Chapter XIII: Naturalism--The Goncourts, Zola, and Maupassant (3)

Yet in recompense--a recompense largely if not wholly due to the strong Romantic[516] element which countervails the Naturalist--he was certainly the greatest novelist who was specially of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in France. In verse he showed the dawn, and in prose the noon-day, of a combination of veracity and vigour, of succinctness and strength, which no Frenchman who made his _début_ since 1870 could surpass. The limitations of his art have been sufficiently dealt with; the excellences of it within those limitations are unmistakable. He had no tricks--the worst curse of art at all times, and the commonest in these days of what pretends to be art. He had no splash of so-called "style"; no acrobatic contortions of thought or what does duty for thought; no pottering and peddling of the psychological kind, which would fain make up for a faulty product by ostentatiously parading the processes of production. Had he once got free--as more than once it seemed that he might--from the fatal conventionalities of his unconventionalism, from the trammels of his obtrusive negations, there is hardly a height in prose fiction which he might not have attained. As it is, he gave us in verse _Au bord de l'eau_, which is nearly the "farthest possible" in a certain expression, of a certain mood of youth, and not of youth only; in prose _Boule de Suif_, _Monsieur Parent_, _Pierre et Jean_, which are all in their way masterpieces, and a hundred things hardly inferior. And so he put himself in the company of "Les Phares"--a light-giver at once and a warner of danger, as well as a part of

cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'âge en âge,
Et vient mourir au bord de _notre_ éternité.[517]

[Sidenote: Huysmans.]

The Naturalist rank and file are so far below Zola and Maupassant that they cannot now, whatever they might have done twenty years ago, claim much notice in such a history as this. The most remarkable of them was probably J. K. Huysmans. It has been charitably suggested or admitted above that his contribution to the _Soirées de Médan_--a deeply felt story, showing the extreme disadvantage, when, as Mr. De la Pluche delicately put it, "your midlands are out of order," of wandering quarters and vicissitudes in the country, and the intense relief experienced on return to your own comfortable chambers in town,--that this _may_ have been written in the spirit of a _farceur_, reducing the Goncourtian and Zolaesque principle to the lowest terms of the absurd. But I am by no means sure that it was so, though this suspicion of parody pursues the earlier work of Huysmans to such an extent that a certain class of critic might take his later developments as evidence of design in it. _Les Soeurs Vatard_ is a sort of _apodiabolosis_ of the Goncourts and Zola--a history of entirely uninteresting persons (the "sisters" are work-girls in a printing-house, and their companions suit them) doing entirely uninteresting things, in an atmosphere of foul smells, on a scene littered with garbage, cheered by wine which is red ink, and brandy which is vitriol. _À Rebours_, not really a novel at all, is the history of a certain M. Des Esseintes, who is a sort of transposed "Bouvard et Pécuchet" in one--trying all arts and sensations; his experiences being made by his historian a vehicle of mostly virulent and almost always worthless criticism on contemporaries. Perhaps the most intolerable thing is the _affiche_ of idolatry for Baudelaire. One remembers the glorious lines:

Et Charles Baudelaire
Dédaigneux du salaire.

He certainly might have been disdainful of the salary of the admiration of one of the _farceurs_ of his own "Coucher du Soleil Romantique." But on the whole there is a better way of taking leave of this first Naturalist, and then mystic, and always _blagueur_. "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Philistine." Which perhaps was his cryptic and circuitous intention. Later M. Huysmans took to Black Arts; and at the last he turned devout--a sort of sequence not by any means uncommon, and one of the innumerable illustrations of the irony of things. Gautier and others had anticipated and satirised all these stages in the Romantic dawn; they reappeared, serious and dreary, in the twilight of the dusk.

[Sidenote: Belot and others.]

Adolphe Belot was not, strictly speaking, a Naturalist, for he was a dozen years older than Zola, and ran up a huge list of novels ranging in character between Naturalism and melodrama. His most famous book, _Mlle. Giraud ma Femme_, was the most popular of a large number of attempts, about the last third of the century, in the school of _La Religieuse_, but with more or less deliberately pornographic effect. There is, however, some power in this book, and the "curtain"--the foiled husband, after Mlle. Giraud's death, seeing his she-rival swimming, swims out after and drowns her--is quite refreshing. But I have always liked M. Belot best for a thoughtful and delightful remark in _La Femme de Feu_. "Heureuse elle-même, elle trouva naturel de faire les autres heureux," which, translated into plain English, means that she was so happy with her husband that she couldn't help making her lover happy. M. Belot did not work out this modification of the Golden Rule--he was not a philosophic novelist. But it is very humorous in itself, and the extensions and applications of it are illimitable and vertiginous.[518]

Below him it is unnecessary to go.

