THE FRENCH NOVEL, C. 1800

Frequent reference has been made, in the last two chapters, to the curious phenomenon called in French sensibilité (with a derivative of contempt, sensiblerie), the exact English form of which supplies part of the title, and the meaning an even greater part of the subject, of one of Miss Austen’s novels.  The thing itself appears first definitely in Madame de la Fayette, largely, though not unmixedly, in Marivaux, and to some extent in Prevost and Marmontel, while it is, as it were, sublimed in Rousseau, and present very strongly in Saint-Pierre.  There are, however, some minor writers and books displaying it in some cases even more extensively and intensively; and in this final chapter of the present volume they may appropriately find a place, not merely because some of them are late, but because Sensibility is not confined to any part of the century, but, beginning before its birth, continued till after its end.  We may thus have to encroach on the nineteenth a little, but more in appearance than in reality.  In quintessence, and as a reigning fashion, Sensibility was the property of the eighteenth century.

To recur for a moment to Miss Austen and Sense and Sensibility, everybody has laughed, let us hope not unkindly, over Marianne Dashwood’s woes.  But she herself was only an example, exaggerated in the genial fashion of her creatress, of the proper and recognised standard of feminine feeling in and long before her time.  The “man of feeling” was admitted as something out of the way ­on which side of the way opinions might differ.  But the woman of feeling was emphatically the accepted type ­a type which lasted far into the next century, though it was obsolete at least by the Mid-Victorian period, of which some do so vainly talk.  The extraordinary development of emotion which was expected from women need not be illustrated merely from love-stories.  The wonderful transports of Miss Ferrier’s heroines at sight of their long-lost mothers; even those of sober Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, at the recovery of her estimable but not particularly interesting brother William, give the keynote much better than any more questionable ecstasies.  “Sensibility, so charming,” was the pet affectation of the period ­an affectation carried on till it became quite natural, and was only cured by the half-caricature, half-reaction of Byronism.

The thing, however, was not English in origin, and never was thoroughly English at all.  The main current of the Sensibility novelists, who impressed their curious morals or manners on all men and women in civilised Europe, was French in unbroken succession, from the day when Madame de la Fayette first broke ground against the ponderous romances of Madeleine de Scudery, to the day when Benjamin Constant forged, in Adolphe, the link between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century romance, between the novel of sentiment and the novel of analysis.

Of the relations to it of the greater novelists of the main century we have already spoken:  and as for the two greatest of the extreme close, Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, they mix too many secondary purposes with their philandering, and moreover do not form part of the plan of the present volume.  For the true Sensibility, the odd quintessence of conventional feeling, played at steadily till it is half real, if not wholly so, which ends in the peculiarities of two such wholesome young Britonesses as Marianne Dashwood and Fanny Price, we must look elsewhere.  After Madame de la Fayette, and excluding with her other names already treated, we come to Madame de Fontaines, Madame de Tencin (most heartless and therefore naturally not least sentimental of women), Madame Riccoboni, the group of lady-novelists of whom Mesdames de Souza and de Duras are the chief, and, finally, the two really remarkable names of Xavier de Maistre and Benjamin Constant.  These are our “documents.”  Even the minor subjects of this inquiry are pleasant pieces of literary bric-a-brac; perhaps they are something a little more than that.  For Sensibility was actually once a great power in the world.  Transformed a little, it did wonderful things in the hands of Rousseau and Goethe and Chateaubriand and Byron.  It lingers in odd nooks and corners even at the present day, when it is usually and irreverently called “gush,” and Heaven only knows whether it may not be resuscitated in full force before some of us are dead. For it has exactly the peculiarities which characterise all recurrent fashions ­the appeal to something which is genuine connected with the suggestion of a great deal that is not.

In the followers of Madame de la Fayette we find that a good many years have passed by.  The jargon appropriated to the subject has grown still more official; and instead of using it to express genuine sentiments, which in another language might deserve expression well enough, the characters are constantly suspected by the callous modern reader or elaborately, though perhaps unconsciously, feigning the sentiments which the jargon seems to imply that they ought to have.  This is somewhat less noticeable in the work of Madame de Tencin than elsewhere, because d’Alembert’s mother was so very much cleverer a person than the generality of the novel-writers of her day that she could hardly fail to hide defects more cunningly.  But it is evident enough in the Comte de Comminge and in the Malheurs de l’Amour.  Having as questionable morals as any lady of the time (the time of the Regency), Madame de Tencin of course always had a moral purpose in her writings, and this again gives her books a certain difference.  But, like the former, this difference only exposes, all the more clearly, the defects of the style, and the drawbacks from which it was almost impossible that those who practised it should escape.

Madame de Tencin tried to escape by several gates.  Besides her moral purposes and her esprit, she indulged in a good deal of rather complicated and sometimes extravagant incident. M. de Comminge, which is very short, contains, not to mention other things, the rather startling detail of a son who, out of chivalrous affection for his lady-love, burns certain of his father’s title-deeds which he has been charged to recover, and the still more startling incident of the heroine living for some years in disguise as a monk.  The following epistle, however, from the heroine to the hero, will show better than anything else the topsy-turvy condition which sensibility had already reached.  All that need be said in explanation of it is that the father (who is furious with his son, and not unreasonably so) has shut him up in a dungeon, in order to force him to give up his beloved Adelaide.

Your father’s fury has told me all I owe you:  I know what your generosity had concealed from me.  I know, too, the terrible situation in which you are, and I have no means of extracting you therefrom save one.  This will perhaps make you more unhappy still.  But I shall be as unhappy as yourself, and this gives me the courage to do what I am required to do.  They would have me, by engaging myself to another, give a pledge never to be yours:  ’tis at this price that M. de Comminge sets your liberty.  It will cost me perhaps my life, certainly my peace.  But I am resolved.  I shall in a few days be married to the Marquis de Benavides.  What I know of his character forewarns me of what I shall have to suffer; but I owe you at least so much constancy as to make only misery for myself in the engagement I am contracting.

The extremity of calculated absurdity indicated by the italicised passages was reached, let it be remembered, by one of the cleverest women of the century:  and the chief excuse for it is that the restrictions of the La Fayette novel, confined as it was to the upper classes and to a limited number of elaborately distressing situations, were very embarrassing.

Madame Riccoboni, mentioned earlier as continuing Marianne, shows the completed product very fairly.  Her Histoire du Marquis de Cressy is a capital example of the kind.  The Marquis is beloved by a charming girl of sixteen and by a charming widow of six-and-twenty.  An envious rival betrays his attentions to Adelaide de Bugei, and her father makes her write an epistle which pretty clearly gives him the option of a declaration in form or a rupture.  For a Sensible man, it must be confessed, the Marquis does not get out of the difficulty too well.  She has slipped into her father’s formal note the highly Sensible postscript, “Vous dire de m’oublier?  Ah!  Jamais.  On m’a force de l’ecrire; rien ne peut m’obliger a lé penser ni lé desirer.”  Apparently it was not leap-year, for the Marquis replied in a letter nearly as bad as Willoughby’s celebrated epistle in Sense and Sensibility.

MADEMOISELLE, ­Nothing can console me for having been the innocent cause of fault being found with the conduct of a person so worthy of respect as you.  I shall approve whatever you may think proper to do, without considering myself entitled to ask the reason of your behaviour.  How happy should I be, mademoiselle, if my fortune, and the arrangements which it forces me to make, did not deprive me of the sweet hope of an honour of which my respect and my sentiments would perhaps make me worthy, but which my present circumstances permit me not to seek.

Sensibility does not seem to have seen anything very unhandsome in this broad refusal to throw the handkerchief; but though not unhandsome, it could not be considered satisfactory to the heart.  So M. de Cressy despatches this private note to Adelaide by “Machiavel the waiting-maid” ­

Is it permitted to a wretch who has deprived himself of the greatest of blessings, to dare to ask your pardon and your pity?  Never did love kindle a flame purer and more ardent than that with which my heart burns for the amiable Adelaide.  Why have I not been able to give her those proofs of it which she had the right to expect?  Ah! mademoiselle, how could I bind you to the lot of a wretch all whose wishes even you perhaps would not fulfil? who, when he possessed you, though master of so dear, so precious a blessing, might regret others less estimable, but which have been the object of his hope and desire, etc. etc.

