As a piece (_v. sup._) of art or craft, the thing is beyond praise or pay. It could not be improved, on its own specification, except that perhaps the author might have told us how Mademoiselle Cunegonde, who had kept her beauty through some very severe experiences, suddenly lost it. It is idle as literary, though not as historical, criticism to say, as has been often said about the Byng pa.s.sage, that Voltaire"s smartness rather "goes off through the touch-hole," seeing that the admiral"s execution did very considerably "encourage the others." It is superfluous to urge the unnecessary "s.m.u.ts," which are sometimes not in the least amusing. All these and other sought-for knots are lost in the admirable smoothness of this reed, which waves in the winds of time with unwitherable greenness, and slips through the hand, as you stroke it, with a coaxing tickle. To praise its detail would again be idle--n.o.body ought to read such praise who can read itself; and if anybody, having read its first page, fails to see that it is, and how it is, praiseworthy, he never will or would be converted if all the eulogies of the most golden-mouthed critics of the world were poured upon him in a steady shower. As a whole it is undoubtedly the best, and (except part of _Zadig_) it is nowhere else matched in the book of the romances of Voltaire, while for those who demand "purposes" and "morals," it stands almost alone. It is the comic "Vanity of Human Wishes" in prose, as _Ra.s.selas_ is the tragic or, at least, serious version: and, as has been said, the two make an unsurpa.s.sable sandwich, or, at least, _tartine_.
Nor could it have been told, in any other way than by prose fiction, with anything like the same effect, either as regards critical judgment or popular acceptance.
[Sidenote: _Zadig_ and its satellites.]
_Zadig_, as has been indicated already, probably ranks in point of merit next to _Candide_. If it had stopped about half-way, there could be no doubt about the matter. The reader is caught at once by one of the most famous and one of the most Voltairian of phrases, "Il savait de la metaphysique ce qu"on a su dans tous les ages, c"est-a-dire fort peu de chose," a little more discussion of which saying, and of others like it, may perhaps be given later. The successive disappointments of the almost too perfect[356] hero are given with the simplicity just edged with irony which is Voltaire"s when he is at his best, though he undoubtedly learnt it from the masters already a.s.signed, and--the suggestion would have made him very angry, and would probably have attracted one of his most Yahoo-like descents on this humble and devoted head--from Lesage.
But though the said head has no objection--much the reverse--to "happy endings," the romance-finish of _Zadig_ has always seemed to it a mistake. Still, how many mistakes would one pardon if they came after such a success? _Babouc_, the first of those miniature _contes_ (they are hardly "tales" in one sense), which Voltaire managed so admirably, has the part-advantage part-disadvantage of being likewise the first of a series of satires on French society, which, piquant as they are, would certainly have been both more piquant and more weighty if there had been fewer of them. It is full of the perfect, if not great, Voltairian phrases,--the involuntary _Mene Tekel_, "Babouc conclut qu"une telle societe ne pouvait subsister"; the palinode after a fashion, "Il s"affectionnait a la ville, dont le peuple etait doux [oh! Nemesis!]
poli et bien-faisant, quoique leger, medisant et plein de vanite"; and the characteristic collection of parallel between Babouc and Jonah, surely not objectionable even to the most orthodox, "Mais quand on a ete trois jours dans le corps d"une baleine on n"est pas de si bonne humeur que quand on a ete a l"opera, a la comedie et qu"on a soupe en bonne compagnie."
[Sidenote: _Micromegas._]
_Memnon, ou La Sagesse Humaine_ is still less of a tale, only a lively sarcastic apologue; but he would be a strange person who would quarrel with its half-dozen pages, and much the same may be said of the _Voyages de Scarmentado_. Still, one feels in both of them, and in many of the others, that they are after all not much more than chips of an inferior rehandling of _Gulliver_. _Micromegas_, as has been said, does not disguise its composition as something of the kind; but the desire to annoy Fontenelle, while complimenting him after a fashion as the "dwarf of Saturn," and perhaps other strokes of personal scratching, have put Voltaire on his mettle. You will not easily find a better Voltairism of its particular cla.s.s than, "Il faut bien citer ce qu"on ne comprend point du tout, dans la langue qu"on entend le moins." But, as so often happens, the cracker in the tail is here the princ.i.p.al point.
