III

BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE connects Rousseau with Chateaubriand and the romantic school of the nineteenth century. The new feeling for external nature attained through him a wider range, embracing the romance of tropic lands; it acquired an element of the exotic; at the same time, descriptive writing became more vivid and picturesque, and the vocabulary for the purposes of description was enlarged. He added to French literature a tale in which human passion and the sentiment of nature are fused together by the magic of genius; he created two figures which live in the popular imagination, encircled with a halo of love and sorrow.

Born at Havre in 1737, Bernardin, through his imagination, was an Utopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer; through his temper, an angry disputant with society. His life was a fantastic series of adventures. Having read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the heroic record of the travels and sufferings of Jesuit missionaries, his fancy caught fire; he would seek some undiscovered island in mid-ocean, he would found some colony of the true children of nature, far from a corrupt civilisation, peaceable, virtuous, and free.

In France, in Russia, he was importunate in urging his extravagant designs upon persons of influence. When the French Government in 1767 commissioned him to work in Madagascar, he believed that his dream was to come true, but a rude awakening and the accustomed quarrels followed. He landed on the Isle of France, purposing to work as an engineer, and there spent his days in gazing at the sea, the skies, the mountains, the tropical forests. All forms and colours and sounds and scents impressed themselves on his brain, and were transferred to his collection of notes. When, on returning to Paris, he published (1773) his Voyage a l'Ile de France, the literature of picturesque description may be said to have been founded. Already in this volume his feeling for nature is inspired by an emotional theism, and is burdened by his sentimental science, which would exhibit a fantastic array of evidences of the designs for human welfare of an amiable and ingenious Author of nature. Before the book appeared, Bernardin had made the acquaintance of Rousseau, then living in retirement, tormented by his diseased suspicions and cloudy indignations. To his new disciple Rousseau was in general gracious, and they rambled together, botanising in the environs of Paris.

For a time Bernardin himself was in a condition bordering upon insanity; but the crisis passed, and he employed himself on the Etudes de la Nature, which appeared in three volumes in 1784. The tale of Paul et Virginie was not included; for when the author had read it aloud, though ladies wept, the sterner auditors had been contemptuous; Thomas slumbered, and Buffon called for his carriage. The Etudes accumulate the grotesque notions of Bernardin with reference to final causes in nature: nature is benevolent and harmonious; society is corrupt and harsh; scientific truth is to be discovered by sentiment, and not by reason; the whole universe is planned for the happiness of man; the melon is large because it was designed for the family; the pumpkin is larger, because Providence intended that it should be shared with our neighbours. Providence, indeed, in a sceptical and mocking generation, suffered cruelly at the hands of its advocate. Yet Bernardin conveyed into his book a feeling of the rich and obscure life and energy of nature; his descriptive power is admirable. "He desired," says M. Barine, "to open the door for Providence to enter; in fact he opened the door for the great Pan," and in this he was a precursor of much that followed in literature.

Bernardin's fame was now established. In the sentimental reaction against the dryness of sceptical philosophy, in the return to a feeling for the poetical aspect of things, he was looked upon as a leader. In the fourth volume of Etudes (1788) he had courage to print the tale of Paul et Virginie. It is an idyll of the tropics, written with the moral purpose of contrasting the beneficent influence of nature and of feeling with the dangers and evils of civilised society and of the intellect. The children grow up side by side in radiant innocence and purest companionship; then passion makes its invasion of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces and the faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot hide, the genuine power of those pages which tell of the modest ardours of first love. An element of melodrama mingles with the tragic close. Throughout we do more than see the landscape of the tropics: we feel the life of external nature throbbing in sympathy with human emotion. Something was gained by Bernardin from the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus in the motives and the details of his story, but it is essentially his own. It had a resounding success, and among its most ardent admirers was Napoleon.

Bernardin married at fifty-five, and became the father of a Paul and a Virginie. On the death of his wife, whom he regarded as a faithful housekeeper, he married again, and his life was divided between the devotion of an old man's love and endless quarrels with his colleagues of the Institut. His later writings added nothing to his fame. La Chaumiere Indienne—the story of a pariah who learns wisdom from nature and from the heart—has a certain charm, but it lacks the power of the better portions of Paul et Virginie. The Harmonies de la Nature is a feeble reflection of the Etudes. Chateaubriand, to whom Bernardin was personally known, gave a grudging recognition of the genius of his precursor. Lamartine, in after years, was a more generous disciple. In January 1814 Bernardin died, murmuring the name of God; among the great events of the time his death was almost unnoticed.

IV

In the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by the labours of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, came a revival of the study of antiquity and of the sentiment for classical art. The Count de Caylus (1692-1765), travelling in Italy and the East with the enthusiasm of an archaeologist, presented in his writings an ideal of beauty and grace which was new to sculptors and painters of the time. The discovery of Pompeii followed, after an interval, the discovery of Herculaneum. The Abbe BARTHELEMY (1716-95) embodied the erudite delights of a lifetime in his Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grece (1788), which seemed a revelation of the genius of Hellenism as it existed four centuries prior to the Christian era. It was an ideal Greece—the Greece of Winckelmann and Goethe—unalterably gracious, radiantly calm, which was discovered by the eighteenth century; but it served the imaginative needs of the age. We trace its influence in the harmonious forms of Bernardin's and Chateaubriand's imagining, and in the marbles of Canova. A poet, the offspring of a Greek mother and a French father—Andre Chenier—a latter-day Greek or demi-Greek himself, and yet truly a man of his own century, interpreted this new ideal in literary art.

Born at Constantinople in 1762, ANDRE CHENIER was educated in France, travelled in Switzerland and Italy, resided as secretary to the French Ambassador for three weary years in England—land of mists, land of dull aristocrats—returned to France in 1790, ardent in the cause of constitutional freedom, and defended his opinions and his friends as a journalist. The violences of the Revolution drove him into opposition to the Jacobin party. In March 1794 he was arrested; on the 25th July, two days before the overthrow of Robespierre, Andre Chenier's head fell on the scaffold.

Only two poems, the Jeu de Paume and the Hymne aux Suisses, were published by Chenier; after his death appeared in journals the Jeune Captive and the Jeune Tarentine; his collected poems, already known in manuscript to lovers of literature, many of them fragmentary, were issued in 1819. The romantic school had come into existence without his aid; but under Sainte-Beuve's influence it chose to regard him as a predecessor, and during the years about 1830 he was studied and imitated as a master.

He belongs, however, essentially to the eighteenth century, to its graceful sensuality, its revival of antiquity, its faith in human reason, its comprehensive science of nature and of society. In certain of his poems suggested by public occasions he is little more than a disciple of Lebrun. His Elegies are rather Franco-Roman than Greek; these, together with beauties of their own, have the characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the mundane voluptuousness of their age. His philosophical poem Hermes, of which we have designs and fragments, would have been the De Rerum Natura of an admiring student of Buffon.

In his Eglogues and his epic fragments he is a Greek or a demi-Greek, who has learnt directly from Homer, from the pastoral and idyllic poets of antiquity, and from the Anthology. The Greece of Chenier's imagination is the ideal Greece of his time, more finely outlined, more delicately coloured, more exquisitely felt by him than was possible with his contemporaries in an age of prose. "It is the landscape-painter's Greece," writes M. Faguet, "the Greece of fair river-banks, of gracious hill-slopes, of comely groups around a well-head or a stream, of harmonious theories beside the voiceful sea, of dancing choirs upon the luminous heights, under the blue heavens, which lift to ecstasy his spirit, light as the light breathing of the Cyclades."

In the Iambes, inspired by the emotions of the Revolution during his months of imprisonment, Chenier united modern passion with the beauty of classic form; satire in these loses its critical temper, and becomes truly lyrical. In his versification he attained new and alluring harmonies; he escaped from the rhythmical uniformity of eighteenth-century verse, gliding sinuously from line to line and from strophe to strophe. He did over again for French poetry the work of the Pleiade, but he did this as one who was a careful student and a critic of Malherbe.



BOOK THE FIFTH 1789-1850



CHAPTER I THE REVOLUTION AND THE EMPIRE—MADAME DE STAEL—CHATEAUBRIAND

I

The literature of the Revolution and the Empire is that of a period of transition. Madame de Stael and Chateaubriand announce the future; the writers of an inferior rank represent with declining power the past, and give some faint presentiment of things to come. The great political concussion was not favourable to art. Abstract ideas united with the passions of the hour produced poetry which was of the nature of a declamatory pamphlet. Innumerable pieces were presented on the stage, but their literary value is insignificant.

Marie-Joseph Chenier (1764-1811), brother of the great poet who perished on the scaffold, attempted to inaugurate a school of national tragedy in his Charles IX.; neither he nor the public knew history or possessed the historical sentiment—his tragedy was a revolutionary "school of kings." Arnault, Legouve, Nepomucene Lemercier were applauded for their classic dignity, or their depth of characterisation, or their pomp of language. The true tragedy of the time was enacted in the streets and in the clubs. Comedy was welcome in days of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harleville drew mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in Le Vieux Celibataire (1792); Fabre d'Eglantine moralised Moliere to the taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante debased by egoism and accommodations with the world; Louis Laya, during the trial of the King, satirised the pretenders to patriotism in L'Ami des Lois, yet escaped the vengeance of the Jacobins.

