Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 5. The Romantic School in France - Георг Брандес - Страница 8

The new literary and artistic movement had both foreign and indigenous sources. The foreign are the more clearly evident.

As has already been observed, the older foreign literature which had hitherto been kept out of France, and the new, which was captivating men's minds by its novelty, were simultaneously seized on and assimilated by the young generation, with an eagerness exactly proportioned to the vehemence with which the works in question repudiated the rules adhered to in earlier French literature. Before the eyes of the young school there was, as it were, a prism, which refracted all rays in a certain uniform manner. The rays which passed through changed their character in the process.

The name of Shakespeare early became the great rallying cry of the Romanticists. August Wilhelm Schlegel had prepared the way for Shakespeare; in his famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, which were published in French as well as German, he had been the first to extol and expound him. Mercier, the French "prophet of Romanticism," eagerly took up the cry; Villemain and Guizot followed suit; imitations and translations, the latter more faithful than those of the previous century, did what in them lay to popularise the name and art of the great Englishman. At the beginning of the Twenties, the progress that had been made was not sufficient to prevent a company of English actors who tried to play Shakespeare in the Porte-St. Martin theatre, being received with a shower of apples and eggs and cries of: "Speak French! Down with Shakespeare! He was one of Wellington's adjutants!"[1] But we have seen that their successors met with a most cordial reception only a few years later. In the interval Beyle had made his determined effort to procure Shakespeare due recognition; the Globe (published first three times a week, then daily) had made its appearance as the organ of the younger generation, and its ablest contributors had conducted the campaign of the new cause with remarkable skill.

Beyle who, in spite of his paradoxicalness, is one of the most clear-headed and original writers of his day, expresses profound admiration for Shakespeare without being guilty of any lack of piety towards Racine, whom he represents as the Englishman's antipodes. He shows that the moments of complete illusion which ought to occur during the course of every theatrical performance, occur more frequently during the representation of Shakespeare's than of Racine's plays, and also that the peculiar pleasure imparted by a tragedy depends upon these same seconds of illusion and the emotion which they leave in the spectator's mind. Nothing hinders illusion more than admiration of the beautiful verse of a tragedy. The question we have to answer is: What is the task of the dramatic poet? Is it to present us with a beautifully evolved plot in melodious verse, or is it to give a truthful representation of emotions? In his own answer to this question Beyle goes farther than Romantic tragedy, exemplified by Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, subsequently did; for he unconditionally rejects verse as a vehicle for tragic drama. Granted, he says, that the aim of tragedy is to give a faithful representation of emotions, then its first requirement is distinct expression of thoughts and feelings. Such distinctness is detracted from by verse. He quotes Macbeth's words, spoken when he sees the ghost of Banquo sitting in his place: "The table's full;" and maintains that rhyme and rhythm can add nothing to the beauty of such a cry. It was obviously Vitet, not Hugo, who subsequently came up to Beyle's dramaturgic ideal.

He warns against imitation of Shakespeare. The master should only be followed in his understanding observation of the society in which he lived, and his skill in giving his contemporaries exactly the kind of tragedy which they needed; for to-day too, in 1820, the desire for a certain kind of tragic drama exists, even though the public, intimidated by the fame of Racine, does not venture to demand it of the poet. It is only when an author studies and satisfies his age that he is truly Romantic. For "Romanticism" is the art of providing nations with the literary works which in the existing condition of their ideas and customs are fitted to give them the greatest possible amount of pleasure, whereas "Classicism" offers them the literature which gave their greatgrandfathers the greatest possible amount of pleasure. In his own day Racine was a Romanticist. Shakespeare is a Romanticist, in the first place because he depicted for the Englishmen of 1590 the bloody struggles and the results of their civil wars, and in the second place because he has painted a series of masterly, subtly shaded pictures of the impulses of the human mind and the passions of the human heart. The teaching of Romanticism is, not that men should imitate England or Germany, but that each nation should have its own literature, modelled upon its own character, just as we all wear clothes cut and sewn for ourselves alone.

