XIV. OTHER NOVELISTS OF 1870-1900…

XIV. OTHER NOVELISTS OF 1870-1900

[Sidenote: The last stage.]

The remaining novelists of the Third Republic, apart from the survivors of the Second Empire and the Naturalist School, need not occupy us very long, but must have some space. There would be no difficulty on my part in writing a volume on them, for during half the time I had to produce an article on new French books, including novels, every month,[519] and during no small part of the rest, I did similar work on a smaller and less regular scale, reading also a great deal for my own purposes. But acknowledging, as I have elsewhere done, the difficulty of equating judgment of contemporary and non-contemporary work exactly, I think I shall hardly be doing the new writers of this time injustice if I say that no one, except some excluded by our specifications as living, could put in any pretensions to be rated on level with the greater novelists from Lesage to Maupassant. There are those, of course, who would protest in favour of M. Ferdinand Fabre, and yet others would "throw for" M. André Theuriet, both of whom shall have due honour. I cannot wholly agree with them. But both of them, as well as, for very opposite reasons, MM. Ohnet and Rod, may at least require notice of some length.

[Sidenote: Ferdinand Fabre: L'Abbé Tigrane.]

L'Abbé Tigrane, by Ferdinand Fabre, may be described as one of not the least remarkable, and as certainly one of the most remarked, novels of the later nineteenth century. It never, I think, had a very large sale; for though at the time of its author's death, over thirty years and more after its appearance, it had reached its sixteenth thousand, that is not much for a popular French novel. Books of such different appeal as Zola's and Feuillet's (not to mention for the present a capital example to be noted below) boasted ten times the number. But it dared an extremely non-popular subject, and treated that subject with an audacious disregard of anything like claptrap. There is no love in it and hardly a woman; there is no--at least no military--fighting; no adventure of any ordinary sort. It is neither a berquinade, nor a crime-story, nor (except in a very peculiar way) a novel of analysis. It relies on no preciousness of style, and has not very much description, though its author was a great hand at this when and where he chose. It is simply the history of an ambitious, strong-willed, strong-minded, and violent-tempered priest in an out-of-the-way diocese, who strives for and attains the episcopate, and after it the archiepiscopate, and is left aspiring to the Papacy--which, considering the characters of the actual successors of Pius IX., the Abbé Capdepont[520] cannot have reached, in the fifty years (or nearly so) since the book was published.

Now, in the first place, it is generations since a clerical novel was likely to please the French novel-reading public. In this very book there is an amusing scene where the abbé, then a private tutor, induces his employer, a deputy, to invite clerics of distinction to a party, whereat the other guests melt away in disgust. And this was a long time before a certain French minister boasted that his countrymen "had taken God out of Heaven." Moreover, while there are two obvious ways of reconciling extremists to the subject, M. Fabre rejected both. His book is neither a panegyric on clericalism nor a libel on it. His hero is as far as possible from being a saint, but he is perfectly free from all the vulgar vices. The rest of the characters--all, with insignificant exceptions, clerics--are quite human, and in no case--not even in that of Capdepont's not too scrupulous aide-de-camp the Abbé Mical--offensive. But at the beginning the bishop, between whom and the hero there is truceless war, is, though privately an amiable and charitable gentleman (Capdepont is a Pyrenean peasant by origin), rather undignified, and even a little tyrannical; while a cardinal towards the end makes a distinction--between the impossibility of the Church lying and the positive duty of Churchmen, in certain circumstances, to lie--which would have been a godsend to Kingsley in that unequal conflict of his with a colleague of his Eminence's.[521]

Yet critics of almost all shades agreed, I think, in recognising the merits of M. Fabre's book; and it established him in a special position among French novelists, which he sustained not unworthily with nearly a score of novels in a score and a half of years. It is undoubtedly a book of no small power, which is by no means confined to the petty matters of chapter-and-seminary wrangling and intrigue. On the contrary, the scene where, owing to Capdepont's spite, the bishop's coffin is kept, in a frightful storm, waiting for admission to its inmate's own cathedral, is a very fine thing indeed--almost, if not quite, in the grand style--according to some, if not according to Mr. Arnold. The figure of the arch-priest Clamousse, both in connection with this scene[522] and others--old, timid, self-indulgent, but not an absolutely bad fellow--is of first-rate subordinate quality. Whether Capdepont himself has not a little too much of that synthetic character which I have discussed elsewhere--whether he is quite a real man, and not something of a composition of the bad qualities of the peasant type, the intriguing ecclesiastic type, the ambitious man, the angry man, and so on--must, I suppose, be left to individual tastes and judgments. If I am not so enthusiastic about the book as some have been, it is perhaps because it seems to me rather a study than a story.[523]

[Sidenote: Norine, etc.]

This criticism--it is not intended for a reproach--does not extend to other, perhaps not so powerful, but more pastimeous books, though M. Fabre seldom entirely excluded the clerical atmosphere of his youth.[524] A very pleasant volume-full is Norine, the title-piece of which is full at once of Cevenol scenery and Parisian contrast, of love, and, at least, preparations for feasting; of sketches of that "Institute" life which comes nearest to our collegiate one; and of pleasant bird-worship. But M. Fabre should have told us whether the bishop actually received and appreciated[525] the dinner of Truscas trout and Faugères wine (alas! this is a blank in my fairly extensive wine-list), and the miscellaneous maigre cookery of the excellent Prudence, and the splendid casket of liqueurs borrowed from a brother curé. Cathinelle (an unusual and pretty diminutive of Catherine) is an admirably told pendant to it; and I venture to think the "idyllic" quality of both at least equal, if not superior, to the best of George Sand. Le R. P. Colomban is, according to M. Fabre's habit, a sort of double-edged affair--a severe but just rebuke of the "popular preacher," and a good-humoured touch at the rebuker, Monseigneur Onésime de la Boissière, Evêque de Saint-Pons, who incidentally proposes to submit L'Abbé Tigrane to the Holy Congregation of the Index. Finally, the book closes with a delightful panegyric of Alexandre Dumas père, and an anecdote avowedly autobiographic (as, indeed, the whole book gives itself out to be, though receivable with divers pinches of salt) of that best-natured of men franking a bevy of impecunious students at a première of one of his plays.

[Sidenote: Le Marquis de Pierrerue.]

To read Le Marquis de Pierrerue after these two books--one the piece with which Fabre established his reputation, and the other a product of his proved mastery--is interesting to the critic. Whether it would be so to the general reader may be more doubtful. It is the longest of its author's novels; in fact its two volumes have separate sub-titles;[526] but there is no real break, either of time, place, or action, between them. It is a queer book, quite evidently of the novitiate, and suggesting now Paul de Kock (the properer but not quite proper Paul), now Daudet (to whom it is actually dedicated), now Feuillet, now Murger, now Sandeau, now one of the melodramatic story-tellers. Very possibly all these had a share in its inspiration. It is redolent of the medical studies which the author actually pursued, between his abandonment of preparation for the Church and his settling down as a man of letters. Its art is palpably imperfect--blocks of récit, wedges of not very novel or acute reflection, a continual reluctance or inability to "get forrard." Of the two heroes, Claude Abrial, Marquis de Pierrerue--a fervent Royalist and Catholic, who lavishes his own money, and everybody else's that he can get hold of, on a sort of private Literary Fund,[527] allows himself to be swindled by a scoundrelly man of business, immures his daughter, against her wish, as a Carmelite nun, and dies a pauper--is a quite possible but not quite "brought off" figure. Théven Falgouët, the Breton buveur d'eau,[528] who is introduced to us at actual point of starvation, and who dies, self-transfixed on the sharp spikes of the Carmelite grille, is perhaps not _im_possible, and occasionally pathetic. But the author seems, in his immaturity as a craftsman, never to have made up his mind whether he is producing an "alienist" study, or giving us a fairly ordinary étudiant and aspirant in letters. Of the two heroines, the noble damsel Claire de Pierrerue--object of Falgouët's love at first sight, a love ill-fated and more insane than even love beseems--is quite nice in her way; and Rose Keller--last of grisettes, but a grisette of the Upper House, an artist grisette, and, as some one calls her, the "soeur de charité de la galanterie"[529]--is quite nice in hers. But Rose's action--in burning, to the extent of several hundred thousand francs' worth, notes and bonds, the wicked gains of one of her lovers (Grippon, the Marquis's fraudulent intendant), and promptly expiring--may pair off with Falgouët's repeating on himself the Spanish torture-death of the guanches,[530] as pure melodrama. In fact the whole thing is undigested, and shows, in a high degree, that initial difficulty in getting on with the story which has not quite disappeared in L'Abbé Tigrane, but which has been completely conquered[531] in Norine and Cathinelle.

[Sidenote: Mon Oncle Célestin.]

This mixed quality makes itself felt in others of Fabre's books. Perhaps there is none of them, except L'Abbé Tigrane itself, which has been a greater favourite with his partisans than Mon Oncle Célestin. Here we have something of the same easy autobiographic quality, with the same general scene and the same relations of the narrator and the principal characters, as in other books; but "Mr. the nephew" (the agreeable and continuous title by which the faithful parishioners address their beloved pastor's boy relative) has a different uncle and a different gouvernante, at least in name, from those in Norine and Cathinelle. The Abbé Célestin, threatened with consumption, exchanges the living in which he has worked for many years, and little good comes of it. He is persecuted, actually to the death, by his rural dean, a sort of duplicate of the hero of L'Abbé Tigrane; but the circumstances are not purely ecclesiastical. He has, in his new parish, taken for goat-girl a certain Marie Galtier, daughter of his beadle, but, unluckily, also step-daughter of a most abominable step-mother. Marie, as innocently as possible, "gets into trouble," and dies of it, accusations being brought against her guiltless and guileless master in consequence. There are many good passages; the opening is (as nearly always with M. Fabre) excellent; but both the parts and the whole are, once more, too long--the mere "flitting" from one parish to another seems never to be coming to an end. Still, the book should be read; and it has one very curious class of personages, the "hermits" of the Cevennes--probably the latest (the date is 1846) of their kind in literature. The general characteristics of that kind do not seem to have been exactly saintly;[532] and the best of them, Adon Laborie, after being "good" throughout, and always intending to be so, brings about the catastrophe by calmly suppressing, in the notion that he will save the Abbé trouble, three successive citations from the Diocesan Council, thereby getting him "interdicted." The shock, when the judgment in contumacy is announced by the brutal dean, proves fatal.

[Sidenote: Lucifer.]

In Lucifer M. Fabre is still nearer, though with no repetition, to the Tigrane motive. The book justifies its title by being the most ambitious of all the novels, and justifies the ambition itself by showing a great deal of power--most perhaps again, of all; though whether that power is used to the satisfaction of the reader must depend, even more than is usual, on individual tastes. Bernard Jourfier, at the beginning of the book and of the Second Empire, is a young vicaire, known to be of great talents and, in especial, of unusual preaching faculty, but of a violent temper, ill at ease about his own vocation, and suspected--at least by Ultramontanes--of very doubtful orthodoxy and not at all doubtful Gallicanism. He is, moreover, the grandson of a conventionnel who voted for the King's death, and the son of a deputy of extreme Liberal views. So the Jesuits, after trying to catch him for themselves, make a dead set at him, and secure his appointment to out-of-the-way country parishes only, and even in these his constant removal, so that he may acquire as little influence as possible anywhere. At last, in a very striking interview with his bishop, he succeeds in clearing his character, and enters on the way of promotion. The cabals continue; but later, on the overthrow of Bonapartism, he is actually raised to the episcopate. His violent temper, however, is always giving handles to the enemy, and he finally determines that life is intolerable. After trying to starve himself, he makes use of the picturesque but dangerous situation of his palace, and is crushed by falling, in apparent accident, through a breach in the garden wall with a precipice beneath--"falling like Lucifer," as his lifelong enemy and rival whispers to a confederate at the end. For the appellation has been an Ultramontane nickname for him long before, and has been not altogether undeserved by his pride at least. It has been said that the book is powerful; but it is almost unrelievedly gloomy throughout, and suffers from the extremely narrow range of its interest.

[Sidenote: Sylviane and Taillevent.]

Those who are not tired of the Cevenol atmosphere--which, it must be admitted, is quite a refreshing one--will find a lighter example in Sylviane, once more recounted by "Mr. the nephew," but with his movable uncle and gouvernante shifted back to "M. Fulcran" and "Prudence"; and in Taillevent, a much longer book, which is independent of uncle and nephew both. Sylviane has agreeable things in it, but perhaps might have been better if its form had been different. It is a long récit told by a gamekeeper, with frequent interruptions[533] and a very thin "frame." Taillevent ends with two murders, the second a quite excusable lynch-punishment for the first, and the marriage of the avenger just afterwards to the daughter of the original victim, a combination of "the murders and the marriages" deserving Osric's encomia on sword furniture. So vigorous a conclusion had need have a well-stuffed course of narrative to lead up to it, and this is not wanting. There is a wicked--a very wicked--Spaniard for the lynched-murderer part; an exceedingly good dog-, bear-, and man-fight in the middle; an extensive and well-utilised wolf-trap in the woods; bankruptcies; floods; all sorts of things; with a course of "idyllic" true love running through the whole. There is a curé--a rather foolish one; but the ecclesiastical interest in itself is almost absent from the book. The weakest part of it lies in the characters of what may be called the hero and heroine of the beginning and middle--Frédéric Servières and Madeleine his wife. That the former should fall into the most frantic love before marriage, and almost neglect his wife as soon as she has borne him a child, may be said to be common enough in books, and, unluckily, by no means uncommon in life. But there may be more question about the repetition of the inconsistency in other parts of the character--extreme business aptitude and fatal neglect of business, extreme energy and fatal depression over quite small things, etc. The general combination is not impossible; it is not even improbable; but it is not quite "made so." And something is the same with Madeleine, who is, moreover, left "in the air" in so curious a fashion that one begins to wonder whether the Mrs. Martha Buskbody attitude, so often jibed at, does not possess some excuse.

[Sidenote: Toussaint Galabru.]

A pleasant contrast in this respect, though the end here is tragic in a way, may be found in Toussaint Galabru, the last, perhaps, of M. Fabre's books for which we can find special room here, though no doubt some favourites of particular readers may have been omitted. The novel is divided into two pretty equal halves, with an interval first of ten years between them and, almost immediately, of sixteen more. The first half is occupied by an adventure of "Mr. the nephew's," though he is not here "Mr. the nephew," but "Mr. the son," living with his father and mother at Bédarieux, M. Fabre's actual birthplace. He plays truant from Church on Advent Sunday to join a shooting expedition with his school-fellow Baptistin and that school-fellow's not too pious father, who is actually a church suisse, but has received an exeat from the curé to catch a famous hare for that curé to eat. The vicissitudes of the chase are numerous, and the whole is narrated with extraordinary skill as from the boy's point of view, his entire innocence, when he is brought into contact with very shady incidents, being--and this is a most difficult thing to do--hit off marvellously well. It is only towards the end of this part (he has been heard of before) that Toussaint Galabru, sorcerer and Lothario, makes his appearance--as clever as he is handsome, and as vicious as he is clever. When he does appear he has his way--with the game shot by others, and with a certain métayer's wife--after the same hand-gallop fashion in which the personage in Blake's lines enjoyed both the peach and the lady.

The earlier and shorter, but not short, interval, mentioned above, passes to 1852, and does little more than bring the now "Parisian" narrator into fresh contact with his old school-fellow Baptistin, now a full-grown priest, but, though very pious, in some difficulties from his persistent love of sport. Sixteen years later, again, in 1868, reappears, "coming to his death,"[534] Galabru himself. The part is chiefly occupied by a récit of intervening history (including a sadly unsuccessful attempt, both at spiritual and physical combat, by Baptistin) and by a much-interrupted journey in snow.[535] But it gives occasion for another agreeable "idyll" between Vincinet, Galabru's son, and the Abbé Baptistin's god-child Lalie; and it ends with a striking procession to carry, hardly in time, the viaticum to the dying wizard, whereby, if not his own weal in the other world, that of the lovers in this is happily brought about.

