_Chatterton_, the one play of Alfred de Vigny's which was a success on
the stage, may be designated the Romantic dirge. These two favourite
dramas of the generation of 1830 complement each other; the one
represents the cult of genius, the other the cult of passion; the one
sympathy with the suffering, the other admiration for energetic action;
or, to go deeper, the one the Teutonic, the other the Latin side of
Romanticism.
Alfred de Vigny (born 1799) had failed to win the approbation of
the theatre-going public by his excellent historical drama, _La
Maréchale d'Ancre_, which was put on the stage in 1834. The reason
probably was, that in everything essential its characters belonged
to those types with which the public had already become familiar in
other Romantic historical tragedies. Borgia, the lover, for instance,
is of exactly the same species as Victor Hugo's lovers, and is not
even very different from the lover of Dumas' plays, in spite of the
widely different characters of the two authors. This shows us the
power of a school to set its stamp upon writers of the most varied
individualities.[2]
_Chatterton_, on the other hand, is a work peculiarly characteristic
of De Vigny. This play, which was performed in 1835, is based on
an idea to which its author had already given expression, in three
different forms, in a volume of tales entitled _Stello_, published two
years previously--the idea of the true poet's unhappy and neglected
position in modern society. De Vigny, to begin with, regarded the
poet from the Romantic standpoint, regarded him, that is to say, as
a superior being, nay, as the noblest of all beings (the idea with
which the German Romanticists, too, were so thoroughly impregnated);
and a feeling of strong compassion had been aroused in him by the
poet's fate, especially the fate of the young poet who, when he stands
most in need of help and appreciation, so seldom finds hearts that
understand him and patrons who prevent his life being a struggle for
existence. What lent a certain charm to De Vigny's constant appeal to
the public on behalf of the poet, was the fact that he was not pleading
his own cause; for he was a man of good family, who had always been in
comfortable circumstances. According to his idea, the poet is a poor
unfortunate who is entirely in the power of his own imagination. He is
"incapable of everything except fulfilling his divine mission," and
especially incapable of earning money; it is possible for him, indeed,
to make a living by writing, but if he does so it is probably at the
cost of his noblest gifts; he develops his critical faculty at the
expense of his imagination; and the divine spark which burns in him is
extinguished. Therefore this heavenly messenger ought not to be allowed
to degrade himself by common work; his brain is a volcano, from which
the "harmonious lava" (_laves harmonieuses_) can only issue when he is
in a position to be idle as long as he pleases.[3]
There is, as the modern reader sees at once, some truth in this idea,
but more exaggeration. The play which was based on it, and which
produced floods of tears, appeals so exclusively to the instinct
of compassion, that it has no properly tragic effect; and it has
too strong a lyric bias in favour of its hero to possess the inward
equilibrium without which a drama lacks stability. Chatterton and the
young Quakeress whom he loves have appropriated every single noble
quality of mind and soul; around them there is nothing but coarseness,
cold-heartedness, prose, and stupidity. What we are shown is the cruel
treatment of the intellectual genius by the coarse, earth-bound world
around him. The view of life is not unlike what we find in Germany in
the writings of Novalis, in Denmark in those of Andersen and Ingemann;
for authors such as these Goethe has written his _Tasso_ in vain. We in
our day are tired of the dramas with artist heroes which were ushered
in by Oehlenschläger's _Correggio_, and are represented in Germany by
Holtei's _Lorbeerbaum und Bettelstab_, &c. We no longer indignantly
sympathise with Chatterton, "the man who has been created to descry
in the stars the way pointed out by the finger of the Lord," when he
chooses rather to poison himself than accept an unpoetical appointment
which would bring him in a hundred a year. In this case also, what
touched every heart in an audience of the year 1835, now only elicits a
smile and a shrug of the shoulders.
