notions of the understanding have their sources in the nature of the
soul, and that an innate fundamental conception of religion is to be
found at all times and in all races. Always and everywhere, he says,
there is to be found the belief in a life after death, reverence for
the dead, burial of the dead in the certainty that life has not ended
for them, and, finally, the belief that the universe had a beginning
and will have an end. These are to him, much as they were to Benjamin
Constant, the spiritual elements which constitute the firm foundation
of religion. He does not realise that they may be resolved into still
simpler elements, which are to be found unconnected with religious
feeling. For he does not investigate freely, independently, but esteems
it an honour to succeed to what he calls "le glorieux héritage de la
haute philosophie."
In a precisely similar manner he inveighs against attempts to place
morality upon an empirical basis. "Instead," he says, "of starting
from the feeling of justice and sympathy which dwells in the hearts
of all men, people have tried to base morality upon the instinct
of self-preservation and utility." He clearly has no comprehension
whatever of the profound philosophic instinct which has led the
thinkers of the opposite school to resolve the idea of justice into
its first elements, and show how it originates and takes shape. He
merely writes bombastically and indignantly of the impossibility of
arriving by such processes at revealed religion, "the divine proofs of
which unbelief had rejected."[3] The same man who praises Montesquieu's
_Lettres Persanes_, and approves of that author's qualification of
religion as a secondary matter, is, with the half-heartedness of the
period, horrified by the attempt of the empirical philosophers to
discover the elements which go to the construction of the idea of
justice. Hence it is that we find in Barante the beginnings of that
foolish play upon the double meaning of the word sensualism, which was
to be throughout the century a weapon in the hands of hypocrisy and
baseness--the word being used at one time as the appellation of the
particular philosophy sometimes known by that name, at another as the
equivalent for sensuality, or yet again for the doctrine that sensual
pleasures are the aim of life. Barante, like Cousin, defends the
superficial and unscientific spiritualism which flourished in France
in the first decades of this century as a philosophy which encouraged
virtue and morality.
Mme. de Staël wrote a notice of Barante's book for one of the
newspapers of the day, the _Mercure de France_. The censor forbade
it to be printed at the time, but it was published later, without
alterations. It is only three pages long, but a critic needs no further
evidence to convince him of the genius of the writer. She begins with
some warm words of admiration for the maturity and rare moderation of
the young author, only regretting that he does not more frequently
abandon himself to his impressions, and reminding him that restraint
does not always imply strength. Then, as if in a flash, she perceives
beneath the incidental and personal merits and defects of the book
the intellectual character of the new century. The consideration of
this work seems to have suddenly and forcibly revealed to her to
what an extent she herself, with her cheerful, reformatory energy,
was a product of the preceding century with its firm faith in
progress. Barante's book is to her an intimation that the period of
transition is at an end; she is amazed by the despondent resignation
to circumstances, the fatalism, the reverence for the accomplished
fact, which meet her in its pages. She divines that this despondent
resignation to the pressure of circumstance will be one of the features
of the new period; she has the presentiment that its philosophy will
to a great extent consist of demonstrations that the real is the
rational; and she seems, with the far-sightedness of genius, to discern
how ambiguous that word "the real" will prove to be, and how much
irreflective acquiescence in the existing the maxim will entail. She
closes her review with these words of prophetic wisdom:--
"The eighteenth century proclaimed principles in a too unconditional
manner; possibly the nineteenth century will explain facts in a
spirit of too great resignation to them. The eighteenth believed in
the nature of things, the nineteenth will only believe in the force
of circumstances. The eighteenth desired to control the future, the
nineteenth confines itself to the attempt to understand mankind. The
author of this book is perhaps the first who is very distinctly tinged
with the colour of the new century."
The style and the matter of this utterance are equally striking. Of
all the notable men with whom Mme. de Staël was acquainted, not one
had so distinctly separated himself from the preceding century as this
youngest among them, Barante. The others, one after the other, had
left the sinking ship of the eighteenth century, and gone on board the
ship of the nineteenth, loading it by degrees with all the goods and
seed-corn that it was to carry; but it still lay side by side with the
wreck, made fast to it. It was Barante who cut the cables and sent the
vessel out into the wide ocean.
[1] Alors on pourra distinguer, comment la religion, respectée par
Montesquieu, était pourtant jugée par lui, tandis que Domat l'avait
seulement adorée, et en avait fait tout découler au lieu de la
considérer comme accessoire.