Historical comedy, a novelty in art, was seen in Lemercier's Pinto (1799), where great events are reduced to petty dimensions, and the destiny of nations is satirically viewed as a vulgar game of trick-track. In his Christophe Colomb of 1809 he dared to despise the unities of time and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless, among the spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial regime. Baour-Lormian, the translator of Ossian (1801), converted the story of Joseph in Egypt into a frigid tragedy; Hector and Tippoo Sahib, Mahomet II., and Ninus II. (with scenes of Spanish history transported to Assyria) diversified the stage. The greatest success was that of Raynouard's Les Templiers (1805); the learned author wisely applied his talents in later years to romance philology. Among the writers of comedy—Andrieux, Etienne, Duval, and others—Picard has the merit of reproducing the life of the day, satirising social classes and conditions with vivacity and careless mirth. In melodrama, Pixerecourt contributed unconsciously to prepare the way for the romantic stage. Desaugiers, with his gift for gay plebeian song, was the master of the vaudeville.

Song of a higher kind had been heard twice or thrice during the Revolution. The lesser Chenier's Chanson du Depart has in it a stirring rhetoric for soldiers of the Republic sent forth to war with the acclaim of mother and wife and maiden, old men and little children. Lebrun-Pindare, in his ode Sur le Vaisseau le Vengeur, does not quite stifle the sense of heroism under his flowers of classical imagery. Rouget de Lisle's improvised verse and music, La Marseillaise (1792), was an inspiration which equally lent itself to the enthusiasm of victory and the gallantries of despair. The pseudo-epics and the descriptive poetry of the Empire are laboured and lifeless. But Creuze de Lesser, in his Chevaliers de la Table-Ronde (1812) and other poems, and Baour-Lormian, in his Poesies Ossianiques, widened the horizons of literature. The Panhypocrisiade of Lemercier, published in 1819, but written several years earlier—an "infernal comedy of the sixteenth century"—is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, and genius; it bears to Hugo's Legende des Siecles the relation which the megatherium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous analogues.

If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's poetry, we may find it in the harmonious melancholy of Chenedolle, in the grace of Fontanes' stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications. The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition, for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details. If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out what was commonplace in ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature in the eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and had become a social and political weapon; under the imperial rule this militant function was withdrawn; what remained for literature but frigid ambitions or petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once again recovered?

The Revolution closed the salons and weakened the influence of cultivated society upon literature. Journalism and the pamphlet filled the place left vacant by the salons. The Decade Philosophique was the organ of the ideologists, who applied the conceptions of Condillac and his followers to literary and philosophical criticism. In 1789 the Journal des Debats was founded. Much ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was expended in the columns of the public press. Among the contributors were Andre Chenier, Mallet du Pin, Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine, Camille Desmoulins hoped to render France happy, prosperous, and republican. Heady, vain, pleasure-loving, gay, bitter, sensitive, with outbreaks of generosity and moments of elevation, he did something to redeem his crimes and follies by pleas for justice and mercy in his journal, Le Vieux Cordelier, and died, with Danton as his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and despair.

The orators of the Revolution glorified doctrinaire abstractions, overflowed with sentimental humanity, and decorated their harangues with heroic examples of Roman virtue. The most abstract, colourless, and academic was Rousseau's disciple, who took the "Supreme Being" under his protection, Robespierre. The fervid spirit of the Girondins found its highest expression in Vergniaud, who, with infirm character, few ideas, and a hesitating policy, yet possessed a power of vibrating speech. Danton, the Mirabeau of the populace, was richer in ideas, and with sudden accesses of imagination thundered in words which tended to action; but in general the Mountain cared more for deeds than words. The young Saint-Just thrilled the Convention with icy apothegms which sounded each, short and sharp, like the fall of the knife. Barnave, impetuous in his temper, was clear and measured in discourse, and once in opposition to Mirabeau, defending the royal prerogative, rose beyond himself to the height of a great occasion.

But it was MIRABEAU, and Mirabeau alone, who possessed the genius of a great statesman united with the gifts of an incomparable orator. Born in 1749, of the old Riquetti family, impulsive, proud, romantic, yet clear of intellect and firmly grasping facts, a thinker and a student, calmly indifferent to religion, irregular in his conduct, the passionate foe of his father, the passionate lover of his Sophie and of her child, he had conceived, and in a measure comprehended, the Revolution long before the explosion came. Already he was a copious author on political subjects. He knew that France needed individual liberty and individual responsibility; he divined the dangers of a democratic despotism. He hoped by the decentralisation of power to balance Paris by the provinces, and quicken the political life of the whole country; he desired to balance the constitution by playing off the King against the Assembly, and the Assembly against the King, and to control the action of each by the force of public opinion. From Montesquieu he had learnt the gains of separating the legislative, the executive, and the judicial functions. His hatred of aristocracy, enhanced by the hardship of imprisonment at Vincennes, led him to ignore an influence which might have assisted in the equilibration of power. As an orator his ample and powerful rhetoric rested upon a basis of logic; slow and embarrassed as he began to speak, he warmed as he proceeded, negligent of formal correctness, disdainful of the conventional classical decorations, magnificent in gesture, weaving together ideas, imagery, and passion. His speech, said Madame de Stael, was "like a powerful hammer, wielded by a skilful artist, and fashioning men to his will." At the sitting of the Assembly on April 2, 1791, the President announced, amid murmurs, "Ah! il est mort," which anticipated his words, that Gabriel-Honore Riquetti was dead.

"The 18th Brumaire," writes M. Lanson, "silenced the orators. For fifteen years a solitary voice was heard, imperious but eloquent.... Napoleon was the last of the great Revolutionary orators." As he advanced in power he dropped the needless ornaments of rhetoric, and condensed his summons to action into direct, effective words, now simple and going straight at some motive of self-interest, now grandiose to seduce the imagination to his side. Speech with Napoleon was a means of government, and he knew the temper of the men whom he addressed. His own taste in literature was touched with sentimentality; Ossian and Werther were among his favourite books; but what may be styled the official literature of the Empire was of the decaying classical or neo-classical tradition.

Yet while the democratic imperialism was the direct offspring of the Revolution with its social contract and its rights of man, it was necessary to combat eighteenth-century ideas and defend the throne and the altar. Great scientific names—Laplace, Bichat, Cuvier, Lamarck—testify to the fact that a movement which made the eighteenth century illustrious had not spent its force. Scholarship was laying the bases for future constructions; Ginguene published in 1811 the first volumes of his Histoire Litteraire de l'Italie; Fauriel and Raynouard accumulated the materials for their historical, literary, and philological studies. Philosophy was turning away from sensationalism, which seemed to have said its final word, towards spiritualist conceptions. Maine de Biran (1766-1824) found in the primitive fact of consciousness—the nisus of the will—and in the self-recognition of the ego as a cause, an escape from materialism. Royer-Collard (1763-1845), afterwards more distinguished in politics than he was in speculation, read for his class at the Sorbonne from the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and turned it by his commentary as a siege-train against the positions of Condillac.

The germs of new literary growths were in the soil; but the spring came slowly, and after the storms of Revolution were spent, a chill was in the air. Measureless hopes, and what had come of them? infinite desire, and so poor an attainment! A disciple of Rousseau, who shared in his sentiment without his optimistic faith, and who, like Rousseau, felt the beauty of external nature without Rousseau's sense of its joy, Etienne Pivert de SENANCOURT published in 1799 his Reveries, a book of disillusion, melancholy atheism, and stoical resistance to sadness, a resistance which he was unable to sustain. It was followed in 1804 by Obermann, a romance in epistolary form, in which the writer, disguised in the character of his hero, expresses a fixed and sterile grief, knowing not what he needs, nor what he loves, nor what he wills, lamenting without a cause and desiring without an object. The glories of Swiss landscape, which quicken his imagination, do not suffice to fill the void that is in his soul; yet perhaps in old age—if ever it come—he may resign himself to the infinite illusion of life. It is an indication of the current of the time that fifteen years later, when the Libres Meditations appeared, Senancourt had found his way through a vague theopathy to autumnal brightness, late-born hope, and tranquil reconcilement with existence.

The work of the professional critics of the time—Geoffroy, De Feletz, Dussault, Hoffman—counts now for less than the words of one who was only an amateur of letters, and a moralist who never moralised in public. JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824), the friend of Fontanes and of Chateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity for ideas, and possessing the finest sense of the beauty of literature, lacked the strength and self-confidence needful in a literary career. He read everything; he published nothing; but the Pensees, which were collected from his manuscripts by Chateaubriand, and his letters reveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious dilettante charmed by literary grace, a writer tormented by the passion to put a volume in a page, a page in a phrase, a phrase in a word. Plato in philosophy, Virgil in poetry, satisfy his feeling for beauty and refinement of style. From Voltaire and Rousseau he turns away, offended by their lack of moral feeling, of sanity, of wisdom, of delicacy. A man of the eighteenth century, Joubert had lifted himself into thin clear heights of middle air, where he saw much of the past and something of the future; but the middle air is better suited for speculation than for action.

II

The movement towards the romantic theory and practice of art was fostered in the early years of the nineteenth century by two eminent writers—one a woman with a virile intellect, the other a man with more than a woman's imaginative sensibility—by GERMAINE DE STAEL and by Chateaubriand. The one exhibits the eighteenth century passing into the nineteenth, receiving new developments, yet without a breach of continuity; the other represents a reaction against the ideas of the age of the philosophers. Both opened new horizons—one, by the divinations of her ardent intelligence; the other, by his creative genius. Madame de Stael interpreted new ideas and defined a new theory of art. Chateaubriand was himself an extraordinary literary artist. The style of the one is that of an admirable improvisator, a brilliant and incessant converser; that of the other is at its best a miracle of studied invention, a harmony of colour and of sound. The genius of the one was quickened in brilliant social gatherings; a Parisian salon was her true seat of empire. The genius of the other was nursed in solitude by the tempestuous sea or on the wild and melancholy moors.

