CHAPTER I
THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE—MADAME DE STAËL—CHATEAUBRIAND
I
The literature of the Revolution and the Empire is that of a period of transition. Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand announce the future; the writers of an inferior rank represent with declining power the past, and give some faint presentiment of things to come. The great political concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract ideas united with the passions of the hour produced poetry which was of the nature of a declamatory pamphlet. Innumerable pieces were presented on the stage, but their literary value is insignificant.
Marie-Joseph Chénier (1764-1811), brother of the great poet who perished on the scaffold, attempted to inaugurate a school of national tragedy in his Charles IX.; neither he nor the public knew history or possessed the historical sentiment—his tragedy was a revolutionary "school of kings." Arnault, Legouvé, Népomucène Lemercier were applauded for their classic dignity, or their depth of characterisation, or their pomp of language. The true tragedy of the time was enacted in the streets and in the clubs. Comedy was welcome in days of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harleville drew mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in Le Vieux Célibataire (1792); Fabre d'Eglantine moralised Molière to the taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante debased by egoism and accommodations with the world; Louis Laya, during the trial of the King, satirised the pretenders to patriotism in L'Ami des Lois, yet escaped the vengeance of the Jacobins.
Historical comedy, a novelty in art, was seen in Lemercier's Pinto (1799), where great events are reduced to petty dimensions, and the destiny of nations is satirically viewed as a vulgar game of trick-track. In his Christophe Colomb of 1809 he dared to despise the unities of time and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless, among the spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial régime. Baour-Lormian, the translator of Ossian (1801), converted the story of Joseph in Egypt into a frigid tragedy; Hector and Tippoo Sahib, Mahomet II., and Ninus II. (with scenes of Spanish history transported to Assyria) diversified the stage. The greatest success was that of Raynouard's Les Templiers (1805); the learned author wisely applied his talents in later years to romance philology. Among the writers of comedy—Andrieux, Étienne, Duval, and others—Picard has the merit of reproducing the life of the day, satirising social classes and conditions with vivacity and careless mirth. In melodrama, Pixérécourt contributed unconsciously to prepare the way for the romantic stage. Désaugiers, with his gift for gay plebeian song, was the master of the vaudeville.
Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice during the Revolution. The lesser Chénier's Chanson du Départ has in it a stirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Republic sent forth to war with the acclaim of mother and wife and maiden, old men and little children. Lebrun-Pindare, in his ode Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur, does not quite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of classical imagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse and music, La Marseillaise (1792), was an inspiration which equally lent itself to the enthusiasm of victory and the gallantries of despair. The pseudo-epics and the descriptive poetry of the Empire are laboured and lifeless. But Creuzé de Lesser, in his Chevaliers de la Table-Ronde (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian, in his Poésies Ossianiques, widened the horizons of literature. The Panhypocrisiade of Lemercier, published in 1819, but written several years earlier—an "infernal comedy of the sixteenth century"—is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, and genius; it bears to Hugo's Légende des Siècles the relation which the megatherium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous analogues.
If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's poetry, we may find it in the harmonious melancholy of Chênedollé, in the grace of Fontanes' stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications. The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition, for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details. If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out what was commonplace in ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature in the eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and had become a social and political weapon; under the imperial rule this militant function was withdrawn; what remained for literature but frigid ambitions or petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once again recovered?
The Revolution closed the salons and weakened the influence of cultivated society upon literature. Journalism and the pamphlet filled the place left vacant by the salons. The Décade Philosophique was the organ of the ideologists, who applied the conceptions of Condillac and his followers to literary and philosophical criticism. In 1789 the Journal des Débats was founded. Much ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was expended in the columns of the public press. Among the contributors were André Chénier, Mallet du Pin, Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine, Camille Desmoulins hoped to render France happy, prosperous, and republican. Heady, vain, pleasure-loving, gay, bitter, sensitive, with outbreaks of generosity and moments of elevation, he did something to redeem his crimes and follies by pleas for justice and mercy in his journal, Le Vieux Cordelier, and died, with Danton as his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and despair.