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FRENCH POETRY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE

ACCORDING to most of the critics who have dealt with the history of the Romantic Movement in French Literature, the French poetry of the nineteenth century began with the period—and, indeed, with the verse-of André Chénier. Several among the Romantic poets themselves, Sainte-Beuve, for instance, and Théodore de Banville, were of the same opinion. No greater error could be made. It is because André Chénier was a great poet, and above all, a great artist-as Racine and Ronsard were artists-that he is so clearly distinguished from all the versifiers of his time, from Lebrun and Delille, from Roucher (with whom he is often associated for no better reason than that they two mounted the scaffold on the same day of the Terror), and from the Chevalier de Parny, too. He had not even one of the characteristics of the Romantic School. His Elegies breathe the ardent, yet exquisite, sensuousness of his age, but in his Idylles one finds again the classic, the contemporary of Ronsard, the pagan, the Alexandrian, the pupil of Callimachus and of Theocritus. It must be noted, too, that his Poésies, of which, for more than twenty-five years, only scattered fragments were known, were not published until 1819; and their influence may be traced in the first Poèmes of Alfred de Vigny, which appeared in 1822, but not in the first Odes of Victor Hugo, also published in 1822, nor yet in the Premières Méditations of Lamartine, which bear the date 1820. The truth is, that at the very source of nineteenth-century French poetry, one finds the inspiring influence of two great prose writers, and of one woman of genius:

the author of the Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the author of the Génie du Christianisme, Chateaubriand; and the author-too often forgotten-of l'Allemagne, Mme de Staël Rousseau had freed the Ego from the dungeon in which, for two centuries, it had been confined, victim of a tradition founded upon an essentially social conception of the literary art. Through all these two hundred years, neither the Salons, nor the Court which made and unmade the literary reputations of the period, would permit a writer to talk about himself, his love-affairs, or his domestic life. The privilege of that freedom was accorded only to those who wrote a volume of Memoirs, or compiled a selection of letters, and the canon held that even this measure of liberty could be extended only to cases of posthumous publication. Rousseau-whose whole literary product was a prolonged personal confidence, whose features appeared through the meshes of a veil so transparent that it was no more than a literary convention -broke away from this tradition, and opened again to the world one of the most important and profound sources of truly great poetry; a source not the less important, because it is neither the most abundant nor the purest.

Chateaubriand did even more. He was a traveller, and he restored the perception of nature, of animation, of colour, to a literary period cramped by the narrow routine of fashion; to a people who knew nature only as it appeared on the trim terraces of Versailles and of Fontainebleau, who, if they did not altogether forget that nature existed, at any rate ignored it, and kept their gaze narrowly fixed upon the moral and intellectual aspects of human life. A historian, as well as a traveller, Chateaubriand aroused his contemporaries to an appreciation of the difference between one age and another, he showed them how the man of one century departs from the type of a previous century, he emphasised the contrast between a feudal baron and a courtier of Louis XV. He was a Christian, too, and he informed the art of his time with the religious sentiment which had been lacking in the eighteenthcentury poets a deficiency which made their creations the more definite and clearly cut, but left them, always, dry and hard.

To Mme de Staël we owe, in turn, the last stage of this gradual transformation. Our poets needed a fresh inspiration, and she supplied it when she gave them her Littératures du Nord. It cannot, indeed, be said that Lamartine, Hugo, or Vigny imitated Goethe or Byron, and her achievement may perhaps be more justly defined if one says that she enlarged the skies of France, and tempted the wings of our poets to a broader flight, beyond our frontiers, towards new horizons which she, first, rose high enough to see. A new inquiry, a new curiosity, shone in our eyes. We began to doubt if the old ideals were the only ideals. Fresh processes added themselves to our habits of intellection, new elements came, silently as the dews, to our spiritual soil. There awaited new poets, if they should arise, a liberty which had been denied to their predecessors; the taste of the people, the conditions of the age, were ready for the literary revolution, which even a genius could hardly have operated without the subministration of his environment.

In these conditions lie the secret of the success achieved by Lamartine's first Méditations, a success which bears to the history of our lyric poetry the same relation that the success of the Cid or of Andromaque bears to the history of the French stage. But the Méditations gave rise to no such controversy as that which marked the days of Andromaque or of the Cid; opinion was unanimous in recognising the poet; and when the Nouvelles Méditations, the Mort de Socrate, the Dernier Chant du Pèlerinage de Childe Harold, the Harmonies Poétiques were, between 1820 and 1830, added tothe Méditations, the most obstinate of the Classics were forced to acknowledge that a new school of poetry had been born to France. The Poésies of Alfred de Vigny, published in 1822, and republished in 1826; the Odes of Victor Hugo, in 1822, followed by his Ballades in 1824 and by his Orientales in 1829; soon gave firmness of definition to the essential quality of the new school.

