THE PASTORAL NOVEL

Therehas always been a pastoral novel in France, because France is an agricultural country. Except milk, meat, and a little bread, England draws too little of her nourishment from her own resources; her plenty is a cheap import; and even the beauty of much of her landscape suggests an indifference to agriculture. We have known a French admirer, confronted with a marvellous panorama of wild Sussex heath—wood, grassy links, and gorse-covered common—contemplate the scene and sigh, ‘Rien, rien, rien, à se mettre sous la dent!’

France, on the other hand, is self-sufficing, almost self-supporting, and always has been so. If we consider the Duke of Berry’sBook of Hourswe realise that in many parts of France the business of life has continued almost unchanged since the Fourteenth Century. From the pruning of the vine in February (our month of March) to the fattening of the swine in the oak-woods in November, while the wood-cutters mark the trees for felling, here are just such scenes as the dweller in rural France has constantly before his eyes to-day, unaltered—scenes which the accumulated associations of countless generations have invested with a human interest more poignant, more intimate, than any which mere landscape can afford. And we admirethe French peasant; his frugality, his industry, his endurance are indeed beyond all praise; his economy is marvellous, and such is his good humour that he makes a pleasure of his self-denial; miserably lodged, poorly fed, he is conscious of no inferiority; he knows himself to be the backbone of France.

The peasant and the landscape for ages have remained unchanged. France is so large a country, with so great a variety of soil and climate, that there are all sorts of French peasants: materialistic, clean, bright, and gay, in Touraine and the Charentes; superstitious, poverty-stricken, imaginative, in Vendée and Brittany; good-humoured, ambitious, and positive in Auvergne—and so on through all the nations of France. When you knew the place, you knew the peasant—until quite lately. The ‘regionalist’ (the provincial) novel has come into being just when the field labourer himself has ceased to be regionalist, or provincial; for military service is a wonderful leveller and unifier.

Until the middle of the last century (until, that is to say, the days of George Eliot in England and the latter days of George Sand in France), a Fourteenth-Century peasant might have revisited his country parish almost anywhere in France, and have noted little alteration to mark the flight of time. The last fifty years have made more difference in rural matters than the five centuries that went before them. The dairy farms of Normandy with their patent separators, their ferments forcheese flavours, sent down in neat little tubes from the Pasteur Institute; the arable lands with their great red, throbbing mechanical sowers, reapers, binders, automatic ploughs, threshing machines, etc.; the network of roads with their motor-cars and bicycles; the train whirling past in a white puff of smoke behind the screen of poplars; such homely sights of our everyday Twentieth Century would cause a mediæval husbandman to open his eyes considerably.

He would have to seek the depths of Brittany, the heart of the Cantal, the wastes of the Lozère, to find some faint image of the world he knew. There, indeed, save for the frequent crops of potatoes and buckwheat, which he would not recognise, he would find little changed; the one-toothed wooden plough still scores its furrow on the steep hillside; the thud of the flails is loud in the dusk of autumn evenings; in the fields the women stoop and gather the buckwheat into stooks and bind it standing, even as the reapers cut the stalks from the ground; the old pastoral life continues, not greatly changed for better or for worse. But even here the century-old country life of France is menaced, and that threat hanging over it renders it more dear, and almost sacred, that the rural novel in France is at once more exact and more tender in its record than it was in the century gone by.

When I came to live in France in 1888, there was a pastoral novel of course—there has alwaysbeen a pastoral novel in France, as I said—but it was of a most calumniatory and reviling sort. Great was my surprise, when I spent my summers in the country, to find that the old gaffers on the farms werenotleft to die of hunger and neglect when they could no longer work, but, on the other hand, were treated with the utmost honour and consideration, given invariably the best seat on the settle, the best wine, expensive tonics from the doctor’s shop, and all that filial kindness could devise. Maupassant’s wonderful stories, Zola’sLa Terre, must evidently have some foundation in fact. But my personal experience has not corroborated their pessimism.

