A Novel Paris Revives

by CHARLES MORGAN

1

EUGÈNE FROMENTIN’S Dominique has never made its way among the English-speaking peoples, greatly to their loss. The appearance of a new and sensitive translation by Sir Edward Marsh may lead to its becoming more widely known not in England only but in the United States.

It is difficult in England today to launch such a book, for the same reasons which make it difficult to launch a novel by a new, young writer whose qualities are not modish in either the intellectual or the popular sense. In the past, a writer of distinction, even if he were unknown and swimming against the fashionable tide, would find his book discussed at length in the great dailies and weeklies. Space which now seems fabulous was given to the discussion of literature, so that a novel which won no wide public for itself might nevertheless prove to be the seed of an increasing repute. That space is no longer available.

The work of a genuinely original young writer, if it is to make its way, needs to be analyzed, understood, and interpreted at length by a critic who has already his own public familiar with his critical method — a public, that is to say, regular enough and intelligent enough to be able to read between the lines into the very heart of the book criticized. Only in this way can new and strange talent be launched, or an old book which, like Dominique, has not a smartly fashionable appearance be brought to the attention of those who would value it.

Fromentin was born at La Rochelle in 1820 and died unexpectedly of an anthrax infection in 1876. During his lifetime he was even more celebrated as a painter than as a writer, though his two books of North African travel, his work on the Old Masters of the Low Countries, Les Mnîtres d’autrefois, and his single novel, Dominique, were recognized by his contemporaries as writing of high rank. Today it is by the novel that his name lives, for it is now a small classic of French literature.

The simple truth is that, in France, Dominique started late, and in England desperately later. Though the restraints of its style are classical, its subject and its confessional method give it an air of belonging to the Romantic Movement, and the Romantic Movement, though by no means dead, had long ago ceased to be a fashionable excitement when Dominique began to appear in the Revue des Deux Maudes on April 15, 1862. The readers of that august periodical appear to have taken very little interest in it—so little, indeed, that the Revue became alarmed; Fromentin was hard pressed to abridge the later installments, and there were, according to Edmond Schèrer, who had it from the novelist himself, anxious discussions as to whether to continue publication to the end.

George Sand greeted the story with enthusiasm while it was appearing serially. Flaubert, either then or a little later (his letter is undated), read it at a sitting between eight at night and two in the morning. “I am burning with desire to see you,” he wrote, “to talk about it and to congratulate you.” The praises of the elect were not wanting, but neither as a serial nor as a volume did Dominique set the Seine on fire.

For this there were two reasons: first, the fashionable and relatively unimportant one that, if it was to excite the smart drawing rooms and the pseudo-intellectual back parlors, Dominique should have been published twenty years before, and not five years after, Madame Bovary; second, the more serious reason, arising from Fromentin’s method, that his novel was felt to be, and may still be considered, slow in movement, lacking in action and incident. It is worth while, if we are prepared to take an objective view of our own prejudices, to consider what critical validity these two handicaps have in our own day.

The influence of Madame Bovary was gigantic, and rightly so, for it is one of the great novels of the world, but it was often applauded for the wrong reasons, and still is. Unless we remember that Flaubert also wrote Bouvard et Pécuchet, we cannot understand Madame Bovary, which was not a partisan attack upon the philosophy of Romanticism as such, but a criticism of the stupidities, the inaccuracies, and what Flaubert considered the essential mediocrity of the human mind.

The proof that Flaubert’s masterpiece was not intended as a “naturalistic” textbook and that Flaubert himself was as much a romantic as a naturalist is to be found in the whole body of his work and in the unescapable fact that Emma Bovary herself glows. For all her faults and follies, she is never dry as the women of the professional and — romantics are dry or harsh or dusty. She has sap and let us use the word deliberately in spite of what the films have done to it — glamour. Madame Bovary is not an anti-romantic novel, but a novel written by a romantic with his eyes open.

For that reason, while the fashionable Bovaryists were shrugging their shoulders at Dominique because their anti-romantic snobbism told them that they ought not to approve it, Flaubert himself was sitting up all night to read it. If they had read his letter to Fromentin, they would all have made haste to raise embarrassed cheers, just as in our own day, when T. S. Eliot praised Kipling, all the fashionable antiKiplingists suddenly turned over in bed. Fashion in literature is always a vice of the timid fellow travelers, never of the great men.

