Part 13

The principle of authority consistently applied produces such axioms as: Marriage exists for the sake of society, and the object of society is to preserve itself, or--the same thing differently put: Marriage in its traditional form is sacred, because it is indispensable to the preservation of pure morality. And in what does pure morality consist? In the preservation of marriage in its traditional form.

There is no progress possible on these lines. We go round in a ring without moving from the spot.

But if, on the contrary, the opponents of the principle of authority insist: The object of society is the greatest happiness of its members, and the object of marriage the welfare of the family, we are left free to find out what this welfare and this greatest happiness are. And if they further say: "Moral purity consists in that species of relation between beings of opposite sexes which conduces most to their development and mutual happiness, taking the farthest off as well as the immediate results of the union into consideration," this definition, supposing it to be accepted or put to the test of experiment, leaves such freedom for thorough and scientific investigation into all that concerns the health of the body, of the soul, and of society as has never before been known.

Order and refinement! These were the watchwords of the champions of the principle of authority. By all means let us have order and refinement--but what men have had to learn, and what they will learn even though it should take them centuries, is that order and refinement are the work of science or natural development, and never are or can be the work of arbitrary legislation, or of a criminal code and a public opinion founded upon tradition and authority. There is no real ordering, no real order of society but that which is the result of scientific insight into the nature of man. All societies--the society called the family as well as that called the state--exist, not for their own sake, but for the sake of men, for the purpose of enabling each individual composing them to attain certain great aims and great benefits. Such aims and benefits are personal development, moral purity, the education of the young, the protection of women.

If these objects can only be attained in the manner indicated by the principle of authority, then of course liberty, in so many other domains regarded as a blessing, is in these domains to be regarded as a curse, and is to be attacked and exterminated. But if they can _possibly_ be attained in other ways, possibly be attained _better_ in other ways (and such a possibility is difficult to disprove), if, finally, the measure of attainment arrived at in the traditional manner is hardly worth taking into account, then absolutely free inquiry, without regard to human or superhuman authority, is man's bounden duty. In a century such as that in which we live the principle of authority, as the principle which prevents all free inquiry, is the worst, the most stupid, and the most degrading that can be imagined, and stands self-condemned. The man who, by deriding or forbidding free investigation into any social question whatsoever, prevents, as he undoubtedly does, the suggestion of hypotheses and the trying of practical experiments which might prove to be of value to his fellow-men, is a criminal, for whom, if there were equity and justice upon earth, no punishment would be considered too severe. It unfortunately happens that the majority of educated men are criminals of this class, so that the prospect of having them punished is very slight.

Bonald was such a criminal; but in his outward circumstances we can find no trace of the pursuit of an avenging Nemesis. He lived to the age of eighty-six, and was all his life one of the most influential and respected men of his period. He died in 1840, full of days and of honour.

[1] Louis de Viel-Castel, _Histoire de la Restauration_, iv. 487.

[2] "La société a pour parvenir à sa fin, _qui est sa conservation, des lois_". _Du Divorce_, 107.

[3] _Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l'église_, p. 35.

[4] John Stuart Mill, _Autobiography_, p. 256.

[5] See, for example, Stephen Pearl Andrews, _Love, Marriage, and Divorce_ (New York); also Émile de Girardin, _L'homme et la femme_.

VII

CHATEAUBRIAND

There was no poetry in France under the Empire. Chateaubriand was doubtless an author with great poetic gifts, but Napoleon was the one poet in the grand style. Chateaubriand who hated him, felt this. He writes (in the fourth part of his _Mémoires_): "A marvellous power of imagination inspired this cold politician; but for his muse he would not have been what he was. His intellect carried out his poetic ideas." The long succession of his wars, victories, and defeats was a great Iliad, the Russian campaign a giant tragedy, with which none written at a desk could compare.

Even in the days of the Revolution, for kindred reasons, poetry had disappeared. A few poets still wrote tragedies in the old style; only they transformed Voltaire's philosophical tragedy into political tragedy, exploiting the republics of Rome and Greece for the benefit of the new French Republic, which discovered the prototypes of its heroes in the men whom it called the sansculottes of Rome and Athens. But the interest of these plays could not compare with the interest of the great dramas of the National Assembly and the Convention. Just as in ancient days the gladiatorial combats destroyed men's appreciation of plays in which no one was really killed, now the fifth acts of tragedies seemed flat and stale in comparison with the concluding scenes in the meetings of the Convention, during which the vanquished were led off to the scaffold. The dagger of Melpomene could not, in the long run, compete with the guillotine. Who by means of a poetical work could produce an emotion at all corresponding to what the audience felt on the occasion of the impeachment, sentence, and death of the King and Queen? Who could devise stage plots to compare with Robespierre's and Danton's plots against Vergniaud and the Girondists, or the snares that were afterwards laid for Robespierre? We have evidence that this was the feeling of contemporaries. Ducis, the famous translator of Shakespeare, replies to a friend who has been urging him to write for the theatre: "Do not talk to me of tragedies! We have tragedies in every street. I have but to put my foot out at the door to step into blood up to the ankles." That there is not much exaggeration in these words is proved by a letter written by Chaumette in 1793 to the municipal authorities of Paris, in which he complains that short-sighted persons were constantly exposed to the unpleasantness of stepping into human blood.

