Chapter 9

[1]Villemain,M. de Féletz et les salons de son temps.

[2]Any one interested in their real story will find it told according to the original historical documents in Cuvillier-Fleury'sPortraits Politiques, 1851, pp. 377, &c.

[3]For example, Émile Deschamps,Poésies, edition of 1841, p. 124. "Une page des martyrs."

[4]Lamartine,Mémoires; Voyage en Orient; Méditations poétiques; Nouvelles méditations poétiques; Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, i. ii; Victor Hugo,Odes et Ballades; Edmond Biré,Victor Hugo avant 1830.

Of great significance as regards the whole character of the period is the answer to the question: What is the nature of the amatory sentiment in the writings of the authors of this group?

Of all the emotions treated of in literature the emotion of love is that which receives most attention, and as a rule makes most impression on the reader. Knowledge of the manner in which it is apprehended and represented is an important factor in any real understanding of the spirit of an age. In the age's conception of the passion of love we have, as it were, a gauge by which we can measure with extreme accuracy the force, the nature, the temperature of its whole emotional life. We see gallantry transformed into passion in the works of Rousseau. In the writings of Germany's great poets this passion is chastened and humanised. The German Romanticists turn love into a sort of moonlight sentimentality. In revolutionary times it is represented as at war with existing and regular social relations. In the works of the sceptical authors of the nineteenth century, such as Heine, it is undermined by doubt of its existence.[1]

In such a period as that at present under consideration, a period which rejects the claims of the body, pins its faith to authority, and prizes order above all things, love necessarily receives a characteristic imprint. If we glance at the most notable descriptions of love which the period has bequeathed to us, we gain some idea of its main types of humanity, male and female.

The first pair to meet our eyes are Eudore and Velléda inLes Martyrs.

The hero ofLes Martyrsis peculiarly interesting to us because Chateaubriand has painted him with many of the features of his own expressive countenance. So great is the similarity of their circumstances that the words and the reflections with which Chateaubriand and Eudore begin to tell the stories of their lives are almost identical. Eudore says: "Born at the foot of Mount Taygetus, the melancholy murmur of the sea was the first sound that fell upon my ear. On how many shores have I since then watched those waves break that I am now gazing on! Who could have told me a few short years ago that I should hear the waves moaning on the beaches of Italy, on the shores of the Batavians, the Britons, and the Gauls, which I then saw laving the bright sands of Messenia?" And Chateaubriand, in hisVoyage en Italie, writes: "Born on the rocky shores of Brittany, the first sound which fell on my ear when I came into the world was the roar of the sea; and on how many shores have I since then seen the billows break on which I am now gazing! Who could have told me a few short years ago that I should hear moaning by the graves of Scipio and Virgil the waves that rolled at my feet on English beaches and the shores of Maryland?" &c.

Both these heroes are, thus, far-travelled and sorely tried men of the type of Odysseus and Æneas. Common to both are astonishment at the many and strange adventures of their own lives, and admiration of themselves, who have been protected throughout all these dangers by higher powers. But more significant is another feature which they have in common. Eudore, like Chateaubriand, is the hero who brings about the triumph of Christianity upon earth. Chateaubriand does in the reign of Napoleon what Eudore did in the reign of Galerius; and it is not his fault that he is not a martyr; the thought of martyrdom was one which often occupied him in his youth; he repeatedly said to friends that he would not have drawn back if his life had been required of him. The heroic figure always present to his imagination as a pattern is nothing less than the sacrificial victim who atones for the ungodliness and apostasy of the age, and who by his life-work and his sufferings appeases an angry God. In the first edition ofLes MartyrsEudore is plainly called a lesser Christ. In writing of him the author uses the expression that the Almighty demanded "une hostie entière." In the later editions this particular expression was, on religious grounds, omitted, but in another place the same idea has been inadvertently retained, with an almost comic effect. In the account of Eudore's martyrdom we read: "The chair of fire was now ready. Seated on its glowing bars, the Christian teacher preached the Gospel more eloquently than before. Seraphims shed the dew of heaven on him, and his guardian angel sheltered him with his wings.Il paraissait dans la flamme comme un pain délicieux préparé pour les tables célestes."

We have here the fundamental idea that distinguishes the type. The first sacrifice, the first saviour, the first "host," is not enough. Although he is a Christian, Chateaubriand does not believe that the sacrificial death of Christ has been a complete atonement, has done all that was required. To ensure the triumph of religion minor saviours, such as Chateaubriand himself and his hero Eudore, are still needed. In German Romanticism even a miserable creature like Golo in Tieck'sGenovevais understood to have a resemblance to Christ; the same is the case with Eudore.[2]Though he errs in his youth and for a short time treads the path of destruction in beautiful Naples (Chateaubriand knew by experience that the best resolutions are no security against such backsliding), he reforms, stands steadfast in every trial, and dies a shining light.

His love for Velléda is one of these trials.

Velléda is undoubtedly the most remarkable and most influential female character in the French literature of this period. She is a Gallic maiden of the third century, and in her Chateaubriand depicts the French national type. "This was no ordinary woman. She had that attractive waywardness which distinguishes the women of Gaul. Her glance was quick and keen, the expression of her mouth slightly satirical, her smile peculiarly gentle and expressive. Her bearing was now proud, now voluptuous. Her whole personality was a mixture of gentleness and dignity, of artlessness and art." But Velléda is not simply French; she bears the distinct impress of the age of her creation; she is an ideal of 1808. She is a priestess, and belongs to the family of the Arch-Druid. In the first decade of the nineteenth century the feminine character was not perfect unless it was marked by religious enthusiasm. It was also obligatory that Velléda should not be purely and simply the child of nature; she is so only to the same extent as were the ladies of 1808. We are expressly and somewhat pedantically told of her that in the family of the Arch-Druid she had been "carefully instructed in the literature of Greece and in the history of her own country." Velléda is the last priestess of the Druids, as Cymodocée is the last priestess of Homer. A short time ago Corinne had been the model of the ambitious young Frenchwoman, now she was supplanted by Velléda; and, literature not being merely a medium of expression for society, but also an important agent in remoulding it, we see the type pass from the world of imagination into the world of reality. What is Madame de Krüdener, standing in front of the Russian army, but a Christian Velléda?

