Chapter XXXIII: Literature in Its Relation to the Social and Political Movements of the Day

Meanwhile Saint-Simonism had been thoroughly leavening literature.

Lamartine, the most gifted of the authors who, after the restoration of the hereditary monarchy, lent their support to the Conservative party, began to waver early in the Thirties. In his versified novel, _Jocelyn_ (1836), mild and pious though its tone is, we are conscious of his new sympathies and of new developments in his convictions. In the preface he evades the question of his religious belief, merely remarking that, let it be what it may, he has not forgotten his youthful reverence for the Church. The most careless reader, however, cannot fail to observe that the story itself is a protest against the celibacy of the clergy, one of the fundamental principles of the Church. And in Jocelyn's diary we find the following significant passage, in the entry for 21st September 1800:--

"La caravane humaine un jour était campée
Dans les forêts bordant une rive escarpée,
Et ne pouvant pousser sa route plus avant.
Les chênes l'abritaient du soleil et du vent,
Les tentes, aux rameaux enlaçant leurs cordages,
Formaient autour des troncs des cités, des villages,
Et les hommes épars sur des gazons épais
Mangeaient leur pain à l'ombre et conversaient en paix.
Tout à coup comme atteints d'une rage insensée
Ces hommes se levant à la même pensée,
Portant la hache aux troncs, font crouler à leur piés
Ces dômes où les nids s'étaient multipliés;
Et les brutes des bois sortant de leurs repaires
Et les oiseaux fuyant les cimes séculaires
Contemplaient la ruine avec un œil d'horreur,
Ne comprenaient pas l'œuvre et maudissaient du cœur
Cette race stupide acharnée à sa perte,
Qui détruit jusqu'au ciel l'ombre qui l'a couverte!
Or, pendant qu'en leur nuit les brutes des forêts
Avaient pitié de l'homme et séchaient de regrets,
L'homme continuant son ravage sublime
Avait jeté les troncs en arche sur l'abîme;
Sur l'arbre de ses bords gisant et renversé
La fleuve était partout couvert et traversé,
Et poursuivant en paix son éternel voyage
La caravane avait conquis l'autre rivage."

But this was only the beginning. _La Chute d'un Ange_ showed, in spite of all its faults, that Lamartine had discarded his earlier, "seraphic" style; and his first parliamentary speeches showed that Saint-Simonistic ideas had gradually supplanted his orthodox beliefs. The born aristocrat proclaimed himself a _démocrate conservateur_, desirous of the realisation, under a constitutional monarchy, of all the modern liberal and progressive ideas. And he did not stop even here. His famous _Histoire des Girondins_, published in 1846 (a work valueless as history, but written in a most poetical, persuasively eloquent style), was the book which more than any other attuned men's minds to revolution and prepared for the coming upheaval. And in 1848 we find the man who had been the court poet of the Restoration period, standing--the real chief of the Republic--on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, displaying the proud indifference of the aristocrat to the muskets levelled at his breast while addressing the crowd with the authoritative eloquence of the tribune. That was a great, an immortal moment in his life, when he saved the lives of his colleagues and averted civil war with a few unhesitating words, as beautiful as they were manly.

It was Pierre Leroux who initiated George Sand into the new, fermenting social ideas which with feminine impulsiveness she at once adopted. In his capacity of social reformer, Pierre Leroux, a metaphysician with a noble heart and a confused brain, who thought in triads in the manner of Schelling, championed equality and progress. To him progress meant approach towards equality. He was instigated to his attempts at reform by his indignation with the existing condition of society, with the equality as regarded the law, which permitted the rich man to escape the hardship of military service and the punishment due to his crime, with the liberty which consisted in the right of free competition, that is to say, the legal right of the rich to oppress the poor. Society as reorganised by Leroux was to be based on the triple nature of man. Man is constituted of perception, intuition, and cognition. To these three elements were to correspond three classes, the artisan or industrial, the artist, and the scientist class; but these three classes were not, as in Saint-Simon's imaginary society, to be castes, but were to act in unison. Three individuals or units, one from each class, were to constitute a society individual or unit; and these same three, working together, would constitute an "atelier." The "ateliers" also were to be divided into three classes, according to the activity which predominated in them, &c.

