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

by Georg Brandes

"If I die, Celuta, you may after my death unite yourself with a more tranquil soul than mine. But do not believe that you can accept with impunity the caresses of another man, or that weaker embraces can efface those of René from your soul. I have pressed you to my heart in the midst of the desert and in the hurricane; the day when I bore you across the stream, it was in my mind to plunge my dagger into your heart in order to secure that heart's happiness, and to punish myself for having given you this happiness. It is thou, O supreme Being, the source of love and happiness, it is thou alone who hast made me what I am, and only thou canst understand me! Oh, why did I not fling myself into the foaming waters of the torrent! I should then have returned to the bosom of nature with all my energies unimpaired.

"Yes, Celuta, if you lose me you will remain a widow. Who else could surround you with the flame which radiates from me even when I do not love? The lonely spots to which I imparted the warmth of love, would seem icy cold to you by the side of another mate. What would you seek in the shades of the forest? For you there is no rapture, no intoxication, no delirium left. I robbed you of all this in giving you it all, or rather in giving nothing, for an incurable wound burned in my inmost soul.... I am weary of life, a weariness which has always consumed me. I am left untouched by all that interests other men. If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my shepherd's crook or my crown? Glory and genius, work and leisure, prosperity and adversity, would weary me alike. I have found society and nature irksome in Europe as in America. I take no pleasure in my virtue, and should feel no remorse were I a criminal. I would that I had never been born, or that I were eternally forgotten."[2]

Thus powerfully was the dissonance first sounded which was afterwards repeated with so many variations by the authors of the "Satanic" school. Not satisfied with depicting, with a sure hand and in the grand style, a self-idolatry bordering upon insanity, Chateaubriand throws it into relief on the dark background of a sister's guilty passion. So impelled is he to make René irresistibly seductive, that he does not rest until he has inspired his own sister with an unnatural love for him. This criminal attachment between brother and sister was a subject which occupied men's minds considerably at that time. Not many years previously, Goethe, in his Wilhelm Meister, had made Mignon the fruit of a sinister union between brother and sister; and both Shelley and Byron treated the same subject in Rosalind and Helen, The Revolt of Islam, Cain, and Manfred. It was a favourite theory with the young revolutionary school that the horror of incest between brother and sister was merely based upon prejudice.

But René's melancholy is too innate and profound to be caused by Amélie's unhappy passion alone. The reader feels all the time that this passion only provides an occasion for the outburst of the melancholy. René's despondency, his egotism, his outward coldness and suppressed inward fire, are to be found independently of this external cause in many of the gifted authors of that period, and in a number of their best-known characters—Tieck's William Lovell, Frederick Schlegel's Julius, Byron's Corsair, Kierkegaard's Johannes Forföreren, and Lermontov's Hero of our Own Time. They constitute the European hall-mark with which the heroes of literature are stamped in the early years of the nineteenth century.

But what marks René as being more especially a product of the nascent reaction is the aim of the story—an aim which it has in common with only one of the above-mentioned works, Kierkegaard's Johannes Forföreren. Forming part of a greater whole which has a distinctly moral and religious tendency, it professes to be written for the express purpose of warning against the mental condition it portrays, of showing the glory and the indispensability of Christianity as a refuge for the disordered soul, and more particularly of proving by means of Amélie's example that the re-establishment of convents is imperative, because salvation from certain errors is only to be found in the cloister. The pious intention of the book and its very profane matter conflict in a manner which is not particularly edifying. But this too is a typical trait of the reaction; we find it again, for instance, in the first parts of Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller and Stadier. The prevailing tone is a wild longing of genius for enjoyment, which satisfies itself by mingling the idea of death and destruction, a sort of Satanic frenzy, with what would otherwise be mild and natural feelings of enjoyment and happiness. It avails little that this work, like Atala, has an avowedly Catholic, even clerical, tendency; its undercurrent is anything but Christian, is not even religious.

