THE FRENCH SHORT-STORY
In zest, movement, and airy charm, in glittering style, precise characterization, and compressed vividness, the French short-story is unsurpassed. German writers have excelled in the fantastic and legendary tale; Russians, in both mysticism and in unrestrained naturalism; British, in those subtle moral distinctions which reveal character under crucial stress; Americans, more or less in all these phases; but no nation has ever developed a school of story-tellers who say so much in so few words, and, withal, say it so artistically and pungently as do the French.
There is a real distinction between a short-story in French and a French short-story. The latter implies a national genre, and indeed this implication is sustained by an examination of French shorter fiction.
We are justified in asserting the existence of a national type of short-story in France, or in any other land, when its special literary product reflects in theme the typical spirit of the nation, when its attitude toward life is characteristic, when its literary style is decidedly marked by national idioms, and when local color—by which I mean an individual flavor of characters andlocality—is marked enough to be recognized as a literary trait. Tested by each of these four standards—which I have ventured to set up rather arbitrarily—the short-story in France is the French short-story.
A single example may serve to illustrate the application of these tests. Here, let us imagine, are two short-stories written in French and by Frenchmen. The one deals with a baseball game, played in Hawaii. Its argot is that of the “diamond,” and its attitude is that of the frenzied “fan.” The tone and the Hawaiian background will furnish local-color enough. The second story has for its theme a tragic family schism caused by the struggle over clericalism in France. The attitude of the characters is typical of the contesting parties, the language is richly idiomatic, and the local-color convincing. Of course it would require no wisdom to determine which was the French short-story and which merely the short-story in French.
Now, when the great mass of short-stories written in France meet two or more of these tests, we have a national type of short-story, and I believe that the ten stories grouped in these two little books sufficiently illustrate the French national spirit to warrant our accepting them as types.
At first thought it might appear that the same might be asserted of any nation where short-stories are produced—Italy, for example. But the facts would not bear out any such statement. True, some Italian writers are sufficiently imbued with their language and nationality, and yet sufficiently modern, to produce little fictions which are typically Italian and typically short-stories, but they are too few to constitute a school. The novel, poetry and the drama have thus far claimed the best efforts of Italian literary folk.
In these pages the word short-story is used somewhat broadly, yet with an eye to the technical distinctions between it and similar forms of short narrative.
Since the earliest story-writing of which we have record in the tales of the Egyptian papyri (4000 B. C.?), there have been short fictional narratives in many lands, some of which meet almost every requirement of the short-story form as we now know it. But that every such approach to the short-story was sporadic rather than from intention to conform to a recognized standard is certain because in each case there was shown no progress toward a repetition of the form, but, instead, a reversion to the types common to all short fiction—the straightforward, unplottedchain of incidents which we call thetale; the light delineation of some mood, character, or fixed situation, likewise without real plot, which we name thesketch; the condensed outline of what might well be expanded into a long story, which we term thescenario; and the brief recital of some incident with a point, known as theanecdote.
With occasional accidental exceptions, as just noted, all the Egyptian tales, Greek and Roman stories, sacred narratives, mediæval tales, legends, and wonder-stories, and modern short fictions down to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, were of these four types.
The short-story as a conscious genre was developed in America and in France about the same time, with the weight of opinion favoring Poe as its “inventor.”
In 1830 Balzac began a brilliant series of novelettes, almost short-stories, which lack only compression and unity of impression to stamp him and not Poe as the first consistent and conscious producer of the new form. As it is, these remarkable stories are so near to technical perfection (as short-stories, for there can be little adverse criticism upon them as fiction), that he must share with two Americans the distinction of producing little stories which must have helped Poe materially to see the new form in clear constructivevision—I mean Irving and Hawthorne. Prior to 1835—the date of “Berenice,” Poe’s first technically perfect short-story—both Irving and Hawthorne had produced short fictions incomparably in advance of any consistently frequent short narrative work theretofore. Irving’s style was kin to Addison’s essay-stories in theSpectator, and even in those altogether admirable tale-short-stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the influence of the essay form is quite evident. Hawthorne’s stories were chiefly symbolical tales, up to 1835,[1]or expanded anecdotes done to create a single effect upon the mind. In this they rival the singularly potent unity of Poe’s best work. But shortly Hawthorne turned more and more aside from the short-story to the long symbolical romance, in which he stands without a peer in any land.
