Part 23

Of the poet Hugo writes that it is his duty to lead the vanguard of the people like a pillar of fire, lead them back to the great principles of _order_, morality, and honour. The flaw in the literature of the century of Louis "the Great" is that its authors invoke the gods of heathendom instead of the God of Christianity. If in this matter, Hugo naïvely remarks, they had acted differently, the "triumph of the sophistical writings" of the eighteenth century would have been much impeded. What might not have been the fate of "philosophy," if the cause of God had been championed by genius instead of by virtue alone!

He vigorously objects to being called romantic. He affirms that he "has not the slightest idea of what is meant by classic and romantic literature." Refusing to be influenced by all the nonsense written on the subject at that time, he in the following sensible utterance declares the distinction to be an empty and meaningless one: "It is an acknowledged fact that every literature receives an impression, in some cases strong, in some weak, from the climate, customs, and history of the nation of which it is the expression. David, Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Milton, Corneille, men each one of whom represents a literature and a nation, have nothing in common but genius." It is impossible, therefore, to divide them into classical and romantic poets. He combats the assertion that the literary revival (evidently referring to Chateaubriand) is an outcome of the political revolution. "The literature of to-day may to a certain extent be the result of the Revolution, without on that account being its expression. Revolutionary society had its literature, _ugly and foolish as itself_. That society and that literature are dead and will never come to life again. _Order_ has revived in all the institutions of society; it is also reviving in literature.... Just as the Revolution originated in literature, so the literature of our day is _the anticipatory expression of the pious and loyal society_ which will most certainly arise from those ruins."

Hugo was mistaken; the literature in question was the exact expression of the intellectual mood of its day, and the attempts at reform which aroused such anxiety were really forerunners of a literary revolution. For they destroyed faith in authority as authority--in this particular case faith in Boileau. From the moment when it was discovered that there were spots even in this sun, it was not possible to confine doubt to the few points where it had first modestly and cautiously insinuated itself. Literary tradition was a principle; it had to be either accepted or rejected.

In reading Hugo's second last preface to the _Odes_ (1826) we feel that his thoughts, always turning upon _order_, that favourite idea of the day, are about to drive him from the shore of literature out on to the open sea. He has discovered that order is in reality something different from the regularity which is attained by discipline and coercion. Employing a simile which occurred naturally to a youth brought up in the neighbourhood of Versailles, with Chateaubriand's descriptions of the luxuriant landscape of North America as his leisure reading, he compares the gardens of Versailles and their carefully clipped, symmetrically trimmed trees with a forest in the New World, and exclaims: "We will not ask, Where here is splendour, where grandeur, or beauty? but simply, Where is _order_ and where _disorder?_" He recognises now that regularity concerns only the outward form of things, but that order lies at their very foundation, and is a result of the skilful arrangement of their elements. "A writer is not classic," he says, "because he _slavishly_ treads in the footprints which others have left on the road."

We have thus followed Hugo step by step along the path which leads him towards the final breach with the literary principle of authority. One year more, and he throws off the yoke, assumes the leadership of the Romantic School in France, and in its first manifesto, the preface to _Cromwell_ (October, 1827), declares that there is a tyranny of the past in literature exactly as there is in politics, and that this tyranny lies like a nightmare on the breast of the young generation: "The train of the eighteenth century still stretches into ours, but should not we young men who have seen Bonaparte be too proud to bear such a train?" Observe that he now, in direct antagonism to the spirit of the Restoration, invokes Napoleon as a species of liberator. And he writes of "that rouged, powdered and patched poetry, that literature of hoops and furbelows." He is aiming his first blow at Boileau.

New as Lamartine had seemed, both in style and matter, he had retained many of the classic circumlocutions. In spite of his aversion to the lyre, he often named it in his poetry, and in choosing his subjects he preferred the abstract to the concrete.

Victor Hugo was as yet almost equally cautious. "Granted that it is advantageous and at times necessary," he writes, "to renew a few worn-out expressions, to replace a few old phrases, and perhaps even to endeavour to improve our verse by increasing the sonority of its metre and the purity of its rhyme, it cannot be too often repeated that this must be the limit of all attempts at perfecting it. Every reform at variance with the natural accent and genius of our mother-tongue must be regarded as an attack on the first principles of taste."

Neither alteration of the rhythm, nor variability in the position of the cæsura, nor the continuation of the phrase from one line to another (changes all of which he afterwards vindicated), does he as yet consider permissible. In the _Odes_ he conforms to the old poetic court fashion (he does not, for instance, say _Convention_, but _Senate_, does not say _shawl_, but _drapery_ or _treasure of Kashmir_), only making a few cautious attempts at a change of metre, with the object of rendering the ode style less stiff and heavy.

