did. He spoke English, Spanish (in all its dialects, including the

gipsy language), Italian, modern Greek, and Russian, and had thoroughly studied the literatures of these languages, besides mastering those of ancient Greece and Rome. In his official capacity he published accounts of his travels in France, full of erudite detail; these and some studies on episodes in Roman history procured his election to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1841. In 1844 he was made a member of the Académie Française. Under the Second Empire, as an old friend of the Countess Montijo, he was on intimate terms with the Imperial family; and he and Octave Feuillet were long the only literary ornaments of the new court. In 1853 he was made a Senator. The appointment was beneath his dignity, and his acceptance of it injured his reputation, in spite of the fact that he almost never took part in the deliberations of the Chamber. During his last illness Mérimée heard of the fall of the Empire. He died at Cannes on the 23rd of September 1870.

The inner life of this man, as revealed by his books, is by no means so simple. The character of the youth who went out into the world at eighteen was composed of many conflicting elements. He was exceedingly proud; bold and bashful at the same time. He had an audacious intellect and a shy, reserved disposition. To conceal the shyness, which wounded his pride, he assumed either a stiff, cold manner, or an appearance of frivolity tinged with cynicism. This cynicism became a kind of mannerism with him in conversation with men. As a youth he was certainly not so suspicious and reserved as he afterwards became, but it is a mistake to attribute his general scepticism to any one particular disappointment. He met, like the rest of us, with many disappointments, and was often roughly disillusioned; he was deceived by friends, sacrificed by the woman he loved (d'Haussonville gives particulars in the _Revue des deux Mondes_, 15th August 1877); he learned to know the world, learned that life is warfare, and that a man has not only to protect himself against false and untrustworthy friends, secret and open enemies, but also against those who, as he himself puts it, "do evil for evil's sake." But if the germs of suspicion had not been in him from the first, a dozen consecutive bitter experiences would not have cured him of faith in his fellow-men; for the man of a trustful nature has always had at least an equal number of contrary experiences which outweigh the others. But Mérimée's nature was as critical as it was productive, and men of his character are apt to make the rule by which we judge the professional critic--that he only deserves trust in proportion as he shows distrust--the rule of their lives. We can imagine the suffering which his own poetic impressionability entailed on a man with Mérimée's highly developed critical sense.

The critical temperament is above everything truthful; and Mérimée was remarkably so. His natural audacity, moreover, impelled him to say exactly what he thought, regardless of conventionalities. One sees from his letters how frank he was by nature, how inclined to speak the undisguised truth, and how impatient of conventional falsehoods and even of alleviating or embellishing circumlocutions. This is especially noticeable in the first volume of _Lettres à une inconnue_. Even in these love-letters Mérimée is almost rude when it seems to him that the object of his affections has expressed some merely conventional opinion. Though his fear of ridicule and his ever-increasing scepticism did not dispose him to knight-errantry or lead him to court martyrdom, he nevertheless, in his fiftieth year, committed a chivalrous folly of which most men of the world would only be capable in their extreme youth. When his friend, the notorious Libri, was found guilty of having abused his position as public librarian to the extent of appropriating and selling a number of valuable books belonging to the nation, Mérimée, unable to believe Libri capable of such an action, undertook his rehabilitation with an ardour worthy of a better cause, and attacked the committee of investigation and the judges in an article in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ (April 15, 1852), the sparkling wit of which recalls Paul Louis Courier's pamphlets. A professed Don Quixote could not have acted more foolishly; nor is the case much altered if what the initiated maintain is true, namely, that his ardour was inspired rather by Madame Libri than by her husband.

Under the Empire, and even as a courtier, Mérimée preserved his freedom of speech. I am not referring to the fact that he, as a rule, spoke disparagingly of Napoleon III., which is not particularly to his credit, seeing that he accepted office under that prince's government; but even in conversation with members of the Imperial family he combined frankness with courtesy. Writing in July 1859, he tells that the Empress had asked him in Spanish what he thought of the speech made by the Emperor on his return from Italy. "In order," he writes, "to be both straightforward and courtier-like, I answered, '_Muy necesario!_' (Very necessary)."

Mérimée's natural tendency to outspokenness was, however, held in check by his pride and shyness. He early learned that the man who makes a naïve public display of his feelings not only lays himself open to ridicule, but invites the sympathy and familiarity of the vulgar crowd; and, as a youth, he resolved that he would never wear his heart upon his sleeve. Nor did it need all his mistrust to discover that the great majority of those around him who made a frank and childlike display of their feelings knew very well what they were about. The men who published their noble-mindedness, their earnestness, their love of morality and religion, their patriotism, &c., in the great market-place of publicity, always seemed to him either to be angling for applause or to be actuated by some business motive. He could not fail to see how well it pays, as a rule, to give expression to noble sentiments and warm feeling, and he found it difficult to suppose others ignorant of the fact. In any case, he could not bring himself to do as they did; he was one of those who cannot bear to proclaim the fact that they love virtue and hate vice, and to be always singing the praises of "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful."

To avoid all comradeship with the calculating "men of feeling," and to protect his emotional life from the gaze of the profane, Mérimée had recourse to the expedient of concealing his quivering sensibility under steely irony, as under a coat of mail. He determined rather to appear worse than he was, than to run the risk of being taken for one of these models of all the virtues. With this aim in view he dealt so hardly with himself that he lost his first fresh, simple naturalness, and acquired instead a manner which, though still natural and simple, was, nevertheless, distinctly a cultivated manner. In _Le Vase étrusque_, the one of his tales which gives most insight into his own intellectual and emotional life, we read of the hero, Saint-Clair: "He was born with a tender and loving heart; but, at an age when one is liable to receive impressions which last for the rest of one's life, too frank a display of his tender-heartedness drew down upon him the ridicule of his companions. He was proud and ambitious, and valued the good opinion of others, as all children do. Thenceforward he made it his study to conceal all the outward manifestations of what he regarded as a dishonourable weakness. He attained his aim, but his victory cost him dear. He succeeded in hiding the emotions of his feeling heart from others, but, by shutting them up in his own breast, he made them a thousand times more painful. In society he acquired the lamentable reputation of being unfeeling and careless, and in solitude his restless imagination created torments for him which were the more unbearable because he would confide them to no one." It is impossible to ignore the direct self-portraiture in this character sketch, though the colouring is too sombre.

[1] _Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie_, ii 159. Eugène de Mirécourt: _Mérimée_, 25.

[2] A reproduction of the portrait is to be found in Maurice Tourneux's _Prosper Mérimée: ses portraits, ses dessins, sa bibliothèque_.

XXII

BEYLE AND MÉRIMÉE

Thus prepared, Mérimée, at the age of eighteen, made the acquaintance of Henri Beyle, who was twenty years his senior. They met at the house of the famous singer, Madame Pasta, who had left Milan and taken up her residence in Paris. It was inevitable that Beyle should exercise considerable influence over a kindred spirit so much his junior. Direct proof of this influence can hardly be given, for, before he met Beyle, Mérimée had written nothing; but, if we compare the works of the two authors, the resemblance between some of their peculiarities is striking; and the comparison is further instructive because it serves to throw Mérimée's own special characteristics into strong relief. I consider it impossible that Mérimée can have influenced Beyle, unless, indeed, we reckon as influence the communication of general information; for Beyle is undoubtedly indebted to Mérimée for many of the observations on the subject of art in his _Mémoires d'un Touriste_. Of the two minds Beyle's was obviously the first matured; therefore, when the younger of the two friends begins his biographical notice of the elder with the assertion that, in spite of their friendship, they had hardly had two ideas in common in the course of their lives, this obvious exaggeration may reasonably be attributed to the writer's anxiety to prevent his readers from applying certain of his remarks on Beyle to himself.

Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other, in the first instance, in their love of fact. All Mérimée's readers know that what he presents them with is the bare, accurately demonstrable fact, the exactly drawn detail. All that he cares for in history, as he himself confesses in his _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._, are the anecdotes; and of these he prefers the kind which illustrate the manners and types of character of the period. Exactly the same can be said of Beyle. Anecdote is positively the natural form of his thought; he thinks in anecdotes. He paints the individual in anecdotes, the period in biographies. His aversion for the vague leads him to write the kind of history which seems to him most full of life, in other words, to communicate fact in the form of a novel, or of a short, realistic drama. And the pithy, short anecdotes which he relates are never commonplace, but invariably the striking expression of some essential fact. In so far the resemblance to Mérimée is marked. When a modern admirer of Beyle (Paul Heyse) praises his short Italian tales, "in which strong, reckless passions assert themselves without any self-deception, and take their course with a fiery, or cold, heedlessness of consequences, prepared in the last resort to have recourse to the knife," we feel that these expressions might, without the alteration of a word, be applied to Mérimée's stories.

Nevertheless, a story as communicated by Mérimée conveys such a different meaning from a story as communicated by Beyle, that it is easy to determine the limits of the elder man's influence upon the younger. Beyle's salient characteristic is the tendency to generalise. The trait of character which is exhibited in any given action, is to him only an instance; it illustrates a psychological law, or is the evidence of certain social conditions or racial peculiarities, which it is of great consequence to him to elucidate. When, for example, he fills his book _De l'Amour_ to repletion with anecdotes, he does it merely for the purpose of showing, in a practical and impressive manner, what he means by the different names which he gives to the different varieties of the passion and their different stages of development. To obtain the reader's assent to the conclusions he draws, he presents his material, his arguments, in the form of anecdotes. In his novels this tendency to generalise has almost a distracting effect. He too frequently explains to his reader: "She acted in such and such a manner because she was an Italian; a Parisian would of course have acted very differently."

No traces of anything similar are to be found in Mérimée's writings; no reflections or divagations--strictly accurate, bold representation of his fact, and nothing more. When he has chosen his subject, which is most frequently some survival of ancient savagery that has attracted his attention as an old coin among modern ones attracts the eye of the connoisseur, or an old building in a modern town the eye of the traveller, his whole aim is to make the curious phenomenon stand out in as strong relief as possible from the insipid dead-level of his own day; he removes everything which might prevent the strange survival of the past from producing its full effect; but such a proceeding as tracing its connection with the general condition of the society or country of which it bears the impress, never occurs to him. To see things in their whole bearing is not his affair: the bird's-eye view he leaves to others. He seeks and finds a curious phenomenon in the world of reality, delineates it, and in the process of reproduction imparts to it some of his own life; but he never regards it as anything but the curious phenomenon. And he is as strictly matter-of-fact in interpretation as in delineation. Note, for example, how he protests (in his _Portraits historiques et littéraires_) against any symbolic interpretation of _Don Quixote_, in which work he refuses to see anything but a masterly parody of the romances of chivalry. "Let us leave to solemn German professors," he exclaims, "the honour of the discovery that the Knight of La Mancha symbolises poetry and his squire prose. The interpreter will always discover in the works of a man of genius a thousand poetical intentions of which their author was entirely ignorant." Contrast with this kind of criticism the following fine passage from Sainte-Beuve. "This book, originally a purely topical work, has become part of the literature of the world. It has conquered the imagination of humanity. Every reader has worked his will with it, has shaped it to his taste.... Cervantes did not think of this, but we do. Each one of us is a Don Quixote to-day, a Sancho Panza to-morrow. In every one of us there is more or less of this discordant union of a high-flying ideal with the plain common-sense which keeps close to the ground. With many it is actually only a question of age; a man falls asleep Don Quixote and awakes Sancho Panza." Beyle would have endorsed these sentiments; Mérimée was kept from doing so by his antipathy to generalisation.

Their love of the fact in its simplicity produced in both Beyle and Mérimée a strong aversion for French classic rhetoric; and both are distinguished from all contemporary French Romanticists by the fact that they do not substitute lyric poetry for that rhetoric. Beyle never wrote a line of poetry; he had no ear whatever for rhythm. In spite of the enthusiastic admiration which he imagined he felt for the Italian poets, he regarded metre as merely an assistance to memory, and could see no reason for it in a composition not intended to be learned by rote. Mérimée is characterised by a similar dislike of verse. He had such a repugnance to the effeminate, languishing music of rhyme, that the numerous poems cited in his writings are, without exception, rendered in prose; he preferred letting them lose all their character to translating them in verse. The explanation naturally suggests itself that he did not feel capable of writing poetry. But I am rather of opinion that it was his pride which would not allow him to submit his poetry to the criticism of the public. His _Lettres à une inconnue_ show that he could write English verse, so the question can hardly have been one of inability. But such talent as he had, he did not cultivate; an aversion to display of feeling, a shy reservedness, produced the same practical result as Beyle's want of ear.

In this matter, however, as in various others, Mérimée outdoes his master. In the depths of Beyle's soul there was a lyric tendency; it finds its way to the surface in his persistent enthusiasm for Napoleon, for Italy, for the sixteenth century, for Cimarosa and Rossini, Correggio and Canova, and in all the superlatives which flow almost as abundantly from his pen as from Balzac's. Mérimée, on the other hand, not content with banishing the lyric form from his works, entirely abjures the spirit; he walls himself in; no prose is less lyrical than his.

In order to obtain an adequate impression of his literary matter-of-factness, let us for a moment compare his tales, not with Beyle's, but with George Sand's first novels, which were written about the same time. What George Sand offers us in hers is, principally, such a masterly revelation of the inner life of a young woman, with its modesty and its enthusiasm, its impulse to self-devotion and its susceptibility to passion, as no woman had ever given to the world before; but in the deepest recesses of her soul there is a purpose; she has a wrong to avenge, wrath to satisfy; she does not see the sufferings of the female sex from the standpoint of an outsider; she does not try to conceal that her heart has bled. Mérimée, on the other hand, has no cause, no theory, no political or social bias whatever. He has no enthusiasms and believes in nothing, neither in a philosophic system, nor in a school of art, nor in a religious truth; scarcely even in the general progress of humanity. The sceptical man-of-the-world, he hardens his heart against all reformers, missionaries, improvers of the world, and saviours of humanity; he does not answer the question whether or not he agrees with them; he turns a deaf ear to it. George Sand shows what marriage is in France, and asks her public with a quivering voice: "What do you say to this? Is it to be endured?" Mérimée writes _La double Méprise_ and ends his tale without moving a muscle of his face.

As a rest from overpowering emotion George Sand goes back to primitive human nature, and with simple, beautiful touches delineates (as in Mauprat) the power and the happiness of faithful love, or produces (as in the peasant stories and _Jean de la Roche_) simple, touching, ideal representations of the innate nobility of the human soul. Mérimée does not believe in the ideal, and has no talent for the idyll. There is a sombre, dusky tone over everything he paints; the impulse of the soul towards a purity which it loves, or a heroism which it admires, is foreign to his art. In her inmost heart George Sand is the lyric poet. Whether she makes the passion of love the centre of her book, concedes it every right and gives it her whole sympathy even when it inspires an unworthy character (as in that remarkable and profoundly suggestive tale, _Valvèdre_), or whether she is carried away by her admiration for the courage and strength of character of the best of her own sex, she always shares the emotions and passions of her characters, rejoices, weeps, sighs, and smiles with them. Mérimée, on the contrary, resembles Beyle in giving an impersonal, dramatic expression to his ideas and feelings, and surpasses him in the artistic skill with which he does it. He has been at great trouble to shut up his feelings in his own breast, has imposed silence upon them, the absolute silence of the prison cell, and never, never once, does he give expression to them in his own name. He gives voice to them only through fully responsible characters, and that but sparingly. The characters thus evolved stand out before us with unusual vividness, and their language is peculiarly laconic and vigorous. The more intense and tender Mérimée's emotion originally was, the prouder is its outward bearing. There is nothing feminine in him. Even in his female characters it is not their femininity which he brings out. Beyle, a marked contrast to him in this respect, makes, in writing to him, the true and apt observation, that his novels are wanting in "delicate tenderness."[1] His women are masculine and logical in their passions; almost all of them are powerful individualities; even the most frivolous and immoral meet death with quiet fortitude (Arsène Guillot, Julie de Chaverney, Carmen). None of them have the melting Correggio-like quality which Beyle imparted to his female characters.

Beyle's more lyric style and profounder understanding of true womanliness are principally due to the fact that he was at heart an imaginative enthusiast. His matter-of-factness is only skin deep. Hence enthusiasm itself was a favourite theme of his, whereas it was one which Mérimée avoided. Compare them, for instance, as delineators of battle scenes; compare the two best prose descriptions of battles in existence at that time, Mérimée's famous _L'Enlèvement de la Redoute_ and Beyle's equally famous account of the battle of Waterloo. They present a striking contrast. In Beyle's pages we have a youth's enthusiasm for Napoleon and thirst for military glory depicted with a touch of irony, but also with genuine sympathy; in Mérimée's we have only the dark side of war--the half-mechanical assault on a redoubt, and the tumult of battle, which he paints with as masterly a hand as Gérôme's, without thought of patriotism, enthusiasm, or any more elevated sentiment than soldier-like stoicism and hope of promotion.

Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other in their attitude to religion, which was a peculiar one for Romanticists. The French Romanticists were originally as little inimical to Roman Catholicism as the German. Several of them began life as good Catholics, and the attitude of the rest was, generally speaking, one either of respect or indifference. But both Mérimée and Beyle were from the very first thoroughly pagan in thought and feeling. And Mérimée's free-thought, as well as Beyle's, was of the ardent type. He was not naïve enough to cherish a species of enmity towards a personal God, but he shared Beyle's detestation of the representatives of religion. His dislike of Christianity is, however, far more indirectly expressed than Beyle's, which is incessantly forcing itself on our notice. He does not, like Beyle, hate Catholicism; he only smiles at it. He never puts out more than a finger tip from under his black domino. It amuses him to describe insinuating Catholic priests; and when his characters have occasion to speak of baptism, confession, or any other religious ceremony, he is apt to make them do it "in a sanctimonious, nasal tone." But when the words are his own, we never have more than such cautious, subtle irony as is contained in the following passage. "It was a religious book which Madame de Pienne had brought with her; and I do not intend to tell you its title, in the first place because I do not wish to injure its author, in the second, because you would probably accuse me of desiring to draw some opprobrious inference regarding such books in general. Suffice it to say that the work in question was written by a young man of nineteen, with the special aim of restoring hardened sinners of the female sex to the bosom of the Church, that Arsène was terribly exhausted, and that she had not closed her eyes the whole of the previous night. Whilst the third page was being read, that happened which would have happened whatever the book had been--Mademoiselle Guillot closed her eyes and fell asleep."

Here again the difference between Beyle and Mérimée is mainly conditioned by the fact that the former was far less sceptical than the latter. Beyle was a materialist of the school of the Encyclopedists, and as such had firm beliefs. He had his philosophy--Epicureanism, to which he adhered faithfully; his method--psychological analysis; his religion--the worship of beauty in life, in music, in the plastic arts, and in literature. Mérimée has no philosophy; one cannot imagine anything less dogmatic than his half-stoical, half-sensual turn of mind; and he has no religion; he worships nothing. He avoids enthusiasm as carefully as if it were a disease. We are impressed by this fact in reading his remarks on Leonidas and the battle of Thermopylæ in the famous essay on Grote's _History of Greece_. He tells how he himself some years before had spent three days at Thermopylæ, and confesses that, "prosaic as he is," it was not without emotion that he climbed the little height where the last of the Three Hundred fell. But he did not allow himself to be overcome by his emotion. He examined the Persian arrow-heads, and found that they were of flint--these Asiatics, therefore, were but poor savages in comparison with the Europeans; if we have cause to marvel at anything, it is that they made their way through the Pass at all. He proceeds to criticise Leonidas severely for having occupied this impregnable position himself, leaving the other pass, which was much more difficult to defend, in charge of a coward. The death of Leonidas was undoubtedly the death of a hero; but let us picture to ourselves, if we can, his return to Sparta after having surrendered the key of Hellas to the Barbarians. Mérimée comes to the conclusion that Herodotus has written history as a poet, and moreover as a Greek poet, whose chief aim it is to throw the beautiful into strong relief; and he ends with the question: Can it be said that in this case the fiction is of more value than the truth? Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would unhesitatingly answer: Yes. Mérimée does not. He is writing in 1849, and with recent historical tragedies in his mind he answers: "Possibly. But it was by misrepresenting Thermopylæ, misrepresenting the ease with which three hundred free men could resist three million slaves, that the orators of Italy persuaded the Piedmontese to pit themselves alone against the Austrians." Compare with this sceptic spirit of Mérimée's the enthusiastic and simple faith with which Beyle retails the untrustworthy legend of Beatrice Cenci.

The period of 1830 was a time when the most eminent authors of France were very much on their guard against any excess in the matter of patriotism. The newly aroused appreciation of the merits of foreign literatures led, by a natural reaction, to contempt for their own and its classic authors, and even at times for the French spirit generally. The first, tolerably foolish, attack made by the Romantic School on Racine is a well-known episode. French classic literature was declared to be a literature only suitable for the schoolroom. Victor Hugo, who was by no means generally lacking in national pride, exclaimed, in the preface to _Les Orientales_: "Other nations say, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. We say, Boileau." Hugo's youth had been spent in Spain, and he treated Spanish themes in his first dramas (_Inez de Castro, Hernani_), retaining the Spanish division of the play into days instead of acts. Spain and Italy were the Promised Land of the budding Romanticists. Alfred de Musset wrote _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_; Théophile Gautier never wearied of showering maledictions on the cold climate and colourless customs of France, called Spain his true fatherland, &c., &c.

Beyle and Mérimée both exemplify in a very marked degree this protest against national vanity. In Beyle's mouth the word "French" was almost a term of contumely; his satirical appellation for Frenchmen was _les vainvifs_; his books teem with such ejaculations as: "Could anything be more comical than to ascribe depth of character to a Parisian?" He calls his country, "le plus vilain pays du monde, que les nigauds appellent la belle France." We have seen that he eventually renounced his nationality. Mérimée, who was almost as much in love with Spanish as Beyle with Italian customs, had the essentially Romantic leaning to the foreign, the exotic; and he too, like his older friend, considered one of the leading traits of French national character to be that constant attention to the opinion of others (_le qu'en dira-t-on_) which destroys all originality, makes a joyless thing of life, and forms the best foundation for the hypocrisies of society. His general opinion of his countrymen was a tolerably low one, and he took no pains to conceal the fact from them. But, unlike Beyle, he in the end proclaimed his allegiance to the old gospel, the old creed, of patriotism. The step was not an easy one for a man who hated patriotic phrase-mongering like the plague; it took nothing less than the downfall of France to draw any expression of love for his country from his lips. But in a letter dated September 13, 1870, he writes: "All my life long I have endeavoured to keep free from prejudices, and to be a cosmopolitan rather than a Frenchman; but all these philosophic draperies are of no avail. I bleed to-day from these stupid Frenchmen's wounds, I weep for their humiliations, and, ungrateful and foolish as they are, I love them in spite of everything."

In his estimate of Beyle's character, Mérimée (in this agreeing with Sainte-Beuve) decides that one of its most marked traits was his fear of being duped. "Thence arose," he writes, "that artificial hardness, that overdone analysis of the low motives of all generous actions, and that resistance to the first impulses of the heart, all of which, in my opinion, was more assumed than real. The aversion and contempt with which sentimentality inspired him often led him into the contrary exaggeration, to the great scandal of those who, not knowing him intimately, took all that he said of himself literally." This fear of being duped, with all its consequences as here described, was quite as characteristic of Mérimée himself as of Beyle; only that Mérimée, being of a more refined nature, had to do more violence to himself in the process of acquiring that cynical tone which in the end became as natural to him in intercourse with men as was insinuating gallantry in intercourse with women. He too, as a young man, enjoyed being considered a monster of immorality; and it was only when some comic incident, such as that of the country lady's refusing to travel alone with him in the diligence,[2] showed him what his reputation really was, that he felt a few days' remorse for his folly. Horror of hypocrisy actually made Mérimée a hypocrite, inducing him to feign vice and hard-heartedness; and his fear of being deceived not only led him to deceive others, but to cheat himself out of many pure and simple pleasures. It is not only on the stage, as Gorgias says, that the dupe is often wiser than the man who is never duped. He who does not live in constant fear of treachery has more courage, is more productive, realises more of the possibilities which lie latent in his soul.

In Mérimée's case the constant fear of exposing himself had two bad consequences which it had not in Beyle's. In the first place, it produced in him in course of time a kind of official stiffness. As a member of the Academy and of the Senate, and as the trusted favourite of the Imperial family, he had to appear in public and make speeches on occasions when he could not but inwardly laugh at the figure he cut and at his own words. Beyle never placed himself in a position which obliged him to speak with respect of things he scorned, or to pay compliments to blockheads. It was a sincere feeling which he expressed in the words: "When I see a man strutting about a drawing-room with any number of orders on his coat, I involuntarily think of all the meannesses and the contemptible, nay, often treacherous actions which he must have committed to have amassed so many proofs of them."

