Recollections of My Childhood and Youth Part 24

Quite a short while after my arrival--April 12, 1870--I saw for the first time Sarah Bernhardt, who had just begun to make a name at the Odeon. She was playing in George Sand's beautiful and mutinous drama _L'autre_, from which the great-grandmother in Bjornson's _Leonarda_ is derived. The piece is a plea for the freedom of love, or rather, for indulgence with regard to what are branded by society as the sins of love. Sarah Bernhardt was the young girl who, in her innocence, judges all moral irregularities with the utmost severity, until her eyes are opened to what the world really is. She is, without knowing it, the child of unlawful love, and the father's curse is that of not daring to be anything to his child--whom he has educated and over whom he watches--not daring to claim his right to her affection, as he would otherwise stain her mother's memory. In his presence, the young girl utters all the hard words that society has for those who break her laws; she calls her unknown father false and forsworn. George Sand has collected all the justified protests and every prejudice for this young girl to utter, because in her they inspire most respect, and are to their best advantage.--So far her father has not revealed himself. Then at last it dawns upon her that it is he, her benefactor, who is the _other one_ whom she has just condemned, and as the curtain falls she flings herself, melted, into his arms.

Sarah played the part with great modesty, with what one might a.s.sume to be the natural melancholy of the orphan, and the enthusiasm of the young virgin for strict justice, and yet in such wise that, through all the coldness, through the expressive uncertainty of her words, and especially through the lovely, rich ring of her voice, one suspected tenderness and mildness long held back.

VII.

I tried, while I was in Paris, to understand something of the development of French literature since the beginning of the century, to arrange it in stages, and note the order of their succession; I wanted, at the same time, to form for myself a similar general view of Danish literature, and inst.i.tute parallels between the two, being convinced beforehand that the spirit of the age must be approximately the same in two European countries that were, so to speak, intellectually allied.

This was my first nave attempt to trace The Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.

The French poetry of the nineteenth century seemed to me to fall into three groups: Romanticism, the School of Common Sense, the Realistic Art. I defined them as follows:

I. What the French call _Romanticism_ has many distinguis.h.i.+ng marks. It is, firstly, a _break with Graeco-Roman antiquity_. It therefore harks back to the Gallic, and to the Middle Ages. It is a resurrection of the poets of the sixteenth century. But the attempt is a failure, for Ronsard and the Pleiad [Footnote: The poets who formed the first and greater Pleiad were, besides Ronsard, Dubellay, Remi, Belleau, Jodelle, Dorat, Baif and Pontus de Thiard.] are also Greek-taught, are Anacreontics. If we except the _Chanson de Roland_, there is no original mediaeval literature that can be compared with the Icelandic.

For that reason the choice of subjects is extended from the Middle Ages in France to the Middle Ages in other countries, for instance, Germany, whence Victor Hugo derives his drama _Les Burgraves_. The poets select foreign matter, Alfred de Vigny treats Chatterton and Musset Italian and Spanish themes. Merimee harks back to the French Middle Ages (The Peasant Rising), but as he there finds too little originality, he flees, as a poet, to less civilised nationalities, Spaniards, South Americans, Corsicans, Russians, etc. Romanticism becomes ethnographical.

Its second distinguis.h.i.+ng mark is _tempestuous violence_. It is connected with the 1830 revolution. It attacks society and the conditions of property (Saint Simon, Fourier, Proudhon), attacks marriage and the official verdict upon s.e.xual relations (Dumas) Antony Rousseau's old doctrine that Nature is good, the natural state the right one, and that society alone has spoilt everything. George Sand in particular wors.h.i.+ps Rousseau, and writes in essential agreement with him.

In the later French literature the influence of Voltaire and that of Rousseau are alternately supreme. Voltaire rules until 1820, Rousseau again until 1850, then Voltaire takes the reins once more with About, Taine, and Sarcey. In Renan Voltaire is merged with Rousseau, and now, later still, Diderot has taken the place of both.

