word _romantic_ was introduced into Germany it signified almost the
same as Romanesque; it meant Romanesque flourishes and conceits,
sonnets and canzonets; the Romanticists were enthusiastic admirers of
the Roman Catholic Church and of the great Romanesque poet Calderon,
whose works they discovered and translated and lauded. When, a century
later, Romanticism reached France, the same word meant exactly the
opposite thing--it meant the German-English tendency as opposed to
the Greco-Latin Romanesque tendency; it meant Teutonic. The simple
explanation of this is, that whatever is strange and foreign produces
a romantic impression. The art and literature of a people of a
homogeneous civilisation and culture, like the ancient Greeks, are
classic; but when one civilised, cultured nation discovers another
civilisation and culture which seem to it strange and wonderful, it
is at once impressed by it as romantic, is affected by it as by a
landscape seen through coloured glass. The Romanticists of France
despised their own national excellences, the perspicuity and rational
transparency of their own literature, and extolled Shakespeare and
Goethe because these poets did not, like Racine and, to a certain
extent, Corneille, break up human life into its separate elements, did
not represent isolated emotions and passions which offered dramatic
contrasts, but, without any rhetorical recurrence to the fundamental
elements, flung real human life on the stage in all its complex
cohesion. The Frenchmen determined to follow this great example.
But what was the result? Under their treatment, in the hands of
Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, George Sand, Sainte-Beuve, real life was
dissolved and disintegrated anew. In the hands of Victor Hugo and
Alexandre Dumas its extremes formed symmetrical contrasts, exactly
as in classic tragedy. Order, moderation, aristocratic refinement, a
transparent, severely simple style distinguished Nodier, Beyle, and
Mérimée, exactly as they had done the classic authors of the eighteenth
century. The light, free, airy fancy which intermingles all the most
varied imaginations of the poetic mind, which unites near and far,
to-day and hoary antiquity, the real and the impossible, in one and
the same work, which combines the divine and the human, popular legend
and profound allegory, making of them one great symbolic whole--this
real romantic gift was not theirs. They never saw the dance of the
elves, nor heard the thin, clear tones of their music floating across
the meadows. Although Celts by birth, these men were Latins; they felt
and wrote as Latins; and the word Latin is equivalent to classic. If
we understand by Romanticism what is generally understood, that is, an
overwhelming of the style by the subject-matter, contents uncontrolled
by any laws of form, such as we have in the writings of Jean Paul and
Tieck, and even in Shakespeare and Goethe (_A Midsummer Night's Dream_
and the second part of _Faust_), then all the French Romanticists
are classic writers--Mérimée, George Sand, Gautier, and even Victor
Hugo himself. Hugo's romantic drama is as disintegrative, regular in
construction, perspicuous, and eloquent as a tragedy of Corneille.
At the mention of this name my thoughts turn involuntarily and
naturally from the characteristics common to the periods to the common
characteristics of race. In Hugo, Corneille's apparent antagonist,
Corneille lives again.
There are many veins in the French character. There is a vein of
scepticism, jest, sarcasm--the line Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière,
Mathurin Régnier, Pierre Bayle, &c.; there is the true, thoroughbred
Gallic vein--Rabelais, Diderot, Balzac; and amongst the rest there
is the heroic vein, the vein of enthusiasm. It is this last which
pulsates so strongly in Corneille; and in Victor Hugo the blood begins
to course in it again. If we compare Hugo in his stateliness with
other poets, we shall find that there is probably not one in the whole
world whom he resembles so much as he does old Corneille. There is
something Spanish about the French eloquence of both, and Spain had
certainly made its impression on them both; in Corneille's case a
literary impression, in Hugo's a personal, received in his childhood.
The drama to which Corneille owes his fame is the _Cid_, in which a
Spanish theme is treated in a Spanish spirit, in imitation of Spanish
models. The drama which makes Hugo famous is _Hernani_, Spanish in its
subject, and permeated by the spirit of Calderon's code of honour. But
in both these dramas it is heroism pure and simple which is inculcated
and exhibited. They are schools for heroes. It is not human nature in
its manysidedness, but heroic human nature which Corneille represents;
in Victor Hugo this same heroic human nature is merely symmetrically
complemented by wildly passionate human nature.
