Recent French Literature

Two books on Italy which belong to two epochs bear on their title-pages the date 1891 : the first¹ a treasured fragment from the pen of the great resuscitator of the past, a journal of Michelet written in 1830 ; the second ² the fruit of a recent journey to the land of the vine and the olive, made by the psychologist and analyzer of the present day, M. Paul Bourget. Let us turn first to the Italy of 1830, and note the point of view of the older writer, who was young at that date. It is easy, in reading these vivid sentences of Michelet’s which have the piercing virile force that belongs to his style, and in feeling the unity of the impression conveyed, the summing up of Rome in a personality, to forget that his Rome is not really a book, but a few notes of his itinerary and impressions during a journey which seems to have been a brief one, though we have no dates by which to measure it, and was undertaken for his health when nearly given over by the physicians. Some outline sketches of Roman emperors, intended by him for use in teaching, and a rambling but interesting preface by Madame Michelet help to make up the volume. It gives us one thing well worth having: Michelet’s first eager glance at Italy, his first impressions face to face with the actual Rome, the scene of his reading and his dreams. What an animated, animating glance it is! Michelet’s vision of the past is never merely meditative ; it is energetic, as if scanning a vast active future. To make that past alive again for the quickening of the imagination and the life of to-day is a task that absorbs and satisfies him. He gives few generalizations on the contrasts or affinities between that life and this, having thrown his heart into the past with an ardor which leaves little room for that self-contemplation which is apt to be, perhaps is inevitably, the startingpoint for our analysis of the life immediately about us. The modern Italian was interesting to Michelet as the present occupant of the estate of the ancient Roman, and he notes his characteristics in a quick classification, comparing him with his predecessor, almost equally present to his mind. He is affamé d’érudition, turns from ruins and pictures to burrow in libraries and translate seeing at once into knowledge, and then gazes again, meeting at every turn in Rome its ancient populations. The monuments of the Forum look to him “as if they would fain rise by an effort of their own from the depths of the soil.”

The Rome in which Michelet beheld “ a suggestion of the fortified Paris of the time of Philip Augustus,” the Rome with cows at graze in its Forum, has passed away like the ancient city, and seems to us, as we read, to lie already beneath a layer of soil. The monuments have been freed since then, and are all in view, as are also the improvements of modern progress. The black wooden cross which then stood in the arena of the Coliseum, and which Michelet salutes as the symbol of its greatest memories, is gone. But the glories of the Easter Sunday display in Rome, which drove Michelet to seek the shelter of the smallest and most obscure church to be found, have not all passed away, and his reflection, summing up his impressions of religious Rome, that “ he who has lost his faith cannot hope to find it here,” is not less true since the days of infallibility than it was before. The Roman churches are not those to which the imagination clings; their polished marbles do not rouse the religious feeling; the concentration in Rome of the pomp of the Church has banished from it the sweetness of religion.

M. Bourget’s Sensations d’Italie may almost be taken as the record of a quest for a faith ; in fact, demands to be read as a spiritual confession of some sort, though it comes to hand as a piece of light literature, informal, polished, and artistic. M. Bourget has not sought his faith in Rome. Among the byways of Tuscany and Umbria, with their crumbling frescoes in neglected monasteries and their precious pictures enshrined in the quiet of lonely churches, and along the coasts where relics and suggestions of Greece are to be found, he has made his way in a tour which report describes as a wedding journey, but which his volume, the only document with which a reviewer has to deal, sets down as a pilgrimage of a solemn order. M. Bourget is a civilisé; he is a product of the most refined civilization of this latter day, and when he speaks of this civilization as “ barbarous ” compared with that of the ancient Greeks, it is with the tone of one so thoroughly initiated into an art as to be able to judge intimately, if not condescendingly, of a performance superior to his own. The Roman faculty for government seems to have descended in a measure to the English of modern times, while a smaller portion of the mantle of Greek civilization has fallen upon French soil; if it be not the authentic garment, there are at least no rival relics to dispute its claim. This claim is not invalidated by the highest single examples of culture among other nations. The individuals of highest culture in modern times have not always been the outcome of such refinement of an entire society; Goethe was not, nor Turgeneff, and both gained in fineness by nearness to simpler conditions. In Goethe, the modern type of culture in its largest and most personal sense, all the faculties were in proportion and tending towards one end; it was active, not arrested development. In the civilisé, whether an individual or a world, a large number of faculties develop in exquisite perfection, but remain unrelated, or even tend to prey upon one another, as microbes devour microbes. The melancholy of a generation “ venu trop tard dans un monde trap vieux" has not spared jM. Bourget, but there are other elements in his sadness, which is more austere, altruistic, and invigorating than the usual plaint of French literature. No reader can take up Sensations d’Italie and wander through its Italian autumn landscape, so true in atmosphere and full of subtle touches of color, nor linger upon its faithful reproduction of the spirit of old pictures, nor enjoy its intellectual comment upon things or its evidences of reading and information, now and then a little ostentatiously displayed, without being aware at every moment of an interpenetrative moral feeling so intense and personal as to tinge the whole book. It is something as distinctive and haunting as the melancholy of Obermann or René; as representative, too, of an epoch and exponent of other minds than that of its author. It will hardly prove as infectious, for M. Bourget is not a great creative artist ; and though he appeals to an intimate public, he is more likely to find it waiting for him than to stamp the impress of his special Weltschmerz upon his own or succeeding generations, as the great sentimental and introspective travelers of a bygone day have done.

