Chapter 13

[1]See chapters vi., x., xiv., xx.

[2]The femininely naïve hypocrisy of the following passage is amusing: "Elle se sent, elle se connaît maintenant, la voix unanime du peuple.Elle vous réáuira tous au silence, elle passera sur vos têtes comme le souffle de Dieu; elle ira entourer votre représentation nationale, et voici ce qu'elle lui dira: 'Jusqu'ici tu n'étais pas inviolable, mais nous voici avec des armesparées de fleurset nous te déclarons inviolable. Travaille, fonctionne, nous t'entourons de 400 mille baïonnettes, d'un million de volontés. Aucun parti, aucune intrigue arrivera jusqu'à toi. Recueille-toi et agis!'"

If we take a survey of any literature some ten or twelve years after the beginning of a great new movement in it, at the moment when the army of the new era has proved successful in the conflict, we feel as if we were inspecting a battlefield. Through the victors' shouts of triumph we hear subdued sounds of lamentation. I do not mean the cries of woe that proceed from the vanquished, retreating forces; these have deserved their defeat, and their sufferings inspire no compassion in me; the men I have in my mind are the wounded and the forgotten of the victorious army. For literary warfare, too, has its lists of "killed and missing." It is interesting to walk over the battlefield and cast a glance at the writers of the generation of 1830 who were cut off in their youth and strength, or were so severely wounded that, maimed and dumb, they thenceforth only dragged out a disabled existence.

The conditions of the literary career are such that, out of hundreds who enter for the race, only two or three reach the goal. The rest are left lying exhausted along the course. The first to give in are the unfortunates whose powers are undoubtedly inadequate, the men of fragmentary talent who have been enticed by the hope of fortune and fame, and who run on in an atmosphere of dazzling illusion until they sink exhausted and fainting, to awake in the hospital. Next fall those who, though really highly gifted, lack the peculiar combination of qualities indispensable to success in the society in which they live, those who have not the power of adapting themselves to circumstances, much less of moulding society to suit their requirements, and who are outrun by the more or less nimble mediocrities in whom the great public recognises its own flesh and blood.

The very character of the work is fatal to many. It is work that knows nothing of days of rest, that exhausts the nervous system, that cannot be done leisurely, because only that which the author produces at white heat has the power of affecting the reader with any of the emotion felt by the writer. It is work which is, as a rule, very badly paid. It is work which, being entirely intellectual, refines the senses of the workman and heightens his susceptibilities to a degree incompatible with his position and surroundings, yet which at the same time ties him to, incorporates him with, these surroundings, in which he must observe the same rules and conventions as his neighbours. Hence, in the case of many, a thirst for life, for variety, for beauty, for experience, which, remaining unslaked, preys upon the vitals, and is called by the world decline, or consumption, or madness.

Others, again, succumb to the difficulties inseparable from the author's position. The equilibrium of society depends at any given moment upon a tacit agreement that the whole truth shall not be openly proclaimed. Yet in every society there exist exceptional individuals whose only task, whose mission, is to speak the whole truth. These are its poets, its authors. Unless these speak the truth they degenerate into mere sycophantic formalists. Hence the author is perpetually on the horns of a dilemma. He must choose between ignoring what he ought to proclaim—a proceeding which dulls his intellect and renders him useless—and the dangerous step of speaking out plainly, which makes him the object of such hostility as is only possible in literature. It is a hostility which has at its disposal a thousand tongues if it desires to speak, but also a thousand gags if it desires to impose silence concerning an author and his works; and in the case of a man whose very life depends upon publicity this is the greatest of all dangers, that he may be quietly and treacherously slain with the air-gun of silence.

All the fatigues, dangers, and difficulties of the author's life were necessarily doubly great in such a period as that of 1830, when, as if at the stroke of an enchanter's wand, a whole group of talented writers appeared on the scene at the same moment; when every youth with any gift of intellect or imagination felt himself drawn to the profession of literature or art; when the renown to be won in these professions seemed as glorious as did military fame in the days of Napoleon; when it was more difficult than ever before to come to the front; and when, moreover, enmity to all conventionality and to the quiet regularity of middle-class life was supposed to be an essential condition of success in art, and the ideal of the literary aspirant was to love and be beloved with a consuming passion, to produce a masterpiece, to scorn or save mankind, and die.

