Chapter XII (2)

In the first place, there is no vulgarity in Restif. If he had had a more regular education and society, literary or other, and could have kept his mind, which was to a certainty slightly unhinged, off the continual obsession of morbid subjects, he might have been a very considerable man of letters, and he is no mean one, so far as style goes,[419] as it is. He avails himself duly of the obscurity of a learned language when he has to use (which is regrettably often) words that do not appear in the dictionary of the Academy: and there is not the slightest evidence of his having taken to pornography for money, as Louvet and Laclos--as, one must regretfully add, Diderot, if not even Crebillon--certainly did. When a certain subject, or group of subjects, gets hold of a man--especially one of those whom a rather celebrated French lady called _les cerebraux_--he can think of nothing else: and though this is not absolutely true of Restif (for he had several minor crazes), it is very nearly true of him, and perhaps more true than of any one else who can be called a man of letters.

Probably no one has read all he wrote;[420] even the late M. Assezat, who knew more about him than anybody else, does not, I think, pretend to have done so. He was himself a printer, and therefore found exceptional means of getting the mischief, which his by no means idle hands found to do, into publicity of a kind, though even their subject does not seem to have made his books popular.[421] His largest work, _Les Contemporaines_, is in forty-two volumes, and contains some three hundred different sections, reminding one vaguely, though the differences in detail are very great, of Amory's plan, at least, for the _Memoirs of Several Ladies_. His most remarkable by far, the quasi-autobiographical _Monsieur Nicolas_,[422] in fourteen. He could write with positive moral purpose, as in the protest against _Le Paysan Parvenu_, above referred to; in _La Vie de Mon Pere_ (a book agreeably free from any variety of that sin of Ham which some biographical writings of sons about their fathers display); and in the unpleasantly titled _Pornographe_, which is also morally intended, and dull enough to be as moral as Mrs. Trimmer or Dr. Forsyth.

Indeed, this moral intention, so often idly and offensively put forward by those who are themselves mere pornographers, pervades Restif throughout, and, while it certainly sometimes does carry dulness with it, undoubtedly contributes at others a kind of piquancy, because of its evident sincerity, and the quaint contrast with the subjects the author is handling. These subjects make explicit dealing with himself difficult, if not impossible: but his _differentia_ as regards them may, with the aid of a little dexterity, be put without offence. In the first place, as regards the comparison with Rousseau, Restif is almost a gentleman: and he could not possibly have been guilty of Rousseau's blackguard tale-telling in the cases of Madame de Warens (or, as I believe, we are now told to spell it "Vuarrens") or Madame de Larnage. The way in which he speaks of his one idealised mistress, Madame "Parangon," is almost romantic. He is, indeed, savage in respect to his wife--whom he seems to have married in a sort of _clairvoyant_ mixture of knowledge of her evil nature and fascination by her personal charms and allurements, though he had had no difficulty in enjoying these without marriage. But into none other of his scores and hundreds of actual loves in some cases and at least passing intimacies in others,[423] does he ever appear to have taken either the Restoration and Regency tone on the one hand, or that of "sickly sentimentality" on the other. Against commerce for money he lifts up his testimony unceasingly; he has, as his one editor has put it, a _manie de paternite_, and denounces any vice disconnected with it. With the privileges of Solomon or Haroun al Raschid, Restif would have been perfectly contented: and he never would have availed himself of that of Schahriar before the two divine sisters put a stop to it.

All this, however, strictly speaking, is outside our present subject, and is merely intended as a sort of excuse for the introduction of a writer who has been unfairly ostracised, not as a passport for Restif to the young person. But his actual qualities as tale-teller are very remarkable. The second title of _Monsieur Nicolas_--_Le Coeur Humain Devoile_--ambitious as it is, is not fatuous. It is a human heart in a singularly morbid condition which is unveiled: but as, if I remember rightly, either Goethe or Schiller, or both, saw and said near the time, there is no charlatanery about the unveiling, and no bungling about the autopsy. Restif has been compared, and not unfairly, to Defoe, as well as to Rousseau; in a certain way he may be likened to Pepys; and all four share an intense and unaffected reality, combined, however, in the Frenchman's case with a sort of exaggeration of a dreamy kind, and with other dream-character, which reminds one of Borrow, and even of De Quincey. His absolute shamelessness is less unconnected with this dream-quality than may at first appear, and, as in all such cases, is made much less offensive by it. Could he ever have taken holiday from his day-long and night-long devotion to

Cotytto or Venus
Astarte or Ashtoreth,

he might have been a most remarkable novelist, and as it is his _mere_ narrative faculty is such as by no means every novelist possesses. Moreover, he counts, once more, in the advance towards real things in fiction. "A pretty kind of reality!" cries Mrs. Grundy. But the real is not always the pretty, and the pretty is not always the real.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Pigault-Lebrun--the difference of his positive and relative importance.]

There is also a good deal that is curious, as well as many things that are disgusting, for the student of the novel in Pigault-Lebrun.[424] In the first place, one is constantly reminded of that redeeming point which the benevolent Joe Gargery found in Mr. Pumblechook--

And, wotsume'er the failings on his part,
He were a corn-and-seedsman in his hart.

