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If he wishes to bring before the mind the terrors of nightmare, a single phrase can conjure them up--

C'?tait pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit.

Le jour n'est pas plus pur que le fond de mon coeur;

and the furies of insensate passion--

C'est V?nus toute enti?re ? sa proie attach?e.

But the flavour of poetry vanishes in quotation--and particularly Racine's, which depends to an unusual extent on its dramatic surroundings, and on the atmosphere that it creates. He who wishes to appreciate it to the full must steep himself in it deep and long. He will be rewarded. In spite of a formal and unfamiliar style, in spite of a limited vocabulary, a conventional versification, an unvaried and uncoloured form of expression--in spite of all these things --he will find a new beauty and a new splendour--a subtle and abiding grace.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist. The combination is extremely rare in literature, and in Racine's case it is especially remarkable owing to the smallness of the linguistic resources at his disposal and the rigid nature of the conventions in which he worked. That he should have succeeded in infusing into his tiny commonplace vocabulary, arranged in rhymed couplets according to the strictest and most artificial rules, not only the beauty of true poetry, but the varied subtleties of character and passion, is one of those miracles of art which defy analysis. Through the flowing regularity of his Alexandrines his personages stand out distinct and palpable, in all the vigour of life. The presentment, it is true, is not a detailed one; the accidents of character are not shown us--only its essentials; the human spirit comes before us shorn of its particulars, naked and intense. Nor is it--as might, perhaps, have been expected--in the portrayal of intellectual characters that Racine particularly excels; it is in the portrayal of passionate ones. His supreme mastery is over the human heart--the subtleties, the profundities, the agonies, the triumphs, of love. His gallery of lovers is a long one, and the greatest portraits in it are of women. There is the jealous, terrific Hermione; the delicate, melancholy Junie; the noble, exquisite, and fascinating B?r?nice; there is Roxane with her voluptuous ruthlessness, and Monime with her purity and her courage; and there is the dark, incomparable splendour of Ph?dre.

Un jour sur ses long pieds allait je ne sais o? Le h?ron au long bec emmanch? d'un long cou.

Could there be a better description? And his fables are crowded with these life-like little vignettes. But the moment one goes below the surface one finds the frailties, the follies, the virtues and the vices of humanity. And yet it is not quite that. The creatures of La Fontaine's fantasy are not simply animals with the minds of human beings: they are something more complicated and amusing; they are animals with the minds which human beings would certainly have, if one could suppose them transformed into animals. When the young and foolish rat sees a cat for the first time and observes to his mother--

Je le crois fort sympathisant Avec messieurs les rats: car il a des oreilles En figure aux n?tres pareilles;

this excellent reason is obviously not a rat's reason; nor is it a human being's reason; the fun lies in its being just the reason which, no doubt, a silly young creature of the human species would give in the circumstances if, somehow or other, he were metamorphosed into a rat.

It is indeed by an infinity of small touches that La Fontaine produces his effects. And his effects are very various. With equal ease, apparently, he can be playful, tender, serious, preposterous, eloquent, meditative, and absurd. But one quality is always present in his work; whatever tune he may be playing, there is never a note too much. Alike in his shortest six-lined anecdote and his most elaborate pieces, in which detail follows detail and complex scenes are developed, there is no trace of the superfluous; every word has its purpose in the general scheme. This quality appears most clearly, perhaps, in the adroit swiftness of his conclusions. When once the careful preliminary foundation of the story has been laid, the crisis comes quick and pointed--often in a single line. Thus we are given a minute description of the friendship of the cat and the sparrow; all sorts of details are insisted on; we are told how, when the sparrow teased the cat--

En sage et discr?te personne, Ma?tre chat excusait ces jeux.

Then the second sparrow is introduced and his quarrel with the first. The cat fires up--

Le moineau du voisin viendra manger le n?tre? Non, de par tous les chats!--Entrant lors au combat, Il croque l'?tranger. Vraiment, dit ma?tre chat, Les moineaux ont un gout exquis et d?licat!

And now in one line the story ends--

Cette r?flexion fit aussi croquer l'autre.

