THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
The French Revolution was like a bomb, to the making of which every
liberal thinker and writer of the eighteenth century had lent a hand,
and which, when it exploded, destroyed its creators. After the smoke had
rolled away, it became clear that the old régime, with its despotisms
and its persecutions, had indeed been abolished for ever; but the spirit
of the _Philosophes_ had vanished likewise. Men's minds underwent a
great reaction. The traditions of the last two centuries were violently
broken. In literature, particularly, it seemed as if the very
foundations of the art must be laid anew; and, in this task, if men
looked at all for inspiration from the Past, it was towards that age
which differed most from the age of their fathers--towards those distant
times before the Renaissance, when the medieval Church reigned supreme
in Europe.
But before examining these new developments more closely, one glance
must be given at a writer whose qualities had singularly little to do
with his surroundings. ANDRÉ CHÉNIER passed the active years of his
short life in the thick of the revolutionary ferment, and he was
guillotined at the age of thirty-two; but his most characteristic poems
might have been composed in some magic island, far from the haunts of
men, and untouched by 'the rumour of periods'. He is the only French
writer of the eighteenth century in whom the pure and undiluted spirit
of poetry is manifest. For this reason, perhaps, he has often been
acclaimed as the forerunner of the great Romantic outburst of a
generation later; but, in reality, to give him such a title is to
misjudge the whole value of his work. For he is essentially a classic;
with a purity, a restraint, a measured and accomplished art which would
have delighted Boileau, and which brings him into close kinship with
Racine and La Fontaine. If his metrical technique is somewhat looser
than the former poet's, it is infinitely less loose than the latter's;
and his occasional departures from the strict classical canons of
versification are always completely subordinated to the controlling
balance of his style. In his _Églogues_ the beauty of his workmanship
often reaches perfection. The short poems are Attic in their serenity
and their grace. It is not the rococo pseudo-classicism of the later
versifiers of the eighteenth century, it is the delicate flavour of true
Hellenism that breathes from them; and, as one reads them, one is
reminded alternately of Theocritus and of Keats. Like Keats, Chénier was
cut off when he had hardly more than given promise of what his
achievement might have been. His brief and tragic apparition in the
midst of the Revolution is like that of some lovely bird flitting on a
sudden out of the darkness and the terror of a tempest, to be overcome a
moment later, and whirled to destruction.
The lines upon which the Romantic Movement was to develop had no
connexion whatever with Chénier's exquisite art. Throughout French
Literature, it is easy to perceive two main impulses at work, which,
between them, have inspired all the great masterpieces of the language.
On the one hand, there is that positive spirit of searching and
unmitigated common sense which has given French prose its peculiar
distinction, which lies at the root of the wonderful critical powers of
the nation, and which has produced that remarkable and persistent strain
of Realism--of absolute fidelity to the naked truth--common to the
earliest _Fabliaux_ of the Middle Ages and the latest Parisian novel of
to-day. On the other hand, there is in French literature a totally
different--almost a contradictory--tendency, which is no less clearly
marked and hardly less important--the tendency towards pure Rhetoric.
This love of language for its own sake--of language artfully ordered,
splendidly adorned, moving, swelling, irresistible--may be seen alike in
the torrential sentences of Rabelais, in the sonorous periods of
Bossuet, and in the passionate _tirades_ of Corneille. With the great
masters of the seventeenth century--Pascal, Racine, La Fontaine, La
Bruyère--the two influences met, and achieved a perfect balance. In
their work, the most penetrating realism is beautified and ennobled by
all the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is
preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense. With
the eighteenth century, however, a change came. The age was a critical
age--an age of prose and common sense; the rhetorical impulse faded
away, to find expression only in melodramatic tragedy and dull verse;
and the style of Voltaire, so brilliant and yet so colourless, so
limited and yet so infinitely sensible, symbolized the literary
character of the century. The Romantic Movement was an immense reaction
against the realism which had come to such perfection in the acid prose
of Voltaire. It was a reassertion of the rhetorical instinct in all its
strength and in all its forms. There was no attempt simply to redress
the balance; no wish to revive the studied perfection of the classical
age. The realistic spirit was almost completely abandoned. The pendulum
swung violently from one extreme to the other.
