CHAPTER V.

The Romantic Movement in France.[1]

French romanticism had aspects of its own which distinguished it from the

English and the German alike. It differed from the former and agreed

with the latter in being organised. In France, as in Germany, there was

a romantic school, whose members were united by common literary

principles and by personal association. There were sharply defined and

hostile factions of classics and romantics, with party cries, watchwords,

and shibboleths; a propaganda carried on and a polemic waged in

pamphlets, prefaces, and critical journals. Above all there was a

leader. Walter Scott was the great romancer of Europe, but he was never

the head of a school in his own country in the sense in which Victor Hugo

was in France, or even in the sense in which the Schlegels were in

Germany. Scott had imitators, but Hugo had disciples.

One point in which the French movement differed from both the English and

the German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. It was

not so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. The

reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic tradition

had in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century classicism.

Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary convention

in asserting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life.

Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art.

The French, in political and social matters the most revolutionary people

of Europe, were the most conservative in matters of taste. The

Revolution even intensified the reigning classicism by giving it a

republican turn. The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to the examples

of the Greek and Roman democracies. The Goddess of Reason was enthroned

in place of God, Sunday was abolished, and the names of the months and of

the days of the week were changed. Dress under the Directory was

patterned on antique modes--the liberty cap was Phrygian--and children

born under the Republic were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Cassius,

etc. The great painter of the Revolution was David,[2] who painted his

subjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek temples. Voltaire's

classicism was monarchical and held to the Louis XIV. tradition; David's

was republican. And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticism

were the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675.

A second distinction of the French romanticism was its local

concentration at Paris. The centripetal forces have always been greater

in France than in England and Germany. The earlier group of German

_Romantiker_ was, indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena and

Berlin; and the _Spätromantiker_ at Heidelberg. But this was dispersion

itself as compared with the intense focussing of intellectual rays from

every quarter of France upon the capital. In England, I hardly need

repeat, there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely scattered

men of letters whose work exhibited romantic traits.

In one particular the French movement resembled the English more nearly

than the German. It kept itself almost entirely within the domain of

art, and did not carry out its principles with German thoroughness and

consistency into politics and religion. It made no efforts towards a

practical restoration of the Middle Ages. At the beginning, indeed,

French romanticism exhibited something analogous to the Toryism of Scott,

and the reactionary _Junkerism_ and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels.

Chateaubriand in his "Génie du Christianisme" attempted a sort of

aesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavily

by the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of the

Revolution. Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) as an

enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. "L'histoire des

hommes," he wrote, "ne présente de poésie que jugée du haut des idées

monarchiques et religieuses." But he advanced quite rapidly towards

liberalism both in politics and religion. And of the young men who

surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny,

and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist or

republican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and without

affecting their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school.[3]

The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic and

social. The Parisian _ateliers_ as well as the Parisian _salons_ were

nuclei of revolt against classical traditions. "This intermixture of art

with poetry," says Gautier,[4] "was and remains one of the characteristic

marks of the new school, and enables us to understand why its earliest

recruits were found more among artists than among men of letters. A

multitude of objects, images, comparisons, which were believed to be

irreducible to words, entered into the language and have stayed there.

The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now includes the sphere of art

in its measureless circle." "At that time painting and poetry

fraternised. The artists read the poets and the poets visited the

artists. Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were to

be found in the studio as in the study. There were as many splotches of

colour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were so

incessantly thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited by

themselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreign

writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong.

Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It seemed as if we had discovered

poetry, and that was indeed the truth. Now that this fine flame has

cooled and that the positive-minded generation which possesses the world

is preoccupied with other ideas, one cannot imagine what dizziness, what

_éblouissement_ was produced in us by such and such a picture or poem,

which people nowadays are satisfied to approve by a slight nod of the

head. It was so new, so unexpected, so lively, so glowing!" [5]

The romantic school in France had not only its poets, dramatists, and

critics, but its painters, architects, sculptors, musical composers, and

actors. The romantic artist _par excellence_ was Eugène Delacroix, the

painter of "The Crusaders Entering Jerusalem." "The Greeks and Romans

had been so abused by the decadent school of David that they fell into

complete disrepute at this time. Delacroix's first manner was purely

romantic, that is to say, he borrowed nothing from the recollections or

the forms of the antique. The subjects that he treated were relatively

modern, taken from the history of the Middle Ages, from Dante, Shakspere,

Goethe, Lord Byron, or Walter Scott." He painted "Hamlet," "The Boat of

Dante," "Tasso in Bedlam," "Marino Faliero," "The Death of Sardanapalus,"

"The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha," "The Massacre of the Bishop of

Liége," and similar subjects. Goethe in his conversations with Eckerman

expressed great admiration of Delacroix's interpretations of scenes in

"Faust" (the brawl in Auerbach's cellar, and the midnight ride of Faust

and Mephistopheles to deliver Margaret from prison). Goethe hoped that

the French artist would go on and reproduce the whole of "Faust," and

especially the sorceress' kitchen and the scenes on the Brocken. Other

painters of the romantic school were Camille Roqueplan, who treated

motives drawn from "The Antiquary" and other novels of Walter Scott;[6]

and Eugène Devéria, whose "Birth of Henry IV.," executed in 1827, when

the artist was only twenty-two years of age, was a masterpiece of

colouring and composition. The house of the Devéria brothers was one of

the rallying points of the Parisian romanticists. And then there was

Louis Boulanger, who painted "Mazeppa" and "The Witches' Sabbath" ("La

Ronde du Sabbat" [7]); and the water-colour painter and engraver,

Celestin Nanteuil, who furnished innumerable designs for vignettes,

frontispieces, and book illustrations to the writers of the romantic

school.

"Of all the arts," says Gautier, "the one that lends itself least to the

expression of the romantic idea is certainly sculpture. It seems to have

received from antiquity its definitive form. . . . What can the statuary

art do without the gods and heroes of mythology who furnish it with

plausible pretexts for the nude, and for such drapery as it needs; things

which romanticism prescribes, or did at least prescribe at that time of

its first fervour? Every sculptor is of necessity a classic." [8]

Nevertheless, he says that the romantic school was not quite unprovided

of sculptors. "In our inner circle (_cénacle_), Jehan du Seigneur

represented this art, austere and rebellious to the fancy. . . . Jehan

du Seigneur--let us leave in his name of Jean this mediaeval _h_ which

made him so happy and made him believe that he wore the apron of Ervein

of Steinbach at work on the sculptures of Strasburg minster." Gautier

mentions among the productions of this Gothic-minded statuary an "Orlando

Furioso," a bust of Victor Hugo, and a group from the latter's romance,

"Notre Dame de Paris," the gipsy girl Esmeralda giving a drink to the

humpback Quasimodo. It was the endeavour of the new school, in the arts

of design as well as in literature, to introduce colour, novelty,

picturesqueness, character. They studied the great Venetian and Flemish

colourists, neglected under the reign of David, and "in the first moments

of their fury against _le poncif classique_, they seemed to have adopted

the theory of art of the witches in 'Macbeth'--Fair is foul and foul is

fair",[9] _i.e._, they neglected a traditional beauty in favour of the

_characteristic_. "They sought the true, the new, the picturesque

perhaps more than the ideal; but this reaction was certainly permissible

after so many Ajaxes, Achilleses, and Philocteteses."

It is not quite so easy to understand what is meant by romanticism in

music as in literature. But Gautier names a number of composers as

adhering to the romantic school, among others, Hippolyte Monpon, who set

to music "the leaping metres, the echo-rimes, the Gothic counter-points

of Hugo's 'Odes et Ballades' and songs like Musset's 'L'Andalouse'--

"'Avez vous vu dans Barcelone,'

"He believed like us in serenades, alcaldes, mantillas, castinets; in all

that Italy and that Spain, a trifle conventional, which was brought into

fashion by the author of 'Don Paëz,' of 'Portia,' and of the 'Marchioness

of Amalgui,' . . . 'Gastibelza, the Man with the Carabine,' and that

guitar, so profoundly Spanish, of Victor Hugo, had inspired Monpon with a

savage, plaintive air, of a strange character, which long remained

popular, and which no romanticist--if any such is left--has forgotten."

A greater name than Monpon was Hector Berlioz, the composer of "Romeo and

Juliette" and "The Damnation of Faust." Gautier says that Berlioz

represented the romantic idea in music, by virtue of his horror of common

formulas, his breaking away from old models, the complex richness of his

orchestration, his fidelity to local colour (whatever that may mean in

music), his desire to make his art express what it had never expressed

before, "the tumultuous and Shaksperian depth of the passions, reveries

amorous or melancholy, the longings and demands of the soul, the

indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz

was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere,

Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and

"Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in

"Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English

actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia.

