Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in France

by Georg Brandes

This is the language of a modern Tannhäuser, looking back with longing to his Venusberg. Chateaubriand has evidently forgotten that he had attributed to himself the emotions and aims of a medieval pilgrim. The lady who had given him a rendezvous at the Alhambra was a young Madame de Mouchy, who died insane. Contemporaries represent her as a marvel of beauty, charm, and refinement. Chateaubriand had been married since 1792. His marriage was undoubtedly a rash and foolish one, but, as the ardent champion of Christian morality, he ought to have considered himself bound by it, regardless of circumstances. In his Mémoires he tells how it came about: "The negotiations were entered into without my knowledge. I had not seen Mademoiselle de Lavigne more than three or four times.... I did not feel myself at all fitted to be a husband. All my illusions were still strong; nothing was exhausted in me; the vigour of life had been redoubled in me by my travels. I was constantly tormented by my muse. My sister had a high opinion of Mademoiselle de Lavigne, and saw in this marriage an independent position for me. Arrange it, then, said I. As a public man I am not to be influenced, but in private life I am the prey of any one that chooses to take possession of me; to avoid an hour's annoyance I could let myself be made a slave for half a century." Fortunately, he did not feel himself a slave.

In the rôle of the returned pilgrim, then, he wrote his epic. An epic in the nineteenth century! In our days no one believes in the possibility of such a thing. A clearer comprehension than that possessed by any former age of the historical conditions which went to the production of the great national epics of antiquity has convinced us of the vanity of endeavouring in modern times to rival works of the freshness of the Iliad or the naïveté (in spite of a high degree of culture) of the Odyssey. Just as little as it would occur to any real poet to-day to imitate the Vedas, the Psalms of David, or the Voluspa, would it occur to him to attempt to compete with the immortal works in which, late in the morning of their days, nations, childlike and yet mature, have told the story of their gods and of their heroes—as the Greeks have done in their national epics, the Germans in the Nibelungenlied, and the Finns in Kalevala. The epics which, like Virgil's and Tasso's, Camoens', Klopstock's, and Voltaire's, are conscious, laboured imitations of these old popular works, and which have transformed the miraculous element in them into dead epic machinery, have never taken rank with their models; their comparative value depends upon how close, in time and in spirit, they are to these models. The more naïveté they display, the colder they leave us. The epic poems written in modern times which have not been failures—Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, or Mickiewicz's Herr (Pan) Tadeusz—ave entirely dispensed with the appurtenances of the old epic. But this Chateaubriand had not the slightest intention of doing. Far from it—he rather meant to add to their number, in order to exhibit the vast superiority of the Christian to the antique apparatus.

As he has no command of verse, he determines to write his epic in prose; but, great master of prose as he is, we know in anticipation how he will grope after a style. And we are sensible, as we read, of a confusion of influences—Homer, the Revelation of St. John, Dante and Milton, the Fathers of the Church and Suetonius. The action takes place in the days of Diocletian; one half of the characters are pagans, the other half Christians. The hero, Eudore, wins the heart of a young pagan girl; he converts her, and they die together as martyrs in the arena of the Colosseum. Her father is a Greek priest of the Homeric gods. Some of the events happen in ancient Gaul.

His imitation of the Homeric style has led the author into much artificiality and exaggeration. In the first place he has made his Greeks too religious. They show the same childlike faith in their gods as do those Homeric heroes from whom they are separated by the space of eleven centuries. The Greeks of the age of Eudore were for the most part confirmed sceptics, and those who still believed in their gods did it in a rationalistic manner. Chateaubriand's Greek maiden comes upon Eudore in the forest, while he is resting under a tree. He is young and handsome. He rises hurriedly when he sees her. "Are not you the hunter Endymion?" she stammers confusedly. "And you," asks the young man in his turn, "are not you an angel?" These are not simply polite speeches; the speakers mean what they say. In Chateaubriand's pages it is the most simple matter possible for two lovers living in the most enlightened country in the world to take each other for legendary characters and supernatural beings. Cymodocée's father says in the same style to the young man: "Prithee, my guest, forgive my frankness; I have ever yielded obedience to truth, the daughter of Saturn and the mother of virtue." Even as far back as the days of Plato a Greek was perfectly capable of naming truth without mentioning either its parents or the grandparents of virtue.

We come upon phrases which might have been translated from Homer. When Cymodocée wants to find out who Eudore is, she says: "In what harbours has your ship cast anchor? Do you come from Tyre, famed for the wealth of its merchants? or from beautiful Corinth, after receiving precious gifts from your hosts?" &c.

This sort of thing is passable in dialogue, but the effect is distressing when the narrator himself either altogether forgets the 1500 years which separate him from the characters of the story, and writes as they speak, or else employs expressions borrowed from the medieval romances of chivalry. He writes, for instance, in Homeric style: Nothing would have disturbed the happiness of Démodocus, if he could only have found a husband for his daughter who would have treated her with proper consideration after leading her home to a house full of treasures. And of Velléda, the Gallican Druidess, we are told, in the true ballad style: Fille de roi a moins de beauté, de noblesse et de grandeur.

And if the author sometimes writes as if he himself were the last of the Homeridæ, his characters in retaliation often talk as if they foresaw the whole course of modern intellectual development. The Christian bishop, Cyrille, speaking of the heathen myths, says: "A time will perhaps come when these falsehoods of the childish days of old will simply be ingenious fables, themes for the song of the poet. But in our days they confuse men's minds." What an enlightened man!

It is unnecessary to pass the whole work in review. The author's great ability is only displayed in details and incidental episodes. One beautiful passage is that in which he describes the arrival of the Greek family to visit the Christian family, who are all in the field, binding sheaves; it has a peculiar, idyllic charm which recalls the Book of Ruth, and yet it breathes the New Testament spirit. The account of Velléda's death is also very fine. There is all the fire and divine frenzy of Chateaubriand, the poet's, genius in his representation of Velléda.

There are longer passages than these well worthy of attention, such as the description of the battle between the Franks and the combined armies of the Romans and the Gauls, which, written as it was a number of years before Sir Walter Scott's historical novels, is significant and novel with its element of national characterisation. As in all Chateaubriand's works, the descriptions of nature are fine.

It ought to be observed that when, in his Memoirs, Chateaubriand himself has occasion to write of Les Martyrs, he does so with proud modesty; he shows that he is conscious of the faultiness of the work in certain respects, and draws particular attention to the small degree of success it has had in comparison with Le Génie du Christianisme. He ascribes the comparatively unfavourable reception which it met with at first principally to outward circumstances; and in this he is right. Napoleon's relations with the Pope were at that moment strained and unfriendly. What Chateaubriand had written of Diocletian as the persecutor of the Christians was applied to the Emperor. There were allusions to the humble circumstances of Napoleon's youth and to his insatiable ambition in the description of Galerius, and allusions to his court in the description of Diocletian's.