Landmarks in French Literature

destroyed its creators. After the smoke had rolled away, it became clear that the old régime, with its despotisms and its persecutions, had indeed been abolished for

if men looked at all for inspiration from the Past, it was towards that age which differed most from the age of t

reat Romantic outburst of a generation later; but, in reality, to give him such a title is to misjudge the whole value of his work. For he is essentially a classic; with a purity, a restraint, a measured and accomplished art which would have delighted Boileau, and which brings him into close kinship with Racine and La Fontaine. If his metrical technique is somewhat looser than the former poet's, it is infinitely less loose than the latter's; and his occasional departures from the strict classical canons of versification are always completely subordinated to the controlling balance of his style. In his églogues the beauty of his workmanship often rea

radictory-tendency, which is no less clearly marked and hardly less important-the tendency towards pure Rhetoric. This love of language for its own sake-of language artfully ordered, splendidly adorned, moving, swelling, irresistible-may be seen alike in the torrential sentences of Rabelais, in the sonorous periods of Bossuet, and in the passionate tirades of Corneille. With the great masters of the seventeenth century-Pascal, Racine, La Fontaine, La Bruyère-the two influences met, and achieved a perfect balance. In their work, the most penetrating realism is beautified and ennobled by all the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense. With the eighteenth century, however, a cha

eption of Christianity was the very reverse of that of the eighteenth century. In his Génie du Christianisme and his Martyrs the analytical and critical spirit of his predecessors has entirely vanished; the religion which they saw simply as a collection of theological dogmas, he envisioned as a living creed, arrayed in all the hues of poetry and imagination, and redolent with the mystery of the past. Yet it may be doubted whether Chateaubriand was essentially more religious than Voltaire. What Voltaire dissected in the dry light of reason, Chateaubriand invested with the cloak of his own eloquence-put it up, so to speak, on a platform, in a fine attitude, under a tinted illumination. He lacked the subtle intimacy of Faith. In his descriptions of Nature, too, the same characteristics appear. Compared with Rousseau's, they are far bolder, far richer, composed on a more elaborate and imposin

which he had started was continued in the poems of LAMARTINE. Here there is the same love of Nature, the same religious outlook, the same insistence on the individual point of view; but the tints are less brilliant, the emphasis is more restrained; the rhetorical impulse still dominates, but it is the rhetoric of elegiac tenderness rather than of picturesque pomp. A wonderful limpidity of versification which, while it is always perfectly easy, is never weak, and a charming quietude of sentiment which, however near it may seem to come to the

resources, was a fresh and living instrument of extraordinary power. These writers-as has so often been the case in France-were bound together by a common literary creed. Young, ardent, scornful of the past, dazzled by the possibilities of the future, they raised the standard of revolt against the traditions of Classicism, promulgated a new aesthetic doctrine, and, after a sharp struggle and great excitement, finally succeeded in completely establishing their view. The change

means sweeping. For instance, the numberless minute hard-and-fast metrical rules which, since the days of Malherbe, had held French poetry in shackles, they only interfered with to a very limited extent. They introduced a certain number of new metres; they varied the rhythm of the Alexandrine; but a great mass of petty and meaningless restrictions remained untouched, and no real attempt was made to get rid of them until more than a generation had passed. Yet here, as elsewhere, what they had done was of the highest importance. They had touched the ark of the covenant and they had not been destroyed. They had shown that it was possible to break a 'rule' and yet write good poetry. This explains the extraordinary violence of the Romantic controversy over questions of the smallest detail. When Victor Hugo, in

and destroy the unity of the verse. If the sense demanded the use of such a word, a periphrasis of 'noble' words must be employed instead. Racine had not been afraid to use the word 'chien' in the most exalted of his tragedies; but his degenerate successors quailed before such an audacity. If you must refer to such a creature as a dog, you had better call it 'de la fidélité respectable soutien'; the phrase actually occurs in a tragedy of the eighteenth century. It is clear that, with such a convention to struggle against, no poetry could survive. Everything bold, everything vigorous, everythi

ced. The abolition of the distinction between words that were 'bas' and 'noble' did not at first lead (as might have been expected) to an increase of realism. Rather the opposite took place. The Romantics loved the new words not because they made easier the expression of actual facts, but for their power of suggestion, for the effects of remoteness, contrast, and multiplicity which could be produced by them-in fact, for their rhetorical force. The new vocabulary came into existence as an engine of rhetoric, not as an engine of truth. Nevertheless-and this was the second effect of its introd

of contemporaries to gauge the true significance of new tendencies in art. On the whole, the dramatic achievement of the Romantic School was the least valuable part of their work. Hernani, the first performance of which marked the turning-point of the movement, is a piece of bombastic melodrama, full of the stagiest clap-trap and the most turgid declamation. Victor Hugo imagined when he wrote it that he was inspired by Shakespeare; if he was inspired by anyone it was by Voltaire. His drama is the old drama of the eighteenth century, repainted in picturesque colours; it resembles those gro

ike light from the sun. Nor was his volubility a mere disordered mass of verbiage: it was controlled, adorned, and inspired by an immense technical power. When one has come under the spell of that great enchanter, one begins to believe that his art is without limits, that with such an instrument and such a science there is no miracle which he cannot perform. He can conjure up the strangest visions of fancy; he can evoke the glamour and the mystery of the past; he can sing with exquisite lightness of the fugitive beauti

