GEORGE BRANDES (continued 7)

This was plain speaking. Lamennais made submission, and his newspaper stopped appearing. But the cup given him to drink was gall and wormwood, and only a drop was needed to make it overflow. From this time onwards he stood prepared to throw himself into the arms of the Revolution. And ere long he took the leap.

What most interests us, who are confining our attention to the first stage of Lamennais' psychological development, is to observe the manner in which his childish faith in authority is undermined as soon as he has the opportunity of seeing the holy thing close at hand. He writes from Rome in a private letter: "The Pope is pious, and has the best intentions; but he has little knowledge of the world, and is completely ignorant of the condition of the church and of society; he sits immovable in the darkness which closes in ever thicker round him, weeping and praying; his task, his mission is to prepare and hasten the final catastrophes which must precede the regeneration of society, and without which this regeneration would either be impossible or incomplete. Therefore God has given him into the hands of men who are as base as it is possible to be. Ambitious, greedy, and depraved, in their foolish frenzy they call on the Tatars to produce in Europe what they call order."

Is it not a remarkable coincidence that Lamennais, too, should end by finding a stumbling-block in the word which had determined the intellectual development of the whole generation? Victor Hugo in his endeavour to vindicate the principle of authority in matters of taste at last feels himself obliged to criticise and enlarge the idea of order; Lamennais in his battle for Catholicism is compelled to do the same. With what passionate grief does he describe in his letters the corruption which he finds prevailing amongst the props and pillars of order in Rome!

"Catholicism was my life, because it is the life of humanity; my desire was to defend it, and to rescue it from the abyss into which it is sinking deeper every day. Nothing would have been easier. It did not suit the bishops that I should do it. There remained Rome. To Rome I went, and there I saw the most shameful sewer that has ever defiled the sight of man. The gigantic cloaca of the Tarquinii would be too strait for so much filth. No god but self-interest reigns there; they would sell nations, sell the human race, sell the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, for a piece of ground and a few piastres."

"Such was the appearance at close quarters of the power whose most dauntless knight Lamennais had been. Was it any wonder that he turned round! Was it any wonder that he, like the priests of the ancient Saxons to whom Renan has compared him, cut down with a well-directed blow of his axe the divinity to whose altar he had summoned the reluctant world!"

But even more remarkable than this clearsightedness in a single matter are the gleams of profounder general insight which we now find in Lamennais' letters. Hitherto he had sought absolute truth, and had looked to authority to ensure this. Now he suddenly arrives at the idea of relativity, the idea which most thoroughly and utterly demolishes the principle of authority.

"The older I grow the more it astonishes me to see how all the beliefs which are deepest rooted in us depend upon the age in which we live, the society into which we have been born, and a thousand other equally accidental circumstances. Only think what our beliefs would be if we had come into the world ten centuries earlier, or had been born in this century at Teheran, at Benares, or on the Island of Otaheite!"

There is more philosophy in these two sentences, which forestall Taine's theory of the influence of surroundings, than in all the volumes of Lamennais' famous chief work.[5]

XIII

CULMINATION AND COLLAPSE OF THE REACTION

We have been carried on a few years too far by following Lamennais to the period of his conversion to democracy. At the time of the completion of his book on indifference in the matter of religion, that is in 1823, he, like all the other adherents of the principle of theocracy, still aimed at strengthening the authority of the monarch by means of the authority of the church.

Presently the particular monarch in question dies, and Charles X. ascends the throne. He ascends it with all possible pomp and ceremonial. He is taken to Reims to be anointed. The ceremony was performed on the 20th of May 1825, and it seemed as if the old royalist and religious superstitions had risen from their graves for the occasion. One of the oldest of these was the belief that crowned heads possessed the power of curing scrofula. This power had been regarded as absolutely indisputable. A lady of Valenciennes, who had been touched by Louis XV., and who afterwards, in the hope of getting into favour, sent in a medical certificate that she was entirely cured of scrofula, received the answer: "The privileges which the Kings of France enjoy in the matter of the healing of scrofula have been attested by such conclusive proofs that they require no further confirmation."

This was under Louis XV. Under Charles X. people showed themselves no less orthodox. We remember that at the time of the Revolution the ampulla containing the sacred oil was shivered into fragments. In the eyes of pious Catholics this was sacrilege of the deepest dye. Gregory of Tours, the earliest chronicler who tells of the baptism of Clovis, has evidently no idea that this little fig-shaped vial of heavenly anointing oil was used on the occasion. But some centuries later various traditions on the subject were committed to writing, some of them telling that the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, others that an angel, had deposited it in the cathedral of Reims; and these traditions, which had survived as popular beliefs, were now freshened up again. The man who had been priest at the church of St. Remi at Reims in 1793, and from whom the sacred ampulla had been taken by force, came forward and declared that before giving it up he had extracted most of the congealed oil which it contained; and this he now produced.[1] Another of the faithful asserted that at the time the sacrilege was committed he had collected some fragments of the ampulla, which he had kept until now. The priest and the church officials recognised these fragments as genuine.

So Charles X. was able to rejoice his subjects with the intelligence that he was to be anointed with the sacred oil of Clovis. The fragments of the old ampulla were introduced into a new one, covered with gold and precious stones, and the precious drops were diluted with others. Particulars of the anointment have already been given in connection with the coronation of Napoleon. At ten o'clock on the morning of the following day, the King mounted a beautiful white horse and rode in the midst of a brilliant retinue, and attended by a troop of hussars, to the hospital of St. Mark. There the chief physician to the royal household awaited him at the head of a band of 121 persons afflicted with scrofula. The King, after offering a short prayer in the hospital chapel, set boldly to his task of curing them. The famous surgeon Dupuytren was not ashamed to hold the heads of some of the patients during the comedy.

