Of great significance as regards the whole character of the period is
the answer to the question: What is the nature of the amatory sentiment
in the writings of the authors of this group?
Of all the emotions treated of in literature the emotion of love is
that which receives most attention, and as a rule makes most impression
on the reader. Knowledge of the manner in which it is apprehended and
represented is an important factor in any real understanding of the
spirit of an age. In the age's conception of the passion of love we
have, as it were, a gauge by which we can measure with extreme accuracy
the force, the nature, the temperature of its whole emotional life. We
see gallantry transformed into passion in the works of Rousseau. In
the writings of Germany's great poets this passion is chastened and
humanised. The German Romanticists turn love into a sort of moonlight
sentimentality. In revolutionary times it is represented as at war with
existing and regular social relations. In the works of the sceptical
authors of the nineteenth century, such as Heine, it is undermined by
doubt of its existence.[1]
In such a period as that at present under consideration, a period which
rejects the claims of the body, pins its faith to authority, and prizes
order above all things, love necessarily receives a characteristic
imprint. If we glance at the most notable descriptions of love which
the period has bequeathed to us, we gain some idea of its main types of
humanity, male and female.
The first pair to meet our eyes are Eudore and Velléda in _Les Martyrs_.
The hero of _Les Martyrs_ is peculiarly interesting to us because
Chateaubriand has painted him with many of the features of his
own expressive countenance. So great is the similarity of their
circumstances that the words and the reflections with which
Chateaubriand and Eudore begin to tell the stories of their lives are
almost identical. Eudore says: "Born at the foot of Mount Taygetus, the
melancholy murmur of the sea was the first sound that fell upon my ear.
On how many shores have I since then watched those waves break that I
am now gazing on! Who could have told me a few short years ago that I
should hear the waves moaning on the beaches of Italy, on the shores
of the Batavians, the Britons, and the Gauls, which I then saw laving
the bright sands of Messenia?" And Chateaubriand, in his _Voyage en
Italie_, writes: "Born on the rocky shores of Brittany, the first sound
which fell on my ear when I came into the world was the roar of the
sea; and on how many shores have I since then seen the billows break
on which I am now gazing! Who could have told me a few short years ago
that I should hear moaning by the graves of Scipio and Virgil the waves
that rolled at my feet on English beaches and the shores of Maryland?"
&c.
Both these heroes are, thus, far-travelled and sorely tried men of
the type of Odysseus and Æneas. Common to both are astonishment at
the many and strange adventures of their own lives, and admiration of
themselves, who have been protected throughout all these dangers by
higher powers. But more significant is another feature which they have
in common. Eudore, like Chateaubriand, is the hero who brings about the
triumph of Christianity upon earth. Chateaubriand does in the reign of
Napoleon what Eudore did in the reign of Galerius; and it is not his
fault that he is not a martyr; the thought of martyrdom was one which
often occupied him in his youth; he repeatedly said to friends that
he would not have drawn back if his life had been required of him.
The heroic figure always present to his imagination as a pattern is
nothing less than the sacrificial victim who atones for the ungodliness
and apostasy of the age, and who by his life-work and his sufferings
appeases an angry God. In the first edition of _Les Martyrs_ Eudore
is plainly called a lesser Christ. In writing of him the author uses
the expression that the Almighty demanded "une hostie entière." In the
later editions this particular expression was, on religious grounds,
omitted, but in another place the same idea has been inadvertently
retained, with an almost comic effect. In the account of Eudore's
martyrdom we read: "The chair of fire was now ready. Seated on its
glowing bars, the Christian teacher preached the Gospel more eloquently
than before. Seraphims shed the dew of heaven on him, and his guardian
angel sheltered him with his wings. _Il paraissait dans la flamme comme
un pain délicieux préparé pour les tables célestes_."
We have here the fundamental idea that distinguishes the type. The
first sacrifice, the first saviour, the first "host," is not enough.