The ancient Greek was not troubled by the social problem, that being solved for him, as M. Bourget remarks in this book, by slavery. Neither did it affect Alfred de Musset in his despair over the miseries of an overripe age and of individual destiny. But the human intellect of the present day has undertaken the double problem of adjusting the subtle conditions and faculties of refinement, and at the same time making room, in the name of justice, which is so important an attribute of culture, for the immense element of the uncultured and ignorant. With all these ingredients in the cup of human mystery comes in the element of compassion in skepticism and inquiry as well as in effort. No writer has expressed this compassion simply as a feeling with more sincerity and almost involuntary poignancy than M. Bourget. The title of Pierre Loti’s graceful, tender book, Le Livre de la Pitié, would have had a deeper meaning on the cover of Sensations d’Italie. The desire to know how men live which has led M. Bourget to seek “ sensations — that is, contact with life through feeling — amid every variety of existence is doubled perforce by the question how they ought to live, and the perception of the gulf between by a sense of what is so simply named by Othello “ the pity of it.”

It is through sensation that M. Bourget seeks to escape from “ the burning and desiccating whirlwind of modern cities,” and it is to gain fresh artistic impulse, through sensation, by perceiving and feeling how men have lived the life and wrought the works of faith, that he seeks to renew faith. His skepticism is not that of the scientist, a dogmatic one ; it is not the que sais-je ? of Montaigne ; and it is far from the logical technicalities of the theological doubter. It is rather the skepticism which hesitates to give big names to things, and which is conscious of psychological subtleties unfavorable to the wholeness of belief. He is too wise to look for a key to problems, but he turns to regions in which there is to be found the most direct expression in art and in life of the spirit of faith and worship. He goes from picture to picture of the old Tuscan and Umbrian painters, charmed with the truth and devout feeling of one and another Madonna, and gaining, as so many less susceptible tourists have done, a certain strong composite impression from the reiteration of the same story testified to by so many reverent interpreters. Michelet, too, speaks of the domination of the Christian legend in Italian painting, and of the surprise of finding it “ expressed with so much uniformity among a people whose pantomime is so vivid and whose genius is so varied.” M. Bourget, with a deeper delight in this simple penetrating monotony, with a shade more morbidness and sympathy, writes : —

“ They are so numerous, these pupils of the mystical Duccio and the learned Simone Martini ! Communion of ideal and of manner was as dear to the artists of that day as the acquisition of originality at all hazards is dear to us. They accepted, those men ; they had no hope save to continue simply a tradition, to be each a branch of the same great tree, — nay, not even a branch, but a flower among flowers, a minute of a great day, the resting-place of a great doctrine. That is why the reunion of a number of their works gives a sensation of such force, and why such strength still resides in each one of their isolated works. Something in them half impossible permits us to obtain a glimpse through the fragment which we are contemplating of the vast effort which alone has rendered its achievement possible. Sometimes, even as here [he is in the museum at Siena], the fragment is so delicious that for a second it seems to mark the supreme point on which all the rest is suspended; and during that second all the fame of the whole school shines at once upon the name of the poor modest workman, who, by force of subjected merit, showed a genius in his work like the greatest of the great.”

