Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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Soon afterwards Aliette is dead, to the profound sorrow of Bernard.
Less than two years later he has become the husband of Mademoiselle
Tallevaut. It was about two years after his marriage with Sabine
that Bernard resumed the journal with which we began. In the pages
which he now adds he seems at first unchanged. How then as to that
story of M. de Rance, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head of
his dead mistress; an incident which the reader of La Morte will
surely have taken as a "presentiment"? Aliette had so taken it. "A
head so charming as yours," Bernard had assured her tenderly, "does
not need to be dead that it may work miracles!"--How, in the few
pages that remain, will M. Feuillet justify that, and certain other
delicate touches of presentiment, and at the same time justify the
title of his book?

The journal is recommenced in February. On the twentieth of April
Bernard writes, at Valmoutiers:

Under pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come to
pass a week at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air. By my
orders they have kept Aliette's room under lock and key since
[235] the day when she left it in her coffin. To-day I re-
entered it for the first time. There was a vague odour of her
favourite perfumes. My poor Aliette! why was I unable, as you
so ardently desired, to share your gentle creed, and associate
myself to the life of your dreams, the life of honesty and peace?
Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems to me like
paradise. What a terrible scene it was, here in this room! What
a memory! I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a look
almost of terror! and how quickly she died! I have taken the room
for my own. But I shall not remain here long. I intend to go
for a few days to Varaville. I want to see my little girl: her
dear angel's face.

VALMOUTIERS, April 22.--What a change there has been in the world
since my childhood: since my youth even! what a surprising change
in so short a period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing!
Then we were, as it were, impregnated with the thought of God--a
just God, but benevolent and fatherlike. We really lived under
His eyes, as under the eyes of a parent, with respect and fear,
but with confidence. We felt sustained by His invisible but
undoubted presence. We spoke to Him, and it seemed that He
answered. And now we feel ourselves alone--as it were abandoned
in the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard,
savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle for
existence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements,
let loose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without
pity, with no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above
us, in place of the good God of our happy youth, nothing, any
more! or worse than nothing--a deity, barbarous and ironical,
who cares nothing at all about us.

The aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter,
is lately dead. Bernard proposes to take the child away with
him to Paris. The child's old nurse objects. On April the twenty-
seventh, Bernard writes:

For a moment--for a few moments--in that room where I have been
shutting myself up with the shadow of my poor [236] dead one, a
horrible thought had come to me. I had driven it away as an
insane fancy. But now, yes! it is becoming a reality. Shall I
write this? Yes! I will write it. It is my duty to do so; for
from this moment the journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart,
is but my last will and testament. If I should disappear from
the world, the secret must not die with me. It must be bequeathed
to the natural protectors of my child. Her interests, if not her
life, are concerned therein.

Here, then, is what passed: I had not arrived in time to render
my last duty to Madame de Courteheuse. The family was already
dispersed. I found here only Aliette's brother. To him I
communicated my plan concerning the child, and he could but
approve. My intention was to bring away with Jeanne her nurse
Victoire, who had brought her up, as she brought up her mother.
But she is old, and in feeble health, and I feared some
difficulties on her part; the more as her attitude towards myself
since the death of my first wife has been marked by an ill grace
approaching to hostility. I took her aside while Jeanne was
playing in the garden.

"My good Victoire," I said, "while Madame de Courteheuse was
living, I considered it a duty to leave her granddaughter in
her keeping. Besides, no one was better fitted to watch over
her education. At present my duty is to watch over it myself.
I propose therefore to take Jeanne with me to Paris; and I hope
that you may be willing to accompany her, and remain in her
service." When she understood my intention, the old woman, in
whose hands I had noticed a faint trembling, became suddenly
very pale. She fixed her firm, grey eyes upon me: "Monsieur
le Comte will not do that!"

"Pardon me, my good Victoire, that I shall do. I appreciate
your good qualities of fidelity and devotion. I shall be very
grateful if you will continue to take care of my daughter, as
you have done so excellently. But for the rest, I intend to
be the only master in my own house, and the only master of my
child." She laid a hand upon my arm: "I implore you, Monsieur,
don't do this!" Her fixed look did not leave my face, and
seemed to be questioning me to the very bottom of my soul.
"I have never believed it," she murmured, "No! I [237] never
could believe it. But if you take the child away I shall."