FOOTNOTES:

[455] For the early divisions of verse and prose story were all Topsies, and simply "growed"; although the smaller romances of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and the larger of the latter date, were undoubtedly influenced by the Greek, it was more a case of general imitation than specific endeavour; the Sensibility school was very limited and chiefly attended to tricks of manner; and the "Romantic vague" was never vaguer than in the vast and rather formless, though magnificent and delightful, novel-work started by Nodier, Mérimée, Vigny, and Hugo. The Naturalists, on the other hand, had a deliberate idea of revolutionising the novel--of abolishing old things and creating new. They could not, and did not, succeed: but their scheme, as well as its results, may claim consideration.

[456] To which a brief consideration of the curious fancy of some French critics that there is something "classical" about Naturalism may be specially relegated.

[457] Mérimée, though after his fashion making no fuss about it, was also an early virtuoso in this kind; and one of his letters contains an excellent example of the quiet cynicism in which he excelled. Some ladies had asked to see his collection, and he had very properly warned them that the "curios" of that ingenious and valiant nation were sometimes "curious" in a special sense, and had offered to "select." "Elles ont tout vu," he adds simply, and one hopes his correspondent (I forgot whether it was one of the _Inconnues_ or Madame de Montijo) appreciated the Mount-Everest-like Laconism.

[458] The banal phrase has been framed in the amber of "Théo's" verse, and so debanalised.

[459] The first book of theirs, or rather of Edmond's, though it bore both names, that I read, and the second French book I ever reviewed, was the mainly artistic _Gavarni_ of 1873. One has a human weakness in such cases, but I think one might not have been wholly well disposed to the author from it.

[460] Pepys had nothing that could be called _bad_ blood. Horace perhaps had a little, but it was sweet and childlike compared to the "acrid-quack" fluid of Edmond de Goncourt's veins and heart. Probably several people have seen in M. de Goncourt the suggestion of an _un_-Puritan Malvolio.

[461] Not, however, in the second case, by Sainte-Beuve, whose lukewarmness Edmond--a "Sensitive Plant" in this way if hardly in others--never forgave.

[462] She served them for a very long period without giving them any apparent cause for complaint. They only found out her delinquencies after her death, or in her last illness--I forget which. Probably nothing could better show "the nature of the animals" than this _post-mortem_ grubbing belowstairs for a "subject," and washing your own household dirty linen in public--for profit.

[463] It may be well to smash, in a passing note, a silly catchword popular with some rather belated English admirers of the Naturalist school a few years ago. They praised its "frankness." You might as well praise the "straightforwardness" of a man who goes out of his way to explore laystalls and, having picked up ordure, holds it up to public view.

[464] Both excellent things in their way, of course. Perhaps it would be better to say asafoetida.

[465] It is perhaps only fair to warn readers who may not know the fact, that some very good and (in the French as well as the English sense) respectable judges think much better of the work, and even of the men or man, than I do. _Renée Mauperin_ especially (as indeed I have admitted) has a considerable body of suffrage; the general style pleases some, and it has been urged for Edmond that good men liked him. But these good men had not read his diary. There is, however, no doubt that it is an exceptionally strong case of "rubbing the [right or the] wrong way." Books and men and style all rub me the wrong way; and, though I have some knack at using the brushes and _fixatures_ of pure criticism, I can't get myself smoothed down.

[466] See note at close of chapter. One of the most comic things in the whole Naturalist episode was the rising up of some of these disciples to rebuke their master, in a round robin, for "right-hand and left-hand defections" from the pure gospel of the sect.

[467] The word is used, designedly but not fraudulently, as combining "observation" and "experiment" _to the extent proper to art_. Deliberate and after-thought "experi_ments_" in actual life are (except in trivial matters) very risky things; and the _Summa Rerum_ itself is apt to resent them, as, for instance, Mr. Thomas Day and Mr. Felix Graham found in the matter of wife-culture.

[468] _V. sup._ Vol. I. p. 278. I was much pleased to find that the quotation considerably "put out" one of my few unfavourable critics. "The Importance of Gastronomy in Novels" is a beautiful subject--still, I think, virgin, though Thackeray has touched on it in others once or twice, and illustrated it magnificently himself.

[469] For something on the opposite view, that Naturalism is "classical," see Conclusion.

