A History of French Literature, volume 2 (Charles Henry Conrad)
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"This was followed by Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1760), a half biographical novel, at least so far as Rousseau's emotional life with Mme d'Houdetot was concerned, and reeking with sentiment . It created a perfect furore : once ..."--A History of French Literature by Charles Henry Conrad Wright |
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A History of French Literature (1912) by Charles Henry Conrad (1869-1957).
Subject: French literature
Full text of volume 2[1]
A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
BY
KATHLEEN T. BUTLER
DIRECTOR OF STUDIES IN MODERN AND MEDIEVAL LANGUAGES,
GIRTON COLLEGE,
ASSOCIATE OP NEWNHAM COLLEGE
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME II THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER
METHUEN & GO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.G.
LONDON
Pa
^1.9
First Published in ig2j
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
BOOK I
PERIOD OF TRANSITION THE REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC AGE
(1789-1815)
CHAP. PAGE
I The Literature of the Revolution (i 789-1 799) —
Political Oratory and Political Journalism. . 3
II The Literature of the Consulate and the Empire (1799-1815)—
I. The Pseudo-Classical School: Drama — Poetry
— Literary Criticism ..... 9
III 2. Reaction against the Spirit of the Eighteenth
Century : "Madame de Stael — <^hateaubriand — Benj amin Constant — Senancour — Ultimate Influence on Literature of the Revolution and - of the Napoleonic Regime. . . .12
BOOK II THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
I The Romantic Movement in Europe ... 33 II The Romantic Movement in France—^-
1. Its General Characteristics .... 37
2. Influence of Foreign Literatures . . .41
3. The Controversy between Classics and Romantics 43
4. History of the Romantic Movement in France
after 1830 ...... 49
V
vi A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
CHAP. Ill
PAGE
IV
V
Huge
VI
VII
VIII
Religious, Political, and Philosophical Move- ments DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
1. The Religious Reaction: Joseph de Maistre
— De Bonald — Ballanche — Lamennais — Lacordaire ......
2. Political Writers and Sociologists : Paul-Louis
Courier — Saint-Simon — Fourier — Pierre Leroux .......
3. Philosophy : Victor Cousin ....
4. Centres for the propagation of Ideas : The
Sorbonne and the College de France The Romantic School of Poetry — I. Lamartine .
- 2. Victor Hugo ._ . _
.' 3. Alfred de Vigny .
4. Alfred de Musset
5. Minor Poets of the Period The Romantic Drama —
1. Influences Affecting its Development
2. The Theory of the Romantic Drama
3. The Romantic Dramatists : Victor
Dumas the Elder — Alfred de Vigny — .\lfred de Musset ......
4. Decline of the Romantic Drama .
Prose Fiction during the Romantic Period —
1. The Novel .......
(i) The Novel of Sentiment and the Anal\-tical Novel : George Sand — Stendhal. .....
(ii) The Historical Novel and the Novel of Adventure : Influence of Sir Walter Scott — Alfred de Vignj' — Merimee — Balzac — ^Victor Hugo — Dumas pere .
(iii) The Novel of Contemporary Manners : George Sand — Eugene Sue — Honore de Balzac ......
2. The Short Story : Nodier — Gerard de Nerval —
Prosper Merimee — Theophile Gautier . History during the Romantic Period —
Thierrj- — Guizot — Mignet — Thiers — De Tocque-
\-ille — Michelet — Quinet ....
Literary Criticism during the Romantic Period —
Villemain — Saint-Marc Girardin — Nisard — Sainte-
Beuve before 1848 .....
53
58 66
68
72
77 88
94 99
103 105
107 113
"5
116
120
125 142
154 177;
CONTENTS vii
BOOK III NEO-ROMANTICISM
Part I
THE TRIUMPH OF POSITIVISM
THE AGE OF SCIE^XE AND DOUBT
{c. 1850-1885)
CHAP. PAGE
I The Social, Historical, and Intellectual Back- ground (c, 1850-1870). ..... 187
II Realism and Naturalism —
Brief History of the Growth of Realism — General Characteristics of French Realism — Realism V. Naturalism. — Classicism, Romanticism, and Realism ....... 195
III General Prose after 1850 —
Thought, History, and Literary Criticism : Renan — Taine — Sainte-Beuve after 1848 — The Later Literary Critics . . . . .217
IV The Novel and the Short Story during the Age
OF Positivism —
Flaubert — Fromentin — Edmond and Jules de Goncourt — Zola — Ferdinand Fabre — ^ Alphbnse Daudet — Guy de Maupassant — Other Novelists . . . . .240
V Art for Art's Sake and Artistic Realism in Poetry —
1 . Links between the Romantic and the Parnassian
School : Theophile Gautier — Theodore de Banville ....... 261
2. The Parnassian Group : Leconte de Lisle —
Heredia — Sully Prudh^me— Fran9ois Coppee 264 VI The Drama after 1850 —
1. Comedy of Manners and Problem Plays : Scribe
— Dumas ^/5 — Augier — Sardou . , . 278
2. Light Comedy : Meilhac and Halevy . . 284
3 . The Naturalistic Drama : Henri Becque —
Antoiue and t> e Theatre Libre . . . 2S4
PAGE
viii A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Part II
BETWEEN TWO WARS
MAIN LITERARY CURRENTS
(1885-1914)
CHAP.
VII Political and Intellectual Background . . 287
VIII The Symbolist Movement (c. i 885-1900)
1. Immediate Precursors of Symbolism: Baude-
laire — Ve rlaine ^— Rimbaud . . . ' . 301
2. The Esthetics of Symbolism . . .310
3. Symbolism in Poetry: Mallarme — Samain —
Henri de Regnier . ' "; T . . 316
4. Symbolism in the Novel : Regnier — The Early
Novels of Maurice Barres — Huysmans — Rodenbach ...... 319
5. Symbolism in the Drama: Villiers de ITsIe
Adam — Maeterlinck — Claude! , . . 320
IX Outside the Symbolist Movement —
1. The Novel: Paul Bourget — Anatole France —
Pierre Loti . . '. . . . 325
2. The Drama 329
X The New Idealism AND the New Realism (1900-1 91 4) 331
Appendix A. Synoptic Chronological Tables . 347
Appendix B. Select Bibliographies . . . 367
lNi>EX 375
BOOK I
PERIOD OF TRANSITION
THE REVOLUTIONARY AND
NAPOLEONIC AGE
1789-1815
VOL. II. — I
A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I THE LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTION
THE Revolution and the Empire were each in its own way periods of intense poHtical activity on the one hand and of literary exhaustion on the other. One might have expected that great upheavals like the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars would have either suspended all literary production or else broken entirely with tradition and created an entirely new literature. Neither of these possibilities was realized : in all branches of literature the output was considerable, but if we except Andre Chenier, it was, in the main, of a mediocre kind, running placidly on stereotyped pseudo- classical lines. In fact, the immediate effect of the Revolu- tion and the Empire was to retard the Romantic move- ment heralded by the works of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre ; nevertheless, when the belated movement came, it came enriched by the vitalizing ideas and events which had formed the web of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.
From one point of view the Revolution was the practical result of the theories of the free-thinking philosophers of the eighteenth century. The gods of the revolutionists were
3
4 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Voltaire and Rousseau : when it was a question of destruc- tion, they turned to Voltaire, the hater of all tradition and authority ; when a question of reconstruction, they turned to Rousseau, the preacher of equality and of mutual dependence. Guinguen^ proposed that Voltaire's statue should bear the inscription : " Au destructeur de la superstition," and Jean-Jacques' : " Au fondateur de la liberte." Brandes points out that " there is scarcely a paragraph in the Contrat Social which, during the revolu- tionary period, did not reappear either in a law or a public declaration, or a newspaper article, or a speech in the National Assembly, or in the very constitution of the Republic itself." i
The social upheaval was attended by a transformation of ideas, feelings, manners, and taste, but it was some time before it brought about a corresponding literary revolution. The reasons are not far to seek : the Revolution diverted all the best forces of the nation into political channels, and the two great despotisms which immediately succeeded it — the Consulate and the Empire — though they upheld the principles of equality and fraternity, annihilated personal liberty. A strict censorship of the press and Napoleon's endeavour to absorb all the most gifted men in adminis- trative or military pursuits also had the effect of discour- aging and impoverishing literature.
The only interesting forms of literature — if such they may be called — produced during the revolutionary period were political oratory and political journalism.
Chateaubriand's remark, " L'eloquence est un fruit des revolutions ; elle y croit spontanement et sans
\ratOTy*' Culture," is amply justified by the eloquent speeches declaimed at successive revolutionary assemblies by Mirabeau (1749-1791), Vergniaud (1753-1793), Danton (1759-1794), and Robespierre (1758-1794), to mention only the four most gifted of the many orators of the Revolution.
^ Brandes : Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature : The Reaction in France, p. i8 (Heinemann, 1903).
LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTION 5
Of these, Mirabeau — "rami des hommes," as he was
called — ^was the greatest. From the day when
(^5^^179") ^^ defiantly told Louis XVI's emissary, " Nous
sommes ici par la volonte du peuple, on ne
nous en arrachera que par la force des baionnettes," to
the day of his death he swayed his audiences by his natural
eloquence, the pitilessness of his logic, and the accuracy
of his information. (Cf. Discours centre la banquerouie ;
Sitr le Droit de paix et de guerre.)
Vergniaud, who is the best representative of the eloquence
of the Girondists, had none of Mirabeau's
(1751^1793) 3-CCurate knowledge and little of his logic. He
was an emotional and fluent speaker, easily
carried away by his own words, and fond of repeating his
effects. A past-master in the art of waxing eloquent
over general ideas and feelings of a rather superficial
kind, none knew better than he how to make glowing
appeals to the patriotism of his hearers or to defend his
own party against accusations.
Danton, who was nicknamed by his contemporaries
" le Mirabeau de la populace," and who lost
(1759-1794) h^^ head for his opposition to Robespierre, was
an impetuous speaker who always went straight
to the point, disdaining vague generalities and flowers of
rhetoric. His famous address to the Legislative Assembly
in 1792, when news had come of the siege of Verdun by the ^•
Prussians and when the Allies were hourly expected at
the gates of Paris, is a good example of the electric quality
of his improvisations : " Le tocsin qu'on va sonner n'est
point un signal d'alarme, c'est la charge sur les ennemis
de la patrie. Pour les vaincre. Messieurs, il nous faut de
I'audace, encore de I'audace, toujours de I'audace, et la
France est sauvee."
Robespierre was as rhetorical as Danton was direct and simple — his speeches often have a senti- 1^758^^17^) niental note which he had caught from Rous- seau ; they are admirably composed, and convince without persuading. (Cf. his accusation of the
6 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Girondins, May 31, 1793, and his speech in his own defence, July 26, 1794.)
None of these orators is remarkable for the originality of his ideas, which were drawn almost exclusively from the encyclopedistes and from Voltaire and Rousseau. Filled with the rationalistic ideas and the sentimental humanita- rianism which in the eighteenth century had passed for philosophy, most of them were too fond of abstractions based on insufficient data, while their classical training had taught them to use and abuse classical and mytholo- gical allusions, and to strew their speeches with rhetorical cliches. In spite of these besetting sins, however, the oratory of the Revolution is redeemed by its fundamental sincerity and its youthful ardour. The majority of the public speakers of the period were in their thirties, and even those who were older had not lost the enthusiasm and the optimism of youth ready to believe that Rome can be built in a day.
The last great orator of the Revolution was Napoleon. Napoleon After the 8th of Brumaire his voice alone was (1769-1821) heard. His speeches were always concise, even brusque, very expressive of his personality, and admirably suited to the psychology of a crowd. In his addresses to his soldiers, there is never a word too much, and the opening and closing sentences are of a kind that would engrave themselves on the simplest minds.
Political journalism does not belong to literature proper,
but it may be noted here that its power dates
^omnausm ^^^"^ ^^^ Revolution. The periodical press of
the ancien regime had mainly taken the form
of literary, scientific, and religious reviews, in which politics
played an unimportant part. One of the articles of the
Declaration of the Rights of ]\Ian provided for
orthe dTfiy the liberty of the press, and the result was an
^"^^^ immediate outcrop of political dailies of every
shade of opinion. Only two of these newspapers outlived
the revolutionary period : Le Moniteur which, after 1803,
under the title La Decade Pliilosofhique, became the
LITERATURE OF THE REVOLUTION . 7
official organ of publicity, and Le Journal des Dibats, founded 1789, which has survived to the present day. The daily press may have no literary value in itself, but as M. Lanson points out, throughout the nineteenth century it influenced the reading public and hence modified the methods of writers themselves. " Le journal est le verit-j able heritier des salons pour la direction du gout litteraire " : ^ the average reader is influenced by his daily paper, reads the books and goes to the plays it recommends. Moreover, the newspaper develops a tendency to quick and superficial reading and a demand for novelty and realistic detail, with the result that modern writers eager for popularity have increasingly modified their methods on these lines. This, however, takes us far from the days of the Revolution, when the daily press was too much engrossed in political and social problems to have room for literary criticism, the feuilleton, or the fait divers.
Among the most distinguished pamphleteers and jour- nalists of this period were the Abbe Sieyes and Camille Desmoulins. It was the Abbe Sieyes (1748-1836) who in his pamphlet,
" Qii'est-ce que le tiers Eiat," anticipated the fiAsSS) Constitution of '89. " Qu'est-ce que le tiers
etat ? La nation. — Qu'est-il ? Rien. — Que doit-il etre ? Tout." But the most talented and original of the journalists
proper, and the best prose-WTiter of the Revolu- Desmouiins tiou was Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794), 0-1794) spcj-g^^j-y to Danton and editor of Le Vieux Cordelier, in the pages of which he eloquently and caustic- ally opposed the Terror and all its ways, with the result that he perished under the guillotine side by side with Danton. With the advent of Napoleon, oratory and jour- nalism were extinguished, except in a purely official sense.
^ Lanson : Histoire de la LitUrature frangaise.
CHAPTER II
THE LITERATURE OF THE CONSULATE AND THE EMPIRE, 1799-1815
I. THE PSEUDO-CLASSICAL SCHOOL
IN the literature of the period of which Napoleon was the dominating figure two currents may be distin- guished — the one continuing the eighteenth-century tradition, the other representing a reaction against that tradition.
In the eighteenth century literature had become so much a social and political weapon that it had almost ceased to be an art. It is true that in the years immediately preceding the Revolution pure literature had begun to assert its rights and the air had been full of protest against the classical doctrine, but the fact that the revolutionists themselves introduced the ideals of ancient Athens and Rome into politics stimulated a reaction towards classicism in literature. Under the rule of Napoleon, whose arbitrary nature made him jealous of new ideas and of intellectual independence, literature was deprived of its militant function. At the same time his dreams of world conquest were nourished by memories of the Roman Empire, just as his policy was based on that love of organization and order for which Rome stands pre-eminent in the history of ancient civilization. The result on art was the so-called style of the Empire — ai form of pseudo-classicism which characterizes the archi- tecture, painting, sculpture, and furniture of this period, and was not without its influence on literature.
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 9
During the Revolution the theatre had rivalled the
press and the tribune as a means of political
1. The drama pj-Qpag^jida. The tragic dramatists, of whom
the most famous are Marie Joseph Chenier (1764-1811),
Andre's brother, Lemercier and Legouv^, Trage y fQ^^Q^^g^j Voltaiie's example in making their plays a vehicle for the discussion of political problems, choosing such subjects from Roman or French history as lent themselves to allusions to the situation of the moment. Thus M. J, Ch^nier's Charles IX (1789) is an attack on royalty and religious fanaticism, his Gracchus (1792) a defence of liberty, while in Fenelon ou les Religieuses de Camhrai (1793) he makes his archbishop hero the incarna- tion of tolerance and humanity. Much the same tradition, less the allusions — of which Napoleon would have none — and with an increasing tendency towards the melodramatic, prevailed under the Empire. Typical examples are Les Templiers (1805) by Raynouard, and Luce de Lanceval's Hector (1809).
The comedy of this period, if we except the topical
plays of the Revolution which have only a °^^ ^ documentary value, deserves greater praise than the tragedy. The best of these comedies are Le Tresor (1804) by Andrieux, La Petite Ville (1801) and Les Ricochets (1807) by Picard, and Les Deux Gendres (1810) by Etienne. The serious drama is represented by Alex- andre Duval, whose Edouard en Ecosse on la nuit d'un proscrit (1802) was received with enthusiastic applause ;
while Guilbert de Pixerecourt, nicknamed " le raraa (-^Qj-j^gjjjg ^j^g Boulcvards," with his melodramas,
classical in form but highly romantic in content, uncon- sciously prepared the way for the romantic drama. The descriptive and didactic poetry of the eighteenth century continued on its lifeless and laboured ^ way. The Abbe Delille, the translator of Milton and Pope, whose Jardins (1702) have already been noticed, produced successively L'Homme des Champs (1802), Le Malheur ct la Pitie (1803) — an attack on the excesses of
10 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
the Revolution — and Les Trois Regnes de la Nature {1809), Florian wrote his Fables (1792), which, though far inferior to La Fontaine's, are pleasantly told. The patriotic note is struck in M. J. Chenier's Chanson du Depart, and in the famous Marseillaise (1792), composed for the army of the Rhine by Rouget de Lisle. It originally bore the title Chant de Guerre de I'Armee du Rhin, but as the soldiers of Marseilles were the first to sing it in Paris, it was re- christened, and has ever since been known as La Marseillaise.
Among the elegiac poets we find a presentiment of Lamar- tine's lyrical innovations in La Chute des Feuilles and Le Poete Mourant by Millevoye (1782-1816), and in Chene- dolle's Etudes poetiques (published in 1820, the same year as Lamartine's Meditations but\\Titten much earlier), while Baour-Lormian's Poesies Ossianiques (1801), an adaptation of IVIacpherson's forgeries, had a great influence on con- temporary taste and subsequently on literature.
The conservatism in art which is the distinguishing feature of the Consulate and the Empire is
^crJacism^ clearly reflected in the literary criticism of the day. In 1799 La Harpe published the nine volumes of his Cours de Litteratiire, consisting of the lec- tures he had delivered at the Lycee during the preceding twelve years, and which were intended not for the learned but for men and women of general culture. The book, the first of its kind, was received with great favour, and immediately ran into several editions. It declared the superioritj'of Latin over Greek literature, and taught that, in spite of Racine, the great Classical Age, fine as it was, paled before the literary performances of the Age of Enlighten- ment, which La Harpe regarded as a golden era both in verse and in prose !
In the pages of Le Journal des Dehats, for the moment re-christened Journal de I'Empire, the organ of official criticism, Boissonnade, Geoffroy, Feletz, and Dussault WTOte in the same reactionary spirit. These classical diehards by no means shared all La Harpe's views, and held no brief for eighteenth-century literature, but they were all devotees
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE ii
of the classical doctrine, and believed, as Geoffroy expressed it, not only that " le theatre fran9ais est un theatre classique : on n'y doit rire et pleurer que dans les regies," but also that no form of literature should overstep the narrow circle traced for it once for all by dogmatic theorists.
CHAPTER III
LITERATURE OF THE CONSULATE AND THE EMPIRE {continued)
II. REACTION AGAINST THE SPIRIT OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
SIDE by side with these pseudo-classicists there existed at this period a small group of writers — Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Senancoiu", Ben- jamin Constant and Barante, who were all opposed to the Napoleonic autocracy and to the prevailing order of things. In his Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature, Brandes groups these writers in a volume entitled Emigrant Literature because, owing to their independent views, they were all at one point or another of their careers exiles, either on their own initiative or at the bidding of Napoleon. Their work and thought reveal a curious blending of reactionary and progressive ideas : their point of contact with the eighteenth century is seen in the war they wage against outworn tradition, some of them in all domains, others only in that of literature. On the other hand, they are in open revolt against the eighteenth century's irreligious attitude and its lack of historical sense, and, true disciples of Rousseau, they react against its suppression of feeling and imagination and its conventional and colourless view of nature.
The two writers who for their originality and their literary gifts tower above all the others during the period of the Consulate and the Empire are Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand.
12
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 13
Anne Marie Germaine Necker was the daughter of the great Genevese banker and financier who, shortly i DE STAfiL before the outbreak of the Revolution, became (17^-1817) pj-jj^g Minister of France. She was born in Paris, and from her eleventh year onwards was a pro- minent little figure in her mother's salon, which was frequented by the most brilliant men of the day, including Grimm, Buffon, Marmontel, and La Harpe. At eighteen she published her Lettres sur J.- J. Rousseau, of whom she had for many years been an enthu- siastic reader. Two years later she was married to Baron de Stael-Holstein, the Swedish Ambassador in Paris. Her marriage was not a happy one, and she sought diversion by throwing herself heart and soul into literature and politics. When the Revolution broke out Necker was soon forced to flee, but his daughter remained in Paris, and through the influence of her husband was able to rescue many an innocent victim of the Reign of Terror. Finally, in 1792, she herself was forced to flee the vengeance of the revolutionary leaders, and she sought refuge on her father's country estate at Coppet near Geneva. Five years later she returned to Paris and opened a salon in the Rue du Bac, which soon became the great political rendezvous of the Moderates, with Benjamin Constant at their head. Madame de Stael's independence of mind, her influence, her antagonism to Bonaparte, who is reported to have said that every one thought less of him after he had talked with her, led in 1803 to her banishment from Paris by express command of the First Consul.
No greater punishment could have fallen on Madame de Stael, who would certainly have agreed with the dictum " On ne vit qu'k Paris, on vegete ailleurs," so ill could she dis- pense with intellectual intercoiurse and a certain partici- pation in political events. Rather than vegetate else- where, however, she spent most of her ten years of exile in foreign travel. On leaving Paris she went straight to Weimar, where she made the acquaintance of Schiller and Goethe, with whom she had long literary discussions.
14 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
and whom she somewhat wearied by her endless intelligent questions. From Weimar she proceeded to Berlin, where she obtained an introduction to Fichte who at her request expounded his philosophical system to her in a quarter of an hour. Recalled to Coppet to nurse her dying father, she carried off A. W. Schlegel, the great German romantic critic and translator of Shakespeare, as travelling companion and tutor to her sons.
The following year Madame de Stael travelled in Italy, studying its art, literature, and customs in company with Schlegel. Then she returned to Coppet, and full of the impressions she had absorbed wrote Corinne ou I'ltalie (1806). In 1807 she was once more in Germany; after revisiting Weimar she proceeded to ]\Iunich and Vienna, and on her return to Switzerland set to work upon her great book De I'Allemagne, the record of the ideas and impressions she had gained from her two visits to Germany. The book was barely through the press when it was seized by the police, and all the copies destroyed, on the grounds that the work was not French, and that France was not yet reduced to seeking models among the Germans. This time Madame de Stael was banished, not merely from Paris, but from France itself, and was bidden to consider herself a prisoner at Coppet, where it was intimated to her friends they would be committing a grave political offence if they visited her. Schlegel, who had been tutor to her children for eight years, was ordered to leave Coppet on the pretext that he influenced her against France. Maddened by the isolation to which she was condemned, Madame de Stael resolved to flee from Coppet. She and her daughter suc- ceeded in reaching Vienna without passports. On the Russian frontier she was joined by her second husband, Albert de Rocca, a young Swiss officer whom she had secretly married a few years previously. After spending some tune in Moscow and St. Petersburg (Petrograd), they proceeded via Sweden, to England, where De I'Allemagne was successfully published in 1813. A second tour in Italy followed, and after the downfall of Napoleon, she returned
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 15
to Paris, where her salon once more became a centre of intellectual activity. She spent the last two years of her life editing her Considerations sur la Revolution frangaise and Dix Annees d'Exil, both published posthumously.
Madame de Stael's works fall naturally into three groups : her political writings, which do not concern us here ; her novels ; and her critical works.
Madame de Stael was as emotional as she was intellec- tual, and her whole personality is reflected in her two highly sentimental novels, Delphine {1802) and Corinne (1807), both of which are largely auto- biographical. Their two heroines are superior beings in conflict with their environment — Delphine, in virtue of her ""pure self-sacrificing nature, bows before public
Delphine (1802) ^ . . ^ ' -Z t i.
opmion ; Cormne, the poetess, defies it, but neither of them finds happiness. In spite of its overwrought sentiment and declamatory style, reminiscent of La Nouvelle Heloise, which inspired it and to which it owes its epistolary form, Delphine is interesting because of the war it wages on those social conventions and prejudices which are more binding than any laws. Corinne ou I'ltalie, the novel of
a misunderstood woman, has apart from its
Cormne (1Z07) . ,,. . tt
plot the added mterest of an Italian setting, and digressions on Italian art and literature. Moreover, the book is a study of national peculiarities and limitations : the prejudices and characteristics of Englishmen are represented in Oswald, Lord Nevil, Corinne's unhappy lover ; of Italians in the Prince of Castel Forte, Oswald's unsuccessful rival ; of Frenchmen in d'Erfeuil, his travelling companion, and in Madame de Stael's own reflections and comments. The three nations are confronted and compared with no little penetration by the authoress and by Corinne, who is the offspring of a Roman father and an English mother.
Madame de Stael's cosmopolitan tendencies are even more strongly marked in her two excursions
'• work?' ^^to literary criticism — De la Litterature (1800) and De lAllemagne (1813).
i6 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
In De la Litterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les
institutions sociales, to give it its full title, ^^ufiioo)' Madame de Stael shows herself to be a true
daughter of the eighteenth century, on whose ideas she had been brought up, for the whole book is based upon the idea of perfectibility, the assumption that there is a necessary and continuous progress in aU human affairs. Applied to art or literature this idea is, as we have seen, a fallacy, and in this case it does much to vitiate an otherwise admirable book, for it forces Madame de Stael to regard the literature of each succeeding age as superior to that of the age which had preceded it. On the other hand, by striving to prove the intimate connection which exists between the political and social life of a nation and its literature, she is the inaugurator of a new method of literary criticism, which, instead of basing its judgments on a fixed and absolute standard of taste (cf . Boileau and La Harpe) in criticizing any given literary work, takes into consideration the age and social and historical environ- ment in which it was written : " Je me suis propose d'exam- iner," she writes in her preface, " quelle est I'influence de la religion, des moeurs et des lois sur la litterature, et quelle est I'influence de la litterature sur la religion, les moeurs et les lois." In a word, Madame de Stael is the Montesquieu of literary criticism. In the second part of the book she maintains the thesis that the new, free, social conditions brought about by the Revolution must inevitably bring into being a new literature unshackled by rules, and she points to northern literature — English, German, and Scandinavian — as an implumbed source of poetry and idealism.
Germany, in particular, seemed to Madame de Stael most capable of helping France to create a new literature, and it was in order to make German literature and the
German mentality known to France that she ^^ '■'^^^^^"^ wrote her most influential book, De I'Alle-
magne, which is divided as follows : (i) L'Al- lemagnc et des moeurs des Allemands (twenty chapters) ;
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 17
(2) De la Litterature et des Arts (thirty-two chapters), a brief survey of the chief periods of German literature with a more detailed study of the works of Wieland, Klopstock, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Herder ; (3) La philosophie et la morale, a clear exposition of the German philosophical movement from Kant to Schelling (twenty-one chapters) ; (4) La Religion et V Enthousiasme (twelve chapters), which she regards as the essential characteristics of the German national character, and which she would fain see cultivated in her native land, where she is convinced that they would give new life to thought and poetry. In De I'Allemagne Madame de Stael renounces the eighteenth- century sensationalism which had inspired her earlier work, and adopts the philosophy of Kant and Fichte with its belief in the spirit's independence of the world of matter. The book is strewn with suggestive and often illuminating comparisons between the national characteristics of the French and the Germans, and between their respective attitudes towards life and art. Goethe, in his old age, remarked that De I'Allemagne was like a big gun which had made a breach in the Chinese wall of prejudice and indifference concealing Germany from France. It is true that there had been no lack of literary relations between the two coimtries during the first half of the eighteenth century, but between 1753, when Voltaire left Berlin for ever, and the first years of the nineteenth century, Germany had become an intellectual force, and had within the space of a generation produced a national literature worthy to rank with that of any other nation in Europe. All this was for the first time fully revealed to the French by Madame de Stael, and, as we shall see, the revelation had no small share in breaking the classical tradition.
It has often been remarked that intellectually Madame
Madame de dc Stael belongs to the eighteenth century and
^between ^e cmotioually to the nineteenth. Roughly speak-
Kiment^nd^thei^g' ^^^^ is truc. Her greatest pleasure was
Romantic Age intellectual iutercoursc and conversation, for
which she appears to have had a remarkable gift. " Si
VOL. II. — 2
i8 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
j'etais reine," one of her admirers is said to have remarked, " j 'ordonnerais a Madame de Stael de me parler toujours." Even the natural beauty of Coppet was no balm for her aching longing for Paris and all its intellectual delights. Her ideas, too, she inherited from the Age of Enlighten- ment, her intellectualism, and her belief in progress and in the indefinite perfectibility of man and all his works.
It has been seen how strong was the cosmopoUtan ten- dency of the eighteenth century. Madame de Stael wears her cosmopolitanism \vith a difference, or rather she has no need to wear it, for it is an intrinsic part of her nature. While her predecessors had taken this or that foreign idea or tendency because it fitted in with their general scheme of life, she is interested in other nations for their own sake and primarily in those characteristics which differentiate them from her owti. Her role, as M. Lanson puts it, was to understand and to make others understand. In other ways, too, her work reveals many romantic traits. She was an individualist to the finger-tips : the principal characters of her novels are thoroughly self-centred and introspective, and are obsessed and oppressed by a sense of fatality which gives them no peace. They thus live in a moral isolation which makes them an easy prey to that mal du si^cle which was to continue to work such havoc among the young romantic heroes of a later date. She was one of the first to understand that the modern mind is hamited and troubled by the infinite. This thought appears again and again in her remarks about German poetry. " Le sentiment de I'infini est le veritable attribut de I'ame." What particularly appeals to Madame de Stael in northern literature is its melancholy, its dreami- ness, its vague suggestiveness.
" L'on ne dit en franfais que ce que Ton veut dire et Ton ne voit point errer autour des paroles ces images a mille formes qui entourent la poesie des langues du Nord et reveillent une foule de souvenirs." ^
And again :
1 De I'AUemagne, II, 9.
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 19
" La po6sie est une possession momentan6e de tout ce que notre ame souhaite."^
And she is convinced that she is not preaching to deaf ears, for as she remarks in her preface to Delphine, the ideas that she holds to be good and true are addressed to "la France eclairee mais silencieuse, k I'avenir plutdt qu'au pr&ent."
" Chateaubriand est le pere du romantisme," says Sainte-Beuve, " Jean- Jacques le grand-pere, Bernardin I'oncle, et un oncle arrive des Indes expres pour cela." One would be justified in adding, "Et Madame de Stael la tante et une tante venue d'Allemagne expres pour cela."
While Madame de Stael was theorizing and setting people thinking, her contemporary, Chateaubriand, was busy firing their imaginations.
Frangois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) belonged to a younger branch of an old Breton family, and
BRiAND was born at Saint-Malo the same year as Napo-
(1768-18 leon. His stern upbringing, coupled with a passionate imaginative temperament, made him long for the day when he should be his own master, and in the meantime induced in him an overwhelming desire for soli- tude, which he was only willing to share with his sister Lucile, his one friend and confidante, and a creature as romantic and excitable as himself. Chateaubriand had just obtained a commission in the army and been presented at court when the Revolution broke out. As a cadet of a noble house, brought up in strict conservative views, he had no sympathy with the movement, and in 1791 sailed for North America on adventure bent, with the ostensible pretext of trying to discover the North- West Passage. Needless to say he had neither the infqrm. tion nor the equipment necessary for the purpose, ^^ he spent some eight months travelling over the wildei parts of North America, seeing a good deal of native Indian life, and planning his two short tales, Atala and Rmi. On his return he remained in France just long enough to
1 Idem, II, 10.
20 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
contract the marriage arranged for him, and then joined the army of the emigrants. Wounded at Thionville, he managed to escape to London, where he remained for seven years (1793-1800), making a precarious Hving as a teacher and translator, and sketching the stories of Atala and Rene under the trees in Kensington Gardens. It was in London that he pubhshed his first work, Essai sur les Revolutions (1797), an incoherent and contradictory treatise showing great religious scepticism. The death of his mother the following year led him back to Christianity, or, as he himself puts it, " j'ai pleure et j'ai cru." In 1800 he returned to France, bearing with him the manuscript of his great work, Le Genie du CJiristiantsme, the publication of which in 1802 coincided with the Concordat which sealed Bonaparte's reconciliation with the Papacy and marked the restoration of Catholic worship which for nearly ten years had been more or less under a ban in France. The Moniteur Officiel of the 14th February, in which Chateaubriand's book was announced, contained also the following proclamation from the pen of Bonaparte :
" Franfais, du sein d'une Revolution inspir^e par I'amour de la patrie ^clat^rent tout a coup parmi vous des dissensions religieuses. . . . Fran9ais, que cette religion qui a civilis6 I'Europe soit encore le lien qui en rapproche les habitants."
The opportune appearance of Le Genie du Christianisme brought its author into favour with the First Consul, who made him secretary to the Embassy in Rome, but after the execution of the Due D'Enghien Chateaubriand resigned his post, and set out on an extended tour in Greece, Tur- '-'^y, Palestine, North Africa (1806-1807) in search of local blour for Les Martyrs, on which he was already engaged, he fruits of this journey are to be found in Les Martyrs itself (1809), L'ltineraire de Paris d Jerusalem (1811), and Les Aventures du dernier Ahencerage, written about 1809, but not published till 1826. From the Bourbon restoration to 1830 Chateaubriand's life was mainly that of a politician. After the fall of Charles X he retired into private life.
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 21
and occupied himself with writing his Memoires d'Outre- Tombe, which he read aloud in the salon of Madame Recamier, and which he finally sold on condition that they should not be published until after his death.
Though Chateaubriand lived until the Revolution of 1848 all his best work was written between 1801 and 1811 except his vast autobiography, Les Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, begun under the Empire, and completed a few years before his death, and the delightful Vie de Ranee (1844), his swan-song, which deserves to be better known than it is. Chateaubriand is always regarded as the most immediate and most important precursor of French Romanticism, but if Romanticism was from one point of view a thorough- going reaction against classicism, affirming what it denied and denying what it affirmed, then there is nothing to distinguish Chateaubriand from the recognized members of the Romantic group, except that he belonged to the movement before it actually crystallized into a school.
By reason of his emotional temperament, his arrogant
egoism, his glowing imagination, and his high
^the'aposuerf devclopcd seusc of beauty, Chateaubriand could
feeling and scarcely havc failed to be in revolt against the
imagmation -^ °
eighteenth century and all its teaching, and his earliest published work, Essai stir les Revolutions anciennes et modernes (1797), was written to refute the idea of pro- gress or perfectibility. He had no faith in reason, but believed implicitly in feeling and imagination, while the unexplainable and the mysterious appealed to him pro- foundly.
" II n'est rien de beau, de doux, de grand dans la vie que les choses myst^rieuses." 1
It was his historical and still more his aesthetic sense which
His belief in made him so eager to restore the Christian
^toa^luve!' religion generally and Catholicism in particular
value of\he ^° ^^^^ placc in art and literature which since
Christian religion the Reuaissauce had been usurped by pagan
mythology, and to reinstate it as a spiritual factor in the
^ Le Gdnie du Christianisme, I, 2.
22 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
life of the nation in the place held during the eighteenth century by "enlightenment" or a vague deism.
Le Genie du Christianisme (1802), or as it was orginally entitled, Les Beantes de la religion chretienne, is concerned not with the truth of Christianity but with its supreme emotional, imaginative, and artistic value, and is an attempt to prove that this religion is the source and mainspring of all progress in the modern world. The eighteenth century, says Chateaubriand, has insisted that —
" le christianisme 6tait un culte n6 au sein de la barbaric, absurde dans ses dogmes, ridicule dans ses ceremonies, ennemi des arts et des lettres, de la raison et de la beaute ; un culte qui n'avait fait que verser du sang, enchainer les hommes et retarder le bonheur et les lumi^res du genre humain ; on devait done cliercher a prouver au contraire que, de toutes les religions qui ont jamais exists, la religion chr6tienne est la plus poetique, la plus humaine, la plus favorable ^ la liberty, aux arts et aux lettres ; que le monde moderne lui doit tout, depuis I'agriculture jusqu'aux sciences abstraites, depuis les hospices pour les malheureux jusqu'aux temples batis par Michel- Ange et d6cores par Raphael." ^
In support of his belief that as a source of poetical inspiration Christianity is infinitely superior to pagan mythology, Chateaubriand makes a careful examination of some of the great Christian epics — Dante's Divina Corn- media, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Milton's Paradise Lost ^ (Part II, i, i), and later in the book writes some glowing chapters on the literary value of the Bible. In endeavouring to show the beauties of the Christian religion Chateau- briand was led back to the Middle Ages when Christianity had been at the height of its glory, and when it had found its most perfect artistic expression not in books but in churches and cathedrals. Hence he gave a great impetus to the growing interest in Gothic architecture and in all that it stood for.
Not content with proving theoretically that —
" la religion chr6tienne est plus favorable que le paganisme au d6veloppement des caract^res et au jeu des passions, et que le
1 Le Ginie du Christianisme, I, i.
^ Chateaubriand later translated Paradise Lost into French prose.
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 23
merveilleux de cette religion peut lutter centre le merveilleux emprunt6 a la mythologie,"
Chateaubriand proceeded to give a practical demonstra- tion by writing a Christian epic himself, Les Martyrs. This prose-poem in twenty-four books, dealing with the persecutions of the early Christians under Diocletian in the third century, is not improved by its epic and super- natiu"al machinery, but as a novel of the ancient world it has great and, for its day, singular merits ; idyllic Greece, pagan and Christian Rome, the Gaul of the Franks and Druids are reconstructed for us with extraordinary historical and imaginative skill, and one is not surprised that it was the reading of the famous sixth book of Les Martyrs that decided Thierry on his vocation as an historian. The work abounds in those vivid descriptions of natural scenery painted from life, and in that local colour both in time and space which are among Chateaubriand's chief titles to fame.
Even his romances, Atala, Rend, and Le Dernier Ahen- cerage have a clearly marked religious purpose.
^dm°cy^n'^' The two first were originally intended to form ^?omancer'^part of Les Natchez, which Chateaubriand planned as an " ^pop^e de la nature." They were then introduced into Le Genie du Christianisme — Atala to illustrate the chapter entitled Harmonies de la religion chretienne avec les scenes de la nature et les passions du coeur hjimain, and Rene as an illustrative episode to the chapter entitled Du vague des passions. The one was detached from the main work before publication, the other after the first edition. In Atala, the Red Indian, Chactas, tells his life-story to a young Frenchman, Ren^, of which the central episode is his love for Atala, a young Christian girl, who had saved his life, and for whose sake he was willing to be converted. But Atala, having pro- mised her dying mother to take the veil, refuses to marry him, and, incapable of either breaking or fulfilling her vow, dies by her own hand. In Rene, the Frenchman tells Chactas his story culminating in his dearly-loved sister
24 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
forsaking him to become a nun. Again, in Le Dernier Abencerage, the plot turns on the conversion of the hero. Nevertheless this intentional religious tendency is the least interesting feature in Chateaubriand's novels, which owe their compelling power to their individualism, their brood- ing melancholy, and to the way they reflect the influence of nature and natural scenery on the thoughts and feelings of the principal characters.
Chateaubriand was so profoundly interested in his proud and melancholy self that he portrays
seif-*^rtraiture^his own character and temperament in all his heroes. Rene, his namesake, is the incarnation of that unreasoning and apparently causeless world-weari- ness reinforced by emotionalism which Chateaubriand shared with so many of his generation, and which is admir- ably summed up in the closing words of Atala : " Homme tu n'es qu'un songe rapide, un reve douloureux ; tu n'existes que par le malheur ; tu n'es quelque chose que par la tristesse de ton ame et I'eternelle melancolie de ta pensee." Rene is the spiritual heir of Werther and Jacopo Ort is Faust, the ancestor of ChUde Harold, Manfred, Ol^nnpio, and Rollo, to mention only a few of those mysterious and self-conscious sufferers who were to become such favoiu^ite figures in romantic literatiure.
Rene, alias Chateaubriand, " enchante, tourment^ et Chateaubriand's ^^"^"^^ possede par le demou de son coeur,"
love of Nature finds his ouc consolation in Nature, especially
and his descrip- . . , , . . .
tions of natural m its grander and lonelier aspects, associating scenery ^^ y^nii his wocs and either adoring it for its beauty or cursing it for its indifference. His descriptions of natural scenery are as subjective as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's had been objective, and they have a richness of colour, a glow and a sense of mystery which one would seek in vain in any of his predecessors. Chateaubriand's travels in America, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Spain, undertaken not like Madame de Stael's because he was interested in foreign people and their ideals, but because he was restless and in search of local colour — " Jallais
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 25
chercher des images, voilk tout," he declares — taught him to see and make others see the beauty of Nature in every aspect and in every clime. His natural modem French descriptions havc bccu characterized as "col- ^'^°^^ oured symphonies," and this brings us to his style, which is concrete, imaginative, and rhythmical to such a marked degree that he is rightly regarded as the founder of modern French prose, for since the days when he moulded it for his three great themes — Christianity, Nature, and M. le Vicomle de Chateaubriand — it has never reverted to the dullness and dryness which had characterized it through- out the enlightened eighteenth century.
Three other works which, though by widely different authors, under the Consulate and the Empire herald the Romantic dawn are two novels of disillusionment and despair — Senancour's Oherman (1802), and Adolphe, published 1816, but written several years earlier by the publicist and states- man, Benjamin Constant, and Barante's Tableau de la litteratiire frangaise an xviii^ siecle (1809), a suggestive retrospective survey and interpretation of eighteenth- century literature as the expression of a state of society for which its author has little good to say. Barante was on intimate terms with Madame de Stael and in disfavour with the Government for his frequent visits to Coppet, and his book is the pendant to her De I'Allemagne, but instead of being an enthusiastic glance into the future, it is a resigned but highly condemnatory glance into the past, just as Condorcet's Esquisse d'un Tableau historique dii -progrh de V esprit hnmain (1794) had been " an act of faith and a song of triumph " for the Encyclopedic and all its works.
Before leaving this transitional period it may be well
Ultimate to notc some of the tendencies which either had iiterature^o°uie their sourcc in, or were greatly intensified by, oftSaSeoS? the turn of events during the Revolution and
regime the Napoleonic wars, and which were to find their full expression in the writers who reached maturity between 1820 and 1850.
26 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITER.\TURE
In a greater or lesser degree we have already found, in the works of Madame de Stael and of Chateaubriand, some of the chief factors which go to make up romanticism : an intense individualism in art and life, accompanied by that mysterious moral disease kno\\Ti as the tnal du Steele ; an interest in the local colour of other lands and in medieval national history, to which may now be added a growing taste for the spectacular. All these tendencies were fostered and developed by the Revolution and the Napoleonic regime.
The Revolution did not merely suspend salon life for some ten years, it killed the spirit for which the salons had stood, and though they were re-opened later and continued to flourish throughout the nineteenth century, their influence was henceforth of a very limited kind, and les gens die monde generally and society women in particular no longer fixed the standard of taste in literature. In fact the very idea of goiit, which since the days of Boileau had been the great literary pre- occupation in France, was lost sight of, and this, coupled with the fact that the reading-public was becoming larger, more scattered, and less organized, left the writer free, for good or for ill, to follow the lines dictated to him by his own individual tastes or personal idiosyncracies. And his personal tastes were less and less likely to be classical, for the Revolution which closed the salons also disorganized the classical system of education, and even when in a modified form it was resumed, it had in an ever-increasing degree to make room for science, mathematics, and tech- nical subjects, with the result that before long neither writers nor readers had the necessary background to become producers or consumers of classical literature. IMoreover, the rising generation under the Revolution and the Empire, owing to the general dislocation of life, received a disjointed education, discipline was virtually unknown to them, and no obstacles were placed in the way of the free development of their individuality. Small wonder that they were individualists. Small wonder, too, that the children of
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 27
the Empire were filled with a powerless despair : their
grandfathers had fought in the Revolution,
^' s^c/f" h^d shared its ideals and high hopes, had seen
" France standing on the top of golden hours,"
and had suffered the inevitable disillusionment ; their
fathers were soldiers of Napoleon, and had followed him
from victory to victory until Saint-Helena claimed him as
her own.
" Pendant les guerres de I'Empire, tandis que les maris et les fr^res etaient en Allemagne, les m^res inquiries avaient mis au monde une generation ardente, p41e, nervcuse. . . . Alors s'assit sur un monde en mines une jeunesse soucieuse. Tous ces enfants 6taient des gouttes d'un sang brulant qui avait inonde la terre ; ils 6taient n6s au sein de la guerre, pour la guerre. lis avaient reve pendant quinze ans des neiges de Moscou, et du soleil des Pj-Tamides. ... Ils avaient dans la tete tout un monde ; ils regardaient la terre, le ciel, les rues et les chemins ; tout cela 6tait vide et les cloches de leurs paroisses r^sonnaient seules dans le lointain."
The second chapter of Musset's Confessions d'un enfant du siicle, from which this passage is taken, and Vigny's preface to Servitude et Grandeur Militaire, give an admirable, though excessively generalized, picture of the younger generation's state of mind after the fall of Napoleon. Themselves illustrious victims of the mat du siecle, they were too ready to regard it as a universal malady rather than one which attacked artistic temperaments almost exclusively.
" Toute la maladie du siecle present vient de deux causes ; le peuple qui a passe par '93 et 1814 porte au coeur deux blessures. Tout ce qui itait n'est plus ; tout ce qui sera n'est pas encore. Ne cherchez pas ailleurs le secret de nos maux."i
" All that was, is no more,"' — the Revolution had emanci- pated the individual and it had emancipated thought, but religious faith had been undermined, and so had the belief in the saving power of civilization and progress, which
^ Alfred de Musset : La Confession d'un Enfant du Sidcle, Chap. II.
28 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
had stood in the stead of reHgion during the eighteenth century.
In the meantime war and emigration were bringing Frenchmen into closer contact with other
3- ^°^™^°^^' nations. The influence of the foreign spirit, only superficial and transitory on the soldier, was much deeper and more lasting on the emigres, who gained during their exile a personal knowledge of other I
lands, peoples, and Hteratures, which prepared the way for sympathy with them, while Napoleon's titanic schemes of conquest fired men's imaginations and made the remotest parts of Europe and even India and the East seem nearer than they had ever been before. Though officially Napoleon encouraged pseudo-classicism in art and literature, it should be remembered that in personal action and character he was a very " Prince of Romantics " ; that the books he carried with him on his campaigns included Ossian, Werther, La Nouvelle Heloise, and the old Testament ; that he was fatalistic and superstitious by temperament, and that he had a keen sense for spectacular effect. These traits in the Emperor's personality and taste undoubtedly im- pressed his contemporaries, and confirmed them in their own leanings. The interest in the Middle Ages, manifested in the works of Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand, was
4. Medievalism ^.g^g^^^g^ jj^ ^j^g ^j-^ a,nd in the minor writings
of the Consulate and the Empire, and took the form of the so-called gout troubadour, a false and superficial cult of medievalism and largely a question of costume. At the same time, however, some serious research was being undertaken on the subject of medieval French poetry. In 1810 the Institut de France offered a prize for the best dissertation on the general state of French poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Three years earlier M. J. Chenier had delivered a course of lectures on the Troubadours, and Ra5mouard was already collecting materials for his Choix de poesies des Troubadours (1816- 1821), while Creuze de Lesser, with his adaptations, Les
LITERATURE OF CONSULATE AND EMPIRE 29
Chevaliers de la Table Ronde (1812) and Roland (1814), was spreading a knowledge of the old French epics and romances.
None of these works have any great literary value, but they are important because they furnished the Romantics of a later date with a mine of medieval material.
BOOK II
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
CHAPTER I THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN EUROPE
THE Romantic Revival is a general European move- ment in art, and being, perhaps more than any other movement, vague and complex, defies any attempt at clear and brief definition.
Yet many illuminating and suggestive descriptions of the essential spirit of romanticism have been offered by English and foreign critics. It has been said to stand in the same relation to classicism as the picturesque to the statuesque (Schlegel), as the suggestive to the definite, as the infinite to the finite, as disease to health (Goethe). This last view has been maintained by M. Lasserre, whose book, Le Romantisme frangais, was written to prove that romanticism was nothing more nor less than a " desordre sentimental," and more recently by Irving Babbett who, in Rousseau and Romanticism, regards the philosophy of life inaugurated by Rousseau as radically unsound and as representing a tendency " away from, rather than towards, civilization."
For our present purpose perhaps the best working defini- tion is that which characterizes romanticism as "an endeavour to express that side of life which cannot be explained by pure reason," for it includes Theodore Watts Dunton's idea of a " Renaissance of Wonder," the phrase he applies to " the great revived stirring of the slumbering movement of the soul of man, after a long period of prosaic acceptance in all things, including literature and art," ^ and
^ Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder, p. 237 (Herbert Jenkins, 1916). VOL. II. — 3 33
34 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Symons's definition of the Romantic Movement as the " re- awakening of the imagination, a re-awakening to a sense of beauty and strangeness in natural things, and in all the impulses of the mind and the senses." ^
Since romanticism was a general European movement, it had common characteristics wherever it was found, but these characteristics were modified by the national conditions and traditions prevailing in the various countries in which it flourished. It may therefore be a help to the understanding of the Romantic Revival in France if we take a brief glance into its history in England, Germany, and Italy. As a definite movement romanticism makes its appearance earlier in England and Germany than in France or Italy, but in all countries Rousseau was its real inaugurator.
In England the first signs of the movement are to be found as far back as Thomson's Seasons (1726- ^^^^ '^73'^)' anid the revival of a feeling for nature which they inaugurated is later reflected, together with a mood of melancholy contemplation and in spite of literary and classical conventions, in the poems of Gray and Collins. The English Romantic dawn, however, is usually dated from the publication of Percy's Reliques in 1765, which had been preceded by a few years by Macpherson's Ossian. Both these books, with their tragic atmosphere, their sense of the mysterious and the supernatural, and their idealization of popular tradition had a profound influence not only in England, but the Reliques also in Germany and Ossian all over Europe. The appearance of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), with the successive prefaces and appendices in which Wordsworth framed the collection, gave the new movement a programme ; nevertheless, the Romantic Revival in England never became a definite school as it did for a time at least on the Continent, and being less the result of deliberate planning, produced very few theoretical works, and never allowed its ideals to stiffen into dogmas. As Professor Saintsbury puts it, in England
1 The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, p. 17 (Constable, 1909).
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN EUROPE 35
" the new wine shaped the bottles, when it did not burst them, by its own fermentation." Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Sir Walter Scott are all in varying senses romantic, yet they differ far more profoundly from each other than do any corresponding group of romantic writers in other countries.
It was in Germany that the first and most thorough- going reaction set in against French classicism and the spirit and aesthetic ideas of eighteenth- century France to which German literature had more than that of any other country been in thrall, since, unlike England, France, or Italy, she lacked a national literary tradition. This reaction is the dominant characteristic of the whole period from Klopstock's first appearance on the literary horizon (1748) to the death of Goethe
(1832).
The Sturm und Drang Movement (1770-1780) is full of romantic elements, but what is generally known as German romanticism set in in. 1798 with the publication by the brothers Schlegel of a literary journal, the Athencemn. The Schlegels, together with Tieck and Novalis, became the leaders of the new movement, and they were all in close relation and sympathy with those apostles of indi- vidualism and mysticism — the philosophers, Fichte and Schelling, and the theologian, Schleiermacher. The first Romantic school (1798-1804), which had its centre at Berlin and Jena, was succeeded by a second group of romantic writers — known as the Heidelberg school (1806-1810) — of which the most important members were Arnim, Brentano, and Gorres, and the brothers Grimm, who lived and wrote, under the spell of the Middle Ages and of popular poetry and folk-lore.
The German romanticists, unlike their English contempor- aries, were rather theorists than men of original genius, and the results of the movement in Germany were scientific rather than purely literary. Of it was born the scientific study of Germanic philology and folk-lore, an intense feeling for medieval art and life with its attendant mysti-
36 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
cism, and a strong national feeling which found active expression in the wars of liberation (1813-1815).
In Italy the Romantic Movement (1816-1825) came late, and at a time when its aims and ideals were becoming clearer. This, together with the fact that the classical tradition was indigenous to the very soil of Italy and hence part of her national inheritance, made the movement there much more ephemeral and much more restricted in every way than it was in England, Germany, or France, or as the Italian critic Flamini puts it — " a return of art to the religious, heroic, and chivalrous ideals of the Middle Ages was spontaneous and national in character among the Germanic peoples, but artificial and foreign to us sons of Rome." The Italian Romantic Revival was directly influenced by Ossian and German poetry, and indi- rectly by Madame de Stael's De I'Allemagne, and later by Scott and Byron. In the main, however, romanticism was in Italy, as in Germany and for much the same reasons, intellectual and political rather than literary, but by shaking up ideas and breaking the tyranny of rules it cleared the field for new developments in literature.
CHAPTER II
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE
c. 1820-1850
THUS romanticism in France, retarded by the Revolu- tion and the Empire, was the result of a long process of preparation. With the fall of Napoleon and the return of the Bourbons came peace and liberty,
GENERAL and the long-pent-up movement found a is-ncs^OF^THE fa-vourable atmosphere in which to develop and
MovmENT flourish. From 1820 onwards the new spirit
IN FRANCE which had first entered literature through the medium of prose (Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint- Pierre, Chateaubriand, and Madame de Stael} chose poetry as its chief means of expression. In his glow- ing account of the school of 1830, Catulle Mendes writes : " De meme que la Revolution fut une espece d'ode, de meme que I'Empire fut une espece d'epopee, notre ode sera une revolution et notre epopee triomphera imperiale- ment." ^ Victor Hugo always maintained, and rightly too, that the literary revolution accomplished between 1820 and 1830 was the counterpart of the political upheaval of 1789. " Le romantisme tant de fois mal defini . . . n'est que le liberalisme en litterature."
Romanticism in France was late in crystallizing into a school, but when it did so it was not only more thorough- going and uncompromising but also more consciously a movement than it ever was elsewhere. Moreover, though
1 Rapport sur le moiivement poStique francais de i86y ci igoo, P- 53 (1903).
37
38 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
it was as full of theories as the corresponding German school, it produced as many masterpieces as the Romantic Revival in England, which is saying a good deal.
The Romantic Movement in France has both a negative and a positive aspect : on the one hand, it is a protest and a revolt against classicism in art and literature ; on the other, it is an endeavour to give expression to a changed attitude towards emotion and imagination.
For two centuries and a half French writers had wor- shipped at the classical shrine ; in no other aspect"a reac-^ couutry cxccpt in Italy, where it was indigenous
"ciaifdsm' to the soil, had the classical tradition such deep roots, and in no other country was the hatchet aimed so fiercely at its roots as in uncompromising France. The Romantics reacted against classicism generally — that is to say, against the seventeenth-century interpretation of ^ the art of antiquity — and more particularly against the dead and formal pseudo-classicism of the Age of Enlightenment. It is as though they made it a point of honour to believe and to do just the opposite of what the classical writers had believed and done : the seventeenth century had drawn its inspiration from antiquity ; the pseudo-classicists of a later age had sought their models in the grand siecle and had thus become imitators at second hand; the Romantics either disdain models altogether and turn for inspiration to the contemporary world, or seek quickening and material in the Middle Ages or in modern foreign literature. Classical art had taken the normal and the representative as its theme ; romantic art takes the abnormal and the exceptional. The classicist believed that hard work and discipline are necessary if the greatest genius is to become an artist, that every literary kind has a prescribed form and certain definite laws which must be obeyed ; that he who possesses it need only allow his temperament to overflow, in order to pro- duce a masterpiece ; the romantic believes that genius knows no effort, and that rules and standards are a hindrance rather than a help, for self-expression, not self- control, is the means to his end, which is a representation
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FR.\NCE 39
of the singular and the characteristic rather than of the universal and the beautiful.
The new elements introduced by Romanticism into
2. Its posi- French literature are nearly all due to the chlng^lui- riot of imagination and feeling which it let 'ude,towards joosc. All great literature is imaginative, and
imagination the great classical age in France has been described as " a time when reason and imagination " (and ^ one might add emotion) " pulled together harmoniously in the service of poetic insight," ^ Unfortunately the genera- tions which succeeded lacked imagination, and emotion had degenerated into sensibility. The romantics were right in thinking that reason and sensibility were a poor substitute for imagination and feeling, but wrong in thinking that imagination and feeling can dispense with reason or good sense, which in literature means a sense of fitness and proportion, and it is this blind spot in their artistic out- look that accounts for some of their worst excesses and most signal defects.
" Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas," said Pascal, but Pascal had not broken with tradition. Christian or otherwise ; the Romantics had, and at such a moment " to deny your head in favour of your heart " is a somewhat dangerous experiment. The French Romantics subscribed most heartily to Goethe's dictum " Gefiihl ist alles," and would have amended the Cartesian " Je pense done je suis " into " Je sens done je suis."
Nevertheless, the change of attitude towards feeling and -^ imagination which they preached and practised was salutary at the time, and resulted in an outburst of lyrical poetry such as France had never seen before. Since no standard of taste bade the romantic poet suppress or ignore his most intimate feelings, but on the contrary a revelation of them was the best means of proclaiming his uniqueness ; since he was thrown back upon himself for inspiration, and since, as we have seen, his early environment and training had made him eminently an individualist, it is not surprising
1 Irving Babbett : Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, igig)-
40 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
that the keynote of romantic literature is its intense sub- jectivity. " Le moi est haissable," said and thought Pascal and the whole classical school after him ; not so the romantic poet, who not only beholds everything in the mirror of his own individuality, but is obsessed with himself and is firmly convinced that he is equally interesting to others. The auto- biographical note is ever present in the works of the period, and, not content with this, most of the Romantics wrote their life-story as well, the very titles of which are illuminating : Rousseau's Confessions, and Chateaubriand's Memoires d'Outre-tombe are followed by Musset's Confessions d'un enfant du sikle, Vigny's Journal d'un poete, and Lamartine's Confidences and Nouvelles Confidences, to name only a few of the more important of these autobiographies.
These specialists in their own sensations and emotional adventures found their greatest solace in lonely communing with wild nature, which either soothed or intensified their woes. Indeed, to them it little mattered which, for the mat du Steele, to which they were all more or less victims, though perfectly sincere, was not without its luxury.
The awe felt in the presence cf nature is closely connected with several other characteristics of romantic literature which may be most conveniently summed up by Watts Dunton's phrase " the Renascence of Wonder." The feeling of wonder not only gives the romantic poet himself great emotional satisfaction, but he loves to excite it in others. This partly at least explains his love of the marvellous, the unknown and the infinite, and — to use Pater's phrase — his " addition of strangeness to beauty." In Shakespeare's words he would recommend —
" A wild dedication of yourselves To unpath'd waters, undream 'd shores."
— Winter's Tale, IV, 4,
It is also in part the magic lent by distance which helps to account for the spell cast over the writers of the Romantic Revival by the Middle Ages, to which they were already drawn by reason of its picturesque qualities, its supposed
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE 41
freedom from convention, and its adventurous and romantic legends.
Complete freedom in art, subjectivity, melancholy, an intense love of nature, an attitude of wonder, and a sensitive- ness to all that is picturesque and to the lure of the Middle Ages, these then are in varying degrees in different writers the chief elements in French Romanticism.
The Romantic Revival in France was greatly stimulated
FOREIGN by the example of foreign literature which on" FRENc^ deeply impressed critics and theorists, but which
^°ciSM^^" w^^ probably more admired than read by the
(1813-1830) general public, quite content to accept the interpretation of it given by their critical betters.
After the impression made by English thought and political theories during the first half of the
infIubnce eighteenth century, had followed the vogue of Richardson's novels which greatly influenced Rousseau and were partly at least responsible for the cult of sensibility which characterized that period. Later came translations of Young's Night Thoughts (1769), and Ossian, which, translated first by Letourneur (1777) and re-translated and abridged by Baour Lormian in 1801, remained in high favour throughout the Romantic period, and had a great influence on Lamartine. But the chief literary idols of the day were Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott. Shake- speare was read in Letourneur's translation, revised by Guizot in 1821, and his influence was strong on all the French romantic dramatists, though they missed one of the chief features of his genius, his imaginative insight, and sought chiefly in his work a confirmation and justification of their own theories. The influence of Byron was much more direct : his poems, translated by Pichot (1819-1822), fired the imaginations of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Vigny, and Musset, and increased their desire to sing of nature, solitude, liberty, the East, and Napoleon ; while his own melancholy personality seen through that of his heroes, Conrad the Corsair, Manfred, Lara, etc., together with his romantic and tragic death at Missolonghi, was largely responsible for
42 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
the psychology of the romantic hero "rhomme fatal," " le beau tenebreux." While Byron influenced the thought, Walter Scott put his mark on the form of French literature. His chief works were translated between 1814 and 1821, and as we shall see later the historical novel in France at this period proceeds directly from him.
Sainte-Beuve, the great apostle of national tradition during the Romantic Revival, declares categoric-
iNFLUEN^E ^lly that the movement in France owed nothing essential to Germany, but this is only true if the German inspiration of Madame de Stael's De VAllemagne be left out of account, and if a taste for medievalism and for the fantastic and the supernatural be regarded as unessential features of French Romanticism. The school of 1820 may have read few German books, but those they read they read thoroughly and admired exceedingly : Goethe's ballads, for instance, Werther and Faust, to which Texte traces the growing tendency towards philosophical poetry ; Hoff- mann's Fantastic Tales, and Schiller's plays. Theophile Gautier characterizes Schiller as " Shakespeare corrige et refroidi," and it is significant that, even when in the throes of a Romantic Revival, a Frenchman should have had a more real admiration for him than for the great Englishman.
It was thus mainly in the literatures of the North that the French Romantics sought inspiration, vet
Influence of. ..,.,-^ •'
SOUTHERN their cosmopolitan curiosity did not stop there, but was extended to Italy, Spain, and the East. In these countries of the sun they sought the warmth, the colour, and the vividness which the misty North, for all its other charms, could not give them. Sismondi's Littera- ture du Midi de I'Europe, first published in 1813 and re- edited and enlarged in 1824 and 1829, did much the same work for southern as De I'Allemagne had done for northern
literature. Stendhal, in his novels and in his^ ^^ impressions of travel, revealed Italian passion and energy; others admired Italy's patriotism and sym- pathized with the spirit of the Risorgimcnto. Guinguene, by his Histoire Litteraire d'ltalie (1811), had awakened an
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE 43
interest in the early Italian poets, and especially in Dante, whose Divina Commedia, translated by Arnaud de Montor (1811-1813), was admired by all the Romantics. Petrarch influenced Lamartine, while Manzoni, himself a disciple of Scott, reinforced the latter's influence in France, and traces of the pessimistic Leopardi are to be found in Vigny's poems.
Spain and the East cast their glamour on the Romantics,
though the knowledge they had of them was but
^P^'g^gj'^^® superficial. Chivalrous and heroic Spain, the
Spain of the Moors, influenced Victor Hugo,
while all the writers of his generation were enthusiasts for
the Greek War of Independence, and found in the ruins
and modern heroes of Greece an inexhaustible source of
lyrical themes. Following in the wake of Chateaubriand,
nearly all the Romantics drew inspiration from one of the
great monuments of ancient Eastern literature — the Bible,
and more particularly the Old Testament.
It is to these foreign influences, which are much richer and more complex than can be indicated in a brief survey, that the French Romantics owe their passion for that " local colour " which came to be an essential element in their conception of beauty.
The victory of the Romantic'doctrines was not won witli- THE CONTRO- *^^* ^ Struggle, and was not complete until the tri- BETWEEN u^^phof Hernaniin 1830. The controversy may CLASSICS AND be said to have begun in the year 1813, which saw the publication of Madame de Stael's De I'Allemagne, Sismondi' s Litte'raiure du Midi de I' Europe, and Madame Necker de Saussure's translation of Schlegel's Coiirs de litterature dramatiqiie, three books which seriously imper- illed the classical doctrine, for did not Schlegelsay (^1^3-^1820) in so many words that it was time to overthrow " la pretention qu'ont les Frangais de s'eriger en legislateurs universels du bon gout," and did not Madame de Stael declare that " ce que la France pouvait avoir de varie et d'original lui avait €te ote par la discipline du bon
44 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
ton " ? As for Sismondi, with his glowing descriptions of the emotional and imaginative poetry of the South, was he not teaching admiration for something which was far removed from the classical tradition ? In nine successive articles of the Journal des Debats for 1814, the classical journalist, Dussault, endeavoured to refute the audacious views they expressed, remarking in one of them : " Voila la guerre civile decidement allumee dans tous les etats d'Apollon. Les deux parties sont en presence." Two years later appeared Saint-Chaman's Anti-Romantiqiie, a similar attack on the theories of Madame de Stael, Sismondi, and Schlegel.
The epithet " romantique," applied in France for the first time to literature by Madame de Stael, had come to stay. Hitherto the word had been used as a synonym of fantastic, or partaking of the nature of romance. Rousseau and others had also used it as an epithet for wild scenery. In the late eighteenth century it began to be applied in Germany to things medieval as opposed to classical. Madame de Stael borrowed the term " romantique " from the Germans in this sense, and used it in rather a confused way to denote northern as opposed to southern literature, subjective as opposed to objective \\Titing, and Christian and modern as opposed to ancient and pagan tradition and inspiration. To the end the word retained a very vague connotation, and Musset, the enfant terrible of the French Romantic Movement, in the first of his Lettres de Depuis d Cotonet (1833), made fun of the various meanings which since 1820 had been attached to the term.
The date 1820 is an important one in the annals of the Romantic school. In that year appeared
"oFTHK^^^ Lamartine's Premieres Meditations, which ^(i^^^ilzl) sounded the first onset of a new poetic move- ment, for in these poems the eternal themes of Love, Nature, and Death are treated in a sincere and entirely personal manner. So far the movement had scarcely been conscious of itself, but the press-warfare which was waged between 1820 and 1830 between Classics and Romantics helped the latter to clear up their ideas and aspirations.
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE 45
In 1819 the eighteen-year-old Victor Hugo had, with the help of his eldest brother Abel, founded the weekly Con- servateur Littcraire, the literary counterpart of Chateau- briand's political Conservateur, which had been started a little earlier for the propagation of ultra-royalist ideas. Nearly all the articles in Victor Hugo's review came from his own pen, and though in many ways he shows himself to be as conservative in literary taste as he then was in politics, he wrote an enthusiastic article on Ivanhoe, another on Les Premieres Meditations, and a third on Chenier's poems (published 1819), in which he declares that Chenier is a Romantic among the Classics and Lamartine a Classic among the Romantics. Le Conservateur Litteraire died a natural death in 1821, and the following year appeared Victor Hugo's first volume of verse under the title Odes et ■poesies diverses and Alfred de Vigny's Poemes (published anonymously), followed in 1823 by Lamartine 's Nouvelles Meditations, Victor Hugo's Han d'Islande, and Vigny's Eloa. In the intervening year, 1822, Stendhal issued the first manifesto of the Romantic school, Racine et Shakespeare, an attack on literary imitation and a declara- tion that since literature is essentially the expression of society, nineteenth-century poetry can no longer seek its inspiration in antiquity or in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' interpretation of it. At this point the young poets began to group themselves,
and formed about 1823 what is known as the '^^c^^^cTe^'^ Premier Cenacle, which met every Sunday at
the house of Charles Nodier, and later, when he had been appointed librarian of the Arsenal, at his official residence. This first group comprised, besides Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Emile and Antony Deschamps, men of an older generation like Giraud, Soumet, and Chene- doUe, who, though they themselves wrote in the classical style, were in sympathy with the new movement. The great link between the members of this group was that they were all fervent Royalists and Catholics, or, as they would have said themselves, upholders of the throne and of the
46 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
altar. In July, 1823, they founded a monthly review La Muse frangaise to take the place of the Conservateur Litter aire. This new journal was in no wise revolutionary in its views, but rather adopted a conciliatory attitude. Though it fulminated against the pseudo-classicism of the eighteenth century, and against its lack of emotion and imagination, and though it showed great sympathy for foreign literature. La Muse frangaise laid no disrespectful hand on the literature of the great classical age. The review only lived a year, but in spite of a certain timidity it may be regarded as the forcing house of the Romantic school. Early in 1824 two articles — one by Giraud entitled Nos Doctrines, and another by Emile Deschamps, La Guerre en Temps de Paix — cleared up the position by affirming that while the Classicists are prosaic and put all their trust in reason and memory, the Romantics are fiUed with the poetic spirit and put all their faith in the heart.
The compromising spirit shown by the Cenacle de 1 'Ar- senal and its organ La Muse frangaise did not in the least conciliate the orthodox, who in their official organs. La Minerve frangaise (1818-1820), La Minerve Litteraire (1820-1822), La Gazette de France, La Quotidienne, and Les Debats, persisted in using the word "romantique" as a synonym of " barbare " and " frendtique."
In 1824, at a meeting of the Academic frangaise, Louis Auger read a Discours contre le romantisme. The same year the Academy of Rouen published a collection of discourses against Romanticism, with a preface which contains the following remark : " L'annee 1824 fera epoque dans notre litterature par les jugements severes qui ont ete portes contre le romantisme."
In the early days the young Romantics were staunch
lovers of their king, their coimtry, and their
^'^of°the'^^^ religion, while the champions of classicism
- l°824-]r8^3"'o7 ^^^^ ^^^ *^® most part opposers of the throne
and the altar. In an article in the Quotidienne
(March 19, 1823) Nodier maintains that this is not an
inconsistency on the part of his friends, the Romantics.
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE 47
" Quant aux royalistes roraantiques, je les trouve fort consequents, parce que je suppose qu'ils aimentla liberte qui se concilie fort bien avec un gouvernement monarchique appuye sur les interets nation- aux, et qui ne se concilie peut-etre qu'avec lui."
On the other hand, he declares that he cannot understand how Liberals in politics can be conservative in literary matters. The reason, however, is not far to seek. The Liberals of the early years of the Restoration were nearly all bom under Louis XV and Louis XVI, and having been brought up on Delille's poetry and Voltaire's tragedies, they may be said to have had pseudo-classicism in their very veins. Intellectually, they still belonged to the rationalistic eighteenth century, which had prepared the way for the Revolution, and they seem to have kept a superstitious respect for that little fragment of the old order which had survived the great upheaval of 1789, namely, descriptive poetry and classical tragedy. In his Journal d'un Poete Alfred de Vigny tells us that when in i8ig he asked Benjamin Constant why it was that the Liberals disliked the new trend in literature the latter replied :
" que c'etait affaire de bonne compagnie, que c'6tait crainte de paraitre vouloir briser toutes les chain es, qu'on voulait conserver les plus leg^res, celle des regies UUdraires."
Between 1824 and 1830, however, the Liberals came to see that they could not logically champion political and social freedom without admitting liberty in art also, and this explains the pro-Romantic tendency at this period of their official organ, Le Globe (founded 1793), of which Sainte- Beuve became one of the chief literary critics. At the same time, one of the more important Conservative papers, La Quotidienne, after a period of hostility and hesitation, became between 1824-1829 a staunch supporter of the Romantics, and more particularly of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, whose odes on the death of Louis XVIII and on the solemn coronation of Charles X at Rheims had paid such a flaming tribute to royalism and to all that it stood for.
48 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Only a few months elapsed, however, before the individual Romantics themselves were filled with indignation at the fall of Chateaubriand, with disgust at the ultra-royalism and tyranny of Charles X, and with enthusiasm for the Greek War of Independence, and by 1830 literary and political liberalism had permanently joined hands.
In the meantime the Romantics were becoming more definitely revolutionary, both in the theory and the practice of their art. In 1826 Victor Hugo produced Bug Jargal and Les Odes et Ballades with a preface claiming complete liberty for the poet ; and the same year Vigny published his Poemes Antiques et Modernes and his historical romance Cniq-Mars.
In 1827 followed the famous Preface de Cromicell, in which Victor Hugo summarized and foimulated all the Cromweu\f%27) Tomautic idcas and aspirations which had been in the air since the beginning of the century with the addition of his new theory of the grotesque, the use of which he advocates on the grounds that " Ton a besoin de se reposer de tout, meme du beau."
During the same year Sainte-Beuve was contributing to the Globe a series of articles on French literature of the six- teenth century, in which he sets out to prove that the new school is not really revolutionary, but is merely reverting to an older French tradition. These articles, revised and enlarged, appeared in book-form in 1828 under the title Tableau historique et critique de la poesie frangaise au xvi* Steele, and their insistence on the necessity of a complete reform of the language and metre of poetry was not lost upon his friends, nor was his curious attempt to seek an ancestor for the romantic school of poetry in Andrd Chenier (cf. Preface to his Poesies de Josephe Delorme, 1829). In his Etudes frangaises et etrangeres (1828) Emile Deschamps had, like Sainte-Beuve, laid stress on the importance of technique, and recommended for this purpose a study of Chdnier's work. Henceforward the Romantics, led by Victor Hugo, who had now become the recognized leader of the new school, paid increasing attention to metrical effect and to the enrichment of their vocabulary.
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE 49
During the eighteenth century a distinction had grown up between words which were " noble " and words which were " bas." Since only the former were admitted in poetry, and since, as Nisard puts it, the eighteenth century had confused nobility of language with the language of the nobility, the French poetic vocabulary had steadily diminished since the grand siecle. Given their views, it was natural that the Romantics should have abandoned this distinction, and that they should have loved words chiefly for their power of suggesting strangeness, contrast, vastness, and colour.
These artistic and technical questions were the main subject of discussion at the reunions of the
""^cf^nacie"^ Sccoud Cenaclc, which met at Victor Hugo's house in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and which was far more uncompromisingly romantic than the earlier one had been. Here literary men like Nodier, Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Musset, and Gerard de Nerval, met and talked with artists and sculptors such as Eugene Delacroix, David d'Angers, Louis Boulanger, etc., who helped to teach them the value of form and colour, to which Victor Hugo was by nature so fully alive, witness his Orie?itales published in 1829. The preface to this col- lection of poems contains a further declaration of Romantic principle, namely : " L'ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mau- vais ? Voilk tout le domaine de la critique," and " Tout a droit de cite en po&ie."
On January 25, 1830, when the theatre was packed with an enthusiastic Bohemian audience, came the glorious first night of Herna7ii, and the Romantic battle was to all intents and purposes won.
The Revolution of July dispersed the members of the
HISTORY Cenacle. " La Revolution de 1830," remarks
OF THE Sainte-Beuve, " a rompu brusquement le concert
ROMANTIC , . ,, , TT r 1 r • T-,
MOVEMENT poetique. ^ Henceforward the various Roman- tic writers went their several ways, and developed on their own lines, as indeed, according to their common aesthetic doctrine, it was right that they should do. At
^ Portraits Contemporains, III, p. 331. VOL. II. 4
50 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
the same time a new element introduced itself into their art
Romantic — ^^ increasing preoccupation with the burning
humanitarianism social Questions of the dav. Royalists and
tends to sup- ^ j j
plant romantic Legitimists iu 1820, Liberals in 1830, the Roman- tics, disgusted with the bourgeois regime of Louis Philippe, were Democrats in 1840, and though they still soared in lofty poetic regions far removed from reality, they were increasingly anxious that their poetical dreams V should be a guiding force among the people at large. This new view of their art was doubtless encouraged, if not actually suggested, by the Saint-Simonians, who, masters of the Globe during the early years of the July monarchy, devoted much space in its pages to entreating the great poets of the age to cease singing of the dead past and of themselves, and to sing instead of and to the people with the object of firing it with a desire for progress. Victor Hugo had always believed that the poet is a seer, a prophet who knows intuitively what others "^misskfn'^ may later prove scientifically. After 1830 he became more and more obsessed by the idea that the poet has a mission — that he should be a leader of men, a "shepherd of the people," and this idea was shared by most of his former associates. Filled with this missionary spirit, the Romantics felt that the best way to have an influence over the people was to speak' to it of its interests, its hopes, and its future. Already in 1834 Lamartine writes in his Destinies de la Poesie :
" C'est elle (la poesie) qui plane sur la soci6t6 et qui la juge, et qui, montrant a I'laomme la vulgarity de son ceuvre, I'appelle sans cesse en avant, en lui montrant du doigt des utop6es, des r^publiques imaginaires, des cit6s de Dieu, et lui souffle au cceur le courage de les atteindre."
In France the modern social problem, born of changing T. ,,, . economic conditions, and of the rise of modern
Ine Utopian '
schemes of the industry with its attendant capitalism, was a
Sociahsts find . . i-ni- rri
an echo in bummg qucstion from the Revolution 01 July
to the Revolution of '48. One can understand,
therefore, that under Louis Philippe, Utopian schemes for
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE 51
the amelioration of the lot of the working classes should have been the order of the day. These ideas found an echo in Romantic poetry (Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny) and in the Romantic novel (Victor Hugo, George Sand), mainly in the form of a feeling of love and pity for the poor and disinherited of the earth, and of a desire to lend them a helping hand. Thus Michelet became the historian of the masses, Victor Hugo their bard, Lamartine their orator and statesman, and Lamennais their prophet. With the excep- tion of George Sand, Michelet, and Lamennais, however, sympathy with the socialistic as opposed to the democratic movement remained purely imaginative and sentimental, and never got beyond a kind of visionary philanthropy. During this later period the Romantics were convinced „ ,. , . , not only that they had a mission, but that France
Belief in the i r i i , r i 11
mission of hcrselt had a message to the rest of the world
T^T*^ nop
which she would redeem through her Gospel of the " Rights of Man." Thus was Romantic individualism transformed into Romantic humanitarianism. In 1834 Lamartine, who had always held himself some- Most of the what aloof, became a member of the Chamber of great RomanticsDeputies, and bcforc long renounced poetry
renounce the . . . . . .. . . .
ideals of their entirely m favour of politics. At about the same ^°" date, Alfred de Musset, the only romantic with
a sense of humour, broke definitely with the ideals of his youth, and almost ceased to write poetry at all. Alfred de Vigny, the most reserved of the romantics, who had quarrelled with Victor Hugo even before the Cenacle was broken up, retired more and more into his " tower of ivory," and after 1837 published very little. In 1840 Sainte-Beuve, who had long ago shed his romantic skin, set to work on his monumental His to ire de Port-Royal, and in some of his later work went so far as to disown his former friends.
As for Victor Hugo — who is, in his own person, the synthe- sis of the whole movement, and whose literary productions only ceased with his death in 1885 — for a period of some ten years (1841-1852) literature became with him a form of
52 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
politics, and when in exile he took up his pen once more in the old manner, he seemed to the younger generation a great and admirable siuvivor of an age that was gone.
Thus by about 1840 the decline of the Romantic school as such had definitely set in, and the time was ripe for new developments in literature.
CHAPTER III
RELIGIOUS, POLITICAL, AND PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
THE Romantics, more especially after 1830, fondly imagined that they were leaders in the domain of ideas, but in reality they only echoed and helped to popularize the theories of a group of thinkers whose works, unlike those of their eighteenth-centiu^y predecessors, had, with a few notable exceptions, small literary merit. These post-revolutionary thinkers all react in one way or another against the irreligious and materialistic tendencies of the Age of Enlightenment.
