and let the rest be "wrop in mystery," it would probably have been the best way. But the bulk of the book is beyond improvement: and there is a fluid grace about the autobiographical _recit_ which is very rare indeed, at least in French, except in the unfortunate Gerard de Nerval, who was akin to Cazotte in many ways, and actually edited him. A very carping critic may object to the not obvious nor afterwards explained interposition of a pretty little spaniel between the original diabolic avatar of the hideous camel"s head and the subsequent incarnation of the beautiful Biondetto-Biondetta; especially as the later employment of another dog, to prevent Alvare"s succ.u.mbing to temptation earlier than he did, is confusing. But this would be "seeking a knot in a reed."
Perhaps the greatest merit of the story, next to the pure tale-telling charm above noted, is the singular taste and skill with which Biondetta, except for her repugnance to the marriage ceremony, is prevented from showing the slightest diabolic character during her long cohabitation with Alvare, and her very "comingnesses" are arranged so as to give the idea, not in the least of a temptress, but of an extra-innocent but quite natural _ingenue_. Monk Lewis, of course, knew Cazotte, but he has coa.r.s.ened his original woefully. It may perhaps be added that the first ill.u.s.trations, reproduced in Gerard"s edition as curiosities, are such in the highest degree. They are ushered with an ironic Preface: and they sometimes make one rub one"s eyes and wonder whether Futurism and Cubism are not, like so many other things, merely recooked cabbage.
CHAPTER IX
THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL--II
_From "Francion" to "La Princesse de Cleves"_--_Anthony Hamilton_[247]
[Sidenote: The material of the chapter.]
Justice has, it is hoped, been done to the great cla.s.ses of fict.i.tious work which, during the seventeenth century, made fiction, as such, popular with high and of low in France. But it is one of the not very numerous safe generalisations or inductions which may be fished out from the wide and treacherous Syrtes of the history of literature, that it is not as a rule from "cla.s.ses" that the best work comes; and that, when it does so come, it generally represents a sort of outside and uncovenanted element or const.i.tuent of the cla.s.s. We have, unfortunately, lost the Greek epic, as a cla.s.s; but we know enough about it, with its few specimens, such as Apollonius Rhodius earlier and Nonnus later, to warn us that, if we had more, we should find Homer not merely better, but different, and this though probably every pract.i.tioner was at least trying to imitate or surpa.s.s Homer. Dante stands in no cla.s.s at all, nor does Milton, nor does Sh.e.l.ley; and though Shakespeare indulgently permits himself to be cla.s.sed as an "Elizabethan dramatist," what strikes true critics most is again hardly more his "betterness" than his difference. The very astonishment with which we sometimes say of Webster, Dekker, Middleton, that they come near Shakespeare, is not due, as foolish people say, to any only less foolish idolatry, but to a true critical surprise at the approximation of things usually so very distinct.
The examples in higher forms of literature just chosen for comparison do not, of course, show any wish in the chooser to even any French seventeenth-century novelist with Homer or Shakespeare, with Dante or Milton or Sh.e.l.ley. But the work noticed in the last chapter certainly includes nothing of strong idiosyncrasy. In other books scattered, in point of time of production, over great part of the period, such idiosyncrasy is to be found, though in very various measure. Now, idiosyncrasy is, if not the only difference or property, the inseparable accident of all great literature, and it may exist where literature is not exactly great. Moreover, like other abysses, it calls to, and calls into existence, yet more abysses of its own kind or not-kind; while school- and cla.s.s-work, however good, can never produce anything but more cla.s.s- and school-work, except by exciting the always dubious and sometimes very dangerous desire "to be different." The instances of this idiosyncrasy with which we shall now deal are the _Francion_ of Charles Sorel; the _Roman Comique_ of Paul Scarron; the _Roman Bourgeois_ of Antoine Furetiere; the _Voyages_, as they are commonly called (though the proper t.i.tle is different[248]), _a la Lune et au Soleil_, of Cyrano de Bergerac, and the _Princesse de Cleves_ of Mme. de La Fayette; while last of all will come the remarkable figure of Anthony Hamilton, less "single-speech"[249] than the others and than his namesake later, but possessor of greater genius than any.
[Sidenote: Sorel and _Francion_.]