Not very many generalities are required on M. Ferdinand Fabre. How completely his way lies out of most of the ruts in which the wain of the French novel usually travels must have been shown; and it may be hoped that enough has been said also to show that there are plenty of minor originalities about him. No novelist[536] in any language known to me (unless you call Richard Jefferies a novelist) has such an extraordinary command of "the country"--bird-nature and rock scenery being his favourite but by no means his only subjects. For "Scenes of Clerical Life" he stands admittedly alone in France, and has naturally been dealt with most often from this point of view. Of that intense provincialism, in the good sense, which is characteristic of French literature, there have been few better representatives. Wordsworth himself is scarcely more the poet of our Lake and Hill country than Fabre is the novelist of the Cevennes. Peasant life and child life of the country (he meddles little, and not so happily, with towns of any size) find in him admirably "vatical" properties and combinations; and if he does not run any risk of Feste's rebuke by talking much of "ladies," he knows as much about women as a man well may. His comedy is never coarse or trivial, and the tragedy never goes off through the touch-hole. Of one situation--very easy to spoil by rendering it mawkish--the early but not "calf"-love of rustic man and maid, beginning in childhood, he was curiously master. George Sand herself[537] has nothing to beat (if she has anything to equal) the pairs of Taillevent and Riquette (in the novel named from the lover), and of Vincinet and Lalie (in Toussaint Galabru). As for his pictures of clerical cabals and clerical weaknesses, they may be too much of a good thing for some tastes; but that they are a good thing, both as an exercise in craftsmanship and as an alternative to the common run of French novel subjects, can hardly be denied. In this respect, and not in this respect only, M. Fabre has his own place, and that no low one.

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[Sidenote: André Theuriet.]

In coming to M. André Theuriet I felt a mixture of curiosity with a slight uneasiness. For I had read not a few of his books[538] carefully and critically at their first appearance, and in such cases--when novels are not of the very first order (which, good as these are, I think few really critical readers would allot them) nor possessed of those "oddments" of appeal which sometimes make more or less inferior books readable and readable again--fresh acquaintance, after a long time, is dangerous. It has been said here (possibly more than once) that, when a book possesses this peculiar readableness, a second reading is positively beneficial to it, because you neglect the "knots in the reed" and slip along it easily. This is not quite the case with others: and, unless great critical care is taken, a new acquaintance, itself thirty years old, has, I fear, a better chance than an old one renewed after that time. However, the knight of Criticism, as of other ladies,[539] must dare any adventure, and ought to be able to bring the proper arms and methods to the task. For the purposes of renewal I chose Sauvageonne, Le Fils Maugars, and Raymonde. With the first, though I did not remember much more than its central situation and its catastrophe, with one striking incident, I do remember being originally pleased; the second has, I believe, at least sometimes, been thought Theuriet's masterpiece; and the third (which, by the way, is a "philippine" containing another story besides the title-one) is an early book which I had not previously read.

[Sidenote: Sauvageonne.]

The argument of Sauvageonne can be put very shortly. A young man of four-and-twenty, of no fortune, marries a rich widow ten years older than himself, and, as it happens, possessed of an adopted daughter of seventeen. He--who is by no means an intentional scoundrel, but a commonplace and selfish person, and a gentleman neither by birth nor by nature--soon wearies of his somewhat effusive and exacting wife; the girl takes a violent fancy to him; accident hurries on the natural if not laudable consequences; the wife covers the shame by succeeding in passing off their result as her own child, but the strain is too much for her, and she goes mad, but does not die.

This tragic theme (really a tragic [Greek: hamartia], for there is much good in Sauvageonne, as she is called, from her tomboy habits, and, with happier chance and a nobler lover, all might have been well with her) is handled with no little power, and with abundant display of skill in two different departments which M. Theuriet made particularly his own--sketches of the society of small country towns, and elaborate description of the country itself, especially wood-scenery. In regard to the former, it must be admitted that, though there is plenty of scandal and not a little ill-nature in English society of the same kind, the latter nuisance seems, according to French novelists, to be more active with their country folk than it is with ours[540]--a thing, in a way, convenient for fiction. Of the descriptive part the only unfavourable criticism (and that a rather ungracious one) that could be made is that it is almost too elaborate. Of two fateful scenes of Sauvageonne, that where Francis Pommeret, the unheroic hero, comes across Denise (the girl's proper name) sitting in a crab-tree in the forest and pelting small boys with the fruit, is almost startlingly vivid. You see every detail of it as if it were on the Academy walls. In fact, it is almost more like a picture than like reality, which is more shaded off and less sharp in outline and vivid in colour. As for the character-drawing, if it does not attain to that consummateness which has been elsewhere described and desiderated--the production of people that you know--it attains the second rank; the three prominent characters (the rest are merely sets-off) are all people that you might know. Denise herself is very near the first rank, and Francis Pommeret--not, as has been said, by any means a scoundrel, for he only succumbs to strong and continued temptation, but an ordinary selfish creature--is nearer than those who wish to think nobly of human nature may like, to complete reality. One is less certain about the unhappy Adrienne Lebreton or Pommeret, but discussion of her would be rather "an intricate impeach." And one may have a question about the end. We are told that Francis and Denise keep together (the luckless wife living on in spite of her madness) because of the child, though they absolutely hate each other. Would it not be more natural that, if they do not part, they should vary the hatred with spasms of passion and repulsion?

[Sidenote: Le Fils Maugars.]

Le Fils Maugars is not only a longer book, but its space is less exclusively filled with a single situation, and the necessary prelude to it. In fact, the whole thing is expanded, varied, and peopled. Auberive, near Langres, the place of Sauvageonne, is hardly more than a large village; Saint-Clémentin, on the Charente, though not a large town, is the seat of a judicial Presidency, of a sous-préfecture, etc. "Le père Maugars" is a banker who, from having been a working stone-mason, has enriched himself by sharp practice in money-lending. His son is a lawyer by the profession chosen for him, and a painter by preference. The heroine, Thérèse Desroches, is the daughter of a Republican doctor, whose wife has been unfaithful, and who suspects Thérèse of not being his own child. The scene shifts from Saint-Clémentin itself to the country districts where Poitou and Touraine meet, as well as to Paris. The time begins on the eve of the Coup d'État, and allows itself a gap of five years between the first and second halves of the book. Besides the love-scenes and the country descriptions and the country feasts there is a little general society; much business; some politics, including the attempted and at last accomplished arrest of the doctor for treason to the new régime; a well-told account of a contest for the Prix de Rome; a trial of the elder Maugars for conspiracy (with a subordinate usurer) to defraud, etc. The whole begins with more than a little aversion on everybody's part for the innocent Étienne Maugars, who, having been away from home for years, knows neither the fact nor the cause of his father's unpopularity; and it ends with condign poetical justice, on the extortioner in the form of punishment, and for the lovers in another way. It is thus, though a less poignant book than Sauvageonne, a fuller and wider one, and it displays, better than that book, the competence and adequacy which mark the author, though there may be something else to be said about it (or rather about its illustration of his general characteristics) presently.

[Sidenote: Le Don Juan de Vireloup and Raymonde.]

Le Don Juan de Vireloup, a story of about a hundred pages long, which acts as makeweight to Raymonde, itself only about twice the length, is a capital example of Theuriet at nearly his best--a pleasant mixture of berquinade and gaillardise (there are at least two passages at either of which Mrs. Grundy would require sal volatile, and would then put the book in the fire). The reformation and salvation of Jean de Santenoge--a poor (indeed penniless) gentleman, who lives in a little old manor, or rather farm-house, buried in the woods, and whose sole occupations are poaching and making love to peasant girls--are most agreeably conducted by the agency of the daughter of a curmudgeonly forest-inspector (who naturally regards Santenoge with special abhorrence). She is helped by her grand-uncle, a doctor of the familiar stamp, who has known Diderot's child, Madame de Vandeul (the scene, as in so many of the author's books, is close to Langres), and worships Denis himself. As for Raymonde, its heroine comes closer to "Sauvageonne," though she is less of a savagess: and the worst that can be said against her lucky winner is that he is a little of a prig. But, to borrow, and very slightly alter, one of Sir Walter's pieces of divine charity, "The man is mortal, and a scientific person." Perhaps fate and M. Theuriet are a little too harsh to another (but not this time beggarly) gentillâtre, Osmin de Préfontaine, to whom, one regrets to say, Raymonde positively, or almost positively, engages herself, before she in the same way virtually accepts the physiological Antoine Verdier. And the dénouement, where everything comes right, is a little stagy.[541] But the whole is thoroughly readable, competently charactered, and illustrated by some of the best of the author's forest descriptions.

[Sidenote: General characteristics.]

One has thus been able to give an account, very favourable in the main, of these three or four stories--selected with no hidden design, and in two cases previously unknown to the critic, who has, in addition, a fair remembrance of several others. But it will be observed that there is in them, with all their merits, some evidence of that "rut" or "mould" character which has been specified as absent in greater novelists, but as often found in company with a certain accomplishment, in ordonnance and readable quality, that marks the later novel. The very great prominence of description is common to all of them, and in three out of the four the scenes are from the same district--almost from the same patch--of country. The heroine is the most prominent character and, as she should be, the most attractive figure of all; but she is made up and presented, if not exactly à la douzaine, yet with a strong, almost a sisterly, family likeness. Far be it from the present writer to regret or desiderate the adorably candid creature who so soon smirches her whiteness. Even the luckless Sauvageonne--worst mannered, worst moralled, and worst fated of all--is a jewel and a cynosure compared with that other class of girl; while Raymonde (whose maltreatment of M. de Préfontaine is to a great extent excused by her mother's bullying, her real father's weakness, and her own impulsive temperament); the Thérèse of Le Fils Maugars; and the Marianne of Le Don Juan de Vireloup are, in ascending degrees, girls of quite a right kind. Only, it is just a little too much the same kind. And without unfairness, without even ingratitude, one may say that this sameness does somewhat characterise M. Theuriet.

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[Sidenote: Georges Ohnet.]

There were some who did not share the general admiration, a good many years ago, of the dictum of a popular French critic on a more popular French novelist to the effect that, though it was his habit, in the articles he was writing, to confine himself to literature, he would break this good custom for once and discuss M. Ohnet. In the first place, this appeared to the dissidents a very easy kind of witticism; they knew many men, many women, and many schoolboys who could have uttered it. In the second, they were probably of the opinion (changing the matter, instead of, like that wicked Prince Seithenyn, merely reversing the order, of the old Welsh saying) that "The goodness of wit sleeps in the badness of manners." But if the question had been then, or were now, asked seriously whether the literary value of Le Maître de Forges and its companion novels was high, few of them would, as probably, have been or be able to answer in the affirmative. For my own part, I always used to think, when M. Ohnet's novels came out, that they were remarkably like those of the eminent Mrs. Henry Wood[542] in English--of course mutatis mutandis. They displayed very fair aptitude for the business of novel manufacture, and the results were such as, in almost every way, to satisfy the average subscriber to a circulating library, supposing him or her to possess respectable tastes (scarcely "taste"), moderate intelligence, and a desire to pass the time comfortably enough in reading them once, without the slightest expectation of being, or wish to be, able to read them again. They might even sometimes excite readers who possessed an adjustable "tally" of excitableness. But beyond this, as it seemed to their critic of those days, they never went.

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.

[Sidenote: 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), _melo_dramatic to the _n_th, 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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?

[Sidenote: La Grande Marnière.]

La Grande Marnière does not aspire to such heights, and is perhaps one of the best "machined" of M. Ohnet's books. The main plot is not very novel--his plots seldom are--and, in parts as well as plots, any one who cared for rag-picking and hole-picking might find a good deal of indebtedness. It is the old jealousy of a clever and unscrupulous self-made man towards an improvident seigneur and his somewhat robustious son. The seigniorial improvidence, however, is not of the usual kind, for M. le Marquis de Clairefont wastes his substance, and gets into his enemy's debt and power, by costly experiments on agricultural and other machinery, partly due to the fact that he possesses on his estate a huge marl-pit and hill which want developing. There is the again usual cross-action of an at first hopeless affection on the part of the roturier's son, Pascal Carvajan, a rising lawyer, for Antoinette de Clairefont. But M. Ohnet--still fertile in situations--adds a useful sort of conspiracy among Carvajan's tools of various stations against the house of Clairefont; a conspiracy which actually culminates in a murder-charge against Robert de Clairefont, the victim being the pretty daughter of a local poacher, one of the gang, with whom the Viscount has notoriously and indeed quite openly flirted. Now comes Pascal's opportunity: he defends Robert, and not merely obtains acquittal, but manages to discover that the crime was actually committed by the village idiot, who betrays himself by remorse and sleep-walking. There is a patient, jilted lover, M. de Croix-Mesnil (it may just be noted that since French novel-heroines were allowed any choice at all in marriage, they have developed a faculty of altering that choice which might be urged by praisers of times past against the enfranchisement); a comic aunt; and several other promoters of business. It is no wonder that, given a public for the kind of book, this particular example of it should have been popular. It had reached its sixtieth edition before it had been published a twelvemonth.

[Sidenote: Reflections.]

Sixty editions of one book in one year; three hundred and sixty-seven of another in twenty; a hundred and forty-two of Serge Panine in five; sixty-nine of Le Docteur Rameau in certainly at the outside not more; these are facts which, whatever may be insinuated about the number of an "edition," cannot be simply put aside. Popularity, as the wiser critics have always maintained, is no test of excellence; but as they have also maintained when they were wise, it is a "fact in the case," and it will not do merely to sneer at it. I should say that the popularity of M. Ohnet, like other popularities in England as well as in France, is quite explicable. Novel-writing, once again, had become a business, and he set himself to carry that business out with a thorough comprehension of what was wanted. His books, it is to be observed, are generally quite modern, dealing either with his own day or a few years before it; and modernity has, for a long time, been almost a sine qua non of what is to please the public. They are, it has been said, full of situations, and the situation is what pleases the public most in everything. They came just when the first popularity of Naturalism was exhausting itself,[548] and they are not grimy; but, on the other hand, they do not aim at an excessive propriety. Their characters are not of the best, or even of the second-best class, as so often defined, but they are sufficient to work out the situations without startling inadequacy. The public never really cares, though part of it is sometimes taught to pretend to care, for style, and the same may be said of the finer kind of description. The conversation is not brilliant, but, like the character, it serves its turn. I once knew an excellent gentleman, of old lineage and fair fortune, who used to say that for his part he could not tell mutton from venison or Marsala from Madeira, and he thanked God for it. The novel-reading public,--that at least which reads novels by the three hundred and fifty thousand,--is very much of the same taste, and I am sure I hope it is equally pious.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Édouard Rod.]

I have quite a lively remembrance of the advent of M. Édouard Rod, of the crowning of Le Sens de la Vie, and so forth. That advent formed part of the just mentioned counter-attack on Naturalism, in which, as usual, some of the Naturalist methods and weapons themselves were used; but it had a distinct character of its own. Unless I mistake, it was not at first very warmly welcomed by "mortal" French criticism. There may have been something in this of that curious grudge[549] against Swiss-French, on the part of purely French-French, men of letters which never seems to have entirely ceased. But there was something more than this, though this something more was in a way the reason, some might say the justification, of the grudge. M. Rod was exceedingly serious; the title of his laureated book is of itself almost sufficient to show it; and though the exclusive notion of "the gay and frivolous Frenchman" always was something of a vulgar error, and has been increasingly so since the Revolution, Swiss seriousness, with its strong Germanic leaven, is not French seriousness at all. But he became, if not exactly a popular novelist to the tune of hundreds or even scores of editions, a prolific and fairly accepted one. I think, though he died in middle age and produced other things besides novels, he wrote some twenty or thirty stories, and his production rather increased than slackened as he went on. With the later ones I am not so well acquainted as with the earlier, but there is a pervading character about these earlier ones which is not likely to have changed much, and they alone belong strictly to our subject.

[Sidenote: La Vie Privée de Michel Teissier.]

Next to Le Sens de la Vie and perhaps in a way, as far as popularity goes, above it, may be ranked, I suppose, La Vie Privée de Michel Teissier, with its sequel, La Seconde Vie de M. T. These books certainly made a bold and wide separation of aim and subject from the subject and the aim of most French novels in these recent years. Here you have, instead of a man who attempts somebody else's wife, one who wishes to get rid--on at least legally respectable terms--of his own, and to marry a girl for whom he has, and who has for him, a passion which is, until legal matrimony enfranchises it, able to restrain itself from any practical satisfaction of the as yet illicit kind. He avails himself of the then pretty new facilities for divorce (the famous "Loi Naquet," which used to "deave" all of us who minded such things many years ago), and the situation is (at least intentionally) made more piquant by the fact that Teissier, who is a prominent statesman and gives up not merely his wife but his political position for this new love of his, starts as an actual supporter of the repeal of the divorce laws. To an English reader, of course, the precise problem would not have the same charm of novelty, except in his capacity as a reader of French novels. But, putting that aside, the position is obviously capable of being treated with very considerable appeal. The struggles of the husband, who has loved his wife--M. Rod had not the audacity or the strength to make him love her still--between his duties and his desires; the indignant suffering of the wife; and most of all, the position of the girl who, by ill-fortune or the fault of others, finds herself expending, on an at first illicit and always ill-famed love, what she might have devoted to an honourable one, certainly has great capabilities. But I did not think when I read it first, and I do not think now when I have read it again, that these various opportunities are fully taken. It is not that M. Rod has no idea of passion. He is constantly handling it and, as will be seen presently, not without success occasionally. But he was too much what he calls his eidolon in one book, "Monsieur le psychologue," and the Psyche he deals with is too often a skinny and spectacled creature--not the love of Cupid and the mother of Voluptas.[550]

[Sidenote: La Sacrifiée.]

