Chapter V: The Romantic Movement in France.1 (2)

The outbreak of the Revolution recalled Chateaubriand to France. He joined the army of the _emigrées_ at Coblentz, was wounded at the siege of Thionville, and escaped into England where he lived (1793-1800) until the time of the Consulate, when he made his peace with Napoleon and returned to France. He had been a free-thinker, but was converted to Christianity by a dying message from his mother who was thrown into prison by the revolutionists. "I wept," said Chateaubriand, "and I believed." "Le Génie du Christianisme" was an expression of that reactionary feeling which drove numbers of Frenchmen back into the Church, after the blasphemies and horrors of the Revolution. It came out just when Napoleon was negotiating his _Concordat_ with the Pope, and was trying to enlist the religious and conservative classes in support of his government; and it reinforced his purposes so powerfully that he appointed the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplomatic posts. "Le Génie du Christianisme" is indeed a plea for Christianity on aesthetic grounds--an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommend Christianity by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a close reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character was weakened by vanity and shallowness. He was a sentimentalist and a rhetorician, but one of the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while his sentiment, though not always deep or lasting, was for the nonce sufficiently sincere. He had in particular a remarkable talent for pictorial description; and his book, translated into many tongues, enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. The English version, made in 1815, was entitled "The Beauties of Christianity." For Chateaubriand undertook to show that the Christian religion had influenced favorably literature and the fine arts; that it was more poetical than any other system of belief and worship. He compared Homer and Vergil with Dante, Tasso, Milton, and other modern poets, and awarded the palm to the latter in the treatment of the elementary relations and stock characters, such as husband and wife, father and child, the priest, the soldier, the lover, etc.; preferring Pope's Eloisa, _e.g._, to Vergil's Dido, and "Paul and Virginia" to the idyls of Theocritus. He pronounced the Christian mythology--angels, devils, saints, miracles--superior to the pagan; and Dante's Hell much more impressive to the imagination than Tartarus. He dwelt eloquently upon the beauty and affecting significance of Gothic church architecture, of Catholic ritual and symbolism, the dress of the clergy, the crucifix, the organ, the church bell, the observances of Christian festivals, the monastic life, the orders of chivalry, the country churchyards where the dead were buried, and even upon the superstitions which the last century had laughed to scorn; such as the belief in ghosts, the adoration of relics, vows to saints and pilgrimages to holy places. In his chapter on "The Influence of Christianity upon Music," he says that the "Christian religion is essentially melodious for this single reason, that she delights in solitude"; the forests are her ancient abode, and her musician "ought to be acquainted with the melancholy notes of the waters and the trees; he ought to have studied the sound of the winds in cloisters, and those murmurs that pervade the Gothic temple, the grass of the cemetery, and the vaults of death." He repeats the ancient fable that the designers of the cathedrals were applying forest scenery to architecture; "Those ceilings sculptured into foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, the chapels resembling grottoes, the secret passages, the low doorways, in a word everything in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of a wood, everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of the Divinity." The birds perch upon the steeples and towers as if they were trees, and "the Christian architect, not content with building forests, has been desirous to retain their murmurs, and by means of the organ and of bells, he has attached to the Gothic temple the very winds and the thunders that roll in the recesses of the woods. Past ages, conjured up by these religious sounds, raise their venerable voices from the bosom of the stones and sigh in every corner of the vast cathedral. The sanctuary re-echoes like the cavern of the ancient Sibyl; loud-tongued bells swing over your head; while the vaults of death under your feet are profoundly silent." He praises the ideals of chivalry; gives a sympathetic picture of the training and career of a knight-errant, and asks: "Is there then nothing worthy of admiration in the times of a Roland, a Godfrey, a Coucey, and a Joinville; in the times of the Moors and the Saracens; . . . when the strains of the Troubadours were mingled with the clash of arms, dances with religious ceremonies, and banquets and tournaments with sieges and battles?" Chateaubriand says that the finest Gothic ruins are to be found in the English lake country, on the Scotch mountains, and in the Orkney Islands; and that they are more impressive than classic ruins because in the latter the arches are parallel with the curves of the sky, while in the Gothic or pointed architecture the arches "form a contrast with the circular arches of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. The Gothic being, moreover, entirely composed of _voids_, the more readily admits of the decoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders. The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out in the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which the winds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables. The house-leek fixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with their elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure of a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls in festoons over the arches."