In the second place, the fear in question made Mérimée so severely critical of himself as an author that he became unproductive. Beyle's motto was: "No day without its line." Mérimée never wrote much, and at last stopped altogether. His demands of himself in the matter of plasticity and technical perfection were so excessive that he preferred withdrawing from the contest with his own ideal to risking defeat. It seemed to him that it was better to rest contented with what he had done than to stake his reputation as an artist on any new work. And it made it the easier for him to refrain, that he was by nature of a reserved, retiring disposition, and not impelled by any uncontrollable impulse to constant production.

It was in vain that Beyle reproached him for "laziness." Amongst the causes of that laziness there was one which Beyle did not understand, and which constituted the main difference between the two men. Beyle was a psychologist and a poet, but not an artist; Mérimée was an artist to his finger-tips. It is as the artist and as the artist alone that he is great; and his superiority to Beyle lies in his artistic skill. It was he who gave imperishable artistic form to that wealth of intellectual material which Beyle brought to light. And the laziness was anything but absolute idleness. It found expression in essays, descriptions of historical monuments, translations from the Russian, and modest but careful historical research and historical writings. Mérimée was a philologist and an archaeologist, a scholar and a scientist. His art may be likened to an oasis lying in the midst of his arid technical studies; it borders on science on every side, and the passage from it to historical writing is an easy one; for there comes a moment when the love of fact and the passion for accuracy and precision can no longer find satisfaction in merely imaginary portraiture. In this particular the history of Mérimée's personal career as an author resembles the history of the Romantic School; he reflects a great movement on a small scale. For in France as well as in Germany, scientific criticism and historical research followed in the path which the literary criticism of the Romanticists had opened up for imaginative literature. When the poets had done with the foreign and medieval material, the scientists began to deal with it in the spirit which poetry had evoked.

As Mérimée's fiction was always in a manner the offspring of his researches, as many of his stories, such as _Carmen, La Vénus d'Ille_, and _Lokis_, are even sportively set in a framework of archæological or philological investigation, it was natural enough that science should gradually make its way from the outside to the heart of his work. In his position as a scientific man lies the last great difference between him and Beyle. Mérimée is not a scientist of the first rank; he has the second-class qualities of thoroughness and trustworthiness, but lacks the spark of inspiration which he possesses as an author. He has, however, the distinctive sign of the true man of science; he never speaks of what he does not understand; he never indulges in random conjectures or ingenious paradoxes; he progresses step by step. At times he may be dry and wooden, but he never makes a mistake.

If Mérimée is the sober, uninspired man of science, Beyle is the inspired scientific dilettante, with all the signs of genius, but also all the signs of dilettantism. His books teem with daring assertions, indemonstrable conjectures, theories regarding nations with whose languages he was unfamiliar, amateurish paradoxes like that which places Werner's _Luther_ in the forefront of German drama. His essays are as entertaining and suggestive as Mérimée's are tiresome and dry; but Mérimée's conclusions are founded upon rock, Beyle's too often built upon sand.

Thus, both as the scientist and the author, Mérimée marks an advance upon Beyle. He is a man of a narrower and less fertile mind; but the contents of his mind are infinitely better ordered, and he is master of a highly perfected artistic style.

[1] "Souvent vous ne me semblez pas assez _délicatement tender_; or il faut cela dans un roman pour me toucher."

[2] _Lettres à une inconnue_, i. 72.

XXIII

MÉRIMÉE

Mérimée's earliest attitude as the dramatist and novelist is an attitude of literary aggressiveness. Although by nature an observer, he does not, like Balzac, set himself the task of representing, in all its breadth, the world he sees around him; neither is it his ambition that posterity shall study in his works the customs and ideas of his period; he desires to challenge a prevailing taste; and with the object of irritating and rousing his fellow-countrymen, he generally chooses themes which have as little connection as possible with modern civilised society.

It was natural that his hostility should first vent itself upon literary sentimentality. The shy, proud youth was penetrated with the idea that it is the duty of the author to communicate his ideas to the public, but that his dignity as a man requires him to keep his feelings to himself. But in this opinion he received no support from the French literary men of the day. Ever since Rousseau's novels, not to mention his _Confessions_, had prepared the way for orgies of half-real, half-fictitious emotion and a communicativeness which kept back nothing, a series of authors, from Chateaubriand to Lamartine and Sainte-Beuve, had dissected themselves for the entertainment of the public, initiated their readers into the secrets of their hearts, in short, unreservedly satisfied the low curiosity of the vulgar herd. And with what aim? To win its sympathy. Mérimée was far too proud to desire it. "For Heaven's sake no confessions!" he says to himself the first time he puts pen to paper. And to avoid all risk of becoming sentimental or morbid, he conceals himself completely behind the characters he describes, allows them and their destinies free play, and never expresses his opinion of their conduct. Beyle, who had quite as strong an aversion for sentimentality, was unable to refrain from putting in his word; Mérimée makes himself invisible, inaudible, untraceable. But his temperament makes it impossible for him to do this in any other way than by confining himself to the representation of intense, determined characters, who follow their impulses without much deliberation or talk, are carried away by their passions, and suddenly, unexpectedly, proceed to action. "To me," says Mérimée's South American sea-captain in _La Famille Carvajal_, "all these tragedy heroes are phlegmatic, passionless philosophers. If one of them kills his rival in a duel or any other manner, remorse overpowers him immediately and makes him as soft as a woollen mitten. I have seen twenty-seven years' service, I have killed forty-one Spaniards, and I don't know what such a feeling is.... Characters, emotions, actions--everything seems unnatural to us when we read these plays aloud in the mess-room. They are all princes, who vow that they are madly in love, and dare not so much as touch the tips of their mistresses' fingers, but keep these ladies a boat's hook length off. We sailors go to work more boldly in such matters."

Mérimée does not write for the "bourgeois," into whose eyes the slightest emotion brings tears; he addresses himself to people of stronger nerves, who require more violent shocks to move them. Therefore away with the regulation lengthy introductions, and all the preparations and omens of tragedy! Human beings with blood in their veins do not deliberate so long; and nervous weakness is not an interesting spectacle to any but the neurotic. If a woman loves, what can be more natural than that she should say so, and, regardless of every other consideration, make the intervals between the first avowal, the first kiss, and the first embrace as short as possible? If a man hates with a manly hatred, what more natural than that he should put an end to his torment and his enemy's life with a stab or a shot? It is, undoubtedly, natural, when the race which the author chooses to depict is not an effete, but a vigorous one; and this is the explanation of Mérimée's tendency to give to every feeling the character of a fierce passion, to dwell upon what is cruel and hard, to make death--not tragedy death, but real death, in all its cold, hard pitilessness--the dénouement of every tale which he sends out from his artist's workshop. It explains what may be summed up in a word as _l'atroce_ in his writings.

He is familiar with death. If the old designations were applicable in his case, we should call him a great tragic author; but Mérimée does not believe in what dogmatic upholders of Aristotelian principles call tragic expiation. Concerning the representation of death in the works of other authors he seems to say with Schiller:

"Aber der Tod, Ihr Herrn, ist so ästhetisch doch nicht."

Deepest down in his soul lies the love of strength. But he does not, like Balzac, love strength in the shape of strong desire, strong passions; he loves it in the form of original force of character and of stirring, decisive event; and therefore he naturally begins by feeling and reproducing the poetry of decisive event, long before he is mature enough to represent that of simple, strong character. Of all events, death is the most decisive; and hence it is that he falls in love with death--not, be it observed, with death as it is conceived of by spiritualists and believers, not with death as a purifying passage to another existence, but as a violent, sudden, bloody termination. Like Sièyes, he is for _la mort sans phrase_.

The idea not unnaturally suggests itself that a certain want of feeling, a certain tendency to cruelty, in Mérimée the man, probably lay at the root of this literary hard-heartedness. It can, however, almost be proved from direct assertions of his own, that the most extravagant manifestations of the quality were originally called forth by his strong aversion to sentimentality in literature. In his essay on the friend of his youth, Victor Jacquemont, we come upon the following passage: "I have never known a more truly feeling heart than Jacquemon's. His was a loving, tender nature; but he took as much pains to conceal his sensibility as others do to dissimulate their evil inclinations. In our youth we had been repelled by the false sentiment of Rousseau and his imitators, and the result in our case was the usual one--an exaggerated reaction. We wished to be strong, and therefore we jeered at sentimentality."

It is, nevertheless, self-evident that this hatred of the pathetic, which contrasts so strongly with the extreme sentimentality of most of Mérimée's youthful contemporaries, and this predilection for the violent and the savage, were not purely and simply products of a spirit of contradiction. To gauge the strength of the predilection we have but to glance at the history of Mérimée's development: in another man we should expect to see such a feeling checked in its first outbreaks by the lighter, brighter mood of youth, and tempered in age by waning vigour. But such was not the case with Mérimée. His love of violent solutions is of the same age as his love of pen and ink, and the horrors and terrors with which in the works of his mature manhood his genius produces a tragic effect, become in those of his old age merely gloomy and repulsive.

In the _Théâtre de Clara Gazul_, Mérimée's first book, published when he was only twenty-two, it is amusing to observe the conflict of youth with the inveterate natural bias towards gloom and violence. Read superficially, the book produces the effect of a tolerably serious work. Professing to be written in the Spanish style, it nevertheless differs in many essential particulars from Spanish dramatic literature. The plays of which it is composed have no mutual resemblance; they do not, like the mantle-and-dagger tragedies, monotonously repeat the same types of character and the same situations, produced by jealousy and a touchy sense of honour; nor do they accept the extremely conventional ideas of morality current in the tragedies in question. Mérimée's characters have distinctly defined individualities; and instead of exhibiting superhuman self-control and resignation, they are carried blindly away by their passions and desires. Still less resemblance is there between these plays of Mérimée's and the great series of romantic and fantastic dramas (some of them breathing the spirit of Catholicism, others lacking it) in which Calderon reaches the zenith of his productive power and displays all his wealth of colour. It is only with certain heavy Spanish dramas, such as Calderon's _El alcalde de Zalamea, Las tres justicias in una, El medico de su honra, El pintor de su deshonra_, or Moreto's _El valiente justiciero_, that certain of Mérimée's, for example _Inès Mendo_, harmonise in their general tone. Taken as a whole, instead of being what it pretends to be, namely serious, the book is arrogantly wanton and audacious; genuine French frivolity and satire peep out beneath the costume of the Spanish actress. Personages are introduced upon the stage whom, as we are told in the preface to _Une Femme est un Diable_, our nurses taught us to regard with reverence. But the author hopes that "the emancipated Spaniards" will not take this amiss.

_Clara Gazul_ is, then, a merry book; the good lady who wrote it is no prude. But what a strange kind of mirth it is! Amongst its manifestations is the free use of the knife. If we try to find a parallel to it, nothing suggests itself but the sportive springs of a young tiger. Mérimée finds it almost impossible to end without killing all his principal characters, and one sword-thrust succeeds the other almost automatically. But he amuses himself by destroying the illusion directly after the catastrophe; the actors rise, and one of them thanks the audience for their kind attention; the whole thing is turned into a jest.

_Doña Maria._

Help! She is poisoned, poisoned by me. I will see to my own punishment; the convent well is not far off. (_Exit hurriedly._)

_Fray Eugenio_ (_to the audience_).

Do not take it too much amiss that I have caused the death of these two charming young ladies; and graciously excuse the shortcomings of the author.

Thus ends the wild play _L'Occasion_. The wittiest criticism passed on these dramas, and the style in general, is contained in a sentence in Alfred de Musset's _Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet_: "Souvient l'Espagne, avec ses Castillans, qui se coupent la gorge comme on boit un verre d'eau, ses Andalouses qui font plus vite encore un petit métier moins dépeuplant, ses taureaux, ses toréadors, matadors, &c."

It was not in Mérimée's works alone that the Spain of the young Romantic School (to which De Musset himself contributed the pale-faced, brown-necked Andalusian beauty) was so passionate and hasty. But no one took such delight in it all as he. And the themes he chose in his old age are in complete accordance with this taste of his youth.

His last tale, _Lokis_, is the story of a young Lithuanian count of mysterious descent, who from time to time is possessed by, or at least feels that he possesses, the instincts of a wild animal. He goes mad on his wedding-night and kills his bride by biting her throat. The count's character is drawn with delicate skill; the progress of his mental derangement is indicated by a few slight but graphic touches; and Mérimée has evidently enjoyed contrasting this wild young Lithuanian nobleman with a peculiarly worthy and dull German professor (the German of French fiction prior to 1870), a guest in the count's house, who writes every evening to his _fiancée_, Fräulein Weber, and communicates the horrible catastrophe to the reader in one of his letters. But the impression left by this vampire tale is one of disgust mingled with horror. The masterly treatment, the perfect style, the refined manner in which the loathsome subject is dealt with, remind us of the white kid gloves of the headsman. The story is only of interest to us as a proof of the strength retained by one of its author's original tendencies.

Personally characteristic of Mérimée as this tendency undoubtedly was, it is plainly of near kin to a tendency of the whole of that school to which Southey gave the name of the "Satanic." The influence of Byron is unmistakable. By 1830 Frenchmen were thoroughly weary (as Englishmen had been for some time) of the "Immanuelistic" literature of the Reaction. The sceptre of literature had passed from the hands of Lamartine into the hands of Victor Hugo, whose _Orientales_ contain most sanguinary pictures of war and destruction. Lamartine himself, the Seraphic poet in chief, had struck a Satanic note in _La Chute d'un Ange_. And a young poet of Victor Hugo's school was treating gruesome themes in short, artistically finished stories at the same time as Mérimée, and entirely uninfluenced by him. I allude to Petrus Borel, who died poor and unknown. His _Dina, la belle Juive_, will bear comparison with any of Mérimée's tales of horror. Poor Borel was an enthusiast, an ardent moralist, who, concealing his fervour beneath his realism, desired to inspire indignation with the deeds of violence he described. The refined, polished Mérimée is often only pretending to be bloodthirsty because it amuses him to frighten his readers, especially those of the female sex. But in both cases we have also the genuine Romantic defiance of the "bourgeois."

Mérimée has not escaped unpunished for thus yielding up his talent to the service of literary bloodthirstiness. Though he avoided his Nemesis during his lifetime, she overtook him after death. When De Loménie pronounced the customary panegyric in the Académie Française, he concluded by expressing the opinion that what was wanting in Mérimée's life was the peace and joy of the domestic hearth--that he would have been happier as the father of a family, "with four or five children to bring up." And when his friend, Countess Lise Przezdzieska, published, under the title of _Lettres à une autre inconnue_, a series of his letters to her which were certainly never intended for publication, she devoted the proceeds of her book to the payment of masses for the soul of her anti-Catholic friend.

XXIV

MÉRIMÉE

At the time when Mérimée made his literary début in the disguise of a Spaniard, the Classic drama had reached the stage when the personages of a play had all, like the pieces on a chessboard, their prescribed duties and moves. There were the stereotyped king, tyrant, princess, conspirators, &c. It mattered not whether the queen who had killed her husband was called Semiramis, Clytemnestra, Johanna of Naples, or Mary Stuart, whether the lawgiver's name was Minos or Peter the Great or Cromwell--their words and actions, thoughts and feelings, were always the same. A young poet of the Classic School, who had treated a subject from Spanish history in a manner which was objected to by the censor, got out of the difficulty by transferring the action of his play with a stroke of the pen from Barcelona to Babylon, and from the sixteenth century to the days before the Flood. "Babylone" had the same number of syllables and rhymed with the same words as "Barcelone," and scarcely any other alteration was necessary.[1] The Spain which Mérimée, in the guise of Clara Gazul, shows to his readers, is not the country in which this Barcelona was situated. Nor does he rest content with masquerading as a Spanish lady. The genuine Romanticist, he regards it as the main task of the author to represent the manners and morals of different ages and countries without a touch of varnish or whitewash, bringing out distinctly and strongly what in those days was called "local colour." He therefore transforms himself into an inhabitant of the most dissimilar countries, in all different stages of civilisation. He is in imagination a Moor, a negro, a South American, an Illyrian, a gipsy, a Cossack. But all things remote and foreign do not possess an equal degree of attraction for him. Indeed he is actually repelled by culture and polish. As Théophile Gautier preferred to visit each country at the season of year when its climate is most characteristic--Africa in summer, Russia in winter--so Mérimée preferred imaginary excursions to the regions whose inhabitants have the least regard for human life, the strongest passions, the wildest and most determined characters, and the most violent original prejudices. He does not confine himself to the present. He is keenly interested in the barbarities of the peasant wars of the Middle Ages; he conjures up the age of Charles IX., and writes a masterly account of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He is as familiar with fourteenth-century Spain and seventeenth-century Russia as with ancient France and ancient Rome. As the archaeologist and historian he has examined inscriptions and monuments, buildings, ornaments, and weapons, and has studied documents and manuscripts in many languages of which the ordinary literary man knows nothing. This gives his descriptions a truthfulness which was uncommon in his day.

It is his passion for strength in its primitive nakedness which endows him with the historical sense. Hence the heroes of his historical works are always the wildest and most daring characters--Sulla, Catilina, Don Pedro the Cruel of Castile, the first pseudo-Demetrius, &c, &c. His conscientious accuracy and his distrust of the part played by imagination in science rob his historical works proper of life (he is most successful in _Don Pedro I._ and _Épisode de l'Histoire de la Russie_); but he at once imparts life to any period which he treats as the imaginative artist. After Vitet had shown, in his masterly _Scènes historiques_, how real history can be presented in a free dramatic rendering, Mérimée gave France, in _La Jaquerie_, the picture of a much earlier and more savage age than that which his forerunner and teacher had subjected to poetic treatment. He aptly indicates the spirit of his work in the ironically applied speech of Molière's Mascarille, which he affixes to it as motto: "C'est mon talent particulier, et je travaille à mettre en madrigaux toute l'histoire romaine." He has entered with wonderful understanding into the customs and follies, views and prejudices, which constituted the spirit of that far-off age. Let us take one character as an instance--Isabella, daughter of the Baron d'Apremont, a typical high-minded, amiable young girl of the feudal period. Her heart is pure, her morals are of the strictest, she is merciful to the suffering and the vanquished. To the brave and faithful man-at-arms who goes through fire and water for her sake she is very gracious; she begs her father to give her this serf, and in gratitude to him for having saved her life she makes him her equerry; she even embroiders him a purse. But he dares to love her; and then everything is at an end. She overwhelms him with contemptuous reproaches, repulses him with scorn, and considers herself degraded by his having dared to lift up his eyes to her. Compare this lady with one of Ingemann's noble maidens; imagine how the latter, scorning all the prejudices of her day, would have valued the noble heart which beat under the simple jerkin; and note the difference between an idealistic and a bold, historically accurate representation of a coarse and vigorous age. One more example--the scene which takes place at night in front of a lonely hut in the forest, to which the brutal English freebooter-chief, Siward, has conveyed Isabella, whom he has carried off after the assault in which her father has been killed. The whole is nothing but the conversation of two troopers who are holding the saddled horses at the door, and pass the time in talking of the act of violence which is being committed within. But the impression produced is so vivid that it stamps on our minds a picture of the whole age. It is, however, a fault in this work, that the author, in his aversion for sentimentality, has crowded together so many cruel and horrible actions, that in the general savagery the differences which undoubtedly existed then, as now, between society as a whole and single individuals, are overlooked.

The separate personages in his _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._ stand out much more clearly from the background. They have strongly marked characteristics without on that account being modern (except perhaps George Mergy); indeed Mérimée has bestowed such attention on details that each chapter in its graphic coherence forms a little whole, and the work in its entirety produces the effect of a mosaic design of character portraits and pictures of society. In the last of his semi-historical works, _Les Débuts d'un Aventurier_, we observe that what attracts him in the false Demetrius is the primitive cunning, the rough, vigorous Cossack character, and not those mental conflicts, ensuing on the fraud, which fascinated Schiller. Mérimée may be said to leave off where Schiller begins. The manners and customs of a definite group of human beings at a definite period are of far more interest to him than what these human beings have in common with universal humanity; hence here as elsewhere in his historical fiction, it is not the intellectual or emotional side of life which he shows us, but its character side--the results of strong, concentrated will-power. When he writes of modern times, he describes gipsy or brigand life, as in _Carmen_, a vendetta, as in _Colomba_, a horrible murder on the wedding-night, as in _La Vénus d'Ille_ and _Lokis_. Or if he lays his plot within the pale of modern society proper, he either describes peculiarities of those classes which labour under social disadvantages--the bold language and irregular ideas of young ballet-dancers and actresses, the erotic temptations of Catholic priests; or contents himself with anything in the life of the upper classes that means character--a passionate love-affair terminated by a duel, a case of adultery which leads to the suicide of one of the parties concerned, any thoroughly scandalous story which it delights him to cast in the teeth of the effete, hypocritical society of the day. He feels himself in his element amidst merciless strokes of fate, terrible vicissitudes, violent passions which, when they are fortunate, override the conventions of society, and when unfortunate, are called crimes. Hence it was that modern Russian literature was so sympathetic to him. The works of Pushkin which he translated, _La dame de Pique_ and _Les Bohémiens_, have themes closely akin to those which he treated himself.

Two characteristic feelings lie at the root of Mérimée's disinclination to apprehend and treat the trenchant catastrophes in human life as tragic catastrophes; the one is a kind of fear that the trenchancy which he loves will lose its edge by the introduction of a reconciling element; the other is his disbelief in a greater, comprehensive whole, of which the single incident forms a part. When he produces, as he at times does, a genuinely tragic effect, it happens almost against his will, and is the result of a more mature and profound understanding of the human soul, and of a sympathy, growing with his growing experience of life, for cases in which there is a necessary connection between character and destiny. In his romance of the days of Charles IX., when he makes the one brother fall by the hand of the other, he, the scorner of the symbolic, as a matter of fact represents all the folly and horror of the religious and civil war in one melodramatically tragic, symbolical picture. And when, in the little tale _La Partie de Trictrac_, the unfortunate officer who has cheated on one solitary occasion becomes so miserable in the consciousness of his shame that he is driven to commit suicide, the story imperceptibly assumes the character of a tragedy of honour.

In another little work of art, _La double Méprise_, Mérimée endeavours to represent the web of chance events, of conflicting and wrongly comprehended instincts, which make life so meaningless, and even what is saddest as foolish as it is sad and hideous; but as he unfolds the inner history of the painful incident, and as we by degrees learn that that which seemed foolish was inevitable, it ceases to be foolish. The gist of the story is that a young married woman, Julie de Chaverny, whose dissatisfaction with her married life is developing into actual unhappiness, is led by a chain of ideas and emotions, slight in themselves, but welded together like links of iron, to give herself to a man whom she in reality does not love, and then to take her own life. Mérimée's art displays itself in this case in the calm assurance with which he takes his reader's hand and leads him through the labyrinth of all these ideas and emotions to a climax which is as inevitable as it is illogical. Two inimitable passages are the conversation in which Darcy arouses Julie's enthusiastic admiration by the modesty and humour with which he unwillingly recounts his own gallant deeds, and the conversation in the carriage, during which every utterance of Julie's, her resistance even more than her confessions, brings her nearer to her fall. The situation is summed up in the following classic sentence, prepared for by everything that has gone before: "The unfortunate woman believed at this moment in all sincerity that she had always loved Darcy; that she had felt the same ardent attachment to him during all the six years of his absence as she did at that instant." Mérimée understood what a power, what a tragic motive force in human life, inevitable illusion or self-deception is. It is the source to which not only half of human happiness, but a considerable proportion of human misery may be traced.

But Mérimée approaches nearer than this to tragedy proper, where the fateful element sinks deep into the character, mingling with it as a poison mingles with the blood. Think of _Carmen_. From the day of José's first meeting with Carmen, the gipsy girl, the course of his life is changed; and he, the honest, good-hearted man, becomes of inevitable necessity, for her sake, a robber and a murderer. Nay, the author, whose aim as a young Romanticist was to hold as far aloof as possible from the poets who wrote tragedy in the ancient Greek style, approaches, in _Colomba_, with his modern Corsican heroine, nearer to Greek tragedy than any of his fellow-countrymen who hymned the fate of one or other of "Agamemnon's imperishable race." Not without reason has Colomba been compared to Elektra. Like Elektra, she broods, to the exclusion of every other thought, on the unavenged death of her father; like Elektra, she incites her brother to take a bloody revenge; and she is even less of the stereotyped tragedy heroine than Sophocles' young girl, for, clad though she is in the steel panoply of appalling prejudices, she bears herself simply and lovably. She is at once bloodthirsty and childlike, hard-hearted and girlish; a fierce grace is her characteristic trait. It is easy for us now to see how much more nearly akin this fresh, vigorous daughter of a little southern island race is to the old Greek female characters than are all those princesses who walked the French stage in buskins, and borrowed the names of Elektra, Antigone, or Iphigenia. But she is perhaps still more nearly related to the heathen daughters of a far-away northern isle, the women of the Icelandic sagas, who brood with such passionate obstinacy over their family feuds, and force the unwilling men to take blood for blood.