If Pigault cannot exactly be said to have been a good novelist, he "were" a novelist "in his hart." Beside his _polissonneries_, his frequent dulness, his singular gropings and failures at anything like good novelist _faire_, one constantly finds what might be pedantically and barbarously called a "novelistic velleity." His much too ambitiously titled _Melanges Litteraires_ turn to stories, though stories touched with the _polisson_ brush. His _Nouvelles_ testify at least to his ambition and his industry in the craft of fiction. "Je ne suis pas Voltaire," he says somewhere, in reference, I think, to his plays, not his tales. He most certainly is not; neither is he Marmontel, as far as the tale is concerned. But as for the longer novel, in a blind and blundering way, constantly trapped and hindered by his want of genius and his want of taste, by his literary ill-breeding and other faults, he seems to have more of a "glimmering" of the real business than they have, or than any other Frenchman had before him.

[Sidenote: His general characteristics.]

Pigault-Lebrun[425] spent nearly half of his long life in the nineteenth century, and did not die till Scott was dead in England, and the great series of novel-romances had begun, with Hugo and others, in France. But he was a man of nearly fifty in 1800, and the character of his work, except in one all-important point, or group of points, is thoroughly of the eighteenth, while even the excepted characteristics are of a more really transitional kind than anything in Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, whom we have postponed, as well as in Constant and Xavier de Maistre, whom we have admitted. He has no high reputation in literature, and, except from our own special point of view, he does not deserve even a demi-reputation. Although he is not deliberately pornographic, he is exceedingly coarse, with a great deal of the nastiness which is not even naughty, but nastiness pure and simple. There is, in fact, and in more ways than one, something in him of an extremely inferior Smollett. Comparing him with his elder contemporary, Restif de la Bretonne, he is vulgar, which Restif never is. Passing to more purely literary matters, it would be difficult, from the side of literature as an art--I do not say as a craft--to say anything for him whatever. His style[426] is, I should suppose (for I think no foreigner has any business to do more than "suppose" in that matter), simply wretched; he has sentences as long as Milton's or Clarendon's or Mr. Ruskin's, not merely without the grandeur of the first, the beauty of the last, and the weighty sense of the second, but lacking any flash of graceful, pithy, or witty phrase; character of the model-theatre and cut-out paper kind; a mere accumulation of incidents instead of a plot; hardly an attempt at dialogue, and, where description is attempted at all, utter ineffectiveness or sheer rhyparography.[427]

It is a fair _riposte_ to the last paragraph to ask, "Then why do you drag him in here at all?" But the counter-parry is easy. The excepted points above supply it. With all his faults--admitting, too, that every generation since his time has supplied some, and most much better, examples of his kind--the fact remains that he was the first considerable representative, in his own country, of that variety of professional novelist who can spin yarns, of the sort that his audience or public[428] wants, with unwearied industry, in great volume, and of a quality which, such as it is, does not vary very much. He is, in short, the first notable French novelist-tradesman--the first who gives us notice that novel-production is established as a business. There is even a little more than this to be said for him. He has really made considerable progress, if we compare him with his predecessors and contemporaries, in the direction of the novel of ordinary life, as that life was in his own day. There are extravagances of course, but they are scarcely flagrant. His atmosphere is what the cooks, housemaids, footmen, what the grocers and small- or middle-class persons who, I suppose, chiefly read him, were, or would have liked to be, accustomed to. His scene is not a paradise in either the common or the Greek sense; it is a sort of cabbage-garden, with a cabbage-garden's lack of beauty, of exquisiteness in any form, with its presence of untidiness, and sometimes of evil odour, but with its own usefulness, and with a cultivator of the most sedulous. Pigault-Lebrun, for France, may be said to be the first author-in-chief of the circulating library. It may not be a position of exceeding honour; but it is certainly one which gives him a place in the story of the novel, and which justifies not merely these general remarks on him, but some analysis (not too abundant) of his particular works. As for translating him, a Frenchman might as well spend his time in translating the English newspaper _feuilletons_ of "family" papers in the earlier and middle nineteenth century. Indeed that _Minnigrey_, which I remember reading as a boy, and which long afterwards my friend, the late Mr. Henley, used to extol as one of the masterpieces of literature, is worth all Pigault put together and a great deal more.

[Sidenote: _L'Enfant du Carnaval and Les Barons de Felsheim._]

The worst of it is, that to be amused by him--to be, except as a student, even interested in a large part of his work--you must be almost as ill-bred in literature as he himself is. He is like a person who has had before him no models for imitation or avoidance in behaviour: and this is where his successor, Paul de Kock, by the mere fact of being his successor, had a great advantage over him. But to the student he _is_ interesting, and the interest has nothing factitious in it, and nothing to be ashamed of. There is something almost pathetic in his struggles to master his art: and his frequent remonstrances with critics and readers appear to show a genuine consciousness of his state, which is not always the case with such things.

The book which stands first in his Works, _L'Enfant du Carnaval_, starts with an ultra-Smollettian[429] passage of coarseness, and relapses now and then. The body of it--occupied with the history of a base-born child, who tumbles into the good graces of a Milord and his little daughter, is named by them "Happy," and becomes first the girl's lover and then her husband--is a heap of extravagances, which, nevertheless, bring the picaresque pattern, from which they are in part evidently traced, to a point, not of course anywhere approaching in genius _Don Quixote_ or _Gil Blas_, but somehow or other a good deal nearer general modern life. _Les Barons de Felsheim_, which succeeds it, seems to have taken its origin from a suggestion of the opening of _Candide_, and continues with a still wilder series of adventures, satirising German ways, but to some extent perhaps inspired by German literature. Very commonly Pigault falls into a sort of burlesque melodramatic style, with frequent interludes of horse-play, resembling that of the ineffably dreary persons who knock each others' hats off on the music-hall stage. There is even something dreamlike about him, though of a very low order of dream; he has at any rate the dream-habit of constantly attempting something and finding that he cannot bring it off.

