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

Some be lewd, and some be shrewd,But all they be not so,

and I think that our fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century vates showed his wisdom most in sticking to the strict negative in his exculpatory second line, here italicised.

Now if Alexander the Younger does not absolutely insist that "all they be so," he goes very near to it, excepting only characters of insignificant domesticity. When he does give you an "honnête femme" who is not merely this, such as the Clémentine of the Roman d'une Femme or the Marceline of Diane de Lys, he gives them some queer touches. His "shady Magdalenes" (with apologies to one of the best of parodies for spoiling its double rhyme) and his even more shady, because more inexcusable, marquises; his adorable innocents, who let their innocence vanish "in the heat of the moment" (as the late Mr. Samuel Morley said when he forgot that Mr. Bradlaugh was an atheist), because the husbands pay too much attention to politics; and his affectionate wives, like the Lady in Thérèse,388 who supply their missing husbands' place just for once, and forget all about it – these might be individually creatures of fact, but as a class they are creatures of theory. And theory never made a good novel yet: it is lucky if it has sometimes, but too rarely, failed to make a good into a bad one. But it has been urged – and with some truth as regards at least the later forms of the French novel – that it is almost founded on theory, and certainly Dumas fils can be cited in support – perhaps, indeed, he is the first important and thoroughgoing supporter. And this of itself justifies the place and the kind of treatment allotted to him here, the justification being strengthened by the fact that he, after Beyle, and when Beyle's influence was still little felt, was a leader of a new class of novelist, that he is the first novelist definitely of the Second Empire.

CHAPTER XI

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

The contrast of Flaubert and Dumas fils.

In doing, as may at least be hoped, justice to M. Alexandre Dumas fils in the last chapter, one point was excepted – that though I could rank him higher than I ever expected to do as a novelist, I could not exactly rank his work in the highest range of literature. When you compare him – not merely with those greatest in novel-work already discussed, but with Musset or Vigny, with Nodier, or with Gérard de Nerval, not to mention others, there is something which is at once "weird and wanting," as the admirable Captain Mayne Reid says at the beginning of The Headless Horseman, though one cannot say here, as there, "By Heavens! it is 'the head!'" There is head enough of a kind – a not at all unkempt or uncomely headpiece, very well filled with brains. But it has no aureole, as the other preferred persons cited in the last sentence and earlier have. This aureole may be larger or smaller, brighter or less bright – a full circlet of unbroken or hardly broken splendour, or a sort of will-o'-the-wisp cluster of gleam and darkness. But wherever it is found there is, in differing degrees, literature of the highest class; of the major prose gentes; literature that can show itself with poetry, under its own conditions and with its own possibilities, and fear no disqualification. Of this I am bound to say I do not find very much in this second division of our volume, and I find none in Dumas fils. But I find a great deal more than in any one else in Gustave Flaubert.

Some former dealings with him.

As I have said this, the reader may expect, magisterially, dreadingly, or perhaps in some very "gentle" cases hopefully, a full chapter on Flaubert. He shall have it. But the same cause, or group of causes, which has been at work before prevents this from being a very long one, and from containing very full accounts of his novels. One of the longest and most careful of those detailed surveys of forty years ago, to which I have perhaps too often referred, was devoted to Flaubert, and was slightly supplemented after his death. The earlier form had, though I did not know it for a considerable time, not displeased himself – a fortunate result not too common between author and critic389– and there are, consequently, special reasons for leaving it unaltered and unrehashed. I shall, therefore, as with Balzac and Dumas, attempt a shorter but more general judgment, which – his work being so much less voluminous than theirs – may be perhaps even less extensive than in the other cases,390 but which should leave no doubt as to the writer's opinion of his "place in the story."

His style.

