[Sidenote: _Norine_, etc.]
This criticism--it is not intended for a reproach--does not extend to other, perhaps not so powerful, but more _pastimeous_ books, though M.
Fabre seldom entirely excluded the clerical atmosphere of his youth.[524] A very pleasant volume-full is _Norine_, the t.i.tle-piece of which is full at once of Cevenol scenery and Parisian contrast, of love, and, at least, preparations for feasting; of sketches of that "Inst.i.tute" life which comes nearest to our collegiate one; and of pleasant bird-worship. But M. Fabre should have told us whether the bishop actually received and appreciated[525] the dinner of Truscas trout and Faugeres wine (alas! this is a blank in my fairly extensive wine-list), and the miscellaneous _maigre_ cookery of the excellent Prudence, and the splendid casket of _liqueurs_ borrowed from a brother _cure_. _Cathinelle_ (an unusual and pretty diminutive of Catherine) is an admirably told pendant to it; and I venture to think the "idyllic"
quality of both at least equal, if not superior, to the best of George Sand. _Le R. P. Colomban_ is, according to M. Fabre"s habit, a sort of double-edged affair--a severe but just rebuke of the "popular preacher," and a good-humoured touch at the rebuker, Monseigneur Onesime de la Boissiere, Eveque de Saint-Pons, who incidentally proposes to submit _L"Abbe Tigrane_ to the Holy Congregation of the Index. Finally, the book closes with a delightful panegyric of Alexandre Dumas _pere_, and an anecdote avowedly autobiographic (as, indeed, the whole book gives itself out to be, though receivable with divers pinches of salt) of that best-natured of men franking a bevy of impecunious students at a _premiere_ of one of his plays.
[Sidenote: _Le Marquis de Pierrerue._]
To read _Le Marquis de Pierrerue_ after these two books--one the piece with which Fabre established his reputation, and the other a product of his proved mastery--is interesting to the critic. Whether it would be so to the general reader may be more doubtful. It is the longest of its author"s novels; in fact its two volumes have separate sub-t.i.tles;[526]
but there is no real break, either of time, place, or action, between them. It is a queer book, quite evidently of the novitiate, and suggesting now Paul de k.o.c.k (the properer but not _quite_ proper Paul), now Daudet (to whom it is actually dedicated), now Feuillet, now Murger, now Sandeau, now one of the melodramatic story-tellers. Very possibly all these had a share in its inspiration. It is redolent of the medical studies which the author actually pursued, between his abandonment of preparation for the Church and his settling down as a man of letters.
Its art is palpably imperfect--blocks of _recit_, wedges of not very novel or acute reflection, a continual reluctance or inability to "get forrard." Of the two heroes, Claude Abrial, Marquis de Pierrerue--a fervent Royalist and Catholic, who lavishes his own money, and everybody else"s that he can get hold of, on a sort of private Literary Fund,[527]
allows himself to be swindled by a scoundrelly man of business, immures his daughter, against her wish, as a Carmelite nun, and dies a pauper--is a quite possible but not quite "brought off" figure. Theven Falgouet, the Breton _buveur d"eau_,[528] who is introduced to us at actual point of starvation, and who dies, self-transfixed on the sharp spikes of the Carmelite _grille_, is perhaps not _im_possible, and occasionally pathetic. But the author seems, in his immaturity as a craftsman, never to have made up his mind whether he is producing an "alienist" study, or giving us a fairly ordinary _etudiant_ and aspirant in letters. Of the two heroines, the n.o.ble damsel Claire de Pierrerue--object of Falgouet"s love at first sight, a love ill-fated and more insane than even love beseems--is quite nice in her way; and Rose Keller--last of grisettes, but a grisette of the Upper House, an artist grisette, and, as some one calls her, the "soeur de charite de la galanterie"[529]--is quite nice in hers. But Rose"s action--in burning, to the extent of several hundred thousand francs" worth, notes and bonds, the wicked gains of one of her lovers (Grippon, the Marquis"s fraudulent intendant), and promptly expiring--may pair off with Falgouet"s repeating on himself the Spanish torture-death of the _guanches_,[530] as pure melodrama. In fact the whole thing is undigested, and shows, in a high degree, that initial difficulty in getting on with the story which has not quite disappeared in _L"Abbe Tigrane_, but which has been completely conquered[531] in _Norine_ and _Cathinelle_.
