All these books, and perhaps one or two others, are about the same length—an equality possibly due (as we have seen in English examples on a different scale) to periodical publication. But once, in Madelon, About attempted something of much "longer breath," as his countrymen say. Here we have nearly six hundred pages instead of three hundred, and each page (which is a large one) contains at least half as much again as a page of the others. The book is a handsome one, with a title in red ink; and the author says he took three years to write the novel—of course as an avocation from his vocation in journalism. It is difficult to repress, though probably needless to utter, the most obvious remark on this; but it is not hard to give it another turn. Diderot said (and though some people believe him not, I do) that Rousseau originally intended, in the Dijon prize essay which made his fate and fame, to argue that science and letters had improved morality, etc.; and that he, Diderot, had told Jean Jacques that this was le pont aux ânes, and determined him to take the paradoxical side instead. The "Asses' bridge" (not in the Euclidic sense, nor as meaning that all who took it were asses) of the mid-nineteenth century French novelist was the biography of the demi-monde. Balzac had been the first and greatest engineer of these ponts et chaussées; Dumas fils had shown that they might lead to no mean success; so all the others followed in a fashion certainly rather ovine and occasionally asinine. Madelon is a young woman, attractive rather than beautiful, who begins as a somewhat mysterious favourite of men of fashion in Paris; establishes herself for a time as a married woman in an Alsatian town; ruins nearly, mais non tout, a country baron; and ends, as far as the book goes, by being a sort of inferior Lola Montès to a German princeling. It has cost considerable effort to justify even this short summary. I have found few French novels harder to read. But there is at least one smart remark—of the "publicist" rather than the novelist kind—towards the end:
C'est un besoin inné chez les peuplades germaniques; il faut, bon gré mal gré, qu'ils adorent quelqu'un.
They did not dislike puns and verbal jingles, either in France or in England in the mid-nineteenth century, as much as their ancestors and their descendants in both countries have done before and since. A survivor to-day might annotate "Et quel quelqu'un quelquefois!"
Maître Pierre, etc. Summing up.
In fact, to put the matter brutally, but honestly, as far as the present writer's knowledge extends, Edmond About was not a novelist at all "in his heart." He was a journalist (he himself admits the impeachment so far), and he was a journalist in a country where novel- or at least tale-writing had long established itself as part of the journalist's business. Also he was really a good raconteur—a gift which, though perhaps few people have been good novelists without it, does not by itself make a good novelist. As a publicist, too, he was of no small mark: his Question Romaine could not be left out of any sufficient political library of the nineteenth century. Some of his shorter tales, such as Le Nez d'un Notaire and L'Homme à l'Oreille Cassée, have had a great vogue with those who like comic situations described with lively, if not very refined, wit. He was also a good topographer; indeed this element enters largely into most of his so-called novels already noticed, and constitutes nearly all the interest of a very pleasant book called Maître Pierre. This is a description of the Landes between Bordeaux and Arcachon, and something like a "puff" of the methods used to reclaim them, diversified by an agreeable enough romance. The hero is a local "king," a foundling-hunter-agriculturist who uses his kingdom, not like Hadji Stavros, to pillage and torment, but to benefit his subjects. The heroine is his protégée Marinette, a sort of minor Isopel Berners, with a happier end.[428] The throwing into actual tale-form of curious and decidedly costly local fashions of courtship is clever; but the whole thing is a sort of glorified advertisement. Other books, Les Mariages de Paris and Les Mariages de Province, almost tell their tales, and something more,[429] in their titles.
One cannot but be sorry if this seems an unfair or shabby account of a pleasant and popular writer, but the right and duty of historical criticism is not to be surrendered. One of the main objects of literary history is to separate what is quotidian from what is not. To neglect the quotidian altogether is—whatever some people may say—to fall short of the historian's duty; to put it in its proper place is that duty.
Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau.
What ought to be said and done about Ponson du Terrail and Gaboriau—the younger Sue and Soulié; the protagonists of the melodramatic and criminal feuilleton during the later middle of the century—has been rather a problem with me. Clearly they cannot be altogether neglected. Deep would answer to deep, Rocambole to M. Lecoq, in protesting against such an omission of their manufacturers. I do not know, indeed, that any English writer of distinction has done for M. le Vicomte Ponson du Terrail what Mr. Lang did, "under the species of eternity" which verse confers, for "(Miss Braddon and) Gaboriau." I have known those who preferred that other Viscount, "Richard O'Monroy"—who shared with "Gyp" and Armand Silvestre the cheerful office of cheering the cheerable during the 'eighties and later—to the more canonical possessor of the title before him. But du Terrail was what I believe is called, in Scottish "kirk" language, a "supply"—a person who could undertake the duty of filling gaps—of enormous efficacy in his day. That is a claim on this history which cannot be neglected, though the people who would fain have Martin Tupper blotted out of the history of English poetry, might like to drop Ponson du Terrail in that of the French novel down an oubliette, like one of his own heroes, and not give him the file mercifully furnished to that robustious marquis. Gaboriau claims, in the same way, even more "clamantly."
The worst of it is (to play cards on table with the strictness which is the only virtue of this book, save perhaps an occasional absence of ignorance) that neither of them appeals to me. I have no doubt that this recalcitrance to the crime-novel is a culpa, if not a culpa maxima. I suppose it was born in me. It is certainly not merely due to the fact that, in my journalist days, perhaps because I was a kind of abortion of a barrister, I had to write endless articles on crimes.