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Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

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Title: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

Author: Georg Brandes

Translator: Mary Morison
        Diana White


        
Release date: December 16, 2014 [eBook #47675]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE - 1. THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE ***
MAIN CURRENTS IN

NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

BY

GEORGE BRANDES

IN SIX VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED


I

THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE


NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

MCMVI



To the Memory

of

HANS BRÖCHNER


[Illustration: ROUSSEAU]




INTRODUCTION


It is my intention in the present work to trace the outlines of a
psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century by means of the
study of certain main groups and movements in European literature. The
stormy year 1848, a historical turning-point, and hence a break, is
the limit to which I purpose following the process of development. The
period between the beginning and the middle of the century presents
the spectacle of many scattered and apparently disconnected literary
efforts and phenomena. But he who carefully observes the main currents
of literature perceives that their movements are all conditioned
by one great leading movement with its ebb and flow, namely, the
gradual fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the
preceding century, and the return of the idea of progress in new, ever
higher-mounting waves.

The central subject of this work is, then, the reaction in the first
decades of the nineteenth century against the literature of the
eighteenth, and the vanquishment of that reaction. This historic
incident is of European interest, and can only be understood by a
comparative study of European literature. Such a study I purpose
attempting by simultaneously tracing the course of the most important
movements in French, German, and English literature. The comparative
view possesses the double advantage of bringing foreign literature so
near to us that we can assimilate it, and of removing our own until
we are enabled to see it in its true perspective. We neither see what
is too near the eye nor what is too far away from it. The scientific
view of literature provides us with a telescope of which the one
end magnifies and the other diminishes; it must be so focussed as to
remedy the illusions of unassisted eyesight. The different nations
have hitherto stood so remote from each other, as far as literature is
concerned, that they have only to a very limited extent been able to
benefit by each other's productions. For an image of the position as it
is, or was, we must go back to the old fable of the fox and the stork.
Every one knows that the fox, having invited the stork to dinner,
arranged all his dainties upon a flat dish from which the stork with
his long bill could pick up little or nothing. We also know how the
stork revenged himself. He served his delicacies in a tall vase with
a long and slender neck, down which it was easy for him to thrust his
bill, but which made it impossible for the fox, with his sharp muzzle,
to get anything. The various nations have long played fox and stork in
this fashion. It has been and is a great literary problem how to place
the contents of the stork's larder upon the fox's table, and _vice
versâ_.

Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the
study, the history of the soul. A book which belongs to the literature
of a nation, be it romance, drama, or historical work, is a gallery of
character portraits, a storehouse of feelings and thoughts. The more
momentous the feelings, the greater, clearer, and wider the thoughts,
the more remarkable and at the same time representative the characters,
so much the greater is the historical value of the book, so much the
more clearly does it reveal to us what was really happening in men's
minds in a given country at a given period.

Regarded from the merely æsthetic point of view as a work of art, a
book is a self-contained, self-existent whole, without any connection
with the surrounding world. But looked at from the historical point of
view, a book, even though it may be a perfect, complete work of art,
is only a piece cut out of an endlessly continuous web. Æsthetically
considered, its idea, the main thought inspiring it, may satisfactorily
explain it, without any cognisance taken of its author or its
environment as an organism; but historically considered, it implies,
as the effect implies the cause, the intellectual idiosyncrasy of its
author, which asserts itself in all his productions, which conditions
this particular book, and some understanding of which is indispensable
to its comprehension. The intellectual idiosyncrasy of the author,
again, we cannot comprehend without some acquaintance with the
intellects which influenced his development, the spiritual atmosphere
which he breathed.

The intellectual phenomena which condition, elucidate, and explain each
other, fall of themselves into natural groups.

What I shall describe is a historical movement partaking of the form
and character of a drama. The six different literary groups it is
my intention to represent may be looked on as six acts of a great
play. In the first group, the French Emigrant Literature inspired by
Rousseau, the reaction begins; but here the reactionary are still
everywhere mingled with the revolutionary currents. In the second
group, the semi-Catholic Romantic school of Germany, the reaction
is on the increase; it is more vigorous and holds itself more aloof
from the contemporary struggle for progress and liberty. The third
group, consisting of such men as Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais in his
strictly orthodox period, Lamartine and Victor Hugo when they (after
the restoration of the monarchy) were still mainstays of the Legitimist
and clerical party, represents the militant, triumphant reaction. Byron
and his English contemporaries form the fourth group. It is this one
man, Byron, who produces the revulsion in the great drama. The Greek
war of liberation breaks out, a revivifying breeze blows over Europe,
Byron falls like a hero in the cause of Greece, and his death makes
a tremendous impression on all the productive minds of the Continent.
Shortly before the Revolution of July a change of front occurs among
the great authors of France; they form the French Romantic school,
which is our fifth group, a new Liberal movement on the roll of whose
adherents we find such names as Lamennais, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset,
George Sand, &c. The movement passes from France into Germany, and in
that country also Liberal ideas are victorious. The writers forming the
sixth and last group which I shall depict, Young Germany, are inspired
by the ideas of the Greek war of liberation and the Revolution of July,
and, like the French authors, see in Byron's great shade the leader
of the Liberal movement. The authors of Young Germany, Heine, Börne,
Gutzkow, Ruge, Feuerbach, &c., prepare, together with the contemporary
French writers, the great upheaval of 1848.



      _A household god made of wax, that had been carelessly
      left standing beside a fire in which precious Campanian
      vases were bakings began to melt_.

      _It addressed bitter complaints to the element. "See," it
      said, "how cruelly you treat me! To these things you give
      durability, me you destroy_."

      _But the fire answered: "You have nothing to complain
      of but your own nature. As for my I am fire, always and
      everywhere_."

                                                      _W. HEINSE_.




THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE




CONTENTS

    I. CHATEAUBRIAND
   II. ROUSSEAU
  III. WERTHER
   IV. RENÉ
    V. OBERMANN
   VI. NODIER
  VII. CONSTANT: "ON RELIGION"--"ADOLPHE"
 VIII. MADAME DE STAËL: "DELPHINE"
   IX. EXILE
    X. "CORINNE"
   XI. ATTACK UPON NATIONAL AND PROTESTANT PREJUDICES
  XII. NEW CONCEPTION OF THE ANTIQUE
 XIII. DE L'ALLEMAGNE
  XIV. BARANTE
   XV. CONCLUSION



LIST OF PORTRAITS

    J. J. ROUSSEAU
    DE SÉNANCOUR
    CHARLES NODIER
    BENJAMIN CONSTANT
    MADAME DE STAËL
    WINCKELMANN




THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE


The passage of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century was
accompanied in France by social and political disturbances of hitherto
unknown force and magnitude. The new seed sown by the great ideas
and events of the Revolution at first made little or no growth in
literature. It was unable to shoot up, for, with but brief interval
between, two destroying tyrannies, the dictatorships of the Convention
and of the Empire, passed over France, annihilating all personal
freedom as they went. The first terrorism cowed, exiled, or guillotined
all whose political colouring did not accurately match the then
prevailing shade of popular opinion. Aristocracy, royal family, priests
and Girondists alike succumbed to it, and men fled to the quiet of
Switzerland or the lonely prairies of North America to escape the
fate which had destroyed their nearest and threatened themselves.
The second terrorism persecuted, imprisoned, shot, or exiled all
who would not submit to being silenced (a silence which might only
be broken by cheers for the Emperor). Legitimists and Republicans,
Constitutionalists and Liberals, philosophers and poets were crushed
under the all-levelling roller, unless they preferred, scattered in
every direction, to seek a refuge beyond the boundaries of the empire.
No easy matter in those days, for the empire followed swiftly upon
their heels, rapidly growing, swallowing Germany and Italy in great
gulps, until no place seemed secure from its armies, which overtook
fugitives even in Moscow.

During both these great despotisms it was only far from Paris, in
lonely country places where he lived a life of death-like stillness,
or beyond the frontier, in Switzerland, Germany, England, or North
America, that the French man of letters pursued his calling. Only in
such places could the independent intellects of France exist, and it
is by independent intellects alone that a literature can be founded
or developed. The first French literary group of the present century,
then, a group brought together from all points of the compass, is
distinguished by its oppositionist tendency. I do not mean that its
members are united on certain fundamental principles, for they are
often utterly at variance, but they are all united by their hatred of
the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic autocracy. Whatever they may
originally have been, and whatever they become after the restoration
of the monarchy, whether literary reformers, reactionary Legitimists,
or members of the Liberal Opposition, they are at the beginning of
the century one and all opposed to the prevailing order of things.
Another thing they all have in common is their difficult position as
heirs of the eighteenth century, whose last bequest to them is that
Empire against which they protest. Some of them would fain renounce
the inheritance and its liabilities, others are ready to accept it if
they can repudiate the liabilities, all feel that the intellectual
development of the new century must be based upon other assumptions
than that of the old. The folding-doors of the nineteenth century open;
they stand gazing in intently; they have a presentiment of what they
are to see, and believe they see it, and the new shapes itself for each
and is interpreted by each according to his gifts and desires. Thus as
a body there is something premonitory, precursory about them: they are
the bearers of the spirit of the new age.

There was a wider sphere for a literary revival in France than in
any other European country, for in France in the eighteenth century
literary art had developed into formalism. Social and academic
culture had laced it in the iron corset of so-called good taste, into
stiff, meagre, regulation proportions. France has long presented
the contradiction of being a country with a feverish desire for
change in all external arrangements, unable, once it determines to
gratify this desire, to keep within the bounds of moderation, and of
being at the same time remarkably stable in everything that regards
literature--acknowledging authority, maintaining an academy, and
placing rule and regularity above everything. Frenchmen had instituted
a Republic and overturned Christianity before it occurred to them
to dispute the authority of Boileau. Voltaire, who turns tradition
upside down and uses tragedy as a weapon against the very powers whose
chief support it had been, namely the autocracy and the Church, never
ventures to allow his action to last more than twenty-four hours, or
to pass in two different places in the same play. He, who has little
respect for anything in heaven or earth, respects the uniform caesura
of the Alexandrine.

It was another people than the French, a people to whom Voltaire
had scornfully wished more wit and fewer consonants, who remodelled
literature and re-created poetry, while Frenchmen were overturning
political systems and customs. The Germans of that day, of whom the
French scarcely knew more than that, in humble, patriarchal submission
to their petty princes, they drank their beer, smoked their pipes, and
ate their _sauer-kraut_ in the corner by the stove, made far greater
conquests in the intellectual world than Frenchmen achieved in the
geographical. Of all the nations of Europe none save the Germans had
had their literary blossoming time in the eighteenth century. It was
the second half of that century which witnessed the notable development
of poetry between Lessing and Goethe, and the energetic progress of
metaphysics between Kant and Schelling. For in Germany nothing had been
free save thought.

The French literature of the beginning of the century is, naturally,
influenced by Germany, the more so as the nations now first begin to
enter into unbroken intellectual communion. The great upheavals, the
wars of the Republic and the Empire, jostled the peoples of Europe
together, and made them acquainted with each other. But the men most
profoundly influenced by foreign surroundings were those for whom
these great events meant long, in some cases life-long, exile. The
influence of the foreign spirit, only fleeting as far as the soldier
was concerned, was lasting and momentous in the case of the _émigré_.
Exiled Frenchmen were obliged to acquire a more than superficial
acquaintance with foreign tongues, if for no other reason, in order to
be able to give French lessons in the country of their adoption. It
was the intelligent _émigré_ who diffused knowledge of the character
and culture of other lands throughout France, and in seeking a general
designation for the literary phenomena of this period, it would
scarcely be possible to find a better than the one I have adopted: "The
Emigrant Literature."

The name must not be taken for more than it is--a name--for it would be
foolish not to class along with the works of _émigrés_ proper, kindred
writings by authors who, though they did not live in Paris, perhaps
not even in France, yet were not exiles; and, on the other hand, some
of the works written by _émigrés_ are distinctly not products of
the renovating and fertilising literary movement, but belong to the
anti-liberal literature of the Restoration period.

Nevertheless the name may fitly be applied to the first group of
French books which ushers in the century. The émigré\ as already
remarked, inevitably belongs to the opposition. But the character of
his opposition varies, according to whether it is the Reign of Terror
or the Empire to which he objects, and from the tyranny of which he has
escaped. Frequently he has fled from both, in which case the motive
of his opposition is of a compound nature. He possibly sympathised
with the Revolution in its early stage as curtailing the power of the
monarchy, and his desire may be a moderate republic; in this case he
will be inspired by a more passionate ill-will towards the Empire than
towards the old Reign of Terror. Whatever the nature of the compound, a
double current is discernible in the emigrant literature.

Its direct reaction is against certain mental characteristics of the
eighteenth century, its dry rationalism, its taboo of emotion and
fancy, its misunderstanding of history, its ignoring of legitimate
national peculiarities, its colourless view of nature, and its mistaken
conception of religions as being conscious frauds. But there is also
an unmistakable undercurrent in the direction of the main stream
of the eighteenth century; all the authors carry on the great war
against petrified tradition, some only in the domain of literature,
others in each and every intellectual domain. They are all daring,
enterprising natures, and for none of them has the word Liberty lost
its electrifying power. Even Chateaubriand, who in politics and
religion represents the extreme Right of the group, and who in some of
his writings is positively reactionary, takes "_Liberty_ and Honour"
as his motto; which explains his finally going over to the Opposition.
The double current is everywhere discernible, in Chateaubriand, in
Sénancour, in Constant, in Mme. de Staël, in Barante, Nodier, &c.,
and to this subtle correlation of reaction and progress I shall draw
attention from the first.

In speaking of the spirit of the eighteenth century it is generally
Voltaire's name which rises to our lips. It is he who in most men's
minds embodies and represents the whole period; and in as far as the
_émigrés_ bring about a revulsion against him, they may certainly
be said to represent the reaction against the preceding century.
Even those among them who are closely related to him intellectually,
compulsorily join in the reaction against him, compelled, that is to
say, by the spirit of the age; as, for instance, Constant in his book
_On Religion_. But among the writers of the eighteenth century there
is one who was Voltaire's rival, who is almost his equal, and whose
works, moreover, in a much higher degree than Voltaire's, point to an
age far ahead of that in which they were written. This man in many
ways inspires the Emigrant Literature, and in as far as it descends
from Rousseau, and to a certain extent perpetuates his influence, it
may be said to perpetuate the preceding century and the Revolution. It
is astonishing to what an extent the great literary movements in all
the principal countries of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth
century were influenced by Rousseau. Among his spiritual progeny in
France in the eighteenth century had been men so unlike each other as
St. Pierre, Diderot, and Robespierre, and in Germany geniuses and men
of talent like Herder, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean
Paul. In the rising age he influences, among others, Chateaubriand,
Mme. de Staël, and later, George Sand, in France; in Germany, Tieck;
and in England, Byron. Voltaire influences minds in general, Rousseau
has a special power over productive talents, over authors. These two
great men exercised an alternating influence upon posterity well-nigh
into our own day, when both have been supplanted by Diderot. At the
close of last century, Voltaire yielded his sceptre to Rousseau; fifty
years later his name returned to honour in France; and now in some
of the most eminent writers of that country--take Ernest Renan as an
instance--a twofold intellectual tendency is discernible, something
of Rousseau's spirit combined with something of Voltaire's. But it is
in the writings of Rousseau alone that the great spiritual streams
which flow from other countries into France at the beginning of the
nineteenth century have their source, and to Rousseau is it due that
the literature produced by Frenchmen living in remote provinces or
foreign countries, in spite of its antagonism to the spirit which
produced and upheld the imperial despotism, remained in touch with the
eighteenth century, and was based upon originally French theories.




I


CHATEAUBRIAND


The year 1800 was the first to produce a book bearing the imprint of
the new era, a work small in size, but great in significance and mighty
in the impression it made. _Atala_ took the French public by storm in
a way which no book had done since the days of _Paul and Virginia_. It
was a romance of the plains and mysterious forests of North America,
with a strong, strange aroma of the untilled soil from which it
sprang; it glowed with rich foreign colouring, and with the fiercer
glow of consuming passion. The history of a repressed, and therefore
overpowering and fatal love, was depicted upon a background of wild
Indian life, the effect of the whole being heightened by a varnish of
Roman Catholic piety.

This story of the love and death of a Christian Indian girl was so
admired that its principal characters were soon to be seen adorning
the walls of French inns in the form of coloured prints, while their
waxen images were sold on the quays of Paris, as those of Christ and
the Virgin usually are in Catholic countries. At one of the suburban
theatres the heroine figured in savage attire with cock's feathers
in her hair, and a farce was given at the _Théâtre des Variétés_ in
which a school girl and boy, who had eloped, talked of nothing but
alligators, storks, and virgin forests in the style of _Atala_. A
parody published under the title of "_Ah! là! là_!" substituted for the
long, gorgeous description of Mississippi scenery an equally lengthy
and detailed description of a potato patch--so strange did it seem at
that day that an author should devote several pages to the description
of natural scenery. But though parodies, jests, and caricatures rained
upon the author, he was not to be pitied, such things being symptoms
of fame. With one bound he had risen from complete obscurity to the
rank of a celebrity. His name was upon all lips, the name of François
René de Chateaubriand.

The youngest of ten children, he was born of an ancient and noble house
in St. Malo, Brittany. His father was a stern, dry, unsociable and
silent man, whose one passion was his pride of race; while his mother,
a little, plain, restless, discontented woman, was God-fearing to the
highest degree, a church-goer and a patroness of priests. The son
inherited a mixture of both natures.

Sternly brought up in a home where, as he himself expressed it, the
father was the terror and the mother the scourge of the household, he
was reserved and shy, an obstinate, excitable, melancholy child, early
familiar with the unrest of the sea and the music of its storms, never
reconciled to the discomfort and coldness of his home. His sister
Lucile, the nearest him in age, was his one friend and confidante. Like
him, she was of a morbid and passionate temperament, year by year more
prone, like Rousseau, to suspect every one of conspiracy against her,
and to regard herself as persecuted. In her childhood it was to her
brother, in later life to religion, that she turned for protection in
these troubles and dangers. At first plain and shy, like her brother,
she afterwards became very beautiful; with her pale face and dark
hair she was like a lovely angel of death. She passed the greater
part of her life in convents; was passionate in her sisterly love,
and passionately Catholic; she had considerable poetic talent, and in
shyness and romantic excitability she seems to have been the feminine
counterpart of her brother. Another sister, Julie, having passed her
youth as a gay woman of the world, ended her life in the most saintly
self-renunciation. The tendency towards Catholicism seems to have run
in the blood of the whole family.

The great constraint of young Chateaubriand's upbringing induced in
him a wild longing to be free and his own master, while the perpetual
surveillance under which he suffered created an overwhelming,
misanthropic desire for solitude. When he ran alone down the stairs of
the old manor-house, or went out with his gun, he felt all the passions
boiling and seething within him in wild ecstasy at being able to dream
and long unrestrainedly. Ill at ease in the society of others, he
plunged when alone into dreams of happiness and ambition, the dreams of
a poet. In this half-sensuous, half-spiritual dreaming and longing, he
created the image of a supernaturally charming woman, a youthful queen,
bedecked with flowers and jewels, whom he loved and by whom he was
beloved in the balmy, moonlit nights of Naples or Sicily. To awake from
these dreams and realise the insignificant little Breton that he was,
awkward, unknown, poor and possibly without talent, was torture to him.
The contrast between what he was and what he longed to be overwhelmed
him.

