A History of the French Novel

So, too, there is no such instance known to me of the presentation of two different characters, in two different ways, so complete and yet so idiosyncratic in each. Sainte-Beuve showed what he was going to become (as well, perhaps, as something which he was going to lose) in his slight but suggestive remarks on the relation of Des Grieux to the average _roue_ hero of that most _roue_ time. It is only a suggestion; he does not work it out. But it is worth working out a little. Des Grieux is _ab initio_, and in some ways _usque ad finem_, a sort of _ingenu_. He seems to have no vicious tendencies whatever; and had Manon not supervened, might have been a very much more exemplary Chevalier de Malte than the usual run of those dignitaries, who differed chiefly from their uncrossed comrades and brethren in having no wife to be unfaithful to. He is never false to Manon--the incident of one of Manon's lovers trying vainly to tempt his rival, with a pretty cast-off mistress of his own, is one of the most striking features of the book.

He positively reveres, not his mother, who is dead, and reverence for whom would be nothing in a Frenchman, but his father, and even, it would seem, his elder brother--a last stretch of reverence quite unknown to many young English gentlemen who certainly would not do things that Des Grieux did. Except when Manon is concerned, it would seem that he might have been a kind of saint--as good at least as Tiberge. But his love for her and his desire for her entirely saturate and transform him. That he disobeys his father and disregards his brother is nothing: we all do that in less serious cases than his, and there is almost warrant for it in Scripture. But he cheats at play (let us frankly allow, remembering Grammont and others, that this was not in France the unpardonable sin that it has--for many generations, fortunately--been with us), at the suggestion of his rascally left-hand brother-in-law, in order to supply Manon's wants. He commits an almost deliberate (though he makes some excuses on this point) and almost cowardly murder, on an unarmed lay-brother of Saint-Sulpice, to get to Manon. And, worst of all, he consents to the stealing of moneys given to her by his supplanters in order to feed her extravagance. After this his suborning the King's soldiers to attack the King's constabulary on the King's highway to rescue Manon is nothing. But observe that, though it is certainly not "All for G.o.d," it _is_ "All for Her." And observe further that all these things--even the murder--were quite common among the rank and file of that French aristocracy which was so busily hurrying on the French Revolution. Only, Des Grieux himself would pretty certainly not have done them if She had never come in his way. And he tells it all with a limpid and convincing clarity (as they would say now) which puts the whole thing before us. No apology is made, and no apology is needed. It is written in the books of the chronicles of Manon and Des Grieux; in the lives of Des Grieux and Manon, suppose them ever to have existed or to exist, it could not but happen.

[Sidenote: The inevitableness of both and the inestimableness of their history.]

It is surely not profane (and perhaps it has been done already) to borrow for these luckless, and, if you will, somewhat graceless persons, the words of the mighty colophon of Matthew Arnold's most unequal but in parts almost finest poem, at least the first and last lines:

So rest, for ever rest, immortal pair,

and

The rustle of the eternal rain of love.

Nor is it perhaps extravagant to claim for their creator--even for their reporter--the position of the first person who definitely vindicated for the novel the possibility of creating a pa.s.sionate masterpiece, outstripping _La Princesse de Cleves_ as _Oth.e.l.lo_ outstrips _A Woman Killed with Kindness_. As for the enormous remainder of him, if it is very frankly negligible by the mere reader, it is not quite so by the student. He was very popular, and, careless bookmaker as he was in a very critical time, his popularity scarcely failed him till his horrible death.[342] It can scarcely be said that, except in the one great cited instance, he heightened or intensified the French novel, but he enlarged its scope, varied its interests, and combined new objectives with its already existing schemes, even in his less good work. In _Manon Lescaut_ itself he gave a masterpiece, not only to the novel, not only to France, but to all literature and all the world.

[Sidenote: Crebillon _fils_.]

The unfortunate n.o.bleman as to whom d.i.c.kens has left us in doubt whether he was a peer in his own right or the younger son or a Marquis or Duke, p.r.o.nounced Shakespeare "a clayver man." It was perhaps, in the particular instance, inadequate though true. I hardly know any one in literature of whom it is truer and more adequate than it is of Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon the younger, commonly called Crebillon _fils_.[343] His very name is an abomination to Mrs. Grundy, who probably never read, or even attempted to read, one of his naughty books. Gray's famous tribute[344] to him--also known to a large number who are in much the same case with Mrs. Grundy--is distinctly patronising. But he is a very clever man indeed, and the cleverness of some of his books--especially those in dialogue--is positively amazing.

