psychological analysis. In the following passage he defends his right
to be so. It is taken from a letter written on the 9th of May 1863 to
a critic who had blamed him for certain disparaging remarks in one
of his articles: "Art--and especially a purely intellectual art like
that of criticism--is an instrument which is difficult to handle,
and its worth is dependent upon the worth of the artist. Granted
this, is it not absolutely necessary to have done with that foolish
conventionality, that cant, which compels us to judge an author not
only by his intentions, but also by his pretensions? Am I, for example,
to be obliged to see in Fontanes only the great master, polished,
noble, elegant, religious, and not the hasty, brusque, sensual man
that he really was?... Or to come to our own day.... I have had the
opportunity for thirty years and more of observing Villemain, a man of
distinguished intellect and talent, who is actually brimming over with
generous, liberal, philanthropic, Christian, civilising sentiment, but
who is, nevertheless, the most sordid, malicious ape in existence. What
is to be done in such a case? Are we to go on to all eternity praising
his noble, elevated sentiments, as those by whom he is surrounded
do? Are we to dupe ourselves and dupe others? Are men of letters,
historians, and moralists merely actors, whom we have no right to study
except in the rôles which they have chosen and defined for themselves?
Are we only permitted to see them on the stage? Or is it allowable,
when our knowledge is sufficient, boldly and yet gently to insert the
scalpel and show the weak points of the armour, the faulty joints
between the talent and the soul? allowable to praise the talent whilst
indicating the defects in the soul which actually affect the talent and
any permanent influence it may exercise. Will literature lose by such a
proceeding? It is possible that it may; but the science of psychology
will gain."
This, then, is the first advance--firm ground beneath our feet; no
deceptive idealisation! The next is, that criticism, which had hitherto
been a disintegrating, separating process, becomes in Saint-Beuve's
hands, and with the limitations entailed by his character, an
organising, constructive process. His criticism produces an organism,
a life, as poetry does. It does not break up the given material into
road-metal and gravel, but erects a building with it. It does not
break up the human soul into its component parts, so that we only gain
an understanding of it as a piece of dead mechanism, without having
any idea what it is like when it is in movement. No, he shows us the
machine at work; we see the fire that drives it and hear the noise it
makes, whilst we are learning the secrets of its construction.
Thanks to these reforms of Sainte-Beuve's, the history of literature,
which used to be a kind of secondary, inferior branch of the science of
history, has become the guide of history proper, its most interesting
and most living part; for the literature of nations is the most
attractive and most instructive material with which history has to deal.
We began by asserting that Sainte-Beuve's critical activity did not
lead him to forsake poetry. We are now in a position to prove that
the art of the critic, as practised by him in the last years of his
life, in the highest stage of his development, had entered into the
closest relationship with modern poetry. For poetry became synthetic
simultaneously with criticism; and the cause of the movement was the
same in both cases, namely, the gradual conquest by science of the
whole domain of modern intellectual life. At the beginning of the
century imagination was considered the essential quality in poetry;
it was his capacity of invention which made the poet a poet; he was
not tied down to nature and reality, but was as much at home in
the supernatural as in the actual world. In the generation of 1830
such authors as Nodier and Alexandre Dumas express this view of the
matter, each in his own way. But as Romanticism by degrees developed
into realism, creative literature by degrees gave up its fantastic
excursions into space. It exerted itself even more to understand than
to invent; and this produced a close connection with criticism. Fiction
became psychological. The point of departure of the novelist and of the
critic in their respective descriptions is now the same, namely, the
spiritual atmosphere of a period. In it the real or invented characters
appear to us; the novelist's aim is to represent and interpret the
actions of a human being, the critic's, to represent and interpret a
work, in such a manner that the reader may see both the actions and the
work to be results produced with real or apparent inevitability, when
certain inward qualities or tendencies are acted upon by suggestions
from without. The only fundamental difference is that the creative
author makes the speech and the actions of his characters, who,
fictitious though they are, are generally drawn from life, the probable
consequences of given circumstances; whereas the critic's imagination,
fettered by facts, necessarily restricts itself to the representation
of the psychical condition which led to or influenced the utterances
and actions he describes. The novelist deduces a man's probable actions
from what he has observed of his character. The critic deduces a man's
character from his works.
