NOVELISTS.
The peculiarity of the eighteenth century in France as regards literature——that is to say, the application of great talents to almost every branch of literary production without the result of a distinct original growth in any one department——is nowhere more noticeable than in the department of prose fiction[288]. The names of Lesage, Prévost, Marivaux, Voltaire, Rousseau, are deservedly recorded among the list of the best novel writers. Yet, with the exception of Manon Lescaut, which for the time had no imitators, of the great works of Lesage which, admirable in execution, were by no means original in conception, and of the exquisite but comparatively insignificant variety of the prose Conte, of which Voltaire was the chief practitioner, nothing in the nature of a masterpiece, still less anything in the nature of an epoch-making work, was composed. The example of Manon was left for the nineteenth century to develop, the others either died out (the adventure romance, after Lesage's model, flourishing brilliantly in England, but hardly at all in France), or else were subordinated to a purpose, the purpose of advocating philosophe views, or of pandering to the not very healthy cravings of an altogether artificial society. Yet, so far as merely literary merits are concerned, few branches of literature were more fertile than this during the period.
Lesage.
The first, and on the whole, the most considerable name of the century in fiction is that of the author of Gil Blas. Alain René Lesage was born at Sarzeau, near Vannes, on the 8th of May, 1668, and died at Boulogne on the 17th of November, 1747. He was bred a lawyer, and should have had a fair competence, but, being early left an orphan, was deprived of most of his property by the dishonesty of his guardian. He married young, moreover, and, unlike most of the prominent men of letters of his day, never seems to have enjoyed any solid patronage or protection from any powerful man or woman. This is indeed sufficiently accounted for by anecdotes which exist showing his extreme independence of character. Like most men of talent in such circumstances, he turned, though not very early, to literature, and began by a translation of the 'Letters' of Aristaenetus. No great success could have awaited him in this line, and perhaps the greatest stroke of good-fortune in his life was the suggestion of the Abbé de Lyonne that he should turn his attention to Spanish literature, a suggestion which was not made more unpalatable by the present of a small annuity. He translated the 'New Don Quixote' of Avellaneda (than which he might have found a better subject), and he adapted freely plays from Rojas, Lope de Vega, and Calderon. It was not, however, till he was nearly forty that he produced anything of real merit. The Diable Boiteux appeared in 1707, and was at once popular. Still Lesage did not desert the stage, and the production of his admirable comedy Turcaret ought to have secured him success there. But the Comédie Française was at that time more under the influence of clique than at any other time of its history; and Lesage, disgusted with the treatment he received from it, gave himself up entirely to writing farces and operettas for the minor theatres, and to prose fiction. Gil Blas, his greatest work, originally appeared in 1715, but was not completed till twenty years later. He also wrote—besides one or two bright but trifling minor works of a fictitious character, La Valise Trouvée (a letter-bag supposed to be picked up), Une Journée des Parques, a keen piece of Lucianic satire, etc.—many other romances in the same general style as his great works, and more or less borrowed from Spanish originals. The chief of these are Guzman d'Alfarache, Estévanille Gonzalez, Le Bachelier de Salamanque, and a curious Defoe-like book entitled Vie et Aventures de M. de Beauchéne. In his old age he retired to the house of his second son, who held a canonry at Boulogne, and resided there for some years, until, in 1747, he died in his eightieth year. His works have hitherto been very insufficiently collected and edited.
Le Diable Boiteux and Gil Blas are far the greatest of Lesage's romances, and, as it happens, they are the most original, little except the starting-point being borrowed in the one case, and nothing but a few detached details in the other. Lesage was, however, true to the general spirit of his model, the picaroon romance of Spain, a kind of Roman d'Aventures transported from the days and conventional conditions of chivalry to those of ordinary but still adventurous life in the Peninsula. The directly satirical intention predominates in the Diable Boiteux, the more purely narrative faculty in Gil Blas. In both the piercing observation of human character, which Lesage possessed in a greater degree perhaps than any other French writer, appears, and so does his remarkable power of making the results of this observation live and move. No French writer is so little of a mere Frenchman as Lesage, and in this point of cosmopolitan humanity he may be compared, without extravagance, in kind if not in degree, to Shakespeare. Besides his skill in character-drawing, and his faculty of spicing his narrative with epigram, Lesage also possessed extraordinary narrative ability. His books are not remarkable for what is called plot, that is to say, the action rather continues indefinitely in a straight line than converges on a given and definite point. But this continuance is so adroitly managed that no break is felt, and the succession very seldom becomes tedious. The novel of Lesage is the immediate parent and pattern of that of Fielding and Smollett in England. It is somewhat remarkable that it had no successors of importance or merit in France. This is probably to be accounted for by the cosmopolitan tone which has been already remarked upon. Indeed Lesage, as a rule, has had less justice done to him by his countrymen than any other of their great writers. Yet his style, looked at merely from the point of view of art, is excellent, and perhaps superior to that of any of his contemporaries properly so called.
