The Romantic Propaganda in Periodicals.
It was, however, reserved for a younger generation actually to cross the Rubicon, and to achieve the reform which was needed. The assistance which the vast spread of periodical literature lent to such an attempt has been already noted, and it was in four periodical publications that the first definite note of the literary revolution was sounded. In these the movement was carried on for many years before the famous representation ofHernani, which announced the triumph of the innovators. These four publications were: first,Le Conservateur Littéraire(a journal published as early as 1819, before theOdesof Victor Hugo, who was one of its main-stays, or even theMéditationsof Lamartine had appeared); secondly, theAnnales Romantiques, which began in 1823, with perhaps the most brilliant list of contributors that any periodical—with the possible exception of the nearly contemporaryLondon Magazine—ever had; a list including Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Lamartine, Joseph de Maistre (posthumously), Alfred de Vigny, Henri de Latouche, Hugo, Nodier, Béranger, Casimir Delavigne, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, and Delphine Gay, afterwards Madame de Girardin. Although not formally, this was practically a kind of annual of theMuse Française, which had pretty nearly the same contributors, and conducted the warfare in more definitely polemical manner by criticism and precept, as well as by example. Lastly, there was the important newspaper—a real newspaper this—calledLe Globe, which appeared in 1822. The other Romantic organs had been either colourless as regards politics, or else more or less definitely conservative and monarchical, the middle age influence being still strong. TheGlobewas avowedly liberal in politics. Men of the greatest eminence in various ways, Jouffroy, Damiron, Pierre Leroux, and Charles de Rémusat, wrote in it; but its literary importance in history is due to the fact that here Sainte-Beuve,the critic of the movement, began, and for a long time carried out the vast series of critical studies of French and other literature which, partly by destruction and partly by construction, made the older literary theory for ever obsolete. The various names in poetry and prose of this romantic movement must now be reviewed.
Victor Hugo.
Victor Marie Hugo was born at Besançon on the 28th of February, 1802. His father was an officer of distinction in Napoleon's army, his mother was of Vendean blood and of royalist principles, which last her son for a long time shared. His literary activity began extremely early. He was, as has been seen, a contributor to theConservateur Littéraireat the age of seventeen, and, with much work which he did not choose to preserve, some which still worthily finds a place in his published collections appeared there. Indeed, with his two brothers, Abel and Eugène, he took a principal share in the management of the periodical. HisOdes et Poésies Diversesappeared in 1822, when he was twenty, and were followed two years afterwards by a fresh collection. In these poems, though great strength and beauty of diction are apparent, nothing that can be called distinct innovation appears. It is otherwise with theOdes et Balladesof 1826, and theOrientalesof 1829. Here the Romantic challenge is definitely thrown down. The subjects are taken by preference from times and countries which the classical tradition had regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm are studiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost possible glow of colour as opposed to the cold correctness of classical poetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest reliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms. Two romances in prose, more fantastic in subject and audacious in treatment than the wildest of theOrientales, had preceded the latter. The first,Han d'Islande, was published anonymously in 1823. It handled with much extravagance, but with extraordinary force and picturesqueness, the adventures of a bandit in Norway. The second,Bug Jargal, an earlier form of which had already appeared in theConservateur, was published in 1826. But the rebels, of whom Victor Hugo was by this time the acknowledged chief, knew thatthe theatre was at once the stronghold of their enemies, and the most important point of vantage for themselves. Victor Hugo's theatrical, or at least dramatic,débutwas not altogether happy.Cromwell, which was published in 1828, was not acted, and indeed, from its great length and other peculiarities, could hardly have been acted. It is rather a romance thrown into dramatic form than a play. In its published shape, however, it was introduced by an elaborate preface, containing a full exposition of the new views which served as a kind of manifesto. Some minor works about this time need not be noticed. The final strokes in verse and prose were struck, the one shortly before the revolution of July, the other shortly after it, by the drama ofHernani, ou l'Honneur Castillan, and the prose romance ofNotre Dame de Paris. The former, after great difficulties with the actors and with outside influences—it is said that certain academicians of the old school actually applied to Charles X. to forbid the representation—was acted at the Théâtre Français on the 25th of February, 1830. The latter was published in 1831. The reading of these two celebrated works, despite nearly sixty years of subsequent and constant production with unflagging powers on the part of their author, would suffice to give any one a fair, though not a complete, idea of Victor Hugo, and of the characteristics of the literary movement of which he has been the head. The main subject ofHernaniis the point of honour which compels a noble Spaniard to kill himself, in obedience to the blast of a horn sounded by his mortal enemy, at the very moment of his marriage with his beloved.Notre Dame de Parisis a picture by turns brilliant and sombre of the manners of the mediaeval capital. In both the author's great failing, a deficient sense of humour and of proportion, which occasionally makes him overstep the line between the sublime and the ridiculous, is sometimes perceivable. In both, too, there is a certain lack of technical neatness and completeness in construction. But the extraordinary command of the tragic passions of pity, admiration, and