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Title: A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2

Author: George Saintsbury

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Most recently updated: January 4, 2021

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF
THE FRENCH NOVEL, VOL. 2 ***

A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH
NOVEL

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO

DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

A HISTORY
OF THE

FRENCH NOVEL
(TO THE CLOSE OF THE 19TH CENTURY)

BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY
M.A. AND HON. D.LITT. OXON.; HON. L.L.D. ABERD.;
HON. D.LITT. DURH.; FELLOW OF THE BRITISH
ACADEMY; HON. FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE,
OXFORD; LATE PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND
ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
EDINBURGH

VOL. II

FROM 1800 TO 1900

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1919

Sólo á veces, con un dejo
de zozobra y de ansiedad,
timido tiembla en sus labios
un viejo y triste cantar,
copla que vibre en el aire
como un toque funeral:
La Noche Buena se viene,
la Noche Buena se va!
Y nosotros nos iremos
y no volveremos más.

Carlos Fernandez Shaw,

La Balada de los Viejos.

COPYRIGHT

PREFACE
"The second chantry" (for it would be absurd to keep "temple") of this work
"is not like the first"; in one respect especially, which seems to deserve
notice in its Preface or porch—if a chantry may be permitted a porch. In
Volume I.—though many of its subjects (not quite all) had been handled by
me before in more or less summary fashion, or in reviews of individual
books, or in other connections than that of the novel—only Hamilton,
Lesage, Marivaux, and the minor "Sensibility" men and women had formed
the subjects of separate and somewhat detailed studies, wholly or mainly as
novelists. The case is altered in respect of the present volume. The Essays
on French Novelists, to which I there referred, contain a larger number of
such studies appertaining to the present division—studies busied with
Charles de Bernard, Gautier, Murger, Flaubert, Dumas, Sandeau,
Cherbuliez, Feuillet. On Balzac I have previously written two papers of
some length, one as an Introduction to Messrs. Dent's almost complete
translation of the Comédie, with shorter sequels for each book, the other an
article in the Quarterly Review for 1907. Some dozen or more years ago I
contributed to an American edition[1] of translations of Mérimée by various
hands, a long "Introduction" to that most remarkable writer, and I had,
somewhat earlier, written on Maupassant for the Fortnightly Review. One or
two additional dealings of some substance with the subject might be
mentioned, such as another Introduction to Corinne, but not to Delphine.
These, however, and passages in more general Histories, hardly need
specification.
On the other hand, I have never dealt, substantively and in detail, with
Chateaubriand, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, Beyle, George Sand, or Zola[2]
as novelists, nor with any of the very large number of minors not already
mentioned, including some, such as Nodier and Gérard de Nerval, whom,
for one thing or another, I should myself very decidedly put above minority.
And, further, my former dealings with the authors in the first list given
above having been undertaken without any view to a general history of the
French novel, it became not merely proper but easy for me to "triangulate"

them anew. So that though there may be more previous work of mine in
print on the subjects of the present volume than on those of the last, there
will, I hope, be found here actually less, and very considerably less,
réchauffé—hardly any, in fact (save a few translations[3] and some passages
on Gautier and Maupassant)—of the amount and character which seemed
excusable, and more than excusable, in the case of the "Sensibility" chapter
there. The book, if not actually a "Pisgah-sight reversed," taken from
Lebanon instead of Pisgah after more than forty years' journey, not in the
wilderness, but in the Promised Land itself, attempts to be so; and uses no
more than fairly "reminiscential" (as Sir Thomas Browne would say) notes,
taken on that journey itself.
It was very naturally, and by persons of weight, put to me whether I could
not extend this history to, or nearer to, the present day. I put my negative to
this briefly in the earlier preface: it may be perhaps courteous to others,
who may be disposed to regret the refusal, to give it somewhat more fully
here. One reason—perhaps sufficient in itself—can be very frankly stated. I
do not know enough of the French novel of the last twenty years or so.
During the whole of that time I have had no reasons, of duty or profit, to
oblige such knowledge. I have had a great many other things to do, and I
have found greater recreation in re-reading old books than in experimenting
on new ones. I might, no doubt, in the last year or two have made up the
deficiency to some extent, but I was indisposed to do so for two, yea, three
reasons, which seemed to me sufficient.
In the first place, I have found, both by some actual experiment of my own,
and, as it seems to me, by a considerable examination of the experiments of
other people, that to co-ordinate satisfactorily accounts of contemporary or
very recent work with accounts of older is so difficult as to be nearly
impossible. The foci are too different to be easily adjusted, and the result is
almost always out of composition, if not of drawing.
Secondly, though I know I am here kicking against certain pricks, it does
not appear to me, either from what I have read or from criticisms on what I
have not, that any definitely new and decisively illustrated school of novels
has arisen since the death of M. Zola.

Thirdly, it would be impossible to deal with the subject, save in an absurdly
incomplete fashion, without discussing living persons. To doing this, in a
book, I have an unfashionable but unalterable objection. The productions of
such persons, as they appear, are, by now established custom, proper
subjects for "reviewing" in accordance with the decencies of literature, and
such reviews may sometimes, with the same proviso, be extended to studies
of their work up to date. But even these latter should, I think, be reserved
for very exceptional cases.
A slight difference of method may be observed in the treatment of authors
in Chapter X. and onwards, this treatment being not only somewhat less
judicial and more "impressionist," but also more general and less
buckrammed out with abstracts of particular works.[4] There appeared to me
to be more than one reason for this, all such reasons being independent of,
though by no means ignoring, the mechanical pressure of ever-lessening
space. In the first place, a very much larger number of readers may be
presumed to be more or less familiar with the subjects of discussion, thus
not only making elaborate "statement of case" and production of supporting
evidence unnecessary, but exposing the purely judicial attitude to the charge
of "no jurisdiction." Moreover, there is behind all this, as it seems to me, a
really important principle, which is not a mere repetition, but a noteworthy
extension, of that recently laid down. I rather doubt whether the absolute
historico-critical verdict and sentence can ever be pronounced on work that
is, even in the widest sense, contemporary. The "firm perspective of the
past" can in very few instances be acquired: and those few, who by good
luck have acquired something of it, should not presume too much on this
gift of fortune. General opinion of a man is during his lifetime often wrong,
for some time after his death almost always so: and the absolute balance is
very seldom reached till a full generation—something more than the
conventional thirty years—has passed. Meanwhile, though all readers who
have anything critical in them will be constantly revising their impressions,
it is well not to put one's own out as more than impressions. It is only a very
few years since I myself came to what I may call a provisionally final
estimate of Zola, and I find that there is some slight alteration even in that
which, from the first, I formed of Maupassant. I can hardly hope that
readers of this part of the work will not be brought into collision with
expressions of mine, more frequently than was the case in the first volume

or even the first part of this. But I can at least assure them that I have no
intention of playing Sir Oracle, or of trailing my coat.
The actual arrangement of this volume has been the subject of a good deal
of "pondering and deliberation," almost as much as Sir Thomas Bertram
gave to a matter no doubt of more importance. There was a considerable
temptation to recur to the system on which I have written some other
literary histories—that of "Books" and "Interchapters." This I had
abandoned, in the first volume, because it was not so much difficult of
application as hardly relevant. Here the relevance is much greater. The
single century divides itself, without the slightest violence offered, into four
parts, which, if I had that capacity or partiality for flowery writing, the
absence of which in me some critics have deplored, I might almost call
Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. There is the season, of little positive
crop but important seed-sowing,—the season in which the greater writers,
Chateaubriand and Mme. de Staël, perform their office. Here, too, quite
humble folk—Pigault-Lebrun completing what has been already dealt with,
Ducray-Duminil and others doing work to be dealt with here, and Paul de
Kock most of all, get the novel of ordinary life ready in various ways: while
others still, Nodier, Hugo, Vigny, Mérimée, and, with however different
literary value, Arlincourt, implant the New Romance. There is the sudden,
magnificent, and long-continued outburst of all the kinds in and after 1830.
There is the autumn of the Second Empire, continuing and adding to the
fruits and flowers of summer: and there is the gradual decadence of the last
quarter of the century, with some late blossoming and second-crop fruitage
—the medlars of the novel—and the dying off of the great producers of the
past. But the breach of uniformity in formal arrangement of the divisions
would perhaps be too great to the eye without being absolutely necessary to
the sense, and I have endeavoured to make the necessary recapitulation with
a single "halt" of chapter-length[5] at the exact middle. It will readily be
understood that the loss of my own library has been even more severely felt
in this volume than in the earlier one, while circumstances, public and
private, have made access to larger collections more difficult. But I have
endeavoured to "make good" as much as possible, and grumbling or
complaining supplies worse than no armour against Fate.
I have sometimes, perhaps rashly, during the writing of this book wondered
"What next"? By luck for myself—whether also for my readers it would be

ill even to wonder—I have been permitted to execute all the literary
schemes I ever formed, save two. The first of these (omitting a work on
"Transubstantiation" which I planned at the age of thirteen but did not carry
far) was a History of the English Scholastics, which I thought of some ten
years later, which was not unfavoured by good authority, and which I
should certainly have attempted, if other people at Oxford in my time had
not been so much cleverer than myself that I could not get a fellowship. It
has, strangely enough, never been done yet by anybody; it would be a
useful corrective to the exoteric chatter which has sometimes recently gone
by the name of philosophy; and perhaps it might shake Signor Benedetto
Croce (whom it is hardly necessary to say I do not include among the
"chatterers") in his opinion that though, as he once too kindly said, I am a
valente letterato, I am sadly digiúno di filosofia.[6] But it is "too late a
week" for this. And I have lost my library.
Then there was a History of Wine, which was actually commissioned,
planned, and begun just before I was appointed to my Chair at Edinburgh,
and which I gave up, not from any personal pusillanimity or loss of interest
in the subject, but partly because I had too much else to do, and because I
thought it unfair to expose that respectable institution to the venom of the
most unscrupulous of all fanatics—those of teetotalism. I could take this up
with pleasure: but I have lost my cellar.
What I should really like to do would be to translate in extenso Dr.
Sommer's re-edition of the Vulgate Arthuriad. But I should probably die
before I had done half of it; no publisher would undertake the risk of it; and
if any did, "Dora," reluctant to die, would no doubt put us both in 'prison for
using so much paper. Therefore I had better be content with the divine
suggestion, and not spoil it by my human failure to execute.
And so I may say, for good, Valete to the public, abandoning the rest of the
leave-taking to their discretion.[7]

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

1 Royal Crescent, Bath,
Christmas, 1918.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is perhaps worth while to observe that I did not "edit" this, and that I had
nothing whatever to do with any part of it except the Introduction and my earlier
translation of the Chronique de Charles IX, which was, I believe, reprinted in it.
[2] In very great strictness an exception should perhaps be made for notice of
him, and of some others, in The Later Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh and
London, 1907).
[3] There will, for pretty obvious reasons, be fewer of these than in the former
volume. The texts are much more accessible; there is no difficulty about the
language, such as people, however unnecessarily, sometimes feel about French
up to the sixteenth century; and the space is wanted for other things. If I have
kept one or two of my old ones it is because they have won approval from
persons whose approval is worth having, and are now out of print: while I have
added one or two others—to please myself. Translations—in some cases more
than one or two—already exist, for those who read English only, of nearly the
whole of Balzac, of all Victor Hugo's novels, of a great many of Dumas's, and of
others almost innumerable.
[4] The chief exceptions are Dumas fils, the earliest, and Maupassant, the
greatest except Flaubert and far more voluminous than Flaubert himself.
[5] The most unexpected chorus of approval with which Volume I. was received
by reviewers, and which makes me think, in regard to this, of that unpleasant
song of the Koreish "After Bedr, Ohod," leaves little necessity for defending
points attacked. I have made a few addenda and corrigenda to Volume I. to cover
exceptions, and the "Interchapter" or its equivalent should contain something on
one larger matter—the small account taken here of French criticism of the novel.
[6] I wonder whether he was right, or whether the late Edward Caird was when
he said, "I don't think I ever had a pupil [and he was among the first inter-
collegiate-lecturers] with more of the philosophical ethos than you have. But
you're too fond of getting into logical coaches and letting yourself be carried
away in them." I think this was provoked by a very undergraduate essay arguing
that Truth, as actually realised, was uninteresting, while the possible forms of
Falsehood, as conceivably realisable in other circumstances, were of the highest
interest.
[7] I have to give, not only my usual thanks to Professors Elton, Ker, and
Gregory Smith for reading my proofs, and making most valuable suggestions,
but a special acknowledgment to Professor Ker, at whose request Miss Elsie
Hitchcock most kindly looked up for me, at the British Museum, the exact title
of that striking novel of M. H. Cochin (v. inf. p. 554 note). I have, in the proper
places, already thanked the authorities of the Reviews above mentioned; but I
should like also to recognise here the liberality of Messrs. Rivington in putting
the contents of my Essays on French Novelists entirely at my disposal. And I am
under another special obligation to Dr. Hagbert Wright for giving me, of his own

motion, knowledge and reading of the fresh batch of seventeenth-century novels
noticed below (pp. xiv-xvi).

ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA FOR VOL. I
P. 13.—"The drawback of explanations is that they almost always require to
be explained." Somebody, or several somebodies, must have said this; and
many more people than have ever said it—at least in print—must have felt
it. The dictum applies to my note on this page. An entirely well-willing
reviewer thought me "piqued" at the American remark, and proceeded to
intimate a doubt whether I knew M. Bédier's work, partly on lines (as to the
Cantilenae) which I had myself anticipated, and partly on the question of
the composition of the chansons by this or that person or class, in this or
that place, at that or the other time. But I had felt no "pique" whatever in the
matter, and these latter points fall entirely outside my own conception of the
chansons. I look at them simply as pieces of accomplished literature, no
matter how, where, in what circumstances, or even exactly when, they
became so. And I could therefore by no possibility feel anything but
pleasure at praise bestowed on this most admirable work in a different part
of the field.
P. 38, l. 27.—A protest was made, not inexcusably, at the characterisation of
Launfal as "libellous." The fault was only one of phrasing, or rather of
incompleteness. That beautiful story of a knight and his fairy love is one
which I should be the last man in the world to abuse as such. But it contains
a libel on Guinevere which is unnecessary and offensive, besides being
absolutely unjustified by any other legend, and inconsistent with her whole
character. It is of this only that I spoke the evil which it deserves. If I had
not, by mere oversight, omitted notice of Marie de France (for which I can
offer no excuse except the usual one of hesitation in which place to put it
and so putting it nowhere), I should certainly have left no doubt as to my
opinion of Thomas Chester likewise. Anybody who wants this may find it
in my Short History of English Literature, p. 194.
P. 55, l. 3.—Delete comma at "French."
P. 60, l. 6.—Insert "and" between "half" and "illegitimate."

P. 72, l. 4.—I have been warned of the "change-over" in "Saracen" and
"Christian"—a slip of the pen which I am afraid I have been guilty of before
now, though I have known the story for full forty years. But Floire, though a
"paynim," was not exactly a "Saracen."
P. 75, l. 2 from bottom.—For "his" read "their."
Pp. 158-163.—When the first proofs of the present volume had already
begun to come in, Dr. Hagbert Wright informed me that the London Library
had just secured at Sotheby's (I believe partly from the sale of Lord
Ellesmere's books) a considerable parcel of early seventeenth-century
French novels. He also very kindly allowed me perusal of such of these as I
had not already noticed (from reading at the B. M.) in Vol. I. Of some, if not
all of them, on the principle stated in the Preface of that vol., I may say
something here. There is the Histoire des Amours de Lysandre et de Caliste;
avec figures, in an Amsterdam edition of 1679, but of necessity some sixty
years older, since its author, the Sieur d'Audiguier, was killed in 1624. He
says he wrote it in six months, during three and a half of which he was laid
up with eight sword-wounds—things of which it is itself full, with the
appurtenant combats on sea and land and in private houses, and all sorts of
other divertisements (he uses the word himself of himself) including a very
agreeable ghost-host—a ghost quite free from the tautology and
grandiloquence which ghosts too often affect, though not so poetical as
Fletcher's. "They told me you were dead," says his guest and interlocutor,
consciously or unconsciously quoting the Anthology. "So I am," quoth the
ghost sturdily. But he wants, as they so often do, to be buried. This is done,
and he comes back to return thanks, which is not equally the game, and in
fact rather bores his guest, who, to stop this jack-in-the-box proceeding,
begins to ask favours, such as that the ghost will give him three days'
warning of his own death. "I will, if I can," says the Appearance pointedly.
The fault of the book, as of most of the novels of the period, is the almost
complete absence of character. But there is plenty of adventure, in England
as well as in France, and it must be one of the latest stories in which the
actual tourney figures, for Audiguier writes as of things contemporary and
dedicates his book to Marie de Medicis.
Cléon ou le Parfait Confidant (Paris, 1665), and Hattigé ou Les Amours au
Roy de Tamaran (Cologne, 1676), the first anonymous, the second written

by a certain G. de Brimond, and dedicated to an Englishman of whom we
are not specially proud—Harry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans—are two very
little books, of intrinsic importance and interest not disproportioned to their
size. They have, however, a little of both for the student, in reference to the
extension of the novel kind. For Cléon is rather like a "fictionising" of an
inferior play of Moliere's time; and Hattigé, with its privateering Chevalier
de Malte for a hero and its Turkish heroine who coolly remarks "L'infidélité
a des charmes," might have been better if the author had known how to
make it so. Both these books have, as has been said, the merit of shortness.
Puget de la Serre's La Clytié de la Cour (2 vols., Paris, 1635) cannot plead
even this; for it fills two fat volumes of some 1500 pages. I have sometimes
been accused, both in France and in England, of unfairness to Boileau, but I
should certainly never quarrel with him for including La Serre (not,
however, in respect of this book, I think) among his herd of dunces. Like
most of the novels of its time, though it has not much actual bergerie about
it, it suggests the Astrée, but the contrast is glaring. Even among the group,
I have seldom read, or attempted to read, anything duller. Le Mélante du
Sieur Vidal (Paris, 1624), though also somewhat wordy (it has 1000 pages),
is much more Astréean, and therefore, perhaps, better. Things do happen in
it: among other incidents a lover is introduced into a garden in a barrow of
clothes, though he has not Sir John Falstaff's fate. There are fresh laws of
love, and discussions of them; a new debate on the old Blonde v. Brunette
theme, which might be worse, etc. etc. The same year brought forth Les
Chastes Amours d'Armonde by a certain Damiron, which, as its title may
show, belongs rather to the pre-Astréean group (v. sup. Vol. I. p. 157 note),
and contains a great deal of verse and (by licence of its title) a good deal of
kissing; but is flatly told, despite not a little Phébus. It is a sort of combat of
Spiritual and Fleshly Love; and Armonde ends as a kind of irregular
anchorite, having previously "spent several days in deliberating the cut of
his vestments."
Les Caprices Héroïques (Paris, 1644) is a translation, by Chateaunières de
Grenaille, from the Italian of Loredano. It consists of variations on classical
stories, treated rather in the declamation manner, and ranging in subject
from Achilles to "Friné." How many readers (at least among those who read
with their eyes only) will affirm on their honour that they identified "Friné"
at first reading? In Italian there would, of course, be less hesitation. The

book is not precisely a novel, but it has merits as a collection of rhetorical
exercises. Of a somewhat similar kind, though even further from the strict
novel standard, is the Diverses Affections de Minerve (Paris, 1625) of the
above-mentioned Audiguier, where the heroine is not the goddess, and all
sorts of places and personages, mythological, classical, historic, and
modern, compose a miraculous macédoine, Brasidas jostling Gracchus, and
Chabrias living in the Faubourg Saint-Martin. This is a sort of story, but the
greatest part of the volume as it lies before me is composed of Lettres
Espagnoles, Epîtres Françaises, Libres Discours, etc.
We can apparently return to the stricter romance, such as it is, with the
Histoire Asiatique of the Sieur de Gerzan (Paris, 1633), but it is noteworthy
that the title-page of this ballasts itself by an "Avec un Traité du Trésor de la
Vie Humaine et La Philosophie des Dames." I confess that, as in the case of
most of the books here mentioned, I have not read it with the care I
bestowed on the Cyrus. But I perceive in it ladies who love corsairs,
universal medicines, poodles who are sacrificed to save their owners, and
other things which may tempt some. And I can, by at least sampling, rather
recommend Les Travaux du Prince Inconnu (Paris, 1633) by the Sieur de
Logeas. It calls itself, and its 700 pages, the completion of two earlier
performances, the Roman Historique and the Histoire des Trois Frères
Princes de Constantinople, which have not come in my way. There is,
however, probably no cause to regret this, for the author assures us that his
new work is "as far above the two former in beauty as the sun is above the
stars." If any light-minded person be disposed to scoff at him for this, let it
be added that he has the grace to abstract the whole in the Avis au Lecteur
which contains the boast, and to give full chapter-headings, things too often
wanting in the group. The hero is named Rosidor, the heroine Floralinde;
and they are married with "la réjouissance générale de toute la Chrétienté."
What can mortals ask for more?
Polémire ou l'Illustre Polonais (Paris, 1647), is dedicated to no less a
person than Madame de Montbazon, and contains much piety, a good deal
of fighting, and some verse. L'Amour Aventureux (Paris, 1623), by the not
unknown Du Verdier, is a book with Histoires, and I am not sure that the
volume I have seen contains the whole of it. L'Empire de l'Inconstance
(Paris, 1635), by the Sieur de Ville, and published "at the entry of the little
gallery of Prisoners under the sign of the Vermilion Roses," has a most

admirable title to start with, and a table of over thirty Histoires, a dozen
letters, and two "amorous judgments" at the end. Les Fortunes Diverses de
Chrysomire et de Kalinde (Paris, 1635), by a certain Humbert, blazons
"love and war" on its very title-page, while Celandre (Paris, 1671), a much
later book than most of these, has the rather uncommon feature of a single
name for title. Thirty or forty years ago I should have taken some pleasure
in "cooking" this batch of mostly early romances into a twenty-page article
which, unless it had been unlucky, would have found its way into some
magazine or review. Somebody might do so now. But I think it sufficient,
and not superfluous, to add this brief sketch here to the notices of similar
things in the last volume, in order to show how abundant the crop of French
romance—of which even these are only further samples—was at the time.
P. 231, l. 9 from bottom.—Add 's (Herman sla lerman's).
P. 237, note 2, l. 1.—For "revision" read "revisal."
P. 241, 2nd par., last line but two.—For "But" read "Still."
P. 278, l. 7 from bottom.—Delete comma at "Thackeray's."
P. 286, l. 18.—It occurred to me (among the usual discoveries which one
makes in reading one's book after it has passed the irremeable press) that I
ought to have said "Planchet's" horse, not "D'Artagnan's." True, as a kindly
fellow-Alexandrian (who had not noticed the slip) consoled my remorse by
saying, the horse was D'Artagnan's property; but the phrase usually implies
riding at the moment. And Aramis, brave as he was, would have been sure
to reflect that to play a feat of possibly hostile acrobatism on the Gascon,
without notice, might be a little dangerous.
P. 304, ll. 4 and 7.—Shift "with his wife and mistress" to l. 4, reading "the
relations with his wife and mistress of that Henri II.," etc.
P. 314, l. 12 from bottom.—For "usual" read "common" (common norm.)
P. 338, l. 21.—Delete "in" before "among."
P. 381.—One or two reviewers and some private correspondents have
expressed surprise at my not knowing, or at any rate not mentioning, the
late Professor Morley's publication of Rasselas and a translation of Candide

together. I cannot say positively whether I knew of it or not, though I must
have done so, having often gone over the lists of that editor's numerous
"libraries" to secure for my students texts not overlaid with commentary.
But I can say very truthfully that no slight whatever was intended, in regard
to a scholar who did more than almost any other single man to "vulgarise"
(in the wholly laudable sense of that too often degraded word) the body of
English literature. Only, such a book would not have been what I was
thinking of. To bring out the full contrast-complement of these two
strangely coincident masterpieces, both must be read in the originals.
Paradoxically, one might even say that a French translation of Johnson, with
the original of Voltaire, would show it better than the converse presentment.
Candide is so intensely French—it is even to such an extent an embodiment
of one side of Frenchness—that you cannot receive its virtues except
through the original tongue. I am personally fond of translating; I have had
some practice in it; and some good wits have not disapproved some of my
efforts. But, unless I knew that in case of refusal I should be ranked as a
Conscientious Objector, I would not attempt Candide. The French would
ring in my ears too reproachfully.
P. 396, last line.—Shift comma from after to before "even."
P. 399, l. 10.—For "Rousseau" read "his author."
P. 424, note, first line.—Delete quotes before "The."
P. 453, l. 15.—For "Courray" read "Couvray."
P. 468, l. 17.—For "France has" read "France had."
P. 477.—In the original preface I apologised—not in the idle hope of
conciliating one kind of critic, but out of respect for a very different class—
for slips due to the loss of my own library, and to the difficulty (a difficulty
which has now increased owing to circumstances of no public interest, in
respect of the present volume) of consulting others in regard to small
matters of fact. I have very gratefully to acknowledge that I found the latter
class very much larger than the former. Such a note as that at Vol. I. p. xiii,
will show that I have not spared trouble to ensure accuracy. The charge of
inaccuracy can always be made by anybody who cares to take "the other
authority." This has been done in reference to the dates of Prévost's books.

But I may perhaps say, without outrecuidance, that there is an Art de
négliger les dates as well as one de les verifier. For the purposes of such a
history as this it is very rarely of the slightest importance, whether a book
was published in the year one or the year three: though the importance of
course increases when units pass into decades, and becomes grave where
decades pass into half-centuries. Unless you can collate actual first editions
in every case (and sometimes even then) dates of books as given are always
second-hand. In reference to the same subject I have also been rebuked for
not taking account of M. Harrisse's correction of the legend of Prévost's
death. As a matter of fact I knew but had forgotten it, and it has not the
slightest importance in connection with Prévost's work. Besides, somebody
will probably, sooner or later, correct M. Harrisse. These things pass:
Manon Lescaut remains.

ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA FOR VOL. II
P. 65.—A reviewer of my first volume, who objected to my omission there
of Madame de Charrières, may possibly think that omission made more
sinful by the admission of Madame de Montolieu. But there seems to me to
be a sufficient distinction between the two cases. Isabella Agnes Elizabeth
Van Tuyll (or, as she liked to call herself, Belle de Zuylen), subsequently
Madame de Saint-Hyacinthe de Charrières (how mellifluously these names
pass over one's tongue!), was a very interesting person, and highly
characteristic of the later eighteenth century. I first met with her long ago
(see Vol. I. p. 443) in my "Sensibility" researches, as having, in her maturer
years, played that curious, but at the time not uncommon, part of
"Governess in erotics" to Benjamin Constant, who was then quite young,
and with whose uncle, Constant d'Hermenches, she had, years earlier and
before her own marriage, carried on a long and very intimate but platonic
correspondence. This is largely occupied with oddly business-like
discussions of marriage schemes for herself, one of the prétendants being
no less a person than our own precious Bozzy, who met her on the
Continental tour for which Johnson started him at Harwich. But—and let
this always be a warning to literary lovers—the two fell out over a
translation of the Corsica book which she began. Boswell was not the
wisest of men, especially where women were concerned. But even he might
have known that, if you trust the bluest-eyed of gazelles to do such things
for you, she will probably marry a market-gardener. (He seems also to have
been a little afraid of her superiority of talent, v. his letters to Temple and
his Johnson, pp. 192-3, Globe Ed.)
Besides these, and other genuine letters, she wrote not a few novels,
concocted often, if not always, in epistolary form. Their French was so
good that it attracted Sainte-Beuve's attention and praise, while quite
recently she has had a devoted panegyrist and editor in Switzerland, where,
after her marriage, she was domiciled. But (and here come the reasons for
the former exclusion) she learnt her French as a foreign language. She was
French neither by birth nor by extraction, nor, if I do not mistake, by even
temporary residence, though she did stay in England for a considerable

time. Some of these points distinguish her from Hamilton as others do from
Madame de Montolieu. If I put her in, I do not quite see how I could leave
Beckford out.
P. 400, ll. 2, 3.—For "1859 ... 1858" read "1857—a year, with its
successors 1858 and 1859,"

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I

PAGE

Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand 1

Reasons for beginning with Mme. de Staël—Delphine—The tone—The
story—Corinne—Its improved conditions—An illustrated edition of it—
The story—The character of Nelvil—And the book's absurdities—
Compensations: Corinne herself—Nelvil again—Its aesthetics—The
author's position in the History of the Novel—Chateaubriand: his peculiar
position as a novelist—And the remarkable interconnection of his works in
fiction—Atala—René—Difference between its importance and its merit—
Les Natchez—Les Martyrs—The story—Its "panoramic" quality—And its
remarkable advance in style—Chateaubriand's Janus-position in this—
Illustrated.

CHAPTER II

Paul de Kock, other minors of 1800-1830, and Nodier 39

The fate of popular minor novelists—Examples of them—Paul de Kock—
L'Enfant de ma Femme—Petits Tableaux de Mœurs—Gustave—The
caricatured Anglais—Edmond et sa Cousine—André le Savoyard—Jean—
La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant— Mon Voisin Raymond—Le Barbier de
Paris—The Pauline grisette—Others—The minors before 1830—Mme. de
Montolieu: Caroline de Lichtfield—Its advance on "Sensibility"—Madame
de Genlis iterum—The minor popular novel—Ducray-Duminil: Le Petit
Carillonneur—V. Ducange—L'Artiste et le Soldat— Ludovica—Auguste
Ricard: L'Ouvreuse de Loges—The importance of these minors not
inconsiderable—The Vicomte d'Arlincourt: Le Solitaire—Nodier—His
short stories—Trilby—Le Songe d'Or—The minors—La Fée aux Miettes—

Smarra and Sœur Béatrix—Inès de las Sierras—Nodier's special quality.

CHAPTER III

Victor Hugo 96

Limitations—Han d'Islande—Bug-Jargal—Le Dernier Jour d'un
Condamné—Claude Gueux—Notre-Dame de Paris—The story easy to
anticipate—Importance of the actual title—The working out of the one
under the other—The story recovers itself latterly—But the characters?—
The thirty years' interval—Les Misérables—Les Travailleurs de la Mer—
The genius loci—Guernsey at the time—L'Homme Qui Rit—Quatre-Vingt-
Treize—Final remarks.

CHAPTER IV

Beyle and Balzac 133

Beyle: his peculiarity—Armance—La Chartreuse de Parme—The Waterloo
episode—The subject and general colour—L'Abbesse de Castro, etc.—Le
Rouge et le Noir—Beyle's masterpiece, and why—Julien Sorel and
Mathilde de la Mole—The resuscitated work: Lamiel—The Nouvelles
Inédites—Le Chasseur Vert—Beyle's place in the story—Balzac: conditions
of the present dealing—Limitations of subject—And of Balzac himself—
Balzac's "general ideas"—Abstinence from abstract—The Œuvres de
Jeunesse—Les Chouans—La Peau de Chagrin—The short stories—The
Contes Drolatiques—Notes on select larger books: Eugénie Grandet—Le
Père Goriot and Les Parents Pauvres—Others: the general "scenic"
division—"Balzacity": its constitution—Its effect on successors—And its
own character—The "occult" element—Its action and reaction—Peculiarity
of the conversation—And of the "story" interest.

CHAPTER V

George Sand 176

George Sand: generalities about her—Note on Elle et Lui, etc., and on Un

Hiver à Majorque—Phases of her work—Indiana—Valentine—Lélia—The
moral of the group and its tragi-comedy—Consuelo—Much better in parts
—The degeneration—Recovery; but not maintained quite to the end—La
Comtesse de Rudolstadt—The "making good" of Lucrezia Floriani—The
story—Its balance of power—The "Idylls": La Petite Fadette—La Mare au
Diable—François le Champi—Others: Mauprat—La Daniella—Les Beaux
Messieurs de Bois-Doré—Le Marquis de Villemer—Mlle. La Quintinie—
Flamarande—Summary and judgment—Style—Conversation and
description.

CHAPTER VI

The Novel of Style—Gautier, Mérimée, Gérard de Nerval,
Musset, Vigny 208

Gautier: his burden of "style"—Abstract (with translations) of La Morte
Amoureuse—Criticism thereof—A parallel from painting—The reality—
And the passion of it—Other short stories—Gautier's humour: Les Jeune-
France—Return to Fortunio—And others—Longer books: Le Capitaine
Fracasse and others—Mlle. De> Maupin—Mérimée—Carmen—Colomba
—Its smaller companions: Mateo Falcone, etc.—Those of Carmen; Arsène
Guillot—And L'Abbé Aubain—La Prise de la Redoute—The Dernières
Nouvelles; Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia—Djoumane—Lokis—La
Chambre Bleue—The Chronique de Charles IX—The semi-dramatic
stories: La Jacquerie—Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, etc.—Musset:
charm of his dramatised stories; his pure narration unsuccessful—Frédéric
et Bernerette—Les Deux Maîtresses, Le Fils du Titien, etc.—Emmeline—
Gérard de Nerval: his peculiar position—La Bohême Galante, Les Filles du
Feu, and Le Rêve et la Vie—Their general character—Particular examples
—Aurélia—And especially Sylvie—Alfred de Vigny: Cinq-Mars—The
faults in its general scheme—And in its details—Stello less of a novel, but
containing better novel-stuff—Its framework and "anecdotes"—The death
of Gilbert—The satiric episode: contrast—The Chatterton part—The
tragedy of André Chénier—Servitude et Grandeur Militaires—The first
story—The second—and third—The moral of the three—Note on
Fromentin's Dominique: its altogether exceptional character.

CHAPTER VII

The Minors of 1830 281

Sainte-Beuve: Volupté—Its "puff-book"—Itself—Its character in various
aspects—Jules Sandeau and Charles de Bernard—Sandeau's work—
Bernard's—Sue, Soulié, and the novel of melodrama: Le Juif Errant, etc.—
Melodramatic fiction generally—Le Château des Pyrénées—Le Mémoires
du Diable—Later writers and writings of the class—Murger—The Vie de
Bohême—Les Buveurs d'Eau and the Miscellanies—Reybaud: Jérôme
Paturot, and Thackeray on its earlier part—The windfall of Malvina—The
difference of the Second Part—Not much of a novel—But an invaluable
document—Méry—Les Nuits Anglaises—The minor stories—Histoire
d'une Colline—The "Manchester" article—Karr—Roger de Beauvoir: Les
Cabaret des Morts—Ourliac: Contes du Bocage—Achard—Souvestre,
Féval, etc.—Borel's Champavert.

CHAPTER VIII

Dumas the Elder 323

The case of Dumas—Charge and discharge—Morality—Plagiarism and
devilling—The collaborators?—The positive value as fiction and as
literature of the books: the less worthy works—The worthier: treatment of
them not so much individually as under heads—His attitude to plot—To
character—To description (and "style")—To conversation.

CHAPTER IX

The French Novel in 1850 343

The peculiarity of the moment—A political nadir—And almost a literary
zenith—The performance of the time in novel—The personnel—The kinds:
the historical novel—Appearance of new classes: the historical—Other
kinds and classes—The Novel of Romanticism generally—The
"ordinary"—Discussion on a point of general novel criticism.

CHAPTER X

Dumas the Younger 365

Division of future subjects—A confession—His general character—La
Dame aux Camélias—Tristan le Roux—Antonine—La Vie à Vingt Ans—
Aventures de Quatre Femmes—Trois Hommes Forts—Diane de Lys—
Shorter stories: Une Loge à Camille—Le Docteur Servans—Le Roman
d'une Femme—The habit of quickening up at the end—Contes et Nouvelles
—Ilka—Revenants—Sophie Printemps—Affaire Clémenceau—Story of it
—Criticism of it and of its author's work generally—Note on Dumas fils'
drama, etc.—Reflections.

CHAPTER XI

Gustave Flaubert 397

The contrast of Flaubert and Dumas fils—Some former dealings with him
—His style—The books: Madame Bovary—Salammbô—L'Éducation
Sentimentale—La Tentation de Saint-Antoine—Trois Contes—Bouvard et
Pécuchet—General considerations.

CHAPTER XII

The other "Non-Naturals" of the Second Empire 414

Feuillet—His novels generally—Brief notes on some: Le Roman d'un jeune
homme pauvre—M. de Camors—Other books—La Petite Comtesse—Julia
de Trécœur—Honneur d'Artiste—La Morte—Misters the assassins—
Alphonse Daudet and his curious position—His "personality"—His books
from this point of view and others—His "plagiarisms"—His merits—
About: Le Roi des Montagnes—Tolla—Germaine—Madelon—Maître
Pierre, etc.—Summing up—Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau—The first: his
general character—The second—L'Affaire Lerouge—Feydeau: Sylvie—
Fanny—Others: Daniel—Droz—Mr., Mme. et Bébé and Entre Nous—
Cherbuliez—His general characteristics—Short survey of his books—Three
eccentrics—Léon Cladel: Les Va-nu-pieds, etc.—Barbey d'Aurevilly: his

criticism of novels—His novels themselves: Les Diaboliques and others—
His merits—And defects—Especially as shown in L'Ensorcelée—
Champfleury—Les Excentriques.

CHAPTER XIII

Naturalism—The Goncourts, Zola, and Maupassant 459

The beginnings—"Les deux Goncourts"—Their work—The novels—
Germinie Lacerteux and Chérie taken as specimens—The impression
produced by them—The rottenness of their theory—And the
unattractiveness of their style—Émile Zola to be treated differently—Some
points in his personality: literary and other—The Pillars of Naturalism
—"Document" and "detail" before Naturalism—General stages traced—
Some individual pioneers; especially Hugo—Survey of books: the short
stories—"Les Rougon-Macquart"—"Les Trois Villes"—"Les Quatre
Évangiles"—General considerations—Especially in regard to character—
[Maupassant]—Bel-Ami—Une Vie—Fort comme la Mort—Pierre et Jean
—Notre Cœur—Les Dimanches, etc.—Yvette—Short stories: the various
collections—Classes: stories of 1870-71—Norman stories—Algerian and
Sporting—Purely comic—Tragic—Tales of Life's Irony—Oddments—
General considerations—Huysmans—Belot and others.

CHAPTER XIV

Other Novelists of 1870-1900 518

The last stage—Ferdinand Fabre—L'Abbé> Tigrane—Norine, etc.—Le
Marquis de Pierrerue —Mon Oncle Célestin—Lucifer—Sylviane and
Taillevent—Toussaint Galabru—André Theuriet—Sauvageonne—Le Fils
Maugars—Le Don Juan de Vireloup and Raymonde—General
characteristics—Georges Ohnet—Serge Panine—Le Maître de Forges—Le
Docteur Rameau—La Grande Marnière—Reflections—Édouard Rod—La
Vie Privée de Michel Teissier—La Sacrifiée—Note on La Seconde Vie de
M. T.—Le Silence—Là-Haut—La Course à la Mort—Le Ménage du
Pasteur Naudié—Mademoiselle Annette—L'Eau Courante—Scènes de la
Vie Cosmopolite—Catulle Mendès.

Conclusion 556

Appendix 571

Index 577

CHAPTER I
MADAME DE STAËL AND CHATEAUBRIAND

It has often been thought, and sometimes said, that the
period of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic Reasons for
beginning with
wars—extending as it does strictly to more than a Mme. de Staël.
quarter of a century, while four decades were more than
completed before a distinct turn of tide—is, for France, the least individual
and least satisfactorily productive time in all her great literature. And it is,
to a large extent, true. But the loss of individuality implies the presence of
indiscernibility; and not to go out of our own department, there are at least
three writers who, if but partially, cancel this entry to discredit. Of one of
them—the lowest in general literature, if not quite in our division of it—
Pigault-Lebrun—we have spoken in the last volume. The other two—much
less craftsmanlike novelists merely as such, but immeasurably greater as
man and woman of letters—remain for discussion in the first chapter of
this. In pure chronological order Chateaubriand should come first, as well
as in other "ranks" of various kinds. But History, though it may never
neglect, may sometimes overrule Chronology by help of a larger and higher
point of view: sex and birth hardly count here, and the departmental primes
the intrinsic literary importance. Chateaubriand, too, was a little younger
than Madame de Staël in years, though his actual publication, in anything
like our kind, came before hers. And he reached much farther than she did,
though curiously enough some of his worst faults were more of the
eighteenth century than hers. She helped to finish "Sensibility"; she
transformed "Philosophism" into something more modern; she borrowed a
good deal (especially in the region of aesthetics) that was to be importantly
germinal from Germany. But she had practically nothing of that sense of the
past and of the strange which was to rejuvenate all literature, and which he
had; while she died before the great French Romantic outburst began. So let
us begin with her.[8]

"This dismal trash, which has nearly dislocated the jaws
of every critic who has read it," was the extremely rude Delphine.
judgment pronounced by Sydney Smith on Madame de
Staël's Delphine. Sydney was a good-natured person and a gentleman, nor
had he, merely as a Whig, any reason to quarrel with the lady's general
attitude to politics—a circumstance which, one regrets to say, did in those
days, on both sides, rather improperly qualify the attitude of gentlemen to
literary ladies as well as to each other. It is true that the author of Corinne
and of Delphine itself had been rather a thorn in the side of the English
Whigs by dint of some of her opinions, by much of her conduct, and, above
all, by certain peculiarities which may be noticed presently. But Sydney,
though a Whig, was not "a vile Whig," for which reason the Upper Powers,
in his later years, made him something rather indistinguishable from a Tory.
And that blunt common sense, which in his case cohabited with the finest
uncommon wit, must have found itself, in this instance, by no means at
variance with its housemate in respect of Anne Germaine Necker.
There are many worse books than Delphine. It is excellently written; there
is no bad blood in it; there is no intentional licentiousness; on the contrary,
there are the most desperate attempts to live up to a New Morality by no
means entirely of the Wiggins kind. But there is an absence of humour
which is perfectly devastating: and there is a presence of the most
disastrous atmosphere of sham sentiment, sham morality, sham almost
everything, that can be imagined. It was hinted in the last volume that
Madame de Staël's lover, Benjamin Constant, shows in one way the
Nemesis of Sensibility; so does she herself in another. But the difference! In
Adolphe a coal from the altar of true passion has touched lips in themselves
polluted enough, and the result is what it always is in such, alas! rare cases,
whether the lips were polluted or not. In Delphine there is a desperate
pother to strike some sort of light and get some sort of heat; but the steel is
naught, the flint is clay, the tinder is mouldy, and the wood is damp and
rotten. No glow of brand or charcoal follows, and the lips, untouched by it,
utter nothing but rhetoric and fustian and, as the Sydneian sentence speaks
it, "trash."[9]
In fact, to get any appropriate metaphorical description
of it one has to change the terminology altogether. In a The tone.

very great line Mr. Kipling has spoken of a metaphorical ship—

With a drogue of dead convictions to keep her head to gale.

Madame de Staël has cast off not only that drogue, but even the other and
perhaps commoner floating ballast and steadier of dead conventions, and is
trying to beat up against the gale by help of all sorts of jury-masts and
extemporised try-sails of other new conventions that are mostly blowing out
of the bolt-ropes. We said that Crébillon's world was an artificial one, and
one of not very respectable artifice. But it worked after a fashion; it was
founded on some real, however unrespectable, facts of humanity; and it was
at least amusing to the naughty players on its stage to begin with, and long
afterwards to the guiltless spectators of the commonty. In Delphine there is
not a glimmer of amusement from first to last, and the whole story is
compact (if that word were not totally inapplicable) of windbags of
sentiment, copy-book headings, and the strangest husks of neo-classic type-
worship, stock character, and hollow generalisation. An Italian is
necessarily a person of volcanic passions; an Englishman or an American
(at this time the identification was particularly unlucky) has, of equal
necessity, a grave and reserved physiognomy. Orthodox religion is a
mistake, but a kind of moral-philosophical Deism (something of the
Wolmar type) is highly extolled. You must be technically "virtuous"
yourself, even if you bring a whole second volume of tedious tortures on
you by being so; but you may play Lady Pandara to a friend who is a
devout adulteress, may force yourself into her husband's carriage when he is
carrying her off from one assignation, and may bring about his death by
contriving another in your own house. In fact, the whole thing is topsy-
turvy, without the slightest touch of that animation and interested curiosity
which topsy-turviness sometimes contributes. But perhaps one should give
a more regular account of it.
Delphine d'Albémar is a young, beautiful, rich, clever,
generous, and, in the special and fashionable sense, The story.
extravagantly "sensible" widow, who opens the story (it
is in the troublesome epistolary form) by handing over about a third of her
fortune to render possible the marriage of a cousin of her deceased husband.
This cousin, Matilde de Vernon, is also beautiful and accomplished, but a
dévote, altogether well-regulated and well-conducted, and (though it turns

out that she has strong and permanent affections) the reverse of
"sensible"—in fact rather hard and disagreeable—in manner. She has a
scheming mother, who has run herself deeply, though privately, into debt,
and the intended husband and son-in-law, Léonce de Mandeville, also has a
mother, who is half Spanish by blood and residence, and wholly so
(according to the type-theory above glanced at) in family pride, personal
morgue, and so forth. A good deal of this has descended to her son, with
whom, in spite or because of it, Delphine (she has not seen him before her
rash generosity) proceeds to fall frantically in love, as he does with her. The
marriage, however, partly by trickery on Madame de Vernon's part, and
partly owing to Delphine's more than indiscreet furthering of her friend
Madame d'Ervin's intrigue with the Italian M. de Serbellane, does take
place, and Mme. de Staël's idea of a nice heroine makes her station
Delphine in a white veil, behind a pillar of the church, muttering reproaches
at the bridegroom. No open family rupture, however, is caused; on the
contrary, a remarkable and inevitably disastrous "triple arrangement"
follows (as mentioned above), for an entire volume, in which the widow
and the bridegroom make despairing love to each other, refraining,
however, from any impropriety, and the wife, though suffering (for she, in
her apparently frigid way, really loves her husband), tolerates the
proceeding after a fashion. This impossible and preposterous situation is at
last broken up by the passion and violence of another admirer of Delphine
—a certain M. de Valorbe. These bring about duels, wounds, and Delphine's
flight to Switzerland, where she puts up in a convent with a most
superfluous and in every way unrefreshing new personage, a widowed sister
of Madame de Mandeville. Valorbe follows, and, to get hold of Delphine,
machinates one of the most absurd scenes in the whole realm of fiction. He
lures her into Austrian territory and a chamber with himself alone, locks the
door and throws the key out of the window,[10] storms, rants, threatens, but
proceeds to no voie de fait, and merely gets himself and the object of his
desires arrested by the Austrians! He thus succeeds, while procuring no
gratification for himself, in entirely demolishing the last shred of reputation
which, virtuous as she is in her own way, Delphine's various eccentricities
and escapades have left her; and she takes the veil. In the first form the
authoress crowned this mass of absurdities with the suicide of the heroine
and the judicial shooting of the hero. Somebody remonstrated, and she
made Delphine throw off her vows, engage herself to Léonce (whose

unhappy wife has died from too much carrying out of the duty of a mother
to her child), and go with him to his estates in La Vendée, where he is to
take up arms for the king. Unfortunately, the Vendéans by no means "see"
their seigneur marrying an apostate nun, and strong language is used. So
Delphine dies, not actually by her own hand, and Léonce gets shot, more
honourably than he deserves, on the patriot-royalist side.
Among the minor characters not yet referred to are an old-maid sister-in-
law of Delphine's, who, though tolerably sensible in the better sense, plays
the part of confidante to her brother's mijaurée of a widow much too
indulgently; a M. Barton, Léonce's mentor, who, despite his English-
looking name, is not (one is glad to find) English, but is, to one's sorrow,
one of the detestable "parsons-in-tie-wigs" whom French Anglomania at
this time foisted on us as characteristic of England; a sort of double of his,
M. de Lerensei, a Protestant free-thinker, who, with his divorcée wife, puts
up grass altars in their garden with inscriptions recording the happiness of
their queer union; an ill-natured Mme. du Marset and her old cicisbeo, M.
de Fierville, who suggest, in the dismallest way, the weakest wine of
Marmontel gone stale and filtered through the dullest, though not the
dirtiest, part of Laclos.
Yet the thing, "dismal trash" as Sydney almost justly called it, is perhaps
worth reading once (nothing but the sternest voice of duty could have made
me read it twice) because of the existence of Corinne, and because also of
the undoubted fact that, here as there, though much more surprisingly, a
woman of unusual ability was drawing a picture of what she would have
liked to be—if not of what she actually thought herself.[11] The borrowed
beauty goes for nothing—it were indeed hard if one did not, in the case of a
woman of letters, "let her make her dream All that she would," like
Tennyson's Prince, but in this other respect. The generosity, less actually
exaggerated, might also pass. That Delphine makes a frantic fool of herself
for a lover whose attractions can only make male readers shrug their
shoulders—for though we are told that Léonce is clever, brave, charming,
and what not, we see nothing of it in speech or action—may be matter of
taste; but that her heroine's part should seem to any woman one worth
playing is indeed wonderful. Delphine behaves throughout like a child, and
by no means always like a very well-brought-up child; she never seems to
have the very slightest idea that "things are as they are and that their

consequences will be what they will be"; and though, once more, we are
told of passion carrying all before it, we are never shown it. It is all "words,
words." To speak of her love in the same breath with Julie's is to break off
the speech in laughter; to consider her woes and remember Clarissa's is to
be ready to read another seven or eight volumes of Richardson in lieu of
these three of Madame de Staël's.
And yet this lady could do something in the novel way, and, when the time
came, she did it.
Between Delphine and Corinne Madame de Staël had, in
the fullest sense of a banal phrase, "seen a great of the Corinne.
world." She had lost the illusions which the Duessa
Revolution usually spreads among clever but not wise persons at her first
appearance, and had not left her bones, as too many[12] such persons do, in
the pieuvre-caves which the monster keeps ready. She had seen England,
being "coached" by Crabb-Robinson and others, so as to give some
substance to the vague philosophe-Anglomane flimsiness of her earlier
fancy. She had seen Republicanism turn to actual Tyranny, and had made
exceedingly unsuccessful attempts to captivate the tyrant. She had seen
Germany, and had got something of its then not by any means poisonous, if
somewhat windy, "culture"; a little romance of a kind, though she was never
a real Romantic; some aesthetics; some very exoteric philosophy, etc. She
had done a great deal of not very happy love-making; had been a woman of
letters, a patroness of men of letters, and—most important of all—had never
dismounted from her old hobby "Sensibility," though she had learnt how to
put it through new paces.
A critical reader of Corinne must remember all this, and he must remember
something else, though the reminder has been thought to savour of brutality.
It is perfectly clear to me, and always has been so from reading (in and
between the lines) of her own works, of Lady Blennerhassett's monumental
book on her, of M. Sorel's excellent monograph, and of scores of longer and
shorter studies on and references to her English and German and Swiss and
French—from her own time downwards, that the central secret, mainspring,
or whatever any one may choose to call it, of Madame de Staël's life was a
frantic desire for the physical beauty which she did not possess,[13] and a
persistent attempt, occasionally successful, to delude herself into believing

that she had achieved a sufficient substitute by literary, philosophical,
political, and other exertion.
This partly pathetic, partly, alas! ridiculous, but on the
whole (with a little charity) quite commiserable Its improved
conditions.
endeavour, attained some success, though probably with
not a little extraneous help, in De l'Allemagne, and the posthumous
Considérations on the Revolution; but these books do not concern us, and
illustrate only part of the writer's character, temperament, and talent, if not
genius. Corinne gives us the rest, and nearly, if not quite, the whole. The
author had no doubt tried to do this in Delphine, but had then had neither art
nor equipment for the task, and she had failed utterly. She was now well, if
not perfectly, equipped, and had learnt not a little of the art to use her
acquisitions. Delphine had been dull, absurd, preposterous; Corinne, if it
has dull patches, saves them from being intolerable. If its sentiment is
extravagant, it is never exactly preposterous or exactly absurd; for the truth
and reality of passion which are absent from the other book are actually
present here, though sometimes in unintentional masquerade.
In fact, Corinne, though the sisterhood of the two books is obvious enough,
has almost, though not quite, all the faults of Delphine removed and some
merits added, of which in the earlier novel there is not the slightest trace.
The history of my own acquaintance with it is, I hope, not quite irrelevant. I
read it—a very rare thing for me with a French novel (in fact I can hardly
recollect another instance, except, a quaint contrast, Paul de Kock's André
le Savoyard)—first in English, and at a very early period of life, and I then
thought it nearly as great "rot" as I have always thought its predecessor. But
though I had, I hope, sense enough to see its faults, I had neither age nor
experience nor literature enough to appreciate its merits. I read it a good
deal later in French, and, being then better qualified, did perceive these
merits, though it still did not greatly "arride" me. Later still—in fact, only
some twenty years ago—I was asked to re-edit and "introduce" the English
translation. It is a popular mistake to think that an editor, like an advocate,
is entitled, if not actually bound, to make the best case for his client, quite
apart from his actual opinions; but in this instance my opinion of the book
mounted considerably. And it has certainly not declined since, though this
History has necessitated a fourth study of the original, and though I shall
neither repeat what I said in the Introduction referred to, nor give the

impression there recorded in merely altered words. Indeed, the very purpose
of the present notice, forming part, as it should, of a connected history of
the whole department to which the book belongs, requires different
treatment, and an application of what may be called critical "triangulation"
from different stand-points.
By an odd chance and counter-chance, the edition which
served for this last perusal, after threatening to disserve An illustrated
its text, had an exactly contrary result. It was the edition of it.
handsome two-volume issue of 1841 copiously adorned with all sorts of
ingenious initial-devices, culs-de-lampe, etc., and with numerous
illustrative "cuts" beautifully engraved (for the most part by English
engravers, such as Orrin Smith, the Williamses, etc.), excellently drawn and
composed by French artists from Gros downwards, but costumed in what is
now perhaps the least tolerable style of dress even to the most catholic taste
—that of the Empire in France and the Regency in England—and most
comically "thought."[14] At first sight this might seem to be a disadvantage,
as calling attention to, and aggravating, certain defects of the text itself. I
found it just the reverse. One was slightly distracted from, and half inclined
to make allowances for, Nelvil's performances in the novel when one saw
him—in a Tom-and-Jerry early chimneypot hat, a large coachman's coat
flung off his shoulders and hanging down to his heels, a swallow-tail, tight
pantaloons, and Hessian boots—extracting from his bosom his father's
portrait and expressing filial sentiments to it. One was less likely to accuse
Corinne of peevishness when one beheld the delineation of family worship
in the Edgermond household from which she fled. And the faithful eyes
remonstrated with the petulant brain for scoffing at excessive sentiment,
when they saw how everybody was always at somebody else's feet, or
supporting somebody else in a fainting condition, or resting his or her
burning brow on a hand, the elbow of which rested, in its turn, on a pedestal
like that of Mr. Poseidon Hicks in Mrs. Perkins's Ball. The plates gave a
safety-valve to the letterpress in a curiously anodyne fashion which I hardly
ever remember to have experienced before. Or rather, one transferred to
them part, if not the whole, of the somewhat contemptuous amusement
which the manners had excited, and had one's more appreciative faculties
clear for the book itself.