Then, after the pastoral novelgenre rosse, came, with the very last years of the Nineteenth Century, the reign of the social novel; and, as a matter of course, the pastoral novel followed suit. The best stories of those times, I think, are René Bazin’s, especially that most picturesque and touching idyll of a farm in Vendée gradually destroyed by the rural exodus,La Terre qui Meurt. InDonatienne, the same writer paints the poverty of a Breton village, and the temptation—almost the dire necessity—which induces the young mother to quit home and children in order to earn the large wages, and live the facile days of a wet-nurse in Paris. And, naturally, he shows the moral (and finally the material) ruin which follow on that ill-judged step.

InLe Blé qui Lève(The Growing Corn), RenéBazin describes the life of the woodland labourers—the foresters, wood-cutters, charcoal-burners, and so on—who form an important part of the rural population in France; and he shows them ravaged by strikes, syndicates, etc.; for M. Bazin is nothing if not Catholic and Conservative.

Yet the tone of his novels—though in my brief account the stories sound melancholy enough—is as far removed as possible from theroman rosseof the Eighties; M. Bazin is full of faith and hope and charity; he is, in spite of human malice, so convinced of the final triumph of God that we might write on all his books the refrain of Æschylus:—

‘Sing alas! and say alas! But the Good shall come to its own!’

Aιλινoν, Aἰλινoν, ειπε, τo δʹέυ νικατω.

In those last years of the Nineteenth—in those first years of the Twentieth—Century, while René Bazin’s angelic voice was welling up in treble ecstasies, the pastoral novel in France had other notes which held, as it were, the bass—deep, strange notes—brief, complicated, syncopated phrasing. In other words, Jules Renard and Charles-Louis Philippe were giving their sense, too, of the life of woods and fields.

I wrote once that Jules Renard was the Hokusaï of French literature. He just glances at an object, sees its essential character, fixes that and neglects the rest; a bird, a flower, a little boy with carrotyhair and sensitive, eager eyes, a scolding housewife, best of all, perhaps, an old, old country-woman, who cannot read or write, but who is full of the knowledge of things. I would give evenPoil-de-CarotteforRagotte! The quarrel of Ragotte and her son, ‘le Paul,’ moistens one’s eyes with the tenderest pity; and yet it is told with a dry, almost a hard precision, a concise sobriety; not a word superfluous. The thing happened so, and a pity ’tis ’twas so; there’s no more to be said. But underneath this real compassion there is a sad certitude of the end of all things, a melancholy nihilism, a hopeless irony.

Few books are sadder reading than Jules Renard’s Bucolics. This harsh, terse, impassible writer breaks our heart by his choice of a subject: an ill-treated child, a helpless, infirm old woman. If we smile at anything that he evokes, it is seldom a happy thought, a hopeful suggestion, but some quaint image or touch of character, for Jules Renard enjoyed the gift of an incomparable visual imagination: he makes us see the bushy-tailed squirrel flitting through the autumn woods and lighting up all the dead leaves with his bright brush as he passes; or old Mother La Chalude, knitting as she walks, who has threaded on her apron string the pierced kernel of an apricot and placed it at her waist, a little to the left, to support the end of one of her knitting needles; or older Honorine, coming across the field-path, bent double, so that she appears a headless woman, while her stick,on which her rugged hands stand out like knots, is higher than her cap.

This keen appreciation of the beauty and character of Nature, combined with a tragic sense of the aimlessness and incertitude of human destiny, are the peculiar quality, I think, of the closing Nineteenth Century: a mingling of enchantment and disenchantment. Nowhere, of course, is it so remarkable as in Pierre Loti, but he is out of our perspective—which only concerns the Twentieth Century. We have noticed it in Jules Renard, only lately dead (1864-1909). We shall find it again, with less artistry and a more poignant pity, in another writer, ten years younger, who died about the same time, Charles-Louis Philippe; as we found it in Madame Colette.

