[1]The two following sentences fromPort-Royalexemplify my meaning. In the first we have him calmly and frankly giving up the attempt to produce resemblance between his character portraits of the same person; in the second we see him determined to include every side of the character: "C'est le M. Saint-Cyran tout-à-fait définitif et mûr que j'envisage désormais; c'est de lui qu'est vrai ce qui va suivre; si quelque chose dans ce qui précède ne cadre plus, qu'on le rejette, comme en avançant il l'a rejeté lui-même."—"Certes on peut tailler dans M. de Saint-Cyran un calviniste, mais c'est à condition d'en retrancher mainte parte vitale."
[1]The two following sentences fromPort-Royalexemplify my meaning. In the first we have him calmly and frankly giving up the attempt to produce resemblance between his character portraits of the same person; in the second we see him determined to include every side of the character: "C'est le M. Saint-Cyran tout-à-fait définitif et mûr que j'envisage désormais; c'est de lui qu'est vrai ce qui va suivre; si quelque chose dans ce qui précède ne cadre plus, qu'on le rejette, comme en avançant il l'a rejeté lui-même."—"Certes on peut tailler dans M. de Saint-Cyran un calviniste, mais c'est à condition d'en retrancher mainte parte vitale."
The success of the Romantic School in lyric poetry, fiction, and criticism was indisputable; but there was one branch of literature in which it failed to realise the bold expectations with which it started on its career; and this was the branch which, according to the old principles of æsthetics, was (and curiously enough, as a rule, still is) regarded as the highest, namely, the drama. As the art stood in such high estimation, the comparative slightness of their success in it was painfully felt by the Romanticists. Their plays never found real favour with the public, never became part of the permanent repertory of any theatre. Victor Hugo's were only popular as librettos for Italian operas; Mérimée's were never played at all; George Sand's and Balzac's had generally only asuccès d'estime; and it was long before a few of Alfred de Musset's short pieces found their way on to the stage; whereas Scribe and his collaborators drew full houses, not only in France but abroad.
And yet the school did much admirable work in the domain of drama. The first essay was made by Vitet, who between 1826 and 1829 wrote a succession ofScènes dramatiques, subsequently published in a collected form under the title ofLa Ligue. The original idea had suggested itself to him of dramatising episodes in French history without adding anything fictitious whatever; his imagination was allowed to do nothing but vitalise history, and it succeeded most admirably in doing so. The atmosphere of Vitet's works is the atmosphere of long-past days, and the talk of his sixteenth-century characters conveys such an impression of authenticity that we feel when we are reading his dramas as if we were living history, hour by hour.
Ludovic Vitet was born in Paris in 1802, received his education at the Ecole Normale, took part as a Liberal in the political movements of the day, was a member of the societyAide toi—le ciel t'aidera, and wrote (as already mentioned) in theGlobeas an ardent champion of Romanticism. His poetico-historical works were all produced in this youthful period, with the exception of a series of dramatic scenes, distinctly inferior to the rest, which he published in 1849 under the title ofLes Étais d'Orléans.
His career was uneventful. As a young man he was an inseparable friend of Count Duchâtel. When the Revolution of July placed his friends in power and Duchâtel became a member of the Guizot ministry, Vitet was made Inspector of Historical Monuments, a post which Guizot devised specially for him. Henceforth he was a politician; in 1834 he became a member of the Chamber of Deputies, in 1836 a member of the Council of State, in 1846 a Member of the Academy.
He was a consistent Monarchist and Conservative. From 1851 to 1871 he held aloof from public affairs altogether. After the war he again took a prominent position, under Thiers. He died in 1873.
Vitet furnishes a good example of the power of the first impetus of a strong artistic movement to inspire even minds which are not productive and artistic by nature. After 1830 he was eminent only as a learned historian of art. He wrote a biography of Count Duchâtel. His literary and historical essays are as dry and tedious as Mérimée's.
To his youthful works we always return with pleasure—toLes Barricades, Les États de Blois, andLa Mort de Henri III. The principal characters in them, Henri II, Henri III., and the Dukes of Guise of several successive generations, are portrayed in such masterly style as to bear comparison with the heroes of Shakespeare's great historical plays (Henry IV. and Richard III. certainly excepted). The manners and ideas of the age are so clearly placed before us that we feel as if they cannot have been better known or understood by contemporaries.Les États de Bloisis unmistakably the finest of these works. Let any one who wishes to make acquaintance with Vitet at his best, read the scenes which describe the murder of the Duke of Guise. Seldom has an author ventured to set aside poetic convention to such an extent in a historical play. The event is much more vividly and realistically brought before us than even in Delaroche's fine painting, which shows us Henri III. cautiously opening the door and peeping at the body of his great enemy lying on the floor. Vitet first shows us the King in his room at four o'clock in the morning, dipping Spanish poniards into holy water and tremblingly handing them to his minions without even daring to utter his enemy's name. Then comes the scene in the Duke's room, in which his mother and his mistress in vain beseech him not to imperil his life, but to keep away from the Council to be held next morning. We next see him in the Council-chamber; an uncomfortable feeling comes over him; his nose begins to bleed; he has forgotten his handkerchief, and sends a messenger to fetch it. The Scottish guards stupidly bar this messenger's way; but they quickly perceive their mistake, and the Duke gets the handkerchief. But he is uneasy, this great soldier who has faced drawn blades so often without turning pale, and he begins to feel faint. It is because he is still fasting; the feeling will pass off if he eats something; he opens the littlebonbonnièrewhich hangs at his belt; it is empty. Some one is despatched to fetch him sweetmeats or fruit. At this moment Révol comes out of the King's apartment and says: "The King wishes to speak with you, Monseigneur!" The other lords of the Council stop their conversation and exchange glances. The Duke rises; he takes a little time to fasten his mantle, which slips first off one shoulder, then off the other; he is unconsciously trying to delay his departure—too proud not to be ready to go, even if it be to death, and yet human enough to hesitate a moment on the fatal threshold. He must have another handkerchief, as the first is stained with blood; again one of the conspirators goes, leaving the others in anxious suspense. It is a masterly representation, this of Vitet's, of the restlessness, impatience, and foolish feeling of shame which at times overcome us and impel us to rush blindly into the most hazardous situations, merely to escape from painfully ridiculous ones. The messenger sent for the handkerchief again delays. Then the proud Guise loses patience. With the words, "I cannot keep the King waiting longer," he goes out at the door; as it closes behind him, a dozen officers thrust their long poniards into his body.
We observe that Vitet enters into details which would be unsuitable for the stage. HisScènes dramatiquesare only intended to be read. Therefore they are not genuine dramas. And the explanation of this is, that Vitet, with all his historical insight, lacked both poetic passion and the artistic gift of organisation. Because he is never capable of developing pathos, of rising to a climax, from the height of which all the rest would be felt to be preparation and result, he never attains to really artistic construction. He was evidently haunted by a species of artistic anxiety, a fear of making the slightest alteration in the historical facts, a fear of obtruding his own personality. He had not a strong enough individuality to dare to issue an artistic coinage stamped with his own image. His productivity ceased as early as it did, because the imagination which inspired his works, though vigorous, was not free, not independent, either in its observation or in its reproduction; it was hampered and weighted by scholarship, by the dust of the record office. This beautiful and fiery Pegasus stood tethered in a library.
