Léon Hennique Novel

Théophile Gautier dozing through Racine whilst Rachel holds the stage: could there be a more perfect image of the modern mind exhausted by thought? Its natural calling now, the fresh and logical use of its powers, lies in feeling, in stirring itself up, in fashioning a costume that both reflects and magnifies its restlessness. Ask it to think? It falls asleep.

To do Romanticism justice, without undue harshness or indulgence, we must carefully distinguish the various impulses that shaped, directed, and bounded its course.

It emerges around 1810 and fades around 1850. Yet not everything within these dates belongs to it. Balzac springs from deeper roots, cuts through the movement, and extends far beyond it in both directions. Joubert safeguards for Tomorrow what Yesterday’s traditions held dear. Stendhal stands almost aloof from his age, a man of the future. With certain poets, one work is romantic whilst another is synthetic: witness Goethe’s Werther and Faust, or Vigny’s Chatterton and Les Destinées. Even Victor Hugo, standard-bearer of the new school, remains a vast, chaotic compendium of every formula and every opinion.

How then to distinguish what truly belongs to Romanticism from what it shares with schools ancient or yet to come?

A more pointed question suggests the answer: what struck the generation of 1820 as novel? Not the depths of passion but their outward show, their visible expression. Not God’s profound, metaphysical essence but His external face: nature. The immediately visible and tangible, or more philosophically, nature’s impact on man through feeling, man’s response to nature through expression. This is Romanticism. It cannot hold its tongue and gather itself, cannot stay still to think more clearly, for it does not think at all. It feels and speaks, or rather shouts. We humans habitually close our eyes when the mind is at work, shielding its independence, sparing it ambient distractions, turning our gaze inward. The proof that Romanticism doesn’t think? It keeps its eyes open. It flings them wide, naively, like a waking child or like that primordial man whose senses Buffon depicts stirring one by one to life. It gazes, wonders, delights, content with mere appearances, never probing beneath the surface for hidden truth. Life fascinates it: life in motion with its shifting hues, everything that moves and passes.

Look at the poets it champions from the past, those it instantly celebrates in the present.

The eighteenth century was one protracted death. But death nurtures life. Whilst sensual France dozed smiling amid her splendid degradations, honouring neither past nor future, that very future was taking shape according to the grand traditions of the past. Newton, following Kepler, had formulated the law of gravitation; Kant was born; Germany’s philosophers would soon articulate the ideas destined to fertilise our century. Sometimes Life works through death’s own agents to return to its wellsprings. Voltaire reveals Newton to the French, thereby serving that scientific spirit which, though he knew too little and too poorly to do more than make it say No, would later, once liberated, pursue the noble path towards luminous certainties. In Voltaire’s hands, Science, which demands above all silence and reverence, yielded only the noise of scorn and vanity. From England Voltaire also imported Shakespeare: an entertaining barbarism, an amusing oddity. He understood Shakespeare no better than Newton, and it galled him to see the spirited response shown by those of his nation to the great Philosopher and great Poet exceed his prescribed limits. Yet this was mere enthusiasm. What could eighteenth-century Frenchmen truly appreciate in Shakespeare? Had they genuinely loved and grasped Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they would have ceased being eighteenth-century Frenchmen. They shelved Letourneur’s translation between Crébillon and Florian, decidedly preferring these, finding one more tragic, the other more touching.

The nineteenth century dawns and the Romantics claim Shakespeare as their own. Did the Cénacle understand him better than the salons? Scarcely! At least, scarcely more deeply. They read him with fresher eyes, not keener ones. In his theatre they saw Motion, the weight of stage machinery, daggers and poison vials, blood spilt, dark cloaks, dramatic intrigue: pure surface. The quasi-divine elements of Shakespeare’s genius slipped past his imitators unnoticed.

Would you have the facts speak? Consider Shakespeare’s influence on Hugo’s dramas, then read his book on William Shakespeare: procedural questions of form, platitudes about ideas and passions in general, historical observations, pretexts for railing against old rules. Let us now draw from Goethe:

“All those presentiments about man and destiny that had haunted me since childhood with vague disquiet, I find in Shakespeare explained and fulfilled; he illuminates every mystery for us, though one cannot say where the key to the riddle lies.”

Goethe, at home with German dramatic movement, isn’t sidetracked by this aspect of English drama. He penetrates to the essence: what he seeks in a poet is the nature of his governing ideas. He loves Shakespeare because Hamlet‘s author suffers from the same sublime affliction that torments Faust‘s creator. Both are possessed by causes, and their symbols are beautiful precisely as the vestments of Truth. Yet Goethe, whose poetic gift was crowned by critical awareness, however much he reveres Shakespeare’s greatness, knows its limits: Shakespeare illuminates every mystery without yielding the riddle’s key. Put differently, he halts where God would begin. It is only there that the unmatched insight of Shakespeare comes to an end, like a spark swallowed by a brazier’s blaze. I may have overlooked something: he is further constrained by his art’s boundaries, that unconscious art, the Dramatic Art that freezes the central fiction round which passion, yearning to soar free, wheels captive.