The story of Corinne, though not extraordinarily
"accidented" and, as will be seen, adulterated, or at least The story.
mixed, with a good many things that are not story at all,
is fairly solid, much more so than that of Delphine. It turns—though the
reader is not definitely informed of this till the book is half over—on the
fact of an English nobleman, Lord Edgermond (dead at temp. of tale),
having had two wives, the first an Italian. By her he had one daughter,
whose actual Christian name (unless I forget) we are never told, and he
lived with them in Italy till his wife's death. Then he went home and
married a second wife, an English or Scotch woman (for her name seems to
have been Maclinson—a well-known clan) of very prudish disposition. By
her he had another daughter, Lucile—younger by a good many years than
her sister. To that sister Lady Edgermond the second does not behave
exactly in the traditionally novercal fashion, but she is scandalised by the
girl's Italian ways, artistic and literary temperament, desire for society, etc.
After Lord Edgermond's death the discord of the two becomes intolerable,
and the elder Miss Edgermond, coming of age and into an independent
fortune, breaks loose and returns to Italy, her stepmother stipulating that she
shall drop her family name altogether and allow herself to be given out as
dead. She consents (unwisely, but perhaps not unnaturally), appears in Italy
under the name of "Corinne," and establishes herself without difficulty in
the best Roman society as a lady of means, great beauty, irreproachable
character, but given to private displays of her talents as singer,
improvisatrice, actress, and what not.
But before she has thus thrown a still respectable bonnet over a not too
disreputable mill, something has happened which has, in the long run, fatal
consequences. Lord Edgermond has a friend, Lord Nelvil, who has a son
rather younger than Corinne. Both fathers think that a marriage would be a
good thing, and the elder Nelvil comes to stay with the Edgermonds to
propose it. Corinne (or whatever her name was then) lays herself out in a
perfectly innocent but, as he thinks, forward manner to please him, and he,
being apparently (we never see him in person) not a little of an old fool,
cries off this project, but tells Edgermond that he should like his son to
marry Lucile when she grows up.
Without an intolerable dose of "argument," it is only possible to say here
that Nelvil, after his father's death, journeys to the Continent (where he has

been already engaged in a questionable liaison), meets Corinne, and, not at
first knowing in the least who she is, falls, or thinks he falls, frantically in
love with her, while she really does fall more frantically in love with him.
After a sojourn, of which a little more presently, circumstances make him
(or he thinks they make him) return home, and he falls, or thinks he falls,[15]
out of love with Corinne and into it (after a fashion) with Lucile. Corinne
undertakes an incognito journey to England to find out what is happening,
but (this, though not impossible in itself, is, as told, the weakest part of the
story) never makes herself known till too late, and Nelvil, partly out of
respect for his father's wishes, and partly, one fears, because Lucile is very
pretty and Corinne seems to be very far off, marries the younger sister.
It would have greatly improved the book if, with or even without a
"curtain," it had ended here. But Madame de Staël goes on to tell us how
Nelvil, who is a soldier by profession,[16] leaves his wife and a little
daughter, Juliette, and goes to "Les Iles" on active service for four years;
how Lucile, not unnaturally, suspects hankering after the sister she has not
seen since her childhood; how, Nelvil being invalided home, they all go to
Italy, and find Corinne in a dying condition; how Lucile at first refuses to
see her, but, communications being opened by the child Juliette,
reconciliations follow; and how Corinne dies with Nelvil and Lucile duly
kneeling at her bedside.
The minor personages of any importance are not numerous. Besides Lady
Edgermond, they consist of the Comte d'Erfeuil, a French travelling
companion of Nelvil's; the Prince of Castel-Forte, an Italian of the highest
rank; a Mr. Edgermond, who does not make much appearance, but is more
like a real Englishman in his ways and manners than Nelvil; an old Scotch
nincompoop named Dickson, who, unintentionally, makes mischief
wherever he goes as surely as the personage in the song made music. Lady
Edgermond, though she is neither bad nor exactly ill-natured, is the evil
genius of the story. Castel-Forte, a most honourable and excellent
gentleman, has so little of typical Italianism in him that, finding Corinne
will not have him, he actually serves as common friend, confidant, and
almost as honourable go-between, to her and Nelvil.
On the other hand, French critics have justly complained, and critics not
French may endorse the complaint, that the Comte d'Erfeuil is a mere

caricature of the "frivolous" French type too commonly accepted out of
France. He is well-mannered, not ill-natured, and even not, personally, very
conceited, but utterly shallow, incapable of a serious interest in art, letters,
or anything else, blandly convinced that everything French is superlative
and that nothing not French is worthy of attention. Although he appears
rather frequently, he plays no real part in the story, and, unless there was
some personal grudge to pay off (which is not unlikely), it is difficult to
imagine why Madame de Staël should have introduced a character which
certainly does her skill as a character-drawer very little credit.
It is, however, quite possible that she was led astray by a
will-o'-the-wisp, which has often misled artists not of the The character of
Nelvil.
very first class—the chance of an easy contrast. The
light-hearted, light-minded Erfeuil was to set off the tense and serious
Nelvil—a type again, as he was evidently intended to be, but a somewhat
new type of Englishman. She was a devotee of Rousseau, and she
undoubtedly had the egregious Bomston before her. But, though her sojourn
in England had not taught her very much about actual Englishman, she had
probably read Mackenzie, and knew that the "Man of Feeling" touch had to
some extent affected us. She tried to combine the two, with divers hints of
hearsay and a good deal of pure fancy, and the result was Oswald, Lord
Nelvil. As with that other curious contemporary of hers with whom we deal
in this chapter, the result was startlingly powerful in literature. There is no
doubt that the Byronic hero, whose importance of a kind is unmistakable
and undeniable, is Schedoni, René, and Nelvil sliced up, pounded in a
mortar, and made into a rissole with Byron's own sauce of style in rhetoric
or (if anybody will have it so) poetry, but with very little more substantial
ingredients. As for the worthy peer of Scotland or England, more recent
estimates have seldom been favourable, and never ought to have been so.
M. Sorel calls him a "snob"; but that is only one of the numerous and,
according to amiable judgments, creditable instances of the inability of the
French to discern exactly what "snobbishness" is.[17] My Lord Nelvil has
many faults and very few merits, but among the former I do not perceive
any snobbishness. He is not in the least attracted by Corinne's popularity,
either with the great vulgar or the small, and his hesitations about marrying
her do not arise from any doubt (while he is still ignorant on the subject) of
her social worthiness to be his wife. He is a prig doubtless, but he is a prig

of a very peculiar character—a sort of passionate prig, or, to put it in
another way, one of Baudelaire's "Enfants de la lune," who, not content with
always pining after the place where he is not and the love that he has not, is
constantly making not merely himself, but the place where he is and the
love whom he has, uncomfortable and miserable. There can, I think, be little
doubt that Madame de Staël, who frequently insists on his "irresolution"
(remember that she had been in Germany and heard the Weimar people
talk), meant him for a sort of modern Hamlet in very different
circumstances as well as times. But it takes your Shakespeare to manage
your Hamlet, and Madame de Staël was not Shakespeare, even in petticoats.
The absurdities of the book are sufficiently numerous.
Lord Nelvil, who has not apparently had any special And the book's
absurdities.
experience of the sea, "advises" the sailors, and takes the
helm during a storm on his passage from Harwich to Emden; while these
English mariners, unworthy professional descendants of that admirable
man, the boatswain of the opening scenes of The Tempest, are actually
grateful to him, and when he goes 'ashore "press themselves round him" to
take leave of him (that is to say, they do this in the book; what in all
probability they actually said would not be fit for these pages). He is always
saving people—imprisoned Jews and lunatics at a fire in Ancona; aged
lazzaroni who get caught in a sudden storm-wave at Naples; and this in
spite of the convenient-inconvenient blood-vessels which break when it is
necessary, but still make it quite easy for him to perform these Herculean
feats and resume his rather interim military duties when he pleases. As for
Corinne, her exploits with her "schall" (a vestment of which Madame de
Staël also was fond), and her crowning in the Capitol, where the crown
tumbles off—an incident which in real life would be slightly comical, but
which here only gives Nelvil an opportunity of picking it up—form a
similar prelude to a long series of extravagances. The culmination of them
is that altogether possible-improbable visit to England, which might have
put everything right and does put everything wrong, and the incurable
staginess which makes her, as above related, refuse to see Oswald and
Lucile together till she is actually in articulo mortis.
And yet—"for all this and all this and twice as much as all this"—I should
be sorry for any one who regards Corinne as merely a tedious and not at all
brief subject for laughter. One solid claim which it possesses has been, and

is still for a moment, definitely postponed; but in another point there is, if
not exactly a defence, an immense counterpoise to the faults and follies just
mentioned. Corinne to far too great an extent, and Oswald to an extent
nearly but not quite fatal, are loaded (affublés, to use the word we borrowed
formerly) with a mass of corporal and spiritual wiglomeration (as Mr.
Carlyle used expressively and succinctly to call it) in costume and fashion
and sentiment and action and speech. But when we have stripped this off,
manet res—reality of truth and fact and nature.
There should be no doubt of this in Corinne's own case.
It has been said from the very first that she is, as Compensations—
Corinne herself.
Delphine had been, if not what her creatress was, what
she would have liked to be. The ideal in the former case was more than
questionable, and the execution was very bad. Here the ideal is far from
flawless, but it is greatly improved, and the execution is improved far more
than in proportion. Corinne is not "a reasonable woman"; but reason,
though very heartily to be welcomed on its rare occurrences in that division
of humanity, when it does not exclude other things more to be welcomed
still, is very decidedly not to be preferred to the other things themselves.
Corinne has these—or most of them. She is beautiful; she is amiable; she is
unselfish; without the slightest touch of prudery she has the true as well as
the technical chastity; and she is really the victim of inauspicious stars, and
of the misconduct of other people—the questionable wisdom of her own
father; the folly of Nelvil's; the wilfulness in the bad sense, and the
weakness of will in the good, of her lover; the sour virtue and borné
temperament of Lady Edgermond. Almost all her faults and not a few of her
misfortunes are due to the "sensibility" of her time, or the time a little
before her; for, as has been more than hinted already, Corinne, though a
book of far less genius, strength, and concentration than Adolphe, is, like it,
though from the other side, and on a far larger scale, the history of the
Nemesis of Sensibility.
But Nelvil? He is, it has been said, a deplorable kind of
creature—a kind of creature (to vary Dr. Johnson's doom Nelvil again.
on the unlucky mutton) ill-bred, ill-educated, ill- (though
not quite in the ordinary sense) natured, ill-fated to an extent which he
could partly, but only partly, have helped; and ill-conducted to an extent
which he might have helped almost altogether. But is he unnatural? I fear—

I trow—not. He is, I think, rather more natural than Edgar of Ravenswood,
who is something of the same class, and who may perhaps owe a very little
to him. At any rate, though he has more to do with the theatre, he is less
purely theatrical than that black-plumed Master. And it seems to me that he
is more differentiated from the Sensibility heroes than even Corinne herself
is from the Sensibility heroines, though one sympathises with her much
more than with him. Homo est, though scarcely vir. Now it is humanity
which we have been always seeking, but not always finding, in the long and
often brilliant list of French novels before his day. And we have found it
here once more.
But we find also something more; and this something
more gives it not merely an additional but even to some Its aesthetics.
extent a fresh hold upon the history of the novel itself.
To say that it is in great part a "guide-book novel," as indeed its second
title[18] honestly declares, may seem nowadays a doubtful testimonial. It is
not really so. For it was, with certain exceptions in German, the first "guide-
book" novel: and though some of those exceptions may have shown greater
'literary genius than Madame de Staël's, the Germans, though they have, in
certain lines, had no superiors as producers of tales, have never produced a
good novel yet.[19] Moreover, the guide-book element is a great set-off to
the novel. It is not—or at any rate it is not necessarily—liable to the
objections to "purpose," for it is ornamental and not structural. It takes a
new and important and almost illimitably fresh province of nature and of
art, which is a part of nature, to be its appanage. It would be out of place
here to trace the development of this system of reinforcing the novel
beyond France, in Scott more particularly. It is not out of place to remind
the reader that even Rousseau (to whom Madame de Staël owed so much)
to some extent, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand to more, as far
as what we may call scenery-guide-booking goes, had preceded her. But for
the "art," the aesthetic addition, she was indebted only to the Germans; and
almost all her French successors were indebted to her.[20]
Although, therefore, it is hardly possible to call Madame
de Staël a good novelist, she occupies a very important The author's
position in the
position in the history of the novel. She sees, or helps to History of the
see, the "sensibility" novel out, with forcible Novel.

demonstration of the inconveniences of its theory. She helps to see the
aesthetic novel—or the novel highly seasoned and even sandwiched with
aesthetics—in. She manages to create at least one character to whom the
epithets of "noble" and "pathetic" can hardly be refused; and at least one
other to which that of "only too natural," if with an exceptional and faulty
kind of nature, must be accorded. At a time when the most popular, prolific,
and in a way craftsmanlike practitioner of the kind, Pigault-Lebrun, was
dragging it through vulgarity, she keeps it at any rate clear of that. Her
description is adequate: and her society-and-manners painting (not least in
the récit giving Corinne's trials in Northumberland) is a good deal more
than adequate. Moreover, she preserves the tradition of the great philosophe
group by showing that the writer of novels can also be the author of serious
and valuable literature of another kind. These are no small things to have
done: and when one thinks of them one is almost able to wipe off the slate
of memory that awful picture of a turbaned or "schalled" Blowsalind, with
arms[21] like a "daughter of the plough," which a cruel tradition has
perpetuated as frontispiece to some cheap editions of her works.

There is perhaps no more difficult person to appraise in
all French literature—there are not many in the literature Chateaubriand—his
peculiar position as
of the world—than François René, Vicomte de a novelist.
Chateaubriand. It is almost more difficult than in the
case of his two great disciples, Byron and Hugo, to keep his personality out
of the record: and it is a not wholly agreeable personality. Old experience
may perhaps attain to this, and leave to ghouls and large or small coffin-
worms the business of investigating and possibly fattening on the thing. But
even the oldest experience dealing with his novels (which were practically
all early) may find itself considerably tabusté, as Rabelais has it, that is to
say, "bothered" with faults which are mitigated in the Génie du
Christianisme, comparatively (not quite) unimportant in the Voyages, and
almost entirely whelmed in the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe. These faults are
of such a complicated and various kind that the whole armour of criticism is
necessary to deal with them, on the defensive in the sense of not being too

much influenced by them, and on the offensive in the sense of being severe
but not too severe on them.
The mere reader of Chateaubriand's novels generally
begins with Atala and René, and not uncommonly stops And the remarkable
there. In a certain sense this reader is wise in his interconnection of
his works in fiction.
generation. But he will never understand his author as a
novelist if he does so; and his appreciation of the books or booklets
themselves will be very incomplete. They are both not unfrequently spoken
of as detached episodes of the Génie du Christianisme; and so they are, in
the illustrative sense. They are actually, and in the purely constitutive way,
episodes of another book, Les Natchez, while this book itself is also a novel
"after a sort." The author's work in the kind is completed by the later Les
Martyrs, which has nothing to do, in persons or time, with the others, being
occupied with the end of the third century, while they deal (throwing back a
little in Atala) with the beginning of the eighteenth. But this also is an
illustrative companion or reinforcement of the Génie. With that book the
whole body of Chateaubriand's fiction[22] is thus directly connected; and the
entire collection, not a little supported by the Voyages, constitutes a
deliberate "literary offensive," intended to counter-work the proceedings of
the philosophes, though with aid drawn from one of them—Rousseau,—and
only secondarily designed to provide pure novel-interest. If this is forgotten,
the student will find himself at sea without a rudder; and the mere reader
will be in danger of exaggerating very greatly, because he does not in the
least understand, the faults just referred to, and of failing altogether to
appreciate the real success and merit of the work as judged on that only
criterion, "Has the author done what he meant to do, and done it well, on
the lines he chose?" Of course, if our reader says, "I don't care about all
this, I merely want to be amused and interested," one cannot prevent him.
He had, in fact, as was hinted just now, better read nothing but Atala and
René, if not, indeed, Atala only, immense as is the literary importance of its
companion. But in a history of the novel one is entitled to hope, at any rate
to wish, for a somewhat better kind of customer or client.
According to Chateaubriand's own account, when he quitted England after
his not altogether cheerful experiences there as an almost penniless émigré,
he left behind him, in the charge of his landlady, exactly 2383 folio pages of
MSS. enclosed in a trunk, and (by a combination of merit on the custodian's

part and luck on his own) recovered them fifteen years afterwards, Atala,
René, and a few other fragments having alone accompanied him. These
were published independently, the Génie following. Les Martyrs was a later
composition altogether, while Les Natchez, the matrix of both the shorter
stories, and included, as one supposes, in the 2383 waifs, was partly
rewritten and wholly published later still. A body of fiction of such a
singular character is, as has been said, not altogether easy to treat; but,
without much change in the method usually pursued in this History, we may
perhaps do best by first giving a brief argument of the various contents and
then taking up the censure, in no evil sense, of the whole.
Atala is short and almost entirely to the point. The
heroine is a half-breed girl with a Spanish father and for Atala.
mother an Indian of some rank in her tribe, who has
subsequently married a benevolent chief. She is regarded as a native
princess, and succeeds in rescuing from the usual torture and death, and
fleeing with, a captive chief of another "nation." This is Chactas, important
in René and also in the Natchez framework. They direct their flight
northwards to the French settlements (it is late seventeenth or early
eighteenth century throughout), and of course fall in love with each other.
But Atala's mother, a Christian, has, in the tumult of her early misfortunes,
vowed her daughter's virginity or death; and when, just before the crucial
moment, a missionary opportunely or inopportunely occurs, Atala has
already taken poison, with the object, it would appear, not so much of
preventing as of avenging, of her own free will, a breach of the vow. The
rest of the story is supplied by the vain attempts of the good father to save
her, his evangelising efforts towards the pair, and the sorrows of Chactas
after his beloved's death. The piece, of course, shows that exaggerated and
somewhat morbid pathos of circumstance which is the common form of the
early romantic efforts, whether in England, Germany, or France. But the
pathos is pathos; the unfamiliar scenery, unlike that of Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre (to whom, of course, Chateaubriand is much indebted, though he had
actually seen what he describes), is not overdone, and suits the action and
characters very well indeed. Chactas here is the best of all the "noble
savages," and (what hardly any other of them is) positively good. Atala is
really tragic and really gracious. The missionary stands to other fictitious,
and perhaps some real, missionaries very much as Chactas does to other

savages of story, if not of life. The proportion of the whole is good, and in
the humble opinion of the present critic it is by far Chateaubriand's best
thing in all perhaps but mere writing.
And even in this it is bad to beat, in him or out of him. The small space
forbids mere surplusage of description, and the plot—as all plots should do,
but, alas! as few succeed in doing—acts as a bellows to kindle the flame
and intensify the heat of something far better than description itself—
passionate character. There are many fine things—mixed, no doubt, with
others not so fine—in the tempestuous scene of the death of Atala, which
should have been the conclusion of the story. But this, in its own way,
seems to me little short of magnificent:
"I implored you to fly; and yet I knew I should die if you were
not with me. I longed for the shadow of the forest; and yet I
feared to be with you in a desert place. Ah! if the cost had only
been that of quitting parents, friends, country! if—terrible as it is
to say it—there had been nothing at stake but the loss of my
own soul.[23] But, O my mother! thy shade was always there—
thy shade reproaching me with the torments it would suffer. I
heard thy complaints; I saw the flames of Hell ready to consume
thee. My nights were dry places full of ghosts; my days were
desolate; the dew of the evening dried up as it touched my
burning skin. I opened my lips to the breeze; and the breeze,
instead of cooling me, was itself set aglow by the fire of my
breath. What torment, Chactas! to see you always near me, far
from all other humankind in the deepest solitude, and yet to feel
that between us there was an insuperable barrier! To pass my life
at your feet, to serve you as a slave, to bring you food and lay
your couch in some secret corner of the universe, would have
been for me supremest happiness; and this happiness was within
my touch, yet I could not enjoy it. Of what plans did I not
dream? What vision did not arise from this sad heart?
Sometimes, as I gazed on you, I went so far as to form desires as
mad as they were guilty: sometimes I could have wished that
there were no living creatures on earth but you and me;
sometimes, feeling that there was a divinity mocking my wicked
transports, I could have wished that divinity annihilated, if only,

locked in your arms, I might have sunk from abyss to abyss with
the ruins of God and of the world. Even now—shall I say it?—
even now, when eternity waits to engulf me, when I am about to
appear before the inexorable Judge—at the very moment when
my mother may be rejoicing to see my virginity devour my life
—even now, by a terrible contradiction, I carry with me the
regret that I have not been yours!"
At this let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it looks
back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great love-
poetry since, while as something that is even greater than literature—life—
it carries us up to the highest Heaven and down to the nethermost Hell.

René[24] has greater fame and no doubt exercised far
more influence; indeed in this respect Atala could not do René.
much, for it is not the eternal, but the temporal, which
"influences." But, in the same humble opinion, it is extremely inferior. The
French Werther[25] (for the attempt to rival Goethe on his own lines is
hardly, if at all, veiled) is a younger son of a gentle family in France, whose
father dies. He lives for a time with an elder brother, who seems to be
"more kin than kind," and a sister Amélie, to whom he is fondly, but
fraternally, attached. René has begun the trick of disappointment early, and,
after a time, determines to travel, fancying when he leaves home that his
sister is actually glad to get rid of him. Of course it is a case of coelum non
animum. When he returns he is half-surprised but (for him) wholly glad to
be at first warmly welcomed by Amélie; but after a little while she leaves
him, takes the veil, and lets him know at the last moment that it is because
her affection for him is more than sisterly, that this was the reason of her
apparent joy when he left her, and that association with him is too much for
her passion.[26] She makes an exemplary nun in a sea-side convent, and dies
early of disease caught while nursing others. He, his wretchedness and
hatred of life reaching their acme, exiles himself to Louisiana, and gets
himself adopted by the tribe of the Natchez, where Chactas is a (though not
the) chief.
Now, of course, if we are content to take a bill and write
down Byron and Lamartine, Senancour and Jacopo Difference between
its importance and
Ortis (otherwise Ugo Foscolo), Musset, Matthew

Arnold, and tutti quanti, as debtors to René, we give the its merit.
tale or episode a historical value which cannot be
denied; while its positive aesthetic quality, though it may vary very much in
different estimates, cannot be regarded as merely worthless. Also, once
more, there is real pathos, especially as far as Amélie is concerned, though
the entire unexpectedness of the revelation of her fatal passion, and the
absolute lack of any details as to its origin, rise, and circumstances, injure
sympathy to some extent. But that sympathy, as far as the present writer is
concerned, fails altogether with regard to René himself. If his melancholy
were traceable to mutual passion of the forbidden kind, or if it had arisen
from the stunning effect of the revelation thereof on his sister's side, there
would be no difficulty. But, though these circumstances may to some extent
accentuate, they have nothing to do with causing the weltschmerz or selbst-
schmerz, or whatever it is to be called, of this not very heroic hero. Nor has
Chateaubriand taken the trouble—which Goethe, with his more critical
sense of art, did take—to make René go through the whole course of the
Preacher, or great part of it, before discovering that all was vanity. He is
merely, from the beginning, a young gentleman affected with mental
jaundice, who cannot or will not discover or take psychological calomel
enough to cure him. It does not seem in the least likely that if Amélie had
been content to live with him as merely "in all good, all honour" a loving
and comforting sister, he would have really been able to say, like Geraldine
in Coleridge's original draft of Christabel, "I'm better now."
He is, in fact, what Werther is not—though his own followers to a large
extent are—mainly if not merely a Sulky Young Man: and one cannot help
imagining that if, in pretty early days, some one had been good enough to
apply to him that Herb Pantagruelion, in form not exactly of a halter but of
a rope's end, with which O'Brien cured Peter Simple's mal de mer, his mal
du siècle would have been cured likewise.
Of course it is possible for any one to say, "You are a Philistine and a
Vulgarian. You wish to regard life through a horse-collar," etc., etc. But
these reproaches would leave my withers quite ungalled. I think
Ecclesiastes one of the very greatest books in the world's literature, and
Hamlet the greatest play, with the possible exception of the Agamemnon. It
is the abysmal sadness quite as much as the furor arduus of Lucretius that
makes me think him the mightiest of Latin poets. I would not give the

mystical melancholy of certain poems of Donne's for half a hundred of the
liveliest love-songs of the time, and could extend the list page-long and
more if it would not savour of ostentation in more ways than one. But mere
temperamental ἑωλοκρασια or κραιπαλη (next-day nausea), without even
the exaltation of a previous orgy to ransom it,—mere spleen and sulks and
naughty-childishness,—seem to me not great things at all. You may not be
able to help your spleen, but you can "cook" it; you may have qualm and
headache, but in work of some sort, warlike or peaceful, there is always
small beer, or brandy and soda (with even, if necessary, capsicum or
bromide), for the ailment. The Renés who can do nothing but sulk, except
when they blunder themselves and make other people uncomfortable in
attempting to do something, who "never do a [manly] thing and never say a
[kind] one," are, I confess, not to my taste.[27]
Both these stories, as will have been seen, have a
distinctly religious element; in fact, a distinctly religious Les Natchez.
purpose. The larger novel-romance of which they form
episodes, as well as its later and greater successor, Les Martyrs, increase the
element in both cases, the purpose in the latter; but one of the means by
which this increase is effected has certainly lost—whether it may or may
not ever recover—its attraction, except to a student of literary history who
is well out of his novitiate. Such a person should see at once that
Chateaubriand's elaborate adoption, from Tasso and Milton, of the system
of interspersed scenes of Divine and diabolic conclaves and interferences
with the story, is an important, if not a wholly happy, instance of that
general Romantic reversion to earlier literary devices, and even
atmospheres, of which the still rather enigmatic personage who rests enisled
off Saint-Malo was so great an apostle. And it was probably effectual for its
time. Classicists could not quarrel with it, for it had its precedents, indeed
its origin, in Homer and Virgil; Romanticists (of that less exclusive class
who admitted the Renaissance as well as the Dark and Middle Ages) could
not but welcome it for its great modern defenders and examples. I cannot
say that I enjoy it: but I can tolerate it, and there is no doubt at all, odd as it
may seem to the merely twentieth-century reader, that it did something to
revive the half-extinct religiosity which had been starved and poisoned in
the later days of the ancien régime, forcibly suppressed under the Republic,
and only officially licensed by the Napoleonic system. In Les Martyrs it has

even a certain "grace of congruity,"[28] but in regard to Les Natchez, with
which we are for the moment concerned, almost enough (with an example
or two to come presently) has been said about it.
The book, as a whole, suffers, unquestionably and considerably, from the
results of two defects in its author. He was not born, as Scott was a little
later, to get the historical novel at last into full life and activity; and it would
not be unfair to question whether he was a born novelist at all, though he
had not a few of the qualifications necessary to the kind, and exercised,
coming as and when he did, an immense influence upon it. The subject is
too obscure. Its only original vates, Charlevoix, though always a respectable
name to persons of some acquaintance with literature and history, has never
been much more, either in France or in England. The French, unluckily for
themselves, never took much interest in their transatlantic possessions while
they had them; and their dealings with the Indians then, and ours
afterwards, and those of the Americans since, have never been exactly of
the kind that give on both sides a subject such as may be found in all
mediaeval and most Renaissance matters; in the Fronde; in the English
Civil War; in the great struggles of France and England from 1688 to 1815;
in the Jacobite risings; in La Vendée; and in other historical periods and
provinces too many to mention. On the other hand, the abstract "noble
savage" is a faded object of exhausted engouement, than which there are
few things less exhilarating. The Indian ingénu (a very different one from
Voltaire's) Outougamiz and his ingénue Mila are rather nice; but Celuta (the
ill-fated girl who loves René and whom he marries, because in a sort of way
he cannot help it) is an eminent example of that helpless kind of quiet
misfortune the unprofitableness of which Mr. Arnold has confessed and
registered in a famous passage. Chactas maintains a respectable amount of
interest, and his visit to the court of Louis XIV. takes very fair rank among a
well-known group of things of which it is not Philistine to speak as old-
fashioned, because they never possessed much attraction, except as being
new- or regular-fashioned. But the villain Ondouré has almost as little of
the fire of Hell as of that of Heaven, and his paramour and accomplice
Akansie carries very little "conviction" with her. In short, the merit of the
book, besides the faint one of having been the original framework of Atala
and René, is almost limited to its atmosphere, and the alterative qualities
thereof—things now in a way ancient history—requiring even a

considerable dose of the not-universally-possessed historic sense to discern
and appreciate them.
Outside the "Histoire de Chactas" (which might, like Atala and René
themselves, have been isolated with great advantage), and excepting
likewise the passages concerning Outougamiz and Mila—which possess, in
considerable measure and gracious fashion, what some call the "idyllic"
quality—I have found it, on more than one attempt, difficult to take much
interest in Les Natchez, not merely for the reasons already given, but chiefly
owing to them. René's appearances (and he is generally in background or
foreground) serve better than anything in any other book, perhaps, to
explain and justify the old notion that accidia[29] of his kind is not only a
fault in the individual, but a positive ill omen and nuisance[30] to others.
Neither in the Indian characters (with the exceptions named) nor among the
French and creole does one find relief: and when one passes from them to
the "machinery" parts—where, for instance, a "perverse couple," Satan and
La Renommée (not the ship that Trunnion took), embark on a journey in a
car with winged horses—it must be an odd taste which finds things
improved. In Greek verse, in Latin verse, or even in Milton's English one
could stand Night, docile to the orders of Satan, condescending to deflect a
hatchet which is whistling unpleasantly close to René's ear, not that he may
be benefited, but preserved for more sufferings. In comparatively plain
French prose—the qualification is intentional, as will be seen a little later—
with a scene and time barely two hundred years off now and not a hundred
then, though in a way unfamiliar—the thing won't do. "Time," at the orders
of the Prince of Darkness, cutting down trees to make a stockade for the
Natchez in the eighteenth century, alas! contributes again the touch of weak
allegory, in neither case helping the effect; while, although the plot is by no
means badly evolved, the want of interest in the characters renders it
ineffective.

The defects of Les Martyrs[31] are fewer in number and
less in degree, while its merits are far more than Les Martyrs.
proportionally greater and more numerous. Needing less
historical reinforcement, it enjoys much more. Les Natchez is almost the
last, certainly the last important novel of savage life, as distinguished from
"boys' books" about savages. Les Martyrs is the first of a line of remarkable

if not always successful classical novels from Lockhart's Valerius to
Gissing's Veranilda. It has nothing really in common with the kind of
classical story which lasted from Télémaque to Belisarius and later. And
what is more, it is perhaps better than any of its followers except Kingsley's
Hypatia, which is admittedly of a mixed kind—a nineteenth-century novel,
with events, scenes, and décor of the fifth century. If it has not the
spectacular and popular appeal of The Last Days of Pompeii, it escapes, as
that does not, the main drawback of almost all the others—the "classical-
dictionary" element: and if, on the other, its author knew less about
Christianity than Cardinals Wiseman and Newman, he knew more about lay
"humans" than the authors of Fabiola and Callista.
It is probably unnecessary to point out at any great length that some of the
drawbacks of Les Natchez disappear almost automatically in Les Martyrs.
The supernatural machinery is, on the hypothesis and at the time of the
book, strictly congruous and proper; while, as a matter of fact, it is in
proportion rather less than more used. The time and events—those of the
persecution under Diocletian—are familiar, interesting, and, in a French
term for which we have no exact equivalent, dignes. There is no sulky
spider of a René crawling about the piece; and though history is a little
strained to provide incidents,[32] "that's not much," and they are not in
themselves improbable in any bad sense or degree. Moreover, the classical-
dictionary element, which, as has been said, is so awkward to handle, is, at
least after the beginning, not too much drawn upon.
The book, in its later modern editions, is preceded not merely by several
Prefaces, but by an Examen in the old fashion, and fortified by those
elaborate citation-notes[33] from authorities ancient and modern which were
a mania at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and which sometimes divert and sometimes enrage more modern
readers in work so different as Lalla Rookh and The Pursuits of Literature,
while they provided at the time material for immortal jokes in such other
work as the Anti-Jacobin poems. In the Prefaces Chateaubriand discusses
the prose epic, and puts himself, quite unnecessarily, under the protection of
Télémaque: in the Examen he deals systematically with the objections,
religious, moral, and literary, which had been made against the earlier
editions of the book. But these things are now little more than curiosities for
the student, though they retain some general historical importance.

The book starts (after an "Invocation," proper to its
scheme but perhaps not specially attractive "to us") with The story.
an account of the household of Demodocus, a Homerid
of Chios, who in Diocletian's earlier and unpersecuting days, after living
happily but for too short a time in Crete with his wife Epicharis, loses her,
though she leaves him one little daughter, Cymodocée, born in the sacred
woods of Mount Ida itself. Demodocus is only too glad to accept an
invitation to become high priest of a new Temple of Homer in Messenia, on
the slopes of another mountain, less, but not so much less, famous, Ithome.
Cymodocée becomes very beautiful, and receives, but rejects, the addresses
of Hierocles, proconsul of Achaia, and a favourite of Galerius. One day,
worshipping in the forest at a solitary Altar of the Nymphs, she meets a
young stranger whom (she is of course still a pagan) she mistakes for
Endymion, but who talks Christianity to her, and reveals himself as Eudore,
son of Lasthenes. As it turns out, her father knows this person, who has the
renown of a distinguished soldier.
From this almost any one who has read a few thousand novels—almost any
intelligent person who has read a few hundred—can lay out the probable
plot. Love of Eudore and Cymodocée; conversion of the latter; jealousy and
intrigues of Hierocles; adventures past and future of Eudore; transfer of
scene to Rome; prevalence of Galerius over Diocletian; persecution,
martyrdom, and supernatural triumph. But the "fillings up" are not banal;
and the book is well worth reading from divers points of view. In the
earliest part there is a little too much Homer,[34] naturally enough perhaps.
The ancient world changed slowly, and we know that at this particular time
Greeks (if not also Romans) rather played at archaising manners. Still, it is
probably not quite safe to take the memorable, if not very resultful, journey
in which Telemachus was, rather undeservedly, so lucky as to see Helen and
drink Nepenthe[35] and to reproduce it with guide- and etiquette-book
exactness, c. A. D. 300. Yet this is, as has been said, very natural; and it
arouses many pleasant reminiscences.
The book, moreover, has two great qualities which were
almost, if not quite, new in the novel. In the first place, it Its "panoramic"
has a certain panoramic element which admits—which quality.
indeed necessitates—picturesqueness. Much of it is, almost as necessarily,
récit (Eudore giving the history of his travels and campaigns); but it is récit

of a vividness which had never before been known in French, out of the
most accomplished drama, and hardly at all in prose. The adventures of
Eudore require this most, of course, and they get it. His early wild-oats at
Rome, which earn him temporary excommunication; his service in the wars
with the Franks, where, for almost the only time in literature, Pharamond
and Mérovée become living creatures; his captivity with them; his triumphs
in Britain and his official position in Brittany, where the entrance of the
Druidess Velléda and the fatal love between them provide perhaps the most
famous and actually one of the most effective of the episodes of the book—
all "stand out from the canvas," as the old phrase goes. Nor is the mastery
lost when récit becomes direct action, in the scenes of the persecution, and
the final purification of the hero and crowning of the heroine in the
amphitheatre. "The work burns"; and, while it is practically certain that the
writer knew the Scudéry romances, the contrast of this "burning" quality
becomes so striking as almost to justify, comparatively if not positively, the
accusations of frigidity and languor which have been somewhat excessively
brought against the earlier performances. There is not the passion of Atala
—it would have been out of place: and there is not the soul-dissection of
René, for there is nothing morbid enough to require the scalpel. But, on the
other hand, there is the bustle—if that be not too degrading a word—which
is wanting in both; the vividness of action and of change; colour, variety,
suspense, what may perhaps best be called in one word "pulse," giving, as a
necessary consequence, life.
And this great advance is partly, if not mainly, achieved
by another—the novelty of style. Chateaubriand had set And its remarkable
advance in style.
out to give—has, indeed, as far as his intention goes,
maintained throughout—an effort at le style noble, the already familiar
rhetoric, of which, in French, Corneille had been the Dryden and Racine the
Pope, while it had, in his own youth, sunk to the artifice of Delille in verse
and the "emphasis" of Thomas in prose. He has sometimes achieved the
best, and not seldom something that is by no means the worst, of this. But,
consciously or unconsciously, he has more often put in the old bottles of
form new wine of spirit, which has not only burst them, but by some very
satisfactory miracle of literature shed itself into new receptacles, this time
not at all leathery but glass of iridescent colour and graceful shape. It was
almost inevitable that such a process, at such a time, and with such a

language—for Chateaubriand did not go to the real "ancient mother" of pre-
grand siècle French—should be now and then merely magniloquent, that it
should sometimes fall short of, or overleap, even magniloquence and
become bombast. But sometimes also, and not so seldom, it attains
magnificence as well; and the promise, at least the opportunity, of such
magnificence in capable followers can hardly be mistaken. As in his
younger contemporary, compatriot, and, beyond all doubt, disciple,
Lamennais, the results are often crude, unequal, disappointing;
insufficiently smelted ore, insufficiently ripened and cellared wine. But the
quantity and quality of pure metal—the inspiriting virtue of the vintage—in
them is extraordinary: and once more it must be remembered that, for the
novel, all this was absolutely new. In this respect, if in no other, though
perhaps he was so in others also, Chateaubriand is a Columbus of prose
fiction. Neither in French nor in English, very imperfectly in German, and,
so far as I know, not in any other language to even the smallest degree, had
"prose-poetry" been attempted in this department. "Ossian" perhaps must
have some of the credit: the Bible still more. But wherever the capital was
found it was Chateaubriand who put it into the business of novel-writing
and turned out the first specimens of that business with the new materials
and plant procured by the funds.
Some difficulties, which hamper any attempt to illustrate
and support this high praise, cannot require much Chateaubriand's
Janus-position in
explanation to make them obvious. It has not been the this.
custom of this book to give large untranslated extracts:
and it is at least the opinion of its author that in matters of style, translation,
even if it be of a much higher quality than he conceives himself able to
offer, is, if not quite worthless, very inadequate. Moreover, it is (or should
be) well known that the qualities of the old French style noble—which, as
has been said, Chateaubriand deliberately adopted, as his starting-point if
nothing more—are, even in their own language, and still more when
reproduced in any other, full of dangers for foreign appreciation. The no
doubt largely ignorant and in any case mistaken contempt for French poetry
and poetic prose which so long prevailed among us, and from which even
such a critic and such a lover (to some extent) of French as Matthew Arnold
was not free, was mainly concerned with this very point. To take a single
instance, the part of De Quincey's "Essay on Rhetoric" which deals with

French is made positively worthless by the effects of this almost racial
prejudice. Literal translation of the more flamboyant kind of French writing
has been, even with some of our greatest, an effective, if a somewhat facile,
means of procuring a laugh. Furthermore, it has to be remembered that this
application of ornate style to prose fiction is undoubtedly to some extent an
extraneous thing in the consideration of the novel itself. It is "a grand set
off" (in the old phrase) to tale-telling; but it is not precisely of its essence. It
deserves to be constaté, recorded and set to the credit of those who practise
it, and especially of those who first introduced it. But it is a question
whether, in the necessarily limited space of a book like this, the
consideration of it ought to occupy a large room.
Still, though the warning, "Be not too bold," should never be forgotten, it
should be remembered that it was given only once and its contrary
reiterated: so here goes for one of the most perilous of all possible
adventures—a translation of Chateaubriand's own boldest undertaking, the
description of the City of God, in which he was following not only the
greatest of the Hebrew prophets, but the Vision of Patmos itself.
("Les Martyrs," Book III., opening. The Prayer of Cyril, Bishop
of Lacedaemon, has come before the Throne.)
At the centre of all created worlds, in the midst
of innumerable stars which serve as its bastions Illustrated.
as well as avenues and roads to it, there floats
the limitless City of God, the marvels whereof no mortal tongue
can tell. The Eternal Himself laid its twelve foundations, and
surrounded it with the wall of jasper that the beloved disciple
saw measured by an angel with a rod of gold. Clothed with the
glory of the Most High, the unseen Jerusalem is decked as a
bride for her bridegroom. O monumental structures of earth! ye
come not near these of the Holy City. There the richness of the
matter rivals the perfection of the form. There hang, royally
suspended, the galleries of diamond and sapphire feebly
imitated by human skill in the gardens of Babylon. There rise
triumphal arches, fashioned of brightest stars. There are linked
together porticoes of suns extended across the spaces of the
firmament, like the columns of Palmyra over the sands of the

desert. This architecture is alive. The City of God has a soul of
its own. There is no mere matter in the abiding places of the
Spirit; no death in the locality of eternal existence. The grosser
words which our muse is forced to employ deceive us, for they
invest with body that which is only as a divine dream, in the
passing of a blissful sleep.
Gardens of delight extend round the radiant Jerusalem. A river
flows from the throne of the Almighty, watering the Celestial
Eden with floods of pure love and of the wisdom of God. The
mystic wave divides into streams which entwine themselves,
separate, rejoin, and part again, giving nourishment to the
immortal vine, to the lily that is like unto the Bride, and to all
the flowers which perfume the couch of the Spouse. The Tree of
Life shoots up on the Hill of Incense; and, but a little farther,
that of Knowledge spreads on all sides its deep-planted roots
and its innumerable branches, carrying hidden in the golden
leafage the secrets of the Godhead, the occult laws of Nature,
the truths of morality and of the intellect, the immutable
principles of good and of evil. The learning which intoxicates us
is the common food of the Elect; for in the empire of Sovereign
Intelligence the fruit of science no longer brings death. Often do
the two great ancestors of the human race come and shed such
tears as the Just can still let flow in the shadow of the wondrous
Tree.
The light which lightens these abodes of bliss is compact of the
rose of morning, of the flame of noon, of the purple of even; yet
no star appears on the glowing horizon. No sun rises and no sun
goes down on the country where nothing ends, where nothing
begins. But an ineffable clearness, showering from all sides like
a tender dew, maintains the unbroken[36] daylight in a delectable
eternity.
Of course any one who is so minded may belittle this as classically cold;
even as to some extent neo-classically bedizened; as more like, let us say,
Moore's Epicurean than like our greater "prose-poets" of the seventeenth
and the nineteenth centuries. The presence in Chateaubriand of this dose of

the style that was passing, and that he helped to make pass, has been
admitted already: but I confess I think it is only a dose. Those who care to
look up the matter for themselves might, if they do not choose to read the
whole, turn to the admirable picture of camp-life on the Lower Rhine at the
opening of Book VI. as a short contrast, while the story is full of others. Nor
should one forget to add that Chateaubriand can, when he chooses, be
epigrammatic as well as declamatory. "Such is the ugliness of man when he
bids farewell to his soul and, so to speak, keeps house only with his body"
is a phrase which might possibly shock La Harpe, but which is, as far as I
remember, original, and is certainly crisp and effective enough.
Reassembling, then, the various points which we have endeavoured to make
in respect of his position as novelist, it may once more be urged that if not
precisely a great master of the complete art of novel-writing, by actual
example, he shows no small expertness in various parts of it: and that, as a
teacher and experimenter in new developments of method and indication of
new material, he has few superiors in his own country and not very many
elsewhere. That in this pioneer quality, as well as in mere
contemporaneousness, he may, though a greater writer, be yoked with the
authoress of Corinne need hardly be argued, for the accounts given of the
two should have sufficiently established it.

FOOTNOTES:
[8] Although, except in special cases, biographical notices are not given here, the
reader may be reminded that she was born in 1766, the daughter of Necker and
of Gibbon's early love, Susanne Curchod; married at twenty the Swedish
ambassador, Baron of Staël-Holstein; sympathised at first with the Revolution,
but was horrified at the murder of the king, and escaped, with some difficulty,
from Paris to England, where, as well as in' Germany and at Coppet, her own
house in Switzerland, she passed the time till French things settled down under
Napoleon. With him she tried to get on, as a duplicate of himself in petticoats
and the realm of mind. But this was clearly impossible, and she had once more
to retire to Coppet. She had separated, though without positive quarrel, from her
husband, whom, however, she attended on his death-bed; and the exact character
of her liaisons with others, especially M. de Narbonne and Benjamin Constant,
is not easy to determine. In 1812 she married, privately, a young officer, Rocca
by name, returned to Paris before and after the Hundred Days, and died there in
1817.
[9] I never can make up my mind whether I am more sorry that Madame Necker
did not marry Gibbon or that Mademoiselle Necker did not, as was subsequently

on the cards, marry Pitt. The results in either case—both, alas! could hardly have
come off—would have been most curious.
[10] The most obvious if not the only possible reason for this would be intended
outrage, murder, and suicide; but though Valorbe is a robustious kind of idiot, he
does not seem to have made up such mind as he has to this agreeable
combination.
[11] I forget whether other characters have been identified, but Léonce does not
appear to have much in him of M. de Narbonne, Corinne's chief lover of the
period, who seems to have been a sort of French Chesterfield, without the wit,
which nobody denies our man, or the real good-nature which he possessed.
[12] Perhaps, after all, not too many, for they all richly deserve it.
[13] Eyes like the Ravenswing's, "as b-b-big as billiard balls" and of some
brightness, are allowed her, but hardly any other good point.
[14] I never pretended to be an art-critic, save as complying with Blake's
negative injunction or qualification "not to be connoisseured out of my senses,"
and I do not know what is the technical word in the arts of design corresponding
to διανοια in literature.
[15] I hope this iteration may not seem too damnable. It is intended to bring
before the reader's mind the utterly willowish character of Oswald, Lord Nelvil.
The slightest impact of accident will bend down, the weakest wind of
circumstance blow about, his plans and preferences.
[16] That he seems to have unlimited leave is not perhaps, for a peer in the
period, to be cavilled at; the manner in which he alternately breaks blood-vessels
and is up to fighting in the tropics may be rather more so.
[17] As I may have remarked elsewhere, they often seem to confuse it with
"priggishness," "cant," and other amiable cosas de Inglaterra. (The late M. Jules
Lemaître, as Professor Ker reminds me, even gave the picturesque but quite
inadequate description: "Le snob est un mouton de Panurge prétentieux, un
mouton qui saute à la file, mais d'un air suffisant.") We cannot disclaim the
general origin, but we may protest against confusion of the particular substance.
[18] Corinne, ou l'Italie.
[19] If anybody thinks Wilhelm Meister or the Wahlverwandtschaften a good
novel, I am his very humble servant in begging to differ. Freytag's Soll und
Haben is perhaps the nearest approach; but, on English or French standards, it
could only get a fair second class.
[20] Corinne "walks and talks" (as the lady in the song was asked to do, but
without requiring the offer of a blue silk gown) with her Oswald all over the
churches and palaces and monuments of Rome, "doing" also Naples, Venice, etc.
[21] She was rather proud of these mighty members: and some readers may
recall that not least Heinesque remark of the poet who so much shocks Kaiser
Wilhelm II., "Those of the Venus of Milo are not more beautiful."

[22] Including also a third short story, Le Dernier Abencérage, which belongs,
constructively, rather to the Voyages. It is in a way the liveliest (at least the most
"incidented") of all, but not the most interesting, and with very little temporal
colour, though some local. It may, however, be taken as another proof of
Chateaubriand's importance in the germinal way, for it starts the Romantic
interest in Spanish things. The contrast with the dirty rubbish of Pigault-Lebrun's
La Folie Espagnole is also not negligible.
[23] For the mother, in a fashion which the good Father-missionary most
righteously and indignantly denounces as unchristian, had staked her own
salvation on her daughter's obedience to the vow.
[24] Its author, in the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, expressed a warm wish that he
had never written it, and hearty disgust at its puling admirers and imitators. This
has been set down to hypocritical insincerity or the sourness of age: I see neither
in it. It ought perhaps to be said that he "cut" a good deal of the original version.
The confession of Amélie was at first less abrupt and so less effective, but the
newer form does not seem to me to better the state of René himself.
[25] There had been a very early French imitation of Werther itself (of the end
especially), Les dernières aventures du sieur d'Olban, by a certain Ramond,
published in 1777, only three years after Goethe. It had a great influence on Ch.
Nodier (v. inf.), who actually republished the thing in 1829.
[26] This "out-of-bounds" passion will of course be recognised as a Romantic
trait, though it had Classical suggestions. Chateaubriand appears to have been
rather specially "obsessed" by this form of it, for he not merely speaks
constantly of René as le frère d'Amélie, but goes out of his way to make the good
Father in Atala refer, almost ecstatically, to the happiness of the more immediate
descendants of Adam who were compelled to marry their sisters, if they married
anybody. As I have never been able to take any interest in the discussions of the
Byron and Mrs. Leigh scandal, I am not sure whether this tic of Chateaubriand's
has been noticed therein. But his influence on Byron was strong and manifold,
and Byron was particularly apt to do things, naughty and other, because
somebody else had done or suggested them. And of course it has, from very
early days, been suggested that Amélie is an experience of Chateaubriand's own.
But this, like the investigations as to time and distance and possibility in his
travels and much else also, is not for us. Once more I must be permitted to say
that I am writing much about French novels, little about French novelists, and
least of all about those novelists' biographers, critics, and so forth. Exceptions
may be admitted, but as exceptions only.
[27] I once had to fight it out in public with a valued and valiant friend for
saying something like this in regard to Edgar of Ravenswood—no doubt, in
some sort a child of René's or of Nelvil's; but I was not put to submission. And
Edgar had truer causes for sulks than his spiritual ancestor had—at least before
the tragedy of Amélie.
[28] Not in the strict theological meaning of this phrase, of course; but the
misuse of it has aesthetic justification.
[29] I.e. not mere "sloth," but the black-blooded and sluggish melancholy to
which Dante pays so much attention in the Inferno. This deadly sin we

inadequately translate "sloth," and (on one side of it) it is best defined in Dante's
famous lines (Inf. vii. 121-3):

Tristi fummo
Nell' aer dolce che dal sol s' allegra,
Portando dentro accidioso fummo.

Had Amélie sinned and not repented she might have been found in the Second
circle, flying alone; René, except speciali gratia, must have sunk to the Fourth.
[30] For instance, he goes a-beaver-hunting with the Natchez, but his usual
selfish moping prevents him from troubling to learn the laws of the sport, and he
kills females—an act at once offensive to Indian religion, sportsmanship, and
etiquette, horrifying to the consciences of his adopted countrymen, and an actual
casus belli with the neighbouring tribes.
[31] Its second title, ou Le Triomphe de la Religion Chrétienne, connects it still
more closely than Les Natchez with Le Génie du Christianisme, which it
immediately succeeded in composition, though this took a long time. No book (it
would seem in consequence) exemplifies the mania for annotation and
"justification" more extensively. In vol. i. the proportion of notes to text is 112 to
270, in vol. ii. 123 to 221, and in vol. iii., including some extracts from the Père
Mambrun, 149 to 225.
[32] Such as Eudore's early friendship at Rome, before the persecution under
Diocletian, with Augustine, who was not born till twenty years later.
[33] See note above.
[34] There cannot be too much Homer in Homer; there may be too much outside
Homer.
[35] If one had only been Telemachus at this time! It would have been a good
"Declamation" theme in the days of such things, "Should a man—for this one
experience—consent to be Telemachus for the rest of his life—and after?"
[36] In the original the word which I have translated "unbroken" is éternel, and
with the adjacent éternité illustrates (as do tonnerre and étonnante in Bossuet's
famous passage on the death of "Madame") one of the minor but striking
differences between French and English rhetoric. Save for some very special
purpose, we should consider such repetition a jingle at best, a cacophony at
worst: they think it a beauty.