Berlioz _en revanche_ was better appreciated in Germany than in France,

where he was generally considered mad; where his "Symphonic fantastique"

produced an effect analogous to that of the first pieces of Richard

Wagner; and where "the symphonies of Beethoven were still thought

barbarous, and pronounced by the classicists not to be music, any more

than the verses of Victor Hugo were poetry, or the pictures of Delacroix

painting." And finally there were actors and actresses who came to fill

their roles in the new romantic dramas, of whom I need mention only

Madame Dorval, who took the part of Hugo's Marion Delorme. What Gautier

tells us of her is significant of the art that she interpreted, that her

acting was by sympathy, rather than calculation; that it was intensely

emotional; that she owed nothing to tradition; her tradition was

essentially modern, dramatic rather than tragic.[10]

Romanticism in France was, in a more special sense than in Germany and

England, an effort for freedom, passion, originality, as against rule,

authority, convention. "Romanticism," says Victor Hugo,[11] "so many

times poorly defined, is nothing else than _liberalism_ in

literature. . . . Literary liberty is the child of political

liberty. . . . After so many great things which our fathers have done

and which we have witnessed, here we are, issued forth from old forms of

society; why should we not issue out of the old forms of poetry? A new

people, a new art. While admiring the literature of Louis XIV., so well

adapted to his monarchy, France will know how to have its own literature,

peculiar, personal, and national--this actual France, this France of the

nineteenth century to which Mirabeau has given its freedom and Napoleon

its power." And again:[12] "What I have been pleading for is the liberty

of art as against the despotism of systems, codes, and rules. It is my

habit to follow at all hazards what I take for inspiration, and to change

the mould as often as I change the composition. Dogmatism in the arts is

what I avoid above all things. God forbid that I should aspire to be of

the number of those, either romantics or classics, who make works

_according to their system_; who condemn themselves never to have more

than one form in mind, to always be _proving_ something, to follow any

other laws than those of their organization and of their nature. The

artificial work of such men as those, whatever talents they may possess,

does not exist for art. It is a theory, not a poetry." It is manifest

that a literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long consent

to lend itself to the purposes of political or religious reaction, or to

limit itself to any single influence like mediaevalism, but would strike

out freely in a multitude of directions; would invent new forms and adapt

old ones to its material, and would become more and more modern, various,

and progressive. And such, in fact, was the history of Victor Hugo's

intellectual development and of the whole literary movement in France

which began with him and with De Stendhal (Henri Beyle). This assertion

of the freedom of the individual artist was naturally accompanied with

certain extravagances. "To develop freely all the caprices of thought,"

says Gautier,[13] "even if they shocked taste, convention, and rule, to

hate and repel to the utmost what Horace calls the _profanum vulgus_, and

what the moustached and hairy _rapins_ call grocers, philistines, or

bourgeois; to celebrate love with warmth enough to burn the paper (that

they wrote on); to set it up as the only end and only means of happiness;

to sanctify and deify art, regarded as a second creator; such are the

_données_ of the programme which each sought to realise according to his

strength; the ideal and the secret postulations of the young

romanticists."

Inasmuch as the French romantic school, even more than the English and

the German, was a breach with tradition and an insurrection against

existing conditions, it will be well to notice briefly what the

particular situation was which the romanticists in France confronted.

"To understand what this movement was and what it did," says

Saintsbury,[14] "we must point out more precisely what were the faults of

the older literature, and especially of the literature of the late

eighteenth century. They were, in the first place, an extremely

impoverished vocabulary, no recourse being had to the older tongue for

picturesque archaisms, and little welcome being given to new phrases,

however appropriate and distinct. In the second place, the adoption,

especially in poetry, of an exceedingly conventional method of speech,

describing everything where possible by an elaborate periphrasis, and

avoiding direct and simple terms. Thirdly, in all forms of literature,

but especially in poetry and drama, the acceptance for almost every kind

of work of cut-and-dried patterns,[15] to which it was bound to conform.

We have already pointed out that this had all but killed the tragic

drama, and it was nearly as bad in the various accepted forms of poetry,

such as fables, epistles, odes, etc. Each piece was expected to resemble

something else, and originality was regarded as a mark of bad taste and

insufficient culture. Fourthly, the submission to a very limited and

very arbitrary system of versification, adapted only to the production of

tragic alexandrines, and limiting even that form of verse to one

monotonous model. Lastly, the limitation of the subject to be treated to

a very few classes and kinds." If to this description be added a

paragraph from Gautier's "Histoire du Romantisme," we shall have a

sufficient idea of the condition of French literature and art before the

appearance of Victor Hugo's "Odes et Ballades" (1826). "One cannot

imagine to what a degree of insignificance and paleness literature had

come. Painting was not much better. The last pupils of David were

spreading their wishywashy colours over the old Graeco-Roman patterns.

The classicists found that perfectly beautiful; but in the presence of

these masterpieces, their admiration could not keep them from putting

their hands before their mouths to cover a yawn; a circumstance, however,

that failed to make them any more indulgent to the artists of the new

school, whom they called tattooed savages and accused of painting with a

drunken broom." One is reminded by Mr. Saintsbury's summary of many

features which we have observed in the English academicism of the

eighteenth century; the impoverished vocabulary, _e.g._, which makes

itself evident in the annotations on the text of Spenser and other old

authors; the horror of common terms, and the constant abuse of the

periphrasis--the "gelid cistern," the "stercoraceous heap," the

"spiculated palings," and the "shining leather that encased the limb."

And the heroic couplet in English usage corresponds very closely to the

French alexandrine. In their dissatisfaction with the paleness and

vagueness of the old poetic diction, and the monotony of the classical

verse, the new school innovated boldly, introducing archaisms,

neologisms, and all kinds of exotic words and popular locutions, even

_argot_ or Parisian slang; and trying metrical experiments of many sorts.

Gautier mentions in particular one Théophile Dondey (who, after the

fashion of the school, anagrammatised his name into Philothée O'Neddy) as

presenting this _caractère d'outrance et de tension_. "The word

_paroxyste_, employed for the first time by Nestor Roqueplan, seems to

have been invented with an application to Philothée. Everything is

_poussé_ in tone, high-coloured, violent, carried to the utmost limits of

expression, of an aggressive originality, almost dripping with the

unheard-of (_ruissilant d'inouïsme_); but back of the double-horned

paradoxes, sophistical maxims, incoherent metaphors, swoln hyperboles,

and words six feet long, are the poetic feeling of the time and the

harmony of rhythm." One hears much in the critical writings of that

period, of the _mot propre_, the _vers libre_, and the _rime brisé_. It

was in tragedy especially that the periphrasis reigned most tyrannically,

and that the introduction of the _mot propre_, _i.e._, of terms that were

precise, concrete, familiar, technical even, if needful, horrified the

classicists. It was beneath the dignity of the muse--the elegant muse of

the Abbé Delille--Hugo tells us, to speak naturally. "She underlines,"

in sign of disapprobation, "the old Corneille for his way of saying

crudely

"'Ah, ne me brouillez pas avec la république.'

"She still has heavy on her heart his _Tout beau, monsieur_. And many a

_seigneur_ and many a _madame_ was needed to make her forgive our

admirable Racine his _chiens_ so monosyllabic. . . . History in her eyes

is in bad tone and taste. How, for example, can kings and queens who

swear be tolerated? They must be elevated from their royal dignity to

the dignity of tragedy. . . . It is thus that the king of the people

(Henri IV.) polished by M. Legouvé, has seen his _ventre-saint-gris_

shamefully driven from his mouth by two sentences, and has been reduced,

like the young girl in the story, to let nothing fall from this royal

mouth, but pearls, rubies, and sapphires--all of them false, to say the

truth." It seems incredible to an Englishman, but it is nevertheless

true that at the first representations of "Hernani" in 1830, the simple

question and answer

"Est il minuit?--Minuit bientot"

raised a tempest of hisses and applause, and that the opposing factions

of classics and romantics "fought three days over this hemistich. It was

thought trivial, familiar, out of place; a king asks what time it is like

a common citizen, and is answered, as if he were a farmer, _midnight_.

Well done! Now if he had only used some fine periphrasis, _e.g._:

"----l'heure

Atteindra bientot sa dernière demeure.[16]

"If they could not away with definite words in the verse, they endured

very impatiently, too, epithets, metaphors, comparisons, poetic

words--lyricism, in short; those swift escapes into nature, those

soarings of the soul above the situation, those openings of poetry

athwart drama, so frequent in Shakspere, Calderon, and Goethe, so rare in

our great authors of the eighteenth century." Gautier gives, as one

reason for the adherence of so many artists to the romantic school, the

circumstance that, being accustomed to a language freely intermixed with

technical terms, the _mot propre_ had nothing shocking for them; while

their special education as artists having put them into intimate relation

with nature, "they were prepared to feel the imagery and colours of the

new poetry and were not at all repelled by the precise and picturesque

details so disagreeable to the classicists. . . . You cannot imagine the

storms that broke out in the parterre of the Théâtre Français, when the

'Moor of Venice,' translated by Alfred de Vigny, grinding his teeth,

reiterated his demands for that handkerchief (_mouchoir_) prudently

denominated _bandeau_ (head-band, fillet) in the vague Shakspere

imitation of the excellent Ducis. A bell was called 'the sounding

brass'; the sea was 'the humid element,' or 'the liquid element,' and so

on. The professors of rhetoric were thunderstruck by the audacity of

Racine, who in the 'Dream of Athalie' had spoken of dogs as dogs--molossi

would have been better--and they advised young poets not to imitate this

license of genius. Accordingly the first poet who wrote bell (_cloche_)

committed an enormity; he exposed himself to the risk of being cut by his

friends and excluded from society." [17]

As to the alexandrine, the recognised verse of French tragedy, Victor

Hugo tells us,[18] that many of the reformers, wearied by its monotony,

advocated the writing of plays in prose. He makes a plea, however, for

the retention of the alexandrine, giving it greater richness and

suppleness by the displacement of the caesura, and the free use of

_enjambement_ or run-over lines; just as Leigh Hunt and Keats broke up

the couplets of Pope into a freer and looser form of verse. "Hernani"

opened with an _enjambement_

"Serait ce déja lui? C'est bien à l'escalier

Dérobé."

