A History of French Literature

V

Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical? Was it possible to produce purely objective work, reserving one's own personality, and glancing at one's audience only with an occasional look of superior irony? Such was the task essayed by PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803-70). With some points of resemblance in character to Beyle, whose ideas were influential on his mind, Mérimée possessed the plastic imagination and the craftsman's skill, in which Beyle was deficient. "He is a gentleman," said Cousin, and the words might serve for Mérimée's epitaph; a gentleman not of nature's making, or God Almighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing according to the rules. Such a gentleman must betray no sensibility, must express no sentiment, must indulge no enthusiasm, must attach himself to no faith, must be superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmity of a pose which is impressive only by its correctness; he may be cynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from emphasis; he may be ironical, if the irony is sufficiently disguised; he may mystify his fellows, if he keeps the pleasure of mystification for his private amusement. Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to be only a dilettante. He must never incur ridicule, and yet his whole attitude may be ridiculous.

Such a gentleman was Prosper Mérimée. He had the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish comédienne. His Illyrian poems, La Guzla, were the work of an imaginary Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Mérimée could smile gently at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and Charles Nodier, who had given play to a graceful fantasy, left it. He purged it of sentiment, he reduced fantasy to the law of the imagination, and produced such works as Carmen and Colomba, each one a little masterpiece of psychological truth, of temperate local colour, of faultless narrative, of pure objective art. The public must not suppose that he cares for his characters or what befell them; he is an archæologist, a savant, and only by accident a teller of tales. Mérimée had more sensibility than he would confess; it shows itself for moments in the posthumous Lettres à une Inconnue; but he has always a bearing-rein of ironical pessimism to hold his sensibility in check. The egoism of the romantic school appears in Mérimée inverted; it is the egoism not of effusion but of disdainful reserve.34

CHAPTER V

HISTORY—LITERARY CRITICISM

I

The progress of historical literature in the nineteenth century was aided by the change which had taken place in philosophical opinion; instead of a rigid system of abstract ideas, which disdained the thought of past ages as superstition, had come an eclecticism guided by spiritual beliefs. The religions of various lands and various ages were viewed with sympathetic interest; the breach of continuity from mediæval to modern times was repaired; the revolutionary spirit of individualism gave way before a broader concern for society; the temper in politics grew more cautious and less dogmatic; the great events of recent years engendered historical reflection; literary art was renewed by the awakening of the romantic imagination.

The historical learning of the Empire is represented by Daunou, an explorer in French literature; by Ginguené, the literary historian of Italy; by Michaud, who devoted his best years to a History of the Crusades. In his De la Religion (1824-31) Benjamin Constant, in Restoration days, traced the progress of the religious sentiment, cleaving its way through dogma and ordinance to a free and full development. Sismondi (1773-1842), in his Histoire des Français, investigated such sources as were accessible to him, studied economic facts, and in a liberal spirit exhibited the life of the nation, and not merely the acts of monarchs or the intrigues of statesmen. His wide, though not profound, erudition comprehended Italy as well as France; the Histoire des Républiques Italiennes is the chart of a difficult labyrinth. The method of disinterested narrative, which abstains from ethical judgments, propounds no thesis, and aims at no doctrinaire conclusion, was followed by Barante in his Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne. The precept of Quintilian expresses his rule: "Scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum."

Each school of nineteenth-century thought has had its historical exponents. Liberal Catholicism is represented by Montalembert, Ozanam, De Broglie; socialism, by Louis Blanc; a patriotic Cæsarism, by Thiers; the democratic school, by Michelet and Quinet; philosophic liberalism, by Guizot, Mignet, and Tocqueville.

AUGUSTIN THIERRY (1795-1856) nobly led the way. Some pages of Chateaubriand, full of the sentiment of the past, were his first inspiration; at a later time the influence of Fauriel and the novels of Walter Scott, "the master of historical divination," confirmed him in his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the scholarship of history. For a time he acted as secretary to Saint-Simon, and under his influence proposed a scheme for a community of European peoples which should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he parted from his master, to pursue his way in independence. It seemed to him that the social condition and the revolutions of modern Europe had their origins in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the Norman Conquest of England. As he read the great collection of the original historians of France and Gaul, he grew indignant against the modern travesties named history, indignant against writers without erudition, who could not see, and writers without imagination, who could not depict. The conflict of races—Saxons and Normans in England, Gauls and Franks in his own country—remained with him as a dominant idea, but he would not lose himself in generalisations; he would involve the abstract in concrete details; he would see, and he would depict. There was much philosophy in abstaining from philosophy overmuch. The Lettres sur l'Histoire de France were followed in 1825 by the Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre, in which the art of historiography attained a perfection previously unknown. Through charter and chronicle, Thierry had reached the spirit of the past. He had prophesied upon the dry bones and to the wind, and the dry bones lived. As a liberal, he had been interested in contemporary politics. His political ardour had given him that historical perspicacity which enabled him to discover the soul behind an ancient text.