One more instance of La Fontaine's inimitable conciseness may be given. When Bertrand has eaten the chestnuts which Raton has pulled out of the fire, the friends are interrupted; the fable ends thus--

Une servante vint; adieu, mes gens! Raton N'?tait pas content, ce dit-on.

How admirable are the brevity and the lightness of that 'adieu, mes gens'! In three words the instantaneous vanishing of the animals is indicated with masterly precision. One can almost see their tails whisking round the corner.

Modern admirers of La Fontaine have tended to throw a veil of sentiment over his figure, picturing him as the consoling beatific child of nature, driven by an unsympathetic generation to a wistful companionship with the dumb world of brutes. But nothing could be farther from the truth than this conception. La Fontaine was as unsentimental as Moli?re himself. This does not imply that he was unfeeling: feelings he had--delicate and poignant ones; but they never dominated him to the exclusion of good sense. His philosophy--if we may call so airy a thing by such a name--was the philosophy of some gentle whimsical follower of Epicurus. He loved nature, but unromantically, as he loved a glass of wine and an ode of Horace, and the rest of the good things of life. As for the bad things--they were there; he saw them--saw the cruelty of the wolf, and the tyranny of the lion, and the rapacity of man--saw that--

Jupin pour chaque ?tat mit deux tables au monde; L'adroit, le vigilant, et le fort sont assis A la premi?re; et les petits Mangent leur reste ? la seconde.

Yet, while he saw them, he could smile. It was better to smile--if only with regret; better, above all, to pass lightly, swiftly, gaily over the depths as well as the surface of existence; for life is short--almost as short as one of his own fables--

Qui de nous des clart?s de la vo?te azur?e Doit jouir le dernier? Est-il aucun moment Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement?

O nuit d?sastreuse! O nuit effroyable, o? retentit tout-?-coup comme un ?clat de tonnerre, cette ?tonnante nouvelle: Madame se meurt, Madame est morte!...

--The splendid words flow out like a stream of lava, molten and glowing, and then fix themselves for ever in adamantine beauty.

Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work. In spite of the great labour which he spent upon perfecting it, he has managed, in some subtle way, to preserve all through it an air of slight disdain. 'Yes, these sentences are all perfect,' he seems to be saying; 'but then, what else would you have? Unless one writes perfect sentences, why should one trouble to write?' In his opinion, 'le vrai honn?te homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien'; and it is clear that he followed his own dictum. His attitude was eminently detached. Though what he says reveals so intensely personal a vision, he himself somehow remains impersonal. Beneath the flawless surface of his workmanship, the clever Duke eludes us. We can only see, as we peer into the recesses, an infinite ingenuity and a very bitter love of truth.

A richer art and a broader outlook upon life meet us in the pages of LA BRUY?RE. The instrument is still the same--the witty and searching epigram--but it is no longer being played upon a single string. La Bruy?re's style is extremely supple; he throws his apothegms into an infinite variety of moulds, employing a wide and coloured vocabulary, and a complete mastery of the art of rhetorical effect. Among these short reflections he has scattered a great number of somewhat lengthier portraits or character-studies, some altogether imaginary, others founded wholly or in part on well-known persons of the day. It is here that the great qualities of his style show themselves most clearly. Psychologically, these studies are perhaps less valuable than has sometimes been supposed: they are caricatures rather than portraits--records of the idiosyncrasies of humanity rather than of humanity itself. What cannot be doubted for a moment is the supreme art with which they have been composed. The virtuosity of the language--so solid and yet so brilliant, so varied and yet so pure--reminds one of the hard subtlety of a Greek gem. The rhythm is absolutely perfect, and, with its suspensions, its elaborations, its gradual crescendos, its unerring conclusions, seems to carry the sheer beauty of expressiveness to the farthest conceivable point. Take, as one instance out of a multitude, this description of the crank who devotes his existence to the production of tulips--

Certains animaux farouches, des m?les et des femelles, r?pandus par la campagne, noirs, livides, et tout brul?s du soleil, attach?s ? la terre qu'ils fouillent et qu'ils remuent avec une opini?tret? invincible; ils out comme une voix articul?e, et, quand ils se l?vent sur leurs pieds, ils montrent une face humaine: et en effet ils sont des hommes--

saw the dreadful fact, noted it with all the intensity of his genius, and then passed on. He was not concerned with finding remedies for the evils of a particular society, but with exposing the underlying evils of all societies. He would have written as truthful and as melancholy a book if he had lived to-day.