II. The _School of Common Sense_ (_l'ecole de bon sens_) follows upon Romanticism. As the latter wors.h.i.+pped pa.s.sion, so the School of Common Sense pays homage to sound human intelligence. In certain individuals it is possible to trace the transition--Musset's _Un Caprice_ in contrast with the wanton works of his youth. George Sand's village novels, in contrast with her novels on Marriage. The popular tone and the landscape drawing here, which, for that matter, are all derived from Rousseau, lead on into a tranquil idyl. Works like Ponsard's _Lucrece_ and Augier's _Gabrielle_ show the reaction from Romanticism. In the tragedy it is Lucrece, in the modern play, Gabrielle, upon whom the action hinges. In Ponsard and Augier common sense, strict justice, and a conventional feeling of honour, are acclaimed. Marriage is glorified in all of Ponsard, Augier and Octave Feuillet's dramas. Literature has no doubt been influenced in some degree by the ruling orders of the monarchy of July. Louis Philippe was the bourgeois King. An author like Scribe, who dominates the stages of Europe, is animated by the all-powerful bourgeois spirit, educated and circ.u.mscribed as it was. Cousin, in his first manner, revolutionary Sch.e.l.lingism, corresponded to romanticism; his eclecticism as a moralising philosopher corresponds to the School of Common Sense. The distinctive feature which they have in common becomes a so-called Idealism. Ponsard revives the cla.s.sical traditions of the seventeenth century. In criticism this endeavour in the direction of the sensible and the cla.s.sical, is represented by Nisard, Planche, and Sainte-Beuve in his second manner.

III. The third tendency of the century Is _Realistic Art_, with physiological characteristics. It finds its support in positivist philosophy; Herbart in Germany, Bentham and Mill in England, Comte and Littre in France. In criticism, Sainte-Beuve's third manner. On the stage, the younger Dumas. In novels, the brothers Goncourt, and Flaubert. In Art, a certain brutality in the choice of subject, _Gerome and Regnault_. In politics, the accomplished fact (_le fait accompli_), the Empire, the brutal pressure from above and general levelling by universal suffrage from below. In lyric poetry, the strictly technical artists of form of the _Parna.s.se_, Coppee, who describes unvarnished reality, and the master workmen (_les maitres de la facture_), Leconte Delisle, Gautier and his pupils, who write better verse than Lamartine and Hugo, but have no new thoughts or feelings--the poetic language materialists.

In conclusion, a great many indistinct beginnings, of which it is as yet impossible to say whither they are tending.

This, my first attempt to formulate for myself a general survey of one of the great literatures of the nineteenth century, contained much that was true enough, but revealed very plainly the beginner's lack of ability to estimate the importance of phenomena, an inclination to over- estimate purely evanescent apparitions, and a tendency to include that which was merely externally similar, under one heading. The insignificant School of Common Sense could not by any means be regarded as marking an epoch. Neither, with any justice, could men like Augier and Dumas be placed in different groups. The attempt to point out realism in the lyric art was likewise exceedingly audacious.

However, this division and grouping seemed to me at that time to be a great discovery, and great was my disappointment when one day I consulted Chasles on the subject and he thought it too forced, and another day submitted it to Renan, who restricted himself to the reply:

"No! no! Things do not proceed so systematically!"

As this survey of the literature of France was also intended to guide me with regard to the Danish, I groped my way forward in the following manner:

I. _Romanticism_. Oehlenschlager's att.i.tude towards the past corresponds exactly to Victor Hugo's; only that the resurrection of the Middle Ages in poetry is much more successful (_Earl Hakon, The G.o.ds of the North_), by reason of the fresh originality in Snorre and the _Edda_. Grundtvig's _Scenes from the Lives of the Warriors of the North_ likewise owes all its value to the Edda and the Sagas.