Lamartine celebrated the anointment of Charles X. in a cycle of poems (Chant du sacre) and Victor Hugo in an enthusiastic ode. But on the occasion of the same memorable event there was also written a little song which led to its author's prosecution and punishment. The song was called Sacre de Charles le Simple, and the name of its writer was Béranger.

The tone of Victor Hugo's ode, Le Sacre de Charles X, was, as the following verse shows, orthodox, Biblical, and royalist:

Mais trompant des vautours la fureur criminelle, Dieu garda sa colombe au lys abandonné. Elle va sur un Roi poser encor son aile: Ce bonheur à Charles est donné! Charles sera sacré suivant l'ancien usage, Comme Salomon, le Roi sage, Qui goûta les célestes mets, Quand Sadoch et Nathan d'un baume l'arrosèrent, Et, s'approchant de lui, sur le front le baisèrent, En disant: "Qu'il vive à jamais!"

The tone of Béranger's poem was disrespectful in the extreme. He apostrophises the sparrows, which, according to an old custom, had been driven into the church to fly about there, and charges them to guard their liberty better than human beings have guarded theirs:

Français, que Reims a réunis, Criez: Montjoie et Saint-Denis! On a refait la sainte ampoule, Et, comme au temps de nos aïeux, Des passereaux lâchés en foule Dans l'église volent joyeux. D'un joug brisé ces vains présages Font sourir sa majesté. Le peuple s'écrie: Oiseaux, plus que nous soyez sages, Gardez bien, gardez bien votre liberté! O oiseaux, ce roi miraculeux Va guérir tous les scrofuleux. Fuyez, vous qui de son cortège Dissipez seuls l'ennui mortel; Vous pourriez faire un sacrilége En voltigeant sur cet autel. Des bourreaux sont les sentinelles Que pose ici la piété. Le peuple s'écrie: Oiseaux, nous envions vos ailes. Gardez bien, gardez bien votre liberté! Gardez bien votre liberté!

With the exception of Delavigne, who is a direct descendant of the eighteenth century writers, and who in his Méseniennes shows himself to have been an equally ardent revolutionist and patriot, Pierre de Béranger was the only poet who had kept aloof from the dominant group of thinkers and talented writers. Born in 1780, he was nine at the time of the storming of the Bastille, which event left as ineffaceable an impression on his mind as did those writings of Voltaire which he read in his childhood. The following anecdote will serve to show how early he arrived at definite conclusions on religious matters. One day when he was only thirteen years old he was standing laughing scornfully at his aunt, who was sprinkling the room with holy water during a dreadful thunderstorm, when a flash of lightning came into the room, passing so close to him that he fell to the ground unconscious. He was so long in recovering that it was feared he was dead. The first thing he did when he opened his eyes was to call triumphantly to his kind, pious aunt: "Well, was your holy water of any use?" The anecdote has an air of truth, and it is told in depreciation of him by orthodox writers. It was in this same spirit that he now attacked the Bourbons, and their holy water was of no use to them.

At the very time when they were making themselves ridiculous there occurred a remarkable phenomenon. A poetic halo developed round the once hated name of Napoleon. He was transformed from a historical into a mythical figure; during his own life-time he became a legendary hero. The compulsory inactivity which suddenly followed on a display of energy that had kept all Europe in constant agitation, powerfully affected the popular imagination. There was in reality no element of greatness in Napoleon's compulsory second abdication, and his plan of placing himself under the protection of England was simply a rash one. But the ignoble manner in which the English treated him added to his fame. The far-off, lonely island in the middle of the great ocean became, as it were, a pedestal for the heroic figure. The real Bonaparte was transformed into an ideal Napoleon. History made him over to poetry and legend.

Even his former enemies could not restrain an expression of admiration for the man in whose direction all eyes turned. Chateaubriand gave utterance to the famous saying, "that Napoleon's grey coat and hat upon a stick, planted on the coast at Brest, would be enough to make all Europe take up arms."

Béranger wrote the soulful poem Les souvenirs du peuple, which perhaps gives us the simplest and most beautiful picture of the legendary hero, but also that which has least resemblance to the real man, for it makes him out to be as kindly as he is great. It is the poem which begins:

On parlera de sa gloire Sous le chaume bien long-temps: L'humble toit, dans cinquante ans, Ne connaîtra plus d'autre histoire.

The reminiscences of the Emperor are put into the mouth of the old grandmother, who at different periods of her life has seen him—first as the victorious general, then as the happy father on his way to Notre Dame, then as the defender of France against the allied armies. A good specimen verse is:

Mes enfants, dans ce village, Suivi de rois, il passa. Voilà bien long-temps de ça: Je venais d'entrer en ménage. À pied grimpant le coteau Où pour voir je m'étais mise Il avait petit chapeau Et redingote grise. Près de lui je me troublai! Il me dit: Bon jour, ma chère, Bon jour, ma chère. Il vous a parlé, grand'mère, Il vous a parlé!

The young men who not long ago had been thankful to break their ranks and escape from the tyranny of military discipline, now began to look back with longing to the heroic days of the Consulate and the Empire. They had been dreaming, writes De Musset, of the ice of Russia and the sun of the Pyramids, and the world of the day seemed an empty, colourless world. "The King of France sat upon his throne, and some held out their hats for him to throw an alms into them, and others held out crucifixes, which he kissed. And when boys talked of glory, the answer was: 'Become priests!' and when they talked of honour, the answer was: 'Become priests!' and when they talked of hope, of love, of energy and life, it was still: 'Become priests!'"[2]

And so they became priests. Why and how they did it we can learn from the novels which describe the life of the period, such as Beyle's Rouge et Noire. This was undoubtedly the priests' golden age. On the 7th of June 1814, three days after the publication of the Charter, the notorious law was passed which prescribed compulsory observation of Sundays and holy-days. Frenchmen were to be Catholics under penalty of fine. Even the adherents of other creeds were obliged to decorate their houses on the occasion of processions of the Holy Sacrament. On the 7th of August 1814 the order of the Jesuits was solemnly re-established. The education of the country was placed in the hands of the clergy. As much of its power as possible was taken from the University, if for no other reason than because numbers of the students had taken part in the defence of Paris against the foreign troops, i.e. the allies of the monarchy.