At the close of one of his most extravagant, most indecent, and stupidest novels, _La Folie Espagnole_--a supposed tale of chivalry, which of course shows utter ignorance of time, place, and circumstance, and is, in fact, only a sort of travestied _Gil Blas_, with a rank infusion of further vulgarised Voltairianism[430]--the author has a rather curious note to the reader, whom he imagines (with considerable probability) to be throwing the book away with a suggested cry of "Quelles miseres! quel fatras!" He had, he says, previously offered _Angelique et Jeanneton_, a little work of a very different kind, and the public would neither buy nor read it. His publisher complained, and he must try to please. As for _La Folie_, everybody, including his cook, can understand _this_. One remembers similar expostulations from more respectable authors; but it is quite certain that Pigault-Lebrun--a Lebrun so different from his contemporary "Pindare" of that name--thoroughly meant what he said. He was drawing a bow, always at a venture, with no higher aim than to hit his public, and he did hit it oftener than he missed. So much the worse, perhaps, both for him and for his public; but the fact is a fact, and it is in the observation and correlation of facts that history consists.

[Sidenote: _Angelique et Jeanneton._]

_Angelique et Jeanneton_ itself, as might be expected from the above reference, is, among its author's works, something like _Le Reve_ among Zola's; it is his endeavour to be strictly proper. But, as it is also one of his most Sternian exercises, the propriety is chequered. It begins in sufficiently startling fashion; a single gentleman of easy fortune and amiable disposition, putting his latchkey in the door of his chambers one night, is touched and accosted by an interesting young person with an "argentine" voice. This may look _louche_; but the silvery accents appeal only for relief of needs, which, as it shortly appears, are those most properly to be supplied by a maternity hospital. It is to be understood that the suppliant is an entire stranger to the hero. He behaves in the most amiable and, indeed, noble fashion, instals her in his rooms, turns himself and his servant out to the nearest hotel, fetches the proper ministress, and, not content with this Good Samaritanism, effects a legitimate union between Jeanneton and her lover, half gives and half procures them a comfortable maintenance, resists temptation of repayment (_not_ in coin) on more than one occasion, and sets out, on foot, to Caudebec, to see about a heritage which has come to Jeanneton's husband. On the way he falls in with Angelique (a lady this time), falls also in love with her, and marries her. The later part of the story, as is rather the way with Pigault, becomes more "accidented." There are violent scenes, jealousies, not surprising, between the two heroines, etc. But the motto-title of Marmontel's _Heureusement_ governs all, and the end is peace, though not without some spots in its sun. That the public of 1799 did not like the book and did like _La Folie Espagnole_ is not surprising; but the bearing of this double attempt on the growth of novel-writing as a regular craft is important.

[Sidenote: _Mon Oncle Thomas._]

Perhaps on the whole _Mon Oncle Thomas_, which seems to have been one of the most popular, is also one of the most representative, if not the best, of Pigault-Lebrun's novels. Its opening, and not its opening only, is indeed full of that mere nastiness which we, with Smollett and others to our _dis_credit, cannot disclaim for our own parallel period, and which was much worse among the French, who have a choice selection of epithets for it. But the fortunes of the youthful Thomas--child of a prostitute of the lowest class, though a very good mother, who afterwards marries a miserly and ruffianly corporal of police--are told with a good deal of spirit--one even thinks of _Colonel Jack_--and the author shows his curious vulgar common sense, and his knowledge of human nature of a certain kind, pretty frequently, at least in the earlier part of the book.

[Sidenote: _Jerome._]

_Jerome_ is another of Pigault's favourite studies of boys--distinctly blackguard boys as a rule--from their mischievous, or, as the early English eighteenth century would have put it, "unlucky" childhood, to their most undeserved reward with a good and pretty wife (whom one sincerely pities), and more or less of a fortune. There is, however, more vigour in _Jerome_ than in most, and, if one has the knack of "combing out" the silly and stale Voltairianism, and paying little attention to the far from exciting sculduddery, the book may be read. It contains, in particular, one of the most finished of its author's sketches, of a type which he really did something to introduce into his country's literature--that of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic _routier_ or professional soldier--brave as you like, and--at least at some times when neither drunk nor under the influence of the garden god--not ungenerous; with a certain simplicity too: but as braggart as he is brave; a mere brute beast as regards the other sex; utterly ignorant, save of military matters, and in fact a kind of caricature of the older type, which the innocent Rymer was so wrath with Shakespeare for neglecting in Iago.

[Sidenote: The redeeming points of these.]

It may seem that too much space is being given to a reprobate and often dull author; but something has been said already to rebut the complaint, and something more may be added now and again. French literature, from the death of Chenier to the appearance of Lamartine, has generally been held to contain hardly more than two names--those of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael--which can even "seem to be" those of "pillars"; and it may appear fantastic and almost insulting to mention one, who in long stretches of his work might almost be called a mere muckheap-raker, in company with them. Yet, in respect to the progress of his own department, it may be doubted whether he is not even more than their equal. _Rene_ and _Corinne_ contain great suggestions, but they are suggestions rather for literature generally than for the novel proper. Pigault used the improperest materials; he lacked not merely taste, but that humour which sometimes excuses taste's absence; power of creating real character, decency almost always, sense very often.[431] But all the same, he made the novel _march_, as it had not marched, save in isolated instances of genius, before.

[Sidenote: Others--_Adelaide de Meran_ and _Tableaux de Societe_.]

