Around Victor Hugo were grouped not a few writers who were only inferior to himself. But, before mentioning the members of what is called the cénacle, or innermost Romantic circle, a third name of almost equal temporary importance to those of Hugo and Sainte-Beuve must be named—that of Alexandre Dumas. This writer, one of the most prolific, and in some respects one of the most remarkable of dramatists and novelists, was the son of a general in the revolutionary army, and was born, on the 23rd of July, 1806, at Villers Cotterets. He had hardly any education; but, coming to Paris at the age of twenty, he was fortunate enough to obtain a clerkship in the household of the Duke of Orleans. He tried literature almost at once, and in 1829 his Henri III. et sa Cour was played, and was a great success. This was a year before Hernani, and though Dumas had no pretence to rival Hugo in literary merit, his drama was quite as revolutionary in style, events, language, and general arrangement as Hugo's. But he had not heralded it by any general defiance, and it possessed (what his greater contemporary's dramatic work never fully possessed) the indefinable knowledge of the stage and its requirements, which always tells on an audience. After the Revolution of July, the daring play of Antony achieved an almost equal success, despite its attacks on the proprieties, attacks of which at that time French opinion was not tolerant in a serious play. Then he returned to the historical drama in the Tour de Nesle, another play of strong situations and reckless sacrifice of everything else to excitement. After this Dumas published many plays, of which Don Juan de Marana and Kean are perhaps the most extravagant, and Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, 1839, the best. But before long he fell into a train of writing more profitable even than the drama. This was the composition of historical romances something in Scott's manner. The most famous of these, such as the Three Musketeers, La Reine Margot, and Monte Cristo, were produced towards the latter part of the reign of Louis Philippe, his early patron. He travelled a great deal, making books and money out of his travels; and sometimes, as when he was the companion of Garibaldi, finding himself in curious company. No man, probably, ever made so much money by literature in France as Dumas, though he was not equally skilled in keeping it. He died, in the midst of the disasters of his country, on Christmas Eve, 1870. Dumas' literary position and influence are not very easy to estimate, because of the strange extent to which he carried what is called collaboration, and his frank avowal of something very like plagiarism in many of the works which he wrote unassisted. Endeavours have even been made to show that his most celebrated works are the production of hack writers whom he paid to write under his name. Nor is there the least doubt that he did resort on a large scale to something like the practice of those portrait painters who employ their pupils to paint in the draperies, backgrounds, and accessories of their work. But that Dumas was the moving spirit still, and the actual author of what is best and most peculiar in the works that go by his name, is sufficiently proved by the fact that none of his assistants, whose names are in many cases known, and who in not a few instances subsequently attained eminence on their own account, have equalled or even resembled his peculiar style. Dumas' dramatic work is of but little value as literature properly so called. His forte is the already mentioned playwright's instinct, as it may be termed, which made him almost invariably choose and conduct his action in a manner so interesting and absorbing to the audience that they had no time to think of the merits of the style, the propriety of the morals, the congruity of the sentiments. His plays, in short, are intended to be acted, not to be read. Of his novels many are disfigured by long passages of the inferior work to be expected from mere hack assistants, by unskilful insertions of passages from his authorities, and sometimes by plagiarisms so audacious and flagrant, that the reader takes them as little less than an insult. His best work, however, such as the whole of the long series ranging from Les Trois Mousquetaires through Vingt Ans après to Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, a second long series of which La Reine Margot is a member, and parts of others, has peculiar and almost unique merits. The style is not more remarkable as such than that of the dramas; there is not always, or often, a well-defined plot, and the characters are drawn only in the broadest outline. But the cunning admixture of incident and dialogue by which Dumas carries on the interest of his gigantic narrations without wearying the reader is a secret of his own, and has never been thoroughly mastered by any one else.
Honoré de Balzac.
