Chapter I: Chateaubriand (1)

II. ROUSSEAU
III. WERTHER
IV. RENÉ
V. OBERMANN
VI. NODIER
VII. CONSTANT: "ON RELIGION"--"ADOLPHE"
VIII. MADAME DE STAËL: "DELPHINE"
IX. EXILE
X. "CORINNE"
XI. ATTACK UPON NATIONAL AND PROTESTANT PREJUDICES
XII. NEW CONCEPTION OF THE ANTIQUE
XIII. DE L'ALLEMAGNE
XIV. BARANTE
XV. CONCLUSION

LIST OF PORTRAITS

J. J. ROUSSEAU
DE SÉNANCOUR
CHARLES NODIER
BENJAMIN CONSTANT
MADAME DE STAËL
WINCKELMANN

THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE

The passage of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century was accompanied in France by social and political disturbances of hitherto unknown force and magnitude. The new seed sown by the great ideas and events of the Revolution at first made little or no growth in literature. It was unable to shoot up, for, with but brief interval between, two destroying tyrannies, the dictatorships of the Convention and of the Empire, passed over France, annihilating all personal freedom as they went. The first terrorism cowed, exiled, or guillotined all whose political colouring did not accurately match the then prevailing shade of popular opinion. Aristocracy, royal family, priests and Girondists alike succumbed to it, and men fled to the quiet of Switzerland or the lonely prairies of North America to escape the fate which had destroyed their nearest and threatened themselves. The second terrorism persecuted, imprisoned, shot, or exiled all who would not submit to being silenced (a silence which might only be broken by cheers for the Emperor). Legitimists and Republicans, Constitutionalists and Liberals, philosophers and poets were crushed under the all-levelling roller, unless they preferred, scattered in every direction, to seek a refuge beyond the boundaries of the empire. No easy matter in those days, for the empire followed swiftly upon their heels, rapidly growing, swallowing Germany and Italy in great gulps, until no place seemed secure from its armies, which overtook fugitives even in Moscow.

During both these great despotisms it was only far from Paris, in lonely country places where he lived a life of death-like stillness, or beyond the frontier, in Switzerland, Germany, England, or North America, that the French man of letters pursued his calling. Only in such places could the independent intellects of France exist, and it is by independent intellects alone that a literature can be founded or developed. The first French literary group of the present century, then, a group brought together from all points of the compass, is distinguished by its oppositionist tendency. I do not mean that its members are united on certain fundamental principles, for they are often utterly at variance, but they are all united by their hatred of the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic autocracy. Whatever they may originally have been, and whatever they become after the restoration of the monarchy, whether literary reformers, reactionary Legitimists, or members of the Liberal Opposition, they are at the beginning of the century one and all opposed to the prevailing order of things. Another thing they all have in common is their difficult position as heirs of the eighteenth century, whose last bequest to them is that Empire against which they protest. Some of them would fain renounce the inheritance and its liabilities, others are ready to accept it if they can repudiate the liabilities, all feel that the intellectual development of the new century must be based upon other assumptions than that of the old. The folding-doors of the nineteenth century open; they stand gazing in intently; they have a presentiment of what they are to see, and believe they see it, and the new shapes itself for each and is interpreted by each according to his gifts and desires. Thus as a body there is something premonitory, precursory about them: they are the bearers of the spirit of the new age.

There was a wider sphere for a literary revival in France than in any other European country, for in France in the eighteenth century literary art had developed into formalism. Social and academic culture had laced it in the iron corset of so-called good taste, into stiff, meagre, regulation proportions. France has long presented the contradiction of being a country with a feverish desire for change in all external arrangements, unable, once it determines to gratify this desire, to keep within the bounds of moderation, and of being at the same time remarkably stable in everything that regards literature--acknowledging authority, maintaining an academy, and placing rule and regularity above everything. Frenchmen had instituted a Republic and overturned Christianity before it occurred to them to dispute the authority of Boileau. Voltaire, who turns tradition upside down and uses tragedy as a weapon against the very powers whose chief support it had been, namely the autocracy and the Church, never ventures to allow his action to last more than twenty-four hours, or to pass in two different places in the same play. He, who has little respect for anything in heaven or earth, respects the uniform caesura of the Alexandrine.

It was another people than the French, a people to whom Voltaire had scornfully wished more wit and fewer consonants, who remodelled literature and re-created poetry, while Frenchmen were overturning political systems and customs. The Germans of that day, of whom the French scarcely knew more than that, in humble, patriarchal submission to their petty princes, they drank their beer, smoked their pipes, and ate their _sauer-kraut_ in the corner by the stove, made far greater conquests in the intellectual world than Frenchmen achieved in the geographical. Of all the nations of Europe none save the Germans had had their literary blossoming time in the eighteenth century. It was the second half of that century which witnessed the notable development of poetry between Lessing and Goethe, and the energetic progress of metaphysics between Kant and Schelling. For in Germany nothing had been free save thought.