This was a signal of fight--a challenge to the classicists--and the

battle began at once, with the very first lines of the play.[19] In his

dramas Hugo used the alexandrine, but in his lyric poems, his wonderful

resources as a metrist were exhibited to the utmost in the invention of

the most bizarre, eccentric, and original verse forms. An example of

this is the poem entitled "The Djinns" included in "Les Orientales"

(1829). The coming and going of the flying cohort of spirits is

indicated by the crescendo effect of the verse, beginning with a stanza

in lines of two syllables, rising gradually to the middle stanza of the

poem in lines of ten syllables, and then dying away by exactly graded

diminutions to the final stanza:

"On doute

La nuit--

J'écoute

Tout fuit,

Tout passe:

L'espace

Efface

Le bruit." [20]

But the earlier volume of "Odes et Ballades" (1826) offers many instances

of metrical experiments hardly less ingenious. In "La Chasse du

Burgrave" every rime is followed by an echo word, alike in sound but

different in sense:

"Il part, et Madame Isabelle,

Belle,

Dit gaiement du haut des remparts:

'Pars!'

Tous las chasseurs sont dans la plaine,

Pleine

D'ardents seigneurs, de sénéchaux

Chauds."

The English reader is frequently reminded by Hugo's verses of the queer,

abrupt, and _outré_ measures, and fantastic rimes of Robert Browning.

Compare with the above, _e.g._, his "Love among the Ruins."

"Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles

Miles and miles

On the solitary pastures where our sheep,

Half asleep," etc.

From the fact, already pointed out, that the romantic movement in France

was, more emphatically than in England and Germany, a breach with the

native literary tradition, there result several interesting

peculiarities. The first of these is that the new French school, instead

of fighting the classicists with weapons drawn from the old arsenal of

mediaeval France, went abroad for allies; went especially to the modern

writers of England and Germany. This may seem strange when we reflect

that French literature in the Middle Ages was the most influential in

Europe; and that, from the old heroic song of Roland in the eleventh

century down to the very popular court allegory, the "Roman de la Rose",

in the fourteenth, and to the poems of Villon in the fifteenth, it

afforded a rich treasure-house of romantic material in the shape of

chronicles, _chansons de geste_, _romans d'aventures_, _fabliaux_,

_lais_, legends of saints, homilies, miracles, songs, farces,

_jeuspartis_, _pastourelles_, _ballades_--of all the literary forms in

fact which were then cultivated. Nor was this mass of work entirely

without influence on the romanticists of 1830. Théophile Dondey, wrote a

poem on Roland, and Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old popular

songs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their naïveté and truly

national character. Attention was directed to the Renaissance group of

poets who preceded the Louis XIV. writers--to Ronsard and "The Pleiade."

Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the preservation and

publication of mediaeval remains. But in general the innovating school

sought their inspiration in foreign literatures. Antony Deschamps

translated the "Inferno"; Alfred de Vigny translated "Othello" as the

"Moor of Venice" (1829), and wrote a play on the story of Chatterton,[21]

and a novel, "Cinq Mars," which is the nearest thing in French literature

to the historical romances of Scott.[22] Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo

were both powerfully impressed by Macpherson's "Ossian." Gérard de

Nerval made, at the age of eighteen, a translation of "Faust" (1828),

which Goethe read with admiration, and wrote to the translator, saying

that he had never before understood his own meaning so well. "It was a

difficult task at that time," says Gautier, "to render into our tongue,

which had become excessively timid, the bizarre and mysterious beauties

of this ultra-romantic drama. . . . From his familiarity with Goethe,

Uhland, Bürger and L. Tieck, Gérard retained in his turn of mind a

certain dreamy tinge which sometimes made his own works seem like

translations of unknown poets beyond the Rhine. . . . The sympathies and

the studies of Gérard de Nerval drew him naturally towards Germany, which

he often visited and where he made fruitful sojourns; the shadow of the

old Teutonic oak hovered more than once above his brow with confidential

murmurs; he walked under the lindens with their heart-shaped leaves; on

the margin of fountains he saluted the elf whose white robe trails a hem

bedewed by the green grass; he saw the ravens circling around the

mountain of Kyffhausen; the kobolds came out before him from the rock

clefts of the Hartz, and the witches of the Brocken danced their grand

Walpurgisnight round about the young French poet, whom they took for a

Jena student. . . . He knows how to blow upon the postillion's horn,[23]

the enchanted melodies of Achim von Arnim and Clement Brentano; and if he

stops at the threshold of an inn embowered in hop vines, the _Schoppen_

becomes in his hands the cup of the King of Thule." Among the French

romanticists of Hugo's circle there was a great enthusiasm for wild

German ballads like Bürger's "Lenore" and Goethe's "Erl-King." The

translation of A. W. Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und

Litteratur," by Madame Necker de Saussure, in 1814, was doubtless the

first fruits of Madame de Staël's "Allemagne," published the year before.

Gautier himself and his friend Augustus Mac-Keat (Auguste Maguet)

collaborated in a drama founded on Byron's "Parisina." "Walter Scott was

then in the full flower of his success. People were being initiated into

the mysteries of Goethe's 'Faust,' . . . and discovering Shakspere under

the translation, a little dressed up, of Letourneur; and the poems of

Lord Byron, 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Giaour,' 'Manfred,' 'Beppo,' 'Don

Juan,' were coming to us from the Orient, which had not yet grown

commonplace." Gautier said that in _le petit cénacle_--the inner circle

of the initiated--if you admired Racine more than Shakspere and Calderon,

it was an opinion that you would do well to keep to yourself.

"Toleration is not the virtue of neophytes." As for himself, who had set

out as a painter--and only later deviated into letters--he was all for

the Middle Ages: "An old iron baron, feudal, ready to take refuge from

the encroachments of the time, in the castle of Goetz von Berlichingen."

Of Bouchardy, the extraordinary author of "Le Sonneur de Saint Paul," who

"was to Hugo what Marlowe was to Shakspere"--and who was playfully

accused of making wooden models of the plots of his melodramas--Gautier

says that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of

Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret

passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding

places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts

where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate,

fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in

the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in

the floor for him to disappear through."

The reasons for this resort to foreign rather than native sources of

inspiration are not far to seek. The romantic movement in France was

belated; it was twenty or thirty years behind the similar movements in

England and Germany. It was easier and more natural for Stendhal or Hugo

to appeal to the example of living masters like Goethe and Scott, whose

works went everywhere in translation and who held the ear of Europe, than

to revive an interest all at once in Villon or Guillaume de Lorris or

Chrestien de Troyes. Again, in no country had the divorce between

fashionable and popular literature been so complete as in France; in none

had so thick and hard a crust of classicism overlain the indigenous

product of the national genius. It was not altogether easy for Bishop

Percy in 1765 to win immediate recognition from the educated class for

Old English minstrelsy; nor for Herder and Bürger in 1770 to do the same

thing for the German ballads. In France it would have been impossible

before the Bourbon restoration of 1815. In England and in Germany,

moreover, the higher literature had always remained more closely in touch

with the people. In both of those countries the stock of ballad poetry

and folklore was much more extensive and important than in France, and

the habit of composing ballads lasted later. The only French writers of

the classical period who produced anything at all analogous to the German

"Mährchen" were Charles Perrault, who published between 1691-97 his

famous fairy tales, including "Blue Beard," "The Sleeping Beauty,"

"Little Red Riding-Hood," "Cinderella," and "Puss in Boots"; and the

Countess d'Aulnoy (died 1720), whose "Yellow Dwarf" and "White Cat"

belong to the same department of nursery tales.[24]

