A Short History of French Literature

Théophile Gautier.

Théophile Gautier was born considerably later than most of the writers just mentioned. His birth-year was 1811, and he was a native of Tarbes in Gascony. His education was partly at the grammar school of that town, and partly at the Lycée Charlemagne, where he made friends with Gérard de Nerval, who was destined to have a great influence on his life. After leaving school he was intended for the profession of art. But, like Thackeray, to whom he had many points of resemblance, he had much less artistic faculty than taste. Gérard introduced him to the circle of Victor Hugo, and he speedily became one of the most fervent disciples of the author of Hernani. In a red waistcoat which has become historic, and in a mass of long hair which he continued to wear through life, he was the foremost of the Hugonic claque at the representation of that famous play. Young as he was, he soon justified himself as something more than a hanger-on of great men of letters. In 1830 itself he produced a volume of verse, and this was followed by Albertus, an audacious poem in the extremest Romantic style, and by a work which did him both harm and good, Mademoiselle de Maupin. In this the most remarkable qualities of style and artistic conception were accompanied by a wilful disregard of the proprieties. Before long his unusual command of style, which was partly natural, partly founded on a wide and accurate study of the French writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, recommended him to newspaper work, at which he toiled manfully for the remainder of his life. There was hardly a department of belles lettres which he did not attempt. He travelled in Algeria, in Russia, in Turkey, in Spain, in Italy, in England, and wrote accounts of his travels, which are among the most brilliant ever printed. He was an assiduous critic of art, of the drama and of literature, and the only charge which has ever been brought against his work in this kind is that it is usually too lenient – that his fine appreciation of even the smallest beauties has made him overlook gross defects. His work in prose fiction was incessant, in poetry more intermittent, and all the more perfect. When the Empire established itself, Gautier, who had no political sympathies, but was, in an undecided sort of way, a conservative from the æsthetic point of view, accepted it. But he gave it no active support, beyond continuing to contribute to the Moniteur, and received from it no patronage of any kind. Nor did he sacrifice the least iota of principle, insisting, in the very face of Les Châtiments, on having his praise of Victor Hugo inserted in the official journal on pain of his instant resignation. He led a pleasant but laborious life in one of the suburbs of Paris, with a household of sisters, daughters, and cats, to all of whom he was deeply attached. Here he lived through the Prussian siege. On the restoration of order he manfully grappled with his journalist work again, all hopes of lucrative appointments having gone with the Empire. But his health had been broken for some time, and he died in 1872. The works by which Gautier will be remembered are, in miscellaneous prose, a remarkable series of studies on curious figures, chiefly of the seventeenth century, called Les Grotesques, and a companion series on the partakers in the movement of 1830, besides his descriptive books. In novel writing there must be mentioned an unsurpassed collection of short tales (the best of which is La Morte Amoureuse); Le Roman de la Momie, a clever tour de force reviving ancient Egyptian life; and, lastly, Le Capitaine Fracasse, a novel in the manner of Dumas, but fashioned in his own inimitable style. In verse, he wrote, besides work already mentioned, the Comédie de la Mort, some miscellaneous poems of later date, and, finally, the Émaux et Camées. In prose he is, as has been said, the greatest recent master of the ornate style of French, as Mérimée is the greatest master of the simple style. His mastery over mere language is accompanied by a very fine sense of the total form of his tales, so that the already-mentioned Morte Amoureuse is one of the unsurpassable things of literature. In general writing he has a singular faculty of embalming the most trivial details in the amber of his style, so that his articles can be read again and again for the mere beauty of them. As a poet he is specially noteworthy for the same command of form joined to the same exquisite perfection of language. In Émaux et Camées especially it is almost impossible to find a flaw; language, metre, arrangement, are all complete and perfect, and this formal completeness is further informed by abundant poetic suggestion. The chief fault, if it be a fault, which can be found with Gautier is, that he set himself too deliberately against the tendencies of his age, and excluded too rigidly everything but purely æsthetic subjects of interest from his contemplation, and from the range of his literary energy.

Alfred de Musset.