When we make the acquaintance of the young priestess she is seated in a boat which is tossing on the waves of a tempestuous sea, trying to still the storm with her incantations; for she, like Fouqué's Undine, has, or believes she has, a certain power over the sea. Later we hear her, in an eloquent speech, calling on her countrymen to take up arms against the Romans and reconquer their liberty. We see her, as the priestess of Teutates, sharpening her sickle to offer a human sacrifice. How beautiful she is as her creator describes her to us—tall and straight, scantily clothed in a short, black, sleeveless tunic, her golden sickle hanging from a girdle of steel! Her eyes are blue, her lips rose-red; her fair flowing hair is bound with a slender oak-branch or a wreath of verbena.

Hardly has she seen Eudore than she loves him. But such simple and natural passion is not enough for the age; it demands that Velléda shall be a devotee of Vesta, shall have taken the oath of eternal virginity. "I am a virgin, the virgin of the island of the Seine; whether I keep my oath or break it I die—die for your sake." Eudore admires her, but does not love her. His relation to her is that of the pious Æneas to Dido, a fact to which the author makes him draw our attention. The unfortunate Velléda tries all her magic arts. At one time she determines to steal her way in to Eudore on the moonbeams; at another she is preparing to fly into the tower which he inhabits and win his love in the shape of another woman, but the very thought arouses her jealousy and causes her to desist. Eudore, though he does not return her passion, feels himself, as it were, infected by its atmosphere when he is beside her. As a Christian he shrinks with horror from the temptation. "At least twenty times while Velléda was telling me of her sad and tender feelings, I was on the point of throwing myself at her feet, announcing her victory, and making her happy by the acknowledgment of my defeat. At the moment when I was about to succumb, the compassion with which the unhappy woman inspired me saved me. But this very compassion, which saved me at first, in the end proved my destruction; for it deprived me of the last remnant of my strength." Looking at the matter from the purely artistic point of view, it offends our taste to hear a man dilate thus upon his struggles to preserve his virtue; Eudore's outbursts of shame and remorse do not become him well. "O Cyrille," he says, "how can I go on with such a story! I blush with shame and confusion." When at last, after Velléda has attempted to kill herself, this knight of the doleful countenance has yielded and is lying at her feet, nothing less will serve him than to set all the powers of hell loose on the occasion. "I fell at Velléda's feet. ... Hell gave the signal for these terrible nuptials; the spirits of darkness howled from their abyss, the chaste spouses of our forefathers turned away their faces, my guardian angel hid his with his wings and returned to heaven." Even at the supreme moment this depressing hero is incapable of self-surrender; he is ashamed; he resembles a boy who, with a feeling compounded of gluttony and fear of flogging, devours a stolen apple. "My happiness resembled despair, and any one seeing us in the midst of our rapture would have taken us for two criminals who had just received their sentence of death. From that moment I felt that I was stamped with the seal of divine wrath. Thick darkness spread like a smoke-cloud in my soul; I felt as if a host of rebellious spirits had suddenly taken possession of it. Thoughts filled my mind which until this moment had never occurred to me; the language of hell poured from my lips; I uttered such blasphemies as are heard in the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth."

It is, thus, on a background of hell-fire that Chateaubriand depicts the love of the Christian confessor and the heathen prophetess. InAtala, where we have a kindred representation of combined suffering and pleasure, the insincere anathema against earthly love was not yet launched.

We come upon much the same idea in one of Alfred de Vigny's youthful works,Eloa, a beautiful and notable poem which describes the seduction of a charming young angel of the female sex by the Prince of Darkness. The Satan ofLes Martyrswas a revolutionist, but De Vigny's Satan is hardly to be distinguished from the Eros of the ancients. Without telling who he is, he ensnares the fair angel with his personal charms and his eloquence, and draws her with him into the abyss. He himself describes his power in the following words:

Je suis celui qu'on aime et qu'on ne connaît pas.Sur l'homme j'ai fondé mon empire de flammeDans les désirs du cœur, dans les rêves de l'âme,Dans les liens des corps, attraits mystérieux,Dans les trésors du sang, dans les regards des yeux.C'est moi qui fait parler l'épouse dans ses songes;La jeune fille heureuse apprend d'heureux mensonges;Je leur donne des nuits qui consolent des jours,Je suis le Roi secret des secrètes amours.

We are irresistibly reminded of the song to Eros in theAntigoneof Sophocles.

As the period is now rapidly descending the incline leading to the conception of Eros as the devil himself, it is only natural that in the descriptions of "real" love on which it prides itself it should be more frigid and impotent, more seraphic and platonic than any other age we are acquainted with. Let us see how the Velléda of the day, Madame de Krüdener herself, describes love inValerie.

AlthoughValerieis an imitation ofWerther, it is in many ways extremely unlikeWerther. It is the story of a young Swede, Gustave Linar by name, who in his childhood learned from his mother "to love virtue," and who continues to love it until he dies. Along with virtue he loves Valérie, but Valérie is the wife of the Count, his master and ideal, and is herself such a quintessence of all the virtues that he regards her with a reverence which makes desire impossible. Alexander Stakjev confessed his feelings to Krüdener, but Gustave utters not a word to the Count, nor does he ever speak of his sufferings to the woman he loves.[3]Preyed upon by uncomprehended and unavowed love, and far too well-behaved to shoot himself, he dies of consumption.

This is his style: "O my friend, how criminal of me to have yielded to a passion which I was well aware would be my destruction! But I will at least die in the love of virtue and sacred truth; I will not charge Heaven with my misfortunes, as so many men in my plight do (what virtue); I will endure without complaint the suffering which I have brought upon myself, and which I love, although it is killing me. I will go when the Almighty calls me, burdened with many sins, but not with that of suicide." (ii. 63.)

Gustave is not a man. It is generally acknowledged that the portraiture of men is not the strong point of female authors. They almost invariably depict them as entirely absorbed in their relations with women. Gustave is, as already observed, a Scandinavian; but Scandinavians have no reason to be proud of this compatriot, in whom the vigour of the Northerner is conspicuously absent. The national colouring of the story is confined almost entirely to the Teutonic sentimentality in which the descriptions are immersed, and to a variety of Swedish names, which, it goes without saying, are as a rule incorrectly spelt. At Venice Gustave gives a fête in Valerie's honour; the decorations are intended to remind her of the home of her youth, amongst the birches and pines; when she catches sight of them she cries: "Ah! c'est Dronnigor" (Drottninggård).