Micromegas, the native of Sirius, who may be Voltaire himself, or anybody else--after his joint tour through the universes (much more amusing than that of the late Mr. Bailey"s Festus), with the smaller but still gigantic Saturnian--writes a philosophical treatise to instruct us poor microbes of the earth, and it is taken to Paris, to the secretary of the Academy of Science (Fontenelle himself). "Quand le secretaire l"eut ouvert il ne vit rien qu"un livre tout blanc. "Ah!" dit-il, "je m"en etais bien doute."" Voltaire did a great deal of harm in the world, and perhaps no solid good;[357] but it is things like this which make one feel that it would have been, a loss had there been no Voltaire.
[Sidenote: _L"Ingenu._]
_L"Ingenu_, which follows _Candide_ in the regular editions, falls perhaps as a whole below all these, and _L"Homme aux Quarante ecus_, which follows it, hardly concerns us at all, being mere political economy of a sort in dialogue. _L"Ingenu_ is a story, and has many amusing things in it. But it is open to the poser that if Voltaire really accepted the n.o.ble savage business he was rather silly, and that if he did not, the piece is a stale and not very biting satire. It is, moreover, somewhat exceptionally full (there is only one to beat it) of the vulgar little sn.i.g.g.e.rs which suggest the eunuch even more than the schoolboy, and the conclusion is abominable. The seducer and, indirectly, murderer Saint-Pouange may only have done after his kind in regard to Mlle. de Saint-Yves; but the Ingenu himself neither acted up to his Huron education, nor to his extraction as a French gentleman, in forgiving the man and taking service under him.
[Sidenote: _La Princesse de Babylone._]
_La Princesse de Babylone_ is more like Hamilton than almost any other of the tales, and this, it need hardly be said here, is high praise, even for a work of Voltaire. For it means that it has what we commonly find in that work, and also something that we do not. But it has that defect which has been noticed already in _Zadig_, and which, by its absence, const.i.tutes the supremacy of _Candide_. There is in it a sort of "break in the middle." The earlier stages of the courtship of Formosante are quite interesting; but when she and her lover begin separately to wander over the world, in order that their chronicler may make satiric observations on the nations thereof, one feels inclined to say, as Mr. Mowbray Morris said to Mr. Matthew Arnold (who thought it was Mr. Traill):
Can"t you give us something new?
[Sidenote: Some minors.]
_Le Blanc et le Noir_ rises yet again, and though it has perhaps not many of Voltaire"s _mots de flamme_, it is more of a fairy moral tale--neither a merely fantastic mow, nor sicklied over with its morality--than almost any other. It is noteworthy, too, that the author has hardly any recourse to his usual clove of garlic to give seasoning.
_Jeannot et Colin_ might have been Marmontel"s or Miss Edgeworth"s, being merely the usual story of two rustic lads, one of whom becomes rich and corrupt till, later, he is succoured by the other. Now Marmontel and Miss Edgeworth are excellent persons and writers; but their work is not work for Voltaire.
The _Lettres d"Amabed_[358] are the dirtiest and the dullest of the whole batch, and the _Histoire de Jenni_, though not particularly dirty, is very dull indeed, being the "History of a Good Deist," a thing without which (as Mr. Carlyle used to say) we could do. The same sort of "purpose" mars _Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield_, in which, after the first page, there is practically nothing about Lord Chesterfield or his deafness, but which contains a good deal of Voltaire"s crispest writing, especially the definition of that English freedom which he sometimes used to extol. With thirty guineas a year,[359] the materialist doctor Sidrac informs the unfortunate Goudman, who has lost a living by the said deafness, "on peut dire tout ce qu"on pense de la compagnie des Indes, du parlement, de nos colonies, du roi, de l"etat en general, de l"homme et de Dieu--ce qui est un grand amus.e.m.e.nt." But the piece itself would be more amusing if Voltaire could let the Bible alone, though he does not here come under the stroke of Diderot"s sledge-hammer as he does in _Amabed_.
