Until the middle of the last century (until, that is to say, the days of George Eliot in England and the latter days of George Sand in France), a Fourteenth-Century peasant might have revisited his country parish almost anywhere in France, and have noted little alteration to mark the flight of time. The last fifty years have made more difference in rural matters than the five centuries that went before them. The dairy farms of Normandy with their patent separators, their ferments for cheese flavours, sent down in neat little tubes from the Pasteur Institute; the arable lands with their great red, throbbing mechanical sowers, reapers, binders, automatic ploughs, threshing machines, etc.; the network of roads with their motor-cars and bicycles; the train whirling past in a white puff of smoke behind the screen of poplars; such homely sights of our everyday Twentieth Century would cause a mediæval husbandman to open his eyes considerably.
He would have to seek the depths of Brittany, the heart of the Cantal, the wastes of the Lozère, to find some faint image of the world he knew. There, indeed, save for the frequent crops of potatoes and buckwheat, which he would not recognise, he would find little changed; the one-toothed wooden plough still scores its furrow on the steep hillside; the thud of the flails is loud in the dusk of autumn evenings; in the fields the women stoop and gather the buckwheat into stooks and bind it standing, even as the reapers cut the stalks from the ground; the old pastoral life continues, not greatly changed for better or for worse. But even here the century-old country life of France is menaced, and that threat hanging over it renders it more dear, and almost sacred, that the rural novel in France is at once more exact and more tender in its record than it was in the century gone by.
When I came to live in France in 1888, there was a pastoral novel of course—there has always been a pastoral novel in France, as I said—but it was of a most calumniatory and reviling sort. Great was my surprise, when I spent my summers in the country, to find that the old gaffers on the farms were not left to die of hunger and neglect when they could no longer work, but, on the other hand, were treated with the utmost honour and consideration, given invariably the best seat on the settle, the best wine, expensive tonics from the doctor’s shop, and all that filial kindness could devise. Maupassant’s wonderful stories, Zola’s La Terre, must evidently have some foundation in fact. But my personal experience has not corroborated their pessimism.
Then, after the pastoral novel genre rosse, came, with the very last years of the Nineteenth Century, the reign of the social novel; and, as a matter of course, the pastoral novel followed suit. The best stories of those times, I think, are René Bazin’s, especially that most picturesque and touching idyll of a farm in Vendée gradually destroyed by the rural exodus, La Terre qui Meurt. In Donatienne, the same writer paints the poverty of a Breton village, and the temptation—almost the dire necessity—which induces the young mother to quit home and children in order to earn the large wages, and live the facile days of a wet-nurse in Paris. And, naturally, he shows the moral (and finally the material) ruin which follow on that ill-judged step.
In Le Blé qui Lève (The Growing Corn), René Bazin describes the life of the woodland labourers—the foresters, wood-cutters, charcoal-burners, and so on—who form an important part of the rural population in France; and he shows them ravaged by strikes, syndicates, etc.; for M. Bazin is nothing if not Catholic and Conservative.
Yet the tone of his novels—though in my brief account the stories sound melancholy enough—is as far removed as possible from the roman rosse of the Eighties; M. Bazin is full of faith and hope and charity; he is, in spite of human malice, so convinced of the final triumph of God that we might write on all his books the refrain of Æschylus:—
‘Sing alas! and say alas! But the Good shall come to its own!’
Aιλινoν, Aἰλινoν, ειπε, τo δʹέυ νικατω.
In those last years of the Nineteenth—in those first years of the Twentieth—Century, while René Bazin’s angelic voice was welling up in treble ecstasies, the pastoral novel in France had other notes which held, as it were, the bass—deep, strange notes—brief, complicated, syncopated phrasing. In other words, Jules Renard and Charles-Louis Philippe were giving their sense, too, of the life of woods and fields.
I wrote once that Jules Renard was the Hokusaï of French literature. He just glances at an object, sees its essential character, fixes that and neglects the rest; a bird, a flower, a little boy with carroty hair and sensitive, eager eyes, a scolding housewife, best of all, perhaps, an old, old country-woman, who cannot read or write, but who is full of the knowledge of things. I would give even Poil-de-Carotte for Ragotte! The quarrel of Ragotte and her son, ‘le Paul,’ moistens one’s eyes with the tenderest pity; and yet it is told with a dry, almost a hard precision, a concise sobriety; not a word superfluous. The thing happened so, and a pity ’tis ’twas so; there’s no more to be said. But underneath this real compassion there is a sad certitude of the end of all things, a melancholy nihilism, a hopeless irony.