If he has ever made his story hot enough to make this pale cast glow, it is in La Sacrifiée. This is all the more remarkable in that the beginning of the book itself is far from promising. There is a rather unnecessary usher-chapter--a thing which M. Rod was fond of, and which, unless very cleverly done, is more of an obstacle than of a "shoe-horn." The hero-narrator of the main story is one of the obligatorily atheistic doctors--nearly as great a nuisance as obligatorily adulterous heroines--whom M. Rod has mostly discarded; and what is more, he is one of the pseudo-scientific fanatics who believe in the irresponsibility of murderers, and do not see that, the more irresponsible a criminal is, the sooner he ought to be put out of the way. Moreover, he has the ill-manners to bore the company at dinner with this craze, and the indecency (for which in some countries he might have smarted) to condemn out loud, in a court of justice, the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge on his pet. Neither can one approve the haste with which he suggests to the wife of his oldest and most intimate friend that she is not happy with her husband. But this time M. Rod had got the forge working, and the bellows dead on the charcoal. The development of the situation has something of that twist or boomerang effect which we have noticed in Michel Teissier. Dr. Morgex begins by defending murderers; he does not end, but starts the end, by becoming a murderer himself, though one with far more "extenuating circumstances" than those so often allowed in French courts. His friend--who is an advocate of no mean powers but loose life and dangerously full habit--has, when the doctor warns him against apoplexy, half scoffed, but also begged him, if a seizure should take place, to afford him a chance of euthanasia instead of lingering misery. The actual situation, though with stages and variations which are well handled, arises; the doctor, who has long since been frantically in love with the wife, succumbs to the temptation--which has been aggravated by the old request, by the sufferings of the victim, and by the urgent supplications of the family, that he shall give morphia to relieve these sufferings. He gives it--but in a dose which he knows to be lethal.

After a time, and having gone through no little mental agony, he marries the widow, who is in every sense perfectly innocent; and a brief period of happiness follows. But his own remorse continues; the well-meaning chatter of a lady, who has done much to bring about the marriage, and to whom Morgex had unwarily mentioned "obstacles," awakes the wife's suspicion, and, literally, "the murder is out." Morgex confesses, first to a lawyer friend, who, to his intense surprise, pronounces him legally guilty, of course, but morally excusable; then to a priest, who takes almost exactly the opposite point of view, and admitting that the legal crime may be excusable, declares the moral guilt not lessened; while he points out that while the wages of iniquity are retained, no pardon can be deserved or expected. And so the pair part. Morgex gives himself up to the hardest and least profitable practitioner-work. Of what the wife does we hear nothing. She has been perfectly guiltless throughout; she has loved her second husband without knowing his crime, and after knowing it; and so she is "La Sacrifiée." But this (as some would call it) sentimental appeal is not the real appeal of the book, though it is delicately led up to from an early point. The gist throughout is the tempering and purifying of the character and disposition of Morgex himself, through trial and love, through crime and sacrifice. It is not perfectly done. If it were, it would land the author at once in those upper regions of art which I cannot say I think he attains. But it is a very remarkable "try," and, with one other to be mentioned presently, it is nearest the goal of any of his books.

[Sidenote: Le Silence.]

On the other hand, if he ever wrote a worse book than Le Silence, I have not read, and I do not wish to read, that. The title is singularly unhappy. Silence is so much greater a thing than speech that a speaker, unless he is Shakespeare or Dante or Lucretius,[551] or at least the best kind of Wordsworth, had better avoid the subject, avoid even the word for it. And M. Rod's examples of silence, preluded in each case (for the book has two parts) by one of those curious harbingerings of his which are doubtfully satisfactory, are not what they call nowadays "convincing." The first and longest--it is, indeed, much too long and might have been more acceptable in twenty pages than in two hundred--deals with the usual triangle--brutal husband, suffering wife, interesting lover. But the last two never declare themselves, or are declared; and they both die and make no sign. In the second part there is another triangle, where the illegitimate side is established and results in a duel, the lover killing the husband and establishing himself with the wife. But a stove for tea-making explodes; she loses her beauty, and (apparently for that reason) poisons herself, though it does not appear that her lover's love has been affected by the change. In each case the situation comes under that famous and often-quoted ban of helpless and unmanageable misery.

[Sidenote: Là-Haut.]

Nor can I think highly of Là-Haut, which is quite literally an account of an Alpine village, and of its gradual vulgarisation by an enterprising man of business. Of the ordinary novel-interests there is little more than the introduction at the beginning of a gentleman who has triangled as usual, till, the husband has, in his, the lover's, presence, most inconsiderately shot his wife dead, has missed (which was a pity) M. Julien Sterny himself, and, more unconscionably still, has been acquitted by a court of justice, in which the officials, and the public in general, actually seemed to think that M. Sterny was to blame! He is much upset by this, and, coming to Vallanches to recuperate, is rewarded later for his good deeds and sufferings,[552] by the hand of a very attractive young woman with a fortune. This poetic justice, however, is by no means the point of the book, which, indeed, has no particular point. It is filled up by details of Swiss hotel-life: of the wicked conduct of English tourists, who not merely sing hymns on Sunday, but dance on wet evenings in the week (nearly the oddest combination of crimes known to the present writer); of a death in climbing of one of the characters which is not in the least required by the story; of the scalding of her arm by a paysanne in a sort of "ragging" flirtation, and the operation on the mortifying member by a curé who knows something of chirurgy; and of the ruin of some greedy peasants who turn their châlet into a hotel with no capital to work it, and are bought out, with just enough to cover their outlay and leave them penniless, by the general entrepreneur. It is a curious book, but the very reverse of a successful one.

[Sidenote: La Course à la Mort.]

The centre, not by any means in the chronological sense (for they were among his earliest), but in the logical and psychological, of M. Rod's novel production, is undoubtedly to be found in the two contrastedly titled books Le Sens de la Vie and La Course à la Mort. The first, which, as has been said, received Academic distinction, I approached many years ago without any predisposition against it, and closed with a distinct feeling of disappointment. The other I read more recently with a distinct apprehension of disapproval, which was, if not entirely, to a very large extent removed as I went on. It was strongly attacked as morbid and mischievous at its first appearance in 1885; and the author, some years afterwards, prefixed a defence to his fifth edition, which is not much more effective than such defences usually are. It takes something like the line which, as was mentioned above, Mr. Traill took about Maupassant--that Pessimism was a fact like other facts, and one was entitled to take it as a subject or motive. But it also contained a slip into that obvious but, somehow or other, seldom avoided trap--the argument that a book is "dramatic," and does not necessarily express the author's own attitude. Perhaps not; but the rejoinder that almost all, if not all, M. Rod's books are "sicklied o'er" in this way is rather fatal. One gets to expect, and seldom misses, a close and dreary air throughout, often aggravated by an actual final sentence or paragraph of lamentation and mourning and woe. But I do not resent the "nervous impression" left on me by La Course à la Mort, with its indefinitely stated but certain end of suicide, and its unbroken soliloquy of dreary dream. For it is in one key all through; it never falls out of tune or time; and it does actually represent a true, an existent, though a partial and morbid attitude of mind. It is also in parts very well written, and the blending of life and dream is sometimes almost Poesque. A novel, except by the extremest stretch of courtesy, it is not, being simply a panorama of the moods of its scarcely heroic hero. And he does not "set one's back up" like René, or, in my case at least, produce boredom like most of the other "World-pain"-ers. The still more shadowy appearances of the heroine Cécile, who dies before her lover, while the course of his love is more dream than action, are well brought in and attractive; and there is one passage descriptive of waltzing which would atone for anything. Many people have tried to write about waltzing, but few have done it well; this is almost adequate. I wonder if I dare translate it?

We never thought that people might be turning an evil eye on us; we cared nothing for the indignation of the mammas sitting passive and motionless; we hardly felt the couples that we jostled.[553] Thanks to the cradling of the rhythm, to the intoxication of our rapid and regular movement, there fell on us something like a great calm. Drunk with one another, hurried by the absorbing voluptuousness of the waltz, we went on and on vertiginously. People and things turned with us, surrounding us with a gyre of moving shadows, under a fantastic light formed of crossing reflections, in an atmosphere where one breathed inebriating perfumes, and where every atom vibrated to the ever more bewildering sound of music. Time passed, and we still went on; losing little by little all consciousness except that of our own movement. Then it even seemed that we came out of ourselves; we heard nothing but a single beat, marking the cadence with strokes more and more muffled. The lights, melting into one, bathed us in a dreamy glow; we felt not the floor under our feet; we felt nothing but an immense oblivion--the oblivion of a void which was swallowing us up.

And doubtless it was so, as has been seen of many in the Time of Roses.[554]

[Sidenote: Le Ménage du Pasteur Naudié.]

To take one or two more of his books, Le Ménage du Pasteur Naudié, though less poignant than La Sacrifiée and with no approach to the extra-novelish merit of La Course à la Mort, starts not badly with an interesting scene, no less a place than La Rochelle, very rarely met, since its great days, in a French novel--a rather unfamiliar society, that of French Protestantism at Rochelle itself and Montauban--and a certainly unusual situation, the desire of a young, pretty, and wealthy girl, Jane Defos, to marry an elderly pastor who is poor, and, though a widower, has four children.

That nothing but mischief can come of this proceeding--as of an abnormal leap-year--is clear enough: whether the way in which the mischief is brought about and recounted is good may be more doubtful. That a person like M. Naudié, simple, though by no means a fool, should be taken in by a very pretty girl falling apparently in love with him--even though, to the general dangers of the situation, are added frank warnings that she has been given to a series of freakish fancies--is not unnatural; that she should soon tire of him, and sooner still of the four step-children, is very natural indeed. But the immediate cause of the final disruption--her taking a new fancy to, and being atheistically converted by, a cousin who, after all, runs away from temptation--is not very natural, and is unconvincingly told. Indeed the whole character of Jane is insufficiently presented. She is meant to be a sort of Blanche Amory, with nothing real in her--only a succession of false and fleeting fancies. But M. Rod was not Thackeray.

[Sidenote: Mademoiselle Annette.]

[Sidenote: L'Eau Courante.]

With two or three more of his later-middle books (it does not seem necessary to deal with the very latest, which are actually beyond our limit, and could not alter the general estimate very favourably) the preparation of judgment may cease. Mademoiselle Annette is the history of a "house-angel" and her family, and the fortunes and misfortunes they go through, and the little town of Bielle on the Lake of Geneva.[555] It is told, rather in M. Ferdinand Fabre's way, by a bystander, from the time when the heroine was his school-dame and, as such dames sometimes, if not often, are, adored by her pupils. Annette dies at last, and M. Rod strews the dust of many others on her way to death. An American brother of the typical kind plays a large part. He is tamed partly by Annette, partly by a charming wife, whom M. Rod must needs kill, without any particular reason. L'Eau Courante is an even gloomier story. It begins with a fair picture of a home-coming of bride and bridegroom, on a beautiful evening, to an ideal farm high up on the shore of Leman. In a very few pages M. Rod, as usual, kills the wife after subjecting her to exceptional tortures at the births of her children, and then settles down comfortably to tell us the ruin of the husband, who ends by arson of his own lost home and drowning in his own lost pond. The interval is all blunder, misfortune, and folly--the chief causa malorum being a senseless interference with the "servitude" rights of neighbours, whom he does not like, by stopping, for a week, a spring on his own land. Almost the only cheerful character in the book (except a delightful juge de conciliation, who carries out his benevolent duties in his cellar, dispensing its contents to soften litigants) is a black billy-goat named Samuel, who, though rather diabolical, is in a way the "Luck of the Bertignys," and after selling whom their state is doomed. But we see very little of him.

The summing up need probably not be long. That M. Rod was no mere stuffer of the shelves of circulating libraries must have been made clear; that he could write excellently has been (with all due modesty) confessed; that he could sometimes be poignant, often vivid, even occasionally humorous, is true. He has given us a fresh illustration of that tendency of the later novel, to "fill all numbers" of ordinary life, which has been insisted upon. But that he is too much of a "dismal Jemmy" of novel-writing is certainly true also. The House of Mourning is one of the Houses of Life, and therefore open to the novelist. But it is not the only house. It would sometimes seem as if M. Rod were (as usual without his being able to help it) a sort of jettatore,--as if there were no times or places for him except that

When all the world is old, And all the trees are brown, And all the sport is cold, And all the wheels run down.

[Sidenote: Scènes de la Vie Cosmopolite.]

But there is something to add, and even one book not yet noticed to comment on, which may serve as a real light on this remarkable novelist. The way in which I have already spoken of La Course à la Mort, which was a very early book, may be referred to. Even earlier, or at least as early, M. Rod wrote some short stories, which were published as Scènes de la Vie Cosmopolite. They include "Lilith" (the author, though far from an Anglophile, had a creditable liking for Rossetti), which is a story of the rejection of a French suitor by an English governess; the ending of a liaison between a coxcomb and a lady much older than himself ("Le Feu et l'Eau"); "L'Idéal de M. Gindre," with a doubtful marriage-close; a discovery of falseness ("Le Pardon"); "La Dernière Idylle" (which may be judged from some of its last words: "I have made a spectacle of myself long enough, and now the play is over"), and "Noces d'Or," the shortest and bitterest of all, in which the wife, who has felt herself tyrannised over for the fifty years, mildly retaliates by providing for dinner nearly all the things that she likes and her husband does not, though she effects a reconciliation with pâté de canard d'Amiens. I wonder if they ate duck-pies at Amiens in the spring of 1918?

The purpose of this postscript-account, and of the reference to La Course, should not be very obscure. It is clear that, at first and from the first, M. Rod's vocation was to be a prophet of discouragement and disappointment. You may be this and be quite a major prophet; but if you are not a major prophet your minority will become somewhat painfully apparent, and it will often, if not always, go near to failure. I think this was rather the case with M. Rod.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Catulle Mendès.]

It is with reluctance that I find myself unable to give more than praise for admirable French, and "form" in the strict sense, to the work in prose fiction of M. Catulle Mendès, sometime Gautier's son-in-law[556] and always, I think, his disciple. His early verse-work in the Parnasse Contemporain fifty years ago, was attractive and promising, though perhaps open to the exception which some took to the Parnasse generally, and which may be echoed here, not with that general concernment, but as to his own novel and tale-work. His late critical survey of modern French poetry was a really difficult thing admirably done. But his fiction leaves me cold, as Parnassian poetry did others, but not me. A friend of mine, whom I should have thought quite unshockable, either by principles or practice, once professed himself to me aghast at Méphistophéla. But M. Mendès's improprieties neither shock nor excite nor amuse me, because they have a certain air of being "machined." If anybody wishes to sample them at their very best, the half-score loosely and largely printed pages of "Tourterelle" in the volume entitled Lesbia will be no severe experiment. He may then take his choice of not going further at all, or of going further at the hazard of faring worse, or as well now and then, but hardly, I think, better.

* * * * *

I do not propose to add any further studies in detail to those already presented in this chapter. As I have (perhaps more than once) remarked, there are few periods of the century with the minor as well as major novel work of which I am better acquainted than with that of its last quarter. As I remember independently, or am in this or that way reminded, of the names of Jules de Glouvet; of at least three Pauls--Alexis, Arène, and Mahalin; of Ernest d'Hervilly; of the prolific Hector Malot; of Oscar Meténier, and Octave Mirbeau, and Jules Vallès of the Commune, of the brothers Margueritte and of others too many to mention, a sort of shame invades me at leaving them out.[557] Some of them may be alive still, though most, I think, are dead. But dead or alive, I have no room for them, and, for reasons also elsewhere stated, it is perhaps as well. The blossoming of the aloe, not once in a hundred years but all through them, has been told as best I could tell it.

Not shame but sorrow attends the exclusion of others, some of them, I think, better novelists than those actually discussed in this chapter--especially "Gyp" and MM. Anatole France, Paul Bourget, Jean Richepin, and "Pierre Loti." It would have been agreeable to pay, once more, suit and service to the adorable chronicler of the little rascal Bob and the unpretentiously divine Chiffon; to recall the delighted surprise with which one read Le Crime de Silvestre Bonnard, and follow the train of triumphs that succeeded it; to do justice (unbribed, but pleasantly seasoned, by some private gratitude) to the vigour and acuteness of L'Irréparable and its companions; to salute that masterpiece of Realism at its best, La Glu, and the more complicated as well as more pathetic history of Césarine; and to re-discover the countries and the manners depicted for us from Aziyadé to Pêcheur d'Islande. But the consigne elsewhere laid down and experienced forbids it, and I think that consigne should not be "forced."