Germaine Necker, born in 1766, daughter of the celebrated Swiss banker and future minister of France, a child of precocious intelligence and eager sympathies, reared amid the brilliant society of her mother's salon, a girl whose demands on life were large—demands of the intellect, demands of the heart—enamoured of the writings of Rousseau, married at twenty to the Swedish Ambassador, the Baron de Stael-Holstein, herself a light and an inspirer of the constitutional party of reform in the early days of the Revolution, in her literary work opened fresh avenues for nineteenth-century thought. She did not recoil from the eighteenth century, but rather carried forward its better spirit. The Revolution, as a social upheaval, she failed to understand; her ideal was liberty, not equality; and Necker's daughter was assured that all would be well were liberty established in constitutional forms of government. A republican among aristocrats, she was an aristocrat among republicans. During the years of Revolutionary trouble, the years of her flights from Paris, her returns, excursions, and retreats, she was sustained by her zeal for justice, her pity for the oppressed, and her unquenchable faith in human progress.

A crude panegyric of Rousseau, certain political pamphlets, an Essai sur les Fictions, a treatise on the Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and Nations (1796), were followed in 1800 by her elaborate study, De la Litterature consideree dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales. Its central idea is that of human progress: freedom, incarnated in republican institutions, will assure the natural development of the spirit of man; a great literature will be the offspring of progress and of freedom; and each nation will lend its lights to other nations to illuminate the general advance. Madame de Stael hoped to cast the spell of her intellect over the young conqueror Bonaparte; Bonaparte regarded a political meteor in feminine form with cold and haughty aversion. In 1802 the husband, whom she had never loved, was dead. Her passion for Benjamin Constant had passed through various crises in its troubled career—a series of attractions ending in repulsions, and repulsions leading to attractions, such as may be discovered in Constant's remarkable novel Adolphe. They could neither decide to unite their lives, nor to part for ever. Adolphe, in Constant's novel, after a youth of pleasure-seeking, is disenchanted with life; his love of Ellenore is that of one whose passions are exhausted, who loves for vanity or a new indulgence of egoism; but Ellenore, whose youth is past, will abandon all for him, and she imposes on him the tyranny of her devotion. Each is the other's torturer, each is the other's consolation. In the mastery of his cruel psychology Constant anticipates Balzac.

Madame de Stael lightened the stress of inward storm by writing Delphine, the story of a woman of genius, whose heroic follies bring her into warfare with the world. The lover of Delphine, violent and feeble, sentimental and egoistic, is an accomplice of the world in doing her wrong, and Delphine has no refuge but death in the wilds of America.[1]

[Footnote 1: In the first edition, Delphine dies by her own hand.]

In 1803 Madame de Stael received orders to trouble Paris with her torrent of ideas and of speech no longer. The illustrious victim of Napoleon's persecution hastened to display her ideas at Weimar, where Goethe protected his equanimity, as well as might be, from the storm of her approach, and Schiller endured her literary enthusiasm with a sense of prostration. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, tutor to her sons, became the interpreter of Germany to her eager and apprehensive mind. Having annexed Germany to her empire, she advanced to the conquest of Italy, and had her Roman triumph. England, which she had visited in her Revolutionary flights, and Italy conspired in the creation of her novel Corinne (1807). It is again the history of a woman of genius, beautiful, generous, enthusiastic, whom the world understands imperfectly, and whom her English lover, after his fit of Italian romance, discards with the characteristic British phlegm. The paintings of Italian nature are rhetorical exercises; the writer's sympathy with art and history is of more value; the interpretation of a woman's heart is alive with personal feeling. Madame de Stael's novels are old now, which means that they once were young, and for her own generation they had the freshness and charm of youth.

Her father's death had turned her thoughts towards religion. A Protestant and a liberal, her spiritualist faith now found support in the moral strength of Christianity. She was not, like Chateaubriand, an epicurean and a Catholic; she did not care to decorate religion with flowers, or make it fragrant with incense; it spoke to her not through the senses, but directly to the conscience, the affections, and the will. In the chapters of her book on Germany which treat of "the religion of enthusiasm," her devout latitudinarianism finds expression.

The book De l'Allemagne, published in London in 1813, after the confiscation and destruction of the Paris edition by the imperial police, prepared the way by criticism for the romantic movement. It treats of manners, letters, art, philosophy, religion, interpreting with astonishing insight, however it may have erred in important details, the mind of Germany to the mind of France. It was a Germany of poets, dreamers, and metaphysicians, loyal and sincere, but incapable of patriotic passion, disqualified for action and for freedom, which she in 1804 had discovered. The life of society produces literature in France; the genius of inward meditation and sentiment produces literature in Germany. The literature and art of the South are classical, those of the North are romantic; and since the life of our own race and the spirit of our own religion are infused into romantic art, it has in it possibilities of indefinite growth. Madame de Stael advanced criticism by her sense that art and literature are relative to ages, races, governments, environments. She dreamed of an European or cosmopolitan literature, in which each nation, while retaining its special characteristics, should be in fruitful communication with its fellows.

In 1811 Madame de Stael, when forty-five, became the wife of Albert de Rocca, a young Swiss officer, more than twenty years her junior. Their courage was rewarded by six years of happiness. Austria, Poland, Russia, Sweden, England were visited. Upon the fall of Napoleon Madame de Stael was once more in Paris, and there in 1817 she died. The Dix Annees d'Exil, posthumously published, records a portion of her agitated life, and exhales her indignation against her imperial persecutor. The unfinished Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise, designed originally as an apology for Necker, defends the Revolution while admitting its crimes and errors; its true object, as the writer conceived—political liberty—had been in the end attained; her ideal of liberty was indeed far from that of a revolutionary democracy; England, liberal, constitutional, with a system at once popular and aristocratic, was the country in which she saw her political aspirations most nearly realised.

III

FRANCOIS-RENE DE CHATEAUBRIAND was born in 1768, at St.-Malo, of an ancient Breton family. Except for the companionship of an elder sister, of fragile health and romantic temper, his childhood was solitary. The presence of the old count his father inspired terror. The boy's society was with the waves and winds, or at the old chateau of Combourg, with lonely woods and wilds. Horace, Tibullus, Telemaque, the sermons of Massillon, nourished his imagination or stimulated his religious sentiment; but solitude and nature were his chief inspirers.

At seventeen he already seemed worn with the fatigue of unsatisfied dreaming, before he had begun to know life. A commission in the army was procured for him. He saw, interested yet alien in heart, something of literary life in Paris; then in Revolution days (1791) he quitted France, and, with the dream of discovering the North-West Passage, set sail to America. If he did not make any geographical discovery, Chateaubriand found his own genius in the western world. The news of the execution of Louis XVI. decided him to return; a Breton and a royalist should show himself among the ranks of the emigrants. To gratify the wish of his family, he married before crossing the frontier. Madame de Chateaubriand had the dignity to veil her sorrow caused by an imperfect union, and at a later time she won such a portion of her husband's regard as he could devote to another than himself.

The episode of war having soon closed—not without a wound and a serious illness—he found a refuge in London, enduring dire poverty, but possessing the consolation of friendship with Joubert and Fontanes, and there he published in 1797 his first work, the Essai sur les Revolutions. The doctrine of human progress had been part of the religion of the eighteenth century; Chateaubriand in 1797 had faith neither in social, nor political, nor religious progress. Why be deceived by the hopes of revolution, since humanity can only circle for ever through an exhausting round of illusions? The death of his mother and words of a dying sister awakened him from his melancholy mood; he resolved to write a second book, which should correct the errors of the first, and exhibit a source of hope and joy in religion. To the eighteenth century Christianity had appeared as a gross and barbarous superstition; he would show that it was a religion of beauty, the divine mother of poetry and of art, a spring of poetic thought and feeling alike through its dogma and its ritual; he would convert literature from its decaying cult of classicism, and restore to honour the despised Middle Ages.

The Genie du Christianisme, begun during its author's residence in London, was not completed until four years later. In 1801, detaching a fragment from his poetic apology for religion, he published his Atala, ou les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert. It is a romance, or rather a prose poem, in which the magic of style, the enchantment of descriptive power, the large feeling for nature, the sensibility to human passion, conceal many infirmities of design and of feeling. Chateaubriand suddenly entered into his fame.

On April 18, 1802, the Concordat was celebrated with high solemnities; the Archbishop of Paris received the First Consul within the portals of Notre-Dame. It was the fitting moment for the publication of the Genie du Christianisme. Its value as an argumentative defence of Christianity may not be great; but it was the restoration of religion to art, it contained or implied a new system of aesthetics, it was a glorification of devout sentiment, it was a pompous manifesto of romanticism, it recovered a lost ideal of beauty. From Ronsard to Chenier the aim of art had been to imitate the ancients, while imitating or interpreting life. Let us be national, let us be modern, let us therefore be Christians, declared Chateaubriand, and let us seek for our tradition in the great Christian ages. It was a revolution in art for which he pleaded, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the revolution was in active progress.

The episode of Rene, which was included in the Genie, and afterwards published separately, has been described as a Christianised Werther; its passion is less frank, and even more remote from sanity of feeling, than that of Goethe's novel, but the sadness of the hero is more magnificently posed. A sprightly English lady described Chateaubriand as "wearing his heart in a sling"; he did so during his whole life; and through Rene we divine the inventor of Rene carrying his wounded heart, as in the heroine we can discern some features of his sister Lucile. In all his writings his feelings centre in himself: he is a pure egoist through his sensibility; but around his own figure his imagination, marvellous in its expansive power, can deploy boundless perspectives.

