A History of the French Novel Volume Ii Part 3

_Les Natchez_ is almost the last, certainly the last important novel of savage life, as distinguished from "boys' books" about savages. _Les Martyrs_ is the first of a line of remarkable if not always successful cla.s.sical novels from Lockhart's _Valerius_ to Gissing's _Veranilda_. It has nothing really in common with the kind of cla.s.sical story which lasted from _Telemaque_ to _Belisarius_ and later. And what is more, it is perhaps better than any of its followers except Kingsley's _Hypatia_, which is admittedly of a mixed kind--a nineteenth-century novel, with events, scenes, and _decor_ of the fifth century. If it has not the spectacular and popular appeal of _The Last Days of Pompeii_, it escapes, as that does not, the main drawback of almost all the others--the "cla.s.sical-dictionary" element: and if, on the other, its author knew less about Christianity than Cardinals Wiseman and Newman, he knew more about lay "humans" than the authors of _Fabiola_ and _Callista_.

It is probably unnecessary to point out at any great length that some of the drawbacks of _Les Natchez_ disappear almost automatically in _Les Martyrs_. The supernatural machinery is, on the hypothesis and at the time of the book, strictly congruous and proper; while, as a matter of fact, it is in proportion rather less than more used. The time and events--those of the persecution under Diocletian--are familiar, interesting, and, in a French term for which we have no exact equivalent, _dignes_. There is no sulky spider of a Rene crawling about the piece; and though history is a little strained to provide incidents,[32] "that's not much," and they are not in themselves improbable in any bad sense or degree. Moreover, the cla.s.sical-dictionary element, which, as has been said, is so awkward to handle, is, at least after the beginning, not too much drawn upon.

The book, in its later modern editions, is preceded not merely by several Prefaces, but by an _Examen_ in the old fas.h.i.+on, and fortified by those elaborate citation-notes[33] from authorities ancient and modern which were a mania at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which sometimes divert and sometimes enrage more modern readers in work so different as _Lalla Rookh_ and _The Pursuits of Literature_, while they provided at the time material for immortal jokes in such other work as the _Anti-Jacobin_ poems. In the Prefaces Chateaubriand discusses the prose epic, and puts himself, quite unnecessarily, under the protection of _Telemaque_: in the _Examen_ he deals systematically with the objections, religious, moral, and literary, which had been made against the earlier editions of the book. But these things are now little more than curiosities for the student, though they retain some general historical importance.

[Sidenote: The story.]

The book starts (after an "Invocation," proper to its scheme but perhaps not specially attractive "to us") with an account of the household of Demodocus, a Homerid of Chios, who in Diocletian's earlier and unpersecuting days, after living happily but for too short a time in Crete with his wife Epicharis, loses her, though she leaves him one little daughter, Cymodocee, born in the sacred woods of Mount Ida itself. Demodocus is only too glad to accept an invitation to become high priest of a new Temple of Homer in Messenia, on the slopes of another mountain, less, but not so much less, famous, Ithome. Cymodocee becomes very beautiful, and receives, but rejects, the addresses of Hierocles, proconsul of Achaia, and a favourite of Galerius. One day, wors.h.i.+pping in the forest at a solitary Altar of the Nymphs, she meets a young stranger whom (she is of course still a pagan) she mistakes for Endymion, but who talks Christianity to her, and reveals himself as Eudore, son of Lasthenes. As it turns out, her father knows this person, who has the renown of a distinguished soldier.

From this almost any one who has read a few thousand novels--almost any intelligent person who has read a few hundred--can lay out the probable plot. Love of Eudore and Cymodocee; 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 ba.n.a.l; and the book is well worth reading from divers points of view. In the earliest part there is a little too much Homer,[34]

naturally enough perhaps. The ancient world changed slowly, and we know that at this particular time Greeks (if not also Romans) rather played at archaising manners. Still, it is probably not quite safe to take the memorable, if not very resultful, journey in which Telemachus was, rather undeservedly, so lucky as to see Helen and drink Nepenthe[35] and to reproduce it with guide- and etiquette-book exactness, _c._ A. D.

300. Yet this is, as has been said, very natural; and it arouses many pleasant reminiscences.

[Sidenote: Its "panoramic" quality.]

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, _recit_ (Eudore giving the history of his travels and campaigns); but it is _recit_ 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 Merovee become living creatures; his captivity with them; his triumphs in Britain and his official position in Brittany, where the entrance of the Druidess Velleda 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 _recit_ 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 Scudery 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 pa.s.sion of _Atala_--it would have been out of place: and there is not the soul-dissection of _Rene_, 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.

[Sidenote: And its remarkable advance in style.]

