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

by Georg Brandes

The melancholy of the early nineteenth century partakes of the nature of a disease; and it is not a disease which attacks a single individual or a single nation only, it is an epidemic which spreads from people to people, in the manner of those religious manias which so often spread over Europe in the Middle Ages. René's is merely the first and most marked case of the disease in the form in which it attacked the most gifted intellects.

René bears that mark of Cain already alluded to, which is, withal, the mark of the ruler. The seal of genius, invisible to himself, has been set on his brow. Behind the mournful self-accusations of which his confession consists, lies the proud feeling of superiority which filled the writer's breast. If we read Chateaubriand's Mémoires attentively, we cannot resist the impression that the fiction of Amélie's love for René veils a kind of confession, an admission of the passionate love his sister Lucile cherished for her remarkable brother. How much in the way of confession may not the remainder of the book contain?

René's sufferings are the birth-throes of genius in the modern soul. He is the moment in which the chosen spirit, like the Hebrew prophet of old, hears the voice that calls him, and timidly draws back, shrinking despairingly from the task, and saying: "Choose not me, O Lord; choose another, my brother; I am too weak, too slow of speech." René is this first stage, the stage of unrest, of election. The chosen waits to see another follow the call; he looks around but sees none arise, and the voice continues to call. He sees all that he loathes and scorns triumph, and all that worsted for which he would so willingly sacrifice everything if another would but lead the way. With amazement and dread he realises that there is not one who feels as he does; he wanders about seeking a leader and finding none, until at last the certainty is borne in upon him that, as none appears, as he can discover no helper, no guide, it must be because it is he himself who is destined to be the guide and support of weaker souls. At last he follows the call; he sees that the time for dreaming and doubting is past, that the time to act has come. The crisis leaves him, not, like Werther, prepared to commit suicide, but with a firm resolve and a higher opinion of himself. Genius, however, is always a curse as well as a blessing. Even the greatest and most harmoniously constituted natures have, all their lives, been aware of the curse it carries with it. In René, Chateaubriand has shown us the curse alone. His own nature and the position in which he stood to the ideas of his time caused genius, as he knew it, to seem merely a source of lonely suffering, or of wild, egotistical pleasure, marred by the feeling of its emptiness and worthlessness.

Chateaubriand, the inaugurator of the religious reaction of the nineteenth century, himself possessed no faith, no enthusiasm, no real devotion to an idea. The ideas of the eighteenth century were beginning to suffer an eclipse, to look like fallacies; the great ideas of the nineteenth had not as yet taken scientific shape, and, placed and constituted as he was, Chateaubriand was incapable of anticipating them. Hence he became the leader of the reaction, the champion of Catholicism and the Bourbons. With the genius's instinctive inclination to seize on the great principle of the new age, but without the genius's infallible prevision of its real nature and faith in its final victory, he took hold of the ideas which a temporary revulsion in men's mood and sympathies had brought to light, and championed them with obstinacy, with magnificent but often hollow eloquence, with great talent but without warmth, without that conviction which permeates the whole individual and makes of him the enthusiastic, indefatigable organ of the idea. Whilst Voltaire, with all his restlessness and all his faults, sustained his life's battle freshly, unweariedly, and invincibly to the last, because he never for a moment wavered in his faith in his ideals, Chateaubriand was consumed by ennui, incredulity, and cynicism. In one direction only, namely as a poet, and more especially a colourist, did he break new ground; and hence it was only his youthful poetical efforts that satisfied and inwardly rewarded him. But of all his creations, René, the picture of the intellectual type to which he himself belonged, was the most successful.

A genius of René's type may employ religious phraseology, but he never truly merges himself in a higher being; his melancholy in its inmost essence is only the egoist's unsatisfied craving for enjoyment. As a genius René knows that the Deity is with and within him, and he can scarcely distinguish between himself and the Deity. He feels that his thought and his words are inspired, and where is the boundary between that which is of him and that which is not of him? He demands everything—the homage of the public, the love of women, all the laurels and roses of life—and it never occurs to him that he is in duty bound to make any return. He accepts love without loving again. Is not his a privileged nature? is not he a prophet hastening through life like a fugitive, a fleeting fire which illuminates, consumes, and vanishes?