Both Atala and Rene, though brought into connection with the Genie du Christianisme, are in fact more closely related to the prose epic Les Natchez, written early, but held in reserve until the publication of his collected works in 1826-31. Les Natchez, inspired by Chateaubriand's American travels, idealises the life of the Red Indian tribes. The later books, where he escapes from the pseudo-epic manner, have in them the finest spirit of his early years, his splendour and delicacy of description, his wealth of imaginative reverie. Famous as the author of the Genie, Chateaubriand was appointed secretary to the embassy at Rome. The murder of the Duc d'Enghien alienated him from Napoleon. Putting aside the Martyrs, on which he had been engaged, he sought for fresh imagery and local colour to enrich his work, in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a record of which was published in his (1811) Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem.

The Martyrs appeared in 1809. It was designed as a great example of that art, inspired by Christianity, on behalf of which he had contended in the Genie; the religion of Christ, he would prove, can create passions and types of character better suited for noble imaginative treatment than those of paganism; its supernatural marvels are more than a compensation for the loss of pagan mythology. The time chosen for his epopee in prose is the reign of the persecutor Diocletian; Rome and the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, Egypt, the deserts of the Thebaid, Jerusalem, Sparta, Athens, form only portions of the scene; heaven and hell are open to the reader, but Chateaubriand, whose faith was rather a sentiment than a passion, does not succeed in making his supernatural habitations and personages credible even to the fancy. Far more admirable are many of the terrestrial scenes and narrations, and among these, in particular the story of Eudore.

In the course of the travels which led him to Jerusalem, Chateaubriand had visited Spain, and it was his recollections of the Alhambra that moved him to write, about 1809, the Aventures du Dernier des Abencerages, published many years later. It shows a tendency towards self-restraint, excellent in itself, but not entirely in harmony with his effusive imagination. With this work Chateaubriand's inventive period of authorship closed; the rest of his life was in the main that of a politician. From the position of an unqualified royalist (1814-24) he advanced to that of a liberal, and after 1830 may be described as both royalist and republican. His pamphlet of 1814, De Bonaparte et des Bourbons, was declared by Louis XVIII. to be worth an army to his cause.

In his later years he published an Essai sur la Litterature Anglaise and a translation of "Paradise Lost." But his chief task was the revision of the Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, an autobiography designed for posthumous publication, and actually issued in the pages of the Presse, through the indiscreet haste of the publishers, while Chateaubriand was still living. Its egotism, its vanity, its malicious wit, its fierce reprisals on those whom the writer regarded as his enemies, its many beauties, its brilliance of style, make it an exposure of all that was worst and much of what was best in his character and genius. Tended by his old friend Mme. Recamier, to whom, if to any one, he was sincerely attached, Chateaubriand died in the summer of 1848. His tomb is on the rocky islet of Grand-Be, off the coast of Brittany.

Chateaubriand cannot be loved, and his character cannot be admired without grave reserves. But an unique genius, developed at a fortunate time, enabled him to play a most significant part in the history of literature. He was the greatest of landscape painters; he restored to art the sentiment of religion; he interpreted the romantic melancholy of the age. If he posed magnificently, there were native impulses which suggested the pose; and at times, as in the Itineraire, the pose is entirely forgotten. His range of ideas is not extraordinary; but vision, imagination, and the passion which makes the imaginative power its instrument, were his in a supereminent degree.



CHAPTER II THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS

While the imagination of France was turning towards the romance of the Middle Ages and the art of Christianity, Hellenic scholarship was maintained by Jean-Francois Boissonade. The representative of Hellenism in modern letters was Courier, a brave but undisciplined artillery officer under Napoleon, who loved the sight of a Greek manuscript better than he loved a victory. PAUL-LOUIS COURIER DE MERE (1772-1825) counts for nothing in the history of French thought; in the history of French letters his pamphlets remain as masterpieces of Attic grace, luminous, light and bright in narrative, easy in dialogue, of the finest irony in comment, impeccable in measure and in malice. The translator of Daphnis and Chloe, wearied by war and wanderings in Italy, lived under the Restoration among his vines at Veretz, in Touraine. In 1816 he became the advocate of provincial popular rights against the vexations of the Royalist reaction. He is a vine-dresser, a rustic bourgeois, occupied with affairs of the parish. Shall Chambord be purchased for the Duke of Burgundy? shall an intolerant young cure forbid the villagers to dance? shall magistrates harass the humble folk? Such are the questions agitating the country-side, which the vine-dresser Courier will resolve. The questions have been replaced to-day by others; but nothing has quite replaced the Simple Discours, the Petition pour les Villageois, the Pamphlet des Pamphlets, in which the ease of the best sixteenth and seventeenth century prose is united with a deft rapier-play like that of Voltaire, and with the lucidity of the writer's classical models.

Chateaubriand's artistic and sentimental Catholicism was the satisfaction of imaginative cravings. When JOSEPH DE MAISTRE (1753-1821) revolted against the eighteenth century, it was a revolt of the soul; when he assailed the authority of the individual reason, it was in the name of a higher reason. Son of the President of the Senate of Savoy, he saw his country invaded by the French Republican soldiery in 1792, and he retired to Lausanne. He protested against the Revolutionary aggression in his Lettres d'un Royaliste Savoisien; inspired by the mystical Saint-Martin, in his Considerations sur la France, he interpreted the meaning of the great political cataclysm as the Divine judgment upon France—assigned by God the place of the leader of Christendom, the eldest daughter of the Church—for her faithlessness and proud self-will. The sacred chastisement accomplished, monarchy and Catholicism must be restored to an intact and regenerated country. During fifteen years Maistre served the King of Sardinia as envoy and plenipotentiary at the Russian Court, maintaining his dignity in cruel distress upon the salary of a clerk. Amiable in his private life, he was remorseless—with the stern charity of an inquisitor—in dogma. In a style of extraordinary clearness and force he expounded a system of ideas, logically connected, on which to base a complete reorganisation of European society. Those ideas are set forth most powerfully in the dialogues entitled Les Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg and the treatises Du Pape and De l'Eglise Gallicane.

He honours reason; not the individual reason, source of innumerable errors, but the general reason, which, emanating from God, reveals universal and immutable truth—quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. To commence philosophising we should despise the philosophers. Of these, Bacon, to whose errors Maistre devotes a special study, is the most dangerous; Locke is the most contemptible. The eighteenth century spoke of nature; Maistre speaks of God, the Grand Monarch who rules His worlds by laws which are flexible in His hands. To punish is the prime duty of authority; the great Justiciary avenges Himself on the whole offending race of men; there is no government without an executioner. But God is pitiful, and allows us the refuge of prayer and sacrifice. Without religion there is no society; without the Catholic Church there is no religion; without the sovereign Pontiff there is no Catholic Church. The sovereignty of the Pope is therefore the keystone of civilisation; his it is to give and take away the crowns of kings. Governments absolute over the people, the Pontiff absolute over governments—such is the earthly reflection of the Divine monarchy in heaven. To suppose that men can begin the world anew from a Revolutionary year One, is the folly of private reason; society is an organism which grows under providential laws; revolutions are the expiation for sins. Such are the ideas which Maistre bound together in serried logic, and deployed with the mastery of an intellectual tactician. The recoil from individualism to authority could not have found a more absolute expression.

The Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840), whose theocratic views have much in common with those of Maistre, and of his teacher Saint-Martin, dwelt on the necessity of language as a condition of thought, and maintained that language is of divine origin. Ballanche (1776-1847), half poet, half philosopher, connected theocratic ideas with a theory of human progress—a social and political palingenesis—which had in it the elements of political liberalism. Theocracy and liberalism met in the genius of FELICITE-ROBERT DE LAMENNAIS (1782-1854); they engaged after a time in conflict, and in the end the victory lay with his democratic sympathies. A Breton and a priest, Lamennais, endowed with imagination, passion, and eloquence, was more a prophet than a priest. He saw the world around him perishing through lack of faith; religion alone could give it life and health; a Church, freed from political shackles, in harmony with popular tendencies, governed by the sovereign Pontiff, might animate the world anew. The voice of the Catholic Church is the voice of humanity, uttering the general reason of mankind. When the Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de Religion appeared, another Bossuet seemed to have arisen. But was a democratic Catholicism possible? Lamennais trusted that it might be so, and as the motto of the journal L'Avenir (1830), in which Lacordaire and Montalembert were his fellow-labourers, he chose the words Dieu et Liberte.

The orthodoxy of the Avenir was suspected. Lamennais, with his friends, journeyed to Rome "to consult the Lord in Shiloh," and in the Affaires de Rome recorded his experiences. The Encyclical of 1832 pronounced against the doctrines dearest to his heart and conscience; he bowed in submission, yet he could not abandon his inmost convictions. His hopes for a democratic theocracy failing, he still trusted in the peoples. But the democracy of his desire and faith was one not devoted to material interests; to spiritualise the democracy became henceforth his aim. In the Paroles d'un Croyant he announced in rhythmical prose his apocalyptic visions. "It is," said a contemporary, "a bonnet rouge planted on a cross." In his elder years Lamennais believed in a spiritual power, a common thought, a common will directing society, as the soul directs the body, but, like the soul, invisible. His metaphysics, in which it is attempted to give a scientific interpretation and application to the doctrine of the Trinity, are set forth in the Esquisse d'une Philosophie. His former associates, Lacordaire, the eloquent Dominican, and Montalembert, the historian, learned and romantic, of Western monasticism, remained faithful children of the Church. Lamennais, no less devout in spirit than they, died insubmissive, and above his grave, among the poor of Pere-Lachaise, no cross was erected.