Romanticism was too essentially lyric to produce dramatic works of
enduring value. This fact is perhaps most strongly borne in upon us
when we consider the plays of the greatest of the Romantic lyric
poets. Victor Hugo's dramas have many points of resemblance with
Oehlenschläger's tragedies. We frequently observe that both authors
have been influenced by their reading. In Hugo's _Marie Tudor_ we trace
the influence of Dumas' _Christine à Fontainebleau_, and the last scene
of _Lucrèce Borgia_ owes something to Webster's _Duchess of Malfi_. The
characters in the plays of both authors are merely outlined; in neither
are they real, complete human beings; and yet the power of genuine
enthusiasm and lyric pathos inspires them with life. Hugo's characters
certainly approach nearer to real life, and for this reason, that
events such as those represented in his plays had occurred in France in
much more recent times than in Denmark. Hernani reminds us of the rebel
leaders who defied the Government in La Vendée; Gilbert, who goes to
the scaffold of his own free will to avenge the woman he loves, does no
more than many a noble victim of the guillotine had done; and Ruy Blas'
elevation from the position of a footman to that of a minister of state
is not much more remarkable than Rousseau's rise from the same position
to that of one of the world's most famous authors. This, however,
practically makes little difference; for the author's love of the
unusual, nay, of the monstrous, represses everything which might remind
us of the reality with which we are familiar, and gives prominence
to unnatural phenomena which, though sublime in his eyes, are merely
absurd in the eyes of readers of a later day.
The conception of human nature which reveals itself in Hugo's plays
is purely lyric; it reminds us in all essentials of the psychology
of his rival, Lamartine, an author who was such a contrast to him in
other respects. The only difference is that, whilst Lamartine, with his
harmonious nature, loves to represent a pure and beautiful character
which yields to some sudden temptation and then expiates the one weak
moment with years of repentance and penance (Jocelyn, Cèdar in _La
Chute d'un Ange_), Hugo, in his dramas, loves to represent a human
soul debased by bad passions, by all kinds of misery and humiliations,
by vice, by slavery, by infirmity, yet so constituted that, under
given circumstances, it is irresistibly attracted by the good and
beautiful, in alliance with which it fights against the horrible past
which it has forsworn. This soul aspires; it understands even the most
delicate refinements of the good and beautiful; but it feels unworthy
of the noble emotions which it experiences; it cannot mount into these
unfamiliar regions, and so it falls back, exhausted and defeated, into
its former degraded condition.
Let me illustrate my meaning by a few examples. Triboulet (_Le Roi
s'amuse_) has been corrupted by his position as the unscrupulous
mouthpiece and butt of mockery, yet he loves his daughter with the
purest tenderness. She is stolen from him, and he gives himself up
entirely to hatred and projects of revenge.--Marion (_Marion Delorme_)
has sold herself hundreds of times; but she falls in love with a
young, brave man, and this passion completely purifies her. Didier
is condemned to death, and in the dread hour of trial she becomes
Marion again. She gives herself to the judge in order to save the man
she loves, not understanding that Didier would far rather die than
be saved thus.--Lucrèce Borgia was begotten in crime and has lived a
life of crime. But this licentious woman, this poisoner, has a son
whom she loves, and for his sake she is prepared to renounce the life
she has hitherto led. But a mortal insult is offered her, and in her
fury she has recourse to her old weapons; she invites her enemies to a
repast, gives them poison, and unwittingly murders her son along with
the others.--Ruy Blas, compelled by poverty, has become a nobleman's
lackey. The love of a queen makes of this lackey a minister of state.
He is fit for the position; he evolves and carries out great and noble
plans; he is on the point of becoming the saviour of his country, when
his past rises up against him. The disappointment of all his hopes is
too much for him; he revenges himself like the man he was; he will not
fight a duel with his master, but gets possession of his sword and
kills the defenceless man with it.[4]
The conception of the tragic is, we observe, always the same. But of
chief significance in all these dramas, as far as Hugo is concerned,
is the fountain of lyric pathos which wells forth when the degraded
human soul is raised by noble passion from the mire. The real kernel of
the drama is in every case the hymn of strong emotion with which the
guilt-stained soul sings itself pure.