There is nothing characteristically Swedish about Gustave. Really beautiful in the description of his character is the gleam of youthful philanthropic enthusiasm shed over his confessions. It seems to him that in most men's lives the period of love is succeeded by that of ambition. There is something fine and sincere in the language in which he tells that the glory others desire is not that which in his eyes has seemed desirable. "The glory of which I dreamed was won by occupying one's self with the happiness of all, as love occupies itself with the happiness of a single individual. It was virtue in the man who possessed it, before his fellow-men gave it the name of fame." And he adds: "What has real glory in common with the petty vanity of the many, with the pitiful contention that one is something because one is striving hard to be it?" It is strange to find sentiments like these in a book the fame of which was due to such artifices as were employed to puffValérie.

The heroine is equipped with all the charms which a lady as passionately in love with herself as Madame de Krüdener was could communicate to her own portrait. She is a thorough woman, whilst the unfortunate Gustave, though quite aware of the foolishness and hopelessness of his passion, is absolutely unable to burst his bonds and begin to live the life of a man. He is obliged to content himself with such humble expressions of his adoration as kissing a child whom his mistress has kissed on the spot which her lips have touched, or kissing the outside of the window-pane on the inside of which she is resting her bare arm during the pause between two dances at a ball, or pressing her hand and feeling the ring given her by her husband, or fainting in her presence, so that she is obliged to bathe his brow with eau-de-Cologne.

A faint perfume of eau-de-Cologne may be said to pervade the whole story. It is significant that the first service which Valérie asks Gustave to do her after they have become intimate is to procure her secretly a little rouge, which her husband objects to her using. With the odour of eau-de-Cologne is blended an odour of propriety and veneration which is so powerful that it is almost obnoxious, and a supernaturalness in the matter of the affections which is both silly and unbeautiful. Valérie isenceintewhen Gustave conceives his passion for her, but this circumstance has no curative effect on him, though he lives in intimate companionship with her until her son is born. They wax enthusiastic together over Ossian and Clarissa Harlowe. Gustave never feels the slightest jealousy of the Count, nor does the Count of him. It is with the Count's hand in his that Gustave dies. Love is, in short, so purified, so unnaturally seraphic, that with its passion it has also lost its poetry. This is doubly significant when we happen to know how little seraphic was the life with which this poetess of love had prepared herself to write her novel, and how cleverly she herself managed to reconcile the sacred with the more carnal aspects of love.

Lamartine and his Elvire are the last couple on whose relations we have time to dwell.

Lamartine's youthful poems treated of love, but of a love so pure that it was called "une prière à deux." It was depicted with the transfiguring ideality which is the result of the death of the beloved one. The poet presses to his lips the crucifix which she kissed before she died, and the poemLe Crucifixis so soulful that we believe Lamartine when he tells us in a note appended to it: "I never re-read these verses." In his novel,Raphael, a much later work, he gives us the real facts of the same love story, and these throw a new light on the famous poems.

Julie, to give the lady known by the name of Elvire her real name, is a créole, aged twenty-eight. She is an orphan, and has married a man of seventy, a famous scientist, that she may have a protector; but her actual relation to him has never been anything but that of a daughter to a father. She has an affection of the heart which may at any time prove fatal. By the Lake of Bourget in Savoy (the lake of which Lamartine has sung so beautifully), where she is spending the autumn for the sake of her health, she meets Raphael, the young hero of the book, a man differing in nothing but name from its author, who in its pages gives us not only real facts, but even calls his friends and acquaintances by their real names. He describes himself as he was then—twenty-four years old, young and poor, solitary and shy, tender-hearted and given to enthusiasms, already a littleblaséfrom much dissipation, tired of all the commonplace and dissolute amours in which he had hitherto indulged.

It cannot be said that Lamartine gave an altogether too unfavourable description of himself. The delicacy and refinement of Raphael's feelings was such that his comrades used laughingly to declare that he was home-sick for heaven. In a somewhat clumsy manner Lamartine attempts to give us an idea of this refinement: "If he had wielded the brush, he would have painted the Madonna of Foligno; if the chisel, he would have sculptured Canova's Psyche. If he had been a poet, he would have written the lamentations of Job, Tasso's Herminia stanzas, Shakespeare's moonlight scene inRomeo and Juliet, and Lord Byron's description of Haydee." Fortunately it was not required of him to do any of these things, as they had been done by others. We know that in his efforts at a later period in one of the three directions, namely, as a poet, he did not attain to the level of the masters named.

InRaphaelwe have a masterly description of a young man's ardent love, a love which, though it has taken possession of him heart and soul, is of an almost altogether spiritual nature, partly because its object inspires such a degree of reverence and compassion that the senses are not allowed to come into play, partly because the young man, after leading a loose life with women for whom he has felt no respect, shudders at the very idea of his relation to this woman, whom he reveres, becoming one of the same nature with his past amours.

He has had love affairs, but he has never been truly in love before. It seems to him as if, when she looks at him, there is a remoteness in her gaze which he has never felt before in human eye. It reminds him of the gleam of the stars, which has traversed millions of miles of space. He has a hesitation in approaching her which makes the distance between them seem impassable. When he at last succeeds in making her acquaintance, it is the name and the position of a brother which she gives him, and with this he is contented and happy. No sooner have they found one another than he feels as if he were relieved from a heavy burden—the burden of his heart. As soon as he gives it away he learns what life in all its fulness is. He feels as if he were floating in the purest ether; his joy is infinite and luminous as the air of heaven. During the first hours which he spends with her he loses all perception of time; he is certain that a thousand years spent thus would to him be so many seconds. He does not feel like a human being, but like a living hymn of praise.

And this ecstatic mood lasts as long as he breathes the same air with her. They are happy together during the beautiful summer days, and prolong their summer into autumn: "Our summer was in ourselves."

We feel that this description of the bliss of young love is a description of something that really has existed. The young couple are living not far from the place where Rousseau, as a youth, loved Madame de Warens. Raphael is rather younger than Julie—he is twenty-four, she twenty-eight; this gives their relation a certain resemblance to that between Rousseau and his protectress; but the emotions of Raphael and Julie are as incorporeal and romantic as those of the other couple were substantially human.