That court fashion was of the following nature. A small collection had been made of refined expressions, of choice words--the elect, as it were, of language--which alone had admission into poetry. Poets did not say sword, but brand, did not say soldier, but warrior, and they never mentioned such things as guns or knives; just as Danish poetry for long acknowledged only roses, lilies, violets, woodruff, and at the outside a dozen other flowers as representatives of the whole floral world. The consequence of this was that the supply of words was extremely limited, that there were only a few hundred pairs of noble rhymes, and that the same expressions, which had to be constantly repeated, brought with them exactly the same thoughts and feelings. The poetic oratory of those days was very much on a par with the pulpit oratory of our own. Sublime was the adjective applied to the dignified flow of words in which things were spoken of as far as possible without ever calling them by their real names--and, be it observed, only things that reminded men as little as possible of their earthly nature, of the material side of their being. One result of this was that the direct, unambiguous mention of common things in any work which laid claim to the privilege of classic style at once produced a comic effect. When Lebrun's _Cid_ was acted, the word _chambre_ called forth a murmur of disapproval. It also explains how the attempt made about the time of the earliest experiments in the Romantic style to introduce Shakespeare into France created such consternation. Every one knows that _Othello_, acted in the translation of Alfred de Vigny at the Odéon--that is to say to an audience of students, the least prejudiced and least prudish of Parisian audiences--was hissed because of the occurrence in it of the word "pocket-handkerchief."

Count Alfred de Vigny, who was born in 1797, belonged to a family of ancient lineage, and was brought up a loyal adherent of monarchy by the grace of God. In 1814 he received a lieutenant's commission in the army of Louis XVIII, and he quickly developed into one of the most attractive and most independent literary characters of the day. In several branches of literature it was he who took the first step in the new direction, Hugo who followed. He wrote a historical novel in the style of Sir Walter Scott before Hugo did (_Cinq-Mars_, 1826), had a play acted before Hugo (the rhymed translation of _Othello_, 1829), the style of which created a great sensation, and he forestalled Hugo in introducing freedom and flexibility into lyric poetry. He was the Columbus of the new movement, Hugo the Amerigo Vespucci who gave the newly discovered continent its name.

It is not a matter for surprise that, at a time when authority was upheld on every side, Hugo should have begun by accommodating himself to existing literary rules, nay, by actually believing in them as real laws of poetry and language. But presently he commenced to experiment with them a little, to shake them a little, to doubt them a little, to interpret them in his own way, doing it all with the profoundest reverence, until it became no longer possible for him to observe them, upon which he overthrew them. In one of his poems (_Les Contemplations_, i., vii.) he gives a witty description of the revolution which he ended by making:

Je suis ce monstre énorme, Je suis le démagogue horrible et débordé Et le dévastateur du vieil ABCD; Causons, Quand je sortis du collège, du thème, Des vers latins, farouche, espèce d'enfant blême Et grave, au front penchant, aux membres appauvris; Quand, tâchant de comprendre et de juger, j'ouvris Les yeux sur la nature et sur Part, l'idiome Peuple et noblesse, était l'image du royaume; La poésie était la monarchie; un mot Était un duc ou pair ou n'était qu'un grimaud; Les syllabes, pas plus que Paris et que Londres, Ne se mêlaient; ainsi marchent sans se confondre Piétons et cavaliers traversant le pont Neuf; La langue était l'État avant quatre-vingt-neuf; Les mots, bien ou mal nés, vivaient parqués en castes; Les uns, nobles, hantant les Phèdres, les Jocastes, Les Méropes, ayant le décorum pour loi, Et montant à Versaille aux carosses du roi; Les autres, tas de gueux, drôles patibulaires, Habitant les patois, quelques-uns aux galères Dans l'argot; dévoués à tous les genres bas, Déchirés en haillons dans les halles; sans bas, Sans perruque; créés pour la prose et la farce. * * * * * Alors, brigand, je vins; je m'écriai: Pourquoi Ceux-ci toujours devant, ceux-lâ toujours derrière? Et sur l'Académie, aïeule et douairière, Cachant sous ses jupons les tropes effarés, Et sur les bataillons d'alexandrins carrés Je fis souffler un vent révolutionnaire. Je mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire. Plus de mot sénateur! plus de mot roturier! Je fis une tempête au fond de l'encrier, Et je mêlai parmi les ombres débordées, Au peuple noir des mots l'essaim blanc des idées; Et je dis; Pas de mot où l'idée au vol pur Ne puisse se poser, tout humide d'azur!

