[Sidenote: The story.]
The story of _Corinne_, though not extraordinarily "accidented" and, as will be seen, adulterated, or at least mixed, with a good many things that are not story at all, is fairly solid, much more so than that of _Delphine_. It turns--though the reader is not definitely informed of this till the book is half over--on the fact of an English n.o.bleman, Lord Edgermond (dead at _temp._ of tale), having had two wives, the first an Italian. By her he had one daughter, whose actual Christian name (unless I forget) we are never told, and he lived with them in Italy till his wife"s death. Then he went home and married a second wife, an English or Scotch woman (for her name seems to have been Maclinson--a well-known clan) of very prudish disposition. By her he had another daughter, Lucile--younger by a good many years than her sister.
To that sister Lady Edgermond the second does not behave exactly in the traditionally novercal fashion, but she is scandalised by the girl"s Italian ways, artistic and literary temperament, desire for society, etc. After Lord Edgermond"s death the discord of the two becomes intolerable, and the elder Miss Edgermond, coming of age and into an independent fortune, breaks loose and returns to Italy, her stepmother stipulating that she shall drop her family name altogether and allow herself to be given out as dead. She consents (unwisely, but perhaps not unnaturally), appears in Italy under the name of "Corinne," and establishes herself without difficulty in the best Roman society as a lady of means, great beauty, irreproachable character, but given to private displays of her talents as singer, improvisatrice, actress, and what not.
But before she has thus thrown a still respectable bonnet over a not too disreputable mill, something has happened which has, in the long run, fatal consequences. Lord Edgermond has a friend, Lord Nelvil, who has a son rather younger than Corinne. Both fathers think that a marriage would be a good thing, and the elder Nelvil comes to stay with the Edgermonds to propose it. Corinne (or whatever her name was then) lays herself out in a perfectly innocent but, as he thinks, forward manner to please him, and he, being apparently (we never see him in person) not a little of an old fool, cries off this project, but tells Edgermond that he should like his son to marry Lucile when she grows up.
Without an intolerable dose of "argument," it is only possible to say here that Nelvil, after his father"s death, journeys to the Continent (where he has been already engaged in a questionable _liaison_), meets Corinne, and, not at first knowing in the least who she is, falls, or thinks he falls, frantically in love with her, while she really does fall more frantically in love with him. After a sojourn, of which a little more presently, circ.u.mstances make him (or he thinks they make him) return home, and he falls, or thinks he falls,[15] out of love with Corinne and into it (after a fashion) with Lucile. Corinne undertakes an incognito journey to England to find out what is happening, but (this, though not impossible in itself, is, as told, the weakest part of the story) never makes herself known till too late, and Nelvil, partly out of respect for his father"s wishes, and partly, one fears, because Lucile is very pretty and Corinne seems to be very far off, marries the younger sister.
It would have greatly improved the book if, with or even without a "curtain," it had ended here. But Madame de Stael goes on to tell us how Nelvil, who is a soldier by profession,[16] leaves his wife and a little daughter, Juliette, and goes to "Les Iles" on active service for four years; how Lucile, not unnaturally, suspects hankering after the sister she has not seen since her childhood; how, Nelvil being invalided home, they all go to Italy, and find Corinne in a dying condition; how Lucile at first refuses to see her, but, communications being opened by the child Juliette, reconciliations follow; and how Corinne dies with Nelvil and Lucile duly kneeling at her bedside.
The minor personages of any importance are not numerous. Besides Lady Edgermond, they consist of the Comte d"Erfeuil, a French travelling companion of Nelvil"s; the Prince of Castel-Forte, an Italian of the highest rank; a Mr. Edgermond, who does not make much appearance, but is more like a real Englishman in his ways and manners than Nelvil; an old Scotch nincomp.o.o.p named d.i.c.kson, who, unintentionally, makes mischief wherever he goes as surely as the personage in the song made music. Lady Edgermond, though she is neither bad nor exactly ill-natured, is the evil genius of the story. Castel-Forte, a most honourable and excellent gentleman, has so little of typical Italianism in him that, finding Corinne will not have him, he actually serves as common friend, confidant, and almost as honourable go-between, to her and Nelvil.
