chapter xxv. The best definition of the idea which dominates the book

is to be found in the book itself. A nobleman asserts that he holds the old opinion that everything possible ought to be done for the people, but that they ought not to be consulted, because that would make them both appealing party and judge. His daughter answers: "And is not that just what we are?"

Soon after writing this work George Sand began to take a vigorous share in the practical politics of the day. After her quarrel with the _Revue des deux Mondes_ she had, in collaboration with Pierre Leroux, Viardot, Lamennais, and the Polish author Mickiewiez, started the _Revue Indépendante_; now (in 1843) she and some friends started a republican provincial newspaper in her own part of the country. In this paper, _L'Éclaireur de l'Indre_, to which Lamartine also contributed, she defended the cause, now of the town artisan, now of the peasant (article on the Paris journeymen bakers, letters from a Black Forest peasant). In 1844, in her long essay, _Questions politiques et sociales_, she distinctly declared herself a socialist. When the Revolution broke out in 1848 she was ripe to take part in it. For a short time she published a weekly paper, _La Cause du Peuple_; she wrote _A Word to the Middle Classes_, and the famous _Letters to the People_, and composed the bulletins of the Provisional Government. Towards the close of the year, in face of threatening danger, her republican socialism assumed an almost fanatical form. The article _La Majorité et l'Unanimité_, in which, immediately before the elections for the Constituent National Assembly, she exhorts the electors to show their liberal principles by their votes, ends with the threat, expressed with much circumlocution, but yet plain enough, that if the assembly presently to be elected by universal suffrage does not prove to be such an assembly as popular interests demand, mere still remains the appeal to arms.[2] It is curious to see the champion of the sovereignty of the people having recourse to a threat of despotically violent measures; it shows what a vigorous, ardent, manly spirit dwelt in the bosom of this gifted woman. The same indomitable energy which produced hundreds of novels displayed itself in her alliance with Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, men who were content with thinking what she gave expression to in words.

It was chiefly through Lamennais that the current of democratic ideas reached Victor Hugo. In Lamennais' principal work, _Essai sur l'Indifférence_, there were already signs indicating the possibility of a rejection of that principle of authority which he had championed so ardently in his youth. In August 1832 his theories were condemned by the Pope. The intimate relations between Lamennais and Hugo began in the latter's youth; Lamennais congratulated Hugo on the occasion of his marriage, and Hugo's first odes were dedicated to Lamennais. In 1822, persuaded by the Abbé de Rohan, Hugo determined to unburden his mind to a father confessor. The first he went to was Frayssinous, once the intrepid, self-sacrificing curé, now the fashionable Paris clergyman, a bishop, and head of the University. Hugo was repelled by Frayssinous' worldly ideas and counsels, and the Abbé then sent him to the little, frail, slender man with the yellow face, hooked nose, and beautiful, restless eyes, who walked the streets of Paris in a shabby cassock, blue woollen stockings, and hobnailed shoes--the famous Lamennais, whom he already knew so well.

The ideas of both confessor and penitent underwent a change in the course of the years preceding the Revolution of July, and the one was not long after the other in going over to the Liberal and anti-clerical party. One evening in September 1830 Lamennais, entering Hugo's room, found him writing. "I am disturbing you," said Lamennais. "No. But you will not approve of what I am writing." "Never mind; let me hear it." And Hugo read the following lines from his _Journal d'un Révolutionnaire de 1830_:

"The republic, which is not yet ripe, but which in a century will embrace the whole of Europe, signifies that society is its own sovereign. It protects itself by means of its citizen-soldiers; judges itself, by trial by jury; administers its own affairs, by local government; rules itself, by popular representation. The four limbs of monarchy--the standing army, the courts, the bureaucracy, the peerage--are for the republic only four troublesome excrescences which are withering up and will soon die."

"You have one clause too many," said Lamennais; "that which asserts that the republic is not ripe. You speak of it in the future tense, I in the present."

A few years later, Lamennais' connection with the Roman Catholic Church was at an end. It was in order to show that his defection was not the result of unbelief but of a new conviction, that he entitled his famous manifesto _Paroles d'un Croyant_ (1833).

