VI
Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry of Musset. Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the law of Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a hand that moulds and colours—that is all. A child of the South, born at Tarbes in 1811, THÉOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult's studio till the day when, his friend the poet Gérard de Nerval having summoned him to take part in the battle of Hernani, he swore by the skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter. His first volume, Poésies, appeared in 1830, and was followed in two years by Albertus, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness and horror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The Comédie de la Mort evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust, Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art and love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The Orientales was his poetic gospel; but the Orientales is precisely the volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these early poems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured and picturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far as they can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured with vivid pigments.
It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he believed, for poetry, he was forced to toil day after day, year after year, as a critic of the stage and of the art-exhibitions. He performed his task in workman-like fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressions than to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of literary criticism are his exhumations of the earlier seventeenth-century poets—Théophile, Cyrano, Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others—published in 1844, together with a study of Villon, under the title Les Grotesques, and the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on Les Progrès de la Poésie Française depuis 1830. A reader of that memoir to-day will feel, with Swift, that literary reputations are dislimned and shifted as quickly and softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays aloft.
In 1840 Gautier visited Spain; afterwards he saw Italy, Algeria, Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He travelled not as a student of life or as a romantic sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things in colour; the world was for him so much booty for the eye. Endowed with a marvellous memory, an unwearied searcher of the vocabulary, he could transfer the visual impression, without a faltering outline or a hue grown dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was in the manner of some admired painter; he looked on nature through the medium of a Zurbaran or a Watteau. The dictionary for Gautier was a collection of gems that flashed or glowed; he chose and set them with the skill and precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At Athens, in one of his latest wanderings, he stood in presence of the Parthenon, and found that he was a Greek who had strayed into the Middle Ages; on the faith of Notre-Dame de Paris he had loved the old cathedrals; "the Parthenon," he writes, "has cured me of the Gothic malady, which with me was never very severe."
Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of astonishing the bourgeois; yet if he condescended to ideas, his ideas on all subjects except art had less value than those of the philistine. Mademoiselle de Maupin has lost any pretensions it possessed to supereminent immorality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth; such purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid grossness, lies in the fact that the young author loved life and cared for beauty. In shorter tales he studiously constructs strangeness—the sense of mystery he did not in truth possess—on a basis of exactly carved and exactly placed material. His best invention is the tale of actors strolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the old days of Louis XIII., Le Capitaine Fracasse, suggested doubtless by Scarron's Roman Comique, and patiently retouched during a quarter of a century.
Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces of the Émaux et Camées. He is not without sensibility, but he will not embarrass himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emancipated himself from the egoism of the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter or a gem-engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is much. He values words as sounds, and can combine them harmoniously in his little stanzas. Life goes on around him; he is indifferent to it, caring only to fix the colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfaltering hand. When the Prussian assault was intended to the city, when Regnault gave away his life as a soldier, Gautier in the Muses' bower sat pondering his epithets and filing his phrases. Was it strength, or was it weakness? His work survives and will survive by virtue of its beauty—beauty somewhat hard and material, but such as the artist sought. In 1872 Gautier died. By directing art to what is impersonal he prepared the way for the Parnassien school, and may even be recognised as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism.
These—Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier—are the names which represent the poetry of nineteenth-century romance; four stars of varying magnitudes, and one enormous cometary apparition. There was also a via lactea, from which a well-directed glass can easily disentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a critic and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the Vie, Poésies et Pensées de Joseph Delorme; a singer of spiritual reverie, modest pleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the Consolations and the Pensées d'Août; a virtuoso always in his metrical researches; Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the Iambes, lover of Italian art and nature in Il Pianto; Auguste Brizeux, the idyllist, in his Marie, of Breton wilds and provincial works and ways; Gérard de Nerval, Hégésippe Moreau, Madame Désbordes-Valmore, and paler, lessening lights. These and others dwindle for the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms.
VII
The weaker side of the romantic school is apparent in the theatre. It put forth a magnificent programme of dramatic reform, which it was unable to carry out. The preface to Victor Hugo's Cromwell (1827) is the earliest and the most important of its manifestoes. The poetry of the world's childhood, we are told, was lyrical; that of its youth was epic; the poetry of its maturity is dramatic. The drama aims at truth before all else; it seeks to represent complete manhood, beautiful and revolting, sublime and grotesque. Whatever is found in nature should be found in art; from multiple elements an æsthetic whole is to be formed by the sovereignty of imagination; unity of time, unity of place are worthless conventions; unity of action remains, and must be maintained. The play meant to exemplify the principles of Hugo's preface is of vast dimensions, incapable of presentation on the stage; the large painting of life for which he pleaded, and which he did not attain, is of a kind more suitable to the novel than to the drama. Cromwell, which departs little from the old rules respecting time and place, is a flux and reflux of action, or of speeches in place of action, with the question of the hero's ambition for kingship as a centre; its personages are lay figures draped in the costumes of historical romance.
The genius of Hugo was pre-eminently lyrical; the movement to which he belonged was also essentially lyrical, a movement for the emancipation of the personal element in art; it is by qualities which are non-dramatic that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When, in 1830, his Hernani was presented at the Théâtre Français, a strange, long-haired, bearded, fantastically-attired brigade of young supporters engaged in a mêlée with those spectators who represented the tyranny of tradition. "Kill him! he is an Academician," was heard above the tumult. Gautier's truculent waistcoat flamed in the thickest of the fight. The enthusiasm of Gautier's party was justified by splendours of lyrism and of oratory; but Hugo's play is ill-constructed, and the characters are beings of a fantastic world. In Marion Delorme, in Le Roi s'amuse, in the prose-tragedy Lucrèce Borgia, Victor Hugo develops a favourite theme by a favourite method—the moral antithesis of some purity of passion surviving amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtue discovered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in violent contrasts. Marion is ennobled by the sacrifice of whatever remains to her of honour; the moral deformity of Lucrèce is purified by her instinct of maternal love; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful by virtue of his devotion as a father. The dramatic study of character is too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. Ruy Blas, like Marion Delorme and Hernani, has extraordinary beauties; yet the whole, with its tears and laughter, its lackey turned minister of state, its amorous queen, is an incredible phantasmagoria. Angelo is pure melodrama; Marie Tudor is the melodrama of history. Les Burgraves rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from poetry to declamation; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the reader please, symbolic; it is much that it ought not to be, much that is admirable and out of place; failing in dramatic truth, it fails with a certain sublimity. The logic of action, truth of characterisation, these in tragic creation are essentials; no heights or depths of poetry which is non-dramatic can entirely justify works which do not accept the conditions proper to their kind.
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.