terror, the wonderful faculty of painting in words, the magnificence of language, the power of indefinite poetical suggestion, the sweep and rush of style which transports the reader, almost against his will and judgment, are fully manifestin them. As a mere innovation,Hernaniis the most striking of the two. Almost every rule of the old French stage is deliberately violated. Although the language is in parts ornate to a degree, the old periphrases are wholly excluded; and when simple things have to be said they are said with the utmost simplicity. The cadence and arrangement of the classical Alexandrine are audaciously reconstructed. Not merely is the practice ofenjambement(or overlapping of lines and couplets, as distinct from the rigid separation of them) frequent and daring, but the whole balance and rhythm of the individual line is altered. Ever since Racine the one aim of the dramatist had been to make the Alexandrine run as monotonously as possible. The aim of Victor Hugo was to make it run with the greatest possible variety. In short, the whole theory of the drama was altered. The decade which followed the revolution of July was Victor Hugo's most triumphant period. A series of dramas,Marion de Lorme,Les Roi s'Amuse,Lucrèce Borgia,Marie Tudor,Angelo,Les Burgraves, succeeded each other at short intervals, and were accompanied by four volumes of immortal verse,Les Feuilles d'Automne,Chants du Crépuscule,Les Voix Intérieures,Les Rayons et les Ombres. The dramas continued to show Victor Hugo's command of tragic passion, his wonderful faculty of verse, his fertility in moving situations, and in incidents of horror and grandeur; but they did not indicate an increased acquaintance with those minor arts of the playwright, which are necessary to the success of acted dramas, and which many of Hugo's own pupils possessed to perfection. Accordingly, towards the end of the decade, some reaction took place against them, and their author ceased to write for the stage. His purely poetical productions showed, however, an increase at once of poetical and of critical power; and of the four volumes mentioned, each one contains many pieces which have never been excelled in French poetry, and which may be fairly compared with the greatest poetical productions of the same kind in other literatures. Meanwhile, Victor Hugo's political ideas (which never, in any of their forms, brought him much luck, literary or other) had undergone a remarkable change. During the reign of Louis Philippe, he, who had recently been an ardentlegitimist, became, first, a constitutional royalist (in which capacity he accepted from the king a peerage), then an extreme liberal, and at last, when the revolution of 1848 broke out, a republican democrat. He was banished for his opposition to Louis Napoleon, and fled, first to Brussels, and then to the Channel Islands, launching against his enemy a prose lampoon,Napoléon le Petit, and then a volume of verse,Les Châtiments, of marvellous vigour and brilliancy. During the ten years before this his literary work had been for the most part suspended, at least as far as publication is concerned. But his exile gave a fresh spur to his genius. After four years' residence, first in Jersey, then in Guernsey, he publishedLes Contemplations(2 vols.), a collection of lyrical pieces, not different in general form from the four volumes which had preceded them; and, in 1859,La Légende des Siècles, a marvellous series of narrative or pictorial poems representing scenes from different epochs of the history of the world. These three volumes together represent his poetical talent at its highest. He, at other times before and since, equalled but never surpassed them. InLa Légende des Sièclesthe variety of the music, the majesty of some of the pieces and the pathos of others, the rapid succession of brilliant dissolving views, and the complete mastery of language and versification at which the poet arrived, combine to produce an effect not easily paralleled elsewhere. TheContemplations, as their name imports, are chiefly meditative. They are somewhat unequal, and the tone of speculative pondering on the mysteries of life which distinguishes them sometimes drops into what is called sermonising, but their best pieces are admirable. During the whole of the Second Empire Victor Hugo continued to reside in Guernsey, publishing, in 1862, a long prose romance,Les Misérables, one of the most unequal of his books; then another, the exquisiteTravailleurs de la Mer, as well as a volume of criticism onWilliam Shakespeare, some passages in which rank among the best pieces of ornate prose in French; and, in 1869,L'Homme qui Rit, a historical romance of a somewhat extravagant character, recalling his earliest attempts in this kind, but full of power. A small collection of lyric verse, mostly light and pastoral in character, had appeared under the title ofChansons des Rues et des Bois.The Revolution which followed the troubles of France, in 1870, restored Victor Hugo to his country only to inflict a bitter, though passing, annoyance on him. He had somewhat mistaken the temper of the National Assembly at Bordeaux to which he had been elected. He even found himself laughed at, and he retired to Brussels in disgust. Here he was identified by public opinion with the Communists, and subjected to some manifestations of popular displeasure, which, unfortunately, his sensitive temperament and vivid imagination magnified unreasonably. Returning to France after the publication of nearly his weakest book,L'Année Terrible, he lived quietly, but as a kind of popular and literary idol, till his death in 1885. Of his abundant later (including not a little posthumous) workQuatre-Vingt-Treize, another historical romance, and two books of poetry (a second series of theLégende des Siècles, 1877, andLes Quatre Vents de l'Esprit, 1881) at their best, equal anything he has ever done. The secondLégendeis inferior to the first in variety of tone and in vivid pictorial presentment, but equals it in the declamatory vigour of its best passages.Les Quatre Vents de l'Espritis, perhaps, the most striking single book that Victor Hugo produced, containing as it does lyric and narrative work of the very finest quality, and a drama of an entirely original character, which, after more than sixty years of publicity, showed a new side of the author's genius.