At this time there begins within the Catholic Church itself a short process of fermentation (to which Joseph de Maistre's and Lamennais' feud with Gallicanism belongs), which in the course of a score of years produces the hitherto unknown phenomenon of perfect unity among Catholics. Catholicism and submission to Rome become one and the same thing. And another, kindred phenomenon, quite as unheard of, is witnessed in our century. Religious unity spreads even beyond the bounds of the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant Church holds out its hand to the Catholic, which in days gone by it had abominated as the Babylonian whore. Glancing at the later religious development of the century, we find that in our days the difference between orthodox Protestantism and Catholicism is only an apparent difference, only the difference between faith in the infallibility of the Bible and faith in the infallibility of the Pope. The Protestants reject the reason of the eighteenth and the scientific criticism of the nineteenth century; they go back to the creeds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and do not consider even these orthodox enough; Luther is too advanced for them. Schleiermacher is regarded as a free-thinker by orthodox Germany; Bossuet's attitude is reprobated by French Catholics. He is considered a heretic, in as far as he asserted the independence of the French church. We remember that Joseph de Maistre disapproved of him. Even Montalembert, in his book on the interests of Catholicism in the nineteenth century, mentions him in a condemnatory tone. But the movement does not stop here. The contributors to the Catholic newspapers and periodicals take to writing historical articles which constitute a regular crusade against the great pagan geniuses who founded the civilisation of Europe, such as Pindar, Plato, Virgil. In Danish literature we have an equivalent in Grundtvig's earliest historical pronouncements.[3] Hence Montalembert, in the work just referred to, is able to declare triumphantly: "Lying history, parodied history, declamatory history, as written by Voltaire, Dulaure, and Schiller, the men who educated our fathers, would hardly be put up with to-day, even in a feuilleton." A glance through Lamennais' letters is sufficient to persuade us that one great cause of the Revolution of July was the behaviour of the clerical party. The Jesuits acted as the storming force of fanaticism. Missionaries, whose fervent faith was due to their gross ignorance, were sent to all parts of the country. They sometimes converted whole regiments at a time, and these were then led by their officers in a body to the altar.

The worship of the Virgin developed in a way it had never done before. Belief in Mary underwent the same change that belief in Christ had done in ancient days, only more quickly. She was gradually transformed from a human into a divine being.

Let us for a moment follow the course of the religious reaction beyond the period under consideration, and we shall see that this movement has progressed with giant steps. The dogma of Mary's immaculate conception, from which, in the twelfth century, the Middle Ages shrank, has been finally accepted and sanctioned. Mary imperceptibly supplants Christ and becomes the deity of France, as she already was of Italy and Spain. In one of the manuals used in the education of Catholic priests[4] we read: "The blessed Virgin is to be honoured as the spouse of God the Father, because with her and in her he begot our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; in her we honour all the divine and adorable perfections with which God has endowed her by communicating to her in abundant measure his fertility, his wisdom, his holiness, and his divine fulness of life." In a work on the immaculate conception written by Archbishop Malou, Mary is represented as being at one and the same time the daughter of God, the spouse of God, and the mother of God; so involved are his explanations of the relationships of the Trinity that one of the conclusions we arrive at is that she is the daughter of her own son. In a book by the Abbé Guillon, Le Mois de Marie, she is represented as a kind of chief divinity, to whom consequently it is safest of all to pray. "To be the mother of God means to have a kind of power over God, to retain, if it is permissible to use the expression, a kind of authority over him." Authority thus culminates in the Madonna.

The Mariolaters, in the manner of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, set about collecting proofs of the immaculate conception from the writings of the Fathers. One ecclesiastic, Passaglia by name, collected 8000. Archbishop Malou declared himself able to produce not fewer than 800,000 proofs of it. One's head begins to swim. On Mariolatry followed, about the middle of the century, the recrudescence of the worship of relics; for the relics which had stopped working miracles at the time of the Revolution, began to work them again for the generation educated by the Jesuits. In 1844 Bishop Arnoldi of Treves began to exhibit the coat of our Saviour, a seamless linen garment which is mentioned in a falsified clause introduced (as is convincingly demonstrated by two German historians, J. Gildemeister and H. von Sybel) between 1106 and 1124 into a proclamation of Pope Sylvester (327) as having been given by the Empress Helena to the Cathedral of Treves. It is affirmed to be the garment mentioned in the 19th chapter of the Gospel of St. John as worn by Jesus before his crucifixion. But besides the sacred coat at Treves, there are some twenty more in other parts of the world, all claiming to be equally genuine. The one in Galatia is much older than the one at Treves. The genuineness of several of them is attested by papal briefs. In 1843 Gregory XVI. ratified the genuineness of the coat at Argenteuil; but Leo X. had already, in 1514, acknowledged the claim of the Treves coat, and its champions would not bow to the new decree; the consequence was that pilgrimages were made to both. Görres, in his Historisch-politische Blätter, rejoices at the success of the great pilgrimage to the sacred coat of Treves.

The religious reaction reaches its climax in the famous Encyclical of Pius IX., which pronounces free thought to be the delirium of liberty, anathematises civil marriage, separation of church and state, liberty of religion, liberty of the press, liberty of speech, and the erroneous idea that the church ought to make its peace with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation. But even more severely consistent than the Encyclical are the apologies for it, the German Bishop Kettler's Die falsche und die wahre Freiheit and the French Bishop Dupanloup's La convention du 15 Septembre et l'Encyclique du 8 Décembre, which explain and justify the Pope's determined stand against "the insolent repudiation of all the great truths which form the foundation of human society." Let no one, however, imagine that these pamphlets are either very sensational in tone or very full of glaring absurdities. Both in manner and matter they have a strong resemblance to moderate articles in a Danish Liberal newspaper.