La Bruy?re, in the darkness of his pessimism, sometimes suggests Swift, especially in his sarcastically serious treatment of detail; but he was without the virulent bitterness of the great Dean. In fact his indictment owes much of its impressiveness to the sobriety with which it is presented. There is no rage, no strain, no over-emphasis; one feels as one reads that this is an impartial judge. And, more than that, one feels that the judge is not only a judge, but also a human being. It is the human quality in La Bruy?re's mind which gives his book its rare flavour, so that one seems to hear, in these printed words, across the lapse of centuries, the voice of a friend. At times he forgets his gloom and his misanthropy, and speaks with a strange depth of feeling on friendship or on love. 'Un beau visage,' he murmurs, 'est le plus beau de tous les spectacles, et l'harmonie la plus douce est le son de voix de celle que l'on aime.' And then--'?tre avec les gens qu'on aime, cela suffit; rever, leur parler, ne leur parler point, penser ? eux, penser ? des choses plus indiff?rentes, mais aupr?s d'eux tout est ?gal.' How tender and moving the accent, yet how restrained? And was ever more profundity of intimacy distilled into a few simple words than here--'Il y a du plaisir ? rencontrer les yeux de celui ? qui l'on vient de donner'? But then once more the old melancholy seizes him. Even love itself must end.--'On gu?rit comme on se console; on n'a pas dans le coeur de quoi toujours pleurer et toujours aimer.' He is overwhelmed by the disappointments of life.--'Les choses les plus souhait?es n'arrivent point; ou, si elles arrivent, ce n'est ni dans le temps ni dans les circonstances o? elles auraient fait un extr?me plaisir.' And life itself, what is it? how does it pass?--'Il n'y a pour l'homme que trois ?v?nements: na?tre, vivre, et mourir; il ne se sent pas na?tre, il souffre ? mourir, et il oublie de vivre.'

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

It might be supposed that a book containing such original and far-reaching theories was a solid substantial volume, hard to master and laborious to read. The precise opposite is the case. Montesquieu has dished up his serious doctrines into a spicy story, full of epigrams and light topical allusions, and romantic adventures, and fancy visions of the East. Montesquieu was a magistrate; yet he ventured to indulge here and there in reflections of dubious propriety, and to throw over the whole of his book an airy veil of voluptuous intrigue. All this is highly typical of the literature of the age which was now beginning. The serious, formal tone of the classical writers was abandoned, and was replaced by a gay, unemphatic, pithy manner, in which some grains of light-hearted licentiousness usually gave a flavour to the wit. The change was partly due to the shifting of the centre of society from the elaborate and spectacular world of Versailles to the more intimate atmosphere of the drawing-rooms of Paris. With the death of the old king the ceremonial life of the Court fell into the background; and the spirits of the time flew off into frivolity with a sense of freedom and relief. But there was another influence at work. Paradoxical as it may sound, it was the very seriousness of the new writers which was the real cause of their lack of decorum. Their great object was to be read--and by the largest possible number of readers; the old select circle of literary connoisseurs no longer satisfied them; they were eager to preach their doctrines to a wider public--to the brilliant, inquisitive, and increasingly powerful public of the capital. And with this public no book had a chance of success unless it was of the kind that could be run through rapidly, pleasantly, on a sofa, between dinner and the opera, and would furnish the material for spicy anecdotes and good talk. Like the jesters of the Middle Ages, the philosophers of the eighteenth century found in the use of pranks and buffoonery the best way of telling the truth.

It was only gradually that the new views, of which Montesquieu and Voltaire were the principal exponents, spread their way among the public; and during the first half of the century many writers remained quite unaffected by them. Two of these--resembling each other in this fact alone, that they stood altogether outside the movement of contemporary thought--deserve our special attention.

