Chapter IX: The Seventeenth-Century Novel--Ii (3)

[251] The _Berger_ fills two volumes of some nine hundred pages; _Polyandre_, two of six hundred each! But it must be admitted that the print is very large and widely spaced.

[252] One remembers the story of the greater Corneille calling to the lesser down a trap between their two houses, "Sans-Souci!--une rime!"

[253] I have known this word more than once objected to as pedantic. But pedantry in this kind consists in using out-of-the-way terms when common ones are ready to hand. There is no single word in English to express the lower kind of "Dutch-painting" as this Greek word does. And Greek is a recognised and standing source of words for English. If geography, why not rhyparography?--or, if any one prefers it, "rhypography," which, however, is not, I think, so good a form.

[254] There is, no doubt, significance in the fact that they are definitely called _nouvelles_.

[255] _V. sup._ p. 204. The habit of these continues in all the books. _L'Illustre Bassa_ opens with a most elaborate, but still not very much "alive," procession and sham fight.

[256] Of course Cervantes is not shadowy.

[257] As far as mere chronology goes, Cyrano, _v. inf._, should come between; but it would split the parallel.

[258] Scarron had, in Le Destin's account of himself, made a distinction between the pastoral and heroic groups and the "old" romances, meaning thereby not the true mediaeval specimens but the _Amadis_ cycle. Furetiere definitely classes all of them together.

[259] The time is well known to have been fond of anagrams, and "Charroselles" is such an obvious one for "Charles Sorel" that for once there is no need to gainsay or neglect the interpreters. The thing, if really meant for a real person, is a distinct lampoon, and may perhaps explain the expulsion and persecution of Furetiere, by his colleagues of the Academy, almost as well as the ostensible cause thereof--his compiling, in competition with the Academy itself, of a French Dictionary, and a very good one, which was not printed till after his death, and ultimately became the famous _Dictionnaire de Trevoux_. Not that Sorel himself was of much importance, but that the thing shows the irritable and irritating literary failing in the highest degree. Furetiere had friends of position, from Boileau, Racine, and Bossuet downwards; and the king himself, though he did not interfere, seems to have disapproved the Academy's action. But the _Roman_ was heavily "slated" for many years, though it had a curious revival in the earlier part of the next century; and for the rest of that century and the first part of the nineteenth it was almost wholly forgotten.

[260] She falls in love with an ebony cabinet at a fair which they visit together, and he gives it her. But, anticipating that she will use it for her most precious things, he privately gets a second set of keys from the seller, and in her absence achieves the theft of the promise.

[261] Any one who has, as the present writer has had, opportunities of actually doing this, will find it a not uninteresting operation, and one which "amply repays the expense" of time and trouble.

[262] This is a point of importance. Details of a life-like character are most valuable in the novel; but if they are not "material" in the transferred sense they are simply a bore. Scott undoubtedly learnt this lesson from his prentice work in finishing Strutt's _Queenhoo Hall_, where the story is simply a clumsy vehicle for conveying information about sports and pastimes and costumes and such-like "antiqu_ar_ities."

[263] To us small, as are not those of its predecessors.

[264] Not a bad instance of the subacid touches which make the book lively, and which probably supply some explanation of its author's unpopularity. The "furred law-cats" of all kinds were always a prevailing party in Old France, and required stout gloves to touch them with.

[265] This (often called by its Italian name of Quarant' ore) is a "Devotion" during an exposure of the Sacrament for that time, in memory of the interval between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Our Lord. It is a public service, and, I suppose, collections were made _at intervals_. No one, especially no girl, could stand the time straight through. The "Paradise" was, of course, a "decoration."

[266] Javotte says "shoe the mule"--"ferrer la mule"--one of the phrases like "faire danser l'anse du panier" and others, for taking "self-presented testimonials," as Wilkie Collins's Captain Wragge more elegantly and less cryptically calls it.

[267] Of course the regular "thanks" of a collector for pious purposes.

[268] He does later seek this, and only loses her (if she can be called a loss) by his own folly. But his main objective is to _conter_ (or as Furetiere himself has it, _debiter_) _la fleurette_. It ought, perhaps, to be mentioned, as a possible counterweight or drawback, that the novelist breaks off to discuss the too great matter-of-factness of bourgeois girls and women. But he was to have great followers in this also.

[269] He was born and baptised Savinien de Cyrano, and called himself de Cyrano-Bergerac. The sound of the additional designation and some of his legendary peculiarities probably led to his being taken for a Gascon; but there is no evidence of meridional extraction or seat, and there appears to be some of Breton or other Western connection.

[270] There is nothing in the least astonishing in his having been this--if he was. The tendency of the Renaissance towards what is called "free thought" is quite well known; and the existence, in the seventeenth century, of a sort of school of boisterous and rather vulgar infidelity is familiar--with the names of Bardouville, and Saint-Ibal or Saint-Ibar, as members of it--to all readers of Saint-Evremond, Tallemant, the _Ana_, etc.

[271] Perhaps the dullest part is where (save the mark!) the Demon of Socrates is brought in to talk sometimes mere platitudes, sometimes tame paradoxes which might as well be put in the mouth of any pupil-teacher, or any popular journalist or dramatist, of the present day.--Of the attempt to make Swift Cyrano's debtor one need say little: but among predecessors, if not creditors, Ben Jonson, for his _News from the New World discovered in the Moon_, may at least be mentioned.

[272] The key-mongers, of course, identify the three with the author, her own husband, and La Rochefoucauld.

[273] He has ensconced himself in one of the smaller rooms of a garden pavilion outside of which they are sitting, having left their suite at some distance.

[274] _Maitresse de sa conduite_, a curious but not difficult text as to French ideas of marriage.

