LE SECRET DU PRÉCEPTEUR
At the opening ceremony of a new free library at Lambeth in London, not many weeks ago, Sir John Lubbock is reported to have made the following remarks regarding fiction:—
'Sir J. Lubbock, in moving a vote of thanks to the Prince of Wales and the Princess Louise, remarked that the free libraries of London now contained more than 250,000 books, whilst last year over 100,000 people borrowed volumes, and on more than 2,500,000 occasions books were used in the libraries themselves. It was a fallacy to suppose that public libraries were only used by novel readers. The proportion of works of fiction used in the Camberwell libraries was only 65 per cent., and, of course, in this percentage were included nearly all the books used by children. It must also be borne in mind that it took a great deal longer to read a history or a work of science than it did to run through a story. Under these circumstances he thought it might fairly be said that the people of London exercised a very good choice in the books they read. He himself should be very sorry to undervalue novels. Even nonsense was extremely refreshing, and he thought the English people had learnt more of their history from novels and from Shakespeare's plays than from books of history.'
In these few sentences there are embraced the views entertained in general by the English nation with regard to the art of fiction. By the English nation it is, and probably always will be, regarded as on a par with chromo-lithography, the use of the kodak, and tight-rope dancing.
'Even nonsense is refreshing,' says this kind defender of romance. He might have added that this depends very much on the character of the nonsense; there is dull nonsense, strained nonsense, self-conscious nonsense, vulgar nonsense, which is duller than a dull sermon and heavier than heavy bread; the nonsense which dilates and delights the heart of the coarse and common fool, is as a stagnant and stinking pond to the cultured mind; and true nonsense, i.e., jeux d'esprit, caricatures, parodies, 'exquisite fooling,' does not come under the head of novels at all.
Someone had apparently been objecting to the creation of free libraries on the score that they were chiefly used by readers of fiction, and in support of such libraries Sir John Lubbock (not venturing to make so heterodox an assertion as that the perusal of fiction per se is valuable and desirable) pleads that only sixty-five per cent. of the books borrowed were novels, and refers to the rapidity with which a novel can be 'run through,' as he phrases it, and proceeds, as an excuse for the perusal of fiction, to state that the English public chiefly derives its knowledge of history from novels and from Shakespeare's plays. This declaration, which is enough to make Mr Freeman turn in his grave, and Mr Froude writhe in his professorial chair, is, I believe, based on an exact truth, but it never appears to occur to the speaker that while the history to be learned from fiction and the drama is not of the purest kind, the fine art of an admirable book, as of an admirable play, contains many another lesson more valuable than even those of correct history to the reader who is capable of assimilating and appreciating it.
Sir John Lubbock kindly adds that he should be 'very sorry to undervalue novels.' Sweet and gracious condescension! He would be sorry to 'undervalue' Boccaccio, Cervantes, Guerrazzi, Théophile Gautier, Merimée, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, Walter Scott, Fielding, Octave Feuillet, Georges Sand, and Bulwer Lytton! Admirable benevolence! A treatise on the ways of ants or bees must, of course, rank as an infinitely higher work than a mere study of the manners, characters, and passions of mankind. To peruse the former work is education; to read the latter work is recreation, not absolutely injurious, perhaps, but scarcely beneficial. Sir John Lubbock on an ant-hill has the sublimity of the scientist: Alphonse Daudet on human nature is a mere trumpery trifler.
It does not appear even to occur to Sir John Lubbock that a fine novel contains intellectual qualities of the highest kind, and combines in itself the widest effects and the most delicate minutiæ of creative art. A fine novel should be no more 'run through' than the sculptures of the Vatican or the pictures of the Uffizi should be run through in ignorance and haste: common readers, like common tourists, may do so, but to do so is as gross and unpardonable an insult to the book as it is to the sculptures and the paintings.
Reflect but a moment upon all the divers and numerous qualities which are of necessity existent in the creator of a fine novel before it can be produced; not only imagination but wit, not only wit but scholarship, not only scholarship but fancy, not only fancy but discrimination, observation, knowledge of the passions, sympathy with the most opposite temperaments, the power to call up character from the void, as the sculptor creates figures from the clay, and, for amalgamating, condensing, and vivifying all these talents, the mastery of an exquisite subtlety, force, and eloquence in language. All these various gifts must be united in one writer before a fine novel can be produced; and when it is produced it requires (to be duly estimated) as cultured and as respectful a study of it as an educated traveller would take to the Vatican or to the Uffizi.