This means that M. de Cressy is ambitious, and wants a wife who will assist his views.  The compliment is doubtful, and Adelaide receives it in approved fashion.  She opens it “with a violent emotion,” and her “trouble was so great in reading it through, that she had to begin it again many times before she understood it.”  The exceedingly dubious nature of the compliment, however, strikes her, and “tears of regret and indignation rise to her eyes” ­tears which indeed are excusable even from a different point of view than that of Sensibility.  She is far, however, from blaming that sacred emotion.  “Ce n’est pas,” she says; “de nôtre sensibilité, maïs de l’objet qui l’a fait naître, que nous devons nous plaindre.”  This point seems arguable if it were proper to argue with a lady.

The next letter to be cited is from Adelaide’s unconscious rival, whose conduct is ­translated into the language of Sensibility, and adjusted to the manners of the time and class ­a ludicrous anticipation of the Pickwickian widow.  She buys a handsome scarf, and sends it anonymously to the victorious Marquis just before a Court ball, with this letter ­

A sentiment, tender, timid, and shy of making itself known, gives me an interest in penetrating the secrets of your heart.  You are thought indifferent; you seem to me insensible.  Perhaps you are happy, and discreet in your happiness.  Deign to tell me the secret of your soul, and be sure that I am not unworthy of your confidence.  If you have no love for any one, wear this scarf at the ball.  Your compliance may lead you to a fate which others envy.  She who feels inclined to prefer you is worthy of your attentions, and the step she takes to let you know it is the first weakness which she has to confess.

The modesty of this perhaps leaves something to desire, but its Sensibility is irreproachable.  There is no need to analyse the story of the Marquis de Cressy, which is a very little book and not extremely edifying.  But it supplies us with another locus classicus on sentimental manners.  M. de Cressy has behaved very badly to Adelaide, and has married the widow with the scarf.  He receives a letter from Adelaide on the day on which she takes the black veil ­

’Tis from the depths of an asylum, where I fear no more the perfidy of your sex, that I bid you an eternal adieu.  Birth, wealth, honours, all vanish from my sight.  My youth withered by grief, my power of enjoyment destroyed, love past, memory present, and regret still too deeply felt, all combine to bury me in this retreat.

And so forth, all of which, if a little high-flown, is not specially unnatural; but the oddity of the passage is to come.  Most men would be a little embarrassed at receiving such a letter as this in presence of their wives (it is to be observed that the unhappy Adelaide is profuse of pardons to Madame as well as to Monsieur de Cressy), and most wives would not be pleased when they read it.  But Madame de Cressy has the finest Sensibility of the amiable kind.  She reads it, and then ­

The Marquise, having finished this letter, cast herself into the arms of her husband, and clasping him with an inexpressible tenderness, “Weep, sir, weep,” she cried, bathing him with her own tears; “you cannot show too much sensibility for a heart so noble, so constant in its love.  Amiable and dear Adelaide!  ’Tis done, then, and we have lost you for ever.  Ah! why must I reproach myself with having deprived you of the only possession which excited your desires?  Can I not enjoy this sweet boon without telling myself that my happiness has destroyed yours?”

All Madame Riccoboni’s work is, with a little good-will, more or less interesting.  Much of it is full of italics, which never were used so freely in France as in England, but which seem to suit the queer, exaggerated, topsy-turvyfied sentiments and expressions very well.  The Histoire d’Ernestine in particular is a charming little novelette.  But if it were possible to give an abstract of any of her work here, Milady Catesby, which does us the honour to take its scene and personages from England, would be the one to choose. Milady Catesby is well worth comparing with Evelina, which is some twenty years its junior, and the sentimental parts of which are quite in the same tone with it.  Lord Ossery is indeed even more “sensible” than Lord Orville, but then he is described in French.  Lady Catesby herself is, however, a model of the style, as when she writes ­

Oh! my dear Henrietta!  What agitation in my senses! what trouble in my soul!...  I have seen him....  He has spoken to me....  Himself....  He was at the ball....  Yes! he.  Lord Ossery....  Ah! tell me not again to see him....  Bid me not hear him once more.

That will do for Lady Catesby, who really had no particular occasion or excuse for all this excitement except Sensibility.  But Sensibility was getting more and more exacting.  The hero of a novel must always be in the heroics, the heroine in a continual state of palpitation.  We are already a long way from Madame de la Fayette’s stately passions, from Marianne’s whimsical minauderies.  All the resources of typography ­exclamations, points, dashes ­have to be called in to express the generally disturbed state of things.  Now unfortunately this sort of perpetual tempest in a teacup (for it generally is in a teacup) requires unusual genius to make it anything but ludicrous.  I myself have not the least desire to laugh when I read such a book as La Nouvelle Heloise, and I venture to think that any one who does laugh must have something of the fool and something of the brute in his composition.  But then Rousseau is Rousseau, and there are not many like him.  At the Madame Riccobonis of this world, however clever they may be, it is difficult not to laugh, when they have to dance on such extraordinary tight ropes as those which Sensibility prescribed.

The writers who were contemporary with Madame Riccoboni’s later days, and who followed her, pushed the thing, if it were possible, even farther.  In Madame de Genlis’s tiny novelette of Mademoiselle de Clermont, the amount of tears shed, the way in which the knees of the characters knock together, their palenesses, blushes, tears, sighs, and other performances of the same kind, are surprising.  In the Lettres du Marquis de Roselle of Madame Elie de Beaumont (wife of the young advocate who defended the Calas family), a long scene between a brother and sister, in which the sister seeks to deter the brother from what she regards as a misalliance, ends (or at least almost ends, for the usual flood of tears is the actual conclusion) in this remarkable passage.

“And I,” cried he suddenly with a kind of fury, “I suppose that a sister who loves her brother, pities and does not insult him; that the Marquis de Roselle knows better what can make him happy than the Countess of St. Sever; and that he is free, independent, able to dispose of himself, in spite of all opposition.”  With these words he turned to leave the room brusquely.  I run to him, I stop him, he resists.  “My brother!” “I have no sister.”  He makes a movement to free himself:  he was about to escape me.  “Oh, my father!” I cried.  “Oh, my mother! come to my help.”  At these sacred names he started, stopped, and allowed himself to be conducted to a sofa.

This unlucky termination might be paralleled from many other places, even from the agreeable writings of Madame de Souza.  This writer, by the way, when the father of one of her heroes refuses to consent to his son’s marriage, makes the stern parent yield to a representation that by not doing so he will “authorise by anticipation a want of filial attachment and respect” in the grandchildren who do not as yet exist.  These excursions into the preposterous in search of something new in the way of noble sentiment or affecting emotion ­these whippings and spurrings of the feelings and the fancy ­characterise all the later work of the school.

Two names of great literary value and interest close the list of the novelists of Sensibility in France, and show at once its Nemesis and its caricature.  They were almost contemporaries, and by a curious coincidence neither was a Frenchman by birth.  It would be impossible to imagine a greater contrast than existed personally between Xavier de Maistre and Henri Benjamin de Constant-Rebecque, commonly called Benjamin Constant.  But their personalities, interesting as both are, are not the matter of principal concern here.  The Voyage autour de ma Chambre, its sequel the Expedition Nocturne, and the Lepreux de la Cite d’Aoste, exhibit one branch of the river of Sensibility (if one may be permitted to draw up a new Carte de Tendre), losing itself in agreeable trifling with the surface of life, and in generous, but fleeting, and slightly, though not consciously, insincere indulgence of the emotions.  In Adolphe the river rushes violently down a steep place, and in nigras lethargi mergitur undas.  It is to be hoped that most people who will read these pages know Xavier de Maistre’s charming little books; it is probable that at least some of them do not know Adolphe.  Constant is the more strictly original of the two authors, for Xavier de Maistre owes a heavy debt to Sterne, though he employs the borrowed capital so well that he makes it his own, while Adolphe can only be said to come after Werther and René in time, not in the least to follow them in nature.

The Voyage autour de ma Chambre (readers may be informed or reminded) is a whimsical description of the author’s meditations and experiences when confined to barracks for some military peccadillo.  After a fashion which has found endless imitators since, the prisoner contemplates the various objects in his room, spins little romances to himself about them and about his beloved Madame de Hautcastel, moralises on the faithfulness of his servant Joannetti, and so forth.  The Expedition Nocturne, a less popular sequel, is not very different in plan.  The Lepreux de la Cite d’Aoste is a very short story, telling how the narrator finds a sufferer from the most terrible of all diseases lodged in a garden-house, and of their dialogue.  The chief merit of these works, as of the less mannerised and more direct Prisonnier du Caucase and Jeune Sibérienne, resides in their dainty style, in their singular narrative power (Sainte-Beuve says justly enough that the Prisonnier du Caucase has been equalled by no other writer except Merimee), and in the remarkable charm of the personality of the author, which escapes at every moment from the work.  The pleasant picture of the Chevalier de B ­ in the Soirees de St. Petersbourg, which Joseph de Maistre is said to have drawn from his less formidable brother, often suggests itself as one follows the whimsicalities of the Voyage and the Expedition.  The affectation is so natural, the mannerism so simple, that it is some time before one realises how great in degree both are.

