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Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France

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Title: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France

Author: Georg Brandes

Translator: Mary Morison
        Diana White


        
Release date: January 12, 2015 [eBook #47950]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE - 5. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE ***
MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

BY

GEORG BRANDES


IN SIX VOLUMES


V.

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1904




    _Dis-nous mil huit cent trente._
    _Époque fulgurante,_
    _Ses luttes, ses ardeurs...._
                        --TH. DE BANVILLE

    _Nicht was lebendig, kraftvoll sich verkündigt_
    _Ist das gefährlich Furchtbare. Das ganz_
    _Gemeine ist's, das ewig Gestrige,_
    _Was immer war und immer wiederkehrt_
    _Und morgen gilt, weil's heute hat gegolten._
                                        --SCHILLER.


CONTENTS

         I. THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND
        II. THE GENERATION OF 1830
       III. ROMANTICISM
        IV. CHARLES NODIER
         V. RETROSPECT--FOREIGN INFLUENCES
        VI. RETROSPECT--INDIGENOUS SOURCES
       VII. DE VIGNY'S POETRY AND HUGO'S "ORIENTALES"
      VIII. HUGO AND DE MUSSET
        IX. DE MUSSET AND GEORGE SAND
         X. ALFRED DE MUSSET
        XI. GEORGE SAND
       XII. BALZAC
      XIII. BALZAC
       XIV. BALZAC
        XV. BALZAC
       XVI. BALZAC
      XVII. BALZAC
     XVIII. BEYLE
       XIX. BEYLE
        XX. BEYLE
       XXI. MÉRIMÉE
      XXII. BEYLE AND MÉRIMÉE
     XXIII. MÉRIMÉE
     XXXIV. MÉRIMÉE
       XXV. MÉRIMÉE
      XXVI. MÉRIMÉE AND GAUTIER
     XXVII. THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
    XXVIII. THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
      XXIX. SAINTE-BEUVE
       XXX. SAINTE-BEUVE
      XXXI. SAINTE-BEUVE AND MODERN CRITICISM
     XXXII. THE DRAMA: VITET, DUMAS, DE VIGNY, HUGO
    XXXIII. LITERATURE IN ITS RELATION TO THE SOCIAL
            AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS OF THE DAY
     XXXIV. THE OVERLOOKED AND FORGOTTEN
      XXXV. CONCLUSION


    LIST OF PORTRAITS

    DE MUSSET
    GEORGE SAND
    BALZAC
    HENRY BEYLE (STENDHAL)
    MÉRIMÉE
    THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
    SAINTE-BEUVE




I


THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND


The literature produced in France between the years 1824 and 1828
is important and admirable. After the upheavals of the Revolution,
the wars of the Empire, and the lassitude of the reign of Louis
XVIII., there arose a young generation that applied itself with
eager enthusiasm to those highest intellectual pursuits which had so
long been neglected. During the Revolution and the wars of Napoleon
the youths of France had had other vocations than the reformation
of literature and art. The best energies of the nation had been
diverted into the channels of politics, military enterprise, and civil
administration. Now a great volume of intellectual force which had long
been confined was suddenly set free.

The period of the restored Bourbon kings and the Monarchy of July may
be defined as that of the decisive appearance of the bourgeoisie on
the historical stage. With the fall of Napoleon the industrial period
of history begins. Confining our attention to France, we observe that
the new division of the national property which had been made during
the Revolution, and which it had been Napoleon's economic mission to
vindicate to the rest of Europe, now began to produce its natural
consequences. All restrictions had been removed from industry and
commerce; monopolies and privileges had been abolished; the confiscated
lands of the Church and estates of the nobility, broken up and sold
to the highest bidder, were now in the hands of at least twenty times
as many owners as before. The result was that capital, free, floating
capital, now began to be the moving power of society and consequently
the object of the desires of the individual. After the Revolution of
July the power of wealth gradually supersedes the power of birth and
takes the power of royalty into its service. The rich man is received
into the ranks of the nobility, acquires the privileges of a peer, and,
by utilising the constitution, manages to draw ever-increasing profit
from the monarchical form of government. Thus the pursuit of money,
the struggle for money, the employment of money in great commercial
and industrial enterprises, becomes the leading social feature of the
period; and this prosaic engrossment, which contrasts so strongly with
the revolutionary and martial enthusiasm of the foregoing period,
helps, as background, to give the literature of the day its romantic,
idealistic stamp. One only of its eminent authors, one of the greatest,
Balzac, did not feel himself repelled by the period, but made the
newborn power of capital, the new ruler of souls, money, the hero of
his great epic; the other artists of the day, though it was often the
prospect of material gain which inspired their labours, kept in their
enthusiasms and their works at as great a distance as possible from the
new reality.

The decade 1825-35, the most remarkable and most fertile period from
the literary point of view, was from the political, colourless and
inglorious. Its focus is the Revolution of July, but this Revolution is
a solitary blood-spot amidst all the grey.

The first half of the decade, 1825-30, the reign of Charles X., is
the period of the religious reaction. The three ministries--Villèle,
Martignac, and Polignac--do not mark so much three stages of the
reaction as three different tempos: Allegro, Andante, and Allegro
furioso. During the Villèle ministry the Jesuits attained to almost
unlimited power. The monasteries were restored; laws of mediæval
severity regarding sacrilege were enforced (death, for example, being
the punishment for the robbery of a church); aid was refused to all
poor people who could not produce certificates of confession; and
in 1827 a law circumscribing the liberty of the press was proposed
which would have reduced the enemies of the Church to silence; but
this proposal the Government was obliged to retract, owing to the
opposition of the Chamber of Peers. The citizen troops were disbanded,
the censorship was restored; then the ministry was defeated by a
majority in the Chambers, and resigned in January 1828. The cabinet of
uncompromising churchmen was followed by one which pursued the policy
of concession; the Martignac ministry made a feeble endeavour to stem
the power of the Jesuits, but the only result of this was that the King
seized the opportunity of the first reverse the Government suffered in
the Chambers, to dismiss it and replace it by a ministry whose leader,
Polignac, previously ambassador to the court of England, was a man
after his own heart. Polignac believed in the monarchy as God's shadow
upon earth; believed (and was confirmed by visions in his belief) that
he had received from God the mission to restore it to its ancient
glory. But his Government was so unpopular that its one military
achievement, the conquest of Algiers, was coldly received by the
country and openly regretted by the strong Opposition. The dissolution
of the Chambers led, in spite of the pastoral letters of the bishops
and the personal interference of the King, to the re-election of
the Opposition, and on this followed the _coup d'état_. There were
three days of fighting, and the ministry was swept away by the wave
of popular feeling which carried with it the throne and the house of
Bourbon.

But although the first half of the decade was, politically speaking,
a period of reaction, it presents a very different aspect when
regarded from the social and intellectual point of view. In the first
place, the oppression itself produced the desire for freedom. The
bourgeoisie and the professional classes, who finally, with the aid
of the populace of the capital and the students, dethroned the house
of Bourbon, were during the whole period in a state of increasing
discontent and opposition. One of the consequences of this was that
literature, which at first was as fully inspired as politics with the
spirit of reaction against the doctrines and doings of the close of the
eighteenth century, and which started with any amount of enthusiasm
for Catholicism, monarchy, and the Middle Ages, completely changed
its tone. Chateaubriand's dismissal from the Villèle ministry gave
the signal (see _Main Currents_, iii. 293). In the second place, it
is to be observed that the intellectual life of those highest circles
of society which prescribed the tone and style of literature, was
only outwardly in sympathy with the political reaction. Regarded
from one point of view, the Restoration was an aftermath of the
eighteenth century in the nineteenth, of the age of humanity in the
age of industry. From the powdered court emanated courtly manners and
customs, from the salons of the old nobility emanated the free-thought
on moral and religious subjects in which the eighteenth century had
gloried. One of the strong points of that national tradition which
these highest circles defended and endeavoured to continue, was the
recognition of talent in every shape; they envisaged literature and art
with many-sided culture and wide sympathy. A tolerant, sceptical spirit
in religious matters, genial unrestraint and delicate forbearance in
the domain of morality, was, so to speak, the atmosphere inhaled and
exhaled by good society; and no atmosphere could be more favourable
and more fructifying for a literature in active process of growth. As
the oppression of the reaction begot liberalism in politics, so the
culture of the best society allowed unpolitical literature free play
both in the domain of feeling and that of thought, demanding nothing
but refinement and perfection of form. Hence literature was in a most
favourable position to give the reins, to give a start, to a new
intellectual movement.

The July dynasty was founded, the tri-coloured citizen-monarchy was
established, Louis Philippe was stealthily elevated to the throne of
France, holding the difficult position of king by the grace of the
Revolution.

The pregnant characteristics of his government revealed themselves
during the first five years of his reign. There was, in the first
place, that want of a decided, dignified foreign policy inevitable in
a monarchy that was supported exclusively by the prosperous middle
classes. The cautious, peace-loving King brought one humiliation after
another upon France. For the sake of the peace of nations, he refused
the throne offered by the Belgians to his second son, and with the same
motive he quietly allowed Austria to suppress the Italian revolutions,
which the French nation correctly regarded as the offspring of the
Revolution of July. He was incapable of preventing the suppression of
the Polish insurrection and the surrender of Warsaw, which occasioned
real national mourning in France. The country, as one of the great
powers, lost daily in prestige and influence. And in its internal
relations the Government displayed an equal want of dignity. The
constant demands for money which were made by the royal family and
almost invariably refused by the Chambers produced a most disagreeable
impression.

For a short time Louis Philippe was popular, popular as the soldier
of Valmy and Gemappes, as the citizen King, the former exile and
schoolmaster, whom Lafayette himself had called "the best republic."
But he had not the faculty of preserving popularity, though he made an
eager bid for it to begin with. He was a gifted and, essentially, a
prudent man. His family life was admirable; he was thoroughly domestic,
and regular in his habits; his sons attended the public schools; he
himself, in the attire of an ordinary citizen, carrying the historical
umbrella, walked unattended in the streets of Paris, always ready to
return a bow or a "Vive le Roi!" with a friendly word or a shake of the
hand. But the bourgeois virtues which he displayed are not those which
Frenchmen value in their rulers. The cry: "We want rulers who ride,"
shouted at gouty Louis XVIII., describes one of the feelings which led
to the dethronement of Louis Philippe.

For when Louis Philippe did ride, the spectacle was anything but
an inspiring one. In June 1832, after one of the innumerable small
insurrections in Paris, he declared the city to be in a state of siege,
and on this occasion held a review of 50,000 citizen troops and regular
soldiers, who were drawn up on each side of the boulevard. The King
did not ride along the middle of the street, but first along the right
side, where the citizen soldiers were stationed, leaning from his
saddle the whole time to shake hands with as many of them as possible,
and two hours later back in the same way along the line of the regular
troops. He looked as if his ribs must inevitably be broken. He kept on
smiling the whole time; his cocked hat slipped down over his forehead
and gave him an unhappy look; his eyes wore a beseeching expression,
as if he were entreating favour, and also forgiveness for having
declared them all to be in a state of siege. What a spectacle for an
impressionable, imaginative people, for a crowd of which the older
members had seen Napoleon Bonaparte ride past "with his statuesque,
Cæsar-like countenance, his fixed gaze, and his inapproachable ruler's
hands."[1]

In spite of the King's eager endeavour to win popularity, there was
a wider gulf between his court and the people than there had been
between the people and the paternal monarchy of the Restoration.
The old nobility kept away from the new court, and there was a more
distinct separation of class from class. With enmity and disgust the
landed proprietors saw the magnates of the stock-exchange usurping all
power. Legitimists and the superior bourgeois class, politicians and
artists, ceased to associate. One by one the salons of the old monarchy
were closed, and with them disappeared the gaiety and naturalness of
the refined _beau monde_. With the old form of government vanished
its accompaniments of magnificent elegance and graceful frivolity,
vanished the fine lady's lively wit and charming audacity. In the
circle of the wealthy bankers whom the King patronised and the Crown
Prince associated with before his marriage, the place of all this was
taken by English sport and club fashions, a vulgar addiction to the
pleasures of the table, and tasteless magnificence and luxury. The
King was originally a Voltairian, and in his family alliances he had
shown a leaning to Protestantism, but in his anxiety for the safety
of his throne he made a hasty change of front; he humbled himself (in
vain, as it proved) to win the favour of the clergy, and the tone
of the court became pious. The upper middle classes simultaneously
developed a half-anxious, half-affected piety, originating in fear
of the Fourth Estate. Hypocrisy, which the aristocratic reactionary
literature had fostered, now began to spread into the bourgeois class,
and free-thought was considered "bad form" in a woman. Morals became
outwardly stricter; a more English tone prevailed; but in reality men
were less moral; society was lenient to the fraud of the millionaire,
pharisaically severe to the woman whose heart had led her astray.
"The previous generation had not," as one of the historians of the
day observes, "placed under the ban of society either the priest who
forsook his church or the woman who forsook her husband, so long as
their motives were unselfish; now it was the sign of _mauvais ton_ to
desire the re-institution of divorce, not to mention the marriage of
priests." The Faubourg St. Honoré, the quarter of the financiers, set
the tone.

Little wonder that the umbrella soon became the symbol of this
monarchy, and the expression _Juste-milieu_--which the King had once
cleverly used in speaking of the policy that ought to be employed--the
nickname for everything weak and inefficient, for a power without
lustre and dignity.

If we take the decade 1825-35 as a whole, it is easy to understand how
hopeless it must have seemed from the aesthetic point of view.


[1] Expressions used by Heinrich Heine, who witnessed the scene and
instituted the parallel.




II


THE GENERATION OF 1830


It is against this grey background, this foil of Legitimist cowls and
Louis-Philippe umbrellas--in this society where the new-born power
of capital, strong as Hercules, has, even in its cradle, strangled
all the external romance of life--on this stage upon the grey walls
of which an invisible finger has written in grey letters the word
_Juste-milieu_--that a fiery, glowing, noisy literature, a literature
enamoured of scarlet and of passion, suddenly makes its appearance.
All the conditions were present in combination which were certain to
impel young, restless minds towards romantic enthusiasm, towards ardent
contempt for public opinion, towards worship of unbridled passion
and unrestrained genius. Hatred of the bourgeoisie (as in Germany a
generation earlier hatred of the Philistines) becomes the watchword
of the day. But whereas the word "Philistine" conjures up a picture
of the chimney-corner and the pipe, the word "bourgeois" at once
suggests the omnipotence of economic interests. Its essential antipathy
to utilitarianism and plutocracy turned the intellectual current of
the day, in the case of the men of talent already before the public,
and still more strongly in the case of the budding geniuses, in the
direction of antagonism to everything existing and accepted, at the
same time mightily increasing the force of the current. The religion of
art, and enthusiasm for liberty in art, suddenly took possession of all
hearts. Art was the highest, art was light, art was fire, art was all
in all; its beauty and audacity alone imparted value to life.

The young generation had heard in their childhood of the great events
of the Revolution, had known the Empire, and were the sons of heroes
or of victims. Their mothers had conceived them between two battles,
and the thunder of cannon had ushered them into the world. To the young
poets and artists of the day there were only two kinds of human beings,
the flaming and the grey. On the one side there was the art which meant
blood, scarlet, movement, audacity; on the other, a strictly regular,
timid, bourgeois, colourless art. Everything in the life of their day
seemed to them unpoetic, utilitarian, devoid of genius, grey; they
desired to show their contempt for such a day, their admiration of
genius, and their hatred of the bourgeois spirit. For now, since the
middle-class had become the influential one, this spirit had become a
power.

Seen from the point of view of our own day, the young men of those days
appear to have been younger than youth generally is--younger, fresher,
more richly gifted, more ardent and hot-blooded. And we see the youth
of France, who in the days of the Revolution had by their devotion
changed the political and social conditions of the country, and in
the days of the Empire had risked their lives on every battlefield in
France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Egypt, now devoting themselves with
the same ardour to the culture of literature and the arts. Here, too,
there were revolutions to be made, victories to win, and countries
to conquer. During the Revolution they had worshipped liberty, under
Napoleon martial glory; now they worshipped art.

For the first time in France the word art came to be regularly applied
to literature. In the eighteenth century literature had aimed at
transforming itself into philosophy, and much was then included under
this denomination to which we no longer apply the word; now it aimed at
the name and dignity of art.

The explanation of the change is, that the analytical and reasoning
tendency which distinguishes both the imaginative and reflective
works of the classical period, had in the new century slowly made way
for interest in the actually existing, in what is perceivable by the
senses. And the deeper-lying reason of this new preference was that men
now placed nature, original, unconscious, rustic, uncultivated nature,
above all the culture of civilisation. Why? Because a historically
minded age had succeeded to a rationalising one. A man no longer
coveted the title of philosopher, for it was now considered a greater
distinction to be original than to be a self-conscious thinker.
The poetical literature of the eighteenth, nay, even that of the
seventeenth century was despised, because it was purely intellectual;
because, bloodless and elegant, it seemed to have been produced by
attention to conventions and rules, not to have been born and to have
grown. For whereas the eighteenth century had held thinking and acting
to be the highest forms of activity, the children of the new age
regarded origination, natural genesis, as the highest. It was a German
idea, Herder's and Goethe's, by which men's minds were unconsciously
occupied, and which produced in them an aversion for rules and academic
principles. For how could art as unconscious, natural production be
subjected to arbitrary external rules!

An intellectual movement had begun which recalled the Renaissance. It
was as if the air which men breathed intoxicated them. In the long
period during which France had been at an intellectual standstill
her great neighbours, Germany and England, had hastened past her,
had got a long start in the work of emancipation from old, hampering
traditions. She felt this, felt it as a humiliation, and the feeling
gave a sharp impulse to the new art enthusiasm. And now the works of
foreign authors, both the new and the hitherto unknown older books,
made their way into the country and revolutionised the minds of the
young; every one read translations of Sir Walter Scott's novels, of
Byron's _Corsair_ and _Lara_, and devoured Goethe's _Werther_ and
Hoffmann's fantastic tales. All at once the votaries of the different
arts felt that they were brothers. Musicians studied the literature
both of their own country and of other nations; poets (such as Hugo,
Gautier, Mérimée, Borel) drew and painted. Poems were read in painters'
and sculptors' studios; Delacroix's and Devéria's pupils hummed Hugo's
ballads as they stood at their easels. Certain of the great foreign
authors, such as Scott and Byron, influenced poets (Hugo, Lamartine,
Musset), musicians (Berlioz, Halévy, Félicien David), and painters
(Delacroix, Delaroche, Scheffer). Artists attempt to overstep the
limits of their own in order to embrace a kindred art. Berlioz writes
Childe Harold and Faust symphonies, Félicien David a Desert symphony;
music becomes descriptive. First Delacroix and then Ary Scheffer
choose subjects from Dante, Shakespeare, and Byron; the art of the
painter at times becomes illustration of poetry. But it was the art
of painting which was most powerful in influencing the sister arts,
especially poetry, and that distinctly for good. The lover no longer,
as in the days of Racine, prayed his mistress "to crown his flame."
The public demanded naturalness of the author, and refused to accept
representations of impossibilities.

In 1824 Delacroix exhibits his _Massacre of Scios_, a picture with
a Grecian subject and a reminiscence of Byron, in 1831 _The Bishop
of Liège_, which illustrates Scott's _Quentin Durward_, in May 1831
_Liberty at the Barricades_. In February 1829, Auber's opera, _La
Muette de Portici_, makes a great sensation; Meyerbeer's _Robert le
Diable_ follows in 1831. In February 1830 Victor Hugo's _Hernani_ is
played for the first time at the Théâtre Français; in 1831 Dumas'
_Antony_ is a grand success. The authors Dumas and Hugo, Delacroix the
painter, the sculptor David d'Angers, the musical composers Berlioz
and Auber, the critics Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, Frédéric Lemaître
and Marie Dorval the scenic artists, and, corresponding to them, the
two great dæmonic musical virtuosi Chopin and Liszt--all these make
their appearance simultaneously. One and all proclaim the gospel of
nature and of passion, and around them assemble groups of young men who
apprehend and cultivate literature and art in a spirit akin to theirs.

These men did not always realise that in the eyes of posterity they
would constitute a natural group. Some of the greatest of them felt as
if they stood alone, and believed that the spirit and tendency of their
work was different from that of their contemporaries', nay, actually
antagonistic to it. Nor were they entirely wrong, for there are very
essential points of difference between them. Yet common excellences,
common prejudices, common aims, and common faults unite them and make
of them a whole. And it happened much more frequently than is generally
the case, that those whom reflection inclines us to class together
actually did feel themselves drawn to each other; many of the best
among them early joined hands and formed a league.

Seeking the connecting links we find, as it were, a chain which binds
the group together.

