Category: Literature - Other

Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

It is my intention in the present work to trace the outlines of a psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century by means of the study of certain main groups and movements in European literature. The stormy year 1848, a historical turning-point, and hence a break, is t...

Chapters

5. Part 5

[2] Les Natchez. Chateaubriand, _Oeuvres complètes_, vol. v. pp. 353-463. In his _Mémoires_ the author has, in expressing his own sentiments, unconsciously repeated one of these...

11. Part 11

Here fresh persecutions of every description awaited her. The Prefect of Geneva, on the strength of the first order he received, gave her two sons to understand that they also w...

8. Part 8

Constant prefers his accusation in a story which could hardly be less pretentious. It contains but two characters, no scenery, and there is not a single fortuitous incident in t...

2. Part 2

The great constraint of young Chateaubriand's upbringing induced in him a wild longing to be free and his own master, while the perpetual surveillance under which he suffered cr...

13. Part 13

These remarks apply more particularly to Oswald's heroic behaviour on the occasion of the fire at Ancona, where he saves the entire town under the most terrible circumstances. H...

4. Part 4

So volcanic and pretentious a nature was, naturally, out of place in the land that had given it birth. It is in vain that Chateaubriand attempts to conform in his modes of expre...

9. Part 9

Constant himself thus expresses the moral of the book: "The strongest passion cannot survive the struggle with the established order of things. Society is too powerful. It makes...

6. Part 6

Once, many years ago, in an essay on the tragedy of fate, I put similar words into the mouth of a suicide: "He who groans under the burden of existence may reasonably turn and a...

14. Part 14

The authoress tracks the prejudice which explains Oswald's conduct to its source, which she finds to be the English conception of home. Oswald's principal difficulty in coming t...

18. Part 18

Barante's standpoint is a suggestive, and was in those days an uncommon one. He hears it constantly asserted that the authors of the eighteenth century were responsible for the...

7. Part 7

"The more one thinks it over, the less is one able to imagine any possible good reason for the existence of this foolish thing we call the world. I understand neither the intent...

3. Part 3

_La Nouvelle Héloïse_ appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later, in another country and in very different environments, a youthful genius, who possessed little in common with Rouss...

15. Part 15

When the Catholic faith disappears, as it is doing to-day in Italy, from the Catholic Church, when Inquisition and fanaticism become a legend, when the ugly animal in the snail-...

16. Part 16

When the Germans of those days desired to give a tangible example of the French conception of the antique, they pointed to the portraits of Louis XIV., in which he is represente...

1. Part 1

It is my intention in the present work to trace the outlines of a psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century by means of the study of certain main groups and movemen...

10. Part 10

The plot develops; soon it becomes impossible any longer to maintain the unnatural union, to endure the unnatural misery. Henri de Lebensei writes the letter advising a divorce,...

12. Part 12

Somewhat later in the nineteenth century each of the three principal countries of Europe sent its greatest author into exile; England sent Byron; Germany, Heinrich Heine; and Fr...

17. Part 17

It was something popular that was wanted. The seed was sown of the same popular movement which was started in Denmark by Grundtvig, after he, like so many others, had been power...

19. Part 19

But under the title "Emigrant Literature," I have gathered together and drawn attention to the more healthy literary productions, in which the reaction has not as yet become sub...