On the other hand, French critics have justly complained, and critics not French may endorse the complaint, that the Comte d"Erfeuil is a mere caricature of the "frivolous" French type too commonly accepted out of France. He is well-mannered, not ill-natured, and even not, personally, very conceited, but utterly shallow, incapable of a serious interest in art, letters, or anything else, blandly convinced that everything French is superlative and that nothing not French is worthy of attention.
Although he appears rather frequently, he plays no real part in the story, and, unless there was some personal grudge to pay off (which is not unlikely), it is difficult to imagine why Madame de Stael should have introduced a character which certainly does her skill as a character-drawer very little credit.
[Sidenote: The character of Nelvil.]
It is, however, quite possible that she was led astray by a will-o"-the-wisp, which has often misled artists not of the very first cla.s.s--the chance of an easy contrast. The light-hearted, light-minded Erfeuil was to set off the tense and serious Nelvil--a type again, as he was evidently intended to be, but a somewhat new type of Englishman. She was a devotee of Rousseau, and she undoubtedly had the egregious Bomston before her. But, though her sojourn in England had not taught her very much about actual Englishman, she had probably read Mackenzie, and knew that the "Man of Feeling" touch had to some extent affected us. She tried to combine the two, with divers hints of hearsay and a good deal of pure fancy, and the result was Oswald, Lord Nelvil. As with that other curious contemporary of hers with whom we deal in this chapter, the result was startlingly powerful in literature. There is no doubt that the Byronic hero, whose importance of a kind is unmistakable and undeniable, is Schedoni, Rene, and Nelvil sliced up, pounded in a mortar, and made into a rissole with Byron"s own sauce of style in rhetoric or (if anybody will have it so) poetry, but with very little more substantial ingredients. As for the worthy peer of Scotland or England, more recent estimates have seldom been favourable, and never ought to have been so. M. Sorel calls him a "sn.o.b"; but that is only one of the numerous and, according to amiable judgments, creditable instances of the inability of the French to discern exactly what "sn.o.bbishness" is.[17] My Lord Nelvil has many faults and very few merits, but among the former I do not perceive any sn.o.bbishness. He is not in the least attracted by Corinne"s popularity, either with the great vulgar or the small, and his hesitations about marrying her do not arise from any doubt (while he is still ignorant on the subject) of her social worthiness to be his wife. He _is_ a prig doubtless, but he is a prig of a very peculiar character--a sort of pa.s.sionate prig, or, to put it in another way, one of Baudelaire"s "Enfants de la lune," who, not content with always pining after the place where he is not and the love that he has not, is constantly making not merely himself, but the place where he is and the love whom he has, uncomfortable and miserable. There can, I think, be little doubt that Madame de Stael, who frequently insists on his "irresolution" (remember that she had been in Germany and heard the Weimar people talk), meant him for a sort of modern Hamlet in very different circ.u.mstances as well as times. But it takes your Shakespeare to manage your Hamlet, and Madame de Stael was not Shakespeare, even in petticoats.
[Sidenote: And the book"s absurdities.]
The absurdities of the book are sufficiently numerous. Lord Nelvil, who has not apparently had any special experience of the sea, "advises" the sailors, and takes the helm during a storm on his pa.s.sage from Harwich to Emden; while these English mariners, unworthy professional descendants of that admirable man, the boatswain of the opening scenes of _The Tempest_, are actually grateful to him, and when he goes "ash.o.r.e "press themselves round him" to take leave of him (that is to say, they do this in the book; what in all probability they actually _said_ would not be fit for these pages). He is always saving people--imprisoned Jews and lunatics at a fire in Ancona; aged lazzaroni who get caught in a sudden storm-wave at Naples; and this in spite of the convenient-inconvenient blood-vessels which break when it is necessary, but still make it quite easy for him to perform these Herculean feats and resume his rather interim military duties when he pleases. As for Corinne, her exploits with her "schall" (a vestment of which Madame de Stael also was fond), and her crowning in the Capitol, where the crown tumbles off--an incident which in real life would be slightly comical, but which here only gives Nelvil an opportunity of picking it up--form a similar prelude to a long series of extravagances. The culmination of them is that altogether possible-improbable visit to England, which might have put everything right and does put everything wrong, and the incurable staginess which makes her, as above related, refuse to see Oswald and Lucile _together_ till she is actually in _articulo mortis_.