While Dumas thus gave himself up to the novel of incident, two other writers of equally remarkable genius, and of greater merely literary power, also devoted themselves to prose fiction, and by this means exercised a wide influence on their generation. Honoré de Balzac was born at Tours, on the 20th of May, 1799. He was fairly well educated, but his father's circumstances compelled him to place his son in a lawyer's office. This Balzac could not endure, and he very shortly betook himself to literature, suffering very considerable hardships. The task he attempted was fiction, and his experience in it was unique. For years he wrote steadily, and published dozens of volumes, not merely without attaining success, but without deserving any. But few of these are ever read now, and when they are opened it is out of mere curiosity, a curiosity which meets with but little return. Yet Balzac continued, in spite of hardship and of ill success, to work on, and in his thirtieth year he made his first mark with Les Derniers Chouans, a historical novel, which, if not of great excellence, at least shows a peculiar and decided talent. From this time forward he worked with spirit and success in his own manner, and in twenty years produced the vast collection which he himself termed La Comédie Humaine, the individual novels being often connected by community of personages, and always by the peculiar fashion of analytical display of character which from them is identified with Balzac's name. The most successful of these are concerned with Parisian life, and perhaps the most powerful of all are Le Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, La Cousine Bette, La Peau de Chagrin, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Séraphita. The last is the best piece of mere writing that Balzac has produced. He had also a wonderful faculty for short tales (Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu, Une Passion dans le Désert, etc.). He tried the theatre, but failed. Notwithstanding Balzac's untiring energy (he would often work for weeks together with the briefest intervals of sleep) and the popularity of his books, he was always in pecuniary difficulties. These were caused partly by his mania for speculation, and partly by his singular habits of composition. He would write a novel in short compass, have it printed, then enlarge the printed sheets with corrections, and repeat this process again and again until the expenses of the mere printing swallowed up great part of the profits of the work. At last he obtained wealth, and, as it seemed, a prospect of happiness. In 1850 he married Madame Hanska, a rich Polish lady, to whom he had been attached for many years. He had prepared for a life of opulent ease at Paris with his wife; but a few months after his marriage he died of heart disease. Balzac is in a way the greatest of French novelists, because he is the most entirely singular and original. It has been said of him, with as much truth as exaggeration, that he has drawn a whole world of character after having first created it out of his own head. Balzac's characters are never quite human, and the atmosphere in which they are placed has something of the same unreality (though it is for the most part tragically and not comically unreal) as that of Dickens. Everything is seen through a kind of distorting lens, yet the actual vision is defined with the most extraordinary precision, and in the most vivid colours. Balzac had great drawbacks. Despite his noble prefix he cannot conceive or draw either a gentleman or a lady. His virtuous characters are usually virtuous in the theatrical sense only; his scheme of human character is altogether low and mean. But he can analyse vice and meanness with wonderful vigour, and he is almost unmatched in the power of conferring apparent reality upon what the reader nevertheless feels to be imaginary and ideal. It follows almost necessarily that he is happiest when his subject has a strong touch of the fantastic. The already mentioned Peau de Chagrin—a magic skin which confers wishing powers on its possessor but shrivels at each wish, shortening his life correspondingly—and Séraphita, a purely romantic or fantastic tale, are instances of this. Almost more striking than either are the Contes Drolatiques, tales composed in imitation of the manner and language of the sixteenth century. Here the grotesque and fantastic incidents and tone exactly suit the writer, and some of the stories are among the masterpieces of French literature. The same sympathy with the abnormal may be noticed in the Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu, where a solitary painter touches and retouches his supposed masterpiece till he loses all power of self-criticism, and at lasts exhibits triumphantly a shapeless and unintelligible daub of mingled colours. Balzac's style is not in itself of the best; it is clumsy, inelastic, and destitute of the order and proportion which distinguish the best French prose, but it is not ill suited to the peculiar character of his work.
George Sand.
With Balzac's name is inseparably connected, if only from the striking contrast between them, that of George Sand. Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who took the writing name of George Sand, was born at Paris in 1804, and had a somewhat singular family history, of which it is enough to say here that she was descended through her father's mother from Marshal Saxe, the famous son of Augustus of Saxony and Aurore von Köningsmarck. At the age of eighteen she married a man named Dudevant, and was very unhappy, though it is rather difficult to determine on whom the blame of the unhappiness ought to rest. They separated after a few years, and she came to Paris, from her home at Nohant in Berry, to seek a living. She found it soon in literature, having met with a friend and companion in the novelist Jules Sandeau, and with a stern and most useful critic in Henri de Latouche. Her first novel of importance was Indiana, published in 1832. This was followed by Valentine, Lélia, Jacques, etc. The interest of all or most of these turns on the sufferings of the femme incomprise, a celebrated person in literature, of whom George Sand is the historiographer, if not the inventor. A long series of novels of this kind gave way, between 1840 and 1849, first to a series of philosophical rhapsodies, of which Spiridion is the chief, and then to one in which the political aspirations of the socialist Republicans appear. Of these, Consuelo, which is perhaps popularly considered the author's masterpiece, was the chief. Her private history was somewhat remarkable, and she succeeded in making at least two men of greater genius than herself, Alfred de Musset and Chopin, utterly