I have derived month by month, as it has appeared in the Révue des Deux Mondes, the most delicate and acute pleasure from the perusal of Le Secret du Précepteur, yet it is a pleasure which can only be obtained from it by a serene, leisurely, artistic enjoyment of its exquisite literary qualities. It is like a wine of which the bouquet can only be appreciated by educated palates. There is but little movement in it; the incident is slight, the situations derive their fascination for the reader not from their violence or their singularity, but from their perfect probability, and from their psychological interests; and the whole tone of it is kept carefully throughout to the smooth bantering semi-gouailleur tone of the opening recital. Ah, that style!—clear as water, delicate, full of grace, limpid, harmonious, exquisite! It has all the polished charm of the man of the world, and all the eloquence and brilliancy of the artist. I have heard a great ambassador in a beautiful tapestried chamber play the music of Schumann and Chopin and Bach with admirable and sympathetic maestria; the style of Cherbuliez reminds me of that diplomât-virtuose. We hear incessantly of the magical style of Paul Bourget; but beside the style of Cherbuliez that of Bourget is strained, tortuous, affected, artificial. The supreme excellence of that of Cherbuliez is its consummate ease, like the ease of a perfect manner in society. To employ all the resources of such a style is as great a delight to the master of it as the use of the rapier to the master of fencing, as the handling of the plastic clay to the sculptor. To relate a narrative in such a style is as warm and full a pleasure to the possessor of it as it is to the painter to create a winter's night or summer's day, youth or age, dawn or moonlight, a dance of nymphs, or a frolic of fauns, out of a few ground earths, a little oil, and a square of canvas. But to appreciate it the reader of it must bring with him some qualities on his own behalf.
There are in it none of those Anglicisms so irritating in the works of Bourget and others, such as Henry for Henri, Francis for François, 'window' for 'fenêtre,' 'le cab stoppait' for 'le fiacre s'arrêtait,' and so many similar disfigurements of the most polished and elegant language of the world. The temptation to use a foreign language is great when its expressions are such as no other language can equally well render. But who can think that 'cab' is better than 'fiacre,' or 'window' than 'fenêtre'? The French of Cherbuliez is the French of an elegant writer, of a man of the world, and is, beside that of 'les jeunes,' as a pure and limpid river beside a crooked and choked-up stream. Without their professorial jargon of psychology or their strained analysis, which so greatly fatigues the reader and resembles nothing so much as the efforts of a cyclist to run smoothly on a stony road, Le Secret du Précepteur is full of delicate and interesting studies of the human mind and character. Its especial triumph is to excite and retain the interest of the reader in a character which in the hands of most writers would have been either insignificant or absurd.
The teller of the story is the preceptor himself, who, unlovely in face and form, filling a subordinate and somewhat absurd position, frankly confessing his own follies and errors, is yet the most lovable and the most dignified of men; the intellectual grace of the scholar and the philosopher wholly atoning for and effacing the inferiority of place and the deformity of features. He tells us of his own extreme ugliness, so that we are not deluded into thinking it a belle laideur, but accept it as what he calls it, an ugliness which, coupled with poverty, would scare all women away from him all the years of his life; but, despite of it, we feel the irresistible charm of his personality, we admire his tact, we adore his unselfishness, we are as delighted by his self-restraint as by his courage and his will, and we take leave of him with the regret which we feel when we part for an indefinite period from a companion of the finest culture and the warmest sympathies. We regret also that, like most unselfish persons, he is forced to be content with the crumbs of happiness instead of its bread. It is strictly true to life that he should receive no more; it proves the author a true artist that he has been able to resist the temptation of giving so attractive a character a happy and unnatural fate, and we who know how the awards of life are proportioned, know that it is entirely in keeping both with art and truth that the bon chien should receive no more than the good dog usually gets in recompense for his fidelity. We know that it could not be otherwise; yet we regret the necessity for leaving the good dog with his dry broken crusts.
I regard the extreme interest and attachment with which this character inspires us as one of the greatest triumphs of fiction, because its attraction is stripped of all the adventitious aids to interest which accompany beauty, rank, or position. We have a plain, poor man, in a paltry and invidious situation, who conquers all which is against him as a hero of romance, and arrives at the highest place in the reader's esteem and affection by mere force of natural dignity, excellence of heart, and the irresistible superiority of wit and intellect. He is throughout all his actions, moreover, entirely natural. It is difficult, in reading his account of them, to believe that he is a fictitious character; all that he does and says is so real, so human. No one who reads Terre Promise or Cœur de Femme is ever for an instant tempted to think that the characters ever did live or ever could have lived; they are cartonnages, lay figures, draped in clothes from the costume maker's, and moving in obedience to the hand of their manipulator. But as Maupassant's Pierre et Jean are living, as Loti's Gaud and Fatougay live, as Rod's Michael Teissier lives, as the delicious Yette lives, so, and with even more vitality than they, the tutor Tristan lives in this admirable novel. And all the people around him live in this country house near Epernay, which is the scene of nearly all his joys and sufferings. We wish, indeed, that this scene never changed; so well does its landscape accord with the narrative, that one wishes the unities could have been preserved to the end. One regrets the change of venue when the story is carried to Paris. It is perhaps probable that the end is not what was originally intended by Cherbuliez.