CHAPTER II
PAUL DE KOCK, OTHER MINORS OF 1800-1830, AND
NODIER

The mediocre poet has had a hard fate pronounced
against him of old; but the minor novelist, perhaps The fate of popular
because he is much more likely to get some good things minor novelists.
in his own time, has usually a harder lot still, and in more than one way,
after physical or popular death. In fact it may be said that, the more popular
he is in the one day, the more utterly forgotten he is likely to be in the other.
Besides the obvious facts that his popularity must always have been gained
by the adoption of some more or less ephemeral fashion, and that plenty of
his own kind are always ready to take his place—doing, like the heir in the
old story, all they can to substitute Requiescat in Pace for Resurgam on his
hatchment—there is a more mechanical reason for his occultation. The
more widely he or she has been read the more certain either has been of
being "read to pieces."
These fates, and especially the last, have weighed upon
the minor French novelists of the early nineteenth Examples of them.
century perhaps even more heavily than upon our own:
for the circulating library was an earlier and a more widely spread
institution in France than in England, and the lower and lowest middle
classes were a good deal more given to reading, and especially to "light"
reading, there than here. Nor can it be said that any of the writers to be now
mentioned, with one possible and one certain exception, is of importance to
literature as literature. But all have their importance to literary—and
especially departmental-literary—history, in ways which it is hoped
presently to show: and there is still amusement in some. The chief, though
not the only, names that require notice here are those of Mesdames de
Montolieu and (again) de Genlis, of Ducray-Duminil, born almost as early
as Pigault-Lebrun, even earlier a novelist, and yoked with him by Victor
Hugo in respect of his novel Lolotte et Fanfan in the sneer noted in the last
volume;[37] the other Ducange, again as much "other" as the other Molière;
[38]
the Vicomte d'Arlincourt; and—a comparative (if, according to some,
blackish) swan among these not quite positive geese—Paul de Kock. The
eldest put in his work before the Revolution and the youngest before
Waterloo, but the most prolific time of all was that of the first two or three
decades of the century with which we are dealing.

With these, but not of them—a producer at last of real "letters" and more
than any one else except Chateaubriand (more "intensively" perhaps even
than he was) a pioneer of Romanticism—comes Charles Nodier.
Major Pendennis, in a passage which will probably, at
least in England, preserve the name of the author Paul de Kock.
mentioned long after his own works are even more
forgotten with us than they are at present, allowed, when disparaging novels
generally, and wondering how his nephew could have got so much money
for one, that Paul de Kock "certainly made him laugh." In his own country
he had an enormous vogue, till the far greater literary powers and the wider
range of the school of 1830 put the times out of joint for him, and even
much later. He actually survived the Terrible Year: but something like a
lustrum earlier, when running over a not small collection of cheap novels in
a French country inn, I do not remember coming across anything of his.
And he had long been classed as "not a serious person" (which, indeed, he
certainly was not) by French criticism, not merely of the most academic
sort, but of all decidedly literary kinds. People allowed him entrain, a word
even more difficult than verve to English exactly, though "go" does in a
rough sort of way for both. They were of course not very much shocked at
his indecorums, which sometimes gave occasion for not bad jokes.[39] But if
any foreigner made any great case of him they would probably have looked,
if they did not speak their thoughts, very much as some of us have looked,
if we have not spoken, when foreigners take certain popular scribes and
playwrights of our own time and country seriously.[40]
Let us see what his work is really like to the eyes of impartial and
comparative, if not cosmopolitan, criticism.
Paul de Kock, whose father, a banker, was a victim, but
must have been a late one, of the Terror, was born in L'Enfant de ma
Femme.
1794, and took very early to letters. If the date of his
first book, L'Enfant de ma Femme, is correctly given as 1812, he must
apparently have written it before he was eighteen. There is certainly nothing
either in the quantity or the quality of the performance which makes this
incredible, for it does not fill quite two hundred pages of the ordinary 18mo
size and not very closely packed type of the usual cheap French novel, and
though it is not unreadable, any tolerably clever boy might easily write it

between the time when he gets his scholarship in spring and the time when
he goes up in October. The author had evidently read his Pigault and
adopted that writer's revised picaresque scheme. His most prominent
character (the hero, Henri de Framberg, is very "small doings"), the hussar-
soldier-servant, and most oddly selected "governor" of this hero as a boy,
Mullern, is obviously studied off those semi-savage "old moustaches" of
whom we spoke in the last volume, though he is much softened, if not in
morals, in manners. In fact this softening process is quite obvious
throughout. There is plenty of "impropriety" but no mere nastiness, and the
impropriety itself is, so to speak, rather indicated than described. As nearly
the last sentence announces, "Hymen hides the faults of love" wherever it is
possible, though it would require a most complicated system of polygamy
and cross-unions to enable that amiable divinity to cover them all. There is
a villain, but he is a villain of straw, and outside of him there is no ill-
nature. There seems to be going to be a touch of "out-of-boundness" when
Henri, just about to marry his beloved Pauline, is informed that she is his
sister, and when the pair, separating in horror, meet again and, let us say,
forget to separate. But the information turns out to be false, and Hymen
duly uses the not uncomfortable extinguisher which, as noted above, is
supplied to him as well as the more usual torch.
To call the book good would be ridiculous, but a very large experience of
first novels of dates before, the same as, and after its own may warrant
allotment to it of possibilities of future good gifts. The history, such as it is,
runs currently; there are no hitches and stops and stagnations, the plentiful
improbabilities are managed in such fashion that one does not trouble about
them, and there is an atmosphere, sometimes of horseplay but almost
always of good humour.
The matter which, by accident or design, goes with this
in mid-century reprints of Paul, is of much later date, but Petits Tableaux de
Mœurs.
it shows that, for some time, its author had been
exercising himself in a way valuable to the novelist at any time but by no
means as yet frequently practised. Petits Tableaux de Mœurs consists of
about sixty short sketches of a very few pages each (usually two or three)
and of almost exactly the same kind as those with which Leigh Hunt, a little
earlier in England, transformed the old Spectator essay into the kind of
thing taken up soon afterwards by "Boz" and never disused since. They are

sketches of types of men, of Parisian cafés, gardens, and restaurants; fresh
handlings of old subjects, such as the person who insists on taking you
home to a very bad "pot-luck" dinner, and the like. Once more, there is no
great brilliance in these. But they are lightly and pleasantly done; it must be
obvious to every one that they are simply invaluable training for a novelist
who is to leave the beaten track of picaresque adventure and tackle real
ordinary life. To which it may be added, as at least possible, that Thackeray
himself may have had the creation of Woolsey and Eglantine in The
Ravenswing partly suggested by a conversation between a tailor and a
hairdresser in Paul's "Le Banc de Pierre des Tuileries." As this is very short
it may be worth giving:
To finish our observations, my friend and I went and sat behind
two young men dressed in the extreme of the fashion, who, with
their feet placed on chairs as far as possible from those in which
they were sitting, gracefully rocked themselves, and evidently
hoped to attract general attention.
In a minute we heard the following conversation:
"Do you think my coat a success?" "Superb! delicious! an
admirable cut!" "And the pantaloons?" "Ravishing! Your get up
is really stunning." "The governor told me to spend three hours
in the Grand Alley, and put myself well forward. He wants
people to take up this new shape and make it fashionable. He
has already one order of some consequence." "And, as for me,
do you think my hair well done?" "Why, you look like a very
Adonis. By the way, my hair is falling off. Do give me
something to stop that." "You must give it nourishment. You see
hairs are plants or flowers. If you don't water a flower, you can
see it withering." "Very true. Then must I use pommade?" "Yes,
but in moderation; just as a tree too much watered stops
growing. Hair is exactly like vegetables." "And both want
cutting?" "Why, yes; it's like a plantation; if you don't prune and
thin the branches it kills the young shoots. Cutting helps the rise
of the sap." "Do you hold with false fronts?" "I believe you!
Why, I make them; it's just like putting a new roof on a house."
"And that does no harm to one's head?" "Impossible! neither

glue nor white of egg, which needs must hinder growth, are
used. People who wear them mix their own hair with the front.
They are two flocks, which unite to feed together, as M. Marty
says so well in the Solitaire."[41] "Two torrents which join in the
valley: that is the image of life!"
We had heard enough, and so we left the tailor's young man and
the romantic hairdresser to themselves.
In Gustave ou Le Mauvais Sujet, a book still early but Gustave.
some years later than L'Enfant, Paul de Kock got nearer
to his proper or improper subject—bachelor life in Paris, in the sense of his
contemporary Pierce Egan's Life in London.[42] The hero may be called a
French Tom Jones in something (but not so much as in the original phrase)
of the sense in which Klopstock was allowed to be a German Milton. He
has his Allworthy in a benevolent uncle-colonel, peppery but placable; he is
far more plentifully supplied than even Tom was with persons of the other
sex who play the parts of Black George's daughter and Mrs. Waters, if not
exactly of Lady Bellaston. A Sophia could hardly enter into the Kockian
plan, but her place in that scheme (with something, one regrets to add, of
Lady Bellaston's) is put in commission, and held by a leash of amiable
persons—the erring Madame de Berly, who sacrifices honour and beauty
and very nearly life for the rascal Gustave; Eugénie Fonbelle, a rich,
accomplished, and almost wholly desirable widow, whom he is actually
about to marry when, luckily for her, she discovers his fredaines, and "calls
off"; and, lastly, a peasant girl, Suzon, whom he seduces, whom he keeps
for six weeks in his uncle's house, after a fashion possibly just not
impossible in a large Parisian establishment; who is detected at last by the
uncle; who runs away when she hears that Gustave is going to marry
Eugénie, and who is at the end produced, with an infant ready-made, for
Paul's favourite "curtain" of Hymen, covering (like the curtain) all faults.
The book has more "scabrous" detail than L'Enfant de ma Femme, and
(worse still) it relapses into Smollettian-Pigaultian dirt; but it displays a
positive and even large increase of that singular readableness which has
been noticed. One would hardly, except in cases of actual novel-famine, or
after an immense interval, almost or quite involving oblivion, read a book
of Paul's twice, but there is seldom any difficulty in reading him once. Only,
beware his moral moods! When he is immoral it is in the bargain; if you do

not want him you leave him, or do not go to him at all. But when, for
instance, the unfortunate Madame de Berly has been frightfully burnt and
disfigured for life by an act of her own, intended to save—and successful in
saving—her vaurien of a lover, Paul moralises thus at the end of a chapter
—
Julie perdit en effet tous ses attraits: elle fut punie par où elle
avait pêché. Juste retour des choses ici-bas.
there being absolutely no such retour for Gustave—one feels rather
inclined, as his countrymen would say, to "conspue" Paul.[43] It is fair,
however, to say that these accesses of morality or moralising are not very
frequent.
But there is one thing of some interest about Gustave
which has not yet been noticed. Paul de Kock was The caricatured
Anglais.
certainly not the author,[44] but he must have been one of
the first, and he as certainly was one of the most effective and continuous,
promoters of that curious caricature of Englishmen which everybody knows
from French draughtsmen, and some from French writers, of the first half of
the nineteenth century. It is only fair to say that we had long preceded it by
caricaturing Frenchmen. But they had been slow in retaliating, at least in
anything like the same fashion. For a long time (as is again doubtless
known to many people) French literature had mostly ignored foreigners.
During the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries few, except the
aristocracy, of either country knew much of the other, and there was
comparatively little (of course there was always some) difference between
the manners and customs of the upper classes of both. Prévost and
Crébillon, if not Marivaux,[45] knew something about England. Then arose
in France a caricature, no doubt, but almost a reverential one, due to the
philosophes, in the drawing whereof the Englishman is indeed represented
as eccentric and splenetic, but himself philosophical and by no means
ridiculous. Even in the severe period of national struggle which preceded
the Revolutionary war, and for some time after the beginning of that war
itself, the scarecrow-comic Anglais was slow to make his appearance.
Pigault-Lebrun himself, as was noted in the last volume, indulges in him
little if at all. But things soon changed.

In the book of which we have been speaking, Gustave and a scapegrace
friend of his determine to give a dinner to two young persons of the other
sex, but find themselves penniless, and a fresh edition of one of the famous
old Repues Franches (which date in French literature back to Villon and no
doubt earlier) follows. With this, as such, we need not trouble ourselves.
But Olivier, the friend, takes upon him the duty of providing the wine, and
does so by persuading a luckless vintner that he is a "Milord."
In order to dress the part, he puts on a cravat well folded, a very long coat,
and a very short waistcoat. He combs down his hair till it is quite straight,
rouges the tip of his nose, takes a whip, puts on gaiters and a little pointed
hat, and studies himself in the glass in order to give himself a stupid and
insolent air, the result of the make-up being entirely successful. It may be
difficult for the most unbiassed Englishman of to-day to recognise himself
in this portrait or to find it half-way somewhere about 1860, or even, going
back to actual "temp. of tale," to discover anything much like it in
physiognomies so different as those of Castlereagh and Wellington, of
Southey and Lockhart, nay, even of Tom and Jerry.[46] But that it is the
Englishman of Daumier and Gavarni, artistement complet already, nobody
can deny.
Later in the novel (before he comes to his very problematical "settling
down" with Suzon and the ready-made child) Gustave is allowed a rather
superfluous scattering of probably not final wild oats in Italy and Germany,
in Poland and in England. But the English meesses are too sentimentales
(note the change from sensibles); he does not like the courses of horses, the
combats of cocks, the bets and the punches and the plum-puddings. He is
angry because people look at him when he pours his tea into the saucer. But
what annoys him most of all is the custom of the ladies leaving the table
after dinner, and that of preferring cemeteries for the purpose of taking the
air and refreshing oneself after business. It may perhaps diminish surprise,
but should increase interest, when one remembers that, after Frenchmen had
got tired of Locke, and before they took to Shakespeare, their idea of our
literature was largely derived from "Les Nuits de Young" and Hervey's
Meditations among the Tombs.
Another bit of copy-book (to revert to the Pauline moralities) is at the end
of the same very unedifying novel, when the benevolent and long-suffering

colonel, joining the hands of Gustave and Suzon, remarks to the latter that
she has proved to him that "virtues, gentleness, wits, and beauty can serve
as substitutes for birth and fortune." It would be unkind to ask which of the
"virtues" presided over Suzon's original acquaintance with her future
husband, or whether the same or another undertook the charge of that
wonderful six weeks' abscondence of hers with him in this very uncle's
house.
But no doubt this capacity for "dropping into" morality
stood Paul in good stead when he undertook (as it was Edmond et sa
almost incumbent on such a universal provider of Cousine.
popular fiction to do) what the French, among other nicknames for them,
call berquinades—stories for children and the young person, more or less in
the style of the Ami des Enfants. He diversified his gauloiseries with these
not very seldom. An example is bound up with Gustave itself in some
editions, and they make a very choice assortment of brimstone and treacle.
The hero and heroine of Edmond et sa Cousine are two young people who
have been betrothed from their youth up, and neither of whom objects to the
situation, while Constance, the "She-cosen" (as Pepys puts it) is deeply in
love with Edmond. He also is really fond of her, but he is a bumptious and
superficial snob, who, not content with the comfortable[47] income which he
has, and which will be doubled at his marriage, wants to make fame and
fortune in some way. He never will give sufficient scope and application to
his moderate talents, and accordingly fails very plumply in music,
playwriting, and painting. Then he takes to stock-exchange gambling, and
of course, after the usual "devil's arles" of success, completely ruins
himself, owes double what he has, and is about to blow out his somewhat
unimportant brains. But Constance, in the truest spirit of melodrama, and
having long sought him in vain under the guidance of a quarta persona, of
whom more presently, realises almost the whole of her fortune, except a
small pittance, dashes it down before him in the nick of time, and saves him
for the moment.
Perhaps the straitest sect of the Berquinaders would have finished the story
here, made the two marry on Constance's pittance, reconciled Edmond to
honest work, and so on. Paul, however, had a soul both above and below
this. Edmond, with the easy and cheap sham honour of his kind, will not
"subject her to privations," still hopes for something to turn up, and in

society meets with a certain family of the name of Bringuesingue—a father
who is a retired mustard-maker with some money and no brains, a mother
who is a nonentity, and a daughter Clodora,[48] a not bad-looking and not
unamiable girl, unfortunately dowered with the silliness of her father and
the nullity of her mother combined and intensified. There is some pretty bad
stock farce about M. Bringuesingue and his valet, whom he pays to scratch
his nose when his master is committing solecisms; and about Edmond's
adroitness in saving the situations. The result is that the Bringuesingues
throw their not unwilling daughter at Edmond's head. To do him the only
justice he ever deserves, he does not like to give up Constance; but she,
more melodramatic than ever, contrives to imbue him with the idea that she
is false to him, and he marries Clodora. Again the thing might have been
stopped; but Paul once more goes on, and what, I fear, must be called his
hopeless bad taste (there is no actual bad blood in him), and the precious
stage notion that "Tom the young dog" may do anything and be forgiven,
make him bring about a happy ending in a very shabby fashion. Edmond is
bored by his stupid though quite harmless and affectionate wife, neglects
her, and treats his parents-in-law with more contempt still. Poor Clodora
dies, but persuades her parents to hand over her fortune to Edmond, and
with it he marries Constance. "Hide, blushing honour! hide that wedding-
day." But, you see, the Paul-de-Kockian hero was not like Lord Welter.
There was hardly anything that this "fellow couldn't do."
Paul, however, has kept his word with his subscribers by shutting out all
sculduddery, even of the mildest kind, and has, if not reconciled, partly
conciliated critics by throwing in some tolerable minor personages. Pélagie,
Constance's lively friend, has a character which he could somehow manage
without Richardsonian vulgarity. Her amiable father, an orchestra musician,
who manages to find des jolies choses even in a damned piece, is not bad;
and, above all, Pélagie's lover, and, till Edmond's misconduct, his friend, M.
Ginguet—a modest Government clerk, who adores his mistress, is
constantly snubbed by her, but has his flames crowned at last,—is, though
not a particularly novel character, a very well-played part.
One of the author's longer books, André le Savoyard, is a
curious blend of the berquinade with what some English André le Savoyard.
critics have been kind enough to call the "candour" of
the more usual French novel. The candour, however, is in very small

proportion to the berquinity. This, I suppose, helped it to pass the English
censorship of the mid-nineteenth century; for I remember a translation (it
was the first book of the author's I ever read) far away in the 'fifties, among
a collection of books where nothing flagrantly scabrous would have been
admitted. It begins, and for the most part continues, in an almost completely
Marmontelish or Edgeworthian fashion. A selfish glutton and petit-maître of
a French count, M. de Francornard, loses his way (with a postilion, a valet,
and his little daughter, whom he has carried off from her mother) in the hills
of Savoy, and is rescued and guested by a good peasant, whom he rewards
with a petit écu (three livres, not five or six). The peasant dies, and his two
eldest boys set out for Paris as chimney-sweeps. The elder (eleven-year-old)
André himself is befriended by a good Auvergnat water-carrier and his little
daughter Manette; after which he falls in with the Francornards—now, after
a fashion, a united family. He is taken into their household and made a sort
of protégé by the countess, the child Adolphine being also very fond of him;
while, though in another way, their soubrette Lucile, a pretty damsel of
eighteen, is fonder still. Years pass, and the fortunate André distributes his
affections between the three girls. Manette, though she ends as his wife, is
more of a sister at first; Adolphine is an adored and unhoped-for idol; while
Lucile (it is hardly necessary to say that it is in the scenes with her that
"candour" comes in) is at first a protectress, then a schoolmistress of the
school of Cupid, in process of time a mistress in the other sense, and always
a very good-natured and unselfish helper. In fact, Manette is so
preternaturally good (she can't even be jealous in a sufficiently human
way), Adolphine so prettily and at last tragically null, that one really feels
inclined to observe to André, if he were worth it, the recondite quotation

Ne sit ancillae tibi amor pudori,

though perhaps seven years is a long interval in the first third of life.
A still better instance of the modified berquinade—
indeed, except for the absence of riotous fun, one of the Jean.
best of all Paul de Kock's books—is Jean, also an
example of his middle and ripest period. If translated into English it might
have for second title "or, The History of a Good Lout." The career of Jean
Durand (one of the French equivalents for John Brown or Jones or
Robinson) we have from the moment of, and indeed a little before, his birth

to that crowning of a virtuous young Frenchman's hopes, which consists in
his marrying a pretty, amiable, sensible, and well-to-do young widow.[49]
Jean is the son of a herbalist father who is an eccentric but not a fool, and a
mother who is very much of a fool but not in the least eccentric. The child,
who is born in the actual presence (result of the usual farcical opening) of a
corporal and four fusiliers, is put out to nurse at Saint-Germain in the way
they did then, brought home and put out to school, but, in consequence of
his mother's absurd spoiling, allowed to learn absolutely nothing, and
(though he is not exactly a bad fellow) to get into very bad company. With
two of the choicest specimens of this he runs away (having, again by his
mother's folly, been trusted with a round sum in gold) at the age of sixteen,
and executes a sort of picaresque journey in the environs of Paris, till he is
brought to his senses through an actual robbery committed by the worst of
his companions. He returns home to find his father dead: and having had a
substantial income left him already by an aunt, with the practical control of
his mother's resources, he goes on living entirely à sa guise. This involves
no positive debauchery or ruination, but includes smoking (then, it must be
remembered, almost as great a crime in French as in English middle-class
circles), playing at billiards (ditto), and a free use of strong drink and strong
language. He spends and gives money freely, but does not get into debt;
flirts with grisettes, but falls into no discreditable entanglement, etc., etc.
His most characteristic peculiarity, however, is his absolute refusal to learn
the rudiments of manners. He keeps his hat on in all companies; neglects all
neatness in dress, etc.; goes (when he does go) among ladies with garments
reeking of tobacco and a mouth full of strange oaths, and generally remains
ignorant of, or recalcitrant to, every form of conventional politeness in
speech and behaviour.
The only person of any sense with whom he has hitherto come in contact,
an old hairdresser named Bellequeue (it must be remembered that this
profession or vocation is not as traditionally ridiculous in French literature
as in ours), persuades his mother that the one chance of reforming Jean and
making him like other people is to marry him off. They select an eligible
parti, one Mademoiselle Adelaide Chopard, a young lady of great bodily
height, some facial charms, not exactly a fool, but not of the most amiable
disposition, and possessed of no actual accomplishment (though she thinks
herself almost a "blue") except that of preserving different fruits in brandy,

her father being a retired liqueur manufacturer. Jean, who has never been in
the least "in love," has no particular objection to Adelaide, and none at all to
the preserved cherries, apricots, etc., and the scenes of his introduction and,
after a fashion, proposal to the damsel, with her first resentment at his
unceremonious behaviour and later positive attraction by it, are far from
bad. Luckily or unluckily—for the marriage might have turned out at least
as well as most marriages of the kind—before it is brought about, this
French Cymon at last meets his real Iphigenia. Walking rather late at night,
he hears a cry, and a footpad (one of his own old comrades, as it happens)
rushes past him with a shawl which he has snatched from two ladies. Jean
counter-snatches the shawl from him and succours the ladies, one of whom
strikes his attention. They ask him to put them into a cab, and go off—
grateful, but giving no address. However, he picks up a reticule, which the
thief in his fright has dropped, discovers in it the address he wants, and
actually ventures to call on Madame Caroline Derville, who possesses, in
addition to viduity, all the other attractions catalogued above.
Another scene of farce, which is not so far short of comedy, follows
between the lout and the lady, the fun being, among other things, caused by
Jean's unconventional strolling about the room, looking at engravings, etc.,
and showing, by his remarks on things—"The Death of Tasso," "The
Marriage of Peleus and Thetis," and the like—that he is utterly uneducated.
There is about half the book to come, but no more abstract can be necessary.
The way in which Jean is delivered from his Adelaide and rewarded with
his Caroline, if not quite probable (for Adelaide is made to blacken her own
character to her rival), is not without ingenuity. And the narrative (which
has Paul de Kock's curious "holding" quality for the hour or two one is
likely to bestow on it) is diversified by the usual duel, by Jean's noble and
rather rash conduct, in putting down his pistols to bestow sacks of five-
franc pieces on his two old friends (who try to burgle and—one of them at
least—would rather like to murder him), etc., etc.[50] But the real value—
for it has some—of the book lies in the vivid sketches of ordinary life
which it gives. The curious Cockneydom, diversified by glimpses of a
suburban Arcadia, in which the French bourgeois of the first half of the
nineteenth century seems to have passed his time; the humours of a coucou
journey from Paris to Saint-Germain; all sorts of details of the Durand and
Chopard households—supply these. And not the least of them is given by

the bachelor ménage of Bellequeue with his eighteen-year-old bonne Rose,
the story whereof need not sadden or shock even Mrs. Grundy, unless she
scents unrecounted, indeed not even hinted at, improprieties. Bellequeue, as
noted above, is by no means a fool, and achieves as near an approach to a
successful "character" as Paul de Kock has ever drawn; while Rose plays
the same part of piebald angel as Lucile in André, with a little more
cleverness in her espièglerie and at least no vouched-for unlawfulnesses.
But perhaps if any one wants a single book to judge Paul
de Kock by (with one possible exception, to follow this), La Femme, le Mari
et l'Amant.
he cannot do better than take La Femme, le Mari et
l'Amant, a novel again of his middle period, and one which, if it shows
some of his less desirable points, shows them characteristically and with
comparatively little offence, while it exhibits what the shopkeepers would, I
believe, call "a range of his best lines." The autobiographic hero, Paul
Deligny, is one of his nearest approaches to a gentleman, yet no one can call
him insipid or priggish; the heroine, Augustine Luceval, by marriage
Jenneville, is in the same way one of his nearest approaches to a lady, and,
though not such a madcap as the similarly situated Frédérique of Une
Gaillarde (v. inf.), by no means mawkish. It is needless to say that these are
"l'Amant" and "la Femme," or that they are happily united at the end: it may
be more necessary to add that there is no scandal, but at the same time no
prunes and prism, earlier. "Le Mari," M. Jenneville, is very much less of a
success, being an exceedingly foolish as well as reprobate person, who not
only deserts a beautiful, charming, and affectionate wife, but treats his
lower-class loves shabbily, and allows himself to be swindled and fooled to
the nth by an adventuress of fashion and a plausible speculator. On the other
hand, one of this book's rather numerous grisettes, Ninie, is of the more if
not most gracious of that questionable but not unappetising sisterhood.
Dubois, the funny man, and Jolivet, the parsimonious reveller, who
generally manages to make his friends pay the bill, are not bad common
form of farce. One of the best of Paul's own special scenes, the pancake
party, with a bevy of grisettes, is perhaps the liveliest of all such things,
and, but for one piece of quite unnecessary Smollettism or Pigaulterie, need
only scandalise the "unco guid." The whole has, in unusual measure, that
curious readableness which has been allowed to most of our author's books.
Almost inevitably there is a melodramatic end; but this, to speak rather

Hibernically, is made up for by a minute and curious account, at the
beginning, of the actual presentation of a melodrama, with humours of pit,
box, and gallery. If the reader does not like the book he will hardly like
anything else of its author's; if he does, he will find plenty of the same sort
of stuff, less concentrated perhaps, elsewhere. But if he be a student, as well
as a consumer, of the novel, he can hardly fail to see that, at its time and in
its kind, it is not so trivial a thing as its subjects and their treatment might,
in the abstract, be pronounced to be by the grave and precise.
Yet somebody may say, "This is all very well, but what
was it that made Major Pendennis laugh?" Probably a Mon Voisin
good many things in a good many books; but I do not Raymond.
know any one more likely to have received that crown than the exception
above mentioned, Mon Voisin Raymond, which also bears (to me) the
recommendation of a very competent friend of mine. My experience is that
you certainly do begin laughing at the very beginning, and that the laughter
is kept up, if not without cessation, with very few intervals, through a
remarkable series of comic scenes. The book, in fact, is Paul de Kock's
Gilbert Gurney, and I cannot sink the critic in the patriot to such an extent
as to enable me to put Theodore, even in what is, I suppose, his best long
story, above, or even on a level with, Paul here.
The central point, as one sees almost at once, is that this Raymond (I think
we are never told his other name), a not entirely ill-meaning person, but a
fâcheux of almost ultra-Molièresque strength, is perpetually spoiling his
unlucky neighbour's, the autobiographic Eugène Dorsan's, sport, and,
though sometimes paid out in kind, bringing calamities upon him, while at
last he actually capots his friend and enemy by making him one of the
derniers already mentioned! This is very bold of Paul, and I do not know
any exact parallel to it. On the other hand, Eugène is consoled, not only by
Raymond's death in the Alps (Paul de Kock is curiously fond of Switzerland
as a place of punishment for his bad characters), but by the final possession
of a certain Nicette, the very pearl of the grisette kind. We meet her in the
first scene of the story, where Dorsan, having given the girl a guiltless
sojourn of rescue in his own rooms, is detected and exposed to the malice of
a cast mistress by Raymond. I am afraid that Paul rather forgot that final
sentence of his own first book; for though Pélagie, Dorsan's erring and
unpleasant wife, dies in the last chapter, I do not observe that an actual

Hymen with Nicette "covers the fault" which, after long innocence, she has
at last committed or permitted. But perhaps it would have been indecent to
contract a second marriage so soon, and it is only postponed to the
unwritten first chapter of the missing fifth volume.[51]
The interval between overture and finale is, as has been said or hinted,
uncommonly lively, and for once, not only in the final retribution, Paul has
distributed the peine du talion pretty equally between his personages.
Dorsan has already lost another grisette mistress, Caroline (for whose sake
he has neglected Nicette), and a femme du monde, with whom he has for a
short time intrigued; while in both cases Raymond, though not exactly the
cause of the deprivation, has, in his meddling way, been mixed up with it.
In yet other scenes we have a travelling magic-lantern exhibition in the
Champs Élysées; a night in the Tivoli Gardens; an expedition to a party at a
country house, which, of course, Raymond's folly upsets, literally as well as
metaphorically; a long (rather too long) account of a musical evening at a
very lower-middle-class house; a roaringly farcical interchange of dinners
en cabinet particulier at a restaurant, in which Raymond is the victim. But,
on the whole, he scores, and is a sort of double cause of the hero's last and
greatest misfortune. For it is a lie of his about Nicette which determines
Dorsan to make a long-postponed visit to his sister in the country, and
submit at last to her efforts to get him married to the exaggeratedly ingénue
Pélagie, and saddled with her detestable aunt, Madame de Pontchartrain.
The end of the book is not quite equal to some other parts of it. But there is
abundance of excellent farce, and Nicette might reconcile the veriest
sentimentalist.
At one time in England—I cannot speak for the times of
his greatest popularity in France—Paul de Kock's name, Le Barbier de
Paris.
except for a vague knowledge of his grisette and
mauvais sujet studies, was very mainly connected with Le Barbier de Paris.
It was an instance of the constant mistakes which almost all countries make
about foreign authors. I imagine, from a fresh and recent reading of it, that
he probably did take more trouble with it than with most of his books. But,
unfortunately, instances of lost labour are not confined to literature. The
subject and the author are very ill matched. It is a romance of 1632, and so
in a way competing with the most successful efforts of the great Romantics.
But for such a task Paul had no gifts, except his invariable one of

concocting a readable story. As for style, imagination, atmosphere, and such
high graces, it would be not so much cruel as absurd to "enter" the book
with Notre-Dame de Paris or the Contes Drolatiques, Le Capitaine
Fracasse or the Chronique de Charles IX. But even the lower ways he
could not tread here. He did not know anything about the time, and his
wicked Marquis de Villebelle is not early Louis Treize at all, but rather late
Louis Quinze. He had not the gift (which Scott first showed and Dumas
possessed in no small measure) of writing his conversations, if not in actual
temporal colour of language, at any rate in a kind of lingua franca suitable
to, or at the worst not flagrantly discordant with, any particular time and
any particular state of manners. He could throw in types of the kind so
much admired by no less a person than Sir Philip Sidney—a garrulous old
servant, an innocent young girl, a gasconading coward, a revengeful
daughter of Italy, a this and that and the other. But he could neither make
individual character nor vivid historical scene. And so the thing breaks
down.
The barber-hero-villain himself is the most "unconvincing" of barbers (who
have profited fiction not so ill in other cases), of heroes (who are too often
unconvincing), and even of villains (who have rather a habit of being so).
[52]
Why a man who is represented as being intensely, diabolically, wicked,
but almost diabolically shrewd, should employ, and go on employing, as his
instrument a blundering poltroon like the Gascon Chaudoreille, is a
question which recurs almost throughout the book, and, being unanswered,
is almost sufficient to damn it. And at the end the other question, why M. le
Marquis de Villebelle—represented as, though also a villain, a person of
superior intelligence—when he has discovered that the girl whom he has
abducted and sought to ruin is really his daughter; when he has run upstairs
to tell her, has knocked at her locked door, and has heard a heavy body
splashing into the lake under her window,—why, instead of making his way
at once to the water, he should run about the house for keys, break into the
room, and at last, going to the window, draw from the fact that "an object
shows itself at intervals on the surface, and appears to be still in a state of
agitation," the no doubt quite logical inference that Blanche is drowning—
when, and only then, he precipitates himself after her,—this question would
achieve, if it were necessary, the damnation.

The fact is, that Paul had no turn for melodrama, history,
or tragic matter of any kind. He wrote nearly a hundred The Pauline
novels, and I neither pretend to have read the whole of grisette.
them, nor, if I had done so, should I feel justified in inflicting abstracts on
my readers. As always happens in such cases, the feast he offers us is "pot-
luck," but, as too seldom happens, the luck of the pot is quite often good.
With the grisette, to whom he did much to give a niche (one can hardly call
it a shrine) in literature, whom he celebrated so lovingly, and whose gradual
disappearance he has so touchingly bewailed, or with any feminine person
of partly grisettish kind, such as the curious and already briefly mentioned
heroine of Une Gaillarde,[53] he is almost invariably happy. The above-
mentioned Lucile is not technically a grisette (who should be a girl living
on her own resources or in a shop, not in service) nor is Rose in Jean, but
both have the requirements of the type—minois chiffonné (including what is
absolutely indispensable, a nez retroussé), inexhaustible gaiety, extreme
though by no means promiscuous complaisance, thorough good-nature—all
the gifts, in short, of Béranger's bonne fille, who laughs at everything, but is
perfectly capable of good sense and good service at need, and who not
seldom marries and makes as good a wife as, "in a higher spear," the
English "garrison hack" has had the credit of being. Quite a late, but a very
successful example, with the complaisance limited to strictly legitimate
extent, and the good-nature tempered by a shrewd determination to avenge
two sisters of hers who had been weaker than herself, is the Georgette of La
Fille aux Trois Jupons, who outwits in the cleverest way three would-be
gallants, two of them her sisters' actual seducers, and extracts thumping
solatia from these for their victims.[54]
On the other hand, the older and, I think, more famous
book which suggested the title of this—L'Homme aux Others.
Trois Culottes, symbolising and in a way giving a
history of the times of the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration, and
finishing with "July"—seems to me again a failure. As I have said, Paul
could not manage history, least of all spread-out history like this; and the
characters, or rather personages, though of the lower and lower-middle
rank, which he could manage best, are to me totally uninteresting. Others
may have been, or may be, more fortunate with them.

So, too, Le Petit Fils de Cartouche (which I read before coming across its
first part, Les Enfants du Boulevard) did not inspire me with any desire to
look up this earlier novel; and La Pucelle de Belleville, another of Paul's
attempts to depict the unconventional but virtuous young person, has very
slight interest as a story, and is disfigured by some real examples of the
"coarse vulgarity" which has been somewhat excessively charged against its
author generally. Frère Jacques is a little better, but not much.[55]
Something has been said of "periods"; but, after all, when Paul has once
"got into his stride" there is little difference on the average. I have read, for
instance, in succession, M. Dupont, which, even in the Belgian piracy, is of
1838, and Les Demoiselles de Magazin, which must be some quarter of a
century later—so late, indeed, that Madame Patti is mentioned in it. The
title-hero of the first—a most respectable man—has an ingénue, who loves
somebody else, forced upon him, experiences more recalcitrance than is
usually allowed in such cases, and at last, with Paul's usual unpoetical
injustice, is butchered to make way for the Adolphe of the piece, who does
not so very distinctly deserve his Eugénie. It contains also one Zélie, who is
perhaps the author's most impudent, but by no means most unamusing or
most disagreeable, grisette. Les Demoiselles de Magazin gives us a whole
posy of these curious flower-weeds of the garden of girls—pretty, middling,
and ugly, astonishingly virtuous, not virtuous at all, and couci-couci (one of
them, by the way, is nicknamed "Bouci-Boula," because she is plump and
plain), but all good-natured, and on occasion almost noble-sentimented; a
guileless provincial; his friend, who has a mania for testing his wife's
fidelity, and who accomplishes one of Paul's favourite fairy-tale or rather
pantomime endings by coming down with fifteen thousand francs for an old
mistress (she has lost her beauty by the bite of a parrot, and is the mother of
the extraordinarily virtuous Marie); a scapegrace "young first" or half-first;
a superior ditto, who is an artist, who rejects the advances of Marie's
mother, and finally marries Marie herself, etc. etc. You might change over
some of the personages and scenes of the two books; but they are scarcely
unequal in such merit as they possess, and both lazily readable in the
fashion so often noted.
If any one asks where this readableness comes from, I do not think the
answer is very difficult to give, and it will of itself supply a fuller
explanation (the words apology or excuse are not really necessary) for the

space here allotted to its possessor. It comes, no doubt, in the first place,
from sheer and unanalysable narrative faculty, the secret of the business, the
mystery in one sense of the mystery in the other. But it also comes, as it
seems to me, from the fact that Paul de Kock is the very first of French
novelists who, though he has no closely woven plot, no striking character,
no vivid conversation or arresting phrases, is thoroughly real, and in the
good, not the bad, sense quotidian. The statement may surprise some people
and shock others, but I believe it can be as fully sustained as that other
statement about the most different subject possible, the Astrée, which was
quoted from Madame de Sévigné in the last volume. Paul knew the world
he dealt with as well almost as Dickens[56] knew his very different but
somewhat corresponding one; and, unlike Dickens, the Frenchman had the
good sense to meddle very little[57] with worlds that he did not know. Of
course it would be simply bête to take it for granted that the majority of
Parisian shop- and work- and servant-girls have or had either the beauty or
the amiability or the less praiseworthy qualities of his grisettes. But
somehow or other one feels that the general ethos of the class has been
caught.[58] His bourgeois interiors and outings have the same real and not
merely stagy quality; though his melodramatic or pantomimic endings may
smack of "the boards" a little. The world to which he holds up the mirror
may be a rather vulgar sort of Vanity Fair, but there are unfortunately few
places more real than Vanity Fair, and few things less unreal than vulgarity.
The last sentence may lead to a remark of a graver kind than has been often
indulged in here. Thackeray defined his own plan in Vanity Fair itself as at
least partly an attempt to show people "living without God in the world."
There certainly is not much godliness in the book, but he could not keep it
out altogether; he would have been false to nature (which he never was) if
he had. In Paul de Kock's extensive work, on the other hand, the exclusion
is complete. It is not that there is any expressed Voltairianism as there is in
Pigault. But though the people are married in church as well as at the
mairie, and I remember one casual remark about a mother and her daughter
going to mass, the whole spiritual region—religious, theological,
ecclesiastical, and what not—is left blank. I do not remember so much as a
curé figuring personally, though there may be one. And it is worth noting
that Paul was born in 1794, and therefore passed his earliest childhood in
the time when the Republic had actually gagged, if not stifled, religion in

France—when children grew up, in some cases at any rate, without ever
hearing the name of God, except perhaps in phrases like pardieu or parbleu.
It is not my business or my intention to make reflections or draw inferences;
I merely indicate the fact.
Another fact—perhaps so obvious already that it hardly needs stating—is
that Paul de Kock is not exactly the person to "take a course of," unless
under such conditions as those under which Mr. Carlyle took a course of a
far superior writer, Marryat, and was (one regrets to remember) very
ungrateful for the good it did him. He is (what some of his too critical
countrymen have so falsely called Dumas) a mere amuseur, and his
amusement is somewhat lacking in variety. Nevertheless, few critical
readers[59] of the present history will, I think, consider the space given to
him here as wasted. He was a really powerful schoolmaster to bring the
popular novel into still further popularity; and he made a distinct advance
upon such persons as Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil—upon the
former in comparative decency, if not of subject, of expression; upon the
latter in getting close to actual life; and upon both in what may be called the
furniture of his novels—the scene-painting, property-arranging, and general
staging. This has been most unfairly assigned to Balzac as originator, not
merely in France, but generally, whereas, not to mention our own men, Paul
began to write nearly a decade before the beginning of those curious efforts,
half-prenatal, of Balzac's, which we shall deal with later, and nearly two
decades before Les Chouans. And, horrifying as the statement may be to
some, I venture to say that his mere mise en scène is sometimes, if not
always, better than Balzac's own, though he may be to that younger
contemporary of his as a China orange to Lombard Street in respect of plot,
character, thought, conversation, and all the higher elements, as they are
commonly taken to be, of the novel.

It has been said that the filling-up of this chapter, as to
the rank and file of the novelists of 1800-1830, has been The minors before
1830.
a matter of some difficulty in the peculiar circumstances
of the case. I have, however, been enabled to read, for the first time or
afresh, examples not merely of those writers who have preserved any

notoriety, but of some who have not, and to assure myself on fair grounds
that I need not wait for further exploration. The authors now to be dealt
with have already been named. But I may add another novelist on the very
eve of 1830, Auguste Ricard, whose name I never saw in any history of
literature, but whose work fell almost by accident into my hands, and seems
worth taking as "pot-luck."

Isabelle de Montolieu—a Swiss by birth but a French-
woman by extraction, and Madame de Crousaz by her Mme. de Montolieu
—Caroline de
first marriage—was a friend of Gibbon's friend Georges Lichtfield.
Deyverdun, and indeed of Gibbon himself, who, she
says, actually offered to father her novel. Odd as this seems, there really is
in Caroline de Lichtfield[60] not merely something which distinguishes it
from the ordinary "sensibility" tale of its time (it was first printed at
Lausanne in 1786), but a kind of crispness of thought now and then which
sometimes does suggest Gibbon, in something the same way as that in
which Fanny Burney suggests Johnson. This is indeed mixed with a certain
amount of mere "sensibility" jargon,[61] as when a lover, making a
surprisingly honest confession to his beloved, observes that he is going "to
destroy those sentiments which had made him forget how unworthy he was
of them," or when the lady (who has been quite guiltless, and has at last
fallen in love with her own husband) tells this latter of her weakness in
these very engaging words: "Yes! I did love Lindorf; at least I think I
recognise some relation between the sentiments I had for him and those that
I feel at present!"
A kind of affection was avowed in the last volume for
the "Phoebus" of the "heroics," and something similar Its advance on
"Sensibility."
may be confessed for this "Jupiter Pluvius," this mixture
of tears and stateliness, in the Sentimentalists. But Madame de Montolieu
has emerged from the most larmoyante kind of "sensible" comedy. If her
book had been cut a little shorter, and if (which can be easily done by the
reader) the eccentric survival of a histoire, appended instead of episodically
inserted, were lopped off, Caroline de Lichtfield would not be a bad story.
The heroine, having lost her mother, has been brought up to the age of

fifteen by an amiable canoness, who (to speak rather Hibernically) ought to
have been her mother but wasn't, because the actual mother was so much
richer. She bears no malice, however, even to the father who, well preserved
in looks, manners, and selfishness, is Great Chamberlain to Frederick the
Great.
That very unsacred majesty has another favourite, a certain Count von
Walstein, who is ambassador of Prussia at St. Petersburg. It pleases
Frederick, and of course his chamberlain, that Caroline, young as she is,
shall marry Walstein. As the girl is told that her intended is not more than
thirty, and knows his position (she has, naturally, been brought up without
the slightest idea of choosing for herself), she is not displeased. She will be
a countess and an ambassadress; she will have infinite jewels; her husband
will probably be handsome and agreeable; he will certainly dance with her,
and may very possibly not object to joining in innocent sports like butterfly-
catching. So she sets off to Berlin quite cheerfully, and the meeting takes
place. Alas! the count is a "civil count" (as Beatrice says) enough, but he is
the reverse of handsome and charming. He has only one eye; he has a huge
scar on his cheek; a wig (men, remember, were beginning to "wear their
own hair"), a bent figure, and a leaden complexion. Caroline, promptly and
not unnaturally, "screams and disappears like lightning." Nor can any way
be found out of this extremely awkward situation. The count (who is a
thoroughly good fellow) would give Caroline up, though he has taken a
great fancy to her, and even the selfish Lichtfield tries (or says he tries) to
alter his master's determination. But Frederick of course persists, and with a
peculiarly Frederician enjoyment in conferring an ostensible honour which
is in reality a punishment, sees the marriage ceremony carried out under his
own eye. Caroline, however, exemplifies in combination certain old adages
to the effect that there is "No will, no wit like a woman's." She submits
quite decently in public, but immediately after the ceremony writes a
letter[62] to her husband (whose character she has partly, though imperfectly,
gauged) requesting permission to retire to the canoness till she is a little
older, under a covert but quite clearly intelligible threat of suicide in case of
refusal. There are of course difficulties, but the count, like a man and a
gentleman, consents at once; the father, bon gré mal gré, has to do so, and
the King, a tyrant who has had his way, gives a sulky and qualified
acquiescence. What follows need only be very rapidly sketched. After a

little time Caroline sees, at her old-new home, an engaging young man, a
Herr von Lindorf; and matters, though she is quite virtuous, are going far
when she receives an enormous epistle[1*] from her lover, confessing that
he himself is the author of her husband's disfigurement (under
circumstances discreditable to himself and creditable to Walstein),
enclosing, too, a very handsome portrait of the count as he was, and but for
this disfigurement might be still. What happens then nobody ought to need,
or if he does he does not deserve, to be told. There is no greatness about this
book, but to any one who has an eye for consequences it will probably seem
to have some future in it. It shows the breaking of the Sensibility mould and
the running of the materials into a new pattern as early as 1786. In 1886 M.
Feuillet or M. Theuriet would of course have clothed the story-skeleton
differently, but one can quite imagine either making use of a skeleton by no
means much altered. M. Rod would have given it an unhappy ending, but
one can see it in his form likewise.[63]
Of Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis, it were
tempting to say a good deal personally if we did Madame de Genlis
iterum.
biographies here when they can easily be found
elsewhere. How she became a canoness at six years old, and shortly
afterwards had for her ordinary dress (with something supplementary, one
hopes) the costume of a Cupid, including quiver and wings; how she
combined the offices of governess to the Orleans children and mistress to
their father; how she also combined the voluptuousness and the
philanthropy of her century by taking baths of milk and afterwards giving
that milk to the poor;[64] how, rather late in life, she attained the very
Crown-Imperial of governess-ship in being chosen by Napoleon to teach
him and his Court how to behave; and how she wrote infinite books—many
of them taking the form of fiction—on education, history, religion,
everything, can only be summarised. The last item of the summary alone
concerns us, and that must be dealt with summarily too. Mlle. de Clermont
—a sort of historico-"sensible" story in style, and evidently imitated from
La Princesse de Clèves—is about the best thing she did as literature; but we
dealt with that in the last volume[65] among its congeners. In my youth all
girls and some boys knew Adèle et Théodore and Les Veillées du Château.
From a later book, Les Battuécas, George Sand is said to have said that she
learnt Socialism: and the fact is that Stéphanie Félicité had seen so much,

felt so much, read so much, and done so much that, having also a quick
feminine wit, she could put into her immense body of work all sorts of
crude second-hand notions. The two last things that I read of hers to
complete my idea of her were Le Comte de Corke and Les Chevaliers du
Cygne, books at least possessing an element of surprise in their titles. The
first is a collection of short tales, the title-piece inspired and prefaced by an
account of the Boyle family, and all rather like a duller and more spun-out
Miss Edgeworth, the common relation to Marmontel accounting for this.
The concluding stories of each volume, "Les Amants sans Amour" and
"Sanclair," are about the best. Les Chevaliers du Cygne is a book likely to
stir up the Old Adam in some persons. It was, for some mysterious reason,
intended as a sort of appendix—for "grown-ups"—to the Veillées du
Château, and is supposed to have incorporated parabolically many of the
lessons of the French Revolution (it appeared in 1795). But though its three
volumes and eleven hundred pages deal with Charlemagne, and the
Empress Irene, and the Caliph "Aaron" (Haroun), and Oliver (Roland is
dead at Roncevaux), and Ogier, and other great and beloved names; though
the authoress, who was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has
actually consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest
flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about the
book, and the whole treatment is in the pre-historical-novel style. Indeed
the writer of the Veillées was altogether of the veille—the day just expired
—or of the transitional and half-understood present—never of the past seen
in some perspective, of the real new day, or, still less, of the morrow.
The batch of books into which we are now going to dip
does not represent the height of society and the interests The minor popular
of education like Madame de Genlis; nor high society novel—Ducray-
Duminil—Le Petit
again and at least strivings after the new day, like the Carilloneur.
noble author of the Solitaire who will follow them. They
are, in fact, the minors of the class in which Pigault-Lebrun earlier and Paul
de Kock later represent such "majority" as it possesses. But they ought not
to be neglected here: and I am bound to say that the very considerable
trouble they cost me has not been wholly vain.[66] The most noted of the
whole group, and one of the earliest, Ducray-Duminil's Lolotte et Fanfan,
escaped[67] a long search; but the possession and careful study of the four
volumes of his Petit Carillonneur (1819) has, I think, enabled me to form a

pretty clear notion of what not merely Lolotte (the second title of which is
Histoire de Deux Enfants abandonnés dans une île déserte), but Victor ou
L'Enfant de la Forêt, Cælina ou L'Enfant du Mystère, Jules ou le Toit
paternel, or any other of the author's score or so of novels would be like.
The book, I confess, was rather hard to read at first, for Ducray-Duminil is a
sort of Pigault-Lebrun des enfants; he writes rather kitchen French; the
historic present (as in all these books) loses its one excuse by the wearisome
abundance of it, and the first hundred pages (in which little Dominique,
having been unceremoniously tumbled out of a cabriolet[68] by wicked men,
and left to the chances of divine and human assistance, is made to earn his
living by framed-bell-ringing in the streets of Paris) became something of a
corvée. But the author is really a sort of deacon, though in no high division
of his craft. He expands and duplicates his situations with no inconsiderable
cunning, and the way in which new friends, new enemies, and new should-
be-indifferent persons are perpetually trying to find out whether the boy is
really the Dominique d'Alinvil of Marseilles, whose father and mother have
been foully made away with, or not, shows command of its own particular
kind of ingenuity. Intrigues of all sorts—violent and other (for his wicked
relative, the Comtesse d'Alinvil, is always trying to play Potiphar's wife to
him, and there is a certain Mademoiselle Gothon who would not figure as
she does here in a book by Mr. Thomas Day)—beset him constantly; he is
induced not merely to trust his enemies, but to distrust his friends; there is a
good deal of underground work and of the explained supernatural; a
benevolent musician; an excellent curé; a rather "coming" but agreeable
Adrienne de Surval, who, close to the end of the book, hides her trouble in
the bosom of her aunt while Dominique presses her hand to his heart (the
aunt seems here superfluous), etc., etc. Altogether the book is, to the
historian, a not unsatisfactory one, and joins its evidence to that of Pigault
as showing that new sources of interest and new ways of dealing with them
are being asked for and found. In filling up the map of general novel-
development and admitting English examples, we may assign to its author a
place between Mrs. Radcliffe and the Family Herald: confining ourselves to
French only, he has again, like Pigault, something of the credit of making a
new start. He may appeal to the taste of the vulgar (which is not quite the
same sort of thing as "a vulgar taste"), but he sees that the novel is capable
of providing general pastime, and he does his best to make it do so.

