Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

Georg Brandes

Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

EAN 8596547043027

DigiCat, 2022

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THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE

THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE

THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE

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IN SIX VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED

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THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE

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NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

MCMVI

To the Memory

of

HANS BRÖCHNER

ROUSSEAU

INTRODUCTION

It is my intention in the present work to trace the outlines of a psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century by means of the study of certain main groups and movements in European literature. The stormy year 1848, a historical turning-point, and hence a break, is the limit to which I purpose following the process of development. The period between the beginning and the middle of the century presents the spectacle of many scattered and apparently disconnected literary efforts and phenomena. But he who carefully observes the main currents of literature perceives that their movements are all conditioned by one great leading movement with its ebb and flow, namely, the gradual fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the preceding century, and the return of the idea of progress in new, ever higher-mounting waves.

The central subject of this work is, then, the reaction in the first decades of the nineteenth century against the literature of the eighteenth, and the vanquishment of that reaction. This historic incident is of European interest, and can only be understood by a comparative study of European literature. Such a study I purpose attempting by simultaneously tracing the course of the most important movements in French, German, and English literature. The comparative view possesses the double advantage of bringing foreign literature so near to us that we can assimilate it, and of removing our own until we are enabled to see it in its true perspective. We neither see what is too near the eye nor what is too far away from it. The scientific view of literature provides us with a telescope of which the one end magnifies and the other diminishes; it must be so focussed as to remedy the illusions of unassisted eyesight. The different nations have hitherto stood so remote from each other, as far as literature is concerned, that they have only to a very limited extent been able to benefit by each other's productions. For an image of the position as it is, or was, we must go back to the old fable of the fox and the stork. Every one knows that the fox, having invited the stork to dinner, arranged all his dainties upon a flat dish from which the stork with his long bill could pick up little or nothing. We also know how the stork revenged himself. He served his delicacies in a tall vase with a long and slender neck, down which it was easy for him to thrust his bill, but which made it impossible for the fox, with his sharp muzzle, to get anything. The various nations have long played fox and stork in this fashion. It has been and is a great literary problem how to place the contents of the stork's larder upon the fox's table, and vice versâ.

Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the study, the history of the soul. A book which belongs to the literature of a nation, be it romance, drama, or historical work, is a gallery of character portraits, a storehouse of feelings and thoughts. The more momentous the feelings, the greater, clearer, and wider the thoughts, the more remarkable and at the same time representative the characters, so much the greater is the historical value of the book, so much the more clearly does it reveal to us what was really happening in men's minds in a given country at a given period.

Regarded from the merely æsthetic point of view as a work of art, a book is a self-contained, self-existent whole, without any connection with the surrounding world. But looked at from the historical point of view, a book, even though it may be a perfect, complete work of art, is only a piece cut out of an endlessly continuous web. Æsthetically considered, its idea, the main thought inspiring it, may satisfactorily explain it, without any cognisance taken of its author or its environment as an organism; but historically considered, it implies, as the effect implies the cause, the intellectual idiosyncrasy of its author, which asserts itself in all his productions, which conditions this particular book, and some understanding of which is indispensable to its comprehension. The intellectual idiosyncrasy of the author, again, we cannot comprehend without some acquaintance with the intellects which influenced his development, the spiritual atmosphere which he breathed.

The intellectual phenomena which condition, elucidate, and explain each other, fall of themselves into natural groups.