It would be a shame to employ the same metaphor in writing of the Romantic author who, following in Vitet's steps, set himself to dramatise historical episodes, and who in February 1829, a year before Victor Hugo, achieved popularity with a historical drama,Henri III. et sa Cour. This writer was Alexandre Dumas (born in 1803), a man of brilliant, spontaneous talent and Titanic constitution, who displayed the same aptitude for Herculean tasks in literature as his father had done in war. For forty years he continued without a pause to produce tragedies, comedies, novels, short stories, books of travel, and memoirs. It would be foolish to write contemptuously of such prodigious inventiveness, such incredible productivity. We can trace in these works the French-African blood; there is something in them of the easy-going Creole disposition, something of the ardent sensuality of the negro race. Assisted by numerous collaborators, all much inferior to himself, Dumas peopled the stages, crowded the booksellers' shelves, filled thefeuilletoncolumns of the newspapers with the creations of his brain; the printing-presses creaked and groaned in their efforts to keep pace with his incessant production. What one cannot but regret is the easy-going worldliness which prevented any real process of development taking place. Dumas was an artist only in his first period. Beginning in a romantic age, he began romantically; continuing in a commercial age, he continued commercially.
InHenri III et sa Courhe did what Vitet had not succeeded in doing with the same historical material, namely, produced a spirited and playable drama; but it was a drama in which the defiance of classic theatrical convention was of the most superficial kind. He ventured to reproduce in externals the court customs of the period. On the boards where for a couple of centuries the hero and his confidant had conversed either with both arms hanging by their sides or with their left hands on their sword-hilts, a whole troop of King Henry's courtiers appeared with cups and balls (the game of cup-and-ball was an invention of that day); and in the pauses these same gentlemen amused themselves by blowing small darts out of blow-pipes. Nevertheless they felt and spoke like the young men of 1828.
The psychology of the other historical plays of Dumas' youth (Napoléon Bonaparte, Charles VII chez ses grands Vassaux, &c.) is equally superficial. It was not until he lit upon an age the spirit of which he understood and could master, that he succeeded in giving such excellent representations of past days as we have in the interesting and effective dramas,Un Mariage sous Louis XVandGabrielle de Belle-Isle, both of which (and especially the latter, with its slightly idealised picture of the manners and customs of the Regency) possess real literary value. But before this, in 1831, it had fallen to Dumas' lot to present the young Romantic generation with one of the typical figures which it recognised as representative of itself. He wroteAntony.
With all its faults, there is something in this play which makes it better than even the best of Dumas' other works. There is warmer blood, more human nature in it than in the others. And the reason why, with all its naïveté, it makes a really powerful impression on us is, that in it Dumas has flung his own ego, himself, with his wild passion, his youthful enthusiasm, and chivalrous instincts, on to the stage. Antony is an 1830 hero, of the same type as all of Hugo's—broad-shouldered, lion-maned, enthusiastic and despairing, capable of living without food or sleep, ready at any moment to blow out his own or any one else's brains. But the sensation produced byAntonywas due to the fact that Dumas had done what Hugo never would or could do, namely, laid the action of his play in 1830, and put his hero on the stage dressed in the fashion of the day, in the very same black coat as the male members of the audience wore. Hitherto Romanticism had voluntarily restricted itself on the stage to the Middle Ages. Now it revealed itself in undisguised modernity.
We come upon a vindication of this step in the play itself. A conversation on the subject of the literary disputes of the day is introduced into the fourth act. During the course of it a poet, who is defending the Romanticists' practice of going back to the Middle Ages for their themes, says:
"The drama of passion must necessarily be historical drama. History bequeaths to us the passionate deeds which were really done. If in the midst of our modern society we were to attempt to lay bare the heart which beats under our ugly short black coats, the resemblance between the hero and the public would be too great; the spectator who was following the development of a passion would desire to have it arrested exactly where it would have stopped in his own case. He would cry: 'Stop! that is wrong; that is not how I feel. When the woman whom I love deceives me I suffer, certainly, but I neither kill her nor myself.' And the outcry against exaggeration and melodrama would drown the applause of the few who feel that the passions of the nineteenth century are the same as those of the sixteenth, and that the blood can course as hotly beneath a cloth coat as beneath a steel corselet."
We can imagine the applause which followed this speech. All wished to show that they belonged to these few. Passion was the order of the day, and they proved themselves to be passionate by applauding. AndAntonytruly is a symphony of raging passions, the like of which it would be difficult to find. After several years of travel the hero returns to Paris and finds that the woman he loves is married. He saves her life at the risk of his own by stopping her runaway horses; the shaft of the carriage has pierced his breast; he is carried into her house. Antony is an illegitimate child and a foundling; hence as a lover he is a rebel against the laws of society. "Other men," he says to the woman he loves, "have a father, a mother, a brother—arms which open for them when they are in trouble; I have not so much as a tombstone upon which I can read my name and weep. Other men have a country; I have none, for I belong to no family. One name meant to me everything that I possessed, and that name, your name, I am forbidden to pronounce." The lady reminds him of social obligations: "Call them duties or call them prejudices; such as they are, they exist." "Why," he replies, "should I submit to these laws? Not one among those by whom they were made has spared me a suffering or done me a service. I have received nothing but injustice, and I owe nothing but hatred. My unfortunate mother's shame has been branded on my forehead."
Adèle loves Antony, but avoids him. In the course of a journey she takes, she has to spend a night at an inn; he surprises her there and takes possession of her with violence. In spite of this dastardly act she continues to love him. We meet the couple again in Paris. Their story is known. We hear hypocritical women, who manage to combine secret leanings to the forbidden with irreproachable outward behaviour, destroying Adèle's reputation. Their attacks on her evoke outbursts of indignation from the really worthy, indignation against society and its hypocrisies. But the drama is drawing to a close. The husband, Colonel d'Hervey, returns from a journey; Antony tries in vain to persuade Adèle to escape with him; the step of the injured husband is heard in the anteroom; the lover draws his Romantic dagger and plunges it into Adèle's breast; to save her honour he meets d'Hervey with the cry: "Elle me résistait; je l'ai assassinée!"
What chiefly strikes us now on reading the play is its preposterous absurdity. We feel that if we were to see it acted, as a new play, we should not be able to refrain from smiling at the parts intended to touch us. We can hardly understand to-day how it happened that on the night of its first performance in 1831 a select audience were excited by it to the wildest enthusiasm. They applauded, shed tears, sobbed, shouted Bravo! The effect of the play was heightened by the splendid acting of Bocage and Marie Dorval. Dumas tells that a handsome green coat he was wearing was positively torn off his back and into scraps, which were preserved as relics by the enthusiastic youths who formed a large proportion of the audience; and even if we do not take this anecdote quite literally, there is no doubt of the unboundedness of the enthusiasm. The explanation is, that men never laugh at a work which gives expression to their own moods and feelings. Antony was not merely the impersonation of passion verging on savagery, in combination with a tenderness so great that it would rather take upon itself the responsibility of a murder than expose the beloved one to insult and scorn; he was also the Byronic, mysterious young hero, who is predestined to struggle against the injustice of fate, and is greater than his fate. But even in those days there were not wanting critics who saw the weaknesses of the play. Bocage, who acted Antony, considered the closing speech so foolish, that he would have omitted it if he could. He did omit it one evening, and the curtain fell without it, but only with the result that the audience began to shout and scream as if possessed. They would not be defrauded of their speech. Bocage had gone; but Madame Dorval, who was still lying dead upon the stage, had the presence of mind to order the curtain to be raised again, upon which, holding up her head, she said with a smile and a transposition of the pronouns, "Je lui résistais, il m'a assassinée!"[1]One sharply satirical voice was raised within the precincts of the Romantic camp. Let any one interested turn up the long and excellent criticism ofAntonyin Jules Janin'sHistoire de la littérature dramatique, undoubtedly the best piece of criticism its author ever wrote, and he will have the pleasure of beholding delirious Romanticism overwhelmed with ridicule.