When, after the lapse of many years, we dryly say or write the words,
"they formed a school," we seldom take the trouble to conjure up
any adequately vivid impression of what the formation of a school
of literature and art signifies. There is a mysterious magic about
the process. Some one remarkable man, after a long unconscious or
half-conscious struggle, finally with full consciousness, frees himself
from prejudices and attains to clearness of vision; then, everything
being ready, the lightning of genius illuminates what he beholds. Such
a man gives utterance (as did Hugo in a prose preface of some score of
pages) to some thoughts which have never been thought or expressed in
the same manner before. They may be only half true, they may be vague,
but they have this remarkable quality that, in spite of more or less
indefiniteness, they affront all traditional prejudices and wound the
vanity of the day where it is most vulnerable, whilst they ring in
the ears of the young generation like a call, like a new, audacious
watchword.

What happens? Scarcely are these words spoken than there comes with
the speed and precision of an echo a thousand-tongued answer from the
wounded vanities and injured interests, an answer like the furious
baying of a hundred packs of hounds. And what more? First one man, then
another, then a third, comes to the spokesman of the new tendency,
each with his own standpoint, each with his revolt, his ambition,
his need, his hope, his resolve. They show him that the words he has
spoken are incarnated in them. Some communicate directly with him,
some with each other in his spirit and his name. Men who but lately
were as unknown to each other as they still are to the public, who
have been spiritually languishing, each in his separate seclusion,
now meet and marvel to find that they understand each other, that
they speak the same language, a language unknown to the rest of their
contemporaries. They are young, yet all are already in possession of
what to them constitutes life; the one has his dearly-bought joys, the
other his bracing sufferings; and from these life-elements each has
extracted his own portion of enthusiasm. Their meeting is electric;
they exchange ideas with youthful haste, impart to each other their
various sympathies and antipathies, enthusiasms and detestations; and
all these well-springs of feeling flow together like the streams that
form a river.

But the most beautiful feature in this crystallisation of artistic
spirits into a school is the reverence, the awe which, in spite of the
unanimity of their opinions, and in spite of their good comradeship,
each feels for the other. Outsiders are apt to confuse this with what
is satirically called "mutual admiration." But nothing is in reality
more unlike the interested homage paid in periods of decadence than the
naïve admiration of each other's talents exhibited by the men who are
unconsciously forming a school. Their hearts are too young, too pure,
not to admire in real earnest. One young productive mind regards the
other as something marvellous, which holds surprises in store. To the
one the workshop of the other's mind is like a sealed book; he cannot
guess what will next appear from it, has no idea what pleasures his
comrade has in store for him. They honour in one another something
which they value higher than the personality, than the usually as yet
undeveloped character, namely, the talent by virtue of which they are
all related to the deity they worship--art.

Seldom, however, in the world's history has the mutual admiration
accompanying an artistic awakening been carried to such a pitch as
it was by the generation of 1830. It became positive idolatry. All
the literary productions of the period show that the youth of the
day were intoxicated with the feeling of friendship and brotherhood.
Hugo's poems to Lamartine, Louis Boulanger, Sainte-Beuve, and David
d'Angers; Gautier's to Hugo, Jehan du Seigneur, and Petrus Borel; De
Musset's to Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, and Nodier; and, very specially,
Sainte-Beuve's to all the standard-bearers of the school; Madame de
Girardin's articles; Balzac's dedications; George Sand's _Lettres d'un
Voyageur_--all these testify to a sincere, ardent admiration, which
entirely precluded the proverbial jealousy of authors.

They did not only praise one another, they communicated ideas to each
other and helped each other. Now it is an inspiring influence, now an
artistic criticism, now some actual service rendered, which knits the
bond of friendship between two authors of this period. Émile Deschamps
inspires Victor Hugo to borrow themes from the old Spanish Romancero;
Gautier writes the beautiful tulip sonnet in Balzac's _Un grand Homme
de Province a Paris_, and helps him to dramatise certain of his plots;
Sainte-Beuve reads George Sand's manuscripts and aids her with his
criticism; George Sand and De Musset influence one another powerfully
at a certain stage of their career; Madame de Girardin, Méry, Sandeau,
and Gautier collaborate in a novel written in letters; Mérimée is the
bond of union between the realists Beyle and Vitet and the romanticists.

The short period during which all meet and combine is the blossoming
time of literature. Before many years pass Nodier is in his grave, Hugo
is living in exile in Jersey, Alexandre Dumas is turning literature
into a trade, Sainte-Beuve and Gautier are to be found in Princess
Mathilde's circle, Mérimée is presiding over the Empress Eugenie's
courts of love, De Musset sits solitary over his absinthe, and George
Sand has retired to Nohant.

One and all in their riper years made new connections, connections
which aided their development; but their boldest and freshest, if not
always their most refined and beautiful work was done at the time when
they were holding their first meetings in Charles Nodier's quarters
at the Arsenal, or in the apartments in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
where Hugo and his pretty young wife kept house on their 2000 francs
a year, or in Petrus Borel's garret, where the host's Hernani cloak
decorated the wall in company with a sketch by Devéria and a copy of
a Giorgione, and where, owing to lack of chairs, at least half of the
company had to stand.

These young Romanticists felt like brothers, like fellow-conspirators;
they felt that they were the sharers in a sweet and invigorating
secret; and this gave to the works of the school a flavour, an aroma
like that of the noble wines of a year when the vintage has been more
than ordinarily good. Ah! that bouquet of 1830! There is no other in
the century that can be compared with it.

In all the arts a break with tradition was aimed at and demanded. The
inward fire was to glow through and dissolve the old musical forms,
to devour lines and contours and transform painting into colour
symphonies, to rejuvenate literature. In all the arts colour, passion,
and style were aimed at and demanded--colour with such urgency that the
most gifted painter of the period, Delacroix, neglected drawing for
it; passion with such ardour that both lyric poetry and the drama were
in danger of degenerating into hysteric foolishness; style with such
artistic enthusiasm that some of the younger men, such as those two
opposite poles, Mérimée and Gautier, neglected the human groundwork of
their art and became devotees of style pure and simple.

The original, the unconscious, the popular was sought after and
demanded. "We have been rhetoricians," men cried; "we have never
understood the simple and the illogical--the savage, the people, the
child, woman, the poet!"

Hitherto the people had only served as a background in literature--in
Victor Hugo's dramas the passionate plebeian, the avenger and requiter,
appeared on the scene as the hero. Hitherto the savage had talked like
a Frenchman of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Voltaire)--Mérimée
in _Colomba_ and _Carmen_ depicted savage emotions in all their
wildness and freshness. Racine's child (in _Athalie_) had spoken like
a miniature edition of a grown-up man--Nodier with a childlike heart
put simple, innocent words into his children's mouths. In the French
literature of an earlier period, woman had generally acted with full
consciousness, arriving at conclusions like a man; see the works of
Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. Corneille paid homage to virtue,
Crébillon the younger to frivolity and vice, but both the virtue and
the vice were conscious and acquired. George Sand, on the contrary,
depicted the innate nobility and natural goodness of a noble woman's
heart. Madame de Staël in her _Corinne_ had represented the gifted
woman as a being of great and commanding talent--George Sand, in
_Lélia_, represented her as a great sibyl. In olden days the poet had
been a courtier, like Racine and Molière, or a man of the world, like
Voltaire and Beaumarchais, or simply an ordinary decent citizen, like
Lafontaine. Now he became the neglected step-child of society, the
high-priest of humanity, often poor and despised, but with the starry
brow and the tongue of fire. Hugo hymned him as the shepherd of the
people, Alfred de Vigny represented him in _Stello_ and _Chatterton_
as the sublime child who prefers dying of hunger to degrading his muse
by common work, and dies blessing his fellow-men, who acknowledge his
worth when it is too late.




III


ROMANTICISM


At first Romanticism was, in its essence, merely a spirited defence
of localisation in literature. The Romanticists admired and glorified
the Middle Ages, which the culture of the eighteenth century had
anathematised, and the poets of the sixteenth century--Ronsard, Du
Bellay, &c.--who had been supplanted by the classic authors of the
age of Louis XIV. They attacked pseudo-classicism, the tiresome and
monotonous Frenchifying and modernising of all ages and nationalities.
They took as their watchword "local colouring." By local colouring they
meant all the characteristics of foreign nations, of far-off days, of
unfamiliar climes, to which as yet justice had not been done in French
literature. They felt that their predecessors had been led astray by
the premise that every human being was simply a human being, and,
moreover, more or less of a Frenchman. In reality, there was not such
a thing as universal humanity; there were separate races, peoples,
tribes, and clans. Still less was the Frenchman the typical human
being. It was imperative, if they were to understand and represent
human life, that they should free themselves from themselves. This idea
gave the impulse to the art and criticism of nineteenth-century France.

Authors now made it their endeavour to train their readers to see
things from this new point of view. They no longer wrote to please
the public--and it is this fact which gives value to the books of the
period. Therefore a critic who, like myself, is engaged in tracing
the main currents of literature, must dwell upon many a seldom read
and still more rarely bought Romantic work, and do little more than
mention such a talented dramatist as Scribe, who for a whole generation
dominated the stage in every country in Europe.

For if an author does not penetrate to the essential in the human
soul, to its deepest depth; if he has not dared, or has not been
able to write his book regardless of consequences; if he has not
ventured to represent his ideas in statuesque nakedness, has not
imaged human nature as it showed itself to him, improving nothing and
modifying nothing, but has taken counsel with his public, been guided
by its prejudices, its ignorance, its untruthfulness, its vulgar
or sentimental taste--he may have been, probably has been, highly
distinguished by his contemporaries, he may have won laurels and wealth
by his talents; for me he does not exist, to what I call literature
his work is valueless. All the offspring of the author's _mariage de
convenance_ with that doubtful character, public opinion, all those
literary children which their author begets, giving a side-thought to
the taste and morality of his public, are defunct a generation later.
There was no real life and heat in them, nothing but timorous regard
for a public which is now dead; they were nothing but the supply of
a demand which has long ceased to exist. But every work in which an
independent writer has, without any side-thought, uttered what he felt
and described what he saw, is, and will continue to be, no matter how
few editions of it may be printed, a valuable document.

There is only a seeming contradiction between this condemnation of the
literary work produced to please the public, and the doctrine of the
sound natural influence of society on the author. It is certain that
the author cannot separate himself from his age. But the current of the
age is not an undivided current; there is an upper and an under one. To
let one's self drive with or be driven by the upper one is weakness,
and ends in destruction. In other words, every age has its dominant and
favourite ideas and forms, which are simply the results of the life of
former ages, that were arrived at long ago and have slowly petrified;
but besides these it owns another whole class of quite different ideas,
which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air, and are apprehended
by the greatest men of the age as the results which must now be arrived
at. These last are the ideas which form the unifying element of the new
endeavour.

In 1827 an English theatrical company visited Paris, and for the first
time Frenchmen saw Shakespeare's masterpieces, _King Lear, Macbeth,
Othello_, and _Hamlet_, admirably played. It was under the influence of
these performances that Victor Hugo wrote that preface to _Cromwell_
which is regarded as the programme of the new literature.

The literary war of liberation began with an assault upon French
classical tragedy, the weakest and most exposed point in literary
tradition. Hugo knew very little about the attacks upon its authority
which had been made in other countries; and to those who have read
the utterances delivered on the same subject many years previously
by Lessing, Wilhelm Schlegel, and the English Romantic writers,
his manifesto offers little that is new. But it was, of course, an
important step to carry the war into France itself. The vigorous
arguments expended in proving the unnaturalness of compressing the
action of every drama into twenty-four hours and a single pillared
hall, seem to the reader of to-day almost as uninteresting as the
absurdities attacked; but he must remember that Boileau's authority was
then still supreme, still unshaken in France.

Of interest as regards Hugo's own development are the passages in which
he expounds his private theory of poetry; although he is so much of the
poet and so little of the thinker that his arguments are, as a rule,
sadly inconclusive.

What he attacks is the idealistic, pseudo-classic tendency of tragedy.
This he does, oddly enough, in the name of Christianity, and by means
of a great historical survey, made on as false a system as any of those
of his contemporary, Cousin, of whom it reminds us. He distinguishes
three great periods--the primitive, when poetry is lyric; the period
of ancient civilisation, when it is epic; and the age of Christianity,
which is the period of the drama. The peculiar characteristic of the
poetry of the Christian, which he treats as synonymous with the modern,
period is that it (having learned from religion that man consists of
two elements, an animal and a spiritual, body and soul) makes place in
the same work for the two elements which in literature have hitherto
excluded each other, the sublime and the grotesque. It is no longer
imperative that tragedy should be solemn throughout; it may venture to
develop into drama.

If we pay less heed to what Hugo says than to what he really intends
to say, we find that the sum and substance of this tolerably foolish
argument is a naturalistic protest against pure beauty as the proper
or highest subject of art. His idea is: We will renounce convention;
we will not feel ourselves in duty bound to exclude everything from
serious poetry which directly reminds us of the material world. We
see this from the examples he gives. The judge is to be allowed to
say: "Sentenced to death. And now let us dine." Queen Elizabeth
is to be allowed to swear and speak Latin; Cromwell to say: "I
have the Parliament in my bag and the King in my pocket." Cæsar in
his triumphal car may be afraid of its upsetting. And Hugo calls
Napoleon's exclamation: "There is only one step from the sublime to the
ridiculous," the cry of anguish which is the summary of both drama and
life.

Exaggerated as Hugo's language may be, his meaning is plain. What he
asserts is the aesthetic value of the ugly. He maintains that the
beautiful only comprehends form as absolute symmetry, form in its
simplest relations and most intimate harmony with our being, whereas
the ugly is a detail in a much greater, harmonious whole which we are
unable fully to discern. He declares that the ugly has a thousand
types, whereas the beautiful is poor, and has but one; which last
theory we may be excused for calling one of the most absurd ever
advanced by a poet. It was parodied by his opponents in the axiom: _Le
Laid c'est le Beau_ ("Foul is fair," as the witches sing in _Macbeth_),
and combated with the objections which the Romanticists themselves
offered in the Seventies to extreme realism.

Was not this French Romanticism, then, after all simply a thinly-veiled
naturalism? What did Victor Hugo demand in the name of the young
generation but nature--faithful reproduction, local and historical
colour? Is not George Sand Rousseau's daughter? the preacher of a
gospel of nature? And Beyle and Mérimée, are they not half-brutal,
half-refined worshippers of nature? Is not Balzac nowadays actually
honoured as the founder of a naturalistic school?

The answer is simple. Hugo's watchword was, undoubtedly, nature and
truth, but it was at the same time, and first and foremost, contrast,
picturesque contrast, antithesis founded upon the medieval belief
in the confliction between body and soul; that is, a dualistic
Romanticism. "The salamander heightens the charm of the water-nymph,
the gnome lends beauty to the sylph," he says. He desired truth to
nature, but he believed it was to be arrived at by making nature's
extremes meet, by placing opposites in juxtaposition--Beauty and the
Beast, Esmeralda and Quasimodo, the courtesan's past and the purest
love in Marion Delorme, bloodthirstiness and maternal tenderness in
Lucrèce Borgia.

In his early youth nature was to Victor Hugo a great Ariel-Caliban,
the product of a superhuman ideality and an unnatural bestiality, the
result obtained by the combination of two supernatural ingredients.
But this conception of nature, which corresponded exactly with that
of Germanic Romanticism, at times made way in Hugo's case for the
magnificent pantheism which found typical expression in that profound
and beautiful poem, "Le Satyre," in _La Légende des Siècles_.

The combination of love of nature with predilection for the unnatural,
is to be traced far on into the new literature. All its authors chant
the praises of nature. But what they detest and shun under the name
of the prosaic and the commonplace is very often the simple nature
that lies nearest them. Romantic nature alone is dear to them. George
Sand escapes from the world of dreary, hard realities into that of
beautiful dreams, Théophile Gautier into the world of art. George Sand
in _Lelia_, Balzac in _Père Goriot_, make the ideal or the omnipotent
galley-slave the judge of society; Balzac actually writes fantastic
legends in Hoffmann's style. And they are even more inclined to shun
the plain and simple in their language than in their characters. They
soon evolved a pompous diction, which far outrivalled that of the
classic periods. These were the golden days of the glowing, dazzling
adjective. Picturesque, enthusiastic words, with which the narrative
was inlaid as with so many transparent jewels, opened up endless
vistas. In so far, therefore, it may be said that both the style and
the predilections of these young authors were purely romantic. But only
in so far.

In Victor Hugo, the founder of the school, the dual love of the natural
and the unnatural was the result of a personal peculiarity. His eye
naturally sought and found contrasts; his mind had an innate tendency
towards antithesis. In _Inez de Castro_, the melodrama of his earliest
youth, and later in _Marie Tudor_, we have the throne on one side of
the stage, the scaffold on the other, the monarch and the executioner
face to face. About the time when the preface to _Cromwell_ was
written, Hugo was, his wife tells us, in the habit of walking on the
Boulevard Montparnasse. "There, just opposite the Cemetery, tight-rope
dancers and jugglers had erected their booths. This contrast of shows
and funerals confirmed him in his idea of a drama in which extremes
meet; and it was there that the third act of _Marion Delorme_ occurred
to him, the act in which the tragic, fruitless attempt of the Marquis
de Nangis to save his brother from the scaffold forms the counterpart
to the antics of the jester." In the preface to _Cromwell_, when he is
asserting the necessity of representing an action in the place where
it actually happened, he writes: "Could the poet dare to have Rizzio
murdered anywhere but in Mary Stuart's chamber?... or to behead
Charles I. or Louis XVI. anywhere but on these sorrowful spots within
sight of Whitehall and the Tuileries, which seem as if they had been
chosen in order that the scaffold might contrast with the palace?" In
spite of all his asseverations this poet does not really see natural
environments with an understanding eye. He does not see them act as
formative influences upon the human soul; he employs them as great
symbols of the tremendous reverses of fate; he arranges them like the
stage scenery of a melodrama.

If we look deeper, what reveals itself to us in this? A characteristic
which is to a certain extent distinctive of many of the French
Romanticists, and which may be most briefly expressed thus: French
Romanticism, in spite of all the elements it has in common with general
European Romanticism, is in many ways a classic phenomenon, a product
of classic French rhetoric.

Words undergo strange vicissitudes in this world of ours. When the
word _romantic_ was introduced into Germany it signified almost the
same as Romanesque; it meant Romanesque flourishes and conceits,
sonnets and canzonets; the Romanticists were enthusiastic admirers of
the Roman Catholic Church and of the great Romanesque poet Calderon,
whose works they discovered and translated and lauded. When, a century
later, Romanticism reached France, the same word meant exactly the
opposite thing--it meant the German-English tendency as opposed to
the Greco-Latin Romanesque tendency; it meant Teutonic. The simple
explanation of this is, that whatever is strange and foreign produces
a romantic impression. The art and literature of a people of a
homogeneous civilisation and culture, like the ancient Greeks, are
classic; but when one civilised, cultured nation discovers another
civilisation and culture which seem to it strange and wonderful, it
is at once impressed by it as romantic, is affected by it as by a
landscape seen through coloured glass. The Romanticists of France
despised their own national excellences, the perspicuity and rational
transparency of their own literature, and extolled Shakespeare and
Goethe because these poets did not, like Racine and, to a certain
extent, Corneille, break up human life into its separate elements, did
not represent isolated emotions and passions which offered dramatic
contrasts, but, without any rhetorical recurrence to the fundamental
elements, flung real human life on the stage in all its complex
cohesion. The Frenchmen determined to follow this great example.

But what was the result? Under their treatment, in the hands of
Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, real life was
dissolved and disintegrated anew. In the hands of Victor Hugo and
Alexandre Dumas its extremes formed symmetrical contrasts, exactly
as in classic tragedy. Order, moderation, aristocratic refinement, a
transparent, severely simple style distinguished Nodier, Beyle, and
Mérimée, exactly as they had done the classic authors of the eighteenth
century. The light, free, airy fancy which intermingles all the most
varied imaginations of the poetic mind, which unites near and far,
to-day and hoary antiquity, the real and the impossible, in one and
the same work, which combines the divine and the human, popular legend
and profound allegory, making of them one great symbolic whole--this
real romantic gift was not theirs. They never saw the dance of the
elves, nor heard the thin, clear tones of their music floating across
the meadows. Although Celts by birth, these men were Latins; they felt
and wrote as Latins; and the word Latin is equivalent to classic. If
we understand by Romanticism what is generally understood, that is, an
overwhelming of the style by the subject-matter, contents uncontrolled
by any laws of form, such as we have in the writings of Jean Paul and
Tieck, and even in Shakespeare and Goethe (_A Midsummer Night's Dream_
and the second part of _Faust_), then all the French Romanticists
are classic writers--Mérimée, George Sand, Gautier, and even Victor
Hugo himself. Hugo's romantic drama is as disintegrative, regular in
construction, perspicuous, and eloquent as a tragedy of Corneille.

At the mention of this name my thoughts turn involuntarily and
naturally from the characteristics common to the periods to the common
characteristics of race. In Hugo, Corneille's apparent antagonist,
Corneille lives again.

