A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 37

[437] There is a paper on Cherbuliez in _Essays on French Novelists_, where fuller account of individual works, and very full notice, with translations, of _Le Roman d'une Honnete Femme_ and _Meta Holdenis_ will be found.

[438] _History of Criticism_, vol. iii. See also below.

[439] The author of the _Fleurs du Mal_ himself might have been distinguished in prose fiction. The _Pet.i.ts Poemes en Prose_ indeed abstain from story-interest even more strictly than their avowed pattern, _Gaspard de la Nuit_. But _La Fanfarlo_ is capitally told.

[440] Hugo might do this; hardly a Hugonicule.

[441] There used to be a fancy for writing books about groups of characters. Somebody might do worse in book-making than "Great Editors,"

and Veuillot should certainly be one of them.

[442] The inadvertences which characterise him could hardly be better instanced than in his calling the eminent O'Donovan Rossa "_le depute-martyr_ de Tipperary." In English, if not in French, a "deputy-martyr" is a delightful person.

[443] Its articles are made up--rather dangerously, but very skilfully--of shorter reviews of individual books published sometimes at long intervals.

[444] Who replied explosively.

[445] There used to be something of a controversy whether it should be thus or Aur_e_villy. But the modern editions, at least, never have the accent.

[446] Very little above it I should put the not wholly dissimilar liquor obtained, at great expense and trouble, by a late n.o.bleman of high character and great ability from (it was said) an old monkish vineyard in the Isle of Britain. The monks must have exhausted the goodness of that _clos_; or else have taken the wine as a penance.

[447] Huysmans on this is very funny.

[448] A Spanish d.u.c.h.ess of doubly and trebly "azured" blood revenges herself on her husband, who has ma.s.sacred her lover before her eyes and given his heart to dogs, by becoming a public prost.i.tute in Paris, and dying in the Salpetriere. It is almost, if not quite, a masterpiece.

[449] Barbey's dislike of Feuillet was, evidently and half-confessedly, increased by his notion that _M. de Camors_ had "lifted" something from _L'Ensorcelee_. There is also perhaps a touch of _Le Bonheur dans le Crime_ in _La Morte_.

[450] He knew a good deal (quite independently of Byron and Brummel) about English literature. One is surprised to find somewhere a reference to Walpole's story of Fielding and his dinner-companions.

[451] Observe that this is no demand for the explanation of the supernatural. Let the supernatural remain as it is, by all means. But curses should have causes. Ate and Weird are terrible G.o.ddesses, but they are not unreasonable ones. They might be less _terrible_ if they were.

[452] He has for two years been ordered to be present, but forbidden to celebrate; in punishment for his having, uncanonically, fought as a Chouan--if not also for attempted suicide. But we hear of no amorousness, and the husband Le Hardouey's jealousy, though prompted by his wife's apparent self-destruction, is definitely stated to have no foundation in actual guilt with the priest. On the contrary, she declares that he cared nothing for her.

[453] Of Geoffroy Tory's book which (_v. sup._ Vol. I. p. 124) helped to give us the Limousin student.

[454] It is possible that some readers may say, "Where are Erckmann-Chatrian?" The fact is that I have never been able to find, in those twin-brethren, either literature or that not quite literary interest which some others have found. But I do not wish to abuse them, and they have given much pleasure to these others. So I let them alone.

CHAPTER XIII

NATURALISM--THE GONCOURTS, ZOLA, AND MAUPa.s.sANT

[Sidenote: The beginnings.]

If I were writing this _History_ on the lines which some of my critics (of whom, let it be observed, I do not make the least complaint) seem to prefer, or at least to miss their absence, a very large part of this chapter would give me the least possible difficulty. I should simply take M. Zola's _Le Roman Experimental_ and M. Brunetiere's _Le Roman Naturaliste_ and "combine my information." The process--easy to any one of some practice in letters--could be easier to no one than to me. For I read and reviewed both books very carefully at their first appearance; I had them on my shelves for many years; and the turning of either over for a quarter of an hour, or half at the most, would put its contents once more at my fingers' ends. But, as I have more than once pointed out, elaborate boiling down of them would not accord with my scheme and plan. Inasmuch as the episode or pa.s.sage[455] is perhaps, of all those which make up our story, the most remarkable instance of a deliberate "school"--of a body of work planned and executed under more or less definite schedules--something if not much more of the critical kind than usual may be given, either here or in the Conclusion.[456] But we shall, I think, learn far better things as to M. Zola and those about him by considering what they--at least what he, his would-be teachers, and his greatest disciple--actually did, than by inquiring what they meant, or thought they meant, to do, or what other people thought about them and their doings.

Let us therefore, in the first place and as usual, stick to the history, though even this may require more than one mode and division of dealing.

[Sidenote: "Les deux Goncourt."]