A poet one might still cite even after Goethe, M. Théodore de Banville, made this observation: “Of course I worship Shakespeare, and that scarcely does him justice; for me he is the sovereign spirit of poetic art, and I understand why Berlioz invoked him like a father in his romantic agonies. Yet every fiction, every dramatised event put upon the stage suffers from holding far less interest than the embellishments the poet weaves around it. While the movements of the human soul he captures remain eternally varied and surprising, the events themselves stay fixed, tyrannising us with their stubborn plots.” Shakespeare tried repeatedly to escape this shackle, in his enchanted comedies, for instance, and in Hamlet, which predictably enough has been called insufficiently theatrical. His audience, that grave and violent English public who delight in melancholy so long as you relieve it with outrageous clowning, all the funnier for being delivered deadpan, didn’t always follow him into these bold experiments. More often than not, Shakespeare had to bow to theatrical convention and groundling taste: they cramped his style. Looking back across barely half a century, we find both Shakespeare and Racine pushing against the boundaries of their art and discovering its limitations. Shakespeare would feel his unified dramatic conception brutally constraining the natural exuberance of his genius, whilst the sheer machinery of theatre perhaps threatened to overwhelm his thought. Racine would wither in the increasingly thin air surrounding him, finding no foothold in theatrical apparatus (having abolished it), his thought laid too bare, his focus narrowed too exclusively to the logical progression of passions, until his work lost substance and simply evaporated. One might have hoped that the French genius which produced Racine, upon discovering Shakespeare, would, without sacrificing its native qualities or descending to imitation, seize upon his inspired notion of enlarging dramatic conception to receive the world in all its richness. One might have hoped it would, without coarsening that conception, give it some visual dimension to satisfy the eye whilst keeping the mind engaged. But no such thing happened.

For this to occur, the leaders of the Romantic movement would have needed Goethe’s fundamental concern with first principles. Then, undistracted by Shakespeare’s scenic freedoms (so novel to them), they might have remained true to Latin sensibility whilst adding flesh-and-blood humanity to pure passion. But the Romantics possessed the souls of children, children playing truant from school. They grabbed at Shakespeare’s freedoms as yet another excuse to rebel against Rule and Order. His humanity they left behind, putting onstage instead hollow puppets with neither body nor soul, who gesticulate and declaim in magnificent costumes.

Movement: that’s all they took from Shakespeare. The impulse to movement came from elsewhere entirely, and what an appalling gap between cause and effect! This impulse, call it Sentiment, reached the Romantics through Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

I suggested that Rousseau restored the Christian taste for tears to the modern world. True enough in the long run, but not quite accurate in the immediate sense. Rousseau no more knows how to weep than Voltaire knows how to laugh. Voltaire sneers; Rousseau whimpers. Voltaire counterfeits Joy, Rousseau counterfeits Sorrow. Yet the whimpering of La Nouvelle Héloïse silenced the sneering of Candide because the distant future demanded gravity. The world struck serious poses long before it felt serious emotions. Perhaps it mesmerised itself with posturing until the gesture conjured up genuine feeling. But the pose went far beyond any authentic expression of sincere emotion. Our century opens with a vast wail of anguish, exhaled by young men: wild-haired young men, pale and fever-eyed, young men whom the reborn world courts with smiles but who prefer desolate places and ruins, who summon storms and dare them, never dropping their roles as exiles, pirates, outcasts, rebels. And what lies beneath all this despair? A physical reaction, a dark memory, but above all playacting. We have seen how the seventeenth century convinced man too thoroughly of his insignificance. Pascal declared: “If he boasts, I humble him; if he humbles himself, I exalt him…” But Pascal spoke mainly to posterity; his contemporaries ignored him. Man took his Poets and Doctors at their word. He accepted that he was vile and weak, then spent a century getting revenge on God and himself through actual vileness and weakness, through dissipation, laughter, debauchery and madness. Living thus, he grew frayed and frantic, until after his hundred years came a crisis of vanity and savagery: he deified the Reason that Scripture had ridiculed and unleashed the Terror. Then fear of his own handiwork left him trembling in darkness. Sick of laughter, he had wanted gravity and got fury instead. Before achieving true seriousness, he had to endure the nightmare of recent memories. He felt horror, not remorse; he wouldn’t simply accept that tyranny was his punishment, wouldn’t admit he had half-aborted the Revolution through Terror. He stayed rebellious, but only in a theatrical way. Half-grasping the truth and falsehood in Rousseau’s notorious maxim “Man is born good; society corrupts him²⁷,” he made a show of resenting the society that had corrupted him, using this as licence to corrupt himself further through the cult of despair. No passion is more pernicious, more inhuman, more diabolical than this.

Despair speaks in Nevers; humanity answers with Always. How different was that Christian sorrow which Contrition demands: that sorrow reaped as Joy, that sorrow which brings man low only to lift him higher, which lets him plumb his own abyss only to speed his ascent. Modern man paid dearly for daring to abandon Contrition; he kept, as punishment, its initial grief but forfeited its final joy. Despair feeds on itself and breeds only death. Yet how despicable this moral degradation when it lacks even deep sincerity! The Christians’ Satan, who roars in Paradise Lost:

Evil, be my God!

who replies to Eloa when she damns herself to save him and asks if he is at least happy:

… Plus triste que jamais!

[… More wretched than ever!]

This Satan is sincere in his despair; eternity stretches behind and before him, eternity crushes his guilty head, and if his caress wounds, it is because his laughter is a moan. Manfred’s despair is merely the hypochondriac fit of a man prone to such attacks, who writes almost exclusively in their grip, with a certain naïveté, less to court notoriety²⁸ than to purge himself, to free the mind from its darker hauntings. Yet this same man relishes life with violence and knows hours of frank merriment. Every sensual pleasure captures him: novel spectacles, luxury, love, and glory besides. Why then does he write only when despair gnaws at him? Because he worships it, because he perpetually sins in his soul against Love and Joy. But still, how unnatural! Why commit this dismal sin? The explanation seems so inadequate to the phenomenon that Lord Byron’s contemporaries couldn’t fathom it and concocted romantic explanations that posterity has mocked. Even Goethe swallowed this penny-dreadful romance and enshrined it in his essay on Manfred²⁹. The passage bears repeating, as it shows so perfectly that even those swept by the same influences of that turbulent hour, the first light of the hundred years ahead, would have thought Byron’s despair contrived without personal sins and sorrows to explain it.