Criticism, understood as the capacity of overcoming one's natural
narrow-mindedness by the wideness and many-sidedness of one's
sympathies, has been a distinguishing faculty of all the greatest
authors of this century. It was from this point of view that Émile
Montégut regarded it when he called it the youngest genius, the
Cinderella among the intelligences. "Criticism," he wrote, "is the
tenth Muse. It was she who was Goethe's mystic bride; it was she who
made twenty poets of him. What but criticism is the basis of German
literature? What are the English poets of our own day? Inspired
critics. What was Italy's noble Leopardi? A fiery critic. Amongst all
the modern poets only two, Byron and Lamartine, have not been critics;
and for this reason these two have lacked many-sidedness and variety
and have become as monotonous as they are." When criticism is taken in
a wider sense, in the full meaning of the word, this last limitation
falls away. For in its signification of the power of passing judgment
on the existing state of things, it was an inspiring force in all the
great Romantic lyric writers of the period, Byron as well as Hugo,
Lamartine as well as George Sand. From the moment when their poetry
ceases to exclude all important contemporary life and thought, from
the moment when the Romantic lyric poets transform themselves into
the organs of great ideas, criticism becomes an inspiring principle
in their works also. It inspired Hugo's _Les Châtiments_; it inspired
Byron's _Don Juan_. It is a finger-post on the path of the human mind.
It plants hedges and lights torches along that path. It cuts and clears
new tracks. For it is criticism which removes mountains--the mountains
of belief in authority, of prejudice, of idealess power and dead
tradition.
[1] The two following sentences from _Port-Royal_ exemplify my meaning.
In the first we have him calmly and frankly giving up the attempt
to produce resemblance between his character portraits of the same
person; in the second we see him determined to include every side of
the character: "C'est le M. Saint-Cyran tout-à-fait définitif et mûr
que j'envisage désormais; c'est de lui qu'est vrai ce qui va suivre;
si quelque chose dans ce qui précède ne cadre plus, qu'on le rejette,
comme en avançant il l'a rejeté lui-même."--"Certes on peut tailler
dans M. de Saint-Cyran un calviniste, mais c'est à condition d'en
retrancher mainte parte vitale."
XXXII
THE DRAMA: VITET, DUMAS, DE VIGNY, HUGO
The success of the Romantic School in lyric poetry, fiction, and
criticism was indisputable; but there was one branch of literature in
which it failed to realise the bold expectations with which it started
on its career; and this was the branch which, according to the old
principles of æsthetics, was (and curiously enough, as a rule, still
is) regarded as the highest, namely, the drama. As the art stood in
such high estimation, the comparative slightness of their success in it
was painfully felt by the Romanticists. Their plays never found real
favour with the public, never became part of the permanent repertory of
any theatre. Victor Hugo's were only popular as librettos for Italian
operas; Mérimée's were never played at all; George Sand's and Balzac's
had generally only a _succès d'estime_; and it was long before a few
of Alfred de Musset's short pieces found their way on to the stage;
whereas Scribe and his collaborators drew full houses, not only in
France but abroad.
And yet the school did much admirable work in the domain of drama.
The first essay was made by Vitet, who between 1826 and 1829 wrote
a succession of _Scènes dramatiques_, subsequently published in a
collected form under the title of _La Ligue_. The original idea had
suggested itself to him of dramatising episodes in French history
without adding anything fictitious whatever; his imagination was
allowed to do nothing but vitalise history, and it succeeded most
admirably in doing so. The atmosphere of Vitet's works is the
atmosphere of long-past days, and the talk of his sixteenth-century
characters conveys such an impression of authenticity that we feel when
we are reading his dramas as if we were living history, hour by hour.
Ludovic Vitet was born in Paris in 1802, received his education at the
Ecole Normale, took part as a Liberal in the political movements of
the day, was a member of the society _Aide toi--le ciel t'aidera_, and
wrote (as already mentioned) in the _Globe_ as an ardent champion of
Romanticism. His poetico-historical works were all produced in this
youthful period, with the exception of a series of dramatic scenes,
distinctly inferior to the rest, which he published in 1849 under the
title of _Les Étais d'Orléans_.