Although he is a Christian, Chateaubriand does not believe that the
sacrificial death of Christ has been a complete atonement, has done all
that was required. To ensure the triumph of religion minor saviours,
such as Chateaubriand himself and his hero Eudore, are still needed.
In German Romanticism even a miserable creature like Golo in Tieck's
_Genoveva_ is understood to have a resemblance to Christ; the same is
the case with Eudore.[2] Though he errs in his youth and for a short
time treads the path of destruction in beautiful Naples (Chateaubriand
knew by experience that the best resolutions are no security against
such backsliding), he reforms, stands steadfast in every trial, and
dies a shining light.
His love for Velléda is one of these trials.
Velléda is undoubtedly the most remarkable and most influential
female character in the French literature of this period. She is a
Gallic maiden of the third century, and in her Chateaubriand depicts
the French national type. "This was no ordinary woman. She had that
attractive waywardness which distinguishes the women of Gaul. Her
glance was quick and keen, the expression of her mouth slightly
satirical, her smile peculiarly gentle and expressive. Her bearing
was now proud, now voluptuous. Her whole personality was a mixture
of gentleness and dignity, of artlessness and art." But Velléda is
not simply French; she bears the distinct impress of the age of her
creation; she is an ideal of 1808. She is a priestess, and belongs to
the family of the Arch-Druid. In the first decade of the nineteenth
century the feminine character was not perfect unless it was marked
by religious enthusiasm. It was also obligatory that Velléda should
not be purely and simply the child of nature; she is so only to the
same extent as were the ladies of 1808. We are expressly and somewhat
pedantically told of her that in the family of the Arch-Druid she had
been "carefully instructed in the literature of Greece and in the
history of her own country." Velléda is the last priestess of the
Druids, as Cymodocée is the last priestess of Homer. A short time ago
Corinne had been the model of the ambitious young Frenchwoman, now she
was supplanted by Velléda; and, literature not being merely a medium of
expression for society, but also an important agent in remoulding it,
we see the type pass from the world of imagination into the world of
reality. What is Madame de Krüdener, standing in front of the Russian
army, but a Christian Velléda?
When we make the acquaintance of the young priestess she is seated
in a boat which is tossing on the waves of a tempestuous sea, trying
to still the storm with her incantations; for she, like Fouqué's
Undine, has, or believes she has, a certain power over the sea. Later
we hear her, in an eloquent speech, calling on her countrymen to
take up arms against the Romans and reconquer their liberty. We see
her, as the priestess of Teutates, sharpening her sickle to offer a
human sacrifice. How beautiful she is as her creator describes her to
us--tall and straight, scantily clothed in a short, black, sleeveless
tunic, her golden sickle hanging from a girdle of steel! Her eyes are
blue, her lips rose-red; her fair flowing hair is bound with a slender
oak-branch or a wreath of verbena.