He was at first intended for the navy, but his unconquerable aversion
to discipline proved an insurmountable obstacle, and his thoughts
turned to the Church, from which, however, a conviction of his
unfitness for a life of renunciation made him draw back. In the depth
of his despondency he attempted to commit suicide. An irrevocable
family decision put an end to his vacillation; he was given a
commission as sub-lieutenant in the army, and found the life to his
liking. As a cadet of a noble family he was presented to Louis XVI.,
at whose court he witnessed the last glimmer of the old splendour and
ceremony of royalty. Two years later the Revolution broke out, and in
1790 rank, titles, and feudal rights were abolished. Chateaubriand
gave up his commission, and, as no occupation offered itself under the
new order, or disorder, he conceived the fantastic plan of travelling
to America to discover the North-West Passage. Without any of the
requisite information, without interest or money, he was inevitably
soon obliged to abandon this project. But if he did not find the
North-West Passage, he did discover a new race, fresh conditions,
and new scenery. In his early youth, after reading Rousseau, he had
conceived the idea of writing the Epic of Primitive Man, a description
of the ways of the savages of whom he knew nothing. Now he was upon
their own soil, in their world, and though they were not as untouched
by civilisation as he had imagined, it was not difficult to reconstruct
their original condition. The first impression he received of them
was undeniably a strange one. On the way from Albany to Niagara, when
his guide led him for the first time into the virgin forest, he was
seized by one of those transports of delight in his independence which
he had felt in his early youth when he went hunting in Brittany. He
wandered from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to himself:
"Here are no roads, no towns, no monarchies, no republics, no men."
Imagining himself to be alone in the forest, he suddenly came upon a
score of half-naked, painted savages with ravens' feathers in their
hair and rings in their noses, who--marvellous to relate!--were dancing
quadrilles to the sounds of a violin played by a little powdered and
frizzed Frenchman, once kitchen-boy to a French general, now retained
as dancing-master by these savages for a consideration of beaver-skins
and bear-hams. What a humiliating introduction to primitive life for a
pupil of Rousseau! Subsequent impressions were, fortunately, simpler
and more beautiful than this. Chateaubriand purchased clothes and
weapons from the Indians, and lived their life for some weeks at least.
He was presented to the Sachem, or chief, of the Onondagas (as Byron
at a later period was presented to Ali Pasha); he rode through the
country, coming here and there upon little European houses, with their
pianos and mirrors, close to the huts of the Iroquois; he saw the Falls
of Niagara; and in two charming Florida girls found the models for his
famous characters, Atala and Celuta.

It was in America that Chateaubriand planned his two brilliant short
tales, _Atala_ and _René_, and also the long, somewhat slovenly work
of which they form part, _Les Natchez_, a great romance dealing with
the destruction of an Indian tribe in its struggle with the whites.
_Atala_ was the first to be completed. After a brief stay in France,
where he arrived in January 1792, recalled by the news of the fall
of the monarchy and the dangerous position of Louis XVI., he again
emigrated, this time to London. He made the first rough drafts of
_Atala_ and _René_ sitting under the trees in Kensington Gardens, and
when he joined the emigrant army on the Rhine, his knapsack contained
more manuscript than linen. _Atala_ was revised during the halts of
the army, and repacked in his knapsack when the march was resumed,
his comrades teasing him by tearing the protruding leaves. In the
action in which he was wounded in the thigh by a splinter of shell,
_Atala_ proved the means of saving his life, for two spent bullets
glanced off his knapsack. He arrived at Brussels after the destruction
of the emigrant army, wounded, emaciated, and ill with fever; his
brother, with wife and father-in-law, having meanwhile perished on
the scaffold in Paris. His mother and two sisters, of whom Lucile was
one, had been imprisoned for a time after his flight. In London, in
1797, he published his _Essai historique sur les Revolutions_, which
was written in a comparatively liberal and, as regards religion, a
distinctly sceptical spirit. It was the death of his mother, he tells
us, which led him back to Christianity, but the reactionary spirit of
the times probably contributed quite as much to his change of attitude,
and when he returned to France in 1800, after Bonaparte had quelled
the Revolution, he carried with him his great work, _Le Génie du
Christianisme_, in which _René_ was included, and the publication of
which coincided with Bonaparte's restoration of Christian worship in
France. The book harmonised too well with the plans of the First Consul
not to bring its author into favour with that autocrat; Chateaubriand,
however, broke with his government after the judicial murder of the Duc
d'Enghien in 1804.

These are the principal incidents in the youthful career of the man
who became famous in 1800 as the author of _Atala_. His character
was even more remarkable than his career. High-spirited, ambitious,
vain, and shy, perpetually wavering in his faith in his own powers,
he was not only endowed with the self-consciousness of genius, but
with an egotism which ignored with absolute indifference all that did
not immediately concern himself. He came too late into the world, and
was educated under too peculiar circumstances, to have faith in the
Revolution or the eighteenth century philosophy which partly inspired
it. He came into the world too soon to make acquaintance with the
science of the nineteenth century, and through it to win a new faith
and a new standpoint. He therefore became a kind of Nihilist in the
service of the past, a spirit who, as he repeatedly observes, believed
in nothing. He adds, when he remembers to do so, "except religion"; but
a man is, according to his nature, either a believer or a sceptic, and
the idea that it is possible to be a believer in the matter of religion
when one believes in nothing else, is a mere delusion, to which the
half-educated are specially liable.

Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ are full of the sort of tirade on the
vanity of name and fame which we so often meet with in Byron. There is
undoubtedly a good deal of affectation in these outbreaks, but they
nevertheless betray genuine ennui and persistent melancholy.

"Unable to believe in anything except religion, I am distrustful of
all else.... The trivial and ridiculous side of things is always the
first to show itself to me. In reality neither great geniuses nor great
deeds exist for me.... In politics the warmth of my conviction does not
outlast my speech or pamphlet.... In the whole history of the world I
do not know a fame that could tempt me. If the greatest honour in the
world lay at my feet and I had but to stoop and take it up, I would not
take the trouble. If I had been my own creator, I should probably have
made myself a woman, out of passion for the sex; or if I had chosen to
be a man, I would first of all have bestowed beauty upon myself; then,
to provide against ennui, my worst enemy, I would have been a great
but unknown artist, using my talent for myself alone. If we set aside
all humbug and examine into what it is that gives life real worth, we
find only two things of value, religion in combination with talent,
and love in combination with youth, that is to say the future and the
present; all the rest is not worth the trouble of thinking about.... I
have no belief in anything except religion. If I had been a shepherd or
a king, what should I have done with my staff or sceptre? I should have
been equally weary of glory and genius, work and rest, prosperity and
adversity. Everything irks me. I drag my weariness painfully after me
all day long, and yawn my life away (_et je vais partout bâillant ma
vie_)."[1]

How much passion had he not wasted upon fantastic imaginings and poetic
dreams before he was reduced to this utter boredom! In _Atala_ the
passion still wells up like a hot spring, and its spray stings and
scalds.

The old Indian, Chactas, tells the story of his youth to a young
Frenchman to whom Chateaubriand has given his own second name, René.
Chactas, taken captive by a hostile tribe, is condemned to death upon
the pyre. The daughter of the chief of the tribe takes a fancy to him
and approaches the place where he lies bound. He mistakes her for
the maiden whose part it is to solace the prisoner in the last hour
before the consummation of the death sentence; but her intention is to
release, not to console. He conceives a sudden passion for her, and
entreats her to fly with him and be his; she refuses, and, delayed by
her opposition, he is recaptured. He is already adorned for the pyre,
crowned with flowers, his face painted blue and red, and beads attached
to his ears, when Atala delivers him for the second time and escapes
with him. The greater part of the book describes this flight, Chactas's
desire, and the mingling of passion and reserve in Atala which makes
her constantly vacillate between resistance and surrender. Her
behaviour is explained when she tells Chactas that her mother, who was
seduced by a white man, had her baptized and made her swear to remain
unwed. In her anguish at the vow and her despair of being able to keep
it, she takes poison, and dies in her lover's arms, comforted by the
old missionary in whose hut the pair have taken shelter.

A full impression of the burning passion and lyrical exaltation of
the book can only be gained by reading it, nor can we obtain any idea
from descriptions and quotations of the power with which the wonderful
scenery is described. It is an easy matter, however, to show how much
and how instinctively Chateaubriand relied upon a mingling of the
terrible with the erotic to obtain his effects. In the principal love
scene we have not only a lavish musical accompaniment of the rattle
of snakes, the howling of wolves, the roaring of bears and jaguars,
but also a storm which shatters the trees, and impenetrable darkness,
torn by flash upon flash of the lightning which finally sets fire to
the forest. Round about the lovers the pines are blazing like wedding
torches, and Atala is about to yield when a warning flash strikes
the ground at her feet. It is after this she takes poison, and the
burning passion of her last words to Chactas are in harmony with the
conflagration of the forest:

"What torture to see thee at my side, far from all mankind, in these
profound solitudes, and to feel an invincible barrier between thee
and me! To pass my life at thy feet, to wait upon thee as thy slave,
to prepare thy repast and thy couch in some forgotten corner of the
universe would have been my supreme happiness. This bliss I had
actually attained to, but could not enjoy. What plans have I not
planned! what dreams have I not dreamed! Sometimes, looking upon thee,
I have been tempted to form desires as wild as they were guilty. I have
sometimes wished that thou and I were the only living creatures on
earth; sometimes, conscious of a divinity which arrested my horrible
transports, I have wished that divinity annihilated, that, clasped in
thy arms, I might fall from abyss to abyss amid the ruins of God and
the world."

Remarkable as these outbursts of irresistible passion are, and novel as
is the scenery which throws them into relief, we feel that both would
have been impossible if Rousseau had never lived, and if his literary
work had not been carried on by another and greater intellect of
another nationality.


[1] _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_, vol. i. p. 207-451; vol. ii. p. 129.




II


ROUSSEAU


Rousseau's chief work as an imaginative writer is _La Nouvelle Héloïse_.

The novelty of the book lay, in the first instance, in the fact that it
gave the death-blow to gallantry, and, consequently, to the theory of
the French classical period on the subject of the emotions. This theory
was that all noble, fine emotions, and chief among them love, were the
products of civilisation. It is obvious enough that a certain degree of
civilisation was necessary before such a sentiment as love could arise.
Until they wore womanly garb women did not exist, but only females, and
until there were women there was no love. From this perfectly correct
idea had resulted (in the pre-Rousseau period) the belief that the
veiling of passion ennobled it and made it worthy. The more it could be
shrouded in circumlocutions, hints, and suggestions, the less coarse it
was. The morality and the literature of that period were the products
of social culture, a culture confined to the highest circles. We need
but read Marivaux's plays to find literary evidence of the extent to
which courtly formality and refined sentiment were preferred to nature
and passion. Marivaux's lovers are always each other's equals in
culture, and, what is of still greater importance, in rank. We never
find, as in the dramas of our century, the aristocratic lady who loves
a man of lower social station, nor such a character, for instance,
as Ruy Blas, the lackey who finds favour in the eyes of a Queen. In
Marivaux, if a gentleman is disguised as a lackey, or a young lady as
a waiting-maid, they always divine each other immediately in spite of
their disguise. Their conversation is an incessant pursuit and flight,
advance and retreat; it is full of ambiguities and hints and evasions,
masked confessions and suppressed sighs, love-sickness expressed in a
becomingly conventional manner. In Rousseau's eyes these mannerisms are
as ridiculous as they are artificial. He prefers love, like everything
else, in its natural state, and to him love in its natural state is a
violent, irresistible passion. In his books we are very far removed
from those scenes in Marivaux in which the kneeling lover never forgets
to preserve a graceful attitude while pressing the tips of a glove to
his lips. For all his chivalry and virtue, St. Preux is an electric
battery charged with passion; the first kiss in the Grove of Clarens
produces the shock, the conflagration of a thunderbolt; and when
Julie, bending towards St. Preux and kissing him, swoons away, it is
no coquettish faint of the days of the periwig, but the effect of the
overwhelming might of passion upon a young and healthy child of nature.

The second novelty in the book is the inequality in station of the hero
and heroine. Julie is the daughter of a nobleman, St. Preux is a poor
tutor, a plebeian. Here, as in the _Sorrows of Werther_, the passion
of love is connected with the equality-loving plebeian's determination
to make a name for himself. This is no chance connection, for passion
creates equality, whereas love in fashionable society has a tendency to
develop into gallantry.

A third significant feature in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ is that, just as
we have passion in place of gallantry and inequality of station in
place of similarity of rank, we have also the moral conviction of the
sanctity of marriage in place of that honour grounded on aristocratic
pride and self-respect, which stood for virtue in fashionable
literature. This word, Virtue, little in vogue until now, became with
Rousseau and his school a watchword which was in perfect harmony with
their other watchword, Nature; for to Rousseau virtue was a natural
condition. Following the example of society, French literature had
been making merry at the expense of marriage; Rousseau, therefore,
defied the spirit of the times by writing a book in its honour. His
heroine returns the passion of her lover, but marries another, to
whom she remains faithful. Here, as in _Werther_, the lover proper
loses the maiden, who is wedded to a Monsieur Wolmar (the Albert of
_Werther_ and the Edward of Kierkegaard's _Diary of a Seducer_), a man
as irreproachable as he is uninteresting. The moral conviction which
is vindicated and glorified in Rousseau as Virtue, is the same as that
which in Chateaubriand, under the influence of the religious reaction,
takes the form of a binding religious vow.

Note, finally, that the watchword Nature is to be taken in its literal
meaning. For the first time, out of England, we have the genuine
feeling for nature in fiction, superseding love-making in drawing-rooms
and gardens. Under Louis XV. and the Regency, people passed their
time (in real life as well as in books) in boudoirs, where light
conversation and light morals were in place. The rooms, like the verses
of Voltaire's _Poesies Fugitives_, were adorned with endless multitudes
of Cupids and Graces. In the gardens goat-footed Pans embraced slender
white nymphs by the side of artificial fountains. In their pictures
of the _fêtes-champêtres_ of those days, Watteau and the less-gifted
Boucher and Lancret have preserved for us these gardens with their
shady walks and quiet corners, where courtly gentlemen and gay ladies,
clad as Pierrots and Columbines, coquetted and whispered, conscious of
being on the right stage for such free and frivolous masquerading. Turn
from these to the scenery of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_.

Rousseau's statue stands at this day on a little island lying in the
Lake of Geneva, at its narrow southern extremity. The spot is one of
the loveliest in the world. Pass the island and cross another bridge
and you see the Rhone rush, impetuous and foaming white, out of the
lake. A few steps further and you can see its white stream joined by
the grey snow waters of the Arve. The rivers flow side by side, each
retaining its colour. Far away between two mighty ridges you discern
the white snow-caps of Mont Blanc. Towards evening, as those mountain
ridges darken, the snows of Mont Blanc glow like pale roses. It would
seem as if Nature had gathered together all her contrasts here. Even in
the warmest season as you approach the grey, foaming mountain torrents,
the air becomes icy cold. In the course of a short stroll you may feel
the heat of summer in some sheltered nook, and a few steps farther
on encounter harsh autumn with its cutting winds. One can form no
conception of the cool freshness and strength of the air here. Only the
sun and the brilliant shimmer of the stars at night recall the south.
The latter are not the bright points in a distant sky which they appear
to be in the north; they seem to hang loose in the air; and the air
itself, as one inhales it, feels like a strong massive substance.

Sail up the lake to Vevey. Behind that town the Alpine slopes are clad
with the trees and vineyards of southern lands. On the farther side of
the lake rise great walls of blue rock, solemn and threatening, and
the sun plays in light and shade down the mountain-side. No waters
are so blue as those of the Lake of Geneva. As you sail down it on a
beautiful summer day, it shines like blue satin shot with gold. It is
a fairyland, a dreamland, where mighty mountains cast their blue-black
shadows down into the azure waters and a brilliant sun saturates the
air with colour. Sail a little farther up the lake to Montreux, where
the rock fortress of Chillon, the prison in which mediæval cruelty
collected all its instruments of torture, projects into the water. This
witness to wild and terrible passions lies in the midst of scenery
which may well be called enchanted. The lake is more open here, the
view less peculiar, and the climate more southern than at Vevey.
One sees sky, Alps, and lake, all melting together in a mysterious
blue light. From Montreux walk to Clärens and pause in the chestnut
grove which is still called the _Bosquet de Julie_. It is situated
on a height from which you look down upon Montreux, lying sheltered
and hidden in its bay; look round and you will understand how it was
from this spot that the love of nature spread throughout Europe. We
are standing in Rousseau's country, upon the scene of his _Nouvelle
Héloïse_. This was the scenery which supplanted that of the Regency.

It is not difficult to trace the relation between Chateaubriand's first
work and Rousseau's famous romance. First and foremost Chateaubriand
inherits the love of nature; his strongly coloured pictures of North
American scenery have their progenitors in those descriptions of
Swiss nature. But there is this difference between Rousseau's and
Chateaubriand's landscapes, that the latter's are much more dependent
upon the mood of the hero and heroine. If stormy passions rage in their
hearts, the storm rages without also; the characters are blent with
their natural surroundings, which they permeate with their passions and
moods in a manner quite unknown to the literature of the eighteenth
century.

The hero and heroine themselves, being savages, have even less
suspicion of gallantry about them, are far more the children of nature
than Rousseau's lovers; and although expressions occur again and again
which are absurd coming from the lips of a Red Indian, yet many of
the love-speeches have a touch of primitive poetry in them, a genus
of literature which was entirely unknown in France in the eighteenth
century. Take for an example the warrior's love-song beginning with the
words: "I will fly so fast that before the day has touched the mountain
tops I shall have come to my white dove among the oaks of the forest. I
have bound a necklace of beads about her neck--three red beads to speak
of my love, three violet beads to speak of my fear, and three blue
beads to speak my hope," &c.

The inequality of position between Rousseau's lovers, so typical
of that revolutionary time, finds its equivalent in _Atala_ in the
difference of religion, a matter which in the new century, with its
reaction against Voltaire, acquires new importance. The religious
reaction also explains the fact that a Catholic vow to remain unwed
plays the same rôle in Chateaubriand's story which the dictate of
morality does in Rousseau's. We have, then, progress in colouring,
in the development of character, in the comprehension of the spirit
and racial peculiarities of an uncivilised people, but we have also a
deliberate step backward, in the substitution of Catholic conventual
piety, with its unnatural renunciation, for morality. Passion is
whetted, so to speak, on the altar of Catholicism, and its unnatural
suppression creates that unnatural frenzy which causes Atala, the
charming young Indian girl, who has so long held the desire of her
heathen lover in check, to die with a wish on her lips for the
annihilation of God and the world, if at that price she can be clasped
for ever to his heart.




III


WERTHER


_La Nouvelle Héloïse_ appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later, in
another country and in very different environments, a youthful genius,
who possessed little in common with Rousseau, but who wrote under
the influence of his romance and his ideas, published a little book
which contained all the merits and none of the defects of _La Nouvelle
Héloïse_, a book which stirred thousands upon thousands of minds, which
awoke lively enthusiasm and a morbid longing for death in a whole
generation, which in not a few cases induced hysterical sentimentality,
idleness, despair, and suicide, and which was honoured by being
proscribed by a fatherly Danish government as "irreligious." This book
was _Werther_. St. Preux has changed his costume, has donned the famous
Werther garb, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and Rousseau's _belle
âme_ has passed into German literature as _die schöne Seele_.

