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

456

To which a brief consideration of the curious fancy of some French critics that there is something "classical" about Naturalism may be specially relegated.

457

Mérimée, though after his fashion making no fuss about it, was also an early virtuoso in this kind; and one of his letters contains an excellent example of the quiet cynicism in which he excelled. Some ladies had asked to see his collection, and he had very properly warned them that the "curios" of that ingenious and valiant nation were sometimes "curious" in a special sense, and had offered to "select." "Elles ont tout vu," he adds simply, and one hopes his correspondent (I forgot whether it was one of the Inconnues or Madame de Montijo) appreciated the Mount-Everest-like Laconism.

458

The banal phrase has been framed in the amber of "Théo's" verse, and so debanalised.

459

The first book of theirs, or rather of Edmond's, though it bore both names, that I read, and the second French book I ever reviewed, was the mainly artistic Gavarni of 1873. One has a human weakness in such cases, but I think one might not have been wholly well disposed to the author from it.

460

Pepys had nothing that could be called bad blood. Horace perhaps had a little, but it was sweet and childlike compared to the "acrid-quack" fluid of Edmond de Goncourt's veins and heart. Probably several people have seen in M. de Goncourt the suggestion of an un-Puritan Malvolio.

461

Not, however, in the second case, by Sainte-Beuve, whose lukewarmness Edmond – a "Sensitive Plant" in this way if hardly in others – never forgave.

462

She served them for a very long period without giving them any apparent cause for complaint. They only found out her delinquencies after her death, or in her last illness – I forget which. Probably nothing could better show "the nature of the animals" than this post-mortem grubbing belowstairs for a "subject," and washing your own household dirty linen in public – for profit.

463

It may be well to smash, in a passing note, a silly catchword popular with some rather belated English admirers of the Naturalist school a few years ago. They praised its "frankness." You might as well praise the "straightforwardness" of a man who goes out of his way to explore laystalls and, having picked up ordure, holds it up to public view.

464

Both excellent things in their way, of course. Perhaps it would be better to say asafœtida.

465

It is perhaps only fair to warn readers who may not know the fact, that some very good and (in the French as well as the English sense) respectable judges think much better of the work, and even of the men or man, than I do. Renée Mauperin especially (as indeed I have admitted) has a considerable body of suffrage; the general style pleases some, and it has been urged for Edmond that good men liked him. But these good men had not read his diary. There is, however, no doubt that it is an exceptionally strong case of "rubbing the [right or the] wrong way." Books and men and style all rub me the wrong way; and, though I have some knack at using the brushes and fixatures of pure criticism, I can't get myself smoothed down.

466

See note at close of chapter. One of the most comic things in the whole Naturalist episode was the rising up of some of these disciples to rebuke their master, in a round robin, for "right-hand and left-hand defections" from the pure gospel of the sect.

467

The word is used, designedly but not fraudulently, as combining "observation" and "experiment" to the extent proper to art. Deliberate and after-thought "experiments" in actual life are (except in trivial matters) very risky things; and the Summa Rerum itself is apt to resent them, as, for instance, Mr. Thomas Day and Mr. Felix Graham found in the matter of wife-culture.

468

V. sup. Vol. I. p. 278. I was much pleased to find that the quotation considerably "put out" one of my few unfavourable critics. "The Importance of Gastronomy in Novels" is a beautiful subject – still, I think, virgin, though Thackeray has touched on it in others once or twice, and illustrated it magnificently himself.

469

For something on the opposite view, that Naturalism is "classical," see Conclusion.

470

That Flaubert escaped their error only so far as by fire has been allowed. One might indeed say so by death. For Bouvard et Pécuchet as it stands, and as outlined further, is very near Naturalism. Earlier he had carried the principle far in Salammbô, and would have carried it farther if he had not listened to good advice for once. But he had fire enough in his interior to burn the rubbish and smelt the ore in his better books, and skill enough to run off the metal from the dross, into proper shape. The others had not.

471

I learn from the lucubrations of some Americans – who, having been, rather late and with some difficulty, induced to perceive that Edgar Poe was their chief literary glory, have taken vehemently to his favourite kind, and written voluminously in and on it – that it ought to be called a "brief-narrative," the hyphen being apparently essential. This is very interesting: and throws much light on the subject. However, having read a great deal on it, I do not find myself much advanced beyond a position which I think I occupied some fifty years ago – to wit, that a short story is not merely a long one cut down, nor a long story a short one spun out.