“In this tragedy we find the quintessence of the most astonishing talent, born to consume itself. Lord Byron’s life and poetry scarcely admit fair and balanced judgement. He has confessed his torments often enough; he has painted his anguish repeatedly, yet hardly a soul exists that feels for these unbearable sufferings! He is, truly, haunted by two women whose phantoms dog him everywhere, and who in this piece too fill the principal roles: one as Astarte; the other, bodiless and invisible, merely a voice. Here’s the tale of the ghastly event that ended the first one’s life. Lord Byron, young and bold, won a Florentine lady’s heart; the husband discovered their affair and murdered his wife; but the assassin was found dead that same night in the street, and suspicion fell on no one. Lord Byron fled Florence, and these spectres have hounded him ever since.

This melodramatic incident gains credibility from his countless allusions to it in his poems, as when, turning his gaze inward, he applies to himself the fatal tale of the Spartan king. Pausanias, the Lacedaemonian general, won fame through his crucial victory at Plataea, but later lost his countrymen’s trust through arrogance, stubbornness, and secret dealings with his nation’s enemies. This man brought upon himself the cry of innocent blood that pursued him to his grave. For whilst commanding the allied Greek fleet on the Black Sea, he burned with violent desire for a Byzantine maiden; he finally secured her from her parents after lengthy resistance, and she was to be brought to him by night. She begged, from modesty, that the slave douse the lamp, and whilst groping in darkness, knocked it over. Pausanias, jolted awake and fearing an assassin’s attack, grabbed his sword and slew his lover. This ghastly vision thereafter haunted him constantly; her shade pursued him without respite, and he called futilely on gods and priests’ exorcisms for relief.

The poet who plucks such a scene from antiquity to make his own and mine for tragic imagery must surely have a lacerated heart.”

What might be vile in Goethe’s lending his august name to these slanderous legends is somewhat softened by Byron’s silence. Charged with murder, he never protested. He rather enjoyed letting these bloodstained fables cluster round his fame. The English mood, ever attuned to the tragic chord, cannot alone explain this trait in Byron. It carries a personal note in which nearly every poet of that moment would recognise the amplified echo of their own cry. The prevailing taste for rebellion among this generation alone accounts for it. At the heart of rebellion lies little of substance—chiefly the rhetoric of Rousseau.

His two propositions, one poisoning the other: pride in being born good has curdled into toxic vanity for man corrupted by society. There’s Child-Harold’s entire kit and Lara’s vessel’s whole freight. “We’d be good away from society: let’s escape!” So they cry, and fancy they escape it, through space and time, fleeing homeland for the past. Hence that endless armada of poet-ships, sailing every direction towards every wilderness: the New World, Greece, Jerusalem, the Orient. Chateaubriand, Byron, Shelley, Lamartine, Gautier, Nerval, and more besides! I will grant this stampede contains something of genius’s noble, natural instinct to shun inferior company. Lamartine wrote: “Every Poet creates within his soul a solitude to hear God.” Yes, within the soul! But is it truly the soul’s solitude Harold seeks? I suspect he flees himself, seeking instead some spectacle to distract him from the infinite yearning in his soul. And there’s truth even in slander: the poet cannot help it if his cherished tales of woe remain merely tales. He is a man of action who settles for dreams only when action fails. In short, save for those cowardices of heart and flesh that would surely hold him back, he would prefer experiencing to narrating the crimes he recounts. At least he possesses this reality: private relish. This isn’t about that ancient quarrel, long settled, whether one must be capable of the horrors one depicts to depict them well. We are examining a man, man before poet, crafting hideous pictures where evil wears beauty’s masks: generosity, nobility, valour. This poet clearly savours these pictures; clearly too the poem’s conception sprang from sensations he felt here or there, on Lake Geneva in a storm, in Venice during some tragicomic carnival scene. To devise and arrange the developments and crises of his poem or drama, he needed only to drive to their ultimate conclusions his imaginary yet genuine feelings, those feelings that convulsed his soul when he wondered, intoxicated by the fumes of his genius and the electricity of the tempest: “Given omnipotence, what would I do to my enemies, to the world?” He draped the answer to his rage in the fabric of his fancy and watched his heroes stride through his dream. Yes, the slanders contain truth: if not in deed, then in thought, Byron is that criminal from whom his age recoiled in horror.

Shakespeare and Rousseau, then: these are the forebears who inspired romanticism from the past³⁰. In the present, it hails four poets: Byron and Walter Scott, Chateaubriand and Goethe.