"The other Ducange," whose patronymic appears to have
been Brahain, and who perhaps took the name of the V. Ducange.
great scholar[69] for the sake of contrast, was even more
famous for his melodramas[70] than for his fiction, one L'Artiste et le
Soldat.
piece especially, "Trente Ans, ou La Vie d'un Joueur,"
having been among the triumphs of the Porte-Saint-Martin and of Frédérick
Lemaître. As a novelist he did not write for children like Ducray-Duminil,
and one of his novels contains a boastful preface scoffing at and glorying in
the accusations of impropriety brought against him. I have found nothing
very shocking in those books of his which I have read, and I certainly have
not thought it necessary to extend my acquaintance in search of it. He
seems to have been a quarrelsome sort of person, for he got into trouble not
only with the moralists, not only with the Restoration government, but with
the Academy, which he attacked; and he is rather fond of "scratchy"
references such as "On peut mériter encore quelque intérêt sans être un
Amadis, un Vic-van-Vor [poor Fergus!], un Han, ou un Vampire." But his
intrinsic merit as a novelist did not at first seem to me great. A book worse
charpenté than that just quoted from, L'Artiste et le Soldat, I have seldom
read. The first of its five volumes is entirely occupied with the story (not
badly, though much too voluminously told) of a captain who has lost his leg
at Waterloo, and though tended by a pretty and charming daughter, is in
great straits till helped by a mysterious Black Nun, who loves les militaires,
and has been entrusted with money to help them by the Empress Josephine.
The second, "without with your leave or by your leave" of any kind,[71]
jumps back to give us, under a different name for a long time, the early
history of this captain, which occupies two whole volumes and part of a
third (the fourth of the book). Then another abrupt shift introduces us to the
"artist," the younger brother, who bears a third name, itself explained by
another jump back of great length. Then a lover turns up for Suzanne, the
captain's daughter, and we end the fifth volume with a wedding procession
in ten distinct carriages.
Ludovica ou Le Testament de Waterloo, a much later
book, was, the author tells us, finished in June 1830 Ludovica.
under the fiendish tyranny of "all-powerful bigots,
implacable Jesuits, and restored marquises"; but the glorious days of July
came; a new dynasty, "jeune, forte, sincère" (Louis Philippe "young and

sincere"!), was on the throne; the ship of state entered the vast sea of
liberty; France revived; all Europe seemed to start from its shroud—and
Ludovica got published. But the author's joy was a little dashed by the sense
that, unlike its half-score of forerunners, the book had not to battle with the
bigots and the Jesuits and the "restored marquises"—the last a phrase which
has considerable charms of suggestion.
All this, of course, has its absurd side; but it shows, by way of redemption,
that Ducange, in one of the many agreeable phrases of his country, "did not
go to it with a dead hand." He seems, indeed, to have been a thoroughly
"live" person, if not a very wise one: and Ludovica begins with a rousing
situation—a crowd and block in the streets of Paris, brought about by
nobody quite knows what, but ending in a pistol-shot, a dead body, the
flight of the assassin, the dispersal of the crowd by the gendarmes, and
finally the discovery by a young painter, who has just returned from seeing
his mother at Versailles, of a very youthful, very pretty, and very terrified
girl, speaking an unknown tongue, and not understanding French, who has
fled for refuge into a dark alley ending in a flight of cellar-steps. It is to the
point that among the confused cries attending the disturbance have been
some about a girl being carried off.
It must be admitted that this is not unpromising, and I really think Ludovica
(with a caution as to the excessive prolixity of its kind and time) might be
recommended to lovers of the detective novel, of which it is a rather early
sample. I have confessed, in a later chapter, that this particular "wanity" is
not my favourite; but I found myself getting through M. Victor Ducange's
six volumes—burdened rather than ballasted as they are by political
outbursts, rather "thorn-crackling" attempts at humour, and the like—with
considerably less effort than has sometimes attended similar excursions. If
they had been three instead of six I hardly think I should have felt the collar
at all. The superiority to L'Artiste et le Soldat is remarkable. When honest
Jules Janin attributed to Ducange "une érudition peu commune," he must
either have been confusing Victor with Charles, or, which is more probable,
exhibiting his own lack of the quality he refers to. Ducange does quote tags
of Latin: but erudition which makes Proserpine the daughter of Cybele,
though certainly peu commune in one sense, is not so in the other. The
purposes and the jokes, as has been said, may bore; and though the style is

better than Ducray's, it would not of itself "over-stimulate." But the man is
really almost prodigal of incident, and does not manage it badly.
Here, you have Ludovica's father and mother (the former of whom has been
crimped to perform a marriage under the impression that he is a priest,
whereas he is really a colonel of dragoons) escaping through a hole at the
back of a picture from a skylighted billiard-room. There, an enterprising
young man, "sitting out" at a ball, to attend which he has disguised himself,
kisses his partner,[72] and by that pleasing operation dislodges half his
borrowed moustache. It falls, alas! on her hand, she takes it for a spider,
screams, and so attracts an unwelcome public. Later in the same evening he
finds himself shut up in the young lady's bedroom, and hears her and her
mother talking secrets which very nearly concern him. The carrying off of
Ludovica from Poland to Paris is very smartly managed (I am not sure that
the great Alexander or one of his "young men" did not borrow some details
from it for the arrest of D'Artagnan and Porthos after their return from
England), and the way in which she and a double of hers, Trinette van
Poupenheim, are mixed up is really clever. So is the general cross-
purposing. Cabmen turn up just when they should; and though letters
dropped out of pockets are as common as blackberries, I know few better
excuses for such carelessness than the fact that you have pulled the letter
out with a silk wrapper, which you proceed to fold tenderly round the
beautiful neck of a damsel in a cab somewhere about midnight. A holograph
will made on the eve of Waterloo and preserved for fifteen years by the
faithful depositary; a good doctor, of course; many bad Jesuits, of course;
another, and this time virtuous, though very impudent, carrying-off of the
other young woman from the clutches of the hated congréganistes;[73] a
boghei;[74] a jokei; a third enlèvement of the real Ludovica, who escapes by
a cellar-trap; and many other agreeable things, end in the complete defeat of
the wicked and the marriage of the good to the tune of four couples, the
thing being thus done to the last in Ducange's usual handsome manner.[75] I
do not know whether Ludovica was melodramatised. Le Jésuite of the same
year by Ducange and the great Pixérécourt looks rather like it; and so does
Il y a Seize Ans of a year later, which he seems to have written alone. But if
it was not it ought to have been. The half-moustache-spider-kissing-
screaming scene, and the brilliant youth retreating through the laughing

crowd with the other half of his decoration, might have reconciled even me
to the theatre.
A short account of the last novel (except Le Solitaire)
mentioned above must stand for sample, not merely of Auguste Ricard—
L'Ouvreuse de
the dozen other works of its author, Auguste Ricard, but Loges.
for many more advertised on the fly-leaves of this time,
and long since made "alms for oblivion." Their titles, Le Portier, La
Grisette, Le Marchand de Coco, by Ricard himself, on one side, L'Homme
des Ruines, Bleack- (sic) Beard, La Chambre Rouge (by a certain
Dinocourt) on the other, almost tell their whole story—the story of a range
(to use English terms once more) between the cheap followers of Anne
Radcliffe and G. W. M. Reynolds. L'Ouvreuse de Loges, through which I
have conscientiously worked, inclines to the latter kind, being anti-
monarchic, anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic (though it admits that these
aristocrats are terrible fellows for behaving in a way which the roturier
cannot imitate, however hard he tries), and anti-things-in-general. Its title-
heroine is a bad old woman, who "keeps the door" in the Elizabethan sense
as well as theatrically. Its real hero is a ci-devant duke; malversator under
the Republic; supposed but not real victim of the Septembriseurs; atheist;
winner and loser of several fortunes; and at last particulier of Paris under a
feigned name, with an apartment full of bric-à-brac, a drawer full of little
packets of money, after the expenditure of the last of which he proposes to
blow his brains out; tall man of stature and of his hands, etc., etc. The book
is in a way one of purpose, inculcating the danger of wooing opera-girls,
and instancing it with three very weak young men, another duke, a rich
young parvenu, and a musician. Of these the first and the last are, with their
wives, rather arbitrarily saved from the clutches into which they have fallen,
by the mysterious "M. Luc," while the other comes to a very bad end. The
novel, which is in five volumes, is, like most of those mentioned in this
section, not of the kind that one would read by preference. But it is a very
fair specimen of the "below stairs" romance which sometimes prepares the
way for others, fit to take their places above stairs. And so it has its place
here.[76]
It has been pointed out more than once that though
neglect of such books as these may be perfectly natural The importance of
these minors not
and probable in the average reader, such neglect—and

still more any contempt of them—is, though it may not inconsiderable.
be unnatural, utterly unscholarly and uncritical from the
point of view of history. Their authors themselves learnt something from
their own mistaken experiments, and their successors learnt a good deal
more. They found that "sculduddery" was not a necessary attraction. Ducray
does not avail himself of it, and Ducange seems to have left it off. They did
not give up, but they came less and less to depend upon, extravagant
incident, violent peripeteias, cheap supernaturalities, etc. But the most
important thing about them perhaps is the evidence they give of learning
what has been called their "business." Already, to a great extent if not
wholly, that earliest obsession and preoccupation of the novelist—the idle
anxiety to answer the question, "How do you know all these things?"—has
begun to disappear. This is rather less the case with another foolish fancy—
the belief that it is necessary to account not merely for what we call the
consequents, but for the antecedents of all the characters (at least those of
any importance) that you introduce. There can be no doubt that this was one
of the objects, as it was part of the original cause, of the mistaken Histoire
system, which made you, when or soon after you introduced a personage,
"tell us all about it," as the children say, in a separate inset tale. You did not
now do this, but you made, as in the capital instance of Victor Ducange,
huge diversions, retrospects, episodes, in the body of the story itself. This
method, being much less skippable than the inset by those who did not want
it, was not likely to continue, and so applied the cure to its own ill. And yet
further, as novels multiplied, the supposed necessity of very great length
tended to disappear. The seven or eight volumes of the eighteenth century,
which had replaced the twelves and twenties of the seventeenth, shrank to
six (Ludovica), five (L'Artiste et Le Soldat and l'Ouvreuse de Loges), four
(Le Petit Carillonneur), and then three or two, though later the historical
kind swelled again, and the almost invariable single volume did not
establish itself till the middle of the century. As a consequence again of this,
the enormous delay over single situations tended, though very slowly, to
disappear. It is one of the merits of Pigault-Lebrun that he is not a great
sinner in verbosity and prolixity: his contemporary minors of this volume
are far more peccant in this kind.
Le Solitaire is a book which I have been "going to read"
for some fifty years, but by some accident did not till the The Vicomte
d'Arlincourt—Le

present occasion. I knew it generally as one of the Solitaire.
vedettes of Romanticism, and as extremely popular in its
own day: also as having been, with its author's other work in poem and play
and prose fiction, the subject of some ridicule. But till I read it, and some
things about it, I never knew how well it deserved that ridicule and yet how
very popular it was, and how really important is its position in the history of
the Romantic movement, and so of the French novel and French literature
generally. It was published at the end of January 1821, and at the end of
November a seventh edition appeared, with an elaborate Io Triumphe! from
the publisher. Not only had there been those seven editions (which, it must
be remembered in fairness, represent at least seventy at the other end of the
century[77]), but it had been translated into four foreign languages; fourteen
dramas had been based on it, some half of which had been at least
conditionally accepted for performance; painters of distinction were at work
on subjects from it; it had reached the stages of Madrid and of London
(where one critic had called it "a very beautiful composition"), while French
approval had been practically unanimous. Nay, a game had been founded
thereon, and—crowning, but perhaps rather ominous honour—somebody
had actually published a burlesque imitation.
I have seldom read greater rubbish than Le Solitaire. It is a historical-
romantic story (the idolatrous preface refers both to Scott and to Byron),
and bears also strong, if sometimes distinctly unfortunate, resemblances to
Mrs. Radcliffe, the Germans, and Chateaubriand. The scene is that of
Charles the Bold's defeat at Morat: and the "Solitary" is Charles himself—
the identification of his body after the decisive overthrow at Nancy was a
little doubtful—who has hidden there partly to expiate, by good deeds, his
crime of massacring the monks of the adjoining Abbey of Underlach, and
partly to avail himself of a local tradition as to a Fantôme Sanglant, who
haunts the neighbourhood, and can be conveniently played by the aid of a
crimson mantle. The slaughter of the monks, however, is not the only event
or circumstance which links Underlach to the crimes of Charles, for it is
now inhabited by a Baron d'Herstall (whose daughter, seduced by the Duke,
has died early) and his niece, Elodie de Saint-Maur, whose father, a former
favourite of the Burgundian, that prince has killed in one of his fits of rage.
Throw in a local priest, Anselm, and you have what may be called the chief
characters; but a good Count Ecbert de Norindall, a wicked Prince of Palzo,

and divers others figure. Everybody, including the mysterious Bleeding-
Phantom-Solitary-Duke himself, falls in love with Elodie,[78] and she is
literally "carried off" (that is to say, shouldered) several times, once by the
alarming person in the crimson shroud, but always rescued, till it is time for
her to die and be followed by him. There are endless "alarums and
excursions"; some of the not explained supernatural; woods, caves, ruins,
underground passages—entirely at discretion. Catherine Morland would
have been perfectly happy with it.
It is not, however, because it contains these things that it has been called
"rubbish." A book might contain them all—Mrs. Radcliffe's own do, with
the aggravation of the explained wonders—and not be that. It is because of
the extraordinary silliness of the style and sentiments. I should imagine that
M. d'Arlincourt was trying to write like his brother viscount, the author of
Les Martyrs, and a pretty mess he has made of it. "Le char de la nuit roulait
silencieux sur les plaines du ciel" (p. 3). "L'entrée du jour venait de
s'élancer radieuse du palais de l'Aurore." "L'amante de l'Érèbe et la mère
des Songes[79] avait achevé la moitié de sa course ténébreuse," etc., etc. The
historic present is constantly battling with the more ordinary tenses—the
very same sentence sometimes contains both. And this half-blown bladder
of a style conveys sentiments as feebly pompous as itself. The actual story,
though no great thing, is, if you could strip it of its froth and fustian, not so
very bad: as told it is deplorable.
At the same time its mere existence—much more the fury of acceptance
which for the moment greeted it—shows what that moment wanted. It
wanted Romance, and in default of better it took Le Solitaire.

An occasional contrast of an almost violent kind may be permitted in a
work requiring something more than merely catalogue-composition. It can
hardly be found more appropriately than by concluding this chapter, which
began with the account of Paul de Kock, by one of Charles Nodier.
To the student and lover of literature there is scarcely a
more interesting figure in French literary history, though Nodier.

there are many greater. Except a few scraps (which, by one of the odd ways
of the book-world, actually do not appear in some editions of his Œuvres
Choisies), he did nothing which had the quality of positive greatness in it.
But he was a considerable influence: and even more of a "sign." Younger
than Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, but far older than any of the men
of 1830 proper, he may be said in a way to have, in his single person,
played in France that part of schoolmaster to Romanticism, which had been
distributed over two generations and many personalities in England; and
which Germany, after a fashion, did without, at the cost of a few
undisciplined and quickly overbloomed master-years. Although he was born
in 1780, nine years before the Revolution itself, he underwent German and
English influences early, "took" Wertherism, Terrorism,[80] and other
maladies of that fin de siècle with the utmost facility, and produced divers
ultra-Romantic things long before 1830 itself. But he had any number of
literary and other avocations or distractions. He was a kind of entomologist
and botanist, a kind of philologist (one is a little astonished to find that
rather curious and very charlatanish person and parson Sir Herbert Croft,
whose secretary Nodier was for a time, dignified in French books by the
name of "philologue Anglais"), a good deal more than a kind of
bibliographer (he spent the last twenty years of his life as Librarian of the
Arsenal), and an enthusiastic and stimulating, though not exactly
trustworthy, critic. But he concerns us here, of course, for his prose fiction,
which, if not very bulky, is numerous in its individual examples, and is
animated in the best of them by a spirit almost new in French and, though
often not sufficiently caught and concentrated, present to almost the highest
degrees in at least three examples—the last part of La Fée aux Miettes, La
Légende de Sœur Béatrix, and, above all, Inès de las Sierras.
For those who delight in literary filiations and genealogies, the kind of story
in which Nodier excelled (and in which, though some of his own were
written after 1830, he may truly be considered as "schoolmaster" to
Mérimée and Gautier and Gérard de Nerval and all their fellows), may be,
without violence or exaggeration, said to be a new form of the French fairy-
tale, divested of common form, and readjusted with the help of the German
Märchen and fantasy-pieces. Le Diable Amoureux had, no doubt, set the
fashion of this kind earlier; but that story, charming as it is, is still scarcely
"Romantic." Nodier is so wholly; and it is fair to remember that Hoffmann

himself was rather a contemporary of his, and subject to the same
influences, than a predecessor.[81]
The best collection of Nodier's short tales contains nine
pieces: Trilby, Le Songe d'Or, Baptiste Montauban, La His short stories.
Fée aux Miettes, La Combe de l'Homme mort, Inès de
las Sierras, Smarra, La Neuvaine de la Chandeleur, and La Légende de
Sœur Béatrix. Of these I believe Trilby, La Fée aux Miettes, and Smarra
have been the greatest favourites, and were pretty certainly the most
influential in France. My own special delights are Le Songe d'Or, Inès de
las Sierras, and Sœur Béatrix, with part of the Fée. But none is without its
attractions, and the Preface to the Fée aux Miettes, which is almost a
separate piece, has something of the quintessential in that curious quality
which Nodier possesses almost alone in French or with Gérard de Nerval
and Louis Bertrand only. English readers may "perceive a good deal of
[Charles] Lamb in it," with touches of Sterne and De Quincey and Poe.
It is much to be feared that more people in England
nowadays associate the name of "Trilby" with the late Trilby.
Mr. Du Maurier than with Nodier, and that more still
associate it with the notion of a hat than with either of the men of genius
who used it in literature.

So mighty Byron, dead and turned to clay,
Gave name to collars for full many a day;
And Ramillies, grave of Gallic boasts so big,
Found most perpetuation in a wig.[82]

The original story united divers attractions for its first readers in 1822,
combining the older fashion of Ossian with the newer one of Scott, infusing
the supernatural, which was one great bait of the coming Romanticism, and
steeping the whole cake in the tears of the newer rather than the older
"Sensibility." "Trilby, le Lutin d'Argaïl"[83] (Nodier himself explains that he
alters the spelling here with pure phonetic intent, so as to keep the
pronunciation for French eyes and ears[84]), is a spirit who haunts the cabin
of the fisherman Dougal to make a sort of sylph-like love to his wife
Jeannie. He means and does no harm, but he is naturally a nuisance to the
husband, on whom he plays tricks to keep him away from home, and at

length rather frightens the wife. They procure, from a neighbouring
monastery, a famous exorcist monk, who, though he cannot directly punish
Trilby, lays on him sentence of exclusion from the home of the pair, unless
one of them invites him, under penalty of imprisonment for a thousand
years. How the story turns to Jeannie's death and Trilby's duress can be
easily imagined, and may be read with pleasure. I confess that to me it
seems pretty, but just a little mawkish.[85] Perhaps I am a brute.
Le Songe d'Or, on the other hand, though in a way
tragic, and capable of being allegorised almost ad Le Songe d'Or.
infinitum in its sense of some of the riddles of the
painful earth, is not in the least sentimental, and is told, till just upon the
end, with a certain tender irony. The author called it "Fable Levantine," and
the venerable Lo[c]kman is introduced in it. But I have read it several times
without caring (perhaps this was reprehensible) to ascertain whether it is in
the recognised Lokman bunch or not. All I know is that here Nodier and not
Lokman has told it, and that the result is delightful. First a beautiful
"kardouon," the prettiest of lizards, all azure and ruby and gold, finds in the
desert a heap of gold-pieces. He breaks his teeth on them, but is sure that
such nice-looking things must be good to eat—probably slices of a root
which some careless person has left too long in the sun—and that, if
properly treated, they will make a famous winter provision. So he conveys
them with much care and exertion, one by one, to a soft bed of fresh moss,
just the thing to catch the dew, under the shadow of a fine old tree. And,
being naturally tired, he goes to sleep beside them. And this is the history of
the kardouon.
Now there was in that neighbourhood a poor woodcutter named Xaïloun—
deformed, and not much more than half-witted, but amiable—who had
taken a great fancy to the kardouon as being a beautiful beast, and likely to
make a charming friend. But the kardouon, after the manner of shy lizards,
had by no means reciprocated this affection, and took shelter behind stones
and tree-stumps when advances were made to him. So that the children, and
even his own family, including his mother, used to jeer at Xaïloun and tell
him to go to his friend. On this particular occasion, the day after the
kardouon's trouvaille, Xaïloun actually found the usually wide-awake
animal sleeping. And as the place, with the moss and the great tree-shadow
and a running stream close by, was very attractive, Xaïloun lay down by the

lizard to wait till he should wake. But as he himself might go to sleep, and
the animal, accustomed to the sun, might get a chill in the shade, Xaïloun
put his own coat over him. And he too slept, after thinking how nice the
kardouon's friendship would be when they both woke. And this is the
history of Xaïloun.
Next day again there came a fakir named Abhoc, who was on a pretended
pilgrimage, but really on the look-out for what he might get. He saw a
windfall at once, was sure that neither of its sleeping guardians could keep
it from him, and very piously thanked the Almighty for rewarding his past
devotion and self-sacrifice by opening a merry and splendid life to him. But
as, with such custodians, the treasure could be "lifted" without the slightest
difficulty, he too lay down by it, and went to sleep, dreaming of Schiraz
wine in golden cups and a harem peopled with mortal houris. And this is the
history of the fakir Abhoc.
A day and a night passed, and the morrow came. Again there passed a wise
doctor of laws, Abhac by name, who was editing a text to which a hundred
and thirty-two different interpretations had been given by Eastern Cokes
and Littletons. He had just hit upon the hundred and thirty-third—of course
the true one—when the sight described already struck him and put the
discovery quite out of his head, to be lost for ever. As became a jurist, he
was rather a more practical person than the woodcutter or the fakir, if not
than the lizard. His human predecessors were, evidently, thieves, and must
be brought to justice, but it would be well to secure "pieces of conviction."
So he began to wrap up the coins in his turban and carry them away. But
there were so many, and it was so heavy, that he grew very weary. So he too
laid him down and slept. And this is the history of the doctor Abhac.
But on the fifth day there appeared a much more formidable person than the
others, and also a much more criminous. This was the "King of the
Desert"—bandit and blackmailer of caravans. Being apparently a bandit of
letters, he reflected that, though lizards, being, after all, miniature dragons,
were immemorial guardians of treasure, they could not have any right in it,
but were most inconveniently likely to wake if any noise were made. The
others were three to one—too heavy odds by daylight. But if he sat down by
them till night came he could stab them one by one while they were asleep,

and perhaps breakfast on the kardouon—said to be quite good meat. And he
went to sleep himself. And this is the history of the King of the Desert.
But next day again the venerable Lokman passed by, and he saw that the
tree was a upas tree and the sleepers were dead. And he understood it all,
and he passed his hand through his beard and fell on his face, and gave
glory to God. And then he buried the three covetous ones in separate graves
under the upas itself. But he put Xaïloun in a safer place, that his friends
might come and do right to him; and he buried the kardouon apart on a little
slope facing the sun, such as lizards love, and near Xaïloun. And, lastly,
having stroked his beard again, he buried the treasure too. But he was very
old: and he was very weary when he had finished this, and God took him.
And on the seventh day there came an angel and promised Xaïloun
Paradise, and made a mark on his tomb with a feather from his own wing.
And he kissed the forehead of Lokman and made him rise from the dead,
and took him to the seventh heaven itself. And this is the history of the
angel. It all happened ages ago, and though the name of Lokman has lived
always through them, so has the shadow of the upas tree.
And this is the history of the world.
Only a child's goody-goody tale? Possibly. But for my part I know no better
philosophy and, at least as Nodier told it, not much better literature.
Baptiste Montauban and La Combe de l'Homme mort
are, though scarcely shorter than Le Songe d'Or, slighter. Minors.
The first is a pathetic but not quite consummate story of
"love and madness" in a much better sense than that in which Nodier's
eccentric employer, Sir Herbert Croft, used the words as his title for the
history of Parson Hackman and Miss Ray.[86] The second ("combe," the
omission of which from the official French dictionaries Nodier
characteristically denounces, is our own "combe"—a deep valley; from, I
suppose, the Celtic Cwm; and pronounced by Devonshire folk in a manner
which no other Englishman, born east of the line between the mouths of the
Parret and the Axe, can master) is a good but not supreme diablerie of a not
uncommon kind. La Neuvaine de la Chandeleur is longer, and from some
points of view the most pathetic of all. A young man, hearing some girls
talk of a much-elaborated ceremony like those of Hallowe'en in Scotland

and of St. Agnes' Eve in Keats, by which (in this case) both sexes can see
their fated lovers, tries it, and discerns, in dream or vision, his ideal as well
as his fate. She turns out to be an actual girl whom he has never seen, but
whom both his father and her father—old friends—earnestly desire that he
should marry. He travels to her home, is enthusiastically greeted, and finds
her even more bewitching than her wraith or whatever it is to be called. But
she is evidently in bad health, and dies the same night of aneurism. Not
guested in the house, but trysted in the morning, he goes there, and seeing
preparations in the street for a funeral, asks of some one, being only half
alarmed, "Qui est mort?" The answer is, "Mademoiselle Cecile Savernier."
Had these words terminated the story it would have been nearly perfect.
Two more pages of the luckless lover's progress to resignation from despair
and projected suicide seem to me to blunt the poignancy.
In fact, acknowledging most humbly that I could not
write even the worst and shortest of Nodier's stories, I La Fée aux Miettes.
am bound to say that I think he was not to be trusted
with a long one. La Fée aux Miettes is at once an awful and a delightful
example. The story of the mad shipwright Michel, who fell in love with the
old dwarf beggar—so unlike her of Bednal Green or King Cophetua's love
—at the church door of Avranches; who followed her to Greenock and got
inextricably mixed between her and the Queen of Sheba; who for some time
passed his nights in making love to Belkis and his days in attending to the
wisdom of the Fairy of the Crumbs (she always brought him his breakfast
after the Sabaean Nights); who at last identified the two in one final rapture,
after seeking for a Singing Mandrake; and who spent the rest (if not, indeed,
the whole) of his days in the Glasgow Lunatic Asylum;—is at times so
ineffably charming that one is almost afraid oneself to repeat the refrain—

C'est moi, c'est moi, c'est moi!
Je suis la Mandragore!
La fille des beaux jours qui s'éveille à l'aurore—
Et qui chante pour toi!

though, after all, every one whose life has been worth living has listened for
the song all that life—and has heard it sometimes.

To find any fault with the matrix of this opal is probably blasphemous. But I
own that I could do without the Shandean prologue and epilogue of the
narrator and his man-servant Daniel Cameron. And though, as a tomfool
myself, I would fain not find any of the actions of my kind alien from me, I
do find some of the tomfoolery with which Nodier has seasoned the story
superfluous. Why call a damsel "Folly Girlfree"? What would a Frenchman
say if an English story-teller christened some girl of Gaul "Sottise
Librefille"? "Sir Jap Muzzleburn," the Bailiff of the Isle of Man, and his
black poodle-equerry, Master Blatt, amuse me but little; and Master
Finewood, the shipbuilder,—whose rejected six sons-in-law, lairds of high
estate, run away with his thirty thousand guineas, and are checkmated by
six sturdy shipwrights,—less. I have no doubt it is my fault, my very great
fault, but I wish they would go, and leave me with Michel and La Fée, or
rather allow me to be Michel with La Fée.
Smarra—which made a great impression on its
contemporaries and had a strong influence on the Smarra and Sœur
Romantic movement generally—is a fantasia of Béatrix.
nightmare based on the beginning of The Golden Ass, with, again, a sort of
prologue and epilogue of modern love. It is undoubtedly a fine piece of
work of its kind and beautifully written. But in itself it seems to me a little
too much of a tour de force, and its kind a little rococo. Again, mea maxima
culpa perhaps. On the other hand, Sœur Béatrix is a most charmingly told
version of a very wide-spread story—that of Our Lady taking the place of
an erring sister during her sojourn in the world, and restoring her to it
without any scandal when she returns repentant and miserable after years of
absence. It could not be better done.
But the jewel of the book, and of Nodier's work, to me,
is Inès de las Sierras—at least its first and larger part; Inès de las Sierras.
for Nodier, in one of those exasperatingly uncritical
whims of his which have been noticed, and which probably prevented him
from ever writing a really good novel of length, has attached an otiose
explanation à la Mrs. Radcliffe, which, if it may please the weakest kind of
weak brethren, may almost disgust another, and as to which I myself
exercise the critic's cadi-rights by simply ignoring and banishing what I
think superfluous. As for what remains, once more, it could not be done
better.

Three French officers, at the moment of disturbance of the French garrisons
in the north of Spain, owing to Napoleon's Russian disasters (perhaps also
to more local events, which it was not necessary for Nodier to mention), are
sent on remount duty from Gerona to Barcelona, where there is a great
horse-fair on. They are delayed by bad weather and other accidents, and are
obliged to stop half-way after nightfall. But the halting-place is choke-full
of other travellers on their way to the same fair, and neither at inn nor in
private house is there any room whatever, though there is no lack of
"provant." Everybody tells them that they can only put up at "the castle of
Ghismondo." Taking this for a Spanish folkword, they get rather angry. But,
finding that there is a place of the name close by in the hills—ruinous,
haunted, but actual—they take plenty of food, wine, and torches, etc., and
persuade, with no little difficulty, their arriero and even their companion
and the real hirer of the vehicle (a theatrical manager, who has allowed
them to accompany him, when they could get no other) to dare the night
adventure. On the way the arriero tells them the legend, how, centuries
before, Ghismondo de las Sierras, ruined by debauchery, established
himself in this his last possession, with one squire, one page (both of the
worst characters), his beautiful niece Inès, whom he has seduced, and a few
desperate followers, who help him to live by brigandage. Every night the
three chiefs drank themselves senseless, and were regularly dragged to bed
by their men. But one Christmas Eve at midnight, Inès, struck with remorse,
entered the hall of orgies, and implored them to repent, actually kneeling
before Ghismondo, and placing her hand on his heart. To which the ruffian
replied by stabbing her, and leaving her for the men-at-arms to find, a
corpse, among the drunken but live bodies. For a whole twelvemonth the
three see, in dreams, their victim come and lay a burning hand on their
hearts; and at its end, on the same day and at the same hour, the dream
comes true—the phantom appears, speaks once, "Here am I!" sits with
them, eats and drinks, even sings and dances, but finally lays the flaming
hand of the dream on each heart; and they die in torture—the men-at-arms
entering as usual, only to find four corpses. (Now it is actually Christmas
Eve—the Spanish Noche Buena—at "temp. of tale.")
So far the story, though admirably told, in a fashion which mere summary
cannot convey, is, it may be said, not more than "as per usual." Not so what
follows.

The four travellers—the unnamed captain who tells the story; his two
lieutenants, Boutraix, a bluff Voltairian, with an immense capacity for food
and drink, and Sergy, a young and romantic Celadon, plus the actor-
manager Bascara, who is orthodox—with the arriero, arrive at last at the
castle, which is Udolphish enough, and with some difficulty reach, over
broken staircases and through ruined corridors, the great banqueting-hall.
[87]

Here—for it is less ruinous that the rest of the building and actually
contains furniture and mouldering pictures—they make themselves
tolerably comfortable with their torches, a huge fire made up from broken
stairs and panels, abundance of provisions, and two dozen of wine, less a
supply for the arriero, who prudently remains in the stables, alleging that
the demons that haunt those places are fairly familiar to him and not very
mischievous. As the baggage has got very wet during the day, the dresses
and properties of Bascara's company are taken out and put to air. Well filled
with food and drink, the free-thinker Boutraix proposes that they shall equip
themselves from these with costumes not unsuitable to the knight, squire,
and page of the legend, and they do so, Bascara refusing to take part in the
game, and protesting strongly against their irreverence. At last midnight
comes, and they cry, "Where is Inès de las Sierras?" lifting their glasses to
her health. Suddenly there sounds from the dark end of the great hall the
fateful "Here am I!" and there comes forward a figure in a white shroud,
which seats itself in the vacant place assigned by tradition to Inès herself.
She is extraordinarily beautiful, and is, under the white covering, dressed in
a fashion resembling the mouldering portrait which they have seen in the
gallery. She speaks too, half rallying them, as if surprised at their surprise;
she calls herself Inès de las Sierras; she throws on the table a bracelet with
the family arms, which they have also seen dimly emblazoned or sculptured
about the castle; she eats; and, as a final piece of conviction, she tears her
dress open and shows the scar on her breast. Then she drinks response to
the toast they had in mockery proposed; she accepts graciously the
advances of the amorous Sergy; she sings divinely, and she dances more
divinely still. The whole scene is described supremely well, but the
description of the dance is one of the very earliest and very finest pieces of
Romantic French prose. One may try, however rashly, to translate it:
(She has found a set of castanets in her girdle.)

She rose and made a beginning by grave and measured steps,
displaying, with a mixture of grace and majesty, the perfection
of her figure and the nobility of her attitudes. As she shifted her
position and put herself in new aspects, our admiration turned to
amazement, as though another and another beautiful woman had
come within our view, so constantly did she surpass herself in
the inexhaustible variety of her steps and her movements. First,
in rapid transition, we saw her pass from a serious dignity to
transports of pleasure, at first moderate, but growing more and
more animated; then to soft and voluptuous languors; then to the
delirium of joy, and then to some strange ecstasy more delirious
still. Next, she disappeared in the far-off darkness of the huge
hall, and the clash of the castanets grew feeble in proportion to
the distance, and diminished ever till, as we ceased to see, so we
ceased to hear her. But again it came back from the distance,
increasing always by degrees, till it burst out full as she
reappeared in a flood of light at the spot where we least
expected her. And then she came so near that she touched us
with her dress, clashing the castanets with a maddening
volubility, till they weakened once more and twittered like
cicalas, while now and then across their monotonous racket she
uttered shrill yet tender cries which pierced to our own souls.
Afterwards she retired once more, but plunged herself only half
in the darkness, appearing and disappearing by turns, now flying
from our gaze and now desiring to be seen,[88] while later still
you neither saw nor heard her save for a far-off plaintive note
like the sigh of a dying girl. And we remained aghast, throbbing
with admiration and fear, longing for the moment when her veil,
fluttering with the dance-movement, should be lighted up by the
torches, when her voice should warn us of her return, with a
joyful cry, to which we answered involuntarily, because it made
us vibrate with a crowd of secret harmonies. Then she came
back; she spun round like a flower stripped from its stalk by the
wind; she sprang from the ground as if it rested only with her to
quit earth for ever; she dropped again as if it was only her will
which kept her from touching it at all; she did not bound from
the floor—you would have thought that she shot from it—that

some mysterious law of her destiny forbade her to touch it, save
in order to fly from it. And her head, bent with an expression of
caressing impatience, and her arms, gracefully opened, as
though in appealing prayer, seemed to implore us to save her.
The captain himself is on the point of yielding to the temptation, but is
anticipated by Sergy, whose embrace she returns, but sinks into a chair, and
then, seeming to forget the presence of the others altogether, invites him to
follow her through tortuous and ruined passages (which she describes) to a
sepulchre, which she inhabits, with owls for her only live companions. Then
she rises, picks up her shroud-like mantle, and vanishes in the darkness with
a weird laugh and the famous words, "Qui m'aime me suive."
The other three have the utmost difficulty in preventing Sergy (by main
force at first) from obeying. And the captain tries rationalism, suggesting
first that the pretended Inès is a bait for some gang of assassins or at least
brigands, then that the whole thing is a trick of Bascara's to "produce" a
new cantatrice. But Boutraix, who has been entirely converted from his
Voltairianism by the shock, sets aside the first idea like a soldier, and
Bascara rebuts the second like a sensible man. Brigands certainly would
give no such warning of their presence, and a wise manager does not
expose his prima donna's throat to cohabitation in ruins with skeletons and
owls. They finally agree on silence, and shortly afterwards the three officers
leave Spain. Sergy is killed at Lutzen, murmuring the name of Inès.
Boutraix, who has never relapsed, takes the cowl, and the captain retires
after the war to his own small estate, where he means to stay. He ends by
saying Voilà tout.
Alas! it is not all, and it is not the end. Some rather idle talk with the
auditors follows, and then there is the above-mentioned Radcliffian
explanation, telling how Inès was a real Las Sierras of a Mexican branch,
who had actually made her début as an actress, had been, as was at first
thought, murdered by a worthless lover, but recovered. Her wits, however,
were gone, and having escaped from the kind restraint under which she was
put, she had wandered to the castle of her ancestors, afterwards completely
recovering her senses and returning to the profession in the company of
Bascara himself.

Now I think that, if I took the trouble to do so, I could point out
improbabilities in this second story sufficient to damn it on its own
showing.[89] But, as has been said already, I prefer to leave it alone. I never
admired George Vavasour in Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? But I own
that I agree with him heartily in his opinion that "making a conjurer explain
his tricks" is despicably poor fun.
Still, the story, which ends at "Voilà tout" and which for me does so end
"for good and all," is simply magnificent. I have put it elsewhere with
Wandering Willie's Tale, which it more specially resembles in the way in
which the ordinary turns into the extraordinary. It falls short of Scott in
vividness, character, manners, and impressiveness, but surpasses him in
beauty[90] of style and imagery. In particular, Nodier has here, in a manner
which I hardly remember elsewhere, achieved the blending of two kinds of
"terror"—the ordinary kind which, as it is trivially called, "frightens" one,
and the other[91] terror which accompanies the intenser pleasures of sight
and sound and feeling, and heightens them by force of contrast. The scene
of Inès' actual appearance would have been the easiest thing in the world to
spoil, and therefore was the most difficult thing in the world to do right. But
it is absolutely right. In particular, the way in which her conduct in at once
admitting Sergy's attentions, and finally inviting him to "follow," is guarded
from the very slightest suggestion of the professional "comingness" of a
common courtesan, and made the spontaneous action of a thing divine or
diabolic, is really wonderful.
At the same time, the adverse criticism made here, with that on La Fée aux
Miettes and a few other foregoing remarks, will probably prepare the reader
for the repeated and final judgment that Nodier was very unlikely to
produce a good long story. And, though I have not read quite all that he
wrote, I certainly think that he never did.
In adding new and important masterpieces to the
glittering chain of short cameo-like narratives which Nodier's special
quality.
form the peculiar glory of French literature, he did
greatly. And his performance and example were greater still in respect of
the quality which he infused into those best pieces of his work which have
been examined here. It is hardly too much to say that this quality had been
almost dormant—a sleeping beauty among the lively bevies of that

literature's graces—ever since the Middle Ages, with some touches of
waking—hardly more than motions in a dream—at the Renaissance. The
comic Phantasy had been wakeful and active enough; the graver and more
serious tragic Imagination had been, though with some limitations, busy at
times. But this third sister—Our Lady of Dreams, one might call her in
imitation of a famous fancy—had not shown herself much in French
merriment or in French sadness: the light of common day there had been
too much for her. Yet in Charles Nodier she found the magician who could
wake her from sleep: and she told him what she had thought while sleeping.
[92]

FOOTNOTES:
[37] Vol. I. pp. 458, 472, notes.
[38] Vol. I. p. 161.
[39] When he published Le Cocu, it was set about that a pudibund lady had
asked her book-seller for "Le Dernier de M. Paul de Kock." And this
circumlocution became for a time popular, as a new name for the poor creature
on the ornaments of whose head our Elizabethans joked so untiringly.
[40] A short essay, or at least a "middle" article, might be written on this way of
regarding a prophet in his own country, coupling Béranger with Paul de Kock.
Of course the former is by much a major prophet in verse than Paul is in prose.
But the attitude of the superior French person to both is, in different degrees, the
same. (Thackeray in the article referred to below, p. 62 note, while declaring
Paul to be the French writer whose works are best known in England, says that
his educated countrymen think him pitoyable.—Works, Oxford edition, vol. ii p.
533.)
[41] A gibe at the Vicomte d'Arlincourt's very popular novel, to be noticed
below. I have not, I confess, identified the passage: but it may be in one of the
plays.
[42] It would not be fair to compare the two as makers of literature. In that
respect Theodore Hook is Paul's Plutarchian parallel, though he has more
literature and less life.
[43] Charity, outrunning knowledge, may plead "Irony perhaps?" Unfortunately
there is no chance of it.
[44] I really do not know who was (see a little below). Parny in his absurd
Goddam! (1804) has something of it.
[45] And he knew something of it through Addison.

[46] The straight hair is particularly curious, for, as everybody who knows
portraits of the early nineteenth century at all is aware, Englishmen of the time
preferred brushed back and rather "tousled" locks. In Maclise's famous
"Fraserians" there is hardly a straight-combed head among all the twenty or
thirty. At the same time it is fair to say that our own book-illustrators and
caricaturists, for some strange reason, did a good deal to authorise the libels.
Cruikshank was no doubt a wonderful draughtsman, but I never saw (and I thank
God for it) anything like many, if not most, of his faces. "Phiz" and Cattermole
in (for example) their illustrations to The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby
Rudge sometimes out-Cruikshank Cruikshank in this respect.
[47] Paul's ideas of money are still very modest. An income of 6000 francs
(£240) represents ease if not affluence; with double the amount you can "aspire
to a duchess," and even the dispendious Irish-French Viscount Edward de
Sommerston in La Fille aux Trois Jupons (v. inf.) starts on his career with
scarcely more than three thousand a year.
[48] Paul's scholarship was very rudimentary, as is shown in not a few scraps of
ungrammatical Latin: he never, I think, ventures on Greek. But whether he was
the first to estropier the not ugly form "Cleodora," I know not. Perhaps he
muddled it with "Clotilde."
[49] This cult of the widow might form the subject of a not uninteresting
excursus if we were not confining ourselves to the literary sides of our matter. It
has been noticed before (Vol. I. p. 368), and forms one of the most curious
differences between the two countries. For, putting Mr. Weller out of the
question, I have known far from sentimental critics who thought Trollope's best
book by no means improved by the previous experience of Eleanor Bold.
Cherolatry in France, however, is not really old: it hardly appears before the
eighteenth century. It may be partly due to a more or less conscious idea that
perhaps the lady may have got over the obligatory adultery at the expense of her
"dear first" and may not think it necessary to repeat. A sort of "measles over."
[50] He also improves his neglected education in a manner not unsuggestive of
Prince Giglio. In fact, I fancy there is a good deal of half-latent parody of Paul in
Thackeray.
[51] There might have been fifteen or fifty, for the book is more a sequence of
scenes than a schematic composition: for which reason the above account of it
may seem somewhat décousu.
[52] I think I have commented elsewhere on the difficulty of villains. It was
agreeable to find confirmation, when this book was already in the printer's
hands, given at an exemption tribunal by a theatrical manager. For six weeks, he
said, he had advertised and done everything possible to supply the place of a
good villain, with no success. And your bad stage villain may be comic: while
your bad novel villain is only a bore.
[53] Frédérique, Madame Dauberny (who has, without legal sanction, relieved
herself of a loathsome creature whom she has married, and lives a free though
not at all immoral life), was not very easy to do, and is very well done.

[54] This, which is short and thoroughly lively, is, I imagine, the latest of Paul's
good books. It is indeed so late that instead of the jupons, striped and black and
white, of which Georgette has made irreproachable but profitable use, she
appears at the denouement in a crinoline!
[55] The most interesting thing in it is a longish account by Jacques of his
association with a travelling quack and fortune-teller, which at once reminds one
of Japhet in Search of a Father. The resemblances and the differences are almost
equally characteristic.
[56] Of course I am not comparing him with Paul on any other point.
[57] Except in regard to the historical and other matters noticed above, hardly at
all.
[58] For a picture of an actual grisette, drawn by perhaps the greatest master of
artistic realism (adjective and substantive so seldom found in company!) who
ever lived, see that Britannia article of Thackeray's before referred to—an
article, for a long time, unreprinted, and therefore, till a comparatively short time
ago, practically unknown. This and its companion articles from the Britannia
and the Corsair, all of 1840-41, but summarising ten or twelve years' knowledge
of Paris, form, with the same author's Paris Sketch Book (but as representing a
more mature state of his genius), the best commentary on Paul de Kock. They
may be found together in the third volume of the Oxford Thackeray edited by
the present writer.
[59] Unless they start from the position that an English writer on the French
novel is bound to follow—or at least to pay express attention to—French
criticism of it. This position I respectfully but unalterably decline to accept. A
critical tub that has no bottom of its own is the very worst Danaid's vessel in all
the household gear of literature.
[60] The scene and society are German, but the author knows the name to have
been originally English.
[61] Such, perhaps, as Gibbon himself may have used while he "sighed as a
lover" and before he "obeyed as a son." It should perhaps be said that Mme. de
Montolieu produced many other books, mostly translations—among the latter a
French version of The Swiss Family Robinson.
[62] In dealing with "Sensibility" earlier, it was pointed out how extensively
things were dealt with by letter. In such cases as these the fashion came in rather
usefully.
[63] The treatment of the authors here mentioned, infra, will, I hope, show that
the introduction of their names is not merely "promiscuous."
[64] I am quite prepared to be told that this was somebody else or nobody at all.
"Moi, je dis Madame de Genlis."
[65] P. 436.
[66] The kind endeavours of the Librarian of the London Library to obtain some
in Paris itself were fruitless, but the old saying about neglecting things at your

own door came true. My friend Mr. Kipling urged me to try Mr. George Gregory
of Bath, and Mr. Gregory procured me almost all the books I am noticing in this
division.
[67] The British Museum (see Preface) being inaccessible to me.
[68] Readers will doubtless remember that the too wild career of this kind of
vehicle, charioteered by wicked aristocrats, has been among the thousand-and-
three causes assigned for the French Revolution.
[69] Of course the author of the glossaries himself was, by actual surname,
Dufresne, Ducange being a seignory.
[70] It should be observed that a very large number of these minor novels,
besides those specially mentioned as having undergone the process, from
Ducray's downwards, were melodramatised.
[71] That is to say, in the text: the second title of the whole book, "ou Les
Enfants de Maître Jacques," does in some sort give a warning, though it is with
Maître Jacques rather than with his children that the fresh start is made.
[72] He has, though unknown and supposed to be an intruder, carried her off
from an English adorer—a sort of Lovelace-Byron, whose name is Lord
Gousberycharipay (an advance on Paul de Kock and even Parny in the
nomenclature of the English peerage), and who inserts h's before French words!
[73] If novels do not exaggerate the unpopularity of these persons (strictly the
lay members of the S.J., but often used for the whole body of religious orders
and their lay partisans), the success of "July" needs little further explanation.
[74] That is to say, not a bogey, but a buggy.
[75] Here is another instance. Ludovica's father and a bad Russo-Prussian
colonel have to be finished off at Waterloo. One might suppose that Waterloo
itself would suffice. But no: they must engage in single combat, and even then
not kill each other, the Russian's head being carried off by some kind of a
cannon-ball and the Frenchman's breast pierced by half a dozen Prussian lances.
This is really "good measure."
[76] Ousting others which deserved the place better? It may be so, but one may
perhaps "find the whole" without particularising everything. Of short books
especially, from Fiévée's Dot de Suzette (1798), which charmed society in its
day, to Eugénie Foa's Petit Robinson de Paris (1840), which amused me when I
was about ten years old, there were no end if one talked.
[77] V. inf. on M. Ohnet's books.
[78] Many people have probably noticed the frequency of this name—not a very
pretty one in itself, and with no particular historical or other attraction—in
France and French of the earlier nineteenth century. It was certainly due to Le
Solitaire.
[79] If any proper moral reader is disturbed at this conjunction of amante and
mère, he will be glad to know that M. d'Arlincourt elsewhere regularises the
situation and calls Night "l'épouse d'Érèbe."

[80] In the Radcliffian-literary not the Robespierrean-political sense. For the
Wertherism, v. sup. on Chateaubriand, p. 24 note.
[81] He was four years older than Nodier, but did not begin to write fiction
nearly so early. The Phantasiestücke are of 1814, while Nodier had been writing
stories, under German influence, as early as 1803. It is, however, also fair to say
that all those now to be noticed are later than 1814, and even than Hoffmann's
later collections, the Elixiere des Teufels and Nachtstücke.
[82] The prudent as well as judicious poet who wrote these lines provided a
variant to suit those who, basing their position on "Ramillies cock," maintain
that it was a hat, not a wig, that was named after Villeroy's defeat. For "grave—
big" read "where Gallic hopes fell flat," and for "wig" "hat" simpliciter, and the
thing is done. But Thackeray has "Ramillies wig" and Scott implies it.
[83] Nodier, who had been in Scotland and, as has been said, was a philologist of
the better class, is scrupulously exact in spelling proper names as a rule. Perhaps
Loch Fyne is not exactly "Le Lac Beau" (I have not the Gaelic). But from
Pentland to Solway (literally) he makes no blunder, and he actually knows all
about "Argyle's Bowling Green."
[84] If phonetics had never done anything worse than this they would not be as
loathsome to literature as they sometimes are.
[85] On the other hand, compared with its slightly elder contemporary, Le
Solitaire (v. sup.), it is a masterpiece.
[86] Two little passages towards the end are very precious. A certain bridegroom
(I abridge a little) is "perfectly healthy, perfectly self-possessed, a great talker, a
successful man of business, with some knowledge of physics, chemistry,
jurisprudence, politics, statistics, and phrenology; enjoying all the requirements
of a deputy; and for the rest, a liberal, an anti-romantic, a philanthropist, a very
good fellow—and absolutely intolerable." This person later changes the humble
home of tragedy into a "school of mutual instruction, where the children learn to
hate and envy each other and to read and write, which was all they needed to
become detestable creatures." These words "please the soul well."
[87] The description is worth comparing with that of Gautier's Château de la
Misère—the difference between all but complete ruin and mere, though extreme,
disrepair being admirably, and by the later master in all probability designedly,
worked out.
[88] Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.
[89] Note, too, a hint at a never filled in romance of the captain's own.
[90] I must ask for special emphasis on "beauty." Nothing can be finer or fitter
than the style of Steenie's ghostly experiences. And the famous Claverhouse
passage is beautiful.
[91] As Rossetti saw it in "Sibylla Palmifera":

"Under the arch of Life, where Love and Death,
Terror and Mystery guard her shrine, I saw

Beauty enthroned."
[92] Perhaps there are few writers mentioned in this book to whose lovers
exactly the same kind of apology is desirable as it is in the case of Nodier.
"Where," I hear reproaching voices crying, "is Jean Sbogar? Where is Laure
Ruthwen ou les Vampires in novel-plural or Le Vampire in melodrama-singular?
Where are a score or a hundred other books, pieces, pages, paragraphs, passages
from five to fifty words long?" They are not here, and I could not find room for
them here. "But you found more room for Paul de Kock?" Yes: and I have tried
to show why.

CHAPTER III
VICTOR HUGO

At the present day, and perhaps in all days hitherto, the
greatest writer of the nineteenth century in France for Limitations.
length of practice, diversity of administration of genius,
height of intention, and (for a long time at least) magnitude and altitude of
fame, enjoys, and has enjoyed, more popular repute in England for his work
in prose fiction than for any other part of it. With the comparative side of
this estimate the present writer can indeed nowise agree; and the reasons of
his disagreement should be made good in the present chapter. But this is the
first opportunity he has had of considering, with fair room and verge, the
justice of the latter part of Tennyson's compliment "Victor in Romance";
and it will pretty certainly be the last. As for a general judgment of the
positive and relative value and qualities of the wonderful procession of
work—certainly deserving that adjective whatever other or others may be
added—which covers the space of a full half-century from Han d'Islande to
Quatre-Vingt-Treize, it would, according to the notions of criticism here
followed, be improper to attempt that till after the procession itself has been
carefully surveyed.
Nor will it be necessary to preface, to follow, or, except very rarely and
slightly, to accompany this survey with remarks on the non-literary
characteristics of this French Titan of literature. The object often of frantic
political and bitter personal abuse; for a long time of almost equally frantic
and much sillier political and personal idolatry; himself the victim—in
consequence partly of his own faults, partly of ignoble jealousy of
greatness, but perhaps most of all of the inevitable reaction from this foolish
cult—of the most unsparing rummage into those faults, and the weaknesses
which accompany them, that any poet or prose writer, even Pope, has
experienced—Victor Hugo still, though he has had many a vates in both
senses of sacer, may almost be allowed carere critico sacro,[93] in the best
sense, on the whole of his life and work. I have no pretensions to fill or
bridge the whole of the gap here. It will be quite task enough for the
present, leaving the life almost alone, to attempt the part of the work which
contains prose fiction. Nothing said of this will in the least affect what I
have often said elsewhere, and shall hold to as long as I hold anything, in
regard to the poetry—that its author is the greatest poet of France, and one
of the great poets of the world.