[Sidenote: _Mon Oncle Celestin._]
This mixed quality makes itself felt in others of Fabre"s books. Perhaps there is none of them, except _L"Abbe Tigrane_ itself, which has been a greater favourite with his partisans than _Mon Oncle Celestin_. Here we have something of the same easy autobiographic quality, with the same general scene and the same relations of the narrator and the princ.i.p.al characters, as in other books; but "Mr. the nephew" (the agreeable and continuous t.i.tle by which the faithful parishioners address their beloved pastor"s boy relative) has a different uncle and a different _gouvernante_, at least in name, from those in _Norine_ and _Cathinelle_. The Abbe Celestin, threatened with consumption, exchanges the living in which he has worked for many years, and little good comes of it. He is persecuted, actually to the death, by his rural dean, a sort of duplicate of the hero of _L"Abbe Tigrane_; but the circ.u.mstances are not purely ecclesiastical. He has, in his new parish, taken for goat-girl a certain Marie Galtier, daughter of his beadle, but, unluckily, also step-daughter of a most abominable step-mother. Marie, as innocently as possible, "gets into trouble," and dies of it, accusations being brought against her guiltless and guileless master in consequence. There are many good pa.s.sages; the opening is (as nearly always with M. Fabre) excellent; but both the parts and the whole are, once more, too long--the mere "flitting" from one parish to another seems never to be coming to an end. Still, the book should be read; and it has one very curious cla.s.s of personages, the "hermits" of the Cevennes--probably the latest (the date is 1846) of their kind in literature. The general characteristics of that kind do not seem to have been exactly saintly;[532] and the best of them, Adon Laborie, after being "good" throughout, and always intending to be so, brings about the catastrophe by calmly suppressing, in the notion that he will save the Abbe trouble, three successive citations from the Diocesan Council, thereby getting him "interdicted." The shock, when the judgment in contumacy is announced by the brutal dean, proves fatal.
[Sidenote: _Lucifer._]
In Lucifer M. Fabre is still nearer, though with no repet.i.tion, to the _Tigrane_ motive. The book justifies its t.i.tle by being the most ambitious of all the novels, and justifies the ambition itself by showing a great deal of power--most perhaps again, of all; though whether that power is used to the satisfaction of the reader must depend, even more than is usual, on individual tastes. Bernard Jourfier, at the beginning of the book and of the Second Empire, is a young _vicaire_, known to be of great talents and, in especial, of unusual preaching faculty, but of a violent temper, ill at ease about his own vocation, and suspected--at least by Ultramontanes--of very doubtful orthodoxy and not at all doubtful Gallicanism. He is, moreover, the grandson of a _conventionnel_ who voted for the King"s death, and the son of a deputy of extreme Liberal views. So the Jesuits, after trying to catch him for themselves, make a dead set at him, and secure his appointment to out-of-the-way country parishes only, and even in these his constant removal, so that he may acquire as little influence as possible anywhere. At last, in a very striking interview with his bishop, he succeeds in clearing his character, and enters on the way of promotion. The cabals continue; but later, on the overthrow of Bonapartism, he is actually raised to the episcopate. His violent temper, however, is always giving handles to the enemy, and he finally determines that life is intolerable. After trying to starve himself, he makes use of the picturesque but dangerous situation of his palace, and is crushed by falling, in apparent accident, through a breach in the garden wall with a precipice beneath--"falling like Lucifer," as his lifelong enemy and rival whispers to a confederate at the end. For the appellation has been an Ultramontane nickname for him long before, and has been not altogether undeserved by his pride at least. It has been said that the book is powerful; but it is almost unrelievedly gloomy throughout, and suffers from the extremely narrow range of its interest.
