A Short History of French Literature
sentence made him more popular. After the Revolution of July, however,
he refused to accept any favours from the Orleanist dynasty, and lived
quietly, publishing nothing after 1833. In 1848 he was elected to the
Assembly, but immediately resigned his seat. He behaved to the Second
Empire as he had behaved to the July monarchy, refusing all honours and
appointments. He died in 1857. Beranger's poetical works consist
entirely of _Chansons_, political, amatory, bacchanalian, satirical,
philosophical after a fashion, and of almost every other complexion that
the song can possibly take. Their form is exactly that of the
eighteenth-century _Chanson_, the frivolity and licence of language
being considerably curtailed, and the range of subjects proportionately
extended. The popularity of Beranger with ordinary readers, both in and
out of his own country, has always been immense; but a somewhat singular
reluctance to admit his merits has been shown by successive generations
of purely literary critics. In France his early contemporaries found
fault with him on the one hand for being a mere _chansonnier,_ and on
the other, for dealing with the _chanson_ in a graver tone than that of
his masters, Panard, Colle, Gouffe, and his immediate predecessor and in
part contemporary, Desaugiers. The sentimental school of the Restoration
thought him vulgar and unromantic. The Romantics proper disdained his
pedestrian and conventional style, his classic vocabulary. The
neo-Catholics disliked his Voltairianism. The Royalists and the
Republicans detested, and detest equally, though from the most opposite
sides, his devotion to the Napoleonic legend. Yet Beranger deserves his
popularity, and does not deserve the grudging appreciation of critics.
His one serious fault is the retention of the conventional mannerism of
the eighteenth century in point of poetic diction, and he might argue
that time had almost irrevocably associated this with the _chanson_
style. His versification, careless as it looks, is really studied with a
great deal of care and success. As to his matter, only prejudice against
his political, religious, and ethical attitude, can obscure the lively
wit of his best work; its remarkable pathos; its sound common sense; its
hearty, if somewhat narrow and mistaken, patriotism; its freedom from
self-seeking and personal vanity, spite, or greed; its thorough humanity
and wholesome natural feeling. Nor can it be fairly said that his range
is narrow. _Le Grenier_, _Le Roi d'Yvetot_, _Roger Bontemps_, _Les
Souvenirs du Peuple_, _Les Fous_, _Les Gueux_, cover a considerable
variety of tones and subjects, all of which are happily treated.
Beranger indeed was not in the least a literary poet. But there is room
in literature for other than merely literary poets, and among these
Beranger will always hold a very high place. The common comparison of
him to Burns is in this erroneous, that the element of passion, which is
the most prominent in Burns, is almost absent from Beranger, and that
the unliterary character which was an accident with Burns was with
Beranger essential. The point of contact is, that both were among the
most admirable of song writers, and that both hit infallibly the tastes
of the masses among their countrymen.
[Sidenote: Lamartine.]
Alphonse Prat de Lamartine was in almost every conceivable respect the
exact opposite to Beranger. He was born at Macon, on the 21st of
October, 1791, of a good family of Franche Comte, which, though never
very rich, had long devoted itself to arms and agriculture only. His
father was a strong royalist, was imprisoned during the Terror, and
escaped narrowly. Lamartine was educated principally by the Peres de la
Foi, and, after leaving school, spent some time first at home and then
in Italy. The Restoration gave him entrance to the royal bodyguard; but
he soon exchanged soldiering for diplomacy, and was appointed attache in
Italy. He had already (1820) published the _Meditations_, his first
volume of verse, which had a great success. Lamartine married an English
lady in 1822, and spent some years in the French legations at Naples and
Florence. He was elected to the Academy in 1829. After the revolution of
July he set out for the East, but, being elected by a constituency to
the Chamber of Deputies, returned. He acquired much fame as an orator,
contributed not a little to the overthrow of Louis Philippe, and in 1848
enjoyed for a brief space something not unlike a dictatorship. Power,
however, soon slipped through his hands, and he retired into private
life. His later days were troubled by money difficulties, though he
wrote incessantly. In 1867 he received a large grant from the government
of Napoleon III., and died not long afterwards--in 1869. The chief works
of Lamartine are, in verse, the already mentioned _Meditations_ (of
which a new series appeared in 1823), the _Harmonies_, 1829, the
_Recueillements_, _Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d'Harold_, _Jocelyn_,
_La Chute d'un Ange_, the two last being fragments of a huge epic poem
on the ages of the world; in prose, _Souvenirs d'Orient_, _Histoire des
Girondins_, _Les Confidences_, _Raphael_, _Graziella_, besides an
immense amount of work for the booksellers, in history, biography,
criticism, and fiction, produced in his later days. Lamartine's
characteristics, both in prose and verse, are well marked. He is before
all things a sentimentalist and a landscape-painter. He may indeed be
said to have wrought into verse what Rousseau, Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, and Chateaubriand had already expressed in prose,
supplying only an additional, and perhaps original, note of meditative
tenderness. Lamartine's verse is exquisitely harmonious, and frequently
picturesque; but it is deficient in vigour and brilliancy, and marred by
the perpetual current of sentimental complaining. Beyond this he never
could get; his only important attempt in a different and larger style,
the _Chute d'un Ange_, being, though not without merits, on the whole a
failure. In harmony of verse and delicate tenderness of feeling his
poetry was an enormous advance on the eighteenth century, and its power
over its first readers is easily understood. But Lamartine made little,
if any, organic change in the mechanism of French poetry, so far as its
versification is concerned, while his want of range in subject equally
disabled him from effecting a revolution. His best poems, such as _Le
Lac_, _Paysage dans le Golfe de Genes_, _Le Premier Regret_, are however
among the happiest expressions of a dainty but rather conventional
melancholy, irreproachable from the point of view of morals and
religion, thoroughly well bred, and creditably aware of the beauties of
nature, which it describes and reproduces with a great deal of skill.