In this same _Colomba_, which is Mérimée's most famous work, Romantic "local colouring" celebrates its most signal triumph. The story is pervaded by the genuine aroma of Bonaparte's native isle, and breathes the genuine Corsican spirit. As a proof of the fidelity with which Corsican customs are reproduced, as well as of the popularity of the book, it may be mentioned that when Mérimée was waiting in court to hear the verdict in the Libri case, a Corsican ex-bandit came forward from among the audience and quietly offered, in case of the verdict being given against him, to revenge him by assassinating the president of the court. Better evidence of the correctness of Mérimée's colouring could hardly be required. But Mérimée would not have been Mérimée if he had not (at the very time when he was publishing _Colomba_) saved his reputation as the enemy of all theories by making merry over this same much-talked-of "local colouring." In the preface, written in 1840, to the second edition of _La Guzla_, his collection of fictitious Illyrian popular songs and ballads, he tells that, "in the year of grace 1827," he was a Romanticist with an enthusiasm for local colour, nay, the firm belief that without it there was no salvation. By local colouring he and his comrades meant what in the seventeenth century went by the name of "manners" (_mœurs_); but they were very proud of their word, and imagined themselves to be the inventors of the thing as well as the word. His devotion to local colouring inspired him with the desire to visit Illyria; want of money was the chief obstacle to his carrying out his wish; the idea occurred to him to write a description of his travels in anticipation and pay for the tour with the profits of his book; but he gave up this bold plan, and instead manufactured, with the assistance of a guide-book and the knowledge "of five or six Slavonic words," a collection of "ballads translated from the Illyrian." Everyone was deceived.[2] A German savant of the name of Gerhardt actually translated _Guzla_ (along with two other volumes of Slavonic poetry) into German, and this, moreover, in the original metre, which he had been able to trace in the French translator's prose. After Mérimée had thus discovered how easily "local colouring" may be obtained, he forgave Racine and the Classicists their lack of it.

We are conscious, under all this witty pleasantry, of the distinguished author's vexation with himself for having borne a banner, belonged to a party, even though it was only in literature and as a youth. And the preface, moreover, does not tell the exact truth; for Mérimée's Illyrian prose ballads, though by no means remarkably good in other respects, are distinctly the product of intelligent and careful study, and accurately reproduce the style of Slavonic popular poetry. But Mérimée could never write of himself without self-depreciation. His prefaces, when he on a rare occasion condescends to enter into direct relations with the public by means of a preface, are distinguished by a nonchalant, apathetic humility, a manner which isolates the man who assumes it more completely than the most exaggerated self-assertion.

[1] Guizot: _Shakespeare et son temps_, 294.

[2] Goethe alone publicly proclaimed Mérimée to be the author of the Illyrian poems. In one of his letters Mérimée makes some not unreasonably caustic remarks on the explanation given by the great poet of his divination of the personality concealed under the pseudonym _Hyacinth Maglanovitch_: "It occurred to us that the word Guzla lay concealed in the word Gazul." The fact was that Mérimée, who, like all the other young Romanticists, courted Goethe's favour, had sent him the book along with a letter confiding the secret of its authorship.

XXV

MÉRIMÉE

The stern or satirical reserve of Mérimée's style is most noticeable in the works which he wrote in his official capacity, in his brief descriptions of French historical monuments, crowded with technical expressions (_Notes sur le Midi de la France_, &c.) Not a word about himself, not a single personal impression of travel, not one remark addressed to the uninitiated! What a satisfaction there lay in disappointing all the critics who were lying in wait to detect the dilettante and novel-writer in the inspector of historical monuments!

Reserve is also apparent in the love of mystification displayed by the author of _Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul_ and the Illyrian ballads. We are reminded of Beyle here, though the tendency took a somewhat different form in his case. Mérimée's pseudonymity was of short duration, but whilst it lasted it was impenetrable. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to send his readers on a wild-goose chase. He neglected nothing that could give an appearance of authenticity to his pseudonyms. He supplied his works not only with biographies, but with portraits of their supposed authors. To complete the jest, he prefixed to the first edition of _Clara Gazul_ an engraved portrait of himself dressed as a Spanish lady, in a low-necked dress, with a lace mantilla thrown over his head.

He who misleads by keeping silence is obliged sooner or later to speak, and the mystifier of the public is in the end compelled to admit it into his confidence and bear its criticism. But there is a more impenetrable kind of armour than either silence or mystification, namely irony, and in it Mérimée, like Beyle, clad himself.

There was a satirical vein in his writing from the first; for his ardent admiration for primitive strength of character naturally involved contempt for phrasemongers. Such a play as _Les Mécontents_, for instance, contains as bitter a satire as ever was penned upon drawing-room revolutionists. A set of Royalist provincial noblemen, old imbeciles whose one passion is to hear themselves speak, concoct a conspiracy against the First Empire; they determine to distribute inflammatory pamphlets, they arrange secret signals, draw up plans of procedure, and quarrel for the presidency at their meetings, but disperse incontinently at the mere sight of a gendarme. A play of much later date, _Les deux Héritages ou Don Quichotte_ (which probably served Émile Augier as a model for some of his dramas), contains an analogous satire upon social and religious hypocrisy, political humbug, the cold, calculating, unchivalrous spirit of a youthful generation, comparing himself with which Mérimée must have been tempted to call himself an idealist and enthusiast.

But in these dramatic works, the faulty construction of which is apparent even to the reader, the irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is absent. In them he lays on the colour too thickly; it is as the novelist that he really excels. Far more delicate than the irony of his dramas is, for instance, that of the charming little story _L'abbé Aubain_, a work which proves the versatility of Mérimée's talent, for in it he writes almost like Edmond About, only with much greater elegance. _L'abbé Aubain_ is a short series of letters, some of them written by a lady who supposes herself to be beloved by a young abbé, the rest by the abbé, who jests constrainedly on the subject of the lady's attachment to him. We make the acquaintance of two weak, refined characters, who lie to each other, to themselves, and to the world, and whose little dainty, easy-going passions and counterfeit self-control are the subject of the silent satire of the author.

In a story of this kind there is no narrator; therefore we are no more conscious than in the plays that the author is suppressing himself. The form of irony peculiarly characteristic of Mérimée is most plainly observable where we have a narrator, but know nothing of him except that he has no share in the emotions he describes. Mérimée's method, which is determined by his natural reserve, is to increase the effect of the story he is telling by an irony betraying itself in minute traits; he either with a little curl of the lip allows the touching incidents to speak for themselves, or he exhibits the painful, the revolting, or the passionate, in a frame of cold, indifferent surroundings.

In that little masterpiece, _Le Vase étrusque_, the only one of his stories in which he treats a quite modern theme sympathetically, he tells the story of two young beings who love each other secretly. We hear the young man, who has just returned from a night rendezvous, talking to himself:

"How happy I am!" he keeps on saying to himself. "At last I have found the heart which understands mine! Yes, it is my ideal that I have found--friend and mistress in one.... What character! What passion! ... No, she has never loved before!" And as vanity intrudes itself into every earthly concern, his next thought is: "She is the most beautiful woman in Paris;" and in imagination he retraces all her charms.

The narrative continues in this strain for some time before Mérimée interrupts himself with the remark that a happy lover is almost as tedious as an unhappy one. Then, when the relation between the two lovers has reached its most perfect stage, when Saint-Clair's momentary but fatal fit of jealousy of his beloved's past has resolved itself into a mere nothing, a mere misunderstanding, and we have witnessed a love scene which the most subtly tender of writers could hardly surpass, a scene in which tears of repentance mingle with smiles and kisses, how do we learn, six lines farther on in the story, that everything is at an end, that Saint-Clair was killed the following morning in a duel? We hear of it as we hear of such things in real life:

"Well," said Roquantin to Colonel Beaujeu when he met him at Tartoni's in the evening; "is this news true?"

"Only too true," answered the Colonel, looking very sad.

"Tell me how it happened."

"Simply enough. Saint-Clair told me that he was wrong, but that he would rather be shot by Thémines than make an apology to him. I could not but approve. Thémines wanted to draw lots for the first shot, but Saint-Clair insisted upon his firing first. Thémines fired. I saw Saint-Clair wheel round and then fall, dead. I have more than once seen a soldier, after he had been mortally wounded, turn round in the same curious way before he fell."

"How extraordinary!" said Roquantin. "And Thémines, what did he do?"

"Oh! what every one does on such occasions. He threw his pistol on the ground with an exclamation of regret. He flung it with such force that the trigger broke. _It is an English pistol, a Manton. I don't believe he will find a gunsmith in the whole of Paris who can make him as good a one._"

By describing the sympathy of friends, not in the manner of sentimental authors, but as it expresses itself in real life, Mérimée brings out the passionate sentiment of the relation between the lovers in full force; the neutral tint of the frame enhances the effect of the picture. If the art of icing champagne had not been known before Mérimée's day, he would have invented it.

Let me give one or two more examples of Mérimée's gift of keeping entirely aloof from the emotion which he portrays, and which he excites in the reader. Take the passage in _L'Enlèvement de la Redoute_ which describes the main attack. "We were soon at the foot of the redoubt. The palisades had been shattered and the earth torn up by our balls. The soldiers rushed at these ruins with shouts of: 'Vive l'Empereur!' _which were louder than one would have expected from men who had been shouting so long_." The narrator in this case is not Mérimée himself, but an officer who is relating his first experience of a fight; this officer is, however, near of kin to his creator; he does not share the ardour of the fighting soldiers. Instead of praising their enthusiasm for Napoleon as patriotic or courage-inspiring, he coolly comments upon the strength of their lungs.

It is not at all surprising that this style, this tone, which adds so remarkably to the impression of the reality of the thing described, should have been again and again taken as a sign of the author's want of feeling. As a matter of fact it is no more so than his choice of horrible subjects is a proof of his cruelty. On the contrary, the irony of the style is often only the transparent veil covering compassion and indignation. Study this irony in the little tale _Tamango_, where to the superficial reader the mere choice of subject would be apt to suggest the author's love of the revolting--for what is more horrible than the slave trade and the ill-usage of slaves, or than shipwreck, starvation, and murder? And all this, moreover, told with an ironic smile!

But we feel what the irony signifies when we come upon such a passage as the following:

"The captain, to ratify the bargain, shook hands with the more than half-intoxicated negro chief; and the slaves were immediately delivered to the French sailors, who quickly exchanged the long wooden forks with which the negroes had fettered them, for collars and handcuffs of iron--_a proof of the superiority of European civilization_."

And its real quality is still more distinctly perceptible in the lines which tell of the captain's attempt to make the pretty negress obedient by flogging her:

"With these words the captain went below, sent for Aycha, and tried to console her; but neither caresses nor blows (_for a man loses patience at last_) made the beautiful negress amenable."

The cold composure with which the fact is recognised that such is human nature, and that such things happen, actually heightens the impression of indignation produced by the deed of violence. We do not lay the book aside unmoved. We perceive that what at first seemed coldness, is but the petrified eruption of the inward fire of the artist's soul. We comprehend that an emotion underlies the sober, severe style of these tales, and that it is this emotion which gives them their impressiveness.

Of all Mérimée's stories, _Arsène Guillot_ is the one in which the ironical style of the narrative and a strength of feeling which has freed itself from the bonds of prejudice, are most perfectly fused together. The conventional virtue of the pious fashionable lady is contrasted with the absolute ignorance of the doctrines of Christianity and morality displayed by the poor girl whose own mother has sold her. In a moment of despair Arsène jumps out of the window and breaks her leg and several of her ribs. The action of the story passes in her sick-room. The usual irony in the relation of the events prevents compassion and emotion from overstepping the bounds of artistic moderation. Towards the close, however, in the description of Arsène's death, the heart is permitted to speak unrestrainedly, and its simple language communicates a charm to the dying grisette hardly inferior to that which transfigures De Musset's dying Bernerette. At the very end artistic irony again asserts itself. For the line: "Pauvre Arsène, elle prie _pour nous!_" traced in pencil in a woman's delicate handwriting on Arsène's gravestone, informs us in all its brevity that the austere lady has yielded to the same temptation as the ignorant child, that after Arsène died like a heroine, her patroness inherited her lover. Irony is in this case almost too coarse a word. Expressions are lacking to describe these delicate shades. That faintly ironical pencilled line contains in its six words a Mériméan, that is to say, a laconic, sermon on tolerance.

D'Haussonville has preserved for us some remarks made by Mérimée to Émile Augier on the subject of a little story, _La Chambre bleue_, which the former wrote specially for the Empress, in 1869. They show how this peculiar style of narration, which was originally an unconscious expression of the author's character, in time became a conscious mannerism. Mérimée said: "The story has one great fault, which is due to the fact that in the course of writing it I altered the originally planned ending. As it was my first intention to make the tale end tragically, I _naturally_ began it in a gay tone; then I changed my mind and brought about a cheerful dénouement. I ought to have re-written the first part in a tragic tone, but it was too much trouble; I left it as it was." The method which was originally the stylistic expression of a deeply emotional and very proud soul, became towards the end of the author's life a calculated, excessive use of contrast as a means of producing artistic effect.

XXVI

MÉRIMÉE AND GAUTIER

In a letter, dated 22nd November 1821, Mérimée the painter writes: "I have a big son of eighteen, of whom I should like to make a lawyer. He has such a gift for drawing that, though he has never copied anything, he sketches like a young student." Like many of the other notable French Romanticists, Prosper Mérimée never entirely gave up pictorial art. He painted in water-colours; but it was especially as the draughtsman that he was both indefatigable and gifted. His talent for drawing seems to have been near akin to his gift of literary style.

Prosper Mérimée and Théophile Gautier are the two authors of the generation of 1830 who supplement each other in the matter of style. Mérimée's strength lies in purity of line, Gautier's in glowing colour. Gautier seems to write with a brush rather than with a pen; he loves draperies and effects of light. His exuberant style is Venetian; it is velvet and brocade, which he bestrews with tinsel and spangles. Mérimée's simple, but extremely elegant presentment is in low-toned monochrome; it resembles an etching. His style, however, possesses a quality which no brilliancy of language can surpass--it is transparent; through it we see his vigorous, wild figures and characters as if they were alive. His defiant sharpness of outline reminds us of a painting or etching by Jacques Callot, an artist with whom he has much in common. One of Callot's youths, stepping out briskly with his long leather-sheathed sword dangling by his side, his plumed hat set jauntily on the side of his head, his buff coat fitting closely to his figure, his wide top-boots showing off his strong leg, his shining spurs clanking as he hastens to look on, with proud, defiant mien, at some deed of violence--such a figure would make an admirable frontispiece for a work like the _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._

The final evidence of Mérimée's discreet reserve is to be found in the classically elegant severity of his style. It is smooth and bright as polished steel--not an ornament, not a flower, not a fanciful decoration of any kind; every figure is of beaten metal, accurately proportioned, and as correctly attired as it is life-like. No contemporary French author displayed such aristocratic conservatism in the matter of new words and expressions as Mérimée, not even Charles Nodier. Mérimée used the language which he found ready to his hand, and set his mark upon every sentence he wrote, without employing a single out-of-the-way word, or a single ordinary word in an unusual manner. But he shunned conventional expressions, phrases which throw a veil over the thought, beneath which it looks larger and more important. What especially distinguishes him is his sure touch, his gift of producing with some simple, almost worn-out, word exactly the impression which he desires. Hugo's style is graphic and pathetic, Gautier's (and that of his followers) is sensuous and loaded with imagery--both tried to produce an effect by word-architecture. The masters were justified in the attempt; but the attempts of their imitators and pupils too often recall those magnificent aqueducts which the Romans built with a prodigious expenditure of money and labour to connect one height with another, because they did not know that the force of the water itself was sufficient to raise it from the valley. We admire these mighty erections, but our admiration would have been greater if instead of them we had found simple pipes carried along the ground. The artificial, high-flown expression is like the aqueduct, the simple word that goes straight to the point, like the humble pipe. Mérimée's style, like the pipe, keeps close to the ground, has no useless ornament and no unnecessary loftiness; there is no strength wasted. It is not on this account a style destitute of charm, but it has no other except that of exactly adequate strength. There is not a word too much, and every sentence is in the service of the whole. The old motto, _Ne quid nimis_, might have been the author's device.

Mérimée's aim in evolving such a style evidently was to make his small works of art, by the renunciation of everything superfluous, as invulnerable as possible to the tooth of time. His endeavour reminds us of what is told of Donatello. The characteristic position of that artist's incomparable St. George--arms and hands close to the body--is said to have been chosen after a careful investigation of the condition of the famous statues of antiquity with the view of ascertaining which parts of them had suffered most, and why. In much the same way, Mérimée has tried to insure his works against the change in taste which time brings about, by keeping them free from every ornamental projection, everything in the nature of a digression.

Yet it was not his style which prevailed and became that of the next generation of writers. It was not Mérimée but Gautier, who, as a stylist, was the founder of a school. And I am not of the number of those who regret that a more luxuriant and sensuous style was victorious, and that later French authors have aimed, not merely at making their periods distinct and faultlessly correct, but also at imparting to them, when possible, melody, colour, fragrance. The treatment of language introduced by Gautier, continued by Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, and transmitted by them to Zola and Daudet, has undoubtedly its weak side; and this the most prominent recent master of the descriptive style has not been slow to recognise and acknowledge. Zola himself writes:

"The worst of it is, that I have arrived at the conviction that the jargon of our period, that part of our style which is merely fashionable and must become antiquated, will be known as one of the most atrocious jargons of the French language. It is possible to predict this with almost mathematical certainty. What is most liable to become antiquated is imagery. As long as it is new, the metaphor or simile charms. When it has been employed by one or two generations it becomes a commonplace, a disgrace to the author who employs it. Look at Voltaire, with his dry style, his vigorous period, destitute of adjectives, which relates and does not paint; he remains eternally young. Look at Rousseau, who is our father--look at his imagery, his passionate rhetoric; he has written pages which are perfectly intolerable.... A cheerful fate awaits us who have outbidden Rousseau, us, who on the top of literature pile all the other arts--paint and sing our periods, chisel them as if they were blocks of marble, and require of words to reproduce the perfume of things. All this titillates our nerves: we think it exquisite, perfect. But what will our great-grandchildren say to it? Their ideas will undoubtedly be different, and I am convinced that certain of our works will fill them with astonishment; almost everything in them will be antiquated."

The writer of this melancholy, self-condemnatory criticism obviously goes too far. It is highly probable that our descendants will not think much of our books; but it is not the style in which they are written that will be most to blame for that. Zola's utterance is, however, remarkable as the evidence of a literary colourist in favour of the sober, unimaginative style of which Mérimée is undoubtedly one of the greatest masters in our own century. The best of his works are masterpieces of literature. Seldom, indeed, have short prose pieces been written in such a style. It is the thing itself that stands before us, in clear sunlight, un-obscured by even the faintest mist of sentimentality. It would be unreasonable to regard it as a fault in the author of picturesque prose that his imagery loses by repetition, that he does not stand the ordeal of repeated re-reading; one might just as well blame a composer because his melodies become intolerable by being played on all the street organs. One thing, however, is undeniable--that a severe, unadorned style like Mérimée's survives the works written in the florid style, as surely as the bronze statue survives the blossoming tree.

Curiously enough, Mérimée's contemporaries at first set him down as a naturalist. In some lines in which he naïvely classes him with Calderon, the young Alfred de Musset gives us an excellent idea of the original impression made by his writings. It appeared to his contemporaries that he simply produced casts:

"L'un comme Calderon et comme Mérimée, Incruste un plomb brûlant sur la réalité, Découpe à son flambeau la silhouette humaine, En emporte le moule, et jette sur la scène Le plâtre de la vie avec sa nudité. Pas un coup de ciseau sur la sombre effigie, Rien qu'un masque d'airain, tel que Dieu l'a fondu."

"Not a stroke of the chisel" is comical, as applied to the work of the most energetic stylist of the period; but so much is clear--Alfred de Musset regarded Mérimée as above everything an imitator of nature. This conception was due to a fact which has already been alluded to, namely, that in Romanticism in its earliest stage there was an element of naturalism. The young Romanticists did not at once perceive the gulf between the two. The poetry of the plumed hat and the Toledo blade was undoubtedly more to their taste than the real life which they saw around them; but reality, too, might be represented poetically when there was colour and character in it, and passion and fire and exotic fragrance; and all this it had in Mérimée's books. The germs of naturalism are to be found in Mérimée as they are in the other Romanticists; but in them all the love of art was stronger than the inclination to imitate nature. Mérimée, nevertheless, with his partiality for brutal subjects and his artificial coldness, distinctly prognosticates the tendency of the succeeding literary generation. In Taine's _Vie et Opinions de M. Graindorge_ (1867) we find a remark on the social life of the day, which applies equally to literature: "Depuis dix ans une nuance de brutalité complète l'élégance." We are conscious of it in almost all the most famous writers of the Second Empire--in the younger Dumas, in Flaubert, whom one might call the Mérimée of the next generation, and in Taine himself, who is delighted, like Mérimée, when he has "a fine murder" to describe, and who makes his Graindorge give the reader exact instructions in the most practical method of cutting the throat with a razor.[1]

To-day Mérimée passes for a Classicist. His perspicuous, transparent style, his determined avoidance of lyrical digressions, of metaphor and rhetoric, seem to insure him a place outside the Romantic School. But we have seen how, in a certain sense, all the French Romanticists are at the same time Classicists; and the fact that this is peculiarly observable in Mérimée's case does not give him a position altogether apart from theirs.

When we remember, moreover, that he, as well as Hugo and De Vigny, was influenced by Scott; that there is a distinct trace of Byronism, of the "Satanic," in some of his work; that, sober sceptic as he was, he wrote works (such as _La Vision de Charles XI._) in Hoffmann's style; that he was Beyle's pupil; and that he almost always, in true Romantic fashion, chose foreign, unmodern subjects, we cannot but recognise in the author possessing so many features in common with the French Romanticists, a true child of the age.

Even if we deny him absolute artistic originality, his figure stands out sufficiently from among the gifted literary group of 1830. The others gallop into the lists clad in gaudily-decorated coats of mail, with gilded helmets and waving pennons. He is the Black Knight in the great Romantic tourney.

[1] "Quand Cromwell passe en Irlande, il marque le nombre et la qualité des gens massacrés, et puis c'est tout. Et cependant quels beaux massacres! Quelle occasion pour pénétrer le lecteur de la froide fureur qui poussait les épées des fanatiques!"--Taine: _Essay on Guizot_.

XXVII

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

On a certain day in the beginning of January 1830, three young men might have been seen making their way along a newly paved road in the neighbourhood of the Champs Élysées in Paris, towards a solitary house, the first of a future street. One of them, a fair-haired youth of nineteen, with a slight stoop and a quick, bird-like walk, and with manuscripts sticking out of all his pockets, was the amiable, refined fantast, Gérard de Nerval, a poet whose chief occupation it was to run himself off his legs in the service of his friends. By his side walked, with stately bearing and Castilian gravity of countenance, the pale, black-bearded Petrus Borel, who as the eldest (already twenty-two) was the central figure of a group of young art enthusiasts. A little behind followed, with lagging steps and much inward perturbation, an olive-complexioned, regular-featured, handsome young fellow of eighteen, whom his two friends had promised to introduce to the master of the lonely house, Victor Hugo, in whose home they themselves were welcome guests, a piece of good fortune envied them by many.

Twice did young Gautier mount the steps behind De Nerval and Borel as if his shoes were weighted with lead. He was hardly able to breathe; the cold sweat stood on his brow, and he could hear the beating of his heart. Each time they reached the door and one of the others was about to ring the bell, he turned and rushed down again, pursued by his shouting, laughing companions. The third attempt was successful, as in the fairy tales. The young man, feeling as if his legs would hardly bear him, had just sat down for an instant on the top step to recover himself, when the door opened, and in a stream of light like that which forms the halo round Phœbus Apollo, Victor Hugo himself in all his honour and glory stood revealed to their gaze against the dark background of the stair, attired in a very ordinary black coat and grey trousers, and as carefully shaved as any common philistine. He smiled at the sight of the agitated youth, but did not seem much surprised; for he was accustomed to seeing young poets and painters blush, and turn pale, and stammer on his threshold. He was evidently about to walk out into the street like an ordinary mortal, which was a greater surprise to Gautier than it would have been to see him drive through the town on a triumphal car drawn by five white horses, with a goddess of victory holding a golden crown over his head. But he turned back to his study with the young men, and Théophile Gautier listened in silence to the conversation which followed; he was too embarrassed to take part in it, but it marked an epoch in his existence; from that hour till the day of his death he was Hugo's sworn adherent, ardent admirer, grateful pupil, and unwearied panegyrist. Never, not even momentarily, not even during separation lasting for years and the intellectual separation due to the difference in their political views, did he forget to be absolutely loyal to the man whom at this first meeting he in his heart called lord and master.

