Chapter 25

THE _PHILOSOPHE_ NOVEL

[Sidenote: The use of the novel for "purpose"--Voltaire.]

It has been for some time a commonplace--though, like most commonplaces, it is probably much more often simply borrowed than an actual and (even in the sense of _communis_) original perception of the borrowers--that nothing shows the comparative inevitableness of the novel in the eighteenth century better than the use of it by persons who would, at other times, have used quite different forms to subserve similar purposes. The chief instance of this with us is, of course, Johnson in _Rasselas_, but it is much more variously and voluminously, if not in any single instance much better, illustrated in France by the three great leaders of the _philosophe_ movement; by considerable, if second-rate figures, more or less connected with that movement, like Marmontel and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; and by many lesser writers.

There can be no question that, in more ways than one, Voltaire[351] deserves the first place in this chapter, not only by age, by volume, and by variety of general literary ability, but because he, perhaps more than any of the others, is a tale-teller born. That he owes a good deal to Hamilton, and something directly to Hamilton's master, Saint-Evremond, has been granted elsewhere; but that he is dependent on these models to such an extent as to make his actual production unlikely if the models had not been ready for him, may be roundly denied. There are in literature some things which must have existed, and of which it is not frivolous to say that if their actual authors had not been there, or had declined to write them, they would have found somebody else to do it. Of these, _Candide_ is evidently one, and more than one of _Candide's_ smaller companions have at least something of the same characteristic. Yet one may also say that if Voltaire himself had not written these, he must have written other things of the kind. The mordant wit, the easy, fluent, rippling style, so entirely free from boisterousness yet with constant "wap" of wavelet and bursting of foam-bubble; above all, the pure unadulterated faculty of tale-telling, must have found vent and play somehow. It had been well if the playfulness had not been, as playfulness too often is, of what contemporary English called an "unlucky" (that is, a "mischievous") kind; and if the author had not been constantly longing to make somebody or many bodies uncomfortable,[352] to damage and defile shrines, to exhibit a misanthropy more really misanthropic, because less passionate and tragical, than Swift's, and, in fact, as his patron, persecutor, and counterpart, Frederick the Jonathan-Wildly Great, most justly observed of him, to "play monkey-tricks," albeit monkey-tricks of immense talent, if not actually of genius. If the recent attempts to interpret monkey-speech were to come to something, and if, as a consequence, monkeys were taught to write, one may be sure that prose fiction would be their favourite department, and that their productions would be, though almost certainly disreputable, quite certainly amusing. In fact there would probably be some among these which would be claimed, by critics of a certain type, as hitherto unknown works of Voltaire himself.

Yet if the straightforward tale had not, owing to the influences discussed in the foregoing chapters, acquired a firm hold, it is at least possible that he would not have adopted it (for originality of form was not Voltaire's _forte_), but would have taken the dialogue, or something else capable of serving his purpose. As it was, the particular field or garden had already been marked out and hedged after a fashion; tools and methods of cultivation had been prepared; and he set to work to cultivate it with the application and intelligence recommended in the famous moral of his most famous tale--a moral which, it is only fair to say, he did carry out almost invariably. A garden of very questionable plants was his, it may be; but that is another matter. The fact and the success of the cultivation are both undeniable.

[Sidenote: General characteristics of his tales.]

At the same time, Voltaire--if indeed, as was doubted just now, he be a genius at all--is not a genius, or even a djinn, of the kind that creates and leaves something Melchisedec-like; alone and isolated from what comes before and what comes after. He is an immense talent--perhaps the greatest talent-but-not-genius ever known--who utilises and improves and develops rather than invents. It is from this that his faculty of never boring, except when he has got upon the Scriptures, comes; it is because of this also that he never conceives anything really, simply, absolutely _great_. His land is never exactly weary, but there is no imposing and sheltering and refreshing rock in it. These _romans_ and _contes_ and _nouvelles_ of his stimulate, but they do not either rest or refresh. They have what is, to some persons at any rate, the theatrical quality, not the poetical or best-prosaic. But as nearly consummate works of art, or at least craft, they stand almost alone.

He had seen[353] the effect of which the fairy tale of the sophisticated kind was capable, and the attraction which it had for both vulgars, the great and the small: and he made the most of it. He kept and heightened its _haut gout_; he discarded the limitations to a very partial and conventional society which Crebillon put on it; but he limited it in other ways to commonplace and rather vulgar fancy, without the touches of imagination which Hamilton had imparted. Yet he infused an even more accurate appreciation of certain phases of human nature than those predecessors or partial contemporaries of his who were discussed in the last chapter had introduced; he _practicalised_ it to the _n_th, and he made it almost invariably subordinate to a direct, though a sometimes more or less ignoble, purpose. There is no doubt that he had learnt a great deal from Lucian and from Lucian's French imitators, perhaps as far back as Bonaventure des Periers; there is, I think, little that he had added as much as he could add from Swift.[354] His stolen or borrowed possessions from these sources, and especially this last, remind one in essence rather of the pilferings of a "light horseman," or river-pirate who has hung round an "old three-decker," like that celebrated in Mr. Kipling's admirable poem, and has caught something even of the light from "her tall poop-lanterns shining so far above him," besides picking up overboard trifles, and cutting loose boats and cables. But when he gets to shore and to his own workshop, his almost unequalled power of sheer wit, and his general craftsmanship, bring out of these lootings something admirable in its own way.

[Sidenote: _Candide._]

_Candide_ is almost "great," and though the breed of Dr. Pangloss in its original kind is nearly extinct, the England which suffered the approach, and has scarcely yet allowed itself to comprehend the reality, of the war of 1914, ought to know that there have been and are Pangloss_otins_ of almost appalling variety. The book does not really require the smatches of sculduddery, which he has smeared over it, to be amusing; for its lifelikeness carries it through. As is well known, Johnson admitted the parallel with _Rasselas_, which is among the most extraordinary coincidences of literature. I have often wondered whether anybody ever took the trouble to print the two together. There would be many advantages in doing so; but they might perhaps be counter-balanced by the fact that some of the most fervent admirers of _Rasselas_ would be infinitely shocked by _Candide_, and that perhaps more of the special lovers of _Candide_ would find themselves bored to extinction by _Rasselas_. Let those who can not only value but enjoy both be thankful, but not proud.

Many people have written about the Consolations of Old Age, not seldom, it is to be feared, in a "Who's afraid?" sort of spirit. But there are a few, an apple or two by the banks of Ulai, which we may pluck as the night approaches. One is almost necessarily accidental, for it would be rash and somewhat cold-blooded to plan it. It consists in the reading, after many years, of a book once familiar almost to the point of knowing by heart, and then laid aside, not from weariness or disgust, but merely as things happened. This, as in some other books mentioned in this history, was the case with the present writer in respect of _Candide_. From twenty to forty, or thereabouts, I must have read it over and over again; the sentences drop into their places almost without exercising any effort of memory to recognise them. From forty to seventy I do not think I read it at all; because no reason made reading necessary, and chance left it untouched on the shelf. Sometimes, as everybody knows, the result of renewed acquaintance in such cases is more or less severe disappointment; in a few of the happiest, increased pleasure. But it is perhaps the severest test of a classic (in the exact but limited sense of that word) that its effect shall be practically unchanged, shall have been established in the mind and taste with such a combination of solidity and _nettete_, that no change is possible. I do not think I have ever found this to be more the case than with the history of Candide (who was such a good fellow, without being in the least a prig, as I am afraid Zadig was, that one wonders how Voltaire came to think of him) and of Mademoiselle Cunegonde (nobody will ever know anything about style who does not feel what the continual repetition in Candide's mouth of the "Mademoiselle" does) of the indomitable Pangloss, and the detestable baron, and the forgivable Paquette, and that philosopher Martin, who did _not_ "let cheerfulness break in," and the admirable Cacambo, who shows that, much as he hated Rousseau, Voltaire himself was not proof against the noble savage mania.[355]

As a piece (_v. sup._) of art or craft, the thing is beyond praise or pay. It could not be improved, on its own specification, except that perhaps the author might have told us how Mademoiselle Cunegonde, who had kept her beauty through some very severe experiences, suddenly lost it. It is idle as literary, though not as historical, criticism to say, as has been often said about the Byng passage, that Voltaire's smartness rather "goes off through the touch-hole," seeing that the admiral's execution did very considerably "encourage the others." It is superfluous to urge the unnecessary "smuts," which are sometimes not in the least amusing. All these and other sought-for knots are lost in the admirable smoothness of this reed, which waves in the winds of time with unwitherable greenness, and slips through the hand, as you stroke it, with a coaxing tickle. To praise its detail would again be idle--nobody ought to read such praise who can read itself; and if anybody, having read its first page, fails to see that it is, and how it is, praiseworthy, he never will or would be converted if all the eulogies of the most golden-mouthed critics of the world were poured upon him in a steady shower. As a whole it is undoubtedly the best, and (except part of _Zadig_) it is nowhere else matched in the book of the romances of Voltaire, while for those who demand "purposes" and "morals," it stands almost alone. It is the comic "Vanity of Human Wishes" in prose, as _Rasselas_ is the tragic or, at least, serious version: and, as has been said, the two make an unsurpassable sandwich, or, at least, _tartine_. Nor could it have been told, in any other way than by prose fiction, with anything like the same effect, either as regards critical judgment or popular acceptance.

[Sidenote: _Zadig_ and its satellites.]

_Zadig_, as has been indicated already, probably ranks in point of merit next to _Candide_. If it had stopped about half-way, there could be no doubt about the matter. The reader is caught at once by one of the most famous and one of the most Voltairian of phrases, "Il savait de la metaphysique ce qu'on a su dans tous les ages, c'est-a-dire fort peu de chose," a little more discussion of which saying, and of others like it, may perhaps be given later. The successive disappointments of the almost too perfect[356] hero are given with the simplicity just edged with irony which is Voltaire's when he is at his best, though he undoubtedly learnt it from the masters already assigned, and--the suggestion would have made him very angry, and would probably have attracted one of his most Yahoo-like descents on this humble and devoted head--from Lesage. But though the said head has no objection--much the reverse--to "happy endings," the romance-finish of _Zadig_ has always seemed to it a mistake. Still, how many mistakes would one pardon if they came after such a success? _Babouc_, the first of those miniature _contes_ (they are hardly "tales" in one sense), which Voltaire managed so admirably, has the part-advantage part-disadvantage of being likewise the first of a series of satires on French society, which, piquant as they are, would certainly have been both more piquant and more weighty if there had been fewer of them. It is full of the perfect, if not great, Voltairian phrases,--the involuntary _Mene Tekel_, "Babouc conclut qu'une telle societe ne pouvait subsister"; the palinode after a fashion, "Il s'affectionnait a la ville, dont le peuple etait doux [oh! Nemesis!] poli et bien-faisant, quoique leger, medisant et plein de vanite"; and the characteristic collection of parallel between Babouc and Jonah, surely not objectionable even to the most orthodox, "Mais quand on a ete trois jours dans le corps d'une baleine on n'est pas de si bonne humeur que quand on a ete a l'opera, a la comedie et qu'on a soupe en bonne compagnie."

