remarkably to the impression of the reality of the thing described,
should have been again and again taken as a sign of the author's want
of feeling. As a matter of fact it is no more so than his choice of
horrible subjects is a proof of his cruelty. On the contrary, the irony
of the style is often only the transparent veil covering compassion
and indignation. Study this irony in the little tale _Tamango_, where
to the superficial reader the mere choice of subject would be apt to
suggest the author's love of the revolting--for what is more horrible
than the slave trade and the ill-usage of slaves, or than shipwreck,
starvation, and murder? And all this, moreover, told with an ironic
smile!
But we feel what the irony signifies when we come upon such a passage
as the following:
"The captain, to ratify the bargain, shook hands with the more than
half-intoxicated negro chief; and the slaves were immediately delivered
to the French sailors, who quickly exchanged the long wooden forks
with which the negroes had fettered them, for collars and handcuffs of
iron--_a proof of the superiority of European civilization_."
And its real quality is still more distinctly perceptible in the lines
which tell of the captain's attempt to make the pretty negress obedient
by flogging her:
"With these words the captain went below, sent for Aycha, and tried to
console her; but neither caresses nor blows (_for a man loses patience
at last_) made the beautiful negress amenable."
The cold composure with which the fact is recognised that such is human
nature, and that such things happen, actually heightens the impression
of indignation produced by the deed of violence. We do not lay the
book aside unmoved. We perceive that what at first seemed coldness,
is but the petrified eruption of the inward fire of the artist's
soul. We comprehend that an emotion underlies the sober, severe style
of these tales, and that it is this emotion which gives them their
impressiveness.
Of all Mérimée's stories, _Arsène Guillot_ is the one in which the
ironical style of the narrative and a strength of feeling which has
freed itself from the bonds of prejudice, are most perfectly fused
together. The conventional virtue of the pious fashionable lady is
contrasted with the absolute ignorance of the doctrines of Christianity
and morality displayed by the poor girl whose own mother has sold
her. In a moment of despair Arsène jumps out of the window and breaks
her leg and several of her ribs. The action of the story passes in
her sick-room. The usual irony in the relation of the events prevents
compassion and emotion from overstepping the bounds of artistic
moderation. Towards the close, however, in the description of Arsène's
death, the heart is permitted to speak unrestrainedly, and its simple
language communicates a charm to the dying grisette hardly inferior to
that which transfigures De Musset's dying Bernerette. At the very end
artistic irony again asserts itself. For the line: "Pauvre Arsène, elle
prie _pour nous!_" traced in pencil in a woman's delicate handwriting
on Arsène's gravestone, informs us in all its brevity that the austere
lady has yielded to the same temptation as the ignorant child, that
after Arsène died like a heroine, her patroness inherited her lover.
Irony is in this case almost too coarse a word. Expressions are lacking
to describe these delicate shades. That faintly ironical pencilled line
contains in its six words a Mériméan, that is to say, a laconic, sermon
on tolerance.
D'Haussonville has preserved for us some remarks made by Mérimée to
Émile Augier on the subject of a little story, _La Chambre bleue_,
which the former wrote specially for the Empress, in 1869. They
show how this peculiar style of narration, which was originally an
unconscious expression of the author's character, in time became a
conscious mannerism. Mérimée said: "The story has one great fault,
which is due to the fact that in the course of writing it I altered
the originally planned ending. As it was my first intention to make
the tale end tragically, I _naturally_ began it in a gay tone; then I
changed my mind and brought about a cheerful dénouement. I ought to
have re-written the first part in a tragic tone, but it was too much
trouble; I left it as it was." The method which was originally the
stylistic expression of a deeply emotional and very proud soul, became
towards the end of the author's life a calculated, excessive use of
contrast as a means of producing artistic effect.
XXVI
MÉRIMÉE AND GAUTIER
In a letter, dated 22nd November 1821, Mérimée the painter writes: "I
have a big son of eighteen, of whom I should like to make a lawyer.