Then arose in France—for other countries require no further comment here—a series of notable story-writers, of supreme distinction in all that goes to make the short-story the most popular literary type: compressed delineationof a single crucial situation, highly centralized leading character, swift characterization, deft handling of crisis, climax, and dénouement, and, throughout, masterful work in local color.
The short-story nomenclature among the French is not clearly translatable, for three reasons—we have no precise English equivalents, critics do not entirely agree upon what equivalents are nearest to the French terms, and, best reason of all, the French short-stories have this in common with all others: their forms often overlap, and so bear marks of touching more than one type. And when I have said this I have said nothing to their discredit; only the Procrustean purist first builds a bed and then stretches or cuts every story-guest to fit! I cannot say this in voice loud enough: to set up a standard of what is a true short-story is no more to decry those short fictive narratives which do not meet the form than it would be to brand the lyric as imperfect because it does not fulfill the requirements of the epic.
But, to be specific, the three terms which we constantly meet in French fiction areroman,nouvelle, andconte. Theromanmay be dismissed as a general term standing largely for what we in English variously denominate the (long) romance, the novel, and the (long) tale. Thenouvellemostnearly approaches our English short-story, but it also stands for the novelette, or very short novel, or even the expanded short-story. Theconteis really a generic word for a short fictional narrative or any story that is short, like the tale, the anecdote, and the fictional sketch, without meaning specifically the short-story to whose characteristics of compression, unity of impression, and crisis, climax and dénouement of plot, I have just referred.
So I repeat: in these studies the term short-story must be given some latitude of interpretation.
The French short-story of the last eighty years is not only typically Gallic but characteristic of the period. Just as there are four tests of nationality in fiction so there are four forces which contribute to its periodicity: The influence of the soil, the heritage of the preceding period, the special characteristics of the period itself, and the influence of surrounding nations. All these result in what may be called the Spirit of the Period, concerning which a word must be said presently.
The primacy of the French asconteursis doubtless due quite as much to the rich and colorful provincial life which surrounds the capital as to their priority as tellers of short tales. It has beensaid that Paris is France. Nothing could be less true. Here is a nation which presents the unique paradox of being at once and supremely homogeneous and heterogeneous. The life of each province is part of its soil, colored by the soil—or by the ever-present sea. Yet France has a spirit of nationality equalled by no other nation. While what is now the German Empire was still an unrelated number of minor peoples or an integral part of some vaster state, France was a unified or at least a closely federated kingdom. While Britain was changing under its successive tides of invasion, what was essentially France was sending out its national culture world-wide—it over-climbed the Pyrenees, it spread into the Low Countries, in the west it conquered the Swiss tongue, it permeated the Rhenish provinces, it implanted Norman life in Britain. Thus grew the French national spirit.
Yet the provinces held tenaciously to their own picturesque types, spoke their more than a hundredpatois, wore their folk costumes, sang their native songs, danced their own dances—unchanging through the centuries. And nowhere more than in the French short-story may we see depicted the peculiar French provincial traits. The folk of Champagne and Picardy are shrewd, subtle, ardent, and bornconteurs—witness thestories of Juliette Lamber. Those of Berry are stolid and solid, as pictured by Madame Nahant. The Gascons are vivacious, daring, and cunning, as set forth by Emil Pouvillon. The people of Languedoc are simple, strong and violent, as described by Georges Baume. The happy, excitable sun-children of Provence, reveling among their olive groves and vineyards, have been portrayed by Alphonse Daudet; the picturesque Provençal sailors and fisherfolk live again in the stories of Auguste Marin; while Paul Arène has done loving service not only for Provence but for Maine as well. Maupassant has given us notable portraits of the Norman—bold, tricky, ambitious, economical, and of superb physique as befits the sons of sturdy men-at-arms. Loti’s stories are redolent of the salty spume of rough, melancholy, religious Brittany. And so, in the same recognition of rich material, Theuriet paints Lorraine, Erckmann and Chatrian the Rhine province of Alsace, Fabre the Cévennes, Anatole le Braz the Breton coast, Mérimée Corsica, Maupassant Auverne, and Balzac Touraine. What a wonderful color box has the French story-painter always open to his brush! Truly the soil and the sea have marked this period of the short-story as well as the novel.
