Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France - Георг Брандес - Страница 4

It is against this grey background, this foil of Legitimist cowls and Louis-Philippe umbrellas—in this society where the new-born power of capital, strong as Hercules, has, even in its cradle, strangled all the external romance of life—on this stage upon the grey walls of which an invisible finger has written in grey letters the word Juste-milieu—that a fiery, glowing, noisy literature, a literature enamoured of scarlet and of passion, suddenly makes its appearance. All the conditions were present in combination which were certain to impel young, restless minds towards romantic enthusiasm, towards ardent contempt for public opinion, towards worship of unbridled passion and unrestrained genius. Hatred of the bourgeoisie (as in Germany a generation earlier hatred of the Philistines) becomes the watchword of the day. But whereas the word "Philistine" conjures up a picture of the chimney-corner and the pipe, the word "bourgeois" at once suggests the omnipotence of economic interests. Its essential antipathy to utilitarianism and plutocracy turned the intellectual current of the day, in the case of the men of talent already before the public, and still more strongly in the case of the budding geniuses, in the direction of antagonism to everything existing and accepted, at the same time mightily increasing the force of the current. The religion of art, and enthusiasm for liberty in art, suddenly took possession of all hearts. Art was the highest, art was light, art was fire, art was all in all; its beauty and audacity alone imparted value to life.

The young generation had heard in their childhood of the great events of the Revolution, had known the Empire, and were the sons of heroes or of victims. Their mothers had conceived them between two battles, and the thunder of cannon had ushered them into the world. To the young poets and artists of the day there were only two kinds of human beings, the flaming and the grey. On the one side there was the art which meant blood, scarlet, movement, audacity; on the other, a strictly regular, timid, bourgeois, colourless art. Everything in the life of their day seemed to them unpoetic, utilitarian, devoid of genius, grey; they desired to show their contempt for such a day, their admiration of genius, and their hatred of the bourgeois spirit. For now, since the middle-class had become the influential one, this spirit had become a power.

Seen from the point of view of our own day, the young men of those days appear to have been younger than youth generally is—younger, fresher, more richly gifted, more ardent and hot-blooded. And we see the youth of France, who in the days of the Revolution had by their devotion changed the political and social conditions of the country, and in the days of the Empire had risked their lives on every battlefield in France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Egypt, now devoting themselves with the same ardour to the culture of literature and the arts. Here, too, there were revolutions to be made, victories to win, and countries to conquer. During the Revolution they had worshipped liberty, under Napoleon martial glory; now they worshipped art.

For the first time in France the word art came to be regularly applied to literature. In the eighteenth century literature had aimed at transforming itself into philosophy, and much was then included under this denomination to which we no longer apply the word; now it aimed at the name and dignity of art.

The explanation of the change is, that the analytical and reasoning tendency which distinguishes both the imaginative and reflective works of the classical period, had in the new century slowly made way for interest in the actually existing, in what is perceivable by the senses. And the deeper-lying reason of this new preference was that men now placed nature, original, unconscious, rustic, uncultivated nature, above all the culture of civilisation. Why? Because a historically minded age had succeeded to a rationalising one. A man no longer coveted the title of philosopher, for it was now considered a greater distinction to be original than to be a self-conscious thinker. The poetical literature of the eighteenth, nay, even that of the seventeenth century was despised, because it was purely intellectual; because, bloodless and elegant, it seemed to have been produced by attention to conventions and rules, not to have been born and to have grown. For whereas the eighteenth century had held thinking and acting to be the highest forms of activity, the children of the new age regarded origination, natural genesis, as the highest. It was a German idea, Herder's and Goethe's, by which men's minds were unconsciously occupied, and which produced in them an aversion for rules and academic principles. For how could art as unconscious, natural production be subjected to arbitrary external rules!

An intellectual movement had begun which recalled the Renaissance. It was as if the air which men breathed intoxicated them. In the long period during which France had been at an intellectual standstill her great neighbours, Germany and England, had hastened past her, had got a long start in the work of emancipation from old, hampering traditions. She felt this, felt it as a humiliation, and the feeling gave a sharp impulse to the new art enthusiasm. And now the works of foreign authors, both the new and the hitherto unknown older books, made their way into the country and revolutionised the minds of the young; every one read translations of Sir Walter Scott's novels, of Byron's Corsair and Lara, and devoured Goethe's Werther and Hoffmann's fantastic tales. All at once the votaries of the different arts felt that they were brothers. Musicians studied the literature both of their own country and of other nations; poets (such as Hugo, Gautier, Mérimée, Borel) drew and painted. Poems were read in painters' and sculptors' studios; Delacroix's and Devéria's pupils hummed Hugo's ballads as they stood at their easels. Certain of the great foreign authors, such as Scott and Byron, influenced poets (Hugo, Lamartine, Musset), musicians (Berlioz, Halévy, Félicien David), and painters (Delacroix, Delaroche, Scheffer). Artists attempt to overstep the limits of their own in order to embrace a kindred art. Berlioz writes Childe Harold and Faust symphonies, Félicien David a Desert symphony; music becomes descriptive. First Delacroix and then Ary Scheffer choose subjects from Dante, Shakespeare, and Byron; the art of the painter at times becomes illustration of poetry. But it was the art of painting which was most powerful in influencing the sister arts, especially poetry, and that distinctly for good. The lover no longer, as in the days of Racine, prayed his mistress "to crown his flame." The public demanded naturalness of the author, and refused to accept representations of impossibilities.