The present writer has long ago been found fault with for paying too much attention to _Francion_, and he may possibly (if any one thinks it worth while) be found fault with again for placing it here. But he does so from no mere childish desire to persist in some rebuked naughtiness, but from a sincere belief in the possession by the book of some historical importance. Any one who, on Arnoldian principles, declines to take the historic estimate into account at all, is, on those principles, justified in neglecting it altogether; whether, on the other hand, such neglect does not justify a suspicion of the soundness of the principles themselves, is another question. Charles Sorel, historiographer of France, was a very voluminous and usually a very dull writer. His voluminousness, though beside the enormous compositions of the last chapter it is but a small thing, is not absent from _Francion_, nor is his dulness. Probably few people have read the book through, and I am not going to recommend anybody to do so. But the author does to some extent deserve the cruel praise of being "dull in a new way" (or at least of being evidently in quest of a new way to be dull in), as Johnson wrongfully said of Gray. His book is not a direct imitation of any one thing, though an attempt to adapt the Spanish picaresque style to French realities and fantasies is obvious enough, as it is likewise in Scarron and others. But this is mixed with all sorts of other adumbrations, if not wholly original, yet showing that quest of originality which has been commended. It is an almost impossible book to a.n.a.lyse, either in short or long measure. The hero wanders about France, and has all sorts of adventures, the recounting of which is not without touches of Rabelais, of the _Moyen de Parvenir_, perhaps of the rising fancies about the occult, which generated Rosicrucianism and "astral spirits" and the rest of it--a whole farrago, in short, of matters decent and indecent, congruous seldom and incongruous often. It is not like Sterne, because it is dull, and at the same time quasi-romantic; while "sensibility" had not come in, though we shall see it do so within the limits of this chapter. It has a resemblance, though not very much of one, to the rather later work of Cyrano. But it is most like two English novels of far higher merit which were not to appear for a century or a century and a half--Amory"s _John Buncle_ and Graves"s _Spiritual Quixote_. As it is well to mention things together without the danger of misleading those who run as they read, and mind the running rather than the reading, let me observe that the liveliest part of _Francion_ is duller than the dullest of _Buncle_, and duller still than the least lively thing in Graves. The points of resemblance are in pillar-to-postness, in the endeavour (here almost entirely a failure, but still an endeavour) to combine fancy with realism, and above all in freedom from following the rules of any "school." Realism in the good sense and originality were the two things that the novel had to achieve.
Sorel missed the first and only achieved a sort of "distanced" position in the second. But he tried--or groped--for both.
[Sidenote: The _Berger Extravagant_ and _Polyandre_.]
I am bound to say that in Sorel"s other chief works of fiction, the _Berger Extravagant_ and _Polyandre_, I find the same curious mixture of qualities which have made me more lenient than most critics to _Francion_. And I do not think it unfair to add that they also incline me still more to think that there was perhaps a little of the _Pereant qui ante nos_ feeling in Furetiere"s attack (_v. inf._ p. 288). Neither could possibly be called by any sane judge a good book, and both display the uncritical character,[250] the "pillar-to-postness," the marine-store and almost rubbish-heap promiscuity, of the more famous book. Like it, they are much too big.[251] But the _Berger Extravagant_, in applying (very early) the _Don Quixote_ method, as far as Sorel could manage it, to the _Astree_, is sometimes amusing and by no means always unjust. _Polyandre_ is, in part, by no means unlike an awkward first draft of a _Roman Bourgeois_. The scene in the former, where Lysis--the Extravagant Shepherd and the Don Quixote of the piece,--making an all-night sitting over a poem in honour of his mistress Charite (the Dulcinea), disturbs the unfortunate Clarimond--a sort of "bachelor," the sensible man of the book, and a would-be reformer of Lysis--by constant demands for a rhyme[252] or an epithet, is not bad. The victim revenges himself by giving the most ludicrous words he can think of, which Lysis duly works in, and at last allows Clarimond to go to sleep. But he is quickly waked by the poet running about and shouting, "I"ve got it! I"ve found it. The finest _reprise_ [= refrain] ever made!" And in _Polyandre_ there is a sentence (not the only one by many) which not only gives a _point de repere_ of an interesting kind in itself, but marks the beginning of the "_farrago libelli_ moderni": "Ils ont des mets qu"ils nomment des _bisques_; je doute si c"est potage ou frica.s.see."