The antagonism to eighteenth-century thought assumed other forms than those of the theocratic school. VICTOR COUSIN (1792-1867), a pupil of Maine de Biran and Royer-Collard, became at the age of twenty-three a lecturer on philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was enthusiastic, ambitious, eloquent; with scanty knowledge he spoke as one having authority, and impressed his hearers with the force of a ruling personality. Led on from Scotch to German philosophy, and having the advantage of personal acquaintance with Hegel, he advanced through psychology to metaphysics. Not in the senses but in the reason, impersonal in its spontaneous activity, he recognised the source of absolute truth; in the first act of consciousness are disclosed the finite, the infinite, and their mutual relations. In the history of philosophy, in its four great systems of sensationalism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, he recognised the substance of philosophy itself undergoing the process of evolution; each system is true in what it affirms, false in what it denies. With psychology as a starting-point, and eclecticism as a method, Cousin attempted to establish a spiritualist doctrine. A young leader in the domain of thought, he became at a later time too imperious a ruler. In the writings of his disciple and friend THEODORE JOUFFROY (1796-1842) there is a deeper accent of reality. Doubting, and contending with his doubts, Jouffroy brooded upon the destiny of man, made inquisition into the problems of psychology, refusing to identify mental science with physiology, and applied his remarkable powers of patient and searching thought to the solution of questions in morals and aesthetics. The school of Cousin has been named eclectic; it should rather be named spiritualist. The tendencies to which it owed its origin extended beyond philosophy, and are apparent in the literary art of Cousin's contemporaries.

As a basis for social reconstruction the spiritualist philosophy was ineffectual. Another school of thought issuing from the Revolution, yet opposing its anarchic individualism, aspired to regenerate society by the application of the principles of positive science. CLAUDE-HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON (1760-1825), and FRANCOIS-CHARLES FOURIER (1772-1837), differing in many of their opinions, have a common distinction as the founders of modern socialism. Saint-Simon's ideal was that of a State controlled in things of the mind by men of science, and in material affairs by the captains of industry. The aim of society should be the exploitation of the globe by associative effort. In his Nouveau Christianisme he thought to deliver the Christian religion from the outworn superstition, as he regarded it, alike of Catholicism and Protestantism, and to point out its true principle as adapted to our nineteenth century—that of human charity, the united effort of men towards the well-being of the poorest class.

Saint-Simon, fantastic, incoherent, deficient in the scientific spirit and in the power of co-ordinating his results, yet struck out suggestive ideas. A great and systematic thinker, AUGUSTE COMTE (1798-1857), who was associated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824, perceived the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward by them to researches properly his own. The positivism of Comte consists of a philosophy and a polity, in which a religion is involved. The quickening of his emotional nature through an adoring friendship with Mme. Clotilde de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness of his earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction; he felt the need of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy proceeds from the theory that all human conceptions advance from the primitive theological state, through the metaphysical—when abstract forces, occult causes, scholastic entities are invented to explain the phenomena of nature—to the positive, when at length it is recognised that human knowledge cannot pass beyond the region of phenomena. With these stages corresponds the progress of society from militarism, aggressive or defensive, to industrialism. The several abstract sciences—those dealing with the laws of phenomena rather than with the application of laws—are so arranged by Comte as to exhibit each more complex science resting on a simpler, to which it adds a new order of truths; the whole erection, ascending to the science of sociology, which includes a dynamical as well as a statical doctrine of human society—a doctrine of the laws of progress as well as of the laws of order—is crowned by morals.

In the polity of positivism the supreme spiritual power is entrusted to a priesthood of science. Their moral influence will be chiefly directed to reinforcing the social feeling, altruism, as against the predominance of self-love. The object of religious reverence is not God, but the "Great Being"—Humanity, the society of the noble living and the noble dead, the company, or rather the unity, of all those who contribute to the better life of man. To Humanity we pay our vows, we yield our gratitude, we render our homage, we direct our aspirations; for Humanity we act and live in the blessed subordination of egoistic desire. Women—the mother, the wife, the daughter—purifying through affection the energies of man, act, under the Great Being, as angelic guardians, accomplishing a moral providence.

Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, and positive, was accepted by PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON (1809-65), a far more brilliant writer, a far less constructive thinker, and aided him in arriving at conclusions which differ widely from those of Comte. Son of a cooper at Besancon, Proudhon had the virtues of a true child of the people—integrity, affection, courage, zeal, untiring energy. Religion he would replace by morality, ardent, strict, and pure. Free associations of workmen, subject to no spiritual or temporal authority, should arise over all the land. Qu'est-ce que la Propriete? he asked in the title of a work published in 1840; and his answer was, La Propriete c'est le Vol. Property, seizing upon the products of labour in the form of rent or interest, and rendering no equivalent, is theft. Justice demands that service should be repaid by an equal service. Society, freely organising itself on the principles of liberty and justice, requires no government; only through such anarchy as this can true order be attained. An apostle of modern communism, Proudhon, by ideas leavening the popular mind, became no insignificant influence in practical politics.



CHAPTER III POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL

I

The eighteenth century did homage to the reason; it sought for general truths, scientific, social, political; its art was in the main an inheritance, diminished with lapse of time, from the classical art of the preceding century. With Rousseau came an outburst of the personal element in literature, an overflow of sensibility, an enfranchisement of the passions, and of imagination as connected with the passions; his eloquence has in it the lyrical note. The romantic movement was an assertion of freedom for the imagination, and an assertion of the rights of individuality. Love, wonder, hope, measureless desire, strange fears, infinite sadness, the sentiment of nature, aspiration towards God, were born anew. Imagination, claiming authority, refused to submit to the rules of classic art. Why should the several literary species be impounded each in its separate paddock? Let them mingle at the pleasure of the artist's genius; let the epic and the drama catch what they can of the lyric cry; let tragedy and comedy meet and mix. Why remain in servitude to the models of Greece and Rome? Let all epochs and every clime contribute to the enrichment of art. The primitive age was above all others the age of poetry. The great Christian centuries were the centuries of miracle and marvel, of spiritual exaltation and transcendent passion. Honour, therefore, to our mediaeval forefathers! It is the part of reason to trust the imagination in the imaginative sphere. Through what is most personal and intimate we reach the truths of the universal heart of man. An image may at the same time be a symbol; behind a historical tableau may lie a philosophical idea.

At first the romantic movement was Christian and monarchical. Its assertion of freedom, its claims on behalf of the ego, its licence of the imagination, were in reality revolutionary. The intellect is more aristocratic than the passions. The great spectacle of modern democracy deploying its forces is more moving than any pallid ideals of the past; it has the grandeur and breadth of the large phenomena of nature; it is wide as a sunrise; its advance is as the onset of the sea, and has like rumours of victory and defeat. The romantic movement, with no infidelity to its central principle, became modern and democratic.

Foreign life and literatures lent their aid to the romantic movement in France—the passion and mystery of the East; the struggle for freedom in Greece; the old ballads of Spain; the mists, the solitudes, the young heroes, the pallid female forms of Ossian; the feudal splendours of Scott; the melancholy Harold; the mysterious Manfred; Goethe's champion of freedom, his victim of sensibility, his seeker for the fountains of living knowledge; Schiller's revolters against social law, and his adventurers of the court and camp.

With the renewal of imagination and sentiment came a renewal of language and of metre. The poetical diction of the eighteenth century had grown colourless and abstract; general terms had been preferred to particular; simple, direct, and vivid words had been replaced by periphrases—the cock was "the domestic bird that announces the day." The romantic poets sought for words—whether noble or vulgar—that were coloured, concrete, picturesque. The tendency culminated with Gautier, to whom words were valuable, like gems, for their gleam, their iridescence, and their hardness. Lost treasures of the language were recovered; at a later date new verbal inventions were made. By degrees, also, grammatical structure lost some of its rigidity; sentences and periods grew rather than were built; phrases were alive, and learnt, if there were a need, to leap and bound. Verse was moulded by the feeling that inspired it; the melodies were like those of an Eolian harp, long-drawn or retracted as the wind swept or touched the strings. Symmetry was slighted; harmony was valued for its own sake and for its spiritual significance. Rich rhymes satisfied or surprised the ear, and the poet sometimes suffered through his curiosity as a virtuoso. By internal licences—the mobile cesura, new variations and combinations—the power of the alexandrine was marvellously enlarged; it lost its monotony and became capable of every achievement; its external restraints were lightened; verse glided into verse as wave overtaking wave. The accomplishment of these changes was a gradual process, of which Hugo and Sainte-Beuve were the chief initiators. Gautier and, in his elder years, Hugo contributed to the later evolution of romantic verse. The influence on poetical form of Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, was of minor importance.

The year 1822 is memorable; it saw the appearance of Vigny's Poemes, the Odes of Hugo, which announced a new power in literature, though the direction of that power was not yet defined, and almost to the same moment belongs the indictment of classical literature by Henri Beyle ("Stendhal") in his study entitled Racine et Shakespeare. Around Charles Nodier, in the library of the Arsenal, gathered the young revolters—among them Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Emile Deschamps, afterwards the translator of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, his brother Antony, afterwards the translator of the Divine Comedy. The first Cenacle was formed; in the Muse Francaise and in the Globe the principles of the new literary school were expounded and illustrated. Victor Hugo looked on with friendly intentions, but still held aloof.