Close in the track of Madame de la Fayette followed Madame de Fontaines (Marie Louise Charlotte de Givri), the date of whose birth is unknown, but who died in 1730. She was a friend of Voltaire's youth, and her best work is named La Comtesse de Savoie, the date of the story being the eleventh century. She also wrote a short story of less merit called Aménophis. Madame de Tencin (Claudine Alexandrine Guérin), the mother of D'Alembert, the friend of Fontenelle, and one of the most famous salon-holders of the early eighteenth century, was a more fertile and a cleverer writer. She was born in 1681, and died in 1749. She had a bad heart, but an excellent head, and she showed her powers in the Mémoires du Comte de Comminges and the Siége de Calais, besides some minor works. The fault of almost all romances of the La Fayette school, the habit of throwing the scene into periods about which the writers knew nothing, appears in these works.
Marivaux.
But the first writer of fiction after Lesage who is worthy of separate mention at any length (for in these later centuries of our history there are, as any reader of books will understand, vast numbers of practitioners in every branch of literary art who are entirely unworthy of notice in a compendious history of literature) is Marivaux, an original and remarkable novelist, who, though by no possibility to be ranked among the great names of French literature, occupies a not inconsiderable place among those who are remarkable without being great. Pierre Carlet de Marivaux, whose strict paternal appellation was simply Pierre Carlet, was born at Paris on the 8th of February, 1688. His father was of Norman origin, and held employments in the financial branch of the public service. Very little is known of the son's youth, and indeed not much of his life. He is said to have produced his first play, Le Père Prudent et Equitable, at the age of eighteen, and his dramatic industry was thenceforward considerable. As a romancer he worked more by fits and starts. His first attempt at prose fiction is said to have been—for the authenticity of the attribution is not certain—a romance in a kind of pseudo-Spanish style, called Les Effets surprenants de la Sympathie, published six years later. Then he took to the sterile and ignoble literature of travesty, attacking Homer and Fénelon in the style of Scarron and Cotton. This brought him, through La Motte, under the influence of Fontenelle, to whom he owed not a little. He made a fortune and lost it in Law's bubble. Then he turned journalist, and after writing social articles in the Mercure, started a periodical himself, the nature of which is sufficiently shown by its borrowed title, Le Spectateur Français, 1722. At a later period he began another paper of the same kind, Le Cabinet du Philosophe, 1734. His plays, which have been already noticed, were written partly for the Comédie Française, and partly for a very popular Italian company which appeared in France during the second quarter of the century. But for the present purpose his works which concern us are the famous romance of Marianne, 1731-1742, and the less-known one of the Paysan Parvenu, 1735. His dramas, rather than his fictions, procured him a place in the Academy in 1742, and he died in 1763.
Marianne has been said to be the origin of Pamela, which may not be exactly the fact, though it is difficult not to believe that it gave Richardson his idea. But it is certain that it is a remarkable novel, and that it, rather than the plays, gave rise to the singular phrase Marivaudage, with which the author, not at all voluntarily, has enriched literature. The plot is simple enough. A poor but virtuous girl has adventures and recounts them, and the manner of recounting is extremely original. A morally faulty but intellectually admirable contemporary, Crébillon the younger, described this manner excellently by saying that the characters not only say everything that they have done and everything that they have thought, but everything that they would have liked to think but did not. This curious kind of mental analysis is expressed in a style which cannot be defended from the charge of affectation notwithstanding its extreme ingenuity and occasional wit. The real importance of Marianne in the history of fiction is that it is the first example of the novel of analysis rather than of incident (though incident is still prominent), and the first in which an elaborate style, strongly imbued with mannerism, is applied to this purpose. The Paysan Parvenu, the title of which suggested Restif's novel Le Paysan Perverti, and which was probably not without influence on Joseph Andrews, is not very different in manner from Marianne, and, like it, was left unfinished after publication in parts at long intervals.
Prévost