The young men's call was made in connection with the first performance of _Hernani_ at the Théâtre Français. They came to fetch some packets of the little square red tickets, with "Hierro" printed on them. Gautier, who had read _Les Orientales_, was enthusiastic on the subject of the play, without having read it.

In the part of Paris where he lodged he had long been noted for his eccentricities. In every possible way he bade scornful defiance to the ordinary bourgeois, that personage detested above all others by the young Romanticists. He usually wore a black velvet jacket and yellow shoes, and went about bareheaded, with a parasol or an umbrella, his long, dark brown hair, which suited his olive complexion admirably, hanging down almost to his waist. Cigar in mouth, erect and youthfully dignified, he strolled along, utterly regardless of the contemptuous glances of the scandalised citizens or the jeers of the street boys.

But on the occasion of the first performance of _Hernani_, he felt it incumbent on him to prepare something more striking. He ordered "the red waistcoat," that waistcoat which was to become a historic garment. Its red was not the red which the revolutionists chose as their symbol, and which politicians think of when the colour is named; no, it was the flaming red which emblematised the hatred of the young artists of the period for grey. The colour tones of a particular piece of scarlet satin had fascinated the young painter and poet. He looked at it in the way we can imagine Veronese looking at a piece of silken stuff. When he had obtained possession of the treasure, he sent for his tailor and explained to him that of this material a waistcoat was to be made--yes, a waistcoat. It was to be shaped like a cuirass, to be full across the chest, and fasten at the back. "If," writes Gautier, "you were to pick out from a set of school drawing copies, representing the different expressions of the human countenance, one of those labelled _Amazement_, you would have an idea of the look upon the horror-stricken tailor's face." "But such a waistcoat is not fashionable, sir." "It will be--as soon as I have worn it." "But it is a style I know nothing about; it is more like a part of a theatrical costume than of a gentleman's ordinary dress; I am afraid of spoiling the stuff." "I shall give you a linen pattern, designed, cut out, and tacked together by myself." The waistcoat was made; and on that famous and stormy evening at the theatre, Gautier displayed perfect dignity and indifference when the philistines pointed him out to each other, and made him the target of all their opera-glasses. His name became inextricably connected with the legend of the red waistcoat, although he only wore it that one evening. For long little was known about him beyond the fact that he had worn it (I, myself, when in Paris in 1867, met people who believed that he wore it still); and it shines to this day in the history of French literature, a naïve symbol of the love of brightness and colour in life which distinguished that enthusiastic group of youths.

But the essentially luminous and flamboyant was art, pure art; and seldom has the boundless love of art as art taken such entire possession of a heart as it did of Gautier's. He was animated by it all his life, but in his youth he felt it with all the pleasures it brings, all the admiration it arouses, all the courage it imparts, and all the hatred it inspires.

It was this love which made the man who was himself a master, a sincerely, nobly modest admirer of other artists. He was Hugo's servant, Balzac's self-sacrificing friend. He was a poet, but admiration made him a critic; and to no one did a well-constructed line, a luminous word, a picturesque expression, or a bold flight of imagination give more pleasure. He was a painter before he became an author; and no one meted out such ample recognition as he to the powerful, if somewhat blundering, originality which produced that glory of colour in Delacroix's pictures, which blinds one to their deficiencies in the matter of drawing. With what passionate disapproval he fell upon Scribe's platitudes and Delavigne's cautious improvements, upon stupid vaudevilles and passionless tragedies--this man who worshipped style, and who infinitely preferred a performance at the circus to a bourgeois comedy at the Gymnase Theatre! At the circus, where they only shouted Hop! and Hé! they could not possibly commit all Scribe's sins against syntax and metre. With what fury he fell upon Delaroche when the latter (whose real talent developed late) charmed the half-educated with his laboured, highly finished representations of mediæval subjects, and taught them to prefer his Middle Ages to the Middle Ages of Hugo and Delacroix! To rank cautious talent above reckless, alarming genius was true sacrilege in Gautier's eyes; and the favour which these men of mere talent found in the eyes of the public roused in him a perfectly tiger-like fury. He confessed at a later period that he could have eaten Delaroche raw with the greatest of pleasure.

Art for art's sake! Art as its own end and aim! _L'art pour l'art!_ This was Gautier's motto. And that he loved art for its own sake means (as it would mean in the case of anything else) that he loved it without any regard to its so-called morality or immorality, patriotic or unpatriotic tendency, utility or inutility.

Gautier's worship of art indicates an onward step in the development of Romanticism. In its first stage the literary renaissance was devotion to Catholicism and the old monarchy. When the movement, with Hugo at its head, made its second great advance, it undoubtedly entered upon the stage of enthusiasm for art as art; but in the case of the majority the step was an unconscious one; their enthusiasm for art concealed itself under enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, or for the sixteenth century, or for strength of passion, or for local colouring. Gautier alone was fully conscious of the principle which underlay all these manifestations; hence his name is synonymous with that phase of the Romantic movement during which poetry asserts its rights. If we were to judge by certain of Victor Hugo's prefaces (the preface to _Les Orientales_, for instance), it might seem as if Hugo's poetry, neglecting every other ideal, had no aim but the attainment of perfect liberty for itself; but Hugo was far too much of the agitator by nature to regard this struggle, this endeavour, as more than a preliminary step. It was reserved for the disciple whom the master loved best, to regard this stage as the final one. To Gautier, as to the German Romanticists, the combat of Romanticism with utilitarianism was equivalent to a proclamation of the absolute independence of art.

Théophile Gautier was born at Tarbes, in the south of France, on the 30th of August 1811. He came of a family of good standing and pronounced Royalist principles. Like Hugo and Dumas, he was descended from a brave officer. Hugo's father, as major in Napoleon's army in Italy, fought with Fra Diavolo, and as general and governor of a Spanish province under Joseph, with the brave Spanish rebels. Dumas' father was an athlete, who, according to tradition (strictly speaking, according to the younger Dumas), could crush a horse to death between his legs and bite through a helmet, and who held the bridge of Brixen alone against an advanced guard of twenty men. Gautier's grandfather won renown by being the first in the attack on Bergen-op-Zoom. He was a man of colossal strength and gigantic proportions, who lived in the open air, hunted every day, and was never seen without his gun, which he would fire into the air again and again if anything put him into specially good spirits. He lived to be a hundred. Théophile's father, who also lived to a great age, displayed his inherited vigour chiefly in intellectual matters. He was a well-educated man of many and varied acquirements. It speaks well for his literary taste and his freedom from prejudice, that he greatly admired the preface to _Cromwell_, and that he approved of his son's poetic tendencies; indeed, he was so delighted with the latter's audacious novel, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, that, whilst the book was being written, he often locked the young man into his room with the words: "You don't come out until you have written some pages of _Maupin_." Théophile's mother, a stately beauty, who is said to have had Bourbon blood in her veins, united with his father in spoiling and worshipping the son whom nature had so bountifully endowed. He was one of those beings who are created to be admired and beloved, not only by their relatives and friends, but by every one--one of those on whom a pet-name is bestowed by a whole generation; for he was a great artist and a great child. How significant is the abbreviation, Théo, by which he is alluded to hundreds of times in contemporary literature! It was the familiarity of admiration which thus shortened his name.

To the particulars of his pedigree which seem to explain his character, another must be added, namely, that there was undoubtedly some Eastern blood in the family. This is interesting because, like the negro strain which accounts for much of the violence and force in the writings of Dumas the elder and of Pushkin, it is a physiological explanation of the Oriental impress which became observable in Gautier's personality and works as years went on. He was intended by nature to wear a fez or a turban, and to move slowly and with dignity, and it was natural that he should end by displaying as little emotion as possible in his works.

Théophile Gautier left the south of France and came to live in Paris as quite a child. It is a sign of the early development of his character, that at school he preferred the authors who wrote before or after the so-called Golden Age of their literatures to the classic and correct writers. In French literature his favourite authors were Villon and Rabelais; Corneille and Racine made little impression on him. In Latin literature he read with eager enjoyment only the poets and prose authors of the decadence--Claudian, Martial, Petronius, and Apuleius; these he imitated in his Latin verses in every possible metre; upon Cicero and Quintilian he looked down with perfect indifference. This attitude was due in the first place to the artist's love of a picturesque, exuberant style, and in the second place to the youth's aversion for all the imposing general truths and fine sentiments inevitably met with in the writings of every author whom we call classic. A Frenchman who was as wild and mad as Villon, or as exuberant and rich in colour as Rabelais, had in Gautier's eyes the inestimable advantage of being unaffected by the general polish of the great century; a Roman who had African blood in his veins, like Apuleius, or was of Egyptian origin, like Claudius, was necessarily more to his liking than the more tasteful orators and poets of the Augustan age; for he loved the peculiar, the piquant, the disconcerting, and was not repelled by artificiality and mannerism if any charm accompanied them; he liked his literature, so to speak, a little "high." The mature man retained the love of the boy for the authors of the Silver Age. To it we owe the excellent collection of criticisms which he published under the title of _Les Grotesques_, the aim of which was the rehabilitation of the whole group of minor poets whom Boileau had disgraced and dismissed in his _L'Art poétique_ in order to make more room for the great authors who had observed the rules of Aristotle and the laws of taste. The poor fellows lay unread in the charnel-house of literature with a line of Boileau's upon their foreheads. Gautier, as the sworn enemy of everything regular and commonplace, undertook their defence. His love of the plastic and picturesque found no satisfaction in the study of the dignified authors who had sat writing with periwigs on their heads and lace ruffles at their wrists; but it gave him real pleasure to seek out all those forgotten, curious poets with the strange countenances and grimaces, in whose pages, for the most part sadly remarkable for their bad taste, there are nevertheless to be found many an amusing oddity, many a gleam of originality, many a witty or picturesque line, nay, whole poems as full of life as are the best of François Villon's and Théophile de Viau's. Though their muse was no beauty, there might nevertheless be said of her what Gautier wrote of an attractive woman:

"Elle a dans sa laideur piquante Un grain de sel de cette mer D'où jaillit nue et provocante L'âcre Vénus du gouffre amer."

And one of these poor poets of the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth century, who had lain drunk in the gutter, or hewn his way through the world with his rapier, or ended his life on the gallows, offered, with his mad humour and his verse, just such a silhouette, just such a characteristic, vivid profile as Gautier loved to sketch.

By his own wish young Théophile was taken from school and placed as a pupil in the studio of Rioult the painter. The youth himself, as well as his relatives, overestimated the talent he showed for drawing and painting, which was in reality merely the subordinate supplement to his absolutely unrivalled gift of picturesque writing. It was Victor Hugo who decided his career. When Hugo blew the horn of Hernani, Gautier answered to the call and forsook painting for literature. But he never lost the habit he had acquired of looking at things from the painter's point of view; and his conversation, and those parts of his writings (such as the preface to _Mademoiselle de Maupin_) where he expressed himself with the same freedom as in conversation, were always plentifully larded with that artistic slang for which the French studios are famous.

It was as a lyric poet that he made his first appearance. Five months after the famous first performance of _Hernani_, and unfortunately on the very day on which the Revolution of July broke out, he published his first book of poems. They were swept away and lost to sight in the stream of events; but even at a less troubled time they would hardly have attracted much attention. As a lyric poet Gautier is unpopular; his style is vigorous and faultless, but his is not the true lyric temperament; his attention is too much distracted by externals; he lacks intensity and soul. In his youthful poetry he is best when he is giving expression to his antique pagan, essentially Roman, epicureanism--when he tells of the three things that give happiness, "sunshine, a woman, a horse"; when (as in "La Débauche") he sings of the joy of life, and praises colour, song, and verse; or when (as in "Le premier rayon de mai") he reproduces the simple, almost sensual, at any rate perfectly incomplex, feeling of happiness produced by the close vicinity of the beloved one. Very fine, and quite typical of Gautier, is the little poem "Fatuité," the mocking title of which subtly wards off any attack upon its sentiments. It gives expression to the gay arrogance of youthful strength. The first two verses are as follows:

"Je suis jeune; la pourpre en mes veines abonde. Mes cheveux sont de jais et mes regards de feu. Et, sans gravier ni toux, ma poitrine profonde Aspire à pleins poumons l'air du ciel, l'air de Dieu.

Aux vents capricieux qui soufflent de Bohême, Sans les compter, je jette et mes nuits et mes jours, Et, parmi les flacons, souvent l'aube au teint blême M'a surpris dénouant un masque de velours.

It was not until much later in life that Théophile Gautier made his mark as a lyric poet. In _Émaux et Camées_, a collection of poems in short, eight-syllabled lines, which in their forms are sometimes faintly reminiscent of Goethe's _West-Oestlicher Divan_ and Heine's _Buch der Lieder_, we have the most characteristic exemplification of his personal style. The various subjects are treated entirely in the spirit of plastic art. The author's aim was, by means of vividness and careful blending of colour, perfection and delicacy of form, severe purity and general harmony of rhyme, in short by means of a skill which neglected nothing, not even the minutest trifle, to produce poetic equivalents of the miniature masterpieces in agate or onyx bequeathed to us by the ancients, or of the Italian or French enamel painting on gold of the days of the Renaissance. In these poems, along with which should be named "Musée secret," a most admirable poem, suppressed as indecent (to be found in Bergerat's _Théophile Gautier_), he attained to a beauty of language which may justly be called ideal. The only thing at all comparable to it is the plasticity of some of Leconte de Lisle's later poems. The poem "L'Art," the last in the book and, as regards language, a truly monumental work of art, contains his view of art carved, as it were, in stone. He so loved that art which he understood so well, that he placed it above everything else in this world, and saw in it the one thing that would endure through all the changes of time. He was, doubtless, too much inclined to estimate the value of a work of art by the difficulties overcome in producing it, but only because he believed that it was the struggle with difficulties which gave the finished work its strength, and made it proof against moth and rust. Hear his own words:

"Tout passe.--L'art robuste Seul a l'éternité. Le buste Survit à la cité.

Et la médaille austère Que trouve un laboureur Sous terre Révèle un empereur.

Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent, Mais les vers souverains Demeurent Plus forts que les airains."

--a saying, this last, which holds good of such verse as Gautier wrote.

XXVIII

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

For a vivid, spirited picture of the young Bohemian Romanticist group which rallied round Hugo, a picture distinguished by its wanton self-caricature, we have only to turn to Théophile Gautier's _Les Jeunes-France_. The author intended his work to satirise Romanticism in much the same manner as _Les Précieuses Ridicules_ had satirised the literary fantasticality of an earlier period; but unfortunately _Les Jeunes-France_ is only the frolicsome effusion of a talented boy, whilst _Les Précieuses_ is a mature work of enduring value. _Les Jeunes-France_ was written almost immediately after Gautier's admission into the Romantic camp, and it, like the poetry of Petrus Borel and Philothée O'Neddy, gives us a good idea of the Bohemian camaraderie of the talented young men of the day. Gautier was the very man to write such a book; for not only then, but to the end of his life, he was the real artist--Bohemian; always more or less at variance with society and its notions of respectability; living in his youth, as painter, poet, journalist, and traveller, a Bohemian life in the general acceptation of the word, and in his later years settling down to live with his sisters and his children without a thought of marriage. Of his many liaisons, that with Ernesta Grisi, the mother of his daughters Judith and Estella, lasted longest. He was also for a long time passionately attached to her sister Carlotta. It was for Carlotta that he wrote his ballets. Though he was inconstant as a lover, he was an extremely affectionate brother and father. He gave his daughters a model education. One of his excellent ideas was to have them taught such languages as Japanese and Chinese, proficiency in which was so rare that it provided a woman who required to earn her living with the means of doing so. His daughter Judith reaped the benefit of his foresight.

But the book which gives us the best, completest impression of young Gautier's inner life is not _Les Jeunes-France_, but _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, the novel which he wrote immediately after that work (1836). In _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ the champagne-froth of his youth seethes. It is a perfectly pagan and at times a perfectly indecent book--as indecent as a dialogue of Crébillon _fils_--but there is power in it; and though Swinburne exaggerates considerably when he calls it "the golden book of beauty," there is no doubt that it displays an extraordinary sense of beauty. It was an outlet for the young man's redundant vigour.

Théophile Gautier was originally very slightly built, and swimming was the only physical exercise in which he excelled; but he was bent on becoming an athlete, athletes and prize-fighters being above all other mortals the objects of his admiration. For several years he took fencing and boxing, riding and rowing lessons, until his physical condition was entirely changed, and he had the unutterable satisfaction on the day the Château Rouge was opened, of giving a perfectly new "Turk's head" a blow of 532 pounds weight, which has become historical. "This," he says with amiable vanity in his autobiographical sketch, "is the deed of my life of which I am proudest." And he is evidently quite sincere in his assertion; for even when he was an old man he used, when his friends were disputing his paradoxes and all contradicting him together, to command silence by shouting with his hoarse voice: "Moi, je suis fort; j'amène 530 sur une tête de Turc et je fais des métaphores qui se suivent. Tout est là." In _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ we are conscious at one and the same time of the young dandy who can give the tremendous blow and the artist whose "metaphors hang together," that is to say, whose sentences shape themselves into pictures before our eyes. But what we are still more sensible of is the genuinely antique, plastic nature which distinguishes Gautier from all the other men of that gifted generation. He has painted himself in a passage in which he makes the hero describe his own character:

"I am a man of the Homeric age; the world in which I live is not my world, and I do not understand the society by which I am surrounded. Christ has not lived for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades or Phidias. I have never gathered passion-flowers on Mount Golgotha, and the deep stream which flows from the side of the crucified one and encircles the world with a girdle of red has not laved me in its waves. My rebellious body refuses to recognise the supremacy of the soul; my flesh refuses to be mortified. To me this earth is as beautiful as heaven; and in my eyes perfection of form is virtue. Spirituality is not to my mind; I prefer a statue to a phantom, midday to twilight. Three things give me pleasure--gold, marble, and scarlet; brilliancy, solidity, colour. These are the things I dream of, and all my castles in the air are built of them.... I never imagine mist or vapour, or anything floating and uncertain. My sky has no clouds, or if it happen to have any, they are solid, chiselled out of the fragments of marble fallen from the statue of Jupiter ... for I love to be able to touch with my finger what I have seen, and to trace the contours into their most elusive folds.... This has always been my character. I look on women with the eyes of a sculptor and not of a lover. All my life the shape of the flask has interested me, not the quality of its contents. I believe that, if I had had Pandora's casket in my hands, I should not have opened it."

Théophile Gautier is one of the few French Romanticists who present a distinct parallel to the German. His story _Fortunio_, with its glorification of pleasure and idleness, is the French counterpart of Friedrich Schlegel's _Lucinde_; and he recalls the German Romanticists by his contempt for the distinctively poetic in poetry. He once said to Taine, who was comparing De Musset with Victor Hugo to the disadvantage of the latter: "Taine, I verily believe you are degenerating into bourgeois imbecility. Sentiment in poetry ... that is not the main thing. Radiant, resplendent words, rhythm, and melody--these are poetry. Poetry proves nothing and tells nothing. Take the beginning of Hugo's _Ratbert_, for instance; there is no poetry in the world like that; it is the very summit of the Himalayas. All Italy with its medieval heraldry is there--and nothing but words." Gautier resembles Tieck in his love of the poetry of pure form, guiltless of ideas; but there is this marked difference between them, that whereas Tieck aimed at volatilising words into tones, at diluting poetry into simple mood, into music, Gautier, the good Latin, aimed at making words produce light and colour, at condensing poetry into word-painting, word-sculpture.

He harmonised completely with the German Romanticists in his hatred of utilitarianism. His watchword, _L'art pour l'art_, was the outcome of this aversion. And, regarded from a certain standpoint, this principle of his, so eloquently propounded in the preface to _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, is absolutely incontestable.

It is incontestable when taken in the sense that art is not subject to the same laws of propriety as those which justly rule life, much less to those which rule it unjustly. It is, for instance, perfectly proper that a statue should stand naked in a crowd, though it offends our sense of the proper that a man or woman should do so--life and art stand in entirely different relations to morality. It was Gautier's constant endeavour to free art from subjection to moralising criticism. In the youthfully violent preface to _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ he bursts out, addressing the utilitarian critics: "Non, imbéciles, non, crétins et goîtreux que vous êtes, un livre ne fait pas de la soupe à la gélatine;--un roman n'est pas une paire de bottes sans couture; un sonnet une seringue à jet continu; un drame n'est pas un chemin de fer, toutes choses essentiellement civilisantes." Of the perpetually scandalised critics, he says: "If there is nudity anywhere in a book or a picture, they make as straight for it as a sow for the mire," ... and with an allusion to _Tartuffe_, he continues: "Dorine, the pretty waiting-woman, is at perfect liberty to display her charms as far as I am concerned; I shall certainly not take my handkerchief from my pocket to cover that bosom which ought not to be seen. I look at it as I look at her face, and if it is white and shapely it gives me pleasure." And, defending himself against his critics' reiterated accusations of immorality, he writes: "An extremely curious variety of the so-called moral journalist is the journalist with female relations.... To set up as a journalist of this species a man must provide himself with a certain number of necessary utensils, such as two or three legitimate wives, some mothers, as many sisters as possible, a complete assortment of daughters, and innumerable cousins. The next requisites are a play or novel, a pen, ink, paper, and a printer.... Then he writes: It is impossible to take one's wife to see this play; or: It is a book which a man could not possibly put into the hands of a woman whom he respects.... The wife hides her blushes behind her fan, the sister, the cousin, &c. (The titles of relationship may be varied; all that is necessary is that the relatives should be female.)" Though Gautier's practice is not always defensible, he was right in theory. Poetry has its own morality, the morality which springs from that love of beauty and of truth, which, however indistinctly and indirectly it may be expressed, is its very nature; but it refuses to be bound by the conventions of society. Poetry is in itself a moral power, exactly as science is--such a science, for example, as physiology, which certainly does not confine itself to subjects that are considered fit topics of conversation in polite society. There are immoral poets as there are immoral surgeons, but their immorality has no connection with that regardlessness of convention which the aim of both art and science entails, and which is inherent in the nature of both.

A man of a plastic and artistic temperament like Gautier, who could not have satisfied the demands made of poetry in the name of morality without sacrificing his special talent, was peculiarly fitted to enforce this truth. His special gift is the reproducing of sensuous impressions in words. He was the first to show in the grand style that the doctrine propounded in Lessing's _Laokoon_ is not the whole truth, for he has described much that Lessing regarded as indescribable. There was nothing for which Gautier lacked words--the beauty of a woman, the appearance of a town, nay, the taste of a dish, or the sound of a voice--he was equal to them all. "Since we have him," said Sainte-Beuve once, "the word _inexpressible_ no longer exists in the French language." He had the usual Romantic-Classic aversion for new words, but he enriched modern French with a store of fifteenth and sixteenth century words which had undeservedly fallen into disuse, and with a host of accurately suggestive technical expressions. French dictionaries were his favourite reading. Undoubtedly his was a mind entirely concentrated upon externals; but great intensity and much artistic fervour go to the making of such externality as Gautier's. It was certainly not the aim of his art to touch feeling hearts; but even Goethe had moods in which he wrote:

"Ach, die zärtlichen Herzen! Ein Pfuscher vermag sie zu rühren; Sei es mein einziges Glück, dich zu berühren, Natur!"

_Le Capitaine Fracasse_, a novel which Gautier planned in his youth, but did not write until well on in life, gives the best idea of his prose. We see its personages as we see people in real life--their figures, their dress, their movements, their background of buildings or landscape.

The book begins with a chapter entitled _Le Château de la Misère_, which contains a description of the evening meal of a company of strolling players, which they are taking in one of the rooms of an impecunious young baron's dilapidated castle, a building of Louis XIII's time, by the light of two huge wooden stage candelabra, pasted over with gilt paper. It is a description which reminds us of the famous Rembrandt in Dresden known as "The Wedding of Esther." We see the light modelling the faces, and the shadows creeping up the walls. There is not a single emotional word in it, but such a subtle feeling of melancholy pervades the whole that we quite understand how Gautier said to Feydeau, who found him writing it: "It is an exact description of my state of mind."