Besides the intrinsic merits of the work, it has the additional advantage of being concerned with an age which, of enthralling interest on its own account, also happened to be particularly suited to the capacities of the writer. If Saint-Simon had lived at any other time, his memoirs would have been admirable, no doubt, but they would have lacked the crowning excellence which they actually possess. As it was, a happy stroke of fortune placed him in the one position where he could exercise to the full his extraordinary powers: never, before or since, has there been so much to observe; never, before or since, so miraculous an observer. For, at Versailles, in the last years of Louis, Saint-Simon had before him, under his very eyes as a daily and hourly spectacle, the whole accumulated energy of France in all its manifestations; that was what he saw; and that, by the magic of his pen, is what he makes us see. Through the endless succession of his pages the enormous panorama unrolls itself, magnificent, palpitating, alive. What La Bruy?re saw with the spiritual gaze of a moralist rushed upon the vision of Saint-Simon in all the colour, the detail, the intensity, the frenzy, of actual fact. He makes no comments, no reflections--or, if he does, they are ridiculous; he only sees and feels. Thus, though in the profundity of his judgement he falls so infinitely below La Bruy?re, in his character-drawing he soars as high above him. His innumerable portraits are unsurpassed in literature. They spring into his pages bursting with life--individual, convincing, complete, and as various as humanity itself. He excels in that most difficult art of presenting the outward characteristics of persons, calling up before the imagination not only the details of their physical appearance, but the more recondite effects of their manner and their bearing, so that, when he has finished, one almost feels that one has met the man. But his excellence does not stop there. It is upon the inward creature that he expends his most lavish care--upon the soul that sits behind the eyelids, upon the purpose and the passion that linger in a gesture or betray themselves in a word. The joy that he takes in such descriptions soon infects the reader, who finds before long that he is being carried away by the ardour of the chase, and that at last he seizes upon the quivering quarry with all the excitement and all the fury of Saint-Simon himself. Though it would, indeed, be a mistake to suppose that Saint-Simon was always furious--the wonderful portraits of the Duchesse de Bourgogne and the Prince de Conti are in themselves sufficient to disprove that--yet there can be no doubt that his hatreds exceeded his loves, and that, in his character-drawing, he was, as it were, more at home when he detested. Then the victim is indeed dissected with a loving hand; then the details of incrimination pour out in a multitudinous stream; then the indefatigable brush of the master darkens the deepest shadows and throws the most glaring deformities into still bolder relief; then disgust, horror, pity, and ridicule finish the work which scorn and indignation had begun. Nor, in spite of the virulence of his method, do his portraits ever sink to the level of caricatures. His most malevolent exaggerations are yet so realistic that they carry conviction. When he had fashioned to his liking his terrific images--his Vend?me, his Noailles, his Pontchartrain, his Duchesse de Berry, and a hundred more--he never forgot, in the extremity of his ferocity, to commit the last insult, and to breathe into their nostrils the fatal breath of life.

Saint-Simon's style is the precise counterpart of his matter. It is coloured and vital to the highest degree. It is the style of a writer who does not care how many solecisms he commits--how disordered his sentences may be, how incorrect his grammar, how forced or undignified his expressions--so long as he can put on to paper in black and white the passionate vision that is in his mind. The result is something unique in French literature. If Saint-Simon had tried to write with academic correctness--and even if he had succeeded--he certainly would have spoilt his book. Fortunately, academic correctness did not interest him, while the exact delineament of his observations did. He is not afraid of using colloquialisms which every critic of the time would have shuddered at, and which, by their raciness and flavour, add enormously to his effects. His writing is also extremely metaphorical; technical terms are thrown in helter-skelter whenever the meaning would benefit; and the boldest constructions at every turn are suddenly brought into being. In describing the subtle spiritual sympathy which existed between F?nelon and Madame de Guyon he strikes out the unforgettable phrase--'leur sublime s'amalgama', which in its compression, its singularity, its vividness, reminds one rather of an English Elizabethan than a French writer of the eighteenth century. The vast movement of his sentences is particularly characteristic. Clause follows clause, image is piled upon image, the words hurry out upon one another's heels in clusters, until the construction melts away under the burning pressure of the excitement, to reform as best it may while the agitated period still expands in endless ramifications. His book is like a tropical forest--luxuriant, bewildering, enormous--with the gayest humming-birds among the branches, and the vilest monsters in the entangled grass.