In 1826 Thierry, the martyr of his passionate studies, suffered the calamity of blindness. With the aid of his distinguished brother, of friends, and secretaries—above all, with the aid of the devoted woman who became his wife, he pursued his work. The Récits des Temps Mérovingiens and the Essai sur l'Histoire de la Formation du Tiers État were the labours of a sightless scholar. His passion for perfection was greater than ever; twenty, fifteen lines a day contented him, if his idea was rendered clear and enduring in faultless form. Paralysis made its steady advance; still he kept his intellect above his infirmities, and followed truth and beauty. On May 22, 1856, he woke his attendant at four in the morning, and dictated with laboured speech the alteration of a phrase for the revised Conquête. On the same day, "insatiable of perfection," Thierry died. He is not, either in substance, thought, or style, the greatest of modern French historians; but, more than any other, he was an initiator.

The life of FRANÇOIS GUIZOT—great and venerable name—is a portion of the history of his country. Born at Nîmes in 1787, of an honourable Protestant family, he died, with a verse of his favourite Corneille or a text of Scripture on his lips, in 1874. Austere without severity, simple in habit without rudeness, indomitable in courage, imperious in will, gravely eloquent, he had at once the liberality and the narrowness of the middle classes, which he represented when in power. A threefold task, as he conceived, lies before the historian: he must ascertain facts; he must co-ordinate these facts under laws, studying the anatomy and the physiology of society; finally, he must present the external physiognomy of the facts. Guizot was not endowed with the artist's imagination; he had no sense of life, of colour, of literary style; he was a thinker, who saw the life of the past through the medium of ideas; he does not in his pages evoke a world of animated forms, of passionate hearts, of vivid incidents; he distinguishes social forces, with a view to arrive at principles; he considers those forces in their play one upon another.

The Histoire Générale de la Civilisation en Europe and the Histoire de la Civilisation en France consist of lectures delivered from 1828 to 1830 at the Sorbonne.35 Guizot recognised that the study of institutions must be preceded by a study of the society which has given them birth. In the progress of civilisation he saw not merely the development of communities, but also that of the individual. The civilisation of Europe, he held, was most intelligibly exhibited in that of France, where, more than in other countries, intellectual and social development have moved hand in hand, where general ideas and doctrines have always accompanied great events and public revolutions. The key to the meaning of French history he found in the tendency towards national and political unity. From the tenth to the fourteenth century four great forces met in co-operation or in conflict—royalty, the feudal system, the communes, the Church. Feudalism fell; a great monarchy arose upon its ruins. The human mind asserted its spiritual independence in the Protestant reformation. The tiers état was constantly advancing in strength. The power of the monarchy, dominant in the seventeenth century, declined in the century that followed; the power of the people increased. In modern society the elements of national life are reduced to two—the government on the one hand, the people on the other; how to harmonise these elements is the problem of modern politics. As a capital example for the French bourgeoisie, Guizot, returning to an early work, made a special study of the great English revolution of the seventeenth century. In Germany, of the preceding century, the revolution was religious and not political. In France, of the succeeding century, the revolution was political and not religious. The rare good fortune of England lay in the fact that the spirit of religious faith and the spirit of political freedom ruled together, and co-operated towards a common result.

The work of FRANÇOIS MIGNET (1796-1884), eminent for its research, exactitude, clearness, ordonnance, has been censured for its historical fatalism. In reality Mignet's mind was too studious of facts to be dominated by a theory. He recognised the great forces which guide and control events; he recognised also the power and freedom of the individual will. His early Histoire de la Révolution Française is a sane and lucid arrangement of material that came to his hands in chaotic masses. His later and more important writings deal with his special province, the sixteenth century; his method, as he advanced, grew more completely objective; we discern his ideas through the lines of a well-proportioned architecture.

The analytic method of Guizot, supported by a method of patient induction, was applied by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-59) to the study of the great phenomenon of modern democracy. Limiting the area of investigation to America, which he had visited on a public mission, he investigated the political organisation, the manners and morals, the ideas, the habits of thought and feeling of the United States as influenced by the democratic equality of conditions. He wrote as a liberal in whom the spirit of individualism was active. He regarded the progress of democracy in the modern world as inevitable; he perceived the dangers—formidable for society and for individual character—which accompany that progress; he believed that by foresight and wise ordering many of the dangers could be averted. The fears and hopes of the citizen guided and sustained in Tocqueville a philosophical intelligence. Turning from America to France, he designed to disengage from the tangle of events the true historical significance of the Revolution. Only one volume, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, was accomplished. It can stand alone as a work of capital importance. In the great upheaval he saw that all was not progress; the centralisation of power under the old régime remained, and was rendered even more formidable than before; the sentiment of equality continued to advance in its inevitable career; unhappily the spirit of liberty was not always its companion, its moderator, or its guide.