His career was uneventful. As a young man he was an inseparable friend
of Count Duchâtel. When the Revolution of July placed his friends in
power and Duchâtel became a member of the Guizot ministry, Vitet was
made Inspector of Historical Monuments, a post which Guizot devised
specially for him. Henceforth he was a politician; in 1834 he became a
member of the Chamber of Deputies, in 1836 a member of the Council of
State, in 1846 a Member of the Academy.
He was a consistent Monarchist and Conservative. From 1851 to 1871 he
held aloof from public affairs altogether. After the war he again took
a prominent position, under Thiers. He died in 1873.
Vitet furnishes a good example of the power of the first impetus of a
strong artistic movement to inspire even minds which are not productive
and artistic by nature. After 1830 he was eminent only as a learned
historian of art. He wrote a biography of Count Duchâtel. His literary
and historical essays are as dry and tedious as Mérimée's.
To his youthful works we always return with pleasure--to _Les
Barricades, Les États de Blois_, and _La Mort de Henri III_. The
principal characters in them, Henri II, Henri III., and the Dukes of
Guise of several successive generations, are portrayed in such masterly
style as to bear comparison with the heroes of Shakespeare's great
historical plays (Henry IV. and Richard III. certainly excepted). The
manners and ideas of the age are so clearly placed before us that
we feel as if they cannot have been better known or understood by
contemporaries. _Les États de Blois_ is unmistakably the finest of
these works. Let any one who wishes to make acquaintance with Vitet
at his best, read the scenes which describe the murder of the Duke of
Guise. Seldom has an author ventured to set aside poetic convention to
such an extent in a historical play. The event is much more vividly
and realistically brought before us than even in Delaroche's fine
painting, which shows us Henri III. cautiously opening the door and
peeping at the body of his great enemy lying on the floor. Vitet first
shows us the King in his room at four o'clock in the morning, dipping
Spanish poniards into holy water and tremblingly handing them to his
minions without even daring to utter his enemy's name. Then comes the
scene in the Duke's room, in which his mother and his mistress in vain
beseech him not to imperil his life, but to keep away from the Council
to be held next morning. We next see him in the Council-chamber; an
uncomfortable feeling comes over him; his nose begins to bleed; he has
forgotten his handkerchief, and sends a messenger to fetch it. The
Scottish guards stupidly bar this messenger's way; but they quickly
perceive their mistake, and the Duke gets the handkerchief. But he is
uneasy, this great soldier who has faced drawn blades so often without
turning pale, and he begins to feel faint. It is because he is still
fasting; the feeling will pass off if he eats something; he opens the
little _bonbonnière_ which hangs at his belt; it is empty. Some one
is despatched to fetch him sweetmeats or fruit. At this moment Révol
comes out of the King's apartment and says: "The King wishes to speak
with you, Monseigneur!" The other lords of the Council stop their
conversation and exchange glances. The Duke rises; he takes a little
time to fasten his mantle, which slips first off one shoulder, then
off the other; he is unconsciously trying to delay his departure--too
proud not to be ready to go, even if it be to death, and yet human
enough to hesitate a moment on the fatal threshold. He must have
another handkerchief, as the first is stained with blood; again one
of the conspirators goes, leaving the others in anxious suspense. It
is a masterly representation, this of Vitet's, of the restlessness,
impatience, and foolish feeling of shame which at times overcome us and
impel us to rush blindly into the most hazardous situations, merely
to escape from painfully ridiculous ones. The messenger sent for the
handkerchief again delays. Then the proud Guise loses patience. With
the words, "I cannot keep the King waiting longer," he goes out at
the door; as it closes behind him, a dozen officers thrust their long
poniards into his body.
We observe that Vitet enters into details which would be unsuitable
for the stage. His _Scènes dramatiques_ are only intended to be read.
Therefore they are not genuine dramas. And the explanation of this is,
that Vitet, with all his historical insight, lacked both poetic passion
and the artistic gift of organisation. Because he is never capable of
developing pathos, of rising to a climax, from the height of which all
the rest would be felt to be preparation and result, he never attains
to really artistic construction. He was evidently haunted by a species
of artistic anxiety, a fear of making the slightest alteration in the
historical facts, a fear of obtruding his own personality. He had not
a strong enough individuality to dare to issue an artistic coinage
stamped with his own image. His productivity ceased as early as it did,
because the imagination which inspired his works, though vigorous,
was not free, not independent, either in its observation or in its
reproduction; it was hampered and weighted by scholarship, by the dust
of the record office. This beautiful and fiery Pegasus stood tethered
in a library.
