THE MODERN FRENCH NOVELISTS.
The grand old race of French story-tellers has wellnigh departed. One by one the great names in this department of modern French literature become erased from the lists of the living. Nor is this all. Many of the most brilliant of the novelists of the day have relinquished the pen of the romance-writer for that of the politician. About, for instance, expends in the leading articles of the XIXe. Siècle the wit, the sparkle, the energy that charmed us long years ago in the pages of his novels. The younger Dumas—always less a novelist than a dramatist and (we must coin a word to do justice to the position) an immoralist—confines his efforts now to the production of unclean plays and uncleaner prefaces, that glow with unwholesome lustre like the phosphorescent flames that are bred of corruption and quiver over graves. Pitiless and cold, with a scalpel in one hand and a magnifying-glass in the other, he is at once the closest observer and the most eloquent denunciator of the moral maladies of French society. But he is not a novelist, strictly speaking. His gifts have another direction, his mind another bent. Nor is he altogether a dramatist, as is Sardou. His comedies are less remarkable on the stage than they are in the library. An invincible passion for preaching mars the development of the action. His characters say more than they do, and his plays charm less by any actual theatrical qualifications than by the extreme finish and brilliancy of their style. He will bring two men on the stage, and will let them talk together for half an hour without moving a muscle. They say wonderfully wise and witty things, it is true. But such dramatic writing is not exactly in the manner of Shakespeare. M. Dumas evidently dreams that his mission is to regenerate French society, but, apparently, he has as yet found the task beyond his powers. Nor are the means he suggested—in L'Étrangère, for instance—exactly those that would most strongly commend themselves to the Anglo-Saxon mind.
Among the most daring and successful of the novel-writers of the day we must undoubtedly number M. Émile Zola, whose recent works have created a deep and widespread sensation in literary circles in France. He is the chief of the so-called Realistic school, and is already recognized as a power in the land. To describe the characteristics of his works it is necessary to speak in superlatives. They are immensely strong, immensely realistic, and, it must also be added, immensely repulsive. Vice stands before us stripped of all her plumes and tinsel—naked, hideous and unclean. In Thérèse Roquin, for instance, he tells a tale of adulterous passion, of murder and of remorse. It is precisely the theme that used to arouse the genius of George Sand to its loftiest and most impassioned flights. But instead of poets and high-born ladies, moonlit nights and Italian landscapes, poetry, romance, art and music, Zola descends to the lower classes of society: he takes his characters from the shop and the factory, and shows us evil in all its abominations, remorse in all its horrors. In L'Assommoir, his latest and, in some respects, his most remarkable work, he has given us so atrocious and so powerful a delineation of the vices of the French working-classes that the mind recoils, sickened and terrified, from the contemplation of the tremendous picture. To find its parallel even in another form of art we must turn to some of the most repulsive of the pictures of Hogarth, the representation of Gin Lane or the dissection-scene in the "Successive Stages of Cruelty." Yet the foremost figures in this terrible delineation, his hero and heroine, are not wicked: they are simply weak. The assommoir—otherwise the drinking-shop—is the spider that poisons and ensnares their humble natures. The first pages of the book, the wedding and installation of Gervaise and Coupeau, the birth of their child, her anxieties, her cares, her longing for a clock, her pride in her modest home, are all told with a touch of tenderness, which, however, speedily disappears amid an accumulation of unclean horrors. The book is hideous, terrific, disgusting, but it is not immoral. It is scarcely fit for any decent woman to read, but it is no more demoralizing than is the interior of a dissecting-room.
In the History of the Rougon Macquart Family, a series of six separate works united by the slightest of links, M. Zola attempted to trace the career of a family during the period of the Second Empire, or rather he tried, in imitation of Victor Hugo, to make an epoch, and not a human being, the hero of the work. In this he has but partially succeeded. The Rougon Macquart Family is less a novel or series of novels than it is a dissertation on the Second Empire from a hostile point of view. As a gallery of historical pictures, painted by an able and contemporaneous hand, it is a work of considerable value, but this value is in spite of, not on account of, the story. Victor Hugo could indeed embody in his Quatre-Vingt Treize the mighty image of the first Revolution, but M. Zola is not Victor Hugo, and such a task is beyond his powers.
One of the peculiarities of this tremendous and iconoclastic realist is the care with which he writes and the indefatigable polish he bestows upon his style. He writes and re-writes, corrects and copies, weighs every phrase, and is never content till the written words exactly reproduce the image of his thought. Another is his extreme reticence and self-possession. There are no traces of a fine frenzy about the most vigorous of his works. He paints vice from the standpoint of a street-corner. To others he leaves the roses and the raptures: for him are the mud and the stones. He has no illusions respecting the lower orders, as had Dickens and Eugène Sue. He reminds one of a certain picture by Courbet, who, disgusted with the elegant studies of the nude in the annual exhibition, painted a group of real every-day bathers, some half a dozen washerwomen at Asnières. The picture was revolting, but it was great, because there was truth in the subject and power in the execution. And notwithstanding the tempest of adverse criticism which his later works, and especially his Assommoir, have called forth, he holds a high and recognized place amid the writers of the day.