WhilstAntonymay be described as the Romantic fit of hysterics,Chatterton, the one play of Alfred de Vigny's which was a success on the stage, may be designated the Romantic dirge. These two favourite dramas of the generation of 1830 complement each other; the one represents the cult of genius, the other the cult of passion; the one sympathy with the suffering, the other admiration for energetic action; or, to go deeper, the one the Teutonic, the other the Latin side of Romanticism.
Alfred de Vigny (born 1799) had failed to win the approbation of the theatre-going public by his excellent historical drama,La Maréchale d'Ancre, which was put on the stage in 1834. The reason probably was, that in everything essential its characters belonged to those types with which the public had already become familiar in other Romantic historical tragedies. Borgia, the lover, for instance, is of exactly the same species as Victor Hugo's lovers, and is not even very different from the lover of Dumas' plays, in spite of the widely different characters of the two authors. This shows us the power of a school to set its stamp upon writers of the most varied individualities.[2]
Chatterton, on the other hand, is a work peculiarly characteristic of De Vigny. This play, which was performed in 1835, is based on an idea to which its author had already given expression, in three different forms, in a volume of tales entitledStello, published two years previously—the idea of the true poet's unhappy and neglected position in modern society. De Vigny, to begin with, regarded the poet from the Romantic standpoint, regarded him, that is to say, as a superior being, nay, as the noblest of all beings (the idea with which the German Romanticists, too, were so thoroughly impregnated); and a feeling of strong compassion had been aroused in him by the poet's fate, especially the fate of the young poet who, when he stands most in need of help and appreciation, so seldom finds hearts that understand him and patrons who prevent his life being a struggle for existence. What lent a certain charm to De Vigny's constant appeal to the public on behalf of the poet, was the fact that he was not pleading his own cause; for he was a man of good family, who had always been in comfortable circumstances. According to his idea, the poet is a poor unfortunate who is entirely in the power of his own imagination. He is "incapable of everything except fulfilling his divine mission," and especially incapable of earning money; it is possible for him, indeed, to make a living by writing, but if he does so it is probably at the cost of his noblest gifts; he develops his critical faculty at the expense of his imagination; and the divine spark which burns in him is extinguished. Therefore this heavenly messenger ought not to be allowed to degrade himself by common work; his brain is a volcano, from which the "harmonious lava" (laves harmonieuses) can only issue when he is in a position to be idle as long as he pleases.[3]
There is, as the modern reader sees at once, some truth in this idea, but more exaggeration. The play which was based on it, and which produced floods of tears, appeals so exclusively to the instinct of compassion, that it has no properly tragic effect; and it has too strong a lyric bias in favour of its hero to possess the inward equilibrium without which a drama lacks stability. Chatterton and the young Quakeress whom he loves have appropriated every single noble quality of mind and soul; around them there is nothing but coarseness, cold-heartedness, prose, and stupidity. What we are shown is the cruel treatment of the intellectual genius by the coarse, earth-bound world around him. The view of life is not unlike what we find in Germany in the writings of Novalis, in Denmark in those of Andersen and Ingemann; for authors such as these Goethe has written hisTassoin vain. We in our day are tired of the dramas with artist heroes which were ushered in by Oehlenschläger'sCorreggio, and are represented in Germany by Holtei'sLorbeerbaum und Bettelstab, &c. We no longer indignantly sympathise with Chatterton, "the man who has been created to descry in the stars the way pointed out by the finger of the Lord," when he chooses rather to poison himself than accept an unpoetical appointment which would bring him in a hundred a year. In this case also, what touched every heart in an audience of the year 1835, now only elicits a smile and a shrug of the shoulders.
Romanticism was too essentially lyric to produce dramatic works of enduring value. This fact is perhaps most strongly borne in upon us when we consider the plays of the greatest of the Romantic lyric poets. Victor Hugo's dramas have many points of resemblance with Oehlenschläger's tragedies. We frequently observe that both authors have been influenced by their reading. In Hugo'sMarie Tudorwe trace the influence of Dumas'Christine à Fontainebleau, and the last scene ofLucrèce Borgiaowes something to Webster'sDuchess of Malfi. The characters in the plays of both authors are merely outlined; in neither are they real, complete human beings; and yet the power of genuine enthusiasm and lyric pathos inspires them with life. Hugo's characters certainly approach nearer to real life, and for this reason, that events such as those represented in his plays had occurred in France in much more recent times than in Denmark. Hernani reminds us of the rebel leaders who defied the Government in La Vendée; Gilbert, who goes to the scaffold of his own free will to avenge the woman he loves, does no more than many a noble victim of the guillotine had done; and Ruy Blas' elevation from the position of a footman to that of a minister of state is not much more remarkable than Rousseau's rise from the same position to that of one of the world's most famous authors. This, however, practically makes little difference; for the author's love of the unusual, nay, of the monstrous, represses everything which might remind us of the reality with which we are familiar, and gives prominence to unnatural phenomena which, though sublime in his eyes, are merely absurd in the eyes of readers of a later day.
The conception of human nature which reveals itself in Hugo's plays is purely lyric; it reminds us in all essentials of the psychology of his rival, Lamartine, an author who was such a contrast to him in other respects. The only difference is that, whilst Lamartine, with his harmonious nature, loves to represent a pure and beautiful character which yields to some sudden temptation and then expiates the one weak moment with years of repentance and penance (Jocelyn, Cèdar inLa Chute d'un Ange), Hugo, in his dramas, loves to represent a human soul debased by bad passions, by all kinds of misery and humiliations, by vice, by slavery, by infirmity, yet so constituted that, under given circumstances, it is irresistibly attracted by the good and beautiful, in alliance with which it fights against the horrible past which it has forsworn. This soul aspires; it understands even the most delicate refinements of the good and beautiful; but it feels unworthy of the noble emotions which it experiences; it cannot mount into these unfamiliar regions, and so it falls back, exhausted and defeated, into its former degraded condition.