There are many veins in the French character. There is a vein of
scepticism, jest, sarcasm--the line Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière,
Mathurin Régnier, Pierre Bayle, &c.; there is the true, thoroughbred
Gallic vein--Rabelais, Diderot, Balzac; and amongst the rest there
is the heroic vein, the vein of enthusiasm. It is this last which
pulsates so strongly in Corneille; and in Victor Hugo the blood begins
to course in it again. If we compare Hugo in his stateliness with
other poets, we shall find that there is probably not one in the whole
world whom he resembles so much as he does old Corneille. There is
something Spanish about the French eloquence of both, and Spain had
certainly made its impression on them both; in Corneille's case a
literary impression, in Hugo's a personal, received in his childhood.
The drama to which Corneille owes his fame is the _Cid_, in which a
Spanish theme is treated in a Spanish spirit, in imitation of Spanish
models. The drama which makes Hugo famous is _Hernani_, Spanish in its
subject, and permeated by the spirit of Calderon's code of honour. But
in both these dramas it is heroism pure and simple which is inculcated
and exhibited. They are schools for heroes. It is not human nature in
its manysidedness, but heroic human nature which Corneille represents;
in Victor Hugo this same heroic human nature is merely symmetrically
complemented by wildly passionate human nature.

Let us glance at this _Hernani_, round which the great conflict between
the party of the future and the party of the past raged. The story of
the first performance has often been told. Adherents of the old school
listened at the doors during the rehearsals, and picked up single
lines, which they caricatured; and a parody of the play was acted
before the play itself. The author had a hard struggle with the censor;
he had to fight for his play almost line by line. There was a long
correspondence on the subject of the one line: "C'était d'un imprudent,
seigneur roi de Castille, et d'un lâche." And the actors and actresses
regarded the work with equal disfavour; only one of the company applied
himself with goodwill to the study of his part. Hugo was determined to
dispense with the paid claque, but he arranged to have three hundred
places at his disposal for the first three nights. The most faithful of
his followers, young men who, according to their own confession, spent
their nights in writing "Vive Victor Hugo!" all over the arcade of the
Rue de Rivoli, with no other aim than to annoy the respectable citizen,
now enlisted a corps of young painters, architects, poets, sculptors,
musicians, and printers, to whom Hugo gave the watchword _Hierro_, and
who were prepared to present an iron front to the foe. The moment the
curtain rose the storm burst, and every time the play was performed
there was such an uproar in the theatre that it was with the greatest
difficulty it could be acted to the end. A hundred evenings in
succession was _Hernani_ hissed, and a hundred evenings in succession
was it received with storms of applause by young enthusiasts, who for
their master's sake did not weary of listening to the same speeches
evening after evening and defending them line by line against the hate,
rage, envy, and superior power of his opponents. The fact may seem
unimportant, yet it is worthy of observation, that France is the only
country in which such _esprit de corps_, without the existence of any
tangible _corps_, such unselfish devotion to the cause and honour of
another, has ever been witnessed.

The enemy took boxes and left them unoccupied, in order that the
newspapers might report an empty house; they turned their backs to the
stage; they made disgusted grimaces, as if the play were more than
they could stand; they affected to be absorbed in the newspapers;
they slammed the box doors, or laughed loud and scornfully, or hooted
and hissed and whistled; so that a resolute defence was absolutely
necessary.

There is not an emotion in _Hernani_ which is not strained to its
extremest pitch. The hero is a noble-minded man of genius, the genius
and noble-mindedness being of the type which exists in the imagination
of a young man of twenty. His genius impels him to lead the life of a
brigand chieftain, and out of pure high-mindedness and contempt for
ordinary prudence he does the most foolish things--betrays himself,
lets his mortal enemy escape, gives himself up again and again. As
chieftain he exercises unbounded power over other men, but it seems to
be his courage alone which gives him this, for all his actions are as
unreasoning as a child's. Nevertheless there is life and reality in the
play.

This noble and disinterested highwayman, who lives at war with society
and is the leader of a band of faithful enthusiasts, reminds us of the
poet himself, the literary outlaw, who filled pit and gallery with a
band of young men quite as remarkable in appearance and attire as his
brigand troop. Madame Hugo describes the contingent of spectators who
appeared on the first evening in answer to her husband's invitation as
"a troop of wild, extraordinary creatures, with beards and long hair,
dressed in every fashion except that of the day--in woollen jerseys and
Spanish cloaks, Robespierre waistcoats and Henry III. caps--displaying
themselves in broad daylight at the doors of the theatre with the
clothing of all ages and countries on their backs." Their frantic
devotion to Hugo was as great as that of Hernani's band of robbers
for its captain. They knew that Hugo had received an anonymous letter
in which he was threatened with assassination "if he did not withdraw
his filthy play," and, improbable as it was that the threat would
be literally fulfilled, two of them accompanied him to and from the
theatre every evening, though he and they lived in the farthest apart
quarters of Paris.

Amongst Hugo's papers of this date there is a quaint note from the
painter Charlet, which expresses the feelings of these youths.

      "Four of my Janissaries offer me their strong arms. I send them
      to prostrate themselves at your feet, begging for four places
      for this evening, if it is not too late. I answer for my men;
      they are fellows who would gladly cut off heads for the sake of
      the wigs. I encourage them in this noble spirit, and do not let
      them go without my fatherly blessing. They kneel. I stretch out
      my hands and say: God protect you, young men! The cause is a
      good one; do your duty! They rise and I add: Now, my children,
      take good care of Victor Hugo. God is good, but He has so much
      to do that our friend must in the first instance rely upon us.
      Go, and do not put him you serve to shame.--Yours with life and
      soul,

                                                       "CHARLET."

Supported by such devoted enthusiasts as these in its struggle with
fanatic opposition, romantic art stormed the enemy's first redoubt and
won its first important victory.

What these young men heard from the stage was the expression of
their own defiance and thirst for independence, of their courage and
devotion, their ideal and erotic longings, only pitched in a still
higher key; and their hearts melted within them.

The time was February 1830, five months before the Revolution of July.
The dullest materialism made life colourless. France was as regularly
ordered as the avenues of the gardens of Versailles; it was ruled by
old men, who patronised only such young ones as had written Latin
verse to perfection at school, and had since qualified themselves for
office by absolute correctness of behaviour. There they sat, these
correct, faultlessly-attired youths, with their neckcloths and stiff
standing collars. Contrast with them the youths in the pit, one with
locks reaching to his waist and a scarlet satin doublet, another with a
Rubens hat and bare hands. These latter hated the powerful Philistine
bourgeoisie as Hernani hated the tyranny of Charles V. They gloried
in their position; they, too, were freebooters, poor, proud--one a
cherisher of Republican dreams, most of them worshippers of art. There
they stood, many of them geniuses--Balzac, Berlioz, Théophile Gautier,
Gérard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Préault--taking the measure of their
opponents of the same generation. They felt that they themselves were
at least not place-seekers, not tuft-hunters, beggars, and parasites
like those others; they were the men who a few months later made the
Revolution of July, and who in the course of a few years gave France a
literature and art of the first rank.

We know how they regarded Hernani. What did they see in the second
great character, King Charles of Spain? He repels at first. We cannot
place much faith in this cold, cautious monarch's ardent love for Donna
Sol; and he, moreover, employs violent and dishonourable means to get
her into his power. But the poet soon raises him to a higher level, and
makes us feel the great ambition which fills his soul.

It was Charles's tremendous monologue at the tomb of Charlemagne which
decided the fate of the drama that evening. And this much criticised
and ridiculed monologue is in reality the work of a young master. It is
easy to perceive, even if we did not know, how untrue it is to history,
how impossible it is that Charles V. should have thought thus; but we
are fascinated by the faithfulness with which the political ideas and
dreams of 1830 are mirrored, and by the marvellous political insight
displayed. This is the historical insight which sometimes astonishes
us in poets; Schiller showed it at the age of 21, in _Fiesco_. Listen
to Don Carlos's description of Europe: A building with two human
beings on its pinnacles, two elected chiefs, to whom every hereditary
monarch must bow--the Emperor and the Pope. Almost all the states have
hereditary rulers, and are, in so far, in the power of chance; but the
people are at times able to elect their Pope or their Emperor; chance
corrects chance, and the balance is restored. The Electors in their
cloth of gold, the Cardinals in their scarlet, are the instruments by
means of whom God chooses.


    "Qu'une idée, au besoin des temps, un jour éclose;
    Elle grandît, va, court, se mêle à toute chose,
    Se fait homme, saisit les cœurs, creuse un sillon;
    Maint roi la foule aux pieds ou lui met un baîllon;
    Mais qu'elle entre un matin à la diète, au conclave,
    Et tous les rois soudain verront l'idée esclave
    Sur leurs têtes de rois que ses pieds courberont
    Surgir, le globe en main ou la tiare au front."

The poet was certainly not thinking of Charles V. when he wrote this,
but of an Emperor much nearer his own day, the Emperor of whom he had
just written in the _Ode à la Colonne de la Place Vendôme_, that his
spurs outweighed Charlemagne's sandals. It must not be forgotten that
men's enthusiasm for Napoleon in those days by no means implied that
they were Bonapartists; it only signified that they belonged to the
party of progress. The Napoleon they worshipped was not the tyrant of
France, but the humiliator of kings and of hereditary authority. The
Emperor, as compared with the King, was regarded as the personified
people; therefore the young generation was deeply moved when Charles
in his monologue exclaims: "Rois! regardez en bas!... Ah! le
peuple!--Océan! Vague qui broie un trône! Miroir où rarement un roi se
voit en beau!"

They are, thus, revolutionary and perfectly modern reminiscences
and comparisons which occur in rapid succession to Charles V. At
the grave of Charlemagne he matures into the popular Emperor who
has been so often dreamed of in modern times, and his passionate
ambition is purified by his intense desire to solve gigantic problems
and accomplish prodigious tasks. The man who was, to begin with, so
obnoxious to the youthful part of the audience, whose brutal desire
made him so inferior to his noble-minded rival Hernani and the proud
lady they both love, ends, when he is Emperor, by renouncing his claims
and showing mercy--and suddenly the two happy lovers seem small and
insignificant beside him.

With his hand on his heart he says softly to himself:

          "Éteins-toi, cœur jeune et plein de flamme!
    Laisse régner l'esprit que toujours tu troublas.
    Tes amours désormais, tes maîtresses, hélas!
    C'est l'Allemagne, c'est la Flandre, c'est l'Espagne!"

And with his eye on the imperial banner he adds:

    "L'empereur est pareil à l'aigle, sa compagne.
     A la place du cœur, il n'a qu'un ecusson!"

Such words as these produced a powerful effect on the ambitious young
men who were the real audience of the play. The drama, the tragedy, of
ambition moved them as deeply as the drama of independence. They knew
that great public aims are attained, great tasks accomplished only by
manly resolution nourished upon the intensest emotions, longings, and
joys of the heart, which have been offered as a burnt-offering on the
altar of the aim--therefore they understood Carlos.

Nevertheless the fifth act, with the duet between the lovers, is in its
purely lyric excellence the gem of the play. Here was love as those
young men felt it and desired to have it represented. This dialogue
on the threshold of the bridal chamber which the lovers are never to
enter; this blending of a happiness so great and intense that, as
Hernani says, it demands hearts of bronze on which to engrave itself,
with all the horrors of annihilation; this sensual feeling, which is
chaste and harmonious in her, pure and ardent in him, blissful in both;
Donna Sol's supra-mundane enthusiasm; Hernani's longing to forget the
past in the present and its peace--all this was Romanticism of the kind
the youth of the day demanded and greeted with thunders of applause.

As a drama _Hernani_ is extremely imperfect; it is a lyrical,
rhetorical work, containing much that is extravagant. But it has
the one, all-important merit, namely, that in it an independent and
remarkable human soul has expressed itself unrestrainedly. From such a
work it is possible to learn much of its author's mental idiosyncrasy.
He is there with his genius, his limitations, his character, his whole
past--with his conceptions of liberty and authority, of honour and
nobility, of love and of death.

And the work presents to us not only Victor Hugo and a bit of the Spain
of 1519, but the young generation of its own day and a piece of the
France of 1830. _Hernani_ is the essence of the spirit which inspired
the youth of France at the time of the Revolution of July; it is an
image of France which, seen in a romantic light, expands into an image
of the world.

But when, instead of confining our attention to a single work, we
proceed, as now, to study a whole literature, hosts of pictures of
moods and thoughts, of portraits, and of images of the world, pass
before us. We shall detain them to compare them with one another and
see in what they agree, by this means attaining to a certainty of
what the fundamental characteristic of the age is; then we shall let
them pass before us in historical succession, and try, by carefully
observing in what they differ from one another, to discover the law
which produces these differences; we shall watch, as it were, the
flight of the arrows which indicate the direction of the spiritual
currents.





IV


CHARLES NODIER


From the year 1824 onwards Hugo, Dumas, Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, De
Musset, and De Vigny met almost every Sunday evening at the house of a
friend who that year took up his residence in the outskirts of Paris,
near the Arsenal, in a modest dwelling which went by the name of the
Little Tuileries. Their host was a man who in point of age belonged to
the previous generation (he was born in 1780), but who in his mental
attitude had anticipated the nascent literature, which he consequently
at once and without hesitation took under his protection. His name was
Charles Nodier.

Nodier's life had been one of strange vicissitudes; he had been an
_emigré_ in the Jura, a newspaper editor in Illyria, and now he was a
librarian in Paris.[1] His most remarkable characteristic as an author
is that he is always from ten to twenty years in advance of every
literary movement. His novel _Jean Sbogar_, the story of a species of
Illyrian Karl Moor, which he planned in Illyria in 1812 and published
in 1818, although improbable and uninteresting as a tale, is remarkable
from the fact that its author, long before the days of Proudhon and
modern communism, has put some of the most striking truths and untruths
of the communistic faith into the mouth of his hero. Jean Sbogar
writes:--

"The poor man's theft from the rich man would, if we were to go back to
the origin of social conditions, prove to be merely the just return of
a piece of silver or of bread from the hands of the thief to the hands
of the man from whom it was stolen."

"Show me a power which dares to assume the name of law, and I shall
show you theft assuming the name of property."

"What is that law which calls itself constitution and bears on its brow
the name and seal of equality? Is it the agrarian law? No, it is the
contract of sale, drawn up by intriguers and partisans who have desired
to enrich themselves, which delivers a people into the hands of the
rich."

"Liberty is not such a very rare treasure; it is to be found in the
hand of the strong and the purse of the rich. You are master over my
money. I am master of your life. Give me the money and you may keep
your life."

Jean Sbogar is, we observe, not a common but a philosophic highwayman.
The most natural thing about him is that he wears gold earrings, and
this realistic trait Madame Nodier had almost succeeded in eliminating.
Nodier allowed himself to be, as a rule, guided by his wife's taste
and wishes. But when he once in a way felt inclined to rebel, and, to
excuse himself, pled his submission on all other occasions, Madame
Nodier always said: "Don't forget that you refused to sacrifice Jean
Sbogar's earrings to me." This is declared to have been the one and
only literary disagreement which ever occurred between the couple.

Men had forgotten the existence of such a book as _Jean Sbogar_, when
Napoleon's memoirs came out and informed them that he had had it with
him at St. Helena, and had read it with interest. The little novel
belongs to Nodier's transition period. It was written before he had
developed his characteristic individuality. This he did about the
time of the formation of the Romantic School proper. He stood then,
so to speak, at the open door of literature, and bade that school
welcome. His review of Victor Hugo's boyish romance, _Han d'Islande_,
is a little masterpiece of criticism, sympathetic and acute. It was
the beginning of the warm friendship between the two authors. The
appreciation of Hugo is so marvellously correct that in reading it
to-day one can hardly believe that its writer was unacquainted with all
the master's later works. It required no small amount of cleverness to
foresee them in _Han d'Islande_.

The stories which Nodier now began to write possess a charm and
attraction unique in French literature. They are distinguished by
a mimosa-like delicacy of feeling. They treat chiefly of the first
stirring of passion in the hearts of youths and maidens; the fresh
dew of the morning of life is upon them; they remind us of the woods
in spring. It is a well-known fact that there is some difficulty in
finding French books of any literary value which are fit for young
girls' reading; but such tales as Nodier's _Thérèse Aubert_, or the
collection of stories entitled _Souvenirs de Jeunesse_, meet both
requirements. The only risk run would be the risk of imbuing the
young readers with fanciful platonic ideas; for these tales are as
sentimental as they are chaste; the love which they describe may be a
friendship with little of the sexual element in it, nevertheless it
completely engrosses the little human being. It owes its charm to the
fact that as yet no experience has made these minds suspicious and
that no false or true pride prevents these hearts from revealing their
emotions. As all the tales are founded on reality, on memories of their
author's youth, the terrors of the Revolution form the dark background
of them all, and they all end with a parting or the death of the loved
one.

A childlike delicacy of feeling is the fundamental characteristic of
Nodier's character. To the end of his days he remained a big, unworldly
child, with a girlish shrinking not only from the impure, but even from
the grown-up standpoint.

Above this groundwork of naïve freshness of feeling there rises, as
second story, a wildly exuberant imagination. Nodier possessed such a
gift of extravagant invention that one can hardly help believing that
he must have been subject to visions and hallucinations; he had the
dangerous quality peculiar to a certain type of poetic temperament,
that of scarcely being able to speak the truth. No one, not even
he himself, ever knew for a certainty whether what he was relating
was truth or fiction. Jest is the mean between the two. Nodier was
considered one of the most entertaining of Frenchmen, and he was not
the least offended when he was told by his friends that they did not
believe a word of what he was telling them.

On a tour which he and Hugo, accompanied by their wives, made together
in the south of France, they arrived at an inn in the little town
of Essonne, where they were to breakfast. It was in this inn that
Lesurques had been arrested, a man who was executed in 1796 for a
murder of which he was afterwards proved to have been innocent.
Nodier, who had known him, or at any rate said he had, spoke of him
with an emotion that brought tears into the eyes of the two ladies,
and disturbed the cheerfulness of the repast. Noticing Madame Hugo's
wet eyes, Nodier promptly began: "You know, Madame, that a man is not
invariably certain of being the father of his child, but have you ever
heard of a woman not knowing if she is her child's mother?" "Where did
you hear of such a thing?" asked Madame Hugo. "In the billiard-room
next door," was the reply. Pressed for an explanation, Nodier related
with much gusto how, two years previously, a coachful of wet-nurses,
coming from Paris with children who were to be reared in the country,
stopped at this very inn. That they might breakfast in peace, the
nurses deposited their charges for the time on the billiard-table. But
whilst the women were in the _salle-à-manger_ some carriers, coming
in to play a game of billiards, lifted the children off the table and
laid them at random on the bench. When the nurses returned they were
in despair. How was each to recognise her own nursling? The children
were all only a few days old, and indistinguishable one from the other.
At last, merely making sure of the sex, each took one from the row;
and now there were in France a score or so of mothers who discovered
a likeness to beloved husbands or to themselves in children with whom
they had no connection whatever.

"What a story!" said Madame Nodier. "Were the children's clothes not
marked?"

"If you begin to inquire into the probability of a thing, you will
never arrive at the truth," answered Nodier, nothing daunted, and quite
satisfied with the effect produced.

He himself never inquired into probabilities. The world of
probabilities was not his; he lived in the world of legend, of
fantastic fairy-tale and ghost story. If a fairy has ever stood by the
cradle of a mortal, that mortal was Charles Nodier. And in this fairy
he believed all his life; he loved her as she loved him, and she had
a part in all that he wrote. What though he was married by law and in
earthly fashion to Madame Nodier! The marriage had no more spiritual
significance than Dante's with Gemma Donati; his true bride and
Beatrice was the fairy Bellas, once the Queen of Sheba, whose praises
he and Gérard de Nerval so often sang.

The world in which he lives is the world in which Oberon and Titania
dance, in which strains from the _Thousand and One Nights_ blend with
the melodies of Ariel's celestial orchestra, in which Puck makes his
bed in a rosebud, whilst all the flowers perfume the summer night. It
is a world in which all the personages of real, wide-awake life appear,
but grotesquely magnified or grotesquely diminished, to suit the
comprehension of the child and the requirements of the fantast.

Here, as Nodier himself somewhere says, we have Odysseus the
far-travelled, but he has shrunk into Hop-o'-my-thumb, whose tremendous
voyage consists in swimming across the milk-pail; here is Othello, the
terrible wife-murderer, only his beard is not black but blue--he has
turned into the notorious Bluebeard; here is Figaro, the nimble lackey
who flatters the grandees so cleverly, only he is transformed into Puss
in Boots, a less entertaining personage, though almost as interesting
from the psychological point of view.