And not only the happiness produced by the presence of the loved one, but the pain of separation, the longing for letters, the fever of expectation when the time of meeting draws near, and the agonies of parting are described, with many admirable realistic touches, in a manner worthy of a great writer.

Raphael lives in the country, Julie in Paris. When he takes a walk, his steps involuntarily turn towards the north, to diminish the distance which separates him from her. His day contains only one happy hour, that which brings the postman with her letter. As soon as he hears the postman's step he is at the window; he meets him at the street door, hides the letter in his pocket, and hastens with trembling knees to his room, where he locks himself in to read it in privacy. Later in the story, when Raphael is in Paris, we have the admirable description of his wanderings on the winter evenings back and forwards across one of the Seine bridges, waiting for the moment when the lamp in her window shall show him that her guests have taken their departure, and that he is certain to find her alone. Note the blind beggar on the bridge, into whose tin cup he never forgets to throw his mite; the striking of the hour and the half-hour by the church clocks; and another delicate little touch—Raphael's hearing gradually becomes so acute that he distinguishes the separate chime of each clock in the chorus.

All this is excellent. Unfortunately the novel as a whole is spoiled by its religious purpose.

The authors of this period could not write of love pure and simple; they felt obliged to mix religion up with it. Lamartine makes his lovers go through whole courses of philosophy and theology together. They hold different opinions, and she is intellectually his superior. He still retains the beliefs of his childhood. In the house of her famous husband she has associated with intellectually emancipated men of science, whose opinions, marked with the stamp of the eighteenth century, she has imbibed. He and she really belong to different generations—she to the generation of the empire, he to that of the monarchy. Faust, when he is catechised by his Gretchen, is obliged to parry her attempt to convert him by explaining his unbelief to her in palliating euphemisms; the opposite happens here; Raphael makes long, fruitless attempts to convert his Julie to faith in God and Christianity. The first time the innocent youth recommends her to seek aid from God, he is astonished when, instead of answering him, she looks sad and indifferent and turns away her face. He timidly asks her reason for so doing. She answers: "That word distresses me." "What! the word which signifies life, love, and everything that is good—how can it distress the most perfect of God's creatures?" &c., &c. Then she is obliged to explain to him that what he callsGodis what she callslaw—an infinite greatness, an absolute, inevitable necessity, something that it is impossible to move with prayers.

To this conviction of hers is due Julie's easy and yet dignified moral attitude. She says: "I was educated by a philosopher, and in my husband's house I have lived in the society of free-thinking men, who have severed themselves entirely from the dogmas and observances of a church which they have helped to undermine; hence I have no superstitions and none of the weak-minded scruples which impel most women to bow their heads under a second yoke, superadded to that which our consciences impose upon us."

It is Raphael who plays the girl's part when, time after time, he supplicates a woman of a spirit like this to return to the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. "I besought her to seek in a religion of love and tenderness, in the sacred gloom of our churches, in the mysterious faith in that Christ who is the God of tears, in genuflections and prayer, the relief and the comfort which I myself had found in them in my youth." Raphael's attempt at conversion was not entirely successful; he himself was satisfied with the result, but a more strictly orthodox Christian would hardly have been so.

It is love, we are led to understand, which teaches Julie to believe in God. "There is a God," she said; "there is an infinite love, of which ours is only one drop, a drop which falls back into the divine ocean from which we have drawn it. This ocean is God. At this moment I feel, I see, I understand Him by means of my happiness.... Yes," she continued, with even more ardour in her glance and voice, "let the perishable names by which we have called the attraction which draws us to one another be forgotten. There is only one name which expresses it—that is God. He has revealed Himself to me in your eyes. God, God, God!" she called, as if teaching herself a new language; "God is you; God is what I am to you. We are God."

All this impresses us as having more purpose in it than truth to nature. Not such is the eloquence of happy love.

Had Julie's husband, the old philosopher, happened to overhear these effusions, he could have told the lovers that such doctrines and such emotions, far from being Christian, are pure pantheism. We cannot doubt that he would have done so with perfect calmness, for he does not feel the slightest jealousy. He knows that Julie and Raphael write to each other every day, and he also knows the ethereal nature of their love. When Raphael comes to Paris, all he says to him is: "Remember that you have not one friend but two in this house. Julie could not make a better choice of a brother, nor I of a son." It is comical that Raphael, for his part, should feel no disquietude concerning the old man, unless we reckon as such a feeling of regret that he is drawing near to the grave without any belief in immortality; and it is characteristic of the period that even the aged scientist is in the end converted.

The old man has, in a manner, no ground for jealousy. Lamartine has very naïvely introduced into his novel a piece of realism, which, while it explains many things, weakens the edifying effect which he aimed at producing. Julie's reply to Raphael's first confession of love decides once and for all the nature of their mutual relations. She says: "I believe only in an invisible God, who has imprinted His image upon nature, His law upon our instincts, and His morality upon our reason. Reason, feeling, and conscience are the only revelations I acknowledge. None of these three oracles of my life would forbid me to belong to you; my whole soul would prostrate itself at your feet, if this could purchase your happiness. But are we not more certain of the spirituality and eternity of our love when it remains on the heights of pure thought, in regions inaccessible to change and death, than when it degrades and profanes itself by descending to the base regions of sensuality?"

It is, we observe, the love that despises the senses which Julie somewhat affectedly extols. Now, certain as it is that love can continue to exist even when circumstances forbid its complete gratification, it is equally certain that renunciation for the sake of renunciation and of spirituality is contrary to nature. When the religious reaction set in in Denmark, Ingemann, in his youthful works, preached such renunciation. The question whether Julie really favoured the principle, or whether we are not in reality indebted for it to Lamartine, who admired without practising it, must be left undecided. In his reminiscences of his love affairs, Lamartine is in the habit of describing himself as emancipated from all sensual desire. And we know them all, these love affairs; for the man who, according to his own account, had always such complete control over his passions, had very little control over his pen. We know (from hisConfidences) how during his meetings with Lucy, the beautiful girl of sixteen, in the cold frosty weather, he was as cold as the winter night. We remember the sentence inGraziella: "We slept two steps from each other; my cold indifference protected me." It may be doubtful whether it was really Julie who enounced the principle of renunciation, but there can be no doubt of the genuineness of the next speech attributed to her. She adds, blushing deeply, that the renunciation she demands of him is imperative—on account of her health; she has medical authority for what she says; she would leave his arms like a shadow, like a corpse: "The sacrifice would be the sacrifice not only of my dignity, but of my life."