One of Hugo's most famous poems (_Les Chants du Crépuscule_, xxxii.)
contains an allegory of which we are reminded when considering his
dramas. High in a church tower--so he writes--hangs an old bell. Long
ago its metal was clean and bright. The only inscription it bore
was the word God, with a crown below it. But the tower has had many
visitors, and each of them, one with his blunt knife, another with
a rusty nail, has scratched his own mean name, or a foul word, or a
silly witticism, or a platitude on the bell. It is covered with dust
and cobwebs; rust has found its way into the scratches, marring and
corroding it.
"Mais qu'importe à la cloche et qu'importe à mon âme!
Qu'à son heure, à son jour, l'esprit saint les réclame,
Les touche, l'une et l'autre, et leur dise: chantez!
Soudain, par toute voie et de tous les côtés,
De leur sein ébranlé, rempli d'ombres obscures,
À travers leur surface, à travers leurs souillures,
Et la cendre et la rouille, amas injurieux,
Quelque chose de grand s'épandra dans les cieux."
The poet was only attempting to describe the condition of his own soul
when he sang thus, but he did more; for the allegory strikingly depicts
the outbursts of lyric pathos which escape from the lips of the unhappy
and guilt-stained characters who give his dramas their interest.
But pathos and lyric sonority, in however ample measure, are not
materials out of which alone a dramatic edifice can be constructed. A
strong foundation of accurate reasoning is demanded, or, failing this,
at least of sound common-sense and correct taste.
Such foundations Hugo could not supply. And his failings as a dramatist
increased with time. There happened in his case what happens with so
many artists: his style degenerated into mannerism. He became, as
it were, his own best pupil; as a dramatist he ended by parodying
himself--the most cruelly effective kind of parody.
He had always been wanting in a sense of the comic, and had always been
inclined to confuse the sublime with the colossal. To this inclination
he yielded more unrestrainedly than ever before in writing _Les
Burgraves_. The very list of characters evokes a smile: Job, Burgrave
of Heppenheff, aged 100; Magnus, son of Job, aged 80; Hatto, son of
Magnus, aged 60; Gorlois, son of Hatto, aged 30. A Parisian caricature
of the Burgraves, of about the same date as the play, represents them
standing in a row, decreasing in height and quantity of beard according
to age.
The centenarian is the most energetic of them all; he represents the
good old days. He calls his son of eighty: "Young man!" but Hugo does
not smile. All these old gentlemen vie in declamation with a beggar
of ninety, who turns out to be no less a personage than Frederick
Barbarossa, who has lived in concealment for twenty years, but has
come to execute vengeance upon the eldest of the Burgraves, who as a
youth had plotted against his life. The play teems with improbabilities
and Romantic absurdities. For instance, in order to bring about a
recognition scene, Hugo makes a soldier fight with a piece of red-hot
iron, with which he sets a mark upon an opponent whom he wishes to be
able to recognise again, and whom he cannot see rightly because it is
dark.
When this monstrous production of an overstrained imagination was put
upon the stage, in 1843, it proved a complete failure. On the first
night, in the middle of the play, hissing began. One of Hugo's faithful
henchmen rushed to tell him. Hugo who, like Napoleon, relied upon his
guard, answered as usual: "Get hold of some young men!" It is said that
the messenger answered despondently, with downcast eyes: "There are
no more young men." The generation to which Romanticism had appealed
thirteen years before was no longer young, and, what was worse, it had
grown weary; more than one of its poets had made too heavy demands upon
it.
A reaction was inevitable, and it set in that very year. It found its
author and its histrionic genius.
A young man as yet unknown to fame had left the provincial town in
which he had been brought up, and come to Paris with a manuscript in
his pocket. He was a thoroughly high-principled young man, with no
great gift of imagination, but with much refinement and taste, and of
a nobly serious turn of mind. His name was François Ponsard, and the
title of the manuscript was _Lucrèce_. It was a tragedy on an antique
theme--the rape and death of the chaste Lucretia. The style was sober
and severe; it recalled Racine's. The public was tired of the Romantic
style. For long the quiet citizen had shaken his head over such phrases
of Hugo's as "the tones purled from the organ like water from a
sponge," or "the table-linen was white as pale grief's winding-sheet,"
or "the old woman walked with bent, slow back." But until now there
had been no one capable of competing with Hugo. Here at last seemed to
be a possible rival. At the first glance Ponsard's play appeared to be
exactly on the lines of the old classical tragedy. In their eagerness
its welcomers did not notice in what a modern manner the antique theme
was treated, how much Ponsard had learned from the Romanticists, how
much of its warm colouring his drama owed to Victor Hugo, and how small
an amount of originality the new-comer really possessed.