When we let our eyes wander over the battlefield where the unrenowned fell, we see them lying in serried rows. There are men of richly gifted, well-developed minds, like Eusèbe de Salles (born in Marseilles in 1801), count, doctor, traveller in the East, professor of Arabic, whoseSakontala à Paris(1833) is one of the most talented and original psychological novels of the day, but none of whose books reached a second edition, much less brought him fame, and this though he could remember a Sunday evening at Nodier's in his youth when he and Hugo, on equal footing, were the heroes of the day.—There is Régnier-Destourbet, whose novel,Louise, which is dedicated to Janin and perhaps owes something to him, treats a painful subject with discrimination and good taste.—There is Charles Dovalle, killed in a duel at the age of twenty, whose collection of poems,Le Sylphe, showed talent to which Victor Hugo paid a warm tribute after the author's death.—There is the melancholy Eugène Hugo, Victor's elder brother and faithful comrade and friend, who, equipped with a similar though inferior lyric talent to Victor's, fought at his side in the first Romantic campaign, but died insane in 1837.—There is a man of as remarkable and noble gifts as Fontaney, another of Hugo's faithful adherents. Fontaney was for a time secretary of legation at Madrid. A proud, refined, reserved man, he has told in his novel,Adieu(Revue des deux Mondes_1832), the story of one of the romantically sad adventures of his own life. In the life of George Sand there is an allusion to the unfortunate love affair which was the cause of his death in 1837.—There are men with a refined, delicate poetic talent, like Félix Arvers, whose name now only recalls a single beautiful sonnet, or Labenski, who is remembered by a single ode, or Ernest Fouinet, who wrote the sonnetA deux heureuxon the margin of a leaf of the edition of Ronsard which was presented at Sainte-Beuve's suggestion to Victor Hugo by all the authors of the Romantic School, each contributing something to its poetic equipment. Though Fouinet himself is forgotten, one line of his at least:

"Pour que l'encens parfume il faut que l'encens brûle,"

should be safe from oblivion, for it conveys in a single metaphor, a single phrase, the whole Romantic theory of poetry.—There are luckless Saint-Simonist poets like Poyat; there are satirists like Théophile Ferrière, who ridiculed the extravagances of the young Romanticists in works in the style of Gautier'sLes Jeunes-France, and whoseLord Chattertonis a farcical sequel to De Vigny's drama; and, lastly, there are men like Ulric Guttinger, who is remembered only because of a poem full of enthusiastic admiration addressed to him by the youthful De Musset.

To give a somewhat more life-like impression of these stepchildren of fortune, I shall dwell a little longer on the personality and career of one or two of them, thereby also throwing additional light on the character of the age; for the character of a period often sets its most distinct stamp on the individuals whose peculiarity or extravagance prevents their attaining lasting fame.

I take Ymbert Galloix first, not because he is greater than the rest, but because he is a typical figure. The son of a Geneva schoolmaster, Ymbert displayed remarkable gifts and received an excellent education. He left his native town for Paris without money enough to keep him even for a month, irresistibly attracted by the accounts of the victories of Romanticism, determined to see the men whom he admired so enthusiastically, and if possible to take his place among them as their equal.

He soon found his way to the houses of Charles Nodier, the patriarch, Hugo, the chief, and Sainte-Beuve, the standard-bearer of the new school. Hugo has given a description of his first visit, which I shall condense:

"It was on a cold October morning in 1827 that a tall young man entered my room. He had on a white, comparatively new overcoat, and carried an old hat in his hand. He talked to me of poetry. He had a roll of paper under his arm. I noticed that he kept his feet carefully concealed under his chair. He coughed a little. Next day it rained in torrents, but the young man came back again. He stayed three hours, talking eagerly about the English poets, of whose works he knew more than I did; he specially admired the Lake School. He coughed a great deal, and again I noticed that he always kept his feet under the chair. At last I saw that his boots were in holes, and that his feet were soaking. I could not venture to say anything about it. He left without having spoken of anything but the English poets."

Galloix thus, as we see, went straight to the most famous authors of the day. His words, his verses showed that there was something in him; he was well received, he was even assisted, and his letters to Geneva betray a naïvely vain satisfaction in being able to tell what men have received him as their equal and what famous friends he has made. Yet at the same time he was a prey to melancholy. His lot had been cast by destiny in uncongenial surroundings. The great grief of his life was the seemingly fantastic, and yet real one, that he had not been born an Englishman. His mind dwelt on this till it became a kind of mania. He felt that English literature, not French, was his natural element; he read English from morning to night, and his one aim was to make enough money to be able to live in London and become a writer in the English language. When, a year after his arrival in Paris, he was found lying dead on the bed in his miserable room, dead of despair and want, there was an English grammar in his hand.

Listen to the tone of his letters. "Oh, my only friend I how unhappy are they who are born unhappy I ... I had an attack of fever last night.... Since I came here my unhappiness has taken five or six different forms, but the root of all my misery is that I was not born in England. Do not laugh at me, I beg of you; I am so unhappy. I am on terms of friendship with the most famous authors, and have had in their society, when my verses have met with approval, occasional moments of superficial pleasure; but though I can be intoxicated with these little triumphs of an evening, of a moment, my inner life is not only pure wretchedness, it is a cancer. Molten lead flows in my veins. If men could see into my soul they would pity me. England has everything—fifty authors, at least, who have led a life of adventure and whose books are full of imagination; in France there are not three. There I should have had a country whose very prejudices I could have loved, for there is so much poetry in the old English customs.... An English lady who is giving me lessons says that in two years I shall be able to write perfectly well in English."

