neur.1 The story goes that under the Directory those who lived in the Bois de Boulogne were one day alarmed to see a great blaze amongst the trees, and that when they came close to it they perceived some men, attired in Scandinavian fashion, endeavouring to set fire to a pine and singing to the accompaniment of a guitar with an air of inspiration: they were admirers of Ossian who intended to sleep in the open air and to set the trees alight in order to keep themselves warm, like the heroes of Caledonia. Under the Consulate Ossian enjoyed a far greater vogue, even, than before; the first consul had made him "his own poet," thereby enlisting the sympathies of Mme. de Staël; he read him on board the vessel which brought him back from Egypt, as at a later period he read him on his voyage to St Helena.3 "How beautiful it is," he said to Arnault. It has been said that he imposed the Ossianic stamp upon the art of his time. It would be more just to say that having been brought up in the literary traditions of the eighteenth century, he shared the veneration of his contemporaries for the Caledonian bard. It was under the Consulate, and at his suggestion, that Baour Lormian composed his Poésies galliques, that Girodet painted his picture of Fingal and Ossian welcoming the shades of the French warriors, and that Lesueur wrote his opera Les Bardes, which Napoleon proclaimed a "brilliant, heroic and truly Ossianic" piece.* When, after the Revolution, Mme. de Staël and Chateaubriand attempted to lay down the rules of a new theory of poetry, both 1 Poèmes d'Ossian et de quelques autres bardes, intended as a sequel to Letourneur's Ossian, and translated from the English by Hill (pseudon.), Paris, 1795, 3 vols. 18mo. 2 G. Renard, De l'influence de l'antiquité classique sur la littérature française pendant les dernières années du xviiie siècle et les premières années du xix. Lausanne, 1875, 8vo. 3 See the Journal de la traversée d'Angleterre à Sainte-Hélène, by an English officer, published in the Journal des Débats. The Poésies galliques belong to 1801. Girodet's picture was exhibited at the Salon of 1802. Lesueur's opera was played in 1804. See also Catheluina, or the Rival Friends, a poem written in imitation of Ossian (by General Despinay), Paris, 1801, 8vo; Traductions et imitations de quelques poésies d'Ossian, an old Celtic poet, by Charles Arbaud Jouques, Paris, 1801, 8vo; Traduction libre, en vers, des chants de Selma, from Ossian, etc., by J. Taillasson, Paris, 1801, 8vo, etc. accepted Ossian as a precious legacy from the century which had just come to a close. Through them he became appreciated by the youthful band of writers that was destined shortly afterwards to form the romantic "Pleiad":"Ah, plaintive harp, once, as the faithful comrade of Ossian, wont to sing of love and heroes! No longer shalt thou hang in mournful silence on these walls." 1 These lines are by Alphonse de Lamartine, and were written in 1808. All his life Lamartine remained faithful to the object of his youthful admiration, and even in the Confidences he placed Ossian on a level with Dante and above Homer. The harp of Morven is the emblem of my soul. Many indeed were the imaginations whose dreams were haunted by Ossian, between 1800 and 1830! Edgar Quinet, as a youth, in the depths of his native province, was amazed at an infatuation he did not share, and remarked with curiosity the unrivalled popularity of Fingal, Malvina, and Carril.2 Distributions of prizes, Villemain says, resounded with the names of the Caledonian heroes, Oscar and Temora, and it is possible that Bernadotte owed the throne of Sweden to the Ossianic forename borne by his son.3 Nodier, like everyone else, became fascinated with Macpherson's prose, and George Sand consoled herself for the sorrows of her married life by reading Fingal.* "Four moss-covered stones "-Chateaubriand had written in his Génie du Christianisme—" stand amid the Caledonian heather to mark the tomb of the warriors of Fingal; Oscar and Malvina have departed, but nothing has changed in their lonely land. Still the Scottish Highlander loves to recite the songs of his ancestors: still he is brave, generous, and obliging; but the hand of the bard himself, if the image be allowed, no longer strikes the harp; what we hear is the tremulous vibration of the strings produced by the touch of a spirit, 1 Letter to Mme. de Virieu, 1808. 2 Histoire de mes idées, p. 132. 3 See Brunetière, L'évolution de la poésie lyrique, vol. i., p. 82. 4 Nodier, Essais d'un jeune barde (1804). G. Sand, Histoire de ma vie, vol. iv., chap. i. when, at night, in a deserted hall, it forebodes the death of a hero."1 Many and many are the readers who, from the close of the eighteenth century down to the appearance of the romantic generation, have heard this murmur from the strings of Ossian's harp. IV Yet such readers heard it and, above all, appreciated it, mainly because Rousseau had written. Just as there was an occasional coincidence between Thomson's or Gessner's manner of feeling and portraying nature, and Rousseau's, so it was mainly because Jean-Jacques had led the way that Young, Ossian, and even Werther which made its somewhat unsuccessful appearance in France about the same time 2-found it so easy to obtain a hold over the minds of Frenchmen. They may indeed be, in the history of European literature, his precursors; that, in fact, is what they are. But in the history of French literature, they are merely his successors. He owes nothing to them, nor they to him. What, however, admits of no doubt, is that their melancholy is but a form of his melancholy, their lyricism a variety, or a development of his lyricism. "But behold, alas, the inconceivable swiftness of that fate which is never at rest. It is constantly pursuing, time flies hastily, the opportunity is irretrievable, and your beauty, even your beauty, is circumscribed by very narrow limits of existence: it must some time or other decay and wither away like a flower that fades before it was gathered. . . . O fond, mistaken fair! you are laying 1 Génie du Christianisme, pt. iv., ii. 5. 