It has been averred that no book since the invention of printing had created such a stir as this did. In the course of a few years a hundred editions of it were printed; it was published in foreign countries and translated into many languages. It is an imitation of a work which appeared not long before it, Mickiewiez's _Book of the Polish Pilgrim_. Half in Old Testament, half in Christian style, it denounces monarchy in Europe, the Pope and the priesthood, those to whom the fall of Poland and the serfdom of Italy were due, and the self-interested bourgeois government of France. The eloquence is of the genuine sacerdotal type; the book is strong in pathos, but weak in psychology; it only condemns and praises, knows no shade between black and white--the blackness of hell, the whiteness of heaven; nevertheless its author's warm-heartedness, purity of motive, and beauty of soul have imparted to it a rare charm.

In 1837 followed _Livre du Peuple_, a work written in the same spirit. The bold Abbé was imprisoned, but from his prison he sent book after book out into the world. _Une Voix du Prison, Du Passé et de l'Avenir du Peuple, De l'Esclavage modern_, were all written in Sainte-Pélagie.

Lamennais died three years before the Revolution of February, at a time of violent political and social agitation.

I give a few fragments from _Paroles d'un Croyant_ as specimens of his style:

"Ne vous laissez pas tromper par de vaines paroles. Plusieurs chercheront à vous persuader que vous êtes vraiment libres, parce qu'ils auront écrit sur une feuille de papier le mot de liberté, et l'auront affiché à tous les carrefours.

La liberté n'est pas un placard qu'on lit au coin de la rue. Elle est une puissance vivante qu'on sent en soi et autour de soi, le génie protecteur du foyer domestique, la garantie des droits sociaux, et le premier de ces droits.

L'oppresseur qui se couvre de son nom est le pire des oppresseurs. Il joint le mensonge à la tyrannie, et à l'injustice la profanation; car le nom de la liberté est saint.

Gardez-vous de ceux qui disent: Liberté, Liberté, et qui la détruisent par leurs œuvres."

"Le laboureur porte le poids du jour, s'expose à la pluie, au soleil, aux vents, pour préparer par son travail la moisson qui remplira ses greniers à l'automne.

La justice est la moisson des peuples.

L'artisan se lève avant l'aube, allume sa petite lampe, et fatigue sans relâche pour gagner un peu de pain qui le nourrisse, lui et ses enfants.

La justice est le pain des peuples.

Le marchand ne refuse aucun labeur, ne se plaint d'aucunes peines; il use son corps et oublie le sommeil, afin d'amasser des richesses.

La liberté est la richesse des peuples.

Le matelot traverse les mers, se livre aux flots et aux tempêtes, se hasarde entre les écueils, souffre le froid et le chaud, afin de s'assurer quelque repos dans ses vieux ans.

La liberté est le repos des peuples.

Le soldat se soumet aux plus dures privations, il veille et combat, et donne son sang, pour ce qu'il appelle la gloire.

La liberté est la gloire des peuples.

S'il est un peuple qui estime moins la justice et la liberté que le laboureur sa moisson, l'artisan un peu de pain, le marchand les richesses, le matelot le repos et le soldat la gloire; élevez autour de ce peuple une haute muraille, afin que son haleine n'infecte pas le reste de la terre."

"Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?

Je vais combattre pour la justice, pour la sainte cause des peuples, pour les droits sacrés du genre humain.

Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!

Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?

Je vais combattre contre les hommes iniques pour ceux qu'ils renversent et foulent aux pieds, contre les maîtres pour les esclaves, contre les tyrans pour la liberté.

Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!

Jeune soldat, où vas-tu?

Je vais combattre pour renverser les barrières qui séparent les peuples, et les empêchent de s'embrasser comme les fils du même père, destinés à vivre unis dans un même amour.

Que tes armes soient bénies, jeune soldat!

Jeune soldat, où vas-tu!

Je vais combattre pour affranchir de la tyrannie de l'homme la pensée, la parole, la conscience.

Que tes armes soient bénies, sept fois bénies, jeune soldat!"

Idealistic and monotonous as these utterances and refrains are, they possess the kind of eloquence which makes a powerful impression upon the common people.

