Musset, whose Premières Poésies saw the light between 1830 and Here are two poets who occupy themselves solely with themselves; tell us only of themselves, their predilections, their desires, their dreams of personal happiness. Nor is this the limit of their subjectiveness: Lamartine and Hugo chose, for expression in their verses, those of their impressions which seemed to them to be most general, those which they thought would have been shared by their contemporaries; Sainte-Beuve, on the contrary, in the Confessions de Joseph Delorme turns away from this very class of impressions, and devotes himself only to the observation, the analysis, and the expression of that which he believes to be exclusively his own, that which distinguishes and differentiates him from other men. In this respect and for this reason the Confessions de Joseph Delorme is morbid poetry, almost pathological: it seems the work of a neurasthenic or a neurotic. Add to this that Sainte-Beuve displays, as an artist and as a versifier, refinements and elaborate researches, of which the restless subtlety is equalled only by the utter ineffectiveness. These elaborations escape the unaided eye, they can be appreciated only when one is cautioned to look closely for them. It is in quite another fashion that Musset is "personal," he displayed another sort of affectation; he is foppish, he is ultra-Parisian. He becomes more simple after a few years; passion makes a new man of him. At first, in the Marrons du Feu, in Mardoche, in Namouna, he is the Lovelace, the Brummell, of the Romantic School, notwithstanding the poetic gift which already places him so far above the level of the disguise he assumes, and above Sainte-Beuve's level too. He makes verses for mere pastime, laughing at himself for making them, even; they are his diversion from graver pursuits. These more serious occupations were-his brother tells us-" to hold grave conferences with the best tailors in Paris,"" to waltz with a genuine Marquise." We learn, too, from other sources, that to these ponderous duties he added a routine of attendance at the gambling-clubs and at even less decorous resorts. It is for this reason that, if his inspiration differs from that of Sainte-Beuve, it rests upon the same foundation; it is "personal" to the verge of egoism, and no

man ever carried farther the pretension of individuality. His contemporaries took this view of him, and a legion of imitators crowded upon his footsteps and upon those of Sainte-Beuve, imitators who possessed none of the originality of their models, and who occupy no place in the history of French poetry. The first requisite for a "personal" poet, although not the only qualification necessary, is that he should possess a personality, and that is a gift few can claim. Men of originality are rare!

Théophile Gautier perceived all this, instinctively, and if the issue had been in his hands, the Romantic School would at once have turned to the impersonal phase of art. The description of places, the picturesque presentment of the past, faithfulness of imitative work, the submergence of self in objective studies, would then have become the chief aims of the poets. Neither nature nor history, however, proceed by sudden transformations and revolutions. The possibilities of "personal" poetry had not yet been exhausted, the fertility latent in its formulæ had not yet given place to sterility. None of Gautier's great contemporaries had yet said all that he had to say, completed the outpouring of his confessions. The whole period, too (more especially the years that immediately followed 1830), was inauspicious for the epicurean pursuit of art for art's own sake. New problems presented themselves to the poets of the day. Religion, which had preoccupied the poets of the past decade, ceased to preoccupy the poets of a society which doubted everything, and they became "socialists" and "philosophers."

The evidence of this change is to be found in Victor Hugo's Feuilles d'Automne, of 1831, in the Chants du Crépuscule, of 1835, and in the Voix Intérieures, 1837; or in Lamartine's Jocelyn, of 1836, and his Chute d'un Ange, in 1838. Jocelyn is, in fact, the only long poem in the French language, and the Chute d'un Ange,although it remained unfinished,—is neither the least important of Lamartine's works, nor the least conclusive manifestation of his genius. In both these poems all the qualities of the Méditations are again to be found, some of them, indeed, in an exaggerated degree: liquidity and fertility, for example. Other qualities add

themselves to these, qualities which are not generally admired, and which failed to bring Lamartine the applause they deserved. It was he who created philosophical poetry in France; for André Chénier, who hoped to do so, has left us only the outline of his Hermès, with a bare half hundred lines; and Voltaire's Discours sur l'Homme is a moral, rather than a philosophical, work-and furthermore is only prose. Lamartine has more than once succeeded in expressing, without the slightest loss of clearness or of harmony, ideas of the most abstract, the most purely metaphysical, sort that the human mind can conceive. It is another of his merits, pre-eminently shown in Jocelyn, that he could write in a familiar strain without becoming prosaic, and even without losing his nobility of expression. Nor was his point of view a mere pose, as Sainte-Beuve, not without a tinge of jealousy, asks us to believe. If ever a poet was naturally and involuntarily a poet, it was Lamartine, a poet even when he wrote in prose, and even in his political utterances. Nowhere is this more strikingly shown than in his Jocelyn, unless, indeed, it be in the Chute d'un Ange, or in the larger conception of the philosophical epic of which the Chute d'un Ange is itself only an episode. One certainly regrets that the hasty execution of the work is not always in keeping with the grandeur of the project, but that disparity is characteristic of Lamartine's genius. Is it not possible, indeed, that in the altitudes where metaphysics and poetry melt one into the other, a want of precision adds a further fitness, a new charm and beauty?