[Sidenote: _Sylviane_ and _Taillevent_.]
Those who are not tired of the Cevenol atmosphere--which, it must be admitted, is quite a refreshing one--will find a lighter example in _Sylviane_, once more recounted by "Mr. the nephew," but with his movable uncle and _gouvernante_ shifted back to "M. Fulcran" and "Prudence"; and in _Taillevent_, a much longer book, which is independent of uncle and nephew both. _Sylviane_ has agreeable things in it, but perhaps might have been better if its form had been different.
It is a long _recit_ told by a gamekeeper, with frequent interruptions[533] and a very thin "frame." _Taillevent_ ends with two murders, the second a quite excusable lynch-punishment for the first, and the marriage of the avenger just afterwards to the daughter of the original victim, a combination of "the murders _and_ the marriages"
deserving Osric"s encomia on sword furniture. So vigorous a conclusion had need have a well-stuffed course of narrative to lead up to it, and this is not wanting. There is a wicked--a _very_ wicked--Spaniard for the lynched-murderer part; an exceedingly good dog-, bear-, and man-fight in the middle; an extensive and well-utilised wolf-trap in the woods; bankruptcies; floods; all sorts of things; with a course of "idyllic" true love running through the whole. There _is_ a _cure_--a rather foolish one; but the ecclesiastical interest in itself is almost absent from the book. The weakest part of it lies in the characters of what may be called the hero and heroine of the beginning and middle--Frederic Servieres and Madeleine his wife. That the former should fall into the most frantic love before marriage, and almost neglect his wife as soon as she has borne him a child, may be said to be common enough in books, and, unluckily, by no means uncommon in life.
But there may be more question about the repet.i.tion of the inconsistency in other parts of the character--extreme business apt.i.tude and fatal neglect of business, extreme energy and fatal depression over quite small things, etc. The general combination is not impossible; it is not even improbable; but it is not quite "made so." And something is the same with Madeleine, who is, moreover, left "in the air" in so curious a fashion that one begins to wonder whether the Mrs. Martha Buskbody att.i.tude, so often jibed at, does not possess some excuse.
[Sidenote: _Toussaint Galabru._]
A pleasant contrast in this respect, though the end here is tragic in a way, may be found in _Toussaint Galabru_, the last, perhaps, of M.
Fabre"s books for which we can find special room here, though no doubt some favourites of particular readers may have been omitted. The novel is divided into two pretty equal halves, with an interval first of ten years between them and, almost immediately, of sixteen more. The first half is occupied by an adventure of "Mr. the nephew"s," though he is not here "Mr. the nephew," but "Mr. the son," living with his father and mother at Bedarieux, M. Fabre"s actual birthplace. He plays truant from Church on Advent Sunday to join a shooting expedition with his school-fellow Baptistin and that school-fellow"s not too pious father, who is actually a church _suisse_, but has received an exeat from the _cure_ to catch a famous hare for that _cure_ to eat. The vicissitudes of the chase are numerous, and the whole is narrated with extraordinary skill as from the boy"s point of view, his entire innocence, when he is brought into contact with very shady incidents, being--and this is a most difficult thing to do--hit off marvellously well. It is only towards the end of this part (he has been heard of before) that Toussaint Galabru, sorcerer and Lothario, makes his appearance--as clever as he is handsome, and as vicious as he is clever. When he does appear he has his way--with the game shot by others, and with a certain _metayer"s_ wife--after the same hand-gallop fashion in which the personage in Blake"s lines enjoyed both the peach and the lady.
