Next to Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott was the English author who exercised, if not the most profound, certainly the most plainly traceable influence. He found his way across the French, as across every other frontier. Before the days of his popularity in France the great Scotchman had found in Germany, Italy, and Denmark admirers, who, inspired by patriotic and moral aims, adopted the tone of his fiction. The Waverley novels began to appear in 1814; in 1815 they were already imitated by De la Motte Fouqué in the German "Junker" style; in 1825-26 Manzoni's Promessi Sposi appeared; and in 1826 Ingemann began to publish his romantic historical tales, which inculcate a childish kind of patriotism and royalism, and are, as it were, haunted by a pale ghost of Sir Walter Scott. The Waverley novels were translated into French almost immediately after their appearance, and at once achieved a great success. Scott became so popular that in the early Twenties the managers of the theatres commissioned authors to dramatise his novels. The unsuccessful play Emilia, written by Soumet, the poet of the transition period, was an adaptation of Scott. Victor Hugo himself, using the name of his young brother-in-law, Paul Fouchet, sent in an adaptation of Kenilworth, which as a drama was also a failure.
The young Romantic generation, however, was not appealed to by the qualities in the novels which were most highly appreciated in Protestant countries, but by the talent of their picturesque descriptions and their medieval flavour. It was by his wealth of crossbows and buff jerkins, of picturesque costumes and romantic old castles, that Scott found favour in the eyes of Frenchmen. They ignored or disapproved of the common-sense, sober view of life and the Protestant morality which had won him readers in Germany and Scandinavia. Beyle was the first to criticise Scott severely. He prophesies that in spite of his extraordinary popularity his fame will be short-lived; for, according to Beyle, Scott's talent lay more in the describing of men's clothes and the limning of their features than in the representation of their emotional life and their passions. Art, says Beyle, neither can nor ought to imitate nature exactly; it is always a beautiful untruth; but Scott is too untruthful; his passionate characters strike us as being ashamed of themselves; they lack decision and boldness and naturalness. And it was not long before his critics began to make the complaint, so often reiterated by Balzac, that he could not describe woman and her passions, or at any rate dared not describe these passions with their pleasures, pains, and punishments, in a society which attached exaggerated importance to literary modesty.4[4] The novels with plots laid in modern days made no impression; only Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Kenilworth, The Fair Maid of Perth, and one or two others were popular.
The special merit of this foreign author in the eyes of Frenchmen was, that he had substituted the novel of dramatic dialogue for the two forms of the longer novel hitherto in vogue—the narrative, in which the headings of the chapters were summaries of the contents and the author played a prominent part, and the letter form, which squeezed all the surprises and all the passion in between "Dear Friend" and "Yours sincerely." The most talented of the young French writers are plainly influenced by him. The one whose moral standard most closely approached the English, Alfred de Vigny, wrote Cinq-Mars, a novel with a plot laid in the days of Richelieu, an entertaining, but now old-fashioned work, in which the contrast of good and evil overshadows all other contrasts, and which betrays a remarkable want of appreciation of Richelieu's greatness as a statesman. There is almost a total absence of Scott's skill in characterisation; instead of it we have a lyric element, the glorification of youthful, impetuous chivalry—the old French bravoure. Prosper Mérimée fell under the great Scotchman's influence at the same time as Alfred de Vigny, and wrote his Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., a work the spirit of which is still less like Scott's. Mérimée singles out the strong and violent passions in history for their own sake, but also with the French Romanticist's subordinate aim of rousing the wrath of the respectable bourgeois by his audacious unreservedness; his delineation of character is, generally speaking, clear and concise; he tells his tale coldly and with utter disregard of all established moral convention.
