V. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE (continued 2)

Next to Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott was the English author who exercised, if not the most profound, certainly the most plainly traceable influence. He found his way across the French, as across every other frontier. Before the days of his popularity in France the great Scotchman had found in Germany, Italy, and Denmark admirers, who, inspired by patriotic and moral aims, adopted the tone of his fiction. The Waverley novels began to appear in 1814; in 1815 they were already imitated by De la Motte Fouqué in the German "Junker" style; in 1825-26 Manzoni's Promessi Sposi appeared; and in 1826 Ingemann began to publish his romantic historical tales, which inculcate a childish kind of patriotism and royalism, and are, as it were, haunted by a pale ghost of Sir Walter Scott. The Waverley novels were translated into French almost immediately after their appearance, and at once achieved a great success. Scott became so popular that in the early Twenties the managers of the theatres commissioned authors to dramatise his novels. The unsuccessful play Emilia, written by Soumet, the poet of the transition period, was an adaptation of Scott. Victor Hugo himself, using the name of his young brother-in-law, Paul Fouchet, sent in an adaptation of Kenilworth, which as a drama was also a failure.

The young Romantic generation, however, was not appealed to by the qualities in the novels which were most highly appreciated in Protestant countries, but by the talent of their picturesque descriptions and their medieval flavour. It was by his wealth of crossbows and buff jerkins, of picturesque costumes and romantic old castles, that Scott found favour in the eyes of Frenchmen. They ignored or disapproved of the common-sense, sober view of life and the Protestant morality which had won him readers in Germany and Scandinavia. Beyle was the first to criticise Scott severely. He prophesies that in spite of his extraordinary popularity his fame will be short-lived; for, according to Beyle, Scott's talent lay more in the describing of men's clothes and the limning of their features than in the representation of their emotional life and their passions. Art, says Beyle, neither can nor ought to imitate nature exactly; it is always a beautiful untruth; but Scott is too untruthful; his passionate characters strike us as being ashamed of themselves; they lack decision and boldness and naturalness. And it was not long before his critics began to make the complaint, so often reiterated by Balzac, that he could not describe woman and her passions, or at any rate dared not describe these passions with their pleasures, pains, and punishments, in a society which attached exaggerated importance to literary modesty.4[4] The novels with plots laid in modern days made no impression; only Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Kenilworth, The Fair Maid of Perth, and one or two others were popular.

The special merit of this foreign author in the eyes of Frenchmen was, that he had substituted the novel of dramatic dialogue for the two forms of the longer novel hitherto in vogue—the narrative, in which the headings of the chapters were summaries of the contents and the author played a prominent part, and the letter form, which squeezed all the surprises and all the passion in between "Dear Friend" and "Yours sincerely." The most talented of the young French writers are plainly influenced by him. The one whose moral standard most closely approached the English, Alfred de Vigny, wrote Cinq-Mars, a novel with a plot laid in the days of Richelieu, an entertaining, but now old-fashioned work, in which the contrast of good and evil overshadows all other contrasts, and which betrays a remarkable want of appreciation of Richelieu's greatness as a statesman. There is almost a total absence of Scott's skill in characterisation; instead of it we have a lyric element, the glorification of youthful, impetuous chivalry—the old French bravoure. Prosper Mérimée fell under the great Scotchman's influence at the same time as Alfred de Vigny, and wrote his Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., a work the spirit of which is still less like Scott's. Mérimée singles out the strong and violent passions in history for their own sake, but also with the French Romanticist's subordinate aim of rousing the wrath of the respectable bourgeois by his audacious unreservedness; his delineation of character is, generally speaking, clear and concise; he tells his tale coldly and with utter disregard of all established moral convention.

Every one knows the characteristic manner in which, at a somewhat later period, Alexandre Dumas employed Scott's wealth of colour and historic style in the production of many light and most entertaining novels, of which The Three Musketeers may be named as an example. But it is not so generally known that Balzac, the founder of the modern French novel, was as strongly attracted as De Vigny and Mérimée by the foreign master who made an epoch in the history of fiction. He desired to follow in his path without being a mere imitator. He believed himself quite capable of rivalling Scott in the delineative art which Romanticism had restored to honour, and was confident of his power to impart much more life to dialogue. In Scott's books there was only one type of woman; in France the writer of historic novels could contrast the brilliant vices and motley morals of Catholicism with the dark austerity of Calvinism in the wildest period of French history. This ensured him against monotony. Balzac, who was always projecting monumental works and whose mind had an instinctive bias towards the systematically comprehensive, finally conceived the plan of depicting each historic period since that of Charlemagne in one or more novels, all of which should form a connected chain—an idea which Freytag, in his work, Die Ahnen, has since tried to carry out as regards Germany. The first novel which Balzac published in his own name, Les Chouans, was intended to be a link in this chain. It describes the war in La Vendée at the time of the Revolution, and came out in 1829, the same year as Cinq-Mars and Chronique du Règne de Charles IX. Two books published much later, Sur Cathérine de Médicis and Maître Cornélius, are also fragments of the projected great work. The latter is a novel in which Balzac enters into direct competition with Sir Walter Scott; its hero is Louis XI., whom he considered unfairly treated by Sir Walter. Although these historical romances are good in their way and contain vivid and careful studies of character, they prove that if Balzac had kept to his intention of merely calling the past to life again, his place in the literature of his century would have been an entirely subordinate one; he would only have been known as one of Scott's disciples.

Victor Hugo also was fired by the famous Scotchman with the desire to write a great historical novel. He determined to make it centre round the cathedral church of Notre-Dame in Paris, the whitewashing of which had horrified him; for he had an admiration and love for the grand old historical building which remind us of Goethe's for Strasburg Cathedral and Oehlenschläger's for the Cathedral of Roskilde. According to Hugo's contract with the publisher, this famous novel was to be ready in April 1829; but he was not able to keep his engagement; he first obtained five months' grace, and then a respite until the 1st of December 1830 upon condition of paying 1000 francs weekly after that date if the book was not finished then. By the 27th of July his preparatory studies were made, and that day he began to write the novel; the following day ushered in the Revolution of July; Hugo's house was in danger from the firing, and during the removal to another, all the notes and studies for his book were lost. Under the circumstances the publisher granted three months' grace; Hugo denied himself to every one, locked away his black suit so that he might not be tempted to go out, sent for a bottle of ink, put on his working-jacket, and worked without paying or receiving a single visit until 14th January 1831, when the ink-bottle was empty and the novel written. During all that time he had only allowed himself one distraction, which was to go and see Charles X.'s ministers sentenced. Not to break his resolution, he went dressed in his civic guard's uniform.

In his earliest youth Hugo had been profoundly impressed by Scott. In a review of Quentin Durward, which he wrote at the age of twenty-one, he expresses the greatest admiration for Scott's historical sense, moral earnestness, and dramatic style. But even in this early appreciation we come upon a sentence in which he, as it were, indicates the step he himself hopes to take in advance of Scott. He writes: "After Walter Scott's picturesque but prosaic novel there remains to be created another kind of novel, which in our opinion will be more admirable and more perfect. It is the novel which is both drama and epic, which is both picturesque and poetical, both realistic and idealistic, both true and grand, which combines Walter Scott and Homer." We must not let these last words, with which Hugo, true to himself, spoils his effect by exaggeration, prevent our acknowledging the young author's clear perception of what he himself was one day to be capable of doing in the domain of fiction. He seems to have had the premonition that his novels would be great prose poems, picturesque chronicles rather than pictures of reality like Scott's.

Notre-Dame de Paris, which was intended to give a picture of the life and manners of Paris in the fifteenth century, is the creation of a great constructive imagination. This was a fit subject for Hugo, with his leaning to the grand and colossal. He gives a soul to the building, breathes into it the breath of his spirit until it becomes a living being; and as the scientist reconstructs a whole animal from a single vertebra, so Hugo's brain, with the cathedral as starting-point, conjures up the whole of that long-vanished Paris. The faith and the superstition, the manners and the arts, the laws and the human emotions and passions of those old days, are drawn for us with a broad, strong touch—with no great precision, but with a kind of convincing magic. The characters in Notre-Dame are the character sketches of a genius, drawn in the epic style, in more than life-size. Scott's honest, plain, human beings are superseded by the creatures of an artist intoxicated with colour; his gentle spirit makes way for grandiloquent passion pointing unresignedly to blind, iron necessity, that άνάγχη which is written on the church wall, and which crushes us all—gipsy and priest, beauty and beast, Phœbus and Quasimodo—century after century under its iron heel.

Even more powerful than Scott's influence was Byron's. It was the element of wild passion in his poems and its connection with the wildness of his life—it was Childe Harold and still more Lara, the being marked by the finger of fate, who, suffering from a mysterious melancholy, carries his pride and his anguish with him from land to land—it was this type in its Byronic forms, fantastically magnified by the element of myth and legend enveloping the poet's life, which enchanted the young men whom Hugo had awakened or gathered together. Few were the critics who maintained as Beyle did in spite of his great admiration for Byron, that "this author of deadly dull, conventional tragedies" was certainly not the leader of the Romanticists. Immediately after Byron's death the whole horde of French minor poets seized upon the two themes, Greece and Lord Byron, which they continued year after year to sing with so much ardour and so little comprehension of the dead man's character, that Sainte-Beuve was obliged to protest in the Globe against the abuse of the words Byron, liberty, elegy, &c. In 1824 both Hugo and Lamartine gave expression to their feelings regarding Byron, the former in a newspaper article, the latter in a poem. In treating of him as a poet, both authors at this period lay most stress upon his spirit of doubt and his gloomy view of life; neither of them seems to have been at all deeply impressed by the works of his mature manhood; the bright and trenchant political and religious satire of Don Juan was, in 1824, missed or misunderstood by them as by so many others. But whereas Hugo's chief endeavour is to show the difference between Byron's poetry and that of the eighteenth century ("The difference between Byron's and Voltaire's laughter is this, that Voltaire had not suffered"), to the sentimental and half orthodox Lamartine the English poet is still the fallen angel. Lamartine's Fifth Canto of Childe Harold, in which he endeavours to strike the Byronic note, shows in what he believed himself to resemble the English nobleman, namely, in his romantically heroic personality. Masking as Byron he gives expression to the doubts and rebellious feelings of which we only catch a rare glimpse in his Meditations, but to which he was soon to give utterance in his own name. It was probably Byron who lured both him and Hugo to the East; Hugo contented himself with imaginary excursions, but Lamartine made princely preparations and set off on a grand tour. And if Byron's last works made no profound political impression on these two authors, his last actions and his death did.

