A Short History of French Literature
of the early members were connected with the refining and reforming
coteries of the Rambouillet and other salons. It was somewhat slow in
electing Boileau, though it is to be feared that this arose from no
higher motive than the fact that he had satirised most of its members.
But Boileau was the natural guiding spirit of an Academy, and it fell
more and more under his influence--not so much his personal influence as
that of his principles and critical estimates. In short, during the
seventeenth century it played the very useful part of model and measure
in the midst of a time when the chief danger was the neglect of measures
and of models, and it played it very fairly. But by the time that the
eighteenth century began, it was by no means of a restraining and
guiding influence that France had most need. The exuberance of creative
genius between 1630 and 1690 had supplied literature with actual models
far more valuable than any scheme of cut-and-dried rules, and it was in
need rather of a stimulant to spur it on to further development. Instead
of serving as this, the Academy served (owing, it must be confessed, in
great part to the literary conservatism of Voltaire and the
_philosophes_ generally) as a check and drag upon the spontaneous
instincts all through the century, and in all the departments of Belles
Lettres. It contributed more than anything else to the mischievous
crystallisation of literary ideas, which during this time offers so
strange a contrast to the singular state of solution in which were all
ideas relating to religion, politics, and morals. The consequence of the
propounding of a set of consecrated models, of the constant competition
in imitation of those models, and of the reward of diligent and
successful imitation by admission into the body, which in its turn
nursed and guided a new generation of imitators, was the reduction of
large and important departments of literature to a condition of
cut-and-driedness which has no parallel in history. The drama in
particular, which was artificial and limited at its best, was reduced
to something like the state of a game in which every possible move or
stroke is known and registered, and in which the sole novelty consists
in contriving some permutation of these moves or strokes which shall be,
if possible, not absolutely identical with any former combination. So in
a lesser degree, it was in poetry, in history, in prose tales, in verse
tales. If a man had a loose imagination, he tried to imitate La Fontaine
as well as he could in manner, and outbid him in matter; if he thought
himself an epigrammatist, he copied J. B. Rousseau; if he was disposed
to edification, the same poet supplied him with models; if the gods had
made him descriptive, he executed variations in the style of Delille, or
Saint Lambert, who had themselves copied others; if he wrote in any
other style, he had an eye to the work of Voltaire. Neologism in
vocabulary was carefully eschewed, and a natural consequence of this was
the resort (in the struggle not to repeat merely) to elaborate and
ingenious periphrases, such as those which have been quoted in the
chapter on eighteenth-century poetry. In short, literature had got into
a sort of treadmill in which all the effort expended was expended merely
in the repeated production of certain prescribed motions.
It was partly a natural result of this, and partly an effect of other
and accidental causes, that the actual composition of the Academy was in
the first quarter of the nineteenth century by no means such as to
inspire much respect. But it was all the less likely to initiate or to
head any movement of reform. The consequence was, that when the reform
came, it came from the outside, not from the inside, that it was
violently opposed, and that, though it prevailed, and its leaders
themselves quickly forced their way into the sacred precincts, it was as
victorious rebels, not as welcomed allies. The further consequence of
this, and of the changes of which account will be given briefly in the
following book, was the alteration to a great extent of the status of
the Academy. It still (though with the old reproach of illustrious
outsiders) includes most of the leading men of letters of France, and
its membership is still, theoretically, the greatest honour that a
French man of letters can receive. But its position is far more
ornamental than it was. It hardly pretends to be in any sense
legislative: it is an honorary assembly, not a working parliament. The
chief circumstance that keeps it before the public is the curious and
time-honoured custom which ordains that the academician appointed to
receive each new member shall, in the most polished and amiable manner,
give the most ironical description he can of the novice's achievements
and claims to recognition.
The exact change in literature which has partly caused, and has partly
coincided with this change in the relation of the Academy to letters,
will shortly be displayed, though in somewhat less detail than those
changes which are at a sufficient distance to be estimated by the aid of
what has been well called 'the firm perspective of the past.' For
cut-and-dried rules of criticism, carefully selected and limited models,
narrow range of subject, scanty vocabulary and its corollary
periphrasis, stock metaphor and ornament, stiff or fluidly insignificant
metre and rhythm, there have been substituted the exact opposites. The
gain in poetry is immense, and if it seems to be somewhat exhausted now,
it is fair to remember that fifty years is a long flowering time for any
special poetic plant, not often equalled in history, and still less
often exceeded. The gain in prose has been more dubious. Great prose
writers will have to be noticed, but it may perhaps be doubted whether
the average value of French prose as prose has not declined. There would
be nothing surprising in this, if it be the case; on the contrary, it
would be a mere repetition of the experience of the sixteenth century.
