A History of French Literature Part 18

Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces of the _emaux et Camees_. He is not without sensibility, but he will not embarra.s.s himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emanc.i.p.ated himself from the egoism of the romantic tendency. He sees as a painter or a gem-engraver sees, and will transpose his perceptions into coloured and carven words. That is all, but that is much. He values words as sounds, and can combine them harmoniously in his little stanzas. Life goes on around him; he is indifferent to it, caring only to fix the colour of his enamel, to cut his cameo with unfaltering hand. When the Prussian a.s.sault was intended to the city, when Regnault gave away his life as a soldier, Gautier in the Muses' bower sat pondering his epithets and filing his phrases. Was it strength, or was it weakness? His work survives and will survive by virtue of its beauty--beauty somewhat hard and material, but such as the artist sought. In 1872 Gautier died. By directing art to what is impersonal he prepared the way for the Parna.s.sien school, and may even be recognised as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism.

These--Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier--are the names which represent the poetry of nineteenth-century romance; four stars of varying magnitudes, and one enormous cometary apparition. There was also a _via lactea_, from which a well-directed gla.s.s can easily disentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a critic and a.n.a.lyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the _Vie, Poesies et Pensees de Joseph Delorme_; a singer of spiritual reverie, modest pleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the _Consolations_ and the _Pensees d'Aout_; a virtuoso always in his metrical researches; Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the _Iambes_, lover of Italian art and nature in _Il Pianto_; Auguste Brizeux, the idyllist, in his _Marie_, of Breton wilds and provincial works and ways; Gerard de Nerval, Hegesippe Moreau, Madame Desbordes-Valmore, and paler, lessening lights. These and others dwindle for the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms.

VII

The weaker side of the romantic school is apparent in the theatre.

It put forth a magnificent programme of dramatic reform, which it was unable to carry out. The preface to Victor Hugo's _Cromwell_ (1827) is the earliest and the most important of its manifestoes.

The poetry of the world's childhood, we are told, was lyrical; that of its youth was epic; the poetry of its maturity is dramatic. The drama aims at truth before all else; it seeks to represent complete manhood, beautiful and revolting, sublime and grotesque. Whatever is found in nature should be found in art; from multiple elements an aesthetic whole is to be formed by the sovereignty of imagination; unity of time, unity of place are worthless conventions; unity of action remains, and must be maintained. The play meant to exemplify the principles of Hugo's preface is of vast dimensions, incapable of presentation on the stage; the large painting of life for which he pleaded, and which he did not attain, is of a kind more suitable to the novel than to the drama. _Cromwell_, which departs little from the old rules respecting time and place, is a flux and reflux of action, or of speeches in place of action, with the question of the hero's ambition for kingship as a centre; its personages are lay figures draped in the costumes of historical romance.

The genius of Hugo was pre-eminently lyrical; the movement to which he belonged was also essentially lyrical, a movement for the emanc.i.p.ation of the personal element in art; it is by qualities which are non-dramatic that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When, in 1830, his _Hernani_ was presented at the Theatre Francais, a strange, long-haired, bearded, fantastically-attired brigade of young supporters engaged in a melee with those spectators who represented the tyranny of tradition. "Kill him! he is an Academician," was heard above the tumult. Gautier's truculent waistcoat flamed in the thickest of the fight. The enthusiasm of Gautier's party was justified by splendours of lyrism and of oratory; but Hugo's play is ill-constructed, and the characters are beings of a fantastic world. In _Marion Delorme_, in _Le Roi s'amuse_, in the prose-tragedy _Lucrece Borgia_, Victor Hugo develops a favourite theme by a favourite method--the moral ant.i.thesis of some purity of pa.s.sion surviving amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtue discovered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in violent contrasts. Marion is enn.o.bled by the sacrifice of whatever remains to her of honour; the moral deformity of Lucrece is purified by her instinct of maternal love; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful by virtue of his devotion as a father. The dramatic study of character is too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. _Ruy Blas_, like _Marion Delorme_ and _Hernani_, has extraordinary beauties; yet the whole, with its tears and laughter, its lackey turned minister of state, its amorous queen, is an incredible phantasmagoria. _Angelo_ is pure melodrama; _Marie Tudor_ is the melodrama of history. _Les Burgraves_ rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from poetry to declamation; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the reader please, symbolic; it is much that it ought not to be, much that is admirable and out of place; failing in dramatic truth, it fails with a certain sublimity. The logic of action, truth of characterisation, these in tragic creation are essentials; no heights or depths of poetry which is non-dramatic can entirely justify works which do not accept the conditions proper to their kind.

