exercised, if not the most profound, certainly the most plainly
traceable influence. He found his way across the French, as across
every other frontier. Before the days of his popularity in France the
great Scotchman had found in Germany, Italy, and Denmark admirers, who,
inspired by patriotic and moral aims, adopted the tone of his fiction.
The Waverley novels began to appear in 1814; in 1815 they were already
imitated by De la Motte Fouqué in the German "Junker" style; in 1825-26
Manzoni's _Promessi Sposi_ appeared; and in 1826 Ingemann began to
publish his romantic historical tales, which inculcate a childish kind
of patriotism and royalism, and are, as it were, haunted by a pale
ghost of Sir Walter Scott. The Waverley novels were translated into
French almost immediately after their appearance, and at once achieved
a great success. Scott became so popular that in the early Twenties the
managers of the theatres commissioned authors to dramatise his novels.
The unsuccessful play _Emilia_, written by Soumet, the poet of the
transition period, was an adaptation of Scott. Victor Hugo himself,
using the name of his young brother-in-law, Paul Fouchet, sent in an
adaptation of _Kenilworth_, which as a drama was also a failure.
The young Romantic generation, however, was not appealed to by
the qualities in the novels which were most highly appreciated
in Protestant countries, but by the talent of their picturesque
descriptions and their medieval flavour. It was by his wealth of
crossbows and buff jerkins, of picturesque costumes and romantic
old castles, that Scott found favour in the eyes of Frenchmen. They
ignored or disapproved of the common-sense, sober view of life and
the Protestant morality which had won him readers in Germany and
Scandinavia. Beyle was the first to criticise Scott severely. He
prophesies that in spite of his extraordinary popularity his fame
will be short-lived; for, according to Beyle, Scott's talent lay more
in the describing of men's clothes and the limning of their features
than in the representation of their emotional life and their passions.
Art, says Beyle, neither can nor ought to imitate nature exactly;
it is always a beautiful untruth; but Scott is too untruthful; his
passionate characters strike us as being ashamed of themselves; they
lack decision and boldness and naturalness. And it was not long before
his critics began to make the complaint, so often reiterated by Balzac,
that he could not describe woman and her passions, or at any rate
dared not describe these passions with their pleasures, pains, and
punishments, in a society which attached exaggerated importance to
literary modesty.[4] The novels with plots laid in modern days made no
impression; only _Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Kenilworth, The Fair Maid
of Perth_, and one or two others were popular.
The special merit of this foreign author in the eyes of Frenchmen was,
that he had substituted the novel of dramatic dialogue for the two
forms of the longer novel hitherto in vogue--the narrative, in which
the headings of the chapters were summaries of the contents and the
author played a prominent part, and the letter form, which squeezed all
the surprises and all the passion in between "Dear Friend" and "Yours
sincerely." The most talented of the young French writers are plainly
influenced by him. The one whose moral standard most closely approached
the English, Alfred de Vigny, wrote _Cinq-Mars_, a novel with a plot
laid in the days of Richelieu, an entertaining, but now old-fashioned
work, in which the contrast of good and evil overshadows all other
contrasts, and which betrays a remarkable want of appreciation of
Richelieu's greatness as a statesman. There is almost a total absence
of Scott's skill in characterisation; instead of it we have a lyric
element, the glorification of youthful, impetuous chivalry--the old
French _bravoure_. Prosper Mérimée fell under the great Scotchman's
influence at the same time as Alfred de Vigny, and wrote his _Chronique
du Règne de Charles IX._, a work the spirit of which is still less like
Scott's. Mérimée singles out the strong and violent passions in history
for their own sake, but also with the French Romanticist's subordinate
aim of rousing the wrath of the respectable bourgeois by his audacious
unreservedness; his delineation of character is, generally speaking,
clear and concise; he tells his tale coldly and with utter disregard of
all established moral convention.