Let us glance at this _Hernani_, round which the great conflict between
the party of the future and the party of the past raged. The story of
the first performance has often been told. Adherents of the old school
listened at the doors during the rehearsals, and picked up single
lines, which they caricatured; and a parody of the play was acted
before the play itself. The author had a hard struggle with the censor;
he had to fight for his play almost line by line. There was a long
correspondence on the subject of the one line: "C'était d'un imprudent,
seigneur roi de Castille, et d'un lâche." And the actors and actresses
regarded the work with equal disfavour; only one of the company applied
himself with goodwill to the study of his part. Hugo was determined to
dispense with the paid claque, but he arranged to have three hundred
places at his disposal for the first three nights. The most faithful of
his followers, young men who, according to their own confession, spent
their nights in writing "Vive Victor Hugo!" all over the arcade of the
Rue de Rivoli, with no other aim than to annoy the respectable citizen,
now enlisted a corps of young painters, architects, poets, sculptors,
musicians, and printers, to whom Hugo gave the watchword _Hierro_, and
who were prepared to present an iron front to the foe. The moment the
curtain rose the storm burst, and every time the play was performed
there was such an uproar in the theatre that it was with the greatest
difficulty it could be acted to the end. A hundred evenings in
succession was _Hernani_ hissed, and a hundred evenings in succession
was it received with storms of applause by young enthusiasts, who for
their master's sake did not weary of listening to the same speeches
evening after evening and defending them line by line against the hate,
rage, envy, and superior power of his opponents. The fact may seem
unimportant, yet it is worthy of observation, that France is the only
country in which such _esprit de corps_, without the existence of any
tangible _corps_, such unselfish devotion to the cause and honour of
another, has ever been witnessed.
The enemy took boxes and left them unoccupied, in order that the
newspapers might report an empty house; they turned their backs to the
stage; they made disgusted grimaces, as if the play were more than
they could stand; they affected to be absorbed in the newspapers;
they slammed the box doors, or laughed loud and scornfully, or hooted
and hissed and whistled; so that a resolute defence was absolutely
necessary.
There is not an emotion in _Hernani_ which is not strained to its
extremest pitch. The hero is a noble-minded man of genius, the genius
and noble-mindedness being of the type which exists in the imagination
of a young man of twenty. His genius impels him to lead the life of a
brigand chieftain, and out of pure high-mindedness and contempt for
ordinary prudence he does the most foolish things--betrays himself,
lets his mortal enemy escape, gives himself up again and again. As
chieftain he exercises unbounded power over other men, but it seems to
be his courage alone which gives him this, for all his actions are as
unreasoning as a child's. Nevertheless there is life and reality in the
play.
This noble and disinterested highwayman, who lives at war with society
and is the leader of a band of faithful enthusiasts, reminds us of the
poet himself, the literary outlaw, who filled pit and gallery with a
band of young men quite as remarkable in appearance and attire as his
brigand troop. Madame Hugo describes the contingent of spectators who
appeared on the first evening in answer to her husband's invitation as
"a troop of wild, extraordinary creatures, with beards and long hair,
dressed in every fashion except that of the day--in woollen jerseys and
Spanish cloaks, Robespierre waistcoats and Henry III. caps--displaying
themselves in broad daylight at the doors of the theatre with the
clothing of all ages and countries on their backs." Their frantic
devotion to Hugo was as great as that of Hernani's band of robbers
for its captain. They knew that Hugo had received an anonymous letter
in which he was threatened with assassination "if he did not withdraw
his filthy play," and, improbable as it was that the threat would
be literally fulfilled, two of them accompanied him to and from the
theatre every evening, though he and they lived in the farthest apart
quarters of Paris.
Amongst Hugo's papers of this date there is a quaint note from the
painter Charlet, which expresses the feelings of these youths.
"Four of my Janissaries offer me their strong arms. I send them
to prostrate themselves at your feet, begging for four places
for this evening, if it is not too late. I answer for my men;
they are fellows who would gladly cut off heads for the sake of
the wigs. I encourage them in this noble spirit, and do not let
them go without my fatherly blessing. They kneel. I stretch out
my hands and say: God protect you, young men! The cause is a
good one; do your duty! They rise and I add: Now, my children,
take good care of Victor Hugo. God is good, but He has so much
to do that our friend must in the first instance rely upon us.