In Byron, at least, the poetic sensibility could admire what was most vital and youthful in him: that tremendous outpouring of life which the poet of Don Juan revealed, though no more successfully than any translator might. By embracing Walter Scott, Romanticism betrayed its secret and true inclinations, showing where its natural sympathies would lead once it finally dropped its theatrical mask. Walter Scott reduces to ‘good sense’ all the feelings that stirred his age. Yet these feelings, once reduced to good sense, or rather to mere ‘commonplace’, shrink back into their original void. A single quality survives in Walter Scott: he doesn’t think, he imagines crudely and vulgarly, he turns history into absurd fable; he lacks ingenuity, good humour, and the power to terrify; his characters are neither ideal abstractions nor living beings, not even phantoms; he knows nothing of love or any passion³¹. But he has the picturesque, and that alone suffices to win universal acclaim. Scott brought not one fresh idea, yet he possessed a certain feeling for nature whose very falseness charmed his contemporaries. That turbulent landscape forming the backdrop to his trite drama must have particularly delighted the devotees of Lara, and Lara himself, who proclaimed Walter Scott the greatest poet of the age. The scenery eclipsed the drama and pleased as the natural and fitting stage for the drama of rebellion unfolding in every soul. But forgotten or remembered, the dramatic interest with which Scott contents himself and serves up to us remains thoroughly banal and bourgeois. His heroes are commonplace nobodies; their griefs, their joys, their ambitions, their ‘circumstances’ equally so. The glory Romanticism heaped upon such a poet augured its own dismal future. Through this glorification, Romanticism admitted how shallow was its appetite for the extraordinary, how this ideal, satisfied with mere façade, cheerfully tolerated the dreariest platitudes of mind and heart, how its hunger for novelty settled quite comfortably for the most threadbare conventions. Settled for them, indeed, with a telling preference that reveals much about the sincerity of all its rebellions. Romanticism happily delegates to trees and rocks the task of protesting against God: privately, it finds things perfectly acceptable as they are. So when the landscape loses its charm, when this scenery (lavished as it is, it won’t stay fresh for long) grows stale, when we are thoroughly sick of these crumbling castles, these savage peaks, these wild trees that writhe their branches like accursed arms against a blood-soaked sky, when we have had quite enough, anywhere and everywhere, of the lyrical pirate ship, the picturesque medieval guardhouse, the dramatic ruined keep, what remains is the drama itself. And what is this drama? It is neither passion nor humanity. It is a childish tangle of violent yet hollow incidents, a pointless inflation to absurdity of ordinary feelings. It is, frankly, nothing whatsoever, and with this people will make do by refreshing it through two recipes, the trade secrets of two Schools: the School of Good Sense and the School of the Thesis^(TN1). Both will claim to accept life as it is, and both will falsify it. Both will lose all notion of Beauty and preach only usefulness. Good Sense (we should really say ‘commonplace’) will magnify life’s ugliness, dreariness and banality. It will fashion from them a chimera more fantastical by far than Mohammed’s Paradise. Having arranged its world, imaginary, thank heaven! (though it doesn’t know it), so that one cannot bear to live there by habit, let alone endure the three hours of a play, it will solemnly declare, with a sincerity that provides splendid if unintentional comedy, that “things aren’t so bad; that happiness is possible when one knows one’s limits; that there’s even cause for pride and merriment; that imagination is dispensable, a faculty one painlessly forgoes; that provided one lives without dreams or reason, without heart or mind, without character or temperament, one completes the great journey unperturbed.”

Et si les choses vont de la bonne façon
Nous pourrons nous payer le luxe d’un garçon.
……………………………………………………………………
O père de famille, ô Poëte, je t’aime!

[And if things go the proper way
We can afford to have a boy.
……………………………………………………………
O paterfamilias, O Poet, how I adore thee!]

The Thesis, too, will start by magnifying the world’s ugliness, but with far less optimism. It will insist that ugly isn’t beautiful; that sad isn’t cheerful; that everything around us is going wrong; that society is desperately sick; that we grievously wrong children by sorting them into legitimate and illegitimate according to their parents’ conduct; that it’s equally deplorable when a good man whose wife has indulged her whims remains devastated, and so forth, proposing remedies for all these ills. These approaches, as alien to art (despite the remarkable skill of clever practitioners) as the surveyor’s chain and theodolite to da Vinci’s palette and brush, or as the shouts of speculators and stockjobbers to the harmonies of the Pastoral Symphony, might at least have carried some social and political-economic weight. Unfortunately, all these society’s physicians and bone-setters proved mere quacks whose remedies lacked even the potency of snake oil. So their work, to which I don’t even attribute literary ambitions, will leave no mark on sociology. The other school, by contrast, somehow, no doubt through talent’s unconquerable virtue, despite every effort to crush it, and perhaps too through the hidden irony of its dream, produced works that, while not beautiful, deserve respect. M. Émile Augier’s name ranks among the most estimable in official French literature.

It seems paradoxical yet is true that these two dramatists, whose every tendency opposes the characteristic leanings within the Romantic movement, M. Augier and M. Dumas fils, have precisely laid bare the essence of those tendencies, the emptiness concealed beneath all that sumptuous drapery. They had supplanted profound classical psychology: when they fell away, nothing remained—that nothing from which Good Sense and the Thesis fashioned their dramas.

But alongside Byron and Scott, as I was saying, Romanticism also acclaimed Chateaubriand and Goethe.

In Chateaubriand, as in Goethe, we find two distinct personalities. The Werther is not written by the same man who gave us Faust. The René does not come from the pen that wrote Le Génie du Christianisme. We shall rediscover Faust and Le Génie du Christianisme at the wellspring of the great modern Synthesis. Werther and René belong to Romanticism. Are such distinctions mere caprice? Go back and read them anew. The moonstruck, mawkish lover of Charlotte proves as unbearable to modern sensibilities as they find compelling interest and profound satisfaction in mastering, to borrow Goethe’s own phrase, all the mysteries he secreted within the Second Faust. The contrast is perhaps less stark between Chateaubriand’s corresponding works. Admittedly, much of his magnum opus has aged, whilst certain passages in René remain perpetually exquisite. Perhaps we ought to have compared René not with Le Génie but with the Mémoires d’outre-tombe, whose prose still pulses with life and stands as the Master’s most enduring monument to style and humanity. Yet it is in Le Génie, in Les Martyrs and in Le Pèlerinage that the mystical impulse resonates, and through this impulse Chateaubriand’s spirit intuited what lay ahead. In René we find, still! only a rebel, both feebler and less tempestuous than his Byronic brethren. Even his response to nature rings more studied than genuine, and Chateaubriand himself confessed something worth noting: “Too absorbed by an artificial nature, we miss nature’s true face.” Werther is likewise a rebel, the feeblest, most dispiriting and most pernicious of the lot. Both books are steeped in despair: the tally has been made of how many readers took their own lives, and I have already observed that death is despair’s inevitable terminus. Yet of these two towering geniuses, who together form the perfect Janus of the Modern Spirit, Romanticism grasped and cherished precisely these two flawed works in which neither had fully articulated the revelations dwelling within them. Mark me well: I do not claim that only these two works by Goethe and Chateaubriand were known. Everything they uttered echoed far and wide, achieving fame. At the dawn of the century, they stand as deities who exact reverence and confound the critics. But it was through these two works above all that they wielded their tremendous influence upon their immediate age: the rest spoke to posterity. When contemporaries read Faust, they do so without comprehension and, like Byron (who knew only the First Faust), merely to quarry material for drama. Should they press further, they soon falter, and if they follow Goethe to Helen’s feet, they stand transfixed by pagan beauty, instantly embrace its symbol (limited though it is), mimic it, adopt it as their ideal, never suspecting that for Goethe this was but one step in his sublime ascent towards Beautiful Truth. They never guess that Goethe was an initiate. They remain ignorant of the distant beacon guiding his universal quest, of the burning metaphysical and scientific faith that anchors this vast tapestry of Legends, Faust. Pronouncements such as these remained utterly opaque to them:

“Ah! if only we understood our brain, its connections with Uranus, the myriad threads criss-crossing within it along which thought darts to and fro! The lightning-flash of thought! Yet we glimpse it only as it strikes! Man is NATURE’S FIRST DIALOGUE WITH GOD. I cannot doubt that this dialogue must continue on another sphere, more sublime, more profound, more comprehensible. For now, we lack a thousand forms of knowledge. First comes self-knowledge, then follow the others… Perhaps knowledge must remain fragmentary on a planet which, thrown off course in its solar orbit, renders all reflection incomplete, requiring faith to supply what’s missing… Where science suffices, faith becomes redundant; but where science falters, let us not presume to contest faith’s sovereign claims. Beyond this principle, that science and faith exist not to negate but to complete one another, lies only error and confusion…”

Whether Goethe articulates these profound meditations directly, with that majestic simplicity, or entrusts them to Faust, the Romantics remain deaf to his voice. They cherry-pick: Faust holds their attention only whilst Marguerite shares the stage; they desert him when she exits.

Another selection, still more revealing of which influences the Romantics could absorb and which surpassed their grasp, is their preference for Byron over Shelley. This staggering injustice requires a moment’s pause to remember that Byron and Shelley were exact contemporaries, intimate friends, their works composed in the same years. Why did Byron achieve instant celebrity whilst Shelley³², at least in France, remained virtually unknown until a decade ago? Simply because Shelley belonged to his age neither in his cast of mind nor in his mode of expression. Like Pascal, from whom he seems worlds apart, Shelley is our contemporary. Not that his work lacks flaws. I mean, not that it perfectly aligns with our present convictions. But his very errors spring from partial truths, from the interplay of evolving verities. His antipathy to religion, broadly speaking, strikes a rather theatrical note that jars: “O religion! fertile monster that stocks the earth with demons, hell with men and heaven with slaves!” Yet in his day, such antipathy had its enlightened aspect, for society’s worst afflictions indeed stemmed from the crushing strictures imposed by Christianity in its death throes. His rhetoric overstates and rather undermines his actual position, which remains sound and salutary insofar as it voices the pressing need for spiritual liberation. Moreover, Shelley, unlike those poets besotted with grand and thunderous retreats, understands the only solitude worth having, that of the soul. Such phrases recur throughout his verse: “…until there dawned within my soul the consciousness of my solitude.” “…He felt his solitude return.” Finally, Shelley stands at the threshold of those uncharted realms of thought where glimmers the still-nebulous vision of mysterious beliefs, humanity’s ancient yet utterly modern faith. He senses the vitality in all things: “I have heard kindly sounds emerge from many a tongue not human.” He trusts in correspondences and anticipates Swedenborg: “O blessed earth, heaven made real!” He proclaims a gospel of human dignity, self-sufficient and declaring that contemplation of eternal rewards and punishments adds nothing to our inherent nobility: “Within their own hearts the good shall always find that fire of hope which made them great…”

All this speaks to our present moment, all this rests upon the sole desire man discovers when he searches his soul: the desire for happiness. Shelley eludes the Romantics³³ chiefly in this: he dreams of happiness rather than condemning himself to barren contemplation of his own spectre reflected in the glass of his own wretchedness:

Tum quoque se, postquam est inferna sede receptus, in Stygia spectabat aqua.

[Then, after he had been received into the Underworld, he even began to gaze into the Stygian pool.] ^(TN2)

The Romantics never gazed into their own souls. We need only recall the stock characters they created, already such strangers to us! I’m not speaking of Goethe’s or Byron’s creations. I mean the heroes of Hugo’s dramas and novels: Hernani, Doña Sol, Marion Delorme, Triboulet, and the rest; Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Jean Valjean; I mean Vigny’s Chatterton, Dumas’s Antony, Gautier’s Fortunio, Musset’s Don Paez and Rolla… Their unworldly grace has been praised to the skies. Their speeches are often ravishing, their gestures nearly always as bewitching as their costumes are magnificent. But Banville could never imagine they drew their costumes from their souls, for they never possessed any! I hear their words and see their gestures, yet it galls me that thought never preceded speech, that no heartbeat governs their movements.

Romanticism lacked self-awareness: there’s its sharpest and truest characteristic. Hence its predilection for dramatic form, where poets most readily mask the bankruptcy of their ideas. I will say it once more: Romanticism is a wayward childhood, prone to malice and melancholy, punctuated by fits of mirth and innocence.

