MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE
BY
GEORG BRANDES
IN SIX VOLUMES
V.
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1904
_Dis-nous mil huit cent trente._
_Époque fulgurante,_
_Ses luttes, ses ardeurs...._
--TH. DE BANVILLE
_Nicht was lebendig, kraftvoll sich verkündigt_
_Ist das gefährlich Furchtbare. Das ganz_
_Gemeine ist's, das ewig Gestrige,_
_Was immer war und immer wiederkehrt_
_Und morgen gilt, weil's heute hat gegolten._
--SCHILLER.
CONTENTS
I. THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND
II. THE GENERATION OF 1830
III. ROMANTICISM
IV. CHARLES NODIER
V. RETROSPECT--FOREIGN INFLUENCES
VI. RETROSPECT--INDIGENOUS SOURCES
VII. DE VIGNY'S POETRY AND HUGO'S "ORIENTALES"
VIII. HUGO AND DE MUSSET
IX. DE MUSSET AND GEORGE SAND
X. ALFRED DE MUSSET
XI. GEORGE SAND
XII. BALZAC
XIII. BALZAC
XIV. BALZAC
XV. BALZAC
XVI. BALZAC
XVII. BALZAC
XVIII. BEYLE
XIX. BEYLE
XX. BEYLE
XXI. MÉRIMÉE
XXII. BEYLE AND MÉRIMÉE
XXIII. MÉRIMÉE
XXXIV. MÉRIMÉE
XXV. MÉRIMÉE
XXVI. MÉRIMÉE AND GAUTIER
XXVII. THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
XXVIII. THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
XXIX. SAINTE-BEUVE
XXX. SAINTE-BEUVE
XXXI. SAINTE-BEUVE AND MODERN CRITICISM
XXXII. THE DRAMA: VITET, DUMAS, DE VIGNY, HUGO
XXXIII. LITERATURE IN ITS RELATION TO THE SOCIAL
AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS OF THE DAY
XXXIV. THE OVERLOOKED AND FORGOTTEN
XXXV. CONCLUSION
LIST OF PORTRAITS
DE MUSSET
GEORGE SAND
BALZAC
HENRY BEYLE (STENDHAL)
MÉRIMÉE
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
SAINTE-BEUVE
I
THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND
The literature produced in France between the years 1824 and 1828
is important and admirable. After the upheavals of the Revolution,
the wars of the Empire, and the lassitude of the reign of Louis
XVIII., there arose a young generation that applied itself with
eager enthusiasm to those highest intellectual pursuits which had so
long been neglected. During the Revolution and the wars of Napoleon
the youths of France had had other vocations than the reformation
of literature and art. The best energies of the nation had been
diverted into the channels of politics, military enterprise, and civil
administration. Now a great volume of intellectual force which had long
been confined was suddenly set free.
The period of the restored Bourbon kings and the Monarchy of July may
be defined as that of the decisive appearance of the bourgeoisie on
the historical stage. With the fall of Napoleon the industrial period
of history begins. Confining our attention to France, we observe that
the new division of the national property which had been made during
the Revolution, and which it had been Napoleon's economic mission to
vindicate to the rest of Europe, now began to produce its natural
consequences. All restrictions had been removed from industry and
commerce; monopolies and privileges had been abolished; the confiscated
lands of the Church and estates of the nobility, broken up and sold
to the highest bidder, were now in the hands of at least twenty times
as many owners as before. The result was that capital, free, floating
capital, now began to be the moving power of society and consequently
the object of the desires of the individual. After the Revolution of
July the power of wealth gradually supersedes the power of birth and
takes the power of royalty into its service. The rich man is received
into the ranks of the nobility, acquires the privileges of a peer, and,
by utilising the constitution, manages to draw ever-increasing profit
from the monarchical form of government. Thus the pursuit of money,
the struggle for money, the employment of money in great commercial
and industrial enterprises, becomes the leading social feature of the
period; and this prosaic engrossment, which contrasts so strongly with
the revolutionary and martial enthusiasm of the foregoing period,
helps, as background, to give the literature of the day its romantic,
idealistic stamp. One only of its eminent authors, one of the greatest,
Balzac, did not feel himself repelled by the period, but made the
newborn power of capital, the new ruler of souls, money, the hero of
his great epic; the other artists of the day, though it was often the
prospect of material gain which inspired their labours, kept in their
enthusiasms and their works at as great a distance as possible from the
new reality.
The decade 1825-35, the most remarkable and most fertile period from
the literary point of view, was from the political, colourless and
inglorious. Its focus is the Revolution of July, but this Revolution is
a solitary blood-spot amidst all the grey.
