A LETTER FROM FRANCE
THE PRESENT STATE OF THE FRENCH NOVEL
Paris, October, 1919.
IN France as much as, and perhaps more than, in England the novel has been since the eighteenth century the central massif of literature. While in England the poets and the novelists formed two quite distinct groups, while the poets Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns, Tennyson, Swinburne remained pure poets, in France there have been few poets who have not wished to write novels. Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, Vigny, Gautier have done so. A pure critic like Sainte-Beuve wished, with Volupté, to try his hand at the novel. Taine left in manuscript the novel Etienne Maylan and Renan the novel Patrice; they did not publish these books because they recognised them to be mediocre, but both wished to obtain the glory of the novelist. The novel is in France the highest object of literary ambition. It alone assures a position of material and social importance. Thus it is that a novelist who is read by the upper and middle classes is necessarily admitted to the Academy while a historian or a philosopher is admitted only in exceptional circumstances, and great poets like Baudelaire, Gautier, Banville, Paul Fort remain outside unless they have certain connections and certain sources of support. The prosperity of the novel at a given moment may then be considered, in France, as the most obvious mark of a powerful literary activity. No form of literature addresses a larger public, provokes more discussion, or gives more of its own colour to a generation or to an epoch. I will endeavour to indicate here in a few pages the condition of the French novel on the morrow of the war.
Beyond doubt it is passing through a moment of mediocrity. This is not because its public is beginning to break up. Publishers and readers demand novels. In default of genuinely new novels many old ones are reissued and read again and cheap reprints are swarming. Every new novel in which any grain of originality can be perceived is discussed and brought into the light and sells satisfactorily. And yet nothing so far has told us of the appearance of the Flaubert, the Zola, the Maupassant of to-morrow.
Naturalism proves to have been the last great school, massive, compact, and powerful, of the French novel. Well, the survivors of the naturalist movement, such as MM. Céard, Hennique, Descaves, have ceased to write novels or else, if they still write them, have given up completely the methods of naturalism, and seek, without success, to adapt themselves to new tastes. It is not, however, impossible that in a little time from now naturalism in several ways may again be somewhat in fashion. There is a tendency among young writers and critics to revise the judgment given in the case of Zola, as the judgment on Dickens has been revised in England, and to consider that the poverty and emptiness of his last books has unjustly thrown a shadow on the profound and powerful works of his maturity. Those works, born of the war, which have been most favourably received, have been on the whole inspired by naturalist methods of observation and composition. The European success of Le Feu is due in large part to the fact that the author applies to the great war the point of view and the methods of Zola. It was also from the point of view of the story of a squad that Zola wrote La Débâcle.
So far the novel of manners and psychology born of the war has only been attempted by writers of the older generation, that which knew the masters of the naturalist novel, which lived their life, which took part, from one side or another of the barricade, in their struggles.
I am here thinking especially of the works written during the war by the doyen of the French novel, M. Paul Bourget. M. Bourget occupies to-day in the novel a position analogous to that of Zola in his last years. The young literary generation is hostile to him or regards him with contemptuous indifference, except that part of this generation which is grouped round M. Maurras, whose political ideas he has adopted. He is justly reproached with a painful style, with conventional psychology in upper and middle class surroundings, with laborious intrigues carried out according to antiquated formulæ. He must be regarded, nevertheless, with respect as a great worker, who seeks conscientiously to extend the limits of his manner, and, above all, as the sole representative to-day of the old tradition of the French novelists of the nineteenth century—that of Balzac, of Sand, of Flaubert, of Maupassant, of Zola. Perhaps he marks the irremediable decadence of this style which the twentieth century will replace by one more supple and more precise.