PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY ON THE FRENCH NOVEL.* Boons about novels are
seldom satisfactory. If you have read the novels yourself, you are seldom in agreement with the critic. If you have not, you are too much at his mercy. The second drawback is largely obviated by Professor Saints- bury's liberal citations and full summaries : these are all helpful, and that of Nodier's Le Songe d'Or is quite beautifully done. On this side the survey is illuminating and full of stimulus : it makes you want to read the originals. For the rest, a reader is disarmed on the one hand by the engaging candour of the critic, and his frank admissions of his limitations ; on the other by his amazing thoroughness—by an erudition which is never ponderous, a memory which is rarely at fault, an enthusiasm which never degenerates into effusiveness. For with all his admiration for French literature, he is not denationalized ; he remains unshaken in his devotion to Scott and Dickens and Thackeray. His standpoint is essentially English, but void of insularity. And if his style, with its cumbrous parentheses, alternations of academicism and slang, is not above criticism, he has a wonderful flair for style in others. Footnotes are often tedious, but Professor Saintsbury's are an unfailing embellish- ment to his text, as well as a constant source of entertainment.
For excellent reasons, living writers are ruled out of his survey, which he describes as an attempt to " triangulate " critically a subject which he has already dealt with on many occasions in detail. Biographical notices are also omitted ; Professor. Saintsbury is concerned with novels rather than novelists, with what they wrote rather than what other critics, French or English, have written about them. He deals with his period in four part-s: the first being the seed-sowing, with a small crop but remarkable for influences; the second the wonderful outburst of 1830 and after ; the third the autumn of the Second Empire ; the fourth the decadence of the last quarter of the century. Of the group of writers who emerged before 1830, the outstanding figures are Mme. de Stael and Chateaubriand. To the author of Corinne he attributes the service of helping, though unconsciously, to emancipate the art from "sensibility," and of cultivating the aesthetic element; in the latter he finds a great pioneer of romanticism, a master of passion and pathos, the first to introduce prose-poetry into French fiction, and notable for the panoramic quality of his work. Simultaneously a group of " minors " were doing important work in the way of learning their trusiness, improving the technique, practising condensation and the art of omission. By way of contrast • A History of the French Nord (to the Close of the Nineteenth Century). By George Saintebury. Vol. 11., from 1500 to 1900. London ; Macmillan. ilea. net.]
With Paul de Kock and other experimenters in the sphere of the ordinary, Professor Saintsbury gives us a fascinating appreciation of the charm of Nodier, a writer who was too versatile to be great, but who "added new and important masterpieces to the glittering chain of short cameo-like narratives which form the peculiar glory of French literature " ; in whom "Our Lady of Dreams "—hitherto seldom revealed in French merriment or French sadness—" found the magician who could wake her from sleep."
Of the Titans of the Romantic period, Professor Saintabury takes Hugo first—" the greatest poet of France and one of the great poets of the world." Of Hugo's novels the estimate here given is severely critical Professor Saintsbury rightly casti- gates their absurdities, intolerable irrelevances, and prolixity ; their want of proportion, flux of rhetoric, and ineffectual irony. Yet he remarks finely of Les Travailleura de la Mer : "the thing is sad, delightful, and great. As life, you may say, it could not have happened ; as literature it could not but have happened, and has happened, at its best, divinely well" And Quatre- Vingt-Treize is "a great book in its fine wrong way." Hugo, he sums up, added much splendid matter to literature in his novels, but practically nowhere advanced the art of the novel. That service was freely rendered by Beyle as an efficacious influence rather than as practising novelist, who saw life steadily though not whole. "Happiness did not exist and virtue had hardly a place in his books " ; he was habitat's in sicto, but there was vitality in his dryness, and he proved "an analyst of ugliness for fictitious purposes of singular power." The "immense and wonderful work" of Baleso is duly but not idolatrously recognized. Professor Saintsbury insists with much cogency that Balzac's greatness and weakness consist in the fact that he evolved a new world out of himself. Even when he took human models, they had "not merely to receive the Balzacian image and superscription, but to be transmuted into creatures of a Baloaciont &dos. And it is in the humanity of this planet or system, much more than of our world, whereof his Contedieis the Comedy—a Comedie Balzacienne." Balza° saw little of the society he wrote about so often, but his clairvoyance and prevision were marvellous. (Professor Saintsbury needs not to be reminded of the extraordinary forecast of the develop- ment of modern music in Gambara and Matointillo Doni.) His range of experimentation was immense, yet his influence was limited. Professor Saintsbury regards him as much more der Einzige in novel-writing than Jean Paul in novel- writing or anything else. He lacked supreme distinction of style, and above all the quality of "delightfulness." But at his greatest, as in Euginie Grande, "you have come to one of the ultimate things : the flammantia moenia mundi of the world of fiction forbid any one to go further at this particular point."