One seldom, however, echoes this last wish, and remembers the stroke referred to, more than in reference to _Le Taureau Blanc_. Here, if there were n.o.body who reverenced the volume which begins with _Genesis_ and ends with _Revelation_, the whole thing would be utterly dead and stupid: except for a few crispnesses of the Egyptian Mambres, which could, almost without a single exception, have been uttered on any other theme. The identification of Nebuchadnezzar with the bull Apis is not precisely an effort of genius; but the a.s.sembling, and putting through their paces, of Balaam"s a.s.s and Jonah"s whale, the serpent of Eden, and the raven of the Ark, with the three prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and with an historical King Amasis and an unhistorical Princess Amaside thrown in, is less a _conte a dormir debout_, as Voltaire"s countrymen and he himself would say, than a tale to make a man sleep when he is running at full speed--a very dried poppy-head of the garden of tales. On the other hand, the very short and very early _Le Crocheteur Borgne_, which, curiously enough, Voltaire never printed, and the not much longer _Cosi-Sancta_, which he printed in his queer ostrich-like manner, are, though a little naughty, quite nice; and have a freshness and demure grace about their naughtiness which contrasts remarkably with the ugly and wearisome sn.i.g.g.e.r of later work.
[Sidenote: Voltaire--the Kehl edition--and Plato.]
The half-dozen others,[360] filling scarce twenty pages between them, which conclude the usual collection, need little comment; but a "Kehl"
note to the first of them is for considerable thoughts:
M. de Voltaire s"est egaye quelquefois sur Platon, dont le galimatias, regarde autrefois comme sublime, a fait plus de mal au genre humain qu"on ne le croit communement.
One should not hurry over this, but muse a little. In copying the note, I felt almost inclined to write "_M. de_ Platon" in order to put the whole thing in a consistent key; for somehow "Plato" by itself, even in the French form, transports one into such a very different world that adjustment of clocks and compa.s.ses becomes at once necessary and difficult. "Galimatias" is good, "autrefois" is possibly better, the "evils inflicted on the human race" better still, but _egaye_ perhaps best of all. The monkey, we know, makes itself gay with the elephant, and probably would do so with the lion and the tiger if these animals had not an unpleasant way of dealing with jokers. And the tomt.i.t and canary have, no doubt, at least private agreement that the utterances of the nightingale are _galimatias_, while the carrion crow thinks the eagle a fool for dwelling so high and flying so much higher. But as for the other side of the matter, how thin and poor and puerile even those smartest things of Voltaire"s, some of which have been quoted and praised, sound, if one attempts to read them after the last sentence of the _Apology_, or after pa.s.sage on pa.s.sage of the rest of the "galimatias" of Plato!
Nevertheless, though you may answer a fool according to his folly, you should not, especially when he is not a fool absolute, judge him solely thereby. When Voltaire was making himself gay with Plato, with the Bible, and with some other things, he was talking, not merely of something which he did not completely understand, but of something altogether outside the range of his comprehension. But in the judgment of literature the process of "cancelling" does not exist. A quality is not destroyed or neutralised by a defect, and, properly speaking (though it is hard for the critic to observe this), to strike a balance between the two is impossible. It is right to enter the non-values; but the values remain and require chief attention.
[Sidenote: An attempt at different evaluation of himself.]
From what has been already said, it will be clear that there is no disposition here to give Voltaire anything short of the fullest credit, both as an individual writer of prose fiction and as a link in the chain of its French producers. He worked for the most part in miniature, and even _Candide_ runs but to its bare hundred pages. But these are of the first quality in their own way, and give the book the same position for the century, in satiric and comic fiction, which _Manon Lescaut_ holds in that of pa.s.sion. That both should have taken this form, while, earlier, _Manon_, if written at all, would probably have been a poem, and _Candide_ would have been a treatise, shows on the one side the importance of the position which the novel had a.s.sumed, and on the other the immense advantages which it gave, as a kind, to the artist in literature. I like poetry better than anything, but though the subject could have been, and often has been, treated satirically in verse, a verse _narrative_ could hardly have avoided inferiority, while even Berkeley (who himself borrowed a little of novel-form for _Alciphron_) could not have made _Candide_ more effective than it is. It is of course true that Voltaire"s powers as a "fictionist" were probably limited in fact, to the departments, or the department, which he actually occupied, and out of which he wisely did not go. He must have a satiric purpose, and he must be allowed a very free choice of subject and seasoning. In particular, it may be noted that he has no grasp whatever of individual character. Even Candide is but a "humour," and Pangloss a very decided one; as are Martin, Gordon in _L"Ingenu_, and others. His women are all slightly varied outline-sketches of what he thought women in general were, not persons. Plot he never attempted; and racy as his dialogue often is, it is on the whole merely a setting for these very sparkles of wit some of which have been quoted.