The French literature of the beginning of the century is, naturally, influenced by Germany, the more so as the nations now first begin to enter into unbroken intellectual communion. The great upheavals, the wars of the Republic and the Empire, jostled the peoples of Europe together, and made them acquainted with each other. But the men most profoundly influenced by foreign surroundings were those for whom these great events meant long, in some cases life-long, exile. The influence of the foreign spirit, only fleeting as far as the soldier was concerned, was lasting and momentous in the case of the _émigré_. Exiled Frenchmen were obliged to acquire a more than superficial acquaintance with foreign tongues, if for no other reason, in order to be able to give French lessons in the country of their adoption. It was the intelligent _émigré_ who diffused knowledge of the character and culture of other lands throughout France, and in seeking a general designation for the literary phenomena of this period, it would scarcely be possible to find a better than the one I have adopted: "The Emigrant Literature."

The name must not be taken for more than it is--a name--for it would be foolish not to class along with the works of _émigrés_ proper, kindred writings by authors who, though they did not live in Paris, perhaps not even in France, yet were not exiles; and, on the other hand, some of the works written by _émigrés_ are distinctly not products of the renovating and fertilising literary movement, but belong to the anti-liberal literature of the Restoration period.

Nevertheless the name may fitly be applied to the first group of French books which ushers in the century. The émigré\ as already remarked, inevitably belongs to the opposition. But the character of his opposition varies, according to whether it is the Reign of Terror or the Empire to which he objects, and from the tyranny of which he has escaped. Frequently he has fled from both, in which case the motive of his opposition is of a compound nature. He possibly sympathised with the Revolution in its early stage as curtailing the power of the monarchy, and his desire may be a moderate republic; in this case he will be inspired by a more passionate ill-will towards the Empire than towards the old Reign of Terror. Whatever the nature of the compound, a double current is discernible in the emigrant literature.

Its direct reaction is against certain mental characteristics of the eighteenth century, its dry rationalism, its taboo of emotion and fancy, its misunderstanding of history, its ignoring of legitimate national peculiarities, its colourless view of nature, and its mistaken conception of religions as being conscious frauds. But there is also an unmistakable undercurrent in the direction of the main stream of the eighteenth century; all the authors carry on the great war against petrified tradition, some only in the domain of literature, others in each and every intellectual domain. They are all daring, enterprising natures, and for none of them has the word Liberty lost its electrifying power. Even Chateaubriand, who in politics and religion represents the extreme Right of the group, and who in some of his writings is positively reactionary, takes "_Liberty_ and Honour" as his motto; which explains his finally going over to the Opposition. The double current is everywhere discernible, in Chateaubriand, in Sénancour, in Constant, in Mme. de Staël, in Barante, Nodier, &c., and to this subtle correlation of reaction and progress I shall draw attention from the first.

In speaking of the spirit of the eighteenth century it is generally Voltaire's name which rises to our lips. It is he who in most men's minds embodies and represents the whole period; and in as far as the _émigrés_ bring about a revulsion against him, they may certainly be said to represent the reaction against the preceding century. Even those among them who are closely related to him intellectually, compulsorily join in the reaction against him, compelled, that is to say, by the spirit of the age; as, for instance, Constant in his book _On Religion_. But among the writers of the eighteenth century there is one who was Voltaire's rival, who is almost his equal, and whose works, moreover, in a much higher degree than Voltaire's, point to an age far ahead of that in which they were written. This man in many ways inspires the Emigrant Literature, and in as far as it descends from Rousseau, and to a certain extent perpetuates his influence, it may be said to perpetuate the preceding century and the Revolution. It is astonishing to what an extent the great literary movements in all the principal countries of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century were influenced by Rousseau. Among his spiritual progeny in France in the eighteenth century had been men so unlike each other as St. Pierre, Diderot, and Robespierre, and in Germany geniuses and men of talent like Herder, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul. In the rising age he influences, among others, Chateaubriand, Mme. de Staël, and later, George Sand, in France; in Germany, Tieck; and in England, Byron. Voltaire influences minds in general, Rousseau has a special power over productive talents, over authors. These two great men exercised an alternating influence upon posterity well-nigh into our own day, when both have been supplanted by Diderot. At the close of last century, Voltaire yielded his sceptre to Rousseau; fifty years later his name returned to honour in France; and now in some of the most eminent writers of that country--take Ernest Renan as an instance--a twofold intellectual tendency is discernible, something of Rousseau's spirit combined with something of Voltaire's. But it is in the writings of Rousseau alone that the great spiritual streams which flow from other countries into France at the beginning of the nineteenth century have their source, and to Rousseau is it due that the literature produced by Frenchmen living in remote provinces or foreign countries, in spite of its antagonism to the spirit which produced and upheld the imperial despotism, remained in touch with the eighteenth century, and was based upon originally French theories.

I

CHATEAUBRIAND

The year 1800 was the first to produce a book bearing the imprint of the new era, a work small in size, but great in significance and mighty in the impression it made. _Atala_ took the French public by storm in a way which no book had done since the days of _Paul and Virginia_. It was a romance of the plains and mysterious forests of North America, with a strong, strange aroma of the untilled soil from which it sprang; it glowed with rich foreign colouring, and with the fiercer glow of consuming passion. The history of a repressed, and therefore overpowering and fatal love, was depicted upon a background of wild Indian life, the effect of the whole being heightened by a varnish of Roman Catholic piety.