Let me illustrate my meaning by a few examples. Triboulet (Le Roi s'amuse) has been corrupted by his position as the unscrupulous mouthpiece and butt of mockery, yet he loves his daughter with the purest tenderness. She is stolen from him, and he gives himself up entirely to hatred and projects of revenge.—Marion (Marion Delorme) has sold herself hundreds of times; but she falls in love with a young, brave man, and this passion completely purifies her. Didier is condemned to death, and in the dread hour of trial she becomes Marion again. She gives herself to the judge in order to save the man she loves, not understanding that Didier would far rather die than be saved thus.—Lucrèce Borgia was begotten in crime and has lived a life of crime. But this licentious woman, this poisoner, has a son whom she loves, and for his sake she is prepared to renounce the life she has hitherto led. But a mortal insult is offered her, and in her fury she has recourse to her old weapons; she invites her enemies to a repast, gives them poison, and unwittingly murders her son along with the others.—Ruy Blas, compelled by poverty, has become a nobleman's lackey. The love of a queen makes of this lackey a minister of state. He is fit for the position; he evolves and carries out great and noble plans; he is on the point of becoming the saviour of his country, when his past rises up against him. The disappointment of all his hopes is too much for him; he revenges himself like the man he was; he will not fight a duel with his master, but gets possession of his sword and kills the defenceless man with it.[4]
The conception of the tragic is, we observe, always the same. But of chief significance in all these dramas, as far as Hugo is concerned, is the fountain of lyric pathos which wells forth when the degraded human soul is raised by noble passion from the mire. The real kernel of the drama is in every case the hymn of strong emotion with which the guilt-stained soul sings itself pure.
One of Hugo's most famous poems (Les Chants du Crépuscule, xxxii.) contains an allegory of which we are reminded when considering his dramas. High in a church tower—so he writes—hangs an old bell. Long ago its metal was clean and bright. The only inscription it bore was the word God, with a crown below it. But the tower has had many visitors, and each of them, one with his blunt knife, another with a rusty nail, has scratched his own mean name, or a foul word, or a silly witticism, or a platitude on the bell. It is covered with dust and cobwebs; rust has found its way into the scratches, marring and corroding it.
"Mais qu'importe à la cloche et qu'importe à mon âme!Qu'à son heure, à son jour, l'esprit saint les réclame,Les touche, l'une et l'autre, et leur dise: chantez!Soudain, par toute voie et de tous les côtés,De leur sein ébranlé, rempli d'ombres obscures,À travers leur surface, à travers leurs souillures,Et la cendre et la rouille, amas injurieux,Quelque chose de grand s'épandra dans les cieux."
The poet was only attempting to describe the condition of his own soul when he sang thus, but he did more; for the allegory strikingly depicts the outbursts of lyric pathos which escape from the lips of the unhappy and guilt-stained characters who give his dramas their interest.
But pathos and lyric sonority, in however ample measure, are not materials out of which alone a dramatic edifice can be constructed. A strong foundation of accurate reasoning is demanded, or, failing this, at least of sound common-sense and correct taste.
Such foundations Hugo could not supply. And his failings as a dramatist increased with time. There happened in his case what happens with so many artists: his style degenerated into mannerism. He became, as it were, his own best pupil; as a dramatist he ended by parodying himself—the most cruelly effective kind of parody.
He had always been wanting in a sense of the comic, and had always been inclined to confuse the sublime with the colossal. To this inclination he yielded more unrestrainedly than ever before in writingLes Burgraves. The very list of characters evokes a smile: Job, Burgrave of Heppenheff, aged 100; Magnus, son of Job, aged 80; Hatto, son of Magnus, aged 60; Gorlois, son of Hatto, aged 30. A Parisian caricature of the Burgraves, of about the same date as the play, represents them standing in a row, decreasing in height and quantity of beard according to age.
The centenarian is the most energetic of them all; he represents the good old days. He calls his son of eighty: "Young man!" but Hugo does not smile. All these old gentlemen vie in declamation with a beggar of ninety, who turns out to be no less a personage than Frederick Barbarossa, who has lived in concealment for twenty years, but has come to execute vengeance upon the eldest of the Burgraves, who as a youth had plotted against his life. The play teems with improbabilities and Romantic absurdities. For instance, in order to bring about a recognition scene, Hugo makes a soldier fight with a piece of red-hot iron, with which he sets a mark upon an opponent whom he wishes to be able to recognise again, and whom he cannot see rightly because it is dark.
When this monstrous production of an overstrained imagination was put upon the stage, in 1843, it proved a complete failure. On the first night, in the middle of the play, hissing began. One of Hugo's faithful henchmen rushed to tell him. Hugo who, like Napoleon, relied upon his guard, answered as usual: "Get hold of some young men!" It is said that the messenger answered despondently, with downcast eyes: "There are no more young men." The generation to which Romanticism had appealed thirteen years before was no longer young, and, what was worse, it had grown weary; more than one of its poets had made too heavy demands upon it.
A reaction was inevitable, and it set in that very year. It found its author and its histrionic genius.
A young man as yet unknown to fame had left the provincial town in which he had been brought up, and come to Paris with a manuscript in his pocket. He was a thoroughly high-principled young man, with no great gift of imagination, but with much refinement and taste, and of a nobly serious turn of mind. His name was François Ponsard, and the title of the manuscript wasLucrèce. It was a tragedy on an antique theme—the rape and death of the chaste Lucretia. The style was sober and severe; it recalled Racine's. The public was tired of the Romantic style. For long the quiet citizen had shaken his head over such phrases of Hugo's as "the tones purled from the organ like water from a sponge," or "the table-linen was white as pale grief's winding-sheet," or "the old woman walked with bent, slow back." But until now there had been no one capable of competing with Hugo. Here at last seemed to be a possible rival. At the first glance Ponsard's play appeared to be exactly on the lines of the old classical tragedy. In their eagerness its welcomers did not notice in what a modern manner the antique theme was treated, how much Ponsard had learned from the Romanticists, how much of its warm colouring his drama owed to Victor Hugo, and how small an amount of originality the new-comer really possessed.
All the public saw was that this drama was sane and simple. They saw that its heroine was Lucretia—not Hugo's horrible Lucrèce, that monster of bloodthirstiness and sensuality, but Rome's Lucretia, the emblem of chastity, another name for feminine purity. She represented marriage, the family, the poetry of home, as Antony and his kin had represented the morality of the foundling, and lawlessness. All Catholic and Classic France, all orthodox Switzerland, hymned the praises of the new dramatist and his play. At last Hugo had found his superior, Racine his equal. Even the critical Vinet joined in the great Hallelujah. He went into ecstasies over Ponsard's style: "This author spins gold as his Lucretia does wool &c."
Les Burgraveswas hissed on the 7th of March 1843. On the 22nd of April of the same yearLucrècewas received on its first night with thunders of applause. So closely as this did the short-lived triumph of what went by the name ofl'école du bon sensfollow on the defeat of Romantic dramaticism. If the worthy Ponsard relied upon the verdict of his critics, Janin and the others (Théophile Gautier and Théophile Dondey alone protested), he must have believed that his fame was established for all time.
The Classic reaction had found its actress as well as its dramatist. In 1838 a young Jewess had made her début in the Theatre Français. She was then eighteen, an ignorant child who had played the harp and sung in the cafés and in the streets; but time provedRachelto be a genius, the greatest actress France had ever known. And this great actress, as it happened, had a thorough distaste for the rôles with which the Romantic drama provided her, whilst she studied and played those of the old Classic repertory with such zeal and passion that she actually succeeded in doing what no one had believed possible namely, restoring their power of attraction to the tragedies which the Romantic School had disdainfully driven from the stage. Of what avail was it that Gautier wrung his hands! Iphigénie, Mérope, Émilia, Chimène, Phèdre, again trod the boards. And so nobly and naturally were they personated that an impressionable public was at times actually roused to a kind of fury with the authors and critics who had dared to throw contempt on these sacred national treasures. A nation is naturally rejoiced to learn that it has not been mistaken in the eminence of the men and works it has reverenced for centuries.
