Toussaint Galabru.
A pleasant contrast in this respect, though the end here is tragic in a way, may be found in Toussaint Galabru, the last, perhaps, of M. Fabre's books for which we can find special room here, though no doubt some favourites of particular readers may have been omitted. The novel is divided into two pretty equal halves, with an interval first of ten years between them and, almost immediately, of sixteen more. The first half is occupied by an adventure of "Mr. the nephew's," though he is not here "Mr. the nephew," but "Mr. the son," living with his father and mother at Bédarieux, M. Fabre's actual birthplace. He plays truant from Church on Advent Sunday to join a shooting expedition with his school-fellow Baptistin and that school-fellow's not too pious father, who is actually a church suisse, but has received an exeat from the curé to catch a famous hare for that curé to eat. The vicissitudes of the chase are numerous, and the whole is narrated with extraordinary skill as from the boy's point of view, his entire innocence, when he is brought into contact with very shady incidents, being—and this is a most difficult thing to do—hit off marvellously well. It is only towards the end of this part (he has been heard of before) that Toussaint Galabru, sorcerer and Lothario, makes his appearance—as clever as he is handsome, and as vicious as he is clever. When he does appear he has his way—with the game shot by others, and with a certain métayer's wife—after the same hand-gallop fashion in which the personage in Blake's lines enjoyed both the peach and the lady.
The earlier and shorter, but not short, interval, mentioned above, passes to 1852, and does little more than bring the now "Parisian" narrator into fresh contact with his old school-fellow Baptistin, now a full-grown priest, but, though very pious, in some difficulties from his persistent love of sport. Sixteen years later, again, in 1868, reappears, "coming to his death,"[534] Galabru himself. The part is chiefly occupied by a récit of intervening history (including a sadly unsuccessful attempt, both at spiritual and physical combat, by Baptistin) and by a much-interrupted journey in snow.[535] But it gives occasion for another agreeable "idyll" between Vincinet, Galabru's son, and the Abbé Baptistin's god-child Lalie; and it ends with a striking procession to carry, hardly in time, the viaticum to the dying wizard, whereby, if not his own weal in the other world, that of the lovers in this is happily brought about.
Not very many generalities are required on M. Ferdinand Fabre. How completely his way lies out of most of the ruts in which the wain of the French novel usually travels must have been shown; and it may be hoped that enough has been said also to show that there are plenty of minor originalities about him. No novelist[536] in any language known to me (unless you call Richard Jefferies a novelist) has such an extraordinary command of "the country"—bird-nature and rock scenery being his favourite but by no means his only subjects. For "Scenes of Clerical Life" he stands admittedly alone in France, and has naturally been dealt with most often from this point of view. Of that intense provincialism, in the good sense, which is characteristic of French literature, there have been few better representatives. Wordsworth himself is scarcely more the poet of our Lake and Hill country than Fabre is the novelist of the Cevennes. Peasant life and child life of the country (he meddles little, and not so happily, with towns of any size) find in him admirably "vatical" properties and combinations; and if he does not run any risk of Feste's rebuke by talking much of "ladies," he knows as much about women as a man well may. His comedy is never coarse or trivial, and the tragedy never goes off through the touch-hole. Of one situation—very easy to spoil by rendering it mawkish—the early but not "calf"-love of rustic man and maid, beginning in childhood, he was curiously master. George Sand herself[537] has nothing to beat (if she has anything to equal) the pairs of Taillevent and Riquette (in the novel named from the lover), and of Vincinet and Lalie (in Toussaint Galabru). As for his pictures of clerical cabals and clerical weaknesses, they may be too much of a good thing for some tastes; but that they are a good thing, both as an exercise in craftsmanship and as an alternative to the common run of French novel subjects, can hardly be denied. In this respect, and not in this respect only, M. Fabre has his own place, and that no low one.
André Theuriet.
In coming to M. André Theuriet I felt a mixture of curiosity with a slight uneasiness. For I had read not a few of his books[538] carefully and critically at their first appearance, and in such cases—when novels are not of the very first order (which, good as these are, I think few really critical readers would allot them) nor possessed of those "oddments" of appeal which sometimes make more or less inferior books readable and readable again—fresh acquaintance, after a long time, is dangerous. It has been said here (possibly more than once) that, when a book possesses this peculiar readableness, a second reading is positively beneficial to it, because you neglect the "knots in the reed" and slip along it easily. This is not quite the case with others: and, unless great critical care is taken, a new acquaintance, itself thirty years old, has, I fear, a better chance than an old one renewed after that time. However, the knight of Criticism, as of other ladies,[539] must dare any adventure, and ought to be able to bring the proper arms and methods to the task. For the purposes of renewal I chose Sauvageonne, Le Fils Maugars, and Raymonde. With the first, though I did not remember much more than its central situation and its catastrophe, with one striking incident, I do remember being originally pleased; the second has, I believe, at least sometimes, been thought Theuriet's masterpiece; and the third (which, by the way, is a "philippine" containing another story besides the title-one) is an early book which I had not previously read.
Sauvageonne.
The argument of Sauvageonne can be put very shortly. A young man of four-and-twenty, of no fortune, marries a rich widow ten years older than himself, and, as it happens, possessed of an adopted daughter of seventeen. He—who is by no means an intentional scoundrel, but a commonplace and selfish person, and a gentleman neither by birth nor by nature—soon wearies of his somewhat effusive and exacting wife; the girl takes a violent fancy to him; accident hurries on the natural if not laudable consequences; the wife covers the shame by succeeding in passing off their result as her own child, but the strain is too much for her, and she goes mad, but does not die.