A History of the French Novel

[Sidenote: The peculiarity of the moment.]

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

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

[Sidenote: A political nadir.]

I should imagine that few Frenchmen--despite the almost infinite and sometimes very startling variety of selection which the _laudator temporis acti_ exhibits--look back upon the reign of Louis Philippe as a golden age in any respect but one. Regarding it from the point of view of general politics, the ridiculous change[330] from "King of France" to "King of the French" stamped it at once, finally and hopelessly, as the worst kind of compromise--as a sort of spiritual imitation of the methods of the Triumvirate, where everybody gives up, not exactly his father or his uncle or his brother, but his dearest and most respectable convictions, together with the historical, logical, and sentimental supports of them. The king himself--though certainly no fool, and though hardly to be called an unmitigated knave--was one of those unfortunate persons whose merits do not in the least interest and whose defects do very strongly disgust. Domestically, the reign was a reign, in the other sense, of silly minor revolutions, which, till the end, came to nothing, and then came to something only less absurd than the Russian revolution of the other day, though fortunately less disastrous;[331] of bureaucracy of the corrupt and shabby character which seemed to cling to the whole _regime_; and of remarkable vying between two distinguished men of letters, Guizot and Thiers, as to which should do most to confirm the saying of the wicked that men of letters had much better have nothing to do with politics.[332] Abroad (with the exception of the acquisition of Algeria, which had begun earlier, and which conferred no great honour, though some profit, and a little s.n.a.t.c.hing up of a few loose trifles such as the Society Islands, which we had, according to our custom, carelessly or benevolently left to gleaners), French arms, despite a great deal of brag and swagger, obtained little glory, while French diplomacy let itself wallow in one of the foulest sloughs in history, the matter of the Spanish marriages.

[Sidenote: And almost a literary zenith.]

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

I venture to hope that no great injustice has been done to the previous accomplishments of France in this department as they were surveyed in the last volume. She had been, if not the inventress of Romance, the [Greek: aidoie tamie]--the revered distributress--of it to all nations; she had made the short story her own to such an extent that, in almost all its forms, she had reached and kept mastery of it; and in various isolated instances she had done very important, if not now universally acceptable, work in the practice of the "Heroic." With Rabelais, Lesage, almost Marivaux, certainly, in his one diploma-piece, Prevost, she had contributed persons and things of more or less consummateness to the novel-staff and the novel treasury. But she had never quite reached, as England for two full generations had reached before 1800, the consummate expression of the--_pure_ novel--the story which, not neglecting incident, but as a rule confining itself to the incidents of ordinary life; advancing character to a position at least equal with plot; presenting the manners of its own day, but charging them with essence of humanity in all days; re-creates, for the delectation of readers, a new world of probable, indeed of actual, life through the medium of literature. And she had rarely--except in the fairy-tale and a very few masterpieces like _Manon Lescaut_ again and _La Nouvelle Helose_[333]--achieved what may be called the Romantic or pa.s.sionate novel; while, except in such very imperfect admixtures of the historic element as _La Princesse de Cleves_, she had never attempted, and even in these had never attained, the historical novel proper.

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

[Sidenote: The performance of the time in novel.]

As has been seen, the doing was, if not solely effected between 1830 and 1848, mainly and almost wholly carried out in the second quarter of the century. In the first, only three persons possessing anything like genius--Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stael, and Chateaubriand--had busied themselves with the novel, and they were all strongly charged with eighteenth-century spirit. Indeed, Constant, as we saw in the last volume, though he left pattern and stimulus for the nineteenth and the future generally, really represented the last dying words of that "Sensibility" school which was essentially of the past, though it was undoubtedly necessary to the future. Likewise in Madame de Stael, and still more in Chateaubriand, there was model, stimulus, germ. But they also were, on the whole, of the eve rather than of the morrow. I have indeed sometimes wondered what would have happened if Chateaubriand had gone on writing novels, and had devoted to fiction the talent which he wasted on the _mesquin_[334] politics of the France of his later days and on the interesting but restricted and egotistic _Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_. It is no doubt true that, though old men have often written great poetry and excellent serious prose, n.o.body, so far as I remember, has written a great novel after seventy. For _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, if it be great, is a romance rather than a novel, and a romance which had much better have been poetry. But this is an excursion into the Forbidden Country of the Might-Have-Been. We are concerned with what was.

