III
Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is tempted to affix to the novels of George Sand; but from her early lyrical manner she advanced to perfect idyllic narrative; and while she idealised, she observed, incorporating in her best work the results of a patient and faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied to whatever she wrote; offspring of her idealism or her realism, it is always in a true sense poetic.
LUCILE-AURORE DUPIN, a descendant of Marshal Saxe, was born in Paris in 1804, the daughter of Lieutenant Dupin and a mother of humble origin—a child at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Her early years were passed in Berri, at the country-house of her grandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in temperament, she had a large heart and an ardent imagination. The woods, the flowers, the pastoral heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, the little peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm, their processes of life, their store of old tales and rural superstitions made up her earliest education. Already endless stories shaped themselves in her brain. At thirteen she was sent to be educated in a Paris convent; from the boisterous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank of a sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to heights of religious exaltation, not to be forgotten when afterwards she wrote Spiridion. The country cooled her devout ardour; she read widely, poets, historians, philosophers, without method and with boundless delight; the Génie du Christianisme replaced the Imitation; Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand, and romance in her heart put on the form of melancholy. At eighteen the passive Aurore was married to M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of those qualities of heart and brain which make wedded union a happiness. Two children were born; and having obtained her freedom and a scanty allowance, Madame Dudevant in 1831, in possession of her son and daughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in the capital.
Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar-cases and snuff-boxes; happily her hopes received small encouragement. Perhaps she could succeed in journalism under her friend Delatouche; she proved wholly wanting in cleverness; her imagination had wings; it could not hop on the perch; before she had begun the beginning of an article the column must end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau, she attempted a novel—Rose et Blanche. "Sand" and Sandeau were fraternal names; a countryman of Berri was traditionally George. Henceforth the young Bohemian, who traversed the quais and streets in masculine garb, should be GEORGE SAND.
To write novels was to her only a process of nature; she seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot, and only the slightest acquaintance with her characters; until five in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day and the next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written itself in full, and another was unfolding. Not that she composed mechanically; her stories were not manufactured; they grew—grew with facility and in free abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, her theme was the romance of love. In Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, Jacques, she vindicated the supposed rights of passion. These novels are lyrical cries of a heart that had been wounded; protests against the crime of loveless marriage, against the tyranny of man, the servitude of woman; pleas for the individualism of the soul—superficial in thought, ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in style, yet rising to passages of rare poetic beauty, and often admirable in descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand had translated her private experiences into romance; yet she, the spectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund of sanity which underlay the agitations of her genius, while she lent herself to her creations, plied her pen with a steady hand from day to day. Unwise and blameful in conduct she might be for a season; she wronged her own life, and helped to ruin the life of Musset, who had neither her discretion nor her years; but when the inevitable rupture came she could return to her better self.
Through André, Simon, Mauprat—the last a tale of love subduing and purifying the savage instincts in man—her art advanced in sureness and in strength. Singularly accessible to external influences, singularly receptive of ideas, the full significance and relations of which she failed to comprehend, she felt the force of intelligences stronger than her own—of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin, of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious sentiment, an ardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled in her mind with all the discordant formulas of socialism. From 1840 to 1848 her love and large generosity of nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopes of social reform. Her novels Consuelo, Jeanne, Le Meunier d'Angibault, Le Péché de M. Antoine, become expositions of a thesis, or are diverted from their true development to advocate a cause. The art suffers. Jeanne, so admirable in its rural heroine, wanders from nature to humanitarian symbolism; Consuelo, in which the writer studies so happily the artistic temperament, too often loses itself in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious declamation. But the gain of escape from the egoism of passion to a more disinterested, even if a doctrinaire, view of life was great. George Sand was finding her way.
Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner, she had found her way; her third manner was attained before the second had lost its attraction. La Mare au Diable belongs to the year 1846; La Petite Fadette, to the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand, ever an optimist, hailed with joy; François le Champi is but two years later. In these delightful tales she returns from humanitarian theories to the fields of Berri, to humble walks, and to the huts where poor men lie. The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new to French literature; the better soul of rural France, George Sand found deep within herself; she had read the external circumstances and incidents of country life with an eye as faithful in observation as that of any student who dignifies his collection of human documents with the style and title of realism in art; with a sense of beauty and the instincts of affection she merged herself in what she saw; her feeling for nature is realised in gracious art, and her art seems itself to be nature.