Lamennais' outbursts of revolutionary sentiment come very near to being pure poetry. Hugo's are pure poetry. In reading his verses written in the Forties we feel how his poet's ear hears the dull underground rumbling of the approaching Revolution, and how he foresees that its crater will open in Paris. As far back as in the preface to the _Feuilles d'Automne_ he reproaches England with having turned Ireland into a graveyard, the sovereigns of Europe with having made Italy a prison for galley-slaves, the Czar with having populated Siberia with Poles. In it, too, he already writes of the old religions which are sloughing their skins, and (alluding to Saint-Simonism) of the new, which are stammeringly enunciating their half-reasonable, half-false principles. And from this time onward he is in all his works the champion of the liberty of the people, of their right to self-government, and of the religion of humanity. As a dramatist he began by rebelling merely against the accepted laws of style; but ere long he was, like Voltaire a century earlier, making the drama the organ of his ideas. One of his plays (_Le Roi s'amuse_) is an attack upon absolute monarchy as represented by Francis I, the most brutal of the royal debauchees of France. Another (_Angelo_), the preface to which is an affirmation of genuine Saint-Simonistic principles, contrasts woman within the pale of society with her sister beyond it, endows the strolling actress with virtues which the great lady lacks, and gives each of them her own ideality. A third (_Ruy Blas_) symbolises the elevation of the lowest class to supreme power. In Molière's _Les Précieuses_ the lackey was treated like some animal which, however clever it might be, was liable to be thrashed, even when it had only carried out its master's orders; shortly before the great Revolution Scapin is transformed into Figaro, who, though still in livery, openly manages his masters; in _Ruy Blas_ the servant, that is to say, the born plebeian, throws off his livery, assumes authority, and rules. While fully conscious of the great improbabilities and weaknesses of these dramas, we are also sensible of the atmosphere of new ideas which pervades them.

Hugo's was so dogmatic a mind that each new world of ideas which he entered in the course of his life crystallised itself, for him, into a code of doctrines. From the moment he became a democrat he was the opponent of capital punishment. He protested against it as an author in _Le dernier Jour d'un Condamné_, and also in _Claude Gueux_, where a very unpleasant real incident is turned topsy-turvy, and an execrable bandit is transformed into a hero and victim; he protested against it as a private individual; he made personal appeals for the remittance of sentences of death, both to French kings and foreign juries. Though opinion is still, and with good reason, divided as to the advisability of abolishing capital punishment for murder, Hugo's endeavours to save the lives of political offenders have a claim to our undivided sympathy. In 1839 he interceded in behalf of the noble revolutionary, Armand Barbès; Louis Philippe had, however, in this case remitted the sentence of death before Hugo's verses reached him.

But the most beautiful and the only perfectly accurate expression of the mental attitude of France's greatest lyric poet is, naturally, to be found in his poetry. The dramas of his first period, the novels of his second (which do not fall within the scope of this volume), are of small significance in comparison with the poems of the Thirties and Forties, which are contained in the two volumes entitled _Les Contemplations_. In these his faith in progress, his political convictions, his social hopes, his religious feelings, are expressed in the only artistic form which suits them. It is a form which cannot be dissolved, a style which cannot be paraphrased; it must be enjoyed in the original.

Hugo had every right to exclaim, as he did in one of the poems of this collection:

"J'ai, dans le livre, avec le drame, en prose, en vers. Plaidé pour les petits et les misérables; Suppliant les heureux et les inexorables; J'ai réhabilité le bouffon, l'histrion, Tous les damnés humains, Triboulet, Marion, Le laquais, le forçat et la prostituée; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J'ai réclamé des droits pour la femme et l'enfant; J'ai tâché d'éclairer l'homme en le réchauffant; J'allais criant: Science! Écriture! Parole! Je voulais résorber le bagne par l'école."

But, he complains:

"Le passé ne veut pas s'en aller. Il revient Sans cesse sur ses pas, reveut, reprend, retient. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . L'immense renégat d'Hier, marquis, se nomme Demain; mai tourne bride et plante là l'hiver; Use à tout ressaisir ses ongles noirs; fait rage; Il gonfle son vieux flot, souffle son vieil orage, Vomit sa vieille nuit, crie: À bas! crie: À mort! Pleure, tonne, tempête, éclate, hurle, mord."

