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

by Georg Brandes

This was the beginning of a long series of persecutions and annoyances on the part of the Government, which, although certainly exaggerated by the young poet's lively and always active imagination, must have been anything but pleasant to him. He went from one hiding-place to another in the Jura Mountains, living and writing in unfrequented spots, and never staying long enough in any one place to complete the work begun there. Thus, in addition to all the impressions of the period already received, he had experience, at a very early age, of the emotions of the exile and the mood of the émigré. It is these moods and emotions which form the background of his first literary attempt. Le Peintre de Saltzbourg was written during his incessant changes of abode among the Jura Mountains.

Le Peintre de Saltzbourg, journal des émotions d'un coeur souffrant, suivi des Méditations du Cloître, is the title of the first edition, published in Paris, 1803. The Méditations du Cloître, a sort of appendix to this edition of the romance, possesses a certain interest as the expression of one of the ideas prevailing among the young generation. It is written with the same intention as René, being, namely, a plea for the restoration of monasteries. It is a monologue, spoken by a being peculiarly unhappy in his own estimation, who bewails the absence of any monastery wherein to take refuge, and naïvely seeks to prove his vocation for the life of a Trappist by a perfect torrent of complaint. "I, who am still so young and yet so unhappy, who have too early gauged life and society, and am completely estranged from the fellow-men who have wounded my heart, I, bereft of every hope which has hitherto deluded me, have sought a haven in my misery and found none." Hereon follows a long panegyric on monks and nuns, those "angels of peace, who did nought but pray, console the wretched, educate the young, tend the sick, help the needy, follow the condemned to the scaffold, and bind up the wounds of heroes." How explain the fact that these devout men and women have brought down on themselves a fury of persecution unequalled in the annals of fanaticism? How can the legislators of the eighteenth century have had so little knowledge of the human heart as not to understand, not to divine the existence of those needs, to supply which religion founded monasteries?

"To the present generation political circumstances have given the education that fell to the lot of Achilles. We have been fed on the blood and the marrow of lions; and now that a government which leaves nothing to chance and which determines the future has set limits to the dangerous development of the powers of youth, saying to them: 'Thus far and no farther!'—do they understand now what melancholy occurrences result from so much suppressed passion and unemployed strength, how many temptations to crime exist in a passionate, melancholy, world-weary heart? With bitterness, with horror, I set it down: Werther's pistol and the executioner's axe have already made a clearing amongst us. The present generation rises up and demands the cloisters of old."

Assuredly a humble and sentimental desire for a generation nourished on the marrow of lions! But we discern defiance behind the meekness, and the demand is not to be taken literally. It is impatient despondency grasping at random at any means of alleviating its woe.

In a preface which Nodier added to his book in 1840, he speaks of the circumstances which produced it. Under the Directory, he says, emotionalism was very much out of fashion; the language of reverie and passion, to which thirty years before Rousseau had lent a passing vogue, was considered ridiculous at the close of the century. But it was quite otherwise in Germany, "that wonderful Germany, the final refuge of poetry in Europe, the cradle of the society of the future (if a society can still come into being in Europe). And we were beginning to feel the influence of Germany.... We read Werther, Goetz von Berlichingen, and Die Räuber."

The hero of Nodier's book is fashioned after the pattern of Werther; he is twenty years of age, a painter, a poet, and, above all, a German. But he is a weak imitation, decidedly inferior to the original. Charles (Nodier's own name) is an exile, banished from Bavaria for political offences. For two years he has roamed through Europe, a restless fugitive, for two years has lived Nodier's own life. One feeling alone has sustained him, his love for a young girl who bears the poetical name of Eulalia. He returns to Bavaria, and learns—hear it, ye heavens!—that Eulalia is faithless! Eulalia is wedded to another! The betrayed lover cannot resist his desire to haunt the place of her abode. One day they meet, and—O Destiny!—Eulalia tells him that, never hearing from him, and being told he was dead, she had sorrowfully, and solely out of obedience to her mother, at last consented to marry a young Herr Spronck, whose fancied resemblance to Charles touched her, and who is, it appears, the noblest of men. On this follow lamentations and descriptions of feeling of the Werther type, but all in a much more dejected key. Charles abandons himself to melancholy retrospect. Here it was that he saw her for the first time; there that he had the first dark forebodings of the future; in this other place, in his ecstasy at beholding her, he forgot his paper, his pencils, and his "Ossian"; yonder, where the trees are now hewn down, he had determined to bury his dear Werther; now it is his own grave that he would fain dig. Werther has been Charles's friend, the friend on whom he has obviously formed himself. On one occasion only is Charles more energetic and manly than Werther, namely in his outburst of indignation at the obstacles which interpose themselves between him and his beloved.

"Why did I not take her in my arms, seize her like a prey, carry her far from the abodes of man, and proclaim her my wife in the sight of heaven! Oh, if even this desire be a crime, why is it so intimately entwined with every fibre of my being that I cannot renounce it and live? A crime, did I say I In uncivilised times, in the days of ignorance and of slavery, some one or other of the barbarous horde took it into his head to write down his personal prejudices and say: 'There are laws for you!' How easily deluded men are! What a contemptible comedy to see so many generations ruled by the prejudices and whims of a dead past!"

Immediately upon this follows, quaintly enough, a long, solemn panegyric on Klopstock's Messiah, obviously inspired by other, but very dissimilar, reminiscences of Werther. "O divine Klopstock!" cries Charles, "how magnificently you present the assembled miracles of poetry to our eyes, whether you introduce us into the presence-chamber of the Most High, where the first-born among the angels hymn the mysteries of heaven, or show us the cherubims in holy adoration covering their faces with their golden wings!" The transition from revolutionary sentiments to pious ecstasy is somewhat abrupt, but the mixture of revolutionary with romantic tendencies which would seem extraordinary in any other age, does not surprise in the Emigrant Literature. It is to be found in all its authors. We have it in Chateaubriand as Satanic Catholicism; in Sénancour as sentimental and romantic atheism; here it is revolt against social laws in combination with enthusiasm for the Messiah—different developments of the same phenomenon.

It presently appears that Eulalia's husband is no happier than her unfortunate lover. He has been deprived by death of the love of his youth and cannot forget his bereavement even by the side of Eulalia. He observes the attachment existing between his wife and Charles, and, not wishing to stand in their way, takes poison and dies, after begging them to forgive the suffering he has involuntarily caused them "by his hapless existence." It would be impossible to imagine a more considerate husband. The lovers, however, are not a whit less noble. Eulalia especially is too high-minded to profit by so melancholy a death. She retires to a convent, and Charles drowns himself in the Danube. Two suicides and a retreat to a nunnery was the regulation ending in those days.

To us, nowadays, this romance is a very insignificant intellectual production, but a very interesting piece of historical evidence. Its author soon passed into another phase of development. We shall find Nodier again upon a higher plane of the evolution of French literature; no one changed form more frequently than he—and the butterfly is more beautiful than the grub.