Under Napoleon there is another circumstance to be taken into account, namely, that France had a master. When an author attempted any slight deviation from the beaten track, he was promptly checked. Take Raynouard for an example. His play, _Les États de Blois_, which had been performed at St. Cloud, was prohibited in Paris by express order of the Emperor. It was the cannon's turn to speak. The great cannon in front of the Invalides, which was constantly thundering out the intelligence of a new victory, drowned every other voice. And all the hearts full of youthful enthusiasm, all the ardent souls that at another time would have vented their ardour in poetry, all those who were most warmly attached to liberty and to the ideas of the Revolution, crowded to the colours, and endeavoured to forget their longing for liberty and poetry in the intoxication of martial glory. Intellectual life was extinguished as a sweet song sung in a room is stopped by the incessant rattling of heavy carts through the street. A couple of anecdotes may serve to illustrate the noisiness and the depression. To the question, "What do you think at this time?" Sièyes replied, "I do not think." To the question, "What have you done under the Empire for your convictions?" General Lafayette replied, "I have remained standing upright."

Two of the arts were susceptible of inspiration by the spirit of the time--the art of the painter and the art of the actor. Gérard painted the battle of Austerlitz, Gros the plague scenes at Jaffa, the battle of Aboukir, and the battle of the Pyramids. Talma, who, as he himself tells, learned for the first time one evening when he was in company with the leaders of the Girondists to understand and to represent Roman Republicans, not as they exist in the imagination of school-boys, but as men--Talma learned from Napoleon to play the parts of Cæsars and of kings. According to the well known story, Bonaparte employed Talma to instruct him in the art of assuming imperial attitudes. The real truth is the reverse of this. It was from Napoleon that Talma learned the authoritative deportment, the short, commanding tone, the imperious gestures which he then reproduced on the stage. When, in 1826, the great actor lay consumed with raging fever, he carefully examined in a mirror the traces of madness and terror on his own face, and, half mad at the time, struck himself on the forehead and cried: "Now I have it! If I ever act again, I shall do exactly this when I play the part of Charles VI." Thus passionately did this man love his art. But from his sick-bed he was not to rise again.

One branch of literature alone acquired an influence which it had not before possessed--the youngest of all the branches, which had hitherto been of no importance, but which soon became a power--the newspaper. The well-known _Journal des Débats_ was started to begin the attack upon Voltaire and to provide the prevailing ideas of the day with an organ. The French clerical press employed every possible means to attain its end. In exactly the same spirit which led it, after the Franco-Prussian war, to dub Voltaire "the miserable Prussian," it now searched his letters for passages which might convict him of treachery to his country. In one of the letters to the King of Prussia the great Frenchman's detractors discovered the offensive phrase: "Every time I write to Your Majesty I tremble as our regiments did at Rossbach;" and they hoped with the aid of quotations such as this to irritate the victor of Jena with the philosophers of the school of Voltaire. They emphasised the fact that, according to the testimony of contemporaries, the principal cause of the faintheartedness shown by the French army in the war with Frederick was the fanatic admiration of its officers for that king, a feeling which actually prevented their believing in the possibility of defeating a general who shared and favoured the convictions by which they themselves were inspired. In place of drawing an inference from this favourable to the convictions or ideas in question, the clerical party drew one unfavourable to the persons who, like Voltaire, had promulgated these ideas in France; they denounced them as traitors to their country. The following utterance of the editor of the _Journal des Débats_ gives us some notion of the general tone of that paper: "When I say the philosophy of the eighteenth century, I mean everything that is false in legislation, morals, and politics." The Neo-Catholics had another newspaper entirely in their hands, the _Mercure de France_, the most notable contributors to which were Chateaubriand and Bonald. The authors who formed the remnant of the army of the eighteenth century attempted to combat the influence of these powerful journals, but with little success.

In former days the whole energy of the contending parties had been expended in winning over the reading public, or the nation, to their respective sides; now the desire of both was to win the favour of the mighty potentate. The _Journal des Débats_ endeavoured to stir up the Emperor's wrath against "philosophy." "The philosophers" tried to make him angry with the _Journal des Débats_. The clerical party denounced the philosophers as destroyers by profession, who, as such, must inevitably hate Napoleon, the great master-builder. The philosophers accused the clericals of intending, as soon as the Emperor's building was completed, to hand over the keys of it to another.