The first half of the decade, 1825-30, the reign of Charles X., is
the period of the religious reaction. The three ministries--Villèle,
Martignac, and Polignac--do not mark so much three stages of the
reaction as three different tempos: Allegro, Andante, and Allegro
furioso. During the Villèle ministry the Jesuits attained to almost
unlimited power. The monasteries were restored; laws of mediæval
severity regarding sacrilege were enforced (death, for example, being
the punishment for the robbery of a church); aid was refused to all
poor people who could not produce certificates of confession; and
in 1827 a law circumscribing the liberty of the press was proposed
which would have reduced the enemies of the Church to silence; but
this proposal the Government was obliged to retract, owing to the
opposition of the Chamber of Peers. The citizen troops were disbanded,
the censorship was restored; then the ministry was defeated by a
majority in the Chambers, and resigned in January 1828. The cabinet of
uncompromising churchmen was followed by one which pursued the policy
of concession; the Martignac ministry made a feeble endeavour to stem
the power of the Jesuits, but the only result of this was that the King
seized the opportunity of the first reverse the Government suffered in
the Chambers, to dismiss it and replace it by a ministry whose leader,
Polignac, previously ambassador to the court of England, was a man
after his own heart. Polignac believed in the monarchy as God's shadow
upon earth; believed (and was confirmed by visions in his belief) that
he had received from God the mission to restore it to its ancient
glory. But his Government was so unpopular that its one military
achievement, the conquest of Algiers, was coldly received by the
country and openly regretted by the strong Opposition. The dissolution
of the Chambers led, in spite of the pastoral letters of the bishops
and the personal interference of the King, to the re-election of
the Opposition, and on this followed the _coup d'état_. There were
three days of fighting, and the ministry was swept away by the wave
of popular feeling which carried with it the throne and the house of
Bourbon.
But although the first half of the decade was, politically speaking,
a period of reaction, it presents a very different aspect when
regarded from the social and intellectual point of view. In the first
place, the oppression itself produced the desire for freedom. The
bourgeoisie and the professional classes, who finally, with the aid
of the populace of the capital and the students, dethroned the house
of Bourbon, were during the whole period in a state of increasing
discontent and opposition. One of the consequences of this was that
literature, which at first was as fully inspired as politics with the
spirit of reaction against the doctrines and doings of the close of the
eighteenth century, and which started with any amount of enthusiasm
for Catholicism, monarchy, and the Middle Ages, completely changed
its tone. Chateaubriand's dismissal from the Villèle ministry gave
the signal (see _Main Currents_, iii. 293). In the second place, it
is to be observed that the intellectual life of those highest circles
of society which prescribed the tone and style of literature, was
only outwardly in sympathy with the political reaction. Regarded
from one point of view, the Restoration was an aftermath of the
eighteenth century in the nineteenth, of the age of humanity in the
age of industry. From the powdered court emanated courtly manners and
customs, from the salons of the old nobility emanated the free-thought
on moral and religious subjects in which the eighteenth century had
gloried. One of the strong points of that national tradition which
these highest circles defended and endeavoured to continue, was the
recognition of talent in every shape; they envisaged literature and art
with many-sided culture and wide sympathy. A tolerant, sceptical spirit
in religious matters, genial unrestraint and delicate forbearance in
the domain of morality, was, so to speak, the atmosphere inhaled and
exhaled by good society; and no atmosphere could be more favourable
and more fructifying for a literature in active process of growth. As
the oppression of the reaction begot liberalism in politics, so the
culture of the best society allowed unpolitical literature free play
both in the domain of feeling and that of thought, demanding nothing
but refinement and perfection of form. Hence literature was in a most
favourable position to give the reins, to give a start, to a new
intellectual movement.
The July dynasty was founded, the tri-coloured citizen-monarchy was
established, Louis Philippe was stealthily elevated to the throne of
France, holding the difficult position of king by the grace of the
Revolution.
The pregnant characteristics of his government revealed themselves
during the first five years of his reign. There was, in the first
place, that want of a decided, dignified foreign policy inevitable in
a monarchy that was supported exclusively by the prosperous middle
classes. The cautious, peace-loving King brought one humiliation after
another upon France. For the sake of the peace of nations, he refused
the throne offered by the Belgians to his second son, and with the same
motive he quietly allowed Austria to suppress the Italian revolutions,
which the French nation correctly regarded as the offspring of the
Revolution of July. He was incapable of preventing the suppression of
the Polish insurrection and the surrender of Warsaw, which occasioned
real national mourning in France. The country, as one of the great
powers, lost daily in prestige and influence. And in its internal
relations the Government displayed an equal want of dignity. The
constant demands for money which were made by the royal family and
almost invariably refused by the Chambers produced a most disagreeable
impression.
For a short time Louis Philippe was popular, popular as the soldier
of Valmy and Gemappes, as the citizen King, the former exile and
schoolmaster, whom Lafayette himself had called "the best republic."
But he had not the faculty of preserving popularity, though he made an
eager bid for it to begin with. He was a gifted and, essentially, a
prudent man. His family life was admirable; he was thoroughly domestic,
and regular in his habits; his sons attended the public schools; he
himself, in the attire of an ordinary citizen, carrying the historical
umbrella, walked unattended in the streets of Paris, always ready to
return a bow or a "Vive le Roi!" with a friendly word or a shake of the
hand. But the bourgeois virtues which he displayed are not those which
Frenchmen value in their rulers. The cry: "We want rulers who ride,"
shouted at gouty Louis XVIII., describes one of the feelings which led
to the dethronement of Louis Philippe.