A curious feature of French romanticism was the way in which the

new-found liberty of art asserted itself in manners, costume, and

personal habits. Victor Hugo himself was scrupulously correct and

subdued in dress, but his young disciples affected bright colours and

rich stuffs. They wore Spanish mantillas, coats with large velvet

lapels, pointed doublets or jerkins of satin or damask velvet in place of

the usual waistcoat, long hair after the Merovingian fashion, and pointed

beards. We have seen that Shenstone was regarded as an eccentric, and

perhaps somewhat dangerous, person when at the university, because he

wore his own hair instead of a wig. In France, half a century later, not

only the _perruque_, but the _menton glabre_ was regarded as symptomatic

of the classicist and the academician; while the beard became a badge of

romanticism. At the beginning of the movement, Gautier informs us,

"there were only two full beards in France, the beard of Eugène Devéria

and the beard of Petrus Borel. To wear them required a courage, a

coolness, and a contempt for the crowd truly heroic. . . . It was the

fashion then is the romantic school to be pale, livid, greenish, a trifle

cadaverous, if possible. It gave one an air of doom, Byronic,

_giaourish_, devoured by passion and remorse." It will be remembered

that the rolling Byronic collar, open at the throat, was much affected at

one time by young persons of romantic temperament in England; and that

the conservative classes, who adhered to the old-fashioned stock and high

collar, looked askance upon these youthful innovators as certainly

atheists and libertines, and probably enemies to society--would-be

corsairs or banditti. It is interesting, therefore, to discover that in

France, too, the final touch of elegance among the romantics was not to

have any white linen in evidence; the shirt collar, in particular, being

"considered as a mark of the grocer, the bourgeois, the philistine." A

certain _gilet rouge_ which Gautier wore when he led the _claque_ at the

first performance of "Hernani" has become historic. This flamboyant

garment--a defiance and a challenge to the academicians who had come to

hiss Hugo's play--was, in fact, a _pourpoint_ or jerkin of

cherry-coloured satin, cut in the shape of a Milanese cuirass, pointed,

busked, and arched in front, and fastened behind the back with hooks and

eyes. From the imperturbable disdain with which the wearer faced the

opera-glasses and laughter of the assembly it was evident that it would

not have taken much urging to induce him to come to the second night's

performance decked in a daffodil waistcoat.[25] The young enthusiasts of

_le petit cénacle_ carried their Byronism so far that, in imitation of

the celebrated revels at Newstead, they used to drink from a human skull

in their feasts at _le Petit Moulin Rouge_. It had belonged to a

drum-major, and Gérard de Nerval got it from his father, who had been an

army surgeon. One of the neophytes, in his excitement, even demanded

that it be filled with sea water instead of wine, in emulation of the

hero of Victor Hugo's novel, "Han d'Islande," who "drank the water of the

seas in the skull of the dead." Another _caput mortuum_ stood on Hugo's

mantelpiece in place of a clock.[26] "If it did not tell the hour, at

least it made us think of the irreparable flight of time. It was the

verse of Horace translated into romantic symbolism." There was a decided

flavour of Bohemianism about the French romantic school, and the spirit

of the lives which many of them led may best be studied in Merger's

classic, "La Vie de Boheme." [27]

As another special feature of French romanticism, we may note the

important part taken by the theatre in the history of the movement. The

stage was the citadel of classical prejudice, and it was about it that

the fiercest battles were fought. The climacteric year was 1830, in

which year Victor Hugo's tragedy, "Hernani, or Castilian Honour," was put

on at the Theatre Français on February 25th, and ran for thirty nights.

The representation was a fight between the classics and the romantics,

and there was almost a mob in the theatre. The dramatic censorship under

Charles X., though strict, was used in the interest of political rather

than aesthetic orthodoxy. But it is said that some of the older

Academicians actually applied to the king to forbid the acting of

"Hernani." Gautier has given a mock-heroic description of this famous

literary battle _quorum pars magna fuit_. He had received from his

college friend, Gérard de Nerval--who had been charged with the duty of

drumming up recruits for the Hugonic _claque_--six tickets to be

distributed only to tried friends of the cause--sure men and true. The

tickets themselves were little squares of red paper, stamped in the

corner with a mysterious countersign--the Spanish word _hierro_, iron,

not only symbolizing the hero of the drama, but hinting that the

ticket-holder was to bear himself in the approaching fray frankly,

bravely, and faithfully like the sword. The proud recipient of these

tokens of confidence gave two of them to a couple of artists--ferocious

romantics, who would gladly have eaten an Academician, if necessary; two

he gave to a brace of young poets who secretly practised _la rime riche_,

_le mot propre_, and _la metaphore exacte_: the other two he reserved for

his cousin and himself. The general attitude of the audience on the

first nights was hostile, "two systems, two parties, two armies, two

civilizations even--it is not saying too much--confronted one

another, . . . and it was not hard to see that yonder young man with long

hair found the smoothly shaved gentleman opposite a disastrous idiot; and

that he would not long be at pains to conceal his opinion of him." The

classical part of the audience resented the touches of Spanish local

colour in the play, the mixture of pleasantries and familiar speeches

with the tragic dialogue, and of heroism and savagery in the character of

Hernani, and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun--_de ta

suite, j'en suis_--which terminated the first act. "Certain lines were

captured and recaptured, like disputed redoubts, by each army with equal

obstinacy. On one day the romantics would carry a passage, which the

enemy would retake the next day, and from which it became necessary to

dislodge them. What uproar, what cries, cat-calls, hisses, hurricanes of

bravos, thunders of applause! The heads of parties blackguarded each

other like Homer's heroes before they came to blows. . . . For this

generation 'Hernani' was what the 'Cid' was for the contemporaries of

Corneille. All that was young, brave, amorous, poetic, caught the

inspiration of it. Those fine exaggerations, heroic, Castilian, that

superb Spanish emphasis; that language so proud and high even in its

familiarity, those images of a dazzling strangeness, threw us into an

ecstasy and intoxicated us with their heady poetry." The victory in the

end was with the new school. Musset, writing in 1838, says that the

tragedies of Corneille and Racine had disappeared from the French stage

for ten years.

Another triumphant battlefield--a veritable _fête romantique_--was the

first representation in 1831 of Alexandre Dumas' "Anthony." "It was an

agitation, a tumult, an effervescence. . . . The house was actually

delirious; it applauded, sobbed, wept, shouted. A certain famous green

coat was torn from the author's back and rent into shreds by his too

ardent admirers, who wanted pieces of it for memorabilia." [28]

The English reader who hears of the stubborn resistance offered to the

performance of 'Hernani' will naturally suppose that there must have been

something about it contrary to public policy--some immorality, or some

political references, at least, offensive to the government; and he will

have a difficulty in understanding that the trouble was all about affairs

purely literary. "Hernani" was fought because it violated the unities of

place and time; because its hero was a Spanish bandit; because in the

dialogue a spade was called a spade, and in the verse the lines overlap.

The French are often charged with frivolity in matters of conduct, but to

the discussion of matters of art they bring a most serious conscience.

The scene in "Hernani" shifts from Saragossa to the castle of Don Ruy

Gomez de Silva in the mountains of Arragon, and to the tomb of

Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle. The time of the action, though not

precisely indicated, covers at least a number of months. The dialogue

is, in many parts, nervous, simple, direct, abrupt; in others running

into long _tirades_ and soliloquies, rich with all the poetic resources

of the greatest poet who has ever used the French tongue. The spirit of

the drama, as well as its form, is romantic. The point of honour is

pushed to a fantastic excess; all the characters display the most

delicate chivalry, the noblest magnanimity, the loftiest Castilian pride.

Don Ruy Gomez allows the King to carry off his bride, rather than yield

up the outlaw who has taken refuge in his castle; and that although he

has just caught this same outlaw paying court to this same bride, whose

accepted lover he is. Hernani, not to be outdone in generosity, offers

his life to his enemy and preserver, giving him his horn and promising to

come to meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault here

which is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exaggerated, the _dramatis

personae_ strut. They are rather over-dramatic in their

poses---melodramatic, in fact--and do unlikely things. But this fault is

the fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the

heroes of these plays, "Hernani," "Marion Delorme," "Le Roi d'Amuse,"

loom and stalk across the scene like epic demigods of more than mortal

stature and mortal passions. But Hugo was not only a great dramatist and

a great poet, but a most clever playwright. "Hernani" is full of

effective stage devices, crises in the action which make an audience hold

its breath or shudder; moments of intense suspense like that in the third

act, where the old hidalgo pauses before his own portrait, behind which

the outlaw is hidden; or that in the fifth, where Hernani hears at first,

faint and far away, the blast of the fatal horn that summons him to leave

his bride at the altar and go to his death. The young romantics of the

day all got "Hernani" by heart and used to rehearse it at their

assemblies, each taking a part; and the famous trumpet, the _cor

d'Hernani_, became a symbol and a rallying call.

No such scene would have been possible in an English playhouse as that

which attended the first representation of "Hernani" at the Théâtre

Français. For not only is an English audience comparatively indifferent

to rules of art and canons of taste, but the unities had never prevailed

in practice in England, though constantly recommended in theory. The

French had no Shakspere, and the English no Academy. We may construct an

imaginary parallel to such a scene if we will suppose that all reputable

English tragedies from 1600 down to 1830 had been something upon the

model of Addison's "Cato" and Johnson's "Irene", or better still upon the

model of Dryden's heroic plays in rimed couplets; and that then a drama

like "Romeo and Juliet" had been produced upon the boards of Drury Lane,

and a warm spurt of romantic poetry suddenly injected into the icy

current of classic declamation.

Having considered the chief points in which the French romantic movement

differed from the similar movements in England and Germany, let us now

glance at the history of its beginnings, and at the work of a few of its

typical figures. The presentation of "Hernani" in 1830 was by no means

the first overt act of the new school. Discussion had been going on for

years in the press. De Stendhal says that the classicists had on their

side two-thirds of the Académie Française, and all of the French

journalists; that their leading organ, however, was the very influential

_Journal des Débats_ and its editor, M. Dussant, the general-in-chief of

the classical party. The romanticists, however, were not without organs

of their own; among which are especially mentioned _Le Conservateur

Littéraire_, begun in 1819, _Le Globe_ in 1824, and the _Annales

Romantiques_ in 1823, the last being "practically a kind of annual of the

Muse Française (1823-24), which had pretty nearly the same contributors."

All of these journals were Bourboniste, except _Le Globe_, which was

liberal in politics.[29] The Academy denounced the new literary doctrine

as a heresy and its followers as a sect, but it made head so rapidly that

as early as 1829, a year before "Hernani" was acted, a "Histoire du

Romantisme en France" appeared, written by a certain M. de Toreinx.[30]

It agrees with other authorities in dating the beginning of the movement

from Chateaubriand's "Le Génie du Christianisme" (1802).

"Chateaubriand," says Gautier, "may be regarded as the grandfather, or,

if you prefer it, the sachem of romanticism in France. In the 'Genius of

Christianity' he restored the Gothic cathedral, in the 'Natchez' he

reopened the sublimity of nature, which had been closed, in 'René' he

invented melancholy and modern passion."

