MAIN CURRENTS IN
NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE
BY
GEORGE BRANDES
IN SIX VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED
I
THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
MCMVI
To the Memory
of
HANS BRÖCHNER
[Illustration: ROUSSEAU]
INTRODUCTION
It is my intention in the present work to trace the outlines of a
psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century by means of the
study of certain main groups and movements in European literature. The
stormy year 1848, a historical turning-point, and hence a break, is
the limit to which I purpose following the process of development. The
period between the beginning and the middle of the century presents
the spectacle of many scattered and apparently disconnected literary
efforts and phenomena. But he who carefully observes the main currents
of literature perceives that their movements are all conditioned
by one great leading movement with its ebb and flow, namely, the
gradual fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the
preceding century, and the return of the idea of progress in new, ever
higher-mounting waves.
The central subject of this work is, then, the reaction in the first
decades of the nineteenth century against the literature of the
eighteenth, and the vanquishment of that reaction. This historic
incident is of European interest, and can only be understood by a
comparative study of European literature. Such a study I purpose
attempting by simultaneously tracing the course of the most important
movements in French, German, and English literature. The comparative
view possesses the double advantage of bringing foreign literature so
near to us that we can assimilate it, and of removing our own until
we are enabled to see it in its true perspective. We neither see what
is too near the eye nor what is too far away from it. The scientific
view of literature provides us with a telescope of which the one
end magnifies and the other diminishes; it must be so focussed as to
remedy the illusions of unassisted eyesight. The different nations
have hitherto stood so remote from each other, as far as literature is
concerned, that they have only to a very limited extent been able to
benefit by each other's productions. For an image of the position as it
is, or was, we must go back to the old fable of the fox and the stork.
Every one knows that the fox, having invited the stork to dinner,
arranged all his dainties upon a flat dish from which the stork with
his long bill could pick up little or nothing. We also know how the
stork revenged himself. He served his delicacies in a tall vase with
a long and slender neck, down which it was easy for him to thrust his
bill, but which made it impossible for the fox, with his sharp muzzle,
to get anything. The various nations have long played fox and stork in
this fashion. It has been and is a great literary problem how to place
the contents of the stork's larder upon the fox's table, and _vice
versâ_.
Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the
study, the history of the soul. A book which belongs to the literature
of a nation, be it romance, drama, or historical work, is a gallery of
character portraits, a storehouse of feelings and thoughts. The more
momentous the feelings, the greater, clearer, and wider the thoughts,
the more remarkable and at the same time representative the characters,
so much the greater is the historical value of the book, so much the
more clearly does it reveal to us what was really happening in men's
minds in a given country at a given period.
Regarded from the merely æsthetic point of view as a work of art, a
book is a self-contained, self-existent whole, without any connection
with the surrounding world. But looked at from the historical point of
view, a book, even though it may be a perfect, complete work of art,
is only a piece cut out of an endlessly continuous web. Æsthetically
considered, its idea, the main thought inspiring it, may satisfactorily
explain it, without any cognisance taken of its author or its
environment as an organism; but historically considered, it implies,
as the effect implies the cause, the intellectual idiosyncrasy of its
author, which asserts itself in all his productions, which conditions
this particular book, and some understanding of which is indispensable
to its comprehension. The intellectual idiosyncrasy of the author,
again, we cannot comprehend without some acquaintance with the
intellects which influenced his development, the spiritual atmosphere
which he breathed.
The intellectual phenomena which condition, elucidate, and explain each
other, fall of themselves into natural groups.
What I shall describe is a historical movement partaking of the form
and character of a drama. The six different literary groups it is
my intention to represent may be looked on as six acts of a great
play. In the first group, the French Emigrant Literature inspired by
Rousseau, the reaction begins; but here the reactionary are still
everywhere mingled with the revolutionary currents. In the second
group, the semi-Catholic Romantic school of Germany, the reaction
is on the increase; it is more vigorous and holds itself more aloof
from the contemporary struggle for progress and liberty. The third
group, consisting of such men as Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais in his
strictly orthodox period, Lamartine and Victor Hugo when they (after
the restoration of the monarchy) were still mainstays of the Legitimist
and clerical party, represents the militant, triumphant reaction. Byron
and his English contemporaries form the fourth group. It is this one
man, Byron, who produces the revulsion in the great drama. The Greek
war of liberation breaks out, a revivifying breeze blows over Europe,
Byron falls like a hero in the cause of Greece, and his death makes
a tremendous impression on all the productive minds of the Continent.
Shortly before the Revolution of July a change of front occurs among
the great authors of France; they form the French Romantic school,
which is our fifth group, a new Liberal movement on the roll of whose
adherents we find such names as Lamennais, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset,
George Sand, &c. The movement passes from France into Germany, and in
that country also Liberal ideas are victorious. The writers forming the
sixth and last group which I shall depict, Young Germany, are inspired
by the ideas of the Greek war of liberation and the Revolution of July,
and, like the French authors, see in Byron's great shade the leader
of the Liberal movement. The authors of Young Germany, Heine, Börne,
Gutzkow, Ruge, Feuerbach, &c., prepare, together with the contemporary
French writers, the great upheaval of 1848.
