IV
The scene now shifts to Paris, a city unbelievably frenzied and complex, the Paris that gives the tone to a good half of the music of the romantic period.
‘As I finished my cantata (Sardanapalus),’ writes Berlioz in his ‘Memoirs,’ ‘the Revolution broke out and the Institute was a curious sight. Grapeshot rattled on the barred doors, cannon balls shook the façade, women screamed, and, in the momentary pauses, the interrupted swallows took up their sweet, shrill cry. I hurried over the last pages of my cantata and on the 29th was free to maraud about the streets, pistol in hand, with the “blessed riff-raff,” as Barbier said. I shall never forget the look of Paris during those few days. The frantic bravery of the gutter-snipe, the enthusiasm of the men, the calm, sad resignation of the Swiss and Royal Guards, the odd pride of the mob in being “masters of Paris and looting nothing.”’
This was Paris in Berlioz’s and Liszt’s early years there. In Paris at or about this time were living Victor Hugo, Stendhal, de Vigny, Balzac, Chateaubriand, de Musset, Lamartine, Dumas the elder, Heine, Sainte-Beuve, and George Sand among the poets, dramatists, and novelists; Guizot and Thiers among the historians; Auguste Compte, Joseph le Maistre, Lamennais, Proudhon, and Saint-Simon among the political philosophers. It is hard to recall any other city at any other time in history (save only the Athens of the Peloponnesian War) which had such a vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Thanks to the centralization effected by Napoleon, thanks to the tradition of free speech among the French, the centre of Europe had shifted from Vienna to Paris.
A few months before the political revolution of July, 1830, occurred the outbreak of one of the historic artistic revolutions of the capital. Victor Hugo’s ‘Hernani,’ on which the young romantic school centred its hopes, was first performed on February 25, before an audience that took it as a matter of life and death. The performance was permitted, so tradition says, in the expectation that the play would discredit the romantic school once and for all. The principal actress, Mlle. Mars, was outraged by Hugo’s imagery, and refused point blank to call Firmin her ‘lion, superb and generous.’ A goodly claque, drawn from the ateliers and salons, brought the play to an overwhelming triumph, and for fifteen years the dominance of the romantic school was indisputable.
This romantic school was somewhat parallel to that of Germany, and, in a general way, took the same inspiration. The literary influences, outside of the inevitable Rousseau and Chateaubriand of France itself, were chiefly Grimm’s recensions of old tales, Schiller’s plays, Schlegel’s philosophical and historical works; Goethe’s Faust, as well as our old friend Werther; Herder’s ‘Thoughts on the Philosophy of History’; Shakespeare and Dante as a matter of course; Byron and Sir Walter Scott; and any number of collections of mediæval tales and poems, foreign as well as French. This much the French and German romanticists had in common. But the movement had scarcely any political tinge, though political influences developed out of it. By a curious inversion the literary radicals were the legitimists and political conservatives, and the classicists the political revolutionists—perhaps a remnant of the Revolution, when the republicans were turning to the art and literature of Greece for ideals of ‘purity.’
For the French intellectuals had perhaps had enough of political life, whereas the Germans were starved for it. At any rate, the French romanticists were almost wholly concerned with artistic canons. To them romanticism meant freedom of the imagination, the demolishing of classical forms and traditional rules, the mixing of the genres ‘as they are mixed in life’; the rendering of the language more sensuous and flexible, and, above all, the expression of the subjective and individual point of view. They had a great cult for the historic, and their plays are filled with local color (real or supposed) of the time in which their action is laid. They supposed themselves to be returning to real life, using everyday details and painting men as they are. In particular they made their work more intimately emotional; they substituted the image for the metaphor, and the pictorial word for the abstract word. This last fact is of greatest importance in its influence on romantic music. The painting of the time, though by no means so radical in technique as that of music, showed the influences of the great social overturning. Subjects were taken from contemporary or recent times—the doings of the French in the Far East, the campaigns of Napoleon, or from the natural scenery round about Paris, renouncing the ‘adjusted landscape’ of the classicists with a ruined temple in the foreground. Scenes from the Revolution came into painting, and the drama of the private soldier or private citizen gained human importance. Géricault emphasized sensuous color as against the severe classicist David. The leader, and perhaps the most typical member, of the romantic school was Delacroix, a defender of the art of the Middle Ages as against the exaggerated cult of the Greeks. He took his subjects ‘from Dante, Shakespeare, Byron (heroes of the literary romanticism); from the history of the Crusades, of the French Revolution, and of the Greek revolt against the Turks. He painted with a feverish energy of life and expression, a deep and poetic sense of color. His bold, ample technique thrust aside the smooth timidities of the imitators and prepared the way for modern impressionism.’[80]
But there was still another result of the suppression of political tendencies in French romantic literature. In looking to the outer world for inspiration (as every artist must) the writers of the time, turning from contemporary politics, inevitably saw before their eyes Napoleon the Great, now no longer Corsican adventurer and personal despot, but national hero and creator of magnificent epics. The young people of this time did not remember the miseries of the Napoleonic wars; they remembered only their largeness and glory. Fifteen years after the abdication of Napoleon the inspiration of Napoleon came to literary expression. It was a passion for bigness. Victor Hugo’s professed purpose was to bring the whole of life within the compass of a work of art. Every emotion was raised to its nth power. Hernani passes from one cataclysmic experience to another; the whole of life seems to depend on the blowing of a hunting horn. The painting of the time, under Géricault, Delacroix, and Delaroche, was grandiose and pompous. The stage of the theatre was filled with magnificent pictures. A nation comes to insurrection in William Tell; Catholicism and Protestantism grapple to the death in Les Huguenots. But not only extensively but intensively this cult of bigness was developed. Victor Hugo sums up the whole of life in a phrase. The musicians had caught the trick; Meyerbeer was of Victor Hugo’s stature in some things. He gets the epic clang in a single couplet, as in the ‘Blessing of the Poignards’ or in the G flat section of the fourth act duet from Les Huguenots. And this heroic quality came to its finest expression in Liszt, some of whose themes, like that of Tasso
or that of Les Préludes
seem to say, Arma virumque cano.