BOOKS.
A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL..
Ten fascinating book leaven us marvelling anew at Professor Saintsbury's erudition, and at the sustained power of the French literary genius. Let us first congratulate the author on his industry, his enthusiasm, and his unconquerable light-heartedness. He eeems to have read everything that ever attracted attention in Frame, from the early Lives of saints and the Chansons de Geste down to the romances which beguiled the aristocrats in the Temple or the Committee of Public Safety in their scant hours of leisure. He has not only road a large library of French fiction—a term construed in its broadest sense—but he has digested it, giving neat little summaries of many of the books, with instructive and always amusing comments of his own. We have all heard of Macaulay's prieoner who, being offered the alternative of reading Guieciardini or returning to the galleys, chose without hesitation to be chained anew to his oar. Professor Saintabury is the exact antithesis of that Philistine gaol-bird. For him GuiceiardinCe Histories would have no terrors comparable to the penalty of being deprived of books. He has read all the epics of chivalry and the romans d'aventures like Partsrtoper of .1310i4, the Fabliaux and the fifteenth- century stories like Petit Jehan de Saintre, and the vast body of romance labelled Amadia de Caul& He, almost alone, we suppose, of living men, has toiled through the famous Artamene oa Le frond Cyrus of Madeleine de Souddry, which fills ten parts of over a thousand pages each, and survives to render an intelligible account of his enterprise. Moreover, he has read most of the other works of that heroic and colossal type which delighted Edith Bellenden in Clydesdale, as we know from Old Mortality, and he can compare these twenty-deckers with one another. He regards them as a " rest-cure," of which the military physicians might take note :— " If I were sent to twelve months' imprisonment of a mild descrip- tion, and allowed to choose a library, I should include in it, from the heroic or semi-heroic division, Cidie, La Calprenede's two chief books, Gomberville's Poleranclre, and Gombauld's Endimion (this partly for the pictures), with, as a matter of course, the Aetris, and a choice of one other. By reading slowly and savouring' the process, I should imagine that, with one's memories of other things, they might be able to last for a year. And it would be one of the best kind of fellows for the brain."
The many-volumed Conies des Pies and the multitude of eighteenth-century tales were nothing to the student of Le Grand Cyrus, but few English readers can have covered so much of this carder but often arid ground as Professor Saintsbury, and fewer still could give so coherent and attractive an account of their literary travels.
We pass to the subject, and would at once emphasize our sense of the debt which the civilized world owes to France. That is the chief lesson of Professor Saintsbury's book. For a thousand years the French mind has been almost continuously at work, providing stories for the edification and amusement of mankind. No other nation has played each a part as an entertainer, and therefore as an educator. Though Italy, and Spain to a less degree, exercised an immense influence in certain periods, and England in the last two centuries and Germany in the age of Goethe and Kant have appealed to the reading public of the world through their literature, yet French authors have always had delighted readers far beyond the borders of France. Even now, when the English language has conquered BO much of the world, French novels and plays have a wider vogue than our own throughout Europe and in Spanish America, and up to the close of the eighteenth century, where Professor Saintsbury'S first volume ends, French literature was beyond question more widely read than any other. We should be wrong if we ascribed this to the fashion sot by the Grand Monarque. Louis XIV. was the greatest Prince in Christendom, and all lesser Princes sped his Court and his tastes, and read Le Grand Cyrus as he did. But French literature was just as potent and as popular with foreigners long before France was a mighty political Power. Chrestien de Troyes, or whoever wrote the Arthurian romances in the late twelfth century, lived in a sorely distracted France, on which her neighbours were preying, and the later tales of adventure were produced amidst the Hundred Years' War to delight and soothe mediaeval Europe. The literary greatness of France was far older than her political greatness, and was independent of it. The fortunes of the French Monarchy waxed and waned, but the French romancer continued to rule all hearts. Professor Saintabury is too intent on describing each phase in that astonishing development • A rfistorn of the French Novel (Pau asse of the Nineteenth Century>. By George Ma SaInt act.,abory. Vol. I., "From the aVonIng to 1800." Landon: Macmillan sad Co. to stop and Make general surveys, but we may quote his closing summary :- " France possibly did not invent Romance ; no man or men could do that ; it was a sort of deferred heritage which Humankind, like the Heir of Lynne, discovered when it was ready to hang itself (speaking in terms of literature) during the Dark Ages. But she certainly grew the seed for all other countries, and dispersed the growth to the ends of the earth. Very mush the same was the case with the short tale in the ' Middle ' period. From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth (both included) she entered upon a curious kind of wilderness, studded with oases of a more curious character still. In one of them Rabelais was born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding—more fortunate than the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen—was born Pentagruelism. In another Dame Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it was con- summate. None of these happy sojourns produced a Don Quixote or a Ton, Jones, but divers smaller things resulted. And again and again, as had happened in the Middle Ages themselves, but on a smaller scale, what F•rance did found development and improve- ment in other lands ; while her own miniature masterpieces, from the beat of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the Heptameron, through all others that we noticed down to Adolphe, showed the enormous power which was working half blindly. How the strength got eyes, and the eyes found the right objects to fix upon, must be left, if fortune favour, for the next volume to tell."