To such results did the Neo-Catholic movement lead. But it is to be noted that these results belong entirely to the domain of political history, and in no way concern literature. Every movement continues to affect the course of general history long after it has ceased influencing the history of literature. It affects the latter as long as it has, not only monarchs, nobles, and bishops, but men of distinguished intellect and talent in its service. After 1830 this is no longer the case with the religious reaction in France. The difference between the reaction in 1820 and the reaction with which exhausted and unhappy France was visited after the defeats and the Commune of 1870-71, is that the former vigorous crusade against light had almost every Frenchman of intellect and talent in its service, in its army, whilst the latter could not boast of a single supporter with any literary pretensions.

We have now to see how that first reaction came to an end. It was, in the first place, attacked from without. The daily press began to declaim against the spirit of antagonism to enlightenment; Béranger sang his songs on the subject; one enterprising publisher, Touquet by name, brought out between the years 1817 and 1824 thirty-one thousand copies of the works of Voltaire (1,598,000 vols.) and twenty-four thousand five hundred copies of the works of Rousseau. He was punished and the sale of his books was prohibited; but this aroused such exasperation that the Globe prophesied a general apostasy from Catholicism, whereupon the country was again inundated with the Touquet editions.

The government next wreaked its vengeance on a master of language, the rustic simplicity of whose satiric pamphlets proved an effective offensive weapon.

Paul Louis Courier, born in Paris in 1773, was one of the cleverest writers of the age. From his father, a rich bourgeois who in his youth had narrowly escaped being murdered because he had had an amour with a lady of rank, he inherited a burning hatred of the indolent and haughty aristocracy. At the age of twenty he entered an artillery regiment and served in the campaigns of the Revolution, but they only gave him a loathing of war. From his earliest youth literature had had a strong attraction for him, especially ancient literature, which he studied as a philologist. In 1795 he left his regiment, which was then besieging Mainz, without permission, and occupied himself with translating Latin authors. In 1798 we find him again in the army, in Italy; presently he is studying in Paris; then he returns to Italy in command of a squadron of artillery. He keeps quiet during the Empire, and after its fall lives the life of an agriculturist and Hellenist on his farm in Touraine.

It was the persecution by the victorious clerical party of every countryman, however insignificant, in whom they detected an enemy, which induced Paul Louis Courier to appear before the public as an author. In 1816 he wrote a Petition to the Two Chambers, employing for the first time that plain, shrewd rustic style which, with the purest Greek models in view, he was so successful in acquiring. In simple, clear, always moderate language he tells of the injuries inflicted by clerically disposed provincial tyrants upon unfortunate peasants guilty of not having taken off their hats to a priest or of having "spoken ill of the government." He confesses that there is probably a good foundation for the accusations, since in his part of the country the priests are not popular, and very few people know what the government is. Then he shows how imprisonment for six months without a proper trial, and misery, sickness, and death brought upon the children and other relatives of the prisoners, are the punishment for perfectly trifling offences. Forty gendarmes are sent to a village directly it falls under the suspicion of "Bonapartism"; the suspected persons are taken naked from their beds and fettered like criminals. "They are carried off; their relations, their children would have followed them, if it had been permitted by authority. Authority, Messieurs! that is the great word in France.... Everywhere we see inscribed: Not reasons, authority. It is true that this authority is not the authority of the councils or of the fathers of the church, much less of the law; but it is the authority of the gendarmes, and that is as good as any other."

Courier did not write books, or even what we generally call pamphlets. He produced his effect with tracts of a few pages. In these, with apparent naïve downrightness, in reality with consummate satiric art, he kept up an agitation against the rule of the hereditary monarchy until his assassination in 1825.

A gem of satiric humour is his Pétition pour les villageois que l'on empêche de danser. Its occasion was the prohibition by hypocritical magistrates and priests of dancing in the village market-places. He unveils the hypocrisy which lies at the root of the new holy-day regulations, and the harm which they do. He is perfectly aware of the fact that these holy-days were originally ordained for the good of the serfs and bondmen—but there are no serfs and bondmen in France now. Once their taxes are paid, the peasants now work for themselves, and to compel them to be idle is ridiculous; it is worse even than the old imposts; those at least benefited the courtiers, but idleness benefits no one. He describes the hot-headed young village priests, who fulminate against dancing and all other pleasures, and compares them with the aged curé of Véretz, who is beloved by his flock for his gentle goodness, but who is hated and persecuted by the authorities because of his having sworn allegiance to the constitution at the time of the Revolution. In a later tract Courier tells of the assassination of this good old man. He writes of everything without resentment, simply ejaculating with a sigh that comes from the heart: "Thy will, O Lord, be done!" He cannot, however, resist adding: "Who could have predicted this in the days of Austerlitz?"

He grants that the rural population is much more settled and much happier now than it was before the Revolution, but he maintains that it is also much less religious. "The curé of Azai, who wished last Easter to have his canopy carried by four male communicants, could not find four such in the village. The peasant is so happy in possession of the land of which he has so lately become owner (the confiscated lands of the nobility and the church) that he is entirely absorbed in its cultivation, and forgets religion and everything else." Courier allows that Lamennais is right in reproaching the people with indifference in the matter of religion. "We do not belong to the number of the lukewarm whom the Lord, as Holy Scripture tells us, spews out of his mouth; we are worse; we are cold."

Nowhere do we find more graphic descriptions than in Courier's writings of the state of society throughout France during the latter years of Louis XVIII's reign.