Looked at from a certain point of view, Xavier de Maistre illustrates the effect of the Sensibility theory on a thoroughly good-natured, cultivated, and well-bred man of no particular force or character or strength of emotion.  He has not the least intention of taking Sensibility seriously, but it is the proper thing to take it somehow or other.  So he sets himself to work to be a man of feeling and a humorist at the same time.  His encounter with the leper is so freshly and simply told, there is such an air of genuineness about it, that it seems at first sight not merely harsh, but unappreciative, to compare it to Sterne’s account of his proceedings with his monks and donkeys, his imaginary prisoners, and his fictitious ensigns.  Yet there is a real contact between them.  Both have the chief note of Sensibility, the taking an emotion as a thing to be savoured and degusted deliberately ­to be dealt with on scientific principles and strictly according to the rules of the game.  One result of this proceeding, when pursued for a considerable time, is unavoidably a certain amount of frivolity, especially in dealing with emotions directly affecting the player.  Sympathy such as that displayed with the leper may be strong and genuine, because there is no danger about it; there is the suave mari magno preservative from the risk of a too deep emotion.  But in matters which directly affect the interest of the individual it does not do to be too serious.  The tear of Sensibility must not be dropped in a manner giving real pain to the dropper.  Hence the humoristic attitude.  When Xavier de Maistre informs us that “lé grand art de l’homme de genie est de savoir bien élever sa bête,” he means a great deal more than he supposes himself to mean.  The great art of an easy-going person, who believes it to be his duty to be “sensible,” is to arrange for a series of emotions which can be taken gently.

The author of the Voyage takes his without any extravagance.  He takes good care not to burn his fingers metaphorically in this matter, though he tells us that in a fit of absence he did so literally.  His affection for Madame de Hautcastel is certainly not a very passionate kind of affection, for all his elaborately counted and described heartbeats as he is dusting her portrait.  Indeed, with his usual candour, he leaves us in no doubt about the matter.  “La froide raison,” he says, “reprit bientôt son empire.”  Of course it did; the intelligent, and in the other sense sensible, person who wishes to preserve his repose must take care of that.  We do not even believe that he really dropped a tear of repentance on his left shoe when he had unreasonably rated his servant; it is out of keeping with his own part.  He borrowed that tear, either ironically or by oversight, from Sterne, just as he did “Ma chère Jenny.”  He is much more in his element when he proves that a lover is to his mistress, when she is about to go to a ball, only a “decimal of a lover,” a kind of amatory tailor or ninth part of man; or when, in the Expedition, he meditates on a lady’s slipper in the balcony fathoms below his garret.

All this illustrates what may be called the attempt to get rid of Sensibility by the humorist gate of escape.  Supposing no such attempt consciously to exist, it is, at any rate, the sign of an approaching downfall of Sensibility, of a feeling, on the part of those who have to do with it, that it is an edged tool, and an awkward one to handle.  In comparing Xavier de Maistre with his master Sterne, it is very noticeable that while the one in disposition is thoroughly insincere, and the other thoroughly sincere, yet the insincere man is a true believer in Sensibility, and the sincere one evidently a semi-heretic.  How far Sterne consciously simulated his droppings of warm tears, and how far he really meant them, may be a matter of dispute.  But he was quite sincere in believing that they were very creditable things, and very admirable ones.  Xavier de Maistre does not seem by any means so well convinced of this.  He is, at times, not merely evidently pretending and making believe, but laughing at himself for pretending and making believe.  He still thinks Sensibility a gratissimus error, a very pretty game for persons of refinement to play at, and he plays at it with a great deal of industry and with a most exquisite skill.  But the spirit of Voltaire, who himself did his sensibilité (in real life, if not in literature) as sincerely as Sterne, has affected Xavier de Maistre “with a difference.”  The Savoyard gentleman is entirely and unexceptionably orthodox in religion; it may be doubted whether a severe inquisition in matters of Sensibility would let him off scatheless.  It is not merely that he jests ­as, for instance, that when he is imagining the scene at the Rape of the Sabines, he suddenly fancies that he hears a cry of despair from one of the visitors.  “Dieux immortels!  Pourquoi n’ai-je amène ma femme a la fête?” That is quite proper and allowable.  It is the general tone of levity in the most sentimental moments, the undercurrent of mockery at his own feelings in this man of feeling, which is so shocking to Sensibility, and yet it was precisely this that was inevitable.

Sensibility, to carry it out properly, required, like other elaborate games, a very peculiar and elaborate arrangement of conditions.  The parties must be in earnest so far as not to have the slightest suspicion that they were making themselves ridiculous, and yet not in earnest enough to make themselves really miserable.  They must have plenty of time to spare, and not be distracted by business, serious study, political excitement, or other disturbing causes.  On the other hand, to get too much absorbed, and arrive at Werther’s end, was destructive not only to the individual player, but to the spirit of the game.  As the century grew older, and this danger of absorption grew stronger, that game became more and more difficult to play seriously enough, and yet not too seriously.  When the players did not blow their brains out, they often fell into the mere libertinism from which Sensibility, properly so called, is separated by a clear enough line.  Two such examples in real life as Rousseau and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, one such demonstration of the same moral in fiction as Werther, were enough to discourage the man of feeling.  Therefore, when he still exists, he takes to motley, the only wear for the human race in troublesome circumstances which beset it with unpleasant recurrence.  When you cannot exactly believe anything in religion, in politics, in literature, in art, and yet neither wish nor know how to do without it, the safe way is to make a not too grotesque joke of it.  This is a text on which a long sermon might be hung were it worth while.  But as it is, it is sufficient to point out that Xavier de Maistre is an extremely remarkable illustration of the fact in the particular region of sentimental fiction.

Benjamin Constant’s masterpiece, which (the sequel to it never having appeared, though it was in existence in manuscript less than a century ago) is also his only purely literary work, is a very small book, but it calls here for something more than a very small mention.  The books which make an end are almost fewer in literature than those which make a beginning, and this is one of them.  Like most such books, it made a beginning also, showing the way to Beyle, and through Beyle to all the analytic school of the nineteenth century.  Space would not here suffice to discuss the singular character of its author, to whom Sainte-Beuve certainly did some injustice, as the letters to Madame Recamier show, but whose political and personal experiences as certainly call for a large allowance of charity.  The theory of Adolphe’s best editor, M. de Lescure (which also was the accepted theory long before M. de Lescure’s time), that the heroine of the novel was Madame de Stael, will not, I think, hold water.  In every characteristic, personal and mental, Ellenore and Madame de Stael are at opposite poles.  Ellenore was beautiful, Madame de Stael was very nearly hideous; Ellenore was careless of her social position, Corinne was as great a slave to society as any one who ever lived; Ellenore was somewhat uncultivated, had little esprit, was indifferent to flattery, took not much upon herself in any way except in exacting affection where no affection existed; the good Corinne was one of the cleverest women of her time, and thought herself one of the cleverest of all times, could not endure that any one in company should be of a different opinion on this point, and insisted on general admiration and homage.

However, this is a very minor matter, and anybody is at liberty to regard the differences as deliberate attempts to disguise the truth.  What is important is that Madame de Stael was almost the last genuine devotee of Sensibility, and that Adolphe was certainly written by a lover of Madame de Stael, who had, from his youth up, been a Man of Feeling of a singularly unfeeling kind.  When Constant wrote the book he had run through the whole gamut of Sensibility.  He had been instructed as a youth by ancient women of letters; he had married and got rid of his wife a la mode Germanorum; he had frequently taken a hint from Werther, and threatened suicide with the best possible results; he had given, perhaps, the most atrocious example of the atrocious want of taste which accompanied the decadence of Sensibility, by marrying Charlotte von Hardenburg out of pique, because Madame de Stael would not marry him, then going to live with his bride near Coppet, and finally deserting her, newly married as she was, for her very uncomely but intellectually interesting rival.  In short, according to the theory of a certain ethical school, that the philosopher who discusses virtue should be thoroughly conversant with vice, Benjamin Constant was a past master in Sensibility.  It was at a late period in his career, and when he had only one trial to go through (the trial of, as it seems to me, a sincere and hopeless affection for Madame Recamier), that he wrote Adolphe.  But the book has nothing whatever to do with 1815, the date which it bears.  It is, as has been said, the history of the Nemesis of Sensibility, the prose commentary by anticipation on Mr. Swinburne’s admirable “Stage Love” ­

    Time was chorus, gave them cues to laugh and cry,     They would kill, befool, amuse him, let him die;     Set him webs to weave to-day and break to-morrow,     Till he died for good in play and rose in sorrow.