[Sidenote: _L'Officieux._]

Yet Pigault could hardly have deserved even the very modified praise which has been given to him, if he had been constant to the muckheap. He could never quite help approaching it now and then; but as time went on and the Empire substituted a sort of modified decency for the Feasts of Republican Reason and ribaldry, he tried things less uncomely. _Adelaide de Meran_ (his longest single book), _Tableaux de Societe_, _L'Officieux_, and others, are of this class; and without presenting a single masterpiece in their own kind, they all, more or less, give evidence of that advance in the kind generally with which their author has been credited. _Adelaide_ is very strongly reminiscent of Richardson, and more than reminiscent of "Sensibility"; it is written in letters--though all by and to the same persons, except a few extracts--and there is no individuality of character. Pigault, it has been said, never has any, though he has some of type. But by exercising the most violent constraint upon himself, he indulges only in one rape (though there have been narrow escapes before), in not more than two or three questionable incidents, and in practically no "improper" details--conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and self-denial. Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad and rickety one; the indefinable _naturaleza_ is present in it after a strange fashion. There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named _Tableaux de Societe_--the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de Francheville, who, somewhat originally for a French heroine, starts by being in the most frantic state of mutual passion with her husband, though this is soon to be succeeded by an infatuation (for some time virtuously resisted) on her side for a handsome young naval officer, and by several others (not at all virtuously resisted) for divers ladies on the husband's. With his usual unskilfulness in managing character, Pigault makes very little of the opportunities given by his heroine's almost unconscious transference of her affections to Sainte-Luce; while he turns the uxorious husband, not out of jealousy merely, into a faithless one, and something like a general ruffian, after a very clumsy and "unconvincing" fashion. As for his throwing in, at the end, another fatal passion on part of their daughter for her mother's lover, it is, though managed with what is for the author, perfect cleanliness, entirely robbed of its always doubtful effect by the actual marriage of Fanchette and her sailor, and that immediately after the poor girl's death. If he had had the pluck to make this break off the whole thing, the book might have been a striking novel, as it is actually an attempt at one; but Pigault, like his friends of the gallery, was almost inviolably constant to happy endings.[432] _L'Officieux_, if he had only had a little humour, might have been as good comically as the Tableaux might have been tragically; for it is the history, sometimes not ill-sketched as far as action goes, of a _parvenu_ rich, but brave and extremely well-intentioned marquis, who is perpetually getting into fearful scrapes from his incorrigible habit of meddling with other people's affairs to do them good. The situations--as where the marquis, having, through an extravagance of officiousness, got himself put under arrest by his commanding officer, and at the same time insulted by a comrade, insists on fighting the necessary duel in his own drawing-room, and thereby reconciling duty and honour, to the great terror of a lady with whom he has been having a tender interview in the adjoining apartment--are sometimes good farce, and almost good comedy; but Pigault, like Shadwell, has neither the pen nor the wits to make the most of them.

_La Famille Luceval_--something of an expanded and considerably Pigaultified story _a la_ Marmontel--is duller than any of these, and the opening is marred by an exaggerated study of a classical mania on the part of the hero; but still the novel quality is not quite absent from it.

[Sidenote: Further examples.]

Of the rest, _M. Botte_, which seems to have been a favourite, is a rather conventional extravaganza with a rich, testy, but occasionally generous uncle; a nephew who falls in love with the charming but penniless daughter of an _emigre_; a noble rustic, who manages to keep some of his exiled landlord's property together, etc. _M. de Roberval_, though in its original issue not so long as _Adelaide de Meran_, becomes longer by a _suite_ of another full volume, and is a rather tedious chronicle of ups and downs. There may be silence about the remainder.

[Sidenote: Last words on him.]

The stock and, as it may be called, "semi-official" ticket for Pigault-Lebrun in such French literary history as takes notice of him, appears to be _verve_: and the recognised dictionary-sense of _verve_ is "heat of imagination, which animates the artist in his composition." In the higher sense in which the word imagination is used with us, it could never be applied here; but he certainly has a good deal of "go," which is perhaps not wholly improper as a colloquial Anglicising of the label. These semi-official descriptions, which have always pleased the Latin races, are of more authority in France than in England, though as long as we go on calling Chaucer "the father of English poetry" and Wyclif "the father of English prose" we need not boast ourselves too much. But Pigault has this "go"--never perhaps for a whole book, but sometimes for passages of considerable length, which possess "carrying" power. It undoubtedly gave him his original popularity, and we need not despise it now, inasmuch as it makes less tedious the task of ascertaining and justifying his true place in the further "domestication"--if only in domesticities too often mean and grimy--of the French novel.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The French novel in 1800.]

There are more reasons than the convenience of furnishing a separately published first volume with an interim conclusion, for making, at the close of this, a few remarks on the general state of the French novel at the end of the eighteenth century. No thoroughly similar point is reached in the literary history of France, or of any country known to me, in regard to a particular department of literature. In England--the only place, which can, in this same department, be even considered in comparison, although at this very time two novelists, vastly superior to any of whom France has to boast, were just writing, or just about to write, and were a little later to revolutionise the novel itself--the general state and history of the kind had, for nearly two generations, reached a stage far beyond anything that France could claim. She had made earlier "running"; on the whole period of some seven hundred years she had always, till very recently, been in front. But in the novel, as distinguished from the romance, she had absolutely nothing to show like our great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century, and hardly anything to match the later developments of Miss Burney and others in domestic, of Mrs. Radcliffe and others still in revived romantic fiction. Very great Frenchmen or French writers had written novels; but, with the exceptions of Lesage in _Gil Blas_, Prevost in that everlastingly wonderful "single-speech" of his, and Rousseau in _La Nouvelle Heloise_, none had written a great novel. No single writer of any greatness had been a novelist pure and simple. No species[433] of fiction, except the short tale, in which, through varying forms, France held an age-long mastery, had been thoroughly developed in her literature.