It is impossible to deny that there is an extraordinary inconsistency between this last utterance and those which precede it, and that this exceedingly practical explanation deprives the spiritual friendship of much of its spirituality. We seem to come down from the seventh heaven and feel the solid earth beneath our feet again.

There follow scenes like those inValérie—projects of suicide which are never carried into execution; nights spent by the lovers in tender converse, with a thick oaken door between them; rapt, sentimental ecstasies. This is a love which finds expression only in lingering looks, languishing that reaches the verge of insanity, sighs that are almost screams, long silences and endless outpourings—never a caress or an embrace. Unpleasant, almost offensive, in any case unnatural, is the manner in which, in this love-story too, our attention is perpetually drawn to the fact that the lovers keep their vow, that their love remains platonic. On the one solitary occasion when there seems to be real danger, there arrives at the critical moment—who? None other than that estimable old man, Monsieur Bonald, with whose theories on the subject of woman and of marriage we are acquainted. He is coming to stay with Julie, arrives at twelve o'clock at night, and is thus saved the grief of seeing his pupils rebel against order. Even in his novel, Lamartine does not miss the opportunity of proclaiming that he was at variance with Bonald, especially as regarded his doctrine of theocratic government. It became the fashion to disagree with Bonald. Chateaubriand himself remarks in hisMemoirs(iv. 23): "Monsieur de Bonald was a clever man. His sagacity was mistaken for genius."

Whenever Julie pities Raphael, he answers her with pious outbursts in which he compares her and himself to Abélard and Héloïse. "Have I ever let you feel that I desire ought else than to share this suffering with you? Does it not make both of us voluntary and pure victims? Is not this the eternal burnt-offering of love, which has perhaps not been offered before the eyes of the angels since the days of Héloïse until now?"

When, after studyingRaphael, we re-read Lamartine's poems to Elvire, we have a new key to the understanding of the idealism and vagueness of this poetic love, which, obliged to renounce sensual pleasures, pretends that the corporeal world does not exist for it. A distinction must, however, be drawn between the later poems and some written much earlier and in a perfectly different tone, a tone which recalls the eighteenth century. Take as examples the poemsÀ Elvire(which is in reality addressed toGraziella) andSapho.

We have now enough of examples; let us consider to what conclusion they have led us. Choosing a simple emotion, but one of those which every school of literature sets itself to express and interpret, and which each expresses and interprets in a characteristic manner, we have examined a number of different specimens of the manner in which it is interpreted by this particular school. Here, as in all the other domains of literature which we have inspected, we have found the natural side of life ignored, or concealed, or blackened, or represented as something to be ashamed of. Chateaubriand and Madame de Krüdener seek out cases in which love is considered to be criminal and sinful, and either describe the triumphant yells of the powers of hell when the hero succumbs or the jubilations of the principalities and powers when the infamy is not perpetrated. We have the same paraphernalia in Alfred de Vigny's writings:

Les Chérubins brûlants qu'enveloppent six ailes,Les tendres Séraphins, Dieux des amours fidèles,Les Trônes, les Vertus, les Princes, les Ardeurs,Les Dominations, les Gardiens, les Splendeurs,Et les Rêves pieux, et les saintes Louanges,Et tous les Anges purs, et tous les grands Archanges.

De Vigny makes Satan speak like Eros, that is to say, Eros like Satan. Lamartine enthrones love in his poetry as seraphic, as emancipated from all earthly passion, but inRaphaeldescribes it as what it really was, ethereal against its will—which, however, only adds to the merit of the lovers and provides angels and burnt-offerings, these latter of a sweet savour unknown since the days of poor Abélard.

And below everything there is an under-current of hypocrisy. Eudore, who would have us believe that he is made utterly miserable by Velléda's passion, is nevertheless secretly flattered by her having cut her white throat for his sake. He bewails his fall in expressions which convey the idea that he feels tempted to fall again. The authoress ofValerieproclaims the moral purity of her heroine in the market-place and clamours of chastity and renunciation in all the newspapers at a time when she herself is peculiarly unfit to be a teacher of morality. Lamartine, as novelist, naïvely gives an explanation of his relations with Elvire which differs entirely from the impression of them that the public had naturally gathered from the ethereal ecstasies ofLes Méditations, and ends by smothering the real beauties of his literary art in languid, lachrymose sentimentality.

In the representation of love, as in everything else, men aimed at supernaturalness, and only succeeded in either crippling or hypocritically ignoring nature.[4]

[1]Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dich,So muss ich weinen bitterlich.

[2](F. L. Liebenberg,Bidrag til den Oehlenschlägerske Litteraturs Historie, i 183. Genoveva "sees Christ in him."

[3]In two successive editions of hisFranzösische Litteraturgeschichte, Julian Schmidt, in giving an account ofValérie, has made the mistake of asserting that Gustave confesses to the husband.

[4]Sources: Lamartine,Graziella; Raphael; Les Confidences; Mémoires; Madame de Krüdener,Valérie; Chateaubriand,Les Martyrs, ix., x.

In the lyric poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, as in the prose of Chateaubriand, there was, in spite of the unconditioned assertion of the principle of authority, a hidden or germinating antagonism to that principle inliterature, as demanding unqualified reverence for the past, its writers, and its forms.

It has already been remarked that the great political and social revolution in France did not affect literaryform. As regarded this, there was no necessity to re-establish the principle of authority; it had never been overthrown. In no domain are the French less revolutionary than in that of literature. The Academy is the one institution of the country which has held its ground since the days of Richelieu, and to-day it has the same name, the same aims, and even the same number of members that it had then. In literature the principle of authority was known by the name of the classic spirit, and the Revolution, far from weakening the classic spirit, had strengthened it. The Revolution itself is a classic French tragedy. Like all other French tragedies, it clothes its heroes in Greek and Roman garb. In their style and language they imitate the republicans of ancient Rome, and it is significant that it is the most cultivated and literary revolutionary party, the Girondists, who adopt the antique "thou" and the antique designation of "citizen." The Jacobins are the direct descendants of Corneille—the same toga style of oratory, the same love of magnificent laconicism. With the same enthusiasm with which Cromwell's soldiers metamorphosed themselves into ancient Hebrews, adopting their names and singing their psalms, the Frenchmen of the Revolution metamorphosed themselves into ancient Romans; and when David, the Jacobin and intimate friend of Robespierre, left his seat in the Legislative Assembly to paint the Horatii or the Brutus exhibited in 1791, he simply took his associates as models; as painter he did not need to go a step beyond the boundaries of his own period.

