on his return to France he notices with surprise and grief that she
avoids him; she repeatedly declares that she is unable to meet him,
and has apparently forgotten all his love for her. Once only, when she
divines that he is contemplating suicide, does she draw near to him
again for a moment. He has already added this coldness of his beloved
sister to the list of his bitter experiences of the faithlessness of
mankind, when news of her intention of entering a convent makes him
hasten to her. He arrives just in time to take part in the dreary
ceremony, to see Amélie's hair fall under the scissors, and to kneel
by her side, while she, as the ceremony prescribes, lies prostrate
like a corpse on the marble floor of the church. He hears her murmur a
prayer for forgiveness for the "criminal passion she has felt for her
brother," and, grasping the reason of his sister's conduct towards him,
falls in a swoon. As soon as he recovers consciousness he determines to
leave Europe and travel to the New World. The night he quits the French
coast a terrible storm rages. "Did Heaven," he asks, "mean to warn
me that tempests must always attend my steps?" One thing is certain,
that to Chateaubriand René's career was as unimaginable without an
accompaniment of thunder and lightning as Atala's love tale had been.
We have here an exceptional character encountering an exceptional
destiny. And it is from this character that the melancholy and
misanthropy of the new literature may be said to emanate. This
melancholy and this misanthropy differ from any previously known.
Molière's Alceste, for instance, the finest and most profound of his
masculine characters, is only misanthropical in so far that he is
troubled to the depths of his being by the meanness, the servility,
the frivolous or cowardly duplicity which prevail at a corrupt and
worldly court; but he is not melancholy, there is nothing morbid in his
temperament, he does not bear the mark of Cain upon his brow.
The melancholy of the early nineteenth century partakes of the nature
of a disease; and it is not a disease which attacks a single individual
or a single nation only, it is an epidemic which spreads from people to
people, in the manner of those religious manias which so often spread
over Europe in the Middle Ages. René's is merely the first and most
marked case of the disease in the form in which it attacked the most
gifted intellects.
René bears that mark of Cain already alluded to, which is, withal, the
mark of the ruler. The seal of genius, invisible to himself, has been
set on his brow. Behind the mournful self-accusations of which his
confession consists, lies the proud feeling of superiority which filled
the writer's breast. If we read Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ attentively,
we cannot resist the impression that the fiction of Amélie's love for
René veils a kind of confession, an admission of the passionate love
his sister Lucile cherished for her remarkable brother. How much in the
way of confession may not the remainder of the book contain?
René's sufferings are the birth-throes of genius in the modern soul. He
is the moment in which the chosen spirit, like the Hebrew prophet of
old, hears the voice that calls him, and timidly draws back, shrinking
despairingly from the task, and saying: "Choose not me, O Lord; choose
another, my brother; I am too weak, too slow of speech." René is this
first stage, the stage of unrest, of election. The chosen waits to
see another follow the call; he looks around but sees none arise, and
the voice continues to call. He sees all that he loathes and scorns
triumph, and all that worsted for which he would so willingly sacrifice
everything if another would but lead the way. With amazement and dread
he realises that there is not one who feels as he does; he wanders
about seeking a leader and finding none, until at last the certainty
is borne in upon him that, as none appears, as he can discover no
helper, no guide, it must be because it is he himself who is destined
to be the guide and support of weaker souls. At last he follows the
call; he sees that the time for dreaming and doubting is past, that
the time to act has come. The crisis leaves him, not, like Werther,
prepared to commit suicide, but with a firm resolve and a higher
opinion of himself. Genius, however, is always a curse as well as a
blessing. Even the greatest and most harmoniously constituted natures
have, all their lives, been aware of the curse it carries with it. In
René, Chateaubriand has shown us the curse alone. His own nature and
the position in which he stood to the ideas of his time caused genius,
as _he_ knew it, to seem merely a source of lonely suffering, or of
wild, egotistical pleasure, marred by the feeling of its emptiness and
worthlessness.