And yet--"for all this and all this and twice as much as all this"--I should be sorry for any one who regards Corinne as merely a tedious and not at all brief subject for laughter. One solid claim which it possesses has been, and is still for a moment, definitely postponed; but in another point there is, if not exactly a defence, an immense counterpoise to the faults and follies just mentioned. Corinne to far too great an extent, and Oswald to an extent nearly but not quite fatal, are loaded (_affubles_, to use the word we borrowed formerly) with a ma.s.s of corporal and spiritual wiglomeration (as Mr. Carlyle used expressively and succinctly to call it) in costume and fashion and sentiment and action and speech. But when we have stripped this off, _manet res_--reality of truth and fact and nature.
[Sidenote: Compensations--Corinne herself.]
There should be no doubt of this in Corinne"s own case. It has been said from the very first that she is, as Delphine had been, if not what her creatress was, what she would have liked to be. The ideal in the former case was more than questionable, and the execution was very bad. Here the ideal is far from flawless, but it is greatly improved, and the execution is improved far more than in proportion. Corinne is not "a reasonable woman"; but reason, though very heartily to be welcomed on its rare occurrences in that division of humanity, when it does not exclude other things more to be welcomed still, is very decidedly not to be preferred to the other things themselves. Corinne has these--or most of them. She is beautiful; she is amiable; she is unselfish; without the slightest touch of prudery she has the true as well as the technical chast.i.ty; and she is really the victim of inauspicious stars, and of the misconduct of other people--the questionable wisdom of her own father; the folly of Nelvil"s; the wilfulness in the bad sense, and the weakness of will in the good, of her lover; the sour virtue and _borne_ temperament of Lady Edgermond. Almost all her faults and not a few of her misfortunes are due to the "sensibility" of her time, or the time a little before her; for, as has been more than hinted already, _Corinne_, though a book of far less genius, strength, and concentration than _Adolphe_, is, like it, though from the other side, and on a far larger scale, the history of the Nemesis of Sensibility.
[Sidenote: Nelvil again.]
But Nelvil? He is, it has been said, a deplorable kind of creature--a kind of creature (to vary Dr. Johnson"s doom on the unlucky mutton) ill-_bred_, ill-educated, ill- (though not quite in the ordinary sense) natured, ill-fated to an extent which he could partly, but only partly, have helped; and ill-conducted to an extent which he might have helped almost altogether. But is he unnatural? I fear--I trow--not. He is, I think, rather more natural than Edgar of Ravenswood, who is something of the same cla.s.s, and who may perhaps owe a very little to him. At any rate, though he has more to do with the theatre, he is less purely theatrical than that black-plumed Master. And it seems to me that he is more differentiated from the Sensibility heroes than even Corinne herself is from the Sensibility heroines, though one sympathises with her much more than with him. _h.o.m.o est_, though scarcely _vir_. Now it is humanity which we have been always seeking, but not always finding, in the long and often brilliant list of French novels before his day.
And we have found it here once more.
[Sidenote: Its aesthetics.]
