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poems that he is most prodigal of confidences and avowals, and yet he is not the less attentive to " actuality." Half his poems are poems of occasion; their titles show it: Rêverie d'un passant à propos d'un Roi; Dicté en présence du glacier du Rhône; Pendant que la fenêtre était ouverte; Après une lecture de Dante. But he begins, at this stage of his work, to do what he had not done in the days of the Orientales; he begins to inquire into the mysteries, to wonder at what Baudelaire well calls "the monstrousness which envelops man on every side." Lamartine escaped from himself, raised himself above the level of his own personality, as he turned to the heights, ad augusta; Victor Hugo leaves his own person in order to search in mystery itself, per augusta, the explanation of what he has found inexplicable in his own personality. If it is a different sort of philosophising, it is still philosophy, and after twelve years of silence, or of political activity, from 1840 to 1852, when he returns to poetry, he resumes this philosophical preoccupation, never again to abandon it. No doubt his philosophy, at that period, differs widely from the catholicism of his earlier attitude, but nevertheless he had the right to say that the intensity, the continuity, of that preoccupation were always of a religious character. It is that which saves him from the double, yet diverse, excess of purely personal poetry and purely naturalistic doctrine.

Nevertheless-while Lamartine and Hugo thus imparted to romantic poetry and to personal poetry, a tendency toward philosophical and social poetry-Musset," descending to the desolate depths of the abyss within himself," gave resounding utterance to some of the most energetic notes of passion in all French poetryin all the world's poetry. We need only mention a few of his poems: the Lettre à Lamartine, the Nuits, the Souvenir; not a thousand lines in all. They are poems in which fastidious critics have found passages of mere rhetoric; but they will pass down the ages. Other poets may equal, but can never surpass, their bitter sorrow, their poignant eloquence. Musset's Nuits are at once the most realistic and the most personal poems in the language. The adventure had been commonplace; its termination, although it was cruel, was not extraordinary. But the poet suffered so profoundly,

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his whole life had been so utterly devastated by the blow, that it is impossible to imagine a more irreparable disaster. To express the pride of his passion, his horror of its unfaithful object, his absolute despair, he found words so profoundly pathetic that they wring, even from the driest eyes, tears almost as abundant as those he himself shed over his dead love. He has interposed so slight a veil of "literature" between his readers and his heart, the cry of his agony rises so naturally, that we can never be closer to any man's soul than to his. It is for all these reasons that, whatever one may think of his other works, Musset's Nuits places him in the first rank of poets. And perhaps it is for these reasons, too, that "personal" poetry has become so difficult to the poets of our own day. It is apart from personal poetry, or in antagonism to it, rather, that the evolution continues, in the works of Victor de Laprade, and, above all, in the Poèmes which Alfred de Vigny afterwards embodied in his Destinies.

Impelled by circumstances, yet always in accordance with the direction of his own talent, Vigny followed the same general trend as Lamartine and Victor Hugo, turning from personal poetry to objective and philosophical poetry. He lacked the fertility of the first, and was yet farther from the verbal and rhythmical inventiveness of the second. His philosophy was not the same, nor his philosophical temperament; he was born a pessimist of the most thorough sort; one of those who cannot forgive life for being the miserable thing it is, and still less forgive God for not having made it happier. From such convictions as these, the road to despair is short. Yet Vigny had too noble a nature or too elevated a mind to permit himself to sink into the gulf; and the conviction to which his pessimism led him-after a period of hesitation was what has since been called the religion of human suffering. He proclaimed, in a line which has remained famous, his love for " the majesty of human woes.' It is this sentiment which inspired some of his finest verses: the Sauvage, the Mort du Loup, the Flûte, the Mont des Oliviers, 1843, the Maison du Berger, 1844, and, later, the Bouteille à la Mer, 1854. It is essential to note that, independently of their other merits, all

these poems have the two characteristics of a work of art; each is "a philosophical thought presented in an epic or dramatic form' -the definition is his-and, above all, each is a Poem. By this last word one must understand something complete in itself, something of which the development is not left to the caprice or the fantasy of the poet, but depends upon the nature, the importance, and the compass of the subject. This is the limit imposed upon the liberty of purely romantic poetry.