Go, and do not put him you serve to shame.--Yours with life and
soul,
"CHARLET."
Supported by such devoted enthusiasts as these in its struggle with
fanatic opposition, romantic art stormed the enemy's first redoubt and
won its first important victory.
What these young men heard from the stage was the expression of
their own defiance and thirst for independence, of their courage and
devotion, their ideal and erotic longings, only pitched in a still
higher key; and their hearts melted within them.
The time was February 1830, five months before the Revolution of July.
The dullest materialism made life colourless. France was as regularly
ordered as the avenues of the gardens of Versailles; it was ruled by
old men, who patronised only such young ones as had written Latin
verse to perfection at school, and had since qualified themselves for
office by absolute correctness of behaviour. There they sat, these
correct, faultlessly-attired youths, with their neckcloths and stiff
standing collars. Contrast with them the youths in the pit, one with
locks reaching to his waist and a scarlet satin doublet, another with a
Rubens hat and bare hands. These latter hated the powerful Philistine
bourgeoisie as Hernani hated the tyranny of Charles V. They gloried
in their position; they, too, were freebooters, poor, proud--one a
cherisher of Republican dreams, most of them worshippers of art. There
they stood, many of them geniuses--Balzac, Berlioz, Théophile Gautier,
Gérard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Préault--taking the measure of their
opponents of the same generation. They felt that they themselves were
at least not place-seekers, not tuft-hunters, beggars, and parasites
like those others; they were the men who a few months later made the
Revolution of July, and who in the course of a few years gave France a
literature and art of the first rank.
We know how they regarded Hernani. What did they see in the second
great character, King Charles of Spain? He repels at first. We cannot
place much faith in this cold, cautious monarch's ardent love for Donna
Sol; and he, moreover, employs violent and dishonourable means to get
her into his power. But the poet soon raises him to a higher level, and
makes us feel the great ambition which fills his soul.
It was Charles's tremendous monologue at the tomb of Charlemagne which
decided the fate of the drama that evening. And this much criticised
and ridiculed monologue is in reality the work of a young master. It is
easy to perceive, even if we did not know, how untrue it is to history,
how impossible it is that Charles V. should have thought thus; but we
are fascinated by the faithfulness with which the political ideas and
dreams of 1830 are mirrored, and by the marvellous political insight
displayed. This is the historical insight which sometimes astonishes
us in poets; Schiller showed it at the age of 21, in _Fiesco_. Listen
to Don Carlos's description of Europe: A building with two human
beings on its pinnacles, two elected chiefs, to whom every hereditary
monarch must bow--the Emperor and the Pope. Almost all the states have
hereditary rulers, and are, in so far, in the power of chance; but the
people are at times able to elect their Pope or their Emperor; chance
corrects chance, and the balance is restored. The Electors in their
cloth of gold, the Cardinals in their scarlet, are the instruments by
means of whom God chooses.
"Qu'une idée, au besoin des temps, un jour éclose;
Elle grandît, va, court, se mêle à toute chose,
Se fait homme, saisit les cœurs, creuse un sillon;
Maint roi la foule aux pieds ou lui met un baîllon;
Mais qu'elle entre un matin à la diète, au conclave,
Et tous les rois soudain verront l'idée esclave
Sur leurs têtes de rois que ses pieds courberont
Surgir, le globe en main ou la tiare au front."
The poet was certainly not thinking of Charles V. when he wrote this,
but of an Emperor much nearer his own day, the Emperor of whom he had
just written in the _Ode à la Colonne de la Place Vendôme_, that his
spurs outweighed Charlemagne's sandals. It must not be forgotten that
men's enthusiasm for Napoleon in those days by no means implied that
they were Bonapartists; it only signified that they belonged to the
party of progress. The Napoleon they worshipped was not the tyrant of
France, but the humiliator of kings and of hereditary authority. The
Emperor, as compared with the King, was regarded as the personified
people; therefore the young generation was deeply moved when Charles
in his monologue exclaims: "Rois! regardez en bas!... Ah! le
peuple!--Océan! Vague qui broie un trône! Miroir où rarement un roi se
voit en beau!"