That is a history, in one stanza, of Sensibility, and no better account than Adolphe exists of the rising in sorrow.

The story of the book opens in full eighteenth century.  A young man, fresh from the University of Goettingen, goes to finish his education at the residenz of D .  Here he finds much society, courtly and other.  His chief resort is the house of a certain Count de P ­, who lives, unmarried, with a Polish lady named Ellenore.  In the easy-going days of Sensibility the ménage holds a certain place in society, though it is looked upon a little askance.  But Ellenore is, on her own theory, thoroughly respectable, and the Count de P ­, though in danger of his fortune, is a man of position and rank.  As for Adolphe, he is the result of the struggle between Sensibility, an unquiet and ironic nature, and the teaching of a father who, though not unquiet, is more ironically given than himself.  His main character is all that a young man’s should be from the point of view of Sensibility.  “Je ne demandais alors qu’à me livrer a ces impressions primitives et fougueuses,” etc.  But his father snubs the primitive and fiery impressions, and the son, feeling that they are a mistake, is only more determined to experience them.  Alternately expanding himself as Sensibility demands, and making ironic jests as his own nature and his father’s teaching suggest, he acquires the character of “un homme immoral, un homme peu sur,” the last of which expressions may be paralleled from the British repertory by “an ill-regulated young man,” or “a young man on whom you can never depend.”

All this time Adolphe is not in love, and as the dominant teaching of Sensibility lays it down that he ought to be, he feels that he is wrong.  “‘Je veux être aime,’ me dis-je, et je regardai autour de moi.  Je ne voyais personne qui m’inspirait de l’amour; personne qui me parut susceptible d’en prendre.”  In parallel case the ordinary man would resign himself as easily as if he were in face of the two conditions of having no appetite and no dinner ready.  But this will not do for the pupil of Sensibility.  He must make what he does not find, and so Adolphe pitches on the luckless Ellenore, who “me parut une conquête digne de moi.”  To do Sensibility justice, it would not, at an earlier time, have used language so crude as this, but it had come to it now.  Here is the portrait of the victim, drawn by her ten years younger lover.

Ellenore’s wits were not above the ordinary, but her thoughts were just, and her expression, simple as it was, was sometimes striking by reason of the nobility and elevation of the thought.  She was full of prejudices, but she was always prejudiced against her own interest.  There was nothing she set more value on than regularity of conduct, precisely because her own conduct was conventionally irregular. She was very religious, because religion rigidly condemned her mode of life.  In conversation she frowned on pleasantries which would have seemed quite innocent to other women, because she feared that her circumstances might encourage the use of such as were not innocent.  She would have liked to admit to her society none but men of the highest rank and most irreproachable reputation, because those women with whom she shuddered at the thought of being classed usually tolerate mixed society, and, giving up the hope of respect, seek only amusement.  In short, Ellenore and her destiny were at daggers drawn; every word, every action of hers was a kind of protest against her social position.  And as she felt that facts were too strong for her, and that the situation could be changed by no efforts of hers, she was exceedingly miserable....  The struggle between her feelings and her circumstances had affected her temper.  She was often silent and dreamy:  sometimes, however, she spoke with impetuosity.  Beset as she was by a constant preoccupation, she was never quite calm in the midst of the most miscellaneous conversation, and for this very reason her manner had an unrest and an air of surprise about it which made her more piquant than she was by nature.  Her strange position, in short, took the place of new and original ideas in her.

The difference of note from the earlier eighteenth century will strike everybody here.  If we are still some way from Emma Bovary, it is only in point of language:  we are poles asunder from Marianne.  But the hero is still, in his own belief, acting under the influence of Sensibility.  He is not in the least impassioned, he is not a mere libertine, but he has a “besoin d’amour.”  He wants a “conquête.”  He is still actuated by the odd mixture of vanity, convention, sensuality, which goes by the name of our subject.  But his love is a “dessin de lui plaire”; he has taken an “engagement envers son amour propre.”  In other words, he is playing the game from the lower point of view ­the mere point of view of winning.  It does not take him very long to win.  Ellenore at first behaves unexceptionably, refuses to receive him after his first declaration, and retires to the country.  But she returns, and the exemplary Adolphe has recourse to the threat which, if his creator’s biographers may be believed, Constant himself was very fond of employing in similar cases, and which the great popularity of Werther made terrible to the compassionate and foolish feminine mind.  He will kill himself.  She hesitates, and very soon she does not hesitate any longer.  The reader feels that Adolphe is quite worthless, that nothing but the fact of his having been brought up in a time when Sensibility was dominant saves him.  But the following passage, from the point of view alike of nature and of expression, again pacifies the critic:

I passed several hours at her feet, declaring myself the happiest of men, lavishing on her assurances of eternal affection, devotion, and respect.  She told me what she had suffered in trying to keep me at a distance, how often she had hoped that I should detect her notwithstanding her efforts, how at every sound that fell on her ears she had hoped for my arrival; what trouble, joy, and fear she had felt on seeing me again; how she had distrusted herself, and how, to unite prudence and inclination, she had sought once more the distractions of society and the crowds which she formerly avoided.  I made her repeat the smallest details, and this history of a few weeks seemed to us the history of a whole life.  Love makes up, as it were by magic, for the absence of far-reaching memory.  All other affections have need of the past:  love, as by enchantment, makes its own past and throws it round us.  It gives us the feeling of having lived for years with one who yesterday was all but a stranger.  Itself a mere point of light, it dominates and illuminates all time.  A little while and it was not:  a little while and it will be no more:  but, as long as it exists, its light is reflected alike on the past and on the future.

This calm, he goes on to say, lasted but a short time; and, indeed, no one who has read the book so far is likely to suppose that it did.  Adolphe has entered into the liaison to play the game, Ellenore (unluckily for herself) to be loved.  The difference soon brings discord.  In the earlier Sensibility days men and women were nearly on equal terms.  It was only in the most strictly metaphorical way that the unhappy lover was bound to expire, and his beloved rarely took the method of wringing his bosom recommended by Goldsmith, when anybody else of proper Sensibility was there to console her.  But the game had become unequal between the Charlottes and the Werthers, the Adolphes and the Ellenores.  The Count de P ­ naturally perceives the state of affairs before long, and as naturally does not like it.  Adolphe, having played his game and won it, does not care to go on playing for love merely.  “Ellenore était sans doute un vif plaisir dans mon existence, maïs elle n’etait pas plus un but ­elle était devenue un lien.”  But Ellenore does not see this accurate distinction.  After many vicissitudes and a few scenes ("Nous vecumes ainsi quatre mois dans des rapports forces, quelque fois doux, jamais complètement libres, y rencontrant encore du plaisir maïs n’y trouvant plus de charme”) a crisis comes.  The Count forbids Ellenore to receive Adolphe any more:  and she thereupon breaks the ten years old union, and leaves her children and home.

Her young lover receives this riveting of his chains with consternation, but he does his best.  He defends her in public, he fights with a man who speaks lightly of her, but this is not what she wants.

Of course I ought to have consoled her.  I ought to have pressed her to my heart and said, “Let us live for each other; let us forget the misjudgments of men; let us be happy in our mutual regard and our mutual love.”  I tried to do so, but what can a resolution made out of duty do to revive a sentiment that is extinct?  Ellenore and I each concealed something from the other.  She dared not tell me her troubles, arising from a sacrifice which she knew I had not asked of her.  I had accepted that sacrifice; I dared not complain of ills which I had foreseen, and which I had not had courage enough to forestall.  We were therefore silent on the very subject which occupied us both incessantly.  We were prodigal of caresses, we babbled of love, but when we spoke of it we spoke for fear of speaking of something else.

Here is the full Nemesis of the sentiment that, to use Constant’s own words, is “neither passion nor duty,” and has the strength of neither, when it finds itself in presence of a stronger than itself.  There were none of these unpleasant meetings in Sensibility proper.  There sentiment met sentiment, and “exchanged itself,” in Chamfort’s famous phrase.  When the rate of exchange became unsatisfactory it sought some other customer ­a facile and agreeable process, which was quite consistent in practice with all the sighs and flames.  Adolphe is not to be quit so easily of his conquest.  He is recalled by his father, and his correspondence with Ellenore is described in one of the astonishingly true passages which make the book so remarkable.