To Beyle, we observe, Romanticism is almost the exact equivalent of what we call modern art. Characteristic of that inveterate tendency of the Latin race to classicism which has already been alluded to, are his repeated assertions that the author should be "romantic" in all that concerns his subject-matter, this being "the requirement of the age," but that he should remain classic in his manner of presenting it, in vocabulary and style. For language is an established convention and therefore practically unchangeable. Men should try to write like Pascal, Voltaire, and La Bruyère.[2]

With characteristic variations the most eminent contributors to the Globe formulate their definitions of Romanticism in very fair harmony with each other and with Beyle. At the time when Hugo was still royalist, Christian, and conservative, the Globe was already revolutionary, philosophic, and liberal. The first to publish the programme of Romanticism in the Globewas Thiers. He proclaimed its watchwords to be nature and truth—those almost inevitable war-cries in every artistic and literary revolution. He opposes himself to the academic, the symmetrical in plastic art, and in dramatic poetry demands historic truth, which is the same as what was afterwards called local colouring. Duvergier de Hauranne, in an article On the Romantic, defines classicism as routine, Romanticism as liberty—that is to say, liberty for the most varied talents (Hugo and Beyle, Manzoni and Nodier) to develop in all their marked individuality. Ampère defines classicism as imitation, Romanticism as originality. But an anonymous writer (in all probability Sismondi) tries to give a more exact definition; he remarks that the word Romanticism has not been coined to designate the literary works in which any society whatever has given itself expression, but only that literature which gives a faithful picture of modern civilization. Since this civilisation is, according to his conviction, spiritual in its essence, Romanticism is to be defined as spirituality in literature. The future author of Les Barricades, Vitet, at this time a youth of twenty, tries to settle the matter with the impetuosity and audacity of his age. According to him it simply means independence in artistic matters, individual liberty in literary. "Romanticism is," he says, "Protestantism in literature and art;" and in saying so he is obviously thinking merely of emancipation from a kind of papal authority. He adds that it is neither a literary doctrine nor a party cry, but the law of necessity, the law of change and of progress. "Twenty years hence the whole nation will be Romantic; I say the whole nation, for the Jesuits are not the nation."

The reader can see for himself that there is only the merest shade of difference between these definitions and the conclusion arrived at by Victor Hugo: "Romanticism is Liberalism in literature;" and it will not surprise him to learn that the Globe greeted the preface to Cromwell with the exclamation: "The movement has now reached M. Hugo." Hugo's chief contribution to it was victory.[3]

Next to Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott was the English author who exercised, if not the most profound, certainly the most plainly traceable influence. He found his way across the French, as across every other frontier. Before the days of his popularity in France the great Scotchman had found in Germany, Italy, and Denmark admirers, who, inspired by patriotic and moral aims, adopted the tone of his fiction. The Waverley novels began to appear in 1814; in 1815 they were already imitated by De la Motte Fouqué in the German "Junker" style; in 1825-26 Manzoni's Promessi Sposi appeared; and in 1826 Ingemann began to publish his romantic historical tales, which inculcate a childish kind of patriotism and royalism, and are, as it were, haunted by a pale ghost of Sir Walter Scott. The Waverley novels were translated into French almost immediately after their appearance, and at once achieved a great success. Scott became so popular that in the early Twenties the managers of the theatres commissioned authors to dramatise his novels. The unsuccessful play Emilia, written by Soumet, the poet of the transition period, was an adaptation of Scott. Victor Hugo himself, using the name of his young brother-in-law, Paul Fouchet, sent in an adaptation of Kenilworth, which as a drama was also a failure.

The young Romantic generation, however, was not appealed to by the qualities in the novels which were most highly appreciated in Protestant countries, but by the talent of their picturesque descriptions and their medieval flavour. It was by his wealth of crossbows and buff jerkins, of picturesque costumes and romantic old castles, that Scott found favour in the eyes of Frenchmen. They ignored or disapproved of the common-sense, sober view of life and the Protestant morality which had won him readers in Germany and Scandinavia. Beyle was the first to criticise Scott severely. He prophesies that in spite of his extraordinary popularity his fame will be short-lived; for, according to Beyle, Scott's talent lay more in the describing of men's clothes and the limning of their features than in the representation of their emotional life and their passions. Art, says Beyle, neither can nor ought to imitate nature exactly; it is always a beautiful untruth; but Scott is too untruthful; his passionate characters strike us as being ashamed of themselves; they lack decision and boldness and naturalness. And it was not long before his critics began to make the complaint, so often reiterated by Balzac, that he could not describe woman and her passions, or at any rate dared not describe these passions with their pleasures, pains, and punishments, in a society which attached exaggerated importance to literary modesty.4[4] The novels with plots laid in modern days made no impression; only Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Kenilworth, The Fair Maid of Perth, and one or two others were popular.

