Chapter X: Conclusion

The literary group the formation and development of which we have been following, produces the impression of an interwoven whole. Multitudes of threads that cross and recross each other stretch from the one work to the other; this exposition has only made the connection clear; it has not taken separate entities and arbitrarily woven them together. It is to be noted that this collection of writings, this set of writers, form a group, not a school. A group is the result of the natural, unintentional connection between minds and works which have a common tendency; a school is the result of the conscious fellowship of authors who have submitted themselves to the guidance of some more or less distinctly formulated conviction.

The Emigrant Literature, although French, develops beyond the frontiers of France. In order to understand it, we must keep before our minds that short and violently agitated period in which the old order was abolished, the principle of legitimacy was discarded, the ruling classes were humiliated and ruined, and positive religion was set aside by men who had freed themselves from its yoke rather by the help of a pugnacious philosophy than by scientific culture--men whose ruthless and not always honourable mode of warfare had irritated all those who were more or less dimly sensible of injustice in the charges directed against the old order of things, and whose intellectual, moral, and emotional cravings found no satisfaction in the new. The more unreal and impracticable the ideas of the rights and the progress of humanity proved themselves to be, the more certain did it become that an intellectual rebound must be at hand. It came; the reaction began. I have shown how at first it was only a partial reaction, how the ideas of the Revolution were invariably blended with the ideas which inspire the revulsion against Voltaire; we have seen that the intellectual point of departure of all its leaders lay in the eighteenth century, and that they were all liable to be affected by reminiscences, and subject to relapse. They all proceed, so to speak, from Rousseau. Their first step is simply to take his weapons and direct them against his antagonist Voltaire. Only the youngest of them, Barante, can with truth deny kinship with Rousseau.

These men are followed by a second set of authors whose aim is the preservation of society. They also are for the most part émigrés, and they advocate unconditional reaction. Their writings, along with single works of authors like Chateaubriand, who are progressive in art but reactionary in their attitude towards Church and State, and certain youthful reactionary works of future Liberal and even Radical writers like Lamartine and Hugo, form a group characterised by unconditional adherence to the old--the ruling idea in them being the principle of authority. Amongst the leading men of this set are Joseph de Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.

But under the title "Emigrant Literature," I have gathered together and drawn attention to the more healthy literary productions, in which the reaction has not as yet become subjection to authority, but is the natural and justifiable defence of feeling, soul, passion, and poetry, against frigid intellectuality, exact calculation, and a literature stifled by rules and dead traditions, like that which continued to prolong its feeble and bloodless existence in France under the Empire. The following group, more closely united in its submission to one dominant principle, has necessarily a clearer, sharper outline; but the one at present in question has more life, more feeling, more restless power.

We see the writers and writings of the Emigrant Literature as it were in a tremulous light. It is in the dawn of the new century that they stand, these men; the first beams of the morning sun of the nineteenth century fall upon them, and slowly disperse the veil of Ossianic mist and Wertherian melancholy which envelops them. One feels that a night of terror and bloodshed lies behind them; their faces are pale and serious. But their grief is poetical, their melancholy awakes sympathy, and one is conscious of fermenting forces in the passionate outbursts which betray their mortification at being obliged, instead of continuing the work of the day before, to regard the foundation laid that day with suspicion, and to gather together laboriously the fragments left by the havoc of the night.

The Emigrant Literature is a profoundly agitated literature. Chateaubriand leads the way with the stormy passion and the powerful, brilliant landscape-painting of his novels. In them everything glows and flames with Catholic ecstasy and Satanic passion; but in the midst of the flames stands, like a figure hewn in stone, the modern personality, the egoistic, solitary genius, René.

Sénancour produces a work in which, in a peculiarly soulful manner, modern liberal thought is fused with Romantic yearnings, Teutonic sentimentality and idealism with Latin refined sensuousness, the rebellious inclination to sift every question to the bottom with the despondency that dreams of suicide.