And this great advance is partly, if not mainly, achieved by another--the novelty of _style_. Chateaubriand had set out to give--has, indeed, as far as his intention goes, maintained throughout--an effort at _le style n.o.ble_, the already familiar rhetoric, of which, in French, Corneille had been the Dryden and Racine the Pope, while it had, in his own youth, sunk to the artifice of Delille in verse and the "emphasis"

of Thomas in prose. He has sometimes achieved the best, and not seldom something that is by no means the worst, of this. But, consciously or unconsciously, he has more often put in the old bottles of form new wine of spirit, which has not only burst them, but by some very satisfactory miracle of literature shed itself into new receptacles, this time not at all leathery but gla.s.s of iridescent colour and graceful shape. It was almost inevitable that such a process, at such a time, and with such a language--for Chateaubriand did not go to the real "ancient mother" of pre-_grand siecle_ French--should be now and then merely magniloquent, that it should sometimes fall short of, or overleap, even magniloquence and become bombast. But sometimes also, and not so seldom, it attains magnificence as well; and the promise, at least the opportunity, of such magnificence in capable followers can hardly be mistaken. As in his younger contemporary, compatriot, and, beyond all doubt, disciple, Lamennais, the results are often crude, unequal, disappointing; insufficiently smelted ore, insufficiently ripened and cellared wine.

But the quant.i.ty and quality of pure metal--the inspiriting virtue of the vintage--in them is extraordinary: and once more it must be remembered that, for the novel, all this was absolutely new. In this respect, if in no other, though perhaps he was so in others also, Chateaubriand is a Columbus of prose fiction. Neither in French nor in English, very imperfectly in German, and, so far as I know, not in any other language to even the smallest degree, had "prose-poetry" been attempted in this department. "Ossian" perhaps must have some of the credit: the Bible still more. But wherever the capital was found it was Chateaubriand who put it into the business of novel-writing and turned out the first specimens of that business with the new materials and plant procured by the funds.

[Sidenote: Chateaubriand's Ja.n.u.s-position in this.]

Some difficulties, which hamper any attempt to ill.u.s.trate and support this high praise, cannot require much explanation to make them obvious.

It has not been the custom of this book to give large untranslated extracts: and it is at least the opinion of its author that in matters of style, translation, even if it be of a much higher quality than he conceives himself able to offer, is, if not quite worthless, very inadequate. Moreover, it is (or should be) well known that the qualities of the old French _style n.o.ble_--which, as has been said, Chateaubriand deliberately adopted, as his starting-point if nothing more--are, even in their own language, and still more when reproduced in any other, full of dangers for foreign appreciation. The no doubt largely ignorant and in any case mistaken contempt for French poetry and poetic prose which so long prevailed among us, and from which even such a critic and such a lover (to some extent) of French as Matthew Arnold was not free, was mainly concerned with this very point. To take a single instance, the part of De Quincey's "Essay on Rhetoric" which deals with French is made positively worthless by the effects of this almost racial prejudice.

Literal translation of the more _flamboyant_ kind of French writing has been, even with some of our greatest, an effective, if a somewhat facile, means of procuring a laugh. Furthermore, it has to be remembered that this application of ornate style to prose fiction is undoubtedly to some extent an extraneous thing in the consideration of the novel itself. It is "a grand set off" (in the old phrase) to tale-telling; but it is not precisely of its essence. It deserves to be _constate_, recorded and set to the credit of those who practise it, and especially of those who first introduced it. But it is a question whether, in the necessarily limited s.p.a.ce of a book like this, the consideration of it ought to occupy a large room.

Still, though the warning, "Be not too bold," should never be forgotten, it should be remembered that it was given only once and its contrary reiterated: so here goes for one of the most perilous of all possible adventures--a translation of Chateaubriand's own boldest undertaking, the description of the City of G.o.d, in which he was following not only the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, but the Vision of Patmos itself.

(_"Les Martyrs," Book III., opening. The Prayer of Cyril, Bishop of Lacedaemon, has come before the Throne._)

[Sidenote: Ill.u.s.trated.]

At the centre of all created worlds, in the midst of innumerable stars which serve as its bastions as well as avenues and roads to it, there floats the limitless City of G.o.d, the marvels whereof no mortal tongue can tell. The Eternal Himself laid its twelve foundations, and surrounded it with the wall of jasper that the beloved disciple saw measured by an angel with a rod of gold. Clothed with the glory of the Most High, the unseen Jerusalem is decked as a bride for her bridegroom. O monumental structures of earth!

ye come not near these of the Holy City. There the richness of the matter rivals the perfection of the form. There hang, royally suspended, the galleries of diamond and sapphire feebly imitated by human skill in the gardens of Babylon.

There rise triumphal arches, fas.h.i.+oned of brightest stars.

There are linked together porticoes of suns extended across the s.p.a.ces of the firmament, like the columns of Palmyra over the sands of the desert. This architecture is alive.