The special merit of this foreign author in the eyes of Frenchmen was, that he had substituted the novel of dramatic dialogue for the two forms of the longer novel hitherto in vogue—the narrative, in which the headings of the chapters were summaries of the contents and the author played a prominent part, and the letter form, which squeezed all the surprises and all the passion in between "Dear Friend" and "Yours sincerely." The most talented of the young French writers are plainly influenced by him. The one whose moral standard most closely approached the English, Alfred de Vigny, wrote Cinq-Mars, a novel with a plot laid in the days of Richelieu, an entertaining, but now old-fashioned work, in which the contrast of good and evil overshadows all other contrasts, and which betrays a remarkable want of appreciation of Richelieu's greatness as a statesman. There is almost a total absence of Scott's skill in characterisation; instead of it we have a lyric element, the glorification of youthful, impetuous chivalry—the old French bravoure. Prosper Mérimée fell under the great Scotchman's influence at the same time as Alfred de Vigny, and wrote his Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., a work the spirit of which is still less like Scott's. Mérimée singles out the strong and violent passions in history for their own sake, but also with the French Romanticist's subordinate aim of rousing the wrath of the respectable bourgeois by his audacious unreservedness; his delineation of character is, generally speaking, clear and concise; he tells his tale coldly and with utter disregard of all established moral convention.

Every one knows the characteristic manner in which, at a somewhat later period, Alexandre Dumas employed Scott's wealth of colour and historic style in the production of many light and most entertaining novels, of which The Three Musketeers may be named as an example. But it is not so generally known that Balzac, the founder of the modern French novel, was as strongly attracted as De Vigny and Mérimée by the foreign master who made an epoch in the history of fiction. He desired to follow in his path without being a mere imitator. He believed himself quite capable of rivalling Scott in the delineative art which Romanticism had restored to honour, and was confident of his power to impart much more life to dialogue. In Scott's books there was only one type of woman; in France the writer of historic novels could contrast the brilliant vices and motley morals of Catholicism with the dark austerity of Calvinism in the wildest period of French history. This ensured him against monotony. Balzac, who was always projecting monumental works and whose mind had an instinctive bias towards the systematically comprehensive, finally conceived the plan of depicting each historic period since that of Charlemagne in one or more novels, all of which should form a connected chain—an idea which Freytag, in his work, Die Ahnen, has since tried to carry out as regards Germany. The first novel which Balzac published in his own name, Les Chouans, was intended to be a link in this chain. It describes the war in La Vendée at the time of the Revolution, and came out in 1829, the same year as Cinq-Mars and Chronique du Règne de Charles IX. Two books published much later, Sur Cathérine de Médicis and Maître Cornélius, are also fragments of the projected great work. The latter is a novel in which Balzac enters into direct competition with Sir Walter Scott; its hero is Louis XI., whom he considered unfairly treated by Sir Walter. Although these historical romances are good in their way and contain vivid and careful studies of character, they prove that if Balzac had kept to his intention of merely calling the past to life again, his place in the literature of his century would have been an entirely subordinate one; he would only have been known as one of Scott's disciples.

Victor Hugo also was fired by the famous Scotchman with the desire to write a great historical novel. He determined to make it centre round the cathedral church of Notre-Dame in Paris, the whitewashing of which had horrified him; for he had an admiration and love for the grand old historical building which remind us of Goethe's for Strasburg Cathedral and Oehlenschläger's for the Cathedral of Roskilde. According to Hugo's contract with the publisher, this famous novel was to be ready in April 1829; but he was not able to keep his engagement; he first obtained five months' grace, and then a respite until the 1st of December 1830 upon condition of paying 1000 francs weekly after that date if the book was not finished then. By the 27th of July his preparatory studies were made, and that day he began to write the novel; the following day ushered in the Revolution of July; Hugo's house was in danger from the firing, and during the removal to another, all the notes and studies for his book were lost. Under the circumstances the publisher granted three months' grace; Hugo denied himself to every one, locked away his black suit so that he might not be tempted to go out, sent for a bottle of ink, put on his working-jacket, and worked without paying or receiving a single visit until 14th January 1831, when the ink-bottle was empty and the novel written. During all that time he had only allowed himself one distraction, which was to go and see Charles X.'s ministers sentenced. Not to break his resolution, he went dressed in his civic guard's uniform.