But Hugo, even when he doubts, has not yet reached this stage. He still styles his poetry "cavalier" poetry, stamping himself by a word which recalls the restoration of royalty in England as the poet of the restoration of royalty in France. The rock on which he splits is the impossibility of harmonising religious and literary tradition. This is especially felt in the ballads. Hugo revives memories of the Middle Ages and feudalism. What could be more royalist? But the literature of the age of Louis XIV. had utterly rejected the Middle Ages and their memories--so what could be less classical? One of the ballads (_La ronde du sabbat_) describes a witches' dance, another treats of sylphs and fairies; the motley superstitions of the old popular legends are revived--Romanticism is not far off. And the tone is anything but classic; in France, as in Germany and Denmark, the style of the popular ballad supplants the dignified, literary style. There is, moreover, in these poems a new patriotic element (_Le géant, Le pas d'armes du roi Jean_) which turns from classic antiquity to the France of the far-off past. Of this national movement, too, Chateaubriand had been the leader; his description of the ancient Gauls in _Les Martyrs_ was the first attempt in the new direction; it made a powerful impression (according to his own confession) on such a man as Augustin Thierry, the future author of _The Age of the Merovingians_; we may safely say that it gave the impulse generally to a more graphic and animated historical style. But even this patriotic element was new and foreign to French poetry, was consequently a rebellion against tradition. The revival of old French subjects was accompanied by a revival of old French metres. Here also Chateaubriand led the way with that charming exile's song beginning with the beautiful lines:

Combien j'ai douce souvenance Du joli lieu de ma naissance! Ma sœur, qu'ils étaient beaux, ces jours De France!

a song which was sung on the little rocky island in the Bay of St. Malo as he was laid to rest in the grave which he had hewn for himself there. And the tones of the days of Ronsard and the Pleiades are re-echoed simultaneously by Alfred de Vigny, the brothers Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, and Hugo.

In May 1828 Alfred de Vigny published, in _Madame de Soubise_, lines like:

La voyez-vous croître, La tour du vieux cloître? Et le grand mur noir Du royal manoir? Entrons dans le Louvre. Vous tremblez, je croi, Au son du beffroi? La fenêtre s'ouvre, Saluez le roi.

In June he is followed and surpassed by Hugo in the admirable lines in _Le pas d'armes du roi Jean_:

Cette ville Aux longs cris, Qui profile Son front gris. Des toits frêles, Cent tourelles, Clochers grêles, C'est Paris!

The metre, the picturesqueness, the melodiousness, and the concision which distinguish such verse were something quite new in French poetry.

It seemed at first as if the principle of authority had received new and powerful support from the re-engrafting of the traditions of Christianity and monarchy upon literature. But it soon became evident that religious and literary tradition could not thrive together. The former at first took refuge under the wings, in the very bosom of the latter, but the inherent antagonism soon revealed itself, and the principle of authority in its literary shape was set aside, nay, overthrown by the new spirit, which had all the appearance of sincerely desiring to uphold the practical, that is to say, the politico-religious principle of authority.

We have now to see how the practical principle of authority came to share the fate of the theoretical, the literary principle.[1]

[1] Victor Hugo, _Odes et Ballades; Cromwell_; A. de Vigny, _Poésies complètes_; Émile Deschamps, _Poésies_; Antony Deschamps, _Poésies_; Raynouard, _Les Templiers_.

XII

DISSOLUTION OF THE PRACTICAL PRINCIPLE OF AUTHORITY

On a dark, foggy day in February 1854, a little company of friends followed the remains of one of France's most notable men to a Paris cemetery. The procession made its way between two ranks of soldiers, who were there not to show honour, but to preserve order, to the "common trench." Such had been the will of the deceased. When the earth had been thrown on the coffin, the grave-digger asked: "Is there no cross?" "No," was the answer.

No monument shows where that dead man was laid, though his name was known throughout Europe, and there is no cross upon his grave, though he had been an abbé and a priest, in fact for a long period the most notable champion of the church. It was Lamennais who by his own wish was buried thus.

Félicité de la Mennais (it was not till late in life that he gave his name the more democratic form) was born in 1782 at St. Malo; so he, like Chateaubriand, is a Breton; and the obstinacy of his race was innate in his character. The Breton authors constitute what may be called the Vendée of literature; they continue with words the fight which their fathers fought with material weapons.