We recall no writer whose description brings up to us more graciously the charm of these Italian masters, Perugino, Luca Signorelli, and a host of minor great artists, than M. Bourget. Their Christianity is even more to him than their art. To seek the spirit and essence of each manifestation, to come as near as possible to the most Christian elements of Christianity, to the real paganism of the Greek, is the mission of the traveler of culture, and M. Bourget has performed that mission. But through his delight in Greek memories, as through his Middle Age and Renaissance sympathies, there comes the same note of regret. This expression with almost lyrical insistence through many modulations of a dominant idea gives to the book a certain completeness and distinction, making it not a mere record of travel, but a work of art. It will be found a sad book not alone by those minds to whom all uncertainties are sad, but even by those most in sympathy with its spirit, and alive to that mingling of stimulus and charm which gives M. Bourget’s work so strong a hold upon the intellectual affections of his generation. He is not a morbid writer, nor, with all his introspection, is he an egotistic one. If his sensationalism were taken to pieces and set up as a mechanical theory, it might be open to the charge of morbidness. Feeling alone is too heavy a weight for the mind ; it needs to be lifted and liberated by intellect. But there is no lack of intellect in M. Bourget’s writing.

We have sometimes wondered in reading his novels, as we have in perusing those of Mr. Henry James, whether an intellect is not now and then a little in the way of a writer of fiction. At all events, it has never been quite evident to us that M. Bourget’s large share of mental endowments includes the special faculty of novel-writing. He is always interesting in his analysis as a novelist, though perhaps less so than as a critic. He has done some very delicate work, and has written some pages that cling to the memory and to the feeling. He may yet produce a great novel, but if so it will be by force of sincerity and comprehension of life rather than by a native talent for reproducing and depicting it. One defect as a novelist—the tendency to rely too much on effective incident, and to secure unity by having all the interest centre on one point — he shares with a large number of his compatriots and fellow-workers, who in their predilection for the accidental happenings and extraordinary phases of life miss that large presentation of its workings which belongs to Tolstoï and Turgeneff, to Verga and Valdes. The last has depicted in Scum as depraved a society as that in which the French seek their models, but how true and dispassionate and superior is his handling of it! The French are masters of literary art, and they are often tempted by this supremacy to sacrifice to an artistic unity, which is apt to be an artificial one, the real unity of development, sequence, and accident in human life. So far M. Bourget is only marching in the ranks of French fiction on a road which it is not likely soon to abandon. Individually he has far less ease, less control of his resources, in a word less art, than M. de Maupassant. We do not see the personages in M. Bourget’s novels, or if we do it is at a moment when the action has stopped ; whereas M. de Maupassant has an incomparable faculty of making us see, hear, and understand his people at once, of bringing before us at the same moment, and as by a single process, their action, aspect, and motive. We feel that he knows through and through the life he depicts, knows it by instinct, independently of analysis, and can reproduce it unerringly, or could if he were less hampered by the aforementioned preference for effects. M. Bourget too often stands apart from his characters in giving his admirable analysis of their motives, and the result is a want of coherence and even a certain coldness, due not to lack of feeling, but rather to lack of touch. But our criticisms, if they be valid at all, apply only to the setting of his novels; and we are no more prevented by such defects from delighting in his psychology than we are prevented by the fact that Mr. James’s characters all speak with the home accent from finding a perennial pleasure in their conversation.

The Nouveaux Pastels,³ no longer very new at this date, are put forth as portraits, and are evidently done from sittings, though in some cases worked up with accessories into the form of a short story. We mentioned in our notice of M. Buet’s book on Barbey d’Aurevilly, in the November Atlantic, having encountered in its pages the original of one of the Pastels, Monsieur Legrimaudet. In that sketch the portraiture is so frank and close that it almost justifies M. Bourget’s expressed satisfaction in the entire hideousness of his model, though by insisting so strongly upon his points as a subject and significance as a type M. Bourget rather anticipates any discovery on the part of his reader, and takes the comment out of his mouth. In Un Humble, a ten minutes’ sketch, done in an omnibus, of the poor visiting teacher, we recognize the study for the character of the professor in Mensonges. Un Saint is really a double portrait, although only one of the sitters is mentioned in the title. It is a “ sensation ” of Italy and of Paris, in which the contrast between two minds which are virtually two worlds is analyzed by sympathy rather than by reason. M. Bourget here allows the reader to penetrate naturally and easily into the simple mental life of an Italian monk, ignorant of everything outside the convent walls, childlike almost to childishness in his ideas of the world, but suffused with his faith and living it in every hour; and into the far more subtle brain of a young Parisian, in possession of all the facts of existence and alive to all its meanings, unless it be the real meaning. He has an intelligence of wonderful suppleness and activity, susceptible of the finest civilization, quick to seize and to comprehend, retentive too, but rendered incapable of assimilation by the blighting effects of precocious cynicism and negation. “ This intelligence seemed to belong to him, like a jewel, or rather like a machine. It was exterior to him. It was not he. He possessed it, but it did not possess him. It served him neither for believing nor for loving.” And the author exclaims, in a phrase which seems to have wandered into the volume from the Sensations d’Italie, where it lingers unexpressed, “ Was I not still more wretched, I who shall have passed my life in comprehending equally the guilty attraction of negation and the splendor of profound faith without attaching myself either to the one or the other of those two poles of the human soul ? ”