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

[Sidenote: The _personnel_.]

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

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

[Sidenote: The kinds--the historical novel.]

But while it is not necessary to repeat the favourable estimates already given of individuals, it is almost superfluous to rest the claims of the period to importance in novel history upon them. Elsewhere[336] I have laid some emphatic and reiterated stress on the mischief which has sometimes arisen from too exclusive critical attention to "kinds,"

cla.s.ses, and the like in literature--to the oblivion or obscuring of individual men and works of letters. But as there has been, and I hope will be, no ignoring of individuals here, and as this whole book endeavours to be a history of a kind, remarks on subdivisions of that kind as such can hardly be regarded as inopportune or inconsistent.

[Sidenote: Appearance of new cla.s.ses--the historical.]

Now it is impossible that anybody who is at all inclined or accustomed to think about the characteristics of the pleasure he receives from literature, should not have noticed in this period the fact--beside and outside of the other fact of a provision of delectable novelists--of a great splitting up and (as scientific slang would put it) fissiparous generation of the the cla.s.ses of novel. It is, indeed, open to the advocates or generic or specific criticism--though I think they cannot possibly maintain their position as to poetry--to urge that a great deal of harm was done to the novel, or at least that its development was unnecessarily r.e.t.a.r.ded, by the absence of this division earlier. And in particular they might lay stress on the fortunes and misfortunes of the historical element. That element had at least helped to start--and had largely provided the material of--the earlier verse-romances and stories generally; but the entire absence of criticism at the time had merged it, almost or altogether, in mere fiction. It had played, as we saw, a great part in the novels of the seventeenth century; but it had for the most part merely "got in the way" of its companion ingredients and in its own. I have admitted that there are diversities of opinion as to its value in the _Astree_; but I hold strongly to my own that it would be much better away there. I can hardly think that any one, uninfluenced by the sillier, not the n.o.bler, estimate of the cla.s.sics, can think that the "heroic" novels gain

But this side of the matter is of far less consequence than another.

This historical element of the _historia mixta_[337] was not merely rather a nuisance and quite a superfluity as regarded the whole of the stories in which it appeared; but its presence there and the tricks that had to be played with it prevented the development of the historical novel proper--that, as it has been ticketed, "bodiless childful of life," which waited two thousand years in the ante-natal gloom before it could get itself born. Here, indeed, one may claim--and I suppose no sensible Frenchmen would for a moment hesitate to admit it--that even more than in the case of Richardson's influence nearly a century earlier, help came to their Troy from a Greek city. To France as to England, and to all the world, Scott unlocked the h.o.a.rd of this delightful variety of fict.i.tious literature, though it was not quite at once that she took advantage of the treasury.

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

In order, however, to obviate any possible charge of insular unfairness, it may be well to note that Chateaubriand, though he had never reached (or in all probability attempted to reach) anything of the true Scott kind, had made a great advance in something the same direction, and had indeed to some extent sketched a different variety of historical novel from Scott's own; while, before Scott's death, Victor Hugo imbued the Scott romance itself with intenser doses of pa.s.sion, of the subsidiary interests of art, etc., and of what may be in a way called "theory,"

than Scott had cared for. In fact, the Hugonic romance is a sort of blending of Scott and Byron, with a good deal of the author's country, and still more of himself, added. The connection again between Scott and Dumas is simpler and less blended with other influences; the chief differences should have been already pointed out. But the important thing to notice is that, with a few actual gaps, and several patches which have been more fully worked over and occupied than others, practically the whole of French history from the fourteenth century to, and including, the Revolution was "novelised" by the wand of this second magician.[338]

