A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Hernani

V >> Victor Hugo >> Hernani




Word was passed about among those who regarded Hugo's new theories
with aversion, and a large and mainly hostile audience was assembled
on that memorable night, the most eventful _premiere_ since the first
representation of Corneille's «Cid», nearly two hundred years before.
Everybody knows what happened. Everybody knows how fashion and
aristocracy and journalism combined to kill the new piece, which was
said to have been written in defiance of the rules followed by Racine
and Voltaire; how the regular theatre-goers hissed, and were howled
at in turn by the worshippers of novelty, frowsy, long-haired young
artists and penny-a-liners and students, from the left bank of the
Seine, who had been brought over to support the play. One of the most
sacred institutions of the French theatre is the _claque_, or body of
hired applauders. Now on this occasion there was no _claque_, for
the friends of Victor Hugo had distributed free tickets in the Latin
Quarter, and their recipients were present, ready to raise the roof if
necessary. The hissing and hooting began almost with the first line,
and continued for several hours, until the actors had mouthed through
the whole tragedy; and yet it was considered that «Hernani» had won
the day.

To us such a way of supporting the fine arts and defending the canons
of literary taste, indeed even such widespread and frenzied interest
in anything except business, sport, politics, and religion, seems, to
say the least, remarkable. But we must remember that the French go to
the theatre even more than we go to church; that in February 1830 it
was not safe to get excited about politics in Paris; that athletics
were neglected in France previous to 1871; and that possibly the
French might disagree with us in our estimation of business as the
chief end of man. But although I admire the French for this fine
capability of theirs,--this capability of taking an excited interest
in the things of the mind, I cannot help thinking that the critics and
historians have made too much of that fracas on the 25th of February,
1830, in the Théâtre francais. They tell us that this was the first
great fight between the Romanticists and the Classicists.

We can learn what these words mean only by getting the critics to
indicate to us a piece of art-work constructed according to the
Romanticists and another constructed according to the Classicists, and
then comparing them and picking out the essential differences.
They say «Hernani» is a drama of the Romanticists, and that
seventeenth-century tragedy was classical. We find, indeed, that
Victor Hugo's drama differs from Racine's; «Hernani» is based upon
life in Spain, and not in Greece or Rome, and the period is the
sixteenth century, and not the age of Pericles or Tiberius Caesar.
But if this is all, then Corneille was a Romanticist, for his first
successful tragedy, the «Cid», is also a drama of Spanish life, and
is set, moreover, in the Middle Ages. But, they say, this is not all:
«Hernani» is romantic because it contains a mingling of the comic and
the heroic, inasmuch as there are in it words and notions of common
use, where the author might have employed expressions and ideas
consecrated and set apart wholly to the service of poetry.

And this is true. Victor Hugo does use both phrases and thoughts that
no writer of French tragedy had dared to use before. And here, rather
than anywhere else, do we find what we mean when we say he was a
Romanticist. I have heard one definition of the term as applied to
French literature, which said that the essence of Classicism was the
seeking of material in the life of Greece and Rome, and that the
essence of Romanticism was the seeking of material in the life of the
Middle Ages. The true definition, I think, however, is this, if any be
possible: Classicism in literature consists in limiting the choice of
a writer within a certain range of special terms and special ideas,
these terms and these ideas being such as the best authors of the
past have considered beautiful and appropriate. Romanticism is the
theory--a more generous one--which would permit and encourage a writer
to look for his material and his terms among thoughts and expressions
more common in everyday experience, with large freedom of choice. As
a matter of fact, the poet who is no longer bound by the examples
of Racine and Voltaire will naturally turn to the Middle Ages for
inspiration and material, because Racine and Voltaire have nearly
exhausted the resources of Greece and Rome.