[Sidenote: _Micromegas._]

_Memnon, ou La Sagesse Humaine_ is still less of a tale, only a lively sarcastic apologue; but he would be a strange person who would quarrel with its half-dozen pages, and much the same may be said of the _Voyages de Scarmentado_. Still, one feels in both of them, and in many of the others, that they are after all not much more than chips of an inferior rehandling of _Gulliver_. _Micromegas_, as has been said, does not disguise its composition as something of the kind; but the desire to annoy Fontenelle, while complimenting him after a fashion as the "dwarf of Saturn," and perhaps other strokes of personal scratching, have put Voltaire on his mettle. You will not easily find a better Voltairism of its particular class than, "Il faut bien citer ce qu'on ne comprend point du tout, dans la langue qu'on entend le moins." But, as so often happens, the cracker in the tail is here the principal point. Micromegas, the native of Sirius, who may be Voltaire himself, or anybody else--after his joint tour through the universes (much more amusing than that of the late Mr. Bailey's Festus), with the smaller but still gigantic Saturnian--writes a philosophical treatise to instruct us poor microbes of the earth, and it is taken to Paris, to the secretary of the Academy of Science (Fontenelle himself). "Quand le secretaire l'eut ouvert il ne vit rien qu'un livre tout blanc. 'Ah!' dit-il, 'je m'en etais bien doute.'" Voltaire did a great deal of harm in the world, and perhaps no solid good;[357] but it is things like this which make one feel that it would have been, a loss had there been no Voltaire.

[Sidenote: _L'Ingenu._]

_L'Ingenu_, which follows _Candide_ in the regular editions, falls perhaps as a whole below all these, and _L'Homme aux Quarante Ecus_, which follows it, hardly concerns us at all, being mere political economy of a sort in dialogue. _L'Ingenu_ is a story, and has many amusing things in it. But it is open to the poser that if Voltaire really accepted the noble savage business he was rather silly, and that if he did not, the piece is a stale and not very biting satire. It is, moreover, somewhat exceptionally full (there is only one to beat it) of the vulgar little sniggers which suggest the eunuch even more than the schoolboy, and the conclusion is abominable. The seducer and, indirectly, murderer Saint-Pouange may only have done after his kind in regard to Mlle. de Saint-Yves; but the Ingenu himself neither acted up to his Huron education, nor to his extraction as a French gentleman, in forgiving the man and taking service under him.

[Sidenote: _La Princesse de Babylone._]

_La Princesse de Babylone_ is more like Hamilton than almost any other of the tales, and this, it need hardly be said here, is high praise, even for a work of Voltaire. For it means that it has what we commonly find in that work, and also something that we do not. But it has that defect which has been noticed already in _Zadig_, and which, by its absence, constitutes the supremacy of _Candide_. There is in it a sort of "break in the middle." The earlier stages of the courtship of Formosante are quite interesting; but when she and her lover begin separately to wander over the world, in order that their chronicler may make satiric observations on the nations thereof, one feels inclined to say, as Mr. Mowbray Morris said to Mr. Matthew Arnold (who thought it was Mr. Traill):

Can't you give us something new?

[Sidenote: Some minors.]

_Le Blanc et le Noir_ rises yet again, and though it has perhaps not many of Voltaire's _mots de flamme_, it is more of a fairy moral tale--neither a merely fantastic mow, nor sicklied over with its morality--than almost any other. It is noteworthy, too, that the author has hardly any recourse to his usual clove of garlic to give seasoning. _Jeannot et Colin_ might have been Marmontel's or Miss Edgeworth's, being merely the usual story of two rustic lads, one of whom becomes rich and corrupt till, later, he is succoured by the other. Now Marmontel and Miss Edgeworth are excellent persons and writers; but their work is not work for Voltaire.

The _Lettres d'Amabed_[358] are the dirtiest and the dullest of the whole batch, and the _Histoire de Jenni_, though not particularly dirty, is very dull indeed, being the "History of a Good Deist," a thing without which (as Mr. Carlyle used to say) we could do. The same sort of "purpose" mars _Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield_, in which, after the first page, there is practically nothing about Lord Chesterfield or his deafness, but which contains a good deal of Voltaire's crispest writing, especially the definition of that English freedom which he sometimes used to extol. With thirty guineas a year,[359] the materialist doctor Sidrac informs the unfortunate Goudman, who has lost a living by the said deafness, "on peut dire tout ce qu'on pense de la compagnie des Indes, du parlement, de nos colonies, du roi, de l'etat en general, de l'homme et de Dieu--ce qui est un grand amusement." But the piece itself would be more amusing if Voltaire could let the Bible alone, though he does not here come under the stroke of Diderot's sledge-hammer as he does in _Amabed_.

One seldom, however, echoes this last wish, and remembers the stroke referred to, more than in reference to _Le Taureau Blanc_. Here, if there were nobody who reverenced the volume which begins with _Genesis_ and ends with _Revelation_, the whole thing would be utterly dead and stupid: except for a few crispnesses of the Egyptian Mambres, which could, almost without a single exception, have been uttered on any other theme. The identification of Nebuchadnezzar with the bull Apis is not precisely an effort of genius; but the assembling, and putting through their paces, of Balaam's ass and Jonah's whale, the serpent of Eden, and the raven of the Ark, with the three prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and with an historical King Amasis and an unhistorical Princess Amaside thrown in, is less a _conte a dormir debout_, as Voltaire's countrymen and he himself would say, than a tale to make a man sleep when he is running at full speed--a very dried poppy-head of the garden of tales. On the other hand, the very short and very early _Le Crocheteur Borgne_, which, curiously enough, Voltaire never printed, and the not much longer _Cosi-Sancta_, which he printed in his queer ostrich-like manner, are, though a little naughty, quite nice; and have a freshness and demure grace about their naughtiness which contrasts remarkably with the ugly and wearisome snigger of later work.

[Sidenote: Voltaire--the Kehl edition--and Plato.]

The half-dozen others,[360] filling scarce twenty pages between them, which conclude the usual collection, need little comment; but a "Kehl" note to the first of them is for considerable thoughts:

M. de Voltaire s'est egaye quelquefois sur Platon, dont le galimatias, regarde autrefois comme sublime, a fait plus de mal au genre humain qu'on ne le croit communement.

One should not hurry over this, but muse a little. In copying the note, I felt almost inclined to write "_M. de_ Platon" in order to put the whole thing in a consistent key; for somehow "Plato" by itself, even in the French form, transports one into such a very different world that adjustment of clocks and compasses becomes at once necessary and difficult. "Galimatias" is good, "autrefois" is possibly better, the "evils inflicted on the human race" better still, but _egaye_ perhaps best of all. The monkey, we know, makes itself gay with the elephant, and probably would do so with the lion and the tiger if these animals had not an unpleasant way of dealing with jokers. And the tomtit and canary have, no doubt, at least private agreement that the utterances of the nightingale are _galimatias_, while the carrion crow thinks the eagle a fool for dwelling so high and flying so much higher. But as for the other side of the matter, how thin and poor and puerile even those smartest things of Voltaire's, some of which have been quoted and praised, sound, if one attempts to read them after the last sentence of the _Apology_, or after passage on passage of the rest of the "galimatias" of Plato!

Nevertheless, though you may answer a fool according to his folly, you should not, especially when he is not a fool absolute, judge him solely thereby. When Voltaire was making himself gay with Plato, with the Bible, and with some other things, he was talking, not merely of something which he did not completely understand, but of something altogether outside the range of his comprehension. But in the judgment of literature the process of "cancelling" does not exist. A quality is not destroyed or neutralised by a defect, and, properly speaking (though it is hard for the critic to observe this), to strike a balance between the two is impossible. It is right to enter the non-values; but the values remain and require chief attention.

[Sidenote: An attempt at different evaluation of himself.]

From what has been already said, it will be clear that there is no disposition here to give Voltaire anything short of the fullest credit, both as an individual writer of prose fiction and as a link in the chain of its French producers. He worked for the most part in miniature, and even _Candide_ runs but to its bare hundred pages. But these are of the first quality in their own way, and give the book the same position for the century, in satiric and comic fiction, which _Manon Lescaut_ holds in that of passion. That both should have taken this form, while, earlier, _Manon_, if written at all, would probably have been a poem, and _Candide_ would have been a treatise, shows on the one side the importance of the position which the novel had assumed, and on the other the immense advantages which it gave, as a kind, to the artist in literature. I like poetry better than anything, but though the subject could have been, and often has been, treated satirically in verse, a verse _narrative_ could hardly have avoided inferiority, while even Berkeley (who himself borrowed a little of novel-form for _Alciphron_) could not have made _Candide_ more effective than it is. It is of course true that Voltaire's powers as a "fictionist" were probably limited in fact, to the departments, or the department, which he actually occupied, and out of which he wisely did not go. He must have a satiric purpose, and he must be allowed a very free choice of subject and seasoning. In particular, it may be noted that he has no grasp whatever of individual character. Even Candide is but a "humour," and Pangloss a very decided one; as are Martin, Gordon in _L'Ingenu_, and others. His women are all slightly varied outline-sketches of what he thought women in general were, not persons. Plot he never attempted; and racy as his dialogue often is, it is on the whole merely a setting for these very sparkles of wit some of which have been quoted.

It is in these scintillations, after all, that the chief delight of his tales consists; and though, as has been honestly confessed and shown, he learnt this to some extent from others, he made the thing definitely his own. When the Babylonian public has been slightly "elevated" by the refreshments distributed at the great tournament for the hand of the Princess Formosante, it decides that war, etc., is folly, and that the essence of human nature is to enjoy itself, "Cette excellente morale," says Voltaire gravely, "n'a jamais ete dementie" (the words really should be made to come at the foot of a page so that you might have to turn over before coming to the conclusion of the sentence) "que par les faits." Again, in the description of the Utopia of the Gangarides (same story), where not only men but beasts and birds are all perfectly wise, well conducted, and happy, a paragraph of quite sober description, without any flinging up of heels or thrusting of tongue in cheek, ends, "Nous avons surtout des perroquets qui prechent a merveille," and for once Voltaire exercises on himself the Swiftian control, which he too often neglected, and drops his beloved satire of clerics after this gentle touch at it.[361]

He is of course not constantly at his best; but he is so often enough to make him, as was said at the beginning, very delectable reading, especially for the second time and later, which will be admitted to be no common praise. When you read him for the first time his bad taste, his obsession with certain subjects, his repetition of the same gibes, and other things which have been duly mentioned, strike and may disgust--will certainly more or less displease anybody but a partisan on the same side. On a second or later reading you are prepared for them, and either skip them altogether or pass them by without special notice, repeating the enjoyment of what is better in an unalloyed fashion. And so doth the excellent old chestnut-myth, which probably most of us have heard told with all innocence as an original witticism, justify itself, and one should "prefer the second hour" of the reading to the first. But if there is a first there will almost certainly be a second, and it will be a very great pity if there is no reading at all.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Rousseau--the novel-character of the _Confessions_.]

According to the estimate of the common or vulgate (I do not say "vulgar," though in the best English there is little or no difference) literary history, Rousseau[362] ranks far higher in the scale of novel-writing than Voltaire, having left long and ambitious books of the kind against Voltaire's handful of short, shorter, and shortest stories. It might be possible to accept this in one sense, but in one which would utterly disconcert the usual valuers. The _Confessions_, if it were not an autobiography, would be one of the great novels of the world. A large part of it is probably or certainly "fictionised"; if the whole were fictitious, it would lose much of its repulsiveness, retain (except for a few very matter-of-fact judges) all its interest, and gain the enormous advantage of art over mere _reportage_ of fact. Of course Rousseau's art of another kind, his mere mastery of style and presentation, does redeem this _reportage_ to some extent; but this would remain if the thing were wholly fiction, and the other art of invention, divination, _mimesis_--call it what you will--would come in. Yet it is not worth while to be idly unlike other people and claim it as an actual novel. It may be worth while to point out how it displays some of the great gifts of the novel-writer. The first of these--the greatest and, in fact, the mother of all the rest--is the sheer faculty, so often mentioned but not, alas! so invariably found, of telling the tale and holding the reader, not with any glittering eye or any enchantment, white or black, but with the pure grasping--or, as French admirably has it, "enfisting"--power of the tale itself. Round this there cluster--or, rather, in this necessarily abide--the subsidiary arts of managing the various parts of the story, of constructing characters sufficient to carry it on, of varnishing it with description, and to some extent, though naturally to a lesser one than if it had been fiction pure and simple, "lacing" it, in both senses of the word, with dialogue. Commonplace (but not the best commonplace) taste often cries "Oh! if this were only true!" The wiser mind is fain sometimes--not often, for things are not often good enough--to say, "Oh! if this were only _false_!"

