All still within the house, no fire, no light.
Let me, too, sleep. Alas! no sleep is there!
Pray then. My spirit will not hear my prayer.
My ear is still with dancing measures ringing,
Echoes which memory back to sense is bringing;
I close my eyes: before my inward glance
Still swims the _fete_, still whirls the giddy dance;
The graceful phantoms of the vanished ball
Come flitting by in beauty each and all;
A glance still haunts my couch; a soft hand seems
To press my hand, that trembles in my dreams,
Fair tresses in the dance's flight brought nigh,
Just touch my cheek, and like the wind flow by,
I see from maiden brows the roses falling,
I hear beloved lips my name recalling--
Anne, Lucy, Blanche!--Where am I--What is this?
What must love be, when even love's dream is bliss!
There is an indefinable French difference, but, that apart, the
foregoing is somewhat like Goldsmith in his "Deserted Village." Or is it
the resemblance of meter that produces the impression?
"Jocelyn," though certainly intended by the author to be pure, wavers at
points on the edge of the exceptionably ambiguous. The following spring
song, however, put by the poet into the mouth of his Laurence, is an
inspiration as innocent as it is sweet:
See, in her nest, the nightingale's mute mate,
Hatching her young, her patient vigil hold.
See how with love her fostering wings dilate,
As if to screen her nurslings from the cold.
Her neck alone, in restlessness upraised,
O'ertops the nest in which her brood reposes,
And her bright eye, with weary watching glazed,
Closing to sleep, with every sound uncloses.
Care for her callow young consumes her rest,
My very voice her downy bosom shakes,
And her heart pants beneath its plumy vest,
And the nest trembles with each breath she takes.
What spell enchains her to this gentle care?
Her mate's sweet melody the groves among,
Who, from some branching oak, high poised in air
Sends down the flowing river of his song.
Hark! dost thou hear him, drop by drop distilling
The sighs that sweetest after transport be,
Then suddenly the vault above us filling
With foaming cataracts of harmony?
What spell enchains him in his turn--what makes
His very being thus in languor melt--
But that his voice a living echo wakes,
His lay within one loving heart is felt!
And, ravished by the note, his mate still holds
Her watch attentive through the weary time;
The season comes, the bursting shell unfolds,
And life is music all, and love, and prime.
Passing now from Lamartine's poetry, expressly such, we go to his prose,
which, however, is scarcely, if at all, less poetical. Poetry, or at
least, the presence in power, and in great proportionate excess of
power, of imagination, lording it over every thing else, over memory,
judgment, taste, good sense, veracity--characterizes all that proceeded
from Lamartine's pen. His history is valueless, almost valueless, as
history. His travels are utterly untrustworthy as records of fact.
Lamartine cannot tell the simple truth. Persons, things, events, suffer
a sea-change, always to something rich and strange seen by him looming
in the luminous haze of atmosphere with which his imagination
perpetually invests them. His men are ennobled, like Ulysses
transfigured by Pallas-Athene. His women are beautiful as houris fresh
from paradise. The aspects of ocean and shore and wood and stream and
mountain and sky, are all, to Lamartine, washed with a light that never
was on sea or land or in heaven overhead, the consecration and the
poet's dream. This quality in Lamartine's style does not prevent his
being very fine. He is very fine; but you feel, Oh, if this all were
also true!
On the whole, large, splendid, scenic, admirable in instinct for
choosing his point of view, as Lamartine is in his histories, brilliant
even, and fecund in suggestion, we turn from the ostensibly historical
in our author to the ostensibly autobiographical, in order to find our
prose specimens of his quality in the "Confidences." Lamartine never
perhaps did any thing finer, any thing more characteristic, than in
telling his story of "Graziella" in that work. This story is an
"episode" where it appears; or rather--for it is hardly so much as let
into the continuous warp and woof of the "Confidences"--it is a
separable device of ornament embroidered upon the surface of the fabric.
It is probably, indeed, to some extent autobiographic; but the
imagination had as much part in it as the memory. For instance, the
actual girl that is transfigured into the "Graziella" of the story was
not a coral-grinder, as she is represented by Lamartine, but an
operative in a tobacco factory. The real beauty of the tale is, by a
kind of just retribution on the author, inseparably bound up with
unconscious revelation on his part of heartless vanity and egotism in
his own character. You admire, but while you admire you wonder, you
reprobate, you contemn. A man such as this, you instinctively feel, was
not worthy to live immortally as an author. You are reconciled to let
Lamartine pass.