Nodier mingles his voice in the chorus. Subtle, versatile, fantastic, possessed by the spirit of opposition, he attacks Napoleon and the existing state of society, and panegyrises Klopstock and conventual life. Naive as a child and learned as an old man, he seeks martyrdom for the pleasure of being persecuted and for the sake of being able to pursue his studies in solitude. Constantly progressing, he makes belief in progress the subject of incessant satire.

Constant makes his appearance as a politician, and also as a dilettante in fiction who puts masters to shame. His mind sways like a pendulum between the ideas of two periods. By nature he is the child of the eighteenth century, but his culture and his aims are those of the period of the syntheses and the constitutions. In his one imaginative work he presents his contemporaries with a model of psychological character-drawing, and directs their attention to all the good feelings and energies that are sacrificed to the laws of modern society.

But it is in Mme. de Staël that the Emigrant Literature first becomes conscious of its aims and its best tendencies. It is this woman whose figure dominates the group. In her writings there is collected the best of that which is valid in the productions of the exiles. The tendency to return to the past, and the tendency to press onwards to the future, which produce discordancy in the actions and writings of the other members of the group, in her case combine to produce an endeavour which is neither reactionary nor revolutionary, but reformatory. Like the others, she draws her first inspiration from Rousseau, like the others, she deplores the excesses of the Revolution, but better than any of the others, she loves personal and political freedom. She wages war with absolutism in the State and hypocrisy in society, with national arrogance and religious prejudice. She teaches her countrymen to appreciate the characteristics and literature of the neighbouring nations; she breaks down with her own hand the wall of self-sufficiency with which victorious France had surrounded itself. Barante, with his perspective view of eighteenth-century France, only continues and completes her work.

Naturally connected with the Emigrant Literature is that German Romanticism by which Mme. de Staël was influenced in the last period of her activity, and the influence of which is also to be traced in Barante. The whole group of books to which I have given the common name Emigrant Literature may be described as a species of Romanticism anticipating more especially the great Romantic School of France. But it is also in touch with the German spirit and its Romanticism, often from unconscious sympathy, at times directly influenced by it. Hence it is that in her book on Germany Mme. de Staël calls Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, and Chateaubriand unconscious Germans, and hence it is that we find the men and women of the Emigrant Literature every now and again showing a tendency to Romanticism, or interesting themselves in the word and the idea.

But they not only herald the great authors who are to succeed them; they are in a very remarkable manner their prototypes. As a Romantic colourist Chateaubriand anticipates Victor Hugo, in his melancholy ennui he anticipates Byron. Long before the days of the Romantic School, Sénancour touches the chords which are afterwards sounded by Sainte-Beuve. Nodier, with his philological and archaeological erudition, his pure, austere prose, his fantastic and unpleasant themes, is the precursor of Mérimée. Long before the time of the great French novelists, Constant gives us Balzac's heroines; as a politician, although liberal and anti-clerical, he has some points of resemblance with an emphatically Romantic politician, the German, Gentz. Barante, with his spiritualistic and yet fatalistic literary philosophy, prepares the way for the criticism and æstheticism which were to be enthroned in high places in the days of Victor Cousin. Mme. de Staël seems to announce the greatest authoress of the century, a woman who possessed less elevation of mind than herself, but more genius and fecundity, the poetess and philosopher, George Sand.

The literary history of a whole continent during half a century obviously does not begin at any one single point. The point of departure chosen by the historian may always be described as arbitrary and fortuitous; he must trust to his instinct and critical faculty, or he will never make a beginning at all. To me the Emigrant Literature seemed the natural starting-point indicated by history itself. Looked at from one point of view, this group prepares the way for the later religious and political reaction in French literature; looked at from another, it prepares the way for the Romantic School in France. It is the best of introductions to the study and understanding of the Romantic School in Germany; it has even points of contact with such remote phenomena as Byron and Balzac.

In a word, the Emigrant Literature constitutes the prologue to the great literary drama of the century.

MAIN CURRENTS IN

NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

By GEORGE BRANDES

In Six Vols, illustrated