Every one knows the characteristic manner in which, at a somewhat later
period, Alexandre Dumas employed Scott's wealth of colour and historic
style in the production of many light and most entertaining novels, of
which _The Three Musketeers_ may be named as an example. But it is not
so generally known that Balzac, the founder of the modern French novel,
was as strongly attracted as De Vigny and Mérimée by the foreign master
who made an epoch in the history of fiction. He desired to follow in
his path without being a mere imitator. He believed himself quite
capable of rivalling Scott in the delineative art which Romanticism had
restored to honour, and was confident of his power to impart much more
life to dialogue. In Scott's books there was only one type of woman; in
France the writer of historic novels could contrast the brilliant vices
and motley morals of Catholicism with the dark austerity of Calvinism
in the wildest period of French history. This ensured him against
monotony. Balzac, who was always projecting monumental works and whose
mind had an instinctive bias towards the systematically comprehensive,
finally conceived the plan of depicting each historic period since
that of Charlemagne in one or more novels, all of which should form a
connected chain--an idea which Freytag, in his work, _Die Ahnen_, has
since tried to carry out as regards Germany. The first novel which
Balzac published in his own name, _Les Chouans_, was intended to be a
link in this chain. It describes the war in La Vendée at the time of
the Revolution, and came out in 1829, the same year as _Cinq-Mars_ and
_Chronique du Règne de Charles IX_. Two books published much later,
_Sur Cathérine de Médicis_ and _Maître Cornélius_, are also fragments
of the projected great work. The latter is a novel in which Balzac
enters into direct competition with Sir Walter Scott; its hero is
Louis XI., whom he considered unfairly treated by Sir Walter. Although
these historical romances are good in their way and contain vivid and
careful studies of character, they prove that if Balzac had kept to his
intention of merely calling the past to life again, his place in the
literature of his century would have been an entirely subordinate one;
he would only have been known as one of Scott's disciples.
Victor Hugo also was fired by the famous Scotchman with the desire to
write a great historical novel. He determined to make it centre round
the cathedral church of Notre-Dame in Paris, the whitewashing of which
had horrified him; for he had an admiration and love for the grand old
historical building which remind us of Goethe's for Strasburg Cathedral
and Oehlenschläger's for the Cathedral of Roskilde. According to Hugo's
contract with the publisher, this famous novel was to be ready in April
1829; but he was not able to keep his engagement; he first obtained
five months' grace, and then a respite until the 1st of December 1830
upon condition of paying 1000 francs weekly after that date if the book
was not finished then. By the 27th of July his preparatory studies
were made, and that day he began to write the novel; the following day
ushered in the Revolution of July; Hugo's house was in danger from the
firing, and during the removal to another, all the notes and studies
for his book were lost. Under the circumstances the publisher granted
three months' grace; Hugo denied himself to every one, locked away
his black suit so that he might not be tempted to go out, sent for a
bottle of ink, put on his working-jacket, and worked without paying or
receiving a single visit until 14th January 1831, when the ink-bottle
was empty and the novel written. During all that time he had only
allowed himself one distraction, which was to go and see Charles X.'s
ministers sentenced. Not to break his resolution, he went dressed in
his civic guard's uniform.
In his earliest youth Hugo had been profoundly impressed by Scott.
In a review of _Quentin Durward_, which he wrote at the age of
twenty-one, he expresses the greatest admiration for Scott's historical
sense, moral earnestness, and dramatic style. But even in this early
appreciation we come upon a sentence in which he, as it were, indicates
the step he himself hopes to take in advance of Scott. He writes:
"After Walter Scott's picturesque but prosaic novel there remains to
be created another kind of novel, which in our opinion will be more
admirable and more perfect. It is the novel which is both drama and
epic, which is both picturesque and poetical, both realistic and
idealistic, both true and grand, which combines Walter Scott and
Homer." We must not let these last words, with which Hugo, true to
himself, spoils his effect by exaggeration, prevent our acknowledging
the young author's clear perception of what he himself was one day to
be capable of doing in the domain of fiction. He seems to have had the
premonition that his novels would be great prose poems, picturesque
chronicles rather than pictures of reality like Scott's.