"Graziella" is a story of love and death, on one side, of desertion and
expiation--expiation through sentimental tears--on the other. One would
gladly trust, if one could, that the reality veiled under the fiction
was as free in fact from outward guilt as it is idealized to have been
by the writer's fancy. But neither this supposition, nor any other
charitable supposition whatever, can redeem "Graziella" from the
condemnation of being steeped in egregious vanity, egotism, and false
sentiment, from the heart of the author.
We strike into the midst of the narrative, toward the end. There has
been described the growth of relation between the author and the heroine
of the idyll, a fisherman's daughter. And now this heroine, Graziella,
is desired in marriage by a worthy young countryman of hers. Such a
suitor--for she loves, though secretly, the author (this by the way is a
thing almost of course with Lamartine)--the girl cannot bring herself to
accept. In despair she flees to make herself a nun. She is found by the
autobiographer alone in a deserted house. He ministers to her in her
exhausted state--and this to the following result:
"I feel well," said she to me, speaking in a tone of voice that was
low, soft, even, and monotonous, as if her breast had completely lost
its vibration and its accent at the same time, and as if her voice had
only retained one single note. "I have in vain sought to hide it from
myself--I have in vain sought to hide it forever from thee. I may die,
but thou art the only one that I can ever love. They wished to
betroth me to another; thou art the one to whom my soul is betrothed.
I will never give myself to another on earth, for I have already
secretly given myself to thee. To thee on earth, or to God in heaven!
that is the vow I made the first day I discovered that my heart was
sick for thee! I well know that I am only a poor girl, unworthy to
touch thy feet even in thought; therefore, have I never asked thee to
love me. I never will ask thee if thou dost love me. But I--I love
thee, I love thee, I love thee!" And she seemed to concentrate her
whole soul in those three words. "Now despise me, mock me, spurn me
with thy feet! Laugh at me if thou wilt, as a mad thing who fancies
she is a queen in the midst of her tatters. Hold me up to the scorn of
the whole world! Yes, I will tell them with my own lips--'Yes, I love
him. And had you been in my place you would have done as I have--you
would have loved him or have died.'"
The man thus wooed by the maid assures her of his reciprocal affection.
But the author explains to his readers:
Alas! it was not real love, it was but its shadow in my heart. But I
was too young and too ingenuous not to be deceived by it myself. I
thought that I adored her as so much innocence, beauty, and love
deserved to be adored by a lover. I told her so, with that accent of
sincerity which emotion imparts; with that impassioned restraint which
is imparted by solitude, darkness, despair, and tears. She believed it
because she required that belief to live, and because she had enough
passion in her own heart to make up for its insufficiency in a
thousand other hearts.
The autobiographer is summoned away by his mother, and he goes,
lacerating Graziella's heart, but swearing a thousand oaths of fealty to
his beloved. Alas! the "treacherous air of absence" undid all--with him,
though not with her. He blames himself in retrospect--gently--and pities
himself lamentably, as follows:
I was at that ungrateful period of life when frivolity and imitation
make a young man feel a false shame in the best feelings of his nature
... I would not have dared to confess ... the name and station of the
object of my regret and sadness.... How I blush now for having blushed
then! and how much more precious was one of the joy-beams or one of
the tear-drops of her chaste eyes than all the glances, all the
allurements, all the smiles for which I was about to sacrifice her
image! Ah! man, when he is too young, cannot love! He knows not the
value of any thing! He only knows what real happiness is after he has
lost it.... True love is the ripe fruit of life. At twenty, it is not
known, it is imagined.
A farewell letter from Graziella dying:
"The doctor says that I shall die in less than three days. I wish to
say farewell to thee ere I lose all my strength. Oh! if I had thee
near me, I would live! But it is God's will. I will soon speak to
thee, and forever, from on high. Love my soul! It shall be with thee
as long as thou livest. I leave thee my tresses, which were cut off
for thy sake one night. Consecrate them to God in some chapel in thy
own land, that something belonging to me may be near thee!"