The tragedy of _Torquemada_, strange in conception, wonderful--and wonderfully unequal--in imaginative power, was an inspiration of Hugo's period of exile, wrought into form in his latest years. The dramas of the earlier period, opening with an historical play too enormous for the stage, closed in 1843 with _Les Burgraves_, which is an epic in dialogue. Aspiring to revolutionary freedom, the romantic drama disdained the bounds of art; epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy met and mingled, with a result too often chaotic. The desired harmony of contraries was not attained. Past ages were to be revived upon the stage. The historic evocation possessed too often neither historic nor human truth; it consisted in "local colour," and local colour meant a picturesque display of theatrical bric-a-brac. Yet a drama requires some centre of unity. Failing of unity in coherent action and well-studied character, can a centre be provided by some philosophical or pseudo-philosophical idea? Victor Hugo, wealthy in imagery, was not wealthy in original ideas; in grandiose prefaces he attempted to exhibit his art as the embodiment of certain abstract conceptions. A great poet is not necessarily a philosophical poet.

Hugo's interpretations of his own art are only evidence of the fact that a writer's vanity can practise on his credulity.

Among the romantic poets the thinker was Vigny. But it is not by its philosophical symbolism that his _Chatterton_ lives; it is by virtue of its comparative strength of construction, by what is sincere in its pa.s.sion, what is genuine in its pathos, and by the character of its heroine, Kitty Bell. In the instincts of a dramaturgist both Vigny and Hugo fell far short of ALEXANDRE DUMAS (1803-70). Before the battle of _Hernani_ he had unfolded the romantic banner in his _Henri III. et sa Cour_ (1829); it dazzled by its theatrical inventions, its striking situations, its ever-changing display of the stage properties of historical romance. His _Antony_, of two years later, parent of a numerous progeny, is a domestic tragedy of modern life, exhaling Byronic pa.s.sion, misanthropy, crime, with a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, a seducer, a murderer for its hero, and for its ornaments all those atrocities which fascinate a crowd whose nerves can bear to be agreeably shattered. Something of abounding vitality, of tingling energy, of impetuosity, of effrontery, secured a career for _Antony_, the _Tour de Nesle_, and his other plays. The trade in horrors lost its gallant freebooting airs and grew industriously commercial in the hands of Frederic Soulie. When in 1843--the year of Hugo's unsuccessful _Les Burgraves_--a pseudo-cla.s.sical tragedy, the _Lucrece_ of Ponsard, was presented on the stage, the enthusiasm was great; youth and romance, if they had not vanished, were less militant than in the days of _Hernani_; it seemed as if good sense had returned to the theatre.[2]

[Footnote 2: The influence of the great actress Rachel helped to restore to favour the cla.s.sical theatre of Racine and Corneille.]

Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843) is remembered in lyric poetry by his patriotic odes, _Les Messeniennes_, suggested by the military disasters of France. His dramatic work is noteworthy, less for the writer's talent than as indicating the influence of the romantic movement in checking the development of cla.s.sical art. Had he been free to follow his natural tendencies, Delavigne would have remained a creditable disciple of Racine; he yielded to the stream, and timidly approached the romantic leaders in historical tragedy. Once in comedy he achieved success; _L'ecole des Vieillards_ has the originality of presenting an old husband who is generous in heart, and a young wife who is good-natured amid her frivolity. Comedy during the second quarter of the century had a busy ephemeral life. The name of Eugene Scribe, an incessant improvisator during forty years, from 1811 onwards, in comedy, vaudeville, and lyric drama, seems to recall that of the seventeenth-century Hardy. His art was not all commerce; he knew and he loved the stage; a philistine writing for philistines, Scribe cared little for truth of character, for beauty of form; the theatrical devices became for him ends in themselves; of these he was as ingenious a master as is the juggler in another art when he tosses his bewildering b.a.l.l.s, or smiles at the triumph of his inexplicable surprises.

