Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France - Георг Брандес - Страница 7

From the year 1824 onwards Hugo, Dumas, Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve, De Musset, and De Vigny met almost every Sunday evening at the house of a friend who that year took up his residence in the outskirts of Paris, near the Arsenal, in a modest dwelling which went by the name of the Little Tuileries. Their host was a man who in point of age belonged to the previous generation (he was born in 1780), but who in his mental attitude had anticipated the nascent literature, which he consequently at once and without hesitation took under his protection. His name was Charles Nodier.

Nodier's life had been one of strange vicissitudes; he had been an emigré in the Jura, a newspaper editor in Illyria, and now he was a librarian in Paris.[1] His most remarkable characteristic as an author is that he is always from ten to twenty years in advance of every literary movement. His novel Jean Sbogar, the story of a species of Illyrian Karl Moor, which he planned in Illyria in 1812 and published in 1818, although improbable and uninteresting as a tale, is remarkable from the fact that its author, long before the days of Proudhon and modern communism, has put some of the most striking truths and untruths of the communistic faith into the mouth of his hero. Jean Sbogar writes:—

"The poor man's theft from the rich man would, if we were to go back to the origin of social conditions, prove to be merely the just return of a piece of silver or of bread from the hands of the thief to the hands of the man from whom it was stolen."

"Show me a power which dares to assume the name of law, and I shall show you theft assuming the name of property."

"What is that law which calls itself constitution and bears on its brow the name and seal of equality? Is it the agrarian law? No, it is the contract of sale, drawn up by intriguers and partisans who have desired to enrich themselves, which delivers a people into the hands of the rich."

"Liberty is not such a very rare treasure; it is to be found in the hand of the strong and the purse of the rich. You are master over my money. I am master of your life. Give me the money and you may keep your life."

Jean Sbogar is, we observe, not a common but a philosophic highwayman. The most natural thing about him is that he wears gold earrings, and this realistic trait Madame Nodier had almost succeeded in eliminating. Nodier allowed himself to be, as a rule, guided by his wife's taste and wishes. But when he once in a way felt inclined to rebel, and, to excuse himself, pled his submission on all other occasions, Madame Nodier always said: "Don't forget that you refused to sacrifice Jean Sbogar's earrings to me." This is declared to have been the one and only literary disagreement which ever occurred between the couple.

Men had forgotten the existence of such a book as Jean Sbogar, when Napoleon's memoirs came out and informed them that he had had it with him at St. Helena, and had read it with interest. The little novel belongs to Nodier's transition period. It was written before he had developed his characteristic individuality. This he did about the time of the formation of the Romantic School proper. He stood then, so to speak, at the open door of literature, and bade that school welcome. His review of Victor Hugo's boyish romance, Han d'Islande, is a little masterpiece of criticism, sympathetic and acute. It was the beginning of the warm friendship between the two authors. The appreciation of Hugo is so marvellously correct that in reading it to-day one can hardly believe that its writer was unacquainted with all the master's later works. It required no small amount of cleverness to foresee them in Han d'Islande.

The stories which Nodier now began to write possess a charm and attraction unique in French literature. They are distinguished by a mimosa-like delicacy of feeling. They treat chiefly of the first stirring of passion in the hearts of youths and maidens; the fresh dew of the morning of life is upon them; they remind us of the woods in spring. It is a well-known fact that there is some difficulty in finding French books of any literary value which are fit for young girls' reading; but such tales as Nodier's Thérèse Aubert, or the collection of stories entitled Souvenirs de Jeunesse, meet both requirements. The only risk run would be the risk of imbuing the young readers with fanciful platonic ideas; for these tales are as sentimental as they are chaste; the love which they describe may be a friendship with little of the sexual element in it, nevertheless it completely engrosses the little human being. It owes its charm to the fact that as yet no experience has made these minds suspicious and that no false or true pride prevents these hearts from revealing their emotions. As all the tales are founded on reality, on memories of their author's youth, the terrors of the Revolution form the dark background of them all, and they all end with a parting or the death of the loved one.

A childlike delicacy of feeling is the fundamental characteristic of Nodier's character. To the end of his days he remained a big, unworldly child, with a girlish shrinking not only from the impure, but even from the grown-up standpoint.

Above this groundwork of naïve freshness of feeling there rises, as second story, a wildly exuberant imagination. Nodier possessed such a gift of extravagant invention that one can hardly help believing that he must have been subject to visions and hallucinations; he had the dangerous quality peculiar to a certain type of poetic temperament, that of scarcely being able to speak the truth. No one, not even he himself, ever knew for a certainty whether what he was relating was truth or fiction. Jest is the mean between the two. Nodier was considered one of the most entertaining of Frenchmen, and he was not the least offended when he was told by his friends that they did not believe a word of what he was telling them.