Byron's influence is, then, unmistakably traceable in the works of most of the young poets of our period; but so marked and powerful was the originality of this generation of authors, that his sentimental despair, which was so infectious, and which led to so much imitation and affectation in many literatures, glanced off them. There was only one of them in whose ears this particular Byronic note rang like a message from a kindred spirit, and he was, curiously enough, the most elegant and aristocratic, the truest Parisian among them all—Alfred de Musset.

Most of the literary notables in question were born in the provinces—Victor Hugo and Nodier at Besançon, George Sand in Berry, Gautier at Tarbes, Lamennais in Brittany, Sainte-Beuve at Boulogne—and each of these brings with him his characteristic fund of provincialism which does not allow itself to be interpenetrated by the Byronic influence, although both George Sand and Gautier were, in curiously different ways, affected by Byron. Mérimée, who was born in Paris, cooled too quickly to feel the influence of Byron's poetic temperament; it was Byron's spirit of negation which influenced him, and that at second hand, through Beyle. But upon no one does Byron make the same direct, deep impression as on that slender, pale son of Paris, who is distinguished by all the weakness and all the exquisite charm which are the heritage of the last representatives of a noble and ancient race. In the earliest stages of his career, Byron, the true Englishman, had been spiritually minded and melancholy; the senses play but a small part in the poetry of his youth; not till he is the mature man and has visited Italy and lived in Latin countries does his poetry, like Goethe's in Venice, become sensual and audaciously outspoken. De Musset, on the contrary, begins in his early youth with the bold and fleshly realism which we find in some of Byron's later works, and gradually becomes more and more spiritual. At his best he is a keener observer than Byron, and his love-poetry is more delicate; it has a Raphaelesque beauty which Byron's neither attains nor aims at. He is the weaker, tenderer, more charming, French Byron, as Heine is the smaller, more wanton, wittier, German Byron, and Paludan-Müller the satirical, orthodox, royalist, Danish Byron. De Musset suffers like a boy, complains like a woman; he is what Auguste Préault, the sculptor, once called him: "Mademoiselle Byron."

Shelley, whose name did not find its way into France till much later, was practically unknown to this generation. As for the so-called Lake Poets, Sainte-Beuve, who acquired the English language in his youth, and had more of the critical gift than any of his contemporaries, was the only one of the Romanticists who appreciated that nature-loving, realistic school at its true worth, assimilated some of its spirit, and endeavoured by means of a few translations to bring it into favour. Brizeux, the poet of Brittany, reminds us of the Lake Poets, though he knew nothing about them.

The influence of Germany was less powerful than that of England, and it is still easier in the case of this country to show the free treatment to which the impressions received were subjected. Germany was seen overshadowed by the old Teutonic oaks; its fountains and rivers were haunted by elves and fairies, who trailed their shadowy white garments across the dewy grass; among its mountains dwelt the gnomes, and in the air above the mountain-peaks witches held their revelries. Germany was a Walpurgis Night dreamland. Only one of Goethe's works was really popular, namely, Werther, the high pressure passion of which enchanted all readers. Werther seemed to them a René, because, though he was much older than René, they had made acquaintance with René first, and this circumstance deprived the German hero of his freshness and approximated him to the Childe Harold type. Something of the same kind happened with Faust. That imposing figure, which made such an impression on the whole of Europe, was so completely foreign to the French that they never truly comprehended it. French poetry had never occupied itself with the struggles and sufferings of the questioning spirit. And this German doctor, who is simple enough to see the devil in a poodle dog, sentimental enough to cross Gretchen's threshold with pious emotions in his breast, and yet unscrupulous enough to desert the girl he has betrayed and kill her brother in a dishonourable duel, was too un-French to be understood. We gather from the apologies of the Romanticists the nature of the criticism to which the men of the classic school subjected Faust. "How many," writes Duvergier de Hauranne, "are rendered insensible to all the beauties of this masterpiece by the fact that it treats of a compact with the devil! They cannot understand any one allowing such an improbability to pass unchallenged; and yet they themselves from their childhood have, without raising the slightest objection, beheld Agamemnon murdering his daughter in order to obtain a favourable wind." French readers were accustomed to the superstitions of antiquity, but felt themselves repelled by those of the Middle Ages. And there were, moreover, many who, without reading them, denounced Goethe's works as barbaric literature. As late as 1825 that narrow-minded assailant of the Romanticists, Auger, the secretary of the French Academy, in making an attack on "those lovers of the beauties of nature, who would willingly exchange the Apollo Belvedere for a shapeless image of St. Christopher, and with the greatest pleasure give Phèdre and Iphigénie for Faust and Götz von Berlichingen," drew smiles from the Academicians by pronouncing these last titles in a burlesque manner, as if they were barbaric names. The admiration of the Romanticists for Faust was, however, as has already been observed, barren of result. Though Gérard de Nerval translated the First Part to the entire satisfaction of the aged Goethe, and though Delacroix's painting of Faust and Mephistopheles riding through the air was also much admired by the old poet and art connoisseur, the French literature of the period only rarely (as in the case of Quinet) shows any trace of the influence of the great drama.

One would have imagined that Schiller, with his association with Rousseau and his flowery dramatic rhetoric, would have appealed more forcibly to Frenchmen than Goethe; as a matter of fact he possessed little attraction for the younger generation. Adaptations of all his plays were indeed performed on the French stage, but this happened just before the formation of the Romantic School proper, and the semi-Romantic poets of the transition period, who cut and carved these plays into conventional tragedies to suit the taste of the day, destroyed them in place of teaching the public to appreciate them. Out of the Jungfrau von Orleans and Don Carlos, Soumet manufactured a Jeanne d'Arc and an Élisabeth de France; Fiesco was adapted and maltreated by Ancelot, Wallenstein by Liadières; but neither Classicists nor Romanticists derived any satisfaction from the results, and the verdict of the austere Beyle (who read, or tried to read the originals) is that Schiller paid too much homage to the old French taste to be able to present his countrymen with the tragedy which their manners and customs demanded. He has no appreciation whatever of Schiller's real greatness; he evidently knew too little German to be able to enjoy and understand Wallenstein; besides, like many of the younger men, he allowed himself to be carried away to such an extent by his desire to annoy the Classicists, that he actually extols Werner's Luther as the modern drama most nearly approaching Shakespeare, and its author as a much greater poet than Schiller.

The only contemporary German author besides Goethe who made any deep impression was E. Th. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann, in fact, became to Frenchmen the German par excellence. Tieck was too vague, Novalis too mystical, to find the public in France which they did, for instance, in Denmark; but Hoffmann united to that wildly capricious fantasticality, which to Frenchmen was a perfectly new poetical element, the sharp decision of outline which appeals to them, and which reminded them of their compatriot Callot. His artistic courage, which dares to carry out capricious conceits to their extremest consequences, won their approbation. He dealt in strong colours and startling effects, and his work, with all its wildness, is as full of clear minute detail as a "Temptation of St. Anthony" by Breughel or Teniers; in contrast to Novalis, he appealed to Frenchmen by his Berlin rationality, which is so closely allied to French rationality; there was method in his madness. Thus it came about that he alone of all the German authors had followers, one may almost say disciples, in France. The influence of his tales is, as has already been observed, strongly felt in Charles Nodier's work; at a later period it is even more perceptible in Gérard de Nerval's, and it is unmistakable in Gautier's short stories. Highly original as this last-mentioned author is, and despite the fact that he hardly knew a word of German, he nevertheless at various periods of his life was under German influence. His youthful Romans et Contes remind us of Hoffmann, and much in his Émaux et Camées recalls Heinrich Heine. He had an intense admiration for Goethe's West-Oestlicher Diwan. What attracted him in Goethe was the artistic infallibility manifested by that great poet during the latter years of his life.

VI

RETROSPECT—INDIGENOUS SOURCES

But the renascence of literature in France was not due chiefly to foreign influences. It was upon the soil of their native country that the new men built.

The work accomplished by a great literary school such as the Romantic School in France may be compared to the building of a town, only that the town of literature is invariably built upon land which is protected merely by slight and leaky embankments from the waters of forgetfulness. Water at the foundations is soon discovered; it rises slowly but steadily; at last the lower buildings disappear, and only the loftiest monuments remain towering, eternally visible, above the level of the Lethean stream.

What gives these highest literary monuments their proud position is partly the profundity of the thoughts which support them, partly the exact conformity of the perfect artistic expression to the idea; but, unless the author is really a creative thinker, what is of conclusive importance is that his mind should, consciously or unconsciously, be permeated by the most advanced ideas of his age; for it is the spirit which "maketh alive" and preserves from destruction.

Romanticism in France displays three main tendencies:

1. The endeavour to reproduce faithfully either some real piece of past history or some phase of modern life—the tendency towards the true.

2. The endeavour after perfection of form, whether apprehended as plasticity and picturesqueness of expression, as severe metrical harmony, or as a prose style imperishable from its concise simplicity—the tendency towards the beautiful.