In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri to other regions of France, and interpreted aristocratic together with peasant life. Old, experienced, infinitely good and attaching, she has tales for her grandchildren, and romances—Jean de la Roche, Le Marquis de Villemer, and the rest—for her other grandchildren the public. The soul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must lean upon a stronger woman's arm, of the girl—neither child nor fully adult—she entered into with deepest and truest sympathy. The simple, austere, stoical, heroic man she admired as one above her. Her style at its best, flowing without impetuosity, full and pure without commotion, harmonious without complex involutions, can mirror beauty as faithfully and as magically as an inland river. "Calme, toujours plus calme," was a frequent utterance of her declining years. "Ne détruisez pas la verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sand died. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us intimate with a spirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous, and gaining through experience a wisdom for the season of old age.
IV
George Sand may be described as an "idealist," if we add the words "with a remarkable gift for observation." Her great contemporary HONORÉ DE BALZAC is named a realist, but he was a realist haunted or attacked by phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799 at Tours, son of an advocate turned military commissariat-agent, Honoré de Balzac, after some training in the law, resolved to write, and, if possible, not to starve. With his robust frame, his resolute will, manifest in a face coarsely powerful, his large good-nature, his large egoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might shoulder his way through the crowd to fortune and to fame. But fortune and fame were hard to come at. His tragedy Cromwell was condemned by all who saw the manuscript; his novels were published, and lie deep in their refuge under the waters of oblivion. He tried the trades of publisher, printer, type-founder, and succeeded in encumbering himself with debt. At length in 1829 Le Dernier Chouan, a half-historical tale of Brittany in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott, was received with a measure of favour.
Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with journalism, pamphleteering, and miscellaneous writing, in a Dutch painting of bourgeois life, Le Maison du Chatqui-pelote, which relates the sorrows of the draper's daughter, Augustine, drawn from her native sphere by an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to wield his pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he died, exhausted by the passion of his brain, his own life was concentrated in that of the creatures of his imagination. He had friends, and married one of the oldest of them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death. Sometimes for a little while he wandered away from his desk. More than once he made wild attempts to secure wealth by commercial enterprise or speculation. These were adventures or incidents of his existence. That existence itself is summed up in the volumes of his Human Comedy. He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence of imagination; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crude material on which to work. At six in the evening he retired to sleep; he rose at the noon of night, urged on his brain with cups of coffee, and covered page after page of manuscript, until the noon of day released him. So it went on for nearly twenty years, until the intemperance of toil had worn the strong man out.
There is something gross in Balzac's genius; he has little wit, little delicacy, no sense of measure, no fine self-criticism, no lightness of touch, small insight into the life of refined society, an imperfect sense of natural beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as the equivalent of spiritual mysteries; he is monarchical without the sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment of religion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as the accumulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake? It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power, as the means of pushing towards fame and grasping gold.
Within the gross body of his genius, however, an intense flame burnt. He had a vivid sense of life, a perception of all that can be seen and handled, an eager interest in reality, a vast passion for things, an inexhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a feeling, exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of the conflict for wealth and power, with its triumphs and defeats, its display of fierce volition, its pushing aside of the feeble, its trampling of the fallen, its grandeur, its meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the cruelties of its pathos. He flung himself on the life of society with a desperate energy of inspection, and tried to make the vast array surrender to his imagination. And across his vision of reality shot strange beams and shafts of romantic illumination—sometimes vulgar theatrical lights, sometimes gleams like those which add a new reality of wonder to the etchings of Rembrandt. What he saw with the eyes of the senses or those of the imagination he could evoke without the loss of any fragment of its life, and could transfer it to the brain of his reader as a vision from which escape is impossible.
The higher world of aristocratic refinement, the grace and natural delicacy of virginal souls, in general eluded Balzac's observation. He found it hard to imagine a lady; still harder—though he tried and half succeeded—to conceive the mystery of a young girl's mind, in which the airs of morning are nimble and sweet. The gross bourgeois world, which he detested, and a world yet humbler were his special sphere. He studied its various elements in their environment; a street, a house, a chamber is as much to him as a human being, for it is part of the creature's shell, shaped to its uses, corresponding to its nature, limiting its action. He has created a population of persons which numbers two thousand. Where Balzac does not fail, each of these is a complete individual; in the prominent figures a controlling passion is the centre of moral life—the greed of money, the desire for distinction, the lust for power, some instinct or mania of animal affection. The individual exists in a group; power circulates from inanimate objects to the living actors of his tale; the environment is an accomplice in the action; power circulates from member to member of the group; finally, group and group enter into correspondence or conflict; and still above the turmoil is heard the groundswell of the tide of Paris.
