A History of French Literature

The tragedy of Torquemada, strange in conception, wonderful—and wonderfully unequal—in imaginative power, was an inspiration of Hugo's period of exile, wrought into form in his latest years. The dramas of the earlier period, opening with an historical play too enormous for the stage, closed in 1843 with Les Burgraves, which is an epic in dialogue. Aspiring to revolutionary freedom, the romantic drama disdained the bounds of art; epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy met and mingled, with a result too often chaotic. The desired harmony of contraries was not attained. Past ages were to be revived upon the stage. The historic evocation possessed too often neither historic nor human truth; it consisted in "local colour," and local colour meant a picturesque display of theatrical bric-à-brac. Yet a drama requires some centre of unity. Failing of unity in coherent action and well-studied character, can a centre be provided by some philosophical or pseudo-philosophical idea? Victor Hugo, wealthy in imagery, was not wealthy in original ideas; in grandiose prefaces he attempted to exhibit his art as the embodiment of certain abstract conceptions. A great poet is not necessarily a philosophical poet. Hugo's interpretations of his own art are only evidence of the fact that a writer's vanity can practise on his credulity.

Among the romantic poets the thinker was Vigny. But it is not by its philosophical symbolism that his Chatterton lives; it is by virtue of its comparative strength of construction, by what is sincere in its passion, what is genuine in its pathos, and by the character of its heroine, Kitty Bell. In the instincts of a dramaturgist both Vigny and Hugo fell far short of ALEXANDRE DUMAS (1803-70). Before the battle of Hernani he had unfolded the romantic banner in his Henri III. et sa Cour (1829); it dazzled by its theatrical inventions, its striking situations, its ever-changing display of the stage properties of historical romance. His Antony, of two years later, parent of a numerous progeny, is a domestic tragedy of modern life, exhaling Byronic passion, misanthropy, crime, with a bastard, a seducer, a murderer for its hero, and for its ornaments all those atrocities which fascinate a crowd whose nerves can bear to be agreeably shattered. Something of abounding vitality, of tingling energy, of impetuosity, of effrontery, secured a career for Antony, the Tour de Nesle, and his other plays. The trade in horrors lost its gallant freebooting airs and grew industriously commercial in the hands of Frédéric Soulié. When in 1843—the year of Hugo's unsuccessful Les Burgraves—a pseudo-classical tragedy, the Lucrèce of Ponsard, was presented on the stage, the enthusiasm was great; youth and romance, if they had not vanished, were less militant than in the days of Hernani; it seemed as if good sense had returned to the theatre.33

Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843) is remembered in lyric poetry by his patriotic odes, Les Messéniennes, suggested by the military disasters of France. His dramatic work is noteworthy, less for the writer's talent than as indicating the influence of the romantic movement in checking the development of classical art. Had he been free to follow his natural tendencies, Delavigne would have remained a creditable disciple of Racine; he yielded to the stream, and timidly approached the romantic leaders in historical tragedy. Once in comedy he achieved success; L'École des Vieillards has the originality of presenting an old husband who is generous in heart, and a young wife who is good-natured amid her frivolity. Comedy during the second quarter of the century had a busy ephemeral life. The name of Eugène Scribe, an incessant improvisator during forty years, from 1811 onwards, in comedy, vaudeville, and lyric drama, seems to recall that of the seventeenth-century Hardy. His art was not all commerce; he knew and he loved the stage; a philistine writing for philistines, Scribe cared little for truth of character, for beauty of form; the theatrical devices became for him ends in themselves; of these he was as ingenious a master as is the juggler in another art when he tosses his bewildering balls, or smiles at the triumph of his inexplicable surprises.

CHAPTER IV

THE NOVEL

I

The novel in the nineteenth century has yielded itself to every tendency of the age; it has endeavoured to revive the past, to paint the present, to embody a social or political doctrine, to express private and personal sentiment, to analyse the processes of the heart, to idealise life in the magic mirror of the imagination. The literature of prose fiction produced by writers who felt the influence of the romantic movement tended on the one hand towards lyrism, the passionate utterance of individual emotion—George Sand's early tales are conspicuous examples; on the other hand it turned to history, seeking to effect a living and coloured evocation of former ages. The most impressive of these evocations was assuredly Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. It was not the earliest; Vigny's Cinq-Mars preceded Notre-Dame by five years. The writer had laboriously mastered those details which help to make up the romantic mise en scène; but he sought less to interpret historical truth by the imagination than to employ the material of history as a vehicle for what he conceived to be ideal truth. In Mérimée's Chronique de Charles IX. (1829), which also preceded Hugo's romance, the historical, or, if not this, the archæological spirit is present; it skilfully sets a tale of the imagination in a framework of history.

Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his imagination as a poet; they are lyrical, dramatic, epic; as a reconstitution of history their value is little or is none. The historical novel fell into the hands of Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the animation, the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible invention of Les Trois Mousquetaires and its high-spirited fellows. There were times when no company was so inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Let the critics assure us that Dumas' history is untrue, his characters superficial, his action incredible; we admit it, and we are caught again by the flash of life, the fanfaronade of adventure. We throw Eugène Sue to the critics that we may save Alexandre Dumas. But Dumas' brain worked faster than his hand—or any human hand—could obey its orders; the mine of his inventive faculty needed a commercial company and an army of diggers for its exploitation. He constituted himself the managing director of this company; twelve hundred volumes are said to have been the output of the chief and his subordinates; the work ceased to be literature, and became mere commerce. The money that Dumas accumulated he recklessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his genius decayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous proportions. Protected by his son, he died a poor man amid the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war.

II

HENRI BEYLE, who wrote under the pseudonym of Stendhal, not popular among his contemporaries, though winning the admiration of Mérimée and the praise of Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about 1880. If to be studied and admired is to be understood, the prediction has been fulfilled. Taine pronounced him the greatest psychologist of the century; M. Zola, doing violence to facts, claimed him as a literary ancestor; M. Bourget discovered in him the author of a nineteenth-century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters. During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride in isolation. Born at Grenoble in 1783, he had learnt, during an unhappy childhood, to conceal his natural sensibility; in later years this reserve was pushed to affectation. He served under Napoleon with coolness and energy; he hated the Restoration, and, a lover of Italian manners and Italian music, he chose Milan for his place of abode. The eighteenth-century materialists were the masters of his intellect; "the only excuse for God," he declared, "is that he does not exist"; in man he saw a being whose end is pleasure, whose law is egoism, and who affords a curious field for studying the dynamics of the passions. He honoured Napoleon as an incarnation of force, the greatest of the condottieri. He loved the Italian character because the passions in Italy manifest themselves with the sudden outbreaks of nature. He indulged his own passions as a refuge from ennui, and turned the scrutiny of his intelligence upon every operation of his heart. Fearing to be duped, he became the dupe of his own philosophy. He aided the romantic movement by the paradox that all the true classical writers were romantic in their own day—they sought to please their time; the pseudo-classical writers attempt to maintain a lifeless tradition. But he had little in common with the romantic school, except a love for Shakespeare, a certain feeling for local colour, and an interest in the study of passion; the effusion and exaltation of romance repelled him; he laboured to be "dry," and often succeeded to perfection.

His analytical study De l'Amour, resting on a sensual basis, has all the depth and penetration which is possible to a shallow philosophy. His notes on travel and art anticipate in an informal way the method of criticism which became a system in the hands of Taine; in a line, in a phrase, he resolves the artist into the resultant of environing forces. His novels are studies in the mechanics of the passions and the will. Human energy, which had a happy outlet in the Napoleonic wars, must seek a new career in Restoration days. Julien Sorel, the low-born hero of Le Rouge et le Noir, finding the red coat impossible, must don the priestly black as a cloak for his ambition. Hypocrite, seducer, and assassin, he ends his career under the knife of the guillotine. La Chartreuse de Parme exhibits the manners, characters, intrigues of nineteenth-century Italy, with a remarkable episode which gives a soldier's experiences of the field of Waterloo. In the artist's plastic power Beyle was wholly wanting; a collection of ingenious observations in psychology may be of rare value, but it does not constitute a work of art. His writings are a whetstone for the intelligence, but we must bring intelligence to its use, else it will grind down or break the blade. In 1842 he died, desiring to perpetuate his expatriation by the epitaph which names him Arrigo Beyle Milanese.

III

Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is tempted to affix to the novels of George Sand; but from her early lyrical manner she advanced to perfect idyllic narrative; and while she idealised, she observed, incorporating in her best work the results of a patient and faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied to whatever she wrote; offspring of her idealism or her realism, it is always in a true sense poetic.

LUCILE-AURORE DUPIN, a descendant of Marshal Saxe, was born in Paris in 1804, the daughter of Lieutenant Dupin and a mother of humble origin—a child at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Her early years were passed in Berri, at the country-house of her grandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in temperament, she had a large heart and an ardent imagination. The woods, the flowers, the pastoral heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, the little peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm, their processes of life, their store of old tales and rural superstitions made up her earliest education. Already endless stories shaped themselves in her brain. At thirteen she was sent to be educated in a Paris convent; from the boisterous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank of a sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to heights of religious exaltation, not to be forgotten when afterwards she wrote Spiridion. The country cooled her devout ardour; she read widely, poets, historians, philosophers, without method and with boundless delight; the Génie du Christianisme replaced the Imitation; Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand, and romance in her heart put on the form of melancholy. At eighteen the passive Aurore was married to M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of those qualities of heart and brain which make wedded union a happiness. Two children were born; and having obtained her freedom and a scanty allowance, Madame Dudevant in 1831, in possession of her son and daughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in the capital.

Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar-cases and snuff-boxes; happily her hopes received small encouragement. Perhaps she could succeed in journalism under her friend Delatouche; she proved wholly wanting in cleverness; her imagination had wings; it could not hop on the perch; before she had begun the beginning of an article the column must end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau, she attempted a novel—Rose et Blanche. "Sand" and Sandeau were fraternal names; a countryman of Berri was traditionally George. Henceforth the young Bohemian, who traversed the quais and streets in masculine garb, should be GEORGE SAND.

To write novels was to her only a process of nature; she seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot, and only the slightest acquaintance with her characters; until five in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day and the next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written itself in full, and another was unfolding. Not that she composed mechanically; her stories were not manufactured; they grew—grew with facility and in free abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, her theme was the romance of love. In Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, Jacques, she vindicated the supposed rights of passion. These novels are lyrical cries of a heart that had been wounded; protests against the crime of loveless marriage, against the tyranny of man, the servitude of woman; pleas for the individualism of the soul—superficial in thought, ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in style, yet rising to passages of rare poetic beauty, and often admirable in descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand had translated her private experiences into romance; yet she, the spectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund of sanity which underlay the agitations of her genius, while she lent herself to her creations, plied her pen with a steady hand from day to day. Unwise and blameful in conduct she might be for a season; she wronged her own life, and helped to ruin the life of Musset, who had neither her discretion nor her years; but when the inevitable rupture came she could return to her better self.

Through André, Simon, Mauprat—the last a tale of love subduing and purifying the savage instincts in man—her art advanced in sureness and in strength. Singularly accessible to external influences, singularly receptive of ideas, the full significance and relations of which she failed to comprehend, she felt the force of intelligences stronger than her own—of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin, of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious sentiment, an ardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled in her mind with all the discordant formulas of socialism. From 1840 to 1848 her love and large generosity of nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopes of social reform. Her novels Consuelo, Jeanne, Le Meunier d'Angibault, Le Péché de M. Antoine, become expositions of a thesis, or are diverted from their true development to advocate a cause. The art suffers. Jeanne, so admirable in its rural heroine, wanders from nature to humanitarian symbolism; Consuelo, in which the writer studies so happily the artistic temperament, too often loses itself in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious declamation. But the gain of escape from the egoism of passion to a more disinterested, even if a doctrinaire, view of life was great. George Sand was finding her way.

Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner, she had found her way; her third manner was attained before the second had lost its attraction. La Mare au Diable belongs to the year 1846; La Petite Fadette, to the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand, ever an optimist, hailed with joy; François le Champi is but two years later. In these delightful tales she returns from humanitarian theories to the fields of Berri, to humble walks, and to the huts where poor men lie. The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new to French literature; the better soul of rural France, George Sand found deep within herself; she had read the external circumstances and incidents of country life with an eye as faithful in observation as that of any student who dignifies his collection of human documents with the style and title of realism in art; with a sense of beauty and the instincts of affection she merged herself in what she saw; her feeling for nature is realised in gracious art, and her art seems itself to be nature.

In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri to other regions of France, and interpreted aristocratic together with peasant life. Old, experienced, infinitely good and attaching, she has tales for her grandchildren, and romances—Jean de la Roche, Le Marquis de Villemer, and the rest—for her other grandchildren the public. The soul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must lean upon a stronger woman's arm, of the girl—neither child nor fully adult—she entered into with deepest and truest sympathy. The simple, austere, stoical, heroic man she admired as one above her. Her style at its best, flowing without impetuosity, full and pure without commotion, harmonious without complex involutions, can mirror beauty as faithfully and as magically as an inland river. "Calme, toujours plus calme," was a frequent utterance of her declining years. "Ne détruisez pas la verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sand died. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us intimate with a spirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous, and gaining through experience a wisdom for the season of old age.

IV

George Sand may be described as an "idealist," if we add the words "with a remarkable gift for observation." Her great contemporary HONORÉ DE BALZAC is named a realist, but he was a realist haunted or attacked by phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799 at Tours, son of an advocate turned military commissariat-agent, Honoré de Balzac, after some training in the law, resolved to write, and, if possible, not to starve. With his robust frame, his resolute will, manifest in a face coarsely powerful, his large good-nature, his large egoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might shoulder his way through the crowd to fortune and to fame. But fortune and fame were hard to come at. His tragedy Cromwell was condemned by all who saw the manuscript; his novels were published, and lie deep in their refuge under the waters of oblivion. He tried the trades of publisher, printer, type-founder, and succeeded in encumbering himself with debt. At length in 1829 Le Dernier Chouan, a half-historical tale of Brittany in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott, was received with a measure of favour.

Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with journalism, pamphleteering, and miscellaneous writing, in a Dutch painting of bourgeois life, Le Maison du Chatqui-pelote, which relates the sorrows of the draper's daughter, Augustine, drawn from her native sphere by an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to wield his pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he died, exhausted by the passion of his brain, his own life was concentrated in that of the creatures of his imagination. He had friends, and married one of the oldest of them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death. Sometimes for a little while he wandered away from his desk. More than once he made wild attempts to secure wealth by commercial enterprise or speculation. These were adventures or incidents of his existence. That existence itself is summed up in the volumes of his Human Comedy. He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence of imagination; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crude material on which to work. At six in the evening he retired to sleep; he rose at the noon of night, urged on his brain with cups of coffee, and covered page after page of manuscript, until the noon of day released him. So it went on for nearly twenty years, until the intemperance of toil had worn the strong man out.

There is something gross in Balzac's genius; he has little wit, little delicacy, no sense of measure, no fine self-criticism, no lightness of touch, small insight into the life of refined society, an imperfect sense of natural beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as the equivalent of spiritual mysteries; he is monarchical without the sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment of religion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as the accumulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake? It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power, as the means of pushing towards fame and grasping gold.

Within the gross body of his genius, however, an intense flame burnt. He had a vivid sense of life, a perception of all that can be seen and handled, an eager interest in reality, a vast passion for things, an inexhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a feeling, exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of the conflict for wealth and power, with its triumphs and defeats, its display of fierce volition, its pushing aside of the feeble, its trampling of the fallen, its grandeur, its meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the cruelties of its pathos. He flung himself on the life of society with a desperate energy of inspection, and tried to make the vast array surrender to his imagination. And across his vision of reality shot strange beams and shafts of romantic illumination—sometimes vulgar theatrical lights, sometimes gleams like those which add a new reality of wonder to the etchings of Rembrandt. What he saw with the eyes of the senses or those of the imagination he could evoke without the loss of any fragment of its life, and could transfer it to the brain of his reader as a vision from which escape is impossible.

The higher world of aristocratic refinement, the grace and natural delicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded Balzac's observation. He found it hard to imagine a lady; still harder—though he tried and half succeeded—to conceive the mystery of a young girl's mind, in which the airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bourgeois world, which he detested, and a world yet humbler were his special sphere. He studied its various elements in their environment; a street, a house, a chamber is as much to him as a human being, for it is part of the creature's shell, shaped to its uses, corresponding to its nature, limiting its action. He has created a population of persons which numbers two thousand. Where Balzac does not fail, each of these is a complete individual; in the prominent figures a controlling passion is the centre of moral life—the greed of money, the desire for distinction, the lust for power, some instinct or mania of animal affection. The individual exists in a group; power circulates from inanimate objects to the living actors of his tale; the environment is an accomplice in the action; power circulates from member to member of the group; finally, group and group enter into correspondence or conflict; and still above the turmoil is heard the groundswell of the tide of Paris.

The change from the Renés and Obermanns of melancholy romance was great. But in the government of Louis-Philippe the bourgeoisie triumphed; and Balzac hated the bourgeoisie. From 1830 to 1840 were his greatest years, which include the Peau de Chagrin, Eugénie Grandet, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Le Père Goriot, and other masterpieces. To name their titles would be to recite a Homeric catalogue. At an early date Balzac conceived the idea of connecting his tales in groups. They acquired their collective title, La Comédie Humaine, in 1842. He would exhibit human documents illustrating the whole social life of his time; "the administration, the church, the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the prolétariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the men of letters, the actors, … the shopkeepers of every degree, the criminals," should all appear in his vast tableau of society. His record should include scenes from private life, scenes from Parisian, provincial, political, military, rural life, with philosophical studies in narrative and analytic treatises on the passions. The spirit of system took hold upon Balzac; he had, in common with Victor Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with the charlatanry of pseudo-ideas; to observe, to analyse, to evoke with his imagination was not enough; he also would be among the philosophers—and Balzac's philosophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal. Outside the general scheme of the human comedy lie his unsuccessful attempts for the theatre, and the Contes Drolatiques, in which the pseudo-antique Rabelaisian manner and the affluent power do not entirely atone for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in the sixteenth than in the nineteenth century.