Parisian Points of View

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Title: Parisian Points of View

Author: Ludovic Halévy

Commentator: Brander Matthews

Translator: Edith V. B. Matthews

Release Date: March 25, 2005 [EBook #15465]

Language: English

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MASTER-TALES

PARISIAN

POINTS OF VIEW

BY

LUDOVIC HALÉVY

TRANSLATED BY

EDITH V.B. MATTHEWS

WITH INTRODUCTION BY

BRANDER MATTHEWS

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE SHORT STORIES OF M. LUDOVIC HALÉVY

To most American readers of fiction I fancy that M. Ludovic Halévy is known chiefly, if not solely, as the author of that most charming of modern French novels, The Abbé Constantin. Some of these readers may have disliked this or that novel of M. Zola's because of its bad moral, and this or that novel of M. Ohnet's because of its bad taste, and all of them were delighted to discover in M. Halévy's interesting and artistic work a story written by a French gentleman for young ladies. Here and there a scoffer might sneer at the tale of the old French priest and the young women from Canada as innocuous and saccharine; but the story of the good Abbé Constantin and of his nephew, and of the girl the nephew loved in spite of her American millions—this story had the rare good fortune of pleasing at once the broad public of indiscriminate readers of fiction and the narrower circle of real lovers of literature. Artificial the atmosphere of the tale might be, but it was with an artifice at once delicate and delicious; and the tale itself won its way into the hearts of the women of America as it had into the hearts of the women of France.

There is even a legend—although how solid a foundation it may have in fact I do not dare to discuss—there is a legend that the lady-superior of a certain convent near Paris was so fascinated by The Abbé Constantin, and so thoroughly convinced of the piety of its author, that she ordered all his other works, receiving in due season the lively volumes wherein are recorded the sayings and doings of Monsieur and Madame Cardinal, and of the two lovely daughters of Monsieur and Madame Cardinal. To note that these very amusing studies of certain aspects of life in a modern capital originally appeared in that extraordinary journal, La Vie Parisienne—now sadly degenerate—is enough to indicate that they are not precisely what the good lady-superior expected to receive. We may not say that La Famille Cardinal is one of the books every gentleman's library should be without; but to appreciate its value requires a far different knowledge of the world and of its wickedness than is needed to understand The Abbé Constantin.

Yet the picture of the good priest and the portraits of the little Cardinals are the work of the same hand, plainly enough. In both of these books, as in Criquette (M. Halévy's only other novel), as in A Marriage for Love, and the twoscore other short stories he has written during the past thirty years, there are the same artistic qualities, the same sharpness of vision, the same gentle irony, the same constructive skill, and the same dramatic touch. It is to be remembered always that the author of L'Abbé Constantin is also the half-author of Froufrou and of Tricoche et Cacolet, as well as of the librettos of La Belle Hélène and of La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein.

In the two novels, as in the twoscore short stories and sketches—the contes and the nouvelles which are now spring-like idyls and now wintry episodes, now sombre etchings and now gayly-colored pastels—in all the works of the story-teller we see the firm grasp of the dramatist. The characters speak for themselves; each reveals himself with the swift directness of the personages of a play. They are not talked about and about, for all analysis has been done by the playwright before he rings up the curtain in the first paragraph. And the story unrolls itself, also, as rapidly as does a comedy. The movement is straightforward. There is the cleverness and the ingenuity of the accomplished dramatist, but the construction has the simplicity of the highest skill. The arrangement of incidents is so artistic that it seems inevitable; and no one is ever moved to wonder whether or not the tale might have been better told in different fashion.

Nephew of the composer of La Juive—an opera not now heard as often as it deserves, perhaps—and son of a playwright no one of whose productions now survives, M. Halévy grew up in the theatre. At fourteen he was on the free-list of the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and the Odéon. After he left school and went into the civil service his one wish was to write plays, and so to be able to afford to resign his post. In the civil service he had an inside view of French politics, which gave him a distaste for the mere game of government without in any way impairing the vigor of his patriotism; as is proved by certain of the short stones dealing with the war of 1870 and the revolt of the Paris Communists. And while he did his work faithfully, he had spare hours to give to literature. He wrote plays and stories, and they were rejected. The manager of the Odéon declared that one early play of M. Halévy's was exactly suited to the Gymnase, and the manager of the Gymnase protested that it was exactly suited to the Odéon. The editor of a daily journal said that one early tale of M. Halévy's was too brief for a novel, and the editor of a weekly paper said that it was too long for a short story.