All this is romantic enough; we have the note of Catholic mediaevalism and the note of Ossianic melancholy combined; and this some years before "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and when Byron was a boy of fourteen and still reading his Ossian.[33] But we are precluded from classifying Chateaubriand among full-fledged romanticists. His literary taste was by no means emancipated from eighteenth-century standards. In speaking of Milton, _e.g._, he says that if he had only been born in France in the reign of Louis XIV., and had "combined with the native grandeur of his genius the taste of Racine and Boileau," the "Paradise Lost" might have equalled the "Iliad."

Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic. It is agreed upon all hands that the expressions _romantisme_ and _littérature romantique_ were first invented or imported by Madame de Staël in her "L'Allemagne" (1813), "pour exprimer l'affranchissement des vieilles formes littéraires." [34] Some ten years later, or by 1823, when Stendhal published his "Racine et Shakspere," the issue between the schools had been joined and the question quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisian journals. Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, but his temper was decidedly cool and unromantic. I have quoted his epigrammatic definition of romanticism.[35]

In this _brochure_ Stendhal announces that France is on the eve of a literary revolution and that the last hour of classicism has struck, although as yet the classicists are in possession of the theatres, and of all the salaried literary positions under government; and all the newspapers of all shades of political opinion are shut to the romanticists. A company of English actors who attempted to give some of Shakspere's plays at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1822 were mobbed. "The hisses and cat-calls began before the performance, of which it was impossible to hear a single word. As soon as the actors appeared they were pelted with apples and eggs, and from time to time the audience called out to them to talk French, and shouted, '_À bas Shakspere! c'est un aide de camp du duc de Wellington_.'" It will be remembered that in our own day the first representations of Wagner's operas at Paris were interrupted with similar cries: "_Pas de Wagner_!," "_À bas les Allemands_!," etc.

In 1827 Kemble's company visited Paris and gave, in English, "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," "Othello," and "The Merchant of Venice." Dumas went to see them and described the impression made upon him by Shakspere, in language identical with that which Goethe used about himself.[36] He was like a man born blind and suddenly restored to sight. Dumas' "Henry III." (1829), a _drame_ in the manner of Shakspere's historical plays, though in prose, was the immediate result of this new vision. English actors were in Paris again in 1828 and 1829; and in 1835 Macready presented "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Henry IV." with great success. Previous to these performances, the only opportunities that the French public had to judge of Shakspere's dramas as acting plays were afforded by the wretched adaptations of Ducis and other stage carpenters. Ducis had read Shakspere only in Letourneur's very inadequate translation (revised by Guizot in 1821). His "Hamlet" was played in 1769; "Macbeth," 1784, "King John," 1791; "Othello" (turned into a comedy), 1792. Mercier's "Timon" was given in 1794; and Dejaure's "Imogènes"--an "arrangement" of "Cymbeline"--in 1796. The romanticists labored to put their countrymen in possession of better versions of Shakspere. Alfred de Vigny rendered "Othello" (1827), and Emile Deschamps, "Romeo and Juliet" and "Macbeth."

Stendhal interviewed a director of one of the French theatres and tried to persuade him that there would be money in it for any house which would have the courage to give a season of romantic tragedy. But the director, who seemed to be a liberal-minded man, assured him that until some stage manager could be found rich enough to buy up the dramatic criticism of the _Constitutionnel_ and two or three other newspapers, the law students and medical students, who were under the influence of those journals, would never suffer the play to get as far as the third act. "If it were otherwise," he said, "don't you suppose that we would have tried Schiller's 'William Tell'? The police would have cut out a quarter of it; one of our adapters another quarter; and what was left would reach a hundred representations, _provided it could once secure three_."

To this the author replied that the immense majority of young society people had been converted to romanticism by the eloquence of M. Cousin.

