[Footnote 1: Among writers who fostered the new feeling for external

nature, Ramond (1755-1827), who derived his inspiration, partly

scientific, partly imaginative, from the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees,

deserves special mention.]

II

The fermentation of ideas was now quickened by the new life of

passion--passion social and democratic as the days of Revolution

approached; passion also personal and private, which, welcomed as

a sacred fire, too often made the inmost being of the individual a

scene of agitating and desolating conflict.

The Abbe Raynal (1713-96) made his _Histoire des Deux Indes_ a

receptacle not only for just views and useful information, but for

every extravagance of thought and sentiment. "Insert into my book,"

he said to his brother philosophers, "everything that you choose

against God, against religion, and against government." In the third

edition appears a portrait of the author, posing theatrically, with

the inscription, "To the defender of humanity, of truth, of liberty!"

The _salons_ caught the temper of the time. Voltairean as they were,

disposed to set down Rousseau as an enthusiast or a charlatan, they

could not resist the invasion of passion or of sensibility. It mingled

with a swarm of incoherent ideas and gave them a new intensity of

life. The incessant play of intellect flashed and glittered for many

spirits over a moral void; the bitter, almost misanthropic temper

of Chamfort's maxims and _pensees_ may testify to the vacuity of faith

and joy; sentiment and passion came to fill the void; to desire, to

love, to pity, to suffer, to weep, was to live the true life of the

heart.

Madame du Deffand (1697-1780) might oppose the demon of ennui with

the aid of a cool temperament and a brilliant wit; at sixty-eight,

whatever ardour had been secretly stored up in her nature escaped

to lavish itself half-maternally on Horace Walpole. Her young

companion and reader, who became a rival and robbed her _salon_ of

its brilliance, Mlle. de Lespinasse (1732?-76) might cherish a calm

friendship for D'Alembert. When M. de Guibert came to succeed M. de

Mora in her affections, she poured out the lava torrent of passion

in those Letters which have given her a place beside Sappho and beside

Eloisa. Madame Roland in her girlhood had been the ardent pupil of

Rousseau, whose _Nouvelle Heloise_ was to her as a revelation from

heaven. The first appearance in literature of Madame Necker's amazing

daughter was as the eulogist of Rousseau.

The intellect untouched by emotion may be aristocratic; passion and

sentiment have popular and democratic instincts. "The Revolution was

already in action," said Napoleon, "when in 1784 Beaumarchais's

_Mariage de Figaro_ appeared upon the stage." If Napoleon's words

overstate the fact, we may at least name that masterpiece of comedy

a symptom of the coming explosion, or even, in Sainte-Beuve's words,

an armed Fronde.

Pierre-Augustin Caron, who took the name of BEAUMARCHAIS (1732-99),

son of a watchmaker of Paris, was born under a merry star, with a

true genius for comedy, yet his theatrical pieces were only the

recreations of a man of affairs--a demon of intrigue--determined to

build up his fortune by financial adventures and commercial

enterprises. Suddenly in 1774-75 he leaped into fame. Defeated in

a trial in which his claim to fifteen thousand livres was disputed,

Beaumarchais, in desperate circumstances, made his appeal to public

opinion in four _Memoires_, which admirably united seriousness,

gaiety, argument, irony, eloquence, and dramatic talent. "I am a

citizen," he cried--"that is to say, something wholly new, unknown,

unheard of in France. I am a citizen--that is to say, what you should

have been two hundred years ago, what perhaps you will be twenty years

hence." The word "citizen" sounded strange in 1774; it was soon to

become familiar.

Before this incident Beaumarchais had produced two dramas, _Eugenie_

and _Les Deux Amis_, of the tearful, sentimental, bourgeois type,

yet with a romantic tendency, which distinguishes at least _Eugenie_

from the bourgeois drama of Diderot and of Sedaine. The failure of

the second may have taught their author the wisdom of mirth; he

abandoned his high dramatic principles to laugh and to evoke laughter.

_Le Barbier de Seville_, developed from a comic opera to a comedy

in five acts, was given, after long delays, in 1775. The spectators

manifested fatigue; instantly the play reappeared in four acts,

Beaumarchais having lost no time in removing the fifth wheel from

his carriage. It delighted the public by the novelty of its abounding

gaiety, a gaiety full and free, yet pointed with wit, a revolving

firework scattering its dazzling spray. The old comic theme of the

amorous tutor, the charming pupil, the rival lover, adorned with the

prestige of youth, the intriguing attendant, was renewed by a dialogue

which was alive with scintillating lights.

From the success of the _Barbier_ sprang _Le Mariage de Figaro_.

Completed in 1778, the royal opposition to its performance was not

overcome until six years afterwards. By force of public opinion the

watchmaker's son had triumphed over the King. The subject of the play

is of a good tradition--a daring valet disputes the claim of a

libertine lord to the possession of his betrothed. Spanish colour

and Italian intrigue are added to the old mirth of France. From Regnard

the author had learnt to entangle a varied intrigue; from Lesage he

borrowed his Spanish costumes and decoration--Figaro himself is a

Gil Blas upon the stage; in Marivaux he saw how women may assert

themselves in comic action with a bright audacity. The _Mariage de

Figaro_ resumes the past; it depicts the present, as a social satire,

and a painting of manners; it conveys into art the experience, the

spirit, the temerity of Beaumarchais's adventurous life as a man of

the world; it creates characters--Almaviva, Suzanne, Figaro himself,

the budding Cherubin. It is at the same time--or, rather, became

through its public reception--a pamphlet in comedy which announces

the future; it ridicules the established order with a sprightly

insolence; it pleads for social equality; it exposes the iniquity

of aristocratic privilege, the venality of justice, the greed of

courtiers, the chicanery of politicians. Figaro, since he appeared

in "The Barber of Seville," has grown somewhat of a moralist and a

pedant; he must play the part of censor of society, he must represent

the spirit of independent criticism, he must maintain the cause of

intelligence against the authority of rank and station. Beaumarchais

may have lacked elevation and delicacy, but he knew his craft as a

dramatist, and left a model of prose comedy from which in later years

others of his art and mystery made profitable studies. He restored

mirth to the stage; he rediscovered theatrical intrigue; he created

a type, which was Beaumarchais himself, and was also the lighter

genius of France; he was the satirist of society; he was the

nimble-feathered bird that foretells the storm.

III

BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE connects Rousseau with Chateaubriand and

the romantic school of the nineteenth century. The new feeling for

external nature attained through him a wider range, embracing the

romance of tropic lands; it acquired an element of the exotic; at

the same time, descriptive writing became more vivid and picturesque,

and the vocabulary for the purposes of description was enlarged. He

added to French literature a tale in which human passion and the

sentiment of nature are fused together by the magic of genius; he

created two figures which live in the popular imagination, encircled

with a halo of love and sorrow.

Born at Havre in 1737, Bernardin, through his imagination, was an

Utopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer; through his temper, an angry

disputant with society. His life was a fantastic series of adventures.

Having read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the heroic

record of the travels and sufferings of Jesuit missionaries, his fancy

caught fire; he would seek some undiscovered island in mid-ocean,

he would found some colony of the true children of nature, far from

a corrupt civilisation, peaceable, virtuous, and free.

In France, in Russia, he was importunate in urging his extravagant

designs upon persons of influence. When the French Government in 1767

commissioned him to work in Madagascar, he believed that his dream

was to come true, but a rude awakening and the accustomed quarrels

followed. He landed on the Isle of France, purposing to work as an

engineer, and there spent his days in gazing at the sea, the skies,

the mountains, the tropical forests. All forms and colours and sounds

and scents impressed themselves on his brain, and were transferred

to his collection of notes. When, on returning to Paris, he published

(1773) his _Voyage a l'Ile de France_, the literature of picturesque

description may be said to have been founded. Already in this volume

his feeling for nature is inspired by an emotional theism, and is

burdened by his sentimental science, which would exhibit a fantastic

array of evidences of the designs for human welfare of an amiable

and ingenious Author of nature. Before the book appeared, Bernardin

had made the acquaintance of Rousseau, then living in retirement,

tormented by his diseased suspicions and cloudy indignations. To his

new disciple Rousseau was in general gracious, and they rambled

together, botanising in the environs of Paris.

For a time Bernardin himself was in a condition bordering upon

insanity; but the crisis passed, and he employed himself on the

_Etudes de la Nature_, which appeared in three volumes in 1784. The

tale of _Paul et Virginie_ was not included; for when the author had

read it aloud, though ladies wept, the sterner auditors had been

contemptuous; Thomas slumbered, and Buffon called for his carriage.

The _Etudes_ accumulate the grotesque notions of Bernardin with

reference to final causes in nature: nature is benevolent and

harmonious; society is corrupt and harsh; scientific truth is to be

discovered by sentiment, and not by reason; the whole universe is

planned for the happiness of man; the melon is large because it was

designed for the family; the pumpkin is larger, because Providence

intended that it should be shared with our neighbours. Providence,

indeed, in a sceptical and mocking generation, suffered cruelly at

the hands of its advocate. Yet Bernardin conveyed into his book a

feeling of the rich and obscure life and energy of nature; his

descriptive power is admirable. "He desired," says M. Barine, "to

open the door for Providence to enter; in fact he opened the door

for the great Pan," and in this he was a precursor of much that followed

in literature.

Bernardin's fame was now established. In the sentimental reaction

against the dryness of sceptical philosophy, in the return to a

feeling for the poetical aspect of things, he was looked upon as a

leader. In the fourth volume of _Etudes_ (1788) he had courage to

print the tale of _Paul et Virginie_. It is an idyll of the tropics,

written with the moral purpose of contrasting the beneficent

influence of nature and of feeling with the dangers and evils of

civilised society and of the intellect. The children grow up side

by side in radiant innocence and purest companionship; then passion

makes its invasion of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces and

the faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot hide,

the genuine power of those pages which tell of the modest ardours

of first love. An element of melodrama mingles with the tragic close.

Throughout we do more than see the landscape of the tropics: we feel

the life of external nature throbbing in sympathy with human emotion.

Something was gained by Bernardin from the _Daphnis and Chloe_ of

Longus in the motives and the details of his story, but it is

essentially his own. It had a resounding success, and among its most

ardent admirers was Napoleon.

Bernardin married at fifty-five, and became the father of a Paul and

a Virginie. On the death of his wife, whom he regarded as a faithful

housekeeper, he married again, and his life was divided between the

devotion of an old man's love and endless quarrels with his colleagues

of the _Institut_. His later writings added nothing to his fame. _La

Chaumiere Indienne_--the story of a pariah who learns wisdom from

nature and from the heart--has a certain charm, but it lacks the power

of the better portions of _Paul et Virginie_. The _Harmonies de la

Nature_ is a feeble reflection of the _Etudes_. Chateaubriand, to

whom Bernardin was personally known, gave a grudging recognition of

the genius of his precursor. Lamartine, in after years, was a more

generous disciple. In January 1814 Bernardin died, murmuring the name

of God; among the great events of the time his death was almost

unnoticed.

IV

In the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by the labours

of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, came a revival

of the study of antiquity and of the sentiment for classical art.

The Count de Caylus (1692-1765), travelling in Italy and the East

with the enthusiasm of an archaeologist, presented in his writings

an ideal of beauty and grace which was new to sculptors and painters

of the time. The discovery of Pompeii followed, after an interval,

the discovery of Herculaneum. The Abbe BARTHELEMY (1716-95) embodied

the erudite delights of a lifetime in his _Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis

en Grece_ (1788), which seemed a revelation of the genius of Hellenism

as it existed four centuries prior to the Christian era. It was an

ideal Greece--the Greece of Winckelmann and Goethe--unalterably

gracious, radiantly calm, which was discovered by the eighteenth

century; but it served the imaginative needs of the age. We trace

its influence in the harmonious forms of Bernardin's and

Chateaubriand's imagining, and in the marbles of Canova. A poet, the

offspring of a Greek mother and a French father--Andre Chenier--a

latter-day Greek or demi-Greek himself, and yet truly a man of his

own century, interpreted this new ideal in literary art.

Born at Constantinople in 1762, ANDRE CHENIER was educated in France,

travelled in Switzerland and Italy, resided as secretary to the French

Ambassador for three weary years in England--land of mists, land of

dull aristocrats--returned to France in 1790, ardent in the cause

of constitutional freedom, and defended his opinions and his friends

as a journalist. The violences of the Revolution drove him into

opposition to the Jacobin party. In March 1794 he was arrested; on

the 25th July, two days before the overthrow of Robespierre, Andre

Chenier's head fell on the scaffold.

Only two poems, the _Jeu de Paume_ and the _Hymne aux Suisses_, were

published by Chenier; after his death appeared in journals the _Jeune

Captive_ and the _Jeune Tarentine_; his collected poems, already

known in manuscript to lovers of literature, many of them fragmentary,

were issued in 1819. The romantic school had come into existence

without his aid; but under Sainte-Beuve's influence it chose to regard

him as a predecessor, and during the years about 1830 he was studied

and imitated as a master.

He belongs, however, essentially to the eighteenth century, to its

graceful sensuality, its revival of antiquity, its faith in human

reason, its comprehensive science of nature and of society. In certain

of his poems suggested by public occasions he is little more than

a disciple of Lebrun. His _Elegies_ are rather Franco-Roman than

Greek; these, together with beauties of their own, have the

characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the mundane

voluptuousness of their age. His philosophical poem _Hermes_, of

which we have designs and fragments, would have been the _De Rerum

Natura_ of an admiring student of Buffon.

In his _Eglogues_ and his epic fragments he is a Greek or a demi-Greek,

who has learnt directly from Homer, from the pastoral and idyllic

poets of antiquity, and from the Anthology. The Greece of Chenier's

imagination is the ideal Greece of his time, more finely outlined,

more delicately coloured, more exquisitely felt by him than was

possible with his contemporaries in an age of prose. "It is the

landscape-painter's Greece," writes M. Faguet, "the Greece of fair

river-banks, of gracious hill-slopes, of comely groups around a

well-head or a stream, of harmonious theories beside the voiceful

sea, of dancing choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blue

heavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the light

breathing of the Cyclades."

