the way of a young man who wrote in this style. Borel lived in great
poverty; he knew what starvation meant, and more than once, without a
roof to cover his head, was driven to seek shelter for the night in
some half-finished building. His youthful hatred of wrong was also
detrimental to him as an author. In his two-volume novel, _Madame
Putiphar_, the character of the heroine, Madame Pompadour, is distorted
by the writer's republican indignation and aversion. The dissolute,
art-loving Muse of the rococo period, who had a frivolous little
leaning to free thought, who patronised the Encyclopedists, and took
lessons in etching from Boucher, is transformed into a Megæra, who
throws herself at the head of a strange man, and when he refuses to
have anything to do with her, punishes him for his indifference with
imprisonment in an underground cell of the Bastille. Towards the end
the book improves. The storming of the Bastille, a subject which suited
Borel's pen, is described in a vivid, fiery style which reeks of
gunpowder.
His third book, _Champavert, Contes immoraux_, was published in 1833.
It attracted no attention, and he made nothing by it--an injustice of
fate which is not altogether incomprehensible, seeing that several
of the stories are written in their author's earliest, unpleasantly
ferocious style. But in the best of them the indignation is mastered,
is treated artistically, as lava is treated by the cameo-cutter. All
the tales deal with horrors, with deeds which, precisely because they
are so frightful and unmentionable, are possible, since no criminal
escapes punishment so easily as he who has committed a crime in which
no one will believe. And they are such horrors as fiction seldom deals
with, since one of the author's main aims generally is to produce a
saleable book, if possible one suited for reading aloud in the family
circle.
The scene of the tale entitled _Dina, la belle Juive_, is laid in
Lyons, in 1661. A manly, unprejudiced young nobleman has fallen in love
with a beautiful young Jewess, and goes off to his country home to try
and obtain his father's consent to their marriage. The father curses
his son, and, in his fury, actually tries to shoot him, but misses him.
One day, during Aymar's absence, Dina takes a walk by the banks of the
Saône. Seized with a desire to go on the river, she hails a boat, steps
on board, and lies down to dream under the awning as the boat glides
down the stream. The boatman robs the beautiful Jewess of her rings and
other ornaments, ties her arms, gags her, violates her, throws her into
the river, and after the gag slips out of her mouth plunges his spear
into her body every time it comes to the surface. Then he fishes up the
corpse, and takes it to the _hôtel de ville_ to claim the two ducats
which are given as a reward to any one who recovers a body from the
river. The magistrate asks:
"--Le cadavre a-t-il été reconnu?
--Oui, messire, c'est une jeune fille, nommée Dina, enfant d'un
nommé Israël Judas, un lapidaire.
--Une juive?
--Oui, messire, une hérétique, une huguenotte ... une juive....
--Une juive!... Tu vas pêcher des juifs, marsoufle! et tu as le
front, après cela, de venir demander récompense? Holà! valet!
Holà! Martin! holà! Lefabre! mettez-moi ce butor à la porte! ce
paltoquet!"
The scenes in the Jewish quarter and the scene in the boat are
unsurpassable in their cruel realism. Borel's picture of Jewish life in
the Middle Ages is equal to anything Heine has given us.
In 1846 Théophile Gautier, with the assistance of that influential
lady, Madame de Girardin, brought about a temporary improvement in
Borel's circumstances. They procured him the post of Colonial Inspector
in the interior of Algiers, near Mostaganem. Though it was a wretched
little appointment, it exactly suited a man like Borel, with his
were-wolfish shrinking from contact with human beings; but he was
soon dismissed from it, his strong sense of justice having led him,
unfortunately for himself, to accuse a superior official of defrauding
the government. He never saw France again; he died in Africa, of
sunstroke, some say; according to others, of starvation.
Mérimée, as we have already observed, took up Borel's special
department of literature, and in his admirable short stories treated
revolting subjects with a surer hand. But in Mérimée's writing the
irony of the man of the world and the elegance of the courtier stifled
the passion which was Petrus Borel's strong point. In Mérimée's works
we find some of the challenges which Borel flung in the face of society
paraphrased in language which made them fit to lie on a drawing-room
table. There was no inheritor of the fire which burned in the inmost
sanctuary of Petrus Borel's soul.[2]
The last of these early paralysed authors whom I shall name is
Théophile Dondey, better known as Philothée O'Neddy.
