A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century

"Les Trois Villes."

Before giving any general comment on this mass of fiction, it will probably be best to continue the process of brief survey, with the two remaining groups. It is, I believe, generally admitted that in "Les Trois Villes" purpose, and the document, got altogether the better of any true novel-intention. The anti-religiosity which has been already remarked upon seems not only to have increased, but for the moment to have simply flooded our author's ship of thought and art, and to have stopped the working of that part of its engine-room which did the novel-business. The miracles at, and the pilgrimages to, Lourdes filled the newspapers at one time, and Zola could think of nothing else; the transition to Rome was almost inevitable in any such case; and the return upon Paris quite inevitable in a Frenchman.

"Les Quatre Évangiles."

With the final and incomplete series – coinciding in its latter part with the novelist's passionate interference, at no small inconvenience to himself, in that inconceivable modern replica of the Hermocopidae business, the Dreyfus case, and cut short by his unfortunate death – things are different. I have known people far less "prejudiced," as the word goes, against the ideas of these books than I am myself, who plumply declare that they cannot read Fécondité, Travail, or (most especially) Vérité: while of course there are others who declare them to be not "Gospels" at all, but what Mr. Carlyle used to call "Ba'spels" – not Evangels but Cacodaemonics. I read every word of them carefully some years since, and I should not mind reading Fécondité or Travail again, though I have no special desire to do so.⁴⁷⁶

Both are "novels of purpose," with the purpose developing into mania. Fécondité is only in part – and in that part mainly as regards France – revolutionary. It is a passionate gospel of "Cultivate both gardens! Produce every ounce of food that can be raised to eat, and every child that can be got to eat it: " an anti-Malthusian and Cobbettist Apocalypse, smeared with Zolaesque grime and lighted up with flashes, or rather flares, of more than Zolaesque brilliancy. The scene where the hero (so far as there is one) looks back on Paris at night, and his tottering virtue sees in it one enormous theatre of Lubricity, has something of Flaubert and something of Hugo.

Travail is revolutionary or nothing, revolutionary "in the most approved style," as a certain apologist of robbery and murder put it not long ago as to Bolshevism, amid the "laughter and cheers" of English aspirants thereto. It takes for scene a quite openly borrowed representation of the famous forges of Creusot, and attacks Capital, the bourgeois, and everything established, quite in the purest Bolshevist fashion. Both books, and Vérité, display throughout a singular delusion, aggravating the anti-theism rather than atheism above mentioned, my own formulation of which, in another book some decade ago, I may as well, in a note,⁴⁷⁷ borrow, instead of merely paraphrasing it. The milder idiosyncrasy referred to therein will certainly not adjust itself, whatever it might do to the not ungenial ideals of Fécondité, to those of Travail. This ends in a sort of Paradise of Man, where electricity takes every kind of labour (except that of cultivating the gardens?) off men's hands, and the Coquecigrues have come again, and the pigs run about ready roasted, and a millennium or milliardennium of Cocaigne begins. Yet there are fine passages in Travail, and the author reflects, powerfully enough, the grime and glare and scorch of the furnaces; the thirst and lust and struggles of their slaves; the baser side of the life of their owners and officials – and of the wives of these. There is nothing in the book quite equal to the Vision of the City of Lubricity in Fécondité, but there are one or two things not much below it. And the whole is once more Blake-like, with a degraded or defiled Blakishness. In fact, Fécondité and Travail, illustrated in the spirit of the Prophetic Books, are quite imaginable possessions; and, though a nervous person might not like to go to sleep in the same room with them, not uncovetable ones.⁴⁷⁸