ADOLPHE THIERS (1797-1877) was engaged at the same time as Mignet, his lifelong friend, upon a history of the French Revolution (1823-27). The same liberal principles were held in common by the young authors. Their methods differed widely: Mignet's orderly and compact narration was luminous through its skilful arrangement; Thiers' Histoire was copious, facile, brilliant, more just in its general conception than exact in statement, a plea for revolutionary patriotism as against the royalist reaction of the day, and not without influence in preparing the spirit of the country for the approaching Revolution of July. His Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire (1845-62) is the great achievement of Thiers' maturity; journalist, orator, minister of state, until he became the chief of stricken France in 1871 his highest claim to be remembered was this vast record of his country's glory. He had an appetite for facts; no detail—the price of bread, of soap, of candles—was a matter of indifference to him; he could not show too many things, or show them too clearly; his supreme quality was intelligence; his passion was the pride of patriotism; his foible was the vanity of military success, the zeal of a chauvinist. He was a liberal; but Napoleon summed up France, and won her battles, therefore Napoleon, the great captain, who "made war with his genius and politics with his passions," must be for ever magnified. The coup d'état of the third Napoleon owed a debt to the liberal historian who had reconstructed the Napoleonic legend. The campaigns and battle-pieces of Thiers are unsurpassed in their kind. His style in narrative is facile, abundant, animated, and so transparent that nothing seems to intervene between the object and the reader who has become a spectator; a style negligent at times, and even incorrect, adding no charm of its own to a lucid presentation of things.

JULES MICHELET, the greatest imaginative restorer of the past, the greatest historical interpreter of the soul of ancient France, was born in 1798 in Paris, an infant seemingly too frail and nervous to remain alive. His early years gave him experience, brave and pathetic, of the hardships of the poor. His father, an unsuccessful printer, often found it difficult to procure bread or fire for his household; but he resolved that his son should receive an education. The boy, of a fine and sensitive organisation, knew cold and hunger; he watched his mother toiling, and from day to day declining in health. Two sources of consolation he found—the Imitation, which told him of a Divine refuge from sorrow, and the Museum of French monuments, which made him forget all present distress in visions of the vanished centuries. Mocked and persecuted by his schoolfellows, he never lost courage, and had the joy of rewarding his parents with the cross won by his schoolboy theme. In happy country days his aunt Alexis told him legendary tales, and read to him the old chroniclers of France. Michelet's vocation was before long revealed, and its summons was irresistible.

In 1827 he published his earliest works, the Précis de l'Histoire Moderne, a modest survey of a wide field, in which genius illuminated scholarship, and a translation of the Scienza Nuova of Vico, the master who impressed him with the thought that humanity is in a constant process of creation under the influence of the Divine ideas. The Histoire Romaine and the Introduction à l'Histoire Universelle followed; the latter a little book, written with incredible ardour under the inspiration of the days of July. His friend Quinet had taught him to see in history an ever-broadening combat for freedom—in Michelet's words, "an eternal July," and the exposition of this idea was of the nature of a philosophical entrancement.

A teacher at the École Normale, appointed chief of the historical section of the National Archives in 1831, Guizot's substitute at the Sorbonne in 1833, professor of history and morals at the Collège de France in 1838, Michelet lived in and for the life of his people and of his land. The Histoire de France, begun in 1830, was completed thirty-seven years later. After the disasters of the war of 1870-71, with failing strength the author resumed his labours, endeavouring to add, as it were, an appendix on the nineteenth century.

A passionate searcher among original sources, published and unpublished, handling documents as if they were things of flesh and blood, seeing the outward forms of existence with the imaginative eye, pressing through these to the soul of each successive epoch, possessed by an immense pity for the obscure generations of human toilers, having, more than almost any other modern writer, Virgil's gift of tears, ardent in admiration, ardent in indignation, with ideas impregnated by emotions, and emotions quickened by ideas, Michelet set himself to resuscitate the buried past. It seemed to him that his eminent predecessors—Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, Thierry—had each envisaged history from some special point of view. Each had too little of the outward body or too little of the inward soul of history. Michelet dared to hope that a resurrection of the integral life of the dead centuries was possible. All or nothing was his word. It was a bold venture, but it was a venture, or rather an act, of faith. Thierry had been tyrannised by the idea of the race: the race is much, but the people does not march in the air; it has a geographical basis; it draws its nutriment from a particular soil. Michelet, at the moment of his narrative when France began to have a life distinct from Germany, enters upon a survey of its geography, in which the physiognomy and the genius of each region are studied as if each were a separate living creature, and the character of France itself is discovered in the cohesion or the unity of its various parts. Reaching the tenth and eleventh centuries, he feels the sadness of their torpor and their violence; yet humanity was living, and soon in the enthusiasm of Gothic art and the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirations of the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the mediæval period everything seems to droop and decay: no! it was then, during the Hundred Years' War, that the national consciousness was born, and patriotism was incarnated in an armed shepherdess, child of the people.