In his earliest youth Hugo had been profoundly impressed by Scott. In a review of Quentin Durward, which he wrote at the age of twenty-one, he expresses the greatest admiration for Scott's historical sense, moral earnestness, and dramatic style. But even in this early appreciation we come upon a sentence in which he, as it were, indicates the step he himself hopes to take in advance of Scott. He writes: "After Walter Scott's picturesque but prosaic novel there remains to be created another kind of novel, which in our opinion will be more admirable and more perfect. It is the novel which is both drama and epic, which is both picturesque and poetical, both realistic and idealistic, both true and grand, which combines Walter Scott and Homer." We must not let these last words, with which Hugo, true to himself, spoils his effect by exaggeration, prevent our acknowledging the young author's clear perception of what he himself was one day to be capable of doing in the domain of fiction. He seems to have had the premonition that his novels would be great prose poems, picturesque chronicles rather than pictures of reality like Scott's.

Notre-Dame de Paris, which was intended to give a picture of the life and manners of Paris in the fifteenth century, is the creation of a great constructive imagination. This was a fit subject for Hugo, with his leaning to the grand and colossal. He gives a soul to the building, breathes into it the breath of his spirit until it becomes a living being; and as the scientist reconstructs a whole animal from a single vertebra, so Hugo's brain, with the cathedral as starting-point, conjures up the whole of that long-vanished Paris. The faith and the superstition, the manners and the arts, the laws and the human emotions and passions of those old days, are drawn for us with a broad, strong touch—with no great precision, but with a kind of convincing magic. The characters in Notre-Dame are the character sketches of a genius, drawn in the epic style, in more than life-size. Scott's honest, plain, human beings are superseded by the creatures of an artist intoxicated with colour; his gentle spirit makes way for grandiloquent passion pointing unresignedly to blind, iron necessity, that άνάγχη which is written on the church wall, and which crushes us all—gipsy and priest, beauty and beast, Phœbus and Quasimodo—century after century under its iron heel.

Even more powerful than Scott's influence was Byron's. It was the element of wild passion in his poems and its connection with the wildness of his life—it was Childe Harold and still more Lara, the being marked by the finger of fate, who, suffering from a mysterious melancholy, carries his pride and his anguish with him from land to land—it was this type in its Byronic forms, fantastically magnified by the element of myth and legend enveloping the poet's life, which enchanted the young men whom Hugo had awakened or gathered together. Few were the critics who maintained as Beyle did in spite of his great admiration for Byron, that "this author of deadly dull, conventional tragedies" was certainly not the leader of the Romanticists. Immediately after Byron's death the whole horde of French minor poets seized upon the two themes, Greece and Lord Byron, which they continued year after year to sing with so much ardour and so little comprehension of the dead man's character, that Sainte-Beuve was obliged to protest in the Globe against the abuse of the words Byron, liberty, elegy, &c. In 1824 both Hugo and Lamartine gave expression to their feelings regarding Byron, the former in a newspaper article, the latter in a poem. In treating of him as a poet, both authors at this period lay most stress upon his spirit of doubt and his gloomy view of life; neither of them seems to have been at all deeply impressed by the works of his mature manhood; the bright and trenchant political and religious satire of Don Juan was, in 1824, missed or misunderstood by them as by so many others. But whereas Hugo's chief endeavour is to show the difference between Byron's poetry and that of the eighteenth century ("The difference between Byron's and Voltaire's laughter is this, that Voltaire had not suffered"), to the sentimental and half orthodox Lamartine the English poet is still the fallen angel. Lamartine's Fifth Canto of Childe Harold, in which he endeavours to strike the Byronic note, shows in what he believed himself to resemble the English nobleman, namely, in his romantically heroic personality. Masking as Byron he gives expression to the doubts and rebellious feelings of which we only catch a rare glimpse in his Meditations, but to which he was soon to give utterance in his own name. It was probably Byron who lured both him and Hugo to the East; Hugo contented himself with imaginary excursions, but Lamartine made princely preparations and set off on a grand tour. And if Byron's last works made no profound political impression on these two authors, his last actions and his death did.