472

Barbey d'Aurevilly's (v. sup.) attack on the book is one of the most remarkable instances of the irresponsibility of his criticism.

473

V. sup. p. 258.

474

One ought perhaps to verify; but that would be hard lines to have to read Nana twice!

475

That of the Union Générale.

476

Vérité, though a remarkable "human document" itself, and an indispensable historical document for any student of the particular popular madness with which it deals, need surely be inflicted a second time on no mortal. It is a transposition into the regions of the unmentionable, of the Dreyfus case itself. But nobody save a failure of something like a novelist of genius, with this failure pushed near the confines of madness, could have written it.

477

"M. Zola [is] apparently persuaded that, if you can only kill God, the Devil will die – an idea which seems to leave out of consideration the idiosyncrasy of a third personage, Man" (The Later Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh and London, 1907, pp. 93, 94).

478

Only it would have to be real Blake, not imitation, which latter is one of the furthest examples of dreary futility known to the present writer.

479

The horticulture of L'Abbé Mouret is nearest to an exception; but even that is overdone.

480

Who might even say, "Is not this a slip of pen or press? Has not 'might' dropped out?" I should doubt it, even if a copy of the original edition had the missing word, for it might easily have been put in by a dull but conscientious "reader." The plural, in Thackeray's careless way, comes from his thinking as he wrote "Are they not all … personages…" The context confirms this.

481

There are, of course, comparatively few of these; but the fewness is not positive, even keeping to prose-fiction. Poetry and drama – under their less onerous conditions for this special task – would enlarge the list in goodly fashion.

482

Shortly after Maupassant's death, I contributed an article on him to the Fortnightly Review. It has never been reprinted, but, by the kindness of the Editor of that Review, I have been permitted to use it as a basis for this notice. I have, however, altered, omitted, and added to a much greater extent than in the few other rehandlings acknowledged in this History. The account of the actual books is wholly new.

483

I had known Verlaine since his appearance in the Parnasse Contemporain years earlier, but not yet in his most characteristic work.

484

The following summary, to p. 505, formed no part of the original article and is based on fresh and continuous reading. It is purposely rather more minute than anything else in these later chapters, and was not the easiest part of the book to do, owing to the large number of Maupassant's short stories.

485

Maupassant could draw gentlemen and ladies, but he often did not do so. His pretty young countesses (not the same persons as those referred to in text), who get drunk together tête-à-tête, and discourse on the best way of making more effectual Josephs out of their footmen, are not pleasing, though they are right in holding that no perfume, save Eau de Cologne, doth become a man.

486

Vol. I. pp. 150-1.

487

The usual gutter-Naturalist certainly would – and even M. Zola, I fear, might – have done the "Ephesian matron" business thoroughly: Maupassant, as so often, knew other and better things.

488

It may suggest Leconte de Lisle to others and may even have been meant for him, but I think it worthy of the earlier and greater poet.

489

It went, I fear, by mistake with the rest of my books; so I quote from memory. But Southey and Locker have had their duet pleasantly changed into a trio since by Mr. Austin Dobson's Bookman's Budget.

490

It may be just, and only just necessary to observe (what I know perfectly well) that Maupassant was, in the direct sense, Flaubert's pupil and not Zola's.

491

He was, says his historian well, "de la race des amants et non point de la race des pères."

492

The resemblances between Thackeray and Maupassant are very numerous and most remarkable. That they have both been accused of cynicism and sentimentality is only, as it were, the index-finger to the relationship.

493

At the risk, however, of wearying the reader and "forcing open doors," one may exemplify, from this book also, the artificial character of this obligatory adultery. Anne de Guilleroy has all the qualifications of an almost perfect mistress (in the honourable sense) and wife. She is charming; a flirt to the right point and not beyond it; passionate ditto; affectionate; not capricious; inviolably faithful (in her unfaithfulness, of course); jealous to her own pain, but with no result of malice to others. Yet in order to show all this she has to be an adulteress first – in obedience to this mysterious modernisation and topsy-turvification of ancient Babylonian custom, and the jus primae noctis, and the proverb as to second thoughts being best, and Heaven or the other place knows what else. Here also, as elsewhere, Maupassant – satirist of women as he is – makes her lover a very inferior creature to herself. For Bertin is a selfish coxcomb, and does, at least half, allow himself to be "snuffed out by an article."