To deal with Hugo's first published, though not first
written, novel requires, in almost the highest degree, Han d'Islande.
what Mr. Matthew Arnold called "a purged considerate
mind." There are, I believe, some people (I myself know at least one of
great excellence) who, having had the good luck to read Han d'Islande as
schoolboys, and finding its vein congenial to theirs, have, as in such cases is
not impossible, kept it unscathed in their liking. But this does not happen to
every one. I do not think, though I am not quite certain, that when I first
read it myself I was exactly what may be called a schoolboy pure and
simple (that is to say, under fifteen). But if I did not read it in upper school-
boyhood (that is to say, before eighteen), I certainly did, not much later. I
own that at that time, whatever my exact age was, I found it so
uninteresting that I do not believe I read it through. Nor, except in the last
respect, have I improved with it—for it would be presumptuous to say, "has
it improved with me"—since. The author apologised for it in two successive
prefaces shortly after its appearance, and in yet another after that of Notre-
Dame de Paris, ten years later. None of them, it is to be feared, "touches the
spot." The first, indeed, is hardly an apology at all, but a sort of goguenard
"showing off" of the kind not uncommon with youth; the second, a little
more serious, contains rather interesting hits[94] of again youthful jealousy
at the popularity of Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil; the third and
much later one is a very early instance of the Victorian philosophising.
"There must be," we are told with the solemnity which for some sixty years
excited such a curious mixture of amazement and amusement, "in every
work of the mind—drama or novel—there must be many things felt, many
things observed, and many things divined," and while in Han there is only
one thing felt—a young man's love—and one observed—a girl's ditto—the
rest is all divined, is "the fantastic imagination of an adolescent."
One impeticoses the gratility of the explanation, and refrains, as far as may
be, from saying, "Words! words!" Unluckily, the book does very little
indeed to supply deeds to match. The feeling and the observation furnish
forth a most unstimulating love-story; at least the present critic, who has an
unabashed fondness for love-stories, has never been able to feel the
slightest interest either in Ordener Guldenlew or in Ethel Schumacker,
except in so far as the lady is probably the first of the since innumerable and
sometimes agreeable heroines of her name in fiction. As for the "divining,"

the "intention," and the "imagination," they have been exerted to sadly little
purpose. The absurd nomenclature, definitely excused in one of the
prefaces, may have a slight historic interest as the first attempt, almost a
hopeless failure, at that science des noms with which Hugo was later
credited, and which he certainly sometimes displayed. It is hardly necessary
to say much about Spladgest and Oglypiglaf, Musdaemon and Orugix. They
are pure schoolboyisms. But it is perhaps fair to relieve the author from the
reproach, which has been thrown on him by some of his English translators,
of having metamorphosed "Hans" into "Han." He himself explains
distinctly that the name was a nickname, taken from the grunt or growl (the
word is in France applied to the well-known noise made by a paviour lifting
and bringing down his rammer) of the monster.
But that monster himself! A more impossible improbability and a more
improbable impossibility never conceived itself in the brain of even an as
yet failure of an artist. Han appears to have done all sorts of nasty things,
such as eating the insides of babies when they were alive and drinking the
blood of enemies when they were not dead, out of the skulls of his own
offspring, which he had extracted from their dead bodies by a process like
peeling a banana: also to have achieved some terrible ones, such as burning
cathedrals and barracks, upsetting rocks on whole battalions, and so forth.
But the only chances we have of seeing him at real business show him to us
as overcoming, with some trouble, an infirm old man, and not overcoming
at all, after a struggle of long duration, a not portentously powerful young
one. His white bear, and not he, seems to have had the chief merit of
despatching six surely rather incompetent hunters who followed the rash
"Kennybol": and of his two final achievements, that of poniarding two men
in a court of justice might have been brought about by anybody who was
careless enough of his own life, and that of setting his gaol on fire by any
one who, with the same carelessness, had a corrupt gaoler to supply him
with the means.
It would be equally tedious and superfluous to go through the minor
characters and incidents. The virtuous and imprisoned statesman
Schumacker, Ethel's father, excites no sympathy: his malignant and finally
defeated enemy, the Chancellor Ahlefeld, no interest. That enemy's most
unvirtuous wife and her paramour Musdaemon—the villain of the piece as
Han is the monster—as to whom one wonders whether he could ever have

been as attractive as a lover as he is unattractive as a villain, are both
puppets. Indeed, one would hardly pay any attention to the book at all if it
did not hold a position in the work of a man of the highest genius partly
similar to, and partly contrasted with, that of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. But
St. Irvyne and Zastrozzi are much shorter than Han d'Islande, and Shelley,
whether by accident, wisdom (nemo omnibus horis insanit), or the direct
intervention of Apollo, never resumed the task for which his genius was so
obviously unsuited.
Still, it must be said for Hugo that, even at this time, he could have—in a
manner actually had—put in evidence of not absolute incompetence for the
task.
Bug-Jargal was, as glanced at above, written, according
to its author's own statement, two years before Han, Bug-Jargal.
when he was only sixteen; was partially printed (in the
Constitutionnel) and (in fear of a piracy) rewritten in fifteen days and
published, seven years after its composition, and almost as many before
Notre-Dame de Paris appeared. Taking it as it stands, there is nothing of the
sixteen years or of the fifteen days to be seen in it. It is altogether superior
to Han, and though it has not the nightmare magnificence and the
phantasmagoric variety of Notre-Dame, it is, not merely because it is much
shorter, a far better told, more coherent, and more generally human story.
The jester-obi Habibrah has indeed the caricature-grotesquery of Han
himself, and of Quasimodo, and long afterwards of Gwynplaine, as well as
the devilry of the first named and of Thénardier in Les Misérables; but we
do not see too much of him, and nothing that he does is exactly absurd or
utterly improbable. The heroine—so far as there is a heroine in Marie
d'Auverney, wife of the part-hero-narrator, but separated from him on the
very day of their marriage by the rebellion of San Domingo—is very slight;
but then, according to the story, she is not wanted to be anything more. The
cruelty, treachery, etc., of the half-caste Biassou are not overdone, nor is the
tropical scenery, nor indeed anything else. Even the character of Bug-Jargal
himself, a modernised Oroonoko (whom probably Hugo did not know) and
a more direct descendant of persons and things in Rousseau, Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, and to some extent the "sensibility" novelists generally (whom
he certainly did know), is kept within bounds. And, what is perhaps most
extraordinary of all, the half-comic interludes in the narrative where

Auverney's comrades talk while he makes breaks in his story, contain few
of Hugo's usually disastrous attempts at humour. It is impossible to say that
the book is of any great importance or of any enthralling interest. But it is
the most workmanlike of all Hugo's work in prose fiction, and, except Les
Travailleurs de La Mer and Quatre-Vingt-Treize, which have greater faults
as well as greater beauties, the most readable, if not, like them, the most
likely to be re-read.
Its merits are certainly not ill set off by the two shorter
pieces, both of fairly early date, but the one a little Le Dernier Jour
d'un Condamné.
before and the other a little after Notre-Dame de Paris,
which usually accompany it in the collected editions. Of these Le Dernier
Jour d'un Condamné is, with its tedious preface, almost two-thirds as long
as Bug-Jargal itself; the other, Claude Gueux, contents itself with thirty
pages. Both are pieces with a purpose—manifestos of one of Hugo's most
consistent and most irrational crazes—the objection to capital punishment.
[95]
There is no need to argue against this, the immortal "Que MM. les
assassins," etc., being, though in fact the weakest of a thousand refutations,
sufficient, once for all, to explode it. But it is not irrelevant to point out that
the two pieces themselves are very battering-rams against their own theory.
We are not told—the objection to this omission was made at the time, of
course, and Hugo's would-be lofty waving-off of this is one of the earliest
of many such—what the condemned person's crime was. But the upshot of
his lucubrations during these latest hours of his is this, that such hours are
almost more uncomfortable than the minutes of the actual execution can
possibly be. As this is exactly one of the points on which the advocates of
the punishment, whether from the point of view of deterrence or from that
of retribution, chiefly rely, it seems something of a blunder to bring it out
with all the power of a poet and a rhetorician. We want "M. l'Assassin," in
fact, to be made very uncomfortable—as uncomfortable as possible—and
we want M. l'Assassin, in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he
will be so made. "Serve him right" sums up the one view, "De te fabula" the
other. In fact cheap copies of Le Dernier Jour, supplied to all about to
commit murder, would be highly valuable. Putting aside its purpose, the
mere literary power is of course considerable if not consummate; it hardly
pretends to be a "furnished" story.

The piece, however, is tragic enough: it could hardly fail
to be so in the hands of such a master of tragedy, just as Claude Gueux.
it could hardly fail to be illogical in the hands of such a
paralogician. But Claude Gueux, though it ends with a murder and an
attempt at suicide and an execution, is really, though far from intentionally,
a farce. The hero, made (by the "fault of society," of course) a criminal,
though not a serious one, thinks himself persecuted by the prison director,
and murders that official. The reader who does not know the book will
suppose that he has been treated as Charles Reade's wicked governor treated
Josephs and Robinson and the other victims in It is Never too Late to Mend.
Not at all. The redoubtable Claude had, like the great Victor himself and
other quite respectable men, an equally redoubtable appetite, and the prison
rations were not sufficient for him. As he was a sort of leader or prison
shop-steward, and his fellow-convicts looked up to him, a young fellow
who was not a great eater used to give Claude part of his allowance. The
director, discovering this, removed the young man into another ward—an
action possibly rather spiteful, possibly also only a slight excess, or no
excess at all, of red-tapeism in discipline. Claude not merely asks reasons
for this,—which, of course, even if respectfully done, was an act of clear
insubordination on any but anarchist principles,—but repeats the enquiry.
The director more than once puts the question by, but inflicts no penalty.
Whereupon Claude makes a harangue to the shop (which appears, in some
astounding fashion, to have been left without any supervision between the
director's visits), repeats once more, on the director's entrance, his
insubordinate enquiry, again has it put by, and thereupon splits the
unfortunate official's skull with a hatchet, digging also a pair of scissors,
which once belonged to his (left-handed) wife, into his own throat. And the
wretches actually cure this hardly fallen angel, and then guillotine him,
which he takes most sweetly, placing at the last moment in the hand of the
attendant priest, with the words Pour les pauvres, a five-franc piece, which
one of the Sisters of the prison hospital had given him! After this Hugo, not
contented with the tragedy of the edacious murderer, gives us seven pages
of his favourite rhetoric in saccadé paragraphs on the general question.
As so often with him, one hardly knows which particular question to ask
first, "Did ever such a genius make such a fool of himself?" or "Was ever

such an artist given to such hopeless slips in the most rudimentary
processes of art?"
But it is, of course, not till we come to Notre-Dame de
Paris that any serious discussion of Hugo's claims as a Notre-Dame de
novelist is possible. Hitherto, while in novel at least he Paris.
has very doubtfully been an enfant sublime, he has most unquestionably
been an enfant. Whatever faults may be chargeable on his third novel or
romance proper, they include no more childishness than he displayed
throughout his life, and not nearly so much as he often did later.
The book, moreover, to adopt and adapt the language of another matter,
whether disputably or indisputably great in itself, is unquestionably so "by
position." It is one of the chief manifestos—there are some who have held,
and perhaps would still hold, that it is the chief manifesto and example—of
one of the most remarkable and momentous of literary movements—the
great French Romantic revolt of mil-huit-cent-trente. It had for a time
enormous popularity, extending to many who had not the slightest interest
in it as such a manifesto; it affected not merely its own literature, but others,
and other arts besides literature, both in its own and other countries. To
whatever extent this popularity may have been affected—first by the
transference of interest from the author's "letters" to his politics and
sociology, and secondly, by the reaction in general esteem which followed
his death—it is not very necessary to enquire. One certainly sees fewer,
indeed, positively few, references to it and to its contents now. But it was so
bright a planet when it first came into ken; it exercised its influence so long
and so largely; that even if it now glows fainter it is worth exploring, and
the analysis of the composition of its light is worth putting on record.
In the case of a book which, whether it has or has not
undergone some occultation as suggested, is still kept on The story easy to
anticipate.
sale not merely in the original, but in cheap translations
into every European tongue, there is probably no need to include an actual
"argument" in this analysis. As a novel or at least romance, Notre-Dame de
Paris contains a story of the late fifteenth century, the chief characters of
which are the Spanish gipsy[96] dancing-girl Esmeralda, with her goat Djali;
Quasimodo, the hunchbacked dwarf and bell-ringer of the cathedral; one of
its archdeacons, Claude Frollo, theologian, philosopher, expert in, but

contemner of, physical and astrological science, and above all, alchemist, if
not sorcerer; the handsome and gallant, but "not intelligent" and not very
chivalrous soldier Phœbus de Chateaupers, with minors not a few, "supers"
very many, and the dramatist Pierre Gringoire as a sort of half-chorus, half-
actor throughout. The evolution of this story could not be very difficult to
anticipate in any case; almost any one who had even a slight knowledge of
its actual author's other work could make a guess at the scenario. The end
must be tragic; the beau cavalier must be the rather unworthy object of
Esmeralda's affection, and she herself that of the (one need hardly say very
different) affections of Frollo and Quasimodo; a charge of sorcery, based on
the tricks she has taught Djali, must be fatal to her; and poetic justice must
overtake Frollo, who has instigated the persecution but has half exchanged
it for, half-combined it with, later attempts of a different kind upon her.
Although this scenario may not have been then quite so easy for any
schoolboy to anticipate, as it has been later, the course of the romantic novel
from Walpole to Scott in English, not to mention German and other things,
had made it open enough to everybody to construct. The only thing to be
done, and to do, now was, and is, to see, on the author's own famous critical
principles,[97] how he availed himself of the publica materies.
Perhaps the first impression of any reader who is not
merely not an expert in criticism, but who has not yet Importance of the
actual title.
learnt its first, last, and hardest lesson, shirked by not a
few who seem to be experts—to suspend judgment till the case is fully
heard—may be unfavourable. It is true that the title Notre-Dame de Paris,
so stupidly and unfairly disguised by the addition-substitution of "The
Hunchback of Notre Dame" in English translations—quite honestly and
quite legitimately warns any intelligent reader what to expect. It is the
cathedral itself, its visible appearance and its invisible aura, atmosphere,
history, spirit, inspiration which gives the author—and is taken by him as
giving—his real subject. Esmeralda and Quasimodo, Frollo and Gringoire
are almost as much minors and supers in comparison with It or Her as
Phœbus de Chateaupers and the younger Frollo and the rest are in relation
to the four protagonists themselves. The most ambitious piece of dianoia—
of thought as contrasted with incident, character, or description—is that
embodied in the famous chapter, Ceci tuera cela, where the fatal effect of
literature (at least printed literature) on architecture is inculcated. The

situation, precincts, construction, constitution of the church form the centre
of such action as there is, and supply by far the larger part of its scene.
Therefore nobody has a right to complain of a very large proportion of
purely architectural detail.
But the question is whether, in the actual employment,
and still more in what we may call the administration, of The working out of
the one under the
this and other diluents or obstruents of story, the artist other.
has or has not made blunders in his art; and it is very
difficult not to answer this in the affirmative. There were many excuses for
him. The "guide-book novel" had already, and not so very long before, been
triumphantly introduced by Corinne. It had been enormously popularised
by Scott. The close alliance and almost assimilation of art and history with
literature was one of the supremest articles of faith of Romanticism, and
"the Gothic" was a sort of symbol, shibboleth, and sacrament at once of
Romanticism itself. But Victor Hugo, like Falstaff, has, in this and other
respects, abused his power of pressing subjects into service almost, if not
quite, damnably. Whether out of pure wilfulness, out of mistaken theory, or
out of a mixture[98] of these and other influences, he has made the first
volume almost as little of a story as it could possibly be, while remaining a
story at all. Seventy mortal pages, pretty well packed in the standard two-
volume edition, which in all contains less than six hundred, dawdle over the
not particularly well-told business of Gringoire's interrupted mystery, the
arrival of the Flemish ambassadors, and the election of the Pope of
Unreason. The vision of Esmeralda lightens the darkness and quickens the
movement, and this brightness and liveliness continue till she saves her
unlucky dramatist from the murderous diversions of the Cour des Miracles.
But the means by which she does this—the old privilege of matrimony—
leads to nothing but a single scene, which might have been effective, but
which Hugo only leaves flat, while it has no further importance in the story
whatsoever. After it we hop or struggle full forty pages through the public
street of architecture pure and simple.
At first sight "Coup d'œil impartial sur l'Ancienne
Magistrature" may seem to give even more promise of The story recovers
itself latterly.
November than of May. But there is action here, and it
really has something to do with the story. Also, the subsequent treatment of
the recluse or anchoress of the severest type in the Place Notre-Dame itself

(or practically so), though it is much too long and is lengthened by matters
with which Hugo knows least of all how to deal, has still more claim to
attention, for it leads directly on not merely to the parentage of Esmeralda,
but to the tragedy of her fate. And almost the whole of the second volume
is, whether the best novel-matter or not, at any rate genuine novel-matter. If
almost the whole of the first had been boiled down (as Scott at his best
would have boiled it) into a preliminary chapter or two, the position of the
book as qualified to stand in its kind could not have been questioned. But its
faults and merits in that kind would still have remained matters of very
considerable question.
In respect of one fault, the side of the defence can surely
be taken only by generous, but hardly judicious or But the characters?
judicial devotees. Hugo's singular affection for the
monster—he had Stephano to justify him, but unfortunately did not possess
either the humour of that drunken Neapolitan butler or the power of his and
Caliban's creator—had made a mere grotesque of Han, but had been
reduced within more artistic limits in Bug. In Le Dernier Jour and Claude
Gueux it was excluded by the subjects and objects alike.[99] Here it is, if not
an intellectus, at any rate sibi permissus; and, as it does not in the earlier
cases, it takes the not extremely artistic form of violent contrast which was
to be made more violent later in L'Homme Qui Rit. If any one will consider
Caliban and Miranda as they are presented in The Tempest, with Quasimodo
and Esmeralda as they are presented here, he will see at once the difference
of great art and great failure of art.
Then, too, there emerges another of our author's persistent obsessions, the
exaggeration of what we may call the individual combat. He had probably
intended something of this kind in Han, but the mistake there in telling
about it instead of telling it has been already pointed out. Neither Bug-
Jargal nor Habibrah does anything glaringly and longwindedly impossible.
But the one-man defence of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo against the truands
is a tissue not so much of impossibilities—they, as it has been said of old,
hardly matter—as of the foolish-incredible. Why did the numerous other
denizens of the church and its cloisters do nothing during all this time? Why
did the truands, who, though they were all scoundrels, were certainly not all
fools, confine themselves to this frontal assault of so huge a building? Why
did the little rascal Jean Frollo not take some one with him? These are not

questions of mere dull common sense; it is only dull absence of common
sense which will think them so. Scott, who, once more, was not too careful
in stopping loose places, managed the attacks of Tillietudlem and
Torquilstone without giving any scope for objections of this kind.
Hugo's strong point was never character, and it certainly is not so here.
Esmeralda is beautiful, amiable, pathetic, and unfortunate; but the most
uncharitable interpretation of Mr. Pope's famous libel never was more
justified than in her case. Her salvage of Gringoire and its sequel give about
the only situations in which she is a real person,[100] and they are purely
episodic. Gringoire himself is as much out of place as any literary man who
ever went into Parliament. Some may think better of Claude Frollo, who
may be said to be the Miltonic-Byronic-Satanic hero. I own I do not. His
mere specification—that of the ascetic scholar assailed by physical
temptation—will pass muster well enough, the working out of it hardly.
His brother, the vaurien Jean, has, I believe, been a favourite with others or
the same, and certainly a Villonesque student is not out of place in the
fifteenth century. Nor is a turned-up nose, even if it be artificially and
prematurely reddened, unpardonable. But at the same time it is not in itself
a passport, and Jean Frollo does not appear to have left even the smallest
Testament or so much as a single line (though some snatches of song are
assigned to him) reminding us of the "Dames des Temps Jadis" or the
"Belle Heaulmière." Perhaps even Victor never presumed more
unfortunately on victory than in bringing in Louis XI., especially in one
scene, which directly challenges comparison with Quentin Durward. While,
though Scott's jeunes premiers are not, as he himself well knew and frankly
confessed, his greatest triumphs, he has never given us anything of the kind
so personally impersonal as Phœbus de Chateaupers.
Per contra there are of course to be set passages which are actually fine
prose and some of which might have made magnificent poetry; a real or at
least—what is as good as or better than a real—a fantastic resurrection of
Old Paris; and, above all, an atmosphere of "sunset and eclipse," of night
and thunder and levin-flashes, which no one of catholic taste would
willingly surrender. Only, ungrateful as it may seem, uncritical as some may
deem it, it is impossible not to sigh, "Oh! why were not the best things of

this treated in verse, and why were not the other things left alone
altogether?"
For a very long stretch of time—one that could hardly be
paralleled except in a literary life so unusually extended The thirty years'
as his—it might have seemed that one of those voix interval.
intérieures, which he was during its course to celebrate in undying verse,
had whispered to Hugo some such warning as that conveyed in the words of
the close of the last paragraph, and that he, usually the most indocile of
men, had listened to it. For all but three decades he confined his production
—at least in the sense of substantial publication[101]—to poetry almost
invariably splendid, drama always grandiose and sometimes grand, and
prose-writing of a chiefly political kind, which even sympathisers (one
would suppose) can hardly regard as of much value now if they have any
critical faculty. Even the tremendous shock of disappointment,
discomfiture, and exile which resulted from the success of Napoleon the
Third, though it started a new wave and gust of oceanic and cyclonic force,
range, and volume in his soul, found little prose vent, except the wretched
stuff of Napoléon le Petit, to chequer the fulgurant outburst of the
Châtiments, the apocalyptic magnificence of the Contemplations, and the
almost unmatched vigour, variety, and vividness of the Légende des Siècles.
At last, in 1862, a full decade after the cataclysm, his largest and probably
his most popular work of fiction made its appearance in the return to
romance-writing, entitled Les Misérables. I daresay biographies say when it
was begun; it is at any rate clear that even Victor Hugo must have taken
some years, especially in view of his other work, to produce such a mass of
matter.[102] Probably not very many people now living, at least in England,
remember very clearly the immense effect it produced even with us, who
were then apt to regard Hugo as at best a very chequered genius and at
worst an almost charlatanish rhetorician.
It was no doubt lucky for its popularity that it fell in
with a general movement, in England as well as Les Misérables.
elsewhere, which had with us been, if not brought about,
aided by influences in literature as different as those of Dickens and
Carlyle, through Kingsley and others downwards,—the movement which
has been called perhaps more truly than sympathetically, "the cult of the

lower [not to say the criminal] classes." In France, if not in England, this
cult had been oddly combined with a dash of rather adulterated
Romanticism, and long before Hugo, Sues and Sands, as will be seen later,
had in their different manner been priests and priestesses of it. In his own
case the adoption of the subject "keyed on" in no small degree to the mood
in which he wrote the Dernier Jour and Claude Gueux, while a good deal of
the "Old Paris" mania (I use the word nowise contumeliously) of Notre-
Dame survived, and even the "Cour des Miracles" found itself modernised.
Whether the popularity above mentioned has kept itself up or not, I cannot
say. Of one comparatively recent edition, not so far as I know published at
intervals, I have been told that the first volume is out of print, but none of
the others, a thing rather voiceful to the understanding. I know that, to me,
it is the hardest book to read through of any that I know by a great writer.
Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie are certainly longer, Clarissa and Sir Charles
Grandison are probably so. Le Vicomte de Bragelonne is almost as long.
There are finer things in it than in any of them, (except the deaths of
Lovelace and Porthos and the kidnapping of General Monk) from the pure
novel point of view, and not a few passages which ought to have been verse
and, even prose as they are, soar far over anything that Mademoiselle de
Scudéry or Samuel Richardson or Alexandre Dumas could possibly have
written in either harmony. The Scudéry books are infinitely duller, and the
Richardson ones much less varied.
But none of these others besets the path of the reader with things to which
the obstacles interposed by Quilp in the way of Sampson Brass were down-
pillows, as is the case with Les Misérables. It is as if Victor Hugo had said,
"You shall read this at your peril," and had made good the threat by dint of
every blunder in novel-writing which he could possibly commit. With his
old and almost invariable fault (there is a little of it even in Les Travailleurs
de la Mer, and only Quatre-Vingt-Treize avoids it entirely), he delays any
real interest till the book, huge as it is, is almost half way through. Twenty
pages on Bishop Myriel—that rather piebald angel who makes the way
impossible for any successor by his fantastic and indecent "apostolicism" in
living; who tells, not like St. Athanasius, an allowable equivocation to save
his valuable self, but a downright lie to save a worthless rascal; and who
admits defeat in argument by the stale sophisms of a moribund
conventionnel—might have been tolerable. We have, in the compactest

edition I know, about a hundred and fifty. The ruin and desertion of Fantine
would have been worth twenty more. We have from fifty to a hundred to tell
us the story of four rather impossibly beautiful grisettes, and as many, alas!
too possible, but not interesting, rascals of students. It is difficult to say how
much is wasted on the wildly improbable transformation of Jean Valjean,
convict and pauper, into "M. Madeleine," maire and (nummis gallicis)
millionaire, through making sham jet. All this, by any one who really knew
his craft, would have been sketched rapidly in fluent preliminary, and
subsequent piecemeal retrospect, so as to start with Valjean's escape from
Thénardier and his adoption of Cosette.
The actual matter of this purely preliminary kind extends, as has been
ascertained by rough but sufficient calculation of the sort previously
employed, to at least three-quarters of an average novel of Sir Walter's: it
would probably run to two or three times the length of a modern "six-
shilling." But Hugo is not satisfied with it. A point, an important point,
doubtless, but one that could have been despatched in a few lines, connects
the novel proper with the Battle of Waterloo. To that battle itself, even the
preliminary matter in its earliest part is some years posterior: the main
action, of course, is still more so. But Victor must give us his account of this
great engagement, and he gives it in about a hundred pages of the most
succinct reproduction. For my part, I should be glad to have it "mixed with
much wine," even if the wine were of that luscious and headachy south-of-
France character which he himself is said to have preferred to Bordeaux or
Champagne, Sauterne or even Burgundy. Nay, without this I like it well
enough and quarrel with nothing in it, though it is in many respects (from
the famous hollow way which nobody else ever heard of downwards) very
much of a dream-battle. Victor does quite as much justice as any one could
expect him to do—and, thank heaven, there are still some Englishmen who
are perfectly indifferent whether justice is done to them or not in these
matters, leaving it to poorer persons in such ways who may be glad of it—
to English fighting; while if he represents Wellington as a mere calculator
and Napoleon as a hero, we can murmur politely (like a Roman Catholic
bishop, more real in many ways than His Greatness of Digue), "Perhaps so,
my dear sir, perhaps so." But what has it all got to do here? Even when
Montalais and her lover sat on the wall and talked for half a volume or so in
the Vicomte de Bragelonne; even when His Majesty Louis XIV. and his

(one regrets to use the good old English word) pimp, M. le Duc de Saint-
Aignan, exhausted the resources of carpentry and the stores of printer's ink
to gain access to the apartment of Mlle. de la Vallière, the superabundance,
though trivial, was relevant: this is not. When Thénardier tried to rob and
was no doubt quite ready to murder, but did, as a matter of fact, help to
resuscitate, the gallant French Republican soldier, who was so glad to
receive the title of baron from an emperor who had by abdication resigned
any right to give it that he ever possessed, it might have been Malplaquet or
Leipsic, Fontenoy or Vittoria, for any relevance the details of the battle
possessed to the course of the story.
Now relevance (to make a short paragraph of the kind Hugo himself loved)
is a mighty goddess in novelry.
And so it continues, though, to be absolutely just, the later parts are not
exposed to quite the same objections as the earlier. These objections
transform themselves, however, into other varieties, and are reinforced by
fresh faults. The most inexcusable digressions, on subjects as remote from
each other as convents and sewers, insist on poking themselves in. The
central, or what ought to be the central, interest itself turns on the ridiculous
émeute of Saint-Merry, a thing "without a purpose or an aim," a mere
caricature of a revolution. The gamin Gavroche puts in a strong plea for
mercy, and his sister Eponine, if Hugo had chosen to take more trouble with
her, might have been a great, and is actually the most interesting, character.
But Cosette—the cosseted Cosette—Hugo did not know our word or he
would have seen the danger—is merely a pretty and rather selfish little doll,
and her precious lover Marius is almost ineffable.
Novel-heroes who are failures throng my mind like ghosts on the other
shore of the river whom Charon will not ferry over; but I can single out
none of them who is, without positively evil qualities, so absolutely
intolerable as Marius.[103] Others have more such qualities; but he has no
good ones. His very bravery is a sort of moral and intellectual running
amuck because he thinks he shall not get Cosette. Having, apparently, for
many years thought and cared nothing about his father, he becomes
frantically filial on discovering that he has inherited from him, as above, a
very doubtful and certainly most un-"citizen"-like title of Baron. Thereupon

(taking care, however, to have cards printed with the title on them) he
becomes a violent republican.
He then proceeds to be extremely rude to his indulgent but royalist
grandfather, retires to a mount of very peculiar sacredness, where he comes
in contact with the Thénardier family, discovers a plot against Valjean,
appeals to the civil arm to protect the victim, but, for reasons which seem
good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part, and is very nearly
accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story, carrying out his general
character of prig-pedant, as selfish as self-righteous, he meets Valjean's
rather foolish and fantastic self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and
practically kills the poor old creature by separating him from Cosette. When
the éclaircissement comes, it appears to me—as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola
that he ought to have consented to be damned—that Marius ought to have
consented at least to be kicked.
Of course it may be said, "You should not give judgments on things with
which you are evidently out of sympathy." But I do not acknowledge any
palpable hit. If certain purposes of the opposite kind were obtruded here in
the same fashion—if Victor (as he might have done in earlier days) had
hymned Royalism instead of Republicanism, or (as perhaps he would never
have done) had indulged in praise of severe laws and restricted education,
[104]
and other things, I should be "in sympathy," but I hope and believe that
I should not be "out of" criticism. Unless strictly adjusted to the scale and
degree suitable to a novel—as Sir Walter has, I think, restricted his
Mariolatry and his Jacobitism, and so forth—I should bar them as I bar
these.[105] And it is the fact that they are not so restricted, with the
concomitant faults which, again purely from the point of view of novel-
criticism as such, I have ventured to find, that makes me consider Les
Misérables a failure as a novel. Once again, too, I find few of the really
good and great things—which in so vast a book by such a writer are there,
and could not fail to be there—to be essentially and specially good and
great according to the novel standard. They are, with the rarest exceptions,
the stuff of drama or of poetry, not of novel. That there are such exceptions
—the treacherous feast of the students to the mistresses they are about to
desert; the escapes of Valjean from the ambushes laid for him by Thénardier
and Javert; some of the Saint-Merry fighting; the guesting of the children
by Gavroche in the elephant; and others—is true. But they are oases in a

desert; and, save when they would be better done in poetry, they do not
after all seem to me to be much better done than they might have been by
others—the comparative weakness of Hugo in conversation of the kind
suitable for prose fiction making itself felt. That at least is what the present
writer's notion of criticism puts into his mouth to say; and he can say no
other.
Les Travailleurs de la Mer, on the other hand, is,
according to some persons, among whom that present Les Travailleurs de
writer desires to be included, the summit of Victor la Mer.
Hugo's achievements in prose fiction. It has his "signatures" of absurdity in
fair measure. There is the celebrated "Bug-Pipe" which a Highlander of the
garrison of Guernsey sold (I am afraid contrary to military law) to the hero,
and on which that hero performed the "melancholy air" of "Bonny Dundee."
[106]
There is the equally celebrated "First of the Fourth" (Première de la
Quatrième), which is believed to be Hugonic for the Firth of Forth. There
are some others. There is an elaborate presentation of a quite impossibly
named clergyman, who is, it seems, an anticipator of "le Puseysme" and an
actual high-churchman, who talks as never high-churchman talked from
Laud to Pusey himself, but rather like the Reverend Gabriel Kettledrummle
(with whom Hugo was probably acquainted "in translations, Sir! in
translations").[107] Gilliatt, the hero, is a not very human prig outside those
extraordinary performances, of which more later, and his consummate end.
Déruchette, the heroine, is, like Cosette, a pretty nullity.[108] As always, the
author will not "get under way"; and short as the book is, and valuable as is
its shortness, it could be cut down to two-thirds at least with advantage.
Clubin and Rantaine, the villains, are pure melodrama; Mess Lethierry, the
good old man, is rather an old fool, and not so very good. The real business
of the book—the salvage by Gilliatt of the steamer wrecked on the Douvres
—is, as a schoolboy would say, or would have said, "jolly impossible." But
the book as a whole is, despite or because of its tragic quality, almost
impossibly "jolly."
For here—as he did previously (by the help of the form
that was more his own and of Jersey) in the The genius loci.
Contemplations—he had now got in prose, by that of the
smaller, more isolated, and less contaminated[109] island, into his own

proper country, the dominion of the Angel of the Visions of the Sea. He has
told us in his own grandiloquent way, which so often led him wrong, that
when he settled to exile in the Channel Islands, his son François observed,
"Je traduirai Shakespeare," and he said, "Je contemplerai l'océan." He did;
and good came of it. Students of his biography may know that in the
dwelling which he called Hauteville House (a name which, I regret to say,
already and properly belonged to another) he slept and mainly lived in a
high garret with much glass window, overlooking the strait between
Guernsey and Sark. These "gazebos," as they used to be called, are common
in St. Peter Port, and I myself enjoyed the possession of a more modest and
quite unfamous one for some time. They are worth inhabiting and looking
from, be the weather fair or foul. Moreover, he was, I believe, a very good
walker, and in both the islands made the best of opportunities which are
unmatched elsewhere. Whether he boated much I do not know. The
profusion of nautical terms with which he "deaves" us (as the old Scotch
word has it) would rather lead me to think not. He was in this inferior to
Prospero; but I hope it is not blasphemy to say that, mutatis mutandis, he
had something of the banished Duke of Milan in him, and that, in the one
case as in the other, it was the island that brought it out. And he
acknowledged it in his Dedication to "Guernesey—sevère et douce."
Sevère et Douce! I lived in Guernsey as a Master at
Elizabeth College from 1868, two years after Victor Guernsey at the
time.
Hugo wrote that dedication, to 1874, when he still kept
house there, but had not, since the "Année Terrible," occupied it much. I
suppose the "severity" must be granted to an island of solid granite and to
the rocks and tides and sea-mists that surround it. But in the ordinary life
there in my time there was little to "asperate" the douceur. Perhaps it does
not require so very much to sweeten things in general between the ages of
twenty-three and twenty-nine. But the things in general themselves were
dulcet enough. The beauty of the place—extraordinarily varied in its
triangle of some half-score miles or a little less on each side—was not then
in the least interfered with by the excessive commercial glass-housing
which, I believe, has come in since. For what my friend of many days, the
late Mr. Reynolds of Brasenose and East Ham, a constant visitor in summer,
used to call "necessary luxuries," it was still unique. When I went there you
could buy not undrinkable or poisonous Hollands at four shillings a gallon,

and brandy—not, of course, exactly cognac or fine champagne, but
deserving the same epithets—for six. If you were a luxurious person, you
paid half-a-crown a bottle for the genuine produce of the Charente, little or
not at all inferior to Martell or Hennessy, and a florin for excellent Scotch
or Irish whiskey.[110] Fourpence half-penny gave you a quarter-pound slab
of gold-leaf tobacco, than which I never wish to smoke better.
But this easy supplying of the bodily needs of the "horse with wings" and
his "heavy rider" was as nothing to other things which strengthened the
wings of the spirit and lightened the weight of the burden it bore. I have not
been a great traveller outside the kingdom of England: and you may
doubtless, in the whole of Europe or of the globe, find more magnificent
things than you can possibly find in an island of the dimensions given. But
for a miniature and manageable assemblage of amenities I do not think you
can easily beat Guernsey. The town of St. Peter Port, and its two castles,
Fort George above and Castle Cornet below, looking on the strait above
mentioned, with the curiously contrasted islets of Herm and Jethou in its
midst; the wonderful coast, first south- and then westward, set with tiny
coves of perfection like Bec-du-Nez, and larger bays, across the mouth of
which, after a storm and in calm sunny weather, you see lines of foam
stretching from headland to headland, out of the white clots of which the
weakest imagination can fancy Aphrodite rising and floating shorewards, to
vanish as she touches the beach; the great western promontory of
Pleinmont, a scarcely lessened Land's End, with the Hanois rocks beyond;
the tamer but still not tame western, northern, and north-eastern coasts, with
the Druid-haunted level of L'Ancresse and the minor port of St. Samson—
all these furnish, even to the well-girt man, an extraordinary number[111] of
walks, ranging from an hour's to a day's and more there and back; while in
the valleys of the interior you find scenery which might be as far from the
sea as Warwickshire, or on the heights springs which tell you that they must
have come from the neighbourhood of the Mount of Dol or the Forest of
Broceliande.
With such colour and form of locality to serve, not merely as inspiration but
as actual scene and setting, such genius as Hugo's could hardly fail. The
thing is sad and delightful and great. As life, you may say, it could not have
happened; as literature it could not but have happened, and has happened, at
its best, divinely well. The contrast of the long agony of effort and its

triumph on the Douvres, with the swift collapse of any possible reward at
St. Samson, is simply a windfall of the Muses to this spoiled and, it must be
confessed, often self-spoiling child of theirs. There are, of course,
absurdities still, and of a different kind from the bug-pipe. I have always
wished to know what the experiences of the fortunate and reverend but
sheepish Ebenezer had been at Oxford—he must certainly have held a King
Charles scholarship in his day—during that full-blooded time of the
Regency. The circumstances of the marriage are almost purely Hugonian,
though it does Hugo credit that he admires the service which he travesties
so remarkably. But the Dieu (not diable) au corps which he now enjoys
enables him to change into a beauty (in the wholly natural gabble of Mess
Lethierry on the recovery of the la Durande) those long speeches which
have been already noted as blots. And, beauty or blot, it would not have
mattered. All is in the contrast of the mighty but conquered Douvres and the
comparatively insignificant rocklet—there are hundreds like it on every
granite coast—where Death the Consoler sets on Gilliatt's head the only
crown possible for his impossible feat, and where the dislike of the ignorant
peasantry, the brute resistance of machinery and material, the violence of
the storm, the devilish ambush of the pieuvre, and all other evils are
terminated and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and the euthanasia of
the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or even romance—in
substance it is too abstract and elemental for either of the less majestical
branches of inventive literature. But it is great. "By God! 'tis good," and, to
lengthen somewhat Ben's famous challenge, "if you like, you may" put it
with, and not so far from, in whatever order you please—the deaths of
Cleopatra and of Colonel Newcome.
The book is therefore a success; but that success is an evident tour de force,
and it is nearly as evident to any student of the subject that such a tour de
force was not likely to be repeated, and that the thing owed its actual
salvage to a rather strict limitation of subject and treatment—a limitation
hitherto unknown in the writer and itself unlikely to recur. Also that there
were certain things in it—especially the travesties of names and subjects of
which the author practically knew nothing—the repetition and extension of
which was likely to be damaging, if not fatal. In two or three years the
"fatality" of which Victor Hugo himself was dangerously fond of talking

(the warning of Herodotus in the dawn about things which it is not lawful to
mention has been too often neglected) had its revenge.
L'Homme Qui Rit is probably the maddest book in
recognised literature; certainly the maddest written by an L'Homme Qui Rit.
author of supreme genius without the faintest notion that
he was making himself ridiculous. The genius is still there, and passage on
passage shows us the real "prose-poetry," that is to say, the prose which
ought to have been written in verse. The scheme of the quartette—Ursus,
the misanthrope-Good-Samaritan; Homo, the amiable wolf; Gwynplaine,
the tortured and guiltless child and youth; Dea, the adorable maiden—is
unexceptionable per se, and it could have been worked out in verse or
drama perfectly, though the actual termination—Gwynplaine's suicide in the
sea after Dea's death—is perhaps too close and too easy a "variation of the
same thing" on Gilliatt's parallel self-immolation after Déruchette's
marriage.[112] Not a few opening or episodic parts—the picture of the
caravan; the struggle of the child Gwynplaine with the elements to save not
so much himself as the baby Dea; the revulsions of his temptations and
persecutions later; and yet others[113]—show the poet and the master.
But the way in which these things are merged in and spoilt by a torrent of
silliness, sciolism, and sheer nonsense is, even after one has known the
book for forty years and more, still astounding.
One could laugh almost indulgently over the "bug-pipe" and the "First of
the Fourth"; one could, being of those who win, laugh quite indulgently
over the little outbursts of spite in Les Travailleurs at the institutions and
ways of the country which had, despite some rather unpardonable liberties,
given its regular and royal asylum to the exiled republican and almost
anarchist author. Certainly, also, one can laugh over L'Homme Qui Rit and
its picture of the English aristocracy. But of such laughter, as of all carnal
pleasures (to steal from Kingsley), cometh satiety, and the satiety is rather
early reached in this same book. One of the chief "persons of distinction" in
many ways whom I have ever come across, the late Mr. G. S. Venables—a
lawyer of no mean expertness; one of the earliest and one of the greatest of
those "gentlemen of the Press" who at the middle of the nineteenth century
lifted journalism out of the gutter; a familiar of every kind of the best
society, and a person of infinite though somewhat saturnine wit—had a

phrase of contempt for absurd utterances by persons who ought to have
known better. "It was," he said, "like a drunk child." The major part of
L'Homme Qui Rit is like the utterance of a drunk child who had something
of the pseudo-Homeric Margites in him, who "knew a great many things
and knew them all badly." I could fill fifty pages here easily enough, and
with a kind of low amusement to myself and perhaps others, by
enumerating the absurdities of L'Homme Qui Rit. As far as I remember,
when the book appeared, divers good people (the bad people merely
sneered) took immense pains to discover how and why this great man of
letters made so much greater a fool of himself. This was quite lost labour;
and without attempting the explanation at all, a very small selection of the
facts, being in a manner indispensable, may be given.
The mysterious society of "Comprachicos" (Spanish for "child-buyers"), on
whose malpractices the whole book is founded; the entirely false
conception of the English House of Lords, which gives much of the
superstructure; the confusion of English and French times and seasons,
manners and customs, which enables the writer to muddle up Henri-Trois
and Louis-Quinze, Good Queen Bess and Good Queen Anne: these and
other things of the kind can be passed over. For things like some of them
occur in much saner novelists than Hugo; and Sir Walter himself is
notoriously not free from indisputable anachronisms.[114] But you have
barely reached the fiftieth page when you come to a "Lord Linnæus
Clancharlie, Baron Clancharlie et Hunkerville, Marquis de Corleone en
Sicile," whose English peerage dates from Edward the Elder (the origin of
his Sicilian title is not stated, but it was probably conferred by Hiero or
Dionysius), and whose name "Clancharlie" has nothing whatever to do with
Scotland or Ireland. This worthy peer (who, as a Cromwellian, exiled
himself after the Restoration) had, like others of the godly, a bastard son,
enjoying at "temp. of tale" the remarkable courtesy title of "Lord David
Dirry-Moir," but called by the rabble, with whom his sporting tastes make
him a great favourite, "Tom-Jim-Jack." Most "love-children" of peers would
be contented (if they ever had them) with courtesy titles; but Lord David
has been further favoured by Fortune and King James II., who has first
induced the comprachicos to trepan and mutilate Clancharlie's real heir
(afterwards Gwynplaine, the eponymous hero of the book), and has then
made Lord David a "pair substitué"[115] on condition that he marries one of

the king's natural daughters, the Duchess Josiane, a duchess with no duchy
ever mentioned. In regard to her Hugo proceeds to exhibit his etymological
powers, ignoring entirely the agreeable heroine of Bevis of Hampton, and
suggesting either an abbreviation of "Josefa y Ana" (at this time, we are
gravely informed, there was a prevalent English fashion of taking Spanish
names) or else a feminine of "Josias." Moreover, among dozens of other
instances of this Bedlam nomenclature, we have a "combat of box" between
the Irishman "Phelem-ghe-Madone" (because Irishmen are often Roman
Catholics?) and the Scotchman "Helmsgail" (there is a place called
Helmsdale in Scotland, and if "gael" why not "gail"?), to the latter of whom
a knee is given by "Lord Desertum" (Desart? Dysart? what?).
And so it goes on. There is the immortal scene (or rather half-volume) in
which, Hugo having heard or read of peine forte et dure, we find sheriffs
who discharge the duty of Old Bailey judges, fragments of Law Latin (it is
really a pity that he did not get hold of our inimitable Law French), and
above all, and pervading all, that most fearful wildfowl the "wapentake,"
with his "iron weapon." He, with his satellite the justicier-quorum (but, one
weeps to see, not "custalorum" or "rotalorum"), is concerned with the
torture of Hardquanonne[116]—the original malefactor[117] in Gwynplaine's
case—and thereby restores Gwynplaine to his (unsubstituted) rank in the
English peerage, when he himself is anticipating similar treatment. There is
the presentation by the librarian of the House of Lords of a "little red book"
which is the passport to the House itself: and the very unmannerly reception
by his brother peers, from which he is in a manner rescued by the
chivalrous Lord David Dirry-Moir at the price of a box on the ears for
depriving him of his "substitution." There is the misconduct of the Duchess
Josiane, divinely beautiful and diabolically wicked, who covets the monster
Gwynplaine as a lover, and discards him when, on his peerification, he is
commanded to her by Queen Anne as a husband. And then, after all this
tedious insanity and a great deal more, there is the finale of the despair of
Gwynplaine, of his recovery of the dying Dea in a ship just starting for
Holland, of her own death, and of his suicide in the all-healing sea—a
"reconciliation" not far short of the greatest things in literature.
Now I am not of those unhappy ones who cannot away with the mixture of
tragedy and farce. I have not only read too much, but lived too long for that.
But then the farce must be in life conceivable and in literature conscious.

Shakespeare, and even men much inferior to Shakespeare, have been able to
provide for this stipulation munificently.
With Victor Hugo, generally more or less and intensively here, it was
unfortunately different. His irony was almost always his weakest point; or
rather it was a kind of hit-or-miss weapon, with which he cut himself as
often as he cut his inimical objects or persons. The intense absurdity of his
personified wapentakes, of his Tom-Jim-Jacks, of his courtesy-title
bastards, he deliberately declined (as in the anecdote above given) to see.
But these things, done and evidently thought fine by the doer, almost put to
rout the most determined and expert sifter of the faults and merits of genius.
You cannot enjoy a Garden of Eden when at every other step you plunge
into a morass of mire. You cannot drink a draught of nectar, arranged on the
plan of certain glasses of liqueur, in superimposed layers of different savour
and colour, when every other layer is "stummed" folly or nauseous bad
taste. A novel is not like a book of poems, where, as you see that you have
hit on a failure, you turn the page and find a success. To which it may be
added finally that while erudition of any kind is a doubtful set-off to fiction,
the presentation of ragbag erudition of this kind is, to speak moderately and
in his own words of something else, "a rather hideous thing."[118]
Still, with readers of a certain quality, the good omens may to some extent
shame the ill even here. The death of Dea, with its sequel, is very nearly
perfect; it only wants the verse of which its author was such an absolute
master, instead of the prose, where he alternately triumphed and bungled, to
make it so. And one need not be a common paradoxer to take either side on
the question whether on the whole the omen, if not the actuality, of
L'Homme Qui Rit or that of Les Travailleurs de la Mer was the happier. For,
while the earlier and better book showed how faults were hardening and
might grow worse still, the later showed how these very faults, attaining
their utmost possible development, could not entirely stifle the rarer gifts. I
do not remember that anybody in 1869 took this apparently aleatory side of
the argument. If he did he was justified in 1874.
One enormous advantage of Quatre-Vingt-Treize over its
immediate predecessor lay on the surface—an advantage Quatre-Vingt-
Treize.
enormous in all cases, but almost incalculable in this
particular one. In L'Homme Qui Rit Victor Hugo had been dealing with a

subject about which he knew practically nothing, and about which he was
prepared to believe, or even practise, anything. Here, though he was still
prepared to believe a great deal, he yet knew a very great deal more. A little
room for his eccentricities remained, and long after the truth had become a
matter of registered history, he could accept the legendary lies about the
Vengeur; but there was no danger of his giving us French wapentakes
brandishing iron-weapons, or calling a French noble by any appellation
comparable to Lord Linnæus[119] Clancharlie.
But, it may be said, is not the removal of these annoyances more than
compensated, in the bad sense, by things inseparable from such a subject, as
treated by such an author?—the glorification of "Quatre-Vingt-Treize"
itself, and, in particular, of the Convention—that remarkable assembly
which seems to have made up its mind to prove for all time that, in
democracies, the scum comes to the top?—that assembly in which Fabre
d'Eglantine stood for poetry, Marat for humanitarianism, Robespierre for
justice, Hébert and Chaumette for decency, Siéyès and Chabot for different
forms of religion, the composers of the Republican Calendar[120] for
common sense? where the only suggestion of a great man was Danton, and
the only substitutes for an honest one were the prigs and pedants of the
Gironde? To which the only critical answer must be, even when the critic
does not contest the correctness of this description—"Why, no!"
It is better, no doubt, that a novelist, and that everybody else, should be a
bien-pensant; but, as in the case of the poet, it will not necessarily affect his
goodness in his art if he is not. He had, indeed, best not air his opinions,
whatever they are, at too great length; but what they are matters little or
nothing. A Tory critic who cannot admire Shelley or Swinburne, Dickens or
Thackeray, because of their politics, is merely an ass, an animal
unfortunately to be found in the stables or paddocks of every party. On the
other hand, absurdities and faults of taste matter very much.
Now from these latter, which had nearly ruined L'Homme Qui Rit, Quatre-
Vingt-Treize, if not entirely free, suffers comparatively little. The early and
celebrated incident of the carronade running amuck shows characteristic
neglect of burlesque possibilities (and, as I believe some experts have
maintained, of actual ones), but it has the qualities of the Hugonian defects.
An arm-chair critic may ask, Where was the English fleet in the Channel

when a French one was allowed to come out and slowly mob the Claymore
to destruction, without, as far as one sees, any interference or counter-effort,
though the expedition of that remarkable corvette formed part of an
elaborate and carefully prepared offensive?[121] Undoubtedly, the
Convention scenes must be allowed—even by sympathisers with the
Revolution—to be clumsy stopgaps, unnecessary to the action and
possessed of little intrinsic value in themselves. The old fault of verbosity
and "watering out" recurs; and so does the reappearance, with very slight
change, of figures and situations. Cimourdain in character is very much of a
more respectable Claude Frollo; and in conduct, mutatis not so very many
mutandis, almost as much of a less respectable Javert. The death of Gauvain
is far less effective than that of Sydney Carton, which had preceded it; and
the enormous harangue of the Marquis to the nephew who is about to
liberate him, though it may be intended to heighten the peripeteia, merely
gives fresh evidence of Hugo's want of proportion and of his flux of
rhetoric.
All this and more is true; yet Quatre-Vingt-Treize is, "in its fine wrong way,"
a great book, and with Les Travailleurs de la Mer, completes the pillars,
such as they are, which support Hugo's position as a novelist. The rescue of
the children by Lantenac is superb, though you may find twenty cavils
against it easily: and the whole presentation of the Marquis, except perhaps
the speech referred to, is one of the best pictures of the ancienne noblesse in
literature, one which—to reverse the contrast just made—annihilates
Dickens's caricature thereof in A Tale of Two Cities. The single-handed
defence of La Tourgue by "L'Imanus" has of course a good deal of the
hyperbole which began with Quasimodo's similar act in Notre-Dame; but
the reader who cannot "let himself go" with it is to be pitied. Nowhere is
Hugo's child-worship more agreeably shown than in the three first chapters
of the third volume. And, sinking particulars for a more general view, one
may say that through the whole book, to an extent surpassing even Les
Travailleurs de la Mer as such, there is the great Victorian souffle and
surge, the rush as of mighty winds and mightier waters, which carries the
reader resistlessly through and over all obstacles.
Yet although Hugo thus terminated his career as a
novelist, if not in the odour of sanctity, at any rate in a Final remarks.
comfortable cloud of incense due to a comparative

success; although he had (it is true on a much smaller scale) even
transcended that success in Les Travailleurs de la Mer; although, as a mere
novice, he had proved himself a more than tolerable tale-teller in Bug-
Jargal, it is not possible, for any critical historian of the novel as such, to
pronounce him a great artist, or even a tolerable craftsman, in the kind as a
whole. It has already been several times remarked in detail, and may now
be repeated in general, that the things which we enjoy in his books of this
kind are seldom things which it is the special business of the novelist to
produce, and practically never those which are his chief business. In no
single instance perhaps, with the doubtful exception of Gilliatt's battle with
brute matter and elemental forces, is "the tale the thing" purely as tale. Very
seldom do we even want to know what is going to happen—the childishly
simple, but also childishly genuine demand of the reader of romance as
such, if not even of the novel also. Scarcely once do we—at least do I—
take that interest in the development of character which is the special
subject of appetite of readers of the novel, as such and by itself. The baits
and the rewards are now splendour of style; now magnificence of imagery;
sometimes grandeur of idea; often pathos; not seldom the delight of battle
in this or that sense. These are all excellent seasonings of novelry; but they
are not the root of the matter, the pièce de résistance of the feast.
Unfortunately, too, Hugo not merely cannot, or at any rate does not, give
the hungry sheep their proper food—an interesting story worked out by
interesting characters—but will persist in giving them things as suitable
(granting them to be in the abstract nourishing) as turnips to the carnivora
or legs of mutton to the sheep which walk on them. It would, of course, not
be just to press too strongly the objections to the novel of purpose, though
to the present writer they seem almost insuperable. But it is not merely
purpose in the ordinary sense which leads Victor astray, or rather (for he
was much too wilful a person to be led) which he invents for himself to
follow, with his eyes open, and knowing perfectly well what he is doing.
His digressions are not parabases of the kind which some people object to
in Fielding and still more in Thackeray—addresses to the reader on points
more or less intimately connected with the subject itself. A certain
exception has been made in favour of some of the architectural parts of
Notre-Dame de Paris, but it has been admitted that this will not cover "Ceci
Tuera Cela" nor much else. For the presence of the history of the sewers of

Paris in Les Misérables and any number of other things; for not a little of
the first volume of Les Travailleurs itself; for about half, if not more, of
L'Homme Qui Rit, starting from Ursus's Black-book of fancy pleasances,
palaces, and estates belonging to the fellow-peers of Lord Linnæus
Clancharlie and Hunkerville; for not a few chapters even of Quatre-Vingt-
Treize, there is no excuse at all. They are simply repulsive or at least
unwelcome "pledgets" of unsucculent matter stuck into the body of fiction,
as (but with how different results!) lardons or pistachios or truffles are stuck
into another kind of composition.
It is partly, but not wholly, due to this deplorable habit of irrelevant
divagation that Hugo will never allow his stories to "march" (at least to
begin with marching),[122] Quatre-Vingt-Treize being here the only
exception among the longer romances, for even Les Travailleurs de la Mer
never gets into stride till nearly the whole of the first volume is passed. But
the habit, however great a nuisance it may be to the reader, is of some
interest to the student and the historian, for the very reason that it does not
seem to be wholly an outcome of the other habit of digression. It would thus
be, in part at least, a survival of that odd old "inability to begin" which we
noticed several times in the last volume, aggravated by the irrepressible
wilfulness of the writer, and by his determination not to do like other
people, who had by this time mostly got over the difficulty.
If any further "dull moral" is wanted it may be the obvious lesson that
overpowering popularity of a particular form is sometimes a misfortune, as
that of allegory was in the Middle Ages and that of didactics in the
eighteenth century. If it had not been almost incumbent on any Frenchman
who aimed at achieving popularity in the mid-nineteenth century to attempt
the novel, it is not very likely that Hugo would have attempted it. It may be
doubted whether we should have lost any of the best things—we should
only have had them in the compacter and higher shape of more Orientales,
more Chants du Crépuscule, more Légendes, and so forth. We should have
lost the easily losable laugh over bug-pipe and wapentake—for though
Hugo sometimes thought sillily in verse he did not often let silliness touch
his expression in the more majestical harmony—and we should have been
spared an immensely greater body of matter which now provokes a yawn or
a sigh.