Just as French tragedy, when it came into being, had refused to build upon the foundation of the history of its own country, had turned its back on French tradition and laid its scenes in far-away Rome in the far-off, dimly discerned past, now the Revolution, heedless of history, heedless of the France of its own day, took far-off, un-historically appreciated antiquity, with its republicans, evolved under such different conditions, as the model to be exactly imitated. The modern Gracchi and Horatii imitated the ancient. There is, as has often been remarked, a Roman loftiness of style in Madame Roland's letters to Buzot. The ladies of the Directory at times took Cornelia, and more frequently Aspasia, as their model, even in dress. In the language of some of Napoleon's earliest letters to Josephine the influence of Latin models is to be traced; and even when he no longer stands in need of a model, his style is as classic as his profile. His taste in literature was also classic; his attachment to "les règles" and his admiration of Corneille are matter of history. As long as he is the ruler of France, even those authors who make an attempt at a species of opposition, such as Raynouard, keep in the classic track. A comparison of Werner'sSöhne des Thals(Sons of the Vale) with Raynouard'sLes Templierswill show how differently the same subject can be approached. The German poet is as mysterious and incomprehensible, as extravagant and fantastic in his treatment of the theme as the Frenchman with his obligatory alexandrines, his king and his queen, his five acts and his three unities, is well-regulated and law-abiding. Raynouard's play represents a sort of lawsuit between church and state; the king conducts his case in a most orderly manner; the Knights Templar conduct theirs in an equally orderly manner, and are thereupon burnt in an orderly manner—orderly, for we see as little as possible of the execution and of what precedes it; we only hear of it all in one of those long concluding narrations which were in vogue as far back as the days of Euripides. And the metre is still the metre prescribed by Boileau, that father of evil. The meaning of the clause, which is cut in two by the cæsura, ends with the line, and the lines are as like each other as one penny bun is like another penny bun. There is neither harmony, nor animation, nor rhythm, nor rhyme in them, forlarmesandarmes, épouxandcoups, souffrirandmourircan hardly be called rhymes. They resemble molluscs, these lines; and one of the features they have in common with molluscs is, that it is possible to cut them in two without their showing any less sign of life because of it.

One consequence of this retention of the classic spirit is the exact resemblance between the style of some of the most eminent prose authors of this day and the style of their abhorred opponents, the philosophers of the eighteenth century. We have the most conspicuous instance of this in Joseph de Maistre. De Maistre's inability to comprehend history, his want of the critical faculty and of any deep religious feeling, his tendency to systematise, his argumentativeness, which tempted him to draw hard and fast conclusions—all this in combination, really deriving from the eighteenth century, found expression in the style of that century. Bonalds cold, argumentative style, his craze for reducing everything to formulas, his persuasion that he makes his positions mathematically obvious, show that he too is a child of the century which produced Condillac, and his work a product of the very spirit which he combated. The only difference is, that such a man as Condillac is as clear and consistent as Bonald is changeable and self-contradictory.

A distinguishing feature in both classic prose and poetry isthe domination of reason. It is against this ruler that literature makes its first revolt in Madame de Staël's emotional style and Chateaubriand's richly coloured prose. Emotion and colour—these are the two great exiles who now return from a long banishment. And, curiously enough, it is not only his talents but his art theories which make of Chateaubriand a rebel against the principle of authority in literature, the very principle which it was his aim by means of literature to uphold. For classical poetry from its earliest days had sought its subjects and its inspiration in heathen antiquity and heathen mythology, and he was calling upon his fellow authors to open their own and their countrymen's eyes and ears to a poetry diametrically opposed to this, namely, the poetry of Christianity—was, in other words,attacking literary tradition as the champion of Christian tradition. His artistic principles show him to be of the new age, his political and social principles mark him as the man of the past; he is two-faced; he gives poetical expression to all the modern emotions, wearing a mask of unchangeable reverence for all the official authorities of the past. It is more especially his style which makes of him a Romanticist before the days of Romanticism. Hence, when first Lamartine and then Hugo follow his example, forsake heathen, and seek their themes in Christian mythology, society is for a time at a loss to know whether it is to recognise a conservative or a revolutionary spirit in these attempts to uphold the sacredness of religion in new ways. But by degrees the germ of revolt against the principle of authority latent in the new literary standpoint develops to such an extent that the countenance of the new school is changed.

It is interesting to trace the stages of this development in Victor Hugo's different prefaces to hisOdes. In the first (of 1822), which consists of only a few lines, the young poet asserts that loyalty and Christian faith are the standards of true poetry. The nineteenth century, he declares, has first revealed to the world the truth that poetrydoes not depend upon the form given to ideas, but upon the ideas themselves. In his preface to the second edition (published the same year) he further observes that the poet's task now is to substitute for the faded, false colours of the heathen mythology those new and true ones which belong to the Christian conception of the origin of the universe. The ode ought now to speak the severe, the consolatory, the pious language of which an old society, quitting with trembling steps "the revels of atheism and anarchy" stands in such need.

He earnestly hopes that his readers will not think that he is so conceited as "to wish to strike out a new path or create a new literary style." In the preface of 1824 the same assurances are repeated, in very characteristic words; but we feel that the young poet is now the object of suspiciously observant criticism, and that the name "Romanticist," as synonymous with transgressor of the laws of classic art, is one which men will be very apt to apply to him. He is eager to prove his literary orthodoxy. What is needed, he says, is not novelty, but truth. It is this need which he aims at supplying. Taste, "which is neither more nor less thanauthorityin literature," shows him that works which are true as regards their matter ought also to be true as regards their style. This leads to the demand for "local colouring," a demand which the classic authors can hardly be said to have supplied. But it is an understood matter that the laws imposed upon the language by Boileau are to bereligiouslyobserved. Of him Hugo writes: "Boileau shares with Racine the unique merit of having given its permanent form to the French language; this in itself is a sufficient proof that he too possessedcreative genius!" Boileau a creative genius! With what derisive laughter will Victor Hugo, ere many years have passed, receive such an assertion!

