Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/247

 FRANCE

201

FRANCE

modern lyricism. In this collection of his and in those which followed — "Nouvelles M&iitations" (1823), " Harmonies poetiques et religieuses" (1830) — we find a coml)ination of all those qualities the lack of which had kept the versifiers of the preceding century from being true poets. The expansion of the man's own individual nature, the religious faith which makes him see Divine manifestations m everything, his disquiet in presence of the great problems of human destiny, his deep and serious love, his intimate communion with nat uro, his dreamy melancholy — these are the great sen- timents from which Lamartine's lyricism has its origin. If Lamartine is the earliest of the Romantics, the true real chief of the new school is Victor Hugo, whose career, from 1822 to 1885, extends over the whole nineteenth century, but who by his inspiration be-

proverbes), Musset exhibits some qualities which are not apparent in his great predecessors, elegance, light- ness of touch, wit. On the other hand, he has neither Victor Hugo's variety of inspiration nor Lamartine's elevation of thought. He is characterized by the pro- found, sincere, penetrating emotion with which he expresses the inmost sufferings of his stricken and harassed soul. The peculiarity of Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863), another great poet of this period, is that, unlike most of the Romantics, who are not rich in iileas, he is a thinker. A philosophical poet, he fills his ver.ses not with sensations, emotions, and personal confidences, but with ideas translated into symbols ("Poemes anciens et modernes"; "Lcs Destines") which express his pessimistic conception of life. As for Th^ophile Gautier, while his youthful enthusiasms

.SSAGB FROM A .SKKMOV OF St. BeRNAHD OF ClAIHVAUX

XII-XIII Century MS., Royal Library, Berlin

longs to the period (1820-50) which we are now con- sidering. Not only has he endeavoured to define the romantic ideal in many of his prefaces, but he has set himself to realize it in all departments of literature, no less in romance and drama than in poetry. Still, it is in the last that he has produced his finest works. With him, however, lyricism results less from the out- pouring of his inmost feelings and of hLs £170 than from a masterly faculty which he has of concentrating his mind upon events taking place around him — events public and private — of listening to their reverbera- tions, their echoes, within himself, and translating t hose echoes into strophes of incomparable amplitude, magnificence, and diversity of movement. In a later period this impersonal lyricism, which has dictated all his poetical works from 1831 to 1856, gives place to another inspiration, the product of which is " La Legende des .Siecles" (1859-76). This vast epic of humanity, viewed in its great moments, is, perhaps, a uni(|ue work in French literature; at any rate it Ls the work in which Victor Hugo has most thoroughly real- ized hLs genius — a genius compact of imagination that exaggerates beings and things beyond all measure, of art mighty to describe, to paint, and to evoke, and a marvellous gift for creating images.

Very different from both Lamartine and Victor Hugo is -Alfred de Musset (1810-57). In his poetical works as well as in his prose dramas (Comedies et

and his extreme taste for the picturesque connect him with the Romantics, he parts company w ith them in a conception of poetry (Eraaux et Camces, 1852) wherein he makes no exhibition either of his Ego or of its sentimental outpourings, but keeps to the work of rendering the aspect of things outside of himself with a painter's fidelity and resources of colouring. Thus his lyricism forms a transition between that of the Romantics and that of the Parnassien school which is to succeed them.

The great ambition of Romanticism was to be su- preme in the drama as well as in poetry. Indeed it was in the theatre that the great battle was fought in which, between 1820 and 1830, the partisans of the new school encountered the belatetl ilefenders of the classical ideal. But while in lyric poetry Romanti- cism succeeded in creating veritable masterpieces, it was almost a failure in the drama. In 1827 Victor Hugo, in his preface to " Cromwell ", expounds the new (Iraniatic system: no more unities, but absolute liberty for the author to develop his action just as he conceives it; the mingling of the tragic and the comic, which the Classics abhor, is authorized and even rec- ommended; no more dreams, no more minor charac- ters introduced into the piece solely that the hero may explain the plot to them for the benefit of the audi- ence; on the other hand there was to be an historical setting, local colour, complicated accessories, and au-