For when Louis Philippe did ride, the spectacle was anything but
an inspiring one. In June 1832, after one of the innumerable small
insurrections in Paris, he declared the city to be in a state of siege,
and on this occasion held a review of 50,000 citizen troops and regular
soldiers, who were drawn up on each side of the boulevard. The King
did not ride along the middle of the street, but first along the right
side, where the citizen soldiers were stationed, leaning from his
saddle the whole time to shake hands with as many of them as possible,
and two hours later back in the same way along the line of the regular
troops. He looked as if his ribs must inevitably be broken. He kept on
smiling the whole time; his cocked hat slipped down over his forehead
and gave him an unhappy look; his eyes wore a beseeching expression,
as if he were entreating favour, and also forgiveness for having
declared them all to be in a state of siege. What a spectacle for an
impressionable, imaginative people, for a crowd of which the older
members had seen Napoleon Bonaparte ride past "with his statuesque,
Cæsar-like countenance, his fixed gaze, and his inapproachable ruler's
hands."[1]
In spite of the King's eager endeavour to win popularity, there was
a wider gulf between his court and the people than there had been
between the people and the paternal monarchy of the Restoration.
The old nobility kept away from the new court, and there was a more
distinct separation of class from class. With enmity and disgust the
landed proprietors saw the magnates of the stock-exchange usurping all
power. Legitimists and the superior bourgeois class, politicians and
artists, ceased to associate. One by one the salons of the old monarchy
were closed, and with them disappeared the gaiety and naturalness of
the refined _beau monde_. With the old form of government vanished
its accompaniments of magnificent elegance and graceful frivolity,
vanished the fine lady's lively wit and charming audacity. In the
circle of the wealthy bankers whom the King patronised and the Crown
Prince associated with before his marriage, the place of all this was
taken by English sport and club fashions, a vulgar addiction to the
pleasures of the table, and tasteless magnificence and luxury. The
King was originally a Voltairian, and in his family alliances he had
shown a leaning to Protestantism, but in his anxiety for the safety
of his throne he made a hasty change of front; he humbled himself (in
vain, as it proved) to win the favour of the clergy, and the tone
of the court became pious. The upper middle classes simultaneously
developed a half-anxious, half-affected piety, originating in fear
of the Fourth Estate. Hypocrisy, which the aristocratic reactionary
literature had fostered, now began to spread into the bourgeois class,
and free-thought was considered "bad form" in a woman. Morals became
outwardly stricter; a more English tone prevailed; but in reality men
were less moral; society was lenient to the fraud of the millionaire,
pharisaically severe to the woman whose heart had led her astray.
"The previous generation had not," as one of the historians of the
day observes, "placed under the ban of society either the priest who
forsook his church or the woman who forsook her husband, so long as
their motives were unselfish; now it was the sign of _mauvais ton_ to
desire the re-institution of divorce, not to mention the marriage of
priests." The Faubourg St. Honoré, the quarter of the financiers, set
the tone.
Little wonder that the umbrella soon became the symbol of this
monarchy, and the expression _Juste-milieu_--which the King had once
cleverly used in speaking of the policy that ought to be employed--the
nickname for everything weak and inefficient, for a power without
lustre and dignity.
If we take the decade 1825-35 as a whole, it is easy to understand how
hopeless it must have seemed from the aesthetic point of view.
[1] Expressions used by Heinrich Heine, who witnessed the scene and
instituted the parallel.
II
THE GENERATION OF 1830
It is against this grey background, this foil of Legitimist cowls and
Louis-Philippe umbrellas--in this society where the new-born power
of capital, strong as Hercules, has, even in its cradle, strangled
all the external romance of life--on this stage upon the grey walls
of which an invisible finger has written in grey letters the word
_Juste-milieu_--that a fiery, glowing, noisy literature, a literature
enamoured of scarlet and of passion, suddenly makes its appearance.
All the conditions were present in combination which were certain to
impel young, restless minds towards romantic enthusiasm, towards ardent
contempt for public opinion, towards worship of unbridled passion
and unrestrained genius. Hatred of the bourgeoisie (as in Germany a
generation earlier hatred of the Philistines) becomes the watchword
of the day. But whereas the word "Philistine" conjures up a picture
of the chimney-corner and the pipe, the word "bourgeois" at once
suggests the omnipotence of economic interests. Its essential antipathy
to utilitarianism and plutocracy turned the intellectual current of
the day, in the case of the men of talent already before the public,
and still more strongly in the case of the budding geniuses, in the
direction of antagonism to everything existing and accepted, at the
same time mightily increasing the force of the current. The religion of
art, and enthusiasm for liberty in art, suddenly took possession of all
hearts. Art was the highest, art was light, art was fire, art was all
in all; its beauty and audacity alone imparted value to life.