To turn from Zola to Alphonse Daudet is to leave the back slums of a city for a flower-decked forest-path: it is to exchange the hideous facts of police records and city statistics for the fresh and tender poesy of the woods and fields. M. Daudet is yet so young that he may possibly surpass in the future even the great success of his earlier career—namely, Fromont Jeune et Risler Ainé. His Nabob, now in course of publication as a feuilleton in one of the Parisian newspapers, is a work of far different style and scope from his first great success.
Among the rising writers of the Revue des Deux Mondes the name of André Theuriet is rapidly becoming prominent. As chaste, as tender, as sincere as Daudet, if less gifted and poetical, he depicts provincial life and manners with scarcely less skill than does his brilliant contemporary the factory and the salons of the Marais. He is, above all, an adorer of the woods—not such wild virgin forests as may still be met with in our own land, but the decorous and well-trained woods of France, where the very trees seem to have learned politeness and keep to their own places, not one of them daring to tower to an undue height or to spread its roots or branches over an unaccustomed breadth of space. Born at Marly-le-Roi, his youth was spent at Bar-le-Duc, and in his mature manhood he was transferred to Auberive—three points where his love of forests could be indulged in to any extent. Something of the freshness, the summer sweetness, the natural charm of his favorite haunts seems to pervade the atmosphere of his graceful and delicate tales. He is one of the few French novelists one can imagine writing in English. Gerard's Marriage, Angèle's Fortune, An Undine, are all imbued with that peculiar quality which the French call honnêteté—an expression for which our language furnishes no equivalent. Neither striking in incident nor complicated in plot, his stories charm by their delicate delineations of character, their refinement of tone and sincerity of sentiment, and their truthfulness of description. His stories remind one of what Miss Mulock's novels used to be when she wrote her best, while Daudet might be characterized as a Parisian mingling of Hawthorne and Bret Harte, and Zola as a brutal Thackeray.
M. Jules Claretie has written many novels. But he has also written plays, histories, biographies, leading articles: he is the most indefatigable of writers, as he is one of the most intelligent and clear-headed. He has, however, the defect of being a literary Don Juan, wasting his smiles amid the mille e tre instead of consecrating his pen in legitimate wedlock to a single Muse. The immense facility with which he writes is fatal to the enduring success of his novels. They abound in powerful episodes and strong bits of description, and here and there some single scene, original in conception and forcible in treatment, starts out from the mass like the scarlet draperies in a faded piece of Gobelin tapestry. His gifts are those of an historian or of a critic, not those of a novel-writer. When in his historical novels, such as Les Muscadins or Le Beau Solignac, he trenches on the firm ground of the Real, his true force displays itself. In these works he has attempted to revive the lengthy chronicles of the elder Dumas, but without that irrepressible verve, that headlong vehemence of animal spirits, which, like the rush of a locomotive, bore the reader, breathless and interested, over rough places and smooth alike. The draught M. Claretie brews for our drinking bears no affinity to that intoxicating and sparkling champagne. The Dumas brand is exhausted, and all imitations are but as flat cider in comparison. In the Renegade, which is a specimen of a style of fiction largely in vogue at present in France—one that might be called the contemporaneous historical novel—M. Claretie found himself once more on firm and familiar ground. The hero of the Renegade is a Republican politician who turns Bonapartist, and who finally commits suicide something after the fashion of M. Prevost-Paradol, whose career, it is indeed said, suggested the book.
But M. Claretie is seen at his best when he lays down the pen of a novel-writer and takes up that of a critic or that of a chronicler of passing events. His plays possess the same defects as his novels, being diffuse, devoid of incident and overloaded with unnecessary details. But the clearness and vigor of the style, the strong sense and daylight intelligence that reign in all his writings, prevent his poorest works from being commonplace or uninteresting.
Arsène Houssaye, like his almost un-namable contemporary Belot, is the Laureate of Vice. His imagination is as unclean as a street-gutter, only it is a gutter that runs rose-water. He deals exclusively with the "roses-and-raptures" side of the question. He always lays the scene of his romances in dainty boudoirs, beneath the soft light of real wax candles (gas would be far too vulgar). He revels in annals of the nobility. His heroes seldom or never are without a "handle to their names." His heroines are usually selected from a set whose name he has chosen as the title of one of his novels—Les Courtisanes du Grand Monde. His books would be injurious if they were not so very stupid. They are improbable in incident, immoral in tone, exaggerated in style and lamentably dragged out in length. The trail of the class among which M. Houssaye spends his days is visible in every page. M. Houssaye is possessed with a passionate desire to become a member of the French Academy. Well, why should he not sit where Taine does not and where Sardou does? His History of the Forty-first Fauteuil, one of the brightest and wittiest of his works, will probably avail, not to open the doors to him, but to bar them against him.