Chapter VII: The Minors of 1830 (1)

There is always a risk (as any one who remembers a somewhat ludicrous outburst of indignation, twenty or thirty years ago, among certain English versemen will acknowledge) in using the term "minor." But it is too useful to be given up; and in this particular case, if the very greatest novelists are not of the company, there are those whose greatness in other ways, and whose more than mediocrity in this, should appease the admirers of their companions. We shall deal here with the novel work of Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of France; of Eugène Sue, whose mere popularity exceeded that of any other writer discussed in this half of the volume except Dumas; of men like Sandeau, Charles de Bernard, and Murger, whose actual work in prose fiction is not much less than consummate in its own particular key and subdivisions; of one of the best political satirists in French fiction, Louis Reybaud; and of others still, like Soulié, Méry, Achard, Féval, Ourliac, Roger de Beauvoir, Alphonse Karr, Émile Souvestre, who, to no small extent individually and to a very great extent when taken in battalion, helped to conquer that supreme reputation for amusingness, for pastime, which the French novel has so long enjoyed throughout Europe. And these will supply not a little material for the survey of the general accomplishment of that novel in the first half of the century, which will form the subject of a "halt" or Interchapter, when Dumas himself--the one "major" left, and left purposely--has been discussed.

[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve.--_Volupté._]

When Sainte-Beuve, thirty years after the book first appeared, subjoined a most curious Appendix to his only novel, _Volupté_, he included a letter of his own, in which he confesses that it is "not in the precise sense a novel at all." It is certainly in some respects an outlier, even of the outlying group to which it belongs--the group of _René_ and _Adolphe_ and their followers.

[Sidenote: Its "puff-book."]

I do not remember anything, even in a wide sense, quite like this Appendix--at least in the work of an author _majorum gentium_. It consists of a series of extracts, connected by remarks of Sainte-Beuve's own, from the "puff"-letters which distinguished people had sent him, in recompense for the copies of the book which he had sent _them_. Most people who write have had such letters, and "every fellow likes a hand." The persons who enjoy being biographied expect them, I suppose, to be published after their deaths; and I have known, I think, some writers of "Reminiscences" who did it themselves in their lifetimes. But it certainly is funny to find the acknowledged "first critic" in the Europe or the world of his day paralleling from private sources the collections which are (quite excusably) added as advertisements from published criticisms to later editions of a book. Intrinsically the things, no doubt, have interest. Chateaubriand, whose _René_ is effusively praised in the novel, opens with an equally effusive but rather brief letter of thanks, not destitute of the apparent artificiality which, for all his genius, distinguished that "noble _Why_count," and perhaps, for all its "butter," partly responsible for the _aigre-doux_ fashion in which the prais_ee_ subsequently treated the prais_er_. Michelet, Villemain, and Nisard are equally favourable, and perhaps a little more sincere, though Nisard (of course) is in trouble about Sainte-Beuve's divagations from the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Brizeux applauds in prose _and_ verse. Madame de Castries (Balzac's "Duchesse de Langeais"), afterwards an intimate personal friend of the critic's, acknowledges, in an anonymous letter, her "profound emotion." Lesser, but not least, people like Magnin join. Eugénie de Guérin bribes her future eulogist. Madame Desbordes-Valmore, _the_ French poetess of the day, is enthusiastic as to the book: and George Sand herself writes a good half-dozen small-printed and exuberant pages, in which the only (but repeated) complaint is that Sainte-Beuve actually makes his hero find comfort in Christianity. Neither Lamartine (as we might have expected) nor Lamennais (whose disciple Sainte-Beuve had tried to be) liked it; but Lacordaire did not disapprove.

[Sidenote: Itself.]

Before saying anything more about it, let us give a brief argument of it--a thing which it requires more (for reasons to be given later) than most books, whether "precisely" novels or not. It is the autobiographic history of a certain "Amaury" (whose surname, I think, we never hear), addressed as a caution to a younger friend, no name of whom we ever hear at all. The friend is too much addicted to the pleasures of sense, and Amaury gives him his own experience of a similar tendency. Despite the subject and the title, there is nothing in the least "scabrous" in it. Lacordaire himself, it seems, gave it a "vu et approuvé" as being something that a seminarist or even a priest (which Amaury finishes, to the great annoyance of George Sand, as being) might have composed for edifying purposes. But the whole is written to show the truth of a quatrain of the Judicious Poet:

The wise have held that joys of sense,
The more their pleasure is intense,
More certainly demand again
Usurious interest of pain;

