THE

FOREIGN

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-Revue des Deux Mondes. (Criticisms on English Writers of Romance. By PHILARÈTE CHASLES.) Paris. 1839-1842.

THE mutual opinions entertained by French and English of each other, were in the last century universally admitted and agreed

on.

The Englishman was a sturdy, carnivorous, independent clown: the Frenchman a lantern-jawed skeleton (the epithet was applied to him as far back as Piers Plowman), soup-fed, lace-dizened, and pressed under the triple yoke of " popery, slavery, and wooden shoes." There was no mistaking the physical or moral characteristics of the two people. The Frenchman was irremediably gay, essentially volatile and saltatory: the Englishman, reserved and splenetic, even to suicide. Such were the stereotyped features of each race, when the Revolution drew its dark veil between them, and allowed but distant peeps at each other's deeds, ways, and thoughts.

When the veil or curtain was withdrawn, half a century had done its work on both. The Englishman, pent up in his splenetic island, had become, or at least was found to be, a very gay and pleasurable fellow, and a slender dandy withal. The division of property had in the mean time turned the Frenchman into pastures of his own, almost as fat as John Bull's; and he had become in consequence a grave and ruminant animal, with a protuberant œsophagus. As to fashion, taste, gait, appearance, every thing of course was topsyturvy. A powdered marquis was no more: perukes had vanished: and the only being that adhered to the queue, and other extraordinary appendages of the last century, was perhaps the Postilion: that representative of Progress being more behindhand and retrograde, than any other of his compatriots. In exterior setting forth, as in many more re

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spects, military ideas had superseded all others. The moustachiod officer was in the highest sphere of fashion and notability. And women dressed to correspond: lacing up their chests like those of drum-majors, and placing their waists in and about the region of the hipbone, as hussars are wont to do. Civilian elegance, which had reached such a height in England, in France existed not. In 1815 Young France touched a razor once a week, and divers brushes of the toilet quite as seldom. Yet it was then the dynasty of dandies reigned in England. What was the surprise of the French, when fine specimens of this fraternity rolled over to Dessein's, and invaded the boulevards! The Moustache was dethroned, and in a very few months the little theatres began to ridicule the braggart soldier of the Empire. A learned essay was written, which the Institute refused to print, on the causes to which it was owing, that the genius of tailoring had passed in modern times from Italy to Spain; then from Spain to France; and lastly, in passing to England, had abandoned the Latin for the Teutonic race. The surprise of the French at this was as great as that of the Romans, when they first beheld their general Cecina exchange the toga for a pair of Gallic trews and tartans: quod versicolore sagulo, braccas, tegmen barbarum, indutus, togatos adloqueretur."

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If such difference, mutual surprise, and misapprehension existed respecting external attributes and superficial humours, still greater was the surprise, when each began to examine the intellectual productions and progress of the other. For a Frenchman, during the first fifteen years of the century, to have known English. literature was difficult; to have talked or written of it, impossible. Madame de Staël saw the first edition of her "Germany" pounded in a mortar, because it praised the poetry and philosophy of the Germans. What would have befallen her, had she praised English men and letters, reminds one of the proverbial story of the Marseillais. A boy, walking peaceably down the street, receives from a Marseillais a rude kick, which leaves him sprawling. The boy rises, and with lamentation asks, what he had done to his aggressor to deserve such a blow. "What have you done to me!" responds the Marseillais. "Only imagine what a kick you would have got had you done any thing to me!" Napoleon converted the Allemagne into pasteboard. Had it been an Angleterre, he would have done scarcely less than make an Auto-da-Fé of book and authoress together.

Napoleon's exile of Madame de Stael sent her to England. This enabled her to make an early acquaintance with Waverley and Childe Harold, and through her means Byron and Scott

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poured over the Channel in a tide, that soon reached the farthest limits of Europe. French critics indeed at first withstood the invasion. The classic school of the Empire denounced the author of Waverley as a barbarian of the mad school of Shakspeare. And though Byron's admiration of Napoleon must have mollified them, their admiration of his genius was neither intelligent nor great. It was not for many years, and not till after the fighting of several pitched battles between classics and romantics, that the excellence (very various!) of Byron, Göthe, Scott, and Moore were acknowledged. Their triumph was won in the most legitimate of ways; by translations; and by these translations finding sale and vogue even amongst a lower class of French readers, than that which enjoyed the originals in England.

The French (notwithstanding late adventures of Romancers on the Rhine) are not travellers, neither do they care to go forth to seek out the rarities and excellences of other nations. But they are generous enough to welcome these, when brought home to their doors. Thus from 1819 to 1825 a translation manufactory was set at work, which poured forth translations every monthe prose translations of the poetry, drama, philosophy, and literatur: of other countries. Even the highest names were associated with the scheme, and that of Guizot himself stands at the head of hundreds of volumes, some twenty of Shakspeare being of the

number.