In the _Iambes_, inspired by the emotions of the Revolution during

his months of imprisonment, Chenier united modern passion with the

beauty of classic form; satire in these loses its critical temper,

and becomes truly lyrical. In his versification he attained new and

alluring harmonies; he escaped from the rhythmical uniformity of

eighteenth-century verse, gliding sinuously from line to line and

from strophe to strophe. He did over again for French poetry the work

of the Pleiade, but he did this as one who was a careful student and

a critic of Malherbe.

BOOK THE FIFTH

1789-1850

CHAPTER I

THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE--MADAME DE STAEL--CHATEAUBRIAND

I

The literature of the Revolution and the Empire is that of a period

of transition. Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand announce the future;

the writers of an inferior rank represent with declining power the

past, and give some faint presentiment of things to come. The great

political concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract ideas united

with the passions of the hour produced poetry which was of the nature

of a declamatory pamphlet. Innumerable pieces were presented on the

stage, but their literary value is insignificant.

Marie-Joseph Chenier (1764-1811), brother of the great poet who

perished on the scaffold, attempted to inaugurate a school of national

tragedy in his _Charles IX._; neither he nor the public knew history

or possessed the historical sentiment--his tragedy was a

revolutionary "school of kings." Arnault, Legouve, Nepomucene

Lemercier were applauded for their classic dignity, or their depth

of characterisation, or their pomp of language. The true tragedy of

the time was enacted in the streets and in the clubs. Comedy was

welcome in days of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harleville

drew mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in _Le Vieux

Celibataire_ (1792); Fabre d'Eglantine moralised Moliere to the

taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante debased by egoism and

accommodations with the world; Louis Laya, during the trial of the

King, satirised the pretenders to patriotism in _L'Ami des Lois_,

yet escaped the vengeance of the Jacobins.

Historical comedy, a novelty in art, was seen in Lemercier's _Pinto_

(1799), where great events are reduced to petty dimensions, and the

destiny of nations is satirically viewed as a vulgar game of

trick-track. In his _Christophe Colomb_ of 1809 he dared to despise

the unities of time and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless,

among the spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial regime.

Baour-Lormian, the translator of _Ossian_ (1801), converted the

story of Joseph in Egypt into a frigid tragedy; Hector and Tippoo

Sahib, Mahomet II., and Ninus II. (with scenes of Spanish history

transported to Assyria) diversified the stage. The greatest success

was that of Raynouard's _Les Templiers_ (1805); the learned author

wisely applied his talents in later years to romance philology. Among

the writers of comedy--Andrieux, Etienne, Duval, and others--Picard

has the merit of reproducing the life of the day, satirising social

classes and conditions with vivacity and careless mirth. In melodrama,

Pixerecourt contributed unconsciously to prepare the way for the

romantic stage. Desaugiers, with his gift for gay plebeian song, was

the master of the vaudeville.

Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice during the

Revolution. The lesser Chenier's _Chanson du Depart_ has in it a

stirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Republic sent forth to war with

the acclaim of mother and wife and maiden, old men and little children.

Lebrun-_Pindare_, in his ode _Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur_, does not

quite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of classical

imagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse and music, _La

Marseillaise_ (1792), was an inspiration which equally lent itself

to the enthusiasm of victory and the gallantries of despair. The

pseudo-epics and the descriptive poetry of the Empire are laboured

and lifeless. But Creuze de Lesser, in his _Chevaliers de la

Table-Ronde_ (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian, in his

_Poesies Ossianiques_, widened the horizons of literature. The

_Panhypocrisiade_ of Lemercier, published in 1819, but written

several years earlier--an "infernal comedy of the sixteenth

century"--is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, and

genius; it bears to Hugo's _Legende des Siecles_ the relation which

the megatherium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous analogues.

If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's poetry, we may

find it in the harmonious melancholy of Chenedolle, in the grace of

Fontanes' stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The

special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination

of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain

reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could

not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely

or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications.

The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition,

for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details.

If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out what

was commonplace in ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature

in the eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and had become

a social and political weapon; under the imperial rule this militant

function was withdrawn; what remained for literature but frigid

ambitions or petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once

again recovered?

The Revolution closed the _salons_ and weakened the influence of

cultivated society upon literature. Journalism and the pamphlet

filled the place left vacant by the _salons_. The _Decade

Philosophique_ was the organ of the ideologists, who applied the

conceptions of Condillac and his followers to literary and

philosophical criticism. In 1789 the _Journal des Debats_ was founded.

Much ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was expended in the

columns of the public press. Among the contributors were Andre Chenier,

Mallet du Pin, Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine,

Camille Desmoulins hoped to render France happy, prosperous, and

republican. Heady, vain, pleasure-loving, gay, bitter, sensitive,

with outbreaks of generosity and moments of elevation, he did

something to redeem his crimes and follies by pleas for justice and

mercy in his journal, _Le Vieux Cordelier_, and died, with Danton

as his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and despair.

The orators of the Revolution glorified doctrinaire abstractions,

overflowed with sentimental humanity, and decorated their harangues

with heroic examples of Roman virtue. The most abstract, colourless,

and academic was Rousseau's disciple, who took the "Supreme Being"

under his protection, Robespierre. The fervid spirit of the Girondins

found its highest expression in Vergniaud, who, with infirm character,

few ideas, and a hesitating policy, yet possessed a power of vibrating

speech. Danton, the Mirabeau of the populace, was richer in ideas,

and with sudden accesses of imagination thundered in words which

tended to action; but in general the Mountain cared more for deeds

than words. The young Saint-Just thrilled the Convention with icy

apothegms which sounded each, short and sharp, like the fall of the

knife. Barnave, impetuous in his temper, was clear and measured in

discourse, and once in opposition to Mirabeau, defending the royal

prerogative, rose beyond himself to the height of a great occasion.

But it was MIRABEAU, and Mirabeau alone, who possessed the genius

of a great statesman united with the gifts of an incomparable orator.

Born in 1749, of the old Riquetti family, impulsive, proud, romantic,

yet clear of intellect and firmly grasping facts, a thinker and a

student, calmly indifferent to religion, irregular in his conduct,

the passionate foe of his father, the passionate lover of his Sophie

and of her child, he had conceived, and in a measure comprehended,

the Revolution long before the explosion came. Already he was a

copious author on political subjects. He knew that France needed

individual liberty and individual responsibility; he divined the

dangers of a democratic despotism. He hoped by the decentralisation

of power to balance Paris by the provinces, and quicken the political

life of the whole country; he desired to balance the constitution

by playing off the King against the Assembly, and the Assembly against

the King, and to control the action of each by the force of public

opinion. From Montesquieu he had learnt the gains of separating the

legislative, the executive, and the judicial functions. His hatred

of aristocracy, enhanced by the hardship of imprisonment at Vincennes,

led him to ignore an influence which might have assisted in the

equilibration of power. As an orator his ample and powerful rhetoric

rested upon a basis of logic; slow and embarrassed as he began to

speak, he warmed as he proceeded, negligent of formal correctness,

disdainful of the conventional classical decorations, magnificent

in gesture, weaving together ideas, imagery, and passion. His speech,

said Madame de Stael, was "like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilful

artist, and fashioning men to his will." At the sitting of the Assembly

on April 2, 1791, the President announced, amid murmurs, "Ah! il est

mort," which anticipated his words, that Gabriel-Honore Riquetti was

dead.

"The 18th Brumaire," writes M. Lanson, "silenced the orators. For

fifteen years a solitary voice was heard, imperious but eloquent....

Napoleon was the last of the great Revolutionary orators." As he

advanced in power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric, and

condensed his summons to action into direct, effective words, now

simple and going straight at some motive of self-interest, now

grandiose to seduce the imagination to his side. Speech with Napoleon

was a means of government, and he knew the temper of the men whom

he addressed. His own taste in literature was touched with

sentimentality; _Ossian_ and _Werther_ were among his favourite

books; but what may be styled the official literature of the Empire

was of the decaying classical or neo-classical tradition.

Yet while the democratic imperialism was the direct offspring of the

Revolution with its social contract and its rights of man, it was

necessary to combat eighteenth-century ideas and defend the throne

and the altar. Great scientific names--Laplace, Bichat, Cuvier,

Lamarck--testify to the fact that a movement which made the eighteenth

century illustrious had not spent its force. Scholarship was laying

the bases for future constructions; Ginguene published in 1811 the

first volumes of his _Histoire Litteraire de l'Italie_; Fauriel and

Raynouard accumulated the materials for their historical, literary,

and philological studies. Philosophy was turning away from

sensationalism, which seemed to have said its final word, towards

spiritualist conceptions. Maine de Biran (1766-1824) found in the

primitive fact of consciousness--the _nisus_ of the will--and in the

self-recognition of the _ego_ as a cause, an escape from materialism.

Royer-Collard (1763-1845), afterwards more distinguished in

politics than he was in speculation, read for his class at the Sorbonne

from the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and turned it by his commentary

as a siege-train against the positions of Condillac.

The germs of new literary growths were in the soil; but the spring

came slowly, and after the storms of Revolution were spent, a chill

was in the air. Measureless hopes, and what had come of them? infinite

desire, and so poor an attainment! A disciple of Rousseau, who shared

in his sentiment without his optimistic faith, and who, like Rousseau,

felt the beauty of external nature without Rousseau's sense of its

joy, Etienne Pivert de SENANCOURT published in 1799 his _Reveries_,

a book of disillusion, melancholy atheism, and stoical resistance

to sadness, a resistance which he was unable to sustain. It was

followed in 1804 by _Obermann_, a romance in epistolary form, in which

the writer, disguised in the character of his hero, expresses a fixed

and sterile grief, knowing not what he needs, nor what he loves, nor

what he wills, lamenting without a cause and desiring without an

object. The glories of Swiss landscape, which quicken his imagination,

do not suffice to fill the void that is in his soul; yet perhaps in

old age--if ever it come--he may resign himself to the infinite

illusion of life. It is an indication of the current of the time that

fifteen years later, when the _Libres Meditations_ appeared,

Senancourt had found his way through a vague theopathy to autumnal

brightness, late-born hope, and tranquil reconcilement with

existence.

The work of the professional critics of the time--Geoffroy, De Feletz,

Dussault, Hoffman--counts now for less than the words of one who was

only an amateur of letters, and a moralist who never moralised in

public. JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824), the friend of Fontanes and of

Chateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity for ideas,

and possessing the finest sense of the beauty of literature, lacked

the strength and self-confidence needful in a literary career. He

read everything; he published nothing; but the _Pensees_, which were

collected from his manuscripts by Chateaubriand, and his letters

reveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious dilettante charmed

by literary grace, a writer tormented by the passion to put a volume

in a page, a page in a phrase, a phrase in a word. Plato in philosophy,

Virgil in poetry, satisfy his feeling for beauty and refinement of

style. From Voltaire and Rousseau he turns away, offended by their

lack of moral feeling, of sanity, of wisdom, of delicacy. A man of

the eighteenth century, Joubert had lifted himself into thin clear

heights of middle air, where he saw much of the past and something

of the future; but the middle air is better suited for speculation

than for action.

II

The movement towards the romantic theory and practice of art was

fostered in the early years of the nineteenth century by two eminent

writers--one a woman with a virile intellect, the other a man with

more than a woman's imaginative sensibility--by GERMAINE DE STAEL

and by Chateaubriand. The one exhibits the eighteenth century passing

into the nineteenth, receiving new developments, yet without a breach

of continuity; the other represents a reaction against the ideas of

the age of the philosophers. Both opened new horizons--one, by the

divinations of her ardent intelligence; the other, by his creative

genius. Madame de Stael interpreted new ideas and defined a new theory

of art. Chateaubriand was himself an extraordinary literary artist.

The style of the one is that of an admirable improvisator, a brilliant

and incessant converser; that of the other is at its best a miracle

of studied invention, a harmony of colour and of sound. The genius

of the one was quickened in brilliant social gatherings; a Parisian

_salon_ was her true seat of empire. The genius of the other was nursed

in solitude by the tempestuous sea or on the wild and melancholy moors.

Germaine Necker, born in 1766, daughter of the celebrated Swiss banker

and future minister of France, a child of precocious intelligence

and eager sympathies, reared amid the brilliant society of her

mother's _salon_, a girl whose demands on life were large--demands

of the intellect, demands of the heart--enamoured of the writings

of Rousseau, married at twenty to the Swedish Ambassador, the Baron

de Stael-Holstein, herself a light and an inspirer of the

constitutional party of reform in the early days of the Revolution,

in her literary work opened fresh avenues for nineteenth-century

thought. She did not recoil from the eighteenth century, but rather

carried forward its better spirit. The Revolution, as a social

upheaval, she failed to understand; her ideal was liberty, not

equality; and Necker's daughter was assured that all would be well

were liberty established in constitutional forms of government. A

republican among aristocrats, she was an aristocrat among

republicans. During the years of Revolutionary trouble, the years

of her flights from Paris, her returns, excursions, and retreats,

she was sustained by her zeal for justice, her pity for the oppressed,

and her unquenchable faith in human progress.

A crude panegyric of Rousseau, certain political pamphlets, an _Essai

sur les Fictions_, a treatise on the Influence of the Passions upon

the Happiness of Individuals and Nations (1796), were followed in

1800 by her elaborate study, _De la Litterature consideree dans ses

Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales_. Its central idea is that

of human progress: freedom, incarnated in republican institutions,

will assure the natural development of the spirit of man; a great

literature will be the offspring of progress and of freedom; and each

nation will lend its lights to other nations to illuminate the general

advance. Madame de Stael hoped to cast the spell of her intellect

over the young conqueror Bonaparte; Bonaparte regarded a political

meteor in feminine form with cold and haughty aversion. In 1802 the

husband, whom she had never loved, was dead. Her passion for Benjamin

Constant had passed through various crises in its troubled career--a

series of attractions ending in repulsions, and repulsions leading

to attractions, such as may be discovered in Constant's remarkable

novel _Adolphe_. They could neither decide to unite their lives, nor

to part for ever. Adolphe, in Constant's novel, after a youth of

pleasure-seeking, is disenchanted with life; his love of Ellenore

is that of one whose passions are exhausted, who loves for vanity

or a new indulgence of egoism; but Ellenore, whose youth is past,

will abandon all for him, and she imposes on him the tyranny of her

devotion. Each is the other's torturer, each is the other's

consolation. In the mastery of his cruel psychology Constant

anticipates Balzac.