This is, it may be said, after all a question of taste. Perhaps. But it can
hardly be denied by any critical student of fiction that while Hugo's novel-
work has added much splendid matter to literature, it has practically
nowhere advanced, nor even satisfactorily exemplified, the art of the novel.
It is here as an exception—marvellous, magnificent, and as such to be fully
treated; actually an honour to the art of which it discards the requirements,
but an exception merely and one which proves, inasmuch as it justifies, the
cautions it defies.[123]

FOOTNOTES:
[93] Mr. Swinburne's magnificent pæans are "vatical" certainly, but scarcely
critical, save now and then. Mr. Stevenson wrote on the Romances, but not on
"the whole."
[94] See note in Vol. I. p. 472 of this History, and in the present volume, sup. p.
40.
[95] These crazes were not in origin, though they probably were in influence,
political: Hugo held more than one of them while he was still a Royalist.
[96] She is of course not really Spanish or a gipsy, but is presented as such at
first.
[97] Stated in the Preface to Cromwell, the critical division of his fourfold attack
on neo-Classicism, as Les Orientales were the poetical, Hernani was the
dramatic, and Notre-Dame itself the prose-narrative.
[98] It is scarcely excessive to say that this mixture of wilful temper and
unbridled theorising was the Saturnian influence, or the "infortune of Mart," in
Hugo's horoscope throughout.
[99] Unless anybody chooses to say that the gallows and the guillotine are
Hugo's monsters here.
[100] The failure of the riskiest and most important scene of the whole (where
her surrender of herself to Phœbus is counteracted by Frollo's stabbing the
soldier, the act itself leading to Esmeralda's incarceration) is glaring.
[101] Le Beau Pécopin in his Rhine-book is, of course, fairly substantial in one
sense, but it is only an episode or inset-tale in something else, which is neither
novel or romance.
[102] It must be four or five times the length of Scott's average, more than twice
that of the longest books with which Dickens and Thackeray used to occupy
nearly two years in monthly instalments, and very nearly, if not quite, that of
Dumas' longest and most "spun-out" achievements in Monte Cristo, the Vicomte
de Bragelonne and La Comtesse de Charny.

[103] I am not forgetting or contradicting what was said above (page 26) of
René. But René does very little except when he kills the she-beavers; Marius is
always doing something, and doing it offensively.
[104] The "Je ne sais pas lire" argument has more than once suggested to me a
certain historical comparison. There have probably never been in all history two
more abominable scoundrels for cold-blooded cruelty, the worst of all vices, than
Eccelino da Romano and the late Mr. Broadhead, patron saint and great
exemplar of Trade-Unionism. Broadhead could certainly read. Could Ezzelin? I
do not know. But if he could not, the Hugonic belief in the efficacy of reading is
not strongly supported. If he could, it is definitely damaged.
[105] Vide what is said below on Quatre-Vingt-Treize.
[106] After the lapse of more than half a century some readers may have
forgotten, and more may never have heard, the anecdote connected with this. It
was rashly and somewhat foolishly pointed out to the poet-romancer himself that
the air of "Bonny Dundee" was the very reverse of melancholy, and that he must
have mistaken the name. His reply was the most categoric declaration possible
of his general attitude, in such cases, "Et moi, je l'appelle 'Bonny Dundee.'"
Victor locutus est: causa finita est (he liked tags of not recondite Latin himself).
And the leading case governs those of the bug-pipe and the (later) wapentake
and justicier-quorum, and all the other wondrous things of which but a few can
be mentioned here.
[107] I do not know whether any one has ever attempted to estimate his actual
debt to Scott. There are better classics of inquiry, but in the class many worse
subjects.
[108] In the opening scene she is something worse. If her writing "Gilliatt" in the
snow had been a sort of rustic challenge of the "malo me petit, et fugit ad
salices" kind, there might have been something (not much) to say for her. But
she did not know Gilliatt; she did not want to know him; and the proceeding was
either mere silly childishness, or else one of those pieces of bad taste of which
her great creator was unluckily by no means incapable.
[109] I use this adjective in no contumelious sense, and certainly not because I
have lived in Guernsey and only visited Jersey. To the impartial denizen of
either, the rivalry of the two is as amusing as is that of Edinburgh and Glasgow,
of Liverpool and Manchester, or of Bradford and Leeds. But, at any rate at the
time of which I am speaking, Jersey was much more haunted by outsiders (in
several senses of that word) than Guernsey. Residents—whether for the purposes
unblushingly avowed by that sometime favourite of the stage, Mr. Eccles, or for
the reasons less horrifying to the United Kingdom Alliance—found themselves
more at home in "Caesarea" than in "Sarnia," and the "five-pounder," as the
summer tripper was despiteously called by natives, liked to go as far as he could
for his money, and found St. Helier's "livelier" than St. Peter Port.
[110] Really good wines were proportionally cheap; but the little isle was not
quite so good at beer, except some remarkable old ale, which one small brewery
had ventured on, and which my friends of the 22nd Regiment discovered and
(very wisely) drank up.—It may surprise honest fanatics and annoy others to
hear that, despite the cheapness and abundance of their bugbear, there was no

serious crime of any kind in Guernsey during the six years I knew it, and no
disorder worth speaking of, even among sailors and newly arrived troops.
[111] The shape of the island; the position of its only "residential" town of any
size in the middle of one of the coasts, so that the roads spread fan-wise from it;
the absence of any large flat space except in the northern parish of "The Vale";
the geological formation which tends, as in Devonshire, to sink the roads into
deep and sometimes "water" lanes; lastly, perhaps, the extreme subdivision of
property, which multiplies the ways of communication—these things contribute
to this "pedestrian-paradise" character. There are many places where, with
plenty of good walking "objectives," you can get to none of them without a
disgusting repetition of the same initial grind. In Guernsey, except as regards the
sea, which never wearies, there is no such even partial monotony.
[112] It is well known that even among great writers this habit of duplication is
often, though very far from always, present. Hugo is specially liable to it. The
oddest example I remember is that the approach to the Dutch ship at the end of
L'Homme Qui Rit reproduces on the Thames almost exactly the details of the
iron gate of the sewers on the Seine, where Thénardier treacherously exposes
Valjean to the clutches of Javert, in Les Misérables, though of course the use
made of it is quite different.
[113] It must be remembered that this also belongs to the Channel Islands
division: and the Angel of the Sea has still some part in it.
[114] Those of Ivanhoe and Kenilworth have enraged pedants and amused the
elect for a century. But I do not remember much notice being taken of that jump
of half a millennium and one year more in The Talisman, where Count Henry of
Champagne "smiles like a sparkling goblet of his own wine." This was in 1192,
while the ever-blessed Dom Pérignon did not make champagne "sparkle" till
1693. Idolatry may suggest that "sparkling" is a perpetual epithet of wine; but I
fear this will not do.
[115] Substitué means "entailed" in technical French. But I know no instance of
this kind of "contingent remainder" in England.
[116] A compound (as Victor himself might suggest) of "Hardyknut" and "Sine
qua non"? Or "Hardbake"?
[117] He has been found out through the agency of one "Barkilphedro" (Barkis-
Phaedrus?), an Irishman of familiar sept, who is "Decanter of the Bottles of the
Sea," and who finds, in one of his trovers, a derelict gourd of confession thrown
overboard by the Comprachicos when wrecked (in another half-volume earlier)
all over the Channel from Portland to Alderney.
[118] Perhaps there is no more conspicuous instance of irritating futility in this
way than the famous αναγκη and αναγνεια of Notre-Dame. Of course anybody
who knows no Greek can see that the first four letters of the two words are the
same. But anybody who knows some Greek knows that the similarity is purely
literal, such as exists between "Chateaubriand" and "Chat Botté" and that the αν
has a different origin in the two cases. Moreover, αναγνεια, "uncleanness," is
about the last word one would choose to express the liaison of thought—"The
dread constraint of physical passion" or "Lust is Fate"—which Hugo wishes to

indicate. It is a mere jingle, suggestive of a schoolboy turning over the
dictionary.
[119] That the only person at all likely to be "name-father" of this name was not
born till a considerable time after his name-child's death would perhaps be worth
remarking in another writer. In Hugo it hardly counts.
[120] Let me do even them one justice in this connection. They did not suppose
that the only way to make people get up earlier was to make these people's
clocks and watches tell lies.
[121] There is a smaller point which might be taken up. Undoubtedly there were
many double traitors on both sides in the other Great War. But, like all their kind,
they had a knack for being found out. Dumas would, I think, have given us
something satisfactory as to the "aristocrat" at Jersey who betrayed the Claymore
to the Revolutionary authorities.
[122] It is impossible, with him, not to think of Baudelaire's great line in
L'Albatros (which some may have read even before Les Travailleurs)—

"Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher,"

though the sense is not absolutely coextensive.
[123] If I have spoken above "so that the Congregation be thereby offended," let
me point out that there is no other way of dealing with the subject critically,
except perhaps by leaving a page blank save for such words, in the middle of it,
as "Victor Hugo is Victor Hugo; and he is for each reader to take or to leave." He
would, I think, have rather liked this; I should not, as a person, dislike it; but I
fear it might not suit with my duty as a critic and a historian.

CHAPTER IV
BEYLE AND BALZAC

There may possibly be some readers who might prefer that the two
novelists whose names head this chapter should be treated each in a chapter
to himself. But after trying several plans (for I can assure such readers that
the arrangement of this History has been the reverse of haphazard) I have
thought it best to yoke them. That they have more in common with each
other, not merely than either has with Hugo or Dumas, or even George
Sand, but than either of these three has with the others, few will deny. And
as a practising novelist Beyle has hardly substance enough to stand by
himself, though as an influence—for a time and that no short one and still
existing—scarcely any writer in our whole list has been more efficacious. It
is not my purpose, nor, I think, my duty, to say much about their relations to
each other; indeed Beyle delayed his novel-work so long, and Balzac
codified his own so carefully and so early, that the examination of the
question would need to be meticulous, and might even be a little futile in a
general history, though it is an interesting subject for a monograph. It is
enough to say that, generally, both belong to the analytical rather than to the
synthetical branch of novel-writing, and may almost be said between them
to have introduced the analytical romance; that they compose their palettes
of sombre and neutral rather than of brilliant colours; that actual "story
interest" is not what they, as a rule,[124] aim at. Finally—though this may be
a proposition likely to be disputed with some heat in one case if not in both
—their conception of humanity has a certain "other-worldliness" about it,
though it is as far as possible from being what is usually understood by the
adjective "unworldly" and though the forms thereof in the two only partially
coincide.

Of the books of Henri Beyle, otherwise Stendhal,[125] to
say that they are not like anything else will only seem Beyle—his
peculiarity.
banal to those who bring the banality with them. To
annoy these further by opposing pedantry to banality, one might say that the

aseity is quintessential. There never—to be a man of great power, almost
genius, a commanding influence, and something like the founder of a
characteristic school of literature—was such a habitans in sicco as Beyle;
indeed his substance and his atmosphere are not so much dry as desiccated.
The dryness is not like that which was attributed in the last volume to
Hamilton, which is the dryness of wine: it is almost the dryness of ashes.
By bringing some humour of your own[126] you may confection a sort of
grim comedy out of parts of his work, but that is all. At the same time, he
has an astonishing command of such reality, and even vitality, as will (one
cannot say survive but) remain over the process of desiccation.
That Beyle was not such a passionless person as he gave himself out to be
in his published works was of course always suspected, and more than
suspected, by readers with any knowledge of human nature. It was finally
proved by the autobiographic Vie de Henri Brulard, and the other remains
which were at last given to the world, nearly half a century after the author's
death, by M. Casimir Stryienski. But the great part which he played in
producing a new kind of novel is properly concerned with the earlier and
larger division of the work, though the posthumous stuff reinforces this.
Some one, I believe, has said—many people may have
said—that you never get a much truer notion, though Armance.
you may afterwards get a clearer and fuller, of a writer
than from his earliest work.[127] Armance, Beyle's first published novel,[128]
though by no means the one which has received most attention, is certainly
illuminating. Or rather, perhaps one should say that it poses the puzzle
which Beyle himself put briefly in the words quoted by his editor and
biographer: "Qu'ai-j'été? que suis-je? En vérité je serais bien embarrassé de
le dire." To tell equal truth, it is but a dull book in itself, surcharged with a
vague political spite, containing no personage whom we are permitted to
like (it would be quite possible to like Armance de Zohiloff if we were only
told less about her and allowed to see and hear more of her), and
possessing, for a hero, one of the most obnoxious and foolish prigs that I
can remember in any novel. Octave de Malivert unites varieties of
detestableness in a way which might be interesting if (to speak with only
apparent flippancy) it were made so. He is commonplace in his adoration of
his mother and his neglect (though his historian calls it "respect") of his
father; he is constantly a prig, as when he is shocked at people for paying

more attention to him when they hear that his parents are going to be
indemnified to a large extent for the thefts of their property at the
Revolution; he is such a sneak and such a snob that he is always
eavesdropping to hear what people say about him; such a bounder that he
disturbs his neighbours by talking loud at the play; such a brute that he
deliberately kills a rather harmless coxcomb of a marquis who rebukes him
for making this tapage; and such a still greater brute (for in the duel he had
himself been wounded) that he throws out of the window an unfortunate
lackey who gets in his way at a party where Octave has, as usual, lost his
temper. Finally, he is a combination of prig, sneak, cad, brute, and fool
when (having picked up and read a forged letter which is not addressed to
him, though it has been put by enemies in his way) he believes, without any
enquiry, that his unlucky cousin Armance, to whom he is at last engaged, is
deceiving him, but marries her all the same, lives with her (she loves him
frantically) for a few days, and then, pretending to go to the succour of the
Greeks, poisons himself on board ship—rather more, as far as one can make
out, in order to annoy her than for any other reason. That there are the
elements, and something more than the elements, of a powerful story in this
is of course evident; there nearly always are such elements in Beyle, and
that is why he has his place here. But, as has been said, the story is almost
as dull as it is disagreeable. Unluckily, too, it is, like most of his other
books, pervaded by an unpleasant suggestion that the disagreeableness is
intimately connected with the author's own nature. As with Julien Sorel (v.
inf.) so with Octave de Malivert, one feels that, though Beyle would never
have behaved exactly like his book-child, that book-child has a great deal
too much of the uncanny and semi-diabolical doubles of some occult stories
in it—is, in fact, an incarnation of the bad Beyle, the seamy side of Beyle,
the creature that Beyle might have been but for the grace of that God in
whom he did not believe. Which things, however one may have schooled
oneself not to let book and author interfere with each other, are not
comfortable.
It ought, however, to be said that Armance is an early and remarkable
Romantic experiment in several ways, not least in the foreign mottoes,
English, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, which are prefixed to the
chapters. Unluckily some of them[129] are obviously retranslated from
French versions unverified by the originals, and once there is a most curious

blunder. Pope's description of Belinda's neck and cross, not quite in the
original words but otherwise exact, is attributed to—Schiller!
I have read, I believe, as much criticism as most men,
possibly, indeed, a little more than most, and I ought La Chartreuse de
Parme.
long ago to have been beyond the reach of shocking,
startling, or any other movement of surprise at any critical utterance
whatsoever. But I own that an access of fou rire once came upon me when I
was told in a printed page that La Chartreuse de Parme was a "very lively
and very amusing book." A book of great and peculiar power it most
undoubtedly is, a book standing out in the formidable genealogy of
"psychological" novels as (salva reverentia) certain names stand out from
the others in the greater list that opens the first chapter of St. Matthew. But
"lively"? and "amusing"? Wondrous hot indeed is this snow, and more
lustrous than any ebony are the clerestories towards the south-north of this
structure.
To begin with, there rests on the whole book that
oppression of récit which has been not unfrequently The Waterloo
dwelt upon in the last volume, and sometimes this. Of episode.
the 440 pages, tightly printed, of the usual reprint, I
should say that two-thirds at least are solid, or merely The subject and
general colour.
broken by one or two paragraphs, which are seldom
conversational. This, it may be said, is a purely mechanical objection. But it
is not so. Although the action is laid in the time contemporary with the
writer and writing, from the fall of Napoleon onwards, and in the country
(Italy) that he knew best, the whole cast and scheme are historical, the
method is that of a lecturer at a panorama, who describes and points while
the panorama itself passes a long way off behind a screen of clear but thick
glass. In two or perhaps three mostly minute parts or scenes this description
may seem unjust. One, the first, the longest, and the best, is perhaps also the
best-known of all Beyle's work: it is the sketch of the débâcle after
Waterloo. (It is not wonderful that Beyle should know something about
retreats, for, though he was not at Waterloo, he had come through the
Moscow trial.) This is a really marvellous thing and intensely interesting,
though, as is almost always the case with the author, strangely unexciting.
The interest is purely intellectual, and is actually increased by comparison
with Hugo's imaginative account of the battle itself; but you do not care the

snap of a finger whether the hero, Fabrice, gets off or not. Another patch
later, where this same Fabrice is attacked by, and after a rough-and-tumble
struggle kills, his saltimbanque rival in the affections of a low-class actress,
and then has a series of escapes from the Austrian police on the banks of the
Po, has a little more of the exciting about it. So perhaps for some—I am not
sure that it has for me—may have the final, or provisionally final, escape
from the Farnese Tower. And there is, even outside of these passages, a
good deal of scattered incident.
But these interesting plums, such as even they are, are stuck in an enormous
pudding of presentation of the intrigues and vicissitudes of a petty Italian
court,[130] in which, and in the persons who take part in them, I at least find
it difficult to take the very slightest interest. Fabrice del Dongo himself,[131]
with whom every woman falls in love, and who candidly confesses that he
does not know whether he has ever been really in love with any woman—
though there is one possible exception precedent, his aunt, the Duchess of
Sanseverina, and one subsequent, Clélia Conti, who saves him from prison,
as above—is depicted with extraordinary science of human nature. But it is
a science which, once more, excludes passion, humour, gusto—all the fluids
of real or fictitious life. Fabrice is like (only "much more also") the
simulacra of humanity that were popular in music-halls a few years ago. He
walks, talks, fights, eats, drinks, thinks even, and makes love if he does not
feel it, exactly like a human being. Except the "fluids" just mentioned, it is
impossible to mention anything human that he lacks. But he lacks these,
and by not having them lacks everything that moves the reader.
And so it is more or less with all of them: with the Duchess and Clélia least
perhaps, but even with them to some extent; with the Duchess's first
cicisbeo and then husband, Count Mosca, prime minister of the Duke of
Parma; with his master, the feebly cruel and feebly tyrannical Ranuce-
Ernest IV.; with the opposition intriguers at court; with the Archbishop, to
whom Fabrice is made, by the influence of Count and Duchess, coadjutor
and actual successor; with Clélia's father and her very much belated
husband—with all of them in short. You cannot say they are "out"; on the
contrary they do and say exactly what in the circumstances they would do
and say. Their creator's remarks about them are sometimes of a marvellous
subtlety, expressed in a laconism which seems to regard Marivaudage or
Meredithese with an aristocratic disdain. But at other times this laconic

letter literally killeth. Perhaps two examples of the two effects should be
given:
(Fabrice has found favour in the eyes and arms of the actress
Marietta)
The love of this pretty Marietta gave Fabrice all the charms of
the sweetest friendship. And this made him think of the
happiness of the same kind which he might have found with the
Duchess herself.
If this is not "piercing to the accepted hells beneath" with a diamond-
pointed plunger, I know not what is.
But much later, quite towards the end of the book, the author has to tell how
Fabrice again and Clélia "forgot all but love" in one of their stolen meetings
to arrange his escape.
(He has, by the way, told a lie to make her think he is poisoned)
She was so beautiful—half-dressed and in a state of extreme
passion as she was—that Fabrice could not resist an almost
involuntary movement. No resistance was opposed.[132]
Now I am not (see Addenda and Corrigenda of the last volume) avid of
expatiations of the Laclosian kind. But this is really a little too much of the
"Spanish-fleet-taken-and-burnt-as-per-margin" order.
Much the same characteristics, but necessarily on a
small scale, appear in the short stories usually found L'Abbesse de
Castro, etc.
under the title of the first and longest of them, L'Abbesse
de Castro. Two of these, Mina de Wangel and Le Philtre, are historiettes of
the passion which is absent from La Chartreuse de Parme; but each is
tainted with the macabre touch which Beyle affected or which (for that
word is hardly fair) was natural to him. In one a German girl of high rank
and great wealth falls in love with a married man, separates him from his
wife by a gross deception, lives with him for a time; and when he leaves her
on finding out the fraud, blows her brains out. In the other a Spanish lady,
seduced and maltreated by a creole circus-rider of the worst character,
declares to a more honourable lover her incurable passion for the scoundrel

and takes the veil. The rest are stories of the Italian Renaissance, grimy and
gory as usual. Vittoria Accoramboni herself figures, but there is no evidence
that Beyle (although he had some knowledge of English literature[133])
knew at the time our glorious "White Devil," and his story dwells little on
her faults and much on the punishment of her murderers. L'Abbesse de
Castro itself, La Duchesse de Palliano, San Francesco à Ripa, Vanina
Vanini are all of the same type and all full of the gloomier items seen by the
Dreamer of Fair Women—

Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes,
Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,

and blood everywhere. And these unmerry tales are always recounted ab
extra; in fact, many of them are real or pretended abstracts from chronicles
of the very kind which furnished Browning with the matter of The Ring and
the Book. It is, however, more apt and more curious to compare them with
the scenes of Gerard's experiences with the princess in The Cloister and the
Hearth, as instances of different handling of the same matter by two
novelists of talent almost, if not quite, reaching genius.
This singular aloofness, this separation of subject and
spectator by a vast and impenetrable though translucent Le Rouge et le Noir.
wall, as in a museum or a morgue, is characteristic of all
Beyle's books more or less. In fact, he somewhere confesses—the
confession having, as always in persons of anything like his stamp, the
nature of a boast—that he cannot write otherwise than in récit, that the
broken conversational or dramatic method is impossible to him. But an
almost startling change—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say
reinforcement—of this method appears in what seems to me by far the most
remarkable and epoch-making of his books, Le Rouge et le Noir. That there
is a strong autobiographic element in this, though vigorously and almost
violently "transposed," must have been evident to any critical reader long
ago. It became not merely evident but evidenced by the fresh matter
published thirty years since.
The book is a long one; it drags in parts; and, long as it
is, there is stuff in it for a much longer—indeed Beyle's
masterpiece, and
preferably for two or three. It is not only a roman

passionnel, as Beyle understood passion, not only a why.
collection of Parisian and Provincial scenes, but a
romance of secret diplomacy, and one of Seminarist life, with constant side-
excursions of Voltairianism, in religion, of the revolutionary element in
politics which Voltaire did not ostensibly favour, however much he may
have been responsible for it, of private cynicism, and above all and most
consistently of all, of that psychological realism, which is perhaps a more
different thing from psychological reality than our clever ones for two
generations have been willing to admit, or, perhaps, able to perceive.
That—to adopt a division which foolish folk have sneered at directly and
indirectly, but which is valuable and almost necessary in the case of second-
class literature—it is rather an unpleasant than a pleasant book, must be
pretty well apparent from what has been already said of its author and itself.
That it is a powerful one follows almost in the same way. But what has to
be said, for the first, if not also the last, time in reference to Beyle's fiction,
is that it is interesting.
The interest depends almost entirely—I really do not
think it would be rash to say entirely—upon the hero and Julien Sorel and
Mathilde de la
one of the heroines. The other personages are Mole.
dramatically and psychologically competent, but Beyle
has—perhaps save in one or two cases intentionally—made them something
of comparses or "supers." There may be two opinions about the other
heroine, Madame de Rênal, Julien Sorel's first and last love, his victim in
two senses and directly the cause of his death, though he was not directly
the cause of hers. She seems to me merely what the French call a
femmelette, feebly amorous, feebly fond of her children, feebly estranged
from and unfaithful to her husband, feebly though fatally jealous of and a
traitress to her lover—feebly everything. Shakespeare or Miss Austen[134]
could have made such a character interesting, Beyle could not. Nor do the
other "seconds"—Julien's brutal peasant father and brothers, the notables of
Verrières, the husband, M. de Rênal (himself a gentillâtre, as well as a man
of business, a bully, and a blockhead), and the hero's just failure of a father-
in-law, the Marquis de la Mole—seem to me to come up to the mark. But,
after all, they furnish forth the action, and are necessary in their various
ways to set forth the character of that hero and his second love, almost in

the mediaeval sense his wife and his widow, Mathilde de la Mole, heiress,
great lady, fille folle de son corps, and, in a kind of way, Queen Whims.
Julien Sorel, allowance being made for his date, is one of the most
remarkable heroes of fiction. He is physically handsome, in fact beautiful,
[135]
intellectually very clever, and possessed, in especial, of a marvellous
memory; also, though not well educated early, capable of learning anything
in a very short time—but presented in these favourable lights without any
exaggeration. A distinguished Lord Justice was said by his admirers, at the
beginning of his manhood, to have obtained more marks in examinations
than any youthful person in the United Kingdom: and Julien, with equal
opportunities, would probably have done the same in France. Morally, in no
limited sense of the word, he does not possess a single good quality, and
does possess most bad ones, with the possible exceptions of gluttony and
avarice. That, being in each case a family tutor or employé under trust, he
seduces the wife of his first employer and the daughter of the second,
cannot, in the peculiar circumstances, be said to count. This is, as it were,
the starting-point, the necessary handicap, in the competition of this kind of
novel. It is as he is, and in reference to what he does, after this is put aside,
that he has to be considered. He is not a stage villain, though he has the
peculiar, and in the circumstances important, if highly-to-be-deprecated
habit of carrying pocket-pistols. He is not a Byronic hero with a terrible but
misty past. He is not like Valmont of the Liaisons Dangereuses,[136] a
professional and passionless lady-killer. He is not a swindler nor (though he
sometimes comes near to this also) a conspirator like Count Fosco of The
Woman in White. One might make a long list of such negatives if it were
worth while. He is only an utterly selfish, arrogant, envious, and generally
bad-blooded[137] young man, whom circumstances partly, and his own
misdeeds helping them, first corrupt and then destroy. You never
sympathise with him for one moment, except in a peculiar fashion to be
noted presently; but at the same time he neither quite bores you nor quite
disgusts you. Homo est, and it is Beyle's having made him so that makes
Beyle a sort of genius and much more than a sort of novelist.
But I am not certain that Mathilde is not even a greater creation, though
again it is, except quite towards the end, equally impossible to like her.
Femina est, though sometimes furens, oftener still furiosa (in a still wider

sense than that in which Mr. Norris has[138] ingeniously "feminated"
Orlando Furioso), and, in part of her conduct already alluded to, as destitute
of any morality as Julien himself. Although there could hardly be (and no
doubt had better not be) many like her, she is real and true, and there are not
a few redeeming features in her artistically and even personally. She is, as
has been said, both rich and noble, the famous lover of the third Valois
Marguerite being an (I suppose collateral) ancestor of hers.[139] Her father is
not merely a patrician but a Minister at the close of the French Restoration;
she may marry any one she likes; and has, in fact, a train of admirers whom
she alternately cajoles and snubs. Julien is taken into the household as half
private secretary, half librarian; is especially favoured by her father, and
treated by her brother (one of Beyle's few thoroughly good fellows) almost
on equal terms. But his bad blood and his want of breeding make him stiff
and mysterious, and Mathilde takes a perverse fancy to him, the growth of
which is skilfully drawn. Although she is nothing so little as a Lélia or an
Indiana or a Valentine (vide next chapter), she is idiosyncratically romantic,
and at last it is a case of ladders up to the window, "the irreparable," and
various wild performances on her part and her lover's. But this is all
comparatively banal. Beyle's touch of genius only reappears later. An
extraordinary but (when one comes to think of it) not in the least unnatural
series of "ups and downs" follows. Julien's bad blood and vulgar nature
make him presume on the advantage he has obtained; Mathilde's morgue
and hot-headedness make her feel degraded by what she has given. She
neglects him and he becomes quite frantic about her; he takes sudden
dudgeon and she becomes frantically desirous of him. This spiritual or
emotional man-and-woman-in-the-weather-house business continues; but at
last, with ambages and minor peripeteias impossible to abstract, it so comes
about that the great and proud Marquis de La Mole, startlingly but not quite
improbably, chooses to recognise this traitor and seducer as a possible by-
blow of nobility, gets him a commission, endows him handsomely, and all
but gives his consent to a marriage.
Then the final revolution comes. With again extraordinary but, as it is told,
again not inconceivable audacity, Julien refers for character to his first
mistress in both senses, Madame de Rênal, and she "gives him away." The
marquis breaks off the treaties, and Julien, leaving his quarters, journeys
down to Verrières and shoots Madame de Rênal (with the pocket-pistols) in

church. She does not die, and is not even very seriously wounded; but he is
tried, is (according, it would seem, to a state of French law, which contrasts
most remarkably with one's recent knowledge of it) condemned, and after a
time is executed for a murder which has not been committed. Mathilde
(who is to bear him a child and always considers herself his wife) and
Madame de Rênal both visit him in prison, the former making immense
efforts to save him. But Julien, consistently with his character all through, is
now rather bored by Mathilde and exceedingly fond of Madame de Rênal,
who dies shortly after him. What becomes of Mathilde we are not told,
except that she devotes herself to her paulo-post-future infant. The mere
summary may seem rather preposterous; the book is in a way so. But it is
also, in no ordinary sense, once more real and true. It has sometimes been
regarded as a childish, but I believe it to be a true, criterion of novels that
the reader should feel as if he would like to have had personal dealings with
the personages. I should very much like to have shot[140] Julien Sorel,
though it would have been rather an honour for him. And I should very
much like to have made Mathilde fall in love with me. As for Madame de
Rênal, she was only good for suckling fools and telling tales out of school.
But I do not find fault with Beyle for drawing her, and she, too, is very
human.
In fact the book, pleasant or unpleasant, if we reflect on what the French
novel was at the time, deserves a very high place. Compare it with others,
and nowhere, except in Balzac, will you find anything like it for firm
analysis of character, while I confess that it seems to me to be more strictly
human of this world, and at the same time more original,[141] than a good
deal of the Comédie.
The question, "Would a novelist in altered circumstances
have given us more or better novels?" is sometimes The resuscitated
work—Lamiel.
treated as ultra vires or nihil ad rem on the critic's part. I
myself have been accused rather of limiting than of extending the province
of the literary critic; yet I think this question is, sometimes at least, in place.
If so, it can seldom be more in place than with Beyle, first because of the
unusually mperfect character of his actual published work; and secondly,
because of the still more unusual abundance of half-done work, or of
fragments of self-criticism, which what has been called the "Beyle
resurrection" of the close of the last century has furnished. Indeed the

unfinished and scarcely more than half-drafted novel of Lamiel almost by
itself suggests the question and supplies the answer. That answer—except
from favourers of the grime-novel which, oddly enough, whether by
coincidence or common causation became so popular at about the time of
this "resurrection"—can hardly be favourable. Lamiel is a very grubby little
book. The eponymous heroine is adopted as a child by a parish beadle and
his wife, who do not at all maltreat her, except by bringing her up in ways
of extreme propriety, which she detests, taking delight in the histories of
Mandrin, Cartouche and Co. At early maidenhood she is pitched upon as
lectrice, and in a way favourite, by the great lady of the neighbourhood, the
Duchess of Miossens; and in this position first attracts the attention of a
peculiarly diabolical little dwarf doctor, who, bar the comic[142] element,
reminds one rather of Quilp. His designs are, however, baulked in a most
Beylian manner; for Lamiel (who, by a pleasing chance, was at first called
"Amiel"—a delightfully other Amiel!) coolly bestows some money upon a
peasant to "teach her what love is," and literally asks the Gebirian question
about the ocean, "Is this all?" after receiving the lesson. Further, in the more
and more unfinished parts of the book, she levants for a time with the young
duke, quits him, becomes a professional hetaera in Paris, but never takes
any fancy to the business of her avocation till she meets an all-conquering
criminal, Valbayre.[143] The scenario tells us that, Valbayre having been
caught by justice, she sets fire to the Palace thereof, and her own bones are
discovered in the ashes.
This, though Beyle at least meant to season the misanthropy with irony (he
might be compared with Meredith for some slightly cryptic views of "the
Comic Spirit"), is rather poor stuff, and certainly shows no improvement or
likelihood of improvement on the earlier productions. It is even somewhat
lamentable, not so much for the presence of grime as because of the
absence of any other attraction. Le Rouge et le Noir is not exactly rose-pink,
but it derives hardly any, if any, interest from its smirches of mud and blood
and blackness. In Lamiel there is little else. Moreover, that unchallengeable
"possibility of humanity" which redeems not merely Le Rouge et le Noir but
the less exciting books, is wanting here. Sansfin, the doctor, is a mere
monstrosity in mind as well as in body, and, except perhaps when she
ejaculates (as more briefly reported above), "Comment! ce fameux amour,
ce n'est que ça?" Lamiel herself is not made interesting.

The Vie de Henri Brulard, of high importance for a
History of Novelists, is in strictness outside the subject The Nouvelles
Inédites.
of a historian of the Novel, though it might be adduced
to strengthen the remarks made on Rousseau's Confessions.[144] And the rest
of the "resurrected" matter is also more autobiographical, or at best
illustrative of Beyle's restless and "masterless" habit of pulling his work to
pieces—of "never being able to be ready" (as a deservedly unpopular
language has it)—than contributory to positive novel-achievement. But the
first and by far the most substantive of the Nouvelles Inédites, which his
amiable but not very strong-minded literary executor, Colomb, published
soon after his death, needs a little notice.

Le Chasseur Vert[145] (which had three other titles, three
successive prefaces, and in its finished, or rather Le Chasseur Vert.
unfinished, form is the salvage of five folio volumes of
MS., the rest being at best sketched and at worst illegible) contains, in what
we have of it, the account of the tribulations of a young sub-lieutenant of
Lancers (with a great deal of money, a cynical but rather agreeable banker-
papa, an adoring mother, and the record of an expulsion from the
Polytechnique for supposed Republicanism) suddenly pitchforked into
garrison, soon after the Revolution of July, at Nancy. Here, in the early
years of the July monarchy, the whole of decent society is Legitimist; a very
small but not easily suppressible minority Republican; while officialdom,
civil and military, forms a peculiar juste milieu, supporting itself by
espionage and by what Their Majesties of the present moment, the Trade
Unions, call "victimisation," but in a constant state of alarm for its position,
and "looking over its shoulder" with a sort of threefold squint, at the white
flag, the eagles—and the guillotine. Nothing really happens, but it takes 240
pages to bring us to an actual meeting between Lieutenant Lucien Leeuwen
and his previously at distance adored widow, the Marquise de Chasteller.
The book is not a very good novel, even as a fragment, and probably
nothing would ever have made it so as a whole. But there is good novel-
stuff in it, and it is important to a student of the novel and almost
indispensable to a student of this novelist. Of the cynical papa—who, when
his son comes to him in a "high-falutin" mood, requests him to go to his
(the papa's) opera-box, to replace his sire with some agreeable girl-officials
of that same institution, and to spend at least 200 francs on a supper for

them at the Rocher—one would gladly see more. Of the barrack (or rather
not-barrack) society at Nancy, the sight given, though not agreeable, is
interesting, and to any one who knew something of our old army, especially
before the abolition of purchase, very curious. There is no mess-room and
apparently no common life at all, except on duty and at the "pension" hotel-
meals, to which,—rather, it would seem, at the arbitrary will of the colonel
than by "regulation,"—you have to subscribe, though you may, and indeed
must, live in lodgings exactly like a particulier. Of the social-political life
of the place we see rather too much, for Beyle, not content with making the
politics which he does not like make themselves ridiculous—or perhaps not
being able to do so—himself tells us frequently that they are ridiculous,
which is not equally effective. So also, instead of putting severe or
"spiritual" speeches in Lucien's mouth, he tells us that they were spiritual or
severe, an assurance which, of course, we receive with due politeness, but
which does not give us as much personal delectation as might be supplied
by the other method. No doubt this and other things are almost direct results
of that preference for récit over semi-dramatic evolution of the story by
deed and word, which has been noticed. But they are damaging results all
the same: and, after making the fairest allowance for its incomplete
condition, the thing may be said to support, even more than Lamiel does,
the conclusion already based upon the self-published stories (and most of
all upon that best of them, Le Rouge et le Noir) that Beyle could never have
given us a thoroughly hit-off novel.
Still, there is always something unfair in making use of
"Remains," and for my part I do not think that, unless Beyle's place in the
story.
they are of extraordinary merit, they should ever be
published. "Death should clear all scores" in this way as in others. Yet no
really critical person will think the worse of Beyle's published work because
of these anecdota, though they may, as actually before us, be taken as
throwing some light on what is not so good in the publicata. There can be
no doubt that Beyle occupies a very important position in the history of the
novel, and not of the French novel only, as the first, or almost the first,
analyst of the ugly for fictitious purposes, and as showing singular power in
his analysis. Unfortunately his synthetic gifts were not equally great. He
had strange difficulty in making his stories march; he only now and then got
them to run; and though the real life of his characters has been

acknowledged, it is after all a sort of "Life-in-Death," a new manifestation
of the evil power of that mysterious entity whom Coleridge, if he did not
discover, first named and produced in quasi-flesh, though he left us without
any indication of more than one tiny and accidental part of her dread
kingdom.
He has thus the position of père de famille, whether (to repeat the old joke)
of a famille déplorable in the moral, not the sentimental, sense, must, I
suppose, be left matter of opinion. The plentiful crop of monographs about
him since M. Stryienski's Pompeian explorations and publications is in a
manner—if only in a manner—justified by the numerous followers—not
always or perhaps often conscious followers, and so even more important—
in his footsteps. Nobody can say that the picaresque novelists, whether in
their original country or when the fashion had spread, were given to
berquinades or fairy-tales. Nobody can say that the tale-writers who
preceded and followed them were apostles of virtue or painters of Golden-
Age scenes. But, with some exceptions (chiefly Italian) among the latter,
they did not, unless their aim were definitely tragical—an epithet which one
could show, on irrefragable Aristotelian principles, to be rarely if ever
applicable to Beyle and his school—they did not, as the common phrase
goes, "take a gloomy view" only. There were cakes and ale; and the cakes
did not always give internal pains, nor the ale a bad headache. As even
Hazlitt (who has been selected, not without reason, as in many ways like
Beyle) said of himself on his death-bed, rather to some folks' surprise
though not to mine, most of the characters "had a happy life," though the
happiness might be chequered: and some of them were "good." It is
scarcely an exaggeration to say that in Beyle's books happiness does not
exist, and virtue has hardly a place. There are some characters who may be
said to be neutral or "on the line"; they may be not definitely unhappy or
definitely bad. But this is about as far as he ever goes in that direction. And
accordingly he and his followers have the fault of one-sidedness; they may
(he did) see life steadily, but they do not see it whole. There is no need to
preach a sermon on the text: in this book there is full need to record the fact.
[146]

In dealing with Beyle's greater companion here there are
certain things—not exactly difficulties, but Balzac—conditions
circumstances conditioning the treatment—which should of the present
dealing.
be stated. That it is well to know something about your
subject has been an accepted doctrine with all save very young persons, idle
paradoxers, and (according to Sir Walter Scott) the Scottish Court of
Session in former days.[147] That it is also well not to know too much about
it has sometimes been maintained, without any idleness in either sense of
the word; the excess being thought likely to cause weariness, "staleness,"
and absence of interest. If this were necessarily so, it might be better for the
writer once more to leave this part of the chapter (since at least the heading
of it could not possibly be omitted in the history) a blank or a constellation
of asterisks in Sternian fashion. For it has fallen to his lot to translate one
whole novel of Balzac's,[148] to edit a translation of the entire Comédie,[149]
superintending some of the volumes in narrow detail, and studying each in
short, but (intentionally at least) thorough Introductions, with a very
elaborate preface-study of the whole; to read all Balzac's rather voluminous
miscellanea from the early novel-attempts to posthumous things, including
letters; and, finally, to discuss the subject once more, with the aid or burden
of many previous commentaries, in a long Review article.[150] Nevertheless,
he does not feel that any disgust forbids while a clear duty calls: and he
hopes to show that it is not always necessary to weary of quails as in the
Biblical, partridges as in the old fabliau, and pigeons in the Dumas fils (v.
inf.) version of the Parable of Satiety.
In no case, however, not even in that of Victor Hugo, is
the easement given by the general plan of the book, in Limitations of
Subject.
regard to biographical and other not strictly literary
details, more welcome. We shall say nothing on the point whether the
author of the Comédie Humaine should be called M. de Balzac or M.
Balzac or M. Balssa; nothing about his family, his friends, his enemies, his
strangely long-deferred, and, when it came, as strangely ill-fated marriage;
little, though something necessarily, about his tastes, his commercial and
other enterprises, and so forth; and not very much—something here also
becoming obligatory—on his manner of producing the immense and
wonderful work which he has left us. Those who are curious about such
things will find ample satisfaction in the labours of M. Spoelberch de

Lovenjoul, of MM. Christophe and Cerfbeer, and of others.[151] Here he is,
for us, Honoré de Balzac, author of the Juvenilia (saved from, as it is
understood, a larger bulk still) in ten volumes; of the mighty "Comedy"
itself, and, more incidentally, of the considerable epistolary and
miscellaneous production referred to above. The manner in which this
enormous output was put out has perhaps too much to do with its actual
character to be passed over in total silence. It represents thirty years'
working time almost entirely spent upon it,[152] the alternatives being the
above-mentioned commercial speculations (which were almost invariably
unfortunate, and involved him, during the whole of his career, in
complicated indebtedness) and a good deal of travel, very frequently
connected with these speculations. Of the society which formed so large a
part of the life of the time and of which he wrote so often, Balzac saw little.
He worked at enormous stretches, and he rewrote his work, in MS., in proof
and in temporarily final print, with insatiable and indefatigable industry. To
no writer could the commonplace extravagance about burning the candle at
both ends be applied so truly as to Balzac. Only, his candle was shaped like
a wheel with no felloes, and he burnt it at the end of every spoke and at the
nave as well. How he managed to last, even to fifty, is one of the major
curiosities of literary biography.

Of the three divisions of this vast but far from chaotic
production, the miscellaneous, of course, concerns us And of Balzac
least. It shows Balzac as a failure of a dramatist, a critic himself.
of very varying competence,[153] not a particularly effective writer merely
as such, not possessed of much logical power, but having pretty wide
interests and abundantly provided with what we may call the odd tools of
the novelist's workshop. As a correspondent his writing has absolutely none
of what may be called the "departmental" interest of great letter-writers—of
Madame de Sévigné or Lady Mary, of Horace Walpole or Cowper; its
attraction is not epistolary but wholly autobiographic. And it is only fair to
say that, despite Balzac's immense and intense self-centredness, it leaves
one on the whole with a much better opinion of him as a man than might be
derived from his books or from the anecdotes about him. To adapt one of
the best known of these, there was, in fact, nothing real to him but Honoré
de Balzac, Honoré de Balzac's works and schemes, and, in rare cases (of
which Madame Hanska was the chief), Honoré de Balzac's loves. These
constituted his subject, his universe of thought and feeling, of action and
passion. But at the same time he stands apart from all the other great
egotists. He differs from those of whom Byron is the chief in that he does
not introduce himself prominently in his fictitious creations. He does not,
like those who may take their representative in Goethe, regard everything
merely as it relates to his personality. His chief peculiarity, his unique
literary character, and, it may be added at once, his greatness and his
weakness, all consist in the fact that he evolves a new world out of himself.
Now and then he may have taken an actual human model—George Sand,
Madame d'Agoult, Madame de Castries, Liszt, Latouche,[154] Rémusat—as
many others as anybody likes. But always these had not merely to receive
the Balzacian image and superscription, but to be transmuted into creatures
of a Balzacium Sidus. And it is the humanity of this planet or system, much
more than of our world, whereof his Comédie is the Comedy—a Comédie
Balzacienne.
But, it has been said, and the saying has been attributed
to no less a critic than M. Faguet, there are no "general Balzac's "general
ideas."
ideas" in Balzac.[155] One can only reply, "Heavens!
Why should there be?" The celebrated unreason of "going to a gin-palace

for a leg of mutton" (already quoted, and perhaps to be quoted again) is
sound and sensible as compared with asking general ideas from a novelist.
They are not quite absolutely forbidden to him, though he will have to be
very careful lest they get in his way. But they are most emphatically not his
business, except as very rare and very doubtful means to a quite different
end, means absolutely insufficient by themselves and exceedingly difficult
to combine with the other means which—more or fewer of them—are not
only sufficient but necessary. The "slice of human life," not necessarily, but
preferably ordinary, presenting probable and interesting characters,
connected by sufficient plot, diversified and adorned by descriptive and
other devices, and abundantly furnished with the conversation of men and
women of this world, the whole forming such a whole as will amuse, thrill,
affect, and in other ways, to use the all-important word once more, interest
the reader,—that is what is wanted. And this definition is as rigid at least as
the Aristotelian definition of tragedy and perhaps more exhaustive, as
concerns the novel, including, with the necessary modifications, the
romance—and the romance, including, with the necessary modifications,
the novel. In it "general ideas," unless a very special and not at all usual
meaning is attached to the term, can have no right of place. They may be
brought in, as almost anything may be brought in if the writer is Samson
enough to bring it. But they cannot be demanded of him as facts, images,
emotions, style, and a very large number of other things can or may be, not,
of course, all at once, but in larger or smaller selection. General ideas may
and perhaps should be demanded from the philosopher, the historian, the
political student. From the poet and the novelist they cannot be. And that
they should be so demanded is one of the chief instances of what seems to
the present writer to be the greatest mistake of French novel, as of other,
criticism—its persistent relapse upon the rule-system and its refusal to
judge by the result.[156]
It is all the more unreasonable to demand general ideas from Balzac
himself, because he is so liberal of general imagery, and what is more,
general prosopopœia. Be the Balzacian world real, as some would have it to
be, or be it removed from our mundane reality by the subtle "other-
planetary" influence which is apparent to others, its complexity, its fullness,
its variety, its busy and by no means unsystematic life and motion, cannot
be denied. Why on earth cannot people be content with asking Platonism

from Plato and Balzacity from Balzac? At any rate, it is Balzacity which
will be the subject of the following pages, and if anybody wants anything
else let him go elsewhere.
There is hardly likely to be much grumbling at the
absence of such detailed abstract or survey of individual Abstinence from
abstract.
books as has been given in cases of what may seem to be
much less importance. To begin with, such a survey as is possible[157] exists
already from these hands in the Introductions to the translated edition above
referred to, and to paraphrase or refashion it here would probably occupy a
hundred pages, if not more. Nor would the plan, elsewhere adopted, of
analysing afresh one, or two, or more examples, as representative, be
satisfactory. Although Balzac is in a sense one of the most intensely
individual of all novelists, his individuality, as in a very few others of the
greatest cases, cannot be elicited from particular works. Just as Hamlet will
give you no idea of the probable treatment of As You Like It, so Eugénie
Grandet contains no key to La Cousine Bette. Even the groups into which
he himself rather empirically, if not quite arbitrarily, separated the Comédie,
though they lend themselves a little more to specification, do not yield very
much to the classifier. The Comédie, once more, is a world—a world open
to the reader, "all before him." Chronological order may tell him a little
about Balzac, but it will not tell him very much about Balzac's work that he
cannot gain from the individual books, except in the very earliest stages.
There is no doubt that the Œuvres de Jeunesse, if not very delightful to the
reader (I have myself read them not without pleasure), are very instructive;
the instruction increases, while the pleasure is actually multiplied, when
you come to Les Chouans and the Peau de Chagrin. But it is, after a
fashion, only beyond these that the true Balzac begins, and the beginning is,
to a large extent, a reaction from previous work in consequence of a
discovery that the genius, without which he had acknowledged that it was
all up with him,[158] did not lie that way, and that he had no hope of finding
it there. Not that there is no genius in the two books mentioned; on the
contrary, it is there first to be found, and in La Peau is of the first order. But
their ways are not the ways in which he was to find it—and himself—more
specially.

As to Argow le Pirate[159] and Jane la Pâle (I have
never ceased lamenting that he did not keep the earlier The Œuvres de
Jeunesse.
title, Wann-Chlore) and the rest, they have interest of
various kinds. Some of it has been glanced at already—you cannot fully
appreciate Balzac without them. But there is another kind of interest,
perhaps not of very general appeal, but not to be neglected by the historian.
They are almost the only accessible body, except Pigault-Lebrun's latest and
Paul de Kock's earliest, of the popular fiction before 1830, of the stuff of
which, as previously mentioned, Ducray-Duminil, the lesser Ducange, and
many others are representatives, but representatives difficult to get at. This
class of fiction, which arose in all parts of Europe during the last years of
the eighteenth century and the earlier of the nineteenth, has very similar
characteristics, though the examples differ very slightly in different
countries. What are known with us as the Terror Novel, the Minerva Press,
the Silver Fork school, etc. etc., all have their part in it, and even higher
influences, such as Scott's, are not wanting. Han d'Islande and Bug-Jargal
themselves belong to some extent to the class, and I am far from certain that
the former is at all better than some of these juvenilia of Balzac's. But as a
whole they are of course little more than curiosities.
Whether these curiosities are more widely known than they were some five-
and-twenty, or thirty, years ago, when Mr. Louis Stevenson was the only
friend of mine who had read them, and when even special writers on Balzac
sometimes unblushingly confessed that they had not, I cannot say. Although
printed in the little fifty-five-volume[160] edition which for so many years
represented Balzac, they were excluded, as noted above, from the statelier
"Définitive," and so may have once more "gone into abscondence." I do not
want to read them again, but I no more repent the time once spent on them
than I did earlier. In fact I really do not think any one ought to talk about
Balzac who has not at least gained some knowledge of them, for many of
their defects remained with him when he got rid of the others. These defects
are numerous enough and serious enough. The books are nothing if not
uncritical, generally extravagant, and sometimes (especially in Jean Louis)
appallingly dull. Scarf-pins, made of poisoned fish-bones (Argow le Pirate),
extinction of virgins under copper bells (Le Centénaire), attempts at fairy-
tales (La Dernière Fée) jostle each other. The weaker historical kind figures
largely in L'Excommunié (one of the least bad), L'Israëlite, L'Héritière de

Birague, Dom Gigadas. There is a Vicaire des Ardennes (remarkably
different from him of Wakefield), which is a kind of introduction to Argow
le Pirate, and which, again, is not the worst. When I formerly wrote about
these curious productions, after reading them, I had not read Pigault-
Lebrun, and therefore did not perceive, what I now see to be an undoubted
fact, that Balzac was, sometimes at least, trying to follow in Pigault's
popular footsteps. But he had not that writer's varied knowledge of actual
life or his power of telling a story, and though he for the most part avoided
Pigault's grossièreté, the chaotic plots, the slovenly writing, and other
defects of his model abode with him.
There are not many more surprising things, especially in
pari materia, to be found in literary history than the sun- Les Chouans.
burst of Les Chouans after this darkness-that-can-be-felt
of the early melodramas. Not that Les Chouans is by any means a perfect
novel, or even a great one. Its narrative drags, in some cases, almost
intolerably; the grasp of character, though visible, is inchoate; the plot is
rather a polyptych of separate scenes than a connected action; you see at
once that the author has changed his model to Sir Walter and think how
much better Sir Walter would have done the thing. But there is a strange air
of "coming alive" in some of the scenes, though they are too much
separated, as in the case of the finale and of the execution of the rather
hardly used traitor earlier. These possess a character of thrill which may be
looked for in vain through all the ten volumes of the Œuvres de Jeunesse.
Montauran is a hero in more than one sense, and Mlle. de Verneuil is still
more a heroine. Had Balzac worked her out as he worked out others, who
did not deserve it so well, later, she might have been one of the great
characters in fiction. Even as it is, the "jour sans lendemain," which in one
sense unites, and in another parts, her and her lover for ever, is one of the
most really passionate things that the French novel, in its revival, had yet
seen. Besides this, there is a sort of extrinsic appeal in the book, giving that
curious atmosphere referred to already, and recalling the old prints of the
earth yawning in patches and animals rearing themselves from it at the
Creation. The names and personages of Hulot and Corentin were to be well
known later to readers of the "fifty volumes," and even the ruffianly
patriot[161] Marche-à-Terre had his future.