The autobiographer "complied with the order contained in her dying
behest." He says: "From that day forward, a shadow of her death spread
itself over my features and over my youth." He apostrophizes the
remembered Graziella as follows:
"Poor Graziella! Many days have flown by since those days. I have
loved, I have been loved. Other rays of beauty and affection have
illumined my gloomy path. Other souls have opened themselves for me,
to reveal to me in the hearts of women the most mysterious treasures
of beauty, sanctity, and purity that God ever animated on earth, to
make us understand, foretaste, and desire heaven; but nothing has
dimmed thy first apparition in my heart.... Thy real sepulcher is in
my soul. There every part of thee is gathered and entombed. Thy name
never strikes my ear in vain. I love the language in which it is
uttered. At the bottom of my heart there is always a warm tear which
filters, drop by drop, and secretly falls upon my memory, to refresh
it and embalm it within me."
The pensive poet even makes poetry on the subject, twenty years
afterward, poetry which, in his customary triplets of expression, he
calls "the balm of a wound, the dew of a heart, the perfume of a
sepulchral flower." He wrote it, he says, "with streaming eyes." He
prints his stanzas--for Lamartine is eminently of those who, as it has
been said, weep in print and wipe their eyes with the public--and with a
sigh, says:
Thus did I expiate by these written tears the cruelty and ingratitude
of my heart of nineteen. I have never been able to reperuse these
verses without adoring that youthful image which the transparent and
plaintive waves of the Gulf of Naples will roll eternally before my
eyes ... and without detesting myself! But souls forgive on high. Hers
has forgiven me. Forgive me also, you!--I have wept.
We ought not to disturb, with any further words of our own, the
impression of himself which Lamartine has now made on the reader. He has
given us here his own true image. He is the weeping poet. It is fit--let
him dissolve, let him exhale, from view in tears.
Lachrymose Lamartine, farewell!
XXIII.
THE GROUP OF 1830.
VICTOR HUGO: 1802-1885; SAINTE-BEUVE: 1804-1869; BALZAC: 1799-1850;
GEORGE SAND: 1804-1876; DE MUSSET: 1810-1857.
As a convenient method of inclusion and condensation for a number of
authors who must by no means be omitted, but for whom there is left
little room in these pages, we adopt the plan of making a cluster of
important names to be treated in a single chapter. The political and the
literary history of France join a sort of synchronism with one another
at a certain point of time, which makes this arrangement not only
feasible but natural.
The accession of Louis Philippe to the throne of France and the first
representation of Victor Hugo's "Hernani" in Paris both occurred in the
year 1830. The Bourbon or absolutist tradition in French politics and
the classic tradition in French letters were thus at one and the same
moment decisively interrupted. For, as in the commencing reign of Louis
Philippe, the "Citizen King" of France, the French people became for the
first time, under monarchical rule, a recognized estate in the realm,
so, with the triumph of Victor Hugo's "Hernani" on the stage, the hour
may be said to have struck of culmination in splendor and in influence
for the romantic movement in French literature. The dominance of the
ideas indicated in the expression "the Romantic Movement" was then
suddenly for the moment so overwhelming and so wide that it amounted
almost to a usurpation of letters in France. We might indeed have
written "The French Romanticists" as a fairly good alternative title to
the present chapter.
1. VICTOR HUGO.
The men of 1830--we thus use a designation which has come to be
established in French literary history--began each man his career in
letters as a fighting romanticist. Victor Hugo was the acknowledged
Achilles of the fight. Whoever wavered backward, Victor Hugo clamped his
feet for his lifetime on the bridge of war, where his plume nodded
defiance, seeming still to say for its wearer standing with a cliff of
adamant at his back,
Come one, come all, this rock shall fly
From its firm base as soon as I.
Around Victor Hugo, as the towering central figure among them all, were
mustered, though some of them not to remain in this comradeship with
him, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, George Sand, De Musset. There were others
than these, but these shall for us here constitute the group of 1830.
We shall be in yet better accord with Victor Hugo's estimate of himself,
if we take for his symbol a being mightier even than a demigod like
Achilles. Let us do so and call him a Titan. But the past tense half
seems an anachronism in speaking of Victor Hugo. The earth still
trembles to his retiring footsteps and to the portentous reaction of his
wrestle in war with the gods. This is his glory--he fought against
Olympus, and, if he did not overthrow, at least he was not overthrown.