They are, thus, revolutionary and perfectly modern reminiscences
and comparisons which occur in rapid succession to Charles V. At
the grave of Charlemagne he matures into the popular Emperor who
has been so often dreamed of in modern times, and his passionate
ambition is purified by his intense desire to solve gigantic problems
and accomplish prodigious tasks. The man who was, to begin with, so
obnoxious to the youthful part of the audience, whose brutal desire
made him so inferior to his noble-minded rival Hernani and the proud
lady they both love, ends, when he is Emperor, by renouncing his claims
and showing mercy--and suddenly the two happy lovers seem small and
insignificant beside him.
With his hand on his heart he says softly to himself:
"Éteins-toi, cœur jeune et plein de flamme!
Laisse régner l'esprit que toujours tu troublas.
Tes amours désormais, tes maîtresses, hélas!
C'est l'Allemagne, c'est la Flandre, c'est l'Espagne!"
And with his eye on the imperial banner he adds:
"L'empereur est pareil à l'aigle, sa compagne.
A la place du cœur, il n'a qu'un ecusson!"
Such words as these produced a powerful effect on the ambitious young
men who were the real audience of the play. The drama, the tragedy, of
ambition moved them as deeply as the drama of independence. They knew
that great public aims are attained, great tasks accomplished only by
manly resolution nourished upon the intensest emotions, longings, and
joys of the heart, which have been offered as a burnt-offering on the
altar of the aim--therefore they understood Carlos.
Nevertheless the fifth act, with the duet between the lovers, is in its
purely lyric excellence the gem of the play. Here was love as those
young men felt it and desired to have it represented. This dialogue
on the threshold of the bridal chamber which the lovers are never to
enter; this blending of a happiness so great and intense that, as
Hernani says, it demands hearts of bronze on which to engrave itself,
with all the horrors of annihilation; this sensual feeling, which is
chaste and harmonious in her, pure and ardent in him, blissful in both;
Donna Sol's supra-mundane enthusiasm; Hernani's longing to forget the
past in the present and its peace--all this was Romanticism of the kind
the youth of the day demanded and greeted with thunders of applause.
As a drama _Hernani_ is extremely imperfect; it is a lyrical,
rhetorical work, containing much that is extravagant. But it has
the one, all-important merit, namely, that in it an independent and
remarkable human soul has expressed itself unrestrainedly. From such a
work it is possible to learn much of its author's mental idiosyncrasy.
He is there with his genius, his limitations, his character, his whole
past--with his conceptions of liberty and authority, of honour and
nobility, of love and of death.
And the work presents to us not only Victor Hugo and a bit of the Spain
of 1519, but the young generation of its own day and a piece of the
France of 1830. _Hernani_ is the essence of the spirit which inspired
the youth of France at the time of the Revolution of July; it is an
image of France which, seen in a romantic light, expands into an image
of the world.
But when, instead of confining our attention to a single work, we
proceed, as now, to study a whole literature, hosts of pictures of
moods and thoughts, of portraits, and of images of the world, pass
before us. We shall detain them to compare them with one another and
see in what they agree, by this means attaining to a certainty of
what the fundamental characteristic of the age is; then we shall let
them pass before us in historical succession, and try, by carefully
observing in what they differ from one another, to discover the law
which produces these differences; we shall watch, as it were, the
flight of the arrows which indicate the direction of the spiritual
currents.
IV
CHARLES NODIER
From the year 1824 onwards Hugo, Dumas, Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, De
Musset, and De Vigny met almost every Sunday evening at the house of a
friend who that year took up his residence in the outskirts of Paris,
near the Arsenal, in a modest dwelling which went by the name of the
Little Tuileries. Their host was a man who in point of age belonged to
the previous generation (he was born in 1780), but who in his mental
attitude had anticipated the nascent literature, which he consequently
at once and without hesitation took under his protection. His name was
Charles Nodier.
