To Mme de Staël we owe, in turn, the last stage of this gradual transformation. Our poets needed a fresh inspiration, and she supplied it when she gave them her Littératures du Nord. It cannot, indeed, be said that Lamartine, Hugo, or Vigny imitated Goethe or Byron, and her achievement may perhaps be more justly defined if one says that she enlarged the skies of France, and tempted the wings of our poets to a broader flight, beyond our frontiers, towards new horizons which she, first, rose high enough to see. A new inquiry, a new curiosity, shone in our eyes. We began to doubt if the old ideals were the orly ideals. Fresh processes added themselves to our habits of intellection, new elements came, silently as the dews, to our spiritual soil. There awaited new poets, if they should arise, a liberty which had been denied to their predecessors; the taste of the people, the conditions of the age, were ready for the literary revolution, which even a genius could hardly have operated without the subministration of his environment.

In these conditions lie the secret of the success achieved by Lamartine's first Méditations, a success which bears to the history of our lyric poetry the same relation that the success of the Cid or of Andromaque bears to the history of the French stage. But the Méditations gave rise to no such controversy as that which marked the days of Andromaque or of the Cid; opinion was unanimous in recognising the poet; and when the Nouvelles Méditations, the Mort de Socrate, the Dernier Chant du Pèlerinage de Childe Harold, the Harmonies Poétiques were, between 1820 and 1830, added to the Méditations, the most obstinate of the Classics were forced to acknowledge that a new school of poetry had been born to France. The Poésies of Alfred de Vigny, published in 1822, and republished in 1826; the Odes of Victor Hugo, in 1822, followed by his Ballades in 1824 and by his Orientales in 1829; soon gave firmness of definition to the essential quality of the new school.

These three great poets had much in common, notwithstanding the originality which distinguished each of them from his two fellows Lamartine, the more pure, more harmonious, more vague; Hugo, the more precise, more colorous, more sonorous, the

more barbaric to the French ear; and Vigny, who was more delicate, more elegant, more mystical, but whose note was less sustained. It may be that all three had masters among their predecessors of the nineteenth century,-Lamartine in the person of Parny, and in Millevoye, too; Hugo in Fontanes, in Lebrun, and in Jean Baptiste Rousseau; Vigny in Chénier; but their originality becomes apparent when one compares them with the survivors of the pseudo-classic epoch, such as Casimir Delavigne with his Messéniennes or Béranger in his Chansons. A perspicacious critic might perhaps have foreseen that all three of them would soon diverge upon separate paths: Lamartine becoming more the idealist, Hugo more the realist, Vigny already more the "philosopher"; but for the moment, between 1820 and 1830, they formed a group, if not precisely a school, and it is that group which we must endeavour to describe.

It must first be noted that no one of them belonged to the party which was then called the "Liberals," the party of Benjamin Constant or of Manuel. They were all three " royalists," extremists in their royalism, and they were of the Catholic party, too, the party of Joseph de Maistre, of Bonald, and of Lamennais. Hugo was, even at that time, the most absolute, the most uncompromising of the three; horror and hatred of the Revolution is nowhere more energetically declared than in his first poems, Les Vierges de Verdun, Quiberon, Buonaparte. Their devoutness is as sincere and as ardent as their royalism; and it colours all their ideas, as the religiosity of their master, Chateaubriand, coloured all his. Their conception of Love is a religious conception; it is from the religious point of view that they admire God's work in the domain of Nature; and their conception of the poet's function is, again, religious. Their religion is not always very lasting, nor very firmly grounded upon reason, nor is it even altogether orthodox. Lamartine's piety evaporates in a sort of Hindu pantheism; Hugo glides insensibly from Christianity to Voltairianism; Vigny, from year to year, progresses towards a pessimism not greatly unlike that of Schopenhauer. These changes, however, came later; and, in the meantime, the beginning of nineteenth-century French

poetry is marked by a permeation, even by an exaltation,-of religious sentiment.