The young generation had heard in their childhood of the great events
of the Revolution, had known the Empire, and were the sons of heroes
or of victims. Their mothers had conceived them between two battles,
and the thunder of cannon had ushered them into the world. To the young
poets and artists of the day there were only two kinds of human beings,
the flaming and the grey. On the one side there was the art which meant
blood, scarlet, movement, audacity; on the other, a strictly regular,
timid, bourgeois, colourless art. Everything in the life of their day
seemed to them unpoetic, utilitarian, devoid of genius, grey; they
desired to show their contempt for such a day, their admiration of
genius, and their hatred of the bourgeois spirit. For now, since the
middle-class had become the influential one, this spirit had become a
power.
Seen from the point of view of our own day, the young men of those days
appear to have been younger than youth generally is--younger, fresher,
more richly gifted, more ardent and hot-blooded. And we see the youth
of France, who in the days of the Revolution had by their devotion
changed the political and social conditions of the country, and in
the days of the Empire had risked their lives on every battlefield in
France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Egypt, now devoting themselves with
the same ardour to the culture of literature and the arts. Here, too,
there were revolutions to be made, victories to win, and countries
to conquer. During the Revolution they had worshipped liberty, under
Napoleon martial glory; now they worshipped art.
For the first time in France the word art came to be regularly applied
to literature. In the eighteenth century literature had aimed at
transforming itself into philosophy, and much was then included under
this denomination to which we no longer apply the word; now it aimed at
the name and dignity of art.
The explanation of the change is, that the analytical and reasoning
tendency which distinguishes both the imaginative and reflective
works of the classical period, had in the new century slowly made way
for interest in the actually existing, in what is perceivable by the
senses. And the deeper-lying reason of this new preference was that men
now placed nature, original, unconscious, rustic, uncultivated nature,
above all the culture of civilisation. Why? Because a historically
minded age had succeeded to a rationalising one. A man no longer
coveted the title of philosopher, for it was now considered a greater
distinction to be original than to be a self-conscious thinker.
The poetical literature of the eighteenth, nay, even that of the
seventeenth century was despised, because it was purely intellectual;
because, bloodless and elegant, it seemed to have been produced by
attention to conventions and rules, not to have been born and to have
grown. For whereas the eighteenth century had held thinking and acting
to be the highest forms of activity, the children of the new age
regarded origination, natural genesis, as the highest. It was a German
idea, Herder's and Goethe's, by which men's minds were unconsciously
occupied, and which produced in them an aversion for rules and academic
principles. For how could art as unconscious, natural production be
subjected to arbitrary external rules!
An intellectual movement had begun which recalled the Renaissance. It
was as if the air which men breathed intoxicated them. In the long
period during which France had been at an intellectual standstill
her great neighbours, Germany and England, had hastened past her,
had got a long start in the work of emancipation from old, hampering
traditions. She felt this, felt it as a humiliation, and the feeling
gave a sharp impulse to the new art enthusiasm. And now the works of
foreign authors, both the new and the hitherto unknown older books,
made their way into the country and revolutionised the minds of the
young; every one read translations of Sir Walter Scott's novels, of
Byron's _Corsair_ and _Lara_, and devoured Goethe's _Werther_ and
Hoffmann's fantastic tales. All at once the votaries of the different
arts felt that they were brothers. Musicians studied the literature
both of their own country and of other nations; poets (such as Hugo,
Gautier, Mérimée, Borel) drew and painted. Poems were read in painters'
and sculptors' studios; Delacroix's and Devéria's pupils hummed Hugo's
ballads as they stood at their easels. Certain of the great foreign
authors, such as Scott and Byron, influenced poets (Hugo, Lamartine,
Musset), musicians (Berlioz, Halévy, Félicien David), and painters
(Delacroix, Delaroche, Scheffer). Artists attempt to overstep the
limits of their own in order to embrace a kindred art. Berlioz writes
Childe Harold and Faust symphonies, Félicien David a Desert symphony;
music becomes descriptive. First Delacroix and then Ary Scheffer
choose subjects from Dante, Shakespeare, and Byron; the art of the
painter at times becomes illustration of poetry. But it was the art
of painting which was most powerful in influencing the sister arts,
especially poetry, and that distinctly for good. The lover no longer,
as in the days of Racine, prayed his mistress "to crown his flame."
The public demanded naturalness of the author, and refused to accept
representations of impossibilities.
In 1824 Delacroix exhibits his _Massacre of Scios_, a picture with
a Grecian subject and a reminiscence of Byron, in 1831 _The Bishop
of Liège_, which illustrates Scott's _Quentin Durward_, in May 1831
_Liberty at the Barricades_. In February 1829, Auber's opera, _La
Muette de Portici_, makes a great sensation; Meyerbeer's _Robert le
Diable_ follows in 1831. In February 1830 Victor Hugo's _Hernani_ is
played for the first time at the Théâtre Français; in 1831 Dumas'
_Antony_ is a grand success. The authors Dumas and Hugo, Delacroix the
painter, the sculptor David d'Angers, the musical composers Berlioz
and Auber, the critics Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, Frédéric Lemaître
and Marie Dorval the scenic artists, and, corresponding to them, the
two great dæmonic musical virtuosi Chopin and Liszt--all these make
their appearance simultaneously. One and all proclaim the gospel of
nature and of passion, and around them assemble groups of young men who
apprehend and cultivate literature and art in a spirit akin to theirs.