_A household god made of wax, that had been carelessly
left standing beside a fire in which precious Campanian
vases were bakings began to melt_.
_It addressed bitter complaints to the element. "See," it
said, "how cruelly you treat me! To these things you give
durability, me you destroy_."
_But the fire answered: "You have nothing to complain
of but your own nature. As for my I am fire, always and
everywhere_."
_W. HEINSE_.
THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE
CONTENTS
I. CHATEAUBRIAND
II. ROUSSEAU
III. WERTHER
IV. RENÉ
V. OBERMANN
VI. NODIER
VII. CONSTANT: "ON RELIGION"--"ADOLPHE"
VIII. MADAME DE STAËL: "DELPHINE"
IX. EXILE
X. "CORINNE"
XI. ATTACK UPON NATIONAL AND PROTESTANT PREJUDICES
XII. NEW CONCEPTION OF THE ANTIQUE
XIII. DE L'ALLEMAGNE
XIV. BARANTE
XV. CONCLUSION
LIST OF PORTRAITS
J. J. ROUSSEAU
DE SÉNANCOUR
CHARLES NODIER
BENJAMIN CONSTANT
MADAME DE STAËL
WINCKELMANN
THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE
The passage of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century was
accompanied in France by social and political disturbances of hitherto
unknown force and magnitude. The new seed sown by the great ideas
and events of the Revolution at first made little or no growth in
literature. It was unable to shoot up, for, with but brief interval
between, two destroying tyrannies, the dictatorships of the Convention
and of the Empire, passed over France, annihilating all personal
freedom as they went. The first terrorism cowed, exiled, or guillotined
all whose political colouring did not accurately match the then
prevailing shade of popular opinion. Aristocracy, royal family, priests
and Girondists alike succumbed to it, and men fled to the quiet of
Switzerland or the lonely prairies of North America to escape the
fate which had destroyed their nearest and threatened themselves.
The second terrorism persecuted, imprisoned, shot, or exiled all
who would not submit to being silenced (a silence which might only
be broken by cheers for the Emperor). Legitimists and Republicans,
Constitutionalists and Liberals, philosophers and poets were crushed
under the all-levelling roller, unless they preferred, scattered in
every direction, to seek a refuge beyond the boundaries of the empire.
No easy matter in those days, for the empire followed swiftly upon
their heels, rapidly growing, swallowing Germany and Italy in great
gulps, until no place seemed secure from its armies, which overtook
fugitives even in Moscow.
During both these great despotisms it was only far from Paris, in
lonely country places where he lived a life of death-like stillness,
or beyond the frontier, in Switzerland, Germany, England, or North
America, that the French man of letters pursued his calling. Only in
such places could the independent intellects of France exist, and it
is by independent intellects alone that a literature can be founded
or developed. The first French literary group of the present century,
then, a group brought together from all points of the compass, is
distinguished by its oppositionist tendency. I do not mean that its
members are united on certain fundamental principles, for they are
often utterly at variance, but they are all united by their hatred of
the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic autocracy. Whatever they may
originally have been, and whatever they become after the restoration
of the monarchy, whether literary reformers, reactionary Legitimists,
or members of the Liberal Opposition, they are at the beginning of
the century one and all opposed to the prevailing order of things.
Another thing they all have in common is their difficult position as
heirs of the eighteenth century, whose last bequest to them is that
Empire against which they protest. Some of them would fain renounce
the inheritance and its liabilities, others are ready to accept it if
they can repudiate the liabilities, all feel that the intellectual
development of the new century must be based upon other assumptions
than that of the old. The folding-doors of the nineteenth century open;
they stand gazing in intently; they have a presentiment of what they
are to see, and believe they see it, and the new shapes itself for each
and is interpreted by each according to his gifts and desires. Thus as
a body there is something premonitory, precursory about them: they are
the bearers of the spirit of the new age.
There was a wider sphere for a literary revival in France than in
any other European country, for in France in the eighteenth century
literary art had developed into formalism. Social and academic
culture had laced it in the iron corset of so-called good taste, into
stiff, meagre, regulation proportions. France has long presented
the contradiction of being a country with a feverish desire for
change in all external arrangements, unable, once it determines to
gratify this desire, to keep within the bounds of moderation, and of
being at the same time remarkably stable in everything that regards
literature--acknowledging authority, maintaining an academy, and
placing rule and regularity above everything. Frenchmen had instituted
a Republic and overturned Christianity before it occurred to them
to dispute the authority of Boileau. Voltaire, who turns tradition
upside down and uses tragedy as a weapon against the very powers whose
chief support it had been, namely the autocracy and the Church, never
ventures to allow his action to last more than twenty-four hours, or
to pass in two different places in the same play. He, who has little
respect for anything in heaven or earth, respects the uniform caesura
of the Alexandrine.