This body of verse is, furthermore, personal or individual; the poet himself supplies not only the occasion of his verse, but its purpose, its habitual subject matter. A French ode and even an elegy, had, up to that time, been always of the broadest origin, built upon generalisations, abstractions, which the poet, in the process of elaboration, sedulously deprived of any particularity his premises might have possessed. Any one copy of verse resembled every other. There is no reason why an elegy of Chénier's should not have been Parny's instead; and if the printer had put Lebrun's name on the title-page of a volume of odes by Lefranc de Pompignan, the poets themselves would hardly have perceived the error. The Méditations of Lamartine, the Poèmes of Vigny, the Orientales of Hugo are, on the other hand, no more than metrical journals of the poet's daily impressions. Lamartine spends an hour on the Lake of Bourget, accompanied by the woman he loves, the Elvire of the Méditations, and he writes Le Lac; he passes Holy Week at the house of a friend, and writes the Semaine Sainte à la Roche Guyon. Vigny is interested by a paragraph in the Journal des Débats of July 18, 1822, and he finds the pretext for the Trappiste. As for Victor Hugo the mere titles of his Orientales: Canaris, Les Têtes du Sérail, Navarin, show their close relation to what we call, nowadays, "actuality." There are, no doubt, distinctions to be made; Vigny is, of the three, the most objective in his attitude, the most epic, one is almost tempted to say, in his Eloa or in Moïse. Victor Hugo often loses the sense of his own personality when he is confronted by something that seems very real to him; in the Feu du Ciel, in the Djinns, in Mazeppa, he is borne out of himself not only by his pictorial instinct, but by the current of a word-flow so ample that it betrays the rhetorician. Lamartine himself, the most subjective of the three, has here and there a dissertation,-in his Immortalité, for instance, or a paraphrase, as in his Chant d'Amour which overruns the narrow limits of personal poetry. Yet, after all is said, every one of them found his inspiration in himself, his emotions, his

recollections. The suggestion of the moment guides them. Whether it is Bonaparte dying at St. Helena in 1821, or Charles X. receiving the crown at Reims in 1825, these poets confide to us their own impressions. It is not the inherent and intrinsic beauty of the subject that provokes their song, but the subject's suitability to the especial character of the poet's genius. More precisely yet the subject is a mere pretext for the disclosure of the poet's point of view, the confession of his own fashion of feeling. It is this, and nothing else, that one means when one formulates the second characteristic of Romantic Poetry as opposed to Classic Poetry its dominant personality or individuality.

A third and last characteristic springs from this second: the freedom or novelty of the Romantic School. "Let us set new thoughts to the old rimes," said André Chénier, in a line which has preserved its fame,—a line often overpraised, for that matter. The Romantic poets, better inspired, perceived that these "new thoughts" could only be expressed in the terms of an art as novel, and it is that renovation of style and metre for which they have been most admired. Vigny shows more preciosity, more seeking after words, more embarrassment in his manipulation of rhythm, and for that reason is far less varied. His French, too, is less rich and less abundant. Lamartine's is not always very novel, nor yet very correct; this great poet was a careless writer; and yet his liquidity is incomparable; the form of his verse is faultlessly classic, and not even Racine found more exquisite associations of sound. Victor Hugo unquestionably shares with Ronsard the pinnacle of eminence as a creator of rhythms; and his French, somewhat commonplace in his earlier work, in the first Odes, had attained, at the time of the Orientales, a freedom, a vigour, an originality which may with truth be described as democratic. No one, certainly, did more than he to abolish the old distinction between the Grand French and the Familiar French, to put, as he said, "the Cap of Liberty on the head of the aged Dictionary." It was in this fashion that these three poets, unaided, shook off the yoke of the eighteenth-century grammarians; restored to words their pictorial value as mediums of expression or of description;

and freed French verse from the shackles which prevented its yielding to the requirements of the poet. There is no poetry without music, no music without movement, and movement was precisely what the French alexandrine lacked.

These being, then, the three essential and original characteristics of eighteenth-century French poetry when it first took definite shape, it may be said that its history, from that time, has been the history of a conflict between the three. Their strife is still unsettled. Is the poet to be only an artist, looking down, from the height of his "ivory tower," at the fruitless bustle of his fellow men? Is he to be a thinker? Or is he to turn aside from philosophy as well as from æsthetics, and be only a " sonorous echo " indifferently stirred by all the vibrations of the air? Or should he try only to be himself?

Before tracing the successive stages of the unending struggle, it is due alike to the decorum of chronology and to literary justice that one should say a word about the author-popular, and even famous, for a moment of the Tambes: Auguste Barbier. His lot was that of a middle-class Parisian, and when he had sung his brief song he fell back into his dull routine, and survived himself for nearly fifty years, never again finding the poet that was in him. Yet three or four of his Iambes, such as the Curée, the Popularité, the Idole, are among the masterpieces of French satire. I do not know, indeed, where one can more distinctly perceive the affinity, more clearly trace the consanguinity, between lyric and satiric verse; and the Iambes contain two or three of the most beautiful similes in all French poetry. That is, in itself, something, from the point of view of art. But it is a reason, too, for regretting that even in these few pieces, there is a twang of vulgarity which debars Barbier from the rank of a true poet. No such fault is to be found in the other three men who are, with him, the most illustrious representatives of the second generation of Romantic Poets: Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset, and Théophile Gautier.

Personal poetry is triumphant in the persons of the two firstSainte-Beuve, whose Confessions de Joseph Delorme appeared in 1829, to be followed in 1831 by Consolations; and Alfred de