Oehlenschlager's _Aladdin_ is the Northern pendant to Hugo's _Les Orientales_. Gautier, as a poet, Delacroix as a painter, affect the East, as Oehlenschlager does in _Ali and Gulhyndi_. Steffens and Sibbern, as influenced by Sch.e.l.ling, correspond to Cousin. Hauch not infrequently seeks his poetic themes in Germany, as do Nodier and Gerard de Nerval. Ingemann's weak historical novels correspond to the French imitations of Sir Walter Scott (Alfred de Vigny's _Cinq-Mars_, Dumas' _Musketeers_). Oehlenschlager's tragedies correspond to the dramas of Victor Hugo. With the Danes, as with the French, hatred of intelligence, as cold; only that the Danes glorify imagination and enthusiasm, the French, pa.s.sion. Romanticism lasts in Denmark (without Revolutions and Restorations) until about 1848, as in France.

II. The _School of Common Sense_ is in Denmark partly a wors.h.i.+p of the sound sense of the people, partly a moralising tendency. Grundtvig, with his popular manner, his appreciation of the unsophisticated peasant nature, had points of contact with the pupils of Rousseau. Moralising works are Heiberg's _A Soul after Death_, Paludan-Muller's _Adam h.o.m.o_, and Kierkegaard's _Either-Or_. The funny thing about the defence of marriage contained in this last book is that it defends what no one in Denmark attacks. It can only be understood from the contemporary movement in the intellectual life of Europe, which is now a.s.serting the universal validity of morality, as it formerly did the right of pa.s.sion. Its defence of Protestantism corresponds to Octave Feuillet's defence of Catholicism, only that Feuillet is conciliatory, Kierkegaard vehement. Bjornson's peasant novels, which are a continuation of Grundtvig and Blicher, are, by their harmony and their peaceable relations to all that is, an outcome of love of common sense; they have the same anti-Byronic stamp as the School of Common Sense. The movement comes to us ten years later. But Bjornson has simultaneously something of Romanticism and something of Realism. We have not men to place separately in the various frames.

III. _Realistic Art_. There is so far only an attempt at a realistic art.

Thus, in Bjornson's _Arne_ and _Sigurd Slembe_. Note also an attempt in Bergsoe's clumsy use of realistic features, and in his seeking after effect. Richardt corresponds in our lyric art as an artist in language to the poets of the _Parna.s.se_, while Heiberg's philosophy and most of his poetry may be included in the School of Common Sense. Brochner's _Ideal Realism_ forms the transitional stage to the philosophy of Reality. Ibsen's attack upon the existing state of things corresponds to realism in the French drama. He is Dumas on Northern soil. In the _Love Comedy_, as a scoffer he is inharmonious. In _Peer Gynt_, he continues in the moralising tendency with an inclination to coa.r.s.e and brutal realistic effects (relations with Anitra).

In Germany we find ourselves at the second stage still, sinking deeper and deeper into dialect and popular subjects (from Auerbach to Claus Groth and Fritz Reuter).

It is unnecessary to point out to readers of the present day how incomplete and arbitrary this attempt at a dissection of Danish literature was. I started from the conviction that modern intellectual life in Europe, in different countries, must necessarily in all essentials traverse the same stages, and as I was able to find various unimportant points of similarity in support of this view, I quite overlooked the fact that the counterbalancing weight of dissimilarities rendered the whole comparison futile.

IX.

As, during my first stay in Paris, I had frequently visited Madame Victorine, the widow of my deceased uncle, and her children, very cordial relations had since existed between us, especially after my uncle's faithless friend had been compelled to disgorge the sums sent from Denmark for her support, which he had so high-handedly kept back.

There were only faint traces left of the great beauty that had once been hers; life had dealt hardly with her. She was good and tender-hearted, an affectionate mother, but without other education than was usual in the Parisian small bourgeois cla.s.s to which she belonged. All her opinions, her ideas of honour, of propriety, of comfort and happiness, were typical of her cla.s.s.

Partly from economy, partly from a desire not to waste the precious time, I often, in those days, restricted my midday meal. I would buy myself, at a provision dealer's, a large veal or ham pie and eat it in my room, instead of going out to a restaurant. One day Victorine surprised me at a meal of this sort, and exclaimed horrified: _"Comment? vous vous nourrissez si mal!"_ To her, it was about the same as if I had not had any dinner at all. To sit at home without a cloth on the table, and cut a pie in pieces with a paper knife, was to sink one's dignity and drop to poor man's fare.