It was another people than the French, a people to whom Voltaire
had scornfully wished more wit and fewer consonants, who remodelled
literature and re-created poetry, while Frenchmen were overturning
political systems and customs. The Germans of that day, of whom the
French scarcely knew more than that, in humble, patriarchal submission
to their petty princes, they drank their beer, smoked their pipes, and
ate their _sauer-kraut_ in the corner by the stove, made far greater
conquests in the intellectual world than Frenchmen achieved in the
geographical. Of all the nations of Europe none save the Germans had
had their literary blossoming time in the eighteenth century. It was
the second half of that century which witnessed the notable development
of poetry between Lessing and Goethe, and the energetic progress of
metaphysics between Kant and Schelling. For in Germany nothing had been
free save thought.
The French literature of the beginning of the century is, naturally,
influenced by Germany, the more so as the nations now first begin to
enter into unbroken intellectual communion. The great upheavals, the
wars of the Republic and the Empire, jostled the peoples of Europe
together, and made them acquainted with each other. But the men most
profoundly influenced by foreign surroundings were those for whom
these great events meant long, in some cases life-long, exile. The
influence of the foreign spirit, only fleeting as far as the soldier
was concerned, was lasting and momentous in the case of the _émigré_.
Exiled Frenchmen were obliged to acquire a more than superficial
acquaintance with foreign tongues, if for no other reason, in order to
be able to give French lessons in the country of their adoption. It
was the intelligent _émigré_ who diffused knowledge of the character
and culture of other lands throughout France, and in seeking a general
designation for the literary phenomena of this period, it would
scarcely be possible to find a better than the one I have adopted: "The
Emigrant Literature."
The name must not be taken for more than it is--a name--for it would be
foolish not to class along with the works of _émigrés_ proper, kindred
writings by authors who, though they did not live in Paris, perhaps
not even in France, yet were not exiles; and, on the other hand, some
of the works written by _émigrés_ are distinctly not products of
the renovating and fertilising literary movement, but belong to the
anti-liberal literature of the Restoration period.
Nevertheless the name may fitly be applied to the first group of
French books which ushers in the century. The émigré\ as already
remarked, inevitably belongs to the opposition. But the character of
his opposition varies, according to whether it is the Reign of Terror
or the Empire to which he objects, and from the tyranny of which he has
escaped. Frequently he has fled from both, in which case the motive
of his opposition is of a compound nature. He possibly sympathised
with the Revolution in its early stage as curtailing the power of the
monarchy, and his desire may be a moderate republic; in this case he
will be inspired by a more passionate ill-will towards the Empire than
towards the old Reign of Terror. Whatever the nature of the compound, a
double current is discernible in the emigrant literature.
Its direct reaction is against certain mental characteristics of the
eighteenth century, its dry rationalism, its taboo of emotion and
fancy, its misunderstanding of history, its ignoring of legitimate
national peculiarities, its colourless view of nature, and its mistaken
conception of religions as being conscious frauds. But there is also
an unmistakable undercurrent in the direction of the main stream
of the eighteenth century; all the authors carry on the great war
against petrified tradition, some only in the domain of literature,
others in each and every intellectual domain. They are all daring,
enterprising natures, and for none of them has the word Liberty lost
its electrifying power. Even Chateaubriand, who in politics and
religion represents the extreme Right of the group, and who in some of
his writings is positively reactionary, takes "_Liberty_ and Honour"
as his motto; which explains his finally going over to the Opposition.
The double current is everywhere discernible, in Chateaubriand, in
Sénancour, in Constant, in Mme. de Staël, in Barante, Nodier, &c.,
and to this subtle correlation of reaction and progress I shall draw
attention from the first.
In speaking of the spirit of the eighteenth century it is generally
Voltaire's name which rises to our lips. It is he who in most men's
minds embodies and represents the whole period; and in as far as the
_émigrés_ bring about a revulsion against him, they may certainly
be said to represent the reaction against the preceding century.
Even those among them who are closely related to him intellectually,
compulsorily join in the reaction against him, compelled, that is to
say, by the spirit of the age; as, for instance, Constant in his book
_On Religion_. But among the writers of the eighteenth century there
is one who was Voltaire's rival, who is almost his equal, and whose
works, moreover, in a much higher degree than Voltaire's, point to an
age far ahead of that in which they were written. This man in many
ways inspires the Emigrant Literature, and in as far as it descends
from Rousseau, and to a certain extent perpetuates his influence, it
may be said to perpetuate the preceding century and the Revolution. It
is astonishing to what an extent the great literary movements in all
the principal countries of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth
century were influenced by Rousseau. Among his spiritual progeny in
France in the eighteenth century had been men so unlike each other as
St. Pierre, Diderot, and Robespierre, and in Germany geniuses and men
of talent like Herder, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean
Paul. In the rising age he influences, among others, Chateaubriand,
Mme. de Staël, and later, George Sand, in France; in Germany, Tieck;
and in England, Byron. Voltaire influences minds in general, Rousseau
has a special power over productive talents, over authors. These two
great men exercised an alternating influence upon posterity well-nigh
into our own day, when both have been supplanted by Diderot. At the
close of last century, Voltaire yielded his sceptre to Rousseau; fifty
years later his name returned to honour in France; and now in some
of the most eminent writers of that country--take Ernest Renan as an
instance--a twofold intellectual tendency is discernible, something
of Rousseau's spirit combined with something of Voltaire's. But it is
in the writings of Rousseau alone that the great spiritual streams
which flow from other countries into France at the beginning of the
nineteenth century have their source, and to Rousseau is it due that
the literature produced by Frenchmen living in remote provinces or
foreign countries, in spite of its antagonism to the spirit which
produced and upheld the imperial despotism, remained in touch with the
eighteenth century, and was based upon originally French theories.
