his own destiny. His own generation overlooked him; he was not
appreciated while he lived, although he was in the unhappy position
of possessing no source of income but his pen. But in the days of the
Romantic School he attained renown; the Romantic critics bound his
simple field flowers into garlands along with the passion-flowers and
roses of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël. And he deserved the fame he
attained. For he is one of the most remarkable authors of the Emigrant
Literature-a worshipper of Nature, as becomes a pupil of Rousseau,
melancholy, as befits a genuine admirer of Ossian, weary of life, as
befits a contemporary of Chateaubriand. He is thoroughly modern in his
theories on religion, morality, education, and the position of women in
society; he is the regular German Romanticist in his sentimentality,
his indolence, and his dread of contact with reality, as if it were
something that would burn him; and he is the French Romanticist in
his mixture of liberal-mindedness with excessive scrupulosity and of
enthusiasm with refined sensuousness, a combination which reappears
in French literature twenty years later in Sainte-Beuve's _Joseph
Delorme_. Everything stamps him as a herald or forerunner of the long
train of greater intellects who at this moment begin their progress
through the century; his weak voice announces them and he prepares
their way.
[1] Obermann, 1833, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p. 90.
VI
NODIER
Simultaneously with _Obermann_ there appeared in the French book market
a little romance which was a product of intellectual tendencies akin to
those of Sénancour. Though its author too is a forerunner of greater
men than himself, his remarkable and versatile talent, his sense of the
fantastic (exceptionally strong for a French author), and his courage
in striking out new paths, make of him not a mere precursor but a
pioneeer. This writer was Charles Nodier, and the name of his book, _Le
Peintre de Saltzbourg_.
Charles Nodier, who belongs only by virtue of a couple of early works
to the period with which we are dealing, and who, except for these,
must be classed as a French Romanticist prior to the existence of
the French Romantic School, was born at Besançon in 1780. His father
was a magistrate, a gifted and honourable man, severe in his public
capacity and amiable in his home; he was a declared adherent of the
eighteenth-century philosophy, and educated his son according to the
principles laid down in Rousseau's _Émile_. Charles early showed
an astonishing aptitude for learning, and much talent in various
directions. At seventeen years of age he was so capable a philologist
as to have compiled a dictionary of French onomatopoeic words, a work
which the Minister of Education considered worthy of a place in the
school libraries. By the time he was eighteen he was so accomplished a
naturalist that he brought out a work on the antennae of insects and
their organs of hearing. His first romance was given to the press about
the same time.
[Illustration: NODIER]
Nodier's was a stirring childhood and early youth. At the age of
thirteen he had some experience of the horrors of the Reign of
Terror, for his father was head of the revolutionary tribunal at
Besançon. In 1793 the warmhearted and determined little boy saved a
woman's life. A lady of the town was accused of sending money to an
émigré relation in the Royalist army of the Rhine. The charge was
proved beyond a doubt, and the provisions of the law in such a case
being unmistakable, the lady's fate was apparently sealed. A mutual
friend of his family and the lady told the whole story to young Nodier,
who first vainly attempted to move his father by entreaties, and then
declared that he would kill himself if the death sentence were passed.
He was so much in earnest, and seemed so resolved to carry out his
threat, that at the last moment the father, in dread of losing his son,
did violence to his Roman virtue, and acquitted the offender. In the
same year, Besançon not offering sufficient educational advantages,
young Nodier was sent to Strasburg. It so happened that he was boarded
there in the house of the notorious Eulogius Schneider, the cruel
governor of Alsace, who shortly afterwards perished on the scaffold in
Paris. The scenes he saw in Strasburg were well adapted to quicken the
imagination of a future writer of romance. As a youth in Paris he was
a witness of the frivolity and pleasure-seeking that prevailed under
the Directory, and after his return to Besançon in 1799 he interested
himself in the cause of the state prisoners and suspected persons in
that town. This led to his being denounced as dangerous to society;
one night his door was broken open and his papers were examined, but
nothing more incriminating was found than his works on the antennae
of insects and the roots of words. The excitement of the situation
satisfied his romantic love of adventure; it pleased him to be at war
with the authorities, to run risks, to know he was spied upon, &c. He
had no political convictions then or later, but he was an enthusiast in
the cause of liberty, and always belonged to the Opposition, whatever
the Government of the moment might be; he was religious under the
Republic, a freethinker under the Empire, &c., &c. The despotism of
the First Consul so exasperated him that at the age of twenty he
wrote an ode against him entitled _La Napoléone_. Arrests were made
right and left in the hope of finding the author, and when at last the
printer was imprisoned, Nodier gave himself up. After several months'
imprisonment in Paris he was sent back to his native town, where he was
placed under the surveillance of the police.