It is a story which it is very difficult to end artistically. In point of fact it is not ended at all; it is only broken off at a certain crisis, and leaves the reader in the persuasion that Monique will have many adventures, and her 'bon chien' and her husband many anxieties. The fault in it, if fault there is, seems to me to be that, if this crisis had been contemplated from the beginning, the character of Louis Moufrin, extremely natural as far as it goes, should have been rendered a little more heroic, so that more interest would have attached to his transformation under the stings of jealousy. If this were not done the coup de pistolet should have been given, not by him, but by the preceptor; indeed, since Tristan tells us early in his story that he is a very fine pistol-shot, we are always expecting him to prove his skill on someone, and one could wish that he had exercised it as he desired to do on the odious coxcomb, Triguères. The impression is irresistibly made on the reader's mind that this was the dénouement originally contemplated by the author, and it would have been one stronger and more satisfactory. But perhaps he renounced it from the feeling that tragedy as a climax would have jarred on the harmony of a book which is throughout kept to the good-humoured and jesting tone of cultured society.
It would take many pages to do justice to the other persons of the novel; all are admirably drawn; there is only some exaggeration in that of Madame Moufrin, mère. But the cheery and generous merchant Brogues, the high-bred, high-born dévote who is his wife, the charming priest Verlet, the shy, silent, tender-hearted and timid Moufrin, the inimitable portrait of the learned, excellent and insufferable Sidonie, and lastly, the entirely uncommon conception of the captious and provoking petite Japonaise, who rules her faithful two-legged dog with a rod of iron; all these are admirably pourtrayed, even if they yield in importance to the central figure of the preceptor himself. The finest and most complicated study of them all is that of Madame Brogues, with her piety, her sensuality, her instinctive patrician revolt against the monotony of a bourgeois interior, her complex and scornful nature, her mingled indifference and tenderness for her daughters, the union of touching maternal sadness and devotion to the superior claims of chiffons, which traits are so admirably depicted in her last meeting with her younger daughter Monique.
Cherbuliez has, it is plain to see, been much struck with the large place which chiffons occupy in the lives of women of the world, and with the power of consolation which the interests of the toilette possess for them. The mother and daughter are both extremely touched by their accidental meeting (the first since the elopement of the former and the marriage of the latter); but this meeting takes place in the Exhibition building in Paris, and their emotions do not prevent them from studying, discussing, and purchasing beautiful fabrics. It is exactly the union of conflicting feelings which is really to be observed in life: the mingling of deep sentiment and sincere regret with interests of a totally different kind which appear trivial but are really absorbing distractions, perhaps frivolous, but entirely natural, arising from those cares and pleasures of personal appearance which are indestructible in the élégante by anything short of death.
There is also another passage which equally illustrates the ability and insight of the author in his perception and representation of that dual motive, that twin yet conflicting sentiment, which so frequently moves us and so especially characterises the modern mind, which is frequently complex and artificial, trivial and analytic, and thereby incapable of a single, or of a simple, emotion. Sidonie, a very proud, chaste, and implacable maiden, is stung to the core by her discovery of her mother's flight; the thought of what the neighbours and the servants will think is torture to her, and a generous and genuine grief for the blow to her father moves her to the first tears which she has ever shed. But still the idea, the knowledge that since she means never to marry, she is now and will be for ever supreme mistress of her father's house is a source of irresistible pleasure and consolation, and as she goes upstairs she cannot resist, even on this terrible night, exercising her first despotic and unshared power. Her mother, who loved softness and shadow, had always insisted on the electric lamp at the foot of the staircase being shaded and softened by folds of rose-coloured stuff, Sidonie had the rose-coloured stuff taken away, and even on this first evening of her reign the undimmed and intense radiance of the unveiled light proclaims the change of domestic government, and the absolute authority of the new ruler. This is one of the many exquisite finenesses of touch which reveal the delicacy of observation in the writer throughout this novel, and can be only appreciated by a reader who brings to it that attention and capacity which Sir John Lubbock and his audience would think it only worth while to devote to a treatise on the stalk-eyed crustacea or a monograph upon the household flea.