The everlasting irony of things has seldom, in literature (though, as we have seen, it reigns there if anywhere), secured for itself a more striking opportunity of exemplification than this ending, in a pseudo-apocalyptic paroxysm, of the Roman Expérimental; perhaps one may add that never has Romanticism, or indeed any school of letters, scored such a triumphant victory over its decriers. It has been contended here, and for many years in other places by the present writer, that Naturalism was itself only a "lesion," a sarcoma, a morbidly allotropic form of Romance. At this point the degeneration turned into a sort of parody of the attitude of Ezekiel or Hosea; the business-like observer, in counting-house and workshop, in church and stock-exchange, in tavern and brothel, in field and town generally, became himself a voyant, beholding all things in nightmare. Yet, in doing so, he effected a strange semi-reconciliation with some who had been, if not exactly his enemies, the exceedingly frank critics and unsparing denouncers of his system. Not much more than half sane, and almost more than half disgusting, as are Fécondité and Travail, they connect themselves, as wholes, not with L'Assommoir or Nana, not with La Terre or Germinal, but with La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, with Une Page d'Amour, and La Joie de Vivre, with the best things in L'Œuvre, La Débâcle, and Le Docteur Pascal. Students of English literature will remember how the doctrine of Furor poeticus was once applied to Ben Jonson by a commentator who, addressing him, pointed out that he was very mad in his primer works, not so mad in his dotages. There was always a good deal of furor prosaicus smouldering in Zola, and it broke out with an opposite result on these occasions, the flames, alas! being rather devastating, but affording spectacles at least grandiose. He kept sane and sordid to his loss earlier, and went mad later – partially at least to his advantage.

General considerations.

Passing to those more general considerations which have been promised – and which seem to be to some readers a Promised Land indeed, as compared with the wilderness of compte-rendu and book-appreciation – let us endeavour briefly to answer the question, "What is the general lesson of Zola's work?" I think we may say, borrowing that true and final judgment of Wordsworth which doth so enrage Wordsworthians, that whenever Zola does well he either violates or neglects his principles, and that the more carefully he carries these out the worse, as a rule, his work is. The similarity, of course, is the more quaint because of the dissimilarity of the personages and their productions; but it has not been insisted on from any mere spirit of mischief, or desire to make a paradoxical parallel. On the contrary, this parallel has been made in order to support, at least obiter, a more general dictum still, that principles are much more often fatal than useful to the artist. The successful miniatures of the short stories hardly prove more thoroughly than the smoky flaming Blakish-Turneresque cartoons of the latest "Gospels," though they may do so more satisfactorily, that Émile Zola had the root of the Art of Fiction in him. But he chose to subject the bulk of the growths from this root to something much worse than the ars topiaria, to twist and maim and distort them like Hugo's Comprachicos; to load their boughs, forbidding them to bear natural fruit, with clumsy crops of dull and foul detail, like a bedevilled Christmas-tree. One dares say quite unblushingly, that in no single instance⁴⁷⁹ has this abuse of the encyclopaedia added charm, or value, or even force to Zola's work. A man with far less ability than he possessed could have given the necessary touch of specialism when it was necessary, without dumping and deluging loads and floods of technicalities on the unhappy reader.

Little more need be said about the disastrous ugliness which, with still rarer exception, pervades the whole work. There are those who like the ugly, and those – perhaps more numerous – who think they ought to like it. With neither is it worth while to argue. As for me and my house, we will serve Beauty, giving that blessed word the widest possible extension, of course, but never going beyond or against it.

Especially in regard to character.

A point where there is no such precedent inaccessibility of common ground concerns Zola's grasp of character. It seems to me to have been, if not exactly weak, curiously limited. I do not know that his people are ever unhuman; in fact, by his time the merely wooden character had ceased to be "stocked" (as an unpleasant modern phrase has it) by the novelist. The "divers and disgusting things" that they do are never incredible. The unspeakable villain-hero of Vérité itself is a not impossible person. But the defect, again as it seems to me, of all the personages may best be illustrated by quoting one of those strange flashes of consummate critical acuteness which diversify the frequent critical lapses of Thackeray. As early as The Paris Sketch-book, in the article entitled "Caricatures and Lithography," Mr. Titmarsh wrote, in respect of Fielding's people, "Is not every one of them a real substantial have been personage now?.. We will not take upon ourselves to say that they do not exist somewhere else, that the actions attributed to them have not really taken place."

There, put by a rather raw critic of some seven and twenty, who was not himself to give a perfect creative exemplification of what he wrote for nearly a decade, is the crux of the matter. Observe, not "might have been" merely, but "have been now." The phrase might have holes picked in it by a composition-master or – monger.⁴⁸⁰ Thackeray is often liable to this process. But it states an eternal verity, and so marks an essential differentia.