[Sidenote: The ambiguous position of _Emile_.]

But if a severe auditor were to strike the _Confessions_ out of Rousseau's novel-account to the good, on the score of technical insufficiency or disqualification, he could hardly refuse to do the same with _Emile_ on the other side of the sheet. In fact its second title (_de l'Education_), its opening remarks, and the vastly larger part of the text, not only do not pretend to be a novel but frankly decline to be one. In what way exactly the treatise, from the mere assumption of a supposed "soaring human boy" named Emile, who serves as the victim of a few _Sandford-and-Merton_-like illustrations, burgeoned into the romance of actual novel-kind with Sophie in the Fifth Book, and the purely novel-natured, but unfinished and hardly begun, sequel of _Emile et Sophie ou Les Solitaires_, it is impossible to say. From the sketch of the intended conclusion of this latter given by Prevost[363] it would seem that we have not lost much, though with Rousseau the treatment is so constantly above the substance that one cannot tell. As it is, the novel part is nearly worthless. Neither Emile nor Sophie is made in the least a live person; the catastrophe of their at first ideal union might be shown, by an advocate of very moderate skill, to be largely if not wholly due to the meddlesome, muddle-headed, and almost inevitably mischievous advice given to them just after their marriage by their foolish Mentor; and one neither finds nor foresees any real novel interest whatever. Anilities in the very worst style of the eighteenth century--such as the story how Emile instigated mutiny in an Algerian slave-gang, failed, made a noble protest, and instead of being impaled, flayed, burnt alive, or otherwise taught not to do so, was made overseer of his own projects of reformed discipline--are sufficiently unrefreshing in fact. And the sort of "double arrangement" foreshadowed in the professorial programme of the unwritten part, where, in something like Davenant and Dryden's degradation of _The Tempest_, Emile and Sophie, she still refusing to be pardoned her fault, are brought together after all, and are married, in an actual though not consummated cross-bigamy, with a mysterious couple, also marooned on a desert island, is the sort of thing that Rousseau never could have managed, though Voltaire, probably to the discontent of Mrs. Grundy, could have done it in one way, and Sir William Gilbert would have done it delightfully in another. But Jean-Jacques's absolute lack of humour would have ensured a rather ghastly failure, relieved, it may be, by a few beautiful passages.

[Sidenote: _La Nouvelle Heloise._]

If, therefore, Rousseau had nothing but _Emile_, or even nothing but _Emile_ and the _Confessions_ to put to his credit, he could but obtain a position in our "utmost, last, provincial band," and that more because of his general literary powers than of special right. But, as everybody knows, there is a third book among his works which, whether universally or only by a majority, whether in whole or in part, whether with heavy deductions and allowances or with light ones, has been reckoned among the greatest and most epoch-making novels of the world. The full title of it is _Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise, ou Lettres de deux Amans, habitans d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, recueillies et publiees, par J. J. Rousseau_.[364] Despite its immense fame, direct and at second-hand--for Byron's famous outburst, though scarcely less rhetorical, is decidedly more poetical than most things of his, and has inscribed itself in the general memory--one rather doubts whether the book is as much read as it once was. Quotations, references, and those half-unconscious reminiscences of borrowing which are more eloquent than anything else, have not recently been very common either in English or in French. It has had the fate--elsewhere, I think, alluded to--of one of the two kinds of great literature, that it has in a manner seeded itself out. An intense love-novel--it is some time since we have seen one till the other day--would be a descendant of Rousseau's book, but would not bear more than a family likeness to it. Yet this, of itself, is a great testimony.

[Sidenote: Its numerous and grave faults.]

Except in rhetoric or rhapsody, the allowances and deductions above referred to must be heavy; and, according to a custom honoured both by time and good result, it is well to get them off first. That peculiarity of being a novelist only _par interim_, much more than Aramis was a mousquetaire, appears, even in _Julie_, so glaringly as to be dangerous and almost fatal. The book fills, in the ordinary one-volume editions, nearly five hundred pages of very small and very close print. Of these the First Part contains rather more than a hundred, and it would be infinitely better if the whole of the rest, except a few passages (which would be almost equally good as fragments), were in the bosom of the ocean buried. Large parts of them are mere discussions of some of Rousseau's own fads; clumsy parodies of Voltaire's satiric manners-painting; waterings out of the least good traits in the hero and heroine; uninteresting and superfluous appearances of the third and only other real person, Claire; a dreary account of Julie's married life; tedious eccentricities of the impossible and not very agreeable Lord Edward Bomston, who shares with Dickens's Lord Frederick Verisopht the peculiarity of being alternately a peer and a person with a courtesy "Lord"-ship; a rather silly end for the heroine herself;[365] and finally, a rather repulsive and quite incongruous acknowledgment of affection for the creature Saint-Preux, with a refusal to "implement" it (as they say in Scotland) matrimonially, by Claire, who is by this time a widow.[366] If mutilating books[367] were not a crime deserving terrible retribution in this life or after it, one could be excused for tearing off the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Parts, with the _Amours de Lord Edouard_ which follow. If one was rich, one would be amply justified in having a copy of Part I., and the fragments above indicated, printed for oneself on vellum.

[Sidenote: The minor characters.]

But this is not all. Even the First Part--even the presentation of the three protagonists--is open to some, and even to severe, criticism. The most guiltless, but necessarily much the least important, is Claire. She is, of course, an obvious "borrow" from Richardson's lively second heroines; but she is infinitely superior to them. It is at first sight, though not perhaps for long, curious--and it is certainly a very great compliment to Madame de Warens or Vuarrens and Madame d'Houdetot, and perhaps other objects of his affections--that Rousseau, cad as he was, and impossible as it was for him to draw a gentleman, could and did draw ladies. It was horribly bad taste in both Julie and Claire to love such a creature as Saint-Preux; but then _cela s'est vu_ from the time of the Lady of the Strachy downwards, if not from that of Princess Michal. But Claire is faithful and true as steel, and she is lively without being, as Charlotte Grandison certainly is, vulgar. She is very much more a really "reasonable woman," even putting passion aside, than the somewhat sermonising and syllogising Julie; and it would have been both agreeable and tormenting to be M. d'Orbe. (Tormenting because she only half-loved him, and agreeable because she did love him a little, and, whether it was little or much, allowed herself to be his.) He himself, slight and rather "put upon" as he is, is also much the most agreeable of the "second" male characters. Of Bomston and Wolmar we shall speak presently; and there is so little of the Baron d'Etange that one really does not know whether he was or was not something more than the tyrannical husband and father, and the ill-mannered specimen of the lesser nobility, that it pleased Saint-Preux or Rousseau to represent him as being. He had provocation enough, even in the case of his otherwise hardly pardonable insolence to Bomston.[368]

[Sidenote: The delinquencies of Saint-Preux.]

But Saint-Preux himself? How early was the obvious jest made that he is about as little of a _preux_ as he is of a saint? I have heard, or dreamt, of a schoolboy who, being accidentally somewhat precocious in French, and having read the book, ejaculated, "_What_ a sweep he is!" and I remember no time of my life at which I should not have heartily agreed with that youth. I do not suppose that either of us--though perhaps we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for not doing so--founded our condemnation on Saint-Preux's "forgetfulness of all but love." That is a "forfeit," in French and English sense alike, which has itself registered and settled in various tariffs and codes, none of which concerns the present history. It is not even that he is a most unreasonable creature now and then; that can be pardoned, being understood, though he really does strain the benefit of _amare et sapere_ etc. It is that, except when he is in the altitudes of passion, and not always then, he never "knows how to behave," as the simple and sufficient old phrase had it. If M. d'Etange had had the wits, and had deigned to do it, he might even, without knowing his deepest cause of quarrel with the treacherous tutor, have pointed out that Saint-Preux's claim to be one of God Almighty's gentlemen was as groundless as his "proofs," in the French technical sense of gentility, were non-existent. It is impossible to imagine anything in worse taste than his reply to the Baron's no doubt offensive letter, and Julie's enclosed renunciation. Even the adoring Julie herself, and the hardly less adoring Claire--the latter not in the least a prude, nor given to giving herself "airs"--are constantly obliged to pull him up for his want of _delicatesse_. He is evidently a coxcomb, still more evidently a prig; selfish beyond even that selfishness which is venial in a lover; not in the least, though he can exceed in wine, a "good fellow," and in many ways thoroughly unmanly. A good English school and college might have made him tolerable: but it is rather to be doubted, and it is certain that his way as a transgressor would have been hard at both. As it is, he is very largely the embodiment--and it is more charitable than uncharitable to regard him as largely the cause--of the faults of the worst kind of French, and not quite only French, novel-hero ever since.

[Sidenote: And the less charming points of Julie. Her redemption.]

One approaches Julie herself, in critical intent, with mixed feelings. One would rather say nothing but good of her, and there is plenty of good to say: how much will be seen in a moment. Most of what is not so good belongs, in fact, to the dreary bulk of sequel tacked on by mistaken judgment to that more than true history of a hundred pages, which leaves her in despair, and might well have left her altogether. Even here she is not faultless, quite independently of her sins according to Mrs. Grundy and the Pharisees. If she had not been, as Claire herself fondly but truly calls her, such a _precheresse_, she might not have fallen a victim to such a prig. One never can quite forgive her for loving him, except on the all-excusing ground that she loved him so much; and though she is perhaps not far beyond the licence of "All's fair, in certain conditions," there is no doubt that, like her part-pattern Clarissa, she is not passionately attached to the truth. It might be possible to add some cavils, but for the irresistible plea just glanced at, which stops one.

_Quia multum amavit!_ Nobody--at least no woman--had loved like that in a prose novel before; nobody at all except Des Grieux, and he is but as a sketch to an elaborate picture. She will wander after Pallas, and would like to think that she would like to be of the train of Dian (one shudders at imagining the scowl and the shrug and the twist of the skirt of the goddess!). But the kiss of Aphrodite has been on her, and has mastered her whole nature. How the thing could be done, out of poetry, has always been a marvel to me; but I have explained it by the supposition that the absolute impossibility of writing poetry at this time in French necessitated the break-out in prose. Rousseau's wonderful style--so impossible to analyse, but so irresistible--does much; the animating sense of his native scenery something. But, after all, what gives the thing its irresistibleness is the strange command he had of Passion and of Sorrow--two words, the first of which is actually, in the original sense, a synonym of the second, though it has been expanded to cover the very opposite.

[Sidenote: And the better side of the book generally.]

