Chateaubriand and the French Revolution.
Thereare some men who seem epitomes of their periods, of all the weaknesses, strengths, ideals and follies and wisdoms of their times. All the tangled skeins of different movements seem embroidered into the pattern of a face; and that face is theirs. We seek in them the years in which they lived, and are never disappointed. Sir Philip Sidney means the age of Elizabeth, Dr. Johnson the common-sense English eighteenth century, Rousseau the stirring of revolutionary France, Goethe the awakening of Germany. Of these men was Chateaubriand. He was born before the storm and died after it. He gathered up the best of the things that were before the revolution, and handed them on to the men who, when the revolution had left a new France, were to make that new country the centre of European literature. Rousseau and the Romantics meet in him. He wrote when France, her eyes still bright and wide after the sight of blood, was seeking in religion for one thing, at least, that might be covered by the tossing waves of revolution and yet survive. Christianity in hisfinest story is the rock on which his lovers break themselves. And Christianity was the first earthwork attacked before the revolution, and the first reoccupied afterwards.
Chateaubriand stands curiously in the midst of the opposing elements. Like Byron he was a patrician and a fighter. He too would have died for freedom. But whereas Byron fought, contemptuously sometimes, for revolutionaries, Chateaubriand fought against them.
When some of the ragged ones marched joyously down his street carrying the heads of two of their enemies bleeding on the ends of pikes, he cried at them, 'Brigands! Is this what you mean by Liberty?' and declared that if he had had a gun he would have shot them down like wolves. And if Chateaubriand had not been an aristocrat, he could never so well have represented his times. He would have fought and written as a revolutionist, instead of caring passionately for one party, and pinning to it the ideals of the other, so claiming both for his own. Everything that could make him one with his period and country was his. After a childhood of severe repression, he had seen the fall of the Bastille, and then sought liberty and the North-West Passage, coming back from America to find the revolution successful against himself. Could any man's life be so perfect an analogy of the meteor-like progress of France? France also sought liberty and a North-WestPassage, quicker than all others; France also was to return and find the ground aquiver beneath her feet.
rousseau
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
After that she was to be mistress of Europe. The three stages of Romanticism correspond with these three stages of France; the last that of Hugo and Gautier and Dumas, the Romanticism of 1830, promised by that of Chateaubriand, itself made possible by the unrestful writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is impossible to understand any one of the three without referring to the others. Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker, in a day when superiority of intellect in a man of low birth won him either neglect or the most insufferable patronage. His mother died in bearing him, and his father, although he made a second marriage, never mentioned her without tears. He seems to have been a very simple-hearted man, and found such pleasure in romances that he would sit up all night reading them to his little son, going ashamedly to bed in the morning when the swallows began to call in the eaves. These two traits in his father are characteristic of the work of Rousseau himself. His life was spent in emphasising the compatibility of low birth with lofty animation, and so in preparing that democratisation of literature that generously attributes humanity to men who are not gentlemen. Richardson gave him a suitable narrative form for what he had to say, andLa Nouvelle Héloïseis a novel in letters whose herois a poor tutor in love with his pupil. The book is full of an emotional oratory so fresh and sincere that it seems as if the ice of fifty years of passionless reasoning has suddenly broken over the springs of the human heart. There is in it too an Ossianic sharing of feelings with Nature, as if man had realised with the tears in his eyes that he had not always lived in towns.
The world of the Revolution.
Chateaubriand had not Rousseau's birthright of handicap. He could not feel the righteous energy of the watchmaker's son against a people who did not know their own language and were yet in a position to employ him as a footman. He was outside that quarrel. He left Rousseau's social reform behind him on the threshold of his world, but had learnt from him to carry his heart upon his sleeve, and to cry, likeOssian, 'The murmur of thy streams, O Lara! brings back the memory of the past. The sound of thy woods, Garmallar, is lovely in mine ear.' He took with him Rousseau's twin worships of passion and nature into the melancholy turmoil that was waiting for him, sad with an unrest not of classes but of a nation. He knew, like France, what it was to question everything while standing firm upon nothing. In that maelstrom nothing seemed fixed; there was nothing a man might grasp for a moment to keep his head above the waters of infinite doubt. Everything seemed possible, and much of the Romanticmelancholy is a despairing cry for a little impossibility from which at least there could be no escape. It is one thing to question religion by the light of atheism, or atheism by the light of religion; it is another thing, and far more terrible, to question both while sure of neither, and to see not one word in all the universe, not God, nor Man, nor State, nor Church, without a question mark at its side, a ghastly reminder of uncertainty, like, in some old engravings, the waiting figure of Death muffled in each man's shadow.