The most happily-gifted, save one, of the great men of 1830, the weakest beyond comparison in will, in temperament, in faculty of improving his natural gifts, has yet to be mentioned. Alfred de Musset was born at Paris in 1810. His father held a government place of some value; his elder brother, M. Paul de Musset, was himself a man of letters, and at the same time deeply attached to his younger brother; and the family, though after the death of the father their means were not great, constantly supplied Alfred with a home. He was, fortunately or unfortunately, thrown, when quite a boy, into the society of Victor Hugo, the cénacle or inner clique of the Romantic movement. When only nineteen Musset published a volume of poetry, which showed in him a poetic talent inferior only to Hugo's own, and, indeed, not so much inferior as different. These Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie were quickly followed up by a volume entitled Un Spectacle dans un Fauteuil, and Musset became famous. Unfortunately for him, he became intimate with George Sand, and the result was a journey to Italy, from which he returned equally broken in health and in heart. His temperament was of almost ultra-poetic excitability, and he had a positively morbid incapacity for undertaking any useful employment, whether it was in itself congenial or no. Thus he refused a well-paid and agreeable position in the French embassy at Madrid; and though he had written admirable prose tales for his own pleasure, he was either unwilling or unable to write them under a regular commission. As he grew older he unfortunately became addicted to the constant and excessive use of stimulants. He was elected to the Academy in 1852, but produced little of value thereafter, and died in 1857. Alfred de Musset's work, notwithstanding his comparatively short life and his want of regular energy, is not inconsiderable in amount, and in quality is of the highest merit and interest. His poems, its most important item, are deficient in strictly formal merit. He is a very careless versifier and rhymer, and his choice of language is far from exquisite. He has, however, a wonderful note of genuine passion, somewhat of the Byronic kind, but quite independent in species, and entirely free from the falsetto which spoils so much of Byron's work. Besides this his lyrics are, in what may be called 'song-quality,' scarcely to be surpassed. Les Nuits, a series of meditative poems in the form of dialogues between the poet and his muse on nights in the month of May, August, October, and December; Rolla, an extravagant but powerful tale of the maladie du siècle; the addresses to Lamartine and to Malibran, and a few more poems, yield to no work of our time in genuine, original, and passionate music. Next to his poems in subject, though not in merit, may be ranked the prose Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle. His prose tales, Emmeline, Frédéric et Bernerette, etc., are of great merit, but inferior relatively to his poems, and to his remarkable dramas. These latter are among the most original work of the century. It was some time before they commended themselves to audiences in France, but they have long won their true position. They are of very various kinds. Some, and perhaps the happiest, are of the class called, in French, proverbes, dramatic illustrations, that is to say, of some common saying, Il ne faut jurer de rien: Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée, etc. The grace and delicacy of these, the ingenuity with which the story is adapted to the moral, the abundant wit (for wit is one of Musset's most prominent characteristics) which illustrates and pervades them, make them unique in literature. Others, such as Les Caprices de Marianne, Le Chandelier, are regular comedies, admitting, as against the classical tradition, that a comedy may end ill; and others, as Lorenzaccio, nearly attain to the dignity of the historic play. The dramatic instinct in Musset was very strong, and may, perhaps, be said to have exceeded in volume, originality, and variety, if not in intensity, the purely poetical. Altogether, Musset is the most remarkable instance in French literature, and one of the most remarkable in the literature of Europe, of merely natural genius, hardly at all developed by study, and not assisted in the least by critical power and a strong will. What, perhaps, distinguished him most is the singular conjunction of the most fervid passion and the most touching lyrical 'cry' with the finest wit, and with unusual dramatic ability.

Influence of the Romantic Leaders.