Although the title-rôle ofLucrècehad been written for her, Rachel at first refused to play it; but after the success of the drama at the Odéon she consented. The mood of the audience the first time she appeared in it has been described to me by an eye-witness. "We sat waiting in breathless expectation for the curtain to rise. It rose, and we saw Rachel as Lucretia sitting at her spinning-wheel among her maidens. The silence had been complete enough before; but when she raised her head and opened her lips to say the first words (to one of the slaves):Lève-toi, Laodice!there was such utter stillness that the fruit-sellers were heard crying their oranges in the market-place."
In their enthusiasm for Rachel the public did not realise that the Classic style in art was not really alive because a single genius for a time breathed life into the great works of a bygone age; and in their rejoicing over Ponsard they failed to understand how short his triumph must inevitably be. The Common-sense School, as its name prognosticates, never developed any vigorous originality. Ponsard himself was a writer of only second-rate talent. The youthful dramas of his gifted follower, Émile Augier (who dedicated his poems to him), imitate his sober spirit and style; but Augier's style changed as time went on.[5]Though the school, most praiseworthy in its intentions, by no means deserved the contemptuous attacks made on it by some of the irreconcilable younger Romanticists, including Vacquerie and Théodore de Banville, yet its historical significance is no more than this—it indicates the period when Romantic drama had outlived itself.
[1]Told me by an eye-witness of the scene, Philarète Chasles.
[1]Told me by an eye-witness of the scene, Philarète Chasles.
[2]In the list of personages we find the following directions to the actor for the rendering of the part of Borgia. Observe how all the qualities beloved of Romanticism are enumerated as if in a catalogue, and how in all essentials the directions might serve for Victor Hugo's young heroes, or indeed for Antony: "Montagnard brusque et bon. Vindicatif et animé par la vendetta comme par une seconde âme: conduit par ellecomme par la destinée. Caractère vigoureux, triste et profondément sensible. Haïssant et aimant avec violence. Sauvage par nature, et civilisé comme malgré lui par la cour et la politesse de son temps."
[2]In the list of personages we find the following directions to the actor for the rendering of the part of Borgia. Observe how all the qualities beloved of Romanticism are enumerated as if in a catalogue, and how in all essentials the directions might serve for Victor Hugo's young heroes, or indeed for Antony: "Montagnard brusque et bon. Vindicatif et animé par la vendetta comme par une seconde âme: conduit par ellecomme par la destinée. Caractère vigoureux, triste et profondément sensible. Haïssant et aimant avec violence. Sauvage par nature, et civilisé comme malgré lui par la cour et la politesse de son temps."
[3]See the characteristic introduction toChatterton, "Dernière nuit de travail, du 29 au 30 Juin 1834."
[3]See the characteristic introduction toChatterton, "Dernière nuit de travail, du 29 au 30 Juin 1834."
[4]Cf. Madame de Girardin:Lettres parisiennes, ii 31.
[4]Cf. Madame de Girardin:Lettres parisiennes, ii 31.
[5]Augier'sGabrielleis perhaps the prettiest play which the Common-sense School produced. His dramas,La JeunesseandLa Pierre de Touche, were evidently inspired by Ponsard'sL'Honneur et l'Argent.
[5]Augier'sGabrielleis perhaps the prettiest play which the Common-sense School produced. His dramas,La JeunesseandLa Pierre de Touche, were evidently inspired by Ponsard'sL'Honneur et l'Argent.
Meanwhile Saint-Simonism had been thoroughly leavening literature.
Lamartine, the most gifted of the authors who, after the restoration of the hereditary monarchy, lent their support to the Conservative party, began to waver early in the Thirties. In his versified novel,Jocelyn(1836), mild and pious though its tone is, we are conscious of his new sympathies and of new developments in his convictions. In the preface he evades the question of his religious belief, merely remarking that, let it be what it may, he has not forgotten his youthful reverence for the Church. The most careless reader, however, cannot fail to observe that the story itself is a protest against the celibacy of the clergy, one of the fundamental principles of the Church. And in Jocelyn's diary we find the following significant passage, in the entry for 21st September 1800:—
"La caravane humaine un jour était campéeDans les forêts bordant une rive escarpée,Et ne pouvant pousser sa route plus avant.Les chênes l'abritaient du soleil et du vent,Les tentes, aux rameaux enlaçant leurs cordages,Formaient autour des troncs des cités, des villages,Et les hommes épars sur des gazons épaisMangeaient leur pain à l'ombre et conversaient en paix.Tout à coup comme atteints d'une rage insenséeCes hommes se levant à la même pensée,Portant la hache aux troncs, font crouler à leur piésCes dômes où les nids s'étaient multipliés;Et les brutes des bois sortant de leurs repairesEt les oiseaux fuyant les cimes séculairesContemplaient la ruine avec un œil d'horreur,Ne comprenaient pas l'œuvre et maudissaient du cœurCette race stupide acharnée à sa perte,Qui détruit jusqu'au ciel l'ombre qui l'a couverte!Or, pendant qu'en leur nuit les brutes des forêtsAvaient pitié de l'homme et séchaient de regrets,L'homme continuant son ravage sublimeAvait jeté les troncs en arche sur l'abîme;Sur l'arbre de ses bords gisant et renverséLa fleuve était partout couvert et traversé,Et poursuivant en paix son éternel voyageLa caravane avait conquis l'autre rivage."
But this was only the beginning.La Chute d'un Angeshowed, in spite of all its faults, that Lamartine had discarded his earlier, "seraphic" style; and his first parliamentary speeches showed that Saint-Simonistic ideas had gradually supplanted his orthodox beliefs. The born aristocrat proclaimed himself adémocrate conservateur, desirous of the realisation, under a constitutional monarchy, of all the modern liberal and progressive ideas. And he did not stop even here. His famousHistoire des Girondins, published in 1846 (a work valueless as history, but written in a most poetical, persuasively eloquent style), was the book which more than any other attuned men's minds to revolution and prepared for the coming upheaval. And in 1848 we find the man who had been the court poet of the Restoration period, standing—the real chief of the Republic—on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, displaying the proud indifference of the aristocrat to the muskets levelled at his breast while addressing the crowd with the authoritative eloquence of the tribune. That was a great, an immortal moment in his life, when he saved the lives of his colleagues and averted civil war with a few unhesitating words, as beautiful as they were manly.
It was Pierre Leroux who initiated George Sand into the new, fermenting social ideas which with feminine impulsiveness she at once adopted. In his capacity of social reformer, Pierre Leroux, a metaphysician with a noble heart and a confused brain, who thought in triads in the manner of Schelling, championed equality and progress. To him progress meant approach towards equality. He was instigated to his attempts at reform by his indignation with the existing condition of society, with the equality as regarded the law, which permitted the rich man to escape the hardship of military service and the punishment due to his crime, with the liberty which consisted in the right of free competition, that is to say, the legal right of the rich to oppress the poor. Society as reorganised by Leroux was to be based on the triple nature of man. Man is constituted of perception, intuition, and cognition. To these three elements were to correspond three classes, the artisan or industrial, the artist, and the scientist class; but these three classes were not, as in Saint-Simon's imaginary society, to be castes, but were to act in unison. Three individuals or units, one from each class, were to constitute a society individual or unit; and these same three, working together, would constitute an "atelier." The "ateliers" also were to be divided into three classes, according to the activity which predominated in them, &c.