_Notre-Dame de Paris_, which was intended to give a picture of the
life and manners of Paris in the fifteenth century, is the creation
of a great constructive imagination. This was a fit subject for Hugo,
with his leaning to the grand and colossal. He gives a soul to the
building, breathes into it the breath of his spirit until it becomes a
living being; and as the scientist reconstructs a whole animal from a
single vertebra, so Hugo's brain, with the cathedral as starting-point,
conjures up the whole of that long-vanished Paris. The faith and the
superstition, the manners and the arts, the laws and the human emotions
and passions of those old days, are drawn for us with a broad, strong
touch--with no great precision, but with a kind of convincing magic.
The characters in _Notre-Dame_ are the character sketches of a genius,
drawn in the epic style, in more than life-size. Scott's honest, plain,
human beings are superseded by the creatures of an artist intoxicated
with colour; his gentle spirit makes way for grandiloquent passion
pointing unresignedly to blind, iron necessity, that άνάγκη which is
written on the church wall, and which crushes us all--gipsy and priest,
beauty and beast, Phœbus and Quasimodo--century after century under its
iron heel.
Even more powerful than Scott's influence was _Byron's_. It was the
element of wild passion in his poems and its connection with the
wildness of his life--it was Childe Harold and still more Lara, the
being marked by the finger of fate, who, suffering from a mysterious
melancholy, carries his pride and his anguish with him from land to
land--it was this type in its Byronic forms, fantastically magnified
by the element of myth and legend enveloping the poet's life, which
enchanted the young men whom Hugo had awakened or gathered together.
Few were the critics who maintained as Beyle did in spite of his great
admiration for Byron, that "this author of deadly dull, conventional
tragedies" was certainly not the leader of the Romanticists.
Immediately after Byron's death the whole horde of French minor poets
seized upon the two themes, Greece and Lord Byron, which they continued
year after year to sing with so much ardour and so little comprehension
of the dead man's character, that Sainte-Beuve was obliged to protest
in the _Globe_ against the abuse of the words Byron, liberty, elegy,
&c. In 1824 both Hugo and Lamartine gave expression to their feelings
regarding Byron, the former in a newspaper article, the latter in a
poem. In treating of him as a poet, both authors at this period lay
most stress upon his spirit of doubt and his gloomy view of life;
neither of them seems to have been at all deeply impressed by the works
of his mature manhood; the bright and trenchant political and religious
satire of _Don Juan_ was, in 1824, missed or misunderstood by them as
by so many others. But whereas Hugo's chief endeavour is to show the
difference between Byron's poetry and that of the eighteenth century
("The difference between Byron's and Voltaire's laughter is this, that
Voltaire had not suffered"), to the sentimental and half orthodox
Lamartine the English poet is still the fallen angel. Lamartine's
_Fifth Canto of Childe Harold_, in which he endeavours to strike the
Byronic note, shows in what he believed himself to resemble the English
nobleman, namely, in his romantically heroic personality. Masking as
Byron he gives expression to the doubts and rebellious feelings of
which we only catch a rare glimpse in his _Meditations_, but to which
he was soon to give utterance in his own name. It was probably Byron
who lured both him and Hugo to the East; Hugo contented himself with
imaginary excursions, but Lamartine made princely preparations and
set off on a grand tour. And if Byron's last works made no profound
political impression on these two authors, his last actions and his
death did.
Byron's influence is, then, unmistakably traceable in the works of
most of the young poets of our period; but so marked and powerful was
the originality of this generation of authors, that his sentimental
despair, which was so infectious, and which led to so much imitation
and affectation in many literatures, glanced off them. There was only
one of them in whose ears this particular Byronic note rang like a
message from a kindred spirit, and he was, curiously enough, the most
elegant and aristocratic, the truest Parisian among them all--Alfred de
Musset.
Most of the literary notables in question were born in the
provinces--Victor Hugo and Nodier at Besançon, George Sand in Berry,
Gautier at Tarbes, Lamennais in Brittany, Sainte-Beuve at Boulogne--and
each of these brings with him his characteristic fund of provincialism
which does not allow itself to be interpenetrated by the Byronic
influence, although both George Sand and Gautier were, in curiously
different ways, affected by Byron. Mérimée, who was born in Paris,
cooled too quickly to feel the influence of Byron's poetic temperament;
it was Byron's spirit of negation which influenced him, and that at
second hand, through Beyle. But upon no one does Byron make the same
direct, deep impression as on that slender, pale son of Paris, who is
distinguished by all the weakness and all the exquisite charm which
are the heritage of the last representatives of a noble and ancient
race. In the earliest stages of his career, Byron, the true Englishman,
had been spiritually minded and melancholy; the senses play but a
small part in the poetry of his youth; not till he is the mature man
and has visited Italy and lived in Latin countries does his poetry,
like Goethe's in Venice, become sensual and audaciously outspoken.