The main point, where England went right and France went wrong--to be only in the most equivocal way corrected by such a writer as Pigault-Lebrun--was the recognition of the connection--the intimate and all but necessary connection--of the completed novel with ordinary life. Look over the long history of fiction which we have surveyed in the last three or four or five chapters. There is much and sometimes great literary talent; sometimes, again, even genius; there are episodes of reality; there are most artful adjustments of type and convention and the like, of fashion in morals (or immorals) and sentiments. But a real objective novel of ordinary life, such as _Tom Jones_, or even _Humphry Clinker_, nay, such inferior approaches to it as exist elsewhere in English, you will not find. Of the Scudery romances we need not speak again; for all their key-references to persons, and their abstention from the supernatural, etc., they are, as wholes, hardly more real than _Amadis_ and its family themselves. Scarron has some and Furetiere more objectivity that may be argued for, but the Spanish picaresque has become a convention, and they, especially Scarron, are aiming more at the pattern than at the life-model. Madame de la Fayette has much, and some of her followers a little, real passion; but her manners, descriptions, etc., are all conventional, though of another kind. The fairy tales are of course not "real." Marivaux is aiming directly at Sensibility, preciousness, "psychology," if you like, but not at holding up the glass to any ordinary nature as such.[434] And though Crebillon might plead that his convention was actually the convention of hundreds and almost thousands of accomplished ladies and gentlemen, no one can deny that it was almost as much a convention as the historical or legendary acting of the _Comedie Humaine_ by living persons a hundred years later at Venice.

No writer perhaps illustrates what is being said better than Prevost. No one of his books, voluminous as they are, has the very slightest reality, except _Manon Lescaut_; and that, like _La Princesse de Cleves_, though with much more intensity and fortunately with no alloy of convention whatever, is simply a study of passion, not of life at large at all. With the greater men the case alters to some extent in proportion to their greatness, but, again with one exception, not to such an extent as to affect the general rule. Voltaire avowedly never attempts ordinary representation of ordinary life--save as the merest by-work, it is all "purpose," satire, fancy. Rousseau may not, in one sense, go beyond that life in _Julie_, but in touching it he is almost as limited and exclusive as Prevost in his masterpiece. Diderot has to get hold of the abnormal, if not the unreal, before he can give you something like a true novel. Marmontel is half-fanciful, and though he does touch reality, subordinates it constantly to half-allegorical and wholly moral purpose. All the minor "Sensibility" folk follow their leaders, and so do all the minor _conteurs_.

The people (believed to be a numerous folk) who are uncomfortable with a fact unless some explanation of it is given, may be humoured here. The failure of a very literary nation--applying the most disciplined literary language in Europe to a department, in the earlier stages of which they had led Europe itself--to get out of the trammels which we had easily discarded, is almost demonstrably connected with the very nature of their own literary character. Until the most recent years, if not up to the very present day, few Frenchmen have ever been happy without a type, a "kind," a set of type-and kind-rules, a classification and specification, as it were, which has to be filled up and worked over. Of all this the novel had nothing in ancient times, while in modern it had only been wrestling and struggling towards something of the sort, and had only in one country discovered, and not quite consciously there, that the beauty of the novel lies in having no type, no kind, no rules, no limitations, no general precept or motto for the craftsman except "Here is the whole of human life before you. Copy it, or, better, recreate it--with variation and decoration _ad libitum_--as faithfully, but as freely, as you can." Of this great fact even Fielding, the creator of the modern novel, was perhaps not wholly aware as a matter of theory, though he made no error about it in practice. Indeed the "comic prose epic" notion _might_ reduce to rules like those of the verse. Both Scott and Miss Austen abstained likewise from formalising it. But every really great novel has illustrated it; and attempts, such as have been recently made, to contest it and draw up a novelists' code, have certainly not yet justified themselves according to the Covenant of Works, and have at least not disposed some of us to welcome them as a Covenant of Faith. It is because Pigault-Lebrun, though a low kind of creature from every point of view, except that of mere craftsmanship, did, like his betters, recognise the fact in practice, that he has been allowed here a place of greater consideration than perhaps has ever fallen to his lot before in literary history.

Still, even putting out of sight the new developments which had shown the irrepressible vitality of the French _conte_, the seven hundred years had not been wasted. The product of the first half of them remained, indeed, at this time sealed up in the "gazophile" of the older age, or was popularised only by well-meaning misinterpreters like the Comte de Tressan;[435] but the treasure-house was very soon to be broken open and utilised. It is open to any one to contend--it is, indeed, pretty much the opinion of the present writer--that it was this very neglect which had made the progress of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries themselves so slow and so imperfect in its total results. For those who like to look for literary causes outside literature, there may be other explanations. But any intelligent reader can do something for himself if he has the facts before him. It is these facts that it has been and will be our business to give and to summarise here.