When we think of all these Utopias, we cannot but admire the sane and wise attitude maintained towards them by the authors who allowed themselves to be carried away by some of the ideas inspiring the different systems. They held aloof from everything, or almost everything, that was artificial, fantastic, or absurd. They contented themselves with kindling their poetic torches at the altar fire kept alight by the pure-hearted enthusiasts; they drew inspiration from the philanthropy of these men, from their ardent championship of the poor and the oppressed, from their fervent faith in the people and in progress.

It is quite evident, whatever may be said to the contrary, that Saint-Simonism was a beneficent influence in George Sand's life. It produced tranquillity after the fit of despair which dictated _Lelia_; it gave her a faith which was never afterwards disturbed, and a cause to work and fight for. She had an observant eye for all that was going on around her; and towards the close of the Thirties it was evident that the French working classes were in a state of violent ferment. At that period the slow transformation of France from an almost exclusively agricultural country to one of the chief manufacturing countries was already an accomplished fact. It was now no longer only the poverty of the peasants which called for a remedy, but also, and even more urgently, the poverty and discontent of the ever-increasing proletariat population of the great manufacturing and commercial towns. Like almost all the other French democratic writers, George Sand turned her attention to the working people of the towns, their hard struggle for existence, their remarkable intelligence, their social and political ideas. Saint-Simonism had originally appealed to her and aroused her enthusiasm by its condemnation of the relations between the sexes upheld by the conventions of existing society; it denned as truths to be proclaimed and championed the ideas which were most precious to her--that there is no beauty or value in marriage except when it is a voluntary union; and that mayor, witnesses, and priest cannot invest it with greater sacredness than do love and conscience. Now Saint-Simonism gave a more thoughtful and more definite character to her love of the people. Among the men of the working classes she discovered more unselfishness and manliness than among those of the middle classes; it began to seem to her as if the vices of the male sex which she had condemned with such severity in her first novels were in reality more the vices of a class than of the whole sex; and her love of the working class in conjunction with the innate idealism of her nature led her to see and represent the working man from an ideal point of view. She produced a series of novels in which the old contrast between two men of the same class, one unselfish and the other a hardened egotist, was superseded by the contrast between the idealised representative of the working classes and a more or less egotistical and slavishly conventional representative of the upper or middle classes.

The most interesting books of this series are the two written about 1840--_Horace_, the refusal to accept which produced a temporary disagreement between George Sand and the _Revue des deux Mondes_, and _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_, a genuine labour-question novel, which in its innocence and simple purity presents a striking contrast to the glaringly coloured stories of a socialistic and democratic tendency published a few years later by Eugène Sue.

In my opinion _Horace_ is one of George Sand's best books. In its hero she represents with more shrewdness and profundity than ever before or after the young bourgeois of the reign of Louis Philippe. The acuteness and insight she in this case displays are in no way inferior to Balzac's. She is inspired by a strong antipathy, which, however, does not preclude a good-humouredly tolerant treatment. With Horace is contrasted the noble proletarian, Arsène. This man, originally a painter, has been compelled by poverty to take a place as waiter in a _café_; but the dependent position has not degraded him. The simple goodness and beauty of his character make him most attractive. We believe in him.