[Sidenote: The case against him.]

At the same time it is of the first importance to make the due provisos and allowances, the want of which so frequently causes disappointment, if not positive disgust, when readers have been induced by unbalanced laudation to take up works of the literature of other days. There are, undoubtedly, things--many and heavy things--to be said against Crebillon. A may say, "I am not, I think, _Mr._ Grundy: but I cannot stand your Crebillon. I do not like a world where all the men are apparently atheists, and all the women are certainly the other thing mentioned in Donne's famous line. It disgusts and sickens me: and I will have none of it, however clever it may be." B, not quite agreeing with A, may take another tone, and observe, "He _is_ clever and he _is_ amusing: but he is terribly monotonous. I do not mind a visit to the 'oyster-bearing sh.o.r.es' now and then, but I do not want to live in Lampsacus. After all, even in a pagan Pantheon, there are other divinities besides a cleverly palliated Priapus and a comparatively ladylike Cotytto. Seven volumes of however delicately veiled 'sculduddery' are nearly as bad as a whole evening's golf-talk in a St.

Andrews hotel, or a long men's dinner, where everybody but yourself is a member of an Amateur Dramatic Society." The present writer is not far from agreeing with B, while he has for A a respect which disguises no shadow of a sneer. Crebillon does harp far too much on one string, and that one of no pure tone: and even the individual handlings of the subject are chargeable throughout his work with _longueurs_, in the greater part of it with sheer tedium. It is very curious, and for us of the greatest importance, to notice how this curse of long-windedness, episodic and hardly episodic "inset," endless talk "about it and about it," besets these pioneers of the modern novel. Whether it was a legacy of the "Heroics" or not it is difficult to say. I think it was--to some extent. But, as we have seen, it exists even in Lesage; it is found conspicuously in Marivaux; it "advances insupportably" in Prevost, except when some G.o.d intervenes to make him write (and to stop him writing) _Manon_; and it rests heavily even on Crebillon, one of the lightest, if not one of the purest, of literary talents. It is impossible to deny that he suffers from monotony of general theme: and equally impossible to deny that he suffers from spinning out of particular pieces. There is perhaps not a single thing of his which would not have been better if it had been shorter: and two of his liveliest if also most risky pieces, _La Nuit et le Moment_ and _Le Hasard au Coin du Feu_, might have been cut down to one half with advantage, and to a quarter with greater advantage still.

There are, however, excuses for Crebillon: and though it may seem a rash thing to say, and even one which gives the case away, there is, at least in these two and parts of _Le Sopha_, hardly a page--even of the parts which, if "cut," would improve the work as a whole--that does not in itself prove the almost elfish cleverness now a.s.signed to him.

[Sidenote: For the defendant--The veracity of his artificiality and his consummate cleverness.]

The great excuse for him, from the non-literary point of view, is that this world of his--narrow though crowded as it is, corrupt, preposterous, inviting the Judgment that came after it as no period perhaps has ever done, except that immediately before the Deluge, that of the earlier Roman empire, and one other--was a real world in its day, and left, as all real things do, an abiding mark and influence on what followed. One of the scores and almost hundreds of sayings which distinguish him, trivial as he seems to some and no doubt disgusting as he seems to others, is made by one of his most characteristic and most impudent but not most offensive heroes _a la_ Richelieu, who says, not in soliloquy nor to a brother _roue_, but to the mistress of the moment: "If love-making is not always a pleasure, at any rate it is always a kind of occupation." That is the keynote of the Crebillon novel: it is the handbook, with ill.u.s.trative examples, of the business, employment, or vocation of flirting, in the most extensive and intensive meanings of that term comprehensible to the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: The Crebillonesque atmosphere and method.]