It is in these scintillations, after all, that the chief delight of his tales consists; and though, as has been honestly confessed and shown, he learnt this to some extent from others, he made the thing definitely his own. When the Babylonian public has been slightly "elevated" by the refreshments distributed at the great tournament for the hand of the Princess Formosante, it decides that war, etc., is folly, and that the essence of human nature is to enjoy itself, "Cette excellente morale,"
says Voltaire gravely, "n"a jamais ete dementie" (the words really should be made to come at the foot of a page so that you might have to turn over before coming to the conclusion of the sentence) "que par les faits." Again, in the description of the Utopia of the Gangarides (same story), where not only men but beasts and birds are all perfectly wise, well conducted, and happy, a paragraph of quite sober description, without any flinging up of heels or thrusting of tongue in cheek, ends, "Nous avons surtout des perroquets qui prechent a merveille," and for once Voltaire exercises on himself the Swiftian control, which he too often neglected, and drops his beloved satire of clerics after this gentle touch at it.[361]
He is of course not constantly at his best; but he is so often enough to make him, as was said at the beginning, very delectable reading, especially for the second time and later, which will be admitted to be no common praise. When you read him for the first time his bad taste, his obsession with certain subjects, his repet.i.tion of the same gibes, and other things which have been duly mentioned, strike and may disgust--will certainly more or less displease anybody but a partisan on the same side. On a second or later reading you are prepared for them, and either skip them altogether or pa.s.s them by without special notice, repeating the enjoyment of what is better in an unalloyed fashion. And so doth the excellent old chestnut-myth, which probably most of us have heard told with all innocence as an original witticism, justify itself, and one should "prefer the second hour" of the reading to the first. But if there is a first there will almost certainly be a second, and it will be a very great pity if there is no reading at all.
[Sidenote: Rousseau--the novel-character of the _Confessions_.]
According to the estimate of the common or vulgate (I do not say "vulgar," though in the best English there is little or no difference) literary history, Rousseau[362] ranks far higher in the scale of novel-writing than Voltaire, having left long and ambitious books of the kind against Voltaire"s handful of short, shorter, and shortest stories.
It might be possible to accept this in one sense, but in one which would utterly disconcert the usual valuers. The _Confessions_, if it were not an autobiography, would be one of the great novels of the world. A large part of it is probably or certainly "fictionised"; if the whole were fict.i.tious, it would lose much of its repulsiveness, retain (except for a few very matter-of-fact judges) all its interest, and gain the enormous advantage of art over mere _reportage_ of fact. Of course Rousseau"s art of another kind, his mere mastery of style and presentation, does redeem this _reportage_ to some extent; but this would remain if the thing were wholly fiction, and the other art of invention, divination, _mimesis_--call it what you will--would come in.
Yet it is not worth while to be idly unlike other people and claim it as an actual novel. It may be worth while to point out how it displays some of the great gifts of the novel-writer. The first of these--the greatest and, in fact, the mother of all the rest--is the sheer faculty, so often mentioned but not, alas! so invariably found, of telling the tale and holding the reader, not with any glittering eye or any enchantment, white or black, but with the pure grasping--or, as French admirably has it, "enfisting"--power of the tale itself. Round this there cl.u.s.ter--or, rather, in this necessarily abide--the subsidiary arts of managing the various parts of the story, of constructing characters sufficient to carry it on, of varnishing it with description, and to some extent, though naturally to a lesser one than if it had been fiction pure and simple, "lacing" it, in both senses of the word, with dialogue.
Commonplace (but not the best commonplace) taste often cries "Oh! if this were only true!" The wiser mind is fain sometimes--not often, for things are not often good enough--to say, "Oh! if this were only _false_!"