Sprung from an ancient Breton family, Chateaubriand came to America in

1790 with the somewhat singular and very French idea of travelling

overland to the northwest passage. He was diverted from this enterprise,

however, fell in with an Indian tribe and wandered about with them in the

wilderness. He did not discover the north-west passage, but, according

to Lowell, he invented the forest primeval. Chateaubriand gave the first

full utterance to that romantic note which sounds so loudly in Byron's

verse; the restless dissatisfaction with life as it is, the longing for

something undefined and unattainable, the love for solitude and the

desert, the "passion incapable of being converted into action"--in short,

the _maladie du siécle_--since become familiar in "Childe Harold" and in

Sénancour's "Obermann." In one of the chapters[31] of "Le Génie du

Christianisme" he gives an analysis of this modern melancholy, this

Byronic satiety and discontent, which he says was unknown to the

ancients. "The farther nations advance in civilization, the more this

unsettled state of the passions predominates, for then our imagination is

rich, abundant, and full of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid,

and destitute of charms. With a full heart we dwell in an empty world."

"Penetrate into those forests of America coeval with the world; what

profound silence pervades these retreats when the winds are husht! What

unknown voices when they begin to rise! Stand still and everything is

mute; take but a step and all nature sighs. Night approaches, the shades

thicken; you hear herds of wild beasts passing in the dark; the ground

murmurs under your feet; the pealing thunder rebellows in the deserts;

the forest bows, the trees fall, an unknown river rolls before you. The

moon at length bursts forth in the east; as you proceed at the foot of

the trees, she seems to move before you on their tops and solemnly to

accompany your steps. The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oak

to await the return of day; he looks alternately at the nocturnal

luminary, the darkness, and the river; he feels restless, agitated, and

in expectation of something extraordinary; a pleasure never felt before,

an unusual fear, cause his heart to throb, as if he were about to be

admitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depth of the

forests, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all

the solitudes of the earth are not too vast for the contemplations of his

heart. There is in man an instinctive melancholy, which makes him

harmonise with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hours

seated on the bank of a river, contemplating its passing waves? Who has

not found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitened

by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered

in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus;

it was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons

and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an

indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a

vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste

the fulness of joy in the presence of its Author." [32]

The outbreak of the Revolution recalled Chateaubriand to France. He

joined the army of the _emigrées_ at Coblentz, was wounded at the siege

of Thionville, and escaped into England where he lived (1793-1800) until

the time of the Consulate, when he made his peace with Napoleon and

returned to France. He had been a free-thinker, but was converted to

Christianity by a dying message from his mother who was thrown into

prison by the revolutionists. "I wept," said Chateaubriand, "and I

believed." "Le Génie du Christianisme" was an expression of that

reactionary feeling which drove numbers of Frenchmen back into the

Church, after the blasphemies and horrors of the Revolution. It came out

just when Napoleon was negotiating his _Concordat_ with the Pope, and was

trying to enlist the religious and conservative classes in support of his

government; and it reinforced his purposes so powerfully that he

appointed the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplomatic

posts. "Le Génie du Christianisme" is indeed a plea for Christianity on

aesthetic grounds--an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommend

Christianity by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a close

reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character was

weakened by vanity and shallowness. He was a sentimentalist and a

rhetorician, but one of the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while his

sentiment, though not always deep or lasting, was for the nonce

sufficiently sincere. He had in particular a remarkable talent for

pictorial description; and his book, translated into many tongues,

enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. The English version, made in 1815, was

entitled "The Beauties of Christianity." For Chateaubriand undertook to

show that the Christian religion had influenced favorably literature and

the fine arts; that it was more poetical than any other system of belief

and worship. He compared Homer and Vergil with Dante, Tasso, Milton, and

other modern poets, and awarded the palm to the latter in the treatment

of the elementary relations and stock characters, such as husband and

wife, father and child, the priest, the soldier, the lover, etc.;

preferring Pope's Eloisa, _e.g._, to Vergil's Dido, and "Paul and

Virginia" to the idyls of Theocritus. He pronounced the Christian

mythology--angels, devils, saints, miracles--superior to the pagan; and

Dante's Hell much more impressive to the imagination than Tartarus. He

dwelt eloquently upon the beauty and affecting significance of Gothic

church architecture, of Catholic ritual and symbolism, the dress of the

clergy, the crucifix, the organ, the church bell, the observances of

Christian festivals, the monastic life, the orders of chivalry, the

country churchyards where the dead were buried, and even upon the

superstitions which the last century had laughed to scorn; such as the

belief in ghosts, the adoration of relics, vows to saints and pilgrimages

to holy places. In his chapter on "The Influence of Christianity upon

Music," he says that the "Christian religion is essentially melodious for

this single reason, that she delights in solitude"; the forests are her

ancient abode, and her musician "ought to be acquainted with the

melancholy notes of the waters and the trees; he ought to have studied

the sound of the winds in cloisters, and those murmurs that pervade the

Gothic temple, the grass of the cemetery, and the vaults of death." He

repeats the ancient fable that the designers of the cathedrals were

applying forest scenery to architecture; "Those ceilings sculptured into

foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and

terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the

vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles,

the chapels resembling grottoes, the secret passages, the low doorways,

in a word everything in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of

a wood, everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of

the Divinity." The birds perch upon the steeples and towers as if they

were trees, and "the Christian architect, not content with building

forests, has been desirous to retain their murmurs, and by means of the

organ and of bells, he has attached to the Gothic temple the very winds

and the thunders that roll in the recesses of the woods. Past ages,

conjured up by these religious sounds, raise their venerable voices from

the bosom of the stones and sigh in every corner of the vast cathedral.

The sanctuary re-echoes like the cavern of the ancient Sibyl;

loud-tongued bells swing over your head; while the vaults of death under

your feet are profoundly silent." He praises the ideals of chivalry;

gives a sympathetic picture of the training and career of a

knight-errant, and asks: "Is there then nothing worthy of admiration in

the times of a Roland, a Godfrey, a Coucey, and a Joinville; in the times

of the Moors and the Saracens; . . . when the strains of the Troubadours

were mingled with the clash of arms, dances with religious ceremonies,

and banquets and tournaments with sieges and battles?" Chateaubriand

says that the finest Gothic ruins are to be found in the English lake

country, on the Scotch mountains, and in the Orkney Islands; and that

they are more impressive than classic ruins because in the latter the

arches are parallel with the curves of the sky, while in the Gothic or

pointed architecture the arches "form a contrast with the circular arches

of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. The Gothic being,

moreover, entirely composed of _voids_, the more readily admits of the

decoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders.

The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out in

the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which the

winds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables. The house-leek

fixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with their

elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure

of a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls in

festoons over the arches."

All this is romantic enough; we have the note of Catholic mediaevalism

and the note of Ossianic melancholy combined; and this some years before

"The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and when Byron was a boy of fourteen and

still reading his Ossian.[33] But we are precluded from classifying

Chateaubriand among full-fledged romanticists. His literary taste was by

no means emancipated from eighteenth-century standards. In speaking of

Milton, _e.g._, he says that if he had only been born in France in the

reign of Louis XIV., and had "combined with the native grandeur of his

genius the taste of Racine and Boileau," the "Paradise Lost" might have

equalled the "Iliad."

Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic. It is agreed upon all

hands that the expressions _romantisme_ and _littérature romantique_ were

first invented or imported by Madame de Staël in her "L'Allemagne"

(1813), "pour exprimer l'affranchissement des vieilles formes

littéraires." [34] Some ten years later, or by 1823, when Stendhal

published his "Racine et Shakspere," the issue between the schools had

been joined and the question quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisian

journals. Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, but his

temper was decidedly cool and unromantic. I have quoted his epigrammatic

definition of romanticism.[35]

In this _brochure_ Stendhal announces that France is on the eve of a

literary revolution and that the last hour of classicism has struck,

although as yet the classicists are in possession of the theatres, and of

all the salaried literary positions under government; and all the

newspapers of all shades of political opinion are shut to the

romanticists. A company of English actors who attempted to give some of

Shakspere's plays at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1822 were mobbed. "The

hisses and cat-calls began before the performance, of which it was

impossible to hear a single word. As soon as the actors appeared they

were pelted with apples and eggs, and from time to time the audience

called out to them to talk French, and shouted, '_À bas Shakspere! c'est

un aide de camp du duc de Wellington_.'" It will be remembered that in

our own day the first representations of Wagner's operas at Paris were

interrupted with similar cries: "_Pas de Wagner_!," "_À bas les

Allemands_!," etc.

In 1827 Kemble's company visited Paris and gave, in English, "Hamlet,"

"Romeo and Juliet," "Othello," and "The Merchant of Venice." Dumas went

to see them and described the impression made upon him by Shakspere, in

language identical with that which Goethe used about himself.[36] He was

like a man born blind and suddenly restored to sight. Dumas' "Henry

III." (1829), a _drame_ in the manner of Shakspere's historical plays,

though in prose, was the immediate result of this new vision. English

actors were in Paris again in 1828 and 1829; and in 1835 Macready

presented "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Henry IV." with great success.