Another chapter, entitled _Effet de Neige_, describes the players' waggon driving off at night through the deep snow. After a time the company miss one of their number, the Matamore (the bragging soldier), who had been following the waggon on foot. They search for him in vain, in vain shout his name at the top of their voices across the great snow plain. No answer. One of them carries a lantern, the red light of which moves along the snow; and we see the long, shapeless shadows following the men upon the white ground. The black dog belonging to the company follows them, howling. Suddenly the howls stop, and we are conscious of the death-like stillness which prevails when falling snow stifles every sound. At last the actor who has the sharpest eyes thinks he sees a curious figure lying beneath a tree, strangely, ominously still. It is he, the luckless Matamore. He is lying with his back against the tree, and his long, outstretched legs are half covered with the driving snow. His gigantic rapier, without which he was never seen, stands at such an odd angle to his breast that under any other circumstances one would have laughed. The lantern-bearer holds the lantern to his poor comrade's face, and gets such a shock that he almost drops it. The face is of a waxy whiteness; the ridge of the nose, which is pinched at the nostrils by the bony fingers of death, shines like a piece of cuttle-bone; the skin is tightened across the temples; snow-flakes lie on the eyebrows and lashes; the dilated eyes have a glassy stare. At each end of the heavy, pointed moustache gleams a little icicle, the weight of which drags down the hair. The seal of eternal silence has closed the lips which have delighted so many an audience with their merry brag; and a death's-head shows beneath the pale, thin face, on which the habit of making grimaces has carved furrows, now terrible in their comicality. "Alas!" says one of his comrades, "our poor Matamore is dead. Exhausted and stupefied by the driving snow, he must have sought shelter for a moment under this tree, and as he has not two ounces of flesh upon his bones, he has been frozen to the marrow in no time. When we were in Paris he reduced his rations every day in order to produce more effect, and he had made himself leaner than a greyhound in the coursing season. Poor Matamore! you are safe now from all the kicks and slaps and drubbings which your part obliged you to submit to! You are as stiff now as if you had swallowed your own dagger." The pathos of the situation is here brought out indirectly by a conscientious plastic treatment of the subject.

It was natural that such a degree of feeling as this seldom revealed itself in an art like Gautier's, and that in time he became entirely addicted to a species of descriptive writing which, perfect as it was in its kind, was ever more soulless. He had a passion for travelling; he visited Spain in 1840, Africa (in the company of the Duc d'Aumale) in 1845, Italy in 1850, Constantinople in 1852, Russia (penetrating as far as Novgorod) in the following year; and all these journeys he described, thanks to his fabulous memory for the appearance of things, with incomparable accuracy, though the descriptions were often written long after his return. One disappointment awaits the reader, namely, that everything in the different countries is described except their inhabitants. We are told that when Madame de Girardin had read his _Tra los montes_, she said to him: "But, Théo, are there no Spaniards in Spain?"--a criticism which is applicable to all his books of this kind. The inner man gradually ceased to exist for him, and even the outer man was at last lost to sight in his clothes. In Gautier's conversations with Bergerat, his son-in-law, we come upon the following comical and characteristic speech: "A royal tiger is a more beautiful creature than a man; but if out of the tiger's skin the man cuts himself a magnificent costume, he becomes more beautiful than the tiger, and I begin to admire him. In the same way, a town interests me only by virtue of its public buildings. Why? Because they are the collective result of the genius of its population. Let the inhabitants be utterly vile and the town a habitation of crime, what does it signify to me so long as I am not assassinated whilst I am inspecting the buildings?" This is the worship of beauty and art carried to a characteristic extreme. The human, the emotional, the modern, life itself, at last lost all interest for Gautier the artist and art-lover. In dramatic art he became indifferent to everything but the style, the costumes, and the scenery. He often maintained that it ought to be possible for a dramatist to produce all his effects by employing four Pierrots in different situations--for all that was wanted was "an impression of life, not life itself." "Life itself is too ugly," he used to add.

Thus he finally, as it were, criticised himself, showing distinctly to all except his blind admirers where his limitations lay. He exhibited in himself the weak side of his axiom, _L'art pour l'art_; proved that an art which does nothing but revolve round the axis of art itself, inevitably becomes barren and empty. Art enthusiasm creates a Galatea out of marble, but the personal stream of thought is the divine breath which breathes life into the statue.

Nevertheless Gautier did a great and a good work by labouring with unexampled energy to free art from unwarrantable claims, and by developing it in as characteristic a manner as it lay in his power to do. Though this was not enough for art, it was enough for one man to have done. It cannot, however, be said that Gautier's talent was appreciated as it deserved during his lifetime; the artistic circles formed his public; merely literary people, not to speak of the reading world at large, did not understand him. How often have I myself heard from the lips of French scientific men the foolish assertion that Gautier wrote his books out of dictionaries, without caring for anything but the sound of his words and their singularity.

This want of understanding is to a certain degree explained by the fact that, in the mind of the general public, Gautier the journalist had gradually supplanted Gautier the poet. As early as 1836 the man who had told the journalists such bitter truths had joined their ranks to earn his daily bread; and his connection with the press lasted until his death--thirty-six years. His facility in writing was of great advantage to him, and the tasks he accomplished as art and dramatic critic were herculean. According to his own and Bergerat's calculations, which must, however, be exaggerated, his works, if all his articles were collected, would fill three hundred volumes. He wrote for Girardin's paper, _La Presse_, for nineteen years, and afterwards, under the Empire, chiefly in the _Moniteur officiel_. His dramatic criticism, which he undertook unwillingly, is only valuable for its fine style. As an art critic he confined himself more and more, as time went on, to describing pictures, an art in which he was unapproachable. Weariness of his profession, disinclination to make enemies, compassion for beginners and the untalented, good-nature and indifference in equally large proportions, made him more and more indulgent. At last he praised everything and everyone with the same serene impassibility and in the same distinguished, ornate style. The general public knew him only as an art and literary critic.

But upon authors, both of poetry and prose, his influence was great. Paul de Saint-Victor, with his excellent prose, Leconte de Lisle, the most unemotional of modern poets, Baudelaire, the "Satanic" lyric poet, and the whole group of young poets who during the Second Empire formed themselves into a school under the name of "Les Parnassiens," are direct descendants of Théophile Gautier. Saint-Victor inherited his sense of form and colour, his devotion to plastic art, Leconte de Lisle his perfect comprehension of foreign civilisations and his Oriental serenity, Baudelaire his partiality for abnormal feelings and passions, and the Parnassians his faultless metre and rhyme.

But although Gautier's influence has thus extended far beyond the 1830 period, and beyond the term of his own life, his is one of the names most inseparably connected with the early, the fighting, days of Romanticism. It is significant and touching that the last, uncompleted article he wrote was a description of the audience on the night of the first performance of Victor Hugo's _Hernani_.

XXIX

SAINTE-BEUVE

Gautier's critical writings, though they form such an enormous proportion of his total production, are already almost forgotten; he survives as the novelist and poet. But one of his contemporaries, who like him was both a poet and a critic, and whose name during their lifetime was frequently coupled with his, has had a different fate. The rank which Sainte-Beuve won for himself as a critic is so elevated as completely to overshadow his position as a poet, and as a historian in the usual sense of the word. As a poet he showed himself to be possessed of delicate and original talent; but he was an epoch-making critic, one of the men who inaugurate a system and found a new branch of art. In a certain sense it may be said that he was a greater innovator in his province than the other authors of the period in theirs; for there was modern lyric poetry before Victor Hugo, but modern criticism in the strict acceptation of the word did not exist before Sainte-Beuve. At any rate he remodelled criticism as completely as Balzac did fiction. During the last years of his life his authority was undisputed; nevertheless, it was not until some ten years after his death that the literary public beyond the frontiers of France awoke to a full sense of his preeminence. An excellent foreign critic of French literature, the German historian, Karl Hillebrand, has pronounced Sainte-Beuve's to be the master-mind of the period, an assertion which, though it may be an exaggeration, can only be called absurd if criticism be regarded as in itself a lower branch of art than the drama or lyric poetry. This, however, is surely now an antiquated standpoint. To the author that branch of art is the highest in which his nature finds fullest expression; and though there may be an order of precedence among intellects, it is extremely doubtful if there is an order of precedence among arts, and most doubtful of all when an art or branch of art has been remoulded by a productive intellect into its own special, almost personal, organ. So much is certain, that in reasoning power (not only in critical acumen) Sainte-Beuve holds the first place in the generation of 1830.

The peculiar quality of his mind was its capacity of understanding and interpreting an extraordinary number of other minds. If superiority to the other prominent individuals of the group cannot be claimed for him, the reason lies in the limitations of his gift. Amongst the minds he understood were not numbered the minds of fertile, unrefined geniuses like Balzac, and great but eccentric geniuses like Beyle. And, far-reaching as was his vision, he was seldom able to take a comprehensive view; few historians and thinkers have had such unsystematic minds. This defect had its good side; his freedom from all inclination to systematise kept him fresh to the last, enabled him perpetually, as it were, to slough his skin; so that the man who in 1827 attracted Goethe's attention by his first articles in the _Globe_, in 1869 was not only in complete, understanding sympathy with the group of young scientists and artists who at the moment gave France her claim to the consideration of Europe, but was in a manner their leader. To the very last year of his life he was regarded by all the best men as the natural general, under whose eye the "young guard" was specially anxious to distinguish itself. But his lack of system, his inability to grasp his subject as a whole, not only prevented Sainte-Beuve from distinguishing his name by any single great work, but even from ever attaining in his writings to grandeur of proportion, to the grand style. His eye was formed to see details, characteristic, important details, but no whole. He saw these details in constant, perpetually varying movement, the movement which is life, and by imitating all this movement in his brain and with his pen he gave his pictures a more exact resemblance to life than had ever been seen before. But he had not sufficient mastery over his details; he did not possess the gift of tracing apparent to deeper-lying causes, and these to a first cause.

As a critic he was only capable of describing the isolated individual, and even of the individual he only very occasionally gave a complete, final idea (Talleyrand, Proudhon); he showed him now from this side, now from that, now at one, now at another age, now in one, now in another relation to society. Even his short articles display a lack of the power of concentration; he hid his best ideas in subordinate clauses, his most suggestive thoughts in notes. He broke his bread of life into crumbs. He hid his gold, as peasants used to do, in dark corners, in holes in the floors and walls, at the bottom of chests and in stockings; he was incapable of moulding it into figures.

The freedom from system which was his strong point had this great advantage, that it preserved his writings from artificial symmetry. He never sacrificed for the sake of the inward equilibrium of his work a syllable of what he thought ought to be said; and much less would he have done so to make his description and his style graphic. He had no aversion for the complicate, the intricate, the unfinished. But the result of his lack of that philosophic spirit which largely consists in a tendency to summarise and the love of a whole as whole, is that one never receives powerful, simple impressions from his works. The important and the less important too often occupy the same plane. Regarded as an artist, he reminds us of those Japanese painters, the great artistic value of whose work began to be acknowledged in Europe about the year 1880. One reason why the pictures of these artists surprise and delight is, that there is not a trace of academic symmetry in them; they never completely satisfy us because they despise perspective, but they bring living things before us as if they were alive.

Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer on the 23rd of December 1804. His father, a clever government official and cultured gentleman, was fifty-two before he made up his mind to marry; and his mother at the time of her marriage was nearly forty. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve died before they had been married a year, two months before the birth of his son, whose critically reflective turn of mind was plainly an inheritance from the father he never saw. Sainte-Beuve the elder was interested in all kinds of literature, but especially in poetry; he left his books with their margins crowded with annotations and remarks, the spirit of which curiously anticipates the tendency of his son's writings.[1] Madame Sainte-Beuve, whose mother was an Englishwoman, taught her son English at an early age, and to her is doubtless due his taste (a very uncommon taste in France in those days) for English lyric poetry, for Bowles, Crabbe, Cowper, and especially for Wordsworth and those other poets of the Lake School whom he so often translated and quoted. Something melancholy and prematurely old in his temperament is in all probability attributable partly to the advanced age of both his parents, and partly to the effect produced on his mother's mind, before he was born, by the illness and death of her husband.

Sainte-Beuve was a timid, melancholy child. At the age of twelve, home influence had developed in him an almost alarming degree of childish piety; he served as an acolyte at the mass with extraordinary fervour. The fever of Catholicism was short, but it left its traces, which at one time in later life showed very plainly; and during all the earlier years of his youth the lad not only retained his reverence for Christianity, but dwelt much on religious doubts and theological questions. This lasted until, as a student, he felt himself at once drawn to the philosophers of the eighteenth century and to the living representatives of the sensationalistic philosophy, Tracy, Daunou, and Lamarck, with whose assistance he soon freed himself from the grasp of theology. His intellectual position on entering manhood was that of the pure empiricist; at a later period religious moods and tendencies reasserted themselves; but these again gave way to empiricism, which proved to be the final attitude of his mind. At school he had distinguished himself in history and languages; but, in spite of his strong literary tendencies, he determined, partly for the sake of his future, partly to counteract a too purely literary training, to study medicine. From 1823 to 1827, whilst by no means neglecting literature, he pursued the usual physiological and anatomical studies with ardour and interest. He was poor, but never in want; for he was frugal and extremely industrious.

The young medical student was anything but good-looking. His big round head, covered with fine and yet rough reddish hair, was almost too large for his body; and his figure was bad. But in the bright blue eyes, which seemed now large, now small, and which sometimes dilated strangely, there shone a thousand questions, smiled a mischievous wit, and dreamed a curiously ingratiating, half-poetic, half-sensual longing. As the poor, plain-looking student, his acquaintance with the fair sex was almost entirely limited to the frail sinners of the Quartier Latin. He had an ardently sensual, gross temperament, which demanded the immediate gratification of its desires; but with the gratification invariably came remorse and a strong feeling of humiliation. Quite as markedly developed as the sensuality was a dreamy, poetic imaginativeness, which, tinged as it was with a gentle melancholy, naturally took the direction of romanticism and mysticism. He had, perhaps, a little of the ugly man's involuntary jealous dislike of the men whose good looks capture feminine hearts at once, and yet he himself had something of their dangerously insinuating quality.

Early in 1827 Sainte-Beuve published in the _Globe_ two articles on Victor Hugo's _Odes et Ballades_, which procured him admission to the Romanticist circle. Hugo came to thank him, but did not find him at home. A few days later Sainte-Beuve returned the call. He found Hugo and his wife at breakfast, and thus made at the same moment the acquaintance of the two persons who were to have most influence over his life for many years to come. He soon became the accredited critic of the Romantic School. His first important task was to prove the connection of the new school with the older French literature, to provide it, so to speak, with Gallic ancestors. This task he accomplished in his excellent critical work, _Tableau de la Poésie française au XVIe Siècle_ (1827-28), the aim of which is to show plainly the thread which stretches across the classical age and connects the generation of 1830 with Ronsard, Du Bellay, Philippe des Portes, and those other authors of the Renaissance who had been so long and so unjustly despised. This book occupies the same position among Sainte-Beuve's works that _Les Grotesques_ does among Théophile Gautier's. It was written before _Les Grotesques_, and is as thorough and critically discriminating as Gautier's work is plastic and eccentric.

In 1829 followed Sainte-Beuve's first lyric essay, _Poésies de Joseph Delorme_, a collection of curious, elaborate poems which made no small sensation. They purported to be written by a young medical student who had died of consumption; but in the preface, under the transparent pseudonym, Sainte-Beuve described himself and his own life. Joseph Delorme is of the race of Obermann--poor, gifted, full of compassion for the woes of humanity, a lustreless genius like the founder of the race, but of even a more complex character than he; for Joseph is a philosopher who is unhappy because of his scepticism, an idealist who with all his idealism is addicted to low dissipation. The hero is the usual despairing youth of the 1830 period, but there is more of the bourgeois in him than in the heroes of Saint-Beuve's contemporaries; his despair is less magnificent and more true to nature. As regards form, the poems are remarkable for their return to the charming old French metres of Ronsard and Charles d'Orléans, and also for the frequency with which the sonnet (beloved of Sainte-Beuve as of Wilhelm Schlegel) recurs. But they interest us chiefly because of the tendency to realism which their author already begins to display, a realism which, though it can sometimes be traced to the influence of the English poets of the Lake School, is yet as a rule, with its daring choice of subjects (in the poem "Rose" for example), original and essentially French. The ideal element is represented by the author's ecstatic effusions on the subject of the _Cénacle_, the little fraternal circle of poets and painters into which he had lately been admitted, and the members of which he panegyrises, now collectively, now singly. His admiration of his friends knows no bounds. Some of the poems at the time of their appearance were ridiculed for their affectation ("Les rayons jaunes" undoubtedly verges on the ridiculous) others were considered vulgar. Guizot characterised Joseph Delorme as "un Werther jacobin et carabin" (Werther as the Jacobin and "medical"). On the whole, however, the book may be said to have had the decided success which it deserved.

Sainte-Beuve's next collection of poems, _Les Consolations_ (published in March 1830), his novel _Volupté_ (published in 1834), and the first two volumes of _Port-Royal_, mark the emotional and somewhat pious period in the life of their author. _Les Consolations_ is dedicated to Victor Hugo in terms of hysterical admiration coupled with expressions of Christian contrition, and Hugo's name occurs frequently in the book; but it was in reality quite as much an offering to Madame Hugo, who was the love of Sainte-Beuve's youth, and to whom the first poem and several others are addressed. Of his relations with her he wrote too openly in _Le Livre d'Amour_, a collection of poems which obviously treat of realities, and which, though printed, was never published.[2] And in the novel _Volupté_, too, we have no difficulty in recognising its author's relations with Victor Hugo and his household in Amaury's relations with the eminent politician, Monsieur de Couaën, and his wife.

Sainte-Beuve himself and many of his biographers have hinted that the works which he wrote during the period of his enthusiasm for Madame Hugo, all of which have a faint Catholic tinge or varnish, were directly inspired by that lady, who was a devout Catholic in her youth, though an ardent freethinker in later life, in the days when she wrote her husband's life to his dictation. It has been asserted that Sainte-Beuve, in his lover's ardour, went the length of accustoming himself to speak in her language and even to share her feelings. This explanation, however, I refuse to accept, as I feel convinced that Sainte-Beuve in his old age deceived both himself and others by speaking as he did of his youthful works. In a letter dated July 1863, he writes to Hortense Allart de Méritens, the authoress (Madame Saman): "I tried a little Christian mythology in my youth; but it has evaporated. It was for me the swan of Leda, a means of obtaining access to the fair and producing tenderness in them. Youth has time and employs every means." I object to this, to say the least of it, frivolous manner of explaining away a phenomenon which is plainly attributable to the natural attraction possessed by Catholicism for a youthfully pliant and dependent character, an attraction in this case strengthened by the general tendency of the period, which, as usually happens, was becoming a fashionable tendency before disappearing altogether. The period was the period of the revival of philosophic spiritualism. In 1828 Sainte-Beuve attended the lectures which Jouffroy, after his dismissal, gave in his own house; and he was also, like almost all the young men of his day, strongly influenced by Cousin. The fashionable philosophers converted him temporarily from sensationalism. Romanticism was still regarded by many of the younger men in the light in which it was originally regarded by Hugo, namely, as a reaction against the pagan art and literature of the Classicists; and one branch of the Romantic School was, from its eager desire for the poetic revival of medievalism, so closely associated with the young Catholic party which rallied round Lamennais and founded the newspaper _L'Avenir_ (to which Sainte-Beuve contributed articles), that it was not at all surprising that a few drops from the aspergill of the Neo-Catholics lighted upon the young Romantic writers, and found their way into their works. The part of _Volupté_ which describes conventual life, was actually written by Lacordaire. The piety which prevails throughout _Les Consolations_--and which annoyed many, amongst others Beyle, a sincere admirer of Sainte-Beuve--and the incense fumes which permeate the second part of _Volupté_, vividly recall corresponding phenomena in German Romanticism.

In spite of its diffuseness and heaviness, _Volupté_ is a delicately profound psychological study. It consists of confessions of the nature of Rousseau's, but recorded in a style which is richer in imagery, more saturated with colour, and more delicately shaded than Rousseau's; the emotionally lyric tone reminds us of Lamartine's _Jocelyn_, a work which treats the same kind of theme more chastely. Sainte-Beuve's book presents us with the life-story of a pleasure-seeking, dissipated youth, interspersed with many a profound, sagacious reflection. It represents the sensual and the tender impulses of the soul as equally destructive of the vigour and energy of youth. It treats mainly of those enervating friendships with young women, especially with young married women, in cultivating which clever young men often squander so much time. The word "squander" seems to me to convey Sainte-Beuve's meaning better than the word "lose"; for he himself reproaches a gifted writer whose vigorous style is lacking in shades, with having worked too hard and lived too lonely a life, with having injured himself by too seldom seeking the society "which is the best of all, and leads one to lose most time in the pleasantest way, the society of women."

Amaury, the hero of the book, is on intimate terms with three women. One, who is the wife of his teacher and chief, he loves more than he ventures to let her understand; the second, to whom he is betrothed, he gives up for the sake of the first; and yet at the very same time he allows himself to drift into an intimate friendship with the third, whom he alternately adores passionately, and pains by his cruel indifference--a friendship which neither satisfies him, nor saves him from indulging in the lowest debauchery. Intelligent, ambitious, and obstinately industrious as Amaury is, his intellectual vigour is gradually paralysed by all these entanglements, and he at last feels that there is no hope for him except in submission to the severest discipline of the Roman Catholic Church. His account of his life as a young man is given in the form of the confession of an ecclesiastic, and the unction of parts of it is insufferable; the outbursts of remorse, the moral and religious admonitions, the prayers and homilies, which interrupt the flow of the tale, are tiresome; but the reader is sufficiently compensated for them.

Two things make the book a remarkable one--in the first place, the perfect understanding which it displays of the development process and the diseases of the soul, an understanding which speaks of persistent self-examination, and foreshadows the coming critic; in the second place, the insight into feminine character, which reveals the feminine element in Sainte-Beuve's own nature, and prognosticates his unique success in the critical interpretation of the personalities of notable women. I append a few specimens of his keen observation and impressive reflections:--"How ungrateful youth is by nature! It throws away with a contemptuous gesture everything that has not been given to it by itself. It will only be bound by ties which it has formed itself, demands friends of its own choice, for itself alone, being certain that in its soul are treasures sufficient to buy hearts with, and life sufficient to fructify them. Hence we see it bestow itself for life on friends whom it did not know yesterday, and swear eternal devotion to women who are almost strangers." "How contemptible human friendships are! How they exclude one another! How they follow one another and drive one another away like waves! Alas! this house to which you repair every morning and every evening, which seems like your home and better than your home, and for which you neglect everything that hitherto has been sweet to you, this house, you may be quite certain, will some day lose favour in your eyes; you will avoid it as a fatal place, and if by chance your business leads you into its neighbourhood, you will take a long round to avoid seeing it. The cleverer you are, the stronger will be the feeling." Every one of a truthful disposition who has been under the painful necessity of concealing his or her real feeling, will understand the following sentence, and admire its brevity:--"I tried to express what I really felt, while apparently expressing what I did not feel--to be honest to myself and to mislead her." Here, again, is a mournful little picture of life:--"A brigade is marching slowly along a road. The enemy's troops, in ambush on both sides, make terrible havoc with their rifles, and in the end there is an open fight. The brigade succeeds in putting the enemy to flight, and when the general arrives in the evening at the nearest town with the lucky survivors of his force and the torn remnants of his flag, this is called a triumph. When some one part of our plans, our ambition, our love, has suffered less than the rest, we call this glory or success." And the following is an apt little simile. It is of jealous love Sainte-Beuve is writing;--"At this stage, when it desires absolute possession, when it is irritated and embittered by the slightest opposition, nay, even by the beloved object's affection for others, I can only compare it with those Asiatic despots who, in order to clear the way to the throne for themselves, assassinate all their nearest relations, even their own brothers."

With _Les Pensées d'Août_ Sainte-Beuve closed his career as a poet. It is the only one of his poetical ventures which was quite unsuccessful, and the poems which the volume contains are certainly his coldest; yet it seems to me, though my opinion is unsupported by any other critic, that it is in this work he first displays marked originality. It is realistic to an extent which is quite unique in the lyric poetry of the Romantic School; no poet had yet ventured to make such free use of the language and the surroundings of daily life. In the North, where a poet even to-day would hardly have the courage to give an omnibus or a railway platform a place in a lyric poem, such a work as _Les Pensées d'Août_ would still almost be regarded in the light of a specimen of the poetry of the future.

In it, as in _Les Poésies de Joseph Delorme_, we find several of the characteristics of the English Lake School transplanted to French soil. Sainte-Beuve, like the Englishmen, presents us with simple, sober pictures of real life, and his style, like theirs, is founded upon the conviction that there ought not to be any essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical compositions. But in Sainte-Beuve's poems we have, instead of the strange want of crispness and point of the English poems, a genuinely French dramatic tension. Each of them is a little drama developed within the limits of a short lyric narrative.

Take, as a good specimen, the poem entitled _À Madame la Comtesse de T_. The Countess to whom it is dedicated relates the story. She is travelling by steamer from Cologne to Mainz. To see the scenery better, she has seated herself in her carriage, which is in the fore part of the ship, and she is consequently beside the steerage passengers--servants, workmen and their wives, poor people of all descriptions. One of her children exclaims: "Mother, there is Count Paul!" She looks round and recognises the acquaintance named, a Polish political refugee (the year is 1831). His features are refined and his hands are white, but he is dressed in the old, shabby clothes of a working-man. He is in the company of a family of plain English workpeople. The husband is a coarse-looking man, who is always eating or smoking; his wife is, at the first glance, insignificant; they have a daughter with them, a pretty girl of about fourteen. The Countess's first idea is that the young Pole has been attracted by the girl; then she sees that it is the mother, whose eyes follow him wherever he goes. And this mother is no longer a young woman, though she must, not so long ago, have been very pretty; her figure, in spite of the poverty of her dress, is elegant, and her hair is beautiful. With a solicitude, which is not that of love, but of tenderness towards the being by whom one is beloved, the young man puts her cloak round her and holds the umbrella over her when it rains. He buys expensive grapes for her little boys. The Countess divines that in the distant town where he sought refuge he has found friends in this poor family. But he, like herself, is to go on shore at Mainz, and his friends are to continue their journey in the steamer.

