The Romance of a Poor Young Man. Harland Henry

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ if he can still enjoy it. Here we have romance pure and simple, a thing of glamour all compact; and the danger-line that so definitely separates romance from absurdity, yet leaves them so perilously near together, is never crossed. The action passes in the country, and in the most delectable sort of country at that – the country of the appreciative and imaginative cit. Before all things a Parisian, Feuillet is never particularly happy in presenting Paris. His Paris is correct enough in architecture and topography, no doubt; but the spirit of Paris, the whatever it is which makes Paris Paris, and not merely a large town, somehow evades him. Possibly he knew his Paris too well; familiarity had bred a kind of inability to see, to focus, a kind of "staleness." Anyhow, it is when he gets away from Paris that he wakes to the opportuneness and the opportunities of scenic backgrounds. His eye, "stale" to town, is now all eagerness, all freshness. Impressions of beauty crowd upon him. He sees the country as it is doubtful whether the countryman ever sees it – the countryman who has been surfeited with it, who has long since forgotten its first magical effect. He brings to the country the sensitiveness which is the product of the city's heat and strife. Dew and wild flowers, the green of grass and trees, the music of birds, the flutter of their wings, the pure air, the wide prospects, the changing lights – it is to the appreciative and imaginative townsman that these speak their finest message.

      But Feuillet is more than a townsman: he is a teller of fairy-tales. To him the country is a free playground for his fancy. There beautiful ladies and gallant knights have nothing to do but to love and to sing; and there, without destroying our illusion, he can leave them to live happily forever after. The Brittany, in which Maxime and Marguerite meet and misunderstand and woo and wed, is not that northwestern corner of France that one can reach in a few hours by steamer from Southampton; it is a Brittany of fairy woods and streams and castles, that never was, save in the poet's dream. For if others of Feuillet's novels have been only in part fairy-tales, or only rather like fairy-tales, the Romance of a Poor Young Manis a fairy-tale wholly and absolutely. The personages of the story are the invariable personages of the fairy-tale: the prince disguised as a wood-cutter, in the Marquis de Champcey disguised as a farm-bailiff; the haughty princess, who will not love, yet loves despite her will, and is rewarded by the wood-cutter's appearing in all the prince's splendour at the proper time, in Marguerite Laroque; the bad prince and the bad princess, in M. de Bévallon and Mlle. Hélouin; the good magician, in M. Laubépin; and the delightfullest of conceivable fairy godmothers, in Mlle. de Porhoët. And the progress of the story is the wonted progress of the fairy-tale. There is hardship, but it is overcome; there are perils, but they are turned; misconceptions, but they are cleared up. There are empty pockets, but there is the bag of gold waiting to fill them. The marvellous never shocks our credulity, the longest-armed coincidences seem the most natural happenings in the world. We are not in the least surprised when, at the right moment, the bag of gold appears at Maxime's feet, enabling him to marry; it is the foregone consequence of his having a fairy godmother. We don't even raise the eyebrow of doubt when the Laroques contemplate relinquishing their fortune to the poor, so that Marguerite may come to her lover empty-handed; that is the accepted device of the fairy-tale for administering to the proud princess her well-deserved humiliation. In one small detail only does the fairy-tale teller lose himself, and let the novelist supplant him; that is where he implies that the bad prince and princess, after their wicked wiles had been discovered, took the train to Paris. They did nothing of the sort. They were turned into blocks of stone, and condemned to look on at the happiness of the good prince and princess from the terrace of the Château de Laroque.