[2] On arriva bientôt à tout nier; déjà l'incrédulité avait rejeté les
preuves divines de la révélation et avait abjuré les devoirs et les
souvenirs chrétiens.
[3] _De la Litt. Française_, p. 213.
XV
CONCLUSION
The literary group the formation and development of which we have been
following, produces the impression of an interwoven whole. Multitudes
of threads that cross and recross each other stretch from the one work
to the other; this exposition has only made the connection clear; it
has not taken separate entities and arbitrarily woven them together. It
is to be noted that this collection of writings, this set of writers,
form a group, not a school. A group is the result of the natural,
unintentional connection between minds and works which have a common
tendency; a school is the result of the conscious fellowship of authors
who have submitted themselves to the guidance of some more or less
distinctly formulated conviction.
The Emigrant Literature, although French, develops beyond the frontiers
of France. In order to understand it, we must keep before our minds
that short and violently agitated period in which the old order was
abolished, the principle of legitimacy was discarded, the ruling
classes were humiliated and ruined, and positive religion was set aside
by men who had freed themselves from its yoke rather by the help of a
pugnacious philosophy than by scientific culture--men whose ruthless
and not always honourable mode of warfare had irritated all those who
were more or less dimly sensible of injustice in the charges directed
against the old order of things, and whose intellectual, moral, and
emotional cravings found no satisfaction in the new. The more unreal
and impracticable the ideas of the rights and the progress of humanity
proved themselves to be, the more certain did it become that an
intellectual rebound must be at hand. It came; the reaction began. I
have shown how at first it was only a partial reaction, how the ideas
of the Revolution were invariably blended with the ideas which inspire
the revulsion against Voltaire; we have seen that the intellectual
point of departure of all its leaders lay in the eighteenth century,
and that they were all liable to be affected by reminiscences, and
subject to relapse. They all proceed, so to speak, from Rousseau. Their
first step is simply to take his weapons and direct them against his
antagonist Voltaire. Only the youngest of them, Barante, can with truth
deny kinship with Rousseau.
These men are followed by a second set of authors whose aim is the
preservation of society. They also are for the most part émigrés, and
they advocate unconditional reaction. Their writings, along with single
works of authors like Chateaubriand, who are progressive in art but
reactionary in their attitude towards Church and State, and certain
youthful reactionary works of future Liberal and even Radical writers
like Lamartine and Hugo, form a group characterised by unconditional
adherence to the old--the ruling idea in them being the principle of
authority. Amongst the leading men of this set are Joseph de Maistre,
Bonald, and Lamennais.
But under the title "Emigrant Literature," I have gathered together
and drawn attention to the more healthy literary productions, in which
the reaction has not as yet become subjection to authority, but is the
natural and justifiable defence of feeling, soul, passion, and poetry,
against frigid intellectuality, exact calculation, and a literature
stifled by rules and dead traditions, like that which continued to
prolong its feeble and bloodless existence in France under the Empire.
The following group, more closely united in its submission to one
dominant principle, has necessarily a clearer, sharper outline; but the
one at present in question has more life, more feeling, more restless
power.
We see the writers and writings of the Emigrant Literature as it were
in a tremulous light. It is in the dawn of the new century that they
stand, these men; the first beams of the morning sun of the nineteenth
century fall upon them, and slowly disperse the veil of Ossianic mist
and Wertherian melancholy which envelops them. One feels that a
night of terror and bloodshed lies behind them; their faces are pale
and serious. But their grief is poetical, their melancholy awakes
sympathy, and one is conscious of fermenting forces in the passionate
outbursts which betray their mortification at being obliged, instead
of continuing the work of the day before, to regard the foundation
laid that day with suspicion, and to gather together laboriously the
fragments left by the havoc of the night.
The Emigrant Literature is a profoundly agitated literature.
Chateaubriand leads the way with the stormy passion and the powerful,
brilliant landscape-painting of his novels. In them everything glows
and flames with Catholic ecstasy and Satanic passion; but in the
midst of the flames stands, like a figure hewn in stone, the modern
personality, the egoistic, solitary genius, René.
Sénancour produces a work in which, in a peculiarly soulful manner,
modern liberal thought is fused with Romantic yearnings, Teutonic
sentimentality and idealism with Latin refined sensuousness, the
rebellious inclination to sift every question to the bottom with the
despondency that dreams of suicide.