That the danger of the historical variety was entirely avoided by these its French pract.i.tioners cannot indeed be said. Even Scott had not wholly got the better of it in his less perfect pieces, such, for instance, as those already glanced-at parts of _The Monastery_, where historical _recit_ now and then supplies the place of vigorous novel-action and talk. Dumas' co-operative habits (which are as little to be denied as they are to be exaggerated) lent themselves to it much more freely. But, notwithstanding this, the total accession of pleasure to the novel-reader was immense, and the further possibility of such accession practically unlimited. And accordingly the kind, though sometimes belittled by foolish criticism, and sometimes going out of favour by the vicissitudes of mere fas.h.i.+on, has constantly renewed itself, and is likely to do so. Its special advantages and its special warnings are of some interest to discuss briefly. Among the first may be ranked something which the foolish belittlers above mentioned entirely fail to appreciate, and indeed positively dislike. The danger of the novel of ordinary and contemporary life (which accompanied this and which is to be considered shortly as such) is that there may be so much _mere_ ordinariness and contemporariness that the result may be distasteful, if not sickening, to future ages. This has (to take one example out of many) happened with the novels of so clever a person as Theodore Hook in England, even with comparatively elect judges; with the vulgar it is said to have happened even with such consummate things as those of Miss Austen. With a large number of another sort of vulgar it is said to happen with "Victorian" novels generally, while even the elect sometimes find it difficult to prevent its happening with Edwardian and Fifth Georgian. Now the historical novelist has before him the entire range of the most interesting fas.h.i.+ons, manners, incidents, characters, literary styles of recorded time. He has but to select from this inexhaustible store of general material, and to charge it with sufficient power of humanity of all time, and the thing is done.[339]

Under no circ.u.mstances can the best historical novels ever lose their attraction with the best readers; and as for the others in each kind, who cares what happens to _them_?

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

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

Yet though history has its unaltering laws; though human nature in general is always the same; though that which hath been shall be, and the dreams of new worlds and new societies are the most fatuous of vain imaginations--the details of historical incident vary as much as those of individual character or feature, and the whole of recorded time offers them, more than half ready for use, in something like the same condition as those patterns of work which ladies buy, fill up, and regard as their own. To make an historical novel of the very highest cla.s.s, such as the best of Scott and Thackeray, requires of course very much more than this--to make one of all but the highest cla.s.s, such as _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, requires much more. But that "tolerable pastime," which it is the business of the average novelist to supply at the demand of the average reader, can perhaps be attained more easily, more abundantly, and with better prospect of average satisfaction in the historical way than in any other.

[Sidenote: Other kinds and cla.s.ses.]

[Sidenote: The Novel of Romanticism generally.]

It would, however, of course be an intolerable absurdity to rest the claims of the French novel of 1825 to 1850 wholly--it would be somewhat absurd to rest them mainly--on its performances in this single kind. It found out, continued, or improved many others; and perhaps most of its greatest achievements were in these others. In fact "others" is an incorrect or at least an inexact term; for the historic novel itself is only a subdivision or offshoot of the great literary revolution which we call Romanticism. Indeed the entire novel of the nineteenth century, misapprehend the fact as people may, is in fact Romantic, from the first novel of Chateaubriand to the last of Zola, though the Romanticism is chequered and to a certain extent warped by that invincible French determination towards "Rule" which has vindicated itself so often, and on which shortly we may have to make something almost like an excursus.

