The French novel in 1800.
There are more reasons than the convenience of furnishing a separately published first volume with an interim conclusion, for making, at the close of this, a few remarks on the general state of the French novel at the end of the eighteenth century. No thoroughly similar point is reached in the literary history of France, or of any country known to me, in regard to a particular department of literature. In England—the only place, which can, in this same department, be even considered in comparison, although at this very time two novelists, vastly superior to any of whom France has to boast, were just writing, or just about to write, and were a little later to revolutionise the novel itself—the general state and history of the kind had, for nearly two generations, reached a stage far beyond anything that France could claim. She had made earlier "running"; on the whole period of some seven hundred years she had always, till very recently, been in front. But in the novel, as distinguished from the romance, she had absolutely nothing to show like our great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century, and hardly anything to match the later developments of Miss Burney and others in domestic, of Mrs. Radcliffe and others still in revived romantic fiction. Very great Frenchmen or French writers had written novels; but, with the exceptions of Lesage in Gil Blas, Prévost in that everlastingly wonderful "single-speech" of his, and Rousseau in La Nouvelle Héloïse, none had written a great novel. No single writer of any greatness had been a novelist pure and simple. No species[433] of fiction, except the short tale, in which, through varying forms, France held an age-long mastery, had been thoroughly developed in her literature.
The main point, where England went right and France went wrong—to be only in the most equivocal way corrected by such a writer as Pigault-Lebrun—was the recognition of the connection—the intimate and all but necessary connection—of the completed novel with ordinary life. Look over the long history of fiction which we have surveyed in the last three or four or five chapters. There is much and sometimes great literary talent; sometimes, again, even genius; there are episodes of reality; there are most artful adjustments of type and convention and the like, of fashion in morals (or immorals) and sentiments. But a real objective novel of ordinary life, such as Tom Jones, or even Humphry Clinker, nay, such inferior approaches to it as exist elsewhere in English, you will not find. Of the Scudéry romances we need not speak again; for all their key-references to persons, and their abstention from the supernatural, etc., they are, as wholes, hardly more real than Amadis and its family themselves. Scarron has some and Furetière more objectivity that may be argued for, but the Spanish picaresque has become a convention, and they, especially Scarron, are aiming more at the pattern than at the life-model. Madame de la Fayette has much, and some of her followers a little, real passion; but her manners, descriptions, etc., are all conventional, though of another kind. The fairy tales are of course not "real." Marivaux is aiming directly at Sensibility, preciousness, "psychology," if you like, but not at holding up the glass to any ordinary nature as such.[434] And though Crébillon might plead that his convention was actually the convention of hundreds and almost thousands of accomplished ladies and gentlemen, no one can deny that it was almost as much a convention as the historical or legendary acting of the Comédie Humaine by living persons a hundred years later at Venice.
No writer perhaps illustrates what is being said better than Prévost. No one of his books, voluminous as they are, has the very slightest reality, except Manon Lescaut; and that, like La Princesse de Clèves, though with much more intensity and fortunately with no alloy of convention whatever, is simply a study of passion, not of life at large at all. With the greater men the case alters to some extent in proportion to their greatness, but, again with one exception, not to such an extent as to affect the general rule. Voltaire avowedly never attempts ordinary representation of ordinary life—save as the merest by-work, it is all "purpose," satire, fancy. Rousseau may not, in one sense, go beyond that life in Julie, but in touching it he is almost as limited and exclusive as Prévost in his masterpiece. Diderot has to get hold of the abnormal, if not the unreal, before he can give you something like a true novel. Marmontel is half-fanciful, and though he does touch reality, subordinates it constantly to half-allegorical and wholly moral purpose. All the minor "Sensibility" folk follow their leaders, and so do all the minor conteurs.
The people (believed to be a numerous folk) who are uncomfortable with a fact unless some explanation of it is given, may be humoured here. The failure of a very literary nation—applying the most disciplined literary language in Europe to a department, in the earlier stages of which they had led Europe itself—to get out of the trammels which we had easily discarded, is almost demonstrably connected with the very nature of their own literary character. Until the most recent years, if not up to the very present day, few Frenchmen have ever been happy without a type, a "kind," a set of type-and kind-rules, a classification and specification, as it were, which has to be filled up and worked over. Of all this the novel had nothing in ancient times, while in modern it had only been wrestling and struggling towards something of the sort, and had only in one country discovered, and not quite consciously there, that the beauty of the novel lies in having no type, no kind, no rules, no limitations, no general precept or motto for the craftsman except "Here is the whole of human life before you. Copy it, or, better, recreate it—with variation and decoration ad libitum—as faithfully, but as freely, as you can." Of this great fact even Fielding, the creator of the modern novel, was perhaps not wholly aware as a matter of theory, though he made no error about it in practice. Indeed the "comic prose epic" notion might reduce to rules like those of the verse. Both Scott and Miss Austen abstained likewise from formalising it. But every really great novel has illustrated it; and attempts, such as have been recently made, to contest it and draw up a novelists' code, have certainly not yet justified themselves according to the Covenant of Works, and have at least not disposed some of us to welcome them as a Covenant of Faith. It is because Pigault-Lebrun, though a low kind of creature from every point of view, except that of mere craftsmanship, did, like his betters, recognise the fact in practice, that he has been allowed here a place of greater consideration than perhaps has ever fallen to his lot before in literary history.
Still, even putting out of sight the new developments which had shown the irrepressible vitality of the French conte, the seven hundred years had not been wasted. The product of the first half of them remained, indeed, at this time sealed up in the "gazophile" of the older age, or was popularised only by well-meaning misinterpreters like the Comte de Tressan;[435] but the treasure-house was very soon to be broken open and utilised. It is open to any one to contend—it is, indeed, pretty much the opinion of the present writer—that it was this very neglect which had made the progress of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries themselves so slow and so imperfect in its total results. For those who like to look for literary causes outside literature, there may be other explanations. But any intelligent reader can do something for himself if he has the facts before him. It is these facts that it has been and will be our business to give and to summarise here.
They have been given; let us attempt to summarise them in the briefest possible way. France possibly did not invent Romance; no man or men could do that; it was a sort of deferred heritage which Humankind, like the Heir of Lynne, discovered when it was ready to hang itself (speaking in terms of literature) during the Dark Ages. But she certainly grew the seed for all other countries, and dispersed the growth to the ends of the earth. Very much the same was the case with the short tale in the "Middle" period. From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth (both included) she entered upon a curious kind of wilderness, studded with oases of a more curious character still. In one of them Rabelais was born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding—more fortunate than the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen—was born Pantagruelism. In another came Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it was consummate. None of these happy sojourns produced a Don Quixote or a Tom Jones, but divers smaller things resulted. And again and again, as had happened in the Middle Ages themselves, but on a smaller scale, what France did found development and improvement in other lands; while her own miniature masterpieces, from the best of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the Heptameron, through all others that we noticed down to Adolphe, showed the enormous power which was working half blindly. How the strength got eyes, and the eyes found the right objects to fix upon, must be left, if fortune favour, for the next volume to tell.[436]
FOOTNOTES:
[404] We have seen above how things were "shaping for" it, in the Pastoral and Heroic romances. But the shape was not definitely taken in them.