The religious reaction was inaugurated by Chateaubriand,
, and by the Conservative Catholics, De Maistre
RELIGIOUS and Bonald, determined upholders of the throne
REACTION
and the altar, and it was continued by the Democratic Catholics, Lamennais and Lacordaire, who were eager to prove that the essential spirit of Democracy was in harmony with the teaching of the gospels. Joseph de Maistre (1754-182 1), the apostle of authority in Church and State, and as firm a believer as Maistre Bossuet in the shaping action of Divine Provi- dence on all human affairs, gave expression to his ideas in a number of books, three of which are justly famous : the Considerations sur la France (1796), Dn Pape (1819), and Lcs Soirees de Saint-Petershourg (1821). All these works might fitly bear the collective title which he added as a subtitle to the last : Enireiiens sur le gouverne- ment temporal de la Providence.
53
54 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
In De Maistre's view not only can there be no stable society without religion and no religion without a Church, but the Church of Rome is the only true one, and its virtue depends on an infallible Pope. After the Revolution, which he regarded as a punishment meted out to France by God for her impiety during the eighteenth century, De Maistre was convinced that society needed complete reorganization, but on old not on new lines, for the French absolute monarchy was of di\'ine institution, and man has not the power either to create or improve the work of God.
Much the same thesis was developed by Louis-Gabriel Ambrose de Bonald (1754-1840), but in a style
(i754-°mo) entirely lacking the vigour and colour which
characterizes the work of De Maistre, and gives
the latter an important place among French prose-writers.
With the avowed object of com.bating the doctrines set forth in the Esprit des Lois and the Conirat Social, and in the name of Catholic traditions, Bonald takes up the cudgels against the political ideals of the eighteenth century and against the spirit which made the Revolution possible. In his Thcorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la societe civile (1796), in La Legislation primitive consideree dans les aerniers temps par les seules lumieresde la raison (1802), and in his Recherches philosopkiques sur les premiers objets de nos connaissances morales (1818), he sets out to prove that society can only find salvation by a return to God and the King. God, the sovereign of the world, delegates His power in the family to the father, in the State to the King — and these His representatives have the same absolute rights within their respective spheres as God has over the world. As for individual women, children or subjects, they have many duties but no rights. It was hardly possible to be more reactionary, but Bonald has some shrewd remarks on the evils of democracy, and clearly sees the threat of individual- ism at a time when the Romantic school was still a thing of the future.
There is nothing very original in the views of either De Maistre or Bonald, but their determined effort to prove that
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 55
the work of the Revolution had been purely negative and destructive and that contemporary society was hence in need of complete re-organization made a deep impression on the minds of men like Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and many others, and became the starting-point of their political philosophy. On the other hand, the form this re-organiza- tion was to take became a variable quantity, and in no case coincided with the recommendations of De Maistre and Bonald.
While these two men set themselves to lead modern society forcibly back to the old religion, three others endeavoured in a greater and a lesser degree to adapt the old religion to the new society.
Pierre-Simon Ballanche (1776-1847), like De Maistre and Bonald, belonged to the theocratic school, that
(^7^1847) ^^ ^^ ^^y> ^^ ^^^ ^^ upholder of the principle of authority and set revelation above individual reason. At the same time in a somewhat visionary fashion he tried to reconcile Catholicism with the modern idea of progress, notably in his Essai sur les institutions sociales dans leur rapport avec les idees nouvelles (1818) and in his unfin- ished Essais de Palingenesie Sociale (1827). Ballanche 's speculative reconstruction of society is deeply imbued w'ih mysticism, and he expounds it with the help of much obscure symbolism, with the result that his ideas were not sufficiently intelligible to have much influence.
Far otherwise was it with Felicite-Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), an apostle of democratic and
(i7^-°854) humanitarian Christianity, and one of the chief figures in the religious revival of the time. Ordained priest at the age of thirty-four, Lamennais first made his name with his Essai sur V indifference en maticre de religion (1817-1823), the first volume of which caused quite as great a sensation as the Genie du Christianisme . In this work he constitutes himself the champion of the Catholic Church, and traces indifference in religious matters to a lack of interest in the common weal brought about by excessive individualism. A number of fervent young Catholics,
56 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
among them ]\Iontalembert, Lacordaire, and Maurice de Guerin, became Lamennais' disciples, and in collaboration with them he founded, in 1830, a paper entitled L'Avenir, which, as its motto, " Dieu et Liberte," suggested, was to defend and propagate the doctrine that Catholicism and liberty could and should be reconciled, and to advocate the separation of religion from politics.
The tone of this paper was highly romantic. Its pages rang with youthful and noble enthusiasms expressed in high- sounding phrases, and its doctrines were of the vaguest. The Pope speedily condemned them, and Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert in 1831 made a journey to Rome to ask the papal pardon and blessing. They came empty away, and were forced to suspend the publication of L'Avenir. Shortly afterwards Lamennais broke with orthodox Roman Catholicism, and Montalembert and Lacor- daire severed their connection with Lamennais. The
publication of the Paroles d'un Croyant (1834) cmait {i8u) marks his definite rupture with the Church.
Lamennais chose this title for his passionate and eloquent manifesto of Christian socialism to show that his apostasy was not the result of unbelief but of a new convic- tion. The biblical and apocalyptic style of this book and some of the ideas which it contains were directly inspired by Adam Mickiewicz's Book of the Polish Pilgrim (1832), which Montalembert had translated into French. In the name of the Christian religion Lamennais defends the French Revolution, and the sovereignty of the people, and denounces all those who had brought about the fall of Poland and the serfdom of Italy, the monarchs of Europe, the Pope, and the priesthood, reserving no less scathing words of condem- nation for the self-interested bourgeois government of France. Within a few years the book ran into some hun- dred editions, was translated into nearly all the European languages, and contributed greatly to the humanitarian movement, which resulted in the Revolution of 1848. In 1837 followed Le Livre du Peuple, inspired by the same ideas. For a pamphlet entitled Le pays et le goiivernement
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 57
(1840) he was condemned to a year's imprisonment at Sainte-Pelagie, where he composed Une voix de prison, Du passe et de I'avenir du peuple and De I'Esclavage moderne — in which he once more makes a passionate plea for a spiritualized democracy. The Esquisse d'une philosophie (1841-1846) was Lamennais' last important work. After the Revolution of 1848 this apostle of the people became one of their representatives in the National Assembly, where he sat, until the coup d'etat of 1851 forced him to retire from political life.
Lamennais had great poetic gifts, and his biblical and rhythmical prose frequently rises from its general level of monotonous eloquence to flights of pure poetry, instinct with tenderness, mystery, or even terror (cf. Paroles d'un Croyant, vii, ix, xiii, xviii, xxiii, xxv, XLi).
It is worthy of remark that Lamennais was the channel through which the current of democratic and humanitarian ideas first reached Victor Hugo. Though twenty years his junior, Hugo had, as a very young man, entered into intimate relations with Lamennais, to whom he dedicated some of his earliest odes, and who in 1822 became his confessor. Unlike most of Hugo's friendships, this with Lamennais remained unbroken.
The last important figure in the religious revival of the first half of the nineteenth century was the (1802-1861) preacher, Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861), who represented a sentimental tendency rather than a school of thought. Originally trained for the Bar, Lacor- daire for a time had thought of becoming an actor, but the perusal of Lamennais' passionate vindication of religious belief, L'Essai sur l' Indifference, made a deep impression on his naturally ardent and believing mind, and in 1823 he entered the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice as a theological student. After his ordination he collaborated with Lamen- nais in the editorship of L'Avenir, for which he wrote a num- ber of articles, but after the papal condemnation he broke with his master, and remained an orthodox Catholic to the end of his days. From 1834 to 1851 he preached numerous
58 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
courses of sermons or Christian conferences, as he preferred to call them, first at the College Stanislas, and then at Notre- Dame, These courses, which were neither theological nor dogmatic, and which traced the gradual evolution of a soul (his own) from sincere doubt to unquestioning belief, gave a large place to all the religious, political, and social move- ments and interests of the day, and without outstepping the limits laid down by orthodoxy, advocated Christian demo- cracy and humanitarianism. Lacordaire's conferences at- tracted large audiences by reason of both their content and their form, which varied from the familiar discourse to the highest flights of romantic Ijricism. Already in 1841 Lacordaire had, with the permission of the Pope, re-estab- lished in France the Dominicans as a teaching order, and in 1850 he became their Provincial in his own country. In 1854, after delivering a course of Conferences at Toulouse, he became head master of the College de Soreze (Tarn), and devoted the rest of his life to the education and direc- tion of the boys under his charge.
A pamphleteer, who under the Restoration took up a n POLITICAL P'^s^^^'^^ diametrically opposed both to that of De WRITERS ANDMaistre and Bonald and to that of Lamennais,
SOCIOLOGISTS . . . '
was Paul-Loms Courier, who was wont to sign his pamphlets " Paul-Louis vigneron de la Channoniere."
Paul-Louis Courier (1772-1825) is an isolated figure , „ , whose philosophical and political sympathies are
1. Paul-Loui3 .,, -tT • 1,: 4.U ^ J t T4.
Courier With the eighteenth century, and whose literary
tastes are purely classical. This hater of author- ity and discipline between 1798 and 1809 without any military vocation served in various campaigns of the revolutionary wars. Though by temperament an indif- ferentist in politics and religion, he made his name as a bitter pamphleteer against Church and State, because any personal grievance or discomfort at once led him to protest on general principles. Thus his Petition aux deux Chambres (1816) was inspired by the royalist reaction in Touraine, where he held estates, and by the resulting petty tyranny which was making life there very unpleasant. His Lettre d
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 59
M.M. de I'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Leitres, a literary pamphlet, was penned in revenge for not having been elected to that body. The Simple Discours (1821), his masterpiece which earned him two months' imprison- ment, was written to oppose the proposal that the estate of Chambord should be purchased for the Duke of Bordeaux, on the following grounds :
" Son metier, c'est de regner un jour, s'il plait a Dieu, et un ch&teau de plus ne I'aidera de rien. Nous allons nous gener et augmenter nos dettes, remettre ci d'autres temps nos depenses pressees, pour lui donner une chose dont il n'a pas besoin, qui ne lui pent servir et servirait k d'autres. Ce qu'il lui faut pour regner, ce ne sont pas des chateaux, c'est notre affection ; car il n'est sans cela couronne qui ne pese. Voil5, le bien dont il a besoin et qu'il ne peut avoir en meme temps que notre argent."
This is a typical example of Courier's style, clear, incisive, and restrained, a style which still makes his works delightful reading, ephemeral and often petty in content though they be. He was a satirist and a stylist rather than a thinker. He may be read with the greatest pleasure and profit in the Simple Discours, Le Pamphlet des Pamphlets (1824), and, above all, in the delightful Leitres ecrites de France et d' Italic (1787-1812), which give their author a high place among the letter-writers of France.
Courier was a Greek scholar of no mean order, and he was an intense lover of the French classics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He knew Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, and Moliere by heart, and his letters are full of allusions to and quotations from their work. He translated the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus into archaic French, and began a similar translation of Herodotus, but he did not live to carry out the task. On April 10, 1825, Courier was found shot, in a wood close to his house. Unfortunately, there had been too great a discrepancy between the liberal theories expressed in his public manifestos and his tyranni- cal practice in private life, and he was murdered, on his own estate, by peasants who had suffered at his hands.
Courier hated Bonapartes, Bourbons, and the Church with
6o A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
an equal hatred. He had no constructive political ideas beyond a somewhat vague ideal of democratic control, by means of which —
" la nation enfin ferait marcher le gouvernement, comme un cocher qu'on paie, et qui doit nous mener, non ou il veut ni comme il veut, mais ou nous pr6tendons aller, et par le chemin qui nous convient." — Leitres au Redacteur du Censeur, IX.
Courier has no place in the history of French thought, political or philosophical, but he has a definite place in French literature because of his style.
We now come to a group of Utopian sociologists whose works belong rather to the early history of
socio/^s^te socialism and political economy than to literary history. They must be briefly mentioned here, however, because after 1830 they gave a new turn to Romanticism, and provided it with an ethical aim hitherto lacking, and because they tried to delineate the future direction of progress.
The example of the Revolution and of the Napoleonic Empire led to a very general belief that it was no difficult matter to sweep away an existing order of society and to build it anew on a better plan. Most political thinkers held that the critical and negative work of eighteenth-century philosophers having brought about the necessary destruction of the ancien regime, it was essential for the nineteenth century to accomplish a reorganization of society on entirely new lines. Some thought that the Revolution itself had furnished all the necessary principles upon which to work, but as time went on many more thought otherwise, and not without reason, for within a short space of years the Republic proclaimed by the revolutionary leaders had given way to the Empire and the Empire to the Restoration Monarchy, which, in its turn, was overthrown by the July Revolution of 1830. Such rapid changes of regime could not fail to kill any confidence there may have been in the stability of the existing social order, and as all this was happening at a time when artists and thinkers alike were
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 6i
filled with an exalted idealism, it is not surprising that political and social theorists should have felt themselves called upon not only to provide plans for the social re- organization of France if not of the world, but also to preach the moral and political gospel of a new age.
These Utopian schemes for the amelioration of society left their traces on literature proper. Enthusiasm for humanitarian ideas marks not only the work of the second generation of romantic WTiters like George Sand and Miche- let, but also the later work of Hugo and Lamartine,
The most important and influential builders of social Utopias during this period were S aint- S imon, Four ier, and Pierre JLero ux, who aimed at securing human happiness, not like De Maistre, Lamennais, or Lacordaire, by the hope of reward in the next world, but by a more equitable and ideal organization of society here and now.
Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), a descendant of the author of the Memoires, began his career by
Henri de . ° . •'
Saint-Simon servmg as a voluntecer under Washmgton m the 17 o-i 25 ^jT|^gj.j(,g^j^ -^YsLT of Independence, continued it as a speculator in land and a man of fashion, and from his early forties onwards became a political economist, socio- logist, and the founder of a religion. At the age of fifteen he gave his valet orders to wake him every morning with the words " Levez-vous, Monsieur le Comte, vous avez de grandes choses a faire aujourd'hui," and truly his brain was always teeming with schemes on a grand scale. His plan for connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific by cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama was carried out many years after his death, while another scheme for the canalization of Spain never materialized. Having read and admired the passages in De la Litter ature which deal with human progress, with the value of scientific thought, and with philosophy generally, Saint-Simon imagined that he had discovered his twin-soul, and in 1803 he set out for Coppet in the hope of marrying Madame de Stael, whom he had never seen, and who had recently lost her husband.
" J 'avals con9u le plan le plus vaste et le plus utile qui fut entr6
62 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
dans la tete d'un homme, et Madame de Stael 6tait faite pour le realiser."
But the lady did not fancy the role of wife and collaborator to this world-mender, and Saint-Simon proceeded to Geneva, where he devoted himself to publishing his first book, Leitres d'un habitant de Geneve (1803), which advocates the opening of a subscription at the tomb of Newton with the purpose of supporting an international council of scientists, philosophers, painters, writers, and musicians to take the place of the Catholic Church as a spiritual power in Europe. Among Saint-Simon's numerous writings the most impor- tant are Reorganisation de la Societe europeenne (1814), a pamphlet written in collaboration with Thierry, who was at this time his secretary, and was later to make his name as an historian ; the famous Parahole (1819), which proves that only the productive classes of society are useful and indis- pensable ; Le Systeme industriel (1821), in which the young Auguste Comte was his collaborator ; Le Catechisme politique des Industrielles (1824), and his two last works, Opinions Litteraires (1824) and Le Nouveau Christianisme (1825), which contain the clearest and completest exposition of his views.
Saint-Simon is far from being a systematic or consecutive
Outline of thinker, and the details of his teaching are often
saint-simon's yague and incousistcnt. The broad outline of
suggested "-> . ......
reconstruction his positivc rccoustruction of socicty IS Simple o socie y gj^^^gj^^ j^g procccds from the idea that the
Catholic Church as a spiritual power and the feudal and military system as a temporal power have had their day, and are destined to be superseded on the one hand by science and art and on the other by industry. In the new world priests will be replaced by scientists, thinkers, and artists ; captains of war by captains of industry, bankers, manufacturers, merchants, etc., both groups working together for the amelioration of the spiritual and material condition of the poorest and most numerous class, and preaching to all men equality, brotherly love, and the necessity and dignity of work, and all this in the interests
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 63
not of eternal salvation but of humanity, Saint-Simon's enthusiasm for industry and his repeated declarations that the object of life is production and the object of society to increase production was too utilitarian an idea to appeal to the Romantics. Not so his humanitarianism and the idea, original to him, that no new social order could have stability without a new spiritual doctrine and a 7icw spiritual power, the one central conviction in which he never wavers, and round which all his other fluctuating and often incom- plete ideas gravitate. Moreover, his idolization of genius, whether in the realm of science, philosophy, literature or art, and his firm belief that it would be for the good of the community to give full power of initiative in political, social, and intellectual matters to an elite of scientists, men of letters, and artists, was bound to appeal to romantic writers already conscious of a mission and only too eager to be regarded as leaders of thought. Lastly, the revolution- ary fantastic and vaguely religious elements in Saint-Simon's doctrine could not fail to attract the Romantics for the very reasons for which they repelled the more sober-minded. There is an entry in Victor Hugo's diary for 1830 which shows that he for one at that date was familiar with Saint- Simon's theories, but it was not until after 1S30 that they began to be a social force, or to find an echo in literature, and this largely owing to the Saint-Simonian school, founded after his death by some of his devoted followers, who re- garded their master as a modern Messiah,
In 1831, through the influence of Leroux, Le Globe, hitherto devoted to the interests of Romanticism, became the official organ of the Saint-Simonian school, but by degrees Saint-Simon's disciples deviated more and more from the original system of their master, and when one of their chief leaders, Enfantin, tried to transform the group into a religious sect, most of the less fanatical members seceded and went their several ways, not, however, before their sociological propaganda had drawn the attention of the more intellectual among the general public to the economic and industrial questions they raised. Nearly all the
64 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
members distinguished themselves later in the political, financial, or industrial world.
Charles Fourier (1772-1837), a contemporary of Saint- Simon, planned a Utopia of universal prosperity,
(1^72-1837) ^^ which each individual, following his own bent in a communal life, should not only be happy himself but contribute his share to the general happiness. Fourier's scheme, which he first worked out in detail in his Theone des quatre Moiivements (1808), is based on the idea that the evils of society spring from the unnatural restric- tions imposed upon the gratification of human desire. Con- vinced that individualism and competition are the scoiu-ges of society, he would substitute for them co-operative or united industry, co-operation being not only economically more efficacious than individual effort, but also the best means of securing that free and harmonious development of human desire which makes for happiness. This latter assumption presupposes that there is innate in each one of us a love of liberty and a love of order, and that only in a society planned on communist lines can both these desires be simultaneously satisfied. The Theoric was followed by the Traiti d' association domcstique agricole (1822) and Le Nouveau Monde industriel (1829-1830), which contains the fullest exposition of his views. Fourier wrote in an obscure and pedantic style ; his ideas, however, enjoyed a certain popularity, and traces of his influence are to be found in the social novels of George Sand. He was a great advocate of the emancipation of women, and it was he who coined the word " feminism."
The Utopian sociologist who most directly influenced the Romantics was Pierre Leroux (1798-1871). ^'u'tq^s-^i^?"" This son of an artisan, after receiving a good education, renounced admission to the Ecole Polyt^chnique, and in order to support his mother worked for a time as a mason. Later he became a compositor, and in 1824 joined Du Bois in the foundation of the Globe, which, as we have seen, became in 1830 the ofiicial organ of the Saint-Simonian school, of which Leroux was at that
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 65
time a prominent member, but when the following year the school was transformed into a sect, he broke away from it. In 1838 he founded, with S. Reynaud, a paper entitled the Encyclopedic NoitvcUe for the propagation of his social and philosophical views, which were a curious medley of doctrines borrowed not only from Saint-Simonian but also from ancient and medieval sources. His chief sociological works, De I'Egalite (1838) and De I'humanite, de son principe et dc son avenir (1840), develop the idea that progress con- sists in a steady approach to the ideal of equality between man and man, the gradual obliteration of caste and class. They insist on the necessity of preserving the family, coun- try, and property and on the equal necessity of never allowing these to become despotisms, for they must all be subordinate to humanity. This last-named treatise was regarded in his own day as the manifesto of humanitarian- ism. Indeed, Leroux may almost be said to have made a god of humanity, which he believed to be continuously and indefinitely progressing towards perfection. He had a natural bent towards the cloudy and the mystic, as is clearly seen in his religious views. Rejecting the belief in a future life, he substitutes for it a particular theory of the trans- migration of souls. He regards all the great religions of the world as unsatisfactory and incomplete, because they hold that the material world is evil, and because they insist on separating body and soul, spirit and matter. Hence his interest in all sects who were more or less convinced of the divinity of the physical world, and particularly theTaborites, a group of medieval socialists who believed that God was as much a part of material as of spiritual things. The imag- inative quality of Leroux' work, and the fact that it brims with sentiments and aspirations, made a great appeal to the Romantics, more especially to George Sand, with whom in 1841 he founded the Revue Independunte, because the Revue des deux Mondes had abandoned the democratic cause. Nearly all the novels she wrote between 1839 and 1847 embody his humanitarian, socialistic, and religious views, and one of them, Spiridion, was partly written by him. In VOL. n. — 5
66 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
a letter written during this period she herself declares :
" George Sand n'est qu'un pale reflet de Pierre Leroux, un dis- ciple fanatique du meme ideal. ... Je ne suis que le vulgarisateur h la plume diligente et au coeur passionne qui cherclie a introduire dans des romans la philosophie du maitre."
With Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Leroux, socialism had been Utopian, imaginative, optimistic, vaguely
3. Proudhon ^, • ^. j -^ , , ,•
and Louis Christian, in a word, it was a somewhat romantic ^^'^ conception, and had remarkably little connection with the practical life of the time. With Proudhon (1809- 1865), whose celebrated pamphlet, Qit'est-ce que la propriete? Answer : " La propriete c'est le vol " (1840), belongs to this period, and with Louis Blanc (1811-1882), who belongs both to this period and to the next, socialism was closely con- nected with the actual history of France, became realistic, matter of fact, scientific, and, in Proudhon 's case, frankly atheistic, but such influence as these writers had on liter- ature falls into the second half of the century.
In the domain of philosophy we find the same reaction
against the eighteenth-century spirit as in the ™S(?^°' works of religious, political, or sociological
thinkers. The philosopher whose views were dominant during the Romantic period was Victor Cousin
(1792-1867), who attempted to establish a ^1792-1867)° spiritualist philosophy in place of the rationalist
and sensualist conceptions which had held sway during the Age of Enlightenment. At the early age of twenty-three Cousin was appointed assistant to the then Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, Royer-Collard (1763-1845), a great exponent of the Scottish school of thought — more particularly of Thomas Reid. Both Royer-Collard and Cousin were disciples of Maine de Biran (1766-1824), the originator of a new psychological method, which consisted in viewing conscious experience as formed not only by external influences (Condillac) but by the real consciousness of self as an active power. After mastering the philosophical thought of Royer-Collard and Maine de Biran, Cousin learnt German in order to study Kant,
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 67
Jacobi, and Schelling. Two visits, one to Heidelberg (1S17) and another to Munich (1818), brought him into personal contact with the two latter, and also with Fichte and Hegel, and in the university courses he delivered between 1819 and 1821 he gave a full exposition of the speculative methods of these great German thinkers.
Cousin's own philosophical system was eclectic, that is to say, an ingenious synthesis of what seemed most ideal and optimistic in all other systems, ancient or modern, and more especially did he strive to find a mean between the scepticism of the Scottish thinkers and the idealism of the German school of thought.^ His belief that every system of philosophy contains a share at least of the ultimate truth caused him to lay great stress on the importance of the history of philosophy, on which he delivered courses between 1816 and 1818, of which his celebrated book, Dii Vrai, du Beau et da Bien (1853), was but a matured revision. In 1821 Cousin, like Guizot, was forced to abandon his professorial chair because the Restoration Government regarded his teaching as furthering the ends of liberalism. He remained under suspicion for several years, during which he employed his time by making another visit to Germany, by preparing an edition of the works of Descartes, by begin- ning his translation of Plato, and by writing the Fragments philoso plaques (1826), which contain a reasoned statement of his eclectism and of his philosophy of history. In 1828 Cousin resumed his courses at the Sorbonne,
and for the next few years his lecture hall was iSflulnce crowdcd with interested and admiring listeners.
He was a clear and eloquent lecturer, and had the power of temporarily identifying himself with the system he was explaining. The Revolution of 1830 made Cousin a member of the University Council, and a dictator in all matters relating to the teaching of philosophy. During the next twenty years in colleges and universities the youth of France received their philosophical training
- For a brilliant and witty exposition of Cousin's eclectism read
Faguet : Politiques et Moralisies, II, pp. 229-280 (1898).
68 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
according to a programme drawn up by Cousin and at the hands of men chosen and directed by Cousin. It was a time, as we have seen, when the desire for some new spiritual power was in the air, and he firmly believed that his eclectic philosophy supplied one, for it was indeed a kind of lay religion rather than a philosophy. Cousin's eclectism did not survive him, but he did important work by revealing German philosophj^ to France, by creating a general interest in the history of philosophy and in the philosophy of history, and by teaching the rising generation how great is the power of ideas. The moral earnestness of his spiritual philosophy, the connections he saw between metaphysics on the one hand and literature, art, and even politics on the other, opened up new vistas to many young minds carried away by their master's idealism, the quality of which may be gauged from the following passage from the preface of Dii Vrai, dn Beau et du Bien :
" On lui donne k bon droit le nom de spiritualisme, parce que son caractere est de subordonner les sens a I'esprit et de tendre, par tons les moyens que la raison avoue, a elever et a agrandir rhomme. EUe enseigne la spiritualit6 de I'^me, la liberty et la responsabilite des actions humaines, I'obligation morale, la vertu d6sinteressee, la diguite de la justice, la beaute de la charite ; et par dela les limites de ce monde, elle montre un Dieu auteur et tj^e de I'humanite, qui, apres I'avoir faite evidemment pour une fin excel- lente, ne I'abandonnera pas dans le d^veloppement myst^rieux de sa destinee."
This somewhat vague idealism, which admirably suited the Romantics in so far as they felt the need of a philosophy, was soon to be replaced by the positivism of Auguste Comte, whose works — though by their date they fall within this period and owe much to Saint-Simon — can hardly be said to have become a force in the life and thought of the French nation until after 1850.
In conclusion, it is worth pointing out the important TWO GREAT P^^^ played during this period by the Sorbonne CEOTREs FOR and by the College de France as centres for the
THE PROP A- ■^ . , . ° _, _ , _
GATioN OF propagation of ideas. Between 1815 and 1830 "the Sorbonne triumvirat " — the term is
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 69
Bruneti^re's — Cousin, Guizot, and Villemain, attracted laree crowds to their lectures, the first by his
I.ThsSoRBONNE , ... . .... ii'i
denunciation of matenahsm and his clear exposition of the history of philosophy ; the second by his brilliant interpretation of the philosophy of French civiliza- tion throughout the ages, and the third by his attempt — the first of its kind — to give a course of lectures on com- parative literature. After 1830 these three professors forsook their university chairs for the political arena, and later each was at one time or another Minister of Education. Their posts in the university were filled by men of lesser calibre, and the Sorbonne ceded its place as a centre of intellectual attraction to the College de France, where, after
1830, Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz, pro- '■ J^ p^°^^^'^'^fessors respectively of history, southern and
Slavonic literatures, transformed their chairs into pulpits, whence they preached the gospel of democracy and of romantic humanitarianism. Michelet and his friend Quinet we shall meet again among the historians, but Mickiewicz deserves a special mention here because he introduced a curious Polish doctrine into his democratic and humanitarian teaching which was not without influence on the later Romantic writers, notably on Lamennais, Michelet, Quinet, and George Sand, who attended his lectures at the College de France.
Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) was one of the three great
poets of the Polish Romantic Movement, the
Au&m
Mickiewicz other two being Krasinski and Slowacki. The
( 1798-1855 )
failure of the Polish rising m 1831 led to emigra- tion on a large scale, including the best and most intellectual elements of the country. When in 1832 Mickiewicz came to Paris, the chief centre of the Polish emigration, he immediately became the spiritual and intellectual leader of his exiled compatriots, and it was for them that he wrote his famous Book of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrims,- in which he adjured them not to regard themselves
- Translated into French by Montalembert, and the model for
Lamennais' Paroles d'un Croyant.
70 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
as exiles or refugees, but as " pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land of Liberty." For he believed that it was only through the untiring heroism and self-sacrifice of each individual Pole that Poland, the Christ among nations slain to redeem the sins of the rest of Europe, would be enabled to rise again to usher in the spiritual era of the Universe, when materialism will be a thing of the past, and all nations rule and work together in brotherly love. This belief in the Messianic mission of the Polish nation, or Messianism, as it came to be called, was not peculiar to Mickiewicz, but was shared at the time by nearly all the poets and thinkers of that mart5Ted country, who held that it was the only possible explanation for the unavenged wrong of the destruction of Poland's existence as a nation. Mickiewicz had not long been appointed to the newly- founded professorship of Slavonic at the College de France {1840) before he began to preach this national mysticism to his audience, composed of brother-Poles and of the intellectual elite of Paris, and as a corollary to it he popularized the idea that universal truths at times become incarnate in peoples and in individuals, an idea which finds an echo in the works of Michelet, Quinet, Leroux, and George Sand, and the further idea that all great benefactors of mankind, whether they be nations or persons, are doomed to expiate their high daring with martyrdom.
The belief in Poland's mission and resurrection finds beautiful expression in Lamennais' Hymne ct la Pologne, a prose-poem with the refrain :
" Dors, 6 ma Pologne, dors en paix, dans ce qu'ils appellent ta tombe ; moi, je sais que c'est ton berceau."
Other writers, notably Michelet and Quinet, applied many of the Messianic attributes to France,^ regarding her as a Christ among nations," humanity's right arm," destined to redeem the rest of Europe through her gospel of the Rights
1 This was an extension of the medieval Catholic tradition still accepted by De Maistre, which taught that the French were the chosen people of God — Gesia Dei per francos.
THOUGHT DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 71
of Man. Why the disasters of Waterloo and of 1815 ? asks Quinet. Because —
" Comme tous les grands inventeurs . . . comme Prom6thee . . . comrae Christophe Colomb ... la France devait donner la Revolu- tion au monde et payer son bicnfait par lui jour de mort."
CHAPTER IV THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY
SINCE subjectivity was the keynote of the romantic spirit, it was natural that Romanticism should have found its most perfect and its most original expression in lyrical poetry. A slender little volume of verse, published anonymously in 1820, was the first masterpiece of the new school, and with its author we will begin.
Alphonse Louis-Marie de Lamartine (1790-1869) belonged LAMARTiNE ^^ ^^ ^^^ Burguudy family and was born at (1790-1869) Macon. He spent a happy childhood with his Life and works f^^^ sistcrs at his father's country house at Milly in the Maconnais hills, where his early education was super- intended by his mother, who gave him his first reading- lessons from an illustrated Bible, and by an Abbe of a romantic turn of mind who had a great influence on Lamar- tine 's dawning imagination. Later he was sent to complete his studies at the Jesuit seminary at Belley, where he spent several blissfull}^ happy years. His school-life over, he lived four years of studious leisure at Milly, revelling in country sights and sounds, \mting verses daily in the best eighteenth- century style, and finding food for his imagination in the Bible and in the works of Rousseau, Bemardin de Saint- Pierre, Chateaubriand, Petrarch, Tasso, Ossian, and Young, to mention only the chief WTiters who later influenced his poetry.
Sent in 1811 for a tour in Italy to cure him of a youthful infatuation, he at Naples conceived another for a little cigarette-maker, whom he afterwards idealized in Graziella. In a melancholy and agitated frame of mind he returned
72
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 73
home in 1812 by way of Switzerland in order to visit the scenes depicted in La Nouvelle Heloise. For the next two years Lamartine took service in the guard of Louis XVIII, and became a familiar figure in royalist circles. In 1816 he was sent to Aix-les-Bains for his health, and here he fell in love with a delicate Creole lady, Madame Julie Charles, whose death the following year inspired most of the best poems of his first volume of verse, Les Meditations poetiques (1820). These first Meditations took the French public by storm, as no book had done since Chateaubriand's Genie du Christ ianisme, and Lamartine found himself famous in a day. The same year he was appointed to a diplomatic post at Naples, and married a young Englishwoman, Marianne Birch, who brought him a considerable douTy. Lamartine remained only a year at Naples, and from 1821 to 1825 he lived quietly at the Chateau de Saint-Point, near Macon, which his father had presented to him on the occasion of his marriage. Here he prepared a new and enlarged edition of the Premieres Meditations, and composed La Mort de Socrate and Les Noiwelles Meditations. In 1825 he was appointed secretary to the French Embassy in Florence, where he made the acquaintance of Manzoni, and the same year appeared Le dernier chant du felerinage d'Harold, inspired by the death of Byron at Missolonghi. In 1829 Lamartine, who had held aloof from the literary controver- sies of the day, was elected a member of the French Academy, and the following year he published his Harmonies poetiques et religieuses. On the fall of Charles X, Lamartine aban- doned his diplomatic career, and, after having, vainly sought election to Parliament in 1832, chartered a vessel and set out with his wife and daughter for a voyage to the East — of which he gave his impressions in Le Voyage en Orient (1835). During his absence he was returned to the chamber as deputy for Bergues (Nord), and on his return to France in 1833, saddened by the death of his daughter on the outward journey, Lamartine threw himself heart and soul into politics, and soon made a name for himself as an orator. His leisure, however, was still devoted to poetry : two
74 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
narrative poems belong to this period — Jocelyn (1836), La Chute d'un Ange (1838), and a volume of l3aics — Les Reciieillements poetigites (1839), which closed his career as a poet. Henceforward Lamartine was drawn more and more towards republican and humanitarian ideas, to which he gave expression in his public speeches and his Histoire des Girondins (1847), which helped to prepare the Revolution of 1848. As a member of the Provisional Government of 1848, by his courage and eloquence Lamartine seemed to his countrymen the very incarnation of the Republican spirit, and for three months he was virtually the Dictator of France. But his influence declined swiftly, and on the establishment of the Second Empire in 185 1 he retired from politics altogether. Im.poverished by princely expenditure, unwise speculations, and unfailing generosity, Lamartine 's last years were spent in straitened circumstances, writing historical and critical works, and doing political hack-work for magazines with a view to freeing himself from debt. His last purely literary works were all in prose : his autobio- graphical novels — Raphael (1849), Le Tailleur de Pierres de Saint-Point (1851), and Graziella (1852), and his autobio- graphy proper — Les Confidences (1849) and Les Nouvelles Confidences (185 1). He died in his eightieth year in poverty and loneliness in the midst of a literary movement to which he was a complete stranger.
Perhaps no one ever expressed better the novelty of the Premieres Meditations than Lamartine himself when he wrote in the Preface of 1849 •
" Je suis le premier qui ai fait descendre la po^sie du Pamasse, et qui ai donn6 a ce qu'bn nommait la muse, au lieu d'un IjTe k sept cordes de convention, le3 fibres meme du coeur de I'homme, touch^es et emues par les innombrables frissons de I'dme et de la nature."
Lamartine was gifted in a supreme degree with what Paul Bourget calls " I'imagination des etats de
QuaUtyof &,, ^
Lamartine's lame. With tlic power of provokmg and pro-
poetry jongiug thcse moods, and with giving them a
rare musical interpretation. The haunting caressing music.
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 75
the intense personal emotion, and the extreme simplicity of such poems as Le Lac, L'Isolement, L'Automne, Le Ballon, etc., came as a refreshing revelation to a generation which had not yet forgotten the horrors of the Revolution, and which had been wearied by the spectacular splendours of the Empire. " Lamartine n'etait pas seulement un po^te, c'etait la poesie meme," said Th^ophile Gautier.
" Je chantais, mes amis, comme rhomme respire, Comme I'oiseau g6mit, comme le vent soupire, Comme I'eau murmure en coulant."
— Le poHe mourant.
The result was a poetry " intime, personnelle, meditative et grave " — the epithets are Lamartine's own — a series of impassioned recollections of the emotions he experienced when brought face to face with love, nature, and death. The sense of infinity and eternity which fills him at such moments is at the root of his vague but deep religious rapture.
The love of which Lamartine sings, inspired by Julie Charles — the Elvire of the poems — is the love
IS ove-poetry j^^^ Hiastcr, Petrarch, had for Laura — the ideal Platonic love which lasts beyond the grave, and which, though it leaves the survivor lamenting, is to him in itself a proof of immortality.
"D'ici je vois la vie, k travers un nuage,
S'6vanouir pour moi dans I'ombre du pass6.
L'amour seul est reste, comme une grande image
Survit seule au reveil dans un songe effaced.
Repose-toi, mon S.me, en ce dernier asile,
Ainsi qu'un voyageur qui, le coeur plein d'espoir,
S'assied avant d'entrer aux portes de la ville
Et respire un moment Pair embaum6 du soir."
—Le gallon. V A L c 6 W
Thus death, which was to Victor Hugo a mystery full of terror and to Vigny the beginning of eternal oblivion, was acclaimed by Lamartine as a triumphal entry into immor- tality.
76 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Lamartine loves nature as the witness and consoler of human sorrow :
" Mais la nature est \k qui t'invite et qui t'aime " ;
for the contrast between her serene immutability and the vicissitudes of human life —
" Quand tout change pour toi la nature est la mgme," and because in nature he finds God :
" Sous la nature enfin decouvre son auteur." •
Lamartine has also the artist's love of nature, and though he gives us no detailed descriptions of natural Lam^rtine's sceucry, he is extraordinarily skilful in suggest- ^^^^ ing an atmosphere, in sketching a background which is quickly filled in by the reader's imagination. Like Wordsworth, he spiritualizes material natmre, trans- posing visible forms into thoughts and feelings :
" Ces vents qui du m61^ze au rameau dentele Sortent comme un soupir a demi console."
He makes a sparing use of images, and when he feels the need of one he generally chooses it from such formless moving things as air, wind, and water, or from flying birds and shifting clouds .•
" Tout ce qui monte enfin, qui flotte ou vole ou plane."
Colour has no appeal for him — blacks and whites and greys are his medium — and his landscapes have the veiled and subdued quality of Corot's paintings. Sounds, on the other hand, find a large place in his poetry, more especially melancholy or indefinite sounds like the rustling of trees, the murmur of water, the sighing of reeds, the moaning of the wind. His vague landscapes are nearly all autumnal, and captured at a late evening hour when —
" Les brises du matin se posent pour domrir, Le rivage se tait, la voile tombe vide. La mer roule a ses bords la nuit dans chaque ride, Et tout ce qui cliantait semble a present g^mir."
— Harmonies poSliques.
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 77
One can scarcely lay too much stress on this aspect of Lamar tine's poetry because it is the essential quality of his genius to dematerialize everything that he touches, so truly does he say of himself —
" Au monde des esprits je monte sans efforts."
To hear his poetry read aloud is almost to forget that he uses words at all, and so fluid is the music of his verse that the abstraction of his vocabulary, and certain pseudo- classical circumlocutions such as " le char de la nuit " and " I'arbre du jour," pass almost unnoticed.
It is as the poet of the Premieres and the Nouvelles Meditations that Lamartine is chiefly loved and read to-day. His later Harmonies religieuses et poetiques and Recueille- ments poetiques are, in respect of technique, superior to his earlier collections, and reveal a great philosophical and religious poet, preoccupied with humanitarian ideals. Like his two narrative poems Jocelyn and La Chute d'un Ange, they form the link between Lamartine the l5n:ical poet, pure and simple, and Lamartine the orator, to whom poetry is no longer the breath of life but " le plus beau et le plus intense des actes de la pens^e mais le plus court et celui qui d^robe le moins de temps au travail du jour." (Pref. to Recueillements) Yet once a poet, always a poet, and even as late as 1857 we find such an unforgettable example of the essential Lamartine as the following :
" De la solitaire demeure Une ombre lourde d'heure en heure Se d6tache sur le gazon ; Et cette ombre, couchee et morte, Est la seule chose qui sorte Tout le jour de cette maison."
— La Vigne et la Maison.
Victor Hugo was born at Besan9on in the year that
VICTOR HUGO Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme took \l^ ^
(1802-1885) France by storm. His father, who came origin-
^'"^ ally from Lorraine, was an officer in the armies
of Napoleon, and his mother the daughter of a royalist
78 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
shipowner at Nantes. While still a baby, Victor Hugo, with his mother and two elder brothers, accompanied Major Hugo from garrison to garrison, halting at Elba and Corsica just when the child was of an age to take notice of the things around him. The year 1807 was spent at Avellino, of which province Hugo, now a Colonel, had been made governor. A year later he followed Joseph Bonaparte to his new kingdom of Spain, while Madame Hugo took her two younger boys, Eugene and Victor, to Paris, where she rented a roomy old house with a wild garden, part of a forsaken convent of the Order of the Fcuillantines. Here the chil- dren ran wild to their heart's content, and learned their first lessons from an ex-Oratorian, the Pere de la Riviere.
" J'eus dans ma blonde enfance, h^las trop ^ph6m6re, Trois maltres — un jardin, un vieux pretre et ma m^re."
Ini8iithey took a journey across the Pyrenees to Madrid to visit their father, who was now governor of that city and Count of the Empire. The boys were sent to the College of Nobles at Madrid, where they came into contact with Spaniards of the bluest blood and learnt something of Spanish pride and Spanish courtesy. The following April they were back again at Les FeuiUantines, revelling in the garden, and resuming their pleasant easy-going lessons with the Pere de la Riviere ; but when General Hugo returned to France in 1814, he sent both his younger sons as boarders to the Pension Cordier, so that they might receive a sound general education before entering the Ecole Poly technique. Here Victor remained until his sixteenth year, developing a marked aptitude for mathematics, and a passionate love of literature. While still at school he tried his hand at every form of verse, and always found for " ces betises que je faisais avant ma naissance," as he afterwards labelled his earliest literary efforts, a sympathetic listener in his mother, who was the first to recognize her son's poetic bent. Already in i3i6 he wrote in one of his copy-books : " Je veux etre Chateaubriand ou rien," and the following year he received an honourable mention from the French Academy for an
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 79
essay on " The happiness procured by study in all conditions of life." At seventeen "I'enfant sublime," as Chateau- briand is reported to have called him, was awarded a prize by the Academic des Jeux Floraux de Toulouse for a poem entitled Les Vierges de Verdun. In 18 18 the eighteen-year-old Victor Hugo decided definitely on a literary career, and founded with his two brothers Le Conser- vateur Littdraire, which brought him into touch with a group of young men eager to renew the literature of France. A year after the death of his mother in 182 1, Victor Hugo married his former playmate, Adele Foucher, who had shared the delights of the garden at Les Feuillantines, and bought her wedding gift — the then essential cashmere shawl — from the proceeds of his first book of verses, Odcset poesies diverses (1822), later re-edited and enlarged with the title Odes ct Ballades.
The part played by Hugo in the Romantic battle has Victor Hugo's been told clsewhcre, and a study of his dramas and novels will follow in its proper place. But he was first and foremost a poet, and the twenty- five volumes of verse included in the edition definitive of his complete works are so intimately bound up with his life and thought, private and political, that they form an essential part of the biography of one who truly said of himself :
" Tout souffle, tout rayon ou propice ou fatal. Fait reluire ct vibrer mon S,me de cristal, Men ame aux mille voix, que le Dieu que j 'adore Mit au centre de tout comme un echo sonore."
The Odes of 1822 and 1824 and the Odes et Ballades of 1826 and 1828 already contain poems dictated by ^'^^^'j£g'J«'^« what were to be Victor Hugo's perennial sources of inspiration — historical and political events : Napoleon Bonaparte {Les deux ties ; Ode d, Colonne) ; his belief in the poet's mission (Le poete, etc.) ; the record of his own dreams and feelings to which Book V, with its motto " Prend-moy tel que je suy," is entirely devoted, and his love of children {Portrait d'un
EARLY
POETICAL
WORKS
8o A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
enfant) . For this collection Victor Hugo wrote no less than four successive prefaces, in which he maintains that "la poesie est tout ce qu'il y a d'intime en tout," and that poets are priests, "chantant les grandes choses de leur religion et de leur patrie," taking nature as their model and truth as their guide. He concludes with the fervent hope that " un jour le dix-neuvieme siecle politique et litteraire, pourra etre r^sum^ d'un mot : la liberty dans I'ordre, la liberte dans I'art." The Odes are still classical in form, and are somewhat marred by an excess of apostrophe, exclamation, and other rhetorical devices, while the Ballades inspired by the Middle Ages are chiefly remarkable for the novelty and variety of their metrical effects. {Le pas d'armes du roi Jean, La Chasse du Bur grave, La fille du Timhalier.) The Odes et Ballades were followed at the beginning of 1829 by a collection of a very different kind, Les ^"u&T'" Orientates, inspired by the Greek War of Inde- pendence, in which Byron had laid down his life, though the original idea of writing these Eastern poems had quite another source, for, as Victor Hugo tells us in his inevitable preface : " L'idee d'ecrire Les Orientates m'a pris d'une fa9on assez ridicule I'ete passe en allant voir coucher le soleil." During 1827 and 1828 the little group of artists and poets who formed the C6nacle would often sally forth in the evening to watch the sun set behind the dome of the Invalides, or climb up to the towers of Notre-Dame for the same pmpose, and it is the splendour of these sunsets awakening in Victor Hugo recollections of Naples and of Spain which gave him the first idea of the Orientates. He had never been in the East, but as he remarks : L'Espagne c'est encore I'Orient, I'Espagne est k demi-africaine, I'Afrique est k demi-asiatique," and with a little help from pictures and newspaper reports he created pictures of an unreal but intensely imagined East in poems which for their effect depend on their riot and blaze of colour (" C'est de la poesie pour les yeux," said the Globe) and on their astonish- ing variety and suppleness of rhythm {Les Djinns, Grenade, Lefeii du del) . In this volume Hugo for the first time makes
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 8i
use of all his favourite devices : enumeration, antithesis, and plastic images, of which the following is a typical example :
" Cent coupoles d'etain qui dans I'ombpe eUncellent •
Comme des casques de grants." y^^^^^ ^V» ^•<«~-4C
Two of the last poems in the book, Reverie and Novemhre, form the link between this and his next collection of verse, Les Feuilles d'A utomne, which, appearing in the d'Automne gloiious year 1831, the year of Marion Delorme ^ ^' and Notre Dame de Paris, was written in a mood of retrospect and detachment, when Victor Hugo, saddened by his break with Sainte-Beuve, hitherto his greatest friend, and by the closing chapter of his first youth, casts " un regard melancolique et resigne gk et let sur ce qui est, surtout ce qui a ete " (Preface). The July Revolution precipitated a crisis in Victor Hugo's political opinions which, under the influence of his father and the general turn of events, had been slowly preparing for some time, and after 1830 he was as ardent a liberal democrat as in the early twenties he had been an ardent royalist. Most of the poems in Les Feuilles d'Automne were written before the Revolution of July. In this collection political allusions are few and far between, but both in the poems and the preface there are signs that Victor Hugo's early political convictions are dying within him, and this uncertainty adds another chord of melancholy to his lyre :
" Aprte avoir chant6 j'6coute et je contemple, A I'empereur tomb6 dressant dans I'ombre un temple, Aimant la liberty pour ses fruits, pour ses fleurs, Le trone pour son droit, le roi pour ses malheurs ; Fiddle enfin au sang qu'ont vers6 dans ma veine, Mon pere vieux soldat, ma m^re vendeenne."
These are the closing lines of " Ce siecle avail deux ans," the short autobiographical poem with which the book opens, and nearly all the other pieces are what Victor Hugo him- self calls them, " des vers de I'interieur de I'ame," singing of nature {Ce qu'on entend sur la Montagne, Soleils couchants. Pan) ; man's destiny [Oil done est le bonheicr, La Penle de la
VOL. II. — 6
82 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
reverie) ; humanity {Pour les Pauvres, La Priere pour ious) ; the grace and beauty of childliood {Laissez ious ces enfants sont hien Id, Lorsque V enfant paratt). In Lcs Feuilles d'Automne it is as though the poet were making a halt at a cross-road of life— to use an image of his own from the poem entitled A mes amis L.B. and S.-B.
" Que faire et que penser ? Nier, douter ou croire ? Carrefour t6nebreux ! triple route ! nuit noire ! Le plus sage s'assied sous I'arbre du chemin Disant : j'irai Seigneur oti tu m'envoies. II espere, et, de loin, dans les trois sombres voies, II 6coute, pensif, marcher le genre humain."
But even in this spirit of detachment, Victor Hugo has not quite forgotten his mission " d'etre en la nuit de tous im eclatant flambeau," and the last poem of the book, which is a plea for all oppressed nations, ends with the lines :
" Oh ! la muse se doit aux peuple sans defense. J'oublie alors I'amour, la famille, I'enfance, Et les molles chansons, et le loisir serein, Et j'ajoute h ma lyre une corde d'airain 1 "
His three next volumes of verse, Les Chants du Crepuscule r r-^ . ^ (183s), Les Voix intirieures (1837), and Les
Les Chants du \ -'-'/' -, • . ,^ • •.
Cripuscu]e{i%ii)Rayons et les Ombres (1840), despite their misty tw^nv./r«(T837) titles and the many intimate poems they cou- nt's oX« tain, amply fulfil this promise. Here, true to ^'^'^°^ his maxim, " etre de tous les partis par leur cotd genereux, n'etre d'aucun par leur cote mauvais," ^ Victor Hugo couples enthusiasm for democracy with pity for the Bourbons, and humanitarian hopes with the glorifica- tion of Napoleon. Here, too, are poems celebrating the civilizing role of the artist :
"... Comme un pretre a I'cglise, II reve a I'art qui charme, h. I'art qui civilise,
Qui change I'homme un peu, Et qui, comme un semeur qui jette au loin sa grains
Voix iniirieures (Preface, 1837).
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 83
En semant la nature a travers Fame humaine Y fera germer Dieu."
— A Eugene, Vicomte H Voix iniirieures.
In the two finest poems of Les Chants dii Crdpusciile — the second Ode a la Colonne, written to commemorate the transport to France of the Emperor's remains, and NapoUon II — Victor Hugo helped to popularize the Napoleonic legend, and in the next twC' volumes, together with a certain number of stately national odes, are numbers of purely lyrical poems on the theme which in Les Feuilles d'Automne he had made peculiarly his own {Ce qui se passait aux Feuillantines, La Tristesse d'Olympio, A des Oiseaux envoles) . To these must be added a new source of inspira- tion — the beauty, v/onder, and terror of the sea — Soiree en tner, Une nnit qu'on entendait la mersans la voir, and Oceana Nox with its grand and melancholy music :
" O flots, que vous avez de lugubres histoires ! Flots profonds, redout6s des m^res a genoux ! Vous vous les racontez en montant les marees, Et c'est ce qui vous fait ces voix desesp6r6es Que vous avez le soir quand vous veuez vers nous."
From 1840 to 1853 Victor Hugo wrote no more lyrical poetry.
In 1841 he was elected a member of the French Academy. His growing belief that the poet should be a force in the world, very strongly expressed in Les Rayons et les Ombres {Fonction du poete), led him to throw himself more and more into politics, and very characteristically his Discours de Reception, leaving literary matters untouched, was a brief survey of French history since the Revolution. The follow- ing year on politics bent Victor Hugo made a journey to the Rhine to clear up his ideas on the burning question of the hour as to whether France should repudiate the treaty of 1815 and claim the Left Bank as her own. The result was Le Rhin, a book in the form of letters to a friend in Paris, and Les Burgraves, a drama which, when performed early in 1843, was as great a failure as Hernani had been a success.
84 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
This, and later in the year the death in a boating accident of his daughter Leopoldine with her husband of a few brief months, filled the poet's cup to overflowing. For the next eleven years his mind was occupied with neither drama nor poetry but with political and social questions : the abolition of capital punishment, the amelioration of the condition of the poor, universal education, etc. Created a peer of France by Louis Philippe in 1845, he discoursed on all these subjects in the House, and his utterances are to be found in Acies et Paroles (published posthumously). After the Revolution of 1848 he sat in the Constituent Assembly, and he was one of those who in 1851 unsuccessfully resisted the coup d'etat by which Louis Napoleon prepared the way for the Second Empke. His point of view, expressed fully and violently many years later in L'Hisioired'un Crime (1877), caused his immediate banishment from France. He took refuge for a short time in Belgium ; then in Jersey (1852- 1855) where his family joined him. Later Guernsey became the home of his exile until the fall of the Second Empire in 1870.
In his first island home Victor Hugo once more. took up HIS LATER ^^^ P^"' ^his time to wTite the prose-invective, POEMS Napoleon le Petit (1852), and to discharge his civic indignation in the lyrical satires of Les Chdtiments (1853), dictated by an almost elemental hatred of Les CMHments ^^g perpetrator of the " Crime of December." Furious invective alternates with stinging satire, threats of future punishment for Louis Napoleon and his accomplices, with hopes for the future of France [Patria, Lux). Here and there comes a lull in the storm with poems of an epic grandeur {L' Expiation, soldats de Van deux), or with a calm meditative poem like Stella, and then the lashing satire begins again. The satirical note still makes itself heard occasionally in Les Contemplations ^ioSSe)"" (1856), which is generally regarded as the master- piece of Hugo's Ijo-ical collections. Personal reminiscences, the mystery and immensity of the sea, the horror and pity of death, brought close to him by the loss
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 85
of Leopoldine, grief and indignation at the thought of social inequality and injustice, his social, political, and religious ideals, his faith in progress — these are the chief sources of inspiration of a book which is perhaps the most personal that Victor Hugo ever wTote, and which is most admirably characterized in two lines from its last poem :
" Je sens le vent de I'infini souffler Sur ce livre qu'emplit I'orage at le myst^re."
— A celle qui est restie en France.
In 1859 came the first series of the Legende des Siecles, u ende des ^^ ^^ foUowed by two morc in 1877 and 1883, " a
sacks collection of poems epic and dramatic in inspira- (1859,1877,1883),. , ,, .^. J. -*-?, J -^1 ^
tion but lyric m form, arranged with a view to
illustrating human progress, " I'immense marcheur jamais
decourage," throughout the ages. Unfortunately, Victor
Hugo, like his forerunners of the eighteenth century, believed
that there was a necessary connection between industrial
and scientific progress and the moral ascent of man. But
the unsoundness of his underlying thesis in no wise detracts
from the beauty and grandeur of the individual poems.
From the birth of Eve to the death of Christ ; from the
gods of Olympus to the barbarian kings ; thence through
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the poet's own
day, with a glance into the immediate future and into
eternity, the vast cycle of the ages unwinds before us
in a brilliant succession of pictures and visions (cf.
particularly La Conscience, Booz endormi, Aymerillot,
L'Aigle dn Casque, Les Chevaliers errants, La Rose de
V Infante, Les Pauvres Gens, Pleine Mer, Plein del).
The last poems, written by Victor Hugo in exile, were
, collected under the title Chansons des Rues et des
Chansons des
Rues et des BoisBois (1865), a book, he tells us, " dcrit beaucoup
(1865) 1 /^ 1 • 1,
avec le reve, un peu avec le souvenir. On the fall of the Empire (1870), Victor Hugo returned to
France, and gave his impressions of the siege of ^'^'*|'/^7^f'*'"Paris in the prose Choses Vues and the lyrical
Annee Terrible (1872) . From the sadness caused by the death of his wife {1868) and of his sons, Charles (1871)
86 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
and Franfois- Victor (1873), and the unhappy plight of his
L'Artd'itre ^^^^^^ land, the poet sought solace in the com-
grand-pire pauiouship of his little grandchildren, Georges
' "^^ and Jeanne, who inspired the delightful lyrical
collection L'Art d'etre grand-pere (1877).
From his return to France to the day of his death,
Victor Hugo, now a convinced Republican, was the
idol of the French people, and when he died at the age of
eighty-three, he was mourned by a whole nation. A few
years before his death he had published another volume
LesQuatre of vcrse, Les Quatre Vents de l' Esprit, "vie,
i'E^prT{i88i] amour, joie et courroux," and yet another was
TouteiaLyre to follow posthumously, Toute la Lyre, which
(1888-1893) ^Qyj(j ]3g ^j^ admirable title for the twenty-five
volumes of his collected poetical works.
The bulk and range of Victor Hugo's poetry take one's Hu o's weak- ^^^^-^^ away, and he paid the penalty for his nesses as a prodigality ; there is much in his work for the ^°^ critic to carp and cavil at — his vehemence and
frequent want of dignity, his fondness for declamation, his abuse of antithesis and enumeration. Faguet complains of this habit of accumulating " des enumerations brillantes des titres d'id^es, sans en dcrire le chapitre. II dit : Liberte ! Justice ! Humanity ! Progres ! sans nous dire assez quel est son progres, quelles sa liberte et sa justice, ce qui seul importerait." For Victor Hugo was not a profound or an original thinker, though no poet of the nineteenth century put into circulation so many of the ideas of his age, or clothed them in such imaginative form. Two more defects of intelligence and we can pass on to the poet's undisputed merits, which far outweigh his failings : Hugo was inordi- nately vain, and a sense of humour had been completely denied to him. Heine remarked that he was not merely an egoist, but a Hugoist, and as time went on he conceived of himself as the hero of a Hugo legend, no less wondrous than the Napoleonic legend which he had done so much to create. Of his pompousness and complete lack of humour numerous instances might be given. Two may suffice : his intro-
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY ^7
ductory note to L'Histoire d'ltn Crime — " Ce livre est plus qu'actuel ; il est urgent. Je le publie," and two extant photographs of himself in ecstatic attitudes inscribed by his own hand, the one "Victor Hugo ecoutant Dieu," the other " Victor Hugo causant avec Dieu."
But when all is said, the fact remains that Victor Hugo is a great poet — great because of his lyric and ^'^ merits^'^'^ imaginative genius, great because he is the poetic voice of the whole nineteenth century.
His two supreme gifts as a poet are his extraordinary .visual imagination and his feeling for the music and colour of words, so that, to quote Dowden, " sensations created images and words created ideas." In other words, Victor Hugo habitually thought in images, and one has only to tiun over the leaves of any one of his twenty-five volumes of verse to find on every page examples of the wealth of his plastic imagination :
" Les mauvaises pens6es Qui passent dans I'esprit comme une ombre sur I'eau."
— La Pridre pour tous.
Comparing a poet's songs to a peal of bells he cries :
" Dans son dur voyage ils soutiennent Le peuple immense p61erin ; Vos chants, vos songes, vos pens^es Semblent des urnes renvers6es D'ou tombent des rythmes d'airain."
— Annde Terrible.
For perfect harmony between sound and sight no better example can be given than the well-known Saison des Semailles, Le Soir {Chansons des Rues et des Bois) and the delicious NiUts de Jitin {Rayons et Ombres) with its last wonderful lines :
" Et I'aube douce et plLlc, en attendant son heure, Semble toutc la nuit error au bas du ciel."
Or again :
\^
88 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
" Au loin une cloche, une enclume Jettent dans Pair leurs faibles coups A ses pieds flottent dans la brume Le paysage immense et doux."
— Touts la Lyre, 1, 133,
Well might Victor Hugo say :
" Le rythme est dans I'espace Et la lyre est en nous."
— Toute la Lyre, I, p. 55.
We have already noted incidentally Victor Hugo's favour- ite lyric themes : public events, domestic joys "J^ic^di°em'^^ and sorrows, nature in all her moods, the sea, childhood. His love poems, with the exception of one or two songs like S'il est tin charmant gazon and L'Anhenait et la porte est close {Chants du Crepuscule), have no ring of sincerity or passion. On the other hand, the older he grew, the more frequent became the poems dictated by a feeling of love and pity for all the weak and oppressed, be they nations, human beings, or animals. In L' Art d'etre grand-pere he writes :
" Mon coeur n'a pas de fronti^res, et je n'ai pas d'endroit Oil finisse I'amour des petits et le droit Des faibles et I'appui qu'on doit aux mis6rables."
This humanitarianism at times became maudlin, and devel- oped into false sentiment, but it also inspired some of his finest verse, and was one more element in the poetry of a man whose life was described by Leconte de Lisle, on the occasion of his election to the dead poet's chair in the Academic Fran9aise, as —
" Un chant sonore, oil toutes les passions, toutes les tendresses, toutes les sensations, toutes les col^res g6n6reuses qui ont agit6, 6mu, traverse I'^me humaine dans le cours de ce si^cle, ont trouv6 une expression souveraine."
Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (1797-1863), came of a long line of soldiers, and was born at Loches in
ALFRED DE ° tt-
VIGNY Tourame. His father was a veteran of the (1797-1863) ggygjj Years War, and his mother an aristocrat
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 89
imprisoned with her family by the revolutionary govern- ment. After the Terror, M. de Vigny brought his wife and son to Paris, and at the age of sixteen Alfred entered the army as a lieutenant, to quit it in 1827 with the rank of captain, and without ever having been in action. His military career was a long series of disappointments.
" Je m'aperfus que mes services n'6taient qu'une longue m6prise et que j'avais port6 dans une vie tout active une nature toute contemplative."
In the meantime his literary taste had asserted itself, and he spent his leisure time writing verses and consorting with the members of Nodier's Cenacle. His first collection of verse, Poimes (1822), appeared just before Victor Hugo's Odes et Poesies Diverses, and was re-edited and enlarged in . 1826 under the title Poimes anciens et modernes.
et modernes The Other works published durmg his lifetime were novels. Cinq Mars (1826), Stello (1832), Servitude et Grandeur militaire (1835), and plays Le Mare- chale d'Ancre (1831), Chatterton (1835).
In 1828 Alfred de Vigny married, like Lamartine, an English wife, Lydia Bunbiu-y, and his marriage seems to have been as unsuccessful as his military career. Years before he had loved the beautiful Delphine Gay, and been loved in return, but his mother had wished for a more aristocratic wife for her son ; later he was to fall violently in love with the actress who took the part of Kitty Bell in Chatterton, Marie Dorval, whose standards of honour and fidelity fell far below his, and completely disillusioned him about women.
" Car plus ou moins la femme est toujours Dalila."
In 1845, two years after Victor Hugo, he was very dis- courteously received into the Academic Frangaise. After the Revolution of 1848, like Chateaubriand, Lamartine and Victor Hugo, he had thoughts of a political career, but hav- ing twice unsuccessfully sought election to the National Assembly he abandoned all idea of public life and retired
90 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
to his Chateau du Maine-Guiraud in AngoulSme, where he died in 1863, after a long illness, leaving behind him in manuscript his magnificent philosophical poems Les Destmees, and a kind of diary of notes and jottings, fragments of which were published in 1867 with the title Journal d'v.n poete.
Vigny, the least typical of the Romantics, was, both as a . , man and as a poet, the very antithesis of Victor
ViETiy s con* , ,
centration and Hugo. He was far from lavish with his verse.
His complete poetical works are comprised in one small volume, and if we exclude HeUna and Fantasies ouhliies, which he never destined for publication, his fame as a poet rests on the thirty-five pieces of the Pohnes anciens et modernes and of Les Destinies. Concentration and econ- omy also mark his use of his poetical gift. His interpreta- tion of the destiny of man and of the place occupied in it by Nature, Love, and Death is the theme from which he never strays, and though this interpretation is intensely personal, there is something of detachment in his expression of it. Such avowals as he makes of his " moi " have the quality of reluctance, for the declamation and display, dear to most Romantics, were abhorrent to the proud and reserved Alfred de Vigny. This was partly due to temperament, partly to the
poet 's unwavering intellectual honesty. Among
among the the Romautics he was the one original thinker,
Oman ics ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^ consistcut philosophy of
life, to whom thought meant as much as feeling or possibly more. Thus, while Victor Hugo transforms feelings and sensations into ideas, Vigny starts from the abstract idea, to which he gives an emotional and imaginative value, by means of the symbol in which he clothes it {Molse, Eloa, La Mori du Loup, La Bouteille d la Mer). Two of the finest of Vigny's non-S5mibolic poems are Le Cor, a half-narrative, half-lyrical poem on the death of Roland and Oliver, written whilst he was in garrison in the South of Spain, and La Frigate " la Sirieuse " (1828), with its wonderful description of a fight at sea.
Vigny was a pessimist and a solitary, partly because there
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 91
M^as a strong melancholy strain in his temperament (" Je suis n^ s^rieux jusqu'k la tristesse "), but chiefly because he was a disillusioned idealist who after reasoned reflection had come to the conclusion that in a world made up of good and evil the evil far outbalances the good, in fact, that all is for the worst in the worst of possible worlds. The crowd whom he despises lack either the clear-sightedness or the intellectual honesty to perceive this — and so the elect of the earth, the geniuses, live in a moral isolation, which makes unhappiness their inevitable portion. This is the theme of Vigny's play Chatterion and of four of his greatest poems, Mo'ise, Eloa, La Colere de Samson, and Le Mont des Oliviers which, incidentally, are so many chapters of Vigny's own spiritual autobiography. The forlornness of genius is admirably expressed in the cry of Vigny's Moses :
" Que vous ai-je done fait pour etre votre 61u ? J'ai conduit votre peuple oil vous avez voulu . . . Je suis tr^s grand, mes pieds sent sur les nations. Ma main fait et defait 16s g6n6rations. — Helas ! je suis, Seigneur, puissant et solitaire, Laissez-moi m'cndormir du sommeil de la terre."
Vigny's pessimism, which is a far sincerer and profounder thing than the subjective and emotional mal du Steele from which so many of his contemporaries suffered, affects his conception of nature and of God. Nature is far from being for him the consoler and confidante that she was for Lamar- tine and in a lesser degree for Victor Hugo.
" Ne me laissez jamais seul avec la nature Car je la connais trop pour n'en pas avoir peur,"
he exclaims in La Maison du Berger, for her dumb impassive- ness fills him with horror :
" Je n'entends ni vos cris ni vos soupirs ; h peine Je sens passer sur moi la com^die humaine Qui cherche en vain au ciel ses muets spectateurs " ;
and in a letter to the Vicomtesse du Plessis (Aug. 8, 1848) he writes :
92 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
" Pour moi, je ne lui pardonne son immobilit6, son 6ternit6 impudente, sa fraicheur et ses rajeunissements annuels sur les tombes de ceux qu'on aime, qu'en faveur de son silence et de ses magnifiques horizons."
And Nature in this aspect is, in Vigny's view, but the reflection of her Maker, who, dumb, blind, and deaf, is either powerless or unwilling to help mankind through the vale of tears in which he has set their feet, and makes it difficult for man to help himself, on the one hand by limiting his intelligence —
" Tout homme a vu le mur qui borne son esprit "
{La Fiate)—
and on the other by making him powerless against death, which hangs ever over his head —
" Comme una sombre ep6e Attristant la nature k tout moment frapp6e."
— Le Mont des Oliviers.
Yet this tragic conception of man's destiny wrings no cry of despair from Vigny, still less a helpless whimpering, but braces him to a fortitude which is almost sublime :
" Muet, aveugle et sourd au cri des creatures, Si le Ciel nous laissa comme un monde avort6, Le juste opposera le d^dain k I'absence, Et ne r^pondra plus que par un froid silence Au silence eternel de la Divinity."
The resignation that Vigny preaches is made up of pride and a reaUzation of the futility of resistance or indignation, while at the same time it is accompanied by a deep feeling of pity, not self-pity, but compassion for all the weak, the lonely, and the suffering, to whatever rank of life they belong ; and more than this, a sinking of- personal suffering in the misery of the whole human race.
" J 'aime la majesty des souff ranees humaines."
This feeling of universal compassion is symbolized in Eloa, an angel of pity born of a tear of Christ falling on the tomb
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 93
of Lazarus — Eloa abandons the joys of heaven to bring consolation and salvation to the exiled Lucifer.
But the final word of Vigny's philosophy still remains to be given. In two of his last poems, La Bontcille d la Mer (1858) and L'Esprit pur (1863), shines the silver lining to the dark cloud of evil hanging over human destiny, a silver lining of which glimpses may be caught even in earlier poems {Paris, La Maison du Berger) . God may be the author of a world which is evil and be indifferent to human suffering, but
" Le vrai Dieu, le Dieu fort est le Dieu des id6es,"
and will not let perish a single fragment of the most real of all worlds, the world of ideas.
"... Dieu peut bien permettre a des eaux insensees De perdre des vaisseaux mais non pas des idees."
This is the leading idea of La Bouteille a la Mer, which tells how a ship is lost with all hands, while the bottle to which the captain had consigned a chart of unknown and dangerous seas in which he was sailing, comes safe to port. For there is a realm — the invisible world of ideas — in which man may freely work out his own salvation —
" L'invisible est r(§61. Les S,mes ont leur monde Oil sont accumul6s d'impalpables tresors " —
and with the help of these treasures of the mind he may some day sweep away the miserable ignorance into w^hich he was born.
It was well worth w^hile, that, to use a famous image of Sainte-Beuve's, unlike the other Romantics,
" Vigny plus secret Comme en un tour d'ivoire avant midi rentrait,"
to seek in a moral isolation of his own choosing a key to the riddle of the universe. Vigny may rightly claim to have been the first in France to write poetry in which " une pensee philosophique est mise en scene sous une forme
94 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
epique ou dramatique." His "ivory tower" had no windows on to that outward world of actuaUty which v/as such a rich source of inspiration to Hugo ; for Vigny the message could only be thought out " above the battle," and his view of the poet's mission was Hugo's raised to a higher power.
Vigny 's poetic art has an austerity and a restraint which
are far to seek in the other Romantics. He has vigny's poetic j^q^. yictor Hugo's verbal or rhythmical facility,
and his conceptions are generally finer than his execution. Imagery and picturesqueness of phrase are never used for their own sake, but merely to give greater vividness to the underlying idea. For instance, when describing the long and perilous voyage of the bottle containing the navigator's precious information, he gives us the following picture :
" Les noirs chevaux de mer la heurtent puis reviennent La flairer avec crainte, et passent en soufflant."
And again, addressing Eva in La Maison du Berger, he uses the following beautiful image :
" Ton coeur vibre et r6sonne au cri de ropprim6 Comme dans une 6glise aux aust^res silences L'orgue entcnd un soupir et soupirc alarm6."
By the restraint, moderation, and detachment of his art, Alfred de Vigny is a forerunner of the Parnassian school, which he influenced in the persons of Leconte de Lisle and Sully Prudhomme.
If Lamartine may be said to be the most purely lyrical, Hugo the most imaginative, and Vigny the most
MussET intellectual of the Romantics, Alfred de Musset,
(1810-1857) ^j^g youngest of the group, is undoubtedly the most emotional, and combines two characteristics rarely found together — a sensibility so intense that it verges on morbidity, and a keen sense of humour ; and in this respect he is the French counterpart of Heine,
The story of his life is soon told. Born and bred in
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 95
Paris, Musset was the son of a man who held a lucrative post in the Ministry of War, and who was well known as the biographer and editor of the works of J. -J. Rousseau. Poetry may be said to have been his natural inheritance, for he counted among his ancestors Ronsard's Cassandre and a kinsman of Joachim du Bellay, and still further back, possibly the trou-vere Colin Muset. He was educated at the Lyc^e Henry IV, and, while still in his teens, was introduced to Hugo's Cenacle. At twenty he published the Conies d'Espagne et d' Italic (1830), a collection of dramatic, narra- tive, and lyrical poems, which were included later in the Premieres Podsies (1835). These poems scan- Poisies dalized conservative critics by their free use ^ ^^ of enjanihement and their display of Byronic cynicism, and were not altogether to the liking of the older Romantics, who deplored the poverty of their rimes, and who could not fail to perceive that in the Ballade d la Lime, and in several passages of Mardoche, their youngest recruit was poking fun at them.
Between 1833 and 1835 falls Musset 's liaison with George Sand, whom he accompanied to Italy. The journey ended in disaster. Their temperaments were incompatible — the older and wiser George Sand soon wearied of the youthful poet's eccentricities, and Musset was jealous of his friend's devotion to her work. When he fell ill in Venice, she trans- ferred her affections to his Venetian doctor, and after various attempts at reconciliation, Musset and George Sand parted for ever. This episode in his life, of which he gives an incoherent account in his Confession d'un Enfant du Sikle (1836), aggi-avated the morbid violence of Mussct's emotional nature, and transformed " Ic lord
^pollvf Byronnet," or "Mademoiselle Byron," as his contemporaries called him, into the poet of Les Nuits (1835-1837), L'Espoir en Dieu (1838) and Le Souvenir (1841).
Musset had already written a number of short stories and plays, and some more were still to come, but during the last sixteen years of his life he wrote but sparingly
96 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
either in prose or in verse. He died at the age of forty- seven, prematurely worn out by drink and riotous hving. " Musset s'absente trop,"said a member of the Academy, shortly after the poet's election to that august body in 1852. " II s'absinthe trop," corrected a fellow- Academician. Yet to the end Musset was a lovable creature, and his old servant remarked : " Dieu n'aurait pas le courage de le damner."
He was buried in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, under a willow, as he had desired :
" Mes amis, quand je mourrai, Plantez un saule au cimeti^re. J'aime son feuillage 6plor6, La paleur m'en est douce et chere, Et son ombre sera legere A la terre ou je dormirai."
The whole of Musset 's poetical .work is contained in His two volumes — Premiere Poesies (1829-1835) and poetry Poesics Nouvclles (1836-1852). Between the two lies his love-affair with George Sand, after which he renounced all appeal to the eye in his poetry, and devoted himself entirely to lyrical self-confession. Unhappy love and the suffering it brings is henceforth the theme, on which he plays a hundred variations, now eloquent, now fanciful, now jesting, but always graceful and sincere.
His philosophy, if such it may be called, is that love moves the world : cf . stanza in Rolla beginning —
" J'aime ! voila le mot que la nature enti^re Crie au vent qui I'emporte, a I'oiseau qui le suit " ;
that man only attains to self-knowledge through grief and suffering —
" Rien ne nous rend si grands qu'une grande douleur "
{Nuit de Mai) ;
" L'homme est un appreuti, la douleur est son maltre Et nul ne se connait tant qu'il n'a pas souffert "
{Nuit dVctobre) ;
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 97
and that short-lived happiness, or even suffering, may be the memory of them, will be the very life of his soul —
" O puissance du temps ! 6 legeres ann6es ! Vous emportez nos pleurs, nos cris et nos regrets ; Mais la pitie vous prend, et sur ces fleurs fanees Vous ne marchez jamais.
" Je me dis seulement : ' A cette heure, en ce lieu Un jour je fus aim^, j'aimais, elle etait belle.' J'enfouis ce tresor dans mon ame immortelle
Et je I'emporte a Dieu." — Souvenir.
Musset was the most introspective of all the Romantics,
. and his four Nuits, which alone would have
secured him a high rank as a poet, are an
interesting psychological study of the anguish he went
through after his rupture with George Sand.
In La Nuit de Mai the poet is in a state of hopeless des- ' pair, and the Muse who visits him to suggest new themes of inspiration is repulsed in spite of her cry :
"Le plus desesperes sont les chants les plus beaux Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots."
Even the description of the pelican feeding her young fails to convince, and the poet has the last word :
" J'ai soufEert un dur martyr e Et le moins que j'en pourrais dire Si je I'essayais sur ma lyre, La briserait comme un roseau."
In La Nuit de Decembre Musset tells us of a curious hallu- cination which has been his since early childhood :
" Partout ou j'ai voulu dormir, Partout ou j'ai voulu mourir, Partout ou j'ai touche la terre, Sur ma route est venu s'asseoir Un malheureux vetu de noir Qui me ressemblait comme un fr^re."
And this wraith he interprets as his own moral solitude made visible. The Nuit d'Aoill strikes a more hopeful note.
VOL. II. — 7
98 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
This time the poet appeals to the Muse, not the Muse to the poet :
" Aprte avoir souffert il faut souffrir encore ; II faut aimer sans cesse apres avoir aime."
Finally, in the Nuit d'Octobre, the most beautiful of the series, the poet has attained a certain serenity and is more able to see things in their true proportion.
" II est doux de sourire, il est doux de pleurer Au souvenir des maux qu'on pourrait oublier,"
he cries, and the Muse responds :
" Le coup dont tu te plains t'a pr^serv6 peut-etre, Enfant ; car c'est par Ik que ton coeur s'est ouvert."
The fact that Musset saw nothing in the universe except himself and his emotions makes him a Romantic of the Romantics :
" Le coeur humain de qui, le coeur humain de quoi, Mais morbleu ! . . . j'ai mon coeur humain moi."
— Namouna.
In other respects he differs widely from the other members of
his school, at whom, indeed, he was rather fond
among the of poking fun (cf . Namoiina, Simone, Reponse d
M. Charles Nodier), for he had, as we have seen,
the sense of humour, and hence of proportion, which was
denied to most of them. In the Les Secretes pensecs de
Rafael he hails the
" Classiques bien rasfe a la face vermeille, Romantiques barbus aux visages blemis,"
and takes pride in his own catholicity of taste —
" Racine, rencontrant Shakespeare sur ma table, S'endort pres de Boileau qui leur a pardonn6 " —
admiring the classical writers for their universality and the
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY 99
Romantics for their originality, and to a certain degree, at least, he combined these two characteristics in his own work. Nature meant nothing to Musset, nor did he care about the future progress of the world, and this differentiates him from Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Vigny. His range is narrower, his language much simpler than theirs, and his technique much less perfect. But he can be as musical as Lamartine when he chooses — as, for instance, in the delicious Chanson de Fortunio, which sings itself — and though he makes as sparing a use of metaphor as Vigny, he has a fine sense of the suggestive power of words, be they only proper nouns, as in the following symphonic picture, put into the mouth of the Muse in La Ntiit de Mai :
" Voici la verte Ecosse et la bnine Italie, Et la Grece ma mere ou le niiel est si doux, Argos et Pteleon, ville des hecatombes ; Et Messa la divine agreable aux colombes ; Et le front chevelu du Pelion changeant ; Et le bleu Titarese, et le golfe d'argent Qui niontre dans ses eaux, ou le cj^gne se mire, La blanche Oloosone a la blanche Camj^re."
In these lines the combination of plastic beauty, music, and the mysterious suggestiveness of geographical names is unsurpassed, if not unrivalled, in the French language.
Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset are the greatest among the Romantic
POETS OF poets, and throw all the others into the shade, "even Sainte-Beuve, whose charming Poesies de Joseph Delorme (1829), Consolations (1830), and Pensees d'Aout (1837), simple meditative poems revealing a close observation of nature, owe much to the English Lake School of Poetry. Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) is some- times classed with the four great poets of the age, but since his poetry, the best of which appearied after 1850, marks the transition from the emotional and subjective attitude of the Romantic school to the impersonal and objective manner of the Parnassians, it will be dealt with later.