Chateaubriand, the inaugurator of the religious reaction of the
nineteenth century, himself possessed no faith, no enthusiasm, no
real devotion to an idea. The ideas of the eighteenth century were
beginning to suffer an eclipse, to look like fallacies; the great
ideas of the nineteenth had not as yet taken scientific shape, and,
placed and constituted as he was, Chateaubriand was incapable of
anticipating them. Hence he became the leader of the reaction, the
champion of Catholicism and the Bourbons. With the genius's instinctive
inclination to seize on the great principle of the new age, but without
the genius's infallible prevision of its real nature and faith in its
final victory, he took hold of the ideas which a temporary revulsion
in men's mood and sympathies had brought to light, and championed them
with obstinacy, with magnificent but often hollow eloquence, with great
talent but without warmth, without that conviction which permeates
the whole individual and makes of him the enthusiastic, indefatigable
organ of the idea. Whilst Voltaire, with all his restlessness and all
his faults, sustained his life's battle freshly, unweariedly, and
invincibly to the last, because he never for a moment wavered in his
faith in his ideals, Chateaubriand was consumed by ennui, incredulity,
and cynicism. In one direction only, namely as a poet, and more
especially a colourist, did he break new ground; and hence it was only
his youthful poetical efforts that satisfied and inwardly rewarded him.
But of all his creations, René, the picture of the intellectual type to
which he himself belonged, was the most successful.
A genius of René's type may employ religious phraseology, but he never
truly merges himself in a higher being; his melancholy in its inmost
essence is only the egoist's unsatisfied craving for enjoyment. As a
genius René knows that the Deity is with and within him, and he can
scarcely distinguish between himself and the Deity. He feels that
his thought and his words are inspired, and where is the boundary
between that which is of him and that which is not of him? He demands
everything--the homage of the public, the love of women, all the
laurels and roses of life--and it never occurs to him that he is in
duty bound to make any return. He accepts love without loving again.
Is not his a privileged nature? is not he a prophet hastening through
life like a fugitive, a fleeting fire which illuminates, consumes, and
vanishes?
In these traits the author has simply described his own nature.
Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ contain, especially in their silences,
sufficient witness to the studied coldness with which he accepted love
and admiration. Some of his private letters to which Sainte-Beuve had
access show with what icy egotism he at times attempted to enveigle
with promises of a consuming passion. Even at the age of sixty-four
he wrote to a young lady from whom he was soliciting a rendezvous in
Switzerland: "My life is merely an incident; of that incident take
the passion, the perturbation and the suffering; I shall give you
more of these in one day than others in long years." One looks back
and remembers the touching tenderness shown by Voltaire to his Emilie
even after he knew that he was being grossly deceived by her, and the
so-called Lucifer of the last century seems as innocent as a child in
comparison.
The picture of René was not finished in the book which bears his name;
he plays an important part in _Les Natchez_, a romance written about
the same time, but published later. His behaviour in it completes the
portrayal of the character. Conforming to Indian custom, he takes to
himself a wife, Celuta, who is passionately devoted to him. But it
goes without saying that life with her does not heal the wounds of his
heart. "René," we read, "had longed for an uninhabited country, a wife,
and liberty; he had got what he longed for, but something marred his
enjoyment of it. He would have blessed the hand that at one blow freed
him from his past suffering and present felicity, if felicity indeed
it were. He tried to realise his old dreams. What woman could be more
beautiful than Celuta? He carried her into the heart of the forest,
and strove to strengthen the impression of his freedom by exchanging
one lonely dwelling-place for another, but whether he pressed his
young wife to his heart in the depths of the forest or high on the
mountaintop, he did not experience the happiness he had hoped for. The
vacuum that had formed deep down in his soul could not be filled. A
divine judgment had fallen upon René--which is the explanation both
of his suffering and his genius. He troubled by his presence; passion
emanated from him but could not enter into him; he weighed heavy on the
earth over which he impatiently wandered, and which bore him against
his will." Such is the author's description of René as the married man.
These experiments of the hero with his young bride, these attempts
to enhance the attraction of her love by the added zest of peculiar
natural surroundings, are extremely characteristic. But it is all
in vain! The unnatural passion he had once inspired, and to which
the very fact of its being unnatural, and, according to human laws,
criminal, communicated a strength and a fire which harmonised with the
fiery strength of his own nature, has half infected him, has, in any
case, made it impossible for him to love again. In his very remarkable
farewell letter to Celuta he says that it is this misfortune which has
made him what he is; he has been loved, too deeply loved, and that
mysterious passion has sealed the fountains of his being although it
has not dried them up. "All love," he says, "became a horror to me.