This was the beginning of a long series of persecutions and annoyances
on the part of the Government, which, although certainly exaggerated by
the young poet's lively and always active imagination, must have been
anything but pleasant to him. He went from one hiding-place to another
in the Jura Mountains, living and writing in unfrequented spots, and
never staying long enough in any one place to complete the work begun
there. Thus, in addition to all the impressions of the period already
received, he had experience, at a very early age, of the emotions of
the exile and the mood of the _émigré_. It is these moods and emotions
which form the background of his first literary attempt. _Le Peintre de
Saltzbourg_ was written during his incessant changes of abode among the
Jura Mountains.
_Le Peintre de Saltzbourg, journal des émotions d'un coeur souffrant,
suivi des Méditations du Cloître_, is the title of the first edition,
published in Paris, 1803. The _Méditations du Cloître_, a sort of
appendix to this edition of the romance, possesses a certain interest
as the expression of one of the ideas prevailing among the young
generation. It is written with the same intention as _René_, being,
namely, a plea for the restoration of monasteries. It is a monologue,
spoken by a being peculiarly unhappy in his own estimation, who bewails
the absence of any monastery wherein to take refuge, and naïvely seeks
to prove his vocation for the life of a Trappist by a perfect torrent
of complaint. "I, who am still so young and yet so unhappy, who have
too early gauged life and society, and am completely estranged from
the fellow-men who have wounded my heart, I, bereft of every hope
which has hitherto deluded me, have sought a haven in my misery and
found none." Hereon follows a long panegyric on monks and nuns, those
"angels of peace, who did nought but pray, console the wretched,
educate the young, tend the sick, help the needy, follow the condemned
to the scaffold, and bind up the wounds of heroes." How explain the
fact that these devout men and women have brought down on themselves a
fury of persecution unequalled in the annals of fanaticism? How can the
legislators of the eighteenth century have had so little knowledge of
the human heart as not to understand, not to divine the existence of
those needs, to supply which religion founded monasteries?
"To the present generation political circumstances have given the
education that fell to the lot of Achilles. We have been fed on the
blood and the marrow of lions; and now that a government which leaves
nothing to chance and which determines the future has set limits to the
dangerous development of the powers of youth, saying to them: 'Thus far
and no farther!'--do they understand now what melancholy occurrences
result from so much suppressed passion and unemployed strength,
how many temptations to crime exist in a passionate, melancholy,
world-weary heart? With bitterness, with horror, I set it down:
Werther's pistol and the executioner's axe have already made a clearing
amongst us. The present generation rises up and demands the cloisters
of old."
Assuredly a humble and sentimental desire for a generation nourished on
the marrow of lions! But we discern defiance behind the meekness, and
the demand is not to be taken literally. It is impatient despondency
grasping at random at any means of alleviating its woe.
In a preface which Nodier added to his book in 1840, he speaks of
the circumstances which produced it. Under the Directory, he says,
emotionalism was very much out of fashion; the language of reverie
and passion, to which thirty years before Rousseau had lent a passing
vogue, was considered ridiculous at the close of the century. But it
was quite otherwise in Germany, "that wonderful Germany, the final
refuge of poetry in Europe, the cradle of the society of the future (if
a society can still come into being in Europe). And we were beginning
to feel the influence of Germany.... We read _Werther, Goetz von
Berlichingen_, and _Die Räuber_."
The hero of Nodier's book is fashioned after the pattern of Werther; he
is twenty years of age, a painter, a poet, and, above all, a German.
But he is a weak imitation, decidedly inferior to the original.
Charles (Nodier's own name) is an exile, banished from Bavaria for
political offences. For two years he has roamed through Europe, a
restless fugitive, for two years has lived Nodier's own life. One
feeling alone has sustained him, his love for a young girl who bears
the poetical name of Eulalia. He returns to Bavaria, and learns--hear
it, ye heavens!--that Eulalia is faithless! Eulalia is wedded to
another! The betrayed lover cannot resist his desire to haunt the
place of her abode. One day they meet, and--O Destiny!--Eulalia tells
him that, never hearing from him, and being told he was dead, she
had sorrowfully, and solely out of obedience to her mother, at last
consented to marry a young Herr Spronck, whose fancied resemblance to
Charles touched her, and who is, it appears, the noblest of men. On
this follow lamentations and descriptions of feeling of the Werther
type, but all in a much more dejected key. Charles abandons himself
to melancholy retrospect. Here it was that he saw her for the first
time; there that he had the first dark forebodings of the future; in
this other place, in his ecstasy at beholding her, he forgot his paper,
his pencils, and his "Ossian"; yonder, where the trees are now hewn
down, he had determined to bury his dear Werther; now it is his own
grave that he would fain dig. Werther has been Charles's friend, the
friend on whom he has obviously formed himself. On one occasion only is
Charles more energetic and manly than Werther, namely in his outburst
of indignation at the obstacles which interpose themselves between him
and his beloved.