[470] That Flaubert escaped their error only so far as by fire has been allowed. One might indeed say so by death. For _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ as it stands, and as outlined further, is very near Naturalism. Earlier he had carried the principle far in _Salammbô_, and would have carried it farther if he had not listened to good advice for once. But he had fire enough in his interior to burn the rubbish and smelt the ore in his better books, and skill enough to run off the metal from the dross, into proper shape. The others had not.

[471] I learn from the lucubrations of some Americans--who, having been, rather late and with some difficulty, induced to perceive that Edgar Poe was their chief literary glory, have taken vehemently to his favourite kind, and written voluminously in and on it--that it ought to be called a "brief-narrative," the hyphen being apparently essential. This is very interesting: and throws much light on the subject. However, having read a great deal on it, I do not find myself much advanced beyond a position which I think I occupied some fifty years ago--to wit, that a short story is not merely a long one cut down, nor a long story a short one spun out.

[472] Barbey d'Aurevilly's (_v. sup._) attack on the book is one of the most remarkable instances of the irresponsibility of his criticism.

[473] _V. sup._ p. 258.

[474] One ought perhaps to verify; but that would be hard lines to have to read _Nana_ twice!

[475] That of the _Union Générale_.

[476] _Vérité_, though a remarkable "human document" itself, and an indispensable _historical_ document for any student of the particular popular madness with which it deals, need surely be inflicted a second time on no mortal. It is a transposition into the regions of the unmentionable, of the Dreyfus case itself. But nobody save a failure of something like a novelist of genius, with this failure pushed near the confines of madness, could have written it.

[477] "M. Zola [is] apparently persuaded that, if you can only kill God, the Devil will die--an idea which seems to leave out of consideration the idiosyncrasy of a third personage, Man" (_The Later Nineteenth Century_, Edinburgh and London, 1907, pp. 93, 94).

[478] Only it would have to be real Blake, not imitation, which latter is one of the furthest examples of dreary futility known to the present writer.

[479] The horticulture of _L'Abbé Mouret_ is nearest to an exception; but even that is overdone.

[480] Who might even say, "Is not this a slip of pen or press? Has not 'might' dropped out?" I should doubt it, even if a copy of the original edition had the missing word, for it might easily have been put in by a dull but conscientious "reader." The plural, in Thackeray's careless way, comes from his _thinking_ as he wrote "Are they not _all_ ... personage_s_...." The context confirms this.

[481] There are, of course, comparatively few of these; but the fewness is not positive, even keeping to prose-fiction. Poetry and drama--under their less onerous conditions for this special task--would enlarge the list in goodly fashion.

[482] Shortly after Maupassant's death, I contributed an article on him to the _Fortnightly Review_. It has never been reprinted, but, by the kindness of the Editor of that _Review_, I have been permitted to use it as a basis for this notice. I have, however, altered, omitted, and added to a much greater extent than in the few other rehandlings acknowledged in this History. The account of the actual books is wholly new.

[483] I had known Verlaine since his appearance in the _Parnasse Contemporain_ years earlier, but not yet in his most characteristic work.

[484] The following summary, to p. 505, formed no part of the original article and is based on fresh and continuous reading. It is purposely rather more minute than anything else in these later chapters, and was not the easiest part of the book to do, owing to the large number of Maupassant's short stories.

[485] Maupassant _could_ draw gentlemen and ladies, but he often did not do so. His pretty young countesses (_not_ the same persons as those referred to in text), who get drunk together _tête-à-tête_, and discourse on the best way of making more effectual Josephs out of their footmen, are not pleasing, though they are right in holding that no perfume, save Eau de Cologne, doth become a _man_.

[486] Vol. I. pp. 150-1.

[487] The usual gutter-Naturalist certainly would--and even M. Zola, I fear, might--have done the "Ephesian matron" business thoroughly: Maupassant, as so often, knew other and better things.

[488] It may suggest Leconte de Lisle to others and may even have been meant for him, but I think it worthy of the earlier and greater poet.

[489] It went, I fear, by mistake with the rest of my books; so I quote from memory. But Southey and Locker have had their duet pleasantly changed into a trio since by Mr. Austin Dobson's _Bookman's Budget_.

[490] It may be just, and only just necessary to observe (what I know perfectly well) that Maupassant was, in the direct sense, Flaubert's pupil and not Zola's.

[491] He was, says his historian well, "de la race des amants et non point de la race des pères."

[492] The resemblances between Thackeray and Maupassant are very numerous and most remarkable. That they have both been accused of cynicism _and_ sentimentality is only, as it were, the index-finger to the relationship.