No small part of that high claim to purely literary rank which has been made for him rests, of course, upon his mere style – that famous and much debated "chase of the single word" which, especially since Mr. Pater took up the discussion of it, has been a "topic" of the most usitate in England as well as in France. When I left my chair and my library at Edinburgh I burnt more lecture-notes on the subject than would have furnished material for an entire chapter here, and I have no intention of raking my memory for their ashes. The battle on the one side with the anti-Unitarians who regard "monology" as a fond thing vainly invented, and on the other with Edmond de Goncourt's foolish and bumptious boast that Flaubert's epithets were not so "personal" as his own and his brother's, would be for a different division of literary history. But there is something – a very important, though not a very long something – which must be said on the subject here. I have never found myself in the very slightest degree gêné– as the abonné was by Gautier's and as others are by the styles of Mr. George Meredith and Mr. Henry James – by Flaubert's style. It has never put the very smallest impediment, effected the most infinitesimal delay, in my comprehension of his meaning, or my enjoyment of his art and of his story.391 What is more, though it has intensified that enjoyment, it has never – as may perhaps have been the case with some other great "stylists" —diverted, a little illegitimately, my attention and fruition from the story itself. Style-craft and story-craft have married each other so perfectly that they are one flesh for the lover of literature to rejoice in. And if there be higher praise than this to be bestowed in the cases and circumstances, I do not know what it is. It seems to belong in perfection – I do not deny it to others in lesser degree – to three writers only in this volume – Gautier, Mérimée, and Flaubert – though if any one pleads hard for the addition of Maupassant, it will be seen when we come to him that I am not bound to a rigid non possumus; and though there is still one living writer with whom, if he were not happily disqualified by the fact of his living, I should not refuse to complete the Pentad. But let this suffice for the mere point of style in its purer and therefore more controversial aspect. There may be a little more to say incidentally as we take the general survey under the old heads of plot, etc. But before doing this we must – the books being so few and so individually remarkable – say a little about each of them, though only a very little about one.

The books —Madame Bovary.

Flaubert, after fairly early promise, the fulfilment of which was postponed, began late, and was a man of eight and thirty when his first complete book, Madame Bovary, appeared in 1859 – a year, with its predecessor 1858, among the great years of literature, as judged by the books they produced. An absurd prosecution was got up against it by the authorities of that most moral of régimes, the Second Empire, with the even more absurd result of a "not guilty, but please don't do anything of the kind again" judgment. This, however, belongs mostly – not (v. inf.) entirely – to the biographical part of the matter, with which we have little or nothing to do.392 The book itself is, beyond all question, a great novel – if it had a greater subject393 it would have been one of the greatest of novels. The immense influence of Manon Lescaut appears once more in it; but Emma Bovary, with far more than all the bad points of Manon, has none of her good ones. Nor has she the half-redeeming greatness in evil of her somewhat younger sister Iza in Affaire Clémenceau. Except her physical beauty (of which we do not hear much), there is not one attractive point in her. She sins, not out of passion, but because she thinks a married woman ought to have lovers. She ruins her husband, not for any intrinsic and genuine love of splendour, luxury, or beauty, but because other women have things and she ought to have them. She has a taste for men, but none in them. Yet her creator has made her absolutely "real," and, scum of womanhood as she is, has actually evolved something very like tragedy out of her worthlessness, and has saved her from being detestable, because she is such a very woman. He has, indeed, subjected her to a kenosis, an evisceration, exantlation – or, in plain English, "emptying out" – of everything positively good (she has the negative but necessary salve of not being absolutely ill-natured) that can be added to an abstract pretty girl; and no more. I have paid a little attention to the heroines of the greater fiction; but she is the only one of all the mille e tre I know whom the author has managed to present as acceptable, without its being in the least possible to fall in love with her, and at the same time without its being necessary to detest her.

This defiant and victorious naturalness – not "naturalism" – pervades the book: from the other main characters – the luckless, brainless, tasteless, harmless husband; the vulgar Don Juans of lovers; the apothecary Homais394– one of the most original and firmly drawn characters in fiction – from all, down to the merest "supers." It floods the scene-painting (admirable in itself) with a light of common day – not too cheerful, but absolutely real. It animates the conversation, though Flaubert is not exactly prodigal of this;395 and it presides over the weaving of the story as such in a fashion very little, if at all, inferior to that which prevails in the very greatest masters of pure story-telling.

Salammbô.