Here we have (1) Evidence that Sorel was a man of observation, and took an interest in really interesting things.
(2) A date for the appearance, or the coming into fashion, of an important dish.
(3) An instance of the furnishing of fiction with something more than conventional adventure on the one hand, and conventional harangues or descriptions on the other.
(4) An interesting literary parallel; for here is the libelled "Charroselles" (_v. inf._ p. 288) two centuries beforehand, feeling a doubt, exactly similar to Thackeray"s, as to whether a _bouillabaisse_ should be called soup or broth, brew or stew. Those who understand the art and pastime of "book-fishing" will not go away with empty baskets from either of these neglected ponds.
[Sidenote: Scarron and the _Roman Comique_.]
Almost as different a person as can possibly be conceived from Sorel was Paul Scarron, Abbe, "Invalid to the Queen," husband of the future Mme.
de Maintenon, author of burlesques which did him no particular honour, of plays which, if not bad, were never first rate, of witticisms innumerable, most of which have perished, and of other things, besides being a hero of some facts and more legends; but author also of one book in our own subject of much intrinsic and more historical interest, and original also of pa.s.sages in later books more interesting still to all good wits. Not a lucky man in life (except for the possession of a lively wit and an imperturbable temper), he was never rich, and he suffered long and terribly from disease--one of the main subjects of his legend, but, after all discussions and carpings, looking most like rheumatoid arthritis, one of the most painful and incurable of ailments.
But Scarron was, and has been since, by no means unlucky in literature.
He had, though of course not an unvaried, a great popularity in a troubled and unscrupulous time: and long after his death two of the foremost novelists of his country selected him for honourable treatment of curiously different kinds. Somehow or other the introduction of men of letters of old time into modern books has not been usually very fortunate, except in the hands of Thackeray and a very few more. Among these latter instances may certainly be ranked the pleasant picture of Scarron"s house, and of the attention paid to him by the as yet unmarried Francoise d"Aubigne, in Dumas"s _Vingt Ans Apres_. Nor is it easy to think of any literary following that, while no doubt bettering, abstains so completely from robbing, insulting, or obscuring its model as does Gautier"s _Capitaine Fraca.s.se_.
It is, however, with this pleasant book itself that we are concerned.
Here again, of course, the picaresque model comes in, and there is a good deal of directly borrowed matter. But a much greater talent, and especially a much more acute and critical wit than Sorel"s, brings to that scheme the practical-artistic French gift, the application of which to the novel is, in fact, the subject of this whole chapter. Not unkindly judges have, it is true, p.r.o.nounced it not very amusing; and an uncritical comparer may find it injured by Gautier"s book. The older novel has, indeed, nothing of the magnificent style of the overture of this latter. _Le Chateau de la Misere_ is one of the finest things of the kind in French; for exciting incident there is no better duel in literature than that of Sigognac and Lampourde; and the delicate pastel-like costumes and manners and love-making of Gautier"s longest and most ambitious romance are not to be expected in the rough "rhyparography"[253] of the seventeenth century. But in itself the _Roman Comique_ is no small performance, and historically it is almost great. We have in it, indeed, got entirely out of the pure romance; but we have also got out of the _fatrasie_--the mingle-mangle of story, jargon, nonsense, and what not,--out of the mere tale of adventure, out of the mere tale of _grivoiserie_. We have borrowed the comic dramatist"s mirror--the "Muses" Looking-gla.s.s"--and are holding it up to nature without the intervention of the conventionalities of the stage.
The company to which we are introduced is, no doubt, pursuing a somewhat artificial vocation; but it is pursuing it in the way of real life, as many live men and women have pursued it. The mask itself may be of their trade and cla.s.s; but it is taken off them, and they are not merely _personae_, they are persons.