Hardly has she seen Eudore than she loves him. But such simple and
natural passion is not enough for the age; it demands that Velléda
shall be a devotee of Vesta, shall have taken the oath of eternal
virginity. "I am a virgin, the virgin of the island of the Seine;
whether I keep my oath or break it I die--die for your sake." Eudore
admires her, but does not love her. His relation to her is that of the
pious Æneas to Dido, a fact to which the author makes him draw our
attention. The unfortunate Velléda tries all her magic arts. At one
time she determines to steal her way in to Eudore on the moonbeams;
at another she is preparing to fly into the tower which he inhabits
and win his love in the shape of another woman, but the very thought
arouses her jealousy and causes her to desist. Eudore, though he does
not return her passion, feels himself, as it were, infected by its
atmosphere when he is beside her. As a Christian he shrinks with horror
from the temptation. "At least twenty times while Velléda was telling
me of her sad and tender feelings, I was on the point of throwing
myself at her feet, announcing her victory, and making her happy by
the acknowledgment of my defeat. At the moment when I was about to
succumb, the compassion with which the unhappy woman inspired me saved
me. But this very compassion, which saved me at first, in the end
proved my destruction; for it deprived me of the last remnant of my
strength." Looking at the matter from the purely artistic point of
view, it offends our taste to hear a man dilate thus upon his struggles
to preserve his virtue; Eudore's outbursts of shame and remorse do not
become him well. "O Cyrille," he says, "how can I go on with such a
story! I blush with shame and confusion." When at last, after Velléda
has attempted to kill herself, this knight of the doleful countenance
has yielded and is lying at her feet, nothing less will serve him
than to set all the powers of hell loose on the occasion. "I fell at
Velléda's feet. ... Hell gave the signal for these terrible nuptials;
the spirits of darkness howled from their abyss, the chaste spouses
of our forefathers turned away their faces, my guardian angel hid his
with his wings and returned to heaven." Even at the supreme moment
this depressing hero is incapable of self-surrender; he is ashamed; he
resembles a boy who, with a feeling compounded of gluttony and fear of
flogging, devours a stolen apple. "My happiness resembled despair, and
any one seeing us in the midst of our rapture would have taken us for
two criminals who had just received their sentence of death. From that
moment I felt that I was stamped with the seal of divine wrath. Thick
darkness spread like a smoke-cloud in my soul; I felt as if a host of
rebellious spirits had suddenly taken possession of it. Thoughts filled
my mind which until this moment had never occurred to me; the language
of hell poured from my lips; I uttered such blasphemies as are heard in
the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth."
It is, thus, on a background of hell-fire that Chateaubriand depicts
the love of the Christian confessor and the heathen prophetess. In
_Atala_, where we have a kindred representation of combined suffering
and pleasure, the insincere anathema against earthly love was not yet
launched.
We come upon much the same idea in one of Alfred de Vigny's youthful
works, _Eloa_, a beautiful and notable poem which describes the
seduction of a charming young angel of the female sex by the Prince
of Darkness. The Satan of _Les Martyrs_ was a revolutionist, but De
Vigny's Satan is hardly to be distinguished from the Eros of the
ancients. Without telling who he is, he ensnares the fair angel with
his personal charms and his eloquence, and draws her with him into the
abyss. He himself describes his power in the following words:
Je suis celui qu'on aime et qu'on ne connaît pas.
Sur l'homme j'ai fondé mon empire de flamme
Dans les désirs du cœur, dans les rêves de l'âme,
Dans les liens des corps, attraits mystérieux,
Dans les trésors du sang, dans les regards des yeux.
C'est moi qui fait parler l'épouse dans ses songes;
La jeune fille heureuse apprend d'heureux mensonges;
Je leur donne des nuits qui consolent des jours,
Je suis le Roi secret des secrètes amours.
We are irresistibly reminded of the song to Eros in the _Antigone_ of
Sophocles.
As the period is now rapidly descending the incline leading to the
conception of Eros as the devil himself, it is only natural that in the
descriptions of "real" love on which it prides itself it should be more
frigid and impotent, more seraphic and platonic than any other age we
are acquainted with. Let us see how the Velléda of the day, Madame de
Krüdener herself, describes love in _Valerie_.
Although _Valerie_ is an imitation of _Werther_, it is in many ways
extremely unlike _Werther_. It is the story of a young Swede, Gustave
Linar by name, who in his childhood learned from his mother "to love
virtue," and who continues to love it until he dies. Along with virtue
he loves Valérie, but Valérie is the wife of the Count, his master and
ideal, and is herself such a quintessence of all the virtues that he
regards her with a reverence which makes desire impossible. Alexander
Stakjev confessed his feelings to Krüdener, but Gustave utters not a
word to the Count, nor does he ever speak of his sufferings to the
woman he loves.[3] Preyed upon by uncomprehended and unavowed love, and
far too well-behaved to shoot himself, he dies of consumption.