What I shall describe is a historical movement partaking of the form and character of a drama. The six different literary groups it is my intention to represent may be looked on as six acts of a great play. In the first group, the French Emigrant Literature inspired by Rousseau, the reaction begins; but here the reactionary are still everywhere mingled with the revolutionary currents. In the second group, the semi-Catholic Romantic school of Germany, the reaction is on the increase; it is more vigorous and holds itself more aloof from the contemporary struggle for progress and liberty. The third group, consisting of such men as Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais in his strictly orthodox period, Lamartine and Victor Hugo when they (after the restoration of the monarchy) were still mainstays of the Legitimist and clerical party, represents the militant, triumphant reaction. Byron and his English contemporaries form the fourth group. It is this one man, Byron, who produces the revulsion in the great drama. The Greek war of liberation breaks out, a revivifying breeze blows over Europe, Byron falls like a hero in the cause of Greece, and his death makes a tremendous impression on all the productive minds of the Continent. Shortly before the Revolution of July a change of front occurs among the great authors of France; they form the French Romantic school, which is our fifth group, a new Liberal movement on the roll of whose adherents we find such names as Lamennais, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, George Sand, &c. The movement passes from France into Germany, and in that country also Liberal ideas are victorious. The writers forming the sixth and last group which I shall depict, Young Germany, are inspired by the ideas of the Greek war of liberation and the Revolution of July, and, like the French authors, see in Byron's great shade the leader of the Liberal movement. The authors of Young Germany, Heine, Börne, Gutzkow, Ruge, Feuerbach, &c., prepare, together with the contemporary French writers, the great upheaval of 1848.

A household god made of wax, that had been carelessly left standing beside a fire in which precious Campanian vases were bakings began to melt.

It addressed bitter complaints to the element. See, it said, "how cruelly you treat me! To these things you give durability, me you destroy."

But the fire answered: "You have nothing to complain of but your own nature. As for my I am fire, always and everywhere."

W. HEINSE.

THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE

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THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE

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The passage of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century was accompanied in France by social and political disturbances of hitherto unknown force and magnitude. The new seed sown by the great ideas and events of the Revolution at first made little or no growth in literature. It was unable to shoot up, for, with but brief interval between, two destroying tyrannies, the dictatorships of the Convention and of the Empire, passed over France, annihilating all personal freedom as they went. The first terrorism cowed, exiled, or guillotined all whose political colouring did not accurately match the then prevailing shade of popular opinion. Aristocracy, royal family, priests and Girondists alike succumbed to it, and men fled to the quiet of Switzerland or the lonely prairies of North America to escape the fate which had destroyed their nearest and threatened themselves. The second terrorism persecuted, imprisoned, shot, or exiled all who would not submit to being silenced (a silence which might only be broken by cheers for the Emperor). Legitimists and Republicans, Constitutionalists and Liberals, philosophers and poets were crushed under the all-levelling roller, unless they preferred, scattered in every direction, to seek a refuge beyond the boundaries of the empire. No easy matter in those days, for the empire followed swiftly upon their heels, rapidly growing, swallowing Germany and Italy in great gulps, until no place seemed secure from its armies, which overtook fugitives even in Moscow.

During both these great despotisms it was only far from Paris, in lonely country places where he lived a life of death-like stillness, or beyond the frontier, in Switzerland, Germany, England, or North America, that the French man of letters pursued his calling. Only in such places could the independent intellects of France exist, and it is by independent intellects alone that a literature can be founded or developed. The first French literary group of the present century, then, a group brought together from all points of the compass, is distinguished by its oppositionist tendency. I do not mean that its members are united on certain fundamental principles, for they are often utterly at variance, but they are all united by their hatred of the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic autocracy. Whatever they may originally have been, and whatever they become after the restoration of the monarchy, whether literary reformers, reactionary Legitimists, or members of the Liberal Opposition, they are at the beginning of the century one and all opposed to the prevailing order of things. Another thing they all have in common is their difficult position as heirs of the eighteenth century, whose last bequest to them is that Empire against which they protest. Some of them would fain renounce the inheritance and its liabilities, others are ready to accept it if they can repudiate the liabilities, all feel that the intellectual development of the new century must be based upon other assumptions than that of the old. The folding-doors of the nineteenth century open; they stand gazing in intently; they have a presentiment of what they are to see, and believe they see it, and the new shapes itself for each and is interpreted by each according to his gifts and desires. Thus as a body there is something premonitory, precursory about them: they are the bearers of the spirit of the new age.