100 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
In any strictly chronological survey of the romantic Ijric in France, the very first name which deserves
KjoQafYig Dps*
bordes-vaimore mention is that of a poetess. Marceline Des- -I 59 bordes-Valmore (1786-1859), singer and actress, when forced by the loss of her voice to leave the stage, sought consolation for this misfortune, and for an unhappy love-affair, in writing poetry. Her Elegies et Romances, which appeared in 1818, two years before Lamartine's Premieres Meditations, were the first French lyrics of the nineteenth century with an unmistakable personal ring, and the first to express passion. Of this collection Sainte-Beuve wrote many years later : " Voila un genie charmant, leger, plaintif, reveur, desole, le genie de I'elegie et de la romance qui se fait entendre sur ces tons pour la premiere fois ; il ne doit rien qu'a son propre coeur." ^ And indeed Madame Desbordes-Valmore deserves a place in any anthology of elegiac verse.
" La tristesse est reveuse et je reve souvent ! La nature m'y porte, on la trompe avec peine. Je reve au bruit de I'eau qui se prom^ne, Au murmure du saule agite par le vent. J'ecoute. . . . Un souvenir repond a ma tristesse, Un autre souvenir s'eveille dans mon coeur : Chaque objet me penetre, et repand sa couleur Sur le sentiment qui m'oppresse." ^
Even this early volume is full of those musical phrases and delicate images which only come to the poet who is born, not made, and her later collections, Elegies et Poesies Nou- velles (1825), Fleiirs (1834), Pauvres Fleurs (1837), ^-^^ Bouquets et Prieres (1843), in spite of certain inequalities, amply fulfil the promise of her first poetic venture.
Two little-read poets who represent the most extravagant ^ , , , phase of the French Romantic movement are
Gerard de ^
Nerval Gerard de Nerval and Petrus Borel. Gerard
(1808-1885) ^g Nerval (1808-1885), whose translation of
Faust was greatly admired by Goethe, was a dreamer and
1 Portraits Contemporains, ii. ^ L'Arbrisseau.
THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL OF POETRY loi
a visionary, who lost his reason and died by his own hand, a victim to the sense of the supernatural which had haunted him all his life. Les Cydalises and Chimeres, a sonnet sequence, reveal an intense mysticism and a rarity of form and expression which is not without obscurity.
Petrus Borel (1809-1859) was a melodramatic Bohemian filled with a blind frenzy against the bourgeoisie ^^8^-1^859^ ^^*^ ^^^ i^it^^. influence on art and letters. His announcement,
"Je prends mon Moi pour thfeme avec emportement,"
is more than fulfilled in Rhapsodies (1832), which, in spite of some fine verses, is an incoherent piece of work.
Three poets of this period, Barbier, Beranger, and Brizeux, the first only slightly connected with the Romantic school, the other two not at all, deserve a mention here. Auguste Barbier (1805-1882) leapt suddenly into fame
with his lamhes (1831-1832), which, inspired, like ■^Tsos-^ss^f ' ^^^™i^ Delavigne's Messeniennes (1818), by
the political events of his day, reveal a vehement gift of picturesque satire, and are a lashing indictment of the worship of glory and the lust of political power, of which in the twenty-five years of his life he had already seen so much. The lamhes were followed by II Pianto (1832), a collection of poems on the departed glories and later degradation of Italy, which Barbier had visited in company with the Breton poet, Brizeux ; and Lazare (1833), the record of a visit to England, during which the poet was disagreeably impressed by the contrast between the splen- dour and luxury of the life of the rich and the misery and squalor in which the working classes lived.
Pierre Jean de Beranger (1780-1857), the political singer
for the man in the street, and, hke Hugo, a (^78^35^7) creator of the Napoleonic legend, stood quite
outside the Romantic group, such literary taste as he possessed being purely pseudo-classical. His Chansons (1815-1833), democratic in tone and eminently singable, had an immense popularity in their day, their refrains
102 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
being in every mouth (cf. Le Roi d'Yvefot, Les Souvenirs du Peuple). Augusta Brizeux (1803-1858), whose imagination had
been filled from early childhood with the Celtic (1^3-1858) lore of his native Brittany — "la terre de granit
recouverte de chenes " — and who is, perhaps, the first representative of regionalism in French literature, is inspired by the depth and passion of Celtic love in the graceful elegies of Marie (1831), and by the legends, tradi- tions, and superstitions of Brittany and Celtic romance in Les Bretons {1845) and in Histoires Poetiques (1855).
I
CHAPTER V THE ROMANTIC DRAMA
THE Romantics were less successful in the drama than in poetry or the novel, but the theatre was their chief battleground, and it was on the stage that they scored their popular though short-lived triumph.
Three influences affected the formation of French
I. INFLUENCES Romautic drama — the historical tragedy of
TKE^FORMA- other countries, notably of England and Ger-
roman™ niany ; native mel odrama ; and the anti- class ical
DRAMA obsessiQaofRamajitic dramatists and theorists.
Ever since the days of Voltaire, French"dramatists,
though they still clung to the framework of
Foreign ^" classical tragedy and obeyed its laws, had been
^t^°gedy endeavouring to introduce more movement,
more variety, and more spectacle into their
plays, and had chosen their subjects mainly from modern
and medieval rather than from ancient history. Between
1800 and 1825 historical dramas of this kind were very
numerous, the most important being Nepomucene Lemer-
cier's Pinto (1800), which dramatizes a twenty-four hours'
revolution in Portugal, mingles comic and tragic episodes,
and has a strong picturesque element ; Casimir Delavigne's
Vepres Siciliennes (1819) ; and two tragedies by Pierre
Lebrun — Marie Stuart (1820), inspired by Schiller, and Le
Cid d'Andaloiisie (1825), the plot of which was borrowed
from Lope de Vega. All these dramatists, who, as Musset
later wittily remarked, " committed a romantic crime with
extenuating circumstances," were influenced in their choice
and treatment of plot by foreign playwrights, and most
103
104 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
of them owed a debt to Schiller. In 1822 a collection of plays, entitled Chefs d'ceuvre des theatres etrangers (1822), was hailed with delight, and when immediately after the appearance of Victor Hugo's dramatic manifesto, La Preface de Cromwell, a Shakespearean company, including Charles Kemble, Macready, and Miss Henrietta Smithson, visited Paris and gave performances in English of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, etc., enthusiasm knew no bounds. While historical dramatists of the pseudo-classical school were making their somewhat timid innovations, a popular drama had arisen which found far more favour with the general public. This was melodrama, which had its home at the theatres of L'Ambigu, La Gaiete, and La Porte St. Martin. When the Revolution had come and gone, the populace, hitherto content with the primitive and mainly comic entertainments provided by the theatres de lafoire, was ready and eager for the dramatic representation of nobler emotions, and Guilbert de Pixerecourt, the king of melodrama, or the " Corneille des boulevards," as he has been called, was there to supply the demand. Pixerecourt (1773-1844) was far from being the only purveyor of this popular drama, which flourished exceedingly between 1800 and 1840, but he was the best and most prolific of them. Of the hundred and twenty plays he is said to have pro- duced, he selected twenty-four for publication under the title Theatre Choisi (1843), with a preface by his friend,- Charles Nodier. Of these the most popular were Victor, ou V enfant de la foret (1797), Ccelinq, ou I' enfant du mystere {1801), Christophe Colomb (1S15). Pixerecourt sought his subjects :'n French and European history and fiction, borrow- ing his plots freely from Schiller, Goethe, aftd Kotzebue, and from English plays and novels. True to their type, these three-act melodramas are sensational in plot and situation, and extremely spectacular. </ Each of them contains four main characters — a villain or traitor of the deepest dye ; an unfortunate and innocent heroine, who is a model of all the virtues ; a single-minded hero, who always turns up in the nick of time to protect or save her ; and a simpleton,
THE ROMANTIC DRAMA 105
generally a soldier or a peasant, who provides the comic relief — for the mingling of tragedy and comedy is an essen- tial feature of these plays. The conflict, such as it is, is invariably between unmitigated vice and irreproachable virtue. Virtue triumphs in the end — the hero and heroine are married, and the villain dies. The plays are written in grandiloquent prose, and are strewn with virtuous and moral reflections of an extraordinary platitude. Of char- acter-drawing there is not a trace, and all gradations of light and shade are abolished. In Pixerecourt's melodramas, music, which had originally formed a running accompani- ! ment to the action of this type of play,^ still plays an important part, being used to emphasize strong situations and to bring on and off the stage the more important characters. How much the Romantics owed to melodrama : we shall see in studying the dramatic work of Hugo and the elder Dumas.
The dramatic theories of the Romantics were mainly
THEORY OP ^^^^^^^^ ^y opposition to the French classical 'romantic tradition and by admiration for the freer stage
DRAMA
of Germany, England, and Spain. They find , their fullest expression in Victor Hugo's Preface de Cromwell (1827). Certain details were further elaborated by Hugo in the prefaces to his subsequent plays, and by Alfred de Vigny and Dumas in similar avant-propos to their respective dramas. The main ideas developed by Hugo in this mani- festo and elsewhere may be briefly summarized as follows : — • The function of drama is to give, not a one-sided and , ^. .^ mutilated picture of life, but " tout regarde k la
Leading ideas -^ °
of the Preface fois SOUS toutcs scs faccs." In his later prefaces Hugo insists that the object of this " resurrec- tion de la vie integrale " is to give " a la foule une philoso- phic, aux idees une formule . , . k ceux qui pensent une iexplication desinteressee." Hence " le theatre est une tribune, le theatre est une chaire." In real life, beauty and ugliness, the sublime and the grotesque, are found side by
^ In Italian the word melodramma is still used to denote a kind of musical drama.
io6 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
side, and since "la poesie complete est dans rharmonie des contrastes," the old arbitrary distinction between tragedy and comedy must go and the two dramatic forms be blended in a new type of drama with a framework sufficiently comprehensive to include the essential characteristics of both. If the dramatis personae are to be true to life, they must be individual and complex characters placed in their correct historical setting, and must wear the costumes, speak the language, and behave according to the customs of their age and clime. Local colour is essential : " le drame doit etre impregne de la couleur des temps ; elle doit a quelque sorte y etre en I'air." Again, the broad and varied painting of life which the drama should give is incompatible with an observance of the unities of time and place. To observe them, " c'est mutiler hommes et choses ; c'est faire grimacer I'histoire." Unity of action, however — which Victor Hugo would not have us confound with simplicity of action — is to be maintained. Otherwise, within the limits of his own artistic conscience, the dramatist is free as air to do as he pleases, though he will be wise always to choose the char- acteristic, be it sublime, beautiful, ugly, or grotesque — for in so doing, whether prose or verse be his medium, he will write " comme un homme qu'ime fee aurait done de lame de Corneille et de la tete de Moliere."
It has been very justly remarked that in the Preface de , Cromwell " what is new is not true, and what is
Importance of .
the Prejace true IS uot ucw." Hugo's thcory of thrcc stagcs
de Cromwell <• , i • • i i , • i
of poetry, lyric, epic, and dramatic, correspond- ing to three ages of the world, primitive times, antiquity, and modern days, and represented by the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare, is a neat but purely fantastic one, while his belief that modern poetry is distinguished from ancient by its use of grotesque and farcical elements has no foundation in fact. On the other hand, he was by no means the first to attack the LTnities and to say in effect, " C'est avec les ciseaux des Unites qu'on a coupe I'aile de nos plus grands poetes," for Madame de Stael, Schlegel, Stendhal {Racine et Shakespeare, 1822), and Manzoni [Lettre stir les Unites,
THE ROMANTIC DRAMA ' 107
translated by Fauriel in 1823), had been before him in that field. As for his recommendations on the subject of local colour and the fusing of tragedy and comedy, he merely elaborates what had been said by some of the same theorists and actually put into practice by Lemercier, Pixerecourt, and others.
Nevertheless, the historical importance of the Preface is very great, for in it Victor Hugo, at the psychological mo- ment, developed and combined scattered ideas which were already in the air with such emphasis and with such a wealth of rhetoric and imagery that, as Theophile Gautier picturesquely phrases it, the Preface de Cromivell " rayon- nait . . . comme les tables de la loi sur le Sinai et ses arguments semblaient sans replique."
How far the Romantics were successful in the application of their dramatic theories may best be seen by a study of their respective plays.
The play to which Hugo's famous manifesto formed a Preface, Cromwell (1827) was, with its five acts,
in THE \ / / '
ROMANTIC seventy-five scenes — most of them very long — DRAMATISTS ^j^^ sixty Speaking characters, quite unactable, nor indeed was it intended for the stage. Its plot turns on the Protector's ambition for kingship, and the play was written to illustrate the preface not the preface to explain the play. Despite its youthful crudity — Victor Hugo was only twenty-three when he wrote it — Cronmiell is perhaps the fullest and most logical application that he ever made of his dramatic doctrine. In it he en- deavours to represent a whole epoch, to make a complex character, with all its contradictions, the pivot of the action, and to use a modern natural style, even though he writes in verse. In this last he was successful — but his other two ambitions wreck the play ; for the dramatist must concen- trate and simplify, otherwise he should give up drama for the novel. Victor Hugo never made this mistake to the same extent again, though he made many others. In various ways his subsequent plays — in verse, Hernani (1830), Marion Delormc (1831), Le Roi s'amusc (1832), Riiy Bias
io8 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
(1835), Les Burgraves (1843) ; in prose, Lucrece Borgia (1833), Marie Tudor (1833), Angelo (1835) — are far from being a perfect illustration of the precepts laid down in the Preface de Cromwell. That they are true to life is the very last thing that can be said of them. Situations and characters alike are not only exceptional, startling, and improbable, but they are magnified and distorted out of any resemblance with reality. Further, the characterization is of the most rudi- mentary kind. Each of Hugo's heroes and heroines is a living embodiment of two contradictory tendencies, sublime or beautiful, ugly or grotesque, brought into sharp contrast without any half-lights or gradations. Hugo constantly underlines this antithesis in his characters ; and a spark of virtue or nobility is struck from the soul of the most hardened sinners. With them it is always a case of "la boue, mais I'ame." Under the garb of a bandit beats the heart of a noble-minded hero — Hernani ; a thoroughly corrupt woman is ennobled by her love for a pure-minded man — Marion Delorme ; a murderess is sanctified by her intense maternal love — Lucrece Borgia ; a hideous and deformed monster is transfigured by devotion to his son — Triboulet (in Le Roi s' amuse), etc. The tirades he so fiercely denounces in the Preface appear in almost every scene of his own plays, and indeed it is to these lyrical and epic outbursts that they owe most of their power and beauty. This is so much the case that Sarcey once wrote :
" Tout I'art de Hugo consiste a mettre violemment ses person- nages dans une position ou ils puissent aisement s'epancher en odes, en pieces de vers."
Even the "local colour," on which Hugo so much prided himself, and which in his case depends entirely on scenery and on the suggestive quality of his owti verse, is a some- what superficial thing, for he is quite incapable of creating historical atmosphere, and his interpretation of history was, as a rule, unsound. Thus Hugo's plays contain neither enough human nor enough historical truth to please a cultured taste, and they depend for their interest entirely
THE ROMANTIC DRAMA 109
on their thrills and surprises and on the glamour of their style. In other words, they are the melodramas of a man of genius. The characters to a certain extent approximate to the conventional types of melodrama ; the plots are melo- dramatic in the extreme, and rely on all the stage proper- ties of melodrama, trap- doors, secret staircases, subter- ranean passages, sliding panels, etc. Some important differences there are undoubtedly. In Hugo's plays virtue is not invariably rewarded ; his villains are not common melodramatic villains, but embodiments of evil, of fate, of Satan ; and his heroes are of Byronic mould, gloomy, mysterious creatures, who might all say with Hemani :
" Tu me crois peut-etre Un homme comme sont tous les autres, un 6tre Intelligent, qui court droit au but qu'il reva. Detrompe toi. Je suis une force qui va ! Agent aveugle et sourd de mysteres funebres ! Une ame de mallieur fait avec des tenebres ! Ou vais-je ? Je ne sais. Mais je me sens pousse, D'un soufiBle impetueux, d'un destin insens6."
Act III, So. 4.j_
Lastly, Hugo's plays differ from melodrama in that they all aim at proving some social or political thesis, and thus have that philosophical intention with which their author somewhat wearies us in his prefaces. Hugo's finest drama- tic creations are Hemani and Ruy Bias, and this mainly by reason of the splendour and imaginative quality of their verse ; but even when stripped of this ornament [Liicrece Borgia, Marie Tudor), his drama is redeemed by its vigour and its emotional intensity. M. Glachant, quoting Jules Janin's judgment of Angela, the worst of Hugo's prose dramas : " C'est du Shakespeare, dit la louange — C'est du Pixerecourt, dit la critique," continues : " C'est du Victor Hugo, reprend la vraie et sage critique." ^
Hugo's last two plays, Les Burgraves and Torquemada, are epics in dramatic form. Les Burgraves, which was hissed
^ Essai critique sttr le tMdtre de Victor Hugo. Les Drames en prose, p. 8 (Hachette, 1903).
no A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
off the stage in 1843, is a splendid gallery of epic heroes — four generations of Burgraves (the youngest but one ninety years of age), all living at the same time, and joined by Barbarossa, awakened from his magic sleep — too vast and improbable a subject for a play, but magnificent if regarded as a prelude to La Lcgende des Siecles.
Victor Hugo attempted the impossible feat of making drama a synthesis of all forms of literary art, epic, lyric, and dramatic, and such an attempt was, by reason of its very vastness and incongruity, doomed to failure.
To Alexandre Dumas (1803-1870) belongs the honour of having ^vritten the first romantic drama to be
i^'^s^the performed — Henri III et sa cour (1829). This*^
,,o Elder f^j-st success was immediately followed by numer- ous other historical plays, of which the most important are Christine de Suede, written before Henri III, but not performed till 1830 ; Charles VII et ses grands vas- saux (1831) ; and La Tour de Nesle (1832) ; a prose melo-'^ drama., Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle (1839), etc. Interspersed with these historical plays of the romantic kind came others on contemporary subjects, Antony (1831), Richard Darlington (1831), Kean (1836), in which the heroes are all individual- ists of the gloomy romantic type, misunderstood and ham- pered by their circumstances, and hence in revolt against society and its moral code.
Dumas' plays have the same melodramatic character- / istics as Hugo's, and they are equally weak in psychological ^ analysis. On the other hand, though they have none of the literary qualities which mask the shortcomings of Hugo's dramas, they reveal an instinct for the stage which Hugo was far from possessing. Dumas' boast that all he required for success was " four boards, two actors, and a passion," was not an empty one, and he admirably practised his conception of the whole art of the dramatist, which consisted in making " the first act clear, the last act short, and all the acts interesting." Hence, while Hugo's dramas give greater pleasure to the reader than to the play-goer, the plays of Dumas are not worth reading, but, in spite of their faults,
THE ROMANTIC DRAMA iii
they make good stage-plays, by reason of their skilful tech- nique, their movement, and their vitality.
Psychological insight, conspicuous by its absence in the dramatic work of Hugo and Dumas, is, as might
^Vigny^^ be expected from what we know of his poetry, an essential characteristic of the plays of Vigny, who began his dramatic career with two verse adaptations of Shakespeare : Shylock (1828), which was never acted, and Othello (1829), the first performance of which was hailed with acclamation, and did much to assure the romantic triumph on the stage. Vigny 's original contribution to the drama consists of three plays only — a one-act comedy, Quitte pour la peur (1833), and two tragedies in prose, La Marcchale d'Ancre (1831), which dramatizes a historical episode of the minority of Louis XHI, and is designed to illustrate the power of destiny, and Chatterton (1835), a philosophical drama in three acts on his favourite theme : the tragedy of genius in a materialistic society.
Chatterton may be regarded as the most original of all the romantic dramas — though it is more interesting as an analytical study than as a play. The conflict is an entirely psychological one, and is not dependent on outward incident. "Chatterton," says Vigny himself, "est I'histoire d'un homme qui a ecrit une lettre le matin et qui attend la reponse jusqu'au soir : elle arrive et le tue." This sim- plicity of plot is unusual in romantic drama, and so is the absence of sensational incidents. On the other hand, Chatterton, the proud Romantic egoist, the " etre k part," with his eloquent monologues on the poet's mission — his own personal misfortunes — is true to type, and the bourgeois counterpart of many another romantic hero.
The plays of Alfred de Musset are quite the best produced by the Romantic school. Musset 's ideas natur-
^Muwet^ ally took a dramatic form, as may be seen in Les
Marrons dufeii, Le Spectacle dans un fauieuil, La
Coupe et les Levres, and A quoi revent les jcunes filles, all
contained in the Premieres Poesies. The performance of his
one-act Nuit Venitienne (1831) was so little of a success that
112 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Musset forswore writing for the stage, and though he con- tinued to write plays, he did so without a thought of their representation, and hence was free to eliminate all theatrical conventions. Since he had a strong dramatic instinct his plays gained rather than lost by this freedom. Most of his pieces appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes between 1833 and 1837, 3-^d were published in book form in 1840 with the title Comedies et Proverbes {Proverbes, because many of them, like On ne badine pais avec I' Amour, II faut qu'une porte soil ouverte on fermee, II ne faut jurer de rien, etc., exemplify familiar proverbial sayings). The collection passed almost unnoticed, and the sudden popularity some years later of the plays which composed it has a curious history. In 1847 a French actress, Madame Allan-Despreaux, during a visit to St. Petersburg was taken to see a little Russian play which was drawing large audiences. Charmed with the piece, she wished to have it translated into French, and then discovered that it was Musset's Un Caprice. On her return to France she produced the play in Paris with such success that the performance of Musset's other Comedies et Proverbes soon followed. This unexpected success induced Musset to write three more comedies : On ne saurait penser a tout (1849), Carmosine (1850), and Bettine (1851).
All these plays are written in Musset's inimitable prose, and they are all in three acts, except Lorenzaccio ^ which is in five. This play and another, Andre del Sarto, differ from the rest by their historical subjects and setting, but fine as they are, they scarcely equal the little love-comedies among which it is difficult to choose, so delightful are they all. But if a selection must be made, Fantasio, Les Caprices de Marianne, and Barberine should be added to the Proverbes above-mentioned.
Musset's plays, as M. Strowski has pointed out, have the Shakespearean gift of transporting us into an unreal world which is at once richer, truer, and more beauti- ful than the real world. They are of the very essence of romance, though they are entirely divested of all the usual romantic accessories. Whether the scene be nominally
THE ROMANTIC DRAMA 113
laid in Italy, Bavaria, Hungary, the coujitry-side in France or nowhere in particular, the characters live and move in an atmosphere of poetry and romance, where it is always spring and always afternoon. But the characters them- selves are real enough, and the various phases of feeling through which they pass are exquisitely noted, for Musset, who had the power of seeing himself, objectively gives them his own emotional experiences. Love is the mainspring - of each and every plot — from light love through all the intervening stages to an ideal love, which is less intense than the tragic passion of Racine but far profoimder than the elegant gallantry of Marivaux. As for the dialogue, turn by turn witty, dreamy or passionate, always captivating, it has in an eminent degree the poetical quality of suggesting more than it expresses. By this wonderful blending of fancy and reality, wit and pathos, and by the magic of their j style, Musset's plays, slight as they are, are little master- pieces which have never been equalled in their kind. Romanticism, with its individualism, its lyric tendency,
its preoccupation with the pictiuesque aspect of
^"of^e'e^^ history, and its desire to give " une peinture
ROMANTIC large de la vie" (in which "large" may be
taken as synonymous with vast) was by the very nature of its programme doomed to fail on the stage for the very reasons that made it successful in poetry and the novel, and in history as a " resurrection of the past." And, indeed, romantic drama was but a flash in the pan, and died with the generation which had given it birth, and whose tastes it represented.
In 1843, the year that Les Burgraves was hissed off the
stage and Victor Hugo abandoned the drama in (i8°4-i867) consequence, Frangois Ponsard (1814-1867) won
a great triumph at the Odeon with a classical tragedy, Lucrece. This play, which was far from being a masterpiece, owed much of its success to the great tragic actress, Rachel, who since 1838 had been reviving the tragedies of Corneille and Racine at the Comedie Fran^aise, and thus inaugurated a reaction in favour of classical drama.
VOL. II. — 8
114 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Nevertheless, neither Ponsard nor anyone else repeated the success of Lucrece, though ever since the time of Rachel the plays of Corneille and Racine have had a place in the repertory of the Comedie Fran9aise and of the Odeon. It was too late to write new tragedies in the classical form, after the Romantic school had swept away all dramatic rules and conventions. But if classical tragedy was dead beyond resurrection, romantic drama with its exaggerations and eccentricities was in its death-throes, and, as we shall see later, was succeeded by a form of drama at once lighter and more serious which aimed either at giving a realistic picture of manners or at dramatizing some social problem.
CHAPTER VI
PROSE FICTION DURING THE ROMANTIC
PERIOD
THE NOVEL AND THE SHORT STORY
THE Romantic spirit made its first definite en- trance into literature through the novels of J.-J. Rousseau, Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Ben- jamin Constant, and Senancour. La Nouvelle Heloise, Delphine and Corinne, Atala and Rene, Ober-
I. THE NOVEL ^ j a j ij.7 -u ^ ^ x- Ti. ^
man and Adolplie belong to romantic literature by their semi-autobiographical character, by their intense individualism, and by the violence and gloom of the passions they depict. After 1825 this youngest and least rule-ridden literary form became, as it has since remained, the most popular and the most widely cultivated of all literary kinds, and either continued to be a medium for the expression of private and personal emotion and for psycho- logical analysis, or transformed itself into a vehicle for a picturesque revival of the historical past, for the representa- tion of actual or ideal conditions, and for the embodiment of social or political theories.-
All the great Romantics were first and foremost lyrical poets, but they also prided themselves on being novelists, and from the artistic point of view their novels are as superior to their plays as they are inferior to their best l3Tical poetry. The novels of the Romantic period may be roughly divided into three kinds : the novel of sentiment, the historical romance, and the novel of contemporary manners, which in the hands of Balzac approaches closely to pure realism.
115
ii6 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
The sentimental and analytical novel was not the creation of the Romantic school. It had its far-off and ^'mental^and primitive beginnings in the romances of Chretien ^^novel'^ ds Troyes and in the Cante-fable Aucassin et Nicolette ; in the seventeenth century it is represented by the long-winded affected novels of Scudery and La Calprenede, and by the short and simple Princesse de Cleves ; in the eighteenth century, after Maiion Lescaut, it finds its best example in La Nouvclle Heloise, the first link in the chain which connects Atala, Rene, Delphine, Corinne, and Adolphe. The Romantics proper very naturally con- tinued to write this kind of novel, which gives ample scope for the display of individuality. Autobiogr?phical, senti- mental and lyrical in the hands of Lamartine — Raphael (1849), Graziella (1852), and Jocclyn (1836), which though in verse is in all essentials a novel ; autobiographical, sentimental, and analytical in the hands of Sainte-Beuve, Volupte (1834) ; of Vigny, Stcllo (1832), and of Musset, La Confession d'un Enfant dii siecle (1836), the novel of ideal personal sentiment reaches its high-water mark during the Romantic period in the work of Stendhal, and in the early romances of George Sand.
Lucile-Aurore Dupin, who later took the pen-name of Georee Sand .Greorge Sand, the daughter of an aristocratic (1804-1876) father and a plebeian mother, was born in
Early life p^j-jg^ \y^^ passed her early childhood with her grandmother at Nohant in Berry. In this lovely region she spent her days roaming the country-side with little peasants of her own age, and acquiring that love of nature which inspired much of her later work. At thirteen she was sent to be educated at a convent in Paris, where after a period of two years of naughtiness she became intensely religious. When in 1820 she was called to the sick-bed of her grandmother, the resumption of a country life cooled her religious exaltation, and she began to read enthusiastically all the poets, moralists, philosophers, and historians she could lay hands on. In 1822, shortly after the death of her grandmother, she married the Baron Dude-
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 117
vant, a man of vulgar tastes and no intellectual interests. She separated from him in 1830, and came to Paris with her two children to earn a livelihood by her pen. Her first novel, Rose et Blanche (1831), was written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau, from whom she took the pseudonym, under which all her subsequent novels appeared. After a journey to Italy in the company of Musset, George Sand settled at Nohant, which she left only occasionally when on travel bent. Here she wrote nearly all her books, and was known in the neighbourhood as "la bonne dame de Nohant."
Besides her autobiographical works {Souvenirs, Histoire de ma vie, Elle et Lui), descriptions of travel in Italy (Leitres d'un voyageur), plays, and her vast Correspondence (six vols.), she wrote about a hundred novels and tales, in which she achieved her avowed aim as an artist, " idealisation du sentiment . . . dans un cadre de realite." These novels fall into four main groups, which correspond roughly to four periods in her mental outlook. The novels of the two middle periods, 1837-1852, are novels of manners, and will be dealt with in their proper place, while those she wrote at the beginning and end of her career are romantic love- novels.
At first a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, and Her romantic stiU obscsscd by the unhappiucss of her own love-novels married life, George Sand wrote Indiana (1831), Valentine (1832), Lelia (1833), Jacques (1834), and Mauprat (1837), under the dictation of her personal experiences, and gave unrestrained expression to her feelings of revolt against loveless marriage, male tyranny, and the subjugation of women. All these novels contain a plea for the rights of individuality, more especially from the feminist point of view, and a condemnation of society, which hampers its free development. After this frenzied outburst of individualism she used the novel as a vehicle for socialist and humanitarian ideals, and for painting charming idylls of peasant life, and finally in her later years she returned to the novel of pure sentiment, of
ii8 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
which the best examples are Jean de la Roche (i860), and Le Marquis de Villemer (1861). Both are penetrating studies of the psychology of the young girl who is no longer a child and not yet a woman. They are full of fine nature descrip- tions, and are much less violent and exalted in tone than the early novels.
Stendhal (1783-1842), whose real name was Henri Beyle, was born at Grenoble, and served under Napo- (i783-m2) 1^°" xmiil the end of the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. He idolized Napoleon as the incarnation of that force and energy of which in his own novels he is the apostle — and the very idea of the Restora- tion was hateful to him. Italy was the home of his choice, partly because he had an intense admiration for the violent and passionate temperament of its inhabitants. He lived in Milan from 1814 to 1821, was successively consul of Trieste and of Civitavecchia from 1830 to 1841, and died in Paris in 1842.
Stendhal began his literary career when he was a little over thirty by writing on music and musical composers, Vie de Haydn, Mozart et Metastase (1814-1817) ; on paint- ing, Histoire de la peinture en Italie (1817) ; on the beauties of Italy, Rome, Naples, Florence (1817), and on psychology, Essai sur V Amour (1822).
From 1823 to 1825 he contributed to Romantic propa- ganda by his Racine et Shakespeare, which appeared in two parts, and which develops the paradoxical idea that the great classical writers of France were romantic in their own time because their writings were in harmony with the spirit of the age in which they wrote, while the pseudo-classical writers of a later date had merely perpetuated a then dead and meaningless tradition, against which modern Romanti- cism must react at all costs.
The most famous of Stendhal's novels, Le Rouge et le Noir, Chronique de 1830 (1831), is the story of a proud, ambi- tious, and cynical young man, Julien Sorel, who, finding that the red coat of the soldier which led to glory under the Empire is no passport to fame under the Restoration, dons
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 119
the black coat of a priest for his ambitious purposes, and ends his life on the scaffold for attempted murder. La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), which opens with a wonderful description of the hero's experiences on the field of Waterloo, is mainly occupied with the characters and intrigues of a small Italian court in 1815. Both these novels reveal many romantic traits : their plots are melodramatic, and their heroes, Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo, excep- tional men placed in exceptional circumstances, are exam- ples of the beau tcnebreux, though not quite typical examples, for though they have their dreams, are fully conscious of their superiority to other men, and out of tune with their surroundings, they are not mere ineffectual dreamers, but men of energy and action. Yet despite the fact that the subject-matter and the heroes of Stendhal's novels are highly romantic, the psychology of the characters is so delicately analysed, and the style so impersonal and simple that what might otherwise have been ordinary novels of sentiment become forerunners of the modern novel of \ psychological analysis. The most secret motives of action are laid bare with an unerring hand, and the story proceeds without any of the disciu-sivcness or lyricism which too often characterize the novels of Stendhal's contemporaries. The style in which they are written is simple, condensed, and unadorned to the point of drjmess, and we can well believe their author when he writes : " En composant la Chartreuse, pour prendre le ton, je lisais chaque matin deux ou trois pages du code civil, afin d'etre toujours naturel." Stend- hal's novels found little favour with his contemporaries, though Merimee fully appreciated them, and prophesied that twentieth- century critics would do the same. This pro- phecy and Stendhal's own, " Je serai compris vers 1880," have been amply fulfilled. It was in 1882 that Bourget's Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine first brought him real celebrity, and gave him a secure place in the history of the French novel, and the interest and admiration which have since been lavished on the man and his work have given rise to the word Stendhalisme or Beylisme.
120 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
The Romantics were the creators of the historical novel
2 The his- ^^ France, being naturally led thereto by their
TORicAL NOVEL interest in national history and by their sense
AND THE r 1 o^l r
NOVEL OF of the picturesqueness of the past. 1 he germ of the historical romance is already to be found in Chateaubriand's Martyrs, but the real impetus was given by Scott's Waverley Novels.
French criticism began to deal with Scott's early novels in i8i6 : between i8iq and 1823 Victor Hugo
Influence of ' . , • • , • i . i • ?
Sir Walter wrotc various culogistic articlcs on them m Le
Conservateiir Litter aire and La Muse frangaise,
and in 1822 Defauconpret translated them into French.
When Walter Scott died in 1832 Sainte-Beuve wrote in Le
Globe :
" Ce n'est pas seulement un deuil pour I'Angleterre, e'en doit €tre un pour la France et pour le monde civilise, dont Walter Scott, plus qu'aucun autre des 6crivains du temps, a 6t6 comme I'enchanteur prodigue et I'aimable bienfaiteur."
Between 1820 and 1830 and even beyond that date, the vogue of Scott's novels in France passed all bounds. It was natural for any Frenchman trying his hand at historical fiction to imitate them, and it is not too much to say that all the best and worst historical novels of the Romantic school were inspired by the great Scottish novelist. The first important example of this new kind of fiction was Alfred de Vigny's Cinq Mars ou une Conjura-
^*Sr ^^'^^ ^^^^ ^°^" ^^^^ (1826), the story of the struggle between the ambitious young nobleman Cinq-Mars seeking place and power in order to win the hand of Marie de Gonzague, and the all-powerful Richelieu, who neither forgives nor forgets. Though Vigny had made long preparatory studies before writing it, Cinq-Mars, despite its ] accurate and vivid setting, is not a good historical novel, for its value as such is vitiated from the outset by its author's theory that the novelist has the right to modify historical facts in the direction of popular tradition,^ and by the fact
1 Cf. R6 flexions sur la veritd dans I' art, prefixed to the 1827 edition of Cinq-Mars.
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 121
that his treatment of an historical episode reflects his own IpoHtical sympathies and antipathies. As the latter were those of a royalist and an aristocrat born and bred, his Richelieu is a grotesque distortion of the historical Richelieu, while his Cinq-Mars is idealized out of all resemblance with the far from admirable conspirator of history. This partisan treatment of great historical personages is serious in Vigny's case, because he makes them the most prominent characters in the story. It also differentiates him from Scott, in whose footsteps he wished to tread, for Scott always regarded such historical figures with the impartial eye of the true artist, and rarely gave them a place in the foreground of his novels. A reader entirely ignorant of French history reading Cinq- Mars as a work of pure fiction in an historical setting will read it from cover to cover with delight, carried along by its dramatic incidents, its vivid pictures of the France of Louis XIII, and its admirable style.
Three years after Cinq-Mars appeared Prosper Merimee's Chronique dit regne de Charles IX (1829), an excel- ^T^l'de " lent historical novel with a fictitious plot, as ^\i&2<j)^ little picturesque description as there is much in Cinq-Mars, and with infinitely more suggestion of the atmosphere and way of life and thought of a definite historical period. It had been preceded by a few months by Balzac's Les Chouans, ou la Bretagne en 1799 (1829), in which ^"[i82gf"^ external and what may be termed " psychologi- cal " local colour are in perfect equilibrium. Nevertheless, this novel was less appreciated in its own day than either Cinq-Mars or Charles IX, probably because the subject with which it deals was almost contemporary history, and readers of the Romantic period preferred to have their emotions stirred by tales of a remoter past.
In 1831 appeared an historical novel from the pen of
Not Da Victor Hugo, which had a greater and more
de Paris lastiug succcss than any of its predecessors and
put them all into the shade. This was Notre-
Danie de Paris, which had the double advantage of a ficti-
122 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
tious plot, and of carrying the reader back to the late Middle Ages. Nolre-Dame de Paris was not Hugo's first novel — it had been preceded by two wildly extravagant tales of adven- ture, the legendary Han d'Islande (1823), with a gruesome hero who feeds on human flesh and drinks a mixture of blood and sea-water from the skulls of his victims, and the semi- historical Bug-Jargal (1826), the scene of which is laid in San Domingo during the slave revolt of 1791, and which glorifies a hero whose soul is as white as his skin is black. It had also been preceded by Le Dernier jour d'un Con- damne (1829), which describes the thoughts and feelings of an enlightened criminal during the last twenty-four hours of his life, and was the first of Victor Hugo's reiterated pleas for the abolition of capital punishment. These first essays in fiction pale before Notre-Dame de Paris, that masterly reconstruction of the outward life of the Paris of Louis XI in all its aspects. The story itself is crude and melodra- matic : the foundling gipsy-girl, Esmeralda, strays with her goat through the high and low places of medieval Paris, and is loved by four men, who are chosen to represent differ- ent strata of the society of the day : Pierre Gringoire, the poet ; Jehan Frollo, a priest and a villain, whose love turns to hate when he finds that it is not returned ; Quasimodo, the hunchback bellringer of Notre Dame and a man of the people who protects Esmeralda in all her misfortunes ; and Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers, a fatuous young sprig of the nobility, whom Esmeralda loves to the exclusion of all the others. She, Quasimodo, and Frollo all come to a tragic end, and Phoebus marries another.
Though by their names, their costume, their language, and their manners these characters belong to the fifteenth jCentury, their ideas and feelings are quite modern, and their /psychology is crude at that. The human beings in the novel are as it were absorbed into the wonderful colour and relief of their setting, and we read the book for the magnificence of its descriptions {Notre Dame, III, i ; Paris a vol d'Oiseau, III, ii ; Les Cloches, VII, iii), and for its masterly handling of medieval crowds [La grand' salle du Palais de Justice, I, i ;
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 123
La Place de Greve, II, ii) . The real heroine is not Esmeralda, but the great Gothic cathedral within whose precincts and shadow so many of the incidents take place, and whose architecture, atmosphere, history, and spirit are rendered with consummate skill, and lead to endless digressions, one of the most famous being embodied in the chapter " Ceci tuera cela," a brilliant essay on the fatal efect of the printed book on architecture.
Nearly thirty years elapsed between A^otre Dame and the appearance of Hugo's next novel, Les Miserahles, Les Mudrabies ^j^jd^ owcd its inspiration to the same demo- cratic and humanitarian ideas which underlie so much of George Sand's work. The hero, Jean Valjean, is an ex-convict, regenerated through the magnanimity of Bishop Myriel. When later by honest effort he has become a rich manufacturer, he allows himself to be given up to justice to shield an innocent person. He then disappears, but is hunted down by the police agent, Javert, whose life he saves. In gratitude for this Javert allows him to escape once more, and himself commits suicide because he has failed in his duty. When Jean Valjean dies he has assured the future happiness of his adopted daughter, Cosette, by marrying her to her lover, Marius. This in barest outline is the main plot of Les Miserahles, yet the most compact edition runs to 1,970 closely-printed pages, a full quarter of that number Deing taken up with extraneous episodes, digressions, and medita- tions.
The psj^chology of Jean Valjean, which is an excellent example of Hugo's love of antithesis, has been admirably summed up by Madame Duclaux : " Jean Valjean wears as it were two pouches : in one he has the experiences of a convict, in the other the instincts of a saint ; and his thoughts and deeds as he goes through life are extracted sometimes from the one and sometimes from the other."
Philosophical and symbolical, historical in parts (Water- loo, Paris in 1832, Les Barricades), now adventurous, now idyllic, now sordidly realistic, this vast novel is a curious medley of good and indifferent things, which are," with the
124 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITER.\TURE
rarest exception, the stuff of drama and poetrj^ but not of the novel." ^
After Les Miserahles came Les Travailleurs de la Mer , ^ .„ (1866), a fantastic romance of adventure sym-
de la Mer boHziug the Struggle of man with the forces of
nature, and regarded by many as his finest piece
of fiction ; and two more historical novels — L' Homme qui
rit (1869), an absurd caricature of English life and manners
under the Stuarts, followed in iSyz hy Quaire-Vingt-Treize,
an episode of the Revolution in La Vendee,
Quaire-Vingt- , . f . . . ^^ , , . , ,
Treize which, m spitc of Hugo s habitual haranguing ^ ^^ and digressing, shows him at his very best as a novelist, and is one of the finest historical novels ever wTitten in French. These later novels, like all their author's work, carry us far beyond the period we are studying, but they must be mentioned here, because to the end they retained typically Romantic qualities.
Thirteen years after the appearance of Notre-Dame de
Alexandre Paris, Alexandre Dumas the Elder (1803-1870) ^°EWer"^^ began the long series of his romans de cape (1803-1870) ^i d'epee, with Les trois Mousquetaires (1844, 8 vols).
The complete edition of Dumas' novels runs to some 250 volumes, and their subjects are taken from all periods of French history from the Middle Ages to his own day, but as Professor Saintsbury points out, the best and most justly famous of them are those which " come after Saint-Bartho- lomew and before Sainte-Guillotine." Dumas' fame as a novelist rests mainly on the D'Artagnan trilog}^ — Les Trois Mousquetaires, Vingt ans apres (1845), and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847) ; the Valois trilogy — Marguerite de Valois, La Dame de Monsoreau, and Les Quar ante-Cinq, and a few independent novels like Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1884-1845) and Le Tulipe Noir. Even though it has been proved that he had numerous collaborators so that the term " Dumas et O® " was no mere slanderous gibe, his output was enormous, and his inventiveness extraordinary. From this point of
^ Saintsbury: History of the French Novel, Vol. II (1919).
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 125
view Michelet's remark, " Monsieur je vous admire et je vous aime, vous etes une des forces de la nature," was amply justified. Most French literary historians either disregard Dumas' novels altogether, or dismiss them with a few con- temptuous remarks as being unworthy of the name of literature. It is true that he was neither a stylist nor a psychologist, that he had little historical imagination, and that, as he himself puts it, he only used history as a nail on which to hang his pictures. Yet a better story-teller never existed. From the first page to the last he knows how to arouse and hold his readers' interests, and to carry them along in the spirit of high adventure. His dialogue is lively and dramatic, and like Scott, he introduces it as no mere hors d'ceuvre, but as a means of carrying forward the story.
Dumas' novels have been well defined as " romanticized history rather than historical romance." A careful blending of the best qualities of Hugo and Dumas would have pro- duced a French Scott, but no such person was forthcoming. The romance of adventure, in meaner hands than those of the " Alexander the Great of Fiction," degenerated into the popular and unliterary feuilleton novel, while the historical romance proper died of a surfeit of local colour and pictur- esque description, not however before it had prepared the way for the triumph of the realistic novel and of history, which was by the very nature of things its fiercest and most uncompromising enemy, for to all but the most youthful readers well-told history is more satisfying than the best historical romance. " Qu'est ce qu'un roman d'histoire ? " inquires Brunetiere, ' ' quelque chose , . . qui sera de I'histoire si vous y cherchez le roman, mais qui demeurera du roman si vous y cherchez de I'histoire."
There are two kinds of historical novel — the kind we have* just been studying, which consists in a resuscita- ^'oF coNTEM- tion of past life and manners based on a study of
mTnneJs historical documents, and the novel which gives
a picture of contemporary manners, and which
acquires historical and documentary value with the passage
of time. In the one case past history is the source-book for
V
126 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
the novel ; in the other the novel is a source-book for future social historians. The transition from the historical romance to the novel of contemporary manners was thus an easy one. Novelists had but to transfer their search of local colour and picturesque detail from the past to the present and to realize that since the historical novel depended for its suc- cess on reviving what was life-like in the past, so the repre- sentation of what to-day is life-like will have enduring value in the future. Thus the historical novel of the early nine- teenth century prepared the way for the novel of contem- porary manners, and since, by its very nature, the historical novel demanded objective treatment, it took wTiters out of themselves, and thus helped to pave the w?.y for realism. The two chief representatives of the novel of manners during the Romantic period were a man and a and°BaizaTas womau who regarded life from almost diametric- "'tt»^\*toe°^ ally opposed standpoints, and who differed ac- cordingly in their interpretation of their time. They were George Sand and Balzac.
George Sand, an idealist and an optimist, chose for her main province the life and manners of peasants and of arti- sans in the country districts of Berry, Auvergne, Normandy, and Provence, and endowed them with the lofty humani- tarian aspirations, over which many of her contemporaries were waxing enthusiastic. The subjective element is pre- sent even in her socialistic novels, for she estimates the value of things and ideas only in proportion to the interest they arouse in her, and therefore her novels are apt to express the aspirations rather than the realities of her age.
Far otherwise is it with Balzac. He was perhaps no
better satisfied with existing conditions than was George
fSand, but he accepted men and things as he found them
and treated them objectively and impersonally. The task
he set himself was to give a vast picture of the life and
, manners of his age in all classes of society both in town and
I country, and as he was a pessimist, and the reverse of an
idealist, it was the darker and seamier side of contemporary
life which he saw most clearly and described most forcibly.
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 127
George Sand recounts a conversation she once had with Balzac, which admirably sums up these respective attitudes :
" Vous faites la Com^die humaine. Ce titre est modeste ; vous pourriez aussi bien dire le drame, la tragSdie humaine. Qui, me rcpondit-il, et vous, vous faites Vcpopde humaine. Cette fois, repris-je, le titre serait trop releve. Mais je voudrais faire Vcglogue humaine, le poime, le roman humain. En somme vous voulez et savez peindre I'homme tel qu'il est sous nos yeux, soit ! I\Ioi, je me sens portee a le peindre tel que je souhaite qu'il soit, tel que je crois qu'il droit etre." — Le Compagnon du Tour de France (Notice).
Until the year 1830, George Sand had only left Nohant
for a few brief visits to Paris and a journey to
humanita^r?an Italy, and her chief intellectual friend and
(183^1848) counsellor had been Sainte-Beuve. After 1833,
her society was sought after by certain members
of the Saint-Simonian school, delighted to find in her early
novels, Indiana, Valentine, and Lelia, an independent
expression of their own ideas about the emancipation of
women. In 1835 she made the acquaintance of
influe^cecTher four mcu — Michel de Bourges, Liszt, Lamennais,
'thfs^^eriod" 3-rid Picrrc Leroux, who were to have a great
influence upon her attitude towards life, and
hence upon her work.
It was Michel de Bourges, the eloquent counsel who secured her judicial separation from her husband, and a fiery demagogue to boot, who first interested George Sand in social and political questions, and inspired her with the democratic idealism which underlies all her later novels. The same year the great Hungarian composer, Liszt, who had for some years been an admirer of George Sand's powers as a novelist, secured an introduction to her through Alfred de ]\Iusset. Liszt had been in Paris since 1828, and took a great interest in all the literary, religious, and political aspirations of the day. The meeting between the musician and the novelist was the beginning of a serious friendship ; in tem- perament, conviction, and tastes they had much in common, and George Sand, though no performer, was passionately fond of music. Between 1835 and 1838 they saw a great deal
128 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
of each other, and in the summer of 1837 Liszt and Daniel Stern (Comtesse d'Agoult) spent several weeks at Nohant with George Sand. Every night the hostess and her guest sat up till the small hours of the morning, working, she at Mauprat, he at his pianoforte arrangement of Beethoven's symphonies.
Liszt's personality and his attitude towards life and art made a deep impression on George Sand. Since 1831 he had been in close touch with the Saint-Simonians, with whose conception of artists as the priests or spiritual directors of the society of the future he was in deep sympathy. Through her intercourse with him, George Sand, whose aesthetic sense had already been sharpened by Musset, became con- scious of the sacredness of the artist's vocation, and of the need to treat all art in a spirit of high seriousness. ^ Among the characters of her later novels {Consuelo, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, Lucrezia Floriani) figure many artists, mainly musicians, all filled with a sense of their mission and with the idea that genie oblige. It was also, thanks to Liszt as much as to Leroux, that she became more inter- ested in Saint-Simonianism as a whole, and in 1836 and 1837 attended some of the Saint-Simonian seances. When he first met George Sand, Liszt was already a friend and dis- ciple of Lamennais, the apostle of Christian socialism. He lost no time in making his two friends known to each other, and, through Lamennais, George Sand made the acquaint- ance of Pierre Leroux. Both these men were Saint-Simon- ians according to their respective lights, and both influenced George Sand, though the influence of Leroux was the stronger and the more enduring. In her Lettres a Marcie (1837) she is the mouthpiece of Lamennais' religious mysticism, while Spiridion (1839) contains both an expression of Leroux' mystical philosophy (and indeed the final version of the closing chapters was actually written by him) and a mental and moral portrait of Lamennais in the person of the hero, Pere Alexis. In the development of George Sand's social and religious theories, Lamennais formed the necessary transition between the violent and hard-headed communist,
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 129
Michel de Bourges, in whose schemes art and poetry had no place, and the peaceable Utopist, Pierre Leroux.^ And transitory the Lamennais-Sand friendship was doomed to be, for it came to an abrupt end owing to their diametri- cally opposed views on the questions of women's rights, a subject on which neither of them could compromise. With Leroux it was otherwise. She was first attracted by him because of his feminist views, and then accepted all his other theories wholesale — his advanced though vague socialism (it was he who coined the word) ; his humanitarianism, of which he was to give a full exposition in Dc I'humaniU, de son prwcipe et de son avenir (1870) ; his conviction that there is a spiritual element in all material things ; and his theory of the transmigration of souls.
The novels which she produced between 1839 and 1848, Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre (1840), Le Compagnon dn Tour de France (1841), Horace (1842), Consuelo (1842-1844), La Comtesse de Riidolstadt (1843-1845), Le Meunier d'Angibault (1845), Le Pechede M.Antoine (1847), were nearly all written under the inspiration of his humanitarian, socialistic, and religious views. In the meantime another influence had come into George Sand's life — her friendship with the great musician Chopin, which brought her into contact with a sphere of ideas and feelings which only went to strengthen certain aspects of Leroux's teaching. Chopin, who had been living in Paris since 1831, was the son of a French emigrant in Poland who had become a naturalized Pole. George Sand first met him in 1836, and after wintering together in Majorca for the sake of his health (1838-1839), they settled down in Paris for a time in neighbouring apartments. In Chopin's salon she met all the leading emigrants from Poland then in Paris, including the three greatest modern poets of that unfortunate country, Mickiewicz, Krasinski, and Slowacki, and thus was initiated into the mystical and poetical atti- tude towards life which characterized the Polish writers of that time, including their belief in the Messianic mission of the Polish nation. She attended Mickiewicz's lectures at
^ Cf. L. Buis : Lcs Thdories Sociales dc George Sand (1910). VOL. II. — 9
130 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
the College de France, and having founded in 1841 the Revue Independanie in collaboration with Leroux, she made herself the interpreter of Polish Romanticism by writing articles in it on Mickiewicz and Krasinski, and by editing summaries of Mickiewicz's professorial courses. I\Iadame Waldimir, George Sand's latest and most admirable biographer, who was the first to investigate the influence of these Polish emigrants, and notably of Mickiewicz, on her thought and work,^ points out that the mystic and ecstatic elements so prominent in Consuelo and La Comtesse de Ritdolstadt, and her faith in the people as a regenerating force in the world, as expressed in Le Compagnon dii Tour de France, Le Meunier d'Angibault, and Le Peche de M. Antoim, are derived quite as much from her knowledge of Polish Messianism as from the teaching of Pierre Leroux, except that whereas the Poles expected the revelation to come fromi a single nation, their own, or some inspired individual of that nation, George Sand expected it to come from a single class of all nations — the people.
From all this it would appear that George Sand's ideas were entirely derivative, that she was, to a greater extent even than Victor Hugo, " un echo sonore." At the same time, it is worth noticing that the theories she so readily absorbed and expressed were entirely in harmonj^ with her own natural beliefs and aspirations. She was by tempera- ment an idealist of the most exalted type, and a lover of liberty and equality. Of noble origin on her father's side, of plebeian birth on her mother's, she had more than mere and Romantic reasons for hating the bourgeoisie, who were securing all the power that the aristocracy had lost and the people not yet won. In her childhood and early youth George Sand was doubtless strengthened in her natural equalitarian leanings by the attitude of her grandmother, of whom she writes :
" Elle avait adopte la croyance de I'egalite autant qu'il 6tait possible dans sa situation. Elle etait a la hauteur de toutes les
1 George Sand, 3 vols., 1899-1912.
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 131
id^es avanc6es de son temps . . . et voyait volontiers son egal en tout homme obscur et malheureux."
This account of the main influences which went to the making of George Sand's humanitarian novels has neces- sarity been long ; but it is essential for an understanding of them and their place in the history of her time, for, as M. Strowski remarks : " Ses livres sont le miroir ou la genera- tion qui fit la Revolution de 1848 croyait se voir tout en n'y voyant que le mirage de ses genereuses utopies." Speak- ing of these novels, the Comte d'Hausonville says :
" Elle a connu toutes les scuff ranees et souleve tous les probl ernes dont la poids a pese sur sa generation et sur la notre. Elle vivra non par la perfection de ses ceuvres mais par leur cote, large et humanitaire." ^
From the purely artistic point of view, however, George Sand had not attained such distinction in these "romans^cham- novels of tendency as in a handful of romans (I844?il53) champetres, or idyllic stories of the peasantry and of country life, in which her sympathetic understanding of the French peasant and her love of the sights and sounds of the country-side find their most per- fect expression. The series began in 1844 with Jeanne, and was continued by four exquisite masterpieces — La Mare au Diable {1846), La Petite Fadeite (1849), Frangois de Champi (1850), and Les Maitres Sonneurs (1852). The scene of these novels is laid in her native Berry, and we wander across its fields and through its lanes, learn about its local superstitions and customs, and make the acquaintance of its sturdy, shrewd, and independent peasants, all the while conscious of that "visionary gleam " which George Sand captm-es for us as skilfully as Wordsworth.
Critics vary very considerably in their estimate of George Sand's work as a whole. The time-worn comparison between her idealism and Balzac's realism has something to be said for it, providing it be not forgotten that George Sand was an idealist with acute powers of observation, and that
1 George Sand : Revue dcs Deux Mondes, March 15, 1878.
132 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
in her later novels, when she is neither expounding a thesis nor advocating a cause, her idealism is rather of the nature of poetic realism, for, to quote a remark of her own in her preface to La Petite Fadette, " la mission de I'artiste est de celebrer la douceur, la confiance, I'amiti^ et de rappeler ainsi aux hommes endurcis ou discourages que les moeurs pures, les sentiments tendres et I'equit^ primitive sont ou peuvent etre encore de ce monde." She is a better psychologist than Balzac, and is particularly skUful in delineating the artistic temperament — the musician, the actor, the poet — and in revealing the innermost feelings of a girl on the threshold of womanhood. Her miller {Le Mcunier d'Angibault), her bagpipers [Les Maitres Sonneurs), her journeymen carpenters {Le Compagnon du Tour de France), her workers in mosaic {Les Maitres mosalstes), are as faithful renderings of country-folk as any to be found in Balzac's Scenes de la Vie de Campagne, though neither are quite true to life, for while George Sand almost invariably leaves out of the picture the baser instincts of her peasants, Balzac always ignores their nobler aspirations.
George Sand was a very facile writer, and her style is ^ „ marked by unstudied grace and fluidity and
George Sand's -^ . , ° tt
place in French at thc samc time by correctness. However ^^ ^^ unoriginal her ideas may have been, her style was entirely her own, and was influenced by no one. Unlike Balzac, she founded no school, though subsequent novels of country life in general, and the regional novel in par- ticular, take their point of departure from her.
In Russia she long enjoyed an immense vogue, and both
Dostoievski and Turgeniev, two of the greatest
" to^u'ssL^^ Russian novelists of the century, owe much to
her. The former points out in an essay, written
in 1876, that at the time when George Sand's books were
appearing, novels were the only form of foreign literature
allowed into Russia, and her tales were so full of all the ideas
and theories which the Russian Government was determined
to hold at bay, that they were eagerly devoured as soon as
they crossed the frontier, and helped the cause of freedom
PROSE FICTION -ROMANTIC PERIOD 133
as much as, if not more than, any formal treatises could have done. Another novelist whose tales were strongly imbued with the socialistic and humanitarian aspirations of fi8ot-i8^57l th^ ^^y ^^^ Eugene Sue (1804-1857), whose period of greatest success and popularity coin- cided with that of Alexandre Dumas. His most famous novels, Les Mysteres de Paris (1842-1843) and Le Juif Errant (1844-1845), both in ten volumes, are among the most notable specimens of the roman-feuillcton — that is to say, of novels WTitten to appear in short sections in the daily press. Sue's narratives are prolix, complicated, ill-constructed, and ill-WTitten ; in a word, they are innocent of any artistic quality, but being in the highest degree sensational, they enjoyed immense popularity. These novels have a certain historical significance because they so effectively fulfilled their aim of spreading humanit:^rian and socialistic ideas among the masses. They undoubtedly helped to prepare the revolution of 1848, and it was perhaps in recognition of his services that in 1850 the Department of the Seine elected Eugene Sue as its representative in the National Assembly. We now come to a writer who made the realistic novel Honor6 de of Contemporary manners peculiarly his own — (1799-1^850) Balzac, the greatest and most prolific novelist of Life the Romantic period. Honore de Balzac (1799- 1850) was born at Tours, and educated first at the College de Venddme, and then in Paris, where his family came to live in 1814. When Honore was seventeen his father decided that he should train for the legal profession, and apprenticed him for eighteen months to an attorney, and for another eighteen months to a notary. On the completion of his law appren- ticeship, Balzac, who since his school-days had been deeply interested in literature, decided to become a man of letters, and induced his unwilling parents to allow him to make a two years' experiment of earning a living by his pen. This was in i8ig. Balzac immediately installed himself in a poorly furnished attic near the Arsenal on a small monthly allowance, and spent his first fifteen months as a free-lance
134 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
in writing a drama in verse on Cromwell. At the end of April, 1820, he read his finished tragedy to a gathering of his family and their friends, who voted it an unqualified failiu^e. Nothing daunted, Balzac decided that tragedies were not in his line, and that henceforward he would devote himself to writing novels. The next five years were spent in catering for popular taste in wild, sensational tales on the lines of Pixerecourt and Pigault-Lebrun, spiced with that element of terror which the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Lewis, and Mathurin had introduced into the novel. That Balzac was not proud of such melodramatic productions as L'Heri- iiere de Birague, Argow la Pirate, and Jeanne la Pale, to mention only a few of them, is proved by the fact that he published them under divers pseudonyms. They were written mainly to prove that he could earn a living by his pen, but though he intentionally pandered to popular taste, he was not very successful in hitting the public fancy, and the meagre financial returns these tales brought him, caused him in 1825 to lay down his pen and turn book- seller, printer, and publisher. All his life Balzac was full of schemes for doubling and trebling his income by commercial enterprises, but he had no practical business qualities, and this first venture, like all those which succeeded it, was a complete failure. In 1828 the firm was declared bankrupt, and Balzac himself was so deeply in debt that it was not until ten years later that he was able to pay up, and then only by incurring new debts. This episode in Balzac's life has an important bearing upon his work, for his struggles with his creditors are reflected in many of his novels, while his persistent craving for wealth, which meant more to him than fame, explains the predominance of the money ques- tion throughout the Comedie humaine.
After the crash of 1828, Balzac once more turned to novel- writing as a means of livelihood, and, finding in it his true vocation, never again laid down his pen for the twenty-two years that remained to him of life. His real career as an author begins with Les Chonans (1829) ^ which Saintsbury describes as " a Waverley novel Gallicized and Balzacified," y
PROSE FICTION -ROMANTIC PERIOD 135
and La Peau de Chagrin (1831), which is a cross between the supernatural and the psychological novel, and ends with the completion of L'Envcrs de I'Histoire Contcmforaine (1848). Between 1829 and 1848 the history of Balzac's life may almost be said to be the history of his ninety-six novels, tales, and short stories.
/In 1832 began his correspondence with Countess Eveline Hanska, a wealthy Polish woman of noble birth married to a Russian nobleman in the Ukraine. Fascinated by Balzac's novels, she wrote to him steadily for eighteen months before she had an opportunity of making his acquaintance, and after their first meeting at Neufchatel in the spring of i^2)Z> the correspondence continued on less platonic lines, and was only broken by their almost yearly meetings in Switzer- land or Russia, until in 1848, seven years after the death of the lady's husband, Balzac went to stay with I\Iadame Han- ska in Russia, where in 1850 he married her. He brought , ,, , her back to Paris, and died of heart disease a
vEtrannire few mouths uitcr. Balzac's side of this corres- (i8j3- ia,)H) . 1-111 11,
l)ondence, which has been preserved and pub- lished under the title Lcttrcs d I'liirangere, gives an almost complete autobiography of his life between 1833 and 1848.^ His labours during these years can only be described as
herculean, and only his iron constitution could '^"f work"'°h'^ve enduriHl them as long as he did. He had
generally two or three novels on the stocks at once, and often sat at his desk from twelve to eighteen hours at a stretch, fortifying himself with strong potations of black coffee. Sometimes he would be weeks without leaving the house. WJKii, one wonders, did he find time for that close observation of contemporary life that makes his novels the valuable historical documents they are ? Doubtless his two periods of practical life, i.e. his three years' apprenticeship to the law and his three years' business experience, stood him in good stead, as also his visits to the provinces, which fall mainly between 1833 and 1837, and to which his Scenes de la Vic provincialc owe so much. He had, moreover, an extra- ordinary gift of swift observation, of ec^ualiy swift assimila-
136 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
tion, and a prodigious memory, so that where to others, had they wished to do his work, a prolonged survey would have been indispensable, for him a mere glimpse sufficed, and his vigorous imagination did the rest. For Balzac's imagination was coupled with such a strong sense of reality, that it may be said without exaggeration that he intuitively divined the realities of the life that was going on around him, or as M. Canat puts it : " II a presque tout tire de son imagination, mais son imagination avait, k un degre incroyable, le don d'inventer la realite."
Quite early in his literary career, in 1834 certainly, and probably already in 1831, Balzac, whose mind his nowi-'^yde ^"^^-^ coustautly prcoccupicd with schemes on a grand scale, conceived the idea ot making each of his novels, past and future, so many parts of a vast syn- thetic whole which was to represent every aspect of the life of his time, under the collective title, Etudes de Mceurs, with various subdivisions, of which more hereafter. In 1835 he planned two more parts, entitled Etudes philosophiques and Etudes analytiques respectively, remarking that in the three groups humanity will be described, judged, and ana- lysed in a work which will be, as it were, the Thousand and One Nights of the West.) In 1841 he gave to the whole the S3mthetic title. La Coinedie htimaine. Already in a short story. La Fille aux yeux d'or (1834), Balzac had spoken of Paris as a hell which would some day have its Dante. Henry Reeve, v;ho was then living in Paris, and knew Balzac, relates in his Correspondence (i, p. 39),^ that he suggested to him the title. Diabolical Comedy. Balzac with a stroke of genius struck a mean between divine and diabolical, and finally adopted the expression, Comedie humaine. Into the scheme elaborated in 1835 he fitted all his later novels and tales, and the titles of many more which he did not live to write. It falls into the following divisions : —
I. Etudes de Mceurs, of which Balzac said that it had its geography,
1 Cf. Revue de la LitlSraiure ComparSc, vol. I (1922), p. 638. Une suggestion anglaise pour le Hire de la ComSdie humaine.
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 137
its genealogy, and its families, its places and things, its persons and facts ; and which he subdivided as follows :
1. Scenes de la Vie Privie, in which his object was to represent instinctive emotions and sensations and youthful passions. The most important works belonging to this group are La Maison du Chat qui Pelote {1830), Le Colonel Chabcrt (1832), La Femme de Trente Ans (1834), and Albert Savarus (1842).
2. In Seines de la Vie de Province he wished to show innocent hopes and violent passions in conflict with an interested view of life [Eu gSnie Grandet (1833), Le Lys dans la ValUe (1836), Les Illusions perdues (1837), Ursule Mirouet (1841), Un Minage de Garfon (1842)].
^. ^Scdnes de la Vie Parisienne. " Ici," says Balzac, "les senti- ments vrais sont des exceptions et soht brisks dans le feu des int^rets, 6cras6s entre les rouages de ce monde m^canique . . . I'humanitS n'a plus que deux formules, le trompeur et le tromp6." To this group belong Le Pire G oriot (1834), Grandeur et Decadence de C^sar Bin)ijeai^{i8iy), Les Parents Pauvres, inclusive title of La Cousine Bette (1846) and Le Cousin Pons (1847) ; and L'Envers de VHistoire Contemporaine (1847).
These first three groups were intended to exhaust the life of the individual as such. In the two next :
4. Seines de la Vie Politique [Un Episode sous la Terreur (1830), Une T^nihreuse affaire (1844)], etc.; and
5. Seines de la Vie Militaire [Les Chouans (1829), Une Passion dans le Disert (1830)], etc., Balzac tells us that he wished to interpret " les int^rets des masses, I'effroyable mouvement de la machine sociale, et les contrastes produits par les interets particuliers qui se melent k I'intdret general." Finally, the
6. Seines de la Vie de Campagne were to give a picture of "le repos apr^ le mouvement, les paysages apres les int6rieurs, les douces et uniformes occupations de la vie des champs apres le tracas de Paris ; mais aussi les memes interets, la meme lutte, quoique affaiblie comme les passions se trouvent adoucies dans la solitude " [Le Mddecin de Campagne (1833), Le CurS de Village (1839), Les Paysans (1844)].
II. Etudes philosophiques :
From a detailed description of contemporary society in all its aspects Balzac proceeded to a study of the causes which had pro- duced it —
La Peau de Chagrin (1831), Louis Lambert (1832), La Recherche de I'Absolu (1834), S6raphita (1834-1835); and thence in
III. Etudes analytiques [La Physiologic du Mariage (1829), Petites Misires de la Vie Conjugale], which are not novels at all, to analyse the principles lying behind the causes.
The arbitrariness of all these subdivisions is proved, if proof were needed, by the fact that Balzac himself was
138 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
constantly moving his novels from one division to another. The plan is of interest, nevertheless, because it shows how definitely he envisaged all the tales of the Comedie htinmne as interdependent parts of an organic whole, and because it illustrates his love of system and generalization.
Balzac was the first to regard the novel as a human document, and later generations have found his
The novel as a ,111 i^.ii
human docu- novcls the Valuable documents he intended ™^" them to be. In his Preface of 1842 he tells us that his idea of representing contemporary life as he found it, without moral or artistic pre-occupations, proceeded from Scott : what the Waverley novels had done for the past, his novels of contemporary life should do for the present. But under the influence of certain scientific ideas which he adopted from the biologists, Cuvier and Sainte-Hilaire, Balzac amplified and developed this theory by drawing a parallel between the species of the animal world and the species of the social world, and by endeavouring to show that men like animals are moulded and fashioned by the influence of their environment.
" L'idee premiere de la Comidie hiimaine . . . vint d'une comparaison entre Thumanite et ranimalite. . . . La soci6te ne fait-elle pas de I'homme, suivant les milieux ou son action se deploie, autant d'hommes differents qu'il y a de varietes en zoologie ? . . . II a done existe, il existera done de tons temps des Especes sociales comme il y a des Especes zoologiques. Si Buffon a fait un magnifique ouvrage, en essayant de representer dans un livre I'ensemble de la zoologie, n'y avait il pas une oeuvre de ce genre a faire poui la societe ? " — Preface of 1842.
And it was this history that Balzac undertook to write.
" J'ai entrepris I'histoire de toute la Societe, j'ai exprim6 souvent mon plan dans cette seule phrase : une generation est un drame a quatre ou cinq millc personnages saillants. Ce drame, c'est mon livre." (Letter to Hippolyte Castille, 11 Oct., 1846.)
True to its author's intention the Comedie humaine is a
Historical vast and detailed picture of French society
^^c'omkH^^ under the First Empire, the Restoration, and the
humaine Mouarchy of July. As Mr. Hudson has pointed
out, the period covered is almost coextensive with Balzac's
f
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 139
own life^ for " it may be said to begin in Les Chouans with the Breton rising of 1799, the year of his birth, and to the end in 1846, when, in La Cousine Bette, the infamous Baron Hulot (brother of the General Hnlot of Les Chouans), after the death of his saintly wife, marries his cook." ^ ;This span of years is represented in a work which has the grandiose proportions of an epic. We are given pictures of salon- life, we are introduced into bourgeois circles both in Paris and in the provinces, and are given some idea of the peasant life of the period. All the professions are represented : doctors, lawyers, priests, journalists, artists, businessmen, bankers, tradesmen, clerks, and servants are placed in their environments and viewed in their relationship to them, for Balzac insists on regarding men not as mere individuals but as social units determined by the complex system of modern civilization. Hence the importance he attaches to the antecedents, surroundings, professions, and habits and way of life of his characters, which are all described in the minutest detail, nothing being left to the imagination. Things and places are as important to him as people, for he regards them as part of the human creature to whom they belong or of whom they constitute as it were the outer shell, modified to his uses. Thus a street, a house, a room, an office, a workshop, help to explain the human beings who dwell therein (cf., for instance, his description of the avaricious Molineux's apartment in Cesar Birotteau, p. 392). Here Balzac's memory and extraordinary powers of observation stood him in good stead. Places not only remained photographed on his mind, but he carried away and could render consummately the atmosphere which lingers round them. Of the two to three thousand char- acters who make themselves known to us in the Comedie humaine, even the most minor are drawn by a master hand ^ with all their physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities, ! so that once we have made their acquaintance we are never ) likely to forget them. With regard to the plots of his novels, Balzac does not, as nearly all his predecessors did, make
- Hudson : French Literaturr, p. 249 (iqtq).
140 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
love the sole and engrossing concern of his heroes. Love has its place in his novels, but it is a subordinate one ; and the chief characters are possessed by some other master passion — envy and jealousy {Cousine Bette), ava.vice (Gran- det in Eugenie Grandet), parental love which has degenerated into criminal weakness {Pere Goriot), the passion for scien- tific research and invention (Balthazar Cla^s in La Recherche de I'Ahsolu). But by far the greater number of them are actuated by a desire for wealth either for its own sake or as a means of social advancement. (Cf. Char Birotteau, M. Hulot in La Cousine Bette, and others too numerous to men- tion.) And this is natural, for Balzac's characters are drawn from every grade of the middle-classes, whose chief ideal under their bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, was material prosperity.
" Vous vous abusez, cher ange " [says Celestin Crevel to the Duchess], " si vous croyez que c'est le roi Louis- Philippe qui r^gne et il ne s'abuse pas Ik-dessus. II sait, comme nous tous, qu'au- dessus de la Charte il y a la sainte, la venerea, la solide, I'aimable la gracieuse, la belle, la noble, la jeune, la toute-puissante pi6ce de cinq sous. ... ' Dieu des Juifs, tu I'emportes, a dit le grand Racine.' "
He is the first writer to show us not merely how money is spent or procured by questionable means — Le Sage, Dan- court, and Regnard had done that — but the various ways in which money is made, whether it be by honest toil, commercial enterprise, speculation in land or on the Stock Exchange, or in political and diplomatic circles ; hence the stress laid on the means of making it, and Balzac's detailed descriptions of the mechanism or technique of a profession. In carrying out the gigantic task that he had set himselfjt^ Balzac's ^^ ^^^ inevitable that there should be some limitations as ouc-sidedncss and some omissions. These were
an observer of .
contemporary determined by Balzac's personal preiudiccs and
manners , , , . . "^ . r , • , -,■
by the limitations of his understanding of the finer and more elusive things in life. He hated the bour- geoisie as intensely as any of the Romantics, but instead of ignoring it in his work, as they did, he gave it the chief r61c, though anything but an enviable one. His picture of the
PROSE FICTION—ROMANTIC PERIOD 141
middle-classes of his day and of their sordidness is true in the main, but naturally it does not suffer from under-emphasis. Such members of the aristocracy as appear on his pages are conventional and unconvincing, and he has little of interest to say about peasants and the humbler townsmen. Further, Balzac seems to have had no interest in, or understanding of, the religious and social ideals with which his age was rife, ideals which at an early date aroused the enthusiasm of George Sand, and which influenced the later work of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Michelet.
Most French critics reproach Balzac with writing in a style which is often incorrect and always
His style .,,... . ■'
Without distmction ; some even go so far as to call his style bad. Perhaps a distinction should be made : he is indeed often involved and pretentious in his rather too frequent disquisitions, but when he is simply narrating, describing, or letting his characters speak for themselves, his style is very true to life. This means that it is far from perfect, yet had he written his novels in any other style it would probably have detracted from the sense of reality which they leave upon our minds.
It will be clear from all that has been said about Balzac „ , , , that though the period of his literary activity
Balzac s place ... "^ "^
among the corrcspouds With the rise, triumph, and decline of the Romantic Movement in France, he was, if we except Sainte-Beuve, less of a Romantic than any of his contemporaries. Romantic traits he undoubtedly has, and some of the worst. Many of his plots are wild and incoherent, many of his situations extraordinary, while his leading characters, like Victor Hugh's, are sometimes so excessively simplified and endowed with such inordinate individuality that now and again they give the impression of being superhuman monsters. This is what Zola meant when he remarked that certain parts of the Comedie hu- mame have " I'air d'un reve enorme fait par un homme ^veill^." Again, like Victor Hugo, and with as little justification, Balzac fancies himself in the role of thinker and reformer, and frequently intervenes in the narrative
142 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
with declamatory speeches on moral and would-be philo- sophical topics. Typical examples of this tendency are his apology for Catholicism in Le Medecin de Campagne and his digressions on occultism in Le Cousin Pons. As is the case with most of the Romantics the occult and the super- natural had a strong fascination for him, and they have an important place in the plots of such novels and tales as Louis Lambert, La Peau de Chagrin, Seraphita, and Ursule Mirouet. On the other hand, Balzac differs from the Romantics in choosing to represent ordinary everyday life with all its prosaic detail, and in endeavouring to treat his subjects quite objectively. He does not introduce himself prominently into his novels, nor does he view everything in relation to his own personality. There are indeed recollec- tions of his school-days in Louis Lambert, of his student life in La Peau de Chagrin^ and of his first meeting with the Countess Hanska in Albert Savarus, hut his novels are not confessions of his life and spiritual development in the sense that George Sand's, for instance, were of hers. Balzac stands at the parting of the ways with a backward glance on the road that others were still treading, and one foot firmly planted on a road along which the majority of suc- ceeding novelists were to follow him^
When we look back over the development of the French novel between 1825 and 1850, when we consider the bulk, variety, novelty, and excellence achieved in this branch of literature, we are filled with wonder and admiration. Hugo, Dumas, Stendhal, George Sand, and Balzac compassed singly and together (the remark is Professor Saintsbury's) " an achievement of things never yet achieved ; an acquisi- tion and settlement of territory which had never been previously explored."
Before speaking of the artistic short story which was one of the favourite forms of literature at this SHORT STORY time, it may be well to define what constitutes Its character- this particular kind of narrative. It is a mis- take to think that length is the determining factor which separates the short story from the novel, for
PROSE FICTION— RO:\IANTIC PERIOD 143
this is a result rather than a cause of the difference between the two forms. There are a number of novels which are no longer than a " long " short story — Chateaubriand's Rene and Atala, for instance, or Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, run to no more pages than some of Maupassant's longer contes. The essential distinction lies elsewhere. A good short story is not a " novel in a nutshell." It can no more be expanded into a novel without losing thereby than a really good novel can be condensed into a short story. This does not mean that its range is any less wide or that its characters have any less need to be real and convincing, but it does mean that whereas in a novel there must be either profusion and variety of incident or development of character, and there may be both, in a short story there is neither. Here the plot is of the simplest, if indeed it is not a mere situation, and the characters are drawn at a definite point in their development. To be a good writer of short stories an author must have the gift of selection, great skill in abbreviating and compressing, so as to tell or suggest as much as possible in the fewest possible words. Further, he must not be too fond of psychological analysis or of expressing his personal ideas and feelings, and his style must be terse and vivid. Some of these methods may be, and often are, adopted by the novelist, but in his case they are not essential for success. Indeed, were he to use them all simultaneously the result would be not a novel but a short story. Barry Pain provides the key to the difference between novel and short story when he says : " The novelist gives more to the reader and asks less. The short story writer gives less and asks more." In other words, the novelist satisfies our curiosity by providing us with all the information necessary to our understanding of characters and events, and often much else besides the working out of a thesis, his own reflections, side-issues, by-plots, etc. The writer of short stories on the other hand stimulates our imagination, his method being pre-eminently rich in sugges- tion. Much is merely indicated, and following up the barest hints the imaginative reader easily outsteps the actual
144 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
limits of the time and place in which the story runs its course. It will generally be found that writers of fiction have excelled in one or other of these forms, but rarely in both, and this because they require for their successful treatment qualities which are seldom found in conjunction.
In England we have no specific word for the short story.
The short ^^^ Frcuch havc both conte and nouvelle, and Btoryin jt is natural that they should, for "they order
France before . -^ -ht- i ti
the Romantic this matter better m France. ' In the Middle ^^"° Ages already she led the way in the short story, first in verse (the fabliaux), then in prose, Les Cent Nouvdles Nouvclles, Petit Jehan de Saintre, Jchan de Paris, etc. In the sixteenth century Marguerite de Navarre, Desperiers, Noel du Fail made this form peculiarly their own. But the next age neglected it and for two obvious reasons : in the \ seventeenth century analysis, first of sentiment and later of character, was preferred to the recording of external incidents, while during the great classical age, when one might have expected the short story to appeal to literary men because it needed objective and selective treatment, they despised both it and the novel because they were neither of them an inheritance from classical antiquity and hence had neither status nor rules. At the end of the seven- teenth century the short story reappeared in the guise of the fairy-tale, the vogue of which lasted well into the eighteenth century. Hitherto its content had always been light and generally licentious, but during the second half of the Age of Enlightenment there arose a new kind of tale with a serious intention, the best examples of which are Voltaire's Contes, each of which gives ironical expression to some philosophical idea, and Marmontel's Contes Moraux (1773-1776), which as their title indicates were merely written to point a moral. As none of the tales in these two collections are told for their own sake, and as the ulterior motive is throughout apparent, they are a mere offshoot of the artistic short story which, born in the Middle Ages as a simple everyday narrative, came to life again as the fairy tale at the end of the seventeenth century, and at the
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 145
beginning of the nineteenth century re-entered French Htera- ture for good. It is a significant fact that it did so most frequently in the form of the fantastic tale, i.e. a tale with a supernatural element, a form of narrative which, like the legend, fairy story, or any tale in which mystery plays a part, depends for its effect on suggestion and delicate handling.