3. Enthusiasm for great religious or social reformatory ideas, an ethic aim in art—the tendency towards the good.

These three main tendencies define the nature of this vigorous and talented school as the three dimensions define space; and each of them produced works of great and enduring value.

The last two, as resultant from French influences, occupy our attention first.

Although there were to be found in the Romantic School authors who, like Mérimée and Gautier, retained to the last a natural or artificial indifference to the social and political aims of the age, it numbered far more who were strongly appealed to and affected by the endeavours made to organise the future of their country and of the whole human race. Poetry, literature, has two main developments. It is either of the nature of representation based upon psychological observation—in which form it approaches science—or it bears the character of an annunciation, an inspired appeal—in which form it approaches religion. Many writers of the generation of 1830 show that they apprehended it in the latter manner. The critics who have tried to depreciate these men by calling their productions works with a purpose, or problem literature, have done them wrong. For what such critics condemn is nought else but the spirit of the age—its ideas; and these ideas are the life-blood of all true literature. All that we have a right to demand in the interest of art is, that the veins through which this life-blood flows shall only show blue under the skin, not rise black and swollen as they do in the case of a sick or angry man.

During the course of the Thirties reformatory ideas make their way into French Romanticism from all sides. If we try to trace them back to their source, it is not possible to stop before Saint-Simon. In Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (born in 1760), the only descendant of the famous Duke de Saint-Simon who wrote the private chronicles of the court of Louis XIV., France, which showed so little interest in the drama of Faust, herself produced a nineteenth-century Faust, a genuine Faust in the matter of restless genius and irresistible craving after both theoretical and practical knowledge of everything in the universe. He is less acute and sagacious than the hero of Goethe's famous poem, but his mental horizon is wider, his aim a grander one, and his whole endeavour of a higher nature. He begins where Faust ends. His plans for cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and for the canalisation of Spain, remind us of the undertakings of the latter years of Faust's life. Saint-Simon was in turn soldier, man of fashion, engineer, company-projector, philosopher, scientist, political economist, and founder of a religion; he was a man who possessed almost every talent. In his youth he spent a large fortune, believing himself to be heir to the dignities of peer of France and grandee of Spain and a capital of 500,000 francs; but his father and the Duke de Saint-Simon quarrelled, and he inherited nothing. He sank into abject poverty, worked as a copyist nine hours a day for a thousand francs a year, and in 1812 was reduced to living on bread and water. In despair, he one day made an attempt at suicide; he shot out one of his eyes, but recovered. The attempt at suicide, too, reminds us of Faust.

Disciples came to his assistance, supported him, were instructed by him, and founded one periodical after another to propagate his ideas.

At the time of Saint-Simon's death, which happened five years before the Revolution of July, these ideas were only known to and adopted by a small circle, but during the reign of Louis Philippe they spread rapidly, undergoing various alterations during the process. A Saint-Simonist sect was founded, a sect with a high-priest and with eminent men of all classes and professions amongst its numbers, such men as Isaac Péreire, the financier, and Félicien David, the musical composer. In the end the Saint-Simonist ideas penetrated the whole of French society; through Michel Chevalier they became elements of political economy; they inspired the most eminent historian of the day, Augustin Thierry; they lay at the foundation of the philosophy of the greatest French thinker of the century, Auguste Comte; with certain modifications they won, in Pierre Leroux and Lamennais, influential philosophic and religious apostles; and at the same time they made their way into poetry. And there was nothing marvellous in all this, for, in spite of his extravagances, Saint-Simon undoubtedly had something of the prophetic instinct of the great poet.

He was in advance of his age; for his philosophy is one of the signs of the great European reaction against the eighteenth century, which he regarded as a purely critical, purely disintegrative period, whilst he denominated the nineteenth an organic, directly productive period. He disagreed as entirely with those who imagined that the happiness of humanity can be produced by a mere change in the forms of government as with those who, like the church party, exalted the past in order to bring it back again. He was not the friend of the past, but the herald of the future; the aims and endeavours of the reaction appeared to him only in so far reasonable and right as they arose from a perception of the truth that mankind cannot be civilised by mere reason, that religion is indispensable to civilisation—the religion desiderated by Saint-Simon being, however, one divested of the conventions and externalities of all the existing religions. Possessed, as he was, not with the spirit of doubt, but with the reformer's enthusiasm, the liberty which consisted in emancipation from restraints seemed to him of little value if it were not complemented and completed by true, perfect liberty, that is to say, by an ever greater, wider capability. The work of the last, the critical, centuries had been the destruction of the medieval power of the priest and the warrior; now the time had come to establish the reign of science and industry. In the new order of society science was destined to take the place of faith, industry of war.

The first thing to be done was to "organise" science and industry.

In Saint-Simon's Lettres d'un habitant de Genève, any who are interested in his projects for the organisation of science may read his scheme of starting a subscription at the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton for the purpose of enabling all the greatest scientists and artists to devote themselves to their professions, not only freed from all pecuniary anxieties, but with the certainty of being well paid for their work—a scheme which Alfred de Vigny, as author of Chatterton, must have read with enthusiastic approbation, if he ever did read it. But he would learn with perhaps more surprise than approbation that these geniuses were in return to undertake the supervision of all the spiritual interests of humanity, in accordance with a definite, carefully detailed plan.

Saint-Simon's Parable is the document which gives most information about the proposed organisation of industry. As this parable, from the fact that it is written in a laconic style and with glimpses of a wit which the author displays on no other occasion, is probably the only one of his writings which will continue to be read, I reproduce it in a condensed form.

Suppose, says Saint-Simon, that France were to lose from the ranks of its scientists, painters, poets, mechanicians, physicians, surgeons, &c., the fifty best in each class—say its 3000 best scientific men, artists, and mechanicians—what would be the result?

Since these men are the real productive power of the country, the flower of the French nation, at least another whole generation would be required to repair the misfortune. For the human beings whose life-work is unmistakably of use are exceptions, and nature is not prodigal of these exceptions.

Let us suppose another case. Let us suppose that France keeps all her gifted scientists, artists, industrial and mechanical geniuses, but has the misfortune to lose his Royal Highness the King's brother, their Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Berry, Orléans, and Bourbon, the Duchess of Angoulême, the Duchess of Bourbon, and the young Duchess of Condé. She at the same time loses all the great officers of the crown, all the ministers of state, chamberlains, masters of the hunt, marshals, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, deans, and canons, all the prefects and sub-prefects, all the judges, and into the bargain 10,000 of the richest of those landed proprietors who live in great style.

The event would undoubtedly cause grief to the nation, because the French are a good-hearted people, and not capable of regarding with indifference the sudden disappearance of such a number of their fellow-citizens. But this loss of not fewer than 30,000 of the persons who are esteemed the first in the state could occasion sorrow only on purely sentimental grounds; for no serious harm to the state as state would arise from it. It would be very easy to fill the vacant places. There are any number of Frenchmen who could occupy the position of His Majesty the King's brother quite as well as that august prince, any number who could fill the place of prince of the blood royal, &c., &c. The anterooms of the court are crowded with aspirants ready and fit to be invested with the rank of officers of the crown. The army possesses any number of officers who are quite as good generals as our present marshals; and how many commercial travellers are cleverer men than our ministers of state, how many priests quite as devout and capable as our cardinals, archbishops, deans, and canons! As regards the 10,000 landed proprietors, their heirs would scarcely need any apprenticeship to make quite as charming hosts.

The idea underlying this jest, for which, by the way, Saint-Simon had to answer to the authorities, is, of course, that only the productive class of citizens is in reality useful. Before the Revolution the conflict was between the nobility and the bourgeoisie; now that a part of the bourgeoisie is elevated to the same position as the nobility and shares its privileges, the division is between the unproductive and the productive class; the future belongs to industry, labour, the deeds of peace and utility. But whereas contemporary French political economists only went the length of granting the individual the greatest possible amount of liberty to develop his powers, Saint-Simon demanded the interference of the state. It was, according to him, the province of the state to organise labour and production; it alone could ensure that for the future man should utilise nature only, and not his fellow-man. The state ought, while fully acknowledging the natural differences between man and man, to do its utmost to abolish the artificial differences—ought, therefore, to abolish all hereditary privileges, and to annul or modify the law of succession.

In Saint-Simon's writings we find, then, in the first place, the fundamental ideas of modern socialism—distrust of the consequences of free competition and the demand that productive labour shall receive the recompense and the honour which are its due—ideas which prompted his famous dictum, that every member of society ought to hold the place in it to which his abilities entitle him and receive the due reward of his labour (à chacun selon sa capacité!). In the second place we find, as a result of this demand, the inculcation, for the first time in the writings of a French author, of the doctrine of the complete equality of woman and man as members of society. And, lastly, we have, in the matter of religion, rejection of all dogma, not with the aim of destroying religion, but for the purpose of rescuing from the grave of orthodoxy the one command: Love one another! This is the Christianity which Saint-Simon expounded in his last important work, Le nouveau Christianisme, a Christianity with only one doctrine, which may be expressed as follows: The task of religion is to help society to accomplish that great object, the speediest possible improvement of the condition of the poorest and most numerous class.

There was something in Saint-Simon's personality which could not but be congenial to the more simple-minded among the Romanticists. He had the unbounded self-confidence which inspires others with confidence; the philosopher's inclination to self-examination formed no part of his nature; he was dogmatic; he was a prophet. He was, moreover, possessed by the Romantic desire to experience everything, to feel everything. The lines of conduct which he prescribed as indispensable to progress in philosophy do not differ materially from those which a young Romantic poet would have named as requisite for poetical production. They are: (1) to lead during one's vigorous years as active and independent a life as possible; (2) to make one's self thoroughly acquainted with every variety of theory and every variety of practice; (3) to study all classes of society and to insinuate one's self into the most varied social positions; (4) to sum up one's observations and draw a conclusion from them.

