It divides itself quite obviously into two classes, the almost didactic matter of Bélisaire and Les Incas, and the still partly didactic, but much more "fictionised" Contes Moraux. The first part (which is evidently of the family of Télémaque) may be rapidly dismissed. Except for its good French and good intentions, it has long had, and is likely always to have, very little to say for itself. We have seen that Prévost attempted a sort of quasi-historical novel. Of actual history there is little in Bélisaire, rather more in Les Incas. But historical fact and story-telling art are entirely subordinated in both to moral purpose, endless talk about virtue and the affections and justice and all the rest of it—the sort of thing, in short, which provoked the immortal outburst, "In the name of the Devil and his grandmother, be virtuous and have done with it!" There is, as has just been said, a great deal of this in the Contes also; but fortunately there is something else.
The something else is not to be found in the "Sensibility" parts,[389] and could not be expected to be. They do, indeed, contain perhaps the most absolutely ludicrous instance of the absurdest side of that remarkable thing, except Mackenzie's great trouvaille of the press-gang who unanimously melted into tears[390] at the plea of an affectionate father. Marmontel's masterpiece is not so very far removed in subject from this. It represents a good young man, who stirs up the timorous captain and crew of a ship against an Algerine pirate, and in the ensuing engagement, sabre in hand, makes a terrible carnage: "As soon as he sees an African coming on board, he runs to him and cuts him in half, crying, 'My poor mother!'" The filial hero varies this a little, when "disembowelling" the Algerine commander, by requesting the Deity to "have pity on" his parent—a proceeding faintly suggestive of a survival in his mind of the human-sacrifice period.
Fortunately, as has been said, it is not always thus: and some of the tales are amusing in almost the highest degree, being nearly as witty as Voltaire's, and entirely free from ill-nature and sculduddery. Not that Marmontel—though a great advocate for marriage, and even (for a Frenchman of his time) wonderfully favourable to falling in love before marriage—pretends to be altogether superior to the customs of his own day. We still sometimes have the "Prendre-Avoir-Quitter" series of Crébillon,[391] though with fewer details; and Mrs. Newcome would have been almost more horrified than she was at Joseph Andrews by the perusal of one of Marmontel's most well-intentioned things, Annette et Lubin. But he never lays himself out for attractions of a doubtful kind, and none of his best stories, even when they may sometimes involve bowing in the house of Ashtoreth as well as that of Rimmon, derive their bait from this kind. Indeed they rather "assume and pass it by" as a fashion of the time.
We may take three or four of them as examples. One is the very first of the collection, Alcibiade ou le Moi. Hardly anybody need be told that the Alcibiades of the tale, though nominally, is not in the least really the Alcibiades of history, or that his Athens is altogether Paris; while his Socrates is a kind of philosophe, the good points of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot being combined with the faults of none of them, and his ladies are persons who—with one exception—simply could not have existed in Greece. This Alcibiades wishes to be loved "for himself," and is (not without reason) very doubtful whether he ever has been, though he is the most popular and "successful" man in Athens. His avoir, for the moment, is concerned with a "Prude." (Were there prudes in Greece? I think Diogenes would have gladly lent his lantern for the search.) He is desperately afraid that she only loves him for herself. He determines to try her; takes her, not at her deeds, but at her words, which are, of course, such as would have made the Greeks laugh as inextinguishably as their gods once did. She expresses gratitude for his unselfishness, but is anything but pleased. Divers experiments are tried by her, and when at last he hopes she will not tempt him any more, exclaiming that he is really "l'amant le plus fidèle, le plus tendre et le plus respectueux" ... "et le plus sot," adds she, sharply, concluding the conversation and shutting her, let us say, doors[392] on him.