"Why did I not take her in my arms, seize her like a prey, carry her
far from the abodes of man, and proclaim her my wife in the sight of
heaven! Oh, if even this desire be a crime, why is it so intimately
entwined with every fibre of my being that I cannot renounce it
and live? A crime, did I say I In uncivilised times, in the days of
ignorance and of slavery, some one or other of the barbarous horde took
it into his head to write down his personal prejudices and say: 'There
are laws for you!' How easily deluded men are! What a contemptible
comedy to see so many generations ruled by the prejudices and whims of
a dead past!"
Immediately upon this follows, quaintly enough, a long, solemn
panegyric on Klopstock's _Messiah_, obviously inspired by other, but
very dissimilar, reminiscences of Werther. "O divine Klopstock!" cries
Charles, "how magnificently you present the assembled miracles of
poetry to our eyes, whether you introduce us into the presence-chamber
of the Most High, where the first-born among the angels hymn the
mysteries of heaven, or show us the cherubims in holy adoration
covering their faces with their golden wings!" The transition from
revolutionary sentiments to pious ecstasy is somewhat abrupt, but the
mixture of revolutionary with romantic tendencies which would seem
extraordinary in any other age, does not surprise in the Emigrant
Literature. It is to be found in all its authors. We have it in
Chateaubriand as Satanic Catholicism; in Sénancour as sentimental and
romantic atheism; here it is revolt against social laws in combination
with enthusiasm for the _Messiah_--different developments of the same
phenomenon.
It presently appears that Eulalia's husband is no happier than her
unfortunate lover. He has been deprived by death of the love of his
youth and cannot forget his bereavement even by the side of Eulalia.
He observes the attachment existing between his wife and Charles,
and, not wishing to stand in their way, takes poison and dies, after
begging them to forgive the suffering he has involuntarily caused them
"by his hapless existence." It would be impossible to imagine a more
considerate husband. The lovers, however, are not a whit less noble.
Eulalia especially is too high-minded to profit by so melancholy a
death. She retires to a convent, and Charles drowns himself in the
Danube. Two suicides and a retreat to a nunnery was the regulation
ending in those days.
To us, nowadays, this romance is a very insignificant intellectual
production, but a very interesting piece of historical evidence. Its
author soon passed into another phase of development. We shall find
Nodier again upon a higher plane of the evolution of French literature;
no one changed form more frequently than he--and the butterfly is more
beautiful than the grub.
VII
CONSTANT: "ON RELIGION"--"ADOLPHE"
The literary critic passing from one variety to another of the type
of a certain period in a manner resembles the scientist tracking
some structure through its metamorphoses in the different zoological
species. The next variant of our main type who seems to me worthy of
study, is Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, the hero of the only romance
written by that famous political author. Adolphe is less brilliant
than René, less melancholy than Obermann, but he is a representative
of the same restless and unsatisfied generation. He too is related to
Werther, but, like René, he is the child of the age of disillusionment.
It was not until after the fall of the Empire that the book appeared,
but it was written, or at any rate projected, in the first years of the
century. Like those other books which on their emotional side are in
touch with Rousseau, and which perpetuate his tradition, it conflicted
sharply with the prevailing sentiments of the day. In Paris figures and
the sword held sway, in literature the classic ode and science were
in vogue, whereas in Constant's book emotions and psychical analysis
predominated.
Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was born at Lausanne in 1767, of
Protestant parents. His mother died in childbirth; his father, a
cold-hearted, worldly-wise man, was much such another as the father
in _Adolphe_. Constant was an exceptionally gifted being. If, in
reading _Adolphe_, we find it a little difficult to understand the
extraordinary fascination exercised by the hero, the explanation is,
that, having employed so many reminiscences of his own life in the
making of the book, Constant seems to have shrunk from dwelling too
strongly on his hero's attractive qualities. Adolphe is so distinctly
Constant himself, that we can only, so to speak, understand how the
type originated, by studying the author's youth.
Constant was refined and charming, early addicted to a sort of sportive
self-mockery, excitably impressionable, and, curiously enough, at the
same time slightly blasé. To a craving for strong emotions was added
a gift of putting himself entirely outside his own emotions. Even as
a youth he was able to halve himself, to double himself, and to mock
at himself. He could say: "I am as amused by the embarrassments in
which I find myself as though they were another's," and his favourite
expressions when angry were such as this: "I storm, I am beside myself
with fury, and yet at the bottom of it all I am indifferent."