In 1824 Delacroix exhibits his Massacre of Scios, a picture with a Grecian subject and a reminiscence of Byron, in 1831 The Bishop of Liège, which illustrates Scott's Quentin Durward, in May 1831 Liberty at the Barricades. In February 1829, Auber's opera, La Muette de Portici, makes a great sensation; Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable follows in 1831. In February 1830 Victor Hugo's Hernani is played for the first time at the Théâtre Français; in 1831 Dumas' Antony is a grand success. The authors Dumas and Hugo, Delacroix the painter, the sculptor David d'Angers, the musical composers Berlioz and Auber, the critics Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, Frédéric Lemaître and Marie Dorval the scenic artists, and, corresponding to them, the two great dæmonic musical virtuosi Chopin and Liszt—all these make their appearance simultaneously. One and all proclaim the gospel of nature and of passion, and around them assemble groups of young men who apprehend and cultivate literature and art in a spirit akin to theirs.

These men did not always realise that in the eyes of posterity they would constitute a natural group. Some of the greatest of them felt as if they stood alone, and believed that the spirit and tendency of their work was different from that of their contemporaries', nay, actually antagonistic to it. Nor were they entirely wrong, for there are very essential points of difference between them. Yet common excellences, common prejudices, common aims, and common faults unite them and make of them a whole. And it happened much more frequently than is generally the case, that those whom reflection inclines us to class together actually did feel themselves drawn to each other; many of the best among them early joined hands and formed a league.

Seeking the connecting links we find, as it were, a chain which binds the group together.

When, after the lapse of many years, we dryly say or write the words, "they formed a school," we seldom take the trouble to conjure up any adequately vivid impression of what the formation of a school of literature and art signifies. There is a mysterious magic about the process. Some one remarkable man, after a long unconscious or half-conscious struggle, finally with full consciousness, frees himself from prejudices and attains to clearness of vision; then, everything being ready, the lightning of genius illuminates what he beholds. Such a man gives utterance (as did Hugo in a prose preface of some score of pages) to some thoughts which have never been thought or expressed in the same manner before. They may be only half true, they may be vague, but they have this remarkable quality that, in spite of more or less indefiniteness, they affront all traditional prejudices and wound the vanity of the day where it is most vulnerable, whilst they ring in the ears of the young generation like a call, like a new, audacious watchword.

What happens? Scarcely are these words spoken than there comes with the speed and precision of an echo a thousand-tongued answer from the wounded vanities and injured interests, an answer like the furious baying of a hundred packs of hounds. And what more? First one man, then another, then a third, comes to the spokesman of the new tendency, each with his own standpoint, each with his revolt, his ambition, his need, his hope, his resolve. They show him that the words he has spoken are incarnated in them. Some communicate directly with him, some with each other in his spirit and his name. Men who but lately were as unknown to each other as they still are to the public, who have been spiritually languishing, each in his separate seclusion, now meet and marvel to find that they understand each other, that they speak the same language, a language unknown to the rest of their contemporaries. They are young, yet all are already in possession of what to them constitutes life; the one has his dearly-bought joys, the other his bracing sufferings; and from these life-elements each has extracted his own portion of enthusiasm. Their meeting is electric; they exchange ideas with youthful haste, impart to each other their various sympathies and antipathies, enthusiasms and detestations; and all these well-springs of feeling flow together like the streams that form a river.

But the most beautiful feature in this crystallisation of artistic spirits into a school is the reverence, the awe which, in spite of the unanimity of their opinions, and in spite of their good comradeship, each feels for the other. Outsiders are apt to confuse this with what is satirically called "mutual admiration." But nothing is in reality more unlike the interested homage paid in periods of decadence than the naïve admiration of each other's talents exhibited by the men who are unconsciously forming a school. Their hearts are too young, too pure, not to admire in real earnest. One young productive mind regards the other as something marvellous, which holds surprises in store. To the one the workshop of the other's mind is like a sealed book; he cannot guess what will next appear from it, has no idea what pleasures his comrade has in store for him. They honour in one another something which they value higher than the personality, than the usually as yet undeveloped character, namely, the talent by virtue of which they are all related to the deity they worship—art.