And what is _Werther_? No definitions can give any real idea of the
infinite wealth of an imaginative masterpiece, but we may briefly
say that the great importance of this story of ardent, unhappy love,
lies in its being so treated that it gives expression not merely to
the isolated passion and suffering of a single individual, but to
the passions, longings, and sufferings of a whole age. The hero is a
young man of the burgher class; he is artistically gifted, and paints
for pleasure, but by profession he is Secretary to a Legation. Goethe
has involuntarily made this young man see, and feel, and think as he
himself did in his youth, has endowed him with all his own rich and
brilliant genius. This transforms Werther into a great symbolic figure;
he is more than the spirit of the new era, he is its genius. He is
almost too rich and great for his destiny. There is, perhaps, actually
a certain discrepancy between the first part of the book, in which
Werther's mind manifests itself in its energetic, youthful health and
strength, and the second part, in which he succumbs to circumstances.
In the first half there is in Werther more of Goethe himself, who
certainly did not commit suicide; in the second, more of that young
Jerusalem whose unhappy death inspired the book. But such as he is,
Werther is a type. He is not only the child of nature in his passion,
he is nature in one of its highest developments, genius. Losing himself
in nature, he feels its whole infinite life within himself, and feels
himself "deified" thereby. Turn, for instance, to that wonderful entry
in his journal written on August 18, 1771. It is as powerful and full
of genius as a _Faust_ monologue. Read that description of how "the
inner, glowing, holy life of nature" opens before him, of how he
perceives the "unfathomable powers working and creating in the depths
of the earth," of how he yearns to "drink the surging joy of life
from the foaming cup of infinity, in order that, as far as his narrow
limitations permit, he may taste one drop of the bliss of that being
which produces everything in and by itself," and you will understand
how it is that, when he begins to feel like a prisoner who sees no way
of escape, he is seized by a burning, so to speak, pantheistic, desire
to fling his human life away, that he may "rend the clouds asunder with
the storm-wind and grasp the billows;" you will feel the justification
for his dying exclamation: "Nature! thy son, thy friend, thy lover,
approaches his end."

A soul which demands so much room must inevitably be an offence to
society, especially when society is hedged in by as many rules as it
was at the close of the most social of all centuries. Werther abhors
all rules. At a time when poetry was fettered by them, he reduces all
its laws to one: "Know what is good and dare to put it into words." An
artist, his views on painting are as heretical as his views on poetry.
He meets a young brother artist, fresh from the schools, who deafens
him with the doctrines of all the famous theorists, Winckelmann and
Sulzer amongst others. This fellow is a perfect terror to him. "Nature
alone," he writes, "fashions the great artist. Much may be said in
favour of the laws of art, about as much as may be said in praise of
the laws of society. The artist who observes them will never produce
anything bad or absolutely valueless, just as the man who submits to
the control of convention and decorum will never be an unbearable
neighbour or a remarkable scoundrel; nevertheless, every rule, say
what you will, tends to destroy true feeling for nature and to prevent
its sincere expression." Werther's detestation of rules explains his
abhorrence for all technical and conventional expressions. He gnashes
his teeth with annoyance when the prince, who has no artistic taste,
brings out some æsthetic platitude in reply to an eager remark he
himself has let fall on the subject of art, and he is enraged by the
string of ready-made social judgments which Albert has at his fingers'
ends. "Why," he cries, "must you people, when you speak of a thing,
immediately say, 'it is stupid' or 'it is clever,' 'it is good' or
'it is bad'? What do you mean? Have you investigated into the inner
significance of the action? Have you traced its causes, divined its
inevitability? If you had, you would not be so ready to pass judgment!"
He revolts against the pedantry of the ambassador who cavils at the
style of his secretary's despatches, he wishes misfortune may befall
the theological blue-stocking who has cut down the pretty hazels in the
rectory garden, and he is unreasonably embittered by the arrogance of
antiquated erudition, by all lifeless, solemn ceremonial, and by the
claims which those of a certain rank in society make on the submission
and obedience of their inferiors.

He seeks refuge with children, who "of all things upon earth are
nearest to his heart," and with uncultured souls, whose genuine
feelings and genuine passions give them a beauty in his eyes which
nothing can surpass. Watching the girls fetch water from the well
reminds him of patriarchal times, of Rebecca and Eleazer, and when he
cooks his own green peas he lives in thought in those Homeric days
when Penelope's haughty suitors killed and prepared their own food.
Nature enchants and captivates him. If he is not a Christian, if, as
he expresses it, he is not one of those who have been given to the
Son--something in his heart telling him that the Father has reserved
him for Himself--it is because to him that Father is Nature; Nature is
his God.

Wherever he goes in society he offends against its cold and formal
regulations. He is ejected in the most insulting manner from an
aristocratic gathering; he, the plebeian, all unwitting of offence,
having remained in his chief's drawing-room after the arrival of
distinguished guests. Himself ardently, hopelessly in love, he does
what he can to save an unfortunate youth whom an unconquerable and not
unrequited passion has driven to offer violence and to murder a rival.
Werther's petition is not only rejected by the representatives of the
law, but he is himself compelled by the law to bear witness against the
man he would so willingly shield and save.

All this, however, is mere minor detail. The woman he loves, and whom
he could so easily have won, had no plighted word stood between them,
becomes the wife of another; this is the shock that breaks his heart.

This book represents the full heart, right or wrong, in collision
with the conventions of everyday life, its craving for infinity, for
liberty, which makes life seem a prison and all society's partition
walls seem prison walls. "All that society does," says Werther, "is
to paint them for each individual with fair perspectives opening to
a wide horizon. The walls themselves are never broken down." Hence
this dashing of the head against the wall, these long sobs, this deep
despair which nothing but a bullet through the heart can still. On
the occasion of their meeting, Napoleon reproached Goethe for having
mixed up the love-story with the revolt against society; the reproach
was unreasonable, for the two are indissolubly connected; it is only
together that they express the idea of the book.

Unlike _La Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther_ is no glorification of the
triumph of virtue and deistic piety over natural instincts and
passions; it represents passion running its predestined course. In
this tragedy of the human heart, the law-defying being and the lawless
passion meet their inevitable doom. The termination to the story,
however, was not of Goethe's invention; he made use of a manuscript
describing the death of young Jerusalem (_vide_ Kestner's book on
Goethe and Lotte). In its last lines he only altered a single word, as
being too vulgar. The manuscript runs, "Barbiergesellen trugen ihn";
in the book we read, "Handwerker trugen ihn, kein Geistlicher hat ihn
begleitet." This sentence in its cutting brevity intimates that a life
is at an end, that a human being at war with himself and society,
mortally wounded in his deepest sympathies, has succumbed. Mechanics
bore him to the grave, middle-class society held pharisaically aloof;
no priest accompanied him, for he was a suicide, and had defied the
laws of religion; but he had loved the people and had associated with
the uncultured, so they followed him to the grave.

It is well known to what an outburst of sentimental literature
this work gave rise; how its passionate emotion turned into heavy
sentimentality, as in the case of Clauren, Lafontaine, and Rahbek, the
Dane, or was diluted into sickly platonism, as in Ingemann's feeble
imitation, _Varners Vandringer_, But _Werther_ was not responsible for
all this; absorption in feeling and emotions is only one feature of the
book. There wells forth from the very midst of this absorption such a
healthy love of nature and of life, such a hearty, revolutionary ire at
conventional society, its prejudices, its compulsory regulations, its
terror of genius, whose stream might possibly overflow its banks and
flood the "tulip beds and kitchen-gardens," that the main impression
which the work leaves on our minds is that of the impulse towards
originality and poetry which it depicts, arouses, and satisfies.

What an advance we have here upon _La Nouvelle Héloïse_! In the first
place, there is a far deeper and purer feeling for nature than in
Rousseau. The additional fact, that scenery is looked at from a new
point of view, is to be ascribed to the influence of a literary event
which occurred in 1762, and made a great impression; namely, the
publication of Ossian. The Scottish bard so melted even Napoleon's
hard heart that he much preferred him to Homer. At this time the
authenticity of Ossian had not been called in question; at a later
period men turned from these poems with the pique which people who
have been raving about the singing of a nightingale would show if they
discovered that some rascal hidden among the bushes had been imposing
on them. In the hearts of his contemporaries, Macpherson succeeded in
supplanting Homer. Among others he influenced Goethe, which accounts
for our finding the healthy Homeric view of nature which prevails
in the first half of _Werther_, superseded in the second by the
Ossianic mist pictures which harmonise with the increasing morbidity,
restlessness, and lyrical passion of the tale.

Rousseau's chief female figure is drawn with uncertain touch. Like most
French heroines, she is wanting in womanly simplicity. In genuineness
and sincerity of passion she falls far short of her namesake, the real
Héloïse, whose every word comes from the heart. Julie's utterances are
cold; she perpetually relapses into lectures on Virtue and the Supreme
Being. She makes such observations as the following: "To such a degree
are all human affairs naught, that with the exception of the being
which exists by itself, there is no beauty except in that which is
not." She means in our illusions. Julie dissects feelings, and reasons
in high-flown language. In contrast with her how naïve and natural
is the vigorous Charlotte! Think of the latter, for instance, in the
famous scene where she is cutting bread and butter for her little
sisters and brothers. If she offends it is not by declamation, but by
a touch of sentimentality, as, for instance, in the scene where her
thoughts and Werther's meet, when, looking out into the rain through
the wet window-pane, she utters the word: "Klopstock!"

From St. Preux to Werther the advance is equally great In the former
there was, as his name implies, some reminiscence of the ideal knight.
It is Goethe, the poet of the modern era, who finally disposes of this
ideal. In his heroes, physical courage, which never fails in its effect
on naïve readers, is almost too much ignored. It is so in the case of
Wilhelm Meister and Faust. And Werther too is no knight, but a thinking
and feeling microcosm. From his limited point in space he embraces
the whole of existence, and the trouble in his soul is the trouble
which heralds and accompanies the birth of a new era. His most enduring
mood is one of limitless longing. He belongs to an age of anticipation
and inauguration, not to one of abandonment and despair. We shall see
his antithesis in Chateaubriand's René. The main source of Werther's
unhappiness is to be found in the disparity between the limitations
of society and the infinity of the heart. In early days the heroes of
literature were kings and princes; their worldly position harmonised
with their spiritual greatness; the contrast between desire and power
was unknown. And even after literature had widened its bounds, it still
admitted only those whose birth and wealth raised them above the low
toils and troubles of life. In Wilhelm Meister Goethe indicates the
cause. "O thrice happy," he cries, "are they who are placed by birth
on the heights of humanity, and who have never dwelt in, have never
even travelled through, the valley of humiliation in which so many
an honest soul spends a miserable life. They have scarcely entered
existence before they step on board a ship to take the great common
journey; they profit by every favourable breath of wind, while the
others, left to their own resources, swim painfully after, deriving
but small benefit from the favouring breeze, and often sink when their
strength is exhausted to a miserable death beneath the waves." Here we
have one of the blessings of life, namely, wealth, praised in eloquent
terms, and what may be said of wealth, the lowest in order of life's
outward advantages, may be said with still more reason of all the other
external forms of happiness and power.

It is at the change of the century that we first come upon this strange
incongruity, a personality who is a sort of god and ruler in the
spiritual world, whose capacity of feeling is such that by means of it
he draws into his own life the whole life of the universe, the demand
of whose heart is a demand for omnipotence (for omnipotence he must
have in order to transform the cold, hard world into a world after
his own heart), and who, along with all this, is--what? A Secretary
of Legation, perhaps, like Werther, with a few hundred thalers a
year, a man who is so needy that he is glad when the Hereditary Prince
makes him a present of twenty-five ducats, who is confined half the
day to his office, who is debarred from all except bourgeois society,
and looks for the fulfilment of all his desires of happiness in the
possession of a girl who is carried off from under his nose by a
commonplace prig. Would he cultivate a talent, there are obstacles in
his way; would he gratify a desire, some conventional rule restrains
him; in his longing to follow his ardent impulses, to quench his
burning spiritual thirst, he passionately stretches out his hands, but
society peremptorily says: No. It seemed as if there were a great and
terrible discord between the individual and the general condition of
things, between heart and reason, between the laws of passion and those
of society. The impression that this was so had taken deep hold of that
generation. It appeared to them that there was something wrong with
the great machinery of existence, and that it would soon collapse. Nor
was it long before they heard the crash, before that time came when
all barriers were broken down and all forms done away with; when the
established order was overthrown and distinctions of class suddenly
disappeared; when the air was filled with the smoke of gunpowder and
the notes of the "Marseillaise" when the ancient boundaries of kingdoms
were changed and re-changed, kings were dethroned and beheaded, and the
religion of a thousand years was abolished; when a Corsican lieutenant
of artillery proclaimed himself the heir of the Revolution and declared
all careers open to the man of talent, the son of a French innkeeper
ascended the throne of Naples, and a quondam grenadier grasped the
sceptres of Sweden and Norway.

It is the longing and the vague unrest of anticipation that distinguish
Werther. A revolution lies between him and the next great type, the
Frenchman, René. In René the poetry of prophecy is superseded by
that of disillusionment. In place of pre-revolutionary discontent we
have anti-revolutionary dissatisfaction. All those great changes had
been powerless to bring man's actual condition into harmony with
the cravings of his spirit. The struggle for the human rights of the
individual appeared to have resulted solely in a new tyranny. Once
again we meet the young man of the age in literature. How changed
he is! The fresh colour has gone from his cheek, the ingenuousness
from his mind; his forehead is lined, his life is empty, his hand is
clenched. Expelled from a society which he anathematises because he can
find no place in it, he roams through a new world, through primeval
forests inhabited by savage tribes. A new element, not to be found
in Werther, has entered into his soul--the element of melancholy.
Werther declares again and again that nothing is so obnoxious to him
as ill-humour and despondency; he is unhappy, but never melancholy.
René, on the other hand, is lost in an idle grief which he is unable
to control. He is heavy-hearted and misanthropical. He is a transition
figure, standing midway between Goethe's Werther and Byron's Giaour and
Corsair.




IV


RENÉ


Chateaubriand was not, like Goethe, a man of peace. A star of
destruction stood above his cradle; he was born in the same year as
Napoleon, and the cruel and dark spirit of that age of the sword is
apparent in his writings, and imparts to them a peculiar, wild poetry.

But, it may be objected, has he really anything at all in common with
Goethe and Rousseau? Did he actually learn anything from them? I regard
it as certain that not only he but the whole age was moulded by the
books we have just criticised. A species of proof can be adduced. When
Chateaubriand reproaches Byron for never mentioning his name, for
ignoring all that Childe Harold owes to René, he emphasises the fact
that it is not so with himself, that he will never deny the influence
which Ossian, Werther, and St. Preux have exercised upon his mind.
Again, describing Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, he writes: "The library
he carried with him contained _Ossian, Werther, La Nouvelle Héloïse_,
and the Old Testament; sufficient indication of the chaos reigning in
his brain. He mixed realistic thought with romantic feeling, systems
with dreams, serious studies with fantasies, and wisdom with madness.
It was out of the heterogeneous productions of this century that he
fashioned the empire."[1] I give this pronouncement for what it is
worth, but so much is clear, that if Rousseau's _Héloïse_, Goethe's
_Werther_, and Ossian's poems were so much in the air that they seemed
to a contemporary to be important factors in the creation of the
empire, they must indubitably have had part and lot in the epoch-making
literary works which appeared at the same period.

Comparing Chateaubriand's talent with the contemporary genius of
Napoleon, it seems to us as if the new century had concentrated all its
energy and spirit of enterprise in its great general and conqueror,
leaving none to spare for the young contemporaries who did not follow
him on his warlike path. The procession of men of action and warriors
passes them by and leaves them standing irresolute and dissatisfied.

René is supposed to live in the days of Louis XV., but the description
given of that period would apply equally well to the time of
Chateaubriand's youth. It was, says René, a time when people had
relapsed from the reverence for religion and the austere morality which
had hitherto prevailed, into a condition of impiety and corruption,
when genius had degenerated into mere nimbleness of wit, and the
serious and right-minded felt ill at ease and lonely. All this applies
very accurately to the close of the eighteenth century as it would be
seen by Chateaubriand.

In _Atala_ Chactas had told René the story of his life; now René in
return relates his past history to Chactas. He describes his childhood
in the old manor-house of the remote province, he tells how ill at ease
and repressed he felt in the presence of his father, and how he was
only happy in the society of his sister Amélie. Brother and sister,
both by nature melancholy, and both poetically inclined, are early
left orphans and obliged to quit their home. René's great longing is
for the peace of the cloister; but he is changeable in his longings;
they presently take the form of a desire to travel. This desire he
gratifies. He finds food for his melancholy among the ruins of Greece
and Rome, and discovers as much forgetfulness of the dead among living
peoples as upon the soil of past nations; the workmen whom he questions
in the streets of London know nothing of that Charles the Second at
the foot of whose statue they stand. What, then, is the value of fame?
He travels to Scotland to live in the memory of the heroes of Morven,
and finds herds of cattle grazing on the spots where Ossian sang and
Fingal conquered. He returns to Italy and studies its monuments of
art, but finds that for all his pains he has learned nothing. Past and
Present are two incomplete statues; the one has been dug up from the
earth in a mutilated condition, the other stands unfinished, and can
only be completed by the Future. Nature has as little power as history
to soothe his disordered soul. He climbs Mount Etna, and, standing on
its summit, sees on one side the sun rise above the horizon, with the
whole of Sicily spread out far beneath, surrounded by the great sea,
and looking so small that its rivers resemble the lines on a map; on
the other side he looks down into the crater of the volcano, with its
burning glow and its black smoke. This situation he considers to be
exactly typical of his own character and life. "All my life long," he
says, "I have had a widespread and yet insignificantly small world
before my eyes, and at my side a yawning abyss."

So volcanic and pretentious a nature was, naturally, out of place in
the land that had given it birth. It is in vain that Chateaubriand
attempts to conform in his modes of expression to the standards of
that society to which he considers himself, spiritually, infinitely
superior; he is invariably treated and spoken of as an _esprit
romanesque_ for whom life has no use. Here we come for the first
time on the term which in a slightly different form was to become
so familiar in France as the denomination of a whole school. There
is, undoubtedly, something of the Romanticist before the days of
Romanticism in this mysterious suffering, which is so conscious of
being interesting. From all these half-forgotten memories of vanished
grandeur, all these impressions of the vanity of name and fame, these
transports of indignation at the baseness and littleness of mankind,
René has distilled an obstinate conviction that there is no such thing
as happiness, and a persuasion of the weariness and emptiness of
life even while he feels its healthy glow tingling in his veins. His
favourite expressions are: "La folie de croire au bonheur; dégoût de la
vie; profond sentiment d'ennui," &c.

In all this misery, the thought of his sister is his only solace, but
on his return to France he notices with surprise and grief that she
avoids him; she repeatedly declares that she is unable to meet him,
and has apparently forgotten all his love for her. Once only, when she
divines that he is contemplating suicide, does she draw near to him
again for a moment. He has already added this coldness of his beloved
sister to the list of his bitter experiences of the faithlessness of
mankind, when news of her intention of entering a convent makes him
hasten to her. He arrives just in time to take part in the dreary
ceremony, to see Amélie's hair fall under the scissors, and to kneel
by her side, while she, as the ceremony prescribes, lies prostrate
like a corpse on the marble floor of the church. He hears her murmur a
prayer for forgiveness for the "criminal passion she has felt for her
brother," and, grasping the reason of his sister's conduct towards him,
falls in a swoon. As soon as he recovers consciousness he determines to
leave Europe and travel to the New World. The night he quits the French
coast a terrible storm rages. "Did Heaven," he asks, "mean to warn
me that tempests must always attend my steps?" One thing is certain,
that to Chateaubriand René's career was as unimaginable without an
accompaniment of thunder and lightning as Atala's love tale had been.

We have here an exceptional character encountering an exceptional
destiny. And it is from this character that the melancholy and
misanthropy of the new literature may be said to emanate. This
melancholy and this misanthropy differ from any previously known.
Molière's Alceste, for instance, the finest and most profound of his
masculine characters, is only misanthropical in so far that he is
troubled to the depths of his being by the meanness, the servility,
the frivolous or cowardly duplicity which prevail at a corrupt and
worldly court; but he is not melancholy, there is nothing morbid in his
temperament, he does not bear the mark of Cain upon his brow.

The melancholy of the early nineteenth century partakes of the nature
of a disease; and it is not a disease which attacks a single individual
or a single nation only, it is an epidemic which spreads from people to
people, in the manner of those religious manias which so often spread
over Europe in the Middle Ages. René's is merely the first and most
marked case of the disease in the form in which it attacked the most
gifted intellects.