In Saint-Simon's philosophy there was one outstanding feature that, as a rule, repelled the Romantic authors, namely, his enthusiasm for industrial pursuits, which, as merely useful, were repugnant to most of them. But the philosophy was by no means destitute of poetry. Its revolutionary, its fantastic, and its Utopian elements were certain to appeal to a Romanticist, as also its insistence upon natural inequality, its idolisation of genius, and its leaning to religion. It was poetical, too, in its solicitude for the welfare of woman and its affectionate interest in the most unfortunate classes of society.

And it was not until after 1830 that Saint-Simonism began to be a social power. Saint-Simon himself, like most founders of religions, was both prophet and exemplar; he made of his disciples real apostles; regarding him in sober earnest as the modern Messiah, they went out into the world as his messengers. It was through these men and their intellectual kin that society in general made acquaintance with the doctrines of Saint-Simon during the reign of Louis Philippe, though some of the intellectually vigilant had before this read the master's own writings. There is a memorandum in Victor Hugo's diary for 1830 (Littérature et Philosophie mêlées I.) which shows that he, for one, was already acquainted with Saint-Simon.

A year after Saint-Simon's death, his organ, Le Producteur, had to be given up; but this very circumstance brought his disciples into more personal and intimate relations with their adherents. And when Enfantin, the St. Paul of the new faith, a man of imposing appearance, a sacerdotal genius of the first rank, with something of a Brigham Young's capacity for rule and leadership, became the real head of the sect, it made proselytes of numbers of clever young men and cultivated, high-spirited women. Large sums were voluntarily contributed towards the support of the Saint-Simonist "family"; in 1831 alone they amounted to 330,000 francs. A new weekly paper, L'Organisateur was started, and from 1830 onwards Paul Leroux edited the Globe. But the doctrines propagated deviated ever more and more from Saint-Simon's original system. In his scheme of organisation an important rôle was assigned to the capitalists; one of the three Chambers proposed by him was to consist exclusively of capitalists. But now capital was attacked. Saint-Simon had distinctly reprobated every species of communism; now, in the "family," community of goods was the order of the day, and state communism was considered desirable. One particular conclusion deduced from Saint-Simon's doctrines led to the downfall of the system and the break-up of the sect. The master had taught that, since the old Christianity had put enmity between the flesh and the spirit, it was the task of the new to reconcile them. The old Christianity had made self-denial and mortification of the flesh man's aim, the new ought to make it well-being and universal happiness. Employing other words we may express his thought thus:—The Christianity of renunciation has been a sharp and violent remedy for that indulgence in the satisfaction of every desire which was the order of the day under the empire of Rome; but the remedy has shown itself to be quite as dangerous as the disease. We have got rid of the disease, but what can free us from the remedy without exposing us to a relapse? No power except that of the new Christianity.

From this comparatively sensible idea Enfantin deduced doctrines the practical application of which would have resulted in much such a state of matters as prevailed amongst Jan van Leiden's Anabaptists. One of the original doctrines of Saint-Simonism was that now, in the new era, man, the individual, was superseded by the individual, man-woman, whose constituent parts possessed equal rights and full liberty to dissolve an unsatisfactory marriage, it being in the double, not the single, being that true humanity is realised. From this doctrine Enfantin drew the conclusion that there are two kinds of marriage, the one the marriage of monogamists, the other the marriage of those who in course of time become polygamists—that is to say, the enduring and the ephemeral marriage; actual, simultaneous polygamy was to be the prerogative only of the priests and priestesses. Although little could be advanced, either in general discussion or in the court of justice, against the Saint-Simonists' argument that the inauguration of this order of things would have no other consequence than the confirming and legalising of relations which at present existed illegally, this particular practical conclusion sufficiently showed the entire incapacity of the young enthusiasts to judge what was possible and what impossible of realisation in the existing, state of society; it proved them to be of the number of those who believe that society can be reformed by a stroke of the pen. Their excuse is to be found in the circumstance that, with the exception of Enfantin and Bazard, all the Saint-Simonists of 1830 (as also all Lamennais' disciples) were about twenty years of age. Ridicule cooled their ardour for the spread of the faith. In the summer of 1832 the heads of the "family" were sentenced, Enfantin to a year's imprisonment, Michel, Chevalier, and Duveyrier to a trifling fine. The young enthusiasts of whom the little sect was composed were scattered; but almost all of them distinguished themselves in later life, either in the domain of science, of industry, or of art. Their exaggerations of the theories of Saint-Simon had, like the Utopian schemes of Fourier which belong to the same period, no influence upon literature. It was influenced only by the original ideas.

The air of the day became impregnated with these ideas; minds were infected by them; they seized upon some soft, impressionable character, and this impressionable character influenced a strong one; they gained possession of a woman through a man, or of a man through a woman, of a poet through a priest, or of a young student through a poet. And after the manner of ideas, they summoned up other ideas—socialistically democratic ideas which had lain dormant since the end of the previous century, like Louis Blanc's; philosophico-historic humanitarian ideas like those of Pierre Leroux's maturer period, which recalled Schelling and were inimical to plutocracy; ideas like Lamennais', which recalled the thoughts and feelings with which, during the peasant revolts of the Middle Ages, the priests who bore the crucifix in front of the rebel armies inspired the proletariat, making them ready to risk their lives.

If the source of the Romantic School's reformatory desires and endeavours (what we have called its tendency towards the good) is to be found in the doctrines of Saint-Simon, its tendency towards the beautiful is to be traced to the influence of another great Frenchman.

Nothing contributed more to the remarkable artistic advance noticeable in French literature, and especially French lyric poetry, at this period, than the discovery, the recovery, of a French genius of whose existence no one had any idea. As, at the beginning of the modern era, the impulse to Italian humanism was given by the excavation of the first antique sculptures from the soil which had so long concealed them, so now the impulse to a regular revolution in French poetry was given by the discovery and publication, in 1819, of André Chénier's works. Scales fell, as it were, from men's eyes when, twenty-six years after their author's death, these soulful Ionic poems were brought to the light of day; all the literary idols of the Empire, Delille and all the didactic descriptive poets, fell and were broken to pieces. A fresh spring breeze from ancient Hellas, the true, the real Greece, blew over France and fertilised the ground. The Alexandrine, which in the eighteenth century had been so flaccid and feeble, in the seventeenth so stiff and symmetrical, revealed mysterious harmonies, a delicate, flexible force, an audacious, sensuous charm, and (now that the cæsura no longer came inevitably after the sixth foot and the clause no longer ended with the line) a versatility hitherto undreamt of. The ideas and emotions were modern, but the artistic spirit which dictated the expression given them was antique. In this combination lay concealed the motive power that produced a whole literary development of the same species as that to which Ronsard, by adopting a similar standpoint, gave the impulse in the sixteenth century. In this new literature the ancient and the modern spirit met; and their meeting-place was at a great distance from their rendezvous in the days of Louis XIV. The clear radiance of the name of André Chénier extinguished the light of all the names that had hitherto shone brightly. A poet with the light of genius on his brow and the martyr's aureole round his head, had risen from the grave to lead the young generation into the promised land of the new literature.

André Marie Chénier, born in Constantinople (Galata) in 1762, was the son of a beautiful, bright, and intellectual Greek woman, whose maiden name was Santi l'Homaka.[1] His father was the French consul-general for Turkey, an eminent savant. While still a little child, André was taken to France, to a beautiful part of Languedoc. During the years that he passed there he forgot his native language, but when he began to learn it again at school in Paris, he picked it up so fast that at the age of sixteen he had completely mastered it. He devoted himself eagerly to the study of its literature, with which he was as well acquainted as with that of France. At the age of twenty he entered the army as a cadet gentilhomme, a kind of second lieutenant, and went into garrison with his regiment at Strasburg. He spent all his spare time in studying languages. But the garrison life, with its utter want of intellectual interests, was very irksome to him; after six months of it he returned to Paris; and as he at this time developed a malady the only cure for which was a regular and quiet life, he threw up his commission. But abstinence and inaction were little to the taste of a young man in whose case the eager passions of youth were combined with the restless artistic and scientific bent of the genius. In company with friends he travelled for two years in Switzerland and Italy, making a long stay in Rome. He fell ill in Naples and was unable to reach Greece, the goal of the journey, the country he longed to see. When he returned to Paris in the beginning of 1785, he mixed with the best society of the day in his parents' house. He made acquaintance with Le Brun, the poet, David, the painter, Lavoisier, the chemist, and numbers of diplomatists and public officials whom the Revolution was to make famous. Besides these he had his own private circle of friends, most of whom were talented young noblemen. Dividing his time pretty equally between study and pleasure, he was also much in the company of the most frivolous and dissipated set of the day, which consisted of fine gentlemen (the Duke of Montmorency, Prince Czartoryski, &c.), ladies of rank (the Duchesse de Mailly, the Princesse de Chalais, &c.), artists and authors (Beaumarchais, Mercier, &c), and beautiful young courtesans (the Rose, Glycère, Amélie of Chénier's poems)—a mixed company whose ways and doings Rétif de la Bretonne has described to us, and the majority of whom fell victims to the guillotine. At this period of his life Chénier made acquaintance with a man who, sharing to the full his love of liberty and hatred of all terrorism, at once became his friend; this was the Italian poet Alfieri, who had just arrived in Paris accompanied by the Duchess of Albany. And almost at the same time he became acquainted with the woman who is extolled and bitterly accused in many of his poems under the name of Camille—Madame de Bonneuil, the love of his youth, to whom he was long and passionately attached. Often in her country home did young André kneel at this lady's feet whilst she played the harp and sang one of the fashionable romances recounting the pains and joys of love.