This differentia is what the present writer has, in many various forms, endeavoured to make good in respect of the novels and the novelists with which and whom he has dealt in this book, and in many books and articles for the last forty years and more. There are the characters who never might or could have been – the characters who, by limp and flaccid drawing; by the lumping together of "incompossibilities"; by slavish following of popular models; by equally slavish, though rather less ignoble, carrying out of supposed rules; by this, that, and the other want or fault, have deprived themselves of the fictitious right to live, or to have lived, though they occupy the most ghastly of all limbos and the most crowded shelves of all circulating libraries. At the other end of the scale are the real men and women of fiction – those whom more or less (for there are degrees here as everywhere) you know, whose life is as your life, except that you live by the grace of God and they by that of God's artists. These exist in all great drama, poetry, fiction; and it never would cause you the least surprise or feeling of unfamiliarity if they passed from one sphere to the other, and you met them – to live with, to love or to hate, to dance or to dine with, to murder (for you would occasionally like to kill them) or to marry.⁴⁸¹ But between the two – and perhaps the largest crowd of the three, at least since novel-writing came to be a business – is a vast multitude of figures occupying a middle position, sometimes with little real vitality but with a certain stage-competence; sometimes quite reaching the "might-have-been," but never the full substance of "has been" for us. To these last, I think, though to a high division of them, do Zola's characters belong.

Of plot I never care to say very much, because it is not with me a wedding-garment, though I know an ugly or ill-fitting one when I see it, and can say, "Well tailored or dress-made!" in the more satisfactory circumstances. Moreover, Zola hardly enters himself for much competition here. There is none in the first two Apocalypses; Vérité has what it has, supplied by the "case" and merely adjusted with fair skill; the Trois Villes lie quite outside plot; and the huge synoptic scheme of the Rougon-Macquart series deals little with it in individual books. Of conversation one might say very much what has been said of character. The books have the conversation which they require, and sometimes (in examples generally even more difficult to quote than that of Nana's given above) a little more. But in Description, the Naturalist leader rises when he does not fall. It is obviously here that the boredom and the beastliness of the details offend most. But it is also by means of description that almost all the books well spoken of before, from the too earthly Paradise of L'Abbé Mouret to the Inferno of Travail, produce some of their greatest effects.

So let this suffice as banning for what is bad in him, and as blessing for what is good, in regard to Émile Zola: a great talent – at least a failure of a genius – in literature; a marvellous worker in literary craft. As for his life, it can be honestly avowed that the close of it, in something like martyrdom, had little or nothing to do with the fact that the writer's estimate of his work changed, from very unfavourable, to the parti-coloured one given above. Until about 1880 I did not read his books regularly as they came out, and the first "nervous impression" of what I did read required time and elaboration to check and correct, to fill in and to balance it. I have never varied my opinion that his methods and principles – with everything of that sort – were wrong. But I have been more and more convinced that his practice sometimes came astonishingly near being right.

My introduction to the greatest of M. Zola's associates was more fortunate, for it was impossible to mistake the quality of the new planet.⁴⁸² One day in 1880 the editor of a London paper put into my hands a copy of a just-issued volume of French verse, which had been specially sent to him by his Paris correspondent in a fit of moral indignation. It was entitled Des Vers, and the author of it was a certain Guy de Maupassant, of whom I then knew nothing. The correspondent had seen in it a good opportunity for a denunciation of French wickedness; and my editor handed it over to me to see what was to be done with it. I saw no exceptional wickedness, and a very great deal of power; indeed, though I was tolerably familiar with French verse and prose of the day, it seemed to me that I had not seen so much promise in any new writer since Baudelaire's death;⁴⁸³ and I informed my editor that, though I had not the slightest objection to blessing Maupassant, I certainly would not curse him. He thought the blessing not likely to please his public, while it would annoy his correspondent, and on my representation declined to have anything to do with the cursing. So nous passasmes oultre, except that, like Mr. Bludyer, I "impounded" the book; but, unlike him, did not either sell it, dine off it, or abuse the author.