I
CHATEAUBRIAND
The year 1800 was the first to produce a book bearing the imprint of
the new era, a work small in size, but great in significance and mighty
in the impression it made. _Atala_ took the French public by storm in
a way which no book had done since the days of _Paul and Virginia_. It
was a romance of the plains and mysterious forests of North America,
with a strong, strange aroma of the untilled soil from which it
sprang; it glowed with rich foreign colouring, and with the fiercer
glow of consuming passion. The history of a repressed, and therefore
overpowering and fatal love, was depicted upon a background of wild
Indian life, the effect of the whole being heightened by a varnish of
Roman Catholic piety.
This story of the love and death of a Christian Indian girl was so
admired that its principal characters were soon to be seen adorning
the walls of French inns in the form of coloured prints, while their
waxen images were sold on the quays of Paris, as those of Christ and
the Virgin usually are in Catholic countries. At one of the suburban
theatres the heroine figured in savage attire with cock's feathers
in her hair, and a farce was given at the _Théâtre des Variétés_ in
which a school girl and boy, who had eloped, talked of nothing but
alligators, storks, and virgin forests in the style of _Atala_. A
parody published under the title of "_Ah! là! là_!" substituted for the
long, gorgeous description of Mississippi scenery an equally lengthy
and detailed description of a potato patch--so strange did it seem at
that day that an author should devote several pages to the description
of natural scenery. But though parodies, jests, and caricatures rained
upon the author, he was not to be pitied, such things being symptoms
of fame. With one bound he had risen from complete obscurity to the
rank of a celebrity. His name was upon all lips, the name of François
René de Chateaubriand.
The youngest of ten children, he was born of an ancient and noble house
in St. Malo, Brittany. His father was a stern, dry, unsociable and
silent man, whose one passion was his pride of race; while his mother,
a little, plain, restless, discontented woman, was God-fearing to the
highest degree, a church-goer and a patroness of priests. The son
inherited a mixture of both natures.
Sternly brought up in a home where, as he himself expressed it, the
father was the terror and the mother the scourge of the household, he
was reserved and shy, an obstinate, excitable, melancholy child, early
familiar with the unrest of the sea and the music of its storms, never
reconciled to the discomfort and coldness of his home. His sister
Lucile, the nearest him in age, was his one friend and confidante. Like
him, she was of a morbid and passionate temperament, year by year more
prone, like Rousseau, to suspect every one of conspiracy against her,
and to regard herself as persecuted. In her childhood it was to her
brother, in later life to religion, that she turned for protection in
these troubles and dangers. At first plain and shy, like her brother,
she afterwards became very beautiful; with her pale face and dark
hair she was like a lovely angel of death. She passed the greater
part of her life in convents; was passionate in her sisterly love,
and passionately Catholic; she had considerable poetic talent, and in
shyness and romantic excitability she seems to have been the feminine
counterpart of her brother. Another sister, Julie, having passed her
youth as a gay woman of the world, ended her life in the most saintly
self-renunciation. The tendency towards Catholicism seems to have run
in the blood of the whole family.
The great constraint of young Chateaubriand's upbringing induced in
him a wild longing to be free and his own master, while the perpetual
surveillance under which he suffered created an overwhelming,
misanthropic desire for solitude. When he ran alone down the stairs of
the old manor-house, or went out with his gun, he felt all the passions
boiling and seething within him in wild ecstasy at being able to dream
and long unrestrainedly. Ill at ease in the society of others, he
plunged when alone into dreams of happiness and ambition, the dreams of
a poet. In this half-sensuous, half-spiritual dreaming and longing, he
created the image of a supernaturally charming woman, a youthful queen,
bedecked with flowers and jewels, whom he loved and by whom he was
beloved in the balmy, moonlit nights of Naples or Sicily. To awake from
these dreams and realise the insignificant little Breton that he was,
awkward, unknown, poor and possibly without talent, was torture to him.
The contrast between what he was and what he longed to be overwhelmed
him.