It would be a shame to employ the same metaphor in writing of the
Romantic author who, following in Vitet's steps, set himself to
dramatise historical episodes, and who in February 1829, a year before
Victor Hugo, achieved popularity with a historical drama, _Henri III.
et sa Cour_. This writer was Alexandre Dumas (born in 1803), a man of
brilliant, spontaneous talent and Titanic constitution, who displayed
the same aptitude for Herculean tasks in literature as his father had
done in war. For forty years he continued without a pause to produce
tragedies, comedies, novels, short stories, books of travel, and
memoirs. It would be foolish to write contemptuously of such prodigious
inventiveness, such incredible productivity. We can trace in these
works the French-African blood; there is something in them of the
easy-going Creole disposition, something of the ardent sensuality of
the negro race. Assisted by numerous collaborators, all much inferior
to himself, Dumas peopled the stages, crowded the booksellers' shelves,
filled the _feuilleton_ columns of the newspapers with the creations of
his brain; the printing-presses creaked and groaned in their efforts
to keep pace with his incessant production. What one cannot but regret
is the easy-going worldliness which prevented any real process of
development taking place. Dumas was an artist only in his first period.
Beginning in a romantic age, he began romantically; continuing in a
commercial age, he continued commercially.
In _Henri III et sa Cour_ he did what Vitet had not succeeded in doing
with the same historical material, namely, produced a spirited and
playable drama; but it was a drama in which the defiance of classic
theatrical convention was of the most superficial kind. He ventured
to reproduce in externals the court customs of the period. On the
boards where for a couple of centuries the hero and his confidant
had conversed either with both arms hanging by their sides or with
their left hands on their sword-hilts, a whole troop of King Henry's
courtiers appeared with cups and balls (the game of cup-and-ball was an
invention of that day); and in the pauses these same gentlemen amused
themselves by blowing small darts out of blow-pipes. Nevertheless they
felt and spoke like the young men of 1828.
The psychology of the other historical plays of Dumas' youth (_Napoléon
Bonaparte, Charles VII chez ses grands Vassaux_, &c.) is equally
superficial. It was not until he lit upon an age the spirit of which
he understood and could master, that he succeeded in giving such
excellent representations of past days as we have in the interesting
and effective dramas, _Un Mariage sous Louis XV_ and _Gabrielle de
Belle-Isle_, both of which (and especially the latter, with its
slightly idealised picture of the manners and customs of the Regency)
possess real literary value. But before this, in 1831, it had fallen
to Dumas' lot to present the young Romantic generation with one of the
typical figures which it recognised as representative of itself. He
wrote _Antony_.
With all its faults, there is something in this play which makes it
better than even the best of Dumas' other works. There is warmer blood,
more human nature in it than in the others. And the reason why, with
all its naïveté, it makes a really powerful impression on us is, that
in it Dumas has flung his own ego, himself, with his wild passion, his
youthful enthusiasm, and chivalrous instincts, on to the stage. Antony
is an 1830 hero, of the same type as all of Hugo's--broad-shouldered,
lion-maned, enthusiastic and despairing, capable of living without food
or sleep, ready at any moment to blow out his own or any one else's
brains. But the sensation produced by _Antony_ was due to the fact that
Dumas had done what Hugo never would or could do, namely, laid the
action of his play in 1830, and put his hero on the stage dressed in
the fashion of the day, in the very same black coat as the male members
of the audience wore. Hitherto Romanticism had voluntarily restricted
itself on the stage to the Middle Ages. Now it revealed itself in
undisguised modernity.
We come upon a vindication of this step in the play itself. A
conversation on the subject of the literary disputes of the day is
introduced into the fourth act. During the course of it a poet, who is
defending the Romanticists' practice of going back to the Middle Ages
for their themes, says:
"The drama of passion must necessarily be historical drama. History
bequeaths to us the passionate deeds which were really done. If in
the midst of our modern society we were to attempt to lay bare the
heart which beats under our ugly short black coats, the resemblance
between the hero and the public would be too great; the spectator who
was following the development of a passion would desire to have it
arrested exactly where it would have stopped in his own case. He would
cry: 'Stop! that is wrong; that is not how I feel. When the woman whom
I love deceives me I suffer, certainly, but I neither kill her nor
myself.' And the outcry against exaggeration and melodrama would drown
the applause of the few who feel that the passions of the nineteenth
century are the same as those of the sixteenth, and that the blood can
course as hotly beneath a cloth coat as beneath a steel corselet."
