it endeavoured to widen the narrow circle of subjects provided
by classical literature, and to teach men to appreciate what was
admirable and characteristic in modern foreign nations as well as
in their own country. This made the school a patriotic school, and
patriotic in every country. It is to be observed that there already
existed in Germany that inclination to make excursions into foreign
regions which characterised French Romanticism in the days of Victor
Hugo. We notice it first in Herder, with his admirable appreciation
of the characteristically national intellectual productions of
different countries. Then came A. W. Schlegel, with his criticism
and translations. Schlegels famous lectures on dramatic literature,
published just before the entry of the Powers into Paris, expound the
Greek, English, and Spanish drama sympathetically, but contain the
most violent, bitter attacks upon French taste and the French drama.
Not content with attacking the tragedians, he treats even Molière with
foolish contempt. It is instructive to compare this book with Mme. de
Staël's _De l'Allemagne_. Schlegel's misunderstanding and dislike of
France are as great as Mme. de Staël's understanding and appreciation
of Germany. He makes amends by expounding both Shakespeare and his own
discovery, Calderon, with profound and subtle sympathy. His criticism
of these two poets has, however, along with one great merit, one great
defect.
The merit is, that every characteristic, however small, has justice
done to it. Schlegel's own masterly translations of many of
Shakespeare's and some of Calderon's plays show what progress has been
made in the comprehension of foreign poetry since Schiller, in his
translation of _Macbeth_, cut up the play to suit the classical fancies
of the day, and in so doing cut away all its boldness and realism.
The defect, which is the defect of the whole school (and in Denmark
does not pass away with the school, but is to be observed in the
following period too), lies in the conception of poetry, which, marked
by German one-sidedness, is so sweepingly transcendental that it quite
shuts out the historical interpretation. One model, unquestioned,
absolute, follows the other. The French had found their models in
the Greeks and Aristotle; now it is, say, Shakespeare who is alone
absolutely worthy of imitation in poetry, Mozart (as Kierkegaard
maintains in _Enten-Eller_) who is the perfect model in music. The
sober, trustworthy, historical view of the matter, which recognises no
perfect models, is entirely disregarded. The great work is the model
for a whole new style, is in itself a code of laws. To our Heiberg, for
instance, _St. Hansaften-Spil_ is "the perfect realisation of the drama
proper in lyrical form." Instead of studying poetry in connection with
history, with the whole of life, men evolve systems in which schools
of poetry and poetic works grow out of each other like branches on a
tree. They believe, for instance, that English tragedy is descended
in a direct line from Greek tragedy, not perceiving that the tragedy
of one nation is not the offspring of that of other nations, but the
production of the environment, the civilisation, the intellectual life
in the midst of which it comes into being.
But, in the meantime, barriers were broken down, the world lay open to
the poet's gaze, and he was free to choose his subject wherever his
fancy led him. We have in our own literature a spirited confession of
this new faith in Oehlenschläger's beautiful poem, _Digterens Hjem_
(_The Home of the Poet_)--
"Det strækker sig fra Spitzbergs hvide Klipper,
For Syndflods ældste Lig en heilig Grav,
Til hvor den sidste Tange slipper
I Söndrepolens öde Hav."[1]
This was the emancipating watchword sounded by the Romantic critic.