During this period the first short stories of any „ . , literary value came from the pen of Xavier de
X3V16r QG
Maistre Maistrc (1764-1852), who first made his name by
^"^ *~^ ^' writing, during a period of convalescence, the famous Voyage Autour de ma Chambre (1694), in which he de- scribes all the objects by which he is surrounded in his room and transcribes the memories and new trains of thought they awaken in his mind. His short stories : Le Lepretix de la Cite d'Aoste (1811), a dialogue between a passing soldier and a leper shut up in a tower, Les Prisonniers dn Caucase (1814), a clever sketch of Russian character, and La Jeune Siherienne, the story of a young girl who journeys from Siberia to Saint Petersburg on foot to crave the Czar's pardon for her father, are pathetic little tales of human misfortune, redeemed from sentimentality by an amiable sense of humour, and written in a style remarkable for its ease and purity.
During the Romantic period the writing of short stories
was encouraged by the development of the
\°hortstory^ literary review, especially after 1830, when such
mantfc^^CTfod i^nportant periodicals as the Revue de Paris,
founded in 1829, and the Revue des Deux Mondes,
founded in 1831, to mention only the most important, offered
hospitality in their pages to original contributions of this
kind. Nearly all the best tales written at this period made
their first appearance in one periodical or another, and
only later were they collected in volume form.
The four great poets of the Romantic school tried their hand at the novel, but both Lamartine and Victor Hugo left the short story severely alone. For obvious reasons it was too narrow a form for the display of their particular
VOL. II. — 10
146 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
gifts. Vigny and Musset, who had a greater feeling for form and artistic restraint, attempted the short story, and not unsuccessfully, though they were neither of them to the man- ner born, the former because his tales are the embodiments of an idea, the latter because his are too much a revelation of their author's personal feelings. Nevertheless, the three stories which Vigny collected under the title Servitude ei Alfred de Vigny. S^^^ndeur miUtaires (1835), are far superior to his
Servitude et novels, and their underlying thesis, i.e. that the
miUtaires ouly consolatiou in the soldier's lot of servitude lies in the duty of unquestioning obedience, is not inartistically obtrusive because there is such an inti- mate connection between the idea and the plot.
Musset's Conies et Nouvelles (1837-1853) are superior to
his one novel, if such it can be called, the Con-
cJnuVet fession d'tm Enfant du Steele, but they are less
{^slT-itil) perfect than his plays, though the best of them,
Croisilles, Histoire d'un Merle Blanc, Mimi Pin-
son, Pierre et Camille, and Le Fits du Titien, for instance,
have the same peculiar charm of mingled tenderness and
irony which is one of the characteristics of the Comedies ei
Proverbes.
The two writers who at this period made their names by their novels, and by their novels alone, George Sand and Balzac, both wrote short stories, but the former was so little a mistress of the craft that her ventures in this line are negligible. Balzac, apart from his Contes drolatiqiies , scurrilous tales closely and cleverly modelled on Rabelais, wrote a number of short stories which are very imequal in value. He was too exuberant, too fond of detail and digres- sion, to be easily successful in so concentrated a form. In some ten of his early ventures, however, contributed mostly to the Revue de Paris, and in one or two later ones, he achieved considerable distinction, notably in L'Elixir de longue Vie, Le Requisitionnaire, Le Chef-d' oeuvre Inconnu and Jesus-Christ en Flandre, L'Auberge rouge, and the longer Cure de Tours, all written in 1831, and in La Messe de I'Athee (1836) and Pierre Grasson (1840). In these tales
PROSE FICTION—ROMANTIC PERIOD 147
Balzac is successful because their themes are such that even he realized that he must not labour or prolong them. Having chosen either a plot which compelled rapid and concentrated narrative, or a delicate psychological case, or a situation in which the supernatural played a part, he dealt with each faithfully in short-story fashion. On the other hand, he wrote numbers of would-be short stories which are really truncated or foreshortened novels.
And this brings us to four men, three of whom are, first
and foremost, writers of short stories, and who,
greI't wrI^ers though they wrote much besides, owe their place
sTOR^rDURiNGiri Htcrature to their mastership of this craft :
THE Romantic Charlcs Nodicr, Gerard de Nerval, and Prosper
Movement ' r
Mdrimee, while the fourth and greatest of the quartette, Theophile Gautier, made his mark in no less than three literary kinds — the short story, the novel, and lyrical ^^ . , , poetry. All of them took a rare delight in the
Their fondness -"^ -^ '-' .
for the fantastic mystcrious and the uncanny, and more particu- \
larly in the supernatural, but while the best tales of Nodier, Gerard de Nerval, and Theophile Gautier are almost exclusively of this fantastic kind, those of Prosper j Merimee may be almost evenly divided into tales of fantasy / and heroic, tragic, or ironical stories of real life. /
The fantastic tale, like the fairy-story, is characterized by the fact that the plot or situation is influenced by some marvellous agency — ^in the one by friendly fairies or spirits , whom their human proteges neither fear nor distrust ; in the other by some obscure supernatural power which fills ; the reader with apprehension or terror. Hence the atmo- sphere of the fairy-story is smiling and serene, that of the fantastic tale cruel and disquieting. It was Romanticism that introduced the fantastic element into French literature. Romanticism which in its early stages had such a passion for the Middle Ages, a time when superstitious terrors were' particularly prevalent. The tendency was further strength- ened by foreign influences — on the one hand by the English " tale of terror," of which the best examples are Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), Lewis's The Monk
148 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
(1795), and Mathurin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), in jvvhich the supernatural, explained or unexplained, plays such an important part ; on the, other by the German folk- tales and fantasy pieces, of which Fouque's Undine (1811), the story of a water-sprite without a soul ; Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl (1814), " the man without a shadow " ; and Hoff- mann's Fantastic Tales (1814-1822), are the most notable examples. Hoffmann particularly had an extraordinary influence in France.^ He became the subject of admiring articles in the leading French reviews, and his works were rapidly translated. His stories appealed to the French because, in spite of their fantastical and supernatural elements, they are never so exaggerated as to seem impos- sible, for, as Balzac said of him : " II est le poete de ce qui n'a pas I'air d'exister, et qui neanmoins a vie." In this the best of his French disciples followed him : their fantastic tales are not of the extreme type — they are never merely I horrible or grotesque, and the best of them have something of the fairy-tale atmosphere.
The first to make such expeditions into the land of dream
was Charles Nodier (1793-1844), the oldest in ^mi~im^^ years of the famous Cenacle which met in his
rooms at the Arsenal. He very early came under German and English influences, and wrote various ultra-romantic novels before there was such a thing as a Romantic school. Les Proscrits (1802), Le Peintre de Salz- bourg (1803), Jean Sbogar (1818), out-Werther Werther in melancholy, and Latere Riithwen ou les Vampires, etc., are tales of terror in the English style. Nodier may indeed be said to have been the earliest of French Romantics — " le plus matinal au temeraire assaut," as Sainte-Beuve puts it. But he was to find his true vocation in the writing of short stories, which were a sort of compound of the French f airy-
^ Curiously enough, Hoffmann was himself a great admirer of a little-known French writer of the eighteenth century, a certain Jacques Cazotte, whose Diable Amourciix (1772) is the first literary example of the fantastic tale. Hoffmann brought it to the notice of his French followers, and Gerard de Nerval re-edited it.
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 149
tale and of the German Marchen and fantastic story. Some of them are rather long — too long from the artistic point of view ; but they are all fine, and the shorter ones are master- pieces of their kind. The collection in three volumes, entitled respectively Contes de la Veille'e, Contes Fantastiques, and Nouvelles, is a delight from end to end ; but if a choice of the stories they contain must be made, then let it be Trilby oii le Liitin d'Argail (1822), Jean Francois Ics Bas-Bleus, Le Songe d'Or, La Fee aux Miettes (1832), La Combe de I' Homme Morf, Smarra, La Keuvaine de la Chandeleur (1839), La Legende de Soeur Beatrix (1838), and the delightful three- page Histoire du Chien de Brisquet (1844).
Nodier's immediate follower in this line, Gerard de Nerval
(1808-1855), is undeservedly neglected in most Nerval French literary histories, or only mentioned as
having translated Faust at the early age of eighteen, and translated it so well that Goethe remarked to Eckermann that he had never understood his own poetry better than in reading this French version. Gerard de Nerval, whose real name was Labrunie, made his translation while he was still a student at the Lycee Charlemagne, and soon after, Theophile Gautier who had been his school- friend, bore him off into the thick of the romantic battle ; but Gerard de Nerval, like Sainte-Beuve and Gautier him- self, was too detached a nature to remain long a member of any group, though he differed from both of them in that while they were both essentially men of a positive turn of mind, he for ever dwelt on the fringes of dream and reality. So much was this the case that he suffered occasional attacks of insanity, and was more than once the inmate of an asylum. In the intervals he travelled much in France, Germany, and the East, and wrote, intermittently, poetry, plays, impres- sions of travel [De Paris d Cythere (1848), Voyage en Orient (1851)], experimented in translating from Schiller, Hoff- mann, Richter, and Heine, and produced those strange stories and sketches collected under the titles La Bohenie galante and Les Filles dii Fen {Faces in the Fire), and the dream pieces Sylvie and Aurclia. These stories are very
150 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
difficult to describe, for, like their author, they are " such stuff as dreams are made of," being at once lucid and vision- ary. They show clear traces of Gerard de Nerval's interest in the occult sciences, and through them all runs a strain of music and poetry. That he ranks among the masters of French prose is beyond dispute, and his best verse, which has something of the haunting yet elusive quality of Verlaine's, deserves to be better known than it is. On January 26, 1855, Gerard's body was found hanging from an iron grating in a dark alley near the Chatelet. It is not certain whether, in an access of insanity, he committed suicide or was the victim of a gang of murderers.
With Prosper M^rimde (1803-1870) we are brought back to the real world, a world in which elemental
M6rim6e passious and strange forces indeed play their part, but are only introduced in order to explain the characters and suggest the atmosphere of the time and country with which his stories deal.
In his early twenties Merimee fell under the influence of romanticism, and his earliest literary works were two clever mystifications, Le Theatre de Clara Ga^w/ (1825), which pur- ported to be the translation of the dramatic works of a Spanish actress, and La Guzla (1827), which was given to the public as the literal version of some Illyrian poems. To this period also belongs the historical novel, Chronique de Charles IX (1829), to which reference has already been made. But Merimee was soon to quit the ranks of the romantic army, though not as a deserter. Taking with him into his retirement just enough love of local colour and picturesque detail to refresh the sources of his inspiration, and leaving behind all tendency to declaim, digress, or attitudinize, he found his true line as a writer of tales and stories. These, some twenty in number, which vary in length between the one hundred and fifty pages of Colomha and the six of L'En- Uvement de la Redonte, are the work of one of the most consummate story-tellers that France has ever known. This is all the more remarkable in that Merimee was a scholar by temperament and training, and only by accident a teller
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 151
of tales. He is often compared with Stendhal, who was a family friend, and undoubtedly influenced him. Both , have the same interest in the psychology of strong, energetic 1 characters, the same distrust of emotion, the same acute ' sense of the value of significant detail ; but while Stendhal liked to work on a large canvas, Merimee preferred the limitations imposed by a small one. Never allowing his own personality to intrude, with a few swift strokes of the brush he reveals and fixes character in a passing gesture or a^ significant word. A flawless example of this method is to be found in Don Jose's first encounter with Carmen in the story of that name. He is by preference a delineator of violent primitive natures, who are so dominated by the passions or impulses — generally love, revenge, or jealousy — which bring the stories to their inevitable issue, that they seem almost embodiments of them. Yet there is no trace of exaggeration or abstraction, largely because Merimee was so careful in the choice of his settings. In the gipsy- , haunted Andalusia {Carmen), the brigand-infested scrubs of \ Corsica {Coloniba, Mateo Falcone), the wild Lithuanian forests j (Lokis), on the African coast (Tamango), primitive passions, j even primitive superstitions, have a probability, a reality, ^ which would be impossible in a more sophisticated setting. Even the stories with a supernatural element — La Vision de Charles XI (1830) ; Les Ames du Purgafoire (1834), a ren- dering of an Italian folk-tale ; La Venus d'llle (1837), the story of the ring given to Venus ; Djoumane, a dream piece ; Lokis, the story of a werewolf — are so full of natural detail that in reading them we lose all sense of their improbability. As for his more sophisticated stories, Arsene Guillot, Le Vase Etrusque, Le Parti de Trictrac, La Chambre Bleue, etc., whether they be tragic, comic, or neither, they have every quality that a good short story should have. Here, again, our interest is never allowed to flag for a moment ; with never a word too much and never a word too little, and with an inevitability of phrase which reaches the highest pitch of artistic perfection, Merimee sketches his characters, the events .in which they are concerned, and the atmosphere in
152 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
which they move, in such a way that subject, character, narrative, and style are distilled, as it were, into an essence, which our imagination is free to dilute as it pleases.
Merimee is generally claimed as a forerunner of realism, if not as an actual realist, but romantic tendencies, held, it is true, in check, were strong within him. As Dowden acutely remarks, " The egoism of the romantic school appears in Merimee inverted ; it is the egoism not of effusion, but of disdainful reserve."
With the exception of Lokis, all Merimee's stories were written before 1850. After that date he contributed nothing original to literature. In 1848 he threw himself into the study of Russian, and for the next twelve years, through the translations of Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgsniev, and the articles on Russian history and literature which he contributed regularly to the Revue des Deux Mondes, he awakened in France an interest in the Russian novel which was to bear fruit later in the century.
Merimee's almost exact contemporary, who began to write
short stories a little later, and left off a little
Gautier later too, was Theophile Gautier (1811-1872).
His earliest tales, Les Jeune France, delightfully
humorous sketches of the follies and excesses of the youthful
romantics, appeared in 1833, while his last, but by no
means his best, fantastic tale, Spirite, was published in 1867.
All Gautier's finest short stories are to be found in the
volumes entitled Nouvelles (1845) ^^'^ Romans et Contes
(1857), and, both as regards style and matter, two more
entrancing books it would be hard to find.
With the exception of Les Jeune France, most of his tales are of the fantastic or supernatural order. The gem among them all is a ghost-story entitled La Mort Amoureuse (1836), but there are many others which do not fall far below it — • Le Roi Candaule, for instance, Une Nuit de Cleopdtre, Le Pied de la Momie, Avatar, and La Toison d'Or. Gautier was endowed with extraordinarily vivid descriptive powers, together with a very real sense of humour, a rare quality in French writers generally, and signally absent from the work
PROSE FICTION— ROMANTIC PERIOD 153
of most of his romantic contemporaries. He shows the same qualities in his novels Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and Le Capitaine Fracasse (published in 1863, but written much earlier), which, despite the impropriety of the former, rank among the masterpieces of French fiction. Besides novels and tales, Gautier wrote some delightful animal sketches {Menagerie Intime and Le Paradis des Chats), ac- counts of his travels in Spain, Turkey, and Russia, and several volumes of literary and art criticism. He was also a poet, and in this connection we shall meet him again as a link between the Romantic and the Parnassian schools.
CHAPTER VII HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
FROM the time of the Renaissance until after the French Revolution the only noteworthy books wTitten for the general reader (excluding memoirs) which can lay claim to be ranked as historical works are Bossuet's Discours sur VHistoire Universelle and F^nce^before Histohe dcs Variations, Montesquieu's Esprit des
- ^^c°ntur™'^ L'^^S' ^'^^ Voltaire's Essai sur les Masters and
Siecle de Louis XIV. The first two give us his- tory as seen through the eyes of a theologian, the third deals with the philosophy of law and politics rather than with history, while the two last are histories in the sense in which we now understand the term. In spite of their importance, however, these five works have small artistic or scientific merit when compared with the history written during the nineteenth century. The historical work produced in more recent times is learned rather than literary, but during the earlier part of the last century historians won renown by a combination of scientific and artistic qualities, and hence their writings have a literary as well as an historical value. i The reasons for the efflorescence of historical studies in Reasons for the ^rauce duriug the earlier nineteenth century are development of numcrous, and most of them are the direct or
nistoncal study . ,. r i -i-. i • -t-i
and research, mdircct outcomc of the Rcvolution. The up-
'nine^t^nth heaval of 1789 awakcncd in the breasts of
c^it'^y Frenchmen the patriotic feelings which had long
lain dead or dormant, and taught them to consider their
traditional customs and national institutions from a critical
and historical point of view. There was a natural desire to
154
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 155
find out and explain the remote causes which had made the Revolution possible, and it soon became evident that, in order to do this, it was necessary to go back a long way and, by consulting original sources, such as letters, memoirs, and docmnents relating to public and private life, endeavour to understand not merely the attitude of the ruling classes, but, more important still, the life, manners, and way of thought of the middle classes, and of the people. Moreover, the violent rupture with the ancien regime brought about by the Revolution made the past history of France a kind of closed cycle which could be viewed in perspective and as a whole.
Then, again, once the despotism of Napoleon was at an end, parliamentary government and the freedom of the press gave a great incentive to the formation of political parties. Now the content of history generally reflects the interests of the age in which it is written, and since nearly all the great French historians of the first half of the nineteenth century were either politicians or men deeply interested in politics, they either sought justification for their theories in past history or wrote history to prove the truth of their political beliefs.
A further impetus to the writing of history was given by the removal of most of the obstacles which had formerly stood in the way of serious historical study and research. Hitherto secular and ecclesiastical censorship had made the ' historian's profession a perilous one. Mezerai had been imprisoned in the Bastille for stating that the Franks were of Germanic and not of Gallic race, and Voltaire got into trouble with the authorities for publishing his Sikh de Louis XIV. Under the Napoleonic rule the same danger beset the historian's path, but under the Restoration and the ; July Monarchy there was nothing to prevent him from setting forth what he found to be historically true, from \ . judging and criticizing past events. Formerly it had been difficult for the historian to consult the documents necessary for his researches, for they were scattered up and down the country, and were often in private hands. Now such docu-
156 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
ments and artistic and historical treasures as remained after the vandals of the Revolution had done their work of destruction were collected in public libraries and museums. We know that it was while wandering through the Musee des Monuments fran^ais, founded by the Convention, that Michelet felt the first stirrings of his vocation as an historian. Many of the documents and materials which were thus brought to light were published, the most important collec- tions being that entitled Menwires relatifs a I'histoire de France, the one hundred and thirty-one volumes of which appeared between i8ig and 1829 ; and the Menwires de Saint-Simon (1829-1830), which had lain unpublished as their author left them over a century earlier, and which proved such a valuable mine of information for the latter part of the age of Louis XIV.
Before the Revolution, history had never been a recog- nized subject of study either in schools and universities. It had had no place in the curriculum of the Jesuits, the chief educators of the youth of Europe, nor was it even a university subject until 1769, when a Chair of History and Morals was founded at the College de France — the only one in France at that date. But at the time of which we are now speaking, historical professorships were instituted in Paris and in the provincial universities, and this also gave a new incentive to historical study and research. All these happenings made it possible for Thierry to write in 1834 :
" D^ 1823 . . . j'eus le bonheur de voir ce que je d6sirais le plus, les travaux historiques prendre une haute place dans la faveur populaire, et des ecrivains de premier ordre s'y consacrer de pre- ference. ... Un tel concours d'efforts et de talents donna lieu k cette opinion, deja tr6s r6pandue, que I'histoire serait le cachet du xixe si^cle et qu'elle lui donncrait son nom, comme la philosophic avait donne le sien au xviiie."
There was yet another influence which had its share in the renovation and reshaping of historical literature, and which in some ways strengthened and in others opposed the pohtical and scientific influences to which reference has already been
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 157
made. This was the Romantic movement. Inasmuch as the Romantics preferred to choose their subjects from the national past rather than from antiquity, and reacted against the tendency of French classical literature to deal only with^ the universal and permanent elements in human life and/ thought, their influence on the writing of history was wholly good, for it is the individual and the transitory - aspect of an historical period, the differences between the past and the present rather than the similarities, which make history the fascinating study it is. It was this search for local colour and the fact that the historians of the period were gifted with a strong historical imagination that trans- ' formed what would otherwise have been mere learned works into vivid and animated representations of past realities. The impetus for these evocations of the past came admittedly in the first instance from Chateaubriand and Walter Scott, and more particularly from Les Martyrs, to which Thierry traces the origin of his historical vocation, and from Quentin Durward, which in France was the prime favourite among Scott's novels. There is, of course, in any case a close connection between narrative history and the historical romance, for, as the brothers Goncourt truly remark : " L'histoire c'est du roman qui a €t€, le roman c'est de l'histoire que aurait pu etre." But there was also a bad side to the influence of romanticism, as may be seen very clearly in the later work of Michclet and Quinet, and this consisted in a fondness for declamation, exalted senti- i ment, and Utopian dreams.
It is usual to divide the historians of the first half of the nineteenth century into two main groups — the
schools of philosophical and political school, whose chief representatives are Guizot, Thiers, and Mignet ; and the narrative or romantic school, inaugurated by Mich- aud and continued by De Barante and Thierry. Michelet must be dealt with separately, for he is too individual both in his historical outlook and in his methods to be styled a member of either group.
Both these schools arose simultaneously. The men who
158 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
form the great pleiad of historians, Guizot, Thierry, Mignet, Thiers, and Michelet, were all of the same generation, the first being born in 1787 and the four last between 1795 and 1798. As their methods frequently overlap, it is well to remember that the division into schools is somewhat artifi- cial and misleading, though it is useful as an indication of general tendencies. The romantic or descriptive school of historians endea- voured to make history a picturesque and RokANTic dramatic narrative in which the men and ages tive'sch^l of the past live again in their natural setting, with all their outward characteristics and pecu- liarities. The patriarch of this school was Joseph Francois Michaud (1767-1839), who, under the influence of Chateau- briand's Martyrs, in 1811 began his Histoire des Croisades (1811-1822). He was the first to give a sympathetic inter- pretation to the modem world of the greatest religious movement of the Middle Ages, and to show how the Crusades contributed to the development of European civilization, Michaud's narrative is vivid, though less pictorial than that of his immediate successor, Barante (17S2-1866), whose Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne (1824-1826), based on the chronicles of Froissart, Monstrelet, and Commines, has been compared to a vast tapestry, on which the outstanding figures are Du Guesclin and the Black Prince, Joan of Arc and Louis XL Barante was an enthusiastic admirer of Scott's novels, and it was no mere accident that made him choose for his subject the century of Quentin Durward. The duty of the historian, he says in his preface, is to make the past live again before the eyes of his readers, and this is impossible if he insists on \vriting of the past from the standpoint of the present. " J'ai tente de restitucr k I'his- toirc elle-meme I'attrait que le roman historique lui a emprunte. EUe doit etre avant tout exacte et s^rieuse ; mais il m'a sembld qu'elle pouvait etre en meme temps vraie et vivante." With this object in view, Barante abstains from all personal judgments or reflections upon the events he recounts. The result is a delightful and
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 159
vivid narrative, marred from the historical point of view by a lack of the critical sense and of exact scholar- ship.
Far greater both as an historian and a literary artist than either ]\Iichaud or Barantc was Augustin Thierry (I7™'i856) (1795-1856), who is rightly regarded as the father of modern French history, for it was he who defined and formulated the confused aspirations of his predecessors. As a boy he devoured the novels of Walter Scott, and at the age of fifteen he tells us how Chateau- briand's Martyrs fired his imagination, and how he marched up and down his room shouting the war-song of the Franks • — " Pharamond, Pharamond, nous avons combattu avec I'epee " — and how he later came to regard this moment of enthusiasm as decisive for his vocation.
At the end of his university career, Thierry fell under the spell of Saint-Simon's Utopian theories of an ideal future society. He was for several years secretary to the famous visionary, and for a time regarded himself as his adopted son. His, however, was too practical a nature to remain long in the clouds, and in 1817 he broke away from his master, though not before the latter had inspired him with that I ardent love of the people which was to underlie all his / historical work. Thierry then threw himself into political journalism, and the articles he wrote between 1817 and 1821, later included in the volumes entitled Lettres sur I'Histoire de France (1827) and Dix Ans d'Etudcs Historiques (1834), already reveal his taste for the picturesque, his sympathy with the masses, and the reliance on original sources which distinguished his later work. Henceforward he devoted himself entirely to historical study, the first fruits of which was his Hisioire de la Conquetc de VAngleterre co^uufdc (1825) . The long hours spent poring over manu-j ^'^(lilt"' scripts in ill-lighted libraries cost Thierry hisj eyesight. In 1826 he was obliged to engage secretaries, and in 1830 he became totally blind. Nothing daunted, he continued his tremendous labours, justifying Chateaubriand's homage to his admired disciple, " This-
i6o A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
toire aura son Homere comme la poesie." Six of the seven Recits des Temps Merovingiens published in book-
^Tlmp^ form in 1840 had already appeared in the Revue ^ti^sSf^"* ^es Deux Mondes between 1833 and 1837 under the title Nouvelles Lettres sur I'Histoire de France. This work, which by many is regarded as his finest pro- duction, "unlocked the Merovingian age." It is a vivid picture of Gallo-Roman civilization struggling against Frankish barbarism, and is based on some of the most characteristic stories of Gregory of Tours. When the Recits were collected in book-form, Thierry prefixed to them a long essay entitled Considerations sur I'Histoire de France, in which he summarizes and formulates his favourite historical theories.
In 1836 Thierry was invited by Guizot to edit a series of documents bearing on the growth of the Communes, and hence on the history of the Third Estate, which he had always regarded as the most important class in the making of history. He threw himself heart and soul into the work, for which he wrote a long introduction, bearing the title Essai sur I'Histoire de la Formation et des Progres du Tiers- Etat, and published separately in 1853.
Thierry came to history from politics in search of proofs and arguments in support of his liberal views. This explains both his choice of subjects and his method of treating them. He finds the key to history in the conflict of races, that is to say, in the struggles between a conquering and a conquered nation — the Franks and the Gallo-Romans in his own country, the Normans and the Saxons in England — and believes that these conflicts are continued in the struggle between the middle class and the aristocracy.
" Nous sommes les fils des hommes du tiers-etat ; le tiers-6tat sortait des Communes, les Communes furent I'asile des serfs, les serfs 6taient les vaincus de la Conquete." ^
In his view it was not the ruling classes but the people who,
until the seventeenth century, made France what it was and
thus prepared the way for modern democracy.
1 Dix Ans d' Etudes Historiques (1834).
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD i6i
" L'histoire de France, telle que nous I'ont faite les historiens modernes, n'est point la vraie histoire du pays. . . . La meilleure partie de nos annalcs, la plus grave, la plus instructive, reste h ^crire : il nous manque l'histoire des citoyens, l'histoire des sujets, l'histoire du peuple."
Of such a history Thierry's own work constitutes isolated fragments — but it was Michelet who was to paint a vast historical fresco of the people, the great anonymous crowd processing through the centuries of French history.
Thierry has been reproached with the rigidity of his dominant theory of the conflict of races, but it does not mar his work overmuch, for he never loses himself in generali- zations, being intent on filling his pages with concrete and coloured detail, so that his readers may learn both what he has learnt from charters and chronicles and what he has divined by his historical imagination. Already in 1820 he wrote :
" J 'avals I'ambition de faire de I'art en m6me temps que de la science, d'etre dramatique a I'aide de mat^riaux fournis par une Erudition sincere et scrupuleuse."
Thierry's style is sober, moving, dramatic, or picturesque,
according to the needs of his narrative, and always simplicity
itself. Though he is not the greatest historian of his age,
either in thought, manner, or method, he has the great merit
of being an initiator and a pioneer, or, as he himself puts it,
" celui qui a plante le drapeau de la reforme historique."
The philosophical and political school of historians
jj^ ,j^j, aimed rather at discovering causes and effects,
PHiLOsopm- dissecting and explaining the structure of
CAL AND . °, .^, °,. ..
pouTicAL society, and tracmg the evolution of forms of
SCHOOL -^ i. i.u .. i.- • i.-
government, than at narrating, painting, or dramatizing their past history. In a word, they endea- voured to apply to history the methods of science. Francois Guizot (1787-1874) was bom at Nimes, and educated at Geneva. At the age of twenty-four (1787-1874) he was appointed assistant to Lacretelle, Pro- fessor of History at the Sorbonne. After the fall of the Empire he successively occupied various high administrative posts under the Restoration Monarchy, and
VOL. II. II
i62 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
was throughout an upholder of moderate liberalism. In 1820 he returned to his chair at the Sorbonne to deliver courses of lectures on the origin of representative govern- ment and on the institutions of France, part of which was later embodied in his Essais sur VHistoire de France (1823). As Guizot used lectures for purposes of political propa- ganda, the Government suspended the course in 1822, and he did not resume it until 1828. The intervening six years were spent working at his Histoire de la Revolution d'Angleterre, of which the first part appeared in 1826 and the second and third in 1854 and 1856. His two master- pieces, Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe and Histoire de la Civilisation en France, consist of lectures delivered at the Sorbonne between 1828 and 1830. Unfortunately, the second does not go beyond the fourteenth century, for Guizot 's course was brought to an abrupt end by the revolution of July, which plunged him once more into politics, this time for good. For the next eighteen years, instead of writing history, he helped to make it. Under Louis Philippe he held successively the offices of Home Secretary, Minister of Education, and Minister for Foreign Affairs. With Guizot's work as a statesman we have no concern here, but it is worth remarking that he never lost interest in historical studies, and, in the words of Thierry, did all in his power to make history " a national institution." It was he who was the prime mover in the formation of the Society de I'Histoire de France, which has done such valuable work in re-editing chronicles and publishing manuscript material ; he, again, who proposed that valuable historical documents should be published at the expense of the State. The resulting series of Documents Inedits has proved of untold value to students of history. After the fall of the monarchy in 1848, Guizot took refuge in America for a time, and spent the rest of his life completing his Histoire de la Revolution d'Angleterre, writing the Memoires pour servir d I'Histoire de mon Temps (1858-1868) and the charming Histoire de France racontcc d mcs petits-enfants (1870-1873).
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 163
Guizot was the first French historian to dissect the body social and politic, as an anatomist dissects a human body, and to analyse all its functions. He formulated the histor- ical law of mutual dependence by showing the reciprocal influence of the individual on society and of society on the individual. He studied facts and events with the minutest care, but was interested in them only as the outward and visible signs of ideas. Thus when he came to write down his conclusions, he left out the details which had helped him to form them, for, as he justly remarks :
" Quand on veut arriver, sur le caractere d'une epoque, a des conclusions generales, et faire connaitre a d'autres que des erudits le developpement progressif d'une society et de son gouvcrnement, il faut supprimer une bonne part de cet echafaudage." — Essais sur I'Histoire de France.
Only such historical events and facts as have had an influence on succeeding generations owing to the force of the ideas lying behind them are worthy of interest.
" II y a deux passes. L'un tout a fait mort, sans interet reel parce que son influence ne s'est pas etendue au dela de sa duree ; I'autre durant toujours par I'empire qu'il a exerce sur les si^cles suivants. . . . L'histoire nous offre d. toutes ses epoques quelques idees dominantes, quelques grands evenements qui ont determine le sort et le caractere d'une longue suite de generations." — Hist, de la Civ. en Europe.
Guizot had no interest in the individual and the particular, he was completely lacking in pictorial and dramatic imagi- nation, but he was an admirable investigator of facts, their causes and effects and their relation one to another. All these are woven into such a systematic and symmetrical pattern that one sympathizes with Sainte-Beuvc when he says that Guizot 's history is too logical to be true. But these were but the defects of his qualities. Taine says of Guizot 's style that it possesses " une solidite majestueuse." It has an austerity and a gravity which are not without charm, but it is also sometimes stiff and heavy. When all
i64 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
is said, however, the fact remains that Guizot was not only a great and good man, but the greatest French historian qiia historian of the first half of the nineteenth cen- tury.
Frangois Mignet (1796-1884), however, runs him very close. The son of a locksmith who whole- (179^1884) heartedly believed in the principles of the French Revolution, Mignet was brought up in an atmo- sphere of liberal ideas. After a brilliant career at the Lycee of Avignon, he returned to his native town to study law. Here he became intimate with Thiers, a law student from Marseilles, who shared his ideas and ambitions. In 1821 the two young Provengals came to Paris and threw themselves heart and soul into political journalism. But Mignet, who had already discovered his real vocation while writing a prize-essay on the Institutions of Saint-Louis, did not allow himself to be entirely monopolized by journalism. Between 1822 and 1824 he gave two courses of public lectures at the Athenee — one on the sixteenth century and the Reforma- tion, and another, prior to Guizot's, on the English Revolu- tion. In 1824 appeared his Histoire de la ^Rfvoiium'^ Revolution frangaise, an extraordinarily lucid frm^ise two-volume survey, in which the Revolution was for the first time revealed as an organic whole. Mignet showed that it was no mere accidental upheaval, but the logical outcome of two centuries of French history and the inaugurator of a new era. " Lorsqu' une reforme est devenue necessaire, et que le moment de I'accomplir est venu, rien ne I'empeche et tout la sert."
Charged by Guizot with the task of editing the unpub- lished documents relating to the Spanish Succession, Mignet produced four volumes of Negociatioiis, preceded by an introductory essay entitled Introduction a I'Histoire de la Succession d'Espagne, which is not only a masterpiece of diplomatic history, but threw new light on the diplomacy of Mazarin and Louis XIV, and brilliantly distinguishes and characterizes the different periods of the reign of the Grand Monarch.
HISTORY DURINCx THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 165
Mignet's later work consists of a series of monographs
dealing almost exclusively with the sixteenth
graphfonThe century : Antonio Perez et Philippe II (1845),
^century MuHe Stiiart (1851), Charles Quint, son abdica- tion, son se'jour et sa mort au monastere de St. Jitsf (1852-1854), and La Rivalite de Frangois I et de Charles Quint (1875). All these were fragments of a great work which he planned to write on the Reformation.
In 1837 Mignet was appointed Perpetual Secretary to the Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and the Eloges, ^yi.u^it was one of his duties to write when any of its members died, are models of style and appreciation.
As an historian Mignet was no more interested in events for their own sake than Guizot, though he writes his works in narrative form, instead of merely giving his conclusions, because he sees in history " une science feconde en enseigne- ments, le drame et la legon de la vie humaine," He thus chooses by preference subjects with strong dramatic possi- bilities and lets events tell their own tale, though he never hesitates to supplement it with his own judgments and reflections. He believed, though he later somewhat modi- fied this fatalistic theory, that " ce sont moins les hommcs qui ont mene les choses que les choses qui ont mene les hommes." The sixteenth century, which he made his special province, was the most dramatic period in modern history before the Revolution, for what more dramatic spectacle than that of the combination of European powers involved in the War of the Spanish Succession ? — Spain in full decadence, France beginning to slip from the summit of her glory, and England just emerging from her revolution. Yet Mignet does not treat his materials as a Michelet would have done : he condenses facts, scenes, and events, and he engraves, but does not paint, portraits of the great men of history.
In spite of his harmoniously balanced periods, Mignet's style is lucid, sober, firm, and forcible. He makes much use of antithesis, but none of metaphors or images. His powers of condensation and concentration are remarkable.
i66 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
It would be hard to find another writer who said so much in so few words.
Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), thehfelong friend of Mignet,
began to write history with a frankly political
(17£^-1877) ^^^- -^^^ Histoire de la Revolution fmngaise
(10 vols., 1823-1827) was written to prove that
the Revolution had been a necessity, that the principles it
laid down were unchallengeable, but that they
Histoire de la -i j 11 • ^ • j_ rr j 1 j_i 1 •
Rhmhition could ouly bc carried into effect by the expulsion
(/823-i"27) of the old d3masty and by setting up a constitu- tional monarchy in its stead. While Mignet 's history of the Revolution was a generalization based upon specific facts, Thiers' is a detailed narrative of events, which leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions.
After 1830 Thiers held various ministerial posts under
Louis Philippe, whom he had done much to help
ConsuMet^de to the throuc. In the intervals of his work as
(/sfs-isfc) orator and minister of State he found time to prepare his Histoire du Consiilat et de I'Empire (20 vols., 1845-1862), which begins where his first work had ended, and which, though unintentionally on its author's part, did not a little towards the revival of the Napoleonic cult, and so in a sense prepared the way for the coup d'etat of the third Napoleon. For Thiers, though a liberal in politics and an upholder of the Revolution, saw in Napoleon the man who stepped in at the right moment to save his country from anarchy and ruin, and hence had nothing but admiration for him. " II nous a donne la gloire, qui est la grandeur morale et qui ramene avec le temps la grandeur materielle. II etait par son genie fait pour la France comme la France etait faite pour lui." After the Revolution of i848,Thiers disappeared from public life, and only re-entered it again in 1863 to become the chief anti-Imperialist orator in the French Chamber. The part played by Thiers during the Franco-Prussian War and his work as President of the Third French Republic (1871-1873), which he had been instrumental in founding, are familiar to all students of history.
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 167
Thiers was undoubtedly more gifted as a statesman than as an historian, or as a man of letters. On the other hand, his experience as a practical politician was very valuable to him in writing his Histoire dii Consulat et de I'Empire. Such matters as finance, administration, diplomacy, etc., which had hitherto received scant attention from historians, are here given their due prominence. He had a great taste for detail, and a perfect mastery of it, though it is not the coloured moving detail of Thierry or Barante. He is as diffuse as Mignet is condensed. Unlike Guizot, he has no appreciation of the influence of moral forces on historical events ; indeed, one of his critics has gone so far as to describe his histories as " the epic of matter." Facts plain and unadorned, and plenty of them, these for him are the materials of history for " de toutes les productions de I'esprit, la plus pure, la plus chaste, la plus severe, la plus haute et la plus humble k la fois, c'est I'histoire." ^ These naked facts have to be clothed in language, it is true, but " cette muse fiere, clairvoyante et modeste, a besoin surtout d'etre vetue sans apprets." ^ And Thiers carried out his pre- cept, for his own style, sober, alert, and rapid, has no purple patches and adds no glamour to his lucid presenta- tion of events.
To the philosophical and political school of historians belongs also Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859),
ToAuevine who applied Guizot's analytical method to the
(1805-1859) gj.^^(^y Qf i-j^c j-igg and growth of modern demo- cracy. He made his name by two books — De la Democratie en Amdriqiie (1836-1839), in which he studies the progress and future of democracy in the New World ; and L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution (1856), abriUiant attempt to disen- tangle the true historical significance of the French Revolu- tion, and to show that it was a logical continuation of the work of the ancien regime.
" Elle a pris, il est vrai, le monde h. Timproviste, et cependant elle n'6tait que le complement du plus long travail, la tcrminaison
^ Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire. * Ibid.
i68 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
soudaine et violente d'line oeuvre k laquelle dix generations d'hommes avaient travaill6."
Tocqueville further goes on to show that the Revolution did not bring about that complete rupture with the past, the object which it set itself and which his contemporaries believed it had achieved, but on the contrary that in many ways it only accelerated certain tendencies of the ancicn regime. Tocqueville was the first to judge the greatest event in modern history in an impartial spirit, and two great historical writers of a later date, Taine and Sorel, paid great tribute to his judgment in adopting his main thesis as to its causes and results.
Thierry, Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, and Tocqueville were historians of varying ability and literary gift. We now come to a poetic genius who chose history for his subject, Michelet, " ce prodigieux historien du reve, ce grand som- nambule du passe," ^ the greatest literary artist who ever devoted himself to the history of France.
Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was born in poverty. His ra. HISTORY father was a small printer, and the son as a ciTATKW OF child helped in the actual working of the press, ^^'^PAST^™ where he spent his days, as he himself later Michelet described it, " comme une herbe sans soleil entre (1798-1874) deux paves de Paris." When he was fourteen years of age, by making great sacrifices, his parents were able to send him to the Lycde Charlemagne, where Villemain was one of his teachers, and where in 1816 he carried off nearly all the prizes. Instead of proceeding to the Ecole Normale, he determined to become self-supporting at once, and took a humble post as schoolmaster. In his spare time he continued his studies, and by 182 1 had taken all the degrees necessary to qualify him for a college or univer- sity professorship in history. He immediately obtained a post at the College Sainte-Barbe-RoUin, and was shortly afterwards persuaded by Victor Cousin both to learn Ger- man and to translate Vico's Scienza Nuova (1730), which, as we shall see, was to have an important influence on his
^ Journal des Goncourt, vol. ii, p. 1O5.
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 169
philosophy of history. Hitherto Vico had been scarcely known outside Italy, and little appreciated there, owing to his involved and difficult style. Michelet's fine translation, which appeared in 1827, made Vico's book known not only to France, but to Europe. In the same year he was ap- pointed maUre de conferences in history and philosophy at the Ecole Normale, and published his first historical work, the Precis de I'Histoire Moderne, a brilliant text- VHhtlire book, based largely on original sources, and ^^tzT) containing a survey of civihzation from the fifteenth century to the Revolution. A year later he paid a visit to Germany, and just before he started made the acquaintance of Edgar Quinet, who joined him in Heidelberg and became his lifelong friend. Michelet returned to France filled with an undying enthusiasm for German philosophy and scholarship. Inspired by Niebuhr, whom he had met at Heidelberg, he planned to write a history of the Roman Republic, and in 1830 visited Italy to collect material for his work. His Histoire Romaine, which appeared the following year, popularized some of Niebuhr's favourite hypotheses, and also contains indications of Miche- let's own philosophy of history. In this same year he was appointed chief of the historical section of the National Archives, and published his first famous and ^Tnistotre entirely characteristic book, the Introduciion d, ^"1831)* I'Histoire UniverscUe, which has been summed up as "a hymn to the glories of France as the principal actor in the drama of liberty." ^ In 1833 he was given a deputy-professorship under Guizot at the Sorbonne, and embarked upon the first volume of his chief and monu- mental work, the i7/s/o/r6' rf^ Fm«c^, which, when Franc* ' its twenty-scveuth and last volume was com- fi8*33-i844)' pleted, just before the author's death, gave a complete picture of the destinies of France from the earliest times to the battle of Waterloo. In 1838 Michelet left the Ecole Normale for the College de France,
- Gooch : Jlisluyy and Historians of the Nineteenth Ccnt^iry.
170 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
where, like Quinet and Mickiewicz, he used his professorial chair as a pulpit from which to propound democratic and humanitarian theories of a visionary kind. The subject- matter of these lectures is embodied in three books written at this period — Les Jesitites (1843), Le Pretre, la Femme, et laFmmlle (1845), and Le Peuple {1846). It was his hatred of kings and priests, his belief in the people, his love for the poor and the oppressed, that explain why Michelet, when in 1844 he had completed his survey of medieval France and stood on the threshold of modern history, suddenly broke off his narrative to study the French Revolution. In his own poetical way he tells how one day, while paying an admiring visit to the cathedral of Rheims, where the French kings received their consecration, he noticed high up on one of the towers a curious group of sculptured figures —
" une guirlande de supplicies. Tel a la corde au cou, tel a perdu, I'oreille. . . . Quoi ! I'^glise des fetes, cette mariee, pour collier de noces a pris ce lugubre ornement ! Ce pilori du peuple est place au-dessus de I'autel. Mais ses pleurs n'ont-ils pu, a travers les voutes, toraber sur la tete des rois. Onction redoutable de la R6volution, de la colore de Dieu ! "
And the thought flashed through him : " Je ne comprendrai
pas les siecles monarchiques, si d'abord avant
^^HimiuHo^ tout, je n'etablis en moi I'ame et la foi du peuple."
(i'877-i^853) "^^^ seven volumes of Michelet's Histoire de la
Revolution f ran gaise appeared between 1847 and
1853. Two years before its completion, he had been
deprived of his university chair and of his post at the
National Archives for refusing to take the oaths of allegiance
to the Empire.
Michelet retired into the country and resumed his Histoire
Histoire de de Fruncc at the point where he had left it in
(fromuie 1844. The volumes on the Renaissance and the
^^to'the"'^^ Reformation appeared in 1855, and the remain-
^7i°vob"^' ^^S nine, bringing the narrative up to the Revolu-
(1855-1867) tion, between 1856 and 1867. While engaged on
the completion of this monumental work, Michelet found
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 171
time to write a number of warm appeals in favour of op- pressed nations — Pologne et Russie (1851) ; Principautes Dannhiemies (1853) ; Legendes democratiques du Nord (1854), which includes an account of one of Mickiewicz's lectures; and La Pologne Martyre (1863). During the same period appeared a curious little crop of books on natural history, a subject in which his second wife is believed to have interested him. L'Oiseau (1856), L'Insecte (1857), La Mer (1861), and La MofUagfie (1868) reveal an interest in nature which is neither the scientific interest of a Buffon nor the moral interest of a La Fontaine, nor yet the mere aesthetic delight of a romantic poet, but is more akin to the mystical sense of brotherhood between man and all nature, animate, inanimate, or elemental, of a St. Francis. During the last few years of his life Michelet began to write a history of the nineteenth century, but
^xix°siic1e ^^ ^^^ ^°t ^^^^ ^'^ complete more than three volumes of it, and they fall far below the level of the rest of his work.
JVIichclet was the only great historian of his age who was
Michciet's of the people and not of the bourgeoisie, the on?i^tOTy°as only one, too, who was not primarily led to tionVitlgSe' history through an interest in politics, but be-
deiavie" causc it appealed to his imagination. Later, it is true, he was swept along in the democratic movement of the day, and used history as a vehicle for his half- political, half-mystical views, but, unlike most of his brother historians, he never entered public life or became a practical politician. Though only a year or two younger than Thierry, Thiers, and Mignet, his earliest works are later in date than theirs. He was a great admirer of Guizot, his senior by eleven years, and also of Thierry, but to him their respective methods seemed one-sided, and he would fain combine them. " Augustin Thierry," he remarks, " avait appel^ I'histoire narration ; Guizot, analyse ; moi je I'appelle resurrection." And again in his Preface of 1869 :
172 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
" EUe (la France) avait des annales et non point une histoire. Des hommes eminents I'avaient 6tudi6e surtout au point de vue politique. Nul n'avait penetre dans I'infini detail des developpe- ments divers de son activite (religieuse, 6conomique, artistique, etc. . . . ). Nul ne I'avait encore embrass6e du regard dans I'unit^ vivante des 61ements naturels et geographiques qui Tout constituee. Le premier, je le vis comme une ^me et comme une personne."
France was indeed to Michelet a living creature with a soul peculiarly her own, and for him her past was no more dead than her present. To feel this we have only to read his history, but his account of his first visit to the National Archives is a good example of his attitude and of the way he handled even documents as if they weie things of flesh and blood :
" Je ne tardai pas k m'apercevoir, dans le silence de ces galeries, qu'il y avait un mouvement, un murmure qui n'etait pas la mort. Ces papiers, ces parchemins, laisses la depuis longtemps, ne deman- daient pas mieux que de revenir au jour. Ces papiers ne sont pas des papiers, mais des vies d'hommes, de provinces, de peuples. . . . Et a mesure que je soufflais sur la poussi^re, je les voyais se soulever. lis tiraient du sepulcre qui la main, qui la tete comme dans le jugement dernier de Michel-Ange, ou dans la danse des morts. Cette danse galvanique qu'ils menaient, autour de moi, j'ai essay6 de la reproduire dans ce livre." ^
Michelet's conception of history as " une resurrection
integrale de la vie " never varied. As for his
"of wstorT^ philosophy of history, he learnt it from the two
men who are regarded as the founders of that
science, the Italian Vico and the German Herder. From
the Scienza Nnova (1730) Michelet learnt, among other
things, that documents, however fragmentary, are the most
reliable sources of information about the past, that the
historian must divest himself of his modern standpoint
before he attempts to interpret bygone ages, that the masses
have contributed enormously to civilization, that their
- Histoire de France, Bk. IV, Eclaircissement.
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 173
social conditions are reflected in law and poetry, and that great men are but symbols of their time. From the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte (1784-1791), translated by Edgar Quinet, he learnt to appreciate the extraordinary importance of the geographical factor in history. His study of Vico and Herder was further supplemented by Victor Cousin's Cours d'Histoire de la Philosophie, which he attended in 1828, and in which the dominant ideas of Vico and Herder were analysed and explained.
Guided by these ideas, gifted with an extraordinarily
sympathetic imagination, and inspired by a love
of sympathetic of Fraucc and of the people that knew no bounds,
imagination j^jj^^j^g^g^ ^j.Q^g ^.j^g history of his couutry on the
grand scale of an epic. Much learning went to the making of it, but even more feeling and imagination, for though Michelefs emotions were quickened by ideas, his ideas easily resolved themselves into emotions, and, as Jules Simon remarks, "il devine plus qu'il ne constate, mais comme la plupart des grands poetes il devine juste." It is this combination of sympathy and imagination which enables Michelet to become himself an actor in the great drama of history. He hopes and fears, suffers and rejoices, with his ancestors. He becomes a man of their time, and in his wonderful picture of France at the end of the four- teenth century (to take one example from many) makes us see or feel with him and them "la grande pitie du royaume de France." Not only do the dead rise from their graves, but the soul of France becomes incarnate at his touch, once in her greatest heroine, Joan of Arc, and once again in what Michelet regarded as her most national and ideal movement — the Revolution. Her past history is to him a living thing, of which in the Preface of 1869 he takes a tender farewell :
"France avec qui j'ai vdcu ! que je quitte h. si grand regret 1 Dans quelle communaut6 j'ai pass6 avec toi quarante ann^es (dix si^cles !).... Je travaillais pour toi, j'allais, venais, cherchais, 6crivais ! Je donnais chaque jour de moi-meme tout, peut-€tre encore plus. Le lendemain matin te trouvaut, b. ma table, je me
174 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
trouvais le meme, fort de ta vie puissante et de ta jeunesse 6ter- nelle. . . .
" Eh bien ! ma grande France, s'il a fallu, pour retrouver ta vie qu'un homme se donnat, passat et repassat taut de fois le fleuve des morts, il s'en console, te remercie encore. Et son plus grand chagrin, c'est qu'il faut te quitter ici."
Michelet's love of France is to be found on every page of
his history. Even her geography is treated ^Fra°nce°* with loving Care and made living and dramatic
in that wonderful Tableau de la France, with which the second volume opens, and in which her provinces and principal towns are so admirably and poetically charac- terized. As for Michelet's love of the people, it grew, as we have
seen, as he proceeded, until in the end it became ^he people ^ blind adoratiou. " C'est vous qui aurez porte
la democratic dans I'histoire," MTites Quinet in a letter to Michelet dated November ii, 1863, " et cette revolution que vous avez faite est peut-etre la seule qui n'aura pas de reaction." The theme of the welfare of the masses and of their gradual emancipation forms the unifying thread, one might almost say the plot, of his romantic history. For if subjectivity and l^Tical exaltation spell Romanticism, IMichelet was indeed a Romantic. The first six volumes of the Histoire de France are the
most enduring and perfect portion of his work ; ^m^kitrede '^ thc voltmies on the Revolution, though full of ^'^ wtoie^ ^ inaccuracies and exaggerations, contain a picture
of that upheaval which vies with Carlyle's for brilliancy, and the description of the Fete de la Federation ranks with Jeanne d'Arc and the Tableau de la France. Of the intervening volumes, those on the Renaissance and the Reform are the best, the others being marred by Miche- let's hatred of priests and kings, by his belief that the people can do no wrong, and by digressions on his favourite themes of patriotism, democracy, and liberty. But even at his worst Michelet is " a magnificent illustrator of the book of history," and to the whole work one might apply the remark
HISTORY DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 175
he himself made about his Jeanne d'Arc : " D'autres raconteront encore la vie de cette sainte, mais personne ne fera plus pour elle ce que j'ai fait."
From Michelet's name is inseparable that of Edgar Quinct (1803-1875), for the two men were united ^803-1875^ ^y ^^^y ysars of close and unwavering friend- ship. Vico and Herder were their joint masters in the philosophy of history. Both were ardent apostles of the doctrine of democracy ; both had deep sympathies with all oppressed and struggling nations ; and both fulminated from their professorial chairs at the College de France against the Roman Catholic Church of modem times in general and against the Jesuits in particular. Yet their differences of outlook were profound.
Quinet's Genie des Religions (1842), Le Christianisme et la Revolution frangaise (1845), Les Revolutions d' Italic (1848-1852), La Revolution religieuse du XI X" Siecle (i860), and his most famous historical work, La Revolution (1865), reveal a follower of the school of Thiers, i.e. a student of cause and effect. Notwithstanding his somewhat obscure symbolism and his frequent excursions into the realms of prophecy, Quinet's method is philosophical and critical. Of all the historians of his age he was the most profound believer in religion as the shapcr of historical events ; in fact, his philosophy of history is Bossuet's doctrine of Providence rebaptizcd and clothed in a more scientific dress, i.e. the influence on history of man's idea of God rather than the direct influence of God Himself. His History of the Revolution develops the original thesis that the Revolution was a failure because the men who made it were not true to its spirit.
" II veut la liberte, du moins il croit la vouloir. Mais I'id^e qu'il s'en fait a ete form6c sous le despotisme de rancien regime. Elle est pleine encore du g6nie intraitable du pass6. . . . Mais qui veut vivre libre doit regarder ailleurs. La liberty n'est h. aucune 6poque de notre pass6. Ne la cherchez pas en arrierc."
Quinct regards the failure of the Revolution as complete on the religious side, the only one in which, according to
176 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
him, it was essential to succeed. The revolutionaries should have destroyed the old religion of France, root and branch, and created a new one. They did neither. The religion that Quinet would fain have seen established was Protestantism, which, unlike Catholicism, seemed to him compatible with modern principles. By his emphatic affirmation that no nation can prosper without a religion adapted to its needs, Quinet was one of the most important representatives of the spiritual revival of the early nine- teenth century. Like Michelet, he wrote much besides history — mostly imaginative works of a mystical and symbolical character : Ahasuems (1833), a kind of vast allegorical mystery-play on the wandering Jew, who per- sonifies the human mind progressing through the ages ; Promeihee (1838), an epic poem, in which the Titan symbo- lizes the martyrdom and redemption of humanity ; Les Esclaves (1853), a dramatic poem in five acts on the eternal tragedy of slavery, of which the French were still performing the last act ; and Merlin I' Enchanteur (i860), on which Quinet had been working and meditating for many years. One of his last works, La Creation (1870), an attempt to apply the method of natural science to history and to ex- plain political laws by the laws of nature, reveals a Quinet who is no longer the disciple of Vico and Herder, but of Lamarck, Herbert Spencer, and Darwin, Thus, as Faguet points out :
" Edgar Quinet ... a accompli une sorte d'6volution h. travers les id6es du si^cle, subissant successivement diverscs influences, celle de I'Allemagne, celle de I'Universite anti-clericale de 1870, celle de Darwin et du transformisme, traduisant h, chaque fois, et agrandissant, elargissant ... les idees qu'il recevait ainsi de la region du monde qu'il traversait." ^
^ Politiques et Moralisles, ii.
CHAPTER VIII
LITERARY CRITICISM DURING THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
CLOSELY connected with the progress of historical studies during this period is the renewal and develop- ment of literary criticism. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries literary critics were for the most Literary criti- part not prof cssionals, but great writers who had
- ^'^durLg'the'^° distinguished themselves in other branches of
anrei^htTe'iuh litcraturc and wished to set forth their gesthetic centuries thcories, and incidentally to judge their prede- cessors and contemporaries. Their criticism was purely dogmatic — that is to say, they judged every work of art by reference to a definite standard of taste and by con- formity to a canon of rules. If a poem, a drama, etc., fulfilled this preconceived ideal, it received nothing but praise ; if they departed from it, condemnation was their portion.
During the Romantic Movement the dislike of rule, the
New features extraordinary development of the novel which
introduced had ncvcr had any rules, the interest taken in
during the -' . ■. r ,
romantic the literature of other countries and of other ^^"° ages with varying standards of taste, led to a new kind of criticism, which consisted in an understanding and judicial enjoyment of literature, and which tended more and more to explain literary works by the political, social, and moral environment in which they were produced. At the same time, the spheres of critic and artist tended less
VOL. II. — xz 177
178 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
and less to overlap, to the advantage of criticism, for the artist is rarely the best judge of either his own or other people's productions. This does not mean that writers did not expound their aesthetic theories in prefaces and mani- festos. Frenchmen of all ages have done that, and are likely to continue to do so, because principles mean so much to them ; but as a rule they left literary judgment and appre- ciation to the professional critic or university professor. If the new relative and impressionist criticism can be said to have had any single founder, it was Madame de Stael, who in De la Litterature and De I'Allemagne tried to prove, both by precept and example, that there is no such thing as an absolute standard of taste, and that literature is an expres- sion of society.
With the important exception of Sainte-Beuve, the three best French critics of the first half of the nineteenth century were university professors, and all four held very different views as to the function of literary history and criticism.
Abel Francois Villemain (1790-1867) was successively Professor at the Lycee Charlemagne, the Ecole U79^i^867) Normale, and the Sorbonne. In the university lectures he delivered between 1816 and 1828, he gave to French students for the first time a comprehensive survey of their own literature, a historical view of its origins, and of its debt to other nations. Incidentally, he also attempted to give something approaching a compara- tive account of the literatures of England, Italy, and Spain, and always endeavoured to show the relation that exists between the literature of any given period and the general movement of ideas which precedes or accompanies it. This was a large undertaking, especially at a time when most of the ground was unexplored, and it cannot be said that Villemain carried it out brilliantly. Of the numerous courses he delivered on French literature, he published only two : Tableau de la Litterature frangaise an Moyen Age and Tableau de la Litterature frangaise au XVIII Sikle, wisely choosing the two periods best suited to the
LITERARY CRITICISIVI ROMANTIC PERIOD 179
application of his method of deahng with literary history. Though somewhat superficial and lacking in grasp, these six volumes are interesting to read, and entitle their author to a prominent place among the pioneers of modern literary criticism.
Villemain's most distinguished pupil, though not alto- c • . ,r gether a follower of his method, Saint-Marc
Saint-Marc °
Girardin Girardm (1801-1873), Professor of French Poetry ^ °^ ^ ^^ at the Sorbonne from 1833 to 1863, occupied himself mainly with the psychological and moral aspects of literature. In his Cours de Litter atiire dramatique, published in 1843, he discusses types of parental love, of jealousy and other emotions in ancient and modern drama, and, unlike Villemain, who always left his contemporaries alone, made these studies an occasion for attacking the young romantic school. This was comparative literature, no doubt, but comparative literature of an inferior kind. In his course on La Fontaine et les Fabulistes, a critical study of the various transformations undergone by the fable from iEsop to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Saint-Marc Girardin is the first to trace the evolution of a literary kind. Desire Nisard (1806-1888), Professor of Latin Eloquence at the College de France, and later of French (i^oTlm) Eloquence at the Sorbonne, is a critic of the old doctrinaire school, but one of the very best of the kind. His Histoire de la Litterature frangaise (vols, i-iii, 1844-1849 ; vol. iv, 1861) is a work of reasoned criti- cism based on an d priori theory of the French literary genius, a work in which the connection between literature and history is ignored, and in which biographies and tem- peraments have no place. At the end of the last volume, Nisard went to the trouble of defining his method, or rather his system :
" Elle (cette critique) s'est fait un ideal de I'csprit humain dans Ics livres ; elle s'en est fait un du g6nie particulier de la France, un autre de sa languc ; cllc met chaque autcur et chaquc livrc en
i8o A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITER.\TURE
regard de ce triple ideal. Elle note ce qui s"en rapproche : voila le bon ; ce qui s"en eloigne ; voila le mauvais."
In Nisard's view, this ideal is the expression of general truths in perfect language. Hence his gods are the great writers of the classical school, who so admirably realized this ideal. And he admits no other. He regards the literature of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early seventeenth century as toiling slowly, and with many backward slips, up the slope leading to the tableland of the Great Age ; he sees the literature of the Age of Enlighten- ment descending rapidly from the summit, and romantic literature precipitating itself to the very foot of this sym- bolical mountain. Literary dogmatism can no further go. Yet Nisard's chapters on the age of Louis XIV will always be worth reading, for no one has treated its literature with more enlightened appreciation and enthusiasm, and no one has made a fuller or more suggestive analysis of the classical spirit. For this much must be forgiven him. The whole work is an attack on the theory and practice of the roman- tics, but as the enemy had already won the battle, it was a waste of powder and shot, except in so far as it definitely rehabilitated the great classical writers as masters in their own line. While Nisard was making his gallant attempts to make criticism retread the straight and narrow way of (bXrV^MS* dogmatism, to combat the idea that there is no disputing about tastes, his slightly elder con- temporary, Sainte-Beuve, was leading it along a very differ- ent path, winding uphill and down dale through the lands of literature. Along this road the greatest French critic piusued his tranquil way, examining, explaining, and appreciating all he saw with reference to its surroundings, and in a spirit of scientific impartiality, which at the same time left place for an expression of his personal tastes.
Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), after receiving a good education at the Lycee Charlemagne, without much ardour took up the study of medicine, and
LITERARY CRITICISM— ROMANTIC PERIOD i8i
though he soon abandoned it, he doubtless owed to his early medical studies the taste for scientific method which was later to characterize his work as a literary critic. In 1824 one of his former masters at the L3-cee Charlemagne founded a newspaper, Le Globe, and persuaded Sainte-Beuve to join its staff. In literary and miscellaneous articles for this paper, he served his apprenticeship as a writer, and discovered his critical vocation. His review of the Odes et Ballades (January, 1827) brought him into personal relations with Victor Hugo, who admitted him to the Cenacle. For the next eight or nine years he remained inclose connection with the romantic school, his longest adherence to any movement, for, being of a very impressionable natiu^e, he sojourned for a time in all the literary, philosophical, and humanitarian groups of his age, coming successively under the influence of Victor Hugo, Lamennais, and the Saint- Simonians ; but he was of too sceptical and detached a nature to be held very long by any of them. " II vient, s'enquiert et s'en va."
It was as a recruit to romanticism that Sainte-Beuve
published in 1828 his Tableau de la Poesie /oMefran(lisefran(;aise an XV P Sikle, a landmark in French "" '^^(^8^28^'^^ literary history, for it awakened an interest in
the Pleiad, stimulated the new departures in prosody, and endeavoured to legitimize the romantic move- ment by showing that it was a direct descendant of Ronsard and his school. The opponents of romanticism made great capital out of the assumption that the individualistic ten- dency was not in the national tradition, and that it was contrary to the French genius ; the upholders of romanti- cism were eager to prove that this was not the case. Ville- main, without polemical intention, in his Tableau du Moyen- Age, Sainte-Beuve in his Tableau de la Poesie frangaise an XV P Steele, and Theopliile Gautier in Les Grotesques (1833), the two latter of a set purpose, showed that the literature of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early part of the seventeenth century respectively, while clearly national, had a marked individualistic tendency. After three veil-
i82 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
tures as a poet — Vie, Poesies et Pensdes de Joseph Delorme (1829), Les Consolations (1830), Les Pen sees d'Aot}t{i8^y)— and one as a novelist — Vokipie (1834) — all four written whilst their author was passing through an intellectual and moral crisis, and all four confessions of the typically roman- tic kind, Sainte-Beuve suddenly abandoned creative litera- ture, allowed criticism to absorb all his energies, gradually lost sympathy with romanticism, and finally ceased to be its official critic.
Meanwhile he was contributing industriously to the
National, the Revue de Paris, and the Revue U844-1846/ ^^^ Deux Mondes, and these articles, revised
and republished, form the content of his earliest collection of essays, the Critiques et Portraits litteraires (5 vols., 1832-1839), in 1844 rearranged and reissued under the titles Portraits litteraires (3 vols.) and Portraits de Femmes (i vol.), and of the Portraits Con- temporains (5 vols., 1846). In all these essays Sainte- Beuve combines criticism with an account, not unminglcd with gossip, of the life and personality of the writer under discussion. He has not yet gained a full mastery of his method — the history and personality are apt to swamp the criticism ; but even in these three early collections, Sainte- Beuve reveals critical powers far above those of his prede- cessors or contemporaries, and that charm of manner which is one of his most delightful characteristics. Moreover, we can trace in these essays a steady increase in range and value. During the academic year of 1837-1838, Sainte- Beuve was invited to give a course of lectures at the Univer- sity of Lausanne. His subject was Jansenism and the Jansenists, and these lectures were the starting-point of his great work, the Histoire de Port-Royal, which was to occupy him at intervals for nearly twenty years. After the Revolution of 1848, he accepted an invitation from the Belgian Government to give a course of lectures on French literature at Liege, and this course developed into another work on a large scale, Chateaubriand et son Groupe litteraire, pubhshed in i860. Both of these books, however, belong
LITERARY CRITICISM- ROMANTIC PERIOD 183
to Sainte-Beuve's later and mature period, which coincides both in time and spirit with the literature of the following age. There we shall presently meet him again and discuss his critical work as a whole.
BOOK III
NEO-ROMANTICISM
I. THE TRIUMPH OF POSITIVISM
(c. 1850-1885)
»
II. THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT
(c. 1885-1900)
III. THE NEW REALISM AND THE NEW
IDEALISM
(c. 1900-1914)
PART I
THE TRIUMPH OF POSITIVISM
THE AGE OF SCIENCE AND DOUBT
(c. 1850-1885)
CHAPTER I
THE SOCIAL, HISTORICAL AND INTEL- LECTUAL BACKGROUND (c. 1850-1870)
THE period we are now considering comprises the Second Empire (1852-1870) and the first fifteen years of the Third RepubHc. When by the coup d'etat of December Napoleon III
I THE sociAL^^*^?^^^^ °^ ^^*^ great Napoleon) overthrew the AND HisTORi- Republican constitution and had himself pro-
CAL BACK*
GROUND claimed Emperor of the French, he acted as no (1850-1870) j^jgj.g adventurer, thirsty for power, but as a patriot, desiring above all things the welfare of his country, and convinced that the imperial regime would be a panacea for its woes. " The Restoration had failed because its spirit as well as its form was that of the past ; the Monarchy of July, because it had existed for the present, without tradition and without ideal ; the Republic, because, in its zeal for the future, it had ignored both the present and the past ; the Empire alone represented both the reconcilia- tion of order and progress, the facts of the present and the inspiration of the future." ^
' Lowes Dickinson : Action and Reaction in Modern France, p. 224.
187
i88 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
From the outset Napoleon Ill's programme ^p?ogM^e'^ was glory abroad, peace, order, and progress at home. The first part of his programme involved him in numerous foreign wars, which for the most part turned out badly for France : the unprofitable Crimean War (1854-1856) ; the War of Italian Independence (1859- 1860), in which the French, inspired by a double-sided policy, helped to expel the Austrians from Italy ; intervention in the Mexican War (1863-1867). Finally, in 1870, came the Franco-Prussian War, which Napoleon's previous policy had helped to make possible, and which led to his own overthrow.
As to the second part of his programme, peace and order at home were secured by a repression which the Emperor himself regarded as a temporary and regrettable, though necessary, step towards liberty. The leaders of the Repub- lican and Orleanist parties were driven into exile, and for the first seven or eight years of the new regime political life was stifled, while the stringency of the press laws had, as we shall see, an indirect influence on literatiue.
By progress Napoleon, who had a natural taste for great commercial and industrial enterprises, under-
proVerfty stood au iucreasc in material prosperity which se^nd Empire should make all classes dread the idea of revolu- tion. He was a Saint-Simonian at heart, and by this time the Saint-Simonians, who, it should be remem- bered, had always preached the gospel of industry, had abandoned their Utopian schemes and apostolic zeal and thrown themselves heart and soul into business, banking, and railroad construction. Railways had been introduced under Louis Philippe, and so had industry and commerce on a large scale. Under the Second Empire the pace of this kind of progress was quickened at an almost alarming rate. The rapid development of railways and steam-navigation, the cutting of the Suez Canal, the introduction of telegraphy and of a uniform postal rate for the whole of France, all helped to revolutionize commercial and industrial life. A further impetus to trade and industry was supplied by
THE TRIUMPH OF POSITIVISM 189
great international exhibitions — the fii-st in London, at the Crystal Palace, in 1851 ; the second and third in Paris, in 1855 and 1867. This last exhibition, " la Federation de la Matiere," as the Goncourts contemptuously called it, was attended by nearly all the sovereigns of Europe, and marked the culminating point of the material expansion and pros- perity of the Second Empire. The whole nation, peasants, artisans, as well as bourgeois and commercial men, shared in this general well-being ; there was work and bread for all. Improved means of communication, resulting in the rapid circulation of the necessities of life, had much to do with this, as had also the extensive sanitation and modernization undertaken in all the great cities of France. The partial rebuilding of Marseilles, Lyons, Bordeaux, Lille, Caen, Rouen, etc., provided work for thousands of artisans and labourers. Paris, which the Emperor hoped to make the metropolis of Europe, was almost entirely rebuilt and modernized — haussmannise, as the jargon of the day has it — for these improvements were carried out under the direction of Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1869. Haussmann's modernization of Paris has been regarded as one of the wonders of the nineteenth century. He swept away hundreds of unhealthy streets and alleys, constructed the grands boulevards (one of which bears his name), laid out the Bois de Boulogne, arranged for the building of two new bridges, the Central Markets, and the Opera, and extended the boundaries of the city so as to double its size.
The " epic of productivity and wealth," writ large
Conse uent '^^'^""S the Sccoud Empire, had an aspect which,
lack of obscured at first, was before long to make itself
felt. The general lack of idealism which great
material prosperity brings in its train, and which in finer
spirits induced an aloofness from their age, led in those of
commoner clay to a regrettable blindness concerning the
larger issues of life. Never, perhaps, was there a time in
French history when the facts so completely overshadowed
the problem of life. Again, the vast expansion of industry
igo A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
consequent on the application of steam-machinery to manu- facture concentrated the working classes in the towns, and it was not long before a perception of their interests as a class arose among them. By the end of the Second Empire the relation of the State to the working-man and of capital to labour had become, what they still are — the great social problems of modern times, ^
In the pages dealing with the general intellectual move- ment of the first half of the nineteenth century no place was given to scientists, because their influence on the thought and methods of literature was non-existent. The
n. THE Romantics, who were in such close touch with BK)^MENT painters and sculptors, broke the bonds which,
OP IDEAS since the beginning of the eighteenth century, grew 'S^cfence had united scientists and men of letters. Com- pletely preoccupied with themselves and their art, they took little or no interest in the contemporary discoveries of La- place in mathematics and astronomy, of Ampere and Arago in physics, of Lamarck (the forerunner of Darwin), Cuvier, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in natural history. During the second half of the century the dependence of literature on science was, for the interests of art, if anything too close, and the leaders of the realistic and naturalistic schools had scientific pretensions which were frequently out of propor- tion to their scientific knowledge.
It was during the Second Empire that the chemists Pasteur (1822-1895) and Berthelot (1827-1907), and the physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878), to mention only the most important out of a host of lesser names, were making momentous scientific discoveries and bringing about that unity of science as a whole which had been one of Comte's dearest dreams. All these men were indefatigable laboratory workers. In their view, observation and experi- ment, and not abstract reasoning, were the main avenues to knowledge. To quote from Berthelot's Science et Philo- , Sophie :
" Dans la construction de cette pyramide de la science, toutes les assises, de la base au somnict, reposeut sur robscrvation ct I'cx-
THE TRIUMPH OF POSITIVISM 191
p6rience. C'est un des principes de la science positive qu'aucune r6alite ne peut etre 6tablie par le raisonnement. Le monde no saurait etre devine."
The practical applications to curative and preventative medicine of Pasteur's and Claude Bernard's discoveries, and the far-reaching effects of the breach made by Berthelot in the barrier which had hitherto existed between organic and inorganic chemistry, could not fail to interest all intelli- gent people and to stimulate an interest in science and in scientific method generally, so that before long Pasteur was justified in remarking, " la science fait partie integrale du sens commun." These great developments in science, due to the com- , paratively recent notions of relativity and
Influence of , . , , . . ,. .
science on evolutiou, and to the ever-mcreasing application of the experimental method, thus led to the growth of a scientific temper among the more intelligent members of the general public, and in literary men to the development of what may be called the scientific or scholarly conscience. Nor did the influence of science on literature stop at mere scientific method, for men of letters attempted to apply the new scientific theories to their own subjects. Thus, not long after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species (published 1859, translated into French 1862), his theory of evolution was applied in literary criticism, philology, the study of religious and social institutions. In the same way the determinism worked out by Laplace and applied by Claude Bernard to medicine, and the theory of the influence of environment on which, in zoology, Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had laid such stress, were seized upon for their own purposes by novelists and historians.
The influence of science on the thought, as apart from the subject-matter of literature, is shown in the attempt to explain the universe, from the atom to the human mind, from a purely scientific point of view, and to eliminate from the springs of human conduct all motives for action which science cannot explain.
192 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
The diffusion of the scientific spirit was considerably helped by the philosophical system of Augusta
'sophy of Comte, to which he himself applied the epithet
positivism ,, positive," to distinguish it from the negative or critical philosophy of the eighteenth century, though later positivists used the term as opposed to " hypothetical " or "conjectural."
Auguste Comte (1798-1857), after studying ^|^j^*gfj^°™'^ chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique, and medicine at Mont- pellier, was in 1817 introduced to Saint-Simon, became his secretary, later his collaborator, and for the time being his enthusiastic disciple. Before long, however, differences arose between the two. Comte, who was a more systematic thinker and possessed greater scientific knowledge than the imaginative and visionary Saint-Simon, wished to reform ideas before reforming institutions, and thought that his fellow-worker in the cause of humanity was in too great a hurry to give practical form to his theories. In 1824 they parted in anger, and henceforward Comte denied that he owed anything to Saint-Simon. W'Tiether this be true or not, most of Comte's general ideas are the same as Saint- Simon's, and the two starting-points of his philosophical system, whether he reached them independently or not, are commonplaces of the Saint-Simonian doctrine ; that is to say, that political and social phenomena have their laws like natural phenomena, and that the day has dawned for the establishment and organization of a new spiritual power to replace Catholicism. Comte's spiritual power, like Saint- Simon's, was to consist of a body of scientists (in Comte's scheme, sociologists) whose duty it should be to direct society in the light of the positive truths of science.
Again, like Saint-Simon, Comte was a firm believer in progress, and he explains the whole progress of
the Three humanity by what he calls the Law of the Three
Stages
Stages. In the first or theological stage of his development, man sought successively in fetishism, poly- theism, and monotheism a supernatural explanation of the
THE TRIUMPH OF POSITIVISM 193
universe and of natural phenomena. In the second or meta- physical stage, which Comte dates from the fourteenth century, man sought to interpret the universe by the hypothesis of abstract forces. In the third which Comte ' saw dawning — the positive stage — man seeks to understand himself and the universe by scientific methods, for in Comte's view nothing can be real or positive except such phenomena as lend themselves to observation or experiment.
" Dans I'etat positjf, I'esprit humain, reconnaissant rimpossibilit6 d'obtenir des notions absolues, renonce a chercher Torigine et la destination de I'univers et de connaitre les causes intimes des pheno- mfenes, pour s'attacher uniquement k d6couvrir, par I'usage bien combine du raisonnement et de I'observation, leurs lois effectives, c'est-k-dire Icurs relations invariables de succession ou de simili- tude." 1
( As he looks back over the ages, Comte singles out the social and spiritual organization of medieval Catholicism for high praise. Because of its unity and continuity, and its separation of the temporal from the spiritual power, he regards this organization as " le chef d'oeuvre politique de la sagcsse humaine," but he looks forward to an equally good, if not better, organization under the aegis of science. In the hierarchy of the sciences, classified in the order , of their complexity and dependence on each
Importance of '■ . -^ , . ,
the science of othcr, Comtc givcs sociology the highest place, SOCIO ogy j^Qjjjj^g^ however, that it was impossible for it to develop until the two next in the scale, biology and chemistry, had assumed a truly scientific form. This being now the case, sociology can and must be developed into a positive science and co-ordinated with all the other sciences into an organic whole, for then, and only then, can men embark on the last and positive stage of their development. Such are, very briefly, the leading ideas in Comte's Cours de Philosophie Positive, the six volumes of which appeared between 1830 and 1848, and which he later sum- marized in Le Catechisme du Positivisrne (1852). In his last work, the Systeme de Politique Positive (1851-1854),
^ Cours de Philosophie Positive. VOL. II. — 13
194 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Comte gives a further development to his doctrine by transforming his spiritual power into a non-theological, non-metaphysical religion — the religion of humanity, which was to be organized, as Catholicism had been, to form a vast international association, working for the spiritual and moral welfare of humanity and spreading the light by means of science and scientific philosophy ; in fact, as Huxley wittily remarks, it was to be " a Catholicism without Christianity." Outside purely positivist circles this last development of Comte's sj^stem was never accepted, and consequently had no influence.
Faguet describes Comte as " le semeur d'idees et I'excita-
teur intellectuel le plus puissant qui ait ete
sowe?o1 ideas ^^^ notrc sieclc, le plus grand penseur . . . que
la France ait eu depuis Descartes," ^ and this.
because he not only built a bridge between the natural and
the moral sciences and laid the foundations of sociology, but
because he perceived and made capital of a new tendency
of the human mind which consists in transferring to
science the faith which had hitherto been reserved for the
mysteries of religion or metaphysics.
Comte, who corresponded with and influenced John Stuart His Mfll, was little known outside a small circle in
influence Fraucc uutil after 1850, but through his disciple Littre (the author of the standard French dictionary), and more particularly through the early writings of Renan, the later criticism of Sainte-Beuve, and the philosophical, historical, and literary researches of Taine, who absorbed Comte unconsciously through Mill, his leading principles became current coin not only in the speculative sciences, but in literary criticism, history, the novel, and even in poetry.
^ Politiques et Moyalistes, ii, p. 369.
CHAPTER II REALISM AND NATURALISM
A FAILURE to perceive similarity amid apparent diversity, a tendency to see revolution where there is only evolution, impairs the value of much that has been written about recent literary schools. The error is the more difficult to avoid, because the leaders of these schools have generally deemed themselves revolutionaries in the realm of art, and because the lapse of time alone makes it possible to see an intellectual or artistic movement in its true perspective.
Most critics hold that by the middle of the nineteenth century romanticism was definitely on the wane, if not actually in its death^throes, and that at the turn of the half- century something new and opposed to it arose to take its place. Yet, if one takes a large panoramic view, it would seem that, allowing for certain differences of aim and method and certain eliminations, due to a reaction against the excesses of romanticism, French literature of the second half of the nineteenth century and of the early years of the twentieth was still in the main romantic — in other words, that realism, naturalism, impressionism, Parnas- sianism, symbolism, and all other minor " isms " which have succeeded each other so rapidly since 1850, are only so many branches on the tree of romanticism, and that consequently the whole period might conveniently be labelled Neo-Romantic.
It would be easy to prove the affinity that exists between romanticism and symbolism ; it is perhaps a little more
195 ^
196 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
difficult to see the connection between the romanticism of The Growth OF 1830 and thc realism which flourished in the Realism novel after 1850, and which on the surface '^^ot the^'^™ seems so utterly opposed to it.
Romantics jhough it was uot Until about 1850 that the word realism came to be used as a term of literary criticism, the realistic tendency was no new thing, and is apparent to those who care to seek it throughout the roman- tic movement. Indeed, in a book entitled Le Realisme des Romantiqiies, Pellissier has no difficulty in proving that
" la litterature romantique comparee avec celles des deux sifecles pr6c6dents s'y oppose presque sur tous les points romme r6aliste."
