A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century. Saintsbury George
of Béranger's bonne fille, who laughs at everything, but is perfectly capable of good sense and good service at need, and who not seldom marries and makes as good a wife as, "in a higher spear," the English "garrison hack" has had the credit of being. Quite a late, but a very successful example, with the complaisance limited to strictly legitimate extent, and the good-nature tempered by a shrewd determination to avenge two sisters of hers who had been weaker than herself, is the Georgette of La Fille aux Trois Jupons, who outwits in the cleverest way three would-be gallants, two of them her sisters' actual seducers, and extracts thumping solatia from these for their victims.54
Others.
On the other hand, the older and, I think, more famous book which suggested the title of this —L'Homme aux Trois Culottes, symbolising and in a way giving a history of the times of the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration, and finishing with "July" – seems to me again a failure. As I have said, Paul could not manage history, least of all spread-out history like this; and the characters, or rather personages, though of the lower and lower-middle rank, which he could manage best, are to me totally uninteresting. Others may have been, or may be, more fortunate with them.
So, too, Le Petit Fils de Cartouche (which I read before coming across its first part, Les Enfants du Boulevard) did not inspire me with any desire to look up this earlier novel; and La Pucelle de Belleville, another of Paul's attempts to depict the unconventional but virtuous young person, has very slight interest as a story, and is disfigured by some real examples of the "coarse vulgarity" which has been somewhat excessively charged against its author generally. Frère Jacques is a little better, but not much.55
Something has been said of "periods"; but, after all, when Paul has once "got into his stride" there is little difference on the average. I have read, for instance, in succession, M. Dupont, which, even in the Belgian piracy, is of 1838, and Les Demoiselles de Magazin, which must be some quarter of a century later – so late, indeed, that Madame Patti is mentioned in it. The title-hero of the first – a most respectable man – has an ingénue, who loves somebody else, forced upon him, experiences more recalcitrance than is usually allowed in such cases, and at last, with Paul's usual unpoetical injustice, is butchered to make way for the Adolphe of the piece, who does not so very distinctly deserve his Eugénie. It contains also one Zélie, who is perhaps the author's most impudent, but by no means most unamusing or most disagreeable, grisette. Les Demoiselles de Magazin gives us a whole posy of these curious flower-weeds of the garden of girls – pretty, middling, and ugly, astonishingly virtuous, not virtuous at all, and couci-couci (one of them, by the way, is nicknamed "Bouci-Boula," because she is plump and plain), but all good-natured, and on occasion almost noble-sentimented; a guileless provincial; his friend, who has a mania for testing his wife's fidelity, and who accomplishes one of Paul's favourite fairy-tale or rather pantomime endings by coming down with fifteen thousand francs for an old mistress (she has lost her beauty by the bite of a parrot, and is the mother of the extraordinarily virtuous Marie); a scapegrace "young first" or half-first; a superior ditto, who is an artist, who rejects the advances of Marie's mother, and finally marries Marie herself, etc. etc. You might change over some of the personages and scenes of the two books; but they are scarcely unequal in such merit as they possess, and both lazily readable in the fashion so often noted.
If any one asks where this readableness comes from, I do not think the answer is very difficult to give, and it will of itself supply a fuller explanation (the words apology or excuse are not really necessary) for the space here allotted to its possessor. It comes, no doubt, in the first place, from sheer and unanalysable narrative faculty, the secret of the business, the mystery in one sense of the mystery in the other. But it also comes, as it seems to me, from the fact that Paul de Kock is the very first of French novelists who, though he has no closely woven plot, no striking character, no vivid conversation or arresting phrases, is thoroughly real, and in the good, not the bad, sense quotidian. The statement may surprise some people and shock others, but I believe it can be as fully sustained as that other statement about the most different subject possible, the Astrée, which was quoted from Madame de Sévigné in the last volume. Paul knew the world he dealt with as well almost as Dickens56 knew his very different but somewhat corresponding one; and, unlike Dickens, the Frenchman had the good sense to meddle very little57 with worlds that he did not know. Of course it would be simply bête to take it for granted that the majority of Parisian shop- and work- and servant-girls have or had either the beauty or the amiability or the less praiseworthy qualities of his grisettes. But somehow or other one feels that the general ethos of the class has been caught.58 His bourgeois interiors and outings have the same real and not merely stagy quality; though his melodramatic or pantomimic endings may smack of "the boards" a little. The world to which he holds up the mirror may be a rather vulgar sort of Vanity Fair, but there are unfortunately few places more real than Vanity Fair, and few things less unreal than vulgarity.