It would be foolish to take pride in the discovery, for so much has
been written on this subject that surely some one has expressed my
idea long ago; but I do think that the whole question of Classicism,
and the thing itself, sprang almost entirely from Racine. At any rate
they are purely French in origin. The old stupid German Classicism
which Lessing demolished, the eighteenth-century English Classicism
which Scott and Wordsworth demolished, both had their source in
France. And in France Racine ruled supreme. He built his tragedies
after a severe pattern, and made them very beautiful, but wholly
artificial. People liked them, in that stiff and conventional age,
and were far enough from investigating whether they and the dramas of
Sophocles and Seneca were in truth built on the same plan. They took
that for granted. Henceforth to their minds there was only one way
of making a tragedy: it must not violate the three unities, of time,
place, and action; it must deal exclusively with exalted, heroic, and
terrible emotions; it must contain only poetical expressions; it must
be composed in Alexandrine couplets, with certain minor points of
agreement with the versification of Racine. In short, a writer of
tragedy must think like Racine and rhyme like Racine, and, above all,
he must never under any circumstances employ a term or indicate an
action which might be called vulgar. From France the fashion spread
all over Europe. It affected Italy, even down to Alfieri, who at the
end of the last century was hampered by this spirit of obedience to
Racine. It made English literature of the eighteenth century what it
was, and kept it from being what it might have been. Her acceptance of
this theory was one of the reasons why Germany had no literature of
great account from the time of Luther and Hans Sachs to the day of
brave old Lessing, who was the first man of consequence to see what
was the matter, and to set to work remedying it by destructive
criticism and constructive example. If it is the glory of Germany that
her Lessing was the sharpest-eyed man in Europe and the first person
sound enough, independent enough, blunt enough, and skilful enough
to change the fashion; to us of English speech belongs the pride of
saying that it was back to Shakespeare's large humanity that the
reformers turned. For Shakespeare is the great Romanticist. It was in
Shakespeare that Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, and the later German
Romanticists, whether as critics or translators or poets, studied
literary art. The Germans Tieck and Schlegel and Herder and von Arnim,
justly celebrated as students of mediaeval literature and as original
producers, were pre-eminently Shakespearean scholars. And now the
French make a great stir of self-gratulation when, as late as 1830,
one of their own poets falls into line and discovers that Shakespeare,
and not Racine, had defined the true boundaries of the tragedian's
art.

Racine tolerated no mingling of the comic and the tragic, as if
laughter never followed tears. Shakespeare constantly mingles them.
Racine would have been horrified at the thought of descending
occasionally to prose, or introducing real songs (the choruses in
«Esther» are hardly of that character) in tragedy. Shakespeare, better
acquainted with this mad, sweet, awful world of ours, is no more
afraid of sudden contrasts than Nature is herself. Racine could never
have brought himself to say «handkerchief» in a tragedy. Shakespeare
does not say that Othello demands of Desdemona a quadrangular tissue
of snowiest cambric, but comes plump out with the word, and it wrecked
Alfred de Vigny's French translation of «Othello» when it was first
performed in Paris, in 1829, and the actor uttered the unhappy word
_mouchoir_.

I do not mean to imply that Victor Hugo would not have emancipated
himself from the thraldom of Racine had he never read our Shakespeare.
He would doubtless have felt cramped, and have sought room for
expansion. He would doubtless have done what he did do, in one
respect, and that is, have turned to mediaeval and later European
history for the inspiration of novels such as «Notre Dame de Paris»,
of plays like «Hernani» and «Ruy Blas», and of a number of his lyrics.
The Germans had already set him an example in the matter of utilizing
folklore and the mediaeval epics and mediaeval history. The brothers
Grimm, those quiet, indefatigable giants, had opened up in Germany a
wonderful mine, not only for philological research, but of poetical
inspiration. Since the days when Goethe helped himself so nobly in the
old German storehouse, drawing thence his best dramatic product,
from «Götz von Berlichingen» to «Faust»; and Schiller even more
abundantly,--since the days of these great men no German poet except
Richard Wagner has availed himself of these riches to make a really
great art-work, such as Tennyson has done with the Arthurian romances
and William Morris with the Norse sagas.