The new movement had been already faintly discernible in Diderot's
bright colouring and the oratorical structure of Rousseau's writing. But
it was not until after the Revolution, in the first years of the
nineteenth century, that the Romantic spirit completely declared
itself--in the prose of CHATEAUBRIAND. Chateaubriand was, at bottom, a
rhetorician pure and simple--a rhetorician in the widest sense of the
word. It was not merely that the resources of his style were enormous in
colour, movement, and imagery, in splendour of rhythm, in descriptive
force; but that his whole cast of mind was in itself rhetorical, and
that he saw, felt, and thought with the same emphasis, the same
amplitude, the same romantic sensibility with which he wrote. The three
subjects which formed the main themes of all his work and gave occasion
for his finest passages were Christianity, Nature, and himself. His
conception of Christianity was the very reverse of that of the
eighteenth century. In his _Génie du Christianisme_ and his _Martyrs_
the analytical and critical spirit of his predecessors has entirely
vanished; the religion which they saw simply as a collection of
theological dogmas, he envisioned as a living creed, arrayed in all the
hues of poetry and imagination, and redolent with the mystery of the
past. Yet it may be doubted whether Chateaubriand was essentially more
religious than Voltaire. What Voltaire dissected in the dry light of
reason, Chateaubriand invested with the cloak of his own eloquence--put
it up, so to speak, on a platform, in a fine attitude, under a tinted
illumination. He lacked the subtle intimacy of Faith. In his
descriptions of Nature, too, the same characteristics appear. Compared
with Rousseau's, they are far bolder, far richer, composed on a more
elaborate and imposing scale; but they are less convincing; while
Rousseau's landscapes are often profoundly moving, Chateaubriand's are
hardly ever more than splendidly picturesque. There is a similar
relation between the egoisms of the two men. Chateaubriand was never
tired of writing about himself; and in his long _Mémoires
d'Outre-Tombe_--the most permanently interesting of his works--he gave a
full rein to his favourite passion. His conception of himself was
Byronic. He swells forth, in all his pages, a noble, melancholy, proud,
sentimental creature whom every man must secretly envy and every woman
passionately adore. He had all the vanity of Rousseau, but none of his
honesty. Rousseau, at any rate, never imposed upon himself; and
Chateaubriand always did. Thus the vision that we have of him is of
something wonderful but empty, something striking but unreal. It is the
rhetorician that we see, and not the man.
Chateaubriand's influence was very great. Beside his high-flowing,
romantic, imaginative writings, the tradition of the eighteenth century
seemed to shrivel up into something thin, cold and insignificant. A new
and dazzling world swam into the ken of his readers--a world in which
the individual reigned in glory amid the glowing panorama of Nature and
among the wondrous visions of a remote and holy past. His works became
at once highly popular, though it was not until a generation later that
their full effect was felt. Meanwhile, the impetus which he had started
was continued in the poems of LAMARTINE. Here there is the same love of
Nature, the same religious outlook, the same insistence on the
individual point of view; but the tints are less brilliant, the emphasis
is more restrained; the rhetorical impulse still dominates, but it is
the rhetoric of elegiac tenderness rather than of picturesque pomp. A
wonderful limpidity of versification which, while it is always perfectly
easy, is never weak, and a charming quietude of sentiment which, however
near it may seem to come to the commonplace, always just escapes
it--these qualities give Lamartine a distinguished place in the
literature of France. They may be seen in their perfection in the most
famous of his poems, _Le Lac_, a monody descriptive of his feelings on
returning alone to the shores of the lake where he had formerly passed
the day with his mistress. And throughout all his poetical work
precisely the same characteristics are to be found. Lamartine's lyre
gave forth an inexhaustible flow of melody--always faultless, always
pellucid, and always, in the same key.
* * * * *
During the Revolution, under the rule of Napoleon, and in the years
which followed his fall, the energies of the nation were engrossed by
war and politics. During these forty years there are fewer great names
in French literature than in any other corresponding period since the
Renaissance. At last, however, about the year 1830, a new generation of
writers arose who brought back all the old glories and triumphantly
proved that the French tongue, so far from having exhausted its
resources, was a fresh and living instrument of extraordinary power.