No pains were spared to give this brilliant, intellectual youth an
education suited to his gifts. He was first sent to the University of
Edinburgh, where he formed friendships with several distinguished young
Englishmen and Scotchmen, almost all of whom were destined to become
famous. From Edinburgh he went to the small, peaceful University of
Erlangen, where the foundation was laid of his acquaintance with German
literature and German affairs in general. Here, as in Edinburgh, he
displayed more interest in the politics of the old Greek republics than
in their poetry.
We gain the most trustworthy information on the subject of Constant's
youthful character and development from his letters to Mme. de
Charrière, a gifted, free-thinking Swiss authoress, Dutch by birth but
completely Gallicised, who was over forty years of age when Constant,
then in his twentieth year, first made her acquaintance. It was in
this lady's house, sitting beside her while she wrote, that, at the
age of nineteen, he began the great book on religion at which he was
to work almost all his life, making perpetual alterations as his views
changed and took more definite form. He finished it thirty years later,
in the hours which he could spare from the Chamber and the Paris
gambling-tables. But it was begun at Mme. de Charrière's; and there
was a curious significance in the fact that the first instalment was
written on the backs of a pack of playing cards, each card, as it was
filled, being handed to his mentor. Constant expresses himself with
absolute frankness in his letters to this faithful and devoted friend;
from them we learn how he felt and thought as a youth. The feelings and
thoughts are those of the eighteenth century, minus its enthusiasm for
certain ideas, and plus a good deal of doubt. He writes:--
[Illustration: BENJAMIN CONSTANT]
"I feel the emptiness of everything more than ever; it is all
promise and no fulfilment. I feel how superior our powers are to our
circumstances, and how wretched this incongruity must inevitably make
us. I wonder if God, who created us and our environment, did not die
before He finished His work, if the world is not an _opus posthumum_?
He had the grandest and most beautiful intentions, and all the means
for carrying them out. He had begun to use these means, the scaffolding
for the building was erected, but in the midst of His work He died.
Everything is constructed with an aim which has ceased to exist; we,
in particular, feel ourselves destined for something of which we can
form no conception. We are like clocks without dials or hands, whose
wheels, which are not without understanding, revolve until they are
worn out, without knowing why, but saying, 'I revolve, therefore I have
an aim.'--Farewell, you dear, clever wheel, who have the misfortune to
be so superior to the clock-work of which you are a part and which you
disturb! Without too much self-praise I may say that I am in the same
predicament."
In another place he writes: "Oh, how generous, how magnanimous are our
princes! They have again issued a pardon from which none are excluded
save those who have rebelled against them. It reminds me of a psalm
in praise of the exploits of the Hebrew God. He has slain this one
and that, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has drowned Pharaoh and
all his hosts, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has smitten the
first-born of Egypt with death, for His mercy endureth for ever, &c.
&c."
"You do not appear to be democratic. Like you, I believe fraud and
frenzy to be at the bottom of the Revolutionist's heart. But I prefer
the fraud and frenzy which pulls down prisons, abolishes titles and
such like imbecilities, and places all religious day-dreams upon
the same footing, to the fraud and madness which would maintain and
consecrate that monstrosity produced by grafting the barbaric stupidity
of the Hebrew upon the barbaric ignorance of the Vandal."
"The more one thinks it over, the less is one able to imagine any
possible good reason for the existence of this foolish thing we call
the world. I understand neither the intention, nor the master-builder,
nor the artist, nor the figures in this _Laterna Magica_ of which I
have the honour to form a part. Shall I understand any better when I
have disappeared from the small, dark globe on which it amuses I know
not what unseen power to have me dance, whether I will or no? I cannot
say. But I fear the secret will prove, like that of the Freemasons, to
be a thing of no value except in the estimation of the uninitiated."
Having read these extracts, it does not surprise us to know that the
book _On Religion_, planned at the close of the century to effect the
same object from a Protestant standpoint that Chateaubriand aimed
at from a Catholic, namely, the revival of the religious spirit in
France, had originally a very different character from that which it
finally acquired. If the first part were published as it was originally
written, entirely in the eighteenth-century manner, it would indicate
in its author exactly the stage of mental development indicated in
Chateaubriand by his book on the Revolutions. In the form in which it
has taken its place in French literature the work is remarkable for its
calm, passionless style, its unprejudiced views, and an erudition not
common at that period. Its weaknesses are its total lack of warmth and
the general indecision of its principles.