The brief résumé here given of the aims of the school which was
flourishing in Germany at the time _De l'Allemagne_ was written, has
already indicated to the reader the points upon which Mme. de Staël
was in sympathy with this school, and how far it may be said to have
influenced the direction of her later literary career. The strenuous
opposition of the Romanticists to the philosophy of the eighteenth
century had her full sympathy; Schelling himself had called his whole
system a reaction against the enlightening, clarifying processes of
the age of reason. Their profound respect for poetic inspiration
and their broad-mindedness harmonised with her own tendencies and
prejudices. The Romantic doctrine of the all-importance of imagination
won her approbation, but the Romanticists' conception of the nature
of imagination was incomprehensible to her. They started from the
hypothesis that at the foundation of everything lay a perpetually
producing imagination, a species of juggling imagination, which with
divine irony perpetually destroyed its own creations as the sea engulfs
its own billows; and they held that the poet, that creator on a small
scale, should take up the same ironical position towards the creatures
of his imagining, towards his whole work, and deliberately destroy the
illusion of it. Mme. de Staël had too practical a mind to be able to
accept this far-fetched theory, on the subject of which she had many
hot arguments with her Romantic friends. But on another very important
point she was in harmony with them:
Like all the authors involved in the first reaction against the
eighteenth century, she became as time went on more and more positively
religious. The philosophical ideas of the revolutionary times were
gradually effaced in her mind, and their place was supplied by ever
more serious attempts to imbue herself with the new pious ideas of the
day. She, who in her youth had eagerly controverted Chateaubriand's
theory of the superiority of Christian subjects in art, now becomes a
convert to his æsthetic views. She accepts unreservedly the Romanticist
doctrine that modern poetry and art must build upon Christianity, as
the antique had built upon the Greco-Roman mythology; and, living,
listening, talking herself into ever greater certainty that the
eighteenth century was completely astray, and constantly meeting men
who have returned to the pious belief of the past, she finally herself
comes to believe that idealism in philosophy, which to her, as a woman,
is the good principle, and inspiration in poetry, which to her, as an
authoress, is the saving, emancipating principle, must necessarily
restore its authority to revealed religion, seeing that sensationalism,
the principles of which in both philosophy and art are antipathetic
to her, has opposed religion as an enemy. Thus it is that in her book
on Germany she actually comes to range herself on the side of that
passionate, prejudiced, and often painfully narrow reaction against the
eighteenth-century spirit of intellectual liberty, which had broken out
on the other side of the Rhine, and was to reach its climax in France
itself.
[1] It stretches from the white cliffs of Spitzbergen, the grave
of that which walked the earth before the flood, to where the last
sea-wrack vanishes in the dreary waters round the Southern Pole.
XIV
BARANTE
Mme. de Staël's book on Germany was a glance into the future, a glimpse
of what was going on beyond the frontiers of France; it was in many
ways a prophecy of the nature of the literature of the nineteenth
century. But the group of writers to which she belonged would have left
its task unfulfilled, if it had not supplemented its prognostications
by a backward glance over the intellectual life of the eighteenth
century.
This retrospect was supplied by Barante (1809) in his remarkable book,
_Tableau de la Littérature Française au Dix-huitième Siècle_.
Prosper de Barante, born in 1782 of an old and distinguished bureaucrat
family of Auvergne, is the one member of our group who cannot be
described as an _émigré_; for he took office under the Empire as
Prefect in La Vendée. His book, however, partakes of the general
character of the Emigrant Literature; nor is this surprising, for he
lived far from Paris, was on intimate terms with the exiles, especially
with Mme. de Staël, and in disfavour with the Government on account
of his frequent visits to Coppet. He also shared Mme. de Staël's
partiality for foreign, more particularly German, literature, which was
another offence in the days of the Empire. He translated all Schiller's
plays. After the restoration of the monarchy, he acquired political
influence as a member of the moderate Liberal party.
The work on France in the eighteenth century with which, at the age of
twenty-seven, Barante made his début in literature, reveals a maturity
and moderation surprising in so young an author, but which may be
explained, partly by a certain lack of warmth in his nature, partly by
his official position. In all the books which we have just glanced
at, there lay an implicit judgment of the eighteenth century; in this
we have the first connected survey and estimate of it. The survey is
a brief but excellent one; the general conception of the period is
philosophically based; the presentment is clear and passionless; but
the estimate is very faulty, on every side conditioned and hampered
by those limits beyond which the authors of the Emigrant Literature
were incapable of seeing. This settlement with the past century, in
which the new generation renounces all connection with the old, is
not a final settlement, and is far from being as unprejudiced as it
is passionless. Barante has the honest desire to judge impartially,
and emphasises the fact that he is the better qualified to do so since
he does not belong to the generation which took immediate part in the
Revolution as destroyers or defenders of the old social order; but his
intellect is not as unbiassed as his will; his whole development is,
though he does not know it, conditioned by the reaction against that
century the character of which he, as observer and thinker, undertakes
to explain.
