“Hans of Iceland” is the work of a young man,--a very young man.
As we read it, we see clearly that the eighteen-year old boy who wrote
“Hans of Iceland” during a fever fit in 1821 had no experience of men or
things, no experience of ideas, and that he was striving to divine all
this.
Every intellectual effort, be it drama, poem, or romance, must contain
three ingredients,--what the author has felt, what he has observed, and
what he has divined.
In a romance particularly, if it is to be a good one, there must be
plenty of feeling and plenty of observation; and those things which are
divined must be derived logically, simply, and with no solution of
continuity, from those things which are observed and felt.
If we apply this law to “Hans of Iceland,” we shall readily grasp the
chief defect of the book.
There is but one thing felt in “Hans of Iceland,” the young man’s love;
but one thing observed, the young girl’s love. All the rest is a matter
of divination,--that is, of invention; for youth, having neither facts
nor experience nor models behind it, can only divine by means of its
imagination. “Hans of Iceland,” therefore, admitting that it deserves
classification, is hardly more than a fanciful romance.
When a man’s prime is past, when his head is bowed, when he feels
compelled to write something more than strange stories to frighten old
women and children, when all the rough edges of youth are worn away by
the friction of life, he realizes that every invention, every creation,
every artistic divination, must be based upon study, observation,
meditation, science, measure, comparison, serious reflection, attentive
and constant imitation of Nature, conscientious self-criticism; and the
inspiration evolved from these new conditions, far from losing anything,
gains broader influence and greater strength. The poet then realizes his
true aim. All the vague revery of his earlier years is crystallized, as
it were, and converted into thought. This second period of life is
usually that of an artist’s greatest works. Still young, and yet
mature,--this is the precious phase, the intermediate and culminating
point, the warm and radiant hour of noon, the moment when there is the
least possible shade, and the most light. There are supreme artists who
maintain this height all their lives, despite declining years. These are
the sovereign geniuses. Shakespeare and Michael Angelo left the impress
of youth upon some of their works, the traces of age on none.
To return to the story of which a new edition is now to be published:
Such as it is, with its abrupt and breathless action, its characters all
of a piece, its barbarous and bungling mannerism, its supercilious and
awkward form, its undisguised moods of revery, its varied hues thrown
together haphazard with no thought of pleasing the eye, its crude,
harsh, and shocking style, utterly destitute of skill or shading, with
the countless excesses of every kind committed almost unwittingly
throughout, this book represents with tolerable accuracy the period of
life at which it was written, and the particular condition of the soul,
the imagination, and the heart of a youth in love for the first time,
when the commonplace and ordinary obstacles of life are converted into
imposing and poetic impediments, when his head is full of heroic fancies
which glorify him in his own estimation, when he is already a man in
two or three directions, and still a child in a score of others, when he
has read Ducray-Duminil at eleven years of age, Auguste la Fontaine at
thirteen, Shakespeare at sixteen,--a strange and rapid scale, which
leads abruptly, in the matter of literary taste, from the silly to the
sentimental, from the sentimental to the sublime.
We give this book back to the world in 1833 as it was written in 1821,
because we feel that the work, ingenuous, if nothing else, gives a
tolerably faithful picture of the age that produced it.
Moreover, the author, small as may be his place in literature, having
undergone the common fate of every writer, great or small, and seen his
first works exalted at the expense of the latest, and having heard it
declared that he was far from having fulfilled the promise of his youth,
deems it his duty, not to oppose to a criticism, perhaps wise and just,
objections which might seem suspicious from his lips, but to reprint his
first works simply and literally as he wrote them, that his readers may
decide, so far as he is concerned, whether it be a step forward or
backward that divides “Hans of Iceland” from “Nôtre-Dame de Paris.”
PARIS, May, 1833.