In 1787 he was appointed attaché to the embassy in London, where he felt miserably lonely and dependent. Electrified by the news of the outbreak of the Revolution, he returned, full of hope, to Paris. Ere this he had become conscious of his poetic gifts; he now began to plan and write poetic works, varying very much in character, but all severely antique in style. Twice before had French literature returned to the antique. The first time was in the days of Ronsard, when men decked antiquity with the gaudy tinsel of the Italian Renaissance; the second was in the days of Louis XIV., when they invested it with court pomp and conventions. André Chénier, who had Greek blood in his veins, who read and wrote his mother's tongue as easily as French, and who perhaps alone among Frenchmen saw ancient Hellas neither through Latin spectacles nor through the dust of seventeenth-century perruques, André Chénier calmly and simply, like a young Apollo, put an end to the existing conception of the antique, and, consequently, of the nature of poetry. He realised that the poets of Greece had spoken and written in the language of the people, and that their perfection of form, the result of self-restraint, was something widely different from reverence for arbitrary, conventional directions and prohibitions. He represents a reaction against the eighteenth-century poetic style which resembles Thorvaldsen's reaction against eighteenth-century sculpture; like Thorvaldsen, he frequently imitated and made use of the antique; he surpasses the Dane in ardour, sensuous warmth, and pathos.

Before 1789 André Chénier was the elegiac, idyllic, and erotic poet. He developed marvellously both as poet and man after the French Revolution broke out and filled the air with its thunders and lightnings. He had been educated in the philosophic spirit with which Voltaire had imbued the aristocracy of intellect; he had shared in the feelings which led distinguished Frenchmen to support the cause of the free states of North America; now he hailed with the purest enthusiasm the new era of liberty which he had so long desired to see. His idea of liberty was absolute freedom in the domains of thought and religion. Instructed "by the eighteen centuries which theological follies have stained with blood, devoid of respect for the priesthood of any creed whatsoever," because he is convinced that they have one and all "conspired against the happiness and peace of humanity," he desires "to break the yoke of despotism and priestcraft." He was so inexperienced and enthusiastic as to believe it possible that this result could be attained without overstepping the limits of the strictly lawful.

During the first year of the Revolution he still devoted most of his time to poetry. He conceived a short-lived passion for a young and beautiful lady, Madame Gouy d'Arcy, whose praises he has sung in a famous poem. But politics soon drove all other occupations and passions into the background. In 1792, with a prevision of the approaching Reign of Terror, André made a violent attack on the Jacobins in a newspaper article. When his younger brother, the famous revolutionary poet, Marie-Joseph Chénier, who was an active member of the Jacobin Club, felt obliged to defend his fellow-members, André proudly and recklessly took up the gauntlet thrown down. Mutual friends of the brothers managed to bring the painful controversy to a speedy close, but the strained relations lasted for some time. Before this the brothers had been warmly attached. But it was with André as with the ancient Romans; the ties of blood had to give way to the political idea. In the early days of the Revolution he had allowed his brother's tragedy, Brutus and Cassius, to be dedicated to him, and in acknowledging this dedication had, with the naïveté of the day, declared his conviction that the great Brutus had expressed himself exactly as he was made to do in the drama. He called the heroes of the play "noble murderers, great tyrannicides, whom the phrase-makers of our day are incapable of understanding"—in short, expressed his approval of regicide when necessary. But the trial of Louis XVI. roused his unbounded wrath; he solicited permission to assist in the King's defence; he wrote a series of articles in his favour; and when the sentence of death had been passed, it was André Chénier who composed the beautiful and dignified letter in which the King demanded the permission of the National Assembly to appeal to the nation. It is (as Becq de Fouquières has remarked) significant that three of Europe's best poets, André Chénier, Schiller, and Alfieri, who were all equally antagonistic to the old autocratic government, and had all hailed the Revolution with joy, should all in 1792 desire to defend King Louis.

Marie-Joseph Chénier was a less gifted and less seriously minded man than his brother; he followed with the stream and rejoiced in the popularity which a talent exactly suited to the requirements of the time procured him. André had the courage which on occasion manifests itself in proud defiance; he was of the stuff of which martyrs are made. Obvious danger only made him bolder in his attacks upon the men who, in his opinion, were disgracing France. He published in his own name his extremely sarcastic ode on the occasion of the fête given by the Jacobins to the amnestied soldiers of the Chateauvieux regiment, who had with perfect justice been sentenced to the galleys for ordinary, mean crimes. And after Marat's assassination, when 44,000 altars were erected to "the friend of the people," André Chénier was the one French poet who felt constrained to sing the praises of Charlotte Corday—a much more daring deed at that time than afterwards. He exclaims:

"La Grèce, ô fille illustre, admirant ton courage, Épuiserait Paros pour placer ton image Auprès d'Harmodius, auprès de son ami; Et des chœurs sur ta tombe, en une sainte ivresse, Chanterait Némésis, la tardive déesse, Qui frappe le méchant sur son trône endormi. Mais la France à la hache abandonne ta tête. C'est au monstre égorgé qu'on prépare une fête Parmi ses compagnons, tous dignes de son sort Oh! quel noble dédain fît sourire ta bouche, Quand un brigand, vengeur de ce brigand farouche, Crut te faire pâlir aux menaces de mort."

After the death of the King it was impossible for André to remain in Paris. His brother found a refuge for him in a small house in a retired part of Versailles. Here he lived for some time in quiet and solitude. He worked at his long poem Hermès, of which he had as yet only produced fragments, though it had occupied his thoughts more or less for the last ten years, and wrote to Fanny (Madame Laurent Lecoulteux), a lady who lived in the same neighbourhood, his last love poems, which are distinguished by an emotion new in André Chénier's writings—the melancholy of a purely spiritual love. The nobility and charm of a peculiarly beautiful feminine character communicated themselves to these sad, chaste verses.

But this peaceful life at Versailles was only the lull before the storm. Andre's efforts to prevent an arrest (of a lady) for which orders had been given by the Committee of Public Safety, led to his own imprisonment. He spent his time in Saint-Lazare in revising his manuscripts and writing some of his grandest and most beautiful poems, among others the two famous ones to the Duchesse de Fleury, née Coigny (La jeune Captive, and the lines incorrectly entitled Mademoiselle de Coigny), and the beautiful fragment which begins "Comme un dernier rayon." He was denounced before the tribunal of the Revolution as an enemy of the people, and was condemned to death for having "written against liberty and in defence of tyranny." The day before this happened he had written the lines:

"Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zéphyre Anime la fin d'un beau jour, Au pied de l'échafaud j'essaye encor ma lyre. Peut-être est-ce bientôt mon tour. Peut-être avant que l'heure en cercle promenée Ait posé sur l'émail brillant, Dans les soixante pas où sa route est bornée. Son pied sonore et vigilant, Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupière. Avant que de ses deux moitiés Ce vers que je commence ait atteint la dernière, Peut-être en ces murs effrayés Le messager de mort, noir recruteur des ombres Escorté d'infâmes soldats, Remplira de mon nom ces longs corridors sombres."

On the evening of the 7th Thermidor 1794, the eve of Robespierre's fall, which, if it had happened a day earlier, would have saved him, André Chénier mounted the scaffold. As they were being driven to the place of execution, he said despondently to Roucher, the painter, who was guillotined along with him: "Alas! I have done nothing for posterity." Tradition tells that on the scaffold he struck his forehead, exclaiming: "Yet I had something there!"

Although André Chénier's prose articles had aroused much attention, even abroad—Wieland sent him greetings, the King of Poland sent him a medal—he won no fame as a poet during his lifetime. He had published only two of his poems, the Ode to David on the occasion of the scene in the Tennis Court, and the ironic Ode to the Chateauvieux Regiment; and from that July day in 1794 when his head was severed from his body, his name was forgotten; the memory of him vanished.

Then one fine day in 1819 a firm of Paris publishers who were bringing out a new edition of Marie-Joseph Chénier's (now perfectly antiquated) dramatic works, were offered some poems by "an unknown brother of Chénier's" to fill up the last volume with. They requested a well-known writer of that day, Henri de Latouche, to look through these poems. Struck by their beauty, this man began to make inquiry after the rest of Andre's manuscripts. He brought one old packet, one little yellow book after another to light, made a careful, tasteful selection, and by its publication produced a revolution in the poetic doctrines of his country. The name of André Chénier was soon known throughout the land, and the youth of the provinces as well as the youth of Paris received the new poetic revelation with enthusiasm. (See the description of this enthusiasm in Balzac's Les deux Poètes, the introduction to Les Illusions perdues.)

This poet, who had now been so long dead, not only made all the lyric poetry that had been written in the last generation seem antiquated and impossible, but actually threw Lamartine's first Meditations Poétiques, which were published about this time, completely into the shade. For the scene of Chénier's poetry is not the clouds or the region above the clouds, but the earth; his is poetry that is pure without being pious, soulful without being sentimental; it has nothing to do with the infinite and the abstract, is not mystic and not irreligious.

The pagan youth of André Chénier's earlier works, who believed in Apollo and Artemis, but, above all, in Aphrodite, was brought face to face with the founder of the Seraphic school; the Epicurean (in the antique sense of the word) with the spiritualist. The first women whose praises Chénier sang were not intellectual, consumptive Elviras like Lamartine's, but warm-blooded, truly loving women, or young and beautiful courtesans of the days of Louis XVI.—only that his sensuousness never degenerated into the voluptuousness, still less into the wantonness of that period. The wild orgy, when he described it (see, for example, the 28th Elegy), produced the effect of a bas-relief of the noblest Greek period. The young woman with the flowing locks is described with a chasteness of style which makes of her a dancing Greek mænad, and the sober serenity of its representation transforms the drinking scene into an Athenian Bacchanalian feast, executed in Parian marble. All this life bore the imprint of pure beauty and perfect simplicity. The element of ugliness which Hugo was to introduce into lyric poetry, and to the attraction of which Lamartine at a future period succumbed, was as entirely absent as devoutness or mysticism.