He was at first intended for the navy, but his unconquerable aversion
to discipline proved an insurmountable obstacle, and his thoughts
turned to the Church, from which, however, a conviction of his
unfitness for a life of renunciation made him draw back. In the depth
of his despondency he attempted to commit suicide. An irrevocable
family decision put an end to his vacillation; he was given a
commission as sub-lieutenant in the army, and found the life to his
liking. As a cadet of a noble family he was presented to Louis XVI.,
at whose court he witnessed the last glimmer of the old splendour and
ceremony of royalty. Two years later the Revolution broke out, and in
1790 rank, titles, and feudal rights were abolished. Chateaubriand
gave up his commission, and, as no occupation offered itself under the
new order, or disorder, he conceived the fantastic plan of travelling
to America to discover the North-West Passage. Without any of the
requisite information, without interest or money, he was inevitably
soon obliged to abandon this project. But if he did not find the
North-West Passage, he did discover a new race, fresh conditions,
and new scenery. In his early youth, after reading Rousseau, he had
conceived the idea of writing the Epic of Primitive Man, a description
of the ways of the savages of whom he knew nothing. Now he was upon
their own soil, in their world, and though they were not as untouched
by civilisation as he had imagined, it was not difficult to reconstruct
their original condition. The first impression he received of them
was undeniably a strange one. On the way from Albany to Niagara, when
his guide led him for the first time into the virgin forest, he was
seized by one of those transports of delight in his independence which
he had felt in his early youth when he went hunting in Brittany. He
wandered from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to himself:
"Here are no roads, no towns, no monarchies, no republics, no men."
Imagining himself to be alone in the forest, he suddenly came upon a
score of half-naked, painted savages with ravens' feathers in their
hair and rings in their noses, who--marvellous to relate!--were dancing
quadrilles to the sounds of a violin played by a little powdered and
frizzed Frenchman, once kitchen-boy to a French general, now retained
as dancing-master by these savages for a consideration of beaver-skins
and bear-hams. What a humiliating introduction to primitive life for a
pupil of Rousseau! Subsequent impressions were, fortunately, simpler
and more beautiful than this. Chateaubriand purchased clothes and
weapons from the Indians, and lived their life for some weeks at least.
He was presented to the Sachem, or chief, of the Onondagas (as Byron
at a later period was presented to Ali Pasha); he rode through the
country, coming here and there upon little European houses, with their
pianos and mirrors, close to the huts of the Iroquois; he saw the Falls
of Niagara; and in two charming Florida girls found the models for his
famous characters, Atala and Celuta.
It was in America that Chateaubriand planned his two brilliant short
tales, _Atala_ and _René_, and also the long, somewhat slovenly work
of which they form part, _Les Natchez_, a great romance dealing with
the destruction of an Indian tribe in its struggle with the whites.
_Atala_ was the first to be completed. After a brief stay in France,
where he arrived in January 1792, recalled by the news of the fall
of the monarchy and the dangerous position of Louis XVI., he again
emigrated, this time to London. He made the first rough drafts of
_Atala_ and _René_ sitting under the trees in Kensington Gardens, and
when he joined the emigrant army on the Rhine, his knapsack contained
more manuscript than linen. _Atala_ was revised during the halts of
the army, and repacked in his knapsack when the march was resumed,
his comrades teasing him by tearing the protruding leaves. In the
action in which he was wounded in the thigh by a splinter of shell,
_Atala_ proved the means of saving his life, for two spent bullets
glanced off his knapsack. He arrived at Brussels after the destruction
of the emigrant army, wounded, emaciated, and ill with fever; his
brother, with wife and father-in-law, having meanwhile perished on
the scaffold in Paris. His mother and two sisters, of whom Lucile was
one, had been imprisoned for a time after his flight. In London, in
1797, he published his _Essai historique sur les Revolutions_, which
was written in a comparatively liberal and, as regards religion, a
distinctly sceptical spirit. It was the death of his mother, he tells
us, which led him back to Christianity, but the reactionary spirit of
the times probably contributed quite as much to his change of attitude,
and when he returned to France in 1800, after Bonaparte had quelled
the Revolution, he carried with him his great work, _Le Génie du
Christianisme_, in which _René_ was included, and the publication of
which coincided with Bonaparte's restoration of Christian worship in
France. The book harmonised too well with the plans of the First Consul
not to bring its author into favour with that autocrat; Chateaubriand,
however, broke with his government after the judicial murder of the Duc
d'Enghien in 1804.
These are the principal incidents in the youthful career of the man
who became famous in 1800 as the author of _Atala_. His character
was even more remarkable than his career. High-spirited, ambitious,
vain, and shy, perpetually wavering in his faith in his own powers,
he was not only endowed with the self-consciousness of genius, but
with an egotism which ignored with absolute indifference all that did
not immediately concern himself. He came too late into the world, and
was educated under too peculiar circumstances, to have faith in the
Revolution or the eighteenth century philosophy which partly inspired
it. He came into the world too soon to make acquaintance with the
science of the nineteenth century, and through it to win a new faith
and a new standpoint. He therefore became a kind of Nihilist in the
service of the past, a spirit who, as he repeatedly observes, believed
in nothing. He adds, when he remembers to do so, "except religion"; but
a man is, according to his nature, either a believer or a sceptic, and
the idea that it is possible to be a believer in the matter of religion
when one believes in nothing else, is a mere delusion, to which the
half-educated are specially liable.
Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ are full of the sort of tirade on the
vanity of name and fame which we so often meet with in Byron. There is
undoubtedly a good deal of affectation in these outbreaks, but they
nevertheless betray genuine ennui and persistent melancholy.
"Unable to believe in anything except religion, I am distrustful of
all else.... The trivial and ridiculous side of things is always the
first to show itself to me. In reality neither great geniuses nor great
deeds exist for me.... In politics the warmth of my conviction does not
outlast my speech or pamphlet.... In the whole history of the world I
do not know a fame that could tempt me. If the greatest honour in the
world lay at my feet and I had but to stoop and take it up, I would not
take the trouble. If I had been my own creator, I should probably have
made myself a woman, out of passion for the sex; or if I had chosen to
be a man, I would first of all have bestowed beauty upon myself; then,
to provide against ennui, my worst enemy, I would have been a great
but unknown artist, using my talent for myself alone. If we set aside
all humbug and examine into what it is that gives life real worth, we
find only two things of value, religion in combination with talent,
and love in combination with youth, that is to say the future and the
present; all the rest is not worth the trouble of thinking about.... I
have no belief in anything except religion. If I had been a shepherd or
a king, what should I have done with my staff or sceptre? I should have
been equally weary of glory and genius, work and rest, prosperity and
adversity. Everything irks me. I drag my weariness painfully after me
all day long, and yawn my life away (_et je vais partout bâillant ma
vie_)."[1]
How much passion had he not wasted upon fantastic imaginings and poetic
dreams before he was reduced to this utter boredom! In _Atala_ the
passion still wells up like a hot spring, and its spray stings and
scalds.
The old Indian, Chactas, tells the story of his youth to a young
Frenchman to whom Chateaubriand has given his own second name, René.
Chactas, taken captive by a hostile tribe, is condemned to death upon
the pyre. The daughter of the chief of the tribe takes a fancy to him
and approaches the place where he lies bound. He mistakes her for
the maiden whose part it is to solace the prisoner in the last hour
before the consummation of the death sentence; but her intention is to
release, not to console. He conceives a sudden passion for her, and
entreats her to fly with him and be his; she refuses, and, delayed by
her opposition, he is recaptured. He is already adorned for the pyre,
crowned with flowers, his face painted blue and red, and beads attached
to his ears, when Atala delivers him for the second time and escapes
with him. The greater part of the book describes this flight, Chactas's
desire, and the mingling of passion and reserve in Atala which makes
her constantly vacillate between resistance and surrender. Her
behaviour is explained when she tells Chactas that her mother, who was
seduced by a white man, had her baptized and made her swear to remain
unwed. In her anguish at the vow and her despair of being able to keep
it, she takes poison, and dies in her lover's arms, comforted by the
old missionary in whose hut the pair have taken shelter.
A full impression of the burning passion and lyrical exaltation of
the book can only be gained by reading it, nor can we obtain any idea
from descriptions and quotations of the power with which the wonderful
scenery is described. It is an easy matter, however, to show how much
and how instinctively Chateaubriand relied upon a mingling of the
terrible with the erotic to obtain his effects. In the principal love
scene we have not only a lavish musical accompaniment of the rattle
of snakes, the howling of wolves, the roaring of bears and jaguars,
but also a storm which shatters the trees, and impenetrable darkness,
torn by flash upon flash of the lightning which finally sets fire to
the forest. Round about the lovers the pines are blazing like wedding
torches, and Atala is about to yield when a warning flash strikes
the ground at her feet. It is after this she takes poison, and the
burning passion of her last words to Chactas are in harmony with the
conflagration of the forest:
"What torture to see thee at my side, far from all mankind, in these
profound solitudes, and to feel an invincible barrier between thee
and me! To pass my life at thy feet, to wait upon thee as thy slave,
to prepare thy repast and thy couch in some forgotten corner of the
universe would have been my supreme happiness. This bliss I had
actually attained to, but could not enjoy. What plans have I not
planned! what dreams have I not dreamed! Sometimes, looking upon thee,
I have been tempted to form desires as wild as they were guilty. I have
sometimes wished that thou and I were the only living creatures on
earth; sometimes, conscious of a divinity which arrested my horrible
transports, I have wished that divinity annihilated, that, clasped in
thy arms, I might fall from abyss to abyss amid the ruins of God and
the world."
Remarkable as these outbursts of irresistible passion are, and novel as
is the scenery which throws them into relief, we feel that both would
have been impossible if Rousseau had never lived, and if his literary
work had not been carried on by another and greater intellect of
another nationality.
[1] _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_, vol. i. p. 207-451; vol. ii. p. 129.