This is his style: "O my friend, how criminal of me to have yielded
to a passion which I was well aware would be my destruction! But I
will at least die in the love of virtue and sacred truth; I will not
charge Heaven with my misfortunes, as so many men in my plight do (what
virtue); I will endure without complaint the suffering which I have
brought upon myself, and which I love, although it is killing me. I
will go when the Almighty calls me, burdened with many sins, but not
with that of suicide." (ii. 63.)
Gustave is not a man. It is generally acknowledged that the
portraiture of men is not the strong point of female authors. They
almost invariably depict them as entirely absorbed in their relations
with women. Gustave is, as already observed, a Scandinavian; but
Scandinavians have no reason to be proud of this compatriot, in whom
the vigour of the Northerner is conspicuously absent. The national
colouring of the story is confined almost entirely to the Teutonic
sentimentality in which the descriptions are immersed, and to a
variety of Swedish names, which, it goes without saying, are as a rule
incorrectly spelt. At Venice Gustave gives a fête in Valerie's honour;
the decorations are intended to remind her of the home of her youth,
amongst the birches and pines; when she catches sight of them she
cries: "Ah! c'est Dronnigor" (Drottninggård).
There is nothing characteristically Swedish about Gustave. Really
beautiful in the description of his character is the gleam of youthful
philanthropic enthusiasm shed over his confessions. It seems to him
that in most men's lives the period of love is succeeded by that of
ambition. There is something fine and sincere in the language in which
he tells that the glory others desire is not that which in his eyes has
seemed desirable. "The glory of which I dreamed was won by occupying
one's self with the happiness of all, as love occupies itself with
the happiness of a single individual. It was virtue in the man who
possessed it, before his fellow-men gave it the name of fame." And
he adds: "What has real glory in common with the petty vanity of the
many, with the pitiful contention that one is something because one is
striving hard to be it?" It is strange to find sentiments like these in
a book the fame of which was due to such artifices as were employed to
puff _Valérie_.
The heroine is equipped with all the charms which a lady as
passionately in love with herself as Madame de Krüdener was could
communicate to her own portrait. She is a thorough woman, whilst
the unfortunate Gustave, though quite aware of the foolishness and
hopelessness of his passion, is absolutely unable to burst his bonds
and begin to live the life of a man. He is obliged to content himself
with such humble expressions of his adoration as kissing a child whom
his mistress has kissed on the spot which her lips have touched, or
kissing the outside of the window-pane on the inside of which she is
resting her bare arm during the pause between two dances at a ball, or
pressing her hand and feeling the ring given her by her husband, or
fainting in her presence, so that she is obliged to bathe his brow with
eau-de-Cologne.
A faint perfume of eau-de-Cologne may be said to pervade the whole
story. It is significant that the first service which Valérie asks
Gustave to do her after they have become intimate is to procure her
secretly a little rouge, which her husband objects to her using. With
the odour of eau-de-Cologne is blended an odour of propriety and
veneration which is so powerful that it is almost obnoxious, and a
supernaturalness in the matter of the affections which is both silly
and unbeautiful. Valérie is _enceinte_ when Gustave conceives his
passion for her, but this circumstance has no curative effect on him,
though he lives in intimate companionship with her until her son is
born. They wax enthusiastic together over Ossian and Clarissa Harlowe.
Gustave never feels the slightest jealousy of the Count, nor does the
Count of him. It is with the Count's hand in his that Gustave dies.
Love is, in short, so purified, so unnaturally seraphic, that with its
passion it has also lost its poetry. This is doubly significant when we
happen to know how little seraphic was the life with which this poetess
of love had prepared herself to write her novel, and how cleverly she
herself managed to reconcile the sacred with the more carnal aspects of
love.
Lamartine and his Elvire are the last couple on whose relations we have
time to dwell.
Lamartine's youthful poems treated of love, but of a love so pure
that it was called "une prière à deux." It was depicted with the
transfiguring ideality which is the result of the death of the beloved
one. The poet presses to his lips the crucifix which she kissed before
she died, and the poem _Le Crucifix_ is so soulful that we believe
Lamartine when he tells us in a note appended to it: "I never re-read
these verses." In his novel, _Raphael_, a much later work, he gives us
the real facts of the same love story, and these throw a new light on
the famous poems.