During my absence I wrote regularly to Ellenore.  I was divided between the desire of not hurting her feelings and the desire of truthfully representing my own.  I should have liked her to guess what I felt, but to guess it without being hurt by it.  I felt a certain satisfaction when I had substituted the words “affection,” “friendship,” “devotion,” for the word “love.”  Then suddenly I saw poor Ellenore sitting sad and solitary, with nothing but my letters for consolation:  and at the end of two cold and artificial pages I added in a hurry a few phrases of ardour or of tenderness suited to deceive her afresh.  In this way, never saying enough to satisfy her, I always said enough to mislead her, a species of double-dealing the very success of which was against my wishes and prolonged my misery.

This situation, however, does not last.  Unable to bear his absence, and half puzzled, half pained by his letters, Ellenore follows him, and his father for the first time expresses displeasure at this compromising step.  Ellenore being threatened with police measures, Adolphe is once more perforce thrown on her side, and elopes with her to neutral territory.  Then events march quickly.  Her father’s Polish property, long confiscated, is restored to him and left to her.  She takes Adolphe (still struggling between his obligations to her and his desire to be free) to Warsaw, rejects an offer of semi-reconciliation from the Count de P ­, grows fonder and more exacting the more weary of her yoke her lover becomes; and at last, discovering his real sentiments from a correspondence of his with an artful old diplomatic friend of his father’s, falls desperately ill and dies in his arms.  A prologue and epilogue, which hint that Adolphe, far from taking his place in the world (from which he had thought his liaison debarred him), wandered about in aimless remorse, might perhaps be cut away with advantage, though they are defensible, not merely on the old theory of political justice, but on sound critical grounds.

This was the end of sensibility in more senses than one.  It is true that, five years later than Adolphe, appeared Madame de Duras’s agreeable novelettes of Ourika and Edouard, in which something of the old tone revives.  But they were written late in their author’s life, and avowedly as a reminiscence of a past state of sentiment and of society.  “Le ton de cette société,” says Madame de Duras herself, “était l’engouement.”  As happy a sentence, perhaps, as can be anywhere found to describe what has been much written about, and, perhaps it may be said without presumption, much miswritten about. Engouement itself is a nearly untranslatable word. It may be clumsily but not inaccurately defined as a state of fanciful interest in persons and things which is rather more serious than mere caprice, and a good deal less serious than genuine enthusiasm.  The word expresses exactly the attitude of French polite society in the eighteenth century to a vast number of subjects, and, what is more, it helps to explain the sensibilité which dominated that society.  The two terms mutually involve each other, and sensibilité stands to mere flirtation on the one hand, and genuine passion on the other, exactly as engouement does to caprice and enthusiasm.  People flirted admirably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the art was, I fancy, recovered in the nineteenth with some success, but I do not think they flirted, properly speaking, in the eighteenth. Sensibility (and its companion “sensuality”) prevented that.  Yet, on the other hand, they did not, till the society itself and its sentiments with it were breaking up, indulge in anything that can be called real passion.  Sensibility prevented that also.  The kind of love-making which was popular may be compared without much fancifulness to the favourite card-game of the period, quadrille.  You changed partners pretty often, and the stakes were not very serious; but the rules of the game were elaborate and precise, and it did not admit of being treated with levity.

Only a small part, though the most original and not the least remarkable part, of the representation of this curious phenomenon in literature has been attempted in this discussion.  The English and German developments of it are interesting and famous, and, merely as literature, contain perhaps better work than the French, but they are not so original, and they are out of our province.  Marivaux served directly as model to both English and German novelists, though the peculiarity of the national temperament quickly made itself felt in both cases.  In England the great and healthy genius of Fielding applied the humour cure to Sensibility at a very early period; in Germany the literature of Sensibility rapidly became the literature of suicide ­a consummation than which nothing could be more alien from the original conception.  It is true that there is a good deal of dying in the works of Madame de la Fayette and her imitators.  But it is quite transparent stage-dying, and the virtuous Prince of Cleves and the penitent Adelaide in the Comte de Comminge do not disturb the mind at all.  We know that, as soon as the curtain has dropped, they will get up again and go home to supper quite comfortably.  It is otherwise with Werther and Adolphe.  With all the first-named young man’s extravagance, four generations have known perfectly well that there is something besides absurdity in him, while in Adolphe there is no extravagance at all.  The wind of Sensibility had been sown, in literature and in life, for many a long year, and the whirlwind had begun to be reaped.

This, however, is the moral side of the matter, with which we have not much to do.  As a division of literature these sentimental novels, artificial as they are, have a good deal of interest; and in a History such as the present they have very great importance.  They are so entirely different in atmosphere from the work of later times, that reading them has all the refreshing effect of a visit to a strange country; and yet one feels that they themselves have opened that country for coming writers as well as readers.  They are often extraordinarily ingenious, and the books to which in form they set the example, though the power of the writers made them something very different in matter ­Julie, La Religieuse, Paul et Virginie, Corinne, René ­give their progenitors not a little importance, or at least not a little interest of curiosity.  Besides, it was in the school of Sensibility that the author of Manon Lescaut somehow or other developed that wonderful little book.  I do not know that it would be prudent to recommend modern readers to study Sensibility for themselves in the original documents just surveyed.  Disappointment and possibly malédictions would probably be the result of any such attempt, except in the case of Xavier de Maistre and Constant.  But these others are just the cases in which the office of historical critic justifies itself.  It is often said (and nobody knows the truth of it better than critics themselves) that a diligent perusal of all the studies and causeries that have ever been written, on any one of the really great writers, will not give as much knowledge of them as half an hour’s reading of their own work.  But then in that case the metal is virgin, and to be had on the surface and for the picking up.  The case is different where tons of ore have to be crushed and smelted, in order to produce a few pennyweights of metal.

Whatever fault may be found with the “Sensibility” novel, it is, as a rule, “written by gentlemen [and ladies] for [ladies and] gentlemen.”  Of the work of two curious writers, who may furnish the last detailed notices of this volume, as much cannot, unfortunately, be said.

It may, from different points of view, surprise different classes of readers to find Restif de la Bretonne (or as some would call him, Retif) mentioned here at all ­at any rate to find him taken seriously, and not entirely without a certain respect.  One of these classes, consisting of those who know nothing about him save at second-hand, may ground their surprise on the notion that his work is not only matter for the Index Expurgatorius, but also vulgar and unliterary, such as a French Ned Ward, without even Ned’s gutter-wit, might have written.  And these might derive some support from the stock ticket-jingle Rousseau du ruisseau, which, though not without some real pertinency, is directly misleading.  Another class, consisting of some at least, if not most, of those who have read him to some extent, may urge that Decency ­taking her revenge for the axiom of the boatswain in Mr. Midshipman Easy ­forbids Duty to let him in.  And yet others, less under the control of any Mrs. Grundy, literary or moral, may ask why he is let in, and Choderlos de Laclos and Louvet de Courray, with some more, kept out, as they most assuredly will be.

In the first place, there is no vulgarity in Restif.  If he had had a more regular education and society, literary or other, and could have kept his mind, which was to a certainty slightly unhinged, off the continual obsession of morbid subjects, he might have been a very considerable man of letters, and he is no mean one, so far as style goes, as it is.  He avails himself duly of the obscurity of a learned language when he has to use (which is regrettably often) words that do not appear in the dictionary of the Academy:  and there is not the slightest evidence of his having taken to pornography for money, as Louvet and Laclos ­as, one must regretfully add, Diderot, if not even Crebillon ­certainly did.  When a certain subject, or group of subjects, gets hold of a man ­especially one of those whom a rather celebrated French lady called les cerebraux ­he can think of nothing else:  and though this is not absolutely true of Restif (for he had several minor crazes), it is very nearly true of him, and perhaps more true than of any one else who can be called a man of letters.

Probably no one has read all he wrote; even the late M. Assezat, who knew more about him than anybody else, does not, I think, pretend to have done so.  He was himself a printer, and therefore found exceptional means of getting the mischief, which his by no means idle hands found to do, into publicity of a kind, though even their subject does not seem to have made his books popular. His largest work, Les Contemporaines, is in forty-two volumes, and contains some three hundred different sections, reminding one vaguely, though the differences in detail are very great, of Amory’s plan, at least, for the Memoirs of Several Ladies.  His most remarkable by far, the quasi-autobiographical Monsieur Nicolas, in fourteen.  He could write with positive moral purpose, as in the protest against Le Paysan Parvenu, above referred to; in La Vie de Mon Pere (a book agreeably free from any variety of that sin of Ham which some biographical writings of sons about their fathers display); and in the unpleasantly titled Pornographe, which is also morally intended, and dull enough to be as moral as Mrs. Trimmer or Dr. Forsyth.

