high standard in matters of intellect and taste, has many enemies in
human nature. We all of us like to go our own way, and not to be forced
out of the atmosphere of commonplace habitual to most of us. We like
to be suffered to lie comfortably on the old straw of our habits,
especially of our intellectual habits, even though this straw may not
be very fine and clean. But if this effort to limit the freedom of our
lower nature finds enemies in human nature, it also finds auxiliaries
in it. Man alone of living creatures, says Cicero, goes feeling after
the discovery of an order, a law of good taste; other creatures
submissively fulfil the law of their nature.
Now in France, says M. Sainte-Beuve, "the first consideration for us is
not whether we are amused and pleased by a work of art or of mind, or
is it whether we are touched by it. What we seek above all to learn is
whether we were right in being amused with it, and in applauding it,
and in being moved by it." A Frenchman has, to a considerable degree,
what one may call a conscience in intellectual matters. Seeing this, we
are on the road to see why the French have their Academy and we have
nothing of the kind.
What are the essential characteristics of the spirit of our nation?
Our greatest admirers would not claim for us an open and clear mind,
a quick and flexible intelligence. Rather would they allege as our
chief spiritual characteristics energy and honesty--most important and
fruitful qualities in the intellectual and spiritual, as in the moral
sphere, for, of what we call genius, energy is the most essential
part. Now, what that energy, which is the life of genius, above
everything demands and insists upon, is freedom--entire independence of
authority, prescription and routine, the fullest power to extend as
it will. Therefore, a nation whose chief spiritual characteristic is
energy will not be very apt to set up in intellectual matters a fixed
standard, an authority like an academy. By this it certainly escapes
real inconveniences and dangers, and it can, at the same time, reach
undeniably splendid heights in poetry and science. We have Shakespeare,
and we have Newton. In the intellectual sphere there can be no higher
names.
On the other hand, some of the requisites of intellectual work
are specially the affair of quickness of mind and flexibility of
intelligence. In prose literature they are of first-rate importance.
These are elements that can, to a certain degree, be appropriated,
while the free activity of genius cannot. Academies consecrate and
maintain them, and therefore a nation with an eminent turn for them
naturally establishes academies.
_V.--Our Loss Through Provinciality_
How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose! How much better do
the productions of its spirit show in the qualities of genius than in
the qualities of intelligence! But the question as to the utility of
academies to the intellectual life of a nation is not settled when we
say that we have never had an academy, yet we have, confessedly, a very
great literature. It is by no means sure that either our literature
or the general intellectual life of our nation has got already
without academies all that academies can give. Our literature, in
spite of the genius manifested in it, may fall short in form, method,
precision, proportions, arrangement--all things where intelligence
proper comes in. It may be weak in prose, full of haphazard, crudeness,
provincialism, eccentricity, violence, blundering; and instead of
always fixing our thoughts upon the points in which our literature is
strong, we should, from time to time, fix them upon those in which
it is weak. In France, the Academy serves as a sort of centre and
rallying-point to educated opinion, and gives it a force which it has
not got here. In the bulk of the intellectual work of a nation which
has no centre, no intellectual metropolis like an academy, there is
observable a note of provinciality. Great powers of mind will make a
man think profoundly, but not even great powers of mind will keep his
taste and style perfectly sound and sure if he is left too much to
himself with no sovereign organ of opinion near him.
Even men like Jeremy Taylor and Burke suffer here. Theirs is too often
extravagant prose; prose too much suffered to indulge its caprices;
prose at too great a distance from the centre of good taste; prose with
the note of provinciality; Asiatic prose, somewhat barbarously rich and
overloaded. The note of provinciality in Addison is to be found in the
commonplace of his ideas, though his style is classical. Where there
is no centre like an academy, if you have genius and powerful ideas,
you are apt not to have the best style going; if you have precision of
style and not genius, you are apt not to have the best ideas going.