No author of the French Romantic period is more closely related to
the German and English Romanticists than Nodier. Any one who does not
know his works may form some idea of them by recalling Sir Walter
Scott's ghost stories and Hoffmann's audacious fantasies. But these,
of course, do not convey an idea of Nodier's artistic individuality.
His peculiarity is, that in his representation of Romantic subjects
he is not what we are in the habit of calling Romantic, but, on the
contrary, severely Attic, classically simple, sparing in the matter
of colour, and devoid of passion; there is none of the Scotch mist
we are conscious of in Sir Walter, or of the fumes of the Berlin
wine-vaults which we inhale in reading Hoffmann. His peculiarity as
a stylist is that, whilst the young Romanticists around him were
sensualising language and supplanting the idea by the picture, he
himself transcribed his wildest Romantic fancies into the clear and
simple language of Pascal and Bossuet. Enthusiastic champion as he
was of the new tendency in literature, in the matter of style he
remained old-fashioned, and expressed the fantastic imaginations of
the nineteenth century in the severe, perspicuous language of the
seventeenth. Audacious to the verge of insanity in his fantasies, he
is sober and clear in his style. As Prosper Mérimée has cleverly said,
a fanciful tale by Nodier is like "the dream of a Scythian, told by an
old Greek poet."

His _Inès de Las Sierras_ is a ghost-story the beauty of which renders
it infinitely superior to the ordinary ghost-story. The horror produced
by the unaccountable apparition is blent with the admiration aroused
by the supernatural visitant's gentle grace; these feelings do not
neutralise each other, but act in combination with a peculiar power;
and it is this combination which is the secret of Nodier's effects.
It is a pity that he has spoiled the beautiful story by a trivial
and improbable conclusion, which explains away the ghost in the most
commonplace manner. The apparition seen in the old castle at midnight
is not the ghost of the young dancing-girl, murdered 300 years before,
but a living Spanish maiden who happens to bear the same name, and
whom a fantastic and incredible concatenation of circumstances has led
to dance there, dressed in white. There is genuine Latin rationality
in this solution of the mystery, but it is offered to us, as it were,
ironically. A story like _Inès de Las Sierras_, however, is what most
exactly demonstrates the poetic progress made since the eighteenth
century, which was such an enemy of the supernatural, even in fiction,
that Voltaire regarded himself as an audacious reformer when (in his
_Semiramis_) he allowed the ridiculous ghost of Minus to howl some
alexandrines through a speaking-trumpet in broad daylight.

_La Fée aux Miettes_ seems to me the best of Nodier's fantastic tales.
There is undoubtedly too much of it; it is not without an effort
that one follows all the wild twists and turnings of a fantasy which
occupies 120 quarto pages, even though much of it is both interesting
and charming. A poor, harmless lunatic in the asylum of Glasgow tells
the story of his life. This is the setting of the tale, but we forget
it altogether in the marvellousness of the events related. All the
chords of human life are touched, jarringly and wildly. It is as if
life itself passed before one's eyes seen wrong side out, seen from
the perfectly permissible standpoint of the dreamer or the delirious
fever-patient.

In the little town of Granville in Normandy lives a worthy,
simple-minded young carpenter, Michel by name. In the same town lives
an old female dwarf, shrivelled and ugly, who, because she gathers
up the scraps of the school-children's breakfasts, is called "la fée
aux miettes." Four or five centuries ago she might have been seen in
Granville, living in the same way, and she has made her appearance at
intervals since. This being is assisted by the young carpenter with
small sums of money, and she in return assists him with all manner of
wise advice. She always speaks to him as if she were passionately in
love with him, and she begs him to promise to marry her, so that by
this means his money may in time return to him again. She gives him her
portrait, a picture which does not resemble her at all, but represents
the fairy Belkis, who in olden days was the Queen of Sheba beloved by
Solomon. The youth falls in love with this picture of a beautiful,
dazzling, bewitching woman. Wherever he goes her name meets him; when
he determines to try his fortune in a foreign country, the ship he
sails in is called the _Queen of Sheba_. He wanders about the world
dreaming of Belkis, as we wander, one and all of us, dreaming of our
castle in the air, our ideal, our fixed idea, which to our neighbours
is madness.

Falsely accused of a murder committed in the room in which he had slept
at an inn, poor Michel is sentenced to be hanged. He is carried through
a hooting crowd to the gallows. There proclamation is made that,
according to old custom, his life will be spared if any young woman
will have pity on him and take him for her husband. And behold, Folly
Girlfree, a merry, pretty girl who has always liked him, approaches
the scaffold, prepared to save him. But he asks time for reflection.
He likes Folly Girlfree, and she is both good and beautiful, but he
does not love her; he has only one love, his ardently, secretly adored
ideal, the Fairy Belkis. He looks tenderly and gratefully at Folly,
deliberates, and--requests to be hanged. This deliberation with the
rope round his neck, this conclusion that, as Shakespeare puts it,
"many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage," is described with
delightful humour, with a naïve philosophy which is unforgettable from
the fact that some such idea has occurred at one time or other to all
of us.

They are proceeding to hang Michel, when loud cries are heard, and
the Crumb Fairy, followed by all the street boys, arrives breathless,
bringing proofs of the prisoner's innocence. He marries her out
of gratitude, but hardly has the door on the wedding night been
hermetically closed between him and his aged wife, hardly has he shut
his eyes than Belkis in her bridal veil approaches his couch.

"Alas! Belkis, I am married, married to the Crumb Fairy."

"I am she."

"Nay, that is impossible; you are almost as tall as I."

"That is because I have stretched myself."

"But this beautiful, curly, golden hair falling over your shoulders,
Belkis? The Crumb Fairy has none of it."

"No, for I show it only to my husband."

"But the Fairy's two great teeth, Belkis; I do not see them between
your fresh, fragrant lips?"

"No, they are a superfluity only permissible to old age."

"And this almost deadly feeling of bliss which takes possession of me
in your embrace, Belkis? The Fairy never gave me this."

"No, naturally," is the laughing answer; "but 'at night all cats are
grey.'"

Henceforward Michel lives a divided life; his days are spent with the
wise old Fairy, his nights with the beautiful young Queen of Sheba,
until at last he finds the singing mandragora, and, having made his
escape from the madhouse, mounts to the Fairy's and Belkis's heaven on
the wings of the mandragora's song.

This is madness, no doubt, but it is marvellous madness--madness
instinct with soul. Who is this crumb-gathering fairy? Is she wisdom?
Is she renunciation and duty? Is she the inexhaustible patience which
suddenly reveals itself as genius? Is she fidelity turning into the
happiness that is the reward of fidelity? She is probably a little of
all of this; and therefore it is that she can transform herself into
youth and beauty and bliss. In some such fashion Nodier has thought
out, or dreamt his story.

At its maturity his imaginative faculty is more wanton and bold. No
longer contented with producing shapeless, unordered material, he
presents his material to us with a grotesque, loquacious, satirical
explanation. No Frenchman comes so near having what Englishmen and
Germans call humour as Nodier. At times he seems to be positively
possessed by whimsicality. Then he not only turns the everyday world
topsy-turvy in his stories, but plays with his own relation to
the story, satirises contemporaries, makes a thousand innuendoes,
philosophises over the illusions of life. He takes even the art of
the printer into his service to heighten his fantastic effects; or,
more correctly speaking, in order to prove the absolute power of his
personality over his material, he leaves not a single thing, not even
the purely mechanical means of communication, untouched by his mood. In
his famous tale, _Le Roi de Bohème et ses sept Châteaux_, he exhausted
the resources of the printing establishment. At his command the letters
become so long that they stretch from top to bottom of the page; he
commands again, and they dwindle into the tiniest of the tiny; he
screams, and they stand up on end in terror; he becomes melancholy, and
they hang their heads all along the lines; they are inseparably mixed
up with illustrations; Latin and Gothic groups alternate, according to
the mood of the moment; sometimes they stand on their heads, so that we
have to turn the book upside down to read them; sometimes they follow
the narrative so closely that a descent of the stairs is printed thus:

   Hereupon
          our
            hero
               went
                 dejectedly
                         down
                            the
                               stairs.

It is interesting to trace in the account of Nodier's life written
by his daughter, the foundations of fact upon which he built his
fantastic tales. It rarely happens that, as in _Inès de Las Sierras_,
something real (in this case an old castle which Nodier had visited in
the course of a tour he made with his family in Spain in 1827) forms
the groundwork. Sometimes, as for example in _Trilby_, the point of
departure is a legend; and it is significant that this particular
legend should have been told to Nodier by Pichot, the French translator
of Scott and Byron. The idea of _Smarra_ Nodier got from hearing the
old porter of his house in Paris, who was too ill to sleep anywhere
except sitting in his chair, relate his nightmares and dreams. The
model for the Fée aux Miettes was an old woman who served in his
father's house when he was a child, and who treated his father, a man
of sixty, as if he were a giddy youth. This old Denise maintained that
before entering the Nodiers' household she had been in the service of
a Monsieur d'Amboise, governor of Château-Thierry. When she held forth
on this subject, she mixed up with her own experiences reminiscences
of the most extraordinary events and most antiquated customs; and
the family, out of curiosity, caused inquiry to be made about this
remarkable governor. The archives of the town showed that only one of
the name had ever existed, and that he had died in 1557. One can see
how the story of the fairy evolved itself out of this curious incident.
The very slightest element of fact--a landscape, a legend, a dream, a
lie, a mere mote--was enough for Nodier.

The amiable, clever man, whose house was for a number of years the
rendezvous of the men of letters who made their _début_ about 1830,
the place where all the talented young beginners repaired to seek
encouragement and, if possible, permission to read a ballad or a
little piece of prose before the select company which assembled there
on Sunday afternoons, this man in his proper person represents the
extreme of Romantic fantasticality in the literature of the period. The
fantastic supernaturalism which was the main characteristic of German
Romanticism, is only one of the poles of French Romanticism; or, to
speak more correctly, it is merely one of its elements--in some of
the most notable men of the school a weak and subordinate, in others
an important element, but an element always present. In Victor Hugo's
case it announces itself at once, in his _Ronde du Sabbat_, and makes
itself forcibly felt in the great _Légende des Siècles_, though in
this latter the legend is only naïve history; we have a glimpse of it
even in the rationalistic Mérimée (half explained away in _La Vénus
d'Ille_, more distinct in _La Vision de Charles XI._ and _Les âmes du
purgatoire_); it reigns, half-seraphic, half-sanguinarily sensual, in
Lamartine's _La chute d'un ange_; it pervades Quinet's pantheistically
vague _Ahasvère_; it appears in George Sand's old age in the pretty
fairy-tales she writes for her grandchildren; it occupies even the
plastic Gautier in the many tales in which he allows himself to be
influenced by Hoffmann; and, as Swedenborgian spiritism, it actually,
in a romance like _Séraphitus-Séraphita_, completes Balzac's great
_Comédie Humaine_. But in no other author has it the naïve originality
and the poetic force which distinguish Nodier.


[1] Nodier's youth and first literary efforts are described in _The
Emigrant Literature_.




V


RETROSPECT--FOREIGN INFLUENCES


The new literary and artistic movement had both foreign and indigenous
sources. The foreign are the more clearly evident.

As has already been observed, the older foreign literature which had
hitherto been kept out of France, and the new, which was captivating
men's minds by its novelty, were simultaneously seized on and
assimilated by the young generation, with an eagerness exactly
proportioned to the vehemence with which the works in question
repudiated the rules adhered to in earlier French literature. Before
the eyes of the young school there was, as it were, a prism, which
refracted all rays in a certain uniform manner. The rays which passed
through changed their character in the process.

The name of _Shakespeare_ early became the great rallying cry of
the Romanticists. August Wilhelm Schlegel had prepared the way for
Shakespeare; in his famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature,
which were published in French as well as German, he had been the first
to extol and expound him. Mercier, the French "prophet of Romanticism,"
eagerly took up the cry; Villemain and Guizot followed suit; imitations
and translations, the latter more faithful than those of the previous
century, did what in them lay to popularise the name and art of the
great Englishman. At the beginning of the Twenties, the progress that
had been made was not sufficient to prevent a company of English actors
who tried to play Shakespeare in the Porte-St. Martin theatre, being
received with a shower of apples and eggs and cries of: "Speak French!
Down with Shakespeare! He was one of Wellington's adjutants!"[1] But we
have seen that their successors met with a most cordial reception only
a few years later. In the interval Beyle had made his determined effort
to procure Shakespeare due recognition; the _Globe_ (published first
three times a week, then daily) had made its appearance as the organ of
the younger generation, and its ablest contributors had conducted the
campaign of the new cause with remarkable skill.

Beyle who, in spite of his paradoxicalness, is one of the most
clear-headed and original writers of his day, expresses profound
admiration for Shakespeare without being guilty of any lack of piety
towards Racine, whom he represents as the Englishman's antipodes. He
shows that the moments of complete illusion which ought to occur during
the course of every theatrical performance, occur more frequently
during the representation of Shakespeare's than of Racine's plays, and
also that the peculiar pleasure imparted by a tragedy depends upon
these same seconds of illusion and the emotion which they leave in
the spectator's mind. Nothing hinders illusion more than admiration
of the beautiful verse of a tragedy. The question we have to answer
is: What is the task of the dramatic poet? Is it to present us with
a beautifully evolved plot in melodious verse, or is it to give a
truthful representation of emotions? In his own answer to this question
Beyle goes farther than Romantic tragedy, exemplified by Victor Hugo
and Alexandre Dumas, subsequently did; for he unconditionally rejects
verse as a vehicle for tragic drama. Granted, he says, that the aim
of tragedy is to give a faithful representation of emotions, then its
first requirement is distinct expression of thoughts and feelings. Such
distinctness is detracted from by verse. He quotes Macbeth's words,
spoken when he sees the ghost of Banquo sitting in his place: "The
table's full;" and maintains that rhyme and rhythm can add nothing
to the beauty of such a cry. It was obviously Vitet, not Hugo, who
subsequently came up to Beyle's dramaturgic ideal.

He warns against imitation of Shakespeare. The master should only be
followed in his understanding observation of the society in which he
lived, and his skill in giving his contemporaries exactly the kind
of tragedy which they needed; for to-day too, in 1820, the desire
for a certain kind of tragic drama exists, even though the public,
intimidated by the fame of Racine, does not venture to demand it of
the poet. It is only when an author studies and satisfies his age
that he is truly Romantic. For "Romanticism" is the art of providing
nations with the literary works which in the existing condition of
their ideas and customs are fitted to give them the greatest possible
amount of pleasure, whereas "Classicism" offers them the literature
which gave their greatgrandfathers the greatest possible amount of
pleasure. In his own day Racine was a Romanticist. Shakespeare is a
Romanticist, in the first place because he depicted for the Englishmen
of 1590 the bloody struggles and the results of their civil wars, and
in the second place because he has painted a series of masterly, subtly
shaded pictures of the impulses of the human mind and the passions of
the human heart. The teaching of Romanticism is, not that men should
imitate England or Germany, but that each nation should have its own
literature, modelled upon its own character, just as we all wear
clothes cut and sewn for ourselves alone.

To Beyle, we observe, Romanticism is almost the exact equivalent of
what we call modern art. Characteristic of that inveterate tendency of
the Latin race to classicism which has already been alluded to, are
his repeated assertions that the author should be "romantic" in all
that concerns his subject-matter, this being "the requirement of the
age," but that he should remain classic in his manner of presenting
it, in vocabulary and style. For language is an established convention
and therefore practically unchangeable. Men should try to write like
Pascal, Voltaire, and La Bruyère.[2]

With characteristic variations the most eminent contributors to the
_Globe_ formulate their definitions of Romanticism in very fair
harmony with each other and with Beyle. At the time when Hugo was
still royalist, Christian, and conservative, the _Globe_ was already
revolutionary, philosophic, and liberal. The first to publish the
programme of Romanticism in the _Globe_was Thiers. He proclaimed
its watchwords to be _nature_ and _truth_--those almost inevitable
war-cries in every artistic and literary revolution. He opposes himself
to the academic, the symmetrical in plastic art, and in dramatic poetry
demands _historic_ truth, which is the same as what was afterwards
called local colouring. Duvergier de Hauranne, in an article _On the
Romantic_, defines classicism as routine, Romanticism as liberty--that
is to say, liberty for the most varied talents (Hugo and Beyle, Manzoni
and Nodier) to develop in all their marked individuality. Ampère
defines classicism as imitation, Romanticism as originality. But an
anonymous writer (in all probability Sismondi) tries to give a more
exact definition; he remarks that the word Romanticism has not been
coined to designate the literary works in which any society whatever
has given itself expression, but only that literature which gives _a
faithful picture of modern civilization_. Since this civilisation is,
according to his conviction, spiritual in its essence, Romanticism is
to be defined as spirituality in literature. The future author of _Les
Barricades_, Vitet, at this time a youth of twenty, tries to settle the
matter with the impetuosity and audacity of his age. According to him
it simply means independence in artistic matters, individual liberty in
literary. "Romanticism is," he says, "Protestantism in literature and
art;" and in saying so he is obviously thinking merely of emancipation
from a kind of papal authority. He adds that it is neither a literary
doctrine nor a party cry, but the law of necessity, the law of change
and of progress. "Twenty years hence the whole nation will be Romantic;
I say the whole nation, for the Jesuits are not the nation."

The reader can see for himself that there is only the merest shade
of difference between these definitions and the conclusion arrived
at by Victor Hugo: "Romanticism is Liberalism in literature;" and it
will not surprise him to learn that the _Globe_ greeted the preface
to _Cromwell_ with the exclamation: "The movement has now reached M.
Hugo." Hugo's chief contribution to it was victory.[3]

Next to Shakespeare, _Sir Walter Scott_ was the English author who
exercised, if not the most profound, certainly the most plainly
traceable influence. He found his way across the French, as across
every other frontier. Before the days of his popularity in France the
great Scotchman had found in Germany, Italy, and Denmark admirers, who,
inspired by patriotic and moral aims, adopted the tone of his fiction.
The Waverley novels began to appear in 1814; in 1815 they were already
imitated by De la Motte Fouqué in the German "Junker" style; in 1825-26
Manzoni's _Promessi Sposi_ appeared; and in 1826 Ingemann began to
publish his romantic historical tales, which inculcate a childish kind
of patriotism and royalism, and are, as it were, haunted by a pale
ghost of Sir Walter Scott. The Waverley novels were translated into
French almost immediately after their appearance, and at once achieved
a great success. Scott became so popular that in the early Twenties the
managers of the theatres commissioned authors to dramatise his novels.
The unsuccessful play _Emilia_, written by Soumet, the poet of the
transition period, was an adaptation of Scott. Victor Hugo himself,
using the name of his young brother-in-law, Paul Fouchet, sent in an
adaptation of _Kenilworth_, which as a drama was also a failure.

The young Romantic generation, however, was not appealed to by
the qualities in the novels which were most highly appreciated
in Protestant countries, but by the talent of their picturesque
descriptions and their medieval flavour. It was by his wealth of
crossbows and buff jerkins, of picturesque costumes and romantic
old castles, that Scott found favour in the eyes of Frenchmen. They
ignored or disapproved of the common-sense, sober view of life and
the Protestant morality which had won him readers in Germany and
Scandinavia. Beyle was the first to criticise Scott severely. He
prophesies that in spite of his extraordinary popularity his fame
will be short-lived; for, according to Beyle, Scott's talent lay more
in the describing of men's clothes and the limning of their features
than in the representation of their emotional life and their passions.
Art, says Beyle, neither can nor ought to imitate nature exactly;
it is always a beautiful untruth; but Scott is too untruthful; his
passionate characters strike us as being ashamed of themselves; they
lack decision and boldness and naturalness. And it was not long before
his critics began to make the complaint, so often reiterated by Balzac,
that he could not describe woman and her passions, or at any rate
dared not describe these passions with their pleasures, pains, and
punishments, in a society which attached exaggerated importance to
literary modesty.[4] The novels with plots laid in modern days made no
impression; only _Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Kenilworth, The Fair Maid
of Perth_, and one or two others were popular.

The special merit of this foreign author in the eyes of Frenchmen was,
that he had substituted the novel of dramatic dialogue for the two
forms of the longer novel hitherto in vogue--the narrative, in which
the headings of the chapters were summaries of the contents and the
author played a prominent part, and the letter form, which squeezed all
the surprises and all the passion in between "Dear Friend" and "Yours
sincerely." The most talented of the young French writers are plainly
influenced by him. The one whose moral standard most closely approached
the English, Alfred de Vigny, wrote _Cinq-Mars_, a novel with a plot
laid in the days of Richelieu, an entertaining, but now old-fashioned
work, in which the contrast of good and evil overshadows all other
contrasts, and which betrays a remarkable want of appreciation of
Richelieu's greatness as a statesman. There is almost a total absence
of Scott's skill in characterisation; instead of it we have a lyric
element, the glorification of youthful, impetuous chivalry--the old
French _bravoure_. Prosper Mérimée fell under the great Scotchman's
influence at the same time as Alfred de Vigny, and wrote his _Chronique
du Règne de Charles IX._, a work the spirit of which is still less like
Scott's. Mérimée singles out the strong and violent passions in history
for their own sake, but also with the French Romanticist's subordinate
aim of rousing the wrath of the respectable bourgeois by his audacious
unreservedness; his delineation of character is, generally speaking,
clear and concise; he tells his tale coldly and with utter disregard of
all established moral convention.