The earlier and shorter, but not short, interval, mentioned above, pa.s.ses to 1852, and does little more than bring the now "Parisian"
narrator into fresh contact with his old school-fellow Baptistin, now a full-grown priest, but, though very pious, in some difficulties from his persistent love of sport. Sixteen years later, again, in 1868, reappears, "coming to his death,"[534] Galabru himself. The part is chiefly occupied by a _recit_ of intervening history (including a sadly unsuccessful attempt, both at spiritual and physical combat, by Baptistin) and by a much-interrupted journey in snow.[535] But it gives occasion for another agreeable "idyll" between Vincinet, Galabru"s son, and the Abbe Baptistin"s G.o.d-child Lalie; and it ends with a striking procession to carry, hardly in time, the _viatic.u.m_ to the dying wizard, whereby, if not his own weal in the other world, that of the lovers in this is happily brought about.
Not very many generalities are required on M. Ferdinand Fabre. How completely his way lies out of most of the ruts in which the wain of the French novel usually travels must have been shown; and it may be hoped that enough has been said also to show that there are plenty of minor originalities about him. No novelist[536] in any language known to me (unless you call Richard Jefferies a novelist) has such an extraordinary command of "the country"--bird-nature and rock scenery being his favourite but by no means his only subjects. For "Scenes of Clerical Life" he stands admittedly alone in France, and has naturally been dealt with most often from this point of view. Of that intense provincialism, in the good sense, which is characteristic of French literature, there have been few better representatives. Wordsworth himself is scarcely more the poet of our Lake and Hill country than Fabre is the novelist of the Cevennes. Peasant life and child life of the country (he meddles little, and not so happily, with towns of any size) find in him admirably "vatical" properties and combinations; and if he does not run any risk of Feste"s rebuke by talking much of "ladies," he knows as much about women as a man well may. His comedy is never coa.r.s.e or trivial, and the tragedy never goes off through the touch-hole. Of one situation--very easy to spoil by rendering it mawkish--the early but not "calf"-love of rustic man and maid, beginning in childhood, he was curiously master. George Sand herself[537] has nothing to beat (if she has anything to equal) the pairs of Taillevent and Riquette (in the novel named from the lover), and of Vincinet and Lalie (in _Toussaint Galabru_). As for his pictures of clerical cabals and clerical weaknesses, they may be too much of a good thing for some tastes; but that they are a good thing, both as an exercise in craftsmanship and as an alternative to the common run of French novel subjects, can hardly be denied. In this respect, and not in this respect only, M. Fabre has his own place, and that no low one.
[Sidenote: Andre Theuriet.]
In coming to M. Andre Theuriet I felt a mixture of curiosity with a slight uneasiness. For I had read not a few of his books[538] carefully and critically at their first appearance, and in such cases--when novels are not of the _very_ first order (which, good as these are, I think few really critical readers would allot them) nor possessed of those "oddments" of appeal which sometimes make more or less inferior books readable and readable again--fresh acquaintance, after a long time, is dangerous. It has been said here (possibly more than once) that, when a book possesses this peculiar readableness, a second reading is positively beneficial to it, because you neglect the "knots in the reed"
and slip along it easily. This is not quite the case with others: and, unless great critical care is taken, a new acquaintance, itself thirty years old, has, I fear, a better chance than an old one renewed after that time. However, the knight of Criticism, as of other ladies,[539]
must dare any adventure, and ought to be able to bring the proper arms and methods to the task. For the purposes of renewal I chose _Sauvageonne_, _Le Fils Maugars_, and _Raymonde_. With the first, though I did not remember much more than its central situation and its catastrophe, with one striking incident, I do remember being originally pleased; the second has, I believe, at least sometimes, been thought Theuriet"s masterpiece; and the third (which, by the way, is a "philippine" containing another story besides the t.i.tle-one) is an early book which I had not previously read.
[Sidenote: _Sauvageonne._]
The argument of _Sauvageonne_ can be put very shortly. A young man of four-and-twenty, of no fortune, marries a rich widow ten years older than himself, and, as it happens, possessed of an adopted daughter of seventeen. He--who is by no means an intentional scoundrel, but a commonplace and selfish person, and a gentleman neither by birth nor by nature--soon wearies of his somewhat effusive and exacting wife; the girl takes a violent fancy to him; accident hurries on the natural if not laudable consequences; the wife covers the shame by succeeding in pa.s.sing off their result as her own child, but the strain is too much for her, and she goes mad, but does not die.