But we find also something more; and this something more gives it not merely an additional but even to some extent a fresh hold upon the history of the novel itself. To say that it is in great part a "guide-book novel," as indeed its second t.i.tle[18] honestly declares, may seem nowadays a doubtful testimonial. It is not really so. For it was, with certain exceptions in German, the _first_ "guide-book" novel: and though some of those exceptions may have shown greater "literary genius than Madame de Stael"s, the Germans, though they have, in certain lines, had no superiors as producers of tales, have never produced a good novel yet.[19] Moreover, the guide-book element is a great set-off to the novel. It is not--or at any rate it is not necessarily--liable to the objections to "purpose," for it is ornamental and not structural. It takes a new and important and almost illimitably fresh province of nature and of art, which is a part of nature, to be its appanage. It would be out of place here to trace the development of this system of reinforcing the novel beyond France, in Scott more particularly. It is not out of place to remind the reader that even Rousseau (to whom Madame de Stael owed so much) to some extent, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand to more, as far as what we may call scenery-guide-booking goes, had preceded her. But for the "art," the aesthetic addition, she was indebted only to the Germans; and almost all her French successors were indebted to her.[20]
[Sidenote: The author"s position in the History of the Novel.]
Although, therefore, it is hardly possible to call Madame de Stael a good novelist, she occupies a very important position in the history of the novel. She sees, or helps to see, the "sensibility" novel out, with forcible demonstration of the inconveniences of its theory. She helps to see the aesthetic novel--or the novel highly seasoned and even sandwiched with aesthetics--in. She manages to create at least one character to whom the epithets of "n.o.ble" and "pathetic" can hardly be refused; and at least one other to which that of "only too natural," if with an exceptional and faulty kind of nature, must be accorded. At a time when the most popular, prolific, and in a way craftsmanlike pract.i.tioner of the kind, Pigault-Lebrun, was dragging it through vulgarity, she keeps it at any rate clear of that. Her description is adequate: and her society-and-manners painting (not least in the _recit_ giving Corinne"s trials in Northumberland) is a good deal more than adequate. Moreover, she preserves the tradition of the great _philosophe_ group by showing that the writer of novels can also be the author of serious and valuable literature of another kind. These are no small things to have done: and when one thinks of them one is almost able to wipe off the slate of memory that awful picture of a turbaned or "schalled" Blowsalind, with arms[21] like a "daughter of the plough,"
which a cruel tradition has perpetuated as frontispiece to some cheap editions of her works.
[Sidenote: Chateaubriand--his peculiar position as a novelist.]
There is perhaps no more difficult person to appraise in all French literature--there are not many in the literature of the world--than Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand. It is almost more difficult than in the case of his two great disciples, Byron and Hugo, to keep his personality out of the record: and it is a not wholly agreeable personality. Old experience may perhaps attain to this, and leave to ghouls and large or small coffin-worms the business of investigating and possibly fattening on the thing. But even the oldest experience dealing with his novels (which were practically all early) may find itself considerably _tabuste_, as Rabelais has it, that is to say, "bothered"
with faults which are mitigated in the _Genie du Christianisme_, comparatively (not quite) unimportant in the _Voyages_, and almost entirely whelmed in the _Memoires d"Outre-Tombe_. These faults are of such a complicated and various kind that the whole armour of criticism is necessary to deal with them, on the defensive in the sense of not being too much influenced by them, and on the offensive in the sense of being severe but not too severe on them.
[Sidenote: And the remarkable interconnection of his works in fiction.]
The mere reader of Chateaubriand"s novels generally begins with _Atala_ and _Rene_, and not uncommonly stops there. In a certain sense this reader is wise in his generation. But he will never understand his author as a novelist if he does so; and his appreciation of the books or booklets themselves will be very incomplete. They are both not unfrequently spoken of as detached episodes of the _Genie du Christianisme_; and so they are, in the ill.u.s.trative sense. They are actually, and in the purely const.i.tutive way, episodes of another book, _Les Natchez_, while this book itself is also a novel "after a sort."