René bears that mark of Cain already alluded to, which is, withal, the
mark of the ruler. The seal of genius, invisible to himself, has been
set on his brow. Behind the mournful self-accusations of which his
confession consists, lies the proud feeling of superiority which filled
the writer's breast. If we read Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ attentively,
we cannot resist the impression that the fiction of Amélie's love for
René veils a kind of confession, an admission of the passionate love
his sister Lucile cherished for her remarkable brother. How much in the
way of confession may not the remainder of the book contain?

René's sufferings are the birth-throes of genius in the modern soul. He
is the moment in which the chosen spirit, like the Hebrew prophet of
old, hears the voice that calls him, and timidly draws back, shrinking
despairingly from the task, and saying: "Choose not me, O Lord; choose
another, my brother; I am too weak, too slow of speech." René is this
first stage, the stage of unrest, of election. The chosen waits to
see another follow the call; he looks around but sees none arise, and
the voice continues to call. He sees all that he loathes and scorns
triumph, and all that worsted for which he would so willingly sacrifice
everything if another would but lead the way. With amazement and dread
he realises that there is not one who feels as he does; he wanders
about seeking a leader and finding none, until at last the certainty
is borne in upon him that, as none appears, as he can discover no
helper, no guide, it must be because it is he himself who is destined
to be the guide and support of weaker souls. At last he follows the
call; he sees that the time for dreaming and doubting is past, that
the time to act has come. The crisis leaves him, not, like Werther,
prepared to commit suicide, but with a firm resolve and a higher
opinion of himself. Genius, however, is always a curse as well as a
blessing. Even the greatest and most harmoniously constituted natures
have, all their lives, been aware of the curse it carries with it. In
René, Chateaubriand has shown us the curse alone. His own nature and
the position in which he stood to the ideas of his time caused genius,
as _he_ knew it, to seem merely a source of lonely suffering, or of
wild, egotistical pleasure, marred by the feeling of its emptiness and
worthlessness.

Chateaubriand, the inaugurator of the religious reaction of the
nineteenth century, himself possessed no faith, no enthusiasm, no
real devotion to an idea. The ideas of the eighteenth century were
beginning to suffer an eclipse, to look like fallacies; the great
ideas of the nineteenth had not as yet taken scientific shape, and,
placed and constituted as he was, Chateaubriand was incapable of
anticipating them. Hence he became the leader of the reaction, the
champion of Catholicism and the Bourbons. With the genius's instinctive
inclination to seize on the great principle of the new age, but without
the genius's infallible prevision of its real nature and faith in its
final victory, he took hold of the ideas which a temporary revulsion
in men's mood and sympathies had brought to light, and championed them
with obstinacy, with magnificent but often hollow eloquence, with great
talent but without warmth, without that conviction which permeates
the whole individual and makes of him the enthusiastic, indefatigable
organ of the idea. Whilst Voltaire, with all his restlessness and all
his faults, sustained his life's battle freshly, unweariedly, and
invincibly to the last, because he never for a moment wavered in his
faith in his ideals, Chateaubriand was consumed by ennui, incredulity,
and cynicism. In one direction only, namely as a poet, and more
especially a colourist, did he break new ground; and hence it was only
his youthful poetical efforts that satisfied and inwardly rewarded him.
But of all his creations, René, the picture of the intellectual type to
which he himself belonged, was the most successful.

A genius of René's type may employ religious phraseology, but he never
truly merges himself in a higher being; his melancholy in its inmost
essence is only the egoist's unsatisfied craving for enjoyment. As a
genius René knows that the Deity is with and within him, and he can
scarcely distinguish between himself and the Deity. He feels that
his thought and his words are inspired, and where is the boundary
between that which is of him and that which is not of him? He demands
everything--the homage of the public, the love of women, all the
laurels and roses of life--and it never occurs to him that he is in
duty bound to make any return. He accepts love without loving again.
Is not his a privileged nature? is not he a prophet hastening through
life like a fugitive, a fleeting fire which illuminates, consumes, and
vanishes?

In these traits the author has simply described his own nature.
Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ contain, especially in their silences,
sufficient witness to the studied coldness with which he accepted love
and admiration. Some of his private letters to which Sainte-Beuve had
access show with what icy egotism he at times attempted to enveigle
with promises of a consuming passion. Even at the age of sixty-four
he wrote to a young lady from whom he was soliciting a rendezvous in
Switzerland: "My life is merely an incident; of that incident take
the passion, the perturbation and the suffering; I shall give you
more of these in one day than others in long years." One looks back
and remembers the touching tenderness shown by Voltaire to his Emilie
even after he knew that he was being grossly deceived by her, and the
so-called Lucifer of the last century seems as innocent as a child in
comparison.

The picture of René was not finished in the book which bears his name;
he plays an important part in _Les Natchez_, a romance written about
the same time, but published later. His behaviour in it completes the
portrayal of the character. Conforming to Indian custom, he takes to
himself a wife, Celuta, who is passionately devoted to him. But it
goes without saying that life with her does not heal the wounds of his
heart. "René," we read, "had longed for an uninhabited country, a wife,
and liberty; he had got what he longed for, but something marred his
enjoyment of it. He would have blessed the hand that at one blow freed
him from his past suffering and present felicity, if felicity indeed
it were. He tried to realise his old dreams. What woman could be more
beautiful than Celuta? He carried her into the heart of the forest,
and strove to strengthen the impression of his freedom by exchanging
one lonely dwelling-place for another, but whether he pressed his
young wife to his heart in the depths of the forest or high on the
mountaintop, he did not experience the happiness he had hoped for. The
vacuum that had formed deep down in his soul could not be filled. A
divine judgment had fallen upon René--which is the explanation both
of his suffering and his genius. He troubled by his presence; passion
emanated from him but could not enter into him; he weighed heavy on the
earth over which he impatiently wandered, and which bore him against
his will." Such is the author's description of René as the married man.

These experiments of the hero with his young bride, these attempts
to enhance the attraction of her love by the added zest of peculiar
natural surroundings, are extremely characteristic. But it is all
in vain! The unnatural passion he had once inspired, and to which
the very fact of its being unnatural, and, according to human laws,
criminal, communicated a strength and a fire which harmonised with the
fiery strength of his own nature, has half infected him, has, in any
case, made it impossible for him to love again. In his very remarkable
farewell letter to Celuta he says that it is this misfortune which has
made him what he is; he has been loved, too deeply loved, and that
mysterious passion has sealed the fountains of his being although it
has not dried them up. "All love," he says, "became a horror to me.
I had the image of a woman before my eyes whom none could approach.
Although consumed by passion in my inmost soul, I have been in some
inexplicable fashion frozen by the hand of misfortune...." "There
are," he continues, "some existences so miserable that they seem an
accusation against Providence, and should surely cure any one of the
mania for life."

Even the innate desire to live, the deeply-rooted natural love of life
itself, is scorned by him half affectedly, half weariedly, as a _mama_,
and is supplanted by a wild Satanic lust of destruction. "I take it,"
he continues to Celuta, "that René's heart now lies open before you. Do
you see what a strange world it is? Flames issue from it, which lack
nourishment, and which could consume creation without being satiated,
yea, could even consume thee!"

In the next breath he is religious again, humble again, trembling at
God's wrath. In the solitude he hears the Almighty cry to him as to
Cain: "René! René! what hast thou done with thy sister? The one wrong
which he accuses himself of having done to Celuta is, that he has
united her destiny with his. The deepest sorrow this connection has
caused him lies in the fact that Celuta has made him a father; it is
with a species of horror that he sees his life thus extended beyond
its limits. He bids Celuta burn his papers, burn the hut built by him
in which they have lived, and return home to her brother. He wishes
to leave no traces of his existence upon earth. It is evident that he
would fain also require her, after the manner of Indian widows, to
lay herself upon his funeral pile; for the same species of jealousy
inspires him which prompted many a mediæval knight to kill his
favourite horse. This last letter to his wife ends with the following
characteristic farewell:--

"If I die, Celuta, you may after my death unite yourself with a more
tranquil soul than mine. But do not believe that you can accept with
impunity the caresses of another man, or that weaker embraces can
efface those of René from your soul. I have pressed you to my heart
in the midst of the desert and in the hurricane; the day when I bore
you across the stream, it was in my mind to plunge my dagger into your
heart in order to secure that heart's happiness, and to punish myself
for having given you this happiness. It is thou, O supreme Being, the
source of love and happiness, it is thou alone who hast made me what I
am, and only thou canst understand me! Oh, why did I not fling myself
into the foaming waters of the torrent! I should then have returned to
the bosom of nature with all my energies unimpaired.

"Yes, Celuta, if you lose me you will remain a widow. Who else could
surround you with the flame which radiates from me even when I do not
love? The lonely spots to which I imparted the warmth of love, would
seem icy cold to you by the side of another mate. What would you
seek in the shades of the forest? For you there is no rapture, no
intoxication, no delirium left. I robbed you of all this in giving you
it all, or rather in giving nothing, for an incurable wound burned in
my inmost soul.... I am weary of life, a weariness which has always
consumed me. I am left untouched by all that interests other men.
If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my
shepherd's crook or my crown? Glory and genius, work and leisure,
prosperity and adversity, would weary me alike. I have found society
and nature irksome in Europe as in America. I take no pleasure in my
virtue, and should feel no remorse were I a criminal. I would that I
had never been born, or that I were eternally forgotten."[2]

Thus powerfully was the dissonance first sounded which was afterwards
repeated with so many variations by the authors of the "Satanic"
school. Not satisfied with depicting, with a sure hand and in the grand
style, a self-idolatry bordering upon insanity, Chateaubriand throws
it into relief on the dark background of a sister's guilty passion. So
impelled is he to make René irresistibly seductive, that he does not
rest until he has inspired his own sister with an unnatural love for
him. This criminal attachment between brother and sister was a subject
which occupied men's minds considerably at that time. Not many years
previously, Goethe, in his _Wilhelm Meister_, had made Mignon the fruit
of a sinister union between brother and sister; and both Shelley and
Byron treated the same subject in Rosalind and _Helen, The Revolt of
Islam, Cain_, and _Manfred_. It was a favourite theory with the young
revolutionary school that the horror of incest between brother and
sister was merely based upon prejudice.

But René's melancholy is too innate and profound to be caused by
Amélie's unhappy passion alone. The reader feels all the time that this
passion only provides an occasion for the outburst of the melancholy.
René's despondency, his egotism, his outward coldness and suppressed
inward fire, are to be found independently of this external cause in
many of the gifted authors of that period, and in a number of their
best-known characters--Tieck's _William Lovell_, Frederick Schlegel's
_Julius_, Byron's _Corsair_, Kierkegaard's _Johannes Forföreren_,
and Lermontov's _Hero of our Own Time_. They constitute the European
hall-mark with which the heroes of literature are stamped in the early
years of the nineteenth century.

But what marks _René_ as being more especially a product of the nascent
reaction is the aim of the story--an aim which it has in common
with only one of the above-mentioned works, Kierkegaard's _Johannes
Forföreren_. Forming part of a greater whole which has a distinctly
moral and religious tendency, it professes to be written for the
express purpose of warning against the mental condition it portrays, of
showing the glory and the indispensability of Christianity as a refuge
for the disordered soul, and more particularly of proving by means of
Amélie's example that the re-establishment of convents is imperative,
because salvation from certain errors is only to be found in the
cloister. The pious intention of the book and its very profane matter
conflict in a manner which is not particularly edifying. But this too
is a typical trait of the reaction; we find it again, for instance,
in the first parts of Kierkegaard's _Enten-Eller_ and _Stadier_. The
prevailing tone is a wild longing of genius for enjoyment, which
satisfies itself by mingling the idea of death and destruction, a
sort of Satanic frenzy, with what would otherwise be mild and natural
feelings of enjoyment and happiness. It avails little that this work,
like _Atala_, has an avowedly Catholic, even clerical, tendency; its
undercurrent is anything but Christian, is not even religious.

But this undercurrent, however impure and diluted it may be in the
individual writer, springs from a spiritual condition which is the
result of the great revolution in men's minds. All the spiritual
maladies which make their appearance at this time may be regarded as
products of two great events--the emancipation of the individual, and
the emancipation of thought.

The individual has been emancipated. No longer satisfied with the
place assigned to him, no longer content to follow the plough across
his father's field, the young man released from serfdom, freed from
villenage, for the first time sees the whole world lie open before
him. Everything seems to have become suddenly possible; the word
impossible has lost its meaning now that the drumstick in the soldier's
hand may, by a series of rapid changes, turn into a marshal's baton or
even a sceptre. The powers of the individual, however, have not kept
pace with his possibilities; of the hundred thousand to whom the road
is suddenly thrown open, only one can reach the desired goal, and who
is to assure the individual that he is that one? Inordinate desire is
necessarily accompanied by inordinate melancholy. Nor is it every one,
without exception, that can take part in the great wild race. Those who
for some reason or other feel themselves bound up with the old order
of things, and the finer, less thick-skinned natures, the men who are
rather dreamers than workers, find that they are excluded; they stand
aside or emigrate, they are thrown back upon themselves, and their
self-communings increase their self-centredness and thereby augment
their capacity for suffering. It is the most highly developed organisms
which suffer most.

Add to this, that the collapse of the old order releases the individual
from a wholesome pressure which has kept him within certain social
bounds and prevented his thinking himself of too much importance. Now
self-idolatry is possible, wherever the power of self-restraint is not
as strong as the control formerly exercised by society. And at the same
time that everything has become possible, it seems as if everything had
become permissible. All the power which the individual had given up,
had voluntarily transferred to his God or his king, he now reclaims.
Just as he no longer raises his hat to the gilded chariot for whose
gilding he himself has paid, so he no longer bows to any prohibition
whose human origin he can plainly discern. To all such he has an answer
ready, an answer which is a question, a terrible question, one that
is the beginning of all human knowledge and all human freedom, the
question "Why?" It is plain that even these aberrations of fancy upon
which we have just dwelt, these excursions into the domain of unnatural
passions and unnatural crimes, are only a symptom; they are one of the
mistakes made in the great, momentous struggle of the individual to
assert himself.

Thought has been emancipated. The individual, released from tutelage,
no longer feels himself part of a whole; he feels himself to be a
little world which reflects, on a diminished scale, the whole of
the great world. So many individuals, so many mirrors, in each of
which the universe is reflected. But though thought has gradually
acquired courage to understand, not fragmentarily, but in this
universally comprehensive manner, its capacity has not grown along
with its courage; humanity stumbles on in the dark as before. To
the old questions, Why is man born? Why does he live? To what end
does it all lead? the answer, as far as it can be made out, seems
unsatisfying, discouraging, a pessimistic answer. In times gone by
men had been born into a distinct, unquestioned creed, which provided
them with answers believed to have been supernaturally communicated,
full of comfort and promise. In the eighteenth century, this creed
having been abandoned, they were born into an almost equally
dogmatic, at any rate equally inspiring, belief in the saving power
of civilisation and enlightenment; they lived on the promises of the
happiness and harmony which should spread over the earth when the
doctrines of their philosophers were universally accepted. In the
beginning of the nineteenth century this ground of confidence also was
undermined. History seemed to teach that this path also led nowhere,
and the confusion in men's minds was like the confusion of an army
which receives contradictory orders in the midst of a battle. The
standpoint even of those who try to turn thought back into the old
religious grooves is not the standpoint of the old religion, for they
themselves were but a few years ago either Voltaireans or adherents of
Rousseau's deism; their new piety has been painfully reasoned out and
struggled for. This explains the cribbed, constrained character of the
intellectual movement among the writers who usher in the new century.
In a very striking image Alfred de Musset has expressed the impression
they produce. "Eternity," he says, "is like an eyrie from which the
centuries fly forth like young eaglets to skim through the universe
each in his turn. Now it is our century which has come to the edge of
the nest. It stands there glaring, but its wings have been clipped, and
it awaits its death gazing into the infinite space out into which it is
incapable of flying."


[1] Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, ii. 190; iii. 78.

[2] Les Natchez. Chateaubriand, _Oeuvres complètes_, vol. v. pp.
353-463. In his _Mémoires_ the author has, in expressing his own
sentiments, unconsciously repeated one of these sentences. It has
already been quoted.




V


OBERMANN


A striking contrast to René, egotistical and imperious as he is despite
his weariness of life, is presented by the next remarkable variant of
the type of the age.

_Obermann_, a work produced in the same year as René, was also written
in exile. Its author, Étienne Pierre de Sénancour, was born in Paris in
1770, but emigrated in the early days of the Revolution to Switzerland,
where a long illness and various other circumstances compelled him to
remain. In his quality of émigré he was banished from France, and could
only now and again venture secretly over its frontiers to visit his
mother. Under the Consulate he returned to Paris without permission,
and for the first three years lived the life of an absolute hermit in
order not to attract the attention of the authorities. He afterwards
gained a scanty livelihood by writing for Liberal newspapers and
editing historical handbooks. His was a lonely, quiet life--the life of
a deeply-feeling stoic.

Sénancour's first work, the title of which, _Meditations on the
Original Nature of Man_, proclaims the pupil of Rousseau, appeared in
1799. His psychological romance, _Obermann_, was published early in
1804. This book created no particular stir on its first appearance,
but at a later period it passed through many editions; successive
generations perused its pages, and in France it was long classed with
_Werther_ and _Ossian_. It was studied by Nodier and Ballanche, and was
Sainte-Beuve's favourite work, he and George Sand doing much to bring
it into public notice.

_Obermann_ in France, like _Werther_ in Germany, has been in the hands
of many a suicide; it was constantly read by Victor Hugo's unhappy
friend, Rabbe, known to the public through Hugo's life and poems,
and a certain clique of young men, Bastide, Sautelet (who committed
suicide), Ampère, Stapfer, made a regular cult of the book. As René is
the elect, Obermann is the passed by. Some of the ruling spirits of
the century recognised themselves in René, Obermann was understood and
appreciated by highly-gifted, deeply-agitated spirits of the finest
temper. The book begins as follows: "In these letters are to be found
the utterances of a spirit that feels, not of a spirit that acts."
Here we have the kernel of the matter. Why does he not act? Because
he is unhappy. Why is he unhappy? Because he is too sensitive, too
impressionable. He is all heart, and the heart does not work.

It was the age of rule, discipline, military despotism, the age in
which mathematics was the most esteemed of all the sciences, and
energy, accompanied by a capacity for unqualified submission, the
most esteemed of all the virtues. By no single fibre of his being
does Obermann belong to this period; he abhors both discipline and
mathematics as heartily as could any future Romanticist. He despises
the Philistines who take the same walk every day, turning daily at
the same place. He does not wish to know beforehand how his feelings
will be affected. "Let the mind," he says, "strive to give a certain
symmetry to its productions; the heart does not work, and can only
produce when we exempt it from the labour of fashioning." We feel that
this unreasonable principle is applied in his letters, which form a
heavy, diffuse, serious, badly written book; they produce the effect of
improvisations, to which the author, regarding them as the children of
his heart, has not chosen or else not been able to impart an attractive
form. It is true that nuggets of gold are hidden in the ponderous ore,
but they must be laboriously sought for; a man with real literary
talent would have gilded the whole mass with them.