This somewhat minute account of Victor Hugo's work must be supplemented by some general criticism of his literary characteristics. As will probably have been observed, from what has already been said, there were remarkable gaps in his ability. In purely intellectual characteristics, the characteristics of the logician and the philosopher, he was weak. He was also, as has been said, deficient in the sense of humorous contrast, and in the perception of strict literary proportion. Long years of solitary pre-eminence, and of the frequently unreasonable worship of fools as well as of wise men, gave him, or encouraged in him, a tendency to regard the universe too much from the point of view of France in the first place, Paris in the second, and Victor Hugo in the third. His unequalled skill in the management of proper names tempted him to abusethem as instruments of sonority in his verse. He is often inaccurate in fact, presenting in this respect a remarkable resemblance to his counterpart and complement Voltaire. The one merit which swallowed up almost all others in classical and pseudo-classical literature is wanting in him—the sense of measure. He is a childish politician, a visionary social reformer. But, when all this has been said, there remains a sum total of purely literary merits which suffices to place him on a level with the greatest in literature. The mere fact that he is equally remarkable for the exquisite grace of his smaller lyrics, and for the rhetorical magnificence of his declamatory passages, argues some peculiar and masterly idiosyncrasy in him. No poet has a rarer and more delicate touch of pathos, none a more masculine or a fuller tone of indignation. The great peculiarity of Victor Hugo is that his poetry always transports. No one who cares for poetry at all, and who has mastered the preliminary necessity of acquaintance with the French language and French prosody, can read any of his better works without gradually rising to a condition of enthusiasm in which the possible defects of the matter are altogether lost sight of in the unsurpassed and dazzling excellence of the manner. This is the special test of poetry, and there is none other. The technical means by which Victor Hugo produces these effects have been already hinted at. They consist in a mastery of varied versification, in an extraordinary command of pictorial language, dealing at once with physical and mental phenomena, and, above all, in a certain irresistible habit of never allowing the iron to grow cold. Stroke follows stroke in the exciting and transporting process in a manner not easily paralleled in other writers. Other poets are often best exhibited by very short extracts, by jewels five words long. This is not so with Victor Hugo. He has such jewels, but they are not his chief titles to admiration. The ardour and flow, as of molten metal, which characterise him are felt only in the mass, and must be sought there. What has been said of his verse is true, with but slight modifications, of his prose, which is however on the whole inferior. His unequalled versification is a weapon which he could not exchange for the less pointed tool of prose without losing much of his power. His defects emerge as his merits subside. But taking him altogether,it may be asserted, without the least fear of contradiction, that Victor Hugo deserves the title of the greatest poet hitherto, and of one of the greatest prose writers of France. Such a faculty, thrown into almost any cause, must have gone far to make it triumph. But in a cause of such merits, and so stoutly seconded by others, as that of the destruction of the classical tradition which had cramped and starved French literature, there could be no doubt of success when a champion such as Victor Hugo took up and carried through to the end the task of championship.
Sainte-Beuve.