He is furious, and tries "Glicerie" (the form might be more Greek), an ingénue of fifteen, who was "like a rose," who had attracted already the vows of the most gallant youths, etc. The most brilliant of these youths instantly retire before the invincible Alcibiades. But in the first place she wishes that before "explanations"[393] take place, a marriage shall be arranged; while he, oddly enough, wishes that the explanations should precede the hymen. Also she is particular about the consent of her parents: and, finally, when he asks her whether she will swear constancy against every trial, to be his, and his only, whatever happens, she replies, with equal firmness and point, "Never!" So he is furious again. But there is a widow, and, as we have seen in former cases, there was not, in the French eighteenth century, the illiberal prejudice against widows expressed by Mr. Weller. She is, of course, inconsolable for her dear first, but admits, after a time, the possibility of a dear second. Only it must be kept secret as yet. For a time Alcibiades behaves nobly, but somehow or other he finds that everybody knows the fact; he is treated by his lady-love with obvious superiority; and breaks with her. An interlude with a "magistrate's" wife, on less proper and more Crébillonish lines, is not more successful. So one day meeting by the seashore a beautiful courtesan, Erigone, he determines, in the not contemptible language of that single-speech poetess, Maria del Occidente, to "descend and sip a lower draught." He is happy after a fashion with her for two whole months: but at the end of that time he is beaten in a chariot race, and, going to Erigone for consolation, finds the winner's vehicle at her door. Socrates, on being consulted, recommends Glicerie as, after all, the best of them, in a rather sensible discourse. But the concluding words of the sage and the story are, as indeed might be expected from Xanthippe's husband, not entirely optimist: "If your wife is well conducted and amiable, you will be a happy man; if she is ill-tempered and a coquette, you will become a philosopher—so you must gain in any case." An "obvious," perhaps, but a neat and uncommonly well-told story.
Soliman the Second is probably the best known of Marmontel's tales, and it certainly has great merits. It is hardly inferior in wit to Voltaire, and is entirely free from the smears of uncomeliness and the sniggers of bad taste which he would have been sure to put in. The subject is, of course, partly historical, though the reader of Knollys (and one knows more unhappy persons) will look in vain there, not, indeed, for Roxelana, but for the nez retroussé, which is the important point of the story. The great Sultan tires of his Asiatic harem, complaisant but uninteresting, and orders European damsels to be caught or bought for him. The most noteworthy of the catch or batch are Elmire, Delia, and Roxelane. Elmire comes first to Soliman's notice, charms him by her sentimental ways, and reigns for a time, but loses her piquancy, and (by no means wholly to her satisfaction) is able to avail herself of the conditional enfranchisement, and return to her country, which his magnanimity has granted her. Her immediate supplanter, Delia, is an admirable singer, and possessed of many of the qualifications of an accomplished hetæra. But for that very reason the Sultan tires of her likewise; and for the same, she is not inconsolable or restive: indeed she acts as a sort of Lady Pandara, if not to introduce, at any rate to tame, the third, Roxelane, a French girl of no very regular beauty, but with infinite attractions, and in particular possessed of what Mr. Dobson elegantly calls "a madding ineffable nose" of the retroussé type.
The first thing the Sultan hears of this damsel is that the Master of the Eunuchs cannot in the least manage her; for she merely laughs at all he says. The Sultan, out of curiosity, orders her to be brought to him, and she immediately cries: "Thank Heaven! here is a face like a man's. Of course you are the sublime Sultan whose slave I have the honour to be? Please cashier this disgusting old rascal." To which extremely irreverent address Soliman makes a dignified reply of the proper kind, including due reference to "obedience" and his "will." This brings down a small pageful of raillery from the young person, who asks "whether this is Turkish gallantry?" suggests that the restrictions of the seraglio involve a fear that "the skies should rain men," and more than hints that she should be very glad if they did. For the moment Soliman, though much taken with her, finds no way of saving his dignity except by a retreat. The next time he sends for her, or rather announces his own arrival, she tells the messenger to pack himself off: and when the Commander of the Faithful does visit her and gives a little good advice, she is still incorrigible. She will, once more, have nothing to do with the words dois and devoir. When asked if she knows what he is and what she is, she answers with perfect aplomb, "What we are? You are powerful, and I am pretty; so we are quite on an equality." In the most painfully confidential and at the same time quite decent manner, she asks him what he can possibly do with five hundred wives? and, still more intolerably, tells him that she likes his looks, and has already loved people who were not worth him. The horror with which this Turkish soldan, himself so full of sin, ejaculates, "Vous avez aimé?" may be easily imagined, and again she simply puts him to flight. When he gets over it a little, he sends Delia to negotiate. But Roxelane tells the go-between to stay to supper, declaring that she herself does not feel inclined for a tête-à-tête yet, and finally sends him off with this obliging predecessor and substitute, presenting her with the legendary handkerchief, which she has actually borrowed from the guileless Padishah. There is some, but not too much more of it; there can but be one end; and as he takes her to the Mosque to make her legitimate Sultana, quite contrary to proper Mussulman usage, he says to himself, "Is it really possible that a little retroussé nose should upset the laws of an empire?" Probably, though Marmontel does not say so, he looked down at the said nose, as he communed with himself, and decided that cause and effect were not unworthy of each other. There is hardly a righter and better hit-off tale of the kind, even in French.
