A Short History of French Literature
journey to the East, the result of which was his _Itineraire de Paris a
Jerusalem_, and the unequal but remarkable prose epic of _Les Martyrs_.
This, the story of which is laid in the time of Diocletian, shifts its
scene from classical countries to Gaul, where the half-mythical heroes
of the Franks appear, and then back to Greece, Rome, and Purgatory. The
fall of Napoleon opened once more a political career, of which
Chateaubriand had always been ardently desirous. His pamphlet, _De
Bonaparte et des Bourbons_, was, perhaps, the most important literary
contribution to the re-establishment of the ancient monarchy. During the
fifteen years which elapsed between the battle of Waterloo and the
Revolution of July, Chateaubriand underwent vicissitudes due to the
difficulty of adjusting his liberalism and his legitimism, sentiments
which seem both to have been genuine, but to have been quite
unreconciled by any reasoning process on the part of their holder. Yet,
though he had again and again experienced the most ungracious treatment
both from Louis XVIII. and Charles X., the July monarchy had no sooner
established itself than he resigned his positions and pensions, and took
no further official part in political affairs during the rest of his
life. In his latter days he was much with the celebrated Madame
Recamier, and completed his affectedly-named but admirable _Memoires
d'Outre Tombe_,--an autobiography which, though marred by some of his
peculiarities, contains much of his most brilliant writing. Of the works
not hitherto noticed, _Rene_, _Le Dernier Abencerage_, _Les Natchez_,
and some sketches of travels and of French history, are the most
remarkable.
For some thirty years, from 1810 to 1840, Chateaubriand was
unquestionably the greatest man of letters of France in the estimation
of his contemporaries. His fame has since then diminished considerably,
and much has been written to account for the change. It is not, however,
very difficult to understand it. Chateaubriand is one of the chief
representatives in literature of the working of two conditions, which,
while they lend for the time much adventitious importance to the man who
takes full advantage of them, invariably lead to rapidly-diminished
estimates of him when they have ceased to work. He was a representative
at once of transition and reaction--of transition from the hard and
fast classical standards of the eighteenth century to the principles of
the romantic and eclectic schools, of reaction against the _philosophe_
era. He was one of the earliest and most influential exponents of the
so-called _maladie du siecle_, of what, from his most illustrious pupil,
is generally called Byronism. His immediate literary teachers were
Rousseau and Ossian. He was not a thoroughly well-educated man, and he
was exceptionally deficient in the purely logical and analytic faculty
as distinguished from the rhetorical and synthetic. What he could do and
did, was to glorify Christianity and monarchism in a series of
brilliantly-coloured pictures, which had an immense effect on an age
accustomed to the grey tints and monotonous argument of the opposite
school, but which, to a posterity which is placed at a different point
of view, seem to lack accuracy of detail and sincerity of emotion.
Nevertheless Chateaubriand, if not a very great man, was a very great
man of letters. His best passages are not easily to be surpassed in
brilliancy of style and vividness of colouring. If the sentiment of his
_Rene_ seems hollow now-a-days, it must be remembered that this is
almost entirely a matter of fashion and of novelty. The _Genie du
Christianisme_, despite many defects of taste, more of insight, and most
of mere learning, remains one of the most eloquent pleadings in
literature, and not one of the least effective; while the _Itineraire_
is the pattern of all the picturesque travels of modern times. All these
works, and most of the rest, are practically novels with a purpose. Even
in the autobiography the historic part is entirely subdued and moulded
to the exigencies of the dramatic and narrative construction. Regarded
merely as an individual writer, Chateaubriand would supply a volume of
'Beauties' hardly inferior to that which could be gathered from any
other prose author in France. Regarded as a precursor, he deserves far
more than any other single man, and almost more than all others put
together, the title of father of the Romantic movement.
[Sidenote: Madame de Stael.]
His chief rival in the literature of the empire was also essentially,
though not wholly or professedly, a novelist. Anne Louise Germaine
Necker, who married a Swedish diplomatist, the Baron de Stael Holstein,
and is, therefore, generally known as Madame de Stael, was the daughter
of the great financier Necker, and of Susanne Curchod, Gibbon's early
love. She was introduced young to salon life in Paris, and early
displayed ungovernable vanity, and much of the _sensibilite_ of the
time, that is to say, an indulgence in sentiment which paid equally
little heed to morality and to good sense. Her marriage was one purely
of convenience: and while her husband, of whom she seems to have had no
reason whatever to complain, obtained some wealth by it, she herself
secured a very agreeable position, inasmuch as the king of Sweden
pledged himself either to maintain M. de Stael in the Swedish embassy at
Paris, or to provide for him in other ways. She approved the early
stages of the Revolution, but was shocked at the deposition and death of
the king and queen. Whereupon she fled the country. Before she was
thirty she had written various books, _Lettres sur J. J. Rousseau_,
_Defense de la Reine_, _De l'Influence des Passions_, and other pieces
of many kinds. When the influence of Napoleon became paramount, Madame
de Stael, who had returned to Paris, found herself in an awkward
position, for she was equally determined to say what she chose, and to
have gallant attentions paid to her, and Napoleon would not comply with
either of her wishes. She, therefore, had to leave France, but not
before she had published her first romance, _Delphine_, and a book on
literature. She now travelled for some years in Germany and Italy in the
company of Benjamin Constant, who was the object of one of her numerous
accesses of affection. _Corinne_, her principal novel, and her greatest
work but one, appeared in 1807, her book _De l'Allemagne_ being
suppressed in Paris, whither she had returned, but which she soon had to
leave again. The Restoration gave her access once more to France, and
enabled her to resume possession of property which had been unjustly
seized, but she died not long afterwards, in 1817. Her _Dix Annees
d'Exil_ and her _Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise_ were
published posthumously, the latter being one of her chief works. She had
married secretly, in 1812, a M. de Rocca, a man more than young enough
to be her son.