[Illustration: DE SÉNANCOUR]

The hero of the book is one of those unhappy souls who seem created
for the shady side of life and never succeed in getting out into its
sunshine. There is, as Hamlet says, along with many excellent qualities
some "one defect" in their nature which prevents the harmonious
interplay of its parts. In the delicately balanced works of a watch
some little spring, some little wheel breaks, and the whole mechanism
comes to a standstill. Obermann has no settled occupation, no sphere
of activity, no profession; it is only in the last pages of the book
that he makes up his mind that he will be an author; the reader feels
no assurance, however, that success awaits him upon this path. The
author who has been successful with ever so small a work sees, on
looking back, what an almost incredible variety of circumstances have
favoured him, what an extraordinary number of obstacles, great and
small, have had to be overcome; he remembers how carefully he had
to watch his time, how eagerly to seize the opportune moment, how
often he was on the point of giving it all up, how many paroxysms of
despair he lived through, all to attain this paltry end. The most
insignificant book which is born alive speaks of ten thousand triumphs.
And what a combination of favourable circumstances is demanded to
prevent its dying immediately after birth! As many as in the case of a
living organism. The book must find some unoccupied space into which
it fits, the interest awakened by it must not be interfered with by
other, stronger, interests, or the talent displayed in it outshone by
greater talent. It must not recall any previous work, must not even
accidentally resemble anything else, and yet must, in one way or other,
be associated with something already familiar, must follow a path
already struck out. It is of special importance that it should appear
at the right moment. There are works which are not actually weak,
but which appear so in the light of some contemporaneous event or in
comparison with some contemporaneous production; they are made to seem
old-fashioned, poor, pale, as it were.

It is probable that Obermann, as an author, will belong to the same
class of writers as his creator, Sénancour, namely those who believe
that there is something of a magical nature in the secret of success.

His letters provide us with full particulars of his spiritual life and
history. The latter is epitomised in the following words: "Oh! how
great one is, so long as one is inexperienced! how rich and productive
one would be if only the cold looks of one's neighbours and the chill
blast of injustice did not shrivel up one's heart! I needed happiness;
I was created to suffer. Who does not know those dark days towards
the coming of winter, when even the morning brings dense mists and
the only light is in some burning bars of colour in the clouded sky?
Think of those veils of mist, that wan light, those hurricane gusts
whistling among bending, trembling trees, that steady howl, interrupted
by terrific shrieks; such was the morning of my life. At midday the
colder, steadier storms; towards evening gathering darkness; and man's
day is at an end."

To so morose a temperament a regularly ordered life is insupportable.
The most difficult, distressing moment in a young man's life, that in
which he must choose a profession, is one which Obermann cannot face.
For to choose a calling means to exchange complete liberty and the full
privileges of humanity for confinement resembling that of the beast in
its stall. It is to their freedom from the stamp of any calling that
women owe part of their beauty and of the poetry of their sex. The
stamp of a calling is a restraint, a limitation, a ridiculous thing.
How then could a man with a nature like Obermann's possibly choose a
profession? At once too intense and too weak for real life, he hates
nothing more than dependence! The whole constitution of society is
repellent to him: "Thus much is certain; I will not drag myself up
step by step, take a place in society, be compelled to show respect to
superiors in return for the privilege of despising inferiors. Nothing
is so imbecile as these degrees of contempt reaching down through
society from the prince, who claims to be inferior to God alone, to the
poorest rag-picker who must be servile to the woman from whom he hires
a straw mattress for the night."

He will not purchase the right to command at the price of obedience. To
him a clock represents the quintessence of torture. To bind himself to
tear his mood into fragments when the clock strikes, as the labourer,
the man of business, and the official must, is to him to deprive
himself of the one good thing which life with all its tribulations
offers, namely, independence.

He is a stranger among his fellow-men; they do not feel as he feels,
he does not believe what they believe. They appear to him so tainted
with superstition, prejudices, hypocrisy, and social untruthfulness,
that he shrinks from contact with them. At the close of the eighteenth
century France was not orthodox, but it had not emancipated itself from
the belief in God and in a future existence. Obermann does not share
these beliefs; his is an essentially modern spirit; his philosophy is
the scientific philosophy of the nineteenth century; he is a warm,
convinced humanitarian, and has as little belief in a happier existence
after death as in a personal God.

The question of religion is discussed from various points of view in
his letters. We already find the indignant refutation of the theory
that atheism is the result of wickedness. They who believe in the
Bible, says Obermann, maintain that it is only men's evil passions
which prevent them from being Christians; the atheist might with equal
justice assert that only the bad man is a Christian, since it is only
the Christian who requires the help of phantasms to restrain him from
stealing, lying, and murdering, and who endorses the theory that it
would not be worth while leading an upright life if there were no
hell. He attempts to explain the psychical origin of the belief in the
immortality of the individual. The majority of human beings, restless
and unhappy, live in hope that next hour, that to-morrow, and, finally,
that in a life to come, they may attain the happiness they desire.
To the argument that this belief is, at any rate, a consolation, he
replies, that its being a consolation to the unhappy, is but one reason
the more for doubting its truth. Men so readily credit what they wish
to believe. Suppose one of the old sophists to have succeeded in making
a pupil believe that by following certain directions for ten days he
would be assured of invulnerability, eternal youth, &c.--the belief
would doubtless be very agreeable to the pupil in question, but none
the better founded for that. When asked what becomes of motion, mind,
and soul, which are incorruptible, Obermann replies: "When the fire
on your hearth goes out, its light, its warmth, its force forsake it,
and it passes into another world, where it will be eternally rewarded
if it has warmed your feet and eternally punished if it has burned your
slippers."

He also attacks the theory, as often urged in our own as in those days,
that those who do not believe in the dogmas of religion should hold
their peace and not deprive others of the mainstay of their lives. He
argues warmly, passionately, asserting that the cultivated classes and
the town populations no longer believe in dogma (we must remember that
he is writing of 1801-2), and as regards the lower classes, putting the
matter thus: Even if we take for granted that it is both impossible and
inadvisable to cure the masses of their delusions, does this justify
deceit, does this make it a crime to speak the truth, or an evil that
truth should be told? As a matter of fact, however, the masses now
universally display a desire to learn the truth; it is clear that faith
is everywhere undermined; and our first endeavour ought to be to prove
clearly to all and sundry that the obligation to do right is quite
independent of the belief in a future life.

Obermann, then, maintains that the laws of morality are natural, not
supernatural, and are consequently unaffected by the collapse of
belief. He repeatedly emphasises the disastrous practical results of
silence in matters of religion; it is the system of silence which makes
it possible for the education of woman to be still carried on upon the
old lines, keeping her, as a rule, in a state of ignorance that makes
her the enemy of progress, and too often delivers her, body and soul,
into the power of her father confessor. A comparison between love as a
happiness-producing power and love in the rôle it plays in marriage,
leads him on to express some very strong opinions regarding the then
prevailing ideas on the relations between the sexes, and the principles
according to which a woman's conduct is judged in civilised society.

On these points Obermann is quite modern--he here follows the line of
thought indicated by the preceding century; but in all that regards
the emotions he is less modern, although he heralds something new,
something that is on the way, namely Romanticism. He reflects much
on the subject of the romantic; a portion of his book bears the
significant title, "De l'expression romantique et du Ranz des Vaches."
He defines the idea much as contemporary German writers do, although
he does not systematise to the same extent. He declares the romantic
conception of things to be the only one that harmonises with profound,
true feeling: In all wild countries like Switzerland nature is full
of romance, but romance vanishes when the hand of man is discernible
everywhere; romantic effects resemble isolated words of man's original
speech, which is not remembered by all, &c., &c.; nature is more
romantic in her sounds than in her sights; the ear is more romantically
impressionable than the eye; the voice of the woman we love affects
us more romantically than her features, the Alpine horn expresses the
romance of the Alps more forcibly than any painting; for we admire what
we see, but we feel what we hear.

It is interesting to note how Obermann unconsciously takes up the tone
of the German Romanticists whom he has never read. They also exalt
music as the art of arts. Sénancour declares elsewhere that he cares
almost more for the songs whose words he does not understand than
for those of which he can follow the words as well as the melody. He
remarks this _à propos_ of the German songs he hears in Switzerland,
naïvely adding: "Besides, there is something more romantic about the
German accent." It is remarkable that we should find already suggested
in Sénancour even that conception of language as simply musical sound
which was subsequently characteristic of the German Romantic School.
But his senses are too highly developed for him to rest content with
music as the best means of intercourse between man and nature. In
two separate passages in his book he declares that a succession of
different fragrances contains as rich a melody as any succession of
tones, and can, like music, call up pictures of far-away places and
things.[1] Among the late French Romanticists we do not find such
another highly developed, ultra-refined sense of smell until we
come to Baudelaire. But whereas in Baudelaire it is a symptom of
over-developed sensuousness, in Sénancour it is only an indication of
the purely romantic cult of the Ego; it is one element in an emotional
revel, for Sénancour believes that by means of the sense of smell as
well as by means of the sense of hearing he can distinguish the hidden
harmonies of existence. It also implies a shrinking from reality,
with the corresponding intensified self-centredness; for it is only a
volatilised essence of things that one inhales through the medium of
perfumes and tones.

In his repugnance for realities, no solitude is too complete for
Obermann. He lives alone, avoiding both cities and villages. There
is in him the strangest mixture of love for mankind in general and
complete indifference in all the relations of real life. So sensitive
is he, that he is afflicted by scruples about his addiction to the
mild dissipation of tea-drinking (tea being very characteristically
his favourite beverage). He finds that it distracts his melancholy (le
thé est d'un grand secours pour s'ennuyer d'une manière calme), but he
despises all external excitement and stimulant. He is aware that he
is far from being French in this respect, for, he aptly remarks, if
Frenchmen inhabited Naples, they would build a ball-room in the crater
of Vesuvius. He does not truly live except when he is entirely alone,
in mist-veiled forests which recall the inevitable Ossian, or at night
by the silent shores of a Swiss lake. Like his contemporary Novalis, he
feels that darkness, by veiling visible nature, forces man's Ego back
into itself.

Speaking of a night he passed alone with nature, he says:

"In that one night I experienced all that mortal heart can know of
unutterable longing, unutterable woe. In it I consumed ten years of my
life." And he attains to an even more profound self-consciousness by
day, in the snow-fields of the Alps, where all surrounding life is not
only veiled, as by night, but is frozen and apparently at a standstill.

He is most himself when he climbs from the Swiss valley in which he
lives up to the desolate wilds of the highest mountains. With an
indescribable, almost boyish gladness, he watches the form of his guide
disappearing in the distance; revelling in loneliness, he becomes
oblivious of time and humanity. Note him in these surroundings:
"The day was hot, the horizon misty, and the valleys full of vapour.
The lower atmosphere was lighted up by bright reflections from the
glaciers, but absolute purity seemed the essential quality of the air
I breathed. At this height no exhalation from the lower regions, no
earthly light, troubled the dark, infinite depths of the sky. It had
no longer the pale, clear, soft blue colour of the vault we look up to
from the plains; no, the ether permitted the sight to lose itself in
boundless infinity, and, heedless of the glare of sun and glacier, to
seek other worlds and other suns as it does by night. Imperceptibly,
the vapours of the glaciers rose and formed clouds under my feet. My
eyes were no longer wearied by the sparkle of the snow, and the heavens
grew darker and deeper still. The snowy dome of Mont Blanc lifted its
immovable mass above the moving grey sea of piled-up mist which the
wind raised into enormous billows. A black speck showed far down in
their abysses; swiftly rising, it advanced directly towards me. It was
a great Alpine eagle; its wings were wet and its eyes were fierce;
it was seeking prey. But at the sight of a human being it uttered a
sinister cry, precipitated itself into the mist and disappeared. This
cry was echoed twenty times, but the echoes were dry sounds, without
resonance, like so many isolated cries in the universal silence. Then
all sank back into absolute stillness, as though sound itself had
ceased to exist, as though the reverberating property of bodies had
been universally suspended. Silence is unknown in the noisy valleys,
it is only on these cold heights that this immobility reigns, this
perpetual solemnity which no tongue can express, no imagination conjure
up. Were it not for the memories he brings from the plains, man would
believe up here that, leaving himself out of the question, movement
did not exist; the motion of the stars would be inexplicable to him,
even the mists seem to remain the same despite their changes. He knows
that the moments follow each other, but he does not feel it. Everything
seems to be eternally petrified. I could wish I had preserved a more
exact remembrance of my sensations in those silent regions. In the
midst of everyday life the imagination is hardly capable of recalling
a sequence of ideas which present surroundings seem to contradict and
thrust aside. But in such moments of energy one is not in a condition
to think of the future or of other men and take notes for it and them,
or to dwell upon the fame to be acquired by one's thoughts, or even to
take thought of the common good. One is more natural; one is not bent
on making use of the present moment, one does not control one's ideas,
nor require one's mind to examine into things, discover hidden secrets,
or find something to say which has never been said before. Thought is
no longer active and regulated, but passive and free. One dreams, one
abandons one's self, one is profound without _esprit_, great without
enthusiasm, energetic without will."

We can see him, this pupil of Jean Jacques, who has energy without
will (exactly Obermann's case), sitting solitary amidst Jean Jacques's
scenery. _René_ had widened the range of literary landscape. Instead
of the Swiss lake and the woods and groves with which we began in
_La Nouvelle Héloïse_, _René_ and _Atala_ gave us the great primeval
forest, the gigantic Mississippi and its tributaries, and all the
glowing, dazzling colour and fragrant, intoxicating luxuriance of
tropical nature. This was a fitting natural background for a figure
like René's. The exiled Chateaubriand had wandered through such
scenery, and it had left its imprint on him. Obermann is in his proper
place in the desert silence and dumbness of the mountains.

It is where there is no life, where life loses its hold, that he feels
at home. Will he be able to endure life? Or will he, like Werther, some
day cast it from him?

He does not do so. He finds strength in a great resolve. He gives up
once and for all the idea of pleasure and happiness. "Let us," he says,
"look upon all that passes and perishes as of no importance; let us
choose a better part in the great drama of the world. It is from our
determined resolution alone that we can hope for any enduring result."
His determination to live, not to lay violent hands upon himself, is
not engendered by humility but by a spirit of haughty defiance. "It
may be," he says, "that man is created only to perish. If so, let us
perish resisting, and if annihilation is our portion, let us at least
do nothing to justify our fate."

But it is long before Obermann attains to this calm. Many and
impassioned are his arguments in justification of suicide; and this
is not surprising, for the suicide-epidemic in literature is one of
those symptoms of the emancipation of the individual to which I have
already referred. It is one form, the most radical and definite, of the
individual's rejection of and release from the whole social order into
which he was born. And what respect for human life were men likely to
have in the days when Napoleon yearly made a blood-offering of many
thousands to his ambition? "I hear every one declare," says Obermann,
"that it is a crime to put an end to one's life, but the same sophists
who forbid me death, expose me to it, send me to it. It is honourable
to give up life when we cling to it, it is right to kill a man who
desires to live, but that same death which it is an obligation to seek
when dreaded, it is criminal to seek when desired! Under a thousand
pretexts, now sophistical, now ridiculous, you play with my existence,
and I alone have no rights over myself! When I love life, I am to
despise it; when I am happy, you send me to die; and when I wish to
die, you forbid me, and burden me with a life that I loathe."

"If I ought not to take my life, neither ought I to expose myself to
probable death. All your heroes are simply criminals. The command you
give them does not justify them. You have no right to send them to
death if they had no right to give their consent to your order. If I
have no right of decision in the matter of my own death, who has given
this right to society? Have I given what I did not possess? What insane
social principle is this you have invented, which declares that I have
made over to society, for the purpose of my own oppression, a right I
did not possess to escape from oppression."

Once, many years ago, in an essay on the tragedy of fate, I put similar
words into the mouth of a suicide: "He who groans under the burden of
existence may reasonably turn and accuse destiny, saying, 'Why was I
born? Why are we not consulted? If I had been asked and had known what
it was to live, I would never have consented.' We are like men who
have been pressed as sailors and forced on board a ship: such sailors
do not consider themselves obliged to stay on the ship if they see an
opportunity of deserting. If it is argued that, having enjoyed the good
of life I am bound to accept the evil, I reply: 'The good of life, the
happiness of childhood, for example, which I enjoyed and my acceptance
of which you say implied my consent to live, I accepted in absolute
ignorance of the fact that it was earnest-money, therefore I am not
bound by such earnest-money. I will not violate the ship's discipline,
will not murder my comrades or anything of that sort; I will only take
the one thing I have a right to, my liberty; for I never bound myself
to remain.'"

This is obviously not the place to discourse at length on the
permissibility of suicide. I leave that task to the moralists, only
remarking that, although I do not believe anything reasonable can
be urged against its permissibility except our obligations to our
fellow-men, I consider these obligations in numberless cases an
entirely sufficient and conclusive argument. At present I am only
depicting from a purely historical point of view an actual psychical
condition which is one of the phenomena of the literature under
consideration. For _Werther_ and _Obermann_ are not the only books of
this period in which suicide is represented or discussed. Atala kills
herself. René is only prevented from doing so by his sister Amélie, and
at one time, with a contempt of life almost as great as Schopenhauer's,
he sneers at the love of life as a "mania." Their attitude towards
suicide, then, forms a point of resemblance between two such different
writers as Chateaubriand and Sénancour, and stamps their work with the
impress of the period.

The author of _Obermann_ made his hero in his own image, which perhaps
explains why he makes him finally resolve to be an author. "What
chance have I of success?" says Obermann. "If to say something true
and to endeavour to say it convincingly be not enough, it is certain
that I shall not succeed. Take the first place, ye who desire the
fame of the moment, the admiration of society, ye who are rich in
ideas which last a day, in books which serve a party, in effective
tricks and mannerisms! Take the first place, seducers and seduced; it
is nothing to me; ye will soon be forgotten, so it is well that ye
should have your day. For my own part, I do not consider it necessary
to be appreciated in one's lifetime, unless one is condemned to the
misfortune of having to live by one's pen."

In these words Sénancour expressed his own literary faith and predicted
his own destiny. His own generation overlooked him; he was not
appreciated while he lived, although he was in the unhappy position
of possessing no source of income but his pen. But in the days of the
Romantic School he attained renown; the Romantic critics bound his
simple field flowers into garlands along with the passion-flowers and
roses of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël. And he deserved the fame he
attained. For he is one of the most remarkable authors of the Emigrant
Literature-a worshipper of Nature, as becomes a pupil of Rousseau,
melancholy, as befits a genuine admirer of Ossian, weary of life, as
befits a contemporary of Chateaubriand. He is thoroughly modern in his
theories on religion, morality, education, and the position of women in
society; he is the regular German Romanticist in his sentimentality,
his indolence, and his dread of contact with reality, as if it were
something that would burn him; and he is the French Romanticist in
his mixture of liberal-mindedness with excessive scrupulosity and of
enthusiasm with refined sensuousness, a combination which reappears
in French literature twenty years later in Sainte-Beuve's _Joseph
Delorme_. Everything stamps him as a herald or forerunner of the long
train of greater intellects who at this moment begin their progress
through the century; his weak voice announces them and he prepares
their way.


[1] Obermann, 1833, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p. 90.




VI


NODIER


Simultaneously with _Obermann_ there appeared in the French book market
a little romance which was a product of intellectual tendencies akin to
those of Sénancour. Though its author too is a forerunner of greater
men than himself, his remarkable and versatile talent, his sense of the
fantastic (exceptionally strong for a French author), and his courage
in striking out new paths, make of him not a mere precursor but a
pioneeer. This writer was Charles Nodier, and the name of his book, _Le
Peintre de Saltzbourg_.

Charles Nodier, who belongs only by virtue of a couple of early works
to the period with which we are dealing, and who, except for these,
must be classed as a French Romanticist prior to the existence of
the French Romantic School, was born at Besançon in 1780. His father
was a magistrate, a gifted and honourable man, severe in his public
capacity and amiable in his home; he was a declared adherent of the
eighteenth-century philosophy, and educated his son according to the
principles laid down in Rousseau's _Émile_. Charles early showed
an astonishing aptitude for learning, and much talent in various
directions. At seventeen years of age he was so capable a philologist
as to have compiled a dictionary of French onomatopoeic words, a work
which the Minister of Education considered worthy of a place in the
school libraries. By the time he was eighteen he was so accomplished a
naturalist that he brought out a work on the antennae of insects and
their organs of hearing. His first romance was given to the press about
the same time.