The author"s work in the kind is completed by the later _Les Martyrs_, which has nothing to do, in persons or time, with the others, being occupied with the end of the third century, while they deal (throwing back a little in _Atala_) with the beginning of the eighteenth. But this also is an ill.u.s.trative companion or reinforcement of the _Genie_. With that book the whole body of Chateaubriand"s fiction[22] is thus directly connected; and the entire collection, not a little supported by the _Voyages_, const.i.tutes a deliberate "literary offensive," intended to counter-work the proceedings of the _philosophes_, though with aid drawn from one of them--Rousseau,--and only secondarily designed to provide pure novel-interest. If this is forgotten, the student will find himself at sea without a rudder; and the mere reader will be in danger of exaggerating very greatly, because he does not in the least understand, the faults just referred to, and of failing altogether to appreciate the real success and merit of the work as judged on that only criterion, "Has the author done what he meant to do, and done it well, on the lines he chose?" Of course, if our reader says, "I don"t care about all this, I merely want to be amused and interested," one cannot prevent him. He had, in fact, as was hinted just now, better read nothing but _Atala_ and _Rene_, if not, indeed, _Atala_ only, immense as is the literary importance of its companion. But in a history of the novel one is ent.i.tled to hope, at any rate to wish, for a somewhat better kind of customer or client.
According to Chateaubriand"s own account, when he quitted England after his not altogether cheerful experiences there as an almost penniless _emigre_, he left behind him, in the charge of his landlady, exactly 2383 folio pages of MSS. enclosed in a trunk, and (by a combination of merit on the custodian"s part and luck on his own) recovered them fifteen years afterwards, _Atala_, _Rene_, and a few other fragments having alone accompanied him. These were published independently, the _Genie_ following. _Les Martyrs_ was a later composition altogether, while _Les Natchez_, the _matrix_ of both the shorter stories, and included, as one supposes, in the 2383 waifs, was partly rewritten and wholly published later still. A body of fiction of such a singular character is, as has been said, not altogether easy to treat; but, without much change in the method usually pursued in this _History_, we may perhaps do best by first giving a brief argument of the various contents and then taking up the censure, in no evil sense, of the whole.
[Sidenote: _Atala._]
_Atala_ is short and almost entirely to the point. The heroine is a half-breed girl with a Spanish father and for mother an Indian of some rank in her tribe, who has subsequently married a benevolent chief. She is regarded as a native princess, and succeeds in rescuing from the usual torture and death, and fleeing with, a captive chief of another "nation." This is Chactas, important in _Rene_ and also in the _Natchez_ framework. They direct their flight northwards to the French settlements (it is late seventeenth or early eighteenth century throughout), and of course fall in love with each other. But Atala"s mother, a Christian, has, in the tumult of her early misfortunes, vowed her daughter"s virginity or death; and when, just before the crucial moment, a missionary opportunely or inopportunely occurs, Atala has already taken poison, with the object, it would appear, not so much of preventing as of avenging, of her own free will, a breach of the vow. The rest of the story is supplied by the vain attempts of the good father to save her, his evangelising efforts towards the pair, and the sorrows of Chactas after his beloved"s death. The piece, of course, shows that exaggerated and somewhat morbid pathos of circ.u.mstance which is the common form of the early romantic efforts, whether in England, Germany, or France. But the pathos _is_ pathos; the unfamiliar scenery, unlike that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (to whom, of course, Chateaubriand is much indebted, though he had actually seen what he describes), is not overdone, and suits the action and characters very well indeed. Chactas here is the best of all the "n.o.ble savages," and (what hardly any other of them is) positively good. Atala is really tragic and really gracious. The missionary stands to other fict.i.tious, and perhaps some real, missionaries very much as Chactas does to other savages of story, if not of life. The proportion of the whole is good, and in the humble opinion of the present critic it is by far Chateaubriand"s best thing in all perhaps but mere writing.