Atala.
That was the world of the Revolution, a world whose permanent instability had been suddenly made manifest by a violent removal of the apparently stable crust. With the overturning of one mountain every other shuddered in its bed, and seemed ready at any moment to shake with crash and groan into the valleys. This was the world for whose expression the face of Chateaubriand, nervous, passionate, the fire of vision in his eye, the wind of chaos in his tempestuous hair, seems so marvellously made. This was the world in which, like the spirit of his age, he wrote the books the times expected because they were their own.AtalaandRené, but particularlyAtala, seemed to be the old, vague promises of Rousseau andOssian, reaffirmed with the clarity of a silver trumpet. Chactas and Atala, those savage lovers, who 'took their way towards the star that never moves, guiding their steps by the moss on the tree stems,' walked like youngdeities of light before these people who had known the half-mummied courtesies of an eighteenth century civilisation. 'She made him a cloak of the inner bark of the ash, and mocassins of the musk rat's skin, and he set on her head a wreath of blue mallows, and on her neck red berries of the azalea, smiling as he did so to see how fair she was.' The world is young again, and man has won his way back into Eden, conscious of sorrow, conscious of evil, but alive and unafraid to be himself.
Nature and emotion.
Chateaubriand carried further than Rousseau the transfiguration of nature by emotion, although inAtalanature is still a stage effect, subjected to its uses as illustration of the feelings of the humans in the tale. Chateaubriand tunes up the elements with crash of thunder, bright forked lightning, and fall of mighty tree, to the moment when, in the supreme crisis the hand of Atala's God intervenes between the lovers, and the bell of the forest hermitage sounds in the appropriate silence. But in those vivid, fiery descriptions there is already something besides the theatrical, a new generosity of sentiment that was to let Barye make lions and tigers instead of what would once have been rather impersonal decorations, and to allow Corot to give landscapes their own personality without always seeking to impose on them the irrelevant interest of human figures. Nature is never excluded from the story, and when the action is less urgent the setting is given a greaterfreedom. The lovers never meet on a studio background, but are always seen with trees and rivers, and forest dawn and forest night, more real than any that had been painted before. Chateaubriand is never content to call a tree a tree or a bird a bird, but gives them the dignity of their own names. Aurora no longer rises from her rosy bed in the approved convention for the dawn, but a bar of gold shapes itself in the east, the sparrow-hawks call from the rocks, and the martens retire to the hollows of the elms.
chateaubriand
FRANÇOIS RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND
FRANÇOIS RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND
Particularity in setting.
It was through caring for his setting in this way that Chateaubriand came as if by accident to the discovery of local colour. He wanted his savages to love in the wilderness, and happening to have seen a wilderness, reproduced it, and made his savages not merely savages but Muskogees, fashioned their talk to fit their race, and made it quite clear that this tale, at any rate, could not be imagined as passing on the Mountains of the Moon. When the older story-tellers named a locality they did little more than the Elizabethan stage managers, who placed a label on the stage and expected it to be sufficient to conjure up a forest or a battlefield. Chateaubriand, in making his writing more completely pictorial, visualised his scenes in detail, and so showed the Romantics the way to that close distinction between country and country, age and age, race and race, that made the artists of the nineteenth century richerthan any who were before them in variety of subject, and in the material of self-expression.
Christianity.
The Christianity ofAtalawas the religion that Chateaubriand offered to his country inLe Génie du Christianisme. I can never be quite sure that it was his own, but in that amazing book, divided and subdivided like an ancient treatise on some occult science, he showed with passionate use of reasoning and erudition that Christianity was not the ugly thing that it had been pictured by the eighteenth century philosophers, and, more, that it at least was older than France, and permanent in a world where kings, emperors, and republics swung hither and thither like dead leaves in the wind. The teaching came to Paris like a gospel. These people, anchorless as they were, were not difficult converts, because they were eager to be converted, and to be able, if only for a moment in their lives, to whisper, 'I believe' in something other than uncertainty. All society became Christian for a time, and when that time passed, the effects of the book did not all pass with it. The artists of a younger generation had learned that Christianity was the belief that had brought most loveliness into the world, and that the Gods of Antiquity were not the only deities who were favourable to beautiful things. The false taste of the end of the eighteenth century had been pierced by Gothic spires, and throughthe dull cloud of correct and half-hearted imitation showed again the pinnacles and gargoyles and flying buttresses of the naïve and trustful mediæval art. Atala joins hands with Nicolete, and links Victor Hugo with the builders of Notre Dame.
