in the south of France, they arrived at an inn in the little town
of Essonne, where they were to breakfast. It was in this inn that
Lesurques had been arrested, a man who was executed in 1796 for a
murder of which he was afterwards proved to have been innocent.
Nodier, who had known him, or at any rate said he had, spoke of him
with an emotion that brought tears into the eyes of the two ladies,
and disturbed the cheerfulness of the repast. Noticing Madame Hugo's
wet eyes, Nodier promptly began: "You know, Madame, that a man is not
invariably certain of being the father of his child, but have you ever
heard of a woman not knowing if she is her child's mother?" "Where did
you hear of such a thing?" asked Madame Hugo. "In the billiard-room
next door," was the reply. Pressed for an explanation, Nodier related
with much gusto how, two years previously, a coachful of wet-nurses,
coming from Paris with children who were to be reared in the country,
stopped at this very inn. That they might breakfast in peace, the
nurses deposited their charges for the time on the billiard-table. But
whilst the women were in the _salle-à-manger_ some carriers, coming
in to play a game of billiards, lifted the children off the table and
laid them at random on the bench. When the nurses returned they were
in despair. How was each to recognise her own nursling? The children
were all only a few days old, and indistinguishable one from the other.
At last, merely making sure of the sex, each took one from the row;
and now there were in France a score or so of mothers who discovered
a likeness to beloved husbands or to themselves in children with whom
they had no connection whatever.
"What a story!" said Madame Nodier. "Were the children's clothes not
marked?"
"If you begin to inquire into the probability of a thing, you will
never arrive at the truth," answered Nodier, nothing daunted, and quite
satisfied with the effect produced.
He himself never inquired into probabilities. The world of
probabilities was not his; he lived in the world of legend, of
fantastic fairy-tale and ghost story. If a fairy has ever stood by the
cradle of a mortal, that mortal was Charles Nodier. And in this fairy
he believed all his life; he loved her as she loved him, and she had
a part in all that he wrote. What though he was married by law and in
earthly fashion to Madame Nodier! The marriage had no more spiritual
significance than Dante's with Gemma Donati; his true bride and
Beatrice was the fairy Bellas, once the Queen of Sheba, whose praises
he and Gérard de Nerval so often sang.
The world in which he lives is the world in which Oberon and Titania
dance, in which strains from the _Thousand and One Nights_ blend with
the melodies of Ariel's celestial orchestra, in which Puck makes his
bed in a rosebud, whilst all the flowers perfume the summer night. It
is a world in which all the personages of real, wide-awake life appear,
but grotesquely magnified or grotesquely diminished, to suit the
comprehension of the child and the requirements of the fantast.
Here, as Nodier himself somewhere says, we have Odysseus the
far-travelled, but he has shrunk into Hop-o'-my-thumb, whose tremendous
voyage consists in swimming across the milk-pail; here is Othello, the
terrible wife-murderer, only his beard is not black but blue--he has
turned into the notorious Bluebeard; here is Figaro, the nimble lackey
who flatters the grandees so cleverly, only he is transformed into Puss
in Boots, a less entertaining personage, though almost as interesting
from the psychological point of view.
No author of the French Romantic period is more closely related to
the German and English Romanticists than Nodier. Any one who does not
know his works may form some idea of them by recalling Sir Walter
Scott's ghost stories and Hoffmann's audacious fantasies. But these,
of course, do not convey an idea of Nodier's artistic individuality.
His peculiarity is, that in his representation of Romantic subjects
he is not what we are in the habit of calling Romantic, but, on the
contrary, severely Attic, classically simple, sparing in the matter
of colour, and devoid of passion; there is none of the Scotch mist
we are conscious of in Sir Walter, or of the fumes of the Berlin
wine-vaults which we inhale in reading Hoffmann. His peculiarity as
a stylist is that, whilst the young Romanticists around him were
sensualising language and supplanting the idea by the picture, he
himself transcribed his wildest Romantic fancies into the clear and
simple language of Pascal and Bossuet. Enthusiastic champion as he
was of the new tendency in literature, in the matter of style he
remained old-fashioned, and expressed the fantastic imaginations of
the nineteenth century in the severe, perspicuous language of the
seventeenth. Audacious to the verge of insanity in his fantasies, he
is sober and clear in his style. As Prosper Mérimée has cleverly said,
a fanciful tale by Nodier is like "the dream of a Scythian, told by an
old Greek poet."