O'Neddy, born in 1811, made his literary début in 1833 with a volume
of poems entitled _Feu et Flamme_, which the public, revelling at the
moment in a superabundance of excellent poetry, would have nothing to
say to. The author, who was extremely poor, and was obliged, for the
sake of supporting his mother, to attend to the duties of a small Civil
Service appointment, lost courage, and never published another poem. Of
his book, which he had brought out at his own expense, hardly a copy
was sold. He withdrew like some wounded animal into its lair. When
Gautier met him, a grey-haired man, thirty years later, and greeted him
with the question: "When is the next collection of poems to appear?"
Old O'Neddy answered, with a sigh: "Oh! quand il n'y aura pas de
bourgeois!" It might have been supposed that his powers of production
were exhausted. After his death, however, whole reams of beautiful
lyric poetry were found among his papers. The market value of his first
book is now 300 francs, which is certainly more than its author earned
by all that he wrote.
Théophile Dondey's early poems are quite as immature and as defiant
as Borel's. In the preface to _Feu et Flamme_ he begs his greater
comrades-in-arms to receive him into their fellowship; for, he writes,
"like you I despise with all my soul the social order and the political
order which is its excrement (!); like you I scoff at the priority of
age in literature and in the Academy; like you I am left incredulous
and cold by the magniloquence and the tinsel of the religions of the
world; like you I am kindled to pious emotion only by poetry, the twin
sister of God." He is restless, excited, overstrained; sometimes he
is ill, sometimes haunted by the thought of suicide; and everything
is expressed in verses chiselled by the hand of a master. One of the
outbursts in the suicidal strain is very original. By upholding the
doctrine of the Trinity (in which he does not believe) the poet makes
of Christ's sacrificial death the model suicide:
"Va, que la mort soit ton refuge!
À l'exemple du Rédempteur,
Ose à la fois être le juge,
La victime et l'exécuteur."[3]
Those of O'Neddy's poems which do not deal with his own personality are
all devoted to the cause of free thought and the coming republic. But
by far the greater number are profoundly personal, about seven-eighths
being love poems. A distinguished lady honoured him, the nameless, poor
plebeian, with her love, and the poems overflow with melancholy rapture
and idolisation of the beloved; but, feeling, and knowing himself
to be, ill, O'Neddy is certain that happiness is not for him, and
involuntarily couples the thought of love with the thought of death.
The poetic form which as a youth he sought and found, was one which
satisfied himself, because it was an exactly suitable vehicle for his
feelings and thoughts; but he did not, like more fortunate poets,
succeed in imparting transparency and attractiveness to this form.
Therefore the reading public turned its back on him. He felt himself
ever more and more forgotten by life, doomed to die with unused powers;
again and again in his posthumous poems he calls himself a living
corpse. Here, for example, is one of his sonnets:
"Un montagnard avait une excellente épée
Qu'il laissait se rouiller dans un coin obscur.
Un jour elle lui dit:--Que ce repos m'est dur!
Guerrier, si tu voulais!... Ma lame est bien trempée.
Dans tes rudes combats, sur la côte escarpée
Elle vaudrait, au bout de ton bras ferme et sûr,
Les autres espadons qui brillent sous ce mur.
Pourquoi seule entre tous est-elle inoccupée?--
Je suis comme ce glaive et je dis au destin:
Pourquoi seul de mon type ai-je un sort clandestin?
Ignores-tu quelle est la trempe de mon âme?
Elle pourrait jeter de glorieux reflets,
Si ta droite au soleil faisait jouer sa lame!
Elle est d'un noble acier!... Destin, si tu voulais!..."
But destiny, according to its custom and nature, was inexorable.
Like the shipwrecked man clinging to his rock, waiting for a ship to
appear on the horizon and come to his rescue, O'Neddy waited--waited
for years; but the ship of destiny sailed past and left him standing
alone on his rock. When the lady who had loved him deserted him he
gave up all hope. His poetry meanwhile had been gradually assuming
a more serious and philosophic cast. In one poem, reversing the
Cartesian axiom, he declares: "I suffer, therefore I am." And many
other beautiful poems are pessimistic in a degree which is uncommon in
Romantic lyric verse. Read, for instance, the following lines:
"Or, qu'est-ce que le Vrai? Le Vrai, c'est le malheur;
Il souffle, et l'heur vaincu s'éteint, vaine apparence:
Ses pourvoyeurs constants, le désir, l'espérance,
Sous leur flamme nous font mûrir pour la douleur.
Le Vrai, c'est l'incertain; le Vrai, c'est l'ignorance;
C'est le tâtonnement dans l'ombre et dans l'erreur;
C'est un concert de fête avec un fond d'horreur;
C'est le neutre, l'oubli, le froid, l'indifférence."
O'Neddy tried criticism, but at an unpropitious moment. He began
to praise Hugo as a dramatist just when, in the Forties, the great
man's popularity was on the wane. Its freshness of feeling lends
beauty to his passionately enthusiastic defence of _Les Burgraves_.