Arsène has friends among the _Bousingots_, the circle of young students who in the Thirties transferred the style and deportment of the Romantic School to the domain of politics. They figure in many of the lithographs of the period with their Robespierre waistcoats, thick sticks, and glazed hats or red velvet caps. In outward appearance they somewhat resembled German _corps_ students; and they took part in all riots which were demonstrations of discontent with the _Juste-milieu_ government. George Sand defends them warmly. "None of the men," she says, "who at that time caused a slight disturbance of public order need blush now at the thought of having displayed a little youthful ardour. If the only use which youth can make of such nobility and courage as it possesses, is to attack society with it, the condition of society must be very bad." Arsène fights like a hero and is badly wounded in the working-men's revolt of the 5th of June 1832, which is sympathetically described; and in the course of a few years he becomes an experienced, able politician. The story of his political education is peculiarly interesting to us, because, in telling it, the authoress gives unambiguous expression to her own feelings. Arsène's hero is Godefroy Cavaignac; George Sand describes him and his friends, the society _Les amis du people_. "Their ideas," she writes, "at any rate indicated a great advance upon the liberalism of the Restoration period. The other Republicans were a little too much taken up with the idea of overthrowing monarchy, and did not give sufficient thought to the laying of the foundations of the republic; Godefroy Cavaignac's thoughts were of the emancipation of the people, of free education, of universal suffrage, of the gradual modification of the rights of property, &c." Horace's cold-heartedness and narrow-mindedness display themselves in his contemptuously sweeping condemnation of Saint-Simonism, which to him is pure charlatanism. He is incapable of appreciating its conception of the mutual relations of the sexes, and is obliged to submit to being reproved with the calmness of conscious superiority by a young dressmaker who lives with her friend, a clever young doctor, and regards this life of theirs as "the truly religious marriage."[1] The authoress undoubtedly attacks in this novel more problems than she is capable of solving, but the very fact of its dealing largely with the ideas and aims of the day gives it a vivid and attractive historical colouring. Besides, it was not her business, as a novelist, to solve social problems, but to show how they moved hearts and set brains to work, even the hearts and brains of enamoured young women and self-satisfied young men.

What I specially admire in _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_, a book which, as a novel, is inferior to _Horace_, is the impulsive strength of the feeling which inspired it. To feel the heart swell and burn with compassion for the unfortunates of society, to feel burdened by the favours which Fortune has bestowed on us and not on all, are sensations with which many a youth and maiden are familiar. But it is a rare thing indeed for the man or woman of forty still to hunger and thirst after justice for others, to be unable to sit still and see the yoke weighing down the innocent neck, unable to refrain from planning and striving after a different order of things, a different morality from that which seems to satisfy society in general, nay, to be actually ashamed to sleep or to take pleasure or to be happy for a few moments, as long as things are as they are. And these were the feelings which compelled George Sand to write this book. What a love for "the people" lies at the foundation of it! And it is a love for the people as they are--for the drinking, brawling people, as well as for the working, aspiring people--a love so great that the authoress cannot bear to describe or dwell upon the vices she sees and names. See the conversations in chapter xxv. The best definition of the idea which dominates the book is to be found in the book itself. A nobleman asserts that he holds the old opinion that everything possible ought to be done for the people, but that they ought not to be consulted, because that would make them both appealing party and judge. His daughter answers: "And is not that just what we are?"

Soon after writing this work George Sand began to take a vigorous share in the practical politics of the day. After her quarrel with the _Revue des deux Mondes_ she had, in collaboration with Pierre Leroux, Viardot, Lamennais, and the Polish author Mickiewiez, started the _Revue Indépendante_; now (in 1843) she and some friends started a republican provincial newspaper in her own part of the country. In this paper, _L'Éclaireur de l'Indre_, to which Lamartine also contributed, she defended the cause, now of the town artisan, now of the peasant (article on the Paris journeymen bakers, letters from a Black Forest peasant). In 1844, in her long essay, _Questions politiques et sociales_, she distinctly declared herself a socialist. When the Revolution broke out in 1848 she was ripe to take part in it. For a short time she published a weekly paper, _La Cause du Peuple_; she wrote _A Word to the Middle Classes_, and the famous _Letters to the People_, and composed the bulletins of the Provisional Government. Towards the close of the year, in face of threatening danger, her republican socialism assumed an almost fanatical form. The article _La Majorité et l'Unanimité_, in which, immediately before the elections for the Constituent National Assembly, she exhorts the electors to show their liberal principles by their votes, ends with the threat, expressed with much circumlocution, but yet plain enough, that if the assembly presently to be elected by universal suffrage does not prove to be such an assembly as popular interests demand, mere still remains the appeal to arms.[2] It is curious to see the champion of the sovereignty of the people having recourse to a threat of despotically violent measures; it shows what a vigorous, ardent, manly spirit dwelt in the bosom of this gifted woman. The same indomitable energy which produced hundreds of novels displayed itself in her alliance with Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, men who were content with thinking what she gave expression to in words.