FOOTNOTES:

[519] It was in connection with this, at some time in the 'eighties, that I came across a curious survival of the old prejudice against novels--deserving perhaps, with better claim than as a mere personal anecdote, record in this history. One French publisher, who held himself above the "three-fifty," and produced dainty books of art and letters, once sent a pathetic remonstrance against his wares being reviewed "sometimes unkindly, and always with the novels."

[520] "Tigrane" is a nickname, early accounted for and perhaps suggesting its own explanation.

[521] At the extreme end there is an interesting reminder of that curious moment when it was thought on the cards that Pius IX. might accept an English asylum at Malta, and that, as a part-consequence, not of course Newman but Manning might be his successor. The probable results of this, to "those who knew" at the time, are still matter of interesting, if unpractical, speculation.

[522] He is playing whist comfortably with the cathedral keys in his pocket, and has nearly made a slam (Fr. chelem), while the pelting of the pitiless storm is on the dead bishop's bier and its faithful guardians.

[523] There is something Browningesque about it, a something by no means confined to the use of the history--actually referred to in the text, but likely to be anticipated long before by readers--of Popes Formosus and Stephen. That it did not satisfy Ultramontanes is not surprising; v. inf. on one of the smaller pieces in Norine.

[524] He had actually been intended for the Church.

[525] One thing, for the credit of the Gallican Church, we may trust that he did not do. An Anglican prelate, like this his brother on a Confirmation tour, is alleged to have pointed to a decanter on his host's sideboard and said, "I hope, on my next visit, I shall not see that." I do not know what the rector answered: I do know what I should have said, despite my reverence for the episcopate: "My Lord, you will not have the opportunity."

[526] La Rue du Puits qui Parle and Le Carmel de Vaugirard.

[527] The Société des Secours Intellectuels.

[528] See on Murger.

[529] Whenever she hears that any of her numerous lovers has fallen ill, she promptly "plants there" the man in possession, and tends and, as far as she can, supports the afflicted.

[530] Vide the frontispiece of Settle's Empress of Morocco.

[531] It would be curmudgeonly to say, "evaded by shortness of space."

[532] They are, however, orthodox after a fashion; and I do not think that M. Fabre, in the books that I have read, ever introduces descendants of the Camisards, though dealing with their country.

[533] M. Fabre is so fond of these interrupted récits that one is sometimes reminded of Jacques le Fataliste and its landlady. But, to do him justice, he "does it more natural."

[534]

"Come to thy death, Victor Galbraith."--LONGFELLOW.

[535] See note above on M. Fabre's weakness for this style of narrative.

[536] The next to be mentioned runs him hard perhaps.

[537] Her girls are perhaps as good, but scarcely her men.

[538] This had not been the case--to an extent which I am puzzled to account for--with those of M. Fabre.

[539] Deformem vocant quidam, as in other cases also: but that is because she has eyes and they have none.

[540] For instance, in Highbury or Cranford there might be scandal about a young bachelor's very late visits to a pretty widow. But the adult portion of the population, at any rate, would hardly lay booby-traps to trip him in a river on his return.

[541] An old schoolmaster, whom Raymonde has deeply offended by upsetting his just-gathered mushrooms at the beginning of the book, and who is warmly attached to Antoine, turns out to be the girl's legal father--her mother, a disagreeable, handsome person, having been run away twenty years earlier by another character who has passed hitherto as respectable husband and paterfamilias.

[542] Excepting some of the "Johnny Ludlow" stories, which were, I think, in their kind, better than anything M. Ohnet ever did to my knowledge--I may perhaps observe that the above notice was written, exactly as it stands, before M. Ohnet's death, but under the impression that the death had occurred. When it did, there were things in the obituaries which made me raise my eyebrows. That he was a "belated Romantic" had certainly never occurred to me; but I have no quarrel with the description of him, in another place, as a practitioner of the roman bourgeois.

[543] V. sup. p. 277-280.

[544] The great scene in Mr. Disraeli's Young Duke, when that youthful nobleman loses, what is it? two hundred and seventeen thousand pounds, I think; the brief but poignant plucking of Mr. Dawkins; the occasion in Sans Merci where the hero will not lead trumps, and thereby, though not at once, seals his fate; and a quite nice game at Marmora in Mr. E. F. Benson's The Babe, B.A. emerge from many memories, reinforced by some of actual experience. Marmora is a nice game: with penny stakes, and three players only, you may have five pounds in the pool before you know where you are. But I do not know anything more really exciting than a game at which you guess how many marbles the other fellow holds in his fist. The sequel, however, in which you have to ask for an advance of pocket-money to settle your "differences", is not so pleasant.

[545] Another scene, which brings on the dénouement and in which Claire is again supposed to have the beau rôle, does not please me much better. Thinking that her husband is flirting with the detested Duchess, she publicly orders her out of the house--a very natural, but a rather "fish-faggy" proceeding.

[546] It has been, and will be, pointed out that he was in all ways studious to run before the wind; and it was just at this time, if I remember rightly, that the catchword of "conflict" began to pester one in criticism. Perhaps this was the reason.

[547] The argument, or assumption rather, is all the odder because, on the one hand, orthodoxy holds Free-will (if it accepts that) as a Divine endowment of the Soul: and, on the other, serious Atheism is almost always Determinist. But the study of M. Ohnet was probably not much among the Sentences.

[548] The obituarist above mentioned, who thought M. Ohnet a belated Romantic, thought also that he was "struggling against the rising tide of Realism." I do not think you would ever have found him struggling against rising tides, and, as a matter of fact, the tide was already on the turn.

[549] Already mentioned in the case of M. Cherbuliez (v. sup. p. 447).

[550]

[Sidenote: Note on La Seconde Vie de M. T.]

The second part is occupied with two different but connected subjects. Suzanne, the first wife, dies suddenly, and the two daughters, the elder, Annie, quite, and the second, Laurence, nearly grown up--return to the custody of their father, and therefore to the society at least of his second wife, Blanche, who, though of course feeling the awkwardness, welcomes them as well as she can. The situation, though much more awkward, is something like that of Miss Yonge's Young Stepmother: but M. Rod makes it more tragic by Annie's death, partly in consequence of a love-marriage failing, through the lover's father's objection to the state of her family. The other subject is the gradual hankering of Michel after a return to political life, and his (consequentially inevitable) ratting from Right to Left. M. Rod brought into the matter direct reminiscences of the Parnell and Dilke cases, and possibly owed the conception of the whole book to them; but he has, as is sometimes his wont, rather "sicklied it over" with political and other discussion.

[551] A pleasant study, in poetic use of imagery and phrase, is the gradation from the bare and grand Lucretian simplicity of silentia noctis, through the "favour and prettiness" (slightly tautological though) of the Virgilian tacitae per amica silentia lunae, to the recovery and intensifying of magnificence in dove il sol tace. By the way, silentia (for the singular undergoes Quintilian's apology for the Latin -um) is one of the few instances in which a Latin word beats the Greek. [Greek: sigê] is really inferior.

[552] What annoys him most of all is that he should have an uncomfortable feeling about the woman "comme si je l'avais aimée!" He had only, you see, done something else.

[553] They should not have done this, and I do not think they did; it was the couples that jostled them. And even this ought not to have happened. The fastest waltzing (I am speaking of the old deux-temps, which this must have been) conveyed an almost uncanny extra power of vision, and at the same time of avoidance, to the right persons. Indeed, the first three lines of this extract have been objected to as base and inconsistent. I think not; the common out of which you rise to the uncommon is worth indication.

[554] It may be added that the contrast of an earlier mazurka--in the slowness of which the pair had time to look at each other, feel each other, and otherwise remain in Paradise, but outside of the double Nirvana--is highly creditable. But I hope they waltzed to the mazurka. It is rather annoying to other people who are doing the orthodox step; but it is the perfection of the slow movement, which affords, as above, opportunities that do not exist in the faster and more delirious gyration.

[555] This (which may be called M. Rod's novel-headquarters) occurs also not merely in L'Eau Courante but in Les Roches Blanches, a book which opens very well in a Mrs. Gaskell or Mrs. Oliphant vein, with the introduction of a new pastor, but ends much less satisfactorily, with a guiltless but not at all convincing love-affair between this pastor and the wife of his chief parishioner.

[556] His wife for a time, Madame Judith Gautier, who died very recently, wrote in a fashion not unworthy of her blood both in verse and prose (part of her production being translations from Chinese), and was the only lady-member of the quaint Contre-académie formed by E. de Goncourt.

[557] And this shame becomes more acute when I think of one or two individual books, such especially as M. Henry Cochin's Manuscrit de Monsieur C. A. L. Larsonnier--a most pathetic and delightful story of a mental malady which makes time and memory seem to go backward though the victim can force himself to continue his ordinary duties, and record his sufferings.

CONCLUSION

The remaining pages of this book should be occupied partly with a continuation of a former chapter,[558] partly with a summary of the whole volume, the combination, almost necessary in all cases, being specially motived in this by the overlappings referred to above, and a word added on the whole History. Not only did Victor Hugo hold, to French literature as well as to French poetry, something very like the position[559] occupied by Tennyson and Browning in English poetry only, by covering every quarter of the century in whole or part with his work; but there was, even in France, nothing like the "general post" of disappearances and accessions which marked the period from 1820 to 1860 in English--a consequence necessarily of the later revival of French. No one except Chateaubriand corresponded to the crowd of distinguished writers who thus made their appearance, at the actual meeting of eighteenth and nineteenth, with us; and though, of course, there were exceptions, the general body of the French reinforcement did not dwindle much till 1870 onwards.

We noted that the first great development of the nineteenth-century novel was in the historical department, though many others made notable fresh starts: and we said something about the second development of the "ordinary" one which followed. It is this latter, of course, which has supplied the main material of the last third of the present volume, though (of course again) there have been many noteworthy and some great examples of the historical itself, of the supernatural, of the eccentric, and of many other kinds. But practically all who tried these later tried the ordinary, and a great many who tried the ordinary did not try the others. It is therefore on the development of the novel of common modern life that we must, at any rate for a little time, spend most of our attention here.

The fact of the change is indeed so certain and so obvious, that there is not much need to enforce or illustrate it, though it must be remembered that, on any true conception of history, the most obvious things are not those least worthy of being chronicled. Even Hugo, likely to be, and actually being, the most recalcitrant to the movement, comes close to modern times, and to such ordinary life as was possible to him, in Les Misérables and Les Travailleurs de la Mer. George Sand had begun as a sort of modernist; but by any one who can perform the (it is true not very easy) task of equating relative modernity, it will not be found that Mlle. la Quintinie, or even Flamarande, are more modern than Lélia or Valentine in the mere ratio of the dates. The ordinary life of the 'thirties and that of the 'sixties and 'seventies was no doubt different, but there is more than that difference in the books referred to. The artist is, consciously or unconsciously, trying to get nearer to her model or sitter. And this though George Sand was really almost as self-centred as Hugo, though in another way.

But it is, of course, in less idiosyncratic writers than these, who continued, and in others who began, to write at this time, that we must look for our real documents. Among the elder of this second class, Jules Sandeau's work is worth recurring to. He had sometimes gone a little earlier than his own time, and he had sometimes employed what is called--perhaps inconsiderately and certainly to some extent misleadingly--"romantic" incident in addition to purely novel-character and presentation. But his general manner of dealing reproduces itself, almost more than that of any of his contemporaries, in those novelists of the last quarter of the century who do not bow the knee to Naturalism: and one finds some actual recognition of the fact in dedications to him by younger novelists such as M. André Theuriet.[560]

But, look where you will, the lesson is unmistakable. Take Alexandre Dumas fils, beginning with a Tristan le Roux and ending with an Affaire Clémenceau. Take Flaubert's Madame Bovary and L'Éducation Sentimentale, in comparison with which Salammbô and two of the Trois Contes (the other is quite in the general drift) are obvious variations, excursions, reliefs.[561] Feuillet is practically (whatever may have been his early practice as a "devil"), when he takes to his own line, modern, and in a sense ordinary or nothing: Daudet the same. Naturalism en bloc would lose almost all pretence of justifying itself if it did not stick to the ordinary, or at least actual, though it may sometimes be a sort of transformed "ordinariness in abnormality." So great and so fertile a writer as Maupassant leaves us--except in his supernaturalisms--nothing at all that goes out of the actual probable or easily possible experience of a Frenchman of 1880-90. The four novelists who supply the bulk of the last chapter never outstep this. But since such indulgence in particulars may be thought mere driving at an open door, let us take the fact for granted, and turn to some consideration of its causes, results, conditions, features, and the like.

One of the causes is of such certainty and importance that a person, not indolent or prejudiced, might ask for no other. It is that sempiternal desire for change[562]--that principle of revolution, which is so much more certain than any evolution, and which governs human life, though it is always bringing that life back to the old places, "camouflaged," as they say nowadays, in a fashion that disguises them to the simple. The romance of incident, historical and other, had had a long innings, and people were tired of it. But though this was undoubtedly the main influence, there were some others which it would be hardly judicious to neglect. It is true that the greatest of these were, in a fashion, only partial actions or reactions of the larger one already mentioned.[563] Beyle and Balzac, the latter of course with important "colours" of his own, and even the former with some modifications, had, as men of genius generally do, felt or found the spirit of change early, and their audiences helped to spread it. And yet minor impulsions might be indicated. It is a commonplace that from the days of the Napoleonic War to the middle 'fifties there were few great European events; commercial progress, developments of colonisation, machinery, literature, and the arts, somewhat peddling politics,[564] and the like taking the place of the big wars and the grandiose revolutions that ushered in the nineteenth century. But these mostly meaner things themselves claimed attention; they filled the life of men if they did not glorify it; classes and occupations which had been almost altogether non-vocal began to talk and be talked about, and so the change again held on.

Lastly, of course, there was the increase of education: with which the demand for fiction, plentiful in quantity and easily comprehended, was sure to grow.

On the whole, however, the results concern us more than the causes. What is the general character of this large province, or, looking at it in another way, of these accumulated crops, which the fifty years more specially in question saw added to the prose fiction of France?

The answer is pretty much what any wide student of history--political, social, literary, or other--would expect, supposing, which is of course in fact an impossibility, that he could come to the particular study "fresh and fasting." Novel-writing in France, as elsewhere, became more and more a business; and so, while the level of craftsmanship might be to some extent raised, the level of artistic excellence was correspondingly lowered. It has been before observed more than once that, to the present critic, only Flaubert and Maupassant of the writers we have been discussing in these later chapters can be credited with positive genius, unless the too often smoky and malodorous torch of Zola be admitted to qualify for the Procession of the Chosen. But when we take in the whole century the retrospect is very different; and while the later period may suffer slightly in the respect just indicated, the earlier affords it some compensation in the other noted point.

There is, indeed, no exact parallel, in any literature or any branch of literature within my knowledge, to the manifold development of the French novel during these hundred years. Our own experience in the same department cannot be set in any proper comparison with it, for the four great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century, and their followers from Miss Burney downwards, with the Terror and the Political schools of the extreme close, had advanced our starting-point so far that Scott and Miss Austen possessed advantages not open to any French writer. On the other hand, the Sensibility School, which was far more numerously attended in France than in England, gave other openings, which were taken advantage of in a special direction by Benjamin Constant, and much earlier and less brilliantly, but still with important results, by Madame de Montolieu. The age-long competence of the French in conte and nouvelle was always ready for fresh adaptation; and at the very beginning of the new century, and even earlier, two reinforcements of the most diverse character came to the French novel. Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil (the earliest of whose novels appeared just before the Revolution as Pigault's début was made just after it) may be said to have democratised the novel to nearly[565] the full meaning of that much abused word. They lowered its value aesthetically, ethically (at least in Pigault's case, while Ducray's morality does not go much above the "Be amiable and honest" standard), logically, rhetorically, and in a good many other ways. But they did not merely increase the number of its readers; in so doing they multiplied correspondingly the number of its practitioners, and so they helped to make novel-writing a business and--through many failures and half-successes--to give it a sort of regularised practice, if not a theory.