All the public saw was that this drama was sane and simple. They saw
that its heroine was Lucretia--not Hugo's horrible Lucrèce, that
monster of bloodthirstiness and sensuality, but Rome's Lucretia, the
emblem of chastity, another name for feminine purity. She represented
marriage, the family, the poetry of home, as Antony and his kin had
represented the morality of the foundling, and lawlessness. All
Catholic and Classic France, all orthodox Switzerland, hymned the
praises of the new dramatist and his play. At last Hugo had found his
superior, Racine his equal. Even the critical Vinet joined in the great
Hallelujah. He went into ecstasies over Ponsard's style: "This author
spins gold as his Lucretia does wool &c."
_Les Burgraves_ was hissed on the 7th of March 1843. On the 22nd of
April of the same year _Lucrèce_ was received on its first night with
thunders of applause. So closely as this did the short-lived triumph
of what went by the name of _l'école du bon sens_ follow on the defeat
of Romantic dramaticism. If the worthy Ponsard relied upon the verdict
of his critics, Janin and the others (Théophile Gautier and Théophile
Dondey alone protested), he must have believed that his fame was
established for all time.
The Classic reaction had found its actress as well as its dramatist. In
1838 a young Jewess had made her début in the Theatre Français. She was
then eighteen, an ignorant child who had played the harp and sung in
the cafés and in the streets; but time proved _Rachel_ to be a genius,
the greatest actress France had ever known. And this great actress,
as it happened, had a thorough distaste for the rôles with which the
Romantic drama provided her, whilst she studied and played those of
the old Classic repertory with such zeal and passion that she actually
succeeded in doing what no one had believed possible namely, restoring
their power of attraction to the tragedies which the Romantic School
had disdainfully driven from the stage. Of what avail was it that
Gautier wrung his hands! Iphigénie, Mérope, Émilia, Chimène, Phèdre,
again trod the boards. And so nobly and naturally were they personated
that an impressionable public was at times actually roused to a kind
of fury with the authors and critics who had dared to throw contempt
on these sacred national treasures. A nation is naturally rejoiced to
learn that it has not been mistaken in the eminence of the men and
works it has reverenced for centuries.
Although the title-rôle of _Lucrèce_ had been written for her, Rachel
at first refused to play it; but after the success of the drama at
the Odéon she consented. The mood of the audience the first time she
appeared in it has been described to me by an eye-witness. "We sat
waiting in breathless expectation for the curtain to rise. It rose,
and we saw Rachel as Lucretia sitting at her spinning-wheel among her
maidens. The silence had been complete enough before; but when she
raised her head and opened her lips to say the first words (to one of
the slaves): _Lève-toi, Laodice!_ there was such utter stillness that
the fruit-sellers were heard crying their oranges in the market-place."
In their enthusiasm for Rachel the public did not realise that the
Classic style in art was not really alive because a single genius
for a time breathed life into the great works of a bygone age; and
in their rejoicing over Ponsard they failed to understand how short
his triumph must inevitably be. The Common-sense School, as its name
prognosticates, never developed any vigorous originality. Ponsard
himself was a writer of only second-rate talent. The youthful dramas
of his gifted follower, Émile Augier (who dedicated his poems to him),
imitate his sober spirit and style; but Augier's style changed as time
went on.[5] Though the school, most praiseworthy in its intentions, by
no means deserved the contemptuous attacks made on it by some of the
irreconcilable younger Romanticists, including Vacquerie and Théodore
de Banville, yet its historical significance is no more than this--it
indicates the period when Romantic drama had outlived itself.
[1] Told me by an eye-witness of the scene, Philarète Chasles.