They have been given; let us attempt to summarise them in the briefest possible way. France possibly did not invent Romance; no man or men could do that; it was a sort of deferred heritage which Humankind, like the Heir of Lynne, discovered when it was ready to hang itself (speaking in terms of literature) during the Dark Ages. But she certainly grew the seed for all other countries, and dispersed the growth to the ends of the earth. Very much the same was the case with the short tale in the "Middle" period. From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth (both included) she entered upon a curious kind of wilderness, studded with oases of a more curious character still. In one of them Rabelais was born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding--more fortunate than the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen--was born Pantagruelism. In another came Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it was consummate. None of these happy sojourns produced a _Don Quixote_ or a _Tom Jones_, but divers smaller things resulted. And again and again, as had happened in the Middle Ages themselves, but on a smaller scale, what France did found development and improvement in other lands; while her own miniature masterpieces, from the best of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and the _Heptameron_, through all others that we noticed down to _Adolphe_, showed the enormous power which was working half blindly. How the strength got eyes, and the eyes found the right objects to fix upon, must be left, if fortune favour, for the next volume to tell.[436]

FOOTNOTES:

[404] We have seen above how things were "shaping for" it, in the Pastoral and Heroic romances. But the shape was not definitely taken in them.

[405] In the following pages, and here only in this volume, the author has utilised, though with very considerable alterations, some previously published work, _A Study of Sensibility_, which appeared originally in the _Fortnightly Review_ for September 1882, and was republished in a volume (_Essays on French Novelists_, London, 1891) which has been for some years out of print. Much of the original essay, dealing with Marivaux and others already treated here, has been removed, and the whole has been cut down, revised, and adjusted to its new contexts. But it seemed unnecessary to waste time in an endeavour to say the same thing differently about matters which, though as a whole indispensable, are, with perhaps one exception, individually not of the first importance.

[406] These words were originally written more than thirty years ago. I am not sure that there was not something prophetic in them.

[407] Madame de Fontaines in _La Comtesse de Savoie_ and _Amenophis_ "follows her leader" in more senses than one--including a sort of pseudo-historical setting or insetting which became almost a habit. But she is hardly important.

[408] Readers of Thackeray may remember in _The Paris Sketch Book_ ("On the French School of Painting," p. 52, Oxford ed.) some remarks on Jacquand's picture, "The Death of Adelaide de Comminge," which he thought "neither more nor less than beautiful." But from his "it appears," in reference to the circumstances, it would seem that he did not know the book, save perhaps from a catalogue-extract or summary.

[409] The extreme shortness of all these books may be just worth noticing. Reaction from the enormous romances of the preceding century may have had something to do with it; and the popularity of the "tale" something more. But the _causa verissima_ was probably the impossibility of keeping up sentiment at high pressure for any length of time, incident, or talk.

[410] _Vide_ on the process Crebillon's _Les Egarements du Coeur et de l'Esprit_, as above, pp. 371, 372.

[411] The parallel with "George Eliot" will strike most people.

[412] But for uniformity's sake I should not have translated this, for fear of doing it injustice. "Not presume to dictate," in Mr. Jingle's constantly useful phrase, but it seems to me one of the finest in French prose.

[413] "Craze" has been suggested; but is, I think, hardly an exact synonym.

[414] This may seem to contradict, or at any rate to be inconsistent with, a passage above (p. 367) on the "flirtations" of Crebillon's personages. It is, however, only a more strictly accurate use of the word.

[415] Two remarkable and short passages of his, not quoted in the special notice of him, may be given--one in English, because of its remarkable anticipation of the state of mind of Catherine Morland in _Northanger Abbey_; the other in French, as a curious "conclusion of the whole matter." They are both from _Marianne_.

"I had resolved not to sleep another night in the house. I cannot indeed tell you what was the exact object of my fear, or why it was so lively. All that I know is that I constantly beheld before me the countenance of my landlord, to which I had hitherto paid no particular attention, and then I began to find terrible things in this countenance His wife's face, too, seemed to be gloomy and dark; the servants looked like scoundrels; all their faces made me in a state of unbearable alarm. I saw before me swords, daggers, murders, thefts, insults. My blood grew cold at the perils I imagined."

* * * * *

"Enfin ces agitations, tant agreables que penibles, s'affaiblirent et se passerent. L'ame s'accoutume a tout; sa sensibilite s'use: et je me familiarisais avec mes esperances et mes inquietudes."

[416] Since, long ago, I formed the opinion of _Adolphe_ embodied above, I have, I think, seen French criticisms which took it rather differently--as a personal confession of the "confusions of a wasted youth," misled by passion. The reader must judge which is the juster view.

[417] By a little allowance for influence, if not for intrinsic value.

[418] On representations from persons of distinction I have given Laclos a place in an outhouse (see "Add. and Corr."). But I have made this place as much of a penitentiary as I could.

[419] I must apologise by anticipation to the _official_ French critic. To him, I know, even if he is no mere minor Malherbe, Restif's style is very faulty; but I should not presume to take his point of view, either for praise or blame.

[420] There is a separate bibliography by Cubieres-Palmezeaux (1875). The useful _Dictionnaire des Litteratures_ of Vapereau contains a list of between thirty and forty separate works of Restif's, divided into nearer two than one hundred volumes. He followed Prevost in _Nouveaux Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_ as he had followed Marivaux in the _Paysan Perverti_. He completed this work of his own with _La Paysanne Pervertie_; he wrote, besides the _Pornographe_, numerous books of social, general, and would-be philosophical reform--_Le Mimographe_, dealing with the stage; _Les Gynographes_, with a general plan for rearranging the status of women; _L'Andrographe_, a "whole duty of man" of a very novel kind; _Le Thesmographe_, etc.,--besides, close upon the end and after the autobiography above described, a _Philosophie de M. Nicolas_. His more or less directly narrative pieces, _Le Pied de Fanchette_, _Lucile_, _Adele_, _La Femme Infidele_, _Ingenue Saxancour_, are nearly always more or less tinged with biography of himself and of persons closely connected with him, as _La Vie de Mon Pere_, his most respectable book, is wholly. It may be added, perhaps, that the notice in Vapereau, while not bearing very hard on Restif on the whole, repeats the words _cynisme_ and _cynique_ in regard to him. Unless the term is in part limited and in part extended, so as to mean nothing but "exposure of things generally kept secret without apparent shame," it is entirely misplaced. Not merely outside of, but actually in his erotomania, Restif was a sentimental philanthropist of the all but most genuine kind, tainted indeed with the vanity and self-centredness which had reached their acme in Rousseau, but very much more certainly sincere, and of a temperament as different as possible from what is commonly called cynicism.