But the man, too, who loomed through the works and fragments of André Chénier's maturer years, formed a suggestive temperamental antithesis to those lyric outpourings which aroused enthusiasm in 1819. The women whom he celebrated in unforgettable poems were heroines or victims of the Revolution. There was a manly pathos in his iambics which recalled the old Greek iambic poets, and the fragments of his long poem, Hermès, revealed a philosophy of life, the antique sincerity and scientific sobriety of which formed the strongest possible contrast to the romantic emotionalism of Lamartine. To André the stars are not the flowers in the fields of heaven, but simply worlds revolving in floods of ether; he writes of their weight, their shapes, their distances, and their law of gravitation, which he feels influencing his own soul. Providence does not send its voice down from them to men, prayers do not ascend from men to them; the result of reflection is a profound impression of the unity of nature and its subjection to law.

But André Chénier's poetry, which in so many ways anticipates that of the nineteenth century—it is distinctly lyrical, and in France the eighteenth century produced no other real lyric poet—is also marked by the influence of the two leading spirits of his own age, Rousseau and Voltaire. The idyllic element in it is due to Rousseau; the pastoral scenes may owe much to Theocritus, but Chénier drew from this source only because Rousseau had led the way back to natural conditions. To Voltaire is due that passion for inquiry into what lies at the root of everything, which led André to study and borrow from Newton and to compete with Lucretius in a didactic poem on Nature.

It was, however, especially by his purely artistic, nay, in a manner his purely technical, merits that André Chénier produced such an emancipating, reviving effect upon the poetry of the second generation after his own. The Alexandrine of his poetry is no longer Racine's; by pruning or adding to this last at will he made it a far suppler, freer, more varied measure; the result of the still more astonishing new application of the cæsura in his dithyrambic poetry was a hitherto unknown lyric passion and vigour. Most of these metrical reforms had indeed been attempted by Lamartine, but, as it were, unconsciously, and without that decision or precision which the young men admired so much in Chénier. All who were capable of appreciating plasticity and vigour in style swore by his name. They involuntarily divided the writers of the day into two great groups, one descending from Madame de Staël, the voluble, prolific improvisatrice, who poured forth a whirlwind of words and ideas without troubling herself much about shaping them into a whole, and the other the school now in process of formation, which, taking André Chénier as its model, made the strictest artistic conscientiousness its guiding principle.

Along with the metrical improvements in André Chénier's poetry we have great progress in colouring. Until now poets had preferred the idealistic, sentimental, transcendental expression to the realistically descriptive word. They had written of "The heavens in their wrath;" André wrote, "A black and cloudy sky;" they wrote of "delicate fingers;" André Chénier preferred to say "long, white fingers." And this realistic exactness in certain kinds of description does not exclude another novelty, a sort of chiaroscuro of words and expressions which by their mysterious or enigmatic or fantastic quality suddenly open out wide, unexpected vistas.

When we regard this beautiful poetry more from the human than the artistic standpoint, what we miss in it is the expression of personal grief. In spite of its fire and its Frenchness it is too measured, too Attic. The ugly is too systematically excluded; and among ugly and unclean things, the poet has, in genuine Greek fashion, reckoned his own melancholy, his private sufferings and calamities. It is only from some prose memoranda and a few letters that we learn, for instance, how much he suffered from his dependent position in London. He does not give this suffering expression in his poetry. Occasionally at an earlier period he alluded in a roundabout fashion to the irksome restraints imposed on him by his poverty—in such a poem, for instance, as La Liberté, an idyll in the style of Theocritus, in which the shepherd breaks his flute and shuns the dance and song of the young maidens, rejecting all consolation because he is a slave.[2]

As a fine specimen of André Chénier's writing take Le Malade, a poem which, like most of his, is made out of almost nothing, yet which produces an unextinguishable impression. In its composition it reminds one of the third scene in the first act of Racine's Phèdre, which seems to have been its far-away model. The mother prays:

"Apollon, Dieu sauveur, dieux des savants mystères, Dieu de la vie, et dieu des plantes solitaires, Dieu vainqueur de Python, dieu jeune et triomphant, Prends pitié de mon fils, de mon unique enfant! Prends pitié de sa mère aux larmes condamnée, Qui ne vit que pour lui, qui meurt abandonnée, Qui n'a pas dû rester pour voir mourir son fils; Dieu jeune, viens aider sa jeunesse. Assoupis, Assoupis dans son sein cette fièvre brûlante Qui dévore la fleur de sa vie innocente. Apollon, si jamais, échappé du tombeau, Il retourne au Ménale avoir soin du troupeau, Ces mains, ces vieilles mains orneront ta statue De ma coupe d'onyx à tes pieds suspendue; Et, chaque été nouveau, d'un jeune taureau blanc La hache à ton autel fera couler le sang. Et bien, mon fils, es-tu toujours impitoyable? Ton funeste silence est-il inexorable? Enfant, tu veux mourir? Tu veux, dans ses vieux ans, Laisser ta mère seule avec ses cheveux blancs? Tu veux que ce soit moi qui ferme ta paupière? Que j'unisse ta cendre à celle de ton père? C'est toi qui me devais ces soins religieux, Et ma tombe attendait tes pleurs et tes adieux. Parle, parle, mon fils, quel chagrin te consume? Les maux qu'on dissimule en ont plus d'amertume. Ne lèveras-tu point ces yeux appesantis? —-Ma mère, adieu; je meurs, et tu n'as plus de fils. Non, tu n'as plus de fils, ma mère bien-aimée. Je te perds. Une plaie ardente, envenimée, Me ronge; avec effort je respire, et je crois Chaque fois respirer pour la dernière fois. Je ne parlerai pas. Adieu; ce lit me blesse; Ce tapis qui me couvre accable ma faiblesse, Tout me pèse et me lasse. Aide-moi, je me meurs, Tourne-moi sur le flanc. Ah! j'expire! ô douleurs!"

In vain she gives him a healing draught brewed with magic arts by a Thessalian woman. But he speaks again:

"——O coteaux d'Érymanthe! ô vallons! ô bocage! O vent sonore et frais qui troublais le feuillage, Et faisais frémir l'onde, et sur leur jeune sein Agitais les replis de leur robe de lin! De légères beautés troupe agile et dansante.... Tu sais, tu sais, ma mère? aux bords de l'Érymanthe.... Là, ni loups ravisseurs, ni serpents, ni poisons.... O visage divin! ô fêtes! ô chansons! Des pas entrelacés, des fleurs, une onde pure, Aucun lieu n'est si beau dans toute la nature. Dieux! ces bras et ces flancs, ces cheveux, ces pieds nus, Si blancs, si délicats.... Je ne te verrai plus!"

When the mother learns that it is of hopeless love her son is dying, she says:

"Mais mon fils, mais dis-moi, quelle belle dansante, Quelle vierge as-tu vu au bord de l'Érymanthe? N'est-tu pas riche et beau? du moins quand la douleur N'avait point de ta joue éteint la jeune fleur? Parie. Est-ce cette Églé, fille du roi des ondes, Ou cette jeune Irène aux longues tresses blondes? Ou ne sera-ce point cette fière beauté Dont j'entends le beau nom chaque jour répété, Dont j'apprends que partout les belles sont jalouses? Qu'aux temples, aux festins, les mères, les épouses, Ne sauraient voir, dit-on, sans peine et sans effroi? Cette belle Daphné?...—Dieux! ma mère, tais-toi, Tais-toi. Dieux! Qu'as-tu dit? Elle est fière, inflexible; Comme les immortels elle est belle et terrible! Mille amants l'ont aimée; ils l'ont aimée en vain. Comme eux j'aurais trouvé quelque refus hautain. Non, garde que jamais elle soit informée ... Mais, ô mort! ô tourment! ô mère bien-aimée! Tu vois dans quels ennuis dépérissent mes jours. Ma mère bien-aimée, ah! viens à mon secours: Je meurs; va la trouver: que tes traits, que ton âge, De sa mère à ses yeux offrent la sainte image. Tiens, prends cette corbeille et nos fruits les plus beaux, Prends notre Amour d'ivoire, honneur de ces hameaux; Prends la coupe d'onyx à Corinthe ravie, Prends mes jeunes chevreaux, prends mon cœur, prends ma vie, Jette tout à ses pieds; apprends-lui qui je suis; Dis-lui que je me meurs, que tu n'as plus de fils. Tombe aux pieds du vieillard, gémis, implore, presse; Adjure cieux et mers, dieu, temple, autel, déesse; Pars, et si tu reviens sans les avoir fléchis Adieu, ma mère, adieu, tu n'auras plus de fils. —J'aurai toujours un fils; va, la belle espérance Me dit ... Elle s'incline, et, dans un doux silence, Elle couvre ce front, terni par les douleurs, De baisers maternels entremêlés de pleurs. Puis elle sort en hâte, inquiète et tremblante, Sa démarche est de crainte et d'âge chancelante. Elle arrive; et bientôt revenant sur ses pas, Haletante, de loin: 'Mon cher fils, tu vivras, Tu vivras.' Elle vient s'asseoir près de la couche: Le vieillard la suivait, le sourire à la bouche. La jeune belle aussi, rouge et le front baissé, Vient, jette sur le lit un coup d'œil. L'insensé Tremble; sous ses tapis il veut cacher la tête. 'Ami, depuis trois jours tu n'es d'aucune fête, Dit-elle; que fais-tu? pourquoi veux-tu mourir? Tu souffres. On me dit que je peux te guérir. Vis, et formons ensemble une seule famille; Que mon père ait un fils, et ta mère un fille.'"

One cannot imagine more simplicity, less attempt at effect, in the solution of such a situation.

It was a foundation of this kind which the new Romantic School found to build upon—noble simplicity of language, correct drawing, a Grecian rhythm in all the transitions, the beautiful lines of the bas-relief, pure colour, and austere form.

