Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

by Georg Brandes

[IV]

RENÉ

Chateaubriand was not, like Goethe, a man of peace. A star of destruction stood above his cradle; he was born in the same year as Napoleon, and the cruel and dark spirit of that age of the sword is apparent in his writings, and imparts to them a peculiar, wild poetry.

But, it may be objected, has he really anything at all in common with Goethe and Rousseau? Did he actually learn anything from them? I regard it as certain that not only he but the whole age was moulded by the books we have just criticised. A species of proof can be adduced. When Chateaubriand reproaches Byron for never mentioning his name, for ignoring all that Childe Harold owes to René, he emphasises the fact that it is not so with himself, that he will never deny the influence which Ossian, Werther, and St. Preux have exercised upon his mind. Again, describing Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, he writes: "The library he carried with him contained Ossian, Werther, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and the Old Testament; sufficient indication of the chaos reigning in his brain. He mixed realistic thought with romantic feeling, systems with dreams, serious studies with fantasies, and wisdom with madness. It was out of the heterogeneous productions of this century that he fashioned the empire."[1] I give this pronouncement for what it is worth, but so much is clear, that if Rousseau's Héloïse, Goethe's Werther, and Ossian's poems were so much in the air that they seemed to a contemporary to be important factors in the creation of the empire, they must indubitably have had part and lot in the epoch-making literary works which appeared at the same period.

Comparing Chateaubriand's talent with the contemporary genius of Napoleon, it seems to us as if the new century had concentrated all its energy and spirit of enterprise in its great general and conqueror, leaving none to spare for the young contemporaries who did not follow him on his warlike path. The procession of men of action and warriors passes them by and leaves them standing irresolute and dissatisfied.

René is supposed to live in the days of Louis XV., but the description given of that period would apply equally well to the time of Chateaubriand's youth. It was, says René, a time when people had relapsed from the reverence for religion and the austere morality which had hitherto prevailed, into a condition of impiety and corruption, when genius had degenerated into mere nimbleness of wit, and the serious and right-minded felt ill at ease and lonely. All this applies very accurately to the close of the eighteenth century as it would be seen by Chateaubriand.

In Atala Chactas had told René the story of his life; now René in return relates his past history to Chactas. He describes his childhood in the old manor-house of the remote province, he tells how ill at ease and repressed he felt in the presence of his father, and how he was only happy in the society of his sister Amélie. Brother and sister, both by nature melancholy, and both poetically inclined, are early left orphans and obliged to quit their home. René's great longing is for the peace of the cloister; but he is changeable in his longings; they presently take the form of a desire to travel. This desire he gratifies. He finds food for his melancholy among the ruins of Greece and Rome, and discovers as much forgetfulness of the dead among living peoples as upon the soil of past nations; the workmen whom he questions in the streets of London know nothing of that Charles the Second at the foot of whose statue they stand. What, then, is the value of fame? He travels to Scotland to live in the memory of the heroes of Morven, and finds herds of cattle grazing on the spots where Ossian sang and Fingal conquered. He returns to Italy and studies its monuments of art, but finds that for all his pains he has learned nothing. Past and Present are two incomplete statues; the one has been dug up from the earth in a mutilated condition, the other stands unfinished, and can only be completed by the Future. Nature has as little power as history to soothe his disordered soul. He climbs Mount Etna, and, standing on its summit, sees on one side the sun rise above the horizon, with the whole of Sicily spread out far beneath, surrounded by the great sea, and looking so small that its rivers resemble the lines on a map; on the other side he looks down into the crater of the volcano, with its burning glow and its black smoke. This situation he considers to be exactly typical of his own character and life. "All my life long," he says, "I have had a widespread and yet insignificantly small world before my eyes, and at my side a yawning abyss."

So volcanic and pretentious a nature was, naturally, out of place in the land that had given it birth. It is in vain that Chateaubriand attempts to conform in his modes of expression to the standards of that society to which he considers himself, spiritually, infinitely superior; he is invariably treated and spoken of as an esprit romanesque for whom life has no use. Here we come for the first time on the term which in a slightly different form was to become so familiar in France as the denomination of a whole school. There is, undoubtedly, something of the Romanticist before the days of Romanticism in this mysterious suffering, which is so conscious of being interesting. From all these half-forgotten memories of vanished grandeur, all these impressions of the vanity of name and fame, these transports of indignation at the baseness and littleness of mankind, René has distilled an obstinate conviction that there is no such thing as happiness, and a persuasion of the weariness and emptiness of life even while he feels its healthy glow tingling in his veins. His favourite expressions are: "La folie de croire au bonheur; dégoût de la vie; profond sentiment d'ennui," &c.

In all this misery, the thought of his sister is his only solace, but on his return to France he notices with surprise and grief that she avoids him; she repeatedly declares that she is unable to meet him, and has apparently forgotten all his love for her. Once only, when she divines that he is contemplating suicide, does she draw near to him again for a moment. He has already added this coldness of his beloved sister to the list of his bitter experiences of the faithlessness of mankind, when news of her intention of entering a convent makes him hasten to her. He arrives just in time to take part in the dreary ceremony, to see Amélie's hair fall under the scissors, and to kneel by her side, while she, as the ceremony prescribes, lies prostrate like a corpse on the marble floor of the church. He hears her murmur a prayer for forgiveness for the "criminal passion she has felt for her brother," and, grasping the reason of his sister's conduct towards him, falls in a swoon. As soon as he recovers consciousness he determines to leave Europe and travel to the New World. The night he quits the French coast a terrible storm rages. "Did Heaven," he asks, "mean to warn me that tempests must always attend my steps?" One thing is certain, that to Chateaubriand René's career was as unimaginable without an accompaniment of thunder and lightning as Atala's love tale had been.

We have here an exceptional character encountering an exceptional destiny. And it is from this character that the melancholy and misanthropy of the new literature may be said to emanate. This melancholy and this misanthropy differ from any previously known. Molière's Alceste, for instance, the finest and most profound of his masculine characters, is only misanthropical in so far that he is troubled to the depths of his being by the meanness, the servility, the frivolous or cowardly duplicity which prevail at a corrupt and worldly court; but he is not melancholy, there is nothing morbid in his temperament, he does not bear the mark of Cain upon his brow.