And even in this it is bad to beat, in him or out of him. The small s.p.a.ce forbids mere surplusage of description, and the plot--as all plots should do, but, alas! as few succeed in doing--acts as a bellows to kindle the flame and intensify the heat of something far better than description itself--pa.s.sionate character. There are many fine things--mixed, no doubt, with others not so fine--in the tempestuous scene of the death of Atala, which should have been the conclusion of the story. But this, in its own way, seems to me little short of magnificent:
"I implored you to fly; and yet I knew I should die if you were not with me. I longed for the shadow of the forest; and yet I feared to be with you in a desert place. Ah! if the cost had only been that of quitting parents, friends, country! if--terrible as it is to say it--there had been nothing at stake but the loss of my own soul.[23] But, O my mother! thy shade was always there--thy shade reproaching me with the torments it would suffer. I heard thy complaints; I saw the flames of h.e.l.l ready to consume thee. My nights were dry places full of ghosts; my days were desolate; the dew of the evening dried up as it touched my burning skin. I opened my lips to the breeze; and the breeze, instead of cooling me, was itself set aglow by the fire of my breath. What torment, Chactas! to see you always near me, far from all other humankind in the deepest solitude, and yet to feel that between us there was an insuperable barrier! To pa.s.s my life at your feet, to serve you as a slave, to bring you food and lay your couch in some secret corner of the universe, would have been for me supremest happiness; and this happiness was within my touch, yet I could not enjoy it. Of what plans did I not dream? What vision did not arise from this sad heart? Sometimes, as I gazed on you, I went so far as to form desires as mad as they were guilty: sometimes I could have wished that there were no living creatures on earth but you and me; sometimes, feeling that there was a divinity mocking my wicked transports, I could have wished that divinity annihilated, if only, locked in your arms, I might have sunk from abyss to abyss with the ruins of G.o.d and of the world. Even now--shall I say it?--even now, when eternity waits to engulf me, when I am about to appear before the inexorable Judge--at the very moment when my mother may be rejoicing to see my virginity devour my life--even now, by a terrible contradiction, I carry with me the regret that I have not been yours!"
At this let who will laugh or sneer, yawn or cavil. But as literature it looks back to Sappho and Catullus and the rest, and forward to all great love-poetry since, while as something that is even greater than literature--life--it carries us up to the highest Heaven and down to the nethermost h.e.l.l.
[Sidenote: _Rene._]
_Rene_[24] has greater fame and no doubt exercised far more influence; indeed in this respect _Atala_ could not do much, for it is not the eternal, but the temporal, which "influences." But, in the same humble opinion, it is extremely inferior. The French Werther[25] (for the attempt to rival Goethe on his own lines is hardly, if at all, veiled) is a younger son of a gentle family in France, whose father dies. He lives for a time with an elder brother, who seems to be "more kin than kind," and a sister Amelie, to whom he is fondly, but fraternally, attached. Rene has begun the trick of disappointment early, and, after a time, determines to travel, fancying when he leaves home that his sister is actually glad to get rid of him. Of course it is a case of _coelum non animum_. When he returns he is half-surprised but (for him) wholly glad to be at first warmly welcomed by Amelie; but after a little while she leaves him, takes the veil, and lets him know at the last moment that it is because her affection for him is more than sisterly, that this was the reason of her apparent joy when he left her, and that a.s.sociation with him is too much for her pa.s.sion.[26] _She_ makes an exemplary nun in a sea-side convent, and dies early of disease caught while nursing others. _He_, his wretchedness and hatred of life reaching their acme, exiles himself to Louisiana, and gets himself adopted by the tribe of the Natchez, where Chactas is a (though not _the_) chief.
[Sidenote: Difference between its importance and its merit.]
Now, of course, if we are content to take a bill and write down Byron and Lamartine, Senancour and _Jacopo Ortis_ (otherwise Ugo Foscolo), Musset, Matthew Arnold, and _tutti quanti_, as debtors to _Rene_, we give the tale or episode a historical value which cannot be denied; while its positive aesthetic quality, though it may vary very much in different estimates, cannot be regarded as merely worthless. Also, once more, there is real pathos, especially as far as Amelie is concerned, though the entire unexpectedness of the revelation of her fatal pa.s.sion, and the absolute lack of any details as to its origin, rise, and circ.u.mstances, injure sympathy to some extent. But that sympathy, as far as the present writer is concerned, fails altogether with regard to Rene himself. If his melancholy were traceable to _mutual_ pa.s.sion of the forbidden kind, or if it had arisen from the stunning effect of the revelation thereof on his sister"s side, there would be no difficulty.