These translations were not confined to novels and dramas. Cousin introduced the French to Kant. Jouffroy translated Dugald Stewart and Reid. And the fiercest combats between the old school of imperial literature, and the new one of the rising generation, took place on the fields of metaphysics. Messrs. Jouy and his friends of the Constitutionnel, the Minerve, and the Pandore, were Voltairean, materialist, classic, epigrammatic. Their new antagonists started up as spirituelists, romanticists, and serious reasoners. Condillac was the ne plus ultra of the science of mind with the old school: supported by the physical theories of Cabanis and Broussaix, the latter of whom explained life by nervous irritation. Their antagonists translated Leibnitz, reprinted Descartes, brought back the current of French philosophy to its source, and asserted with Kant that consciousness was proof enough of soul. These doctrines were expounded in the Globe, an organ of the ideas of the rising generation, which was fast superseding the journals and the veteran writers of the imperial school.

The antagonism, which stretched into the profundities of metaphysics, was as great and as fierce in the walks of literature

and the arts, and produced those controversies between classics and romantics, of which all have heard. The Constitutionnel vowed in its feuilletons that the tragedies of Jouy, Arnault, and Lemercier were in the only road to the true sublime. The romantics became so exaggerated in the contrary direction, that they gave birth to the worst extravagances of Dumas and Hugo. There was one writer, however, who might have served to conciliate and connect the schools, since he was of both. He had been nurtured in the one, and had grown into the other. This was Chateaubriand. He had all the pomposity, the affectation, and polished cadence, of the classic; while he practised the imaginative distortion, and aimed at the effect, of the romantic. He had been in England and America, was acquainted with our literature, and had published voluminous criticisms thereon. Like Voltaire, he began by praising us in this respect, and then, vexed to find his praise too loudly taken up and echoed, he turned round and abused us. This was precisely the way in which Voltaire treated Shakspeare: first deified, and then tried to degrade him. Chateaubriand remained true, indeed, to Shakspeare and to Milton. But his opinions of his great English contemporaries varied. They varied with the attacks of his great disease: his vanity. He is loud in praise of Byron; very anxious to establish that the idea of Childe Harold was taken from Réné; and carries conceit to the extreme of the ludicrous in arguing that Byron's total silence as to the name of Chateaubriand must have been owing to his having left an early letter of the poet's unanswered. To Walter Scott, Chateaubriand is unjust when this vanity is again awake; and on one occasion he prefers Manzoni's novels to the Waverley series. At others his better taste predominates, though it does not save him from exaggeration. "England is all Shakspeare," said he, "and even down to the present time Shakspeare has lent his soliloquy to Byron, his dialogue to Walter Scott."

From 1820 to 1830 Chateaubriand became lost in politics. Fortunately for themselves, however, the young school of which we have talked, shut out politics from their studies and writings, if not from their sentiments. It is a singular remark, that any great and successful attack against a dominant political party and established political ideas, must be made by regular and distant approaches, and by a recurrence to other fields and arms than those which politics themselves afford. The old-established Tory system of governing in England, the declaring all for the best, and improvement a chimera, was attacked in 1790 and the following years by a revolutionary party, which thought to carry all by a coup de main. The attempt was defeated, and flung not

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only disgrace but ridicule on its abettors. But then began a more slow and regular warfare. Liberal thinkers, instead of storming the walls of Tory power, began to sap them. The Edinburgh Review was set up, and became a school: a normal school for statesmen, and a medium for the diffusion of a host of opinions all opposed to those which prevailed. It was a literary and philosophical opposition, that commenced in the first years of the century, and that took one quarter of that century to do its work. It brought about the liberal reaction which ended in emancipation and reform.

We have thus digressed into English politics merely for the purpose of showing what the young French school, embodied in Le Globe journal, meditated by commencing a literary and philosophical opposition. They felt that the then existing opposition to ultra-monarchic and ultra-religious ideas was based on a worn-out and worthless foundation: namely, on the materialist and military creed of the empire: and this they deemed pernicious, and incompatible with constitutional progress. They therefore took stand on another ground. They avowed respect for religion, with the right of examination and judgment; respect for monarchy, and for the monarchy of the Bourbons, provided the latter in turn respected the constitution. Politics, however, they did not expatiate upon. Opposition was then carried on in secret societies and conspiracies, by men of action and carbonari; and thinking men feared almost as much the failure, as the success, of such appeals to cunning and to force. Therefore it was that the Globe confined itself to reasoning: and put forth disquisitions on political economy, on penal law; on the collateral, rather than the principal, questions of politics.

Precisely the same thing is at this moment going on in Germany; where political discussion is forbidden, but where opposition to absolutist ideas is carried on by literary, critical, and philosophic journals. Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbücher is much what the Globe was in Paris some fifteen years back. And all Germany is indeed alive with the fiercest discussions on all subjects save politics. The contest between Hegel's scholars and Schelling's, and between the literature of Young Germany and that of the Old, as well as between the prohibition and free trade schools in political economy, give ample exercise to the national mind, and prepare the way for the more serious discussion of a People that must be free. The Parisian Globe was marked with the greatest generosity of criticism towards foreign excellence. The chef d'œuvres of Byron, Göthe, Scott, were welcomed and criticised by it in terms of the highest admiration. And the young men writers, who began