Of the poet Hugo writes that it is his duty to lead the vanguard of the people like a pillar of fire, lead them back to the great principles oforder, morality, and honour. The flaw in the literature of the century of Louis "the Great" is that its authors invoke the gods of heathendom instead of the God of Christianity. If in this matter, Hugo naïvely remarks, they had acted differently, the "triumph of the sophistical writings" of the eighteenth century would have been much impeded. What might not have been the fate of "philosophy," if the cause of God had been championed by genius instead of by virtue alone!

He vigorously objects to being called romantic. He affirms that he "has not the slightest idea of what is meant by classic and romantic literature." Refusing to be influenced by all the nonsense written on the subject at that time, he in the following sensible utterance declares the distinction to be an empty and meaningless one: "It is an acknowledged fact that every literature receives an impression, in some cases strong, in some weak, from the climate, customs, and history of the nation of which it is the expression. David, Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Milton, Corneille, men each one of whom represents a literature and a nation, have nothing in common but genius." It is impossible, therefore, to divide them into classical and romantic poets. He combats the assertion that the literary revival (evidently referring to Chateaubriand) is an outcome of the political revolution. "The literature of to-day may to a certain extent be the result of the Revolution, without on that account being its expression. Revolutionary society had its literature,ugly and foolish as itself. That society and that literature are dead and will never come to life again.Orderhas revived in all the institutions of society; it is also reviving in literature.... Just as the Revolution originated in literature, so the literature of our day isthe anticipatory expression of the pious and loyal societywhich will most certainly arise from those ruins."

Hugo was mistaken; the literature in question was the exact expression of the intellectual mood of its day, and the attempts at reform which aroused such anxiety were really forerunners of a literary revolution. For they destroyed faith in authority as authority—in this particular case faith in Boileau. From the moment when it was discovered that there were spots even in this sun, it was not possible to confine doubt to the few points where it had first modestly and cautiously insinuated itself. Literary tradition was a principle; it had to be either accepted or rejected.

In reading Hugo's second last preface to theOdes(1826) we feel that his thoughts, always turning uponorder, that favourite idea of the day, are about to drive him from the shore of literature out on to the open sea. He has discovered that order is in reality something different from the regularity which is attained by discipline and coercion. Employing a simile which occurred naturally to a youth brought up in the neighbourhood of Versailles, with Chateaubriand's descriptions of the luxuriant landscape of North America as his leisure reading, he compares the gardens of Versailles and their carefully clipped, symmetrically trimmed trees with a forest in the New World, and exclaims: "We will not ask, Where here is splendour, where grandeur, or beauty? but simply, Where isorderand wheredisorder?" He recognises now that regularity concerns only the outward form of things, but that order lies at their very foundation, and is a result of the skilful arrangement of their elements. "A writer is not classic," he says, "because heslavishlytreads in the footprints which others have left on the road."

We have thus followed Hugo step by step along the path which leads him towards the final breach with the literary principle of authority. One year more, and he throws off the yoke, assumes the leadership of the Romantic School in France, and in its first manifesto, the preface toCromwell(October, 1827), declares that there is a tyranny of the past in literature exactly as there is in politics, and that this tyranny lies like a nightmare on the breast of the young generation: "The train of the eighteenth century still stretches into ours, but should not we young men who have seen Bonaparte be too proud to bear such a train?" Observe that he now, in direct antagonism to the spirit of the Restoration, invokes Napoleon as a species of liberator. And he writes of "that rouged, powdered and patched poetry, that literature of hoops and furbelows." He is aiming his first blow at Boileau.

New as Lamartine had seemed, both in style and matter, he had retained many of the classic circumlocutions. In spite of his aversion to the lyre, he often named it in his poetry, and in choosing his subjects he preferred the abstract to the concrete.

Victor Hugo was as yet almost equally cautious. "Granted that it is advantageous and at times necessary," he writes, "to renew a few worn-out expressions, to replace a few old phrases, and perhaps even to endeavour to improve our verse by increasing the sonority of its metre and the purity of its rhyme, it cannot be too often repeated that this must be the limit of all attempts at perfecting it. Every reform at variance with the natural accent and genius of our mother-tongue must be regarded as an attack on the first principles of taste."

Neither alteration of the rhythm, nor variability in the position of the cæsura, nor the continuation of the phrase from one line to another (changes all of which he afterwards vindicated), does he as yet consider permissible. In theOdeshe conforms to the old poetic court fashion (he does not, for instance, sayConvention, butSenate, does not sayshawl, butdraperyortreasure of Kashmir), only making a few cautious attempts at a change of metre, with the object of rendering the ode style less stiff and heavy.

That court fashion was of the following nature. A small collection had been made of refined expressions, of choice words—the elect, as it were, of language—which alone had admission into poetry. Poets did not say sword, but brand, did not say soldier, but warrior, and they never mentioned such things as guns or knives; just as Danish poetry for long acknowledged only roses, lilies, violets, woodruff, and at the outside a dozen other flowers as representatives of the whole floral world. The consequence of this was that the supply of words was extremely limited, that there were only a few hundred pairs of noble rhymes, and that the same expressions, which had to be constantly repeated, brought with them exactly the same thoughts and feelings. The poetic oratory of those days was very much on a par with the pulpit oratory of our own. Sublime was the adjective applied to the dignified flow of words in which things were spoken of as far as possible without ever calling them by their real names—and, be it observed, only things that reminded men as little as possible of their earthly nature, of the material side of their being. One result of this was that the direct, unambiguous mention of common things in any work which laid claim to the privilege of classic style at once produced a comic effect. When Lebrun'sCidwas acted, the wordchambrecalled forth a murmur of disapproval. It also explains how the attempt made about the time of the earliest experiments in the Romantic style to introduce Shakespeare into France created such consternation. Every one knows thatOthello, acted in the translation of Alfred de Vigny at the Odéon—that is to say to an audience of students, the least prejudiced and least prudish of Parisian audiences—was hissed because of the occurrence in it of the word "pocket-handkerchief."