miserable. They, however, afforded the subjects of two noteworthy books, Elle et Lui, and Lucrezia Floriani, the latter perhaps the most characteristic of all her early works. After the establishment of the Second Empire her tastes and habits became quieter. She lived chiefly, and latterly almost wholly, at Nohant, being greatly attached to the country; and she wrote many charming sketches of country life with felicitous introduction of patois, such as La Mare au Diable, François le Champi, La Petite Fadette. Some voluminous memoirs, published in 1854, dealt with her own early experiences. She lived till the age of seventy-two, dying in 1876, and never ceased to put forth novels which showed no distinct falling off in fertility or imagination, or in command of literary style. She must have written in all nearly a hundred books. As the chief characteristics of Balzac are intense observation, concentrated thought, and the most obstinate and unwearying labour, so the chief characteristic of George Sand is easy improvisation. She had an active and receptive mind which took in the surface of things, whether it was love, or philosophy, or politics, or scenery, or manners, with remarkable and indifferent facility. She had also a style which, if it cannot be ranked among the great literary styles from its absence of statuesque outline, and from its too great fluidity, was excellently suited for the task of improvisation. Her novels, therefore, slipped from her without the slightest mental effort, and appear to have cost her nothing. It is not true, in this case, that what has cost nothing is worth nothing. But even favourable critics admit that it is peculiarly difficult to read a novel of George Sand a second time, and this is perhaps a decisive test. She is, indeed, far more of an improvising novelist than Dumas, to whom the term has more often been applied, though she wrote better French, and attempted more ambitious subjects. The better characteristics of her novels reappeared, perhaps to greater advantage, in her numerous and agreeable letters, especially those to the novelist Flaubert.
Mérimée.
In striking contrast with these three novelists was Prosper Mérimée, also a novelist for the most part, but, unlike them, a comparatively infertile writer[292], and one of the most exquisite masters of French prose that the nineteenth century has seen. Mérimée was born in 1803, and was therefore almost exactly of an age with the writers just mentioned. For a time he took a certain share in the Romantic movement, but his distinguishing characteristic was a kind of critical cynicism, partly real, partly affected, which made him dislike and distrust exaggeration of all kinds. He accordingly soon fell off. Possessing independent means, and entering the service of the government, he was not obliged to write for bread, and for many years he produced little, devoting himself as much to archæology and the classical languages as to French. He accepted the Second Empire apparently from a genuine and hearty hatred of democracy, and was rewarded with the post of senator. But he had to assist Napoleon III. in his Cæsar, and to dance attendance on the Court, the latter duty being made somewhat less irksome to him by his personal attachment to the Empress. Two collections of letters, which have appeared since his death, one addressed to an unknown lady, and the other to the late Sir Antonio Panizzi, while adding to Mérimée's literary reputation, have thrown very curious light on his character, exhibiting him as a man who, with very genuine and hearty affections, veiled them under an outward cloak of cynicism, for fear of being betrayed into vulgarity and extravagance. He died in 1870, at the beginning of the troubles of France, by which he was deeply afflicted. The entire amount of Mérimée's work is, as has been said, not large, and during the last twenty years of his life it is almost insignificant. But such as it is, it has an enduring and monumental value, which belongs to the work of few of his contemporaries. He began by a curious practice, which united the romantic fancy for strange countries and strong local colour with his personal longing for privacy and the absence of literary éclat. Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul—plays, nominally by a Spanish actress—was produced when he was but one-and-twenty; two years later, with an audacious anagram on the title of his previous work, he published, under the title of La Guzla, some nominal translation of Dalmatian prose and verse, in which he utilised with extraordinary cleverness the existing books on Slav poetry. La Famille de Carvajal was a further supercherie in the same style. In the very height and climax of the Romantic movement Mérimée produced two works, attesting at once his marvellous supremacy of style, his strange critical appreciation of the current forces in literature, his penetrating insight into history, and the satiric background of all his thoughts and studies. These were La Jacquerie, and a Chronique du Règne de Charles IX. These books, with Balzac's Contes Drolatiques (which they long preceded), are the most happy creative criticisms extant of the middle ages and the Renaissance in France. They are not fair or complete: on the contrary, they are definitely and unfairly hostile. But the mastery at once of human nature and of literary form which they display, the faculty of vivid resurrection indicated by them, the range, the insight, the power of expression, are extraordinary. During the rest of his life Mérimée, with some excursions into history (ancient and modern), archæology, and criticism, confined himself for the most part to the production, at long intervals, of short tales or novels of very limited length. They are all masterpieces of literature, and, like most masterpieces of literature, they indicate, in a comparatively incidental and by-the-way fashion, paths which duller men have followed up to the natural result of absurdity and exaggeration. Colomba, Mateo Falcone, La Double Méprise, La Vénus d'Ille, L'Enlèvement de la Redoute, Lokis, have equals, but no superiors either in French prose fiction or in French prose. Grasp of human character, reserved but masterly description of scenery, delicate analysis of motive, ability to represent the supernatural, pathos, grandeur, simple narrative excellence, appear turn by turn in these wonderful pieces, as they appear hardly anywhere else except in the author to whom we shall come next. It is noteworthy, however, that Mérimée is a master of the simple style in literature as Gautier is of the ornate. One cannot be said to be greater than the other, but between them they exhibit French prose in a perfection which, since the seventeenth century, it had not possessed.