Byron's influence is, then, unmistakably traceable in the works of most of the young poets of our period; but so marked and powerful was the originality of this generation of authors, that his sentimental despair, which was so infectious, and which led to so much imitation and affectation in many literatures, glanced off them. There was only one of them in whose ears this particular Byronic note rang like a message from a kindred spirit, and he was, curiously enough, the most elegant and aristocratic, the truest Parisian among them all—Alfred de Musset.

Most of the literary notables in question were born in the provinces—Victor Hugo and Nodier at Besançon, George Sand in Berry, Gautier at Tarbes, Lamennais in Brittany, Sainte-Beuve at Boulogne—and each of these brings with him his characteristic fund of provincialism which does not allow itself to be interpenetrated by the Byronic influence, although both George Sand and Gautier were, in curiously different ways, affected by Byron. Mérimée, who was born in Paris, cooled too quickly to feel the influence of Byron's poetic temperament; it was Byron's spirit of negation which influenced him, and that at second hand, through Beyle. But upon no one does Byron make the same direct, deep impression as on that slender, pale son of Paris, who is distinguished by all the weakness and all the exquisite charm which are the heritage of the last representatives of a noble and ancient race. In the earliest stages of his career, Byron, the true Englishman, had been spiritually minded and melancholy; the senses play but a small part in the poetry of his youth; not till he is the mature man and has visited Italy and lived in Latin countries does his poetry, like Goethe's in Venice, become sensual and audaciously outspoken. De Musset, on the contrary, begins in his early youth with the bold and fleshly realism which we find in some of Byron's later works, and gradually becomes more and more spiritual. At his best he is a keener observer than Byron, and his love-poetry is more delicate; it has a Raphaelesque beauty which Byron's neither attains nor aims at. He is the weaker, tenderer, more charming, French Byron, as Heine is the smaller, more wanton, wittier, German Byron, and Paludan-Müller the satirical, orthodox, royalist, Danish Byron. De Musset suffers like a boy, complains like a woman; he is what Auguste Préault, the sculptor, once called him: "Mademoiselle Byron."

Shelley, whose name did not find its way into France till much later, was practically unknown to this generation. As for the so-called Lake Poets, Sainte-Beuve, who acquired the English language in his youth, and had more of the critical gift than any of his contemporaries, was the only one of the Romanticists who appreciated that nature-loving, realistic school at its true worth, assimilated some of its spirit, and endeavoured by means of a few translations to bring it into favour. Brizeux, the poet of Brittany, reminds us of the Lake Poets, though he knew nothing about them.

