Volume I Part 27 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Importance of Marianne herself.]

Yet the question at issue is not whether one can approve of Marianne, nor whether one can like her, nor even whether, approving and liking her or not, one could fall in love with her ”for her comely face and for her fair bodie,” as King Honour did in the ballad, and as _h.o.m.o rationalis_ usually, though not invariably, does fall in love. The question is whether Marivaux has, in her, created a live girl, and to what extent he has mastered the details of his creation. The only critical answer, I think, must be that he has created such a girl, and that he has not left her a mere outline or type, but has furnished the house as well as built it. She is, in the particular meaning on which Mr. Hardy's defenders insist, as ”pure” a ”woman” as Tess herself. And if there is a good deal missing from her which fortunately some women have, there is nothing in her which some women have not, and not so very much which the majority of women have not, in this or that degree. It is difficult not to smile when one compares her quintessence with the complicated and elusive caricatures of womanhood which some modern novel-writers--noisily hailed as _gyno_sophists--have put together, and been complimented on putting together. What is more, she is perhaps the first nearly complete character of the kind that had been presented in novel at her date. This is a great thing to say for Marivaux, and it can be said without the slightest fear of inability to support the saying.[334]

[Sidenote: Marivaux and Richardson--”Marivaudage.”]

Although, therefore, we may not care much to enter into calculations as to the details of the indebtedness of Richardson to Marivaux, some approximations of the two, for critical purposes, may be useful. One may even see, without too much folly of the Thaumast kind, an explanation, beyond that of mere idleness, in the Frenchman's inveterate habit of not completing. He did not want you to read him ”for the story”; and therefore he cared little for the story itself, and nothing at all for the technical finis.h.i.+ng of it. The stories of both his characteristic novels are, as has been fairly shown, of the very thinnest. What he did want to do was to a.n.a.lyse and ”display,” in a half-technical sense of that word, his characters; and he did this as no man had done before him, and as few have done since, though many, quite ignorant of their indebtedness, have taken the method from him indirectly. In the second place, his combination of method and phrase is for infinite thoughts.

This combination is not necessary; there is, to take up the comparative line, nothing of it in Richardson, nothing in Fielding, nothing in Thackeray. A few French eighteenth-century writers have it in direct imitation of Marivaux himself; but it dies out in France, and in the greatest novel-period there is nothing of it. It revives in the later nineteenth century, especially with us, and, curiously enough, if we look back to the beginnings of Romance in Greek, there is a good deal there, the crown and flower being, as has been before remarked, in Eustathius Macrembolita, but something being noticeable in earlier folk, especially Achilles Tatius, and the trick having evidently come from those rhetoricians[335] of whose cla.s.s the romancers were a kind of offshoot. It is, however, only fair to say that, if Marivaux thought in intricate and sometimes startling ways, his actual expression is never obscure. It is a maze, but a maze with an unbroken clue of speech guiding you through it.[336]

[Sidenote: Examples:--Marianne on the _physique_ and _moral_ of Prioresses and Nuns.]

A few examples of method and style may now be given. Here is Marianne's criticism--rather uncannily shrewd and very characteristic both of her subject and of herself--of that peculiar placid plumpness which has been observed by the profane in devout persons, especially in the Roman Church and in certain dissenting sects (Anglicanism does not seem to be so favourable to it), and in ”persons of religion” (in the technical sense) most of all.

This Prioress was a short little person, round and white, with a double chin, and a complexion at once fresh and placid. You never see faces like that in worldly persons: it is a kind of _embonpoint_ quite different from others--one which has been formed more quietly and more methodically--that is to say, something into which there enters more art, more fas.h.i.+oning, nay, more self-love, than into that of such as we.[337]

As a rule, it is either temperament, or feeding, or laziness and luxury, which give _us_ such of it as we have. But in order to acquire the kind of which I am speaking, it is necessary to have given oneself up with a saintlike earnestness to the task. It can only be the result of delicate, loving, and devout attention to the comfort and well-being of the body. It shows not only that life--and a healthy life--is an object of desire, but that it is wanted soft, undisturbed, and dainty; and that, while enjoying the pleasures of good health, the person enjoying it bestows on herself all the pettings and the privileges of a perpetual convalescence.

Also this religious plumpness is different in outward form from ours, which is profane of aspect; it does not so much make a face fat, as it makes it grave and decent; and so it gives the countenance an air, not so much joyous, as tranquil and contented.

Further, when you look at these good ladies, you find in them an affable exterior; but perhaps, for all that, an interior indifference. Their faces, and not their souls, give you sympathy and tenderness; they are comely images, which seem to possess sensibility, and which yet have merely a surface of kindness and sentiment.[338]

Acute as this is, it may be said to be somewhat displaced--though it must be remembered that it is the Marianne of fifty, ”Mme. la Comtesse de * * *,” who is supposed to be writing, not the Marianne of fifteen.

No such objection can be taken to what follows.

[_She is, after the breach with Climal, and after Valville has earlier discovered his wicked uncle on his knees before her, packing up the--well! not wages of iniquity, but baits for it--to send back to the giver. A little ”cutting” may be made._]

[Sidenote: She returns the gift-clothes.]

Thereupon I opened my trunk to take out first the newly bought linen. ”Yes, M. de Valville, yes!” said I, pulling it out, ”you shall learn to know me and to think of me as you ought.” This thought spurred me on, so that, without my exactly thinking of it, it was rather to him than to his uncle that I was returning the whole, all the more so that the return of linen, dress, and money, with a note I should write, could not fail to disabuse Valville, and make him regret the loss of me. He had seemed to me to possess a generous soul; and I applauded myself beforehand on the sorrow which he would feel at having treated so outrageously a girl so worthy of respectful treatment as I was--for I saw in myself, confessedly, I don't know how many t.i.tles to respect.