[275] I have been obliged to insert "trials" to bring out the meaning of "_exposee au milieu_." "_Exposee_" has a fuller sense than the simple English verb, and almost equals the legal "exposed for sale."

[276] Mme. de la Fayette was a very accomplished woman, and, possibly from her familiarity with Queen Henrietta Maria, well acquainted with English as well as French history. But our proper names, as usual, vanquish her, and she makes Henry VIII. marry Jane _Seimer_ and Catherine _Havart_.

[277] This does not apply to the _main_ love story but to the atmosphere generally. The Vidame de Chartres, for instance, is represented as in love with (1) Queen Catherine; (2) a Mme. de Themines, with whom he is not quite satisfied; (3) a Mme. de Martignes, with whom he is; (4) a lady unnamed, with whom he has _trompe_ them all. This may be true enough to life; but it is difficult to make it into good matter of fiction, especially with a crowd of other people doing much the same.

[278] It ought, perhaps, to be added that though manners, etc., altered not a little between Henri II. and Louis XIV., the alteration was much less than in most other histories at most other periods. It would be easy to find two persons in Tallemant whose actual experience covered the whole time.

[279] You _had_ to call it so when I first saw it; when I last did so it was "Oiron." No doubt it is something else now.

[280] For that, see Chapter XII.

[281] See below on the version Introduction to the _Quatre Facardins_.

[282] Including miscellaneous imbecility and unsuitableness as well as moral indecorum.

[283] Written for the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1882, but by a chapter of accidents not printed till 1890. Reprinted next year in _Essays on French Novelists_ (London, 1891).

[284] Miss Ruth Clark.

[285] The conclusion of _Vathek_ is of course undoubtedly more "admirable" than anything of Hamilton's; but it is in a quite different genus.

[286] The piece _Celle que j'adore_ is the best of the casual verses, though there are other good songs, etc. Those which alternate with the prose of some of the tales are too often (as in the case of the _Cabinet_ insets, _v. sup._) rather prosaic. Of the prose miscellanies the so-called _Relations_ "of different places in Europe," and "of a voyage to Mauritania," contain some of the cream of Hamilton's almost uniquely ironic narrative and commentary. When that great book, "The Nature and History of Irony," which has to be written is written--the last man died with the last century and the next hour seems far off--a contrast of Hamilton and Kinglake will probably form part of it.

[287] As a member, though a cadet, of a cadet branch of one of the noblest families of Great Britain and Ireland.

[288] As a soldier, a courtier of Charles II., and a Jacobite exile in France.

[289] I may perhaps be allowed to refer to another essay of mine on him in _Miscellaneous Essays_ (London, 1892). It contains a full account, and some translation, of the _Conversation du marechal d'Hocquincourt avec le Pere Canaye_, which is at once the author's masterpiece of quiet irony, his greatest pattern for the novelist, and his clearest evidence of influence on Hamilton.

[290] There are some who hold that _the_ "English" differentia, whether shown in letters or in life, whether south or north of Tweed, east or west of St. George's Channel is always Anglo-Norman.

[291] The "Marian" and Roman comparison of Anne Boleyn's position to Rosamond's is interesting.

[292] It is a sort of brief lift and drop of the curtain which still concealed the true historical novel; it has even got a further literary interest as giving the seamy side of the texture of Macaulay's admirable _Jacobite's Epitaph_. The account would be rather out of place here, but may be found translated at length (pp. 44-46) in the volume of _Essays on French Novelists_ more than once referred to.

[293] The most unexpected bathos of these last three words is of course intentional, and is Hamilton all over.

[294] The nymph is lying on a couch, and her companion (who has been recalcitrant even to this politeness) is sitting beside her.

[295] This is as impudent as the other passages below are imbecile--of course in each case (as before) with a calculated impudence and imbecility. The miserable creature had himself obliged her to "come out of the water" by declining to join her there on the plea that he was never good for an assignation when he was wet!

[296] If they are true, and if Madame de Grammont was the culprit, it is a sad confirmation of the old gibe, "Skittish in youth, prudish in age." It can only be pleaded in extenuation that some youth which was not skittish, such as Sarah Marlborough's, matured or turned into something worse than "devotion." And Elizabeth Hamilton was so very pretty!

[297] "Completions" of both _Zeneyde_ and _Les Quatre Facardins_, by the Duke de Levis, are included in some editions, but they are, after the fashions of such things, very little good.

[298] The name is not, like "Tarare," a direct burlesque; but it suggests a burlesque intention when taken with "facond" and others including, perhaps, even _faquin_.

[299] The Sultaness is almost _persona muta_--and indeed her tongue must have required a rest.

[300] As Hamilton's satiric intention is as sleepless as poor Princess Mousseline herself, it is not impossible that he remembered the incident recorded by Pepys, or somebody, how King Charles the Second could not get a sheet of letter paper to write on for all the Royal Households and Stationery Offices and such-like things in the English world.

[301] _I.e._ colour-printed cotton from India--a novelty "fashionable" and, therefore, satirisable in France.

[302] Or "distaffs and spindles"?

[303] She is indeed said to have "converted" both him and Grammont, the latter perhaps the most remarkable achievement of its kind.

[304] Mr. Austin Dobson's charming translation of this was originally intended to appear in the present writer's essay above mentioned.

[305] The chief region of bookselling. Cf. Corneille's early comedy, _La Galerie du Palais_.

[306] For note on _Telemaque_ see end of chapter.

[307] Who is here herself an improved Doralise.

[308] To put it otherwise in technical French, there is a little _grivoiserie_ in him, but absolutely no _polissonnerie_, still less any _cochonnerie_. Or it may be put, best of all, in his own words when, in a short French-Greek dialogue, called _La Volupte_, he makes Aspasia say to Agathon, "Je vous crois fort voluptueux, sans vous croire debauche."