CHAPTER IV THE NOVEL

I

The novel in the nineteenth century has yielded itself to every tendency of the age; it has endeavoured to revive the past, to paint the present, to embody a social or political doctrine, to express private and personal sentiment, to a.n.a.lyse the processes of the heart, to idealise life in the magic mirror of the imagination. The literature of prose fiction produced by writers who felt the influence of the romantic movement tended on the one hand towards lyrism, the pa.s.sionate utterance of individual emotion--George Sand's early tales are conspicuous examples; on the other hand it turned to history, seeking to effect a living and coloured evocation of former ages.

The most impressive of these evocations was a.s.suredly Hugo's _Notre-Dame de Paris_. It was not the earliest; Vigny's _Cinq-Mars_ preceded _Notre-Dame_ by five years. The writer had laboriously mastered those details which help to make up the romantic _mise en scene_; but he sought less to interpret historical truth by the imagination than to employ the material of history as a vehicle for what he conceived to be ideal truth. In Merimee's _Chronique de Charles IX._ (1829), which also preceded Hugo's romance, the historical, or, if not this, the archaeological spirit is present; it skilfully sets a tale of the imagination in a framework of history.

Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his imagination as a poet; they are lyrical, dramatic, epic; as a reconst.i.tution of history their value is little or is none. The historical novel fell into the hands of Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the animation, the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible invention of _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ and its high-spirited fellows. There were times when no company was so inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Let the critics a.s.sure us that Dumas' history is untrue, his characters superficial, his action incredible; we admit it, and we are caught again by the flash of life, the fanfaronade of adventure. We throw Eugene Sue to the critics that we may save Alexandre Dumas. But Dumas' brain worked faster than his hand--or any human hand--could obey its orders; the mine of his inventive faculty needed a commercial company and an army of diggers for its exploitation. He const.i.tuted himself the managing director of this company; twelve hundred volumes are said to have been the output of the chief and his subordinates; the work ceased to be literature, and became mere commerce. The money that Dumas acc.u.mulated he recklessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his genius decayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous proportions. Protected by his son, he died a poor man amid the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war.

II

HENRI BEYLE, who wrote under the pseudonym of Stendhal, not popular among his contemporaries, though winning the admiration of Merimee and the praise of Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about 1880. If to be studied and admired is to be understood, the prediction has been fulfilled. Taine p.r.o.nounced him the greatest psychologist of the century; M. Zola, doing violence to facts, claimed him as a literary ancestor; M. Bourget discovered in him the author of a nineteenth-century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters.

During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride in isolation.

Born at Gren.o.ble in 1783, he had learnt, during an unhappy childhood, to conceal his natural sensibility; in later years this reserve was pushed to affectation. He served under Napoleon with coolness and energy; he hated the Restoration, and, a lover of Italian manners and Italian music, he chose Milan for his place of abode. The eighteenth-century materialists were the masters of his intellect; "the only excuse for G.o.d," he declared, "is that he does not exist"; in man he saw a being whose end is pleasure, whose law is egoism, and who affords a curious field for studying the dynamics of the pa.s.sions. He honoured Napoleon as an incarnation of force, the greatest of the _condottieri_. He loved the Italian character because the pa.s.sions in Italy manifest themselves with the sudden outbreaks of nature. He indulged his own pa.s.sions as a refuge from ennui, and turned the scrutiny of his intelligence upon every operation of his heart. Fearing to be duped, he became the dupe of his own philosophy.

He aided the romantic movement by the paradox that all the true cla.s.sical writers were romantic in their own day--they sought to please their time; the pseudo-cla.s.sical writers attempt to maintain a lifeless tradition. But he had little in common with the romantic school, except a love for Shakespeare, a certain feeling for local colour, and an interest in the study of pa.s.sion; the effusion and exaltation of romance repelled him; he laboured to be "dry," and often succeeded to perfection.

His a.n.a.lytical study _De l'Amour_, resting on a sensual basis, has all the depth and penetration which is possible to a shallow philosophy. His notes on travel and art antic.i.p.ate in an informal way the method of criticism which became a system in the hands of Taine; in a line, in a phrase, he resolves the artist into the resultant of environing forces. His novels are studies in the mechanics of the pa.s.sions and the will. Human energy, which had a happy outlet in the Napoleonic wars, must seek a new career in Restoration days. Julien Sorel, the low-born hero of _Le Rouge et le Noir_, finding the red coat impossible, must don the priestly black as a cloak for his ambition. Hypocrite, seducer, and a.s.sa.s.sin, he ends his career under the knife of the guillotine. _La Chartreuse de Parme_ exhibits the manners, characters, intrigues of nineteenth-century Italy, with a remarkable episode which gives a soldier's experiences of the field of Waterloo. In the artist's plastic power Beyle was wholly wanting; a collection of ingenious observations in psychology may be of rare value, but it does not const.i.tute a work of art. His writings are a whetstone for the intelligence, but we must bring intelligence to its use, else it will grind down or break the blade. In 1842 he died, desiring to perpetuate his expatriation by the epitaph which names him Arrigo Beyle Milanese.