This tragic theme (really a tragic [Greek: hamartia], for there is much good in Sauvageonne, as she is called, from her tomboy habits, and, with happier chance and a n.o.bler lover, all might have been well with her) is handled with no little power, and with abundant display of skill in two different departments which M. Theuriet made particularly his own--sketches of the society of small country towns, and elaborate description of the country itself, especially wood-scenery. In regard to the former, it must be admitted that, though there is plenty of scandal and not a little ill-nature in English society of the same kind, the latter nuisance seems, according to French novelists, to be more _active_ with their country folk than it is with ours[540]--a thing, in a way, convenient for fiction. Of the descriptive part the only unfavourable criticism (and that a rather ungracious one) that could be made is that it is almost too elaborate. Of two fateful scenes of _Sauvageonne_, that where Francis Pommeret, the unheroic hero, comes across Denise (the girl"s proper name) sitting in a crab-tree in the forest and pelting small boys with the fruit, is almost startlingly vivid. You see every detail of it as if it were on the Academy walls. In fact, it is almost more like a picture than like reality, which is more shaded off and less sharp in outline and vivid in colour. As for the character-drawing, if it does not attain to that consummateness which has been elsewhere described and desiderated--the production of people that you _know_--it attains the second rank; the three prominent characters (the rest are merely sets-off) are all people that you _might_ know. Denise herself is very near the first rank, and Francis Pommeret--not, as has been said, by any means a scoundrel, for he only succ.u.mbs to strong and continued temptation, but an ordinary selfish creature--is nearer than those who wish to think n.o.bly of human nature may like, to complete reality. One is less certain about the unhappy Adrienne Lebreton or Pommeret, but discussion of her would be rather "an intricate impeach." And one may have a question about the end. We are told that Francis and Denise keep together (the luckless wife living on in spite of her madness) because of the child, though they absolutely hate each other. Would it not be more natural that, if they do not part, they should vary the hatred with spasms of pa.s.sion and repulsion?
[Sidenote: _Le Fils Maugars._]
_Le Fils Maugars_ is not only a longer book, but its s.p.a.ce is less exclusively filled with a single situation, and the necessary prelude to it. In fact, the whole thing is expanded, varied, and peopled. Auberive, near Langres, the place of _Sauvageonne_, is hardly more than a large village; Saint-Clementin, on the Charente, though not a large town, is the seat of a judicial Presidency, of a _sous-prefecture_, etc. "Le _pere_ Maugars" is a banker who, from having been a working stone-mason, has enriched himself by sharp practice in money-lending. His son is a lawyer by the profession chosen for him, and a painter by preference.
The heroine, Therese Desroches, is the daughter of a Republican doctor, whose wife has been unfaithful, and who suspects Therese of not being his own child. The scene shifts from Saint-Clementin itself to the country districts where Poitou and Touraine meet, as well as to Paris.
The time begins on the eve of the Coup d"etat, and allows itself a gap of five years between the first and second halves of the book. Besides the love-scenes and the country descriptions and the country feasts there is a little general society; much business; some politics, including the attempted and at last accomplished arrest of the doctor for treason to the new _regime_; a well-told account of a contest for the Prix de Rome; a trial of the elder Maugars for conspiracy (with a subordinate usurer) to defraud, etc. The whole begins with more than a little aversion on everybody"s part for the innocent etienne Maugars, who, having been away from home for years, knows neither the fact nor the cause of his father"s unpopularity; and it ends with condign poetical justice, on the extortioner in the form of punishment, and for the lovers in another way. It is thus, though a less poignant book than _Sauvageonne_, a fuller and wider one, and it displays, better than that book, the competence and adequacy which mark the author, though there may be something else to be said about it (or rather about its ill.u.s.tration of his general characteristics) presently.