In his animadversions on the attitude of Hugo's critics to Ponsard's
_Lucrèce_, O'Neddy was not unjust to Ponsard, and showed a spirit of
noble reverence. But the next time he wrote in defence of Hugo the
editorship of the _Patrie_ was in other hands, and his article was
returned to him. He took this rebuff to heart and gave up journalism,
never again writing a newspaper article. He withdrew into his own inner
world, feeling like Don Quixote after his return home, or Molière's
Misanthrope when he wearily seeks solitude. Yet he writes in his last
poem that, unbeliever in immortality though he may be, if ever his
heroes should ride victoriously over his forgotten grave, his heart
will beat again, in time with their horses' gallop:
"Et qui tendra l'oreille ouïra mon fier cœur
Bondir à l'unison du fier galop vainqueur."
The "heroes" for whom he had the profoundest admiration were, amongst
the men of action, Garibaldi, amongst the poets, Victor Hugo, and
amongst prose authors, Michelet and Quinet, and, at a later period,
Renan.
O'Neddy's later life was sad. After losing his lady-love he lost his
mother. He was long ill, and in the end paralysed. Only one pleasure
was reserved for his old age, that of seeing himself warmly appreciated
by Théophile Gautier in an article which now forms part of the latter's
_Histoire du Romantisme_. He did not die till 1875, when he had been
silent as a poet for forty-two years.
Whilst we are occupied in seeking out these victims of the literary
battle and victory, we seem all the time to hear a funeral march
played on muffled drums. And when we have seen how numerous they are,
we involuntarily regard such a book as De Vigny's _Stello_ and such a
drama as his _Chatterton_ in a more favourable light. The idea of the
suffering poet or artist was an ever-present one at that period; and
yet many were allowed to perish who deserved a better fate. It would
seem that at all times, in every age, there is a difficulty in finding
out the deserving, suffering men of talent.
The historian whose aim is, not to touch his readers, but to throw
light upon his subject, gives these background figures a momentary
prominence because the characteristics of the age are no less
legibly and markedly displayed in their works than in those of its
geniuses. The geniuses show us Romanticism in its health and strength;
its pathology is to be studied in the works and lives of these
unfortunates, who are so enthusiastically devoted to a foreign language
that they neglect the cultivation of their own, or who blaze up in a
sudden, ephemeral literary activity, or who make a desperate assault on
fame only to be discouraged for ever by their first repulse, or who are
mortally wounded by the indifference of the public, or who convulsively
strain their powers until they suddenly give way. These men are as
legitimate offspring of the Romanticism of 1830 as any of the others.
They are its genuine _enfants perdus_.
[1] Ymbert Galloix's _Poésies Posthumes_ were published in
Geneva in 1834. By some mistake--for plagiarism is out of the
question--Sainte-Beuve's poem "Suicide" is included in the collection.
[2] See Borel: _Champavert_ (1833); _Rapsodies_ (Bruxelles, 1838);
_Madame Putiphar_ (Paris, 1878). Jules Claretie: _Petrus Borel, le
Lycanthrope_ (1865).
[3] We feel how genuinely Romantic, how profoundly characteristic of
the period, such a little inspiration as this is, when we come upon
the very same thought in one of George Sand's _Lettres d'un Voyageur_
(January, 1835): "Jésus, en souffrant le martyre, a donné un grand
exemple de suicide." It is curious that the idea never occurred to
Novalis.
XXXV
CONCLUSION
Such was this school, such were its victors and its vanquished, such
its artistic and its social enthusiasts. Thus it arose; thus, with
all this wealth of genius and talent, it grew to be great; thus it
dissolved as a school to continue its life in the intellectual life of
widely different individuals who, even when in appearance farthest from
their starting-point, nevertheless retained the essential qualities of
the school--for we all keep long upon our shoulders the mark of the
first banner we bore. The Romantic School was broken up and scattered;
but before its extinction, Romanticism had revitalised style in almost
every branch of literature, had brought hitherto undreamt of subjects
within the range of art, had allowed itself to be fertilised by all the
social and religious ideas of the day, had re-created lyric poetry, the
drama, fiction, and criticism, had insinuated itself as a fertilising
power into the science of history, as an inspiring power into politics.
To have attempted to write a complete history of the School would
have been, in my case, to have attempted an impossibility. Here,
as elsewhere in this work, I have traced only the main currents. I
have dwelt long and in detail on the principal personages instead
of introducing numerous secondary personages who, in spite of their
real importance and interest, would have stood in the way of the
condensation which has been my aim; and I have even followed the
careers of one or two of these principal personages beyond the limit of
the period, seeing that it was not until after 1848 that they displayed
their originality in its entirety.