We have fallen too much into the habit of embodying it in Victor Hugo. By some unfathomable marvel, poets flocked to him as to an idol rather than a chief, poets whom posterity deems had every bit as much right to lead. Yet all rendered tribute to his genius, all were only too pleased to let him harvest the crop they had sown. Victor Hugo commanded prodigious imaginative and verbal powers, yet he utterly lacked any inner compass of his own. That’s why he could follow every direction with equal ease. His genius accommodated everything, without preference, without those preferences that confine but also anchor a temperament. Diderot, who enjoyed occasional flashes of good sense despite himself and his age, remarked: “One should choose one’s ground and hold to it.” Victor Hugo chose every ground and abandoned them all. A hundred poets inhabit him who together fail to make one. His contemporaries conspired to let him foster the illusion of being the sovereign of poetry. But this very concept of poetic sovereignty is nonsense. There’s neither first nor second in Art; to be is to stand alone, since being consists in saying what no other knows how to say. Geniuses are like women: they admit no ranking. Victor Hugo lays claim to a rank that cannot exist. His originality lies in imitating everyone. He fancied himself foremost in everything? He came second in nearly all. He debuts with Odes that Lefranc de Pompignan might have penned and proceeds by taking from every hand whilst discovering nothing for himself. He apes Shakespeare, Chateaubriand, Byron, Lamartine, Alfred de Vigny, Théophile Gautier, Leconte de l’Isle. Admittedly, he imitates with genius; he possesses the originality of greater abundance than his models; yet he also suffers from slackening every mechanism he handles. No one surpasses his eloquence, but eloquence becomes mere bombast when divorced from firm convictions. What convictions does Hugo hold? He adores Voltaire! He will brazenly yoke that name to Christ’s in a single breath! His philosophical verses amount to catalogues of proper nouns. True, his staggering defects bring staggering virtues in their train. That boldness which permits him to hazard his phrase-making gift at every turn has brought him to the threshold of every insight. Yet his work remains impersonal and bloated: hollow.

Such claims will strike some as reckless: they aren’t made lightly. They will seem to slight genius: they spring from respect for it. Victor Hugo tyrannised his epoch. He mustn’t tyrannise posterity. We must cease believing he realised everything. We must accord him his rightful station as a wondrous craftsman and a poet of the second order.

His contemporaries, in their idolatry, were perhaps more shrewd than humble. They virtually deputised him to bear that hallowed title, the title of Poet, thereby rendering through another the religious homage they couldn’t render in themselves, homage necessary to command the world’s reverence. Yet one poet cast off the shackles of Hugo-worship³⁴. The most perceptive of them all; the sole one to acknowledge being a child amongst all these children with their tragic or pedantic airs, and the sole one haunted by remorse at not being a man. The most perceptive and insouciant of the Romantics, the most joyous, yet also he who raised the most harrowing cries. Musset’s schoolboy jibes at Hugo are well known. These pranks concealed profound insight. I have no wish to inflate Musset’s importance. Greater shares exist than his, though none more pristine. Like his entire generation, he fell prey to Voltaire and Rousseau, yet he alone grasps the source of his malady, and he alone divines the cure, though lacking the fortitude to embrace it. That cure is Poetry’s sincere return, stripped of literary posturing, to the mystical union of religious and scientific understanding. The purity of Musset resides in the human authenticity of his anguish. Amongst the Romantics proper, only this child still discerns human truth beyond the painted masks that leer around him. If they recognise their descent from a century of abomination, deceit, and ennui, they glory in it, they hymn Voltaire. Musset harbours the victim’s loathing for his murderer. He spits at him: “Rejoice, for your spawn are born!” And for these creatures as for himself, alas! he reserves only scorn. He knows them to be, as he is himself, unfit to cherish Truth; yet how this impotence torments him, how revolted he is at being merely what he is! He recognises the hour as poisonous, yearns to flee or conquer it. But how feeble!… he capitulates beforehand. Sickened by Truth as much as by his era and his soul, he settles for drifting through life in utter ignorance. Without pride (what cause for pride?), he owns himself a child of the century, and this admission betrays uncanny acuity. La Confession d’un enfant du siècle isn’t, like Werther, René, or Adolphe, passion’s indulgence in its own negation; it’s the dignified torment of a soul conscious of the chasm between its yearnings and its powers. Werther, René, Adolphe preach cowardice. The Confession merely mirrors anguish and strikes us (an aspect even Musset’s devotees have overlooked) as the masterwork of a piercing and doleful moralist. Musset never departed from the moment and emotions of his Confession, a desolating moment, emotions of helplessness: the awareness of despair. And Musset, who shares many failings and every virtue of the French spirit, proved as logical as that spirit. Powerless to win self-respect through noble exertion, he drew no comfort from self-loathing, and despair drove him to gradual self-destruction. I honour this suicide infinitely more than Hugo’s stately career and venerable twilight. Had Musset, like Hugo, found satisfaction in any counterfeit of Truth, or had he, like Goethe, mustered the valour to probe reality’s depths, he would have embraced life’s duration: he possessed neither such dishonesty nor such courage. His memory lingers, melancholy and enchanting. We cherish his wild merriment all the more knowing it must dissolve into tears, that his songs must expire in this plaint:

Le seul bien qui me reste au monde 
C'est d'avoir quelquefois pleuré.

[The sole blessing left me in this world 
Is having sometimes wept.]

In him alone we cherish that Middle Ages, every bit as mythical and spurious as Hugo’s, yet which refuses to take itself seriously and seems to revel and delight in its own fantastic nature. We readily forgive those romantic flourishes of the Premières Poésies, those liberties with Rhythm and Rhyme. We remember that beneath these whims throbs, despite all, an urgent and vital feeling, a burning hunger to understand and love. This Middle Ages of the Poems, Tales, and Comedies, as capricious as Fantasio himself, remains nonetheless the Middle Ages of those monks whom Rolla envies their capacity for love:

C’est un profond amour qu’au fond de vos calices
Vous buviez à plein cœur, moines mystérieux:
La tête du Sauveur errait sur vos cilices…
Vous aimiez ardemment, ah! vous étiez heureux.

[‘Twas a profound devotion from your chalice-depths
You drank with all your heart, mysterious brothers:
The Saviour’s visage haunted your hair shirts…
You loved with ardour—ah! you knew true happiness.]