[Sidenote: The ambiguous position of _emile_.]
But if a severe auditor were to strike the _Confessions_ out of Rousseau"s novel-account to the good, on the score of technical insufficiency or disqualification, he could hardly refuse to do the same with _emile_ on the other side of the sheet. In fact its second t.i.tle (_de l"education_), its opening remarks, and the vastly larger part of the text, not only do not pretend to be a novel but frankly decline to be one. In what way exactly the treatise, from the mere a.s.sumption of a supposed "soaring human boy" named emile, who serves as the victim of a few _Sandford-and-Merton_-like ill.u.s.trations, burgeoned into the romance of actual novel-kind with Sophie in the Fifth Book, and the purely novel-natured, but unfinished and hardly begun, sequel of _emile et Sophie ou Les Solitaires_, it is impossible to say. From the sketch of the intended conclusion of this latter given by Prevost[363] it would seem that we have not lost much, though with Rousseau the treatment is so constantly above the substance that one cannot tell. As it is, the novel part is nearly worthless. Neither emile nor Sophie is made in the least a live person; the catastrophe of their at first ideal union might be shown, by an advocate of very moderate skill, to be largely if not wholly due to the meddlesome, muddle-headed, and almost inevitably mischievous advice given to them just after their marriage by their foolish Mentor; and one neither finds nor foresees any real novel interest whatever. Anilities in the very worst style of the eighteenth century--such as the story how emile instigated mutiny in an Algerian slave-gang, failed, made a n.o.ble protest, and instead of being impaled, flayed, burnt alive, or otherwise taught not to do so, was made overseer of his own projects of reformed discipline--are sufficiently unrefreshing in fact. And the sort of "double arrangement" foreshadowed in the professorial programme of the unwritten part, where, in something like Davenant and Dryden"s degradation of _The Tempest_, emile and Sophie, she still refusing to be pardoned her fault, are brought together after all, and are married, in an actual though not consummated cross-bigamy, with a mysterious couple, also marooned on a desert island, is the sort of thing that Rousseau never could have managed, though Voltaire, probably to the discontent of Mrs. Grundy, could have done it in one way, and Sir William Gilbert would have done it delightfully in another. But Jean-Jacques"s absolute lack of humour would have ensured a rather ghastly failure, relieved, it may be, by a few beautiful pa.s.sages.
[Sidenote: _La Nouvelle Helose._]
If, therefore, Rousseau had nothing but _emile_, or even nothing but _emile_ and the _Confessions_ to put to his credit, he could but obtain a position in our "utmost, last, provincial band," and that more because of his general literary powers than of special right. But, as everybody knows, there is a third book among his works which, whether universally or only by a majority, whether in whole or in part, whether with heavy deductions and allowances or with light ones, has been reckoned among the greatest and most epoch-making novels of the world. The full t.i.tle of it is _Julie, ou la Nouvelle Helose, ou Lettres de deux Amans, habitans d"une pet.i.te ville au pied des Alpes, recueillies et publiees, par J. J. Rousseau_.[364] Despite its immense fame, direct and at second-hand--for Byron"s famous outburst, though scarcely less rhetorical, is decidedly more poetical than most things of his, and has inscribed itself in the general memory--one rather doubts whether the book is as much read as it once was. Quotations, references, and those half-unconscious reminiscences of borrowing which are more eloquent than anything else, have not recently been very common either in English or in French. It has had the fate--elsewhere, I think, alluded to--of one of the two kinds of great literature, that it has in a manner seeded itself out. An intense love-novel--it is some time since we have seen one till the other day--would be a descendant of Rousseau"s book, but would not bear more than a family likeness to it. Yet this, of itself, is a great testimony.
[Sidenote: Its numerous and grave faults.]