"Believe what, wretched woman? believe what?"

Her voice sank lower still. "Believe that you knew how her
mother came by her death; and that you mean the daughter to
die as she did."

"Die as her mother did?"

"Yes! by the same hand!"

The sweat came on my forehead. I felt as it were a breathing of
death upon me. But still I thrust away from me that terrible
light on things.

"Victoire!" I said, "take care! You are no fool: you are
something worse. Your hatred of the woman who has taken the
place of my first wife--your blind hatred--has suggested to
you odious, nay! criminal words."

"Ah! Ah! Monsieur", she cried with wild energy. "After
what I have just told you, take your daughter to live with
that woman if you dare."

I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses.
Then, returning to the old woman, "Yet how can I believe you?"
I asked. "If you had had the shadow of a proof of what you
give me to understand, how could you have kept silence so long?
How could you have allowed me to contract that hateful marriage?"

She seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler. "Monsieur,
it is because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oath
on the crucifix to keep that secret for ever."

"Yet not with me, in fact,--not with me!" And I, in turn,
questioned her; my eyes upon hers. She hesitated: then
stammered out, "True! not with you! because she believed, poor
little soul! that..."

"What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice?
Tell me!" Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. "Is it
possible, my God, is it possible? But come, sit by me here, and
tell me all you know, all you saw. At what time was it you
noticed anything--the precise moment?" For in truth she had
been suffering for a long time past.

Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's [238] crime--we must
pardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary
world M. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of
fully knowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised her
in the very act, and did not credit her explanation. "When I
surprised her," she goes on:

"It may already have been too late--be sure it was not the first
time she had been guilty--my first thought was to give you
information. But I had not the courage. Then I told Madame.
I thought I saw plainly that I had nothing to tell she was not
already aware of. Nevertheless she chided me almost harshly.
'You know very well,' she said, 'that my husband is always there
when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. So that he too would
be guilty. Rather than believe that, I would accept death at
his hands a hundred times over!' And I remember, Monsieur, how
at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from
the little boudoir, and brought her a glass of valerian. She
cast on me a terrible look and drank. A few minutes afterwards
she was so ill that she thought the end was come. She begged
me to give her her crucifix, and made me swear never to utter
a word concerning our suspicions. It was then I sent for the
priest. I have told you, Monsieur, what I know; what I have
seen with my own eyes. I swear that I have said nothing but
what is absolutely true." She paused. I could not answer her.
I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them
to my forehead, and wept like a child.

May 10.--She died believing me guilty! The thought is terrible
to me. I know not what to do. A creature so frail, so
delicate, so sweet. "Yes!" she said to herself, "my husband
is a murderer; what he is giving me is poison, and he knows
it." She died with that thought in her mind--her last thought.
And she will never, never know that it was not so; that I am
innocent; that the thought is torment to me: that I am the most
unhappy of men. Ah! God, all-powerful! if you indeed exist,
you see what I suffer. Have pity on me!

Ah! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between
[239] her and me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew
the truth. But I find it impossible! impossible!

June.--That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she
will never be undeceived.

All seems so completely ended when one dies. All returns to
its first elements. How credit that miracle of a personal
resurrection? and yet in truth all is mystery,--miracle,
around us, about us, within ourselves. The entire universe
is but a continuous miracle. Man's new birth from the womb
of death--is it a mystery less comprehensible than his birth
from the womb of his mother?

Those lines are the last written by Bernard de Vaudricourt.
His health, for some time past disturbed by grief, was
powerless against the emotions of the last terrible trial
imposed on him. A malady, the exact nature of which was
not determined, in a few days assumed a mortal character.
Perceiving that his end was come, he caused Monseigneur
de Courteheuse to be summoned--he desired to die in the
religion of Aliette. Living, the poor child had been
defeated: she prevailed in her death.