III

Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is tempted to affix to the novels of George Sand; but from her early lyrical manner she advanced to perfect idyllic narrative; and while she idealised, she observed, incorporating in her best work the results of a patient and faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied to whatever she wrote; offspring of her idealism or her realism, it is always in a true sense poetic.

LUCILE-AURORE DUPIN, a descendant of Marshal Saxe, was born in Paris in 1804, the daughter of Lieutenant Dupin and a mother of humble origin--a child at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Her early years were pa.s.sed in Berri, at the country-house of her grandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in temperament, she had a large heart and an ardent imagination. The woods, the flowers, the pastoral heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, the little peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm, their processes of life, their store of old tales and rural superst.i.tions made up her earliest education. Already endless stories shaped themselves in her brain. At thirteen she was sent to be educated in a Paris convent; from the boisterous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank of a sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to heights of religious exaltation, not to be forgotten when afterwards she wrote _Spiridion_. The country cooled her devout ardour; she read widely, poets, historians, philosophers, without method and with boundless delight; the _Genie du Christianisme_ replaced the _Imitation_; Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand, and romance in her heart put on the form of melancholy. At eighteen the pa.s.sive Aurore was married to M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of those qualities of heart and brain which make wedded union a happiness.

Two children were born; and having obtained her freedom and a scanty allowance, Madame Dudevant in 1831, in possession of her son and daughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in the capital.

Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar-cases and snuff-boxes; happily her hopes received small encouragement. Perhaps she could succeed in journalism under her friend Delatouche; she proved wholly wanting in cleverness; her imagination had wings; it could not hop on the perch; before she had begun the beginning of an article the column must end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau, she attempted a novel--_Rose et Blanche_. "Sand" and Sandeau were fraternal names; a countryman of Berri was traditionally George.

Henceforth the young Bohemian, who traversed the _quais_ and streets in masculine garb, should be GEORGE SAND.

To write novels was to her only a process of nature; she seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot, and only the slightest acquaintance with her characters; until five in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day and the next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written itself in full, and another was unfolding. Not that she composed mechanically; her stories were not manufactured; they grew--grew with facility and in free abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, her theme was the romance of love. In _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lelia_, _Jacques_, she vindicated the supposed rights of pa.s.sion. These novels are lyrical cries of a heart that had been wounded; protests against the crime of loveless marriage, against the tyranny of man, the servitude of woman; pleas for the individualism of the soul--superficial in thought, ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in style, yet rising to pa.s.sages of rare poetic beauty, and often admirable in descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand had translated her private experiences into romance; yet she, the spectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund of sanity which underlay the agitations of her genius, while she lent herself to her creations, plied her pen with a steady hand from day to day. Unwise and blameful in conduct she might be for a season; she wronged her own life, and helped to ruin the life of Musset, who had neither her discretion nor her years; but when the inevitable rupture came she could return to her better self.

Through _Andre_, _Simon_, _Mauprat_--the last a tale of love subduing and purifying the savage instincts in man--her art advanced in sureness and in strength. Singularly accessible to external influences, singularly receptive of ideas, the full significance and relations of which she failed to comprehend, she felt the force of intelligences stronger than her own--of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin, of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious sentiment, an ardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled in her mind with all the discordant formulas of socialism. From 1840 to 1848 her love and large generosity of nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopes of social reform. Her novels _Consuelo_, _Jeanne_, _Le Meunier d'Angibault_, _Le Peche de M. Antoine_, become expositions of a thesis, or are diverted from their true development to advocate a cause. The art suffers. _Jeanne_, so admirable in its rural heroine, wanders from nature to humanitarian symbolism; _Consuelo_, in which the writer studies so happily the artistic temperament, too often loses itself in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious declamation.

But the gain of escape from the egoism of pa.s.sion to a more disinterested, even if a doctrinaire, view of life was great. George Sand was finding her way.

Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner, she had found her way; her third manner was attained before the second had lost its attraction. _La Mare au Diable_ belongs to the year 1846; _La Pet.i.te Fadette_, to the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand, ever an optimist, hailed with joy; _Francois le Champi_ is but two years later. In these delightful tales she returns from humanitarian theories to the fields of Berri, to humble walks, and to the huts where poor men lie. The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new to French literature; the better soul of rural France, George Sand found deep within herself; she had read the external circ.u.mstances and incidents of country life with an eye as faithful in observation as that of any student who dignifies his collection of human doc.u.ments with the style and t.i.tle of realism in art; with a sense of beauty and the instincts of affection she merged herself in what she saw; her feeling for nature is realised in gracious art, and her art seems itself to be nature.

In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri to other regions of France, and interpreted aristocratic together with peasant life.

Old, experienced, infinitely good and attaching, she has tales for her grandchildren, and romances--_Jean de la Roche_, _Le Marquis de Villemer_, and the rest--for her other grandchildren the public. The soul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must lean upon a stronger woman's arm, of the girl--neither child nor fully adult--she entered into with deepest and truest sympathy. The simple, austere, stoical, heroic man she admired as one above her. Her style at its best, flowing without impetuosity, full and pure without commotion, harmonious without complex involutions, can mirror beauty as faithfully and as magically as an inland river. "Calme, toujours plus calme," was a frequent utterance of her declining years. "Ne detruisez pas la verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sand died. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us intimate with a spirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous, and gaining through experience a wisdom for the season of old age.

IV

George Sand may be described as an "idealist," if we add the words "with a remarkable gift for observation." Her great contemporary HONORe DE BALZAC is named a realist, but he was a realist haunted or attacked by phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799 at Tours, son of an advocate turned military commissariat-agent, Honore de Balzac, after some training in the law, resolved to write, and, if possible, not to starve. With his robust frame, his resolute will, manifest in a face coa.r.s.ely powerful, his large good-nature, his large egoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might shoulder his way through the crowd to fortune and to fame. But fortune and fame were hard to come at. His tragedy _Cromwell_ was condemned by all who saw the ma.n.u.script; his novels were published, and lie deep in their refuge under the waters of oblivion. He tried the trades of publisher, printer, type-founder, and succeeded in enc.u.mbering himself with debt. At length in 1829 _Le Dernier Chouan_, a half-historical tale of Brittany in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott, was received with a measure of favour.

Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with journalism, pamphleteering, and miscellaneous writing, in a Dutch painting of bourgeois life, _Le Maison du Chatqui-pelote_, which relates the sorrows of the draper's daughter, Augustine, drawn from her native sphere by an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to wield his pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he died, exhausted by the pa.s.sion of his brain, his own life was concentrated in that of the creatures of his imagination. He had friends, and married one of the oldest of them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death.

Sometimes for a little while he wandered away from his desk. More than once he made wild attempts to secure wealth by commercial enterprise or speculation. These were adventures or incidents of his existence. That existence itself is summed up in the volumes of his _Human Comedy_. He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence of imagination; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crude material on which to work. At six in the evening he retired to sleep; he rose at the noon of night, urged on his brain with cups of coffee, and covered page after page of ma.n.u.script, until the noon of day released him. So it went on for nearly twenty years, until the intemperance of toil had worn the strong man out.

There is something gross in Balzac's genius; he has little wit, little delicacy, no sense of measure, no fine self-criticism, no lightness of touch, small insight into the life of refined society, an imperfect sense of natural beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as the equivalent of spiritual mysteries; he is monarchical without the sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment of religion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as the acc.u.mulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake?

It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power, as the means of pushing towards fame and grasping gold.

Within the gross body of his genius, however, an intense flame burnt.

He had a vivid sense of life, a perception of all that can be seen and handled, an eager interest in reality, a vast pa.s.sion for _things_, an inexhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a feeling, exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of the conflict for wealth and power, with its triumphs and defeats, its display of fierce volition, its pushing aside of the feeble, its trampling of the fallen, its grandeur, its meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the cruelties of its pathos. He flung himself on the life of society with a desperate energy of inspection, and tried to make the vast array surrender to his imagination. And across his vision of reality shot strange beams and shafts of romantic illumination--sometimes vulgar theatrical lights, sometimes gleams like those which add a new reality of wonder to the etchings of Rembrandt. What he saw with the eyes of the senses or those of the imagination he could evoke without the loss of any fragment of its life, and could transfer it to the brain of his reader as a vision from which escape is impossible.