When we think of all these Utopias, we cannot but admire the sane and wise attitude maintained towards them by the authors who allowed themselves to be carried away by some of the ideas inspiring the different systems. They held aloof from everything, or almost everything, that was artificial, fantastic, or absurd. They contented themselves with kindling their poetic torches at the altar fire kept alight by the pure-hearted enthusiasts; they drew inspiration from the philanthropy of these men, from their ardent championship of the poor and the oppressed, from their fervent faith in the people and in progress.
It is quite evident, whatever may be said to the contrary, that Saint-Simonism was a beneficent influence in George Sand's life. It produced tranquillity after the fit of despair which dictatedLelia; it gave her a faith which was never afterwards disturbed, and a cause to work and fight for. She had an observant eye for all that was going on around her; and towards the close of the Thirties it was evident that the French working classes were in a state of violent ferment. At that period the slow transformation of France from an almost exclusively agricultural country to one of the chief manufacturing countries was already an accomplished fact. It was now no longer only the poverty of the peasants which called for a remedy, but also, and even more urgently, the poverty and discontent of the ever-increasing proletariat population of the great manufacturing and commercial towns. Like almost all the other French democratic writers, George Sand turned her attention to the working people of the towns, their hard struggle for existence, their remarkable intelligence, their social and political ideas. Saint-Simonism had originally appealed to her and aroused her enthusiasm by its condemnation of the relations between the sexes upheld by the conventions of existing society; it denned as truths to be proclaimed and championed the ideas which were most precious to her—that there is no beauty or value in marriage except when it is a voluntary union; and that mayor, witnesses, and priest cannot invest it with greater sacredness than do love and conscience. Now Saint-Simonism gave a more thoughtful and more definite character to her love of the people. Among the men of the working classes she discovered more unselfishness and manliness than among those of the middle classes; it began to seem to her as if the vices of the male sex which she had condemned with such severity in her first novels were in reality more the vices of a class than of the whole sex; and her love of the working class in conjunction with the innate idealism of her nature led her to see and represent the working man from an ideal point of view. She produced a series of novels in which the old contrast between two men of the same class, one unselfish and the other a hardened egotist, was superseded by the contrast between the idealised representative of the working classes and a more or less egotistical and slavishly conventional representative of the upper or middle classes.
The most interesting books of this series are the two written about 1840—Horace, the refusal to accept which produced a temporary disagreement between George Sand and theRevue des deux Mondes, andLe Compagnon du Tour de France, a genuine labour-question novel, which in its innocence and simple purity presents a striking contrast to the glaringly coloured stories of a socialistic and democratic tendency published a few years later by Eugène Sue.
In my opinionHoraceis one of George Sand's best books. In its hero she represents with more shrewdness and profundity than ever before or after the young bourgeois of the reign of Louis Philippe. The acuteness and insight she in this case displays are in no way inferior to Balzac's. She is inspired by a strong antipathy, which, however, does not preclude a good-humouredly tolerant treatment. With Horace is contrasted the noble proletarian, Arsène. This man, originally a painter, has been compelled by poverty to take a place as waiter in acafé; but the dependent position has not degraded him. The simple goodness and beauty of his character make him most attractive. We believe in him.
Arsène has friends among theBousingots, the circle of young students who in the Thirties transferred the style and deportment of the Romantic School to the domain of politics. They figure in many of the lithographs of the period with their Robespierre waistcoats, thick sticks, and glazed hats or red velvet caps. In outward appearance they somewhat resembled Germancorpsstudents; and they took part in all riots which were demonstrations of discontent with theJuste-milieugovernment. George Sand defends them warmly. "None of the men," she says, "who at that time caused a slight disturbance of public order need blush now at the thought of having displayed a little youthful ardour. If the only use which youth can make of such nobility and courage as it possesses, is to attack society with it, the condition of society must be very bad." Arsène fights like a hero and is badly wounded in the working-men's revolt of the 5th of June 1832, which is sympathetically described; and in the course of a few years he becomes an experienced, able politician. The story of his political education is peculiarly interesting to us, because, in telling it, the authoress gives unambiguous expression to her own feelings. Arsène's hero is Godefroy Cavaignac; George Sand describes him and his friends, the societyLes amis du people. "Their ideas," she writes, "at any rate indicated a great advance upon the liberalism of the Restoration period. The other Republicans were a little too much taken up with the idea of overthrowing monarchy, and did not give sufficient thought to the laying of the foundations of the republic; Godefroy Cavaignac's thoughts were of the emancipation of the people, of free education, of universal suffrage, of the gradual modification of the rights of property, &c." Horace's cold-heartedness and narrow-mindedness display themselves in his contemptuously sweeping condemnation of Saint-Simonism, which to him is pure charlatanism. He is incapable of appreciating its conception of the mutual relations of the sexes, and is obliged to submit to being reproved with the calmness of conscious superiority by a young dressmaker who lives with her friend, a clever young doctor, and regards this life of theirs as "the truly religious marriage."[1]The authoress undoubtedly attacks in this novel more problems than she is capable of solving, but the very fact of its dealing largely with the ideas and aims of the day gives it a vivid and attractive historical colouring. Besides, it was not her business, as a novelist, to solve social problems, but to show how they moved hearts and set brains to work, even the hearts and brains of enamoured young women and self-satisfied young men.
What I specially admire inLe Compagnon du Tour de France, a book which, as a novel, is inferior toHorace, is the impulsive strength of the feeling which inspired it. To feel the heart swell and burn with compassion for the unfortunates of society, to feel burdened by the favours which Fortune has bestowed on us and not on all, are sensations with which many a youth and maiden are familiar. But it is a rare thing indeed for the man or woman of forty still to hunger and thirst after justice for others, to be unable to sit still and see the yoke weighing down the innocent neck, unable to refrain from planning and striving after a different order of things, a different morality from that which seems to satisfy society in general, nay, to be actually ashamed to sleep or to take pleasure or to be happy for a few moments, as long as things are as they are. And these were the feelings which compelled George Sand to write this book. What a love for "the people" lies at the foundation of it! And it is a love for the people as they are—for the drinking, brawling people, as well as for the working, aspiring people—a love so great that the authoress cannot bear to describe or dwell upon the vices she sees and names. See the conversations in chapter xxv. The best definition of the idea which dominates the book is to be found in the book itself. A nobleman asserts that he holds the old opinion that everything possible ought to be done for the people, but that they ought not to be consulted, because that would make them both appealing party and judge. His daughter answers: "And is not that just what we are?"