"Sir," said the director, "your young society people don't go into the parterre to engage in fisticuffs [_faire le coup de poing_], and at the theatre, as in politics, we despise philosophers who don't fight." Stendhal adds that the editors of influential journals found their interest in this state of things, since many of them had pieces of their own on the stage, written of course in alexandrine verse and on the classic model; and what would become of these masterpieces if Talma should ever get permission to play in a prose translation of "Macbeth," abridged, say, one-third? "I said one day to one of these gentlemen, 28,000,000 men, _i.e._, 18,000,000 in England and 10,000,000 in America, admire 'Macbeth' and applaud it a hundred times a year. 'The English,' he answered me with great coolness, 'cannot have real eloquence or poetry truly admirable; the nature of their language, which is not derived from the Latin, makes it quite impossible.'" A great part of "Racine et Shakspere" is occupied with a refutation of the doctrine of the unities of time and place, and with a discussion of the real nature of dramatic illusion, on which their necessity was supposed to rest. Stendhal maintains that the illusion is really stronger in Shakspere's tragedies than in Racine's. It is not essential here to reproduce his argument, which is the same that is familiar to us in Lessing and in Coleridge, though he was an able controversialist, and his logic and irony give a freshness to the treatment of this hackneyed theme which makes his little treatise well worth the reading. To illustrate the nature of _real_ stage illusion, he says that last year (August, 1822) a soldier in a Baltimore theatre, seeing Othello about to kill Desdemona, cried out, "It shall never be said that a damned nigger killed a white woman in my presence," and at the same moment fired his gun and broke an arm of the actor who was playing Othello. "_Eh bien_, this soldier had illusion: he believed that the action which was passing on the stage was true."

Stendhal proposes the following as a definition of romantic tragedy: "It is written in prose; the succession of events which it presents to the eyes of the spectators lasts several months, and they happen in different places." He complains that the French comedies are not funny, do not make any one laugh; and that the French tragic dialogue is epic rather than dramatic. He advises his readers to go and see Kean in "Richard" and "Othello"; and says that since reading Schlegel and Dennis (!) he has a great contempt for the French critics. He appeals to the usages of the German and English stage in disregarding the rules of Aristotle, and cites the great popularity of Walter Scott's romances, which, he says, are nothing more than romantic tragedies with long descriptions interspersed, to support his plea for a new kind of French prose-tragedy; for which he recommends subjects taken from national history, and especially from the mediaeval chroniclers like Froissart. Nevertheless, he does not advise the direct imitation of Shakspere. He blames Schiller for copying Shakspere, and eulogizes Werner's "Luther" as nearer to the masterpieces of Shakspere than Schiller's tragedies are. He wants the new French drama to resemble Shakspere only in dealing freely with modern conditions, as the latter did with the conditions of his time, without having the fear of Racine or any other authority before its eyes.

In 1824 the Academy, which was slowly constructing its famous dictionary of the French language, happened to arrive at the new word _romanticism_ which needed defining. This was the signal for a heated debate in that venerable body, and the director, M. Auger, was commissioned to prepare a manifesto against the new literary sect, to be read at the meeting of the Institute on the 24th of April next. It was in response to this manifesto that Stendhal wrote the second part of his "Racine et Shakspere" (1825), attached to which is a short essay entitled "Qu'est ce que le Romanticisme?" [37] addressed to the Italian public, and intended to explain to them the literary situation in France, and to enlist their sympathies on the romantic side. "Shakspere," he says, "the hero of romantic poetry, as opposed to Racine, the god of the classicists, wrote for strong souls; for English hearts which were what Italian hearts were about 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age _questi tempi della virtu sconosciutta_." Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and effeminate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere on the Italians. The day will come, he hopes, when they will have a national tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better to follow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in the footprints of Racine. In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germany and England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schiller, and Lord Byron will carry it over Racine and Boileau. He says that English poetry since the French Revolution has become more enthusiastic, more serious, more passionate. It needed other subjects than those required by the witty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought its heroes in the rude, primitive, inventive ages, or even among savages and barbarians. It had to have recourse to time or countries when it was permitted to the higher classes of society to have passions. The Greek and Latin classics could give no help; since most of them belonged to an epoch as artificial, and as far removed from the naïve presentation of the passions, as the eighteenth century itself. The court of Augustus was no more natural than that of Louis XIV. Accordingly the most successful poets in England, during the past twenty years, have not only sought deeper emotions than those of the eighteenth century, but have treated subjects which would have been scornfully rejected by the age of _bel esprit_. The anti-romantics can't cheat us much longer. "Where, among the works of our Italian pedants, are the books that go through seven editions in two months, like the romantic poems that are coming out in London at the present moment? Compare, _e.g._, the success of Moore's 'Lalla Rookh,' which appeared in June, 1817, and the eleventh edition of which I have before me, with the success of the 'Camille' of the highly classical Mr. Botta!'"