And Fantasio himself, Lorenzaccio too, and every character in those exquisite Proverbes, they are all Don Juan, the Don Juan of Namouna‘s miraculous lines…

Musset and Lamartine have far better claim than Hugo to represent Romanticism at its finest³⁵. Hugo thought he had discovered Antithesis: did he not know that it forms the very essence of all art and all vital action? Love, Verse, Thought itself, these are antitheses; telling us so teaches us nothing. It’s a simple truth the Classics already grasped but had the wisdom not to belabour, preferring to reconcile extremes in divine unity rather than perpetuate their ancient quarrel. Yet Hugo chooses this latter path, thinking it novel, and in this he does innovate: against Humanity and Wisdom alike. Lamartine and Musset keep their heads, never severing the bonds of tradition. Lamartine has no love for Rousseau, yet springs from his lineage, and has read Chateaubriand who read Bossuet. Musset loathes Voltaire and Rousseau, yet inherits from them, and has read Marivaux who read Molière. Both, however, remain children. We have established Musset’s temperament: a feverish twenty-year-old child, capable of mirth, yet melancholy at heart. Lamartine shares his youth but as a serene and cheerful child. Our generation treats him shabbily, though not without reason. Schooled by profound and learned Masters, magnificent and sombre, devoted to concentrated, singular Beauties that command themselves, trained in every exacting refinement of craft whilst conversant with the rigorous principles of Science (from which springs the loveliest yet most austere Dream), we are poorly equipped to appreciate Lamartine’s magnificent but unrestrained lyricism, his luminous and princely imagination, natural and unguarded, his genius blissfully ignorant of technique and all learnable things. We would judge more fairly with better memories, recalling the wretched state of French Poetry before Lamartine found his voice. It lay wordless and unfeeling, without rhythm or rhyme, a dead, nameless thing, its ideal lost. Lamartine restored that ideal, breathed life back into it, gave it scope, harmony, amplitude; he provided the expansion Baudelaire needed for his concentration. Our ungrateful generation should remember: it owes Lamartine the very possibility of all subsequent Poets. From him directly it inherits, despite careless passages that court oblivion, verses of incomparable lyricism that still resonate in every cultivated memory.

Quand le souffle divin qui flotte sur le monde
S’arrête sur mon âme ouverte au moindre vent,
Et la fait tout à coup frissonner comme une onde
Où le cygne s’abat dans un cercle mouvant!

Quand d’un ciel de printemps l’aurore qui ruisselle
Se brise et rejaillit en gerbes de chaleur,
Que chaque atome d’air roule son étincelle,
Et que tout sous mes pas devient lumière ou fleur!

Quand tout chante ou gazouille, ou roucoule ou bourdonne,
Que d’immortalité tout semble se nourrir,
Et que l’homme, ébloui de cet air qui rayonne,
Croit qu’un jour si vivant ne pourra plus mourir!

Jéhova ! Jéhova ! ton nom seul me soulage!
Il est le seul écho qui réponde à mon coeur!
Ou plutôt ces élans, ces transports, sans langage,
Sont eux-mêmes un écho de ta propre grandeur!

[When the divine breath that drifts across the world
Alights upon my soul, open to every breeze,
And sets it trembling like a pond
Where swans descend in rippling rings;

When springtime’s dawn comes streaming from the sky,
Breaking and splashing up in sheaves of warmth,
When every mote of air spins its own spark
And all beneath my feet turns light or flower;

When everything sings, warbles, coos or hums,
When all creation seems to feed on deathlessness
And man, bedazzled by this radiant air,
Believes so vital a day shall never die,

Jehovah, Jehovah, thy name alone sustains me!
It is the sole echo that speaks to my heart:
Or rather these surges, these wordless raptures
Are themselves the echo of thy very grandeur…]

[Alphonse de Lamartine, Le cri de l’âme]

A few will hear what I have to say. Though Alfred de Vigny and Baudelaire have walked among us, Lamartine remains, among our illustrious dead, our sole true Poet, the only name that conjures an entire realm of enchantment, nobility, reverie, and Beauty. He alone escapes that threefold affliction of the French temperament: the didactic, the critical, and the ironic. The Poet escapes, if not the man. For there existed a national, superannuated Lamartine who admitted to admiring Ponsard, Delavigne, and Béranger, and this counterfeit Lamartine earned his punishment: the devotion of elderly spinsters. Though he may have had a hand in Jocelyn, he knew nothing of the Méditations, the Harmonies, La Chute d’un Ange, or Raphaël. Lamartine recognised this duality. Here is his defence: “A few stumbling, often wayward steps along an endless path: the same portion falls to all who seek truth or beauty. Strength, years, leisure all desert us. A poet’s days are brief, even in the longest human span.” Yet in his season of song, he stood more conspicuously than any other exempt from inherited mediocrity. He possessed the understanding of Nature in festival. Round his spirit turned a mystical garden, natural paradise itself. Half-veiled, half-languishing with a smile, the languor and smile of self-absorbed sensuality, a woman glides through, her step so harmonious the garden falls under her spell. She harbours no mystery. She is neither the marshalled host nor the ailing child. She radiates light, illuminating everything, a living lightning that lends this admiring nature, whose graceful incarnation she is, her own reflected charm, even the generosity of her greeting. For this garden of gentle dreams holds no terrors, though a cross does stand there, wreathed in flowers. Its shadow brings only refreshing coolness, no dread. This cross casts no pall over this inviting, loving nature with its ever-open embrace, and in this atmosphere of sensuous piety, the Poet prays like one chosen. He prays toward the cross, yet sees it mainly reflected in Elvira’s eyes: a Beatrice who embodies Paradise itself, and it’s divinity realised in human form he worships. One day³⁶ he will admit it: the garden trees and flowering cross will vanish, woman will emerge from her veils and, multiplying, leave the poet’s vision dazzled by a palace of splendid female forms. Beyond the luminous Garden stretches the dismal City. Lamartine won’t venture there. He would rather await death in the Garden…