These eight sum up whatever is greatest and most influential in the generation of 1830. Victor Hugo gave direction and leading to the movement, identified it with his own masterly and commanding genius, furnished it, at brief intervals, with consummate examples. Sainte-Beuve supplied it with the necessary basis of an immense comparative erudition, by which he was enabled to disengage and to exhibit to those who run the true principles of literary criticism, and to point the younger generation to the sources of a richer vocabulary, a more flexible and highly-coloured style, a more cosmopolitan appreciation. Alexandre Dumas, with less strictly literary virtue than any other of the group, occupied the important vantage grounds of the theatre and the lending library in the Romantic interest. Balzac, equalling the others in the range of his field, added the special example of a minute psychological analysis, and of the most untiring labour. George Sand taught the secret of utilising to the utmost the passing currents of personal and popular sentiment and thought. Mérimée, the master least followed, supplied, in the first place, the necessary warning against a too enthusiastic following of school models; and, in the second, himself held up a model of prose style of severity and exactness equal to the finest examples of the classical school, yet possessing to the full the romantic merits of versatile adaptability, of glowing colour, of direct and fearless phrase. Gautier exhibited, on the one hand, a model of absolute perfection in formal poetry, the workmanship of a gem or a Greek vase; on the other, the model of a prose style so flexible as to serve the most ordinary purposes, so richly equipped as to be equal to any emergency, and yet, in its most elaborate condition, worthy to rank with his own verse. Lastly, again as an outsider (a position which he shares in the group with Mérimée, though in very different fashion), Musset brought the most natural and unaffected tears and laughter by turns, to correct the too scholastic and literary character of the movement, and to show how the most perfectly artistic effect could be produced with the least apparatus of formal study or preparation.

Under the influence partly of these men, and directly exercised by them, partly of the general movement of which they were the leaders and exponents, the literature of France has developed itself for the rest of the century. It remains to give a brief sketch of its principal ornaments during that time. Many names, whose work is intrinsically of all but the highest interest and merit, will have to be rapidly dispatched, but their chief achievements and their significance in the general march can at least be indicated.

Minor Poets of 1830.

At the head of the poets of this minor band has to be mentioned Millevoye, who might, perhaps with equal or greater appropriateness, have found a place in the preceding book. He is chiefly remarkable as the author of one charming piece of sentimental verse, La Chute des Feuilles; and as the occasion of an immortal criticism of Sainte-Beuve's, 'Il se trouve dans les trois quarts des hommes un poète qui meurt jeune tandis que l'homme survit.' The peculiarity of Millevoye and his happiness was that he did not survive the death of the poet in him, but died at the age of thirty-four. Except the piece just mentioned, he wrote little of value, and his total work is not large. But he may be described as a simpler, a somewhat less harmonious, but a less tautologous Lamartine, to whom the gods were kind in allowing him to die young. A curious contrast to Millevoye is furnished by his contemporary, Ulric Guttinguer. Guttinguer was born in 1785, and, like Nodier, he joined himself frankly to the Romantic movement, and was looked up to as a senior by its more active promoters. Like Millevoye, he has to rest his fame almost entirely on one piece, the verses beginning, 'Ils ont dit: l'amour passe et sa flamme est rapide;' but, unlike him, he lived to a great age, and was a tolerably fertile producer. By the side of these two poets ranks Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, who shares, with Louise Labé and Marie de France, the first rank among the poetesses of her country. Madame Desbordes-Valmore was born in 1787, and died in 1859. Her first volume of poems was published in 1819, and, as in all the verse of this time, the note of sentiment dominates. She continued to publish volumes at intervals until 1843, and another was added after her death. Great sweetness and pathos, with a total absence of affectation, distinguish her work. Perhaps her best piece is the charming song, in a kind of irregular rondeau form, S'il avait su. Jean Polonius, whose real name was Labenski, was a Russian, who contributed frequently to the Annales Romantiques, and subsequently published two volumes of French poetry. Emile and Antoni Deschamps were the translators of the Romantic movement. Antoni accomplished a complete translation of Dante, Emile translated from English, German, and Italian poets indifferently. They also published original poems together, and separately. Madame Tastu was also a translator, or rather a paraphraser, and an author of original poems of a sentimental kind. Lastly, Jean Reboul, a native of Nîmes, and born in a humble situation, deserves a place among these.

Three poets deserving of all but the first rank, and belonging to the generation of 1830 itself, require each a somewhat longer notice.

Alfred de Vigny.