We can imagine the applause which followed this speech. All wished to
show that they belonged to these few. Passion was the order of the day,
and they proved themselves to be passionate by applauding. And _Antony_
truly is a symphony of raging passions, the like of which it would be
difficult to find. After several years of travel the hero returns to
Paris and finds that the woman he loves is married. He saves her life
at the risk of his own by stopping her runaway horses; the shaft of the
carriage has pierced his breast; he is carried into her house. Antony
is an illegitimate child and a foundling; hence as a lover he is a
rebel against the laws of society. "Other men," he says to the woman
he loves, "have a father, a mother, a brother--arms which open for
them when they are in trouble; I have not so much as a tombstone upon
which I can read my name and weep. Other men have a country; I have
none, for I belong to no family. One name meant to me everything that I
possessed, and that name, your name, I am forbidden to pronounce." The
lady reminds him of social obligations: "Call them duties or call them
prejudices; such as they are, they exist." "Why," he replies, "should
I submit to these laws? Not one among those by whom they were made has
spared me a suffering or done me a service. I have received nothing but
injustice, and I owe nothing but hatred. My unfortunate mother's shame
has been branded on my forehead."
Adèle loves Antony, but avoids him. In the course of a journey she
takes, she has to spend a night at an inn; he surprises her there and
takes possession of her with violence. In spite of this dastardly act
she continues to love him. We meet the couple again in Paris. Their
story is known. We hear hypocritical women, who manage to combine
secret leanings to the forbidden with irreproachable outward behaviour,
destroying Adèle's reputation. Their attacks on her evoke outbursts of
indignation from the really worthy, indignation against society and its
hypocrisies. But the drama is drawing to a close. The husband, Colonel
d'Hervey, returns from a journey; Antony tries in vain to persuade
Adèle to escape with him; the step of the injured husband is heard in
the anteroom; the lover draws his Romantic dagger and plunges it into
Adèle's breast; to save her honour he meets d'Hervey with the cry:
"Elle me résistait; je l'ai assassinée!"
What chiefly strikes us now on reading the play is its preposterous
absurdity. We feel that if we were to see it acted, as a new play, we
should not be able to refrain from smiling at the parts intended to
touch us. We can hardly understand to-day how it happened that on the
night of its first performance in 1831 a select audience were excited
by it to the wildest enthusiasm. They applauded, shed tears, sobbed,
shouted Bravo! The effect of the play was heightened by the splendid
acting of Bocage and Marie Dorval. Dumas tells that a handsome green
coat he was wearing was positively torn off his back and into scraps,
which were preserved as relics by the enthusiastic youths who formed
a large proportion of the audience; and even if we do not take this
anecdote quite literally, there is no doubt of the unboundedness of
the enthusiasm. The explanation is, that men never laugh at a work
which gives expression to their own moods and feelings. Antony was
not merely the impersonation of passion verging on savagery, in
combination with a tenderness so great that it would rather take upon
itself the responsibility of a murder than expose the beloved one to
insult and scorn; he was also the Byronic, mysterious young hero,
who is predestined to struggle against the injustice of fate, and is
greater than his fate. But even in those days there were not wanting
critics who saw the weaknesses of the play. Bocage, who acted Antony,
considered the closing speech so foolish, that he would have omitted it
if he could. He did omit it one evening, and the curtain fell without
it, but only with the result that the audience began to shout and
scream as if possessed. They would not be defrauded of their speech.
Bocage had gone; but Madame Dorval, who was still lying dead upon the
stage, had the presence of mind to order the curtain to be raised
again, upon which, holding up her head, she said with a smile and a
transposition of the pronouns, "Je lui résistais, il m'a assassinée!"[1]
One sharply satirical voice was raised within the precincts
of the Romantic camp. Let any one interested turn up the long and
excellent criticism of _Antony_ in Jules Janin's _Histoire de la
littérature dramatique_, undoubtedly the best piece of criticism its
author ever wrote, and he will have the pleasure of beholding delirious
Romanticism overwhelmed with ridicule.