But this undercurrent, however impure and diluted it may be in the individual writer, springs from a spiritual condition which is the result of the great revolution in men's minds. All the spiritual maladies which make their appearance at this time may be regarded as products of two great events—the emancipation of the individual, and the emancipation of thought.

The individual has been emancipated. No longer satisfied with the place assigned to him, no longer content to follow the plough across his father's field, the young man released from serfdom, freed from villenage, for the first time sees the whole world lie open before him. Everything seems to have become suddenly possible; the word impossible has lost its meaning now that the drumstick in the soldier's hand may, by a series of rapid changes, turn into a marshal's baton or even a sceptre. The powers of the individual, however, have not kept pace with his possibilities; of the hundred thousand to whom the road is suddenly thrown open, only one can reach the desired goal, and who is to assure the individual that he is that one? Inordinate desire is necessarily accompanied by inordinate melancholy. Nor is it every one, without exception, that can take part in the great wild race. Those who for some reason or other feel themselves bound up with the old order of things, and the finer, less thick-skinned natures, the men who are rather dreamers than workers, find that they are excluded; they stand aside or emigrate, they are thrown back upon themselves, and their self-communings increase their self-centredness and thereby augment their capacity for suffering. It is the most highly developed organisms which suffer most.

Add to this, that the collapse of the old order releases the individual from a wholesome pressure which has kept him within certain social bounds and prevented his thinking himself of too much importance. Now self-idolatry is possible, wherever the power of self-restraint is not as strong as the control formerly exercised by society. And at the same time that everything has become possible, it seems as if everything had become permissible. All the power which the individual had given up, had voluntarily transferred to his God or his king, he now reclaims. Just as he no longer raises his hat to the gilded chariot for whose gilding he himself has paid, so he no longer bows to any prohibition whose human origin he can plainly discern. To all such he has an answer ready, an answer which is a question, a terrible question, one that is the beginning of all human knowledge and all human freedom, the question "Why?" It is plain that even these aberrations of fancy upon which we have just dwelt, these excursions into the domain of unnatural passions and unnatural crimes, are only a symptom; they are one of the mistakes made in the great, momentous struggle of the individual to assert himself.

Thought has been emancipated. The individual, released from tutelage, no longer feels himself part of a whole; he feels himself to be a little world which reflects, on a diminished scale, the whole of the great world. So many individuals, so many mirrors, in each of which the universe is reflected. But though thought has gradually acquired courage to understand, not fragmentarily, but in this universally comprehensive manner, its capacity has not grown along with its courage; humanity stumbles on in the dark as before. To the old questions, Why is man born? Why does he live? To what end does it all lead? the answer, as far as it can be made out, seems unsatisfying, discouraging, a pessimistic answer. In times gone by men had been born into a distinct, unquestioned creed, which provided them with answers believed to have been supernaturally communicated, full of comfort and promise. In the eighteenth century, this creed having been abandoned, they were born into an almost equally dogmatic, at any rate equally inspiring, belief in the saving power of civilisation and enlightenment; they lived on the promises of the happiness and harmony which should spread over the earth when the doctrines of their philosophers were universally accepted. In the beginning of the nineteenth century this ground of confidence also was undermined. History seemed to teach that this path also led nowhere, and the confusion in men's minds was like the confusion of an army which receives contradictory orders in the midst of a battle. The standpoint even of those who try to turn thought back into the old religious grooves is not the standpoint of the old religion, for they themselves were but a few years ago either Voltaireans or adherents of Rousseau's deism; their new piety has been painfully reasoned out and struggled for. This explains the cribbed, constrained character of the intellectual movement among the writers who usher in the new century. In a very striking image Alfred de Musset has expressed the impression they produce. "Eternity," he says, "is like an eyrie from which the centuries fly forth like young eaglets to skim through the universe each in his turn. Now it is our century which has come to the edge of the nest. It stands there glaring, but its wings have been clipped, and it awaits its death gazing into the infinite space out into which it is incapable of flying."

[1] Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, ii. 190; iii. 78.