Yet if this democratisation of the novel thus went partly but, as does all democratisation inevitably, to the degradation of it in quality, though to its increase in quantity, there were fortunately other influences at work to provide new reinforcements, themselves in some cases of quality invaluable. It has been admitted that neither Chateaubriand nor Madame de Staël can be said to have written a first-class novel--even Corinne can hardly be called that. But it is nearer thereto than anything that had been written since the first part of La Nouvelle Héloïse: while René and Atala recover, and more than recover in tragic material, the narrative power of the best comic tales. And these isolated examples were of less importance for the actual history--being results of individual genius, which are not imitable--than certain more general characteristics of the two writers. Between them--a little perhaps owing to their social position, but much more by their pure literary quality--they reinstated the novel in the Upper House of literature itself. In Madame de Staël there was more than adequacy--in Chateaubriand there was sometimes consummateness--of style; in both, with whatever varnish of contemporary affectation, there was genuine nobility of thought. They both chose subjects worthy of their powers, and Madame de Staël at least contented herself with ordinary, or not very extraordinary, modern life. But the greatest things they did, from the historian's point of view, were introductions of the novel to new fields of exercise and endeavour. Art and religion were brought into its sphere, and if Les Natchez and Les Martyrs cannot exactly be called modern historical novels, they are considerable advances, both upon the model of Télémaque and upon that of Bélisaire. And even putting this aside, the whole body of Chateaubriand's work, as well as not a little in Madame de Staël's, tended to introduce and to encourage the spirit of Romance.

Now the proposition which--though never, I trust, pushed to the unliterary extent of warping the judgment, and never yet, I hope, unduly flaunted or flourished in the reader's face--dominates this volume, is that Romanticism, or, to use the shorter and more glorious name, Romance, itself dominates the whole of the French nineteenth-century novel. If any one considers that this proposition is at variance with the other, that the main function of the novel during the period has been to bring the novel closer to ordinary life, he has failed to grasp what it might be presumptuous plumply to call the true meaning of Romance, but what is certainly that meaning as it has always appeared to me.

To attempt discussion, or even enumeration, of all the definitions or descriptions of Romance in general which have been given by others would not only be impossible in the space at command, but would be really irrelevant. As it happens, the matter can be cut short, without inadequacy and without disingenuousness, by quoting a single pair of epithets, affixed by a critic, for whom I have great respect, a day or two before I wrote these words. This critic held that Romantic treatment--in stage matters more particularly, but we can extend the phrase to fiction without unfairness--was "generous but false." I should call it "generous" certainly, but before all things "true." Nor is this a mere play upon the words of the original. It so happens that our friend the enemy has supplied a most admirable help. Legally, as we know, veracity requires "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." I admit that the last clause will not fit Romance. She does give us something more than the truth, and that is her generosity, but it is a generosity which is necessitated by the fact that Romance is a quality or function not so much of nature essentially--though happily it is sometimes so by accident--as of Art, the essence of which is to require, whether it be art classic or art romantic, art of literature or art of design, art of sight or art of sound, something added to the truth--as that truth exists in reality.

Of what this addition is presently. But Romance, as I see it, insists upon and gives the truth and the whole truth of nature itself. Who is the greatest of Romantics? By agreement of all but the purblind and the paradoxer, Shakespeare. Who is the truest and the most universal of all writers? By consent of classic and romantic, at least of those of either kind who "count"--again Shakespeare. Let me say at once that, having early sworn allegiance to Logic, I am perfectly aware that a coincidence of two things in one person does not prove the identity of the things. But it proves their compossibility, and when it is found in excelsis, it surely goes near to prove a good deal more. Nor is one in the least confined to this argument from example, strong as it is. When you examine Classicism, which, whatever we may say or not say of it, will always stand as the opposite of Romance, you find that it always leaves something out. It may--it does in its best examples--give you truth; it may--it does in its best examples--add something which is its own "generosity"--its castigation, its order, its reason, its this and that and the other. To be very liberal, it may be admitted that the perpetual and meticulous presence in it of "Thou shalt not" do or say this or that, is most conspicuous--let us go to the extreme of generosity ourselves and say, is only conspicuous--in its feebler examples. But there is always something that it does not give, and some of us think that there are not a few things which it cannot give. There is nothing, not even ugliness itself, which Romance cannot give, though there its form of generosity comes in, and the ugly in simple essence becomes beautiful by treatment.

I could bestow any amount of tediousness in these generalities on my readers if I thought it necessary: but having developed my proposition and its meaning, I think it better to pass to the applications thereof in the present subject.

Of the wide extension of aim and object effected by Romantic influence in the novel, as in other departments of literature, there can be little denial, though of course it may be contended that this extension took place not as it ought and as it ought not. But of the fact of it and of the corresponding variety introduced with it, the very pioneers of the so-called Romantic movement give ample proof. We have seen this even in the extremely inchoate stage of the first two decades; when the great definitely Romantic leaders made their appearance it was more remarkable still. The four chief writers who gave the Romantic lead before 1830 itself may be taken to be Nodier, Hugo, Mérimée, and Vigny. They stand in choice of subjects, as in treatment of them, wide apart; and just as it has been noted of Vigny's poetry, that its three chief pieces, "Éloa," "Dolorida," and "Le Cor" point the way to three quite different kinds of Romantic verse, so, confining ourselves to the same example, it may be repeated that Cinq-Mars and the smaller stories exemplify, and in a way pattern, kinds of Romantic prose fiction even further apart from each other. Always, through the work of these and that of Gautier, and of all the others who immediately or subsequently follow them, this broadening and branching out of the Romantic influence--this opening of fresh channels, historical and fanciful, supernatural and ordinary--shows itself. The contention, common in books, that this somehow ceased about the middle of the century, or at least died off with the death of those who had carried it out, appears to me, I confess, to be wildly unhistorical and uncritical. At no time--the proofs fill this volume--do we find any restriction, of choice of subject or conduct of treatment, to anything like the older limits. But the most unhistorical and the most uncritical form of this contention is the astonishing endeavour to vindicate a "classical" character for Naturalism. Most certainly there is "impropriety" in some of the classics and "impropriety" in all the Naturalists, but other resemblance I can see none. As for the argument that as Naturalism is opposed to Romance and Classicalism is opposed to Romance, therefore Naturalism is Classical--this is undoubtedly a very common form of bastard syllogism, but to labour at proving its bastardy would be somewhat ridiculous.

The fact is, as should have been sufficiently made good above, that Naturalism is not opposed to Romance in anything like the sense that Classicism is: it is nothing but a degradation and exaggeration at once of certain things in Romance itself. Nor do I think that there is the slightest difficulty in showing that every form of novel-writing which we have been surveying in this book--that the work of every one of those distinguished or undistinguished writers who have been, with or without regret, declined--is still essentially Romantic. It is Romantic in its inflexible resolution to choose subjects for itself and not according to rule; Romantic in its wise or unwise individuality of treatment; Romantic in its preferential appeal to emotion rather than to pure intelligence; above all, Romantic in its quest--often no doubt ill-guided and unsuccessful, but always more or less present--for that element of strangeness which, though invisible to many who live, is a pervading character of Life itself, and the presence of which it is the glory of Romance itself, from its earliest to its latest manifestations, to have recognised and to some extent fixed, in artistic representation. And so, I hope, that what has been discovered in this volume--in the way of pageant and procession even more than that of examination, though with something of that also--may have shown further progress towards--nay, actual attainment of, the goal which I ventured to mark out in the earlier volume as that of the novelist by the words, "Here is the whole of human life before you. Copy it or, better, re-create it--with variation and decoration ad libitum--as faithfully, but as fully, as you can."

Thesis-writing, however, is but dismal reading, unless (as Mrs. Scott told Jeffrey she hoped he was for the Marmion review) "you are very well paid for it." Nor do I, as I have previously explained, consider it a necessary part of history, though common honesty may require that the presence of a doctrine, behind the delivery of an account, should be confessed. I think the account itself should be sufficient to make good my point; others may differ. But even if they do, some of them at least will, I hope, have found in that account some modicum of the amazing supply of rest and refreshment contained in the mass of literature we have been surveying.

On the two volumes together there may be a little more to say. I have touched, I hope not too frequently, on the curious pleasure which I myself have felt in reading again books sometimes unopened for more than half a century, sometimes read at different times during that period, sometimes positively familiar; and on the contrasted enjoyment of reading others written long ago in all but a few cases, but not, as it happened, read at the time of their appearance. I am indeed inclined to lay much stress on the quality of re-readableness in a novel. Perhaps, as indeed is pretty generally the fact in such cases, a capacity of reading again is required in the person as well as one of being read again in the book. The late Mr. Mark Pattison was not a friend of mine, and we once had a pitched battle; nor was he in any case given to borrow other people's expressions. But he was a critic, if he was anything, and he once did me the honour to repeat verbatim--whether consciously or not I cannot say, but in the very periodical where it had originally appeared--a sentence of mine about "people who would rather read any circulating-library trash, for the first time, than Pendennis or Pride and Prejudice for the second." I think this difference between the two classes is as worthy to rank, among the criteria of opposed races of mankind and womankind, as those between borrowers and lenders, Platonists and Aristotelians, or Big- and Little-Endians.

But the vast library through which I have had the privilege of conducting my readers does not exercise any invidious separation between the two. I have read a good many French novels--hundreds certainly, I do not know that it would be preposterous to say thousands--that I have not even mentioned in this book.[566] But I have been a very busy man, and have had to read and to do a great many other things. If I had had nothing else to do and had devoted my entire life to the occupation which Gray thought not undesirable as regards Marivaux and Crébillon, I doubt whether I could have "overtaken," as the Scotch say, the entire prose fiction of 1800-1900 in French. On the back of one of the volumes of fiction--itself pretty obscure--which I have noticed in Chapter II. of this volume, I find advertised the works of a certain Dinocourt, of whom I never heard before, and who is not to be found in at least some tolerably full French dictionaries of literature. They have quite appetising titles (one or two given in the passage referred to), and there are in all sixty-two volumes of them, distributed in fours, fives, and sixes among the several works. Ought I to have read these sixty odd volumes of Dinocourt? That is a moral question. That there are sixty odd volumes of him, probably not now very easily obtainable, but somewhere for some one to read if he likes, is a simple fact. And there are no doubt many more than sixty such batches waiting likewise,[567] and quite likely to prove as readable as I found M. Ricard.

I have by no means always felt inclined to acquiesce in the endlessly repeated complaints that the hackwork of literature is worse done in England than it is in France. But having had a very large experience of the novels of both languages, having reviewed hundreds of English novels side by side with hundreds of French as they came from the press, and having also read, for pleasure or duty, hundreds of older ones in each literature, I think that the mysterious quality of readableness pure and simple has more generally belonged to the French novel than to the English. This, as I have endeavoured to point out, is not a question of naughtiness or niceness, of candour or convention. I have indeed admitted that the conventions of the French novel bore me quite as much as anything in ours. It may be partly a question of length, for, as everybody knows, the French took to the average single volume, of some three hundred not very closely printed pages, much sooner than we took to anything of the kind. It is perhaps partly also due to what one of the reviewers of my former volume well called the greater "spaciousness" of the English novel, that is to say, its inclusion of more diverse aims, and episodic subjects, and minor interests generally. For this, while it makes for superior greatness when there is strength enough to carry it off, undoubtedly requires more strength, and so gives more openings for weakness to show itself. There are many average English novels which I should not mind reading, and not a few that I should like to read, again, while there are but few French novels that I should care to read so often as I have cared to read the great English ones. But I could read, for a second time, a very much larger proportion of average French fiction.

Of those books which are "above average" I have tried to say what I thought ought to be said in the volume itself, and there is no need of a "peroration with much circumstance" about them. It is a long way--a perfect maze of long ways leading through the most different countries of thought and feeling--from Atala dying in the wilderness to Chiffon doing exquisitely balanced justice to herself and the Jesuit, by allowing that while he and she were both bien élevés, he was un peu trop and she was not. It is not so far, except in time, nor separated by such a difference of intervening country, from the song of the Mandragore in Nodier to those muffled shrieks of a better-known variety of the same mystic plant, that tell us of Maupassant's growing progress to his fate. As you explore the time and the space of the interval you come across wonderful things. There are the micro- macrocosms of Hugo, where, as in Baudelaire's line on the albatross quoted above, he is partly hampered because he has come down from the air of poetry to the earth of prose; of Balzac, where there is no such difficulty, but where the cosmos itself is something other than yours; of Dumas, where half the actual history of France is _dis_realised for your delectation. On a lesser scale you have the manners of town and country, of high life and low life, of Paris most of all, given you through all sorts of perspectives and in all sorts of settings by Paul de Kock and George Sand, by Sandeau and Bernard, by Alexandre Dumas fils and Feuillet, by Theuriet and Fabre. Gautier and Mérimée make for you that marriage of story and style which, before them, so few had attempted at all, yet which, since them, so many have tried with such doubtful success. Once more in Flaubert and then for the last time, as far as our survey goes, in Maupassant, you come to that touch of genius which exalts the novel, as it exalts all kinds, indefinably, unmistakably, finally.

And this journey is not like the one great journey, and more than one of the lesser journeys, of our life, irremeable; there is no denial, no curse, no fiend with outstretched claw, to prevent your going back as often as you like, wandering in any direction you please, passing or staying as and where you wish. It has been perhaps unconscionable of me to inflict so big a book on my readers as a cover for giving myself the pleasure of making and remaking such journeys. But if I have persuaded any one of them to explore the country for himself, by him at least I shall not remain unforgiven.

FOOTNOTES:

[558] V. sup. "The French Novel in 1850."

[559] Called by some a "deadening" one. There was some very cheerful Life in that Death.

[560] The better part even of M. Ohnet is a sort of vulgarised Sandeau.

[561] La Tentation, like others of the very greatest novels, is independent of its time, save in mere unimportant "colour."

[562] How little this change was one back to classicism--as some would have it--we may see presently.

[563] The greatest of all--the direction and maintenance of the revolution under the inspiration of what is called Romance--must be again postponed for a little while.

[564] Of course the convulsions of '48 were ominous enough, but they seemed to be everywhere repressed or placated for a considerable time; and if there had been a single statesman of genius besides Herr von Bismarck (I anticipate but decline the suggestion of Cavour) in the Europe of the next two decades, they might not have broken out again for a much longer time than was actually the case.

[565] Nearly--but fortunately for literature--not quite. The jobbery and the tyranny which are inseparable from democracy in politics find room with difficulty in our "Republic."

[566] I am prepared for blame on account of some of the absences of mention. Perhaps the most provoking, to some readers, will be those affecting two industrious members of the aristocracy: Mme. la Comtesse Dash--more beautifully and properly though less exaltedly, Gabrelli Anna Cisterne de Courtiras, _Vi_comtesse de Saint-Mars--and M. le Comte Xavier de Montépin. They overlapped each other in pouring forth, from the 'forties to the 'nineties, torrents of mostly sensational fiction. But I had rather read them than write about them.

[567] In the same place another novelist, M. Amédée de Bast, of whom I again acknowledge ignorance, advertises no less than four novels of four volumes each, as being actually all at press, pour paraître à diverses époques. Dryden says somewhere "in epoches mistakes." Let us hope there were none here.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Appendix

DATES OF PUBLICATION OF NOVELS ARRANGED UNDER AUTHOR'S NAMES IN THE ORDER OF NOTICE HERE

(These dates are given subject to the caution stated under Addenda and Corrigenda for Vol. I., p. xvii of this present volume. It has not been thought necessary to add editions, etc., as was done in Vol. I.: almost all the books referred to being in common sale. For dates of the authors themselves, see Index as before. Those of some books merely glanced at are excluded to save room.)

Staël, Mme. de. Delphine, 1802; Corinne, 1807.

Chateaubriand. Atala, 1801, in the Mercure; René, 1802, in Génie du Christianisme, 1805; Le Dernier Abencérage, 1805; Les Martyrs, 1809; Les Natchez in Oeuvres Complètes, 1826-31.

Paul de Kock. L'Enfant de ma Femme, 1812; Gustave, 1821; La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant, 1829; Edmond et sa Cousine, 1843; André le Savoyard, 1825; Jean, 1828. Mon Voisin Raymond; 1822; Le Barbier de Paris, 1826.

Ducray-Duminil. Fanfan et Lolotte, 1787; Le Petit Carillonneur, 1809.

Ducange, V. L'Artiste et la Soldat, 1827; Ludovica, 1830.

Montolieu, Mme. de. Caroline de Lichtfield, 1786.

Ricard, A. L'Ouvreuse de Loges, 1829-32.

Arlincourt, Vicomte d'. Le Solitaire, 1821.

Nodier, Charles. Les Proscrits, Le Peintre de Salzbourg, etc., 1802-6; Jean Sbogar, 1818; Smarra, 1821; Trilby, 1822; La Fée aux Miettes, 1831.