A heart untroubled by right or wrong. Perhaps only a work of unsparing psychology like Adolphe might slip past this prohibition. That novel hardly qualifies as romantic, save for certain emotional excesses verging on sentimentality, where Benjamin Constant’s usually sharp analysis dulls, and for those indulgences in despair that mark their era. Better to rank Constant beneath Stendhal among the forerunners of the psychological novel, where external drama barely exists and everything hinges on interior revelation. Drama, by contrast, dominates Sand, Sandeau, and all the novelists through to Mérimée. This last, the dusk-lit trace of Romantic yearning, presents a curious case. He stands at the crossroads where opposing influences converge, clash, struggle, merge, undermine and support one another. Mérimée champions, in spirit and sensibility, an art of scenic intricacy and complication. He is the consummate man of letters, even the courtier-man-of-letters. Yet he senses hostile winds, something new emerging, and stands guard. Psychology returns to favour: Mérimée studies it, grudgingly but thoroughly. Critics charge the last disciples of Lamartine and Hugo with excessive abandon, with letting themselves go. Mérimée keeps himself in check. He cultivates an impeccable bearing, a faultless prose. He strikes no false note in the ranks of flawless stylists. Perhaps there’s irony here: one expects it from the hoaxer of La Guzla. But the pose never slips. Scientific influence has even touched him. When occasion demands, he will invoke a physical cause. He also grasps life’s value in art and conjures quite a convincing illusion of it. Colomba and Carmen aren’t mere conventions, nor are their landscapes… What then relegates these thoroughly enjoyable books to yesterday? What did Mérimée need to become a Poet? Where does he fall short? His shortcoming is an excess of intelligence. Blessed with excellent memory and keen discrimination, he catalogues all his predecessors’ virtues and vices, striving to embrace the former whilst avoiding the latter. His ear, too, is finely tuned, distinguishing truth from falsehood in what he hears. But he intuits nothing. He is a spectator who takes to the stage and performs admirably, without genius. A witness, not a hero. Horribly dry and cold. What did he lack? Heart. His work reeks of the past precisely through its relative perfection. Some flaws are worth having, creation’s necessary dross: Mérimée lacks them because he doesn’t create. He leaves us the example and warning of a flawless work worth nothing.

No conscience and, conclusive evidence, no criticism³⁷. I cannot recognise as literary or aesthetic criticism Jules Janin’s causeries, the arid dissertations of Planche, or the brilliant, entertaining excursions of Gautier or Paul de Saint-Victor on works of literature and art. Their imagination almost always speaks, their reason almost never.

Yet when Romanticism arrived, Criticism had already been born. We find it in Cousin’s works on the seventeenth century, in Villemain’s on the eighteenth, but only as historical inquiry, forever looking backward. Of Art’s present evolution, of where its currents tend and what they crystallise from the living moment, neither Cousin nor Villemain knows, or at any rate tells us, a thing. For someone to stammer forth the philosophy of art as it seethes and ferments in our own day, we must await Sainte-Beuve. But Sainte-Beuve is no Romantic. Even Joseph Delorme, his only book that seems to march with the movement of 1830, teems with elements understood only in 1880, elements derided when they first appeared. At all events, Les Pensées d’août and Volupté stand in no danger of confusion with the period’s novels and heroic verse. Moreover, Sainte-Beuve himself, as Émile Hennequin³⁸ has acutely noted, remains something other than the modern Critic, such as we recognise in M. Taine, and such as we recognised, alas, in Émile Hennequin himself. Sainte-Beuve never grapples with “the relationship between author and work, nor that between authors and the society they inhabit, those delicate and fertile questions which M. Taine had the distinction of first discerning.” Sainte-Beuve lacked both scientific grounding and comprehensive vision; he caught only glimpses.

When all is said and done, the Romantic achievement remains considerable. “Romantic,” declares M. de Banville, “romantic in the word’s true sense: cruel yet ironic, poetic yet farcical, wedding laughter to horror, denial to rapture, riven with antagonisms, grandeur, madness, love, sublime aspirations and absurdity, like Life itself.” Here M. de Banville plays the part of that dramatic critic who reviewed plays not as they were but as they should and could have been. What M. de Banville has defined is not Romanticism but Art perfected: he has defined Shakespeare. Romanticism discovered the outer world, attended to the beauty of surfaces, set Art in motion, and found feeling where its predecessors had found only thought. So much for its substance. As to form, it shook the ancient language awake and taught it to move like a living thing. It slew the periphrasis. It stripped the classical verse of its cerements and breathed life into it through precision wedded to liberty, through reverence for rhyme and the freedom of enjambment. It pursued the exact word, a chimera perhaps, but a productive one. It forged a sculptural prose, whose masterwork remains that elusive Gaspard de la Nuit of Aloysius Bertrand.

TN¹: The “School of the Thesis” (École de la thèse) refers to the writers of “thesis plays” or “problem plays” (pièces à thèse), particularly Alexandre Dumas fils and his followers, who used drama as a vehicle for social criticism and reform. These playwrights explicitly argued moral or social points through their work, addressing issues such as illegitimacy, prostitution, and marriage laws. Morice contrasts them with the “School of Good Sense,” identifying both as betrayals of Romanticism’s artistic promise—one through didactic preaching, the other through bourgeois complacency.

TN²: Ovid, Metamorphoses, III. These lines describe Narcissus continuing to gaze at his reflection even after death, in the waters of the underworld. Morice employs this classical image to crystallise his critique of Romantic self-absorption—the sterile contemplation of one’s own suffering rather than the pursuit of happiness.