But it would be unfair to Rousseau, especially in such a place as this, to confine the praise of _Julie_ as a novel to its exhibition of passion, or even to the charm of Julie herself. Within its proper limits--which are, let it be repeated, almost if not quite exactly those of the First Part--many other gifts of the particular class of artist are shown. The dangerous letter-scheme, which lends itself so easily, and in the other parts surrenders itself so helplessly and hopelessly, to mere "piffle" about this and that, is kept well in hand. Much as Rousseau owes to Richardson, he has steered entirely clear of that system of word-for-word and incident-for-incident reporting which makes the Englishman's work so sickening to some. You have enough of each and no more, this happy mean affecting both dialogue and description. The plot (or rather the action) is constantly present, probably managed, always enlivened by the imminence of disastrous discovery. As has been already pointed out, one may dislike--or feel little interest in--some of the few characters; but it is impossible to say that they are out of drawing or keeping. Saint-Preux, objectionable and almost loathsome as he may be sometimes, is a thoroughly human creature, and is undoubtedly what Rousseau meant him to be, for the very simple reason that he is (like the Byronic hero who followed) what Rousseau wished to be, if not exactly what he was, himself. Bomston is more of a lay figure; but then the _Anglais philosophe de qualite_ of the French imagination in the eighteenth century was a lay figure, and, as has been excellently said by De Quincey in another matter, nothing can be wrong which conforms to the principles of its own ideal. As for Julie and Claire, they once more

Answer the ends of their being created.

Even the "talking-book" is here hardly excessive, and comes legitimately under the excuse of showing how the relations between the hero and heroine originally got themselves established.[369]

[Sidenote: But little probability of more good work in novel from its author.]

Are we, then, from the excellence of the "Confessions" _in pari materia_ and _in ipsa_ of _Julie_, to lament that Rousseau did not take to novel-writing as a special and serious occupation? Probably not. The extreme weakness and almost _fadeur_ of the strictly novel part of _Emile_, and the going-off of _Julie_ itself, are very open warnings; the mere absence of any other attempts worth mentioning[370] is evidence of a kind; and the character of all the rest of the work, and of all this part of the work but the opening of _Julie_, and even of that opening itself, counsel abstention, here as everywhere, from quarrelling with Providence. Rousseau's superhuman concentration on himself, while it has inspired the relevant parts of the _Confessions_ and of _Julie_, has spoilt a good deal else that we have, and would assuredly have spoilt other things that we have not. It has been observed, by all acute students of the novel, that the egotistic variety will not bear heavy crops of fruit by itself; and that it is incapable, or capable with very great difficulty, of letting the observed and so far altruistic kind grow from the same stool. Of what is sometimes called the dramatic faculty (though, in fact, it is only one side of that),--the faculty which in different guise and with different means the general novelist must also possess,--Rousseau had nothing. He could put himself in no other man's skin, being so absolutely wrapped up in his own, which was itself much too sensitive to be disturbed, much less shed. Anything or anybody that was (to use Mill's language) a permanent or even a temporary possibility of sensation to him was within his power; anything out of immediate or closely impending contact was not. Now some of the great novelists have the external power--or at least the will to use that power--alone, others have had both; but Rousseau had the internal only, and so was, except by miracle of intensive exercise, incapable of further range.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The different case of Diderot.]

Neither of the disabilities which weighed on Voltaire and Rousseau--the incapacity of the former to construct any complex character, and of the latter to portray any but his own, or some other brought into intensest communion, actually or as a matter of wish, with his own--weighed upon the third of the great trio of _philosophe_ leaders. There is every probability that Diderot might have been a very great novelist if he had lived a hundred years later; and not a little evidence that he only missed being such, even as it was, because of that mysterious curse which was epigrammatically expressed about him long ago (I really forget who said it first), "Good pages, no good book." So far from being self-centred or of limited interests, he could, as hardly any other man ever could, claim the hackneyed _Homo sum_, etc., as his rightful motto. He had, when he allowed himself to give it fair play, an admirable gift of tale-telling; he could create character, and set it to work, almost after the fashion of the very greatest novelists; his universal interest and "curiosity" included such vivid appreciation of literature, and of art, and of other things useful to the novel-writer, that he never could have been at a loss for various kinds of "seasoning." He had keen observation, an admittedly marvellous flow of ideas, and a style which (though, like everything else about him, careless) was of singular vigour and freshness when, once more, he let it have fair play. But his time, his nature, and his circumstances combined to throw in his way traps and snares and nets which he could not, or would not, avoid. His anti-religiosity, though sometimes greatly exaggerated, was a bad stumbling-block; although he was free from the snigger of Voltaire and of Sterne, you could not prevent him, as Horace Walpole complains of his distinguished sire, from blurting out the most improper remarks and stories at the most inconvenient times and in the most unsuitable companies; while his very multiscience, and his fertility of thought and imagination, kept him in a whirl which hindered his "settling" to anything. Although in one sense he had the finest and wisest critical taste of any man then living--I do not bar even Gray or even Lessing--his taste in some other ways was utterly untrustworthy and sometimes horribly bad; while even his strictly critical faculty seems never to have been exercised on his own books--a failure forming part of the "ostrich-like indifference" with which he produced and abandoned them.[371]

[Sidenote: His gifts and the waste of them.]

It is sometimes contended, and in many cases, no doubt, is the fact, that "Selections" are disgraceful and unscholarly. But what has been said will show that this is an exceptional case. The present writer waded through the whole of twenty-volume edition of Assezat and Tourneux when it first appeared, and is very glad he did; nor is there perhaps one volume (he does not say one page, chapter, or even work) which he has not revisited more or fewer times during the forty years in which (alas! for the preterite) they remained on his shelves. But it is scarcely to be expected that every one, that many, or that more than a very few readers, have done or will do the same. It so happens, however, that Genin's _Oeuvres Choisies_--though it has been abused by some anti-Ydgrunites as too much Bowdlerised--gives a remarkably full and satisfactory idea of this great and seldom[372] quite rightly valued writer. It must have cost much, besides use of paste and scissors, to do; for the extracts are often very short, and the bulk of matter to be thoroughly searched for extraction is, as has just been said, huge. A third volume might perhaps be added;[373] but the actual two are far from unrepresentative, while the Bowdlerising is by no means ultra-Bowdlerish.

[Sidenote: The various display of them.]

The reader, even of this selection, will see how, in quite miscellaneous or heterogeneous writing, Diderot bubbles out into a perfectly told tale or anecdote, no matter what the envelope (as we may call it) of this tale or anecdote may be. All his work is more or less like conversation: and these excursus are like the stories which, if good, are among the best, just as, if bad, they are the worst, sets-off to conversation itself. Next to these come the longer _histoires_--as one would call them in the Heroic novel and its successors--things sometimes found by themselves, sometimes ensconced in larger work[374]--the story of Desroches and Mme. de la Carliere, _Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne_, the almost famous _Le Marquis des Arcis et Mme. de la Pommeraye_, of which more may be said presently; and things which are not exactly tales, but which have the tale-quality in part, like the charming _Regrets sur ma Vieille Robe de Chambre, Ceci n'est pas un conte_, etc. Thirdly, and to be spoken of in more detail, come the things that are nearest actual novels, and in some cases are called so, _Le Neveu de Rameau_, the "unspeakable" _Bijoux Indiscrets_, _Jacques le Fataliste_ (the matrix of _Le Marquis des Arcis_) and _La Religieuse_.

The "unspeakable" one does not need much speaking from any point of view. If it is not positively what Carlyle called it, "the beastliest of all dull novels, past, present, or to come," it really would require a most unpleasant apprenticeship to scavenging in order to discover a dirtier and duller. The framework is a flat imitation of Crebillon, the "insets" are sometimes mere pornography, and the whole thing is evidently scribbled at a gallop--it was actually a few days' work, to get money, from some French Curll or Drybutter, to give (the appropriateness of the thing at least is humorous) to the mistress of the moment, a Madame de Puisieux,[375] who, if she was like Crebillon's heroines in morals, cannot have been like the best of them in manners. Its existence shows, of course, Diderot's worst side, that is to say, the combination of want of breeding with readiness to get money anyhow. If it is worth reading at all, which may be doubted, it is to show the real, if equivocal, value of Crebillon himself. For it is vulgar, which he never is.

[Sidenote: _Le Neveu de Rameau._]

_Le Neveu de Rameau_, has only touches of obscenity, and it has been enormously praised by great persons. It is very clever, but it seems to me that, as a notable critic is said to have observed of something else, "it has been praised quite enough." It is a sketch, worked out in a sort of monologue,[376] of something like Diderot's own character without his genius and without his good fellowship--a gutter-snipe of art and letters possessed of some talent and of infinite impudence. It shows Diderot's own power of observation and easy fluid representation of character and manners, but not, as I venture to think, much more.

[Sidenote: _Jacques le Fataliste._]

_Jacques le Fataliste_ is what may be called, without pedantry or preciousness, eminently a "document." It is a document of Diderot's genius only indirectly (save in part), and to those who can read not only in the lines but between them: it is a document, directly, of the insatiable and restless energy of the man, and of the damage which this restlessness, with its accompanying and inevitable want of self-criticism, imposed upon that genius. Diderot, though he did not rhapsodise about Sterne as he rhapsodised about Richardson, was, like most of his countrymen then, a great admirer of "Tristram," and in an evil hour he took it into his head to Shandyise. The book starts with an actual adaptation of Sterne,[377] which is more than once repeated; its scheme--of a master (who is as different as possible from my Uncle Toby, except that when not in a passion he is rather good-natured, and at almost all times very easily humbugged) and a man (who is what Trim never is, both insolent and indecent)--is at least partially the same. But the most constant and the most unfortunate imitation is of Sterne's literally eccentric, or rather zigzag and pillar-to-post, fashion of narration. In the Englishman's own hands, by some prestidigitation of genius, this never becomes boring, though it probably would have become so if either book had been finished; for which reason we may be quite certain that it was not only his death which left both in fragments. In the hands of his imitators the boredom--simple or in the form of irritation--has been almost invariable;[378] and with all his great intellectual power, his tale-telling faculty, his _bonhomie_, and other good qualities, Diderot has not escaped it--has, in fact, rushed upon it and compelled it to come in. It is comparatively of little moment that the main ostensible theme--the very unedifying account of the loves, or at least the erotic exercises, of Jacques and his master--is deliberately, tediously, inartistically interrupted and "put off." The great feature of the book, which has redeemed it with some who would otherwise condemn it entirely, the Arcis and La Pommeraye episode (_v. inf._), is handled after a fashion which suggests Mr. Ruskin's famous denunciation in another art. The _ink_pot is "flung in the face of the public" by a purely farcical series of interruptions, occasioned by the affairs of the inn-landlady, who tells the story, by her servants, dog, customers, and Heaven only knows what else; while the minor incidents and accidents of the book are treated in the same way, in and out of proportion to their own importance; the author's "simple plan," though by no means "good old rule," being that _everything_ shall be interrupted. Although, in the erotic part, the author never returns quite to his worst _Bijoux Indiscrets_ style, he once or twice goes very near it, except that he is not quite so dull; and when the book comes to an end in a very lame and impotent fashion (the farce being kept up to the last, and even this end being "recounted" and not made part of the mainly dialogic action), one is rather relieved at there being no more. One has seen talent; one has almost glimpsed genius; but what one has been most impressed with is the glaring fashion in which both the certainty and the possibility have been thrown away.

[Sidenote: Its "Arcis-Pommeraye" episode.]