JEAN-PIERRE DE BERANGER (1780-1857) was not one of this company of poets. A child of Paris, of humble parentage, he discovered, after various experiments, that his part was not that of a singer of large ambitions. In 1815 his first collection of Chansons appeared; the fourth appeared in 1833. Standing between the bourgeoisie and the people, he mediated between the popular and the middle-class sentiment. His songs flew like town sparrows from garret to garden; impudent or discreet, they nested everywhere. They seemed to be the embodied wisdom of good sense, good temper, easy morals, love without its ardours, poverty without its pains, patriotism without its fatigues, a religion on familiar terms with the Dieu des bonnes gens. In his elder years a Beranger legend had evolved itself; he was the sage of democracy, the Socrates of the people, the patriarch to whom pilgrims travelled to receive the oracles of liberal and benevolent philosophy. Notwithstanding his faults in the pseudo-classic taste, Beranger was skilled in the art of popular song; he knew the virtue of concision; he knew how to evolve swiftly his little lyric drama; he knew how to wing his verses with a volant refrain; he could catch the sentiment of the moment and of the multitude; he could be gay with touches of tenderness, and smile through a tear reminiscent of departed youth and pleasure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois he was a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was a democrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democratic absolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Beranger count for much; in the history of literature the poet has a little niche of his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elder years supposed himself the champion of a literary revolution, might be called modest.

II

Among the members of the Cenacle was to be seen a poet already famous, their elder by several years, who might have been the master of a school had he not preferred to dwell apart; one who, born for poetry, chose to look on verse as no more than an accident of his existence. In the year 1820 had appeared a slender volume entitled Meditations Poetiques. The soul, long departed, returned in this volume to French poetry. Its publication was an event hardly less important than that of the Genie du Christianisme. The well-springs of pure inspiration once more flowed. The critics, indeed, were not all enthusiastic; the public, with a surer instinct, recognised in Lamartine the singer they had for many years desired, and despaired to find.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, born at Macon in 1790, of royalist parents, had passed his childhood among the tranquil fields and little hills around his homestead at Milly. From his mother he learned to love the Bible, Tasso, Bernardin, and a christianised version of the Savoyard Vicar's faith; at a later time he read Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Milton, Byron, and was enchanted by the wandering gleams and glooms of Ossian. From the melancholy of youth he was roused by Italian travel, and by that Italian love romance of Graziella, the circumstances of which he has dignified for the uses of idealised autobiography. A deeper passion of love and grief followed; Madame Charles, the "Julie" of Lamartine's Raphael, the "Elvire" of his Meditations, died. Lamartine had versified already in a manner which has affinities with that of those eighteenth-century poets and elegiac singers of the Empire whom he was to banish from public regard. Love and grief evoked finer and purer strains; his deepest feelings flowed into verse with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity. Without an effort of the will he had become the most illustrious poet of France.

Lamartine had held and had resigned a soldier's post in the body-guard of Louis XVIII. He now accepted the position of attache to the embassy at Naples; published in 1823 his Nouvelles Meditations, and two years later Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d'Harold (Byron's Childe Harold); after which followed a long silence. Secretary in 1824 to the legation at Florence, he abandoned after a time the diplomatic career, and on the eve of the Revolution of July (1830) appeared again as a poet in his Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses; travelled in the East in company with his wife, and recorded his impressions in the Voyage en Orient; entered into political life, at first a solitary in politics as he had been in literature, but by degrees finding himself drawn more and more towards democratic ideas. "Where will you sit?" he was asked on his presentation in the Chamber. His smiling reply, "On the ceiling," was symbolical of the fact; but from "the ceiling" his exalted oratory, generous in temper, sometimes wise and well informed, descended with influence. Jocelyn (1836), La Chute d'un Ange (1838), the Recueillements Poetiques (1839), closed the series of his poetical works, though he did not wholly cease from song.

In 1847 Lamartine's idealising Histoire des Girondins, brilliant in its romantic portraiture, had the importance of a political event. The Revolution of February placed him for a little time at the head of affairs; as he had been the soul of French poetry, so for a brief hour he was the soul of the political life of France. With the victory of imperialism Lamartine retired into the shade. He was more than sixty years of age; he had lost his fortune and was burdened with debt. His elder years were occupied with incessant improvisations for the booksellers—histories, biographies, tales, criticism, autobiographic confidences flowed from his pen. It was a gallant struggle and a sad one. Through the delicate generosity of Napoleon III. he was at length relieved without humiliating concessions. In 1869 Lamartine died in his eightieth year.

He was a noble dreamer in practical affairs, and just ideas formed a portion of his dreams. Nature had made him an irreclaimable optimist; all that is base and ugly in life passed out of view as he soared above earth in his luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed he knew, but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there were consolations in maternal nature, in love, in religious faith and adoration. His power of vision was not intense or keen; his descriptions are commonly vague or pale; but no one could mirror more faithfully a state of feeling divested of all material circumstance. The pure and ample harmonies of his verse do not attack the ear, but they penetrate to the soul. All the great lyric themes—God, nature, death, glory, melancholy, solitude, regret, desire, hope, love—he interpreted on his instrument with a musician's inspiration. Unhappily he lacked the steadfast force of will, the inexhaustible patience, which go to make a complete artist; he improvised admirably; he refused to labour as a master of technique; hence his diffuseness, his negligences; hence the decline of his powers after the first spontaneous inspiration was exhausted.

Lamartine may have equalled but he never surpassed the best poems of his earliest volume. But the elegiac singer aspired to be a philosophic poet, and, infusing his ideas into sentiment and narrative, became the author of Jocelyn and La Chute d'un Ange. Recalling and idealising an episode in the life of his friend the Abbe Dumont, he tells how Jocelyn, a child of humble parents—not yet a priest—takes shelter among the mountains from the Revolutionary terror; how a proscribed youth, Laurence, becomes his companion; how Laurence is found to be a girl; how friendship passes into love; how, in order that he may receive the condemned bishop's last confession, Jocelyn submits to become a priest; how the lovers part; how Laurence wanders into piteous ways of passion; how Jocelyn attends her in her dying hours, and lays her body among the hills and streams of their early love. It is Jocelyn who chronicles events and feelings in his journal of joy and of sorrow. Lamartine acknowledges that he had before him as a model the idyl dear to him in childhood—Bernardin's Paul et Virginie.

The poem is complete in itself, but it was designed as a fragment of that vast modern epopee, with humanity for the hero, of which La Chute d'un Ange was another fragment. The later poem, vast in dimensions, fantastic in subject, negligent in style, is a work of Lamartine's poetic decline. We are among the mountains of Lebanon, where dwell the descendants of Cain. The angel, enamoured of the maiden Daidha, becomes human. Through gigantic and incoherent inventions looms the idea of humanity which degrades itself by subjugation to the senses, as in Jocelyn we had seen the type of humanity which ascends by virtue of aspirations of the soul. It was a poor jest to say that the title of his poem La Chute d'un Ange described its author. Lamartine had failed; he could not handle so vast a subject with plastic power; but in earlier years he had accomplished enough to justify us in disregarding a late failure—he had brought back the soul to poetry.

III

Among the romantic poets who made themselves known between 1820 and 1830, ALFRED DE VIGNY is distinguished by the special character of his genius, and by the fact that nothing in his poetry is derived from his contemporaries. Lamartine, Hugo, and, at a later date, Musset, found models or suggestions in his writings. He, though for a time closely connected with the romantic school, really stands apart and alone. Born in 1797, he followed the profession of his father, that of arms, and knew the hopes, the illusions, and the disappointments of military service at the time of the fall of the Empire and the Bourbon restoration. He read eagerly in Greek literature, in the Old Testament, and among eighteenth-century philosophers. As early as 1815 he wrote his admirable poem La Dryade, in which, before Andre Chenier's verse had appeared, Chenier's fresh and delicate feeling for antiquity was anticipated. In 1822 his first volume, Poemes, was published, including the Helena, afterwards suppressed, and groups of pieces classified as Antiques, Judaiques, and Modernes. Already his Moise, majestic in its sobriety, was written, though it waited four years for publication in the volume of Poemes Antiques et Modernes (1826). Moses climbing the slopes of Nebo personifies the solitude and the heavy burden of genius; his one aspiration now is for the sleep of death; and it is the lesser leader Joshua who will conduct the people into the promised land. The same volume included Eloa, a romance of love which abandons joy through an impulse of divine pity: the radiant spirit Eloa, born from a tear of Christ, resigns the happiness of heaven to bring consolation to the great lost angel suffering under the malediction of God. Other pieces were inspired by Spain, with its southern violence of passion, and by the pass of Roncesvalles, with its chivalric associations.

The novel of Cinq-Mars, which had a great success, is a free treatment of history; but Vigny's best work is rather the embodiment of ideas than the rendering of historical matter. His Stello in its conception has something of kinship with Moise; in three prose tales relating the sufferings of Chatterton, Chenier, and Gilbert, it illustrates the sorrows of the possessors of genius. Vigny's military experience suggested another group of tales, the Servitude et Grandeur Militaires; the soldier in accepting servitude finds his consolation in the duty at all costs of strenuous obedience.

In 1827 Vigny quitted the army, and next year took place his marriage—one not unhappy, but of imperfect sympathy—to an English lady, Lydia Bunbury. His interest in English literature was shown by translations of Othello and the Merchant of Venice. The former was acted with the applause of the young romanticists, who worshipped Shakespeare ardently if not wisely, and who bore the shock of hearing the unclassical word mouchoir valiantly pronounced on the French stage. The triumph of his drama of Chatterton (1835) was overwhelming, though its glory to-day seems in excess of its deserts. Ten years later Vigny was admitted to the Academy. But with the representation of Chatterton, and at the moment of his highest fame, he suddenly ceased from creative activity. Never was his mind more energetic, never was his power as an artist so mature; but, except a few wonderful poems contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and posthumously collected, nothing was given by him to the world from 1835 to 1863, the year of his death.