[421] There are, however, contradictory statements on this point.

[422] Nicolas [Edme] Restif being apparently his baptismal name, and "de la Bretonne" merely one of the self-bestowed agnominal nourishes so common in the French eighteenth century. He chose to consider the surname evidence of descent from the Emperor Pertinax; and as for his Christian name he seems to have varied it freely. Rose Lambelin, one of his harem, and a _soubrette_ of some literature, used to address him as "Anne-Augustin," Anne being, as no doubt most readers know, a masculine as well as a feminine _prenom_ in French.

[423] Some, and perhaps not a few of their objects, may have been imaginary "dream-mistresses," created by Morpheus in an impurer mood than when he created Lamb's "dream-children." But some, I believe, have been identified; and others of the singular "Calendar" affixed to _Monsieur Nicolas_ have probably escaped identification.

[Sidenote: His life and the reasons for giving it.]

[424] It has not been necessary (and this is fortunate, for even if it had been necessary, it would have been scarcely possible) to give biographies of the various authors mentioned in this book, except in special cases. Something was generally known of most of them in the days before education received a large E, with laws and rates to suit: and something is still in a way, supposed to be known since. But of the life of Pigault, who called himself Lebrun, it may be desirable to say something, for more reasons than one. In the first place, this life had rather more to do with his work than is always the case; in the second, very little will be found about him in most histories of French literature; in the third, there will be found assigned to him, in the text--not out of crotchet, or contumacy, or desire to innovate, but as a result of rather painful reading--a considerably higher place in the history of the novel than he has usually occupied. His correct name--till, by one of the extremest eccentricities of the French _Chats-Fourres_, he was formally unbegot by his Roman father, and the unbegetting (plus declaration of death) confirmed by the Parlement of Paris--was the imposing one of Charles Antoine Guillaume Pigault de L'Epinoy. The paternal Pigault, as may be guessed from his proceedings, was himself a lawyer, but of an old Calais family tracing itself to Queen Philippa's _protege_, Eustache de Saint-Pierre; and, besides the mysterious life-in-death or death-in-life, Charles Antoine Guillaume had to suffer from him, while such things existed, several _lettres de cachet_. The son certainly did his best to deserve them. Having been settled, on leaving school as a clerk in an English commercial house, he seduced his master's daughter, ran away with her, and would no doubt have married her--for Pigault was never a really bad fellow--if she had not been drowned in the vessel which carried the pair back to France. He escaped--one hopes not without trying to save her. After another scandal--not the second only--of the same kind, he did marry the victim, and the marriage was the occasion of the singular exertion of _patria potestas_ referred to above. At least two _lettres de cachet_ had preceded it, and it is said that only the taking of the Bastille prevented the issue, or at least the effect, of a third. Meanwhile, he had been a gentleman-trooper in the _gendarmerie d'elite de la petite maison du roi_, which, seeing that the _roi_ was Louis Quinze, probably did not conduct itself after the fashion of the Thundering Legion, or of Cromwell's Ironsides, or even of Captain Steele's "Christian Hero." The life of this establishment, though as probably merry, was not long, and Pigault became an actor--a very bad but rather popular actor, it was said. Like other bad actors he wrote plays, which, if not good (they are certainly not very cheerful to read), were far from unsuccessful. But it was not till after the Revolution, and till he was near forty, that he undertook prose fiction; his first book being _L'Enfant du Carnaval_ in 1792 (noticed in text). The revolutionary fury, however, of which there are so many traces in his writings, caught him; he went back to soldiering and fought at Valmy. He did not stay long in the army, but went on novel-writing, his success having the rather unexpected, and certainly very unusual, effect of reconciling his father. Indeed, this arbitrary parent wished not only to recall him to life, which was perhaps superfluous, but to "make an eldest son of him." This, Pigault, who was a loose fish and a vulgar fellow, but, as was said above, not a scoundrel, could not suffer; and he shared and shared alike with his brothers and sisters. Under the Empire he obtained a place in the customs, and held it under succeeding reigns till 1824, dying eleven years later at over eighty, and having written novels continuously till a short time before his death, and till the very eve of 1830. This odd career was crowned by an odd accident, for his daughter's son was Emile Augier. I never knew this fact till after the death of my friend, the late Mr. H. D. Traill. If I had, I should certainly have asked him to write an Imaginary Conversation between grandfather and grandson. Some years (1822-1824) before his last novel, a complete edition of novels, plays, and very valueless miscellanies had been issued in twenty octavo volumes. The reader, like the river Iser in Campbell's great poem, will be justified for the most part in "rolling rapidly" through them. But he will find his course rather unexpectedly delayed sometimes, and it is the fact and the reasons of these delays which must form the subject of the text.--There is no doubt that Pigault was very largely read abroad as well as at home. We know that Miss Matilda Crawley read him before Waterloo. She must have inherited from her father, Sir Walpole, a strong stomach: and must have been less affected by the change of times than was the case with her contemporary, Scott's old friend, who having enjoyed "your bonny Mrs. Behn" in her youth, could not read her in age. For our poor maligned Afra (in her prose stories at any rate, and most of her verse, if not in her plays) is an anticipated model of Victorian prudery and nicety compared with Pigault. I cannot help thinking that Marryat knew him too. Chapter and verse may not be forthcoming, and the resemblance may be accounted for by common likeness to Smollett: but not, to my thinking, quite sufficiently.