On a tour which he and Hugo, accompanied by their wives, made together in the south of France, they arrived at an inn in the little town of Essonne, where they were to breakfast. It was in this inn that Lesurques had been arrested, a man who was executed in 1796 for a murder of which he was afterwards proved to have been innocent. Nodier, who had known him, or at any rate said he had, spoke of him with an emotion that brought tears into the eyes of the two ladies, and disturbed the cheerfulness of the repast. Noticing Madame Hugo's wet eyes, Nodier promptly began: "You know, Madame, that a man is not invariably certain of being the father of his child, but have you ever heard of a woman not knowing if she is her child's mother?" "Where did you hear of such a thing?" asked Madame Hugo. "In the billiard-room next door," was the reply. Pressed for an explanation, Nodier related with much gusto how, two years previously, a coachful of wet-nurses, coming from Paris with children who were to be reared in the country, stopped at this very inn. That they might breakfast in peace, the nurses deposited their charges for the time on the billiard-table. But whilst the women were in the salle-à-manger some carriers, coming in to play a game of billiards, lifted the children off the table and laid them at random on the bench. When the nurses returned they were in despair. How was each to recognise her own nursling? The children were all only a few days old, and indistinguishable one from the other. At last, merely making sure of the sex, each took one from the row; and now there were in France a score or so of mothers who discovered a likeness to beloved husbands or to themselves in children with whom they had no connection whatever.

"What a story!" said Madame Nodier. "Were the children's clothes not marked?"

"If you begin to inquire into the probability of a thing, you will never arrive at the truth," answered Nodier, nothing daunted, and quite satisfied with the effect produced.

He himself never inquired into probabilities. The world of probabilities was not his; he lived in the world of legend, of fantastic fairy-tale and ghost story. If a fairy has ever stood by the cradle of a mortal, that mortal was Charles Nodier. And in this fairy he believed all his life; he loved her as she loved him, and she had a part in all that he wrote. What though he was married by law and in earthly fashion to Madame Nodier! The marriage had no more spiritual significance than Dante's with Gemma Donati; his true bride and Beatrice was the fairy Bellas, once the Queen of Sheba, whose praises he and Gérard de Nerval so often sang.

The world in which he lives is the world in which Oberon and Titania dance, in which strains from the Thousand and One Nights blend with the melodies of Ariel's celestial orchestra, in which Puck makes his bed in a rosebud, whilst all the flowers perfume the summer night. It is a world in which all the personages of real, wide-awake life appear, but grotesquely magnified or grotesquely diminished, to suit the comprehension of the child and the requirements of the fantast.

Here, as Nodier himself somewhere says, we have Odysseus the far-travelled, but he has shrunk into Hop-o'-my-thumb, whose tremendous voyage consists in swimming across the milk-pail; here is Othello, the terrible wife-murderer, only his beard is not black but blue—he has turned into the notorious Bluebeard; here is Figaro, the nimble lackey who flatters the grandees so cleverly, only he is transformed into Puss in Boots, a less entertaining personage, though almost as interesting from the psychological point of view.

No author of the French Romantic period is more closely related to the German and English Romanticists than Nodier. Any one who does not know his works may form some idea of them by recalling Sir Walter Scott's ghost stories and Hoffmann's audacious fantasies. But these, of course, do not convey an idea of Nodier's artistic individuality. His peculiarity is, that in his representation of Romantic subjects he is not what we are in the habit of calling Romantic, but, on the contrary, severely Attic, classically simple, sparing in the matter of colour, and devoid of passion; there is none of the Scotch mist we are conscious of in Sir Walter, or of the fumes of the Berlin wine-vaults which we inhale in reading Hoffmann. His peculiarity as a stylist is that, whilst the young Romanticists around him were sensualising language and supplanting the idea by the picture, he himself transcribed his wildest Romantic fancies into the clear and simple language of Pascal and Bossuet. Enthusiastic champion as he was of the new tendency in literature, in the matter of style he remained old-fashioned, and expressed the fantastic imaginations of the nineteenth century in the severe, perspicuous language of the seventeenth. Audacious to the verge of insanity in his fantasies, he is sober and clear in his style. As Prosper Mérimée has cleverly said, a fanciful tale by Nodier is like "the dream of a Scythian, told by an old Greek poet."