Now you should never scamp or hurry over business: and Crebillon observes this doctrine in the most praiseworthy fas.h.i.+on. With the thorough practicality of his century and of his nation (which has always been in reality the most practical of all nations) he sets to work to give us the ways and manners of his world. It is an odd world at first sight, but one gets used to its conventions. It is a world of what they used to call, in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century,

but carry on that occupation which c.l.i.tandre of "The Night and the Moment," at an extremely suitable time and in equally appropriate circ.u.mstances, refers to in the words quoted above. There are some other oddities about this world. In some parts of it n.o.body seems to be married. Mrs. Grundy, and even persons more exercised in actual fact than Mrs. Grundy, would expect them all to be, and to neglect the tie.

But sometimes Crebillon finds it easier to mask this fact. Often his ladies are actual widows, which is of course very convenient, and might be taken as a sign of grace in him by Mrs. G.: oftener it is difficult to say what they are legally. They are nearly all d.u.c.h.esses or marchionesses or countesses, just as the men hold corresponding ranks: and they all seem to be very well off. But their sole occupation is that conducted under the three great verbs, _Prendre_; _Avoir_; _Quitter_.

These verbs are used rather more frequently, but by no means exclusively, of and by the men. Taking the stage nomenclature familiar to everybody from Moliere, which Crebillon also uses in some of his books, though he exchanges it for proper names elsewhere, let us suppose a society composed of Oronte, c.l.i.tandre, Eraste, Damis (men), and Cydalise, Celie, Lucinde, Julie (ladies). Oronte "takes" Lucinde, "possesses" her for a time, and "quits" her for Julie, who has been meanwhile "taken," "possessed," and "quitted" by Eraste. Eraste pa.s.ses to the conjugation of the three verbs with Cydalise, who, however, takes the initiative of "quitting" and conjugates "take" in joint active and pa.s.sive with Damis. Meanwhile Celie and c.l.i.tandre are similarly occupied with each other, and ready to "cut in" with the rest at fresh arrangements. These processes require much serious conversation, and this is related with the same mixture of gravity and irony which is bestowed on the livelier pa.s.sages of action.

The thing, in short, is most like an intensely intricate dance, with endless figures--with elaborate, innumerable, and sometimes indescribable stage directions. And the whole of it is written down carefully by M. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon.

He might have occupied his time much better? Perhaps, as to the subject of occupation. But with that we have, if not nothing, very little to do.

The point is, How did he handle these better-let-alone subjects? and what contribution, in so handling them, did he make to the general development of the novel?

I am bound to say that I think, with the caution given above, he handled them, when he was at his best, singularly well, and gave hints, to be taken or left as they chose, to handlers of less disputable subjects than his.

One at least of the most remarkable things about him is connected with this very disputableness. Voltaire and Sterne were no doubt greater men than Crebillon _fils_: and though both of them dealt with the same cla.s.s of subject, they also dealt with others, while he did not. But, curiously enough, the reproach of sn.i.g.g.e.ring, which lies so heavily on Laurence Sterne and Francois Arouet, does not lie on Crebillon. He has an audacity of grave persiflage[345] which is sometimes almost Swiftian in a lower sphere: and it saves him from the unpardonable sin of the sn.i.g.g.e.r. He has also--as, to have this grave persiflage, he almost necessarily must have--a singularly clear and flexible style, which is only made more piquant by the "-a.s.siez's" and "-ussiez's" of the older language. Further, and of still greater importance for the novelist, he has a pretty wit, which sometimes almost approaches humour, and, if not a diabolically, a _diablotin_ically acute perception of human nature as it affects his subject. This perception rarely fails: and conventional, and very unhealthily conventional, as the Crebillon world is, the people who inhabit it are made real people. He is, in those best things of his at least, never "out." We can see the ever-victorious duke (M. de Clerval of the _Hasard_ is perhaps the closest to the Richelieu model of all Crebillon's c.o.xcomb-gallants), who, even after a lady has given him most unequivocal proofs of her affection, refuses for a long time, if not finally, to say that he loves her, because he has himself a graduated scheme of values in that direction, and though she may have touched his heart, etc., she has not quite come up to his "love"