Voltaire was now sixty years of age. His position was an enviable one. His reputation was very great, and he had amassed a considerable fortune, which not only assured him complete independence, but enabled him to live in his domains on the large and lavish scale of a country magnate. His residence at Ferney, just on the border of French territory, put him beyond the reach of government interference, while he was yet not too far distant to be out of touch with the capital. Thus the opportunity had at last come for the full display of his powers. And those powers were indeed extraordinary. His character was composed of a strange amalgam of all the most contradictory elements in human nature, and it would be difficult to name a single virtue or a single vice which he did not possess. He was the most egotistical of mortals, and the most disinterested; he was graspingly avaricious, and profusely generous; he was treacherous, mischievous, frivolous, and mean, yet he was a firm friend and a true benefactor, yet he was profoundly serious and inspired by the noblest enthusiasms. Nature had carried these contradictions even into his physical constitution. His health was so bad that he seemed to pass his whole life on the brink of the grave; nevertheless his vitality has probably never been surpassed in the history of the world. Here, indeed, was the one characteristic which never deserted him: he was always active with an insatiable activity; it was always safe to say of him that, whatever else he was, he was not at rest. His long, gaunt body, frantically gesticulating, his skull-like face, with its mobile features twisted into an eternal grin, its piercing eyes sparkling and darting--all this suggested the appearance of a corpse galvanized into an incredible animation. But in truth it was no dead ghost that inhabited this strange tenement, but the fierce and powerful spirit of an intensely living man.

Voltaire was a profoundly irreligious man. In this he resembled the majority of his contemporaries; but he carried the quality perhaps to a further pitch than any man of his age. For, with him, it was not merely the purely religious and mystical feelings that were absent; he lacked all sympathy with those vague, brooding, emotional states of mind which go to create the highest forms of poetry, music, and art, and which are called forth into such a moving intensity by the beauties of Nature. These things Voltaire did not understand; he did not even perceive them; for him, in fact, they did not exist; and the notion that men could be influenced by them, genuinely and deeply, he considered to be so absurd as hardly to need discussion. This was certainly a great weakness in him--a great limitation of spirit. It has vitiated a large part of his writings; and it has done more than that--it has obscured, to many of his readers, the real nature and the real value of his work. For, combined with this inability to comprehend some of the noblest parts of man's nature, Voltaire possessed other qualities of high importance which went far to compensate for his defects. If he was blind to some truths, he perceived others with wonderful clearness; if his sympathies in some directions were atrophied, in others they were sensitive to an extraordinary degree. In the light of these considerations his attitude towards religion becomes easier to understand. All the highest elements of religion--the ardent devotion, the individual ecstasy, the sense of communion with the divine--these things he simply ignored. But, unfortunately, in his day there was a side of religion which, with his piercing clear-sightedness, he could not ignore. The spirit of fanaticism was still lingering in France; it was the spirit which had burst out on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, and had dictated the fatal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In every branch of life its influence was active, infusing prejudice, bitterness, and strife; but its effects were especially terrible in the administration of justice. It so happened that while Voltaire was at Ferney some glaring instances of this dreadful fact came to light. A young Protestant named Calas committed suicide in Toulouse, and, owing to the blind zealotry of the magistrates of the town, his father, completely innocent, was found guilty of his murder and broken on the wheel. Shortly afterwards, another Protestant, Sirven, was condemned in similar circumstances, but escaped to Ferney. A few years later, two youths of seventeen were convicted at Abbeville for making some profane jokes. Both were condemned to have their tongues torn out and to be decapitated; one managed to escape, the other was executed. That such things could happen in eighteenth-century France seems incredible; but happen they did, and who knows how many more of a like atrocity? The fact that these three came to light at all was owing to Voltaire himself. But for his penetration, his courage, and his skill, the terrible murder of Calas would to this day have remained unknown, and the dreadful affair of Abbeville would have been forgotten in a month. Different men respond most readily to different stimuli: the spectacle of cruelty and injustice bit like a lash into the nerves of Voltaire, and plunged him into an agony of horror. He resolved never to rest until he had not only obtained reparation for these particular acts of injustice, but had rooted out for ever from men's minds the superstitious bigotry which made them possible. It was to attain this end that he attacked with such persistence and such violence all religion and all priestcraft in general, and, in particular, the orthodox dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. It became the great object of his life to convince public opinion that those dogmas were both ridiculous and contemptible in themselves, and abominable in their results. In this we may think him right or we may think him wrong; our judgement will depend upon the nature of our own opinions. But, whatever our opinions, we cannot think him wicked; for we cannot doubt that the one dominating motive in all that he wrote upon the subject of religion was a passionate desire for the welfare of mankind.