De Musset, on the contrary, begins in his early youth with the bold
and fleshly realism which we find in some of Byron's later works, and
gradually becomes more and more spiritual. At his best he is a keener
observer than Byron, and his love-poetry is more delicate; it has a
Raphaelesque beauty which Byron's neither attains nor aims at. He is
the weaker, tenderer, more charming, French Byron, as Heine is the
smaller, more wanton, wittier, German Byron, and Paludan-Müller the
satirical, orthodox, royalist, Danish Byron. De Musset suffers like a
boy, complains like a woman; he is what Auguste Préault, the sculptor,
once called him: "Mademoiselle Byron."
Shelley, whose name did not find its way into France till much later,
was practically unknown to this generation. As for the so-called Lake
Poets, Sainte-Beuve, who acquired the English language in his youth,
and had more of the critical gift than any of his contemporaries, was
the only one of the Romanticists who appreciated that nature-loving,
realistic school at its true worth, assimilated some of its spirit, and
endeavoured by means of a few translations to bring it into favour.
Brizeux, the poet of Brittany, reminds us of the Lake Poets, though he
knew nothing about them.
The influence of Germany was less powerful than that of England,
and it is still easier in the case of this country to show the free
treatment to which the impressions received were subjected. Germany was
seen overshadowed by the old Teutonic oaks; its fountains and rivers
were haunted by elves and fairies, who trailed their shadowy white
garments across the dewy grass; among its mountains dwelt the gnomes,
and in the air above the mountain-peaks witches held their revelries.
Germany was a Walpurgis Night dreamland. Only one of Goethe's works
was really popular, namely, _Werther_, the high pressure passion of
which enchanted all readers. Werther seemed to them a René, because,
though he was much older than René, they had made acquaintance with
René first, and this circumstance deprived the German hero of his
freshness and approximated him to the Childe Harold type. Something of
the same kind happened with Faust. That imposing figure, which made
such an impression on the whole of Europe, was so completely foreign
to the French that they never truly comprehended it. French poetry
had never occupied itself with the struggles and sufferings of the
questioning spirit. And this German doctor, who is simple enough to
see the devil in a poodle dog, sentimental enough to cross Gretchen's
threshold with pious emotions in his breast, and yet unscrupulous
enough to desert the girl he has betrayed and kill her brother in a
dishonourable duel, was too un-French to be understood. We gather from
the apologies of the Romanticists the nature of the criticism to which
the men of the classic school subjected _Faust_. "How many," writes
Duvergier de Hauranne, "are rendered insensible to all the beauties
of this masterpiece by the fact that it treats of a compact with the
devil! They cannot understand any one allowing such an improbability to
pass unchallenged; and yet they themselves from their childhood have,
without raising the slightest objection, beheld Agamemnon murdering
his daughter in order to obtain a favourable wind." French readers
were accustomed to the superstitions of antiquity, but felt themselves
repelled by those of the Middle Ages. And there were, moreover, many
who, without reading them, denounced Goethe's works as barbaric
literature. As late as 1825 that narrow-minded assailant of the
Romanticists, Auger, the secretary of the French Academy, in making an
attack on "those lovers of the beauties of nature, who would willingly
exchange the Apollo Belvedere for a shapeless image of St. Christopher,
and with the greatest pleasure give _Phèdre_ and _Iphigénie_ for
_Faust_ and _Götz von Berlichingen_," drew smiles from the Academicians
by pronouncing these last titles in a burlesque manner, as if they
were barbaric names. The admiration of the Romanticists for _Faust_
was, however, as has already been observed, barren of result. Though
Gérard de Nerval translated the First Part to the entire satisfaction
of the aged Goethe, and though Delacroix's painting of Faust and
Mephistopheles riding through the air was also much admired by the old
poet and art connoisseur, the French literature of the period only
rarely (as in the case of Quinet) shows any trace of the influence of
the great drama.