We have seen that the conservative reaction, represented by
Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Lamennais, and Hugo, lasted from 1815 to
1830, and that the new spirit, of Romanticism, which had been working
all along, finally became dominant then. The political revolution of
1830, often called the Revolution of July, had dethroned Charles X,
and brought in, with a more liberal constitution, Louis Philippe,
a prince of the house of Orleans. This event proved to be a great
stimulus to literary activity and a guarantee of literary freedom. It
went far towards destroying the expectation of reviving a state of
society and a tone of thought modelled after seventeenth-century life.
It weakened the monarchical tendency altogether, for it divided the
hopes of conservatives and proved that the Bourbons were not the only
possible kings of France, but that many monarchists would take a king
wherever they could get him. As is usual, and not in politics merely,
but in all combinations of human effort where supremacy must be
maintained by compromise, the unsuccessful minority, the hungry
opposition, was freer from division, more single in aim, and purer in
method, than the party in power. There is sometimes no party tonic
like defeat, and nothing is so recuperative as retirement for a
season. So then after fifteen years of invigorating rest, the
republican party was more capable in 1830 than in 1815 of inspiring
the enthusiasm of men who desired well for their country. It had been
so far purified that a young poet like Hugo might be attracted towards
it as to the saving remnant of his people. His drift in the direction
of republicanism was hastened by the fact that his next two dramas,
«Marion De Lorme», 1831, and «Le Roi s'amuse», 1832, were kept from
being performed by ministerial order, because they displayed two
revered kings of France, Louis XIII and Francis I as the shallow,
pleasure-loving men they were.

A new era for French literature began in 1830. We are justified in
saying this, because the great names of the former decade had lost
their brilliancy, and another set of writers began to be celebrated
and to be looked upon as establishing the tone of thought. The
character of the product, too, is different. There was a larger
freedom in the choice and treatment of subjects, the literatures of
England and Germany were being studied and translated. For the first
time, also, was there in France any widespread appreciation of Dante.
The fact I wish to establish is merely that the spirit had completely
changed, and no argument beyond the evidence of our senses is
necessary.

Pursuing still our old method of investigation, if we want to know
what the new spirit was, we must first inquire who were the prominent
men that breathed it, and then possibly attempt a definition. As
Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Lamennais set the tone in 1815, so Hugo
with his friends and others of the same free spirit did in 1830. About
this powerful, enthusiastic man and his cultivated young wife, in
their simple home, there gathered a number of literary men and women,
who were called the _cenacle_ or symposium. They, with other persons
whom their influence touched, had a common tendency, which in the case
of some was clearly enough defined to be called a common conscious
purpose. The German poet Heine was living in Paris at that time, and
we know very well what object he set before his eyes. Matthew Arnold,
in his fine essay on Heinrich Heine, quotes the great singer's own
words, and makes them the text of an illuminating criticism. They
represent exactly the sentiment of Hugo and his friends at that time.
Hear them: «I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one
day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has
always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any
great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether
people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a _sword_:
for I was a brave soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.»

If you have read any of the so-called _comédies et proverbes_ of
Alfred de Musset, as «Fantasio» and «On ne badine pas avec l'amour»,
you must have felt how those short recitals of passion are breathed
through and through with the spirit of revolt against conventional
opinion; how high they stand above whatever is commonplace; how little
they derive their pulsating interest from what is usual and accepted.
You know how it is when you listen to an orator who employs false
methods of exciting the emotions: how he drops his voice at the end of
certain phrases; how he whines through certain cadences; how he tries
his battery of anecdotes; how he grows warm at the conclusion, and
sits down amid a hush and thrill, very likely, leaving in shallow
minds the impression that he has made an effective appeal. Yet to the
discriminating listener it is instantly apparent that he has been
merely following the conventional method, and very possibly has not
meant a word of what he said; and when a simpler, freer man gets
up and talks sensibly and calmly you see wherein the vice of
conventionality lies. It is in deceiving the performer himself and
corrupting his power to judge himself or form a critical estimate of
what he is doing. The result is that he fails to observe that he is
doing nothing original. And so he goes on feeding us with husks of
commonplace. Now, every generation demands, and would, if it were
untrammelled by convention, produce, its own interpretation of the
phenomena of life. The radicals of our fathers' time are conservatives
for us, and we ourselves, however vigorous our protest against present
oppressions, shall in our old age be considered so much detritus,
to be got rid of by the hot young builders of that day. So the
Romanticists of 1830, being soldiers in the war of liberation of
humanity, were the deadly enemies of what is commonplace, of what is
conventional; were radicals in politics, in religion, and in their
aesthetics. One of the most interesting subjects for historical
investigation is the development of aesthetic theories. And of all
periods when art theories have undergone great changes, this period of
1830 in France is one of the most interesting.