Hugo, Victor. Han d'Islande, 1823; Bug-Jargal, 1824-26; Notre Dame de Paris, 1830; Les Misérables, 1862; Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 1866; L'Homme qui Rit, 1869; Quatre-Vingt-Treize, 1873.

Beyle, Henri. Armance, 1827; Le Rouge et le Noir, 1830; La Chartreuse de Parme, 1839; L'Abbesse de Castro, 1832. First set of posthumous Nouvelles, etc., 1854 onwards; second ditto (Lamiel, etc.), 1887 onwards.

Balzac, H. de. Most of the Juvenilia were written, alone or in collaboration, during the years 1821, 1822, 1823, and 1824, but the period of the whole extends to that of Les Chouans (originally Le Dernier Chouan), 1829. The dates of the rest, especially considering their frequent rearrangement, are too numerous to give. Those chiefly commented on in text appeared as follows: Le Peau de Chagrin, 1831; Eugénie Grandet, 1833; Le Père Goriot, 1834; Les Parents Pauvres, 1846-47.

Sand, George. Indiana, 1832; Valentine, 1832; Lélia, 1833; Consuelo, 1842-43; La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, 1844-45; Lucrezia Floriani, 1847; Elle et Lui, 1859; Un Hiver à Majorque, 1842; La Mare au Diable, 1846; La Petite Fadette, 1840; F. le Champi, 1849; Mauprat, 1837; La Daniella, 1857; Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré, 1858; Le Marquis de Villemer, 1861; Mlle. la Quintinie, 1863; Flamarande, 1875.

Gautier, Théophile. Les Jeune-France, 1833; Mlle. de Maupin, 1835; Fortunio, 1838; Nouvelles, 1845; Jettatura, 1857; Le Capitaine Fracasse, 1863; Spirite, 1866.

Mérimée, Prosper. (Clara Gazul, 1825; La Guzla, 1827; Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, part of Clara Gazul originally, did not reach the stage till 1850.) La Jacquerie, 1828; Chronique de Charles IX, 1829. Most of the stories, including Colomba, appeared between 1830 and 1840. Carmen, 1847; Dernières Nouvelles, 1873.

Musset, A. de. Most of the stories noticed in text appeared originally after 1840 in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and were not collected till after his death in 1857. Mimi Pinson had been published in 1852.

Gérard de Nerval. Work noticed appeared sporadically, in many papers and some books, between 1828 and his death in 1855. The best edition of the Oeuvres Complètes is of 1868.

Vigny, A. de. Cinq-Mars, 1826; Stello, 1832; Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, 1835.

Fromentin, Eugène. Dominique, 1863.

Sainte-Beuve, C. A. Volupté, 1834.

Bernard, Ch. de. Gerfaut, 1838; Le Noeud Gordien, 1838; Le Paravent, 1839. The rest between 1840 and his death in 1850.

Sandeau, Jules. Marianna, 1839; Fernand, 1844; Valcreuse, 1846; La Roche aux Mouettes, 1871; Mlle. de La Seiglière, 1851; Sacs et Parchemins, 1851; Mlle. de Kérouare, 1842; La Maison de Penarvon, 1858.

Sue, Eugène. Le Coucaratcha, 1832-34; La Vigie de Koatven, 1833; Les Mystères de Paris, 1842-43; Le Juif Errant, 1844-45; Les Sept Péchés Capitaux, 1847-49.

Soulié, Frédéric. Mémoires du Diable, 1837-38; Le Lion Amoureux, 1839; Le Château des Pyrénées, 1843.

Murger, Henri. [Scènes de] La Vie de Bohême, 1851; Les Buveurs d'Eau, 1855; Adeline Protat, 1853; Le Sabot Rouge, 1860. (Shorter stories at different dates between 1848 (?) and his death in 1861.)

Reybaud, Louis. Jérome Paturot, Part I., 1843; Jérome Paturot, Part II., 1848.

Méry, Joseph. Les Nuits Anglaises, 1853.

Karr, Alphonse. Sous les Tilleuls, 1832.

Beauvoir, Roger de. _Stories mostly, 1832-53.

Ourliac, Édouard. Stories mostly, 1835-48.

Achard, Amédée. Belle-Rose, 1847.

Souvestre, Émile. Les Derniers Bretons, 1835-37; Le Foyer Breton, 1844; Un Philosophe sous les Toits, 1850.

Féval, Paul. La Fée des Grèves, 1851.

Borel, Pétrus. Champavert, 1833; Madame Putiphar, 1839.

Dumas père. Isabeau? [-bel? -belle?] de Bavière, 1835; Le Comte de Monte Cristo, 1844-45; Les Trois Mousquetaires, 1844; Vingt Ans Après, 1845; La Reine Margot, 1845; Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, 1848-50.

The sequels of La Reine Margot and the major part of the eighteenth-century series appeared between 1846 and 1850; Olympe de Clèves in 1852; Les Louves de Machecoul in 1859. Little of real value in novel later. The period of chief attack on him for plagiarism, supercherie, "novel-manufacture," etc., was 1845-48.

Dumas fils. Tristan le Roux, 1850; La Dame aux Camélias, 1848; Antonine, 1849; La Vie à Vingt Ans, 1854; Aventures de Quatre Femmes et d'un Perroquet, 1846-47; Trois Hommes Forts, 1851; Diane de Lys, 1853; Affaire Clémenceau, 1866; Ilka, 1895.

Janin, Jules. L'Âne Mort et la Femme Guillotinée, 1829; Barnave, 1831.

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary, 1857; Salammbô, 1862; L'Éducation Sentimentale, 1869; La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, 1848-74; Trois Contes, 1877; Bouvard et Pécuchet, 1881.

Feuillet, Octave. Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre, 1858; M. de Camors, 1867; La Petite Comtesse, 1857; Julia de Trécoeur, 1872; Honneur d'Artiste, 1890; La Morte, 1886.

Daudet, Alphonse. Le Petit Chose, 1868; Robert Helmont, 1876; Lettres de Mon Moulin, 1869; Jack, 1862; Tartarin de Tarascon, 1872; Le Nabob, 1877; Les Rois en Exil, 1879; Numa Roumestan, 1890; L'Évangéliste, 1883; Sapho, 1884; L'Immortel, 1888.

About, Edmond. Le Roi des Montagnes, 1856; Tolla, 1855; Germaine, 1867; Madelon, 1863; Maître Pierre, 1858.

Ponson du Terrail, Pierre A. Rocambole, 1859; Les Gandins, 1861.

Gaboriau, Émile. L'Affaire Lerouge, 1866.

Feydeau, Ernest. Fanny, 1858; Sylvie, 1861; Daniel, 1859.

Droz, Gustave. Monsieur, Madame et Bébé, 1866; Entre Nous, 1867.

Cherbuliez, Victor. Le Comte Kostia, 1863; Le Roman d'une Honnête Femme, 1867; Meta Holdenis, 1873; Miss Rovel, 1875; Samuel Brohl et Cie, 1877; Olivier Maugant, 1885.

Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules. Les Diaboliques, 1874; L'Ensorcelée, 1854; Un Prête Marié, 1865.

Cladel, Léon. Les Va-nu-pieds, 1873; Crête-Rouge, 1880; La Fête Votive de Saint-Bartholomée Porte-Glaive, 1872.

Champfleury. Les Excentriques, 1852; Madame Eugénio, 1874.

Goncourt, E. and J. Dates in text: from 1860 to 1870.

---- E. only. Chérie, 1884.

Zola, É. Contes à Ninon, 1864; L'Attaque du Moulin, 1880; The Rougon-Macquart books, 1871-93; "Les Trois Villes," 1894-98; "Les Quatre Évangiles," 1890-1903.

Maupassant, Guy de. Boule de Suif, 1880; La Maison Tellier, 1881; Bel-Ami, 1885; Une Vie, 1883; Pierre et Jean, 1888; Fort comme la Mort, 1889; Notre Coeur, 1890. Smaller Tales, 1880-93, and posthumously.

Huysmans, J. K. Contribution to Les Soirées de Médan, 1880; Les Soeurs Vatard, 1879; Là-Bas, 1891; À Rebours, 1884.

Belot, Adolphe. Mlle. Giraud ma Femme, 1870; La Femme de Feu, 1872.

Fabre, Ferdinand. L'Abbé Tigrane, 1873; Norine, 1889; Le Marquis de Pierrerue, 1874; Mon Oncle Célestin, 1881; Lucifer, 1884; Taillevent, 1894; Toussaint Galabru, 1887.

Theuriet, André. Sauvageonne, 1881; Raymonde, 1877; Le Fils Maugars, 1879.

Ohnet, Georges. Serge Panine, 1881; Le Maître de Forges, 1882; Le Docteur Rameau, 1888; La Grande Marnière, 1885.

Rod, Édouard. La Course à la Mort, 1885; Le Sens de la Vie, 1889; La Vie Privée de Michel Teissier, 1893 (2nd part, 1894); La Sacrifiée, 1892; Le Silence, 1894; Là-Haut, 1897; L'Eau Courante, 1902.

Mendès, Catulle. Lesbia, 1886.

(In a not inconsiderable number of cases a difference of one year will be found, from the dates as given in some reference books. This, which renews the elder trouble of "Old" and "New" Style, arises, probably, if not certainly, from the fact of the book having appeared late in autumn or early in spring, with a title-page, anticipatory or retrospective, as the case may be. The same thing occurs, of course, with English books; but not, I think, so often. French books, moreover, unless I am mistaken, not infrequently appear with no date on title-page.)

INDEX

(This Index has been constructed on the same principles as that of Vol. I. But the full names, birth- and death-dates, titles, etc., of authors included in the former Index are not repeated here.)

Abencérage, Le Dernier, 20 note

About, Edmond (1828-1885), 427-436

Achard, Amédée, 281, 319-321, 349

Acta Sanctorum, 408

Addison, 46 note

Adèle et Théodore, 68

Adeline Protat, 305

Adieu, 505

Adolphe, 3, 17, 286, 336, 346 note

Affaire Clémenceau, 388-395, 400, 558

Agamemnon, the, 26

Ainsworth, H., 321, 351

Âmes du Purgatoire, Les, 240

Amours de Philippe, Les, 418

Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 240 note

André le Savoyard, 9, 50, 51

Angélique, 259 note

Anti-Jacobin, The, 31

Antonine, 377

À Rebours, 515

Aristophanes, 404, 409 note

Arlincourt (Charles Victoire Prévot, Vicomte d', 1789-1856), x, 40, 44 note, 78-80, 352 note

Armance, 135-137

Arnold, Mr. M., 25, 28, 35, 97, 164, 279, 412, 436, 444, 520

Arsène Guillot, 241

Astrée, the, 62, 201 note, 350

As You Like It, 137, 235

Atala, 20 sq., 561, 569

Aubigné, Agrippa d', 262

Augier, E., 290

Aurélia, 257 sq.

Aurora Leigh, 297

Austen, Miss, 142, 168, 194, 295 note, 353, 358, 537, 560

Avatar, 226

Adventures de Quatre Femmes et d'un Perroquet, 379, 380

Aziyadé, 554

Babe, B.A., The, 537 note

Bal de Sceaux, Le, 162

Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850), v, 64, 133, 135 note, 146, 147 note, 152-175, 177, 198, 208, 227, 231 note, 240, 282, 289, 293, 343, 347, 348, 363, 364, 386, 423, 432 note, 434, 436 note, 472, 559, 569

Baptiste Montauban, 86

Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules (1808-1889), 401, 449-455, 505 note

Barbiere de Paris, Le, 58, 59

Barnaby Rudge, 47 note

Bast, A. de, 568 note

Bâtard de Mauléon, Le, 328

Battuécas, Les, 68

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-1867), 15, 131 note, 228, 255 note, 412, 413, note, 450 and note, 451, 485, 491, 515, 516, 569

Béatrix, 165, 177

Beau Pécopin, Le, 110

Beauvoir, Roger de (Édouard-Roger de Bully, 1809-1866), 317, 318

Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré, Les, 179 sq.

Beckford (the father), 271 note

Beckford (the son), xix

Bedford Row Conspiracy, The, 294

Bédier, M., xiii

Bel-Ami, 486 sq.

Belinda, 419 note

Bélisaire, 562

Beljame, M., 347 note

Belle-Rose, 320, 321

Belot, Adolphe (1829-1890), 516, 517

Benson, Mr. E. F., 537 note

Béranger, 41 note, 60

Bernard (Charles de Bernard du Grail de la Villette, 1805-1850), v, 208, 237, 240, 281, 289-296, 306, 317, 343, 569

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 18, 22, 101

Bertrand, Louis [or Aloysius] Jacques Napoléon (1807-1841), 82, 228

Bevis of Hampton, 124

Beyle, Marie Henri (1783-1842), vi, 133-152, 169, 273, 336, 343, 348, 356, 363, 396, 559

Bismarck, 559 note

Blake, 10 note, 188, 281, 317, 318 and note, 479, 527

Blennerhassett, Lady, 8

Bohême Galante, La, 257 sq.

Bookman's Budget, A, 488 note

Borel, Pierre or Pétrus d'Hauterive (1809-1859), 322, 371, 453

Borrow, G., 238, 256, 436 note

Bossuet, 37 note

Boswell, xix

Boule de Suif, 468, 473, 485 sq.

Bourget, M. P., 554

Bouvard et Pécuchet, 401 note and sq.

Bovary, Madame, 400 sq.

Braddon, Miss, 205, 457

Bradlaugh, Mr., 396

Bright, Mr., 315

Britannia, The, 52, 53 notes

Brizeux, 282

Broadhead, Mr., 115 note

Brontë, Charlotte, 192

Browne, Sir T., vii, 205

Browning, 141, 159 note, 261, 486, 497, 521 note, 556

Browning, Mrs., 297

Brummell, 449

Brunetière, M., 166 note, 167, 168, 173, 293, 295, 335, 459

Buchanan, Mr., 380

Bug-Jargal, 100, 101, 130, 158

Buloz, 429

Bulwer (the first Lord Lytton), 180, 317, 351

Burney, Miss, 65, 192, 560

Burns, 348 note

Burton (of the Anatomy), 246 note, 409 note, 414

Buveurs d'Eau, Les, 305-306

Byron, 14, 19, 25 and note, 78, 135 note, 147 note, 154, 184, 352, 455 note

Cabaret des Morts, Le, 317, 318

Cabet, 297 note

Caird, E., xi

Callista, 31

Camp of Refuge, The, 342

Candide, xvii

Canticles, the, 497

Capitaine Burle, Le, 473

Capitaine Fracasse, Le, 58, 234

Carlyle, Mr., 16, 64, 111, 115, 400 note, 444, 478, 486

Carmen, 237 sq.

Caroline de Lichtfield, 65-68

Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, Le, 250-251

Cas de Rupture, Un, 384

Castle of Otranto, The, 170

Castor, Le, 305

Castries, Mme. de, 282

Cathinelle, 521

Cattermole, 47 note

Catullus, 227

Cavour, 559 note

Cazotte, 251

Celle-ci et Celle-là, 231

Césarine, 495 note, 554

Chalis, Mme. de, 442

Chambre Bleue, La, 247-248

Champavert, 322, 371, 453

Champfleury (Jules Fleury Husson, 1821-1889), 449, 455-458

Charlevoix, 28

Charrières, Mme. de, xix

Chartreuse de Parme, La, 137-140, 152 note

Chastes, Ph., 167

Chasseur Vert, Le, 148-150

Chateaubriand (François Auguste, Vicomte de, 1768-1848), vi, ix, 1, 2, 18-38, 78, 80, 209, 282, 343, 346, 347, 351, 356, 472, 561, 562

Château de la Misère, Le, 90 note, 234, 339

Château des Pyrénées, Le, 298-300

Château d'If, Le, 330

Châtiments, Les, 110

Chatterton, 266, 271, 272

Chaucer, 470

Chef-d'Oeuvre Inconnu, Le, 162

Chénier, A., 266 sq.

Cherbuliez, Victor (1829-1899), v, 446-449

Chérie, 463

Chester, T., xiii

Chesterfield, Lord, 464

Chevalier de Maison Rouge, 328

Chevalier d'Harmental, 330

Chevaliers du Cygne, Les, 69

Chèvre de M. Séguin, La, 425

Chiffon, Le Mariage de, 554, 569

Chopin, 177 note and sq.

Chouans, Les, 64, 152 sq.

Christabel, 26

Christophe et Cerfbeer, MM., 153, 157 note

"Christopher North" (Prof. Wilson), 261

Chronique de Charles IX, 58, 248-249

Ciel et l'Enfer, Le, 251

Cinq-Mars, 262 sq., 332, 564

Cladel, Léon (1835-1892), 449-451

Clare (the poet), 268

Clarissa, 111, 419

Clarissa Furiosa, 144 note

Claude Gueux, 102, 103, 111

Clélie, 111

Cloister and the Hearth, The, 141, 351

Cochin, M. Henry, 554 note

Coeur Simple, Un, 407 sq.