His Inès de Las Sierras is a ghost-story the beauty of which renders it infinitely superior to the ordinary ghost-story. The horror produced by the unaccountable apparition is blent with the admiration aroused by the supernatural visitant's gentle grace; these feelings do not neutralise each other, but act in combination with a peculiar power; and it is this combination which is the secret of Nodier's effects. It is a pity that he has spoiled the beautiful story by a trivial and improbable conclusion, which explains away the ghost in the most commonplace manner. The apparition seen in the old castle at midnight is not the ghost of the young dancing-girl, murdered 300 years before, but a living Spanish maiden who happens to bear the same name, and whom a fantastic and incredible concatenation of circumstances has led to dance there, dressed in white. There is genuine Latin rationality in this solution of the mystery, but it is offered to us, as it were, ironically. A story like Inès de Las Sierras, however, is what most exactly demonstrates the poetic progress made since the eighteenth century, which was such an enemy of the supernatural, even in fiction, that Voltaire regarded himself as an audacious reformer when (in his Semiramis) he allowed the ridiculous ghost of Minus to howl some alexandrines through a speaking-trumpet in broad daylight.

La Fée aux Miettes seems to me the best of Nodier's fantastic tales. There is undoubtedly too much of it; it is not without an effort that one follows all the wild twists and turnings of a fantasy which occupies 120 quarto pages, even though much of it is both interesting and charming. A poor, harmless lunatic in the asylum of Glasgow tells the story of his life. This is the setting of the tale, but we forget it altogether in the marvellousness of the events related. All the chords of human life are touched, jarringly and wildly. It is as if life itself passed before one's eyes seen wrong side out, seen from the perfectly permissible standpoint of the dreamer or the delirious fever-patient.

In the little town of Granville in Normandy lives a worthy, simple-minded young carpenter, Michel by name. In the same town lives an old female dwarf, shrivelled and ugly, who, because she gathers up the scraps of the school-children's breakfasts, is called "la fée aux miettes." Four or five centuries ago she might have been seen in Granville, living in the same way, and she has made her appearance at intervals since. This being is assisted by the young carpenter with small sums of money, and she in return assists him with all manner of wise advice. She always speaks to him as if she were passionately in love with him, and she begs him to promise to marry her, so that by this means his money may in time return to him again. She gives him her portrait, a picture which does not resemble her at all, but represents the fairy Belkis, who in olden days was the Queen of Sheba beloved by Solomon. The youth falls in love with this picture of a beautiful, dazzling, bewitching woman. Wherever he goes her name meets him; when he determines to try his fortune in a foreign country, the ship he sails in is called the Queen of Sheba. He wanders about the world dreaming of Belkis, as we wander, one and all of us, dreaming of our castle in the air, our ideal, our fixed idea, which to our neighbours is madness.

Falsely accused of a murder committed in the room in which he had slept at an inn, poor Michel is sentenced to be hanged. He is carried through a hooting crowd to the gallows. There proclamation is made that, according to old custom, his life will be spared if any young woman will have pity on him and take him for her husband. And behold, Folly Girlfree, a merry, pretty girl who has always liked him, approaches the scaffold, prepared to save him. But he asks time for reflection. He likes Folly Girlfree, and she is both good and beautiful, but he does not love her; he has only one love, his ardently, secretly adored ideal, the Fairy Belkis. He looks tenderly and gratefully at Folly, deliberates, and—requests to be hanged. This deliberation with the rope round his neck, this conclusion that, as Shakespeare puts it, "many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage," is described with delightful humour, with a naïve philosophy which is unforgettable from the fact that some such idea has occurred at one time or other to all of us.

They are proceeding to hang Michel, when loud cries are heard, and the Crumb Fairy, followed by all the street boys, arrives breathless, bringing proofs of the prisoner's innocence. He marries her out of gratitude, but hardly has the door on the wedding night been hermetically closed between him and his aged wife, hardly has he shut his eyes than Belkis in her bridal veil approaches his couch.

"Alas! Belkis, I am married, married to the Crumb Fairy."

"I am she."

"Nay, that is impossible; you are almost as tall as I."

"That is because I have stretched myself."

"But this beautiful, curly, golden hair falling over your shoulders, Belkis? The Crumb Fairy has none of it."

"No, for I show it only to my husband."

"But the Fairy's two great teeth, Belkis; I do not see them between your fresh, fragrant lips?"

"No, they are a superfluity only permissible to old age."

"And this almost deadly feeling of bliss which takes possession of me in your embrace, Belkis? The Fairy never gave me this."

"No, naturally," is the laughing answer; "but 'at night all cats are grey.'"

Henceforward Michel lives a divided life; his days are spent with the wise old Fairy, his nights with the beautiful young Queen of Sheba, until at last he finds the singing mandragora, and, having made his escape from the madhouse, mounts to the Fairy's and Belkis's heaven on the wings of the mandragora's song.