[Sidenote: _Le Don Juan de Vireloup_ and _Raymonde_.]
_Le Don Juan de Vireloup_, a story of about a hundred pages long, which acts as makeweight to _Raymonde_, itself only about twice the length, is a capital example of Theuriet at nearly his best--a pleasant mixture of _berquinade_ and _gaillardise_ (there are at least two pa.s.sages at either of which Mrs. Grundy would require _sal volatile_, and would then put the book in the fire). The reformation and salvation of Jean de Santenoge--a poor (indeed penniless) gentleman, who lives in a little old manor, or rather farm-house, buried in the woods, and whose sole occupations are poaching and making love to peasant girls--are most agreeably conducted by the agency of the daughter of a curmudgeonly forest-inspector (who naturally regards Santenoge with special abhorrence). She is helped by her grand-uncle, a doctor of the familiar stamp, who has known Diderot"s child, Madame de Vandeul (the scene, as in so many of the author"s books, is close to Langres), and worships Denis himself. As for _Raymonde_, its heroine comes closer to "Sauvageonne," though she is less of a savagess: and the worst that can be said against her lucky winner is that he is a little of a prig. But, to borrow, and very slightly alter, one of Sir Walter"s pieces of divine charity, "The man is mortal, and a scientific person." Perhaps fate and M. Theuriet are a little too harsh to another (but not this time beggarly) _gentillatre_, Osmin de Prefontaine, to whom, one regrets to say, Raymonde positively, or almost positively, engages herself, before she in the same way virtually accepts the physiological Antoine Verdier.
And the _denouement_, where everything comes right, is a little stagy.[541] But the whole is thoroughly readable, competently charactered, and ill.u.s.trated by some of the best of the author"s forest descriptions.
[Sidenote: General characteristics.]
One has thus been able to give an account, very favourable in the main, of these three or four stories--selected with no hidden design, and in two cases previously unknown to the critic, who has, in addition, a fair remembrance of several others. But it will be observed that there is in them, with all their merits, some evidence of that "rut" or "mould"
character which has been specified as absent in greater novelists, but as often found in company with a certain accomplishment, in _ordonnance_ and readable quality, that marks the later novel. The very great prominence of description is common to all of them, and in three out of the four the scenes are from the same district--almost from the same patch--of country. The heroine is the most prominent character and, as she should be, the most attractive figure of all; but she is made up and presented, if not exactly _a la douzaine_, yet with a strong, almost a sisterly, family likeness. Far be it from the present writer to regret or desiderate the adorably candid creature who so soon smirches her whiteness. Even the luckless Sauvageonne--worst mannered, worst moralled, and worst fated of all--is a jewel and a cynosure compared with that other cla.s.s of girl; while Raymonde (whose maltreatment of M.
de Prefontaine is to a great extent excused by her mother"s bullying, her real father"s weakness, and her own impulsive temperament); the Therese of _Le Fils Maugars_; and the Marianne of _Le Don Juan de Vireloup_ are, in ascending degrees, girls of quite a right kind. Only, it is just a little too much the _same_ kind. And without unfairness, without even ingrat.i.tude, one may say that this sameness does somewhat characterise M. Theuriet.
[Sidenote: Georges Ohnet.]