[Sidenote: Lamennais.]
The next name on the list belongs to a far stronger, if a less
accomplished, spirit than Lamartine. Felicite Robert de Lamennais was
born in 1782, at St. Malo. In the confusion of the last decade of the
eighteenth century, when, as a contemporary bears witness, even persons
holding important state offices had often received no regular education
whatever, Lamennais was for the most part his own teacher. He betook
himself, however, to literature, and in 1807 was appointed to a
mastership in the St. Malo Grammar School. Shortly afterwards he
published a treatise on 'The Church during the Eighteenth Century,' and
taking orders before long followed it up by others. These placed him in
the forefront of the Catholic reaction, of which Chateaubriand from the
picturesque, and Joseph de Maistre from the philosophical side, were the
leaders. He took priest's orders in 1816, and in 1817 published his
_Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de Religion_. This is a sweeping
defence of the absolute authority of the Church, but the 'rift within
the lute' already appears. Lamennais bases this authority, according to
a tradition of that very eighteenth century which he most ardently
opposes, on universal consent. Although therefore the deductive portion
of his argument is in thorough accordance with Roman doctrine, the
inductive portion can hardly be said to be so, and it prepared the way
for his subsequent change of front. For a time Lamennais contented
himself with the hope of establishing a sect of liberal royalist
Catholics. A rapid succession of journals, most of which were
suppressed, led to the _Avenir_, in which Montalembert, Lacordaire, and
others took part, and which, like some English periodicals of a later
period, aimed directly at the union of orthodox religious principles of
the Roman complexion with political liberalism, and a certain freedom of
thought in other directions. The _Avenir_ was definitely censured by
Gregory XVI. in 1832, and Lamennais rapidly fell away from his previous
orthodoxy. He had established himself in the country with a following of
youthful disciples. Of these the best-known now is Maurice de Guerin, a
feeble poet who died young, but who, with his abler sister Eugenie,
interested Sainte-Beuve, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and others. _Les Paroles
d'un Croyant_, which appeared in 1834, united speculative Republicanism
of the most advanced kind with a direct defiance of Rome in matter of
religion, and this was followed by a long series of works in the same
spirit. Lamennais' ardent and ill-balanced temperament, the chief note
of which was the most excessive personal vanity, no sooner threw off the
yoke of orthodoxy than it ran to the opposite extreme, and the Catholic
royalist of the first empire became an atheistic, or at most theistic,
democrat. Lamennais died in 1854. He had a great influence both on men
and on books in France, and his literary work is extremely remarkable.
It bears the marks of his insufficient education and of his excitable
temperament. In the _Paroles d'un Croyant_ the style is altogether
apocalyptic in its mystic and broken declamation, full of colour,
energy, and vague impressiveness, but entirely wanting in order,
lucidity, and arrangement. The earlier works show something of this,
though necessarily not so much. Lamennais' literary, as distinguished
from his political and social, importance consists in the fact that he
was practically the first to introduce this style into French. He has
since had notable disciples, among whom Michelet and even Victor Hugo
may be ranked.
[Sidenote: Victor Cousin.]
The contrast of the return from Lamennais to Cousin is almost as great
as that of the change from Lamartine to Lamennais. The careers of the
poet and the philosopher have indeed something in common, for Cousin's
delicate, exquisite, and somewhat feminine prose style is a nearer
analogue to the poetry of Lamartine even than the latter's own prose,
and the sudden decline of Cousin's reputation in philosophy almost
matches that of Lamartine's reputation as a poet. Victor Cousin was born
in 1792, at Paris, and was one of the most brilliant pupils of the Lycee
Charlemagne. He passed thence to the Ecole Normale, and, in the year of
the Restoration, became Assistant Professor to Royer Collard at the
Sorbonne. He adopted vigorously the doctrines of that philosopher, which
practically amounted to a translation of the Scottish school of Reid and
Stewart, but he soon combined with them much that he borrowed from Kant
and his successors in Germany. This latter country he visited twice; on
the second occasion with the unpleasant result of an arrest. He soon
returned to France, however, and became distinguished as a supporter of
the liberal party. The years immediately before and after the July
Revolution were Cousin's most successful time. His lectures were
crowded, his eclecticism was novel and popular, and when after July
itself he became officially powerful, he distinguished himself by