Spice is nice
Alan Brien
The Young Romantics Linda Kelly (Bodley Head £3.75) Revolution and Improvement 1775-1847 John Roberts (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £7.95) 'French flu' Arthur Koestler called it thirty years ago—that benign fever and divine dizziness which thrilled through the veins of Anglo-Saxons at the very sight and sound of the meanest object with a Gallic accent. It was not wogs, but an Arabian Nights Entertainment, which began at Calais. Even the names of the Metro stations unrolled like Symbolist poetry. Koestler's essay had a useful therapeutic effect of reducing the temperature and demisting the eyes of an intellectual elite for a generation. But today, comparing French and British literature of the early nineteenth century, it is difficult not to feel that in those days anyway they dis-ordered those things better in France.
Linda Kelly's The Young Romantics,. Paris 1827-37 slices the spicey garlic sausage into a somewhat arbitrary length but it provides a rich and pungent snack. Her five major male characters (it is difficult to remember this is a collective biography, and not a novel by the author of The Three Musketeers) are Alfred de Musset and Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, two pairs of well-matched battling champions, rivals and also comrades, alternating with each other in the same beds and on the same boards, on the page and between the sheets, with SainteBeuve as a kind of all-purpose referee, publicist, trainer, medical adviser and obituarist.
These five are pictured on the back cover in medals struck by their sculptor colleague, David d'Angers. And, even allowing for a fraternal likeness bestowed by being chiselled by the same hand, they look extraordinarily similar. De Musset, full face, with his carefully disarranged locks, his nobly humped nose and pouting, beestung lips, over a babyish, self-indulgently weak chin seems only a slightly glamorised version of de Vigny in profile. Hugo and Dumas are more wedge-shaped and utilitarian, extroverts seeking their reflection in the eyes of the public rather than in their own mirrors: Hugo willing to be a joke to others if it serves his purpose, but always the rebel storrner of Olympus to himself; Dumas more of a conscious clown, laughing at his own audacity, never allowed to forget that if his grandfather was a Marquis, his grandmother was a West Indian slave. And Sainte-Beuve, clearly somewhat regularised on the medal compared with the hydrocephalic sheep-head gawping in Demary's engraving, seems to have anthologised the weak points of all his confreres.
The lovers in their lives—and almost all, male and female alike, suffered trans-sexual crushes on each other, often the more agonising and fruitful when they stopped just short of consummation—also display a family likeness. Marie Dorval, the extravagant boulevard actress, was Hugo's heroine, de Vigny's mistress, possibly George Sand's lover; George Sand, the blatantly ambiguous writing-machine, was de Musset's mistress, Marie's passionate friend, SainteBeuve's intimate; Adele Hugo, Victor's jealously guarded, then tenderly neglected, wife, was the love of Sainte-Beuve's life, the silent queen of the young romantics' salon. These three have something of the same dusky, large-eyed, opulent charms, a kind of deceptive innocence which only Madame Hugo perhaps preserved in actuality as well as in appearance.
Mrs Kelly is lucky that her cast were indefatigable recorders, gossips, mythmakers and iconoclasts, transmuters of life into art, often not even bothering to change the names. All of them were fighting for a new freedom in literature, some of them for a new freedom in society. They were forever at each other's feet or each other's throats, back to back, side to side, belly to belly, capable of heroic loyalties and petty betrayals.
By the end of this relatively short (one hundred and thirty pages) survey of the ten years, we have become camp followers of
the eight major, and many minor, players. And we feel no need to apologise for this cult of personality, of fascination with the people rather than their work, because they themselves were rarely able to differentiate the two. Linda Kelly quotes the 23-year-old de Mussel on his life with Sand, six years his senior: 'George est dans sa chambrette Entre deux pots de fleurs Fumant so cigarette, Les yeux baignes de pleurs. Sainte-Beuve wrote of Mme Hugo as the 'tendre agneau' and her husband, the lion jaloux'. George Sand wrote up her affair with Alfred de Musset in a novel, Elle et Lui, to which his brother Paul replied in another novel, Lui et Pile. De Vigny described ifi verse his tortures, making love to Marie Dorval in her room, with the door ajar, while her husband, the critic Toussaint Merle entertained his friends in the rest of the flat. Hugo's mistress of a lifetime, Juliette Drouet, had engraved on her tomb his lines: `Le monde a sa pensee, Men j'avais son amour!'
The world, to be accurate, had all their thoughts and all their loves. They performed in front of an audience. Paris was their theatre, and all France waited at the stage door, following their adventures in newspapers, poems and novels—a generation of pop stars who wrote their own material.
The book's terminal date of 1837 is somewhat abrupt, rounding off on the last page with Sainte-Beuve and Hugo parting as glacial enemies at the funeral of Marie Dorval's daughter. John Roberts's book, overlapping the events of Linda Kelly's on either side, also provoked me to wonder why he had chosen the even more arbitrary dates of 1775 to 1847. Mr Roberts keeps dragging them in to his text, sometimes only to push them out again—'1775 is not a date of any significance in this process'; 'the pre-Colombian civilisations of America had long vanished in 1775'; 'this provided a structure maintained with only minor or temporary modification until well after 1847'. In his final chapter, Mr Roberts is still trying to justify his two termini—'At the end of 1847, many Europeans felt a sense of impending tempest'. But at last
confesses, '. . . what does make 1847 significant in the history of the Western World ? The answer is probably "nothing in particular". '
One of Sir George Weidenfeld's series in his many-sided History of the Entire Creation had allotted him that space, It seems, but the series had later collapsed leaving only his section of the causeway. It is, he explains, a personal essay, following his own idiosyncratic interests, and carries no message except that Improvement Is safer than Revolution, and that its effects last longer. Along the way, many surprising, challenging, improving and even revolutionary facts are to be picked up. Mr Roberts has a well-stocked, conservative mind, with a nice taste for paradox, and Revolution and Improvement is like a good browse through a university bookshop.
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