These writers--as has so often been the case in France--were bound
together by a common literary creed. Young, ardent, scornful of the
past, dazzled by the possibilities of the future, they raised the
standard of revolt against the traditions of Classicism, promulgated a
new aesthetic doctrine, and, after a sharp struggle and great
excitement, finally succeeded in completely establishing their view. The
change which they introduced was of enormous importance, and for this
reason the date 1830 is a cardinal one in the literature of France.
Every sentence, every verse that has been written in French since then
bears upon it, somewhere or other, the imprint of the great Romantic
Movement which came to a head in that year. What it was that was then
effected--what the main differences are between French literature before
1830 and French literature after--deserves some further consideration.
The Romantic School--of which the most important members were VICTOR
HUGO, ALFRED DE VIGNY, THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, ALEXANDRE DUMAS, and ALFRED DE
MUSSET--was, as we have said, inspired by that supremely French love of
Rhetoric which, during the long reign of intellect and prose in the
eighteenth century, had been almost entirely suppressed. The new spirit
had animated the prose of Chateaubriand and the poetry of Lamartine; but
it was the spirit only: the _form_ of both those writers retained most
of the important characteristics of the old tradition. It was new wine
in old bottles. The great achievement of the Romantic School was the
creation of new bottles--of a new conception of form, in which the vast
rhetorical impulse within them might find a suitable expression. Their
actual innovations, however, were by no means sweeping. For instance,
the numberless minute hard-and-fast metrical rules which, since the
days of Malherbe, had held French poetry in shackles, they only
interfered with to a very limited extent. They introduced a certain
number of new metres; they varied the rhythm of the Alexandrine; but a
great mass of petty and meaningless restrictions remained untouched, and
no real attempt was made to get rid of them until more than a generation
had passed. Yet here, as elsewhere, what they had done was of the
highest importance. They had touched the ark of the covenant and they
had not been destroyed. They had shown that it was possible to break a
'rule' and yet write good poetry. This explains the extraordinary
violence of the Romantic controversy over questions of the smallest
detail. When Victor Hugo, in the opening lines of _Hernani_, ventured to
refer to an 'escalier dérobé', and to put 'escalier' at the end of one
line, and 'dérobé' at the beginning of the next, he was assailed with
the kind of virulence which is usually reserved for the vilest of
criminals. And the abuse had a meaning in it: it was abuse of a
revolutionary. For in truth, by the disposition of those two words,
Victor Hugo had inaugurated a revolution. The whole theory of 'rules' in
literature--the whole conception that there were certain definite
traditional forms in existence which were, absolutely and inevitably,
the best--was shattered for ever. The new doctrine was triumphantly
vindicated--that the form of expression must depend ultimately, not upon
tradition nor yet upon _a priori_ reasonings, but simply and solely on
the thing expressed.
The most startling and the most complete of the Romantic innovations
related to the poetic Vocabulary. The number of words considered
permissible in French poetry had been steadily diminishing since the
days of Racine. A distinction had grown up between words that were
'noble' and words that were 'bas'; and only those in the former class
were admitted into poetry. No word could be 'noble' if it was one
ordinarily used by common people, or if it was a technical term, or if,
in short, it was peculiarly expressive; for any such word would
inevitably produce a shock, introduce mean associations, and destroy the
unity of the verse. If the sense demanded the use of such a word, a
periphrasis of 'noble' words must be employed instead. Racine had not
been afraid to use the word 'chien' in the most exalted of his
tragedies; but his degenerate successors quailed before such an
audacity. If you must refer to such a creature as a dog, you had better
call it 'de la fidélité respectable soutien'; the phrase actually occurs
in a tragedy of the eighteenth century. It is clear that, with such a
convention to struggle against, no poetry could survive. Everything
bold, everything vigorous, everything surprising became an impossibility
with a diction limited to the vaguest, most general, and most feebly
pompous terms. The Romantics, in the face of violent opposition, threw
the doors of poetry wide open to every word in the language. How great
the change was, and what was the nature of the public opinion against
which the Romantics had to fight, may be judged from the fact that the
use of the word 'mouchoir' during a performance of _Othello_ a few years
before 1830 produced a riot in the theatre. To such a condition of
narrowness and futility had the great Classical tradition sunk at last!