Nodier's life had been one of strange vicissitudes; he had been an
_emigré_ in the Jura, a newspaper editor in Illyria, and now he was a
librarian in Paris.[1] His most remarkable characteristic as an author
is that he is always from ten to twenty years in advance of every
literary movement. His novel _Jean Sbogar_, the story of a species of
Illyrian Karl Moor, which he planned in Illyria in 1812 and published
in 1818, although improbable and uninteresting as a tale, is remarkable
from the fact that its author, long before the days of Proudhon and
modern communism, has put some of the most striking truths and untruths
of the communistic faith into the mouth of his hero. Jean Sbogar
writes:--
"The poor man's theft from the rich man would, if we were to go back to
the origin of social conditions, prove to be merely the just return of
a piece of silver or of bread from the hands of the thief to the hands
of the man from whom it was stolen."
"Show me a power which dares to assume the name of law, and I shall
show you theft assuming the name of property."
"What is that law which calls itself constitution and bears on its brow
the name and seal of equality? Is it the agrarian law? No, it is the
contract of sale, drawn up by intriguers and partisans who have desired
to enrich themselves, which delivers a people into the hands of the
rich."
"Liberty is not such a very rare treasure; it is to be found in the
hand of the strong and the purse of the rich. You are master over my
money. I am master of your life. Give me the money and you may keep
your life."
Jean Sbogar is, we observe, not a common but a philosophic highwayman.
The most natural thing about him is that he wears gold earrings, and
this realistic trait Madame Nodier had almost succeeded in eliminating.
Nodier allowed himself to be, as a rule, guided by his wife's taste
and wishes. But when he once in a way felt inclined to rebel, and, to
excuse himself, pled his submission on all other occasions, Madame
Nodier always said: "Don't forget that you refused to sacrifice Jean
Sbogar's earrings to me." This is declared to have been the one and
only literary disagreement which ever occurred between the couple.
Men had forgotten the existence of such a book as _Jean Sbogar_, when
Napoleon's memoirs came out and informed them that he had had it with
him at St. Helena, and had read it with interest. The little novel
belongs to Nodier's transition period. It was written before he had
developed his characteristic individuality. This he did about the
time of the formation of the Romantic School proper. He stood then,
so to speak, at the open door of literature, and bade that school
welcome. His review of Victor Hugo's boyish romance, _Han d'Islande_,
is a little masterpiece of criticism, sympathetic and acute. It was
the beginning of the warm friendship between the two authors. The
appreciation of Hugo is so marvellously correct that in reading it
to-day one can hardly believe that its writer was unacquainted with all
the master's later works. It required no small amount of cleverness to
foresee them in _Han d'Islande_.
The stories which Nodier now began to write possess a charm and
attraction unique in French literature. They are distinguished by
a mimosa-like delicacy of feeling. They treat chiefly of the first
stirring of passion in the hearts of youths and maidens; the fresh
dew of the morning of life is upon them; they remind us of the woods
in spring. It is a well-known fact that there is some difficulty in
finding French books of any literary value which are fit for young
girls' reading; but such tales as Nodier's _Thérèse Aubert_, or the
collection of stories entitled _Souvenirs de Jeunesse_, meet both
requirements. The only risk run would be the risk of imbuing the
young readers with fanciful platonic ideas; for these tales are as
sentimental as they are chaste; the love which they describe may be a
friendship with little of the sexual element in it, nevertheless it
completely engrosses the little human being. It owes its charm to the
fact that as yet no experience has made these minds suspicious and
that no false or true pride prevents these hearts from revealing their
emotions. As all the tales are founded on reality, on memories of their
author's youth, the terrors of the Revolution form the dark background
of them all, and they all end with a parting or the death of the loved
one.
A childlike delicacy of feeling is the fundamental characteristic of
Nodier's character. To the end of his days he remained a big, unworldly
child, with a girlish shrinking not only from the impure, but even from
the grown-up standpoint.
Above this groundwork of naïve freshness of feeling there rises, as
second story, a wildly exuberant imagination. Nodier possessed such a
gift of extravagant invention that one can hardly help believing that
he must have been subject to visions and hallucinations; he had the
dangerous quality peculiar to a certain type of poetic temperament,
that of scarcely being able to speak the truth. No one, not even
he himself, ever knew for a certainty whether what he was relating
was truth or fiction. Jest is the mean between the two. Nodier was
considered one of the most entertaining of Frenchmen, and he was not
the least offended when he was told by his friends that they did not
believe a word of what he was telling them.