"Montant sur le bateau, je suivis la détresse, Le départ jusqu'au bout! Il baise avec tendresse Les deux petits garçons, embrasse le mari, Prend la main à la fille (et l'enfant a souri, Maligne, curieuse, Ève déjà dans l'âme); Il prend, il serre aussi les deux mains à la femme, Évitant son regard.--C'est le dernier signal De la cloche! Il s'élance! O le moment final! Quand on ôte le pont et pendant qu'on démarre, Quand le cable encor crie, ô minute barbare! Au rivage mouvant, alors il fallait voir, De ce groupe vers lui, gestes, coups de mouchoir; Et les petits enfants, chez qui tout devient joie, Couraient le long du bord d'où leur cri se renvoie. Mais la femme, oh! la femme, immobile en son lieu, Le bras levé, tenant un mouchoir rouge-bleu Qu'elle n'agitait pas, je la vois là sans vie, Digne que, par pitié, le Ciel la pétrifie! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Je pensai: Pauvre cœur, veuf d'insensés amours, Que sera-ce demain, et ce soir, et toujours? Mari commun, grossier, enfants sales, rebelles; La misère; une fille aux couleurs déjà belles, Et qui le sait tout bas, et dont l'œil peu clément A, dans tout ce voyage, épié ton tourment: Quel destin!--Lui pourtant, sur qui mon regard plonge, Et qu'embarrasse aussi l'adieu qui se prolonge, Descendit.--Nous voguions. En passant près de lui, Une heure après: 'Monsieur, vous êtes aujourd'hui Bien seul,' dis-je.--'Oui,' fit-il en paroles froissées, 'Depuis Londres, voilà six semaines passées, J'ai voyagé toujours avec _ces braves gens_.' L'accent hautain notait les mots plus indulgents. --'Et les reverrez-vous bientôt?' osai-je dire. --'Jamais!' répliqua-t-il d'un singulier sourire; 'Je ne les reverrai certainement jamais; Je vais en Suisse; après, plus loin encor, je vais!'"

I would also call attention to a little poem which is a real work of genius, _Monsieur Jean, Maître d'école_. It is the story of a poor country schoolmaster, who, brought up in a foundling hospital, has known nothing of his parents until he one day suddenly finds out who his father is--no less a man than the famous Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, as his readers know, deposited the children of his wife Theresa (of whom he had no absolute certainty of being the father) in the Paris foundling hospital. The schoolmaster has not read Rousseau, but he begins now, and studies _Émile, La nouvelle Héloïse_, and all the other works with the deepest interest. He is more intensely conscious than other readers both of their fertile geniality and of the very slight feeling of personal responsibility displayed by their author. At last he can no longer resist the desire to make the acquaintance of his parents.

"Il part donc, il accourt au Paris embrumé; Il cherche au plein milieu, dans sa rue enfermé, Celui qu'il veut ravir; il a trouvé l'allée, Il monte;... à chaque pas son audace troublée L'abandonnait--Faut-il redescendre?--Il entend, Près d'une porte ouverte, et d'un cri mécontent, Une voix qui gourmande et dont l'accent lésine: C'était là! Le projet que son âme dessine Se déconcerte; il entre, il essaie un propos. Le vieillard écoutait sans tourner le dos, Penché sur une table et tout à sa musique. Le fils balbutiait; mais, avant qu'il s'explique, D'un regard soupçonneux, sans nulle question, Et comme saisissant sur le fait l'espion: 'Jeune homme, ce métier ne sied pas à ton âge; Epargne un solitaire en son pauvre ménage; Retourne d'où tu viens! ta rougeur te dément! 'Le jeune homme, muet, dans l'étourdissement, S'enfuit, comme perdu sous ces mots de mystère, Et se sentant deux fois répudié d'un père. Et c'était là celui qu'il voudrait à genoux Racheter devant Dieu, confesser devant tous! C'était celle.... O douleur! impossible espérance!"

And he hastens back to the country to practise in life as a poor schoolmaster some of the great precepts which are to be found in his father's works, but are set at naught by his practice. The good seed in Rousseau's _Émile_ germinates in the education which the children entrusted to this schoolmaster receive.

_Les Pensées d'Août_ was published in 1837. Thenceforward Sainte-Beuve was exclusively the critic.

[1] Some of the father's aphorisms are given as an appendix to Morand's edition of Sainte-Beuve's letters to the Abbé Barbe.

[2] The most important poems of this collection are printed in Pons's low-minded book, _Sainte-Beuve et ses inconnues_.

XXX

Sainte-Beuve

It was to follow his own peculiar, undoubted vocation that Sainte-Beuve gave up the practice of the art of poetry. It was only the art he forsook; for poetry, like an underground spring, communicated life and freshness to his critical investigations of even the driest and most serious subjects.

It is interesting to observe all the steps of the somewhat intricate process by which the first great modern critic was prepared for the exercise of his vocation. At the time when the Romantic circle was broken up by the Revolution of July, Sainte-Beuve stood on such good terms with the Legitimist leaders that Polignac was on the point of offering him the post of secretary to Lamartine, who was then about to proceed as ambassador to Greece. It was a post which the young poet would have had no objection to accept from them; hence he involuntarily cherished a certain feeling of resentment against the new government, under which almost all his literary friends received political preferment. The democratic element which lay latent in his character (he gave up the _de_ which he was entitled to prefix to his name), proclaimed itself; he became a species of interpreter of the naïvely ardent socialistic philosopher, Pierre Leroux, and continued to write in the _Globe_ even after it had passed from the hands of the Romantic dogmatists into those of the Saint-Simonists, and was appearing as their organ, with the motto: _À chacun selon sa vocation à chaque vocation selon ses œuvres_. Like Heine, he had an enthusiastic admiration for Père Enfantin; and in an article written in 1831 he ranks the religious writings of Saint-Simon high above Lessing's _Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts_.

Hardly had he separated from the Saint-Simonists, after the break-up of their "family" in 1832, than he entered into relations with Armand Carrel, the literary chief of Republican France. Although Sainte-Beuve, in the article he wrote on Carrel in 1852, ignores his own close connection with him, it is quite certain that he wrote in Carrel's paper, the _National_, for three years, and on political as well as literary subjects. He enrolled himself among the Republicans, and made acquaintance with them, as he had previously done with the Saint-Simonists, the Romanticists, and the Legitimists. And it was about this same time that his friend, Ampère, procured him admission to the circle of the Abbaye des Bois, where the venerable Madame Récamier reigned and Chateaubriand was worshipped. After a quarrel with Carrel on the subject of an article on Ballanche, which Carrel considered too favourable to Legitimacy, Sainte-Beuve allied himself with Lamennais, who had made overtures of friendship. What attracted him to Lamennais, whose confidant and adviser he soon became, was partly that great churchman's sincere and ardent devotion to the people, partly sympathy with his main theory, that it was necessary, in order to keep the steadily rising stream of democracy within its banks, to oppose to its powerful, and to a certain extent irrefutable, principle one still more powerful, namely, the religious principle, which addressed itself with authority to the people, and with no less authority to their kings. So strongly did Lamennais' attitude before his defection from the Church of Rome appeal to Sainte-Beuve, that he in one of his articles addressed a public, though qualified, reproach to his friend on the subject of this defection, maintaining that a man who had so lately striven to submit other men's minds to the authority of the church had no right to figure as an anti-papal demagogue.

The years 1834-37 were the most painful of Sainte-Beuve's life. In 1837 the sudden termination of his relations with Madame Hugo simultaneously severed his connection with the Romantic circle and obliterated his religious tendencies. He retired to Lausanne, where, in 1837-38, he began the course of lectures which formed the basis of his great work, _Port-Royal_. They had been planned and partly written before; the fact that they were delivered to an audience which, though Protestant, was orthodox, to a certain extent determined their tone. It was also influenced by Sainte-Beuve's intimacy with the eminent Swiss pastor, Vinet, one of the few men whom he all his life continued to revere. Vinet's character and intellect were equally interesting to Sainte-Beuve; he was a strictly and sincerely religious man, and an exceedingly acute and subtle critic of French literature. His representation and vindication of Christianity as _spirituality_ made an impression on Sainte-Beuve's mind, for which theological problems had a natural attraction! Vinet, seeing his friend such an attentive listener, thought that he had converted him, but Sainte-Beuve left Lausanne an unbeliever. After a tour in Italy he returned to Paris, where he resumed his occupation of critic, writing better than he had ever done before, and with this difference, that his criticism, instead of being as heretofore polemical, was now interpretative and instructive.

He became the highly esteemed literary critic of the _Revue des deux Mondes_, an influential man of the world, a welcome guest in aristocratic houses. He was regarded as a somewhat independent, but refined and dignified author; his politics were, generally speaking, those of the Right Centre. A lady, with whom he stood on terms of the closest friendship, ensured his position in the social world. This was Madame d'Arbouville, the authoress of some sad but pleasing stories; she was the widow of a General, and niece of Comte Molé, the Prime Minister. In winter Sainte-Beuve spent his leisure hours in her house or the houses of her friends, and in summer he paid visits to her relations in the country. He became Count Molé's friend and literary adviser, taking the part of this cultured nobleman and adherent of the Classic School against his own old Romantic allies, when these latter showed themselves wanting in taste and tact.[1] Supported by all the Monarchists and Classicists, he was elected a member of the French Academy in 1844, without having to submit to any preliminary defeat. (In one of the letters of Madame de Girardin, his clever enemy, a bitter attack is made on him apropos of this election.)[2] Particular piquancy was lent to the reception of the ex-Romanticist by the fact that it fell to the lot of Victor Hugo, who had been rejected three times before he was elected, to make the installation speech.

Sainte-Beuve, however, felt himself no more bound by his new social ties than by any previous ones. The circle was broken up by the Revolution of 1848; and as the victorious Republicans offended him mortally by publishing a perfectly imbecile charge against him, he felt more isolated than ever before.[3] He left France for the second time, and, settling in Liège, gave there the course of lectures out of which his book, _Chateaubriand et son Groupe littéraire_, was evolved, lectures the tone of which must have been very offensive to the Monarchical and Church party, and which point to the loss of cherished illusions.

Madame d'Arbouville died in 1830, and with her death the private ties which connected him with the old parties were severed. The democratic and socialistic instincts which had drawn him to Armand Carrel and the Saint-Simonists now drew him to the Second Empire. Like all the other men of 1830, with the solitary exception of Auguste Barbier, a poet of high principles but mediocre talent, Sainte-Beuve shared to a certain extent the popular enthusiasm for Napoleon; to him the Empire was an imperialism which had its support in the people and was inimical to the domination of the bourgeoisie; and now, in his famous and much abused article, _Les Regrets_, he not merely proclaimed his allegiance to Napoleon III., but wrote of Orleanists and Legitimists with a strangely oblivious scorn. He was a regular contributor to the _Constitutionnel_, then for a time wrote in the _Moniteur officiel_, afterwards resuming his connection with the _Constitutionnel_. During the last years of his life he wrote for the Opposition newspaper, the _Temps_. He was evidently perfectly honest; it was not for the sake of any advantage to himself that he changed his opinions; he simply now, as always, involuntarily allowed himself to be influenced--with the result of a clear gain of insight and understanding for his future criticism. He came very little into personal contact with the Emperor; in politics he was an adherent of the "Left"; Princess Mathilde and Prince Napoleon treated him as an honoured friend, and he turned the Princess's friendship to account in the most disinterested manner, namely, in the furtherance of unobtrusive, genuinely benevolent schemes.

It was not till the last stage of his career that Sainte-Beuve's talent attained to its full development. The chances are that an uncritical author will deteriorate as he grows older, but that a critic will improve; Sainte-Beuve improved year by year, to the very end of his life. The absolute truthfulness, which was naturally as marked a feature of his character as his industry, but which had often been held in check by one consideration or another, allowed itself ever freer play; and the capacity for work remained as great as in his youth. Sainte-Beuve's writings fill fifty volumes, and in all these volumes there is not a careless line, and inaccuracies are of the rarest occurrence. But it was not until the last stage of his career that he was courageous enough to give perfectly free expression to his real opinions on religious and philosophical subjects. He now eased his mind of everything that he had repressed since the youthful days when he studied the philosophers of the eighteenth century. His want of appreciation of Balzac and Beyle, the one a man of a much coarser, the other of a much more eccentric nature than his own, must not render us oblivious of the courage and determination with which he championed the rising generation of French authors, even such writers as Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers, whom he did not altogether understand. Nor ought it to be forgotten that he refused to write an article on Napoleon's _Vie de César_, and that in the Senate he distinguished himself as the solitary but determined opponent of clericalism.

In March 1867 he defended Renan and his _Vie de Jésus_. In June of the same year, when it was proposed (apropos of a complaint from the magnates of the town of Saint-Etienne) to exclude from the public libraries accessible to the people all literature objectionable to the clergy, including the works of Voltaire, Rabelais, &c, he was the solitary member of the servile, priest-ridden Senate who boldly championed intellectual liberty and warmly defended the honour of French literature. The students, who in 1855 had hissed him as an Imperialist, now honoured him with a deputation and a banquet. The lying rumours spread by the clerical press on the subject of a small dinner-party which he inadvertently happened to give on Good Friday, 1868, represented him in the light of an antichrist, of a reincarnated Voltaire; and when in May 1869 he made a last effort, and with a weak voice but stout heart spoke in the Senate in defence of liberty of the press and against the Catholic Universities Bill, his name became a war-cry, became the symbol of free thought. In January 1869 he renounced his allegiance to Imperialism. In October of the same year he died, after five years of illness and a long period of terrible suffering, borne with stoic fortitude.

Sainte-Beuve, with his exceptionally impressionable nature, underwent a whole series of religious, literary, and political transformations. These constituted the school he had to pass through to become the founder of modern criticism. Despite all his changes of opinion, we are safe in asserting that he was honest. Private interest can have had little power in great things over a man with a nature as truthful as that which reveals itself in his writings. Truth and honesty are, as Franklin says, like fire and flame; they have a certain natural brightness which cannot be counterfeited.

[1] See Sainte-Beuve's article on Alfred de Vigny's reception into the Academy, and also the letter, published by himself, which was written to him by a lady (Madame Hugo) on the occasion of the same event.

[2] _Lettres parisiennes_, i v. 170.

[3] He was accused of having accepted bribes from the secret fund of Louis Philippe's government. What lay at the foundation of the charge proved to have been a grant of a sum of--one hundred francs--for the repairing of a stove in the Mazarin Library, of which Sainte-Beuve was librarian.

XXXI

SAINTE-BEUVE AND MODERN CRITICISM

_Port-Royal_ (1840-59), Sainte-Beuve's longest piece of connected writing, is a unique work of its kind. Disinclination to tread the beaten track, and the Romanticist's sympathy with religious enthusiasm, two characteristics which early distinguished him, influenced him in choosing the history of Jansenism in France as his subject. Jansenism was an enthusiastic, intelligent, intense form of piety, which, though evolved and retained within the pale of Catholicism, was nevertheless distinguished by a personal, that is to say, heretical, passion for truth, which appeals to our understanding by its independence and to our sympathies by its heroically courageous defiance of persecution and coercion. Like its history, _Port-Royal_, it reaches its highest level in Pascal, whose frail, emaciated figure as its embodiment presents a curious contrast to that of the plethoric, more healthy-minded German who, in a neighbouring country a century earlier, had carried on a very similar, though more successful struggle against ecclesiastical attempts at compromise.

Sainte-Beuve possessed all the qualifications required of the historian of Jansenism. He was not a believer, but he had been, or believed that he had been one. A man is seldom capable of criticising the views he holds himself, and as seldom of understanding those which he has never held; what we all understand best are the views we once shared, but share no longer. If any one doubts Sainte-Beuve's ability to understand these medieval emotions, that impulse to forsake the world, that strife of the awakened soul with nature, and its repentant, anxious recourse to grace; if any one doubts his comprehension of the real spirit inspiring these sermons and theological pamphlets, of the hearts beating under these nuns' habits, of the devotion, the hopes, and the longings, the mystical ecstasies and the sacred enthusiasm, which flourished on that little spot of holy ground, let that doubter read the first two volumes of _Port-Royal_, as far as the chapter on Pascal, who was easier of comprehension because he was a figure of more magnitude and was already better known. Let him study the masterly portraits of St. François de Sales and St. Cyran, and observe how with the help of letters, reported conversations, and a few pamphlets and sermons, Sainte-Beuve succeeds in placing before us two figures which are so true to nature, so human, that we seem to be living with them. We are frequently reminded of the fact that Sainte-Beuve was originally a novelist. The scenes among the innocent dwellers in that dovecote, the convent, for instance, have all the vividness of well-written fiction. And Sainte-Beuve employs his imagination only in describing; he never invents or misrepresents.

It is a defect in the book that its first parts, though they are much the best reading, are not conceived in the historical style. We are too vividly reminded that the _feuilleton_ has hitherto been their author's vehicle of expression. In these earlier volumes Sainte-Beuve simply takes Port-Royal as his starting-point. The old monastery is not much more than his citadel, from which he makes one sortie after another; he hunts out parallels, discovers analogies, now in literature, now in real life--interesting, but often far-fetched, and leading to disquisitions not only upon such writers as Corneille, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, and Vauvenargues, but upon modern authors, such as Lamartine and George Sand. The later volumes, on the other hand, the style of which is more soberly historical, lack the attraction of these interpolations; and the subject is too much of a special subject to interest long, in spite of the loving care which has been bestowed on it.

Though _Port-Royal_ is supposed to be his chief work, Sainte-Beuve reaches a far higher level in the long series of volumes known as _Causeries du Lundi_ and _Nouveaux Lundis_, which contain the shorter articles written during his most perfect period. It will be long before these articles are forgotten. At the time of their author's death, Ulbach wrote: "I cannot tell how much of the literature of which we are now so proud will be preserved by time. Some of Lamartine's and Victor Hugo's verses? some of Balzac's novels? One thing, however, is certain--that it will be impossible to write history without having recourse to Sainte-Beuve and reading him from beginning to end."

Sainte-Beuve has two styles, the youthful and the mature. At the time of his study of sixteenth century literature (from the vocabulary of which he, like the other young Romanticists, adopted various expressions) he got into the habit of picking and choosing his words and polishing and refining his periods to such an extent that he drew down upon himself some justifiably severe criticism--though he hardly deserved the violent reproaches showered on him by Balzac, whom he had annoyed by some sarcastic articles. But when he took to journalism this ultra-refinement of style disappeared. As Littré remarked, "After he had bound himself to send in a _feuilleton_ every week, he had no time to spoil his articles." A style like Sainte-Beuve's second--keen and flexible as a sword-blade--is not easy to characterise. In the first place, it is by no means a striking style. The reader who is not particularly well versed in French literature will not be aware of anything that can be called style. The periods succeed one another unrhythmically; they are not grouped, but proceed carelessly, as Zouaves march; we never come upon a pompous and seldom on a passionate one; occasionally there is an interjection--"Ô poet!" or the like. The language flows like gently rippling water. But the observant reader is charmed by its noble Atticism. The tone is not assertive, but calmly and quietly sceptic. I give a few examples, taken from different works. "Is there stability or instability at the basis of his character? You think instability. But under that instability is there not something more stable? You believe that there is. But under this again is there not something less stable than ever?" How often in their study of character must psychologists query thus, but how few of them could put the question with such delicate precision! What has been called the eccentricity of Sainte-Beuve's style is often only something surprising in his imagery; yet the metaphor itself is always surprisingly correct. In describing a great, austere sixteenth-century preacher of repentance, he tells that this ecclesiastic's contemporaries compared him, because of his dry severity, to a thorn-bush. Later, after giving an account of a vigorous outburst of noble indignation on the part of this man, he adds: "Si j'ai pu dire de M. de Saint-Cyran qu'il était parfois un buisson et un buisson sans jamais de rieurs, il faut ajouter qu'il est souvent aussi un buisson ardent." Observe how the pliant style lends itself to irony and satire. Sainte-Beuve is criticising the style of a literary rival, Nisard; amongst much bitter-sweet praise he insinuates the little remark: "Un académicien lui a trouvé du nerf; les savants lui trouvent de la grâce." Of Cousin he says: "He is a hare with the eye of an eagle." For an example of the power of characterisation latent in the style, take the following sentence from a criticism of De Musset: "Ce n'était pas des couleurs combinées, surajoutées par un procédé successif, mais bien le réel se dorant ça et là comme un atôme à un rayon du matin, et s'envolant tout d'un coup au regard dans une transfiguration divinisée." And for an example of its capacity, equable as it is, to express indignation, take the following passage, which also throws light on the character of the man. He is writing on the subject of a work to which the Academy in full conclave had refused to give the prize adjudged it by a committee of experts, because the "atheistical" principles on which the work was based were at variance with the eclectic philosophy then officially recognised. "There really does exist a small class of sober, unassuming philosophers, who live upon very little, do not intrigue, and are entirely occupied in conscientiously seeking after truth and cultivating their intellects. They refrain from the indulgence of every other passion, and fix their whole attention upon the laws which govern the universe, listening and investigating wherever in the realm of nature the world-soul, the world-thought reveals itself to them. These are men who at heart are stoics, who try to do good and to think as accurately and rightly as they can, even without the hope of any personal reward in the future, content to feel at harmony with themselves and in accord with the harmony of the universe. Is it fitting, I ask, to stamp these men with an odious name on this account, to ostracise them, or at best only to tolerate them with such tolerance as we show to the erring and guilty? Have they not even yet won for themselves in our country a place on which the sunlight falls? Have they not, O ye noble Eclectics, with whom it gives me pleasure to compare them, ye whose invariable and absolute disinterestedness and whose unalterable high-mindedness are known to God and man, have they not the right to be placed at least on an equal footing with you, in virtue of the purity of their doctrine, the uprightness of their motives, and the innocence of their lives? This last great progressive step, worthy of the nineteenth century, I would fain see taken before I die." Sainte-Beuve made various reforms in the art of criticism. In the first place, he put solid ground beneath its feet, gave it the firm foothold of history and science. The old, so-called philosophic criticism treated the literary document as if it had fallen from the clouds, judged it without taking its author into account at all, and placed it under some particular heading in a historical or aesthetic chart. Sainte-Beuve found the author in his work; behind the paper he discovered the man. He taught his own generation and the generations to come, that no book, no document of the past, can be understood before we have gained an understanding of the psychical conditions which produced it, and formed an idea of the personality of the man who wrote it. Not until then does the document live. Not until then does a soul animate history. Not until then does the work of art become transparently intelligible.

Sainte-Beuve's most marked characteristic was an insatiable thirst for knowledge, a quality which he possessed in the form that may be called scientific inquisitiveness. This directed his life even before it expressed itself in his criticism. At first it is only faintly perceptible in his works, because he began with unlimited praise of his contemporaries, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and others, a good deal of which he was obliged subsequently to retract--thus progressing in the opposite direction from Théophile Gautier, who began with severity and gradually declined into a nerveless leniency. But it is possible to trace even Sainte-Beuve's first uncritical praise to his critical instincts. Its exaggeratedness was due to the fact that he stood, as a young man, too near to the personages he criticised; but this circumstance was itself attributable to his curiosity. Before he knew, he dimly divined the difference between books and life, and was less apt than others to accept the author's own account of himself, the image of himself which he desired, by means of his book, to imprint on his readers' minds; and it was the unconscious instinct of investigation, the keen interest of the born psychologist, the longing to see for himself and close at hand, the inclination to pass by all that was official and conventional and make straight for the truth that is concealed, the small facts which explain--that led him to seek personal acquaintance; though he himself believed that it was his enthusiasm for ideas which attracted him irresistibly to their originators.

And here the critic is confronted by one of his greatest difficulties--he knows the truth only about the living, but may speak it only of the dead. And there is no doubt that it makes a disagreeable impression when the death of an author entirely changes the tone of criticism, as Sainte-Beuve's criticism of Chateaubriand, for example, was altered by the latter's death. His earliest article on Chateaubriand was incense pure and simple. We are conscious of the social pressure under which it was written, of the awe and veneration, the personal sympathies and relations, the fear of angry glances from lovely eyes, the impossibility of hurting the feelings of so charming a lady as Madame Récamier by criticising her domestic idol, in short, of all the influences which combined to make the first sketch of Chateaubriand simply an adulatory narrative. The long work and the later articles are, on the contrary, inspired by a perfect rage for saying "No," for tearing off masks.

