Chapter XI: The Philosophe Novel (3)

[379] His longest, most avowed, and most famous, the _Paradoxe sur le Comedien_, has been worthily Englished by Mr. Walter H. Pollock.

[380] Its heroine, Suzanne Simonin, was, as far as the attempt to relieve herself of her vows went, a real person; and a benevolent nobleman, the Marquis de Croixmare, actually interested himself in this attempt--which failed. But Diderot and his evil angel Grimm got up sham letters between themselves and her patron, which are usually printed with the book.

[381] _Mon pere, je suis damnee_ ... the opening words, and the only ones given, of the confession of the half-mad abbess.

[382] Evangelical Protestantism has more than once adopted the principle that the Devil should not be allowed to have all the best tunes: and I remember in my youth an English religious novel of ultra-anti-Roman purpose, which, though, of course, dropping the "scabrousness," had, as I long afterwards recognised when I came to read _La Religieuse_, almost certainly borrowed a good deal from our most unsaintly Denis of Langres.

[383] She seems to have been, in many ways, far too good for her society, and altogether a lady.--The opinions of the late M. Brunetiere and mine on French literature were often very different--though he was good enough not to disapprove of some of my work on it. But with the terms of his expression of mere opinion one had seldom to quarrel. I must, however, take exception to his attribution of _grossierete_ to _La Religieuse_. Diderot, as has been fully admitted, _was_ too often _grossier_: sometimes when it was almost irrelevant to the subject. But here, "scabrous" as the subject might be, the treatment is scrupulously _not_ coarse. Nor do I think, after intimate and long familiarity with the whole of his work, that he was ever a _faux bonhomme_.

[384] They have hardly had a fair opportunity of comparison with Voltaire's _Dictionnaire Philosophique_; but they can stand it.

[385] Unless Dulaurens' not quite stupid, but formless and discreditable, _Compere Mathieu_ be excepted.

[386] In consequence of which Mr. Ruskin's favourite publisher, the late Mr. George Allen, asked the present writer, some twenty years ago, to revise and "introduce" the old translation of his _Contes Moraux_. The volume had, at least, the advantage of very charming illustrations by Miss Chris. Hammond.

[387] They were even worse than Leigh Hunt's in the strictly English counterpart torture-house for the victims of tyranny--consisting, for instance, in the supply of so good a dinner, at His Most Christian Majesty's expense, for the prisoner's servant, that the prisoner ate it himself, and had afterwards, on the principles of rigid virtue and distributive justice, to resign, to the minion who accompanied him, his own still better one which came later, also supplied by the tyrant.

[388] One expects something of value from the part-contemporary, part-successor of the novelists from Lesage to Rousseau. But where it is not mere blether about virtue and vice, and _le coeur humain_ and so on, it has some of the worst faults of eighteenth-century criticism. He thinks it would have been more "moral" if Mme. de Cleves had actually succumbed as a punishment for her self-reliance (certainly one of the most remarkable topsyturvifications of morality ever crotcheted); is, of course, infinitely shocked at being asked and induced to "interest himself in a prostitute and a card-sharper" by _Manon Lescaut_; and, equally of course, extols Richardson, though it is fair to say that he speaks well of _Tom Jones_.

[389] See next chapter.

[390] I wonder whether any one else has noticed that Thackeray, in the very agreeable illustration to one of not quite his greatest "letterpress" things, _A New Naval Drama_ (Oxford Ed. vol. viii. p. 421), makes the press-gang weep ostentatiously in the picture, though not in the text, where they only wave their cutlasses. It may be merely a coincidence: but it may not.

[391] There are reasons for thinking that Marmontel was deliberately "antidoting the _fanfreluches_" of the older tale-teller.

[392] In the original, suiting the rest of the setting, it is _rideaux_.

[393] "Explanations" is quite admirable, and, I think, neither borrowed from, nor, which is more surprising, by others.

[394] She declares that she has never actually "stooped to folly"; but admits that on more than one occasion it was only an accidental interruption which "luckily" (_heureusement_) saved her.

[395] It is necessary to retain the French here: for our "likes" is ambiguous.

[396] Cf. the stories, contradictory of each other, as to _our_ brown-coated philosopher's appearance in France. (Boswell, p. 322, Globe ed.)

[397] Cf. again the bestowal of this title by Horace Walpole, in his later days, on Edward Jerningham, playwright, poetaster, and _petit maitre_, who, unluckily for himself, lived into the more roughly satirical times of the Revolutionary War.

[398] "The _sylph_ishness of _Le Mari Sylphe_ is only an ingenious and defensible fraud; and the philtre-flasks of _Alcidonis_ are little more than "properties.""

[399] Here is a specimen of his largest and most ambitious production, the _Etudes de la Nature_. "La femelle du tigre, exhalant l'odeur du carnage, fait retentir les solitudes de l'Afrique de ses miaulements affreux, et parait remplie d'attraits a ses cruels amants." By an odd chance, I once saw a real scene contrasting remarkably with Saint-Pierre's sentimental melodrama. It was in the Clifton Zoological Gardens, which, as possibly some readers may know, were at one time regarded as particularly home-like by the larger carnivora. It was a very fine day, and an equally fine young tigress was endeavouring to attract the attention of her cruel lover. She rolled delicately about, like a very large, very pretty, and exceptionally graceful cat; she made fantastic gestures with her paws and tail; and she purred literally "as gently as any sucking dove"--_roucoulement_ was the only word for it. But her "lover," though he certainly looked "cruel" and as if he would very much like to eat _me_, appeared totally indifferent to her attractions.

[400] So, also, when one is told that he called his son Paul and his daughter Virginie, it is cheerful to remember, with a pleasant sense of contrast, Scott's good-humoured contempt for the tourists who wanted to know whether Abbotsford was to be called Tullyveolan or Tillietudlem.

[401] As the story is not now, I believe, the universal school-book it once was, something more than mere allusion may be desirable. The ship in which Virginie is returning to the Isle of France gets into shallows during a hurricane, and is being beaten to pieces close to land. One stalwart sailor, stripped to swim for his life, approaches Virginie, imploring her to strip likewise and let him try to pilot her through the surf. But she (like the lady in the coach, at an early part of _Joseph Andrews_) won't so much as look at a naked man, clasps her arms round her own garments, and is very deservedly drowned. The sailor, to one's great relief, is not.

[402] Julie herself is an intense type rather than individual.

[403] I have not thought it necessary, except in regard to those of them who have been touched in treating of the _Cabinet des Fees_, to speak at any length of the minor tale-tellers of the century. They are sometimes not bad reading; but as a whole minor in almost all senses.