Hardly any one, speaking critically, could, I suppose, also speak thus positively about Flaubert's second book, Salammbô– a romance of Carthaginian history at the time of the Mutiny of the Mercenaries. Even Sainte-Beuve – no weak-stomached reader – was put off by its blotches of blood and grime, and by the sort of ghastly gorgeousness which, if it does not "relieve" these, forms a kind of background to throw them up. It was violently attacked by clever carpers like M. de Pontmartin, by eccentrics of half-genius and whole prejudice like M. Barbey d'Aurevilly, and by dull pedants like M. Saint-René Taillandier; while it may be questioned whether, to the present day, its friends have not mostly belonged to that "Save-me-from-them" class which simply extols the "unpleasant" because other people find it unpleasant.396 For my own part, I did not enjoy it much at the very first; but I felt its power at once, and, as always happens in such cases when admiration does not come from the tainted source just glanced at, the enjoyment increased, and the sense of power increased with it, the "unpleasantness," as a known thing, becoming merely "discountable" and disinfected. The book can, of course, never rank with Madame Bovary, because it is a tour de force of abnormality – a thing incompatible with that highest art which consists in the transformation and transcendentalising of the ordinary. The leprosies, and the crucifixions, and the sorceries, and the rest of it are ugly; but then Carthage was ugly, as far as we know anything about it.397 Salammbô herself is shadowy; but how could a Carthaginian girl be anything else? The point to consider is the way in which all this unfamiliar, uncanny, unpleasant stuff is fused by sheer power of art into something which has at least the reality of a bad dream – which, as most people know, is a very real thing indeed while it lasts, and for a little time after. It increases the wonder – though to me it does not increase the interest – to know that Flaubert took the most gigantic pains to make his task as difficult as possible by acquiring and piecing together the available knowledge on his subject. This process – the ostensible sine qua non of "Realism" and "Naturalism" – will require further treatment. It is almost enough for the present to say that, though not a novelty, it had been, and for the matter of that has been, rarely a success. It has, as was pointed out before, spoilt most classical novels, reaching its acme of boredom in the German work of Ebers and Dahn; and it has scarcely ever been very successful, even in the hands of Charles Reade, who used it "with a difference." But it can hardly be said to have done Salammbô much harm, because the "fusing" process which is above referred to, and to which the imported elements are often so rebellious, is here perfectly carried out. You may not like the colour and shape of the ingot or cast; but there is nothing in it which has not duly felt and obeyed the fire of art.

L'Éducation Sentimentale.

That there was no danger of Flaubert's merely palming off, in his novel work, replicas with a few superficial differences, had now been shown. It was further established by his third and longest book, L'Éducation Sentimentale. This was not only, as the others had been, violently attacked, but was comparatively little read – indeed it is the only one of his books, with the usual exception of Bouvard et Pécuchet, which has been called, by any rational creature, dull. I do not find it so; but I confess that I find its intrinsic interest, which to me is great, largely enhanced by its unpopularity – which supplies a most remarkable pendant to that of Jonathan Wild, and is by no means devoid of value as further illustrating the cause of the very limited popularity of Thackeray, and even of the rarity of whole-hearted enthusiasm for Swift. Satire is allowed to be a considerable, and sometimes held to be an attractive, branch of literature. But when you come to analyse the actual sources of the attraction, it is to be feared that you will generally find them to lie outside of the pure exposure of general human weaknesses. A very large proportion of satire is personal, and personality is always popular. Satire is very often "naughty," and "naughtiness" is to a good many, qua naughtiness, "nice." It lends itself well to rhetoric; and there is no doubt, whatever superior persons may say of it, that rhetoric does "persuade" a large portion of the human race. It is constantly associated with directly comic treatment, sometimes with something not unlike tragedy; and while the first, if of any merit, is sure, the second has a fair though more restricted chance, of favourable reception. Try Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal, Lucian, Martial; try the modern satirists of all kinds, and you will always find these secondary sources of enjoyment present.

