V.—The Romantic School in France
During the Revolution the national property had been divided into twenty times as many hands as before, and with the fall of Napoleon the industrial period begins. All restrictions had been removed from industry and commerce, and capital became the moving power of society and the object of individual desires. The pursuit of money helps to give to the literature of the day its romantic, idealistic stamp. Balzac alone, however, made money the hero of his epic. Other great writers of the period, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Beyle, Mérimée, Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, kept as far as possible from the new reality.
The young Romanticists of 1830 burned with a passion for art and a detestation of drab bourgeoisie. A break with tradition was demanded in all the arts; the original, the unconscious, the popular, were what they aimed at. It was now, as in Hugo's dramas, that the passionate plebeian appeared on the scene as hero; Mérimée, as in "Carmen," painted savage emotions; Nodier's children spoke like real children; George Sand depicted, in woman, not conscious virtue and vice, but the innate nobility and natural goodness of a noble woman's heart. The poet was no longer looked on as a courtier, but as the despised high-priest of humanity.
The French Romantic school is the greatest literary school of the nineteenth century. It displayed three main tendencies—the endeavour to reproduce faithfully some real piece of past history or some phase of modern life; the endeavour after perfection of form; and enthusiasm for great religious or social reformatory ideas. These three tendencies are traced out in the ideals and work of the brilliant authors of the period; in George Sand, for instance, who proclaimed that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love; and in Balzac, who views society as the scientist investigates Nature—"he never moralises and condemns; he never allows himself to be led by disgust or enthusiasm to describe otherwise than truthfully; nothing is too small, nothing is too great to be examined and explained."
The impressions which our author gives of Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, George Sand, Balzac and Mérimée are vivid and concrete; they are high achievements in literary portraiture, set in a real historic background.
VI.—Young Germany
The personality, writings, and actions of Byron had an extraordinary influence upon "Young Germany," a movement initiated by Heine and Börne, and characterised by a strong craving for liberty. "Byron, with his contempt for the real negation of liberty that lay concealed beneath the 'wars of liberty' against Napoleon, with his championship of the oppressed, his revolt against social custom, his sensuality and spleen, his passionate love of liberty in every domain, seemed to the men of that day to be an embodiment of all that they understood by the modern spirit, modern poetry."
The literary group known as Young Germany has no creative minds of the highest, and only one of very high rank, namely, Heine. "It denied, it emancipated, it cleared up, it let in fresh air. It is strong through its doubt, its hatred of thraldom, its individualism." The Germany of those days has been succeeded by a quite new Germany, organised to build up and to put forth material strength, and the writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, who were always praising France and condemning the sluggishness of their own country, are but little read.
The literary figures of this period who are painted by our author, are Börne, Heine, Immermann, Menzel, Gutzkow, Laube, Mundt, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, Bettina von Arnim, Charlotte Stieglitz, and many others, to whose writings, in conjunction with those of the French Romanticists, Brandes ascribes the general revolt of the oppressed peoples of Europe in 1848. Of the men of that date he says: "They had a faith that could remove mountains, and a hope that could shake the earth. Liberty, parliament, national unity, liberty of the Press, republic, were to them magic words, at the very sound of which their hearts leaped like the heart of a youth who suddenly sees his beloved."