As a youth Lamennais was slight, thin, and of an excitably lively temperament. At an early age he lost his mother, and after this was even more determined and self-willed than he had been before. His religious vocation was long doubtful; as a youth he devoted much time to music and mathematics, played the flute, and learned the use of various weapons. He fought a serious duel, which proved a hindrance to him in the career which he subsequently chose, had love affairs, and wrote poetry.[1] He was so little inclined to accept the dogmas of Christianity that he did not make his first communion till he was twenty-two, when he had attained to settled religious convictions. After this he began to study theology, and in 1808, at the age of twenty-six, he took the tonsure. But when the time of his ordination as a priest drew near, he was seized with such horror of the vow he was about to take that he again and again postponed the decisive step, and did not really become a priest until he was thirty-five. His letters of these years show the distracted condition of his soul; the proud heart winced and writhed at the thought of giving the power over itself into strange hands. And things were no better when all was over and the irrevocable vow taken. The first letter he wrote to his brother after the dreaded ordination, to which he had finally been persuaded to consent, had actually taken place, gives a gloomy description of his mental condition:

"Although silence has been imposed on me, I believe that it is both allowable and right to let you know once and for all exactly how matters stand with me. I am extremely unhappy, and it is impossible that I can henceforward be anything else. They may reason as they like, may twist and turn things as they please, to persuade me of the opposite, but there is not the slightest probability that they will ever succeed in convincing me of the non-existence of a fact which I perceive. The only consolation I can accept is the cheap counsel to make a virtue of necessity.... All I desire is forgetfulness, in every acceptation of the word. Would to God I could forget myself!"

With such throes as these was the birth of Lamennais' faith in his religious vocation accompanied. He overcame his despair; he, to whom it was a necessity to be whatever he was with his whole soul--even if it was the opposite of what he had been before--became with his whole soul a priest. So absolutely did he feel himself one that his first angry exclamation when Rome left him in the lurch in 1832 was: "I will teach them what it means to defy a priest!" He had a strong character and a narrow mind; a born party man, it was his nature to take a side obstinately and blindly, to defend what he for the moment regarded as absolute truth with passionate love and eloquent hate. Hence as soon as the ruling idea of the period takes hold of him he becomes its doughtiest champion--the most ardent, the most consistent, the most sincere and most undaunted defender of the autocratic principle of authority and the unconditional submission which that principle demands. The man who had suffered such agony of mind in yielding up his own reason and will to the will of the church, the one real priest of the Neo-Catholic school, seems, as it were, to grudge other men better conditions than had been granted to himself. When, in language ominous of storm, he proclaims the gospel of authority and obedience, he, beyond all others, makes us feel how personal passion finds satisfaction in the sweeping, universal demand, how the Ego which has felt itself compelled once for all to submit to authority asserts itself by bending and bowing the wills and thoughts of all other men to that rule with which it now identifies itself.

Violent and obstinately independent, Lamennais certainly recognised no authority within his own camp. His remarks upon the other leaders of the school form a pleasing collection of invectives. Of Bonald, for instance, he writes: "Poor humanity! How M. de Bonald should be suggested to me by the word 'humanity' passes my comprehension. The transition is an abrupt one. They say that the poor man has become quite feeble-minded lately." Of Chateaubriand: "The King and he, he and the King--this is the whole history of France.... No one can understand, he least of all, how Europe is to dispense with his talents. He prophesies that Europe will fare ill." Of Frayssinous, who as leader of the Gallican party in the church was his opponent: "You call him moderate. Why? Because your attention has been drawn to something cold in him, which you take to be moderation, but which is only congealed hatred." Such is the tone of Lamennais' letters. There was, nevertheless, in his vigorous and, if not blindly precipitate, at least blindly impetuous character the very stuff to make a matchless champion of the absolute authority of the church--and this, till the end came, he proved to be--a champion whose capacity of subjecting others to discipline was greater than his capacity of allowing himself to be persuaded against his honest conviction.

In 1808 he published his _Reflections on the Position of the Church in France_, a work which was suppressed by Napoleon's government. He greeted the returning Bourbons with enthusiasm. But he was not yet famous. Between 1817 and 1823, however, there was published, volume by volume, a work which kept men's minds in a constant ferment, and gave occasion to violent controversy; between the publication of the second and third volumes its author had to take up his pen in his own defence. This work was the Abbé de la Mennais' _Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion_. In it the period of the restoration of ecclesiasticism collects all its powers for a last, decisive battle. We find all the leading principles of the day enunciated with a peremptoriness and a determined consistency in the drawing of conclusions which seem to indicate that the revulsion is at hand.

The tendency and even the title of this book suggest comparison with the work which inaugurated the religious revival in Germany in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher's famous _Reden über die Religion an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern_ (Lectures upon Religion to the Educated amongst those who despise it). Both works aim at counteracting the same thing, the indifference towards religion, the positive contempt for it, prevailing amongst the educated classes. Both make an attempt, now that faith has become weak, to rebuild the edifice of piety upon a new foundation. It is in this attempt that the different nationality of the authors makes itself strongly felt.