Madame de Stael lightened the stress of inward storm by writing

_Delphine_, the story of a woman of genius, whose heroic follies bring

her into warfare with the world. The lover of Delphine, violent and

feeble, sentimental and egoistic, is an accomplice of the world in

doing her wrong, and Delphine has no refuge but death in the wilds

of America.[1]

[Footnote 1: In the first edition, Delphine dies by her own hand.]

In 1803 Madame de Stael received orders to trouble Paris with her

torrent of ideas and of speech no longer. The illustrious victim of

Napoleon's persecution hastened to display her ideas at Weimar, where

Goethe protected his equanimity, as well as might be, from the storm

of her approach, and Schiller endured her literary enthusiasm with

a sense of prostration. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, tutor to her

sons, became the interpreter of Germany to her eager and apprehensive

mind. Having annexed Germany to her empire, she advanced to the

conquest of Italy, and had her Roman triumph. England, which she had

visited in her Revolutionary flights, and Italy conspired in the

creation of her novel _Corinne_ (1807). It is again the history of

a woman of genius, beautiful, generous, enthusiastic, whom the world

understands imperfectly, and whom her English lover, after his fit

of Italian romance, discards with the characteristic British phlegm.

The paintings of Italian nature are rhetorical exercises; the

writer's sympathy with art and history is of more value; the

interpretation of a woman's heart is alive with personal feeling.

Madame de Stael's novels are old now, which means that they once were

young, and for her own generation they had the freshness and charm

of youth.

Her father's death had turned her thoughts towards religion. A

Protestant and a liberal, her spiritualist faith now found support

in the moral strength of Christianity. She was not, like Chateaubriand,

an epicurean and a Catholic; she did not care to decorate religion

with flowers, or make it fragrant with incense; it spoke to her not

through the senses, but directly to the conscience, the affections,

and the will. In the chapters of her book on Germany which treat of

"the religion of enthusiasm," her devout latitudinarianism finds

expression.

The book _De l'Allemagne_, published in London in 1813, after the

confiscation and destruction of the Paris edition by the imperial

police, prepared the way by criticism for the romantic movement. It

treats of manners, letters, art, philosophy, religion, interpreting

with astonishing insight, however it may have erred in important

details, the mind of Germany to the mind of France. It was a Germany

of poets, dreamers, and metaphysicians, loyal and sincere, but

incapable of patriotic passion, disqualified for action and for

freedom, which she in 1804 had discovered. The life of society

produces literature in France; the genius of inward meditation and

sentiment produces literature in Germany. The literature and art of

the South are classical, those of the North are romantic; and since

the life of our own race and the spirit of our own religion are infused

into romantic art, it has in it possibilities of indefinite growth.

Madame de Stael advanced criticism by her sense that art and

literature are relative to ages, races, governments, environments.

She dreamed of an European or cosmopolitan literature, in which each

nation, while retaining its special characteristics, should be in

fruitful communication with its fellows.

In 1811 Madame de Stael, when forty-five, became the wife of Albert

de Rocca, a young Swiss officer, more than twenty years her junior.

Their courage was rewarded by six years of happiness. Austria, Poland,

Russia, Sweden, England were visited. Upon the fall of Napoleon Madame

de Stael was once more in Paris, and there in 1817 she died. The _Dix

Annees d'Exil_, posthumously published, records a portion of her

agitated life, and exhales her indignation against her imperial

persecutor. The unfinished _Considerations sur la Revolution

Francaise_, designed originally as an apology for Necker, defends

the Revolution while admitting its crimes and errors; its true object,

as the writer conceived--political liberty--had been in the end

attained; her ideal of liberty was indeed far from that of a

revolutionary democracy; England, liberal, constitutional, with a

system at once popular and aristocratic, was the country in which

she saw her political aspirations most nearly realised.

III

FRANCOIS-RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND was born in 1768, at St.-Malo, of an

ancient Breton family. Except for the companionship of an elder sister,

of fragile health and romantic temper, his childhood was solitary.

The presence of the old count his father inspired terror. The boy's

society was with the waves and winds, or at the old chateau of Combourg,

with lonely woods and wilds. Horace, Tibullus, _Telemaque_, the

sermons of Massillon, nourished his imagination or stimulated his

religious sentiment; but solitude and nature were his chief

inspirers.

At seventeen he already seemed worn with the fatigue of unsatisfied

dreaming, before he had begun to know life. A commission in the army

was procured for him. He saw, interested yet alien in heart, something

of literary life in Paris; then in Revolution days (1791) he quitted

France, and, with the dream of discovering the North-West Passage,

set sail to America. If he did not make any geographical discovery,

Chateaubriand found his own genius in the western world. The news

of the execution of Louis XVI. decided him to return; a Breton and

a royalist should show himself among the ranks of the emigrants. To

gratify the wish of his family, he married before crossing the

frontier. Madame de Chateaubriand had the dignity to veil her sorrow

caused by an imperfect union, and at a later time she won such a portion

of her husband's regard as he could devote to another than himself.

The episode of war having soon closed--not without a wound and a

serious illness--he found a refuge in London, enduring dire poverty,

but possessing the consolation of friendship with Joubert and

Fontanes, and there he published in 1797 his first work, the _Essai

sur les Revolutions_. The doctrine of human progress had been part

of the religion of the eighteenth century; Chateaubriand in 1797 had

faith neither in social, nor political, nor religious progress. Why

be deceived by the hopes of revolution, since humanity can only circle

for ever through an exhausting round of illusions? The death of his

mother and words of a dying sister awakened him from his melancholy

mood; he resolved to write a second book, which should correct the

errors of the first, and exhibit a source of hope and joy in religion.

To the eighteenth century Christianity had appeared as a gross and

barbarous superstition; he would show that it was a religion of beauty,

the divine mother of poetry and of art, a spring of poetic thought

and feeling alike through its dogma and its ritual; he would convert

literature from its decaying cult of classicism, and restore to honour

the despised Middle Ages.

The _Genie du Christianisme_, begun during its author's residence

in London, was not completed until four years later. In 1801,

detaching a fragment from his poetic apology for religion, he

published his _Atala, ou les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert_.

It is a romance, or rather a prose poem, in which the magic of style,

the enchantment of descriptive power, the large feeling for nature,

the sensibility to human passion, conceal many infirmities of design

and of feeling. Chateaubriand suddenly entered into his fame.

On April 18, 1802, the Concordat was celebrated with high solemnities;

the Archbishop of Paris received the First Consul within the portals

of Notre-Dame. It was the fitting moment for the publication of the

_Genie du Christianisme_. Its value as an argumentative defence of

Christianity may not be great; but it was the restoration of religion

to art, it contained or implied a new system of aesthetics, it was

a glorification of devout sentiment, it was a pompous manifesto of

romanticism, it recovered a lost ideal of beauty. From Ronsard to

Chenier the aim of art had been to imitate the ancients, while

imitating or interpreting life. Let us be national, let us be modern,

let us therefore be Christians, declared Chateaubriand, and let us

seek for our tradition in the great Christian ages. It was a revolution

in art for which he pleaded, and throughout the first half of the

nineteenth century the revolution was in active progress.

The episode of _Rene_, which was included in the _Genie_, and

afterwards published separately, has been described as a

Christianised _Werther_; its passion is less frank, and even more

remote from sanity of feeling, than that of Goethe's novel, but the

sadness of the hero is more magnificently posed. A sprightly English

lady described Chateaubriand as "wearing his heart in a sling"; he

did so during his whole life; and through Rene we divine the inventor

of Rene carrying his wounded heart, as in the heroine we can discern

some features of his sister Lucile. In all his writings his feelings

centre in himself: he is a pure egoist through his sensibility; but

around his own figure his imagination, marvellous in its expansive

power, can deploy boundless perspectives.

Both _Atala_ and _Rene_, though brought into connection with the

_Genie du Christianisme_, are in fact more closely related to the

prose epic _Les Natchez_, written early, but held in reserve until

the publication of his collected works in 1826-31. _Les Natchez_,

inspired by Chateaubriand's American travels, idealises the life of

the Red Indian tribes. The later books, where he escapes from the

pseudo-epic manner, have in them the finest spirit of his early years,

his splendour and delicacy of description, his wealth of imaginative

reverie. Famous as the author of the _Genie_, Chateaubriand was

appointed secretary to the embassy at Rome. The murder of the Duc

d'Enghien alienated him from Napoleon. Putting aside the _Martyrs_,

on which he had been engaged, he sought for fresh imagery and local

colour to enrich his work, in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a record

of which was published in his (1811) _Itineraire de Paris a

Jerusalem_.

The _Martyrs_ appeared in 1809. It was designed as a great example

of that art, inspired by Christianity, on behalf of which he had

contended in the _Genie_; the religion of Christ, he would prove,

can create passions and types of character better suited for noble

imaginative treatment than those of paganism; its supernatural

marvels are more than a compensation for the loss of pagan mythology.

The time chosen for his epopee in prose is the reign of the persecutor

Diocletian; Rome and the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, Egypt, the

deserts of the Thebaid, Jerusalem, Sparta, Athens, form only portions

of the scene; heaven and hell are open to the reader, but Chateaubriand,

whose faith was rather a sentiment than a passion, does not succeed

in making his supernatural habitations and personages credible even

to the fancy. Far more admirable are many of the terrestrial scenes

and narrations, and among these, in particular the story of Eudore.

In the course of the travels which led him to Jerusalem, Chateaubriand

had visited Spain, and it was his recollections of the Alhambra that

moved him to write, about 1809, the _Aventures du Dernier des

Abencerages_, published many years later. It shows a tendency towards

self-restraint, excellent in itself, but not entirely in harmony with

his effusive imagination. With this work Chateaubriand's inventive

period of authorship closed; the rest of his life was in the main

that of a politician. From the position of an unqualified royalist

(1814-24) he advanced to that of a liberal, and after 1830 may be

described as both royalist and republican. His pamphlet of 1814, _De

Bonaparte et des Bourbons_, was declared by Louis XVIII. to be worth

an army to his cause.

In his later years he published an _Essai sur la Litterature Anglaise_

and a translation of "Paradise Lost." But his chief task was the

revision of the _Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_, an autobiography designed

for posthumous publication, and actually issued in the pages of the

_Presse_, through the indiscreet haste of the publishers, while

Chateaubriand was still living. Its egotism, its vanity, its

malicious wit, its fierce reprisals on those whom the writer regarded

as his enemies, its many beauties, its brilliance of style, make it

an exposure of all that was worst and much of what was best in his

character and genius. Tended by his old friend Mme. Recamier, to whom,

if to any one, he was sincerely attached, Chateaubriand died in the

summer of 1848. His tomb is on the rocky islet of Grand-Be, off the

coast of Brittany.

Chateaubriand cannot be loved, and his character cannot be admired

without grave reserves. But an unique genius, developed at a fortunate

time, enabled him to play a most significant part in the history of

literature. He was the greatest of landscape painters; he restored

to art the sentiment of religion; he interpreted the romantic

melancholy of the age. If he posed magnificently, there were native

impulses which suggested the pose; and at times, as in the

_Itineraire_, the pose is entirely forgotten. His range of ideas is

not extraordinary; but vision, imagination, and the passion which

makes the imaginative power its instrument, were his in a supereminent

degree.

CHAPTER II

THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS

While the imagination of France was turning towards the romance of

the Middle Ages and the art of Christianity, Hellenic scholarship

was maintained by Jean-Francois Boissonade. The representative of

Hellenism in modern letters was Courier, a brave but undisciplined

artillery officer under Napoleon, who loved the sight of a Greek

manuscript better than he loved a victory. PAUL-LOUIS COURIER DE MERE

(1772-1825) counts for nothing in the history of French thought; in

the history of French letters his pamphlets remain as masterpieces

of Attic grace, luminous, light and bright in narrative, easy in

dialogue, of the finest irony in comment, impeccable in measure and

in malice. The translator of _Daphnis and Chloe_, wearied by war and

wanderings in Italy, lived under the Restoration among his vines at

Veretz, in Touraine. In 1816 he became the advocate of provincial

popular rights against the vexations of the Royalist reaction. He

is a vine-dresser, a rustic bourgeois, occupied with affairs of the

parish. Shall Chambord be purchased for the Duke of Burgundy? shall

an intolerant young _cure_ forbid the villagers to dance? shall

magistrates harass the humble folk? Such are the questions agitating

the country-side, which the vine-dresser Courier will resolve. The

questions have been replaced to-day by others; but nothing has quite

replaced the _Simple Discours_, the _Petition pour les Villageois_,

the _Pamphlet des Pamphlets_, in which the ease of the best sixteenth

and seventeenth century prose is united with a deft rapier-play like

that of Voltaire, and with the lucidity of the writer's classical

models.

Chateaubriand's artistic and sentimental Catholicism was the

satisfaction of imaginative cravings. When JOSEPH DE MAISTRE

(1753-1821) revolted against the eighteenth century, it was a revolt

of the soul; when he assailed the authority of the individual reason,

it was in the name of a higher reason. Son of the President of the

Senate of Savoy, he saw his country invaded by the French Republican

soldiery in 1792, and he retired to Lausanne. He protested against

the Revolutionary aggression in his _Lettres d'un Royaliste

Savoisien_; inspired by the mystical Saint-Martin, in his

_Considerations sur la France_, he interpreted the meaning of the

great political cataclysm as the Divine judgment upon France--assigned

by God the place of the leader of Christendom, the eldest daughter of

the Church--for her faithlessness and proud self-will. The sacred

chastisement accomplished, monarchy and Catholicism must be restored

to an intact and regenerated country. During fifteen years Maistre

served the King of Sardinia as envoy and plenipotentiary at the

Russian Court, maintaining his dignity in cruel distress upon the

salary of a clerk. Amiable in his private life, he was remorseless--with

the stern charity of an inquisitor--in dogma. In a style of

extraordinary clearness and force he expounded a system of ideas,

logically connected, on which to base a complete reorganisation of

European society. Those ideas are set forth most powerfully in the

dialogues entitled _Les Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg_ and the

treatises _Du Pape_ and _De l'Eglise Gallicane_.