He has such a gift for drawing that, though he has never copied
anything, he sketches like a young student." Like many of the other
notable French Romanticists, Prosper Mérimée never entirely gave up
pictorial art. He painted in water-colours; but it was especially as
the draughtsman that he was both indefatigable and gifted. His talent
for drawing seems to have been near akin to his gift of literary style.
Prosper Mérimée and Théophile Gautier are the two authors of the
generation of 1830 who supplement each other in the matter of style.
Mérimée's strength lies in purity of line, Gautier's in glowing colour.
Gautier seems to write with a brush rather than with a pen; he loves
draperies and effects of light. His exuberant style is Venetian; it
is velvet and brocade, which he bestrews with tinsel and spangles.
Mérimée's simple, but extremely elegant presentment is in low-toned
monochrome; it resembles an etching. His style, however, possesses a
quality which no brilliancy of language can surpass--it is transparent;
through it we see his vigorous, wild figures and characters as if
they were alive. His defiant sharpness of outline reminds us of a
painting or etching by Jacques Callot, an artist with whom he has
much in common. One of Callot's youths, stepping out briskly with
his long leather-sheathed sword dangling by his side, his plumed hat
set jauntily on the side of his head, his buff coat fitting closely
to his figure, his wide top-boots showing off his strong leg, his
shining spurs clanking as he hastens to look on, with proud, defiant
mien, at some deed of violence--such a figure would make an admirable
frontispiece for a work like the _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._
The final evidence of Mérimée's discreet reserve is to be found in the
classically elegant severity of his style. It is smooth and bright
as polished steel--not an ornament, not a flower, not a fanciful
decoration of any kind; every figure is of beaten metal, accurately
proportioned, and as correctly attired as it is life-like. No
contemporary French author displayed such aristocratic conservatism in
the matter of new words and expressions as Mérimée, not even Charles
Nodier. Mérimée used the language which he found ready to his hand,
and set his mark upon every sentence he wrote, without employing a
single out-of-the-way word, or a single ordinary word in an unusual
manner. But he shunned conventional expressions, phrases which throw
a veil over the thought, beneath which it looks larger and more
important. What especially distinguishes him is his sure touch, his
gift of producing with some simple, almost worn-out, word exactly the
impression which he desires. Hugo's style is graphic and pathetic,
Gautier's (and that of his followers) is sensuous and loaded with
imagery--both tried to produce an effect by word-architecture. The
masters were justified in the attempt; but the attempts of their
imitators and pupils too often recall those magnificent aqueducts which
the Romans built with a prodigious expenditure of money and labour to
connect one height with another, because they did not know that the
force of the water itself was sufficient to raise it from the valley.
We admire these mighty erections, but our admiration would have been
greater if instead of them we had found simple pipes carried along the
ground. The artificial, high-flown expression is like the aqueduct,
the simple word that goes straight to the point, like the humble pipe.
Mérimée's style, like the pipe, keeps close to the ground, has no
useless ornament and no unnecessary loftiness; there is no strength
wasted. It is not on this account a style destitute of charm, but it
has no other except that of exactly adequate strength. There is not a
word too much, and every sentence is in the service of the whole. The
old motto, _Ne quid nimis_, might have been the author's device.
Mérimée's aim in evolving such a style evidently was to make his
small works of art, by the renunciation of everything superfluous, as
invulnerable as possible to the tooth of time. His endeavour reminds
us of what is told of Donatello. The characteristic position of that
artist's incomparable St. George--arms and hands close to the body--is
said to have been chosen after a careful investigation of the condition
of the famous statues of antiquity with the view of ascertaining which
parts of them had suffered most, and why. In much the same way, Mérimée
has tried to insure his works against the change in taste which time
brings about, by keeping them free from every ornamental projection,
everything in the nature of a digression.