The body of Naturalist or Experimental novels which, beginning in the 'sixties of the century, extended to, and a little over, its close, has long been, and will probably always continue to be, a.s.sociated with the name of emile Zola. But the honour or dishonour of the invention and pioneering of the thing was claimed by another, for himself and a third writer, that is to say, by Edmond de Goncourt for himself and his brother Jules. The elder of the Goncourts--the younger died in early middle age, and knowledge of him is in a way indirect, though we have some letters--might be said to have, like Restif, a _manie de paternite_, though his children were of a different cla.s.s. He thought he invented Naturalism; he thought he introduced into France what some unkind contemporaries called "j.a.pon_i_aiserie";[457] he certainly had a good deal to do with reviving the fancy for eighteenth-century art, artists, _bric-a-brac_ generally, and in a way letters; and he ended by fathering and endowing an opposition Academy. It was with art that "Les deux Goncourt"[458] (who were inseparable in their lives, and whom Edmond--to do him the justice which in his case can rarely be done pleasantly--did his best to keep undivided after Jules's death) began their dealings with eighteenth-century and other artists[459]--perhaps the most valuable of all their work. But it was not till the Second Empire was nearly half-way through, till Jules was thirty and Edmond thirty-eight, that they tried fiction (drama also, but always unsuccessfully), and brought out, always together and before 1870 (when Jules died), a series of some half-dozen novels: _Charles Demailly_ (afterwards re-t.i.tled) (1860), _Soeur Philomene_ (next year), _Renee Mauperin_ (1864), _Germinie Lacerteux_ (next year), _Manette Salomon_ (1867), and _Madame Gervaisais_ (1869).

[Sidenote: Their work.]

It is desirable to add that, besides the work already mentioned and published before 1870, the two had given a book called _Idees et Sensations_, setting forth their literary psychology; and that, after the cataclysm, Edmond published a description of their house and its collections, his brother's letters, and an immense _Journal des Goncourt_ in some half-score of volumes, which was, naturally enough, one of the most read books of its time. Naturally, for it appealed to all sorts of tastes, reputable and disreputable, literary-artistic and Philistine, with pairs enough of ant.i.thetic or complementary epithets enough to fill this page. Here you could read about Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, about Taine and Renan, about Tourguenieff and Flaubert, as well as about Daudet and Zola, and a score of other more or less interesting people. Here you could read how Edmond as a boy made irruptions into a newly-married cousin's bedroom, and about the interesting sight he saw there; how an English virtuoso had his books bound in human skin; how people dined during the siege of Paris, and a million other things; the whole being saturated, larded, or whatever word of the kind be preferred, with observations on the taste, intellect, and general greatness of the MM. de Goncourt, and on the lamentable inferiority of other people, etc., etc. If it could be purged of its bad blood, the book would really deserve to rank, for substance, with Pepys' diary or with Walpole's letters.[460] As it is, when it has become a little forgotten, the quarterly reviewers, or their representatives, of the twenty-first century will be able to make endless _rechauffes_ of it.

And though not t.i.tularly or directly of our subject, it belongs thereto, because it shows the process of acc.u.mulation or incubation, and the temper of the acc.u.mulators and incubators in regard to the subjects of the novels themselves.

[Sidenote: The novels.]

To a.n.a.lyse all these novels, or even one of them, at length, would be a process as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable. The "chronicles of wasted _grime_" may be left to themselves, not out of any mere finical or fastidious superiority, but simply because their own postulates and axioms make such a.n.a.lysis (if the word unfairness can be used in such a connection) unfair to them. For they claimed--and the justice, if not the value, of the claim must be allowed--to have rested their fas.h.i.+on of novel-writing upon two bases. The substance was to be provided by an elaborate observation and reproduction of the facts of actual life, not in the least transcendentalised, inspirited, or in any other way brought near Romance, but considered largely from the points of view which their friend Taine, writing earlier, used for his philosophical and historical work--that of the _milieu_ or "environment," that of heredity, though they did not lay so much stress on this as Zola did--and the like. The treatment, on the other hand, was to be effected by the use of an intensely "personal" style, a new Marivaudage, compared to which, as we remarked above, Flaubert's doctrine of the single word was merely rudimentary. After Jules's death Edmond wrote, alone, _La Fille Elisa_, which was very popular, _La Faustin_, and _Cherie_, the last of which, with _Germinie Lacerteux_, may form the basis of a short critical examination. Those who merely wish to see if they can like or tolerate the Goncourtian novel had perhaps better begin with _Renee Mauperin_ or _Madame Gervaisais_. Both have been very highly praised,[461] and the first named of them has the proud distinction of putting "le mot de Cambronne" in the mouth of a colonel who has been mortally wounded in a duel.