Realism was, in fact, implicit in the romantic doctrine as preached by Victor Hugo in his Preface de Cromwell. Truth drawn from nature itself without the interposition of literary models or rules and the substitution of the particular for the general, the characteristic for the beautiful, were the watchwords of that manifesto and of all the young poets who grouped themselves round the master. Yet romanti- cism as elaborated by its French exponents was a curious amalgamation of principles which tended to paralyse each other. Poets might preach and endeavour to practise truth to nature, but as they also preached and practised the most extreme individualism, their outlook was so much tinged with imagination and feeling, so much determined by a predilection for the exceptional, that their realism was in the main limited to mirroring such realities as were unusual or little known. The desire to render local colour in time and space as illustrated by the historical and exotic novel of the romantic period represents this particular form of realism. Stendhal, who sought reality in foreign lands and in France, and who defined the novel as " un miroir qui se promene sur une grand'route," and more particularly Balzac, who concentrated on the portrayal of the manners—- of his day, were pure realists as regards the setting and--* descriptive detail of their novels, though in choice of plots
-I
tvV
V
\^'\
.,0^^'^^^'^' ^
REALISM AND NATURALISM 197
and characters they were not. Nevertheless, they were both claimed as literary ancestors by the later realists, espe- cially at first, before the latter became fully aware how truly Stendhal expressed his attitude towards the real when he remarked, " je detoume mes yeux de tout ce qui est bas ; je sympathise avec tout ce qui est contes d'amour . . . de g^n^rosite," and before they had begun to take exception to Balzac's imaginative qualities and his fondness for-^ introducing personal reflections into his novels.
A glance at the entries in the chronological table between 1840 and 1850 reveals a complete absence of ^' of re^^Hsm"^ lyrical poetry, Lamartine and Musset having ^'ZTx857° laid down their lyres for good, Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo for the time being. After the failure of Les Burgraves and the triumph of Ponsard's Lucrece (1842), the romantic drama was discredited ; the romantic novel and short story were torn between social preoccupations (George Sand) and art for art's sake (Meri- mee), while Balzac, in spite of certain clearly romantic ele-"^ — ments, pursued his realistic way until in 1850 it was cutV short by death.
Nor did he pursue it alone, for during these years, in circles into which writers who had made their name rarely, if ever, penetrated, a number of now forgotten painters and novelists were independently working their way towards realism.
After the Revolution of 18^0, a group of writers and artists
who prided themselves on their eccentricity, and
^'bei^f i84r of whom Theophile Gauticr, Gerard de Nervd/
Arsene Houssaye, and Petrus Borel were the
leading lights, foregathered in a house in the Rue Doyenne,
styled themselves " les jeunc France," and did their utmost
to lead a Bohemian existence. From the literary point
of view, the history of this group — "la Boheme galante,"
as they retrospectively called themselves when in middle
age they looked back upon their wild and golden youth —
is inseparable from that of romanticism generally.
But in the early forties there arose another Bohemia, the
198 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
members of which were no mere dilettanti, but for the most part needy young men from the provinces, who, having come to Paris to make their fortune as painters, poets, or musi- cians, were often quite unable to make both ends meet, and yet succeeded in assuming that happy-go-lucky attitude towards the material difficulties of life which, combined with a certain unconventionality of behaviour, is generally associated with Bohemianism. At first their rendezvous was the Cafe Momus, in the Latin quarter. Here they installed themselves with their easels, their musical instru- ments, and their writing materials, and it may be assumed that they generally had the place to themselves.
This Bohemia would now be forgotten were it not for the fact that it counted amongst its number three men whose works not only enjoyed a certain vogue in their own day, but also helped to establish the doctrine of realism. These three men were — in the order of their importance in this latter connection — the painter Courbet, a later arrival, and the novelists Champfleury and Murger.
Murger and Champfleury, mediocre novelists though they be, are interesting because they so clearly reflect the con- nection between the romanticism of 1830 and the realism of a later date. In the early days the bonds which united all these frequenters of the Cafe Momus were their poverty and their romanticism. Would-be poets and novelists in the romantic manner justified all their extravagances in prose and verse by the doctrine of the freedom of art, and their favourite themes were the hemi, ie'nebreux and the artist misunderstood by society. They likewise revelled in per- sonal confession, but so great was the contrast between their romantic ideals on the one hand and their daily life and surroundings on the other, that when they came to set down their confidences in prose, short of omitting personal experiences altogether, they were inevitably led to a certain realism of treatment. Again, living as they did amongst eccentrics of every kind, they were able to paint the exceptional and the grotesque from real life, and had no need to invent it as the Romantics perforce had done.
REALISM AND NATURALISM 199
Miirger and Champfleury, who for a long time shared a
lodging in the Latin quarter, are the best repre-
champfleSry scntatives of this gradual transformation of
before 1848 j-Qj^^j^^i^ism in Bohemian circles— through the transition stage of the so-called " ecole fantaisiste."
Henry Murger (1822-1861), the son of a tailor, after act- ing for some time as secretary to Count Alexei .'"(isXSr Tolstoi, and at the same time trying his hand unsuccessfully at poetry and journalism, made his name by his Scenes de la Vie de Bohime and Scenes de la Vie de Jeunesse, which appeared in the pages of the Corsaire from 1846 to 1848, and were collected in book-form in 185 1. In the interval the Scenes de la Vie de Boheme were arranged for the stage, and produced at the Varietes in November, 1849, while many years later they formed the basis of Puccini's opera, La Boheme (1898). This first work of Murger's remained his masterpiece. It is a fantasy embroidered on the real fortunes and misfortunes, loves, studies, and amusements of La Boheme by the imagi- nation-and witty good-humour of one of its leading members -^the Rudolphe of the stories. Such representatives of the bourgeoisie as cross his pages are cruelly caricatured, while all his artists are idealized probably with intention, for, as he remarks towards the beginning of the book :
" Les Scenes de la Vie de Boh5me ne sont . . . que dcs etudes de mceurs dont les heros apparticnncnt k une classe maljug^e jusqu'ici, et dont le plus grand dcfaut est le desordre ; et encore peuvent-ils donner pour excuse que ce desordre meme est une n6ces- sit6 que leur fait la vie."
Champfleury (1821-1889), whose novels and talcs are no longer read, was destined to play an important
Champfleury _°. , . . ttt-u u-
(Jules Husson) Tolc m the Campaign of realism. He began his (1821-1889) jji-gj-^j-y career as an art critic, and continued this form of journahsm intermittently throughout his life. His early stories, .of which Les Confessions de Sylvius, which appeared in the Corsaire for 1885-1886, is a good example,^ are drawn chiefly from Bohemian life somewhat
200 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
embellished, but they lay great stress on the material diffi- culties of the artistic career. Champfleury underlines the eccentricities and affectations of the artist, and delights, even more than Murger, whom he preceded, in throwing a strong light on the solemn and consequential stupidity of the bourgeois. Now, contempt for the bourgeois, the philistine, had been almost a canon of art with the Romantics, but none of them — with the notable exception of Balzac, who definitely set out to paint all classes of society — had deigned to introduce him into their works even for the purpose of satire. La Boheme, on the other hand, took a special delight in doing so, especially as time went on ; but artists in caricature had been before them, and this raises the interesting question of the influence of the plastic arts on the development of realism.
Romanticism in art and literature went hand in hand, (2) Influence of though it was literature which led the way. In
the plastic the gradual detachment of realism from roman-
arts on the . , *-"
development ticism, howcvcr, the mflucnce was reversed, and seems first to have made itself felt in the Bohe- mian circle of which we have just been speaking. That artists in caricature should have been first in the field was, no doubt, natural, for, as Paul Gaultier remarks : "La caricature que beaucoup prennent pour un art du rire est k coup sur un art de la laideur s'il semble bien que de ne montrer que le vilain cote des choses, les tares et les taches." ^ Until the nineteenth century, in France as elsewhere, with the notable exception of Hogarth in England, caricature had consisted almost entirely in deformations of the lines of the human body and in distor- tions and contortions of the human face. French caricature, timid and ineffective under the ancien regime, assumed great importance under the Revolution, though without acquiring any artistic merit, being merely libellous and hideously grotesque. Under the peaceable and materialistic regime of Louis Philippe, with the despised bourgeois in the ascen- dant, French caricaturists wrought a change in the matter
- Paul Gaultier: Le Rirc ct la Caricature {1906), *p. 6,
REALISM AND NATURALISM 201
and manner of their ironic art by bringing it far closer to reality than it had ever been before. With them it is no longer a question of arousing laughter by means of distor- tion or lack of proportion, but by accentuating in the bearing or facial expression of their models the significant trait which reveals some evil, foolish, or vulgar tendency.
The earliest in date of these caricaturists was Henri Monnier (1802-1876), who in his Scenes de la Vie Populaire (1830), realistic sketches in dialogue form accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings by his own hand, was the first to give at once literary and plastic expression to the contempt for the bourgeois prevailing in romantic circles. Here, as in the later Scenes de la Ville et de la Campagne (1841) and the Physiologie du Bourgeois, the drawings only bring out superficial absurdities of gesture and expression, while the scenes themselves, all copied as exactly as possible from lower middle-class life, are those in which nothing remarkable happens and nothing interesting is said. Henri Monnier's name still lives as the creator of M. Joseph Prud- homme, the writing-master who incarnates his author's conception of the typical bourgeois of 1830 or thereabouts.^ This pompous and sententious character already appears in his early sketches, and is the hero of the later Memoires de M. Joseph PrudJiomnie (1857). / Shortly after the appearance of Les Scenes Popiduires, 'Charles Philipon (1802-1862), who has been styled "the father of comic journalism," and who was no mean carica- turist himself, founded two papers, La Caricature (1831- 1835) and Le Charivari (1832 to the present day), the proto- type of Punch, the London Charivari (founded 1840) . Among the caricaturists whose services he secured for these papers were Honore Daumier (1808-1879) and Charles Travies, who respectively dubbed their typical bourgeois Macaire and Mayeux, and whom Champfleury, in the Preface to his Histoire de la Caricature Moderne (1865), refers to, together with Henri Monnier, as "les demolisseurs de la bourgeoisie."
^ Later Monnier made Prudhomme the hero of a comedy bearing the title Gmndcur ct Decadence de Joseph Prudhomme (1852).
202 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITER.\TURE
Another member of Philipon's band was Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier (1801-1806), better kno\\Ti under the nom de guerre Gavarni, which he adopted in affectionate remembrance of a valley in the Pyrenees where he made his first published sketch. Gavarni was an extremely clever caricaturist of all classes of Parisian society, with a special fondness for the elegantly dressed, owing, no doubt, to the fact that, before he joined the staff of Le Charivari, he had designed models for various fashion journals. Between 1840 and 1850 he illustrated Sue's Jiiif Errant, Dumas' Comte de Monte Christo, the French translation of Hoffmann's Fantastic Tales, and the first collected edition of Balzac's novels.
There can be no doubt that these clever and telling caricaturists considerably helped the cause of realism, especially Daumier, the prince of the quartette :
" Ce ne sont plus des portraits sur une feuille de papier," exclaims Champ fieury, who was one of his most ardent admirers. " Tons ces hommes vivent, remuent, ecoutent, regardent comme dans la vie." ^
Champfieury knew Daumier personally — they frequently met at the Brasserie Andler in the Rue Hauteville, whither, about 1846, the former frequenters of the Cafe Momus had transferred their gatherings, and where, side by side with the Bohemians of the early days, were to be found, besides Daumier, the painters Corot and Courbet, the socialist Proudhon (who later prided himself en discovering a whole social philosophy in Courbet's pictures), the poet Baudelaire, and the literary critic Emile Montegut.^
Pure romanticism in painting was destined to be more
short-lived than romanticism in literature. In
'"^ p^^j'l^g^P® the early thirties the famous quarrel between
Ingres and Delacroix about line and colour
marks its waning in the plastic arts, though Delacroix
himself, of whom it has been said that he was " a lui seul
le romantisme fait art," 2 remained, like Victor Hugo, a
convinced romantic to the day of his death (1S63).
^ Histoire de la Caricature Moderne.
2 Rocheblave : Le Gout en France (1914).
REALISM AND NATURALISM 203
The reaction against the violence, high colouring, and careless drawing which romanticism had '^'^^^hoor"" brought in its train is most clearly seen in the work of a small group of landscape painters, who, refusing to treat either conventional or exotic scenes, went straight to the woods and fields of France for their inspira- tion. This group, later known as the Barbizon school, be- cause most of its members settled in the village of that name, near the forest of Fontainebleau, began exhibiting in the early thirties, and its leaders, Corot (1796-1875), Rousseau (1812-1867), and Millet (1814-1875), now rank amongst the greatest artists of their time. Corot's work is throughout more individual and poetic than that of any other member of the school, but his earlier manner has much less of the mistiness, mystery, and poetry, which characterizes his land- scapes from about 1865 onwards. Of the three, Millet has the most clearly marked realistic tendencies. Peasants working in the fields were his favourite subject, and in pictures like Le Vanneur (1848), Le Semeur (1850), Lcs Glaneuses (1857), ^^^ L'Angelns (i860), he gives a faithful and uncxaggerated rendering of certain everyday occur- rences in the lives of those who toil on the land. In con- nection with the history of realism, however, the most important painter who made his name at the turn of the half-century was Courbet.
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), born of peasant stock at
(iii) Genre- O^naus, in Franchc-Comtc, came to Paris in
painting. 1829, and ^cgau his career as an artist by paint-
^"^'"bet *"°"'^' irig literary subjects in the romantic style. But
(1819-1877) these he soon abandoned for the study of real life, and from 1848 onwards he led a campaign against the then prevalent idea that the only object of plastic art was to inspire beautiful thoughts by the representation of beautiful images. Courbet maintained that painters can only paint well what they have actually seen, and that the modern artist should therefore limit himself to his native landscape, animal studies, and scenes from contemporary life. In 1849 ^^c wrote an open letter to the art critics of the
204 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Revue des Deux Mondes, ending with the words : " Qui, il fait encanailler I'art. II y a trop longtemps que les poetes nos contemporains font de I'art k iddes et d'apres des cartons." Courbet practised what he preached, choosing modern and somewhat trivial subjects and signing his efforts : " Courbet sans ideal et sans religion." In the Salon of 1849 he exhibited seven pictures, among them Une Aprh-dinee d Ornans and Le Vendange d'Ornans. Champfleury wrote in high praise of this new painter whom he considered that he had discovered, made Courbet 's acquaintance, and henceforward remained his faithful ally. Three pictures, Les Paysans de Flagey revenant de la Foire, Les Casseurs de Pierre, and L' Enterrement d'Ornans, exhi- bited by Courbet at the Salon of 1851, caused a great stir, and definitely raised the question of realism. Champfleury took it upon himself to define Courbet's manner :
" Est-ce la faute du peintre si les int6rets matdriels, si la vie de petite ville, si des 6goismes sourds, si la mesquinerie de province clouent leurs griffes sur la figure, eteignent les yeux, plissent le front, li6betent la bouche . Les bourgeois sont ainsi. M. Courbet a peint les bourgeois."
In 1853 Courbet's Baigneuses caused an even greater scandal. Dissatisfied with the place assigned to him in the International Exhibition of 1855, Courbet opened a pri- vate exhibition of his pictures and issued a catalogue con- taining his realistic profession of faith, the gist of which was in his own words — " Le fond du realisme c'est la negation de I'id^al et de tout ce qui s'ensuit," or in the words which Theodore de Banville and Paul Boyer put into his mouth in the Feuilleton d'Aristophane, a revue in which Courbet figures under the name of Realista ^ :
" Faire vrai, ce n'est rien pour etre r^aliste, C'est faire laid qu'il faut ! Oui, monsieur s'il vous plait. Tout ce que je dessine est horriblement laid, Ma peinture est affreuse, et, pour qu'elle soit vraie, J 'en arrache le beau comme on fait de Fivraie." ,
' Messager de VAssemhlie Nationale, Feb. 26, 1851, quoted by Martino : Le Roman Rialiste sous le second Empire (1913).
REALISM AND NATURALISM 205
After launching his manifesto, Courbet retired from the fray and spent the rest of his life painting animals, land- scapes, and seascapes, leaving propaganda in the hands of Champfleury.
Since Champfieury's early ventures in the tale of Bohe- mian life, he had come under the influence of and Murger Balzac, Hcuri Mouuicr, and Daumier, to say ^ '"^ ^ '* nothing of Courbet himself, whose aesthetic theories he immediately transferred from art to literature, notably in Les Oies de Noel (1850), Les Ecceniriques (1852), Les Aventures de Mariette (1853), and Les Bourgeois de Molincliart (1855), the interest of which depends purely on their realism. At the same time he influenced his friend Murger in a realistic direction, as may be seen in the cleverly dra\\Ti provincial types of the latter's Pays Latin and in that forerunner of M. Homais, the ignorant, self-satisfied bourgeois M. 'BridiOVix^ofLes^^iveurs d'Eait (contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes (1853-1854)). , In 1857, just after the appearance of Madame Bovary, Champfleury collected his chief critical articles in a volume entitled Le Realisme, from the preface of which one gathers that the writer must represent real life without altering the smallest detail, or, as its author expressed it later in Les Souvenirs de Jeunesse :
" Cc que fe vols entre dans ma tete, descend dans ma plume et devient ce que j'ai vu. La m^thode est simple et h. la port^e de tout le monde. Mais que de temps il faut pour so d6barrasser des sou- venirs, des imitations, du milieu ou Ton vit et pour retrouver sa propre nature."
Complete sincerity in art was his cry, and it was also the cry of a monthly periodical founded by some of his now- forgotten disciples — Realisme, which during the six months of its existence inveighs against art for art's sake and preaches contemporary subjects — ugly ones, if need be.
Champfieury's novels enjoyed a considerable vogue at the time of their appearance, and undoubtedly helped to accustom the general public to the methods and results of realistic art, if not actually to create a taste for it. The intensely artistic Flaubert had, as one can imagine, no
2o6 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
admiration for the intensely inartistic Champfleury, yet the appearance of Les Bourgeois de MoUnchart, the setting of which has a certain similarity with that of Madame Bovary, over which Flaubert was still toiling, made him regret that he had been forestalled in the subject of his choice.^ The Goncourts in their Journal refer more than once to Champfleury, though generally in a somewhat hostile tone. In an early novel, Charles Demailly, he is introduced under the guise of Pommageot, and made to exclaim : " Je pense que le genie n'est qu'une memoire stenographique." Zola, on the other hand, both read and appreciated him, and, curiously enough, does not seem to differentiate very clearly between him and Flaubert. 2 Champfleury's novels, despite the fact that they have no literary merit, mark a date in the history of pfaTi'fa^he^ realism — that is to say, the moment when that '"reliism"^ literary current freed itself from other counter- acting tendencies. Moreover, they represent the typical example of realism developing out of romanti- cism without the influence of science or the scientific spirit, but under the influence of a Bohemian life led in close contact with sordid reality, and under the stimulus of new tendencies in the plastic arts, notably in caricature and painting. More than any other writer of his day, Champ- fleury accustomed the general public to the methods and results of reahsm in literature, thus paving the way for Flaubert, the Goncourts, and Zola. The realism which dominated French literature from about 1850 to about 1885, and which has been
General ^ ^'
characteris- denned as
TICS OF
Realism " ^^ systfeme qui reproduit de la realite ce qui releve Realism and ^^ P^^^ directement de la sensation, c'-a-d. le c6t6 ext6- naturaiism rieur et materiel des hommes et des choses," *
of two kinds. On the one hand, there was the artistic
1 Cf. Correspondance, iii, p. 2.
- Cf. Zola: Correspondance, ii, p. 11.
- David- Sauvagcot : Le Realisme ct le Naturalismc.
REALISM AND NATURALISM 207
realism championed by the school which took " art for art's sake " as its device (Gautier, Flaubert, the Parnassians, Baudelaire) ; on the other, the pseudo-scientific realism or naturalism of which Zola was the admitted master, and which he defines as "la formule de la science moderne appliquee a la litterature," and which he might equally
- well have defined as "art in the interests of science."
Both schools aim at representing things as they really are, and one might, therefore, have expected them to do justice to life as a whole, but representing, as they did, a reaction against the idealistic, imaginative, and sentimental attitude in literature, both tended to eliminate all those realities which are compatible with idealism and emotion, and to substitute for them the realities which had hitherto been regarded as unsuitable for artistic treatment, i.e. the ordinary humdrum aspect of life, and more especially its sordid and seamy side. The naturalists take ordinary, and often abnormal, contemporary life as their sole domain, and make an almost photographic record of commonplace and trivial fact in all its vulgar and uninteresting detail, so that their works give the intended impression of being slices of life cut at random from brute reality. The artistic realists, on the other hand, never v/ent so far as to believe that because the true is not always beautiful, the ugly must always be true. From the dreariness and ugliness of contemporary life they, like the romantics, though in a more scientific and archaeological spirit, made frequent excursions into the realm of realities distant in time. and space ; and even when working on unpromishig material in nineteenth-century France, they still endeavoured to give a heightened impression of the real by choosing their slice of life among those which have a certain value as wholes and by concentrating on the significant and illuminating detail. For the devotees of art for art's sake aimed not only at scientific exactitude to truth, but also at perfection of workmanship and of form in its widest. sense. The belief in art for its own sake, which was already implicitly con- 1 tained in the Preface de Cromwell, was, on the one hand, a
2o8 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
reaction against the romantic practice of subordinating perfection of workmanship to emotion, rapture, etc., and, on the other, the result of the stringency of the press laws during the early years of the Second Empire. The Imperial Government prohibited men of letters, under pain of fine and imprisonment, from introducing into their works, directly or indirectly, anything remotely connected with politics or social science. Since the burning questions of the day were a forbidden topic, and since the growth of industrialism could only be regarded by artists as both soul and beauty- killing, it was natural that they should withdraw into their 4vory towers and cultivate art for art's sake.
Despite Zola's protestations, with the naturalists form and workmanship were only a secondary consideration, largely because naturalism came more and more to mean a confusion of art with science. Zola goes so far as to say :
" La science est done, a vrai dire, de la poesie expliquee ; un savant est un pofete qui remplace les hj'potheses de I'imagination par I'^tude exacte des choses et des etres." ^
Indeed, the aims and methods of naturalism in its extreme form lie outside art altogether, for it implies that the human subject-matter of literature can be measured and analysed in precisely the same way as the materials of the physical sciences. Zola and Taine may or may not be right when they respectively declare that " I'heredite a ses lois comme la pesanteur," and that " le vice et la vertu sont des pro- duits comme le sucre et le vitriol " ; but whereas the laws of gravity are fully known, those of heredity are not, at any rate as yet, while vice and virtue are such complex pro- ducts that so far they have defied the kind of analysis which can be applied to sugar or vitriol.
The determinism to which the naturalists were committed in advance can at best only account for a certain number of the facts of life, and so their works are, to say the least of it, only " the superficial transcript of a very limited reality." ^
1 Le Roman Expdritnental, p. 85.
- McDowall: Realism: A Study in Art and Thought (1918).
REALISM AND NATURALISM 209
For the artistic realist the purpose of art was aesthetic pleasure, which he thought could be best attained by representing the reality which appeals to the senses rather than that which appeals to the mind or to the imagination. For the thorough- going naturalist, on the other hand, the purpose of art was utilitarian, and in a measure didactic.
" Nos romans," writes Zola, " recherchent les causes, les expliquent, amassent des documents humains, pour qu'on puisse etre le maitre du milieu et de I'homme de fafon a developper les bons elements et a exterminer les mauvais." ^
In spite of these divergencies in aim and method, realists Leading and naturalists have a good many character-
common\'o'^ istics in common. Both groups M^ere the sons
an'dartfsuc ^f scieucc, but they were also the heirs of realism romauticism, and though they refused to touch , certain parts of their romantic inheritance, others they \ seized upon gladly, modifying them, extending them, and I sometimes degrading them for their owm uses. The relation of realism and naturalism to romanticism is thus at once derivative and reactionary. On the negative side the reaction is seen in an endeavour to eliminate from art much that the romantics had cherished : idealism, for instance, the treatment of the problem of life in its wide sense, and the purely subjective attitude and method. Positively, it manifests itself in an attempt to limit art to the treatment of actual concrete reality, understood as an indefinite succes-- sion of the small facts and details of life. At the same time, both realists and naturalists subordinated the creative imagination to observation in a far greater degree than the great classical writers had subordinated it to reason.
Idealism, which, from an aesthetic point of view, means the correction of reality by art, or better, perhaps, reality captured in its highest and finest moments, was deliberately eschewed by the new school.
^ Le Roman Experimental, p. 84. VOL. II, 14
210 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
"Notre querelle avec les id^alistes," writes Zola, " est uniquement, dans ce fait que nous partons de I'observation et de I'experience tandis qu'ils partent d'un absolu." ^
Hence the refusal of the champions of art for art's sake and
(i) Eiimination °^ naturahsm to regard the artist as a leader of
and tff'th^ men, still less as an inspired pilot of the ship of
problem of state. Hencc also their refusal to defend any
life
cause or doctrine. "Tout livre a tendances cesse d'etre un livre d'artiste," ^ declares Flaubert ; but here artistic realists and naturalists part company, for the latter, like Courbet and Champfleury, hope by their human docu- ments to point a moral rather than to adorn a tale. As for thejDroblem of life — the meaning of existence — which had been a favourite lyrical theme with the romantics, both parties leave it severely alone.
" La rage de vouloir conclure est une des manies les plus funestes et les plus st^riles qui appartiennent k Thumanite," *
writes Flaubert and Zola agrees with him :
" On ^tudie la nature et rhomme, on classe les documents, on avance pas a pas, en employant la methode exp^rimentale et analy- tique, mais on se garde bien de conclure." '
This abstention was partly, no doubt, due to the influence of science and of the positivist philosophy, but partly also to the fact that it is difficult to deal with the problem of life without revealing a personal point of view, and on no point was the ihou shall not of all realists as categorical as on this one.
" Dans rid6al que j'ai de I'art," writes Flaubert to George Sand, " je crois que . . . I'artiste ne doit pas plus apparaitre dans son ceuvre que Dieu dans la nature."
- Le Roman Experimental, p. 87.
- Flaubert: Correspondance.
- Zola : Le Roman Experimental, p. 83.
REALISM AND NATURALISM 211
Instead of making his novel and poems the vehicle for , , _,. . ,. personal emotion and confession as the roman-
(2) Elimination t^
of subjective tic had donc, the realist effaces himself as far
method, but as possible behind his work, for he believes that
author's he will neither see true nor render faithfully if;
individuality ^^ ^j^^^^ j^j^ ^^^ fcelings and individuality to \
intervene. This does not mean that he is impassive— who less so at heart than Flaubert or Leconte de Lisle ? — but that he dominates his emotion and refuses to set aught down on paper until he has conquered it at least for the time being. " Je n'ai pas dit qu'il fallait se supprimer le coeur, mais le contenir helas," explains Flaubert to George Sand, and again : "II faut par un effort d'esprit se transporter dans les personnages et non les tirer a soi." ^ Nor is this prin- ciple of self-repression intended to exclude individuality from art. Individuality should reveal itself not in perr sonal effusions, but in the way the artist reacts to his environment and in his stjde. In his preface to Pierre et Jean, Maupassant quotes some advice once given him by Flaubert :
" II s'agit de regarder tout ce qu'on veut exprimer assez longtemps et avec assez d'attentiou pour en d6couvrir un aspect qui n'ait 6t6 vu et dit par personne. II y a dans tout de rinexplor6 parce que nous sommes iiabitu6s k ne nous servir de nos yeux qu'avec le souvenir de ce qu'on a pens6 avant nous sur ce que nous contem- plons."
For all the writers of this school, though they refused to display their personal emotions, made a point of rendering their personal sensations, which to their mind offered, with- out loss of dignity, a far wider scope for revealing originality and distinction.
" Nous renoncerions a avoir une languc personnelle, une langue portant notre signature et nous descendrions k parlcr le langage omnibus des faits divers ? " 2
^ Flaubert: Coryespondance, iii, p. 331.
- ChSrie, Preface.
\
212 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
asks Edmond de Goncourt, and his answer to this rhetorical question is a categorical negative. The realists and naturalists may thus be said to have , made an article of faith of their abstention from
^i^eritonce'^ Certain romantic tendencies. Others they fol- lowed, sometimes intentionally, sometimes, it would seem, almost against their will. That the observation of external reality and the belief in the independence of art, on which their whole aesthetic system rested, were a direct inheritance from romanticism, we have already seen. But there were other points, too, in which these neo-romantics were the heirs of the generation of 1830.
First and foremost there is the legacy of style and (i) style and language. Even Zola, who has little good to language g^y ^f ^^le Tomautics, freely admits this in- debtedness, though he regards it as the only one.
' lis venaient surtout parce qu'ils avaient une besogne consider- able h accomplir, c'etait le renouvellement de la langue. ... II fallait, je le repete, une generation de poetes lyriques pour empan- acher la langue, pour en faire un instrument large, souple et bril- lant. . . . Les romantiques venaient a leur heure, ils conqueraient la liberte de la forme, ils forgeaient Toutil dont le siecle devait se servir. . . . Nous tous, 6crivains de la seconde moitie du siecle, nous sommes done, comme stylistes, les enfants des romantiques. . . . Les meilleurs d'entre nous doivent leur rhetorique aux poetes et aux .p) prosateurs de 1830." ^
Again, the neo-romantics indulged in the same attitude of aristocratic aloofness from the rest of mankind aristocratic as thcir immediate forerunners. Both schools ess beiieygfj that the artist should live for his art alone, and that his place, whether he be an inspired seer, or merely a clear-sighted observer, is "above the battle." Hence romantics and neo-romantics are alike over- con- scious of the isolation of the artist unappreciated, if not actually misunderstood, by his fellow-men. This was undoubtedly one of the causes of the later, as of the earlier, mal du siecle. The neo-romantics had other reasons, too, for their pessimism, some connected ^ Le Roman Exphimenlal, pp. 67, 68, 92.
REALISM AND NATURALISM 213
with their attitude towards art, others with their philosophy of hfe. No writers were ever more obsessed than they by the difficulty of art. " Oh, nous aurons ete les martyrs du livre," cry the Goncourts ; and again : " Concevoir, creer, il y a dans ces deux mots pour I'homme de lettres un monde d'efforts douloureux et d'angoisses." ^ Again, idealists at heart, as they nearly all were, they suffered in their self-i imposed task of representing the reality they actually saw, and not the reality they fain would have seen. Added to this, they lived in an age of sceptical criticism in religion, philosophy, and politics. The coup d'etat of 1852 had rung the death-knell of the idealistic movement by con- demning its theories and dispersing its leaders. The Uto- pians and dreamers who had paved the way for the Revolution of 1848 had failed to realize their political and social hopes, and so had brought ideas and ideals into discredit. Lastly, the age in which realism and naturalism flourished was, as we have seen, one in which recent develop- ments in science tended to impress and depress all thoughtful people with the fatality of physical and physiological law, for, as Vigny so forcibly expresses it :
- "La Science Trace autour de la terre un chemin triste et droit. Le monde est retreci par notre experience, Et I'equateur n'est plus qu'un anneau trop etroit. Plus de hasard. Chacun glissera sur sa ligne,-^^ Immobile au seul rang que le depart assigne, > Plong6 dans un calcul silencieux et froid." ^
Thus the pessimism which pervades the literature produced in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which was in some ways a continuation of the earlier mal du siecle, was reinforced from other sources, and, though less openly dis- played, was more reasoned and more fundamental than its romantic counterpart.
1 Journal, 1862 and 1869. ^ La Maison du Bcrger.
214 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Closely connected both with their attitude towards art and their attitude towards life was another
(4) Contempt . , • , 1 • i
for the tradition which the new generation brought over ourgeois f^.Qj^ romanticism — that is, contempt for the bourgeois, regarded as the incarnation of stupid mediocrity and of gross materialism. So great had been the disdain of the romantics for the MM. Prudhommes of this world that, with the exception of Balzac, who aimed at painting all classes of society, they gave them no place in their novels or dramas. The neo-romantics, on the other hand, make a point of doing so, if only to show that they have good ground for their dislike of the bourgeois and all his ways, for, as Flaubert justly remarks in a letter to George Sand : " Le mieux est de les peindre tout bonnement, ces choses qui vous exasp6rent. Dissequer est une vengeance." In this connection it is perhaps worth remarking that one of the jchief of the abstentions of the realists in verse and prose — jthe refusal to betray emotion — was influenced by their contempt of the bourgeois, if this contempt was not its actual starting-point. The emotional effusions and con- fessions which had scandalized the bourgeois of 1830 had, in a degraded form, and provided by a host of second- rate imitators, become by 1850 his everyday literary fare. The sentimental and personal element in liter- .ature had thus in the eyes of the literary artist become j banal, not to say vulgar, and was to be avoided, if only on the grounds of good taste. " Le sentiment," remarks Baudelaire, " par sa nature populaire et familiere, attire ex- clusivement lafoule." 1 And Flaubert exclaims : " Donner au public des details sur soi-meme est une tentation de bourgeois a laquelle j'ai toujours r^sist^." ^ Curiously enough, the bourgeois seems to have been at one and the same time an object of repulsion and of attraction to the realists. He repulsed them by reason of his ignorance and stupidity, his utilitarian point of view, his incomprehension and indifference in matters of art, his lack of idealism in life,
- L'Art Romaniique — article on Th6ophile Gautier.
- Flaubert: Ccrrespondance, iv, p. 337.
REALISM AND NATURALISM 215
manners, and language ; but he attracted them also, and this by reason of his grotesqueness — i.e. that curious mixture of the comic and the ugly which the romantics had regarded as an essential element in art because of its value as a foil to beauty, and which the realists and naturalists came to regard as having an independent value of its own.
And this brings us to the last important characteristic
which the new school inherited from the roman-
the exaggerated, tics — 3. tastc for the exaggerated, the rare, and
theabuomfi ^hc abnormal. Baudelaire and the Goncotrrts
were the extreme examples of this tendency, but all the writers of their generation shared it in a greater or lesser degree. It was partly, no doubt, a survival of the traditional desire to shock the bourgeois, but still more the result of trying to avoid the commonplace while keeping within the bounds of actual reality. Zola reproaches the romantics with " une continuelle et monstreuse exagdra- tion du reel, une fantaisie lachde dans I'outrance." ^ Inno- cent of fancies their successors for the most part were, but I'outrance was their besetting sin, for, as Professor Saints- bury remarks, even their pictures of normal contemporary life "have the distortion of a spoon-reflexion." At most times, however, they went in definite search of the rare and the abnormal in real life. " L'dtude de I'exception, tel est le propre du romantisme," says Bruneti^re ; and his remark, made as it is without qualification, might equally well be applied to the realists and naturalists of the second half of the centiu-y. For these latter only differed from the Romantics in so far that when they sought the rare in past civilizations or in distant lands, they took far more pains to be perfectly accurate than their predecessors in this field had done, and that when they sought it in contemporary France they had a predilection for physical, mental, and moral abnormality — pathological cases, in fact, which could be scientifically examined and explained.
Certain French critics have regarded the realist and naturalist movement as in some sort a return to classicism 1 La Naturalisme an Thidtrc, p. 7.
2i6 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
after the excesses of romanticism, but the foregoing considerations should have made it clear that,
Classicism, ...
romanticism, dcspitc its reactionary elements, the new move- rea ism ^^^^^ ^^^g ^^^ moic closely allied to the school of 1830 than to the school of 1660. The literature of the great classical age may roughly be said to have been written by men who were in sympathy with their time, and who took .' as their province average psychological truth in its most universal aspect, expressing and representing it with great moderation and economy of means. These writers con- formed to a definite standard of taste, which, with regard to form, prescribed certain inviolable rules, and, with regard to content and treatment, forbade an overflow of individu- ality, imagination, or feeling.
\
The literature of the romantic and realist ages, on the
other hand, was written by men who were out of sympathy
\ with the world in which they lived. Though in theory they aimed at taking all life as their province, in practice they concentrated on external rather than on psychologiirfil reality, and within that domain preferred what was above or below the average ; the exceptionally grand or fine expressed and represented with lavishness (romantics) ; the exceptionally strange, or base expressed and represented in its minutest detail (realists and naturalists). The writers of neither of these later schools admitted any invio- » lable standard of taste, save that dictated by the artistic conscience of each individual writer, but while the roman- tics gave full rein to imagination and feeling, the realists ' and naturalists made a serious effort — though not always . a successful one — to curb both in the interests of impartial ' observation.
Thus while the difference between romanticism and classicism is one of kind, that between romanticism and the realism which flourished in France after 1850 was one of degree, and the transformation was wrought by a mere change in the quality and proportion of their common elements.
CHAPTER III GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850
POSITIVISM IN THOUGHT— HISTORY AND LITERARY
CRITICISM
AS we draw nearer to the contemporary age, we find in the domain of general prose more and more " books written by experts for experts, books which do not properly belong to the literary domain at all, though many of them have an indirect bearing on literature because they influenced the general movement of ideas. During the period we are now studying there were three great writers of general prose who were exceptions to this rule, Renan, Taine, and Sainte-Beuve in his later years. These three men, imbued in varying degrees with the spirit of positivism, re-established in their works that combination of scholarship and literary art which had been one of the characteristics of Renaissance literature, while two of them, Taine and Renan, provided the France of the sixties, seventies, and eighties with most of her general ideas.
Ernest Renan (1823-1892), philosopher, historian, and philologist, was born of a clan of fishermen and ^(1823-1892^^ farmers in the small but ancient cathedral town of Treguier, in Brittany. A pure Breton on his father's side, he inherited a Gascon strain from his mother, whose paternal ancestors came from Bordeaux, and Renan himself always attributed the contradictions in his own temperament and tastes to the conflict in his nature between the sceptical, indulgent, light-hearted Gascon and the pensive, dreamy, idcahstic Celt. Fatherless at the age of
217
2i8 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
five, the boy grew up between his simple-minded mother, whom he adored, and his sister Henriette, twelve years his senior, and " dont la haute raison etait . . . comme la colonne lumineuse qui marchait devant moi." ^ In 1838 Renan, having carried off all the prizes in his class at the seminary of Treguier, where he received his early education, consisting mainly of a good grounding in Latin, mathe- matics, and the inculcation of " I'amour de la veritd, le respect de la raison, le serieux de la vie," ^ was given a scholarship at the newly founded ecclesiastical college of Saint-Nicholas du Chardonnet. Here he received a good training in the humanities, and discovered, to his surprise, that learning was to be found outside clerical circles, that antiquity and the Catholic Church by no means exhausted the possible subjects of study, and that there was such a thing as contemporary literature.
" La mort de Louis XIV ne fut plus pour moi la fin du monde. Des idees, des sentiments m'apparurent, qui n'avaient eu d'expres- sion ni dans I'antiquit^ ni au xvii^ siecle." ^
In 1840 Renan was sent to the seminary at Issy, a suburban branch of Saint-Sulpice, for a two years' course in philosophy as a preparation for the study of theology. By the time he left Issy for his theological training at Saint-Sulpice de Paris, he had not only assimilated Malebranche, Locke, Leibniz, Descartes, Reid, and Stewart, but had gained some preliminary acquaintance with the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Herder, and these metaphysical studies, though at the time he was scarcely conscious of it, had awakened in his mind certain doubts as to the truth of Catholicism. His subsequent studies of Hebrew and biblical exegesis at Saint-Sulpice completely unsettled his mind, and in 1845, having lost all faith in the historical and theological basis, not only of Catholicism, but of Christian- ity itself, he quitted the seminary and gave up all idea of the priesthood. To secure the means of continuing his
1 Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse.
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 219
university studies, Renan took a post in a boarding-school for boys, the Pension Crouzet, where he received board and lodging in return for a few hours' teaching each day. Among his pupils was the future chemist, Marcclin Berthelot, then a boy of eighteen. The two immediately struck up what was to be a lifelong friendship based on a common intellec- tual eagerness and on a common desire to work and devote themselves on their respective lines to the ser\dce of truth. It was Berthelot who gave Renan his first serious interest in the natural sciences, to which already at Issy he had felt drawn, and which in later life he regretted not having studied exclusively instead of history and philology, " petites sciences conjecturales qui se defont sans ccsse apr^s s'etre faites, et qu'on negligera dans cent ans." In 1847 Renan took his degree in philosophy — and the gradual develop- ment of his own ideas under the influence of Cousin and of the German philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, jcunfsse and Herder, may be traced in the kind of inti-
(1845-1846) ^^^g journal which he kept during the years 1845 and 1846, and which was published after his death in two volumes bearing the titles Cahiers de Jeunesse and Nouveaux Cahiers de Jeunesse.
The Revolution of 1848 first brought Renan face to face with the problems of democracy, and during the "sdence " first fcw mouths of 1849 he wTote a long work, ^'^'*^^ which was not published until 1890. L'Aventr de la Science may be regarded as both his first and last profession of faith, for when he finally gave it to the world in 1890, in its original form, he accompanied it with a pre- face, in which he points out how little in essentials his views had changed since he wrote it, and how many of them had since been justified.
" J'eus done raison, au d6but de ma carri^rc intellectuoUe, de croire fcrmemcnt h. la science ct de la prendre comnie but de ma vie. Si j'^tais ^ recommencer, je referais ce que j'ai fait, et, pendant le peu de temps qui me teste k vivre, je continuerai."
The gist of the book, which suffers from a youthful over-
220 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
emphasis, is to the effect that science will be the religion of the future —
" La science ne vaut qu'autant qu'elle peut remplacer la religion,"
and science can replace it because —
" Ella restera toujours la satisfaction du plus haut d&ir de notre nature, lacuriosite ; elle fournira toujours a Thomme le seul moyen qu'il ait pour ameliorer son sort."
Renan's programme for the regeneration of humanity by means of an aristocracy of savants working for the advance- ment of knowledge and for its diffusion among the masses is the work of an intensely religious mind. " Dans le temple de la science," remarks Faguet, " il transportait toutes les vertus religieuses et a la science il attribuait tons les caracteres de la religion ; force moralisante, force gouvernante, certitude, infaiUibilite ; et de la science il etait le ministre passionne, impetueux, presque intolerant et presque extatique comme il avait voulu I'etre de Dieu." ^ Renan had barely completed the manuscript of L'Avenir de la Science when he was sent by the French Government on a scientific mission to Italy, which once for all awakened his artistic perceptions. From Rome he wrote to Berthelot :
" Je sais tres bien, cher ami, et je m'ensoucie peu, que la plupart des sentiments que j 'eprouve en ce pays sont fondes sur une connais- sance fautive de la realite. Je m'en soucie peu, dis-je, car le senti- ment a sa valeur independamment de la realit6 de Tobjet qui I'excuse."
On his return to Paris, Renan settled down with his sis- ter Henriette, obtained a small post at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and spent his evenings writing for the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Debats those delightful essays which first made him known to cultured readers, and which were in 1857 3-^d 1859 collected under the titles fssa/s d'Histoire
religieuse and Essais de Morale et de Critique.
Morale ct"de In 1860 hc was again sent on an archaeological
^(js'/gl* mission — this time to Phoenicia. Henriette,
who accompanied him, died of intermittent fever in Syria the following autumn, and Renan returned
Faguet : Politiques et Moralisies, III, 1900.
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 221
to France, himself for the time being broken in health. In January, 1862, some comfort came to him through the realization of his dearest dream : his appointment to the Chair of Hebrew at the College de France. But he was destined to stand before his audience only once. In his inaugural lecture, a reference to Christ as " an incomparable man " raised such a storm that his course was suspended, and he did not return to his chair until after the fall of the Empire.
Henceforward he depended on his pen for a livelihood.
J ,.. , While in the East he had visited Palestine, and
La v ic ae '
j^sus there already, on Henriette's advice, had begun
(1863) .
to write La Vie de Jesus, with only a Bible and a Josephus for reference. His mind, however, was a store- house of biblical learning and exegesis ; he had just acquired a thorough acquaintance with the inscriptions, monuments, and landscapes of Syria. His imagination did the rest. The result, published in 1863, was a book which, though far from being perfect either as a work of art or as a work of scholarship, raised a great storm, and made its author celebrated throughout the Christian world. For the first time the life of Christ was treated as a human and historical biography. By orthodox believers the book was regarded as blasphemous, by many others as a " fifth gospel," more credible than the other four because it explained away the supernatural, but quite as edifying because it preserved all their moral teaching.
Renan himself remained unmoved throughout the con-
Les Origines trovcrsy and deigned no explanations. He was
du chri^uan- deprived of his chair at the College de France,
(1863-1881) and henceforth devoted himself for many years
to a great work, Les Origines du Christianisme, of which
La Vie de Jesus had been the first instalment, and of which
the others were Les Apotres (1868), Saint-Paul (1869),
L'Antechrist (Nero) (1873), Les Evangiles (1877), L'Eglise
Chretienne (1879), Marc-Aurele (1881).
At sixty years of age, having studied the evolution of Christianity from the birth of Christ to the death of Marcus
222 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Aurelius, Renan proceeded to inquire into its remoter ori- gins. The results are embodied in the five Peupied' Israel vohimes of h\s H istoire du Peuple d' Israel (1888- -I 92) jgg2), which traces the evolution of the Jewish religion from the legendary period of the patriarchs to the coming of Christ.
It is thus as an interpreter of the periods covered by the Old and New Testaments that Renan 's fame as an historian rests. Just as Michelet had " resurrected " the past history of France, so Renan resurrected the Eastern, the Greek, and the Roman worlds of the first three centuries of the Chris- tian era — with greater accuracy, it is true, especially when he was on purely historical rather than on religious ground, and with less exuberance, but always allowing his imagina- tion to play on the material he had so patiently and labo- riously collected, for, according to him, scholarship is not sufficient for a reconstruction of the past — "les textes ont besoin de I'interpretation du gout . . . il faut les solliciter doucement." ^ Herein lies Renan 's weakness on the scien- tific side. This would-be man of science had the mind of a positivist but the soul of an idealist and a poet, and this explains many of the inconsistencies of his attitude towards life, an attitude at once scientific and imaginative. An unbeliever in religious matters, he continues to love and admire all that Christianity stands for, and never fails to speak respectfully, even reverently, of Catholicism ; though he held that outside the realm of facts there can be no certainty, yet he admits the value of symbols and dreams, which are a help, provided that they be regarded as no more than a provisional means of keeping man in touch with the ideal until such time as the religion of science shall be organized. His scientific conscience forbade him to draw conclusions, or at least to draw them in anything but a very tentative way.
" Toute phrase doit etre accompagn6e d'un peut-ltre. Je crois faire un usage suffisant de cette particule. Si on n'en trouve pas
^ Vie de J&sus, Preface.
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 223
assez, qu'on en suppose les marges semees a profusion, on aura alors la mesure exacte de ma pensee."
Yet he had the romantic love of legend, and refused to eliminate the legendary elements from his historical works, on the grounds that " le talent de I'historien consiste a faire un ensemble vrai avec des traits qui ne sont vrais qn'k demi." 1
These inconsistencies, which might be multiplied, were clearly recognized by Renan himself, who, as he grew older, took an increasing delight in playing with the most varied ideas. " Je porte avec moi le parterre charmant de la variety de mes pensees." 2 To the many who were only interested in and influenced by the positivist side of Renan's teaching this was a source of irritation. It caused Zola to remark :
" M. Renan est un de cos po6tes de I'id^al qui suivent les savants en trainant la jambe et en profitant de cliaque halte pour cueillir des fleurs."
In a materialistic age, all honour to him for doing so, and for seeing, champion of science though he was, that there are problems in the realm of morals and ideals which are worth considering, even though they cannot be scientifically analysed or explained.
Some of his later works, notably the Dialogues Philcso- phiques (1876) and his Drames Philosophiques
Dialogues et i o o oar\ • i- -A. ,
Drames Phthso-[^oy6-ibQO) , are an expression of Renan s (liySe) conviction that, as absolute truth eternally eludes us, it is well to regard all questions from many sides.
" La forme du dialogue est, dans I'^tat actuel de I'esprit humain, la seule qui, selon moi, puisse convenir k I'exposition des idees philosophiques. Les verites de cet ordre ne doivent etre ni directe- ment ni6es, ni directement affirm^es ; elles ne sauraient etre I'objet de demonstration. Tout ce qu'on peut, c'est de les presenter par
^ Vie de Jdsus, Preface.
- Dialogues Philosophiques.
224 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
leurs faces diverses, d'en montrer le fort, le faible, les equivalences. Tous les hauts problemes de Thumaniti^ sont dans ce cas." ^
Renan might have taken Montaigne's "que scay-je " as his motto, not because he was sceptical, but because he beheved that all religions are imperfect symbols of the ideal which from race to race, from age to age, keeps changing, and that each of these ideals has its share of truth and beauty.
Whatever may be thought of Renan 's historical or philo- sophical views, his intellectual honesty and his large tolerance cannot be denied. As for his purely literary qualities, they are of the highest order. His wonderful portraits and descriptions, the grace and winning beauty of his style, make him one of the greatest prose-writers that France has ever produced. When he was approaching sixty, Renan WTote those delightful reminiscences of his
childhood and early youth, Les Souvenirs d'En- d'E^flwTet /^"^ce ct de Jeunesse (1883), which are probably d-e jeuncsse xQd.6. morc frequently than any of his other
works, and which contain, among even more delightful things, their author's famous Priere siir I'Acro- pole. The book ends with a passage which is so character- istic of Renan that it is worth quoting in full :
" Le siecle ou j'ai vecu n'aura probablement pas ete le plus grand, mais il sera tenu sans doute pour le plus amusant des siecles. . . . Je n'aurai en disant adieu a la vie qu'k remercier la cause de tout bien de la charmante promenade qu'il m'a 6te donne d'accomplir a travers la reality."
Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) was born at Vouziers, in the Ardennes. After the death of his father in 1840,
riTPPOT YXP"
Taine hc was scut to scliool at thc Collegc de Bourbon, (I 2 -I 93) ^j^gj.g Yie formed some lifelong friendships, notably one with Prevost-Paradol. After a brilliant school career, he proceeded, in 1848, to the Ecole Normale, the college of the University of Paris which supplies school- masters to the lycees and professors to the various faculties
Le Pr^tre de Nhni, Preface.
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 225
of France. Taine was regarded as the most remarkable student of his year, and it was fully expected that his name would head the list when the results of the Agregation de Philosophic came out. Instead of this, he failed, owing entirely to the expression of unorthodox views. Never- theless, he was appointed as locum icnens to the Professor of Philosophy at the College of Nevers. Here he spent all his leisure piursuing his studies in psychology, reading Hegel, and planning a great work which was to occupy his mind for over twenty years — De l' Intelligence. After the coup d'etat of December, 185 1, the Minister of Education suppressed the examination in philosophy for the agregation, thus dashing Taine 's hopes of presenting himself for the examination again, and soon after h3 was transferred from Nevers to the College of Poitiers to act as substitute for the classical master there. In June, 1852, Taine's thesis on the -sensations was rejected by the Sorbonne on account of its unorthodox tendencies, and he was informed that if he wished to get his doctor's degree, he had better present a literary thesis. In a spirit of irony, Taine determined to offer the most harmless literary subject he could think of, and the following summer obtained his doctor's degree with a thesis on La Fontaine's fables, which, as he worked at it, had inspired its author with his famous theory of race, moment, and environment, of which more anon.
Henceforward Taine devoted himself almost exclusively to literary work, and moved in a circle which comprised Michelet, Sainte-Beuve, Rcnan, Berthelot, Flaubert, Ga- varni, and the Goncourts. In 1854 he broke down from over- work, and he was ordered a rest in the Pjrenees. The publisher Hachette asked him to use this opportunity for compiling a guide-book of that region. The resulting volume. Voyage aux Pyrenees, can never have been much use to any traveller, for it contains no exact information, but it is full of the wonderful descriptions and humorous sketches of local life which delight those who can only travel in imagination. Two years later appeared his P/u7o- sophes franfais dii XIX^ Steele en France, a series of witty
VOL. II. — 15
226 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
and disrespectful studies attacking the principles under- lying the philosophy of Cousin and his school, and sketch- ing in conclusion a system for applying the methods of the exact sciences to research in psychology and metaphysics. In 1858 Taine published a volume of Essais de Critique et d'Histoire, two further series appearing in 1865 and 1894. Since 1856 he had been working unceasingly at his Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise, four volumes of which were published in 1864, and a fifth five years later. The same year Taine succeeded Viollet-le-Duc as Professor of the Historv of Art and ^Esthetics at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts, an appointment which gave him plenty of leisure for travel and research. The results of his academic lectures are embodied in four volumes on La Philosophie de I' Art ( 1 865-1 869), and his impressions of Italy, where he had travelled just before his appointment to the Beaux- Arts, were given in his Voyage en Italie (1866), a companion volume to the Voyage aux Pyrenees.
In 1868 Taine collected some articles on Parisian life and society which he had contributed to La Vie Parisienne, and published them under the title Notes sur Paris : Vie et Opinions de Thomas Frederic Graindorge, a book which contains a more personal expression of opinion than any of his other writings. The publication of Taine 's great philosophical work, the Theorie de l' Intelligence, which had occupied him ever since his student days, fell in the same year as the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, which diverted his philosophical mind from literary and art criticism to history. In the spring of 1871 he delivered a course of lectures at Oxford, and his impressions of this and a previous visit to England are to be found in his Notes sur VAngleferre (1872). Taine devoted the remaining twenty years of his life to analysing the origins of contemporary France and the causes that had made the recent course of Origines de la cvcuts possiblc. He did not live to complete ^t^i^raiZ' his Origines de la France Confemporaine (1876- (i87&-i894) 1894), but before he died he had, by the help of original documents and his own acumen, shed a piti-
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 227
less light on the causes and results of the Revolution.
Varied as is the subject-matter of Taine's books, his work has great unity, because, whether his studies deal with psychology, art, literature, or history, they are all applica- tions of his positivist and determinist philosophy. Taine believed, like Condillac, that we can know nothing exactly except what we apprehend through our sense ; like Comte, that there is nothing real in the world except facts, and that intellectual and moral phenomena are governed by the same inflexible laws as those which reign in the physical world. This assimilation of the human to the animal world led Taine to apply certain biological laws to literary criticism and history.
In his thesis for the doctorate, later revised and published ^ . , under the title La Fontaine et ses Fables (i860),
Tame s race- . , . , _ , , , , , . , , .
miiieu-momciu m which he nrst sketched and applied his ^^ race-miUeu-moment theory, he declares :
" Ou peut considerer I'homme comme un animal d'une espece superieure, qui produit des philosophies et des poemes a peu pr6s comme les vers a sole font leurs cocons et comme les abeilles font leurs ruches." ^
Sainte-Beuve, as we shall see, had come to regard literature as " une histoire naturelle des esprits," and from this point of view believed that the ancestry, environment, and temperament of men of letters could throw helpful sidelights on their work. But what in Sainte-Beuve 's hands had been a flexible method, was formulated by Taine under the influence of his determinist philosophy as the race-milieu- moment problem, the solution of which was a mere question of elementary mechanics. The theory is fully worked out and explained in the introduction to his Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise, where the method is very rigorously applied. A great writer is not an accident, but he and a literary age generally are the product of three main factors — the race to which he belongs, and from which he inherits certain innate tendencies and characteristics ; the milieu
^ Pr6face.
228 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
or environment into which he is bom, which comprises not only his social conditions, his friends and associates, and the general intellectual atmosphere of his immediate circle, but also the natural scenery and climatic conditions in which he moves and has his being ; finally, the tnoment, that is to say, the pressure exercised by the dominating tendencies in the society, culture, and thought of his time and country. And Taine concludes :
" II n'y a ici, comme partout, qu'un probl^me de mecanique : I'eSet total est un compose determine tout entier par la grandeur et la direction des forces qui le produisent."
To these three " forces primordiales," as he calls them, he ^ . , ^ adds a fourth, la facidte maitresse, the ruling
Tame s theory . , , . "^ , . . , • , , i
, oiia/acuiu faculty Or salient characteristic which he be- lieves IS to be found in every great man, subor- dinating all others to it and directing all its owner's energies into one particular channel.
If not too rigorously applied, Taine 's methods of literary criticism may throw much interesting light on specific literary ages and on specific literary men. To apply them rigidly, even in cases where their use is justified, or to use them at all in others, may lead the critic, as it sometimes led Taine, to a considerable forcing of facts, as when, for instance, the latter deduced the national characteristics of the English, and consequently their literature, from a damp and foggy climate. As M. Lanson remarks : " Cette forte doctrine a le defaut de tout expliquer," — individuahty, for instance, and particularly the highest form of individu- ality — genius. When all that can be explained has been explained, there remains in every artist what Sainte-Beuve calls " le vif de I'homme," and in his work an inexplicable residue which can be appreciated, even analysed, but upon which even the presence of a facidte maitresse, if he happens to have one, can shed no light.
This same determinist method was applied by Taine to history, of which, indeed, as has often been remarked, his
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 229
form of literary criticism was but a branch, for he was mainly interested in men of letters as specimens or products of their time. W-Tien, after the Franco-Prussian War, he turned to history proper, it was with the object of explaining contemporary France by a study of the and en regime. As he once explained in a letter to a friend : " Mon but n'est pas I'histoire narrative, mais I'exposd des forces qui produisent les evenements."
In his Origines de la France Confemporaine, a trilogy of which the last part remained unfinished, Taine proves, by means of a wealth of small but significant and illuminating facts, that the Revolution was the natural consequence of two centuries of French history, and that it neither destroyed nor created despotism, but only gave it a new form. The study of the Revolution itself gave Taine ample scope for illustrating and justifying one of his favourite theories, namely, that under a thin veneer of civilization man is still little more than a ferocious gorilla led by his instincts, or else a maniac driven by his hallucinations and his dreams. " Mon livre sera une consultation de medecin," Taine had written to M. Havet, soon after embarking on the second volume of his history, and indeed his fundamental pessimism made him something of a pathologist.
Taine has been called a " poete-logicicn." Even this brief summary of his work will have sufficed to . liSl^yarUst show that logic was his leading mental charac- teristic ; but that he was an artist as well as a logician one has only to open any of his books at almost any page to see. His history is full of detailed and yet concen- trated portraits and of dramatic little scenes, while the descriptions contained in his travel books are justly famous. His general style, for all its logic and clarity, is very pic- turesque, at times oratorical, always vigorous. The influence of Taine on his own contemporaries and „. , ^ immediate successors can scarcely be over-
His influence . -itti ■> .111.
estimated. He has been called the theorist of reahsm, not because he originated realism, l)ut l)ccause, by summing up a new tendency in thought which fitted in
230 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
with changes which were taking place in art and literature, he, as it were, justified and strengthened the new movement. It was Taine who, by laying stress on the documentary value of literature, encouraged the idea of producing such documents for the benefit of future ages ; Taine who had said :
" Si le roman s'emploie k montrer ce que nous sommes, la critique s'emploie h montrer ce que nous avons ete. L'un et I'autre sont maintenant une grande enquete sur rhomme, sur toutes les vari6tfe, toutes les situations, toutes les floraisons, toutes le degenerescences de la nature humaine. Par leur s^rieux, par leur methode, par leur exactitude rigoureuse, par leurs avenirs et leurs esperances, tous deux se rapprochent de la science." ^
As for Zola's naturalism, it was a mere transposition of Taine's theories of heredity and environment.
Sainte-Beuve's principal work after 1848 consisted in the
completion of his Histoire de Port-Royal (i860), ^tafter^sTsr in editing his Liege lectures, Chateaulriand et
son Groupe Littemire sous V Empire (i860), and in contributing successively to Le Constitutionnel, Le Moniteur, and Le Temps, those weekly " feuilletons litt^raires "
which form the content of his two series of (^85^870) essays Les Causeries du Lundi (15 vols., 1851-
1862) and Les Nouveaux Lnndis (13 vols., 1863- 1870). Except during the few years that he held the post of lecturer in French literature at the Ecole Normale (1858-1862), when his contributions were not quite con- tinuous, Sainte-Beuve produced an article every Monday for a period of twenty years — i.e. from 1849 to his death ; and the reading and research they involved must have meant the better part of a week's work. Militant romantic though he had been at the outset of his career, Sainte-Beuve had shown, even in his earher excursions into literary criti- cism, in spite of a certain violence in his loves and hates, much of the soberness, taste, and sense of reality which are the distinguishing marks of his criticism after 1848. 1 Dibats, Jan. 26, 1865, quoted by G. Giraud : Essai sur Taine.
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 231
" Ce que j'ai voulu en critique," he writes at the end of his Por- traits Littiraires, " 9a a 6t6 d'y introduire une sorte de charme et en meme temps plus de r6alit6, qu'on n'en mettait auparavant, en un mot de la pofesie tout a la fois et quelque physiologic." ^
That Sainte-Beuve has a supreme gift of charm, one has only to read any one of his Lundis to see, to "'^wiuc^^ say nothing of the dehghtful Port-Royal, in which he carries the reader on from vohime to volume by his fascinating treatment of an already fascina- ting subject. His gift of reviving the atmosphere of a past age, as shown in Port-Royal, and in a hundred other studies on a much smaller scale ; his capacity for understanding and admiring and for making his Readers do the same ; and the ease with which he now identifies himself with his subject, now detaches himself from it, all help to make Sainte-Beuve the delightfiil and stimulating critic he 'un- doubtedly is. As for the " reahty " at which he aimed, again with success, it lies at the very root of his conception of the art of criticism. Protesting in a letter to Duruy against Victor Cousin's motto, " Le vrai, le beau, le bien," he wrote : "Si j 'avals une devise, ce serait le vrai, le vrai seul. Et que le beau et le Men s'en tirent comme ils peuvent." Truth, indeed, was what he sought — not abstract truth, but the truth which can be observed and verified ; and even so, he was always conscious that it was relative and not absolute. In the endeavour to give an accurate representa- tion of this kind of truth — in the interests of realism, in fact — Sainte-Beuve would spend hours verifying the signi- ficant small facts out of which he built up his conception of the man behind the book, for every literary work was for him the expression of a temperament.
" Ma curiosit6, men ddsir de tout voir, de tout regarder de pr6s, mon extreme plaisir k trouver le vrai rclatif de chaque chose et de chaque organisation m'entrainaient a une s6rie d'exp6rienccs qui n'ont etc pour moi qu'un long cours de physiologic morale."
1 Portraits Littiraircs, ill. p. 5^6.
232 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Sainte-Beuve's critical method was eminently biographi- cal and psychological, though he himself, under cridMi method the influence of the pseudo-scientific pretensions of the literary age, and more particularly of Taine, preferred to call it physiological or anatomical. In another passage he speaks of the possibility of literary history becoming " une histoire naturelle des esprits," and believes that his short monographs might serve as materials for such a study. He thus advocated the appli- cation of scientific method in literary criticism, though not without reservations :
" La critique litteraire ne saurait devenir une science positive ; elle restera un art, et un art trfes delicat dans la main de ceux qui sauront s'en servir ; mais cet art profitera et a dejk profit6 de toutes les inductions de la science et de toutes les acquisitions de I'his- toire." 1
UAnd with Sainte-Beuve criticism always remained an art. His wide sympathies and catholic taste, and his dislike of systems and formulas of any kind, made him equally opposed to the aesthetic dogmatism of Nisard and the scientific dogmatism of Taine. Sainte-Beuve had a method, though he never stereot5'^ed it or allowed himself to become a slave to it. It consisted in placing an author in his age and surroundings, and in endeavouring to show their influence on him and his work.^ He had, too, a rough general scheme for his essays which lent itself admirably to his desultory manner, and enabled him, without pedantry, to give his readers the benefit of his great learning. He generally approaches his subject along a winding path leading up to a biographical sketch, in which due reference is made to ancestry, environment, tasks, habits, ideas, and literary influences. Then follows some account of the author's work or works, with more quotation than was usual in Sainte-
1 Nouveaux Lundis, ix, Physiologic des Ecrivains.
- For Sainte-Beuve's own account of his method, cf. Nouveattx
Lundis, iii, Chateaubriand, reprinted in Mr. Tilley's Selections from Sainte-Beuve (Camb. Univ. Press,)
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 233
Beuve's day. The essay, as a rule, concludes with some illuminating or suggestive sentence, in which he rarely attempts to formulate any direct or absolute conclusion, but throws out a tentative and comparative estimate.
Sainte-Beuve's Portraits Critiques et Litteraires, Portraits Contemporains, Lnndis, and Nouveaux Lundis between them cover the whole ground of French literature from the Middle Ages down to and inclusive of his own time, with infrequent excursions into the literature of foreign lands and of classical antiquity, and with very frequent dallyings with interesting people who have little or no claim to be regarded as literary men at all. By the insight and sympathy which inform them, by their human interest, by the lucid and elusive grace of their style and treatment, the essays of Sainte- Beuve belong to creative literature as the work of no other French critic does.
Sainte-Beuve has been placed here after Renan and Taine, in spite of the fact that they were his juniors by twenty and twenty-five years respectively, and admittedly his literary disciples, because from about i860 onwards the disciples, and more particularly Taine, in their turn influenced the master. Indeed, for a time he acted as a kind of interpreter and critic between them and the general public.
The Goncourts, not without malice, define Sainte- Beuve's role in connection with the realist movement as follows :
" Sainte-Beuve est pour ainsi dire hygrom^trique litt^rairement ; il marque les id6cs r6gnantes en litterature, klafafon dont le capucin marque le temps dans un barometre." ^
But he did more than this. Apart from what may be called the realism of his own critical method, Sainte- connection"with Bcuvc justificd thc rcalist movement by writing movement frequently and sympathetically of its leading representatives. This former herald of romanti- cism became, shortly after the appearance of Madame Bovary
1 Journal, iii, p. 68.
234 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
(1857), the upholder of realism, and in 1865 refused to wTite a report on the present state of French literature for the Government, on the grounds that it would expect a pane- gyric of literary tradition, which he could not conscien- tiously undertake.
" Pretendre etudier la litterature actuelle au point de vue de la tradition, c'est reliminer presque tout enti^re. C'est en retrancher I'el^ment le plus actuel, le plus vital, celui qui lui fera peut-etre le plus d'honneur dans Tavenir." 1
As for Sainte-Beuve's influence on the evolution of ^ . . „ , literary criticism, it has been truly said that all
Sainte-Beuve s . •' . •'
successors his succcssors; havc a family resemblance because ipes ,, ^j^ ^^ battent Sainte-Beuve que sur le terrain qu'il a conquis." ^ His method was, as we have seen, flexible and comprehensive. Later critics borrowed now this, now that from it, sometimes second-hand through Taine, developing and systematizing the elements which suited them best.
Emile Montegut (1826-1895), for many years chief literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes, ^"^is^S^sT' follows the method of Sainte-Beuve more closel}^ than anj'^one else, applying it mainly, though not solely, to the criticism of foreign, and more espe- cially English, literature. The penetrating and sympathetic studies contained in his Essais sur la Liiterature Anglaise {1883), and his Ecrivains Modernes de I'Angleterre (three vols., 1885-1892), supplemented Taine's History of English Literature, aroused an interest in the Victorians, and thus helped to prepare the way for their influence on the later development of French literature.
The same may be said of Edmond Scherer's Etudes
Critiques sur la Litterature Contemporaine (ten
Etudes CtiUques vols., 1863-1895). Schercr was of Swiss and
^ ^ ^ ^^ English extraction, and though by his birth he belonged to the generation of Sainte-Beuve, he did not take
1 Lettre M. Duruy, 1865.
- Turquet : Introduction to Profits Avglais (Dent).
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 235
up literary criticism until he was forty-five, by which time he had very definite philosophical and moral ideas, and these too often prejudice his literary conclusions.
A more readable critic than either Scherer or Montegut is Emile Faguct (1847-1916), who, like Sainte- ^^47-^i9?6f Beuve, not only dishked all theories, formulas, and systems, but forbore to draw definite conclusions, holding — though even he was not without his prejudices — that it was the critic's duty to have a wide and sympathetic understanding of many things, and act as interpreter between the author and his public. Every student of French literature will hive referred at some time or another to the four volumes of his suggestive Etudes, which deal with the chief figures of the last four centuries of French literature. In these studies Faguet, like Sainte- Beuve, though in a less desultory and artistic fashion, after giving a brief biographical sketch of each author, deals successively with his character and mentality, his general and literary ideas, and finally with his artistic qualities. Faguct wrote many other literary essays and monographs, but, like Scherer, his favourite hunting ground was among the ideas, general, philosophical, or political, of literary men, and he is consequently seen at his best in the penetrating and witty Politiqnes et Moralistes dn XI X^ Siecle (three vols., 1891, 1898, 1900), and in the charming literary excursions of his later years — En lisant les beaux vieux livres (1911), En lisanl Corneille (1913), En lisant Moliere (1914). These three books are explications de iextes in the best French manner— that is to say, conversational commentaries on passages from well-known works, analysing the author's thought, style, and composition.
The last two critics of this group, Bourget and Brunetiere, took as their starting-point the system which Taine had extracted from Sainte-Bcuve's practice, and developed it on their own lines.
Paul Bourget (b. 1852), chiefly known as a novelist, in liis three series of Essaisde Psychologic Contcniporainc (1883- 1886), adopted as his motto of criticism Taine 's remark
236 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
that "la litt^rature est une psychologie vivante," and aimed, to use his own phrase, at putting to- ^I'b.^ss'zr* gether " quelques notes capables de servir k I'historien de la vie morale pendant la deuxieme moitie du xix^ siecle." With the patient care of an experi- mental psychologist he investigated the mental and moral qualities of those writers whom he regarded as particularly representative of their age — Stendhal, Taine, Renan, Baudelaire, etc. — and endeavoured to gauge how far each of them was responsible for the pessimism prevalent in the intellectual circles of the eighties.
The most influential and, after Taine, the most dogmatic French critic of the end of last century was
Ferdinand Brunetiere (1849-1906), mattre de conference ^ ,. , at the Ecole Normale, and from 1893 to his
Ferdinand ... t\
Brunetiere death chicf editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes. 49-190 gQ^jj ^s a critic and as a literary historian he adopted a system which is a curious blend of the aesthetic dogmatism of Nisard, the scientific dogmatism of Taine, and the historical method of Sainte-Beuve with a dash of the moral attitude of Scherer. A great believer in certain constant and universal tendencies in the human mind, and hence in the authority of tradition and discipline, Brunetiere accepts, though with some latitude, the standard of taste set up during the great classical age. Hence his dislike of individualism in literature and of the eccentric or abnormal.
" II s'agit de savoir dans quelle mesure et dans quel sens les 6crivains ont modifie ce que Ton pensait avant eux sur les int^rets les plus g^neraux de I'humanitfe."
In obedience to this principle, Brunetiere pays more atten- tion to the philosophy and ethics than to the aesthetics of literature, and devotes himself more particularly to the literary men who have had an influence on posterity, with the result that his judgments are far from being impartial. Again, his moral bias made him an equally violent opponent of art for art's sake and of contemporary realism, since
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 237
both schools declared that there can be no such thing as immorality in art.
Brunetiere, who had scientific tastes, and was a reader and admirer of Comte, Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel, after winning fame as a critic with his Roman Natiiraliste and the early series of his Etudes Critiques, proceeded to make his name as a literary historian by applying the theory of evolution to the history of literary forms. In L' Evolu- tion des Genres dans la Litterature frangaise (1890), Les Epoques du Theatre frangais (1892), and L'Evolution de la Pocsie lyrique au XIX^ Siecle (1894), Brunetiere shows how, under the changing influences of milieu and moment, a literary form arises, develops, reaches a high point of perfection, then declines and dies, or, more correctly, is in the struggle for life absorbed by another. The evolutionary idea, which he was apt to apply too rigidly when dealing with any particular literary form, proved eminently fruitful and suggestive in his later Manuel de la Litterature frangaise and his Histoire de la Litterature frangaise classique, for it led their author to lay stress on various factors in literary history which hitherto had only been dealt with singly, when they had been dealt with at all — i.e. the study of tendencies and movements, and the consequent importance of transitional periods ; the influence of one work, native or foreign, upon another ; and the connection of any individual work with the literary kind to which it belongs. At the same time, Brunetiere, like Sainte-Beuve, and unlike Taine, endeavours to bring out the original genius or talent of each individual writerv^ Brunetiere 's chief adversaries in the critical realm were Jules Lemaitre and Anatole France, who were '"^crito"'" bom " impressionists," interested solely in their own adventures among books, and convinced that it is impossible to judge any work of art impersonally. Jules Lemaitre (1853-1914), who has been ^f^i^-^H^ regarded as the founder of impressionist criti- cism, was also a poet, dramatist, and novelist ; but it is as a literary critic that he is best known. Succcs-
- -
238 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
sively dramatic critic to the Journal des Debats and literary critic to the Revue des Deux Mondes, he later collected the feuilletons and articles which he had contributed to these papers under the titles of Les Contemporains (seven series, 1886-1899) and Impressions de Theatre (ten series, 1888- 1898) . Jules Lemaitre was a keen analyst of catholic tastes, whose very inconsistencies are suggestive. He combined, to a degree unusual in a French critic, whole-hearted admiration for the great classical writers,^ with a no less great apprecia- tion for the literary art of the second half of the nineteenth century. His studies are little masterpieces, in which acute- ness of judgment and delicate irony go hand in hand. " Ne pas plaire ^ ce critique," remarks M. Canat, " est un mau- vais signe." Anatole France, the novelist, is also a critic of the impressionist school. La Vie Litteraire (four vols., 1888-1892) and Le Genie Latin (1913) are the literary conversations of a man of taste, quick to discover beauty wherever it lies hidden, though with a decided preference for the classical ideal. No one has said more penetrating or appreciative things about Racine, La Fontaine, Lamartine, and Musset than this master of irony, who refuses to regard any judgment as final, and who goes so far as to say :
" II faut que le critique se p6n6tre bien de cetteid^e que tout livre a d'autant d'exemplaires diffdrents qu'il a de lecteurs, et qu'un pofeme, un paysage, se transforme dans tons les yeux qui le voient, dans toutes les S,mes qui le congoivent." ^
The last important critic who made his name during the
The theorist closing ycars of the nineteenth century was
°f lyj^bousm, Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915), a descendant
Gourmont ou his mother's side of the poet Malherbe. An
^ ^ ^^'^ individuaUst, hating above all things pretence,
imitation, and mediocrity, and an aristocrat both by birth
and by temperament, Remy de Gourmont was the chief
^ Cf. his excellent monograph on Racine. ' La Vie Littiraire, vol. ii. Preface.
GENERAL PROSE AFTER 1850 239
theorist of the symbohst school, to whose ideas and subtle- ties he alone succeeded in giving a clear and condensed exposition. No one had a greater aptitude for discovering the literary merit of his contemporaries, or, as he himself puts it, for seeking out " I'eternel dans la diversite momen- tanee des formes," than this prophet of Mallarme, Huys- mans, Maeterlinck, etc., as may be seen in his contributions to the Mercure de France, later collected as Promenades Litteraires (five series, 1904-1913) and Le Litre des Masques (two series, 1896-1898). Nor has anyone so well explained the idealism which lies at the root of the symbolist move- ment {L'Idcalisme, 1893).
At the turn of the century Remy de Gourmont directed his critical energies to the French language {Estheiique de la Langue Frangaise, 1899; Le Probleme du Style, 1902), and to the literature of ideas {La Culture des Idees, 1900 ; Promenades Philosophiques, three series, 1905-1909). Le CJiemin de Velours (1902), perhaps his most characteristic work, is an ironical comparison between the Jesuit and the Jansenist system of morals, and should itself be compared with Pascal's and Saint-EvTemond's views on the subject. Subtle, witty, and paradoxical, Remy de Gourmont served both reason and intuition at a time when the two were at daggers drawn, and his reputation as a critic is likely to grow, rather than to decrease, with time.
The roll of French critics during the nineteenth century is indeed an honourable one . Lack of space has necessitated the omission of many names which in any other country but France — so splendidly gifted in this direction — would, on their own merits, have an important place in the national annals of criticism.
CHAPTER IV THE NOVEL AND THE SHORT STORY
IN the second half of the nineteenth century the novel, which had made enormous strides during the roman- tic period, superseded lyrical poetry as the dominant form of literature, and tended to absorb all other literary kinds. After 1850 the historical romance, the novel of adventure, and the psychological novel of sentiment lost their vogue, and for some thirty years the prevalent type of prose fiction was the realistic novel of contemporary life.
The first great triumph of the realistic movement, which, as has been shown, had long been gradually developing in the highways and b5Avays of literature, and for which Stend- hal and Balzac had created a taste without entirely satisfy- ing it, dates from the publication, in 1857, of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, in which the penetrating observation of a Balzac is blended with the artistic sense of a Merimee or a Gautier.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), the son of a Norman
Artistic surgeon, was born and ' educated at Rouen.
Realism From his earliest childhood he had a passion for
fiIVbert literature. Before he was ten years old he had
(1821-1880) planned a series of novels and plays and decided
upon their titles, and at the same early age he was poring
over the pages of Byron and Weriher in French translations.
A few years later he was devouring Balzac and busy with
youthful productions of his own. In 1840 his father sent
240
THE REALISTIC NOVEL 241
him to Paris to study law, and towards the close of the same year he spent a holiday in the Pyrenees and in Corsica. After five years of desultory study, Flaubert left Paris, for which capital he had little liking, abandoned his legal studies, for which he had less, and returned to Normandy to live with his mother, who within a few months had lost her husband and her daughter Caroline. Mother and son settled down at Croisset, near Rouen, in an old country house everlooking the Seine, where all Flaubert's novels were conceived and written. He never married, and the only sentimental episode of any importance in his life was his friendship between 1846 and 1854 — largely epistolary — with a now-forgotten poetess, Louise Colet. The chief friend of Flaubert's early manhood was Maxime du Camp, with whom, in 1846, he travelled in Brittany, and in whose company, in 1849, he made a tour in the East, visiting Malta, Egypt, Palestine, Constantinople, Athens, and other parts of Greece. This Eastern tour made a deep impression on his imagination, and may be regarded as the central event of his life. „ ^
From i8lo Flaubert's biography resolves itself into the history of his literary productions — five novels and three short tales — the fruits of earlier observation and of laborious nights and days spent within the four walls of his study. Henceforward he rarely stirred from Croisset, save for infre- quent visits to Paris, where he consorted with Sainte-Beuve, Theophile Gauticr, and the Russian novelist, Turgeniev, and later also with George Sand, Alphonse Daudet, Renan, Taine, the Goncourts, and Emile Zola. In 1858 he made another journey to the East, this time to Tunis and Car- thage, with the express purpose of collecting material for Salammho, the archaeological novel upon which he was then engaged, and which appeared in 1862. It had been pre- ceded by Madame Bovary, his first published work and his masterpiece, to which he had devoted seven years of unremitting labour, and which originally appeared as a serial in the Revue de Paris of 1857. Another seven years went to the writing of the final version of L' Education
VOL. II. — 16
242 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Sentimeniale (1869), his second novel of manners, and many more to La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874), the first draft of which dates from 1849. The last years of Flaubert's life were devoted to the composition of the Trois Conies (1877), and to that of a third novel of manners, the unfin- ished Boiivard et Pecucket, published posthumously in 1881. Prematurely aged by the strenuous life to which his artistic conscience subjected him, and gravely affected in health by the national misfortunes of 1870, Flaubert was carried off by a stroke of apoplexy in his fifty-ninth year.