To re-read the _Roman Comique_ just after reading the _Grand Cyrus_ came into the present plan partly by design and partly by accident; but I had not fully antic.i.p.ated the advantage of doing so. The contrast of the two, and the general relation between them could, indeed, escape no one; but an interval of a great many years since the last reading of Scarron"s work had not unnaturally caused forgetfulness of the deliberate and minute manner in which he himself points that contrast, and even now and then satirises the _Cyrus_ by name. The system of inset _Histoires_,[254] beginning with the well-told if borrowed story of Don Carlos of Aragon and his "Invisible Mistress," is, indeed, hardly a contrast except in point of the respective lengths of the digressions, nor does it seem to be meant as a parody. It has been said that this "inset" system, whether borrowed from the episodes of the ancients or descended from the constant divagations of the mediaeval romances, is very old, and proved itself uncommonly tenacious of life. But the difference between the opening of the two books can hardly have been other than intentional on the part of the later writer; and it is a very memorable one, showing nothing less than the difference between romance and novel, between academic generalities and "realist" particularism, and between not a few other pairs of opposites. It has been fully allowed that the overture of the _Grand Cyrus_ is by no means devoid of action, even of bustle, and that it is well done of its kind. But that kind is strongly marked in the very fact that there is a sort of faintness in it. The burning of Sinope, the distant vessel, the street-fighting that follows, are what may be called "cartoonish"--large washes of pale colour. The talk, such as there is, is stage-talk of the pseudo-grand style. It is curious that Scarron himself speaks of the _Cyrus_ as being the most "furnitured" romance, _le roman le plus meuble_, that he knows. To a modern eye the interiors are anything but distinct, despite the elaborate _ecphrases_, some of which have been quoted.[255]
Now turn to the opening pa.s.sage of the _Roman Comique_, which strikes the new note most sharply. It is rather well known, probably even to some who have not read the original or Tom Brown"s congenial translation of it; for it has been largely laid under contribution by the innumerable writers about a much greater person than Scarron, Moliere.
The experiences of the _Ill.u.s.tre Theatre_ were a little later, and apparently not so sordid as those of the company of which Scarron const.i.tuted himself historiographer; but they cannot have been very dissimilar in general kind, and many of the characteristics, such as the a.s.sumption now of fantastic names, "Le Destin," "La Rancune," etc., now of rococo-romantic ones, such as "Mademoiselle de l"etoile," remained long unaltered. But perhaps a fresh translation may be attempted, and the attempt permitted. For though the piece, of course, has recent Spanish and even older Italian examples of a kind, still the change in what may be called "particular universality" is remarkable.
[Sidenote: The opening scene of this.]
The sun had finished more than half his course, and his chariot, having reached the slope of the world, was running quicker than he wished. If his horses had chosen to avail themselves of the drop of the road, they would have got through what remained of the day in less than half or quarter of an hour; but instead of pulling at full strength, they merely amused themselves by curvetting, as they drew in a salt air, which told them the sea, wherein men say their master goes to bed every night, was close at hand. To speak more like a man of this world, and more intelligibly, it was between five and six o"clock, when a cart came into the market-place of Le Mans. This cart was drawn by four very lean oxen, with, for leader, a brood-mare, whose foal scampered about round the cart, like a silly little thing as it was. The cart was full of boxes and trunks, and of great bundles of painted canvas, which made a sort of pyramid, on the top of which appeared a damsel, dressed partly as for town, partly for country. By the side of the cart walked a young man, as ill-dressed as he was good-looking. He had on his face a great patch, which covered one eye and half his cheek, and he carried a large fowling-piece on his shoulder.
With this he had slain divers magpies, jays, and crows; and they made a sort of bandoleer round him, from the bottom whereof hung a pullet and a gosling, looking very like the result of a plundering expedition. Instead of a hat he had only a night-cap, with garters of divers colours twisted round it, which headgear looked like a very unfinished sketch of a turban. His coat was a jacket of grey stuff, girt with a strap, which served also as a sword-belt, the sword being so long that it wanted a fork to draw it neatly for use. He wore breeches trussed, with stockings attached to them, as actors do when they play an ancient hero; and he had, instead of shoes, buskins of a cla.s.sical pattern, muddied up to the ankle. An old man, more ordinarily but still very ill-dressed, walked beside him. He carried on his shoulders a ba.s.s-viol, and as he stooped a little in walking, one might, at a distance, have taken him for a large tortoise walking on its hind legs. Some critic may perhaps murmur at this comparison; but I am speaking of the big tortoises they have in the Indies, and besides I use it at my own risk. Let us return to our caravan.