Except in rhetoric or rhapsody, the allowances and deductions above referred to must be heavy; and, according to a custom honoured both by time and good result, it is well to get them off first. That peculiarity of being a novelist only _par interim_, much more than Aramis was a mousquetaire, appears, even in _Julie_, so glaringly as to be dangerous and almost fatal. The book fills, in the ordinary one-volume editions, nearly five hundred pages of very small and very close print. Of these the First Part contains rather more than a hundred, and it would be infinitely better if the whole of the rest, except a few pa.s.sages (which would be almost equally good as fragments), were in the bosom of the ocean buried. Large parts of them are mere discussions of some of Rousseau"s own fads; clumsy parodies of Voltaire"s satiric manners-painting; waterings out of the least good traits in the hero and heroine; uninteresting and superfluous appearances of the third and only other real person, Claire; a dreary account of Julie"s married life; tedious eccentricities of the impossible and not very agreeable Lord Edward Bomston, who shares with d.i.c.kens"s Lord Frederick Verisopht the peculiarity of being alternately a peer and a person with a courtesy "Lord"-ship; a rather silly end for the heroine herself;[365] and finally, a rather repulsive and quite incongruous acknowledgment of affection for the creature Saint-Preux, with a refusal to "implement"
it (as they say in Scotland) matrimonially, by Claire, who is by this time a widow.[366] If mutilating books[367] were not a crime deserving terrible retribution in this life or after it, one could be excused for tearing off the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Parts, with the _Amours de Lord edouard_ which follow. If one was rich, one would be amply justified in having a copy of Part I., and the fragments above indicated, printed for oneself on vellum.
[Sidenote: The minor characters.]
But this is not all. Even the First Part--even the presentation of the three protagonists--is open to some, and even to severe, criticism. The most guiltless, but necessarily much the least important, is Claire. She is, of course, an obvious "borrow" from Richardson"s lively second heroines; but she is infinitely superior to them. It is at first sight, though not perhaps for long, curious--and it is certainly a very great compliment to Madame de Warens or Vuarrens and Madame d"Houdetot, and perhaps other objects of his affections--that Rousseau, cad as he was, and impossible as it was for him to draw a gentleman, could and did draw ladies. It was horribly bad taste in both Julie and Claire to love such a creature as Saint-Preux; but then _cela s"est vu_ from the time of the Lady of the Strachy downwards, if not from that of Princess Michal. But Claire is faithful and true as steel, and she is lively without being, as Charlotte Grandison certainly is, vulgar. She is very much more a really "reasonable woman," even putting pa.s.sion aside, than the somewhat sermonising and syllogising Julie; and it would have been both agreeable and tormenting to be M. d"Orbe. (Tormenting because she only half-loved him, and agreeable because she did love him a little, and, whether it was little or much, allowed herself to be his.) He himself, slight and rather "put upon" as he is, is also much the most agreeable of the "second" male characters. Of Bomston and Wolmar we shall speak presently; and there is so little of the Baron d"etange that one really does not know whether he was or was not something more than the tyrannical husband and father, and the ill-mannered specimen of the lesser n.o.bility, that it pleased Saint-Preux or Rousseau to represent him as being. He had provocation enough, even in the case of his otherwise hardly pardonable insolence to Bomston.[368]
[Sidenote: The delinquencies of Saint-Preux.]
But Saint-Preux himself? How early was the obvious jest made that he is about as little of a _preux_ as he is of a saint? I have heard, or dreamt, of a schoolboy who, being accidentally somewhat precocious in French, and having read the book, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "_What_ a sweep he is!"
and I remember no time of my life at which I should not have heartily agreed with that youth. I do not suppose that either of us--though perhaps we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for not doing so--founded our condemnation on Saint-Preux"s "forgetfulness of all but love." That is a "forfeit," in French and English sense alike, which has itself registered and settled in various tariffs and codes, none of which concerns the present history. It is not even that he is a most unreasonable creature now and then; that can be pardoned, being understood, though he really does strain the benefit of _amare et sapere_ etc. It is that, except when he is in the alt.i.tudes of pa.s.sion, and not always then, he never "knows how to behave," as the simple and sufficient old phrase had it. If M. d"etange had had the wits, and had deigned to do it, he might even, without knowing his deepest cause of quarrel with the treacherous tutor, have pointed out that Saint-Preux"s claim to be one of G.o.d Almighty"s gentlemen was as groundless as his "proofs," in the French technical sense of gentility, were non-existent.