The enormous influx of words into the literary vocabulary which the
Romantic Movement brought about had two important effects. In the first
place, the range of poetical expression was infinitely increased.
French literature came out of a little, ceremonious, antiquated
drawing-room into the open air. With the flood of new words, a thousand
influences which had never been felt before came into operation.
Strangeness, contrast, complication, immensity, curiosity,
grotesqueness, fantasy--effects of this kind now for the first time
became possible and common in verse. But, one point must be noticed. The
abolition of the distinction between words that were 'bas' and 'noble'
did not at first lead (as might have been expected) to an increase of
realism. Rather the opposite took place. The Romantics loved the new
words not because they made easier the expression of actual facts, but
for their power of suggestion, for the effects of remoteness, contrast,
and multiplicity which could be produced by them--in fact, for their
rhetorical force. The new vocabulary came into existence as an engine of
rhetoric, not as an engine of truth. Nevertheless--and this was the
second effect of its introduction--in the long run the realistic impulse
in French literature was also immensely strengthened. The vocabulary of
prose widened at the same time as that of verse; and the prose of the
first Romantics remained almost completely rhetorical. But the realistic
elements always latent in prose--and especially in French prose--soon
asserted themselves; the vast opportunities for realistic description
which the enlarged vocabulary opened out were eagerly seized upon; and
it was not long before there arose in French literature a far more
elaborate and searching realism than it had ever known before.
* * * * *
It was, perhaps, unfortunate that the main struggle of the Romantic
controversy should have been centred in the theatre. The fact that this
was so is an instance of the singular interest in purely literary
questions which has so often been displayed by popular opinion in
France. The controversy was not simply an academic matter for
connoisseurs and critics to decide upon in private; it was fought out in
all the heat of popular excitement on the public stage. But the wild
enthusiasm aroused by the triumphs of Dumas and Hugo in the theatre
shows, in a no less striking light, the incapacity of contemporaries to
gauge the true significance of new tendencies in art. On the whole, the
dramatic achievement of the Romantic School was the least valuable part
of their work. _Hernani_, the first performance of which marked the
turning-point of the movement, is a piece of bombastic melodrama, full
of the stagiest clap-trap and the most turgid declamation. Victor Hugo
imagined when he wrote it that he was inspired by Shakespeare; if he was
inspired by anyone it was by Voltaire. His drama is the old drama of the
eighteenth century, repainted in picturesque colours; it resembles those
grotesque country-houses that our forefathers were so fond of, where the
sham-Gothic turrets and castellations ill conceal the stucco and the
pilasters of a former age. Of true character and true passion it has no
trace. The action, the incidents, the persons--all alike are dominated
by considerations of rhetoric, and of rhetoric alone. The rhetoric has,
indeed, this advantage over that of _Zaïre_ and _Alzire_--it is bolder
and more highly coloured; but then it is also more pretentious. All the
worst tendencies of the Romantic Movement may be seen completely
displayed in the dramas of Victor Hugo.
For throughout his work that wonderful writer expressed in their
extreme forms the qualities and the defects of his school. Above all, he
was the supreme lord of words. In sheer facility, in sheer abundance of
language, Shakespeare alone of all the writers of the world can be
reckoned his superior. The bulk of his work is very great, and the
nature of it is very various; but every page bears the mark of the same
tireless fecundity, the same absolute dominion over the resources of
speech. Words flowed from Victor Hugo like light from the sun. Nor was
his volubility a mere disordered mass of verbiage: it was controlled,
adorned, and inspired by an immense technical power. When one has come
under the spell of that great enchanter, one begins to believe that his
art is without limits, that with such an instrument and such a science
there is no miracle which he cannot perform. He can conjure up the
strangest visions of fancy; he can evoke the glamour and the mystery of
the past; he can sing with exquisite lightness of the fugitive beauties
of Nature; he can pour out, in tenderness or in passion, the melodies of
love; he can fill his lines with the fire, the stress, the culminating
fury, of prophetic denunciation; he can utter the sad and secret
questionings of the human spirit, and give voice to the solemnity of
Fate. In the long roll and vast swell of his verse there is something of
the ocean--a moving profundity of power. His sonorous music, with its
absolute sureness of purpose, and its contrapuntal art, recalls the
vision in _Paradise Lost_ of him who--
with volant touch
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.