The second[162] blast of the horn with which Balzac
challenged admission to the Inner Sanctuaries or La Peau de
Chagrin.
strongholds of the novel, La Peau de Chagrin, had that
character of difference which one notices not seldom in the first worthy
works of great men of letters—the absence of the mould and the rut. Les
Chouans was a Waverley novel Gallicised and Balzacified; La Peau de
Chagrin is a cross between the supernatural romance and the novel of
psychology. It is one of the greatest of Balzac's books. The idea of the skin
—a new "wishing" talisman, which shrinks with every exercise of the
power it gives, and so threatens extinction at once of wishing and living—is
of course not wholly novel, though refreshed in detail. But then nothing is
wholly novel, and if anything could be it would probably be worthless. The
endless changes of the eternal substance make the law, the curse, and the
blessing of life. In the working out of his theme it may possibly be objected
that Balzac has not interested the reader quite enough in his personages—
that he seems in a way to be thinking more of the play than of the actors or
the audience. His "orgie" is certainly not much of a success; few orgies in
print are, except when they are burlesqued. But, on the other hand, the
curiosity-shop is splendid. Yet it is not on the details of the book, important
as these have been allowed to be throughout Balzac, that attention should be
mainly concentrated. The point of it is the way in which the necessary
atmosphere of bad dream is kept up throughout, yet with an appropriate
contrast of comparatively ordinary life. A competent critic who read Les
Chouans, knowing nothing about its author or his work, should have said,
"Here is more than a promising craftsman"; reading La Peau de Chagrin in
the same conditions he should have said, "Here is a great, though by no
means a faultless, artist." One who read both ought to have had no doubt as
to the coming of something and somebody extraordinary.
Thenceforward Balzac, though hardly ever faultless
except in short stories, was almost always great, and The short stories.
showed what may be called a diffused greatness, to
which there are few parallels in the history of the novel. Some of the tales
are simply wonderful. I cannot think of any one else, even Mérimée, who
could have done La Grande Bretèche—the story of a lover who, rather than
betray his mistress, allows himself to suffer, without a word, the fate of a
nun who has broken her vows—as Balzac has done it. La Recherche de

l'Absolu is one, and Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu is another, of the greatest
known masterpieces in the world of their kind. La Fille aux Yeux d'Or and
Une Passion dans le Désert have not the least need of their "indexable"
qualities to validate them. In the most opposite styles Jésus Christ en
Flandre and La Messe de l'Athée have their warmest admirers. In fact it is
scarcely too much to say that, in the whole list of nearer two than one score
—as they were published in the old collection from Le Bal de Sceaux to
Maître Cornélius—scarcely any are bad or insignificant, few mediocre, and
not a few equal, or hardly inferior, to those specially pointed out just now.
As so often happens, the short story estopped Balzac from some of his usual
delinquencies—over-detail, lingering treatment, etc.,—and encouraged his
virtues—intensity, grandeur, and idiosyncratic tone.
Of his one considerable collection of such stories—the
Contes Drolatiques—it is not possible to speak quite so The Contes
favourably as a whole; yet the reduction of favour need Drolatiques.
not be much. Of its greatest thing, La Succube, there have hardly been two
opinions among competent and unprejudiced judges. "Pity and terror" are
there well justified of their manipulator. The sham Old French, if not
absolutely "according to Cocker" (or such substitute for Cocker as may be
made and provided by scholarly authority), is very much more effective
than most such things. Not a few of the stories are good and amusing in
themselves, though of course the votaries of prunes and prism should keep
clear of them. The book has perhaps only one serious fault, that of the
inevitable and no doubt invited suggestion of, and comparison with,
Rabelais. In some points this will hold not so badly, for Balzac had
narrative power of the first order when he gave it scope; the deficiencies of
mere style which sometimes affect his modern French do not appear so
much in this pastiche, and he could make broad jokes well enough. But—
and this "but" is rather a terrible one—the saving and crowning grace of
Pantagruelist humour is not in him, except now and then in its grimmer and
less catholic variety or manifestation. And this absence haunts one in these
Contes Drolatiques, though it is to some extent compensated by the
presence of a "sentiment" rare elsewhere in Balzac.
Turning to the longer books, the old double difficulty of
selection and omission comes on one in full force. There Notes on select
larger books:
are, I suppose, few Balzacians who have not special

favourites, but probably Eugénie Grandet, Le Père Eugénie Grandet.
Goriot, and the two divisions of Les Parents Pauvres
would unite most suffrages. If I myself—who am not exactly a Balzacian,
though few can admire him more, and not very many, I think, have had
occasion for knowing his work better—put Eugénie Grandet at the head of
all the "scenes" of ordinary life, it is most certainly not because of its
inoffensiveness. It is perhaps partly because, in spite of that
inoffensiveness, it fixes on one a grasp superior to anything of Beyle's and
equal to anything of Flaubert's or Maupassant's. But the real cause of
admiration is the nature of the grasp itself. Here, and perhaps here only—
certainly here in transcendence—Balzac grapples with, and vanquishes, the
bare, stern, unadorned, unbaited, ironic facts of life. It is not an intensely
interesting book; it is certainly not a delightful one; you do not want to read
it very often. Still, when you have read it you have come to one of the
ultimate things: the flammantia mœnia of the world of fiction forbid any
one to go further at this particular point. And when this has been said of a
novel, all has been said of the quality of the novelist's genius, though not of
its quantity or variety.
The other three books selected have greater "interest"
and, in the case of the Parents Pauvres at least, much Le Père Goriot and
Les Parents
greater variety; but they do not seem to me to possess Pauvres.
equal consummateness. Le Père Goriot is in its own way
as pathetic as Eugénie Grandet, and Balzac has saved its pathos from being
as irritating as that of the all but idiotic grandfather in The Old Curiosity
Shop. But the situation still has a share of that fatal helpless ineffectiveness
which Mr. Arnold so justly denounced. Of the remaining pair, La Cousine
Bette is, I suppose, again the favourite; but I am not a backer. I have in other
places expressed my opinion that if Valérie Marneffe is part-model[163] of
Becky Sharp, which is not, I believe, absolutely certain, the copy far—
indeed infinitely—exceeds the original, and not least in the facts that Becky
is attractive while Valérie is not, and that there is any amount of possibility
in her. I should not wonder if, some day, a novelist took it into his head to
show Becky as she would have been if she had had those thousands a year
for which, with their accompanying chances of respectability, she so
pathetically sighed. Now Valérie is, and always must have been, a catin, and
nothing else. Lisbeth, again, though I admit her possibility, is not, to me,

made quite probable. Hulot, very possible and probable indeed, does not
interest or amuse me, and the angelic Adeline is good but dull. In fact the
book, by its very power, throws into disastrous eminence that absence of
delightfulness which is Balzac's great want, uncompensated by the presence
of the magnificence which is his great resource. La Peau de Chagrin and
some of the smaller things have this relief; La Cousine Bette has not. And
therefore I think that, on the whole, Le Cousin Pons is the better of the two,
though it may seem to some weaker, further "below proof." Everything in it
is possible and probable, and though the comedy is rather rueful, it is
comedy. It is a play; its companion is rather too much of a sermon.
The "Scènes de la Vie Privée" (to pass to a rapid general
survey of the "Acts" of the Comedy) provide an Others—the general
"scenic" division.
especially large number of short stories, almost the only
ones of length being Modeste Mignon and Béatrix, a strongly contrasted
couple. Modeste Mignon is perhaps one of the best of Balzac's second best.
Béatrix, a book of more power, appeals chiefly to those who may be
interested in the fact (which apparently is the fact) that the book contains,
almost more than any other, figures taken from real people, such as George
Sand—the "Camille" of the novel—and some of those about her. The
"Scènes de la Vie de Province" are richer in "magnums." Eugénie Grandet
is here, with a sort of companion, cheerfuller generally, in Ursule Mirouet.
The shorter stories are grouped under the titles of Les Parisiens en Province
(with the first appearance of Gaudissart) and Les Rivalités. Le Lys dans la
Vallée (which one is sometimes anxiously begged to distinguish from "the
lily of the valley," otherwise muguet) holds, for some, an almost entirely
unique place in Balzac's work, or one shared only in part by Mémoires de
Deux Jeunes Mariées. I have never, I think, cared much for either. But there
is more strength in two pairs of volumes which contain some of the author's
masterpieces—Les Célibataires with Pierrette, Le Curé de Tours, and the
powerful, if not particularly pleasant, Un Ménage de Garçon;[164] and
Illusions Perdues, running up well with Un Grand Homme de Province à
Paris and the semi-idyllic Ève et David.
But I suppose the "Scenes of Parisian Life" seem to be the citadel to most
people. Here are three of the four books specially selected above, Le Père
Goriot and both the constituents of Les Parents Pauvres. Here are the
Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes, which some rank among the very

first; not a few short stories in the volumes taking their titles from La
Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin and La Maison Nucingen; with César
Birotteau (Balzac on Bankruptcy, as it has been profanely called) and the
celebrated Histoire des Treize.
This last, I confess frankly, has always bored me, even though the volume
contains La Fille aux Yeux d'Or. The idea of a secret society in Society
itself was not new; it was much more worthy of Sue or Soulié than of
Balzac, and it does not seem to me to have been interestingly worked out.
But perhaps this is due to my perverse and elsewhere confessed objection to
crime and conspiracy novels generally.
Neither have I ever cared much for the group of "Scenes de la Vie
Politique," ranging from Une Ténébreuse Affaire to Le Député d'Arcis, the
last being not entirely Balzac's own. The single volume, "Scènes de la Vie
Militaire," consisting merely of Les Chouans and Une Passion dans le
Désert, is much better, and the "Scènes de la Vie de Campagne" reach a
high level with Le Médecin de Campagne, Le Curé de Village, and the late,
grim, but very noteworthy Les Paysans.
None, however, of these sometimes rather arbitrary groups of Balzac's
contains such thoroughly satisfactory matter as that which he chose to call
"Études Philosophiques." It includes only one full-volume novel, but that is
the Peau de Chagrin itself.[165] And here are most of the short stories
singled out at first, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Jésus Christ en Flandre, Le
Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu, with Melmoth Réconcilié[166] in the same batch. The
two volumes entitled L'Enfant Maudit and Les Marana contain all but a
dozen remarkable tales. Here, too, is the curious treatise Sur Cathérine de
Médicis, with another, to some people among the most interesting of all, the
autobiographic Louis Lambert, and also the mystical, and in parts very
beautiful, Séraphita.
The "Études Analytiques," which complete the original Comédie with the
two notorious volumes of Physiologie du Marriage and Petites Misères de
la Vie Conjugale, are not novels or tales, and so do not concern us. They are
not the only instance in literature showing that the sarcasm

The God you took from a printed book

extends to other things besides divinity. The old conventional satires on
marriage are merely rehashed with some extra garlic. Balzac had no
personal experience of the subject till just before his death, and his singular
claustral habits of life could not give him much opportunity for observation.
Experience, indeed, and observation (to speak with only
apparent paradox), though they played an important, yet "Balzacity": its
constitution.
played only a subordinate part at any time in the great
Balzacian achievement. Victor Hugo, in what was in effect a funeral
oration, described that achievement as "un livre qui est l'Observation et qui
est l'Imagination." But no one familiar with the Victorian rhetoric will
mistake the clou, the dominating and decisive word of that sentence. It is
the conjunction. Hugo meant to draw attention to the astonishing union of
Imagination with Observation—two things which, except in the highest
poetry, are apt to be rather strangers to each other—and by putting
Imagination last he meant also doubtless that this was the dominating—the
masculine—element in the marriage. In the immense volume of discussion
of Balzac which the long lifetime succeeding his death has seen, and which
thickened and multiplied towards the close of the last century and a little
later—owing to the conclusion of the Édition Définitive with its additions
and illustrative matter—this point has perhaps been too frequently lost sight
of. The great critics who were his contemporaries and immediate survivors
were rather too near. The greatest of the later batch, M. Brunetière, was a
little too eager to use Balzac as a stick to beat the Romantics with for one
thing, and to make him out a pioneer of all succeeding French fiction for
another. But, quite early, Philarète Chasles hit the white by calling him a
voyant (a word slightly varying in signification from our "seer"), and
recently a critic of less repute than Brunetière, but a good one—M. Le
Breton—though perhaps sometimes not quite fair to Balzac, recognises his
Romanticism, his frénésie, and so the Imagination of which the lunatic and
the lover are—and of which the devotee of Romance in verse and prose
should be—compact.
Nevertheless it would be of course highly improper, and in fact absurd, to
deny the "observation"—at least in detail of all kinds. Although—as we
have seen and may see again when we come to Naturalism and look back—
M. Brunetière was quite wrong in thinking that Balzac introduced
"interiors" to French, and still more wrong in thinking that he introduced

them to European, novel-writing, they undoubtedly make a great show in
his work—are, indeed, one of its chief characteristics. He actually overdoes
them sometimes; the "dragging" of Les Chouans is at least partly due to
this, and he never got complete mastery of his tendency that way. But
undoubtedly this tendency was also a source of power.
Yet, while this observation of things is not to be denied, Balzac's
observation of persons is a matter much more debatable. To listen to some
of the more uncritical—especially among the older and now almost
traditional—estimates of him, an unwary reader who did not correct these,
judging for himself, might think that Balzac was as much of an
"observational" realist in character as Fielding, as Scott when it served his
turn, as Miss Austen, or as Thackeray. Longer study and further perspective
seem recently to have put more people in the position which only a few
held some years ago. The astonishing force, completeness, relative reality
of his creations is more and more admitted, but it is seen (M. Le Breton, for
instance, admits it in almost the very words) that the reality is often not
positive. In fact the Comédie may remind some of the old nautical laudation
of a ship which cannot only sail close to the wind, but even a point or two
on the other side of it. If even Frenchmen now confess that Balzac's
characters are very often not des êtres réels, no Englishman need be
ashamed of having always thought so.
The fact is that this giant in novel-writing did actually succeed in doing
what some of his brethren in Hyperion would have liked to do—in setting
up a new world for himself and getting out of the existing universe. His
characters are never inhuman; they never fail to be human; they are of the
same flesh and blood, the same soul and spirit, as ourselves. But they have,
as it were, colonised the fresh planet—the Balzacium Sidus—and taken
new colour and form from its idiosyncrasies.[167]
It is for this reason that one hesitates to endorse the
opinions quoted above as to the filiation of all or most Its effect on
successors.
subsequent French fiction upon Balzac. Of course he
had a great influence on it; such a genius, in such circumstances, could not
but have. The "interior" business was largely followed and elaborated; it
might be argued—though the contention would have to be strictly limited
and freely provisoed—that Naturalism in general—as the "Rougon-

Macquart" scheme certainly was in particular—was a sort of bastard of the
Comédie. Other points of relationship might be urged. But all this would
leave the most characteristic Balzacities untouched. In the most obvious and
superficial quality—pessimistic psychology—the other novelist dealt with
in this chapter—Beyle—is far more of a real origin than Balzac is. If one
takes the most brilliant of his successors outside the Naturalist school—
Flaubert and Feuillet—very little that is really Balzacian will be found in
either. At least Madame Bovary and M. de Camors—which, I suppose, most
people would choose to represent the greatest genius and the most flexible
talent of the Second Empire in novel-writing—seem to me to show hardly
anything that is like Balzac. The Goncourts have something of degraded
Balzacianism on its lower side in them, and Zola approaches, at least in his
"apocalyptic" period, something like a similar though less offensive
degradation of the higher. But I can hardly conceive anything less like
Balzac's work than Maupassant's.
For the fact is that the real Balzac lies—to and for me—
almost entirely in that aura of other-worldliness of And its own
character.
which I have spoken. It is in the revelation of this other
world, so like ours and yet not the same; in the exploration of its continents;
in the frequentation of its inhabitants; that the pleasure which he has to give
consists. How he came himself to discover it is as undiscoverable as how
his in some sort analogue Dickens, after pottering not unpleasantly with
Bozeries, "thought of Mr. Pickwick," and so of the rest of his human (and
extra-human) comedy. But the facts, in both cases fortunately, remain. And
it may be possible to indicate at least some qualities and characteristics of
the fashion in which he dealt with this world when he had discovered it. In
Les Chouans he had found out not so much it, as the way to it; in the books
between that and La Peau de Chagrin he was over the border, and with La
Peau itself he had "crossed Jordan,"—it was all conquest and extension—as
far as permitted—of territory afterwards.
There can, I should suppose, be very little doubt that the
fancy for the occult, which played a great part, as far as The "occult"
bulk goes, in the Juvenilia, but produced nothing of element.
value there, began to bear fruit at this time. The Supernatural (as was
remarked of woman to the indignation of Mr. Snodgrass) is a "rum creetur."
It is very difficult to deal with; to the last degree unsatisfactory when of bad

quality and badly handled; but possessing almost infinite capabilities of
exhibiting excellence, and conveying enjoyment. Of course, during the
generation before Balzac's birth and also that between his birth and 1830,
the Terror Novel—from the Castle of Otranto to Maturin—had circled
through Europe, and "Illuminism" of various kinds had taken particular
hold of France just before the Revolution. But Balzac's "Occult," like
Balzac's everything, was not the same as anybody else's. Whether you take
it in La Peau de Chagrin itself, or in Séraphita, or anywhere, it consists,
again, rather in atmosphere than in "figures." A weaker genius would have
attached to the skin of that terrible wild ass—gloomier, but more formidable
than even the beast in Job[168]—some attendant evil spirit, genie, or
"person" of some sort. A bit of shagreen externally, shrinking—with age—
perhaps? with weather?—what not?—a life shrinking in mysterious
sympathy—that is what was wanted and what you have, without ekings, or
explanations, or other trumpery.
Nor is it only in the ostensibly "occult" or (as he was
pleased to call them) "philosophic" studies and and Its action and
reaction.
stories that you get this atmosphere. It spreads
practically everywhere—the very bankruptcies and the sordid details of
town and country life are overshadowed and in a certain sense dis-realised
by it. Indeed that verb which, like most new words, has been condemned by
some precisians, but which was much wanted, applies to no prose writer
quite so universally as to Balzac. He is a dis-realiser, not by style as some
are, but in thought—at the very same time that he gives such impressions of
realism. Sometimes, but not often, he comes quite close to real mundane
reality, sometimes, as in the most "philosophical" of the so-called
philosophical works, he hardly attempts a show of it. But as a rule when he
is at his very best, as in La Peau de Chagrin, in La Recherche de l'Absolu,
in Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu, he attains a kind of point of unity between
disrealising and realising—he disrealises the common and renders the
uncommon real in a fashion actually carrying out what he can never have
known—the great Coleridgian definition or description of poetry. In fact, if
prose-poetry were not a contradiction in terms, Balzac would be, except in
style,[169] the greatest prose-poet of them all.

On[170] one remarkable characteristic of the Comédie
very little has usually been said. It has been neglected Peculiarity of the
conversation.
wholly by most critics, though it is of the very first
importance. And that is the astonishingly small use, in proportion, which
Balzac makes of that great weapon of the novelist, dialogue, and the almost
smaller effect which it accordingly has in producing his results (whatever
they are) on his readers. With some novelists dialogue is almost all-
powerful. Dumas, for instance (as is pointed out elsewhere), does almost
everything by it. In his best books especially you may run the eye over
dozens, scores, almost hundreds of pages without finding a single one
printed "solid." The author seldom makes any reflections at all; and his
descriptions, with, of course, some famous exceptions, are little more than
longish stage directions. Nor is this by any means merely due to early
practice in the drama itself; for something like it is to be found in writers
who have had no such practice. In Balzac, after making every allowance for
the fact that he often prints his actual conversations without typographical
separation of the speeches, the case is just the other way. Moreover, and this
is still more noteworthy, it is not by what his characters do say that we
remember them. The situation perhaps most of all; the character itself very
often; the story sometimes (but of that more presently)—these are the things
for and by which we remember Balzac and the vast army of his creations;
while sometimes it is not even for any of these things, but for "interiors,"
"business," and the like. When one thinks of single points in him, it is
scarcely ever of such things as the "He has got his discharge, by——!" of
Dickens; as the "Adsum" of Thackeray; as the "Trop lourd!" of Porthos' last
agony; as the longer but hardly less quintessenced malediction of Habakkuk
Mucklewrath on Claverhouse. It is of Eugénie Grandet shrinking in
automatic repulsion from the little bench as she reads her cousin's letter; of
Henri de Marsay's cigar (his enjoyment of it, that is to say, for his words are
quite commonplace) as he leaves "la Fille aux Yeux d'Or"; of the lover
allowing himself to be built up in "La Grande Bretèche." Observe that there
is not the slightest necessity to apportion the excellence implied in these
different kinds of reminiscence; as a matter of fact, each way of fastening
the interest and the appreciation of the reader is indifferently good.[171] But
the distinction remains.

There is another point on which, though no good critic
can miss it, some critics seem to dislike dwelling; and And of the "story"
this is that, though Balzac's separate situations, as has interest.
just been said, are arresting in the highest degree, it is often distinctly
difficult to read him "for the story." Even M. Brunetière lets slip an
admission that "interest" of the ordinary kind is not exactly Balzac's forte;
while another admirer of his grants freely that his affabulation is weak.
Once more, we need not and must not make too much of this; but it is
important that it should not be forgotten, and the extreme Balzacian is
sometimes apt to forget it. That it comes sometimes from Balzac's mania for
rehandling and reshaping—that he has actually, like the hero of what is to
some his most unforgettable short story, daubed the masterpiece into a blur
—is certain. But it probably comes more often, and is much more
interesting as coming, from want of co-ordination between the observing
and the imagining faculties which are (as Hugo meant) the yoked coursers
of Balzac's car.
The fact is that exceptis excipiendis, of which Eugénie Grandet is the chief
solid example, it is not by the ordinary means, or in the ordinary ways, that
Balzac makes any considerable part of his appeal. He is very much more
der Einzige in novel-writing than Jean Paul was in novel-writing or
anything else; for a good deal of Richter's uniqueness depended[172] upon
eccentricities of style, etc., from which Balzac is entirely free. And the same
may be said, with the proper mutations, of George Meredith. No one ever
made less use—despite his "details" and "interiors"—of what may be called
intellectual or artistic costume and properties than the author of the
Comédie Humaine. The most egotistical of men in certain ways, he never
thrusts his ego upon you. The most personal in his letters, he is almost as
impersonal in most of his writings (Louis Lambert, etc., being avowedly
exceptional) as Shakespeare. Now, though the personal interest may be not
illegitimate and sometimes great, the impersonal is certainly greater. Thanks
to industrious prying, not always deserving the adjective impertinent, we
know a great deal about Balzac; and it is by no means difficult to apply
some of the knowledge to aid the study of his creation. But in reading the
creation itself you never need this knowledge; it never forces itself on you.
The hundreds, and almost thousands, of persons who form the company of
the Comédie—their frequently recurring parts adjusted with extraordinary,

though by no means obtrusive or offensive, consistency to the enormous
world of detail and scenery and general "surroundings" in which their parts
are played—are never interfered with by the pointing-stick or the prompter.
They are there; they can't help being there, and you have to make the best or
the worst of them as you can. Considering the general complexion of this
universe, its inevitableness and apparent αυταρκεια may seem, in some
moods and to some persons, a little oppressive; it is always, perhaps, as has
been admitted, productive rather of admiration than of pleasure. Faults of
various kinds may be found with it. But it is almost always wonderful; it is
often great, and it is sometimes of the greatest.[173]

FOOTNOTES:
[124] Of course there are exceptions, Le Rouge et le Noir and La Peau de
Chagrin being perhaps the chief among long novels; while some of Balzac's
short stories possess the quality in almost the highest degree.
[125] He tried several pseudonyms, but settled on this. Unfortunately, he
sometimes (not always) made it "De Stendhal," without anything before the
"De," and more unfortunately still, in the days of his Napoleonic employment
he, if he had not called himself, had allowed himself to be called "M. de
Beyle"—an assumption which though dropped, was not forgotten in the days of
his later anti-aristocratism.
[126] Beyle himself recognized the necessity of the reader's collaboration.
[127] This does not apply to poets as much as to prose writers: a fact for which
reasons could perhaps be given. And it certainly does not apply to Balzac.
[128] He was now forty-four, and had published not a few volumes, mostly
small, of other kinds—travel description (which he did uncommonly well), and
miscellaneous writing, and criticism, including the famous Racine et
Shakespeare, an avant-coureur of Romanticism which contained, besides matter
on its title-subjects, some sound estimate of Scott as a writer and some very
unsound abuse about him as a man. This last drew from Byron, who had met
Beyle earlier at Milan, a letter of expostulation and vindication which did that
noble poet infinite credit, but of which Beyle, by no means to his credit, took
notice. He was only too like Hazlitt in more ways than one: though few books
with practically the same title can be more different than De l'Amour and Liber
Amoris.
[129] As for instance, those from Dekker and Massiger; Camoens and Ercilla are
allowed their native tongues "neat."
[130] The actual "Chartreuse" of Parma only makes its appearance on the very
last page of the book, when the hero, resigning his arch bishopric, retires to it.

[131] He is the younger son of a rich and noble family, but his father disowns
and his older brother denounces him quite early. It is characteristic of Beyle that
we hear very little of the father and are practically never even introduced to the
brother.
[132] These four words somehow make me think of Samuel Newcome's
comment on the unfortunate dinner where "Farintosh" did not appear: "Scarcely
anything was drank."
[133] See note above.
[134] Both would have declined to meddle with her, I think, but for different
reasons.
[135] Beyle, who had himself no good looks, is particularly lavish of them to his
heroes.
[136] Perhaps one of the rare biographical details which, as has been explained,
may "force the consigne" here, is that Beyle in his youth, and almost up to
middle age, was acquainted with an old lady who had the very unenviable
reputation of having actually "sat for" Madame de Merteuil.
[137] This bad bloodedness, or κακοηθεια, of Beyle's heroes is really curious. It
would have qualified them later to be Temperance fanatics or Trade Union
demagogues. The special difference of all three is an intense dislike of
somebody else "having something."
[138] In that merry and wise book Clarissa Furiosa.
[139] She keeps the anniversary of his execution, and imitates Marguerite in
procuring and treasuring, at the end of the story, Julien's severed head. (It may
be well to note that Dumas had not yet written La Reine Margot.)
[140] In proper duel, of course; not as he shot his mistress.
[141] Its great defect is the utter absence of any poetical element. But, as
Mérimée (than whom there could hardly be, in this case, a critic more competent
or more friendly) said, poetry was, to Beyle, lettre close.
[142] It seems curiously enough, that Beyle did mean to make the book gai. It is
a a very odd kind of gaiety!
[143] This attraction of the forçat is one of the most curious features in all
French Romanticism. It was perhaps partly one of the general results of the
Revolutionary insanity earlier, partly a symptom or sequel of Byronism. But the
way it raged not only among folks like Eugène Sue, but among men and women
of great talent and sometimes genius—George Sand, Balzac, Dumas, Victor
Hugo—the last and greatest carrying it on for nearly two generations—is a real
curiousity of literature. (The later and different crime-novel of Gaboriau & Co.
will be dealt with in its place.)
[144] V. sup. vol. i. p. 39.
[145] A pseudonymous person has "reconstituted" the story under the title of
Lucien Leeuwen (the hero's name). But some not inconsiderable experience of

reconstitutions of this kind determined me to waste no further portion of my
waning life on any one of them.
[146] It may be desirable to glance at Beyle's avowed or obvious "intentions" in
most if not all his novels—in the Chartreuse to differentiate Italian from French
character, in Le Rouge et le Noir to embody the Macchiavellian-Napoleonic
principle which has been of late so tediously phrased (after the Germans) as
"will to" something and the like. These intentions may interest some: for me, I
must confess, they definitely get in the way of the interest. For essays, "good":
for novels, "no."
[147] Vide Guy Mannering as to the "macers."
[148] Les Chouans.
[149] Forty vols. London: 1895-8.
[150] Quarterly Review for January 1907.
[151] I believe I may say, without fatuity, that the general Introduction and the
Quarterly article, above referred to, contain most things that anybody but a
special student will need.
[152] It is, however, important to remember that almost the whole of the first of
these three decades was taken up with the tentatives, while the concluding
lustrum was comparatively infertile. The Comédie was, in the main, the crop of
fifteen years only.
[153] It ought always to be, but has not always been, put as a round sum to his
credit in this part of the account that he heartily recognised the value of Scott as
a novelist. A hasty thinker might be surprised at this; not so the wiser mind.
[154] This remarkable person deserves at least a note here "for one thing that he
did"—the novel of Fragoletta (1829), which many should know of—though
they may not know it—from Mr. Swinburne's poem, and some perhaps from
Balzac's own review. It is one of the followings of La Religieuse, and is a
disappointing book, not from being too immoral nor from being not immoral
enough, but because it does not "come off." There is a certain promise,
suggestion, "atmosphere," but the actual characterisation is vague and obscure,
and the story is told with no grasp. This habit of "flashing in the pan" is said to
have been characteristic of all Latouche's work, which was fairly voluminous
and of many different kinds, from journalism to poetry; and it may have been
partly due to, partly the cause of, a cross-grained disposition. He had, however, a
high repute for spoken if not written criticism, had a great influence as a trainer
or mentor on George Sand, and perhaps not a little on Balzac himself. During
the later years of his fairly long life he lived in retirement and produced nothing.
[155] One of the friends who have read my proofs takes a more Alexandrian way
with this objection and says "But there are." I do not know that I disagree with
him: but as he does not disagree with what follows in itself, both answers shall
stand.
[156] Cf. Maupassant's just protest against this, to which we shall come.

[157] An actual reduction of Balzac's books to smaller but still narrative scale is
very seldom possible and would be still more rarely satisfactory. The best
substitute for it is the already glanced at Répertoire of MM. Christophe and
Cerfbeer, a curious but very satisfactory Biographical Dictionary of the
Comedy's personae.
[158] "Sans génie je suis flambé," as he wrote early to his sister.
[159] This is about the best of the batch, and I agree with those who think that it
would not have disfigured the Comédie. Indeed the exclusion of these juvenilia
from the Édition Définitive was a critical blunder. Even if Balzac did once wish
it, the "dead hand" is not to be too implicitly given way to, and he was so
constantly changing his views that he probably would have altered this also had
he lived.
[160] A certain kind of commentator would probably argue from Mr. Browning's
well-known words "fifty volumes long" that he had, and another that he had not
read the Œuvres de Jeunesse.
[161] He would not have liked the name "patriot" because of its corruption, but
he was one.
[162] Not a few things, some of them very good, came between—the pleasant
Maison du Chat-qui-Pelote, several of the wonderful short stories, and the
beginning of the Contes Drolatiques. But none of them had the "importance"—
in the artistic sense of combined merit and scale—of the Peau.
[163] I mean, of course, as far as books go. We have positive testimony that
there was a live Becky, and I would I had known her!
[164] Originally and perhaps preferably called La Rabouilleuse from the early
occupation of its heroine, Flore Brazier, one of Balzac's most notable figures.
[165] It is one of the strangest instances of the limitations of some of the best
critics that M. Brunetière declined even to speak of this great book.
[166] The immense influence of Maturin in France, and especially on Balzac, is
an old story now, though it was not always so.
[167] It is possible that some readers may miss a more extended survey, or at
least sample, of these characters. But the plea made above as to abstract of the
stories is valid here. There is simply not room to do justice to say, Lucien de
Rubempré, who pervades a whole block of novels and stories, or to others from
Rastignac to Corentin.
[168] It has sometimes occurred to me that perhaps the skin was that of Job's
onager.
[169] He does try a sort of pseudo-poetical style sometimes; but it is seldom
successful, and sometimes mere "fine-writing" of no very fine kind. The close of
Peau de Chagrin and Séraphita contain about the best passages.
[170] The two next paragraphs are, by the kind permission of the Editor and
Publisher of the Quarterly Review, reprinted, with some slight alterations, from
the article above referred to.

[171] I have known this denied by persons of authority, who would exalt the gift
of conversation even above the pure narrative faculty. I should admit the latter
was commoner, but hardly that it was inferior.
[172] I believe I may speak without rashness thus, for a copy of the sixteen-
volume (was it not?) edition was a cherished possession of mine for years, and I
even translated a certain amount for my own amusement—especially Die
unsichtbare Loge.
[173] I have said nothing here on a point of considerable interest to myself—the
question whether Balzac can be said ever (or at least often) to have drawn a
gentleman or a lady. It would require too much "justification" by analysis of
particular characters. And this would pass into a more general enquiry whether
these two species exist in the Balzacium Sidus itself. Which things open long
vistas. (V. inf. on Charles de Bernard.)

CHAPTER V
GEORGE SAND

There is a Scotch proverb (not, I think, among those
most generally known), "Never tell your foe when your George Sand—
generalities about
foot sleeps"; and some have held that this applies her.
specially to the revelation, by an author, of his own
weak points. I do not agree with them, having always had a fancy for
playing and seeing cards on table—except at cards themselves, where a
dummy seems to me only to spoil the game. Therefore I admit, in coming to
George Sand, that this famous novelist has not, as a novelist, ever been a
favourite of mine—that I have generally experienced some, and
occasionally great, difficulty in reading her. Even the "purged considerate
mind" (without, I venture to hope, much dulling of the literary palate)
which I have brought to the last readings necessary for this book, has but
partially removed this difficulty. The causes of it, and their soundness or
unsoundness as reasons, must be postponed for a little—till, as usual,
sufficient survey and analysis of at least specimens (for here as elsewhere
the immense bulk of the total work defies anything more than "sampling")
have supplied due evidence. But it may be said at once that no kind of
prejudice or dislike, arising from the pretty notorious history and character
of Amantine (Amandine? Armandine?) Lucile Aurore Dupin or Dudevant,
commonly called George Sand, has anything to do with my want of
affection or admiration for her work. I do not recommend her conduct in her
earlier days for imitation, and I am bound to say that I do not think it was
ever excused by what one may call real love. But she seems to have been an
extremely good fellow in her age, and not by any means a very bad fellow
in her youth. She was at one time pretty, or at least good-looking;[174] she
was at all times clever; and if she did not quite deserve that almost
superhuman eulogy awarded in the Devonshire epitaph to

Mary Sexton,
Who pleased many a man and never vexed one,[175]

she did fulfil the primal duty of her sex, and win its greatest triumph, by
complying with the first half of the line, while, if she failed as to the
second, it was perhaps not entirely her fault.[176] Finally, Balzac's supposed
picture of her as Camille in Béatrix has the almost unique peculiarity,
among its author's sketches of women, of being positively attractive—
attractive, that is to say, not merely to the critic as a powerful study and
work of art; not perhaps at all to the sentimentalist as a victim or an
adorable piece of candeur; not to the lover of physical beauty or passion,
but to the reader—"sensible" in the old sense as well as in the new—who
feels that here is a woman he should like to have known, even if he feels
likewise that his weather-eye would have had to be kept open during the
knowledge.
It has been customary—and though these customary
things are sometimes delusive and too often mechanical, Phases of her work.
there is also occasionally, and, I think, here, her work,
something not negligible in them, if they be not applied too rigidly—to
divide George Sand's long period (nearly half a century) of novel-
production into four sub-periods, corresponding roughly with the four
whole decades of the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties.[177] The first,
sometimes called, but, I think, misleadingly, "Romantic," is the period of
definite and mainly sexual revolt, illustrated by such novels as Indiana,
Valentine, Lélia, and Jacques. The second is that of illuminé mysticism and
semi-political theorising, to which Spiridion, Consuelo, La Comtesse de
Rudolstadt, and others belong. The third, one of a certain apaisement, when
the author had finally settled at her country-house of Nohant in Berry, turns
to studies of rural life: La Petite Fadette, François le Champi, La Mare au
Diable, etc. The last is represented by novels of no one particular, or at least
single, scope or bent, Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré, Le Marquis de
Villemer, Mademoiselle La Quintinie, etc., reaching to Flamarande and its
sequel shortly before her death. The thing, as has been hinted already, is one
of those first rough sketches of the ground which, if not too closely adhered
to, are often useful. As a matter of fact, the divisions often—as one might
be sure they would—run cross. There is a lot of occult or semi-occult stuff
in Lélia, and the "period of appeasement" did not show much reconciliation
and forgiveness of injury in Elle et Lui, whether we take this as by the
injured or as by her who had done the wrong. But if we take the two first

novels briefly and Lélia itself more fully for Period I.; Consuelo and its
sequel (Spiridion has been "done and done thoroughly"[178] by Thackeray in
the Paris Sketch-book) for II.; the three above-mentioned berquinades for
the Third, with Lucrezia Floriani thrown between as an all-important
outsider, and Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré for IV., giving each some
detailed criticism, with a few remarks on others, it ought to suffice as a
fairly solid groundwork for a general summing-up.
To understand the furore with which Indiana and
Valentine were received, one must remember the time Indiana.
and the circumstance with even more care than is
usually desirable. They were—if not quite so well written as they seemed
even to Thackeray—written very well; they expressed the full outburst of
the French Sturm und Drang movement; there was nothing like them either
in French or in any other literature, though Bulwer was beginning similar
things with us. Essentially, and when taken sub specie aeternitatis, they are
very nearly rubbish. The frail (extremely frail) and gentle Indiana, with her
terrible husband, whose crimes against her and nature even reach the
abominable pitch of declaring himself ready to shoot expected poachers and
possible burglars; her creole maid and foster-sister "Noun," who disguises
herself in Indiana's garments and occupies her room, receives there a lover
who is afterwards her mistress's, but soon commits suicide; the lover
himself, a most appalling "tiger," as his own time would have called him;
and the enigmatic English cousin, indifferently designated as "Sir Rodolphe
Brown," "Sir Ralph," "Sir Brown," and "M. Brown," with whom Indiana
makes a third trial of hitherto "incomprised" and unattained happiness—are
all inhabitants of a sort of toy doll's-house partaking of the lunatic-asylum.
But the author's three prefaces, written at intervals of exactly ten years,
passably inconsistent in detail, but all agreeing in contempt of critics and
lofty anarchist sentiment, are great fun, and are almost a reward for reading
the book.
Valentine has more of the really admirable description of
her beloved Berry with which the author so often honeys Valentine.
her drugs; but the novel-part of it is largely composed of
the same sort of violent bosh which almost monopolises Indiana. In fact,
the peasant-bourgeois hero Benedict, whom every woman loves; who is a
conceited and ill-mannered mixture of clown and prig; who is angry with

his mistress Valentine (Madame de Lansac) for "not knowing how to prefer
him to her honour," though one would have said she had given ample proofs
of this preference; and who finally appeases the reader by tumbling on the
points of a pitchfork placed in his way by an (as it happens) unduly jealous
husband, is a more offensive creature than any one in the earlier book.[179]
One is, on the other hand, a little sorry for Valentine, while one is sorry for
nobody in Indiana except perhaps for the husband, who has the sense to die
early.
Lélia, some years younger than these and later than the
Musset tragedy, is a good deal better, or at least less Lélia.
childish. It is beyond all question an extraordinary book,
though it may be well to keep the hyphen in the adjective to prevent
confusion of sense. It opens, and to a large extent continues, with a twist of
the old epistolary style which, if nothing else, is ingeniously novel. George
Sand was in truth a "well of ingenuity" as D'Artagnan was a puits de
sagesse, and this accounts, to some extent, for her popularity. You have not
only no dates and no places, but no indication who writes the letters or to
whom they are written, though, unless you are very stupid, you soon find
out. The personae are Lélia—a femme incomprise, if not incomprehensible;
Sténio, a young poet, who is, in the profoundest and saddest sense of the
adverb, hopelessly in love with her; and a mysterious personage—a sort of
Solomon-Socrates-Senancour—who bears the Ossianesque name of
Trenmor, with a later and less provincially poetical alias of "Valmarina."
[180]
The history of the preuves of Trenmor's novel-nobility are soon laid
before the reader. They are not, in their earlier stages, engaging to the old-
fashioned believer in "good form."
Trenmor is the sort of exaggeration of Childe Harold which a lively but
rather vulgar mind might conceive. "He was born great; but they developed
the animal in him." The greatness postponed its appearance, but the
animality did credit to the development. "He used to love to beat his dogs;
before long he beat his prostitutes." This harmless diversion accentuated
itself in details, for which, till the acme, the reader must be referred to the
original. The climacteric moment came. He had a mistress called "La
Mantovana," whom he rather preferred to the others, because she was
beautiful and impudent. "In a night of noise and wine" he struck her, and
she drew a dagger. This made him love her for a moment; but unfortunately

she made an improper observation; thereupon he tore off her pearl necklace
and trod it under his feet. She wept. This annoyed Trenmor very much. "She
had wished revenge for a personal insult, and she cried for a toy!"
Accordingly he had a "crispation of nerves," which obliged him to take a
large cut-glass decanter and hit her on the head with it. According to the
natural perversity on such occasions of such persons, she died. The brutal
justice of mankind—so hateful to Godwin and George Sand and Victor
Hugo—sent Trenmor, not, indeed, to the gallows, as it should have done,
but to the galleys. Yet the incident made Lélia, who (she must have had a
sweet set of friends) somehow knew him, very fond of Trenmor, though she
certainly told him that he might as well repent of what he had done, which
seems inconsistent.
They let him out after five years (why, Heaven or the other place knows!)
and he became a reformed character—the Solomon-Socrates-Senancour
above mentioned plus a sort of lay "director" to Lélia, with a carbonaro
attitude of political revolutionary and free-thinking illuminé. Now corruptio
pessimi is seldom optima.
The main interest, however, shifts (with apparitions of Trenmor-Valmarina)
to the loves (if they may be called so) of the pitiable Sténio and the
intolerable heroine. She is unable to love anybody, and knows it; she can
talk—ye Demons, how she can talk!—but she can never behave like a
woman of this world. She alternately hugs Sténio, so that she nearly
squeezes his breath out, and, when he draws natural conclusions from this
process, pushes him away. But worse and more preposterous things happen.
Lélia has a sister, Pulchérie, who is very like her (they are of course both
impossibly beautiful) in body, and so far resembles her in mind and soul as
to be unable to behave decently or sensibly. But her want of decency and
sense takes the more commonplace line of becoming an actual courtesan of
the "Imperia" kind in Italy. By a series of muddles for which Lélia is—as
her plain-spoken sister points out after the catastrophe—herself really
responsible, Sténio is induced, during the excitement of an al fresco fête at
night in the grounds of a sort of fairy palace, to take the "coming" sister for
the recalcitrant one, and avail himself of her complaisance, usque ad finem.
Lélia reproaches him (which she has not the least right to do), and he
devotes himself entirely to Pulchérie (La Zinzolina is her professional
name) and her group of noble paramours. He gets, however, generally

drunk and behaves with a brutal rudeness, which would, in the Italy of
tradition, have finished things up very soon by a stiletto thrust, and in
honest England by a kicking into the street. There are mysterious plots,
cardinals, and anything else you like or don't like. Lélia becomes an abbess,
Sténio a suicide, the above-mentioned priest, Magnus, being much
concerned in this. She admits her unfortunate lover to burial, and is
degraded and imprisoned for it—or for having saved Trenmor-Valmarina
from the law. Everybody else now dies, and the nightmare comes to an end.
The beauties of style which softened the savage breast of
Thackeray himself in the notice above mentioned, and The moral of the
group and its tragi-
which, such as they are, appear even in George Sand's comedy.
earliest work, will receive attention when that work
comes to be discussed as a whole. Meanwhile, at the risk of any charge of
Philistinism, I confess that this part of it seems to me, after fifty years and
more of "corrected impression," almost worthless au fond. It is, being in
prose, and therefore destitute of the easements or at least masquerades
which poetry provides for nonsense, the most conspicuous and considerable
example—despite the undoubted talent of the writer—of the mischief which
Byronism did on the Continent. With us, though it made a great stir, it really
did little harm except to some "silly women" (as the apostle, in unkindly
and uncourtly, but truly apostolic fashion, had called similar persons of the
angelic sex ages before). Counter-jumpers like Thackeray's own Pogson
worshipped "the noble poet"; boys of nobler stamp like Tennyson thought
they worshipped him, but if they were going to become men of affairs
forgot all about him; if they were to be poets took to Keats and Shelley as
models, not to him. Critics hardly took him seriously, except for non-
literary reasons. There was, as I think somebody (perhaps Thackeray
himself) says upon something, "too much roast beef about" for us to fill our
bellies with this worse than east wind of Sensibility gone rotten. But
abroad, for reasons which would be easy but irrelevant to dwell upon,
Byron hit the many-winged bird of popular favour on nearly all its pinions.
He ran strikingly and delightfully contrary to the accepted Anglais, whether
of the philosophical or the caricature type; he was noble, but revolutionary;
he looked (he never was, except in non-essentials) Romantic; he was new,
naughty, nice, all at once. And they went mad over him, and to a large
extent and for a long time remained so; indeed, Continental criticism,

whether Latin, Teutonic, Scandinavian, or Slav, has never reached "the
centre" about Byron. Now George Sand was at no time exactly a silly
woman, but she was for a long time a woman off her balance. Byronism
was exactly the -ism with which she could execute the wildest feats of half-
voluntary and half-involuntary acrobatics, saltimbanquery, and chucking of
her bonnet over all conceivable and inconceivable mills. Childe Harold,
Manfred, Conrad, Lara, Don Juan, Sardanapalus—the shades of these
caught her and waltzed with her and reversed and figured and gesticulated,
With their Sentimentalibus lacrimae rorum, and pathos and
bathos delightful to see,
—or perhaps not so very delightful?
But let us pass to the next stage.
Those persons (I think, without tempting Nemesis too
much, I might say those fortunate persons) to whom the Consuelo.
world of books is almost as real as the other two worlds
of life and of dream, may or must have observed that the conditions and
sensations of the individual in all three are very much the same. In
particular, the change from a state of discomfort to one of comfort—or vice
versa unluckily, but with that we have nothing immediately to do—applies
to all. In actual life you are hot, tired, bored, headachy, "spited with fools,"
what not. A change of atmosphere, a bath, a draught of some not
unfermented liquor, the sight of a face, what not again, nay, sometimes a
mere shift of clothing, will make you cool, satisfied, at peace. In dreams
you have generally to wake, to shake off the "fierce vexation," and to
realise that it is a dream; but the relief comes sooner or later. If anybody
wants to experience this change from discomfort to comfort in the book-
world of a single author, I cannot commend anything better than the
perusal, with a short interval—but there should be some—of Consuelo after
Lélia. We may have some things to say against the later novel; but that does
not matter.
It opens with no tricks or tours de force; in no
atmosphere of darkened footlights and smell of sawdust; Much better in
but in frank and free novel-fashion, with a Venetian parts.
church, a famous maestro (Porpora), a choir of mostly Italian girls, and the

little Spanish gipsy Consuelo, the poorest, humblest, plainest (as most
people think) of all the bevy, but the possessor of the rarest vocal faculties
and the most happiness-producing-and-diffusing temper. There is nothing in
the least milk-soppy or prudish about Consuelo, though she is perfectly
"pure"; nor is there anything tractified about her, though she is pious and
generous. The contrast between her and her betrothed, the handsome but
worthless Anzoleto, also a singer, is, at first, not overworked; and one scene
—that in which, when Consuelo has got over the "scraggy" age and is
developing actual beauty, she and Anzoleto debate, in the most natural
manner, whether she is pretty or not—is quite capital, one of the things that
stick in one's memory and stamp the writer's genius, or, at any rate,
consummate talent.
This happy state of affairs continues without much
deterioration, though perhaps with some warnings to the The degeneration.
experienced, for some two hundred pages. The situations
and the other characters—the Professor Porpora himself; Count Zustiniani,
dilettante, impresario and of course gallant; his prima donna and (in the
story at least) first mistress, La Corilla; her extravagances and seduction of
the handsome Anzoleto; his irresolution between his still existing affection
for Consuelo, who passes through all these things (and Zustiniani's siege of
her) "in maiden meditation, fancy-free"—all discharge themselves or play
their parts quite as they ought to do. But this comparatively quiet, though by
no means emotionless or unincidented, part of the story "ends in a blow-
up," or rather in a sink-down, for Anzoleto, on a stolen gondola trip with
Clorinda, third cantatrice and interim mistress of Zustiniani (beautiful, but
stupid, and a bad singer), meets the Count in another gondola with Corilla
herself, and in his fury rams his rival and the perfidious one. Consuelo, who
has at last had her eyes opened, quits Venice and flees, with a testimonial
from Porpora, to Germany. Even then one hopes for the best, and
acknowledges that at any rate something not far from the best, something
really good, has been given one for two hundred well-filled pages—more
than the equivalent of the first deck of one of our old average "three-
deckers."
But in the mind of experience such hopes are always accompanied by fears,
and alas! in this instance "the fears have it." There is on the border of
Bohemia a "Castle of the Giants"; and oh! how one wishes that my Uncle

Toby had allowed the sea to execute the ravages he deprecated and sweep
that castle into nothingness! When we get there Byronism is back—nay, its
papa and mamma, Lewisism and Radcliffism, are back also—with their
cardboard turrets and precipices and grottos; their pine-woods reminding
one of the little bristly green things, on round cinnamon-coloured bases, of
one's youth; their floods and falls so obviously supplied at so much a
thousand gallons by the nearest water company, and their mystery-men and
dwarfs and catalepsies and all the rest of the weary old "tremblement."
Count Christian of Rudolstadt is indeed a gentleman and an almost too
affectionate father; his brother, Baron Frederick, a not disagreeable
sportsman and bon vivant; their sister, the Canoness, a not too theatrical old
maid; and Frederick's daughter, Amélie, though pert and not too good-
natured, the most human creature of them all, albeit with the humanities of
a soubrette rather than of a great lady. But what shall one say of Albert of
Rudolstadt, the heir, the betrothed of Amélie (this fact excusing much in
her), and, when Consuelo has joined the circle at Porpora's recommendation
as music-mistress and companion in the higher kind to Amélie—her slave,
conqueror, tormentor, and in the long-run husband? He is perhaps the most
intolerable hero[181] ever designed as a gentleman by a novelist who has
been classed as great, and who certainly has some qualities necessary to
greatness. In reading about him vague compunctions even come over the
mind at having spoken harshly of Sténio and Trenmor. Sténio was always a
fool and latterly a cad; Trenmor first a brute and then a bore. Albert is none
of these (except perhaps the last), but he is madder than the Mad Hatter and
the March Hare put together, and as depressing as they are delightful. He
has hallucinations which obliterate the sense of time in him; he thinks
himself one of his ancestors of the days of Ziska; he has second sight; he
speaks Spanish to Consuelo and calls her by her name when he first sees
her, though he has not the faintest sane idea who she is or whence she
comes; and he reduces his family to abject misery by ensconcing himself
for days in a grotto which can be isolated by means of a torrent turned on
and off at pleasure by a dwarf gipsy called Zdenko, who is almost a greater
nuisance than Albert himself. Consuelo discovers his retreat at the risk of
being drowned; and various nightmarish scenes occur, resulting in the slight
return to sanity on Albert's part involved in falling in love with her, and a
very considerable advance towards insanity on hers by falling in love with
him. But perhaps this give-and-take of lovers may seem attractive to some.