though the moral is enforced in rather a curious manner. Amaury is the only, and orphan, representative of a good Norman or Breton family, who has been brought up by an uncle, and arrives at adolescence just at the time of the Peace of Amiens or thereabouts. He has escaped the heathendom which reigned over France a decade previously, and is also a good Royalist, but very much "left to himself" in other ways. Inevitably, he falls in love, though at first half-ignorant of what he is doing or what is being done to him. The first object is a girl, Amélie de Liniers, in every way desirable in herself, but unluckily not enough desired by him. He is insensibly divided from her by acquaintance with the chief royalist family of the district, the Marquis and Marquise de Couaën, with the latter of whom he falls again in much deeper love, though never to any guilty extent. She, who is represented as the real "Elle," is again superseded, at least partially, by a "Madame R.," who is a much less immaculate person, though the precise extent of the indulgence of their affections is left veiled. But, meanwhile, Amaury's tendency towards "Volupté" has, after his first visit to Paris, led him to indulge in the worship of Venus Pandemos, _parallèlement_ with his more exalted passions. No individual object or incident is mentioned in any detail; and the passages relating to this side of the matter are so obscurely phrased that a very innocent person might--without stupidity quite equal to the innocence--be rather uncertain what is meant. But the twin ravages--of more or less pure passion unsatisfied and wholly impure satisfied appetite--ruin the patient's peace of mind. Alongside of this conflict there is a certain political interest. The Marquis de Couaën is a fervent Royalist, and so willing to be a conspirator that he actually gets arrested. But he is an ineffectual kind of person, though in no sense a coward or a fool. Amaury meets with a much greater example of "Thorough" in Georges Cadoudal, and only just escapes being entangled in the plot which resulted in the execution[262] of Cadoudal himself; the possible suicide but probable murder[262] of Pichegru, if not of others; the kidnapping and unquestionable murder[262] of the Duc d'Enghien, and the collapse of the career of Moreau. Some other real persons are brought in, though in an indirect fashion. Finally, the conflict of flesh and spirit and the general tumult of feeling are too much for Amaury, and he takes refuge, through the seminary, in the priesthood. The last event of the book is the death and burial of Madame de Couaën, her husband and Amaury somewhat melodramatically--and perhaps with a slight suggestion both of awkward allegory and possible burlesque--hammering literal nails into her coffin, one on each side.

In addition to the element of passion (both "passion_ate_" in the English and "passion_nel_" in the French sense) and that of politics, there is a good deal of more abstract theology and philosophy, chiefly of the mixed kind, as represented in various authors from Pascal--indeed from the Fathers--to Saint-Martin.[263]

[Sidenote: Its character in various aspects.]

Now the book (which is undoubtedly a very remarkable one, whether it does or does not deserve that other epithet which I have seen denied to it, of "interesting") may be regarded in two ways. The first--as a document in regard to its author--is one which we have seldom taken in this _History_, and which the present historian avoids taking as often as he can. Here, however, it may be contended (and discussion under the next head will strengthen the contention) that it is almost impossible to do the book justice, and not very easy even to understand it, without some consideration of the sort. When Sainte-Beuve published it, he had run up, or down, a rather curious gamut of creeds and crazes. He had been a fervent Romantic. He had (for whatever mixture of reasons need not be entered into here) exchanged this first faith, wholly or partially, for that singular _un_faith of Saint-Simonianism, which, if we had not seen other things like it since and at the present day, would seem incredible as even a hallucination of good wits. He had left this again to endeavour to be a disciple of Lamennais, and had, not surprisingly, failed. He was now to set himself to the strange Herculean task of his _Port-Royal_, which had effects upon him, perhaps stranger at first sight than on reflection. It left him, after these vicissitudes and pretty certainly some accompanying experiences adumbrated in _Volupté_ itself, "L'oncle Beuve" of his later associates--a free-thinker, though not a violent one, in religion; a critic, never perhaps purely literary, but, as concerns literature and life combined, of extraordinary range, sanity, and insight; yet sometimes singularly stunted and limited in respect of the greatest things, and--one has to say it, though there is no need to stir the mud as it has been stirred[264] --something of a "porker of Epicurus."

Now, with such additional light as this sketch may furnish, let us return to the book itself. I have said that it has been pronounced "uninteresting," and it must be confessed that, in some ways, the author has done all he could to make it so. In the first place it is much too long; he has neglected the examples of _René_ and _Adolphe_, and given nearly four hundred solid and closely packed pages to a story with very little incident, very little description, only one solidly presented character, and practically no conversation. There is hardly a novel known to me from which the disadvantages of some more or less mechanical fault of presentation--often noticed in this _History_--could be better illustrated than from _Volupté_. I have called the pages "solid," and they are so in more than the general, more even than the technical printer's sense. One might imagine that the author had laid a wager that he would use the smallest number of paragraph-breaks possible. There are none at all till page 6 (the fourth of the actual book); blocks of the same kind occur constantly afterwards, and more than one, or at most two, "new pars" are very rare indeed on a page. Even such conversation as there is is not extracted from the matrix of narrative, and the whole is unbroken _récit_.

It may seem that there is, and has been elsewhere, too much stress laid upon this point. But if I, who am something of a _helluo librorum_, and very seldom find anything that resists my devouring faculty, feel this difficulty, how much more must persons who require to be tempted and baited on by mechanical and formal allurements?

Still, some strong-minded person may say: "These are 'shallows and miseries'--base mechanical considerations. Tell me _why_ the book, as matter, has been found uninteresting." In this instance there will be no difficulty in complying with the request. Let me at once say that I do not consider it uninteresting myself; that, in fact (and stronger testimony is hardly possible), after reading great part of it without appetite and "against the grain," I began to take a very considerable interest in it. But this did not prevent my having a pretty clear notion of what seem to me faults of treatment, and even of conception, quite independent of those already mentioned.

