Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

the whole period, whilst his view of history, as consisting of stages that close in the positive, which looks at all things in an unsupernatural, unmetaphysical way, led men like George Henry Lewes, Buckle, and Grote to suggestive revisions of the facts of the past. Not till the latter half of our century, not till Darwin and Spencer had revolutionised our view of the past by the theory of development, did the positive attitude to life have much effect upon imaginative literature. Without such a fertile and illuminative thought, its influence upon poets and artists could only be negative and chilling. Perhaps the chief imaginative influence of Comtism in the earlier part of the century was directly, by its lifeless, faithless version of the Catholic church, to encourage the Oxford religious reaction, and indirectly, by its confident and dogmatic negative to idealism and the treatment of the supernatural, to bring about that pathetic scepticism which takes such poetical beauty in Clough's poems and Tennyson's In Memoriam.

3. It was French science that, after the absorption of talent by the Napoleonic wars, grew apace and moulded English thought most. In biological and physiological investigation, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology France took one of the foremost places in Europe. And though Germany, especially in the second quarter of the period, made as great strides in scientific discovery as France, her scientific work did not so closely or so deeply affect English thought and literature. It was the practical tendency and lucid exposition of French science that appealed at once to the popular imagination, and brought illustration and simile into English poetry and suggestion of plot and incident into English fiction.

4. But pure literature was more affected by French history and criticism than by either philosophy or science. Into these the new spirit of the Revolution introduced such an emotional element as made them almost as interesting as fiction. From Chateaubriand to Michelet there was a long series of French writers who found in history the elements of romance and dealt with it as a succession of striking pictures; the great drama of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had been so impressive, so rapid, and

sensational in its acts and dénouements, that the historical imagination was touched into life by it and sought like romantic material in other periods and countries. The dramatic and picturesque style of French historians became the model of many of our historians. And Macaulay, Napier, Milman, Merivale, Prescott, Kinglake, Ticknor, Motley, and Bancroft bring out the romance of various periods with an imagination and style almost poetic. Even Carlyle, Germanised so deeply though he was, caught the dramatic fervour of history from the French and raised the new style to its highest romantic pitch in his French Revolution. The new philosophical treatment of history in France as a series of phenomena social, political, and economical, and represented especially by Guizot, De Tocqueville, and Comte, took as deep root in England, but later in the century. George Henry Lewes, Buckle, and Draper were only the founders of this new combination of history and philosophy in England which has been so fertile during the latter half of the century; and they drew their first inspiration from France.

5. Criticism also learned for the first time in France to be philosophical and picturesque. Villemain, Saintebeuve, Janin, and Scherer taught English critics that to use the lash was not their only function; they brought the sympathetic imagination of the poet to bear on contemporary books as well as books of the past; and in the hands of De Quincey, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, and Greg, who had their natural tendency to sympathetic insight confirmed by French example, criticism rose in England to the rank of literature. Nor has it ceased to feel its higher mission or to drink at French sources of inspiration. Heine, with his Gallicised Germanism, taught it another combination, that of wit, poetry, and philosophy, and there has been much effort to follow in his footsteps since the middle of the century.

6. Even the more difficult task of popularising economics was accomplished by France. St. Simon and Fourier infused into the new science a certain element of romance by introducing into it the whole sphere of government and society; they gave it the socialistic bent which has later in the century made it the special study of the new artisan reading public.

But even without this atttaction, writers like Bastiat, Chevalier, and Lavaleye popularised it by their illustrative style and their lucid exposition. John Stuart Mill, Miss Martineau, Senior, and Bagehot followed their example and made it easy reading for even the average public.

7. But it was French imaginative literature that most influenced English during the last part of our period. The French romantic movement, that culminated in the practical sphere in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, could not fail to affect the literature of the neighbouring country as soon as the reaction from the great Revolution had lost its fierceness of antagonism. And it was the second quarter of the century that began to feel the influence of the new French poetry and fiction. Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Gautier and De Musset and Baudelaire, though the last three repelled at first by their sensuous themes and tone, gave an impulse to the romantic and passionate treatment of love in English poetry, which had been bent in that direction already by Shelley and Keats and Byron. It is apparent in the poems of Mrs. Browning, the early lyrics of Tennyson, and the Pauline of Browning. But it was rather after the middle of the century than before it that this influence became most apparent. The romance and poetry of sensuousness do not come fully into English literature till the Songs before Sunrise of Swinburne.

