September 30. on a Certain Lack of Humour in Frenchmen
The book-club has eliminated Marcel Prevost’s “Mariage de Julianne” as too naughty for our perusal—though not until we had all read it, to see how undesirable it was.
To what H—— calls my “robust nature” it seemed merely deliciously funny and human, and I am not fond of French fiction as a rule. Most of it leaves in my mind only a sense of dreary nastiness—a sort of more closely knit Hall Caine-ism, with his sloppiness of style left out. Yet a good many of one’s contemporaries profess to find French fiction vastly superior to English literature of the same sort: to find Balzac a greater artist than Thackeray; but those who make this assertion are, I find, generally lacking in humour and imagination themselves, and therefore blind to a whole side of life. They, of nature, think marionettes liker life than beings of flesh and blood. Balzac’s dry, minute descriptions give them an impression of reality. To hear that a man had a red nose, had iron-grey hair growing thin on top, and that his bottle-green trousers wrinkled at the knees, gives them the sensation that Balzac is presenting them with “a slice of life”—not being aware, it would seem, that this might be equally truthful a description of a wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s. Such matters as these are not the essentials that differentiate a man from his fellows.
Henry James thinks this elaboration of detail is Balzac’s “strongest gift” and adds, “Dickens often sets a figure before us with extraordinary vividness, but the outline is fantastic and arbitrary—we but half believe in it.” It seems to me that James has, like Balzac, but a half developed sense of life. He too is meticulous in his efforts to make one see and feel what he wishes to convey, because he only half feels and sees it himself; though he is concerned rather with emotions than objects, and in spite of the labour and care expended by each, but a shadowy impression remains. Dickens can dash in a few broad, half caricatured lines of a portrait because the figure he wishes to show is so vivid to his own eye he feels it only necessary to indicate it broadly to make others recognize it. Uncle Pumblechook in “Great Expectations” is suggested, as far as written description goes, in merest outline—“A large, hard-breathing, middle-aged, slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head”—yet after half a page of his conversation and his welcome to Pip at the funeral, “breathing sherry and crumbs,” one needs no more. The man lives and moves. One knows him inside and out.
James speaks again of Balzac’s “choking one with his bricks and mortar,” and thinks his houses, his rooms, his towns, “unequalled for vividness of presentation, of realization.” To an imaginative reader they are as dry and superfluous as a real-estate agent’s pamphlets; one has a sense of the author’s heavy straining effort to make the places palpable to his own mental vision. It is the weary iteration of the bore, who having no imagination can leave nothing to that of his hearer.
Dickens somewhere describes a room merely by telling how the winking fire was reflected in every smooth object. The fire winks cheerily; the pewters winking dully, as if afraid of being suspected of not seeing the joke; the furniture twinkling slyly from every polished point, etc., etc., in Dickens’s well-known fashion of pursuing a happy fancy round and round. There is not one word of catalogue of the room’s contents, yet it remains forever as vivid in the reader’s memory as a chamber with which one is intimately familiar.
Bulwer says that “French nature is not human nature,” and if human nature was necessarily the Anglo-Saxon conception of life it would be true. Nothing so points French heterogeneousness from ourselves as the attitude of our two chosen masters of the novel, Balzac and Thackeray. Not a gleam of humour ever irradiates for a moment the pages of the former. A mere glimmer would make impossible his story of the young man who endeavours to compromise a pretty woman, whose refusal to yield to his dishonourable suggestions so puzzles and disgusts him that he can only explain her coldness as being the probable results of some secret but mortal disease!... A lover abducts a reluctant fair by mingled force and stratagem, and attempts to brand her with hot irons; accompanying this gentle gallantry with the mummeries of a thirteenth-century Inquisition. This picturesque proof of devotion so touches the lady that she promptly grovels in an agony of affection for this chivalrous admirer....
All this is told with perfect gravity, the author having not the smallest suspicion of its absurdity—and yet there be actually Anglo-Saxons who solemnly announce that Balzac knew human nature to its depths. French nature, perhaps; certainly not ours....
A spinster lives twenty years in a family, all of whose members she venomously hates, and not one of them suspect her unselfish devotion until she aids in humiliating them and wrecking their fortunes.... Madame Hulot is a saint, and yet at fifty years of age offers her person to a repulsive scoundrel in order to provide a marriage portion for her daughter; Balzac evidently considering this one of her noblest acts.
The point at which one finds the widest divergence of the French and English attitudes toward life is in the essay made by each of these chosen spokesmen to show us the adventuress. Taine, who honestly tried to see English literature from English eyes and interpret it to his countrymen, breaks down entirely when he reaches this angle of vision.
He says: “There is a personage unanimously recognized as Thackeray’s masterpiece, Becky Sharp.... Let us compare her with a similar personage of Balzac in ‘Les Parents Pauvre,’ Valerie Marneff. The difference in the two works will exhibit the difference in the two literatures”—and they do indeed.
Valerie to the English reader is the old commonplace, stereotyped adventuress of the melodrama. One can imagine none save those as vile and stupid as herself being deceived by such a greedy, outrageous creature. The descriptions of her looks and behaviour smack of the unhumorous shilling shocker. She gives glances from beneath “her long eyelids like the glare of cannon seen through smoke!”... and again “her eyes flashed like daggers.”
Such figures of speech sound like the pompous rhodomontade of a Laura Jean Libby, yet Taine quotes them with much admiration.
Becky, Taine finds incomprehensible. He complains that Thackeray “degrades her” when he laughingly reveals her secret vulgar shifts. Also he is resentful because her carefully built schemes crumble one by one like houses of cards, being ignorant, apparently, of that choice old utilitarian proverb as to Honesty being the best policy, founded upon a very general observation that the same cleverness and energy employed by adventurers in their nefarious schemes pays a far higher rate of interest when turned to legitimate pursuits.
The half affectionate, half contemptuous humour with which her creator regards Becky shocks Taine. With his French passion for logical completeness he cannot comprehend that Thackeray’s vision for truth should make him capable of admitting and admiring that arch-adventuress’s good qualities,—the very qualities of her defects which made her career of deception possible. The consistent monster Valerie could delude no one, while Becky’s patience, gaiety, and good nature made Rawdon Crawley’s devotion plausible, and forced even Lord Steyne, who recognized her baseness, after a fashion to respect and like her, and consent to be used by her, until—by a fundamental impulse of womanliness—“she admired her husband standing there, grand, brave, victorious,” above the prostrate body of her seducer. It is that same underlying womanliness in Becky—of which Valerie lacked even an intimation—which makes her human and real. Its absence leaves Valerie incredible and shadowy.
Take again Lear and Goriot. The latter’s children have no excuse whatever for their crimes of greed and selfishness. They are grotesque succubi, while the astounding wickedness of Regan and Goneril is made credible by Lear’s own violent foolishness and vanity. His tempestuous senility is of the sort that wakes the blindest revolt of youth, which is always restless under the dominance of age, a restlessness likely to deepen to cruelty when age is unrestrained by wisdom or dignity.
A Frenchman once complained to me bitterly of the comic porter in Macbeth, who comes grumbling to unlock the gate so soon after the horror of the murder of Duncan. To him the touch of comedy seemed vulgar and inept. It was impossible to make him understand how to the Anglo-Saxon mind this veracious touch of comedy jostling tragedy but heightened the dramatic poignancy of the play. This incapacity to see the humorous contrasts of life and character is generally characteristic of youth with its narrow inexperience of realities, and the French and the unhumorous of our own race seem never to outgrow this juvenility.