Soon after writing this work George Sand began to take a vigorous share in the practical politics of the day. After her quarrel with theRevue des deux Mondesshe had, in collaboration with Pierre Leroux, Viardot, Lamennais, and the Polish author Mickiewiez, started theRevue Indépendante; now (in 1843) she and some friends started a republican provincial newspaper in her own part of the country. In this paper,L'Éclaireur de l'Indre, to which Lamartine also contributed, she defended the cause, now of the town artisan, now of the peasant (article on the Paris journeymen bakers, letters from a Black Forest peasant). In 1844, in her long essay,Questions politiques et sociales, she distinctly declared herself a socialist. When the Revolution broke out in 1848 she was ripe to take part in it. For a short time she published a weekly paper,La Cause du Peuple; she wroteA Word to the Middle Classes, and the famousLetters to the People, and composed the bulletins of the Provisional Government. Towards the close of the year, in face of threatening danger, her republican socialism assumed an almost fanatical form. The articleLa Majorité et l'Unanimité, in which, immediately before the elections for the Constituent National Assembly, she exhorts the electors to show their liberal principles by their votes, ends with the threat, expressed with much circumlocution, but yet plain enough, that if the assembly presently to be elected by universal suffrage does not prove to be such an assembly as popular interests demand, mere still remains the appeal to arms.[2]It is curious to see the champion of the sovereignty of the people having recourse to a threat of despotically violent measures; it shows what a vigorous, ardent, manly spirit dwelt in the bosom of this gifted woman. The same indomitable energy which produced hundreds of novels displayed itself in her alliance with Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, men who were content with thinking what she gave expression to in words.
It was chiefly through Lamennais that the current of democratic ideas reached Victor Hugo. In Lamennais' principal work,Essai sur l'Indifférence, there were already signs indicating the possibility of a rejection of that principle of authority which he had championed so ardently in his youth. In August 1832 his theories were condemned by the Pope. The intimate relations between Lamennais and Hugo began in the latter's youth; Lamennais congratulated Hugo on the occasion of his marriage, and Hugo's first odes were dedicated to Lamennais. In 1822, persuaded by the Abbé de Rohan, Hugo determined to unburden his mind to a father confessor. The first he went to was Frayssinous, once the intrepid, self-sacrificing curé, now the fashionable Paris clergyman, a bishop, and head of the University. Hugo was repelled by Frayssinous' worldly ideas and counsels, and the Abbé then sent him to the little, frail, slender man with the yellow face, hooked nose, and beautiful, restless eyes, who walked the streets of Paris in a shabby cassock, blue woollen stockings, and hobnailed shoes—the famous Lamennais, whom he already knew so well.
The ideas of both confessor and penitent underwent a change in the course of the years preceding the Revolution of July, and the one was not long after the other in going over to the Liberal and anti-clerical party. One evening in September 1830 Lamennais, entering Hugo's room, found him writing. "I am disturbing you," said Lamennais. "No. But you will not approve of what I am writing." "Never mind; let me hear it." And Hugo read the following lines from hisJournal d'un Révolutionnaire de 1830:
"The republic, which is not yet ripe, but which in a century will embrace the whole of Europe, signifies that society is its own sovereign. It protects itself by means of its citizen-soldiers; judges itself, by trial by jury; administers its own affairs, by local government; rules itself, by popular representation. The four limbs of monarchy—the standing army, the courts, the bureaucracy, the peerage—are for the republic only four troublesome excrescences which are withering up and will soon die."
"You have one clause too many," said Lamennais; "that which asserts that the republic is not ripe. You speak of it in the future tense, I in the present."
A few years later, Lamennais' connection with the Roman Catholic Church was at an end. It was in order to show that his defection was not the result of unbelief but of a new conviction, that he entitled his famous manifestoParoles d'un Croyant(1833).
It has been averred that no book since the invention of printing had created such a stir as this did. In the course of a few years a hundred editions of it were printed; it was published in foreign countries and translated into many languages. It is an imitation of a work which appeared not long before it, Mickiewiez'sBook of the Polish Pilgrim. Half in Old Testament, half in Christian style, it denounces monarchy in Europe, the Pope and the priesthood, those to whom the fall of Poland and the serfdom of Italy were due, and the self-interested bourgeois government of France. The eloquence is of the genuine sacerdotal type; the book is strong in pathos, but weak in psychology; it only condemns and praises, knows no shade between black and white—the blackness of hell, the whiteness of heaven; nevertheless its author's warm-heartedness, purity of motive, and beauty of soul have imparted to it a rare charm.
In 1837 followedLivre du Peuple, a work written in the same spirit. The bold Abbé was imprisoned, but from his prison he sent book after book out into the world.Une Voix du Prison, Du Passé et de l'Avenir du Peuple, De l'Esclavage modern, were all written in Sainte-Pélagie.
Lamennais died three years before the Revolution of February, at a time of violent political and social agitation.
I give a few fragments fromParoles d'un Croyantas specimens of his style:
"Ne vous laissez pas tromper par de vaines paroles. Plusieurs chercheront à vous persuader que vous êtes vraiment libres, parce qu'ils auront écrit sur une feuille de papier le mot de liberté, et l'auront affiché à tous les carrefours.La liberté n'est pas un placard qu'on lit au coin de la rue. Elle est une puissance vivante qu'on sent en soi et autour de soi, le génie protecteur du foyer domestique, la garantie des droits sociaux, et le premier de ces droits.L'oppresseur qui se couvre de son nom est le pire des oppresseurs. Il joint le mensonge à la tyrannie, et à l'injustice la profanation; car le nom de la liberté est saint.Gardez-vous de ceux qui disent: Liberté, Liberté, et qui la détruisent par leurs œuvres.""Le laboureur porte le poids du jour, s'expose à la pluie, au soleil, aux vents, pour préparer par son travail la moisson qui remplira ses greniers à l'automne.La justice est la moisson des peuples.L'artisan se lève avant l'aube, allume sa petite lampe, et fatigue sans relâche pour gagner un peu de pain qui le nourrisse, lui et ses enfants.La justice est le pain des peuples.Le marchand ne refuse aucun labeur, ne se plaint d'aucunes peines; il use son corps et oublie le sommeil, afin d'amasser des richesses.La liberté est la richesse des peuples.Le matelot traverse les mers, se livre aux flots et aux tempêtes, se hasarde entre les écueils, souffre le froid et le chaud, afin de s'assurer quelque repos dans ses vieux ans.La liberté est le repos des peuples.Le soldat se soumet aux plus dures privations, il veille et combat, et donne son sang, pour ce qu'il appelle la gloire.La liberté est la gloire des peuples.S'il est un peuple qui estime moins la justice et la liberté que le laboureur sa moisson, l'artisan un peu de pain, le marchand les richesses, le matelot le repos et le soldat la gloire; élevez autour de ce peuple une haute muraille, afin que son haleine n'infecte pas le reste de la terre.""Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?Je vais combattre pour la justice, pour la sainte cause des peuples, pour les droits sacrés du genre humain.Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?Je vais combattre contre les hommes iniques pour ceux qu'ils renversent et foulent aux pieds, contre les maîtres pour les esclaves, contre les tyrans pour la liberté.Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?Je vais combattre pour renverser les barrières qui séparent les peuples, et les empêchent de s'embrasser comme les fils du même père, destinés à vivre unis dans un même amour.Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!Jeune soldat, où vas-tu!Je vais combattre pour affranchir de la tyrannie de l'homme la pensée, la parole, la conscience.Que tes armes soient bénies, sept fois bénies, jeune soldat!"
"Ne vous laissez pas tromper par de vaines paroles. Plusieurs chercheront à vous persuader que vous êtes vraiment libres, parce qu'ils auront écrit sur une feuille de papier le mot de liberté, et l'auront affiché à tous les carrefours.