The art of Chateaubriand survives the battle in which it was used.
There is little wonder that a writer who answered so fully the needs of his own generation, and did so much to cut a way for the generation to come, became instantly famous, immediately execrated. Chateaubriand wrote: 'La polémique est mon allure naturelle.... Il me faut toujours un adversaire, n'importe où.' In 1800 he had no difficulty in finding them. But it takes two to make a quarrel. It would not have been surprising if books that belonged so absolutely to the battles of their times should have struck their blows, and been then forgotten for want of opposition. Manifestations of the time spirit, and particularly fighting manifestations, not infrequently manifest it only to the time, and are worthless to future generations.Atala, after setting in an uproar the Paris of 1802 is for us but a beautiful piece of colour whose pattern has faded away. Unless we can feel with the men of the dawn that we are tossing on mad waves, clutching at religion as at a rock beneath the shifting waters, and breathlessly thankful for any proof of its steadfastness and power: unless we can remember with them the old love of drawing-rooms and bent knees and kisses on gloved hands, and feel with them a passionate novelty in the love of wild things in theopen air; unless we can remember the tamed, docile nature of the pastorals, and open our eyes upon a first view of any sort of real country; unless, in a word, we can dream back a hundred years, the beauty ofAtalais like that of an old battle-cry:—
'So he cried, as the fight grew thick at the noon,Two red roses across the moon!'
'So he cried, as the fight grew thick at the noon,Two red roses across the moon!'
'So he cried, as the fight grew thick at the noon,Two red roses across the moon!'
'So he cried, as the fight grew thick at the noon,
Two red roses across the moon!'
The cry no longer calls to battle. The combatants are dead. The bugle sounds to armies of white bones, and we who overhear it think only of the skill of the trumpeter. And Chateaubriand had something in him that was independent of his doctrines, independent of his enemies. Flaubert, looking back to him over the years, saw in his books, when the dust of their battles settled about them, early examples of a most scrupulous technique. Chateaubriand the fighter, the man of his time, was forgotten in the old master of a new prose. These books shaped in the din of battle were models for men writing in a fat, quiet day of peace. Then it was possible, the clangour no longer sounding in the ears, to notice the mastery of form, the elaboration, carried so far and no further, of the main idea into the significant detail that was to make the idea alive; then became clear the economy that makes of every fact a vivid illustration of some trait in the people of the story, a heightening of the lights or a deepening of the shadows of the tale.
Scott's place in the romantic movement.
Thegenius of a man like Scott does not leap into the world a complete and novel creation, like Minerva from the skull of Jupiter, ready for battle, and accoutred in the armour that it never afterwards forsakes. Nor does it with the strength of its own hand turn one world into another, or the audience of Fielding and Smollett into that of the Waverley Novels. The world is prepared for it; it finds its weapons lying round its cradle, and works its miracle with the world's co-operation.
Romanticism, although, in our indolence, we like to think of it as the work of a single man, as a stream gushing from the hard rock at the stroke of a Moses, was no conjuring trick, nor sudden invention, but a force as old as story-telling. The rock had been built gradually over it, and was as gradually taken away. It suits our convenience and the pictorial inclination of our minds to imagine it as the work of one man or two; but there is hardly need to remind ourselves of facts we have so wilfully forgotten, and that, if we choose, we can trace without difficulty a more diffuse as well as a more ancient origin of the spring.
Romanticism was a movement too large and too various to be defined in a paragraph, or to allow an essay on any single man to describe, even in the art of story-telling, its several sources, and the innumerable streams that flowed from them to fertilise the nineteenth century. It carried with it liberty and toleration, liberty of expression and toleration of all kinds of spiritual and physical vitality. It was comparable with and related to the French Revolution. It allowed men to see each other in their relations with the universe as well as with each other, and made existence a thing about which it was possible to be infinitely curious. Old desires for terror and fantasy and magnificence arose in the most civilised of minds. Glamour was thrown over the forest and the palace, and the modern and ancient worlds came suddenly together, so that all the ages seemed to be contemporary and all conditions of human life simultaneous and full of promise.
Scott was a part of this revivified world, and his importance in it is not that of its inventor, but of the man who brought so many of its qualities into the art of story-telling that his novels became a secondary inspiration, and moved men as different as Hugo, Balzac, and Dumas, to express themselves in narrative.
scott
SIR WALTER SCOTT
SIR WALTER SCOTT
Romanticism before the Waverley Novels.