[493] At the risk, however, of wearying the reader and "forcing open doors," one may exemplify, from this book also, the artificial character of this obligatory adultery. Anne de Guilleroy has all the qualifications of an almost perfect mistress (in the honourable sense) and wife. She is charming; a flirt to the right point and not beyond it; passionate ditto; affectionate; not capricious; inviolably faithful (in her unfaithfulness, of course); jealous to her own pain, but with no result of malice to others. Yet in order to show all this she has to be an adulteress first--in obedience to this mysterious modernisation and topsy-turvification of ancient Babylonian custom, and the _jus primae noctis_, and the proverb as to second thoughts being best, and Heaven or the other place knows what else. Here also, as elsewhere, Maupassant--satirist of women as he is--makes her lover a very inferior creature to herself. For Bertin is a selfish coxcomb, and _does_, at least half, allow himself to be "snuffed out by an article."

[494] Any one who chooses may compare it with the utterances of the late Mr. Henry James. Maupassant's own selection of novels, to illustrate the impossibility of defining _a_ novel, is of the first interest. They are: _Manon Lescaut_, _Paul et Virginie_, _Don Quichotte_, _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_, _Werther_, _Les Affinités Électives_, _Clarissa_ [_he_ adds _Harlowe_, an unauthentic addition, pardonable in a Frenchman, though not in one of us], _Émile_, _Candide_, _Cinq-Mars_, _René_, _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, _Mauprat_, _Le Père Goriot_, _La Cousine Bette_, _Colomba_, _Le Rouge et Le Noir_, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, _Notre Dame de Paris_, _Salammbô_, _Madame Bovary_, _Adolphe_, _M. de Camors_, _L'Assommoir_, and _Sapho_.

[495] "Amant" as accurately distinguished by M. Jean Richepin in _Césarine_ (for the benefit of an innocent Hungarian) from "amoureux."

[496] Not that I wish to blaspheme Circe, who always seems to me to have adjusted herself to a disconcertingly changed situation with more than demi-goddesslike dexterity and good humour. It may perhaps be not irrelevant, to discussion of novels in general, to mention something which I have never yet seen put in Homeric discussion, though the bare idea of anything new there being possible may seem preposterous. The arguments of the splitters-up are, naturally enough, seldom if ever literary, belonging as they do to the class of Biblical, that is to say, _un_literary, criticism. But strictly literary considerations, furnishing argument of the strongest kind for unity, might be brought by comparing the behaviour of Circe, at the moment referred to, and that of Helen when Paris returned from his defeat. These situations are, of course, in initial circumstance as opposite as possible, though they _arrivent à pareille fin_. But behind their very opposition there is a conception of the eternal feminine--partly human, partly divine--which it would be very surprising to find in two different persons, and which might, if any one cared to do it, be interestingly worked out from divers other Homeric characters of women or goddesses, from Hera and Aphrodite in the one poem to Nausicaa and Calypso in the other. "How great a _novelist_ was in _Homer_ lost" is a theme too much neglected.

[497] For do not fixed hours always become a bore--except in respect of meals? To have to love, or to lecture, or to do anything but eat, at _x_ A. or P.M. precisely, on such and such days in the week, is a weariness to the spirit and the flesh alike.

[498] "The Novelists Who Cannot End" is one of the title-subjects which, "reponing my senescent art," I relinquish to others.

[499] In the card sense.

[500] They run well into, if not over, the second hundred, and it is proper to warn readers (and still more buyers) that different editions vary the contents of individual volumes; so that, without some care, and even with it, duplication is nearly certain. This bad habit, not quite unknown in England, is rather common in France.

[501] If any one is fortunate, or unfortunate, enough not to know this admirable story, it may be well to say that the title is the nickname of a young person, more pleasing than proper, who forms part of a convoy or cartel of non-combatants passing through the Prussian lines in 1871. The Prussian officer, imitating more mildly (and without the additional villainy) the conduct of Colonel Kirke, refuses passage to the whole party, unless she will give him a cast of her office. The story is told as inoffensively as possible, and the crowning irony of the shocked attitude of her respectable companions at her liberating them, though they have been frantically anxious she should do so, is sublime.

[502] Maupassant does not caricature us (at least our men) very extravagantly. But he, like the rest of them, always makes us say, "Aoh." I have frequently endeavoured to produce, otherwise than as a diphthong, this mysterious word (a descendant, perhaps, of the equally mysterious _Aoi_ of the _Chanson de Roland_?). But I cannot make it like the way in which I say, or in which any well-educated Englishman says, "Oh!" American it may be, and it is not unlike the "Ow" of some dialects, but pure English it is not. It may be, for aught I know, phonetic: and has been explained as representing an affected sneer. The curious thing is that "Oh-_a_" actually is a not unfrequent, though slovenly, pronunciation.