But when he is at his best, Sainte-Beuve succeeds in finding the golden mean. He does not admire everything and attribute everything to noble motives, but neither does he search for base ones. He neither praises nor depreciates human nature. He understands it. And intercourse with men and women of every description, constant critical observation, French delicacy of perception, and a Parisian training, have given him an extraordinary power of discernment. At his best, the many-sidedness of his mind actually reminds us of Goethe. We are at times tempted to call him "wise"; and few indeed are the critics who tempt us to apply this adjective to them. He very seldom allows himself to be confused or influenced by the popular sentiment connected with a name, no matter whether it is lofty, or pathetic, or depreciatory. He inquires into the pedigree of his author, his constitution and health, his economic position; he snaps up some involuntary confession he has made, and shows that it is supported by other utterances, and that it throws light on, and explains the actions of the man. He describes him in his bright and noble moments; he surprises him in déshabille; with his marvellous capacity for "finding a needle in a haystack," he discovers what the dead man concealed in the inmost recesses of his heart. With the judicial calm of the scientific investigator, he enumerates his tendencies towards good and his tendencies towards evil, and weighs them in the balance. And by such means he produces a trustworthy portrait--or rather, a series of portraits, each one of which is trustworthy, though some of them contradict each other. For, notable critic as Sainte-Beuve is, he invariably shirks one of the greatest difficulties with which the critic has to contend. A conscientious critic has, as a rule, read the work which he undertakes to interpret and criticise, many times and at various stages of his development; each time he has been struck by something different; and in the end he has seen the work from so many different points of view that it is impossible for him, without doing a sort of inward violence to himself, to maintain one single standpoint, one attitude of feeling. And if he happens to be dealing, not with a single work, but with a highly productive author who has passed through many stages of development, or possibly even with a whole school of literature, the difficulty of making one comprehensive picture out of the many different impressions received under totally different psychical conditions, becomes proportionately greater. A building which we have seen only once, half of it in sunlight, half in the shadow of a heavy cloud, stands out distinctly in our memory in a certain light against a particular sky; but a building we have seen at every hour of day, in the dusk and in moonlight, from all sides, from various elevations, and as often from the inside as the outside, a building in which we have lived, and the size of which has dwindled in our eyes as we grew--of such a building we find it difficult to give a single, fully descriptive picture. This difficulty Sainte-Beuve avoids by constantly producing fresh descriptions and fresh criticisms of the same men and their works, leaving it to the reader to draw his own conclusions. It was with good reason that he chose as the motto for a series of his works the saying of Sénac de Meilhan: "Nous sommes mobiles et nous jugeons des êtres mobiles."

The latter of these propositions, namely, that every human being whom we judge has altered, has developed steadily, Sainte-Beuve understood better than it had ever been understood before. He not only changes his tone every time he changes his theme, but changes it every time there is a change in the man or woman who is his theme for the time being; his agile talent imitates all the movements of the individual human soul during its development process.[1] Hence his manner is as changeable as his subject; he is now the biographer, now the critic; he packs as many limiting and defining parentheses into his periods as possible; connects sentences which modify one another; uses technical words which introduce a whole train of ideas and memories; and vague expressions which may mean much more than they say. For though he moves through the dim depths of a man's life with the certainty of the diver who sees the submarine growths through the water, he nevertheless, for many reasons, prefers to write with a certain amount of vagueness of what he has seen. When he is writing of the living it is, of course, only permissible to make vague allusions to their private life; and the dead have, as a rule, descendants or relatives who keep jealous guard over their reputation. Sainte-Beuve, therefore, generally contents himself with showing that he divines or knows much on which he does not choose to dwell.

With the course of years he became bolder and more scientific in his psychological analysis. In the following passage he defends his right to be so. It is taken from a letter written on the 9th of May 1863 to a critic who had blamed him for certain disparaging remarks in one of his articles: "Art--and especially a purely intellectual art like that of criticism--is an instrument which is difficult to handle, and its worth is dependent upon the worth of the artist. Granted this, is it not absolutely necessary to have done with that foolish conventionality, that cant, which compels us to judge an author not only by his intentions, but also by his pretensions? Am I, for example, to be obliged to see in Fontanes only the great master, polished, noble, elegant, religious, and not the hasty, brusque, sensual man that he really was?... Or to come to our own day.... I have had the opportunity for thirty years and more of observing Villemain, a man of distinguished intellect and talent, who is actually brimming over with generous, liberal, philanthropic, Christian, civilising sentiment, but who is, nevertheless, the most sordid, malicious ape in existence. What is to be done in such a case? Are we to go on to all eternity praising his noble, elevated sentiments, as those by whom he is surrounded do? Are we to dupe ourselves and dupe others? Are men of letters, historians, and moralists merely actors, whom we have no right to study except in the rôles which they have chosen and defined for themselves? Are we only permitted to see them on the stage? Or is it allowable, when our knowledge is sufficient, boldly and yet gently to insert the scalpel and show the weak points of the armour, the faulty joints between the talent and the soul? allowable to praise the talent whilst indicating the defects in the soul which actually affect the talent and any permanent influence it may exercise. Will literature lose by such a proceeding? It is possible that it may; but the science of psychology will gain."

This, then, is the first advance--firm ground beneath our feet; no deceptive idealisation! The next is, that criticism, which had hitherto been a disintegrating, separating process, becomes in Saint-Beuve's hands, and with the limitations entailed by his character, an organising, constructive process. His criticism produces an organism, a life, as poetry does. It does not break up the given material into road-metal and gravel, but erects a building with it. It does not break up the human soul into its component parts, so that we only gain an understanding of it as a piece of dead mechanism, without having any idea what it is like when it is in movement. No, he shows us the machine at work; we see the fire that drives it and hear the noise it makes, whilst we are learning the secrets of its construction.

Thanks to these reforms of Sainte-Beuve's, the history of literature, which used to be a kind of secondary, inferior branch of the science of history, has become the guide of history proper, its most interesting and most living part; for the literature of nations is the most attractive and most instructive material with which history has to deal.

We began by asserting that Sainte-Beuve's critical activity did not lead him to forsake poetry. We are now in a position to prove that the art of the critic, as practised by him in the last years of his life, in the highest stage of his development, had entered into the closest relationship with modern poetry. For poetry became synthetic simultaneously with criticism; and the cause of the movement was the same in both cases, namely, the gradual conquest by science of the whole domain of modern intellectual life. At the beginning of the century imagination was considered the essential quality in poetry; it was his capacity of invention which made the poet a poet; he was not tied down to nature and reality, but was as much at home in the supernatural as in the actual world. In the generation of 1830 such authors as Nodier and Alexandre Dumas express this view of the matter, each in his own way. But as Romanticism by degrees developed into realism, creative literature by degrees gave up its fantastic excursions into space. It exerted itself even more to understand than to invent; and this produced a close connection with criticism. Fiction became psychological. The point of departure of the novelist and of the critic in their respective descriptions is now the same, namely, the spiritual atmosphere of a period. In it the real or invented characters appear to us; the novelist's aim is to represent and interpret the actions of a human being, the critic's, to represent and interpret a work, in such a manner that the reader may see both the actions and the work to be results produced with real or apparent inevitability, when certain inward qualities or tendencies are acted upon by suggestions from without. The only fundamental difference is that the creative author makes the speech and the actions of his characters, who, fictitious though they are, are generally drawn from life, the probable consequences of given circumstances; whereas the critic's imagination, fettered by facts, necessarily restricts itself to the representation of the psychical condition which led to or influenced the utterances and actions he describes. The novelist deduces a man's probable actions from what he has observed of his character. The critic deduces a man's character from his works.

Criticism, understood as the capacity of overcoming one's natural narrow-mindedness by the wideness and many-sidedness of one's sympathies, has been a distinguishing faculty of all the greatest authors of this century. It was from this point of view that Émile Montégut regarded it when he called it the youngest genius, the Cinderella among the intelligences. "Criticism," he wrote, "is the tenth Muse. It was she who was Goethe's mystic bride; it was she who made twenty poets of him. What but criticism is the basis of German literature? What are the English poets of our own day? Inspired critics. What was Italy's noble Leopardi? A fiery critic. Amongst all the modern poets only two, Byron and Lamartine, have not been critics; and for this reason these two have lacked many-sidedness and variety and have become as monotonous as they are." When criticism is taken in a wider sense, in the full meaning of the word, this last limitation falls away. For in its signification of the power of passing judgment on the existing state of things, it was an inspiring force in all the great Romantic lyric writers of the period, Byron as well as Hugo, Lamartine as well as George Sand. From the moment when their poetry ceases to exclude all important contemporary life and thought, from the moment when the Romantic lyric poets transform themselves into the organs of great ideas, criticism becomes an inspiring principle in their works also. It inspired Hugo's _Les Châtiments_; it inspired Byron's _Don Juan_. It is a finger-post on the path of the human mind. It plants hedges and lights torches along that path. It cuts and clears new tracks. For it is criticism which removes mountains--the mountains of belief in authority, of prejudice, of idealess power and dead tradition.

[1] The two following sentences from _Port-Royal_ exemplify my meaning. In the first we have him calmly and frankly giving up the attempt to produce resemblance between his character portraits of the same person; in the second we see him determined to include every side of the character: "C'est le M. Saint-Cyran tout-à-fait définitif et mûr que j'envisage désormais; c'est de lui qu'est vrai ce qui va suivre; si quelque chose dans ce qui précède ne cadre plus, qu'on le rejette, comme en avançant il l'a rejeté lui-même."--"Certes on peut tailler dans M. de Saint-Cyran un calviniste, mais c'est à condition d'en retrancher mainte parte vitale."

XXXII

THE DRAMA: VITET, DUMAS, DE VIGNY, HUGO

The success of the Romantic School in lyric poetry, fiction, and criticism was indisputable; but there was one branch of literature in which it failed to realise the bold expectations with which it started on its career; and this was the branch which, according to the old principles of æsthetics, was (and curiously enough, as a rule, still is) regarded as the highest, namely, the drama. As the art stood in such high estimation, the comparative slightness of their success in it was painfully felt by the Romanticists. Their plays never found real favour with the public, never became part of the permanent repertory of any theatre. Victor Hugo's were only popular as librettos for Italian operas; Mérimée's were never played at all; George Sand's and Balzac's had generally only a _succès d'estime_; and it was long before a few of Alfred de Musset's short pieces found their way on to the stage; whereas Scribe and his collaborators drew full houses, not only in France but abroad.

And yet the school did much admirable work in the domain of drama. The first essay was made by Vitet, who between 1826 and 1829 wrote a succession of _Scènes dramatiques_, subsequently published in a collected form under the title of _La Ligue_. The original idea had suggested itself to him of dramatising episodes in French history without adding anything fictitious whatever; his imagination was allowed to do nothing but vitalise history, and it succeeded most admirably in doing so. The atmosphere of Vitet's works is the atmosphere of long-past days, and the talk of his sixteenth-century characters conveys such an impression of authenticity that we feel when we are reading his dramas as if we were living history, hour by hour.

Ludovic Vitet was born in Paris in 1802, received his education at the Ecole Normale, took part as a Liberal in the political movements of the day, was a member of the society _Aide toi--le ciel t'aidera_, and wrote (as already mentioned) in the _Globe_ as an ardent champion of Romanticism. His poetico-historical works were all produced in this youthful period, with the exception of a series of dramatic scenes, distinctly inferior to the rest, which he published in 1849 under the title of _Les Étais d'Orléans_.

His career was uneventful. As a young man he was an inseparable friend of Count Duchâtel. When the Revolution of July placed his friends in power and Duchâtel became a member of the Guizot ministry, Vitet was made Inspector of Historical Monuments, a post which Guizot devised specially for him. Henceforth he was a politician; in 1834 he became a member of the Chamber of Deputies, in 1836 a member of the Council of State, in 1846 a Member of the Academy.

He was a consistent Monarchist and Conservative. From 1851 to 1871 he held aloof from public affairs altogether. After the war he again took a prominent position, under Thiers. He died in 1873.

Vitet furnishes a good example of the power of the first impetus of a strong artistic movement to inspire even minds which are not productive and artistic by nature. After 1830 he was eminent only as a learned historian of art. He wrote a biography of Count Duchâtel. His literary and historical essays are as dry and tedious as Mérimée's.

To his youthful works we always return with pleasure--to _Les Barricades, Les États de Blois_, and _La Mort de Henri III_. The principal characters in them, Henri II, Henri III., and the Dukes of Guise of several successive generations, are portrayed in such masterly style as to bear comparison with the heroes of Shakespeare's great historical plays (Henry IV. and Richard III. certainly excepted). The manners and ideas of the age are so clearly placed before us that we feel as if they cannot have been better known or understood by contemporaries. _Les États de Blois_ is unmistakably the finest of these works. Let any one who wishes to make acquaintance with Vitet at his best, read the scenes which describe the murder of the Duke of Guise. Seldom has an author ventured to set aside poetic convention to such an extent in a historical play. The event is much more vividly and realistically brought before us than even in Delaroche's fine painting, which shows us Henri III. cautiously opening the door and peeping at the body of his great enemy lying on the floor. Vitet first shows us the King in his room at four o'clock in the morning, dipping Spanish poniards into holy water and tremblingly handing them to his minions without even daring to utter his enemy's name. Then comes the scene in the Duke's room, in which his mother and his mistress in vain beseech him not to imperil his life, but to keep away from the Council to be held next morning. We next see him in the Council-chamber; an uncomfortable feeling comes over him; his nose begins to bleed; he has forgotten his handkerchief, and sends a messenger to fetch it. The Scottish guards stupidly bar this messenger's way; but they quickly perceive their mistake, and the Duke gets the handkerchief. But he is uneasy, this great soldier who has faced drawn blades so often without turning pale, and he begins to feel faint. It is because he is still fasting; the feeling will pass off if he eats something; he opens the little _bonbonnière_ which hangs at his belt; it is empty. Some one is despatched to fetch him sweetmeats or fruit. At this moment Révol comes out of the King's apartment and says: "The King wishes to speak with you, Monseigneur!" The other lords of the Council stop their conversation and exchange glances. The Duke rises; he takes a little time to fasten his mantle, which slips first off one shoulder, then off the other; he is unconsciously trying to delay his departure--too proud not to be ready to go, even if it be to death, and yet human enough to hesitate a moment on the fatal threshold. He must have another handkerchief, as the first is stained with blood; again one of the conspirators goes, leaving the others in anxious suspense. It is a masterly representation, this of Vitet's, of the restlessness, impatience, and foolish feeling of shame which at times overcome us and impel us to rush blindly into the most hazardous situations, merely to escape from painfully ridiculous ones. The messenger sent for the handkerchief again delays. Then the proud Guise loses patience. With the words, "I cannot keep the King waiting longer," he goes out at the door; as it closes behind him, a dozen officers thrust their long poniards into his body.

We observe that Vitet enters into details which would be unsuitable for the stage. His _Scènes dramatiques_ are only intended to be read. Therefore they are not genuine dramas. And the explanation of this is, that Vitet, with all his historical insight, lacked both poetic passion and the artistic gift of organisation. Because he is never capable of developing pathos, of rising to a climax, from the height of which all the rest would be felt to be preparation and result, he never attains to really artistic construction. He was evidently haunted by a species of artistic anxiety, a fear of making the slightest alteration in the historical facts, a fear of obtruding his own personality. He had not a strong enough individuality to dare to issue an artistic coinage stamped with his own image. His productivity ceased as early as it did, because the imagination which inspired his works, though vigorous, was not free, not independent, either in its observation or in its reproduction; it was hampered and weighted by scholarship, by the dust of the record office. This beautiful and fiery Pegasus stood tethered in a library.

It would be a shame to employ the same metaphor in writing of the Romantic author who, following in Vitet's steps, set himself to dramatise historical episodes, and who in February 1829, a year before Victor Hugo, achieved popularity with a historical drama, _Henri III. et sa Cour_. This writer was Alexandre Dumas (born in 1803), a man of brilliant, spontaneous talent and Titanic constitution, who displayed the same aptitude for Herculean tasks in literature as his father had done in war. For forty years he continued without a pause to produce tragedies, comedies, novels, short stories, books of travel, and memoirs. It would be foolish to write contemptuously of such prodigious inventiveness, such incredible productivity. We can trace in these works the French-African blood; there is something in them of the easy-going Creole disposition, something of the ardent sensuality of the negro race. Assisted by numerous collaborators, all much inferior to himself, Dumas peopled the stages, crowded the booksellers' shelves, filled the _feuilleton_ columns of the newspapers with the creations of his brain; the printing-presses creaked and groaned in their efforts to keep pace with his incessant production. What one cannot but regret is the easy-going worldliness which prevented any real process of development taking place. Dumas was an artist only in his first period. Beginning in a romantic age, he began romantically; continuing in a commercial age, he continued commercially.

In _Henri III et sa Cour_ he did what Vitet had not succeeded in doing with the same historical material, namely, produced a spirited and playable drama; but it was a drama in which the defiance of classic theatrical convention was of the most superficial kind. He ventured to reproduce in externals the court customs of the period. On the boards where for a couple of centuries the hero and his confidant had conversed either with both arms hanging by their sides or with their left hands on their sword-hilts, a whole troop of King Henry's courtiers appeared with cups and balls (the game of cup-and-ball was an invention of that day); and in the pauses these same gentlemen amused themselves by blowing small darts out of blow-pipes. Nevertheless they felt and spoke like the young men of 1828.

The psychology of the other historical plays of Dumas' youth (_Napoléon Bonaparte, Charles VII chez ses grands Vassaux_, &c.) is equally superficial. It was not until he lit upon an age the spirit of which he understood and could master, that he succeeded in giving such excellent representations of past days as we have in the interesting and effective dramas, _Un Mariage sous Louis XV_ and _Gabrielle de Belle-Isle_, both of which (and especially the latter, with its slightly idealised picture of the manners and customs of the Regency) possess real literary value. But before this, in 1831, it had fallen to Dumas' lot to present the young Romantic generation with one of the typical figures which it recognised as representative of itself. He wrote _Antony_.

With all its faults, there is something in this play which makes it better than even the best of Dumas' other works. There is warmer blood, more human nature in it than in the others. And the reason why, with all its naïveté, it makes a really powerful impression on us is, that in it Dumas has flung his own ego, himself, with his wild passion, his youthful enthusiasm, and chivalrous instincts, on to the stage. Antony is an 1830 hero, of the same type as all of Hugo's--broad-shouldered, lion-maned, enthusiastic and despairing, capable of living without food or sleep, ready at any moment to blow out his own or any one else's brains. But the sensation produced by _Antony_ was due to the fact that Dumas had done what Hugo never would or could do, namely, laid the action of his play in 1830, and put his hero on the stage dressed in the fashion of the day, in the very same black coat as the male members of the audience wore. Hitherto Romanticism had voluntarily restricted itself on the stage to the Middle Ages. Now it revealed itself in undisguised modernity.

We come upon a vindication of this step in the play itself. A conversation on the subject of the literary disputes of the day is introduced into the fourth act. During the course of it a poet, who is defending the Romanticists' practice of going back to the Middle Ages for their themes, says:

"The drama of passion must necessarily be historical drama. History bequeaths to us the passionate deeds which were really done. If in the midst of our modern society we were to attempt to lay bare the heart which beats under our ugly short black coats, the resemblance between the hero and the public would be too great; the spectator who was following the development of a passion would desire to have it arrested exactly where it would have stopped in his own case. He would cry: 'Stop! that is wrong; that is not how I feel. When the woman whom I love deceives me I suffer, certainly, but I neither kill her nor myself.' And the outcry against exaggeration and melodrama would drown the applause of the few who feel that the passions of the nineteenth century are the same as those of the sixteenth, and that the blood can course as hotly beneath a cloth coat as beneath a steel corselet."

We can imagine the applause which followed this speech. All wished to show that they belonged to these few. Passion was the order of the day, and they proved themselves to be passionate by applauding. And _Antony_ truly is a symphony of raging passions, the like of which it would be difficult to find. After several years of travel the hero returns to Paris and finds that the woman he loves is married. He saves her life at the risk of his own by stopping her runaway horses; the shaft of the carriage has pierced his breast; he is carried into her house. Antony is an illegitimate child and a foundling; hence as a lover he is a rebel against the laws of society. "Other men," he says to the woman he loves, "have a father, a mother, a brother--arms which open for them when they are in trouble; I have not so much as a tombstone upon which I can read my name and weep. Other men have a country; I have none, for I belong to no family. One name meant to me everything that I possessed, and that name, your name, I am forbidden to pronounce." The lady reminds him of social obligations: "Call them duties or call them prejudices; such as they are, they exist." "Why," he replies, "should I submit to these laws? Not one among those by whom they were made has spared me a suffering or done me a service. I have received nothing but injustice, and I owe nothing but hatred. My unfortunate mother's shame has been branded on my forehead."

Adèle loves Antony, but avoids him. In the course of a journey she takes, she has to spend a night at an inn; he surprises her there and takes possession of her with violence. In spite of this dastardly act she continues to love him. We meet the couple again in Paris. Their story is known. We hear hypocritical women, who manage to combine secret leanings to the forbidden with irreproachable outward behaviour, destroying Adèle's reputation. Their attacks on her evoke outbursts of indignation from the really worthy, indignation against society and its hypocrisies. But the drama is drawing to a close. The husband, Colonel d'Hervey, returns from a journey; Antony tries in vain to persuade Adèle to escape with him; the step of the injured husband is heard in the anteroom; the lover draws his Romantic dagger and plunges it into Adèle's breast; to save her honour he meets d'Hervey with the cry: "Elle me résistait; je l'ai assassinée!"

What chiefly strikes us now on reading the play is its preposterous absurdity. We feel that if we were to see it acted, as a new play, we should not be able to refrain from smiling at the parts intended to touch us. We can hardly understand to-day how it happened that on the night of its first performance in 1831 a select audience were excited by it to the wildest enthusiasm. They applauded, shed tears, sobbed, shouted Bravo! The effect of the play was heightened by the splendid acting of Bocage and Marie Dorval. Dumas tells that a handsome green coat he was wearing was positively torn off his back and into scraps, which were preserved as relics by the enthusiastic youths who formed a large proportion of the audience; and even if we do not take this anecdote quite literally, there is no doubt of the unboundedness of the enthusiasm. The explanation is, that men never laugh at a work which gives expression to their own moods and feelings. Antony was not merely the impersonation of passion verging on savagery, in combination with a tenderness so great that it would rather take upon itself the responsibility of a murder than expose the beloved one to insult and scorn; he was also the Byronic, mysterious young hero, who is predestined to struggle against the injustice of fate, and is greater than his fate. But even in those days there were not wanting critics who saw the weaknesses of the play. Bocage, who acted Antony, considered the closing speech so foolish, that he would have omitted it if he could. He did omit it one evening, and the curtain fell without it, but only with the result that the audience began to shout and scream as if possessed. They would not be defrauded of their speech. Bocage had gone; but Madame Dorval, who was still lying dead upon the stage, had the presence of mind to order the curtain to be raised again, upon which, holding up her head, she said with a smile and a transposition of the pronouns, "Je lui résistais, il m'a assassinée!"[1] One sharply satirical voice was raised within the precincts of the Romantic camp. Let any one interested turn up the long and excellent criticism of _Antony_ in Jules Janin's _Histoire de la littérature dramatique_, undoubtedly the best piece of criticism its author ever wrote, and he will have the pleasure of beholding delirious Romanticism overwhelmed with ridicule.

Whilst _Antony_ may be described as the Romantic fit of hysterics, _Chatterton_, the one play of Alfred de Vigny's which was a success on the stage, may be designated the Romantic dirge. These two favourite dramas of the generation of 1830 complement each other; the one represents the cult of genius, the other the cult of passion; the one sympathy with the suffering, the other admiration for energetic action; or, to go deeper, the one the Teutonic, the other the Latin side of Romanticism.

