[XV]
CONCLUSION
The literary group the formation and development of which we have been following, produces the impression of an interwoven whole. Multitudes of threads that cross and recross each other stretch from the one work to the other; this exposition has only made the connection clear; it has not taken separate entities and arbitrarily woven them together. It is to be noted that this collection of writings, this set of writers, form a group, not a school. A group is the result of the natural, unintentional connection between minds and works which have a common tendency; a school is the result of the conscious fellowship of authors who have submitted themselves to the guidance of some more or less distinctly formulated conviction.
The Emigrant Literature, although French, develops beyond the frontiers of France. In order to understand it, we must keep before our minds that short and violently agitated period in which the old order was abolished, the principle of legitimacy was discarded, the ruling classes were humiliated and ruined, and positive religion was set aside by men who had freed themselves from its yoke rather by the help of a pugnacious philosophy than by scientific culture—men whose ruthless and not always honourable mode of warfare had irritated all those who were more or less dimly sensible of injustice in the charges directed against the old order of things, and whose intellectual, moral, and emotional cravings found no satisfaction in the new. The more unreal and impracticable the ideas of the rights and the progress of humanity proved themselves to be, the more certain did it become that an intellectual rebound must be at hand. It came; the reaction began. I have shown how at first it was only a partial reaction, how the ideas of the Revolution were invariably blended with the ideas which inspire the revulsion against Voltaire; we have seen that the intellectual point of departure of all its leaders lay in the eighteenth century, and that they were all liable to be affected by reminiscences, and subject to relapse. They all proceed, so to speak, from Rousseau. Their first step is simply to take his weapons and direct them against his antagonist Voltaire. Only the youngest of them, Barante, can with truth deny kinship with Rousseau.
These men are followed by a second set of authors whose aim is the preservation of society. They also are for the most part émigrés, and they advocate unconditional reaction. Their writings, along with single works of authors like Chateaubriand, who are progressive in art but reactionary in their attitude towards Church and State, and certain youthful reactionary works of future Liberal and even Radical writers like Lamartine and Hugo, form a group characterised by unconditional adherence to the old—the ruling idea in them being the principle of authority. Amongst the leading men of this set are Joseph de Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.
But under the title "Emigrant Literature," I have gathered together and drawn attention to the more healthy literary productions, in which the reaction has not as yet become subjection to authority, but is the natural and justifiable defence of feeling, soul, passion, and poetry, against frigid intellectuality, exact calculation, and a literature stifled by rules and dead traditions, like that which continued to prolong its feeble and bloodless existence in France under the Empire. The following group, more closely united in its submission to one dominant principle, has necessarily a clearer, sharper outline; but the one at present in question has more life, more feeling, more restless power.
We see the writers and writings of the Emigrant Literature as it were in a tremulous light. It is in the dawn of the new century that they stand, these men; the first beams of the morning sun of the nineteenth century fall upon them, and slowly disperse the veil of Ossianic mist and Wertherian melancholy which envelops them. One feels that a night of terror and bloodshed lies behind them; their faces are pale and serious. But their grief is poetical, their melancholy awakes sympathy, and one is conscious of fermenting forces in the passionate outbursts which betray their mortification at being obliged, instead of continuing the work of the day before, to regard the foundation laid that day with suspicion, and to gather together laboriously the fragments left by the havoc of the night.
The Emigrant Literature is a profoundly agitated literature. Chateaubriand leads the way with the stormy passion and the powerful, brilliant landscape-painting of his novels. In them everything glows and flames with Catholic ecstasy and Satanic passion; but in the midst of the flames stands, like a figure hewn in stone, the modern personality, the egoistic, solitary genius, René.
Sénancour produces a work in which, in a peculiarly soulful manner, modern liberal thought is fused with Romantic yearnings, Teutonic sentimentality and idealism with Latin refined sensuousness, the rebellious inclination to sift every question to the bottom with the despondency that dreams of suicide.