The higher world of aristocratic refinement, the grace and natural delicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded Balzac's observation.

He found it hard to imagine a lady; still harder--though he tried and half succeeded--to conceive the mystery of a young girl's mind, in which the airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bourgeois world, which he detested, and a world yet humbler were his special sphere. He studied its various elements in their environment; a street, a house, a chamber is as much to him as a human being, for it is part of the creature's sh.e.l.l, shaped to its uses, corresponding to its nature, limiting its action. He has created a population of persons which numbers two thousand. Where Balzac does not fail, each of these is a complete individual; in the prominent figures a controlling pa.s.sion is the centre of moral life--the greed of money, the desire for distinction, the l.u.s.t for power, some instinct or mania of animal affection. The individual exists in a group; power circulates from inanimate objects to the living actors of his tale; the environment is an accomplice in the action; power circulates from member to member of the group; finally, group and group enter into correspondence or conflict; and still above the turmoil is heard the groundswell of the tide of Paris.

The change from the Renes and Obermanns of melancholy romance was great. But in the government of Louis-Philippe the bourgeoisie triumphed; and Balzac hated the bourgeoisie. From 1830 to 1840 were his greatest years, which include the _Peau de Chagrin_, _Eugenie Grandet_, _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, _Le Pere Goriot_, and other masterpieces. To name their t.i.tles would be to recite a Homeric catalogue. At an early date Balzac conceived the idea of connecting his tales in groups. They acquired their collective t.i.tle, _La Comedie Humaine_, in 1842. He would exhibit human doc.u.ments ill.u.s.trating the whole social life of his time; "the administration, the church, the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the men of letters, the actors, ... the shopkeepers of every degree, the criminals," should all appear in his vast tableau of society. His record should include scenes from private life, scenes from Parisian, provincial, political, military, rural life, with philosophical studies in narrative and a.n.a.lytic treatises on the pa.s.sions. The spirit of system took hold upon Balzac; he had, in common with Victor Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with the charlatanry of pseudo-ideas; to observe, to a.n.a.lyse, to evoke with his imagination was not enough; he also would be among the philosophers--and Balzac's philosophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often ba.n.a.l. Outside the general scheme of the human comedy lie his unsuccessful attempts for the theatre, and the _Contes Drolatiques_, in which the pseudo-antique Rabelaisian manner and the affluent power do not entirely atone for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in the sixteenth than in the nineteenth century.

V

Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical? Was it possible to produce purely objective work, reserving one's own personality, and glancing at one's audience only with an occasional look of superior irony? Such was the task essayed by PROSPER MeRIMeE (1803-70).

With some points of resemblance in character to Beyle, whose ideas were influential on his mind, Merimee possessed the plastic imagination and the craftsman's skill, in which Beyle was deficient.

"He is a gentleman," said Cousin, and the words might serve for Merimee's epitaph; a gentleman not of nature's making, or G.o.d Almighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing according to the rules. Such a gentleman must betray no sensibility, must express no sentiment, must indulge no enthusiasm, must attach himself to no faith, must be superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmity of a pose which is impressive only by its correctness; he may be cynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from emphasis; he may be ironical, if the irony is sufficiently disguised; he may mystify his fellows, if he keeps the pleasure of mystification for his private amus.e.m.e.nt. Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to be only a dilettante. He must never incur ridicule, and yet his whole att.i.tude may be ridiculous.

Such a gentleman was Prosper Merimee. He had the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish _comedienne_.

His Illyrian poems, _La Guzla_, were the work of an imaginary Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Merimee could smile gently at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and Charles Nodier, who had given play to a graceful fantasy, left it. He purged it of sentiment, he reduced fantasy to the law of the imagination, and produced such works as _Carmen_ and _Colomba_, each one a little masterpiece of psychological truth, of temperate local colour, of faultless narrative, of pure objective art. The public must not suppose that he cares for his characters or what befell them; he is an archaeologist, a savant, and only by accident a teller of tales. Merimee had more sensibility than he would confess; it shows itself for moments in the posthumous _Lettres a une Inconnue_; but he has always a bearing-rein of ironical pessimism to hold his sensibility in check. The egoism of the romantic school appears in Merimee inverted; it is the egoism not of effusion but of disdainful reserve.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is one of Merimee's merits that he awakened in France an interest in Russian literature.]