"The Four Flasks" or "The Adventures of Alcidonis of Megara," a sort of outside fairy tale, is good, but not quite so good as either of the former. Alcidonis has a fairy protectress, if not exactly godmother, who gives him the flasks in question to use in amatory adventures. One, with purple liquor in it, sets the drinker in full tide of passion; the second (rose-coloured) causes a sort of flirtation; the third (blue) leads to sentimental and moderate affection; and the last (pure white) recovers the experimenter from the effects of any of the others. He tries all, and all but the last are unsatisfactory, though, much as in the case of Alcibiades and Glicerie, the blue has a second chance, the results of which are not revealed. This is the least important of the group, but is well told.
There is also much good in Heureusement, the nearest to a "Crébillonnade" of all, though the Crébillonesque situations are ingeniously broken off short. It is told by an old marquise[394] to an almost equally old abbé, her crony, who only at the last discovers that, long ago, he himself was very nearly the shepherd of the proverbial hour. And Le Mari Sylphe, which is still more directly connected with one of Crébillon's actual pieces, and with some of the weaker stories (v. sup.) of the Cabinet des Fées, would be good if it were not much too long. Others might be mentioned, but my own favourite, though it has nothing quite so magnetic in it as the nez de Roxelane, is Le Philosophe Soi-disant, a sort of apology for his own clan, in a satire on its less worthy members, which may seem to hit rather unfairly at Rousseau, but which is exceedingly amusing.
Clarice—one of those so useful young widows of whom the novelists of this time might have pleaded that they took their ideas of them from the Apostle St. Paul—has for some time been anxious to know a philosophe, though she has been warned that there are philosophes and philosophes, and that the right kind is neither common nor very fond of society. She expresses surprise, and says that she has always heard a philosophe defined as an odd creature who makes it his business to be like nobody else. "Oh," she is told, "there is no difficulty about that kind," and one, by name Ariste, is shortly added to her country-house party. She politely asks him whether he is not a philosophe, and whether philosophy is not a very beautiful thing? He replies (his special line being sententiousness) that it is simply the knowledge of good and evil, or, if she prefers it, Wisdom. "Only that?" says wicked Doris; but Clarice helps him from replying to the scoffer by going on to ask whether the fruit of Wisdom is not happiness? "And, Madame, the making others happy." "Dear me," says naïve Lucinde, half under her breath, "I must be a philosophe, for I have been told a hundred times that it only depended on myself to be happy by making others happy." There is more wickedness from Doris; but Ariste, with a contemptuous smile, explains that the word "happiness" has more than one meaning, and that the philosophe kind is different from that at the disposal and dispensation of a pretty woman. Clarice, admitting this, asks what his kind of happiness is? The company then proceeds, in the most reprehensible fashion, to "draw" the sage: and they get from him, among other things, an admission that he despises everybody, and an unmistakable touch of disgust when somebody speaks of "his semblables."[395]
Clarice, however, still plays the amiable and polite hostess, lets him take her to dinner, and says playfully that she means to reconcile him to humanity. He altogether declines. Man is a vicious beast, who persecutes and devours others, he says, making all the time a particularly good dinner while denouncing the slaughter of animals, and eulogising the "sparkling brook" while getting slightly drunk. He declaims against the folly and crime of the modern world in not making philosophers kings, and announces his intention of seeking complete solitude. But Clarice, still polite, decides that he must stay with them a little while, in order to enlighten and improve the company.