Every one knows the characteristic manner in which, at a somewhat later
period, Alexandre Dumas employed Scott's wealth of colour and historic
style in the production of many light and most entertaining novels, of
which _The Three Musketeers_ may be named as an example. But it is not
so generally known that Balzac, the founder of the modern French novel,
was as strongly attracted as De Vigny and Mérimée by the foreign master
who made an epoch in the history of fiction. He desired to follow in
his path without being a mere imitator. He believed himself quite
capable of rivalling Scott in the delineative art which Romanticism had
restored to honour, and was confident of his power to impart much more
life to dialogue. In Scott's books there was only one type of woman; in
France the writer of historic novels could contrast the brilliant vices
and motley morals of Catholicism with the dark austerity of Calvinism
in the wildest period of French history. This ensured him against
monotony. Balzac, who was always projecting monumental works and whose
mind had an instinctive bias towards the systematically comprehensive,
finally conceived the plan of depicting each historic period since
that of Charlemagne in one or more novels, all of which should form a
connected chain--an idea which Freytag, in his work, _Die Ahnen_, has
since tried to carry out as regards Germany. The first novel which
Balzac published in his own name, _Les Chouans_, was intended to be a
link in this chain. It describes the war in La Vendée at the time of
the Revolution, and came out in 1829, the same year as _Cinq-Mars_ and
_Chronique du Règne de Charles IX_. Two books published much later,
_Sur Cathérine de Médicis_ and _Maître Cornélius_, are also fragments
of the projected great work. The latter is a novel in which Balzac
enters into direct competition with Sir Walter Scott; its hero is
Louis XI., whom he considered unfairly treated by Sir Walter. Although
these historical romances are good in their way and contain vivid and
careful studies of character, they prove that if Balzac had kept to his
intention of merely calling the past to life again, his place in the
literature of his century would have been an entirely subordinate one;
he would only have been known as one of Scott's disciples.

Victor Hugo also was fired by the famous Scotchman with the desire to
write a great historical novel. He determined to make it centre round
the cathedral church of Notre-Dame in Paris, the whitewashing of which
had horrified him; for he had an admiration and love for the grand old
historical building which remind us of Goethe's for Strasburg Cathedral
and Oehlenschläger's for the Cathedral of Roskilde. According to Hugo's
contract with the publisher, this famous novel was to be ready in April
1829; but he was not able to keep his engagement; he first obtained
five months' grace, and then a respite until the 1st of December 1830
upon condition of paying 1000 francs weekly after that date if the book
was not finished then. By the 27th of July his preparatory studies
were made, and that day he began to write the novel; the following day
ushered in the Revolution of July; Hugo's house was in danger from the
firing, and during the removal to another, all the notes and studies
for his book were lost. Under the circumstances the publisher granted
three months' grace; Hugo denied himself to every one, locked away
his black suit so that he might not be tempted to go out, sent for a
bottle of ink, put on his working-jacket, and worked without paying or
receiving a single visit until 14th January 1831, when the ink-bottle
was empty and the novel written. During all that time he had only
allowed himself one distraction, which was to go and see Charles X.'s
ministers sentenced. Not to break his resolution, he went dressed in
his civic guard's uniform.

In his earliest youth Hugo had been profoundly impressed by Scott.
In a review of _Quentin Durward_, which he wrote at the age of
twenty-one, he expresses the greatest admiration for Scott's historical
sense, moral earnestness, and dramatic style. But even in this early
appreciation we come upon a sentence in which he, as it were, indicates
the step he himself hopes to take in advance of Scott. He writes:
"After Walter Scott's picturesque but prosaic novel there remains to
be created another kind of novel, which in our opinion will be more
admirable and more perfect. It is the novel which is both drama and
epic, which is both picturesque and poetical, both realistic and
idealistic, both true and grand, which combines Walter Scott and
Homer." We must not let these last words, with which Hugo, true to
himself, spoils his effect by exaggeration, prevent our acknowledging
the young author's clear perception of what he himself was one day to
be capable of doing in the domain of fiction. He seems to have had the
premonition that his novels would be great prose poems, picturesque
chronicles rather than pictures of reality like Scott's.

_Notre-Dame de Paris_, which was intended to give a picture of the
life and manners of Paris in the fifteenth century, is the creation
of a great constructive imagination. This was a fit subject for Hugo,
with his leaning to the grand and colossal. He gives a soul to the
building, breathes into it the breath of his spirit until it becomes a
living being; and as the scientist reconstructs a whole animal from a
single vertebra, so Hugo's brain, with the cathedral as starting-point,
conjures up the whole of that long-vanished Paris. The faith and the
superstition, the manners and the arts, the laws and the human emotions
and passions of those old days, are drawn for us with a broad, strong
touch--with no great precision, but with a kind of convincing magic.
The characters in _Notre-Dame_ are the character sketches of a genius,
drawn in the epic style, in more than life-size. Scott's honest, plain,
human beings are superseded by the creatures of an artist intoxicated
with colour; his gentle spirit makes way for grandiloquent passion
pointing unresignedly to blind, iron necessity, that άνάγκη which is
written on the church wall, and which crushes us all--gipsy and priest,
beauty and beast, Phœbus and Quasimodo--century after century under its
iron heel.

Even more powerful than Scott's influence was _Byron's_. It was the
element of wild passion in his poems and its connection with the
wildness of his life--it was Childe Harold and still more Lara, the
being marked by the finger of fate, who, suffering from a mysterious
melancholy, carries his pride and his anguish with him from land to
land--it was this type in its Byronic forms, fantastically magnified
by the element of myth and legend enveloping the poet's life, which
enchanted the young men whom Hugo had awakened or gathered together.
Few were the critics who maintained as Beyle did in spite of his great
admiration for Byron, that "this author of deadly dull, conventional
tragedies" was certainly not the leader of the Romanticists.
Immediately after Byron's death the whole horde of French minor poets
seized upon the two themes, Greece and Lord Byron, which they continued
year after year to sing with so much ardour and so little comprehension
of the dead man's character, that Sainte-Beuve was obliged to protest
in the _Globe_ against the abuse of the words Byron, liberty, elegy,
&c. In 1824 both Hugo and Lamartine gave expression to their feelings
regarding Byron, the former in a newspaper article, the latter in a
poem. In treating of him as a poet, both authors at this period lay
most stress upon his spirit of doubt and his gloomy view of life;
neither of them seems to have been at all deeply impressed by the works
of his mature manhood; the bright and trenchant political and religious
satire of _Don Juan_ was, in 1824, missed or misunderstood by them as
by so many others. But whereas Hugo's chief endeavour is to show the
difference between Byron's poetry and that of the eighteenth century
("The difference between Byron's and Voltaire's laughter is this, that
Voltaire had not suffered"), to the sentimental and half orthodox
Lamartine the English poet is still the fallen angel. Lamartine's
_Fifth Canto of Childe Harold_, in which he endeavours to strike the
Byronic note, shows in what he believed himself to resemble the English
nobleman, namely, in his romantically heroic personality. Masking as
Byron he gives expression to the doubts and rebellious feelings of
which we only catch a rare glimpse in his _Meditations_, but to which
he was soon to give utterance in his own name. It was probably Byron
who lured both him and Hugo to the East; Hugo contented himself with
imaginary excursions, but Lamartine made princely preparations and
set off on a grand tour. And if Byron's last works made no profound
political impression on these two authors, his last actions and his
death did.

Byron's influence is, then, unmistakably traceable in the works of
most of the young poets of our period; but so marked and powerful was
the originality of this generation of authors, that his sentimental
despair, which was so infectious, and which led to so much imitation
and affectation in many literatures, glanced off them. There was only
one of them in whose ears this particular Byronic note rang like a
message from a kindred spirit, and he was, curiously enough, the most
elegant and aristocratic, the truest Parisian among them all--Alfred de
Musset.

Most of the literary notables in question were born in the
provinces--Victor Hugo and Nodier at Besançon, George Sand in Berry,
Gautier at Tarbes, Lamennais in Brittany, Sainte-Beuve at Boulogne--and
each of these brings with him his characteristic fund of provincialism
which does not allow itself to be interpenetrated by the Byronic
influence, although both George Sand and Gautier were, in curiously
different ways, affected by Byron. Mérimée, who was born in Paris,
cooled too quickly to feel the influence of Byron's poetic temperament;
it was Byron's spirit of negation which influenced him, and that at
second hand, through Beyle. But upon no one does Byron make the same
direct, deep impression as on that slender, pale son of Paris, who is
distinguished by all the weakness and all the exquisite charm which
are the heritage of the last representatives of a noble and ancient
race. In the earliest stages of his career, Byron, the true Englishman,
had been spiritually minded and melancholy; the senses play but a
small part in the poetry of his youth; not till he is the mature man
and has visited Italy and lived in Latin countries does his poetry,
like Goethe's in Venice, become sensual and audaciously outspoken.
De Musset, on the contrary, begins in his early youth with the bold
and fleshly realism which we find in some of Byron's later works, and
gradually becomes more and more spiritual. At his best he is a keener
observer than Byron, and his love-poetry is more delicate; it has a
Raphaelesque beauty which Byron's neither attains nor aims at. He is
the weaker, tenderer, more charming, French Byron, as Heine is the
smaller, more wanton, wittier, German Byron, and Paludan-Müller the
satirical, orthodox, royalist, Danish Byron. De Musset suffers like a
boy, complains like a woman; he is what Auguste Préault, the sculptor,
once called him: "Mademoiselle Byron."

Shelley, whose name did not find its way into France till much later,
was practically unknown to this generation. As for the so-called Lake
Poets, Sainte-Beuve, who acquired the English language in his youth,
and had more of the critical gift than any of his contemporaries, was
the only one of the Romanticists who appreciated that nature-loving,
realistic school at its true worth, assimilated some of its spirit, and
endeavoured by means of a few translations to bring it into favour.
Brizeux, the poet of Brittany, reminds us of the Lake Poets, though he
knew nothing about them.

The influence of Germany was less powerful than that of England,
and it is still easier in the case of this country to show the free
treatment to which the impressions received were subjected. Germany was
seen overshadowed by the old Teutonic oaks; its fountains and rivers
were haunted by elves and fairies, who trailed their shadowy white
garments across the dewy grass; among its mountains dwelt the gnomes,
and in the air above the mountain-peaks witches held their revelries.
Germany was a Walpurgis Night dreamland. Only one of Goethe's works
was really popular, namely, _Werther_, the high pressure passion of
which enchanted all readers. Werther seemed to them a René, because,
though he was much older than René, they had made acquaintance with
René first, and this circumstance deprived the German hero of his
freshness and approximated him to the Childe Harold type. Something of
the same kind happened with Faust. That imposing figure, which made
such an impression on the whole of Europe, was so completely foreign
to the French that they never truly comprehended it. French poetry
had never occupied itself with the struggles and sufferings of the
questioning spirit. And this German doctor, who is simple enough to
see the devil in a poodle dog, sentimental enough to cross Gretchen's
threshold with pious emotions in his breast, and yet unscrupulous
enough to desert the girl he has betrayed and kill her brother in a
dishonourable duel, was too un-French to be understood. We gather from
the apologies of the Romanticists the nature of the criticism to which
the men of the classic school subjected _Faust_. "How many," writes
Duvergier de Hauranne, "are rendered insensible to all the beauties
of this masterpiece by the fact that it treats of a compact with the
devil! They cannot understand any one allowing such an improbability to
pass unchallenged; and yet they themselves from their childhood have,
without raising the slightest objection, beheld Agamemnon murdering
his daughter in order to obtain a favourable wind." French readers
were accustomed to the superstitions of antiquity, but felt themselves
repelled by those of the Middle Ages. And there were, moreover, many
who, without reading them, denounced Goethe's works as barbaric
literature. As late as 1825 that narrow-minded assailant of the
Romanticists, Auger, the secretary of the French Academy, in making an
attack on "those lovers of the beauties of nature, who would willingly
exchange the Apollo Belvedere for a shapeless image of St. Christopher,
and with the greatest pleasure give _Phèdre_ and _Iphigénie_ for
_Faust_ and _Götz von Berlichingen_," drew smiles from the Academicians
by pronouncing these last titles in a burlesque manner, as if they
were barbaric names. The admiration of the Romanticists for _Faust_
was, however, as has already been observed, barren of result. Though
Gérard de Nerval translated the First Part to the entire satisfaction
of the aged Goethe, and though Delacroix's painting of Faust and
Mephistopheles riding through the air was also much admired by the old
poet and art connoisseur, the French literature of the period only
rarely (as in the case of Quinet) shows any trace of the influence of
the great drama.

One would have imagined that Schiller, with his association with
Rousseau and his flowery dramatic rhetoric, would have appealed more
forcibly to Frenchmen than Goethe; as a matter of fact he possessed
little attraction for the younger generation. Adaptations of all his
plays were indeed performed on the French stage, but this happened
just before the formation of the Romantic School proper, and the
semi-Romantic poets of the transition period, who cut and carved
these plays into conventional tragedies to suit the taste of the day,
destroyed them in place of teaching the public to appreciate them. Out
of the _Jungfrau von Orleans_ and _Don Carlos_, Soumet manufactured
a _Jeanne d'Arc_ and an _Élisabeth de France_; _Fiesco_ was adapted
and maltreated by Ancelot, _Wallenstein_ by Liadières; but neither
Classicists nor Romanticists derived any satisfaction from the results,
and the verdict of the austere Beyle (who read, or tried to read the
originals) is that Schiller paid too much homage to the old French
taste to be able to present his countrymen with the tragedy which
their manners and customs demanded. He has no appreciation whatever of
Schiller's real greatness; he evidently knew too little German to be
able to enjoy and understand _Wallenstein_; besides, like many of the
younger men, he allowed himself to be carried away to such an extent by
his desire to annoy the Classicists, that he actually extols Werner's
_Luther_ as the modern drama most nearly approaching Shakespeare, and
its author as a much greater poet than Schiller.

The only contemporary German author besides Goethe who made any deep
impression was E. Th. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann, in fact, became to
Frenchmen the German _par excellence_. Tieck was too vague, Novalis too
mystical, to find the public in France which they did, for instance, in
Denmark; but Hoffmann united to that wildly capricious fantasticality,
which to Frenchmen was a perfectly new poetical element, the sharp
decision of outline which appeals to them, and which reminded them of
their compatriot Callot. His artistic courage, which dares to carry
out capricious conceits to their extremest consequences, won their
approbation. He dealt in strong colours and startling effects, and
his work, with all its wildness, is as full of clear minute detail as
a "Temptation of St. Anthony" by Breughel or Teniers; in contrast to
Novalis, he appealed to Frenchmen by his Berlin rationality, which
is so closely allied to French rationality; there was method in his
madness. Thus it came about that he alone of all the German authors had
followers, one may almost say disciples, in France. The influence of
his tales is, as has already been observed, strongly felt in Charles
Nodier's work; at a later period it is even more perceptible in Gérard
de Nerval's, and it is unmistakable in Gautier's short stories. Highly
original as this last-mentioned author is, and despite the fact that he
hardly knew a word of German, he nevertheless at various periods of his
life was under German influence. His youthful _Romans et Contes_ remind
us of Hoffmann, and much in his _Émaux et Camées_ recalls Heinrich
Heine. He had an intense admiration for Goethe's _West-Oestlicher
Diwan_. What attracted him in Goethe was the artistic infallibility
manifested by that great poet during the latter years of his life.


[1] Stendhal: _Racine et Shakespeare_, p. 215.

[2] _Racine et Shakespeare_, pp. 115, 117, 218 _note_.

[3] _Cf_. Th. Ziesing: _Le Globe de 1824 à 1830_.

[4] See Beyle: _Racine et Shakespeare_, 294; Balzac's own words in the
preface to _La Comédie Humaine_; and the utterances of his alter ego,
Daniel d'Arthez, in _Les Illusions perdues_.




VI


RETROSPECT--INDIGENOUS SOURCES


But the renascence of literature in France was not due chiefly to
foreign influences. It was upon the soil of their native country that
the new men built.

The work accomplished by a great literary school such as the Romantic
School in France may be compared to the building of a town, only
that the town of literature is invariably built upon land which is
protected merely by slight and leaky embankments from the waters of
forgetfulness. Water at the foundations is soon discovered; it rises
slowly but steadily; at last the lower buildings disappear, and only
the loftiest monuments remain towering, eternally visible, above the
level of the Lethean stream.

What gives these highest literary monuments their proud position is
partly the profundity of the thoughts which support them, partly the
exact conformity of the perfect artistic expression to the idea; but,
unless the author is really a creative thinker, what is of conclusive
importance is that his mind should, consciously or unconsciously, be
permeated by the most advanced ideas of his age; for it is the spirit
which "maketh alive" and preserves from destruction.

Romanticism in France displays three main tendencies:

1. The endeavour to reproduce faithfully either some real piece of past
history or some phase of modern life--the tendency towards the true.

2. The endeavour after perfection of form, whether apprehended as
plasticity and picturesqueness of expression, as severe metrical
harmony, or as a prose style imperishable from its concise
simplicity--the tendency towards the beautiful.

3. Enthusiasm for great religious or social reformatory ideas, an ethic
aim in art--the tendency towards the good.

These three main tendencies define the nature of this vigorous and
talented school as the three dimensions define space; and each of them
produced works of great and enduring value.

The last two, as resultant from French influences, occupy our attention
first.

Although there were to be found in the Romantic School authors who,
like Mérimée and Gautier, retained to the last a natural or artificial
indifference to the social and political aims of the age, it numbered
far more who were strongly appealed to and affected by the endeavours
made to organise the future of their country and of the whole human
race. Poetry, literature, has two main developments. It is either of
the nature of representation based upon psychological observation--in
which form it approaches science--or it bears the character of an
annunciation, an inspired appeal--in which form it approaches religion.
Many writers of the generation of 1830 show that they apprehended it
in the latter manner. The critics who have tried to depreciate these
men by calling their productions works with a purpose, or problem
literature, have done them wrong. For what such critics condemn is
nought else but the spirit of the age--its ideas; and these ideas are
the life-blood of all true literature. All that we have a right to
demand in the interest of art is, that the veins through which this
life-blood flows shall only show blue under the skin, not rise black
and swollen as they do in the case of a sick or angry man.

During the course of the Thirties reformatory ideas make their way
into French Romanticism from all sides. If we try to trace them back
to their source, it is not possible to stop before Saint-Simon. In
Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (born in 1760), the only descendant
of the famous Duke de Saint-Simon who wrote the private chronicles of
the court of Louis XIV., France, which showed so little interest in
the drama of _Faust_, herself produced a nineteenth-century Faust, a
genuine Faust in the matter of restless genius and irresistible craving
after both theoretical and practical knowledge of everything in the
universe. He is less acute and sagacious than the hero of Goethe's
famous poem, but his mental horizon is wider, his aim a grander one,
and his whole endeavour of a higher nature. He begins where Faust
ends. His plans for cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and
for the canalisation of Spain, remind us of the undertakings of the
latter years of Faust's life. Saint-Simon was in turn soldier, man of
fashion, engineer, company-projector, philosopher, scientist, political
economist, and founder of a religion; he was a man who possessed almost
every talent. In his youth he spent a large fortune, believing himself
to be heir to the dignities of peer of France and grandee of Spain and
a capital of 500,000 francs; but his father and the Duke de Saint-Simon
quarrelled, and he inherited nothing. He sank into abject poverty,
worked as a copyist nine hours a day for a thousand francs a year,
and in 1812 was reduced to living on bread and water. In despair, he
one day made an attempt at suicide; he shot out one of his eyes, but
recovered. The attempt at suicide, too, reminds us of Faust.

Disciples came to his assistance, supported him, were instructed by
him, and founded one periodical after another to propagate his ideas.

At the time of Saint-Simon's death, which happened five years before
the Revolution of July, these ideas were only known to and adopted
by a small circle, but during the reign of Louis Philippe they
spread rapidly, undergoing various alterations during the process. A
Saint-Simonist sect was founded, a sect with a high-priest and with
eminent men of all classes and professions amongst its numbers, such
men as Isaac Péreire, the financier, and Félicien David, the musical
composer. In the end the Saint-Simonist ideas penetrated the whole
of French society; through Michel Chevalier they became elements of
political economy; they inspired the most eminent historian of the day,
Augustin Thierry; they lay at the foundation of the philosophy of the
greatest French thinker of the century, Auguste Comte; with certain
modifications they won, in Pierre Leroux and Lamennais, influential
philosophic and religious apostles; and at the same time they made
their way into poetry. And there was nothing marvellous in all this,
for, in spite of his extravagances, Saint-Simon undoubtedly had
something of the prophetic instinct of the great poet.