The story which has been referred to in passing as muddled, or, to adopt a better French word, for which we have no exact equivalent, _affuble_ (travestied and overlaid) with eccentricities and interruptions, the _Histoire_ of the Marquis des Arcis and the Marquise de la Pommeraye, has received a great deal of praise, most of which it deserves. The Marquis and the Marquise have entered upon one of the fashionable _liaisons_ which Crebillon described in his own way. Diderot describes this one in another. The Marquis gets tired--it is fair to say that he has offered marriage at the very first, but Madame de la Pommeraye, a widow with an unpleasant first experience of the state, has declined it. He shows his tiredness in a gentlemanly manner, but not very mistakably. His mistress, who is not at first _femina furens_, but who possesses some feminine characteristics in a dangerous degree, as he might perhaps have found out earlier if he had been a different person, determines to make sure of it. She intimates _her_ tiredness, and the Marquis makes his first step downwards by jumping at the release. They are--the old, old hopeless folly!--to remain friends, but friends only. But she really loves him, and after almost assuring herself that he has really ceased to love her (which, in the real language of love, means that he has never loved her at all), devises a further, a very clever, but a rather diabolical system of last proof, involving vengeance if it fails. She has known, in exercises of charity (the _femme du monde_ has seldom quite abandoned these), a mother and daughter who, having lost their means, have taken to a questionable, or rather a very unquestionable manner of life, keeping a sort of private gaming-house, and extending to those frequenters of it who choose, what the late George Augustus Sala not inelegantly called, in an actual police-court instance, "the thorough hospitality characteristic of their domicile." She prevails on them to leave the house, get rid of all their belongings (down to clothes) which could possibly be identified, change their name, move to another quarter of Paris, and set up as _devotes_ under the full protection of the local clergy. Then she manages an introduction, of an apparently accidental kind, to the Marquis. He falls in love at once with the daughter, who is very pretty, and with masculine (or at least _some_ masculine) fatuity, makes Madame de la Pommeraye his confidante. She gives him rope, but he uses it, of course, only to hang himself. He tries the usual temptations; but though the mother at least would not refuse them, Madame de la Pommeraye's hand on the pair is too tight. At last he offers marriage, and--with her at least apparent consent--is married. The next day she tells him the truth. But her diabolism fails. At first there is of course a furious outburst. But the girl is beautiful, affectionate, and humble; the mother is pensioned off; the Marquis and Marquise des Arcis retire for some years to those invaluable _terres_, after a sojourn at which everything is forgotten; and the story ends. Diderot, by not too skilfully throwing in casuistical attacks and defences of the two principal characters, but telling us nothing of Madame de la Pommeraye's subsequent feelings or history, does what he can, unluckily after his too frequent fashion, to spoil or at least to blunt his tale. It is not necessary to imitate him by discussing the _pros_ and _cons_ at length. I think myself that the Marquis, both earlier and later, is made rather too much of a _benet_, or, in plain English, a nincompoop. But nincompoops exist: in fact how many of us are not nincompoops in certain circumstances? Madame de la Pommeraye is, I fear, rather true, and is certainly sketched with extraordinary ability. On a larger scale the thing would probably, at that time and by so hasty and careless a workman, have been quite spoilt. But it is obviously the skeleton--and something more--of a really great novel.

[Sidenote: _La Religieuse._]

It may seem that a critic who speaks in this fashion, after an initial promise of laudation, is a sort of Balaam topsyturvied, and merely curses where he is expected to bless. But ample warning was given of the peculiar position of Diderot, and when we come to his latest known and by far his best novel, _La Religieuse_, the paradox (he was himself very fond of paradoxes,[379] though not of the wretched things which now disgrace the name) remains. The very subject of the book, or of the greatest part of it, was for a long time, if it is not still, taboo; and even if this had not been the case, it has other drawbacks. It originated in, and to some extent still retains traces of, one of the silly and ill-bred "mystifications" in which the eighteenth and early nineteenth century delighted.[380] It is, at least in appearance, badly tainted with purpose; and while it is actually left unfinished, the last pages of it, as they stand, are utterly unworthy of the earlier part, and in fact quite uninteresting. Momus or Zoilus must be allowed to say so much: but having heard him, let us cease to listen to the half-god or the whole philologist.

[Sidenote: Its story.]

Yet _La Religieuse_, for all its drawbacks, is almost a great, and might conceivably have been a very great book. Madame d'Holbach is credited by Diderot's own generosity with having suggested its crowning _mot_,[381] and her influence may have been in other ways good by governing the force and fire, so often wasted or ill-directed, of Diderot's genius. Soeur Sainte-Suzanne is the youngest daughter of a respectable middle-class family. She perceives, or half-perceives (for, though no fool, she is a guileless and unsuspicious creature), that she is unwelcome there; the most certain sign of which is that, while her sisters are married and dowered handsomely, she is condemned to be a nun. She has, though quite real piety, no "vocation," and though she allows herself to be coaxed through her novitiate, she at last, in face of almost insuperable difficulties, summons up courage enough to refuse, at the very altar, the final profession. There is, of course, a terrible scandal; she has more black looks in the family than ever, and at last her mother confesses that she is an illegitimate child, and therefore hated by her putative father, whose love for his wife, however, has induced him to forgive her, and not actually renounce (as indeed, by French law, he could not) the child. Broken in heart and spirit, Suzanne at last accepts her doom. She is fortunate in one abbess, but the next persecutes her, brings all sorts of false accusations against her, strips, starves, imprisons, and actually tortures her by means of the _amende honorable_. She manages to get her complaints known and to secure a counsel, and though she cannot obtain liberation from her vows, the priest who conducts the ecclesiastical part of the enquiry is a just man, and utterly repudiates the methods of persecution, while he and her lay lawyer procure her transference to another convent. Here her last trial (except those of the foolish post-_scrap_, as we may call it) begins, as well as the most equivocal and the greatest part of the book. Her new superior is in every respect different from any she has known--of a luxurious temperament, good-natured, though capricious, and inclined to be very much too affectionate. Her temptation of the innocent Suzanne is defeated by this very innocence, and by timely revelation, though the revealer does not know what she reveals, to a "director"; and the wayward and corrupted fancy turns by degrees to actual madness, which proves fatal, Suzanne remaining unharmed, though a piece of not inexcusable eavesdropping removes the ignorance of her innocence.

[Sidenote: A hardly missed, if missed, masterpiece.]

If the subject be not simply ruled out, and the book indexed for silence, it is practically impossible to suggest that it could have been treated better. Even the earlier parts, which could easily have been made dull, are not so; and it is noteworthy that, anti-religionist as Diderot was, and directly as the book is aimed at the conventual system,[382] all the priests who are introduced are men of honour, justice, and humanity. But the wonder is in the treatment of the "scabrous" part of the matter by the author of Diderot's other books. Whether Madame d'Holbach's[383] influence, as has been suggested, was more widely and subtly extended than we know, or whatever else may be the cause, there is not a coarse word, not even a coarsely drawn situation, in the whole. Suzanne's innocence is, in the subtlest manner, prevented from being in the least _bete_. The fluctuations and ficklenesses of the abbess's passion, and in a less degree of that of another young nun, whom Suzanne has partially ousted from her favour, are marvellously and almost inoffensively drawn, and the stages by which erotomania passes into mania general and mortal, are sketched slightly, but with equal power. There is, I suppose, hardly a book which one ought to discommend to the young person more than _La Religieuse_. There are not many in which the powers required by the novelist, in delineating morbid, and not only morbid, character, are more brilliantly shown.

It is not the least remarkable thing about this remarkable book, and not the least characteristic of its most remarkable author, that its very survival has something extraordinary about it. Grimm, who was more likely than any one else to know, apparently thought it was destroyed or lost; it never appeared at all during Diderot's life, nor for a dozen years after his death, nor till seven after the outbreak of the Revolution, and six after the suppression of the religious orders in France. That it might have brought its author into difficulties is more than probable; but the undisguised editor of the _Encyclopedie_, the author, earlier, of the actually disgraceful _Bijoux Indiscrets_, and the much more than suspected principal begetter of the _Systeme de la Nature_, could not have been much influenced by this. The true cause of its abscondence, as in so much else of his work, was undoubtedly that ultra-Bohemian quality of indifference which distinguished Diderot--the first in a way, probably for ever the greatest, and, above all, the most altruistic of literary Bohemians. Ask him to do something definite, especially for somebody else's profit, to be done off-hand, and it was done. Ask him to bear the brunt of a dangerous, laborious, by no means lucrative, but rather exciting adventure, and he would, one cannot quite say consecrate, but devote (which has two senses) his life to it. But set him to elaborate artistic creation, confine him to it, and expect him to finish it, and you were certain to be disappointed. At another time, even at this time, if his surroundings and his society, his education and his breeding had been less unfortunate, he might, as it seems to me, have become a very great novelist indeed. As it is, he is a great possibility of novel and of much other writing, with occasional outbursts of actuality. The _Encyclopedie_ itself, for aught I care, might have gone in all its copies, and with all possibility of recovering or remembering it on earth, to the place where so many people at the time would have liked to send it. But in the rest of him, and even in some of his own Encyclopaedia articles,[384] there is much of quite different stuff. And among the various gifts, critical and creative, which this stuff shows, not the least, I think, was the half-used and mostly ill-used gift of novel-writing.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The successors--Marmontel.]

What has been called the second generation of the _philosophes_, who were naturally the pupils of the first, "were not like [that] first," that is to say, they did not reproduce the special talents of their immediate masters in this department of ours, save in two instances. Diderot's genius did not propagate itself in the novel way at all[385]: indeed, as has been said, his best novel was not known till this second generation itself was waning. The most brilliant of his direct hearers, Joubert, took to another department; or rather, in his famous _Pensees_, isolated and perfected the utterances scattered through the master's immense and disorderly work. Naigeon, the most devoted, who might have taken for his motto a slight alteration of the Mahometan confession of faith, "There is no God; but there is only one Diderot, and I am his prophet," was a dull fellow, and also, to adopt a Carlylian epithet, a "dull-snuffling" one, who could not have told a neck-tale if the Hairibee of the guillotine had caught him and given him a merciful chance. Voltaire in Marmontel, and Rousseau in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, were more fortunate, though both the juniors considerably transformed their masters' fashions; and Marmontel was always more or less, and latterly altogether, an apostate from the principle that the first and last duty of man is summed up in _ecrasons l'infame_.

This latter writer has had vicissitudes both in English and French appreciation. We translated him early, and he had an immense influence on the general Edgeworthian school, and on Miss Edgeworth herself. Much later Mr. Ruskin "took him up."[386] But neither his good nor his bad points have, for a long time, been such as greatly to commend themselves, either to the major part of the nineteenth century, or to what has yet passed of the twentieth, on either side of the channel.

He was, no doubt, only a second-class man of letters, and though he ranks really high in this class, he was unfortunately much influenced by more or less passing fashions, fads, and fancies of his time--_sensibilite_ (see next chapter) philosophism, politico-philanthropic economy, and what not. He was also much of a "polygraph," and naturally a good deal of his polygraphy does not concern us, though parts of his _Memoirs_, especially the rather well-known accounts of his sufferings as a new-comer[387] in the atrocious Bastille, show capital tale-telling faculty. His unequal criticism, sometimes very acute, hardly concerns us at all; his _Essai sur les Romans_ being very disappointing.[388] But he wrote not a little which must, in different ways and "strengths," be classed as actual fiction, and this concerns us pretty nearly, both as evidencing that general set towards the novel which is so important, and also in detail.

[Sidenote: His "Telemachic" imitations worth little.]