This is madness, no doubt, but it is marvellous madness—madness instinct with soul. Who is this crumb-gathering fairy? Is she wisdom? Is she renunciation and duty? Is she the inexhaustible patience which suddenly reveals itself as genius? Is she fidelity turning into the happiness that is the reward of fidelity? She is probably a little of all of this; and therefore it is that she can transform herself into youth and beauty and bliss. In some such fashion Nodier has thought out, or dreamt his story.

At its maturity his imaginative faculty is more wanton and bold. No longer contented with producing shapeless, unordered material, he presents his material to us with a grotesque, loquacious, satirical explanation. No Frenchman comes so near having what Englishmen and Germans call humour as Nodier. At times he seems to be positively possessed by whimsicality. Then he not only turns the everyday world topsy-turvy in his stories, but plays with his own relation to the story, satirises contemporaries, makes a thousand innuendoes, philosophises over the illusions of life. He takes even the art of the printer into his service to heighten his fantastic effects; or, more correctly speaking, in order to prove the absolute power of his personality over his material, he leaves not a single thing, not even the purely mechanical means of communication, untouched by his mood. In his famous tale, Le Roi de Bohème et ses sept Châteaux, he exhausted the resources of the printing establishment. At his command the letters become so long that they stretch from top to bottom of the page; he commands again, and they dwindle into the tiniest of the tiny; he screams, and they stand up on end in terror; he becomes melancholy, and they hang their heads all along the lines; they are inseparably mixed up with illustrations; Latin and Gothic groups alternate, according to the mood of the moment; sometimes they stand on their heads, so that we have to turn the book upside down to read them; sometimes they follow the narrative so closely that a descent of the stairs is printed thus:

Hereupon

our

hero

went

dejectedly

down

the

stairs.

It is interesting to trace in the account of Nodier's life written by his daughter, the foundations of fact upon which he built his fantastic tales. It rarely happens that, as in Inès de Las Sierras, something real (in this case an old castle which Nodier had visited in the course of a tour he made with his family in Spain in 1827) forms the groundwork. Sometimes, as for example in Trilby, the point of departure is a legend; and it is significant that this particular legend should have been told to Nodier by Pichot, the French translator of Scott and Byron. The idea of Smarra Nodier got from hearing the old porter of his house in Paris, who was too ill to sleep anywhere except sitting in his chair, relate his nightmares and dreams. The model for the Fée aux Miettes was an old woman who served in his father's house when he was a child, and who treated his father, a man of sixty, as if he were a giddy youth. This old Denise maintained that before entering the Nodiers' household she had been in the service of a Monsieur d'Amboise, governor of Château-Thierry. When she held forth on this subject, she mixed up with her own experiences reminiscences of the most extraordinary events and most antiquated customs; and the family, out of curiosity, caused inquiry to be made about this remarkable governor. The archives of the town showed that only one of the name had ever existed, and that he had died in 1557. One can see how the story of the fairy evolved itself out of this curious incident. The very slightest element of fact—a landscape, a legend, a dream, a lie, a mere mote—was enough for Nodier.

The amiable, clever man, whose house was for a number of years the rendezvous of the men of letters who made their début about 1830, the place where all the talented young beginners repaired to seek encouragement and, if possible, permission to read a ballad or a little piece of prose before the select company which assembled there on Sunday afternoons, this man in his proper person represents the extreme of Romantic fantasticality in the literature of the period. The fantastic supernaturalism which was the main characteristic of German Romanticism, is only one of the poles of French Romanticism; or, to speak more correctly, it is merely one of its elements—in some of the most notable men of the school a weak and subordinate, in others an important element, but an element always present. In Victor Hugo's case it announces itself at once, in his Ronde du Sabbat, and makes itself forcibly felt in the great Légende des Siècles, though in this latter the legend is only naïve history; we have a glimpse of it even in the rationalistic Mérimée (half explained away in La Vénus d'Ille, more distinct in La Vision de Charles XI. and Les âmes du purgatoire); it reigns, half-seraphic, half-sanguinarily sensual, in Lamartine's La chute d'un ange; it pervades Quinet's pantheistically vague Ahasvère; it appears in George Sand's old age in the pretty fairy-tales she writes for her grandchildren; it occupies even the plastic Gautier in the many tales in which he allows himself to be influenced by Hoffmann; and, as Swedenborgian spiritism, it actually, in a romance like Séraphitus-Séraphita, completes Balzac's great Comédie Humaine. But in no other author has it the naïve originality and the poetic force which distinguish Nodier.

[1] Nodier's youth and first literary efforts are described in The Emigrant Literature.