Shortly afterwards, I think, the Soirées de Médan reached me, and this very remarkable person appeared likewise, but in a new character. Certainly no one can ever have shown to better advantage in company than M. de Maupassant did on this occasion. L'Attaque du Moulin, which opened the volume, has already been spoken of as part of the best of all M. Zola's voluminous work. But as for the works of the young men, other than M. de Maupassant, they had the Naturalist faults in fullest measure, unredeemed by their master's massive vigour and his desperate intensity. The contribution of M. Huysmans, in particular (v. inf.) has always appeared to me one of those voluntary or involuntary caricatures, of the writer's own style and school, which are well known at all times, and have never been more frequent than recently. But Boule de Suif? Among the others that pleasant and pathetic person was not a boule; she was a pyramid, a Colossus, a spire of Cologne Cathedral. Putting the unconventionality of its subject aside, there is absolutely no fault to be found with the story. It is as round and smooth as "Boule de Suif" herself.

Maupassant's work is of very substantial bulk. Of the verse enough for our purpose has been or will be said, though I should like to repeat that I put it much higher than do most of Maupassant's admirers. The volumes of travel-sketches do not appear to me particularly successful, despite the almost unsurpassed faculty of their writer for sober yet vivid description. They have the air of being written to order, and they do not seem, as a rule, to arrive at artistic completeness either objectively or subjectively. Of the criticism, which concerns us more nearly, by far the most remarkable piece is the famous Preface to Pierre et Jean (to be mentioned again below), which contains the author's literary creed, refined and castigated by years of practice from the cruder form which he had already promulgated in the Preface to Flaubert's Correspondence with George Sand. It extols the "objective" as against the psychological method of novel-writing, but directs itself most strongly against the older romance of plot, and places the excellence of the novelist in the complete and vivid projection of that novelist's own particular "illusion" of the world, yet so as to present events and characters in the most actual manner. But, as promised, we shall return to it.

Bel-Ami.

To run through the actual "turn-out" in novel⁴⁸⁴ and tale as far as is possible here, Bel-Ami started, in England at least, with the most favouring gales possible. It was just when the decree had gone forth, issued by the younger Later Victorians, that all the world should be made naughty; that the insipid whiteness of their Early and Middle elders should be washed black and scarlet, and especially "blue"; and that if possible, by this and other processes, something like real literature might be made to take the place of the drivellings and botcheries of Tennyson and Browning; of Dickens and Thackeray; of Ruskin and Carlyle. To these persons Bel-Ami was a sweet content, a really "shady boon." The hero never does a decent thing and never says a good one; but he has good looks and insinuating manners of the kind that please some women, whence his name, originally given to him by an innocent little girl, and taken up by her by no means innocent mamma and other quasi-ladies.⁴⁸⁵ He starts as a soldier who has served his time in Algeria, but has found nothing better to do than a subordinate post in a railway office. He meets a former comrade who is high up in Paris journalism, and who very amiably introduces Georges Duroy to that bad resting-place but promising passageway. Duroy succeeds, not so much (though he is not a fool) by any brains as by impudence; by a faculty of making use of others; by one of the farce-duels in which combatants are put half a mile off each other to fire once, etc.; but most of all by his belamyship (for the word is good old English in a better sense). The women of the book are what is familiarly called "a caution." They revive the old Hélisenne de Crenne⁴⁸⁶ "sensual appetite" for the handsome bounder; and though of course jealous of his infidelities, are quite ready to welcome the truant when he returns. They also get drunk at restaurant dinners, and then call their lovers – quite correctly, but not agreeably – "Cochon!" "Sale bête," etc. This of course is what our fin-de-siècle critics could "recommend to a friend."