His _Inès de Las Sierras_ is a ghost-story the beauty of which renders
it infinitely superior to the ordinary ghost-story. The horror produced
by the unaccountable apparition is blent with the admiration aroused
by the supernatural visitant's gentle grace; these feelings do not
neutralise each other, but act in combination with a peculiar power;
and it is this combination which is the secret of Nodier's effects.
It is a pity that he has spoiled the beautiful story by a trivial
and improbable conclusion, which explains away the ghost in the most
commonplace manner. The apparition seen in the old castle at midnight
is not the ghost of the young dancing-girl, murdered 300 years before,
but a living Spanish maiden who happens to bear the same name, and
whom a fantastic and incredible concatenation of circumstances has led
to dance there, dressed in white. There is genuine Latin rationality
in this solution of the mystery, but it is offered to us, as it were,
ironically. A story like _Inès de Las Sierras_, however, is what most
exactly demonstrates the poetic progress made since the eighteenth
century, which was such an enemy of the supernatural, even in fiction,
that Voltaire regarded himself as an audacious reformer when (in his
_Semiramis_) he allowed the ridiculous ghost of Minus to howl some
alexandrines through a speaking-trumpet in broad daylight.
_La Fée aux Miettes_ seems to me the best of Nodier's fantastic tales.
There is undoubtedly too much of it; it is not without an effort
that one follows all the wild twists and turnings of a fantasy which
occupies 120 quarto pages, even though much of it is both interesting
and charming. A poor, harmless lunatic in the asylum of Glasgow tells
the story of his life. This is the setting of the tale, but we forget
it altogether in the marvellousness of the events related. All the
chords of human life are touched, jarringly and wildly. It is as if
life itself passed before one's eyes seen wrong side out, seen from
the perfectly permissible standpoint of the dreamer or the delirious
fever-patient.
In the little town of Granville in Normandy lives a worthy,
simple-minded young carpenter, Michel by name. In the same town lives
an old female dwarf, shrivelled and ugly, who, because she gathers
up the scraps of the school-children's breakfasts, is called "la fée
aux miettes." Four or five centuries ago she might have been seen in
Granville, living in the same way, and she has made her appearance at
intervals since. This being is assisted by the young carpenter with
small sums of money, and she in return assists him with all manner of
wise advice. She always speaks to him as if she were passionately in
love with him, and she begs him to promise to marry her, so that by
this means his money may in time return to him again. She gives him her
portrait, a picture which does not resemble her at all, but represents
the fairy Belkis, who in olden days was the Queen of Sheba beloved by
Solomon. The youth falls in love with this picture of a beautiful,
dazzling, bewitching woman. Wherever he goes her name meets him; when
he determines to try his fortune in a foreign country, the ship he
sails in is called the _Queen of Sheba_. He wanders about the world
dreaming of Belkis, as we wander, one and all of us, dreaming of our
castle in the air, our ideal, our fixed idea, which to our neighbours
is madness.
Falsely accused of a murder committed in the room in which he had slept
at an inn, poor Michel is sentenced to be hanged. He is carried through
a hooting crowd to the gallows. There proclamation is made that,
according to old custom, his life will be spared if any young woman
will have pity on him and take him for her husband. And behold, Folly
Girlfree, a merry, pretty girl who has always liked him, approaches
the scaffold, prepared to save him. But he asks time for reflection.
He likes Folly Girlfree, and she is both good and beautiful, but he
does not love her; he has only one love, his ardently, secretly adored
ideal, the Fairy Belkis. He looks tenderly and gratefully at Folly,
deliberates, and--requests to be hanged. This deliberation with the
rope round his neck, this conclusion that, as Shakespeare puts it,
"many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage," is described with
delightful humour, with a naïve philosophy which is unforgettable from
the fact that some such idea has occurred at one time or other to all
of us.
They are proceeding to hang Michel, when loud cries are heard, and
the Crumb Fairy, followed by all the street boys, arrives breathless,
bringing proofs of the prisoner's innocence. He marries her out
of gratitude, but hardly has the door on the wedding night been
hermetically closed between him and his aged wife, hardly has he shut
his eyes than Belkis in her bridal veil approaches his couch.