After this, Ariste, in an alley alone, to digest his dinner and walk off his wine, persuades himself that Clarice has fallen in love with him, and that, to secure her face and her fortune, he has only got to go on playing the misanthrope and give her a chance of "taming the bear." The company, perfectly well knowing his thoughts, determine to play up to them—not for his greater glory; and Clarice, not quite willingly, agrees to take the principal part. In a long tête-à-tête he makes his clumsy court, airs his cheap philosophy, and lets by no means the mere suggestion of a cloven foot appear, on the subject of virtue and vice. However, she stands it, though rather disgusted, and confesses to him that people are suggesting a certain Cléon, a member of the party, as her second husband; whereon he decries marriage, but proposes himself as a lover. She reports progress, and is applauded; but the Présidente de Ponval, another widow, fat, fifty, fond of good fare, possessed of a fine fortune, but very far from foolish, vows that she will make the greatest fool of Ariste. Cléon, however, accepts his part; and appears to be much disturbed at Clarice's attentions to Ariste, who, being shown to his room, declaims against its luxuries, but avails himself of them very cheerfully. In the morning he, though rather doubtfully, accepts a bath; but on his appearance in company Clarice makes remonstrances on his dress, etc., and actually prevails on him to let a valet curl his hair. This is an improvement; but she does not like his brown coat.[396] He must write to Paris and order a suit of gris-de-lin clair, and after some wrangling he consents. But now the Présidente takes up the running. After expressing the extremest admiration for his coiffure, she makes a dead set at him, tells him she wants a second husband whom she can love for himself, and goes off with a passionate glance, the company letting him casually know that she has ten thousand crowns a year. He affects to despise this, which is duly reported to her next morning. She vows vengeance; but he dreams of her (and the crowns) meanwhile, and with that morning the new suit arrives. He is admiring himself in it when Cléon comes in, and throws himself on his mercy. He adores Clarice; Ariste is evidently gaining fatally on her affections; will he not be generous and abstain from using his advantages? But if he is really in love Cléon will give her up.
The hook is, of course, more than singly baited and barbed. Ariste can at once play the magnanimous man, and be rewarded by the Présidente's ten thousand a year. He will be off with Clarice and on with Mme. de Ponval, whom he visits in his new splendour. She admires it hugely, but is alarmed at seeing him in Clarice's favourite colour. An admirable conversation follows, in which she constantly draws her ill-bred, ill-blooded, and self-besotted suitor into addressing her with insults, under the guise of compliments, and affects to enjoy them. He next visits Clarice, with whom he finds Cléon, in the depths of despair. She begins to admire the coat, and to pride herself on her choice, when he interrupts her, and solemnly resigns her to Cléon. Doris and Lucinde come in, and everybody is astounded at Ariste's generosity as he takes Clarice's hand and places it in that of his rival. Then he goes to the Présidente, and tells her what he has done. She expresses her delight, and he falls at her feet. Thereupon she throws round his neck a rose-coloured ribbon (her colours), calls him "her Charming man,"[397] and insists on showing him to the public as her conquest and captive. He has no time to refuse, for the door opens and they all appear. "Le voilà," says she, "cet homme si fier qui soupire à mes genoux pour les beaux yeux de ma cassette! Je vous le livre. Mon rôle est joué." So Ariste, tearing his curled hair, and the gris-de-lin clair coat, and, doubtless, the Présidente's "red rose chain," cursing also terribly, goes off to write a book against the age, and to prove that nobody is wise but himself.
I can hardly imagine more than one cavil being made against this by the most carping of critics and the most wedded to the crotchet of "kinds"—that it is too dramatic for a story, and that we ought to have had it as a drama. If this were further twisted into an accusation of plagiarism from the actual theatre, I think it could be rebutted at once. The situations separately might be found in many dramas; the characters in more; but I at least am not aware of any one in which they had been similarly put together. Of course most if not all of us have seen actresses who would make Clarice charming, Madame de Ponval amusing, and Doris and Lucinde very delectable adjuncts; as well as actors by whom the parts of Cléon and Ariste would be very effectively worked out. But why we should be troubled to dress, journey, waste time and money, and get a headache, by going to the theatre, when we can enjoy all this "in some close corner of [our] brain," I cannot see. As I read the story in some twenty minutes, I can see my Clarice, my Madame de Ponval, my Doris and Lucinde and Cléon and Ariste and Jasmin—the silent but doubtless highly appreciative valet,—and I rather doubt whether the best company in the world could give me quite that.
