A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2

A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 Page 17

by George Saintsbury

  CHAPTER XIII

  NATURALISM--THE GONCOURTS, ZOLA, AND MAUPASSANT

  [Sidenote: The beginnings.]

  If I were writing this _History_ on the lines which some of my critics(of whom, let it be observed, I do not make the least complaint) seem toprefer, or at least to miss their absence, a very large part of thischapter would give me the least possible difficulty. I should simplytake M. Zola's _Le Roman Experimental_ and M. Brunetiere's _Le RomanNaturaliste_ and "combine my information." The process--easy to any oneof some practice in letters--could be easier to no one than to me. For Iread and reviewed both books very carefully at their first appearance; Ihad them on my shelves for many years; and the turning of either overfor a quarter of an hour, or half at the most, would put its contentsonce more at my fingers' ends. But, as I have more than once pointedout, elaborate boiling down of them would not accord with my scheme andplan. Inasmuch as the episode or passage[455] is perhaps, of all thosewhich make up our story, the most remarkable instance of a deliberate"school"--of a body of work planned and executed under more or lessdefinite schedules--something if not much more of the critical kindthan usual may be given, either here or in the Conclusion.[456] But weshall, I think, learn far better things as to M. Zola and those abouthim by considering what they--at least what he, his would-be teachers,and his greatest disciple--actually did, than by inquiring what theymeant, or thought they meant, to do, or what other people thought aboutthem and their doings.

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

  [Sidenote: "Les deux Goncourt."]

  The body of Naturalist or Experimental novels which, beginning in the'sixties of the century, extended to, and a little over, its close, haslong been, and will probably always continue to be, associated with thename of Emile Zola. But the honour or dishonour of the invention andpioneering of the thing was claimed by another, for himself and a thirdwriter, that is to say, by Edmond de Goncourt for himself and hisbrother Jules. The elder of the Goncourts--the younger died in earlymiddle age, and knowledge of him is in a way indirect, though we havesome letters--might be said to have, like Restif, a _manie depaternite_, though his children were of a different class. He thought heinvented Naturalism; he thought he introduced into France what someunkind contemporaries called "Japon_i_aiserie";[457] he certainly had agood deal to do with reviving the fancy for eighteenth-century art,artists, _bric-a-brac_ generally, and in a way letters; and he ended byfathering and endowing an opposition Academy. It was with art that "Lesdeux Goncourt"[458] (who were inseparable in their lives, and whomEdmond--to do him the justice which in his case can rarely be donepleasantly--did his best to keep undivided after Jules's death) begantheir dealings with eighteenth-century and other artists[459]--perhapsthe most valuable of all their work. But it was not till the SecondEmpire was nearly half-way through, till Jules was thirty and Edmondthirty-eight, that they tried fiction (drama also, but alwaysunsuccessfully), and brought out, always together and before 1870 (whenJules died), a series of some half-dozen novels: _Charles Demailly_(afterwards re-titled) (1860), _Soeur Philomene_ (next year), _ReneeMauperin_ (1864), _Germinie Lacerteux_ (next year), _Manette Salomon_(1867), and _Madame Gervaisais_ (1869).

  [Sidenote: Their work.]

  It is desirable to add that, besides the work already mentioned andpublished before 1870, the two had given a book called _Idees etSensations_, setting forth their literary psychology; and that, afterthe cataclysm, Edmond published a description of their house and itscollections, his brother's letters, and an immense _Journal desGoncourt_ in some half-score of volumes, which was, naturally enough,one of the most read books of its time. Naturally, for it appealed toall sorts of tastes, reputable and disreputable, literary-artistic andPhilistine, with pairs enough of antithetic or complementary epithetsenough to fill this page. Here you could read about Sainte-Beuve andGautier, about Taine and Renan, about Tourguenieff and Flaubert, as wellas about Daudet and Zola, and a score of other more or less interestingpeople. Here you could read how Edmond as a boy made irruptions into anewly-married cousin's bedroom, and about the interesting sight he sawthere; how an English virtuoso had his books bound in human skin; howpeople dined during the siege of Paris, and a million other things; thewhole being saturated, larded, or whatever word of the kind bepreferred, with observations on the taste, intellect, and generalgreatness of the MM. de Goncourt, and on the lamentable inferiority ofother people, etc., etc. If it could be purged of its bad blood, thebook would really deserve to rank, for substance, with Pepys' diary orwith Walpole's letters.[460] As it is, when it has become a littleforgotten, the quarterly reviewers, or their representatives, of thetwenty-first century will be able to make endless _rechauffes_ of it.And though not titularly or directly of our subject, it belongs thereto,because it shows the process of accumulation or incubation, and thetemper of the accumulators and incubators in regard to the subjects ofthe novels themselves.

  [Sidenote: The novels.]

  To analyse all these novels, or even one of them, at length, would be aprocess as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable. The "chronicles ofwasted _grime_" may be left to themselves, not out of any mere finicalor fastidious superiority, but simply because their own postulates andaxioms make such analysis (if the word unfairness can be used in such aconnection) unfair to them. For they claimed--and the justice, if notthe value, of the claim must be allowed--to have rested their fashion ofnovel-writing upon two bases. The substance was to be provided by anelaborate observation and reproduction of the facts of actual life, notin the least transcendentalised, inspirited, or in any other way broughtnear Romance, but considered largely from the points of view which theirfriend Taine, writing earlier, used for his philosophical and historicalwork--that of the _milieu_ or "environment," that of heredity, thoughthey did not lay so much stress on this as Zola did--and the like. Thetreatment, on the other hand, was to be effected by the use of anintensely "personal" style, a new Marivaudage, compared to which, as weremarked above, Flaubert's doctrine of the single word was merelyrudimentary. After Jules's death Edmond wrote, alone, _La Fille Elisa_,which was very popular, _La Faustin_, and _Cherie_, the last of which,with _Germinie Lacerteux_, may form the basis of a short criticalexamination. Those who merely wish to see if they can like or toleratethe Goncourtian novel had perhaps better begin with _Renee Mauperin_ or_Madame Gervaisais_. Both have been very highly praised,[461] and thefirst named of them has the proud distinction of putting "le mot deCambronne" in the mouth of a colonel who has been mortally wounded in aduel.

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

  To return to our selected examples, _Germinie Lacerteux_ is the story ofan actual _bonne_ of the brothers, whose story, without "trimmings," istold in the _Journal_ itself.[462] The poor creature is as different aspossible, not merely from the usual heroine, but from the _grisette_ ofthe first half of the century and from the _demi-mondaine_ of Dumas_fils_, and Daudet, and even Zola. She is not pretty; she is notfascinating in any way; she is neither good- nor ill-natured in anyspecial fashion; she is not even ambitious of "bettering" herself or ofhaving much pleasure, wealth, etc. If she goes to the bad it is in themost commonplace way and with the most unseductive seducer possible. Herprogress and her end are, to borrow a later phrase and titlemetaphorically, merely a tale of the meanest streets; untouched andunconfirmed by the very slightest art; as destitute of any aestheticattraction, or any evidence of artistic power, as the log-books of acommon lodging-house and a hospital ward could be. In _Cherie_ there isnothing exactly improper; it is merely an elaborate study of aspoilt--at least petted--and unhealthy girl in the upper stages ofsociety, who has at last the kindness--to herself, her relations, andthe reader--to die. If M. de Goncourt had had the slightest particle ofhumour, of which there is no trace in any of his works, one might havetaken this, like other things perhaps, as a slightly cryptic parody--ofthe _poitrinaire_-h
eroine mania of times a little earlier; but there isno hope of this. The subject was, in the sense attached to the word bythese writers, "real"; it could be made useful for combinedphysiological and psychological detail; and, most important of all, itwas more or less repulsive.[463]

  [Sidenote: The impression produced by them.]

  For this is what it really comes to in the Goncourts, in Zola, and inthe rest, till Guy de Maupassant, not seldom dealing with the samematerial, sublimes it, and so robs it of its repulsiveness, by the forceof true comic, tragic, or romantic art. Or course it is open to any oneto say, "It may repel _you_, but it does not repel _me_." But this isvery cheap sophistry. We do not require to be told, in the words whichshocked Lord Chesterfield but do not annoy a humble admirer of his, that"One man's meat is another man's poison." Carrion is not repulsive to avulture. Immediately before writing these words I was reading theconfession of an unfortunate American that he or she found _TheRoundabout Papers_ "depressing." For my part, I have never given up thedoctrine that _any_ subject _may_ be deprived of its repulsiveness bythe treatment of it. But when you find a writer, or a set of writers,deliberately and habitually selecting subjects which are generally heldto be repellent, and deliberately and habitually refusing or failing topass them through the alembic in the manner suggested--then I think youare justified, not merely in condemning their taste, but in thinking notat all highly of their art. A cook who cannot make his meat savouryunless it is "high" is not a good cook, and if he cannot do withoutpepper and garlic[464] he is not much better.

  [Sidenote: The rottenness of their theory.]

  Dismissing, however, for a moment the question of mere taste, it shouldbe evident that the doctrine of rigid "observation," "document,""experience," and the like is bad in art. Like so many--some optimistswould say like all--bad things, it is, of course, a corruption, byexcess and defect both, of something good or at least true. It cannot benecessary here, after scores of expressions of opinion on the subjectthroughout this book, to admit or urge the importance of observation ofactual life to the novelist. The most ethereal of fairy-tales and thewildest of extravaganzas would be flimsy rubbish if not corroborated byand contrasted with it: it can be strengthened, increased, varied almostat discretion in the novel proper. I hold it, as may be argued perhapsin the Conclusion, to be the principle and the justification of Romanceitself. But, independently of the law just mentioned, that you must notconfine your observation to Ugliness and exclude Beauty--it will not doto pull out the pin of your cart, and tilt a collection of observedfacts on the hapless pavement of the reader's mind. You are not areporter; not a compiler of _dossiers_; not a photographer. You are anartist, and you must do something with your materials, add something ofyourself to them, present something not vamped from parts of actual lifeitself, but reinforcing those parts with aesthetic re-creation and withthe sense of "the whole." I find this--to confine ourselves strictly tothe famous society so often mentioned in the _Journal_--eminently inFlaubert, and as far as one can judge from translations, inTourguenieff; I find it, to a less extent, in Daudet; I find itsometimes even in Zola, especially, but not merely, in his shorterstories; I find it again, and abundantly, in Maupassant. But I neverfind it in the Goncourts: and when I find it in the others it is becausethey have either never bowed the knee to, or have for the noncediscarded, the cult of the Naturalist, experimental, documentary idol,in itself and for itself.

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

  [Sidenote: And the unattractiveness of their style.]

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

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Emile Zola to be treated differently.]

  The tone which has been adopted[465] in speaking of the Goncourts (orrather of Edmond de Goncourt, for Jules seems to have been the betterfellow pretty certainly, as well as probably the more genuine talent, ofthe two) would be grossly unfair in dealing with Emile Zola. One maythink his principle demonstrably wrong, and his practice for the mostpart a calamitous mistake. One may, while, if indeed it concerned us,clearing him of the charge of doing any moral harm--such harm would beas likely to be done by records of Bedlam, or the Lock Hospital, or adipsomaniacs' home--put on the wrong side of his account a quantity ofdull and dirty trash,[466] which, without his precept and example, wouldnever have been written, or, if written, read. But the great, if mostlywasted, power displayed in his work is quite undeniable by any realcritic; he did some things--and more parts of things--absolutely good;and if, as has been admitted, he did literary evil, he upset in acurious fashion the usual dictum that the evil that men do lives afterthem. At least it was not his fault if such was the case. Heundoubtedly, whether he actually invented it or not, established,communicated, spread the error of Naturalism. But he lived long enoughand wrote hard enough to "work it out" in a singular fashion--toillustrate the rottenness of the tree by the canker of the fruit to suchan extent, and in such variety of application and example, that nobodyfor a long time has had any excuse for grafting the one or eating theother. Personally--in those points of personality which touch literaturereally, and out of the range of mere gossip--he had many good qualities.He was transparently honest, his honesty being tested and attested by adefect which will be noticed presently. He appears to have had no badblood in him. His fidelity and devotion to what he thought art were asunflinching as Flaubert's own.