Olympus in our parable was classicism in power; Victor Hugo was the
genius of insurgent romanticism.
We thus repeat yet again terms which it would be difficult precisely to
define. Classicism and romanticism are two forces in literature,
seemingly opposed to each other, which, however, need to be compounded
and reconciled in a single resultant, in order to the true highest
effect from either. For neither classicism nor romanticism alone
concludes the ultimate theory of literature.
Classicism criticises; romanticism creates. Classicism enjoins
self-control; romanticism encourages self-indulgence. Classicism is
mold; romanticism is matter. Classicism is art; romanticism is nature.
Classicism is law; romanticism is life. Romanticism is undoubtedly first
and indispensable; but so, not less, classicism is indispensable, though
second. Neither, in short, can get along without the other. But Victor
Hugo represents romanticism.
Victor Hugo's personality seems to have been a literary force almost as
much as was his genius. As his quantity was immense, so his quality was
vivific. Such a man was certain to be not only the master of a school
but the center of a worship. Mr. Swinburne's late volume on Victor Hugo
may be cited in extreme example of the deific ascription rendered by
many at the shrine of this idolatry. Mr. Matthew Arnold, on the other
hand, lost no opportunity to flout with indignity the claims of Victor
Hugo to his supreme literary godship.
This great French writer has so recently died that, for the purposes of
this book, he might almost be considered still living. At any rate, he
has of late been so much talked about in current periodicals; he is, in
some of his books, so freshly familiar to all, and, if we must say it,
he offers a subject so perplexing to treat at this moment judicially,
that we shall in some measure avoid responsibility by presenting him
here with the utmost brevity--brevity, however, to be taken rather as a
homage, than as a slight, to the unmanageable greatness by imminency of
his merit and his fame.
Victor-Marie Hugo wrote verse very early, beginning as a classicist. In
later youth he was royalist and religious in spirit. At twenty he
acquired the title of "the sublime boy." How he acquired this title
seems a matter of doubt. It is generally supposed to have been given by
Chateaubriand, in his quality of patriarch of French letters. But this
origin of the sobriquet the present writer has seen seriously suggested
to be, along with the sobriquet itself, the pure invention of Victor
Hugo's own imaginative egotism; which fruitful source of autobiography
is said also to have yielded the poet's noble pedigree--the process of
production employed on his part being, in the latter case, the extremely
simple one of adopting for ancestry the ancient line of a family,
bearing the same name indeed with himself, but otherwise utterly
unrelated to his own humble house. The really extraordinary independence
of fact with which Victor Hugo undoubtedly made his assertions
respecting himself renders any testimony that he bears on this point
interesting as imagination rather than instructive as history. For three
or four years now he was an irrepressible producer and publisher of
verse. At twenty-five he put out his "Cromwell," a drama, with a
belligerent preface in favor of romanticism. After this each play of his
was a battle for that literary cause. His "Hernani" (1830) was at last
more than a battle--it was a victory.
The royalist in due time became republican. When Louis Napoleon was
president, Victor Hugo opposed him. When Louis Napoleon made himself
emperor, Victor Hugo denounced him. Banished for this from France, the
poet betook himself to Belgium. Repelled from Belgium, he found refuge
in England. Here, or, more exactly, in the island of Jersey first, and
longer, afterward, in the island of Guernsey, he remained till the
second empire fell. He then returned to Paris, and shared the melancholy
fortunes of that beleaguered capital during the Prussian siege and
during the anarchy of the Commune. Here, finally, he died, and, by his
own will and testament, in a quite other than the original meaning of
that pregnant Scripture phrase, "was buried"--for his funeral was to be
attended with peculiar obsequies. He signified his wish to be treated in
burial exactly as one of those paupers of whose cause he had been in his
works the life-long champion.
During his long exile, which, notwithstanding his passionate love of
Paris, he refused to shorten by any understanding arrived at with the
emperor, he kept persecuting that usurper with printed diatribes, both
in prose and in verse, which for mordant bitterness have probably never
been surpassed in the literature of invective. One of these diatribes
was a book entitled "The History of a Crime." To this he prefixed a kind
of _imprimatur_ of his own, which may be quoted here as well
exemplifying the high oracular style of expression characterized by
short sentences and short paragraphs--these often of a single sentence
only--that he habitually affected:
This work is more than opportune. It is imperative. I publish it.