He was again and again imprisoned for his pamphlets; but he did not allow this to intimidate him. In his Réponse aux anonymes qui ont écrit des lettres he writes: "It is not my cleverness, but my stupidity which has landed me in prison. I have put faith in the Charter (la Charte); I confess it to my shame.... If it had not been for the Charter I should never have dreamt of talking to the public of the things that occupy my thoughts. Robespierre, Barras, and the great Napoleon had taught me for twenty years to hold my tongue.... But then came the Charter, and people said to me: 'Speak, you are a free man; write away, print; the liberty of the press is secured along with every other liberty. What are you afraid of?' ... So I said, with my hat in my hand: 'Will you graciously grant us leave to dance in our market-place on Sunday?'.... 'Gendarmes—off with him to the lock-up. The longest possible term of imprisonment, a fine besides,' &c., &c."

In another letter he writes with perfect calmness, and yet with biting severity, of the consequences of the celibacy of the priesthood. One of the priests who had inveighed most fiercely against the harmless peasant dances is discovered to be a seducer and murderer. Some years back he had murdered a woman who had been his mistress. In this case his fellow-priests attempted to throw the blame of the murder on her husband. Since then he has murdered and cut in pieces a young girl whom he had seduced. His superiors have sent him, unpunished, across the frontier, so that he is now an honoured preacher of the Gospel in Savoy. Courier shows what crimes, born of superstition and covetousness, are committed in districts where the inhabitants are so orthodox that nothing would induce them to eat meat on Friday; he says: "This is the true faith—honest, childlike, without suspicion of hypocrisy," and adds laconically: "They say that morality is founded upon this."

The little satire entitled Pièce diplomatique he was obliged to publish privately. It is a letter supposed to be written by King Louis to his cousin, Ferdinand of Spain, in 1823, after the war undertaken by France to restore that depraved Bourbon to his throne had been brought to a successful conclusion. In it Courier satirises Louis's attitude to the constitution. His cousin will not hear of a constitution, but Louis maintains that, far from being burdensome, it is agreeable and advantageous to the king.

Extremely witty is the pamphlet Simple Discours, in which Courier ventured to express his disapprobation of the proposal made by the court party to raise a national subscription for the purpose of purchasing the property and castle of Chambord for the heir to the throne. The delicate little Duke of Bordeaux, afterwards Comte de Chambord, was born so long after his father's death that his birth was regarded as a miracle. Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and De Musset all sang of this wonderful event, Lamartine and Hugo comparing the child to Joash. The proposal to raise the national subscription was, thus, made at a time when an enthusiastic feeling prevailed in loyalist circles; but Courier, true to his principles, opposed it from his peasant standpoint.

Soon all the historians, with the exception of Michaud, began to write in a spirit ominous of danger to the restored monarchy. In 1823 Thiers published the first part of his history, which produced much the same effect as Béranger's songs.

The government of France had always been in the habit of supporting literature. All the rulers of France had done so, with the exception of Napoleon, and the Bourbons were expected to follow the example of their ancestors. But they gave sparingly, in spite of the enthusiastic welcome and homage which they received from both poets and prose writers. On the few disaffected authors they revenged themselves to the best of their ability; to punish Béranger, his rival, Désaugiers, was made a court favourite; Delavigne was punished with the loss of his post as librarian.

But more dangerous than the attacks from without were the germs of dissolution which appeared within the school of authority itself. The authors, both prose writers and poets, who formed the Immanuelist or Legitimist group, felt their principles wavering.

We have already seen that Lamennais was on the verge of defection. And his plight was the plight of all the others; the germs of the new were stirring within them in spite of their sincere desire to defend the old.

This is particularly observable in the case of Alfred de Vigny, who belongs to a generation a little younger than Lamartine, a little older than Victor Hugo. His family, as we have seen, was royalist. His father, who had been an officer and a brilliant courtier in the days of Louis XV., lost all his property at the time of the Revolution. After the fall of the Empire, Alfred, then sixteen, was equipped at his father's expense and enrolled in the gendarme corps of the guards. When the Hundred Days came, he attended the king on the first stages of his flight; when they were over, he was made a lieutenant in the royal foot-guards. But the time of active service was past, and nothing remained but the tedium of garrison life; the young man sought compensation in unremitted intellectual activity.

In his boyhood everything had been done to keep his thoughts from turning to Napoleon and all that concerned him. Hence almost before his schooldays were over he donned the white cockade and entered the guard of the Bourbons. But the ungrateful Bourbons, ungrateful because they believed that people owed everything to them, kept him waiting nine years for promotion, when he became captain by seniority.

When he began to write, his books gave dissatisfaction at the stupid court; though their whole tendency was royalist, they were regarded as seditious. He was accused of liberalism because he exalted Richelieu at the expense of Louis XIII. His father's early inculcations of devotion to the house of Bourbon proved of no avail; he now began to see what that devotion really was—"superstition, political superstition, a groundless, childish old belief in the fealty incumbent on men of noble birth, a kind of vassalage."[5]

Chivalry might, and did, induce him to preserve the outward appearance of a royalist; he would, for instance, have defended the monarchy during the Revolution of July if his services as an old officer had been required; but at heart he was no longer a monarchist—though this by no means implied that he was a democrat. "The world," he writes in his diary, "is vacillating between two absurdities, monarchy by the grace of God and the sovereignty of the people."

In the matter of religious faith he fell away even earlier. In spite of all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers of his youthful poems, he was suited for anything rather than a champion of the faith. By nature he was melancholy and sceptical, so melancholy "that no ray of hope or momentary happiness seems ever to have penetrated into his heart, so sceptical in regard to the creed which he confessed with his lips that he nourished a kind of personal animosity to the idea of God and of the immortality of the soul.

As early as 1824 we find him giving expression (in his diary) to his conception of life in the following parable: "I see a crowd of men, women, and children, all sound asleep. They awake in a prison. They become reconciled to their prison and make little gardens in its yard. By degrees they begin to notice that one after the other of them is taken away, never to return. They neither know why they are in prison nor where they are taken to afterwards, and they know that they will never know it. Nevertheless, some among them tell the others what becomes of them after their period of imprisonment—tell without knowing. Are they not mad? It is plain that the lord of the prison, the governor, could, if such had been his will, have let us know the charge on which we have been arrested and all the particulars of our case. Since he has not done it, and never will do it, let us be content to thank him for the more or less comfortable quarters he has given us...."