The main one is somewhat "tickle of the sere" to handle. It has been said that, despite its alarming title, there is nothing in the book that even prudery, unless it were of the most irritable and morbid kind, could object to. There is no dwelling on what Defoe ingeniously calls "the vicious part" of the matter; there is no description of it closer than, if as close as, some passages of the Book of Proverbs (which are actually quoted), and, above all, there is no hint of any satisfaction whatever being derived from the sins by the sinner. His course in this respect might have been a succession of fits of vertigo or epilepsy as far as pleasure goes. There is even a rather fine piece of real psychology as to his state of mind after his first succumbing to temptation. But all this abstinence and reticence, however laudable in a sense it may be, necessarily deprives the passages of anything but purely psychological interest, and leaves most of them not much of that. Luxury _in vacuo_ may, no doubt, be perilous to the culprit; but it has, for others, nearly as much of the unreal and chimerical as Gluttony confined to "Second intentions."

Yet there is another objection to _Volupté_ which is even more closely "psychological," and which has been indicated in the word "parallèlement," suggested by, though largely transposed from, Verlaine's use thereof in a title. There is no connection established--there is even, it may seem, a great gulf fixed between Amaury's actual "loves" for Amélie de Liniers, for Lucy de Couaën, and even for the more questionable Madame R., and those "sippings of the lower draught" which are so industriously veiled. If Amaury had "disdamaged" himself, for his inability to possess any of his real and superior loves, by lower indulgences, it would have been discreditable but human. But there is certainly no expression--there is, unless I mistake, hardly any suggestion--of anything of the kind. The currents of spiritual and animal passion seem to have run independently of each other, like canals at different heights on the slope of a hill. I do not know that this is less discreditable; but it seems to me infinitely less human. And, while carefully abstaining from any attempt to connect the peculiarity with the above-mentioned scandals about Sainte-Beuve's life and conversation in detail, one may suggest that it offers some explanation of the unquestioned facts about this; also (and this is of infinitely more importance) of that absence of ability to love literature in anything like a passionate way, which, with a certain other inability to love literature for itself, prevents him from attaining the absolutely highest level in criticism, though his command of ranges just below the highest is wider and firmer than that of any other critic on record.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Jules Sandeau and Charles de Bernard.]

We may next take, to some extent together, two writers of the novel who made their reputation in the July Monarchy, though one of them long outlived it; who, though this one inclined to a sort of domestic tragedy and the other to pure comedy, resembled each other not a little in clinging to ordinary life, and my estimate of whom is considerably higher than that recently (or, I think, at present) entertained by French critics or by those English critics who think it right to be guided by their French _confrères_. This estimate, however, has been given at length in another place,[265] and I quite admit that the subjects, though I have not in the least lowered my opinion of them, can hardly be said (like Gautier, Mérimée, Balzac, and Dumas, in the present part of this volume, or others later) to demand, in a general History, very large space in dealing with them. I shall therefore endeavour to summarise my corrected impressions more briefly than in those other cases. This shortening may, I think, be justified doubly: in the first place, because any one who is enough of a student to want more can go to the other handling; and, in the second, because the only excellent way, of reading the books themselves, may be adopted with very unusual absence of any danger of disappointment. I hardly know any work of either Jules Sandeau or of Charles de Bernard which is not worth reading by persons of fairly catholic tastes in novel pastime.

The first-named--the younger by some half-dozen years, but the first to publish by more than as many--concerns those who take a merely or mainly anecdotic interest in literature by his well-known _liaison_ with George Sand--to whom he gave _dimidium nominis_, and perhaps for a time at least _dimidium cordis_, though he probably did not get it back so much "in a worse estate"[266] as was the case with Musset and Chopin. Sandeau's collaboration with her in novel-writing was long afterwards succeeded by another in dramaturgy with Émile Augier, which resulted in at least one of the most famous French plays of the nineteenth century, _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, based on Sandeau's _Sacs et Parchemins_. But we need busy ourselves only with the novels themselves.

[Sidenote: Sandeau's work.]

Sandeau was barely twenty when he wrote _Rose et Blanche_, during the time of, and with his partner in, that most dangerous of all possible _liaisons_. But he was nearly thirty when he produced his own first work of note, _Marianna_. In this, in _Fernand_, and in _Valcreuse_, all books above the average in merit, there is what may be called, from no mere Grundyite point of view, the drawback that they are all studies of "the triangle." They are quite decently, and in fact morally, though not goodily, handled. But it certainly may be objected that trigonometry[267] of this kind occupies an exorbitant place in French literature, and one may be a little sorry to see a neophyte of talent taking to it. However, though Sandeau in these books showed his ability, his way did not really lie _in_, though it might lie _through_, them. He had, indeed, as a novelist should have, good changes of strings to his bow, if not even more than one or two bows to shoot in.