      But it must not be supposed, because the personages of the Romance of a Poor Young Man are fairy-tale personages, that therefore they are not human personages. It is, on the contrary, the humanity of its personages that makes your fairy-tale interesting. You stick to human men and women, you merely more or less improve the conditions of their existence, you merely revise and amend a little the laws of the external universe – an easy thing to do, in spite of the unthinking people who prate of those laws as immutable. Then the fun consists in seeing how human nature will persist and react. Surely none of Feuillet's heroines is more engagingly human than Marguerite Laroque. It is true that we see her only through the eyes of a chronicler who happens to be infatuated with her, but we know what discount to allow for that. We are confident from her first entrance that if, as we hope, our poor young man's head is screwed on as poor young men's heads should be, Marguerite will turn it. We learn that she is capricious, therefore Maxime will be constant; that she is proud, therefore, in all humility, he will be prouder; that she is humble, therefore, in all pride, he will humble himself at her feet. But antecedent to all this, and just because his ostensible business in Brittany is the management of the Laroques' estate, no one needs to warn us that his real business will be the conquest of the Laroques' daughter. We can foresee with half an eye that the affairs of the estate are affairs which our disguised marquis will conscientiously neglect. Indeed, Mme. Laroque herself seems to have been haunted by something of the same premonition. What does she say to the sous-préfet? "Mon Dieu, ne m'en parlez pas; il-y-a là un mystère inconcevable. Nous pensons que c'est quelque prince déguisé… Entre nous, mon cher sous-préfet, je crois bien que c'est un très-mauvais intendant, mais vraiment c'est un homme très-agréable."

      She might have added "un homme très-digne." For if we have a fault to find with Maxime, it is that he seems just possibly a thought too "digne." But that is a fault common to so many men in fiction. French novelists, like English lady novelists, are terribly apt to make their men too "digne" – when they don't make them too unspeakably indigne. Maxime, however, we mustn't forget, is his own portraitist, and we'll hope in this detail the portrait errs. For the rest, we are content to accept it as he paints it. He is a poor young man, but he is also a fairy prince. Therefore he can vaunt himself as an ordinary poor young man could hardly do with taste. He can perform and narrate his prodigies of skill and valour without offending. He can rescue an enormous Newfoundland dog from a raging torrent, for example, with the greatest ease in the world, an exploit you or I might have found ticklish, and he can tell us of it afterward, a proceeding you or I might have shrunk from as vainglorious. For Maxime is a fairy prince; the dog belongs to the fairy princess; and the bad prince, the rival, who is standing by, doesn't know how to swim. Again, with splendid indifference, he can accomplish and record his leap from the Tour d' Elven to save the fairy princess from a situation that might, in Fairyland, have compromised her; hadn't the princess unjustly impugned his honour, and insinuated that the situation was one he had deliberately brought to pass? "Monsieur le Marquis de Champcey, y a t-il eu beaucoup de lâches dans votre famille avant vous?" superbly demands Marguerite; and we can see her kindling eye, the scornful curl of her lip, we can hear the disdainful tremor of her voice. Maxime would be a poor-spirited poor young man, indeed, if, after that, he should hesitate to jump. And he has his immediate compensation. "Maxime! Maxime!" cries the haughty princess, now all remorse, "par grâce, par pitié! au nom du bon Dieu, parlez-moi! pardonnez-moi!" So that, though the prince goes away with a broken arm, the lover carries exultancy in his heart.

      Is Maxime perhaps just a thought too "digne," also, in his relations with his little sister – when he visits her at school, for instance, and promises to convey the bread she cannot eat to some deserving beggar? At the moment he is the most deserving beggar he chances to know of, but he is resolved to keep his beggary a secret from Hélène. "Cher Maxime," says she, "a bientôt, n'est-ce pas? Tu me diras si tu as rencontré un pauvre, si tu lui as donné mon pain, et s'il l'a trouvé bon." And Maxime, in his journal: "Oui, Hélène, j'ai rencontré un pauvre, et je lui ai donné ton pain, qu'il a emporté comme une proie dans sa mansarde solitaire, et il l'a trouvé bon; mais c'était un pauvre sans courage, car il a pleuré en devorant l'aumône de tes petites mains bien-aimeés. Je te dirai tout celà, Hélène, car il est bon que tu saches qu'il y a sur la terre des souffrances plus sérieuses que tes souffrances d'enfant: je te dirai tout, excepté le nom du pauvre." It certainly is "digne," isn't it? Is it a trifle too much so? Isn't it a trifle priggish, a trifle preachy? Is it within the limits of pure pathos? Or does it just cross the line? I don't know.

      I am rather inclined to think that Maxime is at his best – at once most human and most fairy princelike – in his relations with the pre-eminently human fairy Porhoët. He is entirely human, and weak, and nice, when he blurts out to her the secret of СКАЧАТЬ