V. H.
Victor Hugo's egotism was so vast that it was insane if it was not
sublime. To exemplify adequately this statement by extracts would ask
pages of room. The four lines about to follow, from one of his longer
poems, present a modest and moderate example. The poet has been
supposing the impossible case that the Supreme Being should take
different views, in a certain matter, from his, the poet's, own--that he
should outrage his, the poet's, sense of moral propriety. Here is how,
in that case, Victor Hugo would, he declares, deal with offending Deity
(we translate literally the original Alexandrines, line for line,
without attempting to reproduce either meter or rhyme):
I would go, I would see him, and I would seize him,
Amid the heavens, as one takes a wolf amid the woods,
And, terrible, indignant, calm, extraordinary,
I would denounce him with his own thunder.
To Victor Hugo himself, the foregoing was not blasphemy; it was simply
sublimity of a sort suitable to the character of the poet. There was, it
is said, fully developed mental unsoundness in his father's family and
in his own. Victor Hugo's own genius had, we suspect, some trace of a
real, though noble, insanity in it.
In 1862, appeared "Les Miserables," which must be accounted, if not the
greatest, at least the most popular work of its author. This book was
issued simultaneously in eight different cities and in nine different
languages--a circumstance probably not paralleled in the history of
literature. The fame of "Les Miserables" does not fade, and it hardly
will fade. It is a book of truly prodigious elemental power. That,
however, Victor Hugo's genius in producing it worked with some
disturbing consciousness of a theory of literary art to be exemplified
and defended, the following curious note, inserted in the midst of the
text, at a point of interest in the story, may serve to show:
Then the poor old man began sobbing and soliloquizing; _for it is a
mistake to suppose that there is no soliloquy in nature. Powerful
agitations often talk aloud._
"Les Miserables" is justly open to many strictures, both on literary
grounds and on ethical; but it must be pronounced, notwithstanding, a
great, and, on the whole, a noble work.
Victor Hugo made this approach to the illimitable in power, that he was
well-nigh equally able to do great things and to do small. To exhibit by
specimen his achievement in verse we shall offer here a few of his small
things, in the impossibility of representing his great. The small things
that we offer may acquire a value extrinsic to themselves if thought of
as the gentle play of a giant who could with the same ease have
astonished you by exhibitions of strength.
Victor Hugo went a second time, having once failed, to intercede with
King Louis Philippe on behalf of a political offender condemned to
death. It was late at night, and the monarch could not be seen. The
intercessor would not be baffled, and, bethinking himself to appeal by
the tenderness of birth and of death to the king, wrote four lines of
verse which he left on the table. The allusions in them are to a lovely
daughter of the royal house just lost and to a little son just born. We
give the French text, and follow it with a close English translation:
Par votre ange envolee ainsi qu'une colombe,
Par ce royal enfant doux et frele roseau,
Grace encore une fois! grace au nom de la tombe!
Grace au nom du berceau!
By your lost angel, dove-like from you flown,
By this sweet royal babe, fair, fragile reed,
Mercy once more! Be mercy, mercy shown,
In the tomb's name, and cradle's, both, I plead.
The poet's plea availed.
Another little gem of Victor Hugo's is the following quatrain, which,
though it may have had at first some particular occasion, is capable of
the most general application. Again we give the French, for the French
here almost translates itself:
Soyons comme l'oiseau pose pour un instant
Sur des rameaux trop freles;
Qui sent trembler la branche, mais qui chant pourtant,
Sachant qu'il a des ailes.
This may be thus rendered, almost word for word:
Like the bird let us be, for one moment alight
Upon branches too frail to uphold,
Who feels tremble the bough, but who sings in despite,
Knowing well she has wings to unfold.
One more little gem from Victor Hugo's treasury of such we are happily
able to present in a version whose authorship will commend it; Mr.
Andrew Lang translates "The Grave and the Rose." The poet here affirms,
as he is very fond of doing, that capital article in his creed, the
immortality of the soul:
The Grave said to the Rose,
"What of the dews of morn,
Love's flower, what end is theirs?"
"And what of souls outworn,
Of them whereon doth close
The tomb's mouth unawares?"
The Rose said to the Grave.