In time, of course, his luck turned; he had plays performed and stories published; and at last he met M. Henri Meilhac, and entered on that collaboration of nearly twenty years' duration to which we owe Froufrou and Tricoche et Cacolet, on the one hand, and on the other the books of Offenbach's most brilliant operas—Barbebleue, for example, and La Périchole. When this collaboration terminated, shortly before M. Halévy wrote The Abbé Constantin, he gave up writing for the stage. The training of the playwright he could not give up, if he would, nor the intimacy with the manners and customs of the people who live, move, and have their being on the far side of the curtain.

Obviously M. Halévy is fond of the actors and the actresses with whom he spent the years of his manhood. They appear again and again in his tales; and in his treatment of them there is never anything ungentlemanly as there was in M. Jean Richepin's recent volume of theatrical sketches. M. Halévy's liking for the men and women of the stage is deep; and wide is his knowledge of their changing moods. The young Criquette and the old Karikari and the aged Dancing-master—he knows them all thoroughly, and he likes them heartily, and he sympathizes with them cordially. Indeed, nowhere can one find more kindly portraits of the kindly player-folk than in the writings of this half-author of Froufrou; it is as though the successful dramatist felt ever grateful towards the partners of his toil, the companions of his struggles. He is not blind to their manifold weaknesses, nor is he the dupe of their easy emotionalism, but he is tolerant of their failings, and towards them, at least, his irony is never mordant.

Irony is one of M. Halévy's chief characteristics, perhaps the chiefest. It is gentle when he deals with the people of the stage—far gentler then than when he is dealing with the people of Society, with fashionable folk, with the aristocracy of wealth. When he is telling us of the young loves of millionaires and of million-heiresses, his touch may seem caressing, but for all its softness the velvet paw has claws none the less. It is amusing to note how often M. Halévy has chosen to tell the tale of love among the very rich. The heroine of The Abbé Constantin is immensely wealthy, as we all know, and immensely wealthy are the heroines of Princesse, of A Grand Marriage, and of In the Express.[A] Sometimes the heroes and the heroines are not only immensely wealthy, they are also of the loftiest birth; such, for instance, are the young couple whose acquaintance we make in the pages of Only a Waltz.

[A] Perhaps the present writer will be forgiven if he wishes to record here that In the Express (Par le Rapide) was published in Paris only towards the end of 1892, while a tale not wholly unlike it, In the Vestibule Limited, was published in New York in the spring of 1891.

There is no trace or taint of snobbery in M. Halévy's treatment of all this magnificence; there is none of the vulgarity which marks the pages of Lothair, for example; there is no mean admiration of mean things. There is, on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging satire. He lets us see that all this luxury is a little cloying and perhaps not a little enervating. He suggests (although he takes care never to say it) that perhaps wealth and birth are not really the best the world can offer. The amiable egotism of the hero of In the Express, and the not unkindly selfishness of the heroine of that most Parisian love-story, are set before us without insistence, it is true, but with an irony so keen that even he who runs as he reads may not mistake the author's real opinion of the characters he has evoked.

To say this is to say that M. Halévy's irony is delicate and playful. There is no harshness in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We do not find in his pages any of the pessimism which is perhaps the dominant characteristic of the best French fiction of our time. To M. Halévy, as to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need not be taken sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems still enjoyable, as it must to most of those who have a vivid sense of humor. He is not disillusioned utterly, he is not reduced to the blankness of despair as are so many of the disciples of Flaubert, who are cast into the outer darkness, and who hopelessly revolt against the doom they have brought on themselves.

Indeed, it is Merimée that M. Halévy would hail as his master, and not Flaubert, whom most of his fellow French writers of fiction follow blindly. Now, while the author of Salamnbo was a romanticist turned sour, the author of Carmen was a sentimentalist sheathed in irony. To Gustave Flaubert the world was hideously ugly, and he wished it strangely and splendidly beautiful, and he detested it the more because of his impossible ideal. To Prosper Merimée the world was what it is, to be taken and made the best of, every man keeping himself carefully guarded. Like Merimée, M. Halévy is detached, but he is not disenchanted. His work is more joyous than Merimée's, if not so vigorous and compact, and his delight in it is less disguised. Even in the Cardinal sketches there is nothing that leaves an acrid after-taste, nothing corroding—as there is not seldom in the stronger and sterner short stories of Maupassant.

More than Maupassant or Flaubert or Merimée, is M. Halévy a Parisian. Whether or not the characters of his tale are dwellers in the capital, whether or not the scene of his story is laid in the city by the