In these traits the author has simply described his own nature. Chateaubriand's Mémoires contain, especially in their silences, sufficient witness to the studied coldness with which he accepted love and admiration. Some of his private letters to which Sainte-Beuve had access show with what icy egotism he at times attempted to enveigle with promises of a consuming passion. Even at the age of sixty-four he wrote to a young lady from whom he was soliciting a rendezvous in Switzerland: "My life is merely an incident; of that incident take the passion, the perturbation and the suffering; I shall give you more of these in one day than others in long years." One looks back and remembers the touching tenderness shown by Voltaire to his Emilie even after he knew that he was being grossly deceived by her, and the so-called Lucifer of the last century seems as innocent as a child in comparison.

The picture of René was not finished in the book which bears his name; he plays an important part in Les Natchez, a romance written about the same time, but published later. His behaviour in it completes the portrayal of the character. Conforming to Indian custom, he takes to himself a wife, Celuta, who is passionately devoted to him. But it goes without saying that life with her does not heal the wounds of his heart. "René," we read, "had longed for an uninhabited country, a wife, and liberty; he had got what he longed for, but something marred his enjoyment of it. He would have blessed the hand that at one blow freed him from his past suffering and present felicity, if felicity indeed it were. He tried to realise his old dreams. What woman could be more beautiful than Celuta? He carried her into the heart of the forest, and strove to strengthen the impression of his freedom by exchanging one lonely dwelling-place for another, but whether he pressed his young wife to his heart in the depths of the forest or high on the mountaintop, he did not experience the happiness he had hoped for. The vacuum that had formed deep down in his soul could not be filled. A divine judgment had fallen upon René—which is the explanation both of his suffering and his genius. He troubled by his presence; passion emanated from him but could not enter into him; he weighed heavy on the earth over which he impatiently wandered, and which bore him against his will." Such is the author's description of René as the married man.

These experiments of the hero with his young bride, these attempts to enhance the attraction of her love by the added zest of peculiar natural surroundings, are extremely characteristic. But it is all in vain! The unnatural passion he had once inspired, and to which the very fact of its being unnatural, and, according to human laws, criminal, communicated a strength and a fire which harmonised with the fiery strength of his own nature, has half infected him, has, in any case, made it impossible for him to love again. In his very remarkable farewell letter to Celuta he says that it is this misfortune which has made him what he is; he has been loved, too deeply loved, and that mysterious passion has sealed the fountains of his being although it has not dried them up. "All love," he says, "became a horror to me. I had the image of a woman before my eyes whom none could approach. Although consumed by passion in my inmost soul, I have been in some inexplicable fashion frozen by the hand of misfortune...." "There are," he continues, "some existences so miserable that they seem an accusation against Providence, and should surely cure any one of the mania for life."

Even the innate desire to live, the deeply-rooted natural love of life itself, is scorned by him half affectedly, half weariedly, as a mama, and is supplanted by a wild Satanic lust of destruction. "I take it," he continues to Celuta, "that René's heart now lies open before you. Do you see what a strange world it is? Flames issue from it, which lack nourishment, and which could consume creation without being satiated, yea, could even consume thee!"

In the next breath he is religious again, humble again, trembling at God's wrath. In the solitude he hears the Almighty cry to him as to Cain: "René! René! what hast thou done with thy sister? The one wrong which he accuses himself of having done to Celuta is, that he has united her destiny with his. The deepest sorrow this connection has caused him lies in the fact that Celuta has made him a father; it is with a species of horror that he sees his life thus extended beyond its limits. He bids Celuta burn his papers, burn the hut built by him in which they have lived, and return home to her brother. He wishes to leave no traces of his existence upon earth. It is evident that he would fain also require her, after the manner of Indian widows, to lay herself upon his funeral pile; for the same species of jealousy inspires him which prompted many a mediæval knight to kill his favourite horse. This last letter to his wife ends with the following characteristic farewell:—