[425] He had a younger brother, in a small way also a novelist, and, apparently, in the Radcliffian style, who extra-named himself rather in the manner of 1830--Pigault-_Maubaillarck_. I have not yet come across this junior's work.--For remarks of Hugo himself on Pigault and Restif, see note at end of chapter.

[426] At least in his early books; it improves a little later. But see note on p. 453.

[427] For a defence of this word, _v. sup._ p. 280, _note_.

[428] It may be objected, "Did not the Scuderys and others do this?" The answer is that their public was not, strictly speaking, a "public" at all--it was a larger or smaller coterie.

[429] It has been said that Pigault spent some time in England, and he shows more knowledge of English things and books than was common with Frenchmen before, and for a long time after, his day. Nor does he, even during the Great War, exhibit any signs of acute Anglophobia.

[430] Pigault's adoration for Voltaire reaches the ludicrous, though we can seldom laugh _with_ him. It led him once to compose one of the very dullest books in literature, _Le Citateur_, a string of anti-Christian gibes and arguments from his idol and others.

[431] Yet sometimes--when, for instance, one thinks of the rottenness-to-the-core of Dean Farrar's _Eric_, or the _spiritus vulgaritatis fortissimus_ of Mark Twain's _A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_--one feels a little ashamed of abusing Pigault.

[432] There was, of course, a milder and perhaps more effective possibility--to make the young turn to the young, and leave Madame de Francheville no solace for her sin. But for this also Pigault would have lacked audacity.

[433] For the story "species" of _Gil Blas_ was not new, was of foreign origin, and was open to some objection; while the other two books just named derived their attraction, in the one case to a very small extent, in the other to hardly any at all, from the story itself.

[434] Not that Jacob and Marianne are unnatural--quite the contrary--but that their situations are conventionalised.

[435] _Corps d'Extraits de Romans de Chevalerie._ 4 vols. Paris, 1782.

[436] The link between the two suggested at p. 458, _note_, is as follows. That Victor Hugo should, as he does in the Preface to _Han d'Islande_ and elsewhere, sneer at Pigault, is not very wonderful: for, besides the difference between _canaille_ and _caballeria_, the author of _M. Botte_ was the most popular novelist of Hugo's youth. But why he has, in Part IV. Book VII. of _Les Miserables_ selected Restif as "undermining the masses in the most unwholesome way of all" is not nearly so clear, especially as he opposes this way to the "wholesomeness" of, among others--Diderot!

APPENDICES

CHRONOLOGICAL CONSPECTUS OF THE PRINCIPAL WORKS OF FRENCH FICTION NOTICED IN THIS VOLUME

11TH CENTURY

_Vie de Saint Alexis_ (probably).

_Roland_ and one or two other _Chansons_ (possibly).

12TH CENTURY

Most of the older _Chansons_.

_Arthurian Legend_ (in some of its forms).

_Roman de Troie_, _Romans d'Alexandre_ (older forms).

13TH CENTURY

Rest of the more genuine _Chansons_.

Rest of ditto Arthuriad and "Matter of Rome."

_Romans d'Aventures_ (many).

Early Fabliaux (probably).

_Roman de la Rose_ and _Roman de Renart_ (older parts).

Prose Stories (_Aucassin et Nicolette_), etc.

14TH CENTURY

Rehandlings, and younger examples, of all kinds above mentioned.

15TH CENTURY

Ditto, but only latest forms of all but Prose Stories, and many of the others rendered into prose.

_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles._ First _edition_, 1480, but written much earlier.

_Petit Jehan de Saintre_, about 1459, or earlier.

_Jehan de Paris._ Uncertain, but before 1500.

16TH CENTURY

Rabelais. First Book of _Pantagruel_ Second of the whole, 1533; _Gargantua_, 1535; rest of _Pantagruel_ at intervals, to the (posthumous) Fifth Book in 1564.

Marguerite de Navarre. _Heptameron._ Written before (probably some time before) Marguerite's death in 1549. Imperfectly published as _Les Amants Fortunes_, etc., in 1558; completely, under its permanent title, next year.

Bonaventure Desperiers. _Cymbalum Mundi_, 1537; _Contes et Joyeux Devis_, 1558, but written at least fourteen years earlier, as the author died in 1544.

Helisenne de Crenne. _Les Angoisses_, etc., 1538.

_Amadis_ Romances. Date of Spanish or Portuguese originals uncertain. Herberay published the first part of his French translation of _Amadis_ itself in 1540.

Many of the small pastoral and adventurous stories noticed at the beginning of Chapter VIII. appeared in the last fifteen years of the sixteenth century, the remainder in the first quarter of the seventeenth. But of the Greek and Spanish compositions, which had so great an influence on them and on the subsequent "Heroic" School, the work of Heliodorus had been translated as early as 1546, and the _Diana_ of Montemayor in 1578.

17TH CENTURY

Honore d'Urfe. _L'Astree_, 1607-19. (First three parts in Urfe's lifetime, fourth and fifth after his death in 1625.)

"Heroic" Romance, 1622-60, as regards its principal examples, the exact dates of which are given in a note to p. 176. Madame de Villedieu wrote almost up to her death in 1683.