Alfred de Vigny was born at Loches, on the 27th of March, 1799. He was a man of rank, and his marriage in 1826 with an Englishwoman of wealth gave him independence. He left the army, in which he had served for some years, in 1828, and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1864, in literary ease. He had been for some time a member of the Academy. His poetical career was peculiar. Between 1821 and 1829 he produced a small number of poems of the most exquisite finish, which at once attained the popularity they deserved, and were repeatedly reprinted. But for thirty-five years he published hardly anything else in verse, his Poèmes Philosophiques not appearing (at least as a volume) until after his death. Yet he was by no means idle. He had written and published in 1826 the prose romance of Cinq Mars, and he followed this up, though at considerable intervals, with others, as well as with dramas, of which Chatterton is the best and best known. He also translated Othello and The Merchant of Venice. Alfred de Vigny may perhaps be best described as a link between André Chénier and the Romantic poets. He is not much of a lyrist, his best and most famous poems (Moïse, Eloa, Dolorida) being in Alexandrines, and the general form of his verse inclines to that of the eighteenth-century elegy, while it has much of the classical (not pseudo-classical) proportion and grace of Chénier. But his language, and in part his versification, are romantic, though quieter in style than those of most of his companions, whom it must be remembered he for the most part forestalled. In Moïse much of what has been called Victor Hugo's 'science of names' is anticipated, as well as his large manner of landscape and declamation. Eloa suggests rather Lamartine, but a Lamartine with his weakness replaced by strength, while Dolorida has a strong flavour of Musset. The remarkable thing is that in each case the peculiarities of the poet to whom Vigny has been compared were not fully developed until after he wrote, and that therefore he has the merit of originality. It is probable, however, that, exquisite as his poetical power was, it lacked range, and that he, having the rare faculty of discerning this, designedly limited his production. The best of the posthumous poems already mentioned are fully worthy of his earlier ones, but they display no new faculty.

Auguste Barbier.

If Alfred de Vigny is a poet of few books, Auguste Barbier is a poet of one. Born in 1805, Barbier never formed part of the Romantic circle, properly so called, but he shared to the full its inspiring influence. He began by an historical novel of no great merit, but the revolution of 1830 served as the occasion of his Iambes, a series of extraordinarily brilliant and vigorous satires, both political and social. The most famous of all these is La Curée, a description of the ignoble scramble for place and profit under the new Orleanist government. No satirical work in modern days has had greater success, and few have deserved it more; the weight and polish of the verse being altogether admirable. Satire is, however, a vein which it is very difficult to work for any length of time with any novelty, as may be seen sufficiently from the fact that the works of all the best satirists, ancient and modern, are contained in a very small compass. Barbier endeavoured to secure the necessary variety of subjects by going to Italy in Il Pianto, and to England in Lazare, but without success, though both contain many examples of the nervous and splendid verse in which he excels. During the last forty years of his life he wrote much, and he was elected to the Academy in 1869, but Les Iambes will remain his title to fame.

Gérard de Nerval.

A name far less generally known, but deserving of being known very well indeed, is that of Gérard de Nerval, or, as his right appellation was, Gérard Labrunie. He was born in 1805, and was one of the most distinguished pupils of the celebrated Lycée Charlemagne, where he made the acquaintance of Théophile Gautier. Gérard (as he is most generally called) was a man of delicate and far-ranging genius, afflicted with the peculiar malady which weighs on some such men, and which may perhaps be described as an infirmity of will. He was not idle, and there was no reason why he should not be prosperous. At an early age he translated Faust, to the admiration of Goethe. His Travels in the East were widely read, and every newspaper in Paris was glad of his co-operation; yet he was frequently in distress, and died in a horrible and mysterious manner, either by his own hand or murdered by night prowlers. He has been more than once compared to Poe, whom, however, he excelled both in amiability of temperament and in literary knowledge. But the two have been rightly selected by an excellent judge as being, in company with a living English poet, the chief masters of the poetry which 'lies on the further side between verse and music.' Most of Gérard's work is in prose, taking the form of fantastic but exquisite short tales entitled Les Filles de Feu, La Bohême Galante, etc. His verse, at least the characteristic part of it, is not bulky; it consists partly of folksongs slightly modernised, partly of sonnets, partly of miscellaneous poems. But, if the expression 'prose poetry' be ever allowable, which has been doubted, it is seldom more applicable than to much of Gérard de Nerval's work, both in his description of his travels and in avowed fiction.