He was in advance of his age; for his philosophy is one of the signs
of the great European reaction against the eighteenth century, which
he regarded as a purely critical, purely disintegrative period, whilst
he denominated the nineteenth an organic, directly productive period.
He disagreed as entirely with those who imagined that the happiness of
humanity can be produced by a mere change in the forms of government
as with those who, like the church party, exalted the past in order to
bring it back again. He was not the friend of the past, but the herald
of the future; the aims and endeavours of the reaction appeared to him
only in so far reasonable and right as they arose from a perception
of the truth that mankind cannot be civilised by mere reason, that
religion is indispensable to civilisation--the religion desiderated
by Saint-Simon being, however, one divested of the conventions and
externalities of all the existing religions. Possessed, as he was,
not with the spirit of doubt, but with the reformer's enthusiasm, the
liberty which consisted in emancipation from restraints seemed to him
of little value if it were not complemented and completed by true,
perfect liberty, that is to say, by an ever greater, wider capability.
The work of the last, the critical, centuries had been the destruction
of the medieval power of the priest and the warrior; now the time had
come to establish the reign of science and industry. In the new order
of society science was destined to take the place of faith, industry of
war.

The first thing to be done was to "organise" science and industry.

In Saint-Simon's _Lettres d'un habitant de Genève_, any who are
interested in his projects for the organisation of science may read
his scheme of starting a subscription at the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton
for the purpose of enabling all the greatest scientists and artists
to devote themselves to their professions, not only freed from all
pecuniary anxieties, but with the certainty of being well paid for
their work--a scheme which Alfred de Vigny, as author of _Chatterton_,
must have read with enthusiastic approbation, if he ever did read it.
But he would learn with perhaps more surprise than approbation that
these geniuses were in return to undertake the supervision of all
the spiritual interests of humanity, in accordance with a definite,
carefully detailed plan.

Saint-Simon's _Parable_ is the document which gives most information
about the proposed organisation of industry. As this parable, from the
fact that it is written in a laconic style and with glimpses of a wit
which the author displays on no other occasion, is probably the only
one of his writings which will continue to be read, I reproduce it in a
condensed form.

Suppose, says Saint-Simon, that France were to lose from the ranks of
its scientists, painters, poets, mechanicians, physicians, surgeons,
&c., the fifty best in each class--say its 3000 best scientific men,
artists, and mechanicians--what would be the result?

Since these men are the real productive power of the country, the
flower of the French nation, at least another whole generation would be
required to repair the misfortune. For the human beings whose life-work
is unmistakably of use are exceptions, and nature is not prodigal of
these exceptions.

Let us suppose another case. Let us suppose that France keeps all her
gifted scientists, artists, industrial and mechanical geniuses, but has
the misfortune to lose his Royal Highness the King's brother, their
Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Berry, Orléans, and Bourbon, the Duchess
of Angoulème, the Duchess of Bourbon, and the young Duchess of Condé.
She at the same time loses all the great officers of the crown, all
the ministers of state, chamberlains, masters of the hunt, marshals,
cardinals, archbishops, bishops, deans, and canons, all the prefects
and sub-prefects, all the judges, and into the bargain 10,000 of the
richest of those landed proprietors who live in great style.

The event would undoubtedly cause grief to the nation, because the
French are a good-hearted people, and not capable of regarding with
indifference the sudden disappearance of such a number of their
fellow-citizens. But this loss of not fewer than 30,000 of the persons
who are esteemed the first in the state could occasion sorrow only on
purely sentimental grounds; for no serious harm to the state as state
would arise from it. It would be very easy to fill the vacant places.
There are any number of Frenchmen who could occupy the position of His
Majesty the King's brother quite as well as that august prince, any
number who could fill the place of prince of the blood royal, &c., &c.
The anterooms of the court are crowded with aspirants ready and fit to
be invested with the rank of officers of the crown. The army possesses
any number of officers who are quite as good generals as our present
marshals; and how many commercial travellers are cleverer men than our
ministers of state, how many priests quite as devout and capable as our
cardinals, archbishops, deans, and canons! As regards the 10,000 landed
proprietors, their heirs would scarcely need any apprenticeship to make
quite as charming hosts.

The idea underlying this jest, for which, by the way, Saint-Simon had
to answer to the authorities, is, of course, that only the productive
class of citizens is in reality useful. Before the Revolution the
conflict was between the nobility and the bourgeoisie; now that a part
of the bourgeoisie is elevated to the same position as the nobility and
shares its privileges, the division is between the unproductive and the
productive class; the future belongs to industry, labour, the deeds of
peace and utility. But whereas contemporary French political economists
only went the length of granting the individual the greatest possible
amount of liberty to develop his powers, Saint-Simon demanded the
interference of the state. It was, according to him, the province of
the state to organise labour and production; it alone could ensure that
for the future man should utilise nature only, and not his fellow-man.
The state ought, while fully acknowledging the natural differences
between man and man, to do its utmost to abolish the artificial
differences--ought, therefore, to abolish all hereditary privileges,
and to annul or modify the law of succession.

In Saint-Simon's writings we find, then, in the first place, the
fundamental ideas of modern socialism--distrust of the consequences of
free competition and the demand that productive labour shall receive
the recompense and the honour which are its due--ideas which prompted
his famous dictum, that every member of society ought to hold the place
in it to which his abilities entitle him and receive the due reward
of his labour (_à chacun selon sa capacité!_). In the second place we
find, as a result of this demand, the inculcation, for the first time
in the writings of a French author, of the doctrine of the complete
equality of woman and man as members of society. And, lastly, we have,
in the matter of religion, rejection of all dogma, not with the aim of
destroying religion, but for the purpose of rescuing from the grave of
orthodoxy the one command: Love one another! This is the Christianity
which Saint-Simon expounded in his last important work, _Le nouveau
Christianisme_, a Christianity with only one doctrine, which may be
expressed as follows: The task of religion is to help society to
accomplish that great object, the speediest possible improvement of the
condition of the poorest and most numerous class.

There was something in Saint-Simon's personality which could not but
be congenial to the more simple-minded among the Romanticists. He had
the unbounded self-confidence which inspires others with confidence;
the philosopher's inclination to self-examination formed no part of
his nature; he was dogmatic; he was a prophet. He was, moreover,
possessed by the Romantic desire to experience everything, to feel
everything. The lines of conduct which he prescribed as indispensable
to progress in philosophy do not differ materially from those which
a young Romantic poet would have named as requisite for poetical
production. They are: (1) to lead during one's vigorous years as active
and independent a life as possible; (2) to make one's self thoroughly
acquainted with every variety of theory and every variety of practice;
(3) to study all classes of society and to insinuate one's self into
the most varied social positions; (4) to sum up one's observations and
draw a conclusion from them.

In Saint-Simon's philosophy there was one outstanding feature that,
as a rule, repelled the Romantic authors, namely, his enthusiasm for
industrial pursuits, which, as merely useful, were repugnant to most
of them. But the philosophy was by no means destitute of poetry. Its
revolutionary, its fantastic, and its Utopian elements were certain
to appeal to a Romanticist, as also its insistence upon natural
inequality, its idolisation of genius, and its leaning to religion. It
was poetical, too, in its solicitude for the welfare of woman and its
affectionate interest in the most unfortunate classes of society.

And it was not until after 1830 that Saint-Simonism began to be a
social power. Saint-Simon himself, like most founders of religions,
was both prophet and exemplar; he made of his disciples real apostles;
regarding him in sober earnest as the modern Messiah, they went out
into the world as his messengers. It was through these men and their
intellectual kin that society in general made acquaintance with the
doctrines of Saint-Simon during the reign of Louis Philippe, though
some of the intellectually vigilant had before this read the master's
own writings. There is a memorandum in Victor Hugo's diary for 1830
(_Littérature et Philosophie mêlées I_.) which shows that he, for one,
was already acquainted with Saint-Simon.

A year after Saint-Simon's death, his organ, _Le Producteur_, had to
be given up; but this very circumstance brought his disciples into
more personal and intimate relations with their adherents. And when
Enfantin, the St. Paul of the new faith, a man of imposing appearance,
a sacerdotal genius of the first rank, with something of a Brigham
Young's capacity for rule and leadership, became the real head of the
sect, it made proselytes of numbers of clever young men and cultivated,
high-spirited women. Large sums were voluntarily contributed towards
the support of the Saint-Simonist "family"; in 1831 alone they amounted
to 330,000 francs. A new weekly paper, _L'Organisateur_ was started,
and from 1830 onwards Paul Leroux edited the _Globe_. But the doctrines
propagated deviated ever more and more from Saint-Simon's original
system. In his scheme of organisation an important rôle was assigned
to the capitalists; one of the three Chambers proposed by him was to
consist exclusively of capitalists. But now capital was attacked.
Saint-Simon had distinctly reprobated every species of communism; now,
in the "family," community of goods was the order of the day, and state
communism was considered desirable. One particular conclusion deduced
from Saint-Simon's doctrines led to the downfall of the system and
the break-up of the sect. The master had taught that, since the old
Christianity had put enmity between the flesh and the spirit, it was
the task of the new to reconcile them. The old Christianity had made
self-denial and mortification of the flesh man's aim, the new ought to
make it well-being and universal happiness. Employing other words we
may express his thought thus:--The Christianity of renunciation has
been a sharp and violent remedy for that indulgence in the satisfaction
of every desire which was the order of the day under the empire of
Rome; but the remedy has shown itself to be quite as dangerous as the
disease. We have got rid of the disease, but what can free us from the
remedy without exposing us to a relapse? No power except that of the
new Christianity.

From this comparatively sensible idea Enfantin deduced doctrines the
practical application of which would have resulted in much such a state
of matters as prevailed amongst Jan van Leiden's Anabaptists. One of
the original doctrines of Saint-Simonism was that now, in the new era,
man, the individual, was superseded by the individual, _man-woman_,
whose constituent parts possessed equal rights and full liberty to
dissolve an unsatisfactory marriage, it being in the double, not the
single, being that true humanity is realised. From this doctrine
Enfantin drew the conclusion that there are two kinds of marriage, the
one the marriage of monogamists, the other the marriage of those who
in course of time become polygamists--that is to say, the enduring and
the ephemeral marriage; actual, simultaneous polygamy was to be the
prerogative only of the priests and priestesses. Although little could
be advanced, either in general discussion or in the court of justice,
against the Saint-Simonists' argument that the inauguration of this
order of things would have no other consequence than the confirming
and legalising of relations which at present existed illegally,
this particular practical conclusion sufficiently showed the entire
incapacity of the young enthusiasts to judge what was possible and
what impossible of realisation in the existing, state of society; it
proved them to be of the number of those who believe that society can
be reformed by a stroke of the pen. Their excuse is to be found in
the circumstance that, with the exception of Enfantin and Bazard, all
the Saint-Simonists of 1830 (as also all Lamennais' disciples) were
about twenty years of age. Ridicule cooled their ardour for the spread
of the faith. In the summer of 1832 the heads of the "family" were
sentenced, Enfantin to a year's imprisonment, Michel, Chevalier, and
Duveyrier to a trifling fine. The young enthusiasts of whom the little
sect was composed were scattered; but almost all of them distinguished
themselves in later life, either in the domain of science, of industry,
or of art. Their exaggerations of the theories of Saint-Simon had, like
the Utopian schemes of Fourier which belong to the same period, no
influence upon literature. It was influenced only by the original ideas.

The air of the day became impregnated with these ideas; minds were
infected by them; they seized upon some soft, impressionable character,
and this impressionable character influenced a strong one; they gained
possession of a woman through a man, or of a man through a woman, of a
poet through a priest, or of a young student through a poet. And after
the manner of ideas, they summoned up other ideas--socialistically
democratic ideas which had lain dormant since the end of the previous
century, like Louis Blanc's; philosophico-historic humanitarian ideas
like those of Pierre Leroux's maturer period, which recalled Schelling
and were inimical to plutocracy; ideas like Lamennais', which recalled
the thoughts and feelings with which, during the peasant revolts of the
Middle Ages, the priests who bore the crucifix in front of the rebel
armies inspired the proletariat, making them ready to risk their lives.

If the source of the Romantic School's reformatory desires and
endeavours (what we have called its tendency towards the good) is to
be found in the doctrines of Saint-Simon, its tendency towards the
beautiful is to be traced to the influence of another great Frenchman.

Nothing contributed more to the remarkable artistic advance noticeable
in French literature, and especially French lyric poetry, at this
period, than the discovery, the recovery, of a French genius of whose
existence no one had any idea. As, at the beginning of the modern era,
the impulse to Italian humanism was given by the excavation of the
first antique sculptures from the soil which had so long concealed
them, so now the impulse to a regular revolution in French poetry was
given by the discovery and publication, in 1819, of André Chénier's
works. Scales fell, as it were, from men's eyes when, twenty-six years
after their author's death, these soulful Ionic poems were brought to
the light of day; all the literary idols of the Empire, Delille and all
the didactic descriptive poets, fell and were broken to pieces. A fresh
spring breeze from ancient Hellas, the true, the real Greece, blew
over France and fertilised the ground. The Alexandrine, which in the
eighteenth century had been so flaccid and feeble, in the seventeenth
so stiff and symmetrical, revealed mysterious harmonies, a delicate,
flexible force, an audacious, sensuous charm, and (now that the cæsura
no longer came inevitably after the sixth foot and the clause no longer
ended with the line) a versatility hitherto undreamt of. The ideas
and emotions were modern, but the artistic spirit which dictated the
expression given them was antique. In this combination lay concealed
the motive power that produced a whole literary development of the same
species as that to which Ronsard, by adopting a similar standpoint,
gave the impulse in the sixteenth century. In this new literature the
ancient and the modern spirit met; and their meeting-place was at a
great distance from their rendezvous in the days of Louis XIV. The
clear radiance of the name of André Chénier extinguished the light of
all the names that had hitherto shone brightly. A poet with the light
of genius on his brow and the martyr's aureole round his head, had
risen from the grave to lead the young generation into the promised
land of the new literature.

André Marie Chénier, born in Constantinople (Galata) in 1762, was the
son of a beautiful, bright, and intellectual Greek woman, whose maiden
name was Santi l'Homaka.[1] His father was the French consul-general
for Turkey, an eminent savant. While still a little child, André was
taken to France, to a beautiful part of Languedoc. During the years
that he passed there he forgot his native language, but when he began
to learn it again at school in Paris, he picked it up so fast that at
the age of sixteen he had completely mastered it. He devoted himself
eagerly to the study of its literature, with which he was as well
acquainted as with that of France. At the age of twenty he entered the
army as a _cadet gentilhomme_, a kind of second lieutenant, and went
into garrison with his regiment at Strasburg. He spent all his spare
time in studying languages. But the garrison life, with its utter want
of intellectual interests, was very irksome to him; after six months
of it he returned to Paris; and as he at this time developed a malady
the only cure for which was a regular and quiet life, he threw up his
commission. But abstinence and inaction were little to the taste of a
young man in whose case the eager passions of youth were combined with
the restless artistic and scientific bent of the genius. In company
with friends he travelled for two years in Switzerland and Italy,
making a long stay in Rome. He fell ill in Naples and was unable to
reach Greece, the goal of the journey, the country he longed to see.
When he returned to Paris in the beginning of 1785, he mixed with the
best society of the day in his parents' house. He made acquaintance
with Le Brun, the poet, David, the painter, Lavoisier, the chemist, and
numbers of diplomatists and public officials whom the Revolution was to
make famous. Besides these he had his own private circle of friends,
most of whom were talented young noblemen. Dividing his time pretty
equally between study and pleasure, he was also much in the company
of the most frivolous and dissipated set of the day, which consisted
of fine gentlemen (the Duke of Montmorency, Prince Czartoryski, &c.),
ladies of rank (the Duchesse de Mailly, the Princesse de Chalais, &c.),
artists and authors (Beaumarchais, Mercier, &c), and beautiful young
courtesans (the Rose, Glycère, Amélie of Chénier's poems)--a mixed
company whose ways and doings Rétif de la Bretonne has described to us,
and the majority of whom fell victims to the guillotine. At this period
of his life Chénier made acquaintance with a man who, sharing to the
full his love of liberty and hatred of all terrorism, at once became
his friend; this was the Italian poet Alfieri, who had just arrived
in Paris accompanied by the Duchess of Albany. And almost at the same
time he became acquainted with the woman who is extolled and bitterly
accused in many of his poems under the name of Camille--Madame de
Bonneuil, the love of his youth, to whom he was long and passionately
attached. Often in her country home did young André kneel at this
lady's feet whilst she played the harp and sang one of the fashionable
romances recounting the pains and joys of love.

In 1787 he was appointed attaché to the embassy in London, where he
felt miserably lonely and dependent. Electrified by the news of the
outbreak of the Revolution, he returned, full of hope, to Paris. Ere
this he had become conscious of his poetic gifts; he now began to
plan and write poetic works, varying very much in character, but all
severely antique in style. Twice before had French literature returned
to the antique. The first time was in the days of Ronsard, when men
decked antiquity with the gaudy tinsel of the Italian Renaissance;
the second was in the days of Louis XIV., when they invested it with
court pomp and conventions. André Chénier, who had Greek blood in his
veins, who read and wrote his mother's tongue as easily as French, and
who perhaps alone among Frenchmen saw ancient Hellas neither through
Latin spectacles nor through the dust of seventeenth-century perruques,
André Chénier calmly and simply, like a young Apollo, put an end to the
existing conception of the antique, and, consequently, of the nature
of poetry. He realised that the poets of Greece had spoken and written
in the language of the people, and that their perfection of form, the
result of self-restraint, was something widely different from reverence
for arbitrary, conventional directions and prohibitions. He represents
a reaction against the eighteenth-century poetic style which resembles
Thorvaldsen's reaction against eighteenth-century sculpture; like
Thorvaldsen, he frequently imitated and made use of the antique; he
surpasses the Dane in ardour, sensuous warmth, and pathos.

Before 1789 André Chénier was the elegiac, idyllic, and erotic poet. He
developed marvellously both as poet and man after the French Revolution
broke out and filled the air with its thunders and lightnings. He had
been educated in the philosophic spirit with which Voltaire had imbued
the aristocracy of intellect; he had shared in the feelings which led
distinguished Frenchmen to support the cause of the free states of
North America; now he hailed with the purest enthusiasm the new era of
liberty which he had so long desired to see. His idea of liberty was
absolute freedom in the domains of thought and religion. Instructed
"by the eighteen centuries which theological follies have stained with
blood, devoid of respect for the priesthood of any creed whatsoever,"
because he is convinced that they have one and all "conspired against
the happiness and peace of humanity," he desires "to break the yoke of
despotism and priestcraft." He was so inexperienced and enthusiastic
as to believe it possible that this result could be attained without
overstepping the limits of the strictly lawful.

During the first year of the Revolution he still devoted most of his
time to poetry. He conceived a short-lived passion for a young and
beautiful lady, Madame Gouy d'Arcy, whose praises he has sung in a
famous poem. But politics soon drove all other occupations and passions
into the background. In 1792, with a prevision of the approaching Reign
of Terror, André made a violent attack on the Jacobins in a newspaper
article. When his younger brother, the famous revolutionary poet,
Marie-Joseph Chénier, who was an active member of the Jacobin Club,
felt obliged to defend his fellow-members, André proudly and recklessly
took up the gauntlet thrown down. Mutual friends of the brothers
managed to bring the painful controversy to a speedy close, but the
strained relations lasted for some time. Before this the brothers
had been warmly attached. But it was with André as with the ancient
Romans; the ties of blood had to give way to the political idea. In
the early days of the Revolution he had allowed his brother's tragedy,
_Brutus and Cassius_, to be dedicated to him, and in acknowledging this
dedication had, with the naïveté of the day, declared his conviction
that the great Brutus had expressed himself exactly as he was made to
do in the drama. He called the heroes of the play "noble murderers,
great tyrannicides, whom the phrase-makers of our day are incapable
of understanding"--in short, expressed his approval of regicide when
necessary. But the trial of Louis XVI. roused his unbounded wrath; he
solicited permission to assist in the King's defence; he wrote a series
of articles in his favour; and when the sentence of death had been
passed, it was André Chénier who composed the beautiful and dignified
letter in which the King demanded the permission of the National
Assembly to appeal to the nation. It is (as Becq de Fouquières has
remarked) significant that three of Europe's best poets, André Chénier,
Schiller, and Alfieri, who were all equally antagonistic to the old
autocratic government, and had all hailed the Revolution with joy,
should all in 1792 desire to defend King Louis.