I had the image of a woman before my eyes whom none could approach.
Although consumed by passion in my inmost soul, I have been in some
inexplicable fashion frozen by the hand of misfortune...." "There
are," he continues, "some existences so miserable that they seem an
accusation against Providence, and should surely cure any one of the
mania for life."
Even the innate desire to live, the deeply-rooted natural love of life
itself, is scorned by him half affectedly, half weariedly, as a _mama_,
and is supplanted by a wild Satanic lust of destruction. "I take it,"
he continues to Celuta, "that René's heart now lies open before you. Do
you see what a strange world it is? Flames issue from it, which lack
nourishment, and which could consume creation without being satiated,
yea, could even consume thee!"
In the next breath he is religious again, humble again, trembling at
God's wrath. In the solitude he hears the Almighty cry to him as to
Cain: "René! René! what hast thou done with thy sister? The one wrong
which he accuses himself of having done to Celuta is, that he has
united her destiny with his. The deepest sorrow this connection has
caused him lies in the fact that Celuta has made him a father; it is
with a species of horror that he sees his life thus extended beyond
its limits. He bids Celuta burn his papers, burn the hut built by him
in which they have lived, and return home to her brother. He wishes
to leave no traces of his existence upon earth. It is evident that he
would fain also require her, after the manner of Indian widows, to
lay herself upon his funeral pile; for the same species of jealousy
inspires him which prompted many a mediæval knight to kill his
favourite horse. This last letter to his wife ends with the following
characteristic farewell:--
"If I die, Celuta, you may after my death unite yourself with a more
tranquil soul than mine. But do not believe that you can accept with
impunity the caresses of another man, or that weaker embraces can
efface those of René from your soul. I have pressed you to my heart
in the midst of the desert and in the hurricane; the day when I bore
you across the stream, it was in my mind to plunge my dagger into your
heart in order to secure that heart's happiness, and to punish myself
for having given you this happiness. It is thou, O supreme Being, the
source of love and happiness, it is thou alone who hast made me what I
am, and only thou canst understand me! Oh, why did I not fling myself
into the foaming waters of the torrent! I should then have returned to
the bosom of nature with all my energies unimpaired.
"Yes, Celuta, if you lose me you will remain a widow. Who else could
surround you with the flame which radiates from me even when I do not
love? The lonely spots to which I imparted the warmth of love, would
seem icy cold to you by the side of another mate. What would you
seek in the shades of the forest? For you there is no rapture, no
intoxication, no delirium left. I robbed you of all this in giving you
it all, or rather in giving nothing, for an incurable wound burned in
my inmost soul.... I am weary of life, a weariness which has always
consumed me. I am left untouched by all that interests other men.
If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my
shepherd's crook or my crown? Glory and genius, work and leisure,
prosperity and adversity, would weary me alike. I have found society
and nature irksome in Europe as in America. I take no pleasure in my
virtue, and should feel no remorse were I a criminal. I would that I
had never been born, or that I were eternally forgotten."[2]
Thus powerfully was the dissonance first sounded which was afterwards
repeated with so many variations by the authors of the "Satanic"
school. Not satisfied with depicting, with a sure hand and in the grand
style, a self-idolatry bordering upon insanity, Chateaubriand throws
it into relief on the dark background of a sister's guilty passion. So
impelled is he to make René irresistibly seductive, that he does not
rest until he has inspired his own sister with an unnatural love for
him. This criminal attachment between brother and sister was a subject
which occupied men's minds considerably at that time. Not many years
previously, Goethe, in his _Wilhelm Meister_, had made Mignon the fruit
of a sinister union between brother and sister; and both Shelley and
Byron treated the same subject in Rosalind and _Helen, The Revolt of
Islam, Cain_, and _Manfred_. It was a favourite theory with the young
revolutionary school that the horror of incest between brother and
sister was merely based upon prejudice.
