book I reply that its author is certainly not the King's bedmaker. Is

he not, nevertheless, on the level of an age in which the country is governed by stupid bankers and by a monarch whose motto is: 'Dieu soit loué et mes boutiques aussi?'"

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

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

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

"--Le cadavre a-t-il été reconnu?

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

--Une juive?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Un montagnard avait une excellente épée Qu'il laissait se rouiller dans un coin obscur. Un jour elle lui dit:--Que ce repos m'est dur! Guerrier, si tu voulais!... Ma lame est bien trempée.

Dans tes rudes combats, sur la côte escarpée Elle vaudrait, au bout de ton bras ferme et sûr, Les autres espadons qui brillent sous ce mur. Pourquoi seule entre tous est-elle inoccupée?--

Je suis comme ce glaive et je dis au destin: Pourquoi seul de mon type ai-je un sort clandestin? Ignores-tu quelle est la trempe de mon âme?

Elle pourrait jeter de glorieux reflets, Si ta droite au soleil faisait jouer sa lame! Elle est d'un noble acier!... Destin, si tu voulais!..."

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

"Or, qu'est-ce que le Vrai? Le Vrai, c'est le malheur; Il souffle, et l'heur vaincu s'éteint, vaine apparence: Ses pourvoyeurs constants, le désir, l'espérance, Sous leur flamme nous font mûrir pour la douleur.

Le Vrai, c'est l'incertain; le Vrai, c'est l'ignorance; C'est le tâtonnement dans l'ombre et dans l'erreur; C'est un concert de fête avec un fond d'horreur; C'est le neutre, l'oubli, le froid, l'indifférence."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] See Borel: _Champavert_ (1833); _Rapsodies_ (Bruxelles, 1838); _Madame Putiphar_ (Paris, 1878). Jules Claretie: _Petrus Borel, le Lycanthrope_ (1865).

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

XXXV

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END