This story of the love and death of a Christian Indian girl was so admired that its principal characters were soon to be seen adorning the walls of French inns in the form of coloured prints, while their waxen images were sold on the quays of Paris, as those of Christ and the Virgin usually are in Catholic countries. At one of the suburban theatres the heroine figured in savage attire with cock's feathers in her hair, and a farce was given at the _Théâtre des Variétés_ in which a school girl and boy, who had eloped, talked of nothing but alligators, storks, and virgin forests in the style of _Atala_. A parody published under the title of "_Ah! là! là_!" substituted for the long, gorgeous description of Mississippi scenery an equally lengthy and detailed description of a potato patch--so strange did it seem at that day that an author should devote several pages to the description of natural scenery. But though parodies, jests, and caricatures rained upon the author, he was not to be pitied, such things being symptoms of fame. With one bound he had risen from complete obscurity to the rank of a celebrity. His name was upon all lips, the name of François René de Chateaubriand.

The youngest of ten children, he was born of an ancient and noble house in St. Malo, Brittany. His father was a stern, dry, unsociable and silent man, whose one passion was his pride of race; while his mother, a little, plain, restless, discontented woman, was God-fearing to the highest degree, a church-goer and a patroness of priests. The son inherited a mixture of both natures.

Sternly brought up in a home where, as he himself expressed it, the father was the terror and the mother the scourge of the household, he was reserved and shy, an obstinate, excitable, melancholy child, early familiar with the unrest of the sea and the music of its storms, never reconciled to the discomfort and coldness of his home. His sister Lucile, the nearest him in age, was his one friend and confidante. Like him, she was of a morbid and passionate temperament, year by year more prone, like Rousseau, to suspect every one of conspiracy against her, and to regard herself as persecuted. In her childhood it was to her brother, in later life to religion, that she turned for protection in these troubles and dangers. At first plain and shy, like her brother, she afterwards became very beautiful; with her pale face and dark hair she was like a lovely angel of death. She passed the greater part of her life in convents; was passionate in her sisterly love, and passionately Catholic; she had considerable poetic talent, and in shyness and romantic excitability she seems to have been the feminine counterpart of her brother. Another sister, Julie, having passed her youth as a gay woman of the world, ended her life in the most saintly self-renunciation. The tendency towards Catholicism seems to have run in the blood of the whole family.

The great constraint of young Chateaubriand's upbringing induced in him a wild longing to be free and his own master, while the perpetual surveillance under which he suffered created an overwhelming, misanthropic desire for solitude. When he ran alone down the stairs of the old manor-house, or went out with his gun, he felt all the passions boiling and seething within him in wild ecstasy at being able to dream and long unrestrainedly. Ill at ease in the society of others, he plunged when alone into dreams of happiness and ambition, the dreams of a poet. In this half-sensuous, half-spiritual dreaming and longing, he created the image of a supernaturally charming woman, a youthful queen, bedecked with flowers and jewels, whom he loved and by whom he was beloved in the balmy, moonlit nights of Naples or Sicily. To awake from these dreams and realise the insignificant little Breton that he was, awkward, unknown, poor and possibly without talent, was torture to him. The contrast between what he was and what he longed to be overwhelmed him.

He was at first intended for the navy, but his unconquerable aversion to discipline proved an insurmountable obstacle, and his thoughts turned to the Church, from which, however, a conviction of his unfitness for a life of renunciation made him draw back. In the depth of his despondency he attempted to commit suicide. An irrevocable family decision put an end to his vacillation; he was given a commission as sub-lieutenant in the army, and found the life to his liking. As a cadet of a noble family he was presented to Louis XVI., at whose court he witnessed the last glimmer of the old splendour and ceremony of royalty. Two years later the Revolution broke out, and in 1790 rank, titles, and feudal rights were abolished. Chateaubriand gave up his commission, and, as no occupation offered itself under the new order, or disorder, he conceived the fantastic plan of travelling to America to discover the North-West Passage. Without any of the requisite information, without interest or money, he was inevitably soon obliged to abandon this project. But if he did not find the North-West Passage, he did discover a new race, fresh conditions, and new scenery. In his early youth, after reading Rousseau, he had conceived the idea of writing the Epic of Primitive Man, a description of the ways of the savages of whom he knew nothing. Now he was upon their own soil, in their world, and though they were not as untouched by civilisation as he had imagined, it was not difficult to reconstruct their original condition. The first impression he received of them was undeniably a strange one. On the way from Albany to Niagara, when his guide led him for the first time into the virgin forest, he was seized by one of those transports of delight in his independence which he had felt in his early youth when he went hunting in Brittany. He wandered from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to himself: "Here are no roads, no towns, no monarchies, no republics, no men." Imagining himself to be alone in the forest, he suddenly came upon a score of half-naked, painted savages with ravens' feathers in their hair and rings in their noses, who--marvellous to relate!--were dancing quadrilles to the sounds of a violin played by a little powdered and frizzed Frenchman, once kitchen-boy to a French general, now retained as dancing-master by these savages for a consideration of beaver-skins and bear-hams. What a humiliating introduction to primitive life for a pupil of Rousseau! Subsequent impressions were, fortunately, simpler and more beautiful than this. Chateaubriand purchased clothes and weapons from the Indians, and lived their life for some weeks at least. He was presented to the Sachem, or chief, of the Onondagas (as Byron at a later period was presented to Ali Pasha); he rode through the country, coming here and there upon little European houses, with their pianos and mirrors, close to the huts of the Iroquois; he saw the Falls of Niagara; and in two charming Florida girls found the models for his famous characters, Atala and Celuta.