standard.[346] And we know, too, though she is less common, the philosophical Marquise herself, who, "possessing" the most notoriously inconstant lover in all Paris (this same M. de Clerval, it happens), maintains her comparative indifference to the circ.u.mstance, alleging that even when he is most inconstant he is always "very affectionate, though a little _extinguished_." And in fact he goes off to her from the very fireside, where such curious things have chanced. Extravagant as are the situations in _La Nuit et le Moment_, the other best thing, they are, but for the _longueurs_ already censured, singularly verisimilar on their own postulates. The trusty coachman, who always drives particularly slowly when a lady accompanies his master in the carriage, but would never think of obeying the check-string if his master's own voice did not authorise it; the invaluable _soubrette_ who will sit up to any hour to play propriety, when her mistress is according a _tete-a-tete_, but who, most naturally, always falls asleep--these complete, at the lower end of the scale, what the dukes and the countesses have begun at the upper. And Crebillon, despite his verbosity, is never at a loss for pointed sayings to relieve and froth it up. Nor are these mere _mots_ or _pointes_ or conceits--there is a singular amount of life-wisdom in them, and a short anthology might be made here, if there were room for it, which would entirely vindicate the a.s.sertion.

[Sidenote: Inequality of his general work--a survey of it.]

It is true that the praises just given to Crebillon do not (as was indeed hinted above) apply to the whole of his work, or even to the larger part of it. An unfavourable critic might indeed say that, in strictness, they only apply to parts of _Le Sopha_ and to the two little dialogue-stories just referred to. The method is, no doubt, one by no means easy to apply on the great scale, and the restriction of the subject adds to the difficulty. The longest regular stories of all, _Ah!

Quel Conte!_ and _Le Sopha_ itself, though they should have been mentioned in reverse order, are resumptions of the Hamiltonian idea[347]

of chaining things on to the _Arabian Nights_. Crebillon, however, does not actually resuscitate Shahriar and the sisters, but subst.i.tutes a later Caliph, Shah Baham, and his Sultana. The Sultan is exceedingly stupid, but also very talkative, and fond of interrupting his vizier and the other tale-tellers with wiseacreries; the Sultana is an acute enough lady, who governs her tongue in order to save her neck. The framework is not bad for a short story, but becomes a little tedious when it is made to enshrine two volumes, one of them pretty big. It is better in _Le Sopha_ than in _Ah! Quel Conte!_ and some of the tales that it gives us in the former are almost equal to the two excepted dialogues. Moreover, it is unluckily true that _Ah! Quel Conte!_ (an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of the Sultana's at the beginning) might be, as Crebillon himself doubtless foresaw, repeated with a sinister meaning by a reader at the end.

_Tanza et Neadarne_ or _L'ec.u.moire_, another fairy story, though livelier in its incidents than _Ah! Quel Conte!_--nay, though it contains some of Crebillon's smartest sayings, and has perhaps his nicest heroine,--is heavy on the whole, and in it, the author's _gauffre_-like lightness of "impropriety" being absent, the tone approaches nearer to that dismallest form of literature or non-literature--the deliberate obscene.

_Les egarements du Coeur et de l'Esprit_, on the other hand--one of the author's earliest books--is the furthest from that most undesirable consummation, and one of the most curious, if not of the most amusing, of all. It recounts, from the mouth of the neophyte himself, the "forming" of a very young man--almost a boy--to this strange kind of commerce, by an elderly, but not yet old, and still attractive coquette, Madame de Lursay, whose earlier life has scandalised even the not easily scandalisable society of her time (we are not told quite how), but who has recovered a reputation very slightly tarnished. The hero is flattered, but for a long time too timid and innocent to avail himself of the advantages offered to him; while, before very long, Madame de Lursay's wiles are interfered with by an "Inconnue-Ingenue,"

with whom he falls in deep calf-love of a quasi-genuine kind. The book includes sketches of the half-bravo gallants of the time, and is not negligible: but it is not vividly interesting.

Still less so, though they contain some very lively pa.s.sages, and are the chief _locus_ for Crebillon's treatment of the actual trio of husband, wife, and lover, are the _Lettres de la Marquise de M---- au Comte de P----_. The scene in which the husband--unfaithful, peevish, and a _pet.i.t maitre_--enters his wife's room to find an ancient, gouty Marquis, who cannot get off his knees quick enough, and terminates the situation with all the _aplomb_ of the Regency, is rather nice: and the gradual "slide" of the at first quite virtuous writer (the wife herself, of course) is well depicted. But love-letters which are neither half-badinage--which these are not--nor wholly pa.s.sionate--which these never are till the last,[348] when the writer is describing a state of things which Crebillon could not manage at all--are very difficult things to bring off, and Claude Prosper is not quite equal to the situation.