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

  Nor was he deficient in good qualities which were still more purelyliterary. We shall speak later of the excellence of his short stories;if he had never written anything else there would be hardly anything butpraise for him. When he does not lose himself in the wilderness ofparticulars, he sometimes manages to rise from it to wonderfulPisgah-sights of description. He has a really vast, though never anabsolute or consummate, and always a morbid, hold on what may be calledthe second range of character, and a drastic, if rather mechanical,faculty of combining scenes and incidents. The mass of theRougon-Macquart books is very much more coherent than the _ComedieHumaine_. He has real pathos. But perhaps his greatest quality, shown atintervals throughout but never fully developed till the chaotic andsometimes almost Blake-like Apocalypses of his last stage, was agrandiosity of fancy--nearly reaching imagination, and not incapable ofdressing itself in suitable language--which, though one traces someindebtedness to Lamennais and Michelet and Hugo, has sufficientindividuality, and, except in these four, is very rarely found in Frenchliterature later than the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. To setagainst these merits--still leaving the main fault alone--there are somestrange defects. Probably worst of all, for it has its usual appallingpervasiveness, is his almost absolute want of humour. Humour andNaturalism, indeed, could not possibly keep house together; as we shallsee in Maupassant, the attempt has happier results than in the case of"Long John Brown and Little Mary Bell," for the fairy expels the Devilat times wholly. The minor and particular absurdities which result fromthis want of humour crop up constantly in the books; and it is said tohave been taken advantage of by Maupassant himself in one instance, thedisciple "bamming" the master into recording the existences ofpeculiarly specialised places of entertainment, which the fertile fancyof the aut
hor of _Boule de Suif_ had created.

  [Sidenote: The Pillars of Naturalism.]

  The Naturalist Novel, as practised by Zola, rests on three principalsupports, or rather draws its materials from, and guides itstreatment by, three several processes or doctrines. The generalobservational-experimental theory of the Goncourts is very widely, infact almost infinitely extended, "documents" being found or made in orout of the literal farrago of all occupations and states of life. But,as concerns the definitely "human" part of the matter, immense stress islaid on the Darwinian or Spencerian doctrines of heredity, environment,evolution, and the like. While, last of all in order, if the influencebe taken as converging towards the reason of the failure, comes the"medico-legal" notion of a "lesion"--of some flaw or vicious andcancerous element--a sort of modernised [Greek: protarchos ate] in thefamily, which develops itself variously in individuals.

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

  In the first place, it must surely be obvious that insistence on the"lesion," even if the other points of the theory were unassailable, isgrossly excessive, if not wholly illegitimate. If you are to takeobservation and experience for your sole magazine of subjects, you musttake _all_ experience and _all_ observation. Not the veriest pessimistwho retains sense and senses can say that their results are _always_evil, ugly, and sordid. If you are to go by heredity you must attend to:

  Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis,

  as well as to:

  Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit, etc.

  Remounting the stairs, it must be evident that Heredity, NaturalSelection, Evolution, Environment, etc., are things which, at the verybest, can be allowed an exceedingly small part in artistic re-creation.Not only do they come under the general ban of Purpose, but theirpurpose-character is of the most thankless and unsucculent kind. I donot know that any one has ever attempted a mathematical novel, thoughthe great Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe, as we all know, wrote a beautifulmathematical poem, of which the extant fragments are, alas! too few. Ifhe had only lived a generation later, how charming would have been thefytte or canto on Quaternions! But, really, such a thing would not bemore than a "farthest" on a road on which heredity-and-selection novelstravel far. It is no use to say, "Oh! but human beings exemplifyingthose things can be made interesting." If they are it will not bebecause they are dealt with _sub specie hereditatis_, and confined inthe circle of _milieu_.

  Yet the master error lies, farther back still, in the strictly"Naturalist" idea itself--the theory of Experiment, theobservation-document-"note," all for their own sake. Something has beensaid of this in relation to the Goncourts, but M. Zola's ownexemplification of the doctrine was so far "larger" in every sense thantheirs, and reinforced with so much greater literary power, that itcannot be left merely to the treatment which was sufficient for them.Once more, it is a case of "corruption of the best." It is perfectlytrue that all novel-writing--even in a fashion all romance-writingtoo--ought to be based on experience[467] in practical life, and thatinfinite documents are procurable, infinite notes may be made, from thatlife. It is utterly _un_true that _any_ observation, _any_ experiment,_any_ document is good novel or romance stuff.

  A very few remarks may perhaps be made on approaches to Zolaism--not inthe sense of scabrousness--before Zola.

  [Sidenote: "Document" and "detail" before Naturalism.]

  A writer of one of those theses _a la mode Germanorum_, of which, atdifferent times and in different occupations, it is the hard lot of theprofessional man of letters to read so many, would probably begin withthe Catalogue of Ships, or construct an inventory of the "beds andbasons" which Barzillai brought to David. Quite a typical "program"might be made of the lists of birds, beasts, trees, etc., so well knownin mediaeval literature, and best known to the ordinary English readerfrom Chaucer, and from Spenser's following of him. We may, however, passto the Deluge of the Renaissance and the special emergence therefrom ofFrench fiction. It would not be an absolute proof of the "monographitis"just glanced at if any one were to instance the curious discussions onthe propriety of introducing technical terms into heroic poetry--whichis, of course, very close to heroic romance, and so to prose fictiongenerally.

  [Sidenote: General stages traced.]

  But, for practical purposes, Furetiere and the _Roman Bourgeois_ (_vide_Vol. I.) give the starting-point. And here the Second Part, of which weformerly said little, acquires special importance, though the first isnot without it. _All_ the details of _bourgeois_ life and middle-classsociety belong to the department which was afterwards preferred--anddegraded--by the Naturalists; and the legal ins and outs of the SecondPart are Zola in a good deal more than the making. Indeed the luckless"Charroselles" himself had, as we pointed out, anticipated Furetiere innot a few points, such as that most interesting reference to_bisque_.[468] Scarron himself has a good deal of it; in fact there isso much in the Spanish picaresque novel that it could not be absent fromthe followings thereof. For which same reason there is not a very littleof it in Lesage, while, for an opposite one, there is less in Marivaux,and hardly any at all in Crebillon or Prevost. The _philosophes_, exceptDiderot--who was busy with other things and used his acquaintance withmiscellaneous "documents" in another way--would have disdained it, andthe Sentimentalists still more so. But it is a sign of the shortcomingsof Pigault-Lebrun--especially considering the evident discipleship toSmollett, in whom there is no small amount of such detail--that, whilein general he made a distinct advance in "ordinary" treatment, he didnot reinforce this advance with circumstantial accounts of "beds andbasons."

  But with the immense and multifarious new birth of the novel at thebeginning of the nineteenth century, this development also received, inthe most curiously diverse ways, reinforcement and extension. The Terrornovel itself had earlier given a hand, for you had to describe, more orless minutely, the furniture of your haunted rooms, the number andvolume of your drops of blood, the anatomical characteristics of yourskeletons, and the values of your palette of coloured fires. TheHistorical novel lugged document in too often by head and shoulders,introducing it on happier occasions as the main and distinguishingornament of its kind. Romanticism generally, with its tendency toantiquarian detail, its liking for _couleur locale_, its insistence onthe "streaks of the tulip" and the rest, prompted the use and at leastsuggested the abuse.

  [Sidenote: Some individual pioneers--especially Hugo.]

  Nor did the great individual French novelists--for we need not specifyany others--of the earlier part of the century, while they themselveskept to the pleasant slopes above the abyss, fail to point the way toit. Chateaubriand with his flowery descriptions of East and West, andMadame de Stael with her deliberate guide-bookery, encouraged thedocument-hunter and detail-devotee. Balzac, especially in the directionsof finance and commerce, actually set him an example. George Sand,especially in pure country stories, was prodigal of local and technicalmatters and manners. The gorgeous scenery of Gautier, and the sobererbut important "settings" of Merimee, might be claimed as models. Andothers might be added.

  But from one point of view, as an authority above all earlierauthorities, and from another as a sinner beyond all earlier sinners,might be quoted Victor Hugo, even putting his _juvenilia_ aside. He hadflung a whole glossary of architecture, not to mention other things ofsimilar kind, into _Notre Dame de Paris_; and when after a long intervalhe resumed prose fiction, he had ransacked the encyclopaedia for _LesMiserables_. _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ is half a great poem and halfa _real-lexikon_ of mechanics, weather-lore, seafaring, ichthyology, andGod knows what else! If _L'Homme Qui Rit_ had been written a very littlelater, parts of it might have been taken as a deliberate burlesque, by aFrench Sir Francis Burnand, of Naturalist method. Now, as the most acuteliterary historians have always seen, Naturalism was practicallynothing but a degeneration of Rom
anticism:[469] and degeneracy alwaysshows itself in exaggeration. Naturalism exaggerated detail, streak oftulip, local colour, and all the rest, of which Romanticism had madesuch good use at its best. But what it exaggerated most of all was theRomantic neglect of classical _decorum_, in the wider as well as thenarrower sense of that word. Classicism had said, "Keep everythingindecorous out." Naturalism seemed sometimes to say, "Let nothing thatis not indecorous come in."[470]

  [Sidenote: Survey of books--the short stories.]

  It was, however, by no means at first that M. Zola took to the"document" or elaborated the enormous scheme of the Rougon-Macquartcycle: though whether the excogitation of this was or was not due to thefrequentation, exhortation, and imitation of MM. de Goncourt is not apoint that we need discuss. He began, after melodramatic and negligible_juvenilia_, in 1864 with a volume of delightful short stories,[471]_Contes a Ninon_, in which kind he long afterwards showed undiminishedpowers. And he continued this practice at intervals for a great numberof years, with results collected, after the first set, in _NouveauxContes a Ninon_, and in volumes taking their general titles from specialtales--_Le Capitaine Burle_ and _Nais Micoulin_. In 1880 he gave thefirst story, _L'Attaque du Moulin_, to that most remarkable Naturalist"symposium," _Les Soirees de Medan_, which, if nothing of it survivedbut that story itself and Maupassant's _Boule de Suif_, and if thisrepresented the sole extant work of the School, would certainly inducethe fortieth century to think that School one of the very best infiction, and to utter the most pathetic wails over the loss of the restof its production. Of _Boule de Suif_--in more senses than one thefeminine of the pair--more presently. But _L'Attaque_ itself is asplendid and masculine success--the best thing by far, in respect offlawlessness, that its author ever did, and not far below Merimee's_Prise de la Redoute_.

  Unfortunately it was not in these breaches that M. Zola chose to abide.After the war, having no doubt laid his plans long before, he undertookthe vast Rougon-Macquart scheme with its score of volumes; and when thiswas finished, carried on two others, smaller in bulk but hardly lessambitious in scope, "Les Trois Villes"--_Lourdes_, _Paris_, _Rome_; and"Les Quatre Evangiles"--_Fecondite_, _Travail_, and _Verite_, the fourthof which was never written, while the third, _Verite_, appeared with ablack line round its cover, denoting posthumous issue.

  [Sidenote: "Les Rougon-Macquart."]