It is very seldom that the two different forces of criticism and creation work together as they did in the case of the Romantic movement. Each had numerous representatives, but the point of importance is that each was represented by one of the greatest masters. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the critic not merely of the Romantic movement, but of the nineteenth century, and in a manner the first scientific and universal critic that the world has seen, was born at Boulogne on the 23rd of December, 1804. His father held an office of some importance; his mother was of English blood. He was well educated, first at his native town, then at Paris. He began by studying medicine, but very soon turned to literature, and, as has been said, distinguished himself on theGlobe. The most important of his articles in this paper were devoted to the French literature of the sixteenth century, and these were published as a volume, in 1828, with great success. Sainte-Beuve at once became the criticen titreof the movement, though he did not very long continue in formal connection with it. It was some time, however, before he resigned himself to purely critical work.Les Poésies de Joseph Delorme,Les Consolations, andVoluptéwere successive attempts at original composition, which, despite the talent of their author, hardly made much mark, or deserved to make it. He did not persevere further in a career for which he was evidently unfitted, but betook himself to the long series of separate critical studies, partly of foreign and classical literature, but usually of French, which made his reputation. The papers to which he chiefly contributed were theConstitutionneland theMoniteur, and during the middle of this century his Mondayfeuilletonsof criticism were the chief recurring literary event ofEurope. These studies were at intervals collected and published in sets under the titlesCritiques et Portraits Littéraires,Portraits Contemporains,Causeries du Lundi, andNouveaux Lundis, the last series only finishing with his death in 1869. Besides this he had undertaken a single work of great magnitude in hisHistoire de Port Royal, on which he spent some twenty years. He was elected to the Academy in 1845, and after the establishment of the Empire he was one of the few distinguished literary men who took its side. The first reward that he obtained was a professorship in the College de France; but some years before his death he received the senatorship, a lucrative position, and one which interfered very little with the studies of the occupant. In character Sainte-Beuve strongly resembled some of the epicureans of his favourite seventeenth century; but whatever faults he may have had were redeemed by much good-nature and an entire absence of literary vanity.
His Method.
Dangers of the Method.
The importance of Sainte-Beuve in literature is historically, and as a matter of influence, superior even to that of the great poet with whom he was for some time in close friendship, though before very long their stars fell apart. Until his time the science of criticism had been almost entirely conducted on what may be called pedagogic lines. The critic either constructed for himself, or more probably accepted from tradition, a cut-and-dried scheme of the correct plan of different kinds of literature, and contented himself with adjusting any new work to this, marking off its agreements or differences, and judging accordingly. Here and there in French literature critics like Saint-Evremond, Fénelon, La Bruyère in part, Diderot, Joubert, had adopted another method, but the small acquaintance which most Frenchmen possessed of literature other than their own stood in the way of success. Sainte-Beuve was the first to found criticism on a wide study of literature, instead of directing a more or less narrow study of literature by critical rules. Victor Hugo himself has laid down, in the preface to theOrientales, one important principle—the principle that the critic has only to judge of the intrinsic goodness of the book, and not of its conformity to certain pre-established ideas. There remains the difficulty of deciding what is intrinsically good or bad. To solve this, the only way is, first, to prepare the mind of the critic by a wide studyof literature, which may free him from merely local and national prejudices; and, secondly, to direct his attention not so much to cut-and-dried ideas of an epic, a sonnet, a drama, as to the object which the author himself had before him when he composed his work. In carrying out this principle it becomes obviously of great importance to study the man himself as well as his works, and his works as a whole as well as the particular sample before the judge. Sainte-Beuve was almost the first in France to set the example of thecauserie critique, the essay which sets before the reader the life, circumstances, aims, society, and literary atmosphere of the author, as well as his literary achievements. This accounts for the extreme interest shown by the public in what had very commonly been regarded as one of the idlest and least profitable kinds of literature. At the same time the method has two dangers to which it is specially exposed. One is the danger of limiting the consideration to external facts merely, and giving a gossiping biography rather than a criticism. The other, and the more subtle danger, is the construction of a new cut-and-dried theory instead of the old one, by regarding every man as simply a product of his age and circumstances, and ticketing him off accordingly without considering his works themselves to see whether they bear out the theory by facts. In either case, the great question which Victor Hugo has stated, 'L'ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais?' remains unanswered in any satisfactory measure. Sainte-Beuve himself did not often fall into either error. His taste was remarkably catholic and remarkably fine. The only fault which can justly be found with him is the fault which naturally besets such a critic, the tendency to look too complacently on persons of moderate talent, whose merits he himself is perhaps the first to recognise fully, and to be proportionately unjust to the greater names whose merits, on good systems and bad alike, are universally acknowledged, in whose case it is difficult to say anything new, and who are therefore somewhat ungrateful subjects for the ingenious and delicate analysis which more mixed talents repay. But study of the work of such a man as Sainte-Beuve is an almost absolute safeguard against the intolerance of former days in matter of literature, and this is its great merit.
Dumas the Elder.