Nodier mingles his voice in the chorus. Subtle, versatile, fantastic,
possessed by the spirit of opposition, he attacks Napoleon and the
existing state of society, and panegyrises Klopstock and conventual
life. Naive as a child and learned as an old man, he seeks martyrdom
for the pleasure of being persecuted and for the sake of being able to
pursue his studies in solitude. Constantly progressing, he makes belief
in progress the subject of incessant satire.
Constant makes his appearance as a politician, and also as a dilettante
in fiction who puts masters to shame. His mind sways like a pendulum
between the ideas of two periods. By nature he is the child of the
eighteenth century, but his culture and his aims are those of the
period of the syntheses and the constitutions. In his one imaginative
work he presents his contemporaries with a model of psychological
character-drawing, and directs their attention to all the good feelings
and energies that are sacrificed to the laws of modern society.
But it is in Mme. de Staël that the Emigrant Literature first becomes
conscious of its aims and its best tendencies. It is this woman whose
figure dominates the group. In her writings there is collected the best
of that which is valid in the productions of the exiles. The tendency
to return to the past, and the tendency to press onwards to the future,
which produce discordancy in the actions and writings of the other
members of the group, in her case combine to produce an endeavour
which is neither reactionary nor revolutionary, but reformatory. Like
the others, she draws her first inspiration from Rousseau, like the
others, she deplores the excesses of the Revolution, but better than
any of the others, she loves personal and political freedom. She
wages war with absolutism in the State and hypocrisy in society, with
national arrogance and religious prejudice. She teaches her countrymen
to appreciate the characteristics and literature of the neighbouring
nations; she breaks down with her own hand the wall of self-sufficiency
with which victorious France had surrounded itself. Barante, with his
perspective view of eighteenth-century France, only continues and
completes her work.
Naturally connected with the Emigrant Literature is that German
Romanticism by which Mme. de Staël was influenced in the last period
of her activity, and the influence of which is also to be traced in
Barante. The whole group of books to which I have given the common
name Emigrant Literature may be described as a species of Romanticism
anticipating more especially the great Romantic School of France. But
it is also in touch with the German spirit and its Romanticism, often
from unconscious sympathy, at times directly influenced by it. Hence it
is that in her book on Germany Mme. de Staël calls Rousseau, Bernardin
de Saint Pierre, and Chateaubriand unconscious Germans, and hence it is
that we find the men and women of the Emigrant Literature every now and
again showing a tendency to Romanticism, or interesting themselves in
the word and the idea.
But they not only herald the great authors who are to succeed them;
they are in a very remarkable manner their prototypes. As a Romantic
colourist Chateaubriand anticipates Victor Hugo, in his melancholy
ennui he anticipates Byron. Long before the days of the Romantic
School, Sénancour touches the chords which are afterwards sounded
by Sainte-Beuve. Nodier, with his philological and archaeological
erudition, his pure, austere prose, his fantastic and unpleasant
themes, is the precursor of Mérimée. Long before the time of the great
French novelists, Constant gives us Balzac's heroines; as a politician,
although liberal and anti-clerical, he has some points of resemblance
with an emphatically Romantic politician, the German, Gentz. Barante,
with his spiritualistic and yet fatalistic literary philosophy,
prepares the way for the criticism and æstheticism which were to be
enthroned in high places in the days of Victor Cousin. Mme. de Staël
seems to announce the greatest authoress of the century, a woman who
possessed less elevation of mind than herself, but more genius and
fecundity, the poetess and philosopher, George Sand.
The literary history of a whole continent during half a century
obviously does not begin at any one single point. The point of
departure chosen by the historian may always be described as arbitrary
and fortuitous; he must trust to his instinct and critical faculty, or
he will never make a beginning at all. To me the Emigrant Literature
seemed the natural starting-point indicated by history itself. Looked
at from one point of view, this group prepares the way for the later
religious and political reaction in French literature; looked at from
another, it prepares the way for the Romantic School in France. It
is the best of introductions to the study and understanding of the
Romantic School in Germany; it has even points of contact with such
remote phenomena as Byron and Balzac.
In a word, the Emigrant Literature constitutes the prologue to the
great literary drama of the century.
MAIN CURRENTS IN
NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE
By GEORGE BRANDES
In Six Vols, illustrated
I. THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE.
II. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY.
III. THE REACTION IN FRANCE.
IV. NATURALISM IN ENGLAND.
V. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE.
VI. YOUNG GERMANY.