The City of G.o.d has a soul of its own. There is no mere matter in the abiding places of the Spirit; no death in the locality of eternal existence. The grosser words which our muse is forced to employ deceive us, for they invest with body that which is only as a divine dream, in the pa.s.sing of a blissful sleep.

Gardens of delight extend round the radiant Jerusalem. A river flows from the throne of the Almighty, watering the Celestial Eden with floods of pure love and of the wisdom of G.o.d. The mystic wave divides into streams which entwine themselves, separate, rejoin, and part again, giving nourishment to the immortal vine, to the lily that is like unto the Bride, and to all the flowers which perfume the couch of the Spouse. The Tree of Life shoots up on the Hill of Incense; and, but a little farther, that of Knowledge spreads on all sides its deep-planted roots and its innumerable branches, carrying hidden in the golden leaf.a.ge the secrets of the G.o.dhead, the occult laws of Nature, the truths of morality and of the intellect, the immutable principles of good and of evil. The learning which intoxicates _us_ is the common food of the Elect; for in the empire of Sovereign Intelligence the fruit of science no longer brings death. Often do the two great ancestors of the human race come and shed such tears as the Just can still let flow in the shadow of the wondrous Tree.

The light which lightens these abodes of bliss is compact of the rose of morning, of the flame of noon, of the purple of even; yet no star appears on the glowing horizon. No sun rises and no sun goes down on the country where nothing ends, where nothing begins. But an ineffable clearness, showering from all sides like a tender dew, maintains the unbroken[36] daylight in a delectable eternity.

Of course any one who is so minded may belittle this as cla.s.sically cold; even as to some extent _neo_-cla.s.sically bedizened; as more like, let us say, Moore's _Epicurean_ than like our greater "prose-poets" of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. The presence in Chateaubriand of this dose of the style that was pa.s.sing, and that he helped to make pa.s.s, has been admitted already: but I confess I think it is only a dose. Those who care to look up the matter for themselves might, if they do not choose to read the whole, turn to the admirable picture of camp-life on the Lower Rhine at the opening of Book VI. as a short contrast, while the story is full of others. Nor should one forget to add that Chateaubriand can, when he chooses, be epigrammatic as well as declamatory. "Such is the ugliness of man when he bids farewell to his soul and, so to speak, keeps house only with his body" is a phrase which might possibly shock La Harpe, but which is, as far as I remember, original, and is certainly crisp and effective enough.

Rea.s.sembling, then, the various points which we have endeavoured to make in respect of his position as novelist, it may once more be urged that if not precisely a great master of the complete art of novel-writing, by actual example, he shows no small expertness in various parts of it: and that, as a teacher and experimenter in new developments of method and indication of new material, he has few superiors in his own country and not very many elsewhere. That in this pioneer quality, as well as in mere contemporaneousness, he may, though a greater writer, be yoked with the auth.o.r.ess of _Corinne_ need hardly be argued, for the accounts given of the two should have sufficiently established it.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Although, except in special cases, biographical notices are not given here, the reader may be reminded that she was born in 1766, the daughter of Necker and of Gibbon's early love, Susanne Curchod; married at twenty the Swedish amba.s.sador, Baron of Stael-Holstein; sympathised at first with the Revolution, but was horrified at the murder of the king, and escaped, with some difficulty, from Paris to England, where, as well as in' Germany and at Coppet, her own house in Switzerland, she pa.s.sed the time till French things settled down under Napoleon. With him she tried to get on, as a duplicate of himself in petticoats and the realm of mind. But this was clearly impossible, and she had once more to retire to Coppet. She had separated, though without positive quarrel, from her husband, whom, however, she attended on his death-bed; and the exact character of her _liaisons_ with others, especially M. de Narbonne and Benjamin Constant, is not easy to determine. In 1812 she married, privately, a young officer, Rocca by name, returned to Paris before and after the Hundred Days, and died there in 1817.

[9] I never can make up my mind whether I am more sorry that Madame Necker did not marry Gibbon or that Mademoiselle Necker did not, as was subsequently on the cards, marry Pitt. The results in either case--both, alas! could hardly have come off--would have been most curious.

[10] The most obvious if not the only possible reason for this would be intended outrage, murder, and suicide; but though Valorbe is a robustious kind of idiot, he does not seem to have made up such mind as he has to this agreeable combination.

[11] I forget whether other characters have been identified, but Leonce does not appear to have much in him of M. de Narbonne, Corinne's chief lover of the period, who seems to have been a sort of French Chesterfield, without the wit, which n.o.body denies our man, or the real good-nature which he possessed.

[12] Perhaps, after all, _not_ too many, for they all richly deserve it.

[13] Eyes like the Ravenswing's, "as b-b-big as billiard b.a.l.l.s" and of some brightness, are allowed her, but hardly any other good point.