The future showed that the philosophers were right. The adherents of the Neo-Catholic school were and remained closely attached to the old royal family. Their mode of procedure was to praise Delille because he was in disgrace, and Chateaubriand because, by resigning his appointment after the execution of the Duke of Enghien, he proved himself to be an enemy of tyranny. They drew men's attention to all the good points of the old régime under pretext of writing history.

Napoleon, who kept a keen eye upon journalistic literature, at last lost patience. A written communication has been preserved which was put into the hands of one of the Emperor's officials, to be by him transmitted to Fiévée, the publisher of the _Mercure_ (a man with whom the Emperor sometimes corresponded privately). Every word in this paper is significant; note particularly the change from the impersonal third to the first person singular. There is no direct indication as to who is the writer of the document; in the beginning it is that indefinite, anonymous being, the Government, that speaks; then all at once we feel who is wielding the pen--the lion shows his claws. "Monsieur de Lavalette will go to Monsieur Fiévée and say to him that in the _Journal des Débats_, which is read with more attention than the other newspapers, because it has ten times as large a circulation, articles have been found, written in a spirit altogether favourable to the Bourbons, consequently with complete indifference to the welfare of the state; say that it has been determined to suppress any articles in this paper that are too ill-affected; that the system pursued is undoubtedly a system of long-suffering; that it is, however, not enough that they should not be directly hostile; that the Government has the right to demand that they shall be entirely devoted to the reigning house, and that they shall not suffer but oppose everything which can add lustre to the cause of the Bourbons or evoke reminiscences favourable to them; that as yet no decisive step has been determined on; that the inclination is to permit the _Journal des Débats_ to continue to appear if men are presented to _me_ in whom _I_ can have confidence, and to whom _I_ can entrust the editorship of the paper."[1]

We observe the direction which events were taking. During the course of the Emperor's reign Neo-Catholicism lost ever more and more of that favour which it at first enjoyed, and not until the return of the Bourbons did it once more completely triumph. Immediately after the accession of Napoleon, Chateaubriand, Bonald, and De Maistre have full liberty to write, the _Journal des Débats_ is encouraged to undertake its crusade against the philosophy of the eighteenth century, the Pope visits Napoleon in Paris, all honour is shown to the clergy, Frayssinous preaches where and what he pleases. During the last years of the Empire the leaders of the Catholic party are compelled to be silent, the _Journal des Débats_ is suppressed, the Pope is a prisoner, the clergy are in deep disgrace, and Frayssinous may not preach at all.--Not until the monarchy was restored was there a rehabilitation of ecclesiasticism, a confirmation of what had been begun by the Concordat.

It has been said, and said with truth, that no real poetry was written under the rule of Napoleon; nevertheless an attempt, and by no means an insignificant attempt, was made at this time to give to the France of the nineteenth century what Voltaire in his _Henriade_ had attempted to give to the France of the eighteenth--neither more nor less than a great national epic.

It cannot be denied that the task was a tolerably hopeless one. At a time when all Europe was resounding with the names of the heroes of the new empire, and Napoleon was, as has been said, "binding the open wounds of France with the flags of her enemies," when the doings of the day were throwing all the doings of times past into the shade, where was an author to find a hero for an epic or deeds that would enthral the reading world?

The enterprise was undertaken by no less a man than Chateaubriand, the successful initiator of the literary movement of the period, the most admired author of his day. It was not only inclination but also a certain feeling of duty which induced Chateaubriand to undertake a great epic work. In his first work he had maintained that the legends of Christianity infinitely surpassed in beauty those of heathen mythology; that they appealed far more strongly to the poet; that the Christian, as father, husband, lover, bride, was more admirable and of more value to art than the mere natural being. He felt obliged to follow up his rule with an example, his theory with proof; and for this reason, and also to show what he was capable of, he determined to write a Christian epic.

True to the intellectual tendency of which he had been the first distinguished exponent, he did not choose modern or active heroes, in fact did not choose heroes at all, but martyrs as his theme. They also give the name to his work, _Les Martyrs ou le Triomphe de la Religion Chrétienne_, which, written as it is in prose, produces more the effect of an ordinary two-volume novel than of an epic. To understand this choice of subject we must remember that the point of view of the men of this school was not really that of the Empire at all, but that of the returned _émigrés_. They had not yet recovered from the horror excited in them by the deeds of the Revolution. In the leaders of the Revolution they saw only men of blood, in the vanquished party only hapless victims. In their eyes the real hero was not the conqueror, not the adventurous soldier, but Louis XVI., the innocent sufferer. What were they if not martyrs, all those Christian priests who in the Days of September were murdered for the sake of their religion, all those men and women who died in La Vendée for their loyalty to the King by the grace of God! Victims as innocent as the Princesse de Lamballe, or the maidens of Verdun, or the lately executed Duke of Enghien, were heroines and heroes a thousand times more worthy to be sung than the men who were defiling themselves with blood on all the battle-fields of Europe.