Julie, to give the lady known by the name of Elvire her real name,
is a créole, aged twenty-eight. She is an orphan, and has married a
man of seventy, a famous scientist, that she may have a protector;
but her actual relation to him has never been anything but that of a
daughter to a father. She has an affection of the heart which may at
any time prove fatal. By the Lake of Bourget in Savoy (the lake of
which Lamartine has sung so beautifully), where she is spending the
autumn for the sake of her health, she meets Raphael, the young hero
of the book, a man differing in nothing but name from its author, who
in its pages gives us not only real facts, but even calls his friends
and acquaintances by their real names. He describes himself as he
was then--twenty-four years old, young and poor, solitary and shy,
tender-hearted and given to enthusiasms, already a little _blasé_ from
much dissipation, tired of all the commonplace and dissolute amours in
which he had hitherto indulged.
It cannot be said that Lamartine gave an altogether too unfavourable
description of himself. The delicacy and refinement of Raphael's
feelings was such that his comrades used laughingly to declare that
he was home-sick for heaven. In a somewhat clumsy manner Lamartine
attempts to give us an idea of this refinement: "If he had wielded the
brush, he would have painted the Madonna of Foligno; if the chisel,
he would have sculptured Canova's Psyche. If he had been a poet, he
would have written the lamentations of Job, Tasso's Herminia stanzas,
Shakespeare's moonlight scene in _Romeo and Juliet_, and Lord Byron's
description of Haydee." Fortunately it was not required of him to do
any of these things, as they had been done by others. We know that in
his efforts at a later period in one of the three directions, namely,
as a poet, he did not attain to the level of the masters named.
In _Raphael_ we have a masterly description of a young man's ardent
love, a love which, though it has taken possession of him heart and
soul, is of an almost altogether spiritual nature, partly because its
object inspires such a degree of reverence and compassion that the
senses are not allowed to come into play, partly because the young man,
after leading a loose life with women for whom he has felt no respect,
shudders at the very idea of his relation to this woman, whom he
reveres, becoming one of the same nature with his past amours.
He has had love affairs, but he has never been truly in love before.
It seems to him as if, when she looks at him, there is a remoteness in
her gaze which he has never felt before in human eye. It reminds him
of the gleam of the stars, which has traversed millions of miles of
space. He has a hesitation in approaching her which makes the distance
between them seem impassable. When he at last succeeds in making her
acquaintance, it is the name and the position of a brother which she
gives him, and with this he is contented and happy. No sooner have they
found one another than he feels as if he were relieved from a heavy
burden--the burden of his heart. As soon as he gives it away he learns
what life in all its fulness is. He feels as if he were floating in the
purest ether; his joy is infinite and luminous as the air of heaven.
During the first hours which he spends with her he loses all perception
of time; he is certain that a thousand years spent thus would to him be
so many seconds. He does not feel like a human being, but like a living
hymn of praise.
And this ecstatic mood lasts as long as he breathes the same air with
her. They are happy together during the beautiful summer days, and
prolong their summer into autumn: "Our summer was in ourselves."
We feel that this description of the bliss of young love is a
description of something that really has existed. The young couple are
living not far from the place where Rousseau, as a youth, loved Madame
de Warens. Raphael is rather younger than Julie--he is twenty-four, she
twenty-eight; this gives their relation a certain resemblance to that
between Rousseau and his protectress; but the emotions of Raphael and
Julie are as incorporeal and romantic as those of the other couple were
substantially human.
And not only the happiness produced by the presence of the loved one,
but the pain of separation, the longing for letters, the fever of
expectation when the time of meeting draws near, and the agonies of
parting are described, with many admirable realistic touches, in a
manner worthy of a great writer.