M. Jules Lemaitre, in his story of Les Rois, says with a sneer that one of his personages was 'née pour gouter Auber, Cabanel, et les romans de la Révue des Deux Mondes.' Now in his own volume, entitled Les Rois, published this season, and received with great curiosity in Paris, M. Jules Lemaitre has merely mixed up the tragedy of Meyerling, the mystery of Johann Orth, and recent well-known card and debt scandals concerning living princes; and, having reproduced with these the individuality of Louise Michel, the life of Kropotkine, and the career of a well-known financier, he has introduced some essays on social and political problems into his reproductions of these personages, dated the whole 1900, and called it a novel. But it is not a novel, for the imagination does not enter into it. It is a photograph, or a travesty, whatever the reader may please to call it, of actual recent modern events, thinly disguised, but unjustly exaggerated, and an almost impudent imitation in many ways of Daudet's Rois en Exil. There is some brilliant writing in it, and some fine thoughts and expressions, which is, of course, always the case when the writer is so intelligent a man as Lemaitre, but a novel it is not; it is a series of scenes, almost all borrowed or imitated from well-known events; it is a patchwork with little harmony in its arrangement, and it has the supreme fault of introducing long descriptions of anterior events, and bringing in new characters, at the close of the action. There is also one suggestion, if not more, concerning a royal person, so horrible that it seems unfair and even cruel to make it of one who cannot resent it or defend herself. The date of the story may be called 1900, but the events on which it is built have already been lived through by conspicuous characters.
It is not becoming, therefore, in so immature a story-teller as M. Lemaitre proves himself to be, and one who is obliged to go for his incidents to the scandals of courts, to sneer at the novels of the Révue des Deux Mondes, in which, to go no further back than last year, such admirable works as La Vie Privét de Michael Teissier and Le Secret du Précepteur have first seen the light. To be a critic of it is much easier than to be a creator of fine fiction; to pull to pieces requires lesser qualities than to construct.
In the past twenty months there have been some very fine novels in French literature. A l'Abîme, by Paul Vassili, is a masterpiece of originality, and the character of the great egoist, who is its hero, is matchless in its intuition, its philosophy, and its realism; it is a narrative of intense interest without its having any other source for its interest than that which lies in following the evolution of a type wholly new in literature, and the crystallisation of a naturally generous nature into a complete philosophic selfishness through circumstances which lead to its moral isolation amidst the full success of a triumphant career. Amants and La Force des Choses, of Paul Margueritte, are beautiful novels, remarkable for originality of conception, correctness of observation, and the talent of interesting the reader in perfectly natural events. The former in especial is full of truth, poetic feeling, and novelty of situation and of character; it is entirely a story of love, but it is love pourtrayed with equal sympathy and comprehension, and embracing scenes entirely dramatic whilst entirely natural. If Sir John Lubbock will read these three books and end with Le Secret du Précepteur, he will, I think, feel bound to admit that such works require for their due appreciation quite as much attentive respect in their perusal, and quite as many intellectual and perceptive qualities in their reader, as the analysis, however interesting, of a wasp's social habits, and the diary, however delightful, of a caged bluebottle's appetite. The study of earthworms demands, no doubt, the exercise of much higher faculties than are necessary for the study of human nature. Still it is difficult to believe that the earthworm can afford such varied and complicated interest as man, and nowhere are the portraiture and analysis of man so ably depicted as in a fine novel.[6]
V
L'IMPÉRIEUSE BONTÉ.[7]
A French critic has ranked the Frères Rosny amongst the 'authors of to-morrow,' and in a certain sense they, no doubt, belong to the class called les jeunes, often wrongly, since amongst these jeunes there are men of middle age. Les jeunes is an expression which is rather intended to indicate new methods and new views than to describe the actual age of the writers. In a sense everyone belongs to les jeunes who is emancipated from conventional tradition; but too much stress, too much importance, has been attached to this name; true art is always natural, and this new school is seldom natural; there is more eccentricity of manner in it than there is genuine originality of thought; there is too great an effort, too perpetual a strain in its productions; frequently, as in the case of Maurice Barrés, subtlety of language is employed to conceal absolute poverty of idea; or, as in the case of Georges Ohnet, to clothe mere wooden puppets with a semblance of life by skill in depicting incident; or, as in the case of Paul Bourget, to eke out a slender modicum of incident and idiosyncrasy with charm of style and an imposing psychology, and disarm criticism by euphuism.
In the two Rosnys there are some of the affectations of these writers, but there is none of their poverty of idea. They are full of ideas; full of meditation, of observation, of sympathy, of experience; the narrow limits to which custom confines the novel are far too small for their abundant powers. In portions of their work there is that more artificial mode of treatment, that strain after recondite words and tortuous and archaic methods of expressions, which are the blemish of les jeunes; but in many other portions their true insight, their deep feeling, and their artistic instincts raise them above this pedantry and enable them to produce certain passages which have few equals in any literature. L'Impérieuse Bonté is a very long book, but the reader would be dull indeed who did not wish it were longer, and who would not feel that the writers had been forced to renounce many scenes and many reflections and descriptions with which their minds were teeming. They convey to their reader their own attachment to their personages; willingly, we feel sure, they could have filled a hundred volumes with the story of their fate; the fountain of their sympathies is fed by an eternal spring. What is most admirable also in them is their remarkable equity; they can see the injustice done to the rich by the poor, as well as that done to the poor by the rich; and this quality of impartial sympathy is very rare. There is abundance in the world of that one-sided sympathy which springs from a parti pris, but that which is many-sided and perfectly just is very unusual. The Rosnys are capable of it.