In the first place I put my bad luck, which was unique; to add to this bad luck I had virtue, and they went so well together! Then I was young, and on the top of it all I was pretty, and what more do you want? If I had arranged matters designedly to render myself an object of sympathy, to make a generous lover sigh at having maltreated me, I could not have succeeded better; and, provided I hurt Valville's feelings, I was satisfied. My little plan was never to see him again in my lifetime; and this seemed to me a very fair and proud one; for I loved him, and I was even very glad to have loved him, because he had perceived my love, and, seeing me break with him, notwithstanding, would see also what a heart he had had to do with.

The little person goes on very delectably describing the packing, and how she grudged getting rid of the pretty things, and at last sighed and wept--whether for herself, or Valville, or the beautiful gown, she didn't know. But, alas! there is no more room, except to salute her as the agreeable ancestress of all the beloved coquettes and piquant minxes in prose fiction since. Could anything handsomer be said of her creator?

[Sidenote: Prevost.]

[Sidenote: His minor novels--the opinions on them of Sainte-Beuve.]

[Sidenote: And of Planche.]

It is, though an absolute and stereotyped commonplace, an almost equally absolute necessity, to begin any notice of the Abbe Prevost by remarking that nothing of his voluminous work is now, or has been for a long time, read, except _Manon Lescaut_. It may be added, though one is here repeating predecessors to not quite the same extent, that nothing else of his, in fiction at least, is worth reading. The faithful few who do not dislike old criticism may indeed turn over his _Le Pour et [le]

Contre_ not without reward. But his historical and other compilations[339]--his total production in volumes is said to run over the hundred, and the standard edition of his _Oeuvres Choisies_ extends to thirty-nine not small ones--are admittedly worthless. As to his minor novels--if one may use that term, albeit they are as major in bulk as they are minor in merit--opinions of importance, and presumably founded on actual knowledge, have differed somewhat strangely.

Sainte-Beuve made something of a fight for them, but it was the Sainte-Beuve of almost the earliest years (1831), when, according to a weakness of beginners in criticism, he was a little inclined ”to be different,” for the sake of difference. Against _Cleveland_ even he lifts up his heel, though in a rather unfortunate manner, declaring the reading of the greater part to be ”aussi fade que celle d'_Amadis_.” Now to some of us the reading of _Amadis_ is not ”fade” at all. But he finds some philosophical and psychological pa.s.sages of merit. Over the _Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_--that huge and unwieldy galleon to which the frail shallop of _Manon_ was originally attached, and which has long been stranded on the reefs of oblivion, while its fly-boat sails for ever more--he is quite enthusiastic, finds it, though with a certain relativity, ”natural,” ”frank,” and ”well-preserved,” gives it a long a.n.a.lysis, actually discovers in it ”an inexpressible savour”

surpa.s.sing modern ”local colour,” and thinks the handling of it comparable in some respects to that of _The Vicar of Wakefield_! The _Doyen de Killerine_--the third of Prevost's long books--is ”infinitely agreeable,” ”si l'on y met un peu de complaisance.” (The Sainte-Beuve of later years would have noticed that an infinity which has to be made infinite by a little complaisance is curiously finite). The later and shorter _Histoire d'une Grecque moderne_ is a _joli roman_, and _gracieux_, though it is not so charming and subtle as Crebillon _fils_ would have made it, and is ”knocked off rather haphazardly.” Another critic of 1830, now perhaps too much forgotten, Gustave Planche, does not mention the _Grecque_, and brushes aside the three earlier and bigger books rather hastily, though he allows ”interest” to both _Cleveland_ and the _Doyen_. Perhaps, before ”coming to real things” (as Balzac once said of his own work) in _Manon_, some remarks, not long, but first-hand, and based on actual reading at more than one time of life, as to her very unreal family, may be permitted here, though they may differ in opinion from the judgment of these two redoubtable critics.

[Sidenote: The books themselves--_Histoire d'une Grecque Moderne_.]

I do not think that when I first wrote about Prevost (I had read _Manon_ long before) more than thirty years ago, in a _Short History of French Literature_, I paid very much attention to these books. I evidently had not read the _Grecque Moderne_, for I said nothing about it. Of the others I said only that they are ”romances of adventure, occupying a middle place between those of Lesage and Marivaux.” It is perfectly true, but of course not very ”in-going,” and whatever reading I then gave any of them had not left very much impression on my mind, when recently, and for the purpose of the present work, I took them up again, and the _Histoire_ as well. This last is the story of a young modern Greek slave named Theophe (a form of which the last syllable seems more modern than Greek), who is made visible in full harem by her particularly complaisant master, a Turkish pasha, to a young Frenchman, admired and bought by this Frenchman (the relater of the story), and freed by him. He does not at first think of making her his mistress, but later does propose it, only to meet a refusal of a somewhat sentimental-romantic character, though she protests not merely grat.i.tude, but love for him. The latter part of the book is occupied by what Sainte-Beuve calls ”delicate” ambiguities, which leave us in doubt whether her ”cruelty” is shown to others as well, or whether it is not.

In suggesting that Crebillon would have made it charming, the great critic has perhaps made another of those slips which show the novitiate.

The fact is that it is an exceedingly dull book: and that to have made it anything else, while retaining anything like its present ”propriety,”