Raphael lives in the country, Julie in Paris. When he takes a walk, his
steps involuntarily turn towards the north, to diminish the distance
which separates him from her. His day contains only one happy hour,
that which brings the postman with her letter. As soon as he hears the
postman's step he is at the window; he meets him at the street door,
hides the letter in his pocket, and hastens with trembling knees to his
room, where he locks himself in to read it in privacy. Later in the
story, when Raphael is in Paris, we have the admirable description of
his wanderings on the winter evenings back and forwards across one of
the Seine bridges, waiting for the moment when the lamp in her window
shall show him that her guests have taken their departure, and that
he is certain to find her alone. Note the blind beggar on the bridge,
into whose tin cup he never forgets to throw his mite; the striking of
the hour and the half-hour by the church clocks; and another delicate
little touch--Raphael's hearing gradually becomes so acute that he
distinguishes the separate chime of each clock in the chorus.
All this is excellent. Unfortunately the novel as a whole is spoiled by
its religious purpose.
The authors of this period could not write of love pure and simple;
they felt obliged to mix religion up with it. Lamartine makes his
lovers go through whole courses of philosophy and theology together.
They hold different opinions, and she is intellectually his superior.
He still retains the beliefs of his childhood. In the house of her
famous husband she has associated with intellectually emancipated men
of science, whose opinions, marked with the stamp of the eighteenth
century, she has imbibed. He and she really belong to different
generations--she to the generation of the empire, he to that of the
monarchy. Faust, when he is catechised by his Gretchen, is obliged to
parry her attempt to convert him by explaining his unbelief to her
in palliating euphemisms; the opposite happens here; Raphael makes
long, fruitless attempts to convert his Julie to faith in God and
Christianity. The first time the innocent youth recommends her to seek
aid from God, he is astonished when, instead of answering him, she
looks sad and indifferent and turns away her face. He timidly asks her
reason for so doing. She answers: "That word distresses me." "What!
the word which signifies life, love, and everything that is good--how
can it distress the most perfect of God's creatures?" &c., &c. Then
she is obliged to explain to him that what he calls _God_ is what she
calls _law_--an infinite greatness, an absolute, inevitable necessity,
something that it is impossible to move with prayers.
To this conviction of hers is due Julie's easy and yet dignified
moral attitude. She says: "I was educated by a philosopher, and in
my husband's house I have lived in the society of free-thinking men,
who have severed themselves entirely from the dogmas and observances
of a church which they have helped to undermine; hence I have no
superstitions and none of the weak-minded scruples which impel most
women to bow their heads under a second yoke, superadded to that which
our consciences impose upon us."
It is Raphael who plays the girl's part when, time after time, he
supplicates a woman of a spirit like this to return to the bosom of the
Roman Catholic Church. "I besought her to seek in a religion of love
and tenderness, in the sacred gloom of our churches, in the mysterious
faith in that Christ who is the God of tears, in genuflections and
prayer, the relief and the comfort which I myself had found in them in
my youth." Raphael's attempt at conversion was not entirely successful;
he himself was satisfied with the result, but a more strictly orthodox
Christian would hardly have been so.
It is love, we are led to understand, which teaches Julie to believe
in God. "There is a God," she said; "there is an infinite love, of
which ours is only one drop, a drop which falls back into the divine
ocean from which we have drawn it. This ocean is God. At this moment I
feel, I see, I understand Him by means of my happiness.... Yes," she
continued, with even more ardour in her glance and voice, "let the
perishable names by which we have called the attraction which draws us
to one another be forgotten. There is only one name which expresses
it--that is God. He has revealed Himself to me in your eyes. God, God,
God!" she called, as if teaching herself a new language; "God is you;
God is what I am to you. We are God."
All this impresses us as having more purpose in it than truth to
nature. Not such is the eloquence of happy love.