It pa.s.sed in front of the tennis-court called the Doe, at the door of which were gathered a number of the topping citizens of the town. The novel appearance of the conveyance and team, and the noise of the mob who had gathered round the cart, induced these honourable burgomasters to cast an eye upon the strangers; and among others a Deputy-Provost named La Rappiniere came up, accosted them, and, with the authority of a magistrate, asked who they were. The young man of whom I have just spoken replied, and without touching his turban (inasmuch as with one of his hands he held his gun and with the other the hilt of his sword, lest it should get between his legs) told the Provost that they were French by birth, actors by profession, that his stage-name was Le Destin, that of his old comrade La Rancune, and that of the lady who was perched like a hen on the top of their baggage, La Caverne. This odd name made some of the company laugh; whereat the young actor added that it ought not to seem stranger to men with their wits about them than "La Montagne," "La Vallee," "La Rose," or "L"epine." The talk was interrupted by certain sounds of blows and oaths which were heard from the front of the cart. It was the tennis-court attendant, who had struck the carter without warning, because the oxen and the mare were making too free with a heap of hay which lay before the door. The row was stopped, and the mistress of the court, who was fonder of plays than of sermons or vespers, gave leave, with a generosity unheard of in her kind, to the carter to bait his beasts to their fill. He accepted her offer, and, while the beasts ate, the author rested for a time, and set to work to think what he should say in the next chapter.
The sally in the last sentence, with the other about the tortoise, and the mock solemnity of the opening, ill.u.s.trate two special characteristics, which will be noticed below, and which may be taken in each case as a sort of revulsion from, or parody of, the solemn ways of the regular romance. There may be even a special reference to the "_Phebus_" the technical name or nickname of the "high language" in these repeated burlesque introductions of the sun. And the almost pert flings and cabrioles of the narrator form a still more obvious and direct Declaration of Independence. But these are mere details, almost trivial compared with the striking contrast of the whole presentation and _faire_ of the piece, when taken together with most of the subjects of the last chapter.
It may require a little, but it should not require much, knowledge of literary history to see how modern this is; it should surely require none to see how vivid it is--how the sharpness of an etching and the colour of a bold picture take the place of the shadowy "academies" of previous French writers.[256] There may be a very little exaggeration even here--in other parts of the book there is certainly some--and Scarron never could forget his tendency to that form of exaggeration which is called burlesque. But the stuff and substance of the piece is reality.
An important item of the same change is to be found in the management of the insets, or some of them. One of the longest and most important is the autobiographical history of Le Destin or Destin (the article is often dropped), the tall young man with the patch on his face. But this is not thrust bodily into the other body of the story, _Cyrus_-fashion; it is alternated with the pa.s.sages of that story itself, and that in a comparatively natural manner--night or some startling accident interrupting it; while how even courtiers could find breath to tell, or patience and time to hear, some of the interludes of the _Cyrus_ and its fellows is altogether past comprehension. There is some coa.r.s.eness in Scarron--he would not be a comic writer of the seventeenth century if there were none. Not very long after the beginning the tale is interrupted by a long account of an unseemly practical joke which surely could amuse no mortal after a certain stage of schoolboyhood. But there is little or no positive indecency: the book contrasts not more remarkably with the Aristophanic indulgence of the sixteenth century than with the sn.i.g.g.e.ring suggestiveness of the eighteenth. Some remnants of the Heroic convention (which, after all, did to a great extent reflect the actual manners of the time) remain, such as the obligatory "compliment." Le Destin is ready to hang himself because, at his first meeting with the beautiful Leonore, his shyness prevents his getting a proper "compliment" out. On the other hand, the demand for _esprit_, which was confined in the Heroics to a few privileged characters, now becomes almost universal. There are tricks, but fairly novel tricks--affectations like "I don"t know what they did next" and the others noted above: while the famous rhetorical beginnings of chapters appear not only at the very outset, but at the opening of the second volume, "Le Soleil donnant aplomb sur les antipodes,"--things which a century later Fielding, and two centuries later d.i.c.kens, did not disdain to imitate.