Previous to these performances, the only opportunities that the French

public had to judge of Shakspere's dramas as acting plays were afforded

by the wretched adaptations of Ducis and other stage carpenters. Ducis

had read Shakspere only in Letourneur's very inadequate translation

(revised by Guizot in 1821). His "Hamlet" was played in 1769; "Macbeth,"

1784, "King John," 1791; "Othello" (turned into a comedy), 1792.

Mercier's "Timon" was given in 1794; and Dejaure's "Imogènes"--an

"arrangement" of "Cymbeline"--in 1796. The romanticists labored to put

their countrymen in possession of better versions of Shakspere. Alfred

de Vigny rendered "Othello" (1827), and Emile Deschamps, "Romeo and

Juliet" and "Macbeth."

Stendhal interviewed a director of one of the French theatres and tried

to persuade him that there would be money in it for any house which would

have the courage to give a season of romantic tragedy. But the director,

who seemed to be a liberal-minded man, assured him that until some stage

manager could be found rich enough to buy up the dramatic criticism of

the _Constitutionnel_ and two or three other newspapers, the law students

and medical students, who were under the influence of those journals,

would never suffer the play to get as far as the third act. "If it were

otherwise," he said, "don't you suppose that we would have tried

Schiller's 'William Tell'? The police would have cut out a quarter of

it; one of our adapters another quarter; and what was left would reach a

hundred representations, _provided it could once secure three_."

To this the author replied that the immense majority of young society

people had been converted to romanticism by the eloquence of M. Cousin.

"Sir," said the director, "your young society people don't go into the

parterre to engage in fisticuffs [_faire le coup de poing_], and at the

theatre, as in politics, we despise philosophers who don't fight."

Stendhal adds that the editors of influential journals found their

interest in this state of things, since many of them had pieces of their

own on the stage, written of course in alexandrine verse and on the

classic model; and what would become of these masterpieces if Talma

should ever get permission to play in a prose translation of "Macbeth,"

abridged, say, one-third? "I said one day to one of these gentlemen,

28,000,000 men, _i.e._, 18,000,000 in England and 10,000,000 in America,

admire 'Macbeth' and applaud it a hundred times a year. 'The English,'

he answered me with great coolness, 'cannot have real eloquence or poetry

truly admirable; the nature of their language, which is not derived from

the Latin, makes it quite impossible.'" A great part of "Racine et

Shakspere" is occupied with a refutation of the doctrine of the unities

of time and place, and with a discussion of the real nature of dramatic

illusion, on which their necessity was supposed to rest. Stendhal

maintains that the illusion is really stronger in Shakspere's tragedies

than in Racine's. It is not essential here to reproduce his argument,

which is the same that is familiar to us in Lessing and in Coleridge,

though he was an able controversialist, and his logic and irony give a

freshness to the treatment of this hackneyed theme which makes his little

treatise well worth the reading. To illustrate the nature of _real_

stage illusion, he says that last year (August, 1822) a soldier in a

Baltimore theatre, seeing Othello about to kill Desdemona, cried out, "It

shall never be said that a damned nigger killed a white woman in my

presence," and at the same moment fired his gun and broke an arm of the

actor who was playing Othello. "_Eh bien_, this soldier had illusion: he

believed that the action which was passing on the stage was true."

Stendhal proposes the following as a definition of romantic tragedy: "It

is written in prose; the succession of events which it presents to the

eyes of the spectators lasts several months, and they happen in different

places." He complains that the French comedies are not funny, do not

make any one laugh; and that the French tragic dialogue is epic rather

than dramatic. He advises his readers to go and see Kean in "Richard"

and "Othello"; and says that since reading Schlegel and Dennis (!) he has

a great contempt for the French critics. He appeals to the usages of the

German and English stage in disregarding the rules of Aristotle, and

cites the great popularity of Walter Scott's romances, which, he says,

are nothing more than romantic tragedies with long descriptions

interspersed, to support his plea for a new kind of French prose-tragedy;

for which he recommends subjects taken from national history, and

especially from the mediaeval chroniclers like Froissart. Nevertheless,

he does not advise the direct imitation of Shakspere. He blames Schiller

for copying Shakspere, and eulogizes Werner's "Luther" as nearer to the

masterpieces of Shakspere than Schiller's tragedies are. He wants the

new French drama to resemble Shakspere only in dealing freely with modern

conditions, as the latter did with the conditions of his time, without

having the fear of Racine or any other authority before its eyes.

In 1824 the Academy, which was slowly constructing its famous dictionary

of the French language, happened to arrive at the new word _romanticism_

which needed defining. This was the signal for a heated debate in that

venerable body, and the director, M. Auger, was commissioned to prepare a

manifesto against the new literary sect, to be read at the meeting of the

Institute on the 24th of April next. It was in response to this

manifesto that Stendhal wrote the second part of his "Racine et

Shakspere" (1825), attached to which is a short essay entitled "Qu'est ce

que le Romanticisme?" [37] addressed to the Italian public, and intended

to explain to them the literary situation in France, and to enlist their

sympathies on the romantic side. "Shakspere," he says, "the hero of

romantic poetry, as opposed to Racine, the god of the classicists, wrote

for strong souls; for English hearts which were what Italian hearts were

about 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age _questi tempi della

virtu sconosciutta_." Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and

effeminate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere on

the Italians. The day will come, he hopes, when they will have a

national tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better to

follow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in the

footprints of Racine. In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germany

and England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schiller, and Lord

Byron will carry it over Racine and Boileau. He says that English poetry

since the French Revolution has become more enthusiastic, more serious,

more passionate. It needed other subjects than those required by the

witty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought its heroes in the

rude, primitive, inventive ages, or even among savages and barbarians.

It had to have recourse to time or countries when it was permitted to the

higher classes of society to have passions. The Greek and Latin classics

could give no help; since most of them belonged to an epoch as

artificial, and as far removed from the naïve presentation of the

passions, as the eighteenth century itself. The court of Augustus was no

more natural than that of Louis XIV. Accordingly the most successful

poets in England, during the past twenty years, have not only sought

deeper emotions than those of the eighteenth century, but have treated

subjects which would have been scornfully rejected by the age of _bel

esprit_. The anti-romantics can't cheat us much longer. "Where, among

the works of our Italian pedants, are the books that go through seven

editions in two months, like the romantic poems that are coming out in

London at the present moment? Compare, _e.g._, the success of Moore's

'Lalla Rookh,' which appeared in June, 1817, and the eleventh edition of

which I have before me, with the success of the 'Camille' of the highly

classical Mr. Botta!'"

In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal's "Racine et

Shakspere," Victor Hugo had published his "Odes et Poésies Diverses," and

a second collection followed in 1824. In the prefaces to these two

volumes he protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, as

_mots de guerre_ and vague words which every one defines in accordance

with his own prejudices. If romanticism means anything, he says, it

means the literature of the nineteenth century, and all the anathemas

launched at the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to the

following method of argument. "We condemn the literature of the

nineteenth century because it is romantic. And why is it romantic?

Because it is the literature of the nineteenth century." As to the false

taste which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of Racine and

Boileau, he would prefer to distinguish that by the name _scholastic_, a

style which is to the truly classic what superstition and fanaticism are

to religion. The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partly

literary and partly political and religious: "The history of mankind

affords no poetry," he says, "except when judged from the vantage-ground

of monarchical ideas and religious beliefs. . . . He has thought

that . . . in substituting for the outworn and false colours of pagan

mythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian theogony, one

could inject into the ode something of the interest of the drama, and

could make it speak, besides, that austere, consoling, and religious

language which is needed by an old society that issues still trembling

from the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The literature of the

present, the actual literature, is the expression, by way of

anticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue,

doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recent

ruins. . . . If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had

invoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . the

triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been

much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . . But France had not

that good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, and

our literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic,

than of a monarchical and Christian society." The prevailing note,

accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of

1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the sceptical

Éclaircissement of the eighteenth century. The subjects are such as

these: "The Poet in the Times of Revolution"; "La Vendée"; "The Maidens

of Verdun," which chants the martyrdom of three young royalist sisters

who were put to death for sending money and supplies to the _emigres_;

"Quibiron," where a royalist detachment which had capitulated under

promise of being treated like prisoners of war, were shot down in squads

by the Convention soldiery; "Louis XVII."; "The Replacement of the Statue

of Henry IV."; "The Death of the Duke of Berry"; "The Birth of the Duke

of Bourdeaux" and his "Baptism"; "The Funeral of Louis XVIII."; "The

Consecration of Charles X."; "The Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil," the

royalist heroine who saved her father's life by drinking a cupful of

human blood in the days of the Terror; and "La Bande Noire," which

denounces with great bitterness the violation of the tombs of the kings

of France by the regicides, and pleads for the preservation of the ruins

of feudal times:

"O murs! ô créneaux! ô tourelle!

Remparts, fossés aux ponts mouvants!

Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles!

Fiers chateaux! modestes couvents!

Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques,

Où gémissaient les saints cantiques,

Où riaient les banquets joyeux!

Lieux où le coeur met ses chimères!

Églises où priaient nos mères

Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!"