The provincial spirit exaggerates the value of its ideas for want of
a high standard at hand by which to try them; it is hurried away by
fancies; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too exclusively; its
admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its disapprobation foams at the
mouth. So we get the eruptive and aggressive manner in literature. Not
having the lucidity of a large and centrally-placed intelligence, the
provincial spirit has not its graciousness; it does not persuade, it
makes war; it has not urbanity, the tone of the city, of the centre,
the tone that always aims at a spiritual and intellectual effect. It
loves hard-hitting rather than persuading. The newspaper, with its
party spirit, its resolute avoidance of shades and distinctions, is
its true literature. In England there needs a miracle of genius like
Shakespeare to produce balance of mind, and a miracle of intellectual
delicacy like Dr. Newman's to produce urbanity of style.
The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about the
establishment of an academy in this country, and perhaps I shall hardly
give him the one he expects. Nations have their own modes of acting,
and these modes are not easily changed; they are even consecrated when
great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced
a Shakespeare and a Milton, when it has even produced a Barrow and a
Burke, it cannot well abandon its traditions; it can hardly begin at
this late time of day with an institution like the French Academy. An
academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest
literary opinion, a recognised authority in matters of intellectual
tone and taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps ought not to wish to
have. But then every one amongst us with any turn for literature at all
will do well to remember to what shortcomings and excesses, which such
an academy tends to correct, we are liable, and the more liable, of
course, for not having it. He will do well constantly to try himself in
respect of these, steadily to widen his culture, and severely to check
in himself the provincial spirit.
_VI.--Some Illustrative Criticisms_
To try and approach Truth on one side after another, not to strive or
cry, not to persist in pressing forward on any one side with violence
and self-will--it is only thus that mortals may hope to gain any vision
of the mysterious goddess whom we shall never see except in outline.
The grand power of poetry is the power of dealing with things so as to
awaken in us a wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of them and
of our relation with them, so that we feel ourselves to be in contact
with the essential nature of those objects, to have their secret, and
be in harmony with them, and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no
other can. Maurice de Guérin manifested this magical power of poetry in
singular eminence. His passion for perfection disdained all poetical
work that was not perfectly adequate and felicitous.
His sister Eugénie de Guérin has the same characteristic
quality--distinction. Of this quality the world is impatient; it
chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it, but ends by
receiving its influence and by undergoing its law. This quality at last
inexorably corrects the world's blunders, and fixes the world's ideals.
Heine claimed that he was "a brave soldier in the war of the liberation
of humanity." That was his significance. He was, if not pre-eminently
a brave, yet a brilliant soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.
He was not an adequate interpreter of the modern world, but only a
brilliant soldier.
Born in 1754, and dying in 1824, Joseph Joubert chose to hide his life;
but he was a man of extraordinary ardour in the search for truth and
of extraordinary fineness in the perception of it. He was one of those
wonderful lovers of light who, when they have an idea to put forth,
brood long over it first, and wait patiently till it shines.
GEORGE BRANDES
Main Currents of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century
George Brandes was born in Copenhagen on February 4, 1842, and
was educated at the University of Copenhagen. The appearance
of his "Æsthetic Studies" in 1868 established his reputation
among men of letters of all lands. His criticism received a
philosophic bent from his study of John Stuart Mill, Comte, and
Renan. Complaint is often made of the bias exhibited by Brandes
in his works, which is somewhat of a blemish on the breadth
of his judgment. This bias finds its chief expression in his
anti-clericalism. His publications number thirty-three volumes,
and include works on history, literature, and criticism. He
has written studies of Shakespeare, of Lord Beaconsfield, of
Ibsen, and of Ferdinand Lassalle. His greatest work is the "Main
Currents of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century." The field
covered is so vast that any attempted synopsis of the volume is
impossible here, so in this place we merely indicate the scope of
Brandes's monumental work, and state his general conclusions.