VII

DE VIGNY'S POETRY AND HUGO'S "ORIENTALES"

The first author to show the influence of Chénier was one of the most artistically audacious of the school, one of its original leaders—Alfred de Vigny—who as lyric poet was at times very faulty, at times an immaculate master. Chaste, lucid, pure, and austere, there is a quality in his best verse which has led all the critics who have attempted to describe it to employ such figures as the sheen of ivory, the whiteness of ermine, the sailing of the swan. It has the artistic severity, the sober colouring, the conciseness and the fastidiousness which also characterise Chénier's. And De Vigny was evidently afraid that these qualities would be attributed to Chénier's influence. For although no collection of his poetry was published before 1819, he took the trouble in later editions to furnish a number of the poems which seem to bear the clearest marks of this influence, with earlier dates, going even as far back as 1815. But even leaving out of consideration the fact that single poems of Chénier's had been given to the public (in Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme and as a supplement to Millevoye's poetical works) still earlier than this, it is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that, in spite of the absolute uprightness which as a rule distinguished him, Alfred de Vigny has antedated his poems to give himself an undeserved appearance of complete originality. For the single poems which he published before the first collection in question are far inferior to those contained in it which bear a much earlier date—so inferior that he excluded them from the complete edition of his works. André Chénier's influence upon De Vigny is thus indisputable. The latter assimilated many of the characteristics of the rediscovered master, though he emancipated himself from the old-fashioned Hellenism of style which hampered Chénier's flight. The poem La Dryade, to which he gives the additional title of "Idyll in the manner of Theocritus," is in reality an idyll in the manner of André Chénier. What distinguishes De Vigny most markedly from Chénier as a lyric poet is his cult of pure intellect and his proud, stoic feeling of solitude. He has painted his own ideal portrait in such poems as Moïse, La colère de Samson, and La mort du loup. He is very present in Moses' sad cry:

"O Seigneur, j'ai vécu puissant et solitaire, Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre!"

I seem to hear the plaint of his strong, sorely wounded self-esteem in Samson's outburst of wrath over Delilah's treachery (his Delilah being the great actress, Marie Dorval). Thrice already has he forgiven her, but she has been more ashamed than surprised at finding herself discovered and forgiven:

"Car la bonté de l'Homme est forte et sa douceur Écrase, en l'absolvant, l'être faible et menteur."

And I feel his stoicism, and at the same time read an apology for his unproductiveness, in those words in the poem on the wolf which dies without uttering a sound:

"À voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce que l'on laisse, Seul le silence est grand, tout le reste est faiblesse."

Granted that there is a little affected rigidity in this attitude of his, still it is his pride, his spiritual nobility, his desire to perpetuate in his poetry the purity and austerity of his spirit, which impel him to assume it.

The poet who undertook the further development of Chénier's lyrical style was a man of different intellectual stamp from both him and De Vigny—a man intoxicated with self-confidence. Victor Hugo was three-and-twenty, "the bright dawn illumining his spring." In one of his poems ("À Mademoiselle J.," in Chants du Crépuscule) he has himself described the certainty of victory with which he made his début as a lyric poet:

"Alors je disais aux étoiles: O mon astre, en vain tu te voiles. Je sais que tu brilles là-haut! Alors je disais à la rive: Vous êtes la gloire, et j'arrive. Chacun de mes jours est un flot! Je disais au bois: forêt sombre, J'ai comme toi des bruits sans nombre. À l'aigle: contemple mon front! Je disais aux coupes vidées: Je suis plein d'ardentes idées Dont les âmes s'enivreront! Alors, du fond de vingt calices, Rosée, amour, parfum, délices, Se répandaient sur mon sommeil; J'avais des fleurs plein mes corbeilles; Et comme un vif essaim d'abeilles Mes pensées volaient au soleil! La terre me disait: Poète! Le ciel me répétait: Prophète! Marche! parle! enseigne! bénis! Penche l'urne des chants sublimes! Verse aux vallons noirs comme aux cimes, Dans les aires et dans les nids!"

Victor Hugo took the verse which André Chénier had created, that pellucid medium of pure beauty, and when he had breathed upon it, it gleamed with all the colours of the rainbow. Strangely enough it was again from Greece that the inspiration came; but this time from modern Greece. Under the impression produced by the Greek War of Liberation Hugo set to work to write his Orientales. But what a different use of language! The words painted; the words shone, "gilded by a sunbeam" like the beautiful Jewess of the poems; they sang, as if to a secret accompaniment of Turkish music.

First had come Oehlenschläger's East. This was the East of the child, of the fairy-tale book, of the Thousand and One Nights—half Persia, half Copenhagen. It was dreams of genii in lamps and rings, of diamonds and sapphires by the bushel, the illimitable splendours of imagination all grouped round a few imperishable poetic types.

Then came Byron's East, a great decorative background for passion in its recklessness and melancholy.

The third in order was Goethe's, the East of the West-östlicher Divan, the refuge of the old man. He took the reposeful, the contemplative element of Oriental philosophy and wove German Lieder into it. Rückert, the great word-artist, followed in his steps.

But Hugo's East was different from all of these; it was the brightly variegated, outward, barbaric East, the land of light and colour. Sultans and muftis, dervishes and caliphs, hetmans, pirates, Klephts—delicious sounds in his ears, delightful pictures before his eyes. Time is a matter of indifference—far back antiquity, Middle Ages, or to-day; race is a matter of indifference—Hebrew, Moor, or Turk; place is a matter of indifference—Sodom and Gomorrah, Granada, Navarino; creed is a matter of indifference. "No one," he tells us in his preface, "has a right to ask the poet whether he believes in God or in gods, in Pluto, in Satan, or in nothing." His province is to paint. He is possessed by a genius which leaves him no peace until the East, as he feels it, is before him upon paper.

A careful study of the Orientales shows us how they came into being. They were not written in the order in which they stand in the book. The first poem in order of production is No. 23, "La ville prise," written in 1824; next come poems written in 1826 and 1827 upon incidents in the War of Liberation, and not until 1828 is the poet's imagination thoroughly fired. The horizon widens; all the elements which tend, by reason of a close or distant connection of ideas, to crystallise round the Turkish war, group themselves round that nucleus.

If we examine the little poem, "La ville prise," which is an outcome of the powerful emotion produced in the poet by the martyrdom of Greece, we are struck by the identity of its standpoint with the standpoint of the French Romantic school of painting. In 1824 Eugène Delacroix exhibits his famous picture of the "Massacre of Scio," a bold and masterly delineation, glowing with flaming colour and intense feeling, of a horrible incident, destitute of the slightest element of conventional poetic justice. Very soon after this Hugo writes his little poem. It purports to be the intelligence brought by a humble slave. Standing with his hands crossed on his breast, he says:

"La flamme par ton ordre, ô Roi, luit et dévore. De ton peuple en grondant elle étouffe les cris; Et, rougissant les toits comme une sombre aurore, Semble en son vol joyeux danser sur leurs débris. Le meurtre aux mille bras comme un géant se lève; Les palais embrasés se changent en tombeaux; Pères, femmes, époux, tout tombe sous le glaive; Autour de la cité s'appellent les corbeaux. Les mères ont frémi! les vierges palpitantes, O calife! ont pleuré leurs jeunes ans flétris; Et les coursiers fougueux ont traîné hors des tentes Leurs corps vivans, de coups et de baisers meurtris! Les tout petits enfans, écrasés sous les dalles, Ont vécu: de leur sang le fer s'abreuve encor...— Ton peuple baise, ô Roi, la poudre des sandales Qu'à ton pied glorieux attache un cercle d'or!"

This is the first chord which Hugo strikes in these poems; it rings sharp and shrill; but the poem is not quite good, because it is not quite true. It was not thus the slave spoke; we are sensible of the poet's own indignation in the narrative. The next poems, "Les têtes du Sérail," "Enthousiasme," and "Navarin," bear additional evidence to the modern Greek influence to which we originally owe Les Orientales. But then the poet makes a great artistic advance; he transports himself to the standpoint of the Turks, writes himself into their frame of mind.

"La douleur du Pacha" is the first, half-ironic attempt. Dervishes and bombardiers, odalisques and slaves, one after the other, each from his or her own point of view, try to imagine what can be the reason of the Pacha's sitting musing in his tent with his eyes full of tears. But none of the reasons that occur to them is the true one. It is not that his favourite concubine has been unfaithful, nor yet that there has been a head too few in the fellah's sack. No, he is grieving over the death of his favourite Nubian tiger.

But this is still only an attempt. The poet has not yet entirely got rid of himself, got outside of himself; we are conscious of him in one weak spot, which disturbs and dissolves the mental picture. But now comes the "Marche turque," and we are in the East.

Though the refrain of this masterly poem is a very barbarous one, its general tone is not savage; it is serious, full of a piety which is not the less heartfelt, and of ideas of honour which are not the less sincere because they are different from ours:

"Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle, Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle. J'aime le vrai soldat, effroi de Bélial; Son turban évasé rend son front plus sévère; Il baise avec respect la barbe de son père, Il voue à son vieux sabre un amour filial, Et porte un doliman percé dans les mêlées De plus de coups que n'a de taches étoilées La peau du tigre impérial. Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle, Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Celui qui d'une femme aime les entretiens; Celui qui ne sait pas dire dans une orgie Quelle est d'un beau cheval la généalogie; Qui cherche ailleurs qu'en soi force, amis et soutiens, Sur de soyeux divans se couche avec mollesse, Craint le soleil, sait lire, et par scrupule laisse Tout le vin de Chypre aux chrétiens; Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle, Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle. Celui-là, c'est un lâche, et non pas un guerrier. Ce n'est pas lui qu'on voit dans la bataille ardente Pousser un fier cheval, à la housse pendante, La sabre en main, debout sur le large étrier; Il n'est bon qu'à presser des talons une mule, En murmurant tout bas quelque vaine formule, Comme un prêtre qui va prier! Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle, Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle."