He had always been a secluded spirit; external companionship left him inwardly solitary; secret—so Sainte-Beuve puts it—in his "tower of ivory"; touching some mountain-summit for a moment—so Dumas describes him—if he folded his wings, as a concession to humanity. A great disillusion of passion had befallen him; but, apart from this, he must have retreated into his own sphere of ideas and of images, which seemed to him to be almost wronged by an attempt at literary expression. He looked upon the world with a disenchanted eye; he despaired of the possibilities of life for himself and for all men; without declamation or display, he resigned himself to a silent and stoical acceptance of the lot of man; but out of this calm despair arose a passionate pity for his fellows, a pity even for things evil, such as his Eloa felt for the lost angel. La Colere de Samson gives majestic utterance to his despair of human love; his Mont des Oliviers, where Jesus seeks God in vain, and where Judas lurks near, expresses his religious despair. Nature, the benevolent mother, says Vigny, is no mother, but a tomb. Yet he would not clamour against the heavens or the earth; he would meet death silently when it comes, like the dying wolf of his poem (La Mort du Loup), suffering but voiceless. Wealth and versatility of imagination were not Vigny's gifts. His dominant ideas were few, but he lived in them; for them he found apt imagery or symbol; and in verse which has the dignity of reserve and of passion controlled to sobriety, he let them as it were involuntarily escape from the seclusion of his soul. He is the thinker among the poets of his time, and when splendours of colour and opulence of sound have passed away, the idea remains. In fragments from his papers, published in 1867, with the title Journal d'un Poete, the inner history of Vigny's spirit can be traced.

IV

To present VICTOR HUGO in a few pages is to carve a colossus on a cherry-stone. His work dominates half a century. In the years of exile he began a new and greater career. During the closing ten years his powers had waned, but still they were extraordinary. Even with death he did not retire; posthumous publications astonished and perhaps fatigued the world.

Victor-Marie Hugo was born at Besancon on February 26, 1802, son of a distinguished military officer—

"Mon pere vieux soldat, ma mere Vendeenne."

Mother and children followed Commandant Hugo to Italy in 1807; in Spain they halted at Ernani and at Torquemada—names remembered by the poet; at Madrid a Spanish Quasimodo, their school servant, alarmed the brothers Eugene and Victor. A schoolboy in Paris, Victor Hugo rhymed his chivalric epic, his tragedy, his melodrama—"les betises que je faisais avant ma naissance." In 1816 he wrote in his manuscript book the words, "I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing." At fifteen he was the laureate of the Jeux Floraux, the "enfant sublime" of Chateaubriand's or of Soumet's praise.

Founder, with his brothers, of the Conservateur Litteraire, he entered into the society of those young aspirants who hoped to renew the literature of France. In 1822 he published his Odes et Poesies Diverses, and, obtaining a pension from Louis XVIII., he married his early playfellow Adele Foucher. Romances, lyrics, dramas followed in swift succession. Hugo, by virtue of his genius, his domineering temper, his incessant activity, became the acknowledged leader of the romantic school. In 1841 he was a member of the Academy; four years later he was created a peer. Elected deputy of Paris in 1848, the year of revolution, he sat on the Right in the Constituant, on the Left in the Legislative Assembly, tending more and more towards socialistic democracy. The Empire drove him into exile—exile first at Brussels, then in Jersey, finally in Guernsey, where Hugo, in his own imagination, was the martyred but unsubdued demi-god on his sea-beaten rock. In 1870, on the fall of the Empire, he returned to Paris, witnessed the siege, was elected to the National Assembly, urged a continuance of the war, spoke in favour of recognising Garibaldi's election, and being tumultuously interrupted by the Right, sent in his resignation. Occupied at Brussels in the interests of his orphaned grandchildren, he was requested to leave, on the ground of his zeal on behalf of the fallen Communists; he returned to Paris, and pleaded in the Rappel for amnesty. In 1875 he was elected a senator. His eightieth birthday was celebrated with enthusiasm. Three years later, on May 23, 1885, Victor Hugo died. His funeral pomps were such that one might suppose the genius of France itself was about to be received at the Pantheon.

In Victor Hugo an enormous imagination and a vast force of will operated amid inferior faculties. His character was less eminent than his genius. If it is vanity to take a magnified Brocken-shadow for one's self and to admire its superb gestures upon the mist, never was vanity more complete or more completely satisfied than his. He was to himself the hero of a Hugo legend, and did not perceive when the sublime became the ridiculous. Generous to those beneath him, charitable to universal humanity, he was capable of passionate vindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his self-esteem; and, since whatever opposed him was necessarily an embodiment of the power of evil, the contest rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman. His intellect, the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination. Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, could pass with him for ideas; but his visions are sometimes thoughts in images. The voice of his passions was leonine, but his moral sensibility wanted delicacy. His laughter was rather boisterous than fine. He is a poet who seldom achieved a faultless rendering of the subtle psychology of lovers' hearts; there was in him a vein of robust sensuality. Children were dear to him, and he knew their pretty ways; a cynical critic might allege that he exploited overmuch the tender domesticities. His eye seized every form, vast or minute, defined or vague; his feeling for colour was rather strong than delicate; his vision was obsessed by the antithesis of light and shade; his ear was awake to every utterance of wind or wave; phantoms of sound attacked his imagination; he lent the vibrations of his nerves, his own sentiments, to material objects; he took and gave back the soul of things. Words for him were living powers; language was a moving mass of significant myths, from which he chose and which he aggrandised; sensations created images and words, and images and words created ideas. He was a master of all harmonies of verse; now a solitary breather through pipe or flute; more often the conductor of an orchestra.

To say that Hugo was the greatest lyric poet of France is to say too little; the claim that he was the greatest lyric poet of all literature might be urged. The power and magnitude of his song result from the fact that in it what is personal and what is impersonal are fused in one; his soul echoed orchestrally the orchestrations of nature and of humanity—

"Son ame aux mille voix, que le Dieu qu'il adore Mit au centre de tout comme un echo sonore."

And thus if his poetry is not great by virtue of his own ideas, it becomes great as a reverberation of the sensations, the passions, and the thoughts of the world. He did not soar tranquilly aloft and alone; he was always a combatant in the world and wave of men, or borne joyously upon the flood. The evolution of his genius was a long process. The Odes of 1822 and 1824, the Odes et Ballades of 1826, Catholic and royalist in their feeling, show in their form a struggling originality oppressed by the literary methods of his predecessors—J.-B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Casimir Delavigne. This originality asserts itself chiefly in the Ballades. His early prose romances, Han d'Islande (1823) and Bug-Jargal (1826)—the one a tale of the seventeenth-century man-beast of Norway, the other a tale of the generous St. Domingo slave—are challenges of youthful and extravagant romanticism. Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne (1829) is a prose study in the pathology of passion. The same year which saw the publication of the last of these is also the year of Les Orientales. These poems are also studies—amazing studies in colour, in form, in all the secrets of poetic art. The East was popular—Hugo was ever passionate for popularity—and Spain, which he had seen, is half-Oriental. But of what concern is the East? he had seen a sunset last summer, and the fancy took him; the East becomes an occasion for marvellous combinations of harmony and lustrous tinctures; art for its own sake is precious.

From 1827, when Cromwell appeared, to 1843, when the epic in drama Les Burgraves failed, Hugo was a writer for the stage, diverting tragedy from its true direction towards lyrical melodrama.[1] In the operatic libretto La Esmeralda (1836) his lyrical virtuosity was free to display itself in an appropriate dramatic form. The libretto was founded on his own romance Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), an evocation, more imaginative than historical, of the old city of the fifteenth century, its tragic passions, its strangeness, its horrors, and its beauty; it is a marvellous series of fantasies in black and white; things live in it more truly than persons; the cathedral, by its tyrannous power and intenser life, seems to overshadow the other actors. The tale is a juxtaposition of violent contrasts, an antithesis of darkness and light. Through Quasimodo afflicted humanity appeals for pity.

[Footnote 1: See section VII, this chapter.]

In the volume of verse which followed Les Orientales after an interval of two years, Les Feuilles d'Automne (1831), Hugo is a master of his instrument, and does not need to display his miracles of skill; he is freer from faults than in the poetry of later years, but not therefore more to be admired. His noblest triumphs were almost inevitably accompanied by the excesses of his audacity. Here the lyrism is that of memory and of the heart—intimate, tender, grave, with a feeling for the hearth and home, a sensibility to the tranquillising influences of nature, a charity for human-kind, a faith in God, a hope of immortality. Now and again, as in the epilogue, the spirit of public indignation breaks forth—

"Et j'ajoute a ma lyre une corde d'airain."

The spirit of the Chants du Crespuscule (1835) is one of doubt, trouble, almost of gloom. Hugo's faith in the bourgeois monarchy is already waning; he is a satirist of the present; he sees two things that are majestic—the figure of Napoleon in the past, the popular flood-tide in the future which rises to threaten the thrones of kings. But this tide is discerned, as it were, through a dimness of weltering mist. Les Voix Interieures (1837) resumes the tendencies of the two preceding volumes; the dead Charles X. is reverently saluted; the legendary Napoleon is magnified; the faith in the people grows clearer; the inner whispers of the soul are caught with heedful ear; the voice of the sea now enters into Hugo's poetry; Nature, in the symbolic La Vache, is the mother and the exuberant nurse of all living things. In Les Rayons et les Ombres (1840), Nature is not only the nurse, but the instructress and inspirer of the soul, mingling spirit with spirit. Lamartine's Le Lac and Musset's Souvenir find a companion, not more pure, but of fuller harmonies, in the Tristesse d'Olympio; reminiscences of childhood are magically preserved in the poem of the Feuillantines.

