The redeeming points of these.
It may seem that too much space is being given to a reprobate and often dull author; but something has been said already to rebut the complaint, and something more may be added now and again. French literature, from the death of Chénier to the appearance of Lamartine, has generally been held to contain hardly more than two names—those of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël—which can even "seem to be" those of "pillars"; and it may appear fantastic and almost insulting to mention one, who in long stretches of his work might almost be called a mere muckheap-raker, in company with them. Yet, in respect to the progress of his own department, it may be doubted whether he is not even more than their equal. René and Corinne contain great suggestions, but they are suggestions rather for literature generally than for the novel proper. Pigault used the improperest materials; he lacked not merely taste, but that humour which sometimes excuses taste's absence; power of creating real character, decency almost always, sense very often.[431] But all the same, he made the novel march, as it had not marched, save in isolated instances of genius, before.
Others—Adélaïde de Méran and Tableaux de Société.
L'Officieux.
Yet Pigault could hardly have deserved even the very modified praise which has been given to him, if he had been constant to the muckheap. He could never quite help approaching it now and then; but as time went on and the Empire substituted a sort of modified decency for the Feasts of Republican Reason and ribaldry, he tried things less uncomely. Adélaïde de Méran (his longest single book), Tableaux de Société, L'Officieux, and others, are of this class; and without presenting a single masterpiece in their own kind, they all, more or less, give evidence of that advance in the kind generally with which their author has been credited. Adélaïde is very strongly reminiscent of Richardson, and more than reminiscent of "Sensibility"; it is written in letters—though all by and to the same persons, except a few extracts—and there is no individuality of character. Pigault, it has been said, never has any, though he has some of type. But by exercising the most violent constraint upon himself, he indulges only in one rape (though there have been narrow escapes before), in not more than two or three questionable incidents, and in practically no "improper" details—conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and self-denial. Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad and rickety one; the indefinable naturaleza is present in it after a strange fashion. There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named Tableaux de Société—the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de Francheville, who, somewhat originally for a French heroine, starts by being in the most frantic state of mutual passion with her husband, though this is soon to be succeeded by an infatuation (for some time virtuously resisted) on her side for a handsome young naval officer, and by several others (not at all virtuously resisted) for divers ladies on the husband's. With his usual unskilfulness in managing character, Pigault makes very little of the opportunities given by his heroine's almost unconscious transference of her affections to Sainte-Luce; while he turns the uxorious husband, not out of jealousy merely, into a faithless one, and something like a general ruffian, after a very clumsy and "unconvincing" fashion. As for his throwing in, at the end, another fatal passion on part of their daughter for her mother's lover, it is, though managed with what is for the author, perfect cleanliness, entirely robbed of its always doubtful effect by the actual marriage of Fanchette and her sailor, and that immediately after the poor girl's death. If he had had the pluck to make this break off the whole thing, the book might have been a striking novel, as it is actually an attempt at one; but Pigault, like his friends of the gallery, was almost inviolably constant to happy endings.[432] L'Officieux, if he had only had a little humour, might have been as good comically as the Tableaux might have been tragically; for it is the history, sometimes not ill-sketched as far as action goes, of a parvenu rich, but brave and extremely well-intentioned marquis, who is perpetually getting into fearful scrapes from his incorrigible habit of meddling with other people's affairs to do them good. The situations—as where the marquis, having, through an extravagance of officiousness, got himself put under arrest by his commanding officer, and at the same time insulted by a comrade, insists on fighting the necessary duel in his own drawing-room, and thereby reconciling duty and honour, to the great terror of a lady with whom he has been having a tender interview in the adjoining apartment—are sometimes good farce, and almost good comedy; but Pigault, like Shadwell, has neither the pen nor the wits to make the most of them.
La Famille Luceval—something of an expanded and considerably Pigaultified story à la Marmontel—is duller than any of these, and the opening is marred by an exaggerated study of a classical mania on the part of the hero; but still the novel quality is not quite absent from it.
Further examples.
Of the rest, M. Botte, which seems to have been a favourite, is a rather conventional extravaganza with a rich, testy, but occasionally generous uncle; a nephew who falls in love with the charming but penniless daughter of an émigré; a noble rustic, who manages to keep some of his exiled landlord's property together, etc. M. de Roberval, though in its original issue not so long as Adélaïde de Méran, becomes longer by a suite of another full volume, and is a rather tedious chronicle of ups and downs. There may be silence about the remainder.
Last words on him.
The stock and, as it may be called, "semi-official" ticket for Pigault-Lebrun in such French literary history as takes notice of him, appears to be verve: and the recognised dictionary-sense of verve is "heat of imagination, which animates the artist in his composition." In the higher sense in which the word imagination is used with us, it could never be applied here; but he certainly has a good deal of "go," which is perhaps not wholly improper as a colloquial Anglicising of the label. These semi-official descriptions, which have always pleased the Latin races, are of more authority in France than in England, though as long as we go on calling Chaucer "the father of English poetry" and Wyclif "the father of English prose" we need not boast ourselves too much. But Pigault has this "go"—never perhaps for a whole book, but sometimes for passages of considerable length, which possess "carrying" power. It undoubtedly gave him his original popularity, and we need not despise it now, inasmuch as it makes less tedious the task of ascertaining and justifying his true place in the further "domestication"—if only in domesticities too often mean and grimy—of the French novel.