Re-reading, therefore—though perhaps the consequence may not seem downright to laymen—promised some critical interest. I first selected for the purpose, to give the author as good a chance as possible, Serge Panine, which the Academy crowned, and which went near its hundred and fifty editions when it was still a four-year-old; and Le Maître de Forges itself, the most popular of all, adding Le Docteur Rameau and La Grande Marnière, which my memory gave me as having seemed to be of such pillars as the particular structure could boast.
Serge Panine.
I suppose the Forty crowned Serge Panine because it was a virtuous book, and an attack on the financial trickeries which, about the time and a little later, enriched the French language with the word "krach." Otherwise, though no one could call it bad, its royalty could hardly seem much other than that which qualifies for the kingdom of the blind. The situations are good, and they are worked up into a Fifth Act, as we may call it (it occupies almost exactly a fifth of the book, which was, of course, dramatised), melodramatic to the nth, ending in a discovery of flagrant delict, or something very like it, and in the shooting of a son-in-law by his mother-in-law to save the downfall of his reputation. But the characters do not play up to their parts, or each other, very well, with the possible or passable exception of the mother-in-law, and of one very minor personage, the secretary Maréchal, whom M. Ohnet, perhaps distrustful of his power to make him more, left minor. The hero is a Polish prince, with everything that a stage Polish prince requires about him—handsome, superficially amiable, what the precise call "caressing" and the vulgar "carneying" in manner, but extravagant, quite non-moral, and not possessed of much common sense. His princess Micheline is a silly jilt before marriage and a sillier "door-mat" (as some women call others) of a wife. Her rival, and in a fashion foster-sister (she has been adopted before Micheline's birth), does things which many people might do, but does not do them in a concatenation accordingly. The jilted serious young man Pierre accepts a perfectly impossible position in reference to his former fiancée and his supplanter, and gives more proofs of its impossibility by his conduct and speech than was at all necessary. The conversation is very flat, and the descriptions are chiefly confined to long, gaudy inventories of rich parvenus' houses, which read like auctioneers' catalogues.
But the worst part of the book, and probably that which at its appearance exasperated the critics, though it did not disturb the abonné—or, more surprisingly, the Immortals—is the flatness of style which has been already noted in the conversation, but which overflows insupportably into the narrative. M. Ohnet speaks somewhere, justly enough, of "le style à la fois prétentieux et plat, familier aux reporters." But was he trying—there is no sign of it—to parody these unfortunate persons when he himself described dinner-rolls as "Ces boules dorées qui sollicitent l'appétit le plus rebelle, et accommodées dans une serviette damassée artistement pliée, parent si élégamment un couvert"? Or when he tells us that at a ball "Les femmes, leurs splendides toilettes gracieusement étalées sur les meubles bas et moëlleux, causaient chiffons sous l'éventail, ou écoutaient les cantilènes d'un chanteur exotique pendant que les jeunes gens leur chuchotaient des galanteries à l'oreille." This last is really worthy of the feeblest member of our "plated silver fork school" between the time of Scott and Miss Austen and that of Dickens and Thackeray.
Le Maître de Forges.
In the year 1902, Le Maître de Forges, which was then just twenty years old, had reached its three hundred and sixty-seventh edition. Six years later Fromentin's Dominique, which was then forty-five years old, had reached its twenty-seventh. The accident of the two books lying side by side on my table has enabled me to make this comparison, the moral of which will be sufficiently drawn by a reference to what has been said of Dominique above,[543] and by the few remarks on M. Ohnet's most popular book which follow.