Around Victor Hugo were grouped not a few writers who were only inferior to himself. But, before mentioning the members of what is called thecénacle, or innermost Romantic circle, a third name of almost equal temporary importance to those of Hugo and Sainte-Beuve must be named—that of Alexandre Dumas. This writer, one of the most prolific, and in some respects one of the most remarkable of dramatists and novelists, was the son of a general in the revolutionary army, and was born, on the 23rd of July, 1806, at Villers Cotterets. He had hardly any education; but, coming to Paris at the age of twenty, he was fortunate enough to obtain a clerkship in the household of the Duke of Orleans. He tried literature almost at once, and in 1829 hisHenri III. et sa Courwas played, and was a great success. This was a year beforeHernani, and though Dumas had no pretence to rival Hugo in literary merit, his drama was quite as revolutionary in style, events, language, and general arrangement as Hugo's. But he had not heralded it by any general defiance, and it possessed (what his greater contemporary's dramatic work never fully possessed) the indefinable knowledge of the stage and its requirements, which always tells on an audience. After the Revolution of July, the daring play ofAntonyachieved an almost equal success, despite its attacks on the proprieties, attacks of which at that time French opinion was not tolerant in a serious play. Then he returned to the historical drama in theTour de Nesle, another play of strong situations and reckless sacrifice of everything else to excitement. After this Dumas published many plays, of whichDon Juan de MaranaandKeanare perhaps the most extravagant, andMademoiselle de Belle-Isle, 1839, the best. But before long he fell into a train of writing more profitable even than the drama. This was the composition of historical romances something in Scott's manner. The most famous of these, such as theThree Musketeers,La Reine Margot, andMonte Cristo, were produced towards the latter part of the reign of Louis Philippe, his early patron. He travelled a great deal, making books and money out of his travels; and sometimes, as when he was the companion of Garibaldi, finding himself in curious company. No man, probably, ever made so much money by literature inFrance as Dumas, though he was not equally skilled in keeping it. He died, in the midst of the disasters of his country, on Christmas Eve, 1870. Dumas' literary position and influence are not very easy to estimate, because of the strange extent to which he carried what is called collaboration, and his frank avowal of something very like plagiarism in many of the works which he wrote unassisted. Endeavours have even been made to show that his most celebrated works are the production of hack writers whom he paid to write under his name. Nor is there the least doubt that he did resort on a large scale to something like the practice of those portrait painters who employ their pupils to paint in the draperies, backgrounds, and accessories of their work. But that Dumas was the moving spirit still, and the actual author of what is best and most peculiar in the works that go by his name, is sufficiently proved by the fact that none of his assistants, whose names are in many cases known, and who in not a few instances subsequently attained eminence on their own account, have equalled or even resembled his peculiar style. Dumas' dramatic work is of but little value as literature properly so called. His forte is the already mentioned playwright's instinct, as it may be termed, which made him almost invariably choose and conduct his action in a manner so interesting and absorbing to the audience that they had no time to think of the merits of the style, the propriety of the morals, the congruity of the sentiments. His plays, in short, are intended to be acted, not to be read. Of his novels many are disfigured by long passages of the inferior work to be expected from mere hack assistants, by unskilful insertions of passages from his authorities, and sometimes by plagiarisms so audacious and flagrant, that the reader takes them as little less than an insult. His best work, however, such as the whole of the long series ranging fromLes Trois MousquetairesthroughVingt Ans aprèstoLe Vicomte de Bragelonne, a second long series of whichLa Reine Margotis a member, and parts of others, has peculiar and almost unique merits. The style is not more remarkable as such than that of the dramas; there is not always, or often, a well-defined plot, and the characters are drawn only in the broadest outline. But the cunning admixture of incident and dialogue bywhich Dumas carries on the interest of his gigantic narrations without wearying the reader is a secret of his own, and has never been thoroughly mastered by any one else.
Honoré de Balzac.