Indeed, this moral intention, so often idly and offensively put forward by those who are themselves mere pornographers, pervades Restif throughout, and, while it certainly sometimes does carry dulness with it, undoubtedly contributes at others a kind of piquancy, because of its evident sincerity, and the quaint contrast with the subjects the author is handling.  These subjects make explicit dealing with himself difficult, if not impossible:  but his differentia as regards them may, with the aid of a little dexterity, be put without offence.  In the first place, as regards the comparison with Rousseau, Restif is almost a gentleman:  and he could not possibly have been guilty of Rousseau’s blackguard tale-telling in the cases of Madame de Warens (or, as I believe, we are now told to spell it “Vuarrens”) or Madame de Larnage.  The way in which he speaks of his one idealised mistress, Madame “Parangon,” is almost romantic.  He is, indeed, savage in respect to his wife ­whom he seems to have married in a sort of clairvoyant mixture of knowledge of her evil nature and fascination by her personal charms and allurements, though he had had no difficulty in enjoying these without marriage.  But into none other of his scores and hundreds of actual loves in some cases and at least passing intimacies in others, does he ever appear to have taken either the Restoration and Regency tone on the one hand, or that of “sickly sentimentality” on the other.  Against commerce for money he lifts up his testimony unceasingly; he has, as his one editor has put it, a manie de paternité, and denounces any vice disconnected with it.  With the privileges of Solomon or Haroun al Raschid, Restif would have been perfectly contented:  and he never would have availed himself of that of Schahriar before the two divine sisters put a stop to it.

All this, however, strictly speaking, is outside our present subject, and is merely intended as a sort of excuse for the introduction of a writer who has been unfairly ostracised, not as a passport for Restif to the young person.  But his actual qualities as tale-teller are very remarkable.  The second title of Monsieur Nicolas ­Le Coeur Humain Dévoile ­ambitious as it is, is not fatuous.  It is a human heart in a singularly morbid condition which is unveiled:  but as, if I remember rightly, either Goethe or Schiller, or both, saw and said near the time, there is no charlatanery about the unveiling, and no bungling about the autopsy.  Restif has been compared, and not unfairly, to Defoe, as well as to Rousseau; in a certain way he may be likened to Pepys; and all four share an intense and unaffected reality, combined, however, in the Frenchman’s case with a sort of exaggeration of a dreamy kind, and with other dream-character, which reminds one of Borrow, and even of De Quincey.  His absolute shamelessness is less unconnected with this dream-quality than may at first appear, and, as in all such cases, is made much less offensive by it.  Could he ever have taken holiday from his day-long and night-long devotion to

        Cotytto or Venus     Astarte or Ashtoreth,

he might have been a most remarkable novelist, and as it is his mere narrative faculty is such as by no means every novelist possesses.  Moreover, he counts, once more, in the advance towards real things in fiction.  “A pretty kind of reality!” cries Mrs. Grundy.  But the real is not always the pretty, and the pretty is not always the real.

There is also a good deal that is curious, as well as many things that are disgusting, for the student of the novel in Pigault-Lebrun. In the first place, one is constantly reminded of that redeeming point which the benevolent Joe Gargery found in Mr. Pumblechook ­

    And, wotsume’er the failings on his part,     He were a corn-and-seedsman in his hart.

If Pigault cannot exactly be said to have been a good novelist, he “were” a novelist “in his hart.”  Beside his polissonneries, his frequent dulness, his singular gropings and failures at anything like good novelist faire, one constantly finds what might be pedantically and barbarously called a “novelistic velleity.”  His much too ambitiously titled Melanges Littéraires turn to stories, though stories touched with the polisson brush.  His Nouvelles testify at least to his ambition and his industry in the craft of fiction.  “Je ne suis pas Voltaire,” he says somewhere, in reference, I think, to his plays, not his tales.  He most certainly is not; neither is he Marmontel, as far as the tale is concerned.  But as for the longer novel, in a blind and blundering way, constantly trapped and hindered by his want of genius and his want of taste, by his literary ill-breeding and other faults, he seems to have more of a “glimmering” of the real business than they have, or than any other Frenchman had before him.

Pigault-Lebrun spent nearly half of his long life in the nineteenth century, and did not die till Scott was dead in England, and the great series of novel-romances had begun, with Hugo and others, in France.  But he was a man of nearly fifty in 1800, and the character of his work, except in one all-important point, or group of points, is thoroughly of the eighteenth, while even the excepted characteristics are of a more really transitional kind than anything in Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, whom we have postponed, as well as in Constant and Xavier de Maistre, whom we have admitted.  He has no high reputation in literature, and, except from our own special point of view, he does not deserve even a demi-reputation.  Although he is not deliberately pornographic, he is exceedingly coarse, with a great deal of the nastiness which is not even naughty, but nastiness pure and simple.  There is, in fact, and in more ways than one, something in him of an extremely inferior Smollett.  Comparing him with his elder contemporary, Restif de la Bretonne, he is vulgar, which Restif never is.  Passing to more purely literary matters, it would be difficult, from the side of literature as an art ­I do not say as a craft ­to say anything for him whatever.  His style is, I should suppose (for I think no foreigner has any business to do more than “suppose” in that matter), simply wretched; he has sentences as long as Milton’s or Clarendon’s or Mr. Ruskin’s, not merely without the grandeur of the first, the beauty of the last, and the weighty sense of the second, but lacking any flash of graceful, pithy, or witty phrase; character of the model-theatre and cut-out paper kind; a mere accumulation of incidents instead of a plot; hardly an attempt at dialogue, and, where description is attempted at all, utter ineffectiveness or sheer rhyparography.

It is a fair riposte to the last paragraph to ask, “Then why do you drag him in here at all?” But the counter-parry is easy.  The excepted points above supply it.  With all his faults ­admitting, too, that every generation since his time has supplied some, and most much better, examples of his kind ­the fact remains that he was the first considerable representative, in his own country, of that variety of professional novelist who can spin yarns, of the sort that his audience or public wants, with unwearied industry, in great volume, and of a quality which, such as it is, does not vary very much.  He is, in short, the first notable French novelist-tradesman ­the first who gives us notice that novel-production is established as a business.  There is even a little more than this to be said for him.  He has really made considerable progress, if we compare him with his predecessors and contemporaries, in the direction of the novel of ordinary life, as that life was in his own day.  There are extravagances of course, but they are scarcely flagrant.  His atmosphere is what the cooks, housemaids, footmen, what the grocers and small- or middle-class persons who, I suppose, chiefly read him, were, or would have liked to be, accustomed to.  His scene is not a paradise in either the common or the Greek sense; it is a sort of cabbage-garden, with a cabbage-garden’s lack of beauty, of exquisiteness in any form, with its presence of untidiness, and sometimes of evil odour, but with its own usefulness, and with a cultivator of the most sedulous.  Pigault-Lebrun, for France, may be said to be the first author-in-chief of the circulating library.  It may not be a position of exceeding honour; but it is certainly one which gives him a place in the story of the novel, and which justifies not merely these general remarks on him, but some analysis (not too abundant) of his particular works.  As for translating him, a Frenchman might as well spend his time in translating the English newspaper feuilletons of “family” papers in the earlier and middle nineteenth century.  Indeed that Minnigrey, which I remember reading as a boy, and which long afterwards my friend, the late Mr. Henley, used to extol as one of the masterpieces of literature, is worth all Pigault put together and a great deal more.

The worst of it is, that to be amused by him ­to be, except as a student, even interested in a large part of his work ­you must be almost as ill-bred in literature as he himself is.  He is like a person who has had before him no models for imitation or avoidance in behaviour:  and this is where his successor, Paul de Kock, by the mere fact of being his successor, had a great advantage over him.  But to the student he is interesting, and the interest has nothing factitious in it, and nothing to be ashamed of.  There is something almost pathetic in his struggles to master his art:  and his frequent remonstrances with critics and readers appear to show a genuine consciousness of his state, which is not always the case with such things.

The book which stands first in his Works, L’Enfant du Carnaval, starts with an ultra-Smollettian passage of coarseness, and relapses now and then.  The body of it ­occupied with the history of a base-born child, who tumbles into the good graces of a Milord and his little daughter, is named by them “Happy,” and becomes first the girl’s lover and then her husband ­is a heap of extravagances, which, nevertheless, bring the picaresque pattern, from which they are in part evidently traced, to a point, not of course anywhere approaching in genius Don Quixote or Gil Blas, but somehow or other a good deal nearer general modern life. Les Barons de Felsheim, which succeeds it, seems to have taken its origin from a suggestion of the opening of Candide, and continues with a still wilder series of adventures, satirising German ways, but to some extent perhaps inspired by German literature.  Very commonly Pigault falls into a sort of burlesque melodramatic style, with frequent interludes of horse-play, resembling that of the ineffably dreary persons who knock each others’ hats off on the music-hall stage.  There is even something dreamlike about him, though of a very low order of dream; he has at any rate the dream-habit of constantly attempting something and finding that he cannot bring it off.