Théophile Gautier.
Théophile Gautier was born considerably later than most of the writers just mentioned. His birth-year was 1811, and he was a native of Tarbes in Gascony. His education was partly at the grammar school of that town, and partly at the Lycée Charlemagne, where he made friends with Gérard de Nerval, who was destined to have a great influence on his life. After leaving school he was intended for the profession of art. But, like Thackeray, to whom he had many points of resemblance, he had much less artistic faculty than taste. Gérard introduced him to the circle of Victor Hugo, and he speedily became one of the most fervent disciples of the author of Hernani. In a red waistcoat which has become historic, and in a mass of long hair which he continued to wear through life, he was the foremost of the Hugonic claque at the representation of that famous play. Young as he was, he soon justified himself as something more than a hanger-on of great men of letters. In 1830 itself he produced a volume of verse, and this was followed by Albertus, an audacious poem in the extremest Romantic style, and by a work which did him both harm and good, Mademoiselle de Maupin. In this the most remarkable qualities of style and artistic conception were accompanied by a wilful disregard of the proprieties. Before long his unusual command of style, which was partly natural, partly founded on a wide and accurate study of the French writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, recommended him to newspaper work, at which he toiled manfully for the remainder of his life. There was hardly a department of belles lettres which he did not attempt. He travelled in Algeria, in Russia, in Turkey, in Spain, in Italy, in England, and wrote accounts of his travels, which are among the most brilliant ever printed. He was an assiduous critic of art, of the drama and of literature, and the only charge which has ever been brought against his work in this kind is that it is usually too lenient—that his fine appreciation of even the smallest beauties has made him overlook gross defects. His work in prose fiction was incessant, in poetry more intermittent, and all the more perfect. When the Empire established itself, Gautier, who had no political sympathies, but was, in an undecided sort of way, a conservative from the æsthetic point of view, accepted it. But he gave it no active support, beyond continuing to contribute to the Moniteur, and received from it no patronage of any kind. Nor did he sacrifice the least iota of principle, insisting, in the very face of Les Châtiments, on having his praise of Victor Hugo inserted in the official journal on pain of his instant resignation. He led a pleasant but laborious life in one of the suburbs of Paris, with a household of sisters, daughters, and cats, to all of whom he was deeply attached. Here he lived through the Prussian siege. On the restoration of order he manfully grappled with his journalist work again, all hopes of lucrative appointments having gone with the Empire. But his health had been broken for some time, and he died in 1872. The works by which Gautier will be remembered are, in miscellaneous prose, a remarkable series of studies on curious figures, chiefly of the seventeenth century, called Les Grotesques, and a companion series on the partakers in the movement of 1830, besides his descriptive books. In novel writing there must be mentioned an unsurpassed collection of short tales (the best of which is La Morte Amoureuse); Le Roman de la Momie, a clever tour de force reviving ancient Egyptian life; and, lastly, Le Capitaine Fracasse, a novel in the manner of Dumas, but fashioned in his own inimitable style. In verse, he wrote, besides work already mentioned, the Comédie de la Mort, some miscellaneous poems of later date, and, finally, the Émaux et Camées. In prose he is, as has been said, the greatest recent master of the ornate style of French, as Mérimée is the greatest master of the simple style. His mastery over mere language is accompanied by a very fine sense of the total form of his tales, so that the already-mentioned Morte Amoureuse is one of the unsurpassable things of literature. In general writing he has a singular faculty of embalming the most trivial details in the amber of his style, so that his articles can be read again and again for the mere beauty of them. As a poet he is specially noteworthy for the same command of form joined to the same exquisite perfection of language. In Émaux et Camées especially it is almost impossible to find a flaw; language, metre, arrangement, are all complete and perfect, and this formal completeness is further informed by abundant poetic suggestion. The chief fault, if it be a fault, which can be found with Gautier is, that he set himself too deliberately against the tendencies of his age, and excluded too rigidly everything but purely æsthetic subjects of interest from his contemplation, and from the range of his literary energy.
Alfred de Musset.