They hoped, these brilliant enthusiasts, to bring about a new French
Revolution, bloodless, of the spirit rather than of the form. Here are
their names: Lamartine (for he had gone over to the Romanticists),
Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Beranger, Alfred de Vigny, Balzac,
George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Sainte-Beuve. You perceive that although
the original revolt was against the dramatic fetters imposed by Racine
and Boileau and Voltaire, the revolution had extended over the whole
range of literature--against conventionality in criticism, in lyric
poetry, in fiction; just as the revolt of the American colonies soon
got far beyond the original grievance about the tax on tea. Their
common tendency was protest against conventionality. They went too far
under this impulse. Alfred de Musset, for instance, translated liberty
into libertinism, and marred the innocent bloom of his art by the
licentiousness of his life. Victor Hugo, the devout, God-fearing
youth, became a sentimentalist and skeptic; a poet could not do worse,
and the effect is seen in a marked diminution of creative force. He no
longer possessed his old earnestness, and thus his work of this period
fails to touch our hearts with fire. The self-consciousness of youth,
instead of melting into that ever-present recognition of the Divine
which is the true culture of a mature man, only stiffened into an
odious self-conceit, which is Victor Hugo's ugliest blemish. George
Sand advocated and practised free-love. Béranger, the Robert Burns
of France (but not nearly so great a poet), overdid his office of
convivial songster, and one pities him and dreads the effect of his
influence. Dumas' private life was a long scandal, saved from ignominy
only by the contrast between its ludicrousness and his genius. His
lack of restraint affected his work too, for had he possessed more
restraint he would have written fewer books, and they might all have
been as good as «Les Trois Mousquetaires».

Alfred de Vigny is a beautiful exception. Although he followed Victor
Hugo with all the ardor of his chivalrous nature, he preserved at the
same time a measure, a moderation, a grace, a consistency, which the
coldest Classicist might have envied. He was born in 1799, of a family
of soldiers, and tells us he learned war at the wounded knees of his
warrior father. In his early life he was constantly laying down the
pen for the sword. While in garrison at Paris he was to be found
chiefly in the libraries, and it was in camp, in the Pyrenees, that
he wrote his celebrated historical novel, «Cinq Mars». I have already
mentioned his fine translation of «Othello», which met with such
strange and undeserved disaster in 1829. He cultivated English
literature assiduously, and drew inspiration from Milton--and Ossian.
The rhapsodies of the pseudo-Ossian were causing a great stir
throughout Europe, and were eagerly read and applied by the
Romanticists as a proof of what could be done in defiance of the rules
of Boileau. Alfred de Vigny, too, like almost every novelist from that
day to this, was profoundly influenced by Walter Scott. He fortified
his position with several other plays, of which the best known is
«Chatterton». But the works from his hand which our generation reads
most are «Cinq Mars» and his lyric poems.

Alfred de Musset was a poet of such great importance that it is
impossible to say, in a brief sketch like this, anything at all
adequate about his delicate qualities of heart and mind, his strange,
sad life, his wonderful achievements, and his growing fame. He will
live perhaps when all his contemporaries are forgotten, except Hugo.
Hugo himself has no other rival so dangerous.

Of Balzac, George Sand, and Dumas it is hardly necessary to speak in
this connection: being novelists, they have the advantage of being
read--which is not always the case with poets. The development of the
novel has been the only concerted movement of great importance in
French literature since the early days of Romanticism. From Balzac,
the father of the realists, Hugo, the extreme of idealists, learned
little. There seems to be absolutely no artistic relation between
them. George Sand and Dumas were, of course, idealists, romantic to
the last degree, and although Hugo in his novels manifestly strains
after reality, he is much more in line with them than with Balzac. But
Hugo is not a novelist at all in the sense that Balzac or George
Sand or Dumas are novelists. He has written certain prose works of
imagination, entitled «Les Misérables», «Les Travailleurs de la Mer»,
«Notre Dame de Paris», and so forth, but the matter in each case is
essentially poetical, and it seems to me that the language is neither
that of prose nor that of verse.