La liberté n'est pas un placard qu'on lit au coin de la rue. Elle est une puissance vivante qu'on sent en soi et autour de soi, le génie protecteur du foyer domestique, la garantie des droits sociaux, et le premier de ces droits.
L'oppresseur qui se couvre de son nom est le pire des oppresseurs. Il joint le mensonge à la tyrannie, et à l'injustice la profanation; car le nom de la liberté est saint.
Gardez-vous de ceux qui disent: Liberté, Liberté, et qui la détruisent par leurs œuvres."
"Le laboureur porte le poids du jour, s'expose à la pluie, au soleil, aux vents, pour préparer par son travail la moisson qui remplira ses greniers à l'automne.
La justice est la moisson des peuples.
L'artisan se lève avant l'aube, allume sa petite lampe, et fatigue sans relâche pour gagner un peu de pain qui le nourrisse, lui et ses enfants.
La justice est le pain des peuples.
Le marchand ne refuse aucun labeur, ne se plaint d'aucunes peines; il use son corps et oublie le sommeil, afin d'amasser des richesses.
La liberté est la richesse des peuples.
Le matelot traverse les mers, se livre aux flots et aux tempêtes, se hasarde entre les écueils, souffre le froid et le chaud, afin de s'assurer quelque repos dans ses vieux ans.
La liberté est le repos des peuples.
Le soldat se soumet aux plus dures privations, il veille et combat, et donne son sang, pour ce qu'il appelle la gloire.
La liberté est la gloire des peuples.
S'il est un peuple qui estime moins la justice et la liberté que le laboureur sa moisson, l'artisan un peu de pain, le marchand les richesses, le matelot le repos et le soldat la gloire; élevez autour de ce peuple une haute muraille, afin que son haleine n'infecte pas le reste de la terre."
"Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?
Je vais combattre pour la justice, pour la sainte cause des peuples, pour les droits sacrés du genre humain.
Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!
Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?
Je vais combattre contre les hommes iniques pour ceux qu'ils renversent et foulent aux pieds, contre les maîtres pour les esclaves, contre les tyrans pour la liberté.
Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!
Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?
Je vais combattre pour renverser les barrières qui séparent les peuples, et les empêchent de s'embrasser comme les fils du même père, destinés à vivre unis dans un même amour.
Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!
Jeune soldat, où vas-tu!
Je vais combattre pour affranchir de la tyrannie de l'homme la pensée, la parole, la conscience.
Que tes armes soient bénies, sept fois bénies, jeune soldat!"
Idealistic and monotonous as these utterances and refrains are, they possess the kind of eloquence which makes a powerful impression upon the common people.
Lamennais' outbursts of revolutionary sentiment come very near to being pure poetry. Hugo's are pure poetry. In reading his verses written in the Forties we feel how his poet's ear hears the dull underground rumbling of the approaching Revolution, and how he foresees that its crater will open in Paris. As far back as in the preface to theFeuilles d'Automnehe reproaches England with having turned Ireland into a graveyard, the sovereigns of Europe with having made Italy a prison for galley-slaves, the Czar with having populated Siberia with Poles. In it, too, he already writes of the old religions which are sloughing their skins, and (alluding to Saint-Simonism) of the new, which are stammeringly enunciating their half-reasonable, half-false principles. And from this time onward he is in all his works the champion of the liberty of the people, of their right to self-government, and of the religion of humanity. As a dramatist he began by rebelling merely against the accepted laws of style; but ere long he was, like Voltaire a century earlier, making the drama the organ of his ideas. One of his plays (Le Roi s'amuse) is an attack upon absolute monarchy as represented by Francis I, the most brutal of the royal debauchees of France. Another (Angelo), the preface to which is an affirmation of genuine Saint-Simonistic principles, contrasts woman within the pale of society with her sister beyond it, endows the strolling actress with virtues which the great lady lacks, and gives each of them her own ideality. A third (Ruy Blas) symbolises the elevation of the lowest class to supreme power. In Molière'sLes Précieusesthe lackey was treated like some animal which, however clever it might be, was liable to be thrashed, even when it had only carried out its master's orders; shortly before the great Revolution Scapin is transformed into Figaro, who, though still in livery, openly manages his masters; inRuy Blasthe servant, that is to say, the born plebeian, throws off his livery, assumes authority, and rules. While fully conscious of the great improbabilities and weaknesses of these dramas, we are also sensible of the atmosphere of new ideas which pervades them.
Hugo's was so dogmatic a mind that each new world of ideas which he entered in the course of his life crystallised itself, for him, into a code of doctrines. From the moment he became a democrat he was the opponent of capital punishment. He protested against it as an author inLe dernier Jour d'un Condamné, and also inClaude Gueux, where a very unpleasant real incident is turned topsy-turvy, and an execrable bandit is transformed into a hero and victim; he protested against it as a private individual; he made personal appeals for the remittance of sentences of death, both to French kings and foreign juries. Though opinion is still, and with good reason, divided as to the advisability of abolishing capital punishment for murder, Hugo's endeavours to save the lives of political offenders have a claim to our undivided sympathy. In 1839 he interceded in behalf of the noble revolutionary, Armand Barbès; Louis Philippe had, however, in this case remitted the sentence of death before Hugo's verses reached him.
But the most beautiful and the only perfectly accurate expression of the mental attitude of France's greatest lyric poet is, naturally, to be found in his poetry. The dramas of his first period, the novels of his second (which do not fall within the scope of this volume), are of small significance in comparison with the poems of the Thirties and Forties, which are contained in the two volumes entitledLes Contemplations. In these his faith in progress, his political convictions, his social hopes, his religious feelings, are expressed in the only artistic form which suits them. It is a form which cannot be dissolved, a style which cannot be paraphrased; it must be enjoyed in the original.
Hugo had every right to exclaim, as he did in one of the poems of this collection:
"J'ai, dans le livre, avec le drame, en prose, en vers.Plaidé pour les petits et les misérables;Suppliant les heureux et les inexorables;J'ai réhabilité le bouffon, l'histrion,Tous les damnés humains, Triboulet, Marion,Le laquais, le forçat et la prostituée;. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .J'ai réclamé des droits pour la femme et l'enfant;J'ai tâché d'éclairer l'homme en le réchauffant;J'allais criant: Science! Écriture! Parole!Je voulais résorber le bagne par l'école."
But, he complains:
"Le passé ne veut pas s'en aller. Il revientSans cesse sur ses pas, reveut, reprend, retient.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .L'immense renégat d'Hier, marquis, se nommeDemain; mai tourne bride et plante là l'hiver;Use à tout ressaisir ses ongles noirs; fait rage;Il gonfle son vieux flot, souffle son vieil orage,Vomit sa vieille nuit, crie: À bas! crie: À mort!Pleure, tonne, tempête, éclate, hurle, mord."
But the onward movement would not be checked. The cleansing thunderstorm of 1848 broke over Europe. It came, that year of earthquakes, that year of emancipation, of heroic struggles, and, alas! of romantic childishness—when the helm of France was in the hands, not of statesmen, but of poets and enthusiasts; when Saint-Simonistic, neo-Christian, and poetical, instead of practical political ideas prevailed in the councils of the State. How eloquent is such a little fact as this, that one of the first proceedings of the Provisional Government was (at Lamartine's suggestion) to declare negro-slavery abolished! The ideas of Romantic France find their realisation in the Revolution of 1848.