In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal's "Racine et Shakspere," Victor Hugo had published his "Odes et Poésies Diverses," and a second collection followed in 1824. In the prefaces to these two volumes he protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, as _mots de guerre_ and vague words which every one defines in accordance with his own prejudices. If romanticism means anything, he says, it means the literature of the nineteenth century, and all the anathemas launched at the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to the following method of argument. "We condemn the literature of the nineteenth century because it is romantic. And why is it romantic? Because it is the literature of the nineteenth century." As to the false taste which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of Racine and Boileau, he would prefer to distinguish that by the name _scholastic_, a style which is to the truly classic what superstition and fanaticism are to religion. The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partly literary and partly political and religious: "The history of mankind affords no poetry," he says, "except when judged from the vantage-ground of monarchical ideas and religious beliefs. . . . He has thought that . . . in substituting for the outworn and false colours of pagan mythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian theogony, one could inject into the ode something of the interest of the drama, and could make it speak, besides, that austere, consoling, and religious language which is needed by an old society that issues still trembling from the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The literature of the present, the actual literature, is the expression, by way of anticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue, doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recent ruins. . . . If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had invoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . the triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . . But France had not that good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, and our literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic, than of a monarchical and Christian society." The prevailing note, accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of 1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the sceptical Éclaircissement of the eighteenth century. The subjects are such as these: "The Poet in the Times of Revolution"; "La Vendée"; "The Maidens of Verdun," which chants the martyrdom of three young royalist sisters who were put to death for sending money and supplies to the _emigres_; "Quibiron," where a royalist detachment which had capitulated under promise of being treated like prisoners of war, were shot down in squads by the Convention soldiery; "Louis XVII."; "The Replacement of the Statue of Henry IV."; "The Death of the Duke of Berry"; "The Birth of the Duke of Bourdeaux" and his "Baptism"; "The Funeral of Louis XVIII."; "The Consecration of Charles X."; "The Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil," the royalist heroine who saved her father's life by drinking a cupful of human blood in the days of the Terror; and "La Bande Noire," which denounces with great bitterness the violation of the tombs of the kings of France by the regicides, and pleads for the preservation of the ruins of feudal times:

"O murs! ô créneaux! ô tourelle!
Remparts, fossés aux ponts mouvants!
Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles!
Fiers chateaux! modestes couvents!
Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques,
Où gémissaient les saints cantiques,
Où riaient les banquets joyeux!
Lieux où le coeur met ses chimères!
Églises où priaient nos mères
Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!"

In these two ode collections, though the Catholic and legitimist inspiration is everywhere apparent, there is nothing revolutionary in the language or verse forms. But in the "Odes et Ballades" of 1826, "the romantic challenge," says Saintsbury, "is definitely thrown down. The subjects are taken by preference from times and countries which the classical tradition had regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm are studiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost possible glow of colour, as opposed to the cold correctness of classical poetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest reliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms." This description applies more particularly to the Ballades, many of which, such as "La Ronde du Sabbat," "La Légende de la Nonne," "La Chasse du Burgrave," and "Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean" are mediaeval studies in which the lawless _grotesquerie_ of Gothic art runs riot. "The author, in composing them," says the preface, "has tried to give some idea of what the poems of the first troubadours of the Middle Ages might have been; those Christian rhapsodists who had nothing in the world but their swords and their guitars, and went from castle to castle paying for their entertainment with their songs." To show that liberty in art does not mean disorder, the author draws an elaborate contrast between the garden of Versailles and a primitive forest, in a passage which will remind the reader of similar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, and other English romanticists of the eighteenth century. There is as much order, he asserts, in the forest as in the garden, but it is a live order, not a dead regularity. "Choose then," he exclaims, "between the masterpiece of gardening and the work of nature; between that which is beautiful by convention and that which is beautiful without rule; between an artificial literature and an original poetry. . . . In two words--and we shall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with this observation on the two kinds of literature that are called _classic_ and _romantic_,--regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste of genius. . . . It will be objected to us that the virgin forest hides in its magnificent solitudes a thousand dangerous animals, while the marshy basins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an insipidity of Campistron." But above all things--such is the doctrine of this preface--do not imitate anybody--not Shakspere any more than Racine. "He who imitates a _romantic_ poet becomes thereby a _classic_, and just because he imitates." In 1823 Hugo had published anonymously his first prose romance, "Han d'Islande," the story of a Norwegian bandit. He got up the local colour for this by a careful study of the Edda and the Sagas, that "poésie sauvage" which was the admiration of the new school and the horror of the old. But it was in the preface to "Cromwell," published in 1827, that Hugo issued the full and, as it were, official manifesto of romanticism. The play itself is hardly actable. It is modelled, in a sense, upon the historical plays of Shakspere, but its Cromwell is a very melodramatic person, and its Puritans and Cavaliers strike the English reader with the same sense of absurdity produced by the pictures of English society in "L'Homme qui Rit." But of the famous preface Gautier says: "The Bible among Protestants, the Koran among Mahometans are not the object of a deeper veneration. It was, indeed, for us the book of books, the book which contained the pure doctrine." It consisted in great part of a triumphant attack upon the unities, and upon the verse and style which classic usage had consecrated to French tragedy. I need not repeat the argument here. It is already familiar, and some sentences[38] from this portion of the essay I have quoted elsewhere.

