself, added. The connection again between Scott and Dumas is simpler and less blended with other influences; the chief differences should have been already pointed out. But the important thing to notice is that, with a few actual gaps, and several patches which have been more fully worked over and occupied than others, practically the whole of French history from the fourteenth century to, and including, the Revolution was "novelised" by the wand of this second magician.338

That the danger of the historical variety was entirely avoided by these its French practitioners cannot indeed be said. Even Scott had not wholly got the better of it in his less perfect pieces, such, for instance, as those already glanced-at parts of The Monastery, where historical récit now and then supplies the place of vigorous novel-action and talk. Dumas' co-operative habits (which are as little to be denied as they are to be exaggerated) lent themselves to it much more freely. But, notwithstanding this, the total accession of pleasure to the novel-reader was immense, and the further possibility of such accession practically unlimited. And accordingly the kind, though sometimes belittled by foolish criticism, and sometimes going out of favour by the vicissitudes of mere fashion, has constantly renewed itself, and is likely to do so. Its special advantages and its special warnings are of some interest to discuss briefly. Among the first may be ranked something which the foolish belittlers above mentioned entirely fail to appreciate, and indeed positively dislike. The danger of the novel of ordinary and contemporary life (which accompanied this and which is to be considered shortly as such) is that there may be so much mere ordinariness and contemporariness that the result may be distasteful, if not sickening, to future ages. This has (to take one example out of many) happened with the novels of so clever a person as Theodore Hook in England, even with comparatively elect judges; with the vulgar it is said to have happened even with such consummate things as those of Miss Austen. With a large number of another sort of vulgar it is said to happen with "Victorian" novels generally, while even the elect sometimes find it difficult to prevent its happening with Edwardian and Fifth Georgian. Now the historical novelist has before him the entire range of the most interesting fashions, manners, incidents, characters, literary styles of recorded time. He has but to select from this inexhaustible store of general material, and to charge it with sufficient power of humanity of all time, and the thing is done.339 Under no circumstances can the best historical novels ever lose their attraction with the best readers; and as for the others in each kind, who cares what happens to them?

There are, moreover, some interesting general rules about the historical novel which are well worth a moment's notice, even if this partake to some extent of the nature of repetition. The chief of them, which at least ought to be well known, is that it is never safe to make a prominent historical character, and seldom safe to make a prominent historical event, the central subject of your story. The reason is of course obvious. The generally known facts cramp and hamper the writer; he is constantly knocking against them, and finding them in the way of the natural development of his tale. No doubt there is, and has been, a good deal of otiose and even rather silly criticism of details in historical novels which do not satisfy the strict historian. The fuss which some people used to make about Scott's anachronisms in Ivanhoe and Kenilworth; the shakings of heads which ought to know better, over Thackeray's dealings with the Old Chevalier and his scandals about Miss Oglethorpe in Esmond, can be laughed or wondered at merely. But then these are matters of no importance to the main story. It is Ivanhoe and Rebecca, Henry Esmond and Beatrix,340 all of them persons absolutely unknown to history, in whom we are really interested; and in the other case mentioned, Amy Robsart is such a creature or "daughter," if not "of dreams" "of debate," that you may do almost what you like with her; and the book does not sin by presentation of a Leicester so very different from the historical.341 But, on the other hand, the introduction of historical persons, skilfully used, seasons, enforces, and vivifies the interest of a book mightily; and the action of great historical scenes supports that of the general plot in a still more remarkable manner. On the whole, we may perhaps say that Dumas depends more on the latter, Scott on the former, and that the difference is perhaps connected with their respective bulk and position as dramatists. Dumas has made of no historical magnate anything like what Scott has made of Richard and of Mary and of Elizabeth; but Scott has not laid actual historical scenes under contribution to anything like the same extent as that by which Dumas has in a fashion achieved a running panorama-companion to the history of France from the fourteenth century to the Revolution and, more intensively, from the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew to the establishment of Louis XIV.'s autocracy.

In fact, the advantages, both to the novelist and to his readers, of the historical kind can hardly be exaggerated. The great danger of invented prose narrative – of all invented narrative, indeed, prose or verse – has always been, and has always from the first shown itself as being, that of running into moulds. In the old epics (the Classical, not the Chansons) this danger was accentuated by the rise of rule-criticism; but the facts had induced, if they did not justify, that rule-system itself. The monotony of the mediaeval romance, whether Chanson or Roman, has been declared more than once in this book to be exaggerated, but it certainly exists. The "heroic" succumbs to a similar fate rather fatally, though the heroic element itself comes slightly to the rescue; and even the picaresque by no means escapes. To descend, or rather to look, into the gutter for a moment, the sameness of the deliberately obscene novel is a byword to those who, in pursuit of knowledge, have incurred the necessity of "washing themselves in water and being unclean until the evening"; and we saw that even such a light and lively talent as Crébillon's, keeping above the very lowest gutter-depths, could not escape the same danger wholly. In the upper air the fairy-tale flies too often in prescribed gyres; and the most modern kinds of all – the novel of analysis, the problem-novel, and all the rest of them – strive in vain to avoid the curse of – as Rabelais put something not dissimilar long ago – "fatras à la douzaine." "All the stories are told," saith the New, even as the Old, Preacher; all but the highest genius is apt to show ruts, brain-marks, common orientations of route and specifications of design. Only the novel of creative – not merely synthetised – character in the most expert hands escapes – for human character undoubtedly partakes of the Infinite; but few are they who can command the days and ways of creation.