There were some who did not share the general admiration, a good many years ago, of the dictum of a popular French critic on a more popular French novelist to the effect that, though it was his habit, in the articles he was writing, to confine himself to literature, he would break this good custom for once and discuss M. Ohnet. In the first place, this appeared to the dissidents a very easy kind of witticism; they knew many men, many women, and many schoolboys who could have uttered it. In the second, they were probably of the opinion (changing the matter, instead of, like that wicked Prince Seithenyn, merely reversing the order, of the old Welsh saying) that "The goodness of wit sleeps in the badness of manners." But if the question had been then, or were now, asked seriously whether the literary value of _Le Maitre de Forges_ and its companion novels was high, few of them would, as probably, have been or be able to answer in the affirmative. For my own part, I always used to think, when M. Ohnet"s novels came out, that they were remarkably like those of the eminent Mrs. Henry Wood[542] in English--of course _mutatis mutandis_. They displayed very fair apt.i.tude for the _business_ of novel manufacture, and the results were such as, in almost every way, to satisfy the average subscriber to a circulating library, supposing him or her to possess respectable tastes (scarcely "taste"), moderate intelligence, and a desire to pa.s.s the time comfortably enough in reading them once, without the slightest expectation of being, or wish to be, able to read them again. They might even sometimes excite readers who possessed an adjustable "tally" of excitableness. But beyond this, as it seemed to their critic of those days, they never went.
Re-reading, therefore--though perhaps the consequence may not seem downright to laymen--promised some critical interest. I first selected for the purpose, to give the author as good a chance as possible, _Serge Panine_, which the Academy crowned, and which went near its hundred and fifty editions when it was still a four-year-old; and _Le Maitre de Forges_ itself, the most popular of all, adding _Le Docteur Rameau_ and _La Grande Marniere_, which my memory gave me as having seemed to be of such pillars as the particular structure could boast.
[Sidenote: _Serge Panine._]
I suppose the Forty crowned _Serge Panine_ because it was a virtuous book, and an attack on the financial trickeries which, about the time and a little later, enriched the French language with the word "krach."
Otherwise, though no one could call it bad, its royalty could hardly seem much other than that which qualifies for the kingdom of the blind.
The situations are good, and they are worked up into a Fifth Act, as we may call it (it occupies almost exactly a fifth of the book, which was, of course, dramatised), _melo_dramatic to the _n_th, ending in a discovery of flagrant delict, or something very like it, and in the shooting of a son-in-law by his mother-in-law to save the downfall of his reputation. But the characters do not play up to their parts, or each other, very well, with the possible or pa.s.sable exception of the mother-in-law, and of one very minor personage, the secretary Marechal, whom M. Ohnet, perhaps distrustful of his power to make him more, left minor. The hero is a Polish prince, with everything that a stage Polish prince requires about him--handsome, superficially amiable, what the precise call "caressing" and the vulgar "carneying" in manner, but extravagant, quite non-moral, and not possessed of much common sense.
His princess Micheline is a silly jilt before marriage and a sillier "door-mat" (as some women call others) of a wife. Her rival, and in a fashion foster-sister (she has been adopted before Micheline"s birth), does things which many people might do, but does not do them in a concatenation accordingly. The jilted serious young man Pierre accepts a perfectly impossible position in reference to his former _fiancee_ and his supplanter, and gives more proofs of its impossibility by his conduct and speech than was at all necessary. The conversation is very flat, and the descriptions are chiefly confined to long, gaudy inventories of rich parvenus" houses, which read like auctioneers"
catalogues.
But the worst part of the book, and probably that which at its appearance exasperated the critics, though it did not disturb the _abonne_--or, more surprisingly, the Immortals--is the flatness of style which has been already noted in the conversation, but which overflows insupportably into the narrative. M. Ohnet speaks somewhere, justly enough, of "le style a la fois pretentieux et plat, familier aux reporters." But was he trying--there is no sign of it--to parody these unfortunate persons when he himself described dinner-rolls as "Ces boules dorees qui sollicitent l"appet.i.t le plus rebelle, et accommodees dans une serviette dama.s.see artistement pliee, parent si elegamment un couvert"? Or when he tells us that at a ball "Les femmes, leurs splendides toilettes gracieus.e.m.e.nt etalees sur les meubles bas et moelleux, causaient chiffons sous l"eventail, ou ecoutaient les cantilenes d"un chanteur exotique pendant que les jeunes gens leur chuchotaient des galanteries a l"oreille." This last is really worthy of the feeblest member of our "_plated_ silver fork school" between the time of Scott and Miss Austen and that of d.i.c.kens and Thackeray.