The preface also contained a plea for another peculiarity of the romantic drama, its mixture, viz., of tragedy and comedy. According to Hugo, this is the characteristic trait, the fundamental difference, which separates modern from ancient art, romantic from classical literature. Antique art, he says, rejected everything which was not purely beautiful, but the Christian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creation besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything which is in nature is--or has the right to be--in art. It includes in its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Hence results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic comedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more than any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of the comic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sabbath, the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante's hell; the Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; "grimacing silhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity"; and "all those local dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of Tarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given to the modern sublime something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the antique beauty. . . . Is it not because the modern imagination knows how to set prowling hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the ogres, the erl-kings, the _psylles_, the ghouls, the _brucolaques_, the _aspioles_, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless form, that purity of essence which the pagan nymphs approach so little? The antique Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has spread over the figures of Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance? What has given them that unfamiliar character of life and grandeur, unless it be the neighbourhood of the rude and strong carvings of the Middle Ages? . . . The grotesque imprints its character especially upon that wonderful architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of all the arts. It attaches its marks to the fronts of the cathedrals; enframes its hells and purgatories under the portal arches, and sets them aflame upon the windows; unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around the capitals, along the friezes, on the eaves." We find this same bizarre note in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church institutions, and popular legends, in the court fools, in the heraldic emblems, the religious processions, the story of "Beauty and the Beast." It explains the origin of the Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art.

Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the grotesque. He is by turns the greatest of tragic and the greatest of comic artists, and his tragedy and comedy lie close together, as in life, but without that union of the terrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that element of deformity which is the essence of the proper grotesque. He has created, however, one specimen of true grotesque, the monster Caliban. Caliban is a comic figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, uncouth, and frightful about him. He has the dignity and the poetry which all rude, primitive beings have: which the things of nature, rocks and trees and wild beasts have. It is significant, therefore, that Robert Browning should have been attracted to Caliban. Browning had little comic power, little real humour; in him the grotesque is an imperfect form of the comic. The same criticism applies to Hugo. He gave a capital example of the grotesque in the four fools in the third act of "Cromwell" and in Triboulet, the Shaksperian jester of "Le Roi s'Amuse." Their songs and dialogues are bizarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they are not funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns of Shakspere--they are not comic, but merely queer. Hugo's defective sense of humour is shown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which, Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--exaggerating character and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodrama into absurdity. This fault is felt in his great prose romance "Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meant by the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero of his later romance "L'Homme qui Rit."

