It is remarkable how greatly the “novel with a purpose” has developed during the last twenty years in England and, to a less extent, in France. The characters are creatures of their conditions; and it is these conditions, not the characters, that do the talking. Some novels to-day are such careful and withal highly interesting guides to the sociology of England towards the end of the black Industrial Age that we cannot wonder if their authors take themselves too seriously as politicians and reformers. Yet these works show, after all, the same defect as Les Plus Forts, they have no constructive theory of life to set against the very well-defined, solid, and still apparently effective system which they criticise. All their most ironic descriptions, their most penetrating satire are negative, and, in the end, the utterances of men “wandering between two worlds, one dead, one powerless to be born.”
Au Fil des Jours is an interesting collection of pieces in which the author has not made up his mind whether he will write short stories or articles upon social conditions. There is no harm in that; some people may even say that M. Clemenceau has produced a new variety of readable matter; but, curiously enough, the substance of the story is often so telling that one quarrels with the writer for not having put it into the best shape. Take one of the pieces in Au Fil des Jours—La Roulotte. Briefly, a weary old gipsy drives in a covered donkey-cart into a country hamlet, and stops by the riverside, where all the gossips are washing. He is received with hostile and watchful silence, because gipsies are always the scapegoats in a peasant district, and anything and everything that may be lost, stolen or strayed—even if it turns up again—is always laid to their account. In the night he dies, unnoticed; and, after some further time has passed, the villagers inspect his cart. Finding him there, dead, with a very small grandson living, they fetch the local constable and the mayor. The arm of the Law begins to function, the child is sent to the workhouse, the moribund donkey is “taken care of” by one of the villagers, and the dilapidated old cart, which only contained a few rags, is left by the riverside.
But the French peasant knows how to turn every little thing to profit: nothing is useless in his eyes. Gradually handy fragments of the donkey-cart begin to disappear. Bits of the iron fittings vanish, the tilt-props go, a shaft follows, one wheel after another slips away and is no more seen. In fact, the donkey-cart, as such, disappears from mortal sight. Then, one fine day, a gipsy-woman comes swinging along the road, where she had followed the traces of the donkey-cart, and asks for news of her old father and her little boy. The authorities of the village tell her of the old gipsy’s death and burial: they do not require her to pay for his obsequies only because they see it would be no use. She goes to fetch the child from the workhouse, and then asks for the donkey and cart. The former, they tell her, died in the hands of the villager who “took care of him” (and sold his skin for a fair sum). She accepts this loss with resignation; but the cart, as she says, cannot have died: where is her father’s “roulotte“?—Ah, well, nobody in the village knows anything about that! It was here, no doubt, since the old gipsy died in it—but since then——The Law, once more represented by mayor and constables, can only shrug its shoulders in the finest French manner and disclaim all responsibility for a vagabond’s goods. But the gipsy-woman persists: she begins even to clamour for her rights. “Rights, indeed!” The village, hitherto indifferent, becomes hostile; and the old cry that meets the gipsy everywhere is raised, for someone on the edge of the crowd calls out, “Thief!” It is a mere expression of disapproval, not a direct accusation, but the whole village takes it up joyfully: “Thief! Thief!” So the gipsy-woman, who, as it chanced, has stolen nothing, is hounded out of the commune with sticks and stones and objurgations by those who had themselves appropriated her old donkey-cart piecemeal. “A bit of rusty iron whizzed past her as she crossed the bridge. It may once have served as her donkey’s shoe.”
Such is the tale: a sample of many in Au Fil des Jours. Irony and realism are not wanting, nor yet the grimly picturesque, but the reader is left thinking: “What a little gem this would be if it were told by Maupassant, or some other master of the conte!” Certainly M. Clemenceau has something else to do than tell contes! But his literary material is so fine that it is his own fault if we expect the very best of him. As it is, he does not take the trouble to cut the story out clearly from the matrix of thought and memories which enfolded it in his own mind. The effect on the reader is, one might say, a little vague and murmurous, like some tale half-heard in a crowd.
It is a strange thing that the countryside, Nature, the pure and never-failing spring of inspiration for poetry and human delight, should turn so different a countenance towards those who live with her, year out and year in, winning sustenance for us all from her broad and often ungenial breast. Our Mother Earth is an iron taskmaster to the tillers of the soil grinding out their youth and strength, bowing their eyes to their labour, so that all her beauty passes them by unseen. Either Nature keeps her charms jealously for the untroubled mind and the leisured eye, or else all the beauty that we see in her is borrowed, a glamour lent by some immaterial force— not ours, perhaps, but certainly not her own. Be this as it may, in the Embuscades de la Vie M. Clemenceau beholds and describes the careless, endless, natural beauty amid which the peasant-lives that he sketches for us are set; but these themselves are often as ugly as bare stone, and the men and women are hard and close-fisted with one another mainly because the earth is so grudging to them. These stories are the most clear-cut of all Clemenceau’s essays in fiction. They are not exactly contes, either: they are the discoveries, one might say, of Clemenceau in his ancestral character as the descendant of a line of doctors and landowners who worked for generations among the small bourgeois and the tillers of the soil. How he knows them! and—if French fiction is to be believed—how unchangeable they are! Since the bourgeois gained his freedom in the great Revolution by using the arm of the sans-culotte, what a grip he has kept upon his possession! and how much dearer to him his property is than anything else in the world! Clemenceau does but take up the theme of Balzac and others when he describes provincial France and its twin gods, money and the land—money which compels loveless marriages, envy, fawning, bitterness, perpetual small cheating or endless insect-like toil; and the land, in whose service men work themselves and their kindred to the bone, and grudge a pittance to old age.
The bourgeoisie and their customs vary with their nationality, but peasant life is much the same all over Europe. Clemenceau found similar traits of life and character in Galicia to those of La Vendée; and others will tell us that from Ireland to Russia, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the peasant and the small farmer conduct their lives upon the same lines: hard work, dependence upon the seasons, family authority, tribal feuds, and a meticulous social system of comment and convention, under which the individual finds himself far less free than in the unhampered, unnoticed life of the towns.
Yet many of the “ambushes of life” are to be found in the cities; and about a third of these tales are laid in the towns and among the well-to-do middle class. M. Clemenceau’s satire plays freely upon the “marriage of convention,” by which two families agree, after a certain amount of haggling and mutual sharp practice, to bind two young strangers together in the closest of relationship, for time, and also, we are told, for eternity, in the interest of property alone. Still, human nature adapts itself to anything, and even such marriages have their compensations, as our author lightly and ironically points out. Being a genuine sociologist, he does not handle these tales of the bourgeoisie and their vagaries within what is, after all, an artificial and exclusive form of existence, as seriously as he does the great plain outlines of peasant life.
Whether he writes of town or country, of Fleur de Froment and Six Sous, or of a ménage à trois; whether he calls up a Greek courtesan to theorise about her profession, or describes a long-standing bitter, and motiveless peasant feud, his style is always fluent and charming, vivid with irony, and graceful with poetic thought. Yet the defect as well as the merit of M. Clemenceau’s fiction and essay-writing is just this admirable, unvarying ease and fluency. One feels that he writes with perfect unconsciousness, as the thoughts come into his head. And, after a while, the ungrateful reader is inclined to ask for some kind of selection in the feast before him, where all is good, very good, even, but nothing is excellent. Like a far greater writer, Clemenceau—on paper at least—“has no peaks in him.” His literature was an admirable “by-product” of his almost limitless capacities; his actions and not his writings are the achievements of his life.