But, though these circ.u.mstances may to some extent accentuate, they have nothing to do with causing the _weltschmerz_ or _selbst-schmerz_, or whatever it is to be called, of this not very heroic hero. Nor has Chateaubriand taken the trouble--which Goethe, with his more critical sense of art, _did_ take--to make Rene go through the whole course of the Preacher, or great part of it, before discovering that all was vanity. He is merely, from the beginning, a young gentleman affected with mental jaundice, who cannot or will not discover or take psychological calomel enough to cure him. It does not seem in the least likely that if Amelie had been content to live with him as merely "in all good, all honour" a loving and comforting sister, he would have really been able to say, like Geraldine in Coleridge"s original draft of _Christabel_, "I"m better now."
He is, in fact, what Werther is not--though his own followers to a large extent are--mainly if not merely a Sulky Young Man: and one cannot help imagining that if, in pretty early days, some one had been good enough to apply to him that Herb Pantagruelion, in form not exactly of a halter but of a rope"s end, with which O"Brien cured Peter Simple"s _mal de mer_, his _mal du siecle_ would have been cured likewise.
Of course it is possible for any one to say, "You are a Philistine and a Vulgarian. You wish to regard life through a horse-collar," etc., etc.
But these reproaches would leave my withers quite ungalled. I think _Ecclesiastes_ one of the very greatest books in the world"s literature, and _Hamlet_ the greatest play, with the possible exception of the _Agamemnon_. It is the abysmal sadness quite as much as the _furor arduus_ of Lucretius that makes me think him the mightiest of Latin poets. I would not give the mystical melancholy of certain poems of Donne"s for half a hundred of the liveliest love-songs of the time, and could extend the list page-long and more if it would not savour of ostentation in more ways than one. But mere temperamental [Greek: heolokrasia] or [Greek: kraipale] (next-day nausea), without even the exaltation of a previous orgy to ransom it,--mere spleen and sulks and naughty-childishness,--seem to me not great things at all. You may not be able to help your spleen, but you can "cook" it; you may have qualm and headache, but in work of some sort, warlike or peaceful, there is always small beer, or brandy and soda (with even, if necessary, capsic.u.m or bromide), for the ailment. The Renes who can do nothing but sulk, except when they blunder themselves and make other people uncomfortable in attempting to do something, who "never do a [manly]
thing and never say a [kind] one," are, I confess, not to my taste.[27]
[Sidenote: _Les Natchez._]
Both these stories, as will have been seen, have a distinctly religious element; in fact, a distinctly religious purpose. The larger novel-romance of which they form episodes, as well as its later and greater successor, _Les Martyrs_, increase the element in both cases, the purpose in the latter; but one of the means by which this increase is effected has certainly lost--whether it may or may not ever recover--its attraction, except to a student of literary history who is well out of his novitiate. Such a person should see at once that Chateaubriand"s elaborate adoption, from Ta.s.so and Milton, of the system of interspersed scenes of Divine and diabolic conclaves and interferences with the story, is an important, if not a wholly happy, instance of that general Romantic _reversion_ to earlier literary devices, and even atmospheres, of which the still rather enigmatic personage who rests enisled off Saint-Malo was so great an apostle. And it was probably effectual for its time. Cla.s.sicists could not quarrel with it, for it had its precedents, indeed its origin, in Homer and Virgil; Romanticists (of that less exclusive cla.s.s who admitted the Renaissance as well as the Dark and Middle Ages) could not but welcome it for its great modern defenders and examples. I cannot say that I enjoy it: but I can tolerate it, and there is no doubt at all, odd as it may seem to the merely twentieth-century reader, that it did something to revive the half-extinct religiosity which had been starved and poisoned in the later days of the _ancien regime_, forcibly suppressed under the Republic, and only officially licensed by the Napoleonic system. In _Les Martyrs_ it has even a certain "grace of congruity,"[28]
but in regard to _Les Natchez_, with which we are for the moment concerned, almost enough (with an example or two to come presently) has been said about it.