II
ROUSSEAU
Rousseau's chief work as an imaginative writer is _La Nouvelle Héloïse_.
The novelty of the book lay, in the first instance, in the fact that it
gave the death-blow to gallantry, and, consequently, to the theory of
the French classical period on the subject of the emotions. This theory
was that all noble, fine emotions, and chief among them love, were the
products of civilisation. It is obvious enough that a certain degree of
civilisation was necessary before such a sentiment as love could arise.
Until they wore womanly garb women did not exist, but only females, and
until there were women there was no love. From this perfectly correct
idea had resulted (in the pre-Rousseau period) the belief that the
veiling of passion ennobled it and made it worthy. The more it could be
shrouded in circumlocutions, hints, and suggestions, the less coarse it
was. The morality and the literature of that period were the products
of social culture, a culture confined to the highest circles. We need
but read Marivaux's plays to find literary evidence of the extent to
which courtly formality and refined sentiment were preferred to nature
and passion. Marivaux's lovers are always each other's equals in
culture, and, what is of still greater importance, in rank. We never
find, as in the dramas of our century, the aristocratic lady who loves
a man of lower social station, nor such a character, for instance,
as Ruy Blas, the lackey who finds favour in the eyes of a Queen. In
Marivaux, if a gentleman is disguised as a lackey, or a young lady as
a waiting-maid, they always divine each other immediately in spite of
their disguise. Their conversation is an incessant pursuit and flight,
advance and retreat; it is full of ambiguities and hints and evasions,
masked confessions and suppressed sighs, love-sickness expressed in a
becomingly conventional manner. In Rousseau's eyes these mannerisms are
as ridiculous as they are artificial. He prefers love, like everything
else, in its natural state, and to him love in its natural state is a
violent, irresistible passion. In his books we are very far removed
from those scenes in Marivaux in which the kneeling lover never forgets
to preserve a graceful attitude while pressing the tips of a glove to
his lips. For all his chivalry and virtue, St. Preux is an electric
battery charged with passion; the first kiss in the Grove of Clarens
produces the shock, the conflagration of a thunderbolt; and when
Julie, bending towards St. Preux and kissing him, swoons away, it is
no coquettish faint of the days of the periwig, but the effect of the
overwhelming might of passion upon a young and healthy child of nature.
The second novelty in the book is the inequality in station of the hero
and heroine. Julie is the daughter of a nobleman, St. Preux is a poor
tutor, a plebeian. Here, as in the _Sorrows of Werther_, the passion
of love is connected with the equality-loving plebeian's determination
to make a name for himself. This is no chance connection, for passion
creates equality, whereas love in fashionable society has a tendency to
develop into gallantry.
A third significant feature in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ is that, just as
we have passion in place of gallantry and inequality of station in
place of similarity of rank, we have also the moral conviction of the
sanctity of marriage in place of that honour grounded on aristocratic
pride and self-respect, which stood for virtue in fashionable
literature. This word, Virtue, little in vogue until now, became with
Rousseau and his school a watchword which was in perfect harmony with
their other watchword, Nature; for to Rousseau virtue was a natural
condition. Following the example of society, French literature had
been making merry at the expense of marriage; Rousseau, therefore,
defied the spirit of the times by writing a book in its honour. His
heroine returns the passion of her lover, but marries another, to
whom she remains faithful. Here, as in _Werther_, the lover proper
loses the maiden, who is wedded to a Monsieur Wolmar (the Albert of
_Werther_ and the Edward of Kierkegaard's _Diary of a Seducer_), a man
as irreproachable as he is uninteresting. The moral conviction which
is vindicated and glorified in Rousseau as Virtue, is the same as that
which in Chateaubriand, under the influence of the religious reaction,
takes the form of a binding religious vow.
Note, finally, that the watchword Nature is to be taken in its literal
meaning. For the first time, out of England, we have the genuine
feeling for nature in fiction, superseding love-making in drawing-rooms
and gardens. Under Louis XV. and the Regency, people passed their
time (in real life as well as in books) in boudoirs, where light
conversation and light morals were in place. The rooms, like the verses
of Voltaire's _Poesies Fugitives_, were adorned with endless multitudes
of Cupids and Graces. In the gardens goat-footed Pans embraced slender
white nymphs by the side of artificial fountains. In their pictures
of the _fêtes-champêtres_ of those days, Watteau and the less-gifted
Boucher and Lancret have preserved for us these gardens with their
shady walks and quiet corners, where courtly gentlemen and gay ladies,
clad as Pierrots and Columbines, coquetted and whispered, conscious of
being on the right stage for such free and frivolous masquerading. Turn
from these to the scenery of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_.