But, even in saying this, full justice has not yet been done to Marmontel. He has, from our special point of view, made a real further progress towards the ideal of the ordinary novel—the presentation of ordinary life. He has borrowed no supernatural aid;[398] he has laid under contribution no "fie-fie" seasonings; he has sacrificed nothing, or next to nothing, in these best pieces, whatever he may have done elsewhere, to purpose and crotchet. He has discarded stuffing, digression, episode, and other things which weighed on and hampered his predecessors. In fact there are times when it seems almost unjust, in this part of his work, to "second" him in the way we have done; though it must be admitted that if you take his production as a whole he relapses into the second order.
The actual books, in anything that can be called fiction, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre are of far less merit than Marmontel's; but most people who have even the slightest knowledge of French literature know why he cannot be excluded here. Personally, he seems to have been an ineffectual sort of creature, and in a large part of his rather voluminous work he is (when he ceases to produce a sort of languid amusement) a distinctly boring one.[399] He appears to have been unlucky, but to have helped his own bad luck with the only signs of effectualness that he ever showed. It is annoying, no doubt, to get remonstrances from headquarters as to your not sending any work (plans, reports, etc.) as an engineer, and to find, or think you find, that your immediate C.O. has suppressed them. But when you charge him with his disgraceful proceeding, and he, as any French officer in his position at his time was likely to do, puts his hand on his sword, it is undiplomatic to rush on another officer who happens to be present, grab at and draw his weapon (you are apparently not entitled to one), and attack your chief. Nor when, after some more unsuccessful experiences at home and abroad, you are on half or no pay, and want employment, would it seem to be exactly the wisdom of Solomon to give a minister the choice of employing you on (1) the civilisation of Corsica, (2) the exploration of the unknown parts of the Western Continent, (3) the discovery of the sources of the Nile, and (4) a pedestrian tour throughout India. But, except in the first instance (for the "Citizen of Geneva" did not meddle much with cold steel), it was all very like a pupil, and (in the Citizen's later years) a friend, of Rousseau, carrying out his master's ideas with a stronger dose of Christianity, but with quite as little common sense. I have not seen (or remembered) any more exact account of Saint-Pierre's relations with Napoleon than that given by the excellent Aimé-Martin, an academic euphemiser of the French kind. But, even reading between his lines, they must have been very funny.[400]
Paul et Virginie, however, is one of those books which, having attained and long kept a European reputation, cannot be neglected, and it may be added that it does deserve, though for one thing only, never to be entirely forgotten. It is chock-full of sensibilité, the characters have no real character, and all healthy-minded persons have long ago agreed that the concomitant facts, if not causes, of Virginie's fate are more nasty than the nastiest thing in Diderot or Rabelais.[401] But the descriptions of the scenery of Mauritius, as sets-off to a novel, are something new, and something immensely important. La Chaumière Indienne, though less of a story in size and general texture, is much better from the point of view of taste. It has touches of real irony, and almost of humour, though its hero, the good pariah, is a creature nearly as uninteresting as he is impossible. Yet his "black and polished" baby is a vivid property, and the descriptions are again famous. The shorter pieces, Le Café de Surate, etc., require little notice.
It will, however, have been seen by anybody who can "seize points," that this philosophe novel, as such, is a really important agent in bringing on the novel itself to its state of full age. That men like the three chiefs should take up the form is a great thing; that men who are not quite chiefs, like Marmontel and Saint-Pierre, should carry it on, is not a small one. They all do something to get it out of the rough; to discard—if sometimes also they add—irrelevances; to modernise this one kind which is perhaps the predestined and acceptable literary product of modernity. Voltaire originates little, but puts his immense power and diable au corps into the body of fiction. Rousseau enchains passion in its service, as Madame de la Fayette, as even Prévost, had not been able to do before. Diderot indicates, in whatever questionable material, the vast possibilities of psychological analysis. Marmontel—doing, like other second-rate talents, almost more useful work than his betters—rescues the conte from the "demi-rep" condition into which it had fallen, and, owing to the multifariousness of his examples, does not entirely subjugate it even to honest purpose; while Bernardin de Saint-Pierre carries the suggestions of Rousseau still further in the invaluable department of description. No one, except on the small scale, is great in plot; no one produces a really individual character;[402] and it can hardly be said that any one provides thoroughly achieved novel dialogue. But they have inspired and enlivened the whole thing as a whole; and if, against this, is to be set the crime of purpose, that is one not difficult to discard.[403]
FOOTNOTES:
[351] His verse tales, even if stories in verse had not by this time fallen out of our proper range, require little notice. The faculty of "telling" did not remain with him here, perhaps because it was prejudicially affected by the "dryness" and unpoetical quality of his poetry, and of the French poetry of the time generally, perhaps for other reasons. At any rate, as compared with La Fontaine or Prior, he hardly counts. Le Mondain, Le Pauvre Diable, etc., are skits or squibs in verse, not tales. The opening one of the usual collection, Ce qui plaît aux Dames,—in itself a flat rehandling of Chaucer and Dryden,—is saved by its charming last line—
a rede which he himself might well have recked.
