Yet, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, we ought not to quarrel with him for this, and to do so would be again to fall into the old "gin-shop and leg-of-mutton" unreasonableness. It was M. Droz's mission to start a new form of Crébillonade—panaché (to use an excellent term of French cookery), here and there, with another new form of Sensibility. He did it quite admirably, and he taught the simpler device—the compound one hardly—to pupils, some of whom still divert, or at least distract, the world. I am not at all ashamed to say that I think the best of his and their work capital stuff, continuing worthily one of the oldest and most characteristic strains of French literature; displaying no contemptible artistry; and contributing very considerably to that work of pleasure-giving which has been acknowledged as supplying the main subject of this book.
Cherbuliez.
His general characteristics.
Few more striking contrasts—though we have been able to supply a fair number of such things—could be found than by passing from Gustave Droz to Victor Cherbuliez. Scion of a Genevese family already distinguished in letters, M. Cherbuliez became one of the Deux-Mondains, a "publicist" as well as a novelist of great ability, and finally an Academician; but his novels, clever as they are, were never quite "frankly" liked in France—at least, by the critics. This may have been partly due to the curious latent grudge with which French writers—to the country as well as to the language and manners born—have always regarded their Swiss comrades or competitors—the attitude as to a kind of poacher or interloper.[436] But to leave the matter there would be not only to miss thoroughness in the individual case, but also to overlook a point of very considerable importance to the history of the French novel generally. There is undoubtedly something in M. Cherbuliez's numerous, vigorous, and excellently readable novels which reminds one more of English than of French fiction. We have noticed a certain resemblance in Feuillet to Trollope: it is stronger still in Cherbuliez. Not, of course, that the Swiss novelist denies himself—though he uses them more sparingly—the usual latitudes of the French as contrasted with the English novelist during nine-tenths of the nineteenth century. But he does use them more sparingly, and he is apt to make his heroines out of unmarried girls, to an extent which might at that time seem, to the conventional French eye, simply indecent. He is much more prodigal of "interest"—that is to say, of incident, accident, occurrence—than most French novelists who do not affect somewhat melodramatic romance. On the other hand, his character-drawing, though always efficient, is seldom if ever masterly; and that "schematisation," on which, as is pointed out in various places of this book, French critics are apt to insist so much, is not always present. Of actual passion he has little, and his books are somewhat open to the charge—which has been brought against those of so many of our own second-best novelists—that they are somewhat machine-made, or, if that word be too unkind, are rather works of craft than of art. Yet the work of a sound craftsman, using good materials, is a great help in life; and a person who wants good story-pastime for a certain number of nights, without possessing a Scheherazade of his own, will find plenty of it in the thirty years' novel turn-out of Victor Cherbuliez.
Short survey of his books.
He did not find his way at once, beginning with "mixed" novels of a Germanish kind—art-fiction in Un Cheval de Phidias; psychological-literary matter (Tasso's madness) in Le Prince Vitale; politico-social subjects in Le Grand-œuvre. But these things, which have not often been successes, certainly were not so in M. Cherbuliez's hands. He broke fresh ground and "grew" a real novel in Le Comte Kostia, and he continued to till this plot, with good results, for the rest of his life. The "scenes and characters" are sufficiently varied, those in the book just mentioned being Russian and those in Ladislas Bolski Polish—neither particularly complimentary to the nationalities concerned, and the latter decidedly melodramatic. Le Comte Kostia is sometimes considered his best novel; but I should put above it both Le Roman d'une Honnête Femme (his principal attempt in purely French society and on Feuilletesque lines, with a tighter morality) and Meta Holdenis, a story of a Swiss girl—not beautiful, but "vurry attractive," and not actually "no better than she should be," but quite ready to be so if it suited her. Miss Rovel with another girl-heroine—eccentric, but not in the lines of the usual French-English caricatures—is a great favourite with some. La Revanche de Joseph Noirel is again melodramatic; and Prosper Randoce is not good for much. But Paule Méré, one of its author's best character-books, is very much better—it is a study of ill-starred love, as is Le Fiancé de Mlle. Saint-Maur, a book not so good, but not bad. Samuel Brohl et Cie is a very clever story of a rascal. I do not know that any of his subsequent novels, L'Idée de Jean Téterol, Noirs et Rouges, La Ferme du Choquard, Olivier Maugant, La Vocation du Comte Ghislain, La Bête, Une Gageure, which closes the list of my acquaintance with them, will disappoint the reader who does not raise his expectation too high. Olivier Maugant is perhaps the strongest. But the expression just used must not be taken as belittling. In both France and England such novel-writing had become almost a trade—certainly a profession: and the turning out of workmanlike and fairly satisfying articles for daily consumption is, if not a noble ambition, a quite respectable aim. M. Cherbuliez did something more than this: there are numerous scenes and situations in his work which do not merely interest, but excite, if they never exactly transport. And the provision of interest itself is, as has been allowed, remarkably bounteous. I should not despise, though I should be a little sorry for, a reader—especially an English reader—who found more of it in Cherbuliez than even in Feuillet, and much more than in Flaubert or Maupassant. The causes of such preference require no extensive indication, and I need not say, after or before what is said elsewhere, that this order of estimate is not mine. But it is to some extent a "fact in the case."[437]
Three eccentrics.
Before finishing this chapter we ought, perhaps, to consider three odd persons, two of them much extolled by some—Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Léon Cladel, and "Champfleury" of Les Excentriques. The two first were themselves emphatically "eccentrics"—one an apostle of dandyism (he actually wrote a book about Brummel, whom he had met early), a disdainful critic of rather untrustworthy vigour, and a stalwart reactionary to Catholicism and Royalism; the other a devotee of the exact opposite of dandyism, as the title of his best-known book, Les Va-nu-pieds, shows, and a Republican to the point of admiring the Commune. The opposition has at least the advantage of disproving prejudice, in any unfavourable remarks that may be made about either. To Barbey d'Aurevilly's criticism I have endeavoured to do justice in a more appropriate place than this.[438] His fiction occupied a much smaller, but not a small, proportion of his very voluminous work. Les Diaboliques and L'Ensorcelée, as well as Les Va-nu-pieds, are titles which entitle a reader to form certain more or less definite expectations about the books they label; and an author, by choosing them, deprives himself, to some extent, of the right justly claimed for him in Victor Hugo's well-known manifesto, to be judged merely according to his own scheme, and the goodness or badness of its carrying out. If Hugo himself had made Les Orientales studies of Montmartre and the Palais Royal, he could not have made out his right to the privilege he asserted. The objection applies to Barbey d'Aurevilly even more than to Cladel, but as the work of the latter is the less important, we may take it first.