Gautier has left a number of sketches, written in a vein lovingly humorous, of some of the eccentrics--the _curiosités romantiques_--whose oddities are perhaps even more instructive as to the many directions which the movement took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the less extreme votaries. There was the architect Jule Vabre, _e.g._, whose specialty was Shakspere. Shakspere "was his god, his idol, his passion, a wonder to which he could never grow accustomed." Vabre's life-project was a French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely true to the text, reproducing the exact turn and movement of the phrase, following the alternations of prose, rime, and blank verse in the original, and shunning neither its euphemistic subtleties nor its barbaric roughnesses. To fit himself for this task, he went to London and lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmosphere and the _milieu_, and learning to think in English; and there Gautier encountered him about 1843, in a tavern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating _rosbif_ and speaking French with an English accent. Gautier told him that all he had to do now, to translate Shakspere, was to learn French. "I am going to work at it," he answered, more struck with the wisdom than the wit of the suggestion. A few years later Vabre turned up in France with a project for a sort of international seminary. "He wanted to explain 'Hernani' to the English and 'Macbeth' to the French. It made him tired to see the English learning French in 'Telemaque,' and the French learning English in the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'" Poor Vabre's great Shakspere translation never materialised; but François-Victor Hugo, the second son of the great romancer, carried out many of Vabre's principles of translation in his version of Shakspere.

Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, Célestin Nanteuil, who suggested to Gautier the hero of an early piece of his own, written to accompany an engraving in an English keepsake, representing the Square of St. Sebald at Nuremberg. This hero, Elias Wildman-stadius, or l'Homme Moyen-âge, was "in a sort, the Gothic genius of that Gothic town"--a _retardataire_ or man born out of his own time--who should have been born in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Dürer. Célestin Nanteuil "had the air of one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the _sambucque_, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to have come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing his nimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having the least suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one's aureole in the street." He is described as resembling in figure "the spindling columns of the church naves of the fifteenth century. . . . The azure of the frescoes of Fiesole had furnished the blue of his eyes; his hairs, of the blond of an aureole, seemed painted one by one, with the gold of the illuminators of the Middle Ages. . . . One would have said, that from the height of his Gothic pinnacle Célestin Nanteuil overlooked the actual town, hovering above the sea of roofs, regarding the eddying blue smoke, perceiving the city squares like a checkerboard, the streets like the notches of a saw in a stone bench, the passers-by like mice; but all that confusedly athwart the haze, while from his airy observatory he saw, close at hand and in all their detail, the rose windows, the bell towers bristling with crosses, the kings, patriarchs, prophets, saints, angels of all the orders, the whole monstrous army of demons or chimeras, nailed, scaled, tushed, hideously winged; _guivres_, taresques, gargoyles, asses' heads, apes' muzzles, all the strange bestiary of the Middle Age." Nanteuil furnished illustrations for the books of the French romanticists. "Hugo's' Notre-Dame de Paris' was the object of his most fervent admiration, and he drew from it subjects for a large number of designs and aquarelles." Gautier mentions, as among his rarest vignettes, the frontispiece of "Albertus," recalling Rembrandt's manner; and his view of the Palazzo of San Marc in Royer's "Venezia la bella." Gautier says that one might apply to Nanteuil's aquarelles what Joseph Delorme[39] said of Hugo's ballads, that they were Gothic window paintings. "The essential thing in these short fantasies is the carriage, the shape, the clerical, monastic, royal, seignorial _awkwardness_ of the figures and their high colouring. . . . Célestin had made his own the angular anatomy of coats-of-arms, the extravagant contours of the mantles, the chimerical or monstrous figures of heraldry, the branchings of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudal baron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious physiognomy of the big Carthusian Carmelite, the furtive mien of the young page with parti-coloured pantaloons. . . . He excelled also in setting the persons of poem, drama, or romance in ornamented frames like the Gothic shrines with triple colonettes, arches, canopied and bracketed niches, with statuettes, figurines, emblematic animals, male and female saints on a background of gold. He entered so deeply into the sentiment of the old Gothic imagery that he could make a Lady of the Pillar in a brocade dalmatica, a Mater Dolorosa with the seven swords in her breast, a St. Christopher with the child Jesus on his shoulder and leaning on a palm tree, worthy to serve as types to the Byzantine painters of Epinal. . . . Nothing resembled less the clock face and troubadour Middle Age which flourished about 1825. It is one of the main services of the romantic school to have thoroughly disembarrassed art from this." Gautier describes also a manuscript piece of Nerval, for which he furnished a prologue, and which was an imitation of one of the _Diableries_, or popular farces of the Middle Ages, in which the devil was introduced. It contained a piece within the piece, in the fashion of an old mystery play, with scenery consisting of the mouth of hell, painted red and surmounted by a blue paradise starred with gold. An angel came down to play at dice with the devil for souls. In his excess of zeal, the angel cheated and the devil grew angry and called him a "big booby, a celestial fowl," and threatened to pull his feathers out ("Le Prince des Sots").