It is a touching illusion. The poor youth who was not yet completely master of his own language, whose odes were often broken-winded, whose verses, artistically polished as they were, lacked life—dreamt of being able in a couple of years to write a foreign language brilliantly. He soon lost confidence in his powers and judged his own poetry much more harshly than it was judged by others, and much more harshly than it deserved. He withdrew into himself; would see no one, and take no interest in what was going on in the outside world. He had come from Geneva interested in everything and every one, and full of enthusiastic self-confidence. In Paris he squandered his talent in talk and argument (always a dangerous thing to do) until there was not a virgin, not an untampered-with, idea left in his head. Then he became a publisher's hack, and wrote notices of books and biographies until he was completely nauseated. By the time he died, which he did at the age of twenty-two, he had long been utterly indifferent to all general interests and devoid of belief in his own ability. He simply allowed himself to die.[1]

I pass on to men of more remarkable and sterling talent, and of them I choose three—Louis Bertrand, Petrus Borel, and Théophile Dondey. These are names which, while their owners were alive, were almost unknown, but which are now familiar to many a lover of literature in France and beyond its borders. In their lifetime the poor young authors, in the course of a very few years, found it impossible to get their works published; now (especially since the revival of interest in them due to Charles Asselineau) they are published inéditions de luxe; and even the frontispieces and title-pages of their first books are carefully imitated, and the books themselves are marked in sale catalogues, "valuable and rare."

Louis Bertrand, born in 1807 in that town of Dijon the praises of which he has so charmingly sung, is better known by his pseudonym of Gaspard de la Nuit. He represents more perfectly than any other Romanticist one of the main aims of the Romantic endeavour—namely, the renovation of prose style. Whilst his contemporaries were trying to take the world by storm and passionate violence, he was developing in his native town the sculptor's and the goldsmith's artistic qualities in his treatment of language. No one had such an antipathy as he to the conventional phrase, the trite expression. Before he wrote he, as it were, passed the language through a sieve, which cleansed it of all the dull, faded, worn-out words, leaving to be employed in the service of his art only those possessed of picturesque and musical value. In a poem there must always be some words which are really only there for the sake of the rhyme or rhythm; the essence of Bertrand's art is that every parasitic word, every scrap of padding, is rigidly excluded. His work belongs to a branch of literature which he himself originated and which others (Baudelaire, for example) cultivated afterwards; he wrote short descriptions, never occupying more than a page or two, now in Rembrandt's, now in Callot's, now in Velvet-Breughel's, now in Gerard Dow's, now in Salvator Rosa's manner; the best of them are as perfect as pictures by these masters.

In 1828, during the first, entirely unpolitical period of the Romantic movement, Bertrand assisted in founding a literary organ of its ideas in his native town. His contributions toLe Provincialattracted the attention of the famous Parisians, Chateaubriand, Nodier, and Victor Hugo; and ere long the capital had such an attraction for the young author that he was constantly finding his way there. He made his début in its literary society one Sunday evening at Charles Nodier's, where he was permitted to read a ballad aloud. In Nodier's house he made acquaintance with the whole circle. He threw himself specially on the protection of Sainte-Beuve, who became his mentor, showed him hospitality during his short stays in Paris, and was entrusted with his manuscripts. Bertrand had all the awkwardness of the provincial and the extravagances of the dilettante; but to see the fire of the small, shyly restless, black eyes was to divine the poet.

Immediately after the Revolution of July he threw himself ardently into politics, attaching himself to the extreme Opposition party. The true son of an old soldier of the Republic and the Empire, he gave vent to the warlike instinct which had hitherto slumbered in his breast in attacks upon the citizen rulers. He was only twenty-three, and a newspaper of the opposite party had treated him with peculiar contempt because of his youth. He compelled the editor of the paper to insert a reply to the offensive article, in which he writes: "I prefer your disdain to your praise. And your approbation would in any case be of little consequence after that with which Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Ferdinand Denis, and others have encouraged my literary talent. Your insults oblige me to quote the encomiums with which genius itself has deigned to honour me. Monsieur Victor Hugo writes to me: 'I read your verses aloud to my friends as I read André Chénier's, Lamartine's, or Alfred de Vigny's; it is impossible to be possessed in a higher degree than you are of the secrets of form, &c., &c.' This is how Victor Hugo writes to the man you call a clerk. It is true that I have not the honour of being descended from any noble toad-eater, and that I cannot present myself as a candidate at the elections (i.e.am not on the list of the most heavily assessed citizens). My father was only a captain of gendarmerie, only a patriot of 1789, a soldier of fortune who at the age of eighteen hastened to the Rhine to shed his blood there, and at the age of fifty could count thirty years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds. It is true that he left me nothing but honour and his sword, which you, sir, would shrink from seeing drawn."