It was in America that Chateaubriand planned his two brilliant short tales, _Atala_ and _René_, and also the long, somewhat slovenly work of which they form part, _Les Natchez_, a great romance dealing with the destruction of an Indian tribe in its struggle with the whites. _Atala_ was the first to be completed. After a brief stay in France, where he arrived in January 1792, recalled by the news of the fall of the monarchy and the dangerous position of Louis XVI., he again emigrated, this time to London. He made the first rough drafts of _Atala_ and _René_ sitting under the trees in Kensington Gardens, and when he joined the emigrant army on the Rhine, his knapsack contained more manuscript than linen. _Atala_ was revised during the halts of the army, and repacked in his knapsack when the march was resumed, his comrades teasing him by tearing the protruding leaves. In the action in which he was wounded in the thigh by a splinter of shell, _Atala_ proved the means of saving his life, for two spent bullets glanced off his knapsack. He arrived at Brussels after the destruction of the emigrant army, wounded, emaciated, and ill with fever; his brother, with wife and father-in-law, having meanwhile perished on the scaffold in Paris. His mother and two sisters, of whom Lucile was one, had been imprisoned for a time after his flight. In London, in 1797, he published his _Essai historique sur les Revolutions_, which was written in a comparatively liberal and, as regards religion, a distinctly sceptical spirit. It was the death of his mother, he tells us, which led him back to Christianity, but the reactionary spirit of the times probably contributed quite as much to his change of attitude, and when he returned to France in 1800, after Bonaparte had quelled the Revolution, he carried with him his great work, _Le Génie du Christianisme_, in which _René_ was included, and the publication of which coincided with Bonaparte's restoration of Christian worship in France. The book harmonised too well with the plans of the First Consul not to bring its author into favour with that autocrat; Chateaubriand, however, broke with his government after the judicial murder of the Duc d'Enghien in 1804.

These are the principal incidents in the youthful career of the man who became famous in 1800 as the author of _Atala_. His character was even more remarkable than his career. High-spirited, ambitious, vain, and shy, perpetually wavering in his faith in his own powers, he was not only endowed with the self-consciousness of genius, but with an egotism which ignored with absolute indifference all that did not immediately concern himself. He came too late into the world, and was educated under too peculiar circumstances, to have faith in the Revolution or the eighteenth century philosophy which partly inspired it. He came into the world too soon to make acquaintance with the science of the nineteenth century, and through it to win a new faith and a new standpoint. He therefore became a kind of Nihilist in the service of the past, a spirit who, as he repeatedly observes, believed in nothing. He adds, when he remembers to do so, "except religion"; but a man is, according to his nature, either a believer or a sceptic, and the idea that it is possible to be a believer in the matter of religion when one believes in nothing else, is a mere delusion, to which the half-educated are specially liable.

Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ are full of the sort of tirade on the vanity of name and fame which we so often meet with in Byron. There is undoubtedly a good deal of affectation in these outbreaks, but they nevertheless betray genuine ennui and persistent melancholy.

"Unable to believe in anything except religion, I am distrustful of all else.... The trivial and ridiculous side of things is always the first to show itself to me. In reality neither great geniuses nor great deeds exist for me.... In politics the warmth of my conviction does not outlast my speech or pamphlet.... In the whole history of the world I do not know a fame that could tempt me. If the greatest honour in the world lay at my feet and I had but to stoop and take it up, I would not take the trouble. If I had been my own creator, I should probably have made myself a woman, out of passion for the sex; or if I had chosen to be a man, I would first of all have bestowed beauty upon myself; then, to provide against ennui, my worst enemy, I would have been a great but unknown artist, using my talent for myself alone. If we set aside all humbug and examine into what it is that gives life real worth, we find only two things of value, religion in combination with talent, and love in combination with youth, that is to say the future and the present; all the rest is not worth the trouble of thinking about.... I have no belief in anything except religion. If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my staff or sceptre? I should have been equally weary of glory and genius, work and rest, prosperity and adversity. Everything irks me. I drag my weariness painfully after me all day long, and yawn my life away (_et je vais partout bâillant ma vie_)."[1]

How much passion had he not wasted upon fantastic imaginings and poetic dreams before he was reduced to this utter boredom! In _Atala_ the passion still wells up like a hot spring, and its spray stings and scalds.

The old Indian, Chactas, tells the story of his youth to a young Frenchman to whom Chateaubriand has given his own second name, René. Chactas, taken captive by a hostile tribe, is condemned to death upon the pyre. The daughter of the chief of the tribe takes a fancy to him and approaches the place where he lies bound. He mistakes her for the maiden whose part it is to solace the prisoner in the last hour before the consummation of the death sentence; but her intention is to release, not to console. He conceives a sudden passion for her, and entreats her to fly with him and be his; she refuses, and, delayed by her opposition, he is recaptured. He is already adorned for the pyre, crowned with flowers, his face painted blue and red, and beads attached to his ears, when Atala delivers him for the second time and escapes with him. The greater part of the book describes this flight, Chactas's desire, and the mingling of passion and reserve in Atala which makes her constantly vacillate between resistance and surrender. Her behaviour is explained when she tells Chactas that her mother, who was seduced by a white man, had her baptized and made her swear to remain unwed. In her anguish at the vow and her despair of being able to keep it, she takes poison, and dies in her lover's arms, comforted by the old missionary in whose hut the pair have taken shelter.