It will thus be seen that the objectors whom we have called A and B--or at least B--will find that they or he need not read all the pages of all the seven volumes to justify their views: and some other work, still to be mentioned, completes the exhibition. I confess, indeed, once more unblus.h.i.+ngly, that I have not read every page of them myself. Had they fallen in my way forty years ago I should, no doubt, have done so; but forty years of critical experience and exercise give one the power, and grant one the right, of a more summary procedure in respect of matter thus postponed, unless it is perceived to be of very exceptional quality. These larger works of Crebillon's are not good, though they are not by any means so bad as those of Prevost. There are nuggets, of the shrewd sense and the neat phrase with which he has been credited, in nearly all of them: and these the skilled prospector of reading gold will always detect and profit by. But, barring the possibility of a collection of such, the _Oeuvres Choisies_ of Crebillon need not contain more than the best parts of _Le Sopha_, the two comparatively short dialogue-tales, and a longer pa.s.sage or two from _Tanza et Neadarne_. It would const.i.tute (I was going to say a respectable, but as that is hardly the right word, I will say rather) a tolerable volume.

Even in a wider representation _Les Heureux Orphelins_ and _Lettres Atheniennes_ would yield very little.

The first begins sensationally with the discovery, by a young English squire in his own park, of a foundling girl and boy--_not_ of his own production--whom he brings up; and it ends with a tedious description of how somebody founded the first _pet.i.te maison_ in England--a worthy work indeed. It is also noteworthy for a piece of bad manners, which, one regrets to say, French writers have too often committed; lords and ladies of the best known names and t.i.tles in or near Crebillon's own day--such as Oxford, Suffolk, Pembroke--being introduced with the utmost nonchalance.[349] Our novelists have many faults to charge themselves with, and Anthony Trollope, in _The Three Clerks_, produced a Frenchman with perhaps as impossible a name as any English travesty in French literature. But I do not remember any one introducing, in a _not_ historical novel, a Duc de la Tremoille or a member of any of the branches of Rohan, at a time when actual bearers of these t.i.tles existed in France. As for the _Lettres Atheniennes_, if it were not for completeness, I should scarcely even mention them. Alcibiades is the chief male writer; Aspasia the chief female; but all of them, male and female, are equally dest.i.tute of Atticism and of interest. The contrast of the contrasts between Crebillon's and Prevost's best and worst work is one of the oddest things in letters. One wonders how Prevost came to write anything so admirable as _Manon Lescaut_; one wonders how Crebillon came to write anything so insufficient as the two books just criticised, and even others.

It may be said, "This being so, why have you given half a chapter to these two writers, even with Lesage and Marivaux to carry it off?" The reason is that this is (or attempts to be) a history of the French novel, and that, in such a history, the canons of importance are not the same as those of the novel itself. _Gil Blas_, _Marianne_, _Manon Lescaut_, and perhaps even _Le Hasard au Coin du Feu_ are interesting in themselves; but the whole work of their authors is important, and therefore interesting, to the historical student. For these authors carried further--a great deal further--the process of laying the foundations and providing the materials and plant for what was to come.

Of actual masterpieces they only achieved the great, but not _equally_ great, one of _Gil Blas_ and the little one of _Manon Lescaut_. But it is not by masterpieces alone that the world of literature lives in the sense of prolonging its life. One may even say--touching the unclean thing paradox for a moment, and purifying oneself with incense, and salt, and wine--that the masterpieces of literature are more beautiful and memorable and delectable in themselves than fertile in results. They catch up the sum of their own possibilities, and utter it in such a fas.h.i.+on that there is no more to say in that fas.h.i.+on. The dreary imitation _Iliads_, the impossible sham _Divina Commedias_, the Sheridan-Knowles Shakespearian plays, rise up and terrify or bore us.