One would have imagined that Schiller, with his association with
Rousseau and his flowery dramatic rhetoric, would have appealed more
forcibly to Frenchmen than Goethe; as a matter of fact he possessed
little attraction for the younger generation. Adaptations of all his
plays were indeed performed on the French stage, but this happened
just before the formation of the Romantic School proper, and the
semi-Romantic poets of the transition period, who cut and carved
these plays into conventional tragedies to suit the taste of the day,
destroyed them in place of teaching the public to appreciate them. Out
of the _Jungfrau von Orleans_ and _Don Carlos_, Soumet manufactured
a _Jeanne d'Arc_ and an _Élisabeth de France_; _Fiesco_ was adapted
and maltreated by Ancelot, _Wallenstein_ by Liadières; but neither
Classicists nor Romanticists derived any satisfaction from the results,
and the verdict of the austere Beyle (who read, or tried to read the
originals) is that Schiller paid too much homage to the old French
taste to be able to present his countrymen with the tragedy which
their manners and customs demanded. He has no appreciation whatever of
Schiller's real greatness; he evidently knew too little German to be
able to enjoy and understand _Wallenstein_; besides, like many of the
younger men, he allowed himself to be carried away to such an extent by
his desire to annoy the Classicists, that he actually extols Werner's
_Luther_ as the modern drama most nearly approaching Shakespeare, and
its author as a much greater poet than Schiller.
The only contemporary German author besides Goethe who made any deep
impression was E. Th. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann, in fact, became to
Frenchmen the German _par excellence_. Tieck was too vague, Novalis too
mystical, to find the public in France which they did, for instance, in
Denmark; but Hoffmann united to that wildly capricious fantasticality,
which to Frenchmen was a perfectly new poetical element, the sharp
decision of outline which appeals to them, and which reminded them of
their compatriot Callot. His artistic courage, which dares to carry
out capricious conceits to their extremest consequences, won their
approbation. He dealt in strong colours and startling effects, and
his work, with all its wildness, is as full of clear minute detail as
a "Temptation of St. Anthony" by Breughel or Teniers; in contrast to
Novalis, he appealed to Frenchmen by his Berlin rationality, which
is so closely allied to French rationality; there was method in his
madness. Thus it came about that he alone of all the German authors had
followers, one may almost say disciples, in France. The influence of
his tales is, as has already been observed, strongly felt in Charles
Nodier's work; at a later period it is even more perceptible in Gérard
de Nerval's, and it is unmistakable in Gautier's short stories. Highly
original as this last-mentioned author is, and despite the fact that he
hardly knew a word of German, he nevertheless at various periods of his
life was under German influence. His youthful _Romans et Contes_ remind
us of Hoffmann, and much in his _Émaux et Camées_ recalls Heinrich
Heine. He had an intense admiration for Goethe's _West-Oestlicher
Diwan_. What attracted him in Goethe was the artistic infallibility
manifested by that great poet during the latter years of his life.
[1] Stendhal: _Racine et Shakespeare_, p. 215.
[2] _Racine et Shakespeare_, pp. 115, 117, 218 _note_.
[3] _Cf_. Th. Ziesing: _Le Globe de 1824 à 1830_.
[4] See Beyle: _Racine et Shakespeare_, 294; Balzac's own words in the
preface to _La Comédie Humaine_; and the utterances of his alter ego,
Daniel d'Arthez, in _Les Illusions perdues_.
VI
RETROSPECT--INDIGENOUS SOURCES
But the renascence of literature in France was not due chiefly to
foreign influences. It was upon the soil of their native country that
the new men built.
The work accomplished by a great literary school such as the Romantic
School in France may be compared to the building of a town, only
that the town of literature is invariably built upon land which is
protected merely by slight and leaky embankments from the waters of
forgetfulness. Water at the foundations is soon discovered; it rises
slowly but steadily; at last the lower buildings disappear, and only
the loftiest monuments remain towering, eternally visible, above the
level of the Lethean stream.