What kind of mind, what kind of spirit, must that have been, one asks in
amazement, which could animate with such a marvellous perfection the
enormous organ of that voice?
But perhaps it would be best to leave the question unasked--or at least
unanswered. For the more one searches, the clearer it becomes that
the intellectual scope and the spiritual quality of Victor Hugo were
very far from being equal to his gifts of expression and imagination.
He had the powers of a great genius and the soul of an ordinary
man. But that was not all. There have been writers of the highest
excellence--Saint-Simon was one of them--the value of whose productions
have been unaffected, or indeed even increased, by their personal
inferiority. They could not have written better, one feels, if they had
been ten times as noble and twenty times as wise as they actually were.
But unfortunately this is not so with Victor Hugo. His faults--his
intellectual weakness, his commonplace outlook, his lack of humour, his
vanity, his defective taste--cannot be dismissed as irrelevant and
unimportant, for they are indissolubly bound up with the very substance
of his work. It was not as a mere technician that he wished to be
judged; he wrote with a very different intention; it was as a
philosopher, as a moralist, as a prophet, as a sublime thinker, as a
profound historian, as a sensitive and refined human being. With a poet
of such pretensions it is clearly most relevant to inquire whether his
poetry does, in fact, reveal the high qualities he lays claim to, or
whether, on the contrary, it is characterized by a windy inflation of
sentiment, a showy superficiality of thought, and a ridiculous and petty
egoism. These are the unhappy questions which beset the mature and
reflective reader of Victor Hugo's works. To the young and enthusiastic
one the case is different. For him it is easy to forget--or even not to
observe--what there may be in that imposing figure that is
unsatisfactory and second-rate. _He_ may revel at will in the voluminous
harmonies of that resounding voice; by turns thrilling with indignation,
dreaming in ecstasy, plunging into abysses, and soaring upon
unimaginable heights. Between youth and age who shall judge? Who decide
between rapture and reflection, enthusiasm and analysis? To determine
the precise place of Victor Hugo in the hierarchy of poets would be
difficult indeed. But this much is certain: that at times the splendid
utterance does indeed grow transfused with a pure and inward beauty,
when the human frailties vanish, and all is subdued and glorified by the
high purposes of art. Such passages are to be found among the lyrics of
_Les Feuilles d'Automne, Les Rayons et Les Ombres, Les Contemplations_,
in the brilliant descriptions and lofty imagery of _La Légende des
Siècles_, in the burning invective of _Les Châtiments_. None but a place
among the most illustrious could be given to the creator of such a
stupendous piece of word-painting as the description of the plain of
Waterloo in the latter volume, or of such a lovely vision as that in _La
Légende des Siècles_, of Ruth looking up in silence at the starry
heaven. If only the wondrous voice had always spoken so!
* * * * *
The romantic love of vastness, richness, and sublimity, and the romantic
absorption in the individual--these two qualities appear in their
extremes throughout the work of Hugo: in that of ALFRED DE VIGNY it is
the first that dominates; in that of ALFRED DE MUSSET, the second. Vigny
wrote sparingly--one or two plays, a few prose works, and a small volume
of poems; but he produced some masterpieces. A far more sober artist
than Hugo, he was also a far profounder thinker, and a sincerer man. His
melancholy, his pessimism, were the outcome of no Byronic
attitudinizing, but the genuine intimate feelings of a noble spirit; and
he could express them in splendid verse. His melancholy was touched with
grandeur, his pessimism with sublimity. In his _Moïse_, his _Colère de
Samson_, his _Maison du Berger_, his _Mont des Oliviers_, and others of
his short reflective poems, he envisions man face to face with
indifferent Nature, with hostile Destiny, with poisoned Love, and the
lesson he draws is the lesson of proud resignation. In _La Mort du
Loup_, the tragic spectacle of the old wolf driven to bay and killed by
the hunters inspires perhaps his loftiest verses, with the closing
application to humanity--'Souffre et meurs sans parler'--summing up his
sad philosophy. No less striking and beautiful are the few short stories
in his _Servitude et Grandeur Militaires_, in which some heroic
incidents of military life are related in a prose of remarkable strength
and purity. In the best work of Vigny there are no signs of the strain,
the over-emphasis, the tendency towards the grotesque, always latent in
Romanticism; its nobler elements are alone preserved; he has achieved
the grand style.