  In all these books the Experimental and Documentary idea is worked out,with an important development in the other directions above glanced at.The whole of the Rougon-Macquart series was intended to picture thevarying careers of the branches, legitimate and illegitimate, of twofamilies, under the control of heredity, and the evolution of thecerebral lesion into various kinds of disease, fault, vice, crime, etc.But further scope was found for the use of the document, human andother, by allotment of the various books, both in this and in the latergroups, to the special illustration of particular places, trades,professions, habits of life, and _quicquid agunt homines_ generally. The_super_-title of the first and largest series, "Les Rougon-Macquart:Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire," canhardly need comment or amplification to any intellect that is nothopelessly enslaved to the custom of having its meat not only killed,dressed, cooked, and dished, but cut up, salted, peppered, and put intoits mouth with assiduous spoonings. _La Fortune des Rougon_, in thevery year when Europe invited a _polemos aspondos_ by acquiescing in theseizure of Alsace-Lorraine, laid the foundation of the whole. _La Curee_and _Son Excellence Eugene Rougon_ show how the more fortunate membersof the clan prospered in the somewhat ignoble _tripotage_ of their time.Anybody could see the "power" of which the thing was "effect" (to borrowone half of a celebrated aphorism of Hobbes's); but it must have been acurious taste to which (borrowing the other) the books were "a cause ofpleasure." _La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret_ rose to a much higher level. Toregard it as merely an attack on clerical celibacy is to take a veryobvious and limited view of it. It is so, of course, but it is muchmore. The picture of the struggle between conscience and passion is, foronce, absolutely true and human. There is no mistake in the psychology;there is no resort to "sculduddery"; there is no exaggeration of anykind, or, if there is any, it is in a horticultural extravagance--apiece of fairy Bower-of-Bliss scene-painting, in part of the book, whichis in itself almost if not quite beautiful--a Garden of Eden providedfor a different form of temptation.[472] There is no poetry in _LaConquete de Plassans_ or in _Le Ventre de Paris_; but the one is adigression, not yet scavenging, into country life, and the other emptiesone of M. Zola's note-books on a theme devoted to the Paris Markets--thefamous "Halles" which Gerard had done so lightly and differently longbefore.[473] The key of this latter is pretty well kept in one of themost famous books of the whole series, _L'Assommoir_, where thebeastlier side of pot-house sotting receives hundreds of pages to dowhat William Langland had done better five centuries earlier in a fewscore lines. _Pot-Bouille_--ascending a little in the social but not inthe spiritual scale--deals with lower middle-class life, and _Au Bonheurdes Dames_ with the enormous "stores" which, beginning in America, hadalready spread through Paris to London. _Une Page d'Amour_ recoverssomething of the nobler tone of _L'Abbe Mouret_; and _La Joie deVivre_--a title, as will readily be guessed, ironical inintention--still keeps out of the gutter. _Nana_ may be said, combiningdecency with exactitude, to stand in the same relation to the service ofVenus as _L'Assommoir_ does to that of Bacchus, though one apologises toboth divinities for so using their names. It was supposed, like otherbooks of the kind, to be founded on fact--the history of a certain youngperson known as Blanche d'Antigny--and charitable critics have pleadedfor it as a healthy corrective or corrosive to the morbid tone ofsentimentality-books like _La Dame aux Camelias_. I never could findmuch amusement in the book, except when Nana, provoked at the tediousprolongation of a professional engagement, exclaims, "Ca ne finissaitpas!" or "Ca ne voulait pas finir."[474] The strange up-and-down of thewhole scheme reappears in _L'Oeuvre_--chiefly devoted to art, butpartly to literature--where the opening is extraordinarily good, andthere are fine passages later, interspersed with tedious grime of thecommoner kind. _La Terre_ and _Germinal_ are, I suppose, generallyregarded as, even beyond _L'Assommoir_ and _Nana_, the "farthest" ofthis griminess. Whether the filth-stored broom of the former really doesblot out George Sand's and other pictures of a modified Arcadia in theFrench provinces, nothing but experience, which I cannot boast, couldtell us; and the same may be said of _Germinal_, as to the miningdistricts which have since received so awful a purification by fire.That more and more important person the railway-man takes his turn in_La Bete Humaine_, and the book supplies perhaps the most strikinginstance of the radically inartistic character of the plan of floodingfiction with technical details. But there is, in the vision of thedriver and his engine as it were going mad together, one of the earliestand not the least effective of those nightmare-pieces in which Zola,evidently inspired by Hugo, indulged more and more latterly. Then camewhat was intended, apparently, for the light star of this dark group,_Le Reve_. Although always strongly anti-clerical, and at the last, aswe shall see, a "Deicide" of the most uncompromising fanaticism, M. Zolahere devoted himself to cathedral services and church ritual generally,and, as a climax, the administration of extreme unction to his innocentheroine. But, as too often happens in such cases, the saints were notgrateful and the sinners were bored. _L'Argent_ was at least inconcatenation accordingly, seeing that the great financial swindle and"crash"[475] it took for subject had had strong clerical support; butpurely financial matters, stock-exchange dealings, and some exceedinglyscabrous "trimmings" occupied the greater part of it. Of the penultimatenovel, _La Debacle_, a history of the terrible birth-year of the seriesitself, few fair critics, I think, could speak other than highly; of theactual ultimatum, _Le Docteur Pascal_, opinions have varied much. It isvery unequal, but I thought when it came out that it contained some ofits author's very best things, and I am not disposed to change myopinion.

  [Sidenote: "Les Trois Vil
les."]

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

  [Sidenote: "Les Quatre Evangiles."]

  With the final and incomplete series--coinciding in its latter part withthe novelist's passionate interference, at no small inconvenience tohimself, in that inconceivable modern replica of the Hermocopidaebusiness, the Dreyfus case, and cut short by his unfortunatedeath--things are different. I have known people far less "prejudiced,"as the word goes, against the ideas of these books than I am myself, whoplumply declare that they cannot read _Fecondite_, _Travail_, or (mostespecially) _Verite_: while of course there are others who declare themto be not "Gospels" at all, but what Mr. Carlyle used to call"Ba'spels"--not Evangels but Cacodaemonics. I read every word of themcarefully some years since, and I should not mind reading _Fecondite_ or_Travail_ again, though I have no special desire to do so.[476]

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

  _Travail_ is revolutionary or nothing, revolutionary "in the mostapproved style," as a certain apologist of robbery and murder put it notlong ago as to Bolshevism, amid the "laughter and cheers" of Englishaspirants thereto. It takes for scene a quite openly borrowedrepresentation of the famous forges of Creusot, and attacks Capital, the_bourgeois_, and everything established, quite in the purest Bolshevistfashion. Both books, and _Verite_, display throughout a singulardelusion, aggravating the anti-theism rather than atheism abovementioned, my own formulation of which, in another book some decade ago,I may as well, in a note,[477] borrow, instead of merely paraphrasingit. The milder idiosyncrasy referred to therein will certainly notadjust itself, whatever it might do to the not ungenial ideals of_Fecondite_, to those of _Travail_. This ends in a sort of Paradise ofMan, where electricity takes every kind of labour (except that ofcultivating the gardens?) off men's hands, and the Coquecigrues havecome again, and the pigs run about ready roasted, and a millennium ormill_iard_ennium of Cocaigne begins. Yet there are fine passages in_Travail_, and the author reflects, powerfully enough, the grime andglare and scorch of the furnaces; the thirst and lust and struggles oftheir slaves; the baser side of the life of their owners andofficials--and of the wives of these. There is nothing in the book quiteequal to the Vision of the City of Lubricity in _Fecondite_, but thereare one or two things not much below it. And the whole is once moreBlake-like, with a degraded or defiled Blakishness. In fact, _Fecondite_and _Travail_, illustrated in the spirit of the Prophetic Books, arequite imaginable possessions; and, though a nervous person might notlike to go to sleep in the same room with them, not uncovetableones.[478]

  The everlasting irony of things has seldom, in literature (though, as wehave seen, it reigns there if anywhere), secured for itself a morestriking opportunity of exemplification than this ending, in apseudo-apocalyptic paroxysm, of the _Roman Experimental_; perhaps onemay add that never has Romanticism, or indeed any school of letters,scored such a triumphant victory over its decriers. It has beencontended here, and for many years in other places by the presentwriter, that Naturalism was itself only a "lesion," a _sarcoma_, amorbidly allotropic form of Romance. At this point the degenerationturned into a sort of parody of the attitude of Ezekiel or Hosea; thebusiness-like observer, in counting-house and workshop, in church andstock-exchange, in tavern and brothel, in field and town generally,became himself a _voyant_, beholding all things in nightmare. Yet, indoing so, he effected a strange semi-reconciliation with some who hadbeen, if not exactly his enemies, the exceedingly frank critics andunsparing denouncers of his system. Not much more than half sane, andalmost more than half disgusting, as are _Fecondite_ and _Travail_, theyconnect themselves, as wholes, not with _L'Assommoir_ or _Nana_, notwith _La Terre_ or _Germinal_, but with _La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret_,with _Une Page d'Amour_, and _La Joie de Vivre_, with the best things in_L'Oeuvre_, _La Debacle_, and _Le Docteur Pascal_. Students of Englishliterature will remember how the doctrine of _Furor poeticus_ was onceapplied to Ben Jonson by a commentator who, addressing him, pointed outthat he was very mad in his primer works, not so mad in his dotages.There was always a good deal of _furor prosaicus_ smouldering in Zola,and it broke out with an opposite result on these occasions, the flames,alas! being rather devastating, but affording spectacles at leastgrandiose. _He_ kept sane and sordid to his loss earlier, and went madlater--partially at least to his advantage.

  [Sidebar: General considerations.]

  Passing to those more general considerations which have beenpromised--and which seem to be to some readers a Promised Landindeed, as compared with the wilderness of _compte-rendu_ andbook-appreciation--let us endeavour briefly to answer the question,"What is the general lesson of Zola's work?" I think we may say,borrowing that true and final judgment of Wordsworth which doth soenrage Wordsworthians, that whenever Zola does well he either violatesor neglects his principles, and that the more carefully he carriesthese out the worse, as a rule, his work is. The similarity, of course,is the more quaint because of the dissimilarity of the personages andtheir productions; but it has not been insisted on from any mere spiritof mischief, or desire to make a paradoxical parallel. On the contrary,this parallel has been made in order to support, at least _obiter_, amore general dictum still, that principles are much more often fatalthan useful to the artist. The successful miniatures of the shortstories hardly prove more thoroughly than the smoky flamingBlakish-Turneresque cartoons of the latest "Gospels," though they may doso more satisfactorily, that Emile Zola had the root of the Art ofFiction in him. But he chose to subject the bulk of the growths fromthis root to something much worse than the _ars topiaria_, to twist andmaim and distort them like Hugo's Comprachicos; to load their boughs,forbidding them to bear natural fruit, with clumsy crops of dull andfoul detail, like a bedevilled Christmas-tree. One dares say quiteunblushingly, that in no single instance[479] has this abuse of theencyclopaedia added charm, or value, or even force to Zola's work. A manwith far less ability than he possessed could have given the necessarytouch of specialism when it _was_ necessary, without dumping anddeluging loads and floods of technicalities on the unhappy reader.

  Little more need be said about the disastrous _ugliness_ which, withstill rarer exception, pervades the whole work. There are those who likethe ugly, and those--perhaps more numerous--who think they _ought_ tolike it. With neither is it worth while to argue. As for me and myhouse, we will serve Beauty, giving that blessed word the widestpossible extension, of course, but never going beyond or against it.

  [Sidenote: Especially in regard to character.]

  A point where there is no such precedent inaccessibility of commonground concerns Zola's grasp of character. It seems to me to have been,if not exactly weak, curiously limited. I do not know that his peopleare ever unhuman; in fact, by his time the merely wooden character hadceased to be "stocked" (as an unpl
easant modern phrase has it) by thenovelist. The "divers and disgusting things" that they do are neverincredible. The unspeakable villain-hero of _Verite_ itself is a notimpossible person. But the defect, again as it seems to me, of all thepersonages may best be illustrated by quoting one of those strangeflashes of consummate critical acuteness which diversify the frequentcritical lapses of Thackeray. As early as _The Paris Sketch-book_, inthe article entitled "Caricatures and Lithography," Mr. Titmarsh wrote,in respect of Fielding's people, "Is not every one of them a realsubstantial _have been_ personage now?... We will not take uponourselves to say that they do not exist somewhere else, that the actionsattributed to them have not really taken place."