By the thirteenth year of his labours—1843—Michelet had traversed the mediæval epoch, and reached the close of the reign of Louis XI. There he paused. Seeing one day high on the tower of Reims Cathedral, below which the kings of France received their consecration, a group or garland of tortured and mutilated figures carved in stone, the thought possessed him that the soul and faith of the people should be confirmed within his own soul before he could trust himself to treat of the age of the great monarchy. He leaped at once the intervening centuries, and was at work during eight years—from 1845 to 1853—on the French Revolution. He found a hero for his revolutionary epic in the people.

The temper of 1848 was hardly the temper in which the earlier Revolution could be judiciously investigated. Michelet and Quinet had added to their democratic zeal the passions connected with an anticlerical campaign. The violence of liberalism was displayed in Des Jésuites, and Du Prêtre, de la Femme et de la Famille. When the historian returned to the sixteenth century his spirit had undergone a change: he adored the Middle Ages; but was it not the period of the domination of the Church, and how could it be other than evil? He could no longer be a mere historian; he must also be a prophet. The volumes which treat of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the wars of religion, are as brilliant as earlier volumes, but they are less balanced and less coherent. The equilibrium between Michelet's intellect and his imagination, between his ideas and his passions, was disturbed, if not destroyed.

Michelet, who had been deprived of his chair in the Collège de France, lost also his post in the Archives upon his refusal, in 1852, to swear allegiance to the Emperor. Near Nantes in his tempest-beaten home, near Genoa in a fold of the Apennines, where he watched the lizards sleep or slide, a great appeasement came upon his spirit. He had interpreted the soul of the people; he would now interpret the soul of humbler kinsfolk—the bird, the insect; he would interpret the inarticulate soul of the mountain and the sea. He studied other documents—the documents of nature—with a passion of love, read their meanings, and mingled as before his own spirit with theirs. L'Oiseau, L'Insecte, La Mer, La Montagne, are canticles in prose by a learned lover of the external world, rather than essays in science; often extravagant in style, often extreme in sentiment, and uncontrolled in imagination, but always the betrayals of genius.

Michelet's faults as an historian are great, and such as readily strike an English reader. His rash generalisations, his lyrical outbreaks, his Pindaric excitement, his verbiage assuming the place of ideas, his romantic excess, his violence in ecclesiastical affairs, his hostility to our country, his mysticism touched with sensuality, his insistence on physiological details, his quick and irregular utterance—these trouble at times his imaginative insight, and mar his profound science in documents. He died at Hyères in 1874, hoping that God would grant him reunion with his lost ones, and the joys promised to those who have sought and loved.

EDGAR QUINET (1803-1875), the friend and brother-in-arms of Michelet in his attack upon the Jesuits, born at Bourg, of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, approached the study of literature and history with that tendency to large vues d'ensemble which was natural to his mind, and which had been strengthened by discipleship to Herder. Happy in temper, sound of conscience, generous of heart, he illuminated many subjects, and was a complete master of none. A poet of lofty intentions, in his Ahasvérus (1833)—the wandering Jew, type of humanity in its endless Odyssey—in his Napoléon, his Prométhée, his vast encyclopædic allegory Merlin l'Enchanteur (1860), his poetry lacked form, and yielded itself to the rhetoric of the intellect.

In the Génie des Religions Quinet endeavoured to exhibit the religious idea as the germinative power of civilisation, giving its special character to the political and social idea. La Révolution, which is perhaps his most important work, attempts to replace the Revolutionary hero-worship, the Girondin and Jacobin legends, by a faithful interpretation of the meaning of events. The principles of modern society and the principles of the Roman Catholic Church, Quinet regarded as incapable of conciliation. In the incompetence of the leaders to perceive and apply this truth, and in the fatal logic of their violent and anarchic methods, lay, as he believed, the causes of the failure which followed the bright hopes of 1789. In 1848 Quinet was upon the barricades; the Empire drove him into exile. In his elder years, like Michelet, he found a new delight in the study of nature. La Création (1870) exhibits the science of nature and that of human history as presenting the same laws and requiring kindred methods. It closes with the prophecy of science that creation is not yet fully accomplished, and that a nobler race will enter into the heritage of our humanity.