A History of French Literature

V

ALFRED DE MUSSET has been reproached with having isolated himself from the general interests and affairs of his time. He did not isolate himself from youth or love, and the young of two generations were his advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of Rousseau, he was a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment and the scepticism of the eighteenth century. Impressionable, excitable, greedy of sensations, he felt around him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire, the void left by the passing away of religious faiths. One thing was new and living—poetry. Chénier's remains had appeared; Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine had opened the avenues for the imagination; Byron was dead, but Harold and Manfred and Don Juan survived. Musset, born a poet, was ready for imaginative ventures; he had been introduced, while still a boy, to the Cénacle. Spain and Italy were the regions of romance; at nineteen he published his first collection of poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, and—an adolescent Chérubin-Don Juan of song—found himself famous.

He gave his adhesion to the romantic school, rather with the light effrontery of youth than with depth of conviction; he was impertinent, ironical, incredulous, blasphemous, despairing, as became an elegant Byron minor of the boulevards, aged nineteen. But some of the pieces were well composed; all had the "form and feature of blown youth"; the echoes of southern lands had the fidelity and strangeness of echoes tossed from Paris backwards; certain passages and lines had a classic grace; it might even be questioned whether the Ballade à la Lune was a challenge to the school of tradition, or a jest at the expense of his own associates.

A season of hesitation and of transition followed. Musset was not disposed to play the part of the small drummer-boy inciting the romantic battalion to the double-quick. He began to be aware of his own independence. He was romantic, but he had wit and a certain intellectual good-sense; he honoured Racine together with Hugo; he could not merge his individuality in a school. Yet, with an infirmity characteristic of him, Musset was discouraged. It was not in him to write great poetry of an impersonal kind; his Nuit Vénitienne had been hissed at the Odéon; and what had he to sing out of his own heart? He resolved to make the experiment. Three years after his first volume a second appeared, which announced by its title that, while still a dramatic poet, he had abandoned the stage; the Spectacle dans un Fauteuil declared that, though his glass was small, it was from his own glass that he would drink.

The glass contained the wine of love and youth mingled with a grosser potion. In the drama La Coupe et les Lèvres he exhibited libertine passion seeking alliance with innocence and purity, and incapable of attaining self-recovery; in Namouna, hastily written to fit the volume for publication, he presented the pursuit of ideal love as conducting its victim through all the lures of sensual desire; the comedy À quoi rêvent les jeunes Filles, with its charm of fantasy, tells of a father's device to prepare his daughters for the good prose of wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset had emancipated himself from the Cénacle, and would neither appeal to the eye with an overcharge of local colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curious rhymes. Next year (1833) in the Revue des Deux Mondes appeared Rolla, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's early manner, and of Byron's influence on his genius; the prodigal, beggared of faith, debased by self-indulgence, is not quite a disbeliever in love; through passion he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge of death.

At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in Italy. The hours of illusion were followed by months of despair. He knew suffering, not through the imagination, but in his own experience. After a time calm gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue of the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivolously despairing and elegantly corrupt. In Les Nuits—two of these (Mai, Octobre) inspired by the Italian joy and pain—he speaks simply and directly from the heart in accents of penetrating power. Solitude, his constant friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love, shall be his consolers—

Musset's powers had matured through suffering; the Lettre à Lamartine, the Espoir en Dieu, the Souvenir, the elegy À la Malibran, the later stanzas Après une Lecture (1842), are masterpieces of the true Musset—the Musset who will live.

At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind; but the years were years of lassitude. His patriotic song, Le Rhin Allemand, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received him. "Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academician; the ungracious reply, "Il s'absinthe trop," told the truth, and it was a piteous decline. In 1857, attended by the pious Sister Marceline, Musset died.

Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty, intelligence, esprit, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse—these were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructive imagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of an artist's passion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, has borne the lapse of time ill. "J'y ai vomi la vérité," he said. It is not the happiest way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis-Quinze boudoir. Pierre et Camille, with its deaf-and-dumb lovers, and their baby, who babbles in the presence of the relenting grandfather "Bonjour, papa," has a pretty innocence. Le Fils de Titien returns to the theme of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence. Frédéric et Bernerette and Mimi Pinson may be said to have created the poetic literature of the grisette—gay and good, or erring and despairful—making a flower of what had blossomed in the stories of Paul de Kock as a weed.

Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac poems, Musset's best Comédies and Proverbes (proverbial sayings exemplified in dramatic action), deserve a place. Written in prose for readers of the Revue des Deux Mondes, their scenic qualities were discovered only in 1847, when the actress Madame Allan presented Un Caprice and Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermée at St. Petersburg. The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political conspiracy, Lorenzaccio, was an effort beyond the province and the powers of Musset. His André del Sarto, a tragic representation of the great painter betrayed by his wife and his favourite pupil, needed the relief of his happier fantasy. It is in such delicate creations of a world of romance, a world of sunshine and of perpetual spring, as On ne badine pas avec l'Amour, Les Caprices de Marianne, Le Chandelier, Il ne faut jurer de rien, that Musset showed how romantic art could become in a high sense classic by the balance of sensibility and intelligence, of fantasy and passion. The graces of the age of Madame de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freer graces of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance of Shakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the artificial elegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love, and still repeated love; sentiment is relieved by the play of gaiety; the grotesque approaches the beautiful; we sail in these light-timbered barques to a land that lies not very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest of our own great enchanter.

VI

Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry of Musset. Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the law of Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a hand that moulds and colours—that is all. A child of the South, born at Tarbes in 1811, THÉOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult's studio till the day when, his friend the poet Gérard de Nerval having summoned him to take part in the battle of Hernani, he swore by the skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter. His first volume, Poésies, appeared in 1830, and was followed in two years by Albertus, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness and horror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The Comédie de la Mort evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust, Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art and love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The Orientales was his poetic gospel; but the Orientales is precisely the volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these early poems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured and picturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far as they can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured with vivid pigments.

It was the sorrow of Gautier's life, that born, as he believed, for poetry, he was forced to toil day after day, year after year, as a critic of the stage and of the art-exhibitions. He performed his task in workman-like fashion, seeking rather to communicate impressions than to pronounce judgments. His most valuable pieces of literary criticism are his exhumations of the earlier seventeenth-century poets—Théophile, Cyrano, Saint-Amant, Scarron, and others—published in 1844, together with a study of Villon, under the title Les Grotesques, and the memoir of 1867, drawn up in compliance with the request of the Minister of Public Instruction, on Les Progrès de la Poésie Française depuis 1830. A reader of that memoir to-day will feel, with Swift, that literary reputations are dislimned and shifted as quickly and softly as the forms of clouds when the wind plays aloft.

In 1840 Gautier visited Spain; afterwards he saw Italy, Algeria, Constantinople, Russia, Greece. He travelled not as a student of life or as a romantic sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things in colour; the world was for him so much booty for the eye. Endowed with a marvellous memory, an unwearied searcher of the vocabulary, he could transfer the visual impression, without a faltering outline or a hue grown dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was in the manner of some admired painter; he looked on nature through the medium of a Zurbaran or a Watteau. The dictionary for Gautier was a collection of gems that flashed or glowed; he chose and set them with the skill and precision of a goldsmith enamoured of his art. At Athens, in one of his latest wanderings, he stood in presence of the Parthenon, and found that he was a Greek who had strayed into the Middle Ages; on the faith of Notre-Dame de Paris he had loved the old cathedrals; "the Parthenon," he writes, "has cured me of the Gothic malady, which with me was never very severe."

Gautier's tales attained one of their purposes, that of astonishing the bourgeois; yet if he condescended to ideas, his ideas on all subjects except art had less value than those of the philistine. Mademoiselle de Maupin has lost any pretensions it possessed to supereminent immorality; its sensuality is that of a dream of youth; such purity as it possesses, compared with books of acrid grossness, lies in the fact that the young author loved life and cared for beauty. In shorter tales he studiously constructs strangeness—the sense of mystery he did not in truth possess—on a basis of exactly carved and exactly placed material. His best invention is the tale of actors strolling in the time most dear to his imagination, the old days of Louis XIII., Le Capitaine Fracasse, suggested doubtless by Scarron's Roman Comique, and patiently retouched during a quarter of a century.

Gautier as a poet found his true self in the little pieces of the Émaux et Camées. He is not without sensibility, but he will not embarrass himself with either feelings or ideas. He has emancipated 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 assault 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 Parnassien 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 glass can easily disentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a critic and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the Vie, Poésies et Pensées de Joseph Delorme; a singer of spiritual reverie, modest pleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the Consolations and the Pensées d'Août; 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; Gérard de Nerval, Hégésippe Moreau, Madame Désbordes-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 æsthetic 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.