  There, put by a rather raw critic of some seven and twenty, who was nothimself to give a perfect creative exemplification of what he wrote fornearly a decade, is the crux of the matter. Observe, not "_might_ havebeen" merely, but "have been now." The phrase might have holes picked init by a composition-master or -monger.[480] Thackeray is often liable tothis process. But it states an eternal verity, and so marks an essentialdifferentia.

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

  Of plot I never care to say very much, because it is not with me awedding-garment, though I know an ugly or ill-fitting one when I see it,and can say, "Well tailored or dress-made!" in the more satisfactorycircumstances. Moreover, Zola hardly enters himself for much competitionhere. There is none in the first two Apocalypses; _Verite_ has what ithas, supplied by the "case" and merely adjusted with fair skill; the_Trois Villes_ lie quite outside plot; and the huge synoptic scheme ofthe Rougon-Macquart series deals little with it in individual books. Ofconversation one might say very much what has been said of character.The books have the conversation which they require, and sometimes (inexamples generally even more difficult to quote than that of Nana'sgiven above) a little more. But in Description, the Naturalist leaderrises when he does not fall. It is obviously here that the boredom andthe beastliness of the details offend most. But it is also by means ofdescription that almost all the books well spoken of before, from thetoo earthly Paradise of _L'Abbe Mouret_ to the Inferno of _Travail_,produce some of their greatest effects.

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

  * * * * *

  My introduction to the greatest of M. Zola's associates was morefortunate, for it was impossible to mistake the quality of the newplanet.[482] One day in 1880 the editor of a London paper put into myhands a copy of a just-issued volume of French verse, which had beenspecially sent to him by his Paris correspondent in a fit of moralindignation. It was entitled _Des Vers_, and the author of it was acertain Guy de Maupassant, of whom I then knew nothing. Thecorrespondent had seen in it a good opportunity for a denunciation ofFrench wickedness; and my editor handed it over to me to see what was tobe done with it. I saw no exceptional wickedness, and a very great dealof power; indeed, though I was tolerably familiar with French verse andprose of the day, it seemed to me that I had not seen so much promise inany new writer since Baudelaire's death;[483] and I informed my editorthat, though I had not the slightest objection to blessing Maupassant, Icertainly would not curse him. He thought the blessing not likely toplease his public, while it would annoy his correspondent, and on myrepresentation declined to have anything to do with the cursing. So_nous passasmes oultre_, except that, like Mr. Bludyer, I "impounded"the book; but, unlike him, did not either sell it, dine off it, or abusethe author.

  Shortly afterwards, I think, the _Soirees de Medan_ reached me, and thisvery remarkable person appeared likewise, but in a new character.Certainly no one can ever have shown to better advantage in company thanM. de Maupassant did on this occasion. _L'Attaque du Moulin_, whichopened the volume, has already been spoken of as part of the best of allM. Zola's voluminous work. But as for the works of the young men, otherthan M. de Maupassant, they had the Naturalist faults in fullestmeasure, unredeemed by their master's massive vigour and his desperateintensity. The contribution of M. Huysmans, in particular (_v. inf._)has always appeared to me one of those voluntary or involuntarycaricatures, of the writer's own style and school, which are well knownat all times, and have never been more frequent than recently. But_Boule de Suif_? Among the others that pleasant and pathetic person wasnot a _boule_; she was a pyramid, a Colossus, a spire of CologneCathedral. Putting the unconventionality of its subject aside, there isabsolutely no fault to be found with the story. It is as round andsmooth as "Boule de Suif" herself.

  Maupassant's work is of very substantial bulk. Of the verse enough forour purpose has been or will be said, though I should like to repeatthat I put it much higher than do most of Maupassant's admirers. Thevolumes of travel-sketches do not appear to me particularly successful,despite the almost unsurpassed faculty of their writer for sober yetvivid description. They have the air of being written to order, and theydo not seem, as a rule, to arrive at artistic completeness eitherobjectively or subjectively. Of the criticism, which concerns us morenearly, by far the most remarkable piece is the famous Preface to_Pierre et Jean_ (to be mentioned again below), which contains theauthor's literary creed, refined and castigated by years of practicefrom the cruder form which he had already promulgated in the Preface toFlaubert's _Correspondence with George Sand_. It extols the "objective"as against the psychological method of novel-writing, but directs itselfmost strongly against the older romance of plot, and places theexcellence of the novelist in the complete and vivid projection of thatnovelist's own particular "illusion" of the world, yet so as to presentevents and characters in the most actual manner. But, as promised, weshall return to it.

  [Sidenote: _Bel-Ami._]

  To run through the actual "turn-out" in novel[484] and tale as far as ispossib
le here, _Bel-Ami_ started, in England at least, with the mostfavouring gales possible. It was just when the decree had gone forth,issued by the younger Later Victorians, that all the world should bemade naughty; that the insipid whiteness of their Early and Middleelders should be washed black and scarlet, and especially "blue"; andthat if possible, by this and other processes, something like realliterature might be made to take the place of the drivellings andbotcheries of Tennyson and Browning; of Dickens and Thackeray; of Ruskinand Carlyle. To these persons _Bel-Ami_ was a sweet content, a really"_shady_ boon." The hero never does a decent thing and never says a goodone; but he has good looks and insinuating manners of the kind thatplease some women, whence his name, originally given to him by aninnocent little girl, and taken up by her by no means innocent mamma andother quasi-ladies.[485] He starts as a soldier who has served his timein Algeria, but has found nothing better to do than a subordinate postin a railway office. He meets a former comrade who is high up in Parisjournalism, and who very amiably introduces Georges Duroy to that badresting-place but promising passageway. Duroy succeeds, not so much(though he is not a fool) by any brains as by impudence; by a faculty ofmaking use of others; by one of the farce-duels in which combatants areput half a mile off each other to fire _once_, etc.; but most of all byhis belamyship (for the word is good old English in a better sense). Thewomen of the book are what is familiarly called "a caution." They revivethe old Helisenne de Crenne[486] "sensual appetite" for the handsomebounder; and though of course jealous of his infidelities, are quiteready to welcome the truant when he returns. They also get drunk atrestaurant dinners, and then call their lovers--quite correctly, but notagreeably--"Cochon!" "Sale bete," etc. This of course is what our_fin-de-siecle_ critics _could_ "recommend to a friend."

  But if the reader thinks that this summary is a prelude to anything likethe "slate" that I thought it proper to bestow upon _Les LiaisonsDangereuses_, or even to such remarks as those made on the Goncourts, heis quite mistaken. Laclos had, as it seemed to me, a disgusting subjectand no real compensation of treatment. In _Bel-Ami_ the merits of thetreatment are very great. The scenes pass before you; the charactersplay their part in the scenes--if not in an engaging manner, in acompletely life-like one. There is none of the _psychologie decommande_, which I object to in Laclos, but a true adumbration of life.The music-hall opening; the first dinner-party; the journalist scenes;the death of Forestier and the proposal of re-marriage over hiscorpse;[487] the honeymoon journey to Normandy--a dozen otherthings--could not be better done in their way, though this way may notbe the best. It did not fall to me to review _Bel-Ami_ when it came out,but I do not think I should have made any mistake about it if it had.There are weak points technically; for instance, the character ofMadeleine Forestier, afterwards Duroy--still later caught in flagrantdelict and divorced--is left rather enigmatic. But the general technique(with the reservations elsewhere made) is masterly, and two passages--aVigny-like[488] descant on Death by the old poet Norbert de Varenne andthe death-scene of Forestier itself--give us Maupassant in that mood of_macabre_ sentiment--almost Romance--which chequers and purifies hisNaturalism.

  But the main objection which I should take to the book is neithertechnical nor goody. The late Mr. Locker, in, I think, that mostfascinating "New Omniana" _Patchwork_,[489] tells how, in theTravellers' Club one day, a haughty member thereof expressed surprisethat he should see Mr. Locker going to the corner-house next door. Theamiable author of _London Lyrics_ was good enough to explain that somenot uninteresting people also used the humbler establishment--bishops,authors, painters, cabinet-ministers, etc. "Ah!" said the Traverser ofPerilous Ways, "that would be all very well if one _wanted_ to meet thatsort of people. But, you see, one _doesn't_ want to meet them." Now, Ido not want to meet anybody in _Bel-Ami_; in fact, I would much rathernot.

  [Sidenote: _Une Vie._]

  _Une Vie_ is, in this respect and others, a curious pendant to_Bel-Ami_. It illustrates another side of Maupassant's pessimism--theovertly, but for the most part quietly, tragic. It might almost(borrowing a second title from the _Index_) call itself "Jeanne; ou LesMalheurs de la Vertu." The heroine is perfectly innocent, though both a_femmelette_ and a fool. She never does any harm, nor, except throughweakness and folly, deserves that any should be done to her. But she hasan unwise and not blameless though affectionate and generous father,with a mother who is an invalid, and whom, after her death, the daughterdiscovers to have been, in early days, no better than she should be.Both of them are, if not exactly spendthrifts, "wasters," very mainlythrough careless and excessive generosity. She marries the first youngman of decent family, looks, and manners that she comes across; and heturns out to be stingy, unfaithful in the most offensive way, with herown maid and others, and unkind. She loses him, by the vengeance of ahusband whom he has wronged, and her second child is born dead inconsequence of this shock. Her first she spoils for some twenty years,till he goes off with a concubine and nearly ruins his mother. We leaveher consoling herself, in a half-imbecile fashion, with a grandchild.Her only earthly providence is her _bonne_ Rosalie, the same who hadbeen her husband's mistress, but a very "good sort" otherwise. The bookis charged with grime of all kinds. It certainly cannot be said of M. deMaupassant, to alter the pronoun in Mr. Kipling's line, that "[_He_]never talked obstetrics when the little stranger came," for _Une Vie_contains two of these delectable scenes; and in other respects we aretreated with the utmost "candour." But the book is again saved by somewonderful passages--specially those giving Jeanne's first night at thesea-side _chateau_ which is to be her own, and her last visit to it aquarter of a century after, when it has passed to strangers--andgenerally by the true tragedy which pervades it. When Maupassant tookSorrow into cohabitation and collaboration, there was no danger of theresult.

  _Mont-Oriol_, though not, save in one respect, the most "arresting" ofMaupassant's books, has rather more varied and at the same time coherentinterest than some others. It is also that one which most directlyillustrates--on the great scale--the general principles of theNaturalist school. Not, indeed, in specially grimy fashion, though thereis the usual adultery (_not_ behind the scenes) and the (for Maupassant)not unusual _accouchement_. (His fondness for this most unattractiveepisode of human life is astonishing: if he were a more pious person anda political feminist, one might think that he was trying to make usmodern Adams share the curse of Eve, at least to the extent of thedisgust caused by reading about its details.) The main extra-amatorytheme throughout is the "physiologie" of an inland watering-place, itsextension by the discovery of new springs, the financing of them, thejealousies of the doctors, the megrims of the patients, etc. All theseare treated quite on the Zolaesque scheme, but with a lightness andbeauty not often reached by the master, though common enough in thepupil.[490] The description of Christiane Andermatt's first bath, andthe sensations of mild bliss that it gave her, is as true as it ispretty; and others of scenery have that vividness withoutover-elaboration which marks their author's work. Nor are hisironic-human touches wanting. Almost at its birth he satirises, in hisown quiet Swiftian way, an absurd tendency which has grown mightilysince, and flourishes now: "'Tres _moderne_'--entre ses levres, etait lecomble de l'admiration." As for the love-affair itself, one's feelingstowards it are mixed. A good deal of it shows that unusual grasp of theproper ways of the game with which Maupassant is fully credited here.Personally, I should not, after quoting Baudelaire to a lady (so far sogood), inform her that I was a donkey for expecting her to enjoyanything so subtle. But perhaps Paul Bretigny, though neglectful of theSeventh Commandment, was an honester man than I am. And it is quite truethat Christiane was _not_ subtle. Her hot lover's[491] cooling partlydated from the time when she expected him to show palpable interest inthe fact that she was likely to have a child by him. And though her cry(on the question what name this infant, of course accepted as his own bythe unfortunate Andermatt, should bear) that as for _her_ name, "Celapromet trop de souffrances de porter le nom du Crucifie," could not bebetter as
a general sentiment, the particular circumstances in which itis uttered show a slight want of grace of congruity. Still, the minorcharacters are not only more in number, but more interesting than isalways the case; and the book, if you skip the obstetrics, is readablethroughout. Yet it is, to use wine-language, not above "Maupassant_premier bourgeois_," except in some of the earlier love-scenes.