Yet it was not his style which prevailed and became that of the
next generation of writers. It was not Mérimée but Gautier, who, as
a stylist, was the founder of a school. And I am not of the number
of those who regret that a more luxuriant and sensuous style was
victorious, and that later French authors have aimed, not merely at
making their periods distinct and faultlessly correct, but also at
imparting to them, when possible, melody, colour, fragrance. The
treatment of language introduced by Gautier, continued by Flaubert and
the Goncourt brothers, and transmitted by them to Zola and Daudet, has
undoubtedly its weak side; and this the most prominent recent master of
the descriptive style has not been slow to recognise and acknowledge.
Zola himself writes:
"The worst of it is, that I have arrived at the conviction that
the jargon of our period, that part of our style which is merely
fashionable and must become antiquated, will be known as one of the
most atrocious jargons of the French language. It is possible to
predict this with almost mathematical certainty. What is most liable
to become antiquated is imagery. As long as it is new, the metaphor
or simile charms. When it has been employed by one or two generations
it becomes a commonplace, a disgrace to the author who employs it.
Look at Voltaire, with his dry style, his vigorous period, destitute
of adjectives, which relates and does not paint; he remains eternally
young. Look at Rousseau, who is our father--look at his imagery,
his passionate rhetoric; he has written pages which are perfectly
intolerable.... A cheerful fate awaits us who have outbidden Rousseau,
us, who on the top of literature pile all the other arts--paint and
sing our periods, chisel them as if they were blocks of marble,
and require of words to reproduce the perfume of things. All this
titillates our nerves: we think it exquisite, perfect. But what will
our great-grandchildren say to it? Their ideas will undoubtedly be
different, and I am convinced that certain of our works will fill them
with astonishment; almost everything in them will be antiquated."
The writer of this melancholy, self-condemnatory criticism obviously
goes too far. It is highly probable that our descendants will not
think much of our books; but it is not the style in which they are
written that will be most to blame for that. Zola's utterance is,
however, remarkable as the evidence of a literary colourist in favour
of the sober, unimaginative style of which Mérimée is undoubtedly one
of the greatest masters in our own century. The best of his works are
masterpieces of literature. Seldom, indeed, have short prose pieces
been written in such a style. It is the thing itself that stands
before us, in clear sunlight, un-obscured by even the faintest mist of
sentimentality. It would be unreasonable to regard it as a fault in
the author of picturesque prose that his imagery loses by repetition,
that he does not stand the ordeal of repeated re-reading; one might
just as well blame a composer because his melodies become intolerable
by being played on all the street organs. One thing, however, is
undeniable--that a severe, unadorned style like Mérimée's survives
the works written in the florid style, as surely as the bronze statue
survives the blossoming tree.
Curiously enough, Mérimée's contemporaries at first set him down as
a naturalist. In some lines in which he naïvely classes him with
Calderon, the young Alfred de Musset gives us an excellent idea of
the original impression made by his writings. It appeared to his
contemporaries that he simply produced casts:
"L'un comme Calderon et comme Mérimée,
Incruste un plomb brûlant sur la réalité,
Découpe à son flambeau la silhouette humaine,
En emporte le moule, et jette sur la scène
Le plâtre de la vie avec sa nudité.
Pas un coup de ciseau sur la sombre effigie,
Rien qu'un masque d'airain, tel que Dieu l'a fondu."
"Not a stroke of the chisel" is comical, as applied to the work of the
most energetic stylist of the period; but so much is clear--Alfred de
Musset regarded Mérimée as above everything an imitator of nature.