In Un Saint and in Maurice Olivier M. Bourget has made his analysis part of the very texture of his story. Maurice Olivier is a very charming little love story, almost fragile in its delicacy, a society idyl, with plenty of chiffons and a note of real feeling. But we prefer Un Saint, and the books where we get M. Bourget’s comment and analysis most direct from life.

“Every one,” says the hero of Jean Paul’s Titan, “ is born with his north or his south; whether in an outer besides, that is of little consequence.” M. Bourget, with all his feeling for Italy, is a northerner born ; with his knowledge of foreign literature and susceptibility to foreign influence, he is most completely French. Pierre Loti has introduced an Oriental element into French letters. The East and Brittany, with the sea between them, are the harvest fields of his pen ; China and Japan have furnished him with material for his wonderful descriptions, with the cadences of his prose. But his inward south is Italy : he has a certain Italian quality of mind ; with his power of description and his caressing tenderness, softened almost to the sentimental, he has more affinity with Amicis than with any other writer. It can hardly be a case of literary influence, for Amicis has probably been far more influenced by French than Pierre Loti by Italian writers. It would perhaps be more correct to use the word “ analogy ” than “ affinity,”and to speak of Pierre Loti as a French writer with an Italian quality. His writing has a certain warmth and fluidity outside the bounds of a French style. His prodigious descriptive power is a sort of plastic talent in writing; it is wordpainting and something more, — a manipulation of words to the very form and dye of the things they represent, rather than that harmonious use of them in relation to one another, that purity of expression which constitutes a style.

Amicis writes lovingly of the discipline and comradeship of a soldier’s life ; Pierre Loti, of the hardships of the sailor’s, the loneliness of the sea. Both are wanderers, describers, sensationists in M. Bourget’s sense. Amicis has kept his feeling more clear of self-consciousness, a little deeper and truer perhaps. But the comparison between them will not go far. The merit of Pierre Loti’s novels is of a different sort from that of the stories of La Vita Militare. Pierre Loti is a novelist more decidedly than Amicis, exquisite as are such stories as Carmela ; he has the gift of narrative, the natural capacity for fiction which M. Bourget lacks. His novels do not cut very deep into life, nor do they exhibit a profound psychology, but they have vividness, pathos, and completeness. Pêcheur d’Islande is an organic whole, as complete as a statue, with its strange wild water scenery indissolubly wedded to its human story.

Le Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort ⁴ has all the charm that Pierre Loti’s pen can give. Nobody could have told better the Vies des Deux Chattes, where the Angora and the Chinese heroine are fully modeled in the foreground in all their pliant attitudes, with their cat personalities wittily divined from each pose or action, while the two quiet elderly ladies in black are painted lightly into the background, half in shadow; stiff, gracious figures, full of distinction, and the real personalities of the sketch. There is here no forced tone in the feeling, whereas we are sometimes conscious, while enjoying Pierre Loti, that he is too literary, too mannered ; that he is bending his perception to the exigencies of composition. We cannot help a slight suspicion of this sort in reading even the touching sketch Tante Claire nous quitte, with its simple, quiet tones, its record of an experience which so many of us have been through, and in which we have perhaps had the same sense of a literary quality in our own feeling that we have in reading Pierre Loti’s narrative.

Of the other stories in the volume, Le Chagrin d’un Vieux Forcat has a sentiment which is a little too easily picked up; but the concluding sketch, La Chanson des Vieux Époux, is a delightful fantasy, a sort of prose ballad, with its pathos located in Japan or the moon, and its homeliness as decorative as the figures on a teapot.