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recollections. The suggestion of the moment guides them. Whether it is Bonaparte dying at St. Helena in 1821, or Charles X. receiving the crown at Reims in 1825, these poets confide to us their own impressions. It is not the inherent and intrinsic beauty of the subject that provokes their song, but the subject's suitability to the especial character of the poet's genius. More precisely yet the subject is a mere pretext for the disclosure of the poet's point of view, the confession of his own fashion of feeling. It is this, and nothing else, that one means when one formulates the second characteristic of Romantic Poetry as opposed to Classic Poetry its dominant personality or individuality.

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A third and last characteristic springs from this second: the freedom or novelty of the Romantic School. "Let us set new thoughts to the old rimes," said André Chénier, in a line which has preserved its fame,—a line often overpraised, for that matter. The Romantic poets, better inspired, perceived that these "new thoughts" could only be expressed in the terms of an art as novel, and it is that renovation of style and metre for which they have. been most admired. Vigny shows more preciosity, more seeking after words, more embarrassment in his manipulation of rhythm, and for that reason is far less varied. His French, too, is less rich and less abundant. Lamartine's is not always very novel, nor yet. very correct; this great poet was a careless writer; and yet his liquidity is incomparable; the form of his verse is faultlessly classic, and not even Racine found more exquisite associations of sound. Victor Hugo unquestionably shares with Ronsard the pinnacle of eminence as a creator of rhythms; and his French, somewhat commonplace in his earlier work, in the first Odes, had attained, at the time of the Orientales, a freedom, a vigour, an originalityTM which may with truth be described as democratic. No one, certainly, did more than he to abolish the old distinction between the Grand French and the Familiar French, to put, as he said, "the Cap of Liberty on the head of the aged Dictionary." It was in this fashion that these three poets, unaided, shook off the yoke of the eighteenth-century grammarians; restored to words their pictorial value as mediums of expression or of description;

and freed French verse from the shackles which prevented its yielding to the requirements of the poet. There is no poetry without music, no music without movement, and movement was precisely what the French alexandrine lacked.

These being, then, the three essential and original characteristics of eighteenth-century French poetry when it first took definite shape, it may be said that its history, from that time, has been the history of a conflict between the three. Their strife is still unsettled. Is the poet to be only an artist, looking down, from the height of his "ivory tower," at the fruitless bustle of his fellow men? Is he to be a thinker? Or is he to turn aside from philosophy as well as from æsthetics, and be only a " sonorous echo indifferently stirred by all the vibrations of the air? Or should he try only to be himself?

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Before tracing the successive stages of the unending struggle, it is due alike to the decorum of chronology and to literary justice that one should say a word about the author-popular, and even famous, for a moment of the Iambes: Auguste Barbier. His lot was that of a middle-class Parisian, and when he had sung his brief song he fell back into his dull routine, and survived himself for nearly fifty years, never again finding the poet that was in him. Yet three or four of his Iambes, such as the Curée, the Popularité, the Idole, are among the masterpieces of French satire. I do not know, indeed, where one can more distinctly perceive the affinity, more clearly trace the consanguinity, between lyric and satiric verse; and the Iambes contain two or three of the most beautiful similes

in all French poetry. That is, in itself, something, from the point of view of art. But it is a reason, too, for regretting that even in these few pieces, there is a twang of vulgarity which debars Barbier from the rank of a true poet. No such fault is to be found in the other three men who are, with him, the most illustrious representatives of the second generation of Romantic Poets: Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset, and Théophile Gautier.

Personal poetry is triumphant in the persons of the two firstSainte-Beuve, whose Confessions de Joseph Delorme appeared in 1829, to be followed in 1831 by Consolations; and Alfred de

Musset, whose Premières Poésies saw the light between 1830 and 1832. Here are two poets who occupy themselves solely with themselves; tell us only of themselves, their predilections, their desires, their dreams of personal happiness. Nor is this the limit of their subjectiveness: Lamartine and Hugo chose, for expression in their verses, those of their impressions which seemed to them to be most general, those which they thought would have been shared by their contemporaries; Sainte-Beuve, on the contrary, in the Confessions de Joseph Delorme turns away from this very class of impressions, and devotes himself only to the observation, the analysis, and the expression of that which he believes to be exclusively his own, that which distinguishes and differentiates him from other men. In this respect and for this reason the Confessions de Joseph Delorme is morbid poetry, almost pathological: it seems the work of a neurasthenic or a neurotic. Add to this that Sainte-Beuve displays, as an artist and as a versifier, refinements and elaborate researches, of which the restless subtlety is equalled only by the utter ineffectiveness. These elaborations escape the unaided eye, they can be appreciated only when one is cautioned to look closely for them. It is in quite another fashion that Musset is "personal," he displayed another sort of affectation; he is foppish, he is ultra-Parisian. He becomes more simple after a few years; passion makes a new man of him. At first, in the Marrons du Feu, in Mardoche, in Namouna, he is the Lovelace, the Brummell, of the Romantic School, notwithstanding the poetic gift which already places him so far above the level of the disguise he assumes, and above Sainte-Beuve's level too. He makes verses for mere pastime, laughing at himself for making them, even; they are his diversion from graver pursuits. These more serious occupations were his brother tells us-" to hold grave conferences with the best tailors in Paris," " to waltz with a genuine Marquise." We learn, too, from other sources, that to these ponderous duties he added a routine of attendance at the gambling-clubs and at even less decorous resorts. It is for this reason that, if his inspiration differs from that of Sainte-Beuve, it rests upon the same foundation; it is "personal" to the verge of egoism, and no