These men did not always realise that in the eyes of posterity they
would constitute a natural group. Some of the greatest of them felt as
if they stood alone, and believed that the spirit and tendency of their
work was different from that of their contemporaries', nay, actually
antagonistic to it. Nor were they entirely wrong, for there are very
essential points of difference between them. Yet common excellences,
common prejudices, common aims, and common faults unite them and make
of them a whole. And it happened much more frequently than is generally
the case, that those whom reflection inclines us to class together
actually did feel themselves drawn to each other; many of the best
among them early joined hands and formed a league.
Seeking the connecting links we find, as it were, a chain which binds
the group together.
When, after the lapse of many years, we dryly say or write the words,
"they formed a school," we seldom take the trouble to conjure up
any adequately vivid impression of what the formation of a school
of literature and art signifies. There is a mysterious magic about
the process. Some one remarkable man, after a long unconscious or
half-conscious struggle, finally with full consciousness, frees himself
from prejudices and attains to clearness of vision; then, everything
being ready, the lightning of genius illuminates what he beholds. Such
a man gives utterance (as did Hugo in a prose preface of some score of
pages) to some thoughts which have never been thought or expressed in
the same manner before. They may be only half true, they may be vague,
but they have this remarkable quality that, in spite of more or less
indefiniteness, they affront all traditional prejudices and wound the
vanity of the day where it is most vulnerable, whilst they ring in
the ears of the young generation like a call, like a new, audacious
watchword.
What happens? Scarcely are these words spoken than there comes with
the speed and precision of an echo a thousand-tongued answer from the
wounded vanities and injured interests, an answer like the furious
baying of a hundred packs of hounds. And what more? First one man, then
another, then a third, comes to the spokesman of the new tendency,
each with his own standpoint, each with his revolt, his ambition,
his need, his hope, his resolve. They show him that the words he has
spoken are incarnated in them. Some communicate directly with him,
some with each other in his spirit and his name. Men who but lately
were as unknown to each other as they still are to the public, who
have been spiritually languishing, each in his separate seclusion,
now meet and marvel to find that they understand each other, that
they speak the same language, a language unknown to the rest of their
contemporaries. They are young, yet all are already in possession of
what to them constitutes life; the one has his dearly-bought joys, the
other his bracing sufferings; and from these life-elements each has
extracted his own portion of enthusiasm. Their meeting is electric;
they exchange ideas with youthful haste, impart to each other their
various sympathies and antipathies, enthusiasms and detestations; and
all these well-springs of feeling flow together like the streams that
form a river.
But the most beautiful feature in this crystallisation of artistic
spirits into a school is the reverence, the awe which, in spite of the
unanimity of their opinions, and in spite of their good comradeship,
each feels for the other. Outsiders are apt to confuse this with what
is satirically called "mutual admiration." But nothing is in reality
more unlike the interested homage paid in periods of decadence than the
naïve admiration of each other's talents exhibited by the men who are
unconsciously forming a school. Their hearts are too young, too pure,
not to admire in real earnest. One young productive mind regards the
other as something marvellous, which holds surprises in store. To the
one the workshop of the other's mind is like a sealed book; he cannot
guess what will next appear from it, has no idea what pleasures his
comrade has in store for him. They honour in one another something
which they value higher than the personality, than the usually as yet
undeveloped character, namely, the talent by virtue of which they are
all related to the deity they worship--art.
Seldom, however, in the world's history has the mutual admiration
accompanying an artistic awakening been carried to such a pitch as
it was by the generation of 1830. It became positive idolatry. All
the literary productions of the period show that the youth of the
day were intoxicated with the feeling of friendship and brotherhood.
Hugo's poems to Lamartine, Louis Boulanger, Sainte-Beuve, and David
d'Angers; Gautier's to Hugo, Jehan du Seigneur, and Petrus Borel; De
Musset's to Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, and Nodier; and, very specially,
Sainte-Beuve's to all the standard-bearers of the school; Madame de
Girardin's articles; Balzac's dedications; George Sand's _Lettres d'un
Voyageur_--all these testify to a sincere, ardent admiration, which
entirely precluded the proverbial jealousy of authors.
