A Short History of French Literature
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 Merimee'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 _eclat. Le
Theatre 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 Merimee 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 Regne 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 Merimee, with
some excursions into history (ancient and modern), archaeology, 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
Meprise_, _La Venus d'Ille_, _L'Enlevement 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 Merimee 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.
[Sidenote: Theophile Gautier.]
Theophile 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 Lycee Charlemagne, where he made friends with Gerard
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. Gerard 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 aesthetic 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 Chatiments_, 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 _Comedie de la Mort_, some miscellaneous poems of
later date, and, finally, the _Emaux et Camees_. In prose he is, as has
been said, the greatest recent master of the ornate style of French, as
Merimee 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 _Emaux et
Camees_ 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 aesthetic subjects of interest
from his contemplation, and from the range of his literary energy.
[Sidenote: Alfred de Musset.]
The most happily-gifted, save one, of the great men of 1830, the weakest
beyond comparison in will, in temperament, in faculty of improving his
natural gifts, has yet to be mentioned. Alfred de Musset was born at
Paris in 1810. His father held a government place of some value; his
elder brother, M. Paul de Musset, was himself a man of letters, and at
the same time deeply attached to his younger brother; and the family,
though after the death of the father their means were not great,
constantly supplied Alfred with a home. He was, fortunately or
unfortunately, thrown, when quite a boy, into the society of Victor
Hugo, the _cenacle_ or inner clique of the Romantic movement. When only
nineteen Musset published a volume of poetry, which showed in him a
poetic talent inferior only to Hugo's own, and, indeed, not so much
inferior as different. These _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_ were quickly
followed up by a volume entitled _Un Spectacle dans un Fauteuil_, and
Musset became famous. Unfortunately for him, he became intimate with
George Sand, and the result was a journey to Italy, from which he
returned equally broken in health and in heart. His temperament was of
almost ultra-poetic excitability, and he had a positively morbid
incapacity for undertaking any useful employment, whether it was in
itself congenial or no. Thus he refused a well-paid and agreeable
position in the French embassy at Madrid; and though he had written
admirable prose tales for his own pleasure, he was either unwilling or
unable to write them under a regular commission. As he grew older he
unfortunately became addicted to the constant and excessive use of
stimulants. He was elected to the Academy in 1852, but produced little
of value thereafter, and died in 1857. Alfred de Musset's work,
notwithstanding his comparatively short life and his want of regular
energy, is not inconsiderable in amount, and in quality is of the
highest merit and interest. His poems, its most important item, are
deficient in strictly formal merit. He is a very careless versifier and
rhymer, and his choice of language is far from exquisite. He has,
however, a wonderful note of genuine passion, somewhat of the Byronic
kind, but quite independent in species, and entirely free from the
falsetto which spoils so much of Byron's work. Besides this his lyrics
are, in what may be called 'song-quality,' scarcely to be surpassed.
_Les Nuits_, a series of meditative poems in the form of dialogues
between the poet and his muse on nights in the month of May, August,
October, and December; _Rolla_, an extravagant but powerful tale of the
_maladie du siecle_; the addresses to Lamartine and to Malibran, and a
few more poems, yield to no work of our time in genuine, original, and
passionate music. Next to his poems in subject, though not in merit, may
be ranked the prose _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_. His prose tales,
_Emmeline_, _Frederic et Bernerette_, etc., are of great merit, but
inferior relatively to his poems, and to his remarkable dramas. These
latter are among the most original work of the century. It was some time
before they commended themselves to audiences in France, but they have
long won their true position. They are of very various kinds. Some, and
perhaps the happiest, are of the class called, in French, _proverbes_,
dramatic illustrations, that is to say, of some common saying, _Il ne
faut jurer de rien: Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermee_, etc.
The grace and delicacy of these, the ingenuity with which the story is