Every one knows the characteristic manner in which, at a somewhat later period, Alexandre Dumas employed Scott's wealth of colour and historic style in the production of many light and most entertaining novels, of which The Three Musketeers may be named as an example. But it is not so generally known that Balzac, the founder of the modern French novel, was as strongly attracted as De Vigny and Mérimée by the foreign master who made an epoch in the history of fiction. He desired to follow in his path without being a mere imitator. He believed himself quite capable of rivalling Scott in the delineative art which Romanticism had restored to honour, and was confident of his power to impart much more life to dialogue. In Scott's books there was only one type of woman; in France the writer of historic novels could contrast the brilliant vices and motley morals of Catholicism with the dark austerity of Calvinism in the wildest period of French history. This ensured him against monotony. Balzac, who was always projecting monumental works and whose mind had an instinctive bias towards the systematically comprehensive, finally conceived the plan of depicting each historic period since that of Charlemagne in one or more novels, all of which should form a connected chain—an idea which Freytag, in his work, Die Ahnen, has since tried to carry out as regards Germany. The first novel which Balzac published in his own name, Les Chouans, was intended to be a link in this chain. It describes the war in La Vendée at the time of the Revolution, and came out in 1829, the same year as Cinq-Mars and Chronique du Règne de Charles IX. Two books published much later, Sur Cathérine de Médicis and Maître Cornélius, are also fragments of the projected great work. The latter is a novel in which Balzac enters into direct competition with Sir Walter Scott; its hero is Louis XI., whom he considered unfairly treated by Sir Walter. Although these historical romances are good in their way and contain vivid and careful studies of character, they prove that if Balzac had kept to his intention of merely calling the past to life again, his place in the literature of his century would have been an entirely subordinate one; he would only have been known as one of Scott's disciples.
Victor Hugo also was fired by the famous Scotchman with the desire to write a great historical novel. He determined to make it centre round the cathedral church of Notre-Dame in Paris, the whitewashing of which had horrified him; for he had an admiration and love for the grand old historical building which remind us of Goethe's for Strasburg Cathedral and Oehlenschläger's for the Cathedral of Roskilde. According to Hugo's contract with the publisher, this famous novel was to be ready in April 1829; but he was not able to keep his engagement; he first obtained five months' grace, and then a respite until the 1st of December 1830 upon condition of paying 1000 francs weekly after that date if the book was not finished then. By the 27th of July his preparatory studies were made, and that day he began to write the novel; the following day ushered in the Revolution of July; Hugo's house was in danger from the firing, and during the removal to another, all the notes and studies for his book were lost. Under the circumstances the publisher granted three months' grace; Hugo denied himself to every one, locked away his black suit so that he might not be tempted to go out, sent for a bottle of ink, put on his working-jacket, and worked without paying or receiving a single visit until 14th January 1831, when the ink-bottle was empty and the novel written. During all that time he had only allowed himself one distraction, which was to go and see Charles X.'s ministers sentenced. Not to break his resolution, he went dressed in his civic guard's uniform.
In his earliest youth Hugo had been profoundly impressed by Scott. In a review of Quentin Durward, which he wrote at the age of twenty-one, he expresses the greatest admiration for Scott's historical sense, moral earnestness, and dramatic style. But even in this early appreciation we come upon a sentence in which he, as it were, indicates the step he himself hopes to take in advance of Scott. He writes: "After Walter Scott's picturesque but prosaic novel there remains to be created another kind of novel, which in our opinion will be more admirable and more perfect. It is the novel which is both drama and epic, which is both picturesque and poetical, both realistic and idealistic, both true and grand, which combines Walter Scott and Homer." We must not let these last words, with which Hugo, true to himself, spoils his effect by exaggeration, prevent our acknowledging the young author's clear perception of what he himself was one day to be capable of doing in the domain of fiction. He seems to have had the premonition that his novels would be great prose poems, picturesque chronicles rather than pictures of reality like Scott's.
Notre-Dame de Paris, which was intended to give a picture of the life and manners of Paris in the fifteenth century, is the creation of a great constructive imagination. This was a fit subject for Hugo, with his leaning to the grand and colossal. He gives a soul to the building, breathes into it the breath of his spirit until it becomes a living being; and as the scientist reconstructs a whole animal from a single vertebra, so Hugo's brain, with the cathedral as starting-point, conjures up the whole of that long-vanished Paris. The faith and the superstition, the manners and the arts, the laws and the human emotions and passions of those old days, are drawn for us with a broad, strong touch—with no great precision, but with a kind of convincing magic. The characters in Notre-Dame are the character sketches of a genius, drawn in the epic style, in more than life-size. Scott's honest, plain, human beings are superseded by the creatures of an artist intoxicated with colour; his gentle spirit makes way for grandiloquent passion pointing unresignedly to blind, iron necessity, that άνάγχη which is written on the church wall, and which crushes us all—gipsy and priest, beauty and beast, Phœbus and Quasimodo—century after century under its iron heel.