Before the writing of the Waverley Novels, Romanticism in English narrative had shown itselfbut a stuttering and one-legged abortion, remarkable only for its extravagances. It had not, except in poetry, been humane enough to be literature. It had made only violent gesticulations like a man shut up in a sack.
Horace Walpole, protesting, I suppose, against Fielding and Smollett, had said that the 'great resources of fancy had been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life,' while the older romances were 'all imagination and improbability.' He had tried to combine the two inThe Castle of Otranto, a book in which portraits sigh and step down from their canvases, dead hermits reappear as skeletons in sackcloth, and gigantic ghosts in armour rise to heaven in a clap of thunder. These eccentricities were efforts after the strangeness of all true romance, and their instant popularity showed how ready people were for mystery and ancient tale. Before Scott succeeded in doing what Walpole had attempted, in writing a tale that should be strange but sane, ancient but real, a crowd of novels, whose most attractive quality was their 'horridness,' had turned the heads of the young women who read them. Miss Thorpe, inNorthanger Abbey, says:
'My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on withUdolpho?''Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.''Are you indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?''Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me: I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.''Dear creature, how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finishedUdolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.''Have you indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?''I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocket-book.Castle of Wolfenbach,Clermont,Mysterious Warnings,Necromancer of the Black Forest,Midnight Bell,Orphan of the Rhine, andHorrid Mysteries. These will last us some time.''Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?''Yes, quite sure, for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can imagine.'
'My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on withUdolpho?'
'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.'
'Are you indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?'
'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me: I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you; if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.'
'Dear creature, how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finishedUdolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.'
'Have you indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?'
'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocket-book.Castle of Wolfenbach,Clermont,Mysterious Warnings,Necromancer of the Black Forest,Midnight Bell,Orphan of the Rhine, andHorrid Mysteries. These will last us some time.'
'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?'
'Yes, quite sure, for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can imagine.'
Percy,Ossian, and Chatterton.
These things were but the clothes of romantic story-telling, walking bodiless about the world, while a poetry old enough to be astonishingly new was nurturing the body that was to stretch them for itself. Chatterton's ballads, imitations as they were, showed a sudden and novel feelingfor mediæval colouring.Ossian, that book of majestic moments, carried imagination out again to stand between the wind and the hill. Scott disliked its vagueness, but it helped in preparing his world. Percy'sReliques, excused by their compiler on the frivolous ground of antiquarian interest, brought the rough voice and rude style of Sir Philip Sidney's blind beggar ringing across the centuries, and in those old tales, whose rhymes clash like sword on targe, Scott found the inspiration that Macpherson's disorderly, splendid flood swept down on other men.
Scott's life.
Scott's life was no patchwork but woven on a single loom. He did not turn suddenly in manhood to discover the colour of his life. It had been his in babyhood. An old clergyman, a friend of his aunt, protested that 'one may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is,' while Walter Scott, aged three or four, shouted the ballad of Hardyknute:—
'And he has ridden o'er muir and moss,O'er hills and mony a glen,When he came to a wounded knightMaking a heavy mane.Here maun I lye, here maun I dye,By treacherie's false guiles;Witless I was that e'er gave faithTo wicked woman's smiles.'
'And he has ridden o'er muir and moss,O'er hills and mony a glen,When he came to a wounded knightMaking a heavy mane.Here maun I lye, here maun I dye,By treacherie's false guiles;Witless I was that e'er gave faithTo wicked woman's smiles.'
'And he has ridden o'er muir and moss,O'er hills and mony a glen,When he came to a wounded knightMaking a heavy mane.Here maun I lye, here maun I dye,By treacherie's false guiles;Witless I was that e'er gave faithTo wicked woman's smiles.'
'And he has ridden o'er muir and moss,
O'er hills and mony a glen,
When he came to a wounded knight
Making a heavy mane.
Here maun I lye, here maun I dye,
By treacherie's false guiles;
Witless I was that e'er gave faith
To wicked woman's smiles.'
As he grew older, he was able, like Froissart, to 'inquire of the truth of the deeds of war and adventures' that were to be the background ofmuch of his work. He knew old Lowland gentlemen who had paid blackmail to Rob Roy, was told of the '15 and the '45 by veterans who had used their swords on those occasions, and heard of the executions after Culloden from one who had seen at Carlisle the rebels' heads above the Scottish Gate. The warlike knowledge of his childhood was ripened and mellowed for story-telling by the enthusiasms of his youth. Riding through the Lowland valleys collecting the border minstrelsy, his good nature and pleasant way let him learn in a broad acquaintanceship fashion the character of his countrymen. He had not Balzac's deep-cutting analytic knowledge of men, but knew them as a warm-hearted fellow of themselves. He knew them as one man knows another, and not with the passionately speculative knowledge belonging to a mind that contemplates them from another world. He did not analyse them, but wrote of their doings with an unconscious externality that very much simplified their motives and made them fit participators in the sportsman-like life of his books.