Coleridge, 26

Colline, Histoire d'une, 314-315

Colomba, 239 sq.

Colomban, Le R. P., 521, 522

Combe de l'Homme mort, La, 86

Comédie Humaine. See Balzac

Comte, 297

Comte de Corke, Le, 69

Comte Kostia, Le, 448

Comtesse de Rudolstadt, La, 179 sq.

Constant, B., xix, 2 note, 3, 346, 560

Consuelo, 179 sq.

Contemplations, Les, 110

Contes à Ninon, 473

Contes de la Bécasse, 501 sq.

Contes Drolatiques, 58, 160 note, 162, 163

Contes du Bocage, 318, 319

Contes et Nouvelles (Dumas fils), 387

Corinne, vi, 7-91, 38, 106, 201, 561

Corneille, 34, 262, 291

Course à la Mort, La, 584 sq.

Cousin Pons, Le, 164

Cousine Bette, La, 157 sq.

Crébillon fils, 46, 209, 231, 250, 355, 362, 367 note, 386, 471, 497, 567

Crête-Rouge, 451

Crime de Silvestre Bonnard, Le, 554

Croce, Signor B., xi

Croft, Sir H., 81, 86

Crofton Boys, The, 505 note

Croisilles, 254 note

Croix de Berny, La, 312 note

Cromwell, 105 note

Cruikshank, 47 note

Dahn, 403

Dame aux Camélias, La, 367 sq., 389

Dame de Monsoreau, La, 329

Daniel, 442

Daniella, La, 201

Dante, 29 note, 188, 512, 546

Darmesteter, M., 358

"Dash," La Comtesse (1804-1872), 567 note

Daudet, Alphonse (1840-1897), 414, 422-427, 452, 461, 463, 465, 522, 558

Daudet, Ernest, 422 note

Daumier, 47, 456

Day, Thomas, 70

Dead Leman, The, 210 note

Defoe, 287, 362

De l'Amour, 135 note

Delille, 34

Delphine, vi, 2-7, 9

Demoiselles de Magazin, Les, 61

De Quincey, 35, 256, 258, 298

Dernier Jour d'un Condamné, Le, 101, 102, 111

Derniers Bretons, Les, 321

Desbordes-Valmore, Mme., 283

Des Vers, 484

Deux Frères, Les, 204

Deux Maîtresses, Les, 253

Diable Amoureux, Le, 81, 251

Diaboliques, Les, 450 sq., 505 note

Diane de Lys, 382, 383

Dickens, 62, 111, 128, 129, 170, 173, 258, 325, 331, 348, 423, 425, 444, 456, 486, 557

Diderot, 228, 236, 256, 434, 471

Dies Irae, 513

Dimanches d'un Bourgeois de Paris, Les, 499

Dinocourt, 567

Disraeli, Mr., 423, 537 note

Djoumane, 244-245

Dobson, Mr. A., 488 note

Docteur Rameau, Le, 535 sq.

Docteur Servans, Le, 384-385

Dominique, 277-280, 356, 537

Don Juan de Vireloup, Le, 532 sq.

Donne, 26, 290 note, 497

Dot de Suzette, La, 76 note

Droz, Antoine Gustave (1832-1895), 443-446

Dryden, 568 note

Du Camp, Maxime, 400 note

Ducange (Victor Henri Joseph Brahain, 1783-1833), 40, 71-75, 77, 158

Ducray-Duminil, François Guillaume (1761-1819), x, 40, 64, 70, 71, 98, 158, 560, 561

Dudevant, Amantine Lucile Aurore (1804-1876). See Sand, George

Dumas père, Alexandre (1803-1870), v, 58, 64, 128, 133, 147 note, 228, 234, 249, 264, 281, 289, 298, 307, 319, 323-342, 348, 351, 352, 354, 357, 359, 361 note, 522, 569

Dumas fils, Alexandre (1824-1895), viii, 153, 344, 362, 363, 365-396, 414, 463, 558, 569

Du Maurier, Mr., 82

Ebers, 403

Eccelino da Romano (Ezzelin), 115 note

Ecclesiastes, 26, 492

Edgeworth, Miss, 69, 419 note

Edmond et sa Cousine, 48-50

Egan, Pierce, 44

Elle et Lui, 177 note and sq.

Elton, Prof., xii

Emmeline, 253-254

Empress of Morocco, The, 523 note

Encyclopædia Britannica, 373

Entre Nous, 443 sq.

Epicurean, The, 37

Erckmann (1822-1899)-Chatrian (1826-1890), 458 note

Esmond, 351, 354

Eugénie Grandet, 157 sq.

Excentriques, Les, 449, 455 sq.

Fabiola, 31

Fabre, Ferdinand (1830-1898), 278, 279, 452, 518-529, 569

Faërie Queene, The, 354 note

Faguet, M., 155

Famille Carvajal, La, 251

Family Herald, The, 71

Fanfarlo, La, 450 note

Fanny, 441

Faux Saulniers, Les, 259 note

Federigo, 244

Fée aux Miettes, La, 81 sq., 258

Fée des Grèves, La, 321

Femme Immortelle, La, 438

Fénelon, 205

Fernand, 290

Feuillet, Octave (1822-1890), v, 67, 169, 204, 326, 381 note, 386, 414-422, 447, 449, 452, 454 note, 558, 569

Féval, Paul (1817-1887), 281, 321, 349

Feydeau, Ernest (1821-1873), 440-443

Fielding, 131, 168, 229, 362, 455 note

Fiévée, Joseph (1767-1839), 76 note

Fille aux Yeux d'Or, La, 162, 166, 173

Filles du Feu, Les, 257 sq.

Fils du Titien, Le, 253

Fils Maugars, Le, 529 sq.

Fiorentino, 326

Flamarande, 177 note and sq., 557

Flaubert, Gustave (1827-1880), v, viii note, 163, 169, 206, 362, 365, 386, 397-413, 427, 449, 452, 461, 465, 467, 473 note, 486, 490 note, 492 558, 560, 569

Fleurs du Mal, Les, 450 note

Foa, Eugénie (1795-1853), 76 note

Folengo, 256

Folie Espagnole, La, 20 note

Fort comme la Mort, 491 sq.

Fortnightly Review, vi, 304, 484 note

Fortunio, 266 sq.

Foscolo, Ugo, 25

Fourier, 297

Foyer Breton, Le, 321

Fragoletta, 155 note

France, M. A., 554

François le Champi, 179 note

Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71, Maupassant's stories of, 501-502

Frédéric et Bernerette, 252-253

Frère Jacques, 61 and note

Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné, 423

Fromentin, Eugène (1820-1876), 277-280, 493, 537

Fronde, Mr., 400 note

Furetière, 471

Gaboriau, Émile (1835-1873), 147 note, 303 note, 436-440

Gandins, Les, 438

Gaspard de la Nuit, 228, 255 note, 450 note

Gautier, Théophile (1811-1872), v, vi, 81, 90 note, 206, 208-237, 239, 259, 277, 278, 289, 307, 312, 317, 339, 343, 348, 356, 370 note, 386, 399, 413, 441, 456, 461, 472, 553, 564, 569

Gautier, Mme. Judith, 553 note

Gavarni, 47, 461 note

Gendre, Le, 294

Gendre de M. Poirier, Le, 290

Génie du Christianisme, Le, 20

Genlis, Mme. de, 40, 68, 69

George Eliot, 192, 205

George III., 339

Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie, Gérard, 1808-1855), vi, 81, 82, 208, 209, 228, 255-261, 312, 349, 356, 397, 456

Gerfaut, 292

Germaine, 432 sq.

Germinie Lacerteux, 411, 461 sq.

Gibbon, 2 note, 3 note

Gilbert (French poet), 266 sq.

Gilbert Gurney, 56

Girardin, É. de, 209, 339

Girardin, Mme. de (Delphine Gay, 1805-1855), 312 note

Gissing, 30

Gladstone, Mr., 434

Glu, La, 554

Goddam!, 45 note

Godwin, 182

Goethe, 24, 25, 154

Golden Ass, The, 88

Goncourts, the--Edmond (1822-1896), 169, 206, 362, 399, 411, 423

---- Jules (1830-1870), 452, 460-466, 487

Grand Cyrus, Le, 111

Grande Bretèche, La, 162, 163, 173

Grande Marnière, La, 535 sq.

Grangette, 383

Gray, 567

Gregory, Mr. George, 70 note

Guérin, Eugénie de, 283

Guizot, 345

Gustave ou Le Mauvais Sujet, 44-48

Guy Mannering, 152 note

Guzla, La, 250

"Gyp", 437, 554

Halsbury, Lord, 434

Hamilton, A., v, xix, 134, 209

Hamlet, 15, 26, 157, 235

Han d'Islande, 97-100

Harrisse, M. H., xviii

Haydon, 233 note

Hazlitt, 135 note, 210

Headless Horseman, The, 397

Hearn, Mr. L., 210 note, 222

Heine, 19 note, 411, 497

Hélisenne de Crenne, 178 note, 487

Henley, Mr., 319 note, 324, 328 note, 330 note

Hereward the Wake, 391

Hernani, 105 note

Herodias, 408

Herodotus, 121

Herrick, 210

Histoire des Treize, 166, 167

Histoire du Lieutenant Valentin, 456

Histoire d'une Puce Enragée, 270, 277

Histoire sans Nom, Une, 455

Hitchcock, Miss Elsie, xii

Hiver à Majorque, Un, 177 note and sq.

Hoffmann, 81 and 82 note, 230

Homer, 27, 32, 33 note, 268 note, 340 note

Honneur d'Artiste, 420 sq.

Hook, Theodore, 44 note, 56, 353

Horace, 404, 425

Horla, Le (and other terror-stories of Maupassant's), 503 note, 508, 509

Houghton, Lord, 255 note

Hugo, Victor Marie (1802-1885), vi, x, 19, 40, 96-133, 147 note, 167, 173, 182, 188, 208, 227, 256 note, 262, 266, 277, 343, 348, 351, 356, 386, 450, 459 note, 467, 472, 497, 556, 557, 564, 569

Hunt, Leigh, 43

Huysmans, Joris Karl (1848-1907), 452, 453 note, 485, 515, 516, 556

Hypatia, 31

Hyperion (Keats's), 169

Idées et Sensations, 461

Ilka, 387-388

Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia, 243-244

Indiana, 177 note and sq.

Inès de las Sierras, 81 sq., 246, 339

Irving, Washington, 317

Isabel de Bavière, 328

It is Never too Late to Mend, 102

Ivanhoe, 124 note, 353

Jack, 423 sq.

Jacob, P. L., 231 note

Jacquerie, La, 249, 250

Jacques le Fataliste, 236, 526 note

James, G. P. R., 201, 321, 351

---- Mr. H., 399, 493 note

Janin, Jules Gabriel (1804-1874), 73, 231 note, 369, 370 note, 453

Japhet in Search of a Father, 61 note

Jean, 51-54

Jean Sbogar, 95 note

Jeffrey, 566

Jérôme Paturot, 306-312, 499

Jésus Christ en Flandre, 162

Jettatura, 226

Jeune-France, Les, 227 sq., 243, 307, 441

Johnson, Dr., xix, 17, 65, 370, 383 note, 513

Jonathan Wild, 403

Jonson, Ben, 121, 409 note

Journal des Goncourt, Le, 461, 462, 465

Juif Errant, Le, 296

Julia de Trécoeur, 381 note, 418 sq.

Julie, 225

Juvenal, 404

Karr, Alphonse (1808-1890), 281, 316, 317, 326

Keats, 184, 233 note

Kenilworth, 124 note, 353

Ker, Professor, xii, 15 note

Kingsley, Charles, 31, 111, 123, 351, 520

Kipling, Mr., 3, 70 note, 489

Kock, Paul de (Charles P., 1794-1871), vi, x, 9, 40-63, 69, 74 note, 80, 95 note, 158, 188, 302, 305, 308, 349, 357, 569

L'Abbé Aubain, 242

L'Abbé Tigrane, 279, 519 sq.

L'Abbesse de Castro, 140

Laclos, 6, 231, 302, 359, 360, 426, 487

Lacordaire, 283

L'Affaire Lerouge, 439, 440

La Femme de Feu, 516

La Femme, le Mari et l'Amant, 54-56

La Fille aux Trois Jupons, 60

La Fontaine, 227 note

La Harpe, 38

Là-Haut, 547 sq.

Lalla Rookh, 31

Lamartine, 25, 283

Lamb, Charles, 82, 256, 341, 348 note

Lamennais, 34, 188, 205, 283, 467

La Mettrie, 190

Lamiel, 147, 148

Landor, 258

L'Âne Mort et la Femme Guillotinée, 370 note, 153

Lang, Mr. A., 210 note, 256, 292, 324, 437

La Religieuse, 516

La Rochefoucauld, 426

L'Artiste et le Soldat, 72

Last Days of Pompeii, The, 31

Latouche, Henri de (really Hyacinthe Joseph Alexandre Thabaud de L. (1785-1851)), 154 and note

L'Attaque du Moulin, 473, 485

Launfal, xiii

Laure Ruthwen, 95 note

L'Eau Courante, 551

Le Breton, M., 168

Leconte de Lisle, 262 note, 488 note

L'Écueil, 294

L'Éducation Sentimentale, 403 sq., 558

Leech, 499

Légende des Siècles, La, 110

Légende du Mont Saint-Michel, 502

Lélia, 179 sq., 577

Lemaître, M. Jules, 15 note

Le Moyne, le Père, 262 note

L'Enfant de sa Femme, 462

L'Ensorcelée, 450 sq.

Leopardi, 273

L'Épave, 501

Lesage, 301, 346, 362, 471

"Les Quatre Évangiles," Zola's, 474, 477-480

"Les Trois Villes," Zola's, 474, 477

Lettres de Mon Moulin, 423 sq.

L'Évangéliste, 411, 426

Lewis, "Monk," 251

L'Homme aux Trois Culottes, 60

L'Homme Qui Rit, 122-127, 131, 348, 472

L'Hôtellerie Sanglante, 303

Liaisons Dangereuses, Les, 143 and note, 487

Liber Amoris, 135 note

Life in London, 44

L'Immortel, 424 sq.

Lion Amoureux, Le, 300 note

Lionne, La, 300 note

L'Irréparable, 554

Locker, Mr., 488

Lockhart, 30

Loge à Camille, Une, 384

Lokis, 245-246

Lokman, 83-86

Lolotte et Fanfan, 40, 70

Longfellow, 527 note

"Loti, Pierre," 554

Louis Lambert, 166, 174

Louves de Machecoul, Les, 328

L'Ouvreuse de Loges, 75-77

Lucian, 256, 404

Lucifer, 524 sq.

Lucretius, 26, 546

Lucrezia Floriani, 177 note and sq.

Ludovica, 72-75, 77

Lui et Elle, 177 note

Macfarlane, Ch., 342

Mackenzie, 14

Maclise, 47 note

Madame Bovary, 169, 400 sq., 558

Madame de Chamblay, 328

Madame Eugénio, 456

Madame Gervaisais, 461 sq.

Madame Putiphar, 322

Madelon, 434 sq.

Mademoiselle Annette, 551

Mademoiselle de Clermont, 68

Mademoiselle de Kérouare, 291

Mademoiselle de La Seiglière, 290

Mademoiselle de Maupin, 235, 236

Mademoiselle Giraud ma Femme, 516

Mademoiselle La Quintinie, 179 sq., 416, 557

Magnin, 283

Maison de Penarvan, La, 291

Maison du Chat-qui-Pelote, La, 160 note

Maison Tellier, La, 503 note

Maistre, X. de, 384 note

Maître Cornélius, 162

Maître de Forges, Le, 534 sq.

Maître Pierre, 436

Man of Feeling, The, 14

Manning, Cardinal, 520 note

Manon Lescaut, 225, 346, 369, 372, 393, 394, 400, 426

Manuscrit de M. Larsonnier, Le, 554 note

Maquet, A., 321, 326-327

Mare au Diable, La, 179 sq.

Margot, 253

Mariage dans le Monde, Un, 418

Marianna, 290

Marie de France, xiii

Marivaux, 46, 209, 346, 362, 471, 567

Marlowe, 301

Marmion, 566

Marmontel, 6, 69, 416

Marquis de Pierrerue, Le, 522 sq.

Marquis de Villemer, Le, 179 sq.