There was a wider sphere for a literary revival in France than in any other European country, for in France in the eighteenth century literary art had developed into formalism. Social and academic culture had laced it in the iron corset of so-called good taste, into stiff, meagre, regulation proportions. France has long presented the contradiction of being a country with a feverish desire for change in all external arrangements, unable, once it determines to gratify this desire, to keep within the bounds of moderation, and of being at the same time remarkably stable in everything that regards literature—acknowledging authority, maintaining an academy, and placing rule and regularity above everything. Frenchmen had instituted a Republic and overturned Christianity before it occurred to them to dispute the authority of Boileau. Voltaire, who turns tradition upside down and uses tragedy as a weapon against the very powers whose chief support it had been, namely the autocracy and the Church, never ventures to allow his action to last more than twenty-four hours, or to pass in two different places in the same play. He, who has little respect for anything in heaven or earth, respects the uniform caesura of the Alexandrine.

It was another people than the French, a people to whom Voltaire had scornfully wished more wit and fewer consonants, who remodelled literature and re-created poetry, while Frenchmen were overturning political systems and customs. The Germans of that day, of whom the French scarcely knew more than that, in humble, patriarchal submission to their petty princes, they drank their beer, smoked their pipes, and ate their sauer-kraut in the corner by the stove, made far greater conquests in the intellectual world than Frenchmen achieved in the geographical. Of all the nations of Europe none save the Germans had had their literary blossoming time in the eighteenth century. It was the second half of that century which witnessed the notable development of poetry between Lessing and Goethe, and the energetic progress of metaphysics between Kant and Schelling. For in Germany nothing had been free save thought.

The French literature of the beginning of the century is, naturally, influenced by Germany, the more so as the nations now first begin to enter into unbroken intellectual communion. The great upheavals, the wars of the Republic and the Empire, jostled the peoples of Europe together, and made them acquainted with each other. But the men most profoundly influenced by foreign surroundings were those for whom these great events meant long, in some cases life-long, exile. The influence of the foreign spirit, only fleeting as far as the soldier was concerned, was lasting and momentous in the case of the émigré. Exiled Frenchmen were obliged to acquire a more than superficial acquaintance with foreign tongues, if for no other reason, in order to be able to give French lessons in the country of their adoption. It was the intelligent émigré who diffused knowledge of the character and culture of other lands throughout France, and in seeking a general designation for the literary phenomena of this period, it would scarcely be possible to find a better than the one I have adopted: The Emigrant Literature.

The name must not be taken for more than it is—a name—for it would be foolish not to class along with the works of émigrés proper, kindred writings by authors who, though they did not live in Paris, perhaps not even in France, yet were not exiles; and, on the other hand, some of the works written by émigrés are distinctly not products of the renovating and fertilising literary movement, but belong to the anti-liberal literature of the Restoration period.

Nevertheless the name may fitly be applied to the first group of French books which ushers in the century. The émigré\ as already remarked, inevitably belongs to the opposition. But the character of his opposition varies, according to whether it is the Reign of Terror or the Empire to which he objects, and from the tyranny of which he has escaped. Frequently he has fled from both, in which case the motive of his opposition is of a compound nature. He possibly sympathised with the Revolution in its early stage as curtailing the power of the monarchy, and his desire may be a moderate republic; in this case he will be inspired by a more passionate ill-will towards the Empire than towards the old Reign of Terror. Whatever the nature of the compound, a double current is discernible in the emigrant literature.

Its direct reaction is against certain mental characteristics of the eighteenth century, its dry rationalism, its taboo of emotion and fancy, its misunderstanding of history, its ignoring of legitimate national peculiarities, its colourless view of nature, and its mistaken conception of religions as being conscious frauds. But there is also an unmistakable undercurrent in the direction of the main stream of the eighteenth century; all the authors carry on the great war against petrified tradition, some only in the domain of literature, others in each and every intellectual domain. They are all daring, enterprising natures, and for none of them has the word Liberty lost its electrifying power. Even Chateaubriand, who in politics and religion represents the extreme Right of the group, and who in some of his writings is positively reactionary, takes "Liberty and Honour" as his motto; which explains his finally going over to the Opposition. The double current is everywhere discernible, in Chateaubriand, in Sénancour, in Constant, in Mme. de Staël, in Barante, Nodier, &c., and to this subtle correlation of reaction and progress I shall draw attention from the first.