  [Sidenote: _Fort comme la Mort._]

  In _Fort comme la Mort_ the author rises far above these two books,powerful as they are in parts. The basis is indeed the invariable andunsatisfactory "triangle." But the structure built on it might almosthave been lifted to another, and stands foursquare in nearly allrespects of treatment. The chief technical objection that can be broughtagainst it is that there is a certain want of air and space; theimportant characters are too few, the situations too uniform; so that akind of oppression results. Olivier Bertin, one of the most popular ofParisian painters though no longer young, a great man of society, etc.,has, for many years, been the lover of the Countess de Guilleroy, and,of course, the dear friend of her husband. We are introduced to themjust at the time when a sort of disgust of middle age is coming overhim, as well as a certain feeling that the springs of his genius arerunning low. He is not tired of the Countess, who is passionatelydevoted to him; and, except that they do not live together, theirrelations are rather conjugal than anything else. Just at this momenther daughter Annette comes home from a country life with hergrandmother, and proves to be the very double of what her mother was inher own youth. Bertin, without ceasing to love the mother, conceives afrantic passion for the daughter; and the vicissitudes of this take upthe book. At last the explosives of the situation are "fused," as onemay say, by one of the newspaper attacks of youth on age. Annette'sapproaching marriage, and this _Figaro_ critique of his own"old-fashioned" art, put Bertin beside himself. Either hurryingheedlessly along, or deliberately exposing himself, he is run over by anomnibus, is mortally hurt, and dies with the Countess sitting beside himand receiving his last selfishness--a request that she will bring thegirl to see him before he dies.

  The story, though perhaps, as has been said, too much concentrated as awhole, is brilliantly illuminated by sketches of society on the greaterand smaller scale: of Parisian club-life; of picture-shows; of thediversions of the country, etc.: but its effect, though certainly helpedby, is not derived from, these. As always with Maupassant, it is out ofthe bitter that comes the sweet. Hardly anywhere outside of_Ecclesiastes_, Thackeray,[492] and Flaubert is the irony of life moreconsummately handled in one peculiar fashion; while the actual _passion_of love is nowhere better treated by this author,[493] or perhaps byany other French novelist of the later century, except Fromentin.

  [Sidenote: _Pierre et Jean._]

  The line of ascent was continued in _Pierre et Jean_. It is not a longbook--a fact which perhaps has some significance--and no small part ofit is taken up by a Preface on "Le Roman" generally (_v. sup._), whichis the author's most remarkable piece of criticism; one of the mostnoteworthy from a man who was not specially a critic; and one of the fewbut precious examples of an artist dealing, at once judicially andmasterfully, with his own art.[494] In fact, recognising the truth ofthe "poetic moment," he would extend it to the moments of allliterature; and lays it down that the business of the novelist is, firstto realise his own illusion of the world and then to make others realiseit too.

  _Pierre et Jean_ itself has no weakness except that _narrowing_ ofinterest which has been already noted in Maupassant, and which is rathera limitation than a positive fault. There is practically one situationthroughout; and though there are several characters, their interestdepends almost wholly on their relations with the central personage.This is Pierre Roland, a full-fledged physician of thirty, but not yetsuccessful, and still living with, and on, his parents. His father is aretired Paris tradesman, who has come to live at Havre to indulge amania for sea-fishing; he has a mother who is rather above her husbandin some ways; and a brother, Jean, who, though considerably younger, isalso ready to start in his own profession--that of the law. A "friend ofthe family," Mme. Rosemilly--a young, pretty, and rather well-to-dowidow--completes the company, with one or two "supers." Just as thestory opens, a large legacy to Jean by an older friend of thefamily--this time a man--is announced, to the surprise of almosteverybody, but at first only causing a little natural jealousy inPierre. Charitable remarks of outsiders, however, suggest to him thetruth--that Jean is the fruit of his mother's adultery with thetestator--and this "works like poison in his brain," till--Jean, havinggained another piece of luck in Mme. Rosemilly's hand, and having,though enlightened by Pierre and by his mother's confession, verycommon-sensibly decided that he will not resign the legacy, smirched asit is--Pierre accepts a surgeon-ship on a Transatlantic steamer, and thestory ends.

  On its own scheme and showing there is scarcely a fault in it. The meresettings--the fishing and prawn-catching; the scenery of port and cliff;the "interiors"; the final sailing of the great ship--are perfect. Theminor characters--the good-tempered, thick-headed _bourgeois_ husbandand father; the wife and mother, with her bland acceptance of thetransferred wages of shame, and (after discovery only) her breaking downwith the banal blasphemy of "marriage before God" and the rest of it;the younger brother--not exactly a bad fellow, but thoroughly convincedof the truth of _non olet_; the widow playing her part and no more,--allare artistically just what they should be. And so, always rememberingscale and scheme, is Pierre. One neither likes him (for he is notexactly a likeable person) nor dislikes him (for he is quite excusable)very much; one is only partially sorry for him. But one knows that he_is_--he has that actual and indubitable existence which is the test andquality alike of creator and creation. His first vague envy of hisbrother's positive luck in money and probable luck in love--for bothhave had floating fancies for the pretty widow; the again perfectlynatural spleen when this lucky brother, by an accident, secures theparticular set of rooms in which Pierre had hoped to improve hisposition as a doctor; the crushing blow of finding out his mother'sshame; the process (the truest thing in the whole book, though it is alltrue) by which he tortures both her and himself in constant obliquereferences to her fault; the explosion when he directly informs hisbrother; and all the rest, could hardly be improved. It is not a novelon the great scale, but rather what may be called a long short story. Itdoes not quite attain to the position of some books on a small scale indifferent kinds--_Manon Lescaut_ itself, _Adolphe_, _La Tentation deSaint-Antoine_. But the author has done what he meant to do, and hasdone it in such a fashion that it could not, on its own lines, be donebetter.

  Maupassant's last novel of some magnitude, _Notre Coeur_, was writtenwhen the shadow was near enveloping him; and it cannot be said to havethe perfection of _Pierre et Jean_. But it still rises higher in certainvery important ways--it is perhaps the book that one likes him best for,outside of pure comedy; and there is none which impresses one more withthe sense of his loss to French literature.

  [Sidenote: _Notre Coeur._]

  The story, like all Maupassant's stories, is of the simplest. AndreMariolle, a well-to-do young Parisian bachelor of no profession, is amember of a set of mostly literary and artistic people, almost all ofwhom have, as a main rendezvous, the house of a beautiful, wealthy, andvariously gifted young widow, Mme. de Burne. She lives chaperoned in amanner by her father; indisposed to a second marriage by the fact thatshe has had a tyrannical husband; accepting homage from all herfamiliars and being very gracious in differing degrees to all of them;but having no "lover in title" and not even being suspected of having(in the French novel-sense[495]) any "lover" at all. For a long timeMariolle has, from whim, refused introduction to her, but at last heconsents to be taken to the house by his friend the musician Massival,and of course falls a victim. It cannot be said that she is aCirce,[496] nor that, as perhaps might be expected, she revenges herselffor his holding aloof by snaring and throwing him away. Quite thecontrary. She shows him special favour: when she has to go to stay
withfriends at Avranches she privately asks him to follow her; and finally,when the party pass the night at Mont Saint-Michel, shecomes--uninvited, though of course much longed for--to his room, and (asthey used to say with elaborate decency) "crowns his flame." Nor doesshe turn on him--as again might be expected--even then. On the contrary,she comes constantly to a secret Eden which he has prepared for her inParis, and though, after long practice of this, she is sometimes ratherlate, and once or twice actually puts off her assignation, it is "nomore than reason,"[497] and she by no means jilts or threatens jilting,though she tells him frankly that his way of loving (which _is_ morethan reason) is not hers. At last he cannot endure seeing her surroundedwith admirers, and flies to Fontainebleau, where he is partly--onlypartly--consoled by a pretty and devoted _bonne_. Yet he sends adespairing cry to Mme. de Burne; and she, gracious as ever, actuallycomes to see him, and induces him to return to Paris. He does so, buttakes the _bonne_ Elisabeth with him; and the book ends abruptly,leaving the reader to imagine what is the outcome of this "doublearrangement"--or failure to arrange.

  But, as always with Maupassant's longer stories and not quite never withhis shorter ones, the "fable is the least part." The "atmosphere"; theprojection of character and passion; the setting; the situations; thephrase--these are the thing. And, except for the enigmatic and"stump-ended" conclusion, and for a certain overdose of words (whichrather grew on him), they make a very fine thing. It is here that, onone side at least, the author's conception of love--which at some timesmight appear little more than animal, at others conventional-capriciousin a fashion which makes that of Crebillon universal and sincere--hassublimed itself, as it had begun to do in _Fort comme la Mort_ (_Pierreet Jean_ is in this respect something of a divagation), into very nearlythe true form of the Canticles and Shakespeare, of Donne and Shelley andHeine, of Hugo and Musset and Browning. But it is curious, in the firstplace, that he whom his friends fondly called a _fier male_, who hassometimes pushed masculinity near to brutality, and who is alwayscynical more or less, has made his Andre Mariolle, though a very goodlover, a distinct weakling in love. He is a "too quick despairer," andhis despair is more illogical than even a lover's has a right to be. Andthis is very interesting, because, evidently without the author'sknowledge (though perhaps, if things had gone more happily, he mighthave come to that knowledge later), it shows the rottenness of thefoundation, and the flimsiness of the superstructure, on and in whichthe Covenant of Adultery--even that of Free Love--is built. Michelle deBurne gives Andre Mariolle everything with one exception, if even withthat, that the greediest lover can want. She "distinguishes" him atonce; she shows keen desire for his company; she makes the last (orfirst) surrender like a goddess answering a hopeless and unspokenprayer; she is strangely generous in continuing the _don d'amoureuxmerci_; she never really wearies of or jilts him, though he is a mostexacting lover; and when he has flung away from her she allows him, inthe most gracious manner, to whistle himself back. But there is onething, or rather two which are one, that she will not, or perhapscannot, give him. It is the idealised passion which nature has denied toher, though not to him, and the absolute faithfulness and "forsaking ofall others" proper to what?--to a perfect wife. So here, in the realmsof spouse-breach, marriage is once more king, or rather the throne isfelt to be empty--the kingdom an anarchy--without it!

  The lighter side of the matter reminds one of two celebratedutterances. The first is Paul de Florac's criticism on the LadyClara-Barnes-Highgate triangle, "Do not adopt our institutions _ademi_." Here the situation is topsy-turvied in the most curious fashion,for it is the character of marriage that is desiderated in the absencethereof, and in a country where that character itself is scoffed at.Further, it reminds one still more of Sydney Smith's excellent jest whenLady Holland, having previously asked him to stay at Holland House, senthim a formal invitation to dinner, for a day within the period of thelarger hospitality. This, said Sydney, was "an attempt to combine thestimulus of gallantry with the security of connubial relations." Thatwas precisely the moon that Mariolle sighed for, and that his notexactly Artemis would not--indeed could not be expected to--give him.

  Of Michelle de Burne herself there is less to be said. The curiousmisogyny which chequered Maupassant's gynomania seems to have tried hardto express itself in her portrait. It is less certain that it does. Theother characters are quite subordinate, except the _bonne_ Elisabeth(who, promising as she is, merely makes her _debut_) and a novelist,Gaston de Lamarthe, who may sometimes be taken as the author'smouthpiece, but who does not do him justice. The book on the whole doesmuch to confirm, and hardly anything to invalidate, the position thatits writer had far more to say than he ever said.

  [Sidenote: _Les Dimanches_, etc.]