It divides itself quite obviously into two classes, the almost didactic matter of _Belisaire_ and _Les Incas_, and the still partly didactic, but much more "fictionised" _Contes Moraux_. The first part (which is evidently of the family of _Telemaque_) may be rapidly dismissed. Except for its good French and good intentions, it has long had, and is likely always to have, very little to say for itself. We have seen that Prevost attempted a sort of quasi-historical novel. Of actual history there is little in _Belisaire_, rather more in _Les Incas_. But historical fact and story-telling art are entirely subordinated in both to moral purpose, endless talk about virtue and the affections and justice and all the rest of it--the sort of thing, in short, which provoked the immortal outburst, "In the name of the Devil and his grandmother, _be_ virtuous and have done with it!" There is, as has just been said, a great deal of this in the _Contes_ also; but fortunately there is something else.

[Sidenote: The best of his _Contes Moraux_ worth a good deal.]

The something else is not to be found in the "Sensibility" parts,[389] and could not be expected to be. They do, indeed, contain perhaps the most absolutely ludicrous instance of the absurdest side of that remarkable thing, except Mackenzie's great _trouvaille_ of the press-gang who unanimously melted into tears[390] at the plea of an affectionate father. Marmontel's masterpiece is not so very far removed in subject from this. It represents a good young man, who stirs up the timorous captain and crew of a ship against an Algerine pirate, and in the ensuing engagement, sabre in hand, makes a terrible carnage: "As soon as he sees an African coming on board, he runs to him and cuts him in half, crying, 'My poor mother!'" The filial hero varies this a little, when "disembowelling" the Algerine commander, by requesting the Deity to "have pity on" his parent--a proceeding faintly suggestive of a survival in his mind of the human-sacrifice period.

Fortunately, as has been said, it is not always thus: and some of the tales are amusing in almost the highest degree, being nearly as witty as Voltaire's, and entirely free from ill-nature and sculduddery. Not that Marmontel--though a great advocate for marriage, and even (for a Frenchman of his time) wonderfully favourable to falling in love _before_ marriage--pretends to be altogether superior to the customs of his own day. We still sometimes have the "Prendre-Avoir-Quitter" series of Crebillon,[391] though with fewer details; and Mrs. Newcome would have been almost more horrified than she was at _Joseph Andrews_ by the perusal of one of Marmontel's most well-intentioned things, _Annette et Lubin_. But he never lays himself out for attractions of a doubtful kind, and none of his best stories, even when they may sometimes involve bowing in the house of Ashtoreth as well as that of Rimmon, derive their bait from this kind. Indeed they rather "assume and pass it by" as a fashion of the time.

[Sidenote: _Alcibiade ou le Moi._]

We may take three or four of them as examples. One is the very first of the collection, _Alcibiade ou le Moi_. Hardly anybody need be told that the Alcibiades of the tale, though nominally, is not in the least really the Alcibiades of history, or that his Athens is altogether Paris; while his Socrates is a kind of _philosophe_, the good points of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot being combined with the faults of none of them, and his ladies are persons who--with one exception--simply could not have existed in Greece. This Alcibiades wishes to be loved "for himself," and is (not without reason) very doubtful whether he ever has been, though he is the most popular and "successful" man in Athens. His _avoir_, for the moment, is concerned with a "Prude." (Were there prudes in Greece? I think Diogenes would have gladly lent his lantern for the search.) He is desperately afraid that she only loves him for _her_self. He determines to try her; takes her, not at her deeds, but at her words, which are, of course, such as would have made the Greeks laugh as inextinguishably as their gods once did. She expresses gratitude for his unselfishness, but is anything but pleased. Divers experiments are tried by her, and when at last he hopes she will not tempt him any more, exclaiming that he is really "l'amant le plus fidele, le plus tendre et le plus respectueux" ... "et le plus sot," adds she, sharply, concluding the conversation and shutting her, let us say, doors[392] on him.

He is furious, and tries "Glicerie" (the form might be more Greek), an _ingenue_ of fifteen, who was "like a rose," who had attracted already the vows of the most gallant youths, etc. The most brilliant of these youths instantly retire before the invincible Alcibiades. But in the first place she wishes that before "explanations"[393] take place, a marriage shall be arranged; while he, oddly enough, wishes that the explanations should precede the hymen. Also she is particular about the consent of her parents: and, finally, when he asks her whether she will swear constancy against every trial, to be his, and his only, whatever happens, she replies, with equal firmness and point, "Never!" So he is furious again. But there is a widow, and, as we have seen in former cases, there was not, in the French eighteenth century, the illiberal prejudice against widows expressed by Mr. Weller. She is, of course, inconsolable for her dear first, but admits, after a time, the possibility of a dear second. Only it must be kept secret as yet. For a time Alcibiades behaves nobly, but somehow or other he finds that everybody knows the fact; he is treated by his lady-love with obvious superiority; and breaks with her. An interlude with a "magistrate's" wife, on less proper and more Crebillonish lines, is not more successful. So one day meeting by the seashore a beautiful courtesan, Erigone, he determines, in the not contemptible language of that single-speech poetess, Maria del Occidente, to "descend and sip a lower draught." He is happy after a fashion with her for two whole months: but at the end of that time he is beaten in a chariot race, and, going to Erigone for consolation, finds the winner's vehicle at her door. Socrates, on being consulted, recommends Glicerie as, after all, the best of them, in a rather sensible discourse. But the concluding words of the sage and the story are, as indeed might be expected from Xanthippe's husband, not entirely optimist: "If your wife is well conducted and amiable, you will be a happy man; if she is ill-tempered and a coquette, you will become a philosopher--so you must gain in any case." An "obvious," perhaps, but a neat and uncommonly well-told story.

[Sidenote: _Soliman the Second._]

_Soliman the Second_ is probably the best known of Marmontel's tales, and it certainly has great merits. It is hardly inferior in wit to Voltaire, and is entirely free from the smears of uncomeliness and the sniggers of bad taste which he would have been sure to put in. The subject is, of course, partly historical, though the reader of Knollys (and one knows more unhappy persons) will look in vain there, not, indeed, for Roxelana, but for the _nez retrousse_, which is the important point of the story. The great Sultan tires of his Asiatic harem, complaisant but uninteresting, and orders European damsels to be caught or bought for him. The most noteworthy of the catch or batch are Elmire, Delia, and Roxelane. Elmire comes first to Soliman's notice, charms him by her sentimental ways, and reigns for a time, but loses her piquancy, and (by no means wholly to her satisfaction) is able to avail herself of the conditional enfranchisement, and return to her country, which his magnanimity has granted her. Her immediate supplanter, Delia, is an admirable singer, and possessed of many of the qualifications of an accomplished _hetaera_. But for that very reason the Sultan tires of her likewise; and for the same, she is not inconsolable or restive: indeed she acts as a sort of Lady Pandara, if not to introduce, at any rate to tame, the third, Roxelane, a French girl of no very regular beauty, but with infinite attractions, and in particular possessed of what Mr. Dobson elegantly calls "a madding ineffable nose" of the _retrousse_ type.

The first thing the Sultan hears of this damsel is that the Master of the Eunuchs cannot in the least manage her; for she merely laughs at all he says. The Sultan, out of curiosity, orders her to be brought to him, and she immediately cries: "Thank Heaven! here is a face like a man's. Of course you are the sublime Sultan whose slave I have the honour to be? Please cashier this disgusting old rascal." To which extremely irreverent address Soliman makes a dignified reply of the proper kind, including due reference to "obedience" and his "will." This brings down a small pageful of raillery from the young person, who asks "whether this is Turkish gallantry?" suggests that the restrictions of the seraglio involve a fear that "the skies should rain men," and more than hints that she should be very glad if they did. For the moment Soliman, though much taken with her, finds no way of saving his dignity except by a retreat. The next time he sends for her, or rather announces his own arrival, she tells the messenger to pack himself off: and when the Commander of the Faithful does visit her and gives a little good advice, she is still incorrigible. She will, once more, have nothing to do with the words _dois_ and _devoir_. When asked if she knows what he is and what _she_ is, she answers with perfect _aplomb_, "What we are? You are powerful, and I am pretty; so we are quite on an equality." In the most painfully confidential and at the same time quite decent manner, she asks him what he can possibly do with five hundred wives? and, still more intolerably, tells him that she likes his looks, and has already loved people who were not worth him. The horror with which this Turkish soldan, himself so full of sin, ejaculates, "Vous _avez_ aime?" may be easily imagined, and again she simply puts him to flight. When he gets over it a little, he sends Delia to negotiate. But Roxelane tells the go-between to stay to supper, declaring that she herself does not feel inclined for a _tete-a-tete_ yet, and finally sends him off with this obliging predecessor and substitute, presenting her with the legendary handkerchief, which she has actually borrowed from the guileless Padishah. There is some, but not too much more of it; there can but be one end; and as he takes her to the Mosque to make her legitimate Sultana, quite contrary to proper Mussulman usage, he says to himself, "Is it really possible that a little _retrousse_ nose should upset the laws of an empire?" Probably, though Marmontel does not say so, he looked down at the said nose, as he communed with himself, and decided that cause and effect were not unworthy of each other. There is hardly a righter and better hit-off tale of the kind, even in French.

[Sidenote: _The Four Flasks._]

"The Four Flasks" or "The Adventures of Alcidonis of Megara," a sort of outside fairy tale, is good, but not quite so good as either of the former. Alcidonis has a fairy protectress, if not exactly godmother, who gives him the flasks in question to use in amatory adventures. One, with purple liquor in it, sets the drinker in full tide of passion; the second (rose-coloured) causes a sort of flirtation; the third (blue) leads to sentimental and moderate affection; and the last (pure white) recovers the experimenter from the effects of any of the others. He tries all, and all but the last are unsatisfactory, though, much as in the case of Alcibiades and Glicerie, the blue has a second chance, the results of which are not revealed. This is the least important of the group, but is well told.

[Sidenote: _Heureusement._]

There is also much good in _Heureusement_, the nearest to a "Crebillonnade" of all, though the Crebillonesque situations are ingeniously broken off short. It is told by an old marquise[394] to an almost equally old abbe, her crony, who only at the last discovers that, long ago, he himself was very nearly the shepherd of the proverbial hour. And _Le Mari Sylphe_, which is still more directly connected with one of Crebillon's actual pieces, and with some of the weaker stories (_v. sup._) of the _Cabinet des Fees_, would be good if it were not much too long. Others might be mentioned, but my own favourite, though it has nothing quite so magnetic in it as the _nez de Roxelane_, is _Le Philosophe Soi-disant_, a sort of apology for his own clan, in a satire on its less worthy members, which may seem to hit rather unfairly at Rousseau, but which is exceedingly amusing.

[Sidenote: _Le Philosophe Soi-disant._]

Clarice--one of those so useful young widows of whom the novelists of this time might have pleaded that they took their ideas of them from the Apostle St. Paul--has for some time been anxious to know a _philosophe_, though she has been warned that there are _philosophes_ and _philosophes_, and that the right kind is neither common nor very fond of society. She expresses surprise, and says that she has always heard a _philosophe_ defined as an odd creature who makes it his business to be like nobody else. "Oh," she is told, "there is no difficulty about _that_ kind," and one, by name Ariste, is shortly added to her country-house party. She politely asks him whether he is not a _philosophe_, and whether philosophy is not a very beautiful thing? He replies (his special line being sententiousness) that it is simply the knowledge of good and evil, or, if she prefers it, Wisdom. "Only that?" says wicked Doris; but Clarice helps him from replying to the scoffer by going on to ask whether the fruit of Wisdom is not happiness? "And, Madame, the making others happy." "Dear me," says naive Lucinde, half under her breath, "I must be a _philosophe_, for I have been told a hundred times that it only depended on myself to be happy by making others happy." There is more wickedness from Doris; but Ariste, with a contemptuous smile, explains that the word "happiness" has more than one meaning, and that the _philosophe_ kind is different from that at the disposal and dispensation of a pretty woman. Clarice, admitting this, asks what _his_ kind of happiness is? The company then proceeds, in the most reprehensible fashion, to "draw" the sage: and they get from him, among other things, an admission that he despises everybody, and an unmistakable touch of disgust when somebody speaks of "his _semblables_."[395]

Clarice, however, still plays the amiable and polite hostess, lets him take her to dinner, and says playfully that she means to reconcile him to humanity. He altogether declines. Man is a vicious beast, who persecutes and devours others, he says, making all the time a particularly good dinner while denouncing the slaughter of animals, and eulogising the "sparkling brook" while getting slightly drunk. He declaims against the folly and crime of the modern world in not making philosophers kings, and announces his intention of seeking complete solitude. But Clarice, still polite, decides that he must stay with them a little while, in order to enlighten and improve the company.

