All the fatigues, dangers, and difficulties of the author's life were necessarily doubly great in such a period as that of 1830, when, as if at the stroke of an enchanter's wand, a whole group of talented writers appeared on the scene at the same moment; when every youth with any gift of intellect or imagination felt himself drawn to the profession of literature or art; when the renown to be won in these professions seemed as glorious as did military fame in the days of Napoleon; when it was more difficult than ever before to come to the front; and when, moreover, enmity to all conventionality and to the quiet regularity of middle-class life was supposed to be an essential condition of success in art, and the ideal of the literary aspirant was to love and be beloved with a consuming passion, to produce a masterpiece, to scorn or save mankind, and die.
When we let our eyes wander over the battlefield where the unrenowned fell, we see them lying in serried rows. There are men of richly gifted, well-developed minds, like Eusèbe de Salles (born in Marseilles in 1801), count, doctor, traveller in the East, professor of Arabic, whose Sakontala à Paris (1833) is one of the most talented and original psychological novels of the day, but none of whose books reached a second edition, much less brought him fame, and this though he could remember a Sunday evening at Nodier's in his youth when he and Hugo, on equal footing, were the heroes of the day.—There is Régnier-Destourbet, whose novel, Louise, which is dedicated to Janin and perhaps owes something to him, treats a painful subject with discrimination and good taste.—There is Charles Dovalle, killed in a duel at the age of twenty, whose collection of poems, Le Sylphe, showed talent to which Victor Hugo paid a warm tribute after the author's death.—There is the melancholy Eugène Hugo, Victor's elder brother and faithful comrade and friend, who, equipped with a similar though inferior lyric talent to Victor's, fought at his side in the first Romantic campaign, but died insane in 1837.—There is a man of as remarkable and noble gifts as Fontaney, another of Hugo's faithful adherents. Fontaney was for a time secretary of legation at Madrid. A proud, refined, reserved man, he has told in his novel, Adieu (Revue des deux Mondes_ 1832), the story of one of the romantically sad adventures of his own life. In the life of George Sand there is an allusion to the unfortunate love affair which was the cause of his death in 1837.—There are men with a refined, delicate poetic talent, like Félix Arvers, whose name now only recalls a single beautiful sonnet, or Labenski, who is remembered by a single ode, or Ernest Fouinet, who wrote the sonnet A deux heureux on the margin of a leaf of the edition of Ronsard which was presented at Sainte-Beuve's suggestion to Victor Hugo by all the authors of the Romantic School, each contributing something to its poetic equipment. Though Fouinet himself is forgotten, one line of his at least:
"Pour que l'encens parfume il faut que l'encens brûle,"
should be safe from oblivion, for it conveys in a single metaphor, a single phrase, the whole Romantic theory of poetry.—There are luckless Saint-Simonist poets like Poyat; there are satirists like Théophile Ferrière, who ridiculed the extravagances of the young Romanticists in works in the style of Gautier's Les Jeunes-France, and whose Lord Chatterton is a farcical sequel to De Vigny's drama; and, lastly, there are men like Ulric Guttinger, who is remembered only because of a poem full of enthusiastic admiration addressed to him by the youthful De Musset.
To give a somewhat more life-like impression of these stepchildren of fortune, I shall dwell a little longer on the personality and career of one or two of them, thereby also throwing additional light on the character of the age; for the character of a period often sets its most distinct stamp on the individuals whose peculiarity or extravagance prevents their attaining lasting fame.
I take Ymbert Galloix first, not because he is greater than the rest, but because he is a typical figure. The son of a Geneva schoolmaster, Ymbert displayed remarkable gifts and received an excellent education. He left his native town for Paris without money enough to keep him even for a month, irresistibly attracted by the accounts of the victories of Romanticism, determined to see the men whom he admired so enthusiastically, and if possible to take his place among them as their equal.
He soon found his way to the houses of Charles Nodier, the patriarch, Hugo, the chief, and Sainte-Beuve, the standard-bearer of the new school. Hugo has given a description of his first visit, which I shall condense:
"It was on a cold October morning in 1827 that a tall young man entered my room. He had on a white, comparatively new overcoat, and carried an old hat in his hand. He talked to me of poetry. He had a roll of paper under his arm. I noticed that he kept his feet carefully concealed under his chair. He coughed a little. Next day it rained in torrents, but the young man came back again. He stayed three hours, talking eagerly about the English poets, of whose works he knew more than I did; he specially admired the Lake School. He coughed a great deal, and again I noticed that he always kept his feet under the chair. At last I saw that his boots were in holes, and that his feet were soaking. I could not venture to say anything about it. He left without having spoken of anything but the English poets."
Galloix thus, as we see, went straight to the most famous authors of the day. His words, his verses showed that there was something in him; he was well received, he was even assisted, and his letters to Geneva betray a naïvely vain satisfaction in being able to tell what men have received him as their equal and what famous friends he has made. Yet at the same time he was a prey to melancholy. His lot had been cast by destiny in uncongenial surroundings. The great grief of his life was the seemingly fantastic, and yet real one, that he had not been born an Englishman. His mind dwelt on this till it became a kind of mania. He felt that English literature, not French, was his natural element; he read English from morning to night, and his one aim was to make enough money to be able to live in London and become a writer in the English language. When, a year after his arrival in Paris, he was found lying dead on the bed in his miserable room, dead of despair and want, there was an English grammar in his hand.
Listen to the tone of his letters. "Oh, my only friend I how unhappy are they who are born unhappy I ... I had an attack of fever last night.... Since I came here my unhappiness has taken five or six different forms, but the root of all my misery is that I was not born in England. Do not laugh at me, I beg of you; I am so unhappy. I am on terms of friendship with the most famous authors, and have had in their society, when my verses have met with approval, occasional moments of superficial pleasure; but though I can be intoxicated with these little triumphs of an evening, of a moment, my inner life is not only pure wretchedness, it is a cancer. Molten lead flows in my veins. If men could see into my soul they would pity me. England has everything—fifty authors, at least, who have led a life of adventure and whose books are full of imagination; in France there are not three. There I should have had a country whose very prejudices I could have loved, for there is so much poetry in the old English customs.... An English lady who is giving me lessons says that in two years I shall be able to write perfectly well in English."