A few years ago, Victor Hugo was “out" in France; now he is a god again. Today it is fashionable in Paris to say that the plays of Musset are admissible but that his poems are not; and yet every sane man knows that his poetry, and particularly his Ode to Malibran, is indestructible. Today all but the first-rate talk of Anatole France with disparagement, yet in a few years those who now despise him will be chattering about his flawless prose.

Fashion in literature is absurd; the masters, from Donne to Meredith, from Meredith to Kipling, from Baudelaire to Poe, always survive it; but it is temporarily formidable, and Dominique was held back by it. Today there is no reason that it should be held back among us; whoever can listen to Chopin can read Fromentin.

2

WHAT is the uniqueness of Dominique? Unique does not mean rare, exceptional, unusual; it means, by the dictionary: “of which there is only one; one and only; single, sole, solitary.” In that strict sense of the word, Fromentin’s novel is unique. There are greater novels, but there is none in the same kind with it.

Its story is by no means unique, nor even exceptional. Dominique, when very young, falls in love with Madeleine, a little older than himself. She marries another before Dominique has declared his love to her or even to himself. Rapture, melancholy, torment, and frustration follow. Dominique tries to cure himself by solitude and work, then by taking a mistress who has no impact upon him and passes across the novel as a nameless shadow. Next he tries by being continually in Madeleine’s company to convert love into friendship, and she, wishing to help him, makes a corresponding attempt. All in vain. Passion is contagious. Instead of curing him, she herself falls passionately in love with him. For them there is no remedy but to part for ever, she to continue in her marriage, he to find at last, as the husband of another and admirable woman, tranquillity in the countryside where he was born.

Whore, it may be asked, is the “uniqueness” of that ? Is not the tale, in its outline, familiar enough?

Yes; but it is familiar neither in its motive nor in its method. Consider its method first. It begins with an account of Dominique as an aging man living, with his wife and children, a retired life at Les Trembles, his country estate on the border of the Bay of Biscay. This is a long prologue, and a brief epilogue reverts to the same scene. In between is Dominique’s own narrative of his boyhood, of his love for Madeleine, of his life with her and without her in the country and in Paris, and of the final crisis and parting.

The “slowness,” the lack of incident and dialogue, may be seen, from another point of view, as an extreme dramatic economy. No writer knows better than Fromentin how to stop when he has made his point. For example, he describes with beautiful care Madeleine and Dominique’s final parting: —

It was nearly ten when Madeleine came down. . . .

“Father,” she said, in a fearless and resolute tone,

“I want to he alone with M. de Bray for a moment.”

He got up without demur, and left us, giving her a fatherly kiss.

“You are going away tomorrow,” she said. We were both standing.

“Yes,” I replied.

“And we shall never see one another again.”

I made no answer.

“Never,” she repeated. “Do you understand? Never. I’ve put between us the only barrier which neither of us could ever dream of passing.”

By this, she means her admission of passion in herself, her acknowledgment that their continued meeting could now be only a prelude to mortal sin. Nothing is harder to communicate in a novel than this quality of absolute resolve that makes argument superfluous and qualification a surrender. Fromentin communicates it with a finality and simplicity of language equal to the cause.

His method has another quality peculiar to him which is an integral part of what is called his slowness. It has been said that he was a painter. In particular, he was a landscapist. It is therefore not surprising that he should have seen the background of his story with a painter’s eye, but it is remarkable that, having this pictorial power, he was able to transcend it, to transmute it to serve his narrative purpose. His descriptions of nature are a part of his dramatic method. Through them he communicates the moods, the sufferings, the delights, and above all, the tensions of his characters.

In this special power, he has no superior, and takes rank even with Turgenev in his Sportsman’s Sketches. The most ignorant townsman, who can find none of the pleasures of familiarity in descriptions of rural scenes, may be enthralled by Fromentin in this vein, for it Is in his descriptions of nature that he continually reveals t he essence of his characters.