He honours reason; not the individual reason, source of innumerable

errors, but the general reason, which, emanating from God, reveals

universal and immutable truth--_quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab

omnibus_. To commence philosophising we should despise the

philosophers. Of these, Bacon, to whose errors Maistre devotes a

special study, is the most dangerous; Locke is the most contemptible.

The eighteenth century spoke of nature; Maistre speaks of God, the

Grand Monarch who rules His worlds by laws which are flexible in His

hands. To punish is the prime duty of authority; the great Justiciary

avenges Himself on the whole offending race of men; there is no

government without an executioner. But God is pitiful, and allows

us the refuge of prayer and sacrifice. Without religion there is no

society; without the Catholic Church there is no religion; without

the sovereign Pontiff there is no Catholic Church. The sovereignty

of the Pope is therefore the keystone of civilisation; his it is to

give and take away the crowns of kings. Governments absolute over

the people, the Pontiff absolute over governments--such is the

earthly reflection of the Divine monarchy in heaven. To suppose that

men can begin the world anew from a Revolutionary year One, is the

folly of private reason; society is an organism which grows under

providential laws; revolutions are the expiation for sins. Such are

the ideas which Maistre bound together in serried logic, and deployed

with the mastery of an intellectual tactician. The recoil from

individualism to authority could not have found a more absolute

expression.

The Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840), whose theocratic views have much

in common with those of Maistre, and of his teacher Saint-Martin,

dwelt on the necessity of language as a condition of thought, and

maintained that language is of divine origin. Ballanche (1776-1847),

half poet, half philosopher, connected theocratic ideas with a theory

of human progress--a social and political palingenesis--which had

in it the elements of political liberalism. Theocracy and liberalism

met in the genius of FELICITE-ROBERT DE LAMENNAIS (1782-1854); they

engaged after a time in conflict, and in the end the victory lay with

his democratic sympathies. A Breton and a priest, Lamennais, endowed

with imagination, passion, and eloquence, was more a prophet than

a priest. He saw the world around him perishing through lack of faith;

religion alone could give it life and health; a Church, freed from

political shackles, in harmony with popular tendencies, governed by

the sovereign Pontiff, might animate the world anew. The voice of

the Catholic Church is the voice of humanity, uttering the general

reason of mankind. When the _Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de

Religion_ appeared, another Bossuet seemed to have arisen. But was

a democratic Catholicism possible? Lamennais trusted that it might

be so, and as the motto of the journal _L'Avenir_ (1830), in which

Lacordaire and Montalembert were his fellow-labourers, he chose the

words _Dieu et Liberte_.

The orthodoxy of the _Avenir_ was suspected. Lamennais, with his

friends, journeyed to Rome "to consult the Lord in Shiloh," and in

the _Affaires de Rome_ recorded his experiences. The Encyclical of

1832 pronounced against the doctrines dearest to his heart and

conscience; he bowed in submission, yet he could not abandon his

inmost convictions. His hopes for a democratic theocracy failing,

he still trusted in the peoples. But the democracy of his desire and

faith was one not devoted to material interests; to spiritualise the

democracy became henceforth his aim. In the _Paroles d'un Croyant_

he announced in rhythmical prose his apocalyptic visions. "It is,"

said a contemporary, "a _bonnet rouge_ planted on a cross." In his

elder years Lamennais believed in a spiritual power, a common thought,

a common will directing society, as the soul directs the body, but,

like the soul, invisible. His metaphysics, in which it is attempted

to give a scientific interpretation and application to the doctrine

of the Trinity, are set forth in the _Esquisse d'une Philosophie_.

His former associates, Lacordaire, the eloquent Dominican, and

Montalembert, the historian, learned and romantic, of Western

monasticism, remained faithful children of the Church. Lamennais,

no less devout in spirit than they, died insubmissive, and above his

grave, among the poor of Pere-Lachaise, no cross was erected.

The antagonism to eighteenth-century thought assumed other forms

than those of the theocratic school. VICTOR COUSIN (1792-1867), a

pupil of Maine de Biran and Royer-Collard, became at the age of

twenty-three a lecturer on philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was

enthusiastic, ambitious, eloquent; with scanty knowledge he spoke

as one having authority, and impressed his hearers with the force

of a ruling personality. Led on from Scotch to German philosophy,

and having the advantage of personal acquaintance with Hegel, he

advanced through psychology to metaphysics. Not in the senses but

in the reason, impersonal in its spontaneous activity, he recognised

the source of absolute truth; in the first act of consciousness are

disclosed the finite, the infinite, and their mutual relations. In

the history of philosophy, in its four great systems of sensationalism,

idealism, scepticism, mysticism, he recognised the substance of

philosophy itself undergoing the process of evolution; each system

is true in what it affirms, false in what it denies. With psychology

as a starting-point, and eclecticism as a method, Cousin attempted

to establish a spiritualist doctrine. A young leader in the domain

of thought, he became at a later time too imperious a ruler. In the

writings of his disciple and friend THEODORE JOUFFROY (1796-1842)

there is a deeper accent of reality. Doubting, and contending with

his doubts, Jouffroy brooded upon the destiny of man, made inquisition

into the problems of psychology, refusing to identify mental science

with physiology, and applied his remarkable powers of patient and

searching thought to the solution of questions in morals and

aesthetics. The school of Cousin has been named eclectic; it should

rather be named spiritualist. The tendencies to which it owed its

origin extended beyond philosophy, and are apparent in the literary

art of Cousin's contemporaries.

As a basis for social reconstruction the spiritualist philosophy was

ineffectual. Another school of thought issuing from the Revolution,

yet opposing its anarchic individualism, aspired to regenerate

society by the application of the principles of positive science.

CLAUDE-HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON (1760-1825), and FRANCOIS-CHARLES

FOURIER (1772-1837), differing in many of their opinions, have a

common distinction as the founders of modern socialism.

Saint-Simon's ideal was that of a State controlled in things of the

mind by men of science, and in material affairs by the captains of

industry. The aim of society should be the exploitation of the globe

by associative effort. In his _Nouveau Christianisme_ he thought to

deliver the Christian religion from the outworn superstition, as he

regarded it, alike of Catholicism and Protestantism, and to point

out its true principle as adapted to our nineteenth century--that

of human charity, the united effort of men towards the well-being

of the poorest class.

Saint-Simon, fantastic, incoherent, deficient in the scientific

spirit and in the power of co-ordinating his results, yet struck out

suggestive ideas. A great and systematic thinker, AUGUSTE COMTE

(1798-1857), who was associated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824,

perceived the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward by

them to researches properly his own. The positivism of Comte consists

of a philosophy and a polity, in which a religion is involved. The

quickening of his emotional nature through an adoring friendship with

Mme. Clotilde de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness of

his earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction; he felt the

need of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy proceeds from the

theory that all human conceptions advance from the primitive

theological state, through the metaphysical--when abstract forces,

occult causes, scholastic entities are invented to explain the

phenomena of nature--to the positive, when at length it is recognised

that human knowledge cannot pass beyond the region of phenomena. With

these stages corresponds the progress of society from militarism,

aggressive or defensive, to industrialism. The several abstract

sciences--those dealing with the laws of phenomena rather than with

the application of laws--are so arranged by Comte as to exhibit each

more complex science resting on a simpler, to which it adds a new

order of truths; the whole erection, ascending to the science of

sociology, which includes a dynamical as well as a statical doctrine

of human society--a doctrine of the laws of progress as well as of

the laws of order--is crowned by morals.

In the polity of positivism the supreme spiritual power is entrusted

to a priesthood of science. Their moral influence will be chiefly

directed to reinforcing the social feeling, altruism, as against the

predominance of self-love. The object of religious reverence is not

God, but the "Great Being"--Humanity, the society of the noble living

and the noble dead, the company, or rather the unity, of all those

who contribute to the better life of man. To Humanity we pay our vows,

we yield our gratitude, we render our homage, we direct our

aspirations; for Humanity we act and live in the blessed subordination

of egoistic desire. Women--the mother, the wife, the daughter--purifying

through affection the energies of man, act, under the Great Being, as

angelic guardians, accomplishing a moral providence.

Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, and

positive, was accepted by PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON (1809-65), a far

more brilliant writer, a far less constructive thinker, and aided

him in arriving at conclusions which differ widely from those of Comte.

Son of a cooper at Besancon, Proudhon had the virtues of a true child

of the people--integrity, affection, courage, zeal, untiring energy.

Religion he would replace by morality, ardent, strict, and pure. Free

associations of workmen, subject to no spiritual or temporal

authority, should arise over all the land. _Qu'est-ce que la

Propriete?_ he asked in the title of a work published in 1840; and

his answer was, _La Propriete c'est le Vol_. Property, seizing upon

the products of labour in the form of rent or interest, and rendering

no equivalent, is theft. Justice demands that service should be repaid

by an equal service. Society, freely organising itself on the

principles of liberty and justice, requires no government; only

through such anarchy as this can true order be attained. An apostle

of modern communism, Proudhon, by ideas leavening the popular mind,

became no insignificant influence in practical politics.

CHAPTER III

POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL

I

The eighteenth century did homage to the reason; it sought for general

truths, scientific, social, political; its art was in the main an

inheritance, diminished with lapse of time, from the classical art

of the preceding century. With Rousseau came an outburst of the

personal element in literature, an overflow of sensibility, an

enfranchisement of the passions, and of imagination as connected with

the passions; his eloquence has in it the lyrical note. The romantic

movement was an assertion of freedom for the imagination, and an

assertion of the rights of individuality. Love, wonder, hope,

measureless desire, strange fears, infinite sadness, the sentiment

of nature, aspiration towards God, were born anew. Imagination,

claiming authority, refused to submit to the rules of classic art.

Why should the several literary species be impounded each in its

separate paddock? Let them mingle at the pleasure of the artist's

genius; let the epic and the drama catch what they can of the lyric

cry; let tragedy and comedy meet and mix. Why remain in servitude

to the models of Greece and Rome? Let all epochs and every clime

contribute to the enrichment of art. The primitive age was above all

others the age of poetry. The great Christian centuries were the

centuries of miracle and marvel, of spiritual exaltation and

transcendent passion. Honour, therefore, to our mediaeval

forefathers! It is the part of reason to trust the imagination in

the imaginative sphere. Through what is most personal and intimate

we reach the truths of the universal heart of man. An image may at

the same time be a symbol; behind a historical tableau may lie a

philosophical idea.

At first the romantic movement was Christian and monarchical. Its

assertion of freedom, its claims on behalf of the _ego_, its licence

of the imagination, were in reality revolutionary. The intellect is

more aristocratic than the passions. The great spectacle of modern

democracy deploying its forces is more moving than any pallid ideals

of the past; it has the grandeur and breadth of the large phenomena

of nature; it is wide as a sunrise; its advance is as the onset of

the sea, and has like rumours of victory and defeat. The romantic

movement, with no infidelity to its central principle, became modern

and democratic.

Foreign life and literatures lent their aid to the romantic movement

in France--the passion and mystery of the East; the struggle for

freedom in Greece; the old ballads of Spain; the mists, the solitudes,

the young heroes, the pallid female forms of Ossian; the feudal

splendours of Scott; the melancholy Harold; the mysterious Manfred;

Goethe's champion of freedom, his victim of sensibility, his seeker

for the fountains of living knowledge; Schiller's revolters against

social law, and his adventurers of the court and camp.

With the renewal of imagination and sentiment came a renewal of

language and of metre. The poetical diction of the eighteenth century

had grown colourless and abstract; general terms had been preferred

to particular; simple, direct, and vivid words had been replaced by

periphrases--the cock was "the domestic bird that announces the day."

The romantic poets sought for words--whether noble or vulgar--that

were coloured, concrete, picturesque. The tendency culminated with

Gautier, to whom words were valuable, like gems, for their gleam,

their iridescence, and their hardness. Lost treasures of the language

were recovered; at a later date new verbal inventions were made. By

degrees, also, grammatical structure lost some of its rigidity;

sentences and periods grew rather than were built; phrases were alive,

and learnt, if there were a need, to leap and bound. Verse was moulded

by the feeling that inspired it; the melodies were like those of an

Eolian harp, long-drawn or retracted as the wind swept or touched

the strings. Symmetry was slighted; harmony was valued for its own

sake and for its spiritual significance. Rich rhymes satisfied or

surprised the ear, and the poet sometimes suffered through his

curiosity as a virtuoso. By internal licences--the mobile cesura,

new variations and combinations--the power of the alexandrine was

marvellously enlarged; it lost its monotony and became capable of

every achievement; its external restraints were lightened; verse

glided into verse as wave overtaking wave. The accomplishment of these

changes was a gradual process, of which Hugo and Sainte-Beuve were

the chief initiators. Gautier and, in his elder years, Hugo

contributed to the later evolution of romantic verse. The influence

on poetical form of Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, was of minor importance.

The year 1822 is memorable; it saw the appearance of Vigny's _Poemes_,

the _Odes_ of Hugo, which announced a new power in literature, though

the direction of that power was not yet defined, and almost to the

same moment belongs the indictment of classical literature by Henri

Beyle ("Stendhal") in his study entitled _Racine et Shakespeare_.

Around Charles Nodier, in the library of the Arsenal, gathered the

young revolters--among them Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Emile Deschamps,

afterwards the translator of _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Macbeth_, his

brother Antony, afterwards the translator of the _Divine Comedy_.