Scarron did not live to finish the book, and the third part or volume, which was tinkered--still more the _Suite_, which was added--by somebody else, are very inferior. The somewhat unfavourable opinions referred to above may be partly based on the undoubted fact that the story is rather formless; that its most important machinery is dependent, after all, on the old _rapt_ or abduction, the heroines of which are Mademoiselle de l"etoile (nominally Le Destin"s sister, really his love, and at the end his wife) and Angelique, daughter of La Caverne, who is provided with a lover and husband of 12,000 (_livres_) a year in the person of Leandre, one of the stock theatrical names, professedly "valet" to Le Destin, but really a country gentleman"s son. Thus everybody is somebody else, again in the old way. Another, and to some tastes a more serious, blot may be found in the everlasting practical jokes of the knock-about kind, inflicted on the unfortunate Ragotin, a sort of amateur member of the troupe. But again these "_low_ jinks" were an obvious reaction from (just as the ceremonies were followings of) the solemnity of the Heroics; and they continued to be popular for nearly two hundred years, as English readers full well do know. Nevertheless these defects merely accompany--they do not mar or still less destroy--the striking characteristics of progress which appear with them, and which, without any elaborate abstract of the book, have been set forth somewhat carefully in the preceding pages. Above all, there is a real and considerable attempt at character, a trifle _typy_ and stagy perhaps, but still aiming at something better; and the older _nouvelle_-fashion is not merely drawn upon, but improved upon, for curious anecdotes, striking situations, effective names. Under the latter heads it is noteworthy that Gautier simply "lifted" the name Sigognac from Scarron, though he attached it to a very different personage; and that Dumas got, from the same source, the startling incident of Aramis suddenly descending on the crupper of D"Artagnan"s horse. The jokes may, of course, amuse or not different persons, and even different moods of the same person; the practical ones, as has been hinted, may pall, even when they are not merely vulgar. Practical joking had a long hold of literature, as of life; and it would be sanguine to think that it is dead. Izaak Walton, a curious contemporary--"disparate," as the French say, of Scarron, would not quite have liked the quarrel between the dying inn-keeper, who insists on being buried in his oldest sheet, full of holes and stains, and his wife, who asks him, from a sense rather of decency than of affection, how he can possibly think of appearing thus clad in the Valley of Jehoshaphat? But there is something in the book for many tastes, and a good deal more for the student of the history of the novel.
[Sidenote: Furetiere and the _Roman Bourgeois_.]
The couplet-contrast of the Comic Romance of Scarron and the "Bourgeois"
Romance of Furetiere[257] is one of the most curious among the minor phenomena of literary history; but it repeats itself in that history so often that it becomes, by acc.u.mulation, hardly minor. There is a vast difference between Furetiere and Miss Austen, and a still vaster one between Scarron and Scott; but the two French books stand to each other, on however much lower a step of the stair, very much as _Waverley_ stands to _Pride and Prejudice_, and they carry on a common revulsion against their forerunners and a common quest for newer and better developments. The _Roman Bourgeois_, indeed, is more definitely, more explicitly, and in further ways of exodus, a departure from the subjects and treatment of most of the books noticed in the last chapter. It is true that its author attributes to the reading of the regular romances the conversion of his pretty idiot Javotte from a mere idiot to something that can, at any rate, hold her own in conversation, and take an interest in life.[258] But he also adds the consequence of her elopement, without apparently any prospect of marriage, but with an accomplished gentleman who has helped her to _esprit_ by introducing her to those very same romances; and he has numerous distinct girds at his predecessors, including one at the multiplied abductions of Mandane herself. Moreover his inset tale _L"Amour egare_ (itself something of a parody), which contains most of the "key"-matter, includes a satirical account (not uncomplimentary to her intellectual, but exceedingly so to her physical characteristics) of "Sapho" herself. For after declining to give a full description of poor Madeleine, for fear of disgusting his readers, he tells us, in mentioning the extravagant compliments addressed to her in verse, that she only resembled the Sun in having a complexion yellowed by jaundice; the Moon in being freckled; and the Dawn in having a red tip to her nose!
But this last ill-mannered particularity ill.u.s.trates the character, and in its way the value, of the whole book. A romance, or indeed in the proper sense a story--that is to say, _one_ story,--it certainly is not: the author admits the fact frankly, not to say boisterously, and his t.i.tle seems to have been definitely suggested by Scarron"s. The two parts have absolutely no connection with one another, except that a single personage, who has played a very subordinate part in the first, plays a prominent but entirely different one in the second. This second is wholly occupied by legal matters (Furetiere had been "bred to the law"), and the humours and amours of a certain female litigant, Collantine, to whom Racine and Wycherley owe something, with the unlucky author "Charroselles"[259] and a subordinate judge, Belastre, who has been pitch-forked by interest into a place which he finally loses by his utter incapacity and misconduct. To understand it requires even more knowledge of old French law terms generally than parts of Balzac do of specially commercial and financial lingo.