This conception was due to a fact which has already been alluded to,
namely, that in Romanticism in its earliest stage there was an element
of naturalism. The young Romanticists did not at once perceive the gulf
between the two. The poetry of the plumed hat and the Toledo blade
was undoubtedly more to their taste than the real life which they
saw around them; but reality, too, might be represented poetically
when there was colour and character in it, and passion and fire and
exotic fragrance; and all this it had in Mérimée's books. The germs
of naturalism are to be found in Mérimée as they are in the other
Romanticists; but in them all the love of art was stronger than
the inclination to imitate nature. Mérimée, nevertheless, with his
partiality for brutal subjects and his artificial coldness, distinctly
prognosticates the tendency of the succeeding literary generation. In
Taine's _Vie et Opinions de M. Graindorge_ (1867) we find a remark
on the social life of the day, which applies equally to literature:
"Depuis dix ans une nuance de brutalité complète l'élégance." We are
conscious of it in almost all the most famous writers of the Second
Empire--in the younger Dumas, in Flaubert, whom one might call the
Mérimée of the next generation, and in Taine himself, who is delighted,
like Mérimée, when he has "a fine murder" to describe, and who makes
his Graindorge give the reader exact instructions in the most practical
method of cutting the throat with a razor.[1]
To-day Mérimée passes for a Classicist. His perspicuous, transparent
style, his determined avoidance of lyrical digressions, of metaphor
and rhetoric, seem to insure him a place outside the Romantic School.
But we have seen how, in a certain sense, all the French Romanticists
are at the same time Classicists; and the fact that this is peculiarly
observable in Mérimée's case does not give him a position altogether
apart from theirs.
When we remember, moreover, that he, as well as Hugo and De Vigny, was
influenced by Scott; that there is a distinct trace of Byronism, of the
"Satanic," in some of his work; that, sober sceptic as he was, he wrote
works (such as _La Vision de Charles XI._) in Hoffmann's style; that he
was Beyle's pupil; and that he almost always, in true Romantic fashion,
chose foreign, unmodern subjects, we cannot but recognise in the author
possessing so many features in common with the French Romanticists, a
true child of the age.
Even if we deny him absolute artistic originality, his figure stands
out sufficiently from among the gifted literary group of 1830. The
others gallop into the lists clad in gaudily-decorated coats of mail,
with gilded helmets and waving pennons. He is the Black Knight in the
great Romantic tourney.
[1] "Quand Cromwell passe en Irlande, il marque le nombre et la qualité
des gens massacrés, et puis c'est tout. Et cependant quels beaux
massacres! Quelle occasion pour pénétrer le lecteur de la froide fureur
qui poussait les épées des fanatiques!"--Taine: _Essay on Guizot_.
XXVII
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
On a certain day in the beginning of January 1830, three young men
might have been seen making their way along a newly paved road in
the neighbourhood of the Champs Élysées in Paris, towards a solitary
house, the first of a future street. One of them, a fair-haired youth
of nineteen, with a slight stoop and a quick, bird-like walk, and with
manuscripts sticking out of all his pockets, was the amiable, refined
fantast, Gérard de Nerval, a poet whose chief occupation it was to run
himself off his legs in the service of his friends. By his side walked,
with stately bearing and Castilian gravity of countenance, the pale,
black-bearded Petrus Borel, who as the eldest (already twenty-two)
was the central figure of a group of young art enthusiasts. A little
behind followed, with lagging steps and much inward perturbation,
an olive-complexioned, regular-featured, handsome young fellow of
eighteen, whom his two friends had promised to introduce to the master
of the lonely house, Victor Hugo, in whose home they themselves were
welcome guests, a piece of good fortune envied them by many.