"Alas! Belkis, I am married, married to the Crumb Fairy."
"I am she."
"Nay, that is impossible; you are almost as tall as I."
"That is because I have stretched myself."
"But this beautiful, curly, golden hair falling over your shoulders,
Belkis? The Crumb Fairy has none of it."
"No, for I show it only to my husband."
"But the Fairy's two great teeth, Belkis; I do not see them between
your fresh, fragrant lips?"
"No, they are a superfluity only permissible to old age."
"And this almost deadly feeling of bliss which takes possession of me
in your embrace, Belkis? The Fairy never gave me this."
"No, naturally," is the laughing answer; "but 'at night all cats are
grey.'"
Henceforward Michel lives a divided life; his days are spent with the
wise old Fairy, his nights with the beautiful young Queen of Sheba,
until at last he finds the singing mandragora, and, having made his
escape from the madhouse, mounts to the Fairy's and Belkis's heaven on
the wings of the mandragora's song.
This is madness, no doubt, but it is marvellous madness--madness
instinct with soul. Who is this crumb-gathering fairy? Is she wisdom?
Is she renunciation and duty? Is she the inexhaustible patience which
suddenly reveals itself as genius? Is she fidelity turning into the
happiness that is the reward of fidelity? She is probably a little of
all of this; and therefore it is that she can transform herself into
youth and beauty and bliss. In some such fashion Nodier has thought
out, or dreamt his story.
At its maturity his imaginative faculty is more wanton and bold. No
longer contented with producing shapeless, unordered material, he
presents his material to us with a grotesque, loquacious, satirical
explanation. No Frenchman comes so near having what Englishmen and
Germans call humour as Nodier. At times he seems to be positively
possessed by whimsicality. Then he not only turns the everyday world
topsy-turvy in his stories, but plays with his own relation to
the story, satirises contemporaries, makes a thousand innuendoes,
philosophises over the illusions of life. He takes even the art of
the printer into his service to heighten his fantastic effects; or,
more correctly speaking, in order to prove the absolute power of his
personality over his material, he leaves not a single thing, not even
the purely mechanical means of communication, untouched by his mood. In
his famous tale, _Le Roi de Bohème et ses sept Châteaux_, he exhausted
the resources of the printing establishment. At his command the letters
become so long that they stretch from top to bottom of the page; he
commands again, and they dwindle into the tiniest of the tiny; he
screams, and they stand up on end in terror; he becomes melancholy, and
they hang their heads all along the lines; they are inseparably mixed
up with illustrations; Latin and Gothic groups alternate, according to
the mood of the moment; sometimes they stand on their heads, so that we
have to turn the book upside down to read them; sometimes they follow
the narrative so closely that a descent of the stairs is printed thus:
Hereupon
our
hero
went
dejectedly
down
the
stairs.
It is interesting to trace in the account of Nodier's life written
by his daughter, the foundations of fact upon which he built his
fantastic tales. It rarely happens that, as in _Inès de Las Sierras_,
something real (in this case an old castle which Nodier had visited in
the course of a tour he made with his family in Spain in 1827) forms
the groundwork. Sometimes, as for example in _Trilby_, the point of
departure is a legend; and it is significant that this particular
legend should have been told to Nodier by Pichot, the French translator
of Scott and Byron. The idea of _Smarra_ Nodier got from hearing the
old porter of his house in Paris, who was too ill to sleep anywhere
except sitting in his chair, relate his nightmares and dreams. The
model for the Fée aux Miettes was an old woman who served in his
father's house when he was a child, and who treated his father, a man
of sixty, as if he were a giddy youth. This old Denise maintained that
before entering the Nodiers' household she had been in the service of
a Monsieur d'Amboise, governor of Château-Thierry. When she held forth
on this subject, she mixed up with her own experiences reminiscences
of the most extraordinary events and most antiquated customs; and
the family, out of curiosity, caused inquiry to be made about this
remarkable governor. The archives of the town showed that only one of
the name had ever existed, and that he had died in 1557. One can see
how the story of the fairy evolved itself out of this curious incident.
The very slightest element of fact--a landscape, a legend, a dream, a
lie, a mere mote--was enough for Nodier.