This "specialising" of the novel is perhaps of more importance than interest; but interest itself may be found in the First Part, where there is, if not much, rather more of a story, some positive character-drawing, a fair amount of smart phrase, and a great deal of lively painting of manners. There is still a good deal of law, to which profession most of the male characters belong, but there are plentiful compensations.
As far as there is any real story or history, it is that of two girls, both of the legal _bourgeoisie_ by rank. The prettier, Javotte, has been briefly described above. She is the daughter of a rich attorney, and has, before her emanc.i.p.ation and elopement, two suitors, both advocates; the one, Nicodeme, young, handsome, well dressed, and a great flirt, but feather-headed; the other, Bedout, a middle-aged sloven, collector, and at the same time miser, but very well off. The second heroine, Lucrece, is also handsome, though rather less so than Javotte: but she has plenty of wits. She is, however, in an unfortunate position, being an orphan with no fortune, and living with an uncle and aunt, the latter of whom has a pa.s.sion for gaming, and keeps open house for it, so that Lucrece sees rather undesirable society. Despite her wits, she falls a victim to a rascally marquis, who first gives her a written promise of marriage, and afterwards, by one of the dirtiest tricks ever imagined by a novelist--a trick which, strange to say, the present writer does not remember to have seen in any other book, obvious though it is--steals it.[260] Fortunately for her, Nicodeme, who is of her acquaintance, and a general lover, has also given her, though not in earnest and for no serious "consideration," a similar promise: and by the help of a busybody legal friend she gets 2000 crowns out of him to prevent an action for breach. And, finally, Bedout, after displacing the unlucky Nicodeme (thus left doubly in the cold), and being himself thrown over by Javotte"s elopement, takes to wife, being induced to do so by a cousin, Lucrece herself, in blissful ignorance (which is never removed) of her past. The cousin, Laurence, has also been the link of these parts of the tale with an episode of _precieuse_ society in which the above-mentioned inset is told; a fourth feminine character, Hyppolyte (_vice_ Philipote), of some individuality, is introduced; Javotte makes a greater fool of herself than ever; and her future seducer, Pancrace, makes his appearance.
Thus reduced to "argument" form, the story may seem even more modern than it really is, and the censures, apologies, etc., put forward above may appear rather unjust. But few people will continue to think so after reading the book. The materials, especially with the "tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs"
to be mentioned presently, would have made a very good novel of the completest kind. But, once more, the time had not come, though Furetiere was, however unconsciously, doing his best to bring it on. One fault, not quite so easy to define as to feel, is prominent, and continued to be so in all the best novels, or parts of novels, till nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. There is far too much mere _narration_--the things being not smartly brought before the mind"s eye as _being_ done, and to the mind"s ear as _being_ said, but recounted, sometimes not even as present things, but as things that _have been_ said or done already.
This gives a flatness, which is further increased by the habit of not breaking up even the conversation into fresh paragraphs and lines, but running the whole on in solid page-blocks for several pages together.
Yet even if this mechanical mistake were as mechanically redressed,[261]
the original fault would remain and others would still appear. A scene between Javotte and Lucrece, to give one instance only, would enliven the book enormously; while, on the other hand, we could very well spare one of the few pa.s.sages in which Nicodeme is allowed to be more than the subject of a _recit_, and which partakes of the knock-about character so long popular, the young man and Javotte b.u.mping each other"s foreheads by an awkward slip in saluting, after which he first upsets a piece of porcelain and then drags a mirror down upon himself. There is "action"
enough here; while, on the other hand, the important and promising situations of the two promises to Lucrece, and the stealing by the Marquis of his, are left in the flattest fashion of "recount." But it was very long indeed before novelists understood this matter, and as late as Hope"s famous _Anastasius_ the fault is present, apparently to the author"s knowledge, though he has not removed it.
