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

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.

137

This bad bloodedness, or κακοηθεια, of Beyle's heroes is really curious. It would have qualified them later to be Temperance fanatics or Trade Union demagogues. The special difference of all three is an intense dislike of somebody else "having something."

138

In that merry and wise book Clarissa Furiosa.

139

She keeps the anniversary of his execution, and imitates Marguerite in procuring and treasuring, at the end of the story, Julien's severed head. (It may be well to note that Dumas had not yet written La Reine Margot.)

140

In proper duel, of course; not as he shot his mistress.

141

Its great defect is the utter absence of any poetical element. But, as Mérimée (than whom there could hardly be, in this case, a critic more competent or more friendly) said, poetry was, to Beyle, lettre close.

142

It seems curiously enough, that Beyle did mean to make the book gai. It is a a very odd kind of gaiety!

143

This attraction of the forçat is one of the most curious features in all French Romanticism. It was perhaps partly one of the general results of the Revolutionary insanity earlier, partly a symptom or sequel of Byronism. But the way it raged not only among folks like Eugène Sue, but among men and women of great talent and sometimes genius – George Sand, Balzac, Dumas, Victor Hugo – the last and greatest carrying it on for nearly two generations – is a real curiousity of literature. (The later and different crime-novel of Gaboriau & Co. will be dealt with in its place.)

144

V. sup. vol. i. p. 39.

145

A pseudonymous person has "reconstituted" the story under the title of Lucien Leeuwen (the hero's name). But some not inconsiderable experience of reconstitutions of this kind determined me to waste no further portion of my waning life on any one of them.

146

It may be desirable to glance at Beyle's avowed or obvious "intentions" in most if not all his novels – in the Chartreuse to differentiate Italian from French character, in Le Rouge et le Noir to embody the Macchiavellian-Napoleonic principle which has been of late so tediously phrased (after the Germans) as "will to" something and the like. These intentions may interest some: for me, I must confess, they definitely get in the way of the interest. For essays, "good": for novels, "no."

147

Vide Guy Mannering as to the "macers."

148

Les Chouans.

149

Forty vols. London: 1895-8.

150

Quarterly Review for January 1907.

151

I believe I may say, without fatuity, that the general Introduction and the Quarterly article, above referred to, contain most things that anybody but a special student will need.

152

It is, however, important to remember that almost the whole of the first of these three decades was taken up with the tentatives, while the concluding lustrum was comparatively infertile. The Comédie was, in the main, the crop of fifteen years only.

153

It ought always to be, but has not always been, put as a round sum to his credit in this part of the account that he heartily recognised the value of Scott as a novelist. A hasty thinker might be surprised at this; not so the wiser mind.