The first-named—the younger by some half-dozen years, but the first to publish by more than as many—concerns those who take a merely or mainly anecdotic interest in literature by his well-known liaison with George Sand—to whom he gave dimidium nominis, and perhaps for a time at least dimidium cordis, though he probably did not get it back so much "in a worse estate"[266] as was the case with Musset and Chopin. Sandeau's collaboration with her in novel-writing was long afterwards succeeded by another in dramaturgy with Émile Augier, which resulted in at least one of the most famous French plays of the nineteenth century, Le Gendre de M. Poirier, based on Sandeau's Sacs et Parchemins. But we need busy ourselves only with the novels themselves.
Sandeau's work.
Sandeau was barely twenty when he wrote Rose et Blanche, during the time of, and with his partner in, that most dangerous of all possible liaisons. But he was nearly thirty when he produced his own first work of note, Marianna. In this, in Fernand, and in Valcreuse, all books above the average in merit, there is what may be called, from no mere Grundyite point of view, the drawback that they are all studies of "the triangle." They are quite decently, and in fact morally, though not goodily, handled. But it certainly may be objected that trigonometry[267] of this kind occupies an exorbitant place in French literature, and one may be a little sorry to see a neophyte of talent taking to it. However, though Sandeau in these books showed his ability, his way did not really lie in, though it might lie through, them. He had, indeed, as a novelist should have, good changes of strings to his bow, if not even more than one or two bows to shoot in.
No Frenchman has written a better boy's book than La Roche aux Mouettes, deservedly well known to English readers in translation: and whether he did or did not enter into designed competition with his quondam companion on the theme of Pastoral berquinade, I do not myself think that Catherine is much below La Petite Fadette or La Mare au Diable. He was a very considerable master of the short story; you cannot have much better things of the kind than Le Jour sans Lendemain and Un Début dans la Magistrature. But his special gift lay in treating two situations which sometimes met, or crossed, or even substantially coincided. The one was the contrast of new and old, whether from the side of actual "money-bags and archives" or from others. The second and higher development of, or alternative to, this was the working out of the subdued tragical, in which, short of the very great masters, he had few superiors, while the quietness of his tones and values even, enhances to some tastes the poignancy of the general effect. Mlle. de La Seiglière is, I suppose, the best representative of the first class as a novel, for Sacs et Parchemins, as has been said, waited for dramatisation to bring out its merits. The pearls or pinks of the other are Mlle. de Kérouare and La Maison de Penarvan, the latter the general favourite, the former mine. Both have admirably managed peripeteias, the shorter story (Mlle. de Kérouare) having, in particular, a memorable setting of that inexorable irony of Fate against which not only is there no armour, but not even the chance and consolement of fighting armourless. When Marie de Kérouare accepts, at her father's wish, a suitor suitable in every way, but somewhat undemonstrative; when she falls in love (or thinks she does) with a handsome young cousin; when the other aspirant loses or risks all his fortune as a Royalist, and she will not accept what she might have, his retirement, thereby eliciting from her father a mot like the best of Corneille's;[268] when, having written to a cousin excusing herself, she gets a mocking letter telling her that he is married already; when the remorseless turn of Fortune's wheel loses her the real lover whom she at last really does love—then it is not mere sentimental-Romantic twaddle; it is a slice of life, soaked in the wine of Romantic tragedy.[269]
Bernard's
In Charles de Bernard (or, if anybody is unable to read novels published under a pseudonym with sufficient comfort, Charles Bernard du Grail de la Villette[270]) one need not look for high passions and great actions of this kind. He does try tragedy sometimes,[271] but, as has been already admitted, it is not his trade. Occasionally, as in Gerfaut, he takes the "triangle" rather seriously à la George-Sand-and-the-rest-of-them. The satirists have said that, though not invariably (our present author contains cautions on that point) yet as a rule, if you take yourself with sufficient seriousness, mankind will follow suit. It is certainly very risky to appear to take yourself not seriously. Gerfaut, I believe, is generally held to be Bernard's masterpiece. I remember that even my friend Mr. Andrew Lang, who seldom differed with me on points of pure literature, almost gravely remonstrated with me for not thinking enough of it. There are admirable things in Gerfaut; but they are, as it seems to me, separately admirable, and so are more like grouped short stories than like a whole long novel. He wrote other books of substance, two of them, Un Beau-père and Le Gentilhomme Campagnard, each extending to a brace of well-filled volumes. But these, as well as the single-volume but still substantial Un Homme Sérieux and Les Ailes d'Icare, like Gerfaut itself, could all, I think, be split up into shorter stories without difficulty and with advantage. It is of course very likely that the comparative slighting which the author has received from M. Brunetière and other French critics of the more theoretic kind is due to this. The strict rule-system no doubt disapproves of the mere concatenation of scenes—still more of the mere accumulation of them.