There is hardly one of them – if one – to be found in L'Éducation Sentimentale. It is simply a panorama of human folly, frailty, feebleness, and failure – never permitted to rise to any great heights or to sink to any infernal depths, but always maintained at a probable human level. We start with Frédéric Moreau as he leaves school at the correct age of eighteen. I am not sure at what actual age we leave him, though it is at some point or other of middle life, the most active part of the book filling about a decade. But "vanity is the end of all his ways," and vanity has been the beginning and middle of them – a perfectly quiet and everyday kind of vanity, but vain from centre to circumference and entire surface. He (one cannot exactly say "tries," but) is brought into the possibility of trying love of various kinds – illegitimate-romantic, legitimate-not-unromantic, illegitimate-professional but not disagreeable, illegitimate-conventional. Nothing ever "comes off" in a really satisfactory fashion. He is "exposed" (in the photographic-plate sense) to all, or nearly all, the influences of a young man's life in Paris – law, literature, art, insufficient means, quite sufficient means, society, politics – including the Revolution of 1848 – enchantments, disenchantments —tout ce qu'il faut pour vivre– to alter a little that stock expression for "writing materials" which is so common in French. But he never can get any real "life" out of any of these things. He is neither a fool, nor a cad, nor anything discreditable or disagreeable. He is "only an or'nary person," to reach the rhythm of the original by adopting a slang form in not quite the slang sense. And perhaps it is not unnatural that other ordinary persons should find him too faithful to their type to be welcome. In this respect at least I may claim not to be ordinary. One goes down so many empty wells, or wells with mere rubbish at the bottom of them, that to find Truth at last is to be happy with her (without prejudice to the convenience of another well or two here and there, with an agreeable Falsehood waiting for one). I do not know that L'Éducation Sentimentale is a book to be read very often; one has the substance in one's own experience, and in the contemplation of other people's, too readily at hand for that to be necessary or perhaps desirable. But a great work of art which is also a great record of nature is not too common – and this is what it is.

La Tentation de Saint-Antoine.

Yet, as has been remarked before, nothing shows Flaubert's greatness better than his absolute freedom from the "rut." Even in carrying out the general "Vanity" idea he has no monotony. The book which followed L'Éducation had been preluded, twenty years earlier, by some fragments in L'Artiste, a periodical edited by Gautier. But La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, when it finally appeared, far surpassed the promise of these specimens. It is my own favourite among its author's books; and it is one of those which you can read merely for enjoyment or take as a subject of study, just as you please – if you are wise you will give "five in five score" of your attentions to the latter occupation and the other ninety-five to the former. The people who had made up their minds to take Flaubert as a sort of Devil's Gigadibs – a "Swiss, not of Heaven," but of the other place, hiring himself out to war on all things good – called it "an attack on the idea of God"! As it, like its smaller and later counterpart Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, ends in a manifestation of Christ, which would do honour to the most orthodox of Saints' Lives, the "attack" seems to be a curious kind of offensive operation.

As a matter of fact, the book takes its vaguely familiar subject, and embroiders that subject with a fresh collection of details from untiring research. The nearest approach to an actual person, besides the tormented Saint himself, is the Evil One, not at first in propria persona, but under the form of the Saint's disciple Hilarion, who at first acts as usher to the various elements of the Temptation-Pageant, and at last reveals himself by treacherous suggestions of unbelief. The pageant itself is of wonderful variety. After a vividly drawn sketch of the hermitage in the Thebaid, the drama starts with the more vulgar and direct incitements to the coarser Deadly Sins and others – Gluttony, Avarice, Ambition, Luxury. Then Hilarion appears and starts theological discussion, whence arises a new series of actual visions – the excesses of the heretics, the degradation of martyrdom itself, the Eastern theosophies, the monstrous cults of Paganism. After this, Hilarion tries a sort of Modernism, contrasting the contradictions and absurdities of actual religions with a more and more atheistic Pantheism. This failing, the Temptation reverts to the moral forms, Death and Vice contending for Anthony and bidding against each other. The next shift of the kaleidoscope is to semi-philosophical fantasies – the Sphinx, the Chimaera, basilisks, unicorns, microscopic mysteries. The Saint is nearly bewildered into blasphemy; but at last the night wanes, the sun rises, and the face of Christ beams from it. The Temptation is ended.398