There remains one other member of the _cénacle_ who is not so well
known that mention of him here would seem superfluous, and who yet
had much influence over Hugo. Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) was one of the
greatest literary critics the world has known--perhaps the greatest.
At the age of twenty-four he published his «Tableau historique et
critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au seizième
siècle», a work of deep maturity, showing a marvellous grasp of fact
and a spirit of rare discrimination. Some men seem born with literary
taste. There are boys of ten who appreciate poetry better than most
educated men of forty, and can tell you the reasons, more or less
correctly, for their opinions. The end and aim of all literary
education should be to create and foster this faculty of apprehension
and discrimination. Some come by it naturally. For others it can only
be the result of large and varied reading and considerable experience
in affairs, and of a culture of the heart. To Sainte-Beuve it was
given in abundant measure at an early age, and he strengthened it by
assiduous labor. No other language can boast a body of criticism at
all comparable with his «Causeries du Lundi» and «Nouveaux Lundis». In
English we prize jealously, as things unparalleled in our language and
precious beyond expression for their rare beauty and usefulness,
the literary criticisms of Matthew Arnold. Imagine a Matthew Arnold
without prejudices, without hobbies, without mannerisms, who should
give us a complete body of criticism covering the whole range of
English literature, not merely discussing and estimating and comparing
authors, but telling us the contents of their writings! This is
Sainte-Beuve's secret. He makes us see the man he is talking about,
he makes us know and appreciate his productions, and then, with a few
brief, luminous suggestions, leaves the whole matter to settle
itself properly in our minds. Sainte-Beuve also wrote poetry of no
inconsiderable merit, but passes this severe condemnation upon all
the poetry of himself and his friends, at this epoch, saying: «Il
est résulté de ce concours de talent, pendant plusieurs saisons,
une très-riche poésie lyrique, plus riche que la France n'en avait
soupçonné jusqu'alors, mais une poésie très-inégale et très-mêlée. La
plupart des poëtes se sont livrés, sans contrôle et sans frein, à tous
les instincts de leur nature, et aussi à toutes les prétentions de
leur orgueil, ou même aux sottises de leur vanité. Les défauts et les
qualités sont sortis en toute licence, et la postérité aura à faire le
départ. Rien ne subsistera de complet des poëtes de ce temps.»

But Victor Hugo outlived all parties and groups and associations of
which he was a member in that early time, and his life subsequent to
the exciting days of 1830 was a steady development and contains in
itself a reflection of nearly everything that was going on in France.

We may consider him under three aspects: as dramatist, novelist, and
lyric poet. He is greatest under the last aspect. Through all his life
he expressed himself in song. Perhaps no other poet has done this so
thoroughly, so beautifully, and for so long a period. So I shall speak
of his personality and actual experiences when I come to consider his
lyric poetry, and shall first give an account of his work for the
stage and in prose fiction.

In 1827 appeared a so-called historical drama, «Cromwell», which was
not remarkable for much except its lack of historical truth, and its
preface, in which the young man outlined his theories and laid down
the programme of attack upon the classical ideas. This attack was in
reality first made with «Hernani» in 1830. «Marion De Lorme», which
appeared in 1831, is a much weaker play, and abounds in all the
excesses to which Romanticism was prone. Apart from the substance,
which is repulsive and harrowing, when not trivial and weak, the form
of the drama is loose, and one can very easily understand how such a
production would offend an ear trained to the stately, chaste, and
elegant dialogue of the elder poets. If this is all Romanticism has
to offer, let us have back our Corneille and Racine. «Le Roi s'amuse»
(1832) suffers from the same faults, and offends even more against
good taste. These pieces are both strong in the main, though there are
weak passages in both, but their strength is not healthy or beautiful.
Victor Hugo himself called attention to the fact that he depended for
his effect, in these two plays, upon the principle of contrast. It is
a principle which he has employed in nearly all his work, and which is
indeed one of the strongest elements of artistic effect, always and
everywhere, with all writers. Hugo, however, uses it too deliberately
and too exclusively. In «Le Roi s'amuse», for example, he has chosen
a most repulsive figure, Triboulet, whom lie makes hideous both
externally and internally, by every device known to art, and in this
character he implants a pure flower of paternal love. Then he stands
off and says: «Behold what I have done! How deformity looks black
behind that white virtue!» The principle is useful, but he makes a
forced application of it. In his novels, too, every reader will recall
instances where a contrast has been insisted upon till one's patience
is exhausted.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.