[14] I never pretended to be an art-critic, save as complying with Blake's negative injunction or qualification "not to be connoisseured out of my senses," and I do not know what is the technical word in the arts of design corresponding to [Greek: dianoia] in literature.

[15] I hope this iteration may not seem too d.a.m.nable. It is intended to bring before the reader's mind the utterly _willowish_ character of Oswald, Lord Nelvil. The slightest impact of accident will bend down, the weakest wind of circ.u.mstance blow about, his plans and preferences.

[16] That he seems to have unlimited leave is not perhaps, for a peer in the period, to be cavilled at; the manner in which he alternately breaks blood-vessels and is up to fighting in the tropics may be rather more so.

[17] As I may have remarked elsewhere, they often seem to confuse it with "priggishness," "cant," and other amiable _cosas de Inglaterra_.

(The late M. Jules Lemaitre, as Professor Ker reminds me, even gave the picturesque but quite inadequate description: "Le sn.o.b est un mouton de Panurge pretentieux, un mouton qui saute a la file, mais d'un air suffisant.") We cannot disclaim the general origin, but we may protest against confusion of the particular substance.

[18] _Corinne, ou l'Italie._

[19] If anybody thinks _Wilhelm Meister_ or the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ a good novel, I am his very humble servant in begging to differ. Freytag's _Soll und Haben_ is perhaps the nearest approach; but, on English or French standards, it could only get a fair second cla.s.s.

[20] Corinne "walks and talks" (as the lady in the song was asked to do, but without requiring the offer of a blue silk gown) with her Oswald all over the churches and palaces and monuments of Rome, "doing" also Naples, Venice, etc.

[21] She was rather proud of these mighty members: and some readers may recall that not least Heinesque remark of the poet who so much shocks Kaiser Wilhelm II., "Those of the Venus of Milo are not more beautiful."

[22] Including also a third short story, _Le Dernier Abencerage_, which belongs, constructively, rather to the _Voyages_. It is in a way the liveliest (at least the most "incidented") of all, but not the most interesting, and with very little _temporal_ colour, though some local.

It may, however, be taken as another proof of Chateaubriand's importance in the germinal way, for it starts the Romantic interest in Spanish things. The contrast with the dirty rubbish of Pigault-Lebrun's _La Folie Espagnole_ is also not negligible.

[23] For the mother, in a fas.h.i.+on which the good Father-missionary most righteously and indignantly denounces as unchristian, had staked her own salvation on her daughter's obedience to the vow.

[24] Its author, in the _Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_, expressed a warm wish that he had never written it, and hearty disgust at its puling admirers and imitators. This has been set down to hypocritical insincerity or the sourness of age: I see neither in it. It ought perhaps to be said that he "cut" a good deal of the original version. The confession of Amelie was at first less abrupt and so less effective, but the newer form does not seem to me to better the state of Rene himself.

[25] There had been a very early French imitation of _Werther_ itself (of the end especially), _Les dernieres aventures du sieur d'Olban_, by a certain Ramond, published in 1777, only three years after Goethe. It had a great influence on Ch. Nodier (_v. inf._), who actually republished the thing in 1829.

[26] This "out-of-bounds" pa.s.sion will of course be recognised as a Romantic trait, though it had Cla.s.sical suggestions. Chateaubriand appears to have been rather specially "obsessed" by this form of it, for he not merely speaks constantly of Rene as _le frere d'Amelie_, but goes out of his way to make the good Father in _Atala_ refer, almost ecstatically, to the happiness of the more immediate descendants of Adam who were _compelled_ to marry their sisters, if they married anybody. As I have never been able to take any interest in the discussions of the Byron and Mrs. Leigh scandal, I am not sure whether this _tic_ of Chateaubriand's has been noticed therein. But his influence on Byron was strong and manifold, and Byron was particularly apt to do things, naughty and other, because somebody else had done or suggested them. And of course it has, from very early days, been suggested that Amelie is an experience of Chateaubriand's own. But this, like the investigations as to time and distance and possibility in his travels and much else also, is not for us. Once more I must be permitted to say that I am writing much about French novels, little about French novelists, and least of all about those novelists' biographers, critics, and so forth.

Exceptions may be admitted, but as exceptions only.

[27] I once had to fight it out in public with a valued and valiant friend for saying something like this in regard to Edgar of Ravenswood--no doubt, in some sort a child of Rene's or of Nelvil's; but I was not put to submission. And Edgar had truer causes for sulks than his spiritual ancestor had--at least before the tragedy of Amelie.

[28] Not in the strict theological meaning of this phrase, of course; but the misuse of it has aesthetic justification.

[29] _I.e._ not mere "sloth," but the black-blooded and sluggish melancholy to which Dante pays so much attention in the _Inferno_. This deadly sin we inadequately translate "sloth," and (on one side of it) it is best defined in Dante's famous lines (_Inf._ vii. 121-3):