Rousseau's statue stands at this day on a little island lying in the
Lake of Geneva, at its narrow southern extremity. The spot is one of
the loveliest in the world. Pass the island and cross another bridge
and you see the Rhone rush, impetuous and foaming white, out of the
lake. A few steps further and you can see its white stream joined by
the grey snow waters of the Arve. The rivers flow side by side, each
retaining its colour. Far away between two mighty ridges you discern
the white snow-caps of Mont Blanc. Towards evening, as those mountain
ridges darken, the snows of Mont Blanc glow like pale roses. It would
seem as if Nature had gathered together all her contrasts here. Even in
the warmest season as you approach the grey, foaming mountain torrents,
the air becomes icy cold. In the course of a short stroll you may feel
the heat of summer in some sheltered nook, and a few steps farther
on encounter harsh autumn with its cutting winds. One can form no
conception of the cool freshness and strength of the air here. Only the
sun and the brilliant shimmer of the stars at night recall the south.
The latter are not the bright points in a distant sky which they appear
to be in the north; they seem to hang loose in the air; and the air
itself, as one inhales it, feels like a strong massive substance.
Sail up the lake to Vevey. Behind that town the Alpine slopes are clad
with the trees and vineyards of southern lands. On the farther side of
the lake rise great walls of blue rock, solemn and threatening, and
the sun plays in light and shade down the mountain-side. No waters
are so blue as those of the Lake of Geneva. As you sail down it on a
beautiful summer day, it shines like blue satin shot with gold. It is
a fairyland, a dreamland, where mighty mountains cast their blue-black
shadows down into the azure waters and a brilliant sun saturates the
air with colour. Sail a little farther up the lake to Montreux, where
the rock fortress of Chillon, the prison in which mediæval cruelty
collected all its instruments of torture, projects into the water. This
witness to wild and terrible passions lies in the midst of scenery
which may well be called enchanted. The lake is more open here, the
view less peculiar, and the climate more southern than at Vevey.
One sees sky, Alps, and lake, all melting together in a mysterious
blue light. From Montreux walk to Clärens and pause in the chestnut
grove which is still called the _Bosquet de Julie_. It is situated
on a height from which you look down upon Montreux, lying sheltered
and hidden in its bay; look round and you will understand how it was
from this spot that the love of nature spread throughout Europe. We
are standing in Rousseau's country, upon the scene of his _Nouvelle
Héloïse_. This was the scenery which supplanted that of the Regency.
It is not difficult to trace the relation between Chateaubriand's first
work and Rousseau's famous romance. First and foremost Chateaubriand
inherits the love of nature; his strongly coloured pictures of North
American scenery have their progenitors in those descriptions of
Swiss nature. But there is this difference between Rousseau's and
Chateaubriand's landscapes, that the latter's are much more dependent
upon the mood of the hero and heroine. If stormy passions rage in their
hearts, the storm rages without also; the characters are blent with
their natural surroundings, which they permeate with their passions and
moods in a manner quite unknown to the literature of the eighteenth
century.
The hero and heroine themselves, being savages, have even less
suspicion of gallantry about them, are far more the children of nature
than Rousseau's lovers; and although expressions occur again and again
which are absurd coming from the lips of a Red Indian, yet many of
the love-speeches have a touch of primitive poetry in them, a genus
of literature which was entirely unknown in France in the eighteenth
century. Take for an example the warrior's love-song beginning with the
words: "I will fly so fast that before the day has touched the mountain
tops I shall have come to my white dove among the oaks of the forest. I
have bound a necklace of beads about her neck--three red beads to speak
of my love, three violet beads to speak of my fear, and three blue
beads to speak my hope," &c.
The inequality of position between Rousseau's lovers, so typical
of that revolutionary time, finds its equivalent in _Atala_ in the
difference of religion, a matter which in the new century, with its
reaction against Voltaire, acquires new importance. The religious
reaction also explains the fact that a Catholic vow to remain unwed
plays the same rôle in Chateaubriand's story which the dictate of
morality does in Rousseau's. We have, then, progress in colouring,
in the development of character, in the comprehension of the spirit
and racial peculiarities of an uncivilised people, but we have also a
deliberate step backward, in the substitution of Catholic conventual
piety, with its unnatural renunciation, for morality. Passion is
whetted, so to speak, on the altar of Catholicism, and its unnatural
suppression creates that unnatural frenzy which causes Atala, the
charming young Indian girl, who has so long held the desire of her
heathen lover in check, to die with a wish on her lips for the
annihilation of God and the world, if at that price she can be clasped
for ever to his heart.
III
WERTHER
_La Nouvelle Héloïse_ appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later, in
another country and in very different environments, a youthful genius,
who possessed little in common with Rousseau, but who wrote under
the influence of his romance and his ideas, published a little book
which contained all the merits and none of the defects of _La Nouvelle
Héloïse_, a book which stirred thousands upon thousands of minds, which
awoke lively enthusiasm and a morbid longing for death in a whole
generation, which in not a few cases induced hysterical sentimentality,
idleness, despair, and suicide, and which was honoured by being
proscribed by a fatherly Danish government as "irreligious." This book
was _Werther_. St. Preux has changed his costume, has donned the famous
Werther garb, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and Rousseau's _belle
âme_ has passed into German literature as _die schöne Seele_.