  The ordinary list of Maupassant's "Romans," as distinct from "Nouvelles"and "Contes," ends with _Les Dimanches d'un Bourgeois de Paris_. This,however, is merely a series of tales (some of them actually rehandledfrom earlier ones), with a single figure for centre, to wit, a certainM. Patissot, a bachelor government-official, who is a sort of mixture ofLeech's Mr. Briggs and of Jerome Paturot, with other predecessors whoget into scrapes and "fixtures." It is not unamusing, but scarcelyfirst-class, the two political skits at the end being about the bestpart of it.

  [Sidenote: _Yvette._]

  On the other hand, _Yvette_, which is only allowed the eponymship of avolume of short stories, though it fills to itself some hundred andseventy pages, is one of Maupassant's most carefully written things andone of his best--till the not fully explained, but in any caseunsatisfactory, end[498]. Its heroine is the daughter of a sham Marquiseand real courtesan, who has attained wealth, who can afford herselflovers "for love"[499] and not for money, when she chooses, and whokeeps up a sort of demi-monde society, in which most of the men areadventurers and all the women adventuresses, but which maintains outwarddecencies. In consequence of this Yvette herself--in a fashion a littleimpossible, but artistically made not improbable--though she allowsherself the extreme "tricks and manners" of faster society, calls halfthe men by nicknames, wanders about alone with them, etc., preserves notmerely her personal purity but even her ignorance of unclean things ingeneral, and especially of her mother's real character and conduct. Herrelations with a clever and not ungentlemanly _roue_, one M. deServigny; his difficulties (these are very curiously and cleverly told)in making love to a girl not of the lower class (at least apparently)and not vicious; his attempt to brusque the matter; her horror at it andat the coincident discovery of her mother's ways; her attempt to poisonherself; and her salvage by Servigny's coolness and devotion--arecapitally done. Out of many passages, one, where Madame la MarquiseObardi, otherwise Octavie Bardin, formerly domestic servant, drops hermask, opens her mouth, and uses the crude language of a procuress-motherto her daughter, is masterly. But the end is not from any point of viewsatisfactory. Apparently (for it is not made quite clear) Yvetteretracts her refusal to be a kept mistress. In that case certainly, andin the almost impossible one of marriage probably, it may be feared thatthe catastrophe is only postponed. Now Yvette has been made too good (Ido not mean goody) to be allowed to pine or poison herself, as asoon-to-be-neglected concubine or a not-much-longer-to-be-loved wife.

  [Sidenote: Short stories--the various collections.]

  That the very large multitude[500] of his short stories (or, one begspardon, brief-narratives) is composed of units very different in meritis not wonderful. It was as certain that the covers of the author of_Boule de Suif_[501] would be drawn for the kind of thing frequently, asthat these would sometimes be drawn either blank, or with the result ofa very indifferent run. To an eye of some expertness, indeed, a goodmany of these pieces are, at best, the sort of thing that a clevercontributor would turn off to editorial order, when he looked into anewspaper office between three and five, or ten and midnight. I confessthat I once burst out laughing when, having thought to myself on readingone, "This is not much above a better written Paul-de-Kockery," I foundat the end something like a frank ac
knowledgment of the fact, _with thename_. In fact, Maupassant was not good at the pure _grivoiserie_; hiscontemporary M. Armand Silvestre (_v. inf._) did it much better. Touchesof tragedy, as has been said, save the situation sometimes, and atothers the supernatural element of dread (which was to culminate in _LeHorla_, and finally to overpower the author himself) gives help; but thezigzags of the line of artistic success are sharp and far too numerous.For a short story proper and a "proper" short story, _L'Epave_, where aninspector of marine insurance visits a wreck far out on the sands of theIsle of Rhe, and, finding an Englishman and his daughter there, mostunprofessionally forgets that the tides come up rapidly in such places,is nearly perfect. On the other hand, _Le Rosier de Mme. Husson_, one ofthe longest, is almost worthless.

  [Sidenote: Classes--stories of 1870-71.]

  At one time I had designed--and to no small extent written--a runningsurvey of a large number of these stories as they turn up in thevolumes, most of which--the _Contes de la Becasse_ is the chiefexception--have no unity, and are merely "scoopings" of pieces enough tofill three hundred pages or so. But it would have occupied far too muchspace for its importance and interest. As a matter of fact, they are tosome extent classifiable, and so may be dealt with on a representativesystem. There is the division of "La Revanche," which might have savedsome of our fools at home from mistaking the Prussian for anything but aPrussian. _Boule de Suif_ heads this, of course; but _Mlle. Fifi_, whichis a sort of tragic _Boule de Suif_--the tragedy being, one is glad tosay, at the invaders' expense--is not far below it. _Deux Amis_, one ofthe best, records how two harmless Parisian anglers, pursuing theirbeloved sport too far, were shot for refusing to betray the passwordback; and _La Mere Sauvage_, the finest of all, how a French mother,hearing of her son's death, burnt her own house with some Germansbilleted in it, and was, on her frank confession, shot. But _Un Duel_,though a Prussian officer (_vile damnum_) pays for his brutality withhis life, restores the comic element, partly at the expense of the twoEnglish seconds.[502]

  Connected with the war of 1870 too, though not military, is the capital_Coup d'Etat_, in which a Monarchist French squire checkmates, for themoment at least, a blatant Republican village doctor.

  [Sidenote: Norman stories.]

  Very much larger than any other group is, naturally enough, that onNorman subjects. Maupassant does not flatter his fellow-subjects of thegreat Duchy, but he loves them, and knows them, and delights to talk ofthem--talking always well and often at his best. There must be, in all,several volumes-full of these, though they are actually scattered over adozen: and it is not easy to go wrong with them. Perhaps a new "Farce duCuvier," quite different from those known to readers of Boccaccio andthe Fabliaux (a very drunk peasant sells his wife[503] by weight ormeasure to another, and scientifically ascertains the exact sum to bepaid by making her fill a butt with water and putting her into it--thedisplacement giving the required result) is the merriest. The story ofthe schoolboy who negotiates a marriage between his Latin tutor and ayoung person is excellent; and that of "Boitelle," a poor fellow who isprevented (through that singular abuse of _patria potestas_ so longallowed by French law) from marrying an agreeable negress, is the mostpathetic. But I myself am rather fond of the _Legende du MontSaint-Michel_. At first one is a little shocked at finding "the greatvision of the guarded mount"[504] yoked to the old Scandinaviantroll-and-farmer story of the fraudulent bargain as to alternate upper-and under-ground crops. But the magnificent opening description of "thefairy castle planted in the sea"[505] excuses, and is thrown up by, thesequel. Mont-Saint-Michel is not like Naples. When you have seen it, itis not your business to die, but to live and remember the sight of it;and, if you are lucky, your remembrance will have anticipatedMaupassant's words, and be freshened by them.

  [Sidenote: Algerian and Sporting.]

  Algiers and the Riviera were also fruitful in quantity, rather less soin quality. But on the former two stories, _Allouma_ and _Au Soir_, maybe found together, the whole of the first of which, and the beginning ofthe second, are first-rate. The above mentioned _Contes de la Becasse_are almost all good, though by no means all sporting.

  [Sidenote: Purely comic.]

  For pure comedy one might put as the first three--with the caution thatMrs. Grundy had better keep away from them--_Les Soeurs Rondoli_,[506]for which I feel certain that, when Maupassant reached the ElysianFields, Aristophanes and Rabelais jointly requested the pleasure ofintroducing him to the company, and crowned him with the choicestlaurels; _Mouche_, which is really touching as well as tickling at theend, though the grave and precise must be doubly warned off this; and_Enragee_--which is a sort of blend of an old smoking-room story of theperils of the honeymoon when new, and that curious tale[507] of Vigny'swhich has been given above.

  [Sidenote: Tragic.]

  For pure, or almost pure, tragedy and pathos, again, _Monsieur Parent_stands first--the history of the late vengeance of a deceived husbandand friend. _Miss Harriet_ gives us something more than a stageEnglishwoman with large feet, projecting teeth, tartan skirts, andtracts, though it gives us this too. _Madame Baptiste_--the very shorttale of a hapless woman who, having been the victim of crime in heryouth, is pursued by the scandal thereof to suicide, in spite of herhaving found a worthy husband--is one of Maupassant's intensest.

  [Sidenote: Tales of Life's Irony.]

  As examples, bending sometimes to the comic, sometimes to the patheticside of studies in the irony of life, one may recommend _A Cheval_ (aholiday taken by a poor but well-born family, which saddles them with anunconscionable "run-over" Old-_Wo_man-of-the-_Land_); _La Parure_ and_Les Bijous_ (the first a variant of _A Cheval_, the second a discoveryby a husband, after his wife's death, of her shame); and perhaps best ofall, _Regret_, in which a gentleman of sixty, reflecting on his wastedlife, remembers a picnic, decades earlier, where the wife of hislifelong friend--both of them still friends and neighbours--behavedrather oddly. He hurries across to ask her (whom he finds jam-making)what she would have done if he had "failed in respect," and receives thecool answer, "J'aurais cede." It is good; but fancy not being able totake a walk, and observe the primroses by the river's brim, withoutbeing bound in honour to observe likewise whether the lady by your sidewas ready to "cede" or not! It seems to me that in such circumstancesone would, to quote a French critic on an entirely different author andmatter, "lose all the grace and liberty of the composition."

  [Sidenote: Oddments.]

  Some oddments[508] may deserve addition. _Fini_, which might have beenmentioned in the last group, is a very perfect thing. A well-preserveddandy in middle age meets, after many years, an old love, and sees,mirrored in _her_ decay, his own so long ignored. Nobody save a mastercould have done this as it is done. _Julie Romain_ is a quainthalf-dream based on some points in George Sand's life, and attractive.The _title_ of _L'Inutile Beaute_ has also always been so to me (the_story_ is worth little). It would be, I think, a fair test of any man'staste in style, whether he did or did not see any difference between itand _La Beaute Inutile_. In _Adieu_, I think, Maupassant has been guiltyof a fearful heresy in speaking of part of a lady's face as "ce _sot_organe qu'on appelle le nez." Now that a nose, both in man and woman,can be foolish, nobody will deny. But that foolishness is an organiccharacteristic of it--in the sense of inexpressiveness, want ofcharacter, want of charm--is flatly a falsehood.[509] Neither mouth noreyes can beat it in that respect; and if it has less varietyindividually, it gives perhaps more general character to the face thaneither. However, he is, if I mistake not, obliged to retract partiallyin the very story.

  I have notes of many others--some of which may be special favouriteswith readers of mine--but room for no more. Yet for me at least amongall these, despite the glaring inequality, despite the presence of somethings utterly ephemeral and not in the least worth giving a new day to;despite the "_salete_ bete"[510] and the monotonous and obligatoryadultery,[511] there abides, as in the large books, and fromcircumstances now and then with gathered intensity, that qual
ity ofabove-the-commonness which has obliged me to speak of Maupassant as Ihave spoken.

  [Sidenote: General considerations.]