No Frenchman has written a better boy's book than _La Roche aux Mouettes_, deservedly well known to English readers in translation: and whether he did or did not enter into designed competition with his _quondam_ companion on the theme of Pastoral _berquinade_, I do not myself think that _Catherine_ is much below _La Petite Fadette_ or _La Mare au Diable_. He was a very considerable master of the short story; you cannot have much better things of the kind than _Le Jour sans Lendemain_ and _Un Début dans la Magistrature_. But his special gift lay in treating two situations which sometimes met, or crossed, or even substantially coincided. The one was the contrast of new and old, whether from the side of actual "money-bags and archives" or from others. The second and higher development of, or alternative to, this was the working out of the subdued tragical, in which, short of the very great masters, he had few superiors, while the quietness of his tones and values even, enhances to some tastes the poignancy of the general effect. _Mlle. de La Seiglière_ is, I suppose, the best representative of the first class as a novel, for _Sacs et Parchemins_, as has been said, waited for dramatisation to bring out its merits. The pearls or pinks of the other are _Mlle. de Kérouare_ and _La Maison de Penarvan_, the latter the general favourite, the former mine. Both have admirably managed _peripeteias_, the shorter story (_Mlle. de Kérouare_) having, in particular, a memorable setting of that inexorable irony of Fate against which not only is there no armour, but not even the chance and consolement of fighting armourless. When Marie de Kérouare accepts, at her father's wish, a suitor suitable in every way, but somewhat undemonstrative; when she falls in love (or thinks she does) with a handsome young cousin; when the other aspirant loses or risks all his fortune as a Royalist, and she will not accept what she might have, his retirement, thereby eliciting from her father a _mot_ like the best of Corneille's;[268] when, having written to a cousin excusing herself, she gets a mocking letter telling her that _he_ is married already; when the remorseless turn of Fortune's wheel loses her the real lover whom she at last really does love--then it is not mere sentimental-Romantic twaddle; it is a slice of life, soaked in the wine of Romantic tragedy.[269]

[Sidenote: Bernard's]

In Charles de Bernard (or, if anybody is unable to read novels published under a pseudonym with sufficient comfort, Charles Bernard du Grail de la Villette[270]) one need not look for high passions and great actions of this kind. He does try tragedy sometimes,[271] but, as has been already admitted, it is not his trade. Occasionally, as in _Gerfaut_, he takes the "triangle" rather seriously _à la_ George-Sand-and-the-rest-of-them. The satirists have said that, though not invariably (our present author contains cautions on that point) yet as a rule, if you take yourself with sufficient seriousness, mankind will follow suit. It is certainly very risky to appear to take yourself not seriously. _Gerfaut_, I believe, is generally held to be Bernard's masterpiece. I remember that even my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, who seldom differed with me on points of pure literature, almost gravely remonstrated with me for not thinking enough of it. There are admirable things in _Gerfaut_; but they are, as it seems to me, _separately_ admirable, and so are more like grouped short stories than like a whole long novel. He wrote other books of substance, two of them, _Un Beau-père_ and _Le Gentilhomme Campagnard_, each extending to a brace of well-filled volumes. But these, as well as the single-volume but still substantial _Un Homme Sérieux_ and _Les Ailes d'Icare_, like _Gerfaut_ itself, could all, I think, be split up into shorter stories without difficulty and with advantage. It is of course very likely that the comparative slighting which the author has received from M. Brunetière and other French critics of the more theoretic kind is due to this. The strict rule-system no doubt disapproves of the mere concatenation of scenes--still more of the mere accumulation of them.

We, on the other hand, _quibus est nihil negatum_, or who at any rate deny nothing to our favourite authors so long as they amuse or interest us, ought to be--and some of the best as well as the not-best of us have been--very fond of Charles de Bernard. How frankly and freely Thackeray praised, translated, and adapted him ought to be known to everybody; and indeed there was a great similarity between the two. The Frenchman had nothing of Thackeray's strength--of his power of creating character; of his intensity when he cared to be intense; of his satiric sweep and "stoop"; of his spacious view and masterly grasp of life. But in some ways he was a kind of Thackeray several degrees underproof--a small-beer Thackeray that was a very excellent creature. In his grasp of a pure and simple comic situation; in his faculty of carrying this out decently to its appropriate end; and, above all, in the admirable quality of his conversation, he was really a not so very minor edition of his great English contemporary. Almost the only non-technical fault that can be found with him--and it has been found by French as well as English critics, so there is no room for dismissing the charge as due to a merely insular cult of "good form"--is the extreme unscrupulousness of some of his heroes, who appear to have no sense of honour at all. Yet, in other ways, no French novelist of the century has obtained or deserved more credit for drawing ladies and gentlemen. It has been hinted that the inability to do this has been brought as a charge against even the mighty Honoré,[272] and that, here at any rate, it has been found impossible to deny it absolutely. But if the company of the Human Comedy falls short in this respect, it is not because some of its members do "shady" things. It is because the indefinable, but to those who can perceive it unmistakable, _aura_ of "gentility"--in the true and not the debased sense--is, at best, questionably present. This is not the case with Bernard.

It is particularly difficult, in such a book as this, to deal with so large a collection of what may be most appropriately called "Scenes and Characters" as that which constitutes his most valuable if not all his valuable work. In the older handling referred to, I selected, for pretty full abstract and some translation, _Un Homme Sérieux_ among longer books, and _Le Gendre_ among the short stories; and I still think them the best, except _Le Pied d'Argile_, which, from Thackeray's incomparable adaptation[273] of it in _The Bedford Row Conspiracy_, remains as a standing possibility of acquaintance with Charles de Bernard's way for those who do not read French, or do not care to "research" for the original. Thackeray also gave a good deal of _Les Ailes d'Icare_ in abstract and translation, and he borrowed something more from it in _A Shabby Genteel Story_. _La Peau du Lion_ and _La Chasse aux Amants_ have some slight resemblance to _Le Gendre_, in that the gist of all three is concerned with the defeat of unscrupulous lovers, and neither is much inferior to it. I never knew anybody who had read _La Femme de Quarante Ans_ and its history of sentimental star-gazing _à deux_ without huge enjoyment; and _L'Arbre de la Science_, as well as the shorter _Un Acte de Vertu_, deserve special mention.