Had Julie's husband, the old philosopher, happened to overhear these
effusions, he could have told the lovers that such doctrines and such
emotions, far from being Christian, are pure pantheism. We cannot doubt
that he would have done so with perfect calmness, for he does not
feel the slightest jealousy. He knows that Julie and Raphael write to
each other every day, and he also knows the ethereal nature of their
love. When Raphael comes to Paris, all he says to him is: "Remember
that you have not one friend but two in this house. Julie could not
make a better choice of a brother, nor I of a son." It is comical
that Raphael, for his part, should feel no disquietude concerning
the old man, unless we reckon as such a feeling of regret that he is
drawing near to the grave without any belief in immortality; and it is
characteristic of the period that even the aged scientist is in the end
converted.
The old man has, in a manner, no ground for jealousy. Lamartine has
very naïvely introduced into his novel a piece of realism, which,
while it explains many things, weakens the edifying effect which he
aimed at producing. Julie's reply to Raphael's first confession of
love decides once and for all the nature of their mutual relations.
She says: "I believe only in an invisible God, who has imprinted His
image upon nature, His law upon our instincts, and His morality upon
our reason. Reason, feeling, and conscience are the only revelations I
acknowledge. None of these three oracles of my life would forbid me to
belong to you; my whole soul would prostrate itself at your feet, if
this could purchase your happiness. But are we not more certain of the
spirituality and eternity of our love when it remains on the heights of
pure thought, in regions inaccessible to change and death, than when
it degrades and profanes itself by descending to the base regions of
sensuality?"
It is, we observe, the love that despises the senses which Julie
somewhat affectedly extols. Now, certain as it is that love can
continue to exist even when circumstances forbid its complete
gratification, it is equally certain that renunciation for the sake
of renunciation and of spirituality is contrary to nature. When the
religious reaction set in in Denmark, Ingemann, in his youthful works,
preached such renunciation. The question whether Julie really favoured
the principle, or whether we are not in reality indebted for it to
Lamartine, who admired without practising it, must be left undecided.
In his reminiscences of his love affairs, Lamartine is in the habit
of describing himself as emancipated from all sensual desire. And we
know them all, these love affairs; for the man who, according to his
own account, had always such complete control over his passions, had
very little control over his pen. We know (from his _Confidences_) how
during his meetings with Lucy, the beautiful girl of sixteen, in the
cold frosty weather, he was as cold as the winter night. We remember
the sentence in _Graziella_: "We slept two steps from each other; my
cold indifference protected me." It may be doubtful whether it was
really Julie who enounced the principle of renunciation, but there can
be no doubt of the genuineness of the next speech attributed to her.
She adds, blushing deeply, that the renunciation she demands of him is
imperative--on account of her health; she has medical authority for
what she says; she would leave his arms like a shadow, like a corpse:
"The sacrifice would be the sacrifice not only of my dignity, but of my
life."
It is impossible to deny that there is an extraordinary inconsistency
between this last utterance and those which precede it, and that this
exceedingly practical explanation deprives the spiritual friendship of
much of its spirituality. We seem to come down from the seventh heaven
and feel the solid earth beneath our feet again.
There follow scenes like those in _Valérie_--projects of suicide which
are never carried into execution; nights spent by the lovers in tender
converse, with a thick oaken door between them; rapt, sentimental
ecstasies. This is a love which finds expression only in lingering
looks, languishing that reaches the verge of insanity, sighs that are
almost screams, long silences and endless outpourings--never a caress
or an embrace. Unpleasant, almost offensive, in any case unnatural,
is the manner in which, in this love-story too, our attention is
perpetually drawn to the fact that the lovers keep their vow, that
their love remains platonic. On the one solitary occasion when there
seems to be real danger, there arrives at the critical moment--who?
None other than that estimable old man, Monsieur Bonald, with whose
theories on the subject of woman and of marriage we are acquainted. He
is coming to stay with Julie, arrives at twelve o'clock at night, and
is thus saved the grief of seeing his pupils rebel against order. Even
in his novel, Lamartine does not miss the opportunity of proclaiming
that he was at variance with Bonald, especially as regarded his
doctrine of theocratic government. It became the fashion to disagree
with Bonald. Chateaubriand himself remarks in his _Memoirs_ (iv. 23):
"Monsieur de Bonald was a clever man. His sagacity was mistaken for
genius."