Whereas these second-rate experimenters, these adventurers in quest of what they themselves hardly know, strike out paths, throw seed, sketch designs which others afterwards pursue, and plant out, and fill up.

There are probably not many persons now who would echo Gray's wish for eternal romances of either Marivaux or Crebillon; and the accompanying remarks in the same letter on _Joseph Andrews_, though they show some appreciation of the best characters, are quite inappreciative of the merit of the novel as a whole. For eternal variations of _Joseph Andrews_, "_Pa.s.se!_" as a French Gray might have said.

Nevertheless, I am myself pretty sure that Marivaux at least helped Richardson and Fielding, and there can be no doubt that Crebillon helped Sterne. And what is more important to our present purpose, they and their companions in this chapter helped the novel in general, and the French novel in particular, to an extent far more considerable. We may not, of course, take the course of literary history--general or particular--which has been, as the course which in any case must have been. But at the same time we cannot neglect the facts. And it is a quite certain fact that, for the whole of the last half of the eighteenth century, and nearly the whole of the first quarter of the nineteenth, the French novel, as a novel, made singularly little progress. We shall have to deal in the next chapter, if not in the next two chapters, with at least two persons of far greater powers than any one mentioned in the last two. But we shall perhaps be able to show cause why even Voltaire and Rousseau, why certainly Diderot, why Marmontel and almost every one else till we come, not in this volume, to Chateaubriand, whose own position is a little doubtful, somehow failed to attain the position of a great advancer of the novel.

These others, whatever their shortcomings, _had_ advanced it by bringing it, in various ways, a great deal nearer to its actual ideal of a completed picture of real human life. Lesage had blended with his representation a good deal of the conventional picaresque; Marivaux had abused preciousness of language and petty psychology; Prevost, save in that marvellous windfall of his and the Muses which the historian of novels can hardly mention without taking off his hat if he has one on, or making his best bow if he has not, had gone wandering after impossible and uninteresting will-o'-the-wisps; Crebillon had done worse than "abide in his inn," he had abided almost always in his polite[350]

bordello. But all of them had meant to be real; and all of them had, if only now and then, to an extent which even Madame de la Fayette had scarcely achieved before, attained reality.

FOOTNOTES:

[309] In fact it has been said, and may be said again, that Lesage is one of the prophets who have never had so much justice done them in their own countries as abroad.

[310] The first part of _Gil Blas_ appeared in 1715; and nearly twenty years later gossip said that the fourth was not ready, though the author had been paid in advance for it six or seven years earlier.

[311] I have never read it in the original, being, though a great admirer of Spanish, but slightly versed therein.

[312] This, which is a sort of Appendix to the _Diable Boiteux_, is much the best of these _opera minora_.

[313] He had a temper of the most _Breton-Bretonnant_ type--not ill-natured but st.u.r.dy and independent, recalcitrant alike to ill-treatment and to patronage. He got on neither at the Bar, his first profession, nor with the regular actors, and he took vengeance in his books on both; while at least one famous anecdote shows his way of treating a patron--indeed, as it happened, a patroness--who presumed.

[314] Asmodeus, according to his usual station in the infernal hierarchy, is _demon de la luxure_: but any fears or hopes which may be aroused by this description, and the circ.u.mstances of the action, will be disappointed. Lesage has plenty of risky situations, but his language is strictly "proper."

[315] Against this may be cited his equally anecdotic acceptance of Regnard, who was also "run" against Moliere. But Regnard was a "cla.s.sic"

and orthodox in his way; Lesage was a free-lance, and even a Romantic before Romanticism. Boileau knew that evil, as evil seemed to him, _had_ come from Spain; he saw more coming in this, and if he antic.i.p.ated more still in the future, 1830 proved him no false prophet.

[316] In other words, there is a unity of personality in the att.i.tude which the hero takes to and in them.

[317] And in it too, of course; as well as in Spain's remarkable but too soon re-enslaved criticism.

[318] As he says of himself (vii. x.): _Enfin, apres un severe examen je tombais d'accord avec moi-meme, que si je n'etais pas un fripon, il ne s'en fallait guere._ And the Duke of Lerma tells him later, "_M. de Santillane, a ce que je vois, vous avez ete tant soit peu_ picaro."