The change from the Renés and Obermanns of melancholy romance was great. But in the government of Louis-Philippe the bourgeoisie triumphed; and Balzac hated the bourgeoisie. From 1830 to 1840 were his greatest years, which include the Peau de Chagrin, Eugénie Grandet, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Le Père Goriot, and other masterpieces. To name their titles would be to recite a Homeric catalogue. At an early date Balzac conceived the idea of connecting his tales in groups. They acquired their collective title, La Comédie Humaine, in 1842. He would exhibit human documents illustrating the whole social life of his time; "the administration, the church, the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the prolétariat, the peasantry, the artists, the journalists, the men of letters, the actors, … the shopkeepers of every degree, the criminals," should all appear in his vast tableau of society. His record should include scenes from private life, scenes from Parisian, provincial, political, military, rural life, with philosophical studies in narrative and analytic treatises on the passions. The spirit of system took hold upon Balzac; he had, in common with Victor Hugo, a gift for imposing upon himself with the charlatanry of pseudo-ideas; to observe, to analyse, to evoke with his imagination was not enough; he also would be among the philosophers—and Balzac's philosophy is often pretentious and vulgar, it is often banal. Outside the general scheme of the human comedy lie his unsuccessful attempts for the theatre, and the Contes Drolatiques, in which the pseudo-antique Rabelaisian manner and the affluent power do not entirely atone for the anachronism of a grossness more natural in the sixteenth than in the nineteenth century.
V
Was it possible to be romantic without being lyrical? Was it possible to produce purely objective work, reserving one's own personality, and glancing at one's audience only with an occasional look of superior irony? Such was the task essayed by PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803-70). With some points of resemblance in character to Beyle, whose ideas were influential on his mind, Mérimée possessed the plastic imagination and the craftsman's skill, in which Beyle was deficient. "He is a gentleman," said Cousin, and the words might serve for Mérimée's epitaph; a gentleman not of nature's making, or God Almighty's kind, but constructed in faultless bearing according to the rules. Such a gentleman must betray no sensibility, must express no sentiment, must indulge no enthusiasm, must attach himself to no faith, must be superior to all human infirmities, except the infirmity of a pose which is impressive only by its correctness; he may be cynical, if the cynicism is wholly free from emphasis; he may be ironical, if the irony is sufficiently disguised; he may mystify his fellows, if he keeps the pleasure of mystification for his private amusement. Should he happen to be an artist, he must appear to be only a dilettante. He must never incur ridicule, and yet his whole attitude may be ridiculous.
Such a gentleman was Prosper Mérimée. He had the gift of imagination, psychological insight, the artist's shaping hand. His early romantic plays were put forth as those of Clara Gazul, a Spanish comédienne. His Illyrian poems, La Guzla, were the work of an imaginary Hyacinthe Maglanovich, and Mérimée could smile gently at the credulity of a learned public. He took up the short story where Xavier de Maistre, who had known how to be both pathetic and amiably humorous, and Charles Nodier, who had given play to a graceful fantasy, left it. He purged it of sentiment, he reduced fantasy to the law of the imagination, and produced such works as Carmen and Colomba, each one a little masterpiece of psychological truth, of temperate local colour, of faultless narrative, of pure objective art. The public must not suppose that he cares for his characters or what befell them; he is an archæologist, a savant, and only by accident a teller of tales. Mérimée had more sensibility than he would confess; it shows itself for moments in the posthumous Lettres à une Inconnue; but he has always a bearing-rein of ironical pessimism to hold his sensibility in check. The egoism of the romantic school appears in Mérimée inverted; it is the egoism not of effusion but of disdainful reserve.34
CHAPTER V
HISTORY—LITERARY CRITICISM
I
The progress of historical literature in the nineteenth century was aided by the change which had taken place in philosophical opinion; instead of a rigid system of abstract ideas, which disdained the thought of past ages as superstition, had come an eclecticism guided by spiritual beliefs. The religions of various lands and various ages were viewed with sympathetic interest; the breach of continuity from mediæval to modern times was repaired; the revolutionary spirit of individualism gave way before a broader concern for society; the temper in politics grew more cautious and less dogmatic; the great events of recent years engendered historical reflection; literary art was renewed by the awakening of the romantic imagination.
The historical learning of the Empire is represented by Daunou, an explorer in French literature; by Ginguené, the literary historian of Italy; by Michaud, who devoted his best years to a History of the Crusades. In his De la Religion (1824-31) Benjamin Constant, in Restoration days, traced the progress of the religious sentiment, cleaving its way through dogma and ordinance to a free and full development. Sismondi (1773-1842), in his Histoire des Français, investigated such sources as were accessible to him, studied economic facts, and in a liberal spirit exhibited the life of the nation, and not merely the acts of monarchs or the intrigues of statesmen. His wide, though not profound, erudition comprehended Italy as well as France; the Histoire des Républiques Italiennes is the chart of a difficult labyrinth. The method of disinterested narrative, which abstains from ethical judgments, propounds no thesis, and aims at no doctrinaire conclusion, was followed by Barante in his Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne. The precept of Quintilian expresses his rule: "Scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum."