A full impression of the burning passion and lyrical exaltation of the book can only be gained by reading it, nor can we obtain any idea from descriptions and quotations of the power with which the wonderful scenery is described. It is an easy matter, however, to show how much and how instinctively Chateaubriand relied upon a mingling of the terrible with the erotic to obtain his effects. In the principal love scene we have not only a lavish musical accompaniment of the rattle of snakes, the howling of wolves, the roaring of bears and jaguars, but also a storm which shatters the trees, and impenetrable darkness, torn by flash upon flash of the lightning which finally sets fire to the forest. Round about the lovers the pines are blazing like wedding torches, and Atala is about to yield when a warning flash strikes the ground at her feet. It is after this she takes poison, and the burning passion of her last words to Chactas are in harmony with the conflagration of the forest:

"What torture to see thee at my side, far from all mankind, in these profound solitudes, and to feel an invincible barrier between thee and me! To pass my life at thy feet, to wait upon thee as thy slave, to prepare thy repast and thy couch in some forgotten corner of the universe would have been my supreme happiness. This bliss I had actually attained to, but could not enjoy. What plans have I not planned! what dreams have I not dreamed! Sometimes, looking upon thee, I have been tempted to form desires as wild as they were guilty. I have sometimes wished that thou and I were the only living creatures on earth; sometimes, conscious of a divinity which arrested my horrible transports, I have wished that divinity annihilated, that, clasped in thy arms, I might fall from abyss to abyss amid the ruins of God and the world."

Remarkable as these outbursts of irresistible passion are, and novel as is the scenery which throws them into relief, we feel that both would have been impossible if Rousseau had never lived, and if his literary work had not been carried on by another and greater intellect of another nationality.

[1] _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_, vol. i. p. 207-451; vol. ii. p. 129.

II

ROUSSEAU

Rousseau's chief work as an imaginative writer is _La Nouvelle Héloïse_.

The novelty of the book lay, in the first instance, in the fact that it gave the death-blow to gallantry, and, consequently, to the theory of the French classical period on the subject of the emotions. This theory was that all noble, fine emotions, and chief among them love, were the products of civilisation. It is obvious enough that a certain degree of civilisation was necessary before such a sentiment as love could arise. Until they wore womanly garb women did not exist, but only females, and until there were women there was no love. From this perfectly correct idea had resulted (in the pre-Rousseau period) the belief that the veiling of passion ennobled it and made it worthy. The more it could be shrouded in circumlocutions, hints, and suggestions, the less coarse it was. The morality and the literature of that period were the products of social culture, a culture confined to the highest circles. We need but read Marivaux's plays to find literary evidence of the extent to which courtly formality and refined sentiment were preferred to nature and passion. Marivaux's lovers are always each other's equals in culture, and, what is of still greater importance, in rank. We never find, as in the dramas of our century, the aristocratic lady who loves a man of lower social station, nor such a character, for instance, as Ruy Blas, the lackey who finds favour in the eyes of a Queen. In Marivaux, if a gentleman is disguised as a lackey, or a young lady as a waiting-maid, they always divine each other immediately in spite of their disguise. Their conversation is an incessant pursuit and flight, advance and retreat; it is full of ambiguities and hints and evasions, masked confessions and suppressed sighs, love-sickness expressed in a becomingly conventional manner. In Rousseau's eyes these mannerisms are as ridiculous as they are artificial. He prefers love, like everything else, in its natural state, and to him love in its natural state is a violent, irresistible passion. In his books we are very far removed from those scenes in Marivaux in which the kneeling lover never forgets to preserve a graceful attitude while pressing the tips of a glove to his lips. For all his chivalry and virtue, St. Preux is an electric battery charged with passion; the first kiss in the Grove of Clarens produces the shock, the conflagration of a thunderbolt; and when Julie, bending towards St. Preux and kissing him, swoons away, it is no coquettish faint of the days of the periwig, but the effect of the overwhelming might of passion upon a young and healthy child of nature.

The second novelty in the book is the inequality in station of the hero and heroine. Julie is the daughter of a nobleman, St. Preux is a poor tutor, a plebeian. Here, as in the _Sorrows of Werther_, the passion of love is connected with the equality-loving plebeian's determination to make a name for himself. This is no chance connection, for passion creates equality, whereas love in fashionable society has a tendency to develop into gallantry.