Alfred de Vigny (born 1799) had failed to win the approbation of the theatre-going public by his excellent historical drama, _La Maréchale d'Ancre_, which was put on the stage in 1834. The reason probably was, that in everything essential its characters belonged to those types with which the public had already become familiar in other Romantic historical tragedies. Borgia, the lover, for instance, is of exactly the same species as Victor Hugo's lovers, and is not even very different from the lover of Dumas' plays, in spite of the widely different characters of the two authors. This shows us the power of a school to set its stamp upon writers of the most varied individualities.[2]

_Chatterton_, on the other hand, is a work peculiarly characteristic of De Vigny. This play, which was performed in 1835, is based on an idea to which its author had already given expression, in three different forms, in a volume of tales entitled _Stello_, published two years previously--the idea of the true poet's unhappy and neglected position in modern society. De Vigny, to begin with, regarded the poet from the Romantic standpoint, regarded him, that is to say, as a superior being, nay, as the noblest of all beings (the idea with which the German Romanticists, too, were so thoroughly impregnated); and a feeling of strong compassion had been aroused in him by the poet's fate, especially the fate of the young poet who, when he stands most in need of help and appreciation, so seldom finds hearts that understand him and patrons who prevent his life being a struggle for existence. What lent a certain charm to De Vigny's constant appeal to the public on behalf of the poet, was the fact that he was not pleading his own cause; for he was a man of good family, who had always been in comfortable circumstances. According to his idea, the poet is a poor unfortunate who is entirely in the power of his own imagination. He is "incapable of everything except fulfilling his divine mission," and especially incapable of earning money; it is possible for him, indeed, to make a living by writing, but if he does so it is probably at the cost of his noblest gifts; he develops his critical faculty at the expense of his imagination; and the divine spark which burns in him is extinguished. Therefore this heavenly messenger ought not to be allowed to degrade himself by common work; his brain is a volcano, from which the "harmonious lava" (_laves harmonieuses_) can only issue when he is in a position to be idle as long as he pleases.[3]

There is, as the modern reader sees at once, some truth in this idea, but more exaggeration. The play which was based on it, and which produced floods of tears, appeals so exclusively to the instinct of compassion, that it has no properly tragic effect; and it has too strong a lyric bias in favour of its hero to possess the inward equilibrium without which a drama lacks stability. Chatterton and the young Quakeress whom he loves have appropriated every single noble quality of mind and soul; around them there is nothing but coarseness, cold-heartedness, prose, and stupidity. What we are shown is the cruel treatment of the intellectual genius by the coarse, earth-bound world around him. The view of life is not unlike what we find in Germany in the writings of Novalis, in Denmark in those of Andersen and Ingemann; for authors such as these Goethe has written his _Tasso_ in vain. We in our day are tired of the dramas with artist heroes which were ushered in by Oehlenschläger's _Correggio_, and are represented in Germany by Holtei's _Lorbeerbaum und Bettelstab_, &c. We no longer indignantly sympathise with Chatterton, "the man who has been created to descry in the stars the way pointed out by the finger of the Lord," when he chooses rather to poison himself than accept an unpoetical appointment which would bring him in a hundred a year. In this case also, what touched every heart in an audience of the year 1835, now only elicits a smile and a shrug of the shoulders.

Romanticism was too essentially lyric to produce dramatic works of enduring value. This fact is perhaps most strongly borne in upon us when we consider the plays of the greatest of the Romantic lyric poets. Victor Hugo's dramas have many points of resemblance with Oehlenschläger's tragedies. We frequently observe that both authors have been influenced by their reading. In Hugo's _Marie Tudor_ we trace the influence of Dumas' _Christine à Fontainebleau_, and the last scene of _Lucrèce Borgia_ owes something to Webster's _Duchess of Malfi_. The characters in the plays of both authors are merely outlined; in neither are they real, complete human beings; and yet the power of genuine enthusiasm and lyric pathos inspires them with life. Hugo's characters certainly approach nearer to real life, and for this reason, that events such as those represented in his plays had occurred in France in much more recent times than in Denmark. Hernani reminds us of the rebel leaders who defied the Government in La Vendée; Gilbert, who goes to the scaffold of his own free will to avenge the woman he loves, does no more than many a noble victim of the guillotine had done; and Ruy Blas' elevation from the position of a footman to that of a minister of state is not much more remarkable than Rousseau's rise from the same position to that of one of the world's most famous authors. This, however, practically makes little difference; for the author's love of the unusual, nay, of the monstrous, represses everything which might remind us of the reality with which we are familiar, and gives prominence to unnatural phenomena which, though sublime in his eyes, are merely absurd in the eyes of readers of a later day.

The conception of human nature which reveals itself in Hugo's plays is purely lyric; it reminds us in all essentials of the psychology of his rival, Lamartine, an author who was such a contrast to him in other respects. The only difference is that, whilst Lamartine, with his harmonious nature, loves to represent a pure and beautiful character which yields to some sudden temptation and then expiates the one weak moment with years of repentance and penance (Jocelyn, Cèdar in _La Chute d'un Ange_), Hugo, in his dramas, loves to represent a human soul debased by bad passions, by all kinds of misery and humiliations, by vice, by slavery, by infirmity, yet so constituted that, under given circumstances, it is irresistibly attracted by the good and beautiful, in alliance with which it fights against the horrible past which it has forsworn. This soul aspires; it understands even the most delicate refinements of the good and beautiful; but it feels unworthy of the noble emotions which it experiences; it cannot mount into these unfamiliar regions, and so it falls back, exhausted and defeated, into its former degraded condition.

Let me illustrate my meaning by a few examples. Triboulet (_Le Roi s'amuse_) has been corrupted by his position as the unscrupulous mouthpiece and butt of mockery, yet he loves his daughter with the purest tenderness. She is stolen from him, and he gives himself up entirely to hatred and projects of revenge.--Marion (_Marion Delorme_) has sold herself hundreds of times; but she falls in love with a young, brave man, and this passion completely purifies her. Didier is condemned to death, and in the dread hour of trial she becomes Marion again. She gives herself to the judge in order to save the man she loves, not understanding that Didier would far rather die than be saved thus.--Lucrèce Borgia was begotten in crime and has lived a life of crime. But this licentious woman, this poisoner, has a son whom she loves, and for his sake she is prepared to renounce the life she has hitherto led. But a mortal insult is offered her, and in her fury she has recourse to her old weapons; she invites her enemies to a repast, gives them poison, and unwittingly murders her son along with the others.--Ruy Blas, compelled by poverty, has become a nobleman's lackey. The love of a queen makes of this lackey a minister of state. He is fit for the position; he evolves and carries out great and noble plans; he is on the point of becoming the saviour of his country, when his past rises up against him. The disappointment of all his hopes is too much for him; he revenges himself like the man he was; he will not fight a duel with his master, but gets possession of his sword and kills the defenceless man with it.[4]

The conception of the tragic is, we observe, always the same. But of chief significance in all these dramas, as far as Hugo is concerned, is the fountain of lyric pathos which wells forth when the degraded human soul is raised by noble passion from the mire. The real kernel of the drama is in every case the hymn of strong emotion with which the guilt-stained soul sings itself pure.

One of Hugo's most famous poems (_Les Chants du Crépuscule_, xxxii.) contains an allegory of which we are reminded when considering his dramas. High in a church tower--so he writes--hangs an old bell. Long ago its metal was clean and bright. The only inscription it bore was the word God, with a crown below it. But the tower has had many visitors, and each of them, one with his blunt knife, another with a rusty nail, has scratched his own mean name, or a foul word, or a silly witticism, or a platitude on the bell. It is covered with dust and cobwebs; rust has found its way into the scratches, marring and corroding it.

"Mais qu'importe à la cloche et qu'importe à mon âme! Qu'à son heure, à son jour, l'esprit saint les réclame, Les touche, l'une et l'autre, et leur dise: chantez! Soudain, par toute voie et de tous les côtés, De leur sein ébranlé, rempli d'ombres obscures, À travers leur surface, à travers leurs souillures, Et la cendre et la rouille, amas injurieux, Quelque chose de grand s'épandra dans les cieux."

The poet was only attempting to describe the condition of his own soul when he sang thus, but he did more; for the allegory strikingly depicts the outbursts of lyric pathos which escape from the lips of the unhappy and guilt-stained characters who give his dramas their interest.

But pathos and lyric sonority, in however ample measure, are not materials out of which alone a dramatic edifice can be constructed. A strong foundation of accurate reasoning is demanded, or, failing this, at least of sound common-sense and correct taste.

Such foundations Hugo could not supply. And his failings as a dramatist increased with time. There happened in his case what happens with so many artists: his style degenerated into mannerism. He became, as it were, his own best pupil; as a dramatist he ended by parodying himself--the most cruelly effective kind of parody.

He had always been wanting in a sense of the comic, and had always been inclined to confuse the sublime with the colossal. To this inclination he yielded more unrestrainedly than ever before in writing _Les Burgraves_. The very list of characters evokes a smile: Job, Burgrave of Heppenheff, aged 100; Magnus, son of Job, aged 80; Hatto, son of Magnus, aged 60; Gorlois, son of Hatto, aged 30. A Parisian caricature of the Burgraves, of about the same date as the play, represents them standing in a row, decreasing in height and quantity of beard according to age.

The centenarian is the most energetic of them all; he represents the good old days. He calls his son of eighty: "Young man!" but Hugo does not smile. All these old gentlemen vie in declamation with a beggar of ninety, who turns out to be no less a personage than Frederick Barbarossa, who has lived in concealment for twenty years, but has come to execute vengeance upon the eldest of the Burgraves, who as a youth had plotted against his life. The play teems with improbabilities and Romantic absurdities. For instance, in order to bring about a recognition scene, Hugo makes a soldier fight with a piece of red-hot iron, with which he sets a mark upon an opponent whom he wishes to be able to recognise again, and whom he cannot see rightly because it is dark.

When this monstrous production of an overstrained imagination was put upon the stage, in 1843, it proved a complete failure. On the first night, in the middle of the play, hissing began. One of Hugo's faithful henchmen rushed to tell him. Hugo who, like Napoleon, relied upon his guard, answered as usual: "Get hold of some young men!" It is said that the messenger answered despondently, with downcast eyes: "There are no more young men." The generation to which Romanticism had appealed thirteen years before was no longer young, and, what was worse, it had grown weary; more than one of its poets had made too heavy demands upon it.

A reaction was inevitable, and it set in that very year. It found its author and its histrionic genius.

A young man as yet unknown to fame had left the provincial town in which he had been brought up, and come to Paris with a manuscript in his pocket. He was a thoroughly high-principled young man, with no great gift of imagination, but with much refinement and taste, and of a nobly serious turn of mind. His name was François Ponsard, and the title of the manuscript was _Lucrèce_. It was a tragedy on an antique theme--the rape and death of the chaste Lucretia. The style was sober and severe; it recalled Racine's. The public was tired of the Romantic style. For long the quiet citizen had shaken his head over such phrases of Hugo's as "the tones purled from the organ like water from a sponge," or "the table-linen was white as pale grief's winding-sheet," or "the old woman walked with bent, slow back." But until now there had been no one capable of competing with Hugo. Here at last seemed to be a possible rival. At the first glance Ponsard's play appeared to be exactly on the lines of the old classical tragedy. In their eagerness its welcomers did not notice in what a modern manner the antique theme was treated, how much Ponsard had learned from the Romanticists, how much of its warm colouring his drama owed to Victor Hugo, and how small an amount of originality the new-comer really possessed.

All the public saw was that this drama was sane and simple. They saw that its heroine was Lucretia--not Hugo's horrible Lucrèce, that monster of bloodthirstiness and sensuality, but Rome's Lucretia, the emblem of chastity, another name for feminine purity. She represented marriage, the family, the poetry of home, as Antony and his kin had represented the morality of the foundling, and lawlessness. All Catholic and Classic France, all orthodox Switzerland, hymned the praises of the new dramatist and his play. At last Hugo had found his superior, Racine his equal. Even the critical Vinet joined in the great Hallelujah. He went into ecstasies over Ponsard's style: "This author spins gold as his Lucretia does wool &c."

_Les Burgraves_ was hissed on the 7th of March 1843. On the 22nd of April of the same year _Lucrèce_ was received on its first night with thunders of applause. So closely as this did the short-lived triumph of what went by the name of _l'école du bon sens_ follow on the defeat of Romantic dramaticism. If the worthy Ponsard relied upon the verdict of his critics, Janin and the others (Théophile Gautier and Théophile Dondey alone protested), he must have believed that his fame was established for all time.

The Classic reaction had found its actress as well as its dramatist. In 1838 a young Jewess had made her début in the Theatre Français. She was then eighteen, an ignorant child who had played the harp and sung in the cafés and in the streets; but time proved _Rachel_ to be a genius, the greatest actress France had ever known. And this great actress, as it happened, had a thorough distaste for the rôles with which the Romantic drama provided her, whilst she studied and played those of the old Classic repertory with such zeal and passion that she actually succeeded in doing what no one had believed possible namely, restoring their power of attraction to the tragedies which the Romantic School had disdainfully driven from the stage. Of what avail was it that Gautier wrung his hands! Iphigénie, Mérope, Émilia, Chimène, Phèdre, again trod the boards. And so nobly and naturally were they personated that an impressionable public was at times actually roused to a kind of fury with the authors and critics who had dared to throw contempt on these sacred national treasures. A nation is naturally rejoiced to learn that it has not been mistaken in the eminence of the men and works it has reverenced for centuries.

Although the title-rôle of _Lucrèce_ had been written for her, Rachel at first refused to play it; but after the success of the drama at the Odéon she consented. The mood of the audience the first time she appeared in it has been described to me by an eye-witness. "We sat waiting in breathless expectation for the curtain to rise. It rose, and we saw Rachel as Lucretia sitting at her spinning-wheel among her maidens. The silence had been complete enough before; but when she raised her head and opened her lips to say the first words (to one of the slaves): _Lève-toi, Laodice!_ there was such utter stillness that the fruit-sellers were heard crying their oranges in the market-place."

In their enthusiasm for Rachel the public did not realise that the Classic style in art was not really alive because a single genius for a time breathed life into the great works of a bygone age; and in their rejoicing over Ponsard they failed to understand how short his triumph must inevitably be. The Common-sense School, as its name prognosticates, never developed any vigorous originality. Ponsard himself was a writer of only second-rate talent. The youthful dramas of his gifted follower, Émile Augier (who dedicated his poems to him), imitate his sober spirit and style; but Augier's style changed as time went on.[5] Though the school, most praiseworthy in its intentions, by no means deserved the contemptuous attacks made on it by some of the irreconcilable younger Romanticists, including Vacquerie and Théodore de Banville, yet its historical significance is no more than this--it indicates the period when Romantic drama had outlived itself.

[1] Told me by an eye-witness of the scene, Philarète Chasles.

[2] In the list of personages we find the following directions to the actor for the rendering of the part of Borgia. Observe how all the qualities beloved of Romanticism are enumerated as if in a catalogue, and how in all essentials the directions might serve for Victor Hugo's young heroes, or indeed for Antony: "Montagnard brusque et bon. Vindicatif et animé par la vendetta comme par une seconde âme: conduit par elle _comme par la destinée_. Caractère vigoureux, triste et profondément sensible. Haïssant et aimant avec violence. Sauvage par nature, et civilisé comme malgré lui par la cour et la politesse de son temps."

[3] See the characteristic introduction to _Chatterton_, "Dernière nuit de travail, du 29 au 30 Juin 1834."

[4] _Cf_. Madame de Girardin: _Lettres parisiennes_, ii 31.

[5] Augier's _Gabrielle_ is perhaps the prettiest play which the Common-sense School produced. His dramas, _La Jeunesse_ and _La Pierre de Touche_, were evidently inspired by Ponsard's _L'Honneur et l'Argent_.

XXXIII

LITERATURE IN ITS RELATION TO THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS OF THE DAY

Meanwhile Saint-Simonism had been thoroughly leavening literature.

Lamartine, the most gifted of the authors who, after the restoration of the hereditary monarchy, lent their support to the Conservative party, began to waver early in the Thirties. In his versified novel, _Jocelyn_ (1836), mild and pious though its tone is, we are conscious of his new sympathies and of new developments in his convictions. In the preface he evades the question of his religious belief, merely remarking that, let it be what it may, he has not forgotten his youthful reverence for the Church. The most careless reader, however, cannot fail to observe that the story itself is a protest against the celibacy of the clergy, one of the fundamental principles of the Church. And in Jocelyn's diary we find the following significant passage, in the entry for 21st September 1800:--

"La caravane humaine un jour était campée Dans les forêts bordant une rive escarpée, Et ne pouvant pousser sa route plus avant. Les chênes l'abritaient du soleil et du vent, Les tentes, aux rameaux enlaçant leurs cordages, Formaient autour des troncs des cités, des villages, Et les hommes épars sur des gazons épais Mangeaient leur pain à l'ombre et conversaient en paix. Tout à coup comme atteints d'une rage insensée Ces hommes se levant à la même pensée, Portant la hache aux troncs, font crouler à leur piés Ces dômes où les nids s'étaient multipliés; Et les brutes des bois sortant de leurs repaires Et les oiseaux fuyant les cimes séculaires Contemplaient la ruine avec un œil d'horreur, Ne comprenaient pas l'œuvre et maudissaient du cœur Cette race stupide acharnée à sa perte, Qui détruit jusqu'au ciel l'ombre qui l'a couverte! Or, pendant qu'en leur nuit les brutes des forêts Avaient pitié de l'homme et séchaient de regrets, L'homme continuant son ravage sublime Avait jeté les troncs en arche sur l'abîme; Sur l'arbre de ses bords gisant et renversé La fleuve était partout couvert et traversé, Et poursuivant en paix son éternel voyage La caravane avait conquis l'autre rivage."

But this was only the beginning. _La Chute d'un Ange_ showed, in spite of all its faults, that Lamartine had discarded his earlier, "seraphic" style; and his first parliamentary speeches showed that Saint-Simonistic ideas had gradually supplanted his orthodox beliefs. The born aristocrat proclaimed himself a _démocrate conservateur_, desirous of the realisation, under a constitutional monarchy, of all the modern liberal and progressive ideas. And he did not stop even here. His famous _Histoire des Girondins_, published in 1846 (a work valueless as history, but written in a most poetical, persuasively eloquent style), was the book which more than any other attuned men's minds to revolution and prepared for the coming upheaval. And in 1848 we find the man who had been the court poet of the Restoration period, standing--the real chief of the Republic--on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, displaying the proud indifference of the aristocrat to the muskets levelled at his breast while addressing the crowd with the authoritative eloquence of the tribune. That was a great, an immortal moment in his life, when he saved the lives of his colleagues and averted civil war with a few unhesitating words, as beautiful as they were manly.

It was Pierre Leroux who initiated George Sand into the new, fermenting social ideas which with feminine impulsiveness she at once adopted. In his capacity of social reformer, Pierre Leroux, a metaphysician with a noble heart and a confused brain, who thought in triads in the manner of Schelling, championed equality and progress. To him progress meant approach towards equality. He was instigated to his attempts at reform by his indignation with the existing condition of society, with the equality as regarded the law, which permitted the rich man to escape the hardship of military service and the punishment due to his crime, with the liberty which consisted in the right of free competition, that is to say, the legal right of the rich to oppress the poor. Society as reorganised by Leroux was to be based on the triple nature of man. Man is constituted of perception, intuition, and cognition. To these three elements were to correspond three classes, the artisan or industrial, the artist, and the scientist class; but these three classes were not, as in Saint-Simon's imaginary society, to be castes, but were to act in unison. Three individuals or units, one from each class, were to constitute a society individual or unit; and these same three, working together, would constitute an "atelier." The "ateliers" also were to be divided into three classes, according to the activity which predominated in them, &c.

When we think of all these Utopias, we cannot but admire the sane and wise attitude maintained towards them by the authors who allowed themselves to be carried away by some of the ideas inspiring the different systems. They held aloof from everything, or almost everything, that was artificial, fantastic, or absurd. They contented themselves with kindling their poetic torches at the altar fire kept alight by the pure-hearted enthusiasts; they drew inspiration from the philanthropy of these men, from their ardent championship of the poor and the oppressed, from their fervent faith in the people and in progress.

It is quite evident, whatever may be said to the contrary, that Saint-Simonism was a beneficent influence in George Sand's life. It produced tranquillity after the fit of despair which dictated _Lelia_; it gave her a faith which was never afterwards disturbed, and a cause to work and fight for. She had an observant eye for all that was going on around her; and towards the close of the Thirties it was evident that the French working classes were in a state of violent ferment. At that period the slow transformation of France from an almost exclusively agricultural country to one of the chief manufacturing countries was already an accomplished fact. It was now no longer only the poverty of the peasants which called for a remedy, but also, and even more urgently, the poverty and discontent of the ever-increasing proletariat population of the great manufacturing and commercial towns. Like almost all the other French democratic writers, George Sand turned her attention to the working people of the towns, their hard struggle for existence, their remarkable intelligence, their social and political ideas. Saint-Simonism had originally appealed to her and aroused her enthusiasm by its condemnation of the relations between the sexes upheld by the conventions of existing society; it denned as truths to be proclaimed and championed the ideas which were most precious to her--that there is no beauty or value in marriage except when it is a voluntary union; and that mayor, witnesses, and priest cannot invest it with greater sacredness than do love and conscience. Now Saint-Simonism gave a more thoughtful and more definite character to her love of the people. Among the men of the working classes she discovered more unselfishness and manliness than among those of the middle classes; it began to seem to her as if the vices of the male sex which she had condemned with such severity in her first novels were in reality more the vices of a class than of the whole sex; and her love of the working class in conjunction with the innate idealism of her nature led her to see and represent the working man from an ideal point of view. She produced a series of novels in which the old contrast between two men of the same class, one unselfish and the other a hardened egotist, was superseded by the contrast between the idealised representative of the working classes and a more or less egotistical and slavishly conventional representative of the upper or middle classes.

The most interesting books of this series are the two written about 1840--_Horace_, the refusal to accept which produced a temporary disagreement between George Sand and the _Revue des deux Mondes_, and _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_, a genuine labour-question novel, which in its innocence and simple purity presents a striking contrast to the glaringly coloured stories of a socialistic and democratic tendency published a few years later by Eugène Sue.

In my opinion _Horace_ is one of George Sand's best books. In its hero she represents with more shrewdness and profundity than ever before or after the young bourgeois of the reign of Louis Philippe. The acuteness and insight she in this case displays are in no way inferior to Balzac's. She is inspired by a strong antipathy, which, however, does not preclude a good-humouredly tolerant treatment. With Horace is contrasted the noble proletarian, Arsène. This man, originally a painter, has been compelled by poverty to take a place as waiter in a _café_; but the dependent position has not degraded him. The simple goodness and beauty of his character make him most attractive. We believe in him.

Arsène has friends among the _Bousingots_, the circle of young students who in the Thirties transferred the style and deportment of the Romantic School to the domain of politics. They figure in many of the lithographs of the period with their Robespierre waistcoats, thick sticks, and glazed hats or red velvet caps. In outward appearance they somewhat resembled German _corps_ students; and they took part in all riots which were demonstrations of discontent with the _Juste-milieu_ government. George Sand defends them warmly. "None of the men," she says, "who at that time caused a slight disturbance of public order need blush now at the thought of having displayed a little youthful ardour. If the only use which youth can make of such nobility and courage as it possesses, is to attack society with it, the condition of society must be very bad." Arsène fights like a hero and is badly wounded in the working-men's revolt of the 5th of June 1832, which is sympathetically described; and in the course of a few years he becomes an experienced, able politician. The story of his political education is peculiarly interesting to us, because, in telling it, the authoress gives unambiguous expression to her own feelings. Arsène's hero is Godefroy Cavaignac; George Sand describes him and his friends, the society _Les amis du people_. "Their ideas," she writes, "at any rate indicated a great advance upon the liberalism of the Restoration period. The other Republicans were a little too much taken up with the idea of overthrowing monarchy, and did not give sufficient thought to the laying of the foundations of the republic; Godefroy Cavaignac's thoughts were of the emancipation of the people, of free education, of universal suffrage, of the gradual modification of the rights of property, &c." Horace's cold-heartedness and narrow-mindedness display themselves in his contemptuously sweeping condemnation of Saint-Simonism, which to him is pure charlatanism. He is incapable of appreciating its conception of the mutual relations of the sexes, and is obliged to submit to being reproved with the calmness of conscious superiority by a young dressmaker who lives with her friend, a clever young doctor, and regards this life of theirs as "the truly religious marriage."[1] The authoress undoubtedly attacks in this novel more problems than she is capable of solving, but the very fact of its dealing largely with the ideas and aims of the day gives it a vivid and attractive historical colouring. Besides, it was not her business, as a novelist, to solve social problems, but to show how they moved hearts and set brains to work, even the hearts and brains of enamoured young women and self-satisfied young men.

What I specially admire in _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_, a book which, as a novel, is inferior to _Horace_, is the impulsive strength of the feeling which inspired it. To feel the heart swell and burn with compassion for the unfortunates of society, to feel burdened by the favours which Fortune has bestowed on us and not on all, are sensations with which many a youth and maiden are familiar. But it is a rare thing indeed for the man or woman of forty still to hunger and thirst after justice for others, to be unable to sit still and see the yoke weighing down the innocent neck, unable to refrain from planning and striving after a different order of things, a different morality from that which seems to satisfy society in general, nay, to be actually ashamed to sleep or to take pleasure or to be happy for a few moments, as long as things are as they are. And these were the feelings which compelled George Sand to write this book. What a love for "the people" lies at the foundation of it! And it is a love for the people as they are--for the drinking, brawling people, as well as for the working, aspiring people--a love so great that the authoress cannot bear to describe or dwell upon the vices she sees and names. See the conversations in