While Dumas thus gave himself up to the novel of incident, two other writers of equally remarkable genius, and of greater merely literary power, also devoted themselves to prose fiction, and by this means exercised a wide influence on their generation. Honoré de Balzac was born at Tours, on the 20th of May, 1799. He was fairly well educated, but his father's circumstances compelled him to place his son in a lawyer's office. This Balzac could not endure, and he very shortly betook himself to literature, suffering very considerable hardships. The task he attempted was fiction, and his experience in it was unique. For years he wrote steadily, and published dozens of volumes, not merely without attaining success, but without deserving any. But few of these are ever read now, and when they are opened it is out of mere curiosity, a curiosity which meets with but little return. Yet Balzac continued, in spite of hardship and of ill success, to work on, and in his thirtieth year he made his first mark withLes Derniers Chouans, a historical novel, which, if not of great excellence, at least shows a peculiar and decided talent. From this time forward he worked with spirit and success in his own manner, and in twenty years produced the vast collection which he himself termedLa Comédie Humaine, the individual novels being often connected by community of personages, and always by the peculiar fashion of analytical display of character which from them is identified with Balzac's name. The most successful of these are concerned with Parisian life, and perhaps the most powerful of all areLe Père Goriot,Eugénie Grandet,La Cousine Bette,La Peau de Chagrin,La Recherche de l'Absolu,Séraphita. The last is the best piece of mere writing that Balzac has produced. He had also a wonderful faculty for short tales (Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu,Une Passion dans le Désert, etc.). He tried the theatre, but failed. Notwithstanding Balzac's untiring energy (he would often work for weeks together with the briefest intervals of sleep) and the popularity of his books, he was always in pecuniary difficulties. These were caused partly by his mania for speculation, andpartly by his singular habits of composition. He would write a novel in short compass, have it printed, then enlarge the printed sheets with corrections, and repeat this process again and again until the expenses of the mere printing swallowed up great part of the profits of the work. At last he obtained wealth, and, as it seemed, a prospect of happiness. In 1850 he married Madame Hanska, a rich Polish lady, to whom he had been attached for many years. He had prepared for a life of opulent ease at Paris with his wife; but a few months after his marriage he died of heart disease. Balzac is in a way the greatest of French novelists, because he is the most entirely singular and original. It has been said of him, with as much truth as exaggeration, that he has drawn a whole world of character after having first created it out of his own head. Balzac's characters are never quite human, and the atmosphere in which they are placed has something of the same unreality (though it is for the most part tragically and not comically unreal) as that of Dickens. Everything is seen through a kind of distorting lens, yet the actual vision is defined with the most extraordinary precision, and in the most vivid colours. Balzac had great drawbacks. Despite his noble prefix he cannot conceive or draw either a gentleman or a lady. His virtuous characters are usually virtuous in the theatrical sense only; his scheme of human character is altogether low and mean. But he can analyse vice and meanness with wonderful vigour, and he is almost unmatched in the power of conferring apparent reality upon what the reader nevertheless feels to be imaginary and ideal. It follows almost necessarily that he is happiest when his subject has a strong touch of the fantastic. The already mentionedPeau de Chagrin—a magic skin which confers wishing powers on its possessor but shrivels at each wish, shortening his life correspondingly—andSéraphita, a purely romantic or fantastic tale, are instances of this. Almost more striking than either are theContes Drolatiques, tales composed in imitation of the manner and language of the sixteenth century. Here the grotesque and fantastic incidents and tone exactly suit the writer, and some of the stories are among the masterpieces of French literature. The same sympathy with the abnormal may be noticed in theChef-d'œuvre Inconnu, where asolitary painter touches and retouches his supposed masterpiece till he loses all power of self-criticism, and at lasts exhibits triumphantly a shapeless and unintelligible daub of mingled colours. Balzac's style is not in itself of the best; it is clumsy, inelastic, and destitute of the order and proportion which distinguish the best French prose, but it is not ill suited to the peculiar character of his work.
George Sand.
With Balzac's name is inseparably connected, if only from the striking contrast between them, that of George Sand. Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who took the writing name of George Sand, was born at Paris in 1804, and had a somewhat singular family history, of which it is enough to say here that she was descended through her father's mother from Marshal Saxe, the famous son of Augustus of Saxony and Aurore von Köningsmarck. At the age of eighteen she married a man named Dudevant, and was very unhappy, though it is rather difficult to determine on whom the blame of the unhappiness ought to rest. They separated after a few years, and she came to Paris, from her home at Nohant in Berry, to seek a living. She found it soon in literature, having met with a friend and companion in the novelist Jules Sandeau, and with a stern and most useful critic in Henri de Latouche. Her first novel of importance wasIndiana, published in 1832. This was followed byValentine,Lélia,Jacques, etc. The interest of all or most of these turns on the sufferings of thefemme incomprise, a celebrated person in literature, of whom George Sand is the historiographer, if not the inventor. A long series of novels of this kind gave way, between 1840 and 1849, first to a series of philosophical rhapsodies, of whichSpiridionis the chief, and then to one in which the political aspirations of the socialist Republicans appear. Of these,Consuelo, which is perhaps popularly considered the author's masterpiece, was the chief. Her private history was somewhat remarkable, and she succeeded in making at least two men of greater genius than herself, Alfred de Musset and Chopin, utterly miserable. They, however, afforded the subjects of