These three great poets had much in common, notwithstanding the originality which distinguished each of them from his two fellows Lamartine, the more pure, more harmonious, more vague; Hugo, the more precise, more colorous, more sonorous, the

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more barbaric to the French ear; and Vigny, who was more delicate, more elegant, more mystical, but whose note was less sustained. It may be that all three had masters among their predecessors of the nineteenth century,-Lamartine in the person of Parny, and in Millevoye, too; Hugo in Fontanes, in Lebrun, and in Jean Baptiste Rousseau; Vigny in Chénier; but their originality becomes apparent when one compares them with the survivors of the pseudo-classic epoch, such as Casimir Delavigne with his Messéniennes or Béranger in his Chansons. A perspicacious critic might perhaps have foreseen that all three of them would soon diverge upon separate paths: Lamartine becoming more the idealist, Hugo more the realist, Vigny already more the "philosopher"; but for the moment, between 1820 and 1830, they formed a group, if not precisely a school, and it is that group which we must endeavour to describe.

It must first be noted that no one of them belonged to the party which was then called the "Liberals," the party of Benjamin Constant or of Manuel. They were all three " royalists," extremists in their royalism, and they were of the Catholic party, too, the party of Joseph de Maistre, of Bonald, and of Lamennais. Hugo was, even at that time, the most absolute, the most uncompromising of the three; horror and hatred of the Revolution is nowhere more energetically declared than in his first poems, Les Vierges de Verdun, Quiberon, Buonaparte. Their devoutness is as sincere and as ardent as their royalism; and it colours all their ideas, as the religiosity of their master, Chateaubriand, coloured all his. Their conception of Love is a religious conception; it is from the religious point of view that they admire God's work in the domain of Nature; and their conception of the poet's function is, again, religious. Their religion is not always very lasting, nor very firmly grounded upon reason, nor is it even altogether orthodox. Lamartine's piety evaporates in a sort of Hindu pantheism; Hugo glides insensibly from Christianity to Voltairianism; Vigny, from year to year, progresses towards a pessimism not greatly unlike that of Schopenhauer. These changes, however, came later; and, in the meantime, the beginning of nineteenth-century French

poetry is marked by a permeation, even by an exaltation,—of religious sentiment.

This body of verse is, furthermore, personal or individual; the poet himself supplies not only the occasion of his verse, but its purpose, its habitual subject matter. A French ode and even an elegy, had, up to that time, been always of the broadest origin, built upon generalisations, abstractions, which the poet, in the process of elaboration, sedulously deprived of any particularity his premises might have possessed. Any one copy of verse resembled every other. There is no reason why an elegy of Chénier's should not have been Parny's instead; and if the printer had put Lebrun's name on the title-page of a volume of odes by Lefranc de Pompignan, the poets themselves would hardly have perceived the error. The Méditations of Lamartine, the Poèmes of Vigny, the Orientales of Hugo are, on the other hand, no more than metrical journals of the poet's daily impressions. Lamartine spends an hour on the Lake of Bourget, accompanied by the woman he loves, the Elvire of the Méditations, and he writes Le Lac; he passes Holy Week at the house of a friend, and writes the Semaine Sainte à la Roche Guyon. Vigny is interested by a paragraph in the Journal des Débats of July 18, 1822, and he finds the pretext for the Trappiste. As for Victor Hugo the mere titles of his Orientales: Canaris, Les Têtes du Sérail, Navarin, show their close relation to what we call, nowadays, "actuality." There are, no doubt, distinctions to be made; Vigny is, of the three, the most objective in his attitude, the most epic, one is almost tempted to say, in his Eloa or in Moïse. Victor Hugo often loses the sense of his own personality when he is confronted by something that seems very real to him; in the Feu du Ciel, in the Djinns, in Mazeppa, he is borne out of himself not only by his pictorial instinct, but by the current of a word-flow so ample that it betrays the rhetorician. Lamartine himself, the most subjective of the three, has here and there a dissertation,-in his Immortalité, for instance, or a paraphrase, as in his Chant d'Amour which overruns the narrow limits of personal poetry. Yet, after all is said, every one of them found his inspiration in himself, his emotions, his

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