Chapter X · (continued 2)
Reading edition
Still less so, though they contain some very lively passages, and are the chief locus for Crébillon's treatment of the actual trio of husband, wife, and lover, are the Lettres de la Marquise de M—— au Comte de P——. The scene in which the husband—unfaithful, peevish, and a petit maître—enters his wife's room to find an ancient, gouty Marquis, who cannot get off his knees quick enough, and terminates the situation with all the aplomb of the Regency, is rather nice: and the gradual "slide" of the at first quite virtuous writer (the wife herself, of course) is well depicted. But love-letters which are neither half-badinage—which these are not—nor wholly passionate—which these never are till the last,[348] when the writer is describing a state of things which Crébillon could not manage at all—are very difficult things to bring off, and Claude Prosper is not quite equal to the situation.
It will thus be seen that the objectors whom we have called A and B—or at least B—will find that they or he need not read all the pages of all the seven volumes to justify their views: and some other work, still to be mentioned, completes the exhibition. I confess, indeed, once more unblushingly, that I have not read every page of them myself. Had they fallen in my way forty years ago I should, no doubt, have done so; but forty years of critical experience and exercise give one the power, and grant one the right, of a more summary procedure in respect of matter thus postponed, unless it is perceived to be of very exceptional quality. These larger works of Crébillon's are not good, though they are not by any means so bad as those of Prévost. There are nuggets, of the shrewd sense and the neat phrase with which he has been credited, in nearly all of them: and these the skilled prospector of reading gold will always detect and profit by. But, barring the possibility of a collection of such, the Œuvres Choisies of Crébillon need not contain more than the best parts of Le Sopha, the two comparatively short dialogue-tales, and a longer passage or two from Tanzaï et Néadarné. It would constitute (I was going to say a respectable, but as that is hardly the right word, I will say rather) a tolerable volume. Even in a wider representation Les Heureux Orphelins and Lettres Athéniennes would yield very little.
The first begins sensationally with the discovery, by a young English squire in his own park, of a foundling girl and boy—not of his own production—whom he brings up; and it ends with a tedious description of how somebody founded the first petite maison in England—a worthy work indeed. It is also noteworthy for a piece of bad manners, which, one regrets to say, French writers have too often committed; lords and ladies of the best known names and titles in or near Crébillon's own day—such as Oxford, Suffolk, Pembroke—being introduced with the utmost nonchalance.[349] Our novelists have many faults to charge themselves with, and Anthony Trollope, in The Three Clerks, produced a Frenchman with perhaps as impossible a name as any English travesty in French literature. But I do not remember any one introducing, in a not historical novel, a Duc de la Tremoille or a member of any of the branches of Rohan, at a time when actual bearers of these titles existed in France. As for the Lettres Athéniennes, if it were not for completeness, I should scarcely even mention them. Alcibiades is the chief male writer; Aspasia the chief female; but all of them, male and female, are equally destitute of Atticism and of interest. The contrast of the contrasts between Crébillon's and Prévost's best and worst work is one of the oddest things in letters. One wonders how Prévost came to write anything so admirable as Manon Lescaut; one wonders how Crébillon came to write anything so insufficient as the two books just criticised, and even others.
It may be said, "This being so, why have you given half a chapter to these two writers, even with Lesage and Marivaux to carry it off?" The reason is that this is (or attempts to be) a history of the French novel, and that, in such a history, the canons of importance are not the same as those of the novel itself. Gil Blas, Marianne, Manon Lescaut, and perhaps even Le Hasard au Coin du Feu are interesting in themselves; but the whole work of their authors is important, and therefore interesting, to the historical student. For these authors carried further—a great deal further—the process of laying the foundations and providing the materials and plant for what was to come. Of actual masterpieces they only achieved the great, but not equally great, one of Gil Blas and the little one of Manon Lescaut. But it is not by masterpieces alone that the world of literature lives in the sense of prolonging its life. One may even say—touching the unclean thing paradox for a moment, and purifying oneself with incense, and salt, and wine—that the masterpieces of literature are more beautiful and memorable and delectable in themselves than fertile in results. They catch up the sum of their own possibilities, and utter it in such a fashion that there is no more to say in that fashion. The dreary imitation Iliads, the impossible sham Divina Commedias, the Sheridan-Knowles Shakespearian plays, rise up and terrify or bore us. Whereas these second-rate experimenters, these adventurers in quest of what they themselves hardly know, strike out paths, throw seed, sketch designs which others afterwards pursue, and plant out, and fill up. There are probably not many persons now who would echo Gray's wish for eternal romances of either Marivaux or Crébillon; and the accompanying remarks in the same letter on Joseph Andrews, though they show some appreciation of the best characters, are quite inappreciative of the merit of the novel as a whole. For eternal variations of Joseph Andrews, "Passe!" as a French Gray might have said.
Nevertheless, I am myself pretty sure that Marivaux at least helped Richardson and Fielding, and there can be no doubt that Crébillon helped Sterne. And what is more important to our present purpose, they and their companions in this chapter helped the novel in general, and the French novel in particular, to an extent far more considerable. We may not, of course, take the course of literary history—general or particular—which has been, as the course which in any case must have been. But at the same time we cannot neglect the facts. And it is a quite certain fact that, for the whole of the last half of the eighteenth century, and nearly the whole of the first quarter of the nineteenth, the French novel, as a novel, made singularly little progress. We shall have to deal in the next chapter, if not in the next two chapters, with at least two persons of far greater powers than any one mentioned in the last two. But we shall perhaps be able to show cause why even Voltaire and Rousseau, why certainly Diderot, why Marmontel and almost every one else till we come, not in this volume, to Chateaubriand, whose own position is a little doubtful, somehow failed to attain the position of a great advancer of the novel.
These others, whatever their shortcomings, had advanced it by bringing it, in various ways, a great deal nearer to its actual ideal of a completed picture of real human life. Lesage had blended with his representation a good deal of the conventional picaresque; Marivaux had abused preciousness of language and petty psychology; Prévost, save in that marvellous windfall of his and the Muses which the historian of novels can hardly mention without taking off his hat if he has one on, or making his best bow if he has not, had gone wandering after impossible and uninteresting will-o'-the-wisps; Crébillon had done worse than "abide in his inn," he had abided almost always in his polite[350] bordello. But all of them had meant to be real; and all of them had, if only now and then, to an extent which even Madame de la Fayette had scarcely achieved before, attained reality.