But René's melancholy is too innate and profound to be caused by
Amélie's unhappy passion alone. The reader feels all the time that this
passion only provides an occasion for the outburst of the melancholy.
René's despondency, his egotism, his outward coldness and suppressed
inward fire, are to be found independently of this external cause in
many of the gifted authors of that period, and in a number of their
best-known characters--Tieck's _William Lovell_, Frederick Schlegel's
_Julius_, Byron's _Corsair_, Kierkegaard's _Johannes Forföreren_,
and Lermontov's _Hero of our Own Time_. They constitute the European
hall-mark with which the heroes of literature are stamped in the early
years of the nineteenth century.
But what marks _René_ as being more especially a product of the nascent
reaction is the aim of the story--an aim which it has in common
with only one of the above-mentioned works, Kierkegaard's _Johannes
Forföreren_. Forming part of a greater whole which has a distinctly
moral and religious tendency, it professes to be written for the
express purpose of warning against the mental condition it portrays, of
showing the glory and the indispensability of Christianity as a refuge
for the disordered soul, and more particularly of proving by means of
Amélie's example that the re-establishment of convents is imperative,
because salvation from certain errors is only to be found in the
cloister. The pious intention of the book and its very profane matter
conflict in a manner which is not particularly edifying. But this too
is a typical trait of the reaction; we find it again, for instance,
in the first parts of Kierkegaard's _Enten-Eller_ and _Stadier_. The
prevailing tone is a wild longing of genius for enjoyment, which
satisfies itself by mingling the idea of death and destruction, a
sort of Satanic frenzy, with what would otherwise be mild and natural
feelings of enjoyment and happiness. It avails little that this work,
like _Atala_, has an avowedly Catholic, even clerical, tendency; its
undercurrent is anything but Christian, is not even religious.
But this undercurrent, however impure and diluted it may be in the
individual writer, springs from a spiritual condition which is the
result of the great revolution in men's minds. All the spiritual
maladies which make their appearance at this time may be regarded as
products of two great events--the emancipation of the individual, and
the emancipation of thought.
The individual has been emancipated. No longer satisfied with the
place assigned to him, no longer content to follow the plough across
his father's field, the young man released from serfdom, freed from
villenage, for the first time sees the whole world lie open before
him. Everything seems to have become suddenly possible; the word
impossible has lost its meaning now that the drumstick in the soldier's
hand may, by a series of rapid changes, turn into a marshal's baton or
even a sceptre. The powers of the individual, however, have not kept
pace with his possibilities; of the hundred thousand to whom the road
is suddenly thrown open, only one can reach the desired goal, and who
is to assure the individual that he is that one? Inordinate desire is
necessarily accompanied by inordinate melancholy. Nor is it every one,
without exception, that can take part in the great wild race. Those who
for some reason or other feel themselves bound up with the old order
of things, and the finer, less thick-skinned natures, the men who are
rather dreamers than workers, find that they are excluded; they stand
aside or emigrate, they are thrown back upon themselves, and their
self-communings increase their self-centredness and thereby augment
their capacity for suffering. It is the most highly developed organisms
which suffer most.
Add to this, that the collapse of the old order releases the individual
from a wholesome pressure which has kept him within certain social
bounds and prevented his thinking himself of too much importance. Now
self-idolatry is possible, wherever the power of self-restraint is not
as strong as the control formerly exercised by society. And at the same
time that everything has become possible, it seems as if everything had
become permissible. All the power which the individual had given up,
had voluntarily transferred to his God or his king, he now reclaims.
Just as he no longer raises his hat to the gilded chariot for whose
gilding he himself has paid, so he no longer bows to any prohibition
whose human origin he can plainly discern. To all such he has an answer
ready, an answer which is a question, a terrible question, one that
is the beginning of all human knowledge and all human freedom, the
question "Why?" It is plain that even these aberrations of fancy upon
which we have just dwelt, these excursions into the domain of unnatural
passions and unnatural crimes, are only a symptom; they are one of the
mistakes made in the great, momentous struggle of the individual to
assert himself.
