Others—Daniel.
Madame de Chalis, according to a memory of many years which I have not thought it worth while to freshen, has a weaker draught of this rancid and mawkish sentimentality. But having in those days missed (or failed over) Daniel, I thought it incumbent on me to gird myself up to its eight hundred pages. A more dismal book, even to skim, I have seldom taken up. The hero—a prig of the first water—marries one of those apparently only half-flesh-and-blood wives who, novelistically, never fail to go wrong. He cannot, in the then state of French law, divorce her, but he is able to return her on her mother's hands. Going to Trouville (about which, then a quite new-fashioned resort, there is a great deal in the book), he meets a beautiful girl, Louise de Grandmont, and the pair fall—not merely hopelessly, which is, in the circumstances, a matter of course, but, it would seem, innocently—in love with each other. But in such a case scandal must needs come; and it is engineered by revenge of the discarded wife and the mother-in-law, by the treachery of some of Daniel's friends and the folly of others, as well as, it must be added, by his own weak violence, thoughtless conduct, and general imbecility. All this is developed at enormous length, and it ends in a general massacre, Louise's uncle being killed in a duel which Daniel ought to have fought (he is no coward, but a hopeless blunderer), the girl herself dying of aneurism, and Daniel putting an end to himself in her grave, much more messily and to quite infinitely less tragic effect than Romeo. There is one scene in which he is represented as gathering all his enemies together (including a lawyer, who is half-rogue, half-dupe) and putting them all to confusion by his oratory. The worst of it is that one does not in the least see why they were confused, except in one case, where the foe is literally kicked downstairs—an effective method, and one rare enough in French novels up to this date to be worth notice.[434]
Droz.
It was, for all contemporary readers of the French novel, except those of the gravest and most precise kind, a day to be marked, not with vanishing forms in chalk, but with alabaster or Parian, when "Marcellin" of the Vie Parisienne—one of those remarkable editors who, without ever writing themselves, seem to have the knack of attracting and almost creating writers, enlisted one "Z," the actual final letter of the name of Gustave Droz, and published the first article of those to be later collected as Monsieur, Madame et Bébé and Entre Nous. Although the contents of these books only added a fresh sprout to the age-old tree that, for more than half a millennium, had borne fabliau and nouvelle and conte and histoire, and so forth, they had a remarkable, if not easily definable, differentia of their own, and have influenced fiction-writing of the same kind for a good half-century since. The later-working "Gyp" and others owed a good deal to them; and I am bound to say that—reading the two books recently after a long interval—I found my old favourites just as amusing as I found them the very first time, shortly after they came out.
Of course—and only those who have made much study of criticism know how seldom critics recognise this "of course"—you must take the things in, and not out of, their own class. They are not bread, or meat, or milk of literature. They are, to take one order of gastronomic preference and taste, devilled biscuits; to take another, chocolate with whipped cream on it. And the devilling and the creaming are sometimes better than the chocolate and the biscuit.
Mr., Mme. et Bébé and Entre Nous.
It is not very easy to say—and perhaps not very important to know—whether the mixture of naughtiness and sentimentality which characterises these books[435] was what Mr. Carlyle, I think, was first to call an "insurance" or only a spontaneous and in no way "dodgy" or "hedgy" expression of the two sides of the French character. For everybody ought to know that the complaint of Dickens's "Mr. the Englishman" as to the French being "so d—d sentimental" is at least as well justified as Mr. Arnold's disapproval of their "worship of Lubricity." I suppose there are some people who would prefer the sentiment and are others who would choose the "tum-te-dy," while yet a third set might find each a disagreeable alternative to the other. For myself, without considering so curiously, I can very frankly enjoy the best of both. The opening story of the earlier and, I think, more popular book, "Mon Premier Reveillon," is not characteristic. It might have been written by almost anybody, and is in substance a softened and genteel version of the story of Miss Jemima Ivins, and her luckless (but there virtuous) suitor, in the "Boz" Sketches. "L'Âme en Peine," which follows, strikes the peculiar Drozian note for the first time; and very pleasant is the painting of the struggles of a pious youth—pious and pudibund to a quite miraculous extent for a French collégien of good family—with the temptations of a beautiful Marquise and cousin who, arrayed in an ultra-Second-Empire bathing-costume, insists on his bathing with her. "Tout le Reste de Madame de K." may a little remind an English reader of the venerable chestnut about the Bishop and the housemaid's knee; but the application is different. There is nothing wicked in it, but it contains some of the touches of varying estimate of "good form" in different countries which make the comparative reading of English and French novels so interesting. "Souvenirs de Carême" is (or rather are, for the piece is subdivided) the longest of several bits of Voltairianism, sometimes very funny and seldom offensive. But, alas! one cannot go through them all. The most remarkable exercise in the curious combination or contrast noticed above is afforded by Une Nuit de Noce and Le Cahier Bleu (tricks of ingeniously "passed-off" naughtiness which need not shock anybody), combined with the charming and pathetic "Omelette" which opens the second book, and which gives the happy progress and the sad termination of the union so merrily begun. All are drawn with equal skill and with no real bad taste. In one or two articles of both books the gauloiserie broadens and coarsens, while in the more purely "Bébé" sections of the first the sentimentality may seem a little watered out. But you cannot expect acrobatics on wine-glasses of this kind always to "come off" without some slips and breakages.
On the whole, I think Entre Nous contains the very best things, and most good ones. The pathos of the first (which is itself by no means mere pleurnicherie) is balanced at the other end by the audacity of "Le Sentiment à l'Épreuve," a most agreeable "washing white" of the main idea of Wycherley's Country Wife; and between the two, few in the whole score are inferior. "Nocturne," "Oscar," "Causerie," and "Le Maillot de Madame" were once marked for special commendation by a critic who certainly deserved the epithet of competent, in addition to those of fair and gentle. It is, however, in this volume that what seems to me Droz's one absolute failure occurs. It is neither comic nor tragic, neither naughty nor nice, and one really wonders how it came to be put in. It is entitled "Les de Saint-Paon," and is a commonplace, hackneyed, quite unhumorous, and rather ill-tempered satire on certain dubious aristocrats and anti-modernists. Nothing could be cheaper or less pointed. And the insertion of it is all the stranger because, elsewhere, there is something very similar, in subject and tendency, but of half the length and ten times the wit, in "Le Petit Lever," a conversation between a certain Count and his valet.
The plain critical fact is that the non-pathetic serious was in no way Droz's trade. His satire on matters ecclesiastical is sometimes delightful when it is mere persiflage: an Archbishop might relax over the conversation in Paradise between two great ladies, one of whom has charitably stirred up the efforts of her director in favour of her own coachman to such effect, that she actually finds that menial promoted to a much higher sphere Above than that which she herself occupies. But here, also, the more gravity the less goodness.