This is French journalistic style of 1832—not modest, certainly, but also not spiritless. Bertrand was one of the company of young men sympathetically alluded to by George Sand inHorace, who looked on Godfrey Cavaignac as their political leader, and went by the name ofles bousingots(sailor-hats). In Bertrand himself, republican bluntness was curiously combined with the artistic ultra-refinement of the Romanticist. He never won fame. He put too much ardour into his first efforts, did not husband his strength. He overworked himself to support his mother and sister, and died in poverty in 1841 in a Paris hospital. David d'Angers, the great Romantic sculptor, who had faithfully watched by the bedside of the dying man, sent to Bertrand's home for a fine white sheet to wrap the body in, and was the solitary mourner who followed him to his grave. (See David d'Angers' touching letter on the subject of Bertrand's death in Charles Asselineau'sMélanges tirés d'une petite bibliothèque romantique, p. 18l, &c. -Author's footnote.) He erected a monument to him; and Sainte-Beuve and Victor Pavie published hisGaspard de la Nuit. In 1842 twenty copies of this book were sold with difficulty, but in 1868 the Romanticist bibliophile, Charles Asselineau, brought out anédition de luxe.

As an example of Bertrand's manner I give in the original the sketch entitledMadame de Montbazon, with its motto, taken from Saint-Simon's Memoirs:

Madame de Montbazon était une fort bellecréature qui mourut d'amour, cela pris à lalettre, l'autre siècle, pour le chevalier de laRue qui ne l'aimait point.—Mémoires de Saint-Simon.

La suivante rangea sur la table de laque un vase de fleurs et les flambeaux de cire, dont les reflets moiraient de rouge et de jaune les rideaux de soie bleue au chevet du lit de la malade."Crois-tu, Mariette, qu'il viendra?—Oh! dormez, dormez un peu, madame!—Oui, je dormirai bientôt, pour rêver à lui toute l'éternité!""On entendit quelqu'un monter l'escalier: "Ah! si c'était lui!" murmura la mourante, en souriant, le papillon du tombeau déjà sur les lèvres.C'était un petit page qui apportait de la part de la reine, à madame la duchesse, des confitures, des biscuits et des elixirs, sur un plateau d'argent."Ah! il ne vient pas," dit-elle d'une voix défaillante; "il ne viendra pas! Mariette, donne-moi une de ces fleurs, que je la respire et la baise pour l'amour de lui!"Alors Madame de Montbazon, fermant les yeux, demeura immobile. Elle était morte d'amour, rendant son âme dans le parfum d'une jacinthe.

La suivante rangea sur la table de laque un vase de fleurs et les flambeaux de cire, dont les reflets moiraient de rouge et de jaune les rideaux de soie bleue au chevet du lit de la malade.

"Crois-tu, Mariette, qu'il viendra?—Oh! dormez, dormez un peu, madame!—Oui, je dormirai bientôt, pour rêver à lui toute l'éternité!"

"On entendit quelqu'un monter l'escalier: "Ah! si c'était lui!" murmura la mourante, en souriant, le papillon du tombeau déjà sur les lèvres.

C'était un petit page qui apportait de la part de la reine, à madame la duchesse, des confitures, des biscuits et des elixirs, sur un plateau d'argent.

"Ah! il ne vient pas," dit-elle d'une voix défaillante; "il ne viendra pas! Mariette, donne-moi une de ces fleurs, que je la respire et la baise pour l'amour de lui!"

Alors Madame de Montbazon, fermant les yeux, demeura immobile. Elle était morte d'amour, rendant son âme dans le parfum d'une jacinthe.

It often seems as if the place of those who disappear too early from the field of literature were, a little sooner or a little later, filled by others. But, strictly speaking, no individual ever exactly fills another's place. The pen which fell from Louis Bertrand's hand was, undoubtedly, seized by Théophile Gautier; and Gautier's far more comprehensive talent caused Bertrand's to be forgotten; but no connoisseur can fail to see that in Bertrand's writing there is an exquisite, a marvellously touching quality, to the possession of which Gautier with his colder plastic gift never attained.

Frequent mention has already been made of Petrus Borel, whose simple home was long the headquarters of Victor Hugo's young friends. Borel was both artist and author; he painted in Dévéria's studio and wrote defiant poems under thenom de plumeof "Le Lycanthrope." He inspired the others with great respect. In appearance he resembled a Spaniard or Arab of the fifteenth century; and when his comrades returned from the theatre after seeing Firmin (an actor accustomed to the rôles in Delavigne's and Scribe's plays) play Hernani, they always lamented that the part of that ideal bandit could not be given to Petrus. He would have swooped down on the stage like a falcon; and how magnificent he would have looked in the red head-covering and the leather jerkin with the green sleeves. Naturally he would, for he and such as he were the spiritual prototypes of Hernani.

