THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830
The mingling of the arts.
Dumas in La Femme au Collier de Velours thus describes Hoffmann's room: 'It was the room of a genius at once capricious and picturesque, for it had the air of a studio, a music-shop, and a study, all together. There was a palette, brushes, and an easel, and on the easel the beginnings of a sketch. There was a guitar, a violin, and a piano, and on the piano an open sonata. There was pen, ink, and paper, and on the paper the first scrawled lines of a ballad. Along the walls were bows, arrows, and arbalests of the fifteenth century, sixteenth-century drawings, seventeenth-century musical instruments, chests of all times, tankards of all shapes, jugs of all kinds, and, lastly, glass necklaces, feather fans, stuffed lizards, dried flowers, a whole world of things, but a whole world not worth twenty-five silver thalers.'
That account, whether from hearsay, conjecture, or knowledge, I do not know, is not only an admirable portrait of the room and brain of an arch-romantic, but might serve as a parable of the Romanticism of 1830. In that year Hugo's Hernani was produced at the Comédie Française, and the young men who battled with the Philistines for its success were drawn from the studios as well as from the libraries, and had their David in Théophile Gautier. Never before had the arts been so inextricably entangled, had antiquarianism been so lively and humane, had gems and worthless baubles been so confounded together. Chateaubriand had reaffirmed the pictorial rights of literature. Delacroix was painting pictures from Byron and from Dante, in bold, predominant colours, very different from the lassitudinous livery of the schools. There was a new generosity of sentiment responsible for Corot's landscapes and Barye's beasts. The sudden widening of knowledge and sympathy was expressed in the new broadness and courage of technique, and the same forces that covered the palette with vivid reds and blues, and compelled the sculptor to a virile handling of his chisel, found outlet in words also. Writers, like painters, seized the human, coloured, passionate elements in foreign literatures, looking everywhere for the liberty and brilliance they desired. The open-throated, sinewy, gladiatorial muse of Byron found here devoted worshippers, and the spacious movements of Shakespeare, his people alive and free, independent of the dramas in which for a few hours in the Globe Theatre they had had a part to play, delighted men with an outlook very different from, and hostile to, that of Voltaire, although he had done his share in making their outlook possible.
VICTOR HUGO
The studio and the study were very close together. Gautier, Hugo, and Mérimée were all painters in their own right, and there is a difference between the writers who have only seen life from a library, and those who have seen it from behind an easel. The writer who has once felt them can never forget the eye-delighting pleasures of the palette, but composes in colour-schemes, and feels for the tints of words as well as for their melody. The work of the Romantics was visualised and coloured in a manner then new. It was almost shocking to men who had been accustomed, as it were, to write in the severest monotone, and to refuse, if indeed they had ever thought of it, such luxury of realisation.
Local colour.
There is no need, except for the sake of the argument, to state the fact that pictures are called up in a reader's mind by a careful selection of details presented in a proper order. It is well known that a few details correctly chosen have a more compelling power on the imagination than a complete and catalogued description. These men, writing pictorially, gave a new responsibility to single touches. It became clear that visualisation was impossible unless observation preceded it, and details accordingly took upon themselves the exigent dignity of local colour. Local colour, from distinguishing between places, was brought to mark the difference between times. Archæology became suddenly of absorbing interest; its materials were more than its materials; they were made the symbols of lives as real and as red in the veins as those of the archæologists themselves. Notre Dame was no longer to be expressed in a learned antiquarian paper, but in a passionate book. And Victor Hugo visualising with the accuracy of a poet, found that just as archæology meant little without life, so the life was vapid without the archæology. Quasimodo shoves his hideous face through a hole in order to be elected king of fools, but Hugo does not allow that marvellous grimace to fill the picture. The hole must be there as well, and so 'une vitre brisée à la jolie rosace audessus de la porte laissa libre un cercle de pierre par lequel il fut convenu que les concurrents passeraient la tête.' The setting is as important as the head; humanity and its trappings are worthless by themselves, and valuable only together. Here is the source of Realism, within Romanticism itself. Indeed almost the whole development of the art in the nineteenth century is due to this new care for the frame, and to this new honesty in dealing with the man within it.
The youth of the Romantics.