two noteworthy books,Elle et Lui, andLucrezia Floriani, the latter perhaps the most characteristic of all her early works. After the establishment of the Second Empire her tastes and habits became quieter. Shelived chiefly, and latterly almost wholly, at Nohant, being greatly attached to the country; and she wrote many charming sketches of country life with felicitous introduction ofpatois, such asLa Mare au Diable,François le Champi,La Petite Fadette. Some voluminous memoirs, published in 1854, dealt with her own early experiences. She lived till the age of seventy-two, dying in 1876, and never ceased to put forth novels which showed no distinct falling off in fertility or imagination, or in command of literary style. She must have written in all nearly a hundred books. As the chief characteristics of Balzac are intense observation, concentrated thought, and the most obstinate and unwearying labour, so the chief characteristic of George Sand is easy improvisation. She had an active and receptive mind which took in the surface of things, whether it was love, or philosophy, or politics, or scenery, or manners, with remarkable and indifferent facility. She had also a style which, if it cannot be ranked among the great literary styles from its absence of statuesque outline, and from its too great fluidity, was excellently suited for the task of improvisation. Her novels, therefore, slipped from her without the slightest mental effort, and appear to have cost her nothing. It is not true, in this case, that what has cost nothing is worth nothing. But even favourable critics admit that it is peculiarly difficult to read a novel of George Sand a second time, and this is perhaps a decisive test. She is, indeed, far more of an improvising novelist than Dumas, to whom the term has more often been applied, though she wrote better French, and attempted more ambitious subjects. The better characteristics of her novels reappeared, perhaps to greater advantage, in her numerous and agreeable letters, especially those to the novelist Flaubert.
Mérimée.
In striking contrast with these three novelists was Prosper Mérimée, also a novelist for the most part, but, unlike them, a comparatively infertile writer[292], and one of the most exquisite masters of French prose that the nineteenth century has seen. Mérimée was born in 1803, and was therefore almostexactly of an age with the writers just mentioned. For a time he took a certain share in the Romantic movement, but his distinguishing characteristic was a kind of critical cynicism, partly real, partly affected, which made him dislike and distrust exaggeration of all kinds. He accordingly soon fell off. Possessing independent means, and entering the service of the government, he was not obliged to write for bread, and for many years he produced little, devoting himself as much to archæology and the classical languages as to French. He accepted the Second Empire apparently from a genuine and hearty hatred of democracy, and was rewarded with the post of senator. But he had to assist Napoleon III. in hisCæsar, and to dance attendance on the Court, the latter duty being made somewhat less irksome to him by his personal attachment to the Empress. Two collections of letters, which have appeared since his death, one addressed to an unknown lady, and the other to the late Sir Antonio Panizzi, while adding to Mérimée's literary reputation, have thrown very curious light on his character, exhibiting him as a man who, with very genuine and hearty affections, veiled them under an outward cloak of cynicism, for fear of being betrayed into vulgarity and extravagance. He died in 1870, at the beginning of the troubles of France, by which he was deeply afflicted. The entire amount of Mérimée's work is, as has been said, not large, and during the last twenty years of his life it is almost insignificant. But such as it is, it has an enduring and monumental value, which belongs to the work of few of his contemporaries. He began by a curious practice, which united the romantic fancy for strange countries and strong local colour with his personal longing for privacy and the absence of literaryéclat. Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul—plays, nominally by a Spanish actress—was produced when he was but one-and-twenty; two years later, with an audacious anagram on the title of his previous work, he published, under the title ofLa Guzla, some nominal translation of Dalmatian prose and verse, in which he utilised with extraordinary cleverness the existing books on Slav poetry.La Famille de Carvajalwas a furthersupercheriein the same style. In the very height and climax of the Romantic movement Mérimée produced two works, attesting at once his marvellous supremacy of style, his strangecritical appreciation of the current forces in literature, his penetrating insight into history, and the satiric background of all his thoughts and studies. These wereLa Jacquerie, and aChronique du Règne de Charles IX. These books, with Balzac'sContes Drolatiques(which they long preceded), are the most happy creative criticisms extant of the middle ages and the Renaissance in France. They are not fair or complete: on the contrary, they are definitely and unfairly hostile. But the mastery at once of human nature and of literary form which they display, the faculty of vivid resurrection indicated by them, the range, the insight, the power of expression, are extraordinary. During the rest of his life Mérimée, with some excursions into history (ancient and modern), archæology, and criticism, confined himself for the most part to the production, at long intervals, of short tales or novels of very limited length. They are all masterpieces of literature, and, like most masterpieces of literature, they indicate, in a comparatively incidental and by-the-way fashion, paths which duller men have followed up to the natural result of absurdity and exaggeration.Colomba,Mateo Falcone,La Double Méprise,La Vénus d'Ille,L'Enlèvement de la Redoute,Lokis, have equals, but no superiors either in French prose fiction or in French prose. Grasp of human character, reserved but masterly description of scenery, delicate analysis of motive, ability to represent the supernatural, pathos, grandeur, simple narrative excellence, appear turn by turn in these wonderful pieces, as they appear hardly anywhere else except in the author to whom we shall come next. It is noteworthy, however, that Mérimée is a master of the simple style in literature as Gautier is of the ornate. One cannot be said to be greater than the other, but between them they exhibit French prose in a perfection which, since the seventeenth century, it had not possessed.