[Sidenote: _Le Maitre de Forges._]
In the year 1902, _Le Maitre de Forges_, which was then just twenty years old, had reached its three hundred and sixty-seventh edition. Six years later Fromentin"s _Dominique_, which was then forty-five years old, had reached its twenty-seventh. The accident of the two books lying side by side on my table has enabled me to make this comparison, the moral of which will be sufficiently drawn by a reference to what has been said of _Dominique_ above,[543] and by the few remarks on M.
Ohnet"s most popular book which follow.
One old receipt for popularity, "Put your characters up several steps in society," M. Ohnet has faithfully obeyed. We begin with a marquis unintentionally poaching on the ironmaster"s ground, and (rather oddly) accepting game which he has _not_ shot thereon. We end with the marquis"s sister putting her dainty fingers before the mouth of a duke"s exploding pistol--to the not surprising damage of those digits, but with the result of happiness ever afterwards for the respectable characters of the book. There is a great deal of gambling, though, unfortunately told in a rather uninteresting manner of _recit_, which is a pity, for gambling can be made excellent in fiction.[544] There are several of M.
Ohnet"s favourite inventories, and a baroness--not a bad baroness--who has frequented sales, and knows all about _bric-a-brac_. Also there are several exciting situations, even before we come to the application of a lady"s fingers as tompions. M. Ohnet is, it has been said, rather good at situations. But situations, to speak frankly, are rather things for the stage than for the story, except very rarely, and of a very striking--which does not mean melodramatic--kind. And it is very important, off the stage, that they should be led up to, and acted in by, vigorously drawn and well filled in characters.
To do M. Ohnet justice, he has attempted to meet this requirement in one instance at least, the one instance by which the book has to stand or fall. Some of the minor personages (like Marechal in _Serge Panine_) are fair enough; and the little baroness who, arriving at a country-house in a whirl of travel and baggage, cries, "Ou est mon mari? Est-ce que j"ai _deja_ egare mon mari?" puts one, for the moment, in quite a good temper. The ironmaster"s sister, too, is not a bad sort of girl. He himself is too much of the virtuous, loyal, amiable, but not weak man of the people; the marquis is rather null, and the duke, who jilts his cousin Claire de Beaulieu, gambles, marries a rich and detestable daughter of a chocolate-man, and finally fires through Claire"s fingers, is very much, to use our old phrase, _a la douzaine_. But Claire might save the book, and probably does so for those who like it. To me she seems quite wrongly put together. The novel has been so very widely read, in the original and in translations, that it is perhaps unnecessary to waste s.p.a.ce on a full a.n.a.lysis of its central scene--a thing not to be done very shortly. It may be sufficient to say that Claire, treacherously and spitefully informed, by her successful rival, of the fact that she has been jilted, and shortly afterwards confronted with the jilter himself, recovers, as it seems to her, to the company, and I suppose to the author, the whip-hand by summoning the ironmaster (who is hanging about "promiscuous," and is already known to be attached to her, though she has given him no direct encouragement) and bestowing her hand upon him, insisting, too, upon being married at once, before the other pair. The act is supposed to be that of an exceptionally calm, haughty, and aristocratic damsel: and the acceptance of it is made by a man certainly deep in love, but independent, sharp-sighted, and strong-willed. To be sure, he could not very well refuse; but this very fact should have weighed additionally, with a girl of Claire"s supposed temperament, in deciding her not to make a special Leap Year for the occasion. To hand yourself over to d.i.c.k because Tom has declined to have anything to do with you is no doubt not a very unusual proceeding: but it is not usually done quite so much _coram populo_, or with such acknowledgment of its being done to spite Tom and Tom"s preferred one.[545]
[Sidenote: _Le Docteur Rameau._]
Two more of "Les Batailles de la Vie" (as, for some not too obvious[546]