Léon Hennique Novel

Grant someone complete and perfect knowledge
of the present, and they would scarcely
need to lift a finger to see the future.
— Sainte-Beuve

History has long established a law linking society’s political upheavals to its spiritual transformations. This principle traces how art visibly shifts alongside social change, both in its modes of expression and, at least temporarily, in its very ideals. It ranks among history’s surest lessons. Great convulsions like wars and revolutions may prove barren in the moment, yet they fertilize the immediate future, finishing off those rules and fashions that threatened to outlive their usefulness. The Great Revolution delivered the coup de grâce to a Classicism that had been dragging on in pitiful exhaustion, barren of living work and breeding only grotesques. Revolution and Empire sparked the Romantic movement into life.

Three crucial points, however, must temper our faith in this law.

Like all living things, the mind follows its own nature. The same driving force—Thought—produces both revolutionary upheavals and artistic achievements. The mind’s action underlies events and works alike, which explains why politically turbulent times prove artistically barren. The mind cannot serve two masters. When it throws itself into external affairs and public gestures, it abandons its true, inward realm. Yet it returns there with redoubled vigour after such absence. Action is its lifeblood. It recovers from political exertion through poetic creation. Small wonder, then—indeed, how could it be otherwise?—that these twin activities show such clear correlation. They are two notes from the same voice, two blasts of the same wind…

Or better still, the ebb and flow of tides. The comparison holds. Pure thought is the mind’s natural element, and when it overflows into historical action, it seems to breach its eternal bounds, like the sea at high tide. But the ebb inevitably follows. Mind and sea withdraw to their primordial depths. Then comes that blessed hour of luxuriant growth and potent calm, when sea and mind ripple from shore to shore, mirroring the entire sky in their crystalline depths.

The fishermen, driven off by the flood, naturally assume the ebb follows from the flow. Perhaps. But such consequences reach back further. Ebb and flow share a common source in the vast waters’ expansive force (whether or not some heavenly body exerts its pull), in that universal law of motion governing all existence, that withdrawal of Being into itself after pouring forth into the Infinite. This is the law to which all reduces and in which all finds its symbol, as the sun finds its reflections. Yet the sea may return to its vastness bearing new colours from its journey, having rolled over ochre cliffs or slate shores whose dissolved pigments left their mark, reddish or black sediment in the waves. Human Thought takes on such colouring from its social ventures in roughly these proportions, reflecting it in turn through philosophical and artistic endeavour—though soon enough the tinted current vanishes in the immense blue mass.

Thus art’s fluctuations with society find their explanation in common origins. But there is more to consider.

This fertilization of Art through external upheaval may not be essential to aesthetic development, which neither blindly nor inevitably bows to outside forces. Instead, it pursues, era by era, an ascent that stands apart from society’s chancy experiments. External influence alone cannot explain that unconscious consistency which prevents aesthetic periods from following one another randomly, where each fresh ideal answers a need not so much new as unmet, another conquest adding its particular spoils to the accumulated treasure.

True, the turmoil of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries helped birth Romanticism. Yet one suspects it did more harm than good in the direction it imposed. Without such external disturbances, perhaps Thought would have remained stuck in that torpor where it could only mock itself with lewd or trivial pantomime. Still, Thought gained nothing from the rebellious spirit that suddenly erupted. Mirroring a society that rejected the Ancien Régime’s rules and leapt from one flawed system (rotten with age) into another (flawed by novelty and brazen contempt for tradition), the new literature likewise turned on the old, rashly proclaiming all rules abolished. In their hatred of etiquette, they scrapped Order itself. They couldn’t win the right to feel without stripping the mind of its right to think.

Here indeed lies the dual nature of early Romanticism. Born from Thought’s own sorrow at its long immobility and self-imprisonment, it stirred to life and restored the rights of Feeling—its genuine achievement and lasting contribution. Yet corrupted by Thought’s self-disgust after its excesses, by frustration with self-imposed boundaries (meant to prevent a slide into chaos but which had turned suffocating, making obedience a bondage), Romanticism effectively if not explicitly proclaimed that obedience was the fault, thinking the disease, limits on human nature the danger. It plunged into frenzied disorder that mocked true movement. This flaw alienates us from the formula and reduces it, initially, to mere reaction.