An energetic simplicity of nature was needed for the fullest enjoyment of these new conditions, and the greatest of the French Romantics were almost like big interested children in their attitude towards life and themselves. As soon as we find a Romantic like Mérimée, reserved, subtle, a tender-hearted Machiavellian, we find a man who is to dissociate himself from them sooner or later, and to produce something different a little from the purely Romantic ideals. There is something beautiful and inspiriting in the youth of the Romantics. I like to think of Gautier, the olive-skinned boy from the studio in the rue St. Louis, overcome with nervousness at the idea of touching the hand of Hugo, himself only twenty-seven, sitting down and trembling like a girl on the stairs before the master's door. And then the splendid prank of Dumas, who, on the eve of revolution, went down into the country like one of his own heroes, held up a town, and with a very few friends obtained the submission of the governor, and captured an arsenal for his party. They were boys, and some hostility was needed for their uttermost delight. In England the battles of art are more like squabbles, but in the Paris of 1830 it seemed as if the town were divided into camps for the defence of classicism and the support of the new ideas. It was as if each point of vantage had to be taken by storm, and the great night of Hernani, when Hugo's supporters had red tickets and a password—the Spanish word hierro, which means 'steel'—was the noblest memory in the life of at least one of Hugo's enthusiastic lieutenants.
Such a joyous and vigorous thing was the Romanticism of 1830. It touched story-telling through Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Gautier, and Mérimée, of whom the first three, in turning from the theatre to the art of narrative, found inspiration in Sir Walter Scott. Scott's influence has been one of bulk rather than of quality on English story-telling. But in France, instead of tracing his progeny in insipid copies, we follow it through the bold variations of these three powerful and original minds. Through them it returned to England again. Balzac, as the most important of the three, in view of the later developments of the novel, I have discussed in a separate chapter. Gautier's Oriental and Antique inspiration, and Mérimée's combination of ascetic narrative with vivid subject, are also themes for separate and particular consideration. But Hugo and Dumas are so generally representative of the Romantic movement in story-telling, that in writing of them in this chapter I feel I am but filling in the background already sketched for the others.
The Preface to Cromwell.
The theatre was, in 1830, the scene of the most decisive battle between Romanticism and Classicism. The fight of the painters, of the poets, of the story-tellers, seemed concentrated in the more obvious combat of the dramatists, whose armies could see their enemies, and even come to blows with them. And in Hugo's preface to Cromwell, that preface which is now so much more interesting than the play that follows it, he claims several things for the dramatist that by act if not by argument he was later to claim for the artist in narrative. He demands that the sublime and ridiculous should be together in literature and, as in life, win their force from each other. The drama, and so the novel, which also attempts in some sort a reproduction of human existence, is not to be written on a single note. It is not to be wholly sublime or wholly ridiculous, but both at once. The general in his triumphal car is to be genuinely afraid of toppling over. And so, in Les Misérables, the student's frolic is whole-heartedly described, without in any way binding the author to make light of the sorrow of Fantine when she finds that her own desertion is the merry surprise at the end of it. The sublime will not be the less sublime for being mingled with the grotesque, and so, in Notre Dame de Paris, the deepest passion in the book is felt by a hideous and deformed dwarf, and by this same dwarf rather than by any more obvious impersonation of justice, the lascivious priest is flung from the tower. Looking up in his agony, as he clings to the bending cornice his desperate hands have clutched, he does not meet the eyes of some person of a grandeur matching the moment, but sees the grotesque face of Quasimodo, utterly indifferent to him, looking, like one of the gargoyles, over Paris, with tears on his distorted cheeks.
In this same preface, too, Hugo justifies innovations in language, very necessary for an art whose new won freedom was to let it explore so much that was unknown. When the body changes, he asks, would you keep the coat the same? Triumphantly appealing to history, he points out that 'the language of Montaigne is no longer that of Rabelais, the language of Pascal is no longer that of Montaigne, and the language of Montesquieu is no longer that of Pascal.' He is justifying there the coloured prose of Chateaubriand, the opulent vocabulary of Gautier, and his own infinitely various effects in prose and verse.
Victor Hugo on Scott.
He was, until Sainte-Beuve took the work from his hands, at once the leader and the defender of Romanticism. And, critic and artist, severally and in the combination that we have grown accustomed to expect in fulfilment of both these functions, his was too sovereign a mind to adopt or borrow anything from another writer without knowing very clearly what he intended to do with it. Writing of Quentin Durward, he said: 'Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poètique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère.' That romance is Victor Hugo's own. His tremendous books are conceived in the manner of an epic poet rather than of a novelist or a romancer. The relations of his characters are not solely concerned with themselves but with some large principle that animates the book in which they live. If he is without Norns or Fates, if he sets his characters against a background other than that of Destiny, he substitutes the power of the law or the power of the sea, and illumines with a story not only the actors who take part in it, but also the spirit of the Gothic or the spirit of revolution.
The Waverley Novels and Hugo's romances.