A third significant feature in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ is that, just as we have passion in place of gallantry and inequality of station in place of similarity of rank, we have also the moral conviction of the sanctity of marriage in place of that honour grounded on aristocratic pride and self-respect, which stood for virtue in fashionable literature. This word, Virtue, little in vogue until now, became with Rousseau and his school a watchword which was in perfect harmony with their other watchword, Nature; for to Rousseau virtue was a natural condition. Following the example of society, French literature had been making merry at the expense of marriage; Rousseau, therefore, defied the spirit of the times by writing a book in its honour. His heroine returns the passion of her lover, but marries another, to whom she remains faithful. Here, as in _Werther_, the lover proper loses the maiden, who is wedded to a Monsieur Wolmar (the Albert of _Werther_ and the Edward of Kierkegaard's _Diary of a Seducer_), a man as irreproachable as he is uninteresting. The moral conviction which is vindicated and glorified in Rousseau as Virtue, is the same as that which in Chateaubriand, under the influence of the religious reaction, takes the form of a binding religious vow.

Note, finally, that the watchword Nature is to be taken in its literal meaning. For the first time, out of England, we have the genuine feeling for nature in fiction, superseding love-making in drawing-rooms and gardens. Under Louis XV. and the Regency, people passed their time (in real life as well as in books) in boudoirs, where light conversation and light morals were in place. The rooms, like the verses of Voltaire's _Poesies Fugitives_, were adorned with endless multitudes of Cupids and Graces. In the gardens goat-footed Pans embraced slender white nymphs by the side of artificial fountains. In their pictures of the _fêtes-champêtres_ of those days, Watteau and the less-gifted Boucher and Lancret have preserved for us these gardens with their shady walks and quiet corners, where courtly gentlemen and gay ladies, clad as Pierrots and Columbines, coquetted and whispered, conscious of being on the right stage for such free and frivolous masquerading. Turn from these to the scenery of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_.

Rousseau's statue stands at this day on a little island lying in the Lake of Geneva, at its narrow southern extremity. The spot is one of the loveliest in the world. Pass the island and cross another bridge and you see the Rhone rush, impetuous and foaming white, out of the lake. A few steps further and you can see its white stream joined by the grey snow waters of the Arve. The rivers flow side by side, each retaining its colour. Far away between two mighty ridges you discern the white snow-caps of Mont Blanc. Towards evening, as those mountain ridges darken, the snows of Mont Blanc glow like pale roses. It would seem as if Nature had gathered together all her contrasts here. Even in the warmest season as you approach the grey, foaming mountain torrents, the air becomes icy cold. In the course of a short stroll you may feel the heat of summer in some sheltered nook, and a few steps farther on encounter harsh autumn with its cutting winds. One can form no conception of the cool freshness and strength of the air here. Only the sun and the brilliant shimmer of the stars at night recall the south. The latter are not the bright points in a distant sky which they appear to be in the north; they seem to hang loose in the air; and the air itself, as one inhales it, feels like a strong massive substance.

Sail up the lake to Vevey. Behind that town the Alpine slopes are clad with the trees and vineyards of southern lands. On the farther side of the lake rise great walls of blue rock, solemn and threatening, and the sun plays in light and shade down the mountain-side. No waters are so blue as those of the Lake of Geneva. As you sail down it on a beautiful summer day, it shines like blue satin shot with gold. It is a fairyland, a dreamland, where mighty mountains cast their blue-black shadows down into the azure waters and a brilliant sun saturates the air with colour. Sail a little farther up the lake to Montreux, where the rock fortress of Chillon, the prison in which mediæval cruelty collected all its instruments of torture, projects into the water. This witness to wild and terrible passions lies in the midst of scenery which may well be called enchanted. The lake is more open here, the view less peculiar, and the climate more southern than at Vevey. One sees sky, Alps, and lake, all melting together in a mysterious blue light. From Montreux walk to Clärens and pause in the chestnut grove which is still called the _Bosquet de Julie_. It is situated on a height from which you look down upon Montreux, lying sheltered and hidden in its bay; look round and you will understand how it was from this spot that the love of nature spread throughout Europe. We are standing in Rousseau's country, upon the scene of his _Nouvelle Héloïse_. This was the scenery which supplanted that of the Regency.

It is not difficult to trace the relation between Chateaubriand's first work and Rousseau's famous romance. First and foremost Chateaubriand inherits the love of nature; his strongly coloured pictures of North American scenery have their progenitors in those descriptions of Swiss nature. But there is this difference between Rousseau's and Chateaubriand's landscapes, that the latter's are much more dependent upon the mood of the hero and heroine. If stormy passions rage in their hearts, the storm rages without also; the characters are blent with their natural surroundings, which they permeate with their passions and moods in a manner quite unknown to the literature of the eighteenth century.

The hero and heroine themselves, being savages, have even less suspicion of gallantry about them, are far more the children of nature than Rousseau's lovers; and although expressions occur again and again which are absurd coming from the lips of a Red Indian, yet many of the love-speeches have a touch of primitive poetry in them, a genus of literature which was entirely unknown in France in the eighteenth century. Take for an example the warrior's love-song beginning with the words: "I will fly so fast that before the day has touched the mountain tops I shall have come to my white dove among the oaks of the forest. I have bound a necklace of beads about her neck--three red beads to speak of my love, three violet beads to speak of my fear, and three blue beads to speak my hope," &c.