It is impossible to imagine anything in worse taste than his reply to the Baron"s no doubt offensive letter, and Julie"s enclosed renunciation. Even the adoring Julie herself, and the hardly less adoring Claire--the latter not in the least a prude, nor given to giving herself "airs"--are constantly obliged to pull him up for his want of _delicatesse_. He is evidently a c.o.xcomb, still more evidently a prig; selfish beyond even that selfishness which is venial in a lover; not in the least, though he can exceed in wine, a "good fellow," and in many ways thoroughly unmanly. A good English school and college might have made him tolerable: but it is rather to be doubted, and it is certain that his way as a transgressor would have been hard at both. As it is, he is very largely the embodiment--and it is more charitable than uncharitable to regard him as largely the cause--of the faults of the worst kind of French, and not quite only French, novel-hero ever since.
[Sidenote: And the less charming points of Julie. Her redemption.]
One approaches Julie herself, in critical intent, with mixed feelings.
One would rather say nothing but good of her, and there is plenty of good to say: how much will be seen in a moment. Most of what is not so good belongs, in fact, to the dreary bulk of sequel tacked on by mistaken judgment to that more than true history of a hundred pages, which leaves her in despair, and might well have left her altogether.
Even here she is not faultless, quite independently of her sins according to Mrs. Grundy and the Pharisees. If she had not been, as Claire herself fondly but truly calls her, such a _precheresse_, she might not have fallen a victim to such a prig. One never can quite forgive her for loving him, except on the all-excusing ground that she loved him so much; and though she is perhaps not far beyond the licence of "All"s fair, in certain conditions," there is no doubt that, like her part-pattern Clarissa, she is not pa.s.sionately attached to the truth.
It might be possible to add some cavils, but for the irresistible plea just glanced at, which stops one.
_Quia multum amavit!_ n.o.body--at least no woman--had loved like that in a prose novel before; n.o.body at all except Des Grieux, and he is but as a sketch to an elaborate picture. She will wander after Pallas, and would like to think that she would like to be of the train of Dian (one shudders at imagining the scowl and the shrug and the twist of the skirt of the G.o.ddess!). But the kiss of Aphrodite has been on her, and has mastered her whole nature. How the thing could be done, out of poetry, has always been a marvel to me; but I have explained it by the supposition that the absolute impossibility of writing poetry at this time in French necessitated the break-out in prose. Rousseau"s wonderful style--so impossible to a.n.a.lyse, but so irresistible--does much; the animating sense of his native scenery something. But, after all, what gives the thing its irresistibleness is the strange command he had of Pa.s.sion and of Sorrow--two words, the first of which is actually, in the original sense, a synonym of the second, though it has been expanded to cover the very opposite.
[Sidenote: And the better side of the book generally.]
But it would be unfair to Rousseau, especially in such a place as this, to confine the praise of _Julie_ as a novel to its exhibition of pa.s.sion, or even to the charm of Julie herself. Within its proper limits--which are, let it be repeated, almost if not quite exactly those of the First Part--many other gifts of the particular cla.s.s of artist are shown. The dangerous letter-scheme, which lends itself so easily, and in the other parts surrenders itself so helplessly and hopelessly, to mere "piffle" about this and that, is kept well in hand. Much as Rousseau owes to Richardson, he has steered entirely clear of that system of word-for-word and incident-for-incident reporting which makes the Englishman"s work so sickening to some. You have enough of each and no more, this happy mean affecting both dialogue and description. The plot (or rather the action) is constantly present, probably managed, always enlivened by the imminence of disastrous discovery. As has been already pointed out, one may dislike--or feel little interest in--some of the few characters; but it is impossible to say that they are out of drawing or keeping. Saint-Preux, objectionable and almost loathsome as he may be sometimes, is a thoroughly human creature, and is undoubtedly what Rousseau meant him to be, for the very simple reason that he is (like the Byronic hero who followed) what Rousseau wished to be, if not exactly what he was, himself. Bomston is more of a lay figure; but then the _Anglais philosophe de qualite_ of the French imagination in the eighteenth century was a lay figure, and, as has been excellently said by De Quincey in another matter, nothing can be wrong which conforms to the principles of its own ideal. As for Julie and Claire, they once more
Answer the ends of their being created.