To a reader of the book who does not know, or care to pay attention to, the history of the matter, the opening of the _Roman Bourgeois_ may seem to promise something quite free, or at any rate much more free than is actually the case, from this fault. But, as we have seen, they generally took some care of their openings, and Furetiere availed himself of a custom possibly, to present readers, especially those not of the Roman Church, possessing an air of oddity, and therefore of freshness, which it certainly had not to those of his own day. This was the curious fashion of _quete_ or collection at church--not by a commonplace verger, or by respectable churchwardens and sidesmen, but by the prettiest girl whom the _cure_ could pitch upon, dressed in her best, and lavishing smiles upon the congregation to induce them to give as lavishly, and to enable her to make a "record" amount.
The original meeting of Nicodeme and the fair Javotte takes place in this wise, and enables the author to enlighten us further as to matters quite proper for novel treatment.[262] The device of keeping gold and large silver pieces uppermost in the open "plate"; the counter-balancing mischief of covering them with a handful of copper; the licensed habit, a rather dangerous one surely, of taking "change" out of that plate, which enables the aspirant for the girl"s favour to clear away the obnoxious _sous_ as change for a whole pistole--all this has a kind of attraction for which you may search the more than myriad pages of _Artamene_ without finding it. The daughter of a citizen"s family, in the French seventeenth century, was kept with a strictness which perhaps explains a good deal in the conduct of an Agnes or an Isabelle in comedy. She was almost always tied to her mother"s ap.r.o.n-strings, and even an accepted lover had to carry on his courtship under the very superfluous number of _six_ eyes at least. But the Church was misericordious. The custom of giving and receiving holy water could be improved by the resources of amatory science; but this of the _quete_ was, it would seem, still more full of opportunity. Apparently (perhaps because in these city parishes the church was always close by, and the whole proceedings public) the fair _queteuse_ was allowed to walk home alone; and in this instance Nicodeme, having ground-baited with his pistole, is permitted to accompany Javotte Vollichon to her father"s door--her extreme beauty making up for the equally extreme silliness of her replies to his observations.
The possible objection that these things, fresh and interesting to us, were ordinary and ba.n.a.l to them, would be a rather shallow one. The point is that, in previous fiction, circ.u.mstantial verisimilitude of this kind had hardly been tried at all. So it is with the incident of Nicodeme sending a rabbit (supposed to be from his own estate, but really from the market--a joke not peculiar to Paris, but specially favoured there), or losing at bowls a capon, to old Vollichon, and on the strength of each inviting himself to dinner; the fresh girds at the extraordinary and still not quite accountable plenty of marquises (Scarron, if I remember rightly, has the verb _se marquiser_); and the contributory (or, as the ancients would have said, symbolic) dinners--as it were, picnics at home--of _bourgeois_ society at each other"s houses, with not a few other things. A curious plan of a fashion-review, with patterns for the benefit of ladies, is specially noticeable at a period so early in the history of periodicals generally, and is one of the not few points in which there is a certain resemblance between Furetiere and Defoe.
It is in this daring to be quotidian and contemporary that his claim to a position in the history of the novel mainly consists. Some might add a third audacity, that of being "middle-cla.s.s." Scarron had dealt with barn-mummers and innkeepers and some mere riff-raff; but he had included not a few n.o.bles, and had indulged in fighting and other "n.o.ble"
subjects. There is no fighting in Furetiere, and his chief "n.o.ble"
figure--the rascal who robbed Lucrece of her virtue and her keys--is the sole figure of his cla.s.s, except Pancrace and the _precieuse_ Angelique. This is at once a practical protest against the common interpretation and extension of Aristotle"s prescription of "distinguished" subjects, and an unmistakable relinquishment of mere picaresque squalor. Above all, it points the way in practice, indirectly perhaps but inevitably, to the selection of subjects that the author really _knows_, and that he can treat with the small vivifying details given by such knowledge, and by such knowledge alone. There is an advance in character, an advance in "interior" description--the Vollichon family circle, the banter and the gambling at Lucrece"s home, the humour of a _precieuse_ meeting, etc. In fact, whatever be the defects[263] in the book, it may almost be called an advance all round.
A specimen of this, as of other pioneer novels, may not be superfluous; it is the first conversation, after the collection, between Nicodeme and Javotte.