Jules Renard was one of the rare French authors of our time who do not scorn to love their calling; who are men of letters from the bottom of their soul, and not principally apostles, or disciples, or reformers, or philosophers;—who are as happy as Flaubert when at last they enclose an aspect of reality, however humble, in some perfect phrase as pure as the amber which preserves a fly. Renard had ideas and passionate convictions of his own; to resume, let us say that they were the exact opposite of the ideas and passionate convictions of a Paul Claudel; but he did not usually write to express or to expound his peculiar theory of anti-clericalism or democracy. If these opinions came into the picture, he noted them with his customarypoignant exactitude, no more. Only once did he think of writing a play with a purpose. His great, his scrupulous endeavour was to represent reality as he saw it, just as it struck his shrewd, short-sighted gimlet-glance, his Japanese or Alexandrian sense of detail; but an endless patience—the patience of the sportsman and the painter—enabled him to track an impression down to its most secret touch. And then he fixed it in one perfect phrase—sometimes just marred by too tense an effort to seize an evanescent reality. Jules Renard, in fine, was an artist.

He looked at Nature, not as so many do, from the fourth floor of a Paris boulevard, but from the village street or from the field that slopes away beyond the orchard hedge. He was mayor of the little commune in the department of the Nièvre where he spent so much of his time—and a mayor passionately absorbed in his municipal affairs; but when he turned homewards and sat down to his writing-table, Chitry-les Mines and Chaumont lost their magic; the man, the mayor, gave place to the patient artist—surely the most scrupulous of our time—carving his cherry-stone, polishing his bead of amber, where some chance insect lives for ever in a pellucid incorruptibility.

This love of detail, this desire to reproduce a landscape, an object or a personage in its individual, intimate truth, are points of contact between Renard and another novelist from the same centre of France: Charles-Louis Philippe. But Philippe’seyes were less keen and his heart was far more tender: Philippe was, as it were, steeped in the Russian pity of a Dostoievski. And he knew the poor and the miseries of the poor, not as an artist knows them, mingled with romance, but as the child of poor people who has felt such things at first hand.

He was born in 1874 at Cérilly, a little town of the department of the Allier, where his father was a maker of wooden shoes. A pupil of the board school, his rare abilities promised a prosperous future, and, gifted for mathematics, he studied for the school of engineering—for ‘Polytechnique.’ But his frail health and tiny size rendered him inapt for that profession, and his livelihood seemed a problem too difficult to solve when Maurice Barrès, a Deputy for Paris, recommended him for a small post in the pay of the town council at the Hôtel-de-Ville. Philippe was thenceforth an inspector of stalls and shop-fronts—and his kind protector chose for him the VII. arrondissement of Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where stalls are few. In return for his nine guineas a month (230 francs) Philippe had but to stroll about the quiet, almost provincial streets of the old-fashioned courtly quarter and reap the harvest of a quiet eye. But Philippe’s vision was chiefly interior. In the noble Rue de Varenne and the historical Rue Saint-Dominique he contemplated that abyss of misery, that slippery Avernus of women’s lazy wiles and young men’s dangerous desire, which he has revealedto us inBubu de MontparnasseandMarie Donadieu: tragic idylls of the distant Latin quarter.

Here we seem as far as may be from the pastoral novel! But Philippe, in Paris, saw rise upon his inner eye the Cérilly of his childhood; the one-storied house, opposite his father’s shop, where the Père Perdrix lived with his old wife; and the lonely cottage, capped with thatch, where little Charles Blanchard lived alone with his mother, the widowed charwoman, and where the poor, dull, dreamy, ill-nourished lad died at nine years old—of ‘old age.’ And he saw his own house and his childish self, and his adorable clever mother, and all the poem of their love. And he wroteLe Père Perdrix, andLa Mère et l’Enfant, and he beganCharles Blanchard. And then, at five-and-thirty years of age, he died.

He cannot be said to have lived in vain, for the young inspector of stalls left behind him, not only a great name to a little clan—a clan which included Barrès, André Gide, Daniel Halévy, Valéry Larbaud, André Beaunier; that is to say, whatever is most delicately critical in France—but also a school. The chief names in that school are Émile Guillaumin and Marguerite Audoux, both of them, like Philippe, natives of the Bourbonnais.

