Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/13

Rh at the same time how many scrannel pipes once held for divine reeds of the gods and immortal instruments of music, which have long ago ceased to give out the smallest vibration! But against this bondage English genius rebelled conclusively and successfully in an outburst of insurrection which carried all before it. This is the only insurrection which France has never attempted. The restraints which were intolerable to us have agreed with her natural instincts. Except, perhaps, in the person of Alfred de Musset, whom we shall consider hereafter, and whose bolder genius has made for itself a distinct place in French literature, and given to modern French poetry almost its only real grasp upon the contemporary mind of Europe, no Frenchman has lifted any standard of opposition to the prevailing rule. It has suited the national mind, in which there is so curious a mixture of license and submissiveness; and still more it has suited the genius of the language which all Frenchmen have conjoined in elaborating, and of which they have made the most highly cultivated, exact, correct, and brilliant of European tongues. France has pointed and polished her language with the most laborious and the most loving care. Under the vigilant guardianship of her supreme literary authorities, it has grown into almost absolute, if, in the nature of things, somewhat artificial perfection. It is not enough for a French writer to have expressed noble sentiments in a beautiful way—it is not enough for him to convince the intelligence or to touch the heart. The one thing absolutely incumbent upon him, enforced by laws universally accepted, and penalties inexorably exacted, is that he shall be correct. Without this correctness, point de salut in art.

From these rules much excellence results, but, we think, little poetry. We have rhetoric, often fine in its way, declamation, eloquence; but poetry has to be the sacrifice, the victim whose immolation secures all this success. She, poor muse, to whom "a sweet neglect" is more essential than to any less ethereal beauty, and whose "robes loosely flowing, hair as free," should, one would think, be protected by all the chivalry of the arts, walks humble and confined in the classic robes which are shapen for her by authority; or feebly makes-believe to glory in them as if they were her natural choice, according to a well-established natural instinct. It is hard indeed for the learned and classical not to despise more or less the natural and untrained. Even Milton exhibits a certain half-adoring contempt for Shakespeare when he speaks of the "wood-notes wild" of that perverse and undisciplined writer, whose strains the most self-important of critics would scarcely venture nowadays to commend in such moderate measure. A hundred years ago Shakespeare was a barbarous writer to the French critics, as he was to their dilettante contemporaries in England. The latter have happily dropped out of all hearing; and France has learned, superficially at least, to know better, and is even somewhat ashamed now, like all incautious critics, of having thus committed herself. But she has never lost, and probably never will lose, her confidence in the justice of her own system. It suits her and the traditions of her fine language. Sharp-cutting logic, keen and sparkling as diamonds, fine antithesis, brilliant epigram, the keenest powers of reasoning, the warmest flow of eloquence are hers; but the language of epigram and antithesis is not the language of poetry. No country boasts a richer literature, but poetry has never been the field of her greatest triumphs.

It is not necessary to go back to the period of Corneille and Racine, both of whom precede our date; nor even to that of Voltaire and Rousseau, which, though reaching down within its limits, yet are separated from the modern world in which we live by that tremendous barrier of the French Revolution, which changed everything. Notwithstanding the numerous ﬁne vers which occurs in his dramas, it is impossible to attribute the title of poet to a spirit so little conformed to all that we identify with the poetic temperament, as Voltaire; and though Rousseau is, on the other hand, in some respects the very exaggeration and extravagance of that temperament, the form of his writings does