" II y a en moi deux bonshommes distincts," wrote Flaubert to Louise Colet in 1852, " un qui est epris de guetilades, de lyrisme, de grands vols d'aigle, de toutes les sonorites de la phrase et des sommets de I'idee ; un autre qui creuse et qui fouille le vrai tant qu'il peut, qui aime a accuser le petit fait aussi puissamment que le gr^d, qui voudrait vous faire sentir presque materiellement les chpsfes qu'il reproduit." ^
In his Conespondance, from which this passage is taken,
Flaubert constantly refers to these conflicting
anTrLhfr^ elcmeuts in his tastes and temperament. It
'"^work"'^ has been truly said of him that imagination
was his muse and reality his conscience, and
one might add that he invariably allowed his conscience
to discipline his muse — and this in her own interests, for
Flaubert was endowed with an imagination so rich and
vigorous that no amoimt of lopping and pruning could
impo^'erish it. It has become a commonplace of literary
criticism to remark of him, as of Balzac, that he was a
romantic and a realist in almost equal proportions, but
in Flaubert's case this duality was welded into a perfect
oneness.
That Flaubert was a romantic by tempera-
^" ^iite°^ ment one can see at once from his delightful
letters, to say nothing of his recently pubhshed'
(Eiivres de Jeicnesse, the verj^ titles of which are illuminating
^ Conespondance, ii, p. 69 (Chaq^entier, 1902).
THE REALISTIC NOVEL 243
in this respect — Les Memoires d'lm Fou, Le Chant de la
Mort, Le Reve d'Enfer, etc. To the end of his
^ "tosK""^ life, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Theophile
Gautier were among his chief hterary gods.
Of his brother reahsts, with whom he strongly objected
to being classed, he had no liking for Stendhal, he despised
Champfleury, and even Balzac was dismissed as " un
immense bonhomme mais de second ordre," and this
because he lacked that perfection of form and style which,
in Flaubert's view, was the be-all and end-all of literature.
For the same reason, though he admired their force and
originality, he was never a whole-hearted admirer of the
Goncourts or Zola.
Like most of the writers of his age and country, Flaubert
inherited the romantic contempt of the bour-
(2) His con- . , . , . . , ^ . ,
tempt for geois and of their conventional attitude towards ourgeois ^^ things in heaven and on earth, though he did not merely apply the epithet " bourgeois " to one social class — " J'appelle bourgeois quiconque pense bassement " — that is to say, the vast majority of his fellow-men, for, to use his own words,
" la foule sera toujours haissable. II n'y a d'important qu'un petit groupe d'esprits, toujours les memes, et qui so repassent le flambeau." ^
In his very early youth Flaubert and his friends created a mysterious symbolical phantom, Le Gargon, who was a compound " de toutes les betises bourgeoises," and some- what later Flaubert planned a Dictiontiaire des Idees reQues, to which he more than once refers in his Correspondance, and which was to be a collection of truisms and platitudes culled from conversations between members of that hated race. Indeed, with Flaubert, contempt for the bourgeois amounted to an obsession, and one has the impression that he sought them out and studied them in order to hate them more.
- Correspondance, iv, p. 73.
244 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Lastly, more than any of his contemporaries, except
Leconte de Lisle, Flaubert had the romantic
of the splendid, passion foi the splendid, the violent, the ba.T-
t^e barbaric baric. " J'ai la vie ordinaire en execration,"
he once wrote. Hence his imaginative escapes
from the environments he described in Madame Bovary,
L' Education Sentimentale, Un Cceur Simple, and Bouvard
et Pecuchet, into times and countries where splendour
and violence were an everyday reality [Salammbo, Herodias,
La Ligende de Saini-Jalien I'Hospitalier, La Tentation de
Saint- Antoine) .
On the other hand, Flaubert's romantic tendencies were held in check by his whole conception of art, '■ ^i^^^'^ and by a certain positive and scientific turn of mind, which he owed, perhaps, not only to the influence of his age, but also to that of his own environ- ment : his father and brother were both medical men, and he himself was keenly interested in the study of physiology and medicine. According to Flaubert, art being an end in itself, and not a means to something else, its creator must avoid playing the role of philanthropist, moralist, or philo- sopher, and confine himself, without drawing conclusions, to representing, not his own errors, illusions, or dreams, but objective external truth, and to clothing it in the most perfect form possible, or, as he so much more succinctly puts it, to "la recherche incessante du vrai rendu par le beau."
To no aesthetic question does Flaubert return so frequently in his Correspondance as to the importance of a completely detached and disinterested attitude on the part of the literary artist :
" L'artiste doit d'arranger de fagon k faire croire k la post^rit6 qu'il n'a pas vecu." ^
On this will depend his power to see truth, and to see it whole.
^ Correspondance , iii, p. 86.
THE REALISTIC NOVEL 245
" Quand on ne regarde la verit6 que de profil ou de trois quarts on la voit toujours mal, il y a peu de gens qui savent la contempler de face." 1
Flaubert practised what he preached. No wxiter ever took His novels of such pains to make the scenes and characters "^ro'ltaciaf he painted true and exact in their minutest manners details. He was convinced that he ought to treat subjects with which, by experience, he was familiar. The very fact that he had no sympathy with what he knew best — the bourgeoisie — made it, in his view, an ideal sub- ject for the display of detached artistic realism. Hence Madame Bovary, that extraordinarily vivid and veracious study of middle-class provincial manners, in which the heroine descends from weakness to vice and from vice to suicide, because, her head being filled with romantic non- sense, she is out of tune with her environment and finds no satisfaction in- intercours"^ with her natural associates : the country doctor of limited intelligence, whom she has married, and the apothecary Homais, who is the very apotheosis of middle-class mediocrity. Hence also the first of the Trois Contes, Un Ccem Simple, the pathetic story of a country servant who sacrifices everything to her employers ; and L'Education Sentimentale, the study of a weak and romantic youth Frederic — a masculine Emma Bovary set against the moral, social, and political background of the Revolution of 18^8. The last of this group, the unfinished Bouvard et Pe'cuchet, which, as Faguet remarks, might well, in opposition to its predecessor, have borne the title Educa- tion Iniellcctnelle, is the story of two uneducated and stupid men who set out to acquire encyclopaedic knowledge of both a practical and theoretical kind. They fail ignominiously, and when " tout leur a craque dans la main," they return to the office-stools from which they came.
Flaubert tells us that he read over fifteen hundred books on technical subjects before sitting down to write this dreary and depressing story, and this is typical of the
^ Correspondance, i, p. 179.
246 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
method he employed in writing his historical and legendary- novels and tales. " Pour qu'un livre sue la Historical and yerite, 11 faut ctrc bourre de son suiet iusque
legendary -n i J J ^
novels and pardessus Ics oreilles," ^ he ^\Tote when he was
tales
labouring with Salammho, a romance of Carth- age at the time of the mutiny of the mercenaries after the first Punic War. For this novel, as for La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and his two short stories, Herodias and La Legende de Saint- Julien VHospitalier, Flaubert not only made minute researches in all the available original authorities, but also visited the places he wished to de- scribe. The result is an unequalled realistic rendering of the strange barbaric past.
Flaubert owes his high place in French literature to liis
extraordinary visual imagination, to the stress ^^tyte'"* he lays on what he himself calls " I'importance
des petites choses dans le pays des petites gens," and to his impeccable style. No wTiter ever regarded his form and style with such passionate seriousness, or sub- mitted it to such merciless criticism. An indefatigable seeker after perfect expression, he would sometimes spend a week over a single page and hours over a single phrase. His aim was to make every sentence at one and the same time rhythmical and pregnant with significance, and his chase for the one and only word which could render the particular shade of meaning he wished to convey has become proverbial. Maupassant, in his summary of Flaubert's literary counsels, remarks :
" Quelle que soit la chose qu'on veut dire, il n'y a qu'un mot pour I'exprimer, qu'un verba pour ranimer et qu'un adjectif pour le qualifier." *
It is by practising this precept that Flaubert produces his effect of absolutely convincing veracity. There is not a sentence in Madame Bovary which fails to fulfil these conditions, and not a paragraph which lacks that curious
^ Correspondance, iii, p. 112.
- Preface to Pierre et Jean.
THE REALISTIC NOVEL 247
inner rhythm which helps, as much as/the words themselves, to convey the author's meaning. One example must suf-
" Le lendemain fut pour Emma une joumde funebre. Tout lui parut enveloppe par une atmosphere noire qui flottait confusement sur I'exterieur des choses, et le chagrin s'engoulfrait dans son dme avec des hurlements doux, comme fait le vent d'hiver dans les chateaux abandonnes."
To quote Professor Saintsbury, in Flaubert's work " style- craft and story-craft have married each other so perfectly that they are one flesh for the lover of literature to rejoice in."
With the exception of Gautier, whose stories have al- ready been discussed, the only other prose -writer
fromenti>j among Flaubert's contemporaries who can be (I 20-1 70) ^^y\q^ a devotee of art for art's sake was Eugene Fromentin (1820-1876). By training and profession Fro- mentin was a painter, and a painter who speciahzed in the picturesque and characteristic details of North African life. Finding, however, that the brush could not render all his sensations (" il y a des formes pour I'esprit comme il y a des formes pour les yeux " ^), he took up the pen and in Un Ete dans le Sahara (1857) ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ dans le Sahel (1858) gave a vivid chronicle of his travels in Algeria.
Fromentin also WTote a psychological love-story, Domi- nique (1863), a masterpiece of delicate analysis and of imagi- native observation, containing unsurpassed descriptions of natural scenery, and more especially of autumn and winter landscapes. This jewel among novels belongs to no parti- cular class, but fuses in a most subtle manner the best features of each.
In his last work, Les Mattres d' Autrefois (1876), the fruits of his studies in the picture galleries of Holland and Belgium, Fromentin reveals himself as the Saintc-Beuve of art criticism. Applying Taine's race-momcn i-milieu theory to the Dutch and Flemish schools of painting, with great
1 Preface to Un EU dans le Sahara (1874).
248 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
penetration and delicacy of touch, he explains their essential differences and the leading characteristics of their chief representatives.
Maupassant, who, more than any other writer, may be regarded as the spi ritual h eir_Qf JFlaubert, remarks of his master :
" II devait etre le miroir des faits mais un miroir qui les reprodui- sait en leur donnant ce reflet inexprimable, ce je ne sais quoi de presque divin qui est Tart."
This perfect equilibrium between art and reality was not attained by any of Flaubert's followers, with the possible exception of Maupassant himself. It is not to be found in the realistic impressionism of the Goncourts, nor in the more emotional realism of Daudet, nor yet in the natural- ism of Zola and his school.
The brothers de Goncourt, Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules (1830-1870), who wrote in collaboration until
^presstoniim the lattcr's death, like Flaubert, made an idol Edmond (1822- of their art, and insisted that reality, pure ^^liss^o^-isio^^ and simple, was its subject-matter. But they DK Goncourt g^jj^g^^j ^ggs at giving a picturc of reality than at rendering, with every subtlety of style they could devise, the impressions made by rare or sordid reality on highly strung, sensitive natures — that is to say, their own, which they themselves described as " maladivement impression- nables."
The Goncourts, who were passionate collectors of rare French and Japanese bibelots of the eighteenth
of the eigh- ccutury, began their literary career with studies century ^^ ^^^^ ^^^ .^ Fraucc. Their Portraits Intimes dn
XVIIP Sikle (1857-8), La Femme au XVIIP Siecle (1862), and L'Art du XVIIP Siecle (1857-1875 ; three vols.), are pieced together out of unpublished documents, scraps of costume, letters, etc., in fact, out of anything that could be regarded as an unselfconscious revelation of the spirit of the time. When they came to write novels, they showed the same love of the inidit, and more particularly of the morbid
THE IMPRESSIONISTIC NOVEL 249
and abnormal. In their search for sensations that could provide them with Hterary material they visited law-courts, prisons, hospitals, and lunatic asylums, and then hastened home to note down their impressions in their famous Journal (begun in 1S51, and brought to a close by Edmond in 1892), the reservoir from which they drew all their novels, sometimes elaborating, sometimes merely tran- scribing whole passages. Their joint novels, composed always on the same method, are morbid and unsavoiu-y, for the Goncourts '^'nove°s°* were obsessed with the idea of disease — mental, moral, and physical. Charles Demailly (i860) is a story of the journalistic world ; Soeur Philomene (1861), a study of hospital life and of the evil effects of drink ; Renee Mauperin (1864) is the story of a highly strung girl of high society ; Gcrminie Lacertieux (1865), the study of a low-class servant ; and Manette Salomon (1867) describes the irregu- larities of studio life.
A novel by the Goncourts gives no impression of miity, because it is made up of an infinite number of details, all, of equal prominence. As Arthur Symons remarks : " Their novels are scarcely stories at all, but picture galleries hung with pictures of the momentary aspects of the world."
The tediousness of these novels is redeemed — for those who like it — by an original and curious style of which the authors were inordinately proud, and which consisted mainly in a search for the rare epithet and in an attempt to reproduce their sensations in a language which by its jerkiness, feverishness, and lack of syntax, should faithfully reflect their own highly strung temperament.
After the death of his brother, Edmond de Goncourt wrote , , and published a few more novels which they
The novels of ^ -'
Edmoudde had jomtly planned, notably Les Freres Zeni- ganno (1879), La Faustin (1882), La Fille Elisa (1883), and CJierie (1884), which all have a very pronounced pathological tendency, and lay even more stress than the earlier novels on the influence of heredity and environ- ment.
250 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Perhaps the Goncourts' chief title to fame is their Journal, ^ ^ which throws many sidelights on the literary
The Goncourts' ..,.-._,.",. ,
Journal and artistic life in Fans during the second (I ji-i 92) j^^j^ ^j j^g^ century. Apart from their private
intercourse with all the leading writers and artists of the time, the Goncourts were among the most assiduous fre- quenters of the famous fortnightly dinners at the Restaurant Magny, organized in 1862 by Sainte-Beuve and Gavarni, " un desderniers cenacles de la vraie libertede penseret de parler." ^ Here they met Taine, Renan, Gautier, and, when they were in Paris, George Sand, Flaubert, Turgeniev, and many others. They also frequented the salon of the Princesse Mathilde, sister of Jerome Bonaparte, who liked to gather round her distinguished men of letters.
In his will Edmond de Goncourt left his estate for the endowment of an Academ}^ — the Academic ^^Goncourf^^ Goucourt, which consists of ten members, and which awards — " k la jeunesse, k I'hardiesse et au talent " — an annual prize for a novel combining artistic and realistic qualities. It thus forms a kind of complement to the Academie Frangaise, which rarely favours either " jeunesse "or " hardiesse." Among the original members were Alphonse Daudet, the brothers Rosny, and Jules Renard, author of the famous Poll de Carotte (1894). Un- like the " Immortal Forty," the Academie Goncourt opens its doors to both sexes, but so far it has only had one woman member, Madame Judith Gautier (1850-1917), a daughter of Theophile Gautier, and a student and popularizer of the literature and customs of China and Japan.
The Goncourts claim to have been the initiators of that
literary naturalism which is both an exaggerated
^fhenwd'" ^^^ ^ contracted form of realism. It is true
that their novels were pathological rather than
psychological, that they preferred the detail that smothers
to the detail that illuminates, and they had the distorted
notion that the uglier the subject-matter, the greater the
truth ; but it was Zola who invented the term, and it was
1 Journal, iii, p. 160.
THE NATURALISTIC NOVEL 251
he who gave to the naturaHstic novel a dogmatic, or, as he thought, a scientific formula, and embodied it in the most striking examples.
Emile Zola (1840-1902) began, like Balzac, by wTiting j^novels and stories of a sensaticfnal and melo- (1840-1902) dramatic kind, but already at the age of twenty- four he showed his undoubted gifts in a volume of delightful short stories entitled Conies d Ninon (1864), followed later by Noicveaux Contes a Ninon and other similar collections.
Zola's short stories, written at intervals throughout the first half of his literary career, deserve to be
"sTodeT' better known than they are, and one of them, L'Attaque du Moulin (1880), contributed to the naturalist symposium, Les Soirees dc Midan, is, from the artistic point of view, the most perfect thing that Zola ever wrote. But from the very outset he had larger projects, and at a very early date he seems to have conceived the idea of assimilating literature to science ?.nd sociology. His powerful though gruesome novel, Therese Raquin (1867), already reveals this preoccupation. The same year appeared Claude Bernard's Introduction d la Medecine Expcrimentale, and it was upon the ideas developed in this treatise, upon the Darwinian theories of heredity, evolution, and environ- ment, and upon the literary positivism of Taine, who had introduced the determinism of the natural sciences into psychology and literature, that Z»la built up his theory of naturalism. Before putting it to the test, he elaborated it in a series of critical articles on literature and art contributed to Villemessant's paper, L'Evenenient, and later collected under the title Le Roman Experimental (1880).
It was not until order had been restored after the war
LES ROVGON °^ ^^'^^ ^^'^^ ^°^'^ bcgau to put his theories into MACQUARi- practice by embarking on a great novel-cycle, '"~^ Les Roiigon-Macquart : Histoire natnrelle et sociale d'line famille sous le Second Empire (1871-1893), which, both as a whole and in each of its twenty volumes taken singly, was to illustrate the principles of heredity,
252 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
environment, and of the ruling passion. Zola's design is to follow the fortunes of the various members, legitimate and illegitimate, of a single family in all the environments, trades, and professions in which, through force of circum- stances, they are placed, and incidentally to g^ a com- plete picture of French civilization under i^ Second Empire. The scheme was a great one, something on the lines of Balzac's Comedie Humaine, but far more logical and systematic. As some one has remarked, however, this new comedie humaine deserves rather to be called a comedie hestiale, and thus to be regarded as the third part of a trilogy, of which Dante's Divine Comedy had been, as it were, the first instalment. For Zola not only regarded man as an animal led by his appetites, but chose to chronicle the lives of a family of degenerates, as he himself in medical language admits.
" Physiologiquement, les Rougon-Macquart sont la lente succes- sion des accidents nerveux et sanguins qui se d6clarent dans une race, h. la suite d'une premiere lesion organique." ^
From this entirely arbitrary theory of heredity Zola deduces the history of the Rougon family, representatives of which he studies in every walk of life — in politics [Son Excellence Eugene Rougon), in the financial world [L Argent), in the Church [La Faute de I'Abbe Mouret), the army {La Debacle), in artistic and scientific circles {L'CEuvre, Le Docteur Pascal). Less fortunate members of the family are to be found among the shopkeeping class {Aii Bonheur des Dames), among ordinary workmen {L'Assommoir), railwaymen {La Bete Humaine), domestic servants {Pot-Bouille), peasants {La Terre), and miners {Germinal).
Owing largely to the unsoundness of Zola's pseudo- scientific method, his novel-cycle as a whole is now dead, but three portions of it at least are likely to survive — L'Assommoir (1877), which has been described as " a sort of epic of the working classes," and " the most tremendous
^ Preface to Les Rougon-Macquart,
THE NATURALISTIC NOVEL 253
exposure of the evils of drink in any language " ; Germinal (1885), the epic of a miners' strike and of the conflict between capital and labour ; and La Debacle (1892), a broad and masterly study of the first act of the Franco-Prussian War. The excellence of these three novels lies in the fact that their' subject-matter gave Zola scope for displaying what was probably his greatest artistic gift — the power of giving a vivid impression of vast crowds in movement, their instinctive behaviour and their elementary psycho- logy.
Zola followed up Les Rougon-Macquart with a trilogy,
Les Trois Villes : Lourdes, Rome, Paris (1894-
viiies 1898), novels with a strong anti-clerical ten-
' * ^ ^ dency, and then embarked upon a third novel sequence, Les Quatre Evangiles (1899-1903), of which he
, ^ only lived to write three, Fecondite, Travail, and
Evangiles Verite, prcachmg the gospel of theu: respective 99"^9°° titles. To the last, which was a parable of the Dreyfus affair, in which its author had shown great courage and disinterestedness, he planned a sequel, Justice. These last three novels reveal the pessimist of the Rougon-Mac- quart transformed into a hopeful believer in social recon- struction.
Zola, like Flaubert, had a romantic temperament and a
romantic imagination, but, unlike Flaubert, he
tivecha^racte'r ncvcr succcssfully supprcsscd either, and this
novels'^ was fortunatc, for it is their symbolism and visionary quality, and not their naturalism, which give his novels a value as works of art. Like Victor Hugo, Zola sa^y his world — though it was a different one — through highly coloured magnifying-glasses, with the result that the reality he fain would give us has more often than not the quality of hallucination or nightmare. Like Victor Hugo again, and like Balzac, he over-simplifies his characters until they lose all value as individuals and become types summing up a whole social class. It has often been remarked that Zola's heroes are overshadowed by their environment or by some inanimate object to which
254 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
he imparts an intense and mysterious life. Just as the cathedral may be regarded as the central figure in Notre Dame de Paris, so in La Faute de I' Abbe Mouret the chief personage is a wild and fantastic garden ; in Le Ventre de Paris it is the central market ; in Germinal, a coal-mine, " le Voreux," " avec son air mauvais de bete goulue accroupie \k pour manger le monde " ; in Au Bonheur des Dames, the large modern emporium ; and in La Bete Humaine, a railway engine, " la Lison," which, " renversee sur les reins, le ventre ouvert," possesses itself of its driver in a mad flight through space. "To make his characters swarm," writes Henry James of Zola, " and to make the great central thing they swarm about 'as large as life,' portentously, heroically big, that was the task he set himself very nearly from the first, that was the secret he triumphantly mastered," and the result is that " the fullest, the most characteristic episodes affect us like a sounding chorus or procession, as with a hubbub of voices and a multitudinous tread of feet." 1
Of the many other novelists of this period who have been roughly grouped as " naturalists," though they are all naturalists " with a difference," the most important are Ferdinand Fabre, Daudet, and Maupassant.
Ferdinand Fabre (1830-1898), who was destined for the priesthood, and who, like Renan, discovered
Ferdinand f .
Fabre bcforc it was too latc that he had no vocation, I 30-1 9 jj^ade his name with novels which are almost entirely " Scenes of Clerical Life," though they are of a very different order from those painted by George Eliot or Anthony Trollope. Fabre excels in the vigorous and sympathetic portrayal of the virtues and weaknesses most commonly to be found in the clerical character. The hero of his first novel, Les Courbezon (1862), is a charitable and lovable abbe who creates misery all round him owing to his imprudence and lack of foresight, thought, and common sense ; L'Abbe Tigrane, candidal a la papaute (1873), the ^ Henry James : Notes on Novelists.
THE NATURALISTIC NOVEL 255
finest of all Fabre's twenty or more novels, is a very power- ful study of an ambitious, strong-willed, violent-tempered, and unscrupulous priest, who covets and secures successively a bishopric and an archbishopric, and is left at the end of the book aspiring to the papacy ; Mon Oncle Celcstin (1881) is a companion study of an entirely single-minded and warm-hearted country abb^ ; while Liicifer (1884), besides being a story of priestly pride and ambition ending in disaster, contains an almost complete gallery of clerical types.
Fabre's portraits are drawn with an intense realism ; he is extraordinarily skilful in conveying the ecclesiastical atmosphere, and in depicting in its minutest detail the daily business of country priests. Most of his novels have for setting the wild and rocky scenery of his native Cevennes, and considerable space is given to the local manners and customs of its mountain villages. Le Chevrier (1868) has been compared to the rustic novels of George Sand, and it can well bear the comparison ; but though idyllic in a sense, it is more intensely and brutally true to everyday rustic reality. For in Fabre's work there is undoubtedly some of that brutality in delineating truth which is commonly associated with naturalism, and the same remark applies to Daudet, more particularly in his later novels.
Alphonsc Daudet (1840-1897) has been classed as a
naturalist, for the reason given above, and more
Daudet especially as a follower of the Goncourts,
(1840-1897) , ^ J- , • • . , ,
because 01 his nervous, impressiomst style, and
because of his fondness for the documentary method.
He, too, kept a note-book, in which he jotted down his
impressions as he received them, and he, too, was so eager to
waste no scrap of material that, from the artistic point of
view, his novels contain many episodes which have only
a very indirect connection with the mat-ter in hand. But
Daudet came from the sunny lands of Provence (he was
born at Nimes), and being richly endowed with imagination,
feeling, and humour, as well as with the power of looking at
life objectively, he succeeded in avoiding the trivial and
256 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
in making his work, as Lanson puts it, " non seulement chose vue mais chose sentie." It is this gift of conveying emotion — be it sympathy or pity — that differentiates Daudet from Flaubert, the Goncourts, or Zola, and gives him a certain resemblance to Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoievski, and Tolstoi.
That Daudet had the gift of laughter and the gift of tears was clearly revealed in three of his earliest volumes — Le Petit Chose (1868), which is to a great extent the story of his owTi childhood and youth, and which has often been com- pared with David Copper field ; and two del ightful collections of short s tori es, Let tresde mon Moulin (1869) and C ow/gs du _ Lundi ( i873}_ These two last, with their blend of pathos and humour, their delicate fancy and their inimitable style, would have sufficed to give their author a place in French literature, even if he had never written another line. The year before the appearance of the Conies du Lundi, Daudet wrote a humorous extravaganza caricaturing the comic elements in the temperament of the " meridional " he knew so well, Tartarin de Tarascon, which has remained the most popular of all his books, followed later by two sequels, in which the hero, who had first made his appearance in the guise of a mighty hunter, reappears successively as the President of an Alpine Club {Tartarin sur les Alpes, 1885) and as the founder of a republic in Australasia {Port- Tarascon, 1890).
After the first Tartarin, Daudet took to novel-writing
seriously, and was not long in acquiring great popularity.
- < Froment jeune et Risler atne (1874), by many regarded as his
finest work, and Jack (1876), the pathetic story of a child
sacrificed to his mother's selfishness, owe much, the one to
,, , , Thackeray and the other to Dickens. Then
Novels of r .,
Parisian followcd m rapid successiou a series of novels depicting Parisian manners, and incidentally throwing dirt at various contemporary celebrities — Le Nabab (1878), Les Rois en Exil (1879), Numa Routnestan (1880), alias Gambetta, a clever study of the southern temperament, L' Evangeliste (1883), a.ndL'Immoricl (1888), a
THE NATURALISTIC NOVEL 257
bitter attack on the French Academy, to which Daiidet never belonged. These personaHties, clever as they are, give a distressing touch of vulgarity to nearly all his later novels. To the end, however, he preserved his pathos and humour and his power of creating characters which were real and also typical. This last was, indeed, the gift on which he most prided himself.
" La vrai joie du romancier restera de cr6er des 6tres, de mettre sur pied k force de vraisemblance des types d'humanit^ qui circulent d6sormais par le monde avec le nom, le geste, la grimace qu'il leur a doan^s et qui font parler d'eux ... en dehors de leur cr^ateur at sans que son nom soit prononce." ^
Flaubert, Zola, and Daudet, as we have seen, owe their place in French literature less to their intrinsic realism or naturalism than to other qualities which modified it, and were, indeed, often in opposition to it. We now come to a writer who transcribed reality so objectively, so serenely, and so intensely, that, as Faguet remarks, " le lecteor ne sait pas, quand il lit Maupassant, si c'est de I'art de Maupassant, ou seulement de la realite qu'il a le gout." ^
Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) learnt his first lessons in the art and craft of literature from
Guy de
Maupassant Flaubcrt, whosc most ardent disciple he ever I 50-1 93 g^^^gj. j-gnia^ij^g(i Obedience to Flaubert's dic- tates respecting the impersonal and impassive attitude of the artist came much more naturally to Maupassant, than they did to their author. The former never felt the' need of giving vent to his emotions, and being no enthu- siast for ideas, moral or intellectual, his vision of reality was never disturbed by idterior considerations, scientific, philosophical, or ethical. He was thus able to depict every- day life just as he saw it, and without any trace of that ill-repressed contempt and rebelliousness which is charac- teristic of Flaubert.
At heart, however, Maupassant was as great a pessimist
^ Trentc Ans de Paris : Histoire dc mes livres. 2 Propos litiiraircs, iii, p. 185. VOL. II. — 17
258 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
and materialist as any of his contemporary brethren of the pen.
" La mediocrite de I'univers m'etonne et me revolte," he writes, " la petite^e de toutes choses m'emplit de degout, la pauvret6 des etres humains m'aneantit."
Like Zola, he saw little in man beyond ferocious and cun- / ning animal instincts. His pessimism and his materialism, 1 though never obtrusive, shut out from him vast tracts of 1 life, feeling, and thought, and account foT- his undoubted limitations. He rarely portrayed anything beyond ordi- nary characters, ordinary scenery, and everyday events, priding himself on describing nothing that he had not actually seen and closely observed.
]\Iaupassant's first published tale, Bonle de Suif {i88o), contributed to the famous Soirees de Medan, edited by Zola, at once revealed him as a master of French prose, with an unusual gift for the short story. The thirty-five volumes of his complete works contain, beside, some two hundred contes and nouvelles, a certain number of short novels, such as Une Vie (1882), Bel-Ami {18S 5), Mont-Oriol (1887), full of those unsavoury physiological and pathological details in which the naturalist school deUghted, and Pierre et Jean (1888), Fort Comme la Mort (1889), and Notre Cceur (1890), which reveal a more delicate perception of the tragedy of life and a broader human sympathy than his earlier work.
Excellent as Maupassant's novels are from the artistic, if not from the moral point of view, his short
"stori^'^' stories are even better. Among so many good things it is hard to choose.^ The majority of his tales are drawn from Norman peasant or lower middle- class life, seen in its comic and its tragic aspects {Aux Champs, Le Garde, La Ficelle, etc.) ; others are stories of the war of 1870-1871 {Boiile de Suif, Deux Atnis, La Mere Saiivage, Les Prisonniers, etc.) ; others, again, of super-
1 There is an excellent selection of Maupassant's tales edited by Marcel Prevost, and entitled Contes Choisis de G. de Maupassant, ed. pour la Jeunesse (Hachette).
THE IDEALISTIC NOVEL 259
natural terror {LeHorla, Fou ?, Le Loup, Lettre trotwie sur un Noye, La Peur, L'Auberge, etc.). All these contes are written with the same intensity of vision, the same sharpness of definition, and in the same simple, vivid, yet sober style. As Pellissier remarks : "II nous montre les choses elles- memes avec une transparence parfaite, si bien que, croyant les avoir sous les yeux nous oublions I'ecrivain."
Even during the heyday of realism and naturalism there
were a certain number of novelists who carried
other novelists on the traditions of romantic idealism in one
form or another. Chief among these were
Octave Feuillet and Victor Cherbuliez.
Octave Feuillet (1821-1890) was the direct literary suc- cessor of George Sand. Zola stigmatized his work as "un delayage de Musset et de George Sand," and the Goncourts sneeringly labelled him " le Musset des families." Though his novels {Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre, 1858 ; Hisioire de Sihylle, 1862 ; M. de Camors, 1867 ; Julie de Trecceur, 1872, etc.) are frankly romantic and sentimental examples of society fiction, they are WTitten with vigour, reveal no mean skill in the handling of character and in the art of telling a story, and give a vivid, if a somewhat one- sided, idea of one class of the society of his time.
Victor Cherbuliez (1829-1899), a Genevan by birth, produced in Le Comte Kostia (1863), Le Prince Vital (1864), Le Roman d'une Honnete Fenitne (1866), L'Aventure de Ladislas Bolski (1869), Meta Holdenis (1873), Miss Rovel (1875), etc., readable novels, full of ingenious incident and exciting sentimental situations in a cosmopolitan setting.
Of a very different order from either of these novelists were the collaborators Erckmann (1822-1899) and Chatrian (1826-1890), who, though they have no particular literary claim, enjoyed a considerable vogue in their own day. Their simply told patriotic novels and tales glorif3ing the Revolu- tion and belittling Napoleon are interspersed with pictures of peasant life in the Vosges and Alsace {Madame Therese, 1863 ; Hisfoire d'un Consent de 1813, L Ami Fritz, 1864 ; Waterloo, 1865, etc.). After 1870, for political and senti-
26o A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
mental reasons, these romans nationaux were much admked in France, and since the development of the regional novel, and more particularly since the Great War, they have enjoyed a renewed popularity which seems somewhat out of proportion to their intrinsic merits
CHAPTER V POETRY
ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND ARTISTIC REALISM IN POETRY— THEOPHILE GAUTIER, THEODORE DE BANVILLE, THE PARNASSIANS
THE poetry of this period follows the general drift of French literature and art, and becomes increasingly objective and impersonal. It, too, goes through a phase of realism — a phase which was the logical outcome of romanticism. Having run through the gamut of emotions poets retuned their lyres to render sensations pure and simple. After 1850 this evolution towards a more objective poetry is perceptible even in Victor Hugo, who, as we have Links between Seen, carried on single-handed the romanticism I ^^la'dX"" of 1830 for a quarter of a century after it had ^chod^'of exhausted itself as a movement. But it reveals poetry itself much more clearly, and at an earlier date, in the work of two poets who mark the transition from the romantic to the so-called Parnassian school of poetry. Th(jophile Gautier (1811-1872), Hugo's staunchest and most truculent lieutenant during the rehearsals Gautier of Hcfnani, was by temperament and by early ii-i 7- ]^-[2amng a painter, and all his literary work is marked by a high pictorial quality. Unlike Victor Hugo, he believed that art is an end in itself, and that beauty is the only reality — not spiritual beauty, but beauty of form, sound and coloiu". Hence Gautier's own somewhat senten- tious remark, quoted by the Goncourts : " Je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe." Gautier's novels and tales have been discussed elsewhere. His earliest poems of note,
261
•262 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Alhertus (1832), a wild tale of sorcery, and La Comedie de la Mort (1838), are highly romantic in theme, though the second is far more restrained in style than the first. Both abound in admirable descriptive passages, and display that command over poetical form which distinguishes the minor poems written between 1830 and 1840, and collected by Gautier in 1845. But the plastic and rhythmical qualities of his talent reach their highest expression in
Emaux et ^ f r r, \ ii
camees Emaiix ctQaniees (1852), well-named enamels ^ and cameos, for, as their author remarks in
his preface :
" Ce titre exprime le dessein de trailer sous forme restreinte de petits sujets, tantot sur plaques d'or ou de cuivre, avec les vives couleurs de I'emai], tantot avec la roue du graveur de pierres fines, sur I'agate, la cornaline ou I'onjTc."
This collection is very varied in tone, but each of its several poems, whether composed in a dreamy minor key [Le Chateau du Souvenir, Variations sur le Carneval d-e Venise), in a tone of delicate humour and irony {Les Fantaisies d'hiver, Nostalgic d'Ohclisques), or in one of loud laughter {Le Souper des Armures), or whether, on the other hand, its appeal is purely to the eye {Etude des Mains, Symphonic en blanc niajeur) , is unsurpassed in perfection of form and verbal beauty. Gautier was the first writer of his age to formulate the theory of " art for art's sake " — very fully in his preface to Mademoiselle Maupin (1835), and very poetically in the last poem of Emaux et Camees — L'Art, which is in itself an admirable example of its author's rhythmical skill.
" Les dieux eux-memes meurent, Mais les vers souverains
Demeurent Plus fort que les airains.
Sculpte, lime, cisHe ; Que ton reve flottant
Se scelle Dans le bloc r&istant."
THE POETRY OF ART FOR ART'S SAKE 263
The reaction against the passionate subjectivity and ex- ^ , altation of the romantic poets, who put content
TufeODORE DE .-^ r 1 ■• ^
Danville befoie form, was Carried a step further by Gau- ' *^ ^ ^' tier's friend and disciple, Theodore de Banville (1823-1891) — clown, juggler, acrobat, as he has been desig- nated by French critics, because of his faculty for conjuring with rhythms and ringing the changes upon rime. The immense importance which Banville attached to form is clear on every page of his Petit Traite de Versification frangaise (187 2). published at the very end of his career, and summarizing his own practice, which by that time had in essentials become that of the Parnassian group. Here we find his famous definition of poetry as " I'art de grouper les mots de telle sorte que leur arrangement offre, par lm~ menie, un caractere musical," and the view expressed that " ou n'entend dans un vers que le mot qui est k la rime, et ce mot est un seul mot qui travaille a produire I'effet voulu par le poete." Even his earliest poetical ventures, Les Cariatides (1842) and Les Stalactites (1846) which con- tains the delightful "Nous n'irons plus aux bois," show great technical skill, and much feeling for the musical element in poetry ; while Les Odes Funamhtlcsqites {1857), many of which are indeed acrobatic feats in rime and rhythm, contain an element of refined buffoonery rare in French verse. For the next ten years Banville abandoned lyrical poetry and devoted himself to writing comedies in verse, which made up in charm and distinction for what they lacked in dramatic quality, and of which the most famous is Gringoire (1866). His later lyrics, Les Exiles (1867), Les Occidentales (1869), Les Idylles Prussiennes (1871), in which the Prussian enemy is treated as an exaggerated type of the much-despised bourgeois, and Trente-six Ballades Joycuses (1873), show the same consummate metrical skill, the same supple grace as his earlier collections. But Banville 's inspiration remained to the end almost purely verbal, and even the rare beauty and flawlcssncss of its form cannot entirely make up for the lack of those spiritual and imagina- tive elements without which there is no great poetry.
264 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Theophile Gautier and Theodore de BanviUe prepared the my. p way for a group of poets generally known as the
sian group Pamassians, who represent the dominant ten- '°^ dency in French poetry between 1850 and 1880. Catulle Mendes, who was allied to the Parnassians from the beginning of the movement, tells us how in the early fifties, soon after Victor Hugo had betaken himself into exile, " quelques jeunes gens, sans relations personnelles d'ailleurs avec les maitres qu'ils s'elurent plus tard, s'aviserent de croire en la poesie et la beaute." ^ At the instigation of Catulle Mendes, the young publisher, Alphonse Lemerre, was induced to publish in 1866 an anthology bearing the title Le Parnasse Contemporain, Recneil dc Vers Nottveaux, the first series of which (there were two others in 1871 and 1876) was published in eighteen instalments, and contained poems by Gautier, Ban\dlle, Leconte de Lisle, Coppee, Baudelaire, Sully Prudhomme, Verlaine, and Mallarme. The title Parnassian was first used merely as a collective name for the contributors to this anthology, and superseded the designations/o^m/si!^, fantaisiste, styliste, and impassible, which the press had freely applied to the younger school of poets. It was later narrowed down to Leconte de Lisle and his immediate circle (Sully Prudhomme, Fran9ois Coppee, and Heredia), who were aJl^of_qnemind. oil three points at least— i.e. that all great art is impersonal, that the poet has no higher quality than the power of seeing truly, and of rendering what he sees in the most perfect form possible. Even this group gradually divided. Sully Prud- homme ended by devoting himself almost entirely to philosophical poetry, and Francois Coppee, who had begun
" D^daignant la douleur vulgaire Qui pousse des cris importuns "
(Le Reliquaire),
later constituted himself the poet of the lower middle classes and decent poor of Paris. The term Parnassian school is
^ Catulle Mendes : Rapport sur le Mouvement Poiiique Fratifais, 1867-1900 (1903).
PARNASSIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 265
thus a misnomer, unless we regard it as a school consisting of two men — Leconte de Lisle and Heredia, who alone fully embody all the aesthetic doctrines implied by the term Parnassianism. The many other poets to whom the title Parnassian has been freely applied can only be included if one regards the cult of form, of art for art's sake, to the exclusion of inspiration and subject-matter.
Nevertheless, Leconte de Lisle undoubtedly determined the direction of French poetry for some twenty years, owing to the clarity of his aims and his masterly illustration of them. The preface to his Poemes Antiques (1852) was immediately accepted as a gospel and a manifesto, and was in its owTi day scarcely less influential than the Defense et Illustration and the Preface de Cromwell had been in theirs. The ideas propounded in Leconte de Lisle's preface are, briefly, that poetry should be as impassive and as impersonal as natrue, as exact as science, and as impeccable as a per- fect piece of sculpture. Of the relative impersonality and impassivity, which was in the natiue of a reaction against romantic rhapsody and romantic confession, enough has already been said elsewhere. Turning away from the parade , of individual passions and individual judgments, and re- / luctant to draw conclusions, the Parnassian poets tended to carry the historical, and even the scientific, method into the realm of the imagination. Intellectual rather than emotional — " nous sommes une generation de savants," remarks Leconte do Lisle — these poets introduced the criti- cal spirit into poetry, descriptive or metaph3'sical, believing with Leconte de Lisle that
" L'art et la science, longtemps s6par6s par suite des efforts divergents de rintelligcnce. doivent tendre h s'unir 6troitement, si ce n'est b. se confondre."
This tendency is seen, not only in their love of the circum- scribed, in the accuracy and exactitude with which they render local colour in time and space, biit also in the way they dissect their attitude towards life and their own controlled emotions, for these neo-romantics were as eager
266 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
for precision and certitude in these matters as their prede- cessors had been content to leave them vague, indefinite, and mysterious.
With regard to the form as apart from the subject-matter of their work, it may truly be said that no poets ever set up a more inflexible ideal of beauty, plastic and musical, or more frequently attained it, and yet one would willingly forgo some of their flawlessness for something which never came within their ken :
/c4'
» " The light that never was on sea oi land,
' The consecration and the poet's dream."
./V CirV' Charles Marie Rene Leconte de Lisle (1820-1894) was !' .il ., bornin the Indian Ocean, on the French island
.fJV Leconte de "-T—CT/ — T T — ' — i ■?— i -i i ^
g Lisle of Reumou, whcre he lived until he was three,
I 20-1 94 ^^^ then again from his tenth to his twentieth year, the intervening period being spent with relatives in France. His father, a surgeon, hailing from Brittany, was deeply imbued with the doctrines of Rousseau and the Encyclopedistes, and his mother was a very pious and conservative woman, of Gascon origin, and a niece of Pamy, the eighteenth-century poet. In this intellectual atmo- sphere and amid tropical scenery, Leconte de Lisle spent the most impressionable years of his hfe, and his ancestry and early environment were not for nothing in the develop- ment of his genius. As Heredia puts it : " Le souvenir du pays natal I'a toujours hante. Son cerveau en demeura comme baigne de lumiere." In 1838 Leconte de Lisle set sail from his native island to finish his education at a French university. As a student of law at Renncs, he appears to have spent most of his time reading the French romantics and the masterpieces of English, German, and Italian literature, and dabbling in science, for he had already decided to become a poet, and felt that science plays far too important a part in modem life to be ignored even in poetry. Having passed his law examinations, Leconte de Lisle returned to Reunion, where he spent two unhappy years, misunderstood by his own people, who made fun of
\^
PARNASSIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 267
his poetical aspirations, and horrified by the sight and sounds of slavery which met him on every side. In 1847 he returned to France for good, settled down in Paris, and gave up all idea of anything but a literary career. The following year slavery was abolished in the French colonies, largely owing to his representations. Henceforward the history of his life is that of his poems — Potmes Antiques (1852), vivid and scrupulously accurate pictures drawn from Greek and Oriental mythology ; Poemes et Poesies (1854) >' and Poemes Barbarcs (1862). In 1861 Leconte de Lisle began to publish his admirable prose translations of the Greek and Latin poets, which ended with his version of Euripides in 1885. A year earlier appeared his fifth volume of poems, the Poemes Tragiques, to be followed by a sixth, Derniers Poemes, published posthumously in 1895. In 1886 he succeeded Victor Hugo at the Academic Frangaise, and during the later years of his life he exercised a very real sovereignty over literary Paris, even after the advent of the symbolists. Referring to his influence, Maurice Barres remarks : " Nul de scs familiers me demcntira, si je lui vois quelques traits d'un Malherbe ou d'un Boileau." Leconte de Lisle was what the French term an " intellec- tual," with the result that his general ideas and ^L^sieV ^ his philosophy of life are of interest to the reader philosophy of q£ j^ig poetry. From his earliest boyhood he was an ardent Republican, and hater of brute- force or tyranny of any kind, and the champion of the down-trodden. Later he worked for the abolition of slavery, and took a small part in the Revolution of 1848, but otherwise he stood aloof from the political movements of the day. M. Calmette, in an interesting book, Leconte de Lisle et ses Amis, explains this apparent contradiction by the fact that Leconte de Lisle was an intellectual aristocrat. He had no sooner stepped down into the arena than he became disgusted with the stupidity and vulgarity of the people for whom he had been ready to fight. His aloofness and detachment from the burning quoslions of the day was thus not the result of indiifcrence, but of a desire to keep
268 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
his own ideals intact, and to cloak the intensity of his feelings. Hence the cry of loneliness and isolation which, occasionally escapes from his poetry :
"... Vois, mon ame est semblable a quelque morne espace OH seul je m'interroge, ou je me r^ponds seul."
— La Paix des Di.mx {Dernier s Podmes).
Catulle Mendes, who knew the poet well, describes him as " quelque chose comme un volcan couvert de glace," and indeed his so-called impassivity both in life and art was more apparent than real. Leconte de Lisle 's pessimism has also been exaggerated, or, perhaps more accurately, mis- interpreted. Brunetiere compares him with the romantics, and says that he always considered that " le premier bon- heur pour I'homme etait de ne pas naitre, le second etait de mourir." It is true that he frequently calls upon death in his poems, yet he never seems to have been able to regard its coming with serenity.
" L'intelligible cesse, et voici Tagonie, Le mepris de soi-meme, et Pombre et le remord, Et le renoncement furieux du genie."
Again, Leconte de Lisle never regarded himself as the chosen prey of destiny, nor was he convinced of the usclessness of life in any season or in any clime, but rather of its hope- lessness for all men in the present condition of Western civilization. From the spectacle of the stupidity, ugliness, and mercenary spirit of modern times, laid bare in Aux Modernes {Poemes Barhares), he turns with relief to the freedom, simplicity, and vigour of the primitive world.
" Oh ! la tente au d&ert et sur les monts sublimes, Les grandes visions sous les cMres pensifs, Et la libert6 vierge et ces cris magnanimes, Et le debordement des transports primitifs ! "
— Dies IrcB {Podmes Antiques).
Leconte de Lisle finds a justification for his contemplative inaction in the philosophy of India. Buddhism, which teaches, among other things, that pain, which is inseparable from existence, is engendered by desire : —
PARNASSIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 269
" Bien des sifecles sont morts depuis que I'homme pleure Et qu'un §.pre desir nous consume et nous leurre. Plus ardent que le feu sans fin et plus amer "
— Le Vceu Suprime (Poemes Barhares) —
Nirvana (i.e. the extinction of individuality and the absorp- tion into the supreme spirit) can alone bring relief, and Leconte de Lisle would fain plunge into a Nirvana of his own :
" Nature ! Immensity si tranquille et si belle, Majestueux abime ou dort I'oubli sacr6, Que ne me plongeais-tu dans ta paix 6ternelle, Quand je n'avais encor ni souffert ni pleur6.
Laissant ce corps d'une heure errer a I'aventure Par le torrent banal de la foule emporte, Que n'en detachais-tu Tame en fleur, 6 Nature, Pour I'absorber dans ton impassible beaut6."
— Ultra Ccelus (Podmes Barhares).
In spite of his imaginative escapes from Europe and the nineteenth century to ancient Greece and L^r^sra- Scandinavia, and to the Far East and the Far
- '^"ypo™°'^®'^" South, Leconte de Lisle is essentially a modem
poet — modern by reason of what has been called his " socialistic imagination " ; modern, again, by reason of his scientific interpretation of nature and life ; modern even in his pessimism, which, as has been shown, was the result of his experience of nineteenth-century civilization in the West, and in no wise due to his researches into ancient or primitive customs. Many of Leconte de Lisle 's finest poems are frescoes, in which the individual is lost in the crowd [La Rimoia, Le Massacre de Mona, La Vision de Snorr, Les Elephants), or is merely the mouthpiece of the crowd {Cain) — vast epic paintings of that "collective life " of which contemporary sociologists have so much to tell us. But he is, above all, a modem of the moderns in his scientific attitude towards the universe. " Des yeux de poete ouverts sur des hypotheses de la science," says Bourget, " c'est presque la gdnese cntiere des Podmes Antiques et des Poifnes Barhares." His poems arc inspired
270 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
both by an evolutionist theory of the history of religions, and by an evolutionist theory of beast and man. In a series of poems dealing with Indian and pagan religions {Surga, Bhagavat, La Vision de Brahma, Kybele, Hypathie et Cyrille), and with northern myths and Christianity {La Legende des Nornes, Les Ascites, Le Nazareen, Les Parables de Don Guy) he endeavours to show that each religion has had its hour of truth and beauty, but that no religion has more than a provisional value. Leconte de Lisle is an evolutionist, too, in his belief that animals are but a lower form of humanity, and that their more rudimentary brains know emotions which vaguely resemble ours, just as we share many of their instincts and appetites. This idea is clearly expressed in Sacra Fames, and in the last lines of Les Hurleurs :
" chiens qui hurliez sur les plages, Apr^s tant de soleils qui iie reviendront plus, J'entends toujours, du fond de mon pass6 confus Le cri d^sespere de vos douleurs sauvages ! "
Leconte de Lisle 's superiority as an animal painter over his predecessors, and indeed over many of his successors, may be seen in Le Reve du Jaguar, La PantMre Noire, Les Jungles, and Le Loup, which reveal not only great pictorial skill, but a real insight into animal psychology.
Critics never weary of pointing out that Leconte de
Lisle 's poetry appeals almost entirely to the
of Leconte de cyc, and it is true that the majority of his purple
IS e s poe ry pg^|.^j^gg j^^vc either a sculptural quality, like the passage in Cain, beginning —
" Et les femmes marchaient, g^antes, d'un pas lent, Sous les vases d'airain qu'emplit I'eau des citcrnes. Graves, et les bras nus, et les mains sur le flanc" —
or else they are inundated with the light and colour which are only to be found under tropical skies (cf. L'Aurore). For Leconte de Lisle knows no half-tones. His palette, which is even richer than Victor Hugo's, is composed entirely of pure, bright colours. But he was almost equally scnsi-
PARNASSIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 271
tive to sounds, and not only makes a very skilful use of alliteration and assonance — take, for instance, the heavy and lethargic effect conveyed by the repeated "o's" and nasals in the following lines :
" Comme des troncs pesants flottaient les crocodiles "
— but also, and more particularly in his pictures of wild animals, he often obtains his whole effect by a description of the sounds and movements they make. For instance, in Cain, the passage heard, but not seen, of an antediluvian monster through the desert at night is conveyed to us thus. The sandy waste is
" parfois travers6 brusquement Par quelque monstre 6pais qui grinfait des machoires Et laissait apres lui comme un ebranlement."
Or, again, in his description of a tiger :
" Le frisson de la faim crcuse son maigi'e flanc ; H^risse, sur soi-meme, il tourne en grommelant ; Centre le sol rugueux il s'etire et se traine, Flaire I'etroit sentier qui conduit a la plaine, Et, se levant dans Thcrbe avcc un baillemcnt, Au travers de la nuit miaule tristement."
— Les Jungles.
Leconte de Lisle gives us wonderful pictures of nature in repose. Two of his most admired poems, Midi and Juin, produce an unmatched impression, the one of the drowsi- ness of a midsummer noon, the other of the still and dewy freshness of a summer dawn ; while Le Sommeil du Condor and Nox are sjnnphonics of the hush of night.
Leconte de Lisle, who was a lover of the wide spaces of „. , ^ the earth, rarely describes European landscapes,
His landscapes , . , -, , \ ■, i ,, • ^ ■, , ,
and mdeed the Andes, the Pacific, and the desert are the only possible setting for the tragic primitive passions of some of his " legends of the ages." No better example of his power of conveying the idea of space and distance can be given than a short poem entitled Les Elephants, which begins with an impression of perfect stillness, broken suddenly by the tramp of approaching elephants :
272 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
"lis passent Comme une ligne noire, au sable illimite ; Et le desert reprend son immobility Quand les lourds voyageurs a I'horizon s'effacent."
Leconte de Lisle is best known and most admired for his
evocation of Greek, Celtic, Finnish, and Indian
"'a^whoie *^ civilizations, and for his paintings of the scenery
and animal life of the tropics ; and he is, indeed,
a master of description, but interspersed among this splendid
pageantry are some poems of a different inspiration, such
Ijrics, written in a restrained elegiac tone, as Requies ; Le
Manchy, composed in memory of the Creole lost-love of his
youth ; and L' Illusion Supreme, charged with longing for
the home of his birth ; while the only two of his poems
inspired by contemporary events — A I'ltalie and Le Sucre
de Paris — both on the theme that it is better for a whole
nation to die than to accept servitude, would deserve a
place in any anthology of their author's work.
Leconte de Lisle 's weaknesses as a lyrical poet are, on the one hand, a certain lofty monotony due to his one-sided conception of life and the universe, and to an over-fondness for slow majestic words ; and, on the other, the narrow range of inspiration imposed by his theory of ini £ersonal_ art, which excluded certain eternal sources of lyricism.
Jose-Marie de Heredia (1842-1905), Leconte de Lisle's closest disciple, has been iokingly reproached
JOSft-MARIE . ^ JO- r i r 1
DB HfeRfeDiA for having robbed Spam 01 a poet, tor he was (1842-1905) ^^^^ -^ Cuba of a Spanish father, and he traced his ancestry direct from one of those conquistadores of the New World who had sailed the Spanish main with Cortez. But his mother came from a Norman family, and so when Herddia was eight years old it was decided to send him to school in France. After receiving a sound classical educa- tion under the priests of Saint Vincent at Senlis, he spent a year studying law and theology at the University of Havana in his native island, and then returned to France to complete his education by a course of history and palaeo- graphy at the Ecolc dcs Chartes in Paris, where he finally
PARNASSIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 273
settled down for good. Here he soon entered into friendly relations with Leconte de Lisle, and became a prominent member of the Parnassian group.
H^redia's first published verses appeared in the Revue de Paris for 1862, and for the next thirty years or ^"(1893)'" rnore his sonnets were doled out singly or in small groups in the literary reviews and in the successive Parnasses. At the age of fifty Heredia, under considerable pressure, collected his scattered sonnets under the title Les Trophees (1893), thus endowing the Parnassian movement with a kind of posthumous success, for, despite the fact that by that date Parnassianism was a thing of the past, the book had an immediate and extraordinary success, twelve editions being exhausted between May and Decem- ber, 1893. Three years later its author succeeded his friend and master, Leconte de Lisle, at the Academic Fran^aise, over the head of Zola.
Few purely literary men have been received by that august body on the merits of work so small in quantity, for beyond his one slender volume of verse, Heredia published nothing save some prose translations from the Spanish, and an introduction or so to other men's works. Les Trophees, which represents the achievement of a lifetime, and con- tains the concentrated essence of Heredia's culture and learning, consists of one hundred and eighteen sonnets dealing in successive series with the art and Hfe (and more particularly the everyday life) of ancient Greece and Sicily, of Rome and the Barbarians, of France, Italy, and Spain during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, of the Tropics and the Far East (more especially Japan), and concluding with a section entitled La Nature ct le Rive, which is mainly devoted to Brittany. This sonnet sequence is quite appro- priately completed by a Romanccro and a narrative poem on the exploits of Pizarro — Les Conqueranls de I'Or. Hdre- dia is thus almost exclusively a sonneteer, who deliberately chose this form because its brevity and difficulty demands " une conscience dans I'execution et une concentration dans la pensee qui ne peuvent qu'exciter ct poussor i la
VOL. II. — 18
274 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
perfection I'artiste digne de ce beau nom." In all times and countries the sonnet has been most commonly used for the expression of personal feelings, but Heredia, faithful to the tenets of his school, used it exclusively as a frame- work for some characteristic phase or scene in man's long history, chosen always for its pomp, colour, or decorative effect. For Les Trophies are, indeed, what Francois Coppee called them, a Legende des Siecles in sonnet form, but a Legende des Siecles in which no theories are advanced, no causes pleaded, and in which each single poem presupposes deep researches into the period, country, and theme with which it is concerned. Maurice Barres tells us that Here- dia " dans chaque sonnet des Trophees, a concentre, ecrase la matiere de soixante volumes bien choisis," and again that it took him ten years to find the second tercet of Vitrail. Such labours were well rewarded, for Heredia's sonnets are flawless, though their very perfection at times gives an impression of effort. To quote a felicitous simile of Mr. John Bailey's : "To the trained ear the sound of a perfect sonnet is like the rise and fall of a wave on the shore, only that it has in it no moment so marked as that of the breaking of the wave," and Heredia's sonnets fully justify this comparison, for between the octave and the sextet there is always a very clear pause in the scene or narrative (cf. Le Labouyeur). Some of these sonnets are very dramatic — a strange situation unfolds itself [Fuite de Centaures, Andromede an Monstre), and we are left wondering until the last tercet, or sometimes even until the last line for the key to the mystery. For Heredia generally ends his sonnets with a line charged with meaning, and musical, with a haunting sonority, as in the sonnet entitled Anioine et CUopdtre, where Antony, gazing into the eyes of the Egyptian enchantress, saw there
" Toute une mer immense ou fuyaient des galercs."
Heredia had a great gift for mingling pictorial and sonorous effects. To give only one example out of a multitude :
PARNASSIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 275
" Et plus clair en I'azur noir de la nuit sereine Silencieusement s'argente le croissant."
Born, like Leconte de Lisle, under a tropical sky, he never lost his taste for what was rich and splendid in sound and colour, though in some of the sonnets devoted to Breton scenery and the humble lives of Breton fisher-folk, he very skilfully renders the grey melancholy of Northern seas and skies {Soldi Couchant, Mer Montante).
By his consummate genius for concentration, Heredia is the most typical representative of the first neo-romantic generation, in so far as it embodied a reaction against the lavishness and diffuseness of its elders. No writer in prose or verse ever made such a distilled essence of the world of facts, historical or legendary. A few examples may suffice. The fourteen lines of Nemee summarize the origin of the legend of Hercules ; La Belle Viole gives the essentials of Du Bellay's genius and personality, while four lines in Medaille Antique contain a bird's-eye view of the history of Sicily :
" Perdant la puret6 de son profil divin, Tour k tour Arethuse esclave et favorite A mele dans sa veine ou le sang grec s'irrite La fureur sarrasine a rorgueil angevin."
Leconte de Lisle and Heredia, whatever their limitations, were real poets. Great is the fall from them to Sully Prudhomme and Franfois Coppce, who were merely artists in verse.
Of Sully Prudhomme (1839-1907), the author of the ^ „ ^ ^ famous Vase Brise, and the winner of the Nobel
Sullv Pnid- .... . , 1 , ,
homme pnzc for literature m 1902, much good has been I 39 190 gg^- J ^y French critics. They praise his accurate rendering of the most subtle shades of feeling in Stances et Poemes (1865), Les Epreuves (1866), Les Solitudes (1869), Les Vaines Tendresses (1872), and when their author seeks inspiration in philosophy, and, convinced that poetry can interpret " outre tons les sentiments presque toutcs les idees," tries to justify this view in La Justice (1878), Le Prisme (1886), and Le Bonhci.r (1888), they praise
276 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
" cette simplicity, cette candeur sur lesquelles son scepticisme philosophique s'eleve comme sur deux ailes dans les hautes regions oh la foi ravissait les mystiques." ^
It is true that Sully Prudhomme was a cunning distiller of refined and elegant emotions, but he has no lyrical swing. As a philosophical poet he has much that is edify- ing, but little that is original or profound, to tell us, nor has he the imaginative sweep which might make us forget this. It may seem strange, from what has been said about Sully Prudhomme, that he should ever have been classed among the Parnassians, but even in his most personal poems he applies to his own thoughts and feelings the precise and rigorous method of observation, which the rest of his group applied to the external world. Later, it is true, when he came to regard poetry as a vehicle for his own thoughts, and as a medium for stating the laws of science rather than as a representation of things seen, he broke away almost completely from the Parnassian doctrine. But in one point he remained at one with it to the end : even more than Leconte de Lisle he sought to unite art and science in his poetry. His philosophy is based on the great hypotheses of physics and natural history — and though at times this scientific element weighs heavily upon his verse, at others he succeeds in giving it symbolical value, and it is on these occasions that Sully Prudhomme is at his best. A good example is to be found in a short poem entitled Le Zenith, in which a balloon ascent symbolizes the soaring aspirations of the soul freed from the heaviness of the body. Others are to be found in certain passages of Justice and Bonheur.
Those who prefer to read their " higher thought " in verse rather than in prose will find satisfaction in Sully
FrdQ cois
coppee Prudhomme, while those who have a taste for
1 42-190 sentimental realism in narrative poetry will find
plenty of it in the poems of Francois Coppee (1842-1908),
who, after writing lyrics in the approved Parnassian style
{Le Reliquaire, 1866 ; Les Intimites, 1868), discovered his
^ Anatole France : La Vie Liitdrairc.
PARNASSIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 277
particular line in singing " the short and simple annals of the poor " {La Greve des Forgerons and Poemes Modernes, 1869 ; Les Humbles, 1872 ; Le Cahier Rouge, 1874, etc.). Though not a great poet in any sense of the word, Coppce is a clever and easy verse-writer who handles the conte en vers admirably {L'Un on L' Autre, Le Liseron, etc.), and excels in the description of everyday Paris street scenes. Most of his poems are an attempt to poetize the com- monplace — and not infrequently the trivial. Coppee also wrote short stories in prose {Une Ldylle pendant le Siege, Confes en Prose, Longiies et Breves, etc.), in which, even more than in his verse-tales, sentiment too often degenerates into sentimentality. But it is for his poetical dramas — Le Passant (i86g), Le Tresor (1878), Severe Torelli (1883), and Pour la Conronne (1895) — that he is most likely to be remembered.
CHAPTER VI THE DRAMA AFTER 1850
THE stage, though it had been the noisiest battle- ground of the romantic school, was also the one on which its victories were destined to be least enduring. We have already seen some of the aesthetic reasons for this, but there was another of a more immediate and practical nature. In order to be really successful, the drama, more than any other literary form, must in some measure at least, adapt itself to the prevailing tastes of the day. Now, the romantic drama may be said to have pleased no one but its creators and the few who shared their views. The peaceable, conservative bourgeois, intent on growing rich, who formed the vast majority of the theatre-going public, had no sympathy with exalted sentiment, and only went to the play to be amused ; while the democrats and revolutionaries, who formed the minority, regarded the romantic dramatists as lovers of things dead and gone, and hence as reactionaries. The romantics consistently refused to pander to middle-class tastes. The bourgeois, nevertheless, had his poet — Beranger ; his novelist — Paul de Kock ; and last, but by no means least, his dramatist — Scribe^
Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), in some four hundred pieces,
I COMEDY i^3.ny of them written in collaboration with OF MANNERS other playwrights, gave the midd.l.e:class play-
LEM PLAYS goer exactly what he wanted— amusement and scriITe'^ nothing more. After beginning with numerous
(1791-18C1) farces and vaudevilles,^ Scribe made his debut
1 Vaudeville, originally Vau de Vire, name given to the satirical
278
THE DRAMA AFTER 1850 279
in serious comedy in 1822 with Valerie, and followed up this first success with numerous plays of the same kind, notably Le Mariage d'Argent (1827), La Camaraderie (1836), Une Chaine (1841), Adrienne Lecouvreur (1849), ^-^-d Bataille de Dames (1851). Scribe also wrote historical plays [Bertrand et Raton, 1833 5 -^^ Verreji'M,(l.u, 1840), and the libretti of many of the most famous operas of the mid-century {Fra Diavolo, Robert le Diable, La Jiiive, Les Huguenots, Le Pro ph etc, etc.).
Scribe's plays are innocent of ideas or style, nor do they reveal more than very superficial powers of observation— the main inspiration of his comedies of manners appears to be a glorification of wealth and a contempt for poverty, and under the boixrgeois regime of Louis Philippe this could not fail to appeal to the general public. Scribe owes his place in literature to the extraordinary skill he displayed in inventing and handling plots, and to his dramatic technique generally. " L'art y est, si tout le reste y manque," ^ remarks Brunetiere in a study of Scribe's plays, and as a theatrical craftsman his influence on his younger con- temporaries and his successors is unmistakable. As far as comedy is concerned. Scribe, with his belief that play- writing is a highly specialized art, was an isolated figure in his own generation, yet his work cannot in any way be regarded as representing an intentional reaction against the romantic drama. That reaction only set in when his fame as a dramatist had long been secure — i.e. after the failure of Les Bur graves and the success of Ponsard's Lucrke — and it was represented by the so-called Ecole de Bon Sens,
songs composed in the fifteenth century by a certain OUvier Basselin, who lived in the valley of the Vire in Normandy. The term Van de Vire degenerated into Vaudeville, and was applied to a certain type of comic song until the end of the eighteenth century. At the begin- ning of the same century songs of this Icind were introduced into popular comedy — hence the term comidies avec vaudevilles, and later vaudevilles. After Scribe and Labiche a vaudeville came to mean any light comedy with an amusing and clever plot.
^ Epoqites du Tlddtrc Fran^ais.
28o A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
which aimed definitely at being as prosaic, highly moral,
and purely French as the romantics had been
Bon Sens lyiical, cxaltcd, and exotic. Ponsard was
(c. 1844-1853) acclaimed its chief, and Latour, Scribe, and the
early Emile Augier were counted its leading exponents.
Ponsard, who declared boldly, " Pour ma part, je n'admets
que la souverainete 4u bon ser^s ; je tiens que toute doctrine
ancienne ou moderne, doit etre continueUement soumise a
I'examen de ce juge supreme," is now chiefly remembered,
not for his regular tragedies, Lucrece (1843), Charlotte Corday
(1850), and Le Lion Amoureux (1866) — but for his comedy
of manners, L'Honneur et l' Argent (1853).
The Ecole de Bons Sens was short-lived (c. 1844-1853),
Hei ed to ^^^ ^^^ pla-ys which it produced were for the
determine the most part mcdiocrc ; but it has its historical
realistic move- . ^ • , i i i i ^ j • ^i
ment on the importance, for it helped to determine the ^^^^^ realistic movement in the drama, and one of its members, Emile Augier, with Dumas fils and Sardou, may be said to have held the French stage during the Second Empire. These three men, under the combined influence of Scribe's technique, of Balzac's novels, and of romantic drama, wrote comedies of serious purpose, inspired by the facts and problems of modern life. The romantic dramatists had prepared the way for a serious comedy of manners by breaking down, once and for all, the barriers between tragedy and comedy, by making the passion of love the mainspring of every dramatic action, and by setting the fashion of problem plays. The new dramatists accepted these innovations, and poured the content of Balzac's Comedie Humaine into the shell of plot and situation constructed by Scribe,
These plays are serious, often moving, and the comic element is generally only an accessory. The majority of them have a moral purpose which differentiates them from most of the realistic literature of the period.
Alexandre Dumas the Younger (1824-1895), son of the famous novelist, began his literary career by treading in his father's footsteps, and obtained his first success on the
THE DRAMA AFTER 1850 281
stage in_i85?, with the dramatized version of a novel writ- ,? — -^ 1 ten some years before, La Dame_.aux Camelias. d^^^s^'tob This play, written when its author was barely 1(1^24-1%") twenty-five, has that freshness and charm of / ,^='- r early youth which age cannot wither nor custom stale. It deserves a high place among the love stories of the world, and in the history of the drama it may be regarded as the first great comedy of manners produced on the French stage in the nineteenth century. Dumas followed it up by Diane de Lys (1853), Le Demi-Monde (1855), La Question d' Argent (1857), Le Fils Nature! (1858), Un Pere Prodigue (1859), L'Ami des Femmes (1864), all of which combine in almost equal proportions the features of the comedy of manners and the problem play. In a further group — Les Ldees de Madame Auhray (1867), La Visile de Noces (1871), La Princesse Georges (1871), Denise (1885), and Francillon (1887) — Bumas definitely subordinates the dramatic interest of the play to the demonstration of some moral or social thesis ; while in a third group of plays — La Femme de Claude (1873), Monsieur Alphonse (1874), L'Etrangere (1876), and La Princesse dc Bagdad — his concern with a thesis imparts to his heroes, and more especially to his heroines, an abstract and symbolical character which robs them of their human interest.
By birth, education, and, to a certain extent, by tempera- ment, Dumas " sprang straight from the lap of full-grown romanticism," and to the end of his days he preserved a strong romantic bias, as may be seen in the romanesque character of some of his plots, in his fondness for the violent and the exceptional, and in his love of lyrical declamation. Yet, both by aim and conviction, he was a realist, and a didactic realist, who endeavoured to give an accurate tran- scription of those aspects of contemporary life with which he was most familiar, from the point of view of a moralist, for Dumas was a firm believer in the social mission of the stage. Love is the passion with which he was almost exclusively concerned, but he studied it not for its beauty or poetry, but in the light of right and wrong, duty and
282 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
conduct, and with regard to the inevitable results of its misuse : " 2 et 2 font 4, et 4 et 4 font 8, Le theatre est aussi impitoj^able que rarithmetique." ^ In nearly all Dumas' plays there is a character (technically known as le raisonneur) who is the mouthpiece of the author's ideas, and who does his preaching for him. Not content with this, Dumas preached long and often in his numerous and volu- minous prefaces. Didacticism is indeed his besetting sin, but it mars his plays less than might be expected, because it is admirably counterbalanced by great dramatic and literary gifts. No one knew better than Dumas how to create interesting situations, lead up to a crisis, handle dialogue, and make characters really live. His dramatic instinct and technique, his keen powers of obser\^ation, and his trenchant wit, give to his plays the rare combination of acting and literary quality.
Emile Augier (1820-1889), under the influence of Ponsard,
began his career as a dramatist with pseudo-
^^jgf^^g^^^"* classical and historical plays in verse {La
eigne, 1844; L'Aventtmere, 1848; Le Joueur de
Flute, 1850).
In 1849, three years before La Dame aux Camelias, he produced Gahrielle, a realistic comedy of contemporary manners in verse, attacking the false sentiment and false passion which romanticism had made fashionable. In all his later comedies Augier, following the lead of the younger Dumas, abandoned verse for prose, and made a special study of the demoralizing effects of the greed for gold and lust for power which he saw on every side in the France of his day, and of the consequent unnatural intermingling of the various classes of society. His masterpiece, Le Gcndrc de M. Poirier (1854), one of the classics of the modem stage, is a portrait from the life of the nineteenth-century honrgeois- gentilhomme. Augier followed up this first success with Le Manage d'Olympe (1855), Ceinture Doree (1856), Les Lionnes Pauvres (1858), and Maitre Guirin (1864), in all of
^ Preface to Lcs Iddes dc Madame Aubray.
THE DRAMA AFTER 1850 283
which the action turns on the conflict between honour ?nd money.
Apart from these comedies of manners pure and simple, Augier also tried his hand at political comedy {Les Effronies, 1861 ; Le Fils du Giboycr, 1862 ; Lions et Renards, 1869) and at problem-plays {Paul Foresiier, 1868 ; Madame Caverlet, 1876 ; Les Fourchambattlt, 1878).
Augier, who was a bourgeois himself, has the sane and practical, though somewhat limited, outlook on life of the middle classes of his day, and upholds their ideas about love, marriage, and the family. Yet he is much less of a preacher than Dumas, and even in his pieces-d~these he never loses touch with reality. The setting of his plays is almost exclusively domestic, and they owe their interest, not to an elaborate plot, nor yet to psychological com- plexities, but to the lively characterization of some- what simple natures with set habits of life and thought. Though Augier constructed his comedies with great skill, he had not such a strongly developed dramatic instinct as Dumas, and his style, though fluent and natural, shows less originality.
By the side of Dumas and Augier, their somewhat younger contemporary, Victorien Sardou (1831-IQ08),
VXCTORIEN . , . ^ \ . ,. ,-1
Sardou inferior to them in literary quality but not 31-190 -^^ popularity, scored successes in almost every kind of play — comedy of intrigue {Les Paties de Mouche, 1861) ; comedy of manners of a somewhat superficial kind {Nos Intimes, 1861 ; La Famille Benoiion, 1865 ; Nos Bons Villagcois, 1866 ; DivorQons, 1888) ; political comedy {Rabagas, 1872) ; and historical dramas {Patric, 1869 ; La Haine, 1875 ; La Tosca, 1887 ; Thermidor, 1891 ; Madame Sans-Gcne, 1893). As a writer of comedy, Sardou was a second Scribe, with a wider satirical range. His plays reveal a remarkable knowledge of the requirements of the stage, and a brilliant technique, and they make up in liveliness and cleverness for what they lack in depth and sincerity. On the whole, it may be said that the only literary form
284 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
which reflected the frivolous and pleasure-loving tastes of society under the Second Empire was the vande- "oMEDY ^^^^^' *^^ ^^S^* comedy, which flourished so exceed- ingly during that period, and which has ever since remained a speciality of the French stage. Of the many successful playwrights in this line, three stand out supreme — Labiche, Meilhac and Halevy.
Eugene Labiche (1815-1888), for over forty years the most popular vatidevilliste in France, wrote
w T * r^ "P M 1?
Labiche Sparkling and witty plays, the best known of (1815-1888) ^j^.^j^ ^^^ jj^ Chapean de Faille d'ltalie (1851) ;
Le Misanthrope et I'Auvergnat (1854) .' Le Voyage de M.
Perrichon (i860), his masterpiece ; La Poudre aux Yenx
(1861) ; and La Cagnotte (1864).
Meilhac (1831-1897) and Halevy (1834-1908), who wrote
Meilhac ^^ Collaboration, were much applauded for their
(1831-1897) vaudevilles. La Vie Parisienne (1867), Froufrou
HALfevY (1869), La Petite Marquise (1874), and even more
34-190 g^ £^j. ^j^gjj. cQjnic operas (music by Offenbach),
of which the most famous are Orphee aux Enfers (1861),
La Belle Helhie (1865), and La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein
(1867). Sarcey sums up the respective merits of these
two collaborators as follows :
" Dou6 d'un sens exquis de la realite, M. Ludovic Haldvy a maintenu ce qu'il y a de trop fantasque et d'un peu bizarre dans le tour d 'imagination de M. Meilhac."
Somewhat later, Edouard Pailleron (1834-1899) made
his name with Le Monde oil I'on s'Ennuie
U834-1899) (1881), a nineteenth-century counterpart of the
Precieuses Ridicules, and the Femmes Savantes,
which is still a favourite with playgoers.
Naturalism had almost run its course in the novel before
it made its appearance on the stage, and its
NATURALISTIC short-lived success in the drama coincided
chronologically with newer tendencies in other
departments of literature.
THE DRAMA AFTER 1850 285
Edmond de Goncourt has the doubtful honour of having
Edmond de written the first drama naturaliste — Henriette
Henriette Marechule [iSG^) Somewhat later a number of
(1865) the novels of Zola and the Goncourts were
dramatized by their authors and others, but none of these
adaptations had any great merit or success.
One French playuxight only can be said to have written actable plays according to the purely natural- "("isar-^sgg^^istic formula. This was Henri Becque (1837- iSqq), who aimed at freeing the drama from all theatrical and literar}^ conventions, and at making it an almost photographic reflection of .life a.s it really is. Becque 's most"sli'ccessful plays, Michel Pauper (1870), Les Corhcaux (1882), and La Parisienne (1885), are slices of drab and sordid life presented without commentary or didactic pur- pose. They are innocent of dramatic technique in the ordinary sense of the word, the chara cters are all of a piece, and the dialogue is unrelieved by that wit or fancy which Ai^^ eF"and Duma s an_djheir disciples had so sedulously c ultiva ted. 'iJie movement which Becque inaugurated on the stage was continued for some ten years after 1885, "^hexS? thanks to the Theatre Libre (1887-1895). Its (1887-1895) founder, Andre Antoinc, who held a small post in a gas company, and was an enthusiastic amateur actor, thought, like Becque, that, even apart from its regrettable didactic tendencies, contemporary drama was untrue to life by reason of its elaborate plots, improbable incidents, and conventional denouements. He and the young dramatic authors who gathered round him set up as an ideal complete truth to nature in plot, dialogue, setting, and acting, and despised the tradition of the " well-made play " which had set in with Scribe and reached its cul- minating point with Sardou. Since the performances of the Theatre Libre were held in a small hall, and were only open to holders of season tickets, they not only escaped the ordinary censorship, but were free to ignore the tastes of the average playgoer. Thus Antoinc was in a position
286 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
to give hospitality to the works of French playwrights whose ideas-.abQjit art were jtpp advanced for the general public. C It was he who launched such writers of original talent as Georges Courteline, Georges Ancey,J3rieuj^, and Francois dc Curel, whose subsequent works transcended the bounds of naturalism, and will be dealt with later. Nor did the Theatre Libre confine itself exclusively to the produc- tion of the efforts of the French naturalistic school, for by including in its repertoire specimens of the new foreign drama, it introduced the plays of Tolstoi, Ibsen, and Haupt- mann to the French public. In spite of its exaggerated / naturalism, the movement, led by Antoine, did the French
drama good service by advocating a simplification of ,j/-' , dramatic technique, and by objecting to the undue promi- ^ij • nence of a thesis and of a didactic intention generally. ' V Even playwrights who kept aloof from the movement — %^' Georges de Porto-Riche, Henri Lavedan, Paul Hervieu,
Maurice Donnay, etc. — were not slow in adopting what seemed to them good in the experiments carried out by the Theatre Libre. The latest development in the theatrical art of France ^, ,. , is seen in the work carried on by the Theatre du
Theatre du /-. , i • r i i i t /-
vieuxcoiom- Vieux Colombicr, founded by Jacques Copeau
in 1913. This theatre produces at popular
prices, and in a simple setting, the best plays, ancient and
modern, French and foreign, and gives a special place in
its repertory to plays by new dramatists.
PART II
BETWEEN TWO WARS MAIN LITERARY CURRENTS (1885-1914)
CHAPTER VII
POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL BACK- GROUND (1871-1914)
AFTER the ten months of foreign and civil war which constitute " L'Annee Terrible," France immediately set herself the double task of estab- lishing a permanent form of government, and of paying off the Germans who occupied the fortified towns
1 1 rf r
poLmcAL along her eastern frontier. During the first ^ " five years after the war, under the able leader- ship of Thiers, the first President of the Third Republic, France gave marvellous proof of vitality. Not onl}' did she, within three years from the capitulation of Paris, hand over the whole war indemnity of £200,000,000 demanded by her late enemy, who had hoped to cripple her financially for a generation at least, but within a remarkably short time she repaired the havoc WTOught by tlie war on rail- roads, bridges, and public and private buildings, and set to work to develop to the utmost her natural and industrial resources. The International Exhibition held in Paris in 1878, though less spkndid than its predecessor of 1S67, bore ample witness to the prosperous condition of French trade and industry.