But if the reader thinks that this summary is a prelude to anything like the "slate" that I thought it proper to bestow upon Les Liaisons Dangereuses, or even to such remarks as those made on the Goncourts, he is quite mistaken. Laclos had, as it seemed to me, a disgusting subject and no real compensation of treatment. In Bel-Ami the merits of the treatment are very great. The scenes pass before you; the characters play their part in the scenes – if not in an engaging manner, in a completely life-like one. There is none of the psychologie de commande, which I object to in Laclos, but a true adumbration of life. The music-hall opening; the first dinner-party; the journalist scenes; the death of Forestier and the proposal of re-marriage over his corpse;⁴⁸⁷ the honeymoon journey to Normandy – a dozen other things – could not be better done in their way, though this way may not be the best. It did not fall to me to review Bel-Ami when it came out, but I do not think I should have made any mistake about it if it had. There are weak points technically; for instance, the character of Madeleine Forestier, afterwards Duroy – still later caught in flagrant delict and divorced – is left rather enigmatic. But the general technique (with the reservations elsewhere made) is masterly, and two passages – a Vigny-like⁴⁸⁸ descant on Death by the old poet Norbert de Varenne and the death-scene of Forestier itself – give us Maupassant in that mood of macabre sentiment – almost Romance – which chequers and purifies his Naturalism.

But the main objection which I should take to the book is neither technical nor goody. The late Mr. Locker, in, I think, that most fascinating "New Omniana" Patchwork,⁴⁸⁹ tells how, in the Travellers' Club one day, a haughty member thereof expressed surprise that he should see Mr. Locker going to the corner-house next door. The amiable author of London Lyrics was good enough to explain that some not uninteresting people also used the humbler establishment – bishops, authors, painters, cabinet-ministers, etc. "Ah!" said the Traverser of Perilous Ways, "that would be all very well if one wanted to meet that sort of people. But, you see, one doesn't want to meet them." Now, I do not want to meet anybody in Bel-Ami; in fact, I would much rather not.

Une Vie.

Une Vie is, in this respect and others, a curious pendant to Bel-Ami. It illustrates another side of Maupassant's pessimism – the overtly, but for the most part quietly, tragic. It might almost (borrowing a second title from the Index) call itself "Jeanne; ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu." The heroine is perfectly innocent, though both a femmelette and a fool. She never does any harm, nor, except through weakness and folly, deserves that any should be done to her. But she has an unwise and not blameless though affectionate and generous father, with a mother who is an invalid, and whom, after her death, the daughter discovers to have been, in early days, no better than she should be. Both of them are, if not exactly spendthrifts, "wasters," very mainly through careless and excessive generosity. She marries the first young man of decent family, looks, and manners that she comes across; and he turns out to be stingy, unfaithful in the most offensive way, with her own maid and others, and unkind. She loses him, by the vengeance of a husband whom he has wronged, and her second child is born dead in consequence of this shock. Her first she spoils for some twenty years, till he goes off with a concubine and nearly ruins his mother. We leave her consoling herself, in a half-imbecile fashion, with a grandchild. Her only earthly providence is her bonne Rosalie, the same who had been her husband's mistress, but a very "good sort" otherwise. The book is charged with grime of all kinds. It certainly cannot be said of M. de Maupassant, to alter the pronoun in Mr. Kipling's line, that "[He] never talked obstetrics when the little stranger came," for Une Vie contains two of these delectable scenes; and in other respects we are treated with the utmost "candour." But the book is again saved by some wonderful passages – specially those giving Jeanne's first night at the sea-side château which is to be her own, and her last visit to it a quarter of a century after, when it has passed to strangers – and generally by the true tragedy which pervades it. When Maupassant took Sorrow into cohabitation and collaboration, there was no danger of the result.