The first Cenacle was formed; in the _Muse Francaise_ and in the

_Globe_ the principles of the new literary school were expounded and

illustrated. Victor Hugo looked on with friendly intentions, but

still held aloof.

JEAN-PIERRE DE BERANGER (1780-1857) was not one of this company of

poets. A child of Paris, of humble parentage, he discovered, after

various experiments, that his part was not that of a singer of large

ambitions. In 1815 his first collection of _Chansons_ appeared; the

fourth appeared in 1833. Standing between the bourgeoisie and the

people, he mediated between the popular and the middle-class

sentiment. His songs flew like town sparrows from garret to garden;

impudent or discreet, they nested everywhere. They seemed to be the

embodied wisdom of good sense, good temper, easy morals, love without

its ardours, poverty without its pains, patriotism without its

fatigues, a religion on familiar terms with the _Dieu des bonnes gens_.

In his elder years a Beranger legend had evolved itself; he was the

sage of democracy, the Socrates of the people, the patriarch to whom

pilgrims travelled to receive the oracles of liberal and benevolent

philosophy. Notwithstanding his faults in the pseudo-classic taste,

Beranger was skilled in the art of popular song; he knew the virtue

of concision; he knew how to evolve swiftly his little lyric drama;

he knew how to wing his verses with a volant refrain; he could catch

the sentiment of the moment and of the multitude; he could be gay

with touches of tenderness, and smile through a tear reminiscent of

departed youth and pleasure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois he

was a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was a

democrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty,

and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democratic

absolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Beranger count

for much; in the history of literature the poet has a little niche

of his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elder

years supposed himself the champion of a literary revolution, might

be called modest.

II

Among the members of the Cenacle was to be seen a poet already famous,

their elder by several years, who might have been the master of a

school had he not preferred to dwell apart; one who, born for poetry,

chose to look on verse as no more than an accident of his existence.

In the year 1820 had appeared a slender volume entitled _Meditations

Poetiques_. The soul, long departed, returned in this volume to French

poetry. Its publication was an event hardly less important than that

of the _Genie du Christianisme_. The well-springs of pure inspiration

once more flowed. The critics, indeed, were not all enthusiastic;

the public, with a surer instinct, recognised in Lamartine the singer

they had for many years desired, and despaired to find.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, born at Macon in 1790, of royalist parents,

had passed his childhood among the tranquil fields and little hills

around his homestead at Milly. From his mother he learned to love

the Bible, Tasso, Bernardin, and a christianised version of the

Savoyard Vicar's faith; at a later time he read Chateaubriand,

Rousseau, Milton, Byron, and was enchanted by the wandering gleams

and glooms of Ossian. From the melancholy of youth he was roused by

Italian travel, and by that Italian love romance of Graziella, the

circumstances of which he has dignified for the uses of idealised

autobiography. A deeper passion of love and grief followed; Madame

Charles, the "Julie" of Lamartine's _Raphael_, the "Elvire" of his

_Meditations_, died. Lamartine had versified already in a manner

which has affinities with that of those eighteenth-century poets and

elegiac singers of the Empire whom he was to banish from public regard.

Love and grief evoked finer and purer strains; his deepest feelings

flowed into verse with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity.

Without an effort of the will he had become the most illustrious poet

of France.

Lamartine had held and had resigned a soldier's post in the body-guard

of Louis XVIII. He now accepted the position of attache to the embassy

at Naples; published in 1823 his _Nouvelles Meditations_, and two

years later _Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d'Harold_ (Byron's Childe

Harold); after which followed a long silence. Secretary in 1824 to

the legation at Florence, he abandoned after a time the diplomatic

career, and on the eve of the Revolution of July (1830) appeared again

as a poet in his _Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses_; travelled in

the East in company with his wife, and recorded his impressions in

the _Voyage en Orient_; entered into political life, at first a

solitary in politics as he had been in literature, but by degrees

finding himself drawn more and more towards democratic ideas. "Where

will you sit?" he was asked on his presentation in the Chamber. His

smiling reply, "On the ceiling," was symbolical of the fact; but from

"the ceiling" his exalted oratory, generous in temper, sometimes wise

and well informed, descended with influence. _Jocelyn_ (1836), _La

Chute d'un Ange_ (1838), the _Recueillements Poetiques_ (1839),

closed the series of his poetical works, though he did not wholly

cease from song.

In 1847 Lamartine's idealising _Histoire des Girondins_, brilliant

in its romantic portraiture, had the importance of a political event.

The Revolution of February placed him for a little time at the head

of affairs; as he had been the soul of French poetry, so for a brief

hour he was the soul of the political life of France. With the victory

of imperialism Lamartine retired into the shade. He was more than

sixty years of age; he had lost his fortune and was burdened with

debt. His elder years were occupied with incessant improvisations

for the booksellers--histories, biographies, tales, criticism,

autobiographic confidences flowed from his pen. It was a gallant

struggle and a sad one. Through the delicate generosity of Napoleon

III. he was at length relieved without humiliating concessions. In

1869 Lamartine died in his eightieth year.

He was a noble dreamer in practical affairs, and just ideas formed

a portion of his dreams. Nature had made him an irreclaimable

optimist; all that is base and ugly in life passed out of view as

he soared above earth in his luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed

he knew, but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there were

consolations in maternal nature, in love, in religious faith and

adoration. His power of vision was not intense or keen; his

descriptions are commonly vague or pale; but no one could mirror more

faithfully a state of feeling divested of all material circumstance.

The pure and ample harmonies of his verse do not attack the ear, but

they penetrate to the soul. All the great lyric themes--God, nature,

death, glory, melancholy, solitude, regret, desire, hope, love--he

interpreted on his instrument with a musician's inspiration.

Unhappily he lacked the steadfast force of will, the inexhaustible

patience, which go to make a complete artist; he improvised admirably;

he refused to labour as a master of technique; hence his diffuseness,

his negligences; hence the decline of his powers after the first

spontaneous inspiration was exhausted.

Lamartine may have equalled but he never surpassed the best poems

of his earliest volume. But the elegiac singer aspired to be a

philosophic poet, and, infusing his ideas into sentiment and

narrative, became the author of _Jocelyn_ and _La Chute d'un Ange_.

Recalling and idealising an episode in the life of his friend the

Abbe Dumont, he tells how Jocelyn, a child of humble parents--not

yet a priest--takes shelter among the mountains from the

Revolutionary terror; how a proscribed youth, Laurence, becomes his

companion; how Laurence is found to be a girl; how friendship passes

into love; how, in order that he may receive the condemned bishop's

last confession, Jocelyn submits to become a priest; how the lovers

part; how Laurence wanders into piteous ways of passion; how Jocelyn

attends her in her dying hours, and lays her body among the hills

and streams of their early love. It is Jocelyn who chronicles events

and feelings in his journal of joy and of sorrow. Lamartine

acknowledges that he had before him as a model the idyl dear to him

in childhood--Bernardin's _Paul et Virginie_.

The poem is complete in itself, but it was designed as a fragment

of that vast modern epopee, with humanity for the hero, of which _La

Chute d'un Ange_ was another fragment. The later poem, vast in

dimensions, fantastic in subject, negligent in style, is a work of

Lamartine's poetic decline. We are among the mountains of Lebanon,

where dwell the descendants of Cain. The angel, enamoured of the

maiden Daidha, becomes human. Through gigantic and incoherent

inventions looms the idea of humanity which degrades itself by

subjugation to the senses, as in _Jocelyn_ we had seen the type of

humanity which ascends by virtue of aspirations of the soul. It was

a poor jest to say that the title of his poem _La Chute d'un Ange_

described its author. Lamartine had failed; he could not handle so

vast a subject with plastic power; but in earlier years he had

accomplished enough to justify us in disregarding a late failure--he

had brought back the soul to poetry.

III

Among the romantic poets who made themselves known between 1820 and

1830, ALFRED DE VIGNY is distinguished by the special character of

his genius, and by the fact that nothing in his poetry is derived

from his contemporaries. Lamartine, Hugo, and, at a later date, Musset,

found models or suggestions in his writings. He, though for a time

closely connected with the romantic school, really stands apart and

alone. Born in 1797, he followed the profession of his father, that

of arms, and knew the hopes, the illusions, and the disappointments

of military service at the time of the fall of the Empire and the

Bourbon restoration. He read eagerly in Greek literature, in the Old

Testament, and among eighteenth-century philosophers. As early as

1815 he wrote his admirable poem _La Dryade_, in which, before Andre

Chenier's verse had appeared, Chenier's fresh and delicate feeling

for antiquity was anticipated. In 1822 his first volume, _Poemes_,

was published, including the _Helena_, afterwards suppressed, and

groups of pieces classified as _Antiques_, _Judaiques_, and

_Modernes_. Already his _Moise_, majestic in its sobriety, was

written, though it waited four years for publication in the volume

of _Poemes Antiques et Modernes_ (1826). Moses climbing the slopes

of Nebo personifies the solitude and the heavy burden of genius; his

one aspiration now is for the sleep of death; and it is the lesser

leader Joshua who will conduct the people into the promised land.

The same volume included _Eloa_, a romance of love which abandons

joy through an impulse of divine pity: the radiant spirit Eloa, born

from a tear of Christ, resigns the happiness of heaven to bring

consolation to the great lost angel suffering under the malediction

of God. Other pieces were inspired by Spain, with its southern

violence of passion, and by the pass of Roncesvalles, with its

chivalric associations.

The novel of _Cinq-Mars_, which had a great success, is a free

treatment of history; but Vigny's best work is rather the embodiment

of ideas than the rendering of historical matter. His _Stello_ in

its conception has something of kinship with _Moise_; in three prose

tales relating the sufferings of Chatterton, Chenier, and Gilbert,

it illustrates the sorrows of the possessors of genius. Vigny's

military experience suggested another group of tales, the _Servitude

et Grandeur Militaires_; the soldier in accepting servitude finds

his consolation in the duty at all costs of strenuous obedience.

In 1827 Vigny quitted the army, and next year took place his

marriage--one not unhappy, but of imperfect sympathy--to an English

lady, Lydia Bunbury. His interest in English literature was shown

by translations of _Othello_ and the _Merchant of Venice_. The former

was acted with the applause of the young romanticists, who worshipped

Shakespeare ardently if not wisely, and who bore the shock of hearing

the unclassical word _mouchoir_ valiantly pronounced on the French

stage. The triumph of his drama of _Chatterton_ (1835) was

overwhelming, though its glory to-day seems in excess of its deserts.

Ten years later Vigny was admitted to the Academy. But with the

representation of _Chatterton_, and at the moment of his highest fame,

he suddenly ceased from creative activity. Never was his mind more

energetic, never was his power as an artist so mature; but, except

a few wonderful poems contributed to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_,

and posthumously collected, nothing was given by him to the world

from 1835 to 1863, the year of his death.

He had always been a secluded spirit; external companionship left

him inwardly solitary; secret--so Sainte-Beuve puts it--in his

"tower of ivory"; touching some mountain-summit for a moment--so

Dumas describes him--if he folded his wings, as a concession to

humanity. A great disillusion of passion had befallen him; but, apart

from this, he must have retreated into his own sphere of ideas and

of images, which seemed to him to be almost wronged by an attempt

at literary expression. He looked upon the world with a disenchanted

eye; he despaired of the possibilities of life for himself and for

all men; without declamation or display, he resigned himself to a

silent and stoical acceptance of the lot of man; but out of this calm

despair arose a passionate pity for his fellows, a pity even for things

evil, such as his Eloa felt for the lost angel. _La Colere de Samson_

gives majestic utterance to his despair of human love; his _Mont des

Oliviers_, where Jesus seeks God in vain, and where Judas lurks near,

expresses his religious despair. Nature, the benevolent mother, says

Vigny, is no mother, but a tomb. Yet he would not clamour against

the heavens or the earth; he would meet death silently when it comes,

like the dying wolf of his poem (_La Mort du Loup_), suffering but

voiceless. Wealth and versatility of imagination were not Vigny's

gifts. His dominant ideas were few, but he lived in them; for them

he found apt imagery or symbol; and in verse which has the dignity

of reserve and of passion controlled to sobriety, he let them as it

were involuntarily escape from the seclusion of his soul. He is the

thinker among the poets of his time, and when splendours of colour

and opulence of sound have passed away, the idea remains. In fragments

from his papers, published in 1867, with the title _Journal d'un

Poete_, the inner history of Vigny's spirit can be traced.

IV

To present VICTOR HUGO in a few pages is to carve a colossus on a

cherry-stone. His work dominates half a century. In the years of exile

he began a new and greater career. During the closing ten years his

powers had waned, but still they were extraordinary. Even with death

he did not retire; posthumous publications astonished and perhaps

fatigued the world.

Victor-Marie Hugo was born at Besancon on February 26, 1802, son of

a distinguished military officer--

"_Mon pere vieux soldat, ma mere Vendeenne._"

Mother and children followed Commandant Hugo to Italy in 1807; in

Spain they halted at Ernani and at Torquemada--names remembered by

the poet; at Madrid a Spanish Quasimodo, their school servant, alarmed

the brothers Eugene and Victor. A schoolboy in Paris, Victor Hugo

rhymed his chivalric epic, his tragedy, his melodrama--"les betises

que je faisais avant ma naissance." In 1816 he wrote in his manuscript

book the words, "I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing." At fifteen

he was the laureate of the Jeux Floraux, the "enfant sublime" of

Chateaubriand's or of Soumet's praise.