[Illustration: NODIER]

Nodier's was a stirring childhood and early youth. At the age of
thirteen he had some experience of the horrors of the Reign of
Terror, for his father was head of the revolutionary tribunal at
Besançon. In 1793 the warmhearted and determined little boy saved a
woman's life. A lady of the town was accused of sending money to an
émigré relation in the Royalist army of the Rhine. The charge was
proved beyond a doubt, and the provisions of the law in such a case
being unmistakable, the lady's fate was apparently sealed. A mutual
friend of his family and the lady told the whole story to young Nodier,
who first vainly attempted to move his father by entreaties, and then
declared that he would kill himself if the death sentence were passed.
He was so much in earnest, and seemed so resolved to carry out his
threat, that at the last moment the father, in dread of losing his son,
did violence to his Roman virtue, and acquitted the offender. In the
same year, Besançon not offering sufficient educational advantages,
young Nodier was sent to Strasburg. It so happened that he was boarded
there in the house of the notorious Eulogius Schneider, the cruel
governor of Alsace, who shortly afterwards perished on the scaffold in
Paris. The scenes he saw in Strasburg were well adapted to quicken the
imagination of a future writer of romance. As a youth in Paris he was
a witness of the frivolity and pleasure-seeking that prevailed under
the Directory, and after his return to Besançon in 1799 he interested
himself in the cause of the state prisoners and suspected persons in
that town. This led to his being denounced as dangerous to society;
one night his door was broken open and his papers were examined, but
nothing more incriminating was found than his works on the antennae
of insects and the roots of words. The excitement of the situation
satisfied his romantic love of adventure; it pleased him to be at war
with the authorities, to run risks, to know he was spied upon, &c. He
had no political convictions then or later, but he was an enthusiast in
the cause of liberty, and always belonged to the Opposition, whatever
the Government of the moment might be; he was religious under the
Republic, a freethinker under the Empire, &c., &c. The despotism of
the First Consul so exasperated him that at the age of twenty he
wrote an ode against him entitled _La Napoléone_. Arrests were made
right and left in the hope of finding the author, and when at last the
printer was imprisoned, Nodier gave himself up. After several months'
imprisonment in Paris he was sent back to his native town, where he was
placed under the surveillance of the police.

This was the beginning of a long series of persecutions and annoyances
on the part of the Government, which, although certainly exaggerated by
the young poet's lively and always active imagination, must have been
anything but pleasant to him. He went from one hiding-place to another
in the Jura Mountains, living and writing in unfrequented spots, and
never staying long enough in any one place to complete the work begun
there. Thus, in addition to all the impressions of the period already
received, he had experience, at a very early age, of the emotions of
the exile and the mood of the _émigré_. It is these moods and emotions
which form the background of his first literary attempt. _Le Peintre de
Saltzbourg_ was written during his incessant changes of abode among the
Jura Mountains.

_Le Peintre de Saltzbourg, journal des émotions d'un coeur souffrant,
suivi des Méditations du Cloître_, is the title of the first edition,
published in Paris, 1803. The _Méditations du Cloître_, a sort of
appendix to this edition of the romance, possesses a certain interest
as the expression of one of the ideas prevailing among the young
generation. It is written with the same intention as _René_, being,
namely, a plea for the restoration of monasteries. It is a monologue,
spoken by a being peculiarly unhappy in his own estimation, who bewails
the absence of any monastery wherein to take refuge, and naïvely seeks
to prove his vocation for the life of a Trappist by a perfect torrent
of complaint. "I, who am still so young and yet so unhappy, who have
too early gauged life and society, and am completely estranged from
the fellow-men who have wounded my heart, I, bereft of every hope
which has hitherto deluded me, have sought a haven in my misery and
found none." Hereon follows a long panegyric on monks and nuns, those
"angels of peace, who did nought but pray, console the wretched,
educate the young, tend the sick, help the needy, follow the condemned
to the scaffold, and bind up the wounds of heroes." How explain the
fact that these devout men and women have brought down on themselves a
fury of persecution unequalled in the annals of fanaticism? How can the
legislators of the eighteenth century have had so little knowledge of
the human heart as not to understand, not to divine the existence of
those needs, to supply which religion founded monasteries?

"To the present generation political circumstances have given the
education that fell to the lot of Achilles. We have been fed on the
blood and the marrow of lions; and now that a government which leaves
nothing to chance and which determines the future has set limits to the
dangerous development of the powers of youth, saying to them: 'Thus far
and no farther!'--do they understand now what melancholy occurrences
result from so much suppressed passion and unemployed strength,
how many temptations to crime exist in a passionate, melancholy,
world-weary heart? With bitterness, with horror, I set it down:
Werther's pistol and the executioner's axe have already made a clearing
amongst us. The present generation rises up and demands the cloisters
of old."

Assuredly a humble and sentimental desire for a generation nourished on
the marrow of lions! But we discern defiance behind the meekness, and
the demand is not to be taken literally. It is impatient despondency
grasping at random at any means of alleviating its woe.

In a preface which Nodier added to his book in 1840, he speaks of
the circumstances which produced it. Under the Directory, he says,
emotionalism was very much out of fashion; the language of reverie
and passion, to which thirty years before Rousseau had lent a passing
vogue, was considered ridiculous at the close of the century. But it
was quite otherwise in Germany, "that wonderful Germany, the final
refuge of poetry in Europe, the cradle of the society of the future (if
a society can still come into being in Europe). And we were beginning
to feel the influence of Germany.... We read _Werther, Goetz von
Berlichingen_, and _Die Räuber_."

The hero of Nodier's book is fashioned after the pattern of Werther; he
is twenty years of age, a painter, a poet, and, above all, a German.
But he is a weak imitation, decidedly inferior to the original.
Charles (Nodier's own name) is an exile, banished from Bavaria for
political offences. For two years he has roamed through Europe, a
restless fugitive, for two years has lived Nodier's own life. One
feeling alone has sustained him, his love for a young girl who bears
the poetical name of Eulalia. He returns to Bavaria, and learns--hear
it, ye heavens!--that Eulalia is faithless! Eulalia is wedded to
another! The betrayed lover cannot resist his desire to haunt the
place of her abode. One day they meet, and--O Destiny!--Eulalia tells
him that, never hearing from him, and being told he was dead, she
had sorrowfully, and solely out of obedience to her mother, at last
consented to marry a young Herr Spronck, whose fancied resemblance to
Charles touched her, and who is, it appears, the noblest of men. On
this follow lamentations and descriptions of feeling of the Werther
type, but all in a much more dejected key. Charles abandons himself
to melancholy retrospect. Here it was that he saw her for the first
time; there that he had the first dark forebodings of the future; in
this other place, in his ecstasy at beholding her, he forgot his paper,
his pencils, and his "Ossian"; yonder, where the trees are now hewn
down, he had determined to bury his dear Werther; now it is his own
grave that he would fain dig. Werther has been Charles's friend, the
friend on whom he has obviously formed himself. On one occasion only is
Charles more energetic and manly than Werther, namely in his outburst
of indignation at the obstacles which interpose themselves between him
and his beloved.

"Why did I not take her in my arms, seize her like a prey, carry her
far from the abodes of man, and proclaim her my wife in the sight of
heaven! Oh, if even this desire be a crime, why is it so intimately
entwined with every fibre of my being that I cannot renounce it
and live? A crime, did I say I In uncivilised times, in the days of
ignorance and of slavery, some one or other of the barbarous horde took
it into his head to write down his personal prejudices and say: 'There
are laws for you!' How easily deluded men are! What a contemptible
comedy to see so many generations ruled by the prejudices and whims of
a dead past!"

Immediately upon this follows, quaintly enough, a long, solemn
panegyric on Klopstock's _Messiah_, obviously inspired by other, but
very dissimilar, reminiscences of Werther. "O divine Klopstock!" cries
Charles, "how magnificently you present the assembled miracles of
poetry to our eyes, whether you introduce us into the presence-chamber
of the Most High, where the first-born among the angels hymn the
mysteries of heaven, or show us the cherubims in holy adoration
covering their faces with their golden wings!" The transition from
revolutionary sentiments to pious ecstasy is somewhat abrupt, but the
mixture of revolutionary with romantic tendencies which would seem
extraordinary in any other age, does not surprise in the Emigrant
Literature. It is to be found in all its authors. We have it in
Chateaubriand as Satanic Catholicism; in Sénancour as sentimental and
romantic atheism; here it is revolt against social laws in combination
with enthusiasm for the _Messiah_--different developments of the same
phenomenon.

It presently appears that Eulalia's husband is no happier than her
unfortunate lover. He has been deprived by death of the love of his
youth and cannot forget his bereavement even by the side of Eulalia.
He observes the attachment existing between his wife and Charles,
and, not wishing to stand in their way, takes poison and dies, after
begging them to forgive the suffering he has involuntarily caused them
"by his hapless existence." It would be impossible to imagine a more
considerate husband. The lovers, however, are not a whit less noble.
Eulalia especially is too high-minded to profit by so melancholy a
death. She retires to a convent, and Charles drowns himself in the
Danube. Two suicides and a retreat to a nunnery was the regulation
ending in those days.

To us, nowadays, this romance is a very insignificant intellectual
production, but a very interesting piece of historical evidence. Its
author soon passed into another phase of development. We shall find
Nodier again upon a higher plane of the evolution of French literature;
no one changed form more frequently than he--and the butterfly is more
beautiful than the grub.




VII


CONSTANT: "ON RELIGION"--"ADOLPHE"


The literary critic passing from one variety to another of the type
of a certain period in a manner resembles the scientist tracking
some structure through its metamorphoses in the different zoological
species. The next variant of our main type who seems to me worthy of
study, is Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, the hero of the only romance
written by that famous political author. Adolphe is less brilliant
than René, less melancholy than Obermann, but he is a representative
of the same restless and unsatisfied generation. He too is related to
Werther, but, like René, he is the child of the age of disillusionment.
It was not until after the fall of the Empire that the book appeared,
but it was written, or at any rate projected, in the first years of the
century. Like those other books which on their emotional side are in
touch with Rousseau, and which perpetuate his tradition, it conflicted
sharply with the prevailing sentiments of the day. In Paris figures and
the sword held sway, in literature the classic ode and science were
in vogue, whereas in Constant's book emotions and psychical analysis
predominated.

Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was born at Lausanne in 1767, of
Protestant parents. His mother died in childbirth; his father, a
cold-hearted, worldly-wise man, was much such another as the father
in _Adolphe_. Constant was an exceptionally gifted being. If, in
reading _Adolphe_, we find it a little difficult to understand the
extraordinary fascination exercised by the hero, the explanation is,
that, having employed so many reminiscences of his own life in the
making of the book, Constant seems to have shrunk from dwelling too
strongly on his hero's attractive qualities. Adolphe is so distinctly
Constant himself, that we can only, so to speak, understand how the
type originated, by studying the author's youth.

Constant was refined and charming, early addicted to a sort of sportive
self-mockery, excitably impressionable, and, curiously enough, at the
same time slightly blasé. To a craving for strong emotions was added
a gift of putting himself entirely outside his own emotions. Even as
a youth he was able to halve himself, to double himself, and to mock
at himself. He could say: "I am as amused by the embarrassments in
which I find myself as though they were another's," and his favourite
expressions when angry were such as this: "I storm, I am beside myself
with fury, and yet at the bottom of it all I am indifferent."

No pains were spared to give this brilliant, intellectual youth an
education suited to his gifts. He was first sent to the University of
Edinburgh, where he formed friendships with several distinguished young
Englishmen and Scotchmen, almost all of whom were destined to become
famous. From Edinburgh he went to the small, peaceful University of
Erlangen, where the foundation was laid of his acquaintance with German
literature and German affairs in general. Here, as in Edinburgh, he
displayed more interest in the politics of the old Greek republics than
in their poetry.

We gain the most trustworthy information on the subject of Constant's
youthful character and development from his letters to Mme. de
Charrière, a gifted, free-thinking Swiss authoress, Dutch by birth but
completely Gallicised, who was over forty years of age when Constant,
then in his twentieth year, first made her acquaintance. It was in
this lady's house, sitting beside her while she wrote, that, at the
age of nineteen, he began the great book on religion at which he was
to work almost all his life, making perpetual alterations as his views
changed and took more definite form. He finished it thirty years later,
in the hours which he could spare from the Chamber and the Paris
gambling-tables. But it was begun at Mme. de Charrière's; and there
was a curious significance in the fact that the first instalment was
written on the backs of a pack of playing cards, each card, as it was
filled, being handed to his mentor. Constant expresses himself with
absolute frankness in his letters to this faithful and devoted friend;
from them we learn how he felt and thought as a youth. The feelings and
thoughts are those of the eighteenth century, minus its enthusiasm for
certain ideas, and plus a good deal of doubt. He writes:--

[Illustration: BENJAMIN CONSTANT]

"I feel the emptiness of everything more than ever; it is all
promise and no fulfilment. I feel how superior our powers are to our
circumstances, and how wretched this incongruity must inevitably make
us. I wonder if God, who created us and our environment, did not die
before He finished His work, if the world is not an _opus posthumum_?
He had the grandest and most beautiful intentions, and all the means
for carrying them out. He had begun to use these means, the scaffolding
for the building was erected, but in the midst of His work He died.
Everything is constructed with an aim which has ceased to exist; we,
in particular, feel ourselves destined for something of which we can
form no conception. We are like clocks without dials or hands, whose
wheels, which are not without understanding, revolve until they are
worn out, without knowing why, but saying, 'I revolve, therefore I have
an aim.'--Farewell, you dear, clever wheel, who have the misfortune to
be so superior to the clock-work of which you are a part and which you
disturb! Without too much self-praise I may say that I am in the same
predicament."

In another place he writes: "Oh, how generous, how magnanimous are our
princes! They have again issued a pardon from which none are excluded
save those who have rebelled against them. It reminds me of a psalm
in praise of the exploits of the Hebrew God. He has slain this one
and that, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has drowned Pharaoh and
all his hosts, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has smitten the
first-born of Egypt with death, for His mercy endureth for ever, &c.
&c."

"You do not appear to be democratic. Like you, I believe fraud and
frenzy to be at the bottom of the Revolutionist's heart. But I prefer
the fraud and frenzy which pulls down prisons, abolishes titles and
such like imbecilities, and places all religious day-dreams upon
the same footing, to the fraud and madness which would maintain and
consecrate that monstrosity produced by grafting the barbaric stupidity
of the Hebrew upon the barbaric ignorance of the Vandal."

"The more one thinks it over, the less is one able to imagine any
possible good reason for the existence of this foolish thing we call
the world. I understand neither the intention, nor the master-builder,
nor the artist, nor the figures in this _Laterna Magica_ of which I
have the honour to form a part. Shall I understand any better when I
have disappeared from the small, dark globe on which it amuses I know
not what unseen power to have me dance, whether I will or no? I cannot
say. But I fear the secret will prove, like that of the Freemasons, to
be a thing of no value except in the estimation of the uninitiated."

Having read these extracts, it does not surprise us to know that the
book _On Religion_, planned at the close of the century to effect the
same object from a Protestant standpoint that Chateaubriand aimed
at from a Catholic, namely, the revival of the religious spirit in
France, had originally a very different character from that which it
finally acquired. If the first part were published as it was originally
written, entirely in the eighteenth-century manner, it would indicate
in its author exactly the stage of mental development indicated in
Chateaubriand by his book on the Revolutions. In the form in which it
has taken its place in French literature the work is remarkable for its
calm, passionless style, its unprejudiced views, and an erudition not
common at that period. Its weaknesses are its total lack of warmth and
the general indecision of its principles.

The main idea is as follows: All the earlier conceptions of the nature
of religion have been imperfect. One school of writers, who regard
religion as inaccessible by the path of reason, and who believe it to
have been imparted to man once for all by divine revelation, seek to
restore it to its original form. Another school, rightly appalled by
the evils resulting from intolerance and fanaticism, have rejected
religion as a delusion, and have sought to base an ethical system
upon a purely earthly foundation. A third have believed themselves
able to steer a middle course; they accept something which they call
natural religion, or the religion of reason, and which consists only
of the purest dogmas and the simplest fundamental principles. But
the adherents of this school, like those of the first two, believe
that mankind can attain to absolute truth--that truth, therefore,
is one and unchangeable; they stigmatise all who believe less than
themselves as ungodly, and all who believe more as priest-ridden and
superstitious. In opposition to all these three schools, Constant
regards religion as progressive; he starts from the premise that the
religious feeling is a fundamental element of the human soul, that
it is only the forms it assumes which differ, and that these are
capable of ever-increasing perfection. He has obviously read Lessing's
_Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts_; but he is more in sympathy with
his own contemporaries, Kreuzer and Görres, than with Lessing. He
either does not understand or does not appreciate the latter's delicate
and yet profound irony; he is captivated by the Romantic-Protestant
revival ideas, and assimilates as much of them as a French Liberal
politician and converted Voltairean can. He strongly objects to the
spirit of intolerance and persecution which makes itself felt so
strongly in Lamennais' book on "Indifference in Matters of Religion"
unlike Chateaubriand and De Maistre, he objects to the temporal power
of the Papacy, or to any other combination of spiritual and temporal
power; but he imagines that in his _sentiment religieux_ he has
discovered a kind of spiritual primary element, incapable of further
resolution, an element which is unalterable and universal, i.e.
diffused over the whole earth and unaffected by time; and upon this
theory, which is incompatible with the data of psychology, he bases his
whole conservative system. As far as possible he evades troublesome
questions: he refuses, for example, to decide whether mankind came
into being in a savage or in a paradisaically perfect condition; and
he expressly states that he begins with a delineation of the lowest
fetish worship only for the sake of order, that he by no means denies
that this pitiable stage may have been the result of a fall, this
hypothesis, indeed, seeming to him a very probable one.--Few books have
more rapidly grown old-fashioned than this of Constant's, which is now
merely of historical interest as typical of the half-heartedness and
indecision of the period in which it was written.

In the early years of the French Revolution, Constant was appointed
gentleman-in-waiting to the Duchess of Brunswick. In this position he
heard the Revolution spoken of with that mixture of fear and abhorrence
of which we have an example in the dialogue of Goethe's play, _Der
Bürgergeneral_; but he had no difficulty in forming an independent
and unprejudiced estimate of the significance of the great movement.
In Brunswick, as elsewhere, much of his time seems to have been spent
in amours, one following on the other in rapid succession. He himself
jestingly assumed _Sola inconstantia constans_ as his motto. He
married, solely out of ennui, it would appear, divorced his wife after
the honeymoon, and presently fell in love with a lady who was at the
time sueing for a divorce from her husband. For this lady's sake he
returned at a later period to Brunswick. Her maiden name was Charlotte
von Hardenberg, and many years afterwards she became his second wife.
In the letters of this Brunswick period to Mme. de Charrière, Constant
appears as aimless and bored as he is sagacious and witty. He makes
merry over his stupid, little-minded associates, and for a time even
over his feeling for the lady of his heart, until it suddenly occurs
to him that jesting on this latter subject is scarcely seemly, and he
decides to forego it. So far there was neither a centre nor an object
in his life.

Towards the close of 1774, however, a decisive change took place.
He met Mme. de Staël, and it became apparent that neither of these
two minds could produce the best of which it was capable without the
assistance of the other. Constant was then twenty-seven years of age,
Mme. de Staël twenty-eight. He had just arrived in Paris, the city to
which his ambition had long attracted him, but which he now saw for
the first time. He was introduced into the best society, frequented
the houses of Mme. Tallien, Mme. Beauharnais, and Mme. de Staël, and
made an impression both by his personal beauty and his intellectual
gifts. With his fresh complexion and fair hair he resembled a young
Northerner, but in mind he was the acute Frenchman, and in culture the
cosmopolitan. He made an impression on the most gifted Frenchwoman of
the day that was never effaced, even when the circumstances of life
estranged and separated them, and it was soon no secret that Mme.
de Staël's admiration had become passionate love. She imparted to
the rising states man her faith in political liberty, her enthusiasm
for the rights of the individual, and for a government which should
assure them; and her fiery ardour inspired him with her spirit of
enterprise and with her confidence in the power of words and of deeds
to influence, to re-mould life in spite of destiny. In return for this,
her relation to him seems, by setting her at variance with society, to
have supplied her with the greater part of the passions, emotions, and
rebellious thoughts which form the kernel of her imaginative writings.

