Hernani. Victor Hugo
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