Alfred de Musset presents a complete contrast. He was the spoilt child
of the age--frivolous, amorous, sensuous, charming, unfortunate, and
unhappy; and his poetry is the record of his personal feelings, his
varying moods, his fugitive loves, his sentimental despairs.
Le seul bien qui me reste au monde
Est d'avoir quelquefois pleuré,
he exclaims, with an accent of regretful softness different indeed from
that of Vigny. Among much that is feeble, ill constructed, and
exaggerated in his verse, strains of real beauty and real pathos
constantly recur. Some of his lyrics are perfect; the famous song of
Fortunio in itself entitles him to a high place among the masters of the
language; and in his longer pieces--especially in the four _Nuits_--his
emotion occasionally rises, grows transfigured, and vibrates with a
strange intensity, a long, poignant, haunting note. But doubtless his
chief claim to immortality rests upon his exquisite little dramas (both
in verse and prose), in which the romance of Shakespeare and the fantasy
of Marivaux mingle with a wit, a charm, an elegance, which are all
Musset's own. In his historical drama, _Lorenzaccio_, he attempted to
fill a larger canvas, and he succeeded. Unlike the majority of the
Romantics, Musset had a fine sense of psychology and a penetrating
historical vision. In this brilliant, vivacious, and yet subtle tragedy
he is truly great.
We must now glance at the effects which the Romantic Movement produced
upon the art which was destined to fill so great a place in the
literature of the nineteenth century--the art of prose fiction. With the
triumph of Classicism in the seventeenth century, the novel, like all
other forms of literature, grew simplified and compressed. The huge
romances of Mademoiselle de Scudéry were succeeded by the delicate
little stories of Madame de Lafayette, one of which--_La Princesse de
Clèves_--a masterpiece of charming psychology and exquisite art,
deserves to be considered as the earliest example of the modern novel.
All through the eighteenth century the same tendency is visible. _Manon
Lescaut_, the passionate and beautiful romance of l'Abbé Prévost, is a
very small book, concerned, like _La Princesse de Clèves_, with two
characters only--the lovers, whose varying fortunes make up the whole
action of the tale. Precisely the same description applies to the subtle
and brilliant _Adolphe_ of Benjamin Constant, produced in the early
years of the nineteenth century. Even when the framework was larger--as
in Le Sage's _Gil Blas_ and Marivaux's _Vie de Marianne_--the spirit was
the same; it was the spirit of selection, of simplification, of delicate
skill. Both the latter works are written in a prose style of deliberate
elegance, and both consist rather of a succession of small
incidents--almost of independent short stories--than of one large
developing whole. The culminating example of the eighteenth-century form
of fiction may be seen in the _Liaisons Dangereuses_ of Laclos, a witty,
scandalous and remarkably able novel, concerned with the interacting
intrigues of a small society of persons, and revealing on every page a
most brilliant and concentrated art. Far more modern, both in its
general conception and in the absolute realism of its treatment, was
Diderot's _La Religieuse_; but this masterpiece was not published till
some years after the Revolution; and the real honour of having
originated the later developments in French fiction--as in so many other
branches of literature--belongs undoubtedly to Rousseau. _La Nouvelle
Héloïse_, faulty as it is as a work of art, with its feeble psychology
and loose construction, yet had the great merit of throwing open whole
new worlds for the exploration of the novelist--the world of nature on
the one hand, and on the other the world of social problems and all the
living forces of actual life. The difference between the novels of
Rousseau and those of Hugo is great; but yet it is a difference merely
of degree. _Les Misérables_ is the consummation of the romantic
conception of fiction which Rousseau had adumbrated half a century
before. In that enormous work, Hugo attempted to construct a prose epic
of modern life; but the attempt was not successful. Its rhetorical cast
of style, its ceaseless and glaring melodrama, its childish presentments
of human character, its endless digressions and--running through all
this--its evidences of immense and disordered power, make the book
perhaps the most magnificent failure--the most 'wild enormity' ever
produced by a man of genius. Another development of the romantic spirit
appeared at about the same time in the early novels of George Sand, in
which the ardours of passionate love are ecstatically idealized in a
loose and lyric flow of innumerable words.