There are, in the literary world of Paris, those who do not scruple to assert that Madame Audoux’s great pastoral novel,Marie-Claire, was in reality written by Charles-Louis Philippe. I wonder ifthose inconsiderate critics can have read either author! It is as though one should accuse Baudelaire of having written the country novels of George Sand; as though one should say that Thomas Hardy really wrote Tennyson’sIdylls of the King. The incomparable simplicity and serenity ofMarie-Claireare as different as may be from the difficult harmony, the obscure, subtle, poignant intuitions of Philippe. It is true that Philippe was gaining in simplicity (perhaps from his contact with Madame Audoux?) when he died. And no doubt he was prodigal of counsel, aid, and precept to the little dressmaker who was his pupil in letters: he showed her, perhaps, in a novel, how to ‘cut out.’ But their genius, their experience, their character, and even their view of life is quite distinct: the one infinitely minute, tormented, tragic; the other large, quiet, and serene; either equally sincere.

It was Madame Audoux who called the friends—the ardent, devoted friends—of Philippe to the nursing home in the Rue de la Chaise, where he lay dying of typhoid fever; it was she, with his mother, summoned from Cérilly, who received his dying breath; and he had often spoken in his circle of the noble imagination, the just and luminous elegance of mind which distinguishMarie-Claire. So that when the book appeared there were friends to greet it—the friends of poor Philippe, dead in his grave.

But the book did not need these protectors, forits success was immediate, popular, immense, and by no means purely literary; readers, who had barely heard of Philippe himself, of André Gide, of any of Madame Audoux’s literary clan, opened her volume in their thousands. The story has been translated into several languages—into English, I think. No doubt it owed something to Mirbeau’s eloquent preface, revealing the author’s personality. The public is sentimental; it was touched by the picture of the poor little dressmaker—not a princess of tape and scissors, but one of those little snips who go out to ladies’ houses, working for half a crown a day. The account of this poor woman, no longer quite young, suddenly threatened with blindness if she pursue her trade; turning then, for a consolation, as much as for a means of livelihood, to literature, and with her first venture discovering herself a great artist; this poignant history seemed to the public a novel before the novel began.

Will Marguerite Audoux, intimidated by this rare success, remain the woman of one book? I hope not! If she dare not again attack the pastoral novel, let her write the touching life of her friend and master, Philippe. Or let her turn from the fields of France to the moving story of a woman alone in Paris, earning the right to live as she draws an interminable thread.

Marie-Claireis the history of an orphan girl, brought up in an orphanage, placed out at thirteen years of age as little shepherdess on a farm; somefive years later—after the merest sketch of a love-story with her mistress’s brother—dismissed; again received at the orphanage as cook or kitchen-maid, until, on the last page of all—not yet twenty years of age, she takes the train for Paris. Can one imagine anything flatter, staler, more unprofitable? Such stories must be written by the thousand in the simple annals of the poor. And yetMarie-Claireis a sequence of images of unforgettable loveliness.

The story is divided into three parts; and if the beginning and the end—the convent and the love-story—have their rare merits, the middle section, the life of the little shepherdess on the farm, seems to me in all sincerity equal to the loveliest pastoral novels of George Sand—toFrançois le ChampiorLe petite Fadette. The shepherdess and her flock lost in the mist, and that winter scene, when a ‘great yellow dog’ pounces on a sheep and drags it away while the collie howls plaintively, crouching at the shepherdess’s feet:—

‘Aussitôt je devinai que c’était un loup. Il emportait le mouton à pleine gueule, par le milieu du corps. Il grimpa sans effort sur le talus et quand il sauta le large fossé qui le séparait du bois, ses pattes de derrière me firent penser à des ailes. À ce moment je n’aurais pas trouvé extraordinaire qu’il se fut envolé pardessus les arbres.’