2 On this subject, see Th. Süpfle (Goethes literarischer Einfluss auf Frankreich, in the Goethe-Jahrbuch, 1887, p. 208), and F. Gross, Werther in Frankreich, Leipzig, 1888. Besides translations by Seckendorff and Aubry, there was a play by La Rivière, Werther ou le Délire de l'Amour (la Haye, 1778). On the subject of Goethe's novel, the Correspondance littéraire (March 1778) says: “All that we have found in it is ordinary events set forth without art, unpolished manners, a bourgeois tone, and a heroine apparently utterly uneducated and absolutely provincial." plans for a futurity at which you may never arrive, and neglecting the present moments which can never be retrieved. You are so anxious, and intent on that uncertain hereafter, that you forget that in the meantime our hearts melt away like snow before the sun." If the writer of these lines followed Ossian and Young in order of time, he preceded them in order of genius, and for this reason may be regarded as the creator of modern lyric poetry. Nevertheless-and the fact is one which Frenchmen are too apt to forget the sentiments he expresses were also expressed in foreign works, and through them were introduced into France as soon as, or even earlier than, through the pages of Rousseau. To the new art which he created, English literature furnished ancestors, Germany disciples. What more inevitable than that those who were weary of classical tradition and impatient to escape from the leading strings by which they felt they had been confined for ages, should turn with an ever more and more lively curiosity to England, in their eyes the intellectual birthplace of Rousseau, and to Germany which welcomed him—and English writers as well-with such youthful enthusiasm ? "Every method of imitating the ancients," it was said, “has been exhausted. Let us therefore fathom these deep mines (of English literature); let us separate the gold from the dross which conceals it; let us polish it and turn it to a useful purpose."2 But thus to imitate foreign models was to reject the heritage, hitherto enjoyed exclusively by the French nation, bequeathed by Greece and Rome. It was to break with all the traditions of French classical literature. Rousseau himself, who owes so many ideas to the ancients, is not indebted to them for a single one of his artistic methods; rather is his art the very negation of theirs. Thus, with the growth of foreign influence, whether English or German, in France, the influence of Rousseau proportionately increased, while that of antiquity, and even of the national classics, was further and further undermined. "O Germany, wrote a French critic in 1768, "the days of our greatness have 1 Nouvelle Héloïse, i. 26. 2 Yart, Idée de la poésie anglaise, vol. i., preface. departed, and thine are only in their dawn. Within thy breast dwells every quality that can raise one race above the others, and our conceited frivolity is compelled to do homage to thy mighty offspring!" 1 In the Germany of the eighteenth century we have the incarnation of what Mme. de Staël was to call the Ossianic literatures, of the "genius of the North," of everything that was novel, poetic and disturbing in Rousseau, in so far as he seems to personify the influence of the Germanic nations. "I can see," says Chateaubriand, "that in my early youth Ossian, Werther, the Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire, and the Études de la nature must have become wedded with my own ideas."2 He makes no distinction between them; on the contrary he treats the genius of Rousseau, the genius of Ossian, and the genius of Goethe as So too Mme. de Staël, when writing off-hand, speaks of "Rousseau and the English," or of "Rousseau and the Teutonic ideal"; the idea in her mind is always the same, whether she speaks of the Teutonic spirit as opposed to the Latin, or of the genius of the North as opposed to that of the South. one. There is no doubt whatever that this substitution of the cosmopolitan and exotic spirit for the old-fashioned humanism which satisfied our fathers was a revolution of very great importance. To tell the truth, it only came to fulfilment during the present century, with Mme. de Staël and the romantic school. But we have seen that it was in preparation before '89. The five-and-twenty years which preceded the Revolution paved the way for the invasion of Europe by the literatures of the North. Can we wonder that Herder, blinded by prejudice, thought himself justified in writing: "French literature has had its day"?3 The only thing that had had its day, and that after three centuries of glory, was one particular form of the French spirit, one of the fairest it ever assumed, but in which, whatever may be said to the contrary, it neither exhausted itself nor revealed the whole of its limitations. 1 Dorat, Idée de la poésie allemande, 1768, p. 133. 3 Lebensbilder. |