[Sidenote: _Germinie Lacerteux_ and _Cherie_ taken as specimens.]

To return to our selected examples, _Germinie Lacerteux_ is the story of an actual _bonne_ of the brothers, whose story, without "tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs," is told in the _Journal_ itself.[462] The poor creature is as different as possible, not merely from the usual heroine, but from the _grisette_ of the first half of the century and from the _demi-mondaine_ of Dumas _fils_, and Daudet, and even Zola. She is not pretty; she is not fascinating in any way; she is neither good- nor ill-natured in any special fas.h.i.+on; she is not even ambitious of "bettering" herself or of having much pleasure, wealth, etc. If she goes to the bad it is in the most commonplace way and with the most unseductive seducer possible. Her progress and her end are, to borrow a later phrase and t.i.tle metaphorically, merely a tale of the meanest streets; untouched and unconfirmed by the very slightest art; as dest.i.tute of any aesthetic attraction, or any evidence of artistic power, as the log-books of a common lodging-house and a hospital ward could be. In _Cherie_ there is nothing exactly improper; it is merely an elaborate study of a spoilt--at least petted--and unhealthy girl in the upper stages of society, who has at last the kindness--to herself, her relations, and the reader--to die. If M. de Goncourt had had the slightest particle of humour, of which there is no trace in any of his works, one might have taken this, like other things perhaps, as a slightly cryptic parody--of the _poitrinaire_-heroine mania of times a little earlier; but there is no hope of this. The subject was, in the sense attached to the word by these writers, "real"; it could be made useful for combined physiological and psychological detail; and, most important of all, it was more or less repulsive.[463]

[Sidenote: The impression produced by them.]

For this is what it really comes to in the Goncourts, in Zola, and in the rest, till Guy de Maupa.s.sant, not seldom dealing with the same material, sublimes it, and so robs it of its repulsiveness, by the force of true comic, tragic, or romantic art. Or course it is open to any one to say, "It may repel _you_, but it does not repel _me_." But this is very cheap sophistry. We do not require to be told, in the words which shocked Lord Chesterfield but do not annoy a humble admirer of his, that "One man's meat is another man's poison." Carrion is not repulsive to a vulture. Immediately before writing these words I was reading the confession of an unfortunate American that he or she found _The Roundabout Papers_ "depressing." For my part, I have never given up the doctrine that _any_ subject _may_ be deprived of its repulsiveness by the treatment of it. But when you find a writer, or a set of writers, deliberately and habitually selecting subjects which are generally held to be repellent, and deliberately and habitually refusing or failing to pa.s.s them through the alembic in the manner suggested--then I think you are justified, not merely in condemning their taste, but in thinking not at all highly of their art. A cook who cannot make his meat savoury unless it is "high" is not a good cook, and if he cannot do without pepper and garlic[464] he is not much better.

[Sidenote: The rottenness of their theory.]

Dismissing, however, for a moment the question of mere taste, it should be evident that the doctrine of rigid "observation," "doc.u.ment,"

"experience," and the like is bad in art. Like so many--some optimists would say like all--bad things, it is, of course, a corruption, by excess and defect both, of something good or at least true. It cannot be necessary here, after scores of expressions of opinion on the subject throughout this book, to admit or urge the importance of observation of actual life to the novelist. The most ethereal of fairy-tales and the wildest of extravaganzas would be flimsy rubbish if not corroborated by and contrasted with it: it can be strengthened, increased, varied almost at discretion in the novel proper. I hold it, as may be argued perhaps in the Conclusion, to be the principle and the justification of Romance itself. But, independently of the law just mentioned, that you must not confine your observation to Ugliness and exclude Beauty--it will not do to pull out the pin of your cart, and tilt a collection of observed facts on the hapless pavement of the reader's mind. You are not a reporter; not a compiler of _dossiers_; not a photographer. You are an artist, and you must do something with your materials, add something of yourself to them, present something not vamped from parts of actual life itself, but reinforcing those parts with aesthetic re-creation and with the sense of "the whole." I find this--to confine ourselves strictly to the famous society so often mentioned in the _Journal_--eminently in Flaubert, and as far as one can judge from translations, in Tourguenieff; I find it, to a less extent, in Daudet; I find it sometimes even in Zola, especially, but not merely, in his shorter stories; I find it again, and abundantly, in Maupa.s.sant. But I never find it in the Goncourts: and when I find it in the others it is because they have either never bowed the knee to, or have for the nonce discarded, the cult of the Naturalist, experimental, doc.u.mentary idol, in itself and for itself.

"But," some one may say, "you have neglected one very important point to which you have yourself referred, and as to which you have just recommitted yourself. Did not _les deux_ 'add something,' a very considerable something, 'of their own'? How about their style?"

[Sidenote: And the unattractiveness of their style.]