Rapsodies, Borel's volume of poems, is a very youthful and immature work; it contains some really fine poetry mixed up with childish protests and imprecations. One thing it proves, that no prouder heart than its author's beat in the whole Romantic group. His verses breathe the despair engendered by poverty, the loneliness, the ardent love of liberty and consuming thirst for justice, which fill the poet's heart. Read such a verse as the following, taken from the poem "Désespoir":

"Comme une louve ayant fait chasse vaine,Grinçant les dents, s'en va par le chemin;Je vais, hagard, tout chargé de ma peine,Seul avec moi, nulle main dans ma main;Pas une voix qui me dise: À demain."

and you have the reality of the emotional life which Dumas put on the stage inAntony. Even the get-up of the book is significant. The frontispiece represents Borel himself sitting at his table with bared neck and arms, a Phrygian cap on his head, and in his hands a broad-bladed dagger, at which he is gazing, deep in thought. The preface gives us a vivid impression of the tone prevailing in the republican group of young Romanticists in 1832. In it Borel writes:

"I answer the question before it is asked, and say frankly: Yes, I am a Republican! Ask the Duke of Orleans (the King) if he remembers the voice that pursued him on the 9th of August, when he was on his way to take the oath to the ex-Chamber, shouting into his face: Liberté et Republique! while the deceived populace was cheering loudly?... But if I speak of Republic it is only because this word represents to me the greatest possible degree of independence which society and civilisation permit. I am a Republican because I cannot be a Caribbean. I require an immense amount of liberty ... and a man with a lot like mine, a man irritated by numberless evils, would deserve only approbation if he dreamed of absolute equality, if he demanded an agrarian law.... To those who say that there is something offensively vulgar about the book I reply that its author is certainly not the King's bedmaker. Is he not, nevertheless, on the level of an age in which the country is governed by stupid bankers and by a monarch whose motto is: 'Dieu soit loué et mes boutiques aussi?'"

It is hardly necessary to mention that rapid promotion did not come the way of a young man who wrote in this style. Borel lived in great poverty; he knew what starvation meant, and more than once, without a roof to cover his head, was driven to seek shelter for the night in some half-finished building. His youthful hatred of wrong was also detrimental to him as an author. In his two-volume novel,Madame Putiphar, the character of the heroine, Madame Pompadour, is distorted by the writer's republican indignation and aversion. The dissolute, art-loving Muse of the rococo period, who had a frivolous little leaning to free thought, who patronised the Encyclopedists, and took lessons in etching from Boucher, is transformed into a Megæra, who throws herself at the head of a strange man, and when he refuses to have anything to do with her, punishes him for his indifference with imprisonment in an underground cell of the Bastille. Towards the end the book improves. The storming of the Bastille, a subject which suited Borel's pen, is described in a vivid, fiery style which reeks of gunpowder.

His third book,Champavert, Contes immoraux, was published in 1833. It attracted no attention, and he made nothing by it—an injustice of fate which is not altogether incomprehensible, seeing that several of the stories are written in their author's earliest, unpleasantly ferocious style. But in the best of them the indignation is mastered, is treated artistically, as lava is treated by the cameo-cutter. All the tales deal with horrors, with deeds which, precisely because they are so frightful and unmentionable, are possible, since no criminal escapes punishment so easily as he who has committed a crime in which no one will believe. And they are such horrors as fiction seldom deals with, since one of the author's main aims generally is to produce a saleable book, if possible one suited for reading aloud in the family circle.

The scene of the tale entitledDina, la belle Juive, is laid in Lyons, in 1661. A manly, unprejudiced young nobleman has fallen in love with a beautiful young Jewess, and goes off to his country home to try and obtain his father's consent to their marriage. The father curses his son, and, in his fury, actually tries to shoot him, but misses him. One day, during Aymar's absence, Dina takes a walk by the banks of the Saône. Seized with a desire to go on the river, she hails a boat, steps on board, and lies down to dream under the awning as the boat glides down the stream. The boatman robs the beautiful Jewess of her rings and other ornaments, ties her arms, gags her, violates her, throws her into the river, and after the gag slips out of her mouth plunges his spear into her body every time it comes to the surface. Then he fishes up the corpse, and takes it to thehôtel de villeto claim the two ducats which are given as a reward to any one who recovers a body from the river. The magistrate asks:

"—Le cadavre a-t-il été reconnu?—Oui, messire, c'est une jeune fille, nommée Dina, enfant d'un nommé Israël Judas, un lapidaire.—Une juive?—Oui, messire, une hérétique, une huguenotte ... une juive....—Une juive!... Tu vas pêcher des juifs, marsoufle! et tu as le front, après cela, de venir demander récompense? Holà! valet! Holà! Martin! holà! Lefabre! mettez-moi ce butor à la porte! ce paltoquet!"

"—Le cadavre a-t-il été reconnu?

—Oui, messire, c'est une jeune fille, nommée Dina, enfant d'un nommé Israël Judas, un lapidaire.

—Une juive?

—Oui, messire, une hérétique, une huguenotte ... une juive....