But this very fact, if nothing else, would make a discussion of the Romantic novel as such out of place _here_; it will have to come, to some extent at any rate, in the Conclusion itself. Only for the present need it be said, without quite the same danger of meeting with scornful or indignant protest, that all the books..h.i.therto discussed from _Rene_ to _Dominique_, from _Le Solitaire_ to _Monte Cristo_--even the work of Merimee and Sainte-Beuve, those celebrated "apostates" as some would have them to be--is really Romantic. It may follow the more poetical romanticism of Nodier and Hugo, of Gautier and Gerard; the historical romanticism of Vigny and Merimee; the individualism and a.n.a.lysis of Beyle and his disciples; the supernaturalism of George Sand and Nodier again; the adventurous incident of Sue and Soulie and Dumas and the Dumasians generally; it may content itself with that modified form of the great Revolt which admits "low" or "middle" subjects and discards the cla.s.sical theories that a hero ought to be dignified. But always there is something of the general Romantic colour about--something over which M. Nisard has shaken or would have shaken his respectable _perruque_.[342]

So turn we to the other larger group--the largest group of all that come under our survey--the New Ordinary Novel, that which concerns itself with the last shade of his colour just described.

[Sidenote: The "ordinary."]

We had seen, before the beginning of this volume, how Pigault-Lebrun, in vulgar ways and with restricted talent, had nevertheless made distinct advances in this direction; and we saw in the beginning of this how Paul de k.o.c.k--with something of the same limitations but with the advantage of a predecessor in Pigault and of further changes in society towards the normal--improved upon the earlier progression. But Pigault and Paul were thrown into the shade by those writers, younger contemporaries of both, who brought to their task greater genius, better taste, and if not knowledge of better society, at any rate better knowledge how to use their knowledge. Whether Balzac's books can be ticketed _sans phrase_, as "novels of _ordinary_ life," has been, or should have been, duly discussed already. It is certain that, as a rule, they intend to be so.

So it is with at least the majority of George Sand's; so with all those of her first lover and half name-father Sandeau; so with Charles de Bernard; so with some at least of Merimee's best short stories and Musset's, if not exactly of Gautier's; so with others who have had places, and a good many more for whom no place could be found. France, indeed, may be said to have caught up and pa.s.sed England in this kind, between the time when Miss Austen died and that when Thackeray at last did justice to himself with _Vanity Fair_. And this novel of ordinary life has continued, and shows no signs of ceasing, to be the kind most in demand, according to the usual law of "Like to Like." We shall see further developments of it and shall have to exercise careful critical discretion in deciding whether the apparent improvement only means nearer approximation to our own standard of ordinariness, or to a more abstract one. But that it was in these twenty or five and twenty years that something like a norm of ordinariness was first reached, hardly admits of any question. Still, very much question may arise, and must be faced, on the point whether this novel of ordinary life has not redeveloped a _non_-ordinary subdivision, or many such, in the "problem"

novel, the novel of a.n.a.lysis, of abnormal individualism, of theory, naturalist and other, etc. To this we must turn; for at least part of this new question is a very important one, though it may require something of a digression to deal with it properly.

[Sidenote: Discussion on a point of general novel criticism.]

I have in these volumes, rather sedulously--some readers no doubt may think too sedulously--avoided "fighting prizes" on general points of the criticism or novel-theory. Not that I have the slightest objection to fighting "for my own hand" or to seeing or reading about a good fight between others--very much the contrary. I never thought it the worst compliment paid to Englishmen--the Indian opinion of us, as reported by the late M. Darmesteter--that we cared for nothing but fighting, sport, and making love. But the question now to be discussed is so germane to our subject, both general and special; and the discussion of it once for all (with _renvois_ thereto elsewhere) will save so much s.p.a.ce, trouble, and inconvenience, that it may as well be handled at full length.

