And below everything there is an under-current of hypocrisy. Eudore, who would have us believe that he is made utterly miserable by Velléda's passion, is nevertheless secretly flattered by her having cut her white throat for his sake. He bewails his fall in expressions which convey the idea that he feels tempted to fall again. The authoress of _Valerie_ proclaims the moral purity of her heroine in the market-place and clamours of chastity and renunciation in all the newspapers at a time when she herself is peculiarly unfit to be a teacher of morality. Lamartine, as novelist, naïvely gives an explanation of his relations with Elvire which differs entirely from the impression of them that the public had naturally gathered from the ethereal ecstasies of _Les Méditations_, and ends by smothering the real beauties of his literary art in languid, lachrymose sentimentality.
In the representation of love, as in everything else, men aimed at supernaturalness, and only succeeded in either crippling or hypocritically ignoring nature.[4]
Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dich, So muss ich weinen bitterlich.
[2] (F. L. Liebenberg, _Bidrag til den Oehlenschlägerske Litteraturs Historie_, i 183. Genoveva "sees Christ in him."
[3] In two successive editions of his _Französische Litteraturgeschichte_, Julian Schmidt, in giving an account of _Valérie_, has made the mistake of asserting that Gustave confesses to the husband.
[4] Sources: Lamartine, _Graziella; Raphael; Les Confidences; Mémoires_; Madame de Krüdener, _Valérie_; Chateaubriand, _Les Martyrs_, ix., x.
DISSOLUTION OF THE THEORETICAL PRINCIPLE OF AUTHORITY
In the lyric poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, as in the prose of Chateaubriand, there was, in spite of the unconditioned assertion of the principle of authority, a hidden or germinating antagonism to that principle in _literature_, as demanding unqualified reverence for the past, its writers, and its forms.
It has already been remarked that the great political and social revolution in France did not affect literary _form_. As regarded this, there was no necessity to re-establish the principle of authority; it had never been overthrown. In no domain are the French less revolutionary than in that of literature. The Academy is the one institution of the country which has held its ground since the days of Richelieu, and to-day it has the same name, the same aims, and even the same number of members that it had then. In literature the principle of authority was known by the name of the classic spirit, and the Revolution, far from weakening the classic spirit, had strengthened it. The Revolution itself is a classic French tragedy. Like all other French tragedies, it clothes its heroes in Greek and Roman garb. In their style and language they imitate the republicans of ancient Rome, and it is significant that it is the most cultivated and literary revolutionary party, the Girondists, who adopt the antique "thou" and the antique designation of "citizen." The Jacobins are the direct descendants of Corneille--the same toga style of oratory, the same love of magnificent laconicism. With the same enthusiasm with which Cromwell's soldiers metamorphosed themselves into ancient Hebrews, adopting their names and singing their psalms, the Frenchmen of the Revolution metamorphosed themselves into ancient Romans; and when David, the Jacobin and intimate friend of Robespierre, left his seat in the Legislative Assembly to paint the Horatii or the Brutus exhibited in 1791, he simply took his associates as models; as painter he did not need to go a step beyond the boundaries of his own period.