They did not only praise one another, they communicated ideas to each
other and helped each other. Now it is an inspiring influence, now an
artistic criticism, now some actual service rendered, which knits the
bond of friendship between two authors of this period. Émile Deschamps
inspires Victor Hugo to borrow themes from the old Spanish Romancero;
Gautier writes the beautiful tulip sonnet in Balzac's _Un grand Homme
de Province a Paris_, and helps him to dramatise certain of his plots;
Sainte-Beuve reads George Sand's manuscripts and aids her with his
criticism; George Sand and De Musset influence one another powerfully
at a certain stage of their career; Madame de Girardin, Méry, Sandeau,
and Gautier collaborate in a novel written in letters; Mérimée is the
bond of union between the realists Beyle and Vitet and the romanticists.
The short period during which all meet and combine is the blossoming
time of literature. Before many years pass Nodier is in his grave, Hugo
is living in exile in Jersey, Alexandre Dumas is turning literature
into a trade, Sainte-Beuve and Gautier are to be found in Princess
Mathilde's circle, Mérimée is presiding over the Empress Eugenie's
courts of love, De Musset sits solitary over his absinthe, and George
Sand has retired to Nohant.
One and all in their riper years made new connections, connections
which aided their development; but their boldest and freshest, if not
always their most refined and beautiful work was done at the time when
they were holding their first meetings in Charles Nodier's quarters
at the Arsenal, or in the apartments in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
where Hugo and his pretty young wife kept house on their 2000 francs
a year, or in Petrus Borel's garret, where the host's Hernani cloak
decorated the wall in company with a sketch by Devéria and a copy of
a Giorgione, and where, owing to lack of chairs, at least half of the
company had to stand.
These young Romanticists felt like brothers, like fellow-conspirators;
they felt that they were the sharers in a sweet and invigorating
secret; and this gave to the works of the school a flavour, an aroma
like that of the noble wines of a year when the vintage has been more
than ordinarily good. Ah! that bouquet of 1830! There is no other in
the century that can be compared with it.
In all the arts a break with tradition was aimed at and demanded. The
inward fire was to glow through and dissolve the old musical forms,
to devour lines and contours and transform painting into colour
symphonies, to rejuvenate literature. In all the arts colour, passion,
and style were aimed at and demanded--colour with such urgency that the
most gifted painter of the period, Delacroix, neglected drawing for
it; passion with such ardour that both lyric poetry and the drama were
in danger of degenerating into hysteric foolishness; style with such
artistic enthusiasm that some of the younger men, such as those two
opposite poles, Mérimée and Gautier, neglected the human groundwork of
their art and became devotees of style pure and simple.
The original, the unconscious, the popular was sought after and
demanded. "We have been rhetoricians," men cried; "we have never
understood the simple and the illogical--the savage, the people, the
child, woman, the poet!"
Hitherto the people had only served as a background in literature--in
Victor Hugo's dramas the passionate plebeian, the avenger and requiter,
appeared on the scene as the hero. Hitherto the savage had talked like
a Frenchman of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Voltaire)--Mérimée
in _Colomba_ and _Carmen_ depicted savage emotions in all their
wildness and freshness. Racine's child (in _Athalie_) had spoken like
a miniature edition of a grown-up man--Nodier with a childlike heart
put simple, innocent words into his children's mouths. In the French
literature of an earlier period, woman had generally acted with full
consciousness, arriving at conclusions like a man; see the works of
Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. Corneille paid homage to virtue,
Crébillon the younger to frivolity and vice, but both the virtue and
the vice were conscious and acquired. George Sand, on the contrary,
depicted the innate nobility and natural goodness of a noble woman's
heart. Madame de Staël in her _Corinne_ had represented the gifted
woman as a being of great and commanding talent--George Sand, in
_Lélia_, represented her as a great sibyl. In olden days the poet had
been a courtier, like Racine and Molière, or a man of the world, like
Voltaire and Beaumarchais, or simply an ordinary decent citizen, like
Lafontaine. Now he became the neglected step-child of society, the
high-priest of humanity, often poor and despised, but with the starry
brow and the tongue of fire. Hugo hymned him as the shepherd of the
people, Alfred de Vigny represented him in _Stello_ and _Chatterton_
as the sublime child who prefers dying of hunger to degrading his muse
by common work, and dies blessing his fellow-men, who acknowledge his
worth when it is too late.
III
ROMANTICISM
At first Romanticism was, in its essence, merely a spirited defence
of localisation in literature. The Romanticists admired and glorified
the Middle Ages, which the culture of the eighteenth century had
anathematised, and the poets of the sixteenth century--Ronsard, Du
Bellay, &c.--who had been supplanted by the classic authors of the
age of Louis XIV. They attacked pseudo-classicism, the tiresome and
monotonous Frenchifying and modernising of all ages and nationalities.
They took as their watchword "local colouring." By local colouring they
meant all the characteristics of foreign nations, of far-off days, of
unfamiliar climes, to which as yet justice had not been done in French
literature. They felt that their predecessors had been led astray by
the premise that every human being was simply a human being, and,
moreover, more or less of a Frenchman. In reality, there was not such
a thing as universal humanity; there were separate races, peoples,
tribes, and clans. Still less was the Frenchman the typical human
being. It was imperative, if they were to understand and represent
human life, that they should free themselves from themselves. This idea
gave the impulse to the art and criticism of nineteenth-century France.