Many remarkable personalities I have merely sketched--such as Alexandre
Dumas, who may well be called the Ariosto of French Romanticism, and De
Vigny, who has described himself in the saying: "Honour is the poetry
of duty." Others I have only been able to name--such as Jules Janin,
"the prince of feuilletonists," whose novel, _L'Âne mort et la Femme
guillotine_, is such a remarkable forerunner of the naturalism of a
later period; and Nodier's successor, Gérard de Nerval, the Euphorion
of Romanticism, whose female characters are ethereally delicate,
whose preternatural fantasies have an oriental marvellousness, and
whose sonnets, written when he was insane, are amongst the cleverest
and most beautiful which the period has produced. Many men of talent
of the second and third rank I have been obliged to leave altogether
unnoticed--such as Antony Deschamps, who occupies much the same
place in literature as Leopold Robert does in art; and Victor Hugo's
worshipper, Auguste Vacquérie, who is interesting because of his blind
belief in Romanticism and his aplomb, and whose drama _Tragabaldas_
is one of the boldest exploits of French Romantic volatility. I have
only been able, and have only desired, as a rule, to present the great
typical figures in relief. The great woman of the period, George Sand,
must stand alone, as a representative of its women, interesting though
it would have been to describe several of the others--clever Madame de
Girardin, melancholy Madame Desbordes-Valmore, or the two emancipated
authoresses, the Comtesse d'Agoult and Madame Allart. Sainte-Beuve is
the solitary representative of criticism; both Philarète Chasles and
Jules Janin I have been obliged to ignore; and Balzac alone represents
realism in fiction, no mention being made of less gifted and profound
observers of life, like Alphonse Karr or Charles de Bernard. The
authors of the generation of 1830 naturally divide themselves into two
groups, a small group which wrote for the whole world, and a larger,
which wrote for France alone; it is only the former which I have
endeavoured to place distinctly before my readers.
We have seen how the character of the two Restoration monarchies,
the Legitimist and the popular, formed the historic background from
which Romanticism projected itself, and without which it cannot be
understood; and we have also observed that the movement had numerous
foreign forerunners and a not inconsiderable period of preparation in
France itself. The Restoration starts Romanticism; the _Juste-milieu_
government goads it on; the study of Scott and Byron, Goethe and
Hoffmann, enriches it; at the hands of André Chénier it receives its
lyrical consecration; the controversies in the _Globe_ develop its
critical powers. The writings of Charles Nodier, which are romantic
in the general, European, sense of the word, prepare the way for the
great French Romanticists. Then Victor Hugo assumes the leadership of
the movement, proves himself capable of the task he has undertaken, and
hastens from victory to victory. Presently he and De Vigny are named
in the same breath with Lamartine as lyric poets; then Hugo outshines
all the rest. Both Sainte-Beuve and Théophile Gautier possess a lyrical
vein, but as a lyric poet, Alfred de Musset supplants all the other
younger men in the favour of the reading public, in time supplants even
Hugo himself, and is long the idol of youth.
Romanticism had at first a historical tendency; De Vigny, Victor Hugo,
Balzac, Mérimée, endeavoured to give France the historical novel of
which England was so proud; Vitet, Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas, De Vigny,
Hugo, tried to create a historical drama which should take the place
of tragedy. But the historical novel soon made way for the modern
novel in its various forms, as written by George Sand, Beyle, and
Balzac; and the historical drama also soon lost favour; for it was,
generally speaking, either uninterestingly dry, as in the case of
Vitet's and Mérimée's plays, or exaggeratedly lyrical, as in Hugo's.
The dramatic authors had, as a rule, most success on the stage after
the first passion of their youth had raged itself out. There came a
time in the Forties when there existed, not only an _école de bon
sens_ outside of the Romantic School, but a phase of _bon sens_ in
the lives of the authors within the Romantic circle. It was during
this period that Alfred de Musset wrote his short plays and George
Sand her peaceful novels and peasant stories. Whilst Hugo was steadily
increasing in power as a lyric poet, Gautier was leading Romanticism
in the direction of plastic art. Balzac developed it in the direction
of physiology; Beyle, in the direction of national, or comparative,
psychology; Mérimée, in the historical direction; Sainte-Beuve, in that
of naturalistic criticism. In every one of these domains the generation
of 1830 has produced imperishable works.
The French Romantic School may therefore, without exaggeration, be
called the greatest literary school of the nineteenth century.
THE END