[352] In justice to Voltaire it ought to be remembered that no less great, virtuous, and religious a person than Milton ranked as one of the two objects to which "all mortals most aspire," "to offend your enemies."
[353] It has been noted above (see p. 266, note), how some have directly traced Zadig to the work of a person so much inferior to Hamilton as Gueulette.
[354] Micromégas and one or two other things avowed—in fact, Voltaire, if not "great," was "big" enough to make as a rule little secret of his levies on others; and he had, if not adequate, a considerable, respect for the English Titan.
[355] Cacambo was not a savage, but he had savage or, at least, non-European blood in him.
[356] Not in the Grandisonian sense, thank heaven! But as has been hinted, he is a little of a prig.
[357] He has been allowed a great deal of credit for the Calas and some other similar businesses. It is unlucky that the injustices he combated were somehow always clerical, in this or that fashion.
[358] It was said of them at their appearance "[cet] ouvrage est sans goût, sans finesse, sans invention, un rabâchage de toutes les vieilles polissonneries que l'auteur a débitées sur Moïse, et Jésus-Christ, les prophètes et les apôtres, l'Église, les papes, les cardinaux, les prêtres et les moines; nul intêret, nulle chaleur, nulle vraisemblance, force ordures, une grosse gaieté.... Je n'aime pas la religion: mais je ne la hais pas assez pour trouver cela bon." The authorship, added to the justice of it, makes this one of the most crushing censures ever committed to paper; for the writer was Diderot (Œuvres, Ed. Assézat, vi. 36).
[359] It is a singular coincidence that this was exactly the sum which Johnson mentioned to Boswell as capable of affording decent subsistence in London during the early middle eighteenth century.
[360] Songe de Platon, Bababec et les Fakirs, Aventure de la Mémoire, Les Aveugles Juges des Conteurs, Aventure Indienne, and Voyage de la Raison.
[361] It is only fair to mention in this place, and in justice to a much abused institution, that this Babylonian story is said to be the only thing of its kind and its author that escaped the Roman censorship. If this is true, the unfeathered perroquets were not so spiteful as the feathered ones too often are. Or perhaps each chuckled at the satire on his brethren.
[362] As with other controverted points, not strictly relevant, it is permissible for us to neglect protests about la légende des philosophes and the like. Of course Rousseau was not only, at one time or another, the personal enemy of Voltaire and Diderot—he was, at one time or another, the personal enemy of everybody, including (not at any one but at all times) himself—but held principles very different from theirs. Yet their names will always be found together: and for our object the junction is real.
[363] Not the Abbé, who had been dead for some years, but a Genevese professor who saw a good deal of Jean-Jacques in his later days.
[364] "For short" La Nouvelle Héloïse has been usually adopted. I prefer Julie as actually the first title, and for other reasons with which it is unnecessary to trouble the reader.
[365] She dies after slipping into the lake in a successful attempt to rescue one of her children; but neither is drowned, and she does not succumb rapidly enough for "shock" to account for it, or slowly enough for any other intelligible malady to hold its course.
[366] There is another curious anticipation of Dickens here: for Julie, as Dora does with Agnes, entreats Claire to "fill her vacant place"—though, by the way, not with her husband. And a third parallel, between Saint-Preux and Bradley Headstone, need not be quite farcical.
[367] You may tear out Introductions, if you do it neatly; and this I say, having written many.
[368] Also Rousseau, without meaning it, has made him by no means a fool. When, on learning from his wife and daughter that Saint-Preux had been officiating as "coach," he asked if this genius was a gentleman, and on hearing that he was not, replied, "What have you paid him, then?" it was not, as the novelist and his hero took it, in their vanity, to be, mere insolence of caste. M. d'Étange knew perfectly well that though he could not trust a French gentleman with his wife, there was not nearly so much danger with his daughter—while a roturier was not only entitled to be paid, and might accept pay without derogation, but was not unlikely, as the old North Country saying goes, to take it in malt if he did not receive it in meal.