The language indeed is at times tortuous, inflated, archaic, after the manner of the modern school; but at other times it loses this mannerism and becomes the clear, limpid, polished French so dear to us. It is never clearer or simpler than in the passages concerning the Lamarques and other sufferers which touch the heart.
The first portion of the book is the finest; the scenes which treat of this family are the greatest as they are the simplest of the whole. Was there ever any passage more pathetic and more real than this description of the last drive in the poor hired vehicle of the dying man and his children?
'Lamarque drew a deep breath under the delicious weight of the freshened air. Strength and peace brushed his tired, sickly frame.
'"Ah! I was sure that this would make me well."
'A smile came around his diaphanous nostrils, his lips parted with childlike pleasure. Albert felt that heaven and earth were born again in endless life. His soul shone through his blue eyes; he began to laugh and jest with nature. But his mother and Georges only saw more plainly in the luminous light the deadly thinness of Lamarque, and could think of nothing except how they should be able to make up for the expense of the five francs for the cab. They had driven out towards a road which looked mysterious and poetic; limes, acacias, young elms, all kinds of shades of green, were lit by a descending sun. There were flocks of slender trunks; a dainty philosophy of verdure; high above, pale foliage seemed to drink in the light; then depths where the sun-rays seemed to flow and stream like the nebulæ of comets, where they lay like vapour on which some fragile insect life floated like medusæ on the sea. Already dead leaves were on the ground like the tanned flesh, or the brown fur, of forest creatures. Spiders' webs had the colours of the rainbow; in these birdless trees butterflies lent an illusion of winged life and figured the flight of nestlings. Happiness seemed crystallised in the figure of a woman knitting; in the cry of a distant railway train; in the joy of two children munching pears with their crusts; in the sport of a dog who rolled on the grass with a youthful bark and the eyes of one in love with life. The red frock of a young girl passing by lent a note of force, of splendour, of intensity, to the golden afternoon.
'"It is so nice here!" said Albert.
'Georges, watching the silvery gossamer webs of the spiders, remembered all the visions he had ever had of liberty and space for kind animals and kind people.
'"I am young again!" murmured Lamarque.
'He was still pale, but his pallor was less corpse-like. Even the little François listened and enjoyed with a mute delight—mute because shut within himself—and loved his parents, his brothers, the driver, the trees, and the buzzing flies.
'"Stop," said the sick man suddenly. It was before a high gate, through which was visible a spectacle of Eden, a large garden.
'They could see a great pond, over which there could float whole broods of delicate dreams; there were tall Lombardy poplars, and the grace of weeping willows. Drooping larches also hung over the water-lilies; there were the thick shade of Canadian poplars, and also the timid murmurs, the sensitive sighs, of aspens. Then there was the charm of woodland life reflected in the water; of the landscape repeated below, symmetrical, and sombre in an abyss of oxidised silver. Then came grassy walks and gentle slopes of turf; further off were clearings in which beautiful trees were half seen, half hidden in misty distance like a promise of abundance and of happiness. The felicity of the place entered into the souls of the poor family who looked on it; they had at once the anguish of feeling that nothing like this would ever be theirs, and the ecstasy of knowing that such beauty did exist.
'Standing up in their sorry hired carriage, they gazed in rapture, saying but few words.
'"One little corner of this garden would be wealth to us!" sighed the mother.
'"That corner—there," said Lamarque.
'"One could not eat one's garden," said Albert.
'Georges, hypnotised, followed with his eyes the flight of an insect. Poised in the sunlight, the creature was motionless awhile; then descended, ascended, then, swift as a sped arrow, vanished in the shadows. One would wish for such an atom, taking so small a place in creation, the joys, the instincts, the intelligence of a great animal. At anyrate, it symbolises all the enjoyments of life, repose on a leaf, movement, ecstasy of travel through space and towards mystery.
'"Ah!" thought Georges, in distress, "even to come and see this, one must have money!"
'The hard and heavy thought was like a blow on the tender heart of the boy. Soon this bitterness entered into the souls of all, even of the youngest child.'
What I have translated as 'oxidised silver' is in the original 'blackened nickel,' one of those unfortunate, grotesque, inharmonious expressions of which there are many in this work. To compare water, the liquid, the mobile, the translucent, to any metal is a strange and unfitting comparison. In this passage, which is serious and poetical, the intrusion of such words as 'blackened nickel' seems offensive, and mars all the impression of the phrase. But it is in this kind of offence to the ear and the intelligence that les jeunes unhappily revel; they see in such offences signs of emancipation, of realism, of originality, when, in truth, the usage is no sign of anything except of a faulty ear and a lack of judgment.