Marie-Joseph Chénier was a less gifted and less seriously minded man
than his brother; he followed with the stream and rejoiced in the
popularity which a talent exactly suited to the requirements of the
time procured him. André had the courage which on occasion manifests
itself in proud defiance; he was of the stuff of which martyrs are
made. Obvious danger only made him bolder in his attacks upon the
men who, in his opinion, were disgracing France. He published in his
own name his extremely sarcastic ode on the occasion of the fête
given by the Jacobins to the amnestied soldiers of the Chateauvieux
regiment, who had with perfect justice been sentenced to the galleys
for ordinary, mean crimes. And after Marat's assassination, when 44,000
altars were erected to "the friend of the people," André Chénier
was the one French poet who felt constrained to sing the praises of
Charlotte Corday--a much more daring deed at that time than afterwards.
He exclaims:

    "La Grèce, ô fille illustre, admirant ton courage,
     Épuiserait Paros pour placer ton image
     Auprès d'Harmodius, auprès de son ami;
     Et des chœurs sur ta tombe, en une sainte ivresse,
     Chanterait Némésis, la tardive déesse,
     Qui frappe le méchant sur son trône endormi.

     Mais la France à la hache abandonne ta tête.
     C'est au monstre égorgé qu'on prépare une fête
     Parmi ses compagnons, tous dignes de son sort
     Oh! quel noble dédain fît sourire ta bouche,
     Quand un brigand, vengeur de ce brigand farouche,
     Crut te faire pâlir aux menaces de mort."

After the death of the King it was impossible for André to remain in
Paris. His brother found a refuge for him in a small house in a retired
part of Versailles. Here he lived for some time in quiet and solitude.
He worked at his long poem _Hermès_, of which he had as yet only
produced fragments, though it had occupied his thoughts more or less
for the last ten years, and wrote to Fanny (Madame Laurent Lecoulteux),
a lady who lived in the same neighbourhood, his last love poems, which
are distinguished by an emotion new in André Chénier's writings--the
melancholy of a purely spiritual love. The nobility and charm of a
peculiarly beautiful feminine character communicated themselves to
these sad, chaste verses.

But this peaceful life at Versailles was only the lull before the
storm. Andre's efforts to prevent an arrest (of a lady) for which
orders had been given by the Committee of Public Safety, led to his
own imprisonment. He spent his time in Saint-Lazare in revising his
manuscripts and writing some of his grandest and most beautiful poems,
among others the two famous ones to the Duchesse de Fleury, née Coigny
(_La jeune Captive_, and the lines incorrectly entitled _Mademoiselle
de Coigny_), and the beautiful fragment which begins "Comme un dernier
rayon." He was denounced before the tribunal of the Revolution as an
enemy of the people, and was condemned to death for having "written
against liberty and in defence of tyranny." The day before this
happened he had written the lines:

    "Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zéphyre
        Anime la fin d'un beau jour,
     Au pied de l'échafaud j'essaye encor ma lyre.
        Peut-être est-ce bientôt mon tour.
     Peut-être avant que l'heure en cercle promenée
        Ait posé sur l'émail brillant,
     Dans les soixante pas où sa route est bornée.
        Son pied sonore et vigilant,
     Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupière.
        Avant que de ses deux moitiés
     Ce vers que je commence ait atteint la dernière,
        Peut-être en ces murs effrayés
     Le messager de mort, noir recruteur des ombres
        Escorté d'infâmes soldats,
     Remplira de mon nom ces longs corridors sombres."

On the evening of the 7th Thermidor 1794, the eve of Robespierre's
fall, which, if it had happened a day earlier, would have saved him,
André Chénier mounted the scaffold. As they were being driven to the
place of execution, he said despondently to Roucher, the painter,
who was guillotined along with him: "Alas! I have done nothing for
posterity." Tradition tells that on the scaffold he struck his
forehead, exclaiming: "Yet I had something there!"

Although André Chénier's prose articles had aroused much attention,
even abroad--Wieland sent him greetings, the King of Poland sent him a
medal--he won no fame as a poet during his lifetime. He had published
only two of his poems, the Ode to David on the occasion of the scene in
the Tennis Court, and the ironic Ode to the Chateauvieux Regiment; and
from that July day in 1794 when his head was severed from his body, his
name was forgotten; the memory of him vanished.

Then one fine day in 1819 a firm of Paris publishers who were bringing
out a new edition of Marie-Joseph Chénier's (now perfectly antiquated)
dramatic works, were offered some poems by "an unknown brother of
Chénier's" to fill up the last volume with. They requested a well-known
writer of that day, Henri de Latouche, to look through these poems.
Struck by their beauty, this man began to make inquiry after the rest
of Andre's manuscripts. He brought one old packet, one little yellow
book after another to light, made a careful, tasteful selection, and by
its publication produced a revolution in the poetic doctrines of his
country. The name of André Chénier was soon known throughout the land,
and the youth of the provinces as well as the youth of Paris received
the new poetic revelation with enthusiasm. (See the description of this
enthusiasm in Balzac's _Les deux Poètes_, the introduction to _Les
Illusions perdues_.)

This poet, who had now been so long dead, not only made all the lyric
poetry that had been written in the last generation seem antiquated
and impossible, but actually threw Lamartine's first _Meditations
Poétiques_, which were published about this time, completely into
the shade. For the scene of Chénier's poetry is not the clouds or
the region above the clouds, but the earth; his is poetry that is
pure without being pious, soulful without being sentimental; it has
nothing to do with the infinite and the abstract, is not mystic and not
irreligious.

The pagan youth of André Chénier's earlier works, who believed in
Apollo and Artemis, but, above all, in Aphrodite, was brought face
to face with the founder of the Seraphic school; the Epicurean (in
the antique sense of the word) with the spiritualist. The first women
whose praises Chénier sang were not intellectual, consumptive Elviras
like Lamartine's, but warm-blooded, truly loving women, or young
and beautiful courtesans of the days of Louis XVI.--only that his
sensuousness never degenerated into the voluptuousness, still less into
the wantonness of that period. The wild orgy, when he described it
(see, for example, the 28th Elegy), produced the effect of a bas-relief
of the noblest Greek period. The young woman with the flowing locks is
described with a chasteness of style which makes of her a dancing Greek
mænad, and the sober serenity of its representation transforms the
drinking scene into an Athenian Bacchanalian feast, executed in Parian
marble. All this life bore the imprint of pure beauty and perfect
simplicity. The element of ugliness which Hugo was to introduce into
lyric poetry, and to the attraction of which Lamartine at a future
period succumbed, was as entirely absent as devoutness or mysticism.

But the man, too, who loomed through the works and fragments of André
Chénier's maturer years, formed a suggestive temperamental antithesis
to those lyric outpourings which aroused enthusiasm in 1819. The women
whom he celebrated in unforgettable poems were heroines or victims of
the Revolution. There was a manly pathos in his iambics which recalled
the old Greek iambic poets, and the fragments of his long poem,
_Hermès_, revealed a philosophy of life, the antique sincerity and
scientific sobriety of which formed the strongest possible contrast to
the romantic emotionalism of Lamartine. To André the stars are not the
flowers in the fields of heaven, but simply worlds revolving in floods
of ether; he writes of their weight, their shapes, their distances,
and their law of gravitation, which he feels influencing his own soul.
Providence does not send its voice down from them to men, prayers do
not ascend from men to them; the result of reflection is a profound
impression of the unity of nature and its subjection to law.

But André Chénier's poetry, which in so many ways anticipates that of
the nineteenth century--it is distinctly lyrical, and in France the
eighteenth century produced no other real lyric poet--is also marked by
the influence of the two leading spirits of his own age, Rousseau and
Voltaire. The idyllic element in it is due to Rousseau; the pastoral
scenes may owe much to Theocritus, but Chénier drew from this source
only because Rousseau had led the way back to natural conditions. To
Voltaire is due that passion for inquiry into what lies at the root
of everything, which led André to study and borrow from Newton and to
compete with Lucretius in a didactic poem on Nature.

It was, however, especially by his purely artistic, nay, in a manner
his purely technical, merits that André Chénier produced such an
emancipating, reviving effect upon the poetry of the second generation
after his own. The Alexandrine of his poetry is no longer Racine's;
by pruning or adding to this last at will he made it a far suppler,
freer, more varied measure; the result of the still more astonishing
new application of the cæsura in his dithyrambic poetry was a hitherto
unknown lyric passion and vigour. Most of these metrical reforms had
indeed been attempted by Lamartine, but, as it were, unconsciously, and
without that decision or precision which the young men admired so much
in Chénier. All who were capable of appreciating plasticity and vigour
in style swore by his name. They involuntarily divided the writers of
the day into two great groups, one descending from Madame de Staël,
the voluble, prolific improvisatrice, who poured forth a whirlwind
of words and ideas without troubling herself much about shaping them
into a whole, and the other the school now in process of formation,
which, taking André Chénier as its model, made the strictest artistic
conscientiousness its guiding principle.

Along with the metrical improvements in André Chénier's poetry we
have great progress in colouring. Until now poets had preferred the
idealistic, sentimental, transcendental expression to the realistically
descriptive word. They had written of "The heavens in their wrath;"
André wrote, "A black and cloudy sky;" they wrote of "delicate
fingers;" André Chénier preferred to say "long, white fingers." And
this realistic exactness in certain kinds of description does not
exclude another novelty, a sort of chiaroscuro of words and expressions
which by their mysterious or enigmatic or fantastic quality suddenly
open out wide, unexpected vistas.

When we regard this beautiful poetry more from the human than the
artistic standpoint, what we miss in it is the expression of personal
grief. In spite of its fire and its Frenchness it is too measured, too
Attic. The ugly is too systematically excluded; and among ugly and
unclean things, the poet has, in genuine Greek fashion, reckoned his
own melancholy, his private sufferings and calamities. It is only from
some prose memoranda and a few letters that we learn, for instance,
how much he suffered from his dependent position in London. He does
not give this suffering expression in his poetry. Occasionally at
an earlier period he alluded in a roundabout fashion to the irksome
restraints imposed on him by his poverty--in such a poem, for instance,
as _La Liberté_, an idyll in the style of Theocritus, in which the
shepherd breaks his flute and shuns the dance and song of the young
maidens, rejecting all consolation because he is a slave.[2]

As a fine specimen of André Chénier's writing take _Le Malade_, a poem
which, like most of his, is made out of almost nothing, yet which
produces an unextinguishable impression. In its composition it reminds
one of the third scene in the first act of Racine's _Phèdre_, which
seems to have been its far-away model. The mother prays:

    "Apollon, Dieu sauveur, dieux des savants mystères,
     Dieu de la vie, et dieu des plantes solitaires,
     Dieu vainqueur de Python, dieu jeune et triomphant,
     Prends pitié de mon fils, de mon unique enfant!
     Prends pitié de sa mère aux larmes condamnée,
     Qui ne vit que pour lui, qui meurt abandonnée,
     Qui n'a pas dû rester pour voir mourir son fils;
     Dieu jeune, viens aider sa jeunesse. Assoupis,
     Assoupis dans son sein cette fièvre brûlante
     Qui dévore la fleur de sa vie innocente.
     Apollon, si jamais, échappé du tombeau,
     Il retourne au Ménale avoir soin du troupeau,
     Ces mains, ces vieilles mains orneront ta statue
     De ma coupe d'onyx à tes pieds suspendue;
     Et, chaque été nouveau, d'un jeune taureau blanc
     La hache à ton autel fera couler le sang.

     Et bien, mon fils, es-tu toujours impitoyable?
     Ton funeste silence est-il inexorable?
     Enfant, tu veux mourir? Tu veux, dans ses vieux ans,
     Laisser ta mère seule avec ses cheveux blancs?
     Tu veux que ce soit moi qui ferme ta paupière?
     Que j'unisse ta cendre à celle de ton père?
     C'est toi qui me devais ces soins religieux,
     Et ma tombe attendait tes pleurs et tes adieux.
     Parle, parle, mon fils, quel chagrin te consume?
     Les maux qu'on dissimule en ont plus d'amertume.
     Ne lèveras-tu point ces yeux appesantis?

     ---Ma mère, adieu; je meurs, et tu n'as plus de fils.
     Non, tu n'as plus de fils, ma mère bien-aimée.
     Je te perds. Une plaie ardente, envenimée,
     Me ronge; avec effort je respire, et je crois
     Chaque fois respirer pour la dernière fois.
     Je ne parlerai pas. Adieu; ce lit me blesse;
     Ce tapis qui me couvre accable ma faiblesse,
     Tout me pèse et me lasse. Aide-moi, je me meurs,
     Tourne-moi sur le flanc. Ah! j'expire! ô douleurs!"

In vain she gives him a healing draught brewed with magic arts by a
Thessalian woman. But he speaks again:

    "----O coteaux d'Érymanthe! ô vallons! ô bocage!
     O vent sonore et frais qui troublais le feuillage,
     Et faisais frémir l'onde, et sur leur jeune sein
     Agitais les replis de leur robe de lin!
     De légères beautés troupe agile et dansante....
     Tu sais, tu sais, ma mère? aux bords de l'Érymanthe....
     Là, ni loups ravisseurs, ni serpents, ni poisons....
     O visage divin! ô fêtes! ô chansons!
     Des pas entrelacés, des fleurs, une onde pure,
     Aucun lieu n'est si beau dans toute la nature.
     Dieux! ces bras et ces flancs, ces cheveux, ces pieds nus,
     Si blancs, si délicats.... Je ne te verrai plus!"

When the mother learns that it is of hopeless love her son is dying,
she says:

    "Mais mon fils, mais dis-moi, quelle belle dansante,
     Quelle vierge as-tu vu au bord de l'Érymanthe?
     N'est-tu pas riche et beau? du moins quand la douleur
     N'avait point de ta joue éteint la jeune fleur?
     Parie. Est-ce cette Églé, fille du roi des ondes,
     Ou cette jeune Irène aux longues tresses blondes?
     Ou ne sera-ce point cette fière beauté
     Dont j'entends le beau nom chaque jour répété,
     Dont j'apprends que partout les belles sont jalouses?
     Qu'aux temples, aux festins, les mères, les épouses,
     Ne sauraient voir, dit-on, sans peine et sans effroi?
     Cette belle Daphné?...--Dieux! ma mère, tais-toi,
     Tais-toi. Dieux! Qu'as-tu dit? Elle est fière, inflexible;
     Comme les immortels elle est belle et terrible!
     Mille amants l'ont aimée; ils l'ont aimée en vain.
     Comme eux j'aurais trouvé quelque refus hautain.
     Non, garde que jamais elle soit informée ...
     Mais, ô mort! ô tourment! ô mère bien-aimée!
     Tu vois dans quels ennuis dépérissent mes jours.
     Ma mère bien-aimée, ah! viens à mon secours:
     Je meurs; va la trouver: que tes traits, que ton âge,
     De sa mère à ses yeux offrent la sainte image.
     Tiens, prends cette corbeille et nos fruits les plus beaux,
     Prends notre Amour d'ivoire, honneur de ces hameaux;
     Prends la coupe d'onyx à Corinthe ravie,
     Prends mes jeunes chevreaux, prends mon cœur, prends ma vie,
     Jette tout à ses pieds; apprends-lui qui je suis;
     Dis-lui que je me meurs, que tu n'as plus de fils.
     Tombe aux pieds du vieillard, gémis, implore, presse;
     Adjure cieux et mers, dieu, temple, autel, déesse;
     Pars, et si tu reviens sans les avoir fléchis
     Adieu, ma mère, adieu, tu n'auras plus de fils.
     --J'aurai toujours un fils; va, la belle espérance
     Me dit ... Elle s'incline, et, dans un doux silence,
     Elle couvre ce front, terni par les douleurs,
     De baisers maternels entremêlés de pleurs.
     Puis elle sort en hâte, inquiète et tremblante,
     Sa démarche est de crainte et d'âge chancelante.
     Elle arrive; et bientôt revenant sur ses pas,
     Haletante, de loin: 'Mon cher fils, tu vivras,
     Tu vivras.' Elle vient s'asseoir près de la couche:
     Le vieillard la suivait, le sourire à la bouche.
     La jeune belle aussi, rouge et le front baissé,
     Vient, jette sur le lit un coup d'œil. L'insensé
     Tremble; sous ses tapis il veut cacher la tête.
     'Ami, depuis trois jours tu n'es d'aucune fête,
     Dit-elle; que fais-tu? pourquoi veux-tu mourir?
     Tu souffres. On me dit que je peux te guérir.
     Vis, et formons ensemble une seule famille;
     Que mon père ait un fils, et ta mère un fille.'"

One cannot imagine more simplicity, less attempt at effect, in the
solution of such a situation.

It was a foundation of this kind which the new Romantic School found to
build upon--noble simplicity of language, correct drawing, a Grecian
rhythm in all the transitions, the beautiful lines of the bas-relief,
pure colour, and austere form.


[1] Thiers was the grandson of this lady's sister.

[2] Sainte-Beuve is evidently in error, when, in his comparison of
André Chénier with Mathurin Régnier (in his book on French poetry in
the sixteenth century), he attributes the poem _La Liberté_ to a period
subsequent to Chénier's residence in London. Becq de Fouquières has
proved the improbability of Andre's having been in London before 1790.




VII


DE VIGNY'S POETRY AND HUGO'S "ORIENTALES"


The first author to show the influence of Chénier was one of the
most artistically audacious of the school, one of its original
leaders--Alfred de Vigny--who as lyric poet was at times very faulty,
at times an immaculate master. Chaste, lucid, pure, and austere,
there is a quality in his best verse which has led all the critics
who have attempted to describe it to employ such figures as the sheen
of ivory, the whiteness of ermine, the sailing of the swan. It has
the artistic severity, the sober colouring, the conciseness and the
fastidiousness which also characterise Chénier's. And De Vigny was
evidently afraid that these qualities would be attributed to Chénier's
influence. For although no collection of his poetry was published
before 1819, he took the trouble in later editions to furnish a number
of the poems which seem to bear the clearest marks of this influence,
with earlier dates, going even as far back as 1815. But even leaving
out of consideration the fact that single poems of Chénier's had been
given to the public (in Chateaubriand's _Génie du Christianisme_ and
as a supplement to Millevoye's poetical works) still earlier than this,
it is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that, in spite of the
absolute uprightness which as a rule distinguished him, Alfred de
Vigny has antedated his poems to give himself an undeserved appearance
of complete originality. For the single poems which he published
before the first collection in question are far inferior to those
contained in it which bear a much earlier date--so inferior that he
excluded them from the complete edition of his works. André Chénier's
influence upon De Vigny is thus indisputable. The latter assimilated
many of the characteristics of the rediscovered master, though he
emancipated himself from the old-fashioned Hellenism of style which
hampered Chénier's flight. The poem _La Dryade_, to which he gives
the additional title of "Idyll in the manner of Theocritus," is in
reality an idyll in the manner of André Chénier. What distinguishes De
Vigny most markedly from Chénier as a lyric poet is his cult of pure
intellect and his proud, stoic feeling of solitude. He has painted his
own ideal portrait in such poems as _Moïse, La colère de Samson_, and
_La mort du loup_. He is very present in Moses' sad cry:

    "O Seigneur, j'ai vécu puissant et solitaire,
     Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre!"

I seem to hear the plaint of his strong, sorely wounded self-esteem
in Samson's outburst of wrath over Delilah's treachery (his Delilah
being the great actress, Marie Dorval). Thrice already has he forgiven
her, but she has been more ashamed than surprised at finding herself
discovered and forgiven:

    "Car la bonté de l'Homme est forte et sa douceur
     Écrase, en l'absolvant, l'être faible et menteur."

And I feel his stoicism, and at the same time read an apology for his
unproductiveness, in those words in the poem on the wolf which dies
without uttering a sound:

    "À voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce que l'on laisse,
     Seul le silence est grand, tout le reste est faiblesse."

Granted that there is a little affected rigidity in this attitude of
his, still it is his pride, his spiritual nobility, his desire to
perpetuate in his poetry the purity and austerity of his spirit, which
impel him to assume it.

The poet who undertook the further development of Chénier's lyrical
style was a man of different intellectual stamp from both him and
De Vigny--a man intoxicated with self-confidence. Victor Hugo was
three-and-twenty, "the bright dawn illumining his spring." In one of
his poems ("À Mademoiselle J.," in _Chants du Crépuscule_) he has
himself described the certainty of victory with which he made his début
as a lyric poet:

    "Alors je disais aux étoiles:
     O mon astre, en vain tu te voiles.
     Je sais que tu brilles là-haut!
     Alors je disais à la rive:
     Vous êtes la gloire, et j'arrive.
     Chacun de mes jours est un flot!

     Je disais au bois: forêt sombre,
     J'ai comme toi des bruits sans nombre.
     À l'aigle: contemple mon front!
     Je disais aux coupes vidées:
     Je suis plein d'ardentes idées
     Dont les âmes s'enivreront!

     Alors, du fond de vingt calices,
     Rosée, amour, parfum, délices,
     Se répandaient sur mon sommeil;
     J'avais des fleurs plein mes corbeilles;
     Et comme un vif essaim d'abeilles
     Mes pensées volaient au soleil!

     La terre me disait: Poète!
     Le ciel me répétait: Prophète!
     Marche! parle! enseigne! bénis!
     Penche l'urne des chants sublimes!
     Verse aux vallons noirs comme aux cimes,
     Dans les aires et dans les nids!"