man ever carried farther the pretension of individuality. His contemporaries took this view of him, and a legion of imitators crowded upon his footsteps and upon those of Sainte-Beuve, imitators who possessed none of the originality of their models, and who occupy no place in the history of French poetry. The first requisite for a "personal" poet, although not the only qualification necessary, is that he should possess a personality, and that is a gift few can claim. Men of originality are rare!

Théophile Gautier perceived all this, instinctively, and if the issue had been in his hands, the Romantic School would at once have turned to the impersonal phase of art. The description of places, the picturesque presentment of the past, faithfulness of imitative work, the submergence of self in objective studies, would then have become the chief aims of the poets. Neither nature nor history, however, proceed by sudden transformations and revolutions. The possibilities of "personal" poetry had not yet been exhausted, the fertility latent in its formulæ had not yet given place to sterility. None of Gautier's great contemporaries had yet said all that he had to say, completed the outpouring of his confessions. The whole period, too (more especially the years that immediately followed 1830), was inauspicious for the epicurean pursuit of art for art's own sake. New problems presented themselves to the poets of the day. Religion, which had preoccupied the poets of the past decade, ceased to preoccupy the poets of a society which doubted everything, and they became "socialists" and "philosophers."

The evidence of this change is to be found in Victor Hugo's Feuilles d'Automne, of 1831, in the Chants du Crépuscule, of 1835, and in the Voix Intérieures, 1837; or in Lamartine's Jocelyn, of 1836, and his Chute d'un Ange, in 1838. Jocelyn is, in fact, the only long poem in the French language, and the Chute d'un Ange,although it remained unfinished,—is neither the least important of Lamartine's works, nor the least conclusive manifestation of his genius. In both these poems all the qualities of the Méditations are again to be found, some of them, indeed, in an exaggerated degree: liquidity and fertility, for example. Other qualities add

themselves to these, qualities which are not generally admired, and which failed to bring Lamartine the applause they deserved. It was he who created philosophical poetry in France; for André Chénier, who hoped to do so, has left us only the outline of his Hermès, with a bare half hundred lines; and Voltaire's Discours sur l'Homme is a moral, rather than a philosophical, work—and furthermore is only prose. Lamartine has more than once succeeded in expressing, without the slightest loss of clearness or of harmony, ideas of the most abstract, the most purely metaphysical, sort that the human mind can conceive. It is another of his merits, pre-eminently shown in Jocelyn, that he could write in a familiar strain without becoming prosaic, and even without losing his nobility of expression. Nor was his point of view a mere pose, as Sainte-Beuve, not without a tinge of jealousy, asks us to believe. If ever a poet was naturally and involuntarily a poet, it was Lamartine, a poet even when he wrote in prose, and even in his political utterances. Nowhere is this more strikingly shown than in his Jocelyn, unless, indeed, it be in the Chute d'un Ange, or in the larger conception of the philosophical epic of which the Chute d'un Ange is itself only an episode. One certainly regrets that the hasty execution of the work is not always in keeping with the grandeur of the project, but that disparity is characteristic of Lamartine's genius. Is it not possible, indeed, that in the altitudes where metaphysics and poetry melt one into the other, a want of precision adds a further fitness, a new charm and beauty?

Yet, as one is about to think so and to say so, the shade of Victor Hugo interposes. Whether Hugo's visions be filled with realities, or only with possibilities, no poet has ever made his dreams more vivid, given to them a firmer form, made them more palpable. A blind man could perceive how boldly Victor Hugo's verse brings its subject into relief. Lamartine purifies and idealises the real-dissolves it, sometimes, in the liquidity of his lines; but Hugo, in the architecture of his poetry, captures the ideal, makes it concrete and material. He is as "personal" as ever in his Feuilles d'Automne or his Voix Intérieures, it may even be said that he is nowhere more "personal" than in his Orientales or his Odes. It is in these

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