In these two ode collections, though the Catholic and legitimist

inspiration is everywhere apparent, there is nothing revolutionary in the

language or verse forms. But in the "Odes et Ballades" of 1826, "the

romantic challenge," says Saintsbury, "is definitely thrown down. The

subjects are taken by preference from times and countries which the

classical tradition had regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm are

studiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost

possible glow of colour, as opposed to the cold correctness of classical

poetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest

reliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms." This description

applies more particularly to the Ballades, many of which, such as "La

Ronde du Sabbat," "La Légende de la Nonne," "La Chasse du Burgrave," and

"Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean" are mediaeval studies in which the lawless

_grotesquerie_ of Gothic art runs riot. "The author, in composing them,"

says the preface, "has tried to give some idea of what the poems of the

first troubadours of the Middle Ages might have been; those Christian

rhapsodists who had nothing in the world but their swords and their

guitars, and went from castle to castle paying for their entertainment

with their songs." To show that liberty in art does not mean disorder,

the author draws an elaborate contrast between the garden of Versailles

and a primitive forest, in a passage which will remind the reader of

similar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, and other

English romanticists of the eighteenth century. There is as much order,

he asserts, in the forest as in the garden, but it is a live order, not a

dead regularity. "Choose then," he exclaims, "between the masterpiece of

gardening and the work of nature; between that which is beautiful by

convention and that which is beautiful without rule; between an

artificial literature and an original poetry. . . . In two words--and we

shall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with this

observation on the two kinds of literature that are called _classic_ and

_romantic_,--regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste of

genius. . . . It will be objected to us that the virgin forest hides in

its magnificent solitudes a thousand dangerous animals, while the marshy

basins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures.

That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a

crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an

insipidity of Campistron." But above all things--such is the doctrine of

this preface--do not imitate anybody--not Shakspere any more than Racine.

"He who imitates a _romantic_ poet becomes thereby a _classic_, and just

because he imitates." In 1823 Hugo had published anonymously his first

prose romance, "Han d'Islande," the story of a Norwegian bandit. He got

up the local colour for this by a careful study of the Edda and the

Sagas, that "poésie sauvage" which was the admiration of the new school

and the horror of the old. But it was in the preface to "Cromwell,"

published in 1827, that Hugo issued the full and, as it were, official

manifesto of romanticism. The play itself is hardly actable. It is

modelled, in a sense, upon the historical plays of Shakspere, but its

Cromwell is a very melodramatic person, and its Puritans and Cavaliers

strike the English reader with the same sense of absurdity produced by

the pictures of English society in "L'Homme qui Rit." But of the famous

preface Gautier says: "The Bible among Protestants, the Koran among

Mahometans are not the object of a deeper veneration. It was, indeed,

for us the book of books, the book which contained the pure doctrine."

It consisted in great part of a triumphant attack upon the unities, and

upon the verse and style which classic usage had consecrated to French

tragedy. I need not repeat the argument here. It is already familiar,

and some sentences[38] from this portion of the essay I have quoted

elsewhere.

The preface also contained a plea for another peculiarity of the romantic

drama, its mixture, viz., of tragedy and comedy. According to Hugo, this

is the characteristic trait, the fundamental difference, which separates

modern from ancient art, romantic from classical literature. Antique

art, he says, rejected everything which was not purely beautiful, but the

Christian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creation

besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything

which is in nature is--or has the right to be--in art. It includes in

its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Hence

results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic

comedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of

imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more than

any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of the

comic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sabbath,

the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante's hell; the

Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; "grimacing

silhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity"; and "all those

local dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of

Tarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given to the modern

sublime something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the

antique beauty. . . . Is it not because the modern imagination knows how

to set prowling hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the ogres,

the erl-kings, the _psylles_, the ghouls, the _brucolaques_, the

_aspioles_, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless form, that

purity of essence which the pagan nymphs approach so little? The antique

Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has spread over the

figures of Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance? What has

given them that unfamiliar character of life and grandeur, unless it be

the neighbourhood of the rude and strong carvings of the Middle

Ages? . . . The grotesque imprints its character especially upon that

wonderful architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of all

the arts. It attaches its marks to the fronts of the cathedrals;

enframes its hells and purgatories under the portal arches, and sets them

aflame upon the windows; unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around the

capitals, along the friezes, on the eaves." We find this same bizarre

note in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church institutions, and

popular legends, in the court fools, in the heraldic emblems, the

religious processions, the story of "Beauty and the Beast." It explains

the origin of the Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art.

Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the grotesque. He is by turns

the greatest of tragic and the greatest of comic artists, and his tragedy

and comedy lie close together, as in life, but without that union of the

terrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that element of

deformity which is the essence of the proper grotesque. He has created,

however, one specimen of true grotesque, the monster Caliban. Caliban is

a comic figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, uncouth,

and frightful about him. He has the dignity and the poetry which all

rude, primitive beings have: which the things of nature, rocks and trees

and wild beasts have. It is significant, therefore, that Robert Browning

should have been attracted to Caliban. Browning had little comic power,

little real humour; in him the grotesque is an imperfect form of the

comic. The same criticism applies to Hugo. He gave a capital example of

the grotesque in the four fools in the third act of "Cromwell" and in

Triboulet, the Shaksperian jester of "Le Roi s'Amuse." Their songs and

dialogues are bizarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they are

not funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns of Shakspere--they

are not comic, but merely queer. Hugo's defective sense of humour is

shown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which,

Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--exaggerating

character and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodrama

into absurdity. This fault is felt in his great prose romance

"Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the

humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meant

by the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero of

his later romance "L'Homme qui Rit."

Gautier has left a number of sketches, written in a vein lovingly

humorous, of some of the eccentrics--the _curiosités romantiques_--whose

oddities are perhaps even more instructive as to the many directions

which the movement took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the less

extreme votaries. There was the architect Jule Vabre, _e.g._, whose

specialty was Shakspere. Shakspere "was his god, his idol, his passion,

a wonder to which he could never grow accustomed." Vabre's life-project

was a French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely true to

the text, reproducing the exact turn and movement of the phrase,

following the alternations of prose, rime, and blank verse in the

original, and shunning neither its euphemistic subtleties nor its

barbaric roughnesses. To fit himself for this task, he went to London

and lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmosphere and the

_milieu_, and learning to think in English; and there Gautier encountered

him about 1843, in a tavern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating

_rosbif_ and speaking French with an English accent. Gautier told him

that all he had to do now, to translate Shakspere, was to learn French.

"I am going to work at it," he answered, more struck with the wisdom than

the wit of the suggestion. A few years later Vabre turned up in France

with a project for a sort of international seminary. "He wanted to

explain 'Hernani' to the English and 'Macbeth' to the French. It made

him tired to see the English learning French in 'Telemaque,' and the

French learning English in the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'" Poor Vabre's great

Shakspere translation never materialised; but François-Victor Hugo, the

second son of the great romancer, carried out many of Vabre's principles

of translation in his version of Shakspere.

Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, Célestin Nanteuil,

who suggested to Gautier the hero of an early piece of his own, written

to accompany an engraving in an English keepsake, representing the Square

of St. Sebald at Nuremberg. This hero, Elias Wildman-stadius, or l'Homme

Moyen-âge, was "in a sort, the Gothic genius of that Gothic town"--a

_retardataire_ or man born out of his own time--who should have been born

in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Dürer. Célestin Nanteuil "had the air

of one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the

_sambucque_, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to

have come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing his

nimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having the

least suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one's aureole in

the street." He is described as resembling in figure "the spindling

columns of the church naves of the fifteenth century. . . . The azure of

the frescoes of Fiesole had furnished the blue of his eyes; his hairs, of

the blond of an aureole, seemed painted one by one, with the gold of the

illuminators of the Middle Ages. . . . One would have said, that from

the height of his Gothic pinnacle Célestin Nanteuil overlooked the actual

town, hovering above the sea of roofs, regarding the eddying blue smoke,

perceiving the city squares like a checkerboard, the streets like the

notches of a saw in a stone bench, the passers-by like mice; but all that

confusedly athwart the haze, while from his airy observatory he saw,

close at hand and in all their detail, the rose windows, the bell towers

bristling with crosses, the kings, patriarchs, prophets, saints, angels

of all the orders, the whole monstrous army of demons or chimeras,

nailed, scaled, tushed, hideously winged; _guivres_, taresques,

gargoyles, asses' heads, apes' muzzles, all the strange bestiary of the

Middle Age." Nanteuil furnished illustrations for the books of the

French romanticists. "Hugo's' Notre-Dame de Paris' was the object of his

most fervent admiration, and he drew from it subjects for a large number

of designs and aquarelles." Gautier mentions, as among his rarest

vignettes, the frontispiece of "Albertus," recalling Rembrandt's manner;

and his view of the Palazzo of San Marc in Royer's "Venezia la bella."

Gautier says that one might apply to Nanteuil's aquarelles what Joseph

Delorme[39] said of Hugo's ballads, that they were Gothic window

paintings. "The essential thing in these short fantasies is the

carriage, the shape, the clerical, monastic, royal, seignorial

_awkwardness_ of the figures and their high colouring. . . . Célestin

had made his own the angular anatomy of coats-of-arms, the extravagant

contours of the mantles, the chimerical or monstrous figures of heraldry,

the branchings of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudal

baron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious physiognomy of

the big Carthusian Carmelite, the furtive mien of the young page with

parti-coloured pantaloons. . . . He excelled also in setting the persons

of poem, drama, or romance in ornamented frames like the Gothic shrines

with triple colonettes, arches, canopied and bracketed niches, with

statuettes, figurines, emblematic animals, male and female saints on a

background of gold. He entered so deeply into the sentiment of the old

Gothic imagery that he could make a Lady of the Pillar in a brocade

dalmatica, a Mater Dolorosa with the seven swords in her breast, a St.