It was chiefly through Lamennais that the current of democratic ideas reached Victor Hugo. In Lamennais' principal work, _Essai sur l'Indifférence_, there were already signs indicating the possibility of a rejection of that principle of authority which he had championed so ardently in his youth. In August 1832 his theories were condemned by the Pope. The intimate relations between Lamennais and Hugo began in the latter's youth; Lamennais congratulated Hugo on the occasion of his marriage, and Hugo's first odes were dedicated to Lamennais. In 1822, persuaded by the Abbé de Rohan, Hugo determined to unburden his mind to a father confessor. The first he went to was Frayssinous, once the intrepid, self-sacrificing curé, now the fashionable Paris clergyman, a bishop, and head of the University. Hugo was repelled by Frayssinous' worldly ideas and counsels, and the Abbé then sent him to the little, frail, slender man with the yellow face, hooked nose, and beautiful, restless eyes, who walked the streets of Paris in a shabby cassock, blue woollen stockings, and hobnailed shoes--the famous Lamennais, whom he already knew so well.

The ideas of both confessor and penitent underwent a change in the course of the years preceding the Revolution of July, and the one was not long after the other in going over to the Liberal and anti-clerical party. One evening in September 1830 Lamennais, entering Hugo's room, found him writing. "I am disturbing you," said Lamennais. "No. But you will not approve of what I am writing." "Never mind; let me hear it." And Hugo read the following lines from his _Journal d'un Révolutionnaire de 1830_:

"The republic, which is not yet ripe, but which in a century will embrace the whole of Europe, signifies that society is its own sovereign. It protects itself by means of its citizen-soldiers; judges itself, by trial by jury; administers its own affairs, by local government; rules itself, by popular representation. The four limbs of monarchy--the standing army, the courts, the bureaucracy, the peerage--are for the republic only four troublesome excrescences which are withering up and will soon die."

"You have one clause too many," said Lamennais; "that which asserts that the republic is not ripe. You speak of it in the future tense, I in the present."

A few years later, Lamennais' connection with the Roman Catholic Church was at an end. It was in order to show that his defection was not the result of unbelief but of a new conviction, that he entitled his famous manifesto _Paroles d'un Croyant_ (1833).

It has been averred that no book since the invention of printing had created such a stir as this did. In the course of a few years a hundred editions of it were printed; it was published in foreign countries and translated into many languages. It is an imitation of a work which appeared not long before it, Mickiewiez's _Book of the Polish Pilgrim_. Half in Old Testament, half in Christian style, it denounces monarchy in Europe, the Pope and the priesthood, those to whom the fall of Poland and the serfdom of Italy were due, and the self-interested bourgeois government of France. The eloquence is of the genuine sacerdotal type; the book is strong in pathos, but weak in psychology; it only condemns and praises, knows no shade between black and white--the blackness of hell, the whiteness of heaven; nevertheless its author's warm-heartedness, purity of motive, and beauty of soul have imparted to it a rare charm.

In 1837 followed _Livre du Peuple_, a work written in the same spirit. The bold Abbé was imprisoned, but from his prison he sent book after book out into the world. _Une Voix du Prison, Du Passé et de l'Avenir du Peuple, De l'Esclavage modern_, were all written in Sainte-Pélagie.

Lamennais died three years before the Revolution of February, at a time of violent political and social agitation.

I give a few fragments from _Paroles d'un Croyant_ as specimens of his style:

"Ne vous laissez pas tromper par de vaines paroles. Plusieurs
chercheront à vous persuader que vous êtes vraiment libres,
parce qu'ils auront écrit sur une feuille de papier le mot de
liberté, et l'auront affiché à tous les carrefours.

La liberté n'est pas un placard qu'on lit au coin de la rue.
Elle est une puissance vivante qu'on sent en soi et autour de
soi, le génie protecteur du foyer domestique, la garantie des
droits sociaux, et le premier de ces droits.