Scott and reality.
Ballads and sagas and the historical reading to which they had given their savour; a free open air life, and a broad, humorous understanding of men; these were the things that Scott had behind him when Cervantes moved him to write narrative, and when the gold that shines through the dress of education in the stories of Maria Edgeworthmade him fall in love with local as well as historical colour, anxious to draw his nation as she had drawn hers, and to paint Scottish character in prose as Burns had painted it in verse. The historical character of his work should not disguise from us its more vital qualities. Hazlitt, whose keen eye was not to be put out by the gold and pomp of trappings and armour, notices that Scott represents a return to the real. He is noticing the most invigorating quality of Romanticism. Scott's importance is not his because he wrote historical novels, but because his historical novels were humane. He had found out, as Hazlitt says, that 'there is no romance like the romance of real life.'
His technique.
'As for his technique, there is no need to praise him, who had so many other virtues, for that of delicate craftsmanship, which he had not. He was not a clever performer, but an honest one whose methods were no more elaborate than himself. Dumas describes them in that chapter of theHistoire de mes Bêtesin which he discusses his own:—
'His plan was to be tedious, mortally tedious, often for half a volume, sometimes for a volume.'But during this volume he posed his characters; during this volume he made so minute a description of their physiques, characters, and habits; you learnt so well how they dressed, how they walked, how they talked, that when, at the beginning of the second volume, one of these charactersfound himself in some danger, you exclaimed to yourself:'"What, that poor gentleman in an applegreen coat, who limped as he walked, and lisped as he talked, how is he going to get out of that?"'And you were very much astonished, after being bored for half a volume, a volume, sometimes indeed for a volume and a half; you were astonished to find that you were enormously concerned for the gentleman who lisped in talking, limped in walking, and had an applegreen coat.'
'His plan was to be tedious, mortally tedious, often for half a volume, sometimes for a volume.
'But during this volume he posed his characters; during this volume he made so minute a description of their physiques, characters, and habits; you learnt so well how they dressed, how they walked, how they talked, that when, at the beginning of the second volume, one of these charactersfound himself in some danger, you exclaimed to yourself:
'"What, that poor gentleman in an applegreen coat, who limped as he walked, and lisped as he talked, how is he going to get out of that?"
'And you were very much astonished, after being bored for half a volume, a volume, sometimes indeed for a volume and a half; you were astonished to find that you were enormously concerned for the gentleman who lisped in talking, limped in walking, and had an applegreen coat.'
The sensation of reading a Waverley Novel is that of leaning on the parapet of a bridge on a summer day, watching the sunlight on a twig that lies motionless in a backwater. The day is so calm and the sunlight so pleasant that we continue watching the twig for a time quite disproportionate to the interest we feel in it, until, when it is at last carried into the main current, we follow its swirling progress down the stream, and are no more able to take our eyes from it than if we were watching the drowning of ourselves.
Improvisation.
Scott knew very well the disadvantages of improvisation, of piling up his interest and our own together. But he could work in no other manner. He said: 'There is one way to give novelty, to depend for success on the interest of a well contrived story. But, wo's me! that requires thought, consideration—the writing out of a regular plan or plot—above all, the adhering to one, which I can never do, for the ideas rise as I write, and bearsuch a disproportioned extent to that which each occupied at the first concoction, that (cocksnowns!) I shall never be able to take the trouble.' His was a mind entirely different from Poe's, or Mérimée's, or Flaubert's, those scrupulous technicians with whom was the future of Romanticism, and it was an artistic virtue in him to realise the fact, to proceed on his own course, leaving as he went large, rough, incomparable things, as impressive as the boulder stones of which the country people say that a giant threw them as he passed.
His character and work.