But, in fact, take the volumes entitled _L'Écueil_, _Le Noeud Gordien_, _Le Paravent,_ and _Le Paratonnerre_; open any of them where you like, and it will go hard but, in the comic stories at any rate, you will find yourself well off. The finest of the tragic ones is, I think, _L'Anneau d'Argent_, which in utilising the sad inefficacy of the Legitimist endeavours to upset the July Monarchy, comes close to the already-mentioned things of Sandeau and Ourliac.

That a critic like M. Brunetière should dismiss Bernard as "commonplace" (I forget the exact French word, but the meaning was either this or "mediocre"), extending something the same condemnation, or damningly faint praise, to Sandeau, may seem strange at first sight, but explains itself pretty quickly to those who have the requisite knowledge. Neither could, by any reasonable person, be accused of that _grossièreté_ which offended the censor so much, and to no small extent so rightly. Neither was extravagantly unacademic or in other ways unorthodox. But both might be called _vulgaire_ from the same point of view which made Madame de Staël so call her greatest contemporary as a she-novelist--one, too, so much greater than herself.[274] That is to say, they did deal with strictly ordinary life, and neither attempted that close psychological analysis and ambitious _schematism_ which (we have been told) is the pride of the French novel, and which, certainly, some French critics have supposed to be of its essence. These points of view I have left undiscussed for the most part, but have consistently in practice declined to take, in the first volume, while they are definitely opposed and combated in more than one passage of this.[275] I admit that Sandeau, save in the one situation where I think he comes near to the first class--that of subdued resignation to calamity--is not passionate; I admit that Bernard has a certain superficiality, and that, as has been confessed already, his "form" sometimes leaves to desire. But they both seem to me to have, in whatever measure and degree, what, with me, is the article of standing or falling in novels--humanity. And they seem--also to me, and speaking under correction--to _write_, if not consummately, far more than moderately well, and to _tell_ in a fashion for which consummate is not too strong a word. While for pure gaiety, unsmirched by coarseness and unspoilt by ill-nature, you will not find much better pastime anywhere than in the work of the author of _L'Écueil_ and _Le Paratonnerre_.

Indeed these two--though the _berquinade_ tendency, considerably _masculated_, prevails in one, and the _esprit gaulois_, decorously draped, in the other--seem to me to run together better than any two other novelists of our company. They do not attempt elaborate analysis; they do not grapple with thorny or grimy problems; they are not purveyors of the indecent, or dealers in the supernatural and fantastic, or poignant satirists of society at large or individuals in particular. But they can both, in their different ways, tell a plain tale uncommonly well, and season it with wit or pathos when either is suitable. Their men and women are real men and women, and the stages on which they move are not _mere_ stages, but pieces of real earth.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Sue, Soulié, and the novel of melodrama--_Le Juif Errant_, etc.]

As regards one formerly almost famous and still well-known novelist, Eugène Sue, I am afraid I shall be an unprofitable servant to such masters in the guise of readers as desire to hear about him. For he is one more of those--I do not think I have had or shall have to confess to many--whom I have found it almost impossible to read. I acknowledge, indeed, that though at the first reading (I do not know how many years ago) of his most famous work, _Le Juif Errant_, I found no merit in it at all, at a second, though I do not think that even then I quite got through it, I had to allow a certain grandiosity. _The Mysteries of Paris_ has always defeated me, and I am now content to enjoy Thackeray's very admirable _précis_ of part of it. Out of pure goodness and sheer equity I endeavoured, for the present volume, to make myself acquainted with one of his later books--the immense _Sept Péchés Capitaux_, which is said to be a Fourierist novel, and explains how the vices may be induced, in a sort of Mandeville-made-amiable fashion, to promote the good of society. I found it what Mrs. Browning has made somebody pronounce Fourier himself in _Aurora Leigh_, "Naught!"[276] except that I left them at the end actually committing an Eighth deadly sin by drinking _iced_ Constantia![277] Sue, who had been an army surgeon and had served during the Napoleonic war, both on land and at sea, wrote, before he took to his great melodramas, some rather extravagant naval novels, which are simply rubbish compared with Marryat, but in themselves not quite, I think, so difficult to read as his better known work. I remember one in particular, but I am not certain whether it was _La Coucaratcha_ or _La Vigie de Koatven_. They are both very nice titles, and I am so much afraid of disillusionment that I have thought it better to look neither up for this occasion.[278]

[Sidenote: Melodramatic fiction generally.]

The fact is, as it seems to me, that the proper place for melodrama is not the study but the stage. I fear I have uttered some heresies about the theatre in this book, and I should not be sorry if I never passed through its doors again. If I must, I had rather the entertainment were melodrama than anything else. The better the play is as literature, the more I wish that I might be left to read it in comfort and see it acted with my mind's eye only. But I can rejoice in the valiant curate when (with the aid of an avalanche, if I remember rightly) he triumphs over the wicked baronet, who is treading on the fingers of the heroine as she hangs over the precipice. I can laugh and applaud when the heroic mother slashes her daughter's surreptitious portrait in full Academy. The object of melodrama is to make men rejoice and laugh; but it seems to me to require the stage to do it on, or at any rate to receive an immense assistance from theatrical presentation. So given, it escapes the curse of _segnius irritant_, because it attacks both ear and eye; being entirely independent of style (which _is_ in such cases actually _gênant_), it does not need the quiet and solitary devotion which enjoyment of style demands; and it is immensely improved by dresses and _décor_, scenery and music, and "spectacle" generally--all things which, again, interfere with pure literary enjoyment. I shall hope to have demonstrated, or at any rate done something to show, how Dumas, when at his best, and even not quite at his best, escapes the actual melodramatic. Perhaps this was because he had purged himself of the stagy element in his abundant theatric exercise earlier. Sue, of course, dramatised or got dramatised a considerable part of his many inventions; but I think one can see that they were not originally stage-stuff.