Throughout the work, however, despite these occasional blemishes, every episode connected with the Lamarques is a masterpiece of pathos and of simplicity, until the last scene of all, when the three children with their mother are about to light the charcoal collected by the little François as it dropped from the waggons when they passed along the quay, and kept in a corner of the miserable room, in readiness for the last hour of all.
The characters of the three boys, so dissimilar and yet united by the vague likeness of race, are drawn with a life-like distinctness: Georges, pensive and philosophic, proud, gentle, observant; Albert, sceptic and scornful, with his passionate sense that, since death killed his father through serving others, there can be no God; and the youngest, François, timid, imaginative, devoted, hiding himself under the table, to still the pangs of hunger with fancies of a lonely fairy isle where neither want nor death should come. These three children offer one of the most perfect pictures of innocent and unmerited suffering which literature can offer, and the limner of them and of their sorrows is a fine writer. Jacques Fougeraye, the central figure of the romance, yields his place to them as its chief interest; and is also perhaps inferior in interest to his unhappy and generous patron Dargelle. One would desire to know through what circumstances a man of the talent and character of Fougeraye comes to be destitute in the streets of Paris; something also of the parentage, education, influences which have gone towards making him what he is. In the same way one would wish to know how Lamarque fell into poverty, how his children became so cultured and refined, how the whole family is aloof in every way from their common and odious kindred. Les jeunes do not deign to throw light on the antecedents of their dramatis personæ; they are wrong, for two reasons: one because they thus baulk the natural and legitimate curiosity of their readers; the second, that there is no true psychology (the word they worship) without study of the causes which have contributed to make a man or woman what the observer of them finds them to be. A writer like Gyp may with airy grace jump, as through a circus-hoop, into the middle of the lives of her personages without further explanation, but in a philosophic student of human nature in its sad seriousness such saltatory pranks are unbecoming.
One could well spare the hundreds of pages devoted to long and, one must say, tiresome descriptions of moral and mental states, for a few pages of lucid and graphic information as to the causes which brought the characters of the book to the pass in which we find them at their first appearance. But this is a method of composition too simple, direct, and natural to commend itself to les jeunes. And when on rare occasions they do furnish personal descriptions, these are so wrapped up in anatomical and physiological language that we can conjure up from them little or no real likeness. The characteristic of this new school is an extreme vagueness, an intentional nebulosity. Their personages are never introduced to the reader, nor are they given any pedigree; even personal description of them is of the slightest. They come abruptly on the scene as though they came up through a trap-door. It is left to the intelligence of the reader to supply all the details which the author disdains to furnish. In a book, as in life, one likes to have people duly presented before making their acquaintance; but this is a prejudice which the new school scorns to gratify.
There is a certain tedium in some of the experiences of Fougeraye, such as in his visits to the hospitals and the asylum of misshappen human creatures; and the young woman Louise, a medical student, who has learned to look on death with professional indifference, is so virtuous and self-satisfied that one is indisposed to share the admiration which Fougeraye feels for her. He himself is so unpretentious, so warm-hearted, so single-minded, and so manly that he deserves a more sympathetic and less vain helpmeet than this female doctor, with her too prosy platitudes and her chill philosophies.
Jeanne Dargelle, whom he rejects, is the least truthful, the most artificial, figure in the book. We are never interested in her. The breath of life has not been breathed into her; and when she kills herself we remain indifferent; we know that in her world women do not kill themselves, and a very proud woman would have found the idea of dying, because her husband's secretary had no love for her, altogether unendurable. We feel also that in real life Fougeraye would probably have shared her passion, and the struggle it would have caused between his temptation, and his loyalty and gratitude to Dargelle, would have been of profound interest. The chapter following on her death, in which Dargelle is alone with her dead body, is very fine, and reflects exactly that strange mixture of emotions and sensations which sway the survivor who passes long hours of solitude beside the corpse of one once dear to him—the trivial incongruities which force themselves in amidst intense regret, the eccentric fancies which dance like marsh-lights over the sombre swamp of a deep despair. Who amongst us has not cried, like Dargelle, 'Pardon, pardon!' from the depths of an aching heart, looking on the dead features of one to whom, in the eyes of the world, we had no fault?
There is in the Rosnys the distressing habit, common to all the more recent French writers, with few exceptions, of endeavouring to be pedantic, to be involved, to express an idea barbarously and bewilderingly instead of harmoniously and clearly; to say épiderme instead of peau, véridique instead of vrai, prunelles instead of yeux; to use the jargon of science, the abomination of foreign or technical idioms; to turn away from the natural, the direct, the usual, the obvious, and seek an appearance of profundity in what is merely a confusion of sounds. These affectations, these efforts, spoil many of the pages, and weary the most attentive reader in many of the chapters; as does also the incessant tendency to find similes of the most bizarre and eccentric kind, such as the comparison of dead leaves to the fur of animals; of a simile 'frail as the downy blow-ball of dandelion-seed'; of a sky 'of a powdery blue, with the horizon of an aquarium'; of a heart beating 'like a pear oscillating in a breeze,' and many others as far-fetched, as incongruous, and as grotesque. The excessive use of simile, however apt and exact, is always a fault; but similes as absurd and as strained as are most of those employed by the Rosnys, become a deformity of style, annoy the mind, and disagreeably abstract and distract the thoughts.