His swift, confused writing gets its effect because he never asked too much from it. He never tried to do anything with it beyond the description of his characters and the telling of their story. He had no need to catch an atmosphere by subtleties of language. His conception of the beings and life of another age did not make them different except in externals, from our own. He did not, like Gautier or Flaubert, regard the past as a miraculous time in which it was possible to be oneself, or in which true feeling was not veiled in inexactitudes. Very simple himself, he did not feel in the present those laxities of sensation or inexactitudes of expression that made the past a place of refuge. He was not dissatisfied with life as he found it, and was not disposed to alter it when he dressed it for a masquerade. Nor was that difficult for him. His mind was full of the stage properties of the past, and, as he walkedabout, he lived in any time he chose and was the same in all of them. He lived with humanity rather than in any particular half-century, and did not feel, like Peacock, the need of dainty, careful movement in order not to break the fabric he was building.Maid Marianis the same story asIvanhoe. Scott seems to have stepped straight out of his story to write it, Peacock to be looking a long way back, and building very skilfully the replica of something he had never seen but in a peculiarly happy vision. Scott is quite at home in his tale, and can treat it as rudely as he likes. Peacock seems to be playing very warily on the fragile keys of a spinet.
Sir Walter's fingers would have broken a spinet. His was no elaborately patterned music threaded with the light delicacies of melody. He struck big chords and used the loud pedal. His was the art of a Wagner rather than that of a Scarlatti. 'The Big Bow-wow strain,' he wrote, comparing himself with Jane Austen, 'I can do like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.' 'One man can do but one thing. Universal pretensions end in nothing.' Scott knew that jewellery-work was not for him, and never tried his eyes by peering through the watchmaker's glass. He saw life, as a short-sighted man sees a landscape, in its essentials. He couldspread over it what dress of detail he preferred, and chose that which came readiest to his hand, flinging over humanity the cloak of his boyish dreams. Humanity was not hampered by it, but moves through his pages like a stout wind over a northern moor.
The mingling of the arts.
DumasinLa Femme au Collier de Veloursthus describes Hoffmann's room: 'It was the room of a genius at once capricious and picturesque, for it had the air of a studio, a music-shop, and a study, all together. There was a palette, brushes, and an easel, and on the easel the beginnings of a sketch. There was a guitar, a violin, and a piano, and on the piano an open sonata. There was pen, ink, and paper, and on the paper the first scrawled lines of a ballad. Along the walls were bows, arrows, and arbalests of the fifteenth century, sixteenth-century drawings, seventeenth-century musical instruments, chests of all times, tankards of all shapes, jugs of all kinds, and, lastly, glass necklaces, feather fans, stuffed lizards, dried flowers, a whole world of things, but a whole world not worth twenty-five silver thalers.'
That account, whether from hearsay, conjecture, or knowledge, I do not know, is not only an admirable portrait of the room and brain of an arch-romantic, but might serve as a parable of the Romanticism of 1830. In that year Hugo'sHernaniwas produced at the Comédie Française,and the young men who battled with the Philistines for its success were drawn from the studios as well as from the libraries, and had their David in Théophile Gautier. Never before had the arts been so inextricably entangled, had antiquarianism been so lively and humane, had gems and worthless baubles been so confounded together. Chateaubriand had reaffirmed the pictorial rights of literature. Delacroix was painting pictures from Byron and from Dante, in bold, predominant colours, very different from the lassitudinous livery of the schools. There was a new generosity of sentiment responsible for Corot's landscapes and Barye's beasts. The sudden widening of knowledge and sympathy was expressed in the new broadness and courage of technique, and the same forces that covered the palette with vivid reds and blues, and compelled the sculptor to a virile handling of his chisel, found outlet in words also. Writers, like painters, seized the human, coloured, passionate elements in foreign literatures, looking everywhere for the liberty and brilliance they desired. The open-throated, sinewy, gladiatorial muse of Byron found here devoted worshippers, and the spacious movements of Shakespeare, his people alive and free, independent of the dramas in which for a few hours in the Globe Theatre they had had a part to play, delighted men with an outlook very different from, and hostile to, that of Voltaire,although he had done his share in making their outlook possible.
hugo
VICTOR HUGO
VICTOR HUGO
The studio and the study were very close together. Gautier, Hugo, and Mérimée were all painters in their own right, and there is a difference between the writers who have only seen life from a library, and those who have seen it from behind an easel. The writer who has once felt them can never forget the eye-delighting pleasures of the palette, but composes in colour-schemes, and feels for the tints of words as well as for their melody. The work of the Romantics was visualised and coloured in a manner then new. It was almost shocking to men who had been accustomed, as it were, to write in the severest monotone, and to refuse, if indeed they had ever thought of it, such luxury of realisation.
Local colour.