The most difficult problem with which France was con-
287
288 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
fronted immediately after the Franco-Prussian War was that ^ , . , of her future form of government. It seemed
Establishment ^ . . . ?^ ^ it -i
of the Third as though Legitimists, Orleanists, and Imperial- epu ic j^^^ j^^^ ahnost equal chances of prevailing, and indeed when, in February, 1875, the National Assembly drew up a Constitution for the Republic proclaimed by revolutionary Paris in 1870, so strong was the opposition that the measure was carried by a majority of only one vote. Nevertheless, the Constitution of 1875, with a few slight subsequent adjustments, has endured to the present day, and has had a longer life and a greater degree of stability than any of the six post-revolutionary governments which had preceded it. In matters connected both with home and foreign policy, the line of French presidents, from Thiers to Poincare, has had innumerable problems to face. Here, however, only a brief reference can be made to such political events as influenced or throw light on the literature of the period.
After the war, and as a consequence of it, there seems to have been a genuine desire for a return to
DubI l)6twGcn
Church religion among the people at large, " symbolized by the two votive churches which rose on the heights of Fourvieres and Montmartre like citadels of prayer protecting the cities of Lyons and Paris." ^ Any real religious revival was, however, checked for many years by the traditional alliance between the Church and political reaction, and the consequent political and clerical intrigues. Gambctta's famous declaration after the elections of 1877, " le Clericalisme voila I'ennemi," is the leitmotiv of the duel between Church and State, which fills so many pages in all histories of the Third Republic. Open war was first declared in 1879, when Jules Ferry drew up an education bill for- bidding members of unauthorized religious orders to teach. It is therefore not surprising that when, ten years later, the Minister of War, General Boulanger, attempted to overthrow the Government, he should have been supported
^ Gu6rard : French Civilization in the Nineteenth Century, p. 271 (-914)-
BETWEEN TWO WARS 289
by the Catholic clergy, who had from the first been hostile to the Republic, fearing, not without reason, that it would sooner or later undermine their authority. Shortly after the Boulangist crisis, the Pope issued an encyclical, the famous Rerum Novarum, urging French Catholics to rally to the Republic. A number of Monarchists, led by the Comte de Mun, followed his advice, and formed the party of the " Rallies." For the moment there seemed some hope of a reconciliation between Church and State. Then in 1894 occurred an incident which stirred up the bitterest animosities of all parties, and which, resolving itself into a military, reUgious, and political question, was destined to be a turning-point in the national life of France, and consequently to give a new direction to her thought and literature. For eight years — from 1894 to 1906 — the Drey- fus affair rent France into angry factions, and in its later stages aroused the interest of the whole civilized world. In order to explain the true inwardness of this famous affair,
it is necessary to go back a few j^ears. During Tte^movement' ^hc early eighties, the anti-Semite movement,
which had taken its rise in Germany and Austria, spread to France. The movement was political rather than racial or religious in origin. The European Jews were all concentrated in one class of society — the industrial bour- geoisie. Their emancipation in the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with the revolutions which made their class the ruling power in Europe, and as they were its richest and cleverest members, a semblance of a Jewish domination presented itself in countries like Austria and Germany, where the proportion of Jews to the total popula- tion was a high one. In France, on the contrary, it was extremely low ; but, on the other hand, the bourgeois Repub- lican regime attracted to that country many financial adventurers, among them not a few German Jews alienated
from their own country by the anti-Semite agi- Francejuive tatious there. The campaign in France was
opened by Edouard Drumont, by a book entitled La France Juive (1886), written to denounce the VOL. II. — 19
290 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
supposed evil influence of Jewish financiers on French national life. The book was read eagerly by the general public, who welcomed its explanation of the prevailing cor- ruption, confirmed shortly afterwards by the suspension of the Panama Company, which ruined many thrifty French families who had invested all their savings in the enterprise. By exposing the Panama scandals in his newly-founded paper, La Libre Parole, by attributing the anti-clerical policy of the government to Jewish influence, and by alleging that the Jewish elements in the Army were secret agents in the pay of the national enemy, Drumont secured for his campaign against the Jews not only all classes of small investors, but also all good Catholics and patriots.
In October, 1894, La Libre Parole gave great "^^affatf^"^ prominence to a concrete case of treason.
Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer attached to the General Staff, had been arrested on the charge of betraying important military secrets to Germany. He was tried by court-martial and condemned to perpetual solitary confinement in the He du Diable, off the coast of French Guiana. The case attracted little attention at the time, except in so far as it seemed a proof of the soundness of Drumont 's theories, and no one outside a small circle of Dreyfus 's personal friends raised the question of his possible innocence. But in 1896 rumours began to be circulated that everything had not been regular in the judgment of 1895, and these rumours grew and spread until, in 1898, it was deemed necessary to produce new proofs of the guilt of Dreyfus. Barely a month later, the Chief of the Intelli- gence Department, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry, confessed to having forged these new proofs, and thereupon committed suicide. In a moment the whole outlook of the question changed, and there was an outburst of indignation through- out the length and breadth of France. Emile Zola wrote an open letter to the War Office, headed /'Accuse, in which he accused all the officials connected with the trial and conviction of Dreyfus not only of injustice, but of dis- honesty. He himself was tried and condemned for his
BETWEEN TWO WARS 291
indictment, and only escaped punishment by crossing the Channel. Dreyfus was brought back from the Devil's Island and put upon his trial a second time. His old accusers redoubled their efforts to prove him guilty, and in August, 1899, at Rennes, the military court again convicted him of treason by a majority of five votes to two ; but this time it was with extenuating circumstances, and almost immediately afterwards M. Waldeck-Rousseau issued a decree granting Dreyfus a full and free pardon, which he accepted. The affair seemed closed, but his personal friends continued the legal agitation until, in 1906, they succeeded in getting the case tried again, this time not by a military tribunal, but by the Cour de Cassation, the supreme court of France, with the result that the whole accusation against Dreyfus was declared to be disproved. His character being thus completely cleared, he was restored to the active list of the Army, promoted to the rank of Major, and made Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur.
Since the Franco-Prussian War and the suppression of the Commune, no event in the political life of France had caused feeling to run so high as this famous affair. During the ten years which it took to win the victory for common sense and humanity, the struggle was not merely a question between those who thought Dreyfus innocent and those who thought him guilty, but was complicated by the fact that many people used the affair as a means of supporting or attacking certain definite political principles. The anti-Dreyfusards included not only a small number of people who sincerely thought that Dreyfus was a traitor, but a large number of anti-Republicans and strong Nationalists and bigoted Catholics, who felt that this was an opportunity for defending their race and their traditions. The Dreyfusards, on the other hand, included, apart „ , „ , from those who believed in the innocence of
Moral effects _-.. ., ... ,..,,.
of the Dreyfus Dreyfus, without any religious or political bias, all the internationalists, free-thinkers, and social- ists, together with the best liberal element in the country, ' eager to uphold liberty and justice at all costs. These men,
292 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
and they represented the noblest minds of France, held that truth must be told and justice done, even if it should cast a slur on such grand old national institutions as the Church and the Army. Yet when the Dreyfusards had won the day, these men, who were neither irreligious nor pacifists, saw their triumph resulting in a political majority which would fain have done away with the Army and the Church altogether, and they and the rising generation, whom they influenced, bent all their best efforts towards giving a definite direction to two ideals already in the air — a movement of national renaissance, and a revival of the Catholic faith unhampered by clericalism. Well might one of the most heroic defenders of the cause of Dreyfus — Charles Peguy — who long kept the symbolical aspect of the affair alive, write in his Cahiers de la Quinzaine :
" L' Affaire Dreyfus aura dans I'histoire du mondc au moins la valeur morale d'unc guerre et sans doute la valeur morale d'une r6volution."
Few were the men of letters and learning who did not give some sort of utterance to their opinions either during or after the event. Zola's last novel, Vcritc (1903), is a parable of the Dreyfus case. It inspired the last three volumes of Anatole France's novel sequence — Histoire Contemporaine {i8gy-igoi), his Craingiicbille (i90i),and his lie des Pingoiiins (1908). It is the theme of Romain Rol- land's play, Les Loups (1909), and it moved ]\Iaurice Barres to write his Seines et Doctrines du Nationalisme (1902).
Politically, the Dreyfus affair had the immediate effect of creating an alliance, known as the hloc, ^^^Kuiti"^*' among the Republicans of all shades of opinion, including the Socialists, for the purpose of reducing the political importance of the Army and the Church/ In 1901, Waldeck-Rousseau's Association Law was passed, requiring any association, political, social, or religious, to apply for Government authorization, and for- bidding the members of any unauthorized religious order
BETWEEN TWO WARS 293
to teach in schools. Under the ministry of Combes, a rabid anti-cleric, bitterly hostile to the Church of which he had been a minister, the Association Law was used as a means of suppressing, rather than of regulating, religious orders. Authorization was rarely given, and in 1904 a further law forbade even authorized orders to teach. As a result, two thousand four hundred schools were closed before the end of the year. This attack on the religious orders was only the prelude Separation to the final Separation between Church and
between
Church and State, which took placc in 1905. The separation (1905) law expressly abolished the Concordat of 1801, and declared that the Repubhc no longer recognized nor subsidized any religious organization.
There can be little doubt that the anti-religious policy of the Combes ministry — for it was far more than anti- clerical — was not without its effect on the recent Catholic revival in France among the cultured classes, for " the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church."
The religious question, though far from being the only matter with which French politicians of the eighties and nineties had to deal, was nevertheless the one which loomed largest throughout the history of the Third Republic before 1914, and the one which it is most necessary to under- stand if one is to realize the mental attitude of the rising generation of Frenchmen during the first fourteen years of this century.^
Though France made such a speedy material recovery n. THE after the defeat of 1870, her spiritual and
TUAL AND intellectual recovery was far slower. It has BACKGROUND often been pointed out that the war neither (i) 1871-1890 interrupted nor modified the prevailing ten- dencies in French literature and thought. That the posi- tivist and realistic spirit remained the dominant influence during the first twenty years after the war is amply proved
^ A novel written during the war, Roger Martin du Card's Jean Barois, is an excellent study of the passions aroused by the Dreyfus case.
294 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
by the fact that a large proportion of the works studied in the preceding sections were written during those twenty years. Setting on one side the few masterpieces directly inspired by the events of 1870, such as certain short stories by Daudet and Maupassant and Zola's Debacle, it would be difficult to distinguish which of the works by men of letters who had already made their names previous to 1870 were written before or after that date.
An exception, however, must be made in the case of Taine and Renan. Though they neither of
Renan, after them cvcr rcconsidcred their determinist philo- ^ ^° sophy, which for many years to come was to remain the chief mental pabulum of the cultured classes in France, " the double catastrophe of the defeat and the Commune . . . brought it home to them that, in spite of their long years of intellectual aloofness, they belonged to a community of men and not of pure spirits." ^ Though they had both been revolutionaries in their respective ways — neither had ever believed in democracy — they now both became reactionists, convinced of the value of the national tradition. Taine spent the remainder of his life on the six volumes of his Origines de la France Contemporaine, in which he sets out to prove that the Revolution was a mistake and a failure because it so completely refused to recognize the value of tradition, and instead of compromising and patching up in the English fashion, destroyed completely in order to build anew. Renan summarized his political views in La Reforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871), an indictment of democracy and an apology for govern- ment by the enlightened few, which might be summarized in a sentence of his own : "La conservation de la civihsa- tion est une oeuvre aristocrate." In his later works Renan reveals an irony and a cynicism, at times even a flippancy, which the shattering of his dearest illusions about Germany undoubtedly helped to develop. For him, as for Cousin,
1 Ernest Dimnet : France Herself Again (1914). and passim ; cf. also Bourget : Nouvelles Pages de Critique et de Doctrine, vol. ii (1922).
BETWEEN TWO WARS 295
Michelet, and Taine, Germany had been a kind of intellec- tual and spiritual home, and until the war of 1870 German philosophy and learning had exercised in France an influence comparable only to that of Italy during the sixteenth century and England during the Age of Enlightenment, This influence was only temporarily interrupted by the war, for hard on the heels of defeat came the gloomy philosophy of Schopenhauer (d. i860), which began to become popular in France about 1875. According to Schopenhauer, life is not worth living on its own merits. Two extraneous things alone make it liveable — art, which transcends life and lifts its creators and contemplators on to another plane ; and philosophy, " which, as it were, blunts the sting of life by the contemplation of the essentially unreal nature of the universe." This was to a great extent the attitude of the early symbolists, who had been brought up on Schopenhauer as well as on Taine and Re nan.
To return to the results of the war of 1870. They are already to be seen in part in the attitude of the literary generation which was just reaching manhood when the war broke out — Bourget, Loti, Anatole France, Melchior de Vogiie, etc. ; but still more fully in the next, which was beginning to leave childish things behind it in 1885 or thereabouts. Bourget, in his Essais de Psychologie Con- temporaine (1883 and 1885), makes a kind of moral inventory of the pessimism, sometimes sombre, sometimes flippant, of his own and the succeeding generation, a pessimism which was partly the outcome of a materialistic philosophy, partly the result of the defeat of 1870. Convinced as he is that " les etats de I'ame particuliere k une generation sont enveloppes en germe dans les theories et les reves de la generation precedente," he makes a careful study of the works read by the youth of his day — Les Fleurs du Mai, Madame Bovary, La Fille Elisa, etc. — and finds in all of them " une mortelle fatigue de vivre, une morne perception de la vanite de tout effort." ^ He further points out that what he calls " la ferocity de la vie " had
- Nonveaux Essais de Psychologie Contcmporaine (Preface).
296 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
been early brought home to his own generation by the national disaster, which had been a victory for brute-force. Hence their pessimism was complicated by a sense of powerlessness, so strong that in the eighties and early nineties there was much talk in intellectual circles and a whole library of books written about the decadence of the Latin races in general, and of France in particular. A group of poets was not even averse from bearing the name Decadents, the idea being that the most idealistic and cultured nations and individuals are doomed to go under. For a decade or more it was the fashion among French intellectuals to admire foreign nations and to belittle France. This national despondency, which sometimes paraded under the false name of internationalism, could not fail to have bad consequences, springing as it did from a morbid lack of faith in the perennial qualities of France.
But no nation can live on negations for ever. By 1885 France had been doing so for over thirty years, and she was to continue to do so for a good many years more, but already a new and more optimistic note was beginning to make itself heard. Four important books, written during the eighties, reveal a definite reaction against the spirit of the age ^ — Amiel's Fragments d'un Journal Intime (1883- 1884), a spiritual autobiography ; - Bruneti^re's Roman Naturaliste (1882), which rings the death-knell of Zola and his school ; Melchior de Vogiie's Roman Russe (1886), with its championship of a humaner and more poetic realism than the French novel had hitherto achieved ; and Paul Bourget's psychological novel, Le Disciple (1889), the pre- face to which asserts the importance of the spiritual as against the material element in man's nature — while the story itself is an indictment of the practical moral con- sequences of Taine's determinist philosophy.
In the early nineties, when symbolism and all that it
1 Cf. Gaston Riou : Aiix Ecoutes de la France qui vient (1915), p. 278.
- " Fais le testament de ta pens^e et de ton cceur, c'est ce que tu,
peux faire de plus utile."— /owmw/, 3 mai, 1849.
BETWEEN TWO WARS 297
stood for as a reaction against excessive positiveness and materialism was still the privilege of the few, came the Dreyfus crisis, the far-reaching results of which have already been indicated. In combination with other causes, some of them of a philosophical order, this great crisis inaugurated a new_epqch in French literature and thought, which ended with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, and which is characterized, in contradistinction to tb"" pessimism, scepticism, and over-intellectualism of the preceding period, by its optimism, its faith, and its convic- tion of the liveableness of a life of effort and action.
Needless to say, this change of attitude had been long preparing, though it may fairly be said that the Dreyfus case very greatly speeded its progress ; nor was it imme- diately felt by France herself, much less by foreigners. Indeed, we find an English journalist writing in 1899 :
" After the Revolution, when the whole fabric of society was swept away, there was a great faith wherewith to build everything anew and again after the miracle of Napoleon. In 1899, after the Drej-fus case, the great institutions of France still stand, but every- body knows them to be undermined. There is no faith, and because there is no faith there will be no miracle." ^
But the journalists were wrong ; faith was dawning, and the miracle came.
In a series of interesting studies entitled U Attitude (2) 1890-1914 ^^^ Lyrisme Ccmtemporain, Tancrede de Visan Philosophical points out the strong resemblances which influences g^ist between the French symbolist movement of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the Ger- man romantic school of 1785, of which the chief represen- tatives were Novalis, Tieck, and Sclilegel, all three strongly iniluenccd by the idealist philosophy of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling, whose philosophy was a reaction against the materialism and over-intellectualism of the Aufkldnmg, just as symbolism was a reaction against these same char- acteristics in the literature and thought of France during
1 T. W. Stevens : The Tragedy of Dreyfus, 1899-
298 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
the third quarter of last century. Whether this was a question of direct influence or not it is hard to say, but to see that Fichte's and Hegel's ideas were well known in the intellectual France of the eighties, one has only to consult the Revile I iidependante (1884-1885), and the Revue Wag- nirienne (1815-1887), or the works of the two admitted leaders of the symbolist movement, Villiers de ITsle Adam and Mallarme. It is worth noting, too, that the first com- plete French translation of the works of Novalis came from the pen of Maurice Maeterlinck in 1895.
The tendency of German idealistic philosophy, from Fichte through Hegel and Schelling to Schopenhauer, to regard spontaneous feeling as superior to logical intelligence, was eagerly seized upon by a generation, who, though con- vinced that life was evil, were equally tired of the "slice of life " of the naturalists, and of the impassive and sculptural methods of the Parnassians.
Therefore, when Bergson came with the announcement that men misread or misinterpreted the cease- "%" i^sTir" ^6ss flux of life and nature by adopting the purely intellectual attitude appropriate for the scientist but not for the philosopher, and in Les Donnees immediates de la Conscience (1887), Matiere et Memoire (1898), and L' Evolution Creatrice {1908) brilliantly and poeti- cally vindicated intuition and all those manifestations of the spirit for which neither reason nor science can account, his teaching did not fall upon stony ground. Symbolist poetry, with its dreamy suggestiveness and its attempt to express the inexpressible, came before the triumph of the Bergsonian philosophy, and certainly before there could have been any question of its influence ; but by the value Bergson attaches to intuition and to subconscious states of mind, and by his conception of life as a continuous rhyth- mical becoming, he formulated, and therefore strengthened, the mental attitude of his own generation. On the younger generation, which reached manhood at the dawn of the twentieth century, the influence of Bergson was still stronger. His belief that society is not a creation of pure
BETWEEN TWO WARS 299
reason, nor the result of any " social contract," but the creation of time, and thus " a complex indivisible whole, in which every citizen is the continuation of his forefathers," ^ helps to explain the value attached by these younger writers to their national heritage and their national traditions, while his conviction that the intelligence so useful in the domain of matter is a hindrance rather than a help in understanding life and the things of the spirit, was partly responsible for the change of the attitude of the intellectual classes towards religion. One of his chief disciples, M. Lotte, writes :
" Je ne sais plus quel Athenien, dans le Banquet de Platon, declare qu'il ne vit vraiment que depuis qu'il a connu Platon ; j'en dirais autant de Bergson, si, depuis que je I'ai connu, je n'etais redevenu chi-^tien. ... Je n'oublierai jamais I'emotion dent me transporta L'Evoluiion Crdatrice : j'y sentais Dieu a chaque page."
In the book here mentioned life is represented as a continu- ous streaming forth of creative energy and every individual effort as a part of the rhythm of the universe, and the obvious deduction that students of Bergson drew from it was that all energy and effort is worth while, and that the world, therefore, is a very liveable place.
The cult of action and energy, and of the heroic virtues generally, had already been preached by Nietz-
(1844-1900) sche (1844-1900), who enjoyed a certain vogue in France before the Great War, mainly because he gave voice to the revolt of those who were inclined to think that life was a good thing after all, and because he believed in the capacity possessed, by an elect few at least, of working out their own salvation. Since the war it has been the fashion in France, as elsewhere, to deny the influ- ence of Nietzsche beyond the frontiers of Germany, yet the Futurist attitude is essentially Nietzschian, and even those writers who would have scorned to emulate him, caught something of his frenzy for life and his delight in the beauty of strength. M. Bordeau, in Nietzsche ci la Religion de la Force, attacks the doctrine of the superman who, by his
^ Turquet Milne: Some Modern French Writers (1921), passim.
300 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
pride and selfishness, raises himself above the crowd for purposes of domination ; but he admits, on the other hand, that " la philosophie de Nietzsche s'offre comme antidote k la maladie du siecle, au pessimisme decourage, au degout de la vie."
CHAPTER VIII
THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT
(c. 1885-1900)
SYMBOLISM, as a literary movement, has both a negative and a positive side. In its negative aspect it represents a reaction against the introduction of the scientific spirit into hteratiire and against the limited vision and cold plastic form of Parnassian poetry ; in its positive aspect it has been defined as "an attempt to evoke the subconscious element of life, to set vibrating the infinity within us by the exquisite juxtaposition of images," ^ and, one might add, by the subtle suggestiveness of mere sound. Symbolism became a conscious movement some fifteen years after the defeat of 1870, just as romanticism crystallized into a school some fifteen years after the fall of the Empire. Its immediate precursors were three poets, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, who, standing somewhat
Immediate ,,. °,
precursors of apart from the general literary tendencies of sym o ism ^j^^^j. ^^^^ struck a ucw chord which was to
sound loud and long, and to multiply its echoes in the lyrics of the next generation.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1868), who was old enough to have been the father of the other two, devoted an other- wise uncdifying life to writing one book of verse, Lcs Fleurs du Mai (1857), one book of faultless imaginative prose, Les Paradis Arlificiels (1859), and Les Petits Poetnes en Prose
^ F. S. Flint: Poetry Review, August, 1912. 301
302 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
(1868), later collected in one volume ; some art criticism,
in which he both attacks the conventional idea of
Baudelaire bgauty [Sulon dc 1845) ^'^^ defends imagination
(1821-1868) ^^^ ^j^^ poet's dream against realism {L'Art
Romantique, 1868) ; and a translation of Poe's Tales, which makes quite as fine reading as the original. At first Baudelaire was ranged among the Parnassians, because he contributed his Nouvelles Fleiirs du Mai to their anthology, and because he not only shared their scrupulous attitude towards art, but was firmly convinced of the superiority of form over content. At one time, too, the realists sought to claim him because of certain pictures of crude ugliness and tri\dality in his poems, " le realisme macabre," for which Victor Hugo praised him ; but if Baudelaire is to be placed in any group, it ought to be among the symbolists, for though his genius is expressive rather than suggestive, " le but qu'il poursuit n'est pas de traduire une idee mais de provoquer chez le lecteur un etat d'ame." ^ For Baudelaire was a man of very subtle sensations and fond of noting the delicate connections between those of hearing, sight, and scent.
" Sans avoir recours a I'opium," he wrote in 1855, " Q^ n'a connu des admirables heures . . . ou les sons tintent musicalement, ou les couleurs parlent, ou les parfums racontent des mondes d'idees." And again in his famous sonnet entitled Correspondances :
" La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles ; L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles Qui I'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une t6n6breuse et profonde unite
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent."
Thus for Baudelaire the whole_iimverse is full of hidden
1 Barre : Le SymhoUsme, 1911.
SYMBOLISM 303
meanings, of signs to be interpreted, of elements of thought, of symbols of the spiritual life. Les Fleurs du Mai traces the steady progress of the poet's , ^, heart and mind towards a more and more sin- duMai ister eujiui, the disease of an inordinate craving ^ ^ for new and strange sensations and of an insati- able imagination :
" Mon ame est un tombeau que, mauvais cenobite, Depuis I'eternite je parcours et j'habite."
And again :
" J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans . . . Rien n'egale la longueur des boiteuses journees, Quand sous les lourds flocons des neigeuses annees L'ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosite, Prend les proportions de rimmortalite."
— Spleen et Ideal, Ixxvi.
The subject is a dreary one, yet the poems which develop it are the work of a man who, in his own words —
" Trebu chant sur les mots comme sur les paves, Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps reves " —
records his delicate sensations with that subtle mingling of music and imagery which spells pure poetry (cf . Harmonie du Soir, A la tres chere, d la ires belle).
Baudelaire's imagery is rich and rare, though not very varied. For instance, he is very fond of comparing the beauty of a woman to certain effects of the sky on the atmosphere :
" Tu contiens dans ton ceil le couchant et Taurore ; Tu repands des parfums comme un soir orageux."
And again in his impassioned cry to the " Venus noire " :
" Je t 'adore k I'egal de la voute nocturne O vase de tristesse, 6 grande taciturne."
His verse is more musical than that of any preceding French poet since the Pleiad — with the notable exception of Racine and Lamartine. The beauty of his poetry owes much to
304 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
his suggestive use of assonance and alliteration — that " prosodie mysterieuse " which he admired so much in Enghsh poetry, and by means of which he expresses the minor or major key of his mood. A few examples must suffice — others will be found on every page of Les Fleurs du Mai.
" Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique, D^filent lentement dans men ame."
"Des rires efEr^nes meles aux sombres pleurs. . . ."
, " L'air est plein du frisson des choses qui s'enfuient."
Baudelaire's weakness as a poet Ues in the fact that the fine passages such as these, on whose strangely haunting quaUty his greatness rests, are short and somewhat isolated. His poetry has been defined as " une somptueuse prose aux allures liturgiques et etonnamment versifiee." ^ He himself seems to have felt that he could be a greater poet in prose than in verse, and soon after the publication of Les Fleurs du Mai, he began to write for various reviews his
Pettis Pohnes ^^ . -r^ , -n, , • i
en Prose PeUts Foenies en Prose, which are not mere rhythmical pictures in the style of Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), which gave him the idea of his prose poems, but a delightful blend of the real and the ideal, and full of the thought which their author often found it difficult to express in verse. It has been said that contemporary French poetry proceeds almost entirely from Baudelaire, but if this is the case, it was through the intermediary of one who was greater than he, of one who was perhaps the most perfect singer that France has ever known — Paul Verlaine.
Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), whose father came from the
Belgian Ardennes, and whose mother was a
^'^('^^^^f^ggg^^ native of French Flanders, was born at Metz.
His life is a pitiful record of aimless vagabondage
and dissipation, interspersed with periods of repentance
^ A. Poizat : Le Symbolismc (1919), p. 60.
SYMBOLISM 305
and remorse. The last eleven years of his life were spent on and off in the hospitals of Paris, and he died in poverty and in squalid surroundings.
Verlaine's early collection of verse, Les Poenies Saturniens
(1866), is written in the impassive and objective Saturniens stylc of the Pamassiau school, but both the
title and many of the individual poems show the influence of Les Fleurs du Mai, which, according to Lepelletier, his friend and chosen biographer, Verlaine used to read surreptitiously under the lid of his desk at school. Artistically superior, but written in the same impersonal
vein, are the Fetes Galantes (1869), charming ^^%86^'*^" vignettes of the manners and amusements of
eighteenth-century Versailles. Verlaine first freed himself from the Parnassian tradition and struck a
purely personal note in La Bonne Chanson (1870),
La Bonne ^ .-^ ^ . . . , ,, r
Chanson a collcction of twcnty-six poems, nearly all of them addressed to his fiancee, Matilde Maute de Fleurville. This " fleur dans un obus," as Victor Hugo characteristically styled it, because it appeared during the war, already gives a foretaste of the essential Verlaine, and contains the exquisite Lune Blanche, later set to music by Debussy. The same year he married, and shortly after- wards came under the influence of the boy-genius, Arthur Rimbaud, ten years his junior, who had already written some of his extraordinary poems. The two friends, both vagabonds at heart, set out on an aimless wandering from Paris to Belgium, and thence across the Channel to London, where they spent the better part of 1872 and 1873 — Rim- baud writing his Illuminations, Verlaine his
Parous Romances sans Paroles (1874), which, besides ■* many delightful fugitive impressions of Belgian towns {Walcourt, Charleroi, Chevaiix de Bois, etc.), and of London streets, contains many poems inspired by a melan- choly regret for the wife whom he had deserted but could not forget (// pleitre dans mon coeur ; trisie, triste etait man dme, etc.), a regret which transformed itself into a tone of gentle reproach when he heard that she had insti-
voL. II. — 20
3o6 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
tuted proceedings for a legal separation {Child-wife, Birds in the Night).
The friendship with Rimbaud was destined to end in disaster. In 1873 Verlaine was tried and sentenced at Brussels to two years' imprisonment for attempting to shoot the friend who had decided to say good-bye to him for ever.
The central fact of Verlaine 's sixteen m.onths' imprison- ment in the gaol at ]\Ions was his sincere, if only ■^lifiT poetically fruitful, reconversion to the Catholic faith, to which we owe the beautiful poems of Sagesse {1S81), which has been described as " one of the greatest books of religious verse in the world." Scattered among the mj^stic elevations of Sagesse there are other poems in which the religious inspiration is less obvious, full of a serene and quiet beauty, poems of which the following is a typical example :
" Un grand sommeil noir Tombe sur ma vie : Dormez tout Espoir;- Dormez toute Envie !"
Je ne vols plus rien Je perds la memoire Du mal et du bien . . • O la triste histoire.
Je suis un berceau Qu'une main balance Au creux d'un caveau . . . Silence, silence ! "
Others, again, suggest the few sights and sounds of the outside world which reached him in his cell {Le Cicl est ■pardcssus le toil, si bleu, si calme, Le son du cor s'afflige vers les hois, etc.). The poems contained in Sagesse were not the only ones which Verlaine composed in prison. There exists a manuscript entitled Ccllulairement,^ which contains some
1 Cf. article by Ernest Dupuj' {Revue des Deux Mondes, December i, 191 2).
SYMBOLISM 307
twenty poems written by him while he was at Mons, and afterwards distributed among his later collections — Jadis et Nagiiere (1884), Parallelement (i88g), and Bonheur (1891). Verlaine is one of those poets rare in France, who " do but sing because they must," and such theories as he suggests in his Art Poetique of nine short stanzas were those most suited to one whose genius was entirely lyrical, and who delighted above all things in capturing fugitive moods and passing impressions. Take, for example, the wonderful Impression Fausse in Parallelement. He was the first French poet to recognize that the lyric is the most im- material form of literary art and the most nearly akin to music. And indeed his own poems have the haunting and elusive quality of the folk-song ; they are, as he himself so charmingly puts it in Crimen Amoris :
" Les choses qui chantent dans la tete Alors que la m^moire est absente, Ecoutcz c'est notre sang qui chante . . . O Musique lointaine et discrete."
It is this musical element in his poetry that makes it almost as impossible to quote Verlaine a few lines at a time as it is impossible to convey any impression by picking out a few notes from a melody. He is, moreover, the poet of half- lights, the wistful minor key, and of the word half spoken, which opens up a vista of thoughts and imaginings beyond itself. When we read Verlaine, or, better still, when we hear him read, it is always as though the poet said to us in the unforgettable opening lines of the poem with which he sent Sagesse as a peace-offering to his wife :
" Ecoutez la chanson bien douce Qui ne pleure que pour vous plaire."
And when we leave him it is always with the feeling which he again so admirably expresses in another poem :
"Dans une rue, au cceur d'une villa de reve Cc sera commc quand ou a d6ja vecu ;
3o8 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Un instant k la fois tres vague et tres aigu . . . O le soleil parmi la brume qui se leve.
Ce sera comme quand on reve et qu'on s'eveille
Et que Ton se reveille et que Ton reve encor
De la meme feerie et du meme decor,
L'6te dans I'herbe, au bruit moire d'un vol d'abeille."
Verlaine's violent and abnormal friend, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), who between the ages of sixteen
RiMa^iLD and nineteen composed all the poetry he was
I 54-1 91) g^g^ ^Q write, was, after his rupture with the older poet, turn by turn a teacher of French in London and Stuttgart, a wanderer begging his way on foot from St. Gothard to Milan and Leghorn, a dockyard hand at Marseilles, a mercenary soldier with Dutch troops bound for Java and Sumatra, an interpreter on a British merchant ship sailing for Liverpool, a pressgang agent in Holland, a cashier in a travelling circus in Sweden, and a quarry over- seer in Cyprus. In 1880 he abandoned what he has called " I'Europe aux anciens parapets" and worked his way through Egj^t to Aden, and thence up into Abyssinia, where he was one of the pioneers of European commercial adven- ture. At Harrar, on the east coast of Africa, he established himself as a trader in coffee, perfumes, ivory, and gold, treating the natives with great justice and humanity, and trying to instil into them all that was good in European civilization, until he finally became a kind of semi-inde- pendent chieftain, leading many expeditions into unknown parts of Northern Africa, and intriguing with the French Government in favour of Menelik and against Italy. In 1891 a tumour on the knee obliged Rimbaud to return to Europe for surgical advice, and the same year he died in hospital at Marseilles.
Both by reason of his adventures in real life and of his adventures in poetry, Rimbaud is one of the most curious figures in French literature. Among the poems he wrote when he was barely sixteen aieLe Bal des Pendus, a macabre fantasy which might have been signed by Villon, and the
SYMBOLISM 309
extraordinary Bateau Ivre, in which the poet becomes " a beaten and wandering ship flying in a sort of intoxication before the wind over undiscovered seas." Les Illuminations, written during his wanderings with Verlaine, consist of a series of prose poems interspersed with occasional pieces in verse. The title is well chosen, for, violent and obscure as they are, they are every now and again traversed by a flash of vivid light (cf. the prose poems Auhe and the section entitled Villes, a picture of what the great world-cities of the future will be). To almost all Rimbaud's poems, whether in prose or verse, might be applied the remark which Claudel makes about their author's last composition, Une Saison en Enfer, a spiritual autobiography in which experience and prophecy meet and mingle, " La marche de la pensee . . . procede, non plus par developpement logique mais, comme chez un musicien, par dessins m^lodiques." For Rimbaud is as musical and as suggestive as Verlaine, though the suggestions of his music are far less easy to understand.
Rimbaud, both as a man and as an artist, has been com- pared to Nietzsche's superman. Not only have the visions in Une Saison en Enfer and parts of Ilhiminations a certain affinity with Thus spoke Zarathustra, but their author, having formulated his ideal, set forth into the world to live it to the full. For this visionary was also a man of action — or, to quote Arthur Symons : " He was a dreamer, but all his dreams were discoveries. . . . And having suggested, with some impatience, half the things that his own and the next generation were to busy themselves with developing, he gave up WTiting as an inadequate form." ^
The tendency, represented in varying degrees by Baude- laire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud, to strip poetry of
THE 8YM- • ' A JT */
BOLisT rhetoric and of everything extraneous to itself
(c?i8™woo) 3-^<i to vie witli the musician rather than with
the painter or the sculptor, was by about 18S5
beginning to assume the proportions of a movement, the
latest development in French literature to which such a
term can be applied, for the many odd groupings which
- Arthur Symons : The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
310 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
coexisted during the first fourteen years of the twentieth century were all its heirs, while the older generation of contemporary writers are for the most part wholly or half- repentant sj^mbolists. By the end of the century the symbolists had produced a coherent system of aesthetic theory and applied their principles in a body of verse on the whole remarkable for its incoherency, but containing many a masterpiece. Though first and foremost a poeti- cal movement, symbolism also found its way into the novel and the drama.
In the early eighties, a group of young idealists, counting Jean Moreas and Maurice Barres among their
^history^ number, exasperated by the devotion to external beauty, rare epithets, and rich rime of the Par- nassian school, and disgusted with the naturalism of Zola's "Epopee de I'animalite humaine," announced in various manifestos their intention of revolutionizing poetry. Before long they gathered round Stdphane Mallarme, whose beautiful though difficult Apres-midi d'un Faune had been rejected by the Pamasse Contemporain of 1875. Mallarme 's wonderful talk seems to have been as lucid as his WTitings were often obscure, and for some twenty years his rooms in the Rue de Rome became the centre of the artistic life of Paris.
At first the new poets were branded as Decadents, and the epithet seems to have pleased them for a time, reminding them, no doubt, of Verlaine's much-admired lines :
" Je suis I'Empire a la fin de la D6cadence Qui regarde passer les grands barbares blancs En composant des acrostiches indolents "
— lines which admirably expressed the languorous attitude of a generation who, in the words of one of its representatives, were over-conscious of the prosaic side of the Third Republic, which in their eyes " portait en elle le vice original d'etre nee dans le d^faite, d'etre le gouvemement d'une France humilide et k peu pres r^signee." ^ Later, however, they
1 Alfred Poizat : Le Symbolisme (1919).
SYMBOLISM 311
repudiated the epithet " decadent " in favour of the more comprehensive, though not altogether illuminating, term " symbolist," to which they gave a somewhat unusual meaning. As the writings of the new poets were not welcomed by the old-established reviews, they soon found it necessary to found periodicals of their own. Remy de Gourmont, the official critic of the symbolists, and a poet himself, enumerates over one hundred and thirty ephemeral reviews founded by them between 1885 and 1895, and his list is far from being complete. One outlived the movement, the Mercure de France, which from small beginnings in 1889 had by 1895 become the official organ of the symbolists, besides establishing a publishing firm which still flourishes to-day, and w^hich has the copyright of nearly all the authors belonging to the symbolist group.
In a short sketch hke this it is quite impossible to go into the very large question of the theories upon " actofstics^f which the symbolists based their practice. ^ ^^^etey' Let it suffice to say here that their essential reform consisted in stripping poetry of every- thing but its purely musical and spiritual elements, and using these almost entirely for their suggestive value, " Suggerer, voila la reve," says Mallarme ; ^'^quaifty^^^ " ^'cst Ic parfait usage de ce mystere qui con- stitue le symbole." Words are at best but clumsy interpreters of the subtle and complex modern mind, and therefore the poets of this school use the sj^mbol, I not as their predecessors had done, with a view to making ': themselves clearer and more readily understood, but rather in order to blur their thoughts or sensations, to take all
1 For an understanding of what symbolism meant to the young poets themselves, the following critical works are indispensable : — Remy de Gourmont : Le Livre des Masques (two series) and Prome- nades Liiiiraires (five series). Robert de Souza : La Podsie Populaire et le Lyrisme Sentimental (1899). TancrMe de Visan : Essai sur le Symholisme (Pref. to Paysages Inirospectifs, 1904) and L' Attitude du Lyrisme Contemporain (191 1). Tancrfede de Visan was the first, to point out the similarity between the symbolist attitude and the ! philosophy of Bergson. '
312 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
precision and definition from them, for to define is to limit. In a passage of his admirable book on general aesthetics, Le Tourment de V Unite, M. Adrien Mithouard explains the desire for simplification which underlay this cult of suggestion :
" Un siecle de science, dix si?;cles d'art, plusieurs millenaires d'aventures et d'occasions nous ont confere una multiple experience. Notre curiosit6 sans limites etend partout ses antennes. . . . L'art est aujourd'hui dessemin6 par toute la vie et il pretend d^sormais ^ etre expressif de tout. Nous voici arrives k I'extreme de I'expres- sion. Une oeuvre parfaitement achevde risquerait aujourd'hui de nous froisser, tant il lui faudrait nier et omettre de choses pour se parfaire. . , . C'est un symptome : le charme de rinachev6 nous mfene. . . . Comme ils desesp^rent des ordonnances minutieuse- ment definitives, faute d'y consigner tout ce qui les tourmente, les artistes s'efforcent bu suggerer ce qu'ils ne rdussiraient pas a finir d'exprimer." ^
Now music is the most suggestive of all the arts — the one which can most easily call up and prolong the
\*ec^qS^ echoes of an emotion and set the listener dreaming — and it was almost entirely to music that the poets of the eighties and nineties went for their inspiration. Hitherto literary men had been much more interested in the plastic arts than in music, the romantics and realists in painting, the Parnassians in sculpture. Their successors, on the other hand, were intensely interested in music. "Nous etions nourris de musique," writes Paul Valery, " et nos tetes litteraires ne revaient que de tirer du langage presque les memes effets que les causes purement sonores produisaient sur nos etres nerveux. Les uns, Wagner; les autres cherissaient Schumann." ^ This tendency to render musical impressions and to imitate in verse certain points of musical technique was no doubt due to the influence of Wagner, on whom Baudelaire had written an enthusiastic study for the Revue Europeenne as early as 1861, and whose music was popularized in Paris by the
^ Quoted in Ecclcs : La Liquidation du Romaniisme, 1919.
- Preface to Lucien Fabre's Connaissance de la Diesse, 1922,
SYMBOLISM 313
famous Concerts Lamoureux, founded in 1881 by the violinist and conductor of that name. At the same time the theories of the great musician were promulgated by the Revue Wagnerienne (1885-1887), which sang the praises of Wagner not only as a musician, but as a poet and dramatist, and which aimed at talking poetry to musicians and music to poets. Now Wagner not only preached and practised spirituality in art and regarded the artist as a creator of religious symbols, but he also believed that the time had come for a fusion of all the arts, and in his libretti he treats the German language as though it were music. The endeavour of the symbolists to " reprendre k la musique leur bien " — the phrase is Mallarme's — caused them to seek their poetical effects less in the meaning of the words and phrases they used than in their sound and rhythm. Hence their fondness for alliteration, and more especially for assonance, which they frequently use instead of rime, because, when chosen by a trained ear, it is more subtly and delicately musical.
With the same musical end in view, many symbolists abandoned the regular cadence of the twelve-syllable line and, making the strophe the element of their song, built it up of lines of unequal rhythm, the greater or lesser length of line being determined by the natural pauses for breath and by the swift or slow phrasing demanded by the emotion expressed. These two innovations in prosody, the sub- stitution of assonances for rime and the rhythmic variety of the strophe, taken singly or together, con- stitute what is generally known as vers libre. The way had already been prepared by the romantics, who, \ with their free use of enjamhement, had made the rhythmical I { sentence either longer or shorter than the line, and still more by Verlaine, who, by his free rime system and his unequal rhythms, carried out the suggestion offered in his own Art Poetique :
"De la musique avant toute chose Et pour ccla pr^f^re Timpair
314 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Plus vague et plus soluble dans Pair Sans rien en lui qui pese ou pose."
The first vers libres were written simultaneously by Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kahn, whose Coniplaintes and Palais Noniades were published in 1885 and 1887 respectively. The form was later adopted by Jean Moreas ^ and Henri de Regnier, who both abandoned it after a time, and was consistently used by Viele-Griffin, Verhaeren, Francis Jammes, and a host of lesser poets. Critics hostile to the free-verse movement and all that it stood for lay great stress on the number of foreign names in the ranks of the school. It is not immaterial, they say, that Jean Moreas was a Greek, Gustave Kahn a Jew ; that Jules Laforgue, though of French blood, was born in Montevideo ; that Verhaeren was a Fleming, and that Viele- Griffin and Stuart ^Merrill were North Americans by birth and half-EngHsh by ancestry. The influence of Walt Whitman has been invoked, and it is true that a certain number of his poems, translated by Jules Laforgue, appeared in La Vogue of 1886, and three more by Francis Viele-Griffin in the Revue Independante of 1888. But there was no complete French translation of The Leaves of Grass until 1909. Whitman's description of his own poetry in the preface would fit almost any symbolist, and there is little doubt that when his influence came it strengthened an already existing attitude. For Whitman and the symbolists had certain common sources of inspiration. They were both adherents of the German idealistic philosophers, and they were both enthusiastic admirers of Wagner and Edgar Allan Poe. The latter, whose tales had had the honour of a translation by Baudelaire, 1856-1864, and whose poems appeared in Mallarme's translation in 1888 — The Raven already in 1875 — was greatly admired for the elusive music of his verse,
1 Jean Moreas (1856-1910), a sjinbolist with all his heart in Le Pdlerin Passionni (1891 ), had, by the time he composed Les Stances (1899-1901), become the founder of the so-called " Ecole romane," which preached a return to classical metre and to classical simplicity.
SYMBOLISM 315
while his essays undoubtedly provided the early symbolists with some of their poetic principles. ^
Closely connected with the desire to substitute suggestion for description, and to evoke moods and feelings by the music of words and of rhythm, are other characteristics of symbolist poetry upon which there is no space to enlarge here — for instance, the fondness for making colours, sounds, and perfumes convertible sensations, of which a striking though somewhat extreme example is to be found in Henri de Regnier's Songe de la Forei :
" J'entends sur I'etang chanter votre oiseau d'or : Le bois clair se gemme de voix de pierreries, De voix de diamants, de voix de rubis, de voix de saphirs, Et le chant s 'exhale plus riche a se fleurir Et I'oiseau senablait crier des pierreries."
The intensely individualistic tendency of symbolist poetry connects it with romanticism — with this difference, how- ever, that for the symbolist poetry is not a mere outlet for his personal emotions, but, in the words of Remy de Gourmont, a means of revealing to others "la sorte de monde qui se mire en son miroir individuel." The excesses, too — that is to say, its frequent formlessness and obscurity — are the excesses of an intense individualism, bent on speaking its own language and careless who understands. As a mili- tant theory, symbolism has had its day. But this " chaotic adventure," as it has been called, was an extremely interest- ing experimental phase in French poetry, and its effects are likely to be far-reaching, because of the scope and pliability of its method, and because it recognized that mood, mystery, and music are the essential elements of lyrical poetry.
The symbolist movement produced some half-dozen really fine lyric poets, and many more who each wrote a few good things, examples of which will be found in all modern French anthologies. Here, for reasons of space, we must limit ourselves to the three greatest, Mallarm^, Albert
^ Cf. his essays on The Poetic Principle and The Rationale of Verse.
3i6 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Samain, and last, but by no means least, Henri de Regnier.^
Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898), by many years the
senior of the other two, was not only the admitted
StkPhank
MALLARMfe leader of the symbolist movement, but the 1 42-1 9 ]-Qost intellectual and the most original of all its members. At his famous Tuesday receptions from nine to midnight he would hold forth on questions of general aesthetics, and more especially on the aesthetics of poetry. Later he wrote down some of these ideas elaborated in talk, and included them in the volume entitled Divagations, in which we find such suggestive fragments as the following :
" L'intention de la tragedie fran^aise ne fut pas de ramener I'antiquite, mais de produire en un milieu nul ou a peu pr^s les grandes poses humaines et comme notre plastique morale."
Mallarme had an extraordinarily elliptical mind, and this, together with his desire to free poetry from matter and to suggest, by means of sounds and images, our subconscious thoughts and feelings, accounts for the obscurity of his prose and verse. He does not use words for their gram- matical and logical value, but entirely for their allusive quality and for their dignity and beauty, arranging them according to a scheme at once decorative and melodic. The adverb " like " does not enter into his vocabulary. Of the two terms of a comparison he only retains the second. Even his imaginative masterpiece, L' Apr^s-midi d'un Faune, conveys very little on a first reading, though to a musical ear it renders up all its treasures if read to the accompani- ment of Debussy's Prelude of the same name. Perhaps no one has better summed up the peculiarity of Mallarme's poetry than Remy de Gourmont when he wrote :
" II semble que toutes les choses de la vie ayant 6t6 dites mille et mille fois, il ne resta plus au pofete qu'k les montrer du doigt en
1 Francis Jammes and Paul Fort are excluded here, because they belong to a younger generation with somewhat different ideals; and Verhaeren, because, though he belonged to the symbolist genera- tion, he has characteristics wliich transcend the movement.
SYMBOLISM 317
murmurant quelques mots pour accompagner son geste et c'est ce qu'a fait Mallarm6."
While Mallarm^ carried the symbolist ideal to its
' Albert farthest logical conclusions, which takes poetry
samai.v beyond the verge of the intelligible, Albert
I 5 1900, ^gg^j^g^^j^ (1858-1900) was perhaps the most timid
of all the symbolists, for he constantly oscillated between
the impassive objective method of the Parnassians and the
musical, suggestive method of Verlaine. Poe, Baudelaire,
and Mallarme were Samain's delight, and their influence on
his poetry is unmistakable. His first collection, Au Jardin
de V Infante (1893), bore as a motto some lines from Poe's
poem To Helen, and in the opening piece he symbolizes his
own soul under the guise of a Spanish Infanta :
"Mon ime est une infante en robe de parade
EUe est la, r6flet^e aux miroirs d'autrefois Ainsi qu'une galere oubli^e dans la rade."
Like Baudelaire, Samain is fond of laying stress on the subtle affinities between concrete and spiritual things. Other good examples in his first volume are the poems beginning—
"Mon ime est ua velours douloureux que tout froisse,"
and
" Mon coeur est un beau lac solitaire qui tremble."
The twenty-five poems of Aux Flancs du Vase (1898) are as impersonal and objective as those oi Au Jardin de ITnfante had been elegiac and intimate. These graceful idylls of Greece might have been signed by Heredia, if they did not leave so much to the imagination of the reader, for though they say a great deal, they suggest still more. Samain's last collection of poems, Le Chariot d' Or, published posthumously in 1901, has a simplicity, a vigour, and a sincerity which we sometimes miss in the earlier two (cf. the four sonnets on Versailles and Tenthres). There is an exquisite quality in Samain's poetry, due mainly to its veiled suggestions and haunting elusive music. The verses
3i8 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
in which he tries to describe his own poetic creed {Dilection, Je reve de vers doux) are in complete agreement with Verlaine's Art Poetiqiie, and hence with the symbohst doctrine in its essentials. The following lines from a sonnet in Le Chariot d'Or, in which he suggests the aim of poetry, are a good example of his manner and of his use of the symbol :
"Lentement, doucement, de peur qu'elle se brise, Prendre une ^me, ecouter ses plus secrets aveux, En silence, comme on caresse des cheveux ; Atteindre a la douceur fluide de la brise . . . Essaj^er des accords de mots mysterieux . . . Et dans Tame qui gonfle un immense soupir Laisser, en s'en allant, comme le souvenir D'un grand cygne de neige aux longues, longues plumes."
Neither Mallarme nor Samain ever attempted vers libre. The masters of this form are Francis Viele-Grifhn (b. 1864), Charles van Lerberghe (1861-1907), Emile Verhaeren, of whom more anon, and, above all, Henri de R6gnier. Henri de Regnier (b. 1864), one of the best poets of the symbolist group, has, up to the date of writing, Regnier produced uo less than nine volumes of poetry, (b. 1864) gjgi-^tggn volumes of novels and short stories, one play, and three volumes of essays. Jean de Gourmont, in a study of M. de Regnier's works, remarks very truly that while most of the other symbolist poets shut themselves up within their particular symbols and tried to describe their prison from within, de Regnier's symbolical prison has large windows, through which he looks out upon nature and life. His most characteristic, and perhaps his most beautiful, volume of verse is Les Jeux Rustiqiies et Divins (1897), which contains a wonderful poem entitled Le Vase, a symphony on the theme of the artistic creator at work ; the Inscriptions pour les Treize Portcs de la Ville, which are among the finest poems that Regnier has ever written ; and a series of Odes and Odelettes, revealing an unsurpassed mastery of free verse, equalled only by Viele-Griffin's Threne, in memory of Mallarme, and certain parts of Lcrberghe's Chanson d'Eve.
SYMBOLISM 319
One has only to read the Odelettes beginning " Une petit roseau m'a suffi," "Si j'ai parle de mon amour," and the poem entitled Exergue of an earlier volume, to understand that free verse in the hands of a master like de Regnier may be neither verse nor prose, but that it is certainly poetry. All de Regnier's collections are full of good things. In Les Medailles d'Argile (1900) and La Cite des Eaux (1902) he returns to more traditional metres. " La Cite des Eaux " is Versailles, with its park of a thousand fountains, a subject which had already tempted Verlaine, Stuart Merrill, and Samain. La Sandale Ailee (1906) and Le Miroir des Heures (1910) are less interesting though they too contain beauti- ful passages.
Symbolism was not confined to poetry, though, by the very nature of its aesthetic, it was natural that it should have been most fruitful in the lyric.
Henri de Regnier, the only symbolist poet who has
SYMBOLISM written novels and short stories which can bear
NOVEL comparison with his poetry, in his early tales,
Henri de Cotites 0. Moi-meme (1893) and La Canne de
Regnier Jaspe, crcatcs characters which are symbols of
ideas, and even his later novels. La Double Mattresse (1900),
etc., have what he himself calls " un sens inattendu au
dela de ce qu'ils semblent signifier." The same remark
Th ari • ^^^^ ^^ applied to the early novels of Maurice
novels of Barrcs (b. 1862), written before he became the
Maurice Barres , i r i • i i • • c- i, -i i
apostle of his race and his province, Sous I ceil des Barhares (1888), Un Homme Libre (1889), Le Jardin de Berenice (1891), to which their author gave the collective title Le Cnlte du Mai, novels in which external incidents count for nothing and the inner life for everything ; novels which, in spite of their ironical tone, conform to the aesthetic ideas of the symbolist school.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), after writing a series ^ . ,.^ , of novels in which he outdid Zola in minute and
Jons-Karl
Huysmans uiicompromising naturalism, followed by a kind
of caricature of literary and artistic symbolism,
A Rebours (1884), the hero of which, Des Esseintes, is " the
320 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITER.\TURE
offspring of the decadent art that he adores," gave in En Route (1895) a curious revelation of the subconscious self. In the most famous of his novels, La Cathedrale (1898), an interpretation of the profound s}Tnbolism of the cathedral of Chartres, Huysmans shows how inert matter, how stone, wood, and glass may acquire through symbol a spiritual significance. In the same way the Belgian symbolist poet,
Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898), in Bruges-la- Rodenbach Mortc (1892), which is Icss a novel than a prose 55-1 9 pQgni full of striking and unexpected images, gives a spiritual interpretation of the silent old Flemish city with its deserted streets, its gliding canals, its begiiinage, where " les cantiques se depliaient tout blancs comme des linges," its churches and its belfry. " En reality," remarks the author in his preface, " cette Bruges qu'il nous a plu d'elire apparait presque humaine. . . . Un ascendant s'etablit d'elle sur eux qui y sejournent."
Symbolism was more productive in the drama than in
the novel. One of the most important pre-
SYMBOLISM , ^, ^ _,.,.. J i,T 1 ^J
IN THE cursors of the movement, Vilhers de I Isle Adam
DRAMA (j3^q_j889), who, by the addition of one
syllable, might have reversed Gautier's famous remark
into " Je suis un homme pour qui le monde
risieAdam wvisiblc existc," found it easier to express his
(1840-1889) jy^g^g^pi^ysical ideas in dramatic form than in
any other. ^ Li\dng in an age of materialism, Villiers de
risle Adam, even in his very earliest plays, Elen (1863) and
Morgane (1864), reveals his behef in the world of the spirit.
La Revolte (1870) is a one-act play which anticipates
Ibsen's Doll's House, and Le Nouveau Monde (1880), a fine
drama in five acts, has for background the American War
of Independence. All these plays have a spiritual and
^ sjTTibolical meaning above and bej^ond their
(1890) real plot, but it was in Axel, a prose poem in
dramatic form, which was never intended for the stage,
^ He also wrote several novels, notably L'Eve Future (1888), a satire on the pretensions of science, and several collections of Poesque
SYMBOLISM 321
that Villiers produced the typical example of the symbolist drama. Published posthumously in i8go, this play, to which he had devoted many years of his life, moves entirely in the world of ideas. Though the action takes place in the early nineteenth century, the scene is laid partly in a monastery on the borders of French Flanders, partly in a medieval castle in the depths of the Black Forest — remote corners of the world into which the modern spirit has not 3^et penetrated — and in which the hero and heroine are faced turn by turn with the religious, the occult, the worldly, and the passionate ideal, only to regret them all. As a prose poem Axel is a very fine piece of work and pregnant with meaning, but it is too metaphysical and too discursive for successful representation on the stage.
" Discursive " is the last adjective that can be applied „ . to the symbolical plays of Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice "^ tr j
Maeterlinck (b. 1862). "The sccret of things which is just beyond the most subtle words," says Arthur Symons, " the secret of the expressive silences, has always been clearer to Maeterlinck than to most people ; and in his plays he has elaborated an art of sensitive, taciturn, and at the same time highly ornamental simplicity, which has come nearer than any other art to being the voice of silence." Maeterlinck's career as an author began in i88g, when he published a volume in the symbolist manner, Serres Chaudes, and a symbolical play. La Princesse Maleine, which was at once greeted as a masterpiece. L'Intruse, Les Awugles, and Les Sept Princesses, which followed eaph other rapidly within the next two years, are one-act pieces of a concentrated tragic simplicity, and filled with a sense of the mystery of the imiverse and of the weakness of humanity. The idea that man is the destined victim of unknown and inexorable forces comes out very strongly in Maeterlinck's dramatic trio entitled
short stories — Contes Cruels (1883), Histoires insolites (1888), which arc masterpieces of their kind.
VOL. II. — 21
322 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
" Plays for Marionettes " (1894) — Alladme et Palomides, L'lnterieitr, and La Mort de Tintagiles. Of Maeterlinck's two plays based on the traditional triangular situation between two women and a man, Pelleas et Melisande (1893), and between two men and a woman, Aglavaine et Selysette (1896), the former, of which there is an operatic version by Strauss, is the greater masterpiece, because, though both are occupied with the spiritual adventures of souls and both overshadowed by the inevitable doom which threatens the lovers, Aglavaine et Selysette " seems to be written for a phantom stage and to be acted by disembodied spirits." The interest in the unconscious and the sub- conscious which inspired these dramas is the theme of Maeterlinck's first volume of essays, Le Tresor des Humbles (1896), while the second, La Sagesse et la Destinee (1898), shows its author's transition from pessimism to optimism, an optimism which somewhat tiresomely pervades his numerous later collections of essays, and which finds its epitome in his fairy-play, L'Oiseau bleu (1908).
In the heyday of the symbolist movement, while Maeter- linck was writing his early plays, a somewhat ^^b! 1868^^^ younger man, who only much later won recogni- tion as a writer, was in Paris studying for the consular service, and in his leisure moments composing symbolical plays of a deeply philosophical kind. This was Paul Claudel (b. 1868), who has since held consulships in the United States, in China, at Prague, Frankfort, Hamburg, and Rio de Janeiro, and who is at present French Ambassador at Tokio.
It is impossible in a few lines to give any adequate idea of Claudel 's over-subtle and disconcerting genius. He himself has formulated his mystical conception of poetic creation in three metaphysical treatises, collected under the title Art Poetique (1904), the leading idea of which is that the poet alone can enter into perfect communion with the whole of creation, he alone can elicit the inward order of the universe — or, as Claudel expresses it in one of his odes, " Toute la nature sans moi est vaine ; c'est moi
SYMBOLISM 323
qui lui confere son sens " ^ ; and again, " Par moi, aucune chose ne reste plus seule, mais je I'associe a une autre dans mon coeur." ^
This belief in association as a creative element in thought accounts for Claudel's literary method, which consists almost entirely in accumulating images. He never analyses or develops his ideas, but passes from one metaphor to another without transition, and his style is thus like that of Rimbaud and Mallarme, synthetic and elliptical in the highest degree, and hence often very obscure. All Claudel's plays are written in a sort of rhythmical prose cut up into lines or short paragraphs, and their theme is the insufficiency of worldly success and " the beau ty and duty of self-mastery."
While Maeterlinck's orphan princesses, blind men and women, forlorn children, and aged guardians of lonely castles are unsubstantial dream-figures whom one always imagines as being of diminutive stature, the characters of Claudel's eight dramas, though endowed with a strong symbolical meaning, are over life-size, and never for a moment lose touch with the earth. As Duhamel remarks, in Claudel's plays " a aucun moment on ne cesse d'etre en pleine humanite." All his heroes are men of action — a general in Tete d'Or (i8gi), an American merchant in L'Echangc (1894), an engineer in La Jeime Fille Violaine (1892) and La Ville, a consul in Pariage du Midi (1905), a cathedral builder in L'Annonce faite d Marie (1911) (the second version of La Jeune Fille Violaine), an Emperor of China in Le Repas du Septieme Jour (1896).^
Claudel's drama is, in fact, a glorification of activity and
- Cinq Grandes Odes, p. 144.
' Ibid., p. 41.
' The dates given here are the dates of composition, not of pub- lication. Claudel's early plays were collected under the title ThSdtre (1911-1912, four vols.). Apart from his plays and poems, Claudel also wrote a series of prose sketches and impressions of China, La Connaissance de I'Esi (1907), which by many is regarded as his masterpiece.
324 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
effort, as it is also a glorification of the Catholic religion, and this double tendency in his work connects Claudel with the younger generation of French poets on the eve of the war.
i
CHAPTER IX
OUTSIDE THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT
THE NOVEL AND THE DRAMA
WHILE symbolism is a term which roughly covers the whole lyrical production of France during th* last fifteen years or so of the nineteenth century and beyond, the best and most characteristic novels and dramas of the period, though they all reveal a revulsion from excessive realism or naturalism and the impersonal method, remained on the whole uninfluenced by the aesthetic doctrines of the symbolist school.
Weary of an art dealing entirely with externals, the
THE NOVEL ^^^^^ great novelists of the end of the century,
Paul Bourget, Anatole France, and Pierre Loti,
made the novel a vehicle, the first for psychological analysis,
^^the second f &rjiis philo sopj^ jcaLidea s, and the third for his
i'3 pers onal impr essions.
Paul Bourget (b. 1852) was the first to deflect the natura- listic current into a psychological channel, and ^*CB. ^Ss^ar" ^'^^^ to return to the novel of analysis, of which, after Rene, Adolphe, and Le Rouge et le Noir, there had been but two adequate examples, Sainte-Beuve's Volupte (1834) ^'^d Fromentin's Dominique (1862). Brought up in a scientific atmosphere — his father was a professor of mathematics — and educated for the medical profession, Bourget brought a scientifically trained mind to bear upon psychological problems. After studying them in the literature read by his own generation — witness his Essais de Psychologic Coniemporaine (1885-1886) — he proceeded to study them in real life, and even his earhest novels, Cruelle
325
326 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Enigme (1885), Un Crime d' Amour (1886), Andre Cornelis (1887), etc., reveal a skilful anatomist of the moral nature of man, and also a confirmed pessimist. In 1889 appeared the most powerful novel that Bourget has ever written, Le Disciple, a severe indictment of thinkers and writers who philosophize without regard for the practical con- sequences of their teaching, accompanied by a preface asserting that the spiritual element in man's nature is every whit as important as those elements which can be explained physiologically. In his preface to Terre Promise (1892) Bourget takes up the same question again, insisting that " I'enquete sur la vie interieure et morale doit fonctionner parallelement a I'enquete sur la vie exterieure et sociale, I'une eclairant, approfondissant, corrigeant I'autre."
In 1899, in a preface to a collected edition of his works, he declares that his prolonged studies on the moral maladies of contemporary France have led him to the conclusion that the only remedy for this ill is a return to the traditional religion. By the time he wrote his next important novel, Bourget had returned to it himself, and at the same time to a belief in political and social tradition. L'Etape (1902) is a ronian d these representing the disasters of a certain family as the inevitable consequences of its departure from its native province, the social condition of its ancestors, and the God of its fathers. The problem of national tradition and of man's moral obligation to his ancestors is the subject of most of Bourget's subsequent novels — Un Divorce {igo4),L'Emigrd (1907), etc.
Bourget is extremely acute in his analysis of states of mind, but from the artistic point of view his novels are some- what marred by the delight he takes in pulling to pieces and putting together again the mechanism of the human mind, and by his method of continuous soliloquy. His characters are unnaturally introspective both about their
"siories' feelings and about their actions. These defects are absent from Bourget's short stories, of which there are several collections — Lcs Recommencements (1897), Le Jnsticier, etc.
OUTSIDE THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 327
Very different in every respect from Paul Bourget is Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Thibaut,
AnaTOLK 1 r. \ 1 !• •
France b. 1844), the greatest living master of French
^ '^'^ prose and the winner of the Nobel prize for
literature in 192 1.
Anatole France is an artist and a thinker who has doubts about most things, and is even a little sceptical about his own negative conclusions. But of one thing he is quite con- vinced — that the only object of literature is the artistic ex- pression of ideas, and that with morality, which varies with the ages, it has absolutely no concern. His first published work was a study of Alfred de Vigny (1868), which already showed signs of the discriminating critical faculty which distinguishes his later volumes of essays— La Vie Litteraire (1888-1892, four vols.) and Le Genie Latin (1913) — and which makes him one of the best literary critics of the age. Of his novels and short stories, which already fill some thirty volumes, all are delightful reading, both for the felicity and grace of their style and for their revelation of the workings of an interesting mind. For Anatole France's novels are impregnated with his individuality and his philosophy from his first masterpiece, Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), to his latest volume. La Vie en Fleur (1922).
Sometimes he speaks in his own person, and is frankly autobiographical, as in Le Livre de mon Ami (1885), Pierre Noziere (1899), and Le Petit Pierre (1918) ; at others he allows one of his characters to voice his ideas for him — the cynical Abb^ Coignard, for instance, in La Rotisserie de la reine Pedauqne (1893), in Les Opinions de Jerome Coignard and the M. Bergeret of L'Orme du Mail (1896), Le Mannequin d'Osier {i8gy), L'Anneau d'Amethysie (1899), andM. Bergeret d Paris (1901). These four novels, published under the col- lective title Hisioire Contemporaine, were written while the feeling aroused by the Dreyfus case was at its height, and were largely inspired by their author's contempt for the anti-Dreyfusards, while his Swift-like satire, L'lle des Pingiiins, about a quarter of which fs devoted to the famous Affaire, pours sarcasm on friends and adversaries P
ii
328 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
alike. Anatole France thus uses the novel chiefly as a | medium for expressing his opinions on men and things, and this is the case even in those stories which have a more definite plot, such as Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), Thais (1890), Le Lys Rouge (1894), and Les Dieux ont Soif (1912).
In his attitude towards life Anatole France combines the tolerance of Montaigne, the determinism of Taine, and the cynicism of the later Renan. From the depths of his great learning, and with irony and dialectical skill as his weapons, he ridicules all attempts, theological, metaphysical, or scientific, to arrive at absolute truth. Yet his materialism is redeemed partly by the lightness of his touch and his frequent flashes of sympathy ; partly by the magic of his style, which combines in equal proportions three qualities, found singly, but rarely together, in all great prose-writers — a musical rhythm, pictorial beauty, and a feeling for the genius of French syntax which can only be described as exquisite.
Unlike Bourget and Anatole France, Pierre Loti (Julien
Viaud, b. 1850) is not primarily either a psycho- '
^i85Q-i^2°3y logist or a thinker, but a painter and a poet, who
possesses the gift of transcribing his impressions
very vividly and at the same time of suffusing them with
the melancholy of his own temperament, and with a poetic
glamour, which removes him far from the realists.
As a naval officer, Loti travelled all over the globe, and in his novels, which are for the most part records of his wandering existence, the settings are very varied — the South Sea Islands in Le Mariage de Loti (1880), Senegambia in Le Roman d'un Spahi (1881), Brittany and the high seas in Mon Frere Yves (1881) and Pecheur d'Islande (1886), Japan in Madame Chrysantheme (1887), the Basque pro- vinces in RamunicJw (1897) — one of the finest of his novels — Turkey in Les Desenchantes (1906), etc. Loti is not the first French novelist to give an exotic setting to his stories — Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand had already done this — but he is the first to sketch the manners of
OUTSIDE THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT 329
peoples who are still primitive to the extent of acting almost entirely upon instinct.
It is, however, as a poet of the sea and of seafaring life that Loti made his greatest contribution to literature. The passion for " life on the ocean wave " was in his blood : all his ancestors had been sailors, and his grandfather fought at the battle of Trafalgar. In the two novels in which he tells us the story of his childhood, Le Roman d'un Enfant (1890) and Le Livre de la Pitie et de la Mort (1891), we are told how from his earliest years he was attracted by the awe and mystery of "la grande tueuse," of whom he was to write the prose epic in Mon Frere Yves, and above all in Pecheur d'Islande. This last, with its unsurpassed pictures of the sea in all her moods, " of wind-swept, wave-washed Brittany " and her melancholy fisherfolk, and its rendering of certain very simple but deep emotions, is undoubtedly Loti's masterpiece, and, if he had never written anything else, would assure him a high rank both among novelists and among writers of descriptive prose.
In the drama of the last fifteen years of the century, as in the novel, one is embarrassed by the amount
THE DRAMA , , , . , . . -^
produced, amongst which it is as yet too early to attempt any selection. After the naturalism of the Theatre Libre, the problem play comes once more to the fore, and is developed in a moral or psychological direction by Paul Hervieu, Maurice Donnay, Henri Bataille, etc., and in a philosophical or sociological direction by Francois de Curel, Eugene Brieux, Emile Fabre, etc., all of whom regard the drama as a school of morals, even as Dumas and Augier had done.
The reaction in favour of idealism, which we have studied in poetry and in the novel, is, apart from the symbolist drama, represented on the stage by the poetical dramas of Henri de Bornier [La Fille de Roland, 1875), Frangois Coppee [Severo Torclli, 1883, and Pour la Couronne), and above all by Edmond Rostand (1864-1918). The latter's Romanesques (1894) and La Princesse Lointaine (1895) had already been hailed with joy by a public weary
330 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
of seeing nothing but the prose of real life on the stage ; but the first performance of Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), with Coquelin in the title-role, was a triumph, and awakened an enthusiasm among playgoers which had been unknown since the appearance of Heriiani. Rostand's next play, L'A iglon, was produced in 1900 by Sarah Bernhardt, at her own theatre, she herself acting the part of the Duke of Reich- stadt. Chantecler (1910), a fantasy of bird and animal life, was much less favourably received. Rostand has had the great merit of never repeating himself — the only resem- blance between his plays lies in their heroic idealism, their lyrical quaUties, their glowing enthusiasm, and a certain preciosity of style.
CHAPTER X THE NEW IDEALISM AND THE NEW REALISM
" ART FOR LIFE'S SAKE " 1900-1914
IF the symbolist movement is still too recent to be viewed in its true perspective, the same remark applies with even greater reason to the period which was brought to a sudden close by the outbreak of the Great War, The most one can do is to indicate some of the tendencies of the new spirit in French literature during the first fourteen years of the twentieth century, for a new spirit there undoubtedly was, which, if formulas are helpful, might be summed up in the phrase " Art_for life's sake." ^ The renaissance of idealism, which Brunetiere, the coiner of the phrase, saw dawning about 1890, ^'jSemS^ and which was partly the result of what others have called " the bankruptcy of science," con- sisted mainly in a growing belief in the liveableness of life, a rediscovery of the value and beauty of life in all its forms. This faith and optimism, strengthened, if not actually sug- gested, by the two very different philosophies of Nietzsche
^ Much valuable information concerning the trend of contemporary literature is to be found in the pages of the Notivclle Revue franc-aise (founded 1906), which, during the years before the war, represented the opinions of the younger generation of writers, just as the Mcrcure de France represented those of their elders. For an understanding of the intellectual background, the Cahiers de la Qitinzaine (1897-1914) and L'Effort Libre (1910-1914) should be consulted.
331
332 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
and Bergson, was the leading characteristic of the younger generation of French writers before the war, and is to be found also in some of their elders. Romantics, realists, naturalists, and symbolists (with the single exception of Viele- Griffin), whatever their other differences, had all been firmly convinced that life on its o\vn merits was dust and ashes, and that the man who thought otherwise was a philis- tine. Hence the pessimism, scepticism, and contempt for the active life which pervades ^w de siecle literature. p imism ^j^^ ^^^ writers who were making their names at the turn of the century and beyond were, on the contrary, in love with life, whether it brought joy or suffering. One of the best known of the younger poets, Fernand Gregh^ (b. 1873), wrote in the Figaro of 1902 :
" Apr^s I'ecole de la beaut6 pour la beaute, apr&s I'^cole de la beaut6 par le reve, il est temps de constituer I'ecole de la beaut6 par la vie."
And some lines from another poet, Charles Vildrac ^ —
" Une vie dans le vent, toutes voiles dehors. Chair, esprit et le coeur — extase ou larmes — O oui, furieusement toutes voiles dehors, Une vie sans rien de commun avec la mort " —
might well serve as a motto for the majority of the younger poets, whatever their other differences. This same ardour for life rings through the work of the woman poets of the period. Their name is legion, but two at least rise far above the average minor poet, Madame de Noailles,^ and Valentine de Saint-Point,^ the great-niece of Lamar- tine.
^ La Beauts de Vivre (1900), Les ClarUs Humaines (1904), L'Or dcs Minutes (1905), etc,
2 Pohnes (1905), Images et Mirages (1908), Le Livre d'Amoni' (1910).
- Le Coeur In?wmbrable (1901 ), L'Ombrc dcs Jours (1902 ), Eblouissc-
ments {1907), etc.
- Potmes de la Mer et du Soleil (1905), Poimes d'Orgueil (1908),
VOrbe Pdle (191 1).
NEW IDEALISM AND NEW REALISM 333
The new writers of the first fourteen years of the century
were not only filled with the joy of life, but they
for aAUeoi"^ Were for the most part apostles of a life of action
^ ra°ergT'^ and energy, and many of them led one, often not
from necessity, but by choice. Claudel is in the
Consular Service, Maurice Barres sits in the French Chamber
as Deputy for Paris, while Charles Peguy printed every word
of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine with his own hand and then
sold them over the counter, and Psichari wrote his three
novels while on active service in Mauretania and Morocco.
And here it may be mentioned that, owing to French
colonial expansion during the last twenty years
The colonial r .1 • j. ji j ^ '-n l^
novel and the ot the mnetcenth century, when Tums, the adventoe Toukiu, Madagascar, the French Congo, the Soudan, and Morocco in turn came definitely under French rule, a whole literature of colonial life and adventure has sprung up (cf . Emile Nolly : La Barque Annamite, 1910 ; Paul Adam : La Ville Inconnue, 1911 ; Jerome et Jean Tharaud : La Fete Arahe, 1912 ; L'Ombre de la Croix, 1917 ; Pierre Mille : Louise et Barnavaux, 1912 ; Henry Daguerches : Le Kilometre 83, 1913 ; Louis Hemon : Marie Chapdelaine, 1921, etc.).
The French have always taken their role as " civilisa- teurs " very seriously. This preoccupation comes out very clearly in most of their colonial novels, strengthened without doubt by that faith in the future of their race which per- meates the work of pre-war French writers, and which is in complete contrast to the misgivings expressed or implied during the eighties and early nineties of last century. Never before, perhaps, had Frenchmen felt such a strong pride in their national past, or so secure a confidence in the perennial qualities of their race, as in the early years of the twentieth century. This pride and this confidence find expression in books bearing such illuminating titles as Les Diver ses Families Spirituelles de la France (Maurice Barres), Quand les Frangais ne s'aimaient pas (Charles Maurras), La Renaissance de I'Orgueil Frangais (Ernest Rey), La Victoire de la France
334 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
sur les Frangais (Pierre Hamp), etc. But quite apart from works of propaganda and criticism, works of pure literature reveal the same patriotic spirit and a general tendency to return to the characteristically French qualities of clarity and order.
This renaissance of the national tradition was to some degree a reaction on the part of a generation who had not experienced the defeat of 1870, and were determined to rise superior to it.^ It was only after the insults offered to France by the German Emperor at Tangiers in 1905, and again at Agadir in 1911, that the expression of this patriotism, which was in origin racial rather than terri- torial, became, in the writings of Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras, so resolute as to be decidedly narrow. These authors, two of the finest contemporary prose-writers of France, were before the war, and still are, the greatest apostles of nationalism and tradition. Charles Maurras (b. 1868), founder and director of L' Action Frangaise ",^^^^^^^^^^^(1905), has very much weakened his cause by Franfaise scciug a nccessary connection between patriot-
(founded 1905) . ° J I, u i. J -i. u- i- u
ism and monarchy, but despite his royalism, he is an interesting thinker and a name to conjure with in certain circles in France, while his literary gifts are beyond dispute. 2
Maurice Barres (b. 1862), after his early introspective
novels, which have been mentioned elsewhere,
^^^bl'i^sS)"^ published, between 1897 and 1902, the trilogy
entitled Le Roman de I'Energie nationale — Les
Deracines, L'Appelau Soldat, Leurs Figures — which already
reveal the fervent traditionalist and believer in local
patriotism who was to \mte Les Amities Frangaises (1903),
All Service de I'Allemagne (1905), Colette Baudoche (1909),
and La Colline Inspiree (1913).
( 1 Re i r Barres, who is a Lorrainer, has a devotion
to his native province which reminds one of Du
Bellay's love of his " petit Lyre," and his longing for " la
1 Cf. Psichari : VAppel des Armes, Pt. II, chap. v.
- Cf. Albert Thibaudet : Les I dees de Charles Mauryas (1920).
NEW IDEALISM AND NEW REALISM 335
douceur angevine." He believes, moreover, that the indivi- dual can only develop fully and happily if " profondement racine dans la terre et dans les morts." Les Deracines (1897), like Bourget's Etape (1903) and Estaunie's Ferment (1899), shows the evils of violently uprooting anyone from the traditions and surroundings which have been those of his ancestors for generations. The novels of Maurice Barres are nearly all set against the background of his native Lorraine, and though he did not invent literary regionalism, he supplied, as it were, an aesthetic and moral justification at a moment when a certain decentralization, administrative and intellectual, was taking place, when it was no longer true to say that Paris was France. At the present day there is scarcely a French province which has not had its literary interpreter, of great or small merit. ^ This love of the homeland, in the narrower as well as in , , ^ . , the wider sense, and this desire to keep alive
(S) Fusion of . . ^. .
patriotism and auccstral mcmorics and ancestral traditions, to re igion ^^^ ^^ ^^ wcrc, in commuuion with the historic past of their country, explain to some extent the new atti- tude towards the Church and the Army expressed by so many men of letters at the turn of the century. The Army and the Church, which, in spite of abuses, are the repositories of many fine old ideals, had been justly attacked for their attitude during the Dreyfus case, and there were some who, instead of reforming them, would fain have swept them away
^ Cf. an interesting article by Edmon.d Eggli, entitled L^-JfJ^^wMrt/- isme dans la Litidraiure Frangaise (The French Quarterly, March, 1922). Already in 1837, Michelet, in the opening chapters to the third volume of his Histoire de France, had given a wonderful picture of the geographical and ethnical characteristics of the ancient pro- vinces of France. From about 1840 onwards there are numerous examples of regionalism in French literature — George Sand (Berry) ; M6rim6e (Corsica) ; Ferdinand Fabre (Languedoc) ; Erckmann- Chatrian (Alsace) ; Pierre Loti and Anatole Le Braz (Brittany) ; Rene Bazin, La Terre qui Meiirt (1899), Le Ble qui Leve (1907), etc. (La Vend6e) ; Henri Bordeaux, Le Pays Natal (1900), Les Roquc- villard (1906), etc. (Savoy) ; Emile Moselly, Tcrrcs Lorraines (1907), etc. ; Louis Bertrand, Le Sang des Races (1899), L'Invasion (1907) (shores of the Mediterranean).
336 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
for ever, and this brought about a reaction in their favour. This fusion of patriotism and religion is best seen in the novels of Ernest Psichari, and above all in the writings of Charles Peguy, the one killed in the retreat from Charleroi, the other in the battle of the Marne.
Ernest Psichari (1883-1914), the grandson of Renan, who gave up his studies at the Sorbonne and his ^™883-^iTi4r* thesis on the bankruptcy of idealism to become a private in an African regiment, because "I'armee seule aujourd'hui, et malgre tons les efforts que Ton a faits, possede une tradition," ^ sees a kind of relation between the soldier and the priest {L'Appel des Armes, 1913 ; Le Voyage du Centurion, 1916).