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en, one asks in amazement, which could animate with such

n that he wished to be judged; he wrote with a very different intention; it was as a philosopher, as a moralist, as a prophet, as a sublime thinker, as a profound historian, as a sensitive and refined human being. With a poet of such pretensions it is clearly most relevant to inquire whether his poetry does, in fact, reveal the high qualities he lays claim to, or whether, on the contrary, it is characterized by a windy inflation of sentiment, a showy superficiality of thought, and a ridiculous and petty egoism. These are the unhappy questions which beset the mature and reflective reader of Victor Hugo's works. To the young and enthusiastic one the case is different. For him it is easy to forget-or even not to observe-what there may be in that imposing figure that is unsatisfactory and second-rate. He may revel at will in the voluminous harmonies of that resounding voice; by turns thrilling with indignation, dreaming in ecstasy, plunging into abysses, and soaring upon unimaginable heights. Be

dinizing, but the genuine intimate feelings of a noble spirit; and he could express them in splendid verse. His melancholy was touched with grandeur, his pessimism with sublimity. In his Mo?se, his Colère de Samson, his Maison du Berger, his Mont des Oliviers, and others of his short reflective poems, he envisions man face to face with indifferent Nature, with hostile Destiny, with poisoned Love, and the lesson he draws is the lesson of proud resignation. In La Mort du Loup, the tragic spectacle of the old wolf driven to bay and killed by the hunters ins

us, amorous, sensuous, charming, unfortunate, and unhappy; and his poetry is the record o

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; and in his longer pieces-especially in the four Nuits-his emotion occasionally rises, grows transfigured, and vibrates with a strange intensity, a long, poignant, haunting note. But doubtless his chief claim to immortality rests upon his exquisite little dramas (both in verse and prose), in which the romance of Shakespeare and the fantasy of Mari

Blas and Marivaux's Vie de Marianne-the spirit was the same; it was the spirit of selection, of simplification, of delicate skill. Both the latter works are written in a prose style of deliberate elegance, and both consist rather of a succession of small incidents-almost of independent short stories-than of one large developing whole. The culminating example of the eighteenth-century form of fiction may be seen in the Liaisons Dangereuses of Laclos, a witty, scandalous and remarkably able novel, concerned with the interacting intrigues of a small society of persons, and revealing on every page a most brilliant and concentrated art. Far more modern, both in its general conception and in the absolute realism of its treatment, was Diderot's La Religieuse; but this masterpiece was not published till some years after the Revolution; and the real honour of having originated the later developments in French fiction-as in so many other branches of literature-belongs undoubtedly to Rousseau. La Nouvelle Hélo?se, faulty as it is as a work of art, with its feeble psychology and loose construction, yet had the

s for dealing adequately with the vast masses of new material was wanting. It is pathetic to watch the romantic novelists trying to infuse beauty and significance into their subjects by means of fine writing, lyrical outbursts, impassioned philosophical dissertations, and all the familiar rhetorical devices so dear to them. The inevitable result was something lifeless, formless, fantastic; they were on the wrong track. The true method for the treatment of their material was not that of rhetoric at all; it was that of realism. This fact was discovered by

; in spite of the electric vigour that runs through his writing, it is formless, clumsy, and quite without distinction; it is the writing of a man who was highly perspicacious, formidably powerful, and vulgar. But, on the other hand, he possessed one great quality which Hugo altogether lacked-the sense of the real. Hugo was most himself when he was soaring on the wings of fancy through the empyrean; Balzac was most himself when he was rattling in a hired cab through the streets o

erly pointless writer; and he would have been altogether at sea in a novel by Henry James. The elusive things that are so important, the indecisive things that are so curious, the intimate things that are so thrilling-all these slipped through his rough, matter-of-fact grasp. His treatment of the relations between the sexes is characteristic. The subject fills a great place in his

e lapses occur quite indiscriminately. Side by side with some detailed and convincing description, one comes upon glaring absurdities; in the middle of some narrative of extraordinary actuality, one finds oneself among hissing villains, disguises, poisons, and all the paraphernalia of a penny novelette. Balzac's lack of critical insight into his own work is one of the most singular of his characteristics. He hardly seems to have known at all wh

ul force that the mere common details of everyday life were filled with drama, that, to him who had eyes to see, there might be significance in a ready-made suit of clothes, and passion in the furniture of a boarding-house. Money in particular gave him an unending theme. There is hardly a character in the whole vast range of his creation of whose income we are not exactly informed; and it might almost be said that the only definite moral that can be drawn from La Comédie Humaine is that the importance of money can never be over-estimated. The classical writers preferred to leave such matters to the imagination of the reader; it was Balzac's great object to leave nothing to the imagination of the reader. By ceaseless effort, by infinite care, by elaborate attention to the minutest details, he would describe all. He

gnities of poverty, the low intrigues of parasites, the long procession of petty agonies that embitter and ruin a life. Over this world of shadow and grime he throws strange lights. Extraordinary silhouettes

chievement, it led the way to its own supersession. The spirit which animated its doctrines was the spirit of progress and of change; it taught that there were no fixed rules for writing well; that art, no less than science, lived by experiment; that a literature which did not develop was dead. Therefore it was inevitable that the Romantic ideal itself should form the stepping-stone for a fresh