The inequality of position between Rousseau's lovers, so typical of that revolutionary time, finds its equivalent in _Atala_ in the difference of religion, a matter which in the new century, with its reaction against Voltaire, acquires new importance. The religious reaction also explains the fact that a Catholic vow to remain unwed plays the same rôle in Chateaubriand's story which the dictate of morality does in Rousseau's. We have, then, progress in colouring, in the development of character, in the comprehension of the spirit and racial peculiarities of an uncivilised people, but we have also a deliberate step backward, in the substitution of Catholic conventual piety, with its unnatural renunciation, for morality. Passion is whetted, so to speak, on the altar of Catholicism, and its unnatural suppression creates that unnatural frenzy which causes Atala, the charming young Indian girl, who has so long held the desire of her heathen lover in check, to die with a wish on her lips for the annihilation of God and the world, if at that price she can be clasped for ever to his heart.

III

WERTHER

_La Nouvelle Héloïse_ appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later, in another country and in very different environments, a youthful genius, who possessed little in common with Rousseau, but who wrote under the influence of his romance and his ideas, published a little book which contained all the merits and none of the defects of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, a book which stirred thousands upon thousands of minds, which awoke lively enthusiasm and a morbid longing for death in a whole generation, which in not a few cases induced hysterical sentimentality, idleness, despair, and suicide, and which was honoured by being proscribed by a fatherly Danish government as "irreligious." This book was _Werther_. St. Preux has changed his costume, has donned the famous Werther garb, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and Rousseau's _belle âme_ has passed into German literature as _die schöne Seele_.

And what is _Werther_? No definitions can give any real idea of the infinite wealth of an imaginative masterpiece, but we may briefly say that the great importance of this story of ardent, unhappy love, lies in its being so treated that it gives expression not merely to the isolated passion and suffering of a single individual, but to the passions, longings, and sufferings of a whole age. The hero is a young man of the burgher class; he is artistically gifted, and paints for pleasure, but by profession he is Secretary to a Legation. Goethe has involuntarily made this young man see, and feel, and think as he himself did in his youth, has endowed him with all his own rich and brilliant genius. This transforms Werther into a great symbolic figure; he is more than the spirit of the new era, he is its genius. He is almost too rich and great for his destiny. There is, perhaps, actually a certain discrepancy between the first part of the book, in which Werther's mind manifests itself in its energetic, youthful health and strength, and the second part, in which he succumbs to circumstances. In the first half there is in Werther more of Goethe himself, who certainly did not commit suicide; in the second, more of that young Jerusalem whose unhappy death inspired the book. But such as he is, Werther is a type. He is not only the child of nature in his passion, he is nature in one of its highest developments, genius. Losing himself in nature, he feels its whole infinite life within himself, and feels himself "deified" thereby. Turn, for instance, to that wonderful entry in his journal written on August 18, 1771. It is as powerful and full of genius as a _Faust_ monologue. Read that description of how "the inner, glowing, holy life of nature" opens before him, of how he perceives the "unfathomable powers working and creating in the depths of the earth," of how he yearns to "drink the surging joy of life from the foaming cup of infinity, in order that, as far as his narrow limitations permit, he may taste one drop of the bliss of that being which produces everything in and by itself," and you will understand how it is that, when he begins to feel like a prisoner who sees no way of escape, he is seized by a burning, so to speak, pantheistic, desire to fling his human life away, that he may "rend the clouds asunder with the storm-wind and grasp the billows;" you will feel the justification for his dying exclamation: "Nature! thy son, thy friend, thy lover, approaches his end."

A soul which demands so much room must inevitably be an offence to society, especially when society is hedged in by as many rules as it was at the close of the most social of all centuries. Werther abhors all rules. At a time when poetry was fettered by them, he reduces all its laws to one: "Know what is good and dare to put it into words." An artist, his views on painting are as heretical as his views on poetry. He meets a young brother artist, fresh from the schools, who deafens him with the doctrines of all the famous theorists, Winckelmann and Sulzer amongst others. This fellow is a perfect terror to him. "Nature alone," he writes, "fashions the great artist. Much may be said in favour of the laws of art, about as much as may be said in praise of the laws of society. The artist who observes them will never produce anything bad or absolutely valueless, just as the man who submits to the control of convention and decorum will never be an unbearable neighbour or a remarkable scoundrel; nevertheless, every rule, say what you will, tends to destroy true feeling for nature and to prevent its sincere expression." Werther's detestation of rules explains his abhorrence for all technical and conventional expressions. He gnashes his teeth with annoyance when the prince, who has no artistic taste, brings out some æsthetic platitude in reply to an eager remark he himself has let fall on the subject of art, and he is enraged by the string of ready-made social judgments which Albert has at his fingers' ends. "Why," he cries, "must you people, when you speak of a thing, immediately say, 'it is stupid' or 'it is clever,' 'it is good' or 'it is bad'? What do you mean? Have you investigated into the inner significance of the action? Have you traced its causes, divined its inevitability? If you had, you would not be so ready to pass judgment!" He revolts against the pedantry of the ambassador who cavils at the style of his secretary's despatches, he wishes misfortune may befall the theological blue-stocking who has cut down the pretty hazels in the rectory garden, and he is unreasonably embittered by the arrogance of antiquated erudition, by all lifeless, solemn ceremonial, and by the claims which those of a certain rank in society make on the submission and obedience of their inferiors.