[369] I observe that I have not yet fulfilled the promise of saying something of Wolmar, but the less said of him the better. He belongs wholly to that latter portion which has been wished away; he is a respectable Deist—than which it is essentially impossible, one would suppose, for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy alike to imagine anything more uninteresting; and his behaviour to Saint-Preux appears to me to be simply nauseous. He cannot, like Rowena, "forgive as a Christian," because he is not one, and any other form of forgiveness or even of tolerance is, in the circumstances, disgusting. But it was Rousseau's way to be disgusting sometimes.
[370] We have spoken of his attempt at the fairy tale; qui Gomersal non odit in English verse, amet Le Lévite d'Ephraïm in French prose, etc. etc.
[371] He did not even, as Rousseau did with his human offspring, habitually take them to the Foundling Hospital—that is to say, in the case of literature, the anonymous press. He left them in MS., gave them away, and in some cases behaved to them in such an incomprehensible fashion that one wonders how they ever came to light.
[372] Carlyle's Essay and Lord Morley of Blackburn's book are excepted. But Carlyle had not the whole before him, and Lord Morley was principally dealing with the Encyclopédie.
[373] Especially as Génin, like Carlyle, did not know all. There is, I believe, a later selection, but I have not seen it.
[374] Even the long, odd, and sometimes tedious Rêve de D'Alembert, which Carlyle thought "we could have done without," but which others have extolled, has vivid narrative touches, though one is not much surprised at Mlle. de Lespinasse having been by no means grateful for the part assigned to her.
[375] The cleansing effect of war is an old cliché. It has been curiously illustrated in this case: for the first proof of the present passage reached me on the very same day with the news of the expulsion of the Germans from the village of Puisieux. So the name got "red-washed" from its old reproach.
[376] There really are touches of resemblance in it to Browning, especially in things like Mr. Sludge the Medium.
[377] The corporal's wound in the knee.
[378] Of course, there are exceptions, and with one of the chief of them, Xavier de Maistre, we may have, before long, to deal.
[379] His longest, most avowed, and most famous, the Paradoxe sur le Comédien, has been worthily Englished by Mr. Walter H. Pollock.
[380] Its heroine, Suzanne Simonin, was, as far as the attempt to relieve herself of her vows went, a real person; and a benevolent nobleman, the Marquis de Croixmare, actually interested himself in this attempt—which failed. But Diderot and his evil angel Grimm got up sham letters between themselves and her patron, which are usually printed with the book.
[381] Mon père, je suis damnée ... the opening words, and the only ones given, of the confession of the half-mad abbess.
[382] Evangelical Protestantism has more than once adopted the principle that the Devil should not be allowed to have all the best tunes: and I remember in my youth an English religious novel of ultra-anti-Roman purpose, which, though, of course, dropping the "scabrousness," had, as I long afterwards recognised when I came to read La Religieuse, almost certainly borrowed a good deal from our most unsaintly Denis of Langres.
[383] She seems to have been, in many ways, far too good for her society, and altogether a lady.—The opinions of the late M. Brunetière and mine on French literature were often very different—though he was good enough not to disapprove of some of my work on it. But with the terms of his expression of mere opinion one had seldom to quarrel. I must, however, take exception to his attribution of grossièreté to La Religieuse. Diderot, as has been fully admitted, was too often grossier: sometimes when it was almost irrelevant to the subject. But here, "scabrous" as the subject might be, the treatment is scrupulously not coarse. Nor do I think, after intimate and long familiarity with the whole of his work, that he was ever a faux bonhomme.
[384] They have hardly had a fair opportunity of comparison with Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique; but they can stand it.
[385] Unless Dulaurens' not quite stupid, but formless and discreditable, Compère Mathieu be excepted.
[386] In consequence of which Mr. Ruskin's favourite publisher, the late Mr. George Allen, asked the present writer, some twenty years ago, to revise and "introduce" the old translation of his Contes Moraux. The volume had, at least, the advantage of very charming illustrations by Miss Chris. Hammond.