Twice did young Gautier mount the steps behind De Nerval and Borel as
if his shoes were weighted with lead. He was hardly able to breathe;
the cold sweat stood on his brow, and he could hear the beating of
his heart. Each time they reached the door and one of the others was
about to ring the bell, he turned and rushed down again, pursued by
his shouting, laughing companions. The third attempt was successful,
as in the fairy tales. The young man, feeling as if his legs would
hardly bear him, had just sat down for an instant on the top step to
recover himself, when the door opened, and in a stream of light like
that which forms the halo round Phœbus Apollo, Victor Hugo himself in
all his honour and glory stood revealed to their gaze against the dark
background of the stair, attired in a very ordinary black coat and grey
trousers, and as carefully shaved as any common philistine. He smiled
at the sight of the agitated youth, but did not seem much surprised;
for he was accustomed to seeing young poets and painters blush, and
turn pale, and stammer on his threshold. He was evidently about to
walk out into the street like an ordinary mortal, which was a greater
surprise to Gautier than it would have been to see him drive through
the town on a triumphal car drawn by five white horses, with a goddess
of victory holding a golden crown over his head. But he turned back to
his study with the young men, and Théophile Gautier listened in silence
to the conversation which followed; he was too embarrassed to take part
in it, but it marked an epoch in his existence; from that hour till the
day of his death he was Hugo's sworn adherent, ardent admirer, grateful
pupil, and unwearied panegyrist. Never, not even momentarily, not even
during separation lasting for years and the intellectual separation
due to the difference in their political views, did he forget to be
absolutely loyal to the man whom at this first meeting he in his heart
called lord and master.
The young men's call was made in connection with the first performance
of _Hernani_ at the Théâtre Français. They came to fetch some packets
of the little square red tickets, with "Hierro" printed on them.
Gautier, who had read _Les Orientales_, was enthusiastic on the subject
of the play, without having read it.
In the part of Paris where he lodged he had long been noted for his
eccentricities. In every possible way he bade scornful defiance to the
ordinary bourgeois, that personage detested above all others by the
young Romanticists. He usually wore a black velvet jacket and yellow
shoes, and went about bareheaded, with a parasol or an umbrella, his
long, dark brown hair, which suited his olive complexion admirably,
hanging down almost to his waist. Cigar in mouth, erect and youthfully
dignified, he strolled along, utterly regardless of the contemptuous
glances of the scandalised citizens or the jeers of the street boys.
[Illustration: THÉOPHILE GAUTIER]
But on the occasion of the first performance of _Hernani_, he felt
it incumbent on him to prepare something more striking. He ordered
"the red waistcoat," that waistcoat which was to become a historic
garment. Its red was not the red which the revolutionists chose as
their symbol, and which politicians think of when the colour is named;
no, it was the flaming red which emblematised the hatred of the young
artists of the period for grey. The colour tones of a particular piece
of scarlet satin had fascinated the young painter and poet. He looked
at it in the way we can imagine Veronese looking at a piece of silken
stuff. When he had obtained possession of the treasure, he sent for
his tailor and explained to him that of this material a waistcoat was
to be made--yes, a waistcoat. It was to be shaped like a cuirass,
to be full across the chest, and fasten at the back. "If," writes
Gautier, "you were to pick out from a set of school drawing copies,
representing the different expressions of the human countenance, one
of those labelled _Amazement_, you would have an idea of the look
upon the horror-stricken tailor's face." "But such a waistcoat is not
fashionable, sir." "It will be--as soon as I have worn it." "But it is
a style I know nothing about; it is more like a part of a theatrical
costume than of a gentleman's ordinary dress; I am afraid of spoiling
the stuff." "I shall give you a linen pattern, designed, cut out, and
tacked together by myself." The waistcoat was made; and on that famous
and stormy evening at the theatre, Gautier displayed perfect dignity
and indifference when the philistines pointed him out to each other,
and made him the target of all their opera-glasses. His name became
inextricably connected with the legend of the red waistcoat, although
he only wore it that one evening. For long little was known about him
beyond the fact that he had worn it (I, myself, when in Paris in 1867,
met people who believed that he wore it still); and it shines to this
day in the history of French literature, a naïve symbol of the love of
brightness and colour in life which distinguished that enthusiastic
group of youths.
But the essentially luminous and flamboyant was art, pure art;
and seldom has the boundless love of art as art taken such entire
possession of a heart as it did of Gautier's. He was animated by it all
his life, but in his youth he felt it with all the pleasures it brings,
all the admiration it arouses, all the courage it imparts, and all the
hatred it inspires.