If, however, any one must have melodrama, but at the same time does not want it in stage form, I should myself recommend to him Frédéric Soulié in preference to Eugène Sue. Soulié is, indeed, a sort of blend of Dumas and Sue, but more melodramatic than the former, and less full of grime and purpose and other "non-naturals" of the novel than the latter. It is evident that he has taken what we may call his schedules pretty directly from Scott himself; but he has filled them up with more melodramatic material. It is very noteworthy, too, that Soulié, like Dumas, turned _his_ stagy tastes and powers on to actual stage-work, and so kept the two currents duly separate. And it seems to be admitted that he had actual literary power, if he did not achieve much actual literary performance.

[Sidenote: _Le Château des Pyrénées._]

For myself, I think that _Le Château des Pyrénées_ is a thing, that in De Quincey's famous phrase, you _can_ recommend to a friend whose appetite in fiction is melodramatic. Here is, if not exactly "_God's_ plenty," at any rate plenty of a kind--plenty whose horn is inexhaustible and the reverse of monotonous. You never, though you have read novels as the waves of the sea or the sands of the shore in number, know exactly what is going to happen, and when you think you know what is happening, it turns out to be something else. Persons who wear, as to the manner born, the jackets of lackeys turn out to be bishops; and bishops prove to be coiners. An important _jeune premier_ or _quasi-premier_, having just got off what seems to be imminent danger, is stabbed in the throat, is left for dead, and then carries out a series of risky operations and conversations for several hours. A castle, more than Udolphian in site, size, incidents, and opportunities, is burnt at a moment's notice, as if it were a wigwam. Everybody's sons and daughters are somebody else's daughters and sons--a state of things not a little facilitated by the other fact that everybody's wife is somebody else's mistress. Everybody knows something mysterious and exceedingly damaging about everybody else; and the whole company would be cleared off the stage in the first few chapters if something did not always happen to make them drop the daggers in a continual stalemate. Dukes who are governors of provinces and peers of France are also heads (or think they are) of secret societies--the orthodox members of which chiefly do the coining, but are quite ignorant that a large number of other members are Huguenots (it is not long after the "Revocation") and are, in the same castle, storing arms for an insurrection. Spanish counts who are supposed to have been murdered fifteen years ago turn up quite uninjured, and ready for the story to go on sixteen years longer. When you have got an ivory casket supposed to be full of all sorts of compromising documents, somebody produces another, exactly like it, but containing documents more compromising still. There is a counsellor of the Parliament of Toulouse--supposed to be not merely a severe magistrate, but a man of spotless virtue, and one who actually submits fearlessly to great danger in doing his duty, but who turns out to be an atrocious criminal. And in the centre of all the turmoil there is a wondrous figure, a sorcerer-shepherd, who is really an Italian prince, who pulls all the strings, makes all cups slip at all lips, sets up and upsets all the puppets, and is finally poniarded by the wicked counsellor, both of them having been caught at last, and the counsellor going mad after commission of his final crime.

Now, if anybody wants more than this--there is, in fact, a great deal more in the compass of two volumes,[279] containing between them less than six hundred pages--all I can say is that he is vexatious and unreasonable, and that I have no sympathy whatever with him. Of course the book is of its own kind, and not of another. Some people may like that kind less than others; some may not like it at all. But in that case nobody obliges them to have anything to do with it.

Soulié wrote nearly two score novels or works of fiction, ranging from _Contes pour les Enfants_ to _Mémoires du Diable_. I do not pretend to have read all or even very many of them, for, as I have confessed, they are not my special kind. In novels of action there should be a great deal of fighting and a great deal of love-making, and it does not seem to me that either[280] was Soulié's forte. But as the _Mémoires_ are sometimes quoted as his masterpiece, something should, I suppose, be said about them.

[Sidenote: _Les Mémoires du Diable._]