—Une juive!... Tu vas pêcher des juifs, marsoufle! et tu as le front, après cela, de venir demander récompense? Holà! valet! Holà! Martin! holà! Lefabre! mettez-moi ce butor à la porte! ce paltoquet!"

The scenes in the Jewish quarter and the scene in the boat are unsurpassable in their cruel realism. Borel's picture of Jewish life in the Middle Ages is equal to anything Heine has given us.

In 1846 Théophile Gautier, with the assistance of that influential lady, Madame de Girardin, brought about a temporary improvement in Borel's circumstances. They procured him the post of Colonial Inspector in the interior of Algiers, near Mostaganem. Though it was a wretched little appointment, it exactly suited a man like Borel, with his were-wolfish shrinking from contact with human beings; but he was soon dismissed from it, his strong sense of justice having led him, unfortunately for himself, to accuse a superior official of defrauding the government. He never saw France again; he died in Africa, of sunstroke, some say; according to others, of starvation.

Mérimée, as we have already observed, took up Borel's special department of literature, and in his admirable short stories treated revolting subjects with a surer hand. But in Mérimée's writing the irony of the man of the world and the elegance of the courtier stifled the passion which was Petrus Borel's strong point. In Mérimée's works we find some of the challenges which Borel flung in the face of society paraphrased in language which made them fit to lie on a drawing-room table. There was no inheritor of the fire which burned in the inmost sanctuary of Petrus Borel's soul.[2]

The last of these early paralysed authors whom I shall name is Théophile Dondey, better known as Philothée O'Neddy.

O'Neddy, born in 1811, made his literary début in 1833 with a volume of poems entitledFeu et Flamme, which the public, revelling at the moment in a superabundance of excellent poetry, would have nothing to say to. The author, who was extremely poor, and was obliged, for the sake of supporting his mother, to attend to the duties of a small Civil Service appointment, lost courage, and never published another poem. Of his book, which he had brought out at his own expense, hardly a copy was sold. He withdrew like some wounded animal into its lair. When Gautier met him, a grey-haired man, thirty years later, and greeted him with the question: "When is the next collection of poems to appear?" Old O'Neddy answered, with a sigh: "Oh! quand il n'y aura pas de bourgeois!" It might have been supposed that his powers of production were exhausted. After his death, however, whole reams of beautiful lyric poetry were found among his papers. The market value of his first book is now 300 francs, which is certainly more than its author earned by all that he wrote.

Théophile Dondey's early poems are quite as immature and as defiant as Borel's. In the preface toFeu et Flammehe begs his greater comrades-in-arms to receive him into their fellowship; for, he writes, "like you I despise with all my soul the social order and the political order which is its excrement (!); like you I scoff at the priority of age in literature and in the Academy; like you I am left incredulous and cold by the magniloquence and the tinsel of the religions of the world; like you I am kindled to pious emotion only by poetry, the twin sister of God." He is restless, excited, overstrained; sometimes he is ill, sometimes haunted by the thought of suicide; and everything is expressed in verses chiselled by the hand of a master. One of the outbursts in the suicidal strain is very original. By upholding the doctrine of the Trinity (in which he does not believe) the poet makes of Christ's sacrificial death the model suicide:

"Va, que la mort soit ton refuge!À l'exemple du Rédempteur,Ose à la fois être le juge,La victime et l'exécuteur."[3]

Those of O'Neddy's poems which do not deal with his own personality are all devoted to the cause of free thought and the coming republic. But by far the greater number are profoundly personal, about seven-eighths being love poems. A distinguished lady honoured him, the nameless, poor plebeian, with her love, and the poems overflow with melancholy rapture and idolisation of the beloved; but, feeling, and knowing himself to be, ill, O'Neddy is certain that happiness is not for him, and involuntarily couples the thought of love with the thought of death.

The poetic form which as a youth he sought and found, was one which satisfied himself, because it was an exactly suitable vehicle for his feelings and thoughts; but he did not, like more fortunate poets, succeed in imparting transparency and attractiveness to this form. Therefore the reading public turned its back on him. He felt himself ever more and more forgotten by life, doomed to die with unused powers; again and again in his posthumous poems he calls himself a living corpse. Here, for example, is one of his sonnets:

"Un montagnard avait une excellente épéeQu'il laissait se rouiller dans un coin obscur.Un jour elle lui dit:—Que ce repos m'est dur!Guerrier, si tu voulais!... Ma lame est bien trempée.Dans tes rudes combats, sur la côte escarpéeElle vaudrait, au bout de ton bras ferme et sûr,Les autres espadons qui brillent sous ce mur.Pourquoi seule entre tous est-elle inoccupée?—Je suis comme ce glaive et je dis au destin:Pourquoi seul de mon type ai-je un sort clandestin?Ignores-tu quelle est la trempe de mon âme?Elle pourrait jeter de glorieux reflets,Si ta droite au soleil faisait jouer sa lame!Elle est d'un noble acier!... Destin, si tu voulais!..."