Barante's standpoint is a suggestive, and was in those days an uncommon
one. He hears it constantly asserted that the authors of the eighteenth
century were responsible for the revolution which at the close of that
century shook France to its very foundations, and this assertion he
considers a baseless one. It contains an injustice to those authors,
from the fact that it attributes too much significance to them. If
the building had not been ready to fall, that literary puff of wind
would not have sufficed to blow it over. Contemporaneously with Nodier
and Mme. de Staël, he formulates and interprets the proposition:
Literature is the expression of the state of society, not its cause.
In his opinion, the Seven Years' War had a great deal more to do with
the weakening of authority in France than had the Encyclopedia, and
the profanity which prevailed at the court of old Louis XIV., at the
time when he was cruelly persecuting both the Protestants and the
Jansenists, did more to undermine reverence for religion than the
attacks and jeers of the philosophers. He is very far from ascribing
any particular merit to the literature of the preceding century, but
he regards it as merely "a symptom of the general disease." With
historical penetration he searches for the omens of the collapse of
monarchy, and finds them much further back, in the results of the
conflict between Mazarin and the Fronde. Held down by the iron hand of
Richelieu, princes, nobles, and officials, all the great in turn, had
made a bid for popular support, and by so doing had lost in dignity and
consideration. The power of royalty alone remained totally unaffected.
The waves of opposition rolled to the steps of the throne, but stopped
there; during the first half of Louis XIV.'s reign the throne stood in
more solitary elevation than ever over the general level. Richelieu's
work was accomplished; every power in the land, except that of the
throne, was destroyed. If this one remaining authority were undermined,
then all the powers of society would stand bereft of the veneration
which had constituted their strength; and this was very sufficiently
done during Louis XIV.'s miserable old age, the insolent rule of the
Regency, and the wanton, foolish rule of Louis XV.
The philosophy of the eighteenth century, then, according to Barante,
was not the conscious work of any individual or individuals, but
represented the general bent of the mind of the people; it was
written, so to speak, at their dictation. This did not add to its
value; to his thinking, all that this philosophy accomplished was
to overturn an immoral and inequitable government in an immoral and
inequitable manner. But what thus happened, happened of necessity.
The soul of Barante's book is the firmest faith in historical laws.
"The human mind," he says, "seems as irrevocably appointed to run a
prescribed course as are the stars." He knows that there is at all
times a necessary connection between literature and the condition of
society; but whereas this connection is at times indistinct, requiring
penetration to detect it, and careful demonstration to prove it
plainly, in the period under consideration it seems to him so plain
that no nice observation is required to discover it.
The first reason for this he finds in the relation of the writers to
their readers. In earlier times the number of the former had been very
small; thinly scattered over the whole of Europe, they had written in a
dead language. In those days there was no social life, and conversation
had not become a power. Authors did not write for society but for each
other, and society in return looked upon them as uninteresting pedants.
In time culture and enlightenment spread among the higher classes,
and writers entered into relation with them; they wrote for princes
and courtiers, for the little class which did not need to work. In
the days of Louis XIV. authors tried to please this class, and were
flattered by its approbation. But by degrees civilisation spread until
a real reading public came into existence, a public which made the
author independent of the great. Frederick the Second of Prussia, who,
to shed lustre upon his reign, called Voltaire to his court, did not
treat him with the condescension shown by Louis XIV. to Molière, but
seemed to place him by his side as an equal. The greatest political and
the greatest intellectual powers of the age stood for a moment upon an
equal footing, without any one discerning that the time was approaching
when these two powers were to declare war upon each other. And in the
last half of the century there was unintermitted reciprocity between
men of letters and society in general.
In the olden times a philosopher had been a severe, systematic
thinker, who, careless of approbation, developed a connected system.