Seldom, however, in the world's history has the mutual admiration accompanying an artistic awakening been carried to such a pitch as it was by the generation of 1830. It became positive idolatry. All the literary productions of the period show that the youth of the day were intoxicated with the feeling of friendship and brotherhood. Hugo's poems to Lamartine, Louis Boulanger, Sainte-Beuve, and David d'Angers; Gautier's to Hugo, Jehan du Seigneur, and Petrus Borel; De Musset's to Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, and Nodier; and, very specially, Sainte-Beuve's to all the standard-bearers of the school; Madame de Girardin's articles; Balzac's dedications; George Sand's Lettres d'un Voyageur—all these testify to a sincere, ardent admiration, which entirely precluded the proverbial jealousy of authors.

They did not only praise one another, they communicated ideas to each other and helped each other. Now it is an inspiring influence, now an artistic criticism, now some actual service rendered, which knits the bond of friendship between two authors of this period. Émile Deschamps inspires Victor Hugo to borrow themes from the old Spanish Romancero; Gautier writes the beautiful tulip sonnet in Balzac's Un grand Homme de Province a Paris, and helps him to dramatise certain of his plots; Sainte-Beuve reads George Sand's manuscripts and aids her with his criticism; George Sand and De Musset influence one another powerfully at a certain stage of their career; Madame de Girardin, Méry, Sandeau, and Gautier collaborate in a novel written in letters; Mérimée is the bond of union between the realists Beyle and Vitet and the romanticists.

The short period during which all meet and combine is the blossoming time of literature. Before many years pass Nodier is in his grave, Hugo is living in exile in Jersey, Alexandre Dumas is turning literature into a trade, Sainte-Beuve and Gautier are to be found in Princess Mathilde's circle, Mérimée is presiding over the Empress Eugenie's courts of love, De Musset sits solitary over his absinthe, and George Sand has retired to Nohant.

One and all in their riper years made new connections, connections which aided their development; but their boldest and freshest, if not always their most refined and beautiful work was done at the time when they were holding their first meetings in Charles Nodier's quarters at the Arsenal, or in the apartments in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs where Hugo and his pretty young wife kept house on their 2000 francs a year, or in Petrus Borel's garret, where the host's Hernani cloak decorated the wall in company with a sketch by Devéria and a copy of a Giorgione, and where, owing to lack of chairs, at least half of the company had to stand.

These young Romanticists felt like brothers, like fellow-conspirators; they felt that they were the sharers in a sweet and invigorating secret; and this gave to the works of the school a flavour, an aroma like that of the noble wines of a year when the vintage has been more than ordinarily good. Ah! that bouquet of 1830! There is no other in the century that can be compared with it.

In all the arts a break with tradition was aimed at and demanded. The inward fire was to glow through and dissolve the old musical forms, to devour lines and contours and transform painting into colour symphonies, to rejuvenate literature. In all the arts colour, passion, and style were aimed at and demanded—colour with such urgency that the most gifted painter of the period, Delacroix, neglected drawing for it; passion with such ardour that both lyric poetry and the drama were in danger of degenerating into hysteric foolishness; style with such artistic enthusiasm that some of the younger men, such as those two opposite poles, Mérimée and Gautier, neglected the human groundwork of their art and became devotees of style pure and simple.

The original, the unconscious, the popular was sought after and demanded. "We have been rhetoricians," men cried; "we have never understood the simple and the illogical—the savage, the people, the child, woman, the poet!"

Hitherto the people had only served as a background in literature—in Victor Hugo's dramas the passionate plebeian, the avenger and requiter, appeared on the scene as the hero. Hitherto the savage had talked like a Frenchman of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Voltaire)—Mérimée in Colomba and Carmen depicted savage emotions in all their wildness and freshness. Racine's child (in Athalie) had spoken like a miniature edition of a grown-up man—Nodier with a childlike heart put simple, innocent words into his children's mouths. In the French literature of an earlier period, woman had generally acted with full consciousness, arriving at conclusions like a man; see the works of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. Corneille paid homage to virtue, Crébillon the younger to frivolity and vice, but both the virtue and the vice were conscious and acquired. George Sand, on the contrary, depicted the innate nobility and natural goodness of a noble woman's heart. Madame de Staël in her Corinne had represented the gifted woman as a being of great and commanding talent—George Sand, in Lélia, represented her as a great sibyl. In olden days the poet had been a courtier, like Racine and Molière, or a man of the world, like Voltaire and Beaumarchais, or simply an ordinary decent citizen, like Lafontaine. Now he became the neglected step-child of society, the high-priest of humanity, often poor and despised, but with the starry brow and the tongue of fire. Hugo hymned him as the shepherd of the people, Alfred de Vigny represented him in Stello and Chatterton as the sublime child who prefers dying of hunger to degrading his muse by common work, and dies blessing his fellow-men, who acknowledge his worth when it is too late.