There is no need, except for the sake of the argument, to state the fact that pictures are called up in a reader's mind by a careful selection of details presented in a proper order. It is well known that a few details correctly chosen have a more compelling power on the imagination than a complete and catalogued description. These men, writing pictorially, gave a new responsibility to single touches. It became clear that visualisation was impossible unless observation preceded it, and details accordingly took upon themselves the exigent dignity of local colour. Local colour, from distinguishing between places, was broughtto mark the difference between times. Archæology became suddenly of absorbing interest; its materials were more than its materials; they were made the symbols of lives as real and as red in the veins as those of the archæologists themselves. Notre Dame was no longer to be expressed in a learned antiquarian paper, but in a passionate book. And Victor Hugo visualising with the accuracy of a poet, found that just as archæology meant little without life, so the life was vapid without the archæology. Quasimodo shoves his hideous face through a hole in order to be elected king of fools, but Hugo does not allow that marvellous grimace to fill the picture. The hole must be there as well, and so 'une vitre brisée à la jolie rosace audessus de la porte laissa libre un cercle de pierre par lequel il fut convenu que les concurrents passeraient la tête.' The setting is as important as the head; humanity and its trappings are worthless by themselves, and valuable only together. Here is the source of Realism, within Romanticism itself. Indeed almost the whole development of the art in the nineteenth century is due to this new care for the frame, and to this new honesty in dealing with the man within it.
The youth of the Romantics.
An energetic simplicity of nature was needed for the fullest enjoyment of these new conditions, and the greatest of the French Romantics werealmost like big interested children in their attitude towards life and themselves. As soon as we find a Romantic like Mérimée, reserved, subtle, a tender-hearted Machiavellian, we find a man who is to dissociate himself from them sooner or later, and to produce something different a little from the purely Romantic ideals. There is something beautiful and inspiriting in the youth of the Romantics. I like to think of Gautier, the olive-skinned boy from the studio in the rue St. Louis, overcome with nervousness at the idea of touching the hand of Hugo, himself only twenty-seven, sitting down and trembling like a girl on the stairs before the master's door. And then the splendid prank of Dumas, who, on the eve of revolution, went down into the country like one of his own heroes, held up a town, and with a very few friends obtained the submission of the governor, and captured an arsenal for his party. They were boys, and some hostility was needed for their uttermost delight. In England the battles of art are more like squabbles, but in the Paris of 1830 it seemed as if the town were divided into camps for the defence of classicism and the support of the new ideas. It was as if each point of vantage had to be taken by storm, and the great night ofHernani, when Hugo's supporters had red tickets and a password—the Spanish wordhierro, which means 'steel'—was the noblest memory in the life of at least one of Hugo's enthusiastic lieutenants.
Such a joyous and vigorous thing was the Romanticism of 1830. It touched story-telling through Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Gautier, and Mérimée, of whom the first three, in turning from the theatre to the art of narrative, found inspiration in Sir Walter Scott. Scott's influence has been one of bulk rather than of quality on English story-telling. But in France, instead of tracing his progeny in insipid copies, we follow it through the bold variations of these three powerful and original minds. Through them it returned to England again. Balzac, as the most important of the three, in view of the later developments of the novel, I have discussed in a separate chapter. Gautier's Oriental and Antique inspiration, and Mérimée's combination of ascetic narrative with vivid subject, are also themes for separate and particular consideration. But Hugo and Dumas are so generally representative of the Romantic movement in story-telling, that in writing of them in this chapter I feel I am but filling in the background already sketched for the others.
The Preface toCromwell.
The theatre was, in 1830, the scene of the most decisive battle between Romanticism and Classicism. The fight of the painters, of the poets, of the story-tellers, seemed concentrated in the more obvious combat of the dramatists, whose armies could see their enemies, and even come to blows with them. And in Hugo's preface toCromwell,that preface which is now so much more interesting than the play that follows it, he claims several things for the dramatist that by act if not by argument he was later to claim for the artist in narrative. He demands that the sublime and ridiculous should be together in literature and, as in life, win their force from each other. The drama, and so the novel, which also attempts in some sort a reproduction of human existence, is not to be written on a single note. It is not to be wholly sublime or wholly ridiculous, but both at once. The general in his triumphal car is to be genuinely afraid of toppling over. And so, inLes Misérables, the student's frolic is whole-heartedly described, without in any way binding the author to make light of the sorrow of Fantine when she finds that her own desertion is the merry surprise at the end of it. The sublime will not be the less sublime for being mingled with the grotesque, and so, inNotre Dame de Paris, the deepest passion in the book is felt by a hideous and deformed dwarf, and by this same dwarf rather than by any more obvious impersonation of justice, the lascivious priest is flung from the tower. Looking up in his agony, as he clings to the bending cornice his desperate hands have clutched, he does not meet the eyes of some person of a grandeur matching the moment, but sees the grotesque face of Quasimodo, utterly indifferent to him, looking, like one of the gargoyles, over Paris, with tears on his distorted cheeks.