Each school of nineteenth-century thought has had its historical exponents. Liberal Catholicism is represented by Montalembert, Ozanam, De Broglie; socialism, by Louis Blanc; a patriotic Cæsarism, by Thiers; the democratic school, by Michelet and Quinet; philosophic liberalism, by Guizot, Mignet, and Tocqueville.
AUGUSTIN THIERRY (1795-1856) nobly led the way. Some pages of Chateaubriand, full of the sentiment of the past, were his first inspiration; at a later time the influence of Fauriel and the novels of Walter Scott, "the master of historical divination," confirmed him in his sense of the uses of imagination as an aid to the scholarship of history. For a time he acted as secretary to Saint-Simon, and under his influence proposed a scheme for a community of European peoples which should leave intact the nationality of each. Then he parted from his master, to pursue his way in independence. It seemed to him that the social condition and the revolutions of modern Europe had their origins in the Germanic invasions, and especially in the Norman Conquest of England. As he read the great collection of the original historians of France and Gaul, he grew indignant against the modern travesties named history, indignant against writers without erudition, who could not see, and writers without imagination, who could not depict. The conflict of races—Saxons and Normans in England, Gauls and Franks in his own country—remained with him as a dominant idea, but he would not lose himself in generalisations; he would involve the abstract in concrete details; he would see, and he would depict. There was much philosophy in abstaining from philosophy overmuch. The Lettres sur l'Histoire de France were followed in 1825 by the Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre, in which the art of historiography attained a perfection previously unknown. Through charter and chronicle, Thierry had reached the spirit of the past. He had prophesied upon the dry bones and to the wind, and the dry bones lived. As a liberal, he had been interested in contemporary politics. His political ardour had given him that historical perspicacity which enabled him to discover the soul behind an ancient text.
In 1826 Thierry, the martyr of his passionate studies, suffered the calamity of blindness. With the aid of his distinguished brother, of friends, and secretaries—above all, with the aid of the devoted woman who became his wife, he pursued his work. The Récits des Temps Mérovingiens and the Essai sur l'Histoire de la Formation du Tiers État were the labours of a sightless scholar. His passion for perfection was greater than ever; twenty, fifteen lines a day contented him, if his idea was rendered clear and enduring in faultless form. Paralysis made its steady advance; still he kept his intellect above his infirmities, and followed truth and beauty. On May 22, 1856, he woke his attendant at four in the morning, and dictated with laboured speech the alteration of a phrase for the revised Conquête. On the same day, "insatiable of perfection," Thierry died. He is not, either in substance, thought, or style, the greatest of modern French historians; but, more than any other, he was an initiator.
The life of FRANÇOIS GUIZOT—great and venerable name—is a portion of the history of his country. Born at Nîmes in 1787, of an honourable Protestant family, he died, with a verse of his favourite Corneille or a text of Scripture on his lips, in 1874. Austere without severity, simple in habit without rudeness, indomitable in courage, imperious in will, gravely eloquent, he had at once the liberality and the narrowness of the middle classes, which he represented when in power. A threefold task, as he conceived, lies before the historian: he must ascertain facts; he must co-ordinate these facts under laws, studying the anatomy and the physiology of society; finally, he must present the external physiognomy of the facts. Guizot was not endowed with the artist's imagination; he had no sense of life, of colour, of literary style; he was a thinker, who saw the life of the past through the medium of ideas; he does not in his pages evoke a world of animated forms, of passionate hearts, of vivid incidents; he distinguishes social forces, with a view to arrive at principles; he considers those forces in their play one upon another.
The Histoire Générale de la Civilisation en Europe and the Histoire de la Civilisation en France consist of lectures delivered from 1828 to 1830 at the Sorbonne.35 Guizot recognised that the study of institutions must be preceded by a study of the society which has given them birth. In the progress of civilisation he saw not merely the development of communities, but also that of the individual. The civilisation of Europe, he held, was most intelligibly exhibited in that of France, where, more than in other countries, intellectual and social development have moved hand in hand, where general ideas and doctrines have always accompanied great events and public revolutions. The key to the meaning of French history he found in the tendency towards national and political unity. From the tenth to the fourteenth century four great forces met in co-operation or in conflict—royalty, the feudal system, the communes, the Church. Feudalism fell; a great monarchy arose upon its ruins. The human mind asserted its spiritual independence in the Protestant reformation. The tiers état was constantly advancing in strength. The power of the monarchy, dominant in the seventeenth century, declined in the century that followed; the power of the people increased. In modern society the elements of national life are reduced to two—the government on the one hand, the people on the other; how to harmonise these elements is the problem of modern politics. As a capital example for the French bourgeoisie, Guizot, returning to an early work, made a special study of the great English revolution of the seventeenth century. In Germany, of the preceding century, the revolution was religious and not political. In France, of the succeeding century, the revolution was political and not religious. The rare good fortune of England lay in the fact that the spirit of religious faith and the spirit of political freedom ruled together, and co-operated towards a common result.