The amiable, clever man, whose house was for a number of years the
rendezvous of the men of letters who made their _début_ about 1830,
the place where all the talented young beginners repaired to seek
encouragement and, if possible, permission to read a ballad or a
little piece of prose before the select company which assembled there
on Sunday afternoons, this man in his proper person represents the
extreme of Romantic fantasticality in the literature of the period. The
fantastic supernaturalism which was the main characteristic of German
Romanticism, is only one of the poles of French Romanticism; or, to
speak more correctly, it is merely one of its elements--in some of
the most notable men of the school a weak and subordinate, in others
an important element, but an element always present. In Victor Hugo's
case it announces itself at once, in his _Ronde du Sabbat_, and makes
itself forcibly felt in the great _Légende des Siècles_, though in
this latter the legend is only naïve history; we have a glimpse of it
even in the rationalistic Mérimée (half explained away in _La Vénus
d'Ille_, more distinct in _La Vision de Charles XI._ and _Les âmes du
purgatoire_); it reigns, half-seraphic, half-sanguinarily sensual, in
Lamartine's _La chute d'un ange_; it pervades Quinet's pantheistically
vague _Ahasvère_; it appears in George Sand's old age in the pretty
fairy-tales she writes for her grandchildren; it occupies even the
plastic Gautier in the many tales in which he allows himself to be
influenced by Hoffmann; and, as Swedenborgian spiritism, it actually,
in a romance like _Séraphitus-Séraphita_, completes Balzac's great
_Comédie Humaine_. But in no other author has it the naïve originality
and the poetic force which distinguish Nodier.
[1] Nodier's youth and first literary efforts are described in _The
Emigrant Literature_.
V
RETROSPECT--FOREIGN INFLUENCES
The new literary and artistic movement had both foreign and indigenous
sources. The foreign are the more clearly evident.
As has already been observed, the older foreign literature which had
hitherto been kept out of France, and the new, which was captivating
men's minds by its novelty, were simultaneously seized on and
assimilated by the young generation, with an eagerness exactly
proportioned to the vehemence with which the works in question
repudiated the rules adhered to in earlier French literature. Before
the eyes of the young school there was, as it were, a prism, which
refracted all rays in a certain uniform manner. The rays which passed
through changed their character in the process.
The name of _Shakespeare_ early became the great rallying cry of
the Romanticists. August Wilhelm Schlegel had prepared the way for
Shakespeare; in his famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature,
which were published in French as well as German, he had been the first
to extol and expound him. Mercier, the French "prophet of Romanticism,"
eagerly took up the cry; Villemain and Guizot followed suit; imitations
and translations, the latter more faithful than those of the previous
century, did what in them lay to popularise the name and art of the
great Englishman. At the beginning of the Twenties, the progress that
had been made was not sufficient to prevent a company of English actors
who tried to play Shakespeare in the Porte-St. Martin theatre, being
received with a shower of apples and eggs and cries of: "Speak French!
Down with Shakespeare! He was one of Wellington's adjutants!"[1] But we
have seen that their successors met with a most cordial reception only
a few years later. In the interval Beyle had made his determined effort
to procure Shakespeare due recognition; the _Globe_ (published first
three times a week, then daily) had made its appearance as the organ of
the younger generation, and its ablest contributors had conducted the
campaign of the new cause with remarkable skill.
Beyle who, in spite of his paradoxicalness, is one of the most
clear-headed and original writers of his day, expresses profound
admiration for Shakespeare without being guilty of any lack of piety
towards Racine, whom he represents as the Englishman's antipodes. He
shows that the moments of complete illusion which ought to occur during
the course of every theatrical performance, occur more frequently
during the representation of Shakespeare's than of Racine's plays, and
also that the peculiar pleasure imparted by a tragedy depends upon
these same seconds of illusion and the emotion which they leave in
the spectator's mind. Nothing hinders illusion more than admiration
of the beautiful verse of a tragedy. The question we have to answer
is: What is the task of the dramatic poet? Is it to present us with
a beautifully evolved plot in melodious verse, or is it to give a
truthful representation of emotions? In his own answer to this question
Beyle goes farther than Romantic tragedy, exemplified by Victor Hugo
and Alexandre Dumas, subsequently did; for he unconditionally rejects
verse as a vehicle for tragic drama. Granted, he says, that the aim
of tragedy is to give a faithful representation of emotions, then its
first requirement is distinct expression of thoughts and feelings. Such
distinctness is detracted from by verse. He quotes Macbeth's words,
spoken when he sees the ghost of Banquo sitting in his place: "The
table's full;" and maintains that rhyme and rhythm can add nothing
to the beauty of such a cry. It was obviously Vitet, not Hugo, who
subsequently came up to Beyle's dramaturgic ideal.