The magnificence of the style, in which the sweep of this dream-procession over the stage is conveyed to the reader, is probably the first thing that will strike him; and certainly it never palls. But, if not at once, pretty soon, any really critical mind must perceive something different from, and much rarer than, mere style. It is the extraordinary power – the exactness, finish, and freedom from any excess or waste labour, of the narrative, in reproducing dream-quality. A very large proportion – and there is nothing surprising in the fact – of the best pieces of ornate prose in French, as well as in English, are busied with dreams; but the writers have not invariably remembered one of the most singular – and even, when considered from some points of view, disquieting – features of a dream, – that you are never, while dreaming, in the least surprised at what happens. Flaubert makes no mistake as to this matter. The real realism which had enabled him to re-create the most sordid details of Madame Bovary, the half-historic grime and gorgeousness mixed of Salammbô, and the quintessentially ordinary life of L'Éducation, came mightily to his assistance in this his Vision of the Desert. You see and hear its external details as Anthony saw and heard them: you almost feel its internal influence as if Hilarion had been – as if he was– at your side.

Trois Contes.

The Trois Contes which followed, and which practically completed (except for letters) Flaubert's finished work in literature,399 have one of those half-extrinsic interests which, once more, it is the duty of the historian to mention. They show that although, as has been said, Flaubert suffered from no monotony of faculty, the range of his faculty – or rather the range of the subjects to which he chose to apply it – was not extremely wide. Of the twin stories, Un Cœur Simple is, though so unlike in particular, alike in general ordinariness to Madame Bovary and L'Éducation Sentimentale. The unlikeness in particular is very striking, and shows that peculiar victoriousness in accomplishing what he attempted which is so characteristic of Flaubert. It is the history-no-history of a Norman peasant woman, large if simple of heart, simple and not large of brain, a born drudge and prey to unscrupulous people who come in contact with her, and almost in her single person uniting the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. I admire it now, without even the touch of rather youthful impatience which used, when I read it first, to temper my admiration. It is not a berquinade, because a berquinade is never quite real. Un Cœur Simple shares Flaubert's Realism as marvellously as any equal number of pages of either of the books to which I have compared it. But there is, perhaps, something provocative – something almost placidly insolent – about the way in which the author says, "Now, I will give you nothing of the ordinary baits for admiration, and yet, were you the Devil himself, you shall admire me." And one does – in youth rather reluctantly – not so in age.

Herodias groups itself in the same general fashion, but even more definitely in particulars, with Salammbô– of which, indeed, it is a sort of miniature replica cunningly differentiated. Anybody can see how easily the story of the human witchcraft of Salome, and the decollation of the Saint, and the mixture of terror and gorgeousness in the desert fortress, parallel the Carthaginian story. But I do not know whether it was deliberate or unconscious repetition that made Flaubert give us something like a duplicate of the suffete Hanno in Vitellius. There is no lack of the old power, and the shortness of the story is at least partly an advantage. But perhaps the Devil's Advocate, borrowing from, but reversing, Hugo on Baudelaire, might say, "Ce frisson n'est pas nouveau."

The third story, Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, has always seemed to me as near perfection in its own kind as anything I know in literature, and one of the best examples, if not the very best example, of that adaptableness of the Acta Sanctorum to modern rehandling of the right kind, which was noticed at the beginning of this History.400 The excessive devotion of the not yet sainted Julian to sport; the crime and the dooms that follow it; the double parricide which he commits under the false impression that his wife has been unfaithful to him; his self-imposed penance of ferrying, somewhat like Saint Christopher, and the trial – a harder one than that good giant bore, for Julian has, not merely to carry over but, to welcome, at board and bed, a leper – and the Transfiguration and Assumption that conclude the story, give some of the best subjects – though there are endless others nearly or quite as good – in Hagiology. And Flaubert has risen to them in the miraculous manner in which he could rise, retaining the strangeness, infusing the reality, and investing the whole with the beauty, deserved and required. There is not a weak place in the whole story; but the strongest places are, as they should be, the massacre of hart, hind, and fawn which brings on the curse; the ghastly procession of the beasts Julian has slain or not slain (for he has met with singular ill-luck); the final "Translation."401 Nowhere is Flaubert's power of description greater; nowhere, too, is that other power noticed – the removal of all temptation to say "Very pretty, but rather added ornament" – more triumphantly displayed.