The word had changed its meaning now; the philosopher was no longer a
solitary thinker, but a man of the world, who conversed more than he
wrote or taught, who invariably sought to please society and win its
approbation, and who did this by making himself its organ. Barante
sees an evidence of the powerful influence exercised by the spirit of
the times upon individual writers in the circumstance that authors,
such, for instance, as the Abbé de Mably, who had the strongest
antipathy to the philosophers of the fashionable school, nevertheless
resembled the very men they opposed, and arrived at the same results by
different means. And he finds in the unpatriotic classical education
of the upper classes the explanation of the fact that the public
forestalled the men of letters in neglecting and slighting their own
historical traditions and national memories for the sake of laboriously
appropriated exotic ideals. At school the child learned to spell the
names of Epaminondas and Leonidas long before he heard of Bayard or Du
Guesclin; he was encouraged to take a deep interest in the Trojan wars,
but no one dreamt of interesting him in the Crusades. Roman law, the
principles of which are the outcome of autocratic rule, had gradually
superseded those Germanic laws, which were the outcome of the life of
a free people. What wonder then, that when authors turned to antiquity
for their subject-matter, and grew enthusiastic on the subject of
Greece and Rome, they found a ready audience in French society! What
wonder that in literature also, national tradition was slighted and
broken!
Having thus in advance laid the blame on society of all the mistakes
made by literature in the eighteenth century (and its achievements
appear to him to be one and all mistakes), Barante has provided himself
with the basis for a calm appraisement of the individual eminent
writers. In his appreciations we have the views scattered throughout
the Emigrant Literature concentrated and, as it were, brought to a
focus.
Voltaire, whose reputation had, since his death, been made the subject
of as much hot dispute as the body of Patroclus, he criticises coldly,
but without animosity. He admires his natural gifts, the easily
stirred, impetuous feeling that produced his pathos, the irresistible
fascination of his eloquence and his wit, and the charm that lies in
his genial facility in shaping and expressing thoughts. But he sees
the use Voltaire made of his talents, sees how he allowed himself
to be led by the opinions of the time, by the desire to succeed, to
please. He laments the tendency to shameless, irreverent mockery, which
characterised Voltaire even as an old man. And this is all. For what
was just, for what was great in Voltaire's life-warfare he has no eyes,
no word. He professes to criticise Voltaire impartially, and yet he,
as it were, juggles away the indignation that was in his soul, that
which was the very breath of life in him; he calls the persecutions of
Voltaire stupid, but never once wicked; he excuses, not the blots on
Voltaire's greatness, but, as it were, the greatness itself--and it is
evident that he really desires to be impartial, since he excuses.
Of all the great authors of the past century, Montesquieu is the only
one for whom Barante expresses any really warm admiration. This is
natural enough, for in him he recognised some of his own qualities.
Montesquieu was not the ordinary author who could let his pen run away
with him; he was, like Barante himself, an official, a high official, a
famous lawyer, who was obliged to consider the dignity of his position
and the effect of his example. "President Montesquieu," says Barante,
"was not in that position of independence which men of letters prize so
highly, and which is possibly injurious both to their talents and their
characters." One is sensible of the cautious attempt at selfvindication
made in this ingenious paradox by the imperial official who was at
enmity with the Emperor. But whatever the cause, Barante made no
mistake in rating Montesquieu very highly. Other authors of his period
had more genius, but Montesquieu's accurate knowledge of practical
life, of administration and government, gave him an insight which the
others lacked, and a moderation on which high value was set at the
beginning of this century. In Montesquieu Barante approves of things
which he censures bitterly in others. He invites the reader to compare
Montesquieu's work, _De l'Esprit des Lois_, with an older work by
Domat on the same subject, in order to see the progress in philosophy
made by Montesquieu, who, treating religion with all due reverence,
nevertheless regards it as a subordinate matter.[1]
Diderot is the author against whom Barante is most biassed; in judging
him he shows himself extremely narrow-minded; he allows Diderot's
precipitancy and violence to blind him to his genius. A genius whose
recklessness ever and again reminds one of the recklessness of an
elemental force, was as little comprehensible to Barante as to the rest
of the alarmed, disillusioned generation to which he belongs. Diderot
was better calculated to please the Germans, who were unprejudiced in
intellectual matters, than his own over-sensitive countrymen of this
period. Goethe himself translated _Le Neveu de Rameau_, and Hegel
treated of it exhaustively in his _Phänomenologie des Geistes_. But
Barante, passionately condemning Diderot's incessant and unbridled
attacks upon religion, sums him up in these words: "His inner man was
ardent and disorderly, his mind was a fire without fuel, and the talent
of which he showed _some gleams_ was never put to any systematic use."