Authors now made it their endeavour to train their readers to see
things from this new point of view. They no longer wrote to please
the public--and it is this fact which gives value to the books of the
period. Therefore a critic who, like myself, is engaged in tracing
the main currents of literature, must dwell upon many a seldom read
and still more rarely bought Romantic work, and do little more than
mention such a talented dramatist as Scribe, who for a whole generation
dominated the stage in every country in Europe.
For if an author does not penetrate to the essential in the human
soul, to its deepest depth; if he has not dared, or has not been
able to write his book regardless of consequences; if he has not
ventured to represent his ideas in statuesque nakedness, has not
imaged human nature as it showed itself to him, improving nothing and
modifying nothing, but has taken counsel with his public, been guided
by its prejudices, its ignorance, its untruthfulness, its vulgar
or sentimental taste--he may have been, probably has been, highly
distinguished by his contemporaries, he may have won laurels and wealth
by his talents; for me he does not exist, to what I call literature
his work is valueless. All the offspring of the author's _mariage de
convenance_ with that doubtful character, public opinion, all those
literary children which their author begets, giving a side-thought to
the taste and morality of his public, are defunct a generation later.
There was no real life and heat in them, nothing but timorous regard
for a public which is now dead; they were nothing but the supply of
a demand which has long ceased to exist. But every work in which an
independent writer has, without any side-thought, uttered what he felt
and described what he saw, is, and will continue to be, no matter how
few editions of it may be printed, a valuable document.
There is only a seeming contradiction between this condemnation of the
literary work produced to please the public, and the doctrine of the
sound natural influence of society on the author. It is certain that
the author cannot separate himself from his age. But the current of the
age is not an undivided current; there is an upper and an under one. To
let one's self drive with or be driven by the upper one is weakness,
and ends in destruction. In other words, every age has its dominant and
favourite ideas and forms, which are simply the results of the life of
former ages, that were arrived at long ago and have slowly petrified;
but besides these it owns another whole class of quite different ideas,
which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air, and are apprehended
by the greatest men of the age as the results which must now be arrived
at. These last are the ideas which form the unifying element of the new
endeavour.
In 1827 an English theatrical company visited Paris, and for the first
time Frenchmen saw Shakespeare's masterpieces, _King Lear, Macbeth,
Othello_, and _Hamlet_, admirably played. It was under the influence of
these performances that Victor Hugo wrote that preface to _Cromwell_
which is regarded as the programme of the new literature.
The literary war of liberation began with an assault upon French
classical tragedy, the weakest and most exposed point in literary
tradition. Hugo knew very little about the attacks upon its authority
which had been made in other countries; and to those who have read
the utterances delivered on the same subject many years previously
by Lessing, Wilhelm Schlegel, and the English Romantic writers,
his manifesto offers little that is new. But it was, of course, an
important step to carry the war into France itself. The vigorous
arguments expended in proving the unnaturalness of compressing the
action of every drama into twenty-four hours and a single pillared
hall, seem to the reader of to-day almost as uninteresting as the
absurdities attacked; but he must remember that Boileau's authority was
then still supreme, still unshaken in France.
Of interest as regards Hugo's own development are the passages in which
he expounds his private theory of poetry; although he is so much of the
poet and so little of the thinker that his arguments are, as a rule,
sadly inconclusive.
What he attacks is the idealistic, pseudo-classic tendency of tragedy.
This he does, oddly enough, in the name of Christianity, and by means
of a great historical survey, made on as false a system as any of those
of his contemporary, Cousin, of whom it reminds us. He distinguishes
three great periods--the primitive, when poetry is lyric; the period
of ancient civilisation, when it is epic; and the age of Christianity,
which is the period of the drama. The peculiar characteristic of the
poetry of the Christian, which he treats as synonymous with the modern,
period is that it (having learned from religion that man consists of
two elements, an animal and a spiritual, body and soul) makes place in
the same work for the two elements which in literature have hitherto
excluded each other, the sublime and the grotesque. It is no longer
imperative that tragedy should be solemn throughout; it may venture to
develop into drama.
If we pay less heed to what Hugo says than to what he really intends
to say, we find that the sum and substance of this tolerably foolish
argument is a naturalistic protest against pure beauty as the proper
or highest subject of art. His idea is: We will renounce convention;
we will not feel ourselves in duty bound to exclude everything from
serious poetry which directly reminds us of the material world. We
see this from the examples he gives. The judge is to be allowed to
say: "Sentenced to death. And now let us dine." Queen Elizabeth
is to be allowed to swear and speak Latin; Cromwell to say: "I
have the Parliament in my bag and the King in my pocket." Cæsar in
his triumphal car may be afraid of its upsetting. And Hugo calls
Napoleon's exclamation: "There is only one step from the sublime to the
ridiculous," the cry of anguish which is the summary of both drama and
life.