Some minor names remain to be mentioned. Méry, one of the most fertile authors of the century, was a writer of verse as well as of prose, and displayed much the same talent of brilliant improvisation in each capacity. Auguste Brizeux, a Breton by birth, made himself remarkable by idyllic poetry (Marie, La Fleur d'Or) chiefly dealing with the scenery and figures of his native province. Amédée Pommier is a fertile and not inelegant verse writer, of no very marked characteristics. Charles Dovalle, who was shot in one of the miserable duels between journalists so common in France, at the age of twenty-two, would probably have done remarkable work had he lived. Hégésippe Moreau, to whom a life but very little longer was vouchsafed, devoted himself partly to bacchanalian and satirical work, for which he had not the slightest genius, but produced also some poems of country life, which rank among the sweetest and most natural of the century. Much of his work is little more than a corrupt following of Béranger. In the same way the imitation of Lamartine was not fortunate for Victor de Laprade (Psyché, Les Symphonies, Les Voix de Silence). This imitation is not so much in subject (for M. de Laprade was a philosopher rather than a sentimentalist) as in manner and versification. His verse is also much more strongly impregnated than Lamartine's with classical culture. With due allowance for difference of dates and countries, there is a considerable resemblance between Laprade and Southey. Both had the same accomplishment of style, the same unquestioning submission to the dogmas of Christianity, the same width of literary information. It is unfortunate for France that Laprade was somewhat deficient in humour, a rare growth on her soil at all times.

Curiosités Romantiques.

Pétrus Borel.

Louis Bertrand.

All these names are more or less widely known, but there is a class of 'oubliés et dédaignés,' as one of their most faithful biographers has called them, who belong to the movement of 1830, and whose numbers are probably, while their merit is certainly, greater than is the case at any other literary epoch. Few of them can be mentioned here, but those few are worthy of mention, and it may perhaps be said that the native vigour of most of them, though warped and distorted for the most part by oddities of temperament or the unkindness of fortune, equals, if it does not surpass, that of many of their more fortunate brethren. The first of these is Pétrus Borel, one of the strangest figures in the history of literature. Very little is known of his life, which was spent partly at Paris and partly in Algeria. He was perhaps the most extravagant of all the Romantics, surnaming himself 'Le Lycanthrope,' and identifying himself with the eccentricities of the Bousingots, a clique of political literary men who for a short time made themselves conspicuous after 1830. Borel wrote partly in verse and partly in prose. His most considerable exploit in the former was a strange preface in verse to his novel of Madame Putiphar; his best work in prose, a series of wild but powerful stories entitled Champavert. His talent altogether lacked measure and criticism, but it is undeniable. Auguste Fontaney was born in 1803 and died in 1837, having, like many of the literary men of his day, served for a short time in diplomacy. He was a frequent contributor to the early Romantic periodicals, and somewhat later to the Revue des Deux-Mondes. His work is very unequal, but at its best it is saturated with the true spirit of poetry. Félix Arvers, like our own Blanco White, has obtained his place in literary history by a single sonnet, one of the most beautiful ever written. Auguste de Chatillon was both poet and painter; his chief title to remembrance in the former capacity being a volume of cheerful verse entitled A l'Auberge de la Grand' Pinte. Napoléon Peyrat, who, after the fashion of those times (in which Auguste Maquet, a fertile novelist, and a journalist, and a collaborateur of Alexandre Dumas, called himself Augustus Mackeat, and Théophile Dondey anagrammatised his surname into O'Neddy), dubbed himself Napol le Pyrénéen, survives, and justly, in virtue of a single short poem on Roland, possessed of extraordinary verve and spirit. Last of all has to be mentioned Louis Bertrand, a poet possessed of the rarest faculty, but unfortunately doomed to misfortune and premature death. Born at Ceva in Piedmont, in 1807, and brought up at Dijon, he came to Paris, found there but scanty encouragement, and died in a hospital in 1841. His only work of any importance, Gaspard de la Nuit, a series of prose ballads arranged in verses something like those of the English translation of the Bible, and testifying to the most delicate sense of rhythm, and the most exquisite power of poetical suggestion, did not appear until after his death. He and Borel perhaps only of the names contained in this paragraph represent individual and solid talent: the others are chiefly noteworthy as instances of the extraordinary stimulating force of the time on minds which in other days would probably have remained indocile to poetry, or at least unproductive of it.