In this same preface, too, Hugo justifies innovations in language, very necessary for an art whose new won freedom was to let it explore so much that was unknown. When the body changes, he asks, would you keep the coat the same? Triumphantly appealing to history, he points out that 'the language of Montaigne is no longer that of Rabelais, the language of Pascal is no longer that of Montaigne, and the language of Montesquieu is no longer that of Pascal.' He is justifying there the coloured prose of Chateaubriand, the opulent vocabulary of Gautier, and his own infinitely various effects in prose and verse.
Victor Hugo on Scott.
He was, until Sainte-Beuve took the work from his hands, at once the leader and the defender of Romanticism. And, critic and artist, severally and in the combination that we have grown accustomed to expect in fulfilment of both these functions, his was too sovereign a mind to adopt or borrow anything from another writer without knowing very clearly what he intended to do with it. Writing ofQuentin Durward, he said: 'Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poètique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère.' That romance is Victor Hugo's own. His tremendous books are conceived in the manner ofan epic poet rather than of a novelist or a romancer. The relations of his characters are not solely concerned with themselves but with some large principle that animates the book in which they live. If he is without Norns or Fates, if he sets his characters against a background other than that of Destiny, he substitutes the power of the law or the power of the sea, and illumines with a story not only the actors who take part in it, but also the spirit of the Gothic or the spirit of revolution.
The Waverley Novels and Hugo's romances.
To turn from the Waverley Novels to the romances of Hugo, is like stepping from the open air into a vast amphitheatre whose enclosed immensity is more overwhelming than the clear sky. Scott writes, on a plain human level, tales that we can readily believe, chronicles that are like private documents, or memoirs such as might have been written by the ancestors of our own families. Hugo does not tell his tale from the point of view of its actors, but puts them before us in a setting far larger than the one they saw. Their petty adventures are but threads chosen arbitrarily from a far more intricate design, and they themselves but illustrations of some greater motion than any to which in their own right they could aspire. There are hundreds of them, and with our narrow powers of interest and attention we fasten on one or two, like children choosing colours on a race-course, and follow them to the end, while Hugo,with his godlike eye, sees them all as threads in his pattern, poor, small lives, twisted in accordance with a design beyond their comprehension. In Scott's open air we can live and breathe and be content, and stand firmly with our feet upon the ground. In Hugo's amphitheatre we see an ordered spectacle of life and death, and are, as it were, present at the shapings of the ends of man.
dumas
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Dumas on Scott.
There is a much less terrible pleasure to be had from the works of Dumas. Behind all Hugo's books is the solemnity, behind Dumas' the joy of living, thejoie de vivre—the French phrase, although identical, seems better to express it. To compare Hugo's with Dumas' criticism of the Scott novel is to see very clearly the difference in weight and depth between the two men. Hugo sees in Scott the promise of another and a greater kind of romance. Dumas sees only that it is possible to improve on Scott's technique. He notices that Scott spends half a volume or so in describing his characters before setting them in action, and in his gay way justifies him by saying: 'Il n'y a pas de feu sans fumée, il n'y a pas de soleil sans ombre. L'ennui, c'est l'ombre; l'ennui c'est la fumée.' Sacrifice fifty pages ofennuito the gods, and then away with your story. Dumas decides to improve on this, to set his characters moving, and to pour his libations ofennuion the way. 'Commencer par l'intérêt, au lieu de commencerpar l'ennui; commencer par l'action, au lieu de commencer par la préparation; parler des personnages après les avoir fait paraître, au lieu de les faire paraître après avoir parlé d'eux.' This is not very sublime, after the suggestion that Hugo won from the same subject; but it produced 'Les Trois Mousquetaires.' D'Artagnan is in a hubbub on the first page, and theennuiof description is given us so sparsely that, watching for it chapter by chapter, we almost consider ourselves swindled when we reach the last and are still without it. 'The purpose of this tale is not to describe interiors,' Dumas petulantly ejaculates when tired of talking about Cornelius' room inLa Tulipe Noire. No; certainly not; neither of rooms nor of men. Damn psychology, and hey for full-blooded adventure. Dumas took a free stage for his duels and headlong rides and gallant adventures and ingenious stratagems. His men moved too fast not to feel themselves encumbered in a furnished room; there was little point in describing a landscape for them, since, before it was done, they were several leagues off in another; too intricate furniture in their own heads would have cost them hesitancies, unguarded stabs, and possible falls from a galloping horse.