Exaggerated as Hugo's language may be, his meaning is plain. What he
asserts is the aesthetic value of the ugly. He maintains that the
beautiful only comprehends form as absolute symmetry, form in its
simplest relations and most intimate harmony with our being, whereas
the ugly is a detail in a much greater, harmonious whole which we are
unable fully to discern. He declares that the ugly has a thousand
types, whereas the beautiful is poor, and has but one; which last
theory we may be excused for calling one of the most absurd ever
advanced by a poet. It was parodied by his opponents in the axiom: _Le
Laid c'est le Beau_ ("Foul is fair," as the witches sing in _Macbeth_),
and combated with the objections which the Romanticists themselves
offered in the Seventies to extreme realism.
Was not this French Romanticism, then, after all simply a thinly-veiled
naturalism? What did Victor Hugo demand in the name of the young
generation but nature--faithful reproduction, local and historical
colour? Is not George Sand Rousseau's daughter? the preacher of a
gospel of nature? And Beyle and Mérimée, are they not half-brutal,
half-refined worshippers of nature? Is not Balzac nowadays actually
honoured as the founder of a naturalistic school?
The answer is simple. Hugo's watchword was, undoubtedly, nature and
truth, but it was at the same time, and first and foremost, contrast,
picturesque contrast, antithesis founded upon the medieval belief
in the confliction between body and soul; that is, a dualistic
Romanticism. "The salamander heightens the charm of the water-nymph,
the gnome lends beauty to the sylph," he says. He desired truth to
nature, but he believed it was to be arrived at by making nature's
extremes meet, by placing opposites in juxtaposition--Beauty and the
Beast, Esmeralda and Quasimodo, the courtesan's past and the purest
love in Marion Delorme, bloodthirstiness and maternal tenderness in
Lucrèce Borgia.
In his early youth nature was to Victor Hugo a great Ariel-Caliban,
the product of a superhuman ideality and an unnatural bestiality, the
result obtained by the combination of two supernatural ingredients.
But this conception of nature, which corresponded exactly with that
of Germanic Romanticism, at times made way in Hugo's case for the
magnificent pantheism which found typical expression in that profound
and beautiful poem, "Le Satyre," in _La Légende des Siècles_.
The combination of love of nature with predilection for the unnatural,
is to be traced far on into the new literature. All its authors chant
the praises of nature. But what they detest and shun under the name
of the prosaic and the commonplace is very often the simple nature
that lies nearest them. Romantic nature alone is dear to them. George
Sand escapes from the world of dreary, hard realities into that of
beautiful dreams, Théophile Gautier into the world of art. George Sand
in _Lelia_, Balzac in _Père Goriot_, make the ideal or the omnipotent
galley-slave the judge of society; Balzac actually writes fantastic
legends in Hoffmann's style. And they are even more inclined to shun
the plain and simple in their language than in their characters. They
soon evolved a pompous diction, which far outrivalled that of the
classic periods. These were the golden days of the glowing, dazzling
adjective. Picturesque, enthusiastic words, with which the narrative
was inlaid as with so many transparent jewels, opened up endless
vistas. In so far, therefore, it may be said that both the style and
the predilections of these young authors were purely romantic. But only
in so far.
In Victor Hugo, the founder of the school, the dual love of the natural
and the unnatural was the result of a personal peculiarity. His eye
naturally sought and found contrasts; his mind had an innate tendency
towards antithesis. In _Inez de Castro_, the melodrama of his earliest
youth, and later in _Marie Tudor_, we have the throne on one side of
the stage, the scaffold on the other, the monarch and the executioner
face to face. About the time when the preface to _Cromwell_ was
written, Hugo was, his wife tells us, in the habit of walking on the
Boulevard Montparnasse. "There, just opposite the Cemetery, tight-rope
dancers and jugglers had erected their booths. This contrast of shows
and funerals confirmed him in his idea of a drama in which extremes
meet; and it was there that the third act of _Marion Delorme_ occurred
to him, the act in which the tragic, fruitless attempt of the Marquis
de Nangis to save his brother from the scaffold forms the counterpart
to the antics of the jester." In the preface to _Cromwell_, when he is
asserting the necessity of representing an action in the place where
it actually happened, he writes: "Could the poet dare to have Rizzio
murdered anywhere but in Mary Stuart's chamber?... or to behead
Charles I. or Louis XVI. anywhere but on these sorrowful spots within
sight of Whitehall and the Tuileries, which seem as if they had been
chosen in order that the scaffold might contrast with the palace?" In
spite of all his asseverations this poet does not really see natural
environments with an understanding eye. He does not see them act as
formative influences upon the human soul; he employs them as great
symbols of the tremendous reverses of fate; he arranges them like the
stage scenery of a melodrama.
If we look deeper, what reveals itself to us in this? A characteristic
which is to a certain extent distinctive of many of the French
Romanticists, and which may be most briefly expressed thus: French
Romanticism, in spite of all the elements it has in common with general
European Romanticism, is in many ways a classic phenomenon, a product
of classic French rhetoric.