[387] They were even worse than Leigh Hunt's in the strictly English counterpart torture-house for the victims of tyranny—consisting, for instance, in the supply of so good a dinner, at His Most Christian Majesty's expense, for the prisoner's servant, that the prisoner ate it himself, and had afterwards, on the principles of rigid virtue and distributive justice, to resign, to the minion who accompanied him, his own still better one which came later, also supplied by the tyrant.
[388] One expects something of value from the part-contemporary, part-successor of the novelists from Lesage to Rousseau. But where it is not mere blether about virtue and vice, and le cœur humain and so on, it has some of the worst faults of eighteenth-century criticism. He thinks it would have been more "moral" if Mme. de Clèves had actually succumbed as a punishment for her self-reliance (certainly one of the most remarkable topsyturvifications of morality ever crotcheted); is, of course, infinitely shocked at being asked and induced to "interest himself in a prostitute and a card-sharper" by Manon Lescaut; and, equally of course, extols Richardson, though it is fair to say that he speaks well of Tom Jones.
[389] See next chapter.
[390] I wonder whether any one else has noticed that Thackeray, in the very agreeable illustration to one of not quite his greatest "letterpress" things, A New Naval Drama (Oxford Ed. vol. viii. p. 421), makes the press-gang weep ostentatiously in the picture, though not in the text, where they only wave their cutlasses. It may be merely a coincidence: but it may not.
[391] There are reasons for thinking that Marmontel was deliberately "antidoting the fanfreluches" of the older tale-teller.
[392] In the original, suiting the rest of the setting, it is rideaux.
[393] "Explanations" is quite admirable, and, I think, neither borrowed from, nor, which is more surprising, by others.
[394] She declares that she has never actually "stooped to folly"; but admits that on more than one occasion it was only an accidental interruption which "luckily" (heureusement) saved her.
[395] It is necessary to retain the French here: for our "likes" is ambiguous.
[396] Cf. the stories, contradictory of each other, as to our brown-coated philosopher's appearance in France. (Boswell, p. 322, Globe ed.)
[397] Cf. again the bestowal of this title by Horace Walpole, in his later days, on Edward Jerningham, playwright, poetaster, and petit maître, who, unluckily for himself, lived into the more roughly satirical times of the Revolutionary War.
[398] "The sylphishness of Le Mari Sylphe is only an ingenious and defensible fraud; and the philtre-flasks of Alcidonis are little more than "properties.""
[399] Here is a specimen of his largest and most ambitious production, the Études de la Nature. "La femelle du tigre, exhalant l'odeur du carnage, fait retentir les solitudes de l'Afrique de ses miaulements affreux, et paraît remplie d'attraits à ses cruels amants." By an odd chance, I once saw a real scene contrasting remarkably with Saint-Pierre's sentimental melodrama. It was in the Clifton Zoological Gardens, which, as possibly some readers may know, were at one time regarded as particularly home-like by the larger carnivora. It was a very fine day, and an equally fine young tigress was endeavouring to attract the attention of her cruel lover. She rolled delicately about, like a very large, very pretty, and exceptionally graceful cat; she made fantastic gestures with her paws and tail; and she purred literally "as gently as any sucking dove"—roucoulement was the only word for it. But her "lover," though he certainly looked "cruel" and as if he would very much like to eat me, appeared totally indifferent to her attractions.
[400] So, also, when one is told that he called his son Paul and his daughter Virginie, it is cheerful to remember, with a pleasant sense of contrast, Scott's good-humoured contempt for the tourists who wanted to know whether Abbotsford was to be called Tullyveolan or Tillietudlem.
[401] As the story is not now, I believe, the universal school-book it once was, something more than mere allusion may be desirable. The ship in which Virginie is returning to the Isle of France gets into shallows during a hurricane, and is being beaten to pieces close to land. One stalwart sailor, stripped to swim for his life, approaches Virginie, imploring her to strip likewise and let him try to pilot her through the surf. But she (like the lady in the coach, at an early part of Joseph Andrews) won't so much as look at a naked man, clasps her arms round her own garments, and is very deservedly drowned. The sailor, to one's great relief, is not.
[402] Julie herself is an intense type rather than individual.
[403] I have not thought it necessary, except in regard to those of them who have been touched in treating of the Cabinet des Fées, to speak at any length of the minor tale-tellers of the century. They are sometimes not bad reading; but as a whole minor in almost all senses.