  The vividness and actuality of his power of presentation areunquestioned, and there has been complaint rather of the character ofhis "illusions" (_v. sup._) than of his failure to convey them toothers. It is not merely that nature, helped by the discipline ofpractice under the severest of masters, had endowed him with a style ofthe most extraordinary sobriety and accuracy--the style of a morescholarly, reticent, and tightly-girt Defoe. It is not merely that hisvision, and his capacity of reproducing that vision, were unsurpassedand rarely equalled for sharpness of outline and perfection ofdisengagement. He had something else which it is much less easy to putinto words--the power of treating an incident or a character (character,it is true, less often and less fully than incident) as if it were aphrase or a landscape, of separating it, carving it out (so to speak),and presenting it isolated and framed for survey. His performances inthese tracks are so numerous that it is difficult to single out any. ButI do not know that finer examples (besides those noticed above in _UneVie_) of his power of thus isolating and projecting a scene are to befound than two of the passages in _Pierre et Jean_, the prawn-catchingparty and Pierre's meditation at the jetty-head. Of his similar butgreater faculty of treating incident _and_ character _Monsieur Parent_is perhaps the very finest example (for _Boule de Suif_ is somethinggreater than a mere slice), though _Promenade_, _Les Soeurs Rondoli_,_Boitelle_, _Deux Amis_, and others are almost as good. But this veryexcellence of our author's carries with it a danger which most of hisreaders must have recognised. His definition and vignetting of separatescenes, incidents, and characters is so sharp and complete that he findsa difficulty in combining them. The attempt to disdain and depreciateplot which the above-mentioned Preface contains is, I suspect (though Iam, as often confessed, no plot-worshipper), as our disdains anddepreciations so often are, itself a confession. At any rate, it isallowed that the longer books, with the exception of _Pierre et Jean_(which was for that very reason, and perhaps for others, disdained bythe youngest and most impressionist school of critics), are deficient inbeginning, middle, and end. _Une Vie_ and _Bel-Ami_ are surveys orchronicles, not dramas or histories. _Mont-Oriol_, open enough toobjection in some ways, is rather better in this point. _Fort Comme laMort_ relapses under the old curse of the situation of teasingunhappiness from which there is no outlet, and in which there is littleaction. _Notre Coeur_ should perhaps escape criticism on this head, asthe shadow of the author's fate was already heavy on him. In fact, asobserved above, it is little more than a torso. Even _Pierre et Jean_,by far the greatest of all, if scale and artistic perfection be takentogether, falls short in the latter respect of _Boule de Suif_, which,small as it is, is a complete tragi-comedy in little, furnished withbeginning, middle, and end, complying fully with those older exigenceswhich its author affected to despise, and really as great as anything ofMerimee's--greater it could not be.

  There is no doubt that the theory which Maupassant says he learnt fromFlaubert (in whose own hands it was always subordinated to an effort atlarger completeness) does lead to the composition of a series or flockof isolated vignettes or scenes rather than to that of a great pictureor drama. For it comes perilously close--though perhaps in Maupassant'sown case it never actually reached--the barest and boldest (or baldest)individualising of impressions, and leaving them as they are, without anattempt at architectonic. For instance, once upon a time[512] I waswalking down the Euston Road. There passed me a fellow dragging atruck, on which truck there were three barrels with the heads knockedout, so that each barrel ensheathed, to a certain extent, the one infront of it. Astride of the centre barrel, his arms folded and a pipe inhis mouth, there sat a man in a sort of sailor-costume--trousers,guernsey, and night-cap--surveying the world, and his fellow who draggedhim, with an air of placid _goguenarderie_. It was really a strikingimpression, and absorbed me, I should think, for five or six seconds. Ican conceive its coming into a story very well. But Maupassant'stheories would have led to his making a whole story out of it, and hisfollowers have already done things quite as bad, while he has himselfcome near to it more than once.[513] In other words, the method tends tothe presentations of scraps, orts, fragments, instead of completewholes. And Art should always seek the whole.

  As for the character of Maupassant's "illusions," there could never bemuch doubt about some of them. _Boule de Suif_ itself pretty clearlyindicated, and _La Maison Tellier_ shortly after showed, at the veryopening of his literary career, the scenes, the society, and the solaceswhich he most affected: while it was impossible to read even two orthree of his stories without discovering that, to M. de Maupassant, theworld was most emphatically _not_ the best of all possible worlds. Thiswas by no means principally shown in the stories of supernatural terrorto which, with an inconsistency by no means uncommon in declaredmaterialists, and, had it not been for his unhappy end, very amusing, hewas so much given. The chief of these, _Le Horla_, has not been much ofa favourite with the lovers of "ghost-stories" in general. I think theyare rather unjust to it. But if it has a fault, that fault lies (and, toavoid the charge of being wise after the event, I may observe that Ithought so at the time) in too much conviction. The darkness is darknesswhich has been felt, and felt so much by the artist that he has losthis artistic grasp and command. There was, perhaps, in his own actualstate, too much reason for this. In earlier things of the kind it isless perceptible. _Fou?_ is rather splendid. _Aupres d'un Mort_--ananecdote of the death-bed of Schopenhauer, whom Maupassant naturallyadmired as the greatest of _saccageurs de reves_, though there are somewho, admiring the first master of thoroughly good German prose style andone of the best of German critics, have kept the fort of their dreamssafe from all he could do--has merits. _Lettre trouvee sur un noye_ isgood; _L'Horrible_ not quite so good; _Le Loup_ (a sort of fancy fromthe "bete du Gevaudan" story) better; _Apparition_ of the best, with _LaMorte_ to pair it, and _Un Cas de Divorce_ and _Qui sait?_ to make upthe quartette. Perhaps the best of all (I do not specify its title inorder that those who do not know it may read till they find it out) isthat where the visionary sees the skeletons of the dead rising andtransforming their lying epitaphs into confessions--the last tomb nowbearing the true cause of his own mistress's death. But thedouble-titled _La Nuit--Cauchemar_ runs it hard.

  Yet it is not in these stories of doubt and dread, or in the ostensibleand rather shallow philosophisings of the travel-books, thatMaupassant's pessimism is most obvious. His preference for the unhappyending amounts almost to a _tic_, and would amount wholly to abore--for _toujours_ unhappy-ending is just as bad as _toujours_marriage-bells--if it were not relieved and lightened by a real presenceof humour. With this sovereign preservative for self, and more sovereigncharm for others, Guy de Maupassant was more richly provided than any ofhis French contemporaries, and more than any but a very few of hiscountrymen at any time. And as humour without tenderness is animpossibility, so, too, he could be and was tender. Yet it was seldomand _malgre lui_, while he allowed the mere exercise of his humouritself too scantily for his own safety and his readers' pleasure. Thatthere was any more _fanfaronnade_ either of vice or of misanthropyabout him, I do not believe. An unfortunate conformity of innatetemperament and acquired theory made such a _fanfaronnade_ asunnecessary as it would have been repugnant to him. But illusion, insuch cases, is more dangerous, if less disgusting, than imposture. Andso it happened that, in despite of the rare and vast faculties justallowed him, he was constantly found applying them to subjectsdistasteful if not disgraceful, and allowing the results to be sickliedover with a persistent "soot-wash" of pessimism which was always rathermonotonous, and not always very impressive.

  It was, of course, inevitable that, on this side of the Channel atleast, strictures should be passed--and appealed against--on a writer ofthis kind. The impropriety of M. de Maupassant's subjects, the"cruelty," the "brutality," the "pessimism," and what not, of hishandling, were sure to be d
enounced or defended, as the case may be.Although the merely "shoking" tone (as the spelling dear to Frenchmenhas it) has waned persistently ever since his day, expressions in ithave not been wanting; while, on the other hand, newer-fashioned andprobably younger censors have scornfully waved aside the veryconsideration of this part of the subject. Further, no less a criticthan my friend Mr. Traill entered, long ago, a protest against theadmission of Maupassant's pessimism as a drawback. "He did not," saysMr. Traill (I quote from memory), "_pose_ as a pessimist; he wasperfectly sincere, and an artist's sincere life-philosophy, whatever itis, is not to be urged against the products of his art."

  I think that these questions require a little discussion, even in ageneral _History_.

  With reference to the impropriety matter, I have myself, after alifetime of fighting against the _heresie de l'enseignement_, not thevery slightest intention of deserting to or transacting with it. I domost heartily agree and affirm that the subject of a work of art is not,as such, the better or the worse, the more or the less legitimate,because of its tastefulness or distastefulness on moral considerations.But there is a perpetual danger, when we are clearing our minds of onecant, of allowing them to be invaded by another; and I think I have seencases where the determination not to be moral of malice prepense hasbeen so great that it has toppled over into a determination to beimmoral of malice prepense. Now, the question is, whether Maupassant andsome of Maupassant's admirers are not somewhat in this case? It issurely impossible for any impartial critic to contend that the unluckynovelist's devotion to the class of subjects referred to, and his mannerof handling them, did not amount to what has been pedantically, butaccurately, termed an "obsession of the _lupanar_." Now, it seems to methat all obsession, no matter of what class or kind, is fatal, or, atleast, injurious, to the artist. It is almost impossible that he shouldkeep his judgment and his taste cool and clear under it; it is almostimpossible that his poring shall not turn into preaching. And I think itnot much less hard to defend Maupassant from the charge of having becomea kind of preacher in this way, and so a heretic of instruction, just asmuch as if he had taken to theology, dogmatic or undogmatic. Perpetualrepresentation amounts to inculcation.[514]

  So, again, in reference to the apologies for Maupassant's pessimism. Icannot see how it can be contended that the perpetual obtrusion of alife-philosophy of any special kind is other than a fault in art. I haveno particular objection to pessimism as such; I suppose most people whohave thought and felt a good deal are nearer to it than to its opposite;and, though both opposites bore me when they are obtruded, I thinkrose-pink and sky-blue bore me rather more than the various shades ofgrey and brown and black. I admit further that, but for the pessimist_diathesis_, we might not have had that peculiar tragedy in which hehas been admitted to excel. But it seems to me that the creative artist,as such, and as distinguished from the critical, has no more business todisplay--to _arborer_--a life-philosophy, than he has to display aphilosophy of any other kind. Signs of it may escape him at times; butthey should be escapes, not deliberate exhibitions. He is to see lifewhole as far as he can; and it is impossible that he should see it wholeif he is under the domination of any 'ism to the extent that Maupassantwas under the domination of this. In the one supreme artist (I amtalking, of course, throughout of the art of letters only) whom we know,there is, perhaps, no more distinctive peculiarity than his elusion ofall attempts to class him as "Thissist" or "Thattist." And in those whocome nearest to him, though they may have strong beliefs and strongproclivities, we always see the capacity of taking the other side. Thefervent theologian of the _Paradiso_ treats hardly any of his victimswith more consideration than the inhabitants of the City of Dis: theprophet and poet of his own Uranian love for Beatrice swoons at thesight of Francesca's punishment, and feels "so that boiling glass werecoolness," the very penalty of the Seventh Circle of Purgatory. ButMaupassant's materialism and his pessimism combined shut out from himvast parts and regions of life and thought and feeling, as it were withthe blank wall of his very earliest poem. The fantastic shadows of hispeculiar imagination play on that wall fascinatingly enough; and theregion of passion and of gloom within is not without a charm, if asomewhat unholy and unhealthy one. But beyond the wall there is a wholeuniverse which Maupassant does not merely neglect, but of which he seemsto be blankly ignorant and unconscious, except in flashes of ignorantdisdain. That the infinite province of religious emotion and reflectionis shut out is a matter of course; but most of the other regions, inwhich those who decline religion take refuge, are equally closed. I canremember in Maupassant only the slightest signs of interest in generalliterature (except so far as it bears upon his own special craft), inthe illimitable ranges of history, in politics, in the higherphilosophy.[515] It cannot be said of him, as of his master's dismalheroes, that _tout lui a craque dans la main_. There is no sign of trialon his part; he starts where Bouvard and Pecuchet end, and takes forgranted a failure which he has not given himself the trouble toexperience.

  But, it may be said, "What does it matter what he does not do, know,feel, care for, if he treats what he does do, know, feel, and care for,well?" The objection is ingenious, and, as Petruchio would say, "'amight have a little galled me" if its ingenuity had not been theingenuity of fallacy. For the question is whether this insensibility tolarge parts of life has not injured Maupassant's treatment of the partsin which he did feel an interest. I think it has. There were too manythings in emotion and in thought of which he was ignorant. Mrs. Piozzi,in her _Anecdotes of Johnson_, observes that the Doctor, despite hisfreedom from gush and his dislike to religious verse, could never repeatthe stanza of _Dies Irae_ which ends "Tantus labor non sit cassus"without bursting into tears. I know a person very different from Johnsonwho, though he had not read the _Anecdotes_ till an advanced period ofhis life, had never failed to experience something like the same resultat the same line. And, for a third point, it is well known that actualagnostics have often confessed to like affections in similar cases. Thenumerous and complicated causes of this weakness, or, if any one prefersto call them so, the numerous and complicated causes of this enjoyment,had no hold whatever on Maupassant.