It will be seen from this quotation that the author, with all his enthusiasm, retains his privileges as a stern critic. He finds, of course, much to condemn as dull or distasteful, though his adroit handling of these matters will give no offence to the most sensitive. But we like the earnestness with which he strives to see the best side of each author and to do justice to genius wherever it may be. His chapter on Rabelais, for instance, seems to us excellent. He regards Rabelais not only as a great humorist but as " a very great novelist," because he is always readable, because 110 tells a story, and because he can create a character—above all, that of Panurge:- " Many doubtful things have been said about this meet remark- able personage. He has been fathered upon the Cingar of Folengo, which is too much of a complement to that creation of the great Macaronis, and Falstaff has been fathered upon him, which is distinctly unfair to Falstaff. Sir John has absolutely noticing of the ill-nature which, characterises both Cingar and Panurge ; and Panurge is an actual and contemptible coward, while many good wits have doubted whether Falstaff is, in the true some, a coward at all. But Panurge is certainly one thing—the first distinct and striking character in prose fiction. Morally, of course, there is little to be said for him, except that, when he has no temptations to the contrary, he is a • good fellow ' enough. As a human example of mimesis in the true Greek sense, not of ' incitation' but of fictitious creation,' he is, once more, the first real character in wean fiction—the ancestor, in the literary sense, of the mighty company in which he has been followed by the similar creations of the masters from Cervantes to Thackeray."
The author's entertaining account of Le Grand Cyrus, to which we must refer again, brings out the important fact that, despite its terrible prolixity, the book has a real plot, skilfully worked out to the end, and thus marks a definite advance from the formless chronicle type of Amadis or the older romances. Its myriad heroes and heroines unfortunately lacked character, though they possessed many fine qualities. Of character-drawing in the modern sense we have a foretaste in Furetitre and Scarron, who began to write stories of comparatively humble life mainly to ridicule the heroic romances—just as Fielding began Joseph Andrews as parody on Richardson—and found that they had invented a literary form. Losage's Gil Bias, the first French novel to become in its original shape a permanent favourite, all the world over, opened a still wider field. " It is hardly an extravagance to say that every novel of miscellaneous adventure since its date owes something, directly or indirectly, to Gil Bias." But the author reminds us that Lesege was essentially a cosmopolitan at heart, and that the French, though proud of his reputation, are not his enthusiastic admirers. His successors Marivaux, whose Marianne will cer- tainly gain new readers from Professor Saintabury's appreciative criticism, and Prevost were thoroughly French. His estimate of Manes Lescaut is admirable, though, like every one else, he fails to explain how it was that Prevost, who wrote so many dull books, should have succeeded in writing this one perfect story, the attraction of which lies " in its marvellous humanity, its equally marvellous grasp of character, and the intense, the absolutely shattering pathos of the relations of the hero and heroine." Professor Sainte- bury's chapter on " The Philosophe Novel," of which Voltaire's Candide and Rousseau's Emile and La Nouvelle lieledee are of course the greet examples, is interesting, but he evidently felt that there was not much new to say. The volume ends with au account of the novels of " Sensibility " of the late eighteenth century, which had developed direct from La Princesae de Clive., of a hundred years earlier and led to a wonderful crop of fiction throughout the Napoleonic period in Europe, and not least, by a partial reaction, to the work of Jane Austen in England. Professor Saintsbury has not spared himself in preparing this learned and highly entertaining history, but he will have his reward in the gratitude of all who care for literature. We can only hope that he will be able to complete his history of the nineteenth century, when the French II0V01 reached its full growth at Met.
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