There was hinted--in a review[343] of the first volume of this work otherwise so complimentary that it must have satisfied the Archbishop of Granada himself--a doubt whether I had given sufficient weight to something which I shall let the reviewer express in his own words;[344]

and whether my admission of Rabelais (of which admission, except on principle, he was himself very glad); my relegation of Laclos to the Condemned Corps; and my comparative toleration of Pigault-Lebrun, did not indicate heresy. Now I feel pretty certain that such a well-wisher would hardly suspect me of doing any of these things by inadvertence; and as I must have gone, and shall still go, much further from what is the right line in his (and no doubt others') opinion, I may as well state my point of view here. It should supply a sort of justificatory comment not merely on the chapters and pa.s.sages just referred to, and others in the last volume, but on a much larger number in this--in fact, after a fas.h.i.+on, to the whole of this. Any difference of it from the normal French view will even help to explain my att.i.tude in those parts of this book (_e.g._ the remarks on Dumas _pere_) to which it does not directly apply, as well as those (_e.g._ on Dumas _fils_) to which it does.

The whole question seems to me to turn on the curiously different estimates which different people make of what const.i.tutes "humanity." To cite another dictum of my friend the enemy, he, while, as I have said, speaking with extraordinary kindness of my chapter on Rabelais in itself, disallows it in a _History of the Novel_ because, among other reasons, Panurge is not, or is very slightly, human. I should have said that Panurge was as human as Hamlet, though certainly not so _gentle_human.[345] I never met either; but I might do so, and I am sure I should recognise both as men and brothers. Still, the comparison here is of course somewhat rhetorical. Let us take Panurge with Laclos'

Valmont, whom, I think, my critic _does_ consider human; whom I am sure I never have met and never shall meet, even if I should be so unfortunate as to go to the place which (but, of course, for the consolations of the Church) would have been his, _if_ he had been human; and whom I never could in the most impossible event or _milieu_ recognise as anything but a synthetised specification. One may perhaps dwell on this, for it is of immense importance to the general question.

Panurge and Valmont, comparatively considered, have beyond doubt points in common. Both are extremely immoral, and both are--though the one only sometimes, the other always--ill-natured. Neither is a fool, though the one does, or is going to do, at least one very foolish thing with his eyes open; while nothing that the other does--even his provocation of Madame de Merteuil--can be said to be exactly "foolish." Both are attempts to do what Thackeray said he attempted to do in most of the characters of _Vanity Fair_--to draw people "living without G.o.d in the world." Yet I can tolerate Panurge, and recognise him as human even when he indirectly murders Dindenault, even when (which is worse) he behaves so atrociously to the Lady of Paris; and I cannot tolerate or validate Valmont even when he excogitates and puts in practice that very ingenious and picturesque idea of a writing-desk, or when he seeks the consolations and fortifications of the Church after Danceny has done on him the first part of the judgment of G.o.d. And I think I can give reasons, both for my intolerance and for my toleration, "rightly and in mine own division."

The reason why I think that Panurge is rightly and Valmont wrongly "copied or re-created" is that Panurge is made at the hazard of the artist, Valmont according to prescription. There might be--there have been--fifty or a hundred Valmonts, the prescription being followed, and slightly--still remaining a prescription--altered. There is and can be only one Panurge. This difference reminds me of, and may be ill.u.s.trated by, a fact which, in one form or another, must be familiar to many people. I was once talking to a lady who had just come over from China, and who wore a dress of soft figured silk of the most perfect love-in-a-mist colour-shade which I had ever seen, even in turning over the wonder-drawers at Liberty's. I asked her if (for she then intended to go back almost at once) she could get me any like it. "No," she said, "at least not exactly. They never make two pieces of just the same shade, and in fact they couldn't if they tried. They take handfuls of different dyes, measured and mixed, as it seems, at random." Now that is the way G.o.d and, in a lesser degree, the great artists work, and the result is living creatures, according to the limitations of artistic and the no-limitations of natural life. The others weigh out a dram of l.u.s.t, a scruple of cleverness, an ounce of malice, half an ounce of superficial good manners, etc., and say, "Here is a character for you.

Type No. 12345." And it is not a living creature at all. But, having been made by regular synthesis,[346] it can be regularly a.n.a.lysed, and people say, "Oh, how clever he is." The first product, having grown rather than been made, defies a.n.a.lysis, and they say, "How commonplace!"