One day, quite suddenly, he appeared in Paris, which he had not visited for nearly thirty years. His arrival was the signal for one of the most extraordinary manifestations of enthusiasm that the world has ever seen. For some weeks he reigned in the capital, visible and glorious, the undisputed lord of the civilized universe. The climax came when he appeared in a box at the Th??tre Fran?ais, to witness a performance of the latest of his tragedies, and the whole house rose as one man to greet him. His triumph seemed to be something more than the mere personal triumph of a frail old mortal; it seemed to be the triumph of all that was noblest in the aspirations of the human race. But the fatigue and excitement of those weeks proved too much even for Voltaire in the full flush of his eighty-fourth year. An overdose of opium completed what Nature had begun; and the amazing being rested at last.

But Rousseau was not, at bottom, concerned with the truth of any historical theory at all. It was only because he hated the present that he idealized the past. His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge from the actual world of the eighteenth century. What he detested and condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the conventionality of civilization--the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilized life. The strange feeling of revolt that surged up within him when he contemplated the drawing-rooms of Paris, with their brilliance and their philosophy, their intellect and their culture, arose from a profounder cause than a false historical theory, or a defective logical system, or a mean personal jealousy and morbid pride. All these elements, no doubt, entered into his feeling--for Rousseau was a very far from perfect human being; but the ultimate source was beyond and below them--in his instinctive, overmastering perception of the importance and the dignity of the individual soul. It was in this perception that Rousseau's great originality lay. His revolt was a spiritual revolt. In the Middle Ages the immense significance of the human spirit had been realized, but it had been inextricably involved in a mass of theological superstition. The eighteenth century, on the other hand, had achieved the great conception of a secular system of society; but, in doing so, it had left out of account the spiritual nature of man, who was regarded simply as a rational animal in an organized social group. Rousseau was the first to unite the two views, to revive the medieval theory of the soul without its theological trappings, and to believe--half unconsciously, perhaps, and yet with a profound conviction--that the individual, now, on this earth, and in himself, was the most important thing in the world.

This belief, no doubt, would have arisen in Europe, in some way or other, if Rousseau had never lived; but it was he who clothed it with the splendour of genius, and, by the passion of his utterance, sowed it far and wide in the hearts of men. In two directions his influence was enormous. His glowing conception of individual dignity and individual rights as adhering, not to a privileged few, but to the whole mass of humanity, seized upon the imagination of France, supplied a new and potent stimulus to the movement towards political change, and produced a deep effect upon the development of the Revolution. But it is in literature, and those emotions of real life which find their natural outlet in literature, that the influence of Rousseau's spirit may be most clearly seen.

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

During the Revolution, under the rule of Napoleon, and in the years which followed his fall, the energies of the nation were engrossed by war and politics. During these forty years there are fewer great names in French literature than in any other corresponding period since the Renaissance. At last, however, about the year 1830, a new generation of writers arose who brought back all the old glories and triumphantly proved that the French tongue, so far from having exhausted its resources, was a fresh and living instrument of extraordinary power. These writers--as has so often been the case in France--were bound together by a common literary creed. Young, ardent, scornful of the past, dazzled by the possibilities of the future, they raised the standard of revolt against the traditions of Classicism, promulgated a new aesthetic doctrine, and, after a sharp struggle and great excitement, finally succeeded in completely establishing their view. The change which they introduced was of enormous importance, and for this reason the date 1830 is a cardinal one in the literature of France. Every sentence, every verse that has been written in French since then bears upon it, somewhere or other, the imprint of the great Romantic Movement which came to a head in that year. What it was that was then effected--what the main differences are between French literature before 1830 and French literature after--deserves some further consideration.