In France, as in England and Germany, the romantic revival promoted and accompanied works of erudition like Raynouard's researches in Provençal and old French philology and the poetry of the troubadours (1816); Creuzé de Lesser's "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde"; Marchangy's "La Gaule Poétique." History took new impulse from that _sens du passé_ which romanticism did so much to awaken. Augustin Thierry's obligations to Scott have already been noticed. It was the war chant of the Prankish warriors in Chateaubriand's "Les Martyrs"--

"Pharamond! Pharamond! nous avons combattu avec l'épée"--

which first excited his historical imagination and started him upon the studies which issued in the "Récits Mérovingiens" and the "Conquéte d'Angleterre." Barante's "Ducs de Bourgogne" (1814-28) confessedly owes much of its inception to Scott. Michaud's "History of the Crusades" (1811-22) and the "History of France" (1833-67) by that most romantic of historians, Michelet, may also be credited to the romantic movement. The end of the movement, as a definite period in the history of French literature, is commonly dated from the failure upon the stage of Victor Hugo's "Les Burgraves" in 1843. The immediate influence of the French romantic school upon English poetry or prose was slight. Like the German school, it came too late. The first generation of English romantics was drawing to its close. Scott died two years after "Hernani" stormed the French theatre. Two years later still died Coleridge, long since fallen silent--as a poet--and always deaf to Gallic charming. We shall find the first impress of French romance among younger men and in the latter half century.

In France itself the movement passed on into other phases. Many early adherents of Hugo's _cénacle_ and _entourage_ fell away from their allegiance and, like Sainte-Beuve and Musset, took up a critical or even antagonistic attitude. Musset's "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet" [40] turns the whole romantic contention into mockery. Yet no work more fantastically and gracefully romantic, more Shaksperian in quality, was produced by any member of the school than Musset produced in such dramas as "Fantasio" and "Lorenzaccio."

[1] It is scarcely necessary to say that no full-length picture of the French romantic movement is attempted in this chapter, but only such a sketch as should serve to illustrate its relation to English romanticism. For the history of the movement, besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, I have relied principally upon the following: Petit de Julleville: "Histoire de la Littérature Française," Tome vii., Paris, 1899. Brunetière: "Manual of the History of French Literature" (authorized translation), New York, 1898. L. Bertrand; "La Fin du Classicisme," Paris, 1897. Adolphe Jullien: "Le Romantisme et L'Editeur Renduel," Paris, 1897. I have also read somewhat widely, though not exhaustively, in the writings of the French romantics themselves, including Hugo's early poems and most of his dramas and romances; Nodier's "Contes en prose et en verse "; nearly all of Musset's works in prose and verse; ditto of Théophile Gautier's; Stendhal's "La Chartreuse de Parme," "Le Rouge et le Noir," "Racine et Shakespeare," "Lord Byron en Italie," etc.; Vigny's "Chatterton," "Cinq-Mars," and many of his Scriptural poems; Balzac's "Les Chouans"; Mérimée's "Chronique de Charles IX.," and most of his "Nouvelles "; Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du Christianisme"; some of Lamartine's "Meditations"; most of George Sand's novels, and a number of Dumas'; many of Sainte-Beuve's critical writings; and the miscellanies of Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie). Of many of these, of course, no direct use or mention is made in the present chapter.

[2] "Il a pour l'art du moyen âge, un mepris voisin de la demence et de la frénésie. . . . Voir le discours où il propose de mutiler les statues des rois de la facade de Notre-Dame, pour en former un piédestal à la statue du peuple français." Bertrand: "La Fin du Classicisme," pp. 302-3 and _note_.

[3] But see, for the Catholic reaction in France, the writings of Joseph de Maistre, especially "Du Pape" (1819).

[4] "Histoire du Romantisme" (1874).

[5] _ibid._, 210.

[6] Heine counted, in the Salon of 1831, more than thirty pictures inspired by Scott.

[7] Also "Le Roi Lear" (Salon of 1836) and "La Procession du Pape des Fous" (aquarelle) for Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris."

[8] Recall Schlegel's saying that the genius of the classic drama was plastic and that of the romantic picturesque.