_The Man and the Book_
This remarkable essay in literary criticism is limited to the first
half of the nineteenth century; it concludes with the historical
turning-point of 1848. Within this period the author discovers, first,
a reaction against the literature of the eighteenth century; and then,
the vanquishment of that reaction. Or, in other words, there is first
a fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the
preceding century, and then a return of the ideas of progress in new
and higher waves.
"Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the
study, the history of the soul"; and literary criticism is, with our
author, nothing less than the interior history of peoples. Whether we
happen to agree or to disagree with his personal sympathies, which
lie altogether with liberalism and whether his interpretation of these
complex movements be accepted or rejected by future criticism, it is at
least unquestionable that his estimate of his science is the right one,
and that his method is the right one, and that no one stands beside
Brandes as an exponent.
The historical movement of the years 1800 to 1848 is here likened to a
drama, of which six different literary groups represent the six acts.
The first three acts incorporate the reaction against progress and
liberty. They are, first, the French Emigrant Literature, inspired
by Rousseau; secondly, the semi-Catholic Romantic school of Germany,
wherein the reaction has separated itself more thoroughly from the
contemporary struggle for liberty, and has gained considerably in
depth and vigour; and, thirdly, the militant and triumphant reaction
as shown in Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais, Lamartine and Victor Hugo,
standing out for pope and monarch. The drama of reaction has here come
to its climax; and the last three acts are to witness its fall, and the
revival, in its place, of the ideas of liberty and of progress.
"It is one man, Byron, who produces the revulsion in the great drama."
And Byron and his English contemporaries, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott,
Keats and Shelley, hold the stage in the fourth act, "Naturalism in
England." The fifth act belongs to the Liberal movement in France, the
"French Romantic School," including the names of Lamennais, Lamartine
and Hugo in their second phase; and also those of De Musset and George
Sand. The movement passes from France into "Young Germany," where the
sixth act is played by Heine, Ruge, Feuerbach and others; and the
ardent revolutionary writers of France and of Germany together prepare
for the great political transformation of 1848.
_I.--The Emigrant Literature_
At the beginning of our period, France was subjected to two successive
tyrannies: those, namely, of the Convention and of the Empire, both of
which suppressed all independent thought and literature. Writers were,
perforce, emigrants beyond the frontiers of French power, and were, one
and all, in opposition to the Reign of Terror, or to the Napoleonic
tyranny, or to both; one and all they were looking forward to the new
age which should come.
There was, therefore, a note of expectancy in this emigrant literature,
which had also the advantage of real knowledge, gained in long exile,
of foreign lands and peoples. Although it reacts against the dry and
narrow rationalism of the eighteenth century, it is not as yet a
complete reaction against the Liberalism of that period; the writers
of the emigrant group are still ardent in the cause of Liberty. They
are contrary to the spirit of Voltaire; but they are all profoundly
influenced by Rousseau.
Chateaubriand's romances, "Atala" and "René," Rousseau's "The New
Héloïse" and Goethe's "Werther" are the subjects of studies which lead
our critic to a consideration of that new spiritual condition of which
they are the indications. "All the spiritual maladies," he says, "which
make their appearance at this time may be regarded as the products
of two great events--the emancipation of the individual and the
emancipation of thought."
Every career now lies open, potentially, to the individual. His
opportunities, and therefore his desires, but not his powers, have
become boundless; and "inordinate desire is always accompanied by
inordinate melancholy." His release from the old order, which limited
his importance, has set him free for self-idolatry; the old laws
have broken down, and everything now seems permissible. He no longer
feels himself part of a whole; he feels himself to be a little world
which reflects the great world. The belief in the saving power of
enlightenment had been rudely shaken, and the minds of men were
confused like an army which receives contradictory orders in the midst
of a battle. Sénancour, Nodier and Benjamin Constant have left us
striking romances picturing the human spirit in this dilemma; they show
also a new feeling for Nature, new revelations of subjectivity, and new
ideas of womanhood and of passion.