494

Any one who chooses may compare it with the utterances of the late Mr. Henry James. Maupassant's own selection of novels, to illustrate the impossibility of defining a novel, is of the first interest. They are: Manon Lescaut, Paul et Virginie, Don Quichotte, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Werther, Les Affinités Électives, Clarissa [he adds Harlowe, an unauthentic addition, pardonable in a Frenchman, though not in one of us], Émile, Candide, Cinq-Mars, René, Les Trois Mousquetaires, Mauprat, Le Père Goriot, La Cousine Bette, Colomba, Le Rouge et Le Noir, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Notre Dame de Paris, Salammbô, Madame Bovary, Adolphe, M. de Camors, L'Assommoir, and Sapho.

495

"Amant" as accurately distinguished by M. Jean Richepin in Césarine (for the benefit of an innocent Hungarian) from "amoureux."

496

Not that I wish to blaspheme Circe, who always seems to me to have adjusted herself to a disconcertingly changed situation with more than demi-goddesslike dexterity and good humour. It may perhaps be not irrelevant, to discussion of novels in general, to mention something which I have never yet seen put in Homeric discussion, though the bare idea of anything new there being possible may seem preposterous. The arguments of the splitters-up are, naturally enough, seldom if ever literary, belonging as they do to the class of Biblical, that is to say, unliterary, criticism. But strictly literary considerations, furnishing argument of the strongest kind for unity, might be brought by comparing the behaviour of Circe, at the moment referred to, and that of Helen when Paris returned from his defeat. These situations are, of course, in initial circumstance as opposite as possible, though they arrivent à pareille fin. But behind their very opposition there is a conception of the eternal feminine – partly human, partly divine – which it would be very surprising to find in two different persons, and which might, if any one cared to do it, be interestingly worked out from divers other Homeric characters of women or goddesses, from Hera and Aphrodite in the one poem to Nausicaa and Calypso in the other. "How great a novelist was in Homer lost" is a theme too much neglected.

497

For do not fixed hours always become a bore – except in respect of meals? To have to love, or to lecture, or to do anything but eat, at x A. or P.M. precisely, on such and such days in the week, is a weariness to the spirit and the flesh alike.

498

"The Novelists Who Cannot End" is one of the title-subjects which, "reponing my senescent art," I relinquish to others.

499

In the card sense.

500

They run well into, if not over, the second hundred, and it is proper to warn readers (and still more buyers) that different editions vary the contents of individual volumes; so that, without some care, and even with it, duplication is nearly certain. This bad habit, not quite unknown in England, is rather common in France.

501

If any one is fortunate, or unfortunate, enough not to know this admirable story, it may be well to say that the title is the nickname of a young person, more pleasing than proper, who forms part of a convoy or cartel of non-combatants passing through the Prussian lines in 1871. The Prussian officer, imitating more mildly (and without the additional villainy) the conduct of Colonel Kirke, refuses passage to the whole party, unless she will give him a cast of her office. The story is told as inoffensively as possible, and the crowning irony of the shocked attitude of her respectable companions at her liberating them, though they have been frantically anxious she should do so, is sublime.

502

Maupassant does not caricature us (at least our men) very extravagantly. But he, like the rest of them, always makes us say, "Aoh." I have frequently endeavoured to produce, otherwise than as a diphthong, this mysterious word (a descendant, perhaps, of the equally mysterious Aoi of the Chanson de Roland?). But I cannot make it like the way in which I say, or in which any well-educated Englishman says, "Oh!" American it may be, and it is not unlike the "Ow" of some dialects, but pure English it is not. It may be, for aught I know, phonetic: and has been explained as representing an affected sneer. The curious thing is that "Oh-a" actually is a not unfrequent, though slovenly, pronunciation.

503

Evidently, therefore, the practice with which we have been so often reproached is of French – at least Norman – origin.

504

The other one, of course, but here one must admit the superiority of the foreign "strength." And the "story" has French antecedents.