There is much contempt in this for the theologians, with their pretensions to knowledge, and much acrimony beneath the gratitude to "the lord of the prison." He adds in the same tone: "How good God is, what an adorable jailer, to sow so many flowers in our prison yard!... How explain this wonderful, consoling pity, which makes our punishment so mild? For no one has ever doubted that we are punished—we only do not know for what."

Six years later, employing the same parable, he writes: "I feel myself bowed down, O Lord, by the weight of a punishment which causes me constant suffering; but as I neither know my crime nor the accusation brought against me, I reconcile myself to my prison. I plait straw in order sometimes to forget it. For this is what human work amounts to. I am prepared for all possible evils, and I thank Thee, O Lord, for every day which has passed without any calamity!"

But two years after this he speaks out plainly: "The world revolts at the injustices entailed by its creation; dread of eternity prevents it from speaking openly; but its heart is full of hatred of the God who created evil and death. When a defier of the gods, like Ajax the son of Oileus, appears, the world approves him and loves him. Such another is Satan, such Orestes, such Don Juan. All who have combated the injustice of heaven have been admired and secretly loved by men."

De Vigny's diary shows that down to the very last days of the hereditary monarchy the connection between the literary, merely theoretical principle of authority and the practical, working principle was perfectly well understood. Germinating Romanticism was not less ardently opposed by the political opposition (who saw in the young school a support of ecclesiasticism) than by the men who from principle adhered to old tradition. De Vigny tells that he asked Benjamin Constant during the winter of 1819 what was the cause of the extreme disfavour shown by the Left to the poetry of the day. The answer was that the party wished to avoid the appearance of breaking every chain, and therefore retained the least irksome, the literary.

When the Revolution of July came, and put an end to the reign of the Bourbons, Vigny's attachment to the ideas of the restoration came to an end too. He writes: "I feel happy that I have left the army; after thirteen years of ill-rewarded service I may regard myself as quits with the Bourbons.... I have done for ever with burdensome political superstition."

Lamartine, too, at this time showed signs of an intellectual development of a suspicious nature. He continued to sing his pious hymns, but the orthodox Genevan pastor, Vinet, discovered that this piety was Christianity only in appearance, and that a most unorthodox pantheism lay concealed beneath the Christian phraseology.[6]

And Victor Hugo, whom one would have taken, judging by his début, to be more reliable, soon showed himself, not only by the style of his poems, but by their tone, to be a doubtful acquisition. In 1822, in the ode entitled Buonaparte, he had pronounced Napoleon to be a false god, an emissary of hell; and even as late as June 1825, in Les Deux Îles (Corsica and St. Helena), he had caused the nations to shout in chorus to the fallen Emperor: "Honte! Opprobre! Malheur! Anathême! Vengeance!" and the curses of the dead, as the echo of his fatal glory, to roll like thunder from the Volga, the Tiber, and the Seine, from the walls of the Alhambra, from the grave at Vincennes (Enghien's), from Jaffa, from the Kremlin which he had tried to destroy, from all his bloody battle-fields. Now, a year and a half later, Hugo suddenly strikes a different chord. In the first ode À la Colonne de la Place Vendôme, written in February 1827, Buonaparte has become Napoleon, and his glory the glory of France. The occasion of the ode was this. At the conclusion of peace in 1814, Austria had demanded that the Frenchmen to whom Napoleon had given titles which conveyed the idea of supremacy over any Austrian town or province should cease to bear these titles. This was all that was required, no objection being raised to titles which merely recalled the French victories in Austria. The French government had persuaded Austria to refrain from making the agreement arrived at public, and the Austrian ambassador contrived to avoid wounding French susceptibility by placing himself on his reception evenings so near the door that it was not necessary to announce the guests. But in the beginning of 1827 this ambassador was recalled, and his successor was ordered by the Austrian government to decide the matter finally. Consequently, on one of his reception evenings, Marshal Oudinot, Duke of Reggio, and Marshal Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, were simply announced by their military titles and their family names. They immediately withdrew, and the affair aroused a great sensation and considerable animosity. As the two officers in question were in high favour with the royal family, the royalist party took up their cause and made it the cause of France. Victor Hugo, who was created to give expression to every prevailing sentiment, and who was conscious before any one else of that movement in men's minds which in the course of a few years was to transform Napoleon into a legendary and national hero, made himself for the first time, in his ode À la Colonne de la Place Vendôme, the organ of the cult of the great memories of the Empire. The column, cast of the metal of conquered cannon, which roared as it was melted in the furnace, speaks to the poet in the silent watches of the night, in its character of last remnant of the great empire and the great army. He hears a murmur from the bronze battalions on its sides, hears the sound of names: Tarentum, Reggio, Dalmatia, Treviso, sees the eagles on the pedestal whetting their beaks, and feels that the immortal shades are awakening. Who dare think of wiping out this history of France written in blood with the points of swords! Who dare dispute the right of the old generals to the inheritance of Napoleon's glory! Who dare strike at the trophies of France! Every spark struck from the column is a flash of lightning. With magnificent eloquence and ardent enthusiasm Napoleon's history is evolved into a heroic poem, and any sagacious reader of that poem might have foreseen that in the course of a year Hugo (in his poem "Bounaberdi," in Les Orientales, the motto of which is: "Grand comme le monde") would go over to the veritable cult of Napoleon. And since Bonapartism and Liberalism, in those days shaded off into each other—vide Béranger, Armand Carrel, and Heinrich Heine—it would also have been easy to foresee the possibility of his defining Romanticism a few years later (in the preface to Hernani) as "liberalism in literature."