The work of FRANÇOIS MIGNET (1796-1884), eminent for its research, exactitude, clearness, ordonnance, has been censured for its historical fatalism. In reality Mignet's mind was too studious of facts to be dominated by a theory. He recognised the great forces which guide and control events; he recognised also the power and freedom of the individual will. His early Histoire de la Révolution Française is a sane and lucid arrangement of material that came to his hands in chaotic masses. His later and more important writings deal with his special province, the sixteenth century; his method, as he advanced, grew more completely objective; we discern his ideas through the lines of a well-proportioned architecture.
The analytic method of Guizot, supported by a method of patient induction, was applied by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-59) to the study of the great phenomenon of modern democracy. Limiting the area of investigation to America, which he had visited on a public mission, he investigated the political organisation, the manners and morals, the ideas, the habits of thought and feeling of the United States as influenced by the democratic equality of conditions. He wrote as a liberal in whom the spirit of individualism was active. He regarded the progress of democracy in the modern world as inevitable; he perceived the dangers—formidable for society and for individual character—which accompany that progress; he believed that by foresight and wise ordering many of the dangers could be averted. The fears and hopes of the citizen guided and sustained in Tocqueville a philosophical intelligence. Turning from America to France, he designed to disengage from the tangle of events the true historical significance of the Revolution. Only one volume, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, was accomplished. It can stand alone as a work of capital importance. In the great upheaval he saw that all was not progress; the centralisation of power under the old régime remained, and was rendered even more formidable than before; the sentiment of equality continued to advance in its inevitable career; unhappily the spirit of liberty was not always its companion, its moderator, or its guide.
ADOLPHE THIERS (1797-1877) was engaged at the same time as Mignet, his lifelong friend, upon a history of the French Revolution (1823-27). The same liberal principles were held in common by the young authors. Their methods differed widely: Mignet's orderly and compact narration was luminous through its skilful arrangement; Thiers' Histoire was copious, facile, brilliant, more just in its general conception than exact in statement, a plea for revolutionary patriotism as against the royalist reaction of the day, and not without influence in preparing the spirit of the country for the approaching Revolution of July. His Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire (1845-62) is the great achievement of Thiers' maturity; journalist, orator, minister of state, until he became the chief of stricken France in 1871 his highest claim to be remembered was this vast record of his country's glory. He had an appetite for facts; no detail—the price of bread, of soap, of candles—was a matter of indifference to him; he could not show too many things, or show them too clearly; his supreme quality was intelligence; his passion was the pride of patriotism; his foible was the vanity of military success, the zeal of a chauvinist. He was a liberal; but Napoleon summed up France, and won her battles, therefore Napoleon, the great captain, who "made war with his genius and politics with his passions," must be for ever magnified. The coup d'état of the third Napoleon owed a debt to the liberal historian who had reconstructed the Napoleonic legend. The campaigns and battle-pieces of Thiers are unsurpassed in their kind. His style in narrative is facile, abundant, animated, and so transparent that nothing seems to intervene between the object and the reader who has become a spectator; a style negligent at times, and even incorrect, adding no charm of its own to a lucid presentation of things.
JULES MICHELET, the greatest imaginative restorer of the past, the greatest historical interpreter of the soul of ancient France, was born in 1798 in Paris, an infant seemingly too frail and nervous to remain alive. His early years gave him experience, brave and pathetic, of the hardships of the poor. His father, an unsuccessful printer, often found it difficult to procure bread or fire for his household; but he resolved that his son should receive an education. The boy, of a fine and sensitive organisation, knew cold and hunger; he watched his mother toiling, and from day to day declining in health. Two sources of consolation he found—the Imitation, which told him of a Divine refuge from sorrow, and the Museum of French monuments, which made him forget all present distress in visions of the vanished centuries. Mocked and persecuted by his schoolfellows, he never lost courage, and had the joy of rewarding his parents with the cross won by his schoolboy theme. In happy country days his aunt Alexis told him legendary tales, and read to him the old chroniclers of France. Michelet's vocation was before long revealed, and its summons was irresistible.