When Madeleine is lost, and Dominique is returning to his old home, “hurrying on my miserable journey like a wounded animal losing blood and struggling to reach its hole before its strength gives out,”Fromentin describes the young man’s walk across the solitary marshes, “the peculiar rushing, rustling sound of wild-duck overhead,” and his encounter with an old servant out shooting. It is a description not only of great beauty but of astonishing evocative power. It is too precious to abbreviate, too long to quote at length. Perhaps quotation is unnecessary. That little phrase about a wounded animal losing blood is evidence enough that, as a country poet, a country dramatist, Fromentin is unique.

3

Dominique is unique also in its motive. Fromentin has something to say about love and the responsibilities arising from it which has not been said elsewhere; and what he says about love has its bearing upon the whole conduct of life — upon all our hungers, and not only upon that of desire; upon all our dedications and loyalties, and not only upon those of love; upon all our confusions, our deadlocks, our tormented oppositions of right to right, our cry that “nothing makes sense!”

A few years ago, no cry was more frequent among the contradictions and frustrations of the contemporary world. The despair and the self-pity implied in it were characteristic of the novel of violence (of anarchy) and of a formidable body of verst that shouted and whimpered but did not sing.

Upon all this Fromentin makes his unique comment. In effect he says: “No. Your unhappiness, even though it spring from no fault of yours, does not entitle you to take sides with chaos. Life which is not lived within a rule of law is not life but death.” When, near the end of the book, Madeleine’s and Dominique’s love is fully recognized by them both, and Dominique, knowing that she is awake within, has come as far as her bedroom door, he turns away, not because it is expedient to do so, not in any consideration of conventional honor, but in obedience to an absolute law which is of the essence of Fromentin’s story: —

Here I was, groping my way about the sleeping, unsuspecting house, in the middle of the night, drawn irresistibly to Madeleine’s bedroom door, and bumping against it like a man in a dream. Was I merely an unhappy being with nothing left to sacrifice, blinded by desire, neither better nor worse than the rest of my fellow-creatures? or was I a criminal? This crucial question floated vaguely at the back of my mind without leading me to anything remotely resembling a positive choice between the alternatives of behaving like a man of honour, and deliberately planning an infamy. All that I knew beyond a doubt — and even that left me undecided — was that if Madeleine sinned it would kill her and that most certainly I shouldn’t survive her an hour,

I can t tell you what saved me. All I know is that I found myself in the park. . . .

The important sentence is: La seule chose dont je ne dontais pas . . . e’est qu’une favte tuerait Madeleine. The novel rests upon that absolutism.

Sainte-Beuve, who was prevented by the limitations of his genius from recognizing absolutism when he saw it, while praising Dominique on all other grounds, objected to this denouement which, he said, was not entièrement d’accord avec la vérité humaine. He thought — and it is typical of SainteBeuve — that Madeleine would have had good reason to despise Dominique for having brought her so far and then drawn back; and Dominique himself, according to Sainte-Beuve, was a halfhearted lover “who mistook his natural timidity for stoicism.” It is one of those unseeing and would-be worldly-wise comments which, in the work of a critic so masterly and so discerning on his own territory, make one blink. It misses the whole point of the book, which consists in its assumption that it was not open to the two lovers to argue with their appetites or to compromise with their separation. Their struggle from beginning to end is not to find a way round the truth as they see it, not to pride themselves on their stoicism or to despise each other for their abstentions, not to submit themselves to their satisfactions, but to liberate themselves by their acceptances.

It is this that Sainte-Beuve could not see when he wrote in 1804, and that we might not have been able to see in 1984. But today, when society is in peril of dissolving because the rejection of absolute values has resulted in chaos and chaos in violence, when we have come— to use Sainte-Beuve’s words —jnsqu’an bord extrême du précipice, we know that there are moments in life when it is necessary to stand absolutely.

That this is an enduring truth, independent of fashion, is a reason for Dominique’s survival through eighty years of tragedy in France. That it is a present truth, of mounting urgency in our own day, is a reason for thinking that there is a considerable modern audience who would find their own intuitions of wisdom crystallized in Fromentin’s story.