Two distinguished souls! deux etres d'elite--M. Feuillet thinks--
whose fine qualities properly brought them together. When
Mademoiselle de Courteheuse said of the heroes of her favourite age,
that their passions, their errors, did but pass over a ground of what
was solid and serious, and which always discovered itself afresh, she
was unconsciously describing Bernard. Singular young brother of
Monsieur de Camors--after all, certainly, more fortunate than he--he
belongs to the age, which, if it had great faults, had also great
repentances. In appearance, frivolous; with all the light charm of
the world, yet with that impressibility to great things, according to
the law which makes the best of M. Feuillet's [240] characters so
interesting; above all, with that capacity for pity which almost
everything around him tended to suppress; in real life, if he exists
there, and certainly in M. Feuillet's pages, it is a refreshment to
meet him.

1886.

POSTSCRIPT

ainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnon neoteron+

[241] THE words, classical and romantic, although, like many other
critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood
them too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies
in the history of art and literature. Used in an exaggerated sense,
to express a greater opposition between those tendencies than really
exists, they have at times tended to divide people of taste into
opposite camps. But in that House Beautiful, which the creative
minds of all generations--the artists and those who have treated
life in the spirit of art--are always building together, for the
refreshment of the human spirit, these oppositions cease; and the
Interpreter of the House Beautiful, the true aesthetic critic, uses
these divisions, only so far as they enable him to enter into the
peculiarities of the objects with which he has to do. The term
classical, fixed, as it is, to a well-defined literature, and a well-
defined group in art, is clear, indeed; but then it has often been
used in a hard, and merely scholastic [242] sense, by the praisers of
what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics
who would never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work,
whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for
its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has
gathered about it--people who would never really have been made glad
by any Venus fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of
old Greece and Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into
something staid and tame.

And as the term, classical, has been used in a too absolute, and
therefore in a misleading sense, so the term, romantic, has been used
much too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The sense in which
Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this; that, in
opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved
strange adventure, and sought it in the Middle Age. Much later, in a
Yorkshire village, the spirit of romanticism bore a more really
characteristic fruit in the work of a young girl, Emily Bronte, the
romance of Wuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of
Catherine Linton, and of Heathcliffe--tearing open Catherine's grave,
removing one side of her coffin, that he may really lie beside her in
death--figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicately
beautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit.
In Germany, again, [243] that spirit is shown less in Tieck, its
professional representative, than in Meinhold, the author of Sidonia
the Sorceress and the Amber-Witch. In Germany and France, within the
last hundred years, the term has been used to describe a particular
school of writers; and, consequently, when Heine criticises the
Romantic School in Germany--that movement which culminated in
Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen; or when Theophile Gautier criticises
the romantic movement in France, where, indeed, it bore its most
characteristic fruits, and its play is hardly yet over where, by a
certain audacity, or bizarrerie of motive, united with faultless
literary execution, it still shows itself in imaginative literature,
they use the word, with an exact sense of special artistic qualities,
indeed; but use it, nevertheless, with a limited application to the
manifestation of those qualities at a particular period. But the
romantic spirit is, in reality, an ever-present, an enduring
principle, in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought
and style which that, and other similar uses of the word romantic
really indicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and
widely working influence.

Though the words classical and romantic, then, have acquired an
almost technical meaning, in application to certain developments of
German and French taste, yet this is but one variation of an old
opposition, which may be traced from the [244] very beginning of the
formation of European art and literature. From the first formation
of anything like a standard of taste in these things, the restless
curiosity of their more eager lovers necessarily made itself felt, in
the craving for new motives, new subjects of interest, new
modifications of style. Hence, the opposition between the
classicists and the romanticists--between the adherents, in the
culture of beauty, of the principles of liberty, and authority,
respectively--of strength, and order or what the Greeks called
kosmiotes.+

Sainte-Beuve, in the third volume of the Causeries du Lundi, has
discussed the question, What is meant by a classic? It was a
question he was well fitted to answer, having himself lived through
many phases of taste, and having been in earlier life an enthusiastic
member of the romantic school: he was also a great master of that
sort of "philosophy of literature," which delights in tracing
traditions in it, and the way in which various phases of thought and
sentiment maintain themselves, through successive modifications, from
epoch to epoch. His aim, then, is to give the word classic a wider
and, as he says, a more generous sense than it commonly bears, to
make it expressly grandiose et flottant; and, in doing this, he
develops, in a masterly manner, those qualities of measure, purity,
temperance, of which it is the especial function of classical art
[245] and literature, whatever meaning, narrower or wider, we attach
to the term, to take care.

