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

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

PREFACE

CHAPTER I. MADAME DE STAËL AND CHATEAUBRIAND

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

CHAPTER III. VICTOR HUGO

CHAPTER IV. BEYLE AND BALZAC

CHAPTER V. GEORGE SAND

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

CHAPTER VII. THE MINORS OF 1830

CHAPTER VIII. DUMAS THE ELDER

CHAPTER IX. THE FRENCH NOVEL IN 1850

CHAPTER X. DUMAS THE YOUNGER

CHAPTER XI. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

CHAPTER XII. THE OTHER "NON-NATURALS" OF THE SECOND EMPIRE

CHAPTER XIII. NATURALISM – THE GONCOURTS, ZOLA, AND MAUPASSANT

CHAPTER XIV. OTHER NOVELISTS OF 1870-1900

CONCLUSION

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"This dismal trash, which has nearly dislocated the jaws of every critic who has read it," was the extremely rude judgment pronounced by Sydney Smith on Madame de Staël's Delphine. Sydney was a good-natured person and a gentleman, nor had he, merely as a Whig, any reason to quarrel with the lady's general attitude to politics – a circumstance which, one regrets to say, did in those days, on both sides, rather improperly qualify the attitude of gentlemen to literary ladies as well as to each other. It is true that the author of Corinne and of Delphine itself had been rather a thorn in the side of the English Whigs by dint of some of her opinions, by much of her conduct, and, above all, by certain peculiarities which may be noticed presently. But Sydney, though a Whig, was not "a vile Whig," for which reason the Upper Powers, in his later years, made him something rather indistinguishable from a Tory. And that blunt common sense, which in his case cohabited with the finest uncommon wit, must have found itself, in this instance, by no means at variance with its housemate in respect of Anne Germaine Necker.

There are many worse books than Delphine. It is excellently written; there is no bad blood in it; there is no intentional licentiousness; on the contrary, there are the most desperate attempts to live up to a New Morality by no means entirely of the Wiggins kind. But there is an absence of humour which is perfectly devastating: and there is a presence of the most disastrous atmosphere of sham sentiment, sham morality, sham almost everything, that can be imagined. It was hinted in the last volume that Madame de Staël's lover, Benjamin Constant, shows in one way the Nemesis of Sensibility; so does she herself in another. But the difference! In Adolphe a coal from the altar of true passion has touched lips in themselves polluted enough, and the result is what it always is in such, alas! rare cases, whether the lips were polluted or not. In Delphine there is a desperate pother to strike some sort of light and get some sort of heat; but the steel is naught, the flint is clay, the tinder is mouldy, and the wood is damp and rotten. No glow of brand or charcoal follows, and the lips, untouched by it, utter nothing but rhetoric and fustian and, as the Sydneian sentence speaks it, "trash."9

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From this almost any one who has read a few thousand novels – almost any intelligent person who has read a few hundred – can lay out the probable plot. Love of Eudore and Cymodocée; conversion of the latter; jealousy and intrigues of Hierocles; adventures past and future of Eudore; transfer of scene to Rome; prevalence of Galerius over Diocletian; persecution, martyrdom, and supernatural triumph. But the "fillings up" are not banal; and the book is well worth reading from divers points of view. In the earliest part there is a little too much Homer,34 naturally enough perhaps. The ancient world changed slowly, and we know that at this particular time Greeks (if not also Romans) rather played at archaising manners. Still, it is probably not quite safe to take the memorable, if not very resultful, journey in which Telemachus was, rather undeservedly, so lucky as to see Helen and drink Nepenthe35 and to reproduce it with guide- and etiquette-book exactness, c. A. D. 300. Yet this is, as has been said, very natural; and it arouses many pleasant reminiscences.

The book, moreover, has two great qualities which were almost, if not quite, new in the novel. In the first place, it has a certain panoramic element which admits – which indeed necessitates – picturesqueness. Much of it is, almost as necessarily, récit (Eudore giving the history of his travels and campaigns); but it is récit of a vividness which had never before been known in French, out of the most accomplished drama, and hardly at all in prose. The adventures of Eudore require this most, of course, and they get it. His early wild-oats at Rome, which earn him temporary excommunication; his service in the wars with the Franks, where, for almost the only time in literature, Pharamond and Mérovée become living creatures; his captivity with them; his triumphs in Britain and his official position in Brittany, where the entrance of the Druidess Velléda and the fatal love between them provide perhaps the most famous and actually one of the most effective of the episodes of the book – all "stand out from the canvas," as the old phrase goes. Nor is the mastery lost when récit becomes direct action, in the scenes of the persecution, and the final purification of the hero and crowning of the heroine in the amphitheatre. "The work burns"; and, while it is practically certain that the writer knew the Scudéry romances, the contrast of this "burning" quality becomes so striking as almost to justify, comparatively if not positively, the accusations of frigidity and languor which have been somewhat excessively brought against the earlier performances. There is not the passion of Atala– it would have been out of place: and there is not the soul-dissection of René, for there is nothing morbid enough to require the scalpel. But, on the other hand, there is the bustle – if that be not too degrading a word – which is wanting in both; the vividness of action and of change; colour, variety, suspense, what may perhaps best be called in one word "pulse," giving, as a necessary consequence, life.

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