At the close of one of his most extravagant, most indecent, and stupidest novels, La Folie Espagnole ­a supposed tale of chivalry, which of course shows utter ignorance of time, place, and circumstance, and is, in fact, only a sort of travestied Gil Blas, with a rank infusion of further vulgarised Voltairianism ­the author has a rather curious note to the reader, whom he imagines (with considerable probability) to be throwing the book away with a suggested cry of “Quelles misères! quel fatras!” He had, he says, previously offered Angelique et Jeanneton, a little work of a very different kind, and the public would neither buy nor read it.  His publisher complained, and he must try to please.  As for La Folie, everybody, including his cook, can understand this.  One remembers similar expostulations from more respectable authors; but it is quite certain that Pigault-Lebrun ­a Lebrun so different from his contemporary “Pindare” of that name ­thoroughly meant what he said.  He was drawing a bow, always at a venture, with no higher aim than to hit his public, and he did hit it oftener than he missed.  So much the worse, perhaps, both for him and for his public; but the fact is a fact, and it is in the observation and correlation of facts that history consists.

Angelique et Jeanneton itself, as might be expected from the above reference, is, among its author’s works, something like Le Rêve among Zola’s; it is his endeavour to be strictly proper.  But, as it is also one of his most Sternian exercises, the propriety is chequered.  It begins in sufficiently startling fashion; a single gentleman of easy fortune and amiable disposition, putting his latchkey in the door of his chambers one night, is touched and accosted by an interesting young person with an “argentine” voice.  This may look louche; but the silvery accents appeal only for relief of needs, which, as it shortly appears, are those most properly to be supplied by a maternity hospital.  It is to be understood that the suppliant is an entire stranger to the hero.  He behaves in the most amiable and, indeed, noble fashion, instals her in his rooms, turns himself and his servant out to the nearest hotel, fetches the proper ministress, and, not content with this Good Samaritanism, effects a legitimate union between Jeanneton and her lover, half gives and half procures them a comfortable maintenance, resists temptation of repayment (not in coin) on more than one occasion, and sets out, on foot, to Caudebec, to see about a heritage which has come to Jeanneton’s husband.  On the way he falls in with Angelique (a lady this time), falls also in love with her, and marries her.  The later part of the story, as is rather the way with Pigault, becomes more “accidented.”  There are violent scenes, jealousies, not surprising, between the two heroines, etc.  But the motto-title of Marmontel’s Heureusement governs all, and the end is peace, though not without some spots in its sun.  That the public of 1799 did not like the book and did like La Folie Espagnole is not surprising; but the bearing of this double attempt on the growth of novel-writing as a regular craft is important.

Perhaps on the whole Mon Oncle Thomas, which seems to have been one of the most popular, is also one of the most representative, if not the best, of Pigault-Lebrun’s novels.  Its opening, and not its opening only, is indeed full of that mere nastiness which we, with Smollett and others to our discredit, cannot disclaim for our own parallel period, and which was much worse among the French, who have a choice selection of epithets for it.  But the fortunes of the youthful Thomas ­child of a prostitute of the lowest class, though a very good mother, who afterwards marries a miserly and ruffianly corporal of police ­are told with a good deal of spirit ­one even thinks of Colonel Jack ­and the author shows his curious vulgar common sense, and his knowledge of human nature of a certain kind, pretty frequently, at least in the earlier part of the book.

Jerome is another of Pigault’s favourite studies of boys ­distinctly blackguard boys as a rule ­from their mischievous, or, as the early English eighteenth century would have put it, “unlucky” childhood, to their most undeserved reward with a good and pretty wife (whom one sincerely pities), and more or less of a fortune.  There is, however, more vigour in Jerome than in most, and, if one has the knack of “combing out” the silly and stale Voltairianism, and paying little attention to the far from exciting sculduddery, the book may be read.  It contains, in particular, one of the most finished of its author’s sketches, of a type which he really did something to introduce into his country’s literature ­that of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic routier or professional soldier ­brave as you like, and ­at least at some times when neither drunk nor under the influence of the garden god ­not ungenerous; with a certain simplicity too:  but as braggart as he is brave; a mere brute beast as regards the other sex; utterly ignorant, save of military matters, and in fact a kind of caricature of the older type, which the innocent Rymer was so wrath with Shakespeare for neglecting in Iago.

It may seem that too much space is being given to a reprobate and often dull author; but something has been said already to rebut the complaint, and something more may be added now and again.  French literature, from the death of Chenier to the appearance of Lamartine, has generally been held to contain hardly more than two names ­those of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael ­which can even “seem to be” those of “pillars”; and it may appear fantastic and almost insulting to mention one, who in long stretches of his work might almost be called a mere muckheap-raker, in company with them.  Yet, in respect to the progress of his own department, it may be doubted whether he is not even more than their equal. René and Corinne contain great suggestions, but they are suggestions rather for literature generally than for the novel proper.  Pigault used the improperest materials; he lacked not merely taste, but that humour which sometimes excuses taste’s absence; power of creating real character, decency almost always, sense very often. But all the same, he made the novel march, as it had not marched, save in isolated instances of genius, before.

Yet Pigault could hardly have deserved even the very modified praise which has been given to him, if he had been constant to the muckheap.  He could never quite help approaching it now and then; but as time went on and the Empire substituted a sort of modified decency for the Feasts of Republican Reason and ribaldry, he tried things less uncomely. Adelaide de Meran (his longest single book), Tableaux de Societe, L’Officieux, and others, are of this class; and without presenting a single masterpiece in their own kind, they all, more or less, give evidence of that advance in the kind generally with which their author has been credited. Adelaide is very strongly reminiscent of Richardson, and more than reminiscent of “Sensibility”; it is written in letters ­though all by and to the same persons, except a few extracts ­and there is no individuality of character.  Pigault, it has been said, never has any, though he has some of type.  But by exercising the most violent constraint upon himself, he indulges only in one rape (though there have been narrow escapes before), in not more than two or three questionable incidents, and in practically no “improper” details ­conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and self-denial.  Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad and rickety one; the indefinable naturaleza is present in it after a strange fashion.  There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named Tableaux de Societe ­the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de Francheville, who, somewhat originally for a French heroine, starts by being in the most frantic state of mutual passion with her husband, though this is soon to be succeeded by an infatuation (for some time virtuously resisted) on her side for a handsome young naval officer, and by several others (not at all virtuously resisted) for divers ladies on the husband’s.  With his usual unskilfulness in managing character, Pigault makes very little of the opportunities given by his heroine’s almost unconscious transference of her affections to Sainte-Luce; while he turns the uxorious husband, not out of jealousy merely, into a faithless one, and something like a general ruffian, after a very clumsy and “unconvincing” fashion.  As for his throwing in, at the end, another fatal passion on part of their daughter for her mother’s lover, it is, though managed with what is for the author, perfect cleanliness, entirely robbed of its always doubtful effect by the actual marriage of Fanchette and her sailor, and that immediately after the poor girl’s death.  If he had had the pluck to make this break off the whole thing, the book might have been a striking novel, as it is actually an attempt at one; but Pigault, like his friends of the gallery, was almost inviolably constant to happy endings. L’Officieux, if he had only had a little humour, might have been as good comically as the Tableaux might have been tragically; for it is the history, sometimes not ill-sketched as far as action goes, of a parvenu rich, but brave and extremely well-intentioned marquis, who is perpetually getting into fearful scrapes from his incorrigible habit of meddling with other people’s affairs to do them good.  The situations ­as where the marquis, having, through an extravagance of officiousness, got himself put under arrest by his commanding officer, and at the same time insulted by a comrade, insists on fighting the necessary duel in his own drawing-room, and thereby reconciling duty and honour, to the great terror of a lady with whom he has been having a tender interview in the adjoining apartment ­are sometimes good farce, and almost good comedy; but Pigault, like Shadwell, has neither the pen nor the wits to make the most of them.

La Famille Luceval ­something of an expanded and considerably Pigaultified story a la Marmontel ­is duller than any of these, and the opening is marred by an exaggerated study of a classical mania on the part of the hero; but still the novel quality is not quite absent from it.