In speaking of the spirit of the eighteenth century it is generally Voltaire's name which rises to our lips. It is he who in most men's minds embodies and represents the whole period; and in as far as the émigrés bring about a revulsion against him, they may certainly be said to represent the reaction against the preceding century. Even those among them who are closely related to him intellectually, compulsorily join in the reaction against him, compelled, that is to say, by the spirit of the age; as, for instance, Constant in his book On Religion. But among the writers of the eighteenth century there is one who was Voltaire's rival, who is almost his equal, and whose works, moreover, in a much higher degree than Voltaire's, point to an age far ahead of that in which they were written. This man in many ways inspires the Emigrant Literature, and in as far as it descends from Rousseau, and to a certain extent perpetuates his influence, it may be said to perpetuate the preceding century and the Revolution. It is astonishing to what an extent the great literary movements in all the principal countries of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century were influenced by Rousseau. Among his spiritual progeny in France in the eighteenth century had been men so unlike each other as St. Pierre, Diderot, and Robespierre, and in Germany geniuses and men of talent like Herder, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul. In the rising age he influences, among others, Chateaubriand, Mme. de Staël, and later, George Sand, in France; in Germany, Tieck; and in England, Byron. Voltaire influences minds in general, Rousseau has a special power over productive talents, over authors. These two great men exercised an alternating influence upon posterity well-nigh into our own day, when both have been supplanted by Diderot. At the close of last century, Voltaire yielded his sceptre to Rousseau; fifty years later his name returned to honour in France; and now in some of the most eminent writers of that country—take Ernest Renan as an instance—a twofold intellectual tendency is discernible, something of Rousseau's spirit combined with something of Voltaire's. But it is in the writings of Rousseau alone that the great spiritual streams which flow from other countries into France at the beginning of the nineteenth century have their source, and to Rousseau is it due that the literature produced by Frenchmen living in remote provinces or foreign countries, in spite of its antagonism to the spirit which produced and upheld the imperial despotism, remained in touch with the eighteenth century, and was based upon originally French theories.

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CHATEAUBRIAND

The year 1800 was the first to produce a book bearing the imprint of the new era, a work small in size, but great in significance and mighty in the impression it made. Atala took the French public by storm in a way which no book had done since the days of Paul and Virginia. It was a romance of the plains and mysterious forests of North America, with a strong, strange aroma of the untilled soil from which it sprang; it glowed with rich foreign colouring, and with the fiercer glow of consuming passion. The history of a repressed, and therefore overpowering and fatal love, was depicted upon a background of wild Indian life, the effect of the whole being heightened by a varnish of Roman Catholic piety.

This story of the love and death of a Christian Indian girl was so admired that its principal characters were soon to be seen adorning the walls of French inns in the form of coloured prints, while their waxen images were sold on the quays of Paris, as those of Christ and the Virgin usually are in Catholic countries. At one of the suburban theatres the heroine figured in savage attire with cock's feathers in her hair, and a farce was given at the Théâtre des Variétés in which a school girl and boy, who had eloped, talked of nothing but alligators, storks, and virgin forests in the style of Atala. A parody published under the title of "Ah! là! là!" substituted for the long, gorgeous description of Mississippi scenery an equally lengthy and detailed description of a potato patch—so strange did it seem at that day that an author should devote several pages to the description of natural scenery. But though parodies, jests, and caricatures rained upon the author, he was not to be pitied, such things being symptoms of fame. With one bound he had risen from complete obscurity to the rank of a celebrity. His name was upon all lips, the name of François René de Chateaubriand.

The youngest of ten children, he was born of an ancient and noble house in St. Malo, Brittany. His father was a stern, dry, unsociable and silent man, whose one passion was his pride of race; while his mother, a little, plain, restless, discontented woman, was God-fearing to the highest degree, a church-goer and a patroness of priests. The son inherited a mixture of both natures.

Sternly brought up in a home where, as he himself expressed it, the father was the terror