Founder, with his brothers, of the _Conservateur Litteraire_, he

entered into the society of those young aspirants who hoped to renew

the literature of France. In 1822 he published his _Odes et Poesies

Diverses_, and, obtaining a pension from Louis XVIII., he married

his early playfellow Adele Foucher. Romances, lyrics, dramas

followed in swift succession. Hugo, by virtue of his genius, his

domineering temper, his incessant activity, became the acknowledged

leader of the romantic school. In 1841 he was a member of the Academy;

four years later he was created a peer. Elected deputy of Paris in

1848, the year of revolution, he sat on the Right in the Constituant,

on the Left in the Legislative Assembly, tending more and more towards

socialistic democracy. The Empire drove him into exile--exile first

at Brussels, then in Jersey, finally in Guernsey, where Hugo, in his

own imagination, was the martyred but unsubdued demi-god on his

sea-beaten rock. In 1870, on the fall of the Empire, he returned to

Paris, witnessed the siege, was elected to the National Assembly,

urged a continuance of the war, spoke in favour of recognising

Garibaldi's election, and being tumultuously interrupted by the

Right, sent in his resignation. Occupied at Brussels in the interests

of his orphaned grandchildren, he was requested to leave, on the

ground of his zeal on behalf of the fallen Communists; he returned

to Paris, and pleaded in the _Rappel_ for amnesty. In 1875 he was

elected a senator. His eightieth birthday was celebrated with

enthusiasm. Three years later, on May 23, 1885, Victor Hugo died.

His funeral pomps were such that one might suppose the genius of France

itself was about to be received at the Pantheon.

In Victor Hugo an enormous imagination and a vast force of will

operated amid inferior faculties. His character was less eminent than

his genius. If it is vanity to take a magnified Brocken-shadow for

one's self and to admire its superb gestures upon the mist, never

was vanity more complete or more completely satisfied than his. He

was to himself the hero of a Hugo legend, and did not perceive when

the sublime became the ridiculous. Generous to those beneath him,

charitable to universal humanity, he was capable of passionate

vindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his self-esteem;

and, since whatever opposed him was necessarily an embodiment of the

power of evil, the contest rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman.

His intellect, the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination.

Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, could pass

with him for ideas; but his visions are sometimes thoughts in images.

The voice of his passions was leonine, but his moral sensibility

wanted delicacy. His laughter was rather boisterous than fine. He

is a poet who seldom achieved a faultless rendering of the subtle

psychology of lovers' hearts; there was in him a vein of robust

sensuality. Children were dear to him, and he knew their pretty ways;

a cynical critic might allege that he exploited overmuch the tender

domesticities. His eye seized every form, vast or minute, defined

or vague; his feeling for colour was rather strong than delicate;

his vision was obsessed by the antithesis of light and shade; his

ear was awake to every utterance of wind or wave; phantoms of sound

attacked his imagination; he lent the vibrations of his nerves, his

own sentiments, to material objects; he took and gave back the soul

of things. Words for him were living powers; language was a moving

mass of significant myths, from which he chose and which he

aggrandised; sensations created images and words, and images and

words created ideas. He was a master of all harmonies of verse; now

a solitary breather through pipe or flute; more often the conductor

of an orchestra.

To say that Hugo was the greatest lyric poet of France is to say too

little; the claim that he was the greatest lyric poet of all literature

might be urged. The power and magnitude of his song result from the

fact that in it what is personal and what is impersonal are fused

in one; his soul echoed orchestrally the orchestrations of nature

and of humanity--

"_Son ame aux mille voix, que le Dieu qu'il adore

Mit au centre de tout comme un echo sonore._"

And thus if his poetry is not great by virtue of his own ideas, it

becomes great as a reverberation of the sensations, the passions,

and the thoughts of the world. He did not soar tranquilly aloft and

alone; he was always a combatant in the world and wave of men, or

borne joyously upon the flood. The evolution of his genius was a long

process. The _Odes_ of 1822 and 1824, the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826,

Catholic and royalist in their feeling, show in their form a

struggling originality oppressed by the literary methods of his

predecessors--J.-B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Casimir Delavigne. This

originality asserts itself chiefly in the _Ballades_. His early prose

romances, _Han d'Islande_ (1823) and _Bug-Jargal_ (1826)--the one

a tale of the seventeenth-century man-beast of Norway, the other a

tale of the generous St. Domingo slave--are challenges of youthful

and extravagant romanticism. _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne_ (1829)

is a prose study in the pathology of passion. The same year which

saw the publication of the last of these is also the year of _Les

Orientales_. These poems are also studies--amazing studies in colour,

in form, in all the secrets of poetic art. The East was popular--Hugo

was ever passionate for popularity--and Spain, which he had seen,

is half-Oriental. But of what concern is the East? he had seen a sunset

last summer, and the fancy took him; the East becomes an occasion

for marvellous combinations of harmony and lustrous tinctures; art

for its own sake is precious.

From 1827, when _Cromwell_ appeared, to 1843, when the epic in drama

_Les Burgraves_ failed, Hugo was a writer for the stage, diverting

tragedy from its true direction towards lyrical melodrama.[1] In the

operatic libretto _La Esmeralda_ (1836) his lyrical virtuosity was

free to display itself in an appropriate dramatic form. The libretto

was founded on his own romance _Notre-Dame de Paris_ (1831), an

evocation, more imaginative than historical, of the old city of the

fifteenth century, its tragic passions, its strangeness, its horrors,

and its beauty; it is a marvellous series of fantasies in black and

white; things live in it more truly than persons; the cathedral, by

its tyrannous power and intenser life, seems to overshadow the other

actors. The tale is a juxtaposition of violent contrasts, an

antithesis of darkness and light. Through Quasimodo afflicted

humanity appeals for pity.

[Footnote 1: See section VII, this chapter.]

In the volume of verse which followed _Les Orientales_ after an

interval of two years, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_ (1831), Hugo is a

master of his instrument, and does not need to display his miracles

of skill; he is freer from faults than in the poetry of later years,

but not therefore more to be admired. His noblest triumphs were almost

inevitably accompanied by the excesses of his audacity. Here the

lyrism is that of memory and of the heart--intimate, tender, grave,

with a feeling for the hearth and home, a sensibility to the

tranquillising influences of nature, a charity for human-kind, a

faith in God, a hope of immortality. Now and again, as in the epilogue,

the spirit of public indignation breaks forth--

"_Et j'ajoute a ma lyre une corde d'airain._"

The spirit of the _Chants du Crespuscule_ (1835) is one of doubt,

trouble, almost of gloom. Hugo's faith in the bourgeois monarchy is

already waning; he is a satirist of the present; he sees two things

that are majestic--the figure of Napoleon in the past, the popular

flood-tide in the future which rises to threaten the thrones of kings.

But this tide is discerned, as it were, through a dimness of weltering

mist. _Les Voix Interieures_ (1837) resumes the tendencies of the

two preceding volumes; the dead Charles X. is reverently saluted;

the legendary Napoleon is magnified; the faith in the people grows

clearer; the inner whispers of the soul are caught with heedful ear;

the voice of the sea now enters into Hugo's poetry; Nature, in the

symbolic _La Vache_, is the mother and the exuberant nurse of all

living things. In _Les Rayons et les Ombres_ (1840), Nature is not

only the nurse, but the instructress and inspirer of the soul,

mingling spirit with spirit. Lamartine's _Le Lac_ and Musset's

_Souvenir_ find a companion, not more pure, but of fuller harmonies,

in the _Tristesse d'Olympio_; reminiscences of childhood are

magically preserved in the poem of the _Feuillantines_.

From 1840 to 1853 Hugo as a lyrical poet was silent. Like Lamartine,

he had concerned himself with politics. A private grief oppressed

his spirits. In 1843 his daughter Leopoldine and her husband of a

few short months were drowned. In 1852 the poet who had done so much

to magnify the first Napoleon in the popular imagination was the exile

who launched his prose invective _Napoleon le Petit_. A year later

appeared _Les Chatiments_, in which satire, with some loss of critical

discernment, is infused with a passionate lyrical quality,

unsurpassed in literature, and is touched at times with epic grandeur.

The Empire, if it severed Hugo from the soil of France, restored him

to himself with all his superb power and all his violences and errors

of genius.

The volumes of _Les Contemplations_ (1856) mark the culmination of

Hugo's powers as a lyrical poet. The earlier pieces are of the past,

from 1830 to 1843, and resemble the poems of the past. A group of

poems, sacred to the memory of his daughter, follow, in which beauty

and pathos are interpenetrated by a consoling faith in humanity, in

nature, and in God. The concluding pieces are in a greater manner.

The visionary Hugo lives and moves amid a drama of darkness and of

light; gloom is smitten by splendour, splendour collapses into gloom;

and darkness and light seem to have become vocal in song.

But a further development lay before him. The great lyric poet was

to carry all his lyric passion into an epic presentation, in detached

scenes, of the life of humanity. The first part of _La Legende des

Siecles_ was published in 1859 (later series, 1877, 1883). From the

birth of Eve to the trumpet of judgment the vast cycle of ages and

events unrolls before us; gracious episodes relieve the gloom; beauty

and sublimity go hand in hand; in the shadow the great criminals are

pursued by the great avengers. The spirit of _Les Chatiments_ is

conveyed into a view of universal history; if kings are tyrants and

priests are knaves, the people is a noble epic hero. This poem is

the epopee of democratic passions.

The same spirit of democratic idealism inspires Hugo's romance _Les

Miserables_ (1862). The subject now is modern; the book is rather

the chaos of a prose epic than a novel; the hero is the high-souled

outcast of society; everything presses into the pages; they are turn

by turn historical, narrative, descriptive, philosophical (with such

philosophy as Hugo has to offer), humanitarian, lyrical, dramatic,

at times realistic; a vast invention, beautiful, incredible, sublime,

absurd, absorbing in its interest, a nightmare in its tedium.

We have passed beyond the mid-century, but Hugo is not to be presented

as a torso. In the tale _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ (1866) the choral

voices of the sea cover the thinness and strain of the human voices;

if the writer's genius is present in _L'Homme qui Rit_ (1869), it

often chooses to display its most preposterous attitudes; the better

scenes of _Quatre-vingt Treize_ (1874) beguile our judgment into the

generous concessions necessary to secure an undisturbed delight.

These are Hugo's later poems in prose. In verse he revived the feelings

of youth with a difference, and performed happy caprices of style

in the _Chansons des Rues et des Bois_ (1865); sang the incidents

and emotions of his country's sorrow and glory in _L'Annee Terrible_

(1872), and--strange contrast--the poetry of babyland in _L'Art

d'etre Grandpere_ (1877). Volume still followed volume--_Le Pape_,

_La Pitie Supreme_, _Religions et Religion_, _L'Ane_, _Les Quatre

Vents de l'Esprit_, the drama _Torquemada_. The best pages in these

volumes are perhaps equal to the best in any of their author's

writings; the pages which force antithesis, pile up synonyms, develop

commonplaces in endless variations, the pages which are hieratic,

prophetic, apocalyptic, put a strain upon the loyalty of our

admiration. The last legend of Hugo's imagination was the Hugo legend:

if theism was his faith, autotheism was his superstition. Yet it is

easy to restore our loyalty, and to rediscover the greatest lyric

poet, the greatest master of poetic counterpoint that France has

known.

V

ALFRED DE MUSSET has been reproached with having isolated himself

from the general interests and affairs of his time. He did not isolate

himself from youth or love, and the young of two generations were

his advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of Rousseau, he

was a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment and the scepticism of the

eighteenth century. Impressionable, excitable, greedy of sensations,

he felt around him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire,

the void left by the passing away of religious faiths. One thing was

new and living--poetry. Chenier's remains had appeared; Vigny, Hugo,

Lamartine had opened the avenues for the imagination; Byron was dead,

but Harold and Manfred and Don Juan survived. Musset, born a poet,

was ready for imaginative ventures; he had been introduced, while

still a boy, to the Cenacle. Spain and Italy were the regions of

romance; at nineteen he published his first collection of poems,

_Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_, and--an adolescent Cherubin-Don Juan

of song--found himself famous.

He gave his adhesion to the romantic school, rather with the light

effrontery of youth than with depth of conviction; he was impertinent,

ironical, incredulous, blasphemous, despairing, as became an elegant

Byron minor of the boulevards, aged nineteen. But some of the pieces

were well composed; all had the "form and feature of blown youth";

the echoes of southern lands had the fidelity and strangeness of

echoes tossed from Paris backwards; certain passages and lines had

a classic grace; it might even be questioned whether the _Ballade

a la Lune_ was a challenge to the school of tradition, or a jest at

the expense of his own associates.

A season of hesitation and of transition followed. Musset was not

disposed to play the part of the small drummer-boy inciting the

romantic battalion to the double-quick. He began to be aware of his

own independence. He was romantic, but he had wit and a certain

intellectual good-sense; he honoured Racine together with Hugo; he

could not merge his individuality in a school. Yet, with an infirmity

characteristic of him, Musset was discouraged. It was not in him to

write great poetry of an impersonal kind; his _Nuit Venitienne_ had

been hissed at the Odeon; and what had he to sing out of his own heart?

He resolved to make the experiment. Three years after his first volume

a second appeared, which announced by its title that, while still

a dramatic poet, he had abandoned the stage; the _Spectacle dans un

Fauteuil_ declared that, though his glass was small, it was from his

own glass that he would drink.

The glass contained the wine of love and youth mingled with a grosser

potion. In the drama _La Coupe et les Levres_ he exhibited libertine

passion seeking alliance with innocence and purity, and incapable

of attaining self-recovery; in _Namouna_, hastily written to fit the

volume for publication, he presented the pursuit of ideal love as

conducting its victim through all the lures of sensual desire; the

comedy _A quoi revent les jeunes Filles_, with its charm of fantasy,

tells of a father's device to prepare his daughters for the good prose

of wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset had emancipated

himself from the Cenacle, and would neither appeal to the eye with

an overcharge of local colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curious

rhymes. Next year (1833) in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ appeared

_Rolla_, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's early manner,

and of Byron's influence on his genius; the prodigal, beggared of

faith, debased by self-indulgence, is not quite a disbeliever in love;

through passion he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge of

death.