XIV

CONCLUSION

But what did more than anything else to forward the dissolution of the school of authority was the great and crowning piece of folly, as regards literature, committed by the Bourbons in 1824. Chateaubriand was dismissed in the most contemptuous manner from the Villèle ministry, and that at the moment when he had just added to the reputation of the name of Bourbon by the successful Spanish war, which he himself called his political René, that is to say, his political masterpiece. Chateaubriand, the man to whom in a manner everything was due, the man who had laid the foundation stone of the whole building that had been erected, was contemptuously set aside.[1] And the ingratitude of his colleagues was as glaring as that of the court, for it was he who had made ministers of Villèle and Corbière.[2]

His popularity amongst the royalists was at this time at its height, and with reason; for the war in Spain, which he had succeeded in carrying through in spite of all manner of opposition in Europe and the disinclination of France itself, was well calculated to do service to the cause of the monarchy by the grace of God, then in considerable disrepute.

Not that Chateaubriand himself was simple enough to have any respect whatever for that Ferdinand of Spain for whom French troops were to shed their blood, in order that he might be restored to a throne which his own people considered him unfit to occupy. He calls him a promise-breaker and a traitor, calls him a tyrant who allowed himself to be influenced by the evil passions of his female relations, one of those cowardly tyrants who have no peace until they have done some high-handed deed, and who sit and tremble when they have done it.

Chateaubriand's reason for making war was this. He knew that France was undermined by Bonapartist and Republican plots, which were widely spread even in the army; he knew that discontent with the restored monarchical government was universal; therefore, trusting to the friendship of the Emperor Alexander, he determined, in spite of Canning's protests and Metternich's dissuasions, to stake everything on one card. Victory, which he considered probable, meant the suppression of the plots, the union under the white flag of all the different parties, and the firm establishment of the Bourbons on the family thrones of Spain and France. In the case of victory, which the inward disunion of Spain might even make easy (as it actually did), the French nation would behold the spectacle of the tricoloured flag lowered to the white, and would, for the first time since Napoleon's palmy days, hear tidings of victories won by the arms of France, and that in a country which the great Emperor himself had not been able thoroughly to subdue. All this meant "new laurels for the race of St. Louis," as Chateaubriand says, and—new laurels for its minister of foreign affairs, a fact which he did not forget to take into account.[3]

As we all know, the French army under the command of the Duke of Angoulème, the heir-apparent, succeeded, almost without bloodshed, in liberating Ferdinand at Cadiz, and conducting him back to Madrid. Ferdinand immediately wrote a letter of thanks to Louis XVIII. The answer to this was written for Louis by Chateaubriand; it is amusing to compare it with Paul Louis Courier's imaginary letter from Louis to Ferdinand. Chateaubriand exhorts the Spanish monarch to refrain from high-handedness, "which, instead of strengthening the power of the king, only weakens it"—a piece of good advice to which Ferdinand paid uncommonly little attention.

In its giddy elation over this Spanish triumph the court entirely neglected the man to whom the success was originally due. Chateaubriand was no favourite. The Duchess of Angoulème did not address a word to him when he came, on receiving the news of Ferdinand's liberation, to offer his congratulations on her husband's success. Villèle and Corbière were envious of him, and feared that he might wish to take their places; such an idea had never occurred to him, but they were too deeply in his debt not to bear him a grudge.

The court and the cabinet plotted to bring about his downfall. On the 5th of June 1824 Corbière interrupted him in the middle of a speech in the Chamber, to prevent his enjoying a triumph as an orator immediately before his disgrace. On the following morning, when Chateaubriand, still suspecting no evil, presented himself at the Tuileries to pay his respects to the King's brother, he learned his fate from the manner in which an aide-de-camp said to him: "Monsieur le Comte, I did not expect to see you here. Have you not received anything?" Shortly afterwards his secretary brought him his formal dismissal by the King in the shape of a curt "ordonnance" of a dozen lines. It was little wonder that he felt himself irreparably insulted by the tone of the letter and the manner of his dismissal.[4] In mentioning Villèle's attempt to excuse himself by pleading an accidental delay in the delivery of the letter, but for which the humiliating incident at the Tuileries would not have occurred, Chateaubriand justifiably remarks "that it is hardly the thing to address to a man of position a letter which one would be ashamed to write to a footman who was to be turned out of the house."

Christian humility was not the leading feature in Chateaubriand's character; he did not turn the right cheek when he was struck on the left. He writes very characteristically: "And yet my long and faithful attachment did perhaps deserve some little consideration. It was impossible for me entirely to ignore what I perhaps after all really was worth, or entirely to forget that I was the restorer of religion, the author of The Spirit of Christianity."

The restorer of religion did not feel obliged to act in the spirit of Christianity. He naïvely says: "It would have been better if I had displayed a humbler, more cast-down, more Christian spirit. Unfortunately I am not faultless, have not attained to the perfection recommended in the Gospel. If my enemy gave me a box on the ear I should not turn round and present the other cheek. If he were a subject I should have his life, or he should take mine; if he were the King ..."

The sentence does not end, because Chateaubriand's behaviour made any end superfluous. He went over openly to the opposition, and it is to be noted that it was to the thorough-going opposition, which had always seemed to him to be the only sensible thing under a representative government, anything less being impotent. The day after his fall he met with a warm reception from the whole party then in antagonism to the government. An article by Bertin in the Journal des Débats announced that he had become the leader of the party, and he was soon also practically the editor of that newspaper.

The whole Seraphic school, of which he was the founder, soon followed him. Lafayette sent him a laurel leaf. Constant flattered him. He began to fraternise with Béranger, who afterwards addressed a poem to him. Two of its verses run:

Son éloquence à ces rois fit l'aumône: Prodigue fée, en ses enchantements Plus elle voit de rouille à leur vieux trône, Plus elle y sème et fleurs et diamants. Mais de nos droits il gardait la mémoire. Les insensés dirent: Le ciel est beau. Chassons cet homme, et soufflons sur sa gloire, Comme au grand jour on éteint un flambeau.