George Sand is not one of Professor Sairdsbury's favourites, though he allows her to be supreme in conversation and some- times unsurpassable in description. Fecundity and fecundity were hers ; her style was excellent, but too facile to be first, rate; he denies her title to be considered a very great crafts- wcepan in the art of novel-writing. But then Professor Saints- bury denies first-rate genius to all women novelists save Jane Austen. Gautier, Mediae, Gerard de Norval, Allred de Musset, and Vigny are grouped under "The Novel of Style." Gautier ita freely quoted to illustrate his wonderful manner of telling a story, and his gift of humour, rare in French writers since Rabelais and Moliere. As a teller of " short, shorter, or shortest stories" he is placed in the first rank with Charles de Bernard, Maui:me:went, and Merimee. Except that he had more head than heart, Professor Saintsbury has hardly any fault to find with the author of Colomba and Carmen, "a. late Classical with a strong Romantic ?tins." For Gerard de Norval he has a great kindness in virtue of a strange and exquisite blending of dream and reality ; and he renders full justice to the "melancholy magnificence" of Vigny. From the " minors " of 1830— Bandeau, Charles de Bernard, Eugene Sue, Smile, Murger, and Achard—we pass to Dumas, Professor Saintsbury is a whole-hearted Alexandrophil, but here as always on this side idolatry. The charges of devilling and plagiarism are well handled and rebutted. The "ghosts" were useful; but they never could do anything great "on their own."
The limits of apace must be our excuse for passing briefly over the remaining chapters of this fascinating survey. Pro- fessor Saintsbury revises hie earlier verdict on Dtunes file and places him high, though not te, the first 1.,aa1e He owns to adopting a less judicial and more impressionist standpoint in dealing with the later writers. Flaubert and Maupassant earn his highest praise. Daudet's addiction to "personality" comes in for severe animadversion. The Goncourts he cannot abide for the " rottenness " of their theory, and he considers Zola's achievement to have been greatest when he broke away from the fetters of his special formula. Generally speaking, he finds more pleasure in the" non-Naturals "—Feuillet, Cherbuliez, Droz, and Gaboriau—than in the Naturalists. Good craftsman- ship he always respects, but in the last resort the secret of great novel-writing defies analysis. Professor Saintabury compares it with the Chinese silk dyers, who never make two pieces of just the same shade, and couldn't if they tried :— " They take handful of different dyes, measured and mixed. as it seems, at random. Now that is the way God, and, in a lesser degree, the great artists work, and the result is living creatures, according to the limitations of artistic) and the no- limitations of natural life. The others weigh out a dram of lust, a scruple of cleverness, an ounce of malice, half-an-ounce of superficial good manners, dzo., and say : Here is a character for you, type No. 123452 And it is not a living character at all. But having been made by regular synthesis, it can be regularly analysed, and people say : Oh, how elever he is.' The first product, having grown rather than been made, defies analysis, and they say : How commonplace "
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