Christopher with the child Jesus on his shoulder and leaning on a palm

tree, worthy to serve as types to the Byzantine painters of Epinal. . . .

Nothing resembled less the clock face and troubadour Middle Age which

flourished about 1825. It is one of the main services of the romantic

school to have thoroughly disembarrassed art from this." Gautier

describes also a manuscript piece of Nerval, for which he furnished a

prologue, and which was an imitation of one of the _Diableries_, or

popular farces of the Middle Ages, in which the devil was introduced. It

contained a piece within the piece, in the fashion of an old mystery

play, with scenery consisting of the mouth of hell, painted red and

surmounted by a blue paradise starred with gold. An angel came down to

play at dice with the devil for souls. In his excess of zeal, the angel

cheated and the devil grew angry and called him a "big booby, a celestial

fowl," and threatened to pull his feathers out ("Le Prince des Sots").

In France, as in England and Germany, the romantic revival promoted and

accompanied works of erudition like Raynouard's researches in Provençal

and old French philology and the poetry of the troubadours (1816); Creuzé

de Lesser's "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde"; Marchangy's "La Gaule

Poétique." History took new impulse from that _sens du passé_ which

romanticism did so much to awaken. Augustin Thierry's obligations to

Scott have already been noticed. It was the war chant of the Prankish

warriors in Chateaubriand's "Les Martyrs"--

"Pharamond! Pharamond! nous avons combattu avec l'épée"--

which first excited his historical imagination and started him upon the

studies which issued in the "Récits Mérovingiens" and the "Conquéte

d'Angleterre." Barante's "Ducs de Bourgogne" (1814-28) confessedly owes

much of its inception to Scott. Michaud's "History of the Crusades"

(1811-22) and the "History of France" (1833-67) by that most romantic of

historians, Michelet, may also be credited to the romantic movement. The

end of the movement, as a definite period in the history of French

literature, is commonly dated from the failure upon the stage of Victor

Hugo's "Les Burgraves" in 1843. The immediate influence of the French

romantic school upon English poetry or prose was slight. Like the German

school, it came too late. The first generation of English romantics was

drawing to its close. Scott died two years after "Hernani" stormed the

French theatre. Two years later still died Coleridge, long since fallen

silent--as a poet--and always deaf to Gallic charming. We shall find the

first impress of French romance among younger men and in the latter half

century.

In France itself the movement passed on into other phases. Many early

adherents of Hugo's _cénacle_ and _entourage_ fell away from their

allegiance and, like Sainte-Beuve and Musset, took up a critical or even

antagonistic attitude. Musset's "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet" [40]

turns the whole romantic contention into mockery. Yet no work more

fantastically and gracefully romantic, more Shaksperian in quality, was

produced by any member of the school than Musset produced in such dramas

as "Fantasio" and "Lorenzaccio."

[1] It is scarcely necessary to say that no full-length picture of the

French romantic movement is attempted in this chapter, but only such a

sketch as should serve to illustrate its relation to English romanticism.

For the history of the movement, besides the authorities quoted or

referred to in the text, I have relied principally upon the following:

Petit de Julleville: "Histoire de la Littérature Française," Tome vii.,

Paris, 1899. Brunetière: "Manual of the History of French Literature"

(authorized translation), New York, 1898. L. Bertrand; "La Fin du

Classicisme," Paris, 1897. Adolphe Jullien: "Le Romantisme et L'Editeur

Renduel," Paris, 1897. I have also read somewhat widely, though not

exhaustively, in the writings of the French romantics themselves,

including Hugo's early poems and most of his dramas and romances;

Nodier's "Contes en prose et en verse "; nearly all of Musset's works in

prose and verse; ditto of Théophile Gautier's; Stendhal's "La Chartreuse

de Parme," "Le Rouge et le Noir," "Racine et Shakespeare," "Lord Byron en

Italie," etc.; Vigny's "Chatterton," "Cinq-Mars," and many of his

Scriptural poems; Balzac's "Les Chouans"; Mérimée's "Chronique de Charles

IX.," and most of his "Nouvelles "; Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du

Christianisme"; some of Lamartine's "Meditations"; most of George Sand's

novels, and a number of Dumas'; many of Sainte-Beuve's critical writings;

and the miscellanies of Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie). Of many of these,

of course, no direct use or mention is made in the present chapter.

[2] "Il a pour l'art du moyen âge, un mepris voisin de la demence et de

la frénésie. . . . Voir le discours où il propose de mutiler les statues

des rois de la facade de Notre-Dame, pour en former un piédestal à la

statue du peuple français." Bertrand: "La Fin du Classicisme," pp. 302-3

and _note_.

[3] But see, for the Catholic reaction in France, the writings of Joseph

de Maistre, especially "Du Pape" (1819).

[4] "Histoire du Romantisme" (1874).

[5] _ibid._, 210.

[6] Heine counted, in the Salon of 1831, more than thirty pictures

inspired by Scott.

[7] Also "Le Roi Lear" (Salon of 1836) and "La Procession du Pape des

Fous" (aquarelle) for Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris."

[8] Recall Schlegel's saying that the genius of the classic drama was

plastic and that of the romantic picturesque.

[9] Gautier, 192.

[10] This is a distinction more French than English: _la tragédie_ vs.

_le drame_.

[11] Preface to "Hernani."

[12] Preface to "Cromwell."

[13] "Histoire du Romantisme," p. 64.

[14] "Primer of French Literature," p. 115.

[15] One of the principles of the romanticists was the _mélange des

genres_, whereby the old lines between tragedy and comedy, _e.g._, were

broken down, lyricism admitted into the drama, etc.

[16] Stendhal, writing in 1823 ("Racine et Shakspere"), complains that

"it will soon be thought bad form to say, on the French stage, 'Fermez

cette fenêtre' [window]: we shall have to say, 'Fermez cette croisée'

[casement]. Two-thirds of the words used in the parlours of the best

people (_du meilleur ton_) cannot be reproduced in the theatre. M.

Legouvé, in his tragedy 'Henri IV.,' could not make use of the patriot

king's finest saying, 'I could wish that the poorest peasant in my

kingdom might, at the least, have a chicken in his pot of a Sunday.'

English and Italian verse allows the poet to say everything; and this

good French word _pot_ would have furnished a touching scene to

Shakspere's humblest pupil. But _la tragédie racinienne_, with its

_style noble_ and its artificial dignity, has to put it thus,--in four

alexandrines:

"'Je veux enfin qu'au jour marqué pour le repos,

L'hôte laborieux des modestes hameaux,

Sur sa table moins humble, ait, par ma bienfaisance,

Quelques-uns de ces mets réservés à l'aisance.'"

It was Stendhal (whose real name was Henri Beyle) who said that Paris

needed a chain of mountains on its horizon.

[17] Gautier, 188.

[18] "Cromwell," 1827,

[19] Gautier, 107.

[20] Musset's fantastic "Ballade à la Lune," exaggerates the romantic so

decidedly as to seem ironical. It is hard to say whether it is hyperbole

or parody. See Petit de Julleville, vol. vii., p. 652.

[21] See vol. i., pp. 372-73.

[22] Gautier, 163.

[23] "Des Knaben Wunderhorn."

[24] Charles Nodier vindicated the literary claims of Perrault.

[25] Gautier, 93.

[26] Rue Jean-Gougon, where the _cénacle_ met often.

[27] Nerval hanged himself at Paris, in January, 1855, in the rue de la

Vielle Lanterne.

[28] Gautier, 167.

[29] The romanticism of the _Globe_ was of a more conservative stripe

than that of the Muse Française, which was the organ of the group of

young poets who surrounded Hugo. The motto of the latter was _Jam nova

progenies coelo demittitur alto_. The _Globe_ defined romanticism as

Protestantism in letters. The critical battle was on as early as 1824.

On April 24, in that year, Auger, director of the Academy, read at the

annual session of the Institute a discourse on romanticism, which he

denounced as a literary schism. The prospectus of the _Globe_, an

important document on the romantic side, dates from the same year. The

_Constitutionnel_, the most narrowly classical of the opposing journals,

described romanticism as an epidemic malady. To the year 1825, when the

_Cénacle_ had its headquarters at Victor Hugo's house, belong, among

others, the following manifestoes on both sides of the controversy; "Les

Classiques Vengés," De la Touche; "Le Temple du Romantisme," Morel; "Le

Classique et le Romantique" (a satirical comedy in the classical

interest), Baour-Lormian. Cyprien Desmarais' "Essais sur les classiques

et les romantiques" had appeared at Paris in 1823. At Rouen was printed

in 1826 "Du Classique et du Romantique," a collection of papers read at

the Rouen Academy during the year, rather favorable, on the whole, to the

new movement.

[30] This is now a somewhat rare book; I have never seen a copy of it;

but it was reviewed in The Saturday Review (vol. lxv., p. 369).

[31] Part ii., Book iii., chap ix.

[32]Part ii., Book iv., chap. i.

[33] For Chateaubriand and Ossian see vol. i., pp. 332-33. He made

translations from Ossian, Gray, and Milton.

[34] "Victor Hugo," par Paul Boudois, p. 32.

[35] Vol. i., p. 10.

[36] See vol. i., p. 379.

[37] The use of this form instead of _romantisme_ is perhaps worth

noticing.

[38] See vol. i., pp. 19-20.

[39] Sainte-Beuve's "Confessions de Joseph Delorme," 1829.

[40] See vol. i., pp. 18-23.