[III]
ROMANTICISM
At first Romanticism was, in its essence, merely a spirited defence of localisation in literature. The Romanticists admired and glorified the Middle Ages, which the culture of the eighteenth century had anathematised, and the poets of the sixteenth century—Ronsard, Du Bellay, &c.—who had been supplanted by the classic authors of the age of Louis XIV. They attacked pseudo-classicism, the tiresome and monotonous Frenchifying and modernising of all ages and nationalities. They took as their watchword "local colouring." By local colouring they meant all the characteristics of foreign nations, of far-off days, of unfamiliar climes, to which as yet justice had not been done in French literature. They felt that their predecessors had been led astray by the premise that every human being was simply a human being, and, moreover, more or less of a Frenchman. In reality, there was not such a thing as universal humanity; there were separate races, peoples, tribes, and clans. Still less was the Frenchman the typical human being. It was imperative, if they were to understand and represent human life, that they should free themselves from themselves. This idea gave the impulse to the art and criticism of nineteenth-century France.
Authors now made it their endeavour to train their readers to see things from this new point of view. They no longer wrote to please the public—and it is this fact which gives value to the books of the period. Therefore a critic who, like myself, is engaged in tracing the main currents of literature, must dwell upon many a seldom read and still more rarely bought Romantic work, and do little more than mention such a talented dramatist as Scribe, who for a whole generation dominated the stage in every country in Europe.
For if an author does not penetrate to the essential in the human soul, to its deepest depth; if he has not dared, or has not been able to write his book regardless of consequences; if he has not ventured to represent his ideas in statuesque nakedness, has not imaged human nature as it showed itself to him, improving nothing and modifying nothing, but has taken counsel with his public, been guided by its prejudices, its ignorance, its untruthfulness, its vulgar or sentimental taste—he may have been, probably has been, highly distinguished by his contemporaries, he may have won laurels and wealth by his talents; for me he does not exist, to what I call literature his work is valueless. All the offspring of the author's mariage de convenance with that doubtful character, public opinion, all those literary children which their author begets, giving a side-thought to the taste and morality of his public, are defunct a generation later. There was no real life and heat in them, nothing but timorous regard for a public which is now dead; they were nothing but the supply of a demand which has long ceased to exist. But every work in which an independent writer has, without any side-thought, uttered what he felt and described what he saw, is, and will continue to be, no matter how few editions of it may be printed, a valuable document.
There is only a seeming contradiction between this condemnation of the literary work produced to please the public, and the doctrine of the sound natural influence of society on the author. It is certain that the author cannot separate himself from his age. But the current of the age is not an undivided current; there is an upper and an under one. To let one's self drive with or be driven by the upper one is weakness, and ends in destruction. In other words, every age has its dominant and favourite ideas and forms, which are simply the results of the life of former ages, that were arrived at long ago and have slowly petrified; but besides these it owns another whole class of quite different ideas, which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air, and are apprehended by the greatest men of the age as the results which must now be arrived at. These last are the ideas which form the unifying element of the new endeavour.
In 1827 an English theatrical company visited Paris, and for the first time Frenchmen saw Shakespeare's masterpieces, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet, admirably played. It was under the influence of these performances that Victor Hugo wrote that preface to Cromwell which is regarded as the programme of the new literature.
The literary war of liberation began with an assault upon French classical tragedy, the weakest and most exposed point in literary tradition. Hugo knew very little about the attacks upon its authority which had been made in other countries; and to those who have read the utterances delivered on the same subject many years previously by Lessing, Wilhelm Schlegel, and the English Romantic writers, his manifesto offers little that is new. But it was, of course, an important step to carry the war into France itself. The vigorous arguments expended in proving the unnaturalness of compressing the action of every drama into twenty-four hours and a single pillared hall, seem to the reader of to-day almost as uninteresting as the absurdities attacked; but he must remember that Boileau's authority was then still supreme, still unshaken in France.
Of interest as regards Hugo's own development are the passages in which he expounds his private theory of poetry; although he is so much of the poet and so little of the thinker that his arguments are, as a rule, sadly inconclusive.