It was but natural that the eighteenth-century writer who had the
profoundest understanding of nature, should be held in lowest esteem by
the young idealists.
Rousseau, the last of the writers of the eighteenth century cited
before the bar of the nineteenth, had characteristics which
necessarily appealed to Barante. He was the only sentimentalist
among these writers, and the new century had begun sentimentally. He
was the most solitary of them, and the new century appreciated the
isolated personality. He stood quite apart from the philosophers and
Encyclopedists; his character had been formed by a strange and unhappy
life; he was uninfluenced by society or public opinion. Without family,
friends, position, or country, he had wandered about the world, and,
on his first appearance as an author, he had condemned society instead
of flattering it; instead of giving in to public opinion, he tried
to alter it; his attempt was successful, and where others pleased,
he roused enthusiasm. All this was certain to appeal to Barante. But
one has only to compare Barante's pronouncement on Rousseau with that
published twenty years earlier by his friend Mme. de Staël, to see
what progress the reaction against the spirit of the previous century
has made. That he dwells at length on the impurity of Rousseau's life
and the bad points in his character is in itself quite justifiable,
and in this matter his criticism only presents the natural contrast to
Mme. de Staël's warm apologetics. His severe judgment of Rousseau's
political doctrines is the result of more critical, mature reflection
than Mme. de Staël's woman-like attempt to vindicate them up to a
certain point. But in his appreciation of Rousseau's attempts at
religious reform, he is far from reaching her level. His principal
objection to the famous Confession of Faith, to the so-called natural
religion, is that it is a religion without public worship. "Nor can
we wonder at this," he says, "for to a morality without deeds, like
Rousseau's, a religion without worship is the inevitable corollary."
His bias towards inference-drawing in favour of the existing, actually
led this free-thinking critic to defend the traditional usages of the
Church against Rousseau.
At the bottom of all this narrow-mindedness and injustice of Barante's,
lay what lay at the root of much that was false and perverted in
other Liberal writers during the two following decades, namely, that
spiritualistic philosophy which was now making its way into France, and
which, after encountering much resistance, became dominant; nay, was
actually, under Cousin and his school, elevated to the rank of State
philosophy. Had this philosophy been content to develop its principles
and ideas as clearly and convincingly as possible, it would have been
a philosophy like any other, would have roused opposition, but never
enmity and detestation. But its champions, from the very beginning,
and in almost every country into which it found its way, displayed
unscientific and ill-omened tendencies. They were less anxious to prove
their theories than to vindicate the moral and religious tendency of
these theories. They were far less bent upon refuting their opponents
than upon denying them feeling for what is noble, high enthusiasms,
sense of duty, and ardour.
Mme. de Staël's dread of sensationalism was not a dread of the
philosophy in itself, but of its consequences. The noble-hearted woman,
who, with all her love of truth, was never anything but a dilettante
in philosophy, was possessed by a naïve fear that sensationalistic
psychology would lead men to submit unresistingly to the tyranny of
Napoleon; so, out of love for liberty, she took up arms against it.
Barante, as a man, has not her excuse. To him also, however, Descartes
and Leibnitz are not only great thinkers, but represent the principle
of good in metaphysics; as if there were any place for moral principles
in metaphysics. "Possibly," he observes, "they at times lost themselves
in misty regions, but at least they pursued an upward direction; their
teaching harmonises with the thoughts which move us when we reflect
profoundly on ourselves; and this path necessarily led to the noblest
of sciences, to religion and morality." He goes on to describe how
men grew weary of following them, and turned to follow in the path of
Locke and Hume, whose doctrine he describes, not as a contradictory
though equally justifiable one-sidedness, but as a degradation of human
nature, a prostitution of science. He thinks it natural that Spinoza
(whom he couples with Hobbes) should be opposed not only with reasons,
but "with indignation."[2]