The enormous influx of words into the literary vocabulary which the Romantic Movement brought about had two important effects. In the first place, the range of poetical expression was infinitely increased. French literature came out of a little, ceremonious, antiquated drawing-room into the open air. With the flood of new words, a thousand influences which had never been felt before came into operation. Strangeness, contrast, complication, immensity, curiosity, grotesqueness, fantasy--effects of this kind now for the first time became possible and common in verse. But, one point must be noticed. The abolition of the distinction between words that were 'bas' and 'noble' did not at first lead to an increase of realism. Rather the opposite took place. The Romantics loved the new words not because they made easier the expression of actual facts, but for their power of suggestion, for the effects of remoteness, contrast, and multiplicity which could be produced by them--in fact, for their rhetorical force. The new vocabulary came into existence as an engine of rhetoric, not as an engine of truth. Nevertheless--and this was the second effect of its introduction--in the long run the realistic impulse in French literature was also immensely strengthened. The vocabulary of prose widened at the same time as that of verse; and the prose of the first Romantics remained almost completely rhetorical. But the realistic elements always latent in prose--and especially in French prose--soon asserted themselves; the vast opportunities for realistic description which the enlarged vocabulary opened out were eagerly seized upon; and it was not long before there arose in French literature a far more elaborate and searching realism than it had ever known before.

with volant touch Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.

What kind of mind, what kind of spirit, must that have been, one asks in amazement, which could animate with such a marvellous perfection the enormous organ of that voice?

Alfred de Musset presents a complete contrast. He was the spoilt child of the age--frivolous, amorous, sensuous, charming, unfortunate, and unhappy; and his poetry is the record of his personal feelings, his varying moods, his fugitive loves, his sentimental despairs.

Le seul bien qui me reste au monde Est d'avoir quelquefois pleur?,

The limitations and the faults of Balzac's work are, indeed, sufficiently obvious and sufficiently grave. The same coarseness of fibre which appears in his style made him incapable of understanding the delicacies of life--the refined shades of emotion, the subtleties of human intercourse. He probably never read Jane Austen; but if he had he certainly would have considered her an utterly pointless writer; and he would have been altogether at sea in a novel by Henry James. The elusive things that are so important, the indecisive things that are so curious, the intimate things that are so thrilling--all these slipped through his rough, matter-of-fact grasp. His treatment of the relations between the sexes is characteristic. The subject fills a great place in his novels; he approaches it with an unflinching boldness, and a most penetrating gaze; yet he never succeeds in giving a really satisfactory presentment of the highest of those relations--love. That eluded him: its essence was too subtle, too private, too transcendental. No one can describe love who has not the makings of a poet in him. And a poet was the very last thing that Balzac was.

But his work does not merely suffer from the absence of certain good qualities; it is also marred by the presence of positively bad ones. Balzac was not simply a realist. There was a romantic vein in him, which occasionally came to the surface with unfortunate results. When that happened, he plunged into the most reckless melodrama, revelled in the sickliest sentiment, or evolved the most grotesque characters, the most fantastic plots. And these lapses occur quite indiscriminately. Side by side with some detailed and convincing description, one comes upon glaring absurdities; in the middle of some narrative of extraordinary actuality, one finds oneself among hissing villains, disguises, poisons, and all the paraphernalia of a penny novelette. Balzac's lack of critical insight into his own work is one of the most singular of his characteristics. He hardly seems to have known at all what he was about. He wrote feverishly, desperately, under the impulsion of irresistible genius. His conceptions crowded upon him in vivid, serried multitudes--the wildest visions of fantasy mixed pell-mell with the most vital realizations of fact. It was not for him to distinguish; his concern was simply, somehow or other, to get them all out: good, bad, or indifferent, what did it matter? The things were in his brain; and they must be expressed.

Undoubtedly it is in descriptions of the sordid, the squalid, the ugly, and the mean that Balzac particularly excels. He is at his greatest when he is revealing the horrible underside of civilization--the indignities of poverty, the low intrigues of parasites, the long procession of petty agonies that embitter and ruin a life. Over this world of shadow and grime he throws strange lights. Extraordinary silhouettes flash out and vanish; one has glimpses of obscure and ominous movements on every side; and, amid all this, some sudden vision emerges from the darkness, of pathos, of tenderness, of tragic and unutterable pain.

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