Another poet of the same period restrained that liberty in another fashion: Victor de Laprade, whose Psyché in 1841, Odes et Poèmes in 1843, Poèmes évangéliques in 1852, unquestionably contain fine lines, but they are cold; they seem enveloped by some indefinable haze. There is no comparison between Victor de Laprade and Lamartine or Vigny, to whom he really owes less, though he may seem to owe more, than to two writers who are somewhat overlooked to-day: Ballanche, the Lyon's printer, who was Mme Récamier's friend, and Edgar Quinet, the friend of Michelet. Whatever may have been his inferiority, the purposes of Victor Laprade were profoundly interesting. Instinctively a pantheist, and an idealist as well, he laboured for ten or twelve years at the task of eliminating the poet's personality by reducing him to the office of an interpreter of the voice of nature. It was a sort of reversal of the romantic point of view, according to which nature herself only served as a pretext or an occasion for displaying the poet's personality. The subjective impression became, with Laprade, almost a matter of indifference; the truthful representation of the object was the important matter. Unfortunately for Laprade, he combined with this purpose, even in his verses, so many vague side-issues that one loses sight of his novel idea. And amid all this philosophy, which at times was little better than theosophy, the sense of form, of style, and even of prosody, was lost. Poets built their manner upon isolated examples of the work of Musset and of Lamartine, and thought that to be as careless, as often incorrect, as they, was the way to equal them.

Upon this theory a whole school of poets founded their

work, a school which the barbarous word " Formistes" was coined to describe. Happily the word has not survived the school. They did not at once formulate the doctrines of "art for art's own sake," but they were finding their way to that motto. The Cariatides of Théodore de Banville, 1842, and his Stalactites, 1846, were born of this suggestion. All that he appropriated from romanticism, and from the Orientales and the Consolations of Sainte-Beuve, was a scrupulous attention to form, to "pure beauty" as it was soon to be called. At the same time, however, he turned back to the Greek and Latin antiques, to the very source of classicism. He looked to André Chénier for inspiration, he sang the Vénus de Milo, the Triomphe de Bacchus, or the Jugement de Paris; and all this was at once an abjuration of the romanticism of the Middle Ages and of that which might have been called Lamartine's neoChristianism. The same must be said—or almost as much-of Théophile Gautier's collections Emaux et Camées, which appeared in 1852.

Banville and Gautier were true poets, true artists, over-anxious, indeed, to find new and singular expressions of art, but they had the misfortune to be also journalists and "men about town." From this combination there resulted a confusing association of incongruous ideals; strata of the quivering air of Paris and of the serene atmosphere of art. It is not always easy to distinguish their serious utterances from their æsthetic paradoxes. Were they sincere, or were they laughing at their readers? In the case of Banville the suspicion is stronger, for in the earlier work one perceives the "dandysm" of Musset, the Musset of Mardoche and of Namouna. The mere title of one of his collections, Odes Funambulesques, which appeared in 1857, sufficiently indicates the prankish side of his nature, and shows, too, why it is that his influence was so limited. Théophile Gautier, on the other hand, urged by the spur of need, did so much work of all sorts that the hack novelist pressed close upon the heels of the poet. The honour of becoming the true leader of the school was reserved for another; the author of the Poèmes Antiques, 1852, and the Poèmes Barbares, 1855, 1856: Leconte de Lisle, one of the foremost

poets of contemporary France-if not the most perfect among them all.

He is certainly the most "objective," and in this regard he is the antithesis of the romantic poet and of the lyrical poet; in reality he is an epic poet. In all his works he only speaks of himself two or three times, and with splendid disinterestedness he soars above all the questions of his day, giving place in his verses only to the thoughts which he believed were for eternity, sub specie aeternitatis. It is this which gives him his sound and lasting value. He sang of the exchanging aspects of nature, the same before his time, in his time, and in our time. They fill his Midi, his Juin, the Rêve du Jaguar, the Sommeil du Condor. He celebrated, too, the traces which have been left to us by the great races and their successive civilisation: Qain, Brahma, Khirón, the Enfance d'Héraclès, Hypatie, Mouça al Kébyr, the Tête du Comte, the Epée d'Angantyr, the Cœur d'Hialmar. He gave voice to the resistless melancholy which rises from the mass of ruins, from the dark void in which all human effort seems at last to be lost. He was a great artist, he always prepared himself for his work, adding the breadth of modern erudition to the scrupulous accuracy of the classic school. It was his ambition to give every line the precision of a bas-relief, the durability of bronze or marble. The larger public could hardly have been expected to turn with eagerness to so severe a form of art, but the poets promptly rendered their homage, and one is not surprised to learn that the influence of Leconte de Lisle was felt for a moment by Hugo himself.

This is plainly to be seen, if one compares the Châtiments, 1852, or the Contemplations, 1856, with the Légende des Siècles, 1859. In the two earlier collections we find Hugo still a lyric poet, and more than ever before a personal poet, but in the third he is manifestly inspired by the dominant note of the Poèmes Antiques and the Poèmes Barbares. With still greater truth he may be said to have been aroused by the sound of a rival's lyre, and, calling all his skill to his aid, he reasserts his sway over the empire which the newcomer had attacked. But the leopard skin which hangs from

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