The personality of Madame de Stael is far from being attractive owing to
her excessive vanity, which disgusted all her contemporaries, and the
folly which made a woman, who had never been beautiful, continue, long
after she had ceased to be young, to give herself in life and literature
the airs of a newest Heloise. But she is a very important figure in
French literature. Part of her influence, as represented by the book _De
l'Allemagne,_ does not directly concern us in this chapter; this part
was mainly, but not wholly, literary. It was helped and continued,
however, by her other works, especially by her novels, and, above all,
by _Corinne_. This influence, put briefly, was to break up the
narrowness of French notions on all subjects, and to open it to fresh
ideas. Her political and general works led the way to the nineteenth
century, side by side with Chateaubriand's, but in an entirely different
sense. What Chateaubriand inculcated was the sense of the beauty of
older and simpler times, countries, and faiths which the
self-satisfaction of the eighteenth century had obscured; what Madame de
Stael had to impress were general ideas of liberalism and progress to
which the same century, in its crusade against superstition and its
rather short-sighted belief in its own enlightenment, was equally blind.
_Delphine_, which is in the main a romance of French society only,
written before the author had seen much of any other world except a
close circle of French emigrants abroad, exhibits this tendency much
less than _Corinne_, which was written after that German visit--by far
the most important event of Madame de Stael's life. Here, as Rousseau
had inculcated the story of nature and savage life, as Chateaubriand
was, at the same time, inculcating the study of Christian antiquity and
the middle ages, so Madame de Stael inculcated the cultivation of
aesthetic emotions and impulses as a new influence to be brought to bear
on life. Her style, though not to be spoken of disrespectfully, is, on
the whole, inferior to her matter. It is full of the drawbacks of
eighteenth-century _eloges_ and academic discourses, now tawdry, now
deficient in colour, flexibility, and life, at one time below the
subject, at another puffed up with commonplace and insincere
declamation. Yet when she understood a subject, which was by no means
invariably the case, Madame de Stael was an excellent exponent; and when
her feelings were sincere, which they sometimes were, she was a fair
mistress of pathos.
A considerable number of names of writers of fiction during the later
republic and the empire have a traditional place in the history of
literature, and some of their works are still read, but chiefly as
school-books. Madame de Genlis, the author of _Les Veillees du Chateau_,
and also of many volumes of ill-natured, and not too accurate, memoirs
and reminiscences, continued the moral tale of the eighteenth century,
and in _Mlle. de Clermont_ produced work of merit. Fievee, a journalist
and critic of some talent, is remembered for the pretty story of the
_Dot de Suzette_. Madame de Souza, in her _Adele de Senanges_ and other
works, revived, to a certain extent, the style of Madame de la Fayette.
_Ourika_ and _Edouard_, especially the latter, preserve the name of
Madame de Duras. Madame Cottin, in _Malek Adel_, _Elizabeth_ or _Les
Exiles de Siberie_, etc., combined a mild flavour of romance with
irreproachable moral sentiments. A vigorous continuator of the
licentious style of novel, with hardly any of the literary refinement of
its eighteenth-century contributors, but with more fertility of incident
and fancy, was Pigault Lebrun, the forerunner of Paul de Kock. Madame de
Krudener, a woman of remarkable history, produced a good novel of
sentiment in _Valerie_.
[Sidenote: Xavier de Maistre.]
Two novelists, singularly different in idiosyncrasy, complete what may
be called the eighteenth-century school. Xavier de Maistre, younger
brother of the great Catholic polemist, Joseph de Maistre, was born at
Chambery, in 1763. He served in the Piedmontese army during his youth,
and his most famous work, the _Voyage autour de ma Chambre_, was
published in 1794. The national extinction of Savoy and Piedmont, at
least the annexation of Savoy and the effacement of Piedmont, made
Xavier de Maistre an exile. He joined his brother in St. Petersburg,
served in the Russian army, fought, and was wounded in the Caucasus;
attained the rank of general, and died at St. Petersburg, in 1852, at
the great age of eighty-nine. His work consists of the _Voyage_, an
account of a temporary imprisonment in his quarters at Turin, obviously
suggested by Sterne, but exceedingly original in execution; _Le Lepreux
de la Cite d'Aoste,_ in which the same inspiration and the same
independent use of it are noticeable; and _Les Prisonniers du Caucase_,