The charm, therefore, of what is classical, in art or literature, is
that of the well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen
over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute
beauty of its artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil, charm
of familiarity. There are times, indeed, at which these charms fail
to work on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us.
"Romanticism," says Stendhal, "is the art of presenting to people the
literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and
beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure;
classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave
the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers." But then,
beneath all changes of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere
abstract proportion--of music--which what is classical in literature
possesses, still maintains itself in the best of us, and what pleased
our grandparents may at least tranquillise us. The "classic" comes
to us out of the cool and quiet of other times; as the measure of
what a long experience has shown will at least never displease us.
And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the
classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is
that quality of order in beauty, which they possess, indeed, [246] in
a pre-eminent degree, and which impresses some minds to the exclusion
of everything else in them.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the
romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed
element in every artistic organisation, it is the addition of
curiosity to this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic
temper. Curiosity and the desire of beauty, have each their place in
art, as in all true criticism. When one's curiosity is deficient,
when one is not eager enough for new impressions, and new pleasures,
one is liable to value mere academical proprieties too highly, to be
satisfied with worn-out or conventional types, with the insipid
ornament of Racine, or the prettiness of that later Greek sculpture,
which passed so long for true Hellenic work; to miss those places
where the handiwork of nature, or of the artist, has been most
cunning; to find the most stimulating products of art a mere
irritation. And when one's curiosity is in excess, when it
overbalances the desire of beauty, then one is liable to value in
works of art what is inartistic in them; to be satisfied with what is
exaggerated in art, with productions like some of those of the
romantic school in Germany; not to distinguish, jealously enough,
between what is admirably done, and what is done not quite so well,
in the writings, for instance, of Jean Paul. And if I had to give
[247] instances of these defects, then I should say, that Pope, in
common with the age of literature to which he belonged, had too
little curiosity, so that there is always a certain insipidity in the
effect of his work, exquisite as it is; and, coming down to our own
time, that Balzac had an excess of curiosity--curiosity not duly
tempered with the desire of beauty.

But, however falsely those two tendencies may be opposed by critics,
or exaggerated by artists themselves, they are tendencies really at
work at all times in art, moulding it, with the balance sometimes a
little on one side, sometimes a little on the other, generating,
respectively, as the balance inclines on this side or that, two
principles, two traditions, in art, and in literature so far as it
partakes of the spirit of art. If there is a great overbalance of
curiosity, then, we have the grotesque in art: if the union of
strangeness and beauty, under very difficult and complex conditions,
be a successful one, if the union be entire, then the resultant
beauty is very exquisite, very attractive. With a passionate care
for beauty, the romantic spirit refuses to have it, unless the
condition of strangeness be first fulfilled. Its desire is for a
beauty born of unlikely elements, by a profound alchemy, by a
difficult initiation, by the charm which wrings it even out of
terrible things; and a trace of distortion, of the grotesque, may
perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression, about its
[248] ultimate grace. Its eager, excited spirit will have strength,
the grotesque, first of all--the trees shrieking as you tear off the
leaves; for Jean Valjean, the long years of convict life; for
Redgauntlet, the quicksands of Solway Moss; then, incorporate with
this strangeness, and intensified by restraint, as much sweetness, as
much beauty, as is compatible with that. Energique, frais, et
dispos--these, according to Sainte-Beuve, are the characteristics of
a genuine classic--les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques parce
qu'ils sont vieux, mais parce qu'ils sont energiques, frais, et
dispos. Energy, freshness, intelligent and masterly disposition:--
these are characteristics of Victor Hugo when his alchemy is
complete, in certain figures, like Marius and Cosette, in certain
scenes, like that in the opening of Les Travailleurs de la Mer, where
Deruchette writes the name of Gilliatt in the snow, on Christmas
morning; but always there is a certain note of strangeness
discernible there, as well.