The Romantics never grasped that this sort of anti-rule—”In all things, thou shalt do the opposite of thy predecessors”—stripped the artist of free will just as effectively as etiquette itself. This is why Romanticism, holding all things equal in its confused vision, proclaimed through its chief legislator this remarkable claim: “In art, beauty and ugliness have equal value.” The witches in Macbeth had uttered something similar: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” But they were witches, speaking lies. Victor Hugo echoed the lie with the earnestness of a rather guileless sincerity.

The worst part—though providentially so—is that he was right, if only for a time. Once the spirit surrenders its natural starring role in the drama of the soul, once the human Composite renounces its power to think (that is, to choose between Truth and falsehood), then Beauty and Ugliness, those twin species of True and False, cease to matter. Nothing counts any more but motion itself—stirring, shifting, thrashing about in whatever direction. Picture a child who, after hours of sitting still, stretches and flails to get the blood flowing again. After the deathly torpor of the eighteenth century, blood desperately needed to course through modern veins. Revolution and Empire in the physical sphere, Romanticism in the spiritual, served as agents of this great work.

Here was an age made entirely of gestures, wildly enamoured of life—but wildly, meaning beyond life’s bounds, and thus fatally so. Hence this epoch’s meaning lies in its backward turn, spurning the future to revisit the past through history.

Such sweeping claims would prove unfair if we looked closely at particulars. Among those who quietly formed the bedrock of the Romantic evolution, who carried out what I have called its “genuine work”—Lamartine, Vigny, de Nerval and Senancour, to stay within France—Art preserved its essential principle. This principle remains unchanging because it constitutes humanity’s share of eternity, immune to contradictory circumstances because it represents the fixed point where relationships reveal their distinctions.

Yet these four poets—even the first, who though he liked playing roles in life, did so as a prince might dabble in theatre, to pass the time—were aliens in their own century, solitary dreamers whom events left untouched. Indeed, might we not argue (since works of genius belong to us like natural phenomena, like mountains or seas that shift with our perspective) that Vigny’s divine poem Eloa, beyond its many unfaded meanings, served in its day as an elevated satire of those muddled theories that welcomed the grotesque and monstrous into Art? Isn’t Eloa’s love for the Accursed One precisely that impossible union then imagined between Beauty and Ugliness?

It was a doomed, impossible union. Eloa, seeking to redeem the Prince of Evil, falls with him, having failed even to bring him comfort. Still, these strident theories—not the heart of Romantic innovation but its inevitable excess—lent it colour and served as its Scripture: false scripture and false colour, clearly derived from Revolutionary doctrine, those rebellious creeds that Napoleon’s victories forced upon the defeated world, as Muhammad spread the Koran’s triumph by the sword.

We shall see how a remarkably coherent design seems to have guided modern humanity’s successive impulses to examine itself first through thought, then through feeling and bearing, then through physical makeup and sensation. For now, we need only establish these proven points.

First, political and artistic movements correlate because both spring from the deeper evolution of human thought—an evolution that may surface initially as political change but naturally and primarily aims at spiritual transformation (philosophical or aesthetic), which only seems to result from political upheaval.

Second, the knock-on effect of political change on spiritual change, rather than revealing the latter’s true significance, tends to corrupt it. For this significance to achieve its authentic fullness, the external political turmoil that appeared to spark the new spiritual movement must fade entirely from memory.

Yet more recent events, including our present moment, offer two witnesses to a third and perhaps most crucial point. As suggested earlier, the aesthetic idea evolves on its own, more reliably so, independent of external shocks, driven by its own inner force of expansion.

Consider how Naturalism—that chapter in Art’s history devoted to studying Sensation—emerged during politically tranquil times. And today, this fresh movement of Art and the arts toward a new Ideal, this shift whose reality no one disputes (whatever debate surrounds its aims), whether we call it Decadence or Symbolism—what social earthquake produced it?

These opening reflections seek to untangle Art’s history, particularly that of Literature, from political history. They allow us to examine, nearly free from external contingencies, how the modern spirit has carved, century by century across three centuries, its ideal statue of Beauty.

The previous chapter addressed Beauty’s relationship with Truth, the substance of things. Here we try to clarify how, in terms of expression, the trajectory of Established Forms illuminates the new forms that today struggle forth, still rather hazily, under pressure from so many fresh influences.