The language and literature have been flooded with new words, new forms
of speech, new ideas, new models. It takes a very long time before the
mixture thus produced can settle down (at least in the vessel of the
average prose writer) to clearness and brilliancy. It is otherwise in
poetry; in the first place because there is no such thing as an average
poet, and in the second, because the peculiar conditions of poetry
exercise of themselves a refining influence, which is not present in
prose. At present it may be said, and not without truth, that, putting
the work of the extraordinary writers aside, ordinary French prose has
lost some of its former graces--its lucidity, its proportion, its easy
march. From being the most childishly prudish of all writers about
neologisms and the _mot propre_, the French prose writer has become the
most clumsily promiscuous in his vocabulary. He is always using 'square'
instead of 'place,' 'le macadam' instead of 'le pave,' 'un caoutchouc'
when he means a waterproof overcoat. Much of this, no doubt, is due to
the singular inability which the language seems to experience in forming
genuine vernacular compounds; an inability from which a few more persons
like the much ridiculed Du Bartas might have rescued it. But, however
this may be, it must be admitted that, great as have been the benefits
of the Romantic movement, it has left the ordinary French prose style of
novel and newspaper in a condition of indigestion and disarray.
As for the movement itself, the most brilliant season of romantic
productiveness seems to have terminated, after being long represented
only by its greatest, earliest, and at the same time latest name. The
comparative disorganisation is all the more noticeable. It is in this
disorganisation that our history perforce leaves the magnificent
literature which we have traced from its source. Unsafe as all prophecy
is, there are few things less safe to prophesy about than the progress
of literary development. But it is not historically unreasonable to
expect, after the splendid harvest of the last half century, what is
called a dead season, of longer or shorter duration. There is nothing
really discouraging in such seasons either in nature or in art. In each
case there is the garnered wealth of the past to fall back upon, and in
each there is confidence that the seeming stagnation and death are in
truth only the necessary pause and period of gestation which precede and
bring about the life of the future.
BOOK V.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
[Sidenote: The Romantic Movement.]
The preceding chapter will at once have indicated the defects under
which the later classical literature of France laboured, and the
remedies which were necessary for them. Those remedies began to be
applied early in the reign of Charles X., and the literary revolution
which accompanied them is called the Romantic movement. Strictly
speaking, this movement did not affect, or rather was not supposed to
affect, any branch of letters except the Belles Lettres; really its
influence was far wider, and has affected every branch of literary
composition. Nor is it yet exhausted, although more than two generations
have passed since the current was started. As is usual in the later
stages of such things, this influence is in part disguised under the
form of apparent reactions, developments, modifications, and other
eddies or backwaters of the great wave. But as the Romantic movement was
above all things a movement of literary emancipation, it can never be
said to be superseded until fresh chains are imposed on literature. Of
this there is as yet no sign, except in the puerile and disgusting
school of naturalism, a mere scum-flake--to keep up the metaphor--on the
surface of the waters.
[Sidenote: Writers of the later Transition.]
The literature of the Revolution, the Empire, and the early Restoration,
which has been in part already surveyed, displayed the last effete
products of the old classical tradition side by side with the vigorous
but nondescript and tentative efforts at reform of Chateaubriand, Madame
de Stael, Courier, and others. So the first products of the new movement
found themselves side by side with what may be called a second
generation of the transition. The names which chiefly illustrate this
second generation must be dealt with before the Romantics proper are
arrived at. The chief of them are Beranger, Lamartine, Lamennais,
Cousin, Stendhal, Nodier, and the dramatists Alexandre Soumet and
Casimir Delavigne. Most of these, while irresistibly impelled half way
towards the movement, stood aloof from it in feeling and taste; others,
such as Stendhal, exercised upon it an influence not much felt at first,
but deep and lasting; one, Nodier, threw in his lot with it frankly and
decidedly.
[Sidenote: Beranger.]
Pierre Jean de Beranger is one of the most original and not the least
pleasant figures in the long list of French poets. His life, though
long, was comparatively uneventful. Despite the particle of nobility, he
belonged to the middle class, and rather to the lower than to the upper
portion of it; for, if his father was a man of business, his grandfather
was a tailor. He himself lived in his youth with an aunt at Peronne, was
then apprenticed to a printer, and was so ill off that, in 1804, he was
saved from absolute poverty only by the patronage of Lucien Bonaparte,
to whom he had sent some of his verses, and who procured him a small
government clerkship. He held this for some years. After the
Restoration, Beranger, whose political creed was an odd compound of
Bonapartism and Republicanism, got into trouble with the government for
his political songs. He was repeatedly fined and imprisoned, but each