[9] Gautier, 192.

[10] This is a distinction more French than English: _la tragédie_ vs. _le drame_.

[11] Preface to "Hernani."

[12] Preface to "Cromwell."

[13] "Histoire du Romantisme," p. 64.

[14] "Primer of French Literature," p. 115.

[15] One of the principles of the romanticists was the _mélange des genres_, whereby the old lines between tragedy and comedy, _e.g._, were broken down, lyricism admitted into the drama, etc.

[16] Stendhal, writing in 1823 ("Racine et Shakspere"), complains that "it will soon be thought bad form to say, on the French stage, 'Fermez cette fenêtre' [window]: we shall have to say, 'Fermez cette croisée' [casement]. Two-thirds of the words used in the parlours of the best people (_du meilleur ton_) cannot be reproduced in the theatre. M. Legouvé, in his tragedy 'Henri IV.,' could not make use of the patriot king's finest saying, 'I could wish that the poorest peasant in my kingdom might, at the least, have a chicken in his pot of a Sunday.' English and Italian verse allows the poet to say everything; and this good French word _pot_ would have furnished a touching scene to Shakspere's humblest pupil. But _la tragédie racinienne_, with its _style noble_ and its artificial dignity, has to put it thus,--in four alexandrines:

"'Je veux enfin qu'au jour marqué pour le repos,
L'hôte laborieux des modestes hameaux,
Sur sa table moins humble, ait, par ma bienfaisance,
Quelques-uns de ces mets réservés à l'aisance.'"

It was Stendhal (whose real name was Henri Beyle) who said that Paris needed a chain of mountains on its horizon.

[17] Gautier, 188.

[18] "Cromwell," 1827,

[19] Gautier, 107.

[20] Musset's fantastic "Ballade à la Lune," exaggerates the romantic so decidedly as to seem ironical. It is hard to say whether it is hyperbole or parody. See Petit de Julleville, vol. vii., p. 652.

[21] See vol. i., pp. 372-73.

[22] Gautier, 163.

[23] "Des Knaben Wunderhorn."

[24] Charles Nodier vindicated the literary claims of Perrault.

[25] Gautier, 93.

[26] Rue Jean-Gougon, where the _cénacle_ met often.

[27] Nerval hanged himself at Paris, in January, 1855, in the rue de la Vielle Lanterne.

[28] Gautier, 167.

[29] The romanticism of the _Globe_ was of a more conservative stripe than that of the Muse Française, which was the organ of the group of young poets who surrounded Hugo. The motto of the latter was _Jam nova progenies coelo demittitur alto_. The _Globe_ defined romanticism as Protestantism in letters. The critical battle was on as early as 1824. On April 24, in that year, Auger, director of the Academy, read at the annual session of the Institute a discourse on romanticism, which he denounced as a literary schism. The prospectus of the _Globe_, an important document on the romantic side, dates from the same year. The _Constitutionnel_, the most narrowly classical of the opposing journals, described romanticism as an epidemic malady. To the year 1825, when the _Cénacle_ had its headquarters at Victor Hugo's house, belong, among others, the following manifestoes on both sides of the controversy; "Les Classiques Vengés," De la Touche; "Le Temple du Romantisme," Morel; "Le Classique et le Romantique" (a satirical comedy in the classical interest), Baour-Lormian. Cyprien Desmarais' "Essais sur les classiques et les romantiques" had appeared at Paris in 1823. At Rouen was printed in 1826 "Du Classique et du Romantique," a collection of papers read at the Rouen Academy during the year, rather favorable, on the whole, to the new movement.

[30] This is now a somewhat rare book; I have never seen a copy of it; but it was reviewed in The Saturday Review (vol. lxv., p. 369).

[31] Part ii., Book iii., chap ix.

[32]Part ii., Book iv., chap. i.

[33] For Chateaubriand and Ossian see vol. i., pp. 332-33. He made translations from Ossian, Gray, and Milton.

[34] "Victor Hugo," par Paul Boudois, p. 32.

[35] Vol. i., p. 10.

[36] See vol. i., p. 379.

[37] The use of this form instead of _romantisme_ is perhaps worth noticing.

[38] See vol. i., pp. 19-20.

[39] Sainte-Beuve's "Confessions de Joseph Delorme," 1829.

[40] See vol. i., pp. 18-23.