And the personages of the farm: Maître Sylvain,the kind Pauline, the friendly delicate-minded Eugène, are drawn not only with an artist’s sense of beauty, but with a marvellous and mysterious sense of life. In France to-day there are many women writers of great talent and success: Madame Marcelle Tinayre, with herMaison du Péché; Madame de Noailles, with her wonderful poems; Mlle Marie Lenéru, with her plays; I admire them all with my heart, but I think I would as soon have writtenMarie-Claire!

Madame Audoux is not the only pupil of Charles-Louis Philippe: Émile Guillaumin is also of his following, or at least he resembles him in his birthplace and his profession. Guillaumin is a farmer who lives on his farm, about ten miles from Cérilly; he works the land with his brother; and, in the intervals of seedtime and harvest he, too, writes pastoral novels about the pleasant country round the Allier river.

But seek not there for the keen, anxious psychology of Philippe, nor for the large poetry of Madame Audoux; nothing could be more matter-of-fact, moreterre-à-terre(as we say in France), thanLa Vie d’un SimpleorRose et sa Parisienne. For that very reason these books, and others from the same pen, are valuable to the inquirer who desires to know, without any alloy of poetry, the real conditions of the farmer’s and field-labourer’s life in France; but they are not admirable to the artist like the novels of Jules Renard or Marguerite Audoux. Obstinate, precise, Guillaumin delveshis style as a peasant tills his land—not (like Philippe or Madame Audoux, who are equally fastidious and minute) in order to produce a certain effect of beauty or impression of sensibility, but in the effort to render a just, exact account of what he has seen.

His best book isLa Vie d’un Simple. Regarded as art it is dull, monotonous, and bare; and yet, considered as life, it is singularly touching and ample, like one of those vast plains of France, traversed by interminable, poplar-bordered roads, whose great sweeping lines melt, far off, into long, low horizons.

La Vie d’un Simpleis the life of a peasant from the time when, a child of seven years old, he pastures his sheep among the stubble and the heather until, an old, bent man, too feeble to work on the land, he again minds the herds at pasture, as they use in France. Tiennou has lived all his life in front of the same horizon; he has no book-learning; he knows nothing but the land; but he knows it well. Like his father before him, he has been amétayer, that is to say, a tenant-farmer who combines with the landlord to stock a farm, tills it, and manages the live-stock, and pays his rent on a system of half-profits.

The system is very common in France, and in theory is admirable. It appears a means of uniting capital and labour in the cultivation of the soil. But, if the tenant has no capital behind him, in bad seasons he has to borrow at usurious interest.And then, if the cart-horse break his neck, or the cow die of anthrax, on the top of a bad harvest, his plight is poor indeed; for the landlord has a right to exact that stock and tools shall always correspond to the inventory drawn up when the tenant entered into possession. And too often, if he improves his farm, the owner makes that an occasion for increasing his own pretensions. Such is the fate of Tiennou, who, having spent the better part of his life on bettering his land, in the end receives notice to quit.

Unless he be (as he so often is) a peasant-proprietor, the lot of the French husbandman is austere. In a little pamphlet,En Bourbonnais, M. Guillaumin has added up the yearly receipts of a day-labourer in good work, turn by turn haymaker, harvester, thresher, wood-cutter, and so on. His annual earnings amount, in English coin, to £21 12s.Though he be fed abundantly at the farms where he works all summer long, still his family must live; and he must feed himself all winter-time. And bread is dear in France; out of his twenty guineas a year, the day-labourer must reckon fifteen or sixteen for bread alone. The rent of the cottage will cost another £4; and there remains about 30s.for school expenses, shoes, clothing, fuel, doctoring, wine, tobacco—all the pleasures and luxuries of life. No doubt he sells his pig, and his kids and his poultry, and anything he can, to increase his slender revenues; for, in the valley of the Allier, the peasant is too poor toput a fowl in his pot on Sundays, or enjoy a rasher of his own bacon by his own fireside.