[2] In the list of personages we find the following directions to the
actor for the rendering of the part of Borgia. Observe how all the
qualities beloved of Romanticism are enumerated as if in a catalogue,
and how in all essentials the directions might serve for Victor
Hugo's young heroes, or indeed for Antony: "Montagnard brusque et
bon. Vindicatif et animé par la vendetta comme par une seconde âme:
conduit par elle _comme par la destinée_. Caractère vigoureux, triste
et profondément sensible. Haïssant et aimant avec violence. Sauvage par
nature, et civilisé comme malgré lui par la cour et la politesse de son
temps."
[3] See the characteristic introduction to _Chatterton_, "Dernière nuit
de travail, du 29 au 30 Juin 1834."
[4] _Cf_. Madame de Girardin: _Lettres parisiennes_, ii 31.
[5] Augier's _Gabrielle_ is perhaps the prettiest play which the
Common-sense School produced. His dramas, _La Jeunesse_ and _La
Pierre de Touche_, were evidently inspired by Ponsard's _L'Honneur et
l'Argent_.
XXXIII
LITERATURE IN ITS RELATION TO THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS OF THE DAY
Meanwhile Saint-Simonism had been thoroughly leavening literature.
Lamartine, the most gifted of the authors who, after the restoration of
the hereditary monarchy, lent their support to the Conservative party,
began to waver early in the Thirties. In his versified novel, _Jocelyn_
(1836), mild and pious though its tone is, we are conscious of his new
sympathies and of new developments in his convictions. In the preface
he evades the question of his religious belief, merely remarking that,
let it be what it may, he has not forgotten his youthful reverence for
the Church. The most careless reader, however, cannot fail to observe
that the story itself is a protest against the celibacy of the clergy,
one of the fundamental principles of the Church. And in Jocelyn's
diary we find the following significant passage, in the entry for 21st
September 1800:--
"La caravane humaine un jour était campée
Dans les forêts bordant une rive escarpée,
Et ne pouvant pousser sa route plus avant.
Les chênes l'abritaient du soleil et du vent,
Les tentes, aux rameaux enlaçant leurs cordages,
Formaient autour des troncs des cités, des villages,
Et les hommes épars sur des gazons épais
Mangeaient leur pain à l'ombre et conversaient en paix.
Tout à coup comme atteints d'une rage insensée
Ces hommes se levant à la même pensée,
Portant la hache aux troncs, font crouler à leur piés
Ces dômes où les nids s'étaient multipliés;
Et les brutes des bois sortant de leurs repaires
Et les oiseaux fuyant les cimes séculaires
Contemplaient la ruine avec un œil d'horreur,
Ne comprenaient pas l'œuvre et maudissaient du cœur
Cette race stupide acharnée à sa perte,
Qui détruit jusqu'au ciel l'ombre qui l'a couverte!
Or, pendant qu'en leur nuit les brutes des forêts
Avaient pitié de l'homme et séchaient de regrets,
L'homme continuant son ravage sublime
Avait jeté les troncs en arche sur l'abîme;
Sur l'arbre de ses bords gisant et renversé
La fleuve était partout couvert et traversé,
Et poursuivant en paix son éternel voyage
La caravane avait conquis l'autre rivage."
But this was only the beginning. _La Chute d'un Ange_ showed, in
spite of all its faults, that Lamartine had discarded his earlier,
"seraphic" style; and his first parliamentary speeches showed that
Saint-Simonistic ideas had gradually supplanted his orthodox beliefs.
The born aristocrat proclaimed himself a _démocrate conservateur_,
desirous of the realisation, under a constitutional monarchy, of all
the modern liberal and progressive ideas. And he did not stop even
here. His famous _Histoire des Girondins_, published in 1846 (a work
valueless as history, but written in a most poetical, persuasively
eloquent style), was the book which more than any other attuned men's
minds to revolution and prepared for the coming upheaval. And in 1848
we find the man who had been the court poet of the Restoration period,
standing--the real chief of the Republic--on the balcony of the Hôtel
de Ville, displaying the proud indifference of the aristocrat to the
muskets levelled at his breast while addressing the crowd with the
authoritative eloquence of the tribune. That was a great, an immortal
moment in his life, when he saved the lives of his colleagues and
averted civil war with a few unhesitating words, as beautiful as they
were manly.