But of the emigrant literature Madame de Staël is the chief and
central figure. The lawless savagery of the Revolution did not weaken
her fidelity to personal and political freedom. "She wages war with
absolutism in the state and hypocrisy in society. She teaches her
countrymen to appreciate the characteristics and literature of the
neighbouring nations; she breaks down with her own hands the wall of
self-sufficiency with which victorious France had surrounded itself.
Barante, with his perspective view of eighteenth-century France, only
continues and completes her work."
_II.--The Romantic School in Germany_
German Romanticism continues the growing reaction against the
eighteenth century; yet, though it is essentially reaction, it is not
mere reaction, but contains the seeds of a new development. It is
intellectual, poetical, philosophical and full of real life.
This literary period, marked by the names of Hölderlin, A. W. Schlegel,
Tieck, Jean Paul Richter, Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, Novalis, Arnim,
Brentano, resulted in little that has endured. It produced no typical
forms; the character of its literature is musical rather than plastic;
its impulse is not a clear perception or creation, but an infinite and
ineffable aspiration.
An intenser spiritual life was at once the impulse and the goal of
the Romanticists, in whom wonder and infinite desire are born again.
A sympathetic interest in the fairy tale and the legend, in the face
of Nature and in her creatures, in history, institutions and law, and
a keener emotional sensitiveness in poetry, were the result of this
refreshed interior life. In religion, the movement was towards the
richly-coloured mystery and child-like faith of Catholicism; and in
respect of human love it was towards freedom, spontaneity, intensity,
and against the hard bonds of social conventions.
But its emotions became increasingly morbid, abnormal and ineffectual.
Romanticism tended really, not to the spiritual emancipation that was
its avowed aim, but to a refinement of sensuality; an indolent and
passive enjoyment is its actual goal; and it repudiates industry and
utility as the philistine barriers which exclude us from Paradise.
Retrogression, the going back to a fancied Paradise or Golden Age, is
the central idea of Romanticism, and is the secret of the practical
ineffectiveness of the movement.
Friedrich Schlegel's romance, "Lucinde," is a very typical work of
this period. It is based on the Romantic idea that life and poetry are
identical, and its aim is to counsel the transformation of our actual
life into a poem or work of art. It is a manifesto of self-absorption
and of subjectivity; the reasoned defence of idleness, of enjoyment, of
lawlessness, of the arbitrary expression of the Self, supreme above all.
The mysticism of Novalis, who preferred sickness to health, night to
day, and invested death itself with sensual delights, is described by
himself as voluptuousness. It is full of a feverish, morbid desire,
which becomes at last the desire for nothingness. The "blue flower," in
his story "Heinrich von Ofterdingen," is the ideal, personal happiness,
sought for in all Romanticism, but by its very nature never attainable.
_III.--The Reaction in France_
Herein we have the culmination of the reactionary movement. Certain
authors are grouped together as labouring for the re-establishment of
the fallen power of authority; and by the principle of authority is to
be understood "the principle which assumes the life of the individual
and of the nation to be based upon reverence for inherited tradition."
Further, "the principle of authority in general stood or fell with the
authority of the Church. When that was undermined, it drew all other
authorities with it in its fall."
After a study of the Revolution in its quality as a religious movement,
and the story of the Concordat, our author traces the genesis of
this extreme phase of the reaction. Its promoters were all of noble
birth and bound by close ties to the old royal families; their aim
was political rather than religious; "they craved for religion as
a panacea for lawlessness." Their ruling idea was the principle of
externality, as opposed to that of inward, personal feeling and private
investigation; it was the principle of theocracy, as opposed to the
sovereignty of the people; it was the principle of power, as opposed to
the principles of human rights and liberties.
Chateaubriand's famous book, "Le Génie du Christianisme," devoid of
real feeling, attempts to vindicate authority by means of an appeal
to sentiment, as if taking for granted that a reasoned faith was now
impossible. His point of view is romantic, and therefore, religiously,
false; his reasoning is of the "how beautiful!" style.