Théophile Gautier.
Théophile Gautier was born considerably later than most of the writers just mentioned. His birth-year was 1811, and he was a native of Tarbes in Gascony. His education was partly at the grammar school of that town, and partly at the Lycée Charlemagne, where he made friends with Gérard de Nerval, who was destined to have a great influence onhis life. After leaving school he was intended for the profession of art. But, like Thackeray, to whom he had many points of resemblance, he had much less artistic faculty than taste. Gérard introduced him to the circle of Victor Hugo, and he speedily became one of the most fervent disciples of the author ofHernani. In a red waistcoat which has become historic, and in a mass of long hair which he continued to wear through life, he was the foremost of the Hugonicclaqueat the representation of that famous play. Young as he was, he soon justified himself as something more than a hanger-on of great men of letters. In 1830 itself he produced a volume of verse, and this was followed byAlbertus, an audacious poem in the extremest Romantic style, and by a work which did him both harm and good,Mademoiselle de Maupin. In this the most remarkable qualities of style and artistic conception were accompanied by a wilful disregard of the proprieties. Before long his unusual command of style, which was partly natural, partly founded on a wide and accurate study of the French writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, recommended him to newspaper work, at which he toiled manfully for the remainder of his life. There was hardly a department of belles lettres which he did not attempt. He travelled in Algeria, in Russia, in Turkey, in Spain, in Italy, in England, and wrote accounts of his travels, which are among the most brilliant ever printed. He was an assiduous critic of art, of the drama and of literature, and the only charge which has ever been brought against his work in this kind is that it is usually too lenient—that his fine appreciation of even the smallest beauties has made him overlook gross defects. His work in prose fiction was incessant, in poetry more intermittent, and all the more perfect. When the Empire established itself, Gautier, who had no political sympathies, but was, in an undecided sort of way, a conservative from the æsthetic point of view, accepted it. But he gave it no active support, beyond continuing to contribute to theMoniteur, and received from it no patronage of any kind. Nor did he sacrifice the least iota of principle, insisting, in the very face ofLes Châtiments, on having his praise of Victor Hugo inserted in the official journal on pain of his instant resignation. He led a pleasant but laborious life in one of the suburbs of Paris, witha household of sisters, daughters, and cats, to all of whom he was deeply attached. Here he lived through the Prussian siege. On the restoration of order he manfully grappled with his journalist work again, all hopes of lucrative appointments having gone with the Empire. But his health had been broken for some time, and he died in 1872. The works by which Gautier will be remembered are, in miscellaneous prose, a remarkable series of studies on curious figures, chiefly of the seventeenth century, calledLes Grotesques, and a companion series on the partakers in the movement of 1830, besides his descriptive books. In novel writing there must be mentioned an unsurpassed collection of short tales (the best of which isLa Morte Amoureuse);Le Roman de la Momie, a clevertour de forcereviving ancient Egyptian life; and, lastly,Le Capitaine Fracasse, a novel in the manner of Dumas, but fashioned in his own inimitable style. In verse, he wrote, besides work already mentioned, theComédie de la Mort, some miscellaneous poems of later date, and, finally, theÉmaux et Camées. In prose he is, as has been said, the greatest recent master of the ornate style of French, as Mérimée is the greatest master of the simple style. His mastery over mere language is accompanied by a very fine sense of the total form of his tales, so that the already-mentionedMorte Amoureuseis one of the unsurpassable things of literature. In general writing he has a singular faculty of embalming the most trivial details in the amber of his style, so that his articles can be read again and again for the mere beauty of them. As a poet he is specially noteworthy for the same command of form joined to the same exquisite perfection of language. InÉmaux et Caméesespecially it is almost impossible to find a flaw; language, metre, arrangement, are all complete and perfect, and this formal completeness is further informed by abundant poetic suggestion. The chief fault, if it be a fault, which can be found with Gautier is, that he set himself too deliberately against the tendencies of his age, and excluded too rigidly everything but purely æsthetic subjects of interest from his contemplation, and from the range of his literary energy.