Certainly they prided themselves on this, and certainly they took a great deal of trouble about it. If any one likes the result, let him like it. It appears to me only to prove that an unsound principle is not a certain means to secure sound practice. Possibly, as Edmond boasted, this style is not the style _de tout le monde_. And _tout le monde_ may congratulate itself on the fact. One can see that it _must_ have given them a good deal of trouble--perhaps as much as, say, Paul de Saint-Victor's gave him. But then his excites a cheerful glow of satisfaction, whereas theirs only creates, as Saint-Victor himself (to one's regret) says of Swift, _un morne etonnement_.

[Sidenote: emile Zola to be treated differently.]

The tone which has been adopted[465] in speaking of the Goncourts (or rather of Edmond de Goncourt, for Jules seems to have been the better fellow pretty certainly, as well as probably the more genuine talent, of the two) would be grossly unfair in dealing with emile Zola. One may think his principle demonstrably wrong, and his practice for the most part a calamitous mistake. One may, while, if indeed it concerned us, clearing him of the charge of doing any moral harm--such harm would be as likely to be done by records of Bedlam, or the Lock Hospital, or a dipsomaniacs' home--put on the wrong side of his account a quant.i.ty of dull and dirty trash,[466] which, without his precept and example, would never have been written, or, if written, read. But the great, if mostly wasted, power displayed in his work is quite undeniable by any real critic; he did some things--and more parts of things--absolutely good; and if, as has been admitted, he did literary evil, he upset in a curious fas.h.i.+on the usual dictum that the evil that men do lives after them. At least it was not his fault if such was the case. He undoubtedly, whether he actually invented it or not, established, communicated, spread the error of Naturalism. But he lived long enough and wrote hard enough to "work it out" in a singular fas.h.i.+on--to ill.u.s.trate the rottenness of the tree by the canker of the fruit to such an extent, and in such variety of application and example, that n.o.body for a long time has had any excuse for grafting the one or eating the other. Personally--in those points of personality which touch literature really, and out of the range of mere gossip--he had many good qualities.

He was transparently honest, his honesty being tested and attested by a defect which will be noticed presently. He appears to have had no bad blood in him. His fidelity and devotion to what he thought art were as unflinching as Flaubert's own.

[Sidenote: Some points in his personality--literary and other.]

Nor was he deficient in good qualities which were still more purely literary. We shall speak later of the excellence of his short stories; if he had never written anything else there would be hardly anything but praise for him. When he does not lose himself in the wilderness of particulars, he sometimes manages to rise from it to wonderful Pisgah-sights of description. He has a really vast, though never an absolute or consummate, and always a morbid, hold on what may be called the second range of character, and a drastic, if rather mechanical, faculty of combining scenes and incidents. The ma.s.s of the Rougon-Macquart books is very much more coherent than the _Comedie Humaine_. He has real pathos. But perhaps his greatest quality, shown at intervals throughout but never fully developed till the chaotic and sometimes almost Blake-like Apocalypses of his last stage, was a grandiosity of fancy--nearly reaching imagination, and not incapable of dressing itself in suitable language--which, though one traces some indebtedness to Lamennais and Michelet and Hugo, has sufficient individuality, and, except in these four, is very rarely found in French literature later than the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. To set against these merits--still leaving the main fault alone--there are some strange defects. Probably worst of all, for it has its usual appalling pervasiveness, is his almost absolute want of humour. Humour and Naturalism, indeed, could not possibly keep house together; as we shall see in Maupa.s.sant, the attempt has happier results than in the case of "Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell," for the fairy expels the Devil at times wholly. The minor and particular absurdities which result from this want of humour crop up constantly in the books; and it is said to have been taken advantage of by Maupa.s.sant himself in one instance, the disciple "bamming" the master into recording the existences of peculiarly specialised places of entertainment, which the fertile fancy of the author of _Boule de Suif_ had created.

[Sidenote: The Pillars of Naturalism.]

The Naturalist Novel, as practised by Zola, rests on three princ.i.p.al supports, or rather draws its materials from, and guides its treatment by, three several processes or doctrines. The general observational-experimental theory of the Goncourts is very widely, in fact almost infinitely extended, "doc.u.ments" being found or made in or out of the literal farrago of all occupations and states of life. But, as concerns the definitely "human" part of the matter, immense stress is laid on the Darwinian or Spencerian doctrines of heredity, environment, evolution, and the like. While, last of all in order, if the influence be taken as converging towards the reason of the failure, comes the "medico-legal" notion of a "lesion"--of some flaw or vicious and cancerous element--a sort of modernised [Greek: protarchos ate] in the family, which develops itself variously in individuals.

Now, before pointing out the faulty results of this as shown generally in the various books, let us, reversing the order in which the influences or elements have been stated, set out the main lines of error in the elements themselves.