As one turns over the pages,the suspense of the author becomes almost unbearable.The horses of Mr.William Black's phaeton do not soar towards the sun.They merely frighten the sky at evening into violent chromolithographic effects.On seeing them approach,the peasants take refuge in dialect.Mrs.Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates,lawn-tennis parties,domesticity,and other wearisome things.Mr.Marion Crawford has immolated himself upon the altar of local colour.He is like the lady in the French comedy who keeps talking about "le beau ciel d'Italie."Besides,he has fallen into the bad habit of uttering moral platitudes.He is always telling us that to be good is to be good,and that to be bad is to be wicked.At times he is almost edifying.ROBERTELSMERE is of course a masterpiece -a masterpiece of the "genre ennuyeux,"the one form of literature that the English people seems thoroughly to enjoy.A thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Nonconformist family,and we can quite believe it.Indeed it is only in England that such a book could be produced.England is the home of lost ideas.As for that great and daily increasing school of novelists for whom the sun always rises in the East-End,the only thing that can be said about them is that they find life crude,and leave it raw.
'In France,though nothing so deliberately tedious as ROBERTELSMERE has been produced,things are not much better.M.Guy de Maupassant,with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid style,strips life of the few poor rags that still cover her,and shows us foul sore and festering wound.He writes lurid little tragedies in which everybody is ridiculous;bitter comedies at which one cannot laugh for very tears.M.Zola,true to the lofty principle that he lays down in one of his pronunciamientos on literature,"L'homme de genie n'a jamais d'esprit,"is determined to show that,if he has not got genius,he can at least be dull.And how well he succeeds!
He is not without power.Indeed at times,as in GERMINAL,there is something almost epic in his work.But his work is entirely wrong from beginning to end,and wrong not on the ground of morals,but on the ground of art.From any ethical standpoint it is just what it should be.The author is perfectly truthful,and describes things exactly as they happen.What more can any moralist desire?
We have no sympathy at all with the moral indignation of our time against M.Zola.It is simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed.But from the standpoint of art,what can be said in favour of the author of L'ASSOMMOIR,NANA and POT-BOUILLE?
Nothing.Mr.Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot's novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus,but M.Zola's characters are much worse.They have their dreary vices,and their drearier virtues.The record of their lives is absolutely without interest.Who cares what happens to them?In literature we require distinction,charm,beauty and imaginative power.We don't want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.M.Daudet is better.
He has wit,a light touch and an amusing style.But he has lately committed literary suicide.Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle with his "Il faut lutter pour l'art,"or for Valmajour with his eternal refrain about the nightingale,or for the poet in JACK with his "mots cruels,"now that we have learned from VINGT ANS DE MAVIE LITTERAIRE that these characters were taken directly from life.
To us they seem to have suddenly lost all their vitality,all the few qualities they ever possessed.The only real people are the people who never existed,and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations,and not boast of them as copies.The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are,but that the author is what he is.Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.As for M.Paul Bourget,the master of the ROMANPSYCHOLOGIQUE,he commits the error of imagining that the men and women of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for an innumerable series of chapters.In point of fact what is interesting about people in good society -and M.Bourget rarely moves out of the Faubourg St.Germain,except to come to London,-is the mask that each one of them wears,not the reality that lies behind the mask.It is a humiliating confession,but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet,in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff.The fat knight has his moods of melancholy,and the young prince his moments of coarse humour.Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals:in dress,manner,tone of voice,religious opinions,personal appearance,tricks of habit and the like.The more one analyses people,the more all reasons for analysis disappear.Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.Indeed,as any one who has ever worked among the poor knows only too well,the brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream,it is a most depressing and humiliating reality;and if a writer insists upon analysing the upper classes,he might just as well write of match-girls and costermongers at once.'
However,my dear Cyril,I will not detain you any further just here.I quite admit that modern novels have many good points.All I insist on is that,as a class,they are quite unreadable.
CYRIL.That is certainly a very grave qualification,but I must say that I think you are rather unfair in some of your strictures.
I like THE DEEMSTER,and THE DAUGHTER OF HETH,and LE DISCIPLE,and MR.ISAACS,and as for ROBERT ELSMERE,I am quite devoted to it.