At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in Italy. The hours

of illusion were followed by months of despair. He knew suffering,

not through the imagination, but in his own experience. After a time

calm gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue of

the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivolously despairing

and elegantly corrupt. In _Les Nuits_--two of these (_Mai_,

_Octobre_) inspired by the Italian joy and pain--he speaks simply

and directly from the heart in accents of penetrating power. Solitude,

his constant friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love,

shall be his consolers--

"_Apres avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore;

Il faut aimer sans cesse, apres avoir aime._"

Musset's powers had matured through suffering; the _Lettre a

Lamartine_, the _Espoir en Dieu_, the _Souvenir_, the elegy _A la

Malibran_, the later stanzas _Apres une Lecture_ (1842), are

masterpieces of the true Musset--the Musset who will live.

At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came the flash and outbreak

of a fiery mind; but the years were years of lassitude. His patriotic

song, _Le Rhin Allemand_, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received

him. "Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academician; the

ungracious reply, "Il s'absinthe trop," told the truth, and it was

a piteous decline. In 1857, attended by the pious Sister Marceline,

Musset died.

Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty,

intelligence, _esprit_, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse--these

were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructive

imagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of

an artist's passion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose,

the _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, has borne the lapse of time

ill. "J'y ai vomi la verite," he said. It is not the happiest way of

communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends

in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shorter

tales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with

breathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a

Louis-Quinze boudoir. _Pierre et Camille_, with its deaf-and-dumb

lovers, and their baby, who babbles in the presence of the relenting

grandfather "Bonjour, papa," has a pretty innocence. _Le Fils de

Titien_ returns to the theme of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence.

_Frederic et Bernerette_ and _Mimi Pinson_ may be said to have created

the poetic literature of the grisette--gay and good, or erring and

despairful--making a flower of what had blossomed in the stories of

Paul de Kock as a weed.

Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac poems, Musset's

best _Comedies_ and _Proverbes_ (proverbial sayings exemplified in

dramatic action), deserve a place. Written in prose for readers of

the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, their scenic qualities were discovered

only in 1847, when the actress Madame Allan presented _Un Caprice_

and _Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermee_ at St. Petersburg.

The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political conspiracy,

_Lorenzaccio_, was an effort beyond the province and the powers of

Musset. His _Andre del Sarto_, a tragic representation of the great

painter betrayed by his wife and his favourite pupil, needed the

relief of his happier fantasy. It is in such delicate creations of

a world of romance, a world of sunshine and of perpetual spring, as

_On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_, _Les Caprices de Marianne_, _Le

Chandelier_, _Il ne faut jurer de rien_, that Musset showed how

romantic art could become in a high sense classic by the balance of

sensibility and intelligence, of fantasy and passion. The graces of

the age of Madame de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freer

graces of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance of

Shakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the artificial

elegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love, and still repeated love;

sentiment is relieved by the play of gaiety; the grotesque approaches

the beautiful; we sail in these light-timbered barques to a land that

lies not very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest of

our own great enchanter.

VI

Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry of Musset.

Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the law

of Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a hand

that moulds and colours--that is all. A child of the South, born at

Tarbes in 1811, THEOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult's

studio till the day when, his friend the poet Gerard de Nerval having

summoned him to take part in the battle of _Hernani_, he swore by

the skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter.

His first volume, _Poesies_, appeared in 1830, and was followed in

two years by _Albertus_, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness and

horror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The

_Comedie de la Mort_ evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust,

Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art and

love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The

_Orientales_ was his poetic gospel; but the _Orientales_ is precisely

the volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most

exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these early

poems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured and

picturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far as

they can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured

with vivid pigments.

It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he believed, for

poetry, he was forced to toil day after day, year after year, as a

critic of the stage and of the art-exhibitions. He performed his task

in workman-like fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressions

than to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of literary

criticism are his exhumations of the earlier seventeenth-century

poets--Theophile, Cyrano, Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others--published

in 1844, together with a study of Villon, under the title _Les

Grotesques_, and the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the

request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on _Les Progres de la

Poesie Francaise depuis 1830_. A reader of that memoir to-day will

feel, with Swift, that literary reputations are dislimned and shifted

as quickly and softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays aloft.

In 1840 Gautier visited Spain; afterwards he saw Italy, Algeria,

Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He travelled not as a student of life

or as a romantic sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things

in colour; the world was for him so much booty for the eye. Endowed

with a marvellous memory, an unwearied searcher of the vocabulary,

he could transfer the visual impression, without a faltering outline

or a hue grown dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which

he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was in the manner

of some admired painter; he looked on nature through the medium of

a Zurbaran or a Watteau. The dictionary for Gautier was a collection

of gems that flashed or glowed; he chose and set them with the skill

and precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At Athens, in one

of his latest wanderings, he stood in presence of the Parthenon, and

found that he was a Greek who had strayed into the Middle Ages; on

the faith of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ he had loved the old cathedrals;

"the Parthenon," he writes, "has cured me of the Gothic malady, which

with me was never very severe."

Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of astonishing

the bourgeois; yet if he condescended to ideas, his ideas on all

subjects except art had less value than those of the philistine.

_Mademoiselle de Maupin_ has lost any pretensions it possessed to

supereminent immorality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth;

such purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid grossness,

lies in the fact that the young author loved life and cared for beauty.

In shorter tales he studiously constructs strangeness--the sense of

mystery he did not in truth possess--on a basis of exactly carved

and exactly placed material. His best invention is the tale of actors

strolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the old days of

Louis XIII., _Le Capitaine Fracasse_, suggested doubtless by

Scarron's _Roman Comique_, and patiently retouched during a quarter

of a century.

Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces of the

_Emaux et Camees_. He is not without sensibility, but he will not

embarrass himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emancipated

himself from the egoism of the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter

or a gem-engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into

coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is much. He values

words as sounds, and can combine them harmoniously in his little

stanzas. Life goes on around him; he is indifferent to it, caring

only to fix the colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfaltering

hand. When the Prussian assault was intended to the city, when

Regnault gave away his life as a soldier, Gautier in the Muses' bower

sat pondering his epithets and filing his phrases. Was it strength,

or was it weakness? His work survives and will survive by virtue of

its beauty--beauty somewhat hard and material, but such as the artist

sought. In 1872 Gautier died. By directing art to what is impersonal

he prepared the way for the Parnassien school, and may even be

recognised as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism.

These--Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier--are the names which

represent the poetry of nineteenth-century romance; four stars of

varying magnitudes, and one enormous cometary apparition. There was

also a _via lactea_, from which a well-directed glass can easily

disentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a critic

and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the _Vie, Poesies

et Pensees de Joseph Delorme_; a singer of spiritual reverie, modest

pleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the _Consolations_

and the _Pensees d'Aout_; a virtuoso always in his metrical

researches; Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the

_Iambes_, lover of Italian art and nature in _Il Pianto_; Auguste

Brizeux, the idyllist, in his _Marie_, of Breton wilds and provincial

works and ways; Gerard de Nerval, Hegesippe Moreau, Madame

Desbordes-Valmore, and paler, lessening lights. These and others

dwindle for the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms.

VII

The weaker side of the romantic school is apparent in the theatre.

It put forth a magnificent programme of dramatic reform, which it

was unable to carry out. The preface to Victor Hugo's _Cromwell_

(1827) is the earliest and the most important of its manifestoes.

The poetry of the world's childhood, we are told, was lyrical; that

of its youth was epic; the poetry of its maturity is dramatic. The

drama aims at truth before all else; it seeks to represent complete

manhood, beautiful and revolting, sublime and grotesque. Whatever

is found in nature should be found in art; from multiple elements

an aesthetic whole is to be formed by the sovereignty of imagination;

unity of time, unity of place are worthless conventions; unity of

action remains, and must be maintained. The play meant to exemplify

the principles of Hugo's preface is of vast dimensions, incapable

of presentation on the stage; the large painting of life for which

he pleaded, and which he did not attain, is of a kind more suitable

to the novel than to the drama. _Cromwell_, which departs little from

the old rules respecting time and place, is a flux and reflux of action,

or of speeches in place of action, with the question of the hero's

ambition for kingship as a centre; its personages are lay figures

draped in the costumes of historical romance.

The genius of Hugo was pre-eminently lyrical; the movement to which

he belonged was also essentially lyrical, a movement for the

emancipation of the personal element in art; it is by qualities which

are non-dramatic that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When,

in 1830, his _Hernani_ was presented at the Theatre Francais, a

strange, long-haired, bearded, fantastically-attired brigade of

young supporters engaged in a melee with those spectators who

represented the tyranny of tradition. "Kill him! he is an

Academician," was heard above the tumult. Gautier's truculent

waistcoat flamed in the thickest of the fight. The enthusiasm of

Gautier's party was justified by splendours of lyrism and of oratory;

but Hugo's play is ill-constructed, and the characters are beings

of a fantastic world. In _Marion Delorme_, in _Le Roi s'amuse_, in

the prose-tragedy _Lucrece Borgia_, Victor Hugo develops a favourite

theme by a favourite method--the moral antithesis of some purity of

passion surviving amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtue

discovered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in violent

contrasts. Marion is ennobled by the sacrifice of whatever remains

to her of honour; the moral deformity of Lucrece is purified by her

instinct of maternal love; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful by

virtue of his devotion as a father. The dramatic study of character

is too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. _Ruy Blas_, like

_Marion Delorme_ and _Hernani_, has extraordinary beauties; yet the

whole, with its tears and laughter, its lackey turned minister of

state, its amorous queen, is an incredible phantasmagoria. _Angelo_

is pure melodrama; _Marie Tudor_ is the melodrama of history. _Les

Burgraves_ rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from poetry

to declamation; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the reader please,

symbolic; it is much that it ought not to be, much that is admirable

and out of place; failing in dramatic truth, it fails with a certain

sublimity. The logic of action, truth of characterisation, these in

tragic creation are essentials; no heights or depths of poetry which

is non-dramatic can entirely justify works which do not accept the

conditions proper to their kind.

The tragedy of _Torquemada_, strange in conception, wonderful--and

wonderfully unequal--in imaginative power, was an inspiration of

Hugo's period of exile, wrought into form in his latest years. The

dramas of the earlier period, opening with an historical play too

enormous for the stage, closed in 1843 with _Les Burgraves_, which

is an epic in dialogue. Aspiring to revolutionary freedom, the

romantic drama disdained the bounds of art; epic, lyric, tragedy,

comedy met and mingled, with a result too often chaotic. The desired

harmony of contraries was not attained. Past ages were to be revived

upon the stage. The historic evocation possessed too often neither

historic nor human truth; it consisted in "local colour," and local

colour meant a picturesque display of theatrical bric-a-brac. Yet

a drama requires some centre of unity. Failing of unity in coherent

action and well-studied character, can a centre be provided by some

philosophical or pseudo-philosophical idea? Victor Hugo, wealthy in

imagery, was not wealthy in original ideas; in grandiose prefaces

he attempted to exhibit his art as the embodiment of certain abstract

conceptions. A great poet is not necessarily a philosophical poet.

Hugo's interpretations of his own art are only evidence of the fact

that a writer's vanity can practise on his credulity.

Among the romantic poets the thinker was Vigny. But it is not by its

philosophical symbolism that his _Chatterton_ lives; it is by virtue

of its comparative strength of construction, by what is sincere in

its passion, what is genuine in its pathos, and by the character of

its heroine, Kitty Bell. In the instincts of a dramaturgist both Vigny

and Hugo fell far short of ALEXANDRE DUMAS (1803-70). Before the

battle of _Hernani_ he had unfolded the romantic banner in his _Henri

III. et sa Cour_ (1829); it dazzled by its theatrical inventions,

its striking situations, its ever-changing display of the stage

properties of historical romance. His _Antony_, of two years later,

parent of a numerous progeny, is a domestic tragedy of modern life,

exhaling Byronic passion, misanthropy, crime, with a bastard, a

seducer, a murderer for its hero, and for its ornaments all those

atrocities which fascinate a crowd whose nerves can bear to be

agreeably shattered. Something of abounding vitality, of tingling

energy, of impetuosity, of effrontery, secured a career for _Antony_,

the _Tour de Nesle_, and his other plays. The trade in horrors lost

its gallant freebooting airs and grew industriously commercial in

the hands of Frederic Soulie. When in 1843--the year of Hugo's

unsuccessful _Les Burgraves_--a pseudo-classical tragedy, the

_Lucrece_ of Ponsard, was presented on the stage, the enthusiasm was

great; youth and romance, if they had not vanished, were less militant

than in the days of _Hernani_; it seemed as if good sense had returned

to the theatre.[2]

[Footnote 2: The influence of the great actress Rachel helped to

restore to favour the classical theatre of Racine and Corneille.]

Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843) is remembered in lyric poetry by his

patriotic odes, _Les Messeniennes_, suggested by the military

disasters of France. His dramatic work is noteworthy, less for the

writer's talent than as indicating the influence of the romantic

movement in checking the development of classical art. Had he been

free to follow his natural tendencies, Delavigne would have remained

a creditable disciple of Racine; he yielded to the stream, and timidly

approached the romantic leaders in historical tragedy. Once in comedy

he achieved success; _L'Ecole des Vieillards_ has the originality

of presenting an old husband who is generous in heart, and a young

wife who is good-natured amid her frivolity. Comedy during the second

quarter of the century had a busy ephemeral life. The name of Eugene

Scribe, an incessant improvisator during forty years, from 1811

onwards, in comedy, vaudeville, and lyric drama, seems to recall that

of the seventeenth-century Hardy. His art was not all commerce; he

knew and he loved the stage; a philistine writing for philistines,

Scribe cared little for truth of character, for beauty of form; the

theatrical devices became for him ends in themselves; of these he

was as ingenious a master as is the juggler in another art when he

tosses his bewildering balls, or smiles at the triumph of his

inexplicable surprises.

CHAPTER IV

THE NOVEL

I

The novel in the nineteenth century has yielded itself to every

tendency of the age; it has endeavoured to revive the past, to paint

the present, to embody a social or political doctrine, to express

private and personal sentiment, to analyse the processes of the heart,

to idealise life in the magic mirror of the imagination. The

literature of prose fiction produced by writers who felt the influence

of the romantic movement tended on the one hand towards lyrism, the

passionate utterance of individual emotion--George Sand's early

tales are conspicuous examples; on the other hand it turned to history,

seeking to effect a living and coloured evocation of former ages.