One thing about the book is certain--that it is much more ambitiously planned than the _Château_; and I do not think it uncritical to say that the ambition is, to a certain extent, successful. One credit, at any rate, can hardly be denied it. Considering the immense variety in circumstances of the bargains with the Devil which are made in actual life, it may seem strange that the literary treatment of the subject should be so comparatively monotonous as it is. Soulié, I think, has been at least as original as anybody else, though it was of course almost impossible for him to avoid suggestions, if not of Marlowe, of Lesage, Goethe, Maturin (whose wide popularity in France at this time must never be forgotten), and others. At the very beginning there is one touch which, if not absolutely invented, is newish in the connection. The Château of Ronquerolles, again in the Pyrenean district (besides the advantages of a mountainous country, Soulié himself was born at Foix), has a range of mysterious windows, each of which has for many generations emerged, with the room appertaining, from wall and corridor without anybody remembering it before.[281] As a matter of fact these chambers have been the scenes of successive bargains between the Lords of Ronquerolles and the Prince of Darkness; and a fresh one is opened whenever the last inheritor of an ancestral curse (details of which are explained later) has gone to close his account. The new Count de Luizzi knows what he has to do, which is to summon Satan by a certain little silver bell at the not most usual but sufficiently witching hour of _two_ A.M., saying at the same time, "Come!" After a slightly trivial farce-overture of apparitions in various banal forms, Luizzi compels the fallen archangel to show himself in his proper shape; and the bargain is concluded after some chaffering. It again is not quite the usual form; there being, as in Melmoth's case, a redemption clause, though a different one. If the man can say and show, after ten years, that he has been happy he will escape. The "consideration" is also uncommon. Luizzi does not want wealth, which, indeed, he possesses; nor, directly, pleasure, etc., which he thinks he can procure for himself. He wants (God help him!) to know all about other people, their past lives, their temptations, etc.--a thing which a person of sense and taste would do anything, short of selling himself to the Devil, _not_ to know. There are, however, some apparently liberal, if discreditable, concessions--that Luizzi may reveal, print, and in any other way avail himself of the diabolic information. But, almost immediately, the metaphorical cloven foot and false dice appear. For it seems that in certain circumstances Luizzi can only rid himself of his ally when unwelcome, and perform other acts, at the price of forfeiting a month of his life--a thing likely to abridge and qualify the ten years very considerably, and the "happiness" more considerably still.[282] And this foul play, or at any rate sharp practice, continues, as might be expected, throughout. The evil actions which Luizzi commits are not, as usual, committed with impunity as to ordinary worldly consequences, while he is constantly enlarging the debt against his soul. He is also always getting into trouble by mixing up his supernatural knowledge with his ordinary life, and he even commits murder without intending or indeed knowing it. This is all rather cleverly managed; though the end--the usual sudden "foreclosure" by Diabolus, despite the effort of no less than three Gretchens who go upwards, and of a sort of inchoate repentance on Luizzi's own part before he goes downwards--might be better.

The bulk, however, of the book, which is a very long one--three volumes and nearly a thousand closely printed pages--consists of the _histoires_ or "memoirs" (whence the title) of other people which the Devil tells Luizzi, sometimes by actual _récit_, sometimes otherwise. Naturally they are most of them grimy; though there is nothing of the Laclos or even of the Paul de Kock kind. I find them, however, a little tedious.

[Sidenote: Later writers and writings of the class.]

The fact, indeed, is that this kind of novel--as has been hinted sometimes, and sometimes frankly asserted--has its own peculiar appeals; and that these appeals, as is always the case when they are peculiar, leave some ears deaf. There is no intention here to intimate any superfine scorn of it. It has another and a purely literary, or at least literary-scientific, interest as descending from the Terror Novel of the end of the eighteenth century. It shows no sign of ceasing to exist or to appeal to those to whom it is fitted to appeal, and who are fitted to be appealed to by it. Towards the close of the period at which I ceased to see French novels generally, I remember meeting with many examples of it. There was one which, with engaging candour, called itself _L'Hôtellerie Sanglante_, and in which persons, after drinking wine which was, as Rogue Riderhood says, "fur from a 'ealthy wine," retired to a rest which knew no or only a very brief and painful waking, under the guardianship of a young person, who, to any one in any other condition, would have seemed equally "fur" from an attractive young person. There was another, the title of which I forget, in which the intended victim of a plunge into a water-logged _souterrain_ connected with the Seine made his way out and saw dreadful things in the house above. There is really no great interval or discrepancy (except in details of manners and morals) between these and the novels of detective, gentleman-thief, and other impolite life which delight many persons indubitably respectable and presumably intelligent in England to-day.[283] To sneer at these would be ridiculous.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Murger.]

Henry Murger is not the least of the witnesses to the truth of a remark--which I owe to one of the critics of my earlier volume--that in England people (he was kind enough to except me) are too apt to accept the contemporary French estimates of French contemporary literature and the traditional French estimates of earlier authors. Murger had, I believe, a hardly earned and too brief popularity in his own country; and though it was a little before my time, I can believe that this overflowed into England. But the posthumous and accepted judgments of him altered _there_ to a sort of slighting patronage; and I remember that when, nearly twenty years after his death, I wrote on him in the _Fortnightly Review_,[284] some surprise at my loftier estimate was expressed _here_. The reasons for this depreciation are not hard to give, and as they form a base for, and indeed really a part of, my critical estimate they may be stated shortly. The "Bohemia"[285] of which Murger was the laureate, both in prose and verse, is a country whose charms have been admitted by some of the greatest, but which no wise person has ever regarded, much less recommended, as providing any city to dwell in; and which has certainly been the scene if not the occasion, not merely of much mischief, which does not particularly concern us, but of much foolishness and bad taste, which partly does. It was almost--not quite--the only theme of Murger's songs and words. And--last and perhaps most dangerous of all--there was the fact that, if not in definite Bohemianism, there was in other respects a good deal in him of a far minor Musset, and both in Bohemianism and other things still more of an inferior Gérard de Nerval. I believe the case _against_ has been fairly stated here.

[Sidenote: The _Vie de Bohême_.]