The inheritance of the preceding period—thatof the Revolution, the First Empire, and the First Restoration—was rich in war pictures, dramatic episodes of intrigue, and a never-so-remarkable display of contrasts in human passion and changing conditions. The French short-story is therefore full of these national conditions.
The period itself, 1830-1912, witnessed kaleidoscopic social and governmental changes—the Second Restoration, the Bourgeois Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, and the Third Republic, to say nothing of numberless minor attempts at change. All these filled the story-teller’s pack with rich national materials. Especially are the problems of socialism, militarism and clericalism in evidence.
Finally, the influence of surrounding peoples has been felt not only in the content but in the form of the French short-story.
All these forces, and others less ponderable, have fused into what I may term the nineteenth century French spirit, as illustrated and measurably interpreted by the French short-story.
Three sub-tones of this French symphony, to use a trope, are emotional nature, passion for military glory, and religious sentiment. Emotional endowment the French, in common with other Latin races, possess—a fact which calls forno comment. The military spirit, chastened by the experiences of the Franco-Prussian War, has been decreasingly in evidence during the last four decades, yet indications are not wanting that the fire burns none the less vitally because smothered by practicalities. The war-theme constantly recurs in the short-story, and “glory” is still dear to every Frenchman. As for the third element, religion, the evidence is more contradictory. France has always felt a deep undercurrent of religious feeling. Her public worship has perpetuated this ideal in churches many and noble, as well as in a pomp of ceremonial peculiarly suited to an artistic Latin people. But I should seek for the surest proof of the religious spirit not so much in these signs as in the life of the provinces, the influence of the church there, and their constant manifestations of religious faith. The clerical crisis was not confined to the great cities, so that the last twenty years has shown marked changes in public sentiment, but there are potent signs of a reaction toward free religious life, for France will be church-loving. The typical abbé lives in her fiction as beautifully as does the soldier.
And so I have ventured to name emotion, war, and religion as three significant sub-tones of French life. But there are five other phases of theFrench spirit which show out in the short-story, though they do not seem to me so fundamental. Of these now a few words.
We find, first, volatile sentiment, as shown in quick changes of attitude, sudden concentrations, extremes of gayety and depression, lively speech, and a general habit of regarding a tempest in a teapot as a serious crisis, with now and then a surprising way of smiling away a real tragedy. There is much of the child-nature here, and therefore the loving, the lovable, and the sweet.
Love of hearth is another French characteristic, the mistresses and assignations, true and fictive, to the contrary notwithstanding. The typical homes of any nation are found less in its cities than in its smaller centers; and so it is in France, for the bulk of high-grade fiction is pretty certain to be a safe index of public feeling.
A third characteristic is the unique attitude of the French toward womanhood. The mother, in France, is honored above belief; the wife somewhat less so; the young girl knows nothing, and is therefore merely amusing; the woman of easy morals occupies a large place because she must be reckoned with as arecognizedfactor. The whole attitude of France toward its womanhood is compounded of sentiment, lightness, and cynicism. Less independent than the Americanwoman, less free than the English, less domestic than the German, the French woman is more a being to charm man than a companion for him. And so runs the current of the short-story, side by side with the sweep of life.
A fourth trait in the French short-story is a minute, detached observation, tinged with cynicism—the inevitable result of realism. It is for this reason that so many French short-stories seem unsympathetic. Scientific observation—really, a German trait—is likely to be cold when applied to tumults of the soul! And the writer who as a moral vivisectionist relentlessly applies the scalpel runs the risk of becoming blasé, not to say cruel. He is more concerned with the truthoffacts than with extracting the truthfromfacts.