Marryat, 64, 297, 381

Martial, 227 note, 404

Martineau, Miss, 505 note

Martyrs, Les, 20 sq., 79, 562

Master Humphrey's Clock, 457

Mateo Falcone, 240

Mathilde, 297 note

Maturin, 166 note, 170, 301

Maupassant, Guy de (1850-1893), vi, viii note, ix, 156 note, 163, 170, 226, 237, 386, 413, 417, 449, 464, 465, 467, 484-515, 548, 558, 560, 569

Mauprat, 200

Mayne-Reid, Captain, 397

Méry, Joseph (1798-1866), 281, 312-318

Méryon, 256

Melmoth Réconcilié, 166

Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, 20 sq., 347

Mémoires du Diable, Les, 300, 302

Ménage de Garçon, Un, 165

Ménage du Pasteur Naudié, Le, 550 sq.

Mendès, Catulle (?-?), 452, 553

Meredith, Mr. G., 148, 174, 399

Mérimée, Prosper (1803-1870), v, x, 81, 146 note, 208, 228, 237-251, 277, 289, 343, 348, 352, 356, 386, 399, 413, 459 note, 460 note, 472, 474, 564, 569

Messe de l'Athée, La, 162

Meta Holdenis, 448, 449 note

Michelet, 282, 373 note, 467

Michiels, 315

Milton, 27, 30, 306, 416 note

Mimi Pinson, 255 note

Mina de Wangel, 140

Mirecourt, E. de, 326

Misérables, Les, 100, 110-116, 131, 348, 382 note, 472, 557

Miss Rovel, 448

Molière, 227

Monastery, The, 341

Mon Oncle Célestin, 523 sq.

M. de Camors, 169, 417 sq., 454 note

M. Dupont, 61

Monsieur, Madame et Bébé, 443 sq.

Monsieur Parent, 506 sq.

Monte Cristo, 327 sq., 356

Montolieu, Mme. de (Jeanne Isabelle Pauline Poltier de Bottens, 1751-1832), xix, 40, 65-68, 560

Mont-Oriol, 490 sq.

Mon Voisin Raymond, 56, 57

Moore, Albert, 224

---- Mr. O. H., 514 note

---- Thomas, 37

Morley, Prof. H., xvii

---- Mr. S., 396

Morris, Mr. W., 240

Morte Amoureuse, La, 210 sq., 243

Morte, La (Feuillet's), 417 sq., 454 note

Mr. Midshipman Easy, 393 note

Mrs. Perkins's Ball, 11

Murger, Henry (1822-1861), v, 281, 303-306

Musset, Louis Charles Alfred de (1810-1857), 25, 195, 208, 227, 252-254, 277, 378, 397, 497

---- Paul de, 177-178 notes

Mystères de Paris, Les, 296

Nabab, Le, 424 sq.

Naïs Micoulin, 473

Napoléon le Petit, 110

Narbonne, M. de, 2 note, 7 note

Natchez, Les, 20 sq., 562

Necker, Mme. (Susanne Curchod), 2 note, 3 note

Neuvaine de la Chandeleur, La, 87

New Arabian Nights, The, 232 note

Newman, Cardinal, 31, 520 note

Nez d'un Notaire, Le, 435

Nisard, 282, 357

Noctes [Ambrosianae], the, 233

Nodier, Jean Charles Emmanuel (1780-1844), vi, x, 24 note, 40, 80-95, 255, 256, 349, 356, 357, 397, 459 note, 564, 569

Noeud Gordien, Le, 294

Norine, 521 sq.

Norman Stories, Maupassant's, 502, 503

Norris, Mr. W. E., 144

Northanger Abbey, 265

Notre Coeur, 495 sq.

Notre Dame de Paris, 58, 98, 100, 103-111, 129-131, 332 note, 351, 472

Nouvelle Héloïse, La, 346, 561

Nuits Anglaises, Les, 313 sq.

Numa Roumestan, 424 sq.

O'Donovan Rossa, 451 note

Oeuvres de Jeunesse (Balzac's), 157 sq.

Ohnet, Georges (1848-1917), 78 note, 518, 534-542, 558 note

Old Curiosity Shop, The, 47 note, 164

Oliphant, Mrs., 205

Olivier Maugant, 449

Olympe de Clèves, 330 sq.

Omniana, 488

Oreille Cassée, L'Homme à l', 435

Orientales, Les, 105 note, 132, 450

Orphelins de la Saint-Barthélemy, Les, 438

Ossian, 35, 82

Ourliac, Édouard (1813-1848), 281, 318, 319

Our Mutual Friend, 179 note

Paratonnerre, Le, 237, 294

Paravent, Le, 294

Parent, M., 504

Parents Pauvres, Les, 163 sq.

Parnasse Contemporain, Le, 485 note, 553

Parny, 45 note, 74 note

Patchwork, 488

Pater, Mr., 205, 398

Pattison, Mr. Mark, 566

"Paul Sylvester," 210 note

Paule Méré, 448

Paysans, Les, 166

Peau de Chagrin, La, 133 note, 157 sq., 302 note

Pêcheur d'Islande, 555

Pendennis, 567

Pepys, 48, 462

Père Goriot, Le, 163 sq.

Peter Simple, 26

Petit Carillonneur, Le, 70, 71

Petit Chose, Le, 423 sq.

Petit Robinson de Paris, Le, 76

Petite Comtesse, La, 418 sq.

Petite Fadette, La, 179 sq.

Petits Poëmes en Prose, 450 note

Petits Tableaux de Moeurs, 41, 42

Petronius, 256

Peveril of the Peak, 331

Philtre, Le, 140

"Phiz," 47 note

Pied d'Argile, Le, 294

Pierre et Jean, 486 sq.

Pigault-Lebrun, 1, 19, 20 note, 40, 41, 46, 69, 70, 71, 77, 98, 158, 159, 305, 357, 359, 362, 471, 560, 561

Piozzi, Mrs., 513

Pitt (the younger), 3 note, 344 note

Pixérécourt, 75

Plato, 268 note

Plautus, 227 note

Poe, 82, 256, 317, 473 note

Ponson du Terrail, Pierre Alexis, Vicomte (1829-1871), 303 note, 436-438

Pontmartin, M. de, 401

Pope, 97, 109, 137

Port-Royal, 286

Prêtre Marié, Un, 453 sq.

Prévost, xvii, 46, 346, 362, 369, 386, 471

Pride and Prejudice, 567

Princesse de Clèves, La, 68, 253, 346, 350

Prise de la Redoute, La, 242-243, 474

Pursuits of Literature, The, 31

Pusey, Dr., 373 note

Quarante-Cinq, Les, 329 sq.

Quarterly Review, v, 152 note, 172 note

Quatre-Vingt-Treize, 127-129, 347, 348

Quentin Durward, 109, 266

Quérard, 326

Question Romaine, La, 435

Quintilian, 546 note

Rabelais, 20, 227, 256, 355, 359

Racine et Shakespeare, 135 note

Radcliffe, Mrs., 71, 75, 78, 79, 89

Ravenswing, The, 43

Raymonde, 529 sq.

Reade, Charles, 102, 351, 403

Recaptured Rhymes, 380

Recherche de l'Absolu, La, 162

Redgauntlet, 337

Réflexions sur la Vérité dans l'Art (Vigny's), 262

Reine Margot, La, 144 note, 327 sq.

Religieuse, La, 235, 393 note

Renan, M., 373 note, 461

René, 20 sq., 114 note, 282, 286, 336, 356, 561

Renée Mauperin, 461 sq.

Restif de la Bretonne, 460

Rêve, Le, 411

Rêve et la Vie, Le, 257 note

Revenants, 388 note

Revue des Deux Mondes, 427

Reybaud, 306-312, 317

Reynolds, G. W. M., 75

---- Mr. S. H., 119

Ricard, Auguste (?-?), 65, 75-76

"Richard O'Monroy," Vicomte, 437

Richardson, 7, 111, 112, 362

Richepin, M. Jean, 452, 495 note, 554

Richter, J. P., 174

Ring and the Book, The, 141

Ring given to Venus, The, 240

Rivington, Messrs., xii

Robert Helmont, 426

Robertson-Smith, Prof., 373, 377

Robinson, Crabb, 8

Roche aux Mouettes, La, 291

Roches Blanches, Les, 551 note

Rod, Édouard (1857-1910), 67, 447 note, 518, 542-553

Roi des Gabiers, Le, 297 note

Roi des Montagnes, Le, 420 sq.

Rolliad, The, 344 note

Roman Bourgeois, Le, 471

Roman Comique, Le, 234

Roman Contemporain, Le, 452

Roman de la Momie, Le, 234

Roman d'un Femme, 385

Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre, 417

Roman Expérimental, Le, 459

Roman Naturaliste, Le, 459

Rossetti, D. G., 94 note, 224-225, 552

Rouge et le Noir, Le, 133 note, 141-146, 148, 152 note

Rougon-Macquart, Les, 169, 467 sq.

Roundabout Papers, The, 464

Rousseau, J. J., 14, 18, 101, 148, 362, 434

Ruskin, 486

Sabot Rouge, Le, 305

Sacrifiée, La, 544 sq.

Sacs et Parchemins, 290-291

Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, 405 sq.

Saint-Martin, 285

Saint-René Taillandier, 401

Saint-Victor, Paul de, 257, 466

Sainte-Beuve, C. A. (1804-1869), 242 note, 266, 279, 281-288, 307, 356, 401, 413, 440, 441, 461, 463 note

Salammbô, 401 sq., 473 note, 558

Samuel Brohl et Cie, 448

Sand, George (see Dudevant, A. L. A.), vi, 68, 111, 133, 147 note, 155 note, 165, 176-208, 227, 283, 343, 348, 364, 367 note, 472, 486, 529, 557, 569

Sandeau, Jules (1811-1883), v, 177 note, 195, 208, 281, 289-296, 306, 312, 349, 522, 556, 569

Sans Merci, 537 note

Sapho, 411

Sauvageonne, 529 sq.

Scènes de la Vie Cosmopolite, 552

Schiller, 137

Scott, Sir W., 28, 58, 78, 82, 106, 107, 109, 115, 117 note, 123, 124 note, 135 note, 152, 168, 262, 263, 266, 331, 332, 338, 340-342, 348, 351, 352, 353-355, 386, 505 note, 533, 537

---- Mrs., 566

Scudéry Romances, the, 33, 111, 112

Seconde Vie de M. Teissier, La, 544 note

Senancour, 25

Sens de la Vie, Le, 542 sq.

Sept Péchés Capitaux, Les, 297

Séraphita, 166, 172 note

Serge Panine, 535 sq.

Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, 273 sq.

Settle, Elkanah, 523 note

Seventeenth-Century Novels, Note on some Additional, xiv-xvi

Sévigné, Mme. de, 62

Shakespeare, 15, 47, 126, 142, 174, 268, 431, 497, 546, 563

Shelley, 100, 128, 184, 188, 431, 497

Sibylle, Histoire de, 416 sq., 421

Sidney, Sir Philip, 58

Silence, Le, 346, 347

Silvestre, Armand, 437, 501

Sir Charles Grandison, 111

Smarra, 88

Smith, Prof. Gregory, xii

---- Sydney, 2, 6, 498

Smollett, 178 note, 471

Soeur Béatrix, La Légende de, 81 sq.

Soeurs Rondoli, Les, 503

Soeurs Vatard, Les, 515

Soirées de Médan, Les, 473 sq., 485, 515

Solitaire, Le, 78-80, 83 note, 356

Soll und Haben, 18 note

Sommer, Dr., xi

Songe d'Or, Le, 82-86

Sophie Printemps, 388 note

Sorel, M., 8, 14

---- Charles, 471

Soulié [Melchior], Frédéric (1800-1847), 166, 208, 266, 281, 298-302, 307, 319, 335, 357

Sous les Tilleuls, 317

Southey, 488 note

Souvestre, Émile, 281, 321

Spectator, The, 43, 315

Spenser, 470

Spiridion, 179

Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, M., 153

St. Irvyne, 100

Staël, Mme. de (Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, 1766-1817), ix, 1-19, 80, 295, 336, 347, 472, 561, 562

Stello, 266 sq.

Stendhal. See Beyle

Sterne, 256

Stevenson, Mr., 97 note, 324

Stryienski, M. C., 134 sq.

Succube, La, 162

Sue, Eugène (really Joseph Marie, 1804-1859), 111, 147 note, 166, 208, 231 note, 281, 296 sq., 307, 319, 335, 349, 357

Sur Cathérine de Médicis, 166

Swift, 205, 256, 403, 466

Swinburne, Mr., 97 note, 128, 155 note, 380

Swiss Family Robinson, The, 65 note

Sylviane, 525 sq.

Sylvie (G. de Nerval's), 257 note and sq.

---- (Feydeau's), 441

Taillevent, 525 sq.

Taine, 461, 462

Tale of Two Cities, A, 129

Talisman, The, 124 note

Tallemant des Réaux, 263

Tartarin de Tarascon, 423 sq.

Tasso, 27

Télémaque, 30, 32, 562

Tempest, The, 15, 108

Tennyson, 7, 96, 184, 420 note, 486, 556

Tentation de Saint-Antoine, La, 405 sq., 558 note

Terre, La, 198, 279

Thackeray, 41 note, 43, 54 note, 62-63 note, 82 note, 168, 173, 179, 183, 184, 193, 229, 293, 296, 297 note, 306 sq., 316 note, 317, 319 note, 322 note, 324-326, 331, 351, 353, 355, 358, 360, 370, 392 note, 403, 411, 413, 423, 425, 471 note, 482, 486, 492, 537, 550

Théâtre de Clara Gazul, 250

Thérèse, 361 note, 384 note, 396

Theuriet, André (1839-1907), 67, 278, 518, 529-534, 558, 569

Thiers, 345

Thomson, James (the Second), 305 note

Times, The, 359 note

Timon of Athens, 430

Tobacco Plant (Cope's), 305 note

Toison d'Or, La, 233

Tolla, 428 sq.

Tory, Geoffroy, 456 note

Tourguénieff, 461, 465

Toussaint Galabru, 527 sq.

Traill, Mr., 380, 510, 548

Travailleurs de la Mer, Les, 116-121, 129-131, 348, 472, 557

Trilby, 82, 83

Tristan le Roux, 372 sq., 558

Trois Contes, 407 sq., 558

Trois Hommes Forts, 381

Trois Mousquetaires, Les, 325 sq., 356

Trollope, A., 51 note, 94, 205, 239, 325, 415, 447

Une Femme est un Diable, 251

Une Gaillarde, 55, 60

Une Passion dans le Désert, 162

Une Vie, 489 sq.

Univers, The, 451

Valcreuse, 290

Valentine, 179 sq., 557

Valerius, 30

Vampire, Le, 95 note

Vampires, Les, 95 note

Vanity Fair, 63, 358, 360, 425

Va-nu-pieds, Les, 449 sq.

Veillées du Château, Les, 68, 69

Venables, Mr. G. S., 123

Vénus d'Ille, La, 240

Veranilda, 30

Verlaine, P., 228, 288, 485

Veuillot, 451

Vicomte de Bragelonne, 110 note, 112, 113, 329 sq.

Vie à Vingt Ans, La, 379

Vie de Bohême, La, 305

Vie de Henri Brulard, 134, 148

Vie Parisienne, La, 443

Vie Privée de M. Teissier, La, 543 sq.

Vieille Maîtresse, Une, 454 sq.

Vigny, Alfred Victor, Comte de (1799-1863), x, 208, 227, 261-277, 332, 352, 356, 397, 459 note, 564

Villemain, 282

Villon, 40, 109

Vingt Ans Après, 329 sq.

Virgil, 27, 546 note

Voltaire, 28, 209

Volupté, 266, 279, 282-288

Voyages (Chateaubriand's), 20, 21

Wahlverwandtschaften, Die, 18 note

Walpole, H., 455 note, 462

Wandering Willie's Tale, 94, 330

Waverley, 341

Werther, 24 and note, 81

Westward Ho!, 351

Wilberforce, Bishop, 506 note

Wilhelm Meister, 18 note, 235

Wilson, Prof. ("Christopher North"), 233

Wiseman, Cardinal, 31

Wood, Mrs. Henry, 535

Wordsworth, 306, 342 note, 480, 528, 546

Wright, Dr. H., xiv

Wycherley, 445

Wyndham, Mr. George, 330 note

Xavier de Montépin, 567 note

Yonge, Miss, 544 note

Young Duke, The, 537 note

Young Stepmother, The, 544 note

Yvette, 499 sq.

Zastrozzi, 100

Zola, Émile (1840-1902), vi, vii, ix, 170, 198, 356, 423, 452, 459 note, 460 sq., 466-484, 488 note, 490 note, 560

THE END

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