A too long, too technical, and too involved description is an inventory which leaves no concrete whole upon the reader's mind; it is a mere conglomeration of items. Take, as an instance, this description of Dargelle's physiognomy; and be it remembered that we never know who or what Dargelle is, how he came by his vast fortune, or anything, indeed, about him, except that he is un pauvre riche, a capitalist, one supposes, rich by inheritance. Here is the personal description of him:—
'A fat face, sad, meditative; his cheeks fell in; they were flabby. The forehead was a half-circle, with three deep wrinkles, the temples inflamed. The brow was vast but undecided, despite heavy eyebrows above violent eyes. The lips of a wild beast; a short beard which had never grown; flat hair, forming a little patch behind the brow and advancing laterally to the ears. The whole a Finnish face, very pale, with a disposition of the skin to become scaly. The nose long, broad, very irregular, between the snub and the aquiline, the end raised, the bridge bowed. Hardly any back to the head; the neck, like a Celt's, running straight up to the crown. The ears folded backward, stiff, cartilaginous,' etc., etc., etc.
This long and disagreeable description merely conveys the impression of a monster; and it does not in any way agree with the character of Dargelle, magnanimous, tender, generous, and sensitive; suffering acutely from a sense of utter loneliness amidst the parasites, who trade on his kind feelings. A man of this temperament would not have violent eyes or wild-beast lips; and the elevation of his sentiments would certainly have given some beauty of expression to his features.
Of Jacques Fougeraye, the hero of the work, we are given no description whatever. On the other hand, the portraiture of the frightful occupant of a monsters' asylum is traced in fullest and most minute detail, with an ostentation of technical knowledge, in that passion for what is horrible and abnormal which is characteristic of this school.
Dargelle, morally, is throughout consistent and lovable, from his first movement of suspicion and distrust, feeling that his new favourite will only use him and cheat him, as all the other dispensers of his charities have done, to the last frank smile with which, though jealous of the happiness he has himself created, he says: 'Allons donc! Je vois bien que vous m'aimez aussi.'
The rich man will only have the crumbs of the bread of the soul which is called love, but his generosity is content with it. 'Le pauvre riche!' say the Rosnys, with rare insight into the small consolation which, to those in full possession of them, the powers of wealth can give. Dargelle is unique, and it is almost to be regretted that he should occupy but a secondary place in the narrative. The description of his physical malady is perhaps exaggerated; deafness would scarcely cause such violent moral and mental torture; but the pathos of his last appearance is unexaggerated, and goes to the heart of the reader. By his mere word so many people are made happy, and yet, to secure happiness, even relief, for himself his millions are powerless! This is what many a rich and generous man must have felt. The irony of fate is more cruel in a sense to the heirs, than to the disinherited, of fortune. But the pain which the rich suffer is purely sentimental, and there are very few indeed who have nobility of nature enough to feel this at all.
The rich man has always material comfort, freedom from daily and hourly anxieties; he is at liberty to go wherever he likes, to do whatever he pleases; he enjoys, if he have the true faculty for enjoyment; he can make himself obeyed, if the obedience be but eye-service; he can surround himself with beautiful objects; and he can freely indulge the luxury of generosity, although it is the one luxury of which the rich are not enamoured, the rich man in general never gives except to see his name in print in the newspapers. The compassion of the Rosnys for the rich is scarcely justified, since their greatest burden is ennui, and this is an artificial kind of suffering due to defective sympathies, as cold feet are due to sluggish circulation. The statement, put in the mouth of Dargelle, that suicide is much more general amongst the rich than the poor, is certainly not based on fact or on statistics. The rich man, moreover, has one great and most precious exemption: he is free from petty, carking bodily cares; he never knows the greatest agony possible, that of seeing those dear to him hungry and homeless; he can be always warm in cold weather, cool in hot weather; in illness he has every palliative and assistance; his home is his own if he care for it, intangible and immutable; the whole world is his if he possess perception enough to enjoy it; his sufferings may be considerable from dyspepsia and discontent, and, if he be of a high nature, from irritation at the ingratitude and insincerity of human nature, but it is absurd to compare his pains with those of the poor—above all, when the poor are of fine temper, sensitive nerve and cultured intellect like the Fougeraye and Lamarque of the Rosnys. It is well to remind society that there are sorrows of the soul from which the rich may suffer more acutely than the poor; but it is to exceed this truth to represent the rich as often suffering from this cause. The rich man is usually a complete egotist, whose philanthropy has a political purpose or a social ambition as its mainspring. A Dargelle may exist, does exist; but he is one in ten millions. He is legitimate in his place as a character in romance, but as a character in real life he is met with but very rarely.