The case _for_ I have put in the essay referred to with the full, though, I think, not more than the fair emphasis allowed to even a critical advocate when he has to demolish charges. The historian passes from bar to bench; and neither ought to speak, nor in this instance is inclined to speak, quite so enthusiastically. I admitted there that I did not think Murger's comparatively early death lost us much; and I admit even more frankly here, that in what he has left there is no great variety of excellence, and that while there are numerous good things in the work, there is little that can be called actually great. But after these admissions no small amount remains to his credit as a writer who can manage both comedy and pathos; who, if he has no wide range or variety of subject, can vary his treatment quite efficiently, and who has a certain freshness rarely surviving the first years of journalism of all work. His faintly but truly charming verse is outside our bounds, and even prose poetry like "The Loves of a Cricket and a Spark of Flame"[286] are on the line, though this particular thing is not far below Gérard himself. The longer novels, _Adeline Protat_ and _Le Sabot Rouge_, are competent in execution and pleasant enough to read; yet they are not above good circulating-library strength. But the _Vie de Bohême_, in its various sections, and a great number of shorter tales and sketches, are thoroughly agreeable if not even delightful. Murger has completely shaken off the vulgarity which almost spoilt Pigault, and damaged Paul de Kock not a little. If any one who has not yet reached age, or has not let it make him "crabbed," cannot enjoy Schaunard and the tame lobster; the philosophic humours of Gustave (afterwards His Excellency Gustave) Colline; the great journal _Le Castor_,[287] which combined the service of the hat-trade with the promotion of high thinking and great writing; and the rest of the comedy of _La Vie de Bohême_ proper, I am sorry for him. He must have been, somehow, born wrong.

[Sidenote: _Les Buveurs d'Eau_ and the Miscellanies.]

The serious Bohemia of the _Buveurs d'Eau_ (the devotees of High Art who carry their devotion to the point of contemning all "commission" work whatsoever) may require more effort, or more special predestination, to get into full sympathy with it. The thing is noble; but it is nobility _party per_ a very thin _pale_ with and from silliness; and the Devil's Advocate has no very hard task in suggesting that it is not even nobility at all, but a compound of idleness and affectation.[288] With rare exceptions, the greatest men of art and letters have never disdained, though they might not love, what one of them called "honest journey-work in default of better"; and when those exceptions come to be examined--as in the leading English cases of Milton[289] and Wordsworth--you generally find that the persons concerned never really felt the pinch of necessity. However, Murger makes the best of his Lazare and the rest of them; and his power over pathos, which is certainly not small, assists him as much here as it does _more_ than assist him--as it practically carries him through--in other stories such as _Le Manchon de Francine_ and _La Biographie d'un Inconnu_. And, moreover, he can use all these means and more in handfuls of little things--some mere _bleuettes_ (as the French call them)--_Comment on Devient Coloriste_, _Le Victime du Bonheur_, _La Fleur Bretonne_, _Le Fauteuil Enchanté_, _Les Premières Amours du Jeune Bleuet_.

With such high praise still allotted to an author, it may seem unfair not to give him more room; and I should certainly have done so if I had not had the other treatment to refer to. Since that existed, as in the similar cases of Sandeau, Bernard, and perhaps one or two more, it seemed to me that space, becoming more and more valuable, might be economised, especially as, in his case and theirs, there is nothing extraordinary to interest, nothing difficult to discuss. _Tolle_, _lege_ is the suitable word for all three, and no fit person who obeys will regret his obedience.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Reybaud--_Jérôme Paturot_, and Thackeray on its earlier part.]

Any one who attempts to rival Thackeray's abstract ("_with_ translations, Sir!") of the first part of Louis Reybaud's _Jérôme Paturot_ must have a better conceit of himself than that with which the present writer has been gifted, by the Divinity or any other power. The essay[290] in which this appears contains some of the rather rash and random judgments to which its great author was too much addicted; he had not, for instance, come to his later and saner estimate of Dumas,[291] and still ranks him with Sue and Soulié. But the Paturot part itself is simply delightful, and must have sent many who were not fortunate enough to know (or fortunate enough _not_ to know) it already to the book. This well deserved and deserves to be known. Jérôme's own earlier career as a romantic and unread poet is not so brilliantly done as similar things in Gautier's _Les Jeune-France_ and other books; but the Saint-Simonian sequel, in which so many _mil-huit-cent-trentiers_ besides Jérôme himself and (so surprisingly) Sainte-Beuve indulged, is most capitally hit off. The hero's further experiences in company-meddling (with not dissimilar results to those experienced by Thackeray's own Samuel Titmarsh, and probably or certainly by Thackeray himself); and as the editor of a journal enticing the _abonné_ with a _bonus_, which may be either a pair of boots, a greatcoat, or a _gigot_ at choice; the side-hits at law and medicine; the relapse into trade and National Guardism; the visit to the Tuileries; the sad bankruptcy and the subsequent retirement to a little place in the prefecture of a remote department--all these things are treated in the best Gallic fashion, and with a certain weight of metal not always achievable by "Gigadibs, the literary man," whether Gallic or Anglo-Saxon. Reybaud himself was a serious historian, a student of social philosophy, who has the melancholy honour of having popularised, if he did not invent, the word "Socialist" and the cheerfuller one of having faithfully dealt with the thing Socialism. And Jérôme is well set off by his still more "Jeune-France" friend Oscar, a painter, not exactly a bad fellow, but a _poseur_, a dauber (he would have been a great Futurist or Cubist to-day), a very Bragadochio in words and flourish, and, alas! as he turns out presently, a Bragadochio also in deeds and courage.

[Sidenote: The windfall of Malvina.]