Victor Hugo took the verse which André Chénier had created, that
pellucid medium of pure beauty, and when he had breathed upon it, it
gleamed with all the colours of the rainbow. Strangely enough it was
again from Greece that the inspiration came; but this time from modern
Greece. Under the impression produced by the Greek War of Liberation
Hugo set to work to write his _Orientales_. But what a different use
of language! The words painted; the words shone, "gilded by a sunbeam"
like the beautiful Jewess of the poems; they sang, as if to a secret
accompaniment of Turkish music.

First had come Oehlenschläger's East. This was the East of the child,
of the fairy-tale book, of the _Thousand and One Nights_--half Persia,
half Copenhagen. It was dreams of genii in lamps and rings, of diamonds
and sapphires by the bushel, the illimitable splendours of imagination
all grouped round a few imperishable poetic types.

Then came Byron's East, a great decorative background for passion in
its recklessness and melancholy.

The third in order was Goethe's, the East of the _West-östlicher
Divan_, the refuge of the old man. He took the reposeful, the
contemplative element of Oriental philosophy and wove German Lieder
into it. Rückert, the great word-artist, followed in his steps.

But Hugo's East was different from all of these; it was the brightly
variegated, outward, barbaric East, the land of light and colour.
Sultans and muftis, dervishes and caliphs, hetmans, pirates,
Klephts--delicious sounds in his ears, delightful pictures before his
eyes. Time is a matter of indifference--far back antiquity, Middle
Ages, or to-day; race is a matter of indifference--Hebrew, Moor, or
Turk; place is a matter of indifference--Sodom and Gomorrah, Granada,
Navarino; creed is a matter of indifference. "No one," he tells us in
his preface, "has a right to ask the poet whether he believes in God or
in gods, in Pluto, in Satan, or in nothing." His province is to paint.
He is possessed by a genius which leaves him no peace until the East,
as he feels it, is before him upon paper.

A careful study of the _Orientales_ shows us how they came into being.
They were not written in the order in which they stand in the book. The
first poem in order of production is No. 23, "La ville prise," written
in 1824; next come poems written in 1826 and 1827 upon incidents in
the War of Liberation, and not until 1828 is the poet's imagination
thoroughly fired. The horizon widens; all the elements which tend, by
reason of a close or distant connection of ideas, to crystallise round
the Turkish war, group themselves round that nucleus.

If we examine the little poem, "La ville prise," which is an outcome
of the powerful emotion produced in the poet by the martyrdom of
Greece, we are struck by the identity of its standpoint with the
standpoint of the French Romantic school of painting. In 1824 Eugène
Delacroix exhibits his famous picture of the "Massacre of Scio," a
bold and masterly delineation, glowing with flaming colour and intense
feeling, of a horrible incident, destitute of the slightest element
of conventional poetic justice. Very soon after this Hugo writes his
little poem. It purports to be the intelligence brought by a humble
slave. Standing with his hands crossed on his breast, he says:

    "La flamme par ton ordre, ô Roi, luit et dévore.
     De ton peuple en grondant elle étouffe les cris;
     Et, rougissant les toits comme une sombre aurore,
     Semble en son vol joyeux danser sur leurs débris.

     Le meurtre aux mille bras comme un géant se lève;
     Les palais embrasés se changent en tombeaux;
     Pères, femmes, époux, tout tombe sous le glaive;
     Autour de la cité s'appellent les corbeaux.

     Les mères ont frémi! les vierges palpitantes,
     O calife! ont pleuré leurs jeunes ans flétris;
     Et les coursiers fougueux ont traîné hors des tentes
     Leurs corps vivans, de coups et de baisers meurtris!

     Les tout petits enfans, écrasés sous les dalles,
     Ont vécu: de leur sang le fer s'abreuve encor...--
     Ton peuple baise, ô Roi, la poudre des sandales
     Qu'à ton pied glorieux attache un cercle d'or!"

This is the first chord which Hugo strikes in these poems; it rings
sharp and shrill; but the poem is not quite good, because it is not
quite true. It was not thus the slave spoke; we are sensible of the
poet's own indignation in the narrative. The next poems, "Les têtes du
Sérail," "Enthousiasme," and "Navarin," bear additional evidence to the
modern Greek influence to which we originally owe _Les Orientales_. But
then the poet makes a great artistic advance; he transports himself to
the standpoint of the Turks, writes himself into their frame of mind.

"La douleur du Pacha" is the first, half-ironic attempt. Dervishes and
bombardiers, odalisques and slaves, one after the other, each from his
or her own point of view, try to imagine what can be the reason of the
Pacha's sitting musing in his tent with his eyes full of tears. But
none of the reasons that occur to them is the true one. It is not that
his favourite concubine has been unfaithful, nor yet that there has
been a head too few in the fellah's sack. No, he is grieving over the
death of his favourite Nubian tiger.

But this is still only an attempt. The poet has not yet entirely got
rid of himself, got outside of himself; we are conscious of him in one
weak spot, which disturbs and dissolves the mental picture. But now
comes the "Marche turque," and we are in the East.

Though the refrain of this masterly poem is a very barbarous one, its
general tone is not savage; it is serious, full of a piety which is
not the less heartfelt, and of ideas of honour which are not the less
sincere because they are different from ours:

    "Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
     Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.

     J'aime le vrai soldat, effroi de Bélial;
     Son turban évasé rend son front plus sévère;
     Il baise avec respect la barbe de son père,
     Il voue à son vieux sabre un amour filial,
     Et porte un doliman percé dans les mêlées
     De plus de coups que n'a de taches étoilées
         La peau du tigre impérial.

     Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
     Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.
        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

     Celui qui d'une femme aime les entretiens;
     Celui qui ne sait pas dire dans une orgie
     Quelle est d'un beau cheval la généalogie;
     Qui cherche ailleurs qu'en soi force, amis et soutiens,
     Sur de soyeux divans se couche avec mollesse,
     Craint le soleil, sait lire, et par scrupule laisse
         Tout le vin de Chypre aux chrétiens;

     Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
     Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.

     Celui-là, c'est un lâche, et non pas un guerrier.
     Ce n'est pas lui qu'on voit dans la bataille ardente
     Pousser un fier cheval, à la housse pendante,
     La sabre en main, debout sur le large étrier;
     Il n'est bon qu'à presser des talons une mule,
     En murmurant tout bas quelque vaine formule,
         Comme un prêtre qui va prier!

     Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
     Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle."

There is nothing Greek in this, nor yet any European satire of Turkish
barbarity; the poet has become the dramatist within the Turkish
intellectual and emotional pale; in this local colouring there is the
genuine brutality which no northern poet has ever attained in handling
such themes. This is true masculine savagery.

These are not sentimental, but robust major chords; and the major key
predominates in all the poems, even where woman and love entwine their
rhythms among the harsh, masculine ones. There are cruel, heartless
women, like the Jewish sultana who demands the heads of her rivals;
and there are refined, musical daughters of Eve, like the captive who
longs for her own country and yet loves the sight of Smyrna's fairy
palaces, and rejoices in breathing the soft air of the East in winter
and in summer, by day and at night when the full moon shines upon the
sea. There is the charming woman depicted in "Les adieux de l'hôtesse
Arabe." The love which finds expression in this last-named poem is sad
in its feeling of unrequitedness, repressed and chaste; it is a mixture
of sisterly care, childlike superstition, and submissive worship, which
reveals itself with plastic grace in a noble, proud character.

From the moment when the poet deserts the Greek camp for that of the
enemy, his imagination allows itself free play. From pictures of
Turkish cruelty it passes to the delineation of Turkish superstition.
"Les Djinns" is a metrical marvel in which the approach of the wild
hunt to the house, its thundering over the heads of the terror-stricken
inmates, and its gradual dying away into the distance, are represented
by the gradual rise from two-syllabic to ten-syllabic lines and gradual
fall back to the two-syllabic. From the life of the Turkish seraglio
it wings its flight to the tents of the Bedouins in the desert; from
the desert as it is to-day to the desert as it was in the days when
Buonaberdi overshadowed it with the wings of his eagles.

Enormous stretches of sand and water, the ordering and manœuvres of
masses of troops, the architecture of towns, the sieges and storming
of these towns, are seen with the poet's eye; and at a certain moment
a natural association of ideas summons up the picture of great scenes
of destruction read of in Bible history. In these last Hugo found his
most gorgeous material. And it was also the material nearest akin to
his own personality. His imagination was always at its best in dealing
with the monstrous. The original Pegasus was, in the literal sense of
the word, a superb monster, and that is just what Hugo's Pegasus is, in
the figurative.

He writes "Le Feu du Ciel," the first poem in the book, the last in
chronological order. We see the awful black cloud sailing across the
sky. Whence has it come? Whither is it bound? No one knows. Hovering
above the sea, it asks the Lord if it shall dry up the waters with
its fires. No! answers the Lord, and onward it hurries, driven by His
breath. Over the beautiful bays of the Mediterranean, over the fair
corn lands of Egypt it passes, but the Lord still gives no signal
to stop. Over the desert it flies, over the ruins of ancient Babel.
It asks: Is it here? But still onward it must go. In the night time
it reaches the magnificent sister cities--Sodom and Gomorrah--whose
inhabitants have fallen asleep after their wild, voluptuous revels.
Now the Lord gives the signal. The cloud opens, and from its flaming
gorge pours a torrent of fire and sulphur and brimstone upon the doomed
cities, until agate and porphyry and idols and marble colossi melt like
wax, and the dazzling flames envelop and destroy everything living in
the houses and the streets. Towards morning the ruin of old Babel is
seen to lift its head above the mountain-ridge to see and enjoy the
end of the play. It knows all about it; it also in its day has had
experience of the love that chasteneth.

This is, as already remarked, not poetry in a minor key; some critics
actually accused it of coldness; but if ever there was an unwarrantable
accusation this was one. We feel as if the poet had actually seen it
all, and had painted it with a brush like that pine which Heine would
fain have torn from the Norwegian cliffs and dipped in the fire of
Etna, to write with it the name of his beloved across the expanse
of heaven. These _Orientales_ became the model for Romantic lyric
poetry. In them the poet dared to lay hold of the painful, the ugly,
the terrible (τὸ δεινόν as the Greeks said), and incorporate it in his
verse, assured of his power to penetrate it all with poetry, to impart
transparency to all these shadows and immerge all the blackness in a
poetic sea of light. What he once wrote of the earth may be applied
to his own lyric poetry. He describes the poor, stony, niggardly
soil, which unwillingly yields man his daily bread; burning deserts
here, polar ice there; cities from which mercy and hope have departed
wringing their hands. He paints death, an eyeless spectre which
generally seizes the best first; tells of seas where ships are wrecked
in the night, and of continents where howling war swings its torches
and races fall furiously one upon the other. And, he concludes, of all
this is composed a star in the firmament of heaven.





VIII


HUGO AND DE MUSSET


Scarcely had Victor Hugo completed _Les Orientales_ before he set
to work upon a series of poems of a completely different character.
_Feuilles d'Automne_ conquered a new territory for French lyric poetry,
a domain in which the personal element was as conspicuously present as
it had been absent in _Les Orientales_.

Hugo had married at the age of twenty on the strength of a trifling
pension granted him by Louis XVIII. The dowry of his beloved bride,
Adèle Foucher, was 2000 francs. The young couple lived for a number of
years in straitened circumstances; but after the _Hernani_ battle was
won, Hugo's writings began to bring him in thousands, which rose to
hundreds of thousands, and finally to millions. Still, the poor home
was a happy one, and when, at the age of twenty-five, Hugo appeared
before the public as a literary revolutionist, he was the father of a
family.

In _Feuilles d'Automne_ the poet presents his readers with pictures and
thoughts of his own home. They are memories of his childhood and his
beloved dead, remembrances of his mother's tenderness, of his father's
soldierly figure and mien, of Napoleon, whom, standing by his father's
side as a child, he had once seen. He unburdens his heart to intimate
friends, confesses to them the sadness and the doubts induced in him
by the hard battle of life. There are love poems too, matchless ones.
He finds his first love-letters and reads them with a heart full of
sadness and of longing for the vanished first freshness of youth. He
gives us the poetry of his home. This was a side of life which almost
all the great poets of the world had left untouched. Shakespeare had no
home, and his conjugal relations were not such as to deserve writing
about. Schiller and Goethe wrote few poems to their wives, and none
about their family life. What Byron had thought fit to communicate to
the world of such matters was the reverse of edifying. Oehlenschläger,
whose personal circumstances and literary position in many respects
resemble Hugo's, did not marry his Christiane till her youth was past.
When he writes of his wife his tone is more dutiful than chivalrous;
she is rather his Morgiana than his Gulnare; and in his poems about his
children there is a touch of parental vanity; he writes of them in the
style in which royal personages sometimes allude to theirs on public
occasions; we feel that he regards them as beings whose welfare must be
of importance to every one. Hugo avoided these pitfalls.

Not that Adèle Foucher remained the central female figure in Hugo's
life during all the years when he was singing of his home. _Feuilles
d'Automne_ is the last collection of his poems in which he could
truthfully write of the happiness he found there. In 1833, during the
rehearsals of his _Lucrèce Borgia_, he became intimate with the young
and beautiful, though talentless, actress, Juliette Drouet (her real
name was Julienne Gauvain), whom he had chosen to play the very small
part of the Princess Negroni. This lady's contemporaries write with
enthusiasm of her beauty, which is said to have combined the purity
of outline of the Greek statue with the poetic expression which we
attribute to Shakespeare's heroines. In Hugo's tragedy she had only two
words to say, merely walked across the stage; yet Théophile Gautier,
after describing her lovely dress, writes thus of her performance:
"She resembled a lizard that had erected itself on its tail, so wavy,
supple, and serpentlike was her carriage. And with all her charm, how
skilfully she managed to insinuate something poisonous into her words!
With what mocking and perturbing agility did she avoid the attentions
of the handsome Venetian noblemen!"

Juliette Drouet's profile was antique, and she had a profusion of
beautiful hair. Pradier, the sculptor, has immortalised her in the
statue of the city of Lille in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

When Hugo made her acquaintance he was thirty-one and she twenty-seven;
and their connection lasted until her death, that is, for nearly fifty
years. After 1833 she accompanied him on his travels, and both during
and after his exile "Madame Juliette Drouet" lived in his house.

His wife, between whom and Sainte-Beuve there was soon a liaison which
the latter's literary indiscretions made unnecessarily public, seems as
long as she lived to have borne patiently with Hugo's inconstancy; and
Hugo's letters show that he, in his turn, showed both dignity and great
delicacy of feeling in the way in which he received Sainte-Beuve's
intimation of his passion for Madame Hugo.

In his poetry, at least, Hugo remained united by the tenderest of ties
to his home.

It is in the _Chants du Crépuscule_ which were published in 1835,
consequently long after he and Juliette Drouet had become closely
connected, that (in the poem "Date lilia!") he writes of his wife as
the being to whom he says: _Toujours!_ and who answers: _Partout!_

And it is in this same poem that we have the perfectly charming picture
of the young mother followed by her four children, the youngest of whom
still walks with tottering steps:

    "Oh! si vous rencontrez quelque part sous les cieux
     Une femme au front pur, au pas grave, aux doux yeux,
     Que suivent quatre enfants dont le dernier chancelle,
     Les surveillant bien tous, et, s'il passe auprès d'elle
     Quelque aveugle indigent que l'âge appesantit,
     Mettant une humble aumône aux mains du plus petit;
     Si, quand la diatribe autour d'un nom s'élance,
     Vous voyez une femme écouter en silence,
     Et douter, puis vous dire: Attendons pour juger.
     Quel est celui de nous qu'on ne pourrait charger?
     On est prompt à ternir les choses les plus belles.
     La louange est sans pieds et le blâme a des ailes.
         . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     Si, loin des feux, des voix, des bruits et des splendeurs,
     Dans un repli perdu parmi les profondeurs,
     Sur quatre jeunes fronts groupés près du mur sombre,
     Vous voyez se pencher un regard voilé d'ombre
     Où se mêle, plus doux encor que solennel,
     Le rayon virginal au rayon maternel;

     Oh! qui que vous soyez, bénissez-la. C'est elle!
     La sœur, visible aux yeux, de mon âme immortelle!
     Mon orgueuil, mon espoir, mon abri, mon recours!
     Toit de mes jeunes ans qu'espèrent mes vieux jours!"

And through all these poems there is a twitter and a hum, a sound as
of the play of little children and their bird-like cries. The child
rushes into the room, and the darkest brow, nay, even the guilty
countenance, brightens; it interrupts the most serious converse with
its questions, and the talk ends in a smile; it opens its young soul to
every impression, and offers a kiss to strangers and to friends.

"Let the children stay! do not drive them from the poet's study; let
them laugh and sing and mingle their childish clamour with the chorus
of spirit voices whilst he writes and dreams at his desk. Their breath
will not disperse the gay bubbles of his dream. Do you think that I
fear, when these bright heads pass before my eyes in the midst of my
visions of blood and fire, that my verses will take flight like a
flock of birds startled by playing children? No, indeed! No image is
destroyed by them. The painted, chased flowers of the gay _Orientale_
expand more freely when they are near, the ballad grows more spirited,
the winged lines of the ode mount with more ardent aspiration towards
heaven."

A sad event which happened in 1843 carried the poet in riper years back
to these youthful days and that happy family circle. In February 1843
his eldest daughter married; in September she was accidentally drowned,
from a sailing-boat on the Seine. Her husband, Charles Vacquerie,
jumped into the water after her, and when his and all attempts to save
her proved fruitless, he drowned himself. The series of poems in _Les
Contemplations_ beginning with the verses, "Oh! je fus comme fou dans
le premier moment!" ought to be read along with _Feuilles d'Automne_.

In this series we come upon simple scenes exquisitely reproduced and
full of sincere feeling:

    "Elle avait pris ce pli dans son âge enfantin
     De venir dans ma chambre un peu chaque matin;
     Je l'attendais ainsi qu'un rayon qu'on espère;
     Elle entrait et disait: 'Bonjour, mon petit père;'
     Prenait ma plume, ouvrait mes livres, s'asseyait
     Sur mon lit, dérangeait mes papiers et riait,
     Puis soudain s'en allait comme un oiseau qui passe.
     Alors je reprenais, la tête un peu moins lasse,
     Mon œuvre interrompue, et, tout en écrivant,
     Parmi mes manuscrits je rencontrais souvent
     Quelque arabesque folle et qu'elle avait tracée,
     Et mainte page blanche entre ses mains froissée
     Où, je ne sais comment, venaient mes plus doux vers.
     Elle aimait Dieu, les fleurs, les astres, les prés verts,
     Et c'était un esprit avant d'être une femme.
     Son regard reflétait la clarté de son âme.
     Elle me consultait sur tout à tous moments.
     Oh! que de soirs d'hiver radieux et charmants
     Passés à raisonner langue, histoire et grammaire,
     Mes quatre enfants groupés sur mes genoux, leur mère
     Tout près, quelques amis causant au coin du feu!
     J'appelais cette vie être content de peu!"

Almost more beautiful is the following poem:--

    "O souvenirs! printemps! aurore!
     Doux rayon triste et réchauffant!
     --Lorsqu'elle était petite encore,
     Que sa sœur était tout enfant....--

     Connaissez-vous sur la colline
     Qui joint Montlignon à Saint-Leu
     Une terrasse qui s'incline
     Entre un bois sombre et le ciel bleu?

     C'est là que nous vivions.--Pénètre,
     Mon cœur, dans ce passé charmant!--
     Je l'entendais sous ma fenêtre
     Jouer le matin doucement.

     Elle courait dans la rosée,
     Sans bruit, de peur de m'éveiller;
     Moi, je n'ouvrais pas ma croisée,
     De peur de la faire envoler.

     Ses frères riaient ... Aube pure!
     Tout chantait sous ces frais berceaux,
     Ma famille avec la nature,
     Mes enfants avec les oiseaux!--

     Je toussais, on devenait brave;
     Elle montait à petits pas,
     Et me disait d'un air très-grave:
     'J'ai laissé les enfants en bas.'

     Nous jouions toute la journée.
     O jeux charmants! chers entretiens!
     Le soir, comme elle était l'aînée,
     Elle me disait: Père, viens!

     'Nous allons t'apporter ta chaise,
     Conte nous une histoire, dis!'--
     Et je voyais rayonner d'aise
     Tous ces regards de paradis.

     Alors, prodiguant les carnages,
     J'inventais un conte profond
     Dont je trouvais les personnages
     Parmi les ombres du plafond.

     Toujours, ces quatre douces têtes
     Riaient, comme à cet âge on rit,
     De voir d'affreux géants très bêtes
     Vaincus par des nains pleins d'esprit.

     J'étais l'Arioste et l'Homère
     D'un poëme éclos d'un seul jet;
     Pendant que je parlais, leur mère
     Les regardait rire, et songeait.

     Leur aïeul, qui lisait dans l'ombre,
     Sur eux parfois levait les yeux,
     Et moi, par la fenêtre sombre
     J'entrevoyais un coin des cieux!"

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