Victor Hugo addressed a eulogistic and consolatory ode to him (livre iii. ode 2) containing such sentiments as: Was a court the place for you? and: What can be more beautiful than a laurel scathed by lightning?

Chateaubriand's defection was a fatal blow to the monarchy by the grace of God. As long as the illusions of the restoration lasted, the poets of France were Immanuelistic and saw a guardian angel beside every cradle and every bier. With Chateaubriand's illusions vanished the illusions of all the rest, and the Immanuelistic school was succeeded by one to which Southey gave the name of Satanic, a name which it accepted—a school with a keen eye for all that is evil and terrible, a gloomy view of life, and a tendency to rebellion.

But while the minds of Frenchmen were still occupied with this unexpected and momentous event, there occurred a more momentous event, which stirred the whole world, namely, Byron's death in Greece.

The news of Byron's death raised the enthusiasm for the first war of liberation that had been fought since the Revolution to fever heat. A new ideal was conceived by the human mind. With Napoleon the glory of energy had passed away, and the heroes of action had for a time disappeared from the earth. Human enthusiasm was, as has been said, in the plight of a pedestal from which the statue has been removed. Byron took possession of the vacant place with his fantastically magnificent heroes. Napoleon had supplanted Werther, René, and Faust; Byron's Promethean and despairing heroes supplanted Napoleon. Byron was in marvellous accord with the spirit and the cravings of the age. Orthodox dogmas had in the early years of the century overcome revolutionary and free-thinking principles; now orthodoxy was in its turn undermined and obsolete. There was at this moment no future for either thorough-going unbelief or thorough-going piety. There remained doubt, as doubt—poetic Radicalism, the thousand painful and agitating questions concerning the goal and the worth of human life. These were the questions which Byron asked.

But he did not ask indifferently. It was the spirit of rebellion which asked with his voice, and which through his voice made of the young generation in all lands one cosmopolitan society. They united their voices with his in the cry:

.... Revolution Alone can save the world from hell's pollution.

His death did far more to advance the cause of liberty in general than his life. Under the restored monarchy by the grace of God society had been reduced to an extreme of believing subjection to authority, of slavish subjection to theology, of dutiful subjection to power—to an extreme of supineness and hypocrisy. That monarchy was rotten to the core, but supported outwardly by superstition and bayonets. In England Bentham, the Radical philosopher, ashamed to see the reaction successful even in that most advanced of countries, had tried to undermine it by appealing to men's interests. Byron let loose all the passions. His attack was not directed at any one point; he aimed at revolutionising men's minds, at awaking them to the sense of tyranny.

The politicians of the Holy Alliance period believed that they had bound the spirit of the Revolution in everlasting chains, that they had broken, once and for all, the link which united the nineteenth century to the eighteenth. "Then this one man tied the knot again, which a million of soldiers had hewn through. American republicanism, German free-thought, French revolutionism, Anglo-Saxon radicalism—everything seemed combined in this one spirit. After the Revolution had been suppressed, the press gagged, and science induced to submit, the son of imagination, the outlawed poet, stepped into the breach," and called all vigorous intellects to arms again against the common enemy.[5] The restored monarchy does not really survive him. The principle of authority has never had a more inveterate opponent.

In literature the French reaction begins in the name of feeling with Madame de Staël and the whole group of writers connected with her; in society it begins in the name of order with Robespierre and those revolutionists who were his associates. Madame de Staël and Robespierre have this in common, that they are both pupils of Rousseau. After the reaction against Voltaire comes the reaction against Rousseau. On the festival of the Supreme Being follows the great Te Deum in Notre-Dame; on Madame de Staël follows Bonald. The principle of feeling is ousted, or employed, as in the writings of Chateaubriand, to support authority; the principle of order is merged in the principle of authority, which soon controls every domain of life and literature. This principle is, as it were, personified in the first group of reactionaries, led by Joseph de Maistre and Bonald. It has its epic in Les Martyrs, and the idea of order reigns in its poets' descriptions of heaven, of hell, and sometimes even of terrestrial scenery. It has its political monument in the Holy Alliance. The supernatural everywhere supplants the natural. We have not only seraphic epic, but also seraphic lyric poetry, seraphic love, pious pilgrimages, and seraphic predictions and visions.

In no country had the principle of authority in the domain of literary style received such homage and honour as in France. The new school itself begins by acknowledging it. But it unfortunately soon becomes evident that the principle of the newly introduced matter, namely, Christian tradition, is utterly at variance with the traditional principles of literature—and authority begins to totter. Much the same thing happens in another domain. The lady in whose brain the idea of the Holy Alliance originates stands in high favour with the powers as long as her principles seem entirely to coincide with theirs; the moment they discover that it is possible for Christian tradition to unsettle men's minds with regard to authority, they feel obliged to break the tool they have been using; and thenceforward the idea of the brotherhood of humanity is regarded as the source of rebellious feelings and doctrines which undermine authority. Lamennais is the author by whom the principle of authority is most consistently set forth and determinedly upheld during this period; but it soon becomes apparent that beneath his doctrine of the sovereignty of universal reason lies concealed the revolutionary doctrine of the sovereignty of the people; the principle, as it were, puts an end to itself. At this same time the enemies of the liberty of the press are compelled to make use of this liberty for their own purposes, and the enemies of parliamentary government defend parliamentary government in order to bring about the fall of a ministry which keeps them out of power. Soon all the personages whom we have watched appearing on the scene, from Chateaubriand to Madame de Krüdener, from Victor Hugo to Lamennais, are at war with the potentates whose cause they began by championing with such ardour, and at war with that principle of authority which had ruled themselves and the age.

And the principle falls, never to rise again.

MAIN CURRENTS IN

NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

By GEORGE BRANDES

In Six Vols, illustrated

I.THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE.

II.THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY.

III.THE REACTION IN FRANCE.

IV.NATURALISM IN ENGLAND.

V.THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE.

VI.YOUNG GERMANY.