There can be little doubt that if the development of fiction had stopped
at this point the infusion into it of the romantic spirit could only
have been judged a disaster. From the point of view of art, such novels
as those of Victor Hugo and the early works of George Sand were a
retrogression from those of the eighteenth century. _Manon Lescaut_,
tiny, limited, unambitious as it is, stands on a far higher level of
artistic achievement than the unreal and incoherent _Les Misérables_.
The scale of the novel had indeed been infinitely enlarged, but the
apparatus for dealing adequately with the vast masses of new material
was wanting. It is pathetic to watch the romantic novelists trying to
infuse beauty and significance into their subjects by means of fine
writing, lyrical outbursts, impassioned philosophical dissertations, and
all the familiar rhetorical devices so dear to them. The inevitable
result was something lifeless, formless, fantastic; they were on the
wrong track. The true method for the treatment of their material was not
that of rhetoric at all; it was that of realism. This fact was
discovered by STENDHAL, who was the first to combine an enlarged view of
the world with a plain style and an accurate, unimpassioned, detailed
examination of actual life. In his remarkable novel, _Le Rouge et Le
Noir_, and in some parts of his later work, _La Chartreuse de Parme_,
Stendhal laid down the lines on which French fiction has been developing
ever since. The qualities which distinguish him are those which have
distinguished all the greatest of his successors--a subtle psychological
insight, an elaborate attention to detail, and a remorseless fidelity to
the truth.
Important as Stendhal is in the history of modern French fiction, he is
dwarfed by the colossal figure of BALZAC. By virtue of his enormous
powers, and the immense quantity and variety of his output, Balzac might
be called the Hugo of prose, if it were not that in two most important
respects he presents a complete contrast to his great contemporary. In
the first place, his control of the technical resources of the language
was as feeble as Hugo's was mighty. Balzac's style is bad; in spite of
the electric vigour that runs through his writing, it is formless,
clumsy, and quite without distinction; it is the writing of a man who
was highly perspicacious, formidably powerful, and vulgar. But, on the
other hand, he possessed one great quality which Hugo altogether
lacked--the sense of the real. Hugo was most himself when he was soaring
on the wings of fancy through the empyrean; Balzac was most himself when
he was rattling in a hired cab through the streets of Paris. He was of
the earth earthy. His coarse, large, germinating spirit gave forth, like
the earth, a teeming richness, a solid, palpable creation. And thus it
was he who achieved what Hugo, in _Les Misérables_, had in vain
attempted. _La Comédie Humaine_, as he called the long series of his
novels, which forms in effect a single work, presents, in spite of its
limitations and its faults, a picture of the France of that age drawn on
the vast scale and in the grand manner of an epic.
The limitations and the faults of Balzac's work are, indeed,
sufficiently obvious and sufficiently grave. The same coarseness of
fibre which appears in his style made him incapable of understanding the
delicacies of life--the refined shades of emotion, the subtleties of
human intercourse. He probably never read Jane Austen; but if he had he
certainly would have considered her an utterly pointless writer; and he
would have been altogether at sea in a novel by Henry James. The elusive
things that are so important, the indecisive things that are so curious,
the intimate things that are so thrilling--all these slipped through his
rough, matter-of-fact grasp. His treatment of the relations between the
sexes is characteristic. The subject fills a great place in his novels;
he approaches it with an unflinching boldness, and a most penetrating
gaze; yet he never succeeds in giving a really satisfactory presentment
of the highest of those relations--love. That eluded him: its essence
was too subtle, too private, too transcendental. No one can describe
love who has not the makings of a poet in him. And a poet was the very
last thing that Balzac was.
But his work does not merely suffer from the absence of certain good
qualities; it is also marred by the presence of positively bad ones.
Balzac was not simply a realist. There was a romantic vein in him, which
occasionally came to the surface with unfortunate results. When that
happened, he plunged into the most reckless melodrama, revelled in the
sickliest sentiment, or evolved the most grotesque characters, the most
fantastic plots. And these lapses occur quite indiscriminately. Side by
side with some detailed and convincing description, one comes upon
glaring absurdities; in the middle of some narrative of extraordinary
actuality, one finds oneself among hissing villains, disguises, poisons,
and all the paraphernalia of a penny novelette. Balzac's lack of
critical insight into his own work is one of the most singular of his
characteristics. He hardly seems to have known at all what he was about.