8. Almost the same may be said of the new French fiction The influence of even Balzac and Dumas and George Sand comes rather in the latter half of the century, though we can see that Bulwer Lytton and Lever, Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte have felt it, if not studied their books. English fiction learned from Balzac to deal with separate passions or problems or phases of human nature, from Dumas in his Gallicised imitations of Scott to treat sections of history or contemporary life in a romantic, if not sensational, way, and from Paul de Kock and Eugene Sue to concentrate interest in a dramatic plot. The later novels of George Sand, and those of Gautier, Flaubert, and Murger belong to the latter half of the century and have little influence till our own generation. French fiction at first rather affected the English acting drama. Now was

begun the habit of dramatising novels and that of adapting from French plays or romances. Theatrical audiences were not yet sufficiently acquainted with the language to find the sources of plots. And play-wrights began to hunt in its preserves. The new literary drama seldom looked to France for either material or inspiration.

9. When it or any other branch of English poetry did, it found them in a different type of literature—either in the mystical prose rhapsodies of Sénancour in Obermann, or in the romantic poetry or prose of Hugo or Lamartine. For there were two distinct attitudes in the French imagination of the second quarter of the century, corresponding to the English literary movement of half a century before—the sentimental and the romantic. The one turned sadly to nature and the past and found material and scenes for melancholy reflection that rose into almost poetic eloquence when expressed; it drew somewhat from German sources and was perhaps already affected with the pessimism which had begun again to appear in Europe in Schopenhauer the German thinker and Leopardi the Italian artist; for it found little hope in the actual state of the world; all its consolation came from mystic sympathy with either nature or religion; and it found its most natural expression in prose that passed often from rhetoric into poetry. Chateaubriand and Joseph de Maistre formed the connecting link between this school and that of Rousseau and St. Pierre, which had been more optimistic; and its most prominent representatives were Sénancour, Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Eugenie and Maurice de Guérin. They gave some of the literary colour to the Oxford movement, not only to its High Church but to its Broad Church phase. Maurice and Matthew Arnold and Clough were as much tinged with their mysticism as Newman and Keble and Faber; they all alike tried to find support for their faith in sad appeal to nature and most of them delighted in the harmonies the harmonies of half-rhetorical, half-poetic prose as much as in verse. Mrs. Browning and Tennyson felt their influence too and indulged in a poetic mysticism that often became pessimistic in its view of the world. Still more was the English pulpit of the middle of the century affected by their half-poetical rhetoric as well as

their spiritual attitude; Lamennais and Lacordaire could not but mould the young preachers of the time by their eloquence. The romantic movement represented by Lamartine and Hugo with its optimistic and revolutionary ardour was not so influential in English literature till after the middle of the century; yet we can see its more cheerful attitude to the past and to nature in Macaulay and Thackeray, Kingsley and Longfellow.

IO. The older literature of France continued to hold its own in the English literary mind against contemporary French literature. Rabelais, Montaigne, and Le Sage still showed their influence in the English essayists, humourists, and novelists. Molière and Beaumarchais and the older dramatists moulded English plays as much as Scribe and De Vigny. Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu continued to affect English philosophical prose throughout the period especially amongst utilitarians and advanced thinkers.

Section 3.

I. So was it with the literature of Italy and Spain. It was the older that was the more powerful over the English literary imagination. It was the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Sonnets of Petrarch, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, the Jerusalem Delivered of Tasso, and Don Quixote that were frequently translated into English during the period. Few of the poets in the second quarter of the century but studied them with care. The earlier poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott and Byron, Shelley and Keats were less affected by them. And yet it was Byron and Shelley and Keats that first brought Italy into note as the natural exilehome of English poets. They found that land with its newly discovered treasures of ancient art and its atmosphere of traditional art one of the finest stimuli to the imagination. Venice and the Adriatic especially inspired Byron, Florence and the Mediterranean shore Shelley and Keats and Landor. And though they did not turn to Dante and Tasso, they found many of their best themes in the older history and literature. Byron sought the subjects of two of his dramas, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari, in older Venice, and

« AnteriorContinuar »