Even more powerful than Scott's influence was Byron's. It was the element of wild passion in his poems and its connection with the wildness of his life—it was Childe Harold and still more Lara, the being marked by the finger of fate, who, suffering from a mysterious melancholy, carries his pride and his anguish with him from land to land—it was this type in its Byronic forms, fantastically magnified by the element of myth and legend enveloping the poet's life, which enchanted the young men whom Hugo had awakened or gathered together. Few were the critics who maintained as Beyle did in spite of his great admiration for Byron, that "this author of deadly dull, conventional tragedies" was certainly not the leader of the Romanticists. Immediately after Byron's death the whole horde of French minor poets seized upon the two themes, Greece and Lord Byron, which they continued year after year to sing with so much ardour and so little comprehension of the dead man's character, that Sainte-Beuve was obliged to protest in the Globe against the abuse of the words Byron, liberty, elegy, &c. In 1824 both Hugo and Lamartine gave expression to their feelings regarding Byron, the former in a newspaper article, the latter in a poem. In treating of him as a poet, both authors at this period lay most stress upon his spirit of doubt and his gloomy view of life; neither of them seems to have been at all deeply impressed by the works of his mature manhood; the bright and trenchant political and religious satire of Don Juan was, in 1824, missed or misunderstood by them as by so many others. But whereas Hugo's chief endeavour is to show the difference between Byron's poetry and that of the eighteenth century ("The difference between Byron's and Voltaire's laughter is this, that Voltaire had not suffered"), to the sentimental and half orthodox Lamartine the English poet is still the fallen angel. Lamartine's Fifth Canto of Childe Harold, in which he endeavours to strike the Byronic note, shows in what he believed himself to resemble the English nobleman, namely, in his romantically heroic personality. Masking as Byron he gives expression to the doubts and rebellious feelings of which we only catch a rare glimpse in his Meditations, but to which he was soon to give utterance in his own name. It was probably Byron who lured both him and Hugo to the East; Hugo contented himself with imaginary excursions, but Lamartine made princely preparations and set off on a grand tour. And if Byron's last works made no profound political impression on these two authors, his last actions and his death did.
Byron's influence is, then, unmistakably traceable in the works of most of the young poets of our period; but so marked and powerful was the originality of this generation of authors, that his sentimental despair, which was so infectious, and which led to so much imitation and affectation in many literatures, glanced off them. There was only one of them in whose ears this particular Byronic note rang like a message from a kindred spirit, and he was, curiously enough, the most elegant and aristocratic, the truest Parisian among them all—Alfred de Musset.
Most of the literary notables in question were born in the provinces—Victor Hugo and Nodier at Besançon, George Sand in Berry, Gautier at Tarbes, Lamennais in Brittany, Sainte-Beuve at Boulogne—and each of these brings with him his characteristic fund of provincialism which does not allow itself to be interpenetrated by the Byronic influence, although both George Sand and Gautier were, in curiously different ways, affected by Byron. Mérimée, who was born in Paris, cooled too quickly to feel the influence of Byron's poetic temperament; it was Byron's spirit of negation which influenced him, and that at second hand, through Beyle. But upon no one does Byron make the same direct, deep impression as on that slender, pale son of Paris, who is distinguished by all the weakness and all the exquisite charm which are the heritage of the last representatives of a noble and ancient race. In the earliest stages of his career, Byron, the true Englishman, had been spiritually minded and melancholy; the senses play but a small part in the poetry of his youth; not till he is the mature man and has visited Italy and lived in Latin countries does his poetry, like Goethe's in Venice, become sensual and audaciously outspoken. De Musset, on the contrary, begins in his early youth with the bold and fleshly realism which we find in some of Byron's later works, and gradually becomes more and more spiritual. At his best he is a keener observer than Byron, and his love-poetry is more delicate; it has a Raphaelesque beauty which Byron's neither attains nor aims at. He is the weaker, tenderer, more charming, French Byron, as Heine is the smaller, more wanton, wittier, German Byron, and Paludan-Müller the satirical, orthodox, royalist, Danish Byron. De Musset suffers like a boy, complains like a woman; he is what Auguste Préault, the sculptor, once called him: "Mademoiselle Byron."