Farther south, among the hills and high valleys of the Cantal, another peasant-farmer, Antonin Dusserre, offers us, in hisJean et Louise, another image of pastoral France: the rich yeomanry, theCouarrousandCouarros, who compose the notable society of those isolated villages, where the château is empty four-fifths of the year or more. TheCouarros(rich grazing-farmers, intelligent, tenacious, positive, active, and money-loving) compose a rustic middle-class far wealthier than their simple lives would lead us to suppose, proud of their flocks and herds, and their balance at the bankers. M. Dusserre, I believe, is blind; but before that misfortune fell upon him, he has looked long and lovingly at the high-lying heather, the cliffs capped with basalt, the gentian-starred mountain-pastures, and the green glens andtrobersof his native land. The landscapes and the types of the Cantal live on in his inner eye.

Much farther west, on the borders of Anjou and Vendée, a village schoolmaster, M. Pérochon, has recently given us a picture of peasant life in the style of Guillaumin and Dusserre, inLes Creux-de-Maisons. Acreux-de-maisonis not, as one might expect, one of those cave-dwellings hewn out of the chalky banks of the Indre or the Loire, which look so primitive but which are said to be dry and cosy, possessing the local reputation of keeping off rheumatism; no, acreux-de-maisonis a sort ofcabin about seven feet high, built of mud or of rough stone cemented with clay, single-roomed, thatch-roofed, with a pane for a window and an earthen floor.

‘C’était une cabane bossue et lépreuse, à peine plus haute qu’un homme; on descendait à l’intérieur par deux marches de granit; il y faisait très sombre, car le jour n’entrait que par une lucarne à deux petits carreaux; l’hiver il y avait de l’eau partout, et cela faisait de la boue qui ne finissait de sécher, sous les lits surtout; il y avait des trous qui empêchaient les tabourets de tenir debout; on les bouchait de temps en temps avec de la terre apportée du jardin.’

Such are thecreux-de-maisons, still not infrequent round Bressuire in Vendée, though happily rarer every year, as the spread of creameries and co-operatives brings the sense and the means of comfort into the Ireland of France. M. Pérochon is perhaps a little unfair in taking no notice of this clearing of the horizon: he will not allow us a gleam of consolation; Zola himself was never more resolutely lugubrious. His book is conceived in a low tone, a minor key, by a deliberate purpose, and we must accept the artist’s postulate.

His theme is the life of a day-labourer from the day he leaves the regiment till the time when, at forty-eight years of age, having buried wifeand child, he owns that life has been too much for him. He has had his romance, has married the miller’s lovely daughter, and has seen her die of want in the horriblecreux-de-maison. He has watched the children grow thinner month by month.

‘Depuis le Mardi-Gras, mes pauvres petits n’ont mangé ni lard, ni œufs, ni lait ... quatre livres de beurre en tout depuis quatre mois.... Je suis fatiguée de n’avoir rien à faire manger aux petits; des haricots et des pommes de terre, des pommes de terre et des haricots! Pas moyen seulement d’élever des poules!’

And indeed in the poorer parts of frugal France, so royally fertile, there are many districts where the married labourer in winter used to have little more in his larder; where a sack of potatoes, a sack of chestnuts, and a sack of buckwheat supplied the chief of his diet, or at least of his children’s diet if he be fed at the farm. I speak in the past tense, but I fear it is so to-day in many a village of Lozère or Brittany, where the food of the agricultural poor is as much worse than it is in England, as it is better and more varied in Normandy or Anjou or Touraine. And this constant strife between hunger and love, between natures naturally tender, gay, and brave, and circumstances continually depressing—has resulted in a stampede towards the towns, a rural exodus,which is the great problem of the day in the poorer provinces of France.

The war has singularly respected the writers of Pastoral novels. It has even added to their ranks a new name, that of M. Henri Bachelin, whose village tales,Le Serviteur, in 1918,Le Village, in 1919, are direct and living sketches of rural France in the minute and finely-stippled taste of Émile Guillaumin.

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