But the principle was enthroned by Count Joseph de Maistre, a very
different man. The minister of the King of Sardinia at the court
of Russia, he gained the emperor's confidence by his strong and
pure character, his royalist principles, and his talents. His more
important works, "Du Pape," "De l'Eglise Gallicane," and "Soirées de
St. Pétersbourg," are the most uncompromising defence of political
and religious autocracy. The fundamental idea of his works is that
"there is no human society without government, no government without
sovereignty, and no sovereignty without infallibility." Beside De
Maistre stands Bonald, a man of the same views, but without the other's
daring and versatile wit. Chateaubriand's prose epic "Les Martyrs," the
mystically sensual writings of Madame Krüdener, and the lyric poetry
of Lamartine and Victor Hugo further popularised the reaction, which
reached its breaking point in Lamennais.
It was at this moment, April, 1824, that the news came of Byron's death
in Greece. The illusion dissolved; the reaction came to an end. The
principle of authority fell, never to rise again; and the Immanuelistic
school was succeeded by the Satanic.
_IV.--Naturalism in England_
The distinguishing character which our author discovers in the English
poets is a love of Nature, of the country and the sea, of domestic
animals and vegetation. This Naturalism, common to Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Moore, Shelley and Byron, becomes, when
transferred to social interests, revolutionary; the English poet is
a Radical. Literary questions interest him not; he is at heart a
politician.
The political background of English intellectual life at this period
is painted forcibly and in the darkest tones. It was "dark with
terror produced in the middle classes by the excesses of the liberty
movement in France, dark with the tyrannic lusts of proud Tories and
the Church's oppressions, dark with the spilt blood of Irish Catholics
and English artisans." In the midst of all this misery, Wordsworth and
Coleridge recalled the English mind to the love of real Nature and to
the love of liberty. Wordsworth's conviction was that in town life
and its distractions men had forgotten Nature, and had been punished
for it; constant social intercourse had dissipated their talents and
impaired their susceptibility to simple and pure impressions. His
naturalism is antagonistic to all official creeds; it is akin to the
old Greek conception of Nature, and is impregnated with pantheism.
The separate studies which follow, dealing with the natural Romanticism
of Coleridge, Southey's Oriental Romanticism, the Lake school's
conception of Liberty, the Historic Naturalism of Scott, the sensuous
poetry of Keats, the poetry of Irish opposition and revolt, Thomas
Campbell's poetry of freedom, the Republican Humanism of Landor,
Shelley's Radical Naturalism, and like subjects, are of the highest
importance to every English reader who would understand the time in
which he lives. But Byron's is the heroic figure in this act. "Byron's
genius takes possession of him, and makes him great and victorious in
his argument, directing his aim with absolute certainty to the vital
points." Byron's whole being burned with the profoundest compassion
for the immeasurable sufferings of humanity. It was liberty that he
worshipped, and he died for liberty.
_V.--The Romantic School in France_
During the Revolution the national property had been divided into
twenty times as many hands as before, and with the fall of Napoleon
the industrial period begins. All restrictions had been removed
from industry and commerce, and capital became the moving power of
society and the object of individual desires. The pursuit of money
helps to give to the literature of the day its romantic, idealistic
stamp. Balzac alone, however, made money the hero of his epic. Other
great writers of the period, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, George
Sand, Beyle, Mérimée, Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, kept as far as
possible from the new reality.
The young Romanticists of 1830 burned with a passion for art and a
detestation of drab bourgeoisie. A break with tradition was demanded
in all the arts; the original, the unconscious, the popular, were what
they aimed at. It was now, as in Hugo's dramas, that the passionate
plebeian appeared on the scene as hero; Mérimée, as in "Carmen,"
painted savage emotions; Nodier's children spoke like real children;
George Sand depicted, in woman, not conscious virtue and vice, but the
innate nobility and natural goodness of a noble woman's heart. The poet
was no longer looked on as a courtier, but as the despised high-priest
of humanity.