[4] Sources: Lamartine, Graziella; Raphael; Les Confidences; Mémoires; Madame de Krüdener, Valérie; Chateaubriand, Les Martyrs, ix., x.
[XI]
DISSOLUTION OF THE THEORETICAL PRINCIPLE OF AUTHORITY
In the lyric poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, as in the prose of Chateaubriand, there was, in spite of the unconditioned assertion of the principle of authority, a hidden or germinating antagonism to that principle in literature, as demanding unqualified reverence for the past, its writers, and its forms.
It has already been remarked that the great political and social revolution in France did not affect literary form. As regarded this, there was no necessity to re-establish the principle of authority; it had never been overthrown. In no domain are the French less revolutionary than in that of literature. The Academy is the one institution of the country which has held its ground since the days of Richelieu, and to-day it has the same name, the same aims, and even the same number of members that it had then. In literature the principle of authority was known by the name of the classic spirit, and the Revolution, far from weakening the classic spirit, had strengthened it. The Revolution itself is a classic French tragedy. Like all other French tragedies, it clothes its heroes in Greek and Roman garb. In their style and language they imitate the republicans of ancient Rome, and it is significant that it is the most cultivated and literary revolutionary party, the Girondists, who adopt the antique "thou" and the antique designation of "citizen." The Jacobins are the direct descendants of Corneille—the same toga style of oratory, the same love of magnificent laconicism. With the same enthusiasm with which Cromwell's soldiers metamorphosed themselves into ancient Hebrews, adopting their names and singing their psalms, the Frenchmen of the Revolution metamorphosed themselves into ancient Romans; and when David, the Jacobin and intimate friend of Robespierre, left his seat in the Legislative Assembly to paint the Horatii or the Brutus exhibited in 1791, he simply took his associates as models; as painter he did not need to go a step beyond the boundaries of his own period.
Just as French tragedy, when it came into being, had refused to build upon the foundation of the history of its own country, had turned its back on French tradition and laid its scenes in far-away Rome in the far-off, dimly discerned past, now the Revolution, heedless of history, heedless of the France of its own day, took far-off, un-historically appreciated antiquity, with its republicans, evolved under such different conditions, as the model to be exactly imitated. The modern Gracchi and Horatii imitated the ancient. There is, as has often been remarked, a Roman loftiness of style in Madame Roland's letters to Buzot. The ladies of the Directory at times took Cornelia, and more frequently Aspasia, as their model, even in dress. In the language of some of Napoleon's earliest letters to Josephine the influence of Latin models is to be traced; and even when he no longer stands in need of a model, his style is as classic as his profile. His taste in literature was also classic; his attachment to "les règles" and his admiration of Corneille are matter of history. As long as he is the ruler of France, even those authors who make an attempt at a species of opposition, such as Raynouard, keep in the classic track. A comparison of Werner's Söhne des Thals (Sons of the Vale) with Raynouard's Les Templiers will show how differently the same subject can be approached. The German poet is as mysterious and incomprehensible, as extravagant and fantastic in his treatment of the theme as the Frenchman with his obligatory alexandrines, his king and his queen, his five acts and his three unities, is well-regulated and law-abiding. Raynouard's play represents a sort of lawsuit between church and state; the king conducts his case in a most orderly manner; the Knights Templar conduct theirs in an equally orderly manner, and are thereupon burnt in an orderly manner—orderly, for we see as little as possible of the execution and of what precedes it; we only hear of it all in one of those long concluding narrations which were in vogue as far back as the days of Euripides. And the metre is still the metre prescribed by Boileau, that father of evil. The meaning of the clause, which is cut in two by the cæsura, ends with the line, and the lines are as like each other as one penny bun is like another penny bun. There is neither harmony, nor animation, nor rhythm, nor rhyme in them, for larmes and armes, époux and coups, souffrir and mourir can hardly be called rhymes. They resemble molluscs, these lines; and one of the features they have in common with molluscs is, that it is possible to cut them in two without their showing any less sign of life because of it.
One consequence of this retention of the classic spirit is the exact resemblance between the style of some of the most eminent prose authors of this day and the style of their abhorred opponents, the philosophers of the eighteenth century. We have the most conspicuous instance of this in Joseph de Maistre. De Maistre's inability to comprehend history, his want of the critical faculty and of any deep religious feeling, his tendency to systematise, his argumentativeness, which tempted him to draw hard and fast conclusions—all this in combination, really deriving from the eighteenth century, found expression in the style of that century. Bonalds cold, argumentative style, his craze for reducing everything to formulas, his persuasion that he makes his positions mathematically obvious, show that he too is a child of the century which produced Condillac, and his work a product of the very spirit which he combated. The only difference is, that such a man as Condillac is as clear and consistent as Bonald is changeable and self-contradictory.
A distinguishing feature in both classic prose and poetry is the domination of reason. It is against this ruler that literature makes its first revolt in Madame de Staël's emotional style and Chateaubriand's richly coloured prose. Emotion and colour—these are the two great exiles who now return from a long banishment. And, curiously enough, it is not only his talents but his art theories which make of Chateaubriand a rebel against the principle of authority in literature, the very principle which it was his aim by means of literature to uphold. For classical poetry from its earliest days had sought its subjects and its inspiration in heathen antiquity and heathen mythology, and he was calling upon his fellow authors to open their own and their countrymen's eyes and ears to a poetry diametrically opposed to this, namely, the poetry of Christianity—was, in other words, attacking literary tradition as the champion of Christian tradition. His artistic principles show him to be of the new age, his political and social principles mark him as the man of the past; he is two-faced; he gives poetical expression to all the modern emotions, wearing a mask of unchangeable reverence for all the official authorities of the past. It is more especially his style which makes of him a Romanticist before the days of Romanticism. Hence, when first Lamartine and then Hugo follow his example, forsake heathen, and seek their themes in Christian mythology, society is for a time at a loss to know whether it is to recognise a conservative or a revolutionary spirit in these attempts to uphold the sacredness of religion in new ways. But by degrees the germ of revolt against the principle of authority latent in the new literary standpoint develops to such an extent that the countenance of the new school is changed.
It is interesting to trace the stages of this development in Victor Hugo's different prefaces to his Odes. In the first (of 1822), which consists of only a few lines, the young poet asserts that loyalty and Christian faith are the standards of true poetry. The nineteenth century, he declares, has first revealed to the world the truth that poetry does not depend upon the form given to ideas, but upon the ideas themselves. In his preface to the second edition (published the same year) he further observes that the poet's task now is to substitute for the faded, false colours of the heathen mythology those new and true ones which belong to the Christian conception of the origin of the universe. The ode ought now to speak the severe, the consolatory, the pious language of which an old society, quitting with trembling steps "the revels of atheism and anarchy" stands in such need.