Yet, as one is about to think so and to say so, the shade of Victor Hugo interposes. Whether Hugo's visions be filled with realities, or only with possibilities, no poet has ever made his dreams more vivid, given to them a firmer form, made them more palpable. A blind man could perceive how boldly Victor Hugo's verse brings its subject into relief. Lamartine purifies and idealises the real-dissolves it, sometimes, in the liquidity of his lines; but Hugo, in the architecture of his poetry, captures the ideal, makes it concrete and material. He is as "personal" as ever in his Feuilles d'Automne or his Voix Intérieures, it may even be said that he is nowhere more "personal" than in his Orientales or his Odes. It is in these

poems that he is most prodigal of confidences and avowals, and yet he is not the less attentive to " actuality." Half his poems are poems of occasion; their titles show it: Rêverie d'un passant à propos d'un Roi; Dicté en présence du glacier du Rhône; Pendant que la fenêtre était ouverte; Après une lecture de Dante. But he begins, at this stage of his work, to do what he had not done in the days of the Orientales; he begins to inquire into the mysteries, to wonder at what Baudelaire well calls "the monstrousness which envelops man on every side." Lamartine escaped from himself, raised himself above the level of his own personality, as he turned to the heights, ad augusta; Victor Hugo leaves his own person in order to search in mystery itself, per augusta, the explanation of what he has found inexplicable in his own personality. If it is a different sort of philosophising, it is still philosophy, and after twelve years of silence, or of political activity, from 1840 to 1852, when he returns to poetry, he resumes this philosophical preoccupation, never again to abandon it. No doubt his philosophy, at that period, differs widely from the catholicism of his earlier attitude, but nevertheless he had the right to say that the intensity, the continuity, of that preoccupation were always of a religious character. It is that which saves him from the double, yet diverse, excess of purely personal poetry and purely naturalistic doctrine.

Nevertheless-while Lamartine and Hugo thus imparted to romantic poetry and to personal poetry, a tendency toward philosophical and social poetry-Musset," descending to the desolate depths of the abyss within himself," gave resounding utterance to some of the most energetic notes of passion in all French poetry— in all the world's poetry. We need only mention a few of his poems: the Lettre à Lamartine, the Nuits, the Souvenir; not a thousand lines in all. They are poems in which fastidious critics have found passages of mere rhetoric; but they will pass down the ages. Other poets may equal, but can never surpass, their bitter sorrow, their poignant eloquence. Musset's Nuits are at once the most realistic and the most personal poems in the language. The adventure had been commonplace; its termination, although it was cruel, was not extraordinary. But the poet suffered so profoundly,

his whole life had been so utterly devastated by the blow, that it is impossible to imagine a more irreparable disaster. To express the pride of his passion, his horror of its unfaithful object, his absolute despair, he found words so profoundly pathetic that they wring, even from the driest eyes, tears almost as abundant as those he himself shed over his dead love. He has interposed so slight a veil of "literature" between his readers and his heart, the cry of his agony rises so naturally, that we can never be closer to any man's soul than to his. It is for all these reasons that, whatever one may think of his other works, Musset's Nuits places him in the first rank of poets. And perhaps it is for these reasons, too, that "personal" poetry has become so difficult to the poets of our own day. It is apart from personal poetry, or in antagonism to it, rather, that the evolution continues, in the works of Victor de Laprade, and, above all, in the Poèmes which Alfred de Vigny afterwards embodied in his Destinies.

Impelled by circumstances, yet always in accordance with the direction of his own talent, Vigny followed the same general trend as Lamartine and Victor Hugo, turning from personal poetry to objective and philosophical poetry. He lacked the fertility of the first, and was yet farther from the verbal and rhythmical inventiveness of the second. His philosophy was not the same, nor his philosophical temperament; he was born a pessimist of the most thorough sort; one of those who cannot forgive life for being the miserable thing it is, and still less forgive God for not having made it happier. From such convictions as these, the road to despair is short. Yet Vigny had too noble a nature or too elevated a mind to permit himself to sink into the gulf; and the conviction to which his pessimism led him-after a period of hesitation was what has since been called the religion of human suffering. He proclaimed, in a line which has remained famous, his love for "the majesty of human woes." It is this sentiment which inspired some of his finest verses: the Sauvage, the Mort du Loup, the Flate, the Mont des Oliviers, 1843, the Maison du Berger, 1844, and, later, the Bouteille à la Mer, 1854. It is essential to note that, independently of their other merits, all