We, on the other hand, quibus est nihil negatum, or who at any rate deny nothing to our favourite authors so long as they amuse or interest us, ought to be—and some of the best as well as the not-best of us have been—very fond of Charles de Bernard. How frankly and freely Thackeray praised, translated, and adapted him ought to be known to everybody; and indeed there was a great similarity between the two. The Frenchman had nothing of Thackeray's strength—of his power of creating character; of his intensity when he cared to be intense; of his satiric sweep and "stoop"; of his spacious view and masterly grasp of life. But in some ways he was a kind of Thackeray several degrees underproof—a small-beer Thackeray that was a very excellent creature. In his grasp of a pure and simple comic situation; in his faculty of carrying this out decently to its appropriate end; and, above all, in the admirable quality of his conversation, he was really a not so very minor edition of his great English contemporary. Almost the only non-technical fault that can be found with him—and it has been found by French as well as English critics, so there is no room for dismissing the charge as due to a merely insular cult of "good form"—is the extreme unscrupulousness of some of his heroes, who appear to have no sense of honour at all. Yet, in other ways, no French novelist of the century has obtained or deserved more credit for drawing ladies and gentlemen. It has been hinted that the inability to do this has been brought as a charge against even the mighty Honoré,[272] and that, here at any rate, it has been found impossible to deny it absolutely. But if the company of the Human Comedy falls short in this respect, it is not because some of its members do "shady" things. It is because the indefinable, but to those who can perceive it unmistakable, aura of "gentility"—in the true and not the debased sense—is, at best, questionably present. This is not the case with Bernard.
It is particularly difficult, in such a book as this, to deal with so large a collection of what may be most appropriately called "Scenes and Characters" as that which constitutes his most valuable if not all his valuable work. In the older handling referred to, I selected, for pretty full abstract and some translation, Un Homme Sérieux among longer books, and Le Gendre among the short stories; and I still think them the best, except Le Pied d'Argile, which, from Thackeray's incomparable adaptation[273] of it in The Bedford Row Conspiracy, remains as a standing possibility of acquaintance with Charles de Bernard's way for those who do not read French, or do not care to "research" for the original. Thackeray also gave a good deal of Les Ailes d'Icare in abstract and translation, and he borrowed something more from it in A Shabby Genteel Story. La Peau du Lion and La Chasse aux Amants have some slight resemblance to Le Gendre, in that the gist of all three is concerned with the defeat of unscrupulous lovers, and neither is much inferior to it. I never knew anybody who had read La Femme de Quarante Ans and its history of sentimental star-gazing à deux without huge enjoyment; and L'Arbre de la Science, as well as the shorter Un Acte de Vertu, deserve special mention.
But, in fact, take the volumes entitled L'Écueil, Le Nœud Gordien, Le Paravent, and Le Paratonnerre; open any of them where you like, and it will go hard but, in the comic stories at any rate, you will find yourself well off. The finest of the tragic ones is, I think, L'Anneau d'Argent, which in utilising the sad inefficacy of the Legitimist endeavours to upset the July Monarchy, comes close to the already-mentioned things of Sandeau and Ourliac.
That a critic like M. Brunetière should dismiss Bernard as "commonplace" (I forget the exact French word, but the meaning was either this or "mediocre"), extending something the same condemnation, or damningly faint praise, to Sandeau, may seem strange at first sight, but explains itself pretty quickly to those who have the requisite knowledge. Neither could, by any reasonable person, be accused of that grossièreté which offended the censor so much, and to no small extent so rightly. Neither was extravagantly unacademic or in other ways unorthodox. But both might be called vulgaire from the same point of view which made Madame de Staël so call her greatest contemporary as a she-novelist—one, too, so much greater than herself.[274] That is to say, they did deal with strictly ordinary life, and neither attempted that close psychological analysis and ambitious schematism which (we have been told) is the pride of the French novel, and which, certainly, some French critics have supposed to be of its essence. These points of view I have left undiscussed for the most part, but have consistently in practice declined to take, in the first volume, while they are definitely opposed and combated in more than one passage of this.[275] I admit that Sandeau, save in the one situation where I think he comes near to the first class—that of subdued resignation to calamity—is not passionate; I admit that Bernard has a certain superficiality, and that, as has been confessed already, his "form" sometimes leaves to desire. But they both seem to me to have, in whatever measure and degree, what, with me, is the article of standing or falling in novels—humanity. And they seem—also to me, and speaking under correction—to write, if not consummately, far more than moderately well, and to tell in a fashion for which consummate is not too strong a word. While for pure gaiety, unsmirched by coarseness and unspoilt by ill-nature, you will not find much better pastime anywhere than in the work of the author of L'Écueil and Le Paratonnerre.