The essential elements, then, of the romantic spirit are curiosity
and the love of beauty; and it is only as an illustration of these
qualities, that it seeks the Middle Age, because, in the over-charged
atmosphere of the Middle Age, there are unworked sources of romantic
effect, of a strange beauty, to be won, by strong imagination, out of
things unlikely or remote.

Few, probably, now read Madame de Stael's [249] De l'Allemagne,
though it has its interest, the interest which never quite fades out
of work really touched with the enthusiasm of the spiritual
adventurer, the pioneer in culture. It was published in 1810, to
introduce to French readers a new school of writers--the romantic
school, from beyond the Rhine; and it was followed, twenty-three
years later, by Heine's Romantische Schule, as at once a supplement
and a correction. Both these books, then, connect romanticism with
Germany, with the names especially of Goethe and Tieck; and, to many
English readers, the idea of romanticism is still inseparably
connected with Germany--that Germany which, in its quaint old towns,
under the spire of Strasburg or the towers of Heidelberg, was always
listening in rapt inaction to the melodious, fascinating voices of
the Middle Age, and which, now that it has got Strasburg back again,
has, I suppose, almost ceased to exist. But neither Germany, with
its Goethe and Tieck, nor England, with its Byron and Scott, is
nearly so representative of the romantic temper as France, with
Murger, and Gautier, and Victor Hugo. It is in French literature
that its most characteristic expression is to be found; and that, as
most closely derivative, historically, from such peculiar conditions,
as ever reinforce it to the utmost.

For, although temperament has much to do with the generation of the
romantic spirit, and [250] although this spirit, with its curiosity,
its thirst for a curious beauty, may be always traceable in excellent
art (traceable even in Sophocles) yet still, in a limited sense, it
may be said to be a product of special epochs. Outbreaks of this
spirit, that is, come naturally with particular periods--times, when,
in men's approaches towards art and poetry, curiosity may be noticed
to take the lead, when men come to art and poetry, with a deep thirst
for intellectual excitement, after a long ennui, or in reaction
against the strain of outward, practical things: in the later Middle
Age, for instance; so that medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is
often opposed to Greek and Roman poetry, as romantic poetry to the
classical. What the romanticism of Dante is, may be estimated, if we
compare the lines in which Virgil describes the hazel-wood, from
whose broken twigs flows the blood of Polydorus, not without the
expression of a real shudder at the ghastly incident, with the whole
canto of the Inferno, into which Dante has expanded them, beautifying
and softening it, meanwhile, by a sentiment of profound pity. And it
is especially in that period of intellectual disturbance, immediately
preceding Dante, amid which the romance languages define themselves
at last, that this temper is manifested. Here, in the literature of
Provence, the very name of romanticism is stamped with its true
signification: here we have indeed a romantic world, grotesque [251]
even, in the strength of its passions, almost insane in its curious
expression of them, drawing all things into its sphere, making the
birds, nay! lifeless things, its voices and messengers, yet so
penetrated with the desire for beauty and sweetness, that it begets a
wholly new species of poetry, in which the Renaissance may be said to
begin. The last century was pre-eminently a classical age, an age in
which, for art and literature, the element of a comely order was in
the ascendant; which, passing away, left a hard battle to be fought
between the classical and the romantic schools. Yet, it is in the
heart of this century, of Goldsmith and Stothard, of Watteau and the
Siecle de Louis XIV.--in one of its central, if not most
characteristic figures, in Rousseau--that the modern or French
romanticism really originates. But, what in the eighteenth century
is but an exceptional phenomenon, breaking through its fair reserve
and discretion only at rare intervals, is the habitual guise of the
nineteenth, breaking through it perpetually, with a feverishness, an
incomprehensible straining and excitement, which all experience to
some degree, but yearning also, in the genuine children of the
romantic school, to be energique, frais, et dispos--for those
qualities of energy, freshness, comely order; and often, in Murger,
in Gautier, in Victor Hugo, for instance, with singular felicity
attaining them.

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