ANDRÉ CHÉNIER.—Almost on the verge of the Revolution, quite unexpectedly there emerged a really great poet, André Chénier, marvellously gifted in every way. As the poet of love he recalled Catullus and Tibullus; in political lyricism he suggested d'Aubigny, though with more fervour; as elegiac poet he possessed a grace that was truly Grecian; as the poet of nature he employed the large manner of Lucretius; in polemical prose he was remarkably eloquent. Struck down whilst quite young amid the turmoil of the Revolution, he bequeathed immortal fragments. No doubt he would have been the greatest French poet between Racine and Lamartine.
BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE.—In prose, his contemporary, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, primarily was a man of genius, since he wrote that immortal idyllic romance, Paul and Virginia; subsequently he became a gracious and amiable pupil of Jean Jacques Rousseau, being smitten with the sentiment of nature in his Harmonies of Nature; finally he attained a great importance in literary history as the creator of exotic literature through the descriptions he wrote of many lands: Asia, African isles traversed and studied by him, Russia, and Germany.
THE REVOLUTIONARY ORATORS.—During the revolutionary period may be pointed out the great orators of the Assembly: Mirabeau, Barnave, Danton, Vergniaud, Robespierre; the ill-starred authors of national songs: Marie Joseph Chénier; the author of the Marseillaise, Rouget de Lisle, who only succeeded on the day that he wrote it. And so we reach the nineteenth century.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.—At the commencement of a century which was so brilliant from the literary aspect, James Delille was despotic: his earlier efforts have already been attended to. A skilled versifier, but without fire or many ideas, he made cultured translations from Virgil and Milton, wrote perennially descriptive poems, such as The Man in the Fields, The Gardens, etc., and a witty satirical poem on Conversation, which, in our opinion, was the best thing he wrote.
GREAT POETS: LAMARTINE.—Great poets were to come. Aroused, without doubt, by the poetic genius of the prose writer Chateaubriand, the first generation of the romantics was formed by Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. Romanticism was the preponderance of imagination and sensibility over reason and observation. Lamartine rebathed poetry in its ancient and eternal sources: love, religion, and the sentiment of nature. In his Meditations, his Harmonies, and his Contemplations, he reawoke feelings long slumbering, and profoundly moved the hearts of men. In Jocelyn he widened his scope, and, emerging from himself, narrated, as he imagined it, the story of the soul of a priest during the Revolution, and subsequently in the obscurity of a rural parish; in The Fall of an Angel he reverted to the life of primaeval man as he conceived it to be when humanity was still barbarous. Apart from his poetic works, he wrote The History of the Girondins, which is a romanesque history of almost the whole of the Revolution, some novels, some autobiographic episodes, and a few discourses on literature.
VICTOR HUGO.—Victor Hugo, though less sensitive than Lamartine but more imaginative, began with lyrical poems which were somewhat reminiscent of the classical manner, then went on to pictures of the East, thence to meditations on what happened to himself, and on all subjects (Autumn Leaves, Lights and Shades); next, in full possession of his genius, he dwelt on great philosophical meditations in his Contemplations, and in The Legend of the Centuries gave that epic fragment which is a picture of history. His was one of the most powerful imaginations that the world has ever seen, as well as a creator of style, who made a style for himself all in vision and colour, and also in melody and orchestration. Although in prose he lacked one part of his resources, he utilised the rest magnificently, and Notre Dame and The Miserable are works which excite admiration, at least in parts. Later, he will be dealt with as a dramatist.
ALFRED DE VIGNY.—Alfred de Vigny was the most philosophical of these three great poets, though inferior to the other two in creative imaginativeness. He meditated deeply on the existence of evil on earth, on the misfortunes of man, and the sadness of life, and his most despairing songs, which were also his most beautiful, left a profound echo in the hearts of his contemporaries. Some of his poems, such as The Bottle in the Sea, The Shepherd's House, The Fury of Samson, are among the finest works of French literature.
MUSSET; THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.—The second generation of romanticism, which appeared about 1830, possessed Alfred de Musset and Théophile Gautier as chief representatives. They bore little mutual resemblance, be it said, the former only knowing how to sing about himself, his pleasures, his illusions, his angers, and, above all, his sorrows, always with sincerity and in accents that invariably charmed and sometimes lacerated; the latter, supremely artist, always seeking the fair exterior and delighting in reproducing it as though he were a painter, a sculptor, or a musician, and excellent and dexterous in these "transpositions of art," whether they were in verse or prose.
THE PROSE WRITERS: CHATEAUBRIAND.—The French prose writers of this first half of the nineteenth century were emphatically poets, as had also already been Jean Jacques Rousseau and even Buffon. Imagination, sensibility, and the sentiment for nature were the mistresses of their faculties. Chateaubriand was the promoter of all the literary movement of the nineteenth century, alike in prose and poetry. He was a literary theorist, an epic poet in prose, traveller, polemist, orator. His great literary theory was in The Genius of Christianity, and consisted in supporting that all true poetic beauties lay in Christianity. His epic poems in prose are The Natchez, a picture of the customs of American Indians, The Martyrs, a panorama of the struggle of paganism at its close and of Christianity at its beginning; his travels were The Voyage in America and The Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem. Member of the parliamentary assemblies, ambassador and minister, he wrote and spoke in the most brilliant and impassioned manner on the subjects that he took up. Finally, falling back on himself, as he had never ceased to do more or less all through his career, he left, in his marvellous Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, a posthumous work which is, perhaps, his masterpiece. His infinitely supple and variegated style formed a continuous artistic miracle, so harmonious and musical was it more musical even than that of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
MME. DE STAËL.—At the same time, though she died long before him, Mme. de Staël, by her curious and interesting, though never affecting, novels, Delphine and Corinne, by her dissertations on various serious subjects, by her work on Germany, which initiated the French into the habits and literature of neighbours they were ill acquainted with, also directed the minds of men into new paths, and she was prodigal of ideas which she had almost always borrowed, but which she thoroughly understood, profoundly reconsidered, and to which she imparted an appearance of originality even in the eyes of those who had given them to her.