Diane de Lys.

Diane de Lys, a little later than most of the books just mentioned, and one, I think, of the first to be dramatised, so announcing the author's change of "kind," acquired a certain fame by being made (in which form I am not certain, but probably as a play) the subject of one of those odd "condemnations" by which the Second Empire occasionally endeavoured to show itself the defender of morality and the prop of family and social life. I do not think that Flaubert and Baudelaire had much reason to pride themselves on their predecessor in this particular pillory. Alexander the younger is not here even a coppersmith; his metal is, to me, not attractive at all. The Marquise de Lys is one of those beauties, half Greek, half Madonnish, and wholly regular-scholastic, to whom it has been the habit of modern novelists and poets to assign what our Elizabethan ancestors would have called "cold hearts and hot livers." Dumas fils' theory—for he must, Heaven help him! always have one[372]—is that it all depends on ennui. I know not. At any rate, Diane is not a heroine that I should recommend, for personal acquaintance, to myself or my friends. With one of those rather silly excuses which chequer his cleverness equally, whether they are made honestly or with tongue in cheek, our author says: "On va sans doute nous dire que nous présentons un caractère impossible, que nous faisons de l'immoralité" (which the compositors of the stereotyped edition pleasantly misprint "immortalité"), etc. Far be it from me to say that any woman is impossible. I would only observe that when Diane, neglected by and neglecting her husband for some two years, determines to take a lover, being vexed at the idea of reaching the age of thirty without having one; when she takes him without any particular preference, as one might call a cab from a longish rank, and then has a fancy to make a scientific comparison of forgotten joys with her husband, deciding finally that there is nothing like alternation—when, I say, she does this, I think she is not quite nice.[373] Nor does her school-friend Marceline Delaunay—who, being herself a married woman irreproachably faithful to her own husband, makes herself a go-between, at least of letters, for Diane—seem very nice either. It is fair to say that Mme. Delaunay gets punished in the latter part of the story, which any one may read who likes. It is, if not white, a sort of—what shall we say?—French grey, compared with the opening.

Shorter stories—Une Loge à Camille.

That standard edition of Diane de Lys which has enabled us to pick up such a pleasant coquille d'imprimerie contains three shorter stories (Diane itself is not very long). Two or them are not worth much: Ce qu'on ne sait pas is a pathetic grisetterie, something of the class of Musset's Frédéric et Bernerette; Grangette deals with the very true but very common admonition that in being "on with" two loves at once there is always danger, particularly when, as M. le Baron Francis de Maucroix does here, you write them letters (to save time) in exactly the same phraseology. Neither love, Adeline the countess or the Gris-Grang-ette, is disagreeable; indeed Francis himself is a not detestable idiot, and there is a comfortable conversation as he sits at Adeline's feet in proper morning-call costume, with his hat and stick on a chair. (Even kneeling would surely be less dangerous, from the point of view of recovering a more usual attitude when another caller comes.) But the whole thing is slight. The third and last, however, Une Loge à Camille, is the only thing in the whole volume that is thoroughly recommendable. It begins with an obviously "felt" and "lived" complaint of the woes which dramatic authors perhaps most of all, but others more or less, experience from that extraordinary inconsecutiveness (to put it mildly) of their acquaintances which makes people—who, to do them justice, would hardly ask for five, ten, or fifty shillings except as a loan, with at least pretence of repayment—demand almost, or quite, as a right, a box at the theatre or a copy of a book. This finished, an example is given in which the hapless playwright, having rashly obliged a friend, becomes (very much in the same way in which Mr. Nicodemus Easy killed several persons on the coast of Sicily) responsible for the breach, not merely of a left-handed yet comparatively harmless liaison, but of a formal marriage, the knitting of a costly and disreputable amour, a duel, an imprisonment for debt, and—for himself—the abiding reputation of having corrupted, half ruined, and driven into enlistment for Africa a guileless scientific student. It is good and clean fun throughout.[374]

Le Docteur Servans.

Le Roman d'une Femme.

Some others must have shorter shrift. One volume of the standard edition contains two stories, Le Docteur Servans and Un Cas de Rupture. The latter is short and not very happy, beginning with a rather feeble following of Xavier de Maistre,[375] continuing with stock liaison-matter, and ending rather vulgarly. Let us, however, give thanks to Alexander the younger in that he nobly defends the sacred persons of our English ladies against the venerable Gallic calumny of large feet, though he unhappily shows imperfect knowledge of the idioms of our language by using "Lady" as if it were like "Milady": "Reprit Lady," "Lady vit," etc. Le Docteur Servans is more substantial, though itself not very long. It is a rather well-engineered story (illustrative of a fact to be noticed presently in regard to much of its author's work) about a benevolent doctor who, at first as a method of kindness and then as a method of testing character, "makes believe," and makes others believe, that he has the secret of Resurrection.[376] On the other hand, I have only read Le Roman d'une Femme in the beloved little old Belgian edition which gave one one's first knowledge of so many pleasant things, and the light-weighting and large print of which are specially suitable to fiction. Putting one thing aside, it is not one of its author's greatest triumphs. It begins with a good deal of that rather nauseous gush about the adorable candour of young persons which, in a French novel, too often means that the "blanche colombe" will become a very dingy dunghill hen before long—as duly happens here. There is, however, a chance for the novel reader of comparing the departure of two of these white doves[377] from their school-dovecot with that of Becky and Amelia from Miss Pinkerton's. And I must admit that, after a middle of commonplace grime, the author works up an end of complicated and by no means unreal tragedy.

The habit of quickening up at the end.

The point referred to about the two principal books just noticed, and indeed about Alexander the Younger's books generally, is the remarkable faculty—and not merely faculty but actual habit—which he displays, of turning an uninteresting beginning into an interesting end. I cannot remember any other novelist, in any of the literatures with which I am acquainted, who possesses, or at least uses, this odd gift to anything like the same degree. On the contrary, some of the greatest—far greater than he is—give results exactly contrary. Lady Louisa Stuart's reproach to Scott for "huddling up" his conclusions is well known and by no means ill-justified, while Sir Walter is far from being a solitary sinner. I must leave it to those who have given more study than I have to drama, especially modern drama, to decide whether this had anything to do with the fact that Dumas turned to the other kind. The main fact itself admits, as far as my experience and opinion go, of absolutely no dispute. Again and again, not merely in Le Docteur Servans and Le Roman d'une Femme, but in La Dame aux Camélias itself, in Tristan le Roux, in Les Aventures de Quatre Femmes, and in others still, I have been, at first reading, on the point of dropping the book. But, owing to the mere "triarian" habit of never giving up an appointed post, I have been able to turn my defeat (and his, as it seemed to me) into a victory, which no doubt I owe to him, but which has something of my own in it too. His heroes very frequently disgust and his heroines do not often delight me; I have "seen many others" than his baits of voluptuousness; he does not amuse me like Crébillon; nor thrill me like Prévost in the unique moment; nor interest me like his closest successor, Feuillet. I cannot place his work, despite the excellence of his mere writing, high as great literature. He is altogether on a lower level than Flaubert or Maupassant; and one could not think of evening him with Hugo in one way, with Balzac in another, with his own father in a third, with Gautier or Mérimée in a fourth. But he does, somehow or other, manage that, in the evening time, there shall be such light as he can give; and I am bound to acknowledge this as a triumph of craft, if not of actual art. That while a gift and a remarkable one, it is rather a dangerous gift for a novelist to rely on, needs little argument.

Contes et Nouvelles.