But destiny, according to its custom and nature, was inexorable. Like the shipwrecked man clinging to his rock, waiting for a ship to appear on the horizon and come to his rescue, O'Neddy waited—waited for years; but the ship of destiny sailed past and left him standing alone on his rock. When the lady who had loved him deserted him he gave up all hope. His poetry meanwhile had been gradually assuming a more serious and philosophic cast. In one poem, reversing the Cartesian axiom, he declares: "I suffer, therefore I am." And many other beautiful poems are pessimistic in a degree which is uncommon in Romantic lyric verse. Read, for instance, the following lines:

"Or, qu'est-ce que le Vrai? Le Vrai, c'est le malheur;Il souffle, et l'heur vaincu s'éteint, vaine apparence:Ses pourvoyeurs constants, le désir, l'espérance,Sous leur flamme nous font mûrir pour la douleur.Le Vrai, c'est l'incertain; le Vrai, c'est l'ignorance;C'est le tâtonnement dans l'ombre et dans l'erreur;C'est un concert de fête avec un fond d'horreur;C'est le neutre, l'oubli, le froid, l'indifférence."

O'Neddy tried criticism, but at an unpropitious moment. He began to praise Hugo as a dramatist just when, in the Forties, the great man's popularity was on the wane. Its freshness of feeling lends beauty to his passionately enthusiastic defence ofLes Burgraves. In his animadversions on the attitude of Hugo's critics to Ponsard'sLucrèce, O'Neddy was not unjust to Ponsard, and showed a spirit of noble reverence. But the next time he wrote in defence of Hugo the editorship of thePatriewas in other hands, and his article was returned to him. He took this rebuff to heart and gave up journalism, never again writing a newspaper article. He withdrew into his own inner world, feeling like Don Quixote after his return home, or Molière's Misanthrope when he wearily seeks solitude. Yet he writes in his last poem that, unbeliever in immortality though he may be, if ever his heroes should ride victoriously over his forgotten grave, his heart will beat again, in time with their horses' gallop:

"Et qui tendra l'oreille ouïra mon fier cœurBondir à l'unison du fier galop vainqueur."

The "heroes" for whom he had the profoundest admiration were, amongst the men of action, Garibaldi, amongst the poets, Victor Hugo, and amongst prose authors, Michelet and Quinet, and, at a later period, Renan.

O'Neddy's later life was sad. After losing his lady-love he lost his mother. He was long ill, and in the end paralysed. Only one pleasure was reserved for his old age, that of seeing himself warmly appreciated by Théophile Gautier in an article which now forms part of the latter'sHistoire du Romantisme. He did not die till 1875, when he had been silent as a poet for forty-two years.

Whilst we are occupied in seeking out these victims of the literary battle and victory, we seem all the time to hear a funeral march played on muffled drums. And when we have seen how numerous they are, we involuntarily regard such a book as De Vigny'sStelloand such a drama as hisChattertonin a more favourable light. The idea of the suffering poet or artist was an ever-present one at that period; and yet many were allowed to perish who deserved a better fate. It would seem that at all times, in every age, there is a difficulty in finding out the deserving, suffering men of talent.

The historian whose aim is, not to touch his readers, but to throw light upon his subject, gives these background figures a momentary prominence because the characteristics of the age are no less legibly and markedly displayed in their works than in those of its geniuses. The geniuses show us Romanticism in its health and strength; its pathology is to be studied in the works and lives of these unfortunates, who are so enthusiastically devoted to a foreign language that they neglect the cultivation of their own, or who blaze up in a sudden, ephemeral literary activity, or who make a desperate assault on fame only to be discouraged for ever by their first repulse, or who are mortally wounded by the indifference of the public, or who convulsively strain their powers until they suddenly give way. These men are as legitimate offspring of the Romanticism of 1830 as any of the others. They are its genuineenfants perdus.

[1]Ymbert Galloix'sPoésies Posthumeswere published in Geneva in 1834. By some mistake—for plagiarism is out of the question—Sainte-Beuve's poem "Suicide" is included in the collection.

[2]See Borel:Champavert(1833);Rapsodies(Bruxelles, 1838);Madame Putiphar(Paris, 1878). Jules Claretie:Petrus Borel, le Lycanthrope(1865).

[3]We feel how genuinely Romantic, how profoundly characteristic of the period, such a little inspiration as this is, when we come upon the very same thought in one of George Sand'sLettres d'un Voyageur(January, 1835): "Jésus, en souffrant le martyre, a donné un grand exemple de suicide." It is curious that the idea never occurred to Novalis.

Such was this school, such were its victors and its vanquished, such its artistic and its social enthusiasts. Thus it arose; thus, with all this wealth of genius and talent, it grew to be great; thus it dissolved as a school to continue its life in the intellectual life of widely different individuals who, even when in appearance farthest from their starting-point, nevertheless retained the essential qualities of the school—for we all keep long upon our shoulders the mark of the first banner we bore. The Romantic School was broken up and scattered; but before its extinction, Romanticism had revitalised style in almost every branch of literature, had brought hitherto undreamt of subjects within the range of art, had allowed itself to be fertilised by all the social and religious ideas of the day, had re-created lyric poetry, the drama, fiction, and criticism, had insinuated itself as a fertilising power into the science of history, as an inspiring power into politics.