He wrote feverishly, desperately, under the impulsion of irresistible
genius. His conceptions crowded upon him in vivid, serried
multitudes--the wildest visions of fantasy mixed pell-mell with the most
vital realizations of fact. It was not for him to distinguish; his
concern was simply, somehow or other, to get them all out: good, bad, or
indifferent, what did it matter? The things were in his brain; and they
must be expressed.
Fortunately, it is very easy for the reader to be more discriminating
than Balzac. The alloy is not inextricably mingled with the pure
metal--the chaff may be winnowed off, and the grain left. His errors and
futilities cannot obscure his true achievement--his evocation of
multitudinous life. The whole of France is crammed into his pages, and
electrified there into intense vitality. The realism of the classical
novelists was a purely psychological realism; it was concerned with the
delicately shifting states of mind of a few chosen persons, and with
nothing else. Balzac worked on a very different plan. He neglected the
subtleties of the spirit, and devoted himself instead to, displaying the
immense interest that lay in those prosaic circumstances of existence
which the older writers had ignored. He showed with wonderful force that
the mere common details of everyday life were filled with drama, that,
to him who had eyes to see, there might be significance in a ready-made
suit of clothes, and passion in the furniture of a boarding-house. Money
in particular gave him an unending theme. There is hardly a character in
the whole vast range of his creation of whose income we are not exactly
informed; and it might almost be said that the only definite moral that
can be drawn from _La Comédie Humaine_ is that the importance of money
can never be over-estimated. The classical writers preferred to leave
such matters to the imagination of the reader; it was Balzac's great
object to leave nothing to the imagination of the reader. By ceaseless
effort, by infinite care, by elaborate attention to the minutest
details, he would describe _all_. He brought an encyclopaedic knowledge
to bear upon his task; he can give an exact account of the machinery of
a provincial printing-press; he can write a dissertation on the methods
of military organization; he can reveal the secret springs in the
mechanism of Paris journalism; he is absolutely at home in the
fraudulent transactions of money-makers, the methods of usurers, the
operations of high finance. And into all this mass of details he can
infuse the spirit of life. Perhaps his masterpiece in realistic
description is his account of La Maison Vauquer--a low boarding-house,
to which he devotes page after page of minute particularity. The result
is not a mere dead catalogue: it is a palpitating image of lurid truth.
Never was the sordid horror which lurks in places and in things evoked
with a more intense completeness.
Undoubtedly it is in descriptions of the sordid, the squalid, the ugly,
and the mean that Balzac particularly excels. He is at his greatest when
he is revealing the horrible underside of civilization--the indignities
of poverty, the low intrigues of parasites, the long procession of petty
agonies that embitter and ruin a life. Over this world of shadow and
grime he throws strange lights. Extraordinary silhouettes flash out and
vanish; one has glimpses of obscure and ominous movements on every side;
and, amid all this, some sudden vision emerges from the darkness, of
pathos, of tenderness, of tragic and unutterable pain.
Balzac died in 1850, and at about that time the Romantic Movement came
to an end. Victor Hugo, it is true, continued to live and to produce for
more than thirty years longer; but French literature ceased to be
dominated by the ideals of the Romantic school. That school had
accomplished much; it had recreated French poetry, and it had
revolutionized French prose. But, by the very nature of its achievement,
it led the way to its own supersession. The spirit which animated its
doctrines was the spirit of progress and of change; it taught that there
were no fixed rules for writing well; that art, no less than science,
lived by experiment; that a literature which did not develop was dead.
Therefore it was inevitable that the Romantic ideal itself should form
the stepping-stone for a fresh advance. The complex work of Balzac
unites in a curious way many of the most important elements of the old
school and of the new. Alike by his vast force, his immense variety,
his formlessness, his lack of critical and intellectual power, he was a
Romantic; but he belonged to the future in his enormous love of prosaic
detail, his materialist cast of mind, and his preoccupation with actual
facts.