After this, Ariste, in an alley alone, to digest his dinner and walk off his wine, persuades himself that Clarice has fallen in love with him, and that, to secure her face and her fortune, he has only got to go on playing the misanthrope and give her a chance of "taming the bear." The company, perfectly well knowing his thoughts, determine to play up to them--not for his greater glory; and Clarice, not quite willingly, agrees to take the principal part. In a long _tete-a-tete_ he makes his clumsy court, airs his cheap philosophy, and lets by no means the mere suggestion of a cloven foot appear, on the subject of virtue and vice. However, she stands it, though rather disgusted, and confesses to him that people are suggesting a certain Cleon, a member of the party, as her second husband; whereon he decries marriage, but proposes himself as a lover. She reports progress, and is applauded; but the Presidente de Ponval, another widow, fat, fifty, fond of good fare, possessed of a fine fortune, but very far from foolish, vows that _she_ will make the greatest fool of Ariste. Cleon, however, accepts his part; and appears to be much disturbed at Clarice's attentions to Ariste, who, being shown to his room, declaims against its luxuries, but avails himself of them very cheerfully. In the morning he, though rather doubtfully, accepts a bath; but on his appearance in company Clarice makes remonstrances on his dress, etc., and actually prevails on him to let a valet curl his hair. This is an improvement; but she does not like his brown coat.[396] He must write to Paris and order a suit of _gris-de-lin clair_, and after some wrangling he consents. But now the Presidente takes up the running. After expressing the extremest admiration for his coiffure, she makes a dead set at him, tells him she wants a second husband whom she can love for himself, and goes off with a passionate glance, the company letting him casually know that she has ten thousand crowns a year. He affects to despise this, which is duly reported to her next morning. She vows vengeance; but he dreams of her (and the crowns) meanwhile, and with that morning the new suit arrives. He is admiring himself in it when Cleon comes in, and throws himself on his mercy. He adores Clarice; Ariste is evidently gaining fatally on her affections; will he not be generous and abstain from using his advantages? But if _he_ is really in love Cleon will give her up.

The hook is, of course, more than singly baited and barbed. Ariste can at once play the magnanimous man, and be rewarded by the Presidente's ten thousand a year. He will be off with Clarice and on with Mme. de Ponval, whom he visits in his new splendour. She admires it hugely, but is alarmed at seeing him in Clarice's favourite colour. An admirable conversation follows, in which she constantly draws her ill-bred, ill-blooded, and self-besotted suitor into addressing her with insults, under the guise of compliments, and affects to enjoy them. He next visits Clarice, with whom he finds Cleon, in the depths of despair. She begins to admire the coat, and to pride herself on her choice, when he interrupts her, and solemnly resigns her to Cleon. Doris and Lucinde come in, and everybody is astounded at Ariste's generosity as he takes Clarice's hand and places it in that of his rival. Then he goes to the Presidente, and tells her what he has done. She expresses her delight, and he falls at her feet. Thereupon she throws round his neck a rose-coloured ribbon (_her_ colours), calls him "her Charming man,"[397] and insists on showing him to the public as her conquest and captive. He has no time to refuse, for the door opens and they all appear. "Le voila," says she, "cet homme si fier qui soupire a mes genoux pour les beaux yeux de ma cassette! Je vous le livre. Mon role est joue." So Ariste, tearing his curled hair, and the _gris-de-lin clair_ coat, and, doubtless, the Presidente's "red rose chain," cursing also terribly, goes off to write a book against the age, and to prove that nobody is wise but himself.

I can hardly imagine more than one cavil being made against this by the most carping of critics and the most wedded to the crotchet of "kinds"--that it is too dramatic for a _story_, and that we ought to have had it as a drama. If this were further twisted into an accusation of plagiarism from the actual theatre, I think it could be rebutted at once. The situations separately might be found in many dramas; the characters in more; but I at least am not aware of any one in which they had been similarly put together. Of course most if not all of us have seen actresses who would make Clarice charming, Madame de Ponval amusing, and Doris and Lucinde very delectable adjuncts; as well as actors by whom the parts of Cleon and Ariste would be very effectively worked out. But why we should be troubled to dress, journey, waste time and money, and get a headache, by going to the theatre, when we can enjoy all this "in some close corner of [our] brain," I cannot see. As I read the story in some twenty minutes, I can see _my_ Clarice, _my_ Madame de Ponval, _my_ Doris and Lucinde and Cleon and Ariste and Jasmin--the silent but doubtless highly appreciative valet,--and I rather doubt whether the best company in the world could give me quite that.

[Sidenote: A real advance in these.]

But, even in saying this, full justice has not yet been done to Marmontel. He has, from our special point of view, made a real further progress towards the ideal of the ordinary novel--the presentation of ordinary life. He has borrowed no supernatural aid;[398] he has laid under contribution no "fie-fie" seasonings; he has sacrificed nothing, or next to nothing, in these best pieces, whatever he may have done elsewhere, to purpose and crotchet. He has discarded stuffing, digression, episode, and other things which weighed on and hampered his predecessors. In fact there are times when it seems almost unjust, in this part of his work, to "second" him in the way we have done; though it must be admitted that if you take his production as a whole he relapses into the second order.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.]

The actual books, in anything that can be called fiction, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre are of far less merit than Marmontel's; but most people who have even the slightest knowledge of French literature know why he cannot be excluded here. Personally, he seems to have been an ineffectual sort of creature, and in a large part of his rather voluminous work he is (when he ceases to produce a sort of languid amusement) a distinctly boring one.[399] He appears to have been unlucky, but to have helped his own bad luck with the only signs of effectualness that he ever showed. It is annoying, no doubt, to get remonstrances from headquarters as to your not sending any work (plans, reports, etc.) as an engineer, and to find, or think you find, that your immediate C.O. has suppressed them. But when you charge him with his disgraceful proceeding, and he, as any French officer in his position at his time was likely to do, puts his hand on his sword, it is undiplomatic to rush on another officer who happens to be present, grab at and draw his weapon (you are apparently not entitled to one), and attack your chief. Nor when, after some more unsuccessful experiences at home and abroad, you are on half or no pay, and want employment, would it seem to be exactly the wisdom of Solomon to give a minister the choice of employing you on (1) the civilisation of Corsica, (2) the exploration of the unknown parts of the Western Continent, (3) the discovery of the sources of the Nile, and (4) a pedestrian tour throughout India. But, except in the first instance (for the "Citizen of Geneva" did not meddle much with cold steel), it was all very like a pupil, and (in the Citizen's later years) a friend, of Rousseau, carrying out his master's ideas with a stronger dose of Christianity, but with quite as little common sense. I have not seen (or remembered) any more exact account of Saint-Pierre's relations with Napoleon than that given by the excellent Aime-Martin, an academic euphemiser of the French kind. But, even reading between his lines, they must have been very funny.[400]

_Paul et Virginie_, however, is one of those books which, having attained and long kept a European reputation, cannot be neglected, and it may be added that it does deserve, though for one thing only, never to be entirely forgotten. It is chock-full of _sensibilite_, the characters have no real character, and all healthy-minded persons have long ago agreed that the concomitant facts, if not causes, of Virginie's fate are more nasty than the nastiest thing in Diderot or Rabelais.[401] But the descriptions of the scenery of Mauritius, as sets-off to a novel, are something new, and something immensely important. _La Chaumiere Indienne_, though less of a story in size and general texture, is much better from the point of view of taste. It has touches of real irony, and almost of humour, though its hero, the good pariah, is a creature nearly as uninteresting as he is impossible. Yet his "black and polished" baby is a vivid property, and the descriptions are again famous. The shorter pieces, _Le Cafe de Surate_, etc., require little notice.

* * * * *

It will, however, have been seen by anybody who can "seize points," that this _philosophe_ novel, as such, is a really important agent in bringing on the novel itself to its state of full age. That men like the three chiefs should take up the form is a great thing; that men who are not quite chiefs, like Marmontel and Saint-Pierre, should carry it on, is not a small one. They all do something to get it out of the rough; to discard--if sometimes also they add--irrelevances; to modernise this one kind which is perhaps the predestined and acceptable literary product of modernity. Voltaire originates little, but puts his immense power and _diable au corps_ into the body of fiction. Rousseau enchains passion in its service, as Madame de la Fayette, as even Prevost, had not been able to do before. Diderot indicates, in whatever questionable material, the vast possibilities of psychological analysis. Marmontel--doing, like other second-rate talents, almost more _useful_ work than his betters--rescues the _conte_ from the "demi-rep" condition into which it had fallen, and, owing to the multifariousness of his examples, does not entirely subjugate it even to honest purpose; while Bernardin de Saint-Pierre carries the suggestions of Rousseau still further in the invaluable department of description. No one, except on the small scale, is great in plot; no one produces a really individual character;[402] and it can hardly be said that any one provides thoroughly achieved novel dialogue. But they have inspired and enlivened the whole thing as a whole; and if, against this, is to be set the crime of purpose, that is one not difficult to discard.[403]

FOOTNOTES:

[351] His _verse_ tales, even if stories in verse had not by this time fallen out of our proper range, require little notice. The faculty of "telling" did not remain with him here, perhaps because it was prejudicially affected by the "dryness" and unpoetical quality of his poetry, and of the French poetry of the time generally, perhaps for other reasons. At any rate, as compared with La Fontaine or Prior, he hardly counts. _Le Mondain_, _Le Pauvre Diable_, etc., are skits or squibs in verse, not tales. The opening one of the usual collection, _Ce qui plait aux Dames_,--in itself a flat rehandling of Chaucer and Dryden,--is saved by its charming last line--

Ah! croyez-moi, l'erreur a son merite,

a rede which he himself might well have recked.

[352] In justice to Voltaire it ought to be remembered that no less great, virtuous, and religious a person than Milton ranked as one of the two objects to which "all mortals most aspire," "to offend your enemies."

[353] It has been noted above (see p. 266, _note_), how some have directly traced _Zadig_ to the work of a person so much inferior to Hamilton as Gueulette.

[354] _Micromegas_ and one or two other things avowed--in fact, Voltaire, if not "great," was "big" enough to make as a rule little secret of his levies on others; and he had, if not adequate, a considerable, respect for the English Titan.

[355] Cacambo was not a savage, but he had savage or, at least, non-European blood in him.

[356] Not in the Grandisonian sense, thank heaven! But as has been hinted, he is a _little_ of a prig.

[357] He has been allowed a great deal of credit for the Calas and some other similar businesses. It is unlucky that the injustices he combated were somehow always _clerical_, in this or that fashion.