And when after a time we get into mere hocus-pocus, and it seems to
Consuelo that Albert's violin "speaks and utters words as through the mouth
of Satan," the same persons may think it fine. For myself, I believe that
without fatuity I may claim to be, if not a visionnaire (perhaps that also), at
least a lover of visions, and of Isaiah and Ezekiel and the Revelation. Dante,
Blake, Shelley, the best of Lamennais and the best of Hugo excite in me
nothing but a passionate reverence. I can walk day-long and night-long by
Ulai and Chebar and Lethe-Eunoe and have no thought of sneer or slumber,
shrug or satiety. But when you ask me to be agitated at Count Albert of
Rudolstadt's violin ventriloquising Satan I really must decline. I do even
remember the poor creature Paul de Kock, and would fain turn to one of the
things he was writing at this very time.
Consuelo is a very long book—it fills three of the tightly
printed volumes of the old Michel-Calmann-Lévy Recovery; but not
maintained quite to
collection, with some three or four hundred pages in the end.
each; and we have not got, in the above survey, to more
than the middle of the second. But in its afternoon and evening there is
some light. The creature Anzoleto recurs; but his immediate effect is good,
[182]
for it starts the heroine on a fresh elopement of an innocent kind, and
we get back to reality. The better side of George Sand's Bohemianism
revives in Bohemia itself; and she takes Consuelo to the road, where she
adopts male dress (a fancy with her creatress likewise), and falls in with no
less a person than the composer Haydn in his youth. They meet some
Prussian crimps, and escape them by help of a coxcombical but not wholly
objectionable Austrian Count Hoditz and the better (Prussian) Trenck. They
get to Vienna (meeting La Corilla in an odd but not badly managed
maternity-scene half-way) and rejoin old Porpora there. There are
interviews with Kaunitz and Maria Theresa:[183] and a recrudescence of the
Venetian musical jealousies. Consuelo endeavours to reopen
communications with the Rudolstadts, but Porpora—chiefly out of his
desire to retain her on the stage, but partly also from an honest and not
wholly unsound belief that a union between a gipsy girl and a German
noble would itself be madness—plays false with the letters. She accepts a
professional invitation from Hoditz to his castle in Moravia, meets there no
less a person than Frederic the Second incognito, and by his order (after she
has saved his life from the vengeance of the re-crimped deserter rescued

with her by Hoditz and Trenck) is invited to sing at Berlin. The carrying out
of the invitation, which has its Fredericianities[184] (as one may perhaps be
allowed to call them), is, however, interrupted. The mysterious Albert, who
has mysteriously turned up in time to prevent an attempt of the other and
worse (Austrian) Trenck on Consuelo, is taken with an apparently mortal
illness at home, and Consuelo is implored to return there. She does so, and a
marriage in articulo mortis follows, the supposed dead Zdenko (whom we
did not at all want) turning up alive after his master's death. Consuelo, fully
if not cheerfully adopted by the family, is offered all the heirloom jewels
and promised succession to the estates. She refuses, and the book ends—
with fair warning that it is no ending.
When her history begins again under the title she has
"reneged," the reader may for no short time think that La Comtesse de
Rudolstadt.
the curse of the sequel—a curse only too common, but
not universal—is going to be averted. She is in Berlin alone (see note
above); is successful, but not at all happy—perhaps least of all happy
because the king, partly out of gratitude for his safety, partly out of
something like a more natural kind of affection than most authors have
credited him with, pays her marked attentions. For a time things are not
unlively; and even the very dangerous experiment of a supper—one of
those at which Frederic's guests were supposed to have perfectly "free
elbows" and availed themselves of the supposition at their peril—a supper
with Voltaire, La Mettrie, Algarotti, D'Argens, Pöllnitz, and "Quintus
Icilius" present—comes off not so badly. One of the reasons of this is that
George Sand has the sense to make Voltaire ill and silent, and puts the bulk
of the "business" on La Mettrie—a person much cleverer than most people
who have only read book-notices of him may think, but not dangerously
brilliant. Then Consuelo, or "La Porporina," as her stage name is, gets
mixed up—owing to no fault of her own in the first place at any rate—with
the intrigues of the Princess Amélie of Prussia and her lover, the less bad
Trenck. This has two awkward results—for herself an imprisonment at
Spandau, into which she is cast by Frederic's half jealous, half purely
tyrannical wrath, and for us a revival of all the massacrant illuminism in
which the Princess herself is dabbling. So we have on the scene not only (as
the reader sees at once, though some rather clumsy efforts are made to hide
it) the resuscitated Albert, who passes as a certain Trismegistus, not only the

historical charlatan Saint-Germain, but another charlatan at this time not at
all historical (seeing that the whole story ends in 1760, and he never left
Palermo till nine years later), Cagliostro. Even at Spandau Consuelo herself
is not quite uninteresting; but the Illuminati determine to rescue her, and for
the latter part of the first volume and the whole of the second the entire
thing is, once more, Bosh. The most absurd "double-gangings" take place
between an inconnu named Liverani, whom Consuelo cannot help loving,
and Albert himself, who is Liverani, as everybody but herself sees at once,
interspersed between endless tracts of the usual rubbish about underground
tribunals, and judges in red cloaks, and skeletons, and museums of torture-
implements, and all the Weishauptian trumpery of mixed occultism and
revolutionary sentiment. The author has even the insufferable audacity to
fling at us another resuscitation—that of the Countess Wanda, Albert's
mother, who appears to have transmitted to him her abominable habit of
catalepsy. So ends, unsatisfactorily enough—unless anybody is satisfied by
the fact that two solid children result from the still mystifying married life
of the pair—the story which had begun so well in the first volume of
Consuelo, and which in the major part of Consuelo itself, though not
throughout, maintains the satisfaction fairly.
If any reader, in two ways gentle, has been good enough
to take some interest in the analysis of these books, but The "making good"
of Lucrezia
is also so soft-hearted as to feel slightly froissé by it, as Floriani.
showing a disqualifying inability to sympathise with the
author, I hope I may put myself right by what I am going to say of another.
Lucrezia Floriani is to me the most remarkable book that George Sand ever
wrote; and the nearest to a great one, if it be not actually that. I have read it,
with no diminution of interest and no abatement of esteem, at very different
times of my life, and I think that it is on the whole not only the most perfect
revelation of what at any rate the author would have liked to be her own
temperament, but—a much greater thing—a presentment in possible and
human form of a real temperament, and almost of a real character. Further,
it is much the most achieved example of that peculiar style of which more
will be said in a general way presently, and it contains comparatively few
blots. One always smiles, of course, at the picture of Lucrezia swinging in a
hammock in the centre of a large room, the four corners of which are
occupied by four bedsteads containing four children, in the production of

whom not exactly four fathers, as they ought for perfect symmetry, but as a
compromise three, have assisted. One always shudders at her notion of
restoring a patient, suffering under a nervous ailment, by surrounding his
couch with the cherubic countenances and the balmy breaths of these
infants.[185] Prince Karol, the hero (such as there is), is a poor creature,
though not such a cad as Sténio; but then, according to Madame Dudevant,
men as a rule were poor creatures, unless they were convicts or conjurors,
so the presentation is ex hypothesi or secundum hypothesin correct. And the
whole is firmly drawn and well, but neither gaudily nor pitchily, coloured. It
ought to be remembered that, with the possible exception of Jane Austen,
who has no peer or second among lady novelists, these either confine
themselves to representation of manners, external character, ton, as was said
of Fanny Burney, or else, like the other "George" and Charlotte Brontë,
endeavour to represent themselves as they are or as they would like to be on
the canvas. They never create; if they "imitate" not in the degraded modern
but the original classical sense, and do it well, punctum ferunt—suum if not
omne.
Lucrezia Floriani does this higher imitation well—
almost, if not quite, greatly. Had George Sand been more The story.
of a blue-stocking and of an affected creature than she
was, she might have called the book Anteros-Nemesis. The heroine, by her
real name Antonietta Menapace, is the daughter of a fisherman on the Lago
d'Iseo, and in her earliest girlhood the servant-maid of a rich neighbour's
wife. As her father, a close-fisted peasant, wants her to marry a well-to-do
churl of her own rank, she elopes with her employer's son and has two
children by him; but develops a magnificent voice, with no small acting and
managing capacity. So she makes a fortune by the time she is thirty,
acquiring the two other children by two other lovers, and having so many
more who do not leave permanent memorials of their love and necessitate
polygonal rooms, that, as she observes, "she cannot count them."[186] At the
above-mentioned age, however, she becomes weary of this sort of life,
retires to her native district, buys the very house in which she had been a
servant, and with the heir of which (now dead) she had eloped, and settles
down to be a model mother, a Lady Bountiful, and a sort of recluse. No
more "love" for her. In fact, in one of the most remarkable passages of the
book she gives a story of her chief attachments, showing that, with brief

accesses of physical excitement, it has always been amour de tête and never
amour de cœur.
Things being so, there arrive one evening, at the only inn on the lake, a
young German Prince, Karol von Roswald, and his friend the Italian Count
Salvator Albani. They are travelling for the Prince's health, he being a sort
of spoilt child, pitiably nervous, imperfectly educated, and half paralysed by
the recent death of his mother and the earlier one of a fiancée. The inn is
good to eat in (or rather out of), but for nothing else; and Salvator, hearing
of Lucrezia, whose friend, though not her lover, he has formerly been,
determines to ask a hospitality which she very cheerfully gives them.
Cetera quis nescit, as George Sand herself in other but often-repeated words
admits.[187] Karol falls in love at first sight, though he is horrified at his
hostess's past. He also falls ill, and she nurses him. Salvator leaves them for
a time, and though Lucrezia plays quite the reverse of the part of temptress,
the inevitable does not fail to happen.
That they were not married and that they did not live happy ever after,
everybody will of course be certain, though it is not Karol's fault that actual
marriage does not take place. There is, however, an almost literal, if
unsanctified and irregular honeymoon; but long before Salvator's[188]
return, it has "reddened" more than ominously. Karol is insanely jealous,
and it may be admitted that a more manly and less childishly selfish
creature might be somewhat upset by the arrival of Lucrezia's last lover, the
father of her youngest child, though it is quite evident that she has not a
spark of love for this one left. But he is also jealous of Salvator; of an old
artist named Beccaferri whom she assists; of a bagman who calls to sell to
her eldest boy a gun; of the aged peasant whom she had refused to marry,
but whose death-bed she visits; of the curé; of everybody. And his jealousy
takes the form not merely of rage, which is bad enough for Lucrezia's desire
of peace, but of cold insult, which revolts her never extinguished
independence and pride. He has, as noted, begged her to marry him in the
time of intoxication, but she has refused, and persists in the refusal. After
one or two "scenes" she rows herself over to an olive wood on the other
side of the lake, and makes it a kind of "place of sacrifice"—of the sacrifice,
that is to say, of all hopes of happiness with him or any one thenceforward.
But she neither dismisses nor leaves him; on the contrary, they live together,
unmarried, but with no public scandal, for ten years, his own passion for her

in its peculiar kind never ceasing, while hers gradually dies under the stress
of the various torments he inflicts, unintentionally if not quite
unconsciously, upon her. At last it is too much, and she dies of heart-failure
at forty years of age.
One might make a few cavils at this. The exact reason of
what has been called the "sacrifice" is not made clear, Its balance of
power.
despite Lucrezia's soliloquy in the olive wood. If it were
meant as an atonement for her ill-spent youth it would be intelligible. But
there is no sign of this, and it would not be in George Sand's way. Lucrezia
merely resolves that she will try to make everybody happy without trying or
expecting to be happy herself. But she must know more and more that she is
not making Karol happy, and that the cohabitation cannot, even in Italy, but
be prejudicial to her children; though, to do him the very scanty justice he
deserves, he does not behave ill to them, little as he likes them.
Again, this long self-martyrdom would need no explanation if she
continued to love Karol. But it is very doubtful whether she had not ceased
to do so (she was admittedly good at "ceasing to love") when she left the
Wood of Olives, and the cessation admittedly took place long before the ten
years' torture came to an end. One is therefore, from more than one point of
view, left with a sort of Fakir self-mortification, undertaken and "dreed"
neither to atone for anything, nor to propitiate any Power, nor really to
benefit any man. After all, however, such a thing is quite humanly possible.
And these aporiae hardly touch knots—only very small spots—in a reed of
admirable strength and beauty. We know that George Sand did not sacrifice
herself for her lovers—very much the reverse. But we know also that in her
youth and early middle age she was very much of a Lucrezia Floriani,
something of a genius, if not so great a one as she made her creature,
something of a beauty, entirely negligent of ordinary sexual morality, but
thoroughly, if somewhat heartlessly, good-natured, and (not merely at the
times mentioned, but to the end of her life) an affectionate mother, a
delightful hostess, and a very satisfactory friend. No imaginary Sténio or
Karol, no actual Sandeau or Musset or Chopin could have caused her at any
time of her life the misery which the Prince caused Lucrezia, because she
would simply have "sent him walking," as the vigorous French idiom has it.
But it pleased her to graft upon her actual nature something else that it
lacked, and a life-like and tragical story resulted.

It is not a bad "turn over of the leaf" from this, the strongest, and in the best
sense most faultless, of George Sand's novels of analysis, to the "idyllic"
group of her later middle and later period—the "prettiest" division, and in
another grade of faultlessness the most free from faults, in ordinary
estimation, of her entire production.
The most popular of these, the prettiest again, the most
of a bergerie-berquinade-conte-de-fées, is no doubt La The "Idylls"—La
Petite Fadette.
Petite Fadette, the history of two twin-boys and a little
girl—this last, of course, the heroine. The boys are devoted to each other
and as like as two peas in person, but very different in character, one being
manly, and the other, if not exactly effeminate, something like it. As for
Fadette, she, though never exactly like the other girl of the saying "horrid,"
but only (and with very considerable excuses) naughty and untidy and rude,
becomes "so very, very good when she is good" as to awake slight
recalcitrances in those who have acquired the questionable knowledge of
good and evil in actual life. But one does not want to cavil. It is a pretty
book, and when the not exactly wicked but somewhat ill-famed
grandmother's stocking yields several thousand francs and facilitates the
marriage of Landry, the manly brother, and Fadette, one can be very
cheerfully cheerful, and anticipate a real ever-after happiness for both. No
doubt, too, the army did knock the girlishness out of the other brother,
Sylvinet, and we hope that one of the village gossips was wrong when she
said that he would never love any girl but one. For it is hardly necessary to
say that his agreement with his twin extends to love for Fadette—love
which is quite honourable, and quite kindly extinguished by that agreeable
materialisation of one of Titania's lower-class maids-of-honour.
Only one slight piece of malice (in the mitigated French sense) may be
permitted. We are told that Sylvinet, after the marriage, served for ten years
"in the Emperor Napoleon's glorious campaigns." This will hardly admit of
a later date for that marriage itself than the breach of the Peace of Amiens.
And this, even if Landry was no more than eighteen or nineteen at that time
(he could hardly be less), will throw the date of his and his brother's birth
well before the Revolution. Now, to insist on chronological exactitude and
draw inferences from its absence is—one admits most cheerfully, and more
than admits—a mere curmudgeonly pedantry in most cases of great or good
fiction, prose or verse. One knows what to think of people who make

crimes of these things in Shakespeare or Scott, in Dumas or Thackeray. But
when a writer makes a great point of Purpose and sets a high value on
Questions, it is not unfair to expect him or her to mind their P's and Q's in
other matters. George Sand is never tired, in other books, of insisting on the
blessedness of the Revolution itself, on the immense and glorious
emancipation from feudal tyranny, etc. But how does it come about that
there is not the very slightest sign of that tyranny in the earlier part of the
story, or of any general disturbance in the middle and later part? Glissons;
n'appuyons pas on this point, but it may be permitted to put it.
In another book of this group—I think chronologically
the earliest, also very popular, and quite "on the side of La Mare au Diable.
the angels"—the heroine, another divine little peasant-
girl—who, if George Sand had been fond of series-titles, might have caused
the book to be named La Petite Marie—omits any, however slightly,
"horrid" stage altogether. She is, if not "the whole" good—which, as
Empedocles said long ago, few can boast to find,—good, and nothing but
good, except pretty, and other things which are parts or forms of goodness.
The piece really is, in the proper sense which so few people know, or at
least use, an idyll, a little picture of Arcadian life. Speaking precisely—that
is to say in précis—it is nothing but the story of a journey in which the
travellers get benighted, and which ends in a marriage. Speaking
analytically, it consists of a prologue—one of the best examples of George
Sand's style and of her power of description, dealing with the ploughlands
of Berry and the ways of their population; of the proposition to a young
widower that he shall undertake re-marriage with a young widow, well-to-
do, of another parish; of his going a-wooing with the rather incongruous
adjuncts of a pretty young servant girl, who is going to a "place," and his
own truant elder sonlet; of the benighting of them as above by the side of a
mere or marsh of evil repute; of the insult offered to Marie on the arrival at
her new place; of the discomfiture of Germain, the hero, at finding that the
young widow keeps a sort of court of pretenders dangling about her; of his
retirement and vengeance on Marie's insulter; and of the proper marriage-
bells. There is also a rather unnecessary appendix, doubtless dear to the
folklorist, of Berrichon wedding customs.
Once more, to cavil at this would be contemptibly easy. To quote La Terre
against it would be uncritical, for, as may be seen later, whatever M. Zola's

books are, they are not evidence that can negative anything. It would be as
sensible to set against the night scene in the wood by the Devil's Pool the
history of the amiable Dumollard, who, as far as fifty years' memory serves
me, used, some years before George Sand's death, sometimes to escort and
sometimes to lie in wait for servant-girls on the way to or from places,
violate, murder, and rob them, in another country district of France. Nor
would it be quite critical, though a little more so, to compare George Sand's
own friend, contemporary, and in some sort counterpart, Balzac's peasant
scenes against her. If, at this time, she viewed all such things en rose,
Balzac viewed them, at this and almost all times, en noir. Perhaps
everybody (except the wicked farmer, who insults Marie) is a little too
good, and it seems rather surprising that somebody did not say something
about Germain and Marie arriving next morning instead of overnight. But
never mind this. The scenery and the writing of the book have real charm.
The long conversation by the watch-fire in the wood, where Germain tries
to break off his suit to the widow already and transfer himself to Marie,
with Marie's cool and (for she has loved him already) self-denying refusal
on the most atrociously rational and business-like principles, is first-rate. It
may rank, with the above-mentioned discussion about Consuelo's beauty
between herself and her lover, as one of the best examples of George Sand's
gift for the novel.
The third in the order of mention of what is usually
considered her trilogy of idylls, François le Champi, if François le
Champi.
not the prettiest, is the strongest, and the most varied in
interest, of the three. The shadier side of human character lifts itself and
says, Et in Arcadia ego,[189] much more decidedly than in the childish
petulances of La Petite Fadette and the merely "Third Murderer"
appearance of the unprincipled farmer in La Mare au Diable. Even the
mostly blameless hero is allowed, towards the close, to exhibit the well-
known rusé or madré characteristics of the French peasant to the extent of
more than one not quite white lie; the husband of the heroine is unfaithful,
tyrannical as far as he dare be, and a waster of his family's goods before his
fortunately rather early death; his pretty young sister, Mariette, is a selfish
and spiteful minx; and his paramour (sarcastically named "La Sevère") is
unchaste, malignant, and dishonest all at once—a combination which may
be said to exclude any possible goodness in woman.

The only thoroughly white sheep—though the "Champi" or foundling (his
cradle being the genial fields and not the steps of stone) has but the grey
patches noticed above, and those acquired with the best intentions—is
Madeleine Blanchet, his protectress for many years, and finally, after
difficulties and her widowhood, his wife. That she is some twelve years
older than he is is a detail which need not in itself be of much importance. It
lends itself to that combination of maternal and sexual affection of which
George Sand is so fond, and of which we may have to speak some harsh
words elsewhere. But here it matters little. Arcady is a kind of Saturnian
realm, and "mixtures" elsewhere "held a stain" may pass there.
We may make a further glissade (to return to some
remarks made above), though of a different kind, over a Others—Mauprat.
few of the very large number of novels that we cannot
discuss in detail. But Mauprat adds just a little support to the remarks there
made. For this (which is a sort of crime-and-detection novel, and therefore
appeals to some readers more than to the present historian) turns wholly on
the atrocious deeds of a seignorial family of the most melodramatic kind.
Yet it is questionable whether the wickedest of them ever did anything
worse than the action of their last and renegade member, who actually,
when he comes into the property, ruins his ancestral castle because naughty
things have been done there. Now, when Milton said, "As well kill a man as
kill a good book," though it was no doubt an intentional hyperbole, there
was much sound sense in what he said. Still, except in the case of such a
book as has been produced only a few times in the world's history, it may be
urged that probably something as good might be written by somebody else
among the numerous men that were not killed. But, on the same principle,
one would be justified in saying, "Better kill a hundred men than ruin a
castle with hundreds of years of memories, bad or good." You can never
replace it, while the hundred men will, at the very moment they are killed,
be replaced, just as good on the average, by the ordinary operations of
nature. Besides, by partially ruining the castle, you give an opening to the
sin of the restorer, for which there is, we know, no pardon, here or hereafter.
[190]

La Daniella is a rather long book and a rather dull one.
There is a good deal of talkee-talkee of the Corinne kind La Daniella.
in it: the heroine is an angelic Italian soubrette; the hero

is one of the coxcombish heroes of French novels, who seem to have set
themselves to confirm the most unjust ideas of their nation entertained in
foreign climes; there is a "Miss Medora," who, as the hero informs us,
"plays the coquette clumsily, as English girls generally do," etc. Passons
outre, without inquiring how much George Sand knew about English girls.
One of the best of her books to read, though it has
neither the human interest of Lucrezia Floriani, nor the Les Beaux
Messieurs de Bois-
prettiness of the Idylls, nor the style-colour of some Doré.
other books, is Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré. It is
all the more agreeable that we may even "begin with a little aversion." It
suggests itself as a sort of interloper in the great business of Dumas and
Co.: it opens, indeed, only a few years before D'Artagnan rode up to the inn
on the buttercup-coloured pony. And, in manner, it may look at first as if the
writer were following another but much inferior example—our own G. P. R.
James; for there are "two cavaliers," and one tells the other a tale fit to make
him fall asleep and off his saddle. But it improves remarkably, and before
you have read a hundred pages you are very fairly "enfisted." The figure of
the old Marquis de Bois-Doré—an aged dandy with divers absurdities about
him,[191] but a gentleman to his by no means yet stiffened or stooping
backbone; a heart of gold, and a wrist with a good core of steel left in it—
might easily have been a failure. It is a success. His first guest and then
adversary, the wicked Spaniard, Sciarra d'Alvimar or de Villareal, whom the
old marquis runs through the body in a moonlight duel for very sufficient
reason,[192] may not be thought quite equally successful. Scoundrel as he is,
George Sand has unwisely thrown over him a touch of guignon—of
shadowing and resistless fate—which creates a certain sympathy; and she
neglects the good old rule that your villain should always be allowed a
certain run for his money—a temporary exercise of his villainy. Alvimar,
though he does not feel the marquis's rapier till nearly the end of the first
half, as it were, of the book, is "marked down" from the start, and never
kills anything within those limits except a poor little tame wolf-cub which
is going (very sensibly) to fly at him. He is altogether too much in
appearance and too little in effectuality of the stage Spaniard—black
garments, black upturned moustache, hook-nose, navaja, and all the rest of
it. But he does not spoil the thing, though he hardly does it much good; and
if he is badly treated he has his revenge on the author.

For the book becomes very dull after his supposed death (he does die, but
not at once), and only revives when, some way into the second volume, an
elaborate attempt to revenge him is made by his servant, Sanche, âme
damnée and also damnante (if one may coin this variant), who is, as it turns
out, his irregular father. This again rather stagy character organises a
formidable body of wandering reîtres, gipsies, and miscellaneous ruffians to
attack and sack the marquis's house—a plan which, though ultimately
foiled, brings about a very refreshing series of hurly-burlys and hullabaloos
for some hundred and fifty pages. The narrative is full of improbable
impossibilities, and contrasts singularly with the fashion in which Dumas,
throughout all his great books (and not a few of his not so great ones),
manages to escamoter the difficulty. The boy Mario,[193] orphan of the
murdered brother, left unknown for many years, recognised by his uncle,
avenger of his father on Sanche, as Bois-Doré himself had been on Alvimar,
is altogether too clever and effective for his age; and the conduct of
Bellinde, Bois-Doré's cashiered gouvernante, is almost preposterous
throughout. But it is what a schoolboy of the old days would have called a
"jolly good scrimmage," and restores the interest of the book for most of the
second volume. The end—scarcely, one would think, very interesting to any
one—is quite spoilt for some by another example of George Sand's
inveterate passion for "maternal" love-making and matches where the lady
is nearly double the age of her husband. Others—or the same—may not be
propitiated for this by the "horrors"[194] which the author has liberally
thrown in. But the larger part of the book, like the larger part of Consuelo,
is quite good stuff.
It is, indeed, a really lively book. Two duller ones than
the first two allotted, at the beginning of this notice, to Le Marquis de
Villemer.
her last period I have seldom read. They are both
instances (and one at least contains an elaborate vindication) of the "novel
of purpose," and they are by themselves almost enough to damn it. M. le
Marquis de Villemer is an appalling prig—virtuous, in the Devil-and-his-
grandmother style, to the nth—who devotes his energies to writing a
History of the Patriciate since the Christian Era, the object being to reveal
the sins of aristocracy. He has a rather nice half-brother spend-thrift, Duque
d'Aleria (Madame de Villemer the elder has first married a Spaniard),
whose debts he virtuously pays, and after a great deal of scandal he marries

a poor but noble and noble-minded damsel, Caroline de Saint-Geneix, who
has taken the position of companion to his mother in order to help her
widowed and four-childed sister. For the virtue of George Sand's virtuous
people is virtue and no mistake. The lively and amiable duke is fortunately
fitted with a lively and amiable duchess, and they show a little light in the
darkness of copy-book morality and republican principles.
This kindly light is altogether wanting in Mademoiselle
La Quintinie, where the purpose passes from politics to Mlle. La Quintinie.
religion. The book is rather famous, and was, at the time,
much read, because it is not merely a novel of purpose, but an instance of
the duello fought, not with sword or pistol, not with quarter-staves or sand-
bags, but with feuilletons of fiction. It, and Octave Feuillet's Sibylle, to
which it is the countercheck-quarrelsome, both appeared in the Revue des
Deux Mondes. It should be seen at a further stage of this volume that I do
not think Sibylle a masterpiece, either of tale-telling or of argumentation,
though it is more on my side than the reply is. But Feuillet, though not a
genius, as some people would have George Sand to be, nor yet possessing
anything like the talent which no sane criticism can deny her, was a much
better craftsman in the art of novel-writing.
For a final notice—dealing also with the last, or almost
the last, of all her books—we may take Flamarande and Flamarande.
its sequel, Les Deux Frères. They give the history of the
unfounded jealousy of a husband in regard to his wife—a jealousy which is
backed up by an equally unfounded suspicion (supported by the most
outrageous proceedings of espionage and something like burglary) on the
part of a confidential servant, who, as we are informed at last, has himself
had a secret passion for his innocent mistress. It is more like a Feuillet book
than a George Sand, and in this respect shows the curious faculty—
possessed also by some lady novelists of our own—of adapting itself to the
change of novel-fashion. But to me at least it appeals not.
So turn we from particulars (for individual notice of the hundred books is
impossible) to generals.
It may be difficult to sum up the characteristics of such a
writer as George Sand shortly, but it has to be done. Summary and
judgment.

There is to be allowed her—of course and at once—an
extraordinary fertility, and a hardly less extraordinary Style.
escape from absolute sinking into the trivial. She is
preposterous early, somewhat facile and "journalistic" later, but she is never
exactly commonplace. She belongs to the school of immense and almost
mechanical producers who are represented in English by Anthony Trollope
as their "prior" and by Mrs. Oliphant[195] and Miss Braddon as
commandresses of the order. (I think she runs a good deal below the Prior
but a good deal above the Commandresses.[196]) But, if she does so belong,
it is very mainly due, not to any pre-eminence of narrative faculty, but to
that gift of style which has been for nearly a hundred years admitted. Now I
have in this History more than once, and by no means with tongue in cheek,
expressed a diffidence about giving opinions on this point. I have, it is true,
read French for more than sixty years, and I have been accustomed to "read
for style" in it, and in divers other languages, for at least fifty. But I see such
extraordinary blunders made by foreigners in regard to this side of our own
literature, that I can never be sure—being less conceited than the pious
originator of the phrase—that even the Grace of God has prevented me
from going the same way. Still, if I have any right to publish this book, I
must have a little—I will not say "right," but venia or licence—to say what
seems to me to be the fact of the matter. That fact—or that seeming of fact
—is that George Sand's style is too facile to be first-rate. By this I do not
mean that it is too plain. On the contrary, it is sometimes, especially in her
early books, ornate to gorgeousness, and even to gaudiness. And it was a
curious mistake of the late Mr. Pater, in a quite honorific reference to me, to
imply that I preferred the plain style—a mistake all the more curious that he
knew and acknowledged (and was almost unduly grateful for) my
admiration of his own. I like both forms: but for style—putting meaning out
of the question—I would rather read Browne than Swift, and Lamennais
than Fénelon.
George Sand has both the plain and the ornate styles (and various shades of
"middle" between them) at command. But it seems to me that she has them
—to use a financial phrase recently familiar—too much "on tap." You see
that the current of agreeable and, so to speak, faultless language is running,
and might run volubly for any period of life that might be allotted to her. In
fact it did so. Now no doubt there was something of Edmond de Goncourt's

bad-blooded fatuity in his claim that his and his brother's epithets were
"personal," while Flaubert's were not. Research for more personal "out-of-
the-wayness" in style will rarely result in anything but jargon. But, on the
other hand, Gautier's great injunction:

Sculpte, lime, cisèle!

is sound. You cannot reach the first class in any art by turning a tap and
letting it run.
The one point of what we may call the "furniture" of
novels, in which she seems to me to have, occasionally Conversation and
description.
at least, touched supremacy, is conversation. It has been
observed by those capable of making the induction that, close as drama and
novel are in some ways, the distinction between dramatic and non-dramatic
talk is, though narrow, deeper than the very deepest Alpine crevasse from
Dauphiné to Carinthia. Such specimens as those already more than once
dwelt on—Consuelo's and Anzoleto's debate about her looks, and that of
Germain and Marie in the midnight wood by the Devil's Mere—are first-
rate, and there is no more to say. Some of her descriptions, again, such as
the opening of the book last quoted (the wide, treeless, communal plain
with its various labouring teams), or as some of the Lake touches in
Lucrezia Floriani, or as the relieving patches in the otherwise monotonous
grumble of Un Hiver à Majorque, are unsurpassable. Nor is this gift limited
to mere paysage. The famous account of Chopin's playing already
mentioned for praise is only first among many. But whether these things are
supported by sufficient strength of character, plot, incident, "thought," and
the rest; whether that strange narrative power, so hard to define and so
impossible to mistake or to fail to distinguish from these other elements, is
present—these are great questions and not easy to answer. I am, as will
have been seen throughout, rather inclined to answer them in the
unfavourable way.
In fact—impertinent, insolent, anything else as it may seem—I venture to
ask the question, "Was George Sand a very great craftswoman in the
novel?" and, what is more, to answer it in the negative. I understand that an
ingenious critic of her own sex has recently described her method as
"rolling through the book, locked in the embraces of her subject," as

distinguished from the aloofness and elaboration of a more recent school.
So far, perhaps, so good; but I could wish to find "the intricacies of Diego
and Julia" more interesting to me than as a rule they are. And it must be
remembered that she is constantly detaching herself from the forlorn
"subject," leaving it unembraced and shivering, in order to sermonise it and
her readers. I do not make the very facile and somewhat futile criticism that
she would have written better if she had written half or a quarter as much as
she did. She could not have written little; it is as natural and suitable for
Tweed to "rin wi' speed" as for Till to "rin slaw," though perhaps the result
—parallel to but more cheerful than that recorded in the old rhyme—may
be that Till has the power not of drowning but of intoxicating two men,
where Tweed can only manage one. But this engrained fecundity and
facundity of hers inevitably make her work novel-journalism rather than
novel-literature in all points but in that of style, which has been discussed
already.[197]

FOOTNOTES:
[174] It is attested by the well-known story, more excusable in a man than
creditable to a gentleman, of her earliest or earliest known lover, Jules Sandeau
(v. inf.), seeing a photograph of her in later days, turning to a companion and
saying, "Et je l'ai connue belle!"
[175] It is possible that some readers may not know the delightfully unexpected,
and not improbably "more-expressive-than-volumes" third line—
"Not like the woman who lies under the next stone."
But tradition has, I believe, mercifully omitted to identify this neighbouring
antipode.
[176] Details of personal scandal seldom claim notice here. But it may be urged
with some show of reason that this scandal is too closely connected with the
substance and the spirit of the novelist's whole work, from Indiana to
Flamarande, to permit total ignoring of it. Lucrezia Floriani, though perhaps
more suggestive of Chopin than of Musset, but with "tangency" on both, will be
discussed in the text. That most self-accusing of excuses, Elle et Lui, with its
counterblast Paul de Musset's Lui et Elle, and a few remarks on Un Hiver à
Majorque (conjoined for a purpose, which will be indicated) may be despatched
in a note of some length.
The rival novel-plaidoyers on the subject of the loves and
strifes of George Sand and Alfred de Musset are Note on Elle et
sufficiently disgusting, and if they be considered as novels, Lui, etc.,

the evil effect of purpose—and particularly of personal purpose—receives from
them texts for a whole series of sermons. Reading them with the experience of a
lifetime, not merely in literary criticism, but (for large parts of that lifetime) in
study of evidence on historical, political, and even directly legal matters, I
cannot help coming to the conclusion that, though there is no doubt a certain
amount of suggestio falsi in both, the suppressio veri is infinitely greater in Elle
et Lui. If the letters given in Paul de Musset's book were not written by George
Sand they were written by Diabolus. And there is one retort made towards the
finale by "Édouard de Falconey" (Musset) to "William Caze" (George Sand)
which stigmatises like the lash of a whip, if not even like a hot iron, the whole
face of the lady's novels.
"Ma chère," lui dit-il, "vous parlez si souvent de chasteté que cela devient
indécent. Votre amitié n'est pas plus 'sainte' que celle des autres." [If he had
added "maternité" the stigma would have been completer still.] And there is also
a startling verisimilitude in the reply assigned to her:
"Mon cher, trouvez bon que je console mes amis selon ma méthode. Vous voyez
qu'elle leur plaît assez, puisqu'ils y reviennent."
It was true: they did so, rather to their own discredit and wholly to their
discomfort. But she and her "method" must have pleased them enough for them
to do it. It is not so pleasing a method for an outsider to contemplate. He sees too
much of the game, and has none of the pleasure of playing or the occasional
winnings. Since I read Hélisenne de Crenne (v. sup. Vol. I, pp. 150-1) there has
seemed to me to be some likeness between the earlier stage of her heroine (if not
of herself) and that of George Sand in her "friendships." They both display a
good deal of mere sensuality, and both seem to me to have been quite ignorant of
passion. Hélisenne did not reach the stage of "maternal" affection, and perhaps it
was well for her lover and not entirely bad for her readers. But the best face that
can be put on the "method" will be seen in Lucrezia Floriani.
The bluntness of taste and the intense concentration on
self, which were shown most disagreeably in Elle et Lui, and on Un
appear on a different side in another book which is not a Hiver à
novel at all—not even a novel as far as masque and Majorque.
domino are concerned,—though indirectly it touches
another of George Sand's curious personal experiences—that with Chopin. Un
Hiver à Majorque is perhaps the most ill-tempered book of travel, except
Smollett's too famous production, ever written by a novelist of talent or genius.
The Majorcans certainly did not ask George Sand to visit them. They did not
advertise the advantages of Majorca, as is the fashion with "health resorts"
nowadays. She went there of her own accord; she found magnificent scenery;
she flouted the sentiments of what she herself describes as the most priest-ridden
country in Europe by never going to church, though and while she actually lived
in a disestablished and disendowed monastery. To punish them for which (the
non sequitur is intentional) she does little but talk of dirt, discomfort, bad food,
extortion, foul-smelling oil and garlic, varying the talk only to foul-smelling oil
and garlic, extortion, bad food, discomfort, or dirt. The book no doubt yields
some of her finest passages of descriptive prose, both as regards landscape, and
in the famous record of Chopin's playing; but otherwise it is hardly worth
reading.

[177] She survived into the next decade and worked till the last with no distinct
declension, but she did not complete it, dying in 1876. Her famous direction
about her grave, Laissez la verdure, is characteristic of her odd mixture if
theatricality and true nature. But if any one wishes to come to her work with a
comfortable preoccupation in favor of herself, he should begin with her Letters.
Those of her old age especially are charming.
[178] Cf. Mr. Alfred Lammle on his unpoetical justice to Mr. Fledgeby in Our
Mutual Friend.
[179] Valentine has an elder sister who has a son, irregularily existent, but is as
much in love with Benedict as if she were a girl and he were a gentleman; and
this son marries the much older Athenais, a lovely peasant girl who has been the
unwilling fiancée and wife of the ingenious pitchforker. You have seldom to go
far in George Sand for an unmarried lady with a child for chastity, and a widow
who marries a boy for maternal affection.
[180] There is also an Irish priest called Magnus, who, like everybody else, is
deeply and (in the proper sense of sans espoir) desperately in love with Lélia. He
is, on the whole, quite the maddest—and perhaps the most despicable—of the
lot.
[181] If any one says, "So, then, there are several 'most intolerables,'" let me
point out that intolerableness is a more than "twy-peaked" hill or range. Julien
Sorel and Marius were not designed to be gentlemen.
[182] It is bad for Amélie, who, in a not unnatural revulsion from her fiancé's
neglects and eccentricities, lets herself be fooled by the handsome Italian.
[183] George Sand's treatment of the great Empress, Marie Antoinette's mother,
is a curious mixture of half-reluctant admiration and Republican bad-
bloodedness.
[184] Porpora is included, but the amiable monarch, who has heard that the old
maestro speaks freely of him, gives private orders that he shall be stopped at the
frontier.
[185] Cow's breath has, I believe, been prescribed in such cases by the faculty;
hardly children's.
[186] She does not make the delicate distinction once drawn by another of her
sex: "I can tell you how many people I have kissed, but I cannot tell you how
many have kissed me."
[187] She is rather fond of taking her readers into confidence this way. I have no
particular objection to it; but those who object to Thackeray's parabases ought to
think this is a still more objectionable thing.
[188] The Count Albani plays his difficult part of thirdsman very well
throughout, though just at first he would make an advance on "auld lang syne" if
Lucrezia would let him. But later he is on strict honour, and quarrels with the
Prince for his tyranny.

[189] It is very pleasing to see, as I have seen, this famous phrase quoted as if it
had reference to the joys of Arcadia.
[190] If any among my congregation be offended by apparent flippancy in this
notice of a book which, to my profound astonishment, some people have taken
as the author's masterpiece, I apologise. But if I spoke more seriously I should
also speak more severely.
[191] He is a frantic devotee of the Astrée, and George Sand brings in a good
deal about the most agreeable book, without, however, showing very intimate or
accurate knowledge of it.
[192] The Spaniard (rather his servant with his connivance) has murdered and
robbed Bois-Doré's brother.
[193] He is also very handsome, and so makes up for the plurality of the title.
[194] Alvimar lies dying for hours with the infidel Bohemians and roistering
Protestant reîtres not only disturbing his death-bed, but interfering with the
"consolation of religion"; the worst of the said Bohemians is buried alive (or
rather stifled after he has been half-buried alive) by the little gipsy girl, Pilar,
whom he has tormented; and Pilar herself is burnt alive on the last page but one,
after she has poisoned Bellinde.
[195] Taking her work on the whole. The earlier part of it ran even Trollope
hard.
[196] Her points of likeness to her self-naming name-child, "George Eliot," are
too obvious to need discussion. But it is a question whether the main points of
unlikeness—the facility and extreme fecundity of the French George, as
contrasted with the laborious book-bearing of the English—are not more
important than the numerous but superficial and to a large extent non-literary
resemblances.
[197] I have said little or nothing of the short stories. They are fairly numerous,
but I do not think that her forte lay in them.

CHAPTER VI
THE NOVEL OF STYLE—GAUTIER, MÉRIMÉE, GÉRARD
DE NERVAL, MUSSET, VIGNY

In arranging this volume I have thought it worth while to include, in a
single chapter and nominatim in the title thereof, five writers of prose
novels or tales; all belonging to "1830"; four of them at least ranking with
all but the greatest of that great period; but no one exclusively or even
essentially a novelist as Balzac and George Sand were in their different
ways, and none of them attempting such imposing bulk-and-plan of novel-
matter as that which makes up the prose fiction of Hugo. Gautier was an
admirable, and Musset and Vigny at their best were each a consummate,
poet; while the first-named was a "polygraph" of the polygraphs, in every
kind of belles-lettres. Mérimée's novels or tales form a small part of his
whole work. "Gérard" is perhaps only admissible here by courtesy, though
more than one or two readers, I hope, would feel his absence as a dark gap
in the book. Musset, again, not ill at short stories, is far better at short plays.
One novel of Vigny's has indeed enjoyed great fame; but, as will be seen, I
am unluckily unable to admire it very much, and I include him here—partly
because I do not wish to herd so clear a name with the Sues and the Souliés,
even with the Sandeaus and Bernards—partly because, though his style in
prose is not so marked as that in verse, some of his minor work in fiction is
extremely interesting. But though so much of their work, and in Musset's
and Vigny's cases all their best work, lies outside our province, and though
they themselves, with the possible exception of Gérard and Gautier, who
have strong affinities, are markedly different from one another, there is one
point which they all have in common, and this point supplies the general
title of this chapter. Style of the more separable and elaborate kind does not
often make its appearance very early in literary departments; and there may
be (v. inf.) some special reasons why it should not do so in prose fiction.
With the exception of Marivaux, who had carried his attention to it over the
boundary-line of mannerism, few earlier novelists, though some of them
were great writers, had made a point of it, the chief exceptions being in the

particular line of "wit," such as Hamilton, Crébillon fils, and Voltaire.
Chateaubriand had been almost the first to attempt a novel-rhetoric; and it
must be remembered that Chateaubriand was a sort of human magnus
Apollo throughout the July monarchy. At any rate, it is a conspicuous
feature in all these writers, and may serve as a link between them.

Some readers may know (for I, and the others, which I
shall probably quote again, have quoted it before now) a Gautier—his
remark of Émile de Girardin when Théophile Gautier burden of "style."
asked him how people liked a story which "Théo" had prevailed on that
experienced editor to insert as a feuilleton in the Presse: "Mon ami, l'abonné
ne s'amuse pas franchement. Il est gêné par le style." Girardin, though not
exactly a genius, was an exceedingly clever man, and knew the foot of his
public—perhaps of "the public"—to a hundredth of an inch. But he could
hardly have anticipated the extent to which his criticism would reflect the
attitude of persons who would have been, and would be, not a little
offended at being classed with l'abonné. The reproach of "over-styling" has
been cast at Gautier by critics of the most different types, and—more
curiously at first sight than after a moment's reflection—by some who are
themselves style-mad, but whose favourite vanities in that matter are
different from his. I can hardly think of any writer—Herrick as treated by
Hazlitt is the chief exception that occurs to me at the moment—against
whom this cheap and obvious, though, alas! not very frequently possible,
charge of "bright far-shining emptiness," of glittering frigidity, of colour
without flesh and blood, of art without matter, etc., etc., has been cast so
violently—or so unjustly. In literature, as in law and war, the favourite
method of offensive defence is to reserve your triarii, your "colophon" of
arms or arguement, to the last; but there are cases in all three where it is
best to carry an important point at once and hold it. I think that this is one of
these cases; and I do not think that the operation can be conducted with
better chance of success than by inserting here that outline,[198] with
specimens, of La Morte Amoureuse which has been already promised—or
threatened—in the Preface. For here the glamour—if it be only glamour—
of the style will have disappeared; the matter will remain.
You ask me, my brother, if I have ever loved. I
answer "Yes." But it is a wild and terrible story, Abstract (with
translations) of
a memory whose ashes, with all my sixty-six La Morte
years, I hardly dare to disturb. To you I can Amoureuse.
refuse nothing, but I would not tell the tale to a
less experienced soul. The facts are so strange that I myself
cannot believe in their actual occurrence. For three years I was
the victim of a diabolical delusion, and every night—God grant

it was a dream—I, a poor country priest, led the life of the lost,
the life of the worldling and the debauchee. A single chance of
too great complacency went near to destroy my soul; but at last,
with God's aid and my patron saint's, I exorcised the evil spirit
which had gained possession of me. Till then my life was
double, and the counterpart by night was utterly different from
the life by day. By day I was a priest of the Lord, pure, and
busied with holy things. By night, no sooner had I closed my
eyes than I became a youthful gallant, critical in women, dogs,
and horses, prompt with dice and bottle, free of hand and
tongue; and when waking-time came at dawn of day, it seemed
to me as if I then fell asleep and was a priest only in dreams.
From this sleep-life I have kept the memory of words and
things, which recur to me against my will; and though I have
never quitted the walls of my parsonage, those who hear me talk
would rather think me a man of the world and of many
experiences, who has entered the religious life hoping to finish
in God's bosom the evening of his stormy day, than a humble
seminarist, whose life has been spent in an obscure parish,
buried deep in woods, and far removed from the course of the
world.
Yes, I have loved—as no one else has loved, with a mad and
wild passion so violent that I can hardly understand how it failed
to break my heart.
After rapidly sketching the history of the early seminary days of the priest
Romuald, his complete seclusion and ignorance almost of the very names of
world and woman, the tale goes on to the day of his ordination. He is in the
church, almost in a trance of religious fervour; the building itself, the
gorgeously robed bishop, the stately ceremonies, seem to him a foretaste of
heaven, when suddenly—
By chance I raised my head, which I had hitherto kept bowed,
and saw before me, within arm's length as it seemed, but in
reality at some distance and beyond the chancel rails, a woman
of rare beauty and royally apparelled. At once, as it were, scales
dropped from my eyes. I was in the case of a blind man whose

sight is suddenly restored. The bishop, but now so dazzling to
me, became dim, the tapers in their golden stands paled like the
stars at morning, and darkness seemed to pervade the church.
On this background of shade the lovely vision stood out like an
angelic appearance, self-illumined, and giving rather than
receiving light. I dropped my eyelids, firmly resolving not again
to raise them, that so I might escape the distraction of outward
things, for I felt the spell more and more, and I hardly knew
what I did; but a minute afterwards I again looked up, for I
perceived her beauty still shining across my dropped lashes as if
with prismatic glory, and encircled by the crimson halo that, to
the gazer, surrounds the sun. How beautiful she was! Painters,
when in their chase of the ideal they have followed it to the
skies and carried off therefrom the divine image of Our Lady,
never drew near this fabulous reality. Nor are the poet's words
more adequate than the colours of the limner. She was tall and
goddess-like in shape and port. Her soft fair hair rolled on either
side of her temples in golden streams that crowned her as with a
queen's diadem. Her forehead, white and transparent, tinged
only by blue vein-stains, stretched in calm amplitude over two
dark eyebrows—a contrast enhanced still further by the sea-
green lustre of her glittering and unfathomable eyes. Ah, what
eyes! One flash of them was enough to settle the fate of a man.
Never had I seen in human eyes such life, such clearness, such
ardour, such humid brilliancy; and there shot from them glances
like arrows, which went straight to my heart. Whether the flame
which lit them came from hell or heaven I know not, but from
one or the other it came, most surely. No daughter of Eve she,
but an angel or a fiend, perhaps—who knows?—something of
both. The quarrelets of pearl flashed through her scarlet smile,
and as her mouth moved the dimples sank and filled by turns in
the blush-rose softness of her exquisite cheek. Over the even
smoothness of her half-uncovered shoulders played a floating
gloss as of agate, and a river of large pearls, not greatly different
in hue from her neck, descended towards her breast. Now and
then she raised her head with a peacock-like gesture, and sent a

quiver through the ruff which enshrined her like a frame of
silver filigree.
The strange vision causes on Romuald strange yet natural effects. His
ardent aspiration for the priesthood changes to loathing. He even tries to
renounce his vows, to answer "No" to the questions to which he should
answer "Yes," and thus to comply with the apparent demand of the
stranger's eyes. But he cannot. The awe of the ceremony is yet too strong on
his soul, if not on his senses and imagination; and the fatal words are
spoken, the fatal rites gone through, despite the promises of untold bliss
which the eyes, evermore caressing and entreating, though sadder, as the
completion of the sacrifice approaches, continue to make him.
At last it was over—I was a priest. Never did face of woman
wear an expression of such anguish as hers. The girl whose
lover drops lifeless at her side, the mother by her dead child's
cradle, Eve at the gate of paradise, the miser who finds his
buried treasure replaced by a stone, the poet whose greatest
work has perished in the flames, have not a more desolate air.
The blood left her countenance, and it became as of marble; her
arms fell by her side, as if their muscles had become flaccid; and
she leant against a pillar, for her limbs refused to support her. As
for me, with a livid face bathed as if in the dews of death, I bent
my tottering steps towards the church door. The air seemed to
stifle me, the vaulted roof settled on my shoulders, and on my
head seemed to rest the whole crushing weight of the dome. As I
was on the point of crossing the threshold a hand touched mine
suddenly—a woman's hand—a touch how new to me! It was as
cold as the skin of a serpent, yet the contact burnt like the brand
of a hot iron. "Unhappy wretch! What have you done?" she said
to me in a low voice, and then disappeared in the crowd.
On the way to the seminary, whither a comrade has to support him, for his
emotion is evident to all, a page, unnoticed, slips into Romuald's hand a
tablet with the simple words, "Clarimonde. At the Concini Palace." He
passes some days in a state almost of delirium, now forming wild plans of
escape, now shocked at his sinful desires, but always regretting the world
he has renounced, and still more Clarimonde.

I do not know how long I remained in this condition, but, as in
one of my furious writhings I turned on my bed, I saw the Father
Serapion standing in the middle of the cell gazing steadily at me.
Shame seized me, and I hid my face with my hands. "Romuald,"
said he, at the end of a few minutes, "something extraordinary
has come on you. Your conduct is inexplicable. You, so pious, so
gentle, you pace your cell like a caged beast. Take heed, my
brother, of the suggestions of the Evil One, for he is wroth that
you have given yourself to the Lord, and lurks round you like a
ravening wolf, if haply a last effort may make you his."
Then, bidding him redouble his pious exercises, and telling him that he has
been presented by the bishop to a country cure, and must be ready to start
on the morrow, Serapion leaves him. Romuald is in despair at quitting the
neighbourhood of Clarimonde. But his seminarist inexperience makes him
feel, more than ever, the impossibility even of discovering her, and the hints
of Serapion have in a manner reawakened his conscience. He departs on the
morrow without protest. They quit the city, and begin to climb the hills
which surround it.
At the top I turned round once more to give a last look to the
place where dwelt Clarimonde. The city lay wholly in the
shadow of a cloud; its blue and red roofs were blended in one
general half-tint, above which here and there white flakes of the
smoke of morning fires hovered. By some optical accident a
single edifice stood out gilded by a ray of light, and more lofty
than the mass of surrounding buildings. Though more than a
league off, it seemed close to us. The smallest details were
visible—the turrets, the terraces, the windows, and even the
swallow-tailed vanes. "What is that sunlit palace yonder?" I
asked of Serapion. He shaded his eyes with his hand, and after
looking he answered, "It is the palace which Prince Concini
gave to the courtesan Clarimonde. Terrible things are done
there." As he spoke, whether it were fact or fancy I know not, it
seemed to me that I saw a slender white form glide out on the
terrace, glitter there for a second, and then disappear. It was
Clarimonde! Could she have known that at that moment, from
the rugged heights of the hill which separated me from her, and

which I was never more to descend, I was bending a restless and
burning gaze on the palace of her abode, brought near me by a
mocking play of light, as if to invite me to enter? Ah yes! she
knew it doubtless, for her soul was bound to mine too nearly not
to feel its least movements; and this it must have been which
urged her to climb the terrace in the cold morning dews,
wrapped only in her snowy nightgear.
But the die is cast, and the journey continues. They reach the modest
parsonage where Romuald is to pass the rest of his days, and he is installed
in his cure, Serapion returning to the city. Romuald attacks his work
desperately, hoping to find peace there, but he very partially succeeds. The
words of Clarimonde and the touch of her hand haunt him constantly, and
sometimes even stranger things happen. He sees the flash of the sea-green
eyes across his garden hedges; he seems to find the imprint of feet, which
are assuredly not those of any inhabitant of the village, on the gravel walks.
At last one night he is summoned late to the bedside of a dying person, by a
messenger of gorgeous dress and outlandish aspect. The journey is made in
the darkness on fiery steeds, through strange scenery, and in an unknown
direction. A splendid palace is at length reached—too late, for the priest is
met by the news that his penitent has already expired. But he is entreated,
and consents, at least to watch and pray by the body during the night. He is
led into the chamber of death, and finds that the corpse is Clarimonde. At
first he mechanically turns to prayer, but other thoughts inevitably occur.
His eyes wander to the appearance and furniture of the boudoir suddenly
put to so different use: the gorgeous hangings of crimson damask
contrasting with the white shroud, the faded rose by the bedside, the
scattered signs of revelry, distract and disturb him. Strange fancies come
thick. The air seems other than that to which he is accustomed in such
chambers of the dead. The corpse appears from time to time to make slight
movements; even sighs seem to echo his own. At last he lifts the veil which
covers her, and contemplates the exquisite features he had last seen at the
fatal moment of his sacrifice. He cannot believe that she is dead. The faint
blush-rose tints are hardly dulled, the hand is not colder than he recollects
it.
The night was now far spent. I felt that the moment of eternal
separation was at hand, and I could not refuse myself the last