The last sentence may lead to a remark of a graver kind than has been often indulged in here. Thackeray defined his own plan in Vanity Fair itself as at least partly an attempt to show people "living without God in the world." There certainly is not much godliness in the book, but he could not keep it out altogether; he would have been false to nature (which he never was) if he had. In Paul de Kock's extensive work, on the other hand, the exclusion is complete. It is not that there is any expressed Voltairianism as there is in Pigault. But though the people are married in church as well as at the mairie, and I remember one casual remark about a mother and her daughter going to mass, the whole spiritual region – religious, theological, ecclesiastical, and what not – is left blank. I do not remember so much as a curé figuring personally, though there may be one. And it is worth noting that Paul was born in 1794, and therefore passed his earliest childhood in the time when the Republic had actually gagged, if not stifled, religion in France – when children grew up, in some cases at any rate, without ever hearing the name of God, except perhaps in phrases like pardieu or parbleu. It is not my business or my intention to make reflections or draw inferences; I merely indicate the fact.
Another fact – perhaps so obvious already that it hardly needs stating – is that Paul de Kock is not exactly the person to "take a course of," unless under such conditions as those under which Mr. Carlyle took a course of a far superior writer, Marryat, and was (one regrets to remember) very ungrateful for the good it did him. He is (what some of his too critical countrymen have so falsely called Dumas) a mere amuseur, and his amusement is somewhat lacking in variety. Nevertheless, few critical readers59 of the present history will, I think, consider the space given to him here as wasted. He was a really powerful schoolmaster to bring the popular novel into still further popularity; and he made a distinct advance upon such persons as Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil – upon the former in comparative decency, if not of subject, of expression; upon the latter in getting close to actual life; and upon both in what may be called the furniture of his novels – the scene-painting, property-arranging, and general staging. This has been most unfairly assigned to Balzac as originator, not merely in France, but generally, whereas, not to mention our own men, Paul began to write nearly a decade before the beginning of those curious efforts, half-prenatal, of Balzac's, which we shall deal with later, and nearly two decades before Les Chouans. And, horrifying as the statement may be to some, I venture to say that his mere mise en scène is sometimes, if not always, better than Balzac's own, though he may be to that younger contemporary of his as a China orange to Lombard Street in respect of plot, character, thought, conversation, and all the higher elements, as they are commonly taken to be, of the novel.
The minors before 1830.
It has been said that the filling-up of this chapter, as to the rank and file of the novelists of 1800-1830, has been a matter of some difficulty in the peculiar circumstances of the case. I have, however, been enabled to read, for the first time or afresh, examples not merely of those writers who have preserved any notoriety, but of some who have
This, which is short and thoroughly lively, is, I imagine, the latest of Paul's good books. It is indeed so late that instead of the
The most interesting thing in it is a longish account by Jacques of his association with a travelling quack and fortune-teller, which at once reminds one of
Of course I am not comparing him with Paul on any other point.
Except in regard to the historical and other matters noticed above, hardly at all.
For a picture of an actual grisette, drawn by perhaps the greatest master of artistic realism (adjective and substantive so seldom found in company!) who ever lived, see that
Unless they start from the position that an English writer on the French novel is bound to follow – or at least to pay express attention to – French criticism of it. This position I respectfully but unalterably decline to accept. A critical tub that has no bottom of its own is the very worst Danaid's vessel in all the household gear of literature.