Of the rest, M.  Botte, which seems to have been a favourite, is a rather conventional extravaganza with a rich, testy, but occasionally generous uncle; a nephew who falls in love with the charming but penniless daughter of an emigre; a noble rustic, who manages to keep some of his exiled landlord’s property together, etc. M. de Roberval, though in its original issue not so long as Adelaide de Meran, becomes longer by a suite of another full volume, and is a rather tedious chronicle of ups and downs.  There may be silence about the remainder.

The stock and, as it may be called, “semi-official” ticket for Pigault-Lebrun in such French literary history as takes notice of him, appears to be verve:  and the recognised dictionary-sense of verve is “heat of imagination, which animates the artist in his composition.”  In the higher sense in which the word imagination is used with us, it could never be applied here; but he certainly has a good deal of “go,” which is perhaps not wholly improper as a colloquial Anglicising of the label.  These semi-official descriptions, which have always pleased the Latin races, are of more authority in France than in England, though as long as we go on calling Chaucer “the father of English poetry” and Wyclif “the father of English prose” we need not boast ourselves too much.  But Pigault has this “go” ­never perhaps for a whole book, but sometimes for passages of considerable length, which possess “carrying” power.  It undoubtedly gave him his original popularity, and we need not despise it now, inasmuch as it makes less tedious the task of ascertaining and justifying his true place in the further “domestication” ­if only in domesticities too often mean and grimy ­of the French novel.

There are more reasons than the convenience of furnishing a separately published first volume with an interim conclusion, for making, at the close of this, a few remarks on the general state of the French novel at the end of the eighteenth century.  No thoroughly similar point is reached in the literary history of France, or of any country known to me, in regard to a particular department of literature.  In England ­the only place, which can, in this same department, be even considered in comparison, although at this very time two novelists, vastly superior to any of whom France has to boast, were just writing, or just about to write, and were a little later to revolutionise the novel itself ­the general state and history of the kind had, for nearly two generations, reached a stage far beyond anything that France could claim.  She had made earlier “running”; on the whole period of some seven hundred years she had always, till very recently, been in front.  But in the novel, as distinguished from the romance, she had absolutely nothing to show like our great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century, and hardly anything to match the later developments of Miss Burney and others in domestic, of Mrs. Radcliffe and others still in revived romantic fiction.  Very great Frenchmen or French writers had written novels; but, with the exceptions of Lesage in Gil Blas, Prevost in that everlastingly wonderful “single-speech” of his, and Rousseau in La Nouvelle Heloise, none had written a great novel.  No single writer of any greatness had been a novelist pure and simple.  No species of fiction, except the short tale, in which, through varying forms, France held an age-long mastery, had been thoroughly developed in her literature.

The main point, where England went right and France went wrong ­to be only in the most equivocal way corrected by such a writer as Pigault-Lebrun ­was the recognition of the connection ­the intimate and all but necessary connection ­of the completed novel with ordinary life.  Look over the long history of fiction which we have surveyed in the last three or four or five chapters.  There is much and sometimes great literary talent; sometimes, again, even genius; there are episodes of reality; there are most artful adjustments of type and convention and the like, of fashion in morals (or immorals) and sentiments.  But a real objective novel of ordinary life, such as Tom Jones, or even Humphry Clinker, nay, such inferior approaches to it as exist elsewhere in English, you will not find.  Of the Scudery romances we need not speak again; for all their key-references to persons, and their abstention from the supernatural, etc., they are, as wholes, hardly more real than Amadis and its family themselves.  Scarron has some and Furetiere more objectivity that may be argued for, but the Spanish picaresque has become a convention, and they, especially Scarron, are aiming more at the pattern than at the life-model.  Madame de la Fayette has much, and some of her followers a little, real passion; but her manners, descriptions, etc., are all conventional, though of another kind.  The fairy tales are of course not “real.”  Marivaux is aiming directly at Sensibility, preciousness, “psychology,” if you like, but not at holding up the glass to any ordinary nature as such. And though Crebillon might plead that his convention was actually the convention of hundreds and almost thousands of accomplished ladies and gentlemen, no one can deny that it was almost as much a convention as the historical or legendary acting of the Comedie Humaine by living persons a hundred years later at Venice.

No writer perhaps illustrates what is being said better than Prevost.  No one of his books, voluminous as they are, has the very slightest reality, except Manon Lescaut; and that, like La Princesse de Cleves, though with much more intensity and fortunately with no alloy of convention whatever, is simply a study of passion, not of life at large at all.  With the greater men the case alters to some extent in proportion to their greatness, but, again with one exception, not to such an extent as to affect the general rule.  Voltaire avowedly never attempts ordinary representation of ordinary life ­save as the merest by-work, it is all “purpose,” satire, fancy.  Rousseau may not, in one sense, go beyond that life in Julie, but in touching it he is almost as limited and exclusive as Prevost in his masterpiece.  Diderot has to get hold of the abnormal, if not the unreal, before he can give you something like a true novel.  Marmontel is half-fanciful, and though he does touch reality, subordinates it constantly to half-allegorical and wholly moral purpose.  All the minor “Sensibility” folk follow their leaders, and so do all the minor conteurs.

The people (believed to be a numerous folk) who are uncomfortable with a fact unless some explanation of it is given, may be humoured here.  The failure of a very literary nation ­applying the most disciplined literary language in Europe to a department, in the earlier stages of which they had led Europe itself ­to get out of the trammels which we had easily discarded, is almost demonstrably connected with the very nature of their own literary character.  Until the most recent years, if not up to the very present day, few Frenchmen have ever been happy without a type, a “kind,” a set of type-and kind-rules, a classification and specification, as it were, which has to be filled up and worked over.  Of all this the novel had nothing in ancient times, while in modern it had only been wrestling and struggling towards something of the sort, and had only in one country discovered, and not quite consciously there, that the beauty of the novel lies in having no type, no kind, no rules, no limitations, no general precept or motto for the craftsman except “Here is the whole of human life before you.  Copy it, or, better, recreate it ­with variation and decoration ad libitum ­as faithfully, but as freely, as you can.”  Of this great fact even Fielding, the creator of the modern novel, was perhaps not wholly aware as a matter of theory, though he made no error about it in practice.  Indeed the “comic prose epic” notion might reduce to rules like those of the verse.  Both Scott and Miss Austen abstained likewise from formalising it.  But every really great novel has illustrated it; and attempts, such as have been recently made, to contest it and draw up a novelists’ code, have certainly not yet justified themselves according to the Covenant of Works, and have at least not disposed some of us to welcome them as a Covenant of Faith.  It is because Pigault-Lebrun, though a low kind of creature from every point of view, except that of mere craftsmanship, did, like his betters, recognise the fact in practice, that he has been allowed here a place of greater consideration than perhaps has ever fallen to his lot before in literary history.

Still, even putting out of sight the new developments which had shown the irrepressible vitality of the French conte, the seven hundred years had not been wasted.  The product of the first half of them remained, indeed, at this time sealed up in the “gazophile” of the older age, or was popularised only by well-meaning misinterpreters like the Comte de Tressan; but the treasure-house was very soon to be broken open and utilised.  It is open to any one to contend ­it is, indeed, pretty much the opinion of the present writer ­that it was this very neglect which had made the progress of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries themselves so slow and so imperfect in its total results.  For those who like to look for literary causes outside literature, there may be other explanations.  But any intelligent reader can do something for himself if he has the facts before him.  It is these facts that it has been and will be our business to give and to summarise here.

They have been given; let us attempt to summarise them in the briefest possible way.  France possibly did not invent Romance; no man or men could do that; it was a sort of deferred heritage which Humankind, like the Heir of Lynne, discovered when it was ready to hang itself (speaking in terms of literature) during the Dark Ages.  But she certainly grew the seed for all other countries, and dispersed the growth to the ends of the earth.  Very much the same was the case with the short tale in the “Middle” period.  From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth (both included) she entered upon a curious kind of wilderness, studded with oases of a more curious character still.  In one of them Rabelais was born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding ­more fortunate than the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen ­was born Pantagruelism.  In another came Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it was consummate.  None of these happy sojourns produced a Don Quixote or a Tom Jones, but divers smaller things resulted.  And again and again, as had happened in the Middle Ages themselves, but on a smaller scale, what France did found development and improvement in other lands; while her own miniature masterpieces, from the best of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the Heptameron, through all others that we noticed down to Adolphe, showed the enormous power which was working half blindly.  How the strength got eyes, and the eyes found the right objects to fix upon, must be left, if fortune favour, for the next volume to tell.