A Short History of French Literature
pictorial language, dealing at once with physical and mental phenomena,
and, above all, in a certain irresistible habit of never allowing the
iron to grow cold. Stroke follows stroke in the exciting and
transporting process in a manner not easily paralleled in other writers.
Other poets are often best exhibited by very short extracts, by jewels
five words long. This is not so with Victor Hugo. He has such jewels,
but they are not his chief titles to admiration. The ardour and flow, as
of molten metal, which characterise him are felt only in the mass, and
must be sought there. What has been said of his verse is true, with but
slight modifications, of his prose, which is however on the whole
inferior. His unequalled versification is a weapon which he could not
exchange for the less pointed tool of prose without losing much of his
power. His defects emerge as his merits subside. But taking him
altogether, it may be asserted, without the least fear of
contradiction, that Victor Hugo deserves the title of the greatest poet
hitherto, and of one of the greatest prose writers of France. Such a
faculty, thrown into almost any cause, must have gone far to make it
triumph. But in a cause of such merits, and so stoutly seconded by
others, as that of the destruction of the classical tradition which had
cramped and starved French literature, there could be no doubt of
success when a champion such as Victor Hugo took up and carried through
to the end the task of championship.
[Sidenote: Sainte-Beuve.]
It is very seldom that the two different forces of criticism and
creation work together as they did in the case of the Romantic movement.
Each had numerous representatives, but the point of importance is that
each was represented by one of the greatest masters. Charles Augustin
Sainte-Beuve, the critic not merely of the Romantic movement, but of the
nineteenth century, and in a manner the first scientific and universal
critic that the world has seen, was born at Boulogne on the 23rd of
December, 1804. His father held an office of some importance; his mother
was of English blood. He was well educated, first at his native town,
then at Paris. He began by studying medicine, but very soon turned to
literature, and, as has been said, distinguished himself on the _Globe_.
The most important of his articles in this paper were devoted to the
French literature of the sixteenth century, and these were published as
a volume, in 1828, with great success. Sainte-Beuve at once became the
critic _en titre_ of the movement, though he did not very long continue
in formal connection with it. It was some time, however, before he
resigned himself to purely critical work. _Les Poesies de Joseph
Delorme_, _Les Consolations_, and _Volupte_ were successive attempts at
original composition, which, despite the talent of their author, hardly
made much mark, or deserved to make it. He did not persevere further in
a career for which he was evidently unfitted, but betook himself to the
long series of separate critical studies, partly of foreign and
classical literature, but usually of French, which made his reputation.
The papers to which he chiefly contributed were the _Constitutionnel_
and the _Moniteur_, and during the middle of this century his Monday
_feuilletons_ of criticism were the chief recurring literary event of
Europe. These studies were at intervals collected and published in sets
under the titles _Critiques et Portraits Litteraires_, _Portraits
Contemporains_, _Causeries du Lundi_, and _Nouveaux Lundis_, the last
series only finishing with his death in 1869. Besides this he had
undertaken a single work of great magnitude in his _Histoire de Port
Royal_, on which he spent some twenty years. He was elected to the
Academy in 1845, and after the establishment of the Empire he was one of
the few distinguished literary men who took its side. The first reward
that he obtained was a professorship in the College de France; but some
years before his death he received the senatorship, a lucrative
position, and one which interfered very little with the studies of the
occupant. In character Sainte-Beuve strongly resembled some of the
epicureans of his favourite seventeenth century; but whatever faults he
may have had were redeemed by much good-nature and an entire absence of
literary vanity.
[Sidenote: His Method.]
[Sidenote: Dangers of the Method.]
The importance of Sainte-Beuve in literature is historically, and as a
matter of influence, superior even to that of the great poet with whom
he was for some time in close friendship, though before very long their
stars fell apart. Until his time the science of criticism had been
almost entirely conducted on what may be called pedagogic lines. The
critic either constructed for himself, or more probably accepted from
tradition, a cut-and-dried scheme of the correct plan of different kinds
of literature, and contented himself with adjusting any new work to
this, marking off its agreements or differences, and judging
accordingly. Here and there in French literature critics like
Saint-Evremond, Fenelon, La Bruyere in part, Diderot, Joubert, had
adopted another method, but the small acquaintance which most Frenchmen
possessed of literature other than their own stood in the way of
success. Sainte-Beuve was the first to found criticism on a wide study
of literature, instead of directing a more or less narrow study of
literature by critical rules. Victor Hugo himself has laid down, in the
preface to the _Orientales_, one important principle--the principle that
the critic has only to judge of the intrinsic goodness of the book, and
not of its conformity to certain pre-established ideas. There remains
the difficulty of deciding what is intrinsically good or bad. To solve
this, the only way is, first, to prepare the mind of the critic by a
wide study of literature, which may free him from merely local and
national prejudices; and, secondly, to direct his attention not so much
to cut-and-dried ideas of an epic, a sonnet, a drama, as to the object
which the author himself had before him when he composed his work. In
carrying out this principle it becomes obviously of great importance to
study the man himself as well as his works, and his works as a whole as
well as the particular sample before the judge. Sainte-Beuve was almost
the first in France to set the example of the _causerie critique_, the
essay which sets before the reader the life, circumstances, aims,
society, and literary atmosphere of the author, as well as his literary
achievements. This accounts for the extreme interest shown by the public
in what had very commonly been regarded as one of the idlest and least
profitable kinds of literature. At the same time the method has two
dangers to which it is specially exposed. One is the danger of limiting
the consideration to external facts merely, and giving a gossiping
biography rather than a criticism. The other, and the more subtle
danger, is the construction of a new cut-and-dried theory instead of the
old one, by regarding every man as simply a product of his age and
circumstances, and ticketing him off accordingly without considering his
works themselves to see whether they bear out the theory by facts. In
either case, the great question which Victor Hugo has stated, 'L'ouvrage
est-il bon ou est-il mauvais?' remains unanswered in any satisfactory
measure. Sainte-Beuve himself did not often fall into either error. His
taste was remarkably catholic and remarkably fine. The only fault which
can justly be found with him is the fault which naturally besets such a
critic, the tendency to look too complacently on persons of moderate
talent, whose merits he himself is perhaps the first to recognise fully,
and to be proportionately unjust to the greater names whose merits, on
good systems and bad alike, are universally acknowledged, in whose case
it is difficult to say anything new, and who are therefore somewhat
ungrateful subjects for the ingenious and delicate analysis which more
mixed talents repay. But study of the work of such a man as Sainte-Beuve
is an almost absolute safeguard against the intolerance of former days
in matter of literature, and this is its great merit.
[Sidenote: Dumas the Elder.]
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
_cenacle_, 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