To turn from the Waverley Novels to the romances of Hugo, is like stepping from the open air into a vast amphitheatre whose enclosed immensity is more overwhelming than the clear sky. Scott writes, on a plain human level, tales that we can readily believe, chronicles that are like private documents, or memoirs such as might have been written by the ancestors of our own families. Hugo does not tell his tale from the point of view of its actors, but puts them before us in a setting far larger than the one they saw. Their petty adventures are but threads chosen arbitrarily from a far more intricate design, and they themselves but illustrations of some greater motion than any to which in their own right they could aspire. There are hundreds of them, and with our narrow powers of interest and attention we fasten on one or two, like children choosing colours on a race-course, and follow them to the end, while Hugo, with his godlike eye, sees them all as threads in his pattern, poor, small lives, twisted in accordance with a design beyond their comprehension. In Scott's open air we can live and breathe and be content, and stand firmly with our feet upon the ground. In Hugo's amphitheatre we see an ordered spectacle of life and death, and are, as it were, present at the shapings of the ends of man.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Dumas on Scott.
There is a much less terrible pleasure to be had from the works of Dumas. Behind all Hugo's books is the solemnity, behind Dumas' the joy of living, the joie de vivre—the French phrase, although identical, seems better to express it. To compare Hugo's with Dumas' criticism of the Scott novel is to see very clearly the difference in weight and depth between the two men. Hugo sees in Scott the promise of another and a greater kind of romance. Dumas sees only that it is possible to improve on Scott's technique. He notices that Scott spends half a volume or so in describing his characters before setting them in action, and in his gay way justifies him by saying: 'Il n'y a pas de feu sans fumée, il n'y a pas de soleil sans ombre. L'ennui, c'est l'ombre; l'ennui c'est la fumée.' Sacrifice fifty pages of ennui to the gods, and then away with your story. Dumas decides to improve on this, to set his characters moving, and to pour his libations of ennui on the way. 'Commencer par l'intérêt, au lieu de commencer par l'ennui; commencer par l'action, au lieu de commencer par la préparation; parler des personnages après les avoir fait paraître, au lieu de les faire paraître après avoir parlé d'eux.' This is not very sublime, after the suggestion that Hugo won from the same subject; but it produced 'Les Trois Mousquetaires.' D'Artagnan is in a hubbub on the first page, and the ennui of description is given us so sparsely that, watching for it chapter by chapter, we almost consider ourselves swindled when we reach the last and are still without it. 'The purpose of this tale is not to describe interiors,' Dumas petulantly ejaculates when tired of talking about Cornelius' room in La Tulipe Noire. No; certainly not; neither of rooms nor of men. Damn psychology, and hey for full-blooded adventure. Dumas took a free stage for his duels and headlong rides and gallant adventures and ingenious stratagems. His men moved too fast not to feel themselves encumbered in a furnished room; there was little point in describing a landscape for them, since, before it was done, they were several leagues off in another; too intricate furniture in their own heads would have cost them hesitancies, unguarded stabs, and possible falls from a galloping horse.
Les Trois Mousquetaires.
Dumas' novels are novels of the theatre. His first piece of work was an attempt to make a melodrama out of Ivanhoe, and his best books exhibit the art of Walter Scott modified by the rules of the stage. The curtain rises on people moving about. It falls on a climax. The action of all its scenes is in crescendo. Alter Scott to fit these rules, and you have something like the form that Dumas for more than half a century has imposed on non-psychological fiction. How admirably he filled it himself. Those splendid fellows of his, whose cavalier way fairly takes us off our feet, are not dead puppets made to wield toy swords at the pulling of a string. There is something exuberant and infectious even in the restraint of Athos. They are all alive, not with an independent, almost hostile existence like that of the characters of Balzac, but with a vitality they owe to their creator and to us, the free coursing blood of boyish dreams. They are the things that at one time or another we have set our hearts on being, the things that Dumas actually was. Where they ride a jolly spirit goes with them, and we know that Dumas had only to settle in a quiet village to turn it into a place of gay and prosperous festivity. 'Madeleine,' says D'Artagnan at the end of Vingt Ans Après, 'give me the room on the first floor. I must keep up my dignity now that I am captain of the musketeers. But always keep my room on the fifth floor; one never knows what may happen.' Is not that just the attitude of Dumas, who remarked upon his deathbed, 'I took twenty francs with me to Paris. Well, I have kept them. There they are,' and pointed to his last louis on the mantelpiece. In the flamboyant youthfulness of Dumas, who died a boy at sixty-seven, and called Mazarin 'still young, for he was only fifty-six,' is perhaps that characteristic that made Romanticism in France so complete and satisfactory a Renaissance. When such men as he were writing books the world had won its youth again.