[503] Evidently, therefore, the practice with which we have been so often reproached is of French--at least Norman--origin.

[504] The _other_ one, of course, but here one must admit the superiority of the foreign "strength." And the "story" has French antecedents.

[505] This is an actual translation of the Norman poet's words. It makes no bad blank-verse line.

[506] Its companions, in the volume to which it gives title, are mostly inferior specimens of the same class. But some, especially _Le Pain Maudit_, are very amusing, and _Lui_? is a curious and melancholy anticipation of _Le Horla_. _La Maison Tellier_, which opens and titles another volume of no very different kind, has never seemed to me quite worthy of its fame. It is not unamusing in itself, and very amusing when one thinks of its greatly-daring imitators, but rather schoolboyish or even monkeyish in its determination to shock. (It doesn't shock _me_.) Another "shocker," but tragic, not comic, _La Femme de Paul_, which closes the book, is more powerful. (It is on the theme of _Mlle. Giraud ma Femme_ (_v. inf._); only the male person, instead of drowning his she-rival, far less wisely drowns himself.) But most of its contents suffer, not merely from Naturalist grime, but from Naturalist _meticulousness_.

[507] _V. sup._ p. 269 _sq._

[508] For the "Terror" group see below.

[509] Curiously enough, a few days _after_ writing the above I came across, in the last _Diabolique_ of that curious flawed genius, Barbey d'Aurevilly (_v. sup._ p. 453), the words which redress, by long anticipation, the wrong done by his fellow Norman: "Les ailes du nez, _aussi expressives que des yeux_."

[510] In a novel by a contemporary of his, otherwise not worth notice, Sir Walter Scott was accused of "_pruderie_ bête"; I am sure the adjective and substantive are much better mated in my text.

[511] I remember, in a book which I have not seen for about two-thirds of a century, Miss Martineau's _Crofton Boys_, an agreeable anecdote (for the good Harriet, when not under the influence of Radicalism, the dismal science, Anti-Christianity, or Mr. Atkinson, could tell a story very well) of a little English girl. It occurred to her one morning that she should have to wash, dress, do her hair, etc., _every day for her whole life_, and she sat down and wept bitterly. Now, if I were a little boy or girl in French novel-world, when as I remembered that I should have, as the one, never to marry, or to commit adultery with every one who asked me; that, as the other, I must not be left five minutes alone with a married woman, without offering her the means of carrying out her and her husband's destiny; I really think I should imitate Miss Martineau's child, if I did not even go and hang myself. "Fay ce que voudras" may be rather a wide commandment. "Fay ce que dois" may require a little enlarging. But "Do what you ought not, not because you wish to do it, but because it is the proper thing to do" is not only "the limit," but beyond it. I think that if I were a Frenchman of the novel-type I should hate the sight of a married woman. Stone walls would not a prison make nor iron bars a cage--so odious as this unrelieved tyranny of _concupiscentia carnis_--to order! Perhaps Wilberforce's Agathos had a tedious time of it in being always ready to resist the Dragon; but how much more wearisome would it be to be always on the _qui vive_, lest you should miss a chance of _not_ resisting him!

[512] The "time" was five and twenty years ago. But this passage, trifling as it may seem to some readers, appeared to me worth preserving, because my recent very careful reperusal of Maupassant, as a whole, made its appositeness constantly recur to me.

[513] Nearest, perhaps, in the story called "En Famille," to be found in the _Maison Tellier_ volume.

[514] Remarks already made on the particular novels and stories from this point of view need only be referred to, not repeated. But it is fair to say that some good judges plead for "warning off" instead of "inculcation."

[515] There are some, but they are very few.

[516] See Conclusion. After the above notice of Maupassant was, in its reconstituted form, entirely completed, there came into my hands a long and careful paper on the novelist's Romanticism, published by Mr. Oliver H. Moore in the Transactions of the American Modern Language Association for March 1918. Those who are curious as to French opinion of him, and especially as to the strange superstition of his "classicism" (see Conclusion again), will find large extracts and references on this subject given by Mr. Moore, who promises further discussion.

[517] One never knows what is necessary or not in the way of explanation. But perhaps it is wiser to say that I am quite aware that, besides writing _votre_, not "notre," Baudelaire had originally written "ce long hurlement" before the immense improvement in the text, and that original "Light-houses" were painters.

[518] One slight alteration may seem almost to justify Belot's criticism of life: "Uncomfortable herself, she thought it natural to make others uncomfortable." There is certainly no want of psychological observation _there_.