Count Alfred de Vigny, who was born in 1797, belonged to a family of ancient lineage, and was brought up a loyal adherent of monarchy by the grace of God. In 1814 he received a lieutenant's commission in the army of Louis XVIII, and he quickly developed into one of the most attractive and most independent literary characters of the day. In several branches of literature it was he who took the first step in the new direction, Hugo who followed. He wrote a historical novel in the style of Sir Walter Scott before Hugo did (Cinq-Mars, 1826), had a play acted before Hugo (the rhymed translation ofOthello, 1829), the style of which created a great sensation, and he forestalled Hugo in introducing freedom and flexibility into lyric poetry. He was the Columbus of the new movement, Hugo the Amerigo Vespucci who gave the newly discovered continent its name.

It is not a matter for surprise that, at a time when authority was upheld on every side, Hugo should have begun by accommodating himself to existing literary rules, nay, by actually believing in them as real laws of poetry and language. But presently he commenced to experiment with them a little, to shake them a little, to doubt them a little, to interpret them in his own way, doing it all with the profoundest reverence, until it became no longer possible for him to observe them, upon which he overthrew them. In one of his poems (Les Contemplations, i., vii.) he gives a witty description of the revolution which he ended by making:

Je suis ce monstre énorme,Je suis le démagogue horrible et débordéEt le dévastateur du vieil ABCD;Causons,Quand je sortis du collège, du thème,Des vers latins, farouche, espèce d'enfant blêmeEt grave, au front penchant, aux membres appauvris;Quand, tâchant de comprendre et de juger, j'ouvrisLes yeux sur la nature et sur Part, l'idiomePeuple et noblesse, était l'image du royaume;La poésie était la monarchie; un motÉtait un duc ou pair ou n'était qu'un grimaud;Les syllabes, pas plus que Paris et que Londres,Ne se mêlaient; ainsi marchent sans se confondrePiétons et cavaliers traversant le pont Neuf;La langue était l'État avant quatre-vingt-neuf;Les mots, bien ou mal nés, vivaient parqués en castes;Les uns, nobles, hantant les Phèdres, les Jocastes,Les Méropes, ayant le décorum pour loi,Et montant à Versaille aux carosses du roi;Les autres, tas de gueux, drôles patibulaires,Habitant les patois, quelques-uns aux galèresDans l'argot; dévoués à tous les genres bas,Déchirés en haillons dans les halles; sans bas,Sans perruque; créés pour la prose et la farce.* * * * * * * *Alors, brigand, je vins; je m'écriai: PourquoiCeux-ci toujours devant, ceux-lâ toujours derrière?Et sur l'Académie, aïeule et douairière,Cachant sous ses jupons les tropes effarés,Et sur les bataillons d'alexandrins carrésJe fis souffler un vent révolutionnaire.Je mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire.Plus de mot sénateur! plus de mot roturier!Je fis une tempête au fond de l'encrier,Et je mêlai parmi les ombres débordées,Au peuple noir des mots l'essaim blanc des idées;Et je dis; Pas de mot où l'idée au vol purNe puisse se poser, tout humide d'azur!

But Hugo, even when he doubts, has not yet reached this stage. He still styles his poetry "cavalier" poetry, stamping himself by a word which recalls the restoration of royalty in England as the poet of the restoration of royalty in France. The rock on which he splits is the impossibility of harmonising religious and literary tradition. This is especially felt in the ballads. Hugo revives memories of the Middle Ages and feudalism. What could be more royalist? But the literature of the age of Louis XIV. had utterly rejected the Middle Ages and their memories—so what could be less classical? One of the ballads (La ronde du sabbat) describes a witches' dance, another treats of sylphs and fairies; the motley superstitions of the old popular legends are revived—Romanticism is not far off. And the tone is anything but classic; in France, as in Germany and Denmark, the style of the popular ballad supplants the dignified, literary style. There is, moreover, in these poems a new patriotic element (Le géant, Le pas d'armes du roi Jean) which turns from classic antiquity to the France of the far-off past. Of this national movement, too, Chateaubriand had been the leader; his description of the ancient Gauls inLes Martyrswas the first attempt in the new direction; it made a powerful impression (according to his own confession) on such a man as Augustin Thierry, the future author ofThe Age of the Merovingians; we may safely say that it gave the impulse generally to a more graphic and animated historical style. But even this patriotic element was new and foreign to French poetry, was consequently a rebellion against tradition. The revival of old French subjects was accompanied by a revival of old French metres. Here also Chateaubriand led the way with that charming exile's song beginning with the beautiful lines:

Combien j'ai douce souvenanceDu joli lieu de ma naissance!Ma sœur, qu'ils étaient beaux, ces joursDe France!

a song which was sung on the little rocky island in the Bay of St. Malo as he was laid to rest in the grave which he had hewn for himself there. And the tones of the days of Ronsard and the Pleiades are re-echoed simultaneously by Alfred de Vigny, the brothers Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, and Hugo.

In May 1828 Alfred de Vigny published, inMadame de Soubise, lines like:

La voyez-vous croître,La tour du vieux cloître?Et le grand mur noirDu royal manoir?Entrons dans le Louvre.Vous tremblez, je croi,Au son du beffroi?La fenêtre s'ouvre,Saluez le roi.

In June he is followed and surpassed by Hugo in the admirable lines inLe pas d'armes du roi Jean:

Cette villeAux longs cris,Qui profileSon front gris.Des toits frêles,Cent tourelles,Clochers grêles,C'est Paris!

The metre, the picturesqueness, the melodiousness, and the concision which distinguish such verse were something quite new in French poetry.

It seemed at first as if the principle of authority had received new and powerful support from the re-engrafting of the traditions of Christianity and monarchy upon literature. But it soon became evident that religious and literary tradition could not thrive together. The former at first took refuge under the wings, in the very bosom of the latter, but the inherent antagonism soon revealed itself, and the principle of authority in its literary shape was set aside, nay, overthrown by the new spirit, which had all the appearance of sincerely desiring to uphold the practical, that is to say, the politico-religious principle of authority.

We have now to see how the practical principle of authority came to share the fate of the theoretical, the literary principle.[1]

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