From 1840 to 1853 Hugo as a lyrical poet was silent. Like Lamartine, he had concerned himself with politics. A private grief oppressed his spirits. In 1843 his daughter Leopoldine and her husband of a few short months were drowned. In 1852 the poet who had done so much to magnify the first Napoleon in the popular imagination was the exile who launched his prose invective Napoleon le Petit. A year later appeared Les Chatiments, in which satire, with some loss of critical discernment, is infused with a passionate lyrical quality, unsurpassed in literature, and is touched at times with epic grandeur. The Empire, if it severed Hugo from the soil of France, restored him to himself with all his superb power and all his violences and errors of genius.

The volumes of Les Contemplations (1856) mark the culmination of Hugo's powers as a lyrical poet. The earlier pieces are of the past, from 1830 to 1843, and resemble the poems of the past. A group of poems, sacred to the memory of his daughter, follow, in which beauty and pathos are interpenetrated by a consoling faith in humanity, in nature, and in God. The concluding pieces are in a greater manner. The visionary Hugo lives and moves amid a drama of darkness and of light; gloom is smitten by splendour, splendour collapses into gloom; and darkness and light seem to have become vocal in song.

But a further development lay before him. The great lyric poet was to carry all his lyric passion into an epic presentation, in detached scenes, of the life of humanity. The first part of La Legende des Siecles was published in 1859 (later series, 1877, 1883). From the birth of Eve to the trumpet of judgment the vast cycle of ages and events unrolls before us; gracious episodes relieve the gloom; beauty and sublimity go hand in hand; in the shadow the great criminals are pursued by the great avengers. The spirit of Les Chatiments is conveyed into a view of universal history; if kings are tyrants and priests are knaves, the people is a noble epic hero. This poem is the epopee of democratic passions.

The same spirit of democratic idealism inspires Hugo's romance Les Miserables (1862). The subject now is modern; the book is rather the chaos of a prose epic than a novel; the hero is the high-souled outcast of society; everything presses into the pages; they are turn by turn historical, narrative, descriptive, philosophical (with such philosophy as Hugo has to offer), humanitarian, lyrical, dramatic, at times realistic; a vast invention, beautiful, incredible, sublime, absurd, absorbing in its interest, a nightmare in its tedium.

We have passed beyond the mid-century, but Hugo is not to be presented as a torso. In the tale Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866) the choral voices of the sea cover the thinness and strain of the human voices; if the writer's genius is present in L'Homme qui Rit (1869), it often chooses to display its most preposterous attitudes; the better scenes of Quatre-vingt Treize (1874) beguile our judgment into the generous concessions necessary to secure an undisturbed delight. These are Hugo's later poems in prose. In verse he revived the feelings of youth with a difference, and performed happy caprices of style in the Chansons des Rues et des Bois (1865); sang the incidents and emotions of his country's sorrow and glory in L'Annee Terrible (1872), and—strange contrast—the poetry of babyland in L'Art d'etre Grandpere (1877). Volume still followed volume—Le Pape, La Pitie Supreme, Religions et Religion, L'Ane, Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit, the drama Torquemada. The best pages in these volumes are perhaps equal to the best in any of their author's writings; the pages which force antithesis, pile up synonyms, develop commonplaces in endless variations, the pages which are hieratic, prophetic, apocalyptic, put a strain upon the loyalty of our admiration. The last legend of Hugo's imagination was the Hugo legend: if theism was his faith, autotheism was his superstition. Yet it is easy to restore our loyalty, and to rediscover the greatest lyric poet, the greatest master of poetic counterpoint that France has known.

V

ALFRED DE MUSSET has been reproached with having isolated himself from the general interests and affairs of his time. He did not isolate himself from youth or love, and the young of two generations were his advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of Rousseau, he was a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment and the scepticism of the eighteenth century. Impressionable, excitable, greedy of sensations, he felt around him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire, the void left by the passing away of religious faiths. One thing was new and living—poetry. Chenier's remains had appeared; Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine had opened the avenues for the imagination; Byron was dead, but Harold and Manfred and Don Juan survived. Musset, born a poet, was ready for imaginative ventures; he had been introduced, while still a boy, to the Cenacle. Spain and Italy were the regions of romance; at nineteen he published his first collection of poems, Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, and—an adolescent Cherubin-Don Juan of song—found himself famous.

He gave his adhesion to the romantic school, rather with the light effrontery of youth than with depth of conviction; he was impertinent, ironical, incredulous, blasphemous, despairing, as became an elegant Byron minor of the boulevards, aged nineteen. But some of the pieces were well composed; all had the "form and feature of blown youth"; the echoes of southern lands had the fidelity and strangeness of echoes tossed from Paris backwards; certain passages and lines had a classic grace; it might even be questioned whether the Ballade a la Lune was a challenge to the school of tradition, or a jest at the expense of his own associates.

A season of hesitation and of transition followed. Musset was not disposed to play the part of the small drummer-boy inciting the romantic battalion to the double-quick. He began to be aware of his own independence. He was romantic, but he had wit and a certain intellectual good-sense; he honoured Racine together with Hugo; he could not merge his individuality in a school. Yet, with an infirmity characteristic of him, Musset was discouraged. It was not in him to write great poetry of an impersonal kind; his Nuit Venitienne had been hissed at the Odeon; and what had he to sing out of his own heart? He resolved to make the experiment. Three years after his first volume a second appeared, which announced by its title that, while still a dramatic poet, he had abandoned the stage; the Spectacle dans un Fauteuil declared that, though his glass was small, it was from his own glass that he would drink.

The glass contained the wine of love and youth mingled with a grosser potion. In the drama La Coupe et les Levres he exhibited libertine passion seeking alliance with innocence and purity, and incapable of attaining self-recovery; in Namouna, hastily written to fit the volume for publication, he presented the pursuit of ideal love as conducting its victim through all the lures of sensual desire; the comedy A quoi revent les jeunes Filles, with its charm of fantasy, tells of a father's device to prepare his daughters for the good prose of wedlock by the poetry of invented romance. Musset had emancipated himself from the Cenacle, and would neither appeal to the eye with an overcharge of local colour, nor seduce the ear with rich or curious rhymes. Next year (1833) in the Revue des Deux Mondes appeared Rolla, the poem which marks the culmination of Musset's early manner, and of Byron's influence on his genius; the prodigal, beggared of faith, debased by self-indulgence, is not quite a disbeliever in love; through passion he hastens forward in desperation to the refuge of death.

At the close of 1833 Musset was with George Sand in Italy. The hours of illusion were followed by months of despair. He knew suffering, not through the imagination, but in his own experience. After a time calm gradually returned, and the poet, great at length by virtue of the sincerity of genius, awoke. He is no longer frivolously despairing and elegantly corrupt. In Les Nuits—two of these (Mai, Octobre) inspired by the Italian joy and pain—he speaks simply and directly from the heart in accents of penetrating power. Solitude, his constant friend, the Muse, and love rising from the grave of love, shall be his consolers—

"Apres avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore; Il faut aimer sans cesse, apres avoir aime."

Musset's powers had matured through suffering; the Lettre a Lamartine, the Espoir en Dieu, the Souvenir, the elegy A la Malibran, the later stanzas Apres une Lecture (1842), are masterpieces of the true Musset—the Musset who will live.

At thirty Musset was old. At rare intervals came the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind; but the years were years of lassitude. His patriotic song, Le Rhin Allemand, is of 1841. In 1852 the Academy received him. "Musset s'absente trop," observed an Academician; the ungracious reply, "Il s'absinthe trop," told the truth, and it was a piteous decline. In 1857, attended by the pious Sister Marceline, Musset died.

Passion, the spirit of youth, sensibility, a love of beauty, intelligence, esprit, fantasy, eloquence, graceful converse—these were Musset's gifts. He lacked ideas; he lacked the constructive imagination; with great capacities as a writer, he had too little of an artist's passion for perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle, has borne the lapse of time ill. "J'y ai vomi la verite," he said. It is not the happiest way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis-Quinze boudoir. Pierre et Camille, with its deaf-and-dumb lovers, and their baby, who babbles in the presence of the relenting grandfather "Bonjour, papa," has a pretty innocence. Le Fils de Titien returns to the theme of fallen art, the ruin of self-indulgence. Frederic et Bernerette and Mimi Pinson may be said to have created the poetic literature of the grisette—gay and good, or erring and despairful—making a flower of what had blossomed in the stories of Paul de Kock as a weed.

Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac poems, Musset's best Comedies and Proverbes (proverbial sayings exemplified in dramatic action), deserve a place. Written in prose for readers of the Revue des Deux Mondes, their scenic qualities were discovered only in 1847, when the actress Madame Allan presented Un Caprice and Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermee at St. Petersburg. The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political conspiracy, Lorenzaccio, was an effort beyond the province and the powers of Musset. His Andre del Sarto, a tragic representation of the great painter betrayed by his wife and his favourite pupil, needed the relief of his happier fantasy. It is in such delicate creations of a world of romance, a world of sunshine and of perpetual spring, as On ne badine pas avec l'Amour, Les Caprices de Marianne, Le Chandelier, Il ne faut jurer de rien, that Musset showed how romantic art could become in a high sense classic by the balance of sensibility and intelligence, of fantasy and passion. The graces of the age of Madame de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freer graces of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance of Shakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the artificial elegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love, and still repeated love; sentiment is relieved by the play of gaiety; the grotesque approaches the beautiful; we sail in these light-timbered barques to a land that lies not very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest of our own great enchanter.