Her thoughts, like those of most poor people in France and elsewhere, centred mostly on money and money anxieties, on getting on well in the world, or meeting with adversity, and on how much this man or the other could earn, or not earn, in the year. Her eldest son was in St.

Petersburg, and he was doing right well; he was good and kind and sent his mother help when he had a little to spare. He had promised, too, to take charge of his next brother. But she had much anxiety about the little ones. One of them was not turning out all that he should be, and there were the two youngest to educate.

There was a charming celebration in the poor home when little Emma went to her first communion, dressed all in white, from head to foot, with a long white veil and white shoes, and several other little girls and boys came just as smartly dressed, and presents were given and good wishes offered. Little Henri looked more innocent than any of the little girls.

Victorine had a friend whom she deemed most happy; this was Jules Claretie's mother, for, young though her son was, he wrote in the papers, wrote books, too, and earned money, so that he was able to maintain his mother altogether. He was a young man who ought to be held in high estimation, an author who was all that he should be. There was another author whom she detested, and that was P.L. Moller, the Dane:

"Jacques, as you know, was always a faithful friend of Monsieur Moller; he copied out a whole book for him, [Footnote: _The Modern Drama in France and Denmark_, which won the University Gold Medal for Moller.]

when he himself was very busy. But then when Jacques died--_pauvre homme!_--he came and paid visits much too often and always at more and more extraordinary times, so that I was obliged to forbid him the house."

X.

In a students' hotel near the Odeon, where a few Scandinavians lived, I became acquainted with two or three young lawyers and more young abbes and priests. If you went in when the company were at table in the dining room, the place rang again with their noisy altercations. The advocates discussed politics, literature and religion with such ardour that the air positively crackled. They were apparently practising to speak one day at the Bar or in the Chamber. It was from surroundings such as these that Gambetta emerged.

The young abbes and priests were very good fellows, earnest believers, but so simple that conversations with them were only interesting because of their ignorance and lack of understanding. Scandinavians in Paris who knew only Roman Catholic priests from _Tartufe_ at the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coa.r.s.e, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet.

Northern Protestants were very apt to cla.s.sify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one of these three types. But my ecclesiastical acquaintances were as free from hypocrisy as from fanaticism. They were good, honest children of the commonalty, with, not the cunning, but the stupidity, of peasants.

Many a day I spent exploring the surroundings of Paris in their company.

We went to St. Cloud and Sevres, to Versailles and St. Germain, to Saint Denis, to Montmorency and Enghien, or to Monthlery, a village with an old tower from the thirteenth century, and then breakfasted at Longjumeau, celebrated for its postillion. There Abbe Leboulleux declared himself opposed to cremation, for the reason that it rendered the resurrection impossible, since G.o.d himself could not collect the bones again when the body had been burnt. It was all so amiable that one did not like to contradict him. At the same meal another was giving a sketch of the youth of Martin Luther; he left the church--_on se demande encore pourquoi_. In the innocence of his heart this abbe regarded the rebellion of Luther less as an unpermissible than as an inexplicable act.

XI.

The society of the Italian friends of my first visit gave me much pleasure. My first call at the Pagellas' was a blank; at the next, I was received like a son of the house and heaped with reproaches for not having left my address; they had tried to find me at my former hotel, and endeavoured in vain to learn where I was staying from Scandinavians whom they knew by name; now I was to spend all the time I could with them, as I used to do in the old days. They were delighted to see me again, and when I wished to leave, drove me home in their carriage. I resumed my former habit of spending the greater part of my spare time with Southerners; once more I was transported to Southern Europe and South America. The very first day I dined at their house I met a jovial old Spaniard, a young Italian, who was settled in Egypt, and a very coquettish young Brazilian girl. The Spaniard, who had been born in Venezuela, was an engineer who had studied conditions in Panama for eleven years, and had a plan for the cutting of the isthmus. He talked a great deal about the project, which Lesseps took up many years afterwards.