A final characteristic is artistry. To do a short-story with fineness, deftness, perfection of detail, and beauty of finish; to cut an intaglio, so to say, to paint a miniature, to inlay a jewel—that is the Frenchman’s conception of the artistic in brief fiction, and in that he is unsurpassed.
Here, then, are some qualities of the French spirit as evidenced in the short-story of the period—qualities fundamental and in the phase, but patent, as it seems to me, in a large proportion of the entire short-story product.
Viewing the subject generally, as one must in attempting a survey of so varied a field as the last eighty years in French fiction, there are several periods fairly well-defined in the movement of the short-story. As a differentiated type the short-story appeared at a time when classical ideals of form had broken down and moral ideals also had quite fallen. For three decades, precise, logical prose had been as cheerfully scouted as were old-fashioned swaddling-clothes of personal virtue. For a period equally long, “Freedom” had been the sweet word every one uttered with unction. Rousseau had laid his blade to the root of the existing order; Chateaubriand had broken loose from the fetters of old literary forms; Madame de Staël had coined the word “romanticism” with a new image and a superscription enchanting to the mind agitated by the sudden opening of the unknown; the success of French arms abroad had let in a flood of new ideas—the reign of romance was undisputed. Color, movement, dreams, enthusiasm—all these prose began to borrow from poetry. Charles Emmaniel Nodier—a classicist in form, but a romanticist in spirit—began his florid tales, while Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset applied their poetic skill to the telling of prose stories.
But the romantic movement began to wane inthe early forties, not, however, before reaching a brilliant high-tide in the work of the elder Dumas. Even Gautier would sometimes scoff in his supremely clever style at the extravagances of the period. But the chief force in this breakdown of the romantic school was Honoré de Balzac, whose brilliant short-story work, chiefly done from 1830 to 1832, laid the foundations of a new school of shorter fiction in France, as the de Goncourts and Stendhal had already done for longer fiction—for Balzac was less an originator than a developer of the psychological novel. However, in fiction long and short, his moderate realism stands to-day as the most important example of his school. Prosper Mérimée became a realist only after having begun as a romanticist; Alphonse Daudet never fully came under the sway of realistic principles; and Ludovic Halévy generally chose a romantic theme even when treating it realistically, so that we must turn to Balzac as the representative of his class.
In Gustave Flaubert, a stylist of the most finished order, but latterly a severe classicist, we find an example of the slight classical reaction which followed the reign of realism. A similar romantic reaction is seen in the short tales of the collaborators, Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrain, as well as of François Coppée. Herethe joint influence of the German Hoffmann and the American Poe is plainly evident.
But these reactionary movements were neither powerful nor for long. The disillusionment and cynicism of French life was bound to find expression in its fiction, and the more sincere and fearless the writer the more direct would be his methods. Naturalism became the final expression of realism, for naturalism is realism plus pessimism. Naturalism proposes not only to see things as they are and report things as they are seen, but it is a pessimist who sees and reports. Result—gloom, mire, and jagged stories, unkissed by a single star of hope! Émile Zola is the chief-priest, and Eugene Sue the industrious acolyte at the altar of this despairing cult.
No people, however, could long enjoy an orgy of depression, and signs of moderation soon appeared. Guy de Maupassant, with all his abnormality, and Paul Bourget with all his pessimism, now and then touched the joyous side, and by and by a braver, more wholesome tone sounded in the French short-story—a tone of eclecticism, both of method and of philosophy. Surrounded by a social order emancipated from many past ills and having the promise of greater equity, quieted by the more or less permanent settlement of at least two of its most vexed questions,the France of to-day is encouraging a group of brilliant writers—Pierre Loti, Anatole France, Gustave Droz, Jules Lemaître, Jules Claretie, Renè Bazin, Jean Richepin, Marcel Prévost, and Paul Margueritte—who, though mostly no longer young, represent a youthful France in that they are emancipated from school and type and write as the story makes its call to their own natures. Sometimes one method, sometimes another, rises to dominance, butthe choice of the most availableis after all the current practice.
Of the future no man may tell, but backed by the rich traditions of literary France, the air of artistry all about, the growth of a more unselfish socialized life, and the promise of stable national conditions, we may well look for the most satisfying results in the French short-story of tomorrow.