At Mme. de Staël's house Constant met a whole host of foreign
diplomatists, disaffected journalists, and plotting women, who for the
moment influenced him against the Convention. He soon, however, arrived
at convictions of his own, refuted his first newspaper articles, and,
more radical than his friend, joined the "Patriot" party in opposing
the so-called Moderates, in whom he perceived no moderation. The year
1795 he spent, on the invitation of Mme. de Staël, at her country-house
of Coppet, in Switzerland; the following year she was separated from
her husband.

When, as First Consul, in 1799, Napoleon gave France a constitution,
in which autocracy was veiled by a slight pretence of freedom,
he nominated-Constant, formerly his ardent admirer, a member of
the Tribunate. In this capacity Constant, supported by some few
sympathisers, carried on an honourable struggle against the Napoleonic
absolutism, a struggle which attracted the attention of all Europe, and
highly exasperated the First Consul. In 1802 the latter made the famous
remark about the five or six metaphysicians among the Tribunes who
deserved to be drowned, and not long after, these five or six, namely
Constant and his friends, were expelled by the votes of a servile
majority. Mme. de Staël and her father, the famous Necker, showing
themselves actively antagonistic to Napoleon's autocratic policy, were
both banished from France. Constant, who followed Mme. de Staël to
Coppet, was forbidden to return. In May 1802, Mme. de Staël became a
widow. In 1803-4 she and Constant travelled together in Germany. She,
loving him devotedly, evidently seems to have expected that he would
marry her; but it is plain that he did not reciprocate her feeling; it
was only out of weakness and compassion that he concealed from her his
constant correspondence with Charlotte von Hardenberg. Having probably
invented some pretext for leaving her, he went to Weimar alone. There,
in 1804, he translated Schiller's _Wallenstein_ into French. It was
not Constant but A. W. Schlegel who accompanied Mme. de Staël to Italy
in 1805 (as tutor to her children), on the journey immortalised in
_Corinne_. Constant was privately married to his Charlotte in the
summer of 1808, and so little was Madame de Staël resigned to his
defection, that terrible scenes occurred when she unexpectedly met the
newly married pair in the neighbourhood of Geneva. Charlotte, driven to
despair by her rival's furious jealousy, made an unsuccessful attempt
to commit suicide. So great was Madame de Staël's influence over
Constant, that she actually persuaded him to leave his wife and return
for a time with her to Coppet.

For some years after this episode Benjamin Constant lived in quiet
retirement at Göttingen, occupied with collecting material for his
work on the origin and development of religion. The defeat of Napoleon
in 1813 brought him and his friend Madame de Staël once more into
the political arena. Her influence at the courts of Russia, Germany,
and Sweden gave him a voice in the proceedings against the defeated
autocrat. He went to Paris in Bernadotte's train, and, although he was
in favour of the restoration of the monarchy, he strove ardently to
save all that could be saved of constitutional liberty. He published
masterly pamphlets on the liberty of the press, on ministerial
responsibility, &c. It is well known that immediately after this,
his blind infatuation for Mme. Récamier caused him to take such
violent action against Napoleon on the latter's return from Elba, that
there seems something traitorous in his acceptance of a post in the
Council of State during the Hundred Days, and his collaboration in the
Emperor's attempt to give France a species of constitution.

We must not judge Constant as a politician by this unfortunate episode.
Under the Bourbons, and even during the first years of the reign of
Louis Philippe, he was the determined and eloquent leader of the
Liberal Opposition. Though never remarkable for purity of character,
he had noble impulses. When in 1830 he received a letter from one of
his friends in Paris saying, "A terrible game is being played here;
our heads are in danger; come and add yours!" he did not hesitate for
a moment, but came and undauntedly sided with the revolutionists. A
few months later, however, although he was at the time leader of the
Opposition, he accepted 100,000 francs from Louis Philippe for the
purpose of paying his gambling debts. Constant was an accomplished
dialectician. No truth, he was accustomed to observe, is complete
unless it includes its antithesis. He succeeded in completing many
truths. The imprint set upon him by the period in which his youth had
fallen was never effaced. The doubleness which in the other notable men
of the same generation is only a secondary quality, is in Constant's
character the essential, distinguishing, and, at the same time,
disturbing trait.

_Adolphe_, the chief work of this man's youth, deserves some study.
In it we find the following utterance: "What surprises me is, not
that humanity should feel the need of a religion, but that it should
in any age fancy itself strong enough, and sufficiently secure from
disaster, to venture to reject anyone religion. It seems to me as if in
its weakness it should rather be prone to invoke the aid of them all.
Is there, in the dense darkness which surrounds us, any ray of light
that we can afford to reject? Does there float on the whirling torrent
which carries us along with it any branch to which we dare refuse to
cling?" We feel that the author is more certain of the existence of
the whirling torrent than of the branch. His manner of recommending
religion reveals his own lack of it, and a profound depth of melancholy.

The explanation is simple. There was a reaction against Voltaire in the
air at that time, a reaction practically inaugurated by Rousseau--the
rebound of repressed, unconsulted, ignored feeling. A half-unconscious
effort was going on in men's minds to restore the balance between
the demands and the possibilities of the human soul which had been
disturbed during the autocratic reign of critical intellect; and this
half-conscious tendency was plainly perceptible even in men whose
natures were really akin to Voltaire's, and who, had they been born
thirty years earlier, would have been his eager sympathisers and
fellow-workers. Voltaire had not only criticised, he had been forced
by the evils of the times and by his unruly wit into an attitude of
aggression. With all available weapons, even poisoned ones, he had
attacked those purely external, palpable forms of authority, which in
his time stood in the way of honourable human conditions, nay, made
them impossible. Now all these powers had fallen, and the times once
more craved authority. There are inner, spiritual authorities. The
Right, the Good, the True are such. But the enthusiastic attempts to
introduce and establish a free form of government which should realise
these ideals without the invocation of any authority unexplainable
by reason, had resulted in the savage excesses of lawlessness. What
wonder, then, that not only many ordinary individuals began to grope
after planks from the wreck of the once powerful political and
religious systems, but that also a majority of the most highly gifted
came forward as the champions of some authority, either temporal or
spiritual, which they supported for the sake of the principle, but with
no real belief or confidence in it.

They had no real confidence, for the simple reason that for them, as
genuine and intelligent sons of the young nineteenth century, it was
impossible to believe in the strength of a stem which their fathers had
sawn through. Chateaubriand's faith in legitimacy was as faint-hearted
as Constant's in religion in general. Men were uneasy in their minds.
The old house was burned down. The new was not even begun. And, instead
of boldly beginning to erect a new building, events led them to seek
refuge among the ruins of the old, the half-burned materials of which
they built up as best they could. During this performance they were
perpetually tempted to try experiments not planned from the first.
After some vain attempts to give solidity to the building by the
addition of new material, they would in despair give a kick at the
shaky, newly built walls, which brought them down again. No group of
writers whose aim was to preserve society ever brought such passionate
accusations against it as the authors of the Emigrant Literature. It is
one of these accusations of society which forms the basis of Benjamin
Constant's _Adolphe_.

Adolphe is a love story which, in its presentment of the relations
of the individual to society, takes a quite different point of view
from _Werther_. In _Werther_ outward, and, by reason of these, also
inward, obstacles prevent the union of a couple obviously made for
each other. In _Adolphe_ outward, and because of them, also inward,
reasons part two beings who are united. _Werther_ represents the power
of society, and of once-accepted social responsibilities, to hinder
a love match. _Adolphe_ describes the power of society and of public
opinion to absolve from accepted personal responsibilities and to sever
a long-united pair. The books, taken together, form a double picture of
the pope-like power of society to bind and loose. But whereas _Werther_
depicts the feelings of the pre-revolutionary, enthusiastic, energetic
generation to which its author belonged, the feelings described in
_Adolphe_ are those of the first French generation of the new century.

Unlike former love stories, _Adolphe_ does not delineate love only
in its first awakening in the dawn of delusive hopes, but follows it
through its whole existence, depicts its growth, its strength, its
decay, its death, and even pursues it to the other side of the grave
and shows the feelings into which it is transformed. Hence _Adolphe_,
even more than _René_, is the story of the individual's rude awakening
from delusion, the representation of the anguish of disappointment.
It is the flower of life which is here stripped of its petals one by
one and carefully dissected. In this point, too, the book is a great
contrast to _Werther, Werther_ is naïve in comparison. It is the same
flower, the perfume of which is a deadly poison to Werther, that is
calmly dissected by Adolphe. The change is expressed in the very
costume; the blue coat and yellow waistcoat have made way for our dull,
funereal black.

But the flame which is extinguished in the man's breast now burns in
the woman's. _Adolphe_ is woman's _Werther_. The passion and melancholy
of the new age have advanced another step; they have spread to the
other sex. In _Werther_ it was the man who loved, suffered, stormed,
and despaired; in comparison with him the woman was sound, strong, and
unharmed--perhaps a trifle cold and insignificant. But now it is her
turn, now it is she who loves and despairs. In _Werther_ it was the
woman who submitted to the laws of society, in _Adolphe_ it is the man
who does so. The selfsame war waged by Werther in the name of his love
is now waged by Eléonore, and with equally tragic result.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to call this romance the prototype of a
whole new species of fiction, namely that which occupies itself with
psychical analysis. It is its treatment of love that is new. Far behind
us now lies the time when Amor was represented as the charming child we
all know from Thorwaldsen's bas-reliefs. To Voltaire Amor was the god
of pleasure. "Les ris, les jeux et les plaisirs" were his attendants.
To Rousseau he is the god of passion. With Goethe he has ceased to be a
beneficent spirit; we understand when we read Goethe what Schopenhauer
meant when he wrote that Amor pursues his way, indifferent to the
misery of the individual. In Faust, the first poem of the new era,
he is transformed from a roguish boy into a criminal. Faust seduces
Gretchen and deserts her; Gretchen's love-story means the death of
her mother, her brother, her infant, and herself. She, the innocent,
loving girl, kills her mother with the sleeping-draught she administers
in order that Faust may visit her by night; Faust and Mephistopheles
together slay the brother who attempts to avenge his sister's disgrace;
from fear of shame Gretchen kills her new-born child, for which she is
thrown into prison and finally executed. Goethe's passion for truth
impelled him to paint a very different picture of Amor from that which
represents him as the rose-crowned boy. And in Goethe it is not only in
its consequences but in its very nature that love is fraught with fate.
In _Elective Affinities_ he has made a study of the mysterious and
irresistible attraction and repulsion by which the mutual relations of
souls are determined, as if they were chemical substances. The book is
a kind of study of passion from the point of view of natural philosophy;
Goethe shows us its rise, its magic power as a mysterious natural
force, its foundation in the unfathomed depths of our soul.

An attempt had thus been made to explain the attraction to which we
give the name of love by instituting a parallel between it and the
attraction with which we are familiar in inanimate nature. But there
was yet another step to be taken, namely, to dissociate love from
everything with which it had hitherto been connected, and analyse it.
This task fell to the lot of the unsettled, unsatisfied generation
to which Constant belongs. However much men had differed in their
conception of love, its causes and its consequences, they had all
agreed in accepting the emotion itself as something understood,
something simple. They now for the first time began to treat it as
something composite, and to attempt to resolve it into its elements.
In _Adolphe_, and the fiction which follows in its steps, an accurate
calculation is made of how many parts, how many grains, of friendship,
how many of devotion, of vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual
attraction, hope, imagination, disappointment, hatred, weariness,
enthusiasm, calculation, &c. on the part of each, go to make up the
compound which the two concerned call their love. With all this
analysis the emotion lost its supernatural character, and the worship
of it ceased. Instead of its poetry, its psychology was offered to
the reader. What happened resembled that which happens when we look
at a star through a telescope; its bright rays disappear, only the
astronomical body remains: before, in the bright full moon we saw only
a clear, shining disc with an unchanging face; now, we distinguish a
multitude of mountains and valleys.

From the moment when men began to desire really to understand, they
necessarily fixed their attention less upon that first awakening of
the emotion, which poets had sung and celebrated from time immemorial,
than upon its later development, its duration and its cessation. In
those tragedies which are to be found in the literature of all races,
which are, as it were, their hymns to love, the death of the lovers
follows close upon the blossoming time of their love. Romeo sees
Juliet; they adore one another; after a few days and nights passed in
the seventh heaven, both lie dead. The question of constancy does not
occur. Our Danish love-tragedy, _Axel and Valborg_, seems, indeed, to
deal with nothing but constancy; the whole plot turns on the prolonged
engagement of the lovers, a characteristically national pivot--but _in
Axel and Valborg_ constancy is glorified as a virtue, not explained
as a product, for the play is a lyrical tragedy, not a psychological
analysis.

It is the question of the conditions of constancy which is treated of
in _Adolphe_--under what conditions is passion lasting or otherwise?
And it is the answer to this question which is really an impeachment
of society. For it is maintained that while society, in this case
represented by public opinion, upholds those unions which are of its
own institution, it at the same time basely strives to destroy all
possibilities of faithfulness in any union it has not sanctioned, even
if that union be to the full as honourable, to the full as unselfish,
as any of those which it fences round and supports.

Constant prefers his accusation in a story which could hardly be
less pretentious. It contains but two characters, no scenery, and
there is not a single fortuitous incident in the whole course of its
action. Everything occurs according to the natural laws indicated by
the relations of the couple to each other and to society in general.
The reader follows this history of two souls to its close much as a
student of chemistry watches the fermentation of two substances in an
inexplosible phial and observes the results. Who, then, are these two
characters?

In the first place, who is _he_? He is a very young man, who (like
the author) has been given an appointment at one of the little German
courts, after completing his studies at a small German university.
He has been tolerably dissipated, but has also gone through a course
of serious and laborious study. His relations with his father, an
outwardly cold, ironical man, who represents the culture of the
eighteenth century, have increased the hero's youthful taste for
powerful, passionate emotions, and his leaning to the unusual, the
extravagant. His father's severe discipline has inspired him with an
impatient longing for freedom from the bonds which gall him, and a
strong disinclination to let himself be trammelled by new ones.

At this stage of his development he comes to a court where monotony
and formality reign. To him, who from his earliest youth has felt an
unconquerable aversion to dogmatism and formalism, it is positive
suffering to be obliged to listen to his companions' eternal
platitudes. "The self-satisfied chatter of mediocrity about absolutely
unquestionable and unshakable religious, moral, or social principles,
all considered of equal importance, drove me to contradict, not so much
because I was of a different opinion as because I had no patience with
such clumsy, stolid certainty. I was involuntarily on the alert against
all these general maxims which are considered universally applicable,
without restriction or modification. The blockheads knead their
morality into such an indivisible mass that it cannot possibly permeate
their actions and be applicable in individual cases."

He revenges himself for the boredom which his associates inflict
on him by jesting at them and their ideals, and soon acquires a
character for ill-natured frivolity. He does not himself approve of
his own contradictory, mocking spirit. "But," he says, "I may urge in
self-defence that it takes time to accustom one's self to such beings,
to that which selfishness, affectation, vanity, and cowardice have
made of them. The astonishment a man in his early youth feels at such
an artificial, arbitrarily regulated state of society witnesses rather
to the naturalness of his character than to depraved tendencies.
Besides, this society has nothing to fear from such as us; it weighs us
down, its foolish influence is so strong that it quickly moulds us to
the general pattern. Then we only wonder that we were ever astonished.
We become accustomed to the new life as men become accustomed to the
air in a room full of people, where at first they feel as if they could
not breathe."

These skirmishes with his narrow surroundings were not sufficient
to satisfy the gifted young man; his discontent is perpetually with
him, he drags it about as a man drags a weight attached to his leg.
Like René and Obermann, he belongs to a generation of sons to whom
their fathers did not appear to have left anything to do worth doing.
The future has no interest for him, for he has anticipated it in
imagination, and the past has made him old, for he has lived in thought
through many a century. He has desired much, but willed nothing, and
the more lacking in will he feels himself, the vainer does he become;
for vanity is the invariable stop-gap with which those in whom will
or ability is defective, attempt to fill the lacunae in their will
or ability. He wishes to love and to be loved, looking on love in
the light of a tonic for his self-esteem. He expects to attain to a
stronger persuasion of his own worth, to be raised in his own and other
people's eyes, by some great triumph and scandal. The happiness that
love is to bring to him is the happiness of feeling for once that his
will is strong, because he is able to bend another's to it. He is not
by nature more faithless than other men. It is in him to love more
tenderly, to act more unselfishly than many do, but for him to love
faithfully many circumstances would need to be altered. He is still so
young that there is more of curiosity and of the spirit of adventure
in his feeling for a woman than of real love; and even if he loved
deeply, he is too weak, too little of the man, to be able to love on
in spite of society's disapproval of his passion; above all, in spite
of his unlikeness to his father, he is too much his son to be able,
without despising or deceiving himself, to stake his whole existence
on one card. He differs from and yet resembles his father, just as the
beginning of the nineteenth century differed from and yet resembled the
eighteenth.

And who is _she_? She is carefully described by the author as being
such that Adolphe's love for her, however strong, is certain sooner
or later to be affected by social considerations. In the first place,
Adolphe is not the only man she has loved, and the verdict of society
has been passed upon her before they meet; she is not his equal in
its eyes, although she is so by birth. In the second place, she is
considerably older than he; and in the third, hers is a passionate,
power-loving nature, which could only be fused with his if social
conditions favoured the process, and which must make both unhappy if
they harden him against her.

When Adolphe makes her acquaintance, Eléonore is no young,
inexperienced girl, who learns for the first time what love is;
she is a woman, whose new emotions stand out upon a background of
sad, harrowing experience. The mark which this experience has set
upon her is the first noticeable trait in her personality. Eléonore
has relinquished her right to all the privileges and pleasures of
a safe-guarded, peaceful life. Although of good family and born to
wealth, she has left home and family to follow the man she loves,
as his mistress. She has chosen between the world and him, and has
ennobled her action by entirely, unconditionally sacrificing herself
for his sake. She has done him the greatest services, has saved his
fortune, and been as faithful as any wife could be, endeavouring by
this absolute fidelity to solace the pride wounded by the reprobation
and scorn of the world. Strength of will is the second noticeable
feature of the character.

When the first doubt of her friend's constancy assails her, the whole
edifice that she has raised crumbles to pieces. Does he love her, or
does he only treat her as a man of honour must? is he faithful, or is
he only too proud and too well-bred to show himself ungrateful and
indifferent? With tears she puts the question to herself, with anguish
answers it. It is at this moment that she meets Adolphe. He is drawn to
her with a desire in which his whole thirst for life and all that life
contains is concentrated, drawn as to one in whom he mysteriously feels
treasures of passion, tenderness, enthusiasm, intellect, and experience
to be accumulated, buried, as it were. And his longing and her regret,
his vanity and her despair, his youth and her disappointment take hold
of each other like two wheels in the works of a watch.

It is easy to foresee with what a fiery flame this passion will blaze
at first, to foretell what a full and mighty chord, what a joyful paean
will resound, as though both had won complete and lasting victory
and salvation. There is a new and strange mixture in her feeling--an
enthusiasm which is almost fanatical, because it must be equal to the
task of stifling his constantly recurring jealousy of the past; a faith
which is almost convulsive, because it is not based upon sound, natural
confidence, but upon a determination to believe in spite of everything,
even in spite of having already been deceived; and a fidelity which
suffers tortures from being constantly called upon to demonstrate its
existence, because it is the offspring of faithlessness towards the
past. This redoublement of passion constitutes the third marked feature
in Eléonore's character. "One regarded her," says Adolphe, "with the
same interest and admiration with which one gazes on a magnificent
thunderstorm."