Thought has been emancipated. The individual, released from tutelage,
no longer feels himself part of a whole; he feels himself to be a
little world which reflects, on a diminished scale, the whole of
the great world. So many individuals, so many mirrors, in each of
which the universe is reflected. But though thought has gradually
acquired courage to understand, not fragmentarily, but in this
universally comprehensive manner, its capacity has not grown along
with its courage; humanity stumbles on in the dark as before. To
the old questions, Why is man born? Why does he live? To what end
does it all lead? the answer, as far as it can be made out, seems
unsatisfying, discouraging, a pessimistic answer. In times gone by
men had been born into a distinct, unquestioned creed, which provided
them with answers believed to have been supernaturally communicated,
full of comfort and promise. In the eighteenth century, this creed
having been abandoned, they were born into an almost equally
dogmatic, at any rate equally inspiring, belief in the saving power
of civilisation and enlightenment; they lived on the promises of the
happiness and harmony which should spread over the earth when the
doctrines of their philosophers were universally accepted. In the
beginning of the nineteenth century this ground of confidence also was
undermined. History seemed to teach that this path also led nowhere,
and the confusion in men's minds was like the confusion of an army
which receives contradictory orders in the midst of a battle. The
standpoint even of those who try to turn thought back into the old
religious grooves is not the standpoint of the old religion, for they
themselves were but a few years ago either Voltaireans or adherents of
Rousseau's deism; their new piety has been painfully reasoned out and
struggled for. This explains the cribbed, constrained character of the
intellectual movement among the writers who usher in the new century.
In a very striking image Alfred de Musset has expressed the impression
they produce. "Eternity," he says, "is like an eyrie from which the
centuries fly forth like young eaglets to skim through the universe
each in his turn. Now it is our century which has come to the edge of
the nest. It stands there glaring, but its wings have been clipped, and
it awaits its death gazing into the infinite space out into which it is
incapable of flying."
[1] Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, ii. 190; iii. 78.
[2] Les Natchez. Chateaubriand, _Oeuvres complètes_, vol. v. pp.
353-463. In his _Mémoires_ the author has, in expressing his own
sentiments, unconsciously repeated one of these sentences. It has
already been quoted.
V
OBERMANN
A striking contrast to René, egotistical and imperious as he is despite
his weariness of life, is presented by the next remarkable variant of
the type of the age.
_Obermann_, a work produced in the same year as René, was also written
in exile. Its author, Étienne Pierre de Sénancour, was born in Paris in
1770, but emigrated in the early days of the Revolution to Switzerland,
where a long illness and various other circumstances compelled him to
remain. In his quality of émigré he was banished from France, and could
only now and again venture secretly over its frontiers to visit his
mother. Under the Consulate he returned to Paris without permission,
and for the first three years lived the life of an absolute hermit in
order not to attract the attention of the authorities. He afterwards
gained a scanty livelihood by writing for Liberal newspapers and
editing historical handbooks. His was a lonely, quiet life--the life of
a deeply-feeling stoic.
Sénancour's first work, the title of which, _Meditations on the
Original Nature of Man_, proclaims the pupil of Rousseau, appeared in
1799. His psychological romance, _Obermann_, was published early in
1804. This book created no particular stir on its first appearance,
but at a later period it passed through many editions; successive
generations perused its pages, and in France it was long classed with
_Werther_ and _Ossian_. It was studied by Nodier and Ballanche, and was
Sainte-Beuve's favourite work, he and George Sand doing much to bring
it into public notice.
_Obermann_ in France, like _Werther_ in Germany, has been in the hands
of many a suicide; it was constantly read by Victor Hugo's unhappy
friend, Rabbe, known to the public through Hugo's life and poems,
and a certain clique of young men, Bastide, Sautelet (who committed
suicide), Ampère, Stapfer, made a regular cult of the book. As René is
the elect, Obermann is the passed by. Some of the ruling spirits of
the century recognised themselves in René, Obermann was understood and
appreciated by highly-gifted, deeply-agitated spirits of the finest
temper. The book begins as follows: "In these letters are to be found
the utterances of a spirit that feels, not of a spirit that acts."
Here we have the kernel of the matter. Why does he not act? Because
he is unhappy. Why is he unhappy? Because he is too sensitive, too
impressionable. He is all heart, and the heart does not work.