  But this hemiplegia of the intellect and the imagination--thissterilising of one-half, or more than one-half, of the sources ofintellectual and imaginative experience and delight--did not prevent himfrom leaving durable and perdurable results of the vigour of his mindand his sense, in the regions which were open to him. He wrote--asalmost every popular writer in these days who does not shut himself upin a _tour d'ivoire_ and neglect popularity must write--too much; and,in the special circumstances and limitations of his interests and hisgenius, this was specially unfortunate. He repeated himself too often;and he too frequently failed to come up to himself in the repetition.The better part of him, as with Flaubert before, transcended--evenopenly contemned--the 'isms of his day: but he too often let himself besubservient to them, if he was never exactly their Helot.

  Yet in recompense--a recompense largely if not wholly due to the strongRomantic[516] element which countervails the Naturalist--he wascertainly the greatest novelist who was specially of the last quarter ofthe nineteenth century in France. In verse he showed the dawn, and inprose the noon-day, of a combination of veracity and vigour, ofsuccinctness and strength, which no Frenchman who made his _debut_ since1870 could surpass. The limitations of his art have been sufficientlydealt with; the excellences of it within those limitations areunmistakable. He had no tricks--the worst curse of art at all times, andthe commonest in these days of what pretends to be art. He had no splashof so-called "style"; no acrobatic contortions of thought or what doesduty for thought; no pottering and peddling of the psychological kind,which would fain make up for a faulty product by ostentatiously paradingthe processes of production. Had he once got free--as more than once itseemed that he might--from the fatal conventionalities of hisunconventionalism, from the trammels of his obtrusive negations, thereis hardly a height in prose fiction which he might not have attain
ed. Asit is, he gave us in verse _Au bord de l'eau_, which is nearly the"farthest possible" in a certain expression, of a certain mood of youth,and not of youth only; in prose _Boule de Suif_, _Monsieur Parent_,_Pierre et Jean_, which are all in their way masterpieces, and a hundredthings hardly inferior. And so he put himself in the company of "LesPhares"--a light-giver at once and a warner of danger, as well as a partof

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

  [Sidenote: Huysmans.]

  The Naturalist rank and file are so far below Zola and Maupassant thatthey cannot now, whatever they might have done twenty years ago, claimmuch notice in such a history as this. The most remarkable of them wasprobably J. K. Huysmans. It has been charitably suggested or admittedabove that his contribution to the _Soirees de Medan_--a deeply feltstory, showing the extreme disadvantage, when, as Mr. De la Pluchedelicately put it, "your midlands are out of order," of wanderingquarters and vicissitudes in the country, and the intense reliefexperienced on return to your own comfortable chambers in town,--thatthis _may_ have been written in the spirit of a _farceur_, reducing theGoncourtian and Zolaesque principle to the lowest terms of the absurd.But I am by no means sure that it was so, though this suspicion ofparody pursues the earlier work of Huysmans to such an extent that acertain class of critic might take his later developments as evidence ofdesign in it. _Les Soeurs Vatard_ is a sort of _apodiabolosis_ of theGoncourts and Zola--a history of entirely uninteresting persons (the"sisters" are work-girls in a printing-house, and their companions suitthem) doing entirely uninteresting things, in an atmosphere of foulsmells, on a scene littered with garbage, cheered by wine which is redink, and brandy which is vitriol. _A Rebours_, not really a novel atall, is the history of a certain M. Des Esseintes, who is a sort oftransposed "Bouvard et Pecuchet" in one--trying all arts and sensations;his experiences being made by his historian a vehicle of mostly virulentand almost always worthless criticism on contemporaries. Perhaps themost intolerable thing is the _affiche_ of idolatry for Baudelaire. Oneremembers the glorious lines:

  Et Charles Baudelaire Dedaigneux du salaire.

  He certainly might have been disdainful of the salary of the admirationof one of the _farceurs_ of his own "Coucher du Soleil Romantique." Buton the whole there is a better way of taking leave of this firstNaturalist, and then mystic, and always _blagueur_. "Almost thoupersuadest me to be a Philistine." Which perhaps was his cryptic andcircuitous intention. Later M. Huysmans took to Black Arts; and at thelast he turned devout--a sort of sequence not by any means uncommon, andone of the innumerable illustrations of the irony of things. Gautier andothers had anticipated and satirised all these stages in the Romanticdawn; they reappeared, serious and dreary, in the twilight of the dusk.

  [Sidenote: Belot and others.]

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

  Below him it is unnecessary to go.

  FOOTNOTES:

  [455] For the early divisions of verse and prose story were all Topsies,and simply "growed"; although the smaller romances of the late sixteenthand early seventeenth century, and the larger of the latter date, wereundoubtedly influenced by the Greek, it was more a case of generalimitation than specific endeavour; the Sensibility school was verylimited and chiefly attended to tricks of manner; and the "Romanticvague" was never vaguer than in the vast and rather formless, thoughmagnificent and delightful, novel-work started by Nodier, Merimee,Vigny, and Hugo. The Naturalists, on the other hand, had a deliberateidea of revolutionising the novel--of abolishing old things and creatingnew. They could not, and did not, succeed: but their scheme, as well asits results, may claim consideration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [462] She served them for a very long period without giving them anyapparent cause for complaint. They only found out her delinquenciesafter her death, or in her last illness--I forget which. Probablynothing could better show "the nature of the animals" than this_post-mortem_ grubbing belowstairs for a "subject," and washing your ownhousehold dirty linen in public--for profit.

  [463] It may be well to smash, in a passing note, a silly catchwordpopular with some rather belated English admirers of the Naturalistschool a few years ago. They praised its "frankness." You might as wellpraise the "straightforwardness" of a man who goes out of his way toexplore laystalls and, having picked up ordure, holds it up to publicview.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [470] That Flaubert escaped their error only so far as by fire has beenallowed. One might indeed say so by death. For _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ asit stands, and as outlined further, is very near Naturalism. Earlier hehad carried the principle far in _Salammbo_, and would have carried itfarther if he had not listened to good advice for once. But he had fireenough in his interior to burn the rubbish and smelt the ore in hisbetter books, and skill enough to run off the metal from the dross, intoproper shape. The others had not.

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

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

  [473] _V. sup._ p. 258.

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

  [475] That of the _Union Generale_.

  [476] _Verite_, though a remarkable "human document" itself, and anindispensable _historical_ document for any student of the particularpopular madness with which it deals, need surely be inflicted a secondtime on no mortal. It is a transposition into the regions of theunmentionable, of the Dreyfus case itself. But nobody save a failure ofsomething like a novelist of genius, with this failure pushed near theconfines of madness, could have written it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [483] I had known Verlaine since his appearance in the _ParnasseContemporain_ years earlier, but not yet in his most characteristicwork.

  [484] The following summary, to p. 505, formed no part of the originalarticle and is based on fresh and continuous reading. It is purposelyrather more minute than anything else in these later chapters, and wasnot the easiest part of the book to do, owing to the large number ofMaupassant's short stories.

  [485] Maupassant _could_ draw gentlemen and ladies, but he often did notdo so. His pretty young countesses (_not_ the same persons as thosereferred to in text), who get drunk together _tete-a-tete_, anddiscourse on the best way of making more effectual Josephs out of theirfootmen, are not pleasing, though they are right in holding that noperfume, save Eau de Cologne, doth become a _man_.

  [486] Vol. I. pp. 150-1.

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

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

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

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

  [491] He was, says his historian well, "de la race des amants et nonpoint de la race des peres."

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

  [493] At the risk, however, of wearying the reader and "forcing opendoors," one may exemplify, from this book also, the artificial characterof this obligatory adultery. Anne de Guilleroy has all thequalifications of an almost perfect mistress (in the honourable sense)and wife. She is charming; a flirt to the right point and not beyond it;passionate ditto; affectionate; not capricious; inviolably faithful (inher unfaithfulness, of course); jealous to her own pain, but with noresult of malice to others. Yet in order to show all this she has to bean adulteress first--in obedience to this mysterious modernisation andtopsy-turvification of ancient Babylonian custom, and the _jus primaenoctis_, and the proverb as to second thoughts being best, and Heaven orthe other place knows what else. Here also, as elsewhere,Maupassant--satirist of women as he is--makes her lover a very inferiorcreature to herself. For Bertin is a selfish coxcomb, and _does_, atleast half, allow himself to be "snuffed out by an article."

  [494] Any one who chooses may compare it with the utterances of the lateMr. Henry James. Maupassant's own selection of novels, to illustrate theimpossibility of defining _a_ novel, is of the first interest. They are:_Manon Lescaut_, _Paul et Virginie_, _Don Quichotte_, _Les LiaisonsDangereuses_, _Werther_, _Les Affinites Electives_, _Clarissa_ [_he_adds _Harlowe_, an unauthentic addition, pardonable in a Frenchman,though not in one of us], _Emile_, _Candide_, _Cinq-Mars_, _Rene_, _LesTrois Mousquetaires_, _Mauprat_, _Le Pere Goriot_, _La Cousine Bette_,_Colomba_, _Le Rouge et Le Noir_, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, _Notre Damede Paris_, _Salammbo_, _Madame Bovary_, _Adolphe_, _M. de Camors_,_L'Assommoir_, and _Sapho_.

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

  [496] Not that I wish to blaspheme Circe, who always seems to me to haveadjusted herself to a disconcertingly changed situation with more thandemi-goddesslike dexterity and good humour. It may perhaps be notirrelevant, to discussion of novels in general, to mention somethingwhich I have never yet seen put in Homeric discussion, though the bareidea of anything new there being possible may seem preposterous. Thearguments of the splitters-up are, naturally enough, seldom if everliterary, belonging as they do to the class of Biblical, that is to say,_un_literary, criticism. But strictly literary consideratio
ns,furnishing argument of the strongest kind for unity, might be brought bycomparing the behaviour of Circe, at the moment referred to, and that ofHelen when Paris returned from his defeat. These situations are, ofcourse, in initial circumstance as opposite as possible, though they_arrivent a pareille fin_. But behind their very opposition there is aconception of the eternal feminine--partly human, partly divine--whichit would be very surprising to find in two different persons, and whichmight, if any one cared to do it, be interestingly worked out fromdivers other Homeric characters of women or goddesses, from Hera andAphrodite in the one poem to Nausicaa and Calypso in the other. "Howgreat a _novelist_ was in _Homer_ lost" is a theme too much neglected.

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

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

  [499] In the card sense.

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

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

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

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

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

  [505] This is an actual translation of the Norman poet's words. It makesno bad blank-verse line.

  [506] Its companions, in the volume to which it gives title, are mostlyinferior specimens of the same class. But some, especially _Le PainMaudit_, are very amusing, and _Lui_? is a curious and melancholyanticipation of _Le Horla_. _La Maison Tellier_, which opens and titlesanother volume of no very different kind, has never seemed to me quiteworthy of its fame. It is not unamusing in itself, and very amusing whenone thinks of its greatly-daring imitators, but rather schoolboyish oreven monkeyish in its determination to shock. (It doesn't shock _me_.)Another "shocker," but tragic, not comic, _La Femme de Paul_, whichcloses the book, is more powerful. (It is on the theme of _Mlle. Giraudma Femme_ (_v. inf._); only the male person, instead of drowning hisshe-rival, far less wisely drowns himself.) But most of its contentssuffer, not merely from Naturalist grime, but from Naturalist_meticulousness_.

  [507] _V. sup._ p. 269 _sq._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [516] See Conclusion. After the above notice of Maupassant was, in itsreconstituted form, entirely completed, there came into my hands a longand careful paper on the novelist's Romanticism, published by Mr. OliverH. Moore in the Transactions of the American Modern Language Associationfor March 1918. Those who are curious as to French opinion of him, andespecially as to the strange superstition of his "classicism" (seeConclusion again), will find large extracts and references on thissubject given by Mr. Moore, who promises further discussion.

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

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

 

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