But the onward movement would not be checked. The cleansing thunderstorm of 1848 broke over Europe. It came, that year of earthquakes, that year of emancipation, of heroic struggles, and, alas! of romantic childishness--when the helm of France was in the hands, not of statesmen, but of poets and enthusiasts; when Saint-Simonistic, neo-Christian, and poetical, instead of practical political ideas prevailed in the councils of the State. How eloquent is such a little fact as this, that one of the first proceedings of the Provisional Government was (at Lamartine's suggestion) to declare negro-slavery abolished! The ideas of Romantic France find their realisation in the Revolution of 1848.

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

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

XXXIV

THE OVERLOOKED AND FORGOTTEN

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

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

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

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

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

When we let our eyes wander over the battlefield where the unrenowned fell, we see them lying in serried rows. There are men of richly gifted, well-developed minds, like Eusèbe de Salles (born in Marseilles in 1801), count, doctor, traveller in the East, professor of Arabic, whose _Sakontala à Paris_ (1833) is one of the most talented and original psychological novels of the day, but none of whose books reached a second edition, much less brought him fame, and this though he could remember a Sunday evening at Nodier's in his youth when he and Hugo, on equal footing, were the heroes of the day.--There is Régnier-Destourbet, whose novel, _Louise_, which is dedicated to Janin and perhaps owes something to him, treats a painful subject with discrimination and good taste.--There is Charles Dovalle, killed in a duel at the age of twenty, whose collection of poems, _Le Sylphe_, showed talent to which Victor Hugo paid a warm tribute after the author's death.--There is the melancholy Eugène Hugo, Victor's elder brother and faithful comrade and friend, who, equipped with a similar though inferior lyric talent to Victor's, fought at his side in the first Romantic campaign, but died insane in 1837.--There is a man of as remarkable and noble gifts as Fontaney, another of Hugo's faithful adherents. Fontaney was for a time secretary of legation at Madrid. A proud, refined, reserved man, he has told in his novel, _Adieu_ (_Revue des deux Mondes_, 1832), the story of one of the romantically sad adventures of his own life. In the life of George Sand there is an allusion to the unfortunate love affair which was the cause of his death in 1837.--There are men with a refined, delicate poetic talent, like Félix Arvers, whose name now only recalls a single beautiful sonnet, or Labenski, who is remembered by a single ode, or Ernest Fouinet, who wrote the sonnet _A deux heureux_ on the margin of a leaf of the edition of Ronsard which was presented at Sainte-Beuve's suggestion to Victor Hugo by all the authors of the Romantic School, each contributing something to its poetic equipment. Though Fouinet himself is forgotten, one line of his at least:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is French journalistic style of 1832--not modest, certainly, but also not spiritless. Bertrand was one of the company of young men sympathetically alluded to by George Sand in _Horace_, who looked on Godfrey Cavaignac as their political leader, and went by the name of _les bousingots_ (sailor-hats). In Bertrand himself, republican bluntness was curiously combined with the artistic ultra-refinement of the Romanticist. He never won fame. He put too much ardour into his first efforts, did not husband his strength. He overworked himself to support his mother and sister, and died in poverty in 1841 in a Paris hospital. David d'Angers, the great Romantic sculptor, who had faithfully watched by the bedside of the dying man, sent to Bertrand's home for a fine white sheet to wrap the body in, and was the solitary mourner who followed him to his grave. (See David d'Angers' touching letter on the subject of Bertrand's death in Charles Asselineau's _Mélanges tirés d'une petite bibliothèque romantique_, p. 181, &c. -Author's footnote.) He erected a monument to him; and Sainte-Beuve and Victor Pavie published his _Gaspard de la Nuit_. In 1842 twenty copies of this book were sold with difficulty, but in 1868 the Romanticist bibliophile, Charles Asselineau, brought out an _édition de luxe_.

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

Madame de Montbazon était une fort belle créature qui mourut d'amour, cela pris à la lettre, l'autre siècle, pour le chevalier de la Rue qui ne l'aimait point. --_Mémoires de Saint-Simon_.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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