The influence of Germany was less powerful than that of England, and it is still easier in the case of this country to show the free treatment to which the impressions received were subjected. Germany was seen overshadowed by the old Teutonic oaks; its fountains and rivers were haunted by elves and fairies, who trailed their shadowy white garments across the dewy grass; among its mountains dwelt the gnomes, and in the air above the mountain-peaks witches held their revelries. Germany was a Walpurgis Night dreamland. Only one of Goethe's works was really popular, namely, Werther, the high pressure passion of which enchanted all readers. Werther seemed to them a René, because, though he was much older than René, they had made acquaintance with René first, and this circumstance deprived the German hero of his freshness and approximated him to the Childe Harold type. Something of the same kind happened with Faust. That imposing figure, which made such an impression on the whole of Europe, was so completely foreign to the French that they never truly comprehended it. French poetry had never occupied itself with the struggles and sufferings of the questioning spirit. And this German doctor, who is simple enough to see the devil in a poodle dog, sentimental enough to cross Gretchen's threshold with pious emotions in his breast, and yet unscrupulous enough to desert the girl he has betrayed and kill her brother in a dishonourable duel, was too un-French to be understood. We gather from the apologies of the Romanticists the nature of the criticism to which the men of the classic school subjected Faust. "How many," writes Duvergier de Hauranne, "are rendered insensible to all the beauties of this masterpiece by the fact that it treats of a compact with the devil! They cannot understand any one allowing such an improbability to pass unchallenged; and yet they themselves from their childhood have, without raising the slightest objection, beheld Agamemnon murdering his daughter in order to obtain a favourable wind." French readers were accustomed to the superstitions of antiquity, but felt themselves repelled by those of the Middle Ages. And there were, moreover, many who, without reading them, denounced Goethe's works as barbaric literature. As late as 1825 that narrow-minded assailant of the Romanticists, Auger, the secretary of the French Academy, in making an attack on "those lovers of the beauties of nature, who would willingly exchange the Apollo Belvedere for a shapeless image of St. Christopher, and with the greatest pleasure give Phèdre and Iphigénie for Faust and Götz von Berlichingen," drew smiles from the Academicians by pronouncing these last titles in a burlesque manner, as if they were barbaric names. The admiration of the Romanticists for Faust was, however, as has already been observed, barren of result. Though Gérard de Nerval translated the First Part to the entire satisfaction of the aged Goethe, and though Delacroix's painting of Faust and Mephistopheles riding through the air was also much admired by the old poet and art connoisseur, the French literature of the period only rarely (as in the case of Quinet) shows any trace of the influence of the great drama.

One would have imagined that Schiller, with his association with Rousseau and his flowery dramatic rhetoric, would have appealed more forcibly to Frenchmen than Goethe; as a matter of fact he possessed little attraction for the younger generation. Adaptations of all his plays were indeed performed on the French stage, but this happened just before the formation of the Romantic School proper, and the semi-Romantic poets of the transition period, who cut and carved these plays into conventional tragedies to suit the taste of the day, destroyed them in place of teaching the public to appreciate them. Out of the Jungfrau von Orleans and Don Carlos, Soumet manufactured a Jeanne d'Arc and an Élisabeth de France; Fiesco was adapted and maltreated by Ancelot, Wallenstein by Liadières; but neither Classicists nor Romanticists derived any satisfaction from the results, and the verdict of the austere Beyle (who read, or tried to read the originals) is that Schiller paid too much homage to the old French taste to be able to present his countrymen with the tragedy which their manners and customs demanded. He has no appreciation whatever of Schiller's real greatness; he evidently knew too little German to be able to enjoy and understand Wallenstein; besides, like many of the younger men, he allowed himself to be carried away to such an extent by his desire to annoy the Classicists, that he actually extols Werner's Luther as the modern drama most nearly approaching Shakespeare, and its author as a much greater poet than Schiller.

The only contemporary German author besides Goethe who made any deep impression was E. Th. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann, in fact, became to Frenchmen the German par excellence. Tieck was too vague, Novalis too mystical, to find the public in France which they did, for instance, in Denmark; but Hoffmann united to that wildly capricious fantasticality, which to Frenchmen was a perfectly new poetical element, the sharp decision of outline which appeals to them, and which reminded them of their compatriot Callot. His artistic courage, which dares to carry out capricious conceits to their extremest consequences, won their approbation. He dealt in strong colours and startling effects, and his work, with all its wildness, is as full of clear minute detail as a "Temptation of St. Anthony" by Breughel or Teniers; in contrast to Novalis, he appealed to Frenchmen by his Berlin rationality, which is so closely allied to French rationality; there was method in his madness. Thus it came about that he alone of all the German authors had followers, one may almost say disciples, in France. The influence of his tales is, as has already been observed, strongly felt in Charles Nodier's work; at a later period it is even more perceptible in Gérard de Nerval's, and it is unmistakable in Gautier's short stories. Highly original as this last-mentioned author is, and despite the fact that he hardly knew a word of German, he nevertheless at various periods of his life was under German influence. His youthful Romans et Contes remind us of Hoffmann, and much in his Émaux et Camées recalls Heinrich Heine. He had an intense admiration for Goethe's West-Oestlicher Diwan. What attracted him in Goethe was the artistic infallibility manifested by that great poet during the latter years of his life.