There is nothing Greek in this, nor yet any European satire of Turkish barbarity; the poet has become the dramatist within the Turkish intellectual and emotional pale; in this local colouring there is the genuine brutality which no northern poet has ever attained in handling such themes. This is true masculine savagery.

These are not sentimental, but robust major chords; and the major key predominates in all the poems, even where woman and love entwine their rhythms among the harsh, masculine ones. There are cruel, heartless women, like the Jewish sultana who demands the heads of her rivals; and there are refined, musical daughters of Eve, like the captive who longs for her own country and yet loves the sight of Smyrna's fairy palaces, and rejoices in breathing the soft air of the East in winter and in summer, by day and at night when the full moon shines upon the sea. There is the charming woman depicted in "Les adieux de l'hôtesse Arabe." The love which finds expression in this last-named poem is sad in its feeling of unrequitedness, repressed and chaste; it is a mixture of sisterly care, childlike superstition, and submissive worship, which reveals itself with plastic grace in a noble, proud character.

From the moment when the poet deserts the Greek camp for that of the enemy, his imagination allows itself free play. From pictures of Turkish cruelty it passes to the delineation of Turkish superstition. "Les Djinns" is a metrical marvel in which the approach of the wild hunt to the house, its thundering over the heads of the terror-stricken inmates, and its gradual dying away into the distance, are represented by the gradual rise from two-syllabic to ten-syllabic lines and gradual fall back to the two-syllabic. From the life of the Turkish seraglio it wings its flight to the tents of the Bedouins in the desert; from the desert as it is to-day to the desert as it was in the days when Buonaberdi overshadowed it with the wings of his eagles.

Enormous stretches of sand and water, the ordering and manœuvres of masses of troops, the architecture of towns, the sieges and storming of these towns, are seen with the poet's eye; and at a certain moment a natural association of ideas summons up the picture of great scenes of destruction read of in Bible history. In these last Hugo found his most gorgeous material. And it was also the material nearest akin to his own personality. His imagination was always at its best in dealing with the monstrous. The original Pegasus was, in the literal sense of the word, a superb monster, and that is just what Hugo's Pegasus is, in the figurative.

He writes "Le Feu du Ciel," the first poem in the book, the last in chronological order. We see the awful black cloud sailing across the sky. Whence has it come? Whither is it bound? No one knows. Hovering above the sea, it asks the Lord if it shall dry up the waters with its fires. No! answers the Lord, and onward it hurries, driven by His breath. Over the beautiful bays of the Mediterranean, over the fair corn lands of Egypt it passes, but the Lord still gives no signal to stop. Over the desert it flies, over the ruins of ancient Babel. It asks: Is it here? But still onward it must go. In the night time it reaches the magnificent sister cities—Sodom and Gomorrah—whose inhabitants have fallen asleep after their wild, voluptuous revels. Now the Lord gives the signal. The cloud opens, and from its flaming gorge pours a torrent of fire and sulphur and brimstone upon the doomed cities, until agate and porphyry and idols and marble colossi melt like wax, and the dazzling flames envelop and destroy everything living in the houses and the streets. Towards morning the ruin of old Babel is seen to lift its head above the mountain-ridge to see and enjoy the end of the play. It knows all about it; it also in its day has had experience of the love that chasteneth.

This is, as already remarked, not poetry in a minor key; some critics actually accused it of coldness; but if ever there was an unwarrantable accusation this was one. We feel as if the poet had actually seen it all, and had painted it with a brush like that pine which Heine would fain have torn from the Norwegian cliffs and dipped in the fire of Etna, to write with it the name of his beloved across the expanse of heaven. These Orientales became the model for Romantic lyric poetry. In them the poet dared to lay hold of the painful, the ugly, the terrible (τό δεινόν as the Greeks said), and incorporate it in his verse, assured of his power to penetrate it all with poetry, to impart transparency to all these shadows and immerge all the blackness in a poetic sea of light. What he once wrote of the earth may be applied to his own lyric poetry. He describes the poor, stony, niggardly soil, which unwillingly yields man his daily bread; burning deserts here, polar ice there; cities from which mercy and hope have departed wringing their hands. He paints death, an eyeless spectre which generally seizes the best first; tells of seas where ships are wrecked in the night, and of continents where howling war swings its torches and races fall furiously one upon the other. And, he concludes, of all this is composed a star in the firmament of heaven.

VIII

HUGO AND DE MUSSET

Scarcely had Victor Hugo completed Les Orientales before he set to work upon a series of poems of a completely different character. Feuilles d'Automne conquered a new territory for French lyric poetry, a domain in which the personal element was as conspicuously present as it had been absent in Les Orientales.

Hugo had married at the age of twenty on the strength of a trifling pension granted him by Louis XVIII. The dowry of his beloved bride, Adèle Foucher, was 2000 francs. The young couple lived for a number of years in straitened circumstances; but after the Hernani battle was won, Hugo's writings began to bring him in thousands, which rose to hundreds of thousands, and finally to millions. Still, the poor home was a happy one, and when, at the age of twenty-five, Hugo appeared before the public as a literary revolutionist, he was the father of a family.

In Feuilles d'Automne the poet presents his readers with pictures and thoughts of his own home. They are memories of his childhood and his beloved dead, remembrances of his mother's tenderness, of his father's soldierly figure and mien, of Napoleon, whom, standing by his father's side as a child, he had once seen. He unburdens his heart to intimate friends, confesses to them the sadness and the doubts induced in him by the hard battle of life. There are love poems too, matchless ones. He finds his first love-letters and reads them with a heart full of sadness and of longing for the vanished first freshness of youth. He gives us the poetry of his home. This was a side of life which almost all the great poets of the world had left untouched. Shakespeare had no home, and his conjugal relations were not such as to deserve writing about. Schiller and Goethe wrote few poems to their wives, and none about their family life. What Byron had thought fit to communicate to the world of such matters was the reverse of edifying. Oehlenschläger, whose personal circumstances and literary position in many respects resemble Hugo's, did not marry his Christiane till her youth was past. When he writes of his wife his tone is more dutiful than chivalrous; she is rather his Morgiana than his Gulnare; and in his poems about his children there is a touch of parental vanity; he writes of them in the style in which royal personages sometimes allude to theirs on public occasions; we feel that he regards them as beings whose welfare must be of importance to every one. Hugo avoided these pitfalls.

Not that Adèle Foucher remained the central female figure in Hugo's life during all the years when he was singing of his home. Feuilles d'Automne is the last collection of his poems in which he could truthfully write of the happiness he found there. In 1833, during the rehearsals of his Lucrèce Borgia, he became intimate with the young and beautiful, though talentless, actress, Juliette Drouet (her real name was Julienne Gauvain), whom he had chosen to play the very small part of the Princess Negroni. This lady's contemporaries write with enthusiasm of her beauty, which is said to have combined the purity of outline of the Greek statue with the poetic expression which we attribute to Shakespeare's heroines. In Hugo's tragedy she had only two words to say, merely walked across the stage; yet Théophile Gautier, after describing her lovely dress, writes thus of her performance: "She resembled a lizard that had erected itself on its tail, so wavy, supple, and serpentlike was her carriage. And with all her charm, how skilfully she managed to insinuate something poisonous into her words! With what mocking and perturbing agility did she avoid the attentions of the handsome Venetian noblemen!"

Juliette Drouet's profile was antique, and she had a profusion of beautiful hair. Pradier, the sculptor, has immortalised her in the statue of the city of Lille in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

When Hugo made her acquaintance he was thirty-one and she twenty-seven; and their connection lasted until her death, that is, for nearly fifty years. After 1833 she accompanied him on his travels, and both during and after his exile "Madame Juliette Drouet" lived in his house.

His wife, between whom and Sainte-Beuve there was soon a liaison which the latter's literary indiscretions made unnecessarily public, seems as long as she lived to have borne patiently with Hugo's inconstancy; and Hugo's letters show that he, in his turn, showed both dignity and great delicacy of feeling in the way in which he received Sainte-Beuve's intimation of his passion for Madame Hugo.

In his poetry, at least, Hugo remained united by the tenderest of ties to his home.

It is in the Chants du Crépuscule which were published in 1835, consequently long after he and Juliette Drouet had become closely connected, that (in the poem "Date lilia!") he writes of his wife as the being to whom he says: Toujours! and who answers: Partout!

And it is in this same poem that we have the perfectly charming picture of the young mother followed by her four children, the youngest of whom still walks with tottering steps:

"Oh! si vous rencontrez quelque part sous les cieux Une femme au front pur, au pas grave, aux doux yeux, Que suivent quatre enfants dont le dernier chancelle, Les surveillant bien tous, et, s'il passe auprès d'elle Quelque aveugle indigent que l'âge appesantit, Mettant une humble aumône aux mains du plus petit; Si, quand la diatribe autour d'un nom s'élance, Vous voyez une femme écouter en silence, Et douter, puis vous dire: Attendons pour juger. Quel est celui de nous qu'on ne pourrait charger? On est prompt à ternir les choses les plus belles. La louange est sans pieds et le blâme a des ailes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Si, loin des feux, des voix, des bruits et des splendeurs, Dans un repli perdu parmi les profondeurs, Sur quatre jeunes fronts groupés près du mur sombre, Vous voyez se pencher un regard voilé d'ombre Où se mêle, plus doux encor que solennel, Le rayon virginal au rayon maternel; Oh! qui que vous soyez, bénissez-la. C'est elle! La sœur, visible aux yeux, de mon âme immortelle! Mon orgueuil, mon espoir, mon abri, mon recours! Toit de mes jeunes ans qu'espèrent mes vieux jours!"