The most impressive of these evocations was assuredly Hugo's

_Notre-Dame de Paris_. It was not the earliest; Vigny's _Cinq-Mars_

preceded _Notre-Dame_ by five years. The writer had laboriously

mastered those details which help to make up the romantic _mise en

scene_; but he sought less to interpret historical truth by the

imagination than to employ the material of history as a vehicle for

what he conceived to be ideal truth. In Merimee's _Chronique de

Charles IX._ (1829), which also preceded Hugo's romance, the

historical, or, if not this, the archaeological spirit is present;

it skilfully sets a tale of the imagination in a framework of history.

Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his imagination as a poet;

they are lyrical, dramatic, epic; as a reconstitution of history their

value is little or is none. The historical novel fell into the hands

of Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the animation,

the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible invention of _Les Trois

Mousquetaires_ and its high-spirited fellows. There were times when

no company was so inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos,

Porthos, and Aramis. Let the critics assure us that Dumas' history

is untrue, his characters superficial, his action incredible; we

admit it, and we are caught again by the flash of life, the fanfaronade

of adventure. We throw Eugene Sue to the critics that we may save

Alexandre Dumas. But Dumas' brain worked faster than his hand--or

any human hand--could obey its orders; the mine of his inventive

faculty needed a commercial company and an army of diggers for its

exploitation. He constituted himself the managing director of this

company; twelve hundred volumes are said to have been the output of

the chief and his subordinates; the work ceased to be literature,

and became mere commerce. The money that Dumas accumulated he

recklessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his genius

decayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous proportions. Protected

by his son, he died a poor man amid the disasters of the

Franco-Prussian war.

II

HENRI BEYLE, who wrote under the pseudonym of Stendhal, not popular

among his contemporaries, though winning the admiration of Merimee

and the praise of Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about

1880. If to be studied and admired is to be understood, the prediction

has been fulfilled. Taine pronounced him the greatest psychologist

of the century; M. Zola, doing violence to facts, claimed him as a

literary ancestor; M. Bourget discovered in him the author of a

nineteenth-century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters.

During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride in isolation.

Born at Grenoble in 1783, he had learnt, during an unhappy childhood,

to conceal his natural sensibility; in later years this reserve was

pushed to affectation. He served under Napoleon with coolness and

energy; he hated the Restoration, and, a lover of Italian manners

and Italian music, he chose Milan for his place of abode. The

eighteenth-century materialists were the masters of his intellect;

"the only excuse for God," he declared, "is that he does not exist";

in man he saw a being whose end is pleasure, whose law is egoism,

and who affords a curious field for studying the dynamics of the

passions. He honoured Napoleon as an incarnation of force, the

greatest of the _condottieri_. He loved the Italian character because

the passions in Italy manifest themselves with the sudden outbreaks

of nature. He indulged his own passions as a refuge from ennui, and

turned the scrutiny of his intelligence upon every operation of his

heart. Fearing to be duped, he became the dupe of his own philosophy.

He aided the romantic movement by the paradox that all the true

classical writers were romantic in their own day--they sought to

please their time; the pseudo-classical writers attempt to maintain

a lifeless tradition. But he had little in common with the romantic

school, except a love for Shakespeare, a certain feeling for local

colour, and an interest in the study of passion; the effusion and

exaltation of romance repelled him; he laboured to be "dry," and often

succeeded to perfection.

His analytical study _De l'Amour_, resting on a sensual basis, has

all the depth and penetration which is possible to a shallow

philosophy. His notes on travel and art anticipate in an informal

way the method of criticism which became a system in the hands of

Taine; in a line, in a phrase, he resolves the artist into the

resultant of environing forces. His novels are studies in the

mechanics of the passions and the will. Human energy, which had a

happy outlet in the Napoleonic wars, must seek a new career in

Restoration days. Julien Sorel, the low-born hero of _Le Rouge et

le Noir_, finding the red coat impossible, must don the priestly black

as a cloak for his ambition. Hypocrite, seducer, and assassin, he

ends his career under the knife of the guillotine. _La Chartreuse

de Parme_ exhibits the manners, characters, intrigues of

nineteenth-century Italy, with a remarkable episode which gives a

soldier's experiences of the field of Waterloo. In the artist's

plastic power Beyle was wholly wanting; a collection of ingenious

observations in psychology may be of rare value, but it does not

constitute a work of art. His writings are a whetstone for the

intelligence, but we must bring intelligence to its use, else it will

grind down or break the blade. In 1842 he died, desiring to perpetuate

his expatriation by the epitaph which names him Arrigo Beyle Milanese.

III

Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is tempted to affix

to the novels of George Sand; but from her early lyrical manner she

advanced to perfect idyllic narrative; and while she idealised, she

observed, incorporating in her best work the results of a patient

and faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied to whatever

she wrote; offspring of her idealism or her realism, it is always

in a true sense poetic.

LUCILE-AURORE DUPIN, a descendant of Marshal Saxe, was born in Paris

in 1804, the daughter of Lieutenant Dupin and a mother of humble

origin--a child at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Her

early years were passed in Berri, at the country-house of her

grandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in temperament, she

had a large heart and an ardent imagination. The woods, the flowers,

the pastoral heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, the

little peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm, their processes of

life, their store of old tales and rural superstitions made up her

earliest education. Already endless stories shaped themselves in her

brain. At thirteen she was sent to be educated in a Paris convent;

from the boisterous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank of

a sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to heights of

religious exaltation, not to be forgotten when afterwards she wrote

_Spiridion_. The country cooled her devout ardour; she read widely,

poets, historians, philosophers, without method and with boundless

delight; the _Genie du Christianisme_ replaced the _Imitation_;

Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand, and romance in her heart

put on the form of melancholy. At eighteen the passive Aurore was

married to M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of those

qualities of heart and brain which make wedded union a happiness.

Two children were born; and having obtained her freedom and a scanty

allowance, Madame Dudevant in 1831, in possession of her son and

daughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in the capital.

Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar-cases and

snuff-boxes; happily her hopes received small encouragement. Perhaps

she could succeed in journalism under her friend Delatouche; she

proved wholly wanting in cleverness; her imagination had wings; it

could not hop on the perch; before she had begun the beginning of

an article the column must end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau,

she attempted a novel--_Rose et Blanche_. "Sand" and Sandeau were

fraternal names; a countryman of Berri was traditionally George.

Henceforth the young Bohemian, who traversed the _quais_ and streets

in masculine garb, should be GEORGE SAND.

To write novels was to her only a process of nature; she seated herself

before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot, and only the

slightest acquaintance with her characters; until five in the evening,

while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day and

the next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written itself in

full, and another was unfolding. Not that she composed mechanically;

her stories were not manufactured; they grew--grew with facility and

in free abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand,

her theme was the romance of love. In _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lelia_,

_Jacques_, she vindicated the supposed rights of passion. These

novels are lyrical cries of a heart that had been wounded; protests

against the crime of loveless marriage, against the tyranny of man,

the servitude of woman; pleas for the individualism of the

soul--superficial in thought, ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in

style, yet rising to passages of rare poetic beauty, and often

admirable in descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand had

translated her private experiences into romance; yet she, the

spectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund of sanity which

underlay the agitations of her genius, while she lent herself to her

creations, plied her pen with a steady hand from day to day. Unwise

and blameful in conduct she might be for a season; she wronged her

own life, and helped to ruin the life of Musset, who had neither her

discretion nor her years; but when the inevitable rupture came she

could return to her better self.

Through _Andre_, _Simon_, _Mauprat_--the last a tale of love subduing

and purifying the savage instincts in man--her art advanced in

sureness and in strength. Singularly accessible to external

influences, singularly receptive of ideas, the full significance and

relations of which she failed to comprehend, she felt the force of

intelligences stronger than her own--of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin,

of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious sentiment, an

ardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled in her mind with all the

discordant formulas of socialism. From 1840 to 1848 her love and large

generosity of nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopes

of social reform. Her novels _Consuelo_, _Jeanne_, _Le Meunier

d'Angibault_, _Le Peche de M. Antoine_, become expositions of a thesis,

or are diverted from their true development to advocate a cause. The

art suffers. _Jeanne_, so admirable in its rural heroine, wanders

from nature to humanitarian symbolism; _Consuelo_, in which the

writer studies so happily the artistic temperament, too often loses

itself in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious declamation.

But the gain of escape from the egoism of passion to a more

disinterested, even if a doctrinaire, view of life was great. George

Sand was finding her way.

Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner, she had found

her way; her third manner was attained before the second had lost

its attraction. _La Mare au Diable_ belongs to the year 1846; _La

Petite Fadette_, to the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand,

ever an optimist, hailed with joy; _Francois le Champi_ is but two

years later. In these delightful tales she returns from humanitarian

theories to the fields of Berri, to humble walks, and to the huts

where poor men lie. The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new

to French literature; the better soul of rural France, George Sand

found deep within herself; she had read the external circumstances

and incidents of country life with an eye as faithful in observation

as that of any student who dignifies his collection of human documents

with the style and title of realism in art; with a sense of beauty

and the instincts of affection she merged herself in what she saw;

her feeling for nature is realised in gracious art, and her art seems

itself to be nature.

In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri to other regions

of France, and interpreted aristocratic together with peasant life.

Old, experienced, infinitely good and attaching, she has tales for

her grandchildren, and romances--_Jean de la Roche_, _Le Marquis de

Villemer_, and the rest--for her other grandchildren the public. The

soul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must lean upon

a stronger woman's arm, of the girl--neither child nor fully

adult--she entered into with deepest and truest sympathy. The simple,

austere, stoical, heroic man she admired as one above her. Her style

at its best, flowing without impetuosity, full and pure without

commotion, harmonious without complex involutions, can mirror beauty

as faithfully and as magically as an inland river. "Calme, toujours

plus calme," was a frequent utterance of her declining years. "Ne

detruisez pas la verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sand

died. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us intimate with a

spirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous, and gaining through

experience a wisdom for the season of old age.

IV

George Sand may be described as an "idealist," if we add the words

"with a remarkable gift for observation." Her great contemporary

HONORE DE BALZAC is named a realist, but he was a realist haunted

or attacked by phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799 at

Tours, son of an advocate turned military commissariat-agent, Honore

de Balzac, after some training in the law, resolved to write, and,

if possible, not to starve. With his robust frame, his resolute will,

manifest in a face coarsely powerful, his large good-nature, his large

egoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might shoulder his

way through the crowd to fortune and to fame. But fortune and fame

were hard to come at. His tragedy _Cromwell_ was condemned by all

who saw the manuscript; his novels were published, and lie deep in

their refuge under the waters of oblivion. He tried the trades of

publisher, printer, type-founder, and succeeded in encumbering

himself with debt. At length in 1829 _Le Dernier Chouan_, a

half-historical tale of Brittany in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott,

was received with a measure of favour.

Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with journalism,

pamphleteering, and miscellaneous writing, in a Dutch painting of

bourgeois life, _Le Maison du Chatqui-pelote_, which relates the

sorrows of the draper's daughter, Augustine, drawn from her native

sphere by an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to wield

his pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he died, exhausted by

the passion of his brain, his own life was concentrated in that of

the creatures of his imagination. He had friends, and married one

of the oldest of them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death.

Sometimes for a little while he wandered away from his desk. More

than once he made wild attempts to secure wealth by commercial

enterprise or speculation. These were adventures or incidents of his

existence. That existence itself is summed up in the volumes of his

_Human Comedy_. He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence of

imagination; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crude

material on which to work. At six in the evening he retired to sleep;

he rose at the noon of night, urged on his brain with cups of coffee,

and covered page after page of manuscript, until the noon of day

released him. So it went on for nearly twenty years, until the

intemperance of toil had worn the strong man out.

There is something gross in Balzac's genius; he has little wit, little

delicacy, no sense of measure, no fine self-criticism, no lightness

of touch, small insight into the life of refined society, an imperfect

sense of natural beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as the

equivalent of spiritual mysteries; he is monarchical without the

sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment of

religion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as the

accumulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake?

It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power,

as the means of pushing towards fame and grasping gold.

Within the gross body of his genius, however, an intense flame burnt.

He had a vivid sense of life, a perception of all that can be seen

and handled, an eager interest in reality, a vast passion for _things_,

an inexhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a feeling,

exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of the conflict for

wealth and power, with its triumphs and defeats, its display of fierce

volition, its pushing aside of the feeble, its trampling of the fallen,

its grandeur, its meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the cruelties

of its pathos. He flung himself on the life of society with a desperate

energy of inspection, and tried to make the vast array surrender to

his imagination. And across his vision of reality shot strange beams

and shafts of romantic illumination--sometimes vulgar theatrical

lights, sometimes gleams like those which add a new reality of wonder

to the etchings of Rembrandt. What he saw with the eyes of the senses

or those of the imagination he could evoke without the loss of any

fragment of its life, and could transfer it to the brain of his reader

as a vision from which escape is impossible.

The higher world of aristocratic refinement, the grace and natural

delicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded Balzac's observation.

He found it hard to imagine a lady; still harder--though he tried

and half succeeded--to conceive the mystery of a young girl's mind,

in which the airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bourgeois

world, which he detested, and a world yet humbler were his special

sphere. He studied its various elements in their environment; a street,

a house, a chamber is as much to him as a human being, for it is part

of the creature's shell, shaped to its uses, corresponding to its

nature, limiting its action. He has created a population of persons

which numbers two thousand. Where Balzac does not fail, each of these

is a complete individual; in the prominent figures a controlling

passion is the centre of moral life--the greed of money, the desire

for distinction, the lust for power, some instinct or mania of animal

affection. The individual exists in a group; power circulates from

inanimate objects to the living actors of his tale; the environment

is an accomplice in the action; power circulates from member to member

of the group; finally, group and group enter into correspondence or

conflict; and still above the turmoil is heard the groundswell of

the tide of Paris.