[358] It was said of them at their appearance "[cet] ouvrage est sans gout, sans finesse, sans invention, un rabachage de toutes les vieilles polissonneries que l'auteur a debitees sur Moise, et Jesus-Christ, les prophetes et les apotres, l'Eglise, les papes, les cardinaux, les pretres et les moines; nul interet, nulle chaleur, nulle vraisemblance, force ordures, une grosse gaiete.... Je n'aime pas la religion: mais je ne la hais pas assez pour trouver cela bon." The authorship, added to the justice of it, makes this one of the most crushing censures ever committed to paper; for the writer was Diderot (_Oeuvres_, Ed. Assezat, vi. 36).

[359] It is a singular coincidence that this was exactly the sum which Johnson mentioned to Boswell as capable of affording decent subsistence in London during the early middle eighteenth century.

[360] _Songe de Platon_, _Bababec et les Fakirs_, _Aventure de la Memoire_, _Les Aveugles Juges des Conteurs_, _Aventure Indienne_, and _Voyage de la Raison_.

[361] It is only fair to mention in this place, and in justice to a much abused institution, that this Babylonian story is said to be the only thing of its kind and its author that escaped the Roman censorship. If this is true, the unfeathered _perroquets_ were not so spiteful as the feathered ones too often are. Or perhaps each chuckled at the satire on his brethren.

[362] As with other controverted points, not strictly relevant, it is permissible for us to neglect protests about _la legende des philosophes_ and the like. Of course Rousseau was not only, at one time or another, the personal enemy of Voltaire and Diderot--he was, at one time or another, the personal enemy of everybody, including (not at any one but at all times) himself--but held principles very different from theirs. Yet their names will always be found together: and for our object the junction is real.

[363] Not the Abbe, who had been dead for some years, but a Genevese professor who saw a good deal of Jean-Jacques in his later days.

[364] "For short" _La Nouvelle Heloise_ has been usually adopted. I prefer _Julie_ as actually the first title, and for other reasons with which it is unnecessary to trouble the reader.

[365] She dies after slipping into the lake in a successful attempt to rescue one of her children; but neither is drowned, and she does not succumb rapidly enough for "shock" to account for it, or slowly enough for any other intelligible malady to hold its course.

[366] There is another curious anticipation of Dickens here: for Julie, as Dora does with Agnes, entreats Claire to "fill her vacant place"--though, by the way, not with her husband. And a third parallel, between Saint-Preux and Bradley Headstone, need not be quite farcical.

[367] You _may_ tear out Introductions, if you do it neatly; and this I say, having written many.

[368] Also Rousseau, without meaning it, has made him by no means a fool. When, on learning from his wife and daughter that Saint-Preux had been officiating as "coach," he asked if this genius was a gentleman, and on hearing that he was not, replied, "What have you paid him, then?" it was not, as the novelist and his hero took it, in their vanity, to be, mere insolence of caste. M. d'Etange knew perfectly well that though he could not trust a French gentleman with his wife, there was not nearly so much danger with his daughter--while a _roturier_ was not only entitled to be paid, and might accept pay without derogation, but was not unlikely, as the old North Country saying goes, to take it in malt if he did not receive it in meal.

[369] I observe that I have not yet fulfilled the promise of saying something of Wolmar, but the less said of him the better. He belongs wholly to that latter portion which has been wished away; he is a respectable Deist--than which it is essentially impossible, one would suppose, for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy alike to imagine anything more uninteresting; and his behaviour to Saint-Preux appears to me to be simply nauseous. He cannot, like Rowena, "forgive as a Christian," because he is not one, and any other form of forgiveness or even of tolerance is, in the circumstances, disgusting. But it was Rousseau's way to be disgusting sometimes.

[370] We have spoken of his attempt at the fairy tale; _qui_ Gomersal _non odit_ in English verse, _amet Le Levite d'Ephraim_ in French prose, etc. etc.

[371] He did not even, as Rousseau did with his human offspring, habitually take them to the Foundling Hospital--that is to say, in the case of literature, the anonymous press. He left them in MS., gave them away, and in some cases behaved to them in such an incomprehensible fashion that one wonders how they ever came to light.

[372] Carlyle's _Essay_ and Lord Morley of Blackburn's book are excepted. But Carlyle had not the whole before him, and Lord Morley was principally dealing with the _Encyclopedie_.

[373] Especially as Genin, like Carlyle, did not know all. There is, I believe, a later selection, but I have not seen it.

[374] Even the long, odd, and sometimes tedious _Reve de D'Alembert_, which Carlyle thought "we could have done without," but which others have extolled, has vivid narrative touches, though one is not much surprised at Mlle. de Lespinasse having been by no means grateful for the part assigned to her.

[375] The cleansing effect of war is an old _cliche_. It has been curiously illustrated in this case: for the first proof of the present passage reached me on the very same day with the news of the expulsion of the Germans from the village of Puisieux. So the name got "_red_-washed" from its old reproach.

[376] There really are touches of resemblance in it to Browning, especially in things like _Mr. Sludge the Medium_.

[377] The corporal's wound in the knee.

[378] Of course, there _are_ exceptions, and with one of the chief of them, Xavier de Maistre, we may have, before long, to deal.

[379] His longest, most avowed, and most famous, the _Paradoxe sur le Comedien_, has been worthily Englished by Mr. Walter H. Pollock.

[380] Its heroine, Suzanne Simonin, was, as far as the attempt to relieve herself of her vows went, a real person; and a benevolent nobleman, the Marquis de Croixmare, actually interested himself in this attempt--which failed. But Diderot and his evil angel Grimm got up sham letters between themselves and her patron, which are usually printed with the book.

[381] _Mon pere, je suis damnee_ ... the opening words, and the only ones given, of the confession of the half-mad abbess.

[382] Evangelical Protestantism has more than once adopted the principle that the Devil should not be allowed to have all the best tunes: and I remember in my youth an English religious novel of ultra-anti-Roman purpose, which, though, of course, dropping the "scabrousness," had, as I long afterwards recognised when I came to read _La Religieuse_, almost certainly borrowed a good deal from our most unsaintly Denis of Langres.

[383] She seems to have been, in many ways, far too good for her society, and altogether a lady.--The opinions of the late M. Brunetiere and mine on French literature were often very different--though he was good enough not to disapprove of some of my work on it. But with the terms of his expression of mere opinion one had seldom to quarrel. I must, however, take exception to his attribution of _grossierete_ to _La Religieuse_. Diderot, as has been fully admitted, _was_ too often _grossier_: sometimes when it was almost irrelevant to the subject. But here, "scabrous" as the subject might be, the treatment is scrupulously _not_ coarse. Nor do I think, after intimate and long familiarity with the whole of his work, that he was ever a _faux bonhomme_.

[384] They have hardly had a fair opportunity of comparison with Voltaire's _Dictionnaire Philosophique_; but they can stand it.

[385] Unless Dulaurens' not quite stupid, but formless and discreditable, _Compere Mathieu_ be excepted.

[386] In consequence of which Mr. Ruskin's favourite publisher, the late Mr. George Allen, asked the present writer, some twenty years ago, to revise and "introduce" the old translation of his _Contes Moraux_. The volume had, at least, the advantage of very charming illustrations by Miss Chris. Hammond.

[387] They were even worse than Leigh Hunt's in the strictly English counterpart torture-house for the victims of tyranny--consisting, for instance, in the supply of so good a dinner, at His Most Christian Majesty's expense, for the prisoner's servant, that the prisoner ate it himself, and had afterwards, on the principles of rigid virtue and distributive justice, to resign, to the minion who accompanied him, his own still better one which came later, also supplied by the tyrant.

[388] One expects something of value from the part-contemporary, part-successor of the novelists from Lesage to Rousseau. But where it is not mere blether about virtue and vice, and _le coeur humain_ and so on, it has some of the worst faults of eighteenth-century criticism. He thinks it would have been more "moral" if Mme. de Cleves had actually succumbed as a punishment for her self-reliance (certainly one of the most remarkable topsyturvifications of morality ever crotcheted); is, of course, infinitely shocked at being asked and induced to "interest himself in a prostitute and a card-sharper" by _Manon Lescaut_; and, equally of course, extols Richardson, though it is fair to say that he speaks well of _Tom Jones_.

[389] See next chapter.

[390] I wonder whether any one else has noticed that Thackeray, in the very agreeable illustration to one of not quite his greatest "letterpress" things, _A New Naval Drama_ (Oxford Ed. vol. viii. p. 421), makes the press-gang weep ostentatiously in the picture, though not in the text, where they only wave their cutlasses. It may be merely a coincidence: but it may not.

[391] There are reasons for thinking that Marmontel was deliberately "antidoting the _fanfreluches_" of the older tale-teller.

[392] In the original, suiting the rest of the setting, it is _rideaux_.

[393] "Explanations" is quite admirable, and, I think, neither borrowed from, nor, which is more surprising, by others.

[394] She declares that she has never actually "stooped to folly"; but admits that on more than one occasion it was only an accidental interruption which "luckily" (_heureusement_) saved her.

[395] It is necessary to retain the French here: for our "likes" is ambiguous.

[396] Cf. the stories, contradictory of each other, as to _our_ brown-coated philosopher's appearance in France. (Boswell, p. 322, Globe ed.)

[397] Cf. again the bestowal of this title by Horace Walpole, in his later days, on Edward Jerningham, playwright, poetaster, and _petit maitre_, who, unluckily for himself, lived into the more roughly satirical times of the Revolutionary War.

[398] "The _sylph_ishness of _Le Mari Sylphe_ is only an ingenious and defensible fraud; and the philtre-flasks of _Alcidonis_ are little more than "properties.""

[399] Here is a specimen of his largest and most ambitious production, the _Etudes de la Nature_. "La femelle du tigre, exhalant l'odeur du carnage, fait retentir les solitudes de l'Afrique de ses miaulements affreux, et parait remplie d'attraits a ses cruels amants." By an odd chance, I once saw a real scene contrasting remarkably with Saint-Pierre's sentimental melodrama. It was in the Clifton Zoological Gardens, which, as possibly some readers may know, were at one time regarded as particularly home-like by the larger carnivora. It was a very fine day, and an equally fine young tigress was endeavouring to attract the attention of her cruel lover. She rolled delicately about, like a very large, very pretty, and exceptionally graceful cat; she made fantastic gestures with her paws and tail; and she purred literally "as gently as any sucking dove"--_roucoulement_ was the only word for it. But her "lover," though he certainly looked "cruel" and as if he would very much like to eat _me_, appeared totally indifferent to her attractions.

[400] So, also, when one is told that he called his son Paul and his daughter Virginie, it is cheerful to remember, with a pleasant sense of contrast, Scott's good-humoured contempt for the tourists who wanted to know whether Abbotsford was to be called Tullyveolan or Tillietudlem.

[401] As the story is not now, I believe, the universal school-book it once was, something more than mere allusion may be desirable. The ship in which Virginie is returning to the Isle of France gets into shallows during a hurricane, and is being beaten to pieces close to land. One stalwart sailor, stripped to swim for his life, approaches Virginie, imploring her to strip likewise and let him try to pilot her through the surf. But she (like the lady in the coach, at an early part of _Joseph Andrews_) won't so much as look at a naked man, clasps her arms round her own garments, and is very deservedly drowned. The sailor, to one's great relief, is not.

[402] Julie herself is an intense type rather than individual.

[403] I have not thought it necessary, except in regard to those of them who have been touched in treating of the _Cabinet des Fees_, to speak at any length of the minor tale-tellers of the century. They are sometimes not bad reading; but as a whole minor in almost all senses.