In 1802 Chateaubriand conceived the idea of his epic; in 1806 the first cantos were ready for publication. But the events of the epic were to happen in all parts of the world known to the Romans. Chateaubriand was not indolent by nature; it was not his aim to finish the work as quickly as possible in order to rest upon his laurels. He stopped short, and in July 1806 went off to travel in Greece, Syria, Egypt, and Carthaginian Africa, returning through Spain. The one object of this tour was, he himself gives us to understand in the prefaces to _Les Martyrs_ and the _Notes of Travel (Itinéraire)_, the perfecting of his work. In the one preface we read: "This journey was undertaken for the sole purpose of seeing and painting those districts in which I intended to lay the scenes of _Les Martyrs_"; in the other: "I did not undertake this journey in order to describe it. I had a purpose, and that purpose I have accomplished in _Les Martyrs_; I went in quest of pictures--that was all."

No, that was not all--neither all that Chateaubriand proposed to himself in taking the journey, nor even all that he wished others to see in it. Chateaubriand is Childe Harold before the real Childe Harold; he is a legitimist and Roman Catholic Byron. His René is the forerunner of the Byronic heroes; he himself, in his pilgrimages, is a forerunner of that half-fictitious, half-real Harold whom love of adventure and longing for new impressions drive from land to land. But the Byron of the ecclesiastical revival could not, like the English nobleman who still felt the blood of the Vikings in his veins, rest satisfied with the honest confession of such a simple motive as this for his wanderings. It would not have been at all in the spirit of Chateaubriand's period, nor would it have been in keeping with the part he played in that period, for him to go to Jerusalem to study landscape, to cover his palette with colours, and fill his sketch-book with sketches. When Childe Harold talks of his pilgrimage, he employs the word in its secondary meaning. Chateaubriand uses it in its original meaning. He tells every one that he is going to the Holy Land to strengthen his faith by the sight of all the holy places. He brings back with him water from the Jordan, and when the Comte de Chambord is born it is with this water that the royal infant is baptized. He himself says: "It may seem strange nowadays to speak of sacred vows and pilgrimages, but in this matter, as every one knows, I have no feeling of shame; I long ago took my place in the ranks of the superstitious and weak-minded. I am perhaps the last Frenchman who will set out for the Holy Land with the ideas, aims, and feelings of a medieval pilgrim. And though I do not possess the virtues which so conspicuously distinguished the De Coucys, De Nesles, De Chatillons, and De Montforts, I have at least their faith; by this sign even the old crusaders would recognise me as one of themselves."

There is an awkward discrepancy between this utterance and the words quoted above: "I went in quest of imagery--that was all." And in Chateaubriand's _Mémoires d'outre-tombe_ we find a confession of yet another object in his quest of pictures, which throws a curious light upon the feelings and motives of the would-be pilgrim. He hoped by his efforts after fame, by his studies and his travels, to win the favour of a lady with whom he was in love. Taken in itself this is most natural. Chateaubriand was an ardent lover and frantically ambitious. It is not surprising that he should have said to himself: Fame, greater, more deserved, that I may deserve her better, that I may show her my ardent desire to render myself worthy of her favour! The lady herself appears to have been ambitious for him, and to have allowed him to view the possession of herself as a possible, far-off reward of new efforts. Though we may acknowledge that there is something medieval and chivalrous in such a relationship as this, an extraordinary confusion of ideas is none the less proved in the man who talks of a crusade and a pilgrimage. And yet Chateaubriand was no priestly casuist; he was a haughty, self-important, cynical aristocrat, who defiantly attached the colours of the church to his helmet and wore them not only at every joust but at every rendezvous.

In his _Mémoires d'outre-tombe_ he writes: "But have I in my _Itinéraire_ really told everything about that voyage on which I embarked from the port of Desdemona and Othello? Was it in the spirit of repentance that I sought the sepulchre of Christ? _One single thought_ consumed me; I counted the moments with impatience. Standing on the deck of my ship, with my eyes fixed on the evening star, I prayed for a fair wind to carry me swiftly onwards, for fame--in order that I might be loved. I hoped to win fame in Sparta, at Mount Zion, at Memphis, at Carthage, and to carry it with me to the Alhambra. Would another remember me with as great steadfastness as mine under my probation?... If I secretly enjoy a moment's happiness, it is disturbed by memories of those days of seduction, of enchantment, of madness."