To have attempted to write a complete history of the School would have been, in my case, to have attempted an impossibility. Here, as elsewhere in this work, I have traced only the main currents. I have dwelt long and in detail on the principal personages instead of introducing numerous secondary personages who, in spite of their real importance and interest, would have stood in the way of the condensation which has been my aim; and I have even followed the careers of one or two of these principal personages beyond the limit of the period, seeing that it was not until after 1848 that they displayed their originality in its entirety.

Many remarkable personalities I have merely sketched—such as Alexandre Dumas, who may well be called the Ariosto of French Romanticism, and De Vigny, who has described himself in the saying: "Honour is the poetry of duty." Others I have only been able to name—such as Jules Janin, "the prince of feuilletonists," whose novel,L'Âne mort et la Femme guillotine, is such a remarkable forerunner of the naturalism of a later period; and Nodier's successor, Gérard de Nerval, the Euphorion of Romanticism, whose female characters are ethereally delicate, whose preternatural fantasies have an oriental marvellousness, and whose sonnets, written when he was insane, are amongst the cleverest and most beautiful which the period has produced. Many men of talent of the second and third rank I have been obliged to leave altogether unnoticed—such as Antony Deschamps, who occupies much the same place in literature as Leopold Robert does in art; and Victor Hugo's worshipper, Auguste Vacquerie, who is interesting because of his blind belief in Romanticism and his aplomb, and whose dramaTragabaldasis one of the boldest exploits of French Romantic volatility. I have only been able, and have only desired, as a rule, to present the great typical figures in relief. The great woman of the period, George Sand, must stand alone, as a representative of its women, interesting though it would have been to describe several of the others—clever Madame de Girardin, melancholy Madame Desbordes-Valmore, or the two emancipated authoresses, the Comtesse d'Agoult and Madame Allart. Sainte-Beuve is the solitary representative of criticism; both Philarète Chasles and Jules Janin I have been obliged to ignore; and Balzac alone represents realism in fiction, no mention being made of less gifted and profound observers of life, like Alphonse Karr or Charles de Bernard. The authors of the generation of 1830 naturally divide themselves into two groups, a small group which wrote for the whole world, and a larger, which wrote for France alone; it is only the former which I have endeavoured to place distinctly before my readers.

We have seen how the character of the two Restoration monarchies, the Legitimist and the popular, formed the historic background from which Romanticism projected itself, and without which it cannot be understood; and we have also observed that the movement had numerous foreign forerunners and a not inconsiderable period of preparation in France itself. The Restoration starts Romanticism; theJuste-milieugovernment goads it on; the study of Scott and Byron, Goethe and Hoffmann, enriches it; at the hands of André Chénier it receives its lyrical consecration; the controversies in theGlobedevelop its critical powers. The writings of Charles Nodier, which are romantic in the general, European, sense of the word, prepare the way for the great French Romanticists. Then Victor Hugo assumes the leadership of the movement, proves himself capable of the task he has undertaken, and hastens from victory to victory. Presently he and De Vigny are named in the same breath with Lamartine as lyric poets; then Hugo outshines all the rest. Both Sainte-Beuve and Théophile Gautier possess a lyrical vein, but as a lyric poet, Alfred de Musset supplants all the other younger men in the favour of the reading public, in time supplants even Hugo himself, and is long the idol of youth.

Romanticism had at first a historical tendency; De Vigny, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Mérimée, endeavoured to give France the historical novel of which England was so proud; Vitet, Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas, De Vigny, Hugo, tried to create a historical drama which should take the place of tragedy. But the historical novel soon made way for the modern novel in its various forms, as written by George Sand, Beyle, and Balzac; and the historical drama also soon lost favour; for it was, generally speaking, either uninterestingly dry, as in the case of Vitet's and Mérimée's plays, or exaggeratedly lyrical, as in Hugo's. The dramatic authors had, as a rule, most success on the stage after the first passion of their youth had raged itself out. There came a time in the Forties when there existed, not only anécole de bon sensoutside of the Romantic School, but a phase ofbon sensin the lives of the authors within the Romantic circle. It was during this period that Alfred de Musset wrote his short plays and George Sand her peaceful novels and peasant stories. Whilst Hugo was steadily increasing in power as a lyric poet, Gautier was leading Romanticism in the direction of plastic art. Balzac developed it in the direction of physiology; Beyle, in the direction of national, or comparative, psychology; Mérimée, in the historical direction; Sainte-Beuve, in that of naturalistic criticism. In every one of these domains the generation of 1830 has produced imperishable works.

The French Romantic School may therefore, without exaggeration, be called the greatest literary school of the nineteenth century.

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