Whenever Julie pities Raphael, he answers her with pious outbursts in
which he compares her and himself to Abélard and Héloïse. "Have I ever
let you feel that I desire ought else than to share this suffering with
you? Does it not make both of us voluntary and pure victims? Is not
this the eternal burnt-offering of love, which has perhaps not been
offered before the eyes of the angels since the days of Héloïse until
now?"
When, after studying _Raphael_, we re-read Lamartine's poems to Elvire,
we have a new key to the understanding of the idealism and vagueness
of this poetic love, which, obliged to renounce sensual pleasures,
pretends that the corporeal world does not exist for it. A distinction
must, however, be drawn between the later poems and some written much
earlier and in a perfectly different tone, a tone which recalls the
eighteenth century. Take as examples the poems _À Elvire_ (which is in
reality addressed to _Graziella_) and _Sapho_.
We have now enough of examples; let us consider to what conclusion
they have led us. Choosing a simple emotion, but one of those which
every school of literature sets itself to express and interpret, and
which each expresses and interprets in a characteristic manner, we
have examined a number of different specimens of the manner in which
it is interpreted by this particular school. Here, as in all the
other domains of literature which we have inspected, we have found
the natural side of life ignored, or concealed, or blackened, or
represented as something to be ashamed of. Chateaubriand and Madame
de Krüdener seek out cases in which love is considered to be criminal
and sinful, and either describe the triumphant yells of the powers of
hell when the hero succumbs or the jubilations of the principalities
and powers when the infamy is not perpetrated. We have the same
paraphernalia in Alfred de Vigny's writings:
Les Chérubins brûlants qu'enveloppent six ailes,
Les tendres Séraphins, Dieux des amours fidèles,
Les Trônes, les Vertus, les Princes, les Ardeurs,
Les Dominations, les Gardiens, les Splendeurs,
Et les Rêves pieux, et les saintes Louanges,
Et tous les Anges purs, et tous les grands Archanges.
De Vigny makes Satan speak like Eros, that is to say, Eros like Satan.
Lamartine enthrones love in his poetry as seraphic, as emancipated from
all earthly passion, but in _Raphael_ describes it as what it really
was, ethereal against its will--which, however, only adds to the merit
of the lovers and provides angels and burnt-offerings, these latter of
a sweet savour unknown since the days of poor Abélard.
And below everything there is an under-current of hypocrisy. Eudore,
who would have us believe that he is made utterly miserable by
Velléda's passion, is nevertheless secretly flattered by her having cut
her white throat for his sake. He bewails his fall in expressions which
convey the idea that he feels tempted to fall again. The authoress of
_Valerie_ proclaims the moral purity of her heroine in the market-place
and clamours of chastity and renunciation in all the newspapers at a
time when she herself is peculiarly unfit to be a teacher of morality.
Lamartine, as novelist, naïvely gives an explanation of his relations
with Elvire which differs entirely from the impression of them that
the public had naturally gathered from the ethereal ecstasies of _Les
Méditations_, and ends by smothering the real beauties of his literary
art in languid, lachrymose sentimentality.
In the representation of love, as in everything else, men aimed
at supernaturalness, and only succeeded in either crippling or
hypocritically ignoring nature.[4]
[1]
Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dich,
So muss ich weinen bitterlich.
[2] (F. L. Liebenberg, _Bidrag til den Oehlenschlägerske Litteraturs
Historie_, i 183. Genoveva "sees Christ in him."
[3] In two successive editions of his _Französische
Litteraturgeschichte_, Julian Schmidt, in giving an account of
_Valérie_, has made the mistake of asserting that Gustave confesses to
the husband.
[4] Sources: Lamartine, _Graziella; Raphael; Les Confidences;
Mémoires_; Madame de Krüdener, _Valérie_; Chateaubriand, _Les Martyrs_,
ix., x.