He warns against imitation of Shakespeare. The master should only be
followed in his understanding observation of the society in which he
lived, and his skill in giving his contemporaries exactly the kind
of tragedy which they needed; for to-day too, in 1820, the desire
for a certain kind of tragic drama exists, even though the public,
intimidated by the fame of Racine, does not venture to demand it of
the poet. It is only when an author studies and satisfies his age
that he is truly Romantic. For "Romanticism" is the art of providing
nations with the literary works which in the existing condition of
their ideas and customs are fitted to give them the greatest possible
amount of pleasure, whereas "Classicism" offers them the literature
which gave their greatgrandfathers the greatest possible amount of
pleasure. In his own day Racine was a Romanticist. Shakespeare is a
Romanticist, in the first place because he depicted for the Englishmen
of 1590 the bloody struggles and the results of their civil wars, and
in the second place because he has painted a series of masterly, subtly
shaded pictures of the impulses of the human mind and the passions of
the human heart. The teaching of Romanticism is, not that men should
imitate England or Germany, but that each nation should have its own
literature, modelled upon its own character, just as we all wear
clothes cut and sewn for ourselves alone.
To Beyle, we observe, Romanticism is almost the exact equivalent of
what we call modern art. Characteristic of that inveterate tendency of
the Latin race to classicism which has already been alluded to, are
his repeated assertions that the author should be "romantic" in all
that concerns his subject-matter, this being "the requirement of the
age," but that he should remain classic in his manner of presenting
it, in vocabulary and style. For language is an established convention
and therefore practically unchangeable. Men should try to write like
Pascal, Voltaire, and La Bruyère.[2]
With characteristic variations the most eminent contributors to the
_Globe_ formulate their definitions of Romanticism in very fair
harmony with each other and with Beyle. At the time when Hugo was
still royalist, Christian, and conservative, the _Globe_ was already
revolutionary, philosophic, and liberal. The first to publish the
programme of Romanticism in the _Globe_was Thiers. He proclaimed
its watchwords to be _nature_ and _truth_--those almost inevitable
war-cries in every artistic and literary revolution. He opposes himself
to the academic, the symmetrical in plastic art, and in dramatic poetry
demands _historic_ truth, which is the same as what was afterwards
called local colouring. Duvergier de Hauranne, in an article _On the
Romantic_, defines classicism as routine, Romanticism as liberty--that
is to say, liberty for the most varied talents (Hugo and Beyle, Manzoni
and Nodier) to develop in all their marked individuality. Ampère
defines classicism as imitation, Romanticism as originality. But an
anonymous writer (in all probability Sismondi) tries to give a more
exact definition; he remarks that the word Romanticism has not been
coined to designate the literary works in which any society whatever
has given itself expression, but only that literature which gives _a
faithful picture of modern civilization_. Since this civilisation is,
according to his conviction, spiritual in its essence, Romanticism is
to be defined as spirituality in literature. The future author of _Les
Barricades_, Vitet, at this time a youth of twenty, tries to settle the
matter with the impetuosity and audacity of his age. According to him
it simply means independence in artistic matters, individual liberty in
literary. "Romanticism is," he says, "Protestantism in literature and
art;" and in saying so he is obviously thinking merely of emancipation
from a kind of papal authority. He adds that it is neither a literary
doctrine nor a party cry, but the law of necessity, the law of change
and of progress. "Twenty years hence the whole nation will be Romantic;
I say the whole nation, for the Jesuits are not the nation."
The reader can see for himself that there is only the merest shade
of difference between these definitions and the conclusion arrived
at by Victor Hugo: "Romanticism is Liberalism in literature;" and it
will not surprise him to learn that the _Globe_ greeted the preface
to _Cromwell_ with the exclamation: "The movement has now reached M.
Hugo." Hugo's chief contribution to it was victory.[3]