It is in reality an entirely new female type which is here presented to
us, a type which many years later Balzac appropriates, styles "la femme
de trente ans," and varies with such genius that he may be said to be
its second creator, and which George Sand too developed and embellished
in a whole series of her novels. Under the treatment of these two
authors this type proved to be a whole, hitherto unknown, world, in
which every feeling, passion, and thought was infinitely stronger than
in the world of the girlish heart. In time the type passed from the
novel into the drama, and long usurped the French stage. In it the
early literature of the century found its queen, as in René it found
its king.[1]

The strong, Promethean generation to which Goethe belonged had produced
its type in Faust, the fully developed man, with the powerful,
cultivated intellect, who, having studied in all the schools and toiled
through all the sciences, becomes conscious in his manhood's prime of
a void in his heart, a thirst for youth, freshness, and simplicity.
Casting himself into the whirl of life, he falls in love with a child.
It is her simplicity and innocence that win and intoxicate him, and
arouse the desire of possession.

The unhappy generation of the homeless and exiled, the young and yet
old, the believers who were at the same time unbelievers, to which
Constant belongs, has its type in Adolphe, who, blasé in thought,
though a mere child in years and experience, seeks in love strong
sensations, violent emotion, knowledge of life, of passion, and of
the heart of woman, difficulties and dangers to overcome--in a word,
mastery over woman. The young girl brought up under her mother's eye
in an ordinary middle-class home does not attract him; it would not be
a sufficient triumph to master her. But with the superiority of years
and experience on the woman's side, the feeling and the relation change
character. The passion uniting two such dissimilar beings is something
less ordinary, less conventional, less happy, but more transient than
the love which we know as a social power. It is no longer the prelude
to a bourgeois wedding. It seems to come into existence when, under
certain conditions, the paths of two beings of a certain complex type
cross or intersect each other; but the result is not harmony.

It is not until considerably later that this new type of woman really
takes possession of French literature. Saint Simon, the Revolution
of July, and George Sand had to pave the way--Saint Simon with his
doctrine of the emancipation of woman, and his theory that humanity
can only be perfected in man and woman together, not in man alone; the
Revolution of July by destroying many of the arbitrary restrictions to
which woman had been subjected; and George Sand by carrying on, almost
alone, the same struggle for the liberation of woman, which for man
had been begun by the great Revolution. The fact that the type, and
with it the conflict of woman with society, appears in literature so
long before George Sand, is to be explained by the circumstance that
Eléonore is modelled from the strongest woman of the day, the woman who
ventured to oppose Napoleon himself--Mme. de Staël.

This new type forms a strong contrast to those female characters of
Goethe's in which German poetry attained its highest level, and in
which the characteristically Teutonic spiritual quality is expressed
more perfectly than it ever had been before. Although Gretchen and
Clärchen are the antitheses of each other, the one being mild and
submissive, the other fiery and daring, both are children, both are
absorbed by a single feeling, both have perfectly simple, single-minded
natures, Both love for the first and only time. Both give themselves
to the man they love without thought of marriage, with entire trust,
without any resistance, without even the wish to resist; the one from
deep womanly devotion, the other from lofty womanly enthusiasm. They
do not understand that they are doing wrong, they do not think at all.
Their whole being, their will, their thoughts pass out of their own
possession, they themselves do not know how. Their hearts are soft as
wax to receive an impression, but once received it is ineffaceable,
it is as though it were stamped in gold. Their innocence, purity, and
integrity are beyond compare. They are faithful by instinct, and do
not dream of the possibility of being anything else. They possess no
morality, but all the virtues; for human beings are moral consciously,
but good by nature. They do not consider themselves the equals of their
lovers, but look up to them, as if the old legend had been realised
and the sons of God had come down to the daughters of men. Gretchen is
amazed and overpowered by Faust's knowledge, Clärchen kneels like a
child before Egmont when he appears in his full splendour. They lose
themselves, they, as it were, disappear in their lovers. What we have
here is not two equals, who take each other's hands, and plight their
faith to each other, but a bewildered, admiring child clinging to a
man. He is her life, while she is but an episode in his. At a glance he
grasps and comprehends her whole nature; she is incapable of grasping
his from any point, incapable of penetrating and judging. She can see
neither his limits nor his faults. Whichever way she turns, she sees
him as something gigantic, looming on every side. Hence there is in
this love no criticism, no emancipation of the spirit, no employment
of the understanding. He is the great, the glorious one--like Faust,
who can talk of everything and has an answer for all questions, or like
Egmont, whose name as a hero and a saviour is upon every tongue and who
is known to the whole city. The reason why this love brings with it no
spiritual emancipation is that the young girl has no spirit, in the
sense of intellect; she is pure soul. When she performs actions which
would seem to require a certain amount of will or firm determination,
when Clärchen, for example, astonished and indignant that the citizens
of Brussels are indifferent and cowardly enough to allow their hero to
be carried off to prison and probable death, makes a public appearance
in the market-place, and vainly attempts to rouse their dull souls
with fiery words, the motive of the action is to be found in the
young girl's naïve belief that her lover's life must be of as great
importance to others as it is to her; as she sees nothing in the world
but him, she cannot imagine how others can think of anything else.
These young girls are genuine daughters of the great family to which
Ophelia and Desdemona belong.

A sharp contrast confronts us in the new type of Frenchwoman; instead
of sweetness, clinging affection, naturalness, we have passion, will,
energy, and conscious intelligence. For it was in the most remarkable
and intellectual woman of the day, a woman who had given up country,
peace, and prosperity, rather than submit to the petty tyranny with
which Napoleon's despotism pursued the unsubmissive, that Constant
found the new type.

The appearance of woman in literature as conscious intelligence is a
first step towards her appearance as genius. We already see Mme. de
Staël's turban appearing on the horizon. The woman who shares man's
passions and struggles will soon share his genius and his renown.
Yet a little while and the struggle ends in victory, the same woman
who succumbs under the name of Eléonore is crowned at the Capitol as
Corinne.

It only now remains to direct attention to the accurate psychological
observation in _Adolphe_, and to show the results arrived at. The hero
starts, as we have seen, with the idea that the conquest of Eléonore
is a task worthy of him; he imagines that he will be able coldly to
study her character, and calmly to lay his plan of campaign; but, his
susceptibility being quite as great as his egoism, he soon succumbs
to a fascination which completely overmasters him, and which so
increases his natural timidity that he cannot summon up courage to make
the declaration which he had promised his vanity to arrive at very
speedily. He writes, but Eléonore will have nothing to say to him, and
avoids him. Her resistance and coldness produce in him a submission
and devotion which soon become a species of worship. Never before has
Eléonore been thus loved, for however much true devotion her protector
has shown her, there has always been a touch of condescension in it. He
could have made a more honourable alliance; he has never said so, but
what is unsaid may quite well make itself felt. It is this reverence of
Adolphe for her which wins Eléonore. She gives herself to him, and he
is almost dazed with rapture and happiness. What first jars upon him is
her not being able (when the Count has gone from home for a day or two)
to let him out of her sight even for a few hours. She detains him when
he attempts to leave her; when he goes, she asks when he will return.
Pleased and flattered at first by this boundless devotion, he soon
finds that his time is so absorbed by her that he has not an hour at
his own disposal. He is compelled to refuse all invitations and break
off with all his acquaintances. This is no great loss to him, but he
would prefer being able to come and go as he pleases to being obliged
to put in an appearance at the stroke of the clock. She who had been
his aim and object in life is now a tie upon him.

Where are ye now, O touching romances, in which the lover never had
anything to do but to love, in which he rose up early to love, loved
all day, and for love passed sleepless nights! It is a wonderfully
naturalistic touch in _Adolphe_ that the lover feels his loss of time
to be indeed a loss.

It avails not that he asserts his right to dispose of his time as
he will, for the thought of the grief she endures when he fails to
appear, prevents his making any satisfactory use of the time gained,
especially as he is also tormented by a feeling of shame that another
human being should have such an ascendency over him. Then when he
returns to her, annoyed with himself for having come back much sooner
than was prudent for the sake of her reputation or his own work, he
finds her miserable because he has stayed away so long. For two hours
he has been suffering from the knowledge that she is longing, and now
he must suffer two more before he can pacify her. In spite of all this
he feels happy; he tells himself that it is sweet to be thus loved;
nevertheless, he is unconsciously consoling himself with the thought
that the peculiarities of their position must, sooner or later, put an
end to the situation.

The Count returns, and Adolphe first suffers from being compelled to
deceive him, and then endures the torture of seeing Eléonore sacrifice
everything for his own sake, give up at one and the same time her home
and her fortune. It is a double grief, partly selfish, for he mourns
over the inevitable restriction of his own liberty by the sacrifice she
is so happy in making for him, and partly compassionate, for he knows
with what hyena-like fury society will tear her reputation to pieces.
All she has won by years of irreproachable behaviour she loses in one
day. Her pride suffers agonies, and his devotion becomes a duty. From
henceforth each has a secret suffering which is not confided to the
other.

Adolphe's character begins to deteriorate. He fights a duel with a man
who has spoken slightingly of Eléonore, but himself unintentionally
injures her reputation by the incessant mockery of women and the
men who live in subjection to them in which he indulges as a kind
of relief from the feeling of his own dependence; men put their own
interpretation on his jests and jeers. He who cannot resist a tear,
makes a point of speaking of women with callous contempt.

Many have suffered the misery of loving without return; Adolphe's
torment consists in being loved after he has ceased to love. Eléonore
sees through his efforts to appear overjoyed when they meet, and one
of those terrible scenes ensues with which Mme. de Staël had made
Constant familiar; the exasperation of her passionate nature resembles
hatred. An attempt is made by Adolphe's relations, who disapprove of
his wasting his youth on such a connection, to get rid of Eléonore.
Adolphe's chivalrous feeling impels him to run away with her, and for a
time their tender feeling towards each other resembles love. Eléonore
makes fresh sacrifices which it galls Adolphe to accept. At one time
she suffers as much from not being loved as he from not loving; at
another she so intoxicates herself with her own passion that she sees
it double and believes that it is returned. Both live in the memory
of their former happiness, which is vivid enough to make parting seem
painful, even impossible, but not strong enough to impart any happiness
to their daily life. The tender but faint protestations of love made
now and again by Adolphe to Eléonore resemble the weak, colourless
leaves put forth from the branches of some uprooted tree.

He fails to make the being happy who is the cause of so much
unhappiness to himself. Every time she feels that she has won new
rights, he feels that he is bound by new fetters. Her passionateness
makes their daily life one incessant storm. In a biography of Constant
we find the following significant sentence: "This year Constant was
happy; Mme. de Staël was in Russia."

Eléonore inherits her father's fortune and is no longer dependent upon
Adolphe's protection. The world now suspects him of deriving pecuniary
advantage from the friendship; he is blamed for injuring her reputation
by being always in her company, and it is of course impossible for him
to explain that it is she who will not live without him.

His life is slipping away between his fingers; he is fulfilling none of
the promises of his youth; for, as he is not allowed to forget, there
is an insurmountable barrier between him and any possible future, and
that barrier is Eléonore. He determines to break off with her, but this
very determination makes his position more hopeless, for the moment he
resolves upon the death sentence (which he is too weak not to postpone)
all bitterness leaves him, and he feels such tender compassion for her
that she misunderstands and believes that all is well.

She makes a final violent effort to win him by rousing his jealousy;
but nothing now has any effect; on all sides the rupture is represented
to him as the most natural thing in the world, as a duty to his father,
to his own future, even to the unhappy being to whom he is chained, and
whom he is tormenting. She receives a letter which throws light on
his intentions, and soon after is attacked by a fatal fever and dies,
proclaiming her devotion to her lover with her last breath.

The moment Adolphe is free he realises that freedom is now useless
to him; he no longer knows what to do with it, and longs for the old
fetters.

Constant himself thus expresses the moral of the book: "The strongest
passion cannot survive the struggle with the established order of
things. Society is too powerful. It makes that love too bitter which
it has not recognised and stamped with the seal of its approval. Woe,
then, to the woman who rests her hope of happiness upon a feeling which
all things combine to poison, and against which society, when it is not
obliged to respect it as legal, enlists all that is basest in the human
heart, with the aim of destroying all that is good."


[1] The day came when criticism uplifted its voice against this
dethronement of youth and beauty. Jules Janin in his light way prefers
this complaint in the form of an attack on Balzac:--

"Formerly," he writes, "as far as the novel and the drama were
concerned, the woman of thirty to forty was regarded as past all
possibilities in the way of passion, but now, thanks to the discovery
of this new wide and smiling domain, she reigns supreme in both drama
and novel. A new world has superseded the old, the woman of forty has
suppressed the girl of sixteen.

"'Who knocks?' shouts drama in its deep voice. 'Who is there?' cries
the novel in gentler tones. 'It is I,' answers tremblingly the girl of
sixteen, with the pearly teeth, the snowy bosom, the soft outlines, the
bright smile, and the gentle glance. 'It is I! I am the same age as
Racine's Julie, Shakespeare's Desdemona, Molière's Agnès, Voltaire's
Zaire, Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Saint-Pierre's Virginie. It is I!
I am the same charming, volatile, delightful age as the young girls in
Ariosto, Lesage, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. It is I! I am innocent
youth, with its hopes, with its divinely beautiful, fearless attitude
towards the future. I am the age of chaste desires, of noble instincts,
of pride, and of innocence. Make room for me, dear sirs!' Thus speaks
the charming girl of sixteen to the novelists and the dramatists. But
the novelists and the dramatists at once reply: 'We are busy with your
mother, child; come again twenty years hence, and we shall see if we
can make something out of you.'

"In the novel and the drama of to-day, we have no one but the woman
of thirty, who will be forty to-morrow. She alone can love, she alone
can suffer. She is so much more dramatic, because she cannot afford
to wait. What can we make out of a little girl who can do nothing but
weep, love, sigh, smile, hope, tremble? The woman of thirty does not
weep, she sobs; she does not sigh, she utters anguished cries; she
does not love, she is consumed with passion; she does not smile, she
shrieks; she does not dream, she acts! This is drama, this is romance,
this is life. Thus speak, act, and reply our great playwrights and our
famous writers of fiction."

The intelligent, refined Madame Émile de Girardin defended Balzac,
answering very justly: "Is it Balzac's fault that thirty is now the
age of love? Balzac is obliged to paint passion where he finds it, and
nowadays it is not to be found in the heart of sixteen."




VIII


MADAME DE STAËL: "DELPHINE"


In one of his letters Byron writes of _Adolphe_: "The book contains
some melancholy truths, though I believe that it is too triste a work
ever to have been popular. The first time I ever read it was at the
desire of Mme. de Staël." Mme. de Staël herself says somewhere: "I do
not believe all men resemble Adolphe, but only vain men." Simple as the
observation is, we feel that it is written by a woman in self-defence;
for _Adolphe_ had struck home to Necker's daughter personally, had
bared her deepest heart wound.

Anne Marie Germaine Necker was born in Paris in 1766. Her father, the
great Genevese financier, became First Minister of France shortly
before the outbreak of the Revolution, and his name was at that time
the watchword of liberal France. Her mother was a highly gifted
woman, but stiff, reserved, and the slave of duty; she believed that
education did everything, nature little, and she laid pedantic stress
upon trifles, being of opinion that nothing is trifling from the moral
point of view. To this lady Rousseau's educational theories were
naturally highly antipathetic, and the consequence was that Rousseau,
with his belief in nature and in innate virtues, became her daughter's
ideal. This daughter, a frank, lively child, developed into a bright,
intelligent brunette, whose dark eyes sparkled with wit and beamed
with kind-heartedness. While Mme. Necker chiefly appreciated common
sense and the habit of self-examination, the daughter, who suffered
from the strict control under which she was kept, and whose great
gifts roused her mother's jealousy, grew to love all the qualities
and virtues which spring without cultivation from Nature's own health
and wealth. In her father's house she was from childhood brought
into contact with the most famous men of the day, who were amused and
attracted by her quick repartee and surprising originality. The lively,
marvellously intelligent child was her father's pride, and she returned
his affection with a boundless love and admiration which lasted all her
life and can be traced in most of her writings.

At fifteen years of age she began to write essays, novels, and
tragedies. One of her tragedies, entitled _Montmorency_, marks the
time when she began to feel attracted by the young Vicomte Mathieu
de Montmorency, who had distinguished himself in the American War
of Independence. Her parents being opposed to her marriage with a
Catholic, she was obliged to refuse his hand, but to the end of their
lives they remained faithful friends. Yielding to her mother's wishes,
Germaine Necker married in 1786 the Swedish Ambassador in Paris, Baron
Erik Magnus Staël Holstein, a favourite of Gustavus the Third. In order
to assist him to this wealthy and influential connection, Gustavus
confirmed the Baron in his post of ambassador in Paris for a certain
number of years. The bridegroom, who was double the age of his bride,
promised her parents that he would never take her to Sweden against
her will. He seems to have been the ordinary northern nobleman of the
period, very simple, polished in manner, but only half educated, a
spendthrift and a gambler. It was said of him that he would never have
found out how to boil a potato, much less have invented gunpowder.
Curiously enough, he sympathised with the Revolution.

Mme. de Staël's first book, _Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau_, was
published immediately before the Revolution. It is a panegyric and
a defence. At the close of the third letter she seeks to interweave
Rousseau's fame with that of her father, who, at the time she wrote,
had just been called to the head of affairs; at the end of the
fourth she hails the assembling of the States-General with youthful
enthusiasm, and expresses the hope that the great French nation
will attain by the path of enlightenment, reason, and peace, to the
possession of those blessings which other peoples had gained by the
shedding of streams of blood. She calls upon the nation to make it
a matter of honour not to go beyond the point which all are united in
regarding as their aim, and she closes with an apostrophe to Rousseau,
in which she laments that he did not live long enough to see the
approaching awe-inspiring spectacle, nor to encourage that patriot,
Necker, who merited a judge, admirer, and fellow-citizen such as he.

[Illustration: MADAME DE STAËL]

The Revolution broke out, and would not be stayed in its career at
what was the limit of her hopes and wishes, i.e. the acquisition of
a constitution after the English pattern. Necker was soon compelled
to flee, but his daughter remained in Paris, and, protected by her
husband's position, rescued many an innocent victim of the Reign of
Terror. With the assistance of the courageous German, Justus Erich
Bollmann, she saved the life of the man who was her lover at that
time, Narbonne, the former Minister of War. Bollmann got him safely
to London in 1792.[1] She had even laid a plan for the flight of the
royal family. The hatred of the revolutionary leaders was roused by her
behaviour; and it was with difficulty she escaped the mob's thirst for
revenge. She fled to Coppet, accompanied by her friend Montmorency,
who, as an aristocrat, was also in danger, and who disguised himself
as her lackey. Afterwards she went to England, where she published
a pamphlet in defence of Marie Antoinette, whom she did not know
personally, but by whose fate she had been deeply affected. This
pamphlet was soon followed by another, also called forth by current
events, entitled _De l'Influence des Passions sur le Bonheur des
Individus et des Nations_, a piece of declamatory writing, in which the
authoress exhibits no knowledge of life except when she treats of love,
and no political acumen except when she is writing of the Revolution.
There is a hollow, insincere ring in what she says on the subject of
ambition.

Though not formally banished by the Directory, Mme. de Staël was placed
under the surveillance of the police, and would have been arrested
if she had entered France without permission. As soon, however, as
Sweden had acknowledged the French Republic, she returned to Paris and
busied herself actively with politics. Her aim was a Parliamentary
constitution and peace with Europe. It was through her influence that
Talleyrand was made Foreign Minister. Her house was a great political
rendezvous, more especially of the Moderates, and it was not long
before Benjamin Constant played the leading part among the politicians
who assembled there, as well as occupied the first place in the good
graces of the mistress of the house.

When Bonaparte came to Paris as a conqueror towards the end of 1797,
after the campaign in Italy, he ma

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