One can perhaps lay out the ropes of the ring of combat most satisfactorily and fairly by using the distinction of the reviewer (if I do not misunderstand him), that I have neglected the interval between "to copy" and "to re-create." I accept this dependence, which may perhaps be ill.u.s.trated further from that (in itself) foolish and vulgar boast of Edmond de Goncourt's that his and his brother's epithets were "personal" while Flaubert's were only "admirably good specimens of the epithets of _tout le monde_."

To translate: Should the novelist aim, by _mimesis_--it is a misfortune which I have lamented over and over again in print that "Imitation" and "Copying" are such misleading versions of this--of actual characters, to evolve a personality which will be recognised by all competent observers as somebody whom he has actually met or might have met? Or should he, trusting to his own personal powers of putting together qualities and traits, but more or less neglecting the patterns which the Almighty has put before him in _tout le monde_--sometimes also regarding conventional types and "academies"--either (for this is important) to follow or violently _not_ to follow them--produce something that owes _its_ personality to himself only? The former has been the aim of the great English novelists since Fielding, if not since Richardson[347] or even Defoe. It was the aim of Lesage: he has told us so in so many words. It is by no means alien from that of Marivaux, though he did not pursue it with a single eye; and the same may be said even of Crebillon. Whether Prevost aimed at it or not, he hit the white in _Manon_ as certainly and unmistakably as he lost his arrows elsewhere. Rousseau both did it and meant it in the first part of _Julie_. Pigault, in a clumsy, botcherly fas.h.i.+on, made "outers" not infrequently. But Laclos seems to me to have (as his in some sense follower Dumas _fils_ has it in the pa.s.sage noted above) "proceeded by synthesis"--to have said, "Let us make a mischievous Marquise and a vile Viscount. Let us deprive them of every amiable quality and of every one that can be called in any sense 'good,'

except a certain kind of intellectual ability, and, in the Viscount's case, an ingenious fancy in the matter of extemporising writing-desks."

And he did it; and then the people who think that because (to adopt the language of George de Barnwell) "the True is not always the Beautiful"

the Ugly must always be the True, hail him as a master.[348]

That this half-digression, half-dilemma, is prospective as well as retrospective will hardly form a subject of objection for any one but a mere fault-finder. From the top of a watershed you necessarily survey both slopes. The tendency which we have been discussing is certainly more prevalent in the second half of the century than in the first half.

It is prominent in Dumas _fils_, with whom we shall be dealing shortly; it increases as time goes on; and it becomes almost paramount in the practice of and the discussions about the Naturalist School. In the time on which we look back it is certainly important in Beyle and Balzac. But I cannot admit that it is predominant elsewhere, and I am prepared to deny utterly that, until the time of the Sensibility and _Philosophe_ novels, it is even a notable characteristic of French fiction. Many hard things have been said of criticism; but, acknowledging the badness of a bird who even admits any foulness in his own nest--far more in one who causes it--I am bound to say that I think the state of the department of literature now under discussion was happier before we meddled with it.

Offence must come; it would even be sometimes rather a pity if it didn't come: but perhaps the old saying is true in the case of those by whom some kinds of it come. If criticism and creation could be kept as separate as some creators pridefully pretend, it would not matter. And the best critics never attempt to show how things should be done, but merely to point out how they have been done--well or badly. But when men begin to write according to criticism, they generally begin to write badly, just as when women begin to dress themselves according to fas.h.i.+on-mongers they usually begin (or would but for the grace of G.o.d) to look ugly. And there are some mistakes which appear to be absolutely incorrigible. When I was a Professor of Literature I used to say every year in so many words, as I had previously written for more than as many years, when I was only a critic of it, "I do not wish to teach you how to write. I wish to teach you how to read, and to tell you what there is to read." The same is my wish in regard to the French Novel. What has been done in it--not what these, even the pract.i.tioners themselves, have said of it--is the burden of my possibly unmusical song.