Charles Peguy (1873-1914), one of Bergson's most remark- able and original pupils, to whom Psichari ?i8?3-i^9tT dedicated L'Appel des Armes as the man " en qui vit aujourd'hui I'ame de la France," had been an ardent Dreyfusard, because he believed in truth and justice more than in anything else in the world. The Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which he founded in la Quinzaine 1900 to defend his idcas and his ideals, were not (1900-1915) ^ review in the ordinary sense of the word, for each number was complete in itself, and usually came from the pen of one author. The whole series, which runs from January 5, 1900, to July 12, 1915, forms a most valuable collection of documents on political, moral, and aesthetic questions, besides containing the first editions of some of the most notable novels of the day — Anatole France's Crainquchille, for instance, the eleven volumes of Romain RoUand's Jean-Christophe, most of Jerome and Jean Tharaud's early novels, Julien Benda's Ordination, the early essays of Snares. In them, too, Peguy published all his own work, including a large number of polemical writings, of which Notre Pairie (1905), Notre Jeunesse (1910), and Victor- Marie Conte Hugo (1910), are the finest examples. Peguy's imaginative works may be divided into two groups — the three IMysteres, Le Mystere de la Char He de Jeanne d'Arc
^ L'Appel des Armes.
NEW IDEALISM AND NEW REALISM 337
(1910), Le PorcJie du Mystere de la Deuxieme Vertu (1911), Les Saints Innocents (1912), all written for the five-hundredth anniversary of Joan of Arc, and dealing with her spiritual preparation for her great mission at the hands of a Francis- can nun, Madame Gervaise, who teaches her the duty of hope, the beauty of heroism, and a loving pride in her native land. While these three books are written in a kind of rhythmical prose, sometimes broken up into lines, the three last Peguy wrote — La Tapisserie de Sainte-Genevieve et de Jeanne d' Arc (1912), La Tapisserie de Notre Dame (1913), and Eve (1914) — are in the regular twelve-syllable riming line, but all six, in spite of great beauty of thought, and often of style, are apt to be tiresome to read, because of their' author's curious and almost childish trick of repetition and; reiteration.
Peguy was a mystic and an idealist, but idealism and mysticism meant for him not remoteness from life, but active^ concrete work in the service of humanity. He began as a socialist, because socialism seemed to open the widest field for active labour ; he ended as a devout Catholic, with an almost medieval attitude towards God, familiar and at the same time adoring, because action implies belief, and because, like Barres, he was a patriot and saw how intimately the Catholic faith is interwoven with the history of France. The saints of whom he sings are patriot saints — Genevieve, who saved Paris from the Huns ; Jeanne, who delivered France from her English invaders. As a child Peguy lived at Orleans, where his mother mended chairs in the cathedral and his grandmother told him stories about Joan of Arc, who became for him the incarnation of the virtues of France, of justice and truth, in the interests of which he preached incessantly " que la France se refasse et se refasse de toutes ses forces."
The cult of Joan of Arc, " fille de France et fille de Dieu," was not confined to Peguy, though it was he who made her peculiarly his own. In 1908 the necessary steps were taken for her canonization ; her feast-day is now a national festival, and she is still to many a symbol of religious and
VOL. II. — 22
338 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
national feeling, though a discordant note was struck by
Anatole France's learned and clever Vie de Jeanne d'Arc
(1908).
Of another Catholic poet, Paul Claudel, we have already
spoken. Though he had steeped himself in
Paul Claudel .f 1 , r ^ • j 5 v i, •
the beauty of paganism and antiquity, he is no more vaguely religious than Peguy.
" Soyez beni mon Dieu," he cries, " que vous m'avez d61ivr6 des idoles et qui faites que je n'adore que vous seul et non point Isis ou Osiris, ou la Justice, ou le Progres, ou la Veriti, ou la Divinite, ou les Lois de la Nature, ou I'Art, ou la Beauts."
In this connection a third name must be mentioned, that (6)Newatti- ^^ Fraucis Jammes (b. 1868), who has been
tude towards described as " a Faun who has turned Francis- nature
Francis Jammes can Friar." ^ It was Claudel who converted (b. 1868) j^-j^^ ^^^ after his conversion, which took place in 1905, he wrote the definitely religious poems contained in L'Eglise habilUe de Feuilles (1906) and Les Georgiqties Chretiennes (1912), "a sort of rural Christian year." ^ But from his solitude at Orthez (Basses-Pyrenees) Jammes had already before his conversion won fame by the three collections which so far contain his finest lyrics — De I'Angelus de I'Atibe a I'Angdlus du Soir (1898) ; Le Deiiil des Primeveres (1901), and Le Triomphe de la Vie (1902). He is essentially the poet of the country-side and of the beasts of the field, enjoying everything that a rural life can offer without ever seeking in nature a reflection of his own moods (cf . the charming poem in Le Triomphe de la Vie, beginning " Je ne veux pas d 'autre joie "). Again, his love of animals is not the artistic and scientific delight in their form and movements which was characteristic of Leconte de Lisle, but rather that feeling of simple comradeship which has caused Jammes to be compared with St. Francis (cf. Priere pour alter an Paradis avec les Anes, and the poem beginning " Petit ane mcndiant et gris "). The characteristics of Jammes' poetry are its extreme simplicity, the delight it
- Madame Duclaux : Contemporary French Writers, 1919.
NEW IDEALISM AND NEW REALISM 339
expresses in work done well and joyously, and the sense of joy it reveals in the communion existing between him- self and all created things.
This same joy rings through Saint-Georges de Bouhelier's Chants de la Vie ardente (1902), and the twenty
^t^ f°u ^^ more volumes containing the Ballades fran- gaises of Paul Fort (b. 1872). The latter, in spite of his nationalism, ^ his regionalism ^ — he is the poet of the lie de France, of which hitherto the painters Monet, Sisley, and Pisarro had alone succeeded in conveying the peculiar charm — and his religious attitude,^ has not been as popular in France as one might expect, chiefly, no doubt, because of his metrical peculiarities. Through his poetry rhymes he writes each verse as though it were a paragraph in prose, beheving that by lessening the appeal to the eye he increases the appeal to the ear.
Paul Fort has a special gift for writing poems in the folk-song style (cf. Ballades frangaises, vol. i, and vol. v, L' Amour Marin), and it is perhaps in these and in his nature poems that we see him at his best. Like Jammes, and indeed like most of the younger generation of poets, he plunges straight into nature and rejoices in her Hke a child.
" Mais toute la nature est au seuil de mon coeur. La terre et le soleil ont la meme cadence, rythmee k I'unisson des battements de ma vie. La lumi^re du jour te p6netre, 6 ma vie ! Elle s'ajoute k moi comme une recompense, quand je laisse errer mes sensdel'astre aux fleurs. La terre et le soleil en moi sont en cadence, et toute la nature est entr6e dans mon ccEur."
Like most of the younger generation of poets, Paul Fort admires in nature all that is strong and life-giving — sun- shine, wind, the soil where men labour — a very different attitude from that of the symbolists, who loved, above all tilings, silence, mist, and moonlight.
^ Vol. ii, Le Roman de Louis XI (1899); vol. xix, Podtnes de France (1916); vol. xx, Qite j'ai de plaisir d itrc jrangais (1917).
2 Vol. ix, He de France (1917), and poems scattered through his other collections.
• Vol. xiv, Vivre en Dieu (1912).
340 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
This new love for the strong things in nature is best seen
EmUe V r- ^^ *^^ works of that international poet, Emile haeren Verhaeren (1855-1916), who, like Peguy, by the date of his birth belongs to the generation of Mallarme, Samain, and Regnier, yet may be said to synthetize the whole modern movement in art. He was a native of Belgium, the country which stands, as it were, at the crossroads of Europe, Flemish by birth like Maeterlinck, Rodenbach, and Van Lerberghe, but like them French by speech and education. It has often been remarked that the Flemish temperament is a curious mixture of violent and almost brutal animal spirits, of which the greatest Belgian novelist, Camille Lemonnier (1845-1913), is an admirable example, and a strange unreasoning mysticism, of which Rodenbach and Maeterlinck are typical representatives, while Verhaeren reveals in his work both sides of the Belgian temperament.
Verhaeren's nature-poems are best studied in the six series of Toute la Flandre, beginning with Les Ten-
^poTtry"^^' (^^(^sses premieres (1904) and ending with Les Bids Mouvants (1913). His landscape is always the land of Flanders, with its broad, rolling, windswept plains, its wide horizons, its great stretches of windy sky piled high with white clouds. (Cf. poems entitled Les Vignes de ma Muraille, Vents de Tempetes, Les Beaux Images, etc.)
This lover of the open air, of sunshine, wind, and rain, is more akin to Wordsworth than any other French poet ; to the Wordsworth who wrote :
All things that love the sun are out of doors ; The sun rejoices in the morning's birth ; The grass is bright with rain-drops ; on the moors The hare is running races in her mirth.
He has been compared with Constable, and indeed they love the same spacious windy skies, the same sun-flecked fields. Some of Verhaeren's finest nature-poems are inspired by the idea of the continuity of natural phenomena. Le Franc
NEW IDEALISM AND NEW REALISM 341
Buvettr {Les Blcs Mouvants), for instance, is a processional in honour of the seasons, and L'Est, I'Onest, leSnd, le Nord {Les Flammes Haiites) a splendid marching-song dedicated to the four points of the compass. Though Verhaeren gives us some wonderfully serene pictures of nature at peace, it is in her wild tempestuous moods that he loves her best.
" La bondissante mer m'a rempli de ferveur ; J'ai c616br6 la tempete, le vent, la neige, L'espace en marche et I'horizon et son cortege, De nuages volants et de rouges lueurs. L'apre nature a guerroy6 par tout mon etre Lui imprimant la loi de sa ferocite."
This admiration for energy and effort in nature as else- where, which, as we have seen, was not peculiar "■rem^^ to Verhaeren, accounts for a tendency in con- temporary literature which has been called the New Realism, and which consists not in a seeking of the real for the sake of its crudities, nor yet in an attempt to bring out a contrast between it and the ideal, but in a desire to show the beauty and poetry of modern cities modim with their crowds, their clanging and belching
^cuTes^^ factories, their railway stations and docks, regarded as the visible expression of twentieth- century power and energy. Thus to the three great lyrical themes — Nature, Love, Death — and the lesser ones of Country and Glory — were now added a new theme — Modem Life. Here again Verhaeren stands supreme — the Parnassians and the symbolists, though they had been perfectly willing to accept all the comforts and luxuries with which machinery and improved means of communica- tion have provided the modern world, were as convinced as Ruskin and Tolstoi that they were ugly and evil things in themselves and a danger to art. Even Sully Prudhomme, who endeavoured to show the poetry of scientific discoveries like electricity, rarely succeeded in avoiding the trivial and the commonplace ; indeed it takes a master-hand to reveal the beauty of the modem industrial city and so to transfigure it, and much poetry of machinery has been
342 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
written in recent years which is not poetry at all. Ver- haeren possesses this gift of transfiguration, for he brings everything into connection with his central vision of man " swinging along in unison with the rhythm of the world " — the phrase is his own — and with his delight in all expressions of power and energy. [Cf . Les Forces Tumultueuses (1902), La Multiple Splendeur (1906), Les Rythmes Soiiveraines
(1910), Les Flammes Hautes (1917)]. Walt \Nh\i- wi°t \«iuman ^lan had been the first to make cities and crowds
the subject of poetry, and though it is unproved how far he influenced the vers lihre of the symbolists, it would be much easier to prove that in choice of subject- matter he was a source of inspiration to the younger generation of French poets. Some critics think, indeed, that his influence has been so strong that they would call the whole poetic movement from 1900 to the outbreak of the war "le Whitmanisme," and though this is no doubt an exaggeration, he has certainly left his mark in contemporary French poetry, notably in the case of Barzun, Jules Romains, and Georges Duhamel. There is, however, as has been pointed out, something lazily complacent in the blessing which Walt Whitman bestowed on modern indus- trialism, which is far removed from the attitude of Verhaeren. When he first made the acquaintance of London, he was filled with the horror and despair reflected in the trilogy, Les Soirs {i8Sy), Les Debacles (1888), Les Flambeaux Noirs (1890). It was only later that he came to recognize the inner meaning of crowded modem cities, the work they are doing for the future, and hence their beauty.
"Vous existez en moi, fleuves, forets et monts, Et vous encor, mais vous surtout, \-illes puissantes, Ou je sens s'exalter les cris les plus profonds, D'^ge en age sur la terre retentissante."
Thus his Campagnes Halliicinees (1893) and his Villes Tentaculaires (1895) are not, as one might suppose, a dirge for the abandoned farms and fields, and a scathing denuncia-
NEW IDEALISM AND NEW REALISM 343
tion of the towns, for Verhaeren believes and declares that the cities will create anew after having destroyed.
The beauty of machinery, " Thomme infiniment multi- pHe," is a constant theme with Verhaeren — machines in which
"Chaque effort vole au but comme un dard vers le cible Si bien que leur travail complexe et inflexible Fait brusquement songer au travail du destin." ^
It seems a strange irony of fate that this singer of engines should have been killed by one. He was crushed by a train in the station at Rouen.
Both Walt Whitman and Verhaeren sang of man in the
mass, of the crowd as apart from the individual.
- ^Xy^a7a°' What they had done objectively, several young
theme for Frcuch pocts at the beginning of the twentieth
century tried to do subjectively — that is to say,
they tried to be, not the singer watching the crowd, but
the crowd itself singing. This was the attempt made by
Henri- Martin Barzun in Poeme de I' Homme and Chant de
I'Idee (1904-1906) and Jules Romains in La Vie Unanime
(1908), which is based on the idea that
" Les v6rit6s de maintenant Naissent oii il y a beaucoup d'hommes Et s'exhalent des multitudes."
This endeavour to interpret what Verhaeren calls " le coeur myriadaire et rouge de la foule " has so far not produced any masterpieces, and has merely popularized the results obtained by the sociologists Durckheim, Tarde, and Le Bon, who have made a special study of collective psychology. It is mentioned here merely as an interesting experiment which may prove fruitful, and as one more instance of the desire to poetize all that is most significant in modern life.
It would be a grave mistake, however, to suggest that French literature before the war was almost entirely inspired by the conditions of twentieth-century civiliza- tion. As we have seen, there are still poets — Verhaeren 1 Les. Machines, in Les Flammes Hautes (1917)-
344 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
himself was one of them^ — who sing of the destiny of man, and are hence inspired by the grand old themes of Nature, Love, and Death, while the greatest and most origi- nal French poet now living, Paul Valery, the author of La Jeime Parque (1917) and Charmes (1922), expresses his difficult thought with classical perfection and restraint. The best contemporary novelists, apart from those already mentioned, Andre Gide,^ Edouard Estaunie,^ Jerome et Jean Tharaud,^ Emile Clermont,^ etc., are all in their several ways psychologists of the individual and not of the crowd, and stylists in the best French manner.
An interesting development of the psychological novel
is to be found in the numerous novels of child- "^chiiXood"^ hood which appeared before the war. In La
Maternelle (1904), La Botte aux Gosses (1907), etc., Leon Frapie studies the psychology of elementary school-children, while other novelists make a careful analysis of a child's feelings when it is first brought into contact with the mysteries of life — love, sin, pain, death, etc. Among the best writers of such novels are Rene Boylesve {La Becquee, 1901 ; V Enfant a la Balustrade, 1903), Romain RoUand (first two volumes of Jean-Christophe, 1904), Edmond Jaloux {Le Reste est Silence, 1909), Marguerite Audoux {Marie-Claire, 1919), and two young men killed early in the war, Andre Lafon, who in L'Eleve Gilles (1911) tells the story of a little boy growing up, though all uncon- scious of it, under the shadow of his father's insanity, and Alain Fournier, whose Grand Meaulnes (1913), a tale full of imagination and fantasy, recounting the adventures of two schoolboys, is a masterpiece of its kind.^
1 See Les Heurcs Claires (1895), Lcs Heurcs d'Apris-midi (1905), Les Heures du Soir (191 1), and many poems in his other collections.
(^■Vlmmovaliste (1902), La Porte Etroite (1909), Isabella (1911), La Symphonie Pastorale (1919).
' La Vie Secrite (1908), Les Chases voient (1914), etc.
- La Maitresse Servante (191 1).
' Amour Promis (1910), Laure (1913), Histoire d'Isabelle.
- Marcel Proust (f 1922), whose first novel, Dm C6ti de chez Swann,
published during the winter of 1913-1914, the first instalment of a
V
NEW IDEALISM AND NEW REALISM 345
And so we find the old and the new side by side, and sometimes combined, proving, if proof were needed, that, as Kipling once said, France is
the comitry most faithful to old things and most wildly
enthusiastic about new ones.
sequence entitled A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, is also a novel of childhood. Its author, however, did not make his name until after 1914, and therefore his interesting work lies outside the province of this chapter.
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APPENDIX B
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHIES
A. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY GENERALLY
I. SUGGESTED SUPPLEMENTARY READING
F. S. Marvin : The Century of Hope. A Sketch of Western
Progress from 1815 to 1914. (Clarendon Press, 1919.) Lanson et Desseignet : La France et sa Civilisation de
1789 d, nos jours. (Harrap, 1922.) A. GuERARD : French Civilisation in the Nineteenth Century.
(Fisher Unwin, 1914.) A. Rambaud : Histoire de la Civilisation Contemporaine en
France, 1789-1912. (Colin, 1919.)
G. Renard : Les Etapes de la Societe frangaise au XIX"
Siicle. (1913.) A. TiLLEY, ed. Modern France. (C.U.P., 1922.) Lowes Dickenson : Action and Reaction in Modern
France. (George Allen, 1892.) A. P. GoocH : History and Historians of the Nineteenth Cen- tury. (Longmans Green, 1913.) Faguet : Politiques et Moralistes, 3 vols. — Etudes sur la LittSraturc frangaise du XIX" Sidcle. SxROWSKi : Tableau de la Litterature frangaise au XIX*
Siicle. (Delaplane.) Georges Pellissier : Le Mouvement Litt^raire au XIX'
Sidcle. (Hachette, 1893.) RENfi Canat : La Litterature frangaise au XIX" Siecle.
Vol.1, 1800-52; Vol. II, 1852-1900. (Payot.) BRUNExrfeRE : UEvolution de la Podsie Lyrique au XIX'
Siicle, 2 vols. (Hachette, 1893-4.) D'AvENEL : Histoire de la Presse frangaise depuis 1789.
(1900.)
367
368 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
IL BIBLIOGRAPHY
H. P. Thieme : Guide Bibliogvaphique de la Littdratiiye fran- faise de 1800 d 1906. (Welter, Paris, 1907.)
III. ANTHOLOGIES WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES
Charles Le Goffic : La Litter ature franfaise an XIX' et
XX' Slides : Tableau general accompagne de pages-types.
(Larousse, 1919.) Gauthier-Ferre&res : Anthologie des Ecrivains frangais dii
XIX' Siicle ; Prose, 2 vols. ; Poe'sie, 2 vols. (Larousse.) AuGUSTE AuzAS : Les Poetes frauQais du XIX' Steele 1800-
1885. (Clarendon Press, 1914.) Charles Bonnier : La Lignee des Poeies an XIX' Sidcle.
(Clarendon Press, 1902.)
F. Y. EccLES : A Century of French Verse. (Constable,
1909.) Vial et Denise : Ide'es et Doctrines Litteraires du XIX'
Sidcle. (Colin, 1918.) Bayet et Albert : Ecrivains politiques du XIX' Sidcle.
(Colin, 1907.) JuLLiAN : Exiraits des Historians du XIX' Siecle. (Hachette.)
B. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
I. SUGGESTED SUPPLEMENTARY READING
Finch and Peers : The Origins of French Romanticism.
(1920.) Pierre Laserre : Le Romantisme franfais. (Mercure de
France, 1907.)
G. Brandes : Main Currents in Nineteenth-Century Litera-
ture. Vols. Ill and V. (Heinemann, 1904.) C. M. Des Granges : La Presse Littdraire sous la Restauration
1815-1830, (Mercure de France, 1917.) Th^ophile Gautier : Histoire de Romantisme. (1874.) J. Marsan : La Bataille Romantique. (Hachette, 1912.) Lebreton : Le Theatre Romantique. (Boivin, 1923.) M. SouRiAU : La Preface de Cromwell. (Lecene Oudin ct
Cie.)
i
APPENDIX B 369
PoTEZ : UEldgie en France avant le Romaniisme. (Calmann
Levy, 1898.) L. Maigron : Le Roman Historique d Vdpoque romantique .
(Champion, 1912.) Madame Duclaux : Vicior Hugo. (Constable, 1921.)
II. ANTHOLOGIES WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES
Stewart and Tilley : The French Romanticists. An An- thology of Verse and Prose. (C.U.P.)
— The Romantic Movement in French Literature. Extracts from prefaces and critical works by the leading Roman-
tics. (C.U.P.)
G. Pellissier : Anthologie des Prosateurs franpais du XIX' Sidcle (1800-1850). (Collection Pallas, Delagrave.)
Stewart and Desjardins : French Patriotism in the Nine- teenth Century (1814-1833). Traced in CdntcmpOrary Texts. (C.U.P., 1923.)
III. SELECTIONS FROM SINGLE AUTHORS
Lamartine : Poesies Choisies, ed. A. Barbier. (Manchester
University Press.) Victor Hugo : (Euvres Choisies. Poesie, 1 vol. ; Prose, i vol.
(Larousse.)
— Morceaux Choisis. (Delagrave.) Contains selections in
chronological order from all his volumes of verse except
Toute la Lyre. Alfred de Vigny : Podmes Choisis, ed. Peers. (Manchester
University Press.) Musset : Poesies Choisies, ed. Delbos. (Clarendon Press.) Chateaubriand : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) Madame de Sta£l : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) Stendhal : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.)
— Les Plus Belles Pages. (Mercure de France.) MfeRiM^E : Contes et Nouvelles, ed. Mitchell. (Clarendon Press.) Charles Nodier : (Euvres Choisies. (Delagrave.) Gerard de Nerval : Les Plus Belles Pages. (Mercure de
France.) George Sand : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) Balzac : Five Short Stories, ed. Tilley. (C.U.P., 1918.) MiCHELET : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) vol. II. — 24
370 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
C. FRENCH LITERATURE, LIFE, AND THOUGHT AFTER
1850
I. SUGGESTED SUPPLEMENTARY READING
1. General
G. P. GoocH : History of Modern Europe. (Cassell, 1923-) F. A. Simpson : Louis Napoleon and the Recovery of France,
1848-1856. (Longmans, 1923-) Un Demi-Siecle de Civilisation franfaise, ed. Levy. (Hachette,
1915-) Frederick Lawton : The Third French Republic. (Grant
Richards, 1909.) F. S. Marvin : Recent Developments in European Thought.
(Milford, 1920.) Alexander Gunn : Modern French Philosophy. A Study
of the Development since Conite. (Fisher Unwin, 1922.) Maurice Barres : Taine et Renan. (Bossard, 1922.) Karin Costello : The Misuse of Mind. A Study ofBergson's
Attack on Intellectualism. (Kegan Paul, 1922.) H. Retinger : Histoire de la Litterature frangaise du Ronian-
tisnie a nos jours. (Grasset, 1911-)
2. Parnassians, Realists, and Naturalists
Catulle Mendes : La Le'gende du Parnasse contemporain.
(Brussels, Kistemaeckers, 1884.) A. Cassagne : La Theorie de VArt pour VArt en France chez les derniers Romantiques et les premiers ReaUstes. (Hach- ette, 1906.) Emile Zola : Le Roman Experimental. (Charpentier, 1880.) — Le Naturalisme au Theatre. (Charpentier, 1881.) David Sauvageot : Le Realisme et le Naturalisme. (Cal-
mann Levy, 1890.) P. Martino : Le Naturalisme frangais 1870-1895. (Armand Colin, 1923.)
3. Symbolism and After
Pierre Laserre : Cinquante ans dc pensee frangaise. (Plon, 1922.)
APPENDIX B 371
Catulle Mendes : Le Mouvement poetique fvangais de 1867
d, 1900. (Fasquelle, 1903.) RENfe Lalou : Histoire de la Litterature frangaise de 1870
d, 1922. (Cres et Cie, 1923.) Florian-Parmentier : Histoire contemporaine des Lettres
fravfaises. (Figuieres, n.d.) EccLES : La Liquidation du Romantisme. (Oxford University
Press, 1919.) Arthur Symons : The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
(Heinemann, 1899.) A. Barre : Le Symbolisme. (Jouve et Cie, 191 1.) Ernest Renaud : La Melee Symboliste, 3 vols. (Renaissance
du Livre, 1918-1922.) A. PoiZAT : Le Symbolisme. (Renaissance du Livre, 1919.) Camille Mauclair: VArt Independant Jrangais. (Renais- sance du Livre, 19 19.) — Servitude et Grandeur Litteraires. (Ollendorff, 1923.) RuDMOSE Brown : French Literary Studies. (Fisher Unwin,
1917-) TANCRi;DE DE VisAN : U Attitude du Lyrisme contemporain.
(Mercure de France, 191 1.) Albert Thibaudet : Trente Ans de Vie frangaise, 4 vols.
(In progress.)
I. Les Idees de Charles Maurras.
IL La Vie de Maurice Barres.
III. Le Bergsonisme.
IV. Une Generation. (Nouvelle Revue frangaise, 1920.)
Madame Duclaux : Twentieth-Century French Writers. (Collins, 1919.)
G. Turquet-Milnes : Some Modern French Writers. A Study in Bergsonism. (Muirhead, 1921.) Contains a complete list of contents of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine.
Daniel Hal6vy : Charles Peguy et les Cahiers de la Quin- zaine. (Payot, 1918.)
Winifred Stephens : French Novelists of To-day. (John Lane, 1914-1915.)
F. W. Chandler : The Contemporary Drama of France.
(Boston, 1920.) Jethro Bithell : Contemporary Belgian Literature. (Fisher Unwin, 1915.)
G. Turquet-Milnes : Some Modern Belgian Writers. (1916,)
372 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
II. ANTHOLOGIES
G. Pellissier : Anthologie des Prosateurs fran^ais conteni-
porains, 3 vols. (Collection Pallas, Delagrave.) — Anthologie du Theatre contemporain . (Delagrave.) GAUTHiER-FERRrfeRES : Anthologie des Ecrivains franfais
content porains. Prose, i vol. ; Podsie, i vol. (Larousse.) Van BfevER et L^ataud : Poetes d'Anjourd'hui, 2 vols.
(Mercure de France, 191 3.) An excellent anthology with
very full bibliographies. Robert de laBaissi^re : Anthologie Poetique dn XX" Steele,
2 vols. (Cres et Cie, 1923.) Begins where Bever and
LSataud leave off. Lady Frazer : Fleurs de France. Poesies Lyriques depuis
le Romantisme. (Clarendon Press, 1921.) La Pleiade. (Librairie de France, 1922.) Contains poems by
Paul Valery, Madame de Noailles, etc.) J. Gresshoff : A la Gloire de la Belgique. Prose and Verse.
(Amsterdam, 1915.) J. DuMONT-WlLDEN : Anthologie des Ecrivains beiges, Pontes
et Prosateurs, 2 vols. (Cres et Cie, 1918.)
III. SELECTIONS FROM SINGLE AUTHORS
1. Poetry
Theodore de Banville : Choix de Poesies. (Charpentier,
1923-) TntoPHiLE Gautier : Choix de Podsies. (Charpentier, 1922.)
Verlaine : Choix de Poesies. (Charpentier, 1918-)
Verhaeren : Choix de Pobnes. (Mercure de France, igi?-)
Charles P£guy : Morceaux Choisis des CEuvres Poeiiques.
(Ollendorff, 1914.) Paul Fort : Anthologie des Ballades frangaises 1897-1917.
(Mercure de France, 1917.) Francis Jammes : Choix de Podmes. (Mercure de France,
1922.) CoMTESSE DE NoAiLLES : Extraits. (Cres, 1922.)
2. Prose
Sainte-Beuve : Extraits des Causeries, ed. Lanson. (Garnier.) Selections from Sainte-Beuve, ed. Tilley. (C.U.P., 1918.)
APPENDIX B 373
Renan : Pages Choisies. (Lecene Oudin et Cie.)
Taine : Pages Choisies. (Hachette.)
Flaubert : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.)
Ferdinand Fabre : CEuvres Choisies. (Collection Pallas,
Delagrave.) Zola : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) E. ET J. de Goncourt : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) Daudet : Conies Choisis. (Charpentier.) Erckmann-Chatrian : Conies Choisis. (Hachette, 1923.) Maupassant : Conies Choisis pour la Jeunesse. (Ollendorff.) HuYSMANS : Pages Choisies. (Collection Gallia, Dent.) Pierre Loti : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) Ren6 Bazin : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) RENfe BoYLESVE : Pages Choisies. (Cres et Cie, 1922.) Maurice Maeterlinck : Morceaiix Choisis. (Collection
Nelson.) R^MY de Gourmont : Pages Choisies. (Mercure de France,
1922.) Anatole France : Pages Choisies. (Armand Colin.) LfeoN FRAPife : L'Ecoliere et auires Conies. (Collection Nelson.) Charles P^guy : Morceanx Choisis, 1900-1910. (Grasset.) Charles Maurras : Pages Liiieraires choisies. (Delagrave,
1922.) Marcel Proust : Morceaiix Choisis. (Mercure de France.
In the Press.)
liNDEX
(Names of works are printed in italics. Figures in heavy type indicate the pages where the main account of an author or subject is given.)
Abelard, i, lo
Academie Fran^aise, i, 203, 216-221, 239, 304
Academie Goncourt, ii, 250
Action Franfaise, L', ii, 334
Adam de la Halle, i, 75, 76
Adam of Saint Victor, i, 12
Adam, Paul, ii, 333
Aiol, i, 56
Alembert, Jean le Rond d', i, 357, 363, 365, 366, 369-372, 397-40°
Alexis, Saint, see Vie de Saint Alexis
Aliscans, i, 24, 56
Amadis de Gaiile, i, 107, 108, 175, 176, 188, 195
Amiel, Henri-Fr6deric, ii, 296
Ampere, Andr6-Marie, ii, 190
Amyot, Jacques, i, 107, 108, 219
Ancey, Georges, ii, 286
Andeli, Henri d', i, 74
Andrieux, Franfois-Guillaume-Jean-Stanislas, ii, 9
Angennes, Julie d', see Montausier, Duchesse de
Angers, David d', ii, 49
Arago, Francois, ii, 190
Arnauld, Antoine, i, 227, 232
Arnauld, Jacqueline, " la M^re Ang61ique," i, 227, 233
Arnauld, Le Grand, i, 227, 228, 229, 245, 253, 283, 305
Assoucy, Francois d', i, 213, 214
Aubignac, Francois Hedelin, Abb6 d', i, 209
Aubign6, Agrippa d', i, 153-156, 181
Aticassin et Nicolette, i, 40; ii, 116
Audoux, Marguerite, ii, 344
Auger, Louis, ii, 46
Augier, Emile, i, 423 ; ii, 280, 282, 283, 285
Aulnoy, Marie Cath6rinc, Comtesse d', i, 329, 330
Avenir, L\ ii, 56, 57
375
376 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Avocat Pathelin, L', i, 77, 78 Aymeri de Narbonne, i, 24
Baif, Antoine de, i, 131, 139, 140, 217
Baif, Lazare de, i, 98, 130, 131, 142
Ballanche, Pierre-Simon, ii, 55
Balzac, Honore de, ii, 115, 121, 126, 127, 131, 132, 133-142, 146,
148, 196, 197, 200, 202, 205, 214, 240, 242, 243, 252, 253, 280 Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de, i, 136, 192, 221, 222, 283 Banville, Theodore de, ii, 204, 263, 264 Baour-Lormian, Pierre, ii, 10, 41 Barante, Prosper de, ii, 12, 25, 157, 158, 159. 167 Barbier, Auguste, ii, loi Barbizon School, the, ii, 203 Baron, Michel, i, 33S
Barr^s, Maurice, ii, 267, 274, 310, 319, 333, 334, 335, 337 Bartas, Guillaume du, i, 136, 153, 174, 178, 180 Barthel^my, I'Abbe Louis, i, 433, 434 Barzun, Henri-Martin, ii, 342, 343 Basnage de Beauval, Henri, i, 344 Bataille, Henri, ii, 329 Baudelaire, Charles, ii, 202, 207, 214, 215, 236, 264, 301-304, 309,
312, 317 Baudouin de Sebourg, i, 56
Bayle, Pierre, i, 302, 305, 330, 343, 344, 375, 376 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Carron de, i, 358, 416-419, 423 Becque, Henri, ii, 2S5 Bellay, Joachim du, i, 97, 99, loi, 120, 128, 131, 136-139, 141, 181,
182 ; ii, 95, 275 Belleau, Remi, i, 128, 139, 140, 149 Belle Doette, see Chansons de Toile Benda, Julien, ii, 336 Benoit de Sainte-Maure, i, 42 Benserade, Isaac, i, 193
B6ranger, Pierre Jean de, ii, 101, 102, 278 Bergson, Henri, ii, 298, 299, 332, 336 Bernard, Claude, ii, 190, 191, 251 Bernard de Ventadour, i, 50, 51 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri, i, 363, 447, 448-450 ;
ii, 3, 19, 24, 37, 72, 328 Bertaut, Jean, i, 136
Berthelot, Marcelin, ii, 190, 219, 220, 225 Bertin, le Chevalier Antoine de, i, 433 Bertran de Born, i, 50 Bertran du Guesclin, i, 84 Bertrand, Aloysius, ii, 304
INDEX 377
Bestiaries, i, i6, 80
Beyle, Henri, see Stendhal
B^ze, Theodore de, i, 144
Blanc, Louis, ii, 66
Blondel de Nesle, i, 51
Bodel, Jean, d'Arras, i, 52, 72
Bohdme, La, ii, 197-200
Boileau, Nicolas, i, 136, 173, 180, 181, 182, 198, 205, 224, 241, 24:4r-
250, 252, 253, 272, 283, 287, 295, 300, 302, 304, 305, 309, 314,
332 ; ii, 16, 26 Boisguillebert, Pierre le Pesant, Sieur de, i, 300 Boissonade, Jean-Franfois, ii, 10
Bonald, Louis-Gabriel Ambrose de, ii, 53, 54, 55, 58 Borel, P6trus, ii, 100, 101, 197 Bornier, Henri de, ii, 329 Bossuet, Jacques B^nigne, i, 190, 224, 230, 240, 243, 255, 283, 291,
292-294, 295, 296, 302, 308, 316, 317, 320, 388, 404 ; ii, 53,
154. 175 Bouhours, le P^re, i, 285, 304 Boulanger, Louis, ii, 49
Bourdaloue, Louis, i, 230, 285, 291, 294-296 Bourget, Paul, ii, 74, 119, 235, 236, 269, 295, 296, 325_, 326,_328,
33-5 Bourgogne, Hotel de, i, 144, 186, 200, 262, 338, 340
Boursault, Jean-Fran9ois, i, 337
Boyer, Paul, ii, 204
Boylesve, Ren6, ii, 344
Brantome, Pierre de Bourdeilles, Sieur de, i, 158
Brieux, Eugene, ii, 286, 329
Brizeux, Augusta, ii, loi, 102
Brunetiere, Ferdinand, i, 321, 393, 419, 430 ; ii, 69, 125, 215, 235,
236, 237, 268, 279, 296, 331 Brut, Roman de, i, 35, 42 Buchanan, George, i, 142, 143 Bude, Guillaume, i, 105, no, 339 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de, i, 355, 360, 365, 373, 399,
401-406, 431 ; ii, 13, 171 Bussy-Rabutin, Roger, Comte de, i, 213, 281, 283, 284, 327 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, ii, 35, 36, 41, 42, 73, 80, 240
Cabinet des Fies, i, 330
Caf6s, i, 362
Cahiers de la Quinzaine, ii, 331 «., 336
Calvin, Jean, i, 99, 100, 107, 108-110, 115
Campistron, Jean Galbert de, i, 409
Canlildnes, i, 25
378 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Caricature, ii, 200-202
Caricature, La, ii, 201
Carte de Tendre, La, i, 197, 198
Caylus, Anne-Claude-Philippe, Comte de, i, 370, 433
Cazotte, Jacques, ii, 148 w.
Cenacle, le Premier, de I'Arsenal, ii, 45, 46, 89, 148
C6nacle, le Second, de Victor Hugo, ii, 49, 80, 95, 181
Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, Les, i, 87, 96 ; ii, 144
Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas, i, 328, 363
Champfieury (Jules Husson), ii, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205,
206, 210, 243 Chanson d'Antioche et de Jerusalem, i, 41, 42 Chanson de Guillaume, i, 20 Chanson de Roland, i, 14, 19, 21, 22, 26, 42 Chansons de Geste, i, 19-28, 80 Chansons d'Histoire, see Chansons de Toile Chansons de la mal-mariie, i, 48, 49 Chansons de Toile, i, 48 Chapelain, Jean, i, 186, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 199. 205, 218,
219, 222, 247, 284, 285 Chapelle, Claude-Emmanuel, i, 245 Chardin, Jean, i, 380 Charivari, Le, ii, 201, 202 Charles d'Orleans, i, 86, 88 Charron, Pierre, i, 102, 172, 185, 212, 213 Chartier, Alain, i, 85, 86, 116, 118 Chastelain, Georges, i, 117 Chateaubriand, Frangois-Rene de, i, 326, 351, 447 ; ii, 4, 12, 19-25,
26, 28, 37. 40, 43, 45, 48, 53, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 89, 115, 117,
120, 143, 157. 158, 159, 243. 328 Chdtelain de Couci, Le, i, 40 Chdtelaine de Vergi, La, i, 40 Chenedolle, Charles de, ii, 10, 45
Ch^nier, Andr6, i, 358, 430, 433, 434-438 ; ii, 3, 45, 48 Ch6nier, Marie-Joseph, ii, 9, 10, 28 Cherbuliez, Victor, ii, 259 Chevalier, Sulpice Guillaume, see Gavarni Chivalry, i, 28-30, 33, 80 Chopin, Frederic, ii, 129 Chrestien, Florent, i, 156
Chr6tien de Troyes, i, 37, 38, 50, 51, 58, 66, 82 ; ii. 116 Claudel, Paul, ii, 309. 322-324, 333, 338 Clermont, Emile, ii, 344 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ii, 35 Colet, Louise, ii, 241, 242 Colin Muset, i, 52 ; ii, 95
INDEX 379
College de France, Le, ii, 69, 70, 156, 169, 175, 221 Combat des Trente, Le, i, 84
Commines, Philippe de, i, 41, 47, 87, 106; ii, 158 Comte. Augusta, ii, 55, 62, 68, 190. 191-194, 227, 237 Comte de Poitiers, Le, i, 40 CondamnatioH de Banquet, i, 74 Conde, le Grand, i, 272, 278. 283. 296, 308, 309, 365 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot, l'Abb6 de, i, 371, 399, 44^ : ". 66, 227 Condorcet, Jacques-Marie de Caritat de, i, 371, 399 ; ". 25 Confrerie de la Passion, La, i, 72, 143, 144, 200 Conon de Bethune, i, 51 Conrart, Valentin, i, 216, 217, 222 Conservateur Litteraire, Le, ii, 45, 46 Constant, Benjamin, ii, 12, 13, 25, 47, 115. I43 Coppee, Fran9ois, ii, 2^4, 274, 275, 276, 277, 329 Corneille, Pierre, i, 151, 173, 184, 188, 190, 193, 195, 199, 202, 203- 210, 224, 253, 254, 255, 263, 280, 282, 286, 302, 376, 407, 409 ; ii, 59, 106, 113, 114 Corneille, Thomas, i, 336
Cornet, Nicolas, i, 228, 229
Coucy, Gui, ChMelain de, i, 51
Courbet, Gustave, ii, 198, 202, 203-205, 210
Courier, Paul-Louis, ii, 58-60
Couronnement de Louis, Le, i, 20, 24
Courrier franfais, Le, i, 342
Courteline, Georges, ii, 286
Cousin, Victor, ii, 66-68, 69, 168. 173, 219, 226, 231, 294
Cr6billon, Fran9ois Jolyot de, i, 363, 409, 410
Creuz6 de Lesser, Le Baron Auguste-Fran9ois, ii, 28, 29
Croisade, Chansons de la, i, 41
Croisade, Cycle de la, i, 49
Curel, Fran9ois de, ii, 286, 329
Cuvier, Georges, ii, 138, 190
Cuvier, Le, i, 77, 78
Cyrano de Bergerac, i, 184
Dacier, Anne Lefevre, Mme. i, 305
Dagu^rches, Henry, ii, 333
Dancourt, Florent Carton, 1, 338, 339, 340 ; ii, 140
Dangeau, Philippe de Courcillon, Abb6 de, i, 322, 323
Danton, Georges-Jacques, ii, 4, 5, 7
Darwin, Charles Robert, ii, 176, 190, 191, 237
Daubenton, Louis, i, 399
Daudet, Alphonse, ii, 241, 248, 250, 254, 255-257, 294
Daumier, Honor6, ii, 201, 202, 205
Dibats, i, 74
38o A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Ddbats, Les, ii, 46, 220
Dicade Philosophique, La, ii, 6
Decadents, Les, ii, 296, 310
Defauconpret, Augusta Jean Baptiste, ii, 120
Difense et Illustration de la Langtie fratifaise, i, 127, 128-130 ; ii, 265
Deffand, Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du, i, 360, 365, 368-
370, 371, 372, 382 Delacroix, Eugene, ii, 49, 202 Delaunay, Mile, see Stael, Mme de Delavigne, Casimir, i, 423 ; ii, loi, 103 Delille, I'Abbe Jacques, i, 432 ; ii, 9, 10, 47 Desbordes-Valmore, Mme Marceline, ii, 100 Descartes, Rene, i, 173, 184, 185, 206, 210, 213, 220, 221, 222-225,
236, 247, 250, 303, 308, 351 ; ii, 67. 194, 218 Deschamps, Antony, ii, 45 Deschamps, Emile, ii, 45, 46, 48 Deschamps, Eustace, i, 84, 85, 86, 117 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, i, 199, 252, 303, 304, 305 Des Masures, Louis, i, 146 Desmoulins, Camille, ii, 7 Des Periers, Bonaventure, i, in, 115, 116, 120, 122, 329; ii,
144 Desportes, Philippe, i, 136, 153, 178, 180 Destouches, Philippe Nicolas, i, 360, 413, 414 Dickens, Charles, ii, 256 Dictionnaire de I'Academie, i, 219 Diderot, Denis, i, 220, 355, 357, 358, 360, 363, 364, 365, 368, 373,
391-395, 403, 421, 422, 423, 427, 442 Dits, the, i, 74
Dolet, Etienne, i, 107, 108, in, 122 Donnay, Maurice, ii, 286, 329 Boon de Mayence, Cycle of the, i, 20, 25 Dorat, Jean, i, 128, 131
Dreyfus Case, the, ii, 289-293, 297, 327, 335 Drouart la Vache, i, 51 Drumont, Edouard, ii, 289, 290 Du Bois, Paul-Franfois, ii, 64 Du Bos, rAbb6 Jean-Baptiste, i, 306 Duclos, Charles Pineau, i, 362, 367, 373, 399 Dufresny, Charles Riviere, i, 338, 339, 341, 380 Duhamel, Georges, ii, 342 Dumas, Alexandre, p^re, ii, 49, 105, 110, in, 124, 125, 133,
142, 202 Dumas, Alexandre, fils, i, 423 ; ii, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285 Dupin, Lucile Aurore, see Sand, George Dussault, Jean- Joseph, ii, 10, 44
INDEX 381
Duval, Alexandre, ii, 9
Duvergier de Hauranne, Jean, i, 227
Ecouchard Lebrun, i, 431, 432
Effort Libre, V, ii, 331 n.
Encyclopaedias, 13th-century, i, 82
EncyclopMie, L\ i, 368, 391, 395-400, 437, 442 ; ii, 25
Encyclopidie Nouvelle, L\ ii, 65
Encyclop6distes, i, 364, 371, 405, 419 ; ii, 6, 266
Enfantin, Barth^lemy-Prosper, ii, 63
Enfant ingrat, L\ i, 74
Enfant prodiguc, L\ i, 74
Enfants de Mainienant, Les, i, 74
England, Influence of, i, 33. 359, 361 ; ii, 41, 42, 99
Romantic Movement in, ii, 34, 35 Epinay, Petronille d'Ecslavelles, Mme d', i, 364, 365, 373 Erasmus, Desiderius, i, 105, 142 Erckmann-Chatrian, ii, 259, 260 Esconfle, L', i, 40 Esprit, Jacques, i, 279 Estauni6, Edouard, ii, 335, 344 Estienne, ?Ienri, i, 152 Etienne, Charles-Guillaume, ii, 9 Evdnement, L\ ii, 251
Fabliaux, i, 60, 61, 62 ; ii, 144
Fabre, Emile, ii, 329
Fabre, Ferdinand, ii, 254, 255
Faguet, Emile, ii, 86, 176, 194, 220, 235, 257
Fail, Noel du, i, 115, 116, 329; ii, 144
Farce, i, 76, 77, 78, 264, 265
Fauriel, Claude, ii, 107
Fauvcl, Roman de, i, 64, 65
Feletz, rAbb6 Charles, ii, 10
F6n61on, Fran9ois Salignac de la Mothe, i, 224, 240, 291, 301, 302,
305. 306, 307, 308, 315-320, 325, 334, 353 Feudalism, i, 18, 19, 80, 98 Feuillet, Octave, ii, 259
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, ii, 14, 17, 35, 67, 297, 298 Figaro, Le. ii, 332 Flaubert, Gustave, ii, 205, 206, 207, 210, 211, 214, 225, 240-247,
250, 253, 257 Fldchier, Esprit, i, 291, 320 Flore et Blancheflcur, i, 39 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de, ii, 10
382 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Fontanes, Louis de, i, 431, 432
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bouvier de, i, 205, 304, 305, 355, 363, 365,
366, 367, 368, 370, 375, 376-378, 431, 441 Fort, Paul, ii, 339
Fougere, Etienne, Bishop of Rennes, i, 15 Fourier, Charles, ii, 61, 64, 66 Foumier, Alain, ii, 344 Franc-Archer de Bagnolet, Le, i, 74, 75 France, Anatole (Jacques Anatole Thibaut), ii, 237, 238, 292, 295,
325. 327, 328, 336, 338 Francis I, i, 104, 105, 107, 118, 127, 142, 175 Frapie, Leon, ii, 344
Froissart, Jean, i, 41, 46, 47, 84; ii, 158 Fromentin, Eugene, ii, 247, 248, 325 Furetiere, Antoine, i, 184, 245, 246, 287
Galland, Antoine, i, 329, 380
Garasse, Le Pere Franfois, i, 212
Garin le Loherain, i, 25
Gamier, Robert, i, 146, 147, 148, 200, 202
Gamier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, i, 14
Gassendi, Pierre, i, 213
Gautier de Coinci, i, 15, 172
Gautier, Mme Judith, ii, 250
Gautier, Thtophile, ii, 42, 75, 99, 107, 147, 149, 152, 153, 181, 197,
207, 241, 243, 247, 250, 261, 262, 263, 264, 320 Gavarni (Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier), ii, 202, 225, 250 Gazette de France, La, i, 336, 342 ; ii, 46 Geoffrey of Monmouth, i, 35, 36
Geoffrin, Mme, i, 360, 365, 367, 370, 371, 372, 373, 377 Geoffrey, Juhen Louis, ii, 10, 11 Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire, ii, 138, 190, 191 Gerbert de Metz, i, 25 Germany, Influence of, ii, 42, 295, 297, 299
Mme de Stael and, ii, 16, 17
Romantic Movement in, ii, 35 Geste de Blaye, i, 25 Geste des Lorrains, 1, 25 Geste du Roi, i, 21 Gide, Andre, ii, 344 Gilbert, Nicolas- Joseph-Laurent, i, 432 Giraud, Victor, ii, 45, 46 Globe, Le, ii, 47, 48, 50, 63. 64, 80, 181 Goethe, Wolfgang von, ii, 13, 17, 33, 35, 39, 42, 104, 149 Gombaud, Jean Ogicr de, i, 218 Gombcrville, Marin le Roy de, i, 196, 330
I
INDEX 383
Goncourt, Edmond et Jules de, ii, 157, 188, 206, 213, 215, 225, 233,
241, 243, 248-251, 255, 259, 261 Goncourt, Edmond de, ii, 212, 249, 250, 285 Gormond et Isembard, i, 20
Gourmont, Remy de, ii, 238, 239, 311, 315, 316 Gournay, Marie de, i, 159 Grail, Quest of the Holy, i, 37 Gregh, Fernand, ii, 332 Gresset, Jean-Baptiste-Louis, i, 414 Gr6vin, Jacques, i, 146, 147, 149, 202 Grimm, Friedricli Melchior, i, 357, 363, 365, 368, 372, 373, 399,
421 ; ii, 13, 35 Gringoire, Pierre, i, 77 Griseldis, Estoire de, i, 73 Guerente, i, 143 Guerin, Maurice de, ii, 56
Gui, Chatelain de Coucy, see Coucy, Gui, Chatelain de Guillaume de Ddle, i, 40 Guillaume d' Orange, Cycle de, i, 20 Guillaume de Palerne, i, 40 Guillaume de Poitiers, i, 49, 51 Guillet, Pernette de, i, 124, 125, 126 Guillot, Jacques, i, 156 Guinguene, Pierre, ii, 4, 42 Guiraut de Borneil, i, 50 Guirlande de Julie, La, i, 193 Guizot, Fran9ois, ii, 41, 67, 69, 157, 158, 160, 161-164, 165, 167,
168, 169, 171
Haeckel, Ernst, ii, 237
Halevy, Ludovic, ii, 284
Haller, Albert von, i, 399
Hamilton, Anthony, i, 301, 308, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333,
339 Hamp, Pierre, ii, 334 Hardy, Alexandre, i, 144, 200-203, 209 Haussmann, Georges-Eugene, ii, 189
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ii, 67, 218, 219, 225, 297, 298 Heine, Heinrich, ii, 86, 94, 149
Helv6tius, Claude-Adrian, i, 360, 367, 372, 373, 398, 399 Hemon, Louis, ii, 333 Henault, Le President, i, 366 Herberay des Essarts, i, 107, io8, 175
Herder, Johann-Gottfried, ii, 17, 172, 173, 175, 176, 218, 219 Her6dia, Jose-Maria de, i, 438; ii, 264, 265, 266, 272-275, 317 Heroet, Aiitoine, i, 107, 122, 124, 126
384 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Hervieu, Paul, ii, 286, 329
Histoire des Ouvrages des Savanis, i, 344
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, ii, 42, 148, 149, 202
Holbach, Paul-Henri, Baron d', i, 360, 364, 365, 372, 373, 399
Hotman, Franfois, i, 153
Houssaye, Ars^ne, ii, 197
Hugo, Victor, ii, 37, 41, 43, 45, 47, 51, 57, 61, 63, 75, 77-88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 104, 105-110, 113, 120, 121-124, 125, 130, 141, 145, 181, 196, 197, 202, 207, 243, 253, 261, 264, 267, 270, 302,
305 Huon de Bordeaux, i, 21, 23, 24, 27 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, ii, 239, 319, 320
Idealism, ii, 209, 210, 239
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, ii, 202
Italy, Influence of, i, 86, 92, 95-99, 185-187 ; ii, 43
Romantic Movement in, ii, 36 Italy, Wars of, i, 97
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, ii, 67
Jaloux, Edmond, ii, 344
Jammes, Francis, ii, 314, 338, 339
Janin, Jules, ii, 109
Jaufre Rudel, i, 50
Jansen, i, 226, 227, 228
Jekan de Paris, ii, 144
Jezi d'Adam, Le, i, 70
Jodelle, Etienne, i, 128, 140, 144-146, 147, 148, 149, 202
Joinville, Sieur de, i, 41, 44—46
Journal de la Villa de Paris, i, 343
Journal des Avis, i, 343
Journal des Dihats, ii, 7, 10, 44, 238
Journal des Savants, i, 343
Kahn, Gustave, ii, 314
Kant, Immanuel, ii, 17, 66, 218, 219
Keats, John, ii, 35
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, ii, 17, 35
Kock, Paul de, ii, 278
Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand, ii, 104
Krasinski, Ignace, ii, 69, 129, 130
Lab6, Louise, i, 124, 125, 126
Labiche, Eugene, ii, 279 «., 284 La Boetie, Etienne de, i, 158, 159
INDEX 385
La Bruyere, Jean de, i, 173, 183, 204, 213, 230, 247, 256, 298, 301,
302, 305, 307, 308-315, 316, 317, 325, 326, 337, 339, 376, 380,
408, 413, 424 La Calprenede, Gautier de, i, 196, 197, 439; ii, 116 La Chaussee, Nivelle de, i, 354, 363, 420, 421 Lacordaire, Henri, ii, 53, 56, 57, 58, 61
Lafayette, Mme de, i, 190, 272, 279, 283, 284, 287, 288, 289, 327 Lafon, Andre, ii, 344 La Fontaine, Jean de, i, 120, 238, 239, 241, 243, 244, 245, 250, 252,
271-277, 283, 285, 287, 300, 302, 304, 305, 314, 315, 358 ; ii,
59, 171, 225 La Force, Charlotte Rose de Caumont de, i, 330 Laforgue, Jules, ii, 314 La Fosse, Antoine de, i, 409 La Grange-Chancel, Joseph, i, 409 La Harpe, Jean-Frangois de, i, 343 ; ii, 10, 13, 16 Lai de I'Ombre, Le, i, 40 Lai du Conseil, Le, i, 40
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, ii, 176, 190, 191 Lamartine, Alphonse de, i, 433, 447 ; ii, 10, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47,
50, 51, 61. 72-77, 89, 94, 99, 100, ir6, 141, 145, 197, 304 Lambert, Anne Therese, Marquise de, i, 352, 354, 365, 366, 367,
377. 379 Lamennais, Felicite-Robert de, ii, 51, 53, 55-57, 58, 61, 69, 70, 127,
128, 129, 181 La Mothe le Vayer, Fran9ois, i, 213 La Motte, Houdart de, i, 305, 363, 366, 431 Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette, i, 38, 82 Langue d'Oc, La, i, 5, 51 Langue d'OEil, La, i, 5, 48 La Noue, Fran9ois de, i, 158 La Peruse, Jean de, i, 146 Lapidaries, i, 16
Laplace, Pierre Simon, ii, 190, 191 Larivey, Pierre, i, 150 La Rochefoucauld, Due de, i, 190, 230, 272, 278-281, 282, 287,
288, 311, 312, 313, 407, 413 Latour de Saint-Ybars, Isidore, ii, 280 Lavedan, Henri, ii, 286 Lebrun, Pierre, ii, 103 Leclerc, Jean, i, 344 Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie Rene, i, 438 ; ii, 88, 94, 211, 244,
264, 265, 266-272, 275, 276, 338 Legouv6, Gabriel, ii, 9 Le Ma9on, Antoine, i, 107 Le Maire de Beiges, Jean, i, 117 VOL. II. — 25
386 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITER-\TURE
Lemaitre, Jules, ii, 237, 238
Lemercier, Nepomucene, ii, 9, 103, 107
Lemonnier, Canaille, ii, 340
Le Moyne, le Pere, i, 199
Lendit, Fair of, i, 23, 54, 83
Leopardi, Giacomo, ii, 43
Lepelletier, Edmond, ii, 305
Leroux, Pierre, ii, 61, 63, 64-66, 70, 127, 128, 129, 130
Leroy, Pierre, i, 156
Le Sage, Alain Rene, i, 302, 338, 341, 363, 419, 424-426; ii, 140
Lespinasse, Julie de, i, 365, 367, 369, 370, 371, 372, 374, 429
Lessing, Gotthold Eptiraim, ii, 17
Letourneur, Pierre, ii, 41
Libertinage, i, 213
Libre Parole, La, ii, 290
Liszt, Franz, ii, 127, 128
Littr6, Emile, ii, 194
Livre des Manures, Le, i, 15
Longepierre, i, 409
Lorrains, Geste des, see Geste des Lorrains
Lorris, Guillaume de, i, 66, 67
Loti, Pierre (Julian Viaud), ii, 295, 325, 328, 329
Louis XIV, i, 237-240, 245, 247, 254, 263, 272, 283, 291, 292, 297-
302, 316, 320, 321, 322, 325, 326, 333, 334, 336, 337, 340, 342,
347 ; ii, 156. 164, 180 Luce de Lance val, ii, 9 Lyons, as an artistic and intellectual centre during the Renaissance,
i, 96, 97 Lyons, School of, i, 123-126, 127
Machaut, Guillaume de, i, 84, 86
Maeterlinck, Maurice, ii, 239, 298, 321, 322, 323, 340
Maine de Biran, ii, 66
Maine, Duchesse de, i, 365, 367
Maintenon, Fran^oise d'Aubigne, Mme de, i, 298, 320, 326, 327,
333-335, 337 Mairet, Jean, i, 205
Maistre, Joseph de, ii, 53, 54, 55, 58, 61 Maistre, Xavier de, ii, 145 Malebranche, Nicolas, i, 224, 351 ; ii, 218 Malesherbes, Chretien Guillaume de, i, 221, 398 Malfilatre, Jacques-Charles-Louis de, i, 432 Malherbe, Franfois de, i, 171, 172, 177-181, 182, 184, 186, 190, 191,
222, 244, 245, 247 Mallarm6, St^phane, ii, 239, 264, 298, 310, 311, 313, 314, 315. 316,
317, 318, 323, 340
INDEX 387
Manon Lescaut, i, 428, 429; ii, 116
Manzoni, Alessandro, ii, 43, 73, 106
Margaret of Navarre, i, 105, 106, 107, 115, 116, 120-122, 124, 127, 142, 329 ; ii, 144
Marie de France, i, 39
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, i, 354, 365, 366, 367, 370, 415, 416, 419, 424, 426, 427, 441 ; ii, 113
Marmontel, Jean-Franfois, i, 343, 362, 363, 367, 371, 399; ii, 13, 144
Marot, Clement, i, 97, iii, 117-120, 121, 126, 127, 128, 219, 388
Mascaron, Jules, i, 291, 292
Massillon, Jean-Baptiste, i, 291, 320, 321
Maiidre de Bretagne, i, 35-38, 82
Malidre de France, i, 20-28
Maupassant, Guy de, ii, 143, 211, 248, 254, 257-259, 294
Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, i, 357, 363, 384, 385
Maurras, Charles, ii, 333, 334
Maynard, Fran9ois, i, 181
Mazarinades, i, 342
Meilhac, Henri, ii, 284
Memoires de Mademoiselle, 1, 324
Mdmoires relatijs d, VHistoire de France, ii, 156
Mend^s, Catulle, ii, 37, 264, 268
Mercier, Louis S6bastien, i, 422
Mercure de France, he, ii, 239, 311, 331 «.
Mercure Galant, Le, i, 342, 343
Merim^e, Prosper, ii, 119, 121, 147, 150-152, 197
Merrill, Stuart, ii, 314, 319
Meschinot, Jean, i, 117
Meung, Jean de, i, 67
M^zerai, Fran9ois Eudes de, ii, 155
Michaud, Joseph Fran9ois, ii, 158, 159
Michelet, Jules, i, 207. 241, 297, 298 ; ii, 51, 61, 69, 70, 125, 141, 156,
157. 158, 161, 165, 168-175, 176, 222, 225, 295 Mickiewicz, Adam, ii, 56, 69, 70, 129, 130, 170, 171 Mignet, Franfois, ii, 157, 158, 164-166, 167, 171 Mill, John Stuart, ii, 194 Mille, Pierre, ii, 333 Millet, Jacques, i, 71 Millevoye, Charles, ii, 10 Minerve Fran^aise, La, ii, 46 Minerve Litieraire, La, ii, 46
Mirabeau, Gabriel-Honor6 de Riquetti, Comtc de, ii, 4, 5 Miracle Plays, i, 72, 73, 202 Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, i, 14, 72 Miracles de Noire Dame, i, 15, 72, 84
VOL. II. 25*
388 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), i, 6i, 151, 173, 183, 188, 193, 198,
220, 233, 238, 239, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 250, 252, 261-270,
272, 314, 315. 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341. 353, 409, 413; ii,
59. 106 Molinet, Jean, i, 117 Moniteur official, Le, ii, 6, 20 Monluc, Blaise de, i, 157 Monnier, Henri, ii, 201, 205 Monstrelet, Enguerrand de, ii, 158 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, i, 97, 102, 106, 153, 156, 158-164,
169, 212, 231, 235, 311, 313, 330, 379, 445 ; ii, 224, 328 Montalembert, Charles de, ii, 56
Montausier, Julie d'Angennes, Mme de, i, 192, 193, 283 Montchrestien, Antoine de, i, 147, 153, 200 Montegut, Emile, ii, 202, 234, 235 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de, i, 281, 338, 339,
355. 356, 360, 364, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 379-382, 388.
397' 399. 406 ; ii, 16, 154 Montfaucon, Bernard de, i, 433 Montfleury, Antoine, i, 337 Montor, Arnaud de, ii, 43 Montpensier, Mile de, i, 279, 311 Moreas, Jean, ii, 310, 314 Morellet, L'Abbe, i, 399 Mousket, Philippe, i, 49 Murat, Mme, i, 330 Muret, Marc- Antoine, i, 143, 146 Murger, Henri, ii, 198, 199, 200 Muse francaise, La, ii, 46 Musset, Alfred de, ii, 27, 40, 41, 44, 49, 51, 94-99, 103, 111-113,
116, 117, 127, 128, 146, 197, 259 Mystere du Siege d'Orleans, i, 71 Mysteres, the, i, 70-73, 143, 144, 202
Napoleon Bonaparte, ii, 4, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 20, 27, 28, 37, 41, 79, 82,
83, 86, 118, 155, 166 Napoleon III, ii, 166, 187-189 Necker, Mme, i, 365, 372, 373, 374 Necker de Saussure, Mme, ii, 43 Nerval, Gerard de (Gerard Labrunie), ii, 49, 100, loi, 147, 149, 150,
197 Nicole, Pierre, i, 245, 252, 285, 286 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, ii, 169 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, ii, 299, 300, 309, 331 Ninon de Lenclos, i, 213, 331 Nisard, D6sire, ii, 49, 179, 180, 232, 236
INDEX 389
Noailles, Mme de, ii, 332
Nodier, Charles, ii, 45, 46, 49, 89, 104, 147, 148, 149
Nolly, Emile, ii, 333
Nouvelle Revue fran^aise, La, ii, 331 n.
Nouvelles a la Main, i, 341, 342
Nouvelles de la Republiqite des Leitres, i, 343
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), ii, 35, 297, 298
Novare, Philippe de, i, 44
Ogier le Danois, i, 20, 25 Oriour, see Chansons de Toile Ossian, ii, 10, 34, 36, 41, 72
Pailleron, Edouard, ii, 284
Parnasse contemporain, Le, ii, 264, 310
Parnassians, the, ii, 99, 153, 195, 207, 261, 263, 264-277, 298, 301,
302, 305, 310, 312, 341 Parny, Evariste de, i, 433 ; ii, 266 Partenopeus de Blois, i, 40 Pascal, Blaise, i, 163, 184, 1S5, 220, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229,
230-236, 243, 250, 2S3, 286, 303, 308, 313 ; ii, 39, 40, 239 Pasquier, Etienne, i, 153 Passerat, Jean, i, 156 Pasteur, Louis, ii, 190 Pastoral Plays, i, 201, 202 Pastourelles, i, 49
Peguy, Charles, ii, 292, 333, 336-338, 340 Pelerinage de Charlemagne, Le, i, 20, 21, 23 Peletier du Mans, Jacques, i, 128, 130 Pellisson, Paul, i, 216, 218 Percy's Reliques, ii, 34
Perrault, Charles, i, 304, 305, 323, 329, 330 Petit Jehan de Sainfrd, ii, 144 Petrarch, i. 125, 132. 139, 186; ii, 43, 72, 75 Philipon, Charles, ii, 201, 202 Picard, Louis Benoit, ii, 9 Picaresque novel, i, 213-215, 424 Pichot, Amedee, ii, 41 Pigault-Lebrun (Charles Antoine Guillaume Pigault de I'Epinoy),
ii. 134 Piron, Alexis, i, 414 Pisan, Christine de, i, 68, 85, 86 Pithou, Pierre, i, 156
Pixerecourt, Guilbert de, ii, 9, 104, 105, 107, 109, 134 Pleiade, La, i, 103, 106, 127-141, 142, 144, 149, 163, 178, 179, 182,
198 ; ii, 181, 303
390 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Poe, Edgar Allan, ii, 302, 314, 317
Poland, ii, 69, 70, 129, 130
Ponsard, Frangois, ii, 113, 114, 197, 279, 280, 282
Pontus de Tyard, i, 128
Port- Royal, i, 185, 197, 224, 227-233, 250, 251, 253, 254. 255, 279,
325 Porto-Riche, Georges de, ii, 286
PrSface de Cromwell, La, ii, 48, 104, 105-108, 196, 207, 265 Pr6vost, l'Abb6, i, 354, 360, 424, 427-429 Prevost-Paradol, Lucien-Anatole, ii, 224 Princesse de CUves, La, i, 286, 288. 327 ; ii, 116 Proudhon, Pierre, ii, 66, 202 Proust, Marcel, ii, 344 n. Psichari, Ernest, ii, 333, 336 Puy d'Arras, le, i, 58-60
Querelle des Anciens et de3 Modemes, i, 168, 254, 302-307, 367 Quinault, Philippe, i, 409
Quinet. Edgar, ii, 69, 70, 71. 157, 169, 170, 173, 174. 175, 176 Quotidienne, La, ii, 46, 47
Rabelais, Fran9ois, i, 97, 107, 110-115, 117, 118, 124, 160, 162, 181, 212 ; ii, 146
Racan, Honor6 de, i, 181, 190, 193, 213, 247
Racine, Jean, i, 185, 195, 202, 208, 210, 230, 236, 241, 243, 244, 245,
246, 247, 250, 251-260, 270, 272, 283, 287, 288, 300, 302, 304,
305. 321. 332, 334. 358, 407. 409, 410, 415: ii. 59. 113. 114.
303 Rambouillet, Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de, i, 189-194, 366
Rambouillet, Hotel de, i, 185, 189-194, 197, 203, 216, 283, 292, 363
Raoul de Camhrai, i, 20, 25, 29
Rapin, Nicolas, i, 156
Raynaud, see Chansons de Toile
Raynouard, Franfois, ii, 9, 28
Realism, ii, 196-216, 233, 234, 240-260, 34^-344
RSalisme, ii, 205
R6aumur, Rend Antoine Ferchault de, i, 403, 404
R6camier, Mme, ii, 21
Ricits d'un MSnistrel de Rheims, i, 44
Reformation, the, i, 99, 100, 102
Regnard, Jean-Franfois, i, 302, 338, 339, 340, 419 ; ii, 140
Regnier, Henri de, ii, 314, 315, 316, 318, 319, 340
Regnier, Mathurin, i, 172, 173, 179, 181-183, 245
Renan, Ernest, ii, 194. 217-224, 225, 233, 236, 241, 250, 254. 294,
295. 328 Renard, Jules, ii, 250
INDEX 391
Renart, Roman de, i, 62, 63, 64, 83
Renaud de Montauban, i, 25, 27
Renaudot, Theophraste, i, 342
Retz, Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de, i, 278, 281, 282, 283, 287, 323
Revue de Paris, ii, 145, 146, 182, 241
Revue des Deux Mondes, ii, 145, 152, 160, 182, 220, 236, 238
Revue Europ6enne, ii, 312
Revue Indipendante, ii, 130, 298, 314
Revue Wagnirienne, ii, 298, 313
Rey, Ernest, ii, 333
Reynaud, Jean, ii, 65
Rh^toriqueurs, Les Grands, i, 91, 92, 116, 117, 118, 127
Richelieu, i, 184, 203, 205, 207, 216, 217, 219, 222, 230, 237, 283,
324, 402 Rimbaud, Arthur, ii, 301, 305, 306, 308, 309, 323 Robert de Boron, i, 38
Robespierre, Maximilien-Marie-Isidore de, ii, 4, 5, 6 Rodenbach, Georges, ii, 320, 340 Roland, Chanson de, see Chanson de Roland RoUand, Romain, ii, 292, 336, 344 Remains, Jules, ii, 342, 343 Roman d' Alexandre, i, 35 Roman d'EnSas, i, 35
Roman de Fauvcl, de Renart, see Fauvel, Renart Roinan de la Rose, i, 65, 66-68, 73, 83, 85 Roman de la Violette, i, 40 Roman de Thebes, i, 35 Roman de Troyes, i, 35 Roman des Fables d'Ovide le Grand, i, 65 Romances, i, 33-40 Romans d' A venture, i, 19 Romantic Movement, the, i, 307, 361 ; ii, 3, 25, 33-183, 216
General Characteristics of the, in France, ii, 37-41
After 1830, ii, 49-52
Controversy with the Classicists, ii, 43-49
In literary criticism, ii, 177-178
In England, Germany, Italy, see under England, Germany, Italy Romanticism, ii, 195, 196, 200, 209, 215, 216, 242, 261, 281 Romantics, the, i, 411, 438, 447 ; ii, 21, 29 Ronsard, Pierre de, i, 35, 127, 128, 130-136, 137, 149, 153, 160,
180, 181, 182 ; ii, 181 Rostand, Edmond, ii, 329, 330 Rotrou, Jean, i, 211, 263 Roucher, Jean-Antoine, i, 432 Rouget de Lisle, Claude-Joseph, ii, 10
392 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste, i, 363, 432
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, i, 317, 318, 354, 355, 360, 361, 363, 364.
368, 372. 373, 386, 397, 398, 399, 428, 439-447, 448, 449;
ii, 3. 4- 5. 6, 12, 13, 19, 33, 34, 37, 40. 44. 72, 95, 115. 117, 266 Royer-Collard, Paul, ii, 66 Russia, ii, 132, 152 Rutebeuf, i, 52, 57, 58, 72, 74, 86 Ryer, Pierre du, i, 211
Sable, La Marquise de, i, 190, 192, 279, 283
Sabliere, Mme de la, i, 377
Saint- Amant, Marc-Antoine Gerard, Sieur de, i, 199, 213, 214
Saint-Chamaji, ii, 44
Saint-Evremond, Charles de, i, 213, 219, 283, 305, 308, 327, 330-
333, 335 ; ii, 239 Saint-Gelais, Mellin de, i, 98, 120, 122 Saint-Georges de Bouhelier, ii, 339 Saint-Lambert, Jean-'Fran9ois, i, 373, 432 Saint-Marc Girardin, ii, 179 Saint- Pierre, I'Abbe de, i, 301, 359, 367 Saint-Point, Valentine de, ii, 332
Saint- Simon, Henri de, ii, 55, 61-63, 64, 66, 68, 159, 191, 192 Saint- Simon, Louis de Rouvray, Due de, i, 238, 239, 301, 302,
321-326, 333, 335 ; ii, 156 Saint-Simonians, the, ii, 50, 63, 64, 65, 128, 181, 188 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin de, i, 204, 221, 250, 269, 310, 328,
332, 373. 438 ; ii, 19, -47, 48. 49. 51. 81, 93, 99. 100, 116, 120,
127, 141, 148, 149, 163, 178, 180-183, 194, 217, 225, 227, 228,
230-234, 235, 236, 237, 241, 250, 325 • Sales, Saint-Fran9ois de, Bishop of Geneva, i, 172, 173-175, 177,
283 Salle, Antoine de la, i, 87 Salons, the, i, 194, 263-374 Samain, Albert, ii, 316, 317, 318, 319, 340 Sand, George (Lucile Aurore Dupin), ii, 51, 61, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70,
95. 96, 97, 116-118, 123, 126-133, 141, 142, 146, 197, 210, 211,
214. 241, 250, 255, 259 Sandeau, Jules, ii, 117 Sarcey, Francisque, ii, 108, 284 Sardou, Victorien, ii, 280, 283, 285 Satire MinippSe, i, 153, 156, 157, 171, 244 Satires, 12th- and 13th century, i, 15 Scarron, Paul, i, 184, 213, 214, 215, 263, 333 Sceaux, Cour de, i, 365, 366, 368 Sceve, Maurice, i, iii, 124, 125, 126
INDEX 393
Schelling, Fiiedrich Wilhelm Joseph, ii, 17, 35, 67, 218, 219, 297,
298 Scherer, Edmond, ii, 234, 235, 236
Schiller, Johann Christopher Friedrich, ii, 13, 17, 42, 103, 104, 149 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, ii, 14, 33, 35, 43, 44, 106, 297 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, ii, 35 Scholasticism, i, 10, 11, 82 Schoolmen, the, i, 10, 82, 98 Schopenhauer, Arthur, ii, 295, 298 Science, the influence of, ii, 190-193
Scott, Sir Walter, ii, 35, 36, 41, 42, 43, 120, 121, 125, 138, 157, 159 Scribe, Eugene, i, 423 ; ii, 278-280, 283, 285 Scudery, Georges de, i, 197, 199, 205 Scudery, Madeleine de, i, 186, 190, 192, 193, 197, 198, 283, 288,
330 ; ii, 116 Sedaine, Michel-Jean, i, 422 Senancour, Etienne de, ii, 12, 25, 115 Sequence of Saint-Eulalia, the, i, 13 Sermons joyeux, i, 75 Sevigne, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Mme de, i, 174, 190, 196, 213,
243, 272, 283, 284-287, 295, 300, 312, 323, 329, 335, 368, 387 Shakespeare, William, ii, 41, 42, 109, iii Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ii, 35 Sibilet, Thomas, i, 128, 142 Sieyes, I'Abbe Joseph, ii, 7 Simon, Jules, ii, 173 Sismondi, Simonde de, ii, 42, 43, 44 Slowacki, ii, 69, 129 Sorbonne, La, ii, 68, 69 Sorel, Albert, ii, 168 Sorel, Charles, i, 213, 215, 246 Sotie, La, i, 76, 77 Soumet, Alexandre, ii, 45 Soiipirs de la France esclave, i, 300 Souza, Robert de, ii. 311 n. Spain. Influence of, i, 187-189, 214-216 ; ii, 43 Spencer, Herbert, ii, 176, 237 Stael, Anne-Marie Germaine Necker, Mme de, i, 366, 372, 447 ; ii,
12, 13-19, 26, 28, 36, 37, 42, 43, 44, 61, 62, 106, 115, 178 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), ii, 42, 45, 106, 116, 118, 119, 142, 151, 196,
197, 236, 240, 243 Strassburg, Oaths of, i, 5 Suarcs, Andre, ii, 336 Sue, Eugene, ii, 133
SuUy-Prudhomme, Armand, i, 438 ; ii, 94, 264, 275, 276, 341 Symbolism, ii, 195, 196, 238, 239, 298, 301-324, 341
394 A HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Taille, Jean de la, i. 146
Taine, Hippolyte, ii, 163, 168, 194, 208, 217, 224-230, 232, 233, 234.
235, 236, 237, 241, 247, 250, 251, 294, 295, 296, 328 Tallemant des R6aux, i, 190, 191 Tasso, Torquato, i, 186, 199; ii, 72 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, i, 380
Tencin, Mme de. i, 360, 365, 367, 368, 370, 376, 377 Thackeray, William Makepeace, ii, 256 Tharaud, Jerome and Jean, ii, 333, 336, 344 Theatre Libre, Le, ii, 285, 286, 329 Theatre du Vieux Colombier, Le, ii, 286 Thibaut IV de Champagne, i, 52 Thierry, Augustin, ii, 23, 62, 156, 157, 158, 159-161, 162, 167, 168,
171 Thiers, Adolphe, ii, 157, 158, 164, 166, 167, 168, 171, 175, 287 Tieck, Ludwig, ii, 35, 297 Tocqueville, Alexis de, ii, 167, 168 Tragi-comedy, i, 201 Travi^s, Charles, ii, 201 Tristan and Iseult, i, 36, 37 Troubadour poetry, i, 32, 49-52 Turgot, Anne-Robert- Jacques, i, 371, 397, 399 Turndbe, Odet de, i, 150
Unities, the Three, i, 191, 210, 256, 268
Urfe, Honors d', i, 172, 173, 175-177, 192, 439
Astrde, i, 175, 176, 177, 184, 192, 197, 202, 215, 311, 439 Utopian Sociologists, ii, 60-66
Vair, Guillaume du, i, 173, 185, 231
Val^ry, Paul, ii, 312, 344
Van Lerberghe, Charles, ii, 318, 340
Vauban, Sebastien Le Prestre, i, 300, 301
Vaudeville, ii, 278 n., 284
Vaugelas, Claude Favre de, i, 190, 218, 219
Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, i, 182
Vauquelin des Yveteaux, i, 213
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapier, Marquis de, i, 244, 312, 350, 354, 401,
406-408, 431 Vergniaud, Pierre- Victorien, ii, 4, 5
Verhaeren, Emile, ii, 314, 318, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344 Verlaine, Paul, i, 150, 178, 259 ; ii, 264, 301, 304-308, 309, 313, 317,
318, 319 Viau, Th6ophile de, i, 181, 212, 213 Vico, Giambattista, ii, i68, 169, 172, 173, 175, 176 Vie de Saint-Alexis, La, i, 13
INDEX 395
Vie de Saint-Liger, i, 13
Vie de Saint-Nicolas, i, 13
Viele-Griffin, Francis, ii, 314, 318, 332
Vieux Cordelier, Le, ii, 7
Vigny, Alfred Victor, Comte de, i, 293 ; ii, 27, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51. 75. 88-94, 99, 105, 111, 116, 120, 121, 146, 197, 213
Vilain Mire, Le, i, 61, 62
Vildrac, Charles, ii, 332
Villehardouin, GeofEroy de, i, 41, 42, 43, 45
Villemain, Abel Francois, ii, 69, 168, 178, 179, 181
Villemessant, Auguste de, ii, 251
Villiers de I'lsle Adam, Auguste, ii, 298, 320, 321
Villon, Fran9ois, i, 87, 88, 116, 118, 212
Visan, Tancrede de, ii, 297, 311 n.
Visconti, Valentina, i, 86, 96, 97
Vise, Donneau de, i, 342, 343
Vogue, La, ii, 314
Vogiie, Melchior de, ii, 295, 296
Voiture, Vincent, i, 190, 191, 193, 247, 283
Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), i, 167, 204, 220, 233, 244, 281, 302, 312, 313, 329, 343, 355, 356, 357, 358, 360, 363, 365, 366, 369, 370. 372, 373, 383-390, 391, 392, 397, 398, 406, 410-413, 415, 432, 447; ii, 4, 6, 9. 17, 47, 103, 144, 154, 155
Wace, Robert, i, 13, 42
Wagner, Richard, ii, 312, 313, 314
Whitman, Walt, ii, 314, 342, 343
Wieland, Melchior, ii, 17
William of Champeaux, i, 10
Wordsworth, William, ii, 34, 35, 76, 131, 340
Young, Edward, ii, 72
Night Thoughts, ii, 41 Ysengyimus, i, 62
Zola, Emile, ii, 141, 206-215 passim, 223, 230, 241, 243, 248, 250- 254, 257, 258, 259, 273, 285, 290, 292, 294, 296, 310, 319
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