Mont-Oriol, though not, save in one respect, the most "arresting" of Maupassant's books, has rather more varied and at the same time coherent interest than some others. It is also that one which most directly illustrates – on the great scale – the general principles of the Naturalist school. Not, indeed, in specially grimy fashion, though there is the usual adultery (not behind the scenes) and the (for Maupassant) not unusual accouchement. (His fondness for this most unattractive episode of human life is astonishing: if he were a more pious person and a political feminist, one might think that he was trying to make us modern Adams share the curse of Eve, at least to the extent of the disgust caused by reading about its details.) The main extra-amatory theme throughout is the "physiologie" of an inland watering-place, its extension by the discovery of new springs, the financing of them, the jealousies of the doctors, the megrims of the patients, etc. All these are treated quite on the Zolaesque scheme, but with a lightness and beauty not often reached by the master, though common enough in the pupil.⁴⁹⁰ The description of Christiane Andermatt's first bath, and the sensations of mild bliss that it gave her, is as true as it is pretty; and others of scenery have that vividness without over-elaboration which marks their author's work. Nor are his ironic-human touches wanting. Almost at its birth he satirises, in his own quiet Swiftian way, an absurd tendency which has grown mightily since, and flourishes now: "'Très moderne' – entre ses lèvres, était le comble de l'admiration." As for the love-affair itself, one's feelings towards it are mixed. A good deal of it shows that unusual grasp of the proper ways of the game with which Maupassant is fully credited here. Personally, I should not, after quoting Baudelaire to a lady (so far so good), inform her that I was a donkey for expecting her to enjoy anything so subtle. But perhaps Paul Brétigny, though neglectful of the Seventh Commandment, was an honester man than I am. And it is quite true that Christiane was not subtle. Her hot lover's⁴⁹¹ cooling partly dated from the time when she expected him to show palpable interest in the fact that she was likely to have a child by him. And though her cry (on the question what name this infant, of course accepted as his own by the unfortunate Andermatt, should bear) that as for her name, "Celà promet trop de souffrances de porter le nom du Crucifié," could not be better as a general sentiment, the particular circumstances in which it is uttered show a slight want of grace of congruity. Still, the minor characters are not only more in number, but more interesting than is always the case; and the book, if you skip the obstetrics, is readable throughout. Yet it is, to use wine-language, not above "Maupassant premier bourgeois," except in some of the earlier love-scenes.

Fort comme la Mort.

In Fort comme la Mort the author rises far above these two books, powerful as they are in parts. The basis is indeed the invariable and unsatisfactory "triangle." But the structure built on it might almost have been lifted to another, and stands foursquare in nearly all respects of treatment. The chief technical objection that can be brought against it is that there is a certain want of air and space; the important characters are too few, the situations too uniform; so that a kind of oppression results. Olivier Bertin, one of the most popular of Parisian painters though no longer young, a great man of society, etc., has, for many years, been the lover of the Countess de Guilleroy, and, of course, the dear friend of her husband. We are introduced to them just at the time when a sort of disgust of middle age is coming over him, as well as a certain feeling that the springs of his genius are running low. He is not tired of the Countess, who is passionately devoted to him; and, except that they do not live together, their relations are rather conjugal than anything else. Just at this moment her daughter Annette comes home from a country life with her grandmother, and proves to be the very double of what her mother was in her own youth. Bertin, without ceasing to love the mother, conceives a frantic passion for the daughter; and the vicissitudes of this take up the book. At last the explosives of the situation are "fused," as one may say, by one of the newspaper attacks of youth on age. Annette's approaching marriage, and this Figaro critique of his own "old-fashioned" art, put Bertin beside himself. Either hurrying heedlessly along, or deliberately exposing himself, he is run over by an omnibus, is mortally hurt, and dies with the Countess sitting beside him and receiving his last selfishness – a request that she will bring the girl to see him before he dies.

The story, though perhaps, as has been said, too much concentrated as a whole, is brilliantly illuminated by sketches of society on the greater and smaller scale: of Parisian club-life; of picture-shows; of the diversions of the country, etc.: but its effect, though certainly helped by, is not derived from, these. As always with Maupassant, it is out of the bitter that comes the sweet. Hardly anywhere outside of Ecclesiastes, Thackeray,⁴⁹² and Flaubert is the irony of life more consummately handled in one peculiar fashion; while the actual passion of love is nowhere better treated by this author,⁴⁹³ or perhaps by any other French novelist of the later century, except Fromentin.

Pierre et Jean.

The line of ascent was continued in Pierre et Jean. It is not a long book – a fact which perhaps has some significance – and no small part of it is taken up by a Preface on "Le Roman" generally (v. sup.), which is the author's most remarkable piece of criticism; one of the most noteworthy from a man who was not specially a critic; and one of the few but precious examples of an artist dealing, at once judicially and masterfully, with his own art.⁴⁹⁴ In fact, recognising the truth of the "poetic moment," he would extend it to the moments of all literature; and lays it down that the business of the novelist is, first to realise his own illusion of the world and then to make others realise it too.