L'oppresseur qui se couvre de son nom est le pire des
oppresseurs. Il joint le mensonge à la tyrannie, et à
l'injustice la profanation; car le nom de la liberté est saint.

Gardez-vous de ceux qui disent: Liberté, Liberté, et qui la
détruisent par leurs œuvres."

"Le laboureur porte le poids du jour, s'expose à la pluie, au
soleil, aux vents, pour préparer par son travail la moisson qui
remplira ses greniers à l'automne.

La justice est la moisson des peuples.

L'artisan se lève avant l'aube, allume sa petite lampe,
et fatigue sans relâche pour gagner un peu de pain qui le
nourrisse, lui et ses enfants.

La justice est le pain des peuples.

Le marchand ne refuse aucun labeur, ne se plaint d'aucunes
peines; il use son corps et oublie le sommeil, afin d'amasser
des richesses.

La liberté est la richesse des peuples.

Le matelot traverse les mers, se livre aux flots et aux
tempêtes, se hasarde entre les écueils, souffre le froid et le
chaud, afin de s'assurer quelque repos dans ses vieux ans.

La liberté est le repos des peuples.

Le soldat se soumet aux plus dures privations, il veille et
combat, et donne son sang, pour ce qu'il appelle la gloire.

La liberté est la gloire des peuples.

S'il est un peuple qui estime moins la justice et la liberté
que le laboureur sa moisson, l'artisan un peu de pain, le
marchand les richesses, le matelot le repos et le soldat la
gloire; élevez autour de ce peuple une haute muraille, afin que
son haleine n'infecte pas le reste de la terre."

"Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?

Je vais combattre pour la justice, pour la sainte cause des
peuples, pour les droits sacrés du genre humain.

Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!

Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?

Je vais combattre contre les hommes iniques pour ceux qu'ils
renversent et foulent aux pieds, contre les maîtres pour les
esclaves, contre les tyrans pour la liberté.

Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!

Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?

Je vais combattre pour renverser les barrières qui séparent les
peuples, et les empêchent de s'embrasser comme les fils du même
père, destinés à vivre unis dans un même amour.

Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!

Jeune soldat, où vas-tu!

Je vais combattre pour affranchir de la tyrannie de l'homme la
pensée, la parole, la conscience.

Que tes armes soient bénies, sept fois bénies, jeune soldat!"

Idealistic and monotonous as these utterances and refrains are, they possess the kind of eloquence which makes a powerful impression upon the common people.

Lamennais' outbursts of revolutionary sentiment come very near to being pure poetry. Hugo's are pure poetry. In reading his verses written in the Forties we feel how his poet's ear hears the dull underground rumbling of the approaching Revolution, and how he foresees that its crater will open in Paris. As far back as in the preface to the _Feuilles d'Automne_ he reproaches England with having turned Ireland into a graveyard, the sovereigns of Europe with having made Italy a prison for galley-slaves, the Czar with having populated Siberia with Poles. In it, too, he already writes of the old religions which are sloughing their skins, and (alluding to Saint-Simonism) of the new, which are stammeringly enunciating their half-reasonable, half-false principles. And from this time onward he is in all his works the champion of the liberty of the people, of their right to self-government, and of the religion of humanity. As a dramatist he began by rebelling merely against the accepted laws of style; but ere long he was, like Voltaire a century earlier, making the drama the organ of his ideas. One of his plays (_Le Roi s'amuse_) is an attack upon absolute monarchy as represented by Francis I, the most brutal of the royal debauchees of France. Another (_Angelo_), the preface to which is an affirmation of genuine Saint-Simonistic principles, contrasts woman within the pale of society with her sister beyond it, endows the strolling actress with virtues which the great lady lacks, and gives each of them her own ideality. A third (_Ruy Blas_) symbolises the elevation of the lowest class to supreme power. In Molière's _Les Précieuses_ the lackey was treated like some animal which, however clever it might be, was liable to be thrashed, even when it had only carried out its master's orders; shortly before the great Revolution Scapin is transformed into Figaro, who, though still in livery, openly manages his masters; in _Ruy Blas_ the servant, that is to say, the born plebeian, throws off his livery, assumes authority, and rules. While fully conscious of the great improbabilities and weaknesses of these dramas, we are also sensible of the atmosphere of new ideas which pervades them.