The book, as a whole, suffers, unquestionably and considerably, from the results of two defects in its author. He was not born, as Scott was a little later, to get the historical novel at last into full life and activity; and it would not be unfair to question whether he was a born novelist at all, though he had not a few of the qualifications necessary to the kind, and exercised, coming as and when he did, an immense influence upon it. The subject is too obscure. Its only original _vates_, Charlevoix, though always a respectable name to persons of some acquaintance with literature and history, has never been much more, either in France or in England. The French, unluckily for themselves, never took much interest in their transatlantic possessions while they had them; and their dealings with the Indians then, and ours afterwards, and those of the Americans since, have never been exactly of the kind that give on both sides a subject such as may be found in all mediaeval and most Renaissance matters; in the Fronde; in the English Civil War; in the great struggles of France and England from 1688 to 1815; in the Jacobite risings; in La Vendee; and in other historical periods and provinces too many to mention. On the other hand, the abstract "n.o.ble savage" is a faded object of exhausted _engouement_, than which there are few things less exhilarating. The Indian _ingenu_ (a very different one from Voltaire"s) Outougamiz and his _ingenue_ Mila are rather nice; but Celuta (the ill-fated girl who loves Rene and whom he marries, because in a sort of way he cannot help it) is an eminent example of that helpless kind of quiet misfortune the unprofitableness of which Mr.
Arnold has confessed and registered in a famous pa.s.sage. Chactas maintains a respectable amount of interest, and his visit to the court of Louis XIV. takes very fair rank among a well-known group of things of which it is not Philistine to speak as old-fashioned, because they never possessed much attraction, except as being new- or regular-fashioned.
But the villain Ondoure has almost as little of the fire of h.e.l.l as of that of Heaven, and his paramour and accomplice Akansie carries very little "conviction" with her. In short, the merit of the book, besides the faint one of having been the original framework of _Atala_ and _Rene_, is almost limited to its atmosphere, and the alterative qualities thereof--things now in a way ancient history--requiring even a considerable dose of the not-universally-possessed historic sense to discern and appreciate them.
Outside the "Histoire de Chactas" (which might, like _Atala_ and _Rene_ themselves, have been isolated with great advantage), and excepting likewise the pa.s.sages concerning Outougamiz and Mila--which possess, in considerable measure and gracious fashion, what some call the "idyllic"
quality--I have found it, on more than one attempt, difficult to take much interest in _Les Natchez_, not merely for the reasons already given, but chiefly owing to them. Rene"s appearances (and he is generally in background or foreground) serve better than anything in any other book, perhaps, to explain and justify the old notion that _accidia_[29] of his kind is not only a fault in the individual, but a positive ill omen and nuisance[30] to others. Neither in the Indian characters (with the exceptions named) nor among the French and creole does one find relief: and when one pa.s.ses from them to the "machinery"
parts--where, for instance, a "perverse couple," Satan and La Renommee (_not_ the ship that Trunnion took), embark on a journey in a car with winged horses--it must be an odd taste which finds things improved. In Greek verse, in Latin verse, or even in Milton"s English one could stand Night, docile to the orders of Satan, condescending to deflect a hatchet which is whistling unpleasantly close to Rene"s ear, not that he may be benefited, but preserved for more sufferings. In comparatively plain French prose--the qualification is intentional, as will be seen a little later--with a scene and time barely two hundred years off now and not a hundred then, though in a way unfamiliar--the thing won"t do. "Time," at the orders of the Prince of Darkness, cutting down trees to make a stockade for the Natchez in the eighteenth century, alas! contributes again the touch of weak allegory, in neither case helping the effect; while, although the plot is by no means badly evolved, the want of interest in the characters renders it ineffective.
[Sidenote: _Les Martyrs._]
The defects of _Les Martyrs_[31] are fewer in number and less in degree, while its merits are far more than proportionally greater and more numerous. Needing less historical reinforcement, it enjoys much more.