505

This is an actual translation of the Norman poet's words. It makes no bad blank-verse line.

506

Its companions, in the volume to which it gives title, are mostly inferior specimens of the same class. But some, especially Le Pain Maudit, are very amusing, and Lui? is a curious and melancholy anticipation of Le Horla. La Maison Tellier, which opens and titles another volume of no very different kind, has never seemed to me quite worthy of its fame. It is not unamusing in itself, and very amusing when one thinks of its greatly-daring imitators, but rather schoolboyish or even monkeyish in its determination to shock. (It doesn't shock me.) Another "shocker," but tragic, not comic, La Femme de Paul, which closes the book, is more powerful. (It is on the theme of Mlle. Giraud ma Femme (v. inf.); only the male person, instead of drowning his she-rival, far less wisely drowns himself.) But most of its contents suffer, not merely from Naturalist grime, but from Naturalist meticulousness.

507

V. sup. p. 269 sq.

508

For the "Terror" group see below.

509

Curiously enough, a few days after writing the above I came across, in the last Diabolique of that curious flawed genius, Barbey d'Aurevilly (v. sup. p. 453), the words which redress, by long anticipation, the wrong done by his fellow Norman: "Les ailes du nez, aussi expressives que des yeux."

510

In a novel by a contemporary of his, otherwise not worth notice, Sir Walter Scott was accused of "pruderie bête"; I am sure the adjective and substantive are much better mated in my text.

511

I remember, in a book which I have not seen for about two-thirds of a century, Miss Martineau's Crofton Boys, an agreeable anecdote (for the good Harriet, when not under the influence of Radicalism, the dismal science, Anti-Christianity, or Mr. Atkinson, could tell a story very well) of a little English girl. It occurred to her one morning that she should have to wash, dress, do her hair, etc., every day for her whole life, and she sat down and wept bitterly. Now, if I were a little boy or girl in French novel-world, when as I remembered that I should have, as the one, never to marry, or to commit adultery with every one who asked me; that, as the other, I must not be left five minutes alone with a married woman, without offering her the means of carrying out her and her husband's destiny; I really think I should imitate Miss Martineau's child, if I did not even go and hang myself. "Fay ce que voudras" may be rather a wide commandment. "Fay ce que dois" may require a little enlarging. But "Do what you ought not, not because you wish to do it, but because it is the proper thing to do" is not only "the limit," but beyond it. I think that if I were a Frenchman of the novel-type I should hate the sight of a married woman. Stone walls would not a prison make nor iron bars a cage – so odious as this unrelieved tyranny of concupiscentia carnis– to order! Perhaps Wilberforce's Agathos had a tedious time of it in being always ready to resist the Dragon; but how much more wearisome would it be to be always on the qui vive, lest you should miss a chance of not resisting him!

512

The "time" was five and twenty years ago. But this passage, trifling as it may seem to some readers, appeared to me worth preserving, because my recent very careful reperusal of Maupassant, as a whole, made its appositeness constantly recur to me.

513

Nearest, perhaps, in the story called "En Famille," to be found in the Maison Tellier volume.

514

Remarks already made on the particular novels and stories from this point of view need only be referred to, not repeated. But it is fair to say that some good judges plead for "warning off" instead of "inculcation."

515

There are some, but they are very few.

516

See Conclusion. After the above notice of Maupassant was, in its reconstituted form, entirely completed, there came into my hands a long and careful paper on the novelist's Romanticism, published by Mr. Oliver H. Moore in the Transactions of the American Modern Language Association for March 1918. Those who are curious as to French opinion of him, and especially as to the strange superstition of his "classicism" (see Conclusion again), will find large extracts and references on this subject given by Mr. Moore, who promises further discussion.

517

One never knows what is necessary or not in the way of explanation. But perhaps it is wiser to say that I am quite aware that, besides writing votre, not "notre," Baudelaire had originally written "ce long hurlement" before the immense improvement in the text, and that original "Light-houses" were painters.

518

One slight alteration may seem almost to justify Belot's criticism of life: "Uncomfortable herself, she thought it natural to make others uncomfortable." There is certainly no want of psychological observation there.

519

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

520

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

521

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

522

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

523

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