He seeks refuge with children, who "of all things upon earth are nearest to his heart," and with uncultured souls, whose genuine feelings and genuine passions give them a beauty in his eyes which nothing can surpass. Watching the girls fetch water from the well reminds him of patriarchal times, of Rebecca and Eleazer, and when he cooks his own green peas he lives in thought in those Homeric days when Penelope's haughty suitors killed and prepared their own food. Nature enchants and captivates him. If he is not a Christian, if, as he expresses it, he is not one of those who have been given to the Son--something in his heart telling him that the Father has reserved him for Himself--it is because to him that Father is Nature; Nature is his God.

Wherever he goes in society he offends against its cold and formal regulations. He is ejected in the most insulting manner from an aristocratic gathering; he, the plebeian, all unwitting of offence, having remained in his chief's drawing-room after the arrival of distinguished guests. Himself ardently, hopelessly in love, he does what he can to save an unfortunate youth whom an unconquerable and not unrequited passion has driven to offer violence and to murder a rival. Werther's petition is not only rejected by the representatives of the law, but he is himself compelled by the law to bear witness against the man he would so willingly shield and save.

All this, however, is mere minor detail. The woman he loves, and whom he could so easily have won, had no plighted word stood between them, becomes the wife of another; this is the shock that breaks his heart.

This book represents the full heart, right or wrong, in collision with the conventions of everyday life, its craving for infinity, for liberty, which makes life seem a prison and all society's partition walls seem prison walls. "All that society does," says Werther, "is to paint them for each individual with fair perspectives opening to a wide horizon. The walls themselves are never broken down." Hence this dashing of the head against the wall, these long sobs, this deep despair which nothing but a bullet through the heart can still. On the occasion of their meeting, Napoleon reproached Goethe for having mixed up the love-story with the revolt against society; the reproach was unreasonable, for the two are indissolubly connected; it is only together that they express the idea of the book.

Unlike _La Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther_ is no glorification of the triumph of virtue and deistic piety over natural instincts and passions; it represents passion running its predestined course. In this tragedy of the human heart, the law-defying being and the lawless passion meet their inevitable doom. The termination to the story, however, was not of Goethe's invention; he made use of a manuscript describing the death of young Jerusalem (_vide_ Kestner's book on Goethe and Lotte). In its last lines he only altered a single word, as being too vulgar. The manuscript runs, "Barbiergesellen trugen ihn"; in the book we read, "Handwerker trugen ihn, kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." This sentence in its cutting brevity intimates that a life is at an end, that a human being at war with himself and society, mortally wounded in his deepest sympathies, has succumbed. Mechanics bore him to the grave, middle-class society held pharisaically aloof; no priest accompanied him, for he was a suicide, and had defied the laws of religion; but he had loved the people and had associated with the uncultured, so they followed him to the grave.

It is well known to what an outburst of sentimental literature this work gave rise; how its passionate emotion turned into heavy sentimentality, as in the case of Clauren, Lafontaine, and Rahbek, the Dane, or was diluted into sickly platonism, as in Ingemann's feeble imitation, _Varners Vandringer_, But _Werther_ was not responsible for all this; absorption in feeling and emotions is only one feature of the book. There wells forth from the very midst of this absorption such a healthy love of nature and of life, such a hearty, revolutionary ire at conventional society, its prejudices, its compulsory regulations, its terror of genius, whose stream might possibly overflow its banks and flood the "tulip beds and kitchen-gardens," that the main impression which the work leaves on our minds is that of the impulse towards originality and poetry which it depicts, arouses, and satisfies.

What an advance we have here upon _La Nouvelle Héloïse_! In the first place, there is a far deeper and purer feeling for nature than in Rousseau. The additional fact, that scenery is looked at from a new point of view, is to be ascribed to the influence of a literary event which occurred in 1762, and made a great impression; namely, the publication of Ossian. The Scottish bard so melted even Napoleon's hard heart that he much preferred him to Homer. At this time the authenticity of Ossian had not been called in question; at a later period men turned from these poems with the pique which people who have been raving about the singing of a nightingale would show if they discovered that some rascal hidden among the bushes had been imposing on them. In the hearts of his contemporaries, Macpherson succeeded in supplanting Homer. Among others he influenced Goethe, which accounts for our finding the healthy Homeric view of nature which prevails in the first half of _Werther_, superseded in the second by the Ossianic mist pictures which harmonise with the increasing morbidity, restlessness, and lyrical passion of the tale.

Rousseau's chief female figure is drawn with uncertain touch. Like most French heroines, she is wanting in womanly simplicity. In genuineness and sincerity of passion she falls far short of her namesake, the real Héloïse, whose every word comes from the heart. Julie's utterances are cold; she perpetually relapses into lectures on Virtue and the Supreme Being. She makes such observations as the following: "To such a degree are all human affairs naught, that with the exception of the being which exists by itself, there is no beauty except in that which is not." She means in our illusions. Julie dissects feelings, and reasons in high-flown language. In contrast with her how naïve and natural is the vigorous Charlotte! Think of the latter, for instance, in the famous scene where she is cutting bread and butter for her little sisters and brothers. If she offends it is not by declamation, but by a touch of sentimentality, as, for instance, in the scene where her thoughts and Werther's meet, when, looking out into the rain through the wet window-pane, she utters the word: "Klopstock!"