Hugo's was so dogmatic a mind that each new world of ideas which he entered in the course of his life crystallised itself, for him, into a code of doctrines. From the moment he became a democrat he was the opponent of capital punishment. He protested against it as an author in _Le dernier Jour d'un Condamné_, and also in _Claude Gueux_, where a very unpleasant real incident is turned topsy-turvy, and an execrable bandit is transformed into a hero and victim; he protested against it as a private individual; he made personal appeals for the remittance of sentences of death, both to French kings and foreign juries. Though opinion is still, and with good reason, divided as to the advisability of abolishing capital punishment for murder, Hugo's endeavours to save the lives of political offenders have a claim to our undivided sympathy. In 1839 he interceded in behalf of the noble revolutionary, Armand Barbès; Louis Philippe had, however, in this case remitted the sentence of death before Hugo's verses reached him.

But the most beautiful and the only perfectly accurate expression of the mental attitude of France's greatest lyric poet is, naturally, to be found in his poetry. The dramas of his first period, the novels of his second (which do not fall within the scope of this volume), are of small significance in comparison with the poems of the Thirties and Forties, which are contained in the two volumes entitled _Les Contemplations_. In these his faith in progress, his political convictions, his social hopes, his religious feelings, are expressed in the only artistic form which suits them. It is a form which cannot be dissolved, a style which cannot be paraphrased; it must be enjoyed in the original.

Hugo had every right to exclaim, as he did in one of the poems of this collection:

"J'ai, dans le livre, avec le drame, en prose, en vers. Plaidé pour les petits et les misérables; Suppliant les heureux et les inexorables; J'ai réhabilité le bouffon, l'histrion, Tous les damnés humains, Triboulet, Marion, Le laquais, le forçat et la prostituée; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J'ai réclamé des droits pour la femme et l'enfant; J'ai tâché d'éclairer l'homme en le réchauffant; J'allais criant: Science! Écriture! Parole! Je voulais résorber le bagne par l'école."

But, he complains:

"Le passé ne veut pas s'en aller. Il revient Sans cesse sur ses pas, reveut, reprend, retient. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . L'immense renégat d'Hier, marquis, se nomme Demain; mai tourne bride et plante là l'hiver; Use à tout ressaisir ses ongles noirs; fait rage; Il gonfle son vieux flot, souffle son vieil orage, Vomit sa vieille nuit, crie: À bas! crie: À mort! Pleure, tonne, tempête, éclate, hurle, mord."

But the onward movement would not be checked. The cleansing thunderstorm of 1848 broke over Europe. It came, that year of earthquakes, that year of emancipation, of heroic struggles, and, alas! of romantic childishness--when the helm of France was in the hands, not of statesmen, but of poets and enthusiasts; when Saint-Simonistic, neo-Christian, and poetical, instead of practical political ideas prevailed in the councils of the State. How eloquent is such a little fact as this, that one of the first proceedings of the Provisional Government was (at Lamartine's suggestion) to declare negro-slavery abolished! The ideas of Romantic France find their realisation in the Revolution of 1848.

[1] See chapters vi., x., xiv., xx.

[2] The femininely naïve hypocrisy of the following passage is amusing: "Elle se sent, elle se connaît maintenant, la voix unanime du peuple. _Elle vous réáuira tous au silence_, elle passera sur vos têtes comme le souffle de Dieu; elle ira entourer votre représentation nationale, et voici ce qu'elle lui dira: 'Jusqu'ici tu n'étais pas inviolable, mais nous voici avec des armes _parées de fleurs_ et nous te déclarons inviolable. Travaille, fonctionne, nous t'entourons de 400 mille baïonnettes, d'un million de volontés. Aucun parti, aucune intrigue arrivera jusqu'à toi. Recueille-toi et agis!'"