One old receipt for popularity, "Put your characters up several steps in society," M. Ohnet has faithfully obeyed. We begin with a marquis unintentionally poaching on the ironmaster's ground, and (rather oddly) accepting game which he has not shot thereon. We end with the marquis's sister putting her dainty fingers before the mouth of a duke's exploding pistol—to the not surprising damage of those digits, but with the result of happiness ever afterwards for the respectable characters of the book. There is a great deal of gambling, though, unfortunately told in a rather uninteresting manner of récit, which is a pity, for gambling can be made excellent in fiction.[544] There are several of M. Ohnet's favourite inventories, and a baroness—not a bad baroness—who has frequented sales, and knows all about bric-à-brac. Also there are several exciting situations, even before we come to the application of a lady's fingers as tompions. M. Ohnet is, it has been said, rather good at situations. But situations, to speak frankly, are rather things for the stage than for the story, except very rarely, and of a very striking—which does not mean melodramatic—kind. And it is very important, off the stage, that they should be led up to, and acted in by, vigorously drawn and well filled in characters.
To do M. Ohnet justice, he has attempted to meet this requirement in one instance at least, the one instance by which the book has to stand or fall. Some of the minor personages (like Maréchal in Serge Panine) are fair enough; and the little baroness who, arriving at a country-house in a whirl of travel and baggage, cries, "Où est mon mari? Est-ce que j'ai déjà égaré mon mari?" puts one, for the moment, in quite a good temper. The ironmaster's sister, too, is not a bad sort of girl. He himself is too much of the virtuous, loyal, amiable, but not weak man of the people; the marquis is rather null, and the duke, who jilts his cousin Claire de Beaulieu, gambles, marries a rich and detestable daughter of a chocolate-man, and finally fires through Claire's fingers, is very much, to use our old phrase, à la douzaine. But Claire might save the book, and probably does so for those who like it. To me she seems quite wrongly put together. The novel has been so very widely read, in the original and in translations, that it is perhaps unnecessary to waste space on a full analysis of its central scene—a thing not to be done very shortly. It may be sufficient to say that Claire, treacherously and spitefully informed, by her successful rival, of the fact that she has been jilted, and shortly afterwards confronted with the jilter himself, recovers, as it seems to her, to the company, and I suppose to the author, the whip-hand by summoning the ironmaster (who is hanging about "promiscuous," and is already known to be attached to her, though she has given him no direct encouragement) and bestowing her hand upon him, insisting, too, upon being married at once, before the other pair. The act is supposed to be that of an exceptionally calm, haughty, and aristocratic damsel: and the acceptance of it is made by a man certainly deep in love, but independent, sharp-sighted, and strong-willed. To be sure, he could not very well refuse; but this very fact should have weighed additionally, with a girl of Claire's supposed temperament, in deciding her not to make a special Leap Year for the occasion. To hand yourself over to Dick because Tom has declined to have anything to do with you is no doubt not a very unusual proceeding: but it is not usually done quite so much coram populo, or with such acknowledgment of its being done to spite Tom and Tom's preferred one.[545]
Le Docteur Rameau.
Two more of "Les Batailles de la Vie" (as, for some not too obvious[546] reason, it pleased M. Ohnet to super-title his novels) may perhaps suffice to give a basis for a more general judgment of his position. Le Docteur Rameau is, at least towards its close, one of the most ambitious, if not the most ambitious of all its author's books. The hero is one of those atheistic and republican physicians who are apt rather to embêter us by their frequency in French novels. He is thrown into the also familiar situation of ascertaining, after his wife's death, that she has been false, and that his daughter, of whom he is very fond, is probably or certainly not his own. At the end, however, things come right as usual. Rameau is converted from hating his daughter, which is well, and from being an atheist, which is better. But, unluckily, M. Ohnet devotes several pages, in his own peculiar style, to a rhetorical exhibition of the logic of these conclusions. It seems to come to this. There is no God and no soul, because freewill is sufficient to account for everything. But M. le Docteur Rameau has willed, in the free-willingest manner, to hate his daughter, and finds he cannot. Therefore there is a God and a soul. A most satisfactory conclusion, but a most singular major premiss. Why should there be no God and no soul because there is (if there is) freewill?[547] But all is well that ends well: and how can you end better than by being heard to ejaculate, "Mon Dieu!" (quite seriously and piously, and not in the ordinary trivial way) by a scientific friend, at the church of Sainte-Clotilde, during your daughter's wedding?