There are many social questions and many philosophic theories discussed in L'Impérieuse Bonté. An unkind critic might say that it is rather a social and philosophic essay than a romance. But in much it conforms to and fulfils the highest demands of fiction, and the naturalness and lovableness of the chief personages lend to it throughout the interest of romance. The mission of Fougeraye in the expenditure of Dargelle's money introduces, perforce, many phases of social misery. It was probably to do this that the book was written; but the harmony and interest of the action of the novel, as a novel, are not sacrificed to this intention. In these chapters all affectation, all artifice drop from the style, and the writers become masters of strong, simple and infinitely touching prose. It is to be regretted that the influence of their time should ever mislead them into tortuous and strained exaggerations and archaisms when it is possible for them to write thus simply and eloquently:—
'The few precious things—the brooch and earrings of Madame Lamarque, even her wedding-ring, alas! then the china service, saved with such effort from the fire, with a little rosewood secrétaire, and two Sèvres vases won at a lottery for charity, the gift to it of the Empress Eugénie—all disappeared, all were devoured by the monster Misery. Georges suffered as much as his parents; his nature was inclined towards the adoration of relics, of frail things, of the semi-vitality of objects.
'It rained a little; in the shadow of the fortifications the lamps trembled under gusts of wind; the reflections touched the wet grass, which seemed for the moment as fresh as the turf of meadows. Everywhere solitude—solitude filled with a sense of near and hidden human life in the closed houses from which came the subdued light of unseen chambers in vague suggestion of mysterious joys. But there was no living creature out of doors except in the openings of the ramparts; on the grass, a dog looking as furtive as a hunting wolf. The boy's eyes gazed at the sky, at the grass, at the long vista of burning lamps, at the grey stony road under his feet. A sense of beauty came into his soul, but a beauty sombre as the psalms of All Saints' Day.
'Beside him his mother carried the mattress which had been sold; he bore one side of it on his shoulder.
'They walk thus, beaten, conquered, the child full of suffocating revolt, the mother humble and resigned, like the meek beasts of the stall, with occasional flickers of wrath soon extinguished. They go thus, saying to each other a few words, muffled and heavyhearted, which are the mere dull echoes of their souls. "We must turn down that street. How will it end?—why does not the family help?" At a corner they stop, and suddenly Georges is overwhelmed with pity for his mother, as he sees her profile wet with rain in the light of the street lamp.
'He gazes at her. He remembers, in his earliest childhood, a time when there had been two servants in their house; when his mother had been a gentlewoman, going out for a walk with his father, while the bonne pushed the little carriage of the baby François. And here she was, his own mother, with a mattress for sale on her shoulder, on foot in the mud at this time of night. "Mamma! mamma! dear little mamma!" he cried, sobbing, without a single selfish thought, caring only for her, so profoundly, so intensely!'
Again, there is the same intense sympathy in the author with the suffering of the spirit when the two Sèvres vases are taken to their new home, sold for twenty francs, the poor, pretty, familiar things which look so elegant, so slender, so aristocratic amongst the coarse, vulgar ornaments of their new owners, that Georges is proud of their superiority amidst the anguish with which he thinks of them, lost for ever:
'Frail penates, saturated with the soul of home. Ah! how many birthday mornings, how many twilights of study, how many long rainy days and gentle suns of springtime, how many dreams of future voyages in far lands, how many nights fearful with storm or mute with falling snow, had these objects seen! They had been always there, fixing themselves inalienably on the retina in their unalterable attitude of delicacy and art: and now they were lost for ever, given over to an alien hand for a coin of gold which would last two days!'
Nothing can be more touching, more sincere, more eloquent than this episode.
Take again the magnificent opening chapter of the fire at which Lamarque contracts the illness which ultimately kills him. It is too long to quote here, but its description is of a force incomparable, and of a truth as great. No one of his contemporaries could have written this chapter; its sobriety and veracity, united to its splendour of diction and its terror of suggestion, make it a magnum opus.
It has only one defect; it gives the reader the impression that it cost great effort to the author. It does not convey that sense of the author's spontaneous fertility and joy in creation which Pierre Loti, François Coppée, Anatole France, feel and give. L'Impérieuse Bonté is a great work, but its greatness must have cost painful thought and unremitting labour.
One feels that there is nothing of improvisation, of careless and happy inspiration, about it. It is the matured fruit of profound observation, and of complicated doubt, of an unselfish sorrow, and of a noble altruism. It is a work which must impress and elevate all readers who are capable of comprehending its teaching. But there is no laughter in it, nor is there even a smile, save that sad divine smile which accompanies the tears of pity.