Pagella, too, was busy with practical plans, setting himself technical problems, and solving them. Thus he had discovered a new method of constructing railway carriages on springs, with a mechanism to prevent collisions. He christened this the _Virginie-ressort_, after his wife, and had had offers for it from the Russian government.

An Italian engineer, named Casellini, who had carried out the construction for him, was one of the many bold adventurers that one met with among the Southerners in Paris. He had been sent to Spain the year before by Napoleon III to direct the counter-revolution there. Being an engineer, he knew the whole country, and had been in constant communication with Queen Isabella and the Spanish Court in Paris. He gave illuminating accounts of Spanish corruptibility. He had bribed the telegraph officials in the South of Spain, where he was, and saw all political telegrams before the Governor of the place. In Malaga, where he was leading the movement against the Government, he very narrowly escaped being shot; he had been arrested, his despatches intercepted and 1,500 rifles seized, but he bribed the officials to allow him to make selection from the despatches and destroy those that committed him. In Madrid he had had an audience of Serrano, after this latter had forbidden the transmission from the town of any telegrams that were not government telegrams; he had taken with him a telegram drawn up by the French party, which sounded like an ordinary business letter, and secured its being sent off together with the government despatches.

Casellini had wished to pay for the telegram, but Serrano had dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand, rung a bell and given the telegram to a servant. It was just as in Scribe's _Queen Marguerite's Novels_, the commission was executed by the enemy himself.

Such romantic adventures did not seem to be rare in Spain. Prim himself had told the Pagellas how at the time of the failure of the first insurrection he had always, in his flight, (in spite of his defective education, he was more magnanimous and n.o.ble-minded than any king), provided for the soldiers who were sent out after him, ordered food and drink for them in every inn he vacated, and paid for everything beforehand, whereas the Government let their poor soldiers starve as soon as they were eight or ten miles from Madrid.

I often met a very queer, distinguished looking old Spaniard named Don Jose Guell y Rente, who had been married to a sister of King Francis, the husband of King Isabella, but had been separated from her after, as he declared, she had tried to cut his throat. As witness to his connubial difficulties, he showed a large scar across his throat. He was well-read and, amongst other things, enthusiastically admired Scandinavian literature because it had produced the world's greatest poet, Ossian, with whom he had become acquainted in Cesarotti's Italian translation. It was useless to attempt to explain to him the difference between Scandinavia and Scotland. They are both in the North, he would reply.

XII.

A young American named Olcott, who visited Chasles and occasionally looked me up, brought with him a breath from the universities of the great North American Republic. A young German, Dr. Goldschmidt, a distinguished Sanscrit scholar, a man of more means than I, who had a pretty flat with a view over the Place du Chatelet, and dined at good restaurants, came, as it were, athwart the many impressions I had received of Romance nature and Romance intellectual life, with his violent German national feeling and his thorough knowledge. As early as the Spring, he believed there would be war between Germany and France and wished in that event to be a soldier, as all other German students, so he declared, pa.s.sionately wished. He was a powerfully built, energetic, well-informed man of the world, with something of the rich man's habit of command. He seemed destined to long life and quite able to stand fatigue. Nevertheless, his life was short. He went through the whole of the war in France without a scratch, after the conclusion of peace was appointed professor of Sanscrit at the University of conquered Strasburg, but died of illness shortly afterwards.

A striking contrast to his reticent nature was afforded by the young Frenchmen of the same age whom I often met. A very rich and very enthusiastic young man, Marc de Rossieny, was a kind of leader to them; he had 200,000 francs a year, and with this money had founded a weekly publication called "_L'Impartial_," as a common organ for the students of Brussels and Paris. The paper's name, _L'Impartial_, must be understood in the sense that it admitted the expression of every opinion with the exception of defence of so-called revealed religion.

The editorial staff was positivist, Michelet and Chasles were patrons